Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to building of network connections, I was referring to the building of user services that rely on them. For example, YouTube is built to dynamically adjust video quality based on available bandwidth, but the range of bandwidths considered by the designers does not include hundreds of megabits, because far too few of the users have that capacity. They have to shoot for the range that most people have.

But as that range changes, services will change their designs to make use of it. We don't really have any idea how things will change if multi-gigabit connections become the norm, but you can be certain they will. Just as programs expand to fill all available memory, Internet services expand to fill all available bandwidth. To some extent that's because more capacity enables laziness on the part of engineers... but it also enables fundamentally different and more useful technologies.

Being able to choose an operating system (BSDs, Linux, commercial UNIXen, Windows, etc.) has been in your favor, particularly from a security perspective. And would you seriously argue that the existence of multiple BSDs has been a bad thing for their security? I'd argue exactly the opposite. The BSDs, have a well-deserved reputation for being more secure than Linux, and part of that reputation arose directly from the BSD forking. In particular, OpenBSD forked specifically to focus on security, and FreeBSD and NetBSD worked to keep up.

Yes, it does. You seem to think that being vulnerable none of the time is an alternative. It's not. The system as a whole is much more resilient if vulnerabilities affect only a subset.

Look how well that has worked for OpenSSL in the past. The many eyes principle only matters if people are looking, and competition creates attention. Also, it's a common error to assume that the software ecosystem is like a company with a fixed pool of staff that must be divided among the projects. It's not. More projects (open and closed source) opens up more opportunities for people to get involved, and creates competition among them.

Competition also often creates funding opportunities, which directly addresses what was OpenSSL's biggest problem. You can argue that it also divides funding, but again that only holds if you assume a fixed pool of funding, and that's not reality. Google is contributing to OpenSSL development and almost fully funding BoringSSL (not with cash, but with people). That isn't because Google's left hand doesn't know what its right is doing.

Huh? No, obviously, you choose a browser with a development team that stays on top of problems and updates quickly. It's almost certain that developers will choose their SSL library at least partly on the same basis, again favoring more work and more attention on the crucial lib.

It's not, it's really not. It would be nice if that were true. It's really more like a car that breaks down over time in various ways; some are more reliable than others, but all require ongoing attention and maintenance.

This is true in theory, but untrue in practice, because new attacks come along all the time and ongoing maintenance (non-security bugfixes, new features, etc.) introduce new opportunities for security bugs.

Your Apache and IIS counterexamples are actually support my argument. IIS, in particular, was riddled with problems. Yes they've been cleaned up, but you're talking about a space that has been static for almost two decades (though it will soon be destabilized with the introduction of HTTP/2 and probably QUIC) and is, frankly, a much simpler problem than that solved by OpenSSL... and I assert that without the competition of alternatives, IIS never would have been cleaned up as thoroughly as it is.

Nah. The OpenSSL codebase will get cleaned up and become trustworthy, and it'll continue to be used. The other forks, especially LibreSSL and Google's BoringSSL, will be used, too... and that's a good thing. Three fairly API-compatible but differing implementations will break up the monoculture so bugs found in one of them (and they *will* have bugs) hopefully won't hit all three of them.

It's tempting to see such apparent duplication of effort as wasteful, but it's really not. Diversity is good and competition is good.

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.

Today? There is no point. The available services have to be built for the speeds that are common; nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance -- because performance would suck for nearly everyone, because hardly anyone has that. The point of gigabit plus speeds is that if you have those speeds, reliably, the difference between local and remote storage almost disappears, which enables very different approaches to building systems.

In addition, define "residential". I work from home full-time, and 100 Mbps isn't anywhere near fast enough for me. The code management and build infrastructure I often use has been designed for low-latency gigabit connections, because most everyone is in the office. A 2 Gbps connection, for me, would still not work quite as well as being in the office, because I'd have higher latency, but it would be a lot closer. I work around the slow connection with various caching strategies, but I'd rather not have to.

Am I residential? Well, I have a business account, but in a residential area. Obviously I'm far, far from typical. But usage will change as the capacity is available.

From another of your posts:

Heh. I upload a lot of ROMs in that range, and bigger (asymmetric connections suck). I download full Android source repos... I just ran "make clean && du -sh ." in the root of one of my AOSP trees: 57GB[*]. I dread having to sync a fresh tree... It takes upwards of two days.

Again, my usage is far from typical, but how long will it be before typical users are streaming multiple 8K video streams, at 500 Mbps each? It can't happen until typical users have multi-gigabit connections, but it'll come.

Comcast actually provides IPv6 for a lot of its customers. I had fully-functional IPv6 on the Comcast connection at my last home (Comcast doesn't serve the area where I live now).

* Yes, 57 GB is nuts, but that's what happens when you have a large codebase, with extremely active development, and you manage it with a DVCS. I could cut the size down with pruning, but that always seems to break something, so I just try to minimize the frequency with which I have to download it all. btrfs snapshots help a lot. Just making copies would work, too, but at these sizes it'd be slow even on an SSD. Much better than downloading, though.

James Nicoll put it best:

You know, it's been years since I actually read that. The basic concept is funny, obviously, but the author took it much further. I'd forgotten such gems as:

Indeed, NAT boxes really should mark all their packets as evil, because NAT is evil.

Oh, I also quite enjoy:

Oh, obviously. If you have a firewall, every host inside the firewall is perfectly safe. BWAHAHA...

Seriously, the unrest is brewing in our towns. The powder keg is filled to the brim, all it takes is a spark, and any kind will do, to blow it up. You're getting close to a critical mass of people who are severely unhappy with how things are going, the only thing missing is a focal point for this anger. As soon as a justification is found to vent that anger, you have a riot.

Seriously? Critical Mass? Seriously?

I kinda doubt it...this is pretty isolated. Seems mostly to just be a problem in the few highly packed urban centers in the US. You don't see this type of behavior, or even sympathy to it in most of the US.

And for the most part, I think the 24/7 news channels blow it up to much more than it actually is. They often choose camera angles to try to make it look like more people than it is.

The majority if folks in the US rarely if ever have a personal encounter with the police in their cities. The majority of US citizens while concerned that these isolated events are coming to our attention, they also don't see it as much a problem in their local areas or states.

However, there are limited limits. The old "you can't yell fire in a crowded movie house" comes to mind.

I should think the same rules apply to social media? I mean, that tweet that went out saying "there's going to be a PURGE at 3pm..etc" could the powers that be not have that taken down, blocked, etc?

I"m guessing no mechanism now..but shouldn't be hard to figure how to put filters on there, no?

I don't say this type thing lightly either, it is a slippery slope...in that righteous expressions that may be controversial, political and all could be in jeopardy, but I think it is something to be discussed.

You have plenty of rights to free speech, but incitement to riot isn't one of them.

At the very least...track down the folks that tweeted to riot, and throw the book at them. Maybe just use existing law to get those doing this would be better than a censorship method like I first proposed...it might not STOP a riot as well, but after awhile people *might* actually start getting wise that it isn't smart to incite a riot on social media of any form.

Compare the policies of the Democrat party with those of the Conservative Party in the UK. The Tories are left of the Democrats, that makes the Democrats a right-wing party and the Republicans further out than Genghis Khan.

And that comparison has exactly what to do with US politics?

We're talking left vs right here in America...not the rest of the world which leans far enough left to be socialist in so many ways.

I consider Obama to be very left in his views, and if he'd not gone checked by congress, would take us down the European path.

I figure if you want to live European style, move to Europe. The US broke off from Europe many moons ago because we did not want to be European. The majority of us still don't.

I always thought the most practical combination of aircraft and submarine was the FA 330, a rotary-wing kite used by Nazi submariners to get their lookout higher to see farther. It was tethered and unpowered, but it was quick to set up, simple to use, and provided a great benefit to the sub in the last few days before radar.

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

Small prop driven aircraft, ALREADY.

The market was almost nonexistent about five years ago but it's growing quite fast. Don't underestimate what the major and ongoing advances in motors, controllers, and batteries will bring in the future. There's many radically new technologies in the works to partially or completely electrify aircraft transportation, far beyond just electrically driven propellers.