By trying to silence the guy who tells you how to beat the polygraph (a useless test by all accounts, as far as the 'science' involved), they have basically told every torrent site to start seeding the way to do it online.

Thanks Government!

I'd be preaching what I don't practice; my favorite phone was the Razr. Tiny thing. Big phones are fine for those who carry purses, but mine stays in my pocket. The one I have now is about as big as I can stand.

I'm about to post a journal with a suggestion for the W3C and mobile browser makers.

It should work. I don't see how it would mess up the charging circuit unless that circuit was poorly designed. It's the same as a TV degausser.

My day was a lineman working around AC at 90,000 volts. If he wore an analog (wind up) watch to work the watch would get magnetized by those high strength magnetic fields and stop working. He probably could have fixed the watches the same way.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)

A solar offgrid (or grid-tied with standalone capabilities) would provide power locally until too much stuff failed.

Lead acid batteries last for several years, recent lithium probably for a couple decades. Nickel-Iron batteries are more lossy, but last for centuries, if provided with water to replace evaporation, potentially decades if they have catalytic fill caps to recombine lost hydrox or, say, a reservoir-based automatic watering system. (If their chemistry has a long-term unavoidable failure mode I'm not aware of it.)

Even with the batteries dead (NiFe or otherwise) the system will have power when the sun is out until at least one panel in every series substring is too degraded, shaded, or smashed to provide adequate power.

Semiconductor controllers might go for a decade to centuries, depending mainly on whether the conductive interconnects of the semiconductors are sized to avoid electromigration at the current levels used and what they're using for large capacitors.

Wind generaors have several moving parts to screw up - how many depends on the design. For a simple homebrew one you have the main bearings, yaw bearing, and tail furling-system bearing. Any one of them failing will take it out. (Even the furling bearing: Once that screws up it doesn't furl right and tears apart in the next storm.) There's also the get-the-power-past-the-yawing mechanism (typically a long cable being twisted and manually "unwound" every few years, or a brush mechanism.) Call it a decade without maintenance at the outside.

So some of 'em may run until a nearby lightning strike fries something.

I wonder what the numbers would be if "Progressivism" were also counted as a religion, rather than JUST a philosophy or political affilication? B-)

Think about it: It claims to prescribe what behavior is good or bad, generally expects its adherents to take its pronouncements on faith, and has a lot to say against various religions - just like ("other") competing religions do to their opponents.

I could go on with the similarities. But since they include suppression of competing ideas by pretty much any available mechanism (including arbitrary down-moderation, personal attacks, and flame wars), I'd prefer to keep the discussion light.

They're not alone in this, either. (c.f. any of several political philosophies, right, left, libertarian, authoritarian, moderate, ...) But they're my current candidate for the largest not-advertised-as-religion-religion at the moment. B-)

My ISP uses an AQM and I can maintain about 10ms of additional latency even when my connection is flooded beyond 100%. ... When I manage my own AQMs on my network, I can maintain 0ms of additional latency, no QoS needed.

Latency is a problem, and as you mention, AQM can deal with it without packet-type distinctions. But it's not the BIG problem when TCP and streams are trying to divide a channel's bandwidth.

That problem is packet loss. TCP imposes it on streams. TCP is HAPPY to accept a little packet loss. Streams get into trouble quickly - and all the workarounds short of QoS packet-class distinctions on the pathway just push the problem around into other aspects (such as delay).

With QoS you can put the drops selectively into, first the TCP flows (which then throttle back), then already-delayed stream packets (which streams no longer need - when TCP could use the equivalent just fine.) In fact you could even give streams strict priority over TCP - provided they're within their bandwidth limit - and avoid dropouts and most of the jitter completely. Streams get the cream and TCP gets the whey, other stuff gets something in between.

So you reference an article that's ten years old?

Not for nothing, and while there are plenty of ways to have insecurity in an OS... I think Microsoft's history especially as of late has been pretty good on that front. IE11 is a bastardized product and while I like the rendering engine because of how smooth it is and low memory, the browser is useless for me. If Edge can maintain that memory footprint, the smoothness, and add better HTML5 compatibility + extensions... I will give it a shot.

Parents choose to have children.

Children do not choose to be born.

This means that children owe their parents nothing in exchange for taking care of them before they are capable of taking care of themselves. It was the parents' actions which are responsible for the state of the child's infirmary (relative to adult capabilities), therefore it is their responsibility to correct.

Everything that parents do to bring their child into adulthood is simply the fulfillment of a obligation they incurred when they created a helpless and dependant child.

Do you expect your bank to go out of their way to thank you for paying your mortgage on time every month?

Mother's Day (and Father's Day) would be a meaningful if there was a general acceptance that parents need to accomplish a bit more than merely breed and see that a child survives to adulthood in order to earn special recognition.

I can't think of another situation where the "everybody gets a trophy, no matter what" effect is more harmful than parenting.

ISP should be limited to purchasing more bandwidth and using anti-bufferbloat AQMs, but no throttling or QoS.

QoS may be hard. But it's necessary, because streaming and TCP don't play well together.

Streaming requires low latency, low jitter, low packet loss, and has a moderate and limited (in absence of compression, typically constant) bandwidth. TCP, when being used for things like large file transfers, increases speed to consume ALL available bandwidth at the tightest choke point, and divide it fairly among all TCP connections using the choke point. It discovers the size of the choke point by expanding until packets are dropped, and signals other TCP connections by making their packets drop. The result that TCP forces poor QoS onto streams unless the infrastructure is massively oversized.

This can be fixed by a number of traffic management schemes. But they all have this in common:
  - They treat different packets differently.
  - The infrastructure can be misused for competitive advantage and other unfair business practices.

The PROBLEM is not the differing treatment of different packages (which can help consumers), but the misuse of the capability (to hurt consumers).

So IMHO an "appropriate legal remedy", under current legal theories, is not to try to force ISPs to treat all packets the same (and break QoS), but to limit the ISPs ability and incentives to misuse the capability.

So the appropriate regulation is not communications technical regulation, but consumer protection and antitrust law:
  - Consumer fraud law should already cover misbehavior that penalizes certain traffic flows improperly. (What is "internet service" if it doesn't handle whatever end-to-end traffic is thrown at it, just for starters) Ditto charging extra for better packet treatment rather than just fatter pipes, charging anyone other than their base customers for the service, or heavily penalizing packets of customers (or the customers themselves) whose usage is problematic for the ISP but within the advertised service. If current law needs a tweak, the enforcement infrastructure is already there should Congress choose to commit the tweak and use it.
  - Penalizing packets of competitors for its own services, or giving appropriate handling to its own packets of a type and not to that of others, is anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, having such services in the same company AT ALL, let alone forming conglomerates that include both "content" creation and Internet service distributing it, is a glaring conflict-of-interest, of the sort that led to the historic breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil. Antitrust law is up to the problem: Just use it.

(I put quotes around "appropriate legal remedy" above, because I think that a free market solution would be even better. Unfortunately, we don't have a free market in ISP services, due to massive, government-created or government-ignored barriers to entry. And we aren't likely to see one in the near future - or EVER, unless the government power-wielders get it through their skulls that "competition" and its free-market betnefits don't kick in until there are at least three, and usually until there are four or more, competitors for each customer. (This "Two-is-competition, Hey! Where's the market benefits?" error has been built into communication law ever since the allocation of bandwidth for the early, analog, AMPS cellphone service.) With only two "competitors", market forces drive them to cartel-like behavior and all-the-market-will-bear pricing, without any collusion at all.)

That's probably the biggest reason to have good in-house security people. They don't have a financial interest to make breaches or lie about them. It's in their best interest to keep everything secure, and continue to look for new ways to attempt breaking into their own stuff.

I've never felt good about letting third parties in to do security testing. When someone above my rank decided to let a 3rd party do external tests, they'll pick anything and make it sound disastrous. One place was bitching about anything.

They complained that we had the current version of Bind running on the DNS servers. "But people can do DNS requests!" Yup.

They flagged the fact that we dropped unwanted traffic at the firewall. Yup. Get over it. They were upset it took forever to scan the network. Good.

They flagged us for having a web server providing static content. They were upset they couldn't find any way to exploit CGIs or do SQL injection. Yup. That was kind of the idea.

There were a whole bunch of other trivial things that they flagged us for. Then they were brought to the office, and got upset that we didn't provide wifi. Nope, that's a security risk. They wanted to plug their laptop into our network, so they were only given external access. Again, they bitched. But letting an unknown computer owned by an unauthorized party plug into our network is a security risk.

They eventually gave up trying to bully us into dropping our security precautions and gave us a pass.

I already habitually ran tests with privileged access to make sure even if all layers of protection failed, nothing really bad could happen.

Honestly, if they are given everything, they can find something. Give them administrative rights to everything, and credentials to everything, they can find something. Like, email accounts can be accessed with full admin rights. Funny how that works.