It's only expensive because you were paying for it. The cable companies employ people to run cables, which makes those employees basically a sunk cost. They have to have those people to do repairs on an ongoing basis. When they aren't doing repairs, it costs the cable nothing to have them run lines to new houses, beyond the cost of the wire, which I suspect is somewhere between a third and a sixth of what you paid. (Over the long term, this isn't true, but when it comes to short-term variation, it is.)

Moreover, it costs $200 to rent a trenching machine for a day, and probably less than that to hire someone for a day to run the thing. So basically, even by the most conservative estimate, you overpaid for your installation by about $1,600, all of which went into the pockets of middlemen. Cable companies don't pay middlemen; they pay workers. So even in the worst case scenario, where all their workers were fully booked so that they had to hire new people to handle running your cable, they'd still pay less than half what you paid.

So at your price, it would have been about an 8-year payoff. At half that price, it would be a 4-year payoff. In the telecom world, a four-year payoff is amazingly quick, from what I've read. Your cable company just couldn't be bothered. It had nothing to do with cost, or if it did have something to do with cost, it was only because they were pushing the high up-front cost onto you as a means of ensuring that you could actually afford the service. Either that or they are nearly bankrupt and couldn't afford the $3,000, in which case you probably just wasted your money. Hard to say which.

The Python code

s = ''
for i in range(0,1000000):
    s += str(i)

will be painfully slow too, for multiple reasons. Both Java and Python have ways to do this that aren't dumb.

One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.

Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.

They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.

Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.

Uranium nukes are even worse. They require strip mines to get the uranium, and then a bunch of very special purpose equipment to enrich it. If you think it's hard to hide a nuclear reactor from a spy satellite, try hiding a strip mine!

"The Sum of All Fears" was released in 1991. Clancy's comment about using computer weapon design is even more applicable today. CnC machines are also now something geeks build in their basements out of a few hundred dollars worth of parts.

Generally it's not an accepted defence to say "you should have seen what I would have done if I hadn't nuked them!"

So is American culture. It doesn't mean all Americans are killers.

I hereby propose to rename it "Software As a Disservice", or "SAD".

Agreed. Flash really should apply the patch, and if it fails, it should refuse to load the Applet.

None of the pages about this bug—not the article, not the CVE, and not the Adobe explanation—tell what the actual attack vector is. They just say that they're vulnerable to XSS. Does that mean that the Flash code can be used on somebody else's domain? Does it mean that the Flash code can in some way be tricked into loading content from the wrong domain on behalf of page JavaScript? If so, and if Flash code uses only non-hardcoded URLs, does that mitigate the problem?

The thing is, even if you got rid of all the insecure Flash applets out there, a malicious person could still host one somewhere. So depending on the nature of the attack, the only real way to fix it might be for Flash to deliberately break every Flash applet linked against the old SDK. If the attack is dependent upon the flash being hosted from the same domain as the content you're trying to steal (e.g. cookies), then the right way to fix it is for web developers to eradicate Flash from their websites.

So you burn over 800 calories an hour running? Why is it you think I don't? I bet we're using the same calculators and you weigh a bit less than I do.

I think I struck a Slashdot nerve. You're the third person so far to reply with a weirdly aggressive and poorly researched message.

I agree. Now turn it around. Think of all the things on the Internet you WOULD miss if they were gone. Now think of how many of them you would be willing to pay for. Think of the number of times you've seen the term "paywall" used on Slashdot.

I don't weigh 150 lbs, and I didn't say per day.

I'm not sure I really follow your argument, but the open source community seems like a reasonable example. Linux is paid for - big companies sink billions of actual dollars into it, and contributors put in even more value in time. Quality, in the things that are important to the people contributing to it, is high. Quality in the things that are not important to contributors, but are important to many of the people who do not contribute? Not so high.

Quality is also high in ad encrusted click bait sites - in the eyes of the people contributing to them. But that's not you.