Grumble grumble. I came into the comments section to see reactionary histrionics and all you can manage is reasonable and dispassionate analysis?

Diversity is a good thing. I understand that, with increasing use of Linux as a desktop OS by people who don't run servers, systemd makes a lot of sense for some people.

I am the primary admin on servers in three different states. The benefits of using init for remote admin outweigh the simplicity and user-friendliness of systemd on my laptop.

I switched from Mandrake to Debian almost fifteen years ago when I first started doing heavy remote admin, I'll make a change again now, and the world will keep on spinning. Having both approaches is a good thing.

Every good law has counterpoints. Traffic signals prevent me from driving through the intersection even when there are no other cars there. Assault laws mean you can't punch someone who talks on their phone at the movies. The right to a trial means we can't just execute people we know are guilty.

One of the other examples I've been hearing lately is about Citizen's United. They say overturning it or passing contradictory legislation could hamper Steven Colbert, or limit the ACLU or EFF. Well, yes, it might. But that would be better, overall, than what we have now.

The goal is not to have laws that capture every nuance. Government is a blunt weapon that must operate in a non-discriminatory fashion. Special cases exist that show the friction in every law. The objective is not for every special case to be efficient, but for the law overall to be efficient.

Last mile providers colluding with incumbents to provide preferential access to consumers harms competition in content. Competition is good in the long run, even for the things we like that may appear to be harmed in the short run. There are natural limitations to competition on carriage, we should not extend those competition limitations to making discriminatory deals with content providers.

TL;DR version: Register.co.uk is a serial clickbaiting site, they admit it, and this article is an intentional, blatant misrepresentation of the research. Link to El Reg only for the same sort of reasons you would link to The National Enquirer.

Some have pointed out the explicit invocation of the slippery slope, but it is worse than that.

His comments to the House of Commons came after the parliamentary intelligence and security committee concluded that the brutal murder of Rigby could have been prevented if an internet company had passed on an online exchange in which one of the killers expressed "in the most graphic terms" his intention to carry out an Islamist jihadi attack.

This is not the same as blocking access to child porn sites. He is calling for the content of all packets to be inspected for unapproved speech.

Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.

It's only 2014. There's still 5 years. Get to work, everyone!

I can't believe I didn't guess that this was the particular flavor of corporate whoring that Gates and Zuckerberg were up to. Get into the educational pipeline with whatever education issue is hot (it started as just STEM, but then shifted to women in STEM when that started sizzling, if you'll remember). Get some big names to attach their reputations to its success. Then start selling ad space to Disney, who can't get much traction buying ad space inside the schools themselves. I should have guessed, but I didn't. I just thought they were after the data.

Pi hundred million. Nothing more to say, but I'm guessing if I don't add more I will run into the lameness filter.

There's a religious refrain, "Pray to God but row toward shore." It means you should ask for God's help, but that doesn't mean you should just sit there in the boat and wait to be saved.

From the Cryptome PDF:
Yesterday the USA Freedom Act was blocked in the Senate as it failed to garner the 60 votes required to move forward. Presumably the bill would have imposed limits on NSA surveillance. Careful scrutiny of the billâ(TM)s text however reveals yet another mere gesture of reform, one that would codify and entrench existing surveillance capabilities rather than eliminate them.

We didn't really lose anything. The government chose not to pass a platitude. That's probably not going to change until we manage to fix the twin problem of fear and hatred, being stoked by those who gain from emotionalism.

In the meantime, we need to row toward shore. Keep working on all the cryptography solutions you have time to help with. If you have an interest in meme propagation on social media or propaganda, see if you can figure out some ways to weaken the grip of emotionalism. I am, and it's fun.

Sometimes your nation calls on you for service. Sometimes you have to know what it needs even if it doesn't know how to ask.

I saw this yesterday and tried, so hard, to be the skeptic poking holes in a feminist's overreaction -- and failed. This thing is just awful. The best I could come up with was, "Well, there are valuable people on software development teams who do design. I value them immensely, because I can't do it."

Well, sure, and maybe they should also put out a book titled, "I can be a game designer." But that's not the title, and (I can tell you from personal experience) women make fine software engineers. Some great, some awful, most somewhere in between -- just like guys. If they want to make a book with a title about Barbie being a software engineer, they should just tell that story.

>> when you want to do something without being watched, you use TOR with clean hardware and connectivity.

> So what is clean? I can only think of an Ubuntu VM, default install with maybe one or two addons in Firefox to delete cookies. Nothing that changes or adds fonts...

That's a fairly good version. I think it's about how extreme you want to go and how secure you feel you need to be. You could grab a fresh laptop off Craig's List and only use it for a few days. You could get a Raspberry Pi with no writable storage and change the MAC address every time you power it up. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, you could just have one laptop that you only use for your alternate persona, and always use it for that, if what you need is pseudonymity instead of anonymity (that's the most aggressive thing I do, actually, being one of those people who doesn't actually have anything to hide, but still believes in privacy as a matter of principle).

And, of course, every step you take is a good one. It all helps to confound those who would violate what I believe are inalienable rights.

Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.

Frequency competition has the most clear natural limits on competition of any of the carriage technologies you mention, but they exist for all of them. If more than one carrier uses the same slice of spectrum, they all degrade. Laissez-faire does a horrible job of maximizing production with wireless spectrum. Easements for wires and the natural barrier to entry of sinking new cables create a similar problem with wired carriage.

The FCC is not creating fiat carriage monopolies, they are managing natural limitations to carriage competition.

It is worth noting that there are genuine fiat monopolies at the local and state levels, but those are almost always created by the corporations through lobbying, partnerships, or collusion, not by the unaided whim of a bureaucrat.

which form of Net Neutrality? A) protocol neutral? B) endpoint neutral?

Both -- the carrier should not make prioritization decisions for me. My network and software should handle that, since my ISP can't know which packets are highest priority to me.

I am convinced that government regulators will find a third definition for Net Neutrality

That is a good reason to be eternally vigilant of the FCC, and the Internet is worth our effort. It is not a good reason to abdicate the decision to the ISPs, whose financial interests and both naturally- and regulatory- limited competition ensures a market-inefficient solution. The ISPs have the privilege of operating the carriage of our network for a profit. If they don't want that privilege, they can sell their gear and rights-of-way to a competitor. Both Google and municipal operations are wiping the floor with the incumbents everywhere they pop up.

As to the will of the people--we're talking net neutrality. People support it because they like the word "Neutral."

There may be some like that, but people like me, who have been working on the Internet since before hypertext, support it because the idea of letting ISPs make deals for fast lanes is about as stupid as allowing the electric company make deals with companies to cut off electricity to their competitors.