The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic.

Don't be so dismissive.

I realize the plague is so dark ages and that we have antibiotics, but from 1990 until 2010 the overall mortality rate was 11%.

People still die even with antibiotics.

The plague exists in the wild in many western states of the USA.

Colorado just had four cases in the past few months.

Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.

That's not the say that men are more often correct than are women. They just seem more eager to do battle, even if it is from behind a keyboard.

Anyone that's been involved in an edit war of wikipedia knows that the winner is often isn't the one with the best grasp of the facts, but it's the one least willing to give up the fight.

Many engineers don't understand that business people are engineers of a sort, too.

What we all should do is realize that we're all part of a team that can't work without the participation of everyone. Mutual respect is key.

Many skills are needed if a firm is to survive.

In Switzerland the slowest speeds you commonly get are about 15 Mbits/s...

And yet the report cited shows that only 45% have access to speeds above 10Mbps and 23% of access to speeds above 15Mbps.

Five US states have more people above 10Mbps than Switzerland.

And one of those states by itself, New Jersey, has almost a million more people.

No 4g available? I'm using a Verizon 4g access point from a horse farm in the middle of nowhere and Speakeasy's speed test gives me 10.46Mbps down/7.53Mbps up.

Yeah, i don't see how their supposed 'netflix is going to extort us' scare is supposed to work. Everything I remember about how the internet works pretty much invalidates the idea.

I think they're looking at how cable companies have to pay content providers to broadcast their content.

Disney, ESPN, CNN, etc all charge the cable company for their content. If the cable company doesn't pay, then their customers don't get the channels.

Will this happen with websites or Netflix? It doesn't seem possible, yet it's hard to know just where all this is going.

Consider facebook. What would happen if suddenly facebook demanded an ISP pay them for access by the ISP's customers? Who would the customers blame? Would they simply give up on facebook or would they hound their ISP to pay up?

there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.

Most Western European countries are mixed economies, mostly capitalist, with some socialism, and a welfare state.

East Germany and the Soviet Union really bought into the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything. Private property was outlawed. You could go to jail for making a profit.

The East Germans were so committed to the idea that the state owned everything that they believed they had a right to build an enormous wall to keep the governments property (people) from escaping to the West.

Reminds me a little of some work done by Terje Mathisen, an expert assembly language programmer. Not exactly that same as the exploit, but probably interesting to a few slashdotters. I'll let him describe it:

"The most complicated code I have ever written is/was a piece of executable text, in order to be able to send binary data over very early text-only email systems:

"Minimum possible amount of self-modification (a single two-byte backwards branch), a first-level bootstrap that fits in two 64-byte lines including a Copyright notice and which survives the most common forms of reformatting, including replacing the CRLF line terminator by any zero, one or two byte sequence. This piece of code picks up the next few lines, combining pairs of characters into arbitrary byte values before flushing the prefetch cache by branching into the newly decoded second-level bootstrap. (Everything uses only the ~70 different ascii codes which are blessed by the MIME standard as never requiring encoding or escape sequences.)

"This second level consists of a _very_ compact BASE64 decode which takes the remainder of the input and re-generates the original binary which it can either execute in place or write to disk.

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

Don't forget those in the construction industry. Like administrators, they contribute where it counts: in the voting booth where they help elect those that will continue to increase spending on that abstraction "education" rather than on actual educators.

There are other advantages to shrinking components. Higher clock rates become possible.

You'd think so, but the problem is global interconnect. Not gates. It was all the way back at the 250nm node when interconnect and gate delay were about the same.

At the 28nm node, wire delay is responsible for something like 80% of the time it takes for signals to work their way through a circuit.

And it some cases inverters are actually used to help signals propagate more quickly down long wires. In other words, long wires are so slow compared to gates that adding gates can speed things up!

We're already at the point where 22nm components are more expensive per transistor than those at 28nm.

Previous shrinks lowered the cost of each transistor. It doesn't look like it's going to happen after 28nm.

I believe many ISPs are actively sabotaging customer's connections to some of the internet's content

They don't have to. The protocols we use are more than capable of screwing with things.

Consider TCP: the protocol is BY DESIGN meant to exponentially increase the amount of data dumped on a link until it overloads and begins dropping packets. TCP then throttles for a little while and then soon goes back to bashing the network with packets until it breaks again.