After the hype it seems that story was overblown -- looked like less than 1% were compromised

That's good. I haven't been able to keep up on the story with the holidays and all.

I'm thinking that services like TOR (and others) are the one hope for having an internet in the future that is worth having.

Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.

That may be the single stupidest sentence in the history of stupid sentences on the Internet.

You won't share what you think because it's what you think. Everything you see and think and say and do reflects your own biases. If you decide not to share a single bit of data that is floating around in your head if it happens to reflect your biases, that means you will spend the rest of your life mute, which come to think of it might be best for everyone.

I've just re-read your entire comment and it doesn't seem to say anything at all about anything. Are you a Markov bot? If so, your maker forgot to put in the AI.

One way or another, you pay for your free Internet services.

It's not "one way or another". It's ONE WAY.

Where do I sign up to pay for Google and Twitter and other internet services directly instead of via my private data? I've been to Google thousands of times, and I've never seen a "subscribe" button.

No, there is no "one way or another". You can ONLY pay for your internet services by letting companies upskirt your private communications and personal data. That gives you some idea of just how valuable your private data really is.

Now we have that story of more than half of all TOR nodes being owned by some hacker group.

The Internet has been weaponized against us.

I don't think the great-grandparent grasps the degree of specialization the various sub-components of and individuals in the services have.

It's more that I don't see how the Army can have the level of generalisation enough to have an air corps, and an engineering corps, but somehow running their own A-10 division is suddenly out of scope. The division seems arbitrary.

Haha nope. Undiagnosed asthma and poor eyesight saved me from a few years of concussions. Years later Lasik fixed the latter and the former is mostly under control. Technically right now I believe I qualify as an extreme athlete. That'd blow the minds of some PE coaches from a couple decades ago, I'm sure.

Our responses tend to be a bit more... killey.

Given the variety of types of equipment and roles needed by the modern armed forces, I wonder if it makes sense to have different services rather than a combined armed forces. When a plausible mission is a sea launched ground attack with tactical air support I have to wonder why we're trying to get three services, each with historical antagonism towards the other, to work together rather than simply have a force with ships, planes and armoured cars.

I moved every three or four years growing up -- I was a military brat. Luckily for me, Dad was stationed at a post in upstate New York for most of the time I was in high school. I attended a very high quality high school there, so I have a first-hand basis for comparison between good educational systems and bad ones. The school in New York could get more done in a 40 minute class than the bad schools I attended down south could manage in an hour. We'd get in, get right down to business and get out before we had time to get bored. Class sizes were smaller and the teacher didn't have to spend 20 minutes getting everyone to settle down.

The difference in focus was apparent as soon as you walked into the building. The school in New York had posters for good colleges and educational awards on prominent display and had very little focus on sports. Despite this, they had a much better PE program -- they had an Olympic-sized swimming pool and offered elective options for cross-country skiing and archery, among other things.

The schools I attended in the South had larger, longer classes and were entirely focused on football. If your aptitude didn't fall into the range of something to do with football, they pretty much just wanted to waste your time until they could kick you out into the real world with a promising career as a gas station attendant to look forward to. You were either a future football player or a future football viewer. That's all they knew how to do.

What no one in any school ever told me was that I was the captain of my own fate. We all are. So if your school is bad and you don't want to grow up to be a gas station attendant, you'd better find some other way to learn the math and science that today's careers demand. The world isn't going to get any easier.

" but anti-GamerGate has harassed far more women than GG has (namely, any)"

That's really how they talk.

Instead if replacing comparatively-cheap programmers with cheaper overseas programmers, why not replace expensive middle and upper management with cheaper overseas middle and upper management? For what our CEO makes, I could hire a couple hundred engineers. But I bet I could find a guy from India who'd be happy to be our CEO for about what one engineer makes. And he'd be every bit as effective at it as our CEO is!

I'd guess they probably tried to dump several gigabytes of comments into one gigantic XML document, and their... lessee 18 years... I'm going to say, DG/UX system couldn't handle a file of that size. Is that about right? I don't even want to know what hokey solution they duct-taped to their system to get it to spit out XML.

If only there were some sort of magical agency that knew how to deal with communications and could actually design a decent transfer format for these guys. I bet that very same agency might know why it would be important that the people who provide access to the Internet should not be allowed to constrain those channels based on who you decide to talk to.

Of course I recognize the marketing phrase. I was just providing a little context to readers who might not realize that there were technology powerhouse corporations before Apple.

Kodak was developing and patenting new technologies when Steve Jobs' great-grandfather was selling pencils under a bridge.