In most places, local politicians have granted exclusive right-of-way access to donors^H^H^H^H^H%H public-minded businesses, like Comcast.
In many cities, power and cable run underground because poles are "ugly". That's a bit more expensive to do, even if the local politicians allow it.
You might want to look up what "line of sight" means.
Suppose I point a laser in your direction and you are trying to detect that laser. We're five miles apart. Will you be able to spot that laser on a clear night? Probably not, because there is probably some other building between you and me. Or a tree. Or a hill.
Go outside and look five miles due west. In all probability you can't, you can only see as far as your neighbor's front door. No amount of error correction is going to fix the fact that there's a friggin house in the way. That's line of sight.
Suppose we go out to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where there are no buildings, trees, or hills. You hold a laser and shine it toward me, five miles away. Can I see it? Nope, even with no building, trees or hills, the curvature of the earth is in the way. Line of sight is one mean bitch.
> You also seem to think that the U.S. is the prime embodiment of justice, innocence and conduct,
Where do you see any of that? You might note that the only thing I said about the US is that they don't respond to cyberattacks the same way they respond to physical attacks. You seem to be smoking something pretty strong that gives you textual hallucinations any time an expert disagrees with your guess.
> Your analogy with the safe and saw is lacking of understanding of the topic.
Let's look at your CVEs and mine and see who is lacking understanding of the topic. Oh, your name isn't on any CVEs? Okay, we'll compare kernel contributions. Whoever is mentioned most in the kernel changelog probably knows a little something about what they're talking about. Oh, not a contributor, are you? Maybe a different metric - the security system I wrote only protects about 34,000 ecommerce sites. If yours protects more, you win.
> Telecoms should never have been given both tax dollars to build infrastructure and ownership of that infrastructure.
Absolutely agreed. The extent to which that has occurred has been VASTLY overstated by people with a particular political agenda, but most people can agree it did happen to some extent and it shouldn't have.
> it's a little late to worry about socialism because the fiber sitting unused was bought and paid for by the people as it is.
It's not too late. You _can_ have politicians trying to run an ISP, or you could get the taxpayers their money back buy selling the failing fiber operations to an ISP who has proven they can provide good service like Wide Open West. That gets rid of the socialism issue. So there are at least two ways to go, it's a matter of which is the best course of action.
One can decide the best course of action based on which one best serves a preconceived political ideology, or one can look at the experience of cities who have tried each approach. You can advocate for the agenda you grew up believing, or you can advocate for what actually works, what will get god results for you and your neighbors. I don't know about you, but baed on where I grew up, what my parents said, etc., as a child I believed in Ronald Reagan and the tooth fairy. It sounds like you probably believed in Bill Clinton and the tooth fairy. Later, you may have believed in Barak Obama or Bush II. Either way, our beliefs may have been mistaken.
and works well on a router where Windows can't run at all.
debatable and factually wrong.
Windows runs on routers, like the 54G, just as Linux distributions like OpenWRT, dd-wrt, etc?
I'm guessing what you mean is that a Windows desktop could kinda do some routing. It could. That's Windows running a desktop, doing some routing (poorly). That's not running on a router.
On the other hand, Windows runs really well on a desktop in the third grade classroom. That's not surprising since that's what Windows is for. It turns out, screwdrivers do a good job of turning screws. Hammers do a better job of hammering nails. Yeah, you CAN sort of pound a nail with a screwdriver and it might kind of work some of the time, but it's very definitely the wrong tool for the job. If you want to pound nails, use a hammer. Don't add an 18-ounce head to my screwdriver so you can pound nails with it.
> but to think that the U.S. government wouldn't be able to secure its networks, and that only the Chinese and Russians would be trying to "get in", is ridiculous.
For $5000, you can buy a heavy safe made of concrete and steel. For $32, I can rent a concrete saw made to cut concrete and steel. You can't secure ANYTHING and have it still be useful. The question is "how hard should it be to breqk in?" The state department network should be pretty hard to breqk into. It'll never, ever be impossible.
The government of China isn't stupid. They know that if you are going to have a military and be a world power, it makes sense to also have significant cyber resources - so they do. They use them regularly, especially since the US allows it. The US doesn't respond to cyber attacks the same way they'd respond to physical attacks.
Well, they were SUPPOSED to follow the regs. Of course that doesn't mean they did. As you suggest, though compliance and security are not only not the same thing, but they are only very loosely coupled, of it all. In some cases we've had security regulations require the use of insecure methods, such as MD5. I spent 15 years doing security for small companies before I just recently started learning compliance with all of these "security " standards.
PCI is pretty good, though. It's not comprehensive, but it doesn't require insecurity.
> what they think is the right way. That ties into what the mentality of this elite crowd is. For years this elite crowd has fought at every turn any attempt to make Linux easier to use for common, everyday users as a Windows alternative.
For decades, not just years. The Unix way predates the Windows philosophy by a rather significant margin. Those who appreciate the Unix philosophy have been protecting it from turning into something else for decades.
Imagine you joined the Ford F-250 design team. Would you insist that the F-250 should be redesigned as a Corvette alternative? Would you be surprised when the veteran members of the team pointed out that the F-250 is a work truck, not a sports car?
The Windows way works well for grandma to look at pictures of her grandkids. Mac may be even better for that use case. That's not suprising, as those systems were designed specifically to be "easier to use
If you want something that is just like a Windows desktop, your best bet is to get a Windows desktop. Linux isn't Windows, and of it tries to be like Windows it'll stop being Linux and being good at what Linux is good at.
Hard drives preloaded with malware would be a problem, but that's not what this is about. Hardware drivers run as part of the operating system kernel. If you get malware (or just buga) in your kernel, you're screwed. There's no way for any anti-malware system to detect or remove it because the security software has to get it's information from the kernel. So it is very important to protect the kernel.
In order to protect the kernel from malicious or crappy code, it won't load any untrusted modules as part of the kernel. Since device drivers are kernel modules which become part of the kernel, they must be trusted (signed) or they aren't loaded.
So there is a balance here - there is a good reason to not run any random code as part of the kernel, but that has the effect of using only the default OSX driver unless the drive manufacturer gets their driver signed. That means drive-specific features don't work without a signed driver.
Unfortunately, drive manufacturers screwed up trim support, so it ended up being a drive-specific feature. You can't just call trim() per the standard without knowing how that specific drive handles it. Some drives will lose data if you do.
At the endof the day, that's the cause of the problem - drive manufacturers sold hardware that would lose data if used according to the standard.
Thanks for your work on that. I'm npt familiar with graphics programming at all since my work always uses either a cli or browser-based GUI, but I do have some Macs around for testing and such.
Your first sentence somewhat saves the post from your subject line. It should be remembered that Comcast already was split up. Last year, half the company was called Time Warner. Comcast has bought lots of cable operators and they sucked when they were seperate. They sucked because they could - each little company had a government franchise over a particular area, an enforced monopoly ensuring no competition. If they were split like the baby Bells were formed from ma Bell, we'd have exactly the same situation that we had five years ago.
What's needed is competitive pressure to improve service and lower rates. An obvious mechanism to do this is to forbid cities from making it effectively illegal to compete. That can be seen as equal protection - the laws of the ciry of Houston government shouldn't establish Comcast as the only provider allowed to build a network, forbidding competition from over builders. Unlike a forced split, that's also consistent with principles of freedom.
Until recently, there was the practical problem of the economics of building a competing coax network. Few companies wanted to risk spending millions building where Comcast already has a network in place. There is a unique opportunity right now, though, as all-fiber networks begin to replace the cable plant. Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber. That means we're in a time period right now where smaller, better, newer companies can and will compete directly with Comcast , where state and city governments allow them to.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
> it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Just at the federal level alone (think just the interstate highways), along with any taxes you're paying, we're incurring $10,000 per person of debt each year. If there are 3 people in your family, that's $30,000 per year your family will have to pay back sooner or later. Right now, we owe $62,000 each ($156,000 per family) .
Is that "each person pays a little" or "each person pays a lot"?
I've noticed over time that you like using the word equivocation. Let me suggest that since you like word, you might be interested in looking it up to see EXACTLY what it means, then maybe using Google to see how other people use it.
I believe the derivation is equi (equal) and voca (as in vocal), meaning to say two things equally, to avoid taking either side.
When asked who was most qualified to be chief, the president said that Ms. Smith had 15 years of related experience, and Mr. Jones had 10 years working as the assistant chief.
2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
