You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.

So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.

Seattle hasn't had a Republican mayor for about 80 years. The city council is all Democrats except for the one socialist.

If you don't like the government there - surprise you don't actually like Democrats, regardless of what your govrrnment-school teacher told you.

My reply didn't exactly match your comment, but I'd say it's true for counterfeiting too. Pick a random electronic device at a random big-box store. It's probably NOT counterfeit. It probably DOES have lax security.

Even more, I'm talking about testing like UL does. UL focuses primarily on fire safety, and it works - our electronic devices rarely catch fire. Fire safety is a success. Data safety is a miserable failure - I can personally hack most devices.

> . I think you were being generous to my argument about 5% being counterfeit, in the western world it would be lower. But equally low are the number of products we have major security issues with.

Being in this industry, it seems to me that ALL major router manufactures have had multiple major security problems. NONE of them have had major "catch on fire" problems to my recollection. So the assertion that the number of devices with security problems is the same as the number that have fire problems is false in the extreme.

>. the potentially darker sides of open data â" from creating a new kind of digital divide to making an argument in favor of privatizing certain government services.

If you choose to get a service from the provider you select, that's choice. If the government, in cooperation with their intelligence services, forces you to get the service, and get it from them, that force.

Force is necessarily ALWAYS better than choice. That's canon to the American left.

Booting is one of the most resource-intensive things that most people do with their computers, so it's ONE EXAMPLE in which the speed difference is obvious. While booting, the kernel and init system hit the CPU quite a bit and the disk even more. Make no mistake, by the time you see the Windows logo, the kernel is running, running a sprint.

Other examples of tasks that are faster on a virtualized system depend on your hardware, drivers, and configuration. Try it sometime. Assign about 75% of the RAM to the guest, less if you have more than 12GB of RAM.

>. You're assuming perfect certification and a lack of counterfeiting

No, I'm pointing out that it's better than NO testing or certification. If 5% of the products are counterfeit, that means 95% aren't. Compare the safety of what's one the shelves at Walmart vs what street vendors sell in Mexico or China. It does in fact work.

> For a certification scheme like this to work you need perfect certification

There's no "would need". UL has been testing products for over a hundred years, so it's not theory. UL certified products do in fact have a much better safety record than untested products. UL LISTED products are in the middle.

Each chunk is downloaded from one peer. Also, normally from each peer you get one chunk at a time. So with two peers, the default behavior is to be downloading one chunk from the fast peer while downloading another from the slow peer.

That can often be less efficient than ignoring the slow peer(s) and just using the near/fast peer(s). If you and your neighbor are both AT&T customers with 30Mbps connections, the ideal is to transfer between you at the full 30Mbps. Using 5Mbps on the far peer with high latency and only 25Mbps on the local peer makes it slower for you and more expensive for the ISP.

This system prefers a closer, better, faster HOST. Suppose your next door neighbor and a guy on the other side of the planet both offer a chunk of a torrent you want. It is better for it to be sent from your neighbor to you. That's faster for you and it's cheaper for the ISP than transporting traffic across the world or across the country. So that's what they patented - a system for encouraging your bittorrent client to download from your neighbor rather than from someone far away.

That's a preference for a particular host - the better one.

Apparently my post was not tested for typos.

> That cannot be true almost by definition. Running a virtual machine of any description carries overhead which you will not incur running directly on the hardware.

A computer scientists might say that's true. A stopwatch will say the virtual machine is faster - much faster. You can easily see it for yourself by checking how long it takes to reboot while installing Windows updates. You can also explain it "scientifically".

You would agree, I'm sure, that a system with 8GB of RAM and a hard drive with 64MB of drive cache might be much faster than a machine with 8.01GB of RAM and 1MB of drive cache. Agreed?

We've established that a machine with more RAM serving as storage cache might be faster than one with less, even if the one with small storage cache has more RAM overall.
Therefore, a system with 6GB of RAM and 1GB of drive cache might be faster than either of the above 8GB machines. That's essentially what a machine running a VM is. From the perspective of the guest OS, the host hypervisor is firmware - firmware with a GB of cache RAM.

Also the hypervisor or host OS may simply do a better job of using the hardware, it may have better drivers. If the hypervisor has a very fast driver for the storage, while Windows has a slower driver for that storage, it may be faster to let the hypervisor talk to the hardware. Windows uses the virtual storage driver which should be extremely fast because all it does is map, or perhaps copy, RAM.

You can see a very clear of case of a virtualized copy of Windows being much faster than one running on metal by just installing some Windows updates that requires rebooting the OS. On metal, a full reboot may over a minute to complete all of the "on startup" processes. Within a hypervisor, the same processes may complete in under 10 seconds because everything is read from host cache RAM rather than from spinning platters. From a computer science perspective you might say "that's cheating, the virtualized Windows didn't have to actually reboot the hardware". Well no, it didn't. And that made it much, much faster. It's much faster BECAUSE it didn't have to reboot the hardware, but the first three words of that sentence are "it's much faster".

> Back then you could justify the increased costs associated with getting the UL stamp of approval as a benefit to the consumer's safety.
> Today, if you tried this, you'd get absolutely buried.

That "sounds good", especially if it plays well with your personal political feelings. However, go pick ten random electrical products at your local big box store. Notice that at least nine, if not all ten, do in fact have the UL mark. The actual fact is that today almost all manufacturers do indeed "justify the increased costs associated with getting the UL stamp of approval". You can be surprised that they do, but you can see with your own eyes that they do. If that doesn't fit your current ideas, your ideas must be mistaken.

Most electrical equipment mass-marketed in the US is tested by UL (Underwriters Laboratories). Many consumers and most large purchasers recognize the UL mark as indicating a degree of safety. Contracts can specify that products an components meet various UL standards. That's why your router's power suppy wall-wart probably has the UL mark, and doesn't generally catch fire.

The "Gubmint" doesn't force UL certification or listing, purchasers choose UL listed products. There's no "billions of lobbying dollars", in fact companies PAY to have their products tested, because if they are recognized by UL they don't sell nearly as well. Not only do individual consumers recognize the UL logo, but purchasing agents for Walmart and Target know they'd rather buy and sell UL tested products, so if you want Walmart to order 500,000 fire safes from you, you better have UL test it.

So no, it doesn't have anything to do with "gubmint" or "lobbying" - UL or another organization could check the firmware in the router just like they already check the power supply circuit.

While I look at other code for the details, such as looking at a function I plan to call, some "big picture" documentation is extremely valuable in order to know where to start. It's best to understand how it's supposed to all fit together and you can't see that by looking at individual lines of code in a codebase of millions of lines.

Also a sample HelloWorld module is very useful. What functions are REQUIRED for a kernel module? Reading over an existing module won't answer that; a sample helloword.so will answer that and many more in a compact form.

I found the Apache Modules book very useful for these reasons. The functions in the Apache API can be understood, but the big picture of the architecture is much clearer after reading the book.

MS Office are basically some XML files on a zip. A VCS designed for them can do version control. Of course, Excel has had five or six different document formats already, so there's no telling what they'll use next year.