It's entirely irrelevant when we're talking about 44.1kHz audio, which is what we are. The cable would have to be ghastly to the point of basically not working at all to bugger up 44.1KHz audio, even uncompressed (which is only 1.5Mbit/sec)

The question is: is the signal-to-noise ratio good enough? If so a cheap cable that passes the data is every bit as good as an expensive one, so long as the packets arrive intact at the other end.

Ethernet already does a lot to counter noise. The signals are differential pairs (so instead of having ground and signal, you have signal+ and signal-). The wire pairs are twisted, which keeps them in close proximity. Interference tends to be common mode noise (so for two wires close together it will affect the signal in each wire almost the same), and differential amplifiers are designed to only amplify the difference between the two wires and will therefore reject common mode noise. Each end also has an isolating transformer, and each end has proper termination (to avoid things like reflections which can bugger up signal integrity). It takes a significantly terrible out-of-spec twisted pair cable to make ethernet stop working.

Incidentally, the signalling for 100baseTX ethernet only has a fundamental frequency of 31.25MHz (naively people would expect 1MHz per 1Mbps but this is not so). 100baseTX uses a 3 level (in other words +1, 0, -1) non return to zero signalling (in other words, a 1 will cause the signal to change level and a 0 will cause the signal to remain at the current level - or it might be the other way around, it's a long time since I did this stuff). Each 4 bits is encoded into a 5 bit symbol designed to prevent long runs of 0s (which would cause the signal level to remain constant for too long). Lots of people call an ethernet connection a "broadband" connection, but it's not, it's baseband (hence the "base" in 100baseTX).

Contrary to what you believe, its not meant to replace RAM, its meant to replace spinning rust.

Try turning your technology map right side up.

Yes. Switching computers on my KVM switch (scroll lock + console number)

I'd have to question that (not that she has to do it or the reasons she was told, but the supposed reality that elders can't read normal text as well as caps). One of the pieces of research that was done here in the 1950s resulted in motorway road signs in the UK being in mixed case rather than all caps - it caused howls of anguish from old-timers resistant to change - but the thing is words with lower case text have more of a shape - for instance "Manchester" can be resolved as the word "Manchester" much faster than "MANCHESTER" - it was found you could read the mixed case before you could even resolve all the letters because you could recognise the shape of the word, given that lower case text has more features like ascenders and descenders. Hence all UK road signs ever since have been in mixed case.

There is this piece of Cat 5 that isn't remotely hackable. Unless it's tapped, or if someone puts an inductor on it, or if they use TDR to estimate the length of the wire to figure out the distance between routers and discover where the Intrusion and Detection Systems are located.

Drones are subject to the same rules that RC aircraft are subject to.

It is however extremely hard to enforce. RC users are generally pretty responsible - they've probably spent many hours building their aircraft, and during this time it has sunk in the dangers they can pose, and usually they've joined a local club to help them learn to fly their new expensive aircraft and the club will also coach them on safely operating their aircraft.

Drone users not so much. Many of the ready-to-fly drones require pretty much zero skill to operate, so people can take off and cause mischief pretty much straight away.

The word "the" is a notorious trickster.

They say "running away from the consequences" when what they really mean is "running away from one particular set of consequences where we get all the photo ops wearing the stick".

The problem with this image is that greater society doesn't usually hand the stick to men wearing B&W, pin-stiped, double-breasted pygamas. He who breaks the law finds the stick slippery.

The consequences is presently enduring are already pretty unpleasant: notoriety he can never live down, and de facto house arrest without so much as a landlord-tenant act to protect his interests.

I'd also suggest that his marriage, family, and career prospects are not what they once were.

Of course, the vast majority of the American population would jump at the chance to throw over marriage, family, and career for the least chance to stick it to The Man, so we better add another heaping helping of grim before all hell breaks loose.

COW filesystems would have no problem with that scenario, especially when they have dynamic block sizes.

What file system do you have in mind? It's certainly not ZFS.

Furthermore, supporting dynamic block size poses real problems for efficient random access. For this reason, almost all file systems support fixed-size payload blocks, and only provide for dynamic on-disk storage size after compression.

If you have any clue what you're talking about, this file system technology is news to me.

Or put simply: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have an extraordinary claim here - highly extraordinary - but the evidence falls very very far short of being even just ordinary, let alone extraordinary.

yet most people somehow attribute to "whore" a worse meaning

Somehow?

Our market-value vigilance over who is zooming whom dates back a good six-million years.

Nowadays we get more upset when someone unworthy buys a home on our street, but the underlying sentiments were once the same.

This modern "whore" make-over as a small proprietor with high integrity is primarily a byproduct of dense urbanization, where there's an infinite number of fish in the sea to whitewash our old instincts—instincts pre-dating fire, language, cities, and agriculture.

"Somehow" you sound like you just fell off the turnip truck, five minutes ago.

That is, the Australian government has $498 billion to spend on whatever, but Walmart gives most of its $468 billion on suppliers.

That's the least comprehension of "whatever" I've ever seen. But you're not first. It's a 100,000-way tie.

The vast majority of government expenditures are written into law, and the benefits go right back to the same people who provided the revenues. A government enjoys great discretion in how it expends, but not much discretion at all concerning what it expends upon.

Certainly in the circular flow, the government's "friends" skim a lot of cream. And why shouldn't they? They're all upstanding businessmen (and businesswomen) engaged in the profit motive, possessed of the oldest, most conservative, barnyard business model:

1) Pick winning horse.
2) Milk cow.

I meant to say it's seen as unfair by the line workers.

Dress codes make a slight amount of sense when the company has a requirement that many employees must wear uniforms. It's not fair to say, "you people who stand in front of customers all day must wear a blue shirt, green tie, and khaki pants" but then say, "you people are in the main office, so you're exempt from dressing like a dork." Some of the line workers resent it. Management can then decide if they want to settle the matter by subjecting everyone to a dress code.

Of course HP doesn't require line workers to wear uniforms, so that's not the case here. This is just another stupid and capricious management decision by a company that's become famous over the last decade for having the most incompetent management of any (formerly) major corporation. HP's executives have been so bad it's easy to imagine an evil Michael Dell offered HP's board of directors one hundred million dollars -each- to sabotage HP into oblivion. (Hey, it makes a lot more sense than any other reason for imposing a dress code on engineers.)

Good point. First, IANAAEE (I am not an automotive electrical engineer) so much of this is speculation, but not all of it. I do think small, hardware firewalls ("data diodes") could help prevent a lot of these problems. I also agree with you in that I don't think the direct access is necessary, but I think it might loop around in such a way that the holes end up being present anyway.

Consider: the crash message from the airbag sensors, which is on the high speed engine control bus (ECB) goes to the door locks. The door locks are on the low speed bus (security network), but bridge both networks. A data diode could stop messages from the door locks from flowing back to the high speed ECB. The door locks, ignition key, and immobilizer are all on the security network. The ignition key talks to the immobilizer. Finally, the immobilizer talks to the ECU, which is on the high speed ECB.

The security network is supposed to be isolated from the cabin comfort network (where the infotainment system, navigation system, and cell phone stuff are.) But the crash signal has to travel to the cell modem somehow, so another component has to allow messages from the ECB to the cabin bus. Plus, some of these cars have "remote start via cell phone", so something still has to enable messages from the cell modem to travel to the immobilizer. How do they get to the security network? (Bigger question: do the Chryslers even have a security network, or do all low speed messages share a common bus?)

If everything were perfect, the immobilizer would be the only potential spot for the bridge; and because the immobilizer's entire job is to prevent the engine from starting unless all the security is perfectly aligned, it seems like the natural place where the engineers would focus their security attention to isolate the low speed bus from the ECB. But obviously not everything's perfect.

It seems like they should have a set of dedicated data protection devices that would be similar in concept to a traffic signal's conflict monitor, somehow hard-wired with a rule that allows only whitelisted messages from the modem to go to the immobilizer.