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Comment Re:The world... (Score 1) 236

Analog is the accepted spelling in the computer industry.

Even worse, analogue is a model of the real. The real and continuous world is not an analogue of binary logic. An analogue is a figurative model of the real, something analogous to something else. Among the binary, however, logic is primary and real is analog. So let's preserve the proper spelling for the proper use and cede the streamlined variant to the Forces of Progress.

These travesties may be quite upsetting, but even the word "quite" once meant "hardly at all." It was used facetiously so often that came to mean "very".

Comment Preserving the disinformation infrastructure. (Score 2) 364

Verizon leads the campaign to preserve the television industry in the United States.

As broadcast television and real-time cable approach irrelevancy, the incumbents in the video-distribution business seek control over cached video programming.

The right to charge extra would affirm Verizon FiOS as a cable television operator with the right to charge to carry even cached content.

Not coincidentally, real-time one-to-many propaganda operations like Fox News depend on this campaign to turn Internet providers into a small subset of the digital data transport industry.

Comment Re:"Lawyer up" doesn't work at all (Score 1) 170

Except you can have said lawyer disbarred if you can prove they violated client confidence for unethical purposes. Contact your state bar association (for the US).

There's a simple solution everyone is ignoring. Hire lawyers in competing countries. For example. US, Switzerland, Russia and China. Split the key, send a piece to all four. Good luck getting the legal systems of all four locations to concur.

It would be a full-time job disbarring every attorney who violated client confidentiality in my presence. Moreover, when I'm there, it's not my confidentiality they are violating.

Lawyers do what they do because they know they can get away with it.

I gather you haven't yet sampled the trustwothiness of lawyers in China and Russia.

Comment Re:"Lawyer up" doesn't work at all (Score 1) 170

Lawyers violate client confidentiality every day. They can't be compelled to do so -- except by their larger clients. There has to be something in it for the attorney. I've seen ample numbers of confidential documents from an attorney soliciting business from me. I think that showing off and acting like an industry kingmaker is the predominant motive, but I don't get to see the horse-trading among legal professionals.

Comment Re:Not like DRM (Score 1) 170

Alas, there will customers keen on destroying any hope of retrieving the historical record. Most of these will be government agencies.

Subpoena would lead to impounding the key-protection device. Then the "investigators" will either engage a lax hacker stooge to trigger the self-destruct or they will pretend to misplace it.

Comment It's not the economics, it's the politics. (Score 1) 223

The cable industry has been the primary drag on broadband deployment through the United States because it has one nightmare these days: that the oligarchy of video propragandists once known as the the Television Industry will be rendered obsolete by low-cost video distribution from any point to any point.

This political monopoly is the main asset they trade when the time comes to get what they want from the government. They have sewn up the market for soapboxes and they want to keep it that way.

They have sleazy armies of blurmasters deployed throughout the standards-setting and franchise-granting spheres, and have insinuated to their Blurmaster General, Tom Wheeler, to head the FCC. They make it look like theory, but it's all practice.

Comment Re:They do. (Score 3, Insightful) 256

Japan, like most of civilization, is not a fuel source, just a fuel depot. A foreign base is an advantage and a disadvantage, an overhead expense, a sore in foreign relations, and a vulnerability requiring additional defense.

As far as supply lines go, this is like taking off the pump-fed diving suit and breathing with gills.

Your point is well taken if this process is just an auxiliary. But if every vessel in an armada can refill from purpose-built reactor-powered saltwater-crackering seaworthy catalytic beds, then it's a much different force, one that can't be stopped at the Solomon Islands.

Comment Re:Something From Nothing. (Score 1) 393

Whatever you believe is the purpose of higher education, you can't really believe that freshman-level mathematics and sciences are delivered with adequate pedagogy.

Of course schools should not accept students unless they think those students will succeed. The reason only 35% of enrollees successfully complete freshamn calculus has little to do with the abilities or the descipline of the students. High schools have great difficulty finding good calculus teachers, but colleges just assign instruction to the lowest level graduate students who can pass a language-competency test.

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