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.

And how weird - to the way I think. It's the concept that certain types of knowledge somehow makes you inferior. And that somehow if say, you know how to repair an alternator on a car, it will be blocking more important knowledge?

Which brings me to a Simpson's reference

Homer: "And how is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

Marge: "That's because you were drunk!"

Homer (smiles) "And How!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Do think that not answering any point I make is burying my ass alive?

Anything you want to address in my post? Or just the typical, and now intellectually bankrupt and remarkably cheap and non sequitar "Talking point" union hate. I didn't mention anything about unions, merely what would seem to be a normal contract issue. And very simple at that, Time and compensation, and not a thing about tenure.

THIS! I have always engaged the "elite" And if they get too high up on their high horse, I bring them down a few pegs.

For in fact, a very intelligent person who knows how to get their hands dirty is vastly superior to a person who merely thinks. A person can be a Nobel Laureate, yet if his car blows a fuse in the desert, he'll die just like anyone else who doesn't know how to fix it.

A few examples:

Years ago, my neighbor, who is an intellectual with whom I've had a lot of interesting conversations, had a car that was continually breaking down, not big things, but I used to help him repair it. That usually consisted of me doing th ework while he listened. One day I was repairing a window that had fallen out of it's track. I was explaining to him how it works and how ot repair it whne he interrupted "To tell the truth, I don't want to know about how to repair cars. Last time I helped him.

Much more recently, there was a woman on the Toyota RV's SIG list who was constantly having issues, mostly electrical, with her toyhome. At one point, I chimed in with a helpful link that would help her understand a little more about electricity. Considering these are ancient beasts, it helps to understand how to at least field repair one. Or to not be taken advantage of by an unscrupulous mechanic.

She quickly answered back to the group and me that She had no intention of learning about these things, that she expected to ask questions and have us answer them for her, because she was an artist, not a technician.

For some reason, her questions were not answered any more.

If she had thought about it, she could have thanked me kindly and ignored the basic electrical stuff. Instead, she had to show her intellectual creds and superiority by announcing she was too good to learn that stuff - she was an artist for christ's sake! It's not that I'm saying everyone can or should be getting their hands dirty. But knowledge is seldom a bad thing.

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.

Are you saying if one court says "x" is illegal and another court disagrees saying same "x" is legal.... illegal determinations are automatically preferred winning out by default?

What are you saying? I don't understand.

The law is so complex and open to human interpretation it is not always feasible to know what is or is not legal a-priori. Lawyers and judges can and often do legitimately disagree. Hence ability for even relatively pedestrian cases to get pushed all the way to the supreme court for final determination.

Unfortunately not every determination of guilt or legality is correct.

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.

First class and business tend to have their products refreshed on a more regular basis, because there's more involved in each rather than "seats" and "entertainment" in economy, and in the case of the 787 most airlines had planned to launch new first and business products with the introduction of the 787 into their fleets, but then the plane was hit with 5 years worth of delays so those products got launched on older aircraft instead.

Don't worry, it won't. The very LAST thing an enemy in your asymmetric war would want is you to stop using them. They cost insane amounts of money to keep them flying. Every hour that thing is in the air is running for your enemy.

Again, the asymmetric war is not about killing Americans. It is about making them spend more money on its military than it can. Interestingly enough, exactly the same strategy the US employed against Russia in the cold war.

And we know how that ended.

As I explained above, the tests don't show whether the student is learning. The tests show whether the student understood the underlying system. I can honestly say that I don't have any clue about bookkeeping despite allegedly learning it for 5 years and passing with a B average.

Tests have a fundamental flaw that they are testing whether you can work as a sponge. Soak up any and all crap and reproduce it at request, without the need to retain anything of it for any longer period of time.

Well, the US (unlike the Reich) pretty much has to go high-tech with its army, simply because high losses would quickly mean that support for any kind of war would decline sharply. Not really a problem for a dictatorship, but certainly one in a democracy. So what the US strives for is a high-tech army that reduces the risk of losing personnel and instead favors spending money. Which would be a great thing if it was done with the main goal of protecting soldier lives rather than keeping home front war support up. But not the point right now.

So in general it's not a bad idea to use better technology instead of more manpower. The problem arises when your enemy can do the opposite with impunity as we see in asymmetric warfare. The US need a huge infrastructure and logistics apparatus to keep its military going, the overhead is incredible. It boggles the mind to ponder just what is necessary to get the average US soldier in the field supplied. With this in mind it can be successful to actually wage war against such a huge military machine, simply by spending a tiny fraction of its expenses and hence weighing it down under its own weight. If putting a gun in the hands of some fanatics is all you have to do to "force" the US to field aircraft carriers and deploy field HQs in some godforsaken corner of the planet (which both needs incredibly complicated logistics and tons of resources to keep running), you can get the international warfare equivalent of a reflected DDoS running: Invest minimal resources that forces your target to waste more resources than they can afford.