You might be right that this is a loaded Trojan horse.

However, I have no problem with what is on the surface. These are good ideas -- the internet is very much deserving "public utility" status. I'm not worried about fast lanes, I'm worried about intentionally making competition-owned services slower. The internet is a freaking power outlet, it should not matter what brand of hair dryer I plug in. If I need more power, I buy more power (bandwidth). But it doesn't matter what I am using it for.

The thing is we're worried about what comcast "might" do. And you're worried about what the NSA/government "might" do. Well maybe we're both right, did that ever occur to you? Maybe the government wants to overreach, to spy on your ebay shopping and snoop on your email. Maybe private industry wants insert extra ads while I web surf, or slow down Skype so that I am more likely to use iMessage, or make Amazon faster than Netflix in return for a little cash on the side. or whatever. Lots of maybe here.

We have to attack on both fronts. Neither party is trustworthy here.

I'd say they are as qualified as the democrats. The democrats are convinced and will vote for anything related to it. The republicans are convinced the other way. Neither party is being particularly scientific about this or any other political issues. And yes, this is only politics. Climate science deserves a lot more than a binary vote.

There are no significant differences in the senators between the two parties. They both wine and dine together, both came from big old-school money, went to Harvard, etc. Mostly law degrees. What did you think, the democrats were all scientists and the republicans all oil surveyors?

Grow up, take the blindfold off. You have been pulled into drinking the party's punch. Stop before it's too late.

This is funny, the implication is that politicians know a lot about climate science. Ha!

Climate science is so much more complex than "warming" or "not warming". Anyone that wants to boil it down to only one variable really isn't trying to solve or understand anything.

What would be great is if MRO could try and make contact on its next fly-by. That antenna would certainly work under a solar panel, it would just have considerably less range. But knowing where it is now, we should be able to jam a signal down the front end and make contact.

If the solar chargers are still functioning with 2/3rds of the design power...

Without a doubt, FreeBSD is the best at these tasks. I have used it in the past and you can create a basic forwarding firewall with only a few lines of config. Add a dozen or so more for better control. I also ran BIND, isc-dhcpd, and a wifi access point. This would be a little tough under OpenBSD and NetBSD as they don't have quite the same range of wifi hardware supported out of the box.

FreeBSD has good package management and is very well documented. In many benchmarks, it is faster and scales better than the other BSDs. SAMBA will work fine, as will netatalk and NFS.

Having said all this, running your own firewall is a really good skill and enjoyable hobby. But if it ever becomes more of a burden than an enjoyable task, switch to a high-performance router running linux (no routers with linux have stooped to systemd yet that I know of). I have an ASUS that can seriously handle all the throughput that I can throw at it. And now I have more time for other things!

PS: If you're not already aware, in addition to local caching, BIND can also connect to DHCPD and create real DNS resolution for your local clients.

Or, they hack a host on the otherwise of the firewall, say via some JavaScript that sends commands to the router. It's very trivial. The assumption that everything on the LAN side is inherently safe is so 90s NFS/rhosts...

Good or bad, it's going to happen.

In the future, it will look completely stupid that people would pay for 200 channels of which they can only watch one at a time. And, they had to watch at the behest of Hollywood TV programming schedules, or get sophisticated personal video recorders to schedule recording (even more silly when you realize most TV is already recorded -- not live).

The model of watching TV channels is on its way out. The only way for cable companies to get some "cord cutters" back is to offer them only what they want, say a sports or news channel. And this will only prolong the inevitable.

No doubt cable companies would not just sit on their hands and let people scale back their bills and channel selections. Duh. But the writing is on the wall, and their days are numbered.

I just ordered a new internet service through a different cable provider, and I had to tell the poor gal that I don't have a TV to get her to stop offering bundled x y and z.

Besides some fancy admin tools, what is the difference between Oracle and MySQL?

I know Oracle sells a lot of enterprise solution apps, but from a database point of view, what's the difference?

But here's the thing, is telling a student that she has now lost her "physics virginity" (a common expression he used) harassment? Is this his "sex life"?

You have jumped to the conclusion that what he did must be horrible without knowing what he did. We (the public) don't even know the context other than that a female student complained about an email and he was fired.

I agree with your points, but I think you should consider that he may not have had a non-exemplary "sex life". He might have just been a grumpy old guy using phrases that a modern PC crowd can't handle.

Just consider it.

Maybe though, in the case of this professor, the judgement of his school that an email he sent constituted harassment... MAYBE it is worth your time to consider the facts (which are unreleased at this time) before you condemn him in the court of popular opinion.

With Cosby, enough people have come forth with pretty vivid and detailed accounts of what took place. Every single one of them sounds horrible and their accounts are so detailed it seems they are likely true. So I am willing to believe that he probably did these things.

With this professor, all we have is an opinion from some probably overly-PC college management types. We don't know what he did, and I bet the accusing student will never tell.

I for one will wait for the evidence and judge a scientist using the scientific method, not a tabloid.

I have two apple 30-inch displays (the anti-glare type) on my linux box. I can easily see four or five "pages" of text all at once, either looking at separate documents or one doc showing several pages at the same time.

For spreadsheets, it's amazing how much I can see at once. I guess if I needed a LOT more rows I could go portrait. Right now on one monitor I can see rows 1 through 81, and columns A through AB (at 100% zoom). If I stretch it all the way across both screens, I can see to column BE.

So... yeah I guess if rows were more important I could effective reverse the situation and stack two monitors vertically, each in portrait mode!

Until they explain, in detail, what the harassing was, I'm not buying it.

There is a rather wide range of things that can be considered "harassment" these days, and I think unless you know the specifics you are lowering yourself.

How about this: We take advice and wisdom about device physics from Shockley, and moral advice from someone else. Why is that so difficult?

In my experience, the most vocal student complainers are the ones that are failing courses and not doing homework.

"He's so difficult, he makes us show our work."

That kind of thing. And they are, always, the most sensitive to teacher comments.

So combine the three together: A PC-culture with zero-tolerance policies, a wild out-there-awesome "round peg in a square hole" professor, and a lazy complaining student.

Getting back to your point, "enough for the student to formally complain" doesn't mean shit unless a large amount of students are complaining that he isn't doing his job.

Obligatory:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.