Yes, and this also exists today (assuming you have working DNSSEC) for OpenSSH.

That is, OpenSSH is already programmed to be able to confirm a remote host fingerprint by looking in DNS. This means "ssh foo.example.com" would reliably connect you to the machine that example.com's owners call 'foo' subject only to interference from the COM registry operator and the DNS root. If someone spoofs DNS, DNSSEC will report it, if they try to spoof the machine itself or TCP/IP, the OpenSSH fingerprint won't match. If they try a Man-in-the-middle attack the protocol design leaves them just moving your encrypted data with no clue what it says.

A public key trust system needs a trust root, but DNS conveniently already has one. We may fix a remarkable number of technical problems via DNSSEC, once we get the root signed and the political problems solved.

It _is_ a replica, but just not in the way you imagined.

The (British) _Science_ Museum has (or had) a workshop for building Difference Engine No. 2. This is the second one, built by replicating the first. They can't build one by following Babbage's plans, because his plans are wrong in subtle ways, and had to be corrected. One of the things the Science Museum gained by making the first one was a _correct_ set of plans for the machine. If you have a lot of money and want a Difference Engine, I have no doubt that the Science Museum would start up that workshop again and build another replica for you too.

Also, while I'm here, it's a lot harder to MitM the link between a user and their ISP in most cases. Both addresses are inside the ISP's range, so it should and probably does have border rules that prevent such packets traversing the border. That means to attack user X at ISP A, you need to be able to mess with packets inside ISP A. Whereas today, by doing MitM on some poor .com site's DNS servers, you get every user visiting the site. So "does nothing to protect" isn't really true.

If you're going to say "What if the bad guys just reconfigure the victim's machine to use their DNS server" Well, yeah, but in that case they broke in and changed system level configuration, it's game over. They could just as easily add an OS patch that redirects all IP traffic via their servers so that DNS is irrelevant.

Yes the digital exchange recognises pulse dialing. It might get phased out eventually because it sucks technically (unintentional "dialing" is common especially on above ground rural lines) and hasn't been needed on new phones for half a lifetime, but even then a $5 adapter could recognise pulse dialing on older phones and convert to tones if you're attached to the specific model of phone. All the smarts in the telephone network are in the exchanges, the telephone itself is nearly unchanged since it was invented.

If the cell network is functioning at all at your location, emergency calls have priority (a new 911 call will bump someone calling their mother if the load is too high to handle both). Whilst the same priority exists on your landline, most likely if there's a problem it'll fail altogether rather than being limited to emergency service.

It's true.. sort of. The smallest software company wins. So the big software company gets sued by a smaller one, and then the smaller one gets sued by a single lawyer working out of a shared office.

He's not infringing you see, all he does is file for patents and write lawsuits. So he wins every time in your system.

Patent supporters mistake "economic activity" (moving money around) for economic _productivity_ ie actually making something. They maximise the former at the cost of the latter and end up up to their necks in debt.

That is of course part of the point. The hams have become like steam railway hobbyists. Some hobbyists will chew your ear off about the reliability of trains during the steam era. They'll give you stats which they like to pretend are comparable to today's passenger multiple units. So-and-so many miles between faults...

But they're telling you how often the steam /locomotive/ failed. The multiple unit is a whole train, its failure rate includes the idiot who tried to flush a nappy down the onboard toilet, that time the PA system didn't work in cars 3 and 4, and many other faults which didn't significantly inconvenience the passengers. If your steam loco fails, you're stuck until a replacement arrives.

This is the 21st century. You got an emergency and can't contact civilisation? 406MHz Distress beacon. Break seal, press button, help is on its way. Don't try to radio someone in Sweden and communicate the problem in Morse (yeah, yeah, I know, morse isn't required any more, bla la la).

"reverbs using impulse responses"

The technical term you were looking for was "convolution reverb" and of course if you'd known that you could easily have found that one of the most popular plugin suites for LADSPA (the Linux plugin API) includes such a reverb and user-customisable impulse recordings.

I wonder how much, if anything, that you actually do is hard, let alone "impossible" with a Linux audio setup...