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Comment Re:Conservatives mostly don't like the involvement (Score 1) 218

However, if another company wants to lay cable on that street... what is the problem?

That tearing up a street is expensive, inconveniences a lot of people and these costs to both the parties involved and those around the event far outweigh the benefits. It's the same reason that we have one publicly owned street and not 20 parallel roads owned by different companies competing for your car to drive on them. It's stupid, that's why.

With telcos, the only reason we have the last mile problem at all was because initially telecommunication was built as a public service, like roads. Then someone decided to make it all private, because free market magic. The proper decision would have been to keep the last mile as public property, but it wasn't made, because idiots.

You're basically just saying

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that visions are a dime a dozen. Realizing them is the hard part, and it takes more than a few "look, a three-headed monkey" sentences to do that.

Comment Re:Communism (Score 1) 628

You are correct to point out the similarity between the failure mode of capitalism and communism as being central control by corporation vs central control by government. But this is precisely the argument for why basic income is a solution to both.

You're correct in another way that needs some elaboration, because on the face of it you are dead wrong:

The demographic transitio, in which total fertility rates fall below replacement rate as women are given independence by economic development, is a powerful force for zero population growth, as can be seen in this GapMinder animation of TFR vs per capita income by country through time. If one relies on such data, one can see that overpopulation is not a problem (although race replacement of non-African countries by African countries will obtain due to liberal immigration policies into the future).

However, income as TFR suppression, must be seen for what it is: A kind of antibiotic targeting human fertility.

Viewed in this way, once the world has been Africanized and has a TFR below replacement rate, subpopulations that are immune to the antibiotic will emerge with very high TFRs.

So, yes, fertility controls will eventually become critical, since the biosphere is a two-dimensional surface and exponentiation is hyperdimensional, but this is true regardless of the political economy in place.

Comment Re:Math author dies rich... (Score 1) 170

"It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive" is an odd phrase indeed. Is this the first time it has ever been used?

The Soviet Union couldn't have gotten on the internet, there would have been too much free information floating around. To heck with the internet - the Soviets couldn't even sell Xerox machines to the general public, they would have been used by the people for anti-Communist activities. But don't trust me, listen to one of the Soviet leaders (and, by extension, one of the smartest people in their entire empire).

In a remarkable tete-a-tete with a US journalist and former arms control official, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, interpreted the real meaning of SDI:
"We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two. Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers. In the US, small children play with computers... Here, we don't even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society. We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."

What were those reasons that everyone knew well? Ever heard of samizdat? No, eh?

Comment A Transition Policy (Score 4, Interesting) 628

My suggestion for a transition policy, which I set forth in a 1992 paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy" was to cease taxing economic activity and, instead, tax net assets beyond bankruptcy protection of home and tools of the trade, and use the funds to pay out an unconditional basic income aka "citizen's dividend", thereby doing away with most of the present functions of government including not only the welfare state but also the need for burdensome regulatory agencies (that are subject to capture). Part of the problem here, of course, is the notion of "citizen" vs "non-citizen", but that is a far lesser problem than massive unemployment and hyper-centralization of net assets.

Quoting from that paper:

The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property should be exempt.

...

With the exception of basic functions of government and the pay down of debt, the government budget should be dispersed to citizens as cash, rather than being spent in government programs or even limited in the form of vouchers. This is "market democracy" in which the citizens and their markets, rather than central planning and politics, influence the selection of goods and services to be capitalized and provided.

Comment Re: Best pick up one of these (Score 1) 89

The protocol needs to start over clear voice, but than you do the equivalent of "STARTTLS" and see if the remote end answers. If it does you disable squelch and start applying the cipher to the payload in the audio packets as you build them, leaving the containers format in place, headers, sync bytes etc.

As far as the network is concerned it will still look like parametrized g.729 audio to the network. It will just decode as noise unless you possess the cipher. Which will be much more economical for most wireless customers until the carriers wise up and realize they ought to be metering the jitter controlled, packet loss intolerant voice traffic on their networks and selling best effort data as all your can eat, rather than the other way around.

Comment Re:SMB, eh? (Score 2) 177

I don't even bother "compromising" an initial host on many engagements when the engagement has me to go on site. Its trivially easy to tailgate your way onto most corporate campuses; and set yourself up in an empty conference room.

Then you wait for LLMNR or NetBIOS/tcp messages on your subnet; which nobody disables, ever. Then you just collect the hashes for a while. No need even to mess around with PTH half the time, more often than not hashcat can crack at least one before you finish your first soda and you have your foot hold.

Comment Re:Conservatives mostly don't like the involvement (Score 1) 218

identified as belonging to the house.

This is not how property works in any western country. Someone dug up the street years ago, bought the copper, and paid to have it put into the ground. They own that cable. You cannot just go around and declare someone else is owner of it, without compensating the current owner, and probably even that would be challenged in court as the "give to the house owner" doesn't even fall into eminent domain.

And then switching from one provider to another would mean going to the gray box and unplugging a wire from provider "A" and plugging it into the box for provider "B".

Which would be a step back from the current system, where most provider changes are done by switching, not by mechanically unplugging wires. If someone needs to actually drive to a gray box and change wires every time someone changes ISPs, the costs for doing so would go up considerably.

ou're trying to prove me wrong instead of trying to understand the issue. It isn't helpful.

You're painting a picture of a fantasy world, ignoring the status quo. Yes, in a perfect world, if we would start from scratch on empty fields, maybe it would be better to do it that way this time around. But we don't start, we inherit a world where certain things are the way they are, like it or not. If you want to change something, you can't just paint a fantasy utopia, you need to show how to get there from where we are now.

So you want to change ownership of the last mile? Might be a good idea, show how to do it. Explain how to buy all the cables and grant or sell them to house owners. Come up with solutions for all the situations in the real world, with multi-story houses, houses with multiple outgoing connections, office buildings and private homes. A solution that works both for dense cities and isolated farms. That will not die trying due to resistence by the ISPs, the old cable owners, the house owners or the two dozen laws involved.

It's easy to say "this ought to be so". Everyone can do 10 of those in one minute. Cars ought to be pollution free. Ebola ought to be defeated. World peace should be achieved. Any of these statements just make you one of seven billion people with a vision. Being able to show step-by-step how to actually get there is the hard part.

Comment board and cardgames (Score 2) 121

Forget programming. Sit down with him and make a few board and card games.

Too many game designers these days look at the technology and the graphics and the monetarization and all the other crap and forget that first and foremost, there needs to be a game.

When you limit yourself to the bare essentials, you see the game for what it is, and learn to make games by focussing on what makes a game.

Comment Re:Conservatives mostly don't like the involvement (Score 1) 218

Cable between the street and the house might have be redone.

Yes. But the cable doesn't connect to the street, that's just how we say it. It connects to that grey box on the corner, which means after the garden it runs underneath the street and/or sidewalk for typically a few hundred meters.

What is more, the cabling between the house and the street might be owned by the home owner.

Can't say for other countries, in my country almost never.

We could set up a junction box at the street that links into the home's network./quote

We not only could, this is what we do right now. But those boxes serve an entire block, not one house. Theoretically we could change the whole network layout and install such a box at the edge of every property and terminate there, but there are reasons why the system is the way it is, and changing it would require changes in the system, maybe even a partial redesign of the local loop.

Comment Re:Conservatives mostly don't like the involvement (Score 1) 218

Your experience has clearly made myopic and unable to think creatively about the issue.

Of course. If you disagree with someone, it must be that the someone is an idiot. It's not possible that maybe you are wrong.

There's no point having a discussion on this level. People who have arguments don't need to use personal insults.

Comment The levels of collusion are immense (Score 1) 343

Like you, I want the facts. I have seen no facts that implicate the DPRK over the people who claimed responsibility initially (GOP). Wired had an article on it two days ago when the first stories started to attempt to pin the hack on the DPRK which has been ignored by all US and UK media. Not only have all US media outlets jumped on the "it was those dirty North Koreans" bandwagon, but the BBC has become complicit in this as well.

I fairness, I was able to do some digging to find more information on the BBC that I could not in US media. Let me go through the evidence. and comment on each after that.

Before doing so, let me explain something critical. In order to teach hacking, a person has to have access to the internet. This is a huge dilemma for the DPRK who has to risk any Internet access with the knowledge that the person with access _WILL_ see information damaging to their loyalty to the DPRK. There are no computer cafe's in North Korea where guys can go learn to hack to make a couple extra bucks, in fact unless you have explicit Government approval you can not have a computer. Even if you are a "tourist" you must have permission and you will not be able to take your laptop wherever you wish.

This means that the only hacking that could come from the DPRK is Government sponsored, and the amount of hackers they have would be tiny. They don't have the money for "new" or unique equipment either, so any computer hardware they have is going to be 2nd hand junk that China no longer wants. What the Military has for hacking tools would be 2nd hand script kiddie tools or, provided by China.

Not only does an extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof, but in this case US Politicians have lied so often I don't trust a damn thing I'm told any longer. Our "media" follows the scripts they are handed just like the politicians, and I don't trust them either. So here is the claim summary.

First, the FBI says its analysis spotted distinct similarities between the type of malware used in the Sony Pictures hack and code used in an attack on South Korea last year.

So we turn to another, better clue: IP addresses - known to be part of "North Korean infrastructure" - formed part of the malware too. This suggests the attack may have been controlled by people who have acted for North Korea in the past.

That's it folks, that is all we have. The "Hacks" last year (actually since 2009) which were never tracked to the DPRK are the first reason they believe this hack was. Wow, that's quite a leap in logic. DarkSeoul is still anonymous and there is no evidence that links them to North Korea. Lots of claims that China is training and letting the DPRK use their resources, but no evidence that the group is even operating out of China. Finally we have IP addresses, which any Script kiddie knows to spoof with someone's IP address you hate! I'm positive that the FBI can not be that goddamn dumb, they have to realize IPs can be spoofed too!

Ok, time to get off my soap box...

Comment Re:How long things take.. (Score 2) 222

How about I prove you wrong in such an embarrassing way that you will have to eat your words? I have that account because at some point I bought Rogers Internet service, and email was part of what I was buying in the package. Eventually Rogers outsourced their email to Yahoo!, so I have an email account that is paid for and that I never imagined would be handled by Yahoo! I am actually a paying customer, you dumb shit.

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