Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation

So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?

Just saying.

the only thing tax breaks do is line the pockets of big corporations. There is no "trickle down" effect any more.

Umm, a very large number of people in the US with any sort of retirement savings have them in stocks of some form or another (either through direct ownership or through mutual funds). So, when a public company becomes more profitable, the price of its stock increases, which in turn helps out many people. But then, I guess I was always a "glass half full" sort of person.

Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.

That is exactly what Eben Moglen discussed during his presentation at DebConf10. Info on the presentation (including links to video) is available. Also check out Joey Hess' commentary on the presentation. His objective price point is less than one hundred dollars, IIRC.

Let's try a little word substitution:

Sorry, but prayer led by state paid chaplain in a state-funded institution i.e. state penitentiary is obviously establishment of a state religion.

Or how about this one:

Sorry, but prayer led by military chaplain in a military-funded institution i.e. chapel is obviously establishment of a state religion.

What about if the "employee" is not paid? What about when congress opens its session with a prayer? (That is done at the opening of every congress, IIRC.) What about when a school sponsored club meets on the school grounds, but wants to start with a student-led prayer? (There are instances that can be cited where such things have been prohibited.) What about the case of the Boy Scout council in Philadelphia that was essentially evicted from the property the city was leasing them for $1/year? (The argument there was that the city's favorable lease to the Boy Scouts constituted an establishment of religion, because of the Boy Scouts' policy against atheists.) Is each one of those a state establishment of religion?

I'm not buying it. I'm not saying that I have the answer, but it sure is not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.

there's hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same).

Is that really necessary? I know that we all would like to have bullet-proof services. However, is the network service to the various offices so unreliable that it justifies the added complexity of instantiating services at every location? Or even introducing redundancy at each location? If you were talking about thousands or tens of thousands of users at each location, it might make sense just because you would have to distribute the load in some way.

What you need to do is evaluate your connectivity and its reliability. For example:

• How reliable is the current connectivity?
• If it is not reliable enough, how much would it cost over the long run to upgrade to a sufficiently reliable service?
• If the connection goes down, how does it affect that office? (I.e., if the Internet is completely inaccessible, will having all those duplicated services at the remote office enable them to continue working as though nothing were wrong? If the service being out causes such a disruption that having duplicate services at the remote office doesn't help, then why bother?)
• How much will it cost over the long run to add all that extra hardware, along with the burden of maintaining it and all the services running on it?

Once you answer at least those questions, then you have the information you need in order to make a sensible decision.

I'm actually a little disappointed that this wasn't expressed in standard metric terms. I thought here on Slashdot, the agreed upon standard was something in terms of libraries of congress. Is there a conversion factor or something we can apply here?

The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms.

Presumably, they are doing this because they know that the CIOs, on average, are less well informed than their technical subordinates. It is a classic salesman's tactic: go straight to the "decision maker." I'm not saying that CIOs are not well qualified and intelligent people (I'm sure that most are). However, at the CxO level in a large company, you are a strategic thinker. You are most likely not going to be on the bleeding edge of the latest hardware trend.

To put it another way, the CIO is the "soft" target. You always go for the soft target.

Naturally, Cisco (and other vendors) know this. Hence, you go after the CIO and dazzle him with fancy presentations and wine and dine him and viola, you get a big sale. This how MS does it, and how other big tech companies do it.

If you are fortunate enough to have the ear of your CIO, make sure to warn him about snake oil peddlers.

The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on.

I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.

Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?

School run out of money? Here is more tax payer money. Spent too much building your pro sports team's venue? Here is some tax payer money. Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop? When we've mortgaged how many generations' future earnings on today's ridiculous growth of government?