I don't know about your country, in mine it's easy: You rear end someone, you're guilty. Period. There is no good explanation you could possibly give why you couldn't keep enough distance that you had enough time to react and stop your vehicle before slamming into another one.

Actually, there's one exception. If a driver slams on his or her brakes right after making a sudden lane change into your lane, then the accident is almost always the fault of the driver in front. However, without a dashboard camera, you're unlikely to be able to prove that the driver in front did this unless the driver admits fault, which is why this is a very common form of insurance fraud.

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.

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.

I thought the dinosaurs own flatulence did them in. Huh.

Another album -

Spite and Contempt for our Customers Collection, Vol I

Including tracks such as the ever popular tune; "We don't want this, but you can't have it [Feat. Bwaa Haaa ha ha...]"

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.

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.

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.

Your ire is aimed at something that was well established when Thatcher spoke about it. It used to be supported by the conservative side of politics until it became politically expedient to pretend that an evidence based approach was inferior to gut feeling.

Once again, pretending that experts in a very long established field, well over one century in this case, in some way have nothing that they can assert is real calls into question the idea of expertise in general. That's the road to mediocrity that we are following. First it was denouncing educated clergy versus anyone that could pick up a bible, be loud, charismatic and declare the San Francisco earthquake to be the judgement of God, then it was geologists for suggesting the earth has changed since creation, then biologists for daring to suggest life has changed since creation, now climate scientists for daring to suggest that it hasn't been dry in Texas forever and that changes have been observed. Such loonies made up the numbers and were grafted onto conservative politics and suddenly it wasn't conservative any more. I get that you want to cheer for your team and that all team dogma must be accepted without question, but it does make otherwise intelligent people pushing their politics into other people's science look bad in a variety of ways.
It's become a mindless proxy for politics just like gun control and abortion. The issues are not considered at all, once you've chosen a side the dogma is defined. If voting in the USA was compulsory you'd have more choices, they'd be less polarisation and less need to stick with party dogma on key issues. If that happens less of the posters on this site would look like hopelessly naive idiots with no idea about the issues they say they are discussing.

Sony basically had no protection or planning at all. Which is what I think this was... Sony being completely irresponsible

Along with a disturbingly large number of others. We're a million quick fixes down to the point where anybody who had the faintest clue about computer networks in the 1990s would laugh at such houses of cards as the work of newbies. Some mistakes are comparable to taking a group of high school girls on a prison tour without any guards in the prison, all the cell doors open, half the lights out and no roll call at the end to see if some girls are missing.

This is why large corporations perform security auditing to see if their own admins are granting themselves access to restricted data.

Do a bare metal recovery drill and you've got all that access. No problem you say, your admins don't do such things and are not prepared for the loss of a server, so you'll be fine.

If you can't trust the people with physical access to the equipment with the data on it then you have the wrong people.

If you were using your company's Exchange server for gossiping and thought it was safe (i.e. the IT department would never have access to this, oh no) then you're stupid and deserve whatever fate you get.

You've just written off a huge portion of the population. Since it also applies to mobile phones etc you've probably included yourself in that portion.

If the attack surface is very small those motivated, targeted, skilled hackers have very little to work with.

If we were talking about a coal mining company or something and terabytes of data going out the door would be pretty unusual

Business as usual for decades, but on tape and USB disks mostly. Seismic data sets can be large.
I get your point though and there's enough paranoia that some day a rival may get the information by mistake that any large transfers to somewhere new are likely to be noticed.

If there's a way in and not enough to identify intruders it doesn't have to be a former employee.

But still, even with the best safeguards, where users just happily click on any old attachment, it doesn't exactly take a rare alignment of the stars to have malware planted in a network

The ones where there is only a URL and no payload astonish me - somehow just clicking on the link and letting IE loose on it is enough for the user to infect their machine with a virus. No "do you really want to run this thing as admin" box or anything - immediate infection with no other user interaction. Microsoft have been dealing with the internet for nearly two decades and such a thing can still happen with their software.

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.

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.

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