The Congressman did not ask for the email. He asked for the "metadata", who sent it and when, and to whom. NSA monitoring and collection of metadata was shown as pervasive by Edward Snowden's revelations and by their own testimony to Congress, so it's difficult for them to now say "we only collect metadata". The IRS office that handles tax exemptions also corresponds with many international organizations, some of which are accused of being criminally based or fronts for illegal political activity. (Sinn Fein from Ireland, and numerous Muslim charities have been accused of this for years.)

It's a fascinating "damned if you do, damned if you don't" for the NSA. If they can't produce the metadata on request, then the amount of effort and money invested in their monitoring is clearly wasted. If they do produce the data, it verifies that they do, as a matter of course, monitor the ordinary business communications of peaceful, law abiding personnel going about charitable enterprise.

This is confusing: From my diabetic colleague: glucagon is dispensed in response to low blood sugar by the alpha cells of the pancreas, which apparently remain intact, not by the destroyed beta cells that are missing form the pancreas. If the diabetes is being treated well with insulin, why wouldn't the patient's normal glucagon response work well?

From my colleague reading over my shoulder: many diabetics lose their glucagon sensitivity, but apparently due to overall blood sugar control. They still have the relevant alpha cells, and my colleague would expect the glucagon sensitivity to recover with otherwise good diabetes control from manipulating the insulin alone..

Wikipedia has a useful list of pre-assigned IP addresses, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... I can certainly understand military groups wanting Class A records, because their equipment can last for decades and be very difficult to upgrade safely and robustly, and because they helped fund the early Intenet.

I do note that MIT has its own /8, or over 16,000,000 addresses. I do wonder if they could be convinced to switch to IPv6 and free up the space for legacy environments around the world.

This is affected profoundly by VPN based remote access, and the enormous variety of software that is incapable of handling multiple A records for the same address. Moreover, the DNS configurations needed to distribute those "regional" IP's for similar hostnames around the world is reasonable to someone who understands DNS. But I'm afraid that most administrators of it only have a passing knowledge of it, and have learned what buttons to click by looking it up on Google.

Handling different, hexadecimal numbering schemes with different tools to manage and parse them is going to be burdensome, and error prone, at every level. It's one of the many reasons most organizations have simply switched to using NAT and keeping only a few exposed IP addresses, and even using name based web services on an outward facing proxy. They have no need to expose their internal address space, and are better off without it for quite simple security reasons.

> anything to force a rewrite will be a very good thing.

Have you ever tried to debug a major of piece of software that has been re-architected, from the ground up? Most of the performance benefits are lost in relearning the lessons that the original authors solved in their early releases with the original architecture. The specific benefits that were used to justify the re-architecture are usually not only lost, but overwhelmed and buried in the lost performance, downtime, and shear wasted manpower of rebuilding from scratch.

This is not always the case: when the original architecture was some one-off of someone who is no longer able or willing to support the product, and that individual author never was convinced to solve the fundamental issues, and when there is already a better built tool available, then yes. But inventing a new physical technology to force a software rebuild would be the height of wasted effort.

The underlying danger is your assumption that a rewrite would improve the software quality. This should not be assumed.

"rm" doesn't follow symlinks. However, if you have a symlink that is a directory, and hit "tab" to complete the link's name, it will put a dangling "/" on the link name. _That_ is referencing the directory from effectively "inside" the actual target directory.

I've had several conversations with colleagues over why just hitting 'tab for completion' can be hazardous. This is one of the particular cases.

If you follow the specifications, there's no need for heat. No Linux variant has been certified according to the POSIX standards for UNIX, and most variants have subtle ways in which they diverge from the POSIX standards, at least subtly. Wikipedia has a good note on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Personally, I've found each UNIX to each have some rather strange distinctions from the other UNIX's, and using the GNU software base and the Linux based software packages to assure compatibility among the different UNIX variants.

The bitrot will change the checksums and cause the files to show up as modified.

Moreover, what will you do about a reported bitrotted file unless you have genuine archival backups somewhere else?

Along with corporate "astroturfing" in the blogs and message boards of various sorts, I'm afraid. We've never been completely free from concealed or fraudulent advertising, but the fake "grassroots" campaigns have gotten out of hand. Even the "Tea Party" was apparently founded as an astroturf campain, with the concealed funding by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers. The Guardian did an excellent article about it at http://www.theguardian.com/com...: it might have been very, very difficult to print that in any of the Rupert Murdoch owned American newspapers.

The economics of pervasive broadband get quite strange. Doing cable based connections _as well as_ fiber _as well as_ DSL means a great deal of expensive, replicated infrastructure, and the installers arguing over space and time to run or repair their connections in very limited physical conduit strung between locations. Every time one of them needs to open up a conduit to upgrade or replace the physical layer they're putting every one else's connections at risk. It's an inevitable source of conflict among the companies.

It's often worse in the wiring closet where the physical connections are tied to network equipment. Shared cooling, power, and rack space are purchased, leased, subleased, and at risk of personnel from one group making mistakes and touching someone else's rack. Given the variety of network wiring styles, mistakes are inevitable. (Look up "bad network closet" on Google for excellent examples of the problem.)

I'm also afraid it's worst of all in the paperwork. The turf wars, the conflicting scheduling and mapping tools and policies, and the unwillingness to share data about infrastructure make the sharing of those common physical resources even more awkward with the current mix of technologies.

The Niven story is merely a well illustrated description of the problems, and an entertaining one.

Please examine the entirety of human history for _any_ examples of an "anarchic" society, especially one that survived more than one winter or dry season. Especially try to find even one that lasted long enough to raise a generation of children.

So do bad ones, much more quickly in good police departments.

I do wonder what happened to this officer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It should be used by the police as a training video of exactly how to handle people carrying rifles openly.

Anarchy cannot _possibly_ be stable. This was illustrated very well in Larry Niven's story at http://www.larryniven.net/stor....

The inability of any social culture with more than a few members to function without an enforced hierarchy forming is well defined by the entire history of humanity, and even shown by observation of animal groups.

From the developers and stock personnel getting out of the business due to risks and low returns on their investments, especially as the FPGA driven technologies have replaced the extremely expensive datacenters with the "high-speed", "low latency" network links. It' has become a playpen for a few leading companies willing to invest tremendous capital in gaining microseconds of advantage over competitors.

It's profit _for the other High Frequency Trading programs_, which are the only programs ready to sip the profits from each set of trades rapidly enough as the price shifts. And the wildly cycling prices rarely restore the price to the original value: this ruins employee stock options and frightens investors and banks away from companies that were not in any way responsible for the oscillation.