Theoretically? Yes. Realistically? Not in our lifetime.

You make a wonderful point, it boggles me how many posters here seem to be fine with the idea of letting the city burn if you were following the rules like a good little citizen that never questions those in power.

I'm suggesting that a political appointee asking for the passwords to a multi-million population city's highly complex network for no other reason than because he thinks he is entitled to have them (no actual, purposeful reason) is either drunk or stupid, and most likely both, lol.

An even better analogy might be if I get drunk and I start looking like I'm going to drunk-dial my boss and my friend takes my phone away from me until I sober up, should my friend be charged with a crime? Should I be mad at him or grateful?

The 18 months it has taken just to get to this point and the 5 million bail is just ridiculous. It can certainly be argued on both sides which was the better judgment call for Terry to make, but this level of persecution for what he did is just piss and vinegar by people who have the power to do so and isn't justifiable in any rational way.

Especially when you consider that Terry didn't stand to benefit in any way personally from the decision he made, only the network stood to benefit by being shielded from harm.

War on drugs and all that. We were eradicating the Mooninite's Moonajuana crop.

I move my LCD monitor around a lot and a few months ago the power connector became loose, the solder joints had failed. So I took it apart to resolder it and to add some stress relief straps so it wouldn't happen again. There wasn't a whole lot to the innards, the LCD itself was a self contained metal panel. I could easily see a DIYer being able to construct your own beveless array out of cheap LCD monitors you can pick up at the store. Would probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than buying a ready made array since those are so low volume.

I'd hardly call something free when it requires you to have an MSDN subscription to download and activate, a subscription that ranges from $700 to $11,000 for 12 months.

I don't think the pirates in Asia will have much trouble competing against that. (Or having to download a DVD size installer for that matter.)

Seriously, if the people choose to provide the services themselves, why should they be prohibited from doing so?

I know, it's anathema to free-market idealists, but the end result is... better, cheaper service.

Actually it's not anathema at all as you describe it. But what you're describing is closer to a cooperative than a government run service. Where everyone using the service does so voluntarily and the costs are entirely borne by those benefiting from the service.

The only way to maintain a monopoly is through government sanction (or regulations that effectively limit others from entering the market). And the problem with government run services is that it becomes very tempting, once they are up and running, to use that governmental power to shield themselves from competition.

It's essentially a benevolent dictator problem, there's nothing inherently preventing a government from providing high value service at the lowest possible cost, it's just that in the real world it almost never works out that way. Just as a dictator could rule the nation better than any democracy ever could, but in the real world they rarely do (and never for more than one generation).

The more immediate problem here though is that a local government has almost no control over the state and national regulations that tie their hands and keep them from dislodging the controls that set up effective monopolies by the cable and teleco companies. And the only real option they have is to do what they're doing and use their clout and bond status to do what should be possible privately.

Think of it as stochastic resonance. You can take a very low power signal and if you add random noise it will raise the signal above the threshold of detection because even though the signal is below threshold, it's still stronger than the background, so the background also gets lifted but not as much.

So astrology could be totally random, and yet still have a powerful effect. By raising motivations from just below the level where they get acted on. So say you like a girl is interested in a guy down the hall but not quite enough to do anything yet. She reads her horoscope and even though its ambiguity and randomness still raise up motivations that were already there past the point where now she decides to go down and flirt with him.