I'm quite familiar with Internet tech but never heard the need to stretch leather to make shoes. Perhaps they're making shoes for people so they can walk to the Internet cafe?

I was ~8 when I used Windows 3.1 for the first time and had no problem figuring it out. It looked a lot like MacOS and XWindows, so I was pretty familiar with it. There were a number of other systems that looked similar that were GUI's for DOS before Windows 3.

I quit using Windows a little after Windows 95 in place of Red Hat 5 (the original, not RHEL) because Windows was crashing all the time when using the network even with bog-standard hardware (an original NE2000).

Most parts of driving is very easy (stay between the lines and a proper distance from the car in front of you). A fully-autonomous grid is also very easy (all participants being autonomous and communicating).

What's not easy is integrating humans driving and autonomous cars driving together (the intermediate hybrid system so-to-say which, unless government mandates otherwise, will be required) because the system has to react to unexpected and irrational behavior from humans driving (cutting in front of you, jaywalking from invisible locations, ignoring road signs and signals).

Technically, I could. Thanks to the widespread availability of (free) CAD software and associated calculators and the availability of the information about bridge making, I could make a bridge or a sky scraper. It would be horribly over-engineered but it would meet current code and probably be both the most expensive, least maintainable although most reliable bridge in the world. It would also take me a few years.

I actually just engineered a fire sprinkler system in my home, totally up to code as verified by our city's architects and fire engineers. It's also horribly over-engineered (too many sprinkler heads, bigger pipes, unnecessary valves and gauges, plenty of leftover capacity) and it took me several weeks just to get the drawings and calculations out but it saved me personally $7000 (a professional install was quoted at ~$8k, I did it for less than $1k).

If you want horribly slow software that is very expensive to maintain but also very robust, you can give the tools to a newbie with the willpower to do it and you would get something, eventually.

The thing has an entire API unauthenticated to whoever is able to connect to it (https:///system_http_api/).

It's well documented that the point is not to have these things port-forwarded on your router but to be controlled through their proprietary gateway which comes with a monthly fee. Sure you can surf to it on your local network but that's more of a convenience and a lot of features the API exposes are not in the GUI.

There possibly IS a host of other problems besides the kernel. We still ran(run) OpenSSL/OpenSSH and Apache on those boxes so the automatic exploits that run against them may be numerous however they are typically very well sandboxed (better than some current *NIX'es) so although you won't get access to any data, they make for a great bot.

I actually have two different-era SPARC we are still supporting (the latest I believe runs Solaris 5, the first one still has an early IBM Token Ring card bridged by a very dusty device to Ethernet).

I understand there are some tracks in the US that allow you to take advanced college-level classes but those seem to be elected rather than mandatory. I'm not talking AP-courses that prep a (rich) kid for college. I am talking about 'basic, mandatory by the state education'.

I went to one of the worst schools in my area, inner-city (positioned next to a red light district) only because they were the only one with an electrical/electronics track education in the area. They closed a few years after my graduation due to an increasing crime problem amongst students. My elected classes were an additional 8-12h/week on top of the regular school hours (no course replacement)

If you don't mind making most foods and fuel unaffordable for the poorest. If you do decide to end all federal subsidies, you include immense amounts of farming and oil subsidies which the 'visible' subsidies between farming and oil are ~$500/person in the US.

If you don't raise wages, a family of 4 would suddenly have to spend $2000/year more on foods and fuel alone (~$160/month). That is not even including the $6000/year that the US government gives away to other big business such as banks and tech companies, retirement funding etc just to keep these companies from destroying either the environment or the workforce.

I would love to see our money go to 'better' companies but then you also need to stimulate a workforce that works 15-20h/week at double the current wages.

There is simply not enough work left in the US to keep everyone employed and things have gotten way too expensive to keep anything but farming here. The US is also lagging massively behind in education starting all the way at first grade and it will take at least 20 years before the first students capable of doing a proper job will graduate IF you reform the education system. As a comparison, I graduated from a "foreign" school at 18 (basically high school) with mathematics and science at a level of a second year bachelor's student in the US (some things I learned in the last year mathematics classes were multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations and geometry and an introduction to chaos theory).

So why don't they hire experts instead of relying on paid-for-someone-else "experts"?

I don't think I have to point out some thing that was widely covered by media about a year ago: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Copper as in either cable or DSL has been paid for under FCC Title II. Verizon FiOS has classified itself as Title II to get the subsidies and tax breaks for it's rollout. ISP's have been collecting and permitted to keep federal and state "taxes" on every bill to implement higher bandwidth services since at least the nineties.

HTML5 is a document rendering specification. How in the hell does it allow for malware in HTML5?

The issues sit in the JavaScript implementations which leverage HTML5. You can disable JavaScript or have it quarantined correctly (like any good browser should do)

Most of these newcomers do it. They'll give you both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 range. Even TWC is doing it, I currently have IPv6 connectivity directly to my computer (which is behind IPv4 NAT).

If TWC/Comcast threatens to pull out, I would let them and give the copper to the newcomers. The copper in your street (cable, phone, even fiber) has been paid several times over by the taxpayers from federal, state and/or local funds. Give it back already or charge a reasonable price.

Try putting in a (Tomato/OpenWRT/DD-WRT) router and enable the fq_codel (or a similar) QoS algorithm - Multiple video streams, torrenting, surfing and video calling at the same time all became much better/possible.