It wasn't until i read more that i realised this was about DNA alone. I have no doubt that othes did the same but didn't bother going deeper into it.

Including the people taking the survey, I suspect.

I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.

Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.

God I feel old...

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

They're well defined now. AFAIK, they were nonstandard when initially proposed. Every time someone wants to deviate from accepted standards, there should be a darn good reason why, and I'm just not seeing any reasonable justification for creating a whole separate transport-layer protocol for something that basically behaves like a normal, connected stream.

And it isn't just explicit blocking that's a problem. Firewalls and NAT often make life miserable for users even when those firewalls aren't trying to block the VPNs. That's why as far as I'm concerned, if you're passing traffic, you should use TCP if you need the data to be robust and reliable, UDP if delayed delivery would make the data worthless, and ICMP for the usual network management purposes. IMO, everything else is anathema. :-)

My point was that there was no valid reason for each of these VPNs to each use its own transport-layer protocol. A normal, connected TCP socket would have done the job just as easily. Every time someone strays from the expectation that all packets are either TCP, UDP, or ICMP, it means every hardware-based firewall maker (and every software-based firewall IT person) has to do extra work to deal with it, and hardware that worked before suddenly doesn't work or (if you're lucky) requires firmware updates. The fact that using a different protocol makes it easier to block is just another in a long list of reasons why the proliferation of transport-layer protocols is a bad idea.

Okay, fair enough. I usually lump firewalls and routers in the same bucket, because outside of backbone hardware, most routers also act as firewalls. The point is that a lot of (badly designed) consumer routers (firewalls) do stupid things like routing only TCP and UDP, or treating those other protocols as "special" under the assumption that VPNs will always be used from the inside out, never from the outside in, resulting in all sorts of fun.

Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.

You can build a full VW Beetle from 3rd party parts. Quite literally, you could have absolutely no parts sourced from Volkswagen or their OEM manufacturers at all. It's an expensive hobby, but people do it.

Try this: Crash safety testing.

Well, assuming the article saying that the consumer can "design" it really means design, and not just select from a few options to make it custom.

Nah, it's more like whining that Chryslers should be able to burn the same 87 octane gas as Fords without having to buy overpriced filler necks on license from GM. Or that GE lightbulbs should be allowed to work on ConEd electricity. Standards exist for a reason. Letting monopolists enforce their own whims without accomodating the competition is bad for everyone in the long run. Ask JP Morgan what happened to Standard Oil in the courts.

On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no. Standards can only go so far. Suppose you design a laptop that has an innovative power storage system that can power it for a week, but in order to get the energy density high enough, you had to run the battery packs at 48VDC. Could you design it to be compatible with an existing 12–18V power supply? Sure. Would it be energy efficient? No.

The same goes for software. If you're designing a new OS, you could ostentibly add the necessary hooks to let it run Android apps, but your OS probably won't run them as efficiently, and you'd prefer folks to develop apps for your own native APIs anyway, because that results in a better, more consistent user experience.