The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users.

There's also a "need" for antigravity and wish-granting genies. They're just needs that may remain unfulfilled due to impossibility.

I assume since you bring up uPnP without citing it as a viable solution, you're aware that it's disasterous for security. I think at least some of that is due to inherent problems in the concept, not just a poor implementation.

Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

I agree that we want people to not be reliant on centralized servers... however, the way to accomplish that would be to upgrade the "average" technical expertise of users to the point where they'd be competent to configure a firewall. That may be practically impossible, but I think developing a technical solution capable of saving them from themselves would be even harder.

I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects.

...that you know of!

Only when they are designed to rule out those groups...

In other words, "only" 100% of the time.

But was that before or after the Supreme Court decided corporations had free speech rights? If it was before, then the situation has probably changed (in the current Court's insane opinion, anyway).

Can you explain in more detail?

If you have a multi-dimensional set of factors of things and you design a metric to collapse them down into a single dimension, what you're really measuring is a combination of the values of the factors and your weighting of them. Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful.

This goes for any situation where you're picking the "best" among a set of choices, not just for compression algorithms, by the way.

Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one.

User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best. User B is trying to shove the entire contents of Wikipedia into a disc to send on a space probe, so for him, the third algorithm is the best.

You gave a really extreme[ly contrived] example, so in that case you might be able to say that "reasonable" use cases would prefer the middle algorithm. But differences between actual algorithms would not be nearly so extreme.

Well shit, if you're so worried about the viability of the platform that you're delaying it, then of course you're going to have a hard time attracting developers!

In theory, voter tests would rule out the gullible. In practice, voter tests would rule out the black / gay / poor / jew / undesirable-group-du-jour.

... which is soon to be overruled once some corporation notices and decides to challenge it, citing Citizens United as precedent, I'm sure.

Yup. Amazon Cloud and a couple others are completely null routed from my work network. Big sections of others overseas are blocked as well.

So far, complaints have been zero. And, we get less log and web site form harassment from misbehaving bots.

We have determined that the signal to noise ratio coming from cloud hosting services is ZERO.

Well sure, but the post would have been less amusing if I added that extra detail.

Project Orion would have been fission-powered, not fusion. This is fusion-powered!

"/" and"per" mean the same thing in that context, so "$X per per capita" doesn't make sense.

The Air Force isn't the only entity who's opinion matters. Did the Navy want it?

The end does not justify the means.

Also, was causing the creation of Git some kind of grand scheme by Tridgdell? If it was an accident, he shouldn't get credit for it.

This is not direct military support.

These are Russians that moved into Ukrainian territory either as soldiers in Russian forces, or as "civilians" over the last few years.

The attackers are RUSSIANS. The guys operating the BUK that shot down the airliner were RUSSIAN SOLDIERS. You don't hand a BUK over to "separatists" and a few months later have them wipe out 5 aircraft in a week. Take a look at the BUK system sometime. There is NO WAY the equipment was "handed over". It was OPERATED by RUSSIANS just like every other proxy war, Vietnam, Korea, and a whole bunch of smaller ones.

Russia is going to do what they are going to do, and for the most part, the West is going to stay out of it. Ukraine needs to start an absolutely brutal guerrilla war, or they are done for. That's all there is to it. (They are probably STILL done for no matter what they do.) The Soviets are re-building their empire.

You can control what time of day the ads are displayed.

Try avoiding the times when they are being used up, or try focusing on when your potential customers are on and using computers.