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To having Communists read your stuff.

Seriously, I was buying Lenovo before now. I did not get burned on Superfish. But I'm done with Lenovo. If this is what they try get away with without effort at hiding, then what they are they spending effort on hiding? I don't need the PRC in my network also, I have the NSA for that.

You might be right that this is a loaded Trojan horse.

However, I have no problem with what is on the surface. These are good ideas -- the internet is very much deserving "public utility" status. I'm not worried about fast lanes, I'm worried about intentionally making competition-owned services slower. The internet is a freaking power outlet, it should not matter what brand of hair dryer I plug in. If I need more power, I buy more power (bandwidth). But it doesn't matter what I am using it for.

The thing is we're worried about what comcast "might" do. And you're worried about what the NSA/government "might" do. Well maybe we're both right, did that ever occur to you? Maybe the government wants to overreach, to spy on your ebay shopping and snoop on your email. Maybe private industry wants insert extra ads while I web surf, or slow down Skype so that I am more likely to use iMessage, or make Amazon faster than Netflix in return for a little cash on the side. or whatever. Lots of maybe here.

We have to attack on both fronts. Neither party is trustworthy here.

Obama a believer in strong encryption? He has made a genuine hash of US Internet / security policy. AKA, enough mistakes that they cannot be reversed.

It's easy.

If a US citizen is in a country where a taxation treaty exists, follow the treaty rules. The US citizen only owes up to the maximum bracket they are in. If they are undertaxed in the foreign country, they get to pay the difference.

If the US citizen's capital should end up in a low tax country, then the US citizen pays the difference following the treaty rules. If the US citizen parks their capital in a non-treaty country, then tax them at the full rate without regard for local tax rates. That will learn them for trying to hide money abroad.

When Rings of Power are outlawed, only outlaws will have Rings of Power.

Let's just be like the rest of the world and stop taxing corporations. We'll save billions on trying to collect.

Then, tax capital gains like every other income. And jack up the maximum tax bracket. 50% at 1MM. No tax shelters. None. Only exception is unincorporated small business which can be inherite exempt up to 10MM.

Labor is a poor man's capital. A rich man's capital should be taxed at the same rate.

If the GOP likes the 1950s so much, let's tax them like it is the 1950s.

Yeah, but it would probably ruin your drone. I don't think anyone would be interested in that.

Yeah.

I'd say they are as qualified as the democrats. The democrats are convinced and will vote for anything related to it. The republicans are convinced the other way. Neither party is being particularly scientific about this or any other political issues. And yes, this is only politics. Climate science deserves a lot more than a binary vote.

There are no significant differences in the senators between the two parties. They both wine and dine together, both came from big old-school money, went to Harvard, etc. Mostly law degrees. What did you think, the democrats were all scientists and the republicans all oil surveyors?

Grow up, take the blindfold off. You have been pulled into drinking the party's punch. Stop before it's too late.

This is funny, the implication is that politicians know a lot about climate science. Ha!

Climate science is so much more complex than "warming" or "not warming". Anyone that wants to boil it down to only one variable really isn't trying to solve or understand anything.

What would be great is if MRO could try and make contact on its next fly-by. That antenna would certainly work under a solar panel, it would just have considerably less range. But knowing where it is now, we should be able to jam a signal down the front end and make contact.

If the solar chargers are still functioning with 2/3rds of the design power...

Without a doubt, FreeBSD is the best at these tasks. I have used it in the past and you can create a basic forwarding firewall with only a few lines of config. Add a dozen or so more for better control. I also ran BIND, isc-dhcpd, and a wifi access point. This would be a little tough under OpenBSD and NetBSD as they don't have quite the same range of wifi hardware supported out of the box.

FreeBSD has good package management and is very well documented. In many benchmarks, it is faster and scales better than the other BSDs. SAMBA will work fine, as will netatalk and NFS.

Having said all this, running your own firewall is a really good skill and enjoyable hobby. But if it ever becomes more of a burden than an enjoyable task, switch to a high-performance router running linux (no routers with linux have stooped to systemd yet that I know of). I have an ASUS that can seriously handle all the throughput that I can throw at it. And now I have more time for other things!

PS: If you're not already aware, in addition to local caching, BIND can also connect to DHCPD and create real DNS resolution for your local clients.

Or, they hack a host on the otherwise of the firewall, say via some JavaScript that sends commands to the router. It's very trivial. The assumption that everything on the LAN side is inherently safe is so 90s NFS/rhosts...

Good or bad, it's going to happen.

In the future, it will look completely stupid that people would pay for 200 channels of which they can only watch one at a time. And, they had to watch at the behest of Hollywood TV programming schedules, or get sophisticated personal video recorders to schedule recording (even more silly when you realize most TV is already recorded -- not live).

The model of watching TV channels is on its way out. The only way for cable companies to get some "cord cutters" back is to offer them only what they want, say a sports or news channel. And this will only prolong the inevitable.

No doubt cable companies would not just sit on their hands and let people scale back their bills and channel selections. Duh. But the writing is on the wall, and their days are numbered.

I just ordered a new internet service through a different cable provider, and I had to tell the poor gal that I don't have a TV to get her to stop offering bundled x y and z.

In the various documentaries I have seen regarding the First Great Depression, the movies were regarded as an inexpensive form of entertainment. Admission for a nickel ($.05). Granted, those were the days before television, so if you wanted to watch something, you had to go to the theaters. During the Second Great Depression, folks can stay at home to get a similar level of entertainment.