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Good. Let's wait to pass net neutrality after you ban corporations like the New York Times, and people aren't allowed to spend money to advance their opinions.

You're advocating a model like taxis where the regulators are overtly hostile to innovation, such as Lyft and Uber. Or if you want to go the utility route, where electric companies are forced to use a certain percentage of their electricity from favored producers such as wind farms and solar and rates are set by a centralized board. Maybe a slogan like "Net Neutrality, it'll be run just like the FAA!" would catch on.

We should trust free markets with infrastructure because they built the infrastructure we're using to discuss this. It's working pretty well. If you prefer a historical example, compare the great northern railroad with the first transcontinental railroad. The first was privately built and quite successful, the second received massive government subsidies, had shoddy construction, and was designed to scam the investors out of their money. As for red herrings, the phrase you're looking for is "regulatory capture," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.... If net neutrality comes into being, I can absolutely guarantee you Cisco, Comcast, and Google will be sending their armies (figuratively) to capture the agency.

And changing it requires amending the Constitution, either with the normal Congressional and state ratification process, or a Constitutional convention. I suspect what you really want is national referendums, and net neutrality is just the way you're bringing it up today, since you didn't respond to anything about net neutrality, or even propose a solution to making it law or regulation that has any chance in the near future.

Since there is no such thing in the U.S. as a national referendum on laws or regulations, do you have any other suggestions?

The thing that net neutrality advocates fail to do is to describe the regulatory system they want to put in place. Take the comic from The Oatmeal, for example (http://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality). "And I'm going to do that by being a super terrific A+ dude and explaining to you exactly how Net Neutrality works." There are lots of panels describing the goal, and none showing the way it would work. How is it run? How are complaints logged? How are ISPs monitored? What reporting mechanisms to ISPs have? What features will be mandated or forbidden in network devices? How is good versus bad traffic shaping to be defined? What are the penalties? What are the exceptions?

Ah, the exceptions. Once VOIP 911 calls are mandated to be prioritized over other data, then you'll get medical data prioritized, which makes sense, because we don't want to kill people, and then ... the same big bad companies will lobby for their data, and net neutrality becomes the opposite of net neutrality. Whoops.

Denver tried that when they built DIA. It was a godawful mess and pretty well abandoned. http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_...

And, if you dual-boot with Windows, the release notes say to use ext4, not BtrFS. https://www.suse.com/releaseno....

The XKCD comic is about what can be done right now; changing the password checking algorithms is a small cost in most places. The article is about the future -- how to change innumerable systems structurally to make a better password system. Heck, most systems today can't even do two-factor authentication, and the number that can do hardware authentication is smaller again. Even systems that can do software PKI is a tiny number.

The random-password tracking tools are great, and they work for a lot of people. But to be used universally, they have to work in 99% of cases, which they're unlikely to. Can you use your favorite one at a library computer? Without your laptop? In a place that forbids USB drives? Without Internet access? It's a similar problem set to why we aren't all using software PKI or GPG email. How do I get the dang keys around to where I am, securely? Here, it's how do I get my password list around to where I am, securely?

It's not the contract, it's the law. If the loser files the right kind of protest in the right amount of time, a stop work must be ordered. It's to avoid unscrupulous contracting officers from throwing a bid to their buddies. It's totally normal for US government contracting.

Google can't possibly give us fast peering with no fast (or slow) lanes without Net Neutrality. They're a company, not a government! I can't believe any of you believe this could happen without a large bureaucracy enforcing arcane rules, written and administered by people who've never been network engineers.

Most proponents of net neutrality can't describe what they think the regulatory regime will look like, besides some "everything is awesome" descriptions. The thought that the implementation would come out the opposite to what they wanted was unthinkable to them. In other words, they'd never seen government regulation.

Well, OneNote can have pictures.

Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.

I've mostly used OneNote when taking online classes. It does a pretty good job of capturing web page text and graphics, and the search works fairly well. I've seen teachers use it to collaboratively edit lessons plans remotely and concurrently.

Dang, that may force developers to move to test first development, finding bugs before it goes over to test. :)

It would drive a few things. The development would likely take much longer, since if the cost for bugs comes out of my pocket, but first coding time comes out of yours, I'm going to spend your money. If you force me to release earlier than I say it's ready, I'll make you responsible for taking the code in the state it's in. And when bugs are found, I'm going to find a way to blame the architect or systems engineer for giving me a bad design, or you for inadequate requirements.

Oh, and feature creep is really going to cost you.

Excellent, excellent. We all agree taxes are a disincentive to investment. And unequal tax rates on goods that are substitutes will change the amounts of each good purchased. So, to make the market work most effectively, let's just set the tax rates equally on all industries, stop the industry subsidies, and people will get to select whether properly priced electric or gas-fueled cars better meet their needs.

Sadly, that is not an unheard of definition. I had a college class that used that definition. If you tried to use one that factored in just feelings or beliefs, or just power differences between two individuals, you'd fail that question.

If he remotes out to code random stuff during work hours, using work resources, for not work activities, he's going to get fired.

There's almost always some manager around who's short of resources and needs to get some stuff done. Find him and offer up some time.

This is also why many employees wind up with tricked out spreadsheets and word macros. They aren't allowed to script in regular languages, can't run websites, can't run databases. So they make do.

Good call. In companies where you can only run approved software, you frequently can't program in those environments, either. You've now written code that's unapproved.

I'd be careful about ssh'ing out or using other outside environments on the company time, though. If they're paying you to be in your chair, they aren't going to like you writing code for people who aren't them at the same time. Get some buy in from your boss on what you want to do.