"The internet has reached a stage were it is just as important a service as power and water ..."

No, it hasn't. It can't. If you need me to explain, you need to review 3rd grade biology. My daughter recently completed 3rd grade, but I'm pretty sure I don't trust any slashdotters around my daughter. So you'll need to find your own 3rd grader.

doc

I can find no part of the MA Constitution which grants government power to pass a mandatory "buy insurance or be fined $1500" law.

Assuming you refer to car insurance, you have a third choice: Don't drive. You have no constitutional right to drive an automobile. If the state wants to require proof of financial responsibility before it licenses you to do so, it has violated your rights no more than if it makes you pay tolls to use the roads.

You do have a constitutional right to be secure in your person, papers and effects. That's the difference.

doc

But the pronunciation of the Norfolk in Nebraska has a story behind it ... The original settlers named it "North Fork," after the northern branch of the Platte River. But by the time the name of the town was being registered in Washington, DC, some Virginia-centric bureaucrat wrote the name as "Norfolk," obviously thinking it was named like Norfolk, VA.

However, the locals continued to pronounce the actual original name. And so, "Norfolk, Nebraska" is pronounced "Nor Fork" to this day. Just sometimes, a word can tell quite a tale.

Way too often, I know way too much utterly useless information.

doctorcisco

Mod parent up. The death of SORBS would be a net gain in the fight against spam. Blacklisting entire ISP's who are "insufficiently responsive" only makes sense if you don't care whether email gets delivered or not.

doc

SSSShhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!! Don't tell the 2 immigrants (one just became a U.S. citizen last month) I work with who make >$100K/yr. They think they're doing just fine, and will be really pissed to learn their families' lives are going to suck for another century.

doc

Did you bother to read the article the GP linked to at time.com?

Why have the stories of cannibalism remained under wraps? "Many of the people involved are still in power in Guangxi," Zheng suggests. "Some of those people told me to beware or I might get myself killed." Equally important, he feels, any revelation of the atrocities would be profoundly embarrassing to the Beijing government. "Top leadership has known about it all along," Zheng charges, "but it has not wanted anyone else to know."

doc

It's not that simple, because your analysis ignores the public cost of people driving.

Already now, I-10 is apparently gridlocked much of the time. This is a high-growth area. Assume that the number of people wanting to make this trip doubles over the next 30 years.

Without rail or some kind of public transit, taxpayers will need to more than double the carrying capacity of I-10 (presumably the goal isn't to have twice as many people in the same gridlock as today.)

What's the PUBLIC cost of doubling the size of I-10, compared to the PUBLIC cost of the train?

The cost-benefit analysis is much different when you stop assuming that the I-10 you need in 30 years will be free, just because a smaller-than-needed version already exists.

doctorcisco

No. Wrong. Incorrect.

He used the Cisco IOS command "no service password-recovery." Normally, with physical access to the router and a reboot, you can gain access to the router configuration file. "no service password-recovery" turns that function off.

HOWEVER, it DOES NOT WIPE THE CONFIGURATION FILE. It simply makes it impossible to gain console access to the router unless you swap out the flash memory. When you reboot the router, the magic key combination doesn't work, the router boots up, and all is as it was before.

Sigh.

doctorcisco

Let's say "most of" the money is $450 million of the $712 million.

Let's say the average small gift was $50.

Do you realize it would take 90 million small donors to give that $450 millions? That's 20 million more people than VOTED for him!

Take off your rose-colored glasses. You voted for the candidate that took lots of donations from the wealthy and powerful, and used it to bury his opponent in ads. The guy who lost went the public funding route.

If you think the right guy won, cool for you. But you may wish to give up mathematically impossible naivete (sp?) about where all that cash came from.