Here is a briefing on the PLAID 6 protocol with more specifics on the actual algorithms and cryptography in general involved. PDF link if the first one doesn't work for you.

In one paragraph the article calls the Internet "meritocratic," but still wants to argue that it "subverts" democracy. Maybe, there is no "tyranny of the minority." Just maybe, people look at a lot of institutions as absurd and really would like to see Stephen Colbert in charge of them, and it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.

If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"

Seriously, if any military official takes more than two seconds to realize that it is clearly insane and has not learned one thing from our struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alienating the populace of a nation like that has no benefit and is outright counterproductive. An attack on civilians like this works only in the context of strategic, conventional total war. We haven't fought a conventional war in 50 years. For any foreseeable conflict that U.S. could be involved in, it would be only sane to scrap the idea of attacking civilian infrastructure of any kind, information infrastructure included.

We should also consider whether it might be necessary to harden some of the local infrastructure of our communities. The old Bell System used to arrange cables in a ring around a city, so that a cut in any one location could be routed around. It's not clear how much modern telephone companies have continued that practice. It might not have helped in Morgan Hill, as the attackers apparently even disabled an unused cable that could have been used to recover from the broken connections.

Always assume the enemy knows the system. Hardening wouldn't hurt, but redundancy is the most important thing. Hardening a system tends to make it that much more vulnerable to a single insider. Redundancy mitigates this effect. Having such a small group be able cause so much disruption from such a relatively simple act makes it obvious that the city placed way too much on a single point of failure remaining in tact. Have redundant fiber. Have auxiliary wireless setups. Maintain a base of ham volunteers. Multiply your points of failure.

Personally, I think this sort of lax infrastructure security has become endemic. The 'war on terror' rhetoric we were fed for so long has us looking for the next suicide jet-liner attack or what have you, completely distorting any real conception the public had of real-world modern security risks.

There is nothing particularly insightful about the article. Obviously the largest portion of the computer using population would never need cutting edge power, so effectively "good enough" has always been the paradigm. How many of us have super computers? This is just a piece with some wishful thinking hoping that people eventually see through Microsoft's coerced perpetual upgrade cycle.

Is this anything like TCMP?

Oh my... we have already used one chair throwing reference in this thread. A more appropriate response would have been, "I imagine that is one alarm clock that is about to get f**king killed!" Alternatively, "Ballmer's lack of reply is most likely due to the torment caused by the voices in his head switching their chant from 'developers, developers, developers...' to 'Oracle, Oracle, Oracle...,' would have worked as well. Please practice proper meme etiquette in the future.

I would agree.

With regard to your post above, does the fact that bandwidth is oversold not change the economics of it to something that is different from other utilities? Another honest question, is it still today necessary to oversell bandwidth to such ratios as 10:1 or higher?

Some bloggers also speculated that the plan was part of a scheme to discourage people from watching streaming videos online rather than watching Time Warner Cable on television, which Time Warner officials denied.

I wouldn't actually be all that upset if Time Warner was able to kill video streamed over the Internet. I like the way the Internet is now. Maybe I'm being too conservative, but moving video over from the sunk cost that is the cable network we already have in place is going to be too costly and to me seems dangerous to the Internet as we know it.

I personally think tiered pricing is a move in the right direction, though. As it stands now, heavy transfer people are being subsidized by those who are light users. This does not exempt communications companies from being held responsible for the universal service funds they most likely squandered, but consumption based billing only makes sense. It always surprises me how this remains a perpetual issue.

Traitor! When the war with machines comes benjamindees will go down as the quisling that taught them they were self-sufficient. You fool! You've completely cut us out of the loop. Now we don't even have a shot at getting that utopian neural simulation of a world to enjoy while we humbly serve as batteries.