That was my intended point: very few entities actually have a quantum channel between point A and point B. Virtually everybody, even the ones with fiber links, has a link to some local telco or peering point and then is N hops away from their destination. At present (and barring substantial advances in all-photonic switching), that means that a 'compromised' quantum channel is the expected state, since there are multiple hops between you and your destination.

If you have the cash for old-school point-to-point hard lines between your facilities, quantum encryption offers a (relatively) cheap way of checking link integrity; but that helps relatively few people. If traceroute says you are more than one hop away from your destination, you probably aren't one of them (again, barring substantial advances in switching technology that allow preserving the quantum properties of photons).

To the best of my (layman's) knowledge, the stuff is ironclad within its area of ability (unlike classical crypto schemes, which tend to make people a bit nervous); but its area of ability is actually really small. It's more of a link-integrity verification system(and one that, since it depends on subtle physical properties, only works over physically continuous links, no VPN-type cases) than a drop-in for classical encryption.

Because a bunch of companies paid a fuckton to have it become a standard, yeah. Google up the history on that... a lot of money was handed out to get an ISO working group and get it stamped as a standard. It was bought and paid for by Adobe. So there's that.

There's also the fact that PDFs don't belong in a browser anyway. It's an outgrowth of PCL, a language for printing documents out of the 90s. It's not multimedia, and every attempt to make it web-friendly is a bandaid that opens large numbers of vulnerabilities up.

Don't put it in the browser. For the love of god don't put it in. Standard or no standard it's a shit technology.

First, I provided a link to an article from a respected trade magazine that backs up every claim I've made. You have provided nothing. I have provided examples of your own logical fallacies. You have responded with ad hominid attacks and strawmans. I shouldn't be responding to this post at all. But I will because you're a sad husk of a geek and I'm bored.

*facepalm* Tell you what, why don't you climb up on the tower, stick your head in front of one, and sit there for a few hours listening to the hum between your ears. Yes, the microwave energy will resonate inside what you call a brain enough to trigger electrical impulses that will give an audible effect. As you so eloquently put it "You might want to familiarize yourself with the inverse square law and the basic fundamentals of RF engineering." I expect your up close and personal experience will likely leave you blind within a year due to developing cataracts, but at least you can say you showed someone on slashdot they were wrong about the safety of them. Meanwhile, the rest of us have figured out that if sticking your head in a home microwave is dangerous... putting your head in front of a microwave emitter that has a lot thicker cabling running into it and a giant yellow sticker that says "DANGER: RADIATION HAZARD" might not be smart and you know, maybe those government guys were right to mount them high up in the sky where they can't Darwin the people near them.

It's in the first paragraph. Please update your eyeglass prescription.

You can't trust any of their competitors either. Everyone's talking about the NSA because that's all the media talks about. But in the business, nobody's talking about the NSA, because nobody gives a damn. Cisco builds good product. Globally, the market they're in is expected to hit close to $9 trillion in 2020. Our GDP is presently sitting at about $15.6 trillion. The way the global economy is moving, if Cisco continued to show growth the way it was before Snowden, it would probably be the largest company in the country by then. Now... it's trending down. Big time.

Our economy depends on selling goods and services, like all other economies. Snowden is a giant monkey wrench in that; He's done more to harm America than pretty much anyone since the turn of the century save perhaps Osama Bin Laden, if we want to count out dollars on it. I hope they find him and make him suffer for a long time, slowly. He claims to be a patriot, but he's done most damage than our biggest enemies.

And most of it is bullshit: All Snowden has done is say that the NSA spies on people. Big fucking deal! Every other country does the same thing, they just didn't get pantsed by some punk kid who decided to trash the biggest economy on the planet for the lulz. Cisco isn't building bugs into their products because they don't have to. That's not how the intelligence community operates; They put their own bugs on the wire, because if it ever got out that Cisco hardware was bugged, it would cost America far more in economic damage than any intelligent asset that would be developed from the bugs could outside of a war-time environment. It's common sense: Don't put your bugs where they can be found! And cisco hardware is some of the most studied there is.

I trust them on their high-end equipment, and their corporate-level offerings. Their consumer offerings have been shit, but then, that's not really where their focus is, and the market is puny by comparison. Cisco just buys out other companies already in that market, tells them to put a Cisco sticker on it, just to say they have a presence. So that people recognize the Cisco brand. It's like Dell -- they still make consumer PCs, but that's not where the majority of their cash flow is coming from. Go to work. Sit down. More than likely, you're staring at something that says "DELL" on it. And it helps maintain the status quo when you go home and see the same thing... but comparing the quality of one line of business with another? Get real. They might as well be separate companies.

I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not. Save it to disk; and let me worry about what to do with it. Everytime you add more features, more code, you add more vulnerabilities.

Knock it the fuck off, Google. Get your head together: We liked Chrome because it was fast and minimalist. If I wanted a bloated up kitchen sink I'd go with Firefox. Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!

*facepalm* You're using your own personal assessment and valuing that higher than the body of research on this topic. I won't even bother replying to the rest. Put some citations to your busted ass logic... Google can turn up a surprising amount of documentation to support everything from Roswell aliens to how the government's pouring flouride into our water to make us stupid... I'm sure you can find at least a four color glossy off Verizon's page to backup your ludicrious claims.

At least try man. Sigh.

No offense, but I have to call BS on this:

These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul.

Well, It's true. They're starting to integrate into other assets, as Time Warner points out: Many cell phone providers are hooking cable modems up to their towers to boost speeds. Some towers, where regulations permit, and where sufficiently high enough to avoid a safety hazard, also use microwave links to nearby central offices. But the majority of towers being deployed only have a T1 or equivalent for the backhaul.

Except you aren't. Parts of their network do, sure, but a lot of towers don't. And you don't seem to understand how these cells mesh together. Your cell phone can, in a typical urban environment, probably talk to over a dozen towers. But it doesn't. It usually talks to the nearest one; To keep transmitter power low and keep wireless "slots" free in adjacent cells. But there may only be 1 or 2 4G towers, but maybe 5 3G, or phone-only towers.. or whatever. My point is that it's a mixed environment. They can even have you talking on one tower while making a data connection on another, and all of this is being handed off all the time when you're mobile. Sometimes a tower oversaturates and hands traffic off to another one, or forces your phone to downgrade; It'll say 4G but it's only talking on 3G, for example.

Yeah. Why do you think the data allowances are so low, while believing the network capacity to be so great? It strikes me as a big flaw in your line of reasoning.

Yeah, actually. I do. The Obamacare website, as much of a failure it was, still cost the American public a tiny fraction of what they're paying in excessive profits to the insurance industry. We would need thousands of Obamacare website fails to equal just what we're losing this year to these people -- and getting nothing in return. We're lining their pockets.

People bitch about the government and toss around terms like "massive overspend", people like you, and they haven't got a single goddamned clue about how much everything else in their life costs them. Bank overdrafts. Insurance markups. Mortgages. Student loans. Cell phone 'hidden fees'. You're being bled dry by the private sector at a rate many multiples what the government takes from you. But you bitch about the government because that's what the talking heads on TV tell you to do.

You sit down someday with your checkbook and parse out how much these government "scandals" actually cost you, and I will be amazed if you even hit 1% of your gross income. And yet, companies like this steal 5, even 10% of your income... and you just bend over and grab your ankles with a smile.

Moron.

It may be a punishment, but it's not a deterrent of any kind, in even the slightest. The fact is that most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most offenders are first-time. They made a bad call, and they got busted. But our lack of focus on rehabilitation, the fact that somewhere around 80% of Americans are now near or below poverty guideline according to recent reports coming out now, suggests that the major motivator of criminal activity today is desperation. And we reward them for our society's lackluster economic performance, high expectations, taxes, and cost of living, pushing them to do it, by taking away any future potential to get a real job. Every job that pays much more than minimum wage requires a background check. If you have ever even been arrested, let alone charged with a crime, chances are good you will not get any job, regardless of qualifications, that's any better than burger flipping, telemarketing, or cleaning rich people's houses.

And you know what that does? It pushes them into more crime. Prisons might as well be named Crime University. Everyone who's in will tell you there schemes. You go in for check fraud, and you come out knowing fifty new types of fraud, and no job prospects. It leads to one, inevitable conclusion.

And people wonder why the whole goddamned country is falling down all around us? It's easy: We're a good Christian country. And as a good christian country, we punish and oppress, we guilt, we lie, and we shit on the poor and downtrodden, while offering them token charity and telling ourselves they're morally weak and thus deserve what's done to them. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.

And then we wonder why record numbers of them are snapping, grabbing a gun, and going around shooting up schools, hospitals, and every other place where people congregate and there's a government presence. Because we don't let anyone cry, we don't help anyone who asks for it, and because they can't cry tears, and can't find help, they cry bullets, and find an outlet for their anger in the blood of innocent people.

They're all very pathetic. They're oversubscribed by many thousands to one; Your shittiest cable provider doesn't hold a candle to how pathetically oversubscribed the average mobile provider is. These towers typically only have a T1 backhaul... it only takes a couple of phones to saturate those links. You will never, ever, get the full-rated OTA speed. Anywhere.

And they employ super-massive buffers; They're the reason buffer-bloat has become a problem. Latencies far above what even 90s-era modems provide -- 500, 800ms easy. Bandwidth is irregular and employs highly manipulated QoS to allow access to a select few websites at full speed, while taking the piss out of the rest of them -- there's a reason Facebook loads quick, while a site like, say, Slashdot, takes 30 seconds or more.

The FCC needs to not just run bandwidth tests, but suss out their QoS; People need to show that anything but the top 50 websites give absolutely terrible performance. You can get your google results in seconds, but it might take several minutes to load up the homepage of the restaurant you were searching for.

That's old. Here's a current model fully automatic milking robot. The cows aren't pushed around. They're fed tastier food at the milking robot, so they go there willingly. Milk cows need and want to be milked; it relieves pressure. They're herd animals, and will mostly do what the other cows are doing. By exploiting normal cow behavior, the cows do part of the work, and the milking robot does the rest. RFID tags on the cows and tracking computers will detect cows that are having problems.

That's not a prototype or a demo. That's commercial technology. At least three other vendors also produce robotic milking systems.

Then there's the feeding robot the automatic manure removal system, and the barn cleaning robot.

Commercial farms are very heavily mechanized. There are dairy farms with 30,000 cows (enough to provide milk for a major city), but only 400 employees. Farm employment in the US is only 3% of workers. This is why.

Unless they mean something rather different by 'quantum encryption' than the present usage, it won't be of much use.

If you are particularly paranoid, and operate on the theory that your fiber isn't being tapped, quantum encryption comes in at a price that compares favorably to having trusted guys with guns stand around keeping people away from your fiber. If, however, you don't have the luxury of a continuous run between you and the destination (like, oh, almost everybody), the fact that a third party has access to your photons isn't news, it's how the network networks.

Why not just simplify things with corporate death sentences and death sentences for corporate officers? So much less paperwork and risk of 'silent partner' activity.

The last few will probably be stubborn; but today's technology has decimated agricultural-sector employment throughout the developed world already.

In the case of Australia, farmers represent a whopping 1.7% of the population, so even their total extirpation as an employment class would be relatively minor shift. Probably one with substantial cultural resonance; but just not that big in absolute or relative terms.

What sort of sick freak would drink robot milk?