Not that the 5 people in that field have trouble getting jobs anyway. But if you like math and the ocean, it's a good field to go into.

Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible.

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Simpleton Edition.

Schwab

Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

I prefer myself to the regular Flippy.

Another thing to keep in mind is that since Type 1 is genetic, you've got it from birth, which means that there are little kids who have to manage their insulin levels. A weekly treatment could be much, MUCH easier for diabetic kids & their parents to deal with, and less invasive than an insulin pump.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!

It seems like, in order to get these nosy little snoops to stop snooping on you, you have to explicitly visit their site, provide them with even more info, and hope they keep their word that they won't compile data on you.

For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?

The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [ ... ]

Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.

For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.

Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?

So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.

A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?

Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [ ... ]

That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.

For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.

When I was using a FreeBSD box as the gateway to my home network, the crushing majority of the spam relay and SSH brute-forcing attempts came from machines inside hinet.net. I ended up black-holeing as many of their subnets as I could in the firewall.

Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...

Schwab