Woops yeah sorry. Been so long I posted on slashdot the thread UI got me confused.

You're assuming all foreign universities can't tech properly and just issue degrees without any knowledge of the field the degree is in, that it's a sham. Having gotten degrees in the US and abroad, I can tell you that your notion is pretty fucked up. China has an incredibly high tech knowledge being taught. So does India. Or Europe. The "top 10" university rankings in any one field are usually biased by the metric used to suit the national narrative of superiority. So screw your biases towards foreign universities. The real issue is the school treats before university, where the rest of the world has a fundamental advantage: their education programs don't underfund them, and have national government exams and curriculums to guarantee a graduate from one tiny out of the way town knows the same as someone from the capital. It's a gap that universities cannot bridge. You (presumably) with in IT, so you sounds be familiar with the concept of crap-in-crap-out. So suck on that thought for a while, as it applies to universities too, not just your IT systems.

The signing mechanisms are there to prevent hash collisions from allowing someone to pay malicious code out... So it's actually completely legitimate.

Yeah autocorrect strikes again. I meant a build signing mechanism. Again, no, the build script is not faulty if that build key has to be signed with a certificate validated by a restricted set of build systems. Think CAs for binaries.

Not necessarily. There are furnace signing mechanisms that rely on signature files similar to ssh keys, that the license will never make them give you. Ergo the signature will not match.

Case and point with Android phones.

The firmwares are digitally signed. The kernel code is open. You can recompile AOSP all day long. If the device manufacturer does not have a bootloader on the phone that allows you to load your AOSP build, you're forever stuck with *his* digitally signed binary.

Agreed. And last I heard, there was research into making the large batteries needed where volume & weight is no object (as would be the case for these static batteries) out of cellulose, aka wood fibers! https://link.springer.com/arti... As you mention, the amount of lithium needed is minimal, the insulating layer between the electrodes within the battery is a larger problem, however.

We'd have to ask a blind person to try it out to get the answer I suppose.

you beat me to it! I truly do miss the feel of a keyboard when using a touchscreen. If this means we can now get tactile feedback for pressing on "virtual keys", I'm all for it!

I think by "lawful" they're really aiming to comply with anti child pornography and other "think of the children" type of legislation currently in the US which ISPs are already blocking when they find out about it.

Also, net neutrality doesn't mean you can't set bandwidth quotas for a service. If your service is to watch the web, you pay for a certain bandwidth. If they decide to provide you with more bandwidth to pass through your TV service, and set your data quota to what you pay for, where's the problem, right?

For wireless access, the problem I think has more to do with being able to provide better service for critical instances. Like trying to dial 911 would have priority over some software download or other...

In the US, corporations have the same rights as a person, except for taxes. It's one of the most screwed up things in the legal system, but it's there nonetheless.

Umm, here's my take on this:

The reason they're doing this is because like you said, wireless is a huge growth sector. But the majority of Verizon's wired infrastructure (i.e. FiOS) can handle a HUGE amount of data - they've already invested in it. Wireless on the other hand, is a restricted data flow pipeline.

The bandwidth available for wireless transmission is determined by the range of frequencies available, divided by the number of users on that band. It's a FIXED amount. The FCC's not going to widen it just because, there are too many considerations for it.

You can only achieve a given data speed over wifi. We've improved it over time. But there is a physical limit for reliability of the signal, and that's why wireless is a different story. With wired (or land-based into wifi hotspots) you can just lay more lines in parallel, add a separate color laser to your fiber, etc. which makes it feasible to upgrade and widen the bandwidth. When you have an easily maintainable infrastructure, you don't mind letting it be used freely without priority restrictions.

Now pictures this: if wireless providers went all net neutral as per your calls, then a phone call would have the same priority as an app downloading updates in the background. Do you know you're going to always have good enough reception to guarantee call quality? Or are OS/firmware updates not more important than that stupid youtube of a dog who can't get up?

The point is that for wireless, there is a need to prioritize bandwidth, and because it's a fixed bandwidth, if you want priority over something else, you can't just claim it like you do on a landline network. The whole point here is that they're making an argument that you pay to use a cellphone, and instead of having a monthly data cap like you would with european providers (they have rates of $0.5 per Mbit after you exceed your allowance of 125, 250 or 500 MB), they're making it such that certain traffic will always work. Like maybe accessing your bank website. Or your Verizon account website to pay bills. If they'd adhered to net neutrality on wireless, it would end up in a huge problem because of LIMITED BANDWIDTH.

I'm a net neutrality supporter, big time. But there's no way to make it work on a wireless device practically to begin with. What other restrictions they impose on it afterwards remain to be seen. But I couldn't care less for browsing the web on a screen so small my fingers cover a third of what I'm trying to read/work on.

The pictures are amazing, and I wish there were more of them to be done that way!

Regarding the rest of your comment, I beg to differ!

I'm in the "under 30" category, and I know a great many deal of people my age or younger, who care about history, learn as much as they can about it, and have hobbies that usually involve modelling or simulating WWII-era war machines.

The sad part is that most of those youngsters are also the first ones to enroll in the armed forces, and too few of them ever make it back from the two battlefields we currently have going on.

But that being said, all you need to do to go see how many WWII "warbirds" are being modelled in 3D on the net, or by remote-controlled airplane pilots to notice they're not disappearing in popularity at all. They're just ever so present that most people accept them as part of their heritage, the same way they'll consider the tradition of Thanksgiving. It's so pervasive it's lost a lot of its impact.

Technically, unless specifically stated in the contract, the company can't sue you for "locking the keys to your desk inside your desk".
The company would then spend several hundreds of dollars on a locksmith to force open and re-key the desk, but in no case is that grounds for a trial.
He didn't take the devices with him, he simply left them in a state that was otherwise unuseable. If the city wasn't smart enough to hire someone who could force their way into the devices to re-image them with a configuration of their choosing, that should have no impact on Terry Childs. He did not steal company (or in fact, government) property. He never did. He simply left devices in a secure state, arguing against reason that nobody knew well enough to handle the systems. A bit paranoid, and overly concerned with his job to be sure, but hardly a case to bring him before court. If his manager had been the slightest bit resourceful, he'd have found someone who could re-image those devices, wiping all previous data on them.
I'm assuming it's not that hard to do when you own the damn things and have full vendor support behind you!

Remind me since when do we trust big companies to set anything right to protect their customers from outside threats. They get the best setups in the world for their corporate networks, but their end-users can all go suck dirt where they're concerned.
Also I wouldn't leave out the possibility that they're getting all sorts of data concerning their customers' LAN, to target them for advertising for, say, faster networks, or TV set-top boxes like the Roku player if they notice a lot of video streaming.
Remember, big corporate cares nothing for their customers, they just care about selling you as much as they can, and then some, to increase their profits and cater to their shareholders' wishes.