Are there any studies that look at the efficacy of police stops? That is, how useful are these opportunistic police efforts to stop and question someone, in terms of preventing crime? The FBI Director's claim relies on a belief that spontaneous stop-and-question interactions are responsible for preventing an extremely significant percentage of violent crimes.

Asking whether we need (want) everyone writing code is the same as asking whether we want everyone to be literate and write prose.

For all of the goodness of the above extended comment, it misses some important marks:

DKIM assigns a validated identifier to a message. It does /not/ tell you who "sent" the message, in the sense that folk normally mean. The validated identifier, for example, does not have to have anything to do with the message author or the originating organization. However once a message reliably has a validated identifier, then that identifier can be used to build a noise-free reputation. The DKIM identifier can't be used by unauthorized actors.

DMARC links the DKIM and/or SPF identifier to the domain of the author (rfc2822.From) field AND it can declare the domain owner's preference for what receivers should do with mail that has that domain in the From: field but doesn't get DMARC validation. Receivers are free to conform to that guidance or do whatever else they deem appropriate.

The underlying point here is that these mechanisms work best at identifying valid mail and at letting receivers build up reliable reputations for the domains using these mechanisms.

IMO all of the uses of these mechanisms for identifying bad messages and bad actors represent a near-term, transient artifact, because it is still much too easy for bad actors to "route around" these mechanisms. And the major lesson of the last 20 years of fighting email abuse is that bad actors are very adaptable.

The clever form should have been attributed to its author, Corey Doctorow. . It has long been useful when responding to someone's believe that they have the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).

The Web and its attendant facilities, such as search, came as the culmination of decades or formative work. For Internet search milestones, check out Archie and Veronica. Anonymous FTP was the public document access method for the 70s and 80s. Archive indexed that world.

Besides Internet-only devices and Internet-enabled televisions, many DVD players are now Internet-enabled and include such things as Netflix access with a single button -- often a physical button on the device. This has the advantage of starting with a device and mode already familiar to older folk, although of course there are still some steps to learn. My 94-year-old father is not facile with his, but he gets it to work. d/

Agreeing with a number of postings: Start by offering your positive assessment of the company, your enthusiasm for the company's future and your feeling that your work has contributed to the current good status. (Of course, touting one's own contribution needs delicacy, but no, it's not wrong to cite it.) Note that you are feeling a responsibility to continue to help the company to succeed. State that you would like to share some of the risk and benefit of the company's good future by participating in the equity plan. As others have noted, this can -- and usually does -- involve a tradeoff with other compensation. Higher pay means less stock. Also as already noted, the company's having matured already means that it is likely the stock price and the amount available to folk such as you won't be as wonderful as founder's shares. You probably do not know any details of the company's stock plan, so you should state openness about what the package of stock should be. But this is a negotiation and you want to cast it positively and flexibly. Before pursuing this, you need to consider what your reaction will be to being turned down. Will it sour your relationship to the company? Good luck. d/

WIFI is a must-have. If you need mobility access through 3G, just go through your phone acting as a hotspot. (What? You don't have an android phone? tsk. tsk.)

The Internet is the result of a continuing sequence of contributions from many different sources, dating back to the 1960s. The transition from the original Arpanet to the Internet began in the 1970s, with the technical proposal by Cerf and Kahn and the ensuing research funded by DARPA. It developed the core technologies that are still in use -- IP, TCP, SMTP, DNS. (The Web came later and separately.)

The Arpanet officially became the Internet in January, 1983. This was a DARPA action.

NSF's contribution began separately, in 1980, as an adjunct to the Arpanet, with CSNet, which was originally a dial-up network, and served as a kind of market research for the NSFNet project. It gave Arpanet access to research and academic sites that could not afford the cost of direct Arpanet connection.

NSFNet continued increasing access, which by now was to the existing Internet. It caused two more significant enhancements: 1) multiple backbones, and 2) regional backbones. The first required creating a new core routing protocol. Major technical enhancement. Allowed competition at the very "top" of the Internet.

The second set the stage for the modern, commercial Internet, by establishing a large-scale hierarchy of relay backbone networks, almost all of which transitioned into commercial form. This was an administrative enhancement, rather than a technical one.

/d

(original administrator of CSNet email relaying.)