I feel you, I worked my way up from help desk and making that transition from help desk to anything else is pretty difficult. I know I could have performed any of my first jobs without the ITT education, but I'll never know if I would have had the chance without it on my resume.

In hindsight I should have dropped out as soon as I got my foot in the IT door, since I got my first helpdesk job when I was barely into the first semester.

Not to mention the scheduling issues you run into at any CC. Required courses that fill up a semester or two before you need them, other courses that are only available at times you usually work. Bosses of white collar workers can be assholes, but it's nothing like the kind of bosses you can find in low level retail or food service work.

Walk a mile in my shoes.

I attended ITT tech, my education did little but provide a degree. I learned on the job and at home, I've been fairly successful despite ITT. There are a couple benefits to a place like ITT that I don't see anyone talking about.

I was married with a child on the way, doing temp office work and warehouse work, usually 2 jobs. I had been attending a traditional University's local campus, but working full time and taking classes is difficult and takes more then 4 years. In hindsight, I probably should have tried for an Associates through the regular University, but it's difficult to find those sorts of opportunities. Everything is geared towards a Bachelor's degree. Required classes are usually offered at very specific times and may not have enough sessions. You can easily burn a semester or two waiting on a class opening.

In comparison, a place like ITT tech has every class you take offered at the same time, same day of the week. It's an easy progression without breaks or scheduling problems. To someone working a full time job, this is very tempting. Too bad it's literally too good to be true. I graduated in 2001 and still have about $40k in student loans...

But were those long address protocols designed to be routable in a worldwide network? Sure, Ethernet had a 48-bit address too, but it was only intended to be a unique hardware ID. There is no way to contact an arbitrary Ethernet MAC address outside of your LAN, even if you already know that it exists. Were they designed to work with the low-speed serial links that were common back in the day? Sure, you can spare a few extra bits when you've got over a million per second, but not when you've got a mere thousands of bits per second.

Back in those days communications were slow (56Kbps was about 6 characters per second, or 7cps synchronous). And CPUs weren't fast. People wouldn't have tolerated protocols that took up a significant percentage of CPU time. More importantly, fast routing depends on custom logic to handle headers without a CPU, and variable-length headers make this much harder. IPv6's optional headers are tricky enough, but variable address lengths would have been very hard to process with custom logic.

And encryption? It was literally a non-issue for network protocols back in those days because it is so compute-intensive. The point of a network protocol is to route data, you don't stick something as expensive as encryption on the lower layers without a good reason, such as wireless transmission. WiFi has link-layer encryption, but that disappears once the data goes onto a wire. And if you're not going to encrypt the headers anyhow (how do you use the options that specify encryption in an already encrypted header?), then why the fuck even bother? If the data needs to be encrypted, put that at layer 5 or 6 or 7 of the protocol.

Also, which algorithm? Any sufficiently fast algorithm from those days would be useless today. DES was brand new in the '70s, and eventually got chips, but you're going to require one of those in every network node? There are still unanswered questions about how its specific design was chosen. All specifying an algorithm would do is keep a bad algorithm alive forever. SSL is still trying to shake off bad algorithms. We've already thrown away at least two generations of encryption just for WiFi alone, that you can still use, and it's barely 20 years old. And yes, the munitions bullshit was another reason why they would have kept it completely out of the network protocol. It just isn't the business of a routing protocol to deal with encryption.

Hindsight is easy when you don't consider the limitations of what was knowable or possible back in the day. Very few things (other than perhaps the limitations of classful routing) could have been foreseen in what was still considered a mostly experimental system. There was no way they could have known that TCP/IP (which wasn't even their first protocol!) would have ended up the winner and persisted for decades until long after the point where it had run out of addresses.

48 or 64 bit addresses would have been enough, IPv6 only used 128 bits because its designers wanted to be really, really, really sure that we wouldn't run out, this time, for sure. The initial classful address allocations didn't help, but we eventually reached a point where a single wasted class A only puts off exhaustion by a few months. What broke everything in the end was the sheer enormous number of addresses used by mobile networks. Now we have enough bits that we can use Ethernet MACs as part of routable addresses and still have plenty.

The problem is that back when IP was new, even 56Kbps was considered fast. TCP headers are already 20 bytes. The overhead of 4 more bytes per packet would have been significant, but 12 more bytes per packet? That's 2ms per packet at 56K asynchronous, and 12ms at 9600 bps. PPP had a way to shorten headers for this reason, but it was a later protocol, after the more obvious SLIP had already been in use.

Well at least they got the dorky part right this time!

Apparently due to the need for cheap domain names, spammers are running their outbound mail configured with cheap TLDs. I suppose they are doing this so that they can have an actual domain name that resolves properly because it's too easy to block an invalid domain name?

Whatever the reason, if you run your own inbound MTA, a lot of spam can be blocked by simply setting it to discard any mail from these sleazy TLDs, before even reaching the point of doing blackhole list lookup. The worst ones these days are .top and .stream, because apparently you can get a domain for $0.88/mo. Sure, spam still comes in from pwned computers, but a surprising amount comes in from IPs with properly resolving A records, and a surprising amount of that spam comes from TLDs that no sane person would be sending mail from.

So I guess some good did come out of ICANN getting greedy with selling all those new TLDs after all.

Does it let you download the raw unrestricted MPEG files to a computer?

I keep buying hard drives for my antenna MythTV.

All of the computers with "standard" disk controller chips used the index hole. (And some CP/M machines were hard sectored, which definitely requires it. That one time I tried to format a 5 1/4" floppy that I didn't realize was hard-sectored was certainly interesting.) I know the TRS-80 used the index hole (I usually made a rough index hole with an X-acto knife), and Atari used it too (I've seen it in the XF551 code).

The Apple II didn't use the index because Woz found out that he didn't need it (even copy protection just used the relative position timing between tracks), and I don't think Commodore used it either.

Name one country that doesn't mind its military bases being photographed every couple of months and being published for anyone to look at.

If Google is photographing your bases and publishing it, the problem isn't that they published it. The problem is that Google was able to successfully photograph it.

If Google can photograph your base, then your adversary can too. And Google is almost certainly doing things in the nicest way possible, obeying laws, not generally willing to put up with planes being shot down as merely an inevitable cost of business, etc. A real adversary doesn't have those constraints.

Attempting to censor Google is symptom-treating, and really, it's to a comical degree. It's way out there; this isn't merely "slightly stupid." This totally reeks of closing barns doors after horses have gotten out... except that there will be an update in a few months and of course they'll want that blurred too,because they still haven't closed the barn door. It's more like they just don't want people talking about the barn door, that they have already decided they're never going to close.

YOUR HORSES ARE OUT, NUMBNUTS!!! WE ARE LOOKING AT YOUR BARN DOOR BECAUSE IT'S HYSTERICALLY FUNNY THAT YOU KEEP LEAVING IT OPEN, not because we want to steal your horses, which aren't in the barn anyway. If the horses were really still in the barn, then you would have shot down the photographer.

Hitler is already a proven election-winner. That's not a fair alternative to Trump. Put up a more hypothetical name, please.

And maybe what both parties need to get out of the trench warfare that they currently have as well.

Maybe, but maybe not.

The parties only hear two language: votes and money. Whatever they're doing, appears to be working for them (contrary to what you suggest, that they change). You write that it's bad, but on election day I think they are going to hear that what they did was good.

You're giving a treat to the dog (and saying "bad dog") every time he barks, and kicking him (and saying "good dog") whenever he sits and cutely wags his tail. Guess what kind of dog you're going to have.

The only good news I'm seeing in this election, is that somewhere around 10-15% of voters have finally decided to stop actively supporting and approving them, compared to single digits in previous years. But a strong majority still approves, applauds, and rewards.

I think the election night numbers are going to show: Clinton and Trump were excellent choices, America's top two favorites. Prove me wrong, America. I don't care what you say to me; I'm watching to see what you say to them and everyone else.

I got better...

I'm an OpenSuSE fan, for my desktop. I run Linux on my personal stuff and windows on my business laptops, with an x2go session open to my linux desktop, usually XFCE.