I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period.
On my Blackberry, hitting the space bar twice automatically enters a period. It's the same number of keystrokes but easier to hit than hitting the Alt and then the M key.
How is dropping a text file in the same folder as wordpress creating something that is "part of WP"?
It doesn't. I can take a copy of this post and drop it in a WP folder and it's not affected in any way.
What causes it to be "part of WP" is the fact that the contents of the file in question literally become part of WP. From the last linked article:
There is a tendency to think that there are two things: WordPress, and the active theme. But they do not run separately. They run as one cohesive unit. They don't even run in a sequential order. WordPress starts up, WordPress tells the theme to run its functions and register its hooks and filters, then WordPress runs some queries, then WordPress calls the appropriate theme PHP file, and then the theme hooks into the queried WordPress data and uses WordPress functions to display it, and then WordPress shuts down and finishes the request. On that simple view, it looks like a multi-layered sandwich. But the integration is even more amalgamated than the sandwich analogy suggests.
Here is one important takeaway: themes interact with WordPress (and WordPress with themes) the exact same way that WordPress interacts with itself. Give that a second read, and then we'll digest.
It's wrong. Suppose that you randomly selected 100 families with two children. We're ignoring all the things that you mention above and assuming that gender distribution 50:50. Statistically speaking, our 100 families would consist of 25 boy/boy, 25 boy/girl, 25 girl/boy and 25 girl/girl. We assign a number from 1 to 100 to each family, write that number on a series of cards, and you randomly select a card and hand it to me. I look at it, see the number, and announce that the family has at least one boy. What are the odds that they have two boys? What are the odds that they have a girl and a boy? There are 25 girl/girl cards, but you know you did not pick one of them, so they can be ignored. So you know you picked one of 75 cards. Of those 75 cards, 25 are boy/boy, 25 are boy/girl and 25 are girl/boy. So there is a 25/75, or 1 in 3 chance that you picked a boy/boy card. There's a 50/75 or 2 in 3 chance that you picked a card with a boy and girl combination.
The fact that the number of days in a week is arbitrary is completely irrelevant. If there were eight days a week, then could make the same calculations, substituting the number eight for seven in the calculations. Yes, the results would be different but that's because the information you were provided is different. In this case, the day the son was born is narrowed to one in seven. If there were eight days a week, it would be narrowed to one in eight.
The number of sides on a die is arbitrary as well. There are dice with 4 sides, 8 sides, 10 sides, 20 sides, etc. On a six sided die, the chance of rolling a one is one in six. On a ten sides die, it's one in ten. Just because a six sided die is an arbitrary choice doesn't mean that one can't calculate odds based on that number. So long as you know the size of the die being used, the odds are directly calculable. So long as everyone understand the number of days in a week, the odds can be calculated based on that as well.
Not sure what you're saying is not a problem - the change to TACO or the forked Beef TACO. If you're talking about the changes to the original, I sort of agree with you. I can understand people being upset over the size expansion, particularly if it slows down Firefox or significantly increases its memory footprint, but is there any real problem with the changes that makes this some sort of malware? So far as I can tell, there's no malicious activity associated with the update. It's just big and bloated but does offer some significant new and useful functionality. Assuming that to be the case, I think the hysteria is a bit overblown.
This isn't domain hijacking. Hijacking is when you impersonate the legitimate owner to have the domain transferred, use some sort of DNS poisoning attack to redirect the traffic to an alternate site or use some other nefarious method to deprive the legitimate owner of the use of the domain. The domain owner allowed the domain to expire. McCrary purchased it legally and legitimately. No high jacking involved.
A dedicated wireless network is one workable and practical solution. Assuming that the network is using business class equipment and is not running on a bunch of consumer grade equipment (which is NOT always a valid assumption,) it's also relatively straightforward to use wired networks. Computers which authenticate to the LAN are placed in a VLAN allowing them full access. Computers which do not authenticate are dynamically placed in a restricted VLAN that only allows access to the Internet,
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd wager he's in the marketing department.
Perhaps. It's also possible that he works in another department and brings his own computer because they won't allow the apps he wants to use on the hospital computers. I've used my personal computer for lots of work stuff because I wasn't allowed to install anything and the only text editor available was Notepad.
I'd echo the advice already given numerous times to stop checking email on anything other than a company machine. But for personal machines at work, it depends on why they're being used and why they're connected to the network. Are they actually being used to access local network resources or is the network merely being used to provide internet connectivity? If its the latter, it's not difficult to set up isolated VLANs and subnets which only have access to the internet. The hospital IT staff may not be willing to do this, of course, but it's a possible option to consider.
A number of facts are in dispute, or at least the interpretation of a number of facts, and that's why this case potentially "...puts all IT admins in danger..."
The city claims that Terry took a number of nefarious actions that endangered the network. They claim that he installed multiple modems connected to the network to allow him to access it without logging or auditing. Connecting a modem to the console port of a router or switch is a common back-up access method. It's the only way you can remotely get to a network device if the network is down. When you connect, you still need the username and/or password to get into the device and that access can be logged. It's no different from connecting your laptop directly to the console port.
They claimed that he disabled password recovery on network devices to prevent the city from accessing them. But all of the devices where password recovery was disabled appear to be devices that could not be physically secured. Disabling password recovery is, again, a common practice for devices that are physically accessible.
They claim he had sniffers installed on his computers in order to snoop on the network. How many network admins out there DON'T have a sniffer program installed for troubleshooting the network?
After he was arrested, his pager was taken and it went off with an alert from one of the routers. The city claims this was unauthorized access to the network. Again, it's extremely common for network admins to have monitor programs that send out an email or pager alert in the event of a failure.
I agree that Terry handled the situation poorly and was probably a bit of a jerk. But the city's attempts to pile on the charges in an attempt to get back at him do threaten to set dangerous precedents that could come back to bite any system or network admin.
There is nothing you can do to ensure that data you've already entered is gone. Even if you delete photos and change the info, there's no guarantee that the previous info is not stored. That being said, I deleted my account when I saw this earlier this morning on another site. When they asked me why I was deleting the account, I checked "Privacy concerns." In the comments section, I pasted a quote from the article noting what they were selling and followed it up with a single word: Bye. If enough people do this, Facebook will get the message that users are unhappy with this decision, even if deleting the account doesn't protect already-entered data.
This case was settled, yes. But if you RTFA you'll note that there were several rulings that were issued and then appealed up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Those rulings, which strongly favor F/OSS, ARE now binding, at least for that circuit.
It's also kind of hard to answer the question asked without knowing much about the software involved. We know it's a web project of some kind, but that doesn't do much to narrow things down. If it's a web application framework like Rails then promoting it would be a very different task than if it's a blog publishing application like Wordpress. Hopefully, it's not an exact duplicate of some other common open source project, of course. If, however, it does perform the same function as another well known program, particularly a closed source one, you might want to start by listing it on AlternativeTo.
Additionally, he says: "And at best I'd maybe get an injunction, not damages. And, really, they're not making enough money for me to regain my losses."
Uh, what losses? Granted, if he owns the copyright to the image, it's illegal to use them without his permission. But in what way did the use of those images actually cause him any losses? How was he actually harmed? I have no issue with him asking, or even demanding, that they stop using his artwork. But to claim "losses" is downright silly.
It's a sort of self perpetuating system. Originally, the Social Security Number was intended only for use with the Social Security system. However, because it's a controlled, unique number assigned to individuals, it's easy and convenient to use as a unique ID for all sorts of record systems. Having someone's name and SSN makes it fairly easy to do identity theft. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of the SSN as an identifier and part of it is sloppy procedures which don't verify that the name and SSN actually belong to the individual using them.
It is nevertheless better to reserve a machine on your network for just this usage. Nothing installed on it but tcpdump and similar tools.
Or boot from a Linux Live CD.
Also, some switches support spanning ports, which will allow you to sniff the traffic on another port. Your typical home network dumb switch probably doesn't support this, but if you have temporary access to a higher end switch, it makes such tasks much easier. You can pick up older switches that support this fairly cheap on Ebay, although you probably won't want to spend the money for a one-time usage.
What brilliant ideas did Microsoft or Apple have? Microsoft was more lucky than anything else, and used mostly someone else's code to succeed. Apple didn't do anything there weren't dozens of other people trying to do. They just did it better. It was execution and implementation, not brilliant ideas. Edison might have had a few brilliant ideas but most of what he's known for weren't his ideas. He didn't invent the light bulb. In fact, he bought the patents from others who'd been there before him but weren't able to make it practical. See here. He created the first commercially practical lightbulb, and he did it based upon thousands of hours of trial and effort. Many of his other inventions have similar histories. It isn't some brilliant idea that leads to success. It's implementation.
As for the inventor of the burp-tank, several minutes of Googling turned up absolutely nothing. Unless you can provide some evidence, I'll assume that it's apocryphal.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with this scenario per se, so long as the transparency requirement is met. And I further agree that there will be backlash from the gamers over the issue, just as there's now a considerable hue and cry over C&C:4's announcement. But I suspect that people will get used to it and it will eventually become the norm.
The one issue I do have with it is that it cuts out certain segments of the market. For a personal example, I spent 20 years in the US Navy, and I did a lot of gaming to pass the time while on six month deployments. On a ship, you don't have an Internet connection for personal use. The same is true for other members of the Armed Forces who are deployed away from home, and undoubtedly for a multitude of other people who for various reasons won't have open Internet access. Unfortunately for them, they make up only a small percentage of the market. Sucks to be them, I suppose.
The summary says Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them.
Don't bet on it. C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else. Register the serial number with the server via your PC or with your XBox live account or your PS3 Online account and the media becomes worthless. In fact, they could simply give the game disks away and require you to pay online to receive an activation number or token.
Sure, the system can probably be cracked and it won't stop all piracy, but it will stop legal used games sales in its tracks.
This has already been addressed in the IP specs: ECN
One of the big problems with getting ECN adopted has been that Windows hasn't supported it. Vista does and I haven't seen anything specific but I'm reasonably certain that Windows 7 does as well. MAC OSX 10.5 supports it as well. Linux has supported it for quite awhile. It's usually disabled by default, so that may be an issue in getting it widely supported. But the issue isn't that we don't know how to do it better. It's just overcoming the inertia.
Exactly how is this different from what we currently have?
Consider a conventional router receiving two packets that are part of the same video. The router looks at the first packet's destination address and consults a routing table. It then holds the packet in a queue until it can be dispatched. When the router receives the second packet, it repeats those same steps, not "remembering" that it has just processed an earlier piece of the same video.
Uh, no. This is called process switching. It hasn't been used in anything but the most low-end routers for quite some time. CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) use flow control. The perform a lookup on the first packet, cache the information in a forwarding table and all further packets which are part of the same flow are switched, not routed, at effectively wire speeds. MPLS adds a label to the packet which identifies the flow, so it isn't even necessary to check the packet for the five components which define the flow. Just look at the label and send it on its way.
QOS (Quality Of Service) has multiple modes of operation and multiple queue types which address the issues of which packets to drop. It may or may not include deep packet inspection to attempt to determine the type of packet.
Perhaps they've come up with some new innovations that aren't obvious in the write-up because it's written at a relatively high level, but there's nothing here that isn't already implemented and that I don't already work with on a daily basis in production networks.
Which is exactly why Mark Cuban is so misguided. No one lives by free. That is, you might start up a business that lives by free and last until your money runs out, but you either find a way to monetize your customers or you go under. Companies which "live by free" actually live by a business model that includes free but isn't exclusively free. And such businesses are no different from any other business. Every business, regardless of whether or not it has free as part of its business model, faces competition and threat from other businesses. It's the way capitalism works. Woolworths and HQ, for example, didn't go out of business because of anything to do with "free." But they were still out-competed and failed. If you take the reference to "free" out of Cuban's comments, he's simply describing the challenges facing any business in a capitalistic system. Cuban of all people should know that.
Your point that the US is hardly a sterling example of protecting civil rights is valid. However, that doesn't change the fact that the US does have much more robust protections of free speech than many, many other countries, including some that outdo us in other areas of civil rights. European countries, partly in an attempt to protect the rights of minorities, generally have much harsher laws concerning "hate speech" and libel than the US, and most non-European countries routinely censor content they deem to be against the interest of the ruling parties. I'm as appalled at some of the recent US actions as anyone. They're a shame and an embarrassment to a country that is supposed to be "...the land of the free..." But I don't doubt that the article is spot on that US control results in a much freer Internet than would be the case under an international overseer.
Uh, not sure if you're trolling or just not aware, but the above is not true or, at best, might be true only in certain canons. In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, for example, Hulk goes on a rampage in New York City and kills several hundred people. Bruce Banner is tried and sentenced to die for the crime but Hulks out just before the nuclear weapon intended to carry out the execution explodes.
Slashdot Mirror
Link for the above DSA: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2010/msg00181.html
I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period.
On my Blackberry, hitting the space bar twice automatically enters a period. It's the same number of keystrokes but easier to hit than hitting the Alt and then the M key.
How is dropping a text file in the same folder as wordpress creating something that is "part of WP"?
It doesn't. I can take a copy of this post and drop it in a WP folder and it's not affected in any way.
What causes it to be "part of WP" is the fact that the contents of the file in question literally become part of WP. From the last linked article:
There is a tendency to think that there are two things: WordPress, and the active theme. But they do not run separately. They run as one cohesive unit. They don't even run in a sequential order. WordPress starts up, WordPress tells the theme to run its functions and register its hooks and filters, then WordPress runs some queries, then WordPress calls the appropriate theme PHP file, and then the theme hooks into the queried WordPress data and uses WordPress functions to display it, and then WordPress shuts down and finishes the request. On that simple view, it looks like a multi-layered sandwich. But the integration is even more amalgamated than the sandwich analogy suggests.
Here is one important takeaway: themes interact with WordPress (and WordPress with themes) the exact same way that WordPress interacts with itself. Give that a second read, and then we'll digest.
It's wrong. Suppose that you randomly selected 100 families with two children. We're ignoring all the things that you mention above and assuming that gender distribution 50:50. Statistically speaking, our 100 families would consist of 25 boy/boy, 25 boy/girl, 25 girl/boy and 25 girl/girl. We assign a number from 1 to 100 to each family, write that number on a series of cards, and you randomly select a card and hand it to me. I look at it, see the number, and announce that the family has at least one boy. What are the odds that they have two boys? What are the odds that they have a girl and a boy? There are 25 girl/girl cards, but you know you did not pick one of them, so they can be ignored. So you know you picked one of 75 cards. Of those 75 cards, 25 are boy/boy, 25 are boy/girl and 25 are girl/boy. So there is a 25/75, or 1 in 3 chance that you picked a boy/boy card. There's a 50/75 or 2 in 3 chance that you picked a card with a boy and girl combination.
The fact that the number of days in a week is arbitrary is completely irrelevant. If there were eight days a week, then could make the same calculations, substituting the number eight for seven in the calculations. Yes, the results would be different but that's because the information you were provided is different. In this case, the day the son was born is narrowed to one in seven. If there were eight days a week, it would be narrowed to one in eight.
The number of sides on a die is arbitrary as well. There are dice with 4 sides, 8 sides, 10 sides, 20 sides, etc. On a six sided die, the chance of rolling a one is one in six. On a ten sides die, it's one in ten. Just because a six sided die is an arbitrary choice doesn't mean that one can't calculate odds based on that number. So long as you know the size of the die being used, the odds are directly calculable. So long as everyone understand the number of days in a week, the odds can be calculated based on that as well.
Not sure what you're saying is not a problem - the change to TACO or the forked Beef TACO. If you're talking about the changes to the original, I sort of agree with you. I can understand people being upset over the size expansion, particularly if it slows down Firefox or significantly increases its memory footprint, but is there any real problem with the changes that makes this some sort of malware? So far as I can tell, there's no malicious activity associated with the update. It's just big and bloated but does offer some significant new and useful functionality. Assuming that to be the case, I think the hysteria is a bit overblown.
This isn't domain hijacking. Hijacking is when you impersonate the legitimate owner to have the domain transferred, use some sort of DNS poisoning attack to redirect the traffic to an alternate site or use some other nefarious method to deprive the legitimate owner of the use of the domain. The domain owner allowed the domain to expire. McCrary purchased it legally and legitimately. No high jacking involved.
A dedicated wireless network is one workable and practical solution. Assuming that the network is using business class equipment and is not running on a bunch of consumer grade equipment (which is NOT always a valid assumption,) it's also relatively straightforward to use wired networks. Computers which authenticate to the LAN are placed in a VLAN allowing them full access. Computers which do not authenticate are dynamically placed in a restricted VLAN that only allows access to the Internet,
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd wager he's in the marketing department.
Perhaps. It's also possible that he works in another department and brings his own computer because they won't allow the apps he wants to use on the hospital computers. I've used my personal computer for lots of work stuff because I wasn't allowed to install anything and the only text editor available was Notepad.
I'd echo the advice already given numerous times to stop checking email on anything other than a company machine. But for personal machines at work, it depends on why they're being used and why they're connected to the network. Are they actually being used to access local network resources or is the network merely being used to provide internet connectivity? If its the latter, it's not difficult to set up isolated VLANs and subnets which only have access to the internet. The hospital IT staff may not be willing to do this, of course, but it's a possible option to consider.
A number of facts are in dispute, or at least the interpretation of a number of facts, and that's why this case potentially "...puts all IT admins in danger..."
The city claims that Terry took a number of nefarious actions that endangered the network. They claim that he installed multiple modems connected to the network to allow him to access it without logging or auditing. Connecting a modem to the console port of a router or switch is a common back-up access method. It's the only way you can remotely get to a network device if the network is down. When you connect, you still need the username and/or password to get into the device and that access can be logged. It's no different from connecting your laptop directly to the console port.
They claimed that he disabled password recovery on network devices to prevent the city from accessing them. But all of the devices where password recovery was disabled appear to be devices that could not be physically secured. Disabling password recovery is, again, a common practice for devices that are physically accessible.
They claim he had sniffers installed on his computers in order to snoop on the network. How many network admins out there DON'T have a sniffer program installed for troubleshooting the network?
After he was arrested, his pager was taken and it went off with an alert from one of the routers. The city claims this was unauthorized access to the network. Again, it's extremely common for network admins to have monitor programs that send out an email or pager alert in the event of a failure.
I agree that Terry handled the situation poorly and was probably a bit of a jerk. But the city's attempts to pile on the charges in an attempt to get back at him do threaten to set dangerous precedents that could come back to bite any system or network admin.
There is nothing you can do to ensure that data you've already entered is gone. Even if you delete photos and change the info, there's no guarantee that the previous info is not stored. That being said, I deleted my account when I saw this earlier this morning on another site. When they asked me why I was deleting the account, I checked "Privacy concerns." In the comments section, I pasted a quote from the article noting what they were selling and followed it up with a single word: Bye. If enough people do this, Facebook will get the message that users are unhappy with this decision, even if deleting the account doesn't protect already-entered data.
And use DenyHosts
This case was settled, yes. But if you RTFA you'll note that there were several rulings that were issued and then appealed up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Those rulings, which strongly favor F/OSS, ARE now binding, at least for that circuit.
It's also kind of hard to answer the question asked without knowing much about the software involved. We know it's a web project of some kind, but that doesn't do much to narrow things down. If it's a web application framework like Rails then promoting it would be a very different task than if it's a blog publishing application like Wordpress. Hopefully, it's not an exact duplicate of some other common open source project, of course. If, however, it does perform the same function as another well known program, particularly a closed source one, you might want to start by listing it on AlternativeTo.
Additionally, he says: "And at best I'd maybe get an injunction, not damages. And, really, they're not making enough money for me to regain my losses."
Uh, what losses? Granted, if he owns the copyright to the image, it's illegal to use them without his permission. But in what way did the use of those images actually cause him any losses? How was he actually harmed? I have no issue with him asking, or even demanding, that they stop using his artwork. But to claim "losses" is downright silly.
It's a sort of self perpetuating system. Originally, the Social Security Number was intended only for use with the Social Security system. However, because it's a controlled, unique number assigned to individuals, it's easy and convenient to use as a unique ID for all sorts of record systems. Having someone's name and SSN makes it fairly easy to do identity theft. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of the SSN as an identifier and part of it is sloppy procedures which don't verify that the name and SSN actually belong to the individual using them.
It is nevertheless better to reserve a machine on your network for just this usage. Nothing installed on it but tcpdump and similar tools.
Or boot from a Linux Live CD.
Also, some switches support spanning ports, which will allow you to sniff the traffic on another port. Your typical home network dumb switch probably doesn't support this, but if you have temporary access to a higher end switch, it makes such tasks much easier. You can pick up older switches that support this fairly cheap on Ebay, although you probably won't want to spend the money for a one-time usage.
What brilliant ideas did Microsoft or Apple have? Microsoft was more lucky than anything else, and used mostly someone else's code to succeed. Apple didn't do anything there weren't dozens of other people trying to do. They just did it better. It was execution and implementation, not brilliant ideas. Edison might have had a few brilliant ideas but most of what he's known for weren't his ideas. He didn't invent the light bulb. In fact, he bought the patents from others who'd been there before him but weren't able to make it practical. See here. He created the first commercially practical lightbulb, and he did it based upon thousands of hours of trial and effort. Many of his other inventions have similar histories. It isn't some brilliant idea that leads to success. It's implementation.
As for the inventor of the burp-tank, several minutes of Googling turned up absolutely nothing. Unless you can provide some evidence, I'll assume that it's apocryphal.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with this scenario per se, so long as the transparency requirement is met. And I further agree that there will be backlash from the gamers over the issue, just as there's now a considerable hue and cry over C&C:4's announcement. But I suspect that people will get used to it and it will eventually become the norm.
The one issue I do have with it is that it cuts out certain segments of the market. For a personal example, I spent 20 years in the US Navy, and I did a lot of gaming to pass the time while on six month deployments. On a ship, you don't have an Internet connection for personal use. The same is true for other members of the Armed Forces who are deployed away from home, and undoubtedly for a multitude of other people who for various reasons won't have open Internet access. Unfortunately for them, they make up only a small percentage of the market. Sucks to be them, I suppose.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The summary says Game publishers and developers may not like it, but people are going to trade in used games for new games and those old games will be sold back to other people. There's nothing game developers can do to stop them.
Don't bet on it. C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else. Register the serial number with the server via your PC or with your XBox live account or your PS3 Online account and the media becomes worthless. In fact, they could simply give the game disks away and require you to pay online to receive an activation number or token.
Sure, the system can probably be cracked and it won't stop all piracy, but it will stop legal used games sales in its tracks.
Goodbye Gamestop, we hardly knew ye.
This has already been addressed in the IP specs: ECN
One of the big problems with getting ECN adopted has been that Windows hasn't supported it. Vista does and I haven't seen anything specific but I'm reasonably certain that Windows 7 does as well. MAC OSX 10.5 supports it as well. Linux has supported it for quite awhile. It's usually disabled by default, so that may be an issue in getting it widely supported. But the issue isn't that we don't know how to do it better. It's just overcoming the inertia.
Exactly how is this different from what we currently have?
Consider a conventional router receiving two packets that are part of the same video. The router looks at the first packet's destination address and consults a routing table. It then holds the packet in a queue until it can be dispatched. When the router receives the second packet, it repeats those same steps, not "remembering" that it has just processed an earlier piece of the same video.
Uh, no. This is called process switching. It hasn't been used in anything but the most low-end routers for quite some time. CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) use flow control. The perform a lookup on the first packet, cache the information in a forwarding table and all further packets which are part of the same flow are switched, not routed, at effectively wire speeds. MPLS adds a label to the packet which identifies the flow, so it isn't even necessary to check the packet for the five components which define the flow. Just look at the label and send it on its way.
QOS (Quality Of Service) has multiple modes of operation and multiple queue types which address the issues of which packets to drop. It may or may not include deep packet inspection to attempt to determine the type of packet.
Perhaps they've come up with some new innovations that aren't obvious in the write-up because it's written at a relatively high level, but there's nothing here that isn't already implemented and that I don't already work with on a daily basis in production networks.
Which is exactly why Mark Cuban is so misguided. No one lives by free. That is, you might start up a business that lives by free and last until your money runs out, but you either find a way to monetize your customers or you go under. Companies which "live by free" actually live by a business model that includes free but isn't exclusively free. And such businesses are no different from any other business. Every business, regardless of whether or not it has free as part of its business model, faces competition and threat from other businesses. It's the way capitalism works. Woolworths and HQ, for example, didn't go out of business because of anything to do with "free." But they were still out-competed and failed. If you take the reference to "free" out of Cuban's comments, he's simply describing the challenges facing any business in a capitalistic system. Cuban of all people should know that.
Your point that the US is hardly a sterling example of protecting civil rights is valid. However, that doesn't change the fact that the US does have much more robust protections of free speech than many, many other countries, including some that outdo us in other areas of civil rights. European countries, partly in an attempt to protect the rights of minorities, generally have much harsher laws concerning "hate speech" and libel than the US, and most non-European countries routinely censor content they deem to be against the interest of the ruling parties. I'm as appalled at some of the recent US actions as anyone. They're a shame and an embarrassment to a country that is supposed to be "...the land of the free..." But I don't doubt that the article is spot on that US control results in a much freer Internet than would be the case under an international overseer.
Uh, not sure if you're trolling or just not aware, but the above is not true or, at best, might be true only in certain canons. In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, for example, Hulk goes on a rampage in New York City and kills several hundred people. Bruce Banner is tried and sentenced to die for the crime but Hulks out just before the nuclear weapon intended to carry out the execution explodes.