seriously, how awesome would it be to stick the family in the SUV in florida and wind up in beijing? or berlin?
Reality would set in very quickly...
First off, it's unimaginably harsh winter conditions in the far north, 6 months out of the years.
For the other 6 months of the year, it would be a ridiculously long drive...
Even if you're in a hurry, you'll spend 4 days going from Florida to Washington state, another 2 days driving north through Canada, then probably another 3-4 driving across Alaska. One thing to keep in mind is that Canada and Alaska is going to be for more barren than even the western US. You're quite literally going to drive entire days, seeing NOTHING but maybe a gas station once every 200 miles. If 6 days of that doesn't put you to sleep, and take all the fun out of it, I don't know what will...
Then, when you cross the bridge and arrive in Russia, you're still in the far north, and you've still got a couple more days of driving across nothingness to get ANYWHERE. And likely 4 or more days of driving to get to any place someone might WANT to visit. So for a week and a half, you've been driving constantly, haven't had more than a few minutes a day to stand up straight, spent several THOUSAND dollars on gasoline, to go someplace you could have made by plane in under 8 hours, and at far less expense than driving. And for what? So you could admire the Canadian/Alaskan trees for a week, as they fly by in your window.
All I had to do was send it ASCII codes over the RS232 lines.
There are many devices (read: drivers) that communicate over the bus in ASCII. It's really no simpler than binary communication, though.
And just because a device has a relatively simple initialization command, doesn't mean it doesn't need drivers. You could connect to your inkjet printer and type-in the (binary) strings to get it to function as well. Most will print ASCII directly, but the commands to get it to print graphics are simply more complex.
If every modem had a different command set, instead of Hayes standardizing it so early on, you'd have the same problem. You wouldn't know what string you needed to type to tell it to dial, what format it accepted, etc.
The problem is, having to have part of the 'hardware' be proprietary closed software that is secret
Every bit of computer hardware you use has embedded firmware on it.
I want the hardware to stand on its own.
I want cookies.
We need to get away from every device having its own [...] 'drivers'
Good luck with that. Use your video card in VESA or VGA mode. Buy only NE2000 NICs, etc.
There's good reason hardware has drivers. A "universal" interface would be ineffectual, inflexible, and otherwise crippled. Whether drivers are proprietary or open source has absolutely nothing to do with the subject.
What's the problem? Anything more deadly than a gun is considered a weapon of mas destruction. If you want to build something like a (potentially working) replica cannon, you have to get permission to construct a WMD.
It's a simple legal term, and a BOMB definitely qualifies as a WMD.
I guess they just can't be found anywhre huh?
It said "threat." You can threaten with anything, whether you have it or not.
The principal is an ordinary member of the public. She didn't arrest the kid or charge him.
Of course not, she merely: "started waving her hands in the air and saying 'we got him, we got him.'"
Principals aren't police, but they are authority figures, and their statements carry weight.
The fact that it "sounded nothing like Webb," he "never even had a detention in his life," and they probably lacked any motive, sounds incredibly damming for the police and judge.
But, still, the principal isn't exactly squeaky clean here.
Dying != DEAD. You don't remove backwards compatibility until 99% of the old hardware is gone.
You see those serial, PS2, and parallel ports on your motherboard? They're dying too, but I'd be mad if they were removed in the next few years.
It has a competitor that is just as cheap and even better performing.
SATA isn't as cheap as IDE. The different, last I looked, was 10-$15. On drives that are expensive to begin with, they might just hide that ~5% price difference, but it's costing them more.
A new 250GB SATA hard drive and SATA CD/DVD burner can be yours for just over $100.
Meanwhile, a motherboard that supports IDE can be had for under $30.
I made no claims about the influence of money on election outcomes. My claim has to do with who can influence seated politicians and who cannot.
Now you have to explain how campaign contributions influence politicians, if it (according to you) has nothing to do with their re-election.
If you gave a lot of money, you will get far more attention than if you did not.
"A lot" being the key word. If you have "a lot" of votes to give, you get just as much attention as if you have "a lot" of money.
I sense that you place a great deal of faith in the system, in spite of daily evidence to the contrary.
You are utterly wrong. I sense that you are among the (irrationally) disenfranchised I've already described, and have no real understanding of the process, and certainly no objectivity in your judgments of the system.
I challenge you to print this message out on paper and read it again 10 years from now. Your perspective will have changed dramatically.
You seem to thing I'm far younger than I actually am, 10 more years isn't going change my opinion. I suspect you're actually the one who's rather young, hasn't been voting for long, and simply doesn't have the decades of watching politics to understand, and get some context. People are brought-up reading history that only includes the heroic, and leaves out real context. You hear how great the founding fathers were, and what gets ignored is the controversies, how corrupt they were, how often wrong they were, etc.
The Iraq war is a very bad thing, no question, but it's not the end of the world. The Vietnam war was infinitely worse than Iraq could ever hope to be, and yet here we are... Bad decisions don't mean democracy is dead, and we're all slaves to our corporate overlords now.
In 10 years, I urge you to look back on all the horrible problems we have today, and see how, in hindsight, they weren't the end of the world, either.
ISDN/T1/OC3 'routers' do in fact connect to your PC via ethernet.
A router, by definition, converts from one standard to another. You can have a dial-on-demand (dial-up modem) router as well.
Routers are much more expensive than having internal hardware, and you sacrifice a tremendous amount by not having direct hardware access.
What you don't seem to understand is that you're not gaining anything. The "router" is still a computer, and it still needs to have drivers for the hardware. What benefit is that?
You know, you could also hook a monitor and a keyboard up to this "router", and install a more user friendly operating system on it...
the analogy is external vs internal 'modem'.
No, external hardware requires drivers as well. Dial-up modems just happen to be simple, and have a standard set of commands, so the single driver needed has been available in every operating system since DOS. If you plug-in an external USB DSL modem, you need drivers, like anything else.
What you're actually doing, is comparing having the hardware on your computer, vs having the hardware on another computer (the 'router') sharing it over the network, and not worrying about security implications, because it's on "that other guy's computer" (ie. 'router') rather than on yours.
Not even remotely. There are a vast number of features and operations needed for WiFi that don't exist in ethernet. So, at that point, you're just using Ethernet as any other bus. You might as well make it a USB device.
And on the more pragmatic side of things, WiFi needs a CPU... If you make it an abstracted device (like a network printer) it's now going to have to integrate a rather fast CPU, memory, etc., etc. Not to mention that you've eliminated the possibility of performance optimizations, commonly done with WiFi.
The point is that ethernet is the 'standard' for networking connectivity to a device, not PCI or PCMCIA.
No, it isn't. Ethernet is popular and cheap, that's all. My dial-up modems don't connect to my ethernet ports. ISDN, T1, OC3, etc. none connects through ethernet. SANS are networked storage, and they certainly don't use ethernet.
PCI and PCMCIA is the standard bus for devices, WiFi is a network device. It is NOT a simple ethernet/network transceiver that can just simply be put in-line.
your slippery slope argument fails especially when you consider technology today. for instance, major media is being killed by the independent journalist and blogger.
That doesn't hold up at all.
The REASON the internet is so successful, is because ISPs are strictly required by government regulations to allow ANYTHING through, without restriction. If that wasn't there in the first place, the internet would be about as exciting as a newspaper... Carefully controlled content.
And another big part of the reason the internet has become a haven for "news" of all sorts, is the anonymity it gives you, BECAUSE your ISP opens itself up to legal liability if it reveals your identity, browsing habits, etc., to 3rd parties. Remove that restriction, and you can expect everyone to know everything you say and do online. Express a somewhat libertarian opinion on a blog somewhere??? Expect your ISP to tell you employer, your credit card company, home mortgage lender, etc. If they don't like what you have to say, you're out of a job, home, money, etc.
and by the way, in the US in the 1930's, the exact opposite happened.
No, you're simply totally and utterly wrong.
you give the government the power, they are going to use it. and if they use it in a way you don't like, well, they have the power to use it as they see fit.
The government is far more responsive to public opinion than a corporation. If you don't give the government the power, someone else will take it.
Just look at any existing countries with a weak government.
Get rid of wifi cards (PCI as well as PCMCIA), and instead implement the wifi 'client' side with an ETHERNET jack to connect
You might as well say we should have one driver to allow communication with an external device, and let it handle all the drivers...
You've merely MOVED the problem, not eliminated it. That external (Ethernet) device can be exploited if it's drivers are equally buggy, and when it is, they've got a direct line to your computer.
You're also depending on your Ethernet driver to not have anything wrong with it... That may be true, because it's a bit simpler, and has been around long enough to have been audited repeatedly, but WiFi is simply young, and will shortly get to that point too, where people suggest we have external devices that connect to our PCs via WiFi...
"Despite the Internet being a global network, the US has traditionally dominated." Then later: "The Internet is still dominated by the United States,"
In other words... Nothing has changed. Figures indicate Eastern Europe is now up to 1%, compared to the US, and South America is nearing 2%.
Good to see it happening, but this is statistical static, worthy of a one-sentence mention in the on-screen ticker of whatever stock/business news program you watch... A complete non-story.
there are plenty of P2P protocols without hashing.
Then name them. If they exist, they must be extremely unpopular. Without hashing, you can't find alternate files for "swarming" (multi-host downloads). The major/popular P2P networks all support it, all the way back to the original, Gnutella.
one that does not is the Soulseek network.
Well, assuming you're correct (I can't find any technical details for SoulSeek, and certainly haven't used it) you're still only 1 for 100.
DC, ED2K, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Kazaa, Mute, Ares, MP2P/Manolito, etc., and those are just off the top of my head.
The albedo of the desert is some 40%, meaning that 40% of incoming sunlight is reflected back into space.
The ground-level, "empty space" albedo of 36% (according to that article) would be a more accurate figure for comparison.
In order to cool the desert, your solar cell needs to have greater than 40% efficiency,
That's simply wrong. No solar technology absorbs 100% of the light that hits it to begin with. The albedo of photovoltaic cells is approx. around 5%, and other solar power generation methods are likely higher. So, already, we've reduce the needed efficiency to at most 31%, and likely even lower...
Though most existing installations are less efficient, current solar/electric technologies range from 30% to 40% efficiency. At the very least, newly built solar facilities won't be causing any warming. And they are quite likely to cause a small amount of cooling.
And to be fair, these figures only apply to the Sahara desert to begin with. Other deserts around the world have significantly different albedo. In much of the Mojave Desert (considered the ideal area for solar, and where the majority of solar power generation in the world is located now, and will be for the foreseeable future) there is far more vegetation than would be found in the Sahara...
A realistic solar farm is not going to cool the desert.
I know from extensive first-hand experience, the area being prepared for the Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison plant contains significant vegetation (ie. weeds) which should give it a fairly high albedo. And, if the other Sterling Systems' installations are any indicator, it should achieve 30% efficiency, more than efficient enough to cause a net cooling effect. On to of that, it's expected to generate more electricity than all other existing solar facilities in the world, combined, when it's completed in approx. 10 years. So that's going to be a significant cooling effect in the immediate area, and you can't get much more "realistic" than something that is already being built...
after transmission of electricity away from the desert is taken into account.
Transmission losses across the grid are minimal, likely much less than 1% in this scenario.
fascists believe in total state control, libertarians believe in individual freedom and limited government.
And Republicans believe in small government...
What you BELIEVE doesn't matter remotely as much as the effect your social, economic, etc. policies will have. When you remove all power from the state, the corporations have all the power, and take control. This was clearly demonstrated in the US around the 1930s.
Libertarianism is simply defacto Fascism, or Fascism from just a slightly different perspective.
and then compare scrapping the Internet with Verizon installing fiber in your *town*?
No, I never compared "scrapping the Internet" to ANYTHING, let alone installing fiber. That's entirely invented by you, or perhaps your utter lack of 3rd grade reading comprehension.
Also I've the feeling even Verizon in your town didn't "scrap" the modems, but will gradually transition to fiber as it's ready to be deployed, area by area.
"Scrap" has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with how and went something is going to be disabled, vs it's replacement.
You really believe that "scraping the internet" means they're going to just shut if all off suddenly, one day, and then start rolling out it's replacement?
The only existing screen technology that likely suits your needs is transreflective LCDs. They're widely available, so you shouldn't have an problems.
Display tech with potential, like e-Ink, just isn't there yet, and likely won't be for several years.
Of course, if you want to go crazy, you could always grab an old LCD, and mount it in an enclosure with a massively powerful backlight, and lots of airflow directed at the screen to keep the LCD from burning up.
There's more loss in scrapping everything and starting over than it is to improve existing solutions in a compatible manner.
Really? Then explain why Verizon is installing fiber all over my town, instead of just improving modem speeds...
everybody knows the x86 instruction set and interface sucks.
"everybody" is wrong. The instruction set and interface isn't too bad. x86 couldn't have been so successful if that was the case. It's CISC CPUs that suck, so with P6/K-6 (anything AFTER the original Pentium), everything was switched to RISC-like microcode internally.
Your observations are too brutally simple to really mean anything. Maintaining backwards compatibility is often best... Throwing away backwards compatibility is often much better.
self destruct, great, so if you want to destroy someones data, just grab their memory stick and intentional use bogus passwords.
If someone has access to your memory stick filled with secret data, having that data ERASED is absolutely the LEAST of your problems. In fact, having the data erased is the best possible outcome of such a scenario. That's why it's a feature.
So smug in their design they don't even encrypt the data. Outstanding.
Use of encryption is strictly limited/regulated in France... you basically have to give them your keys. There is a real need for security mechanisms that don't rely on encryption, in that market.
I firmly believe that because they push that platform so hard is why nobody even thinks of jumping ship from republican or democrat to Libertarian.
Or maybe it's because the Libertarian theology is wholly based on economic theories that have been thoroughly disproven, both in theory, and every single time it's been used in practice anywhere around the world.
You might as well start up a Communist party in the US, and complain that people aren't joining in hordes.
Slashdot Mirror
Reality would set in very quickly...
First off, it's unimaginably harsh winter conditions in the far north, 6 months out of the years.
For the other 6 months of the year, it would be a ridiculously long drive...
Even if you're in a hurry, you'll spend 4 days going from Florida to Washington state, another 2 days driving north through Canada, then probably another 3-4 driving across Alaska. One thing to keep in mind is that Canada and Alaska is going to be for more barren than even the western US. You're quite literally going to drive entire days, seeing NOTHING but maybe a gas station once every 200 miles. If 6 days of that doesn't put you to sleep, and take all the fun out of it, I don't know what will...
Then, when you cross the bridge and arrive in Russia, you're still in the far north, and you've still got a couple more days of driving across nothingness to get ANYWHERE. And likely 4 or more days of driving to get to any place someone might WANT to visit. So for a week and a half, you've been driving constantly, haven't had more than a few minutes a day to stand up straight, spent several THOUSAND dollars on gasoline, to go someplace you could have made by plane in under 8 hours, and at far less expense than driving. And for what? So you could admire the Canadian/Alaskan trees for a week, as they fly by in your window.
There are many devices (read: drivers) that communicate over the bus in ASCII. It's really no simpler than binary communication, though.
And just because a device has a relatively simple initialization command, doesn't mean it doesn't need drivers. You could connect to your inkjet printer and type-in the (binary) strings to get it to function as well. Most will print ASCII directly, but the commands to get it to print graphics are simply more complex.
If every modem had a different command set, instead of Hayes standardizing it so early on, you'd have the same problem. You wouldn't know what string you needed to type to tell it to dial, what format it accepted, etc.
Every bit of computer hardware you use has embedded firmware on it.
I want cookies.
Good luck with that. Use your video card in VESA or VGA mode. Buy only NE2000 NICs, etc.
There's good reason hardware has drivers. A "universal" interface would be ineffectual, inflexible, and otherwise crippled. Whether drivers are proprietary or open source has absolutely nothing to do with the subject.
What's the problem? Anything more deadly than a gun is considered a weapon of mas destruction. If you want to build something like a (potentially working) replica cannon, you have to get permission to construct a WMD.
It's a simple legal term, and a BOMB definitely qualifies as a WMD.
It said "threat." You can threaten with anything, whether you have it or not.
Nice... Because sending lots of e-mail is real punishment. And to think, we've been wasting all this money on JAILS for all these years.
I think sending numerous e-mails is right about on-par with "waving her hands in the air and saying 'we got him, we got him.'"
Of course not, she merely: "started waving her hands in the air and saying 'we got him, we got him.'"
Principals aren't police, but they are authority figures, and their statements carry weight.
The fact that it "sounded nothing like Webb," he "never even had a detention in his life," and they probably lacked any motive, sounds incredibly damming for the police and judge.
But, still, the principal isn't exactly squeaky clean here.
Odd... My kids only beep.
Perhaps I should look into that...
Dying != DEAD. You don't remove backwards compatibility until 99% of the old hardware is gone.
You see those serial, PS2, and parallel ports on your motherboard? They're dying too, but I'd be mad if they were removed in the next few years.
SATA isn't as cheap as IDE. The different, last I looked, was 10-$15. On drives that are expensive to begin with, they might just hide that ~5% price difference, but it's costing them more.
Meanwhile, a motherboard that supports IDE can be had for under $30.
I CAN'T WAIT to buy a bunch of these things, and modify them!
Can you imagine the mischief potential?!
Modify it so it goes at high speed, and NEVER STOPS moving...
I can't wait to unleash a bunch of these annoying little bastards in the nearest shopping mall!
Now you have to explain how campaign contributions influence politicians, if it (according to you) has nothing to do with their re-election.
"A lot" being the key word. If you have "a lot" of votes to give, you get just as much attention as if you have "a lot" of money.
You are utterly wrong. I sense that you are among the (irrationally) disenfranchised I've already described, and have no real understanding of the process, and certainly no objectivity in your judgments of the system.
You seem to thing I'm far younger than I actually am, 10 more years isn't going change my opinion. I suspect you're actually the one who's rather young, hasn't been voting for long, and simply doesn't have the decades of watching politics to understand, and get some context. People are brought-up reading history that only includes the heroic, and leaves out real context. You hear how great the founding fathers were, and what gets ignored is the controversies, how corrupt they were, how often wrong they were, etc.
The Iraq war is a very bad thing, no question, but it's not the end of the world. The Vietnam war was infinitely worse than Iraq could ever hope to be, and yet here we are... Bad decisions don't mean democracy is dead, and we're all slaves to our corporate overlords now.
In 10 years, I urge you to look back on all the horrible problems we have today, and see how, in hindsight, they weren't the end of the world, either.
A router, by definition, converts from one standard to another. You can have a dial-on-demand (dial-up modem) router as well.
Routers are much more expensive than having internal hardware, and you sacrifice a tremendous amount by not having direct hardware access.
What you don't seem to understand is that you're not gaining anything. The "router" is still a computer, and it still needs to have drivers for the hardware. What benefit is that?
You know, you could also hook a monitor and a keyboard up to this "router", and install a more user friendly operating system on it...
No, external hardware requires drivers as well. Dial-up modems just happen to be simple, and have a standard set of commands, so the single driver needed has been available in every operating system since DOS. If you plug-in an external USB DSL modem, you need drivers, like anything else.
What you're actually doing, is comparing having the hardware on your computer, vs having the hardware on another computer (the 'router') sharing it over the network, and not worrying about security implications, because it's on "that other guy's computer" (ie. 'router') rather than on yours.
Not even remotely. There are a vast number of features and operations needed for WiFi that don't exist in ethernet. So, at that point, you're just using Ethernet as any other bus. You might as well make it a USB device.
And on the more pragmatic side of things, WiFi needs a CPU... If you make it an abstracted device (like a network printer) it's now going to have to integrate a rather fast CPU, memory, etc., etc. Not to mention that you've eliminated the possibility of performance optimizations, commonly done with WiFi.
No, it isn't. Ethernet is popular and cheap, that's all. My dial-up modems don't connect to my ethernet ports. ISDN, T1, OC3, etc. none connects through ethernet. SANS are networked storage, and they certainly don't use ethernet.
PCI and PCMCIA is the standard bus for devices, WiFi is a network device. It is NOT a simple ethernet/network transceiver that can just simply be put in-line.
That doesn't hold up at all.
The REASON the internet is so successful, is because ISPs are strictly required by government regulations to allow ANYTHING through, without restriction. If that wasn't there in the first place, the internet would be about as exciting as a newspaper... Carefully controlled content.
And another big part of the reason the internet has become a haven for "news" of all sorts, is the anonymity it gives you, BECAUSE your ISP opens itself up to legal liability if it reveals your identity, browsing habits, etc., to 3rd parties. Remove that restriction, and you can expect everyone to know everything you say and do online. Express a somewhat libertarian opinion on a blog somewhere??? Expect your ISP to tell you employer, your credit card company, home mortgage lender, etc. If they don't like what you have to say, you're out of a job, home, money, etc.
No, you're simply totally and utterly wrong.
The government is far more responsive to public opinion than a corporation. If you don't give the government the power, someone else will take it.
Just look at any existing countries with a weak government.
You might as well say we should have one driver to allow communication with an external device, and let it handle all the drivers...
You've merely MOVED the problem, not eliminated it. That external (Ethernet) device can be exploited if it's drivers are equally buggy, and when it is, they've got a direct line to your computer.
You're also depending on your Ethernet driver to not have anything wrong with it... That may be true, because it's a bit simpler, and has been around long enough to have been audited repeatedly, but WiFi is simply young, and will shortly get to that point too, where people suggest we have external devices that connect to our PCs via WiFi...
This is really pointless. From TFA:
"Despite the Internet being a global network, the US has traditionally dominated."
Then later:
"The Internet is still dominated by the United States,"
In other words... Nothing has changed. Figures indicate Eastern Europe is now up to 1%, compared to the US, and South America is nearing 2%.
Good to see it happening, but this is statistical static, worthy of a one-sentence mention in the on-screen ticker of whatever stock/business news program you watch... A complete non-story.
Then name them. If they exist, they must be extremely unpopular. Without hashing, you can't find alternate files for "swarming" (multi-host downloads). The major/popular P2P networks all support it, all the way back to the original, Gnutella.
Well, assuming you're correct (I can't find any technical details for SoulSeek, and certainly haven't used it) you're still only 1 for 100.
DC, ED2K, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Kazaa, Mute, Ares, MP2P/Manolito, etc., and those are just off the top of my head.
The ground-level, "empty space" albedo of 36% (according to that article) would be a more accurate figure for comparison.
That's simply wrong. No solar technology absorbs 100% of the light that hits it to begin with. The albedo of photovoltaic cells is approx. around 5%, and other solar power generation methods are likely higher. So, already, we've reduce the needed efficiency to at most 31%, and likely even lower...
Though most existing installations are less efficient, current solar/electric technologies range from 30% to 40% efficiency. At the very least, newly built solar facilities won't be causing any warming. And they are quite likely to cause a small amount of cooling.
And to be fair, these figures only apply to the Sahara desert to begin with. Other deserts around the world have significantly different albedo. In much of the Mojave Desert (considered the ideal area for solar, and where the majority of solar power generation in the world is located now, and will be for the foreseeable future) there is far more vegetation than would be found in the Sahara...
I know from extensive first-hand experience, the area being prepared for the Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison plant contains significant vegetation (ie. weeds) which should give it a fairly high albedo. And, if the other Sterling Systems' installations are any indicator, it should achieve 30% efficiency, more than efficient enough to cause a net cooling effect. On to of that, it's expected to generate more electricity than all other existing solar facilities in the world, combined, when it's completed in approx. 10 years. So that's going to be a significant cooling effect in the immediate area, and you can't get much more "realistic" than something that is already being built...
Transmission losses across the grid are minimal, likely much less than 1% in this scenario.
And Republicans believe in small government...
What you BELIEVE doesn't matter remotely as much as the effect your social, economic, etc. policies will have. When you remove all power from the state, the corporations have all the power, and take control. This was clearly demonstrated in the US around the 1930s.
Libertarianism is simply defacto Fascism, or Fascism from just a slightly different perspective.
No, I never compared "scrapping the Internet" to ANYTHING, let alone installing fiber. That's entirely invented by you, or perhaps your utter lack of 3rd grade reading comprehension.
"Scrap" has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with how and went something is going to be disabled, vs it's replacement.
You really believe that "scraping the internet" means they're going to just shut if all off suddenly, one day, and then start rolling out it's replacement?
The only existing screen technology that likely suits your needs is transreflective LCDs. They're widely available, so you shouldn't have an problems.
Display tech with potential, like e-Ink, just isn't there yet, and likely won't be for several years.
Of course, if you want to go crazy, you could always grab an old LCD, and mount it in an enclosure with a massively powerful backlight, and lots of airflow directed at the screen to keep the LCD from burning up.
I doubt this guy is Psychic, and able to determine the cause of a reported problem, based on a couple lines of whining complaints on a blog...
Since there is precisely ONE person, ANYWHERE, claiming this problem exists, it's quite safe to assume it's not actually happening, anywhere.
Really? Then explain why Verizon is installing fiber all over my town, instead of just improving modem speeds...
"everybody" is wrong. The instruction set and interface isn't too bad. x86 couldn't have been so successful if that was the case. It's CISC CPUs that suck, so with P6/K-6 (anything AFTER the original Pentium), everything was switched to RISC-like microcode internally.
Your observations are too brutally simple to really mean anything. Maintaining backwards compatibility is often best... Throwing away backwards compatibility is often much better.
If someone has access to your memory stick filled with secret data, having that data ERASED is absolutely the LEAST of your problems. In fact, having the data erased is the best possible outcome of such a scenario. That's why it's a feature.
Use of encryption is strictly limited/regulated in France... you basically have to give them your keys. There is a real need for security mechanisms that don't rely on encryption, in that market.
Of course they did. Where have you been? Encryption is illegal in France. They don't just WANT, they INSIST on having access to all your data.
Or maybe it's because the Libertarian theology is wholly based on economic theories that have been thoroughly disproven, both in theory, and every single time it's been used in practice anywhere around the world.
You might as well start up a Communist party in the US, and complain that people aren't joining in hordes.