SharePoint is almost an industry unto itself. Probably because it's not useful out of the box without a bunch of coding to make it resemble some kind of workflow or CRM application. I almost never see it deployed without in house talent of some kind because it's one of those things that's never quite done and always needs tweaking.
MS on Intel is an ecosystem and there a reasonably intelligent people at all levels who really don't know anything else, mostly because they don't need to. There's enough customers, product and work to keep them busy and more or less get something done. It's not all that different from IBM or DEC in their heydays.
I think MS partners marching their own customers off to MS cloud solutions is a little weird. It's like giving away your customers to someone else and your customers end up paying more for it. Even if it's just Exchange, that's a whole huge bit of managed service revenue and a not small slice of infrastructure gone and probably forever, as it's the one cloud application that's halfway reasonably priced.
Fortunately the naked greed of cloud computing vendors combined with the unseen complications of "going cloud' for a lot of existing wintel environments makes them so expensive and complex that even naive SMBs won't bite. I just saw a cloud quote for a customer with a clunky, 4-5 VM homegrown app "system" that would make it cheaper to buy all new on site hardware and toss it every 18 months. I guess that's maybe what cloud vendors are doing themselves on the back end, but I just don't see how that kind of economics works.
What you'd really want are farming and basic engineering references from the turn of the century. When this modern shithouse collapses, we'll be incredibly thankful just to try to live at 1900 standards and I'm guessing that 1800 will be about the average.
I believe this. I replaced a 10 year old Kenmore Elite and found that the wiring harness for the supply power had obvious signs of burning and arcing, although I had no idea why as there had been no leaks and no loose wires.
I've read that dishwashers work by chemistry, not hydrology. Meaning it's not the quantity and pressure of the water spraying your dishes, but the work of the dishwasher detergent that actually cleans your dishes. The spraying is mostly about evenly distributing the chemistry and effectively rinsing it off.
I'm on my 3rd dishwasher, a midrange Bosch, and so far it's the best one I've ever owned. The first one (already ~5 years old when we bought the house) was a Frigidaire and mediocre. The second one was a Kenmore (OEM Kitchenaid) and it was a definite improvement, but eventually it quit getting dishes clean for reasons I couldn't figure out. It based the full suite of embedded self-tests, drew a reasonable supply of water, pumped out said water fine and seemed to spray well internally, but nothing came clean.
The Bosch that replaced it gets dishes cleaner than any of them, is so quiet that you literally can't tell it's running by sound and somehow uses some kind of gimmick to dry the dishes without a bake dry cycle that melts plastics.
Both my Bosch and my Kenmore have automagic "optimum clean" cycles that use some kind of sensors to measure the water to gauge cleanliness. I just wish they had some kind of serial port on them that would let you monitor sensor outputs so you could figure out when a machine was mechanically operating well (i.e., pumping, spraying, etc) what was wrong with the sensor system to figure out why it wasn't cleaning well.
I think it would also help to have a harsh-ish chemical that could be dumped in to an empty machine and companion self-clean cycle that would pump said chemical through the system to clean the inevitable buildup of gunk in the plumbing that renders cleaning sensors less effective and probably gets blasted a little every time back onto your dishes, even in a rinse cycle.
The good(?) news is that dishwashers are pretty trivial to swap out anymore. About the only thing missing, really, is a standardized slide-out drawer assembly the unit can be fitted to with a worm drive you could turn from the front with a screwdriver to raise/level the machine to optimally fill the cabinet opening. Ideally with a floor pan with a drain hose that could be dropped down through the floor into a basement floor drain in case a fitting gave out.
How *was* it ever considered legal and how did it ever pass constitutional muster, especially at the Federal level? Taking property without even a conviction for any crime? Besides the obvious constitutional issue with the 4th amendment, doesn't it also flip the burden of proof onto the person whose assets are seized? Possibly also forcing you to testify in court in violation of your 5th amendment rights -- sure, in a civil proceeding to try to recover your assets, but it's not like any evidence or testimony wouldn't be used against you in a criminal proceeding if they felt it was useful.
In a common sense way, I can see assets illegal to possess, like drugs or some kinds of weapons, being forfeited as a result of a legal search even if they don't bother charging you with the crime of possessing them. But the stories I've read have people losing cars and cash over shit like traffic violations with absolutely no contraband involved and no evidence of any crime related to the assets.
I also seem to remember something (maybe on Slashdot) about a certain IRS agent who would write down the license plates of expensive cars. Look up the owners and their tax filings and decide to audit them if there was even the most broken cocktail napkin math suggesting they were living beyond their means.
I guess I can see how rich people stash all their assets in LLCs and trusts to make it extremely difficult to connect the property with an owner.
Are people getting killed for hacking yet, outside of specific national security and military targets?
I could almost see a bank or large financial institution employing some kind of private security contractor to clip especially obnoxious overseas hackers who aren't easily accessible to the normal law enforcement channels.
On the other hand, IDing specific culprits and actually tracking them down might be tough and the more serious ones usually have substantive local allegiances that could make them difficult to access, although I'd generally give a slight advantage to out of town professionals over local amateurs and semi-pros.
Even beyond that level, it's kind of surprising how little actual physical violence you see over Internet fueds of any kind. In the real world, people will shoot each other for wearing the wrong colors or for other trivial slights. Yet people can dox and swat and mock each other viciously online and I never read about anyone eating double-aught buck over it.
What's kind of strange is that up until the early 1970s there wasn't *any* security for air travel. At all. Some of the shuttle flights didn't even require you to buy a ticket in advance, they sold them on the plane.
Even after the first few hijackings, the airlines were stridently opposed to security screening, thinking it would turn off customers and make the airport experience a nightmare. They would have rather just paid the fucking ransoms and moved on.
I can remember in the late 1970s we used to ride our bikes to MSP and walk the gates. I'm sure we must have had to have gone through metal detectors, but they clearly didn't give a shit about a couple of 13 year old boys walking to the gates.
It's kind of hard to fathom why air security got so extreme relative to how lax it had been and how much the airlines resisted increasing it, even when their planes were pretty regularly getting hijacked.
(For great background, read "The Skies Belong to Us" -- a great review of both skyjackings generally and the Western Flight 701 hijacking to Algeria in particular).
Give it a few more months and a few more gaffes and Donald Trump will be in the same position. The UK flights will deny him boarding even if the US airports let him through security right to the gate, etc.
Donald Trump doesn't fly commercial. He owns a 757-200.
Their biggest challenge now, IMHO, is keeping the theme parks usable.
IIRC, the Disneyworld property alone currently has more hotel rooms than Orlando had people when Disneyworld opened.
They've expanded the Magic Kingdom park itself a small amount, and of course added 3 other parks, but current ride paradigm they have (and most of the rides) just can't accommodate the number of people they can actually pack into the parks.
FastPass helps, kind of, but even then you often have long-ish waits and you end up on some kind of un-vacation like schedule to get on the rides. Without it? You can wait for hours.
They need to re-think how they do rides there as they move forward. IMHO, make fewer individual rides, but make the ones they do install longer, and have them be the Omnimover kind that feature continuous loading and unloading, so that they have more capacity.
There are a whole lot easer ways to bring down the grid than hack your way in if you can access it physically (IE you have somebody on the ground, or some way to work your mischief.) All it really takes is a little bit of coordination and planning and looking at the power distribution network topology and some 2nd year undergraduate electrical engineering knowledge.
Yeah, but a remote hack has the potential to break the grid on a scale that makes the effect nation wide. A physical hack on a single substation seems much less likely to have more than a regional impact, and getting a larger impact would require a lot more than just a little bit of coordination and planning.
One of my questions is, if it could be penetrated so deeply, why hasn't the grid been fucked over by someone by now?
Is it that the "control networks" are less vulnerable than they're made out to be, and that as it turns out a telnet session from someplace isn't enough to actually do any serious sabotage?
The "hackers" involved lack the know-how and expertise to do anything serious (maybe combined with it being hard to use these networks to do anything serious)?
$evil_nations are putting this in their back pocket for some later date when they really need it, like when El Presidente Cruz decides to start carpet bombing Iran over nuclear agreement issues or something. This seems compelling, but then again, all security vulnerabilities seem to have something of a shelf-life -- old equipment eventually gets replaced, software ultimately gets updated, networks change, etc -- the hack you thought you have may not be there when you need it, so why wait to hit the button?
Obviously adding battery power also adds weight, but does it actually become negative net power at some point, where the added power of more battery actually can't offset more weight?
If you had an EV semi truck and you filled a semi-trailer with battery power, could it not pull itself?
I've always thought that if they just didn't do drug testing *at all* what would happen is that athletes would take more and more aggressive substances until people started dying in competition and/or former athletes were impossibly sick.
Once it reached that point, the athletes themselves would just refuse all but the most demonstrably benign performance enhancements and we'd mostly be back to where we are now (which IMHO is take what you can get away with, and mostly this means taking stuff that is benign enough not to show up on a drug screen, but not necessarily benign in long term effect).
The problem with having performance enhancing drugs banned is that it just pushes it totally underground and athletes end up encouraged to take all manner of mystery substances in hopes of gaining an edge and if they do have illnesses that result, they themselves are part of a conspiracy of silence about it. Plus there's the endless cat and mouse game of ever-more-elaborate testing to find ever-more-tweaked substances.
It's really no different than the current drug prohibition -- people will smoke all manner of Chinese toxic waste chemicals (aka "spice") because they're "legal" and mostly don't show up on drug tests. They get sick and can't really get help because nobody knows what the hell they've taken. Had they just smoked pot they wouldn't have that problem.
It depends on your perspective. To the Nazis, the work camps were economically valuable.
To the allies, destroying them was an economic value because it made the Nazis easier to fight.
There's no argument that economic expansion through conquest is self-limiting and economically inefficient, and I'm pretty sure it features in many explanations as to the fall of the Roman empire.
Generally no. Race to the bottom, corporate welfare, etc.
But I kind of ask "What's the data center for?"
Is it meant to be a place to house fully automated, large scale, cloud services for companies based elsewhere, where the siting is purely about some kind of risk-management/engineering goal on a continental/global basis?
Or does it have a significant colocation component to it, where they expect to house servers for a regional base of customers at a price point where it may encourage localized business growth by providing a resource they may not have locally?
One thing I've noticed in Minneapolis is that with Target based here, there's like an entire sub-economy of businesses that work with Target. Just having Target based here means that many of those symbiotic business are here, too, which definitely means more local economic activity.
It might be that a regional data center may attract the same kinds of symbiotic businesses that exist because the data center is there.
You can if there's someone else with butter and no guns.
Which is exactly the central growth engine of many Empires.
Conquering new lands was a form of economic expansion. At a minimum they paid tribute (aka protection money) to you, more commonly your treasure was looted, your lands taken, your people taken back as slave labor, and so on.
The Death Star is just an efficiency improvement in the Empire's ability to conquer and control systems.
I don't count myself an expert in Star Wars trivia, but if the Empire is anything like the Roman empire, then economic expansion via military force is a key part of its economic growth. You conquer new lands for tribute, booty, resources, labor/slaves, and so on.
A death star is a valuable military weapon that could conceivably improve the economy by allowing the Empire to more easily (and more cheaply) conquer new systems. In terms of conventional industrial economics, it's like having a vastly superior factory.
A loss of the Death Star would both be an economic loss of the investment and much slower revenue growth because you'd have to fight harder to conquer new systems with more conventional weapons (to the extent that a Super Star Destroyer is a conventional weapon).
You're *already* protected from slander. The statutes and case law on slander are well established, you could probably get an LL.M in just slander & libel.
I'm curious how you can be "persecuted" by speech, though. Persecution ultimately implies harm through violence, discriminatory social practices in hiring, housing or resource allocation or some other means of a tangible nature.
Mere speech doesn't seem capable of persecuting you because it has no tangible element to it. It requires an actual physical action to persecute you. If it didn't, I could claim that North Korea or Iran is persecuting me because they utter serious threats of violence against me. Yet, I am not persecuted because they don't have the ability to turn their speech into actions.
IMHO, the ideal model of this is the government bonding the municipal network construction (fiber, data center, etc) but giving contracting out management of the L1/2 infrastructure to someone who knows how to run a network like this.
Actual services delivered over this infrastructure would be provided by other third parties who buy access to the network, such as ISPs, video providers, telecom, and then resell their services to subscribers. I'd probably mandate that a service provider on the network would be barred from being eligible for managing the network, too, to avoid any conflict of interest.
This to me seems like biggest win/win for everyone. The actual management is handled by someone who has the skills/people to do it, as an "open network" consumers would have a choice of providers and services (ie, geek ISPs with barebones support for people who know what they're doing, grandma ISPs with extras like webmail and support for those who don't).
The school district could be its own ISP, using the municipal network like a private WAN. Businesses with enough points of presence could also use it the same way if the costs made sense to buy in at the central office. I even knew a company that set themselves up as an ISP option with Qwest DSL -- employees who wanted remote access could get DSL and choose their company as the ISP -- instant VPN.
The government wouldn't be in the IP dialtone business at all. If it *wanted* to, it could be just another ISP choice and it wouldn't surprise me if some places decided they wanted to provide a subsidized ISP offering for public housing or something, but at least it has the narrowest and most transparent cost, since the cost of that service wouldn't be buried with the rest of the system.
This is pretty much how the model for municipal roadways works -- the government pays for them, often hiring contractors to maintain or expand them, but service delivery on the roads is handled by various companies depending on the services delivered -- taxis, Uber, pizza delivery, UPS packages, etc.
Really what you'd end up doing is tasking the government for its biggest benefits -- low cost financing through bonding and access to rights of way. The rest would be essentially private, albeit operated at a profit level sufficient to keep up the network but not rent-seek.
I figured that was heavily implied by this. Musk on Mars is Musk in some large and comfortable habitat, whether in orbit or on the surface, largely self-sustaining.
Slashdot Mirror
SharePoint is almost an industry unto itself. Probably because it's not useful out of the box without a bunch of coding to make it resemble some kind of workflow or CRM application. I almost never see it deployed without in house talent of some kind because it's one of those things that's never quite done and always needs tweaking.
MS on Intel is an ecosystem and there a reasonably intelligent people at all levels who really don't know anything else, mostly because they don't need to. There's enough customers, product and work to keep them busy and more or less get something done. It's not all that different from IBM or DEC in their heydays.
I think MS partners marching their own customers off to MS cloud solutions is a little weird. It's like giving away your customers to someone else and your customers end up paying more for it. Even if it's just Exchange, that's a whole huge bit of managed service revenue and a not small slice of infrastructure gone and probably forever, as it's the one cloud application that's halfway reasonably priced.
Fortunately the naked greed of cloud computing vendors combined with the unseen complications of "going cloud' for a lot of existing wintel environments makes them so expensive and complex that even naive SMBs won't bite. I just saw a cloud quote for a customer with a clunky, 4-5 VM homegrown app "system" that would make it cheaper to buy all new on site hardware and toss it every 18 months. I guess that's maybe what cloud vendors are doing themselves on the back end, but I just don't see how that kind of economics works.
What you'd really want are farming and basic engineering references from the turn of the century. When this modern shithouse collapses, we'll be incredibly thankful just to try to live at 1900 standards and I'm guessing that 1800 will be about the average.
I believe this. I replaced a 10 year old Kenmore Elite and found that the wiring harness for the supply power had obvious signs of burning and arcing, although I had no idea why as there had been no leaks and no loose wires.
I've read that dishwashers work by chemistry, not hydrology. Meaning it's not the quantity and pressure of the water spraying your dishes, but the work of the dishwasher detergent that actually cleans your dishes. The spraying is mostly about evenly distributing the chemistry and effectively rinsing it off.
I'm on my 3rd dishwasher, a midrange Bosch, and so far it's the best one I've ever owned. The first one (already ~5 years old when we bought the house) was a Frigidaire and mediocre. The second one was a Kenmore (OEM Kitchenaid) and it was a definite improvement, but eventually it quit getting dishes clean for reasons I couldn't figure out. It based the full suite of embedded self-tests, drew a reasonable supply of water, pumped out said water fine and seemed to spray well internally, but nothing came clean.
The Bosch that replaced it gets dishes cleaner than any of them, is so quiet that you literally can't tell it's running by sound and somehow uses some kind of gimmick to dry the dishes without a bake dry cycle that melts plastics.
Both my Bosch and my Kenmore have automagic "optimum clean" cycles that use some kind of sensors to measure the water to gauge cleanliness. I just wish they had some kind of serial port on them that would let you monitor sensor outputs so you could figure out when a machine was mechanically operating well (i.e., pumping, spraying, etc) what was wrong with the sensor system to figure out why it wasn't cleaning well.
I think it would also help to have a harsh-ish chemical that could be dumped in to an empty machine and companion self-clean cycle that would pump said chemical through the system to clean the inevitable buildup of gunk in the plumbing that renders cleaning sensors less effective and probably gets blasted a little every time back onto your dishes, even in a rinse cycle.
The good(?) news is that dishwashers are pretty trivial to swap out anymore. About the only thing missing, really, is a standardized slide-out drawer assembly the unit can be fitted to with a worm drive you could turn from the front with a screwdriver to raise/level the machine to optimally fill the cabinet opening. Ideally with a floor pan with a drain hose that could be dropped down through the floor into a basement floor drain in case a fitting gave out.
How *was* it ever considered legal and how did it ever pass constitutional muster, especially at the Federal level? Taking property without even a conviction for any crime? Besides the obvious constitutional issue with the 4th amendment, doesn't it also flip the burden of proof onto the person whose assets are seized? Possibly also forcing you to testify in court in violation of your 5th amendment rights -- sure, in a civil proceeding to try to recover your assets, but it's not like any evidence or testimony wouldn't be used against you in a criminal proceeding if they felt it was useful.
In a common sense way, I can see assets illegal to possess, like drugs or some kinds of weapons, being forfeited as a result of a legal search even if they don't bother charging you with the crime of possessing them. But the stories I've read have people losing cars and cash over shit like traffic violations with absolutely no contraband involved and no evidence of any crime related to the assets.
I also seem to remember something (maybe on Slashdot) about a certain IRS agent who would write down the license plates of expensive cars. Look up the owners and their tax filings and decide to audit them if there was even the most broken cocktail napkin math suggesting they were living beyond their means.
I guess I can see how rich people stash all their assets in LLCs and trusts to make it extremely difficult to connect the property with an owner.
Are people getting killed for hacking yet, outside of specific national security and military targets?
I could almost see a bank or large financial institution employing some kind of private security contractor to clip especially obnoxious overseas hackers who aren't easily accessible to the normal law enforcement channels.
On the other hand, IDing specific culprits and actually tracking them down might be tough and the more serious ones usually have substantive local allegiances that could make them difficult to access, although I'd generally give a slight advantage to out of town professionals over local amateurs and semi-pros.
Even beyond that level, it's kind of surprising how little actual physical violence you see over Internet fueds of any kind. In the real world, people will shoot each other for wearing the wrong colors or for other trivial slights. Yet people can dox and swat and mock each other viciously online and I never read about anyone eating double-aught buck over it.
What's kind of strange is that up until the early 1970s there wasn't *any* security for air travel. At all. Some of the shuttle flights didn't even require you to buy a ticket in advance, they sold them on the plane.
Even after the first few hijackings, the airlines were stridently opposed to security screening, thinking it would turn off customers and make the airport experience a nightmare. They would have rather just paid the fucking ransoms and moved on.
I can remember in the late 1970s we used to ride our bikes to MSP and walk the gates. I'm sure we must have had to have gone through metal detectors, but they clearly didn't give a shit about a couple of 13 year old boys walking to the gates.
It's kind of hard to fathom why air security got so extreme relative to how lax it had been and how much the airlines resisted increasing it, even when their planes were pretty regularly getting hijacked.
(For great background, read "The Skies Belong to Us" -- a great review of both skyjackings generally and the Western Flight 701 hijacking to Algeria in particular).
I'm sure they'd rather let him land, refuel and leave then have a 757-200 crash land with no fuel.
Give it a few more months and a few more gaffes and Donald Trump will be in the same position. The UK flights will deny him boarding even if the US airports let him through security right to the gate, etc.
Donald Trump doesn't fly commercial. He owns a 757-200.
Couldn't credit cards be a little like those RSA cards with a number that changes every minute?
When buying things, the number gets entered as part of the transaction, verifying that the card is in the hand of the cardholder.
Their biggest challenge now, IMHO, is keeping the theme parks usable.
IIRC, the Disneyworld property alone currently has more hotel rooms than Orlando had people when Disneyworld opened.
They've expanded the Magic Kingdom park itself a small amount, and of course added 3 other parks, but current ride paradigm they have (and most of the rides) just can't accommodate the number of people they can actually pack into the parks.
FastPass helps, kind of, but even then you often have long-ish waits and you end up on some kind of un-vacation like schedule to get on the rides. Without it? You can wait for hours.
They need to re-think how they do rides there as they move forward. IMHO, make fewer individual rides, but make the ones they do install longer, and have them be the Omnimover kind that feature continuous loading and unloading, so that they have more capacity.
There are a whole lot easer ways to bring down the grid than hack your way in if you can access it physically (IE you have somebody on the ground, or some way to work your mischief.) All it really takes is a little bit of coordination and planning and looking at the power distribution network topology and some 2nd year undergraduate electrical engineering knowledge.
Yeah, but a remote hack has the potential to break the grid on a scale that makes the effect nation wide. A physical hack on a single substation seems much less likely to have more than a regional impact, and getting a larger impact would require a lot more than just a little bit of coordination and planning.
One of my questions is, if it could be penetrated so deeply, why hasn't the grid been fucked over by someone by now?
Is it that the "control networks" are less vulnerable than they're made out to be, and that as it turns out a telnet session from someplace isn't enough to actually do any serious sabotage?
The "hackers" involved lack the know-how and expertise to do anything serious (maybe combined with it being hard to use these networks to do anything serious)?
$evil_nations are putting this in their back pocket for some later date when they really need it, like when El Presidente Cruz decides to start carpet bombing Iran over nuclear agreement issues or something. This seems compelling, but then again, all security vulnerabilities seem to have something of a shelf-life -- old equipment eventually gets replaced, software ultimately gets updated, networks change, etc -- the hack you thought you have may not be there when you need it, so why wait to hit the button?
And why do you want to cut off our air?
Obviously adding battery power also adds weight, but does it actually become negative net power at some point, where the added power of more battery actually can't offset more weight?
If you had an EV semi truck and you filled a semi-trailer with battery power, could it not pull itself?
We need a "where are they now" battery roundup story where they look at why all the promising breakthroughs never delivered.
I've always thought that if they just didn't do drug testing *at all* what would happen is that athletes would take more and more aggressive substances until people started dying in competition and/or former athletes were impossibly sick.
Once it reached that point, the athletes themselves would just refuse all but the most demonstrably benign performance enhancements and we'd mostly be back to where we are now (which IMHO is take what you can get away with, and mostly this means taking stuff that is benign enough not to show up on a drug screen, but not necessarily benign in long term effect).
The problem with having performance enhancing drugs banned is that it just pushes it totally underground and athletes end up encouraged to take all manner of mystery substances in hopes of gaining an edge and if they do have illnesses that result, they themselves are part of a conspiracy of silence about it. Plus there's the endless cat and mouse game of ever-more-elaborate testing to find ever-more-tweaked substances.
It's really no different than the current drug prohibition -- people will smoke all manner of Chinese toxic waste chemicals (aka "spice") because they're "legal" and mostly don't show up on drug tests. They get sick and can't really get help because nobody knows what the hell they've taken. Had they just smoked pot they wouldn't have that problem.
It depends on your perspective. To the Nazis, the work camps were economically valuable.
To the allies, destroying them was an economic value because it made the Nazis easier to fight.
There's no argument that economic expansion through conquest is self-limiting and economically inefficient, and I'm pretty sure it features in many explanations as to the fall of the Roman empire.
Generally no. Race to the bottom, corporate welfare, etc.
But I kind of ask "What's the data center for?"
Is it meant to be a place to house fully automated, large scale, cloud services for companies based elsewhere, where the siting is purely about some kind of risk-management/engineering goal on a continental/global basis?
Or does it have a significant colocation component to it, where they expect to house servers for a regional base of customers at a price point where it may encourage localized business growth by providing a resource they may not have locally?
One thing I've noticed in Minneapolis is that with Target based here, there's like an entire sub-economy of businesses that work with Target. Just having Target based here means that many of those symbiotic business are here, too, which definitely means more local economic activity.
It might be that a regional data center may attract the same kinds of symbiotic businesses that exist because the data center is there.
You can if there's someone else with butter and no guns.
Which is exactly the central growth engine of many Empires.
Conquering new lands was a form of economic expansion. At a minimum they paid tribute (aka protection money) to you, more commonly your treasure was looted, your lands taken, your people taken back as slave labor, and so on.
The Death Star is just an efficiency improvement in the Empire's ability to conquer and control systems.
That doesn't make sense.
I don't count myself an expert in Star Wars trivia, but if the Empire is anything like the Roman empire, then economic expansion via military force is a key part of its economic growth. You conquer new lands for tribute, booty, resources, labor/slaves, and so on.
A death star is a valuable military weapon that could conceivably improve the economy by allowing the Empire to more easily (and more cheaply) conquer new systems. In terms of conventional industrial economics, it's like having a vastly superior factory.
A loss of the Death Star would both be an economic loss of the investment and much slower revenue growth because you'd have to fight harder to conquer new systems with more conventional weapons (to the extent that a Super Star Destroyer is a conventional weapon).
The sword of Damocles works because it hangs, not because it falls.
my freedom to not be persecuted or slandered.
You're *already* protected from slander. The statutes and case law on slander are well established, you could probably get an LL.M in just slander & libel.
I'm curious how you can be "persecuted" by speech, though. Persecution ultimately implies harm through violence, discriminatory social practices in hiring, housing or resource allocation or some other means of a tangible nature.
Mere speech doesn't seem capable of persecuting you because it has no tangible element to it. It requires an actual physical action to persecute you. If it didn't, I could claim that North Korea or Iran is persecuting me because they utter serious threats of violence against me. Yet, I am not persecuted because they don't have the ability to turn their speech into actions.
IMHO, the ideal model of this is the government bonding the municipal network construction (fiber, data center, etc) but giving contracting out management of the L1/2 infrastructure to someone who knows how to run a network like this.
Actual services delivered over this infrastructure would be provided by other third parties who buy access to the network, such as ISPs, video providers, telecom, and then resell their services to subscribers. I'd probably mandate that a service provider on the network would be barred from being eligible for managing the network, too, to avoid any conflict of interest.
This to me seems like biggest win/win for everyone. The actual management is handled by someone who has the skills/people to do it, as an "open network" consumers would have a choice of providers and services (ie, geek ISPs with barebones support for people who know what they're doing, grandma ISPs with extras like webmail and support for those who don't).
The school district could be its own ISP, using the municipal network like a private WAN. Businesses with enough points of presence could also use it the same way if the costs made sense to buy in at the central office. I even knew a company that set themselves up as an ISP option with Qwest DSL -- employees who wanted remote access could get DSL and choose their company as the ISP -- instant VPN.
The government wouldn't be in the IP dialtone business at all. If it *wanted* to, it could be just another ISP choice and it wouldn't surprise me if some places decided they wanted to provide a subsidized ISP offering for public housing or something, but at least it has the narrowest and most transparent cost, since the cost of that service wouldn't be buried with the rest of the system.
This is pretty much how the model for municipal roadways works -- the government pays for them, often hiring contractors to maintain or expand them, but service delivery on the roads is handled by various companies depending on the services delivered -- taxis, Uber, pizza delivery, UPS packages, etc.
Really what you'd end up doing is tasking the government for its biggest benefits -- low cost financing through bonding and access to rights of way. The rest would be essentially private, albeit operated at a profit level sufficient to keep up the network but not rent-seek.
I figured that was heavily implied by this. Musk on Mars is Musk in some large and comfortable habitat, whether in orbit or on the surface, largely self-sustaining.