I didn't read the bill, but why should/are ISPs responsible for this? Granted I guess you could argue that there are tiers of ISPs, but if I am trying to provide internet to a condo, or something, the cost of dedicated bandwidth is what it costs. And most places, the loop is a significant (about half) of the monthly cost as well. So how am I, down at Tier 2 or 3, going to control the cost and availability of bandwidth?
Also.
What does it mean to have 100Mbps internet? Is that 100Mbps internet during peak hours when everyone is downloading, or a maximum rate of 100Mbps theoretical, if no one else is on the line? Things like this matter quite a lot. And just to be clear, where I live the cost of a 45Mbps DS3 is right around $1500/mo., and the loop is about the same. So right now, under the strictest definition, a recurring cost of $6000/mo. would be needed to provide this level of connectivity. Not to mention the hardware costs associated with providing this to more than, say ten people at a time.
I'm 59, and have been programming professionally since I was 20. The two best things for my employment are:
1) Young, inexperienced programmers.
2) "Experienced" Indian programmers.
Why is that? Because they both fuck up constantly, and thus give me lots to fix.
It could be possible your observations have a selection bias.
Yeah, I'll probably get modded down for this, but ah well.*
Screw 'em. There is already enough navel-gazing occurring in the FLOSS developer community. And if you try to do something nice for FLOSS developers, you are likely going to get flamed and generally abused for trying. Some folks have suggested writing a Visual Studio replacement. Heh, have you seen how many of these projects have started and failed? How many times do you think developers for these projects hear things like, "That's stupid, use vi." or "gdb can do anything your bloated software can." Most of them just don't see the value in it, because what they use works for them, and they are too narcissitic to consider what other people might need, or to even consider that the way they are doing something isn't automatically the best way.
So, yeah, if you want to write something for developers, I guess write something for yourself. At least then one person will use your project. Maybe you will even find some like-minded individuals that see the value in it also. But I think you will find it more rewarding working with people who actually want to use your product and are thankful for your time developing it.
Now, if you really want to make a developer tool that will catch on, my advice is to put a diamond in that navel. Pick a flavor of the week language and write a tool in that language that replicates the functionality of another commonly used tool, preferably written in a 'competing' language. Like, oh I don't know, a software code repository written in... let's say Ruby. Or maybe a package manager. Extra points for making a distro based on it.
* Do I seem bitter? Sorry about that, but after years in the community, I grow weary of some of the self-important attitudes I see in the FLOSS community. Most contributions I have attempted has either been flat out stolen (straight-up name replacement), mimicked by someone in a better strategic position (e.g., Ingo/Con style), flat-out ignored (ever submitted a bug report with a patch?), or flamed for it (ever submitted a bug report?). I've actually only found one project that I contribute to regularly that isn't like this and they tend to get most/all of my time. After all, why bother contributing bug reports, documentation, bug fixes, or feature patches to a project if all you get out of it is a fruitless time-sink?
Protip: If someone creates a convoluted rule system, and you're then buying into his rule system, and try to argue on the definition of those rules, you have already lost before you started.
The better way is, to not buy into their crapola in the first place, but have your own set of values that you are secure in. Then you can let them play in your reality, instead of you entering theirs.:)
Protip: If someone creates a set of values, and you're then buying into these values, and try to argue on the definition of those values, you have already lost before you started.
The better way is, to not buy into their crapola in the first place, but have your own convoluted rule system that you are secure in. Then you can play in your own invented reality, instead of leaving your mother's basement.:)
I say bring it on. Maybe this will be a wake up call to journalists who have been more and more in the habit of parroting hearsay in their stories rather than bringing some real intelligence and analysis to their stories. If all they are going to be is puppets, well, I've got a Perl script for that!
In other words, lower bitrate can be better, but only if you compare to shitty and inefficient compression.
And by this you mean compression that is state of the art two minutes ago, vs. today. Seriously, this field is moving pretty fast, and what you call shitty and inefficient was not long ago the best people could do. A few years ago when I was messing with the x264-svn libraries, stuff would get tweaked daily.
Not to mention there are other factors at play with regards to compression. A well-engineered system isn't necessarily going to go for the maximum compression rate for video quality. One has to look at other limitations, such as the decoding hardware, the method by which the video is being delievered, and even the viewing devices on the receiving end.
What is disheartening about the article is that it looks like the BBC are just in denial mode, and not really taking the complaints seriously. "Standard viewing equipment"? Seriously, what exactly are they getting at with that comment? On top of that it looks like they are trying to blame the quality of the source material, which certainly muddies the picture, but certainly the customers that are complaining would be used to these variations in quality before the change and not just suddenly notice it at the same time this equipment was rolled out.
I have respect for them sticking to their guns, but not when they are doing it with such lame excuses. Then again, the BBC spokesperson and reporter may not be the most tech savvy individuals, and its likely some of the message here is lost in translation. Lossy codec indeed.
I got a good laugh off of this, but is it really possible to get better quality from a lower bitrate?
Sure, if you also switch to a better codec, such as using H.264 instead of MPEG-2. However, I don't think that's what's happening in this case
Just to amplify what has been said here a few times, yes it is possible, and not only from changing codecs. H.264 supports many optional features that are not implemented in all decoders, and these features can have an effect on quality. Use of a variable bit rate vice a constant bitrate can also increase quality and decrease bandwidth needs, at the cost of requiring some bursting capability or buffering to accomodate the variation. Also, there are tricks that can be played with dark and light tone masking to increase the compressibility of a video stream, and any number of other preprocessing tricks that people use.
The reason I bring up this point, is it might be that they tweaked the parameters to achieve a lower bitrate, and thought they weren't sacraficing quality, but that different viewing devices, or different people, were able to notice a change in quality that the study group they used was not. Point being that these guys may not have been as stupid as people are making them out to be, but just designed a poor test. Video compression and judging output quality is really complicated and depends on a lot of factors. It could be they just missed some of those factors when they tweaked the encoding algorithm.
It is unfortunate that companies in this situation are caving to the requests of a government that has different ideals about the freedom of information than we do, but honestly, do you expect anything different? These companies aren't in the business of battling China on their political ideology. They are out to sell a web browser and maximize the NPV of the company. This is what a business and a free market is all about. To do anything different would be a strategic move that while it could be argued might benefit Chinese citizens, it is much less likely to benefit Opera. Furthermore, if they did fight China on this one, I think it would be naive to think that they did it for any other reason that as a calculated risk to gain marketshare and ultimately profit. So don't act surprised when stuff like this happens. The sooner people realize what businesses are and aren't, the sooner they will understand the forces shaping the world in which we live.
Those kinds of modifications shouldn't and likely wouldn't be covered by the provision. There is already a pretty well-established metric by which photojournalists follow. It can be summed up in this statement, "Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects."
Cropping and white balance adjustments are considered ok. Adjusting lighting, posing, or other things are not considered ok, although most people consider it ok as long as the context is obvious (e.g., a portrait for someone's profile or similar). Adjusting the face, removing/adding hair is not ok.
AC may not have given any details (or wiki), but using argumentum ad hominem isn't nice either.
I might lose a point for being off-topic here, but really it is a usage question. While you are correct in stating that usage experts consider it wrong, the phrase has come into common usage to mean what I intended. The debate regarding whether a prescriptive or descriptive approach to linguistics is appropriate is open to heated academic debate. Moreover, the meaning of "begs the question," when used as prescribed, is not really contained in the English translation, but borrowed from the logicians' Latin lexicon. A literal interpretation of the English phrase reveals a meaning not dissimilar to my original intent. And why not interpret the phrase literally, since it is pretty obvious from context that I am not trying to argue against the story's main premise?
As for the supposed argumentum ad hominem-- again, that would require me actually making an argument, which I wasn't. I was pointing out irony. Really, if one is going to correct someone on a finer point of usage in a casual, off-the-cuff, internet forum comment, one might want to make sure they proofread their work for simple grammatical errors. This kind of communication is outside the realm of logical debate, as human communication often is.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
Why go all that way and not send a few men down to the surface of Mars in a lander? Sure, it might be dangerous, but the whole mission of getting there would be dangerous too.
Because weight is at an expensive premium when launching into space?
The problem with probes on Mars and the like, is just what the article said. A good space program that would advance science would take a huge ammount of money. The public is a very easily bored creature, just look what happened after Apollo 11. "Well, we made it to the moon! Wait, why are we going back? we DID that already."
Why WERE we going back? Did we really "get what we paid for" on those later trips to the moon? It sounds like engineering for engineering's sake more than science for science's sake.
At any rate, I applaud the new administration for trying to raise the level of public activity:
The public is very cold on science for science's sake, you have to have photo ops. A trip to the moon would get interest going, get money flowing so they can DO the important stuff. You have to get the public on your side, and, sadly, there's no big Russian menace for the public to cry out, "We must beat them!" Quite a few people thought that once we beat the Russians to the Moon, well, that was fun, no need to go back. Hopefully people will realize how important the space program is, but something tells me that it won't be soon, and it won't be until we get something inspiring. Deep space voyages, while important, won't inspire anyone. Landing on the Moon or Mars? That will.
It is thinking like this that has gotten the US into meaningless, expensive wars. Yes, it is more of a challenge to excite the public about the prospect of something real, instead of ginning up some fake reason to do something, with pretty pictures and photo-ops. But instead of the government wasting our money trying to be a marketing organization, how about they actually try to do something useful as a primary function, and worry about how to sell it as a second priority? The entertainment industry is thriving. They don't need any help from the Government.
With all due respect to the parent, the non-government-owned companies who build submarines, aircraft carriers and other nuclear powered vessels are not government owned or run. They are 100% non-government-owned free market capitalistic companies.
Unfortunately, you are kinda wrong about this. While those companies act as subcontractors, the people who design and are charged for building and supporting the Naval nuclear powered vessels are Government-owned and contractor operated. Those prime contractors are managed by a government agency who are also very involved in the design process. The paradigm of the US Nuclear Navy is VERY different from the commercial nuclear model.
From personal experience I can say that 'Windows on a submarine' really isn't an issue. The Navy uses at LEAST three independent networks on their ships. Two that I was told about and one that I wasn't supposed to notice on my own. These aren't connected together, and only one of them connects to the outside world. Even if they were running a completely un-patched version of Windows 3.11 on that inner-most network, they're still as secure as they need to be.
In the case of the Navy's most important systems, they're not secured via copper but instead by steel-jacketed lead.
Unless you are sealing up a cask of Amontilado, having an air gap doesn't preclude the possibility of malicious code from getting loaded onto the machine. Gotta install the software update somehow. And when refitting hardware on a submarine runs about 10x the cost of changing software, there is a strong incentive to make the exception.
Not to mention there are dozens of networks at military installations, each of them seperated by an air-gap (meaning they're not connected to any others). IMO this report is mostly a scaretactic to try to make the US system look more vulnerable than it is. Most likely because there's an agenda to dismantle the whole she-bang.
I agree with you, although an air-gap really isn't the end-all be-all of security/safety for these systems. These systems still need to be updated, which is a path for malicious code.
Example: An air-gapped facility will many times have a method for bringing stuff outside the network inside the network. A lot of times there is more focus on keeping stuff IN and air-gapped network than keeping stuff OUT. Usually this involves some kind of virus scan and maybe walking a zip disk or whatever to another machine (sneakernet). A busy network might have a very high volume of these requests, and things can/and have/ definitely gotten in. Of course there is no way some hacker is going to login WarGames style but still its a real vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't read the bill, but why should/are ISPs responsible for this? Granted I guess you could argue that there are tiers of ISPs, but if I am trying to provide internet to a condo, or something, the cost of dedicated bandwidth is what it costs. And most places, the loop is a significant (about half) of the monthly cost as well. So how am I, down at Tier 2 or 3, going to control the cost and availability of bandwidth?
Also.
What does it mean to have 100Mbps internet? Is that 100Mbps internet during peak hours when everyone is downloading, or a maximum rate of 100Mbps theoretical, if no one else is on the line? Things like this matter quite a lot. And just to be clear, where I live the cost of a 45Mbps DS3 is right around $1500/mo., and the loop is about the same. So right now, under the strictest definition, a recurring cost of $6000/mo. would be needed to provide this level of connectivity. Not to mention the hardware costs associated with providing this to more than, say ten people at a time.
I'm 59, and have been programming professionally since I was 20. The two best things for my employment are:
1) Young, inexperienced programmers.
2) "Experienced" Indian programmers.
Why is that? Because they both fuck up constantly, and thus give me lots to fix.
It could be possible your observations have a selection bias.
Yeah, I'll probably get modded down for this, but ah well.*
Screw 'em. There is already enough navel-gazing occurring in the FLOSS developer community. And if you try to do something nice for FLOSS developers, you are likely going to get flamed and generally abused for trying. Some folks have suggested writing a Visual Studio replacement. Heh, have you seen how many of these projects have started and failed? How many times do you think developers for these projects hear things like, "That's stupid, use vi." or "gdb can do anything your bloated software can." Most of them just don't see the value in it, because what they use works for them, and they are too narcissitic to consider what other people might need, or to even consider that the way they are doing something isn't automatically the best way.
So, yeah, if you want to write something for developers, I guess write something for yourself. At least then one person will use your project. Maybe you will even find some like-minded individuals that see the value in it also. But I think you will find it more rewarding working with people who actually want to use your product and are thankful for your time developing it.
Now, if you really want to make a developer tool that will catch on, my advice is to put a diamond in that navel. Pick a flavor of the week language and write a tool in that language that replicates the functionality of another commonly used tool, preferably written in a 'competing' language. Like, oh I don't know, a software code repository written in... let's say Ruby. Or maybe a package manager. Extra points for making a distro based on it.
* Do I seem bitter? Sorry about that, but after years in the community, I grow weary of some of the self-important attitudes I see in the FLOSS community. Most contributions I have attempted has either been flat out stolen (straight-up name replacement), mimicked by someone in a better strategic position (e.g., Ingo/Con style), flat-out ignored (ever submitted a bug report with a patch?), or flamed for it (ever submitted a bug report?). I've actually only found one project that I contribute to regularly that isn't like this and they tend to get most/all of my time. After all, why bother contributing bug reports, documentation, bug fixes, or feature patches to a project if all you get out of it is a fruitless time-sink?
Take Both. Make time for it.
Protip: If someone creates a convoluted rule system, and you're then buying into his rule system, and try to argue on the definition of those rules, you have already lost before you started.
The better way is, to not buy into their crapola in the first place, but have your own set of values that you are secure in. Then you can let them play in your reality, instead of you entering theirs. :)
Protip: If someone creates a set of values, and you're then buying into these values, and try to argue on the definition of those values, you have already lost before you started.
The better way is, to not buy into their crapola in the first place, but have your own convoluted rule system that you are secure in. Then you can play in your own invented reality, instead of leaving your mother's basement. :)
I say bring it on. Maybe this will be a wake up call to journalists who have been more and more in the habit of parroting hearsay in their stories rather than bringing some real intelligence and analysis to their stories. If all they are going to be is puppets, well, I've got a Perl script for that!
Cue the moral outrage for a person promulgating deragatory gender stereotypes.
Wait, it is a woman? Nevermind.
In other words, lower bitrate can be better, but only if you compare to shitty and inefficient compression.
And by this you mean compression that is state of the art two minutes ago, vs. today. Seriously, this field is moving pretty fast, and what you call shitty and inefficient was not long ago the best people could do. A few years ago when I was messing with the x264-svn libraries, stuff would get tweaked daily.
Not to mention there are other factors at play with regards to compression. A well-engineered system isn't necessarily going to go for the maximum compression rate for video quality. One has to look at other limitations, such as the decoding hardware, the method by which the video is being delievered, and even the viewing devices on the receiving end.
What is disheartening about the article is that it looks like the BBC are just in denial mode, and not really taking the complaints seriously. "Standard viewing equipment"? Seriously, what exactly are they getting at with that comment? On top of that it looks like they are trying to blame the quality of the source material, which certainly muddies the picture, but certainly the customers that are complaining would be used to these variations in quality before the change and not just suddenly notice it at the same time this equipment was rolled out.
I have respect for them sticking to their guns, but not when they are doing it with such lame excuses. Then again, the BBC spokesperson and reporter may not be the most tech savvy individuals, and its likely some of the message here is lost in translation. Lossy codec indeed.
I got a good laugh off of this, but is it really possible to get better quality from a lower bitrate?
Sure, if you also switch to a better codec, such as using H.264 instead of MPEG-2. However, I don't think that's what's happening in this case
Just to amplify what has been said here a few times, yes it is possible, and not only from changing codecs. H.264 supports many optional features that are not implemented in all decoders, and these features can have an effect on quality. Use of a variable bit rate vice a constant bitrate can also increase quality and decrease bandwidth needs, at the cost of requiring some bursting capability or buffering to accomodate the variation. Also, there are tricks that can be played with dark and light tone masking to increase the compressibility of a video stream, and any number of other preprocessing tricks that people use.
The reason I bring up this point, is it might be that they tweaked the parameters to achieve a lower bitrate, and thought they weren't sacraficing quality, but that different viewing devices, or different people, were able to notice a change in quality that the study group they used was not. Point being that these guys may not have been as stupid as people are making them out to be, but just designed a poor test. Video compression and judging output quality is really complicated and depends on a lot of factors. It could be they just missed some of those factors when they tweaked the encoding algorithm.
It is unfortunate that companies in this situation are caving to the requests of a government that has different ideals about the freedom of information than we do, but honestly, do you expect anything different? These companies aren't in the business of battling China on their political ideology. They are out to sell a web browser and maximize the NPV of the company. This is what a business and a free market is all about. To do anything different would be a strategic move that while it could be argued might benefit Chinese citizens, it is much less likely to benefit Opera. Furthermore, if they did fight China on this one, I think it would be naive to think that they did it for any other reason that as a calculated risk to gain marketshare and ultimately profit. So don't act surprised when stuff like this happens. The sooner people realize what businesses are and aren't, the sooner they will understand the forces shaping the world in which we live.
.
Close, but more like this: Microsoft <3 Evil. *
That's a new record for a Microsoft product. Lesser of two evils? Okay, occasionally. But a lesser of three!? There's hope for them yet!
Microsoft
Close:
New slogan -- Microsoft 3 Evil.
Those kinds of modifications shouldn't and likely wouldn't be covered by the provision. There is already a pretty well-established metric by which photojournalists follow. It can be summed up in this statement, "Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects."
Cropping and white balance adjustments are considered ok. Adjusting lighting, posing, or other things are not considered ok, although most people consider it ok as long as the context is obvious (e.g., a portrait for someone's profile or similar). Adjusting the face, removing/adding hair is not ok.
Then, so much for your tagline, eh?
I'd be happy to switch carriers.
AC may not have given any details (or wiki), but using argumentum ad hominem isn't nice either.
I might lose a point for being off-topic here, but really it is a usage question. While you are correct in stating that usage experts consider it wrong, the phrase has come into common usage to mean what I intended. The debate regarding whether a prescriptive or descriptive approach to linguistics is appropriate is open to heated academic debate. Moreover, the meaning of "begs the question," when used as prescribed, is not really contained in the English translation, but borrowed from the logicians' Latin lexicon. A literal interpretation of the English phrase reveals a meaning not dissimilar to my original intent. And why not interpret the phrase literally, since it is pretty obvious from context that I am not trying to argue against the story's main premise?
As for the supposed argumentum ad hominem-- again, that would require me actually making an argument, which I wasn't. I was pointing out irony. Really, if one is going to correct someone on a finer point of usage in a casual, off-the-cuff, internet forum comment, one might want to make sure they proofread their work for simple grammatical errors. This kind of communication is outside the realm of logical debate, as human communication often is.
you're not using "begs the question" correctly.
...says he who cannot capitalize the beginning of a sentence. (Still only half-kidding.)
This summary begs the question... Could you revise the bit torrent spec to allow people to query an index of torrents via bittorrent?
I'm only half-kidding here...
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Reactor
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
From the percentages you post, I deduce there had been exactly 6 votes posted, so we now know there are at least 3 assholes on the internet.
Really 6n, where n is a positive integer.
Why go all that way and not send a few men down to the surface of Mars in a lander? Sure, it might be dangerous, but the whole mission of getting there would be dangerous too.
Because weight is at an expensive premium when launching into space?
The problem with probes on Mars and the like, is just what the article said. A good space program that would advance science would take a huge ammount of money. The public is a very easily bored creature, just look what happened after Apollo 11. "Well, we made it to the moon! Wait, why are we going back? we DID that already."
Why WERE we going back? Did we really "get what we paid for" on those later trips to the moon? It sounds like engineering for engineering's sake more than science for science's sake. At any rate, I applaud the new administration for trying to raise the level of public activity:
The public is very cold on science for science's sake, you have to have photo ops. A trip to the moon would get interest going, get money flowing so they can DO the important stuff. You have to get the public on your side, and, sadly, there's no big Russian menace for the public to cry out, "We must beat them!" Quite a few people thought that once we beat the Russians to the Moon, well, that was fun, no need to go back. Hopefully people will realize how important the space program is, but something tells me that it won't be soon, and it won't be until we get something inspiring. Deep space voyages, while important, won't inspire anyone. Landing on the Moon or Mars? That will.
It is thinking like this that has gotten the US into meaningless, expensive wars. Yes, it is more of a challenge to excite the public about the prospect of something real, instead of ginning up some fake reason to do something, with pretty pictures and photo-ops. But instead of the government wasting our money trying to be a marketing organization, how about they actually try to do something useful as a primary function, and worry about how to sell it as a second priority? The entertainment industry is thriving. They don't need any help from the Government.
With all due respect to the parent, the non-government-owned companies who build submarines, aircraft carriers and other nuclear powered vessels are not government owned or run. They are 100% non-government-owned free market capitalistic companies.
Unfortunately, you are kinda wrong about this. While those companies act as subcontractors, the people who design and are charged for building and supporting the Naval nuclear powered vessels are Government-owned and contractor operated. Those prime contractors are managed by a government agency who are also very involved in the design process. The paradigm of the US Nuclear Navy is VERY different from the commercial nuclear model.
a particularly clear example: http://www.bettis.gov/
From personal experience I can say that 'Windows on a submarine' really isn't an issue. The Navy uses at LEAST three independent networks on their ships. Two that I was told about and one that I wasn't supposed to notice on my own. These aren't connected together, and only one of them connects to the outside world. Even if they were running a completely un-patched version of Windows 3.11 on that inner-most network, they're still as secure as they need to be.
In the case of the Navy's most important systems, they're not secured via copper but instead by steel-jacketed lead.
Unless you are sealing up a cask of Amontilado, having an air gap doesn't preclude the possibility of malicious code from getting loaded onto the machine. Gotta install the software update somehow. And when refitting hardware on a submarine runs about 10x the cost of changing software, there is a strong incentive to make the exception.
Not to mention there are dozens of networks at military installations, each of them seperated by an air-gap (meaning they're not connected to any others). IMO this report is mostly a scaretactic to try to make the US system look more vulnerable than it is. Most likely because there's an agenda to dismantle the whole she-bang.
I agree with you, although an air-gap really isn't the end-all be-all of security/safety for these systems. These systems still need to be updated, which is a path for malicious code.
Example: An air-gapped facility will many times have a method for bringing stuff outside the network inside the network. A lot of times there is more focus on keeping stuff IN and air-gapped network than keeping stuff OUT. Usually this involves some kind of virus scan and maybe walking a zip disk or whatever to another machine (sneakernet). A busy network might have a very high volume of these requests, and things can /and have/ definitely gotten in. Of course there is no way some hacker is going to login WarGames style but still its a real vulnerability.