You've described "just like wifi", then asked if there's any reason people won't use it for mobile phone service, instead of using a wireless carrier.
Well, do people use wifi for their phone and not have a carrier? That's essentially the same thing as what you're proposing. Do people do it? Nope, most people use a carrier with their phone. Why? Well, why DO you have a carrier?
Sure, theoretically everyone could run their wifi with an open guest network, then use voip from their phone. Aside from security concerns, let's look at one obvious financial issue. You're running the hotspot, which you presumably have connected to your cable internet connection to connect to the rest of the world. Two of your neighbors like to stream HD Netflix all night, falling asleep with movies playing. That's helping run your internet usage close to the cap amd you need to upgrade your internet if you're going to have enough bandwidth for you and your neighbors, so you ask the neighbors to throw you a few bucks toward the bill each month. They each pay you $25/month, which you use to pay the upstream cable bill. So now your neighbors are paying you for the connection - congratulations, you're a carrier.
Suppose you DON'T connect your microcell to the internet. Suppose it's a pure mesh, where you hand the data off to the next neighbor, who hands it to the next, who hands it off to the next, on and on until it hopefully reaches the Netflix server. So that kinda works for a month or two - it takes a long time to make several hundred hops, and sometimes a site in the middle gets overwhelmed and drops calls but it kinda works. Then somebody says to you "rather than sending your traffic over hundreds of micro-routers and hoping it doesn't get dropped, you can conect to our cell which has a direct fiber optic connection to an all-fiber network, and it's just three hops (via fiber) to reach Netflix." The fiber-connected cells work a shitload better than jumping hundreds of wifi-like connections, of course, so you want to get on their fiber-connected cell. Only $25/month.
Mesh networks CAN work, much like two cans on a string can work. If you're in a small farming community in the middle of the desert with no cabling and no connections to the outside, talking to someone 20 miles away by being routed through a dozen neighbors is better than not being connected at all. But compared to connecting to a multi-gigabit fiber network running on redundant $25,000 Cisco routers that can reconverge around a dropped link in under a second? Not even close. On average Verizon spends $6 billion each year on network upgrades. Last year they spent $11 billion. They don't spend that kind of money on something that's no better than Linksys.
The other funny conspiracy theory is that back when this happened, then there were a dozen Republican candidates and nobody thought Trump stood a chance of getting the nomination, he was somehow running Russia and having the Russian intelligence agencies attack an opponent that he was unlikely to even run against. At the time, Trump was running against Bush and 10 other Republicans.
He owns the same thing Walmart owns, though a smaller amount. Walmart thinks their portion is worth over $3 billion, so no the shares probably aren't worthless.
If the company is a) making money and b) not re-investing all of the profit go growth, they'll pay out the extra profit to shareholders as dividends. He'll get his portion of the dividends (profit).
If the company is growing quickly, and therefore reinvesting all profit, his holding increases in value as the company gets bigger, because eventually when it stops growing fast it'll be a bigger company paying bigger dividends.
If someone else wants those future dividends, they can get them by buying the stock from him today, in a private sale. Just because the stock isn't publicly traded doesn't mean it can't be privately traded.
The benefits of being publicly traded would just be that he wouldn't need to take the time to find a buyer, and he could more easily see how much the stock is selling for on any given day.
Google, and some of the cable overbuilders, have been quite clear that they'll focus first on cities where they don't *have* to out-bribe the incumbent. Why spend a ton of money and many years trying to be allowed to build in Seattle when you can build in Austin *today*?
For this reason, Austin now has as many as four high-speed providers competing, Seattle has none.
AFTER they've built out their networks in areas where the govt allows them to without undue restriction, then it might make sense to start looking at Seattle and NYC.
Initially the 1996 was supposed to put an end to exclusive franchises, or at least it was pitched as trying to do that. Didn't happen that way. See the New York City cable franchise map for some ridiculous examples of not just exclusivity, but gerrymandered exclusivity based on the franchise fees paid to the city.
The 1996 Act says that a city may not *unreasonably* grant *new* exclusive monopolies *if* the new competitor will be offering the exact same service under the exact same terms, and the new change will not impact (huge list of excuses).
In NYC, one company has a franchise for one side of the street, the other gets the other side, with no overlap allowed.
The cable companies wrote into the law a huge number of number of ways to maintain exclusive monopolies. Here's one obvious and stupid example. The prohibition only applies if the competitor agrees to offer the same service as the existing service - TWC has the Sprout Channel, the potential competitor has Disney Junior; not the same service, it can be denied.
The 1996 Act says that a city may not *unreasonably* grant *new* exclusive monopolies *if* the new competitor will be offering the exact same service under the exact same terms, and the new change will not impact (huge list of excuses).
A great example is New York City. One company has a franchise for one side of the street, the other gets the other side, with no overlap allowed.
The cable companies wrote into the law a huge number of number of ways to maintain exclusive monopolies. Here's one obvious and stupid example. The prohibition only applies if the competitor agrees to offer the same service as the existing service - TWC has the Sprout Channel, the potential competitor has Disney Junior; not the same service, it can be denied.
Competing for two million customers in Queens (where there is one existing provider) would be much more profitable than expanding to underserved areas of New York state, such as parts of Hamilton County. Most underserved areas are underserved precisely BECAUSE they are unprofitable.
However, it's ILLEGAL to compete by bringing faster service to Queens. The franchise board assigns each neighborhood to a single provider. The map of assigned providers is gerrymandered in weird ways, too. A company might be allowed to serve 110th street and 112th street, but not 111rh.
That's right, no consumer provider truly has the fastest service everywhere. To claim they do is a lie. Perhaps they could tell the truth by running this ad in Dallas:
"The fastest home internet service available throughout Dallas."
Maybe it would be true to say "Cable internet is twice as fast as DSL, on average."
Or "the most reliable service of any nationwide provider".
were billing thousands of consumers for a monthly directory assistance service on their AT&T landline telephone bills.
> To classify them as public utilities, with strict regulation. State level - where the PSCs already exist... Let the Feds watch the PSCs for corruption.
That's precisely how they ARE classified and regulated. So you're suggesting we keep treating them as we have been treating them, so they keep doing what they've been doing. As opposed to most any other business, say a burger joint or mexican restaurant. Because restaurants, which do NOT have regulated billing, have a lot more BS on the bill than AT&T does, right?
> limit to 2% profit?
That sounded good when it was first suggested, over 50 years ago. The thing is, that means the only way they can make more money from a customer is to make the service more expensive. Contrast that with wireless, or voip. When a voip provider can find a way to reduce costs by 10%, they can get more customers by dropping the rate 5% (or skipping a rate increase) AND make 5% more per customer. The unregulated voip service provider has incentive to REDUCE costs. The regulated provider with profit set at 5% has incentive to INCREASE costs. Compare the total bill and services provided for Vonage vs AT&T to see which one works better. On the AT&T bill, don't forget the $26 in misc small fees on top the the $22 "monthly rate" (or $54 in extra fees for the same features that Vonage includes in their $25 flat rate).
The Scott Adams thing reminds me of what I do sometimes. Something I can't quite describe about giving off the vibe that you belong there. I used to do lighting and sound for bands on the weekends, and sometimes I DJ. I've made it a bit of a game to just walk right past the bouncer without *telling* them that I'm with the band. Everybody else is paying the cover charge, I just walk right by like it doesn't apply to me (because it doesn't). 95% of the time the bouncer doesn't challenge me. If they make eye contact, I nod as I continue walking. It would be interesting to do or read some experiments about the psychology of that.
A note about magic tricks - very often, the tricky bit is done BEFORE the audience thinks the trick has really started, and certainly before they know that the deck will change color or whatever. The first time you see a trick, you CAN'T be paying attention to how the magician makes the color change because you don't yet know that he's going to make the color change. If you watch a trick twice you're much more likely to see the secret because the second time you know you're watching to see how he causes it to change color.
> I'm going to try to get a Modafinil prescription from a doctor now, and uh. Patient walks in asking for drugs, seems well-informed. Spinning a line of bullshit or nah?
What worked for me was to very humbly ASK the doctor about my preferred medication, to not seem overly confident that I wanted that specific medication. "I was reading about ABC and sounded interesting because XYZ. Would it be worth trying ABC, do you think?"
Therefore you can easily be *compliant* and up-to-date, no problem.
If you want to be *certified* and up-to-date, the low cost option is to use something like the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module, which is recertified every six months or so. (This is a very restricted subset of OpenSSL). That provides the latest certified encryption.
If you want to also certify the product as a whole, you can do that and batch any security-sensitive changes into new versions, then recertify new versions only infrequently.
I really like the second video you linked to, where you count the number of times the players pass the ball. I saw that for the first time a few months ago - maybe you linked it from another post, or maybe I encountered it elsewhere.
> As a professional magician, were you more amazed by how the tricks worked mechanically, or by the very fact that people are too stupid to live and will simply not notice what they're looking *right* *at* if it's out of the ordinary?
As you may know, the mechanical working of most effects are quite simple and boring. It's mostly about the psychology - directing people's attention (though *some* tricks involve interesting mechanisms).
However, I have a different viewpoint on this than "people are too stupid.. not notice". I tested off-the-charts ADD. One of the tests for ADD was somewhat similar to the "count the passes" video - I was to click the button every time the number 5 showed on the screen. I thought I had done very well, that I hadn't missed any or clicked when there was no 5, but the results showed different - I did actually miss the giant 5 on the screen several times as I was noticing the adjustable feet on the stand for the screen, the knot in the wiring, the stains on the ceiling. The results DID match up with my experience in daily life - I often have to ask people to repeat what they just said, because I was noticing the imperfections in the wall finish or some other irrelevant thing about the background of the room. Most of the time, that's NOT good. Most of time, paying attention to the important part is better. When you ask people to count the passes, most people can do that rather than be distracted by bug in the light fixture or whatever else is going on in the room - they pay attention to what they trying to watch. Being easily distracted by unimportant details of the room isn't normally a good thing.
Yes, that *can* be manipulated, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. Magicians do it constantly. Hillary's friends got a whole bunch of people looking at "who released the Democrats' emails?", ignoring the truly much more important issue of what what said in those emails. Still, on balance a driver *should* be looking at the road ahead of them, not how many LEDs burned out in the green light, or the color of the buildings they are driving by.
Federal purchasing, including DoD (military) is done through an open bid process. The acquiring agency publishes a very detailed requirements document. The encryption requirement normally refers to FIPS 140-2 (FIPS: Federal Information Processing Standard). The standard specifies not only which algorithms, but which implementations are acceptable, so you use a FIPS-certified library. FIPS-140-2 can be found here: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST...
Because most companies and standards bodies aren't run by security specialists, they too often refer to FIPS-140-2. "Must meet DoD security requirements" is a lot easier to specify in a contract than figuring out all the details yourself.
> It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots.
I've been involved in computer security for 20 years. Before that, I did physical security, lockingsmith work. Before that, I was a professional magician. I could cheat a paper ballot. Might use a bit of sleight of hand.
I could also cheat an internet ballot, and very easily put a FOR loop around to run the cheat a million times. That's the big difference with networked computer systems vs physical systems. You can rob someone in person once; you rob EVERYBODY in the entire database via computer.
Electronic systems that serve many people are fundamentally less secure because nobody can ever physically do anything a million times; computers routinely do things a million times per second. One improper ballot is less than the noise floor; a million improper ballots will swing the election.
The program HAS been expensive in the short run. A lot of money has been spent om R&D.
People who are less interested in facts and more interested in rooting for or against their team or idea then decide "I don't like it, so it sucks in every way." People interested in objectiveness and facts learn that spending all that money allowed some pretty good stuff to be developed. I won't argue that ot was worth every penny, but we did get something for that money.
The thing about that is that Republican leaders ALREADY don't like Trump and his style. Yes, he got a chunk of voters, because the reasonable people were split up between the reasonable candidates, but most elected Republicans have made it clear they don't like him. I'm not sure what they could do next time to avoid another reality show star getting the votes.
I supoose they COULD switch to a super delegate system like the Democrats, in which the primaries don't really matter, the super delegates pick the nominee as long as they get *some* votes in the primary. Paul Ryan has been pretty clear that he's very much against that, though, that the nominee should be picked by primary voters. If Ryan's sentiments reflect other Republican leadership, the party will continue to get the nominee who stands out from the rest for whatever reason - a Kardashian perhaps, as the other, more similar candidates will split the "Never ______" vote.
This story got me thinking, we hardly ever hear anything about that country. The same as all of western Europe, it's the 8th largest country in the world, geographically, and the largest economy in central Asia. Yet it's mostly invisible in world affairs, it seems. That's interesting.
See also most any physical networking standards document.
> What if my gig ethernet is optical? Am I now narrowband? How about optical 10Gb?
Early and simple optical networking standards were baseband (using a single channel or frequency). Faster and more current standards are often broadband (multiple frequencies). There are many optical Ethernet standards. Most are baseband. 10GBASEâ'LX4 is broadband, requiring a frequency division multiplexer.
This is interesting timing. A few years ago I might have thought that the details of election machinizations were rather important, maybe even "critical".
Now I know that the election itself will only decide "by how large of a margin will Hillary win"? That doesn't seem so critical. She's been in politics since 1976 and I don't remember a time that it was particularly important whether she won by four points, six points, or eight points.
Actually it doesn't have anything to do with using "broadband" as a marketing term. It's from a 1996 law directing the FCC to create regulations "encouraging" ISP to deploy high-speed BROADBAND service to "underserved" areas. Congress meant "make them build infrastructure for HIGH SPEED service in rural areas". Apparently not knowing what "broadband" meant, Congresd required that ISPs build "broadband", which means the medium is shared by frequency (channel) rather than by time, such as TDMA or CMDA.
Anyway, it's about regulations requiring that ISPs build "broadband" networks, nothing to do with using the term "broadband" in marketing.
Funny thing many high speed fiber connections don't qualify under the wording of the law - they are baseband, and the law says it has to be broadband.
Here's the FCC announcement where they said any connection greater than 25 Mbps one way and 3 Mbps the other is a broadband connection: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet. So yes, the FCC has declared that Ethernet is broadband.
Yet it continues to be baseband, whether the FCC likes it or not.
Fast ethernet uses one channel. It is therefore baseband. That's a fact. It's not a matter of opinion. Claiming that ethernet isn't baseband, but rather broadband, is just like claiming that ethernet is wifi. That's simply false.
Baseband vs broadband are determined by whether a signal is multi-channel or single-channel, and have nothing to do with speed. "Defining" ethernet as broadband is precisely the same as "defining" Pi as 4.
It would be correct for the FCC to come up with their own standard for "high speed". Saying that broadband is "anything over X Mbps" is exactly the same as saying "anything over X Mbps is fiber optic". It's factually false.
> broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
Which is itself an example of government redefining scientific truth, not unlike the Indiana Pi bill. Baseband, passband, narrowband, and broadband have actual meanings, they describe the physics of how the connection works. 100 Mbps ethernet uses one channel, therefore it is narrowband. Gigabit ethernet uses four channels, so it's broadband.
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You've described "just like wifi", then asked if there's any reason people won't use it for mobile phone service, instead of using a wireless carrier.
Well, do people use wifi for their phone and not have a carrier? That's essentially the same thing as what you're proposing. Do people do it? Nope, most people use a carrier with their phone. Why? Well, why DO you have a carrier?
Sure, theoretically everyone could run their wifi with an open guest network, then use voip from their phone. Aside from security concerns, let's look at one obvious financial issue. You're running the hotspot, which you presumably have connected to your cable internet connection to connect to the rest of the world. Two of your neighbors like to stream HD Netflix all night, falling asleep with movies playing. That's helping run your internet usage close to the cap amd you need to upgrade your internet if you're going to have enough bandwidth for you and your neighbors, so you ask the neighbors to throw you a few bucks toward the bill each month. They each pay you $25/month, which you use to pay the upstream cable bill. So now your neighbors are paying you for the connection - congratulations, you're a carrier.
Suppose you DON'T connect your microcell to the internet. Suppose it's a pure mesh, where you hand the data off to the next neighbor, who hands it to the next, who hands it off to the next, on and on until it hopefully reaches the Netflix server. So that kinda works for a month or two - it takes a long time to make several hundred hops, and sometimes a site in the middle gets overwhelmed and drops calls but it kinda works. Then somebody says to you "rather than sending your traffic over hundreds of micro-routers and hoping it doesn't get dropped, you can conect to our cell which has a direct fiber optic connection to an all-fiber network, and it's just three hops (via fiber) to reach Netflix." The fiber-connected cells work a shitload better than jumping hundreds of wifi-like connections, of course, so you want to get on their fiber-connected cell. Only $25/month.
Mesh networks CAN work, much like two cans on a string can work. If you're in a small farming community in the middle of the desert with no cabling and no connections to the outside, talking to someone 20 miles away by being routed through a dozen neighbors is better than not being connected at all. But compared to connecting to a multi-gigabit fiber network running on redundant $25,000 Cisco routers that can reconverge around a dropped link in under a second? Not even close. On average Verizon spends $6 billion each year on network upgrades. Last year they spent $11 billion. They don't spend that kind of money on something that's no better than Linksys.
The other funny conspiracy theory is that back when this happened, then there were a dozen Republican candidates and nobody thought Trump stood a chance of getting the nomination, he was somehow running Russia and having the Russian intelligence agencies attack an opponent that he was unlikely to even run against. At the time, Trump was running against Bush and 10 other Republicans.
He owns the same thing Walmart owns, though a smaller amount. Walmart thinks their portion is worth over $3 billion, so no the shares probably aren't worthless.
If the company is a) making money and b) not re-investing all of the profit go growth, they'll pay out the extra profit to shareholders as dividends. He'll get his portion of the dividends (profit).
If the company is growing quickly, and therefore reinvesting all profit, his holding increases in value as the company gets bigger, because eventually when it stops growing fast it'll be a bigger company paying bigger dividends.
If someone else wants those future dividends, they can get them by buying the stock from him today, in a private sale. Just because the stock isn't publicly traded doesn't mean it can't be privately traded.
The benefits of being publicly traded would just be that he wouldn't need to take the time to find a buyer, and he could more easily see how much the stock is selling for on any given day.
Google, and some of the cable overbuilders, have been quite clear that they'll focus first on cities where they don't *have* to out-bribe the incumbent. Why spend a ton of money and many years trying to be allowed to build in Seattle when you can build in Austin *today*?
For this reason, Austin now has as many as four high-speed providers competing, Seattle has none.
AFTER they've built out their networks in areas where the govt allows them to without undue restriction, then it might make sense to start looking at Seattle and NYC.
Initially the 1996 was supposed to put an end to exclusive franchises, or at least it was pitched as trying to do that. Didn't happen that way. See the New York City cable franchise map for some ridiculous examples of not just exclusivity, but gerrymandered exclusivity based on the franchise fees paid to the city.
The 1996 Act says that a city may not *unreasonably* grant *new* exclusive monopolies *if* the new competitor will be offering the exact same service under the exact same terms, and the new change will not impact (huge list of excuses).
In NYC, one company has a franchise for one side of the street, the other gets the other side, with no overlap allowed.
The cable companies wrote into the law a huge number of number of ways to maintain exclusive monopolies. Here's one obvious and stupid example. The prohibition only applies if the competitor agrees to offer the same service as the existing service - TWC has the Sprout Channel, the potential competitor has Disney Junior; not the same service, it can be denied.
The 1996 Act says that a city may not *unreasonably* grant *new* exclusive monopolies *if* the new competitor will be offering the exact same service under the exact same terms, and the new change will not impact (huge list of excuses).
A great example is New York City. One company has a franchise for one side of the street, the other gets the other side, with no overlap allowed.
The cable companies wrote into the law a huge number of number of ways to maintain exclusive monopolies. Here's one obvious and stupid example. The prohibition only applies if the competitor agrees to offer the same service as the existing service - TWC has the Sprout Channel, the potential competitor has Disney Junior; not the same service, it can be denied.
Competing for two million customers in Queens (where there is one existing provider) would be much more profitable than expanding to underserved areas of New York state, such as parts of Hamilton County. Most underserved areas are underserved precisely BECAUSE they are unprofitable.
However, it's ILLEGAL to compete by bringing faster service to Queens. The franchise board assigns each neighborhood to a single provider. The map of assigned providers is gerrymandered in weird ways, too. A company might be allowed to serve 110th street and 112th street, but not 111rh.
That's right, no consumer provider truly has the fastest service everywhere. To claim they do is a lie. Perhaps they could tell the truth by running this ad in Dallas:
"The fastest home internet service available throughout Dallas."
Maybe it would be true to say "Cable internet is twice as fast as DSL, on average."
Or "the most reliable service of any nationwide provider".
Quoting TFA for you:
were billing thousands of consumers for a monthly directory assistance service on their AT&T landline telephone bills.
> To classify them as public utilities, with strict regulation. State level - where the PSCs already exist...
Let the Feds watch the PSCs for corruption.
That's precisely how they ARE classified and regulated. So you're suggesting we keep treating them as we have been treating them, so they keep doing what they've been doing. As opposed to most any other business, say a burger joint or mexican restaurant. Because restaurants, which do NOT have regulated billing, have a lot more BS on the bill than AT&T does, right?
> limit to 2% profit?
That sounded good when it was first suggested, over 50 years ago. The thing is, that means the only way they can make more money from a customer is to make the service more expensive. Contrast that with wireless, or voip. When a voip provider can find a way to reduce costs by 10%, they can get more customers by dropping the rate 5% (or skipping a rate increase) AND make 5% more per customer. The unregulated voip service provider has incentive to REDUCE costs. The regulated provider with profit set at 5% has incentive to INCREASE costs. Compare the total bill and services provided for Vonage vs AT&T to see which one works better. On the AT&T bill, don't forget the $26 in misc small fees on top the the $22 "monthly rate" (or $54 in extra fees for the same features that Vonage includes in their $25 flat rate).
The Scott Adams thing reminds me of what I do sometimes. Something I can't quite describe about giving off the vibe that you belong there. I used to do lighting and sound for bands on the weekends, and sometimes I DJ. I've made it a bit of a game to just walk right past the bouncer without *telling* them that I'm with the band. Everybody else is paying the cover charge, I just walk right by like it doesn't apply to me (because it doesn't). 95% of the time the bouncer doesn't challenge me. If they make eye contact, I nod as I continue walking. It would be interesting to do or read some experiments about the psychology of that.
A note about magic tricks - very often, the tricky bit is done BEFORE the audience thinks the trick has really started, and certainly before they know that the deck will change color or whatever. The first time you see a trick, you CAN'T be paying attention to how the magician makes the color change because you don't yet know that he's going to make the color change. If you watch a trick twice you're much more likely to see the secret because the second time you know you're watching to see how he causes it to change color.
> I'm going to try to get a Modafinil prescription from a doctor now, and uh. Patient walks in asking for drugs, seems well-informed. Spinning a line of bullshit or nah?
What worked for me was to very humbly ASK the doctor about my preferred medication, to not seem overly confident that I wanted that specific medication. "I was reading about ABC and sounded interesting because XYZ. Would it be worth trying ABC, do you think?"
There are updates to FIPS 140-2 every few months, as you can see here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST...
Therefore you can easily be *compliant* and up-to-date, no problem.
If you want to be *certified* and up-to-date, the low cost option is to use something like the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module, which is recertified every six months or so. (This is a very restricted subset of OpenSSL). That provides the latest certified encryption.
If you want to also certify the product as a whole, you can do that and batch any security-sensitive changes into new versions, then recertify new versions only infrequently.
I really like the second video you linked to, where you count the number of times the players pass the ball. I saw that for the first time a few months ago - maybe you linked it from another post, or maybe I encountered it elsewhere.
> As a professional magician, were you more amazed by how the tricks worked mechanically, or by the very fact that people are too stupid to live and will simply not notice what they're looking *right* *at* if it's out of the ordinary?
As you may know, the mechanical working of most effects are quite simple and boring. It's mostly about the psychology - directing people's attention (though *some* tricks involve interesting mechanisms).
However, I have a different viewpoint on this than "people are too stupid .. not notice". I tested off-the-charts ADD. One of the tests for ADD was somewhat similar to the "count the passes" video - I was to click the button every time the number 5 showed on the screen. I thought I had done very well, that I hadn't missed any or clicked when there was no 5, but the results showed different - I did actually miss the giant 5 on the screen several times as I was noticing the adjustable feet on the stand for the screen, the knot in the wiring, the stains on the ceiling. The results DID match up with my experience in daily life - I often have to ask people to repeat what they just said, because I was noticing the imperfections in the wall finish or some other irrelevant thing about the background of the room. Most of the time, that's NOT good. Most of time, paying attention to the important part is better. When you ask people to count the passes, most people can do that rather than be distracted by bug in the light fixture or whatever else is going on in the room - they pay attention to what they trying to watch. Being easily distracted by unimportant details of the room isn't normally a good thing.
Yes, that *can* be manipulated, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. Magicians do it constantly. Hillary's friends got a whole bunch of people looking at "who released the Democrats' emails?", ignoring the truly much more important issue of what what said in those emails. Still, on balance a driver *should* be looking at the road ahead of them, not how many LEDs burned out in the green light, or the color of the buildings they are driving by.
Federal purchasing, including DoD (military) is done through an open bid process. The acquiring agency publishes a very detailed requirements document. The encryption requirement normally refers to FIPS 140-2 (FIPS: Federal Information Processing Standard). The standard specifies not only which algorithms, but which implementations are acceptable, so you use a FIPS-certified library. FIPS-140-2 can be found here:
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST...
Because most companies and standards bodies aren't run by security specialists, they too often refer to FIPS-140-2. "Must meet DoD security requirements" is a lot easier to specify in a contract than figuring out all the details yourself.
> It's certainly possible to make Internet voting at least as secure as paper ballots.
I've been involved in computer security for 20 years. Before that, I did physical security, lockingsmith work. Before that, I was a professional magician. I could cheat a paper ballot. Might use a bit of sleight of hand.
I could also cheat an internet ballot, and very easily put a FOR loop around to run the cheat a million times. That's the big difference with networked computer systems vs physical systems. You can rob someone in person once; you rob EVERYBODY in the entire database via computer.
Electronic systems that serve many people are fundamentally less secure because nobody can ever physically do anything a million times; computers routinely do things a million times per second. One improper ballot is less than the noise floor; a million improper ballots will swing the election.
> The question is whether we're going to have a democracy or not.
The answer is no, the US is not a Democracy.
I look forward to discussing with you more after you finish the fifth grade.
The program HAS been expensive in the short run. A lot of money has been spent om R&D.
People who are less interested in facts and more interested in rooting for or against their team or idea then decide "I don't like it, so it sucks in every way." People interested in objectiveness and facts learn that spending all that money allowed some pretty good stuff to be developed. I won't argue that ot was worth every penny, but we did get something for that money.
The thing about that is that Republican leaders ALREADY don't like Trump and his style. Yes, he got a chunk of voters, because the reasonable people were split up between the reasonable candidates, but most elected Republicans have made it clear they don't like him. I'm not sure what they could do next time to avoid another reality show star getting the votes.
I supoose they COULD switch to a super delegate system like the Democrats, in which the primaries don't really matter, the super delegates pick the nominee as long as they get *some* votes in the primary. Paul Ryan has been pretty clear that he's very much against that, though, that the nominee should be picked by primary voters. If Ryan's sentiments reflect other Republican leadership, the party will continue to get the nominee who stands out from the rest for whatever reason - a Kardashian perhaps, as the other, more similar candidates will split the "Never ______" vote.
I missed a word in my post. That should be "its about the same SIZE as all of western Europe" (geographically speaking).
This story got me thinking, we hardly ever hear anything about that country. The same as all of western Europe, it's the 8th largest country in the world, geographically, and the largest economy in central Asia. Yet it's mostly invisible in world affairs, it seems. That's interesting.
> Talk about redefining terms. Cite a reference that says broadband is defined that way.
Here's one easy to read explanation of baseband vs broadband:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat...
See also most any physical networking standards document.
> What if my gig ethernet is optical? Am I now narrowband? How about optical 10Gb?
Early and simple optical networking standards were baseband (using a single channel or frequency). Faster and more current standards are often broadband (multiple frequencies). There are many optical Ethernet standards. Most are baseband. 10GBASEâ'LX4 is broadband, requiring a frequency division multiplexer.
This is interesting timing. A few years ago I might have thought that the details of election machinizations were rather important, maybe even "critical".
Now I know that the election itself will only decide "by how large of a margin will Hillary win"? That doesn't seem so critical. She's been in politics since 1976 and I don't remember a time that it was particularly important whether she won by four points, six points, or eight points.
Actually it doesn't have anything to do with using "broadband" as a marketing term. It's from a 1996 law directing the FCC to create regulations "encouraging" ISP to deploy high-speed BROADBAND service to "underserved" areas. Congress meant "make them build infrastructure for HIGH SPEED service in rural areas". Apparently not knowing what "broadband" meant, Congresd required that ISPs build "broadband", which means the medium is shared by frequency (channel) rather than by time, such as TDMA or CMDA.
Anyway, it's about regulations requiring that ISPs build "broadband" networks, nothing to do with using the term "broadband" in marketing.
Funny thing many high speed fiber connections don't qualify under the wording of the law - they are baseband, and the law says it has to be broadband.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
> No one is "Defining ethernet as broadband".
Here's the FCC announcement where they said any connection greater than 25 Mbps one way and 3 Mbps the other is a broadband connection:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet. So yes, the FCC has declared that Ethernet is broadband.
Yet it continues to be baseband, whether the FCC likes it or not.
Fast ethernet uses one channel. It is therefore baseband. That's a fact. It's not a matter of opinion. Claiming that ethernet isn't baseband, but rather broadband, is just like claiming that ethernet is wifi. That's simply false.
Baseband vs broadband are determined by whether a signal is multi-channel or single-channel, and have nothing to do with speed. "Defining" ethernet as broadband is precisely the same as "defining" Pi as 4.
More about baseband vs broadband transmission:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat...
It would be correct for the FCC to come up with their own standard for "high speed". Saying that broadband is "anything over X Mbps" is exactly the same as saying "anything over X Mbps is fiber optic". It's factually false.
> broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
Which is itself an example of government redefining scientific truth, not unlike the Indiana Pi bill. Baseband, passband, narrowband, and broadband have actual meanings, they describe the physics of how the connection works. 100 Mbps ethernet uses one channel, therefore it is narrowband. Gigabit ethernet uses four channels, so it's broadband.