I see how you got there. That's the address of your _name_server_. It just so happens that your router (gateway) can also serve as a DNS server. You could have put 8.8.8.8 as your name server, or better yet the name servers of your ISP, and it would work fine.
The gateway is set elsewhere, and needs to be the IP of your router. You'd never go to resolv.conf to set the _gateway_.
> You need to find where the bottleneck is, then widen that.
Abso-friggin-lutely. Customers frequently come to me wanting to switch to a new processor (which means new motherboard and RAM) when their CPU is practically idle - they need faster storage.
At the same time, if 10% more money buys 25% more _anything_ it's probably a good deal, for a server. Server operating systems will make use of as much RAM as you can give them. Also the fundamental tradeoff in comp sci in speed vs size. If you have a system using 1GB of RAM and it responds in 200 ms, there's a very good chance you can adjust it to use 2 GB and respond in half the time. ("Can adjust it" meaning you'd have to _do_ something to have it make best use of the extra RAM).
An example is a geolocation server I wrote, which can answer hundreds of thousands of queries per second. It's incredibly fast by using twice as much disk space than competing systems use, and then even faster by having that disk space cached in plentiful RAM. It does store 16 million entries in memory at all times, which seems silly. Fortunately, each entry is just two bytes, so that's 33 MB.:)
Prior to his crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples:
And I have other sheep that are not of this flock. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. John 10:16
The Biblical authors knew only what they saw and heard. In fact, the Bible says dozens (hundreds?) of times that the disciples and other authors didn't even understand what they WERE told. That's why the books are called "The Gospel According to John, Gospel According to Luke, etc. Speaking of himself and his fellow disciples, Luke (2:50) writes "But they did not understand what he told them." Later, at Easter, the disciples did not understand the written scripture.
Anyone who has actually read the Bible, therefore, knows that a) what the authors write is not all there is, b) they do not fully understand what is written, and c) Jesus left to be with other people somewhere else.
Don't forget they spend that $1.2 million on something. They spend that money getting votes by first figuring out what message will work, then promoting that message. In 2008, 72% of candidates used some of their money on a Facebook page to get their message out ( Williams and Gulati 2012). So while the candidates are spending money building just the right Facebook presence to get votes, I suggested "post on that rep's Facebook wall". By doing so, when the candidate spends $1.2MM asking voters to "Like us on Facebook", he's driving potential voters to your message that you posted on his Facebook.
How does the candidate decide what to say in his ads and on his Facebook to persuade voters? Well, 150 people might have shown up at a town hall meeting and talk about six different topics. Maybe ten of the 150 voters who showed up mentioned the NSA. Nine of the ten of the people who mentioned the NSA were in support of a bill banning bulk collection of metadata. What do you think the candidates ads and Facebook page will say about bulk metadata collection, if 90% of voters who contacted him wanted it banned?
> each one representing approximately 700,000 people.
Of those 700,000, about 150 will show up to a town hall meeting to let the rep know what they think of some topic. Some are most interested in what's happening with the VA, whatever. Of those 150 who show up, maybe 30 will be there to talk about the NSA and such. When the rep thinks about what voters think about a particular issue, he's guided by a small sample - the 30 people who told him what they think.
Representatives in the House are elected every two years, and their districts are small enough that the number of politically active people is limited, especially in midterms. By politically active I mean people who directly affect the local. vote, not those of us who only post on Slashdot.
With a few hundred people who attend town hall meetings and debates, post on that rep's Facebook wall, call into the local radio station when the rep is on etc, a dozen or so active citizens might well swing a representative's vote, especially if their arguments are thoughtful and well-reasoned. (Just saying "abolish the NSA" leaves one wide open to the rebuttal "who then will keep on eye on China, Russia, and actual terrorists like ISIS? ")
So the House is completely doable. It just requires a few people _in_each_district_ who care enough to study and understand beyond the headlines, then put in a few hours of time.
A president would have to think twice about vetoing a reasonable bill that protects our privacy. Obama put pressure on congresscritters in his party to neuter the bill, but if we get a _good_ one through Congress I think any president is likely to sign it.
That just leaves the Senate. The Senate is slower to act and harder to change their course. They run statewide, so a dozen activists won't do. I don't know if we can get a good bill through the Senate. However, those dozen activists per district, if they each bring a friend, or they promote it via Facebook and such, can add up to quite a few people across the state. The problem with Facebook and similar PR directed toward less active and informed people is that congressional representatives can vote for a crappy, neutered version of the bill and the masses will never know thw difference. That makes it tough - not many people know what the current draft of a bill actually says, they just know the headline they read 8 weeks ago about a completely different version.
> One aspect of optimizing systems is that you don't get any performance boost by adding a resource you already have a surplus of.
Yeah. Well except fot the last 15 years Linux has utilized all available memory to cache up to the entire contents of your drives, making data access several thousand times faster. Even Windows is trying to do this a little bit now. So more memory is always faster, until your RAM is bigger than your drive.
And of course modern CPUs speculatively execute instructions, which is called branch prediction. So more CPU is better, even when you have enough.
And caching your disk to and from RAM uses any available bus bandwidth, so good to have plenty to spare. Spare storage bandwidth also reduces data loss in case of a crash.
But yeah, other than the important bits, more won't help. Also if you're running a computer from 1987 it may not effectively take advantage of spare resources.
> The other day, I needed to change the gateway address of my router, since a Netgear had replaced a Belkin, which was toast. I tried editing/etc/resolv.conf
Setting the network gateway in the resolver config? Would that ever work in any version of any OS?
Also, you may find that you need Flash a few times per year. Most Flash is ads, splash pages, and other stuff that's not useful to me. What I do is install Flash in a browser that I rarely use. My daily surfing isn't exposed to Flash vulnerabilties, but those few times per year I want to use Flash I just open the Flash-enabled browser.
> When your meter shows 0 net power, you have generated all the power you need (just not at the right time).
With zero net power, your electric bill is zero. Yay!
You tell your neighbor about it. He does the same, and pretty soon everyone is getting all of their power for free. Everyone generates power during rhe day when they aren't home, and uses power at night, when solar doesn't work. Nobody pays for anything.
Of course since nobody pays, there's no money to generate power at night. Moral of story - solar-electric can work, but only if nobody but you does it. If you tell other people about there won't be anyone paying to generate your evening electricity.
Living creatures are already injesting a lot more radioactive material than few kg of dust in that scenario. If you ever eat carrots, potatos, or other root crops you're injesting far more radioactive material - by several orders of magnitude. Bananas also.
Radiation has been here far longer than humans have. It wasn't scary until The China Syndrome.
Fyi space probes don't reactors. Like the tritium I keep next to my bed, and the isotope in your smoke alarm, it just sits there slowing releasing a little energy. Carrots are the same.
For more fun facts that might interest an environmentally concious person , check out one of Patrick Moore's articles about nuclear energy vs the status quo.
Or theyâ(TM)ll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat! They'll never be satisfied, and I understand that. That's politics. But the truth is the measures we've put in place are getting results."
What a silly article, and a waste of three minutes to read it. What they actually showed is that it's possible to construct a scenario in which it's impossible to know for certain what the best decision is, due to lack of information.
That fact, and their argument, is true whether it's AI making the decision or a human. Sometimes you can't know the outcome of your decisions. So what, decisions still must be made, and can be made.
Their logic also falls down completely because the logic is basically:
a) It's possible to imagine one scenario involving life and death scenario in which you can't be sure of the outcome. b) Therefore, no life-and-death decisions can be made. (wrong, a) just means that _some_ decisions are hard to make, not that _all_ decisions are impossible to make).
Note the exact same logic is true without the "life-and-death" qualifier: a) In some situations, you don't know what the outcome of the decision will be. b) Therefore, no decisions can be made (/correctly).
Again, a) applies to some, not to all. Secondly, just because you can't prove ahead of time which decision will have the best outcome doesn't mean you make make a decision, and even know that that is the correct decision. An example:
I offer to make a bet with you regarding the winner of this weekend's football game. I say you have to give me a 100 point spread, meaning your team has to win by at least 100 points or else you have to pay me. It's an even-money bet.
The right decision is to not make the bet, because you'd almost surely lose. Sure, it's _possible_ that your team might win by 150 points, so it's _possible_ that taking the bet would have the best outcome. That's a very unlikely outcome, though, so the correct decision _right_now_ is to decline the bet. What happens later, when the game is played, has no effect on what the correct decision was today.
The original version several months ago had some significant good points, but after negotiations with the administration removed the primary protections, what was left was mostly a bill extending the Patriot Act. Republicans might be right to vote against this and let the Patriot Act expire.
> > How about simple rules one at a time as needed.
>Oh, you mean Title II classification?
Title II is quite the opposite - over 100 pages of statute enabled by thousands of pages of regulations. You may have noticed Obama said he wanted to put them under Title II in regards to adding the USF tax to your bill and certain other parts, but not other parts of title II. The FCC commisioners had to point out that it doesn't work that way - the president doesn't get to write abnew law for some people by picking and choosing a few parts of the law he likes while leaving out other parts. If we want a new law appropriate for ISPs, Congress would need to pass such a law.
You might want to look up what "line of sight" means.
Suppose I point a laser in your direction and you are trying to detect that laser. We're five miles apart. Will you be able to spot that laser on a clear night? Probably not, because there is probably some other building between you and me. Or a tree. Or a hill.
Go outside and look five miles due west. In all probability you can't, you can only see as far as your neighbor's front door. No amount of error correction is going to fix the fact that there's a friggin house in the way. That's line of sight.
Suppose we go out to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where there are no buildings, trees, or hills. You hold a laser and shine it toward me, five miles away. Can I see it? Nope, even with no building, trees or hills, the curvature of the earth is in the way. Line of sight is one mean bitch.
> You also seem to think that the U.S. is the prime embodiment of justice, innocence and conduct,
Where do you see any of that? You might note that the only thing I said about the US is that they don't respond to cyberattacks the same way they respond to physical attacks. You seem to be smoking something pretty strong that gives you textual hallucinations any time an expert disagrees with your guess.
> Your analogy with the safe and saw is lacking of understanding of the topic.
Let's look at your CVEs and mine and see who is lacking understanding of the topic. Oh, your name isn't on any CVEs? Okay, we'll compare kernel contributions. Whoever is mentioned most in the kernel changelog probably knows a little something about what they're talking about. Oh, not a contributor, are you? Maybe a different metric - the security system I wrote only protects about 34,000 ecommerce sites. If yours protects more, you win.
> Telecoms should never have been given both tax dollars to build infrastructure and ownership of that infrastructure.
Absolutely agreed. The extent to which that has occurred has been VASTLY overstated by people with a particular political agenda, but most people can agree it did happen to some extent and it shouldn't have.
> it's a little late to worry about socialism because the fiber sitting unused was bought and paid for by the people as it is.
It's not too late. You _can_ have politicians trying to run an ISP, or you could get the taxpayers their money back buy selling the failing fiber operations to an ISP who has proven they can provide good service like Wide Open West. That gets rid of the socialism issue. So there are at least two ways to go, it's a matter of which is the best course of action.
One can decide the best course of action based on which one best serves a preconceived political ideology, or one can look at the experience of cities who have tried each approach. You can advocate for the agenda you grew up believing, or you can advocate for what actually works, what will get god results for you and your neighbors. I don't know about you, but baed on where I grew up, what my parents said, etc., as a child I believed in Ronald Reagan and the tooth fairy. It sounds like you probably believed in Bill Clinton and the tooth fairy. Later, you may have believed in Barak Obama or Bush II. Either way, our beliefs may have been mistaken.
and works well on a router where Windows can't run at all.
debatable and factually wrong.
Windows runs on routers, like the 54G, just as Linux distributions like OpenWRT, dd-wrt, etc?
I'm guessing what you mean is that a Windows desktop could kinda do some routing. It could. That's Windows running a desktop, doing some routing (poorly). That's not running on a router.
On the other hand, Windows runs really well on a desktop in the third grade classroom. That's not surprising since that's what Windows is for. It turns out, screwdrivers do a good job of turning screws. Hammers do a better job of hammering nails. Yeah, you CAN sort of pound a nail with a screwdriver and it might kind of work some of the time, but it's very definitely the wrong tool for the job. If you want to pound nails, use a hammer. Don't add an 18-ounce head to my screwdriver so you can pound nails with it.
> but to think that the U.S. government wouldn't be able to secure its networks, and that only the Chinese and Russians would be trying to "get in", is ridiculous.
For $5000, you can buy a heavy safe made of concrete and steel. For $32, I can rent a concrete saw made to cut concrete and steel. You can't secure ANYTHING and have it still be useful. The question is "how hard should it be to breqk in?" The state department network should be pretty hard to breqk into. It'll never, ever be impossible.
The government of China isn't stupid. They know that if you are going to have a military and be a world power, it makes sense to also have significant cyber resources - so they do. They use them regularly, especially since the US allows it. The US doesn't respond to cyber attacks the same way they'd respond to physical attacks.
Well, they were SUPPOSED to follow the regs. Of course that doesn't mean they did. As you suggest, though compliance and security are not only not the same thing, but they are only very loosely coupled, of it all. In some cases we've had security regulations require the use of insecure methods, such as MD5. I spent 15 years doing security for small companies before I just recently started learning compliance with all of these "security " standards.
PCI is pretty good, though. It's not comprehensive, but it doesn't require insecurity.
> what they think is the right way. That ties into what the mentality of this elite crowd is. For years this elite crowd has fought at every turn any attempt to make Linux easier to use for common, everyday users as a Windows alternative.
For decades, not just years. The Unix way predates the Windows philosophy by a rather significant margin. Those who appreciate the Unix philosophy have been protecting it from turning into something else for decades.
Imagine you joined the Ford F-250 design team. Would you insist that the F-250 should be redesigned as a Corvette alternative? Would you be surprised when the veteran members of the team pointed out that the F-250 is a work truck, not a sports car?
The Windows way works well for grandma to look at pictures of her grandkids. Mac may be even better for that use case. That's not suprising, as those systems were designed specifically to be "easier to use... for the common everyday user." The Unix / Linux approach is designed for a different role or two; client/server first and portability also. Linux is designed to work in your router, your phone, and your web server. It's no surprise that Linux makes a better server than Windows, a much better phone, and works well on a router where Windows can't run at all. It was designed to have that flexibility.
If you want something that is just like a Windows desktop, your best bet is to get a Windows desktop. Linux isn't Windows, and of it tries to be like Windows it'll stop being Linux and being good at what Linux is good at.
Slashdot Mirror
I see how you got there. That's the address of your _name_server_. It just so happens that your router (gateway) can also serve as a DNS server. You could have put 8.8.8.8 as your name server, or better yet the name servers of your ISP, and it would work fine.
The gateway is set elsewhere, and needs to be the IP of your router. You'd never go to resolv.conf to set the _gateway_.
> You need to find where the bottleneck is, then widen that.
Abso-friggin-lutely. Customers frequently come to me wanting to switch to a new processor (which means new motherboard and RAM) when their CPU is practically idle - they need faster storage.
At the same time, if 10% more money buys 25% more _anything_ it's probably a good deal, for a server. Server operating systems will make use of as much RAM as you can give them. Also the fundamental tradeoff in comp sci in speed vs size. If you have a system using 1GB of RAM and it responds in 200 ms, there's a very good chance you can adjust it to use 2 GB and respond in half the time. ("Can adjust it" meaning you'd have to _do_ something to have it make best use of the extra RAM).
An example is a geolocation server I wrote, which can answer hundreds of thousands of queries per second. It's incredibly fast by using twice as much disk space than competing systems use, and then even faster by having that disk space cached in plentiful RAM. It does store 16 million entries in memory at all times, which seems silly. Fortunately, each entry is just two bytes, so that's 33 MB. :)
Prior to his crucifixion, Jesus told the disciples:
And I have other sheep that are not of this flock. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.
John 10:16
The Biblical authors knew only what they saw and heard. In fact, the Bible says dozens (hundreds?) of times that the disciples and other authors didn't even understand what they WERE told. That's why the books are called "The Gospel According to John, Gospel According to Luke, etc. Speaking of himself and his fellow disciples, Luke (2:50) writes "But they did not understand what he told them." Later, at Easter, the disciples did not understand the written scripture.
Anyone who has actually read the Bible, therefore, knows that a) what the authors write is not all there is, b) they do not fully understand what is written, and c) Jesus left to be with other people somewhere else.
Don't forget they spend that $1.2 million on something. They spend that money getting votes by first figuring out what message will work, then promoting that message. In 2008, 72% of candidates used some of their money on a Facebook page to get their message out ( Williams and Gulati 2012). So while the candidates are spending money building just the right Facebook presence to get votes, I suggested "post on that rep's Facebook wall". By doing so, when the candidate spends $1.2MM asking voters to "Like us on Facebook", he's driving potential voters to your message that you posted on his Facebook.
How does the candidate decide what to say in his ads and on his Facebook to persuade voters? Well, 150 people might have shown up at a town hall meeting and talk about six different topics. Maybe ten of the 150 voters who showed up mentioned the NSA. Nine of the ten of the people who mentioned the NSA were in support of a bill banning bulk collection of metadata. What do you think the candidates ads and Facebook page will say about bulk metadata collection, if 90% of voters who contacted him wanted it banned?
> each one representing approximately 700,000 people.
Of those 700,000, about 150 will show up to a town hall meeting to let the rep know what they think of some topic. Some are most interested in what's happening with the VA, whatever. Of those 150 who show up, maybe 30 will be there to talk about the NSA and such. When the rep thinks about what voters think about a particular issue, he's guided by a small sample - the 30 people who told him what they think.
Representatives in the House are elected every two years, and their districts are small enough that the number of politically active people is limited, especially in midterms. By politically active I mean people who directly affect the local. vote, not those of us who only post on Slashdot.
With a few hundred people who attend town hall meetings and debates, post on that rep's Facebook wall, call into the local radio station when the rep is on etc, a dozen or so active citizens might well swing a representative's vote, especially if their arguments are thoughtful and well-reasoned. (Just saying "abolish the NSA" leaves one wide open to the rebuttal "who then will keep on eye on China, Russia, and actual terrorists like ISIS? ")
So the House is completely doable. It just requires a few people _in_each_district_ who care enough to study and understand beyond the headlines, then put in a few hours of time.
A president would have to think twice about vetoing a reasonable bill that protects our privacy. Obama put pressure on congresscritters in his party to neuter the bill, but if we get a _good_ one through Congress I think any president is likely to sign it.
That just leaves the Senate. The Senate is slower to act and harder to change their course. They run statewide, so a dozen activists won't do. I don't know if we can get a good bill through the Senate. However, those dozen activists per district, if they each bring a friend, or they promote it via Facebook and such, can add up to quite a few people across the state. The problem with Facebook and similar PR directed toward less active and informed people is that congressional representatives can vote for a crappy, neutered version of the bill and the masses will never know thw difference. That makes it tough - not many people know what the current draft of a bill actually says, they just know the headline they read 8 weeks ago about a completely different version.
> One aspect of optimizing systems is that you don't get any performance boost by adding a resource you already have a surplus of.
Yeah. Well except fot the last 15 years Linux has utilized all available memory to cache up to the entire contents of your drives, making data access several thousand times faster. Even Windows is trying to do this a little bit now. So more memory is always faster, until your RAM is bigger than your drive.
And of course modern CPUs speculatively execute instructions, which is called branch prediction. So more CPU is better, even when you have enough.
And caching your disk to and from RAM uses any available bus bandwidth, so good to have plenty to spare. Spare storage bandwidth also reduces data loss in case of a crash.
But yeah, other than the important bits, more won't help. Also if you're running a computer from 1987 it may not effectively take advantage of spare resources.
> The other day, I needed to change the gateway address of my router, since a Netgear had replaced a Belkin, which was toast. I tried editing /etc/resolv.conf
Setting the network gateway in the resolver config? Would that ever work in any version of any OS?
Also, you may find that you need Flash a few times per year. Most Flash is ads, splash pages, and other stuff that's not useful to me. What I do is install Flash in a browser that I rarely use. My daily surfing isn't exposed to Flash vulnerabilties, but those few times per year I want to use Flash I just open the Flash-enabled browser.
> When your meter shows 0 net power, you have generated all the power you need (just not at the right time).
With zero net power, your electric bill is zero. Yay!
You tell your neighbor about it. He does the same, and pretty soon everyone is getting all of their power for free. Everyone generates power during rhe day when they aren't home, and uses power at night, when solar doesn't work. Nobody pays for anything.
Of course since nobody pays, there's no money to generate power at night. Moral of story - solar-electric can work, but only if nobody but you does it. If you tell other people about there won't be anyone paying to generate your evening electricity.
Living creatures are already injesting a lot more radioactive material than few kg of dust in that scenario. If you ever eat carrots, potatos, or other root crops you're injesting far more radioactive material - by several orders of magnitude. Bananas also.
Radiation has been here far longer than humans have. It wasn't scary until The China Syndrome.
> we don't want plutonium-powered reactors
Fyi space probes don't reactors. Like the tritium I keep next to my bed, and the isotope in your smoke alarm, it just sits there slowing releasing a little energy. Carrots are the same.
For more fun facts that might interest an environmentally concious person , check out one of Patrick Moore's articles about nuclear energy vs the status quo.
Or theyâ(TM)ll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat! They'll never be satisfied, and I understand that. That's politics. But the truth is the measures we've put in place are getting results."
â" President Obama in El Paso, TX
What a silly article, and a waste of three minutes to read it. What they actually showed is that it's possible to construct a scenario in which it's impossible to know for certain what the best decision is, due to lack of information.
That fact, and their argument, is true whether it's AI making the decision or a human. Sometimes you can't know the outcome of your decisions. So what, decisions still must be made, and can be made.
Their logic also falls down completely because the logic is basically:
a) It's possible to imagine one scenario involving life and death scenario in which you can't be sure of the outcome.
b) Therefore, no life-and-death decisions can be made.
(wrong, a) just means that _some_ decisions are hard to make, not that _all_ decisions are impossible to make).
Note the exact same logic is true without the "life-and-death" qualifier:
a) In some situations, you don't know what the outcome of the decision will be.
b) Therefore, no decisions can be made (/correctly).
Again, a) applies to some, not to all. Secondly, just because you can't prove ahead of time which decision will have the best outcome doesn't mean you make make a decision, and even know that that is the correct decision. An example:
I offer to make a bet with you regarding the winner of this weekend's football game.
I say you have to give me a 100 point spread, meaning your team has to win by at least 100 points or else you have to pay me.
It's an even-money bet.
The right decision is to not make the bet, because you'd almost surely lose. Sure, it's _possible_ that your team might win by 150 points, so it's _possible_ that taking the bet would have the best outcome. That's a very unlikely outcome, though, so the correct decision _right_now_ is to decline the bet. What happens later, when the game is played, has no effect on what the correct decision was today.
The NSA supported this bill. Various whistle blowers signed a joint letter against it.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.c...
The original version several months ago had some significant good points, but after negotiations with the administration removed the primary protections, what was left was mostly a bill extending the Patriot Act. Republicans might be right to vote against this and let the Patriot Act expire.
You do realize that CE is a completely separate operating system from Windows, right? A completely different kernel, different APIs, the whole thing.
Microsoft sold OS/2 as well, that doesn't make it Windows.
> > How about simple rules one at a time as needed.
>Oh, you mean Title II classification?
Title II is quite the opposite - over 100 pages of statute enabled by thousands of pages of regulations. You may have noticed Obama said he wanted to put them under Title II in regards to adding the USF tax to your bill and certain other parts, but not other parts of title II. The FCC commisioners had to point out that it doesn't work that way - the president doesn't get to write abnew law for some people by picking and choosing a few parts of the law he likes while leaving out other parts. If we want a new law appropriate for ISPs, Congress would need to pass such a law.
In most places, local politicians have granted exclusive right-of-way access to donors^H^H^H^H^H%H public-minded businesses, like Comcast.
In many cities, power and cable run underground because poles are "ugly". That's a bit more expensive to do, even if the local politicians allow it.
You might want to look up what "line of sight" means.
Suppose I point a laser in your direction and you are trying to detect that laser. We're five miles apart. Will you be able to spot that laser on a clear night? Probably not, because there is probably some other building between you and me. Or a tree. Or a hill.
Go outside and look five miles due west. In all probability you can't, you can only see as far as your neighbor's front door. No amount of error correction is going to fix the fact that there's a friggin house in the way. That's line of sight.
Suppose we go out to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where there are no buildings, trees, or hills. You hold a laser and shine it toward me, five miles away. Can I see it? Nope, even with no building, trees or hills, the curvature of the earth is in the way. Line of sight is one mean bitch.
> You also seem to think that the U.S. is the prime embodiment of justice, innocence and conduct,
Where do you see any of that? You might note that the only thing I said about the US is that they don't respond to cyberattacks the same way they respond to physical attacks. You seem to be smoking something pretty strong that gives you textual hallucinations any time an expert disagrees with your guess.
> Your analogy with the safe and saw is lacking of understanding of the topic.
Let's look at your CVEs and mine and see who is lacking understanding of the topic. Oh, your name isn't on any CVEs? Okay, we'll compare kernel contributions. Whoever is mentioned most in the kernel changelog probably knows a little something about what they're talking about. Oh, not a contributor, are you? Maybe a different metric - the security system I wrote only protects about 34,000 ecommerce sites. If yours protects more, you win.
> Telecoms should never have been given both tax dollars to build infrastructure and ownership of that infrastructure.
Absolutely agreed. The extent to which that has occurred has been VASTLY overstated by people with a particular political agenda, but most people can agree it did happen to some extent and it shouldn't have.
> it's a little late to worry about socialism because the fiber sitting unused was bought and paid for by the people as it is.
It's not too late. You _can_ have politicians trying to run an ISP, or you could get the taxpayers their money back buy selling the failing fiber operations to an ISP who has proven they can provide good service like Wide Open West. That gets rid of the socialism issue. So there are at least two ways to go, it's a matter of which is the best course of action.
One can decide the best course of action based on which one best serves a preconceived political ideology, or one can look at the experience of cities who have tried each approach. You can advocate for the agenda you grew up believing, or you can advocate for what actually works, what will get god results for you and your neighbors. I don't know about you, but baed on where I grew up, what my parents said, etc., as a child I believed in Ronald Reagan and the tooth fairy. It sounds like you probably believed in Bill Clinton and the tooth fairy. Later, you may have believed in Barak Obama or Bush II. Either way, our beliefs may have been mistaken.
and works well on a router where Windows can't run at all.
debatable and factually wrong.
Windows runs on routers, like the 54G, just as Linux distributions like OpenWRT, dd-wrt, etc?
I'm guessing what you mean is that a Windows desktop could kinda do some routing. It could. That's Windows running a desktop, doing some routing (poorly). That's not running on a router.
On the other hand, Windows runs really well on a desktop in the third grade classroom. That's not surprising since that's what Windows is for. It turns out, screwdrivers do a good job of turning screws. Hammers do a better job of hammering nails. Yeah, you CAN sort of pound a nail with a screwdriver and it might kind of work some of the time, but it's very definitely the wrong tool for the job. If you want to pound nails, use a hammer. Don't add an 18-ounce head to my screwdriver so you can pound nails with it.
> but to think that the U.S. government wouldn't be able to secure its networks, and that only the Chinese and Russians would be trying to "get in", is ridiculous.
For $5000, you can buy a heavy safe made of concrete and steel. For $32, I can rent a concrete saw made to cut concrete and steel. You can't secure ANYTHING and have it still be useful. The question is "how hard should it be to breqk in?" The state department network should be pretty hard to breqk into. It'll never, ever be impossible.
The government of China isn't stupid. They know that if you are going to have a military and be a world power, it makes sense to also have significant cyber resources - so they do. They use them regularly, especially since the US allows it. The US doesn't respond to cyber attacks the same way they'd respond to physical attacks.
Well, they were SUPPOSED to follow the regs. Of course that doesn't mean they did. As you suggest, though compliance and security are not only not the same thing, but they are only very loosely coupled, of it all. In some cases we've had security regulations require the use of insecure methods, such as MD5. I spent 15 years doing security for small companies before I just recently started learning compliance with all of these "security " standards.
PCI is pretty good, though. It's not comprehensive, but it doesn't require insecurity.
> what they think is the right way. That ties into what the mentality of this elite crowd is. For years this elite crowd has fought at every turn any attempt to make Linux easier to use for common, everyday users as a Windows alternative.
For decades, not just years. The Unix way predates the Windows philosophy by a rather significant margin. Those who appreciate the Unix philosophy have been protecting it from turning into something else for decades.
Imagine you joined the Ford F-250 design team. Would you insist that the F-250 should be redesigned as a Corvette alternative? Would you be surprised when the veteran members of the team pointed out that the F-250 is a work truck, not a sports car?
The Windows way works well for grandma to look at pictures of her grandkids. Mac may be even better for that use case. That's not suprising, as those systems were designed specifically to be "easier to use ... for the common everyday user." The Unix / Linux approach is designed for a different role or two; client/server first and portability also. Linux is designed to work in your router, your phone, and your web server. It's no surprise that Linux makes a better server than Windows, a much better phone, and works well on a router where Windows can't run at all. It was designed to have that flexibility.
If you want something that is just like a Windows desktop, your best bet is to get a Windows desktop. Linux isn't Windows, and of it tries to be like Windows it'll stop being Linux and being good at what Linux is good at.