Yeah, and why not hunt down the people who run the company and execute them? Send their ashes into the sun, burn down their house, and remove their names from all public record and make it illegal to ever speak of them again?/sarc
My general desire for Freedom of Speech requires me to object to that last part of the proposed punishment. After all, it'd be useful to be able to mention them when using them as an example of what not to do.
Tcl's not dead. There were two releases (patch release of the current production-grade line, and beta release of the development line) over the summer.
Then again I once had the misfortune of writing a TCL interpreter library to be used as an extension language by programs writen in freepascal (and since it supported TK as a GUI language).
Why would you reimplement it? That's quite a lot of work (much more so if you wish to produce a performant implementation). Your library should have just provided a mechanism to bridge both ways between the standard language implementation and the freepascal world; less work, easier to make correct.
The same holds true for integrating with any other scripting language.
"Finally, we have the lifespan issue. If GNU had chosen Tcl because it was popular, we would have a mass of dead code"
If Tcl had been used it may well have been alive I guess. I suppose it is Turing complete.
Tcl's still alive, still in much production use, and still doing releases. It's just run by a bunch of people (myself included) who are crap at doing marketing; we'd rather write code.
There has got to be a performance hit for "extending" garbage collection to files, sockets, and databases. How hard is it to realise you no longer need a resource and free it.
Garbage collection can take some time to realize that a resource is no longer needed and release it. For memory, it's mostly not a huge problem (and you can tune how often the garbage collector runs) but many other resources come from really rather small pools so releasing them earlier is really important. This is especially so for anything connected to a file descriptor and/or process, such as all those that you list.
Releasing a resource early means doing some kind of close operation on it, and requires the programmer to do something (GC is the fully automated approach, and that releases late). In Java up to 6, that operation was typically an explicit close() method call, and while the language did provide a try/finally construct to help with it (itself a big advance over older languages like C) it was still rather verbose. The technique of binding lifetime to a syntactic scope came later (well, it was earlier in Lisp but too many people forget to raid that treasure trove of techniques) and has now been adopted in Java 7. It was around earlier in C#, but in many ways Java is a very conservative language — it simply does not change quickly (and that's mostly a good thing; a platform that is changing rapidly is not a great thing to build production code on). In many ways it's just syntactic sugar as it does not add any fundamental capability to the language, but it makes it enormously easier to write correct and efficient code. (The new-style for loops in Java 5 were another example of this tendency.)
Improving the ability of programmers to write correct and efficient code is indeed an advance.
The only way to make it safe and reliable would be to adopt a single gauge or have bogies that adjust to a new gauge automatically.
No, you can have manual adjustment or transship the contents of the train at some point. Given that this stuff is already done at the European end of Russia (or in Byelorussia; I forget which) I'd suggest that exactly the same solution be used. (Europeans use the same gauge as the US.) It's not very important whether it happens on the Russian or US side of the tunnel, though I suppose the wider gauge is a bit more technically safe due to the centre of gravity being relatively lower over the wheels (relative to the width of the track, so reducing any moment due to jolting forces from track unevenness). I don't think that makes much difference though, not enough to override whatever other conveniences there are to one or the other.
Well, if the Russians are paying then they can run their gage down to Seattle.
They'll probably build to just the current railhead at Fort Nelson up in Alberta. There are a couple of other places they could go to, but it's likely best to minimize the amount of rails laid in awkward terrain (like mountains).
No, WHY did it make slashdot - we had a 5.*9* in Colorado last night and no news about that.
It depends on how well the buildings in the area are built to withstand that sort of shaking. If buildings are all made to take it, that sort of earthquake is no big deal, but if they aren't (much more likely the case in DC, where substantial earthquakes aren't too common) then it's a major story because of the disruption.
Humans maybe have "not the worst" sense of smell, but it's not very decent.
Actually it's pretty good. It's just that we mostly ignore it and our noses are usually not that close to where the scents are. Perhaps if you paid more attention to what you've got and weren't so stuck up with your nose in the air, you'd figure things out better. Yes, dogs are still better at scents. So? We see better than dogs. It doesn't prove that much other than relative acuities in two senses between two species.
One often hears IT people lament, "The 'business' should listen to us", or "The 'business' should understand our value": but IT people need to know that that is not how business decision-making works. Business decision-makers will not risk listening to anyone who has not proven that they are credible and that they can deliver provable added value. It is up to IT people to explain - in a credible, provable manner - that value that they deliver. Otherwise, business people will take the lower risk path and just outsource as much as they can.
There are two sides to this. The IT people must explain what they do, what value they offer the overall business, and the overall business leaders must listen (just as they must listen to all the other parts of the business too; for example, facilities is also important, as few businesses work too well without basic amenities functioning correctly). If IT won't explain what they do properly, how can they expect to be listened to? If the CEO won't listen to the CIO, how can he be aware of what is quite possibly a critical part of the business and know what is the right level of resources to allocate to it?
The vital thing is that proper communication must happen. Let the truth stand on its own legs.
Looking at europe prices are roughly 25% above the US prices.
A fair chunk of that is probably due to different rules on where to put sales taxes on the bill (i.e., are they applied before the price quoted to you or after). You've got to compare what people are actually charged when they do a full purchase, not what price is advertised. Cross-jurisdiction comparisons are difficult.
So only a 5–10% gouge. (Hard to say how much of that is due to currency handling issues. Probably not as much as all that; bigger volumes let you get better prices for that sort of thing.)
But it's not shown in advertising. While in Britain (and most of EU AFAIK) price in advertising must include sales tax.
It depends on whether the market being sold to is mainly consumer or business. Prices for businesses are usually exclusive of VAT, whereas consumers' prices have to be what they actually pay. For most products, you don't see this in action because businesses tend to buy from different suppliers to consumers; about the only place where people notice it is with computing equipment and only at some stores (where both prices will be given, typically one in larger type than the other depending on the profile of customers).
..we can influence their predictions by coordinated postings of a large number of targeted "mood" tweets
and here goes your tweet-based prediction out of the window
Except you'll likely persuade lots of real traders that they've got to change their positions too, at which point you'll end up trampled by the stampede of mooing morons. That's the point when the rest of us will really laugh.
Mass Effect 2 with its unskippable cutscenes, repetitive dialog and stupid quests is one of the worst games I've ever played.
You don't buy (or pirate) many games do you? They come a lot worse. (The canonical example is Big Rigs, the game that is so awful that no amount of ironic "Bad is the New Good" can make it any better, but there are many other truly terrible or just plain dull games out there.)
First of all, research has shown again and again that harsh penalties simply do not work as a deterrent to other offenders.
But speedy arrest and conviction does deter. It's a primate thing: do something socially bad, bad things happen back to you, learn not to do it.
Who is [the judge] trying to deter?
Anyone and everyone stupid enough to ever think that they can get away with this sort of thing without consequences, and he's trying to do it over as many years for the future as possible.
I expect the sentence to be reduced on appeal.
OTOH, incitement to riot is a serious offense particularly when widely disseminated. (That it happened online isn't really germane to this case; doing it by giving speeches to a crowd would be just as bad.) While many of the cases might well be reduced on appeal, this isn't one where I'd particularly expect it.
So, the solution is: first, to require more evidence before a lawsuit can be filed, and, second, to make cost shifting the default when a lawsuit is dismissed on the pleading.
Actually, it's the reimbursement of reasonable costs that is important. If a plaintiff withdraws their suit, they should have to make the defendant whole (pay legal costs, etc.) though only if those costs are proportionate to the action. (This is vital: lawyers must not be encouraged to pad out costs, and everyone needs to use an appropriate level of legal representation, and not jump straight to the most expensive method in the hope of scaring off the other side.) Similarly, if a plaintiff wins their case then their reasonable legal costs should also be reimbursed; the court must not be stacked against either plaintiff or defendant (other than in the level of proof required for criminal cases, of course).
The only just goal must be to discourage the bringing of cases without sufficient merit, not to deny fair access to the law.
The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.
Yes, but it doesn't happen instantly. If it did, people doing freediving would also be in trouble. (The pressure gradient is in the opposite direction there, but the difference is also much larger; you get to 2 atmospheres of pressure — as much difference as between sea level and outer space — at only about 10m deep.)
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty.
International law is a funny thing, in that it is quite malleable to suit facts on the ground. Ultimately, if you can hold it and defend it against all comers for long enough, you'll get accepted as being a country. It might take quite a lot of time and armament though, and having some other countries recognize you is a huge help (getting to a large majority is when you become a country for real, whatever the provenance of the land in question). The hard part is that defending against some countries is very difficult (the US, for example) so you have to come up with a scheme where the only groups who really object (i.e., enough to send round their navy with a detachment of marines) are countries that you can actually handle for real.
Starting as a US citizen and building in US territorial waters is not a good start at the process, as the Feds are keen on tax returns and protecting the territorial integrity of the USA.
(The real problem is that it's horribly expensive to build land up or ships usefully large enough. Cheaper to buy a Caribbean island that's nominally under an existing government who can be paid off to leave you alone. But that's not the Libertarian ideal. Too practical.)
There is exactly one way for SSL certification to be fixed, and that's for browser makers to grow a pair and stop trusting root CAs who do not enforce strict rules for identifiability on all the lesser CAs under them. Yes, this will be painful as many legit sites will catch it in the neck for problems not really of their making, but anything else leaves CAs with an incentive to cheat; cutting violators off from the magic money machine is the only way of getting the crap out of the pool.
Higher-level languages produce more asm per line but express more operations per line too. Easier to (validly) compare at the level of functions or whole programs.
If you get 60 times faster than that without changing your algorithms, even with hand-coded assembly and intimate knowledge of the hardware, you're probably bypassing the entire CPU and running on moonjuice.
Or spotting that something can be evaluated to a constant during compilation. That's a huge win when you can do it.
Of course, the other thing is that it is ever-so possible to write poor C code that can be out-performed by code generated from another language. A classic example of this is in string handling, where the C standard library routines can easily be used to create code with an awful performance, e.g., by repeatedly calling strcat() on the same long string, and any language with a string data structure more suited to repeated appending will outperform that. OTOH, a truly good C programmer will be using the right data structures and algorithms in the first place, making this a bit of a moot point.
It's odd that Techdirt mentions Gopher protocol. That was licensed software and, as I've speculated before, died because it cost money to use.
I remember gopher. Once network bandwidth expanded enough, gopher died a death because it was ugly and hard to use. The killer feature of HTTP was HTML; being able to link arbitrarily from any document to any other was incredibly useful. Gopher had index pages - with nothing but links - and link-less leaf pages; real world data isn't that neat. Inlined pictures and forms and SSL, for all that they have caused so much grief since, just hammered home how little anyone really wanted Gopher's restrictions. HTTP itself though, that was a less-than-brilliant protocol to start out with; 1.0 was a giant step forward, as was 1.1 (though it's difficult to implement fully, hence it being done in libraries).
Not that Gopher couldn't serve HTML (I remember hacking it to do so) and I started using Mosaic for real when I found it was a much nicer Gopher client than the others available at the time (xgopher was ugly!) But the package - HTTP, HTML, inline images, forms, a non-awful client - was very potent; gopher's only chance was to effectively become what the web was, but instead it just got replaced.
"The information that circulates in CST is every bit as material as a chair, a car, or a quantum particle. Electromagnetic waves are just as material as the earth from which the calculi were made: it is simply that their degrees of materiality are different. In modern physics matter is associated with the complex relationship: substance-energy-information-space-time. The semantic shift from material to immaterial is not merely naive, for it can lead to dangerous fantasies."
Now there's plenty of reasonable ways to talk about US weaknesses in cyber warfare (which IMHO is commonly overstated: what seems like weakness can often be a strength. It may merely be the case that the US is more subtle about its cyber shenanigans), but this article seems to meander into complete incoherence. Jung's synchronicity? I Ching? Seriously?
Guess it's all fixable by attaching special crystals ($599+tax each) to the DOD's computers, and having everyone sitting in a circle, holding hands and chanting "Omm" or whatever woowoo is being pushed this week.
This countermeasure definitely isn't viable, because the main mode of cyber attack is insurgency. The first step of cyber attack is to have your adversary attack itself. The US isn't going to cut off access to itself. Indeed, persuading the US to do that, could in fact be the very goal of the attacker, so your suggested defense is in fact surrender.
You've got to distinguish between pulling the plug on the external internet (i.e., international links) which would be annoying but not fatal, especially if temporary, and pulling the plug on internal internet (i.e., what you seem to be thinking of). Losing connectivity with China for a few days would hardly be the end of the world, would it? Moreover, you don't have to kill all the links; pushing things so that congestion chokes the rest will do just fine and once the attack rate is reduced, it's quite possible to react sanely.
But it is still important to ensure that critical infrastructure (e.g., electric grid control hardware) is adequately protected. In fact, I'd call that a no-brainer, and consequently the people who have let things get into their current state are "brainless morons".
i.e. The purpose of the president's "Internet kill switch" to destroy the US economy, in the event that the US economy is threatened. It's pretty damn funny, almost right out of Dr. Strangelove.
Don't worry. You've got Congress to do the destruction of the economy for you. No need to have internet hackers involved at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and why not hunt down the people who run the company and execute them? /sarc
Send their ashes into the sun, burn down their house, and remove their names from all public record and make it illegal to ever speak of them again?
My general desire for Freedom of Speech requires me to object to that last part of the proposed punishment. After all, it'd be useful to be able to mention them when using them as an example of what not to do.
The rest sounds reasonable.
And it's still not too late to resurrect TCL.
Tcl's not dead. There were two releases (patch release of the current production-grade line, and beta release of the development line) over the summer.
Then again I once had the misfortune of writing a TCL interpreter library to be used as an extension language by programs writen in freepascal (and since it supported TK as a GUI language).
Why would you reimplement it? That's quite a lot of work (much more so if you wish to produce a performant implementation). Your library should have just provided a mechanism to bridge both ways between the standard language implementation and the freepascal world; less work, easier to make correct.
The same holds true for integrating with any other scripting language.
"Finally, we have the lifespan issue. If GNU had chosen Tcl because it was popular, we would have a mass of dead code"
If Tcl had been used it may well have been alive I guess. I suppose it is Turing complete.
Tcl's still alive, still in much production use, and still doing releases. It's just run by a bunch of people (myself included) who are crap at doing marketing; we'd rather write code.
There has got to be a performance hit for "extending" garbage collection to files, sockets, and databases. How hard is it to realise you no longer need a resource and free it.
Garbage collection can take some time to realize that a resource is no longer needed and release it. For memory, it's mostly not a huge problem (and you can tune how often the garbage collector runs) but many other resources come from really rather small pools so releasing them earlier is really important. This is especially so for anything connected to a file descriptor and/or process, such as all those that you list.
Releasing a resource early means doing some kind of close operation on it, and requires the programmer to do something (GC is the fully automated approach, and that releases late). In Java up to 6, that operation was typically an explicit close() method call, and while the language did provide a try/finally construct to help with it (itself a big advance over older languages like C) it was still rather verbose. The technique of binding lifetime to a syntactic scope came later (well, it was earlier in Lisp but too many people forget to raid that treasure trove of techniques) and has now been adopted in Java 7. It was around earlier in C#, but in many ways Java is a very conservative language — it simply does not change quickly (and that's mostly a good thing; a platform that is changing rapidly is not a great thing to build production code on). In many ways it's just syntactic sugar as it does not add any fundamental capability to the language, but it makes it enormously easier to write correct and efficient code. (The new-style for loops in Java 5 were another example of this tendency.)
Improving the ability of programmers to write correct and efficient code is indeed an advance.
The only way to make it safe and reliable would be to adopt a single gauge or have bogies that adjust to a new gauge automatically.
No, you can have manual adjustment or transship the contents of the train at some point. Given that this stuff is already done at the European end of Russia (or in Byelorussia; I forget which) I'd suggest that exactly the same solution be used. (Europeans use the same gauge as the US.) It's not very important whether it happens on the Russian or US side of the tunnel, though I suppose the wider gauge is a bit more technically safe due to the centre of gravity being relatively lower over the wheels (relative to the width of the track, so reducing any moment due to jolting forces from track unevenness). I don't think that makes much difference though, not enough to override whatever other conveniences there are to one or the other.
Well, if the Russians are paying then they can run their gage down to Seattle.
They'll probably build to just the current railhead at Fort Nelson up in Alberta. There are a couple of other places they could go to, but it's likely best to minimize the amount of rails laid in awkward terrain (like mountains).
No, WHY did it make slashdot - we had a 5.*9* in Colorado last night and no news about that.
It depends on how well the buildings in the area are built to withstand that sort of shaking. If buildings are all made to take it, that sort of earthquake is no big deal, but if they aren't (much more likely the case in DC, where substantial earthquakes aren't too common) then it's a major story because of the disruption.
Humans maybe have "not the worst" sense of smell, but it's not very decent.
Actually it's pretty good. It's just that we mostly ignore it and our noses are usually not that close to where the scents are. Perhaps if you paid more attention to what you've got and weren't so stuck up with your nose in the air, you'd figure things out better. Yes, dogs are still better at scents. So? We see better than dogs. It doesn't prove that much other than relative acuities in two senses between two species.
drinking bear
Doesn't that leave you feeling rather grizzly?
One often hears IT people lament, "The 'business' should listen to us", or "The 'business' should understand our value": but IT people need to know that that is not how business decision-making works. Business decision-makers will not risk listening to anyone who has not proven that they are credible and that they can deliver provable added value. It is up to IT people to explain - in a credible, provable manner - that value that they deliver. Otherwise, business people will take the lower risk path and just outsource as much as they can.
There are two sides to this. The IT people must explain what they do, what value they offer the overall business, and the overall business leaders must listen (just as they must listen to all the other parts of the business too; for example, facilities is also important, as few businesses work too well without basic amenities functioning correctly). If IT won't explain what they do properly, how can they expect to be listened to? If the CEO won't listen to the CIO, how can he be aware of what is quite possibly a critical part of the business and know what is the right level of resources to allocate to it?
The vital thing is that proper communication must happen. Let the truth stand on its own legs.
Looking at europe prices are roughly 25% above the US prices.
A fair chunk of that is probably due to different rules on where to put sales taxes on the bill (i.e., are they applied before the price quoted to you or after). You've got to compare what people are actually charged when they do a full purchase, not what price is advertised. Cross-jurisdiction comparisons are difficult.
So only a 5–10% gouge. (Hard to say how much of that is due to currency handling issues. Probably not as much as all that; bigger volumes let you get better prices for that sort of thing.)
But it's not shown in advertising. While in Britain (and most of EU AFAIK) price in advertising must include sales tax.
It depends on whether the market being sold to is mainly consumer or business. Prices for businesses are usually exclusive of VAT, whereas consumers' prices have to be what they actually pay. For most products, you don't see this in action because businesses tend to buy from different suppliers to consumers; about the only place where people notice it is with computing equipment and only at some stores (where both prices will be given, typically one in larger type than the other depending on the profile of customers).
..we can influence their predictions by coordinated postings of a large number of targeted "mood" tweets
and here goes your tweet-based prediction out of the window
Except you'll likely persuade lots of real traders that they've got to change their positions too, at which point you'll end up trampled by the stampede of mooing morons. That's the point when the rest of us will really laugh.
Mass Effect 2 with its unskippable cutscenes, repetitive dialog and stupid quests is one of the worst games I've ever played.
You don't buy (or pirate) many games do you? They come a lot worse. (The canonical example is Big Rigs, the game that is so awful that no amount of ironic "Bad is the New Good" can make it any better, but there are many other truly terrible or just plain dull games out there.)
First of all, research has shown again and again that harsh penalties simply do not work as a deterrent to other offenders.
But speedy arrest and conviction does deter. It's a primate thing: do something socially bad, bad things happen back to you, learn not to do it.
Who is [the judge] trying to deter?
Anyone and everyone stupid enough to ever think that they can get away with this sort of thing without consequences, and he's trying to do it over as many years for the future as possible.
I expect the sentence to be reduced on appeal.
OTOH, incitement to riot is a serious offense particularly when widely disseminated. (That it happened online isn't really germane to this case; doing it by giving speeches to a crowd would be just as bad.) While many of the cases might well be reduced on appeal, this isn't one where I'd particularly expect it.
So, the solution is: first, to require more evidence before a lawsuit can be filed, and, second, to make cost shifting the default when a lawsuit is dismissed on the pleading.
Actually, it's the reimbursement of reasonable costs that is important. If a plaintiff withdraws their suit, they should have to make the defendant whole (pay legal costs, etc.) though only if those costs are proportionate to the action. (This is vital: lawyers must not be encouraged to pad out costs, and everyone needs to use an appropriate level of legal representation, and not jump straight to the most expensive method in the hope of scaring off the other side.) Similarly, if a plaintiff wins their case then their reasonable legal costs should also be reimbursed; the court must not be stacked against either plaintiff or defendant (other than in the level of proof required for criminal cases, of course).
The only just goal must be to discourage the bringing of cases without sufficient merit, not to deny fair access to the law.
The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.
Yes, but it doesn't happen instantly. If it did, people doing freediving would also be in trouble. (The pressure gradient is in the opposite direction there, but the difference is also much larger; you get to 2 atmospheres of pressure — as much difference as between sea level and outer space — at only about 10m deep.)
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty.
International law is a funny thing, in that it is quite malleable to suit facts on the ground. Ultimately, if you can hold it and defend it against all comers for long enough, you'll get accepted as being a country. It might take quite a lot of time and armament though, and having some other countries recognize you is a huge help (getting to a large majority is when you become a country for real, whatever the provenance of the land in question). The hard part is that defending against some countries is very difficult (the US, for example) so you have to come up with a scheme where the only groups who really object (i.e., enough to send round their navy with a detachment of marines) are countries that you can actually handle for real.
Starting as a US citizen and building in US territorial waters is not a good start at the process, as the Feds are keen on tax returns and protecting the territorial integrity of the USA.
(The real problem is that it's horribly expensive to build land up or ships usefully large enough. Cheaper to buy a Caribbean island that's nominally under an existing government who can be paid off to leave you alone. But that's not the Libertarian ideal. Too practical.)
There is exactly one way for SSL certification to be fixed, and that's for browser makers to grow a pair and stop trusting root CAs who do not enforce strict rules for identifiability on all the lesser CAs under them. Yes, this will be painful as many legit sites will catch it in the neck for problems not really of their making, but anything else leaves CAs with an incentive to cheat; cutting violators off from the magic money machine is the only way of getting the crap out of the pool.
Higher-level languages produce more asm per line but express more operations per line too. Easier to (validly) compare at the level of functions or whole programs.
If you get 60 times faster than that without changing your algorithms, even with hand-coded assembly and intimate knowledge of the hardware, you're probably bypassing the entire CPU and running on moonjuice.
Or spotting that something can be evaluated to a constant during compilation. That's a huge win when you can do it.
Of course, the other thing is that it is ever-so possible to write poor C code that can be out-performed by code generated from another language. A classic example of this is in string handling, where the C standard library routines can easily be used to create code with an awful performance, e.g., by repeatedly calling strcat() on the same long string, and any language with a string data structure more suited to repeated appending will outperform that. OTOH, a truly good C programmer will be using the right data structures and algorithms in the first place, making this a bit of a moot point.
It's odd that Techdirt mentions Gopher protocol. That was licensed software and, as I've speculated before, died because it cost money to use.
I remember gopher. Once network bandwidth expanded enough, gopher died a death because it was ugly and hard to use. The killer feature of HTTP was HTML; being able to link arbitrarily from any document to any other was incredibly useful. Gopher had index pages - with nothing but links - and link-less leaf pages; real world data isn't that neat. Inlined pictures and forms and SSL, for all that they have caused so much grief since, just hammered home how little anyone really wanted Gopher's restrictions. HTTP itself though, that was a less-than-brilliant protocol to start out with; 1.0 was a giant step forward, as was 1.1 (though it's difficult to implement fully, hence it being done in libraries).
Not that Gopher couldn't serve HTML (I remember hacking it to do so) and I started using Mosaic for real when I found it was a much nicer Gopher client than the others available at the time (xgopher was ugly!) But the package - HTTP, HTML, inline images, forms, a non-awful client - was very potent; gopher's only chance was to effectively become what the web was, but instead it just got replaced.
pay for by burns power co! You Nuclear friend
And the Peabody Energy Corporation, a supporter of coal for a wetter, hotter tomorrow!
"The information that circulates in CST is every bit as material as a chair, a car, or a quantum particle. Electromagnetic waves are just as material as the earth from which the calculi were made: it is simply that their degrees of materiality are different. In modern physics matter is associated with the complex relationship: substance-energy-information-space-time. The semantic shift from material to immaterial is not merely naive, for it can lead to dangerous fantasies."
Now there's plenty of reasonable ways to talk about US weaknesses in cyber warfare (which IMHO is commonly overstated: what seems like weakness can often be a strength. It may merely be the case that the US is more subtle about its cyber shenanigans), but this article seems to meander into complete incoherence. Jung's synchronicity? I Ching? Seriously?
Guess it's all fixable by attaching special crystals ($599+tax each) to the DOD's computers, and having everyone sitting in a circle, holding hands and chanting "Omm" or whatever woowoo is being pushed this week.
Needs more cowbell, err, quantum.
This countermeasure definitely isn't viable, because the main mode of cyber attack is insurgency. The first step of cyber attack is to have your adversary attack itself. The US isn't going to cut off access to itself. Indeed, persuading the US to do that, could in fact be the very goal of the attacker, so your suggested defense is in fact surrender.
You've got to distinguish between pulling the plug on the external internet (i.e., international links) which would be annoying but not fatal, especially if temporary, and pulling the plug on internal internet (i.e., what you seem to be thinking of). Losing connectivity with China for a few days would hardly be the end of the world, would it? Moreover, you don't have to kill all the links; pushing things so that congestion chokes the rest will do just fine and once the attack rate is reduced, it's quite possible to react sanely.
But it is still important to ensure that critical infrastructure (e.g., electric grid control hardware) is adequately protected. In fact, I'd call that a no-brainer, and consequently the people who have let things get into their current state are "brainless morons".
i.e. The purpose of the president's "Internet kill switch" to destroy the US economy, in the event that the US economy is threatened. It's pretty damn funny, almost right out of Dr. Strangelove.
Don't worry. You've got Congress to do the destruction of the economy for you. No need to have internet hackers involved at all.