but why would the marketplace buy a TiVo PC? Regardless of commercial-zapping potential. Sure, $200 is decent, but there've been business models along those lines before that haven't gone anywhere (e.g., the ol' buy-a-computer-with-two-years-of-AOL-and-get-it-damn-cheap). I fail to see a true differentiator here -- at least, one that would sway any significant percentage of home computer users.
Honestly, while I care about the candidates' views on technology, I think long-term impact will be felt far more strongly based on who they appoint to the Supreme Court ("SCOTUS"). The reason I say this is because, by-and-large, republican nominees have been more willing to clamp down on civil liberties, with special attention to interpretation of free speech. (Alas, they've all proved pretty wrong-headed when it came to Eldred v. Ashcroft, a/k/a the unfettered expansion of copyright... but that's where the difference between interpretation and legislation comes in, and, alas (for this case), the SCOTUS isn't nearly as revisionary as the fundies would have us believe.)
So, anyway, I care about McCain and Obmama's positions. But I care far more that the Court is becoming substantially unbalanced, and worry that a republican in office will have decades-long influence over most every freedom we currently take for granted.
Echo is almost always generated by neither latency or impedence mis-matches. Old, cheap phones are great for causing echo... as is VoIP due to latency. (Which is why "real" VoIP PSTN cards have echo cancellation built-in on DSPs.) Joe PC running Asterisk -- and I love Asterisk -- will almost certainly have some pretty bad echo unless you really damp your rx- and tx-gain. Ironically, echo is usually heard on the opposite end of where it's being caused, which can lead to some confusion.
Huh? From Day One, Shuttleworth has made no bones abut the fact that he hopes to eventually see Ubuntu turning a profit. Idle curiosity: is that a bad thing? Or should they be forever beholden to a billionaire who could be hit by a bus tomorrow? I'm not sure why turning a profit has to be a bad thing -- frankly, I'd be ecstatic. After all, barring Segway, I'm unaware of most any dot-com era company that's still going without showing a profit. Would you wish the same fate on Ubuntu? [NOTE: this does not mean I condone in any way the closing of source, or making things proprietary. It does, however, mean that I hope a fully-open-source company can become a vibrant example to the closed-source community.]
No, they aren't networked. But they *are* computers. For example, my office was recently struck by a virus which propagated by USB pen drives; stick the drive into a computer, it fired up the autorun file, installed itself, and infected any future keys -- a play on Ye Olde floppy drive propagation. Bottom line: run an OS, be potentially susceptible to an attack of some sort. For the record, I essentially agree with you -- I'm a pretty non-paranoid sysadmin. But when it comes to stuff like voting, I'm willing to be a bit more paranoid for the sake of prevention, especially when (gad-zooks) legacy systems are reasonably practical.
While I am unfamiliar with the hack you mention, I still stand by my guns: easy to do, easy to verify. ALL voting systems have some hole or flaw; a fully-computerized one is, almost by definition, Swiss cheese compared to the more rudimentary mechanisms. (At least, until such time as a 100% secure OS AND application software, are created. *dies of old age several times over*)
I think we've seen sufficient evidence that Diebold has been inhaling deeply, if you will. And we, as a relatively technology-savvy audience, are acutely aware of the potential for disaster -- just imagine, if you will, a virus that infects just voting machines. Personally, while it pains me to say it, I think we should stick with the solution we use here in New Hampshire: good ol' SAT-like ballots. Darken the oval next to the candidate's name, and you're done. The Machine will either accept it, or reject it (in which case you do a new ballot, and the old one gets destroyed). Simple, easy, accountable. Yes, being able to use a computerized voting machine for tabulation is incredibly seductive, but voting is already something inherently prone to attempts at manipulation. Let's not introduce yet more potential, shall we?
Dear Lord, folks -- or, at least, those of you who seem almost mad that the gov't has passed this -- wake up! Detroit is obviously immune to reality, and dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the 90's is a really, really good idea. Why? Well, for a moment, let's even set aside the question of whether or not this will impact the environment, and let's look at economics, instead: Detroit, through its arrogance, is rapidly trying to win a Darwin award. Their sales continue to sag, layoffs continue to mount, and yet they seem to delude themselves as to whether or not people are voting with their pocketbook. People WANT better gas mileage, for the most simple and selfish of reasons: it saves them money at the gas station. And their increased procurement of Japanese and Korean vehicles proves this.
Detroit's response? FUD commercials claiming that increasing mileage would remove the consumer's ability to choose. I have never seen such a clear case of head-in-sand than today's American car manufacturers. As for the $6,700 price tag increase, that sounds an awful lot like 1998 Microsoft claming that removing IE from Windows would cause performance issues. If Japan can -- and has -- done it, for comparable money, so can America. And if Detroit doesn't do it, they WILL eventually become irrelevant, and go under. So, yeah, as much as I believe in a free market, it's time for the gov't to proactively save their collective (and oh, so sorry) a**es.
I'm just sad it wasn't 40 MPG -- specifically what my Saturn used to get before GM re-Borg'd them.
I admit it, I'm a UID whore. On my WELL account, I have it check/etc/passwd to see how many people still exist that have accounts older than me. It's down to 137 or so. I -will- be the longest-running-continuous-e-mail-account some day! I will! (20 years next April.) So I've always been kind of disgusted that I waited to sign up at Slashdot -- though the irony is, I never saw C&D. But I do remember the no-user-account-at-all days quite well; it's a shame the old pages are lost...
You're so cute when you're condescending. Of course, I have no idea who you are, but that's irrelevant. Folks like you who like to put other folks in their places -- or, put another way, like to espouse their own (supposed) morality -- are the very ones I'd suspect of doing such a thing.
For the record, I do agree with your statements, if not your paternalistic, pseudo-moralistic attitude. But, as system administrators, we also see things without looking: spam being mis-directed, porn sites in a browser's history, etc. Being a system administrator means two things:
- discretion - common sense
Used in correct doses, you'll be good. Draw attention to things that are illegal, and/or reprehensible. Forget you saw the rest. And don't snoop. Simple, really. (Of course, one is taunted by Dogbert's "What good is power if you can't abuse it?" The answer is that, if you abuse the power, sooner or later, someone will find out. And, if done in the "right" way, it could even be illegal.
The previous Sr. SysAdmin at my current employer was indiscreet when he found objectionable material. Such that, not only did the person with the objectionable material go away, but so did the SysAdmin. Rule of thumb: if management *does* respond appropriately, DON'T SHOW IT TO ANYONE ELSE.
Of course, that being said, he's gone, and I got pulled in. So I'm happy.
A local radio station used to prove this point with tongue-in-cheek, and oodles of irony. Specifically, they had a 30-second bit, made out to sound like a commercial, for the Foreign Death Conversion Chart, which would compare how many foreign deaths equated with American deaths. A horrible way to look at things, but very pertinent, if one watches the local news.
Actually if he didn't notice and got the gist of the sentence then it can't be 'important' for understanding.
Eh-hem.
VIOLENT disagreement. Sentences that require an intuitive grasp of -anything- are prone to mis-interpretation. Hell, just yesterday, I was reading a magazine article where the author left out a set of commas. While I don't remember the sentence, itself, I do remember having trouble parsing it... until I realized that the commas were missing, and their absence could make the sentence be read in the manner it was intended, OR ITS EXACT OPPOSITE.
English is an imprecise language; grammar and punctuation exist to help add some precision. Excusing their misuse as "something most people won't notice" is simply inexcusable. There are reasons that programming languages are strongly typed; as far as I'm concerned, these reasons are even more valid for human languages. In programming, at least a good programmer knows when they can be bitten by a mis-interpreted variable, and can usually avoid it. In human languages, there is no such thing as a standard compiler (and/or interpreter), and confusion runs rampant all too often with CORRECTLY written English. An attempt to gloss over mistakes as being irrelevant is Just Plain Dumb.
Don't do it. If you simply don't know English well enough to guarantee you're using it correctly, that can be excused: English is a -hard- language. On the other hand, misuse through laziness is idiotic.
-Slarty
Yes, you -are- crazy if you don't go with Google.
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 1
I've worked for 100-person companies, and I've worked for 20k-person companies (e.g., UPS, Cisco). And the bottom line is that you have two things going for you: the ability to cherry-pick, and your age. Google -- whatever may come in the years ahead -- will be a huge learning experience, and look great on the resume. Not that MS wouldn't... but what has MS *done* lately? Zilch. Oooh. Vista's coming out. To see how excited people are, check out its stock performance over the past five years.
Google is going to fly high, or crash hard, but whatever happens, it will be *interesting*. You'll learn stuff -- both practical, and not-so-practical. And you'll have a hell of a lot of fun. I think MS is way too entrenched in its own mindset to be able to offer anything like the experience you'd get at Google. Sure, if Google does well, it just might become the next MS -- but that's then, and, to be cliche, this is now.
Google, mon, Google. MS ain't going anywhere, and if Google flops, I'm sure they'll be glad to have you.
First, let me just say that OpenVPN is the coolest VPN solution, ever. There's a GUI for Windows users, it can tunnel through ANYTHING (NTLM authentication through a proxy server? No problem!), it's incredibly flexible, it has features out the wazoo, it has good documentation and -- get THIS -- the logs actually contain stuff that helps you fix problems. "Certificate file/etc/openvpn/keys/foo.crt not found." Stuff like that. However, apparently (since OpenVPN -also- uses UDP by default, thus eliminating TCP-over-TCP cascading issues), there's more to OpenVPN than meets my eye; on a BBS I'm a member of (telnet://whip.isca.uiowa.edu), one of the more network-savvy folks had some commentary:
OpenVPN is the only "SSL VPN" that uses UDP, yes. They invented a protocol that uses SSL over UDP for authentication, and until they did, SSL had never been implemented over UDP. There's now an IETF Internet Draft for DTLS, which is another SSL over UDP protocol specification, but no one else uses it yet, AFAIK, and it's still just an Internet Draft, not an RFC yet. The others implemented their SSL VPNs over TCP for two reasons:
1) There wasn't a standard SSL over UDP specification to implement. 2) SSL over UDP doesn't look like HTTPS, which is half the appeal of these
products, because looking like HTTPS is often what gets them through
a firewall on their end when a conventional VPN client can't get through.
Note that OpenVPN doesn't transport its data stream over SSL. They use IPSec ESP over UDP for that, the same as standard IPSec NAT-T does. They just use SSL over UDP for session authentication and management--in other words, as an IKE replacement, as far as I can tell. In that respect, there's really not much to differentiate it from IPSec NAT-T.
Yes, they do. Apparently, however -- and I got this from someone who actually works at Segway -- he hadn't been given formal training, and stepped on it when it hadn't yet been powered up. No gyros spinning, DAMN hard to balance. (I actually made the same mistake -- you WILL go down when 100 lbs. with a very low center of balance is disagreeing with you.)
You're cute. And, yes, warm, fuzzy, and silly. While you make some valid points, the point *I* was making was one you failed to address: the simple fact that, by accepting the job of press secretary, one essentially disowns any views that one might have. IT IS PART AND PARCEL OF THE JOB. After one leaves the post -- or, say, in the case of Tony Snow, before one takes the post -- one is clearly free to state one's views, so long as said person hasn't taken yet *another* PR flak job. In which case, rewind/play. Most large companies have PR folks; it's their JOB -- their whole reason for being -- to tell the the party line in as upbeat a manner as possible, and to put good spin on bad things.
And, while I generally do try to stay away from polarized/binary points-of-view, I think that any press secretary who stated his own personal views while in the employ of an entity with whom (s)he might differ, would very quickly find themselves looking for other employ.
Hello? "Birds of a feather flock together." Social groups, networks, etc., tend to attract like-minded people. And guess what? Slashdot works on submissions from its readerbase. If you see a good story on a site, SUBMIT IT. Regardless of political affiliation. If you don't submit, you can't acq... no, wait, that doesn't work. But don't bitch if you ain't submitting.
C'mon, folks: the words "press secretary" are simply code for "weasel." Anyone who thinks otherwie -- and mind you, this is totally regardless of party affiliation -- is being silly. The one and only press secretary for whom I hold any respect is Reagen's, one Jim Brady. During the assassination attempt, he was shot in the head, with substantial brain damange. The work he's done to control the unfettered access to handguns is nothing short of remarkable; he and his wife are to be commended. All other press secreteries are simply PR figureheads, who never -- not ever -- present their own views, if, indeed, they even have any. (A fine and juicy movie that deals with similar people is Thank You for Smoking. See it.)
It's like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame)'s argument re: Santa: I don't believe he exists, but there's no downside to believing he does, and if he does exist and I don't believe in him, I won't get presents.
The bottleneck is infrastructure: there's no way around the fact that your cable modem/phone line/T1/DSL/whatever winds up at some aggregating point. Wireless is, in a real sense, even worse -- sure, it could avoid said aggregation, but it's wide open. The only true way (and, by the way, the idea behind the genesis of S/WAN) is for encryption to become de-facto. If and when that happens, THEN, and ONLY THEN, will there be the ability to avoid scanning of your stuff by .
Of course, I sure the hell wouldn't put it past the gov't to outlaw encryption. It's not like they haven't done it before.
Slashdot Mirror
but why would the marketplace buy a TiVo PC? Regardless of commercial-zapping potential. Sure, $200 is decent, but there've been business models along those lines before that haven't gone anywhere (e.g., the ol' buy-a-computer-with-two-years-of-AOL-and-get-it-damn-cheap). I fail to see a true differentiator here -- at least, one that would sway any significant percentage of home computer users.
Honestly, while I care about the candidates' views on technology, I think long-term impact will be felt far more strongly based on who they appoint to the Supreme Court ("SCOTUS"). The reason I say this is because, by-and-large, republican nominees have been more willing to clamp down on civil liberties, with special attention to interpretation of free speech. (Alas, they've all proved pretty wrong-headed when it came to Eldred v. Ashcroft, a/k/a the unfettered expansion of copyright... but that's where the difference between interpretation and legislation comes in, and, alas (for this case), the SCOTUS isn't nearly as revisionary as the fundies would have us believe.)
So, anyway, I care about McCain and Obmama's positions. But I care far more that the Court is becoming substantially unbalanced, and worry that a republican in office will have decades-long influence over most every freedom we currently take for granted.
Echo is almost always generated by neither latency or impedence mis-matches. Old, cheap phones are great for causing echo... as is VoIP due to latency. (Which is why "real" VoIP PSTN cards have echo cancellation built-in on DSPs.) Joe PC running Asterisk -- and I love Asterisk -- will almost certainly have some pretty bad echo unless you really damp your rx- and tx-gain. Ironically, echo is usually heard on the opposite end of where it's being caused, which can lead to some confusion.
$.02, etc.
Amen.
Huh? From Day One, Shuttleworth has made no bones abut the fact that he hopes to eventually see Ubuntu turning a profit. Idle curiosity: is that a bad thing? Or should they be forever beholden to a billionaire who could be hit by a bus tomorrow? I'm not sure why turning a profit has to be a bad thing -- frankly, I'd be ecstatic. After all, barring Segway, I'm unaware of most any dot-com era company that's still going without showing a profit. Would you wish the same fate on Ubuntu? [NOTE: this does not mean I condone in any way the closing of source, or making things proprietary. It does, however, mean that I hope a fully-open-source company can become a vibrant example to the closed-source community.]
that's easily the best HHGTTG reference I've seen in years. Congrats.
No, they aren't networked. But they *are* computers. For example, my office was recently struck by a virus which propagated by USB pen drives; stick the drive into a computer, it fired up the autorun file, installed itself, and infected any future keys -- a play on Ye Olde floppy drive propagation. Bottom line: run an OS, be potentially susceptible to an attack of some sort. For the record, I essentially agree with you -- I'm a pretty non-paranoid sysadmin. But when it comes to stuff like voting, I'm willing to be a bit more paranoid for the sake of prevention, especially when (gad-zooks) legacy systems are reasonably practical.
While I am unfamiliar with the hack you mention, I still stand by my guns: easy to do, easy to verify. ALL voting systems have some hole or flaw; a fully-computerized one is, almost by definition, Swiss cheese compared to the more rudimentary mechanisms. (At least, until such time as a 100% secure OS AND application software, are created. *dies of old age several times over*)
I think we've seen sufficient evidence that Diebold has been inhaling deeply, if you will. And we, as a relatively technology-savvy audience, are acutely aware of the potential for disaster -- just imagine, if you will, a virus that infects just voting machines. Personally, while it pains me to say it, I think we should stick with the solution we use here in New Hampshire: good ol' SAT-like ballots. Darken the oval next to the candidate's name, and you're done. The Machine will either accept it, or reject it (in which case you do a new ballot, and the old one gets destroyed). Simple, easy, accountable. Yes, being able to use a computerized voting machine for tabulation is incredibly seductive, but voting is already something inherently prone to attempts at manipulation. Let's not introduce yet more potential, shall we?
Dear Lord, folks -- or, at least, those of you who seem almost mad that the gov't has passed this -- wake up! Detroit is obviously immune to reality, and dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the 90's is a really, really good idea. Why? Well, for a moment, let's even set aside the question of whether or not this will impact the environment, and let's look at economics, instead: Detroit, through its arrogance, is rapidly trying to win a Darwin award. Their sales continue to sag, layoffs continue to mount, and yet they seem to delude themselves as to whether or not people are voting with their pocketbook. People WANT better gas mileage, for the most simple and selfish of reasons: it saves them money at the gas station. And their increased procurement of Japanese and Korean vehicles proves this.
Detroit's response? FUD commercials claiming that increasing mileage would remove the consumer's ability to choose. I have never seen such a clear case of head-in-sand than today's American car manufacturers. As for the $6,700 price tag increase, that sounds an awful lot like 1998 Microsoft claming that removing IE from Windows would cause performance issues. If Japan can -- and has -- done it, for comparable money, so can America. And if Detroit doesn't do it, they WILL eventually become irrelevant, and go under. So, yeah, as much as I believe in a free market, it's time for the gov't to proactively save their collective (and oh, so sorry) a**es.
I'm just sad it wasn't 40 MPG -- specifically what my Saturn used to get before GM re-Borg'd them.
I admit it, I'm a UID whore. On my WELL account, I have it check /etc/passwd to see how many people still exist that have accounts older than me. It's down to 137 or so. I -will- be the longest-running-continuous-e-mail-account some day! I will! (20 years next April.) So I've always been kind of disgusted that I waited to sign up at Slashdot -- though the irony is, I never saw C&D. But I do remember the no-user-account-at-all days quite well; it's a shame the old pages are lost...
You're so cute when you're condescending. Of course, I have no idea who you are, but that's irrelevant. Folks like you who like to put other folks in their places -- or, put another way, like to espouse their own (supposed) morality -- are the very ones I'd suspect of doing such a thing.
For the record, I do agree with your statements, if not your paternalistic, pseudo-moralistic attitude. But, as system administrators, we also see things without looking: spam being mis-directed, porn sites in a browser's history, etc. Being a system administrator means two things:
- discretion
- common sense
Used in correct doses, you'll be good. Draw attention to things that are illegal, and/or reprehensible. Forget you saw the rest. And don't snoop. Simple, really. (Of course, one is taunted by Dogbert's "What good is power if you can't abuse it?" The answer is that, if you abuse the power, sooner or later, someone will find out. And, if done in the "right" way, it could even be illegal.
The previous Sr. SysAdmin at my current employer was indiscreet when he found objectionable material. Such that, not only did the person with the objectionable material go away, but so did the SysAdmin. Rule of thumb: if management *does* respond appropriately, DON'T SHOW IT TO ANYONE ELSE.
Of course, that being said, he's gone, and I got pulled in. So I'm happy.
A local radio station used to prove this point with tongue-in-cheek, and oodles of irony. Specifically, they had a 30-second bit, made out to sound like a commercial, for the Foreign Death Conversion Chart, which would compare how many foreign deaths equated with American deaths. A horrible way to look at things, but very pertinent, if one watches the local news.
Actually if he didn't notice and got the gist of the sentence then it can't be 'important' for understanding.
Eh-hem.
VIOLENT disagreement. Sentences that require an intuitive grasp of -anything- are prone to mis-interpretation. Hell, just yesterday, I was reading a magazine article where the author left out a set of commas. While I don't remember the sentence, itself, I do remember having trouble parsing it... until I realized that the commas were missing, and their absence could make the sentence be read in the manner it was intended, OR ITS EXACT OPPOSITE.
English is an imprecise language; grammar and punctuation exist to help add some precision. Excusing their misuse as "something most people won't notice" is simply inexcusable. There are reasons that programming languages are strongly typed; as far as I'm concerned, these reasons are even more valid for human languages. In programming, at least a good programmer knows when they can be bitten by a mis-interpreted variable, and can usually avoid it. In human languages, there is no such thing as a standard compiler (and/or interpreter), and confusion runs rampant all too often with CORRECTLY written English. An attempt to gloss over mistakes as being irrelevant is Just Plain Dumb.
Don't do it. If you simply don't know English well enough to guarantee you're using it correctly, that can be excused: English is a -hard- language. On the other hand, misuse through laziness is idiotic.
-Slarty
I've worked for 100-person companies, and I've worked for 20k-person companies (e.g., UPS, Cisco). And the bottom line is that you have two things going for you: the ability to cherry-pick, and your age. Google -- whatever may come in the years ahead -- will be a huge learning experience, and look great on the resume. Not that MS wouldn't... but what has MS *done* lately? Zilch. Oooh. Vista's coming out. To see how excited people are, check out its stock performance over the past five years.
Google is going to fly high, or crash hard, but whatever happens, it will be *interesting*. You'll learn stuff -- both practical, and not-so-practical. And you'll have a hell of a lot of fun. I think MS is way too entrenched in its own mindset to be able to offer anything like the experience you'd get at Google. Sure, if Google does well, it just might become the next MS -- but that's then, and, to be cliche, this is now.
Google, mon, Google. MS ain't going anywhere, and if Google flops, I'm sure they'll be glad to have you.
-Slarty
First, let me just say that OpenVPN is the coolest VPN solution, ever. There's a GUI for Windows users, it can tunnel through ANYTHING (NTLM authentication through a proxy server? No problem!), it's incredibly flexible, it has features out the wazoo, it has good documentation and -- get THIS -- the logs actually contain stuff that helps you fix problems. "Certificate file /etc/openvpn/keys/foo.crt not found." Stuff like that. However, apparently (since OpenVPN -also- uses UDP by default, thus eliminating TCP-over-TCP cascading issues), there's more to OpenVPN than meets my eye; on a BBS I'm a member of (telnet://whip.isca.uiowa.edu), one of the more network-savvy folks had some commentary:
OpenVPN is the only "SSL VPN" that uses UDP, yes. They invented a protocol that
uses SSL over UDP for authentication, and until they did, SSL had never been
implemented over UDP. There's now an IETF Internet Draft for DTLS, which is
another SSL over UDP protocol specification, but no one else uses it yet,
AFAIK, and it's still just an Internet Draft, not an RFC yet. The others
implemented their SSL VPNs over TCP for two reasons:
1) There wasn't a standard SSL over UDP specification to implement.
2) SSL over UDP doesn't look like HTTPS, which is half the appeal of these
products, because looking like HTTPS is often what gets them through
a firewall on their end when a conventional VPN client can't get through.
Note that OpenVPN doesn't transport its data stream over SSL. They use IPSec
ESP over UDP for that, the same as standard IPSec NAT-T does. They just use
SSL over UDP for session authentication and management--in other words, as
an IKE replacement, as far as I can tell. In that respect, there's really
not much to differentiate it from IPSec NAT-T.
Yes, they do. Apparently, however -- and I got this from someone who actually works at Segway -- he hadn't been given formal training, and stepped on it when it hadn't yet been powered up. No gyros spinning, DAMN hard to balance. (I actually made the same mistake -- you WILL go down when 100 lbs. with a very low center of balance is disagreeing with you.)
You're cute. And, yes, warm, fuzzy, and silly. While you make some valid points, the point *I* was making was one you failed to address: the simple fact that, by accepting the job of press secretary, one essentially disowns any views that one might have. IT IS PART AND PARCEL OF THE JOB. After one leaves the post -- or, say, in the case of Tony Snow, before one takes the post -- one is clearly free to state one's views, so long as said person hasn't taken yet *another* PR flak job. In which case, rewind/play. Most large companies have PR folks; it's their JOB -- their whole reason for being -- to tell the the party line in as upbeat a manner as possible, and to put good spin on bad things.
And, while I generally do try to stay away from polarized/binary points-of-view, I think that any press secretary who stated his own personal views while in the employ of an entity with whom (s)he might differ, would very quickly find themselves looking for other employ.
Hello? "Birds of a feather flock together." Social groups, networks, etc., tend to attract like-minded people. And guess what? Slashdot works on submissions from its readerbase. If you see a good story on a site, SUBMIT IT. Regardless of political affiliation. If you don't submit, you can't acq... no, wait, that doesn't work. But don't bitch if you ain't submitting.
C'mon, folks: the words "press secretary" are simply code for "weasel." Anyone who thinks otherwie -- and mind you, this is totally regardless of party affiliation -- is being silly. The one and only press secretary for whom I hold any respect is Reagen's, one Jim Brady. During the assassination attempt, he was shot in the head, with substantial brain damange. The work he's done to control the unfettered access to handguns is nothing short of remarkable; he and his wife are to be commended. All other press secreteries are simply PR figureheads, who never -- not ever -- present their own views, if, indeed, they even have any. (A fine and juicy movie that deals with similar people is Thank You for Smoking. See it.)
That's right! I'd forgotten!
It's like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame)'s argument re: Santa: I don't believe he exists, but there's no downside to believing he does, and if he does exist and I don't believe in him, I won't get presents.
;-)
So, yes, I'll respond to your post.
Wasn't this an April Fool's Slashdot joke?
The bottleneck is infrastructure: there's no way around the fact that your cable modem/phone line/T1/DSL/whatever winds up at some aggregating point. Wireless is, in a real sense, even worse -- sure, it could avoid said aggregation, but it's wide open. The only true way (and, by the way, the idea behind the genesis of S/WAN) is for encryption to become de-facto. If and when that happens, THEN, and ONLY THEN, will there be the ability to avoid scanning of your stuff by .
Of course, I sure the hell wouldn't put it past the gov't to outlaw encryption. It's not like they haven't done it before.