And the truth is the boys at the Washington Think Tank ought to be thrilled. This is a free enterprise owned by free and private people who voted on how to run the enterprise they own. They made a decision to "go green" without some regulator forcing them to do so. Its a shining example about how FREEDOM AND CAPITALISM can work. Its evidence that with success and affluence people and even legal fictions like corporations "do the right thing".
Apples energy police IS a case against regulation.
failure of Gox has more to do with the failure of their accountants than with what services they provided or currencies they dealt in.
Given how long this was happening for its impossible to belive anyone was doing any accounting whatsoever at Gox. I understand how the padding bug was exploited to make to do duplicate transactions, but I can't understand how that did not show up in the accounting almost immediately. Is quite baffling unless they were not doing any. Duplicate transactions in one direction should have resulted in lop sided ledger entries. If it did not than they were *correctly* putting in adjusting entries to make the net of the transaction they thought failed net out to zero. That would make the books appear to balance but the moment someone actually audited the Btc wallet it should have again been obvious they had a serious problem, if the volume of adjustments itself was not a big enough red flag.
Well that is pretty clearly a failure of the application documents.thecompanyheworksfor should be authenticated by the application in some fashion. An SSL certificate or similar. Otherwise it was always vulnerable to anyone who could manipulate DNS.
Whats more likely to happen is Mike opens up his laptop at home. The sync program starts up, and attempts a to resolve documents.thecompanyheworksfor, yesterday when it got back NXDOIN it immediately went back to sleep, got out of the way etc, concluding Mike was not on the corporate network. Today it gets back an address and hangs while it tries again and again to see if this server at 127.0.53.53 is going to respond.
Right its a good idea to expect every application developer everywhere to put a special case test into their code see if the value in the buffer after a call to gethostbyname is 127.0.53.53 rather than just checking the return code and using the value directly or not based on the return code. Doing this means a new branch in every new app, for no real reason; It means odd behavior in old/not updated code that expects to either successfully resolve and address or not.
Case in point someone introduced a hostname into our DNS recently that caused a major application to break. Turned out there was a stale config entry for a hostname that no longer existed. As long as it had been getting back NXDOMIN things hummed along nicely, it just tried the next host in its list from a config file. When someone added that name back it, it started trying to connect to the new server ( which did not run the application it was expecting and did not listen on that port ) this would cause long timeouts on login while it tried and retried the other server. I grant this was a configuration error, someone should have cleaned that old config file, but there are situations like laptops where this might not be the case. Inside your organization.mail might exist as a zone, take the machine home and CustomAPP might work fine today getting NXDOMIN and switching to a local database or trying a different public hostname etc, now its going get back 127.0.53.53 and quite likely not know what to do; when the service isn't there.
No its patently stupid for the name resolution system to return BAD data. If something like.mail is not allocated or de-alocated than it does not exist, and NXDOMIN is what a public DNS system should return. The meaning is clear.
The problem really isn't so much not being able to reach some.home, on the internal network or even something.home on the Internet when you already have a local.home. zone.
The problem is all the uncounted config files out there with unqualified or partially qualified names in them. The RFCs are not entirely clear on what the correct behavior is, and worse the web browser folks have decided to implement the behavior differently themselves in some cases, rather than use the system nss services/apis.
So if you imagine an environment where DHCP configures a list of DNS search suffixes, and one of those is something like us.example.com or something. How the Windows boxes interpret a query mobile.mail (note no trailing dot) will possibly be different than the way the Linux machines do, and different than what the OS X machines do, etc and what Chrome or Firefox decide to do might be different than what nslookup does even on the same machine!
Its going to be nightmarish from a support and troubleshooting perspective, and lets face it nobody on your PC tech team really understands DNS, your network admins probably have a good handle but some major blind spots, and your developers are accustomed to making what are now dangerous assumptions. I am not sure I fully understand DNS on most days.
This is going to be a support nightmare at least at some sites, even some places where the ONLY sin was not using FQDNs everywhere all the time. Which might have deliberate, perhaps not the best way to have gone about it but knowing how search domains operate, and being able to set them with DHCP is entirely possible and like someone architect-ed mobile systems getting a local resource by depending on that behavior.
There are all kinds of potential security problems too. The gTLD expansion is making the Internet both less reliable and less safe.
My guess would be Netflix does not care or does not care much. Radio Shack probably paid them something for those promo subscriptions. If anything Radio Shack will now have to buy more from Netflix to ensure they can provide them to their own legitimately entitled customers.
Even if it was a handshake deal where Radio Shack gets to offer a free month of Netflix to entice customers and Netflix gets a shot a retaining some of those subscribers who might not otherwise try the server they probably still don't really care much. It isn't as if Neflix does not offer a free month to all new subscribers anyway! I would guess Netflix's own promo system is smart enough to not let you sign up for a free month multiple times from the same billing address. Where as with these promo codes, each code is probably good for a month of service. So at worst they suffer a few dead beats for a short period. Bandwidth isn't free but I would still guess Netflix incremental per customer costs are very low. Who knows maybe even a handful of cheats will decide they like the service enough to hang around and start paying.
Also on the Netflix side, I'd guess if you use more than a handful of promo codes over a period of a year or so it triggers at least an automated account audit and they probably know what campaign the codes belong to; how far will they go to prove you did not buy 6 PCs from Radio Shack, I don't know. They can probably catch the worst abusers if they care to try.
That sounds 'fair' but it would essentially destroy innovation. Sure the Google's of the world could afford to do those things but the guy working in his garage never could. Its 'regulation' like this that essentially destroys the concept of a free market.
Ultimately the people who decide to 'use' a technology or device under specific conditions need to be responsible. Unless it can be show the device itself is fundamentally hazardous, like just turning it on makes it likely to catch fire or something. In this case drivers need to be responsible, and asses for themselves if a device is to distracting or not to use while driving. Drivers need to be held accountable and know they will be held accountable when the error and cause harm to others.
Ultimately others don't have a legitimate reason to care why you rear ended them / ran over their cat / t-boned them in an intersection what have you, only that you committed the error and were at fault. Frankly why I don't think should matter much. The fact you were day dreaming, drunk, stoned, on your phone, etc does not change the outcome. The law as far as liability is concerned should focus solely on if it was operator error or not.
As far as criminality is concerned it should focus on negligence or not; that is were you operating recklessly or not. If knew or reasonably could have known something or condition was distracting, intoxicating, or otherwise reducing your abilities to a degree that would impair your ability to safely drive and you did anyway it should be considered criminal. There again it should not matter, if its drink, advanced age, Google Glass, etc.
Paying for private healthcare will eat the federal budget.
You won't find anyone who was more anti-AFCA than I was. Still I don't think paying for health care has to break the budget.
The way we have implemented it sure will though. As a society we really need to answer some very fundamental questions we mostly refuse to talk about. In fact the AFCA actually makes the problems worse by mostly removing the lifetime cap on benefits.
The AOL fiasco of some weeks ago highlights the issue, regardless of if those two babies had anything to do with AOL really needing to cut the bottom line; the question still exists; what amount of shared resources can we really justify to the care of one individual? Under a purely capitalist system the problem solves itself, you have the resources to take care of yourself/family or they die. Simple, and fair or unfair depending on your definition of fairness (we could have a long philosophical debate on the subject).
How do you equate the value of a life against the standard of living for everyone else? Should I pay 30% taxes, 50%, 90%, 99% to keep someone else's premature baby alive? We cannot as a society say we are just going to commit every available resource to the preservation of every life, we probably really do need "death panels" or we go back to you can pay or you can't. Health care is already 1/6th of the economy. When do we decide some of that money should go back to people's individual pursuit of happiness, or infrastructure, or basic research outside of medical?
There is no answer that is going to be universally satisfying or agreeable. Someone suffers. Its a limited world.
No geeks generally just look for Better way. Moving SSH to a nonstandard port makes it harder to use. There are better tools like IPtables rules which can limit the maximum number of connections from a given host to say five for minute, or whatever value is reasonable in your case. This way you don't remember to specify nonstandard port every time, but it's still completely effective in preventing brood force attacks. The stupid scanners will find you try five times then get no response assume the host is gone and move on.
I don't commit crimes, I don't associate with known criminals, I pay my taxes, and I drive safely. And you know what? The authorities and government leave me alone.
I am going to Godwin this. I suspect lots of German Jews might have said the same thing if you'd asked them in 1932. I suspect they would have offered a different opinion in 1942. I bet lots of Japanese Americans would have had a similar evolution of opinion.
This is not the sun blowing up there is plenty of historical precedent for this even if you don't consider Nazi Germany. Its happened before it *could* I am not saying will happen again. There are obvious things that make it less likely to happen. One of those things being the government not having an efficient method of preventing citizens from letting each other know what is going on. Everything is about balancing risks. You have to consider both the likelyhood of an event and the consequences of the event.
The risk of someone stealing your smart phone is probably high compared to the risk of government massively abusing peoples rights and stealing our democracy. It has however happened before even here in the good'ole USA! We have watched around the world as governments have sought to curtail communication on things like twitter, to cover their miss deeds; if they were up to no good and in possession of kill switch it would be used. In some ways the more localized you make the kill switch the more dangerous, fewer people will notice others were silenced, and it will make it easier to deny after the fact. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat clad slashdot reader, you could watch the regular TeeVee news and draw these same conclusions. The consequences tilt the scales though, your phone gets purloined well if you could afford a smart phone in the first place you can probably get another; your freedom gets purloined, you may never get it back.
To use a car analogy, demanding carriers implement a kill switch would be like demanding SUNOCO keep a registry of stolen vehicles and verify license plates at all their filling stations before selling anyone gas. Not that most US cellular operators don't deserve to be spend to 'that special hell', its still not fair to burden them with problems which are not their own.
You are responsible for your own property. If you can't hold on to your phone buy some theft insurance for it. As others have stated there is a huge risk to consumers posed by remote wipe and kill switch technology. What happens when your angry girlfirend falsely reports your phone stolen? What happens if the carrier's network get breached and someone sends the kill commands to all devices. What if its just a leak like Verizon's text portal awhile back and someone just spams the system with tons of false reports?
These guys don't have the track record to properly manage this kind of power. They also don't have any moral obligation to you in the first place.
I don't think the model will work for internet service. Separating electrical generation from distribution is one thing. Someone has to generate electricity, some has to maintain and distribution network. Modern ISP are pretty much just distribution. It's not what they provide news and web hosting anymore. How much are we supposed to pay a month for a DNS server and maybe mail, when everyone uses Gmail instead the maybe even Google DNS?
They really are just transfer providers now to get your packets to the backbone nothing more. I don't think you can really separate production and distribution.
Even as a capitalist I would argue competition is not itself an effenciey. It drives the creation of efficiencies, in a compete or die environment. Simply creating competitors with no reason for there being other than competition itself is trying to push a string.
Sure. And people can just decide not to eat for prolonged time whenever no acceptable way to generate income is available.
If you want to eat offer something of value to someone with food. Truth is the number of people in the US who could not afford the calories basic nutrients they need to survive even is vanishingly small. Sure that might mean a diet of whatever canned vegetable is on special this week, beans, fortified bread and water; eaten cold because you have no resources with which to cook it. Pretend whatever you want but most people could easily meet their needs if they thought about it.
Not eating when you are unwilling to do anything for your supper is not exploitation, demanding someone feed you is.
You mean, government activity like protection of lives? Protection of freedom? Or protection of any other human rights?
I would argue freedom and private property are synonymous. Please try to define freedom without it coming down to being able to have things that are yours to do with as 'you like' or a have a place to do in what 'you wish'. Protecting private property is again pretty much the same thing as protecting lives. Nobody should be able to just kill you and take your stuff, instead they should have to offer you something you will accept in exchange for it. Nobody should be able to come and kill you for practicing your faith in your home, its your home; etc. "Human rights" needs a defined as well, that means something different to pretty much anyone you ask.
People never seem to understand is Communism just exchanges one currency for another, instead of trading gold or dollars of people just trade political influence and favors. Naturally favors and influence are much harder to account for the dollars, so the tendency is going to be of course toward corruption as transparency becomes nearly impossible.
No under capitalism no one is exploited. Values exchanges for value and nobody does anything forcibly against their will. It's only when you add government activity beyond the protection of private property that you get exportation. Suddenly there all these regulations and tax requirements and other things that require people to do things.
The Practice was never about economical source of nuclear feel as you say. It was to avoid a security nightmare where there would be large quantities of un accounted for nuclear weapons, and ideally to prop up the Russian Federation at the same time, least it become a failed state. Failure certainly did look possible in the early 90s.
No your counter argument is incorrect. All of those things are there to protect you from a statistical existent risk. Perhaps your smoke detector has never detected smoke but there are many houses and some have caught fire. The same for air bags we know lots people of car accidents every day and those airbags deployed saving lives. Thing is there lots of flights every day to the TSA is never caught a terrorist. I really only been a handful of incense in the last decade all them gotten past the TSA. Which demonstrates the TSA is both ineffective as a detective control and unneeded as the statistical risk is vanishingly small.
I don't think it has to be hypocritical. I can wish someone would be quiet or self censor, while at the same time respecting the right to speak. I can also appreciate there may be a time when someone wishes I would self censor and yet be glad that I would still have the right to speak if I felt compelled to do so.
In Other words I don't think a free-speech advocate is being hypocritical until he asks for someone else be censored, expressing a regret at hearing another's words is not a violation of the principle.
As a fellow Slackware user I echo you sentiment but I kinda suspect we are going to end up with Systemd.
Even some comments Volkerdi has made reflect that. Now that some big dominos like Debian have toppled its probably over. To much of the user land is ending up with Systemd as a hard dependency. Because of the Systemd spawns processes and tracks things the daemons themselves have to get modified which makes them all require Systemd. udev and udisks getting the shotgun wedding treatment to Systemd as well is yet another problem.
The options for Slackware are looking more and more like (from what I can see):
1) End up with a hopeless broken or obsolete set up packages 2) Spend tons of time and energy maintaining forks of thins like udev and patches for everything else, which would take to many resources away for everything else. 3) Move to more user land borrowed from BSD taking Slackware very far out of the Linux mainstream 4) Accept that unlike other things such as Linux Pam its going to be to difficult to swim up stream on this one and just deal with Systemd, as its intended to be used. 5) Come up with some really characteristically un-Slackware complex and kludgy solution like have Systemd call the existing init scripts or a patched init itself.
I know Patrick will find a way through. He always has and I have confidence he and the people he keeps in the inner circle of Slackware development will find a way to stay on the projects mission and remain a top quality distribution. The reality though is Slackware is today probably among the smallest of what people would generally call a main line Linux distribution. Without some other majors players also not going Systemd I am not sure there is enough mind share out there to resist it.
Citation please. If anything salaries have been broadly flat. I don't know maybe salary growth has exceeded averages among cable providers, possible. As you say those not as many new customers, and more customers who already have cable tv don't need cables run and being more internet savy than 10 years ago do self installs. They should if anything be able cut staff. Both on the installer side and on the back office support provisioning end.
Upstream and transport network bandwidth is getting cheaper. So that cost should be going down for them too. I don't see much evidence to support them doing any cable plant upgrades to offer more bandwidth to the home. Most of them have little or no competition so they are content to make 50Mbps down / 15 up their max offerings most places and not splitting the segments up and doing more fiber home runs to enable them to offer more. The lack of incentives to continue investment in enhanced cable plant should also if anything be lowering their costs.
Looking forward if they need more IP bandwidth they can just start scaling back the television offerings that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. Again I don't see their costs going up.
Frankly this merger if allowed looks more like an opportunity for gouging than anything else. Normally I am laissez-faire type when it comes to markets. I'd say let them merge; but this is a case where these companies only are able to operate in the first place because of government granted rights of way. Either the rights of way ought to be reconsidered and property owners allowed to charge them rent, or we should just start regulating them like public utilities.
I agree that will help a lot but it still won't solve the problem. The problems is the size of the sub that's through skateboarders just upset on out there. You can always weapon eyes local subnet cause her is no router to enforce ACL hosts and talk to each other directly. You spoof a few packets 100 or so little Soho routers out there each with 5 Mb upload and you got quite a lot of bandwidth right there. All of that traffic will indeed be sourcing local network with both the ACL's OraVerse path filtering allow to the target. Add a botnet weaponize few more subnets and you are back to a fairly high-bandwidth distributed attack.
I agree for edge networks there is no good reason for RPF not being enable but you hit the nail on the head when it comes larger customers that have an AS or multiple AS allocations and ip addressing they may not share with you. Its not really as simple as just throwing a switch at most of the sites which really matter.
As far as the home and SoHo users I don't know how the rest of the world is but I don't know any main stream ISP that isn't doing some kind of reverse filtering. I have not been able to get packets with spoofed source addresses to the internet on any of the cable or DSL providers I have had at my homes in the last decade. Can I send some spoofed packets to my neighbor who is probably on the same cable segment, very likely maybe I could even push them around Cox's network, but they don't get to the Internet.
RPF is not going solve the problem of these big amplification DOS attacks either. All it really takes is a handful sites with a decent amount of upstream to not be running RPF or other effective egress filtering and an amplification attack like the recent NTP jobs is possible. So its going to go back to those sites where you can't just enable RPF and go back to playing FlappyBird for the rest of the afternoon. Essentially this is any place where you a significant number of customers who are multi homed. Which in turn describes many corporate entities who do not specialize in Internetworking and like have plenty of vulnerabilities attackers can use to get control of a host or two inside of and launch their DDOS.
Slashdot Mirror
And the truth is the boys at the Washington Think Tank ought to be thrilled. This is a free enterprise owned by free and private people who voted on how to run the enterprise they own. They made a decision to "go green" without some regulator forcing them to do so. Its a shining example about how FREEDOM AND CAPITALISM can work. Its evidence that with success and affluence people and even legal fictions like corporations "do the right thing".
Apples energy police IS a case against regulation.
failure of Gox has more to do with the failure of their accountants than with what services they provided or currencies they dealt in.
Given how long this was happening for its impossible to belive anyone was doing any accounting whatsoever at Gox. I understand how the padding bug was exploited to make to do duplicate transactions, but I can't understand how that did not show up in the accounting almost immediately. Is quite baffling unless they were not doing any. Duplicate transactions in one direction should have resulted in lop sided ledger entries. If it did not than they were *correctly* putting in adjusting entries to make the net of the transaction they thought failed net out to zero. That would make the books appear to balance but the moment someone actually audited the Btc wallet it should have again been obvious they had a serious problem, if the volume of adjustments itself was not a big enough red flag.
Well that is pretty clearly a failure of the application documents.thecompanyheworksfor should be authenticated by the application in some fashion. An SSL certificate or similar. Otherwise it was always vulnerable to anyone who could manipulate DNS.
Whats more likely to happen is Mike opens up his laptop at home. The sync program starts up, and attempts a to resolve documents.thecompanyheworksfor, yesterday when it got back NXDOIN it immediately went back to sleep, got out of the way etc, concluding Mike was not on the corporate network. Today it gets back an address and hangs while it tries again and again to see if this server at 127.0.53.53 is going to respond.
Right its a good idea to expect every application developer everywhere to put a special case test into their code see if the value in the buffer after a call to gethostbyname is 127.0.53.53 rather than just checking the return code and using the value directly or not based on the return code. Doing this means a new branch in every new app, for no real reason; It means odd behavior in old/not updated code that expects to either successfully resolve and address or not.
Case in point someone introduced a hostname into our DNS recently that caused a major application to break. Turned out there was a stale config entry for a hostname that no longer existed. As long as it had been getting back NXDOMIN things hummed along nicely, it just tried the next host in its list from a config file. When someone added that name back it, it started trying to connect to the new server ( which did not run the application it was expecting and did not listen on that port ) this would cause long timeouts on login while it tried and retried the other server. I grant this was a configuration error, someone should have cleaned that old config file, but there are situations like laptops where this might not be the case. Inside your organization .mail might exist as a zone, take the machine home and CustomAPP might work fine today getting NXDOMIN and switching to a local database or trying a different public hostname etc, now its going get back 127.0.53.53 and quite likely not know what to do; when the service isn't there.
No its patently stupid for the name resolution system to return BAD data. If something like .mail is not allocated or de-alocated than it does not exist, and NXDOMIN is what a public DNS system should return. The meaning is clear.
The problem really isn't so much not being able to reach some.home, on the internal network or even something.home on the Internet when you already have a local .home. zone.
The problem is all the uncounted config files out there with unqualified or partially qualified names in them. The RFCs are not entirely clear on what the correct behavior is, and worse the web browser folks have decided to implement the behavior differently themselves in some cases, rather than use the system nss services/apis.
So if you imagine an environment where DHCP configures a list of DNS search suffixes, and one of those is something like us.example.com or something. How the Windows boxes interpret a query mobile.mail (note no trailing dot) will possibly be different than the way the Linux machines do, and different than what the OS X machines do, etc and what Chrome or Firefox decide to do might be different than what nslookup does even on the same machine!
Its going to be nightmarish from a support and troubleshooting perspective, and lets face it nobody on your PC tech team really understands DNS, your network admins probably have a good handle but some major blind spots, and your developers are accustomed to making what are now dangerous assumptions. I am not sure I fully understand DNS on most days.
This is going to be a support nightmare at least at some sites, even some places where the ONLY sin was not using FQDNs everywhere all the time. Which might have deliberate, perhaps not the best way to have gone about it but knowing how search domains operate, and being able to set them with DHCP is entirely possible and like someone architect-ed mobile systems getting a local resource by depending on that behavior.
There are all kinds of potential security problems too. The gTLD expansion is making the Internet both less reliable and less safe.
My guess would be Netflix does not care or does not care much. Radio Shack probably paid them something for those promo subscriptions. If anything Radio Shack will now have to buy more from Netflix to ensure they can provide them to their own legitimately entitled customers.
Even if it was a handshake deal where Radio Shack gets to offer a free month of Netflix to entice customers and Netflix gets a shot a retaining some of those subscribers who might not otherwise try the server they probably still don't really care much. It isn't as if Neflix does not offer a free month to all new subscribers anyway! I would guess Netflix's own promo system is smart enough to not let you sign up for a free month multiple times from the same billing address. Where as with these promo codes, each code is probably good for a month of service. So at worst they suffer a few dead beats for a short period. Bandwidth isn't free but I would still guess Netflix incremental per customer costs are very low. Who knows maybe even a handful of cheats will decide they like the service enough to hang around and start paying.
Also on the Netflix side, I'd guess if you use more than a handful of promo codes over a period of a year or so it triggers at least an automated account audit and they probably know what campaign the codes belong to; how far will they go to prove you did not buy 6 PCs from Radio Shack, I don't know. They can probably catch the worst abusers if they care to try.
2 years from production and 10 years before the regulators first begin to think about permitting what will be essentially a drone with passengers.
That sounds 'fair' but it would essentially destroy innovation. Sure the Google's of the world could afford to do those things but the guy working in his garage never could. Its 'regulation' like this that essentially destroys the concept of a free market.
Ultimately the people who decide to 'use' a technology or device under specific conditions need to be responsible. Unless it can be show the device itself is fundamentally hazardous, like just turning it on makes it likely to catch fire or something. In this case drivers need to be responsible, and asses for themselves if a device is to distracting or not to use while driving. Drivers need to be held accountable and know they will be held accountable when the error and cause harm to others.
Ultimately others don't have a legitimate reason to care why you rear ended them / ran over their cat / t-boned them in an intersection what have you, only that you committed the error and were at fault. Frankly why I don't think should matter much. The fact you were day dreaming, drunk, stoned, on your phone, etc does not change the outcome. The law as far as liability is concerned should focus solely on if it was operator error or not.
As far as criminality is concerned it should focus on negligence or not; that is were you operating recklessly or not. If knew or reasonably could have known something or condition was distracting, intoxicating, or otherwise reducing your abilities to a degree that would impair your ability to safely drive and you did anyway it should be considered criminal. There again it should not matter, if its drink, advanced age, Google Glass, etc.
Paying for private healthcare will eat the federal budget.
You won't find anyone who was more anti-AFCA than I was. Still I don't think paying for health care has to break the budget.
The way we have implemented it sure will though. As a society we really need to answer some very fundamental questions we mostly refuse to talk about. In fact the AFCA actually makes the problems worse by mostly removing the lifetime cap on benefits.
The AOL fiasco of some weeks ago highlights the issue, regardless of if those two babies had anything to do with AOL really needing to cut the bottom line; the question still exists; what amount of shared resources can we really justify to the care of one individual? Under a purely capitalist system the problem solves itself, you have the resources to take care of yourself/family or they die. Simple, and fair or unfair depending on your definition of fairness (we could have a long philosophical debate on the subject).
How do you equate the value of a life against the standard of living for everyone else? Should I pay 30% taxes, 50%, 90%, 99% to keep someone else's premature baby alive? We cannot as a society say we are just going to commit every available resource to the preservation of every life, we probably really do need "death panels" or we go back to you can pay or you can't. Health care is already 1/6th of the economy. When do we decide some of that money should go back to people's individual pursuit of happiness, or infrastructure, or basic research outside of medical?
There is no answer that is going to be universally satisfying or agreeable. Someone suffers. Its a limited world.
No geeks generally just look for Better way. Moving SSH to a nonstandard port makes it harder to use. There are better tools like IPtables rules which can limit the maximum number of connections from a given host to say five for minute, or whatever value is reasonable in your case. This way you don't remember to specify nonstandard port every time, but it's still completely effective in preventing brood force attacks. The stupid scanners will find you try five times then get no response assume the host is gone and move on.
I don't commit crimes, I don't associate with known criminals, I pay my taxes, and I drive safely. And you know what? The authorities and government leave me alone.
I am going to Godwin this. I suspect lots of German Jews might have said the same thing if you'd asked them in 1932. I suspect they would have offered a different opinion in 1942. I bet lots of Japanese Americans would have had a similar evolution of opinion.
This is not the sun blowing up there is plenty of historical precedent for this even if you don't consider Nazi Germany. Its happened before it *could* I am not saying will happen again. There are obvious things that make it less likely to happen. One of those things being the government not having an efficient method of preventing citizens from letting each other know what is going on. Everything is about balancing risks. You have to consider both the likelyhood of an event and the consequences of the event.
The risk of someone stealing your smart phone is probably high compared to the risk of government massively abusing peoples rights and stealing our democracy. It has however happened before even here in the good'ole USA!
We have watched around the world as governments have sought to curtail communication on things like twitter, to cover their miss deeds; if they were up to no good and in possession of kill switch it would be used. In some ways the more localized you make the kill switch the more dangerous, fewer people will notice others were silenced, and it will make it easier to deny after the fact. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat clad slashdot reader, you could watch the regular TeeVee news and draw these same conclusions. The consequences tilt the scales though, your phone gets purloined well if you could afford a smart phone in the first place you can probably get another; your freedom gets purloined, you may never get it back.
and the statement will be true, you will no doubt be permitted to keep your expensive paper weight.
To use a car analogy, demanding carriers implement a kill switch would be like demanding SUNOCO keep a registry of stolen vehicles and verify license plates at all their filling stations before selling anyone gas. Not that most US cellular operators don't deserve to be spend to 'that special hell', its still not fair to burden them with problems which are not their own.
You are responsible for your own property. If you can't hold on to your phone buy some theft insurance for it. As others have stated there is a huge risk to consumers posed by remote wipe and kill switch technology. What happens when your angry girlfirend falsely reports your phone stolen? What happens if the carrier's network get breached and someone sends the kill commands to all devices. What if its just a leak like Verizon's text portal awhile back and someone just spams the system with tons of false reports?
These guys don't have the track record to properly manage this kind of power. They also don't have any moral obligation to you in the first place.
I don't think the model will work for internet service. Separating electrical generation from distribution is one thing. Someone has to generate electricity, some has to maintain and distribution network. Modern ISP are pretty much just distribution. It's not what they provide news and web hosting anymore. How much are we supposed to pay a month for a DNS server and maybe mail, when everyone uses Gmail instead the maybe even Google DNS?
They really are just transfer providers now to get your packets to the backbone nothing more. I don't think you can really separate production and distribution.
Even as a capitalist I would argue competition is not itself an effenciey. It drives the creation of efficiencies, in a compete or die environment. Simply creating competitors with no reason for there being other than competition itself is trying to push a string.
Sure. And people can just decide not to eat for prolonged time whenever no acceptable way to generate income is available.
If you want to eat offer something of value to someone with food. Truth is the number of people in the US who could not afford the calories basic nutrients they need to survive even is vanishingly small. Sure that might mean a diet of whatever canned vegetable is on special this week, beans, fortified bread and water; eaten cold because you have no resources with which to cook it. Pretend whatever you want but most people could easily meet their needs if they thought about it.
Not eating when you are unwilling to do anything for your supper is not exploitation, demanding someone feed you is.
You mean, government activity like protection of lives? Protection of freedom? Or protection of any other human rights?
I would argue freedom and private property are synonymous. Please try to define freedom without it coming down to being able to have things that are yours to do with as 'you like' or a have a place to do in what 'you wish'. Protecting private property is again pretty much the same thing as protecting lives. Nobody should be able to just kill you and take your stuff, instead they should have to offer you something you will accept in exchange for it. Nobody should be able to come and kill you for practicing your faith in your home, its your home; etc. "Human rights" needs a defined as well, that means something different to pretty much anyone you ask.
People never seem to understand is Communism just exchanges one currency for another, instead of trading gold or dollars of people just trade political influence and favors. Naturally favors and influence are much harder to account for the dollars, so the tendency is going to be of course toward corruption as transparency becomes nearly impossible.
No under capitalism no one is exploited. Values exchanges for value and nobody does anything forcibly against their will. It's only when you add government activity beyond the protection of private property that you get exportation. Suddenly there all these regulations and tax requirements and other things that require people to do things.
What were the odds of a whole bunch of teen girls claiming to have experienced witchcraft in Salem? Mass hysteria it happens.
The Practice was never about economical source of nuclear feel as you say. It was to avoid a security nightmare where there would be large quantities of un accounted for nuclear weapons, and ideally to prop up the Russian Federation at the same time, least it become a failed state. Failure certainly did look possible in the early 90s.
No your counter argument is incorrect. All of those things are there to protect you from a statistical existent risk. Perhaps your smoke detector has never detected smoke but there are many houses and some have caught fire. The same for air bags we know lots people of car accidents every day and those airbags deployed saving lives. Thing is there lots of flights every day to the TSA is never caught a terrorist. I really only been a handful of incense in the last decade all them gotten past the TSA. Which demonstrates the TSA is both ineffective as a detective control and unneeded as the statistical risk is vanishingly small.
I don't think it has to be hypocritical. I can wish someone would be quiet or self censor, while at the same time respecting the right to speak. I can also appreciate there may be a time when someone wishes I would self censor and yet be glad that I would still have the right to speak if I felt compelled to do so.
In Other words I don't think a free-speech advocate is being hypocritical until he asks for someone else be censored, expressing a regret at hearing another's words is not a violation of the principle.
As a fellow Slackware user I echo you sentiment but I kinda suspect we are going to end up with Systemd.
Even some comments Volkerdi has made reflect that. Now that some big dominos like Debian have toppled its probably over. To much of the user land is ending up with Systemd as a hard dependency. Because of the Systemd spawns processes and tracks things the daemons themselves have to get modified which makes them all require Systemd. udev and udisks getting the shotgun wedding treatment to Systemd as well is yet another problem.
The options for Slackware are looking more and more like (from what I can see):
1) End up with a hopeless broken or obsolete set up packages
2) Spend tons of time and energy maintaining forks of thins like udev and patches for everything else, which would take to many resources away for everything else.
3) Move to more user land borrowed from BSD taking Slackware very far out of the Linux mainstream
4) Accept that unlike other things such as Linux Pam its going to be to difficult to swim up stream on this one and just deal with Systemd, as its intended to be used.
5) Come up with some really characteristically un-Slackware complex and kludgy solution like have Systemd call the existing init scripts or a patched init itself.
I know Patrick will find a way through. He always has and I have confidence he and the people he keeps in the inner circle of Slackware development will find a way to stay on the projects mission and remain a top quality distribution. The reality though is Slackware is today probably among the smallest of what people would generally call a main line Linux distribution. Without some other majors players also not going Systemd I am not sure there is enough mind share out there to resist it.
and costs are increasing with salary raises
Citation please. If anything salaries have been broadly flat. I don't know maybe salary growth has exceeded averages among cable providers, possible. As you say those not as many new customers, and more customers who already have cable tv don't need cables run and being more internet savy than 10 years ago do self installs. They should if anything be able cut staff. Both on the installer side and on the back office support provisioning end.
Upstream and transport network bandwidth is getting cheaper. So that cost should be going down for them too. I don't see much evidence to support them doing any cable plant upgrades to offer more bandwidth to the home. Most of them have little or no competition so they are content to make 50Mbps down / 15 up their max offerings most places and not splitting the segments up and doing more fiber home runs to enable them to offer more. The lack of incentives to continue investment in enhanced cable plant should also if anything be lowering their costs.
Looking forward if they need more IP bandwidth they can just start scaling back the television offerings that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. Again I don't see their costs going up.
Frankly this merger if allowed looks more like an opportunity for gouging than anything else. Normally I am laissez-faire type when it comes to markets. I'd say let them merge; but this is a case where these companies only are able to operate in the first place because of government granted rights of way. Either the rights of way ought to be reconsidered and property owners allowed to charge them rent, or we should just start regulating them like public utilities.
I agree that will help a lot but it still won't solve the problem. The problems is the size of the sub that's through skateboarders just upset on out there. You can always weapon eyes local subnet cause her is no router to enforce ACL hosts and talk to each other directly. You spoof a few packets 100 or so little Soho routers out there each with 5 Mb upload and you got quite a lot of bandwidth right there. All of that traffic will indeed be sourcing local network with both the ACL's OraVerse path filtering allow to the target. Add a botnet weaponize few more subnets and you are back to a fairly high-bandwidth distributed attack.
I agree for edge networks there is no good reason for RPF not being enable but you hit the nail on the head when it comes larger customers that have an AS or multiple AS allocations and ip addressing they may not share with you. Its not really as simple as just throwing a switch at most of the sites which really matter.
As far as the home and SoHo users I don't know how the rest of the world is but I don't know any main stream ISP that isn't doing some kind of reverse filtering. I have not been able to get packets with spoofed source addresses to the internet on any of the cable or DSL providers I have had at my homes in the last decade. Can I send some spoofed packets to my neighbor who is probably on the same cable segment, very likely maybe I could even push them around Cox's network, but they don't get to the Internet.
RPF is not going solve the problem of these big amplification DOS attacks either. All it really takes is a handful sites with a decent amount of upstream to not be running RPF or other effective egress filtering and an amplification attack like the recent NTP jobs is possible. So its going to go back to those sites where you can't just enable RPF and go back to playing FlappyBird for the rest of the afternoon. Essentially this is any place where you a significant number of customers who are multi homed. Which in turn describes many corporate entities who do not specialize in Internetworking and like have plenty of vulnerabilities attackers can use to get control of a host or two inside of and launch their DDOS.