I think you are over looking the potential for municipal broadband to choke change and growth. Say what you will about Comcast and friends but we have things like 100Mbps down 75Mpbs up links at affordable prices. Compare that to what you could get in your home a decade ago. Now think about how fast your local municipality does changes anything. Consider the article about Flit Michigan's water system the other day. The issue was really not the water source but the infrastructure. How many places have over crowed schools, etc?
I am sure public broadband systems could deliver today's technology to consumers more cheaply and better serve under served areas, but the cost would likely be that the level of service rarely improves. If the municipality gets it wrong about population projections etc, it might end up with a radically under or over capacity system and the issues that causes might take a decade to fix.
One thing is true people almost always choose cheap. If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs. The broad band market is broken because there is to little competition, plan to effectively make it so the government is the only game in town isn't a solution to that.
It's the rich mother fuckers that dont even live there that voted for the current crop of scumbags in charge.
Just like I love when morons like you that can't even see past your own since of indignation post stupid shit that does not make any sense whatsoever.
How do vote for someone in a municipality where you do not live? Oh right you can't and even if some highly corrupt current officials tried to enact legislation that would allow non-residents to vote courts would slap it down in a hot second. Unless you are alleging voter fraud which we all not never actually happens which is why we don't have voter id laws.
As far as holding whoever polluted that river responsive, they more than likely already have been under the CERCLA. Its no longer their fault the EPA and DOJ did not actually spend the recovered monies where the problem exists.
So the locals elect a government, that decides to cheap out and not pay Detroit for safe treated water. They further device to cheap out and not treat the river water, known to be polluted, and screw up their infrastructure in the process.
Now you and I have have to pay to provide them all with bottled water? I realize it probably is a drop in the bucket but WTF? I say locals made their bed and now should lay in it. I am sure they enjoyed lower taxes or got to allocate that money to something else they wanted and enjoyed. They then stick us with the bill for their drinking water.
If they need to buy potable water there is place they can get, its called WalMart! They have a fabulous nation wide distribution system, and the CocaCola company and others are ready and able to feed it with safe good tasting bottled water.
"Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, itâ(TM)s a pretty powerful statement."
How did they get the wealth and influence to do any of this 'good' oh yes by succeeding at capitalism and enjoying a society that gives them the freedom to do what they want with their property, including give it away or do research etc.
The neoliberal crowd loves to complain about capitalism and whine it does not provide social justice etc, but they seem to forget its delivered far more in terms of social justice than ANY system that came before and anything we have seen tried since. Where is the concrete proposal for a better socioeconomic system, and how will it resist corruption etc?
No the reality is LOTR was dumb, C. S. Lewis fixed it. Lets face is Narnia is much more readable and if you don't have some strong sense of anit-Christan or Orientalist bias its an all around much better told fantasy.
LOTR and Hobbit are probably the only books in history that were improved translated to their Hollywood script form. Don't get me wrong I love a rich well described complete fantasy world but Tolkien takes it to such extremes that it ends up being tedious more so than rich.
Impossible to prove therefore impossible to prosecute certainly.
However if the M&A people are knowingly buying up dogs to bail out their VC and entrepreneur buddies they are not meeting their fiduciary responsibilities to the share holders. The SEC would have something to say about that.
The problem of course is all they have to say is "no I really believed with the rights synergies we could increase the value of that business..." and how can we ever prove otherwise. Unless they misrepresented or concealed facts about the balance sheet or something so you could get them on fraud there is not much you can you. You can call them stupid but that isn't a crime, and you have no way to show mal intent.
Yahoo now (which raises tricky legal concerns about who owns who).
Really how? in what way? Yahoo has a minority position in Alibaba. I don't see how its complicated at all. Yahoo I am sure has some voting rights or something where Alibaba is concerned, but I don't know I have never directly held stock in a Chinese company before so common vs preferred etc might work a little different.
No because you should only be using an H1B worker if there was no domestic talent available to do the work.
There are a lot of jobs in the high five figure low six figure range, and this is a BIG country. If the market rate for the work you are seeking is only around $95K than it must be the case there is a supply of available labor. If you are trying to put an H1B worker in that seat its almost certainly because you are trying to game the system. You want to higher someone for $70K when the position ought to command $95 or your working conditions are shit compared to your competitors and you want someone who can't easily leave for green pastures.
Putting a price floor for H1B workers is probably a good way to protect American workers from the system being abused while keep a guest worker program in place so a company that really needs the one guy or gal who wrote a PHD thesis on the Psychology of Sheep and has 10 years.Net development experience can get that person.
That makes no sense if you using a 3rd party certificate authority, you will be either doing in bound SSL termination on the load balancer and put the cert there, or you will be copying the cert and its private key to each server in the farm.
If you are running a web farm you are not having IIS auto generate CSRs unless its only to make requests to an internal CA for the trust relationship between the servers and the balancer.
SHA-1 is NOT used to encrypt the stream. Its used to authenticate the certificate. Some other cipher like RC4, AES, 3DES, etc is selected to encrypt the stream.
It might not be as bad as you think. If you have upgraded to a newer browser you probably can and should enable certificate pinning which would help you discover if you were being subjected to the sort of down grade attack you are describing.
OOTH it leaves the people using older technology with about the same security posture they had before.
The sad part being all those people in repressive regimes most likely need to be the most concerned. "The right thing to do" is probably go ahead and let them get cut off. If they can't logon they can't post something to get intercepted and get them into trouble. FB sees dollar signs though....
Not always the case. There are for example lots of server applications the create a thread to handle each client. Its not uncommon to be able to overwrite memory on the thread without stepping on the parent process. In many cases the parent process will handle a thread terminating unexpectedly just fine.
If its a thread pool situation you might have issues consuming the pool where a borked thread is not returned to the pool of workers resulting in a DOS but in other situations you really might be able to take as many runs at it as you like.
I am not saying this situation is common but I have seen it happen. So for server platforms where we probably care most it *is* important ASLR be well randomized if its going to provide a strong protective mechanism.
In the end though the size of the shell code you can insert without overwriting something that results in a immediate crash is probably the driver. If you have room to store some patterns you can use to search memory and locate the gadgets you need you can defeat ASLR.
they also pay next to nothing to creators and even the labels are not getting nearly as much as they wanted
The labels don't get what they want because they don't provide any real value. The labels were advertisers and distributors at a time when doing so required large amounts of capital resources. The internet has changed there is no good reason to pay that rent anymore. How much can BMG do for you that Patreon or Kickstarter can't? Even if they do still have more to offer now, the gap is shrinking not growing.
At the same time small artists can also get all the recording equipment they need to compete with the big label backed guys on production value. Its all about talent, and there is frankly a lot of talent out there. Its basic supply and demand. There is tons of supply so even in the presence of strong demand, recorded music (in aggregate) isn't worth a lot in terms of pennies per play or dollars for a licensed album copy.
The same market forces are starting to touch the broadcast TV / Cable / Satellite industry both on the production and distribution side. Ultimately the industry will have to change. They can only lawsuit and hide under the skirts of regulation so long. It might take another couple decades but change is coming.
I think that is exactly what we should given the situation. Its apparent to me there is a demand to 'do something' about the Internet. I wish we could sensibly leave well enough alone and recognize that while terrorists and criminals might abuse it the network isn't the problem.
Unfortunately just like with air travel the drum beat for some kind of action is getting pretty loud. The TSA is ineffective and may actually harm the overall security posture. I don't want to see the same thing happen to the Internet at least not domestically.
I would rather passify the 'think of the children and OMG terrists' by adding a few route filters to BGP and severing a few undersea cables and SAT links, than going the online version of 1984 route. We don't want to willfully force broken encryption technology on everyone. That will make us less safe. We don't want the government regulating protocols and having to have monitoring capability built into everything, that will kill innovation.
I am so glad we have a national law requiring everything be digitized despite a lack of interest in doing so by the majority of providers. What a great idea that was.
Simple, they will simply outlaw the use of any unauthorized cryptographic system. You're choices will be soft Clipper 2.0 or plaintext. You do something different and risk prosecution. It won't matter if what you actually ciphered was your grandmothers secret family recipe for peanut butter cookies, or the list of targets you cased for ISIS your ass is going to the federal clink either way.
Politically something WILL be done, they have racheted up the FUD levels to the point the public wants more security theater.
I still say the best course is to assuage the fear by making the Internet a little less global along the lines of Trumps proposal to shut certain parts of it down. The alternative is you are going to have this kinda a crap forced on you. A broken by design system where everything is monitored by the thought police and you had better be running some defined back doored per-approved protocol or someone will be sent over to kick in your actual front door.
Politically this is where its headed right now. I would rather just say the Internet is going to be US - EU - China + [ others that conditionally want to participate ] from now on and still have a somewhat free and flexible network.
That sounds about right. There might be some really exiting fraud happening too.
Those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.
What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposes the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment laws.
While (G|W)all St. has largely convinced itself the Alibaba deal is 'ok' I still would not put a dime into that stock. There are plenty of other companies with similarly good growth prospects to gamble on. I'd rather invest in something where there is legal clarity about what I actually own and how it may be converted than forgo that safety just to net another few points. I wonder if Marissa knows something we don't since she appears to be betting the farm on it.
Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.
A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.
Yahoo I am way less optimistic. In terms of technology, they have produced a gem or two along the way like 'web pipes' I think called it? Most of those never really took off though. In terms of their technology being relevant in the market place they have been floundering since before Google showed up. With the resources they have handy they could probably print money if they had a plan and drove some cool products, but they don't seem to have a technology plan. So this move probably is the best option.
I admit if it was the NSA that would certainly raise my level of concern. Just because it would do that does not mean its reasonable. It amounts to an ad hominem attack on a technology does it not?
Its open source an it has had a lot of eyes on it. So far there have been no OMG moments. On the other hand its remarkable the lack of understanding and sometimes seemingly willful ignorance on the part of the users and press coverage of it. I still to this day here news reports saying things like "Bitcoin, the anonymous online currency" when BitCoin is probably the most traceable currency that has ever existed. Its a heck of a lot more likely you can figure out where a BitCoin has been than a Benjamin. Same goes for all the exciting frauds a few years back around the exchanges. We are banks, no we are commodities brokers, no wait were are retailers etc: trying to figure out what the laws were or evade them. BitCoin was a currency except when it wasn't. So with all that in mind maybe there really are not that many people who have thought critically about it.
Like any other technology crypto currency can be used well or badly by people.
But exactly HOW is anyone going to "shut down", or even "monitor", the Internet
Do you really need to ask that? I mean we have a government so stupidly over sized that the NSA could build a system to log every phone record, X-Key-Score or whatever it was called already monitored a large part of the internet etc and nobody knew until one contractor decided to go public with it.
The got all that done clandestinely, and you think they would have any problem getting it accomplished overtly with an actual budget for it?
Don't be silly. If the public can be sold on the idea its needed, and their memory is short Snowden is fading into the background as we speak, it absolutely the sort of thing that could happen and happen quickly.
Personally I agree. If you look at my posting history you can discover that. I don't think the middle east is our fight, I do think though that if we don't fight them 'over there' they will come 'over here' unless we take some real effective steps to prevent that. No a religious test isn't the answer;
We absolutely do need to know who is visiting here, for how long, and we need to make sure they are checking in often and verifiably from the places they said they would be. We need to make sure you can't get across the boarder illegally. Yes that will be a hard problem the boarder is long, Mexico is ill equipped or unwilling to prevent egress, Canada may prove to be not much better. Someone needs to inspect all those shipping containers too unless they can be X-rayed etc. I don't for a second think it will be easy or cheap. I do think if you allocate the level resources we currently direct at the middle east it CAN be done.
I also KNOW it will negatively effect tourism etc, when there is a 6month backlog in processing of visa's and we have to deny all kinds of applications because well it says here you were in Yemen for 6 months five years ago and we can't account for your time there, denied.
If we want to enjoy the free and open society to which we are accustom I think that is possible, but its going to have to end at boarder. At least until we are not the 'Great Satan' anymore. Which I think will happen, if a generation or two of Middle Eastern Muslims grows up without seening the US military bombing their friends and family. Chinese and Russians will more than likely become the new enemy overtime because they will probably decided they have to intervene to prevent the chaos from spilling of their boarders in our absence.
Oh please its just a question of confirmation bias. Liberals say plenty of things they take on faith and expect us to take on faith too. Consider this quote from the President Sunday:
It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It's our responsibility to reject proposals that muslim-americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose.
To broaden things out a little bit some of our nations biggest economic boom years coincide with periods of our strongest anti-immigrant public sentiment. When we have done horrible things like round up the Japanese Americans and put them in camps we won the biggest conflict the globe has ever seen.
So the president can say what he wants. I (and this is rare) agree we should not apply religious tests to decide who we admin into this country. There is a lot better criteria we can use, that my 'gut' tells me would be more predictive. As far as I am aware though the President's lets not lock out all the Muslims isn't any better supported by the facts than Trump and Cruz wanting to shut them out.
Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy?
Yes.
But I also expect Europe WILL go along with us, as would China most likely. If for not other reason than because
not to mention the political alliances and dependence on foreign trade.
Being cut off from the "US Internet" would be more or less like being cut off from competitive access to the US economy. If you're the EU having to chose between Russia and the Middle East and America, you'll pick America. If you are China the decision is harder, but you know a lot of the other economic powers of Asia are US friendly and if you don't pick the US, you might see your access to South Korea, and Japan dry up too.
No I think if we start making the Internet an more exclusive club we will come out on top.
Its like Curz said the other day "I'll direct the pentagon to destroy ISIS"
Guess what that would probably work and I would expect Trump would say something similar. It would probably work. Our Generals don't get where they are in our armed forces by not being effective. If a president told them "eliminate ISIS, I really don't care how and I'll back you" they could probably get it done.
Most presidents don't have the will do the politically unpopular things they would likely want to do. That isn't necessarily bad but Trumps in ability to do much more than shout "just do it" probably means he would have much greater success than anyone who would be more involved.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are over looking the potential for municipal broadband to choke change and growth. Say what you will about Comcast and friends but we have things like 100Mbps down 75Mpbs up links at affordable prices. Compare that to what you could get in your home a decade ago. Now think about how fast your local municipality does changes anything. Consider the article about Flit Michigan's water system the other day. The issue was really not the water source but the infrastructure. How many places have over crowed schools, etc?
I am sure public broadband systems could deliver today's technology to consumers more cheaply and better serve under served areas, but the cost would likely be that the level of service rarely improves. If the municipality gets it wrong about population projections etc, it might end up with a radically under or over capacity system and the issues that causes might take a decade to fix.
One thing is true people almost always choose cheap. If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs. The broad band market is broken because there is to little competition, plan to effectively make it so the government is the only game in town isn't a solution to that.
It's the rich mother fuckers that dont even live there that voted for the current crop of scumbags in charge.
Just like I love when morons like you that can't even see past your own since of indignation post stupid shit that does not make any sense whatsoever.
How do vote for someone in a municipality where you do not live? Oh right you can't and even if some highly corrupt current officials tried to enact legislation that would allow non-residents to vote courts would slap it down in a hot second. Unless you are alleging voter fraud which we all not never actually happens which is why we don't have voter id laws.
As far as holding whoever polluted that river responsive, they more than likely already have been under the CERCLA. Its no longer their fault the EPA and DOJ did not actually spend the recovered monies where the problem exists.
FEMA is now supplying bottled water to the city.
So the locals elect a government, that decides to cheap out and not pay Detroit for safe treated water. They further device to cheap out and not treat the river water, known to be polluted, and screw up their infrastructure in the process.
Now you and I have have to pay to provide them all with bottled water? I realize it probably is a drop in the bucket but WTF? I say locals made their bed and now should lay in it. I am sure they enjoyed lower taxes or got to allocate that money to something else they wanted and enjoyed. They then stick us with the bill for their drinking water.
If they need to buy potable water there is place they can get, its called WalMart! They have a fabulous nation wide distribution system, and the CocaCola company and others are ready and able to feed it with safe good tasting bottled water.
"Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, itâ(TM)s a pretty powerful statement."
How did they get the wealth and influence to do any of this 'good' oh yes by succeeding at capitalism and enjoying a society that gives them the freedom to do what they want with their property, including give it away or do research etc.
The neoliberal crowd loves to complain about capitalism and whine it does not provide social justice etc, but they seem to forget its delivered far more in terms of social justice than ANY system that came before and anything we have seen tried since. Where is the concrete proposal for a better socioeconomic system, and how will it resist corruption etc?
No the reality is LOTR was dumb, C. S. Lewis fixed it. Lets face is Narnia is much more readable and if you don't have some strong sense of anit-Christan or Orientalist bias its an all around much better told fantasy.
LOTR and Hobbit are probably the only books in history that were improved translated to their Hollywood script form. Don't get me wrong I love a rich well described complete fantasy world but Tolkien takes it to such extremes that it ends up being tedious more so than rich.
I know it isn't even illegal.
Impossible to prove therefore impossible to prosecute certainly.
However if the M&A people are knowingly buying up dogs to bail out their VC and entrepreneur buddies they are not meeting their fiduciary responsibilities to the share holders. The SEC would have something to say about that.
The problem of course is all they have to say is "no I really believed with the rights synergies we could increase the value of that business..." and how can we ever prove otherwise. Unless they misrepresented or concealed facts about the balance sheet or something so you could get them on fraud there is not much you can you. You can call them stupid but that isn't a crime, and you have no way to show mal intent.
Yahoo now (which raises tricky legal concerns about who owns who).
Really how? in what way? Yahoo has a minority position in Alibaba. I don't see how its complicated at all. Yahoo I am sure has some voting rights or something where Alibaba is concerned, but I don't know I have never directly held stock in a Chinese company before so common vs preferred etc might work a little different.
No because you should only be using an H1B worker if there was no domestic talent available to do the work.
There are a lot of jobs in the high five figure low six figure range, and this is a BIG country. If the market rate for the work you are seeking is only around $95K than it must be the case there is a supply of available labor. If you are trying to put an H1B worker in that seat its almost certainly because you are trying to game the system. You want to higher someone for $70K when the position ought to command $95 or your working conditions are shit compared to your competitors and you want someone who can't easily leave for green pastures.
Putting a price floor for H1B workers is probably a good way to protect American workers from the system being abused while keep a guest worker program in place so a company that really needs the one guy or gal who wrote a PHD thesis on the Psychology of Sheep and has 10 years .Net development experience can get that person.
What??
That makes no sense if you using a 3rd party certificate authority, you will be either doing in bound SSL termination on the load balancer and put the cert there, or you will be copying the cert and its private key to each server in the farm.
If you are running a web farm you are not having IIS auto generate CSRs unless its only to make requests to an internal CA for the trust relationship between the servers and the balancer.
SHA-1 encrypted stream
SHA-1 is NOT used to encrypt the stream. Its used to authenticate the certificate. Some other cipher like RC4, AES, 3DES, etc is selected to encrypt the stream.
It might not be as bad as you think. If you have upgraded to a newer browser you probably can and should enable certificate pinning which would help you discover if you were being subjected to the sort of down grade attack you are describing.
OOTH it leaves the people using older technology with about the same security posture they had before.
The sad part being all those people in repressive regimes most likely need to be the most concerned. "The right thing to do" is probably go ahead and let them get cut off. If they can't logon they can't post something to get intercepted and get them into trouble. FB sees dollar signs though....
Not always the case. There are for example lots of server applications the create a thread to handle each client. Its not uncommon to be able to overwrite memory on the thread without stepping on the parent process. In many cases the parent process will handle a thread terminating unexpectedly just fine.
If its a thread pool situation you might have issues consuming the pool where a borked thread is not returned to the pool of workers resulting in a DOS but in other situations you really might be able to take as many runs at it as you like.
I am not saying this situation is common but I have seen it happen. So for server platforms where we probably care most it *is* important ASLR be well randomized if its going to provide a strong protective mechanism.
In the end though the size of the shell code you can insert without overwriting something that results in a immediate crash is probably the driver. If you have room to store some patterns you can use to search memory and locate the gadgets you need you can defeat ASLR.
they also pay next to nothing to creators and even the labels are not getting nearly as much as they wanted
The labels don't get what they want because they don't provide any real value. The labels were advertisers and distributors at a time when doing so required large amounts of capital resources. The internet has changed there is no good reason to pay that rent anymore. How much can BMG do for you that Patreon or Kickstarter can't? Even if they do still have more to offer now, the gap is shrinking not growing.
At the same time small artists can also get all the recording equipment they need to compete with the big label backed guys on production value. Its all about talent, and there is frankly a lot of talent out there. Its basic supply and demand. There is tons of supply so even in the presence of strong demand, recorded music (in aggregate) isn't worth a lot in terms of pennies per play or dollars for a licensed album copy.
The same market forces are starting to touch the broadcast TV / Cable / Satellite industry both on the production and distribution side. Ultimately the industry will have to change. They can only lawsuit and hide under the skirts of regulation so long. It might take another couple decades but change is coming.
I think that is exactly what we should given the situation. Its apparent to me there is a demand to 'do something' about the Internet. I wish we could sensibly leave well enough alone and recognize that while terrorists and criminals might abuse it the network isn't the problem.
Unfortunately just like with air travel the drum beat for some kind of action is getting pretty loud. The TSA is ineffective and may actually harm the overall security posture. I don't want to see the same thing happen to the Internet at least not domestically.
I would rather passify the 'think of the children and OMG terrists' by adding a few route filters to BGP and severing a few undersea cables and SAT links, than going the online version of 1984 route. We don't want to willfully force broken encryption technology on everyone. That will make us less safe. We don't want the government regulating protocols and having to have monitoring capability built into everything, that will kill innovation.
I am so glad we have a national law requiring everything be digitized despite a lack of interest in doing so by the majority of providers. What a great idea that was.
Simple, they will simply outlaw the use of any unauthorized cryptographic system. You're choices will be soft Clipper 2.0 or plaintext. You do something different and risk prosecution. It won't matter if what you actually ciphered was your grandmothers secret family recipe for peanut butter cookies, or the list of targets you cased for ISIS your ass is going to the federal clink either way.
Politically something WILL be done, they have racheted up the FUD levels to the point the public wants more security theater.
I still say the best course is to assuage the fear by making the Internet a little less global along the lines of Trumps proposal to shut certain parts of it down. The alternative is you are going to have this kinda a crap forced on you. A broken by design system where everything is monitored by the thought police and you had better be running some defined back doored per-approved protocol or someone will be sent over to kick in your actual front door.
Politically this is where its headed right now. I would rather just say the Internet is going to be US - EU - China + [ others that conditionally want to participate ] from now on and still have a somewhat free and flexible network.
That sounds about right. There might be some really exiting fraud happening too.
Those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.
What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposes the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment laws.
While (G|W)all St. has largely convinced itself the Alibaba deal is 'ok' I still would not put a dime into that stock. There are plenty of other companies with similarly good growth prospects to gamble on. I'd rather invest in something where there is legal clarity about what I actually own and how it may be converted than forgo that safety just to net another few points. I wonder if Marissa knows something we don't since she appears to be betting the farm on it.
In fairness she is probably on the right track.
Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.
A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.
Yahoo I am way less optimistic. In terms of technology, they have produced a gem or two along the way like 'web pipes' I think called it? Most of those never really took off though. In terms of their technology being relevant in the market place they have been floundering since before Google showed up. With the resources they have handy they could probably print money if they had a plan and drove some cool products, but they don't seem to have a technology plan. So this move probably is the best option.
Serious question does that matter?
I admit if it was the NSA that would certainly raise my level of concern. Just because it would do that does not mean its reasonable. It amounts to an ad hominem attack on a technology does it not?
Its open source an it has had a lot of eyes on it. So far there have been no OMG moments. On the other hand its remarkable the lack of understanding and sometimes seemingly willful ignorance on the part of the users and press coverage of it. I still to this day here news reports saying things like "Bitcoin, the anonymous online currency" when BitCoin is probably the most traceable currency that has ever existed. Its a heck of a lot more likely you can figure out where a BitCoin has been than a Benjamin. Same goes for all the exciting frauds a few years back around the exchanges. We are banks, no we are commodities brokers, no wait were are retailers etc: trying to figure out what the laws were or evade them. BitCoin was a currency except when it wasn't. So with all that in mind maybe there really are not that many people who have thought critically about it.
Like any other technology crypto currency can be used well or badly by people.
But exactly HOW is anyone going to "shut down", or even "monitor", the Internet
Do you really need to ask that? I mean we have a government so stupidly over sized that the NSA could build a system to log every phone record, X-Key-Score or whatever it was called already monitored a large part of the internet etc and nobody knew until one contractor decided to go public with it.
The got all that done clandestinely, and you think they would have any problem getting it accomplished overtly with an actual budget for it?
Don't be silly. If the public can be sold on the idea its needed, and their memory is short Snowden is fading into the background as we speak, it absolutely the sort of thing that could happen and happen quickly.
Personally I agree. If you look at my posting history you can discover that. I don't think the middle east is our fight, I do think though that if we don't fight them 'over there' they will come 'over here' unless we take some real effective steps to prevent that. No a religious test isn't the answer;
We absolutely do need to know who is visiting here, for how long, and we need to make sure they are checking in often and verifiably from the places they said they would be. We need to make sure you can't get across the boarder illegally. Yes that will be a hard problem the boarder is long, Mexico is ill equipped or unwilling to prevent egress, Canada may prove to be not much better. Someone needs to inspect all those shipping containers too unless they can be X-rayed etc. I don't for a second think it will be easy or cheap. I do think if you allocate the level resources we currently direct at the middle east it CAN be done.
I also KNOW it will negatively effect tourism etc, when there is a 6month backlog in processing of visa's and we have to deny all kinds of applications because well it says here you were in Yemen for 6 months five years ago and we can't account for your time there, denied.
If we want to enjoy the free and open society to which we are accustom I think that is possible, but its going to have to end at boarder. At least until we are not the 'Great Satan' anymore. Which I think will happen, if a generation or two of Middle Eastern Muslims grows up without seening the US military bombing their friends and family. Chinese and Russians will more than likely become the new enemy overtime because they will probably decided they have to intervene to prevent the chaos from spilling of their boarders in our absence.
Oh please its just a question of confirmation bias. Liberals say plenty of things they take on faith and expect us to take on faith too. Consider this quote from the President Sunday:
It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It's our responsibility to reject proposals that muslim-americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose.
To broaden things out a little bit some of our nations biggest economic boom years coincide with periods of our strongest anti-immigrant public sentiment. When we have done horrible things like round up the Japanese Americans and put them in camps we won the biggest conflict the globe has ever seen.
So the president can say what he wants. I (and this is rare) agree we should not apply religious tests to decide who we admin into this country. There is a lot better criteria we can use, that my 'gut' tells me would be more predictive. As far as I am aware though the President's lets not lock out all the Muslims isn't any better supported by the facts than Trump and Cruz wanting to shut them out.
Are you willing to cut off all traffic to and from the UK? China? India? Mexico? Italy?
Yes.
But I also expect Europe WILL go along with us, as would China most likely. If for not other reason than because
not to mention the political alliances and dependence on foreign trade.
Being cut off from the "US Internet" would be more or less like being cut off from competitive access to the US economy. If you're the EU having to chose between Russia and the Middle East and America, you'll pick America. If you are China the decision is harder, but you know a lot of the other economic powers of Asia are US friendly and if you don't pick the US, you might see your access to South Korea, and Japan dry up too.
No I think if we start making the Internet an more exclusive club we will come out on top.
Its like Curz said the other day "I'll direct the pentagon to destroy ISIS"
Guess what that would probably work and I would expect Trump would say something similar. It would probably work. Our Generals don't get where they are in our armed forces by not being effective. If a president told them "eliminate ISIS, I really don't care how and I'll back you" they could probably get it done.
Most presidents don't have the will do the politically unpopular things they would likely want to do. That isn't necessarily bad but Trumps in ability to do much more than shout "just do it" probably means he would have much greater success than anyone who would be more involved.