The [FCC] took over this authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their job is regulating interstate commerce aspects of communication. Punting this to the FTC is disingenuous and probably illegal. Perhaps the executive branch needs to be reminded to follow the law.
The FCC regulates the interstate commerce of communication technology and utilities. They didn't take over all consumer protection, especially consumer fraud and antitrust (which remained with the FTC and the Justice Department). If the FCC had taken these over, how would you explain, for instance, the breakup of AT&T?
Most of the bad aspects of "network non-neutrality" are the result either of:
- integration between ISPs and companies that provide the services for which they carry the packets - either outright membership in the same conglomerate or special deals - giving them an incentive to favor the packets of their "partners" and committing anticompetitive behavior,
- penalizing packets of services that are costly to carry, a threat to their partners' business models, or of heavy users - thus providing less than what a reasonable person would expect of "internet service" and committing consumer fraud.
Meanwhile the FCC tends to apply technical solutions to anticompetitive behavior problems, and considers two players "competition" (when "the invisible hand" requires at least 3 and typically four or more competitors before cartel-like behavior breaks down without collusion to keep it stable).
I have, for years, been advocating that Network Neutrality be moved to the FTC and Justice Dept, which have no issues with penalizing or disassembling companies that shaft the consumers.
But the FTC can't just step up to this plate - and Pai is being disingenuous to speak as if it could. Some of the "hands off the Internet" legislation explicitly blocks the FTC from playing in that game. Congressional action is required to re-enable it.
Having said that, one could expect the Trump administration to go for it. The media conglomerates that are driving network non-neutrality are exactly the ones that have run the totally anti-Trump mainstream media. Turning the FTC attack dogs loose on them, with an eye to dismembering their unholy alliances, would be a dandy way to punish his enemies by doing something good for the bulk of the consumers. B-)
I was under the impression that Australia already had substantial industrial-scale power grid energy storage using vanadium redox flow batteries.
Seems to me that's a better match to the problem - unless Tesla has made drastic improvements in cost and cycle-life as a fallout of their work to improve them for cars and house-scale renewable storage.
Lithium Ion batteries are, IMHO, more about portability of energy storage than price-efficiency.
Is there ANYONE in the Trump administration, or being appointed by Trump, that is NOT under investigation for some thing or another?
Being investigated doesn't mean squat - other than that somebody in power feels like seeing if they can find anything that can be used to cause you trouble.
Been there. Had that done to me. (Try protesting the military draft while doing classified research some time.)
the Democratic Party members have been voting as a block to oppose and derail...
... corrupt, incompetent and clueless morons. So it's difficult to determine whether it's a policy of voting against unfit candidates or a policy of voting against all candidates, when all of the candidates are unfit.
On one hand, integrity, competence, and cluefulness have never been high on the Democrats' priority list for their own appointees.
On the other hand, "even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while", making uniform unfitness unlikely..
On the gripping hand, the Republicans seem to have no trouble voting for Trump's appointees. Their side includes several factions, virtually all at odds with Trump in one way or another, so party-line lockstep is not credible. And while both parties attract psychopaths, they attract different KINDS of psychopaths. The Rs attract the "rule-bound" type, who would consider corrupt appointees to be rule-breakers and be likely to vote against one they know to be corrupt.
So while you might not be able to distinguish the two explainations, I have no problems preferring my alternative.
Also for most of your stuff it's backing up to the cloud anyways so if your phone erases itself you just get a new one, enter your Google account, and it's all still there anyways.
Assuming you allow such backup, which also makes all your data available to Google and any state actor (or other party) that can coerce them.
IMHO a better approach might be to, after a few tries, have progressively longer times before another try is allowed.
With the right backoff algorithm you can allow only a finite. and reasonably small. number of tries even in infinite time. But the alternative of also shortening the interval with time when no attempts are being made can make it return to normal behavior after a reasonable time, even if it had been poked at for a long time (at the cost of allowing an arbitrary number of tries in infinite time).
The downside is that the phone doesn't render the data permanently unavailable to other attack methods (such as unsoldering, decapping, debug-port probing, etc.) if the password guessing is tried and fails.
(From 2012 to the present, Democrats learned more about Pai's views on deregulation, and changed their minds about him.)
With Trump's appointments and legislative requests, the Democratic Party members have been voting as a block to oppose and derail essentially everything and everyone.
IMHO this is just another example of that policy, opposing any Republican appointee to a power position where confirmation was required, rather than anything that was revealed about his views during his tenure as a commissioner. They'd have voted against any Republican appointee to the chairmanship unless he was a Democrat's dream candidate for the position - and perhaps even then.
Forgot to mention WHY the landlines are so flakey.
The suburb in question was built in the '50s, with underground telephone wiring across the back of the lots (which back up on the school playground). The cables are flakey enough that there aren't enough good pair left. So when one goes out, instead of digging them up and fixing them, they bypass the bad section with a hunk of wire tie-wrapped along the school fence.
These, of course, then get abraded at the tie-wraps by the wind wiggling them, chewed up by squirrels, or cut by the playful kiddies.
(At least they've stopped using cat-5 indoor cabling and switched to the heavy black pole-to-house drop wiring.)
A weeks outage is common with Verizon, they can't even keep their land lines working.
They're not unique in that way.
I have AT&T for my landlines. My main-POTS-and-DSL landline went out in the first rain of the winter a bit over a week ago. (The fax/backup-dialup also went groundfault-noisy ruining it even for glacial dialup speeds.)
The automated testing available after-hours interpreted the water-shorted line as a phone off-the-hook and gave me a couple minutes of canned lecture about that. Once humans were back on duty, line-testing with the house wiring disconnected at the demark point convinced them that it was on their side, they said they "were overloaded" and couldn't get a repairman out to fix the line for TWO WEEKS.
So I have no landline DSL (or fixed IP addresses for my home servers) at the moment - nor did I have them over the Thanksgiving holiday. I've upped my cellphone data plan from token to substantial, so my wife can get her college homework done. That's an extra $60/month, since the cellphones are on a different service and they won't give me the boost as a freebie for covering the outage.
It's nothing like what they did about a year and a half ago. My DSL was out for an ENTIRE MONTH. It turns out they had decommissioned the DSLAM that fed my line. Then they moved me to another one that was PARTIALLY decommissioned - gave one-hop transport to itself but had no internet behind it. Then they claimed the legacy modem was broken (actually it was one of theirs, but from before the web administration interface was standard so it LOOKED broken), had me buy a new one, then refused to support it because I hadn't bought it from THEM. I had to buy a SECOND new one before they'd look at the line enough to figure out that the DSLAM wasn't hooked to the net on the upstrem side and moved me to ANOTHER one that was. (This also downgraded me to PPPoEoATM, with more overhead and thus somewhat less effective data rate on the same carrier setting.)
I'd have abandoned them back then, but the only alternatives at the site are satellite, Comcast, and 4G cellphone. B-b
Buy an RV then. If the entire idea is something temporary, there's your solution. Cheap, too.
Or a travel-trailer. Even less expensive, because you don't have to integrate it with the powertrain or build it to survive-a-crash-while-riding-in-it standards.
That does mean the trailer doesn't become part of your new house. But it is quick, inexpensive, and (if you get one with enough tankage for dry camping) doubles as both a camping vehicle and an emergency utility supply for the critical first three days of the NEXT disaster.
Left-handed BATTERS, on the other hand, have one to two steps less to travel when running for first base.
Left-handed batters also get a momentum boost on startup from decelerating and dropping the bat. A right-hander would have to fling it behind himself to get the equivalent boost, and throwing the bat is a no-no. Instead he loses momentum when slowing it to drop it.
As was pointed out above, a handed mismatch is better for the batter, who gets a better view of the ball.
Left-handed BATTERS, on the other hand, have one to two steps less to travel when running for first base. So a left-handed pitcher is better against the more advantaged batters.
Dialog Semiconductor's Production Line Tool (a GUI-driven BLE chip programming tool) was not available to run under Linux - or anything but Windows 7, 7-pro, 8, or 8.1 - all now made of unobtanium.
It would run (kinda) on wine with mono and a real Microsoft.NET install. But some important GUI components didn't render correctly, so necessary operator feedback fields were not readable, making it unusable.
(When our 7-Pro machine goes belly-up the lab is toast.)
Companies do not care about security, because they see no value in it. They rush their own developers to release software, and never ask them to focus on security.
It's not that they don't care about security (although they often don't). It's because, in the competitive environment, the "invisible hand" separates the companies into "The Quick" (pun intended) and "The Dead".
For each new computer-based market opportunity there are typically far more companies trying to get to product than there are niches for them. The first one, two, or three will get through the "window of oppotunity" and take the market, and the rest will be left out when the window closes - perhaps to die, perhaps to move on to some other opportunity, rinse, and repeat.
To get through the window before it closes, development has to be fast. Something has to give, and practically EVERYTHING that gives makes security holes. So the Pointy Haired Bosses tell the workers to get the product to market and THEN worry about fixing the security holes.
Some of the developers make things secure anyhow. Most of them find the window closed when they're ready to ship, because the ones that did what management told them already got to market with the features working and the infrastructure made of swiss cheese. They took the whole market - before the bad guys discovered the holes, exploited them, and the media finally noticed.
Only 18? I thought that ALL elections were subject to "Social Engineering".
That's part of the point.
Elections aren't about being fair. They're about preventing civil war.
They do this by predicting how a civil war to reverse their decision would come out - believably enough to convince the losers of the election that they'd also lose the war to reverse their results.
Propaganda and other "fake news", to recruit and radicalize cannon-fodder for the civil ware are integral to the process. The election process SHOULD include them - or it becomes less believable and thus less stabilizing.
Maybe time to scrap it and come up with something better.
Maybe just scrapping it IS something better.
Regulating the broadcast media to "promote" divergent viewpoints got us the current monolith. NOT regulating the Internet got us an explosion of divergent views.
Robert LeFevre described government as "a disease masquerading as its own cure". Maybe regulation IS the problem.
Diversity of voices is important, but when >60% of the country gets its "news" from social media (and that percentage is growing), who owns the local TV station or newspaper becomes irrelevant.
But people are getting their "news" from social media (which apparently includes internet-only news reporting operations) BECAUSE the broadcast news operations are ALREADY untrusted.
This, in turn is because the EXISTING regulatory regime produced exactly the non-competitive, single-point-of-view, broadcast media oligopoly that this regulation was SUPPOSED to prevent.
Since it didn't work, why bother with it?
Since it seemed to work BACKWARD (as often happens with laws and regulations), maybe eliminating it will actually IMPROVE the situation by lowering barriers to new entrants.
= = = =
Question for anyone who happened to dig into the actual rulemaking: Did this also eliminate the rule preventing a single owner of a set of broadcast outlets that, in aggregate, can reach more than about a third of the population? THAT's an even more powerful killer of attempts to start up broadcast media with non-mainstream viewpoints.
300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster.
Oops! No, 1200 was something different.
What I had a 110 baud modem that I converted to 300 baud as described. (110 and 300 WERE just fast and slow FSK between the same pair of frequencies.)
It was intended for direct connection. (So I mounted an earphone jack in a Princess phone that I used for dialing, and plugged the modem in (and hung up, with the modem keeping the line "off hook") once the far modem had answered. That was VERY unofficial in those days, when the instruments were all rented and "foreign attachments" were just working their way through the FCC.)
My bits had to travel at 300 baud on toll lines between Ann Arbor and Indian Hill. (Uphill through the snow both ways.)
Eventually Telebit came out with the first OFDM DSP-based modems (PEP at 1200 baud) and the $1,000 for two modems deal for established network sites - which I was. (My site existed when the names of all the sites that exchanged email fit on three typeset pages.)
1200? You rich SOB, I had 300 (TRS80 Model 1 with acoustic coupler, then Model 100).
I had a 300 baud hard-wired modem board (from Carterphone, intended to be mounted in a Teletype machine - and switch a 20 mA current loop.)
Converting the 20 mA loop to TTL was easy because the modem was mostly a switch and a sampling resistor, so a few components did the trick.
300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster. This meant the sidebands (with the information in them) went out farther from the two frequencies, and the high-Q tuned circuits wiped off the modulation on the receiver side. So I modified the modem, reducing the Q of the two tuned circuits by changing the values of the swamping resistors.
I used this thing to get on the UUCP mailnet - from Ann Arbor MI to ihnp4 - a VAX at AT&T's Indian Hill (Napierville Illinois), one of the three original "backbone sites".
Of course I had to pay the long distance bill - which was huge. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of mail back then. (Pre-Spam)
1200 required a special equalized line from the phone company
Actually, if you were within about 3 miles of the switch an ordinary line was fine.
Copper phone lines were designed for voice-only audio, which was only contracted carry up to something under 4 kHz. The stray resistance and capacitance of the phone lines caused the higher frequencies to be selectively attenuated as the lines got longer, causing the frequency response to "roll off", while the stray inductance wasn't enough to compensate. So phone audio got more muffled as you got farther from the switch.
To compensate, the phone company added inductors in series with the lines. These were 88 millihenry double-winding toroids, a "lump" inductance inserted periodically. They flattened the frequence response below their resonance with the line and caused it to fall off sharply, with extreme phase shifting, above the resonance. (They didn't actually amplify, of course. But the DC phone line voltage also dropped with resistive losses. So the phone instruments had some non-linear resistors that adjusted the attenuation (think "volume control"), quieting phones that were nearer the switch, so it all averaged out.)
They had to be inserted starting a quarter-wave of the highest frequency used, every half-wavelength thereafter, and the last one within a quarter wavelength of the far phone. So the first pot of loading coils was inserted about 3 miles from the switch.
Now modems could handle the high-frequency attenuation of the UNloaded lines. But the loading coils fouled things up too badly for them. So for data farther out than the first loading coil you had to pay for a "conditioned" line. This meant that the phone company had to send a lineman out to:
- Find a line that was in good shape (no leakage, bad connections, little noise coupled from other sources, etc.)
- Disconnect any loading coils - so the line was a direct connection from your place to wherever it was going, and
- Put little red rings or caps on the various terminals it connected to on its way (so future linemen wouldn't poke around and screw up your signal when they were working on other phone lines.)
If you happened to be located closer to the central office than the first loading coil, your ordinary line would usually be as good as a "conditioned" one. Get a conditinoed line and you'd be paying the extra bucks just for the pretty red terminal caps and priority on repairs.
This paper is arguably the origin of the modern disinformation campaign against carbon pollution. This is the point where politically powerful interests realized that their core business model was in danger and that they needed to do something to stop it.
It also looks just like the hockey stick the "corrections" to later data warp the readings to match.
Now that the issue has been politicized, any actual science is no longer relevant to the debate.
* One side has caught researchers fudging (or using data pre-fuged by others) and doesn't trust further papers predicting gloom and doom, as possibly defective, pushed and often funded by the powerful institutional interests seeking more power and/or engaging in multi-billion dollar rent-seeking operations (such as carbon credit exchanges).
* The other rejects papers that don't predict gloom and doom as being fake research, possibly funded by fossil-fuel interests.
It's really a pity. If there really IS a problem it would be nice to have some trustworthy advance warning on which to make plans.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how this one compares to the UNcorrected climate data.
On the other hand, a volcano emitting a protoplasmic wind would make a suitable plot for a low-budget movie. Right up there with the "scratch the film raygun SFX" space operas.
After a suitable period of R-to-X rated character and situation establishment, "The Blob" erupts from a volcano and engulfs the red light district.
Sometimes [choosing to plead to an offence for reduced sentence] happens to people who are not guilty of any of their charges. There are many innocent people in prison because that's the best outcome they could realistically hope for.
A friend since my college days became a public defender. He is rabidly against the death penalty. According to him, the main effect is to cause totally innocent people to plead guilty to lower-grades of murder rather than risk their lives by demanding a trial.
It's something like the argument against torture: Hurt someone enough and you can get him to say whatever he thinks you want him to say in the hope you'll stop hurting him. So information extracted by torture is unreliable.
* The suggestion came from AT&T.
* The justice department was against it.
I know it's easy to assume Trump would use the powers of the executive branch to punish his enemies. After all, that's what the Democrats have been doing for years now - and getting caught from time to time. So it's easy to assume the other side would act the same way.
But, so far, The Donald doesn't seem to be stooping so low.
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The [FCC] took over this authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their job is regulating interstate commerce aspects of communication. Punting this to the FTC is disingenuous and probably illegal. Perhaps the executive branch needs to be reminded to follow the law.
The FCC regulates the interstate commerce of communication technology and utilities. They didn't take over all consumer protection, especially consumer fraud and antitrust (which remained with the FTC and the Justice Department). If the FCC had taken these over, how would you explain, for instance, the breakup of AT&T?
Most of the bad aspects of "network non-neutrality" are the result either of:
- integration between ISPs and companies that provide the services for which they carry the packets - either outright membership in the same conglomerate or special deals - giving them an incentive to favor the packets of their "partners" and committing anticompetitive behavior,
- penalizing packets of services that are costly to carry, a threat to their partners' business models, or of heavy users - thus providing less than what a reasonable person would expect of "internet service" and committing consumer fraud.
Meanwhile the FCC tends to apply technical solutions to anticompetitive behavior problems, and considers two players "competition" (when "the invisible hand" requires at least 3 and typically four or more competitors before cartel-like behavior breaks down without collusion to keep it stable).
I have, for years, been advocating that Network Neutrality be moved to the FTC and Justice Dept, which have no issues with penalizing or disassembling companies that shaft the consumers.
But the FTC can't just step up to this plate - and Pai is being disingenuous to speak as if it could. Some of the "hands off the Internet" legislation explicitly blocks the FTC from playing in that game. Congressional action is required to re-enable it.
Having said that, one could expect the Trump administration to go for it. The media conglomerates that are driving network non-neutrality are exactly the ones that have run the totally anti-Trump mainstream media. Turning the FTC attack dogs loose on them, with an eye to dismembering their unholy alliances, would be a dandy way to punish his enemies by doing something good for the bulk of the consumers. B-)
I was under the impression that Australia already had substantial industrial-scale power grid energy storage using vanadium redox flow batteries.
Seems to me that's a better match to the problem - unless Tesla has made drastic improvements in cost and cycle-life as a fallout of their work to improve them for cars and house-scale renewable storage.
Lithium Ion batteries are, IMHO, more about portability of energy storage than price-efficiency.
Is there ANYONE in the Trump administration, or being appointed by Trump, that is NOT under investigation for some thing or another?
Being investigated doesn't mean squat - other than that somebody in power feels like seeing if they can find anything that can be used to cause you trouble.
Been there. Had that done to me. (Try protesting the military draft while doing classified research some time.)
On one hand, integrity, competence, and cluefulness have never been high on the Democrats' priority list for their own appointees.
On the other hand, "even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while", making uniform unfitness unlikely..
On the gripping hand, the Republicans seem to have no trouble voting for Trump's appointees. Their side includes several factions, virtually all at odds with Trump in one way or another, so party-line lockstep is not credible. And while both parties attract psychopaths, they attract different KINDS of psychopaths. The Rs attract the "rule-bound" type, who would consider corrupt appointees to be rule-breakers and be likely to vote against one they know to be corrupt.
So while you might not be able to distinguish the two explainations, I have no problems preferring my alternative.
Also for most of your stuff it's backing up to the cloud anyways so if your phone erases itself you just get a new one, enter your Google account, and it's all still there anyways.
Assuming you allow such backup, which also makes all your data available to Google and any state actor (or other party) that can coerce them.
IMHO a better approach might be to, after a few tries, have progressively longer times before another try is allowed.
With the right backoff algorithm you can allow only a finite. and reasonably small. number of tries even in infinite time. But the alternative of also shortening the interval with time when no attempts are being made can make it return to normal behavior after a reasonable time, even if it had been poked at for a long time (at the cost of allowing an arbitrary number of tries in infinite time).
The downside is that the phone doesn't render the data permanently unavailable to other attack methods (such as unsoldering, decapping, debug-port probing, etc.) if the password guessing is tried and fails.
Everybody knows that no phone manufacturer would ever actually do any software updates.
Ha ha. But seriously ...
Now you know one big reason WHY they don't like to push updates.
"It's working. Why risk bricking it? Especially since we'd brick ALL of 'em and incur enormous costs fixing the oopsie!"
I agree completely except for this:
(From 2012 to the present, Democrats learned more about Pai's views on deregulation, and changed their minds about him.)
With Trump's appointments and legislative requests, the Democratic Party members have been voting as a block to oppose and derail essentially everything and everyone.
IMHO this is just another example of that policy, opposing any Republican appointee to a power position where confirmation was required, rather than anything that was revealed about his views during his tenure as a commissioner. They'd have voted against any Republican appointee to the chairmanship unless he was a Democrat's dream candidate for the position - and perhaps even then.
Forgot to mention WHY the landlines are so flakey.
The suburb in question was built in the '50s, with underground telephone wiring across the back of the lots (which back up on the school playground). The cables are flakey enough that there aren't enough good pair left. So when one goes out, instead of digging them up and fixing them, they bypass the bad section with a hunk of wire tie-wrapped along the school fence.
These, of course, then get abraded at the tie-wraps by the wind wiggling them, chewed up by squirrels, or cut by the playful kiddies.
(At least they've stopped using cat-5 indoor cabling and switched to the heavy black pole-to-house drop wiring.)
A weeks outage is common with Verizon, they can't even keep their land lines working.
They're not unique in that way.
I have AT&T for my landlines. My main-POTS-and-DSL landline went out in the first rain of the winter a bit over a week ago. (The fax/backup-dialup also went groundfault-noisy ruining it even for glacial dialup speeds.)
The automated testing available after-hours interpreted the water-shorted line as a phone off-the-hook and gave me a couple minutes of canned lecture about that. Once humans were back on duty, line-testing with the house wiring disconnected at the demark point convinced them that it was on their side, they said they "were overloaded" and couldn't get a repairman out to fix the line for TWO WEEKS.
So I have no landline DSL (or fixed IP addresses for my home servers) at the moment - nor did I have them over the Thanksgiving holiday. I've upped my cellphone data plan from token to substantial, so my wife can get her college homework done. That's an extra $60/month, since the cellphones are on a different service and they won't give me the boost as a freebie for covering the outage.
It's nothing like what they did about a year and a half ago. My DSL was out for an ENTIRE MONTH. It turns out they had decommissioned the DSLAM that fed my line. Then they moved me to another one that was PARTIALLY decommissioned - gave one-hop transport to itself but had no internet behind it. Then they claimed the legacy modem was broken (actually it was one of theirs, but from before the web administration interface was standard so it LOOKED broken), had me buy a new one, then refused to support it because I hadn't bought it from THEM. I had to buy a SECOND new one before they'd look at the line enough to figure out that the DSLAM wasn't hooked to the net on the upstrem side and moved me to ANOTHER one that was. (This also downgraded me to PPPoEoATM, with more overhead and thus somewhat less effective data rate on the same carrier setting.)
I'd have abandoned them back then, but the only alternatives at the site are satellite, Comcast, and 4G cellphone. B-b
And THIS is in Silicon Valley!
The only real property I've ever seen disappear slid into the Skagit River recently.
My wife recalls when thousands of acres blew up into the sky (having formerly been Mount St. Helens).
Buy an RV then. If the entire idea is something temporary, there's your solution. Cheap, too.
Or a travel-trailer. Even less expensive, because you don't have to integrate it with the powertrain or build it to survive-a-crash-while-riding-in-it standards.
That does mean the trailer doesn't become part of your new house. But it is quick, inexpensive, and (if you get one with enough tankage for dry camping) doubles as both a camping vehicle and an emergency utility supply for the critical first three days of the NEXT disaster.
Left-handed BATTERS, on the other hand, have one to two steps less to travel when running for first base.
Left-handed batters also get a momentum boost on startup from decelerating and dropping the bat. A right-hander would have to fling it behind himself to get the equivalent boost, and throwing the bat is a no-no. Instead he loses momentum when slowing it to drop it.
As was pointed out above, a handed mismatch is better for the batter, who gets a better view of the ball.
Left-handed BATTERS, on the other hand, have one to two steps less to travel when running for first base. So a left-handed pitcher is better against the more advantaged batters.
Dialog Semiconductor's Production Line Tool (a GUI-driven BLE chip programming tool) was not available to run under Linux - or anything but Windows 7, 7-pro, 8, or 8.1 - all now made of unobtanium.
It would run (kinda) on wine with mono and a real Microsoft .NET install. But some important GUI components didn't render correctly, so necessary operator feedback fields were not readable, making it unusable.
(When our 7-Pro machine goes belly-up the lab is toast.)
Companies do not care about security, because they see no value in it. They rush their own developers to release software, and never ask them to focus on security.
It's not that they don't care about security (although they often don't). It's because, in the competitive environment, the "invisible hand" separates the companies into "The Quick" (pun intended) and "The Dead".
For each new computer-based market opportunity there are typically far more companies trying to get to product than there are niches for them. The first one, two, or three will get through the "window of oppotunity" and take the market, and the rest will be left out when the window closes - perhaps to die, perhaps to move on to some other opportunity, rinse, and repeat.
To get through the window before it closes, development has to be fast. Something has to give, and practically EVERYTHING that gives makes security holes. So the Pointy Haired Bosses tell the workers to get the product to market and THEN worry about fixing the security holes.
Some of the developers make things secure anyhow. Most of them find the window closed when they're ready to ship, because the ones that did what management told them already got to market with the features working and the infrastructure made of swiss cheese. They took the whole market - before the bad guys discovered the holes, exploited them, and the media finally noticed.
Only 18? I thought that ALL elections were subject to "Social Engineering".
That's part of the point.
Elections aren't about being fair. They're about preventing civil war.
They do this by predicting how a civil war to reverse their decision would come out - believably enough to convince the losers of the election that they'd also lose the war to reverse their results.
Propaganda and other "fake news", to recruit and radicalize cannon-fodder for the civil ware are integral to the process. The election process SHOULD include them - or it becomes less believable and thus less stabilizing.
Maybe time to scrap it and come up with something better.
Maybe just scrapping it IS something better.
Regulating the broadcast media to "promote" divergent viewpoints got us the current monolith. NOT regulating the Internet got us an explosion of divergent views.
Robert LeFevre described government as "a disease masquerading as its own cure". Maybe regulation IS the problem.
Diversity of voices is important, but when >60% of the country gets its "news" from social media (and that percentage is growing), who owns the local TV station or newspaper becomes irrelevant.
But people are getting their "news" from social media (which apparently includes internet-only news reporting operations) BECAUSE the broadcast news operations are ALREADY untrusted.
This, in turn is because the EXISTING regulatory regime produced exactly the non-competitive, single-point-of-view, broadcast media oligopoly that this regulation was SUPPOSED to prevent.
Since it didn't work, why bother with it?
Since it seemed to work BACKWARD (as often happens with laws and regulations), maybe eliminating it will actually IMPROVE the situation by lowering barriers to new entrants.
= = = =
Question for anyone who happened to dig into the actual rulemaking: Did this also eliminate the rule preventing a single owner of a set of broadcast outlets that, in aggregate, can reach more than about a third of the population? THAT's an even more powerful killer of attempts to start up broadcast media with non-mainstream viewpoints.
300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster.
Oops! No, 1200 was something different.
What I had a 110 baud modem that I converted to 300 baud as described. (110 and 300 WERE just fast and slow FSK between the same pair of frequencies.)
It was intended for direct connection. (So I mounted an earphone jack in a Princess phone that I used for dialing, and plugged the modem in (and hung up, with the modem keeping the line "off hook") once the far modem had answered. That was VERY unofficial in those days, when the instruments were all rented and "foreign attachments" were just working their way through the FCC.)
My bits had to travel at 300 baud on toll lines between Ann Arbor and Indian Hill. (Uphill through the snow both ways.)
Eventually Telebit came out with the first OFDM DSP-based modems (PEP at 1200 baud) and the $1,000 for two modems deal for established network sites - which I was. (My site existed when the names of all the sites that exchanged email fit on three typeset pages.)
1200? You rich SOB, I had 300 (TRS80 Model 1 with acoustic coupler, then Model 100).
I had a 300 baud hard-wired modem board (from Carterphone, intended to be mounted in a Teletype machine - and switch a 20 mA current loop.)
Converting the 20 mA loop to TTL was easy because the modem was mostly a switch and a sampling resistor, so a few components did the trick.
300 and 1200 baud were both FSK and used the same frequencies. But 1200 baud switched between them faster. This meant the sidebands (with the information in them) went out farther from the two frequencies, and the high-Q tuned circuits wiped off the modulation on the receiver side. So I modified the modem, reducing the Q of the two tuned circuits by changing the values of the swamping resistors.
I used this thing to get on the UUCP mailnet - from Ann Arbor MI to ihnp4 - a VAX at AT&T's Indian Hill (Napierville Illinois), one of the three original "backbone sites".
Of course I had to pay the long distance bill - which was huge. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of mail back then. (Pre-Spam)
1200 required a special equalized line from the phone company
Actually, if you were within about 3 miles of the switch an ordinary line was fine.
Copper phone lines were designed for voice-only audio, which was only contracted carry up to something under 4 kHz. The stray resistance and capacitance of the phone lines caused the higher frequencies to be selectively attenuated as the lines got longer, causing the frequency response to "roll off", while the stray inductance wasn't enough to compensate. So phone audio got more muffled as you got farther from the switch.
To compensate, the phone company added inductors in series with the lines. These were 88 millihenry double-winding toroids, a "lump" inductance inserted periodically. They flattened the frequence response below their resonance with the line and caused it to fall off sharply, with extreme phase shifting, above the resonance. (They didn't actually amplify, of course. But the DC phone line voltage also dropped with resistive losses. So the phone instruments had some non-linear resistors that adjusted the attenuation (think "volume control"), quieting phones that were nearer the switch, so it all averaged out.)
They had to be inserted starting a quarter-wave of the highest frequency used, every half-wavelength thereafter, and the last one within a quarter wavelength of the far phone. So the first pot of loading coils was inserted about 3 miles from the switch.
Now modems could handle the high-frequency attenuation of the UNloaded lines. But the loading coils fouled things up too badly for them. So for data farther out than the first loading coil you had to pay for a "conditioned" line. This meant that the phone company had to send a lineman out to:
- Find a line that was in good shape (no leakage, bad connections, little noise coupled from other sources, etc.)
- Disconnect any loading coils - so the line was a direct connection from your place to wherever it was going, and
- Put little red rings or caps on the various terminals it connected to on its way (so future linemen wouldn't poke around and screw up your signal when they were working on other phone lines.)
If you happened to be located closer to the central office than the first loading coil, your ordinary line would usually be as good as a "conditioned" one. Get a conditinoed line and you'd be paying the extra bucks just for the pretty red terminal caps and priority on repairs.
This paper is arguably the origin of the modern disinformation campaign against carbon pollution. This is the point where politically powerful interests realized that their core business model was in danger and that they needed to do something to stop it.
It also looks just like the hockey stick the "corrections" to later data warp the readings to match.
Now that the issue has been politicized, any actual science is no longer relevant to the debate.
* One side has caught researchers fudging (or using data pre-fuged by others) and doesn't trust further papers predicting gloom and doom, as possibly defective, pushed and often funded by the powerful institutional interests seeking more power and/or engaging in multi-billion dollar rent-seeking operations (such as carbon credit exchanges).
* The other rejects papers that don't predict gloom and doom as being fake research, possibly funded by fossil-fuel interests.
It's really a pity. If there really IS a problem it would be nice to have some trustworthy advance warning on which to make plans.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how this one compares to the UNcorrected climate data.
On the other hand, a volcano emitting a protoplasmic wind would make a suitable plot for a low-budget movie. Right up there with the "scratch the film raygun SFX" space operas.
After a suitable period of R-to-X rated character and situation establishment, "The Blob" erupts from a volcano and engulfs the red light district.
Sometimes [choosing to plead to an offence for reduced sentence] happens to people who are not guilty of any of their charges. There are many innocent people in prison because that's the best outcome they could realistically hope for.
A friend since my college days became a public defender. He is rabidly against the death penalty. According to him, the main effect is to cause totally innocent people to plead guilty to lower-grades of murder rather than risk their lives by demanding a trial.
It's something like the argument against torture: Hurt someone enough and you can get him to say whatever he thinks you want him to say in the hope you'll stop hurting him. So information extracted by torture is unreliable.
The Washington Examiner says:
* The suggestion came from AT&T.
* The justice department was against it.
I know it's easy to assume Trump would use the powers of the executive branch to punish his enemies. After all, that's what the Democrats have been doing for years now - and getting caught from time to time. So it's easy to assume the other side would act the same way.
But, so far, The Donald doesn't seem to be stooping so low.