The dendro-proxies are kaput too. We're onto making fun of himalayan glaciers and the Day After Tomorrow warnings now. Next up: satellite thermal measurement calibration to.01 degree C at a range of 2,000 kilometers, and the incredible disappearing Midieval Warm Period.
If the 1800's continue to cool at the current rate, it will not be long before we're thankful of the role of AGW in staving off the impending ice age of 1940.
Seattle is committing hundreds of miles of in-place fiber, and access to hundreds of thousands of utility poles. If they reach out to the community for contributions of resources and subscription commitments they may not need Google to pull this off. And Seattle has a world-class Peering point shared by All these people.
Good guess. Businessweek is forecasting this to cost $3-8000 per home. At 5 year amortization and 8% interest, that's $60-140 per month. Knowing Google, they'll leverage off the shelf technologies and clever networking to come in under the low end.
With cities like Seattle volunteering rights-of way and in-place dark fiber infrastructure, this looks doable. Throw in some guaranteed paid subscriptions by city services like police, fire and so forth to seed the project and we're on! Maybe we don't even need Google for this one.
The salesperson who brought us DSL got a little party in her honor.
Same thing happened with cable internet. We were so happy to fire Ma Bell.
First company to bring gigabit fiber to this door gets a party too. I would rather have Google's fiber than Verizon's - Google's got no motivation to drive up real services like multiple IP addresses or perform filtering or capping. I could see going with Google for the triple play of video, voice and data - and we're paying a lot for that. Comcast hasn't been awful compared to QWest, but that bar was not high.
Cantennas can have a range of over 1 kilometer even if you build one yourself. The engineered commercial model should do better than that. How remote is your area? There should be a friendly person somewhere in that range unless you're way out in the sticks. You do have to spend some time aiming it though. You run the antenna cable through a wall to an exterior mount (grounded!) that holds the cantenna. Scan for networks, turn it a couple degrees and try again and mark the finds on the base. Engineering geeks would of course put the thing on a remote antenna rotator. You can also use an antenna amplifier, a high-gain parabolic directional antenna or high-gain omnidirectional antenna to extend the range to several kilometers. The record is 304 kilometers, but that requires special equipment and cooperation at both ends.
Me, I can get three open WAPs from inside my house with the standard laptop wifi but that's not anonymous enough.
You typed and reasearched all of that and it doesn't matter. They netblocked 4chan, and some responsible person said, "Hey, that's not good" and reversed it.
It's kind of a shame. What the chans could do to VZW would be good for some epic threads.
The sad thing about tyranny is that it's never necessary to submit to the tyrant. It's a voluntary thing often done in little steps for pragmatic reasons.
But this is the Internet and Anonymous does not have to submit to the tyranny of censorship. They don't have to be pragmatic. They don't have to (and can't!) negotiate. They are everywhere and nowhere. Some among them control vast swaths of the network in official and unofficial capacities. They have sympathizers and informants everywhere. They can accidentaly retire your domain, your IP space, your SSL certificate, without fear of consequence.
The corporation and its property employed in censorship is an instrument of tyranny and "in play". Its personnel are uniformed combatants engaged in pressing the fight and the higher in the tree they are the greater their responsibility. Censorship is tyranny and Anonymous is willing to take arms against it - it's that simple. They're not going to hurt anybody but they can wreck some business and they have wrecked some equipment. They've been known to uncover skeletons in the closets of their opposition and they can be quite resourceful in that regard. They are not the mainstream press, which casts its gaze the other way to get continued access to the play.
Anonymous doesn't have to filter their content to play. They're the pimp that supplied the hookers, the pusher that sold the coke to your aide (hell, Anonymous probably is your aide), the concierge that arranged for the gerbil, the maid that cleaned the room. They were the camera men and edit team for your reminiscence porn. They're the crew of the boat, the doctor that prescribed the cocktail, the bartender, the barmaid, all three hookers including the trangender dwarf. They're your accountant, your divorce lawyer, your shrink, your family counselor and your confessor. They sold you the condoms and ordinarily that's no business of theirs - but dick with them and your wife will find out with the rest of the world but the trail will never lead back to anyone in a traceable way unless it's good for a six-figure book deal.
Yes, it's an asymmetric engagement - that's how low intensity conflicts are fought these days. The corporations have their battalions of lawyers, their purchased senators and congressmen. They have their sheriffs and judges, their warrants and seizure laws. The array of legal means is the baton of oppression. Each individual anonymous, however, can rise perhaps only to the level of midemeanor in his civil disobedience and given their bulk bring down the mightiest corporation or its political tool.
Anonymous has their technology, their anonymity, their will, their access and their mass. This is a Cyber war. They've embraced Patton's admonition "The point is not to die for your country, the point is to make the other poor bastard die for his." The only way to be captured in a cyber war is to express incompetence, so they have no pity for the fallen. Their enemy is a lifeless, soulless corporation, so they have no pity for it either.
Yes, it's an asymmetric battle, and the outcome is certain. Your moral plea is nothing more than the tears of the wife of a vanquished Caesar: "It's not fair! The slaves don't know their place!" What you don't realize is that the proper place for a corporation that won't serve its customer is the dustbin of history.
"Looking back upon his handling of the incident, Roosevelt thought he 'never saw a bluff carried more resolutely through to the final limit.' And writing to a friend a few days later, he observed: 'I have always been fond of the West African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." ' "
So it is that from time to time Anonymous must shake their stick at the world to prove they are still vital. It's not wise to volunteer to be the one they shake their stick at.
At no time was 4Chan itself blocked. Ongoing network security team monitoring has now determined there is no longer an immediate threat. Connectivity to those sites is being restored later today.
Link stolen from up the thread, so no informative mods for me.
PFNG - We saved the network! While you were out there was a flood of traffic from one website, so we shut it off in DNS. SRADMIN - What site? PFNG - 4chan something. It was something awful. SRADMIN - Hey! Look at the time. Your shift's over. Let's round up some boxes for your stuff. I'll walk you out.
Google technologies are kind of like expensive shoes. They're painful as hell when they're brand new. You have to break them in until they fit. And then they're great like nothing else.
No doubt as the Google translator learns the peculiarities of your speech it will get better at transcribing it over time. The more people who use it the bigger a wealth of patterns it has to work from. With some gentle correction by self-interested people, it will become great. It would probably be helpful to feed the thing a bunch of data, like transcripts of hearings at the UN multiply translated by human translators in real time, and various translations of printed works.
Ultimately it won't just translate live conversation - it will make Google's scanned books available in every language - with audiobook as well. In the meantime yeah, it's about as great as handwriting recognition.
I don't know why Google needs to advertise - their domain name is the verb "to inquire". But the ad was cute. I was entertained for 30 seconds. Not moved, not inspired, entertained. They went with the mini-movie boy-meets-girl trite story theme in a search engine context and it worked for me. The next time I search for information I'll use Google - not because of the ad but because it's a reliable solution to that need, until it's not.
And it didn't have Bill Gates shaking his butt in my face, which is nice. That was bad enough in standard def, but I was watching this one in HD.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984?
CPT word processor, 1984 - a dedicated word processing station with 8" floppy disks, a portrait orientation widescreen crisp white CRT measuring 8.5"x11", WYSIWYG and daisy wheel printer. 80WPM. Next question.
Modern computers are able to solve problems only dreamed of 20 years ago.
And yet for the most part, they don't. That was the point of that post. Most computers provide negative productivity - they're timesinks that let people send email and browse the web instead of doing something useful.
It's not necessary. Microsoft themselves will publish a list of ones they found for the next forever. If you want advance notice go hang out with the malware geeks. It's not like they're hiding - it's a $20B a year industry. Where are they going to hide?
They're making money like a drunken sailor. I.E. they don't have any more today than they did yesterday because they spend it as fast as it comes in. This has been true for a decade.
No, That's Windows 7 by itself. Office is 3GB extra.
The cited DSL fits in 64MB, all things included.
Damn Small Linux is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:
Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
Boot from a USB pen drive
Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
* Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
* Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
* Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize
It includes three browsers, document processing, email, spreadsheet, VOIP, and a lot more.
The smallest pendrive I've ever heard of is the 64MB USB 1.0 device I'm holding in my hand right now that I bought my wife more than a decade ago. I paid $79 for it at Fred Meyer, because tech stores wouldn't carry it. Actually, there were 16 and 32MB versions of this, but let's not go there because this was the Windows 95 era.
I am on the record as stating that we've had no productivity increases since the advent of Windows. Let me quote from a wise man:
"Word processing was a solved problem in 1984. By 1987 spreadsheets had all the functions a normal person would ever use. Databases took a little longer, but by 1990 that was sorted. An infant could have been born that day and by now would be almost of age to vote and we've seen no real improvement in productivity since."
64MB is 0.32% of 20GB.
So let me ask you: If the Office team needs 3,000 MB to install their full application set, what can they do with 30MB - 1% of that? Splash? Can they even do that?
I've known about this bug for many years - it's one of a few that date back to my college days when I had a scholarly interest in such things. Back then I used to haunt the dark corners of the Internet where these things were good for a laugh. Now they're good for a quarter million dollars because GO's haunt the dark corners now and they pay good money, and only now are ones like this coming out in common knowledge. You may be sure that if you're a high value target you've been exploited this whole time and that's why your competitors mysteriously beat you to market, or how knockoffs appeared more suddenly after your innovation than reverse engineering would allow.
What's absurd is that there are hundreds more just in the core OS. Go to apps and WMP doesn't have a streaming format that doesn't have pwnership, and let's not even talk about IE. Then there's all the forgotten formats and services, each with its vestigal exploits that still work. And then there's Office. Good Lord, as if providing multiple Turing machine capable development environments were not enough, every app includes embeds for hundreds of formats that can hose any machine that opens a document, and for each of those there's a Microsoft-only undocumented interface that's truly trusted to be exploited, because that's how they roll. And one of those apps is an email client - think about that for a bit.
Each fix only adds to the problem. Even if the patch doesn't add new exploits (most do) most people don't patch, and half of the few who do patch slowly to avoid incompatibilities. In the meantime the patch gives clues to the amateurs on which features to exploit. For 90% of systems you only need to pwn it once and leave some obvious malware and the idiot running it will clean it and think it's all good. So the smart black hat builds a database of servers running Windows he can get at from his previously Pwned boxes (yes, some of them are probably inside your firewall and most but not all of them are clients) and crafts a package to pwn the rest of your network and if necessary leave some cleanable traces. The truly nefarious black hats exploit the patching system itself - of course it has exploits and hidden hooks too.
Each rewrite leads to new problems. In 2008 how the hell do you write a server OS that hangs on a bad packet on the file sharing service? That's not what Bill promised us in 2002. In six years they couldn't even get that right? That's your clue that they're not even trying or at least they're not able. At the very least they're struggling just to copy a file as if that were a new requirement.
You would think with the billions they have to throw away on XBox and Pink, from Bing to Zune, Microsoft could afford to hire a few Pakistani code geeks to haunt the dark corners and report what they find written on the wall there. They're getting rid of their profits but they're not doing it well. You would think code security audits would extend to the historical catalog of code, but no... that group has enough to do just vetting this month's patches, let alone the output of the dev teams. I imagine the rest of them are building Bing interfaces into Yahoo's services as if they had a hope in hell of getting us to use Bing. For sure they're not throwing a ton of quality code geeks into saving their butt on WiMo 7. Fixing bugs widely known in the Underground that consumers like you don't know about? That's a 0 priority task.
Windows shops: not only are we laughing at you - we always have and we always will. You poor bastards.
He was speaking in absolute terms. Yes, the kernel could be much smaller. It is getting out of hand, relative to the simplicity of BSD and RTOS's and that means that in absolute terms it's bigger than it need be. Distros like dsl get around this by using older versions of the kernel, leveraging the brilliant Busybox (thanks Bruce!), leaving out unnecessary drivers and applications.
He could not have been talking relative to Windows. W7 x64 is a 20GB install - even before you add an office suite or the antimalware suites we've all come to know and love. Given the history it's reasonable to expect W8 will require continuing innovation in installation media.
I, for one, am glad Linus worries about such things in absolute rather than relative terms; instead of selling it to hardware partners as "it's a great way to drive adoption of new hardware!" This might mean that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will be a total respin to eliminate cruft.
If networking had come before the Internet, you might have a point. Since it didn't, no points for you.
The Internet was born several years before networking - with serial cables and such - for the purpose of passing email. It was some time before the IP stack matured enough to share resources like printers and storage between systems, so at first systems did their own routing. It was many years before we had Ethernet, with its bus and star topology in what we commonly refer to as "networking" - and competing technologies nearly killed it.
The good news for us is that a $40 router today has more computing power than the first 50 computers connected to the Internet, and more bandwidth than the first 1000.
Slashdot Mirror
The dendro-proxies are kaput too. We're onto making fun of himalayan glaciers and the Day After Tomorrow warnings now. Next up: satellite thermal measurement calibration to .01 degree C at a range of 2,000 kilometers, and the incredible disappearing Midieval Warm Period.
If the 1800's continue to cool at the current rate, it will not be long before we're thankful of the role of AGW in staving off the impending ice age of 1940.
Seattle is committing hundreds of miles of in-place fiber, and access to hundreds of thousands of utility poles. If they reach out to the community for contributions of resources and subscription commitments they may not need Google to pull this off. And Seattle has a world-class Peering point shared by All these people.
More should. It's a small part of the problem, but it does help.
Good guess. Businessweek is forecasting this to cost $3-8000 per home. At 5 year amortization and 8% interest, that's $60-140 per month. Knowing Google, they'll leverage off the shelf technologies and clever networking to come in under the low end.
With cities like Seattle volunteering rights-of way and in-place dark fiber infrastructure, this looks doable. Throw in some guaranteed paid subscriptions by city services like police, fire and so forth to seed the project and we're on! Maybe we don't even need Google for this one.
The salesperson who brought us DSL got a little party in her honor.
Same thing happened with cable internet. We were so happy to fire Ma Bell.
First company to bring gigabit fiber to this door gets a party too. I would rather have Google's fiber than Verizon's - Google's got no motivation to drive up real services like multiple IP addresses or perform filtering or capping. I could see going with Google for the triple play of video, voice and data - and we're paying a lot for that. Comcast hasn't been awful compared to QWest, but that bar was not high.
It's already morning in Tehran.
Because there's nothing real to complain about.
Cantennas can have a range of over 1 kilometer even if you build one yourself. The engineered commercial model should do better than that. How remote is your area? There should be a friendly person somewhere in that range unless you're way out in the sticks. You do have to spend some time aiming it though. You run the antenna cable through a wall to an exterior mount (grounded!) that holds the cantenna. Scan for networks, turn it a couple degrees and try again and mark the finds on the base. Engineering geeks would of course put the thing on a remote antenna rotator. You can also use an antenna amplifier, a high-gain parabolic directional antenna or high-gain omnidirectional antenna to extend the range to several kilometers. The record is 304 kilometers, but that requires special equipment and cooperation at both ends.
Me, I can get three open WAPs from inside my house with the standard laptop wifi but that's not anonymous enough.
You typed and reasearched all of that and it doesn't matter. They netblocked 4chan, and some responsible person said, "Hey, that's not good" and reversed it.
It's kind of a shame. What the chans could do to VZW would be good for some epic threads.
The sad thing about tyranny is that it's never necessary to submit to the tyrant. It's a voluntary thing often done in little steps for pragmatic reasons.
But this is the Internet and Anonymous does not have to submit to the tyranny of censorship. They don't have to be pragmatic. They don't have to (and can't!) negotiate. They are everywhere and nowhere. Some among them control vast swaths of the network in official and unofficial capacities. They have sympathizers and informants everywhere. They can accidentaly retire your domain, your IP space, your SSL certificate, without fear of consequence.
The corporation and its property employed in censorship is an instrument of tyranny and "in play". Its personnel are uniformed combatants engaged in pressing the fight and the higher in the tree they are the greater their responsibility. Censorship is tyranny and Anonymous is willing to take arms against it - it's that simple. They're not going to hurt anybody but they can wreck some business and they have wrecked some equipment. They've been known to uncover skeletons in the closets of their opposition and they can be quite resourceful in that regard. They are not the mainstream press, which casts its gaze the other way to get continued access to the play.
Anonymous doesn't have to filter their content to play. They're the pimp that supplied the hookers, the pusher that sold the coke to your aide (hell, Anonymous probably is your aide), the concierge that arranged for the gerbil, the maid that cleaned the room. They were the camera men and edit team for your reminiscence porn. They're the crew of the boat, the doctor that prescribed the cocktail, the bartender, the barmaid, all three hookers including the trangender dwarf. They're your accountant, your divorce lawyer, your shrink, your family counselor and your confessor. They sold you the condoms and ordinarily that's no business of theirs - but dick with them and your wife will find out with the rest of the world but the trail will never lead back to anyone in a traceable way unless it's good for a six-figure book deal.
Yes, it's an asymmetric engagement - that's how low intensity conflicts are fought these days. The corporations have their battalions of lawyers, their purchased senators and congressmen. They have their sheriffs and judges, their warrants and seizure laws. The array of legal means is the baton of oppression. Each individual anonymous, however, can rise perhaps only to the level of midemeanor in his civil disobedience and given their bulk bring down the mightiest corporation or its political tool.
Anonymous has their technology, their anonymity, their will, their access and their mass. This is a Cyber war. They've embraced Patton's admonition "The point is not to die for your country, the point is to make the other poor bastard die for his." The only way to be captured in a cyber war is to express incompetence, so they have no pity for the fallen. Their enemy is a lifeless, soulless corporation, so they have no pity for it either.
Yes, it's an asymmetric battle, and the outcome is certain. Your moral plea is nothing more than the tears of the wife of a vanquished Caesar: "It's not fair! The slaves don't know their place!" What you don't realize is that the proper place for a corporation that won't serve its customer is the dustbin of history.
"Looking back upon his handling of the incident, Roosevelt thought he 'never saw a bluff carried more resolutely through to the final limit.' And writing to a friend a few days later, he observed: 'I have always been fond of the West African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." ' "
- Theodore Roosevelt
So it is that from time to time Anonymous must shake their stick at the world to prove they are still vital. It's not wise to volunteer to be the one they shake their stick at.
I don't even like the cha
4chan is a bunch of bitches compared to Verizon.
Verizon: Nothing to see here. Please move along.
At no time was 4Chan itself blocked. Ongoing network security team monitoring has now determined there is no longer an immediate threat. Connectivity to those sites is being restored later today.
Link stolen from up the thread, so no informative mods for me.
What do you recommend?
Cantenna, of course. Because free speech can't be anonymous if they have your billing address.
Helpful folks can also assist by hooking up an open WAP to a nice long range antenna.
FiOS, DSL are not affected.
Not affected yet. They will be before this is done.
Google technologies are kind of like expensive shoes. They're painful as hell when they're brand new. You have to break them in until they fit. And then they're great like nothing else.
No doubt as the Google translator learns the peculiarities of your speech it will get better at transcribing it over time. The more people who use it the bigger a wealth of patterns it has to work from. With some gentle correction by self-interested people, it will become great. It would probably be helpful to feed the thing a bunch of data, like transcripts of hearings at the UN multiply translated by human translators in real time, and various translations of printed works.
Ultimately it won't just translate live conversation - it will make Google's scanned books available in every language - with audiobook as well. In the meantime yeah, it's about as great as handwriting recognition.
I don't know why Google needs to advertise - their domain name is the verb "to inquire". But the ad was cute. I was entertained for 30 seconds. Not moved, not inspired, entertained. They went with the mini-movie boy-meets-girl trite story theme in a search engine context and it worked for me. The next time I search for information I'll use Google - not because of the ad but because it's a reliable solution to that need, until it's not.
And it didn't have Bill Gates shaking his butt in my face, which is nice. That was bad enough in standard def, but I was watching this one in HD.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984?
CPT word processor, 1984 - a dedicated word processing station with 8" floppy disks, a portrait orientation widescreen crisp white CRT measuring 8.5"x11", WYSIWYG and daisy wheel printer. 80WPM. Next question.
Modern computers are able to solve problems only dreamed of 20 years ago.
And yet for the most part, they don't. That was the point of that post. Most computers provide negative productivity - they're timesinks that let people send email and browse the web instead of doing something useful.
It's not necessary. Microsoft themselves will publish a list of ones they found for the next forever. If you want advance notice go hang out with the malware geeks. It's not like they're hiding - it's a $20B a year industry. Where are they going to hide?
They're making money like a drunken sailor. I.E. they don't have any more today than they did yesterday because they spend it as fast as it comes in. This has been true for a decade.
Can they mod it to oblivion before I burn up all my Karma? We shall see.
No, That's Windows 7 by itself. Office is 3GB extra.
The cited DSL fits in 64MB, all things included.
Damn Small Linux is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:
It includes three browsers, document processing, email, spreadsheet, VOIP, and a lot more.
The smallest pendrive I've ever heard of is the 64MB USB 1.0 device I'm holding in my hand right now that I bought my wife more than a decade ago. I paid $79 for it at Fred Meyer, because tech stores wouldn't carry it. Actually, there were 16 and 32MB versions of this, but let's not go there because this was the Windows 95 era.
I am on the record as stating that we've had no productivity increases since the advent of Windows. Let me quote from a wise man:
"Word processing was a solved problem in 1984. By 1987 spreadsheets had all the functions a normal person would ever use. Databases took a little longer, but by 1990 that was sorted. An infant could have been born that day and by now would be almost of age to vote and we've seen no real improvement in productivity since."
64MB is 0.32% of 20GB.
So let me ask you: If the Office team needs 3,000 MB to install their full application set, what can they do with 30MB - 1% of that? Splash? Can they even do that?
I've known about this bug for many years - it's one of a few that date back to my college days when I had a scholarly interest in such things. Back then I used to haunt the dark corners of the Internet where these things were good for a laugh. Now they're good for a quarter million dollars because GO's haunt the dark corners now and they pay good money, and only now are ones like this coming out in common knowledge. You may be sure that if you're a high value target you've been exploited this whole time and that's why your competitors mysteriously beat you to market, or how knockoffs appeared more suddenly after your innovation than reverse engineering would allow.
What's absurd is that there are hundreds more just in the core OS. Go to apps and WMP doesn't have a streaming format that doesn't have pwnership, and let's not even talk about IE. Then there's all the forgotten formats and services, each with its vestigal exploits that still work. And then there's Office. Good Lord, as if providing multiple Turing machine capable development environments were not enough, every app includes embeds for hundreds of formats that can hose any machine that opens a document, and for each of those there's a Microsoft-only undocumented interface that's truly trusted to be exploited, because that's how they roll. And one of those apps is an email client - think about that for a bit.
Each fix only adds to the problem. Even if the patch doesn't add new exploits (most do) most people don't patch, and half of the few who do patch slowly to avoid incompatibilities. In the meantime the patch gives clues to the amateurs on which features to exploit. For 90% of systems you only need to pwn it once and leave some obvious malware and the idiot running it will clean it and think it's all good. So the smart black hat builds a database of servers running Windows he can get at from his previously Pwned boxes (yes, some of them are probably inside your firewall and most but not all of them are clients) and crafts a package to pwn the rest of your network and if necessary leave some cleanable traces. The truly nefarious black hats exploit the patching system itself - of course it has exploits and hidden hooks too.
Each rewrite leads to new problems. In 2008 how the hell do you write a server OS that hangs on a bad packet on the file sharing service? That's not what Bill promised us in 2002. In six years they couldn't even get that right? That's your clue that they're not even trying or at least they're not able. At the very least they're struggling just to copy a file as if that were a new requirement.
You would think with the billions they have to throw away on XBox and Pink, from Bing to Zune, Microsoft could afford to hire a few Pakistani code geeks to haunt the dark corners and report what they find written on the wall there. They're getting rid of their profits but they're not doing it well. You would think code security audits would extend to the historical catalog of code, but no... that group has enough to do just vetting this month's patches, let alone the output of the dev teams. I imagine the rest of them are building Bing interfaces into Yahoo's services as if they had a hope in hell of getting us to use Bing. For sure they're not throwing a ton of quality code geeks into saving their butt on WiMo 7. Fixing bugs widely known in the Underground that consumers like you don't know about? That's a 0 priority task.
Windows shops: not only are we laughing at you - we always have and we always will. You poor bastards.
Windows 7 is very much still built on the NT codebase.
You lie! Longhorn (Vista, Server 2008) was built from the ground up. Microsoft told me so!
They wouldn't lie to me. <sniff>
He was speaking in absolute terms. Yes, the kernel could be much smaller. It is getting out of hand, relative to the simplicity of BSD and RTOS's and that means that in absolute terms it's bigger than it need be. Distros like dsl get around this by using older versions of the kernel, leveraging the brilliant Busybox (thanks Bruce!), leaving out unnecessary drivers and applications.
He could not have been talking relative to Windows. W7 x64 is a 20GB install - even before you add an office suite or the antimalware suites we've all come to know and love. Given the history it's reasonable to expect W8 will require continuing innovation in installation media.
I, for one, am glad Linus worries about such things in absolute rather than relative terms; instead of selling it to hardware partners as "it's a great way to drive adoption of new hardware!" This might mean that version 3.0 of the Linux kernel will be a total respin to eliminate cruft.
If networking had come before the Internet, you might have a point. Since it didn't, no points for you.
The Internet was born several years before networking - with serial cables and such - for the purpose of passing email. It was some time before the IP stack matured enough to share resources like printers and storage between systems, so at first systems did their own routing. It was many years before we had Ethernet, with its bus and star topology in what we commonly refer to as "networking" - and competing technologies nearly killed it.
The good news for us is that a $40 router today has more computing power than the first 50 computers connected to the Internet, and more bandwidth than the first 1000.