The flip side of the question is "Why are skinny people not fat?".
It's a more interesting question than you may think. One bit of semi-famous research is the 1970s Vermont 'prisoner overfeeding study' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Rv8JnFgw4). Like bits of Nazi science, this is probably irreproducible, as it'd *never* get past a human subject review committee today.
A number of lifetime-normal-weight prisoners were fed substantially over their basal metabolic needs for an extended period. Their input was rigorously controlled (being prisoners), and their exercise regimen was pretty easy to monitor and control. Most of them gained weight, but almost none of them nearly as much as the standard "3500 kCal is a pound of fat" Standard Model would predict. Several plateaued on weight gain, and a few lucky (?) prisoners were *never* able gain 10% of their body weight when eating nearly 10,000 Calories a day. Simply couldn't do it.
A lot of people are overeating in the western culture. A lot more that, by the numbers, should be in the 300-pound range. And while there are no shortage of very-very-fat people, they're not nearly as common as they should be if you study individual diet patterns. This is part of the problem. People look at their skinny friends' diets, and some of those skinny friends are like the luckier Vermont prisoners.
The basic principle is sound. 6 days income for 15mph over is pretty stiff, but then again, a lot of US speeding tickets now are in the $400+ range (after court fees, etc) which is 6 days' income for a lot of people.
"15 mph/25 km/h over" is kinda a poor starting point. 55km/h in a 30km/h zone (one that really needs to be a 30km/h zone... like a dense urban center with playgrounds and schools)... to me that's pretty deserving of punishment. 125km/h on a rural road posted at 100km/h in clear weather? I'm not sure that even merits a warning. I'd put the penalties at 30%/40%/50%/60%/70% over the posted limit rather than a fixed speed-delta.
Value judgement time, but for my money, nobody's out there brute-forcing RSA keys even at 1024-bit except, maybe, the NSA. If you weigh "everyone but the NSA" security as a bigger day-to-day concern, side-channel issues (keylogging, shared memory, copied private key files, implementation flaws, etc) are a lot more pressing realities than the almost-theoretical added security of 4kb+ RSA keys or going ECC.
One bit of paranoia the author might add is moving your private key completely off of your desktop into a smartcard that does the RSA or ECDSA step and, being a far more limited microprocessor, should be more securable than processes running on a general-purpose networked computer and multitasking OS.
I believe there are ways to do ssh with PKCS-based smartcards, but the method used around here is based on PGP/GPG keys and either the "OpenPGP Smartcard" (ISO smartcard form factor, requires a smartcard reader) or the YubiKey Neo (USB pen-drive form factor). You create a key pair (possibly using the smartcard CPU itself). You use gpg-agent with OpenSSH (or PuTTY) support instead of ssh-agent/pageant. The private key never leaves the device (the little bit of flash memory in the chip) and is designed to be unrecoverable. The RSA authentication step happens in the microprocessor on the card. The card has a PIN and is designed to lock after a couple missed PINs.
Basically every H-1B->citizen voter is, leaving ethnicity/immigrant status completely aside, a college-educated, urban-area, younger voter. I'm not sure they vote much differently than anyone else checking those boxes.
Kinesis, who makes the Advantage series (crazy bowl shaped keyboard that I'm typing on right now and love to pieces) also makes the Freestyle (two halves), and they make the latter in a Bluetooth configuration. Amusingly, a wireless keyboard with a wire (between the two halves).
It tells you exactly why in the article. It's the way people drive them.
Doubly-so when we're talking about the vehicles in question in the article. Small displacement cars in the EU are, almost entirely, manual transmission vehicles. This means that you can precisely shift at 1500 RPM on the dynamometer test (which doesn't have any hills, traffic, or risk of death if you stall out), crawl your way up to speed, and get excellent l/100km results. This would be completely suicidal on an Autobahn or Motorway.
Re:Such practices REDUCE profit and kill companies
on
Comcast Confessions
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for posting a link (your CATO one) from 1984. It's rare to get that kind of historical perspective on a site dedicated to modern technology issues.
While you were sleeping, Rip Van Winkle, exclusive local franchise agreements (the crux of that paper) were made illegal by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
They'd discover the same thing phone companies did in the 1990s. Direct calling your customers for an upsell is a good way to create a cancellation.
They'll discover no such thing. In the telephone wars era, you could nearly frictionlessly change your long distance provider (if not your last-mile provider, at first). Most people can't change their cable provider, because that's the only possible provider of internet (above 2Mbps anyway), so they can call you all day and you can fume all day, but one thing you won't do is cancel.
I agreed with the company split they tried to implement before.
For all the people who never or barely use the mail side, there are also tens of thousands of rural low-bandwidth customers. Virtually everyone I visit around my in-laws (rural South Dakota, only internet access is via cellular or satellite, either way capped at 3-5GB/month) gets red envelopes.
The thing is, I'm already having to use a password manager to keep track of my valuable passwords. With what, easily a dozen banking-ish relationships (cards, mortgage, retirement, etc) alone. That battle on complexity was lost long ago (ymmv).
Thus, if I've already resorted to a password manager for my valuable life, adding an entry to that vault for even the most trivial sites (and creating a random password) is easier than remembering a throwaway name/pass for even 30 seconds.
It's not that "you need a password manager to post to your local newspaper blog". You don't. It's that, if you're already using a password manager (and I can't imagine living without one now), using it for trivia is trivial.
Follow any one stack of learning, "the Ruby way" or "the Drupal way" or "the JSP way", and you can create wonderful small-scale things that, while they might get mocked by the tech-weenie chorus, serve their function and make people happy.
Every hip language/framework/DB/deployment tool/bundler/markup language/food processor is designed to make your day better. Virtually all of them actually do just that (okay, a few will piss you off, but most are not intentionally evil).
The problem is supporting a world with 65 different technologies. It is indeed superhuman to expect someone to be a Groovy/Perl/Node.js/SASS/Hadoop/Puppet/XSLT/AWS/PCI-DSS/Postgres-tweaking/network-routing/desktop-supporting "web guy". (My current job wants that and much more, and, sorry, they don't actually have it in me. I hate faking it. I fake it.)
And, yet, much of the suit-wearing world doesn't understand that, and willfully doesn't want to figure that out. In 1998, they hired "a web guy". If they got successful, they hired five "web guys". Or 20. Those business-people are still looking for "web guys". People who are extreme generalists in "the web" in 2014 are either savants or on the hardcore burnout track.
"Never trust" is an exaggeration. It's not a binary.
"Never trust anyone you meet at a party" is a very weak, nearly joking, version of 'never trust' Date them, but don't immediately trust them.
"Never trust some klatch of Ghanaian scammers who you've never actually met in person so much that you send them your entire life's savings and in fact go wildly into debt sending them more money" (as is the advice my uncle got repeatedly and ignored repeatedly) is a much stronger version of 'never trust'.
- can't fix stupid -- but stupid eventually runs out of money (and credit)
Yep. I can name numerous friends and family in rural spots where internet is either Excede, Hughes, or 4G stick. Without exception, they all have a physical-disc NetFlix subscription.
Because Netflix competes with Comcast/TWC/AT&T's ka-ching buckets-of-money-spinning video distribution platforms. If Netflix gets popular enough, Comcast is reduced to a dumb internet pipe for $50 a month (profit of $5), not a primarily a video provider ($100+ bills, profits of $20+).
Which is the problem. If Comcast *were* an internet-tube provider (only), they'd generally be pro-peering. They might try to charge Netflix some (they like money), if the market would bear it, but mostly it's to their advantage to peer. However, most of the ISPs in the US are not pure-internet providers, so if Comcast video can use Comcast internet to hamstring Netflix, that's a natural reaction.
Several other people have mentioned it, but there's a lot of off-decent-broadband people out there (get online via satellite or cell-stick). These rural households may only be 5-7% of the nation, but since you see red envelopes in *almost every* country house I'm ever in, it wouldn't surprise me if they make up 15-20% of Netflix's customer base.
"A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...".
Congress did that. In 1996. There is no local monopoly franchise in your local community. There is, de facto, an economic monopoly/weak duopoly. And in many cases, local governments are actively hostile to competition (because they make a lot from franchise fees from the incumbents and don't want prices to fall). But, what you're asking for? Happened. Is old enough to graduate high school this year.
The problem is, there's ALWAYS going to be "the next thing, it's in the lab now". Meanwhile, AT&T dutifully mails me a postcard each month inviting me to switch to the best thing they have to offer here. The exact same 1.5Mb ADSL they rolled out in late 1999 over JFK-era copper.
The SOTA will always keep going up. Nature of things. By the time we overbuild the top 100 metros (with two generations of improvement in the meantime), we'll presumably have off-the-shelf quantum networking components. Que sera sera. Or, if they don't do it, AT&T will be offering me 1.5Mb over copper in 2022. And increasing the chocolate, ahembit ration to 50GB.
Straight letter-of-the-law, there's no exclusive right to lay copper wires anywhere in the US. No franchise agreements since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed are allowed to be exclusive. This theoretically supercedes state, local, and even HOA/apartment management policy.
Now, again, the reality on the ground is very different. Cities can make it very easy for a competitor to come in. Or they can make it almost impossible (not allowing access rights similar to the incumbents, demanding almost-instant universal coverage (while AT&T offers U-Verse on some blocks and 768/128 ADSL in poorer neighborhoods and calls it 'universal coverage')). But, that's on your local and state governments to get over (but, remember, Comcast and AT&T spend a lot of money to keep those roadblocks coming). The Feds opened up the market years ago.
Google Fiber, meet Netflix. Netflix, Google Fiber. Amazon Web Services, you in? Apple?
It's time to start more overbuilding. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, Comcast or whoever already has the lines and could bump up to 300Mb plans for $50 at almost no additional cost (making them hard to compete against). But, until you build (and build at a much faster rate than the current Google Fiber projects), this is only going to get worse. You're currently dependent on not just a quasi-monopolist monster, but a wounded and irrational monster (because their TV profits are hurting). You have to bypass them.
It's ugly, I know. There will be communities with roadblocks (overbuilding is supposedly legal everywhere since the Telecom Act of 1996, but reality isn't so pretty). Sad, but true. We'll end up bypassing those communities, too. In every community that welcomes you, BUILD. Fiber is nice, but if you have to go DOCSIS/HFC (fiber to the block/neighborhood) with a better upstream split frequency because of cost, build that... coax is under-rated. But build. You can train high school students to lay coax. You can leverage massive discounts for buying 30 million identical ONUs. Build. Please. For the good of the country and the internet.
Any company that is large enough to have more than one person installing software is large enough to be pushing it out through SCCM or any of a half-dozen other solutions like it. If they aren't, they will be quickly replaced by companies who do employ such solutions. A whole SCCM setup, bare-metal up, is cheaper than even one year of one minimum-wage "next clicker".
It's nice to see a lot of people have rediscovered antenna TV. Since the digital changeover (and the recession), I've seen a good number of aerials sprout up in my neighborhood, something basically dead in the 90s.
The question is, how long can that last? The network affiliates are ever more addicted to their retransmission consent money from the pay-providers. Hell, Comcast owns NBC and the other main networks have heavy ties into the paid TV world. Several of the network executives have already threatened to go paid-only in light of the Aereo decision. There will be a lot more temptation to go dark when the FCC lets them reverse-auction 'their' spectrum to internet/mobile providers in a year or two. Besides that... people like me who watch antenna TV instead of paying for cable are either poor or cheapskates. In neither case, anyone's favorite target market demographic.
It will be a slow shutdown, with all the affiliate agreement model, NFL contracts, and the like. But I think that, in a decade, the free OTA world will pretty much be PBS and maybe a couple of infomercial channels.
Seriously... lacking PAE is really, really rare. The only chips released in the even semi-modern era that didn't have PAE it were a handful of Pentium M laptops (and why Intel did that, I'll never know). I do have one laptop that qualifies. It should probably be retired, but when the Ubuntus wouldn't support it, it was an excuse to play with BSD for old-times'-sake.
The problem with Fukushima was that "due to the earthquake/tsunami" is not some unforseeable 'force majure' matter.
The reactors were designed to survive a certain degree of earthquake and even a certain degree of tsunami. They were entirely incapable of surviving the 2011 tsunami (gensets barely above sea level).
But, the 2011 tsunami was *not*, and I repeat *not* unforseeable. It was a smaller tsunami than that exact same coastline experienced in June of 1896. Well within recorded modern history.
If you engineer something to survive everything that's happened in recorded history and stretch your imagination some to encompass possible events marginally greater than that, I'll give you credit for trying. If you engineer something that will fail, in a catastrophic mode, in case of a natural disaster that has actually happened within the last 70 years (from when Fukushima was designed)? You've engineered failure.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.
'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.
Slashdot Mirror
The flip side of the question is "Why are skinny people not fat?".
It's a more interesting question than you may think. One bit of semi-famous research is the 1970s Vermont 'prisoner overfeeding study' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Rv8JnFgw4). Like bits of Nazi science, this is probably irreproducible, as it'd *never* get past a human subject review committee today.
A number of lifetime-normal-weight prisoners were fed substantially over their basal metabolic needs for an extended period. Their input was rigorously controlled (being prisoners), and their exercise regimen was pretty easy to monitor and control. Most of them gained weight, but almost none of them nearly as much as the standard "3500 kCal is a pound of fat" Standard Model would predict. Several plateaued on weight gain, and a few lucky (?) prisoners were *never* able gain 10% of their body weight when eating nearly 10,000 Calories a day. Simply couldn't do it.
A lot of people are overeating in the western culture. A lot more that, by the numbers, should be in the 300-pound range. And while there are no shortage of very-very-fat people, they're not nearly as common as they should be if you study individual diet patterns. This is part of the problem. People look at their skinny friends' diets, and some of those skinny friends are like the luckier Vermont prisoners.
The basic principle is sound. 6 days income for 15mph over is pretty stiff, but then again, a lot of US speeding tickets now are in the $400+ range (after court fees, etc) which is 6 days' income for a lot of people.
"15 mph/25 km/h over" is kinda a poor starting point. 55km/h in a 30km/h zone (one that really needs to be a 30km/h zone... like a dense urban center with playgrounds and schools)... to me that's pretty deserving of punishment. 125km/h on a rural road posted at 100km/h in clear weather? I'm not sure that even merits a warning. I'd put the penalties at 30%/40%/50%/60%/70% over the posted limit rather than a fixed speed-delta.
Value judgement time, but for my money, nobody's out there brute-forcing RSA keys even at 1024-bit except, maybe, the NSA. If you weigh "everyone but the NSA" security as a bigger day-to-day concern, side-channel issues (keylogging, shared memory, copied private key files, implementation flaws, etc) are a lot more pressing realities than the almost-theoretical added security of 4kb+ RSA keys or going ECC.
One bit of paranoia the author might add is moving your private key completely off of your desktop into a smartcard that does the RSA or ECDSA step and, being a far more limited microprocessor, should be more securable than processes running on a general-purpose networked computer and multitasking OS.
I believe there are ways to do ssh with PKCS-based smartcards, but the method used around here is based on PGP/GPG keys and either the "OpenPGP Smartcard" (ISO smartcard form factor, requires a smartcard reader) or the YubiKey Neo (USB pen-drive form factor). You create a key pair (possibly using the smartcard CPU itself). You use gpg-agent with OpenSSH (or PuTTY) support instead of ssh-agent/pageant. The private key never leaves the device (the little bit of flash memory in the chip) and is designed to be unrecoverable. The RSA authentication step happens in the microprocessor on the card. The card has a PIN and is designed to lock after a couple missed PINs.
http://www.bradfordembedded.co... for a starting point.
Basically every H-1B->citizen voter is, leaving ethnicity/immigrant status completely aside, a college-educated, urban-area, younger voter. I'm not sure they vote much differently than anyone else checking those boxes.
How 'ergo' you looking for?
Kinesis, who makes the Advantage series (crazy bowl shaped keyboard that I'm typing on right now and love to pieces) also makes the Freestyle (two halves), and they make the latter in a Bluetooth configuration. Amusingly, a wireless keyboard with a wire (between the two halves).
https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/s...
It tells you exactly why in the article. It's the way people drive them.
Doubly-so when we're talking about the vehicles in question in the article. Small displacement cars in the EU are, almost entirely, manual transmission vehicles. This means that you can precisely shift at 1500 RPM on the dynamometer test (which doesn't have any hills, traffic, or risk of death if you stall out), crawl your way up to speed, and get excellent l/100km results. This would be completely suicidal on an Autobahn or Motorway.
Thanks for posting a link (your CATO one) from 1984. It's rare to get that kind of historical perspective on a site dedicated to modern technology issues.
While you were sleeping, Rip Van Winkle, exclusive local franchise agreements (the crux of that paper) were made illegal by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
They'd discover the same thing phone companies did in the 1990s. Direct calling your customers for an upsell is a good way to create a cancellation.
They'll discover no such thing. In the telephone wars era, you could nearly frictionlessly change your long distance provider (if not your last-mile provider, at first). Most people can't change their cable provider, because that's the only possible provider of internet (above 2Mbps anyway), so they can call you all day and you can fume all day, but one thing you won't do is cancel.
I agreed with the company split they tried to implement before.
For all the people who never or barely use the mail side, there are also tens of thousands of rural low-bandwidth customers. Virtually everyone I visit around my in-laws (rural South Dakota, only internet access is via cellular or satellite, either way capped at 3-5GB/month) gets red envelopes.
The thing is, I'm already having to use a password manager to keep track of my valuable passwords. With what, easily a dozen banking-ish relationships (cards, mortgage, retirement, etc) alone. That battle on complexity was lost long ago (ymmv).
Thus, if I've already resorted to a password manager for my valuable life, adding an entry to that vault for even the most trivial sites (and creating a random password) is easier than remembering a throwaway name/pass for even 30 seconds.
It's not that "you need a password manager to post to your local newspaper blog". You don't. It's that, if you're already using a password manager (and I can't imagine living without one now), using it for trivia is trivial.
Follow any one stack of learning, "the Ruby way" or "the Drupal way" or "the JSP way", and you can create wonderful small-scale things that, while they might get mocked by the tech-weenie chorus, serve their function and make people happy.
Every hip language/framework/DB/deployment tool/bundler/markup language/food processor is designed to make your day better. Virtually all of them actually do just that (okay, a few will piss you off, but most are not intentionally evil).
The problem is supporting a world with 65 different technologies. It is indeed superhuman to expect someone to be a Groovy/Perl/Node.js/SASS/Hadoop/Puppet/XSLT/AWS/PCI-DSS/Postgres-tweaking/network-routing/desktop-supporting "web guy". (My current job wants that and much more, and, sorry, they don't actually have it in me. I hate faking it. I fake it.)
And, yet, much of the suit-wearing world doesn't understand that, and willfully doesn't want to figure that out. In 1998, they hired "a web guy". If they got successful, they hired five "web guys". Or 20. Those business-people are still looking for "web guys". People who are extreme generalists in "the web" in 2014 are either savants or on the hardcore burnout track.
"Never trust" is an exaggeration. It's not a binary.
"Never trust anyone you meet at a party" is a very weak, nearly joking, version of 'never trust' Date them, but don't immediately trust them.
"Never trust some klatch of Ghanaian scammers who you've never actually met in person so much that you send them your entire life's savings and in fact go wildly into debt sending them more money" (as is the advice my uncle got repeatedly and ignored repeatedly) is a much stronger version of 'never trust'.
- can't fix stupid
-- but stupid eventually runs out of money (and credit)
Yep. I can name numerous friends and family in rural spots where internet is either Excede, Hughes, or 4G stick. Without exception, they all have a physical-disc NetFlix subscription.
"So why does Netflix have to pay?"
Because Netflix competes with Comcast/TWC/AT&T's ka-ching buckets-of-money-spinning video distribution platforms. If Netflix gets popular enough, Comcast is reduced to a dumb internet pipe for $50 a month (profit of $5), not a primarily a video provider ($100+ bills, profits of $20+).
Which is the problem. If Comcast *were* an internet-tube provider (only), they'd generally be pro-peering. They might try to charge Netflix some (they like money), if the market would bear it, but mostly it's to their advantage to peer. However, most of the ISPs in the US are not pure-internet providers, so if Comcast video can use Comcast internet to hamstring Netflix, that's a natural reaction.
Several other people have mentioned it, but there's a lot of off-decent-broadband people out there (get online via satellite or cell-stick). These rural households may only be 5-7% of the nation, but since you see red envelopes in *almost every* country house I'm ever in, it wouldn't surprise me if they make up 15-20% of Netflix's customer base.
"A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...".
Congress did that. In 1996. There is no local monopoly franchise in your local community. There is, de facto, an economic monopoly/weak duopoly. And in many cases, local governments are actively hostile to competition (because they make a lot from franchise fees from the incumbents and don't want prices to fall). But, what you're asking for? Happened. Is old enough to graduate high school this year.
Great and all. Marvelous.
The problem is, there's ALWAYS going to be "the next thing, it's in the lab now". Meanwhile, AT&T dutifully mails me a postcard each month inviting me to switch to the best thing they have to offer here. The exact same 1.5Mb ADSL they rolled out in late 1999 over JFK-era copper.
The SOTA will always keep going up. Nature of things. By the time we overbuild the top 100 metros (with two generations of improvement in the meantime), we'll presumably have off-the-shelf quantum networking components. Que sera sera. Or, if they don't do it, AT&T will be offering me 1.5Mb over copper in 2022. And increasing the chocolate, ahem bit ration to 50GB.
Straight letter-of-the-law, there's no exclusive right to lay copper wires anywhere in the US. No franchise agreements since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed are allowed to be exclusive. This theoretically supercedes state, local, and even HOA/apartment management policy.
Now, again, the reality on the ground is very different. Cities can make it very easy for a competitor to come in. Or they can make it almost impossible (not allowing access rights similar to the incumbents, demanding almost-instant universal coverage (while AT&T offers U-Verse on some blocks and 768/128 ADSL in poorer neighborhoods and calls it 'universal coverage')). But, that's on your local and state governments to get over (but, remember, Comcast and AT&T spend a lot of money to keep those roadblocks coming). The Feds opened up the market years ago.
Google Fiber, meet Netflix. Netflix, Google Fiber. Amazon Web Services, you in? Apple?
It's time to start more overbuilding. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, Comcast or whoever already has the lines and could bump up to 300Mb plans for $50 at almost no additional cost (making them hard to compete against). But, until you build (and build at a much faster rate than the current Google Fiber projects), this is only going to get worse. You're currently dependent on not just a quasi-monopolist monster, but a wounded and irrational monster (because their TV profits are hurting). You have to bypass them.
It's ugly, I know. There will be communities with roadblocks (overbuilding is supposedly legal everywhere since the Telecom Act of 1996, but reality isn't so pretty). Sad, but true. We'll end up bypassing those communities, too. In every community that welcomes you, BUILD. Fiber is nice, but if you have to go DOCSIS/HFC (fiber to the block/neighborhood) with a better upstream split frequency because of cost, build that... coax is under-rated. But build. You can train high school students to lay coax. You can leverage massive discounts for buying 30 million identical ONUs. Build. Please. For the good of the country and the internet.
Any company that is large enough to have more than one person installing software is large enough to be pushing it out through SCCM or any of a half-dozen other solutions like it. If they aren't, they will be quickly replaced by companies who do employ such solutions. A whole SCCM setup, bare-metal up, is cheaper than even one year of one minimum-wage "next clicker".
It's nice to see a lot of people have rediscovered antenna TV. Since the digital changeover (and the recession), I've seen a good number of aerials sprout up in my neighborhood, something basically dead in the 90s.
The question is, how long can that last? The network affiliates are ever more addicted to their retransmission consent money from the pay-providers. Hell, Comcast owns NBC and the other main networks have heavy ties into the paid TV world. Several of the network executives have already threatened to go paid-only in light of the Aereo decision. There will be a lot more temptation to go dark when the FCC lets them reverse-auction 'their' spectrum to internet/mobile providers in a year or two. Besides that... people like me who watch antenna TV instead of paying for cable are either poor or cheapskates. In neither case, anyone's favorite target market demographic.
It will be a slow shutdown, with all the affiliate agreement model, NFL contracts, and the like. But I think that, in a decade, the free OTA world will pretty much be PBS and maybe a couple of infomercial channels.
Seriously... lacking PAE is really, really rare. The only chips released in the even semi-modern era that didn't have PAE it were a handful of Pentium M laptops (and why Intel did that, I'll never know). I do have one laptop that qualifies. It should probably be retired, but when the Ubuntus wouldn't support it, it was an excuse to play with BSD for old-times'-sake.
The problem with Fukushima was that "due to the earthquake/tsunami" is not some unforseeable 'force majure' matter.
The reactors were designed to survive a certain degree of earthquake and even a certain degree of tsunami. They were entirely incapable of surviving the 2011 tsunami (gensets barely above sea level).
But, the 2011 tsunami was *not*, and I repeat *not* unforseeable. It was a smaller tsunami than that exact same coastline experienced in June of 1896. Well within recorded modern history.
If you engineer something to survive everything that's happened in recorded history and stretch your imagination some to encompass possible events marginally greater than that, I'll give you credit for trying. If you engineer something that will fail, in a catastrophic mode, in case of a natural disaster that has actually happened within the last 70 years (from when Fukushima was designed)? You've engineered failure.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.
'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.