There is evidence for your point of view as well. Microsoft basically made a truce with IBM to develop a product together in order to better serve their customers. At the last moment, Microsoft pulled their support and rolled many of the technologies they developed in partnership into their own product.
This is the (abbreviated) history of OS/2, with the resulting Microsoft product being Windows NT. While the open source community can gain a huge measure of legitimacy with the general public through this proposed truce, I would encourage open source developers of any major project to embrace the publicity but keep a close eye out on their "partner".
I just hope that the open source folks who are moderate enough to accept a truce with Microsoft are also wary enough to avoid being shanked in the back.
Don't forget the Oklahoma City bombing, the *other* major terrorist attack on US soil. It's still recent history even if it has been overshadowed.
And the terrorists in that attack were not only white boys, but they were also Americans. And if memeory serves, McVeigh was younger, but Nicols was well into middle age.
Generalizing about who might attack doesn't help. Checking everyone equally for dangerous chemicals and weapons does. It's really that simple.
What you describe with a fake key is not possible. I would suggest reading up on symmetric key cryptography.
While I suppose it is possible to use a crypto PROGRAM that spews out innocuous text in response to your fake key, the government investigators will most certainly be decrypting the cyphertext with their own application. The crypto algorithms just perform a series of mathematical operations on either a block of data or a stream of data. There is no known way to make one instance of cyphertext decrypt into two different sensible plaintext outputs depending on which of two keys are used. I suppose someone could design an algorithm to do this, but it sure as hell won't be easy.
No existing crypto algorithm in wide use has the ability to do what you describe (not Rijndael, not DES, nothing). Using your fake key on the real cyphertext will return a bunch of gibberish, which will make it very obvious that you gave them a fake key.
You might want to look into something else. There is a related field, stenography, which deals with hiding the existence of your data. Combining good encryption with good stenography can make it very difficult to discover you data, as an attacker would have to find it first, then attempt to decrypt it. Handing over your crypto keys doesn't do anyone any good if they cannot find coherent cyphertext to decrypt.
Sure, you can avoid Wal-mart for now. But Wal-mart isn't even close to being the only place you'd ever make a financial transaction.
To stay completely out of the databases, you'll have to forgo making any reservations at hotels, airports, or rental agencies. They pretty all require a credit card on file (usually that's just one tidbit among many).
And cash doesn't work for big purchases. Assuming you even have the cash for it--most people don't--go down to the nearest car dealership and pay cash for a new car. By law, they are required to report cash transactions in excess of $10,000. Given how eager most salesmen are to wrap up a deal and get you out the door, you may have more hassle paying cash compared to just financing it. I've been financed during a 5-minute sit-down, and all I had to do was 3 sign three times (and they didn't have my SSN before we sat down, so they couldn't have done much in advance). The more people use credit, debit, store credit, and stored-value cards, the more cash is going to raise a red flag.
My grandpa was going to buy a new car with cash... cash which he legitimately earned while saving for his retirement and which he withdrew from the bank by giving them the required advance notice for a large cash withdrawal. Guess what happened? The dealership told him it would be easier for him to go back to the bank, deposit it, and write a check. Either the paperwork for registering significant cash purchases is so onerous that they risked a sale to avoid, or MOST PEOPLE LIKE HAVING A FINANCIAL "PAPERTRAIL" (including the people you want or need to engage in a transaction).
And regardless of whether it's regulatory burden or a fear of not having everything "in the system", the result is the same. Everything can be moved into the sytem if cash is made too inconvenient to use.
And this doesn't even mention the questionable policies at some retail outlets, such as the absurd policy at Best Buy. Yeah, just try to get a cash refund of over $250 from them. Go buy $250 of cables or video games or DVDs or whatever with cash, and go back the next day with your receipt and everything in its original box. And ask for cash back. Nothing special, just American bills equal in value to ones you handed over yesterday.
Now suppose you needed to get that money for some more-or-less emergency situation because you only pay with cash.
That's a nice idea and all, but it doesn't make a lot of sense architecturally, at least for general-purpose computing. HT is designed as a peripheral bus. Making a CPU be a peripheral to the main system... well, you could offload work onto it, I suppose, and it would have DMA access, but it would still be the ultimate third wheel---far enough out that memory accesses would be relatively slow, and it couldn't realistically share peripheral access, so all UI interaction and device access would pretty much have to be handled on the main CPU/GPU, so you end up bottlenecked by the main CPU for a lot of stuff anyway.
Um... I hate to break this to you, but AMD-64 CPUs use Hypertransport links as their interconnect already. Which means the way you described it is exactly how it works. The 100-series Opterons have 1 HT link that goes to the system's peripheral devices and buses. The 200-series Opterons have 2 HT links: one connects it to the other CPU and the other connects to peripheral devices. I think you can guess how many links the 400- and 800-series Opterons have.
The place where this would be really interesting, though, would be the whole "one bus to rule them all" space. You could use this to cheaply add external PCI slots without the relatively expensive hardware needed to send PCI more than a couple of inches (though this can also be solved using PCIe as the interconnect). You could use this to eventually supersede low performance busses like USB.
This is how HT is used internally already. It connects the CPU to the other buses and system devices (the other end of the link is usually terminated by the southbridge ASIC. As far as clustering goes, a 1-meter link makes it somewhat doable, but rememeber that there are already high bandwidth external interconnects like Infiniband that are already in use. I didn't see anything in the article that suggested HT is capable of blowing the established technologies out of the water.
If they already have bought the machine, it's actually a hell of a lot more wasteful NOT to use it. TFA indicates that it was ranked for the Top 500 in November 2005... and since it had to be purchased a fair bit of time before its delivery date, it could a year or more since the original funding allocation and subsequent purchasing decision were made.
I'm sure the exact date of the purchase order could be dug up by someone more determined than I am.
And for the record, a manned mission to sightsee on Mars will waste thousands of times the amount of money that this machine cost. If you thought launching a probe to Mars was expensive, wait until we get a final look at the cost of sending a few humans there with all of the equipment necessary to support them.
Just because something is legal does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean that it is in accordance with fundamental human rights. Nor does legality determine whether it is wise or desirable.
One of the reasons we have this constitution is because one group of people felt that their rights were being ignored under the law of their land. Because of that they formally broke away from that land and established a new nation.
Correcting legal abuses of rights from within that legal framework is significantly less disruptive compared to splintering off and building a new legal framework from scratch. So much the better if the framework was designed specifically to allow this to happen.
It seems that the reason it's considered a POC at this point is because it has no real payload. All it does is spread, and not nearly as heinously as Blaster/Welchia/Sasser.
As soon as it gets backdoor or downloader functionality... then it becomes a more serious threat. And really you, me, and the guys at Secunia/SARC/SANS/ISC/etc all know that's where this is headed.
So yes... in the sense of where this particular piece of malware is headed, this is a proof-of-concept. It's a live test of the progagation mechanism. The payload will be dropped into place soon... probably in the next version since this one looks like it's working fine.
Microsoft will pay Lucent a pittance or a pretty penny depending on how the details are worked out, and life will move on.
Given the complexity of the XBox 360 and the (probably) limited uses of the decoder by Microsoft itself, will a court really issue an injunction? Not to mention that MPEG-2 has been around for about an eon or so. It's not like MS cribbed someone's hot new trade secret... not this time around anyway.
I'll still be able to buy a 360 next week if I want, assuming they're not sold out again. This is interesting news to some, but I don't see more than a ripple for the 360.
He made a sound point. Obesity contributes to a number of health problems, including but not limited to: heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and diabetes. Furthermore, the circulatory problems present in severe cases can lead to a large number of relatively uncommon ailments.
Many of America's causes of burgeoning healthcare costs correlate directly with America's burgeoning idleness and poor knowledge of basic biology.
The USPS is not a tax-funded entity in the traditional sense. They do not receive a standard opertaing budget from the GAO. The postal service is entirely self-funded. While I believe the federal government would (and maybe already has) step in to bail the USPS out if a nasty surprise caught them blindside, the USPS was set up with the precept that it would be financially independent. (Blame Ben Franklin for that rather sound idea.)
You would still need to have a key for decrypting content that was secret. When the source code is known, it becomes easier to determine where the key is stored in memory and how it is protected (if it even is protected at all).
I won't go so far as to say open source is completing incompatible with DRM in a technical sense, but it's the closest you can possibly come to it. As far as incompatible in a philosophical sense... well, if you can't figure that out maybe you shouldn't worry about philosophy.
As described, the DC current will fluctuate between 12V and 0V almost instantly (I chose 12V arbitrarily because it's one of the more common DC voltages). A standard AC current will swing between +115V and -115 in a sinusoidal pattern (voltage measured at 115V).
Thus, there is a difference in both the absolute range of the voltage as well as the waveform.
In addition, since the voltage never goes negative, the pulse-modulated DC current can be treated under certain circumstances as a regular DC current with voltage sags, or two such currents could be combined at a 180 degree phase variance to create a virtually clean DC current of the same voltage. The latter situation would be unwise with an AC current (regardless of whether or not its waveform was the regular sinusoid).
I don't see a problem if Google uses their initial presence to push things into China later. Obviously, no one who refuses censorship is going to be allowed to set one foot on the other side of the Great Firewall of China.
I'm hoping Google is toeing up to the line simply to get in the door, and then they'll push the envelope every chance they get once the Chinese government realizes the people are as hooked on it as Americans are.
Now that would ultimately be a non-evil strategy. Of course, Google couldn't come out and actually tell people if they were doing this.
I don't think it's selling out. I think it's part of a bigger game. Either way, we'll know in a few years because we should hear the howling of Chinese authorities about how "poorly" Google is enforcing their censorship guidelines.
If this technology can reduce power consumption without having a drastic impact on performance, that puts us up one notch higher in efficiency. Abating an energy crisis and/or reducing energy costs can only help American industry.
Or are we forgetting that strong industry = more taxes and that NASA gets the shaft most readily when the government feels the need to trim down its budget?
If you refuse to license them the binary, you can refuse to release the source code to them.
The GPL does not require to provide a license to whomever comes asking for one, nor does it require you to provide source code to anyone except those to whom you have licensed/given the software.
The fact that most GPL coders make the source available to everyone does not in any way change the fact that the license has less stringent requirements.
When looking through a historical lens, 400 years does equate with relatively new. Furthermore, the dominance of corporations within various spheres of life has expanded greatly, and thus the serious problem that the OP mentions is naturally more recent than that.
Beyond this, the existence of corporations in general and the emergence of a particular problem with corporations in a given society necessarily happen in the order I just listed. Thus, the fact that you cite (existence of corporations as early as 1600) is irrelevant to his point entirely since they must necessarily have come into existence prior to posing any sort of societal problem.
Damn intellectual snobbery... this attitude is what people see when dealing with the "intelligensia" or "academia", and it is one of the primary reasons why there is a negative attitude toward science and higher learning in America. And if you think about it this way, I'm surea bright guy like you can figure out how to stop being a part of the problem.
I have to respond, even at the risk of going further offtopic. This is an issue that is somewhat of a hot button for me.
You think he's ridiculously offbase?
I'll bite on that question by offering you another... ask the instructor: How long does it take before a beginner is able to defend himself effectively against someone? Since you cite martial arts as though you are extremely familiar with them, you should know damn well that most instructors in most disciplines believe a newbie is not skilled enough for a real life-death-and-serious-injury fight for quite some time.
Also, a fairly important part of self-defense is the mindset and focus to act or respond effectively. Do you seriously believe that a woman who has been battered for 5 years or so is going to pick up enough few handy self-defense skills within a few days? I rather doubt it. In a timeframe that's realistic, she would probably learn just enough to delay an attacker--or just really piss him off. While there may be an exception or two, most battered women are not suited for any kind of effective interaction with their abusers, and the ideal situation is to separate her in a way that prevents him from finding her at all. In reality, this is usually not possible so I would suggest a gun, a tazer, and/or pepper spray (the good stuff, with a bit of CS tear gas mixed in... it's available in most states) and basic information on how to use it. These women need something that is effective immediately in this situation.
Having said all of that, I still believe martial arts training in whatever discipline they find appealing would be hugely beneficial. Exercise, greater sense of security, possible spiritual or emotional benefits, the ability to deal effectively with dangerous situations... the list goes on. Don't get me wrong, there are amazing benefits to martial arts training. In this particular context, however, martial arts do not offer an immediate solution when one is desperately needed.
As for "regulation" (by the government, I'm assuming) ensuring a much higher reliability of the 'ne...er...catch any of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, did you?
Right after saying:
If I want reliable communication, I'll pick up the phone or radio.
You do realize that the government regulates both phone companies and radio spectrum allocation/usage, right? Regulation doesn't automatically lead to stifling bureaucracy. Sometimes it's even beneficial. Don't confuse a single incident of poor management with there being something inherently wrong with the notion of enforcing minimum standards of service.
Translation: Cogent will let any Level 3 customer who is cut off use their service for one year at no charge.
This will eliminate any internet performance anomalies for those customers so that they are not affected in a bad way by this issue. It's also a good PR move that might let them grab a few Level 3 customers who are impressed by the goodwill gesture.
Slashdot Mirror
There is evidence for your point of view as well. Microsoft basically made a truce with IBM to develop a product together in order to better serve their customers. At the last moment, Microsoft pulled their support and rolled many of the technologies they developed in partnership into their own product.
This is the (abbreviated) history of OS/2, with the resulting Microsoft product being Windows NT. While the open source community can gain a huge measure of legitimacy with the general public through this proposed truce, I would encourage open source developers of any major project to embrace the publicity but keep a close eye out on their "partner".
I just hope that the open source folks who are moderate enough to accept a truce with Microsoft are also wary enough to avoid being shanked in the back.
Don't forget the Oklahoma City bombing, the *other* major terrorist attack on US soil. It's still recent history even if it has been overshadowed.
And the terrorists in that attack were not only white boys, but they were also Americans. And if memeory serves, McVeigh was younger, but Nicols was well into middle age.
Generalizing about who might attack doesn't help. Checking everyone equally for dangerous chemicals and weapons does. It's really that simple.
What you describe with a fake key is not possible. I would suggest reading up on symmetric key cryptography.
While I suppose it is possible to use a crypto PROGRAM that spews out innocuous text in response to your fake key, the government investigators will most certainly be decrypting the cyphertext with their own application. The crypto algorithms just perform a series of mathematical operations on either a block of data or a stream of data. There is no known way to make one instance of cyphertext decrypt into two different sensible plaintext outputs depending on which of two keys are used. I suppose someone could design an algorithm to do this, but it sure as hell won't be easy.
No existing crypto algorithm in wide use has the ability to do what you describe (not Rijndael, not DES, nothing). Using your fake key on the real cyphertext will return a bunch of gibberish, which will make it very obvious that you gave them a fake key.
You might want to look into something else. There is a related field, stenography, which deals with hiding the existence of your data. Combining good encryption with good stenography can make it very difficult to discover you data, as an attacker would have to find it first, then attempt to decrypt it. Handing over your crypto keys doesn't do anyone any good if they cannot find coherent cyphertext to decrypt.
O rly?
Sure, you can avoid Wal-mart for now. But Wal-mart isn't even close to being the only place you'd ever make a financial transaction.
To stay completely out of the databases, you'll have to forgo making any reservations at hotels, airports, or rental agencies. They pretty all require a credit card on file (usually that's just one tidbit among many).
And cash doesn't work for big purchases. Assuming you even have the cash for it--most people don't--go down to the nearest car dealership and pay cash for a new car. By law, they are required to report cash transactions in excess of $10,000. Given how eager most salesmen are to wrap up a deal and get you out the door, you may have more hassle paying cash compared to just financing it. I've been financed during a 5-minute sit-down, and all I had to do was 3 sign three times (and they didn't have my SSN before we sat down, so they couldn't have done much in advance). The more people use credit, debit, store credit, and stored-value cards, the more cash is going to raise a red flag.
My grandpa was going to buy a new car with cash... cash which he legitimately earned while saving for his retirement and which he withdrew from the bank by giving them the required advance notice for a large cash withdrawal. Guess what happened? The dealership told him it would be easier for him to go back to the bank, deposit it, and write a check. Either the paperwork for registering significant cash purchases is so onerous that they risked a sale to avoid, or MOST PEOPLE LIKE HAVING A FINANCIAL "PAPERTRAIL" (including the people you want or need to engage in a transaction).
And regardless of whether it's regulatory burden or a fear of not having everything "in the system", the result is the same. Everything can be moved into the sytem if cash is made too inconvenient to use.
And this doesn't even mention the questionable policies at some retail outlets, such as the absurd policy at Best Buy. Yeah, just try to get a cash refund of over $250 from them. Go buy $250 of cables or video games or DVDs or whatever with cash, and go back the next day with your receipt and everything in its original box. And ask for cash back. Nothing special, just American bills equal in value to ones you handed over yesterday.
Now suppose you needed to get that money for some more-or-less emergency situation because you only pay with cash.
Take a look at Atlanta and the companies who are either headquartered there or who have large facilities there.
We already have a second Silicon Valley, minus the geek name recognition.
That's a nice idea and all, but it doesn't make a lot of sense architecturally, at least for general-purpose computing. HT is designed as a peripheral bus. Making a CPU be a peripheral to the main system... well, you could offload work onto it, I suppose, and it would have DMA access, but it would still be the ultimate third wheel---far enough out that memory accesses would be relatively slow, and it couldn't realistically share peripheral access, so all UI interaction and device access would pretty much have to be handled on the main CPU/GPU, so you end up bottlenecked by the main CPU for a lot of stuff anyway.
Um... I hate to break this to you, but AMD-64 CPUs use Hypertransport links as their interconnect already. Which means the way you described it is exactly how it works. The 100-series Opterons have 1 HT link that goes to the system's peripheral devices and buses. The 200-series Opterons have 2 HT links: one connects it to the other CPU and the other connects to peripheral devices. I think you can guess how many links the 400- and 800-series Opterons have.
The place where this would be really interesting, though, would be the whole "one bus to rule them all" space. You could use this to cheaply add external PCI slots without the relatively expensive hardware needed to send PCI more than a couple of inches (though this can also be solved using PCIe as the interconnect). You could use this to eventually supersede low performance busses like USB.
This is how HT is used internally already. It connects the CPU to the other buses and system devices (the other end of the link is usually terminated by the southbridge ASIC. As far as clustering goes, a 1-meter link makes it somewhat doable, but rememeber that there are already high bandwidth external interconnects like Infiniband that are already in use. I didn't see anything in the article that suggested HT is capable of blowing the established technologies out of the water.
You just disagreed with yourself.
1) Nobody could duplicate the Windows API.
2) Wine duplicates the Windows API.
Regardless of what he actually said, I believe everyone who is wearing their critical thinking hat today read that as:
2) Wine attempts to duplicate the Windows API.
Um...
If they already have bought the machine, it's actually a hell of a lot more wasteful NOT to use it. TFA indicates that it was ranked for the Top 500 in November 2005... and since it had to be purchased a fair bit of time before its delivery date, it could a year or more since the original funding allocation and subsequent purchasing decision were made.
I'm sure the exact date of the purchase order could be dug up by someone more determined than I am.
And for the record, a manned mission to sightsee on Mars will waste thousands of times the amount of money that this machine cost. If you thought launching a probe to Mars was expensive, wait until we get a final look at the cost of sending a few humans there with all of the equipment necessary to support them.
Just because something is legal does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean that it is in accordance with fundamental human rights. Nor does legality determine whether it is wise or desirable.
One of the reasons we have this constitution is because one group of people felt that their rights were being ignored under the law of their land. Because of that they formally broke away from that land and established a new nation.
Correcting legal abuses of rights from within that legal framework is significantly less disruptive compared to splintering off and building a new legal framework from scratch. So much the better if the framework was designed specifically to allow this to happen.
Anonymous coward bastard beat me to the punch because I wasted time checking to make sure it didn't actually have a payload.
:-p
It seems that the reason it's considered a POC at this point is because it has no real payload. All it does is spread, and not nearly as heinously as Blaster/Welchia/Sasser.
As soon as it gets backdoor or downloader functionality... then it becomes a more serious threat. And really you, me, and the guys at Secunia/SARC/SANS/ISC/etc all know that's where this is headed.
So yes... in the sense of where this particular piece of malware is headed, this is a proof-of-concept. It's a live test of the progagation mechanism. The payload will be dropped into place soon... probably in the next version since this one looks like it's working fine.
Microsoft will pay Lucent a pittance or a pretty penny depending on how the details are worked out, and life will move on.
Given the complexity of the XBox 360 and the (probably) limited uses of the decoder by Microsoft itself, will a court really issue an injunction? Not to mention that MPEG-2 has been around for about an eon or so. It's not like MS cribbed someone's hot new trade secret... not this time around anyway.
I'll still be able to buy a 360 next week if I want, assuming they're not sold out again. This is interesting news to some, but I don't see more than a ripple for the 360.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronom y/stars/lifecycle/
He made a sound point. Obesity contributes to a number of health problems, including but not limited to: heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and diabetes. Furthermore, the circulatory problems present in severe cases can lead to a large number of relatively uncommon ailments.
Many of America's causes of burgeoning healthcare costs correlate directly with America's burgeoning idleness and poor knowledge of basic biology.
A small nitpick...
The USPS is not a tax-funded entity in the traditional sense. They do not receive a standard opertaing budget from the GAO. The postal service is entirely self-funded. While I believe the federal government would (and maybe already has) step in to bail the USPS out if a nasty surprise caught them blindside, the USPS was set up with the precept that it would be financially independent. (Blame Ben Franklin for that rather sound idea.)
You would still need to have a key for decrypting content that was secret. When the source code is known, it becomes easier to determine where the key is stored in memory and how it is protected (if it even is protected at all).
I won't go so far as to say open source is completing incompatible with DRM in a technical sense, but it's the closest you can possibly come to it. As far as incompatible in a philosophical sense... well, if you can't figure that out maybe you shouldn't worry about philosophy.
As described, the DC current will fluctuate between 12V and 0V almost instantly (I chose 12V arbitrarily because it's one of the more common DC voltages). A standard AC current will swing between +115V and -115 in a sinusoidal pattern (voltage measured at 115V).
Thus, there is a difference in both the absolute range of the voltage as well as the waveform.
In addition, since the voltage never goes negative, the pulse-modulated DC current can be treated under certain circumstances as a regular DC current with voltage sags, or two such currents could be combined at a 180 degree phase variance to create a virtually clean DC current of the same voltage. The latter situation would be unwise with an AC current (regardless of whether or not its waveform was the regular sinusoid).
Or you get for-hire botnets that tally up positive votes for whomever is enough of a shithead to pay the slimebags.
Your system is easily broken the first day people start to care about it.
I don't see a problem if Google uses their initial presence to push things into China later. Obviously, no one who refuses censorship is going to be allowed to set one foot on the other side of the Great Firewall of China.
I'm hoping Google is toeing up to the line simply to get in the door, and then they'll push the envelope every chance they get once the Chinese government realizes the people are as hooked on it as Americans are.
Now that would ultimately be a non-evil strategy. Of course, Google couldn't come out and actually tell people if they were doing this.
I don't think it's selling out. I think it's part of a bigger game. Either way, we'll know in a few years because we should hear the howling of Chinese authorities about how "poorly" Google is enforcing their censorship guidelines.
If this technology can reduce power consumption without having a drastic impact on performance, that puts us up one notch higher in efficiency. Abating an energy crisis and/or reducing energy costs can only help American industry.
Or are we forgetting that strong industry = more taxes and that NASA gets the shaft most readily when the government feels the need to trim down its budget?
If you refuse to license them the binary, you can refuse to release the source code to them.
The GPL does not require to provide a license to whomever comes asking for one, nor does it require you to provide source code to anyone except those to whom you have licensed/given the software.
The fact that most GPL coders make the source available to everyone does not in any way change the fact that the license has less stringent requirements.
When looking through a historical lens, 400 years does equate with relatively new. Furthermore, the dominance of corporations within various spheres of life has expanded greatly, and thus the serious problem that the OP mentions is naturally more recent than that.
Beyond this, the existence of corporations in general and the emergence of a particular problem with corporations in a given society necessarily happen in the order I just listed. Thus, the fact that you cite (existence of corporations as early as 1600) is irrelevant to his point entirely since they must necessarily have come into existence prior to posing any sort of societal problem.
Damn intellectual snobbery... this attitude is what people see when dealing with the "intelligensia" or "academia", and it is one of the primary reasons why there is a negative attitude toward science and higher learning in America. And if you think about it this way, I'm surea bright guy like you can figure out how to stop being a part of the problem.
I have to respond, even at the risk of going further offtopic. This is an issue that is somewhat of a hot button for me.
You think he's ridiculously offbase?
I'll bite on that question by offering you another... ask the instructor: How long does it take before a beginner is able to defend himself effectively against someone? Since you cite martial arts as though you are extremely familiar with them, you should know damn well that most instructors in most disciplines believe a newbie is not skilled enough for a real life-death-and-serious-injury fight for quite some time.
Also, a fairly important part of self-defense is the mindset and focus to act or respond effectively. Do you seriously believe that a woman who has been battered for 5 years or so is going to pick up enough few handy self-defense skills within a few days? I rather doubt it. In a timeframe that's realistic, she would probably learn just enough to delay an attacker--or just really piss him off. While there may be an exception or two, most battered women are not suited for any kind of effective interaction with their abusers, and the ideal situation is to separate her in a way that prevents him from finding her at all. In reality, this is usually not possible so I would suggest a gun, a tazer, and/or pepper spray (the good stuff, with a bit of CS tear gas mixed in... it's available in most states) and basic information on how to use it. These women need something that is effective immediately in this situation.
Having said all of that, I still believe martial arts training in whatever discipline they find appealing would be hugely beneficial. Exercise, greater sense of security, possible spiritual or emotional benefits, the ability to deal effectively with dangerous situations... the list goes on. Don't get me wrong, there are amazing benefits to martial arts training. In this particular context, however, martial arts do not offer an immediate solution when one is desperately needed.
You say:
As for "regulation" (by the government, I'm assuming) ensuring a much higher reliability of the 'ne...er...catch any of the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, did you?
Right after saying:
If I want reliable communication, I'll pick up the phone or radio.
You do realize that the government regulates both phone companies and radio spectrum allocation/usage, right? Regulation doesn't automatically lead to stifling bureaucracy. Sometimes it's even beneficial. Don't confuse a single incident of poor management with there being something inherently wrong with the notion of enforcing minimum standards of service.
Translation: Cogent will let any Level 3 customer who is cut off use their service for one year at no charge.
This will eliminate any internet performance anomalies for those customers so that they are not affected in a bad way by this issue. It's also a good PR move that might let them grab a few Level 3 customers who are impressed by the goodwill gesture.