No, he doesn't mean patch "because my application broke!"
You write an e-mail client.
You give it to your user in a.app. It's v1.03 of MacMailGarbage.app.
Now you release v1.04 of MacMailGarbage.app, your user has to download it.
Now libsnmp is found to have a bug. Linux users update libsnmp. Apple users... well, you have to rebuild MacMailGarbage.app with the new libsnmp, put it in the v1.04.app, and ship it to your users. If you don't, then MacMailGarbage.app can be hacked by sending a deformed HELO from the server, executing malware on the user's machine.
Now libssl has a security hole. If you don't release a new version of MacMailGarbage.app, your users will be susceptible to rogue SNMP connections, possibly by a MitM.
Now libpng has a security hole. Again, Linux users update libpng. Mac users have to update your MacMailGarbage.app specifically, because the system-wide libpng they installed isn't the one MacMailGarbage.app is using. Firefox.app also needs updating, because it contains a bad libpng version.
You've made no new releases at all, but your users needed a new.app 3 times. And getting a.app from you doesn't make using any other software safe, as that other software could come in a.app with the same exact library exhibiting the same exact security hole, and so they could be hacked unless they update it.
... with what? MicroUSB, which is also huge? Look I can put a 3.5mm thick connector in something that's barely 3.8mm thick: it's a ring with a few flexible pins. Most of the ones you see in actual devices are a plastic brick with that stuff in it, but...
This is the common 1/4 Stereo jack. For a 3.5 stereo jack, something similar but quite a bit smaller is doable, and in fact SMT onto a circuit board is easy, with elements directly above and below so they press against the case and the PCB. You can even cut a ditch in the PCB so that the parts that flex and move go right through and touch case-to-case rather than case-to-PCB.
MicroUSB is about 3 times as wide, and almost as thick. Much smaller and it gets too fragile.
I can't help thinking you mean the 1/4, not the 3.5. The 3.5mm is the right size for its typical use, with 1/4 being retardedly large for everything but the direct connection to i.e. a guitar. No need for that in the amp/speaker connection, but there's some significant abuse going on at the guitar end. Some silly phone manufacturers have gone to a 2.5mm plug, which is ungodly fragile....
Sony would INITIATE it to defend themselves. They can't be sued twice, anyone who doesn't opt-out can't sue or participate in a new CALS, and they don't have to even notify you of your ability to opt-out. Settle for $100 million, and you're good.
It doesn't need extension; do I/O through the serial port or through MMIO registers. Pass data back and forth, make callbacks. I/O gives you a way to say "call function X with parameters ${PARMS}" and get the thing to pull up a symbol table and do what you want. It then emits the output as a binary stream out a serial port.
Ah, Fusion. True vaporware. Tell me, Mr. Bond, how do you expect to produce sustained nuclear fusion when your wife is dangling by her panties in my evil lair, watching reruns of your exploits with endless loose women?!
No, it's completely impossible, unless you've created a nuclear reactor that'll last that long? Remember we'd need energy from the sun; life rots planets, and plants use solar energy to produce sugar from CO2 + H2O. Without that energy input, the entire earth would find itself in a CO2 atmosphere, with not enough oxygen to sustain life. Other life would flourish, mostly sulfur-consuming bacteria using a thermal process in volcanic vents; surface life would die, and eventually the core of the earth will cool.
Design a nuclear reactor that will output 50% greater than operational power requirements continuously for 450,000 years. I suspect it will produce an abundance of heat; you may need to run thermocouples on it, and use an alternating duty cycle on a thermal engine. Venting the heat to space won't work very well: only heat by radiation escapes. Heat thus needs to vent back into the heating system, into power generation duty cycles, and into a huge radiative array. When the load handling capacity of the system increases, reduce the output of the nuclear reactor by thrusting in control rods (pebble bed reactors won't work here, too bulky and impossible to reclaim fuel from efficiently): as long as the system stays hot, you'll produce enough power from other things to balance the reduced operating level of the nuclear reactor. If the load on the system increases, open up the nuke some more. Otherwise, equilibrium is reached internally.
Yes, but there are already PC emulators that will run in Java and export their display data to glue code that allows a plug-in to display the window in your browser.
Fixed that for you. Java Applets do not "run in your browser," nor does Flash; that is an illusion. These are entire platforms that run programs, and can export the display independently; your browser provides a windowing manager for them, like Sawfish.
No good will come from releasing the pictures of Bin Laden with a bullet hole in his forehead. The AP does not want this because of its "historic value," they want it because anyone who screams "PICTURES OF BIN LADEN HERE!" will get tons and tons of eyeballs-- and money. They want these pictures for their monetary value. The only thing we could get from releasing them as a political impact would be flashing a shiny picture around for evil terrorist leaders to use to go, "LOOK AT THE DEAD BODY OF ONE OF OUR LEADERS! SEE WHAT THE AMERICAN DOGS WILL DO TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES!" I mean we did kill his wife and son, too.
It's not only a problem, it's a legitimate engineering problem. Space and highway funding are one thing: pipe dreams that, while feasible and viable, are giant money sinks with no apparent value until they're put in place. Hydrogen based cars, on the other hand, need serious material science to work: you need a material that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and also seals that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and valves, etc. You need 3 or 4 materials at least to pull this off; putting it all together is trivial. These materials must also be cheap and durable, otherwise we're talking about major economic costs that we can't justify: dumping all our energy into making an alternate pipeline that costs 500 times as much as a regular pipeline just to pass an intermediary energy storage medium (hydrogen is not fuel, it's generated by burning fuel to break down another fuel (CH4) or feed stock (H2O)).
In other words, it's a problem that's huge and complicated, and we should ignore it in favor of doing something with much greater benefit and utility that's far easier. Hence the peanut oil thing: what benefit is there to running hydrogen anyway, when everything peanuts belch into the environment is draw out of the environment by growing peanuts?
diesel is the future. Peanut oil works in diesel engines directly; we could refine and modify (chemically) peanut oil to work in current diesel engines easily. It can transmute into kerosene rather easily too (jet engines). So what we could do is get rid of that petroleum fertilizer shit farmers use and instead do crop rotation. Harvest the peanuts, crush and extract, refine the oil, modify, ship as diesel fuel; use the crushed peanuts as feed crop for pigs and goats; burn the peanut bushes and shells; till the land to move that burned plant fiber into it; and plant corn over it. Rotate like this forever. Burning the plants is fine because the CO2 you release is what came out of the air anyway; the same goes for the oil, so now your car has no CO2 footprint.
Seriously, do you need me to solve the world's problems for you? Here's an easy one: there's a capitalization error somewhere, solve that.
Yes but the federal highway system doesn't have the problem that, if you store it in a tank made of 3 inches of solid steel, it somehow magically leaks because the atoms are smaller than the gaps between the metal atoms in the containment vessel. Storing hydrogen is not easy and requires liquid nitrogen cooling.
Actually TAR is used for the distribution of source code and packaged binaries (rpm, deb), which is excellent: you have no need to do anything except 1) ball these up into a single blob; and 2) dump absolutely everything to the hard disk. These are not things that you pick apart; they're delivery vehicles, like freighter trucks. For archives that you want to mill through, zip/7z archives are better.
Everything ever made was hugely expensive at one time. Shoes used to be a month's worth of pay or more; now a good set of boots costs $150 (try Belleville 770 in black leather). Hand-made shoes were quite cheap compared to today for a while, adjusted for inflation; but when leather shoes were first made they were quite costly. A lot of things were quite costly way back... plate armor used to cost several months' pay, then came down to a month and a half's pay after 600 years, due to better steel manufacturing and better blacksmith technique and technology.
Do you really think we can't marginalize the costs for this stuff? Built of bamboo or particle board (too heavy, stick with bamboo), it'd be quite cheap material-wise for the bulk. A few steel rods for guides to slide along, with bushings or bearings in some mechanisms we could easily mass produce. MA and indirect mechanisms could even be developed, allowing assistance for the weak or even just motorizing. None of this is extremely costly; the architecture needs study, the materials are cheap. It'd come down in price easy enough.
On one hand I love the spatial efficiency here. I'd love to see this in cheaper 500sqft "Efficiency" or "Studio" apartments over here, would be excellent. I'd love to engineer a cheap, long-term solution, probably using lots of bamboo and sealed Teflon-coated bearings chambers with Teflon coated bearings. Plate the damn things with aluminum or a hardwood-style laminate, it doesn't matter, it's just look. In any case, the utility and efficiency would be massive. With low maintenance, the cost to rent wouldn't have to go up to make a huge profit.
On the other hand, we're nearing 7 billion people on this planet. We need to thin the herd. I don't agree with people living like the world is one giant CAFO. Efficiency would be great if everything was like a medieval-style JRPG: we have big cities and farm towns, with miles of wilderness land between. Dirt roads or highways all the way. But the trend seems to be more of "let's build giant apartment buildings and cram everyone into a tiny living space that's barely acceptable, and we'll worry about population density when the next major plague sweeps the whole globe because of high transmission rates." Extremely high populations crammed into tiny areas aren't a protection from extinction; they're a severe liability.
I know seriously. It's like how I look around and wonder how people can drive Corvettes when Porsches are just so much better. Some people are really stuck with the shitty low-grade stuff...
Short-term effects. Nobody wants to see millions of jobs lost, because it upsets people, and it's "horrible." Too fucking bad, shit happens; and besides, with all those unemployed people and that sudden huge vacuum in multiple markets... lots of talent out there for rapidly growing businesses. Sure, there's death and destruction; but a few years later we're all better off, minus a few thousand casualties, instead of all of the hundreds of millions of us here in the US (not to mention impact on the rest of the world) dragging ourselves along under the dead weight of this failed-and-bailed economy that we wrung more money out of to 'save' after it started dying from lack of money.
People are impatient and they want everything and they want it now; politicians especially have their short terms and can't stand to make a problem even worse in the short-term to avoid unholy hell in the long-term. They'll always say they tried, it's good enough for the voters; if they save us all and build a giant eternal utopia via 2 years of suffering, that's 2 years in which they're voted out in the interim and the new guy gets all the credit.
TV is simultaneously one of the best inventions mankind has come up with and the worst invention in the history of society. Do something else with your time. Play Go, read a book, learn a new skill; sit down every month or so and power through a whole series in one gulp, or something, maybe sprinkle them through weekends.
For all the money you pay, you get an IV addiction, served regularly throughout the day between the wage slaving hours and the not enough sleeping hours. Think about how the $40/mo you pay for Internet affects your life versus the $60/mo you pay for TV. I like to binge on TV just because it's a more efficient waste of time than the normal vacuous space spread out from day to day; though all TV does is load a pile of worthless crap into my head to satisfy an information addiction I can't seem to shake (my brain constantly seeks new information to process; I keep learning new things). It's like a... well, a binge. It's a fast way to get a lot of information in my head, useless as it is; all of Deep Space 9 would float my brain in some decent enough endorphins to calm down a while. I actually read an entire Web comic over this weekend, in about 7 hours.
Still, think about it. Swallow the whole season of a couple series in a few days. I guess you would be "behind," especially if you staggered seasons (let's watch all of DS9 and SGA's last season this month, then some anime next month...); but think about how that works with books: who reads the new release of a series the day it comes out? (I've done exactly that.) In any case, you could blast things out in 8-14 hours, waste 2-3 days a month at most, in solid blocks rather than metered daily disruptions that constrict your daily flexibility.
Next time the government bails a business--any business, I don't care if it's a healthcare provider or an orphanage for puppies or the largest car manufacturer in the world--we should start a riot in DC. Imagine if GM and Chrysler collapsed... Ford would own the market, but they don't have the capacity. People would still buy Toyota and superior Mazda cars (Mazda way better than Toyota), Volkswagen and Audi, and of course new American car companies would spring up.
There are cable companies other than Comcast? I mean, there were 3 or 4 Satellite companies in the 90s, but now they're all DirectTV. Dish Network still plugs, but nobody actually buys their service. Comcast has always been the only CableTV provider in the entire mid-atlantic region, though...
Your argument is idiotic: you can look at the DHCP vs MAC address logs, look up the hostname (Windows machines) etc, the service tag vs MAC address in your database, etc.
TRWTF is that the OP hasn't ever heard of "NAT." At a corporation, if you connect to a Web site, you see a single IP address assigned to that corporation connecting to that Web server. NAT servers don't log this. Still, it's doable: time vs source port. NAT lets 64511 people connect to some address on port 80 by assigning them a different source port.
Stupidity is in everything here. They're running vulnerable web servers with no firewalls. Firewalls are irrelevant: your web server is vulnerable, and your web server cannot be blocked by firewall. Firewalls are not security tools; they are administrative tools. A firewall prevents access to resources that shouldn't be accessed; it doesn't magically cast a shell of defense around your network. The shell it puts around your network has lots and lots of holes.
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No, he doesn't mean patch "because my application broke!"
You write an e-mail client.
You give it to your user in a .app. It's v1.03 of MacMailGarbage.app.
Now you release v1.04 of MacMailGarbage.app, your user has to download it.
Now libsnmp is found to have a bug. Linux users update libsnmp. Apple users ... well, you have to rebuild MacMailGarbage.app with the new libsnmp, put it in the v1.04 .app, and ship it to your users. If you don't, then MacMailGarbage.app can be hacked by sending a deformed HELO from the server, executing malware on the user's machine.
Now libssl has a security hole. If you don't release a new version of MacMailGarbage.app, your users will be susceptible to rogue SNMP connections, possibly by a MitM.
Now libpng has a security hole. Again, Linux users update libpng. Mac users have to update your MacMailGarbage.app specifically, because the system-wide libpng they installed isn't the one MacMailGarbage.app is using. Firefox.app also needs updating, because it contains a bad libpng version.
You've made no new releases at all, but your users needed a new .app 3 times. And getting a .app from you doesn't make using any other software safe, as that other software could come in a .app with the same exact library exhibiting the same exact security hole, and so they could be hacked unless they update it.
... with what? MicroUSB, which is also huge? Look I can put a 3.5mm thick connector in something that's barely 3.8mm thick: it's a ring with a few flexible pins. Most of the ones you see in actual devices are a plastic brick with that stuff in it, but ...
http://store.acousticom.com/image/cache/stereo_1-4inch_jack-500x500.jpg
This is the common 1/4 Stereo jack. For a 3.5 stereo jack, something similar but quite a bit smaller is doable, and in fact SMT onto a circuit board is easy, with elements directly above and below so they press against the case and the PCB. You can even cut a ditch in the PCB so that the parts that flex and move go right through and touch case-to-case rather than case-to-PCB.
MicroUSB is about 3 times as wide, and almost as thick. Much smaller and it gets too fragile.
I can't help thinking you mean the 1/4, not the 3.5. The 3.5mm is the right size for its typical use, with 1/4 being retardedly large for everything but the direct connection to i.e. a guitar. No need for that in the amp/speaker connection, but there's some significant abuse going on at the guitar end. Some silly phone manufacturers have gone to a 2.5mm plug, which is ungodly fragile....
Sony would INITIATE it to defend themselves. They can't be sued twice, anyone who doesn't opt-out can't sue or participate in a new CALS, and they don't have to even notify you of your ability to opt-out. Settle for $100 million, and you're good.
It doesn't need extension; do I/O through the serial port or through MMIO registers. Pass data back and forth, make callbacks. I/O gives you a way to say "call function X with parameters ${PARMS}" and get the thing to pull up a symbol table and do what you want. It then emits the output as a binary stream out a serial port.
It'd be like climbing Mt. Matterhorn.
Seventy five trillion times.
In one trip.
Ah, Fusion. True vaporware. Tell me, Mr. Bond, how do you expect to produce sustained nuclear fusion when your wife is dangling by her panties in my evil lair, watching reruns of your exploits with endless loose women?!
No, it's completely impossible, unless you've created a nuclear reactor that'll last that long? Remember we'd need energy from the sun; life rots planets, and plants use solar energy to produce sugar from CO2 + H2O. Without that energy input, the entire earth would find itself in a CO2 atmosphere, with not enough oxygen to sustain life. Other life would flourish, mostly sulfur-consuming bacteria using a thermal process in volcanic vents; surface life would die, and eventually the core of the earth will cool.
Design a nuclear reactor that will output 50% greater than operational power requirements continuously for 450,000 years. I suspect it will produce an abundance of heat; you may need to run thermocouples on it, and use an alternating duty cycle on a thermal engine. Venting the heat to space won't work very well: only heat by radiation escapes. Heat thus needs to vent back into the heating system, into power generation duty cycles, and into a huge radiative array. When the load handling capacity of the system increases, reduce the output of the nuclear reactor by thrusting in control rods (pebble bed reactors won't work here, too bulky and impossible to reclaim fuel from efficiently): as long as the system stays hot, you'll produce enough power from other things to balance the reduced operating level of the nuclear reactor. If the load on the system increases, open up the nuke some more. Otherwise, equilibrium is reached internally.
Not easy, is it?
Yes, but there are already PC emulators that will run in Java and export their display data to glue code that allows a plug-in to display the window in your browser.
Fixed that for you. Java Applets do not "run in your browser," nor does Flash; that is an illusion. These are entire platforms that run programs, and can export the display independently; your browser provides a windowing manager for them, like Sawfish.
No good will come from releasing the pictures of Bin Laden with a bullet hole in his forehead. The AP does not want this because of its "historic value," they want it because anyone who screams "PICTURES OF BIN LADEN HERE!" will get tons and tons of eyeballs-- and money. They want these pictures for their monetary value. The only thing we could get from releasing them as a political impact would be flashing a shiny picture around for evil terrorist leaders to use to go, "LOOK AT THE DEAD BODY OF ONE OF OUR LEADERS! SEE WHAT THE AMERICAN DOGS WILL DO TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES!" I mean we did kill his wife and son, too.
It's not only a problem, it's a legitimate engineering problem. Space and highway funding are one thing: pipe dreams that, while feasible and viable, are giant money sinks with no apparent value until they're put in place. Hydrogen based cars, on the other hand, need serious material science to work: you need a material that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and also seals that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and valves, etc. You need 3 or 4 materials at least to pull this off; putting it all together is trivial. These materials must also be cheap and durable, otherwise we're talking about major economic costs that we can't justify: dumping all our energy into making an alternate pipeline that costs 500 times as much as a regular pipeline just to pass an intermediary energy storage medium (hydrogen is not fuel, it's generated by burning fuel to break down another fuel (CH4) or feed stock (H2O)).
In other words, it's a problem that's huge and complicated, and we should ignore it in favor of doing something with much greater benefit and utility that's far easier. Hence the peanut oil thing: what benefit is there to running hydrogen anyway, when everything peanuts belch into the environment is draw out of the environment by growing peanuts?
diesel is the future. Peanut oil works in diesel engines directly; we could refine and modify (chemically) peanut oil to work in current diesel engines easily. It can transmute into kerosene rather easily too (jet engines). So what we could do is get rid of that petroleum fertilizer shit farmers use and instead do crop rotation. Harvest the peanuts, crush and extract, refine the oil, modify, ship as diesel fuel; use the crushed peanuts as feed crop for pigs and goats; burn the peanut bushes and shells; till the land to move that burned plant fiber into it; and plant corn over it. Rotate like this forever. Burning the plants is fine because the CO2 you release is what came out of the air anyway; the same goes for the oil, so now your car has no CO2 footprint.
Seriously, do you need me to solve the world's problems for you? Here's an easy one: there's a capitalization error somewhere, solve that.
This is an excellent idea. We should all get septic systems.
Yes but the federal highway system doesn't have the problem that, if you store it in a tank made of 3 inches of solid steel, it somehow magically leaks because the atoms are smaller than the gaps between the metal atoms in the containment vessel. Storing hydrogen is not easy and requires liquid nitrogen cooling.
Actually TAR is used for the distribution of source code and packaged binaries (rpm, deb), which is excellent: you have no need to do anything except 1) ball these up into a single blob; and 2) dump absolutely everything to the hard disk. These are not things that you pick apart; they're delivery vehicles, like freighter trucks. For archives that you want to mill through, zip/7z archives are better.
Everything ever made was hugely expensive at one time. Shoes used to be a month's worth of pay or more; now a good set of boots costs $150 (try Belleville 770 in black leather). Hand-made shoes were quite cheap compared to today for a while, adjusted for inflation; but when leather shoes were first made they were quite costly. A lot of things were quite costly way back... plate armor used to cost several months' pay, then came down to a month and a half's pay after 600 years, due to better steel manufacturing and better blacksmith technique and technology.
Do you really think we can't marginalize the costs for this stuff? Built of bamboo or particle board (too heavy, stick with bamboo), it'd be quite cheap material-wise for the bulk. A few steel rods for guides to slide along, with bushings or bearings in some mechanisms we could easily mass produce. MA and indirect mechanisms could even be developed, allowing assistance for the weak or even just motorizing. None of this is extremely costly; the architecture needs study, the materials are cheap. It'd come down in price easy enough.
On one hand I love the spatial efficiency here. I'd love to see this in cheaper 500sqft "Efficiency" or "Studio" apartments over here, would be excellent. I'd love to engineer a cheap, long-term solution, probably using lots of bamboo and sealed Teflon-coated bearings chambers with Teflon coated bearings. Plate the damn things with aluminum or a hardwood-style laminate, it doesn't matter, it's just look. In any case, the utility and efficiency would be massive. With low maintenance, the cost to rent wouldn't have to go up to make a huge profit.
On the other hand, we're nearing 7 billion people on this planet. We need to thin the herd. I don't agree with people living like the world is one giant CAFO. Efficiency would be great if everything was like a medieval-style JRPG: we have big cities and farm towns, with miles of wilderness land between. Dirt roads or highways all the way. But the trend seems to be more of "let's build giant apartment buildings and cram everyone into a tiny living space that's barely acceptable, and we'll worry about population density when the next major plague sweeps the whole globe because of high transmission rates." Extremely high populations crammed into tiny areas aren't a protection from extinction; they're a severe liability.
I know seriously. It's like how I look around and wonder how people can drive Corvettes when Porsches are just so much better. Some people are really stuck with the shitty low-grade stuff...
Am I missing something?
Short-term effects. Nobody wants to see millions of jobs lost, because it upsets people, and it's "horrible." Too fucking bad, shit happens; and besides, with all those unemployed people and that sudden huge vacuum in multiple markets ... lots of talent out there for rapidly growing businesses. Sure, there's death and destruction; but a few years later we're all better off, minus a few thousand casualties, instead of all of the hundreds of millions of us here in the US (not to mention impact on the rest of the world) dragging ourselves along under the dead weight of this failed-and-bailed economy that we wrung more money out of to 'save' after it started dying from lack of money.
People are impatient and they want everything and they want it now; politicians especially have their short terms and can't stand to make a problem even worse in the short-term to avoid unholy hell in the long-term. They'll always say they tried, it's good enough for the voters; if they save us all and build a giant eternal utopia via 2 years of suffering, that's 2 years in which they're voted out in the interim and the new guy gets all the credit.
TV is simultaneously one of the best inventions mankind has come up with and the worst invention in the history of society. Do something else with your time. Play Go, read a book, learn a new skill; sit down every month or so and power through a whole series in one gulp, or something, maybe sprinkle them through weekends.
For all the money you pay, you get an IV addiction, served regularly throughout the day between the wage slaving hours and the not enough sleeping hours. Think about how the $40/mo you pay for Internet affects your life versus the $60/mo you pay for TV. I like to binge on TV just because it's a more efficient waste of time than the normal vacuous space spread out from day to day; though all TV does is load a pile of worthless crap into my head to satisfy an information addiction I can't seem to shake (my brain constantly seeks new information to process; I keep learning new things). It's like a... well, a binge. It's a fast way to get a lot of information in my head, useless as it is; all of Deep Space 9 would float my brain in some decent enough endorphins to calm down a while. I actually read an entire Web comic over this weekend, in about 7 hours.
Still, think about it. Swallow the whole season of a couple series in a few days. I guess you would be "behind," especially if you staggered seasons (let's watch all of DS9 and SGA's last season this month, then some anime next month...); but think about how that works with books: who reads the new release of a series the day it comes out? (I've done exactly that.) In any case, you could blast things out in 8-14 hours, waste 2-3 days a month at most, in solid blocks rather than metered daily disruptions that constrict your daily flexibility.
Next time the government bails a business--any business, I don't care if it's a healthcare provider or an orphanage for puppies or the largest car manufacturer in the world--we should start a riot in DC. Imagine if GM and Chrysler collapsed ... Ford would own the market, but they don't have the capacity. People would still buy Toyota and superior Mazda cars (Mazda way better than Toyota), Volkswagen and Audi, and of course new American car companies would spring up.
There are cable companies other than Comcast? I mean, there were 3 or 4 Satellite companies in the 90s, but now they're all DirectTV. Dish Network still plugs, but nobody actually buys their service. Comcast has always been the only CableTV provider in the entire mid-atlantic region, though...
Your argument is idiotic: you can look at the DHCP vs MAC address logs, look up the hostname (Windows machines) etc, the service tag vs MAC address in your database, etc.
TRWTF is that the OP hasn't ever heard of "NAT." At a corporation, if you connect to a Web site, you see a single IP address assigned to that corporation connecting to that Web server. NAT servers don't log this. Still, it's doable: time vs source port. NAT lets 64511 people connect to some address on port 80 by assigning them a different source port.
Stupidity is in everything here. They're running vulnerable web servers with no firewalls. Firewalls are irrelevant: your web server is vulnerable, and your web server cannot be blocked by firewall. Firewalls are not security tools; they are administrative tools. A firewall prevents access to resources that shouldn't be accessed; it doesn't magically cast a shell of defense around your network. The shell it puts around your network has lots and lots of holes.
Forty years of fornication is better.