In this case, because the DNS is hierarchical, a hierarchical signature system is the right way to authenticate the names. You hand the registrar for ".com" your $6.00 and a public key, the registrar gives you a signed certificate saying you're the Official Owner of "example.com". That doesn't protect you from trademark suits by other people who say *they* should own the name "example.com", or from somebody handing the registry forged papers saying that they're the domain administrator for your company, and it doesn't protect random members of the public from assuming that your domain "example.com" belongs to the company "Best Examples Of North America, Ltd", and maybe those services are something that wants a web-of-trust solution or a hierarchical solution from some different hierarchy, but it's a way for anybody to verify that the IP address they just fetched belongs to the real owner of the example.com domain name and not some forger.
Now, just because there's an absolutely correct simple technical method for handling DNSSEC signatures, that doesn't mean that's how ICANN will choose to implement it, or that they won't also issue DNSSEC signatures to the winners of trademark lawsuits or to governments that want to forge IP addresses for websites, but that's a separate problem. If you're worried about that, you can use DNSSEC Trust Anchors as a web of trust, and they've been in limited use while ICANN's been dragging their feet.
We had to take four semesters of it, plus pass a swimming test. This was the late 70s, but I think they're still doing it. Physical education was a broad range of offers; the first year I did folk dancing and fencing, later volleyball, and one round I took jogging because I needed something requiring entirely no brain power to balance out the academics.
I had two types of classes in college that tracked attendance - physical education was mandatory and your grade was based on attending X% of the classes, and one of the accounting professors got grumpy and took attendance for a week or two because too many people were skipping his valuable and well-taught but, ok, really really dry class. Other than that, we needed our student IDs for things like getting hockey tickets at the student price or checking out library books or keypunch drums, and if the administration had suggested using them to track us, they'd have been thrown out on their ears.
1974-1978 at Cornell. The computer lived in a building out by the airport, and most of our work was done using card readers and printers driven by Data General Nova machines. The punch cards weren't on VM/CMS; they were running on some other system (I think HASP, but maybe JES3.) VM/CMS had actual printer terminals, which I remember as Decwriters but that's probably wrong, and the Tek4014s. When I got to Bell Labs a bit later, we had some punch cards, and TSO for terminals, and also Unix on a bunch of PDP-11s.
It's really cheap for a low-level insurance bureaucrat to just say "no", but if the guy argues and they need to actually have lots of meetings about policy, they're going to spend far more than the $200-300 price of the Wii. And if they need to get lawyers into the meetings, the price goes way up as well.
There's obviously a tradeoff in the other direction - if *lots* of people start getting prescriptions for Wii's, the price could add up, in which case it also matters whether the Wii is cheaper than the alternative physical therapy or not, but it probably is.
Off-topic, the reason California's medical marijuana rules are so loose is that the legislature had twice passed less controversial medical marijuana laws, but the Republican governor (and/or State Reptile) Pete Wilson vetoed them, so it was up to the stoners to get organized enough to pass an initiative. (But that whole topic is giving me a stress headache, so I've got to go get a prescription for some cannabis to treat it.)
Apparently after you get knighted, it's standard form to make self-deprecating humourous remarks about it. Sir Terry Pratchett was talking about it at the DiscWorld Con last fall in Arizona, and said that one thing he really enjoys about it is that when he's dealing with bureaucrats who used to bully him, now that he's *Sir* Terry, he's able to bully them back, so dealing with bureaucracy has become much less onerous.
The government collects some data for legitimate purposes and abuses it for other things, and they collect some data for abusive purposes and does even more abusive things with it. Sure, Facebook may do the same thing, but you don't get arrested for driving without a Facebook account, and it's not illegal to tell Facebook that your birthday is Feb. 29th, 1903, or some other bogus date.
Once you give anybody data, they've got it, and they can do pretty much anything they want with it unless you've got an enforceable contract with them, which isn't generally the case with governments. Consider license plates on cars - they used to basically just be a receipt saying you'd paid taxes on the car - but as communications technology improved, it became possible for cops to use it to chase a given car, and now that optical character recognition has improved, it's possible to identify every car on a given street, or every car taking a given bridge, and track that for whatever reason you want. (Even without OCR, San Francisco did that a decade or so ago to identify most of the users of a freeway they were going to tear down, so they could send everybody a postcard telling them to find a different route - they used electronic cameras, but the plates were read in non-real-time by prisoners at the jail.)
Is there any reason you should trust a census with more information beyond "how many people live here"? Yeah, it's nice to be able to trace your ancestors using census records, but these days it may be more reliable to pass that information on to your descendants by giving it to Facebook...
Yeah, you probably don't want to install it yourself - but for add-on equipment like DVDs and sound systems you can still save a significant amount by going to a car audio shop as opposed to paying hopelessly inflated car-dealer prices, and get a much broader choice of equipment as well. I don't know if that also applies to in-dashboard integrated systems or not; depends on whether any car-info systems are open (or at least licenseable by vendors), which I don't know.
... we had punch cards:-) Still, that didn't stop a friend who has since become famous from running a copy of VM on top of the mainframe's main VM system (buy guessing the backup system password), which let him run his own copy of the system that users interfaced with (albeit rather slowly.)
To be fair, we did also have a few PLATO terminals, and some VM/CMS interactive systems (using paper terminals) that you could access as an upperclassman or CS major, and a couple of Tektronix 4014s, and the various physics and chemistry labs had a few PDPs to drive hardware experiments with, but most of our work ran on punch cards.
There are two reasons you care about your broadband provider - price/performance, and policies. Yeah, if there's only one Layer 2 DSL provider, that's going to limit the speed you can get to whatever your telco offers (though in many places you can also get Covad or other alternate DSLAM provider using telco copper), but for me what's at least as important is the set of policies and pricing on things like static IP addresses, bandwidth caps, being allowed to run servers at home, etc. And for that, you really can get multiple choices of Layer 3 DSL provider, even if they're still reselling telco DSLAM service. I'm using Sonic.net, many people use Speakeasy, and there are other national providers as well.
Yes, a few years ago a telco president made some bone-headed remarks like that which were echoed by other bone-headed telco presidents, and public opinion spanked them very loudly, even before Google had acquired YouTube. It won't happen again in the US. Europeans like to talk about this sort of regulation, so they can get away talking for a while until reality sets in. Asia's a much more diverse market, ranging from countries like Korea which have huge bandwidth to everybody's home and short distances (so it's not a problem) to China with its well-known censorship problems to places that still act like they've got monopoly telcos run by politically-powerful rich families (even though they're technically deregulated) to places that still run networks on barbed-wire.
Eyeball connectors need content providers and vice versa. Access to content is why people buy fast broadband connections, whether that's canned content or peer-to-peer. It makes financial sense for any connectors and providers who are big enough to matter to peer with each other, especially in markets like Europe which have large exchanges so you don't have to do long-haul part yourself (or buy it from a long-haul carrier.) Any broadband eyeball connector company that doesn't want to peer with Google is free not to, but especially in a competitive market, they risk losing most of their customers who to carriers who will let them watch videos of cats doing silly things. Also, as one content provider said to me once, we're peering with carriers A, B, and C, and if you don't want to peer with us, you're peering with all of them so you'll just get the same bits the hard way and miss the last-mile sale.
Pure long-haul carriers are in a slightly different situation, since they need to do business with the broadband eyeball connectors and the content providers, and get money somehow. It's probably more annoying to them to haul YouTube around unless somebody's paying them, but they usually don't do free peering with geographically concentrated players, and at least in the US, Google's supposedly hauling most of the bits around themselves.
ISPs use BGP to talk to each other, but internally they may use iBGP or EIGRP or OSPF or (once upon a time) RIP, and they usually have a complex routing structure internally and a small number of border routers that announce a simplified set of routes to their upstream carriers or peers. Badly-automated conversions between OSPF/etc and BGP are the easiest place to make a big mistake like that, though some operators are clever enough to break their routing purely by hand.
It was actually Pakistan, not Iran, and significant problems are more like every couple of years - and most ISPs have enough filtering to prevent most accidental screwups from getting very far, at least for very long. But yeah, it's not rare, and it only takes multi-party incompetence, not malice.
By "old-school principles", you did mean "pre-ARIN IPv4 Swamp Addresses", didn't you?:-)
Yeah, the people who designed IPv6 hoped that by having a big enough address space with no pre-existing reservations, they could make routing simpler and cleaner and delay the problem of routers running out of special route table memory and routing protocol horsepower, but that was pretty much a pipe dream:
Medium-large businesses want to own their own address space instead of using provider-owned space so they've got the ability to change carriers without renumbering,
businesses that want multi-homing for diversity need to have routing table presence regardless of what size their address blocks are,
geographical addressing may be ok for single-site businesses, but tends to fail for businesses with multiple offices (at least multiple offices with public presence),
and anybody who wants to be an early adopter (i.e. actually be using IPv6 long enough to be stable before the IPv4 ship sails off the edge of the world and everybody else notices the dragons and their ISP does something useful about IPv6) is likely to spend the ~$1250 to get their own public IPv6 space as opposed to just building a tunnel to SiXXs or Hurricane Electric,
so the IPv6 world's going to be a non-hierarchical mess just like the IPv4 world.
As several other people have commented, the ISPs they connect to are responsible for doing some sanity filtering on the routes they announce. It's not universal, especially for connections between ISPs (as opposed to connections from end-user customers that use BGP for multi-homing, where ISPs usually do a better job), and there's nothing close to universal agreement about address range registration systems or how to validate BGP information.
Limited-scope attacks like the Pakistani YouTube diversion are much more likely to be a deliberate attack; broad-spectrum attacks are obviously either mistakes (or really clever DDOS.) Advertising that you're the best route to half the world isn't exactly un-stealthy enough for intelligence gathering - and China doesn't have the bandwidth to handle that much traffic, either inside their entire country's network or especially across the Pacific; the only carriers with a chance of absorbing some fraction of AT&T's plus Level3's traffic are Verizon or possibly Google, and they're both competent enough not to do that.
This kind of thing happens occasionally with BGP, which was designed to be run in a relatively trusted environment by relatively-to-extremely-competent people, which means that it only explodes occasionally and most major carriers do a good job of filtering routing announcements that look seriously wrong, and detecting when other people advertise bogus information about their networks. The typical cause used to be bad conversions between external BGP routes and internal OSPF or RIP routes, especially back when some random customer would have left autosummarization on so they'd take their two Class C subnets, combine them into the Class A that they're both in, and announce to everybody in the world that they were the best route to reach the Tier 1 carrier who's their upstream (or who's the upstream of their local ISP, who wasn't bothering to filter their BGP announcements.)
The first time this happened in a big way was a bit of a surprise, as some little ISP announced that their T1 line was the best way to reach all of MAE-EAST (i.e. half the world), so suddenly there were gigabits of traffic headed that direction, at least until their self-DDOS killed off most of the BGP sessions and somebody fixed it. Since then, if you try to advertise being the best route to some large carrier who has a/8, you'll find they're also advertising a pair of/9s (which win), and that they'll be calling your upstream carrier within a couple of minutes to get your BGP session shut down. On the other hand, if this happens, it also means your upstream carrier wasn't filtering your BGP announcements for sanity, so they may also not be good at having somebody who can answer the phone and quickly resolve that level of problem.
Funny, a lot of people seem to be playing this WoW thing or its predecessors and relatives, even though they run on PCs...
Basically, a console is a DRM platform with a graphics card and various game-related peripherals (button-covered pads, tennis rackets, guitars, dance pads, etc.) Sometimes the graphics card in a console is more cost-effective than the equivalent one in a PC, but the peripherals use relatively straightforward interface technologies even if they don't have USB or DB9 serial ports; there's no reason a DDR dance pad couldn't hook up to a PC. It's really all about the DRM, locking the players and developers into a standardized platform where it's hard for the customers to steal the games and hard for developers to write games without contractual and financial arrangements with the hardware makers that keep the price of games high. Bah.
The first time I saw a LAN in a car was San Diego Usenix in ?1993?. It was Phil Karn's (KA9Q) car, and it was really just a thinwire Ethernet neatly installed from the front seat to the trunk. Laptops were much bigger then - he had a large clunky 386 machine in the front seat, and the alpha and beta versions of the Qualcomm cellular radios in the trunk. We were able to connect to a cell site at something like 9600 baud, and telnet to the Bell Labs firewall, which happily rejected our attempt to log in as "berferd".
So many elements took a long time to get named because the Russians and Americans couldn't agree on who gets the credit; hopefully that should be less of a problem for this one, unless they just decide to leave it with the boring numerical name.
One of the important points made in the Citizens United case was that it's hard to write regulations that can distinguish between for-profit media companies like the NYT/WSJ/FoxNoise and other corporations. Personally, I don't see how the court could have let a law stand that blocks Whiny Republicans United from making a "Hillary Is Evil" movie without also blocking Michael Moore from making a "Bush is Evil" movie (artistic merit's really not the law's territory:-)
The Sierra Club's a different case - aren't they a 501c3 non-profit, which get to be tax-deductable in return for limitations on their activities? Or if they're not, there are certainly issue advocacy groups that are.
Registering a corporation costs what, $100 these days? Even if you could pass such a law, if General Evil-Overlord Services, Inc., wants to spend money in secret, they can have their subsidiary "Concerned Citizens For A Better Tomorrow, Inc." buy the ads, with an arbitrary mesh of obfuscatory shell companies in between just in case pesky investigative reporters or financial auditors want to follow the money, and if necessary throw in some (more expensive) policy research foundations or other cutouts if they're particularly disreputable or have a lot of money to hide. It's not like they don't do this today to work around current ad-labeling laws.
Pitchforks definitely don't comply with the RFC1149 limit of 256mg, and any torches would need to be very small LEDs with solar cells, which probably wouldn't have the desired effect. RFC2549 doesn't explicitly add jumbograms either, but it's possibly that they could be accommodated in the Concorde priority class.
So you're going to be limited to terrestrial transmission systems - I'd recommend at least a 30cm diameter pipe for pitchforks, and torches may be tricky, though there are a wide range of 155mm delivery systems for alternative incendiaries.
It's actually more effective, because it lets you deliver a piece of actual dead-tree paper, and while the politician still isn't going to read it, the avian carrier has several alternate communication interfaces to deliver your message.
Meanwhile, what are you doing with that extra bandwidth that's interesting or useful? 1.5 Mbps is plenty for watching YouTube or running BitTorrent (though more is always better) or video chat or gaming, but the big carriers who keep ranting about wanting to get subsidized to build 100+ Mbps connections to our houses are really just trying to sell us television in competition with the cable and satellite companies, which is a lame and boring thing to do with the bandwidth. What cool stuff can you do to make us need the speed?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously your problem is that your machine has more than 8 MB of RAM in it; otherwise it'd be running fine just like its name says.
In this case, because the DNS is hierarchical, a hierarchical signature system is the right way to authenticate the names. You hand the registrar for ".com" your $6.00 and a public key, the registrar gives you a signed certificate saying you're the Official Owner of "example.com". That doesn't protect you from trademark suits by other people who say *they* should own the name "example.com", or from somebody handing the registry forged papers saying that they're the domain administrator for your company, and it doesn't protect random members of the public from assuming that your domain "example.com" belongs to the company "Best Examples Of North America, Ltd", and maybe those services are something that wants a web-of-trust solution or a hierarchical solution from some different hierarchy, but it's a way for anybody to verify that the IP address they just fetched belongs to the real owner of the example.com domain name and not some forger.
Now, just because there's an absolutely correct simple technical method for handling DNSSEC signatures, that doesn't mean that's how ICANN will choose to implement it, or that they won't also issue DNSSEC signatures to the winners of trademark lawsuits or to governments that want to forge IP addresses for websites, but that's a separate problem. If you're worried about that, you can use DNSSEC Trust Anchors as a web of trust, and they've been in limited use while ICANN's been dragging their feet.
We had to take four semesters of it, plus pass a swimming test. This was the late 70s, but I think they're still doing it. Physical education was a broad range of offers; the first year I did folk dancing and fencing, later volleyball, and one round I took jogging because I needed something requiring entirely no brain power to balance out the academics.
I had two types of classes in college that tracked attendance - physical education was mandatory and your grade was based on attending X% of the classes, and one of the accounting professors got grumpy and took attendance for a week or two because too many people were skipping his valuable and well-taught but, ok, really really dry class. Other than that, we needed our student IDs for things like getting hockey tickets at the student price or checking out library books or keypunch drums, and if the administration had suggested using them to track us, they'd have been thrown out on their ears.
1974-1978 at Cornell. The computer lived in a building out by the airport, and most of our work was done using card readers and printers driven by Data General Nova machines. The punch cards weren't on VM/CMS; they were running on some other system (I think HASP, but maybe JES3.) VM/CMS had actual printer terminals, which I remember as Decwriters but that's probably wrong, and the Tek4014s. When I got to Bell Labs a bit later, we had some punch cards, and TSO for terminals, and also Unix on a bunch of PDP-11s.
It's really cheap for a low-level insurance bureaucrat to just say "no", but if the guy argues and they need to actually have lots of meetings about policy, they're going to spend far more than the $200-300 price of the Wii. And if they need to get lawyers into the meetings, the price goes way up as well.
There's obviously a tradeoff in the other direction - if *lots* of people start getting prescriptions for Wii's, the price could add up, in which case it also matters whether the Wii is cheaper than the alternative physical therapy or not, but it probably is.
Off-topic, the reason California's medical marijuana rules are so loose is that the legislature had twice passed less controversial medical marijuana laws, but the Republican governor (and/or State Reptile) Pete Wilson vetoed them, so it was up to the stoners to get organized enough to pass an initiative. (But that whole topic is giving me a stress headache, so I've got to go get a prescription for some cannabis to treat it.)
Apparently after you get knighted, it's standard form to make self-deprecating humourous remarks about it. Sir Terry Pratchett was talking about it at the DiscWorld Con last fall in Arizona, and said that one thing he really enjoys about it is that when he's dealing with bureaucrats who used to bully him, now that he's *Sir* Terry, he's able to bully them back, so dealing with bureaucracy has become much less onerous.
The government collects some data for legitimate purposes and abuses it for other things, and they collect some data for abusive purposes and does even more abusive things with it. Sure, Facebook may do the same thing, but you don't get arrested for driving without a Facebook account, and it's not illegal to tell Facebook that your birthday is Feb. 29th, 1903, or some other bogus date.
Once you give anybody data, they've got it, and they can do pretty much anything they want with it unless you've got an enforceable contract with them, which isn't generally the case with governments. Consider license plates on cars - they used to basically just be a receipt saying you'd paid taxes on the car - but as communications technology improved, it became possible for cops to use it to chase a given car, and now that optical character recognition has improved, it's possible to identify every car on a given street, or every car taking a given bridge, and track that for whatever reason you want. (Even without OCR, San Francisco did that a decade or so ago to identify most of the users of a freeway they were going to tear down, so they could send everybody a postcard telling them to find a different route - they used electronic cameras, but the plates were read in non-real-time by prisoners at the jail.)
Is there any reason you should trust a census with more information beyond "how many people live here"? Yeah, it's nice to be able to trace your ancestors using census records, but these days it may be more reliable to pass that information on to your descendants by giving it to Facebook...
Yeah, you probably don't want to install it yourself - but for add-on equipment like DVDs and sound systems you can still save a significant amount by going to a car audio shop as opposed to paying hopelessly inflated car-dealer prices, and get a much broader choice of equipment as well. I don't know if that also applies to in-dashboard integrated systems or not; depends on whether any car-info systems are open (or at least licenseable by vendors), which I don't know.
... we had punch cards :-) Still, that didn't stop a friend who has since become famous from running a copy of VM on top of the mainframe's main VM system (buy guessing the backup system password), which let him run his own copy of the system that users interfaced with (albeit rather slowly.)
To be fair, we did also have a few PLATO terminals, and some VM/CMS interactive systems (using paper terminals) that you could access as an upperclassman or CS major, and a couple of Tektronix 4014s, and the various physics and chemistry labs had a few PDPs to drive hardware experiments with, but most of our work ran on punch cards.
Cows With Guns
There are two reasons you care about your broadband provider - price/performance, and policies. Yeah, if there's only one Layer 2 DSL provider, that's going to limit the speed you can get to whatever your telco offers (though in many places you can also get Covad or other alternate DSLAM provider using telco copper), but for me what's at least as important is the set of policies and pricing on things like static IP addresses, bandwidth caps, being allowed to run servers at home, etc. And for that, you really can get multiple choices of Layer 3 DSL provider, even if they're still reselling telco DSLAM service. I'm using Sonic.net, many people use Speakeasy, and there are other national providers as well.
Yes, a few years ago a telco president made some bone-headed remarks like that which were echoed by other bone-headed telco presidents, and public opinion spanked them very loudly, even before Google had acquired YouTube. It won't happen again in the US. Europeans like to talk about this sort of regulation, so they can get away talking for a while until reality sets in. Asia's a much more diverse market, ranging from countries like Korea which have huge bandwidth to everybody's home and short distances (so it's not a problem) to China with its well-known censorship problems to places that still act like they've got monopoly telcos run by politically-powerful rich families (even though they're technically deregulated) to places that still run networks on barbed-wire.
Eyeball connectors need content providers and vice versa. Access to content is why people buy fast broadband connections, whether that's canned content or peer-to-peer. It makes financial sense for any connectors and providers who are big enough to matter to peer with each other, especially in markets like Europe which have large exchanges so you don't have to do long-haul part yourself (or buy it from a long-haul carrier.) Any broadband eyeball connector company that doesn't want to peer with Google is free not to, but especially in a competitive market, they risk losing most of their customers who to carriers who will let them watch videos of cats doing silly things. Also, as one content provider said to me once, we're peering with carriers A, B, and C, and if you don't want to peer with us, you're peering with all of them so you'll just get the same bits the hard way and miss the last-mile sale.
Pure long-haul carriers are in a slightly different situation, since they need to do business with the broadband eyeball connectors and the content providers, and get money somehow. It's probably more annoying to them to haul YouTube around unless somebody's paying them, but they usually don't do free peering with geographically concentrated players, and at least in the US, Google's supposedly hauling most of the bits around themselves.
ISPs use BGP to talk to each other, but internally they may use iBGP or EIGRP or OSPF or (once upon a time) RIP, and they usually have a complex routing structure internally and a small number of border routers that announce a simplified set of routes to their upstream carriers or peers. Badly-automated conversions between OSPF/etc and BGP are the easiest place to make a big mistake like that, though some operators are clever enough to break their routing purely by hand.
It was actually Pakistan, not Iran, and significant problems are more like every couple of years - and most ISPs have enough filtering to prevent most accidental screwups from getting very far, at least for very long. But yeah, it's not rare, and it only takes multi-party incompetence, not malice.
By "old-school principles", you did mean "pre-ARIN IPv4 Swamp Addresses", didn't you? :-)
Yeah, the people who designed IPv6 hoped that by having a big enough address space with no pre-existing reservations, they could make routing simpler and cleaner and delay the problem of routers running out of special route table memory and routing protocol horsepower, but that was pretty much a pipe dream:
so the IPv6 world's going to be a non-hierarchical mess just like the IPv4 world.
As several other people have commented, the ISPs they connect to are responsible for doing some sanity filtering on the routes they announce. It's not universal, especially for connections between ISPs (as opposed to connections from end-user customers that use BGP for multi-homing, where ISPs usually do a better job), and there's nothing close to universal agreement about address range registration systems or how to validate BGP information.
Limited-scope attacks like the Pakistani YouTube diversion are much more likely to be a deliberate attack; broad-spectrum attacks are obviously either mistakes (or really clever DDOS.) Advertising that you're the best route to half the world isn't exactly un-stealthy enough for intelligence gathering - and China doesn't have the bandwidth to handle that much traffic, either inside their entire country's network or especially across the Pacific; the only carriers with a chance of absorbing some fraction of AT&T's plus Level3's traffic are Verizon or possibly Google, and they're both competent enough not to do that.
This kind of thing happens occasionally with BGP, which was designed to be run in a relatively trusted environment by relatively-to-extremely-competent people, which means that it only explodes occasionally and most major carriers do a good job of filtering routing announcements that look seriously wrong, and detecting when other people advertise bogus information about their networks. The typical cause used to be bad conversions between external BGP routes and internal OSPF or RIP routes, especially back when some random customer would have left autosummarization on so they'd take their two Class C subnets, combine them into the Class A that they're both in, and announce to everybody in the world that they were the best route to reach the Tier 1 carrier who's their upstream (or who's the upstream of their local ISP, who wasn't bothering to filter their BGP announcements.)
The first time this happened in a big way was a bit of a surprise, as some little ISP announced that their T1 line was the best way to reach all of MAE-EAST (i.e. half the world), so suddenly there were gigabits of traffic headed that direction, at least until their self-DDOS killed off most of the BGP sessions and somebody fixed it. Since then, if you try to advertise being the best route to some large carrier who has a /8, you'll find they're also advertising a pair of /9s (which win), and that they'll be calling your upstream carrier within a couple of minutes to get your BGP session shut down. On the other hand, if this happens, it also means your upstream carrier wasn't filtering your BGP announcements for sanity, so they may also not be good at having somebody who can answer the phone and quickly resolve that level of problem.
Funny, a lot of people seem to be playing this WoW thing or its predecessors and relatives, even though they run on PCs...
Basically, a console is a DRM platform with a graphics card and various game-related peripherals (button-covered pads, tennis rackets, guitars, dance pads, etc.) Sometimes the graphics card in a console is more cost-effective than the equivalent one in a PC, but the peripherals use relatively straightforward interface technologies even if they don't have USB or DB9 serial ports; there's no reason a DDR dance pad couldn't hook up to a PC. It's really all about the DRM, locking the players and developers into a standardized platform where it's hard for the customers to steal the games and hard for developers to write games without contractual and financial arrangements with the hardware makers that keep the price of games high. Bah.
The first time I saw a LAN in a car was San Diego Usenix in ?1993?. It was Phil Karn's (KA9Q) car, and it was really just a thinwire Ethernet neatly installed from the front seat to the trunk. Laptops were much bigger then - he had a large clunky 386 machine in the front seat, and the alpha and beta versions of the Qualcomm cellular radios in the trunk. We were able to connect to a cell site at something like 9600 baud, and telnet to the Bell Labs firewall, which happily rejected our attempt to log in as "berferd".
So many elements took a long time to get named because the Russians and Americans couldn't agree on who gets the credit; hopefully that should be less of a problem for this one, unless they just decide to leave it with the boring numerical name.
One of the important points made in the Citizens United case was that it's hard to write regulations that can distinguish between for-profit media companies like the NYT/WSJ/FoxNoise and other corporations. Personally, I don't see how the court could have let a law stand that blocks Whiny Republicans United from making a "Hillary Is Evil" movie without also blocking Michael Moore from making a "Bush is Evil" movie (artistic merit's really not the law's territory :-)
The Sierra Club's a different case - aren't they a 501c3 non-profit, which get to be tax-deductable in return for limitations on their activities? Or if they're not, there are certainly issue advocacy groups that are.
Registering a corporation costs what, $100 these days? Even if you could pass such a law, if General Evil-Overlord Services, Inc., wants to spend money in secret, they can have their subsidiary "Concerned Citizens For A Better Tomorrow, Inc." buy the ads, with an arbitrary mesh of obfuscatory shell companies in between just in case pesky investigative reporters or financial auditors want to follow the money, and if necessary throw in some (more expensive) policy research foundations or other cutouts if they're particularly disreputable or have a lot of money to hide. It's not like they don't do this today to work around current ad-labeling laws.
Pitchforks definitely don't comply with the RFC1149 limit of 256mg, and any torches would need to be very small LEDs with solar cells, which probably wouldn't have the desired effect. RFC2549 doesn't explicitly add jumbograms either, but it's possibly that they could be accommodated in the Concorde priority class.
So you're going to be limited to terrestrial transmission systems - I'd recommend at least a 30cm diameter pipe for pitchforks, and torches may be tricky, though there are a wide range of 155mm delivery systems for alternative incendiaries.
It's actually more effective, because it lets you deliver a piece of actual dead-tree paper, and while the politician still isn't going to read it, the avian carrier has several alternate communication interfaces to deliver your message.
Meanwhile, what are you doing with that extra bandwidth that's interesting or useful? 1.5 Mbps is plenty for watching YouTube or running BitTorrent (though more is always better) or video chat or gaming, but the big carriers who keep ranting about wanting to get subsidized to build 100+ Mbps connections to our houses are really just trying to sell us television in competition with the cable and satellite companies, which is a lame and boring thing to do with the bandwidth. What cool stuff can you do to make us need the speed?