gwright

I wish SRV records were more widely adopted, but they are still just a (string -> integer) mapping process above the 16-bit integer values on the wire. Different layers.

The wire format for UDP and TCP specifies 16 bit integer values. As another poster mentioned, you can uses OS level services to map a string to well-known ports, but encoding ports as strings at the wire level would've introduced a lot of serialization complications and performance concerns for parsing packets.

For ephemeral ports, it isn't clear what value there would be for a string identifier vs. the fixed-width integer.

I worked for Rich when he was writing UNP. Seeing comments like this 30+ years later reminds me how fortunate I was to spend time with him early in my career.

I've found that campers/hikers anywhere are generally very approachable.

Don't feel bad. Native-born Americans are having a hard time agreeing on what words like "equality" mean these days...

OK, I'm not sure I would describe that phenomena as an "equality principle" though. That is just a misleading label for a misguided bureaucratic rule.

> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles.

I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post.

What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.

> These are pretty classic union-busting techniques.

It may be a union-busting technique, but I'm not sure about "classic".

I mean how often has the economy had to recover from a multi-year work at home mandate due to a pandemic?

The massive switch to remote work and the pendulum swinging back towards more in-office work is a unique phenomena, not a recurring "classic" situation.

Yeah no. I don't think Tesla makes that claim and if they do they are wrong. Megapack does not provide long term grid-scale energy storage that is required to remove dispachable generation from the grid.

If you can't remove dispachable generation because you need it to back up the intermittent generation then you've successfully increased your cost of energy considerably because you have to build and maintain two systems. Take a look at Germany for example or I think maybe trends in Australia.

You get legislate away dispachable generation as much as you want but until someone solves the energy storage problem you are just creating more problems tha you solve (unreliable and very expensive energy grid).

This is a completely predictable outcome of an energy policy that pretends that intermittent power generation is substitutable for dispatchable power generation. Also related to a distributed energy system (diesel/gasoline) vs a centralized system (electrical grid).

Any reason not to extend that to all cultures? There is a limitation to the bandwidth any one community (including the smallest community, yourself) has to the "outside". Mass media and the Internet has certainly reduced the latency between cultures/communities but has not eliminated it.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought about how cultural differences are sustained over time on the account of synchronization challenges due to bandwidth limitations between cultures (language, frequency, latency).

> Using a common carrier for business is different from purchasing reserved quotas from them and then reselling the access.

OK, I can see how the resale scenario is different from the consume/utilize scenario. Thanks for the clarification.

I'm not sure if this transitive common carrier approach makes sense.

Wouldn't that mean that every company that used telephony, railroads, airlines, or shipping would have to be behave like a common carrier?

I'm not sure what the correct balance is but I don't think it makes sense to force common carrier status to propagate in the way you seem to be suggesting.

There are many situations where law enforcement is authorized (by law) to do something that would normally be illegal. For example here is some language from 18 U.S. Code § 1030 - Fraud and related activity in connection with computers:

> This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States.

I'm not sure if this is the relevant code for this Qakbot incident, I'm just trying to clarify that the law generally accepts that law enforcement officials get special dispensation from the regular requirements of the law in order to carry out their function or to protect the public.

> There are states where they were successful in getting laws passed preventing "wasteful government spending on broadband networks"

The devil is in the details but arguing that municipalities shouldn't compete with private businesses is not the same thing as arguing that private businesses shouldn't have other private competitors.

I have no doubt that telcos lobby heavily to restrict competition. Last mile infrastructure regulation is complicated but I'm more in favor of a level playing field (i.e. regulation) for access to poles/conduits/rights-of-way than having municipalities operate their own broadband architecture or even worse operate and then protect themselves from competition by other providers.

Your two examples leave some questions.

You seem to be saying that your cabin community was able to find a solution that would not be acceptable to a large telco. Why isn't that OK? Why should the large company be forced to do something they don't want to do if, by your example, other organizations are capable of servicing those communities?

To rephrase the question: What, if anything, prevents smaller organizations or non-profits or niche companies from servicing areas that large telcos will only do through regulatory mandates? Can the business/regulatory climate be improved to facilitate these smaller organizations? Are there existing regulations (for example access to poles or conduits) in some areas that block smaller organizations?

OK, but room/board/tuition is not a loan. The college is determining a discount, not the ability to pay back a loan.

My favorite example in this space is college tuition/room/board. This seems to be the only example of a service in which you have to share all your financial details with the vendor and then they will tell you how much it is going to cost.

> Words change, they always have, they always will. Get over it.

While this is true, I think it is helpful to communication to resist changes to language. This isn't the same thing as opposing change entirely, but language needs to have a certain stability and common understanding to maximize its usefulness.

> they get used to configure different environments for different customers

That is not a feature flag, that is a customer configuration option. They are different things and should not be treated in the same way.

Sure, it is possible for a feature flag to behave like a configuration option but they have different lifecycles and different audiences and so should not be confused. Of course it is easy to say that but harder in practice to maintain those differences.

> Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers)

I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)

And of course it isn't a "game". That is a figure of speech to make a point about fairness.

Just because it was accomplished via a "legislative process" doesn't automatically make it a good idea. Surprise laws are a bad idea in any economic system IMHO. It isn't even a "capitalist" issue.

If you have surprise ad-hoc taxes (i.e. laws) they you no longer have the rule of law. In this case it is almost an ex-post facto law as the tax applies to earnings that occurred before the tax existed.

Surprise laws should bother you on general principles.

Tax unpredictability, high taxes, or capping profitability is a great way to scare off businesses from operating in your jurisdiction.

Irrespective of the the benefits and/or feasibility of competition to bring prices down, the larger problem with this ad-hoc windfall profit tax is that it is ad-hoc. This is changing the rules after the game has started.

The article reports the effort as a "surprise tax".

> We are on track to change the climate so abruptly that the species we depend on will not adapt quickly enough. Jellyfish, for example, might thrive. Large mammals like ourselves will not.

The notion that humans, as a species, will not adapt seems farfetched to me. Humans have perpetuated themselves in a wide variety of climates for thousands of years.

I don't say that to discredit concerns about environmental change, its impact on future populations, or its near term impact on existing individuals. All I'm saying is that arguments based on existential threats are not persuasive to me and they tend to be used to assert power over others than to mitigate risk or improve the lives of people on the earth today.

> ATM was the worst network protocol ever devised

Having 53 byte payloads is something only a committee could love.

A cautionary tale regarding being dependent on a single service provider for all DNS resolvers.

I don't think it is just a marketing problem. Lots of evidence to conclude that as a policy initiative it is flawed and detrimental to the communities that adopt that approach.

This seems to be a very naive view of the way people and organizations work.

It is quite typical for managers to delegate projects/efforts/initiatives to a subordinate for the express purpose of giving them an opportunity to develop and demonstrate the skills they will need in a future position/promotion.

If I assigned a stretch opportunity to one of my direct reports and their response was that they needed a promotion before they would do that work, that would be strong evidence that they were not going to be progressing anytime soon.