The room where the Internet started is located in a basement at UCLA, and it's been restored to something strongly resembling its original configuration. Their router, IMP, was a huge piece of equipment; their first transmission, to Stanford Research Institute, was intended to be: LOGIN. However, the system crashed after they typed the first two letters. Thus, the first Internet transmission was LO. But they tried again an hour later, and it worked.
By December 1969, there were four permanent nodes; by 1975, there were 57 IMPs. Six years later, there were 213. Who new it'd go so totally off the charts?
According to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.
Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the U.S. ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.
Why? Because big players like Comcast and Verizon have been permitted to establish de facto monopolies in most parts of the country. Absent competition, they've no incentive to upgrade.
Oregon Senator Merkley and New York Senator Wyden have joined House Republicans in calling for a GAO investigation into Cover Oregon, now the only "marketplace" in the country where folks still can't self-enroll for health "insurance". There's only one explanation: they're trying to distance themselves from Bhutan Boy's massive waste of taxpayer funds. It's not so much that, as Democratics, they object to wasting money; it's that they've heard from ticked-off constituents, and even they don't buy Hairy Reed's claim that the stories are all lies. They also know that this was Bhutan Boy's baby.
Merkley's got an election to win, and while he cheerfully voted for a bill he'd never read, he's trying to boogie away from it all now.
Former CIO of Oregon Health Authority Carolyn Lawson has hired a couple of attorneys and is now claiming that the Cover Oregon debacle wasn't her fault.
"I raised alarms," Lawson said. "I was pounding the table, we were bleeding money.
The response was, I needed to stop irritating Rocky (King, then Cover Oregon executive director.) I recall going into Bruce's office in June 2012. I told him, 'Bruce, we're in trouble. We can't develop without requirements.' Bruce's response was, 'that's not what I'm hearing from Rocky. What I'm hearing from Rocky is that I'm being a problem, I was being an impediment.'"
Of course, we know now that there was a great deal of friction between Rocky's Cover Oregon agency and OHA - Rocky resented what he viewed as interference, but OHA controlled the grant money his agency needed. Still, Lawson doesn't exactly portray herself as a competent manager:
By December, two months after Oregon's site had emerged as a high-profile IT failure, it began to dawn on Lawson that she was in harm's way. Talking point meetings were held where they strategized how best to respond to the media crush.
A central talking point quickly became Cover Oregon's claim that it had very little to do with the exchange project until it was handed over control of the project in May 2013. "I protested strongly," Lawson said. "Voices were raised. I ended up breaking down in tears. I said I felt like I couldn't say that honestly.
So her idea of managing things (and people) is to pound on tables, yell, and cry. Really? That's how someone being paid well into six figures a year behaves? There should be criminal charges for a number of people involved in the profligate waste of tax dollars, and she should be among those charged - if only because she lied to the feds to keep the grant money flowing in.
Cover Oregon spent a million dollars on a Quality Assurance team (Maximus), which raised the alarm with the Governor's Office every month for more than a year. Governor Kitzhaber never acted on the reports and the entire Executive Branch ignored the Quality ssurance Team warnings. Dr. Kitzhaber is clearly lying about being out of the loop. He was the loop. Cover Oregon is his baby.
Ah, but Retread says he's got no problem with being held accountable, whatever that means. Generally, politicians seem to believe that the term translates into "no consequences".
Kitzhaber has not said how much, if any, of the Maximus reports he and his staff reviewed. His interview with KATU on Thursday was cut short before the question could be posed.
He stormed out because they dared question him; something he's done at least twice in the past month. Some "accountability"!
A team at University of Washington has built a small device that correctly interprets hand gestures 90% of the time, so it can be used to control your television or other devices - and it's powered by the energy fields around us.
There’s energy all around us in the form of TV, radio and WiFi signals. Develop a device that doesn’t need much power, and you can harvest enough power from thin air to cut out the need for a battery entirely.
Barbara Bain and Alf Kjellin from Mission: Impossible.
It seems that they've come up with a phone for a few very select users; it self-destructs if anyone tries to mess with it. Kind of a high-tech "Mission Impossible" device. Wonder what else they're into?
Out from the hinterlands around Clatsop County comes Sam with an interesting take on the state of the state and gov. Retread's obsession (at least since he and the First Squeeze got back from Bhutan) not with things like jobs and the economy, but Oregon's rank on the "happiness index". Jobs, it turns out, aren't necessary for happines.
17% of those Oregonians who are working are either stuck in part-time jobs or in jobs well below their skill level - a phenomenon known as underemployment. That's on top of those unemployed and those who've just given up. The state's largest city has an abundance of baristas sporting PhD and Master's degrees; a sure-fire recipe for happiness.
And as for the state's smug self-characterization of being on the cutting edge of technology: take out Intel, and there's not much here. The state can't even build a functional website. In Portland alone, Integra Telecom moved its headquarters and some 500 jobs across the river to Vancouver.
But as long as the political class and their fat-cat friends are happy, well - nothing else really matters, now does it?
Things've been a little weird here since a particularly strong wind gust yesterday took out the power - up here on the hill, we were catching sustained winds of 35-40, with stronger gusts. The power was only out for a couple of minutes (and besides, everything here's surge-protected). However, wireless connections got really spotty, and it took a while to figure out that the outage messed up the router settings.
So in order to get things back to normal on the EA6400, it was time to reset to defaults, let it contact Linksys to complete setup as though it was a new router...after that little bit's done, you can get back into the router and reset things like guest access, passwords, etc., and it's an impressively painless nonevent. Cool!
Rather than suggesting that maybe people should take on the responsibility of situational awareness rather than constantly staring at a screen and texting, politicians in Sacramento and L.A. are floating a new manufacturing mandate: so-called "kill switches" should be built into every phone and tablet. The idea is to cause the device to become unusable if stolen, thus reducing its value on the black market and thereby reducing crime.
"This legislation is critical to reducing robberies," Garcetti wrote to legislators this week.
He's the mayor of L.A., so he figures he knows a thing or two about crime. He's also apparently unfamiliar with the law of unintended consequences. Or in this, case, possibly intentional consequences: after all, if phones are equipped with disabling devices, it's a safe assumption that your government overlords will do just that under the guise of "controlling extremists".
In Ukraine and Venezuela, as recent examples, mobile technology has been used to coordinate dissenters, as well as to get real-world images out to the rest of the world. Authorities in both countries tried blocking Internet, but met with negligible success. How much more convenient to merely turn off all the phones?
Thanks, but no thanks. If you want to reduce robberies, try educating the oblivious idiots wandering the sidewalks and shops with their attention fixed firmly on their phones. That - and only that - will take a bite out of crime.
Personally, I'm of the view that the obliviots are asking for it. If they get robbed of their devices, there's a reason. And they don't get any sympathy from me.
All views are welcome here, but there are a few rules that most understand intuitively. If you're stupid, you need them spelled out. So this note's for you:
1) You don't get to call people names (referred to in general parlance as an "ad-hominem attack").
2) You don't get to hijack discussion threads. This means that you confine your comments to the the post, and/or to comments related to the post.
3) You don't get to spit, drool, crap on the carpets, nor employ expletives - even if you believe that doing so showcases your vast intellectual capabilities.
4) If you happen to be stupid enough to be unable to comply with the above rules, you will receive one (1) warning - after which your subsequent comments may be removed, and your comment privileges revoked.
Leonard Kleinrock and the first IMP. 
