notquiteright

Because it’s not profitable to build fiber out to many places.

We’re talking about you saying the FCC should define broadband as requiring gigabit upload speeds minimum.

It’s not that easy. The federal government is in fact spending over $100 billion in the next decade laying fiber (and that’s only partial subsidies, so the total investment will be even higher) and it still won’t be enough to get fiber everywhere.

The point of this definition of broadband is to guide FCC subsidies. They’re saying 100/20 is goal for what everyone should have in every single home and business in the country, and that it’s so crucial that the taxpayer should pay for it if need be.

Yet the US spends a greater amount EVERY year on building fiber into ever more remote areas (between FCC and NTIA programs, over $10 billion per year) than it has cost Starlink TOTAL to build a network that covers the entire country. Starlink needs more satellites to increase the max number of subscribers they can support, but their costs are actually going down.

Digging trenches in the ground is expensive. It’s a big country. You need immense amounts labor and at the end of the day, you just have a barely profitable fiber line, if that. Many of the new fiber lines will only survive on further government subsidies. Meanwhile, Elon builds a spaceship to launch satellites and people pay him handsomely for access to it. That’s not to mention that construction is heavily unionized, requires locality by locality planning permission and rights of way, etc.

No, wrong level of abstraction. Why do manual memory management in a realm where it doesn’t really matter? In addition to the excessive amount of work (also why I wouldn’t choose Rust for the job), you’re opening yourself up to a whole class of errors for no good reason.

I knew these were all ”I don’t know” edit: but yes, deceptive phrasing by the quiz author. If you don’t know that, then yeah, you’re probably not a great C programmer. Adjust your mental model: C is meant to be useful on a very wide variety of platforms, including ones that don’t follow the conventions (ASCII character table, size of byte, alignment requirements, etc.) of the most common platforms.

Even including knowledge of what is IB and UB, C is still simpler than most languages in common use these days.

It would have been great if they just made a perfect, de-googled version of Chrome with extra features. Instead, they violate your privacy more than Google ever dreamed.

Using a decryption password on boot is less secure than TPM + measured boot/secure boot. Specifically, it’s vulnerable to a two-touch attack. In the first touch, the attacker replaces your bootloader with one that looks identical but steals your password. On the second touch, they now use the password to steal your data.