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Panama Decrees Block To Kill VoIP Service
An anonymous reader writes "In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers. The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls."
How difficult could it be to write some software to use VoIP on port 80 or some other commonly used port?
Banning VoIP? Whats next? Possibly banning email to help the USPS?
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
There are 65534 other ports wich can be used for VoIP, they must block them too!
Please adapt.
People have tried to fight progressive technological evolution for ages and it has yet to ever work once. Any country making laws forcing its citizens to live behind the times is only hurting itself. What if panama had outlawed the original telephone because it hurt the post office? Granted, Voice IP isn't quite as drastic a step, but it is progress and it will succeed on its own merit, laws or no laws.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
If person2person chat programs with voice capabilities, then whoever provides the software (I know Yahoo messenger and ICQ can do that, although it's not VoIP) should be able to make it switch ports easily.
If companies (such as the one I use to call Russia if/when I ever do
Or is my logic flawed somewhere and the port block like that would achieve the desired effect?
Cheers,
DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
The Panamania Government has decreed all citizens are to wear tin foil hats to block telepathic circumvention of POTS.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The obvious solution is going to be a transmission tax on VoIP calls. Cheaper than the old way, but it will begin to cost you money. Hate them you might, but the phone companies have real expenses in physical property, technical services, and customer service. They need to get paid. It will be less than they are used to, but they won't be giving it away for free much longer.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
really ? explain DMCA :)
The old adage says that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. While we may not be able to call into Panama using VoIP, will transnational calls that used to go through there be routed around?
After this kind of crap, I don't think I'd have any problem with them blocking UDP 53.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...some banana republic adventurism!
Heck, maybe it'll tide us over until Iraq War II debuts in January.
In fact, I think it would be a piece of cake to cobble together a proxy server that did just that. The clients wouldn't even have to change their software other than to point to the intermediate proxy server.
The problem here though comes in talking to the rest of the world. The above-mentioned servers have to direct the traffic to the destination servers at some point. Those servers are completely outside the control of the subversives to be. Those servers have to know that the traffic being received is actually VoIP and deal with it appropriately.
It can be done, but it will require servers outside of Panama to cooperate with the scheme.
Of course, once the Panama government locates those sites (shouldn't be hard) they'll start gopher whacking them with a variety of tactics: legal shutdowns through warrants, DOS attacks, etc. Vendors from outside of Panama will also rush to fill the void, and that software will also subsequently be outlawed.
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity. That would be a steep price and they will face economic pressure to not do it.
Oh well, they'll learn this one the hard way I guess.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
What *is* 'the spirit of the internet', and what is "internet" you are referring to in the first place? If you are talking about TCP/IP network, then there is no "spirit". There are RFCs, and i don't think you can find one which specs which ports should or should not be blocked.
"Open and unrestricted"? As in, a bunch of open mail relays avialable to spammers, for example? Thanks, but no thanks :)
Also, what do you mean "supposed"? By whom?
As for "especially by companies": as of now, MOST of the internet is owned (as in, lines and networking equipment) by those "companies" you seem to hate so much.
In short, get off your political horse, and instead of whining go build some program to help use other UDP ports if this action is so against your spirit.
-DVK.
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
I would assume that there will soon be:
VODNSOIP
VOHTTPOIP
VOICMP
Example: I buy a new tool. It is a clawhammer. For some reason, this deprives the company making nail removers of money, especially considering their old nail removers were overpriced.
So, the government affiliated nail remover maker goes and makes buying clawhammers illegal.
This is immoral. You can't just rent-a-law because your overpriced technology is being smashed by a preferrable alternative.
I mean, just because you can buy laws (ie: riaa), doesn't mean it should be allowed to happen..
I have sent an email to Al Gore. I will post the response from the creator as soon as I receive it. Then we all shall know the "true spirit of the internet".
the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers.
That's unbelievable!... that it happened in Panama before America.
the U.S., as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry. When the U.S. says: "You, as a citizen, are not allowed to circumvent insuring your automobile, say by having infinity cash [sic] that you're willing to use to pay for any damages that you might inflict, but must go through a PRIVATE, government regulated insurance agency in order to use the public roads..."
Except for satellite and other wireless communications, ALL VoIP in Panama (as elsewhere) goes through wires that sit on the Government's land (that would be everything). If I can't use a public road except by playing by the rules of regulated private companies, (even if I know of a cheaper alternative), why should Panamians be allowed to use data lines going through public land, except by playing by the rules of a regulated private company?
Okay, that's the most contrived example I could think of. I don't think there's a closer equivalent -- some candidates were Edison (the electric company) - run public schools (look it up -- but you're not required to go to one, since you can homeschool) and private appraisals mandated in certain cases by the government.
Anyway, uh, yeah, HOW DARE THEY.
1034, 1035, 2090, 2091 and 5000 -- aren't those all in the dynamic address range? Wouldn't blocking those ports cause sporadic communications failures in programs such as web browsers?
On the positive side, this should kill the Windows Messenger popup spams, which propagate over UDP ports.
On the negative side, it will kill Quicktime, which needs UDP ports for negotiating a connection.
In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers.
The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls.
In the decree, the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of publication, all ISPs will block the 46 UDP ports used for VoIP and any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous systems."
This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 46 UDP ports blocked."
The significance of the government action affects areas far beyond that nation. Due to its geographical location, numerous undersea cables connect in the country, making it a substantial hub for international IP traffic.
Among the services that are to be disrupted are NetMeeting, Dialpad, and Net2phone, which labels itself "communication without borders," a claim which apparently will no longer be true if one of those borders is Panamanian or communication is between two countries whose IP traffic passes through Panama.
The decree is apparently rooted in complaints by Cable & Wireless Panama (Motto: "If you're worried about your data, voice, or Internet service provider, we're here to help"), which says it is losing money due to users employing the Internet to make otherwise expensive internetional telephone calls -- calls that would otherwise be listed on Cable & Wireless bills.
The UDP ports involved include: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801, 6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582, 35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.
The decree was published October 25.
Among the services that employ some of those ports are "nlockmgr," the NFS lock manager responsible for rpc.statd and rpc.lockd, which in turn are responsible for crash recovery functions for locked files and for processing file locking requests, respectively; telnet; and numerous VoIP services.
In addition to those who wish to save on their phone bills, the government order blocks the perfectly lawful use of those ports by businesses that have legitimate VoIP applications allowed in the country.
There were reports late Sunday that Panamanian ISPs were planning a demonstration aimed at exhibiting their displeasure with the government action.
Out of simple curiosity, I plugged 'panama phone company' into Google.. after all, what could this little pissant country have in the way of phone companines? And what are the first two links to pop up?
Privatization - Phone Company: and A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong: Panama's Wires Crossed. Perhaps this is the start of some revenue-generating stunt to pull some dumbass decision-maker's ass out of a fire somewhere?
-fester (capt. conspiracy?)
ps.. I'm sure Panamanians by and large dislike this as well.. the 'pissant' is directed at the governmental representation of Panama, which right now looks suspiciously like a boil on someone's ass.
-'fester
The company that requested it is C&W Panama, a subsidiary of C&W, based in UK. Isn't UK the US' best friend?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the long run, violent overthrow of the government worked OK for the French, English, and the United States. It's more of a last resort, though.
Adapt or die. There is no rule that states established businesses get to do business "the old" forever. If a better cheaper way of doing things comes along, oh well, tough cookies. There were once a lot of blacksmiths as well. So to the phone companies I say, Adapt or Die, better yet just die.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Actually, you're wrong. If you have enough cash and can prove it (by posting a bond for example), in many states you can avoid purchasing insurance. Essentially, you are self-insuring yourself. Whether that is a smart thing to do is another question entirely.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
This ranks up with the CBDTPA as the most absurd legislation of the twentieth century. There are so many loopholes around this law it's stupid, not to mention the fact that banning a port to try and stop any certain service is stupid -- as has been pointed out, it's not exactly amazingly difficult to change the port used by the program. *clap clap* I think Panama secretly elected GWB. This is exactly the kind of ignorant decision he's famous for.
People have been saying for years we need transparent encryption of internet connections (OK mabee I've been saying it) Once 'important' countries like Panama start playing routing games like this it becomes even more important.
Such heavy handed actions might be just what projects like FreeSwan need to get more universal acceptance. That all being said does anyone honestly belive that panama will be able to block *all* UDP traffic, while they are at it is might be a good idea to block ICMP and TCP - both of which could potentially carry voice data as well.
There is no money to be made in telecommunication in the long run if technology runs its course. Or at least it is going to gross millions instead of billions. In that situation even the remnants of the industry remaining today would largely have to collapse.
... with Bush's soft stance on monopolies the time is ripe to bring the US a couple of steps closer to corporatism, and after that the WTO and globalization can take it on a world tour, and the combined bribing power of the content and the telecommunication industry might just be the force which can accomplish it.
The industry is too big and too rich to go down without a fight, in Panama this results in naively blatant intervention. In the US the telecom industry will probably pair up with the content industry to outlaw private private peer to peer broadband communication sooner or later, under the guise of security and copyright protection. Only a monopoly or a price fixed ogliopoly will be able to squeeze money out of people on the same scale as today for communications in the future
This is very embarassing, but not a surprise.
This is yet another example of our British friends at Cable & Wireless adapting to the local culture of the country which they're sucking the blood out of. They obviously have quickly learned the Panamenian way of politics and have paid off all the necessary politicians, which can often be bought very cheap.
Cable & Wireless is privatization gone totally wrong. The previous phone company was a government owned company called INTEL, and Cable & Wireless beat US GTE and took over the phone system of Panama. The results have been horrible.
Local calls in Panama used to be like in the US, you paid your minimal fee and could talk all the minutes you wanted. Cable & Wireless brought the wonderful European model of paying for each minute for local calls.
If that wasn't enough, they also charge you per minute (I think) for calls from a land line phone in your house to a cell phone. That is, you pay for calling a cell phone and the person on the cell phone pays too. I had to find this the hard way after making a few calls to some friends from my grandmothers house.
So, people are fed up with them, and the internet savy are using Voice over IP a lot. I used to receive a lot of calls from a cousing over dialpad.com (when it was free). This was the ideal system to make a call to the US, dialpad was for US calls only, but the funny thing is that this worked great if you lived in another country.
Here's a good article on the whole mess Cable & Wireless is creating;
A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong -
Panama's Wires Crossed
- sigs are for wimps.
...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.
One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I bet this is really just an elaborate plan by the phone companies in panama. They probably brived a few lawmakers into passing the law, as is often the case in third world countries. However this is so exagerated that I wouln't be surprised if this doesn't last too long. I personally see this as a big disrespect to freedom, privacy, civil rights, common sense, innvation, and everything else good that can be fit in between.
The government of the United States passed a new law prohibiting the manufacturing of internal combustion engines in order to protect the extensive investments of the horse-and-buggy industry against the encroachment of "automobiles". A new 50% tax increase is also planned on the steel and rubber industries as the products of these industries are used extensively in the manufacturing of "automobiles"
Indiana tried this 105 years ago... That will put Panama about the right technological place in time.
-- Multics
I'd like to think this couldn't happen here (in the USA)... but, I really think it could with p2p.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
...that's the same Cable and Wireless, aka Exodus, where Slashdot currently hosts all of its servers.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Ah. A technical solution to a social problem. I swear, the politicians never learn and never will.
My
Limekiller
So everyone will just blue box. Problem solved :/
This is exactly the sort of thing that I expect to push the adoption of IPSEC or another transport level encryption scheme; not the desire to prevent loss of personal information or financial data. Rather than the elimination of eavesdropping, the increased resistance to targeted filtering will be the "killer app" that encourages widespread use of on-by-default encryption by Joe User.
I've wondered this for some time now, and with such developments as VoIP and G3, why don't telco's increase audio fidelity?
I think that if a telephone call could have the same bandwidth as (for example) a 22khz 16bit wav file, then people would feel better about using such archaic technology as the telephone. If 3G phones used more bandwidth for audio, rather than using some crappy lossy compression scheme, more people would think "hey, cool, my new cell phone sounds much better than my landline"
in short, if you can't compete with the same ol' bag of tricks, improve your service so it's at least on par with the competition.
Handicapping competing technologies is a silly way to innovate.
So if a new protocol does the initial negotiation via TCP port 80, using HTTP to carry out that negotiation, which then switches to the agreed random UDP port, they'd have to block TCP port 80, or require all ISPs to proxy filter HTTP (assuming it was easy to detect inside HTTP), or block all of UDP (if they leave 53 open, use that).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm sure that the leader of Panama is either:
1. Paid off by the phone company to do this.
2. Owns the phone company either overtly or covertly.
2. Is being paid off by some U.S. company.
Poltics always gets in the way of progress.
As funny as you thought that was, it's painfully close to the truth. The U.S. government recently enacted a 38% duty on all soft-wood lumber imports from Canada in order to protect its own lumber industry. Now they expect Canada to supply raw logs for processing south of the border (not to mention cheap electricity with which to process it).
I lived in the country in the Mid-90s (after Manuel).
And it once again sounds like the corrupt workings of their ruling junta.
Typical situations:
Transito (traffic cops) targetting rich foreigners for some BS violation, so they could receive bribe money. It was so common, that my friends always planned on taking extra cash to pay corrupt traffic cops.
The railroad system turned over by the US (at the time already "turned over" to the Panamanian govt) which in a few years had became totally non-operational due to local inept management.
Many reliable stories of gov't for hire (much like the US) where the politicos where bought off, not by campaign contributions, but people bought by large amounts of cash for personal gain.
All in all the ordinary people of Panama were friendly and had the attitude: oh well it happens, might as well be happy. (Papas e chulatas) Potatoes and bacon. oh well.
Personally I am surprised the Canal still operates. But one thing most Americans don't realize is that a provision in the treaty stipulates the US can reclaim it if it becomes non-operational. That in my opinion, is the reason the canal hasn't followed the fate of everything else "turned over" and ruined by its corrupt govt.
This is simply because there are too many people in the state of Ohio with 25 or more junkers in their lawn who also refuse to pay for auto insurance...
On a more economics note, efforts like these are generally doomed to failure, or to be very very expensive. If there is an economic inefficiency, there are ALWAYS financial incentives for some parties to remove or bypass the inefficiency. This is why monopolies eventually fall, smuggling of drugs is so costly to stop, and blocking a few UDP ports will be at best temporarily effective in blocking VOIP.
If everyone switched to VoIP, they'd just be using one phone connection, either DSL or analog modem, instead of two...which the phone company managed to survive on for decades. They may not like everyone switching back to one phone line, but I fail to see how it will kill them.
VoIP affects long distance companies, not local companies. Local companies provide the last mile just fine. And long distance companies can just up and die, as far as I care. If they want to run the fiber, they can run the fiber, but that's all we need them for.
Frankly, it's a much saner business model, everyone selling bandwidth to each other, instead of the wackass 'long distance' charges we pay to half a dozen different parties that don't have anything to do with the actual wires.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
--side issue here. You CAN do an indemnity personal bond for car insurance, just most people don't and it's little known about. It's also expensive, goes by state minimum liabilites, and you'd of course want more than those minimums any more with the cost of cars and people in the hospital, etc, but if you got it you can do it and keep your wealth unless it's needed by your proven negligence.
Got a neighbor periodically goes to panama for his oil business stuff, he sez the government there is roughly equivalent to say chicago in corruption levels, ie, total top to bottom. I imagine them mucking with the internet only applies to peons, that if you are at least a semi connected fatcat and pay the correct bribes you can do whatever you want, but at that level you could afford long distance so the point is moot. Most (not al, generally speaking here of course) civil laws in regards to anything but fraud in it's various forms more or less exist to protect the already wealthy's status quo. No different here than in panama, not really.
I'll give you an example I am running into locally here where I live. I'm in the market for a small piece of property to have a home on. My income level for this would be in the uber cheap range. Anywho, this county a few years ago decided on a minimun acreage size for new homes, 1.5 acres. Well, ok, fine and dandy..... trouble is, for the decades preceding this, they "allowed" smaller than that to be deeded up as lots and now exist in undeveloped abundance by the hundreds or thousands really, like 1.1 acre, etc. These lots are now useless except for growing weeds and trees, people are stuck with them now, no one wants to buy them, you can't do anything with them, but they are still taxed. This benefits the more recent richer arrivals who took the county over(lotta cash under the table money gets spread into country government is the popular notion) and don't want it to be farming/light manufacturing, they want it to be yet another yuppie retirement/second home vacation place.
Poorer people are untermenschen here, you can WORK here, but they would rather you to live over real far away some other place and commute, please go home at quitting time, no riff raff. It sucks but that's another example of a civil statute enforced by their bureaucrats and hired badged mercenaries to benefit the more wealthy.
It's not perfect - Compressed RTP does a CSLIP-like elimination of most of the IP, UDP, and rTP overhead, but doesn't work over IPSEC or most other tunneling protocols.) That means bandwidth is pretty tight over 28.8-upstream dialup modems (especially if you don't always get full speed), but I'm not aware of any better tunneling solutions.
It'd be nice to have some tradeoffs like putting more than one voice sample per IP packet, which is not so hot for quality but cuts the packet overhead in half, and the protocols *ought* to have encryption as a standard feature, so you don't need tunneling for the general case, but it's a good start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
s/Panama/USA/g
s/VoIP/P2P/g
s/C&WPA/{MP,RI}AA
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It may be economically beneficial to build a road from point A to point B, but no private interest will do it because once the road is built, everyone can just skip around the tollboothes and the building company will never get paid.
Historically speaking, when turnpikes first became more common in the early 18th century, they were mostly financed by private and local interests, despite the fact that road making companies nearly always had horrible returns on investment. The reason was that the economic benefits of the roads were so great that associations of merchants and individuals would band together and form road companies. Some joined for civic minded reasons, others out of self interest because roads would bring the town and themselves greater business. The infastructure of roads was gradually taken over by states, and with the advent of the personal automobile, began to become competitive with rail.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses. You can leave whenever you want and you can go wherever you want. The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits. States can subsidize economically inefficient interests (eg. farm subsidies), but saying that road construction and the personal automobile is inefficient is just pure baloney.
Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like. Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
Just a little plug for the GPL'd Free internet phone, Speak-Freely.
.deb is rather old.
It uses UDP ports 2074 - 2076. From the article these are not blocked.
Works quite well (I've had better trans-pacific quality with it versus the expensive telephone connection [talking both connections to same party at the same time]). Loads of features, including VOX and PGP encryption. Very good help section.
There's both a basic UNIX cli version (use the xspeakfree tcl/tk frontend in CONTRIB or sflaunch) & a fully developed windows version.
http://speakfreely.org/
(I'm just Happy User)
It's in Debian as speak-freely, but the
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
You are incorrect. There is no port number in an IP header. TCP and UDP both have their source and destination ports as the first 4 bytes after the IP header, but ICMP, for example, does not have ports at all. Thus, the concept of a port is defined by the upper layer protocol and has no meaning at the IP level.
A decade or so ago, when Joe Nacchio was working for AT&T before he started Qwest, he gave us a talk at Bell Labs where he drew a curve on the screen that showed the market price of long-distance voice telephone minutes. It took a steep dive, settling down asymptotically toward zero; given the prices of the time, he was showing it going from a quarter to a dime to a nickel to a penny. What could we do about it? Well, the choices were adapt or die. Use technology to cut costs, and use lower prices (plus advertising) to get people to make more phone calls.
Many countries' PTTs were abusing their monopoly positions by charging excessively non-cost-based prices for their service, ripping off their customers and damaging their overall economies by interfering with international communications and therefore international trade. In the past couple of years, they've been taken down not only by callback companies, but by wholesalers using VOIP technology to keep their costs much lower than the PTTs costs. Everybody wins from that, except the greedier PTTs, and most of them were using excess international prices to cross-subsidize local calling.
What's the next step? What happens if VOIP drops costs to the equivalent of $0.001 per minute? The most likely big impact turns out not to be the costs, but the fact that you no longer need a gigantic expensive #4ESS telephone switch to route large numbers of calls - internet routing technology works quite well for that, with something DNS-like to help with end-user location. Unlike those of you who aren't in the telephony business, yes, we do care that our last several business models have gotten the chairs kicked out from under them, but the problem of proposing new business models for telcos is ours, not that of the people who are trying to make us obsolete.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As it was:
Can you hear me now? Good!
As it will be:
Can you hear me now? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?!?!
For one, look at France; tollbooths do work, period.
Secondly, you contradict yourself: you state that private concerns won't build roadsbecause there's no return on investment, then finish off by saying that road construction is efficient...
All of which doesn't change the fact that personal transit is wastefull, inefficient and poluting. And it literally stinks.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Two of the problems of VOIP over cable are service reliability and reliability during power failures. The easiest way to fix the latter is to integrate some cheap cellphones into the equipment. Service reliability's a bit harder - the economics of the cable TV business assume that you need enough technicians and trucks to take care of most failures, so customers are happy and you don't need to rebate their bills for downtime very often, but that fundamentally it's just television, and if it goes down for the weekend in bad weather, your customers can read a book or go watch videotapes until you can get it fixed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Ah, so you are saying that the IP stack completely ignores bits 72-29, specified as "Protocol" and identifying the content that follows as any of TCP, UDP, icmp, sip, rfc1700, etc.
While port 80 may be handling http traffic in either tcp or udp, you may have completely different applications using those same two ports. Apache may be using port 80 at the same time as tftp is using that port. As noted in another reply to you, IP itself does not care one bit about what port is going to get the data. It cares that there is a protocol stack that understands what IP hands it.
Likewise filtering on firewalls and in access lists on routers specifies the protocol as well as the port being handled.
If whomever you learned networking from told you that the protocol field of the IP header was unimportant and that all traffic to a port had to be of whatever type the application which opened that port to the IP stack expected, I would recomend you ask for your money back.
-Rusty
You never know...
I'd call somebody up with my computer and complain!
Oh....wait...
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
In the telephony business, we invented the concepts of "natural monopolies" and "universal service" as the hook to let TPC get monopolies over local telecom service, and instead of buying politicians with cold cash, we bought them with the concept that they were "doing good", and "encouraging development", and giving them the ability to hire their friends as telecom regulators. Well, that was a fun game for almost a hundred years, but technological change has made it easier for other people to get in the game, and as the computer industry and telecom industry have gotten closer together, the costs of doing business have come way down.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
[ObLiteraryReference:] Everybody hates The Phone Company.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Let's say building a lighthouse off a rocky point stops ten ships from running aground on the shore each year, saving $1 million per incident for a total of $10 million. Let's say building the lighthouse costs $5 million. It's easy to see that building the lighthouse is a good idea. Unfortunately the lighthouse won't be built by a single private company because whoever builds it will NEVER get paid (and with these prices its cheaper for each individual shipper to let his/her ships run aground than build the lighthouse himself). Why? because there's no way to charge people for a good which they can just get for free. Once the lighthouse is built, no one can stop other boats from seeing the light. This is called a "non-excludable" good. You can't "exclude" other people from consuming it. Once it's built, you can't STOP other people (non-subscribers) from using it.
The only way to build the lighthouse is if all the shippers band together and agree to jointly build the lighthouse. This is completely analogous to voters getting together and voting for canidates who are for road construction.
Backing up my previous point, roads are also fairly non-excludable, in the early eighteenth century of America, federal law mandated that tollboothes for roads be a certain MINIMUM distance apart (around 30 miles). Whole companies /groups developped which made small bypasses around tollboothes. Tollboothes couldn't collect tolls on local residents moving short distances from one side of the toll to the other.
Furthermore, there's NO WAY to put toll boothes on local roads. (You have a booth at the end of each driveway??)
Your point is somewhat correct in that tolls sort of work on some large French highways (and they most definately work on bridges, where it's really easy to control the entrances and exits). I'm not really sure a French model where you have to stop every few miles and pay a toll is a really great thing though. It might be better to have everyone pay a little bit more in gas tax and not have tolls on freeways.
I'm not saying that personal transportation doesn't pollute. I'm merely saying that personal transportation is NOT economically inefficient.
Roads are generally referred to as a public good.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
You can leave whenever you want
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
and you can go wherever you want.
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like.
"Massive" relative to what? Compared to the automobile, all those subsidies are negligible. Hell, just the indirect health costs resulting from use of the automobile probably dwarf everything we spend on all those alternatives combined.
Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread. Furthermore, people have no choice anymore: many parts of the country have been built and set up that people can't do without a car anymore. And people are forced to bear a lot of the costs of driving whether they own a car themselves or not. It's not surprising that everybody has a car under those conditions. I do as well--I could not afford not to. But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
Sure there's dozens of ways to get around their port blocking, but I have a feeling it will have the effect they desire. Only a handful of people will have the knowledge and resources to circumvent their port blocking. In fact, the number is probably small enough that the government won't have to put in any more effort.
Sad... but probably true.
Then how do you suggest people that live in small towns get to work and shop if they do not have a personal automobile/roads? Mass transist does not work in a small town.
I don't know whether you have lived in a small town. I have, in Europe. It took three minutes to walk to the supermarket, five minutes to walk to work, and three minutes to walk to the train station (which would take me directly to the airport and pretty much anywhere else). For short distance trips, I'd use a bicycle or the bus (fast and on-time).
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
And some of those 'corrupt' politicians dismantled public transportation because it was/is a very large sinkhole for tax dollars.
Cars are a much bigger "sinkhole" for tax dollars than public transportation. Even disregarding all the infrastructure costs, health costs and lost productivity from cars alone are enormous and dwarf anything spent on public transportation.
say by having infinity cash [sic]
Uhh...erk...
You found a grammatical error in your own sentence, but rather than correct it you add a [sic]?
You might be paying less /on average/ but bad scenarios are a lot worse. The reason we pay insurance companies more money than they give out is for the guarantee that we will never have to individually pay more than the average that each person puts in, (minus the surcharge).
It's like the state lottery: sure, on average I'd rather keep my dollar than get 40 cents for it, but a dollar a week doesn't make any difference to me one way or another, whereas whoever wins the lottery gets a big increase in lifestyle, and that person COULD be me. I'm willing to pay 60 cents for the CHANCE to pool my 40 cents with the 40 cents of everyone else who plays.
Likewise, if a business is about to fail miserably, it can try something really risky, that either will make it go bankrupt a few months earlier, or end up keeping it afloat.
Risk management FREQUENTLY deals with worst-case scenarios as well as "expected return", ie, what you call average. That's why I'd rather walk 15 minutes and arrive exactly on time to an appointment than take the bus, for which I have to wait, and arrive on average 6 minutes earlier. (Because buses come every n minutes, but I don't know when the last one came.)
Fun stuff.
Are you sure this wasn't in Australia? The plan smacks of the intelligence and wisdom of our local minister for The Arts and Technology (he knows nothing of either).
Why do governemnts protect dying, inefficient industries and hold back the growing, efficient ones? Is it always because of monetary 'incentives' from the old boys' club? I hope not, but I assume so.
Panama, I congratulate you! You are idiots.
They want to block UDP ports that *can* be used for VOIP? Why not *make* 'em block all UDP and let them find out how screwed that actually leaves them? Wanna see a government backtrack on a previous decision really quick?
Unless Panama wants to block all web browsing...
Bear with me while I explain
UDP is used for VOIP because TCP is a streaming protocol and as such isn't particularly useful for real-time data transmission -- as said by another poster elsewhere, it's preferable to just simply lose a packet every now and then rather than to have the connection pause suddenly while TCP handles congestion control.
So... what I imagine is this: a system running VOIP listens to a randomly chosen UDP port rather than a specifically chosen one. The exact port to try to connect to is found by connecting to the system via the TCP port 80, and the VOIP system responds to the connection request letting the caller know which UDP port to actually use, and then the TCP connection is closed. The caller can then use the UDP port it was informed about. Since the system can be listening on ANY UDP port, possibly even one that would normally be used for some other well-known service, the government would have no choice but to create a ruling that would unilaterally block all UDP.
Seriously... I think it would be close to hilarious to see what they would come up with to try to stop that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, I just like the sound of it. It's playful. My eleven year old brother said to me the sentence "This cheat gives you INFINITY LIFE!!!" I liked it. He said: "OOOOH! It evoluted!!" haha, because he thought that was the term, since the game said "evolution". :)], and not some grammatical machine.
I correct him, of course, but I like how playful some "wrong" things sound. I'm a human bean, after all, [sic
I'll call something non-sequiturial, if I think it doesn't follow, and use strong verbs with an -ed suffix, although I can't think of one that I tend to do with just now...
I say that I like Boston enough to want to live in it for keeps, or that "You know what they say: there are only two ways to skin a cat: head to tail and tail to head", before adding, "But you know what? That's more than one way!", in a context where a normal person would just say "there's more than one way to skin a cat."
Sometimes I go the other way, and use the original form of an expression that has come down to us differnetly, for example saying, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" (rather than "the proof is in the pudding", taking pudding to mean desert, or the end), and when whereas a normal person might say "The best laid plans...", signifying the idiom "the best laid plans of mice and men", I'll quote the full phrase:
"You know what they say:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang oft a-gley."
With a heavy bobby burnsy accent.
Same for shakespearean quotes common in the language, and, especially, Alexander Pope.
Other times, I'll put a twist on it. If I don't want to talk about religion any more, I'll say:
"Silly mortal! Don't question Gods's plan,
The proper study of mankind is MAN."
If someone tells me they like Chevre (goat's cheese), I will say,
"You know the reason we even are able to milk cows at all today is because we have the practice from back when we were goatherds. It's like airplanes -- you couldn't have them if it weren't for the pioneers in dirigibles."
But of course Pope put it more succinctly with:
True ease in milking comes from milking goats,
As he flies best who also ably floats.
Anyway, that's all.
The only reason I use [sic] when misquoting or misdeclining or misspelling purposefully is to stave off the hordes of ravenous pedants who lurk around slashdot and other places, much like yourself, actually.
Sometimes I'll be tricky, and say something that the pedants find objectionable but really makes sense:
"Hopefully, I say, we should be finished by tomorrow."
(Because some old schoolers don't use hopefully except as an adverb; not as a sentence-modifyer.)
Anyway, toodles.
Panama is, unfortunately, not the only country to try this. Pakistan, for example, has one telco company handling all outgoing internet traffic (telco monopoly until dec 31 2002). They blocked various VoIP sites *and* MSN voice chat last month.
This was done unilaterally, with support from the supposedly independent telco regulation authority.
People complained, ISPs took out ads in papers and made press releases about it, and it's now looking like the sites will be unblocked by the end of the week. Hopefully.
It used to be public domain. I think it's GPL now.
A while back Captain Crunch made a little bit of history by placing his first VOIP call with Speak Freely - from India, where VOIP has long been illegal and I'm pretty sure the ports are supposed to be blocked.
The way people can find what port to use for you is that you can have your name and IP address listed on a webserver. When people look you up they'll see your port. You'll have to instruct people you talk to to set the port, not just the IP address.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
That's the long and short of it, yes.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
A "public good" is not something which every stinking last citizen of that country needs, wants or uses. Libraries are also a public good dispite the fact that they are only useful to people who can read, who are able to travel there, and who want to use them.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one. In the same way, mass transit is a "public good" dispite the fact that the only people who can use mass transit are people who live near the stations. (Meaning the Federal dollars subsidizing the Amtrak raillines in New York--something which my tax dollars help to support--are unusable to me as I live in California.)
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
There has been a tremendous amount of research done into creating civic projects which minimize the need for transportation, or attempt to create transportation corridors which allow the use of mass transit in a more efficient manner.
The problem is twofold. First, there are a lot of people, and by and large most of them don't want to live in a cramped little apartment building in a 200 floor skyrise for the sake of minimizing the horizontal distance they need to travel to work. Most people would rather live in houses and housing developments--and unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, when you get more than a few thousand houses together, you have a transportation problem that cannot be easily solved by busing or rail.
Second, when you get more than a few thousand people in the same town, the combinatorial problem of N people (where N is large--such as Los Angeles, where you're pushing tens of millions), and M places they need to go (such as work, grocery store, etc), and you have a severe transportation problem. Los Angeles is trying to fight the problem by creating time and economic incentives for people to move to transportation hubs--that is, they're trying to fight the problem by severely re-engineering the way people live in Los Angeles. But as I said before, people don't want to live in high rises, they want to live in houses--to the point where they'd rather spend three hours a day in a car to go to work every day so they can have their house.
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
Actually, even in the most severe places, you can arrive by when you want if you just pay attention to the traffic reports and leave early enough. While "I'm sorry I'm late; bad traffic" is occassionally true, more often than not it's the grown up version of "my dog ate my homework."
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
People's transportation uses tend to break down into three categories. There are personal errands (groceries, shopping), work, and recreational (going out to see a movie, etc.)
Do not confuse them just to make a hairbrained point. If you are not buying your daily personal errand products and services locally, what are you thinking? Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
And work is work--for the most part, businesses are required to provide sufficient parking for their employees, so if you are having a hard time finding a place to park at work, you should takl to your employers, not just assume that there is some sort of conspiracy to make your life difficult. (Life *is* difficult, it doesn't need a conspiracy.)
It's only the recreational areas where there is a problem with parking. But in general that's because most recreational areas (such as parks, movie theaters, etc) generally are not built with sufficient parking for peak usage, because it winds up being inefficient from a cost analysis standpoint. (Why build a four floor parking garage if 95% of the time, you will never use three of those floors?)
And in that case, there really is no good solution--except perhaps not going out to see a movie during peak times.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.
No it does not. Mass transportation of products is only efficient when you have a lot of product going from point A to point B. In fact, most of the United State's logistical infrastructure is now organized around that fact. That's why when you send a FedEx package to the next city over, it generally is flown into Memphis--because centralization of transportation corridors is more efficient than solving the O(N**2) problem of moving products directly to their destination.
But once you get to an endpoint--such as the Port of Los Angeles, or the Ralphs Grocery Distribution Hub in Los Angeles, or whatever other central hub that is serviced by rail--you now must rely on surface street traffic and trucks, not mass transit or public transportation--to move the product to the end store.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread.
I don't believe so.
The automobile solved two problems--which accounted for it's massive initial acceptance and for public pressure to create better roads. (Roads significanly predated cars by a few thousand years, by the way--even paved roads with lined beds were built by the Romans.)
The first problem cars solved was the expense and general hassle of owning a horse. Descriptions of the streets of New York's horse maneur problem, especially during the summer, is rather shocking. New York spent a significant amount of resources just cleaning horse droppings on a daily basis, and the illnesses that arose from horse droppings, as well as the stench was shocking. And while we are now (and rightfully so) concerned with the public health problems of car pollution, horse pollution was a real and rather terrible problem.
The second problem cars solved was that cars were more reliable and required less maintanance than horses. You didn't need to provide a stable and hay, or extra space. And that, along with Henry Ford's pricing efforts to bring the price of mass produced cars down to a reasonable level, allowed private individuals for the first time access at any form of private transportation whatsoever.
But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
The most "economically efficient" way for people to live is in massive studio apartment highrises clustered in tight little clusters around mass transportation corridors.
But, with the exception of Manhattan, people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high. They would rather live in their own house on a 1/4 acre lot in the suburbs--and once you start taking people's desires for space and elbow room into account, transportation goes from being a relatively simple exercise of moving people around from a small number of hubs to an O(n**2) problem of figuring out how to allow a person to efficiently go from just about anywhere in a several hundred square mile area to just about anywhere else in a several hundred square mile area.
And that's hard.
People do not want to live in an "economically efficient manner"--taken to the extreme, that would mean that people would wear all the same clothing and eat algae-based paste that wouldn't need to be moved in refrigerated trucks to the grocery store. Instead, people have certain desires (such as a nice house in the suburbs on a quiet street, or unique furnature and decorations, or to go to a movie and a quaint little restaurant in the next town) which makes transportation issues a royal pain in the ass.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno. But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient--that's absurd. And backwards: the question is not what is the most economically efficient solution, but what is the most economically efficient way to give people what they want--including that house in the suburbs which makes transportation by anything other than some form of powered motorized vehicle impractical.
Just goes to show that a properly regulated free market is best! And of course that a poorly regulated free market, like in Panama and a lot of other places, is worse than a government owned monopoly.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one.
Indeed, it is. And my point is that roads and other car-related infrastructure do not benefit the general economy relative to other choices that we have, and that it would be possible to finance them through "normal capitalist means". Hence, they aren't a "public good".
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
I'm not "assuming" anything. I have lived in places where public transportation works. Transportation in the US just sucks in comparison, and it really decreases quality of life greatly.
Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
Who cares about "locally"? The question is: is it walkable or reachable by public transportation, and it isn't. Working in high-tech, there are almost no places in the US where I could move to and walk to work and do shopping on foot.
people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high.
Housing prices in modern cities prove you wrong: the prices of condominiums in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston show that those places are highly desirable places to live. The same is true for places like downtown Los Gatos and Palo Alto. People like to live in communities where they can walk places and use public transportation. Also, there is nothing "tiny" about condominiums.
But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient
But it's not a choice: in the US, I effectively don't have the choice not to use a car. There is little usable public transportation, schedules suck, and many important places, you can't get to other than by car. And if I gave up my car, I would still be forced to subsidize driving-related costs with more money annually than I spend on my car. Furthermore, many of the direct costs of owning a car are fixed: once you buy it, you might as well use it becaues the incremental cost is small compared to the sunk costs. That is what keeps the automobile around.
If people paid for the actual cost of driving on a per-use basis, just like they do for public transportation, and if a decent system of public transporation were deployed in the US so that we actually had a choice, few people would use cars on a regular basis because it just doesn't make sense. Give people the choice and they will take it.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno.
Well, I do, because I have actually lived in places where public transportation works, and let me tell you, it's great. A good system of public transportation together with good urban planning doesn't mean communism, it doesn't mean that you never drive, it doesn't mean living in tiny boxes, it just means that most people can do most things without being forced to use a car on a regular basis.
VoIP uses a LARGE amount of bandwidth. If these and similar sorts of services are disabled then bandwidth will be freed for other uses. Ok , its only a small compensation but nevertheless...
How amusing. I take it you've never bought anything from a store? How do you suppose it got there, hmmm?
Rail works if you have:
Fortunately, lots of people do have such stuff, or even are such stuff themselves, but over short distances between many points with arbitrary journey start times and routes, mass transit systems are the wrong paradigm.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
Sure you can - but you can't expect the benefits of big-city living in a small community. There are plenty of small towns in the US, where people say hello to each other in the streets and the waitress in the diner remembers your name.
But you cannot expect the world to adapt itself to your personal preferences. Either you live in a sprawling metropolis and have access to all it offers, or you live in a small town and adopt the lifestyle. Either way, you make your own choices.
Death to IRC, the bane of the long distance service provider! IRC is stealing the money that people would normally have to pay for 24-hour-a-day party-line conversations between twenty or more people! Billyuns of dollars are being lost, and are probably being used to fund terrorism!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
In response, the Post Office has also decreed that the protocols POP3, SMTP and IMAP should also be banned in an attempt to win back loss revenue.
Although John Dvorak was speaking about copyright law when he said this, It still sounds appropriate:
What's happened, and the point I keep trying to make, is that technology has changed the economics of these industries.
This is indeed true of teh VOIP scene. What a pathetic lack of understanding of the technology the Panamanian governement has displayed. Many of those ports are just as easily used by many apps that they definately don't want to ban. Exchange Sever is one example, but there are many more.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Billyuns of dollars are being lost, and are probably being used to fund terrorism!
Er, the story is about Panama, isn't it? Please try to keep /. reflexive US-bashing in check. Thank you ;)
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
I just don't know what to say about the intellectual capacity of someone who judges the quality of life in the US by looking at the Bay area.
If you don't like the Bay area, why don't you check out the other 99.9999% of the country?
I could not find "Fobbit Fone". Could you provide a link?
You're assuming that the telcos are part of a very simple market mechanism and that VoIP users are somehow cheating the system.
Much of the cost of international calls isn't the bandwidth, but the overseas "termination charges" that carriers get to charge each other to terminate calls on their networks.
Which gets at your most important assumption, that Internet users are "stealing" bandwidth on long-haul links. The internet users have to be self-funded, including out of country bandwidth, otherwise the providers wouldn't be in business.
The subsidy that's probably happening is that the local phone company is probably funding 75% of its operations based on international termination fees and access to overseas carriers. Panama being Panama, you can imagine that about half the people don't even pay for phone service (steal it, government giveaways, etc), and the half that do pay probably pay some ridiculously cross-subsidized amount.
What needs to happen is that the Panama PTT needs to right its economics. The local phone network (ie, calls made end-end inside Panama) need to be wholly self-funding, and NOT reliant on international access & settlements. International calling needs to pay for international calling ONLY.
I currently live in a small ( 75,000 pop towns.
I rather enjoy my quality of life, what am I missing?
One last thing, please don't judge the rest of the USA by how CA does things
Too bad udp ports aren't forwarded by ssh....
The real solution, of course, would be something like IPSec....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Silly Rabbit, Trix are for KIDS!
I currently live in a small ( 75,000 pop towns. I rather enjoy my quality of life, what am I missing?
Well, there are all different kinds of small towns, and different things make different people happy. Here we were talking about transportation. How much time do you spend in the car? How often do you use your car? How long does it take you to get to the airport?
Overall, chances are good that you spend much more time driving and traveling and have much less selection in terms of good food, cultural events, and recreational activities in your town than many comparable small towns in Europe.
One last thing, please don't judge the rest of the USA by how CA does things
What a silly comment. I'm not an outsider "judging" the US, this is my home. And among the many places in the US I have lived and seen, I think California is one of the nicer places. It's just that I know that many nuisances and problems that others take for granted would be avoidable if we changed our approach to urban planning and transportation.
Yes, I've had that before. I like double-meanings (especially when they involve pr0n), so I decided to keep it that way :)
OLPC Australia
It took three minutes to walk to the supermarket
.2 Mi or .35 km. That's 22 supermarkets per square mile, or 8 supermarkets per square Km. If you try to use a hex grid rather than a square grid the results are 34 per sqare mile or 12 per square Km.
I checked several google results and the accepted average walking speed is about 3mph or 5kph. That means a 3 minute walk is 0.15 mile or 0.25 Km to the supermarket. In order for that to be true for everyone supermarkets could be separated bu no more than double that distance. That means the supermarkets are 0.3 miles or 0.5 Km apart. Looking at it 2-dimentionally that actually measures the DIAGONAL spacing if they are in a grid. That means the grid spacing is about
You also neglect the issue of hauling the supermarket shopping home. I guess the load wouldn't be bad if you're shopping for 1 or 2 people and make a trip every 2 or 3 days, but the load is unmanageable on foot if you're shopping for 3 or 4 people and make 1 trip per week. Making one round trip by car is a lot faster and easier than 3 round trips by foot.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I know! It is exactly what the RIAA and MPAA are doing:
:/
1) New technology comes along and obsoletes a buissness model
2) Old buisness model uses power to by law outlawing new, better technology, rather than adapt
Seems reasonalbe to me.
The government of Panama is just a little less capable than the US. The US goverment would have made it illegal to discuss which port any service was on including in research paper.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
Banning VOIP ports is silly, not just because controlling the internet this way is a bad idea, it's because the quality of internet service over there is so bad that VOIP is almost unworkable anyway. Or at least, that's what I've discovered, being called by my father-in-law from Panama using net2phone. "Hello? Hello? Hey, it must be your dad calling, I can't hear anything."
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
, as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry
No, acutally it's pretty different.
If you don't insure your car, you're not allowed to drive on public roads. Yes, a third party makes money, but they actually perform a service (and, as others have pointed out, you're wrong in the fact that you can't escape it.)
Now, if the government mandated which insurance company you had to use, or took a percentage of the profits from other insurance companies and gave it to their preferred one, then there might be some sort of similarity..
As soon as that happens, come back and post a response.
But what's much more important: There are butchers with high-quality meat and sausages (self-made, not those that just resell stuff), family-run bakeries that have a wide variety of bread, shops with daily fresh fruits and vegetables from all over Europe, etc. Hope you get it.
Granted there are European areas where the US mall concept is now prevalent, too - but IMNSHO it's much easier to find a small town with a more-than-decent living standard in Europe than in the US. Of course, it depends on your definition of "living standard."
E.g., I don't really think it's a big problem that most of our shops (as I've said, family-run) close around 7pm. As long as the bars stay open... I have been to so many small US towns where it was impossible to get a drink after one's dinner - but where one could buy T-shirts 24x7. And all the time, for me, at 11pm it was more important to have a drink with friends than being able to buy T-shirts... ;-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I repeat myself..
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
That's 22 supermarkets per square mile, or 8 supermarkets per square Km.
Well, gosh, some people may have had to walk 10 or 20 minutes or walked to a neighborhood store instead of a supermarket. But, yes, the density of stores in European towns seems, in general, much higher. Unfortunately, large shopping malls and supermarkets have started to creep in.
You also neglect the issue of hauling the supermarket shopping home. I guess the load wouldn't be bad if you're shopping for 1 or 2 people and make a trip every 2 or 3 days, but the load is unmanageable on foot if you're shopping for 3 or 4 people
There are several solutions. Yes, one is to go shopping more frequently (you get fresher produce as well). Some people use a folding grocery cart. Some people go by car every now and then for big items but still do most of their shopping on foot. The point is: you aren't forced to use the car--you have options.
True. In fact, many large cab companies are self-insured. They are distributing the risk over a large fleet of vehicles, so in the long run they come out ahead, even if there are a few nasty accidents.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?