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User: mikkelm

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  1. Re:WTF is sending data? on French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic · · Score: 1

    How could your ISP possibly be a third party network? You're a directly attached user on the ISP network, within their management and addressing domain. The network exists explicitly to move your bits, and you're paying for the service. A third party network is one moving bits between stations that aren't part of that network.

    If you ran a big network that Google needed to transit through to get to stations beyond your network, then yes, there'd be a transit settlement in place. That's how the Internet works. If you ran a big network, and your direct users requested access to Google resources, then no, Google would not pay you to deliver the traffic that your users request. You're soliciting the traffic on behalf of your customers, who pay you to do so. There's no reason why Google should pay you their money, and use their resources to fulfill a request that your users are paying you to facilitate.

    If you really were to argue that Google should pay, then where do you mark the line? How much traffic warrants payment? Who has to pay? How big do you have to be? The entire Internet would become analogous to people subscribing for PSTN service and then placing collect calls to everyone they want to talk to.

  2. Re:WTF is sending data? on French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic · · Score: 1

    That's a benefit of being a large content provider. You become the tier 1 networks' product. Just like you become the end user ISPs' product. Notice, however, the distinction here. Regardless of whether or not a small company has to pay for their transit, it certainly doesn't have to pay for access to Orange's end-user network. Nor should Google, or any other company whose resources are being requested by the users of Orange's network.

  3. Re:WTF is sending data? on French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic · · Score: 1

    >Which one does Google sending data to me via my ISP come under?

    Where is the source of confusion? Google is a customer to its transit providers. To your ISP, they're just another station on the Internet sending bits that its clients requested.

    >Seems a bit of an arbitrary distinction, unless we want to go by technicalities like "having your own IP range / AS number makes you a separate network".

    There's nothing arbitrary about it. If your traffic needs to traverse a third party network, then you pay that third party network for the privilege. It's very straight-forward. There is absolutely no source for confusion in any of this.

  4. Re:WTF is sending data? on French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic · · Score: 1

    >The "users" want to access resources. Google want them to, so they can sell advertising. The benefits of the transaction aren't one-way

    Nor is selling milk. The customer gets milk, the dairy gets money.

    >Besides, if I used my internet connection exclusively to host a server I would still have to pay for it. The difference is that Google is big and important enough to be able to bargain for good terms.

    You pay for transit as a provider. Transit is when your traffic passes a third party network. Transit is not when the traffic that the users of a network requested passes through their own network.

  5. Re:WTF is sending data? on French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic · · Score: 1

    At the request of their users. Just like every other part of the Internet works. ISPs make money because their users want to access resources, including Google's. Charging Google for the traffic generated by the requests sent by the subscribers who are also being charged is like the grocery store charging the dairy farm for the shelf space to stock their milk.

  6. Re:Clearly on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    XKCD is a comic that involves a lot of math and science, and complains about dishonesty in academia on a frequent basis. Yet here the author is being excessively generous to one concept that he favours, and excessively pessimistic regarding another that he's trying to dispel. That's what irks me.

    But if you don't understand the concept, and would rather write a post full of meaningless insults and devoid of reason and sensibility, then there's nothing anyone can do to stop you. Knock yourself out.

  7. Re:Clearly on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    I read the transcript. "A few more bits" would actually be a good few more bits. There are many, many more feasible and realistically common permutations. Enough, in my opinion, to bring the total entropy to a level way beyond what's necessary to use on any system that allows a thousand queries per second.

  8. Re:Clearly on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    That's a rather offensive opening for a post that doesn't really do anything to corroborate the methods used to calculate the entropy. I'm well aware of the exponential benefits of longer passwords.

  9. Re:Clearly on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: 1

    That's the real reason to pick a long password, yes, but I have issues with the way the entropy is calculated in that strip. It's based on assumptions, and the entropy seems to be calculated with no regard to any of the many other common permutations.

  10. Re:Clearly on Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I seem to be the only one who thinks that this strip is complete bullshit. There are so many assumptions, and no accounting for variations.

  11. Re:Marketing guy's function on Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code · · Score: 1

    Don't forget uc "free";

  12. Re:No.. on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 2

    I'm having trouble understanding your reply. The people who play games don't buy $300 video cards to run Photoshop. They buy them to run very demanding 3D applications. You can't run those applications on other platforms, so it isn't a matter of going out of one's way to avoid alternatives.

  13. Re:No.. on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "High performance desktop" gamers are a pretty self-selected group now days. If you're sitting in front of a ATX case with a discreet video card, you've gone out your way to avoid every computing trend over the last 10 years. Which is fine, but its not exactly a growth market.

    That's a pretty loaded statement. If you use a tool for a specific tasks, and forgo newer tools that come out in favour of revisions of the tool that you have been using because it remains the best tool for the job, then you haven't "gone out of your way to avoid every computing trend," rather, you've continued to use the best tool for the job. There are no devices more suitable for the kind of stuff these people do than desktop computers with discrete video cards.

  14. Wow, swell! on AT&T Introducing Verizon-Style Shared Data Plans · · Score: 1

    Somehow this still costs more than what we pay T-Mobile for two phones with unlimited minutes and text, and 2GiB for each phone.

    The U.S. is a third world country with respect to cellular providers.

  15. Re:Breathless summary by the clueless on Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    I already covered this in my post. Why are you replying with this?

  16. Re:Breathless summary by the clueless on Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    Use your own critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, and read the full sentence.

    "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

    The list of opposed curricula is disjointed, "critical thinking skills" is not capitalised, unlike the two other specified subjects, suggesting that the paragraph is talking about critical thinking skills in general, and not a specific methodology of the same name. Taking into consideration the rest of the document, which rails against anything other than loyalty to the Christian faith and and Christian morality, it doesn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to understand that what constitutes "purpose" in an environment expecting total loyalty and faith can be anything that might conceivably challenge religious notions, and nor does it take a scholar in logic to understand that verbiage more broad and vague than what is needed to address a stated desire is of no use to anyone aside from a party with hidden motivations.

    Critical thinking requires an understanding of context.

  17. Re:Critical Thinking on Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills · · Score: 1

    Not at all. The paragraph says that they oppose "the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs," because they "are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning)." They oppose this because they feel that the programs "focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

    You're cutting out crucial parts of the sentence and ignoring the flow of proposition and justification to make it seem like they object to a subset of programs that specifically aim to achieve a certain objective, when in fact they object to the entire set of programs because they feel that they all aim to achieve a certain objective.

  18. Re:Poetic Justice on Georgia Apple Store Refuses To Sell iPad To Iranian-American Teen · · Score: 1

    That's a crock of shit, to be honest, even if the question was hypothetical. No part of these export laws have anything to do with subjective judgement of character.

  19. Re:Poetic Justice on Georgia Apple Store Refuses To Sell iPad To Iranian-American Teen · · Score: 1

    Wait, so soldiers are expected to uphold the law, but people outside of the armed forces aren't? Or are soldiers more credible and trustworthy than people who aren't in the military?

  20. Re:High-Frequency Trading on Aussie Telco Lays New Fiber For Microsecond Trading Boost · · Score: 1

    Obviously circumventing the system would result in severe punishment by the regulatory agencies.

  21. Stop. on An HTTP Status Code For Censorship? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    None. If a site absolutely must be blocked, then blackhole its IP addresses and fail resolution on the ISP's DNS servers. Middleboxes that inspect layer 4 and above are never OK, and never part of a trustworthy ISP network unless explicitly requested by the end-user.

  22. Re: Moar on Report Says Schools Need 100Mbps Per 1,000 Users · · Score: 1

    If this kind of bandwidth is necessary for the operation of the institution, then it doesn't really matter what the hardware upgrade costs are, because they're the costs of doing business. You can't operate without paying them. That being said, if you need 1Gbps/1,000 users by 2015, and it's purely for academical purposes, then you're likely dealing with a bunch of streaming video and audio, or large applications. That kind of traffic doesn't need content filtering, and any router you'd sensibly put in front of servers hosting that kind of content will be able to handle the traffic at trivial cost. Firewalling also shouldn't be a large cost-issue in an environment with relatively few, long-lived flows, even at those speeds.

  23. Re: Moar on Report Says Schools Need 100Mbps Per 1,000 Users · · Score: 1

    Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

    In a larger metro area? Initial infrastructure costs would probably be in the tens of thousands, but network infrastructure isn't really an optional expense for larger educational institutions these days. Going with the 1Gbps per 1,000 users, about $10k USD for two devices to handle routing for a handful of 1Gbps uplinks with the necessary failover, roughly $1,000 per 1Gbps commitment, and about another $1k yearly for support contracts. At an institution with 10,000 students, that's $120k/year for the transport, plus $1k/year for support. Or about $6 per student per semester. Not exactly prohibitively expensive considering the "technology fees" charged these days, much less so considering the general cost of tuition.

    At those prices, fuck caching.

  24. Re:High bidders only on World Cup Memo Written By Steve Jobs Going Up For Auction · · Score: 1

    Is that really the only plausible explanation that you can come up with?

  25. High bidders only on World Cup Memo Written By Steve Jobs Going Up For Auction · · Score: 0

    Next up is a set of pinball schematics drawn by an arrogant teenager who refused to take showers. Yours for only two million dollars!