I could have made that clearer. What I meant was to give each country its own root server for use within its own borders. Others could access domains on that server if it were open, but a country could choose to close it off if it wanted... it's theirs, let them do as they please.
But yes, each country would have its own TLD like now, except that every domain would be within that TLD.
I don't get your point about the laws... they need not be any different than they are now: buy from a US site, obey the laws that are applicable to the company that owns that site. Same with other countries. The intervening servers have, or should have, nothing to do with it. That would not make any sense, either now or under my proposed scheme.
Frankly, I don't see that many problems with the idea. I certainly don't think the things you brought up are actual problems.
"I don't even really know what it's about. I heard "protesting corporate greed in America", but I mean that's a tough thing to protest.. you're basically protesting capitalism.."
Um... no.
I don't know who started this BS, but there is nothing about capitalism that requires corporate greed of exploitation of others. On the contrary: the very basis of capitalism is the idea that two people will naturally trade in ways that are mutually beneficial. If they aren't, then it isn't capitalism.
Blaming distortions of capitalism by corporations and government on capitalism itself, is like living in the boondocks where you only get distorted cell phone and television reception, and blaming it all on the whole concept of radio.
"I wish I'd thought of it - and what a neat way to go about it."
Not really... since the way he goes about it invalidates it.
The "million monkey" principle is about random generation of long sequences of text. However, what he is doing is generating short sequences of text, then pasting them into his "generated text" if they pass his fitness test (match existing text).
But the fact that he is selecting short bits of text means that the whole text is no longer random at all. Rather, all the pieces of it were selected out of a pool by an "intelligent" selection mechanism. So it is not even close to random anymore.
This would be cool, if it actually did what it is purported to do. But it doesn't. It is nothing short of cheating. Anybody could do that, and it proves nothing.
I stand corrected. GP did write blocks; I was thinking cells.
On the other hand, large block sizes detract enormously from both the write efficiency and the lifetime of the unit. The smaller the block size, the faster the write time (in general), and also longer life. But the smaller the block size, the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of any block.
"If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles"
You would have to be very lucky, since such a creature does not exist.
Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
Instead, what they do is over-provision, so that a detected bad block is replaced with a spare. (Most hard drives do much the same thing.) However, there are only so many spares.
As someone else mentioned: with any real luck your firmware might report what percentage of those "spare" cells are left. If it doesn't, then you are left with sudden unexpected failure when the last of them is used up and another cell goes bad.
"That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early."
I am aware of how they are constructed and how they work, thank you very much. None of that changes the essential point: they can and do wear out, and probably cannot be expected to last as long as a modern hard drive, depending of course on usage.
The amount of I/O required to break an SSD (if one is doing it deliberately) is nowhere near as much as you seem to think. One only has to do it intelligently.
I can envision a simple virus that could break SSDs willy-nilly, although its operation would be transparent to anyone who knew what to look for.
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
When SSDs were newer, I argued here on/. (against vociferous claims to the contrary) that I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly. The wear-leveling is better today, but since then such applications have actually been written and tested, and they work.
Dictionaries list common usage; they often do not contain technical definitions.
A pure (or direct as you say) democracy is a government in which everybody votes on everything. What we have can be called "representative democracy", but that is not technically accurate. Its true name is "republic".
I did not make that up, or pull it from thin air. Look it up yourself.
By the way: if you want to nitpick about definitions, a "phallacy" would actually mean "a quality of, or state of being, penis". I think you meant fallacy.
Switzerland does not have a true direct democracy. It is supplemented by a representative Parliament.
Historically, true direct democracies have always quickly collapsed. They never lasted long at all. And there is no reason to believe they would last any longer today than they have in the past.
Democracies have always failed, and always quickly. We do not have a democracy. And I don't mean that in a snide way... it simply isn't. It's a representative Republic.
GM has officially announced that it is going to track people with OnStar devices, regardless of whether they have an active account. Which means they are going to sell the data... that is the ONLY plausible motive they have for doing so.
"According to that very link, difference engine != analytical engine. The former is a special-purpose calculator, the latter a general-purpose computer."
That's true, but it misses the point.
The fact is that the Difference Engine worked on exactly the same principles and used the same basic (although slightly improved by Babbage) mechanisms to perform its calculations.
That, and other studies and partial builds of the Analytical Engine have already proven that not only would it work, but that it could have been done in Babbage's time, despite earlier claims that it would have been technologically impossible to build at the time.
So this is a pointless exercise. We already know it would work. If somebody wants to actually make one for a museum piece, fine. But expensive.
While violations of TOS have ended up in court a bit too much lately, that is the result of overzealous corporations and prosecutors who are kissing their asses.
In general, courts have consistently found that violations of TOS are not criminal... if for no other reason than that would allow corporations (or anybody else for that matter) to write their own law... which is completely ridiculous.
What this bill, with the amendment, does is keep these cases out of court in the first place. Which is A Good Thing.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is missing the point.
The question is not whether a contract agreeing to binding arbitration, etc. is enforceable. The questions is whether that kind of clause in a EULA is enforceable. And the answer is: probably not.
You missed the point, which was whether a EULA is binding.
The point here is that in a case like this, the EULA or TOS is a "contract of adhesion", which are weak contracts. (Courts have sometimes found them to be not contracts at all.)
The whole point of contract law is that contracts are supposed to be a freely negotiated, mutually understood agreements. If only one side is dictating the terms of the agreement, then it is a bit of a stretch to be calling it a "contract" at all, and courts generally do not hold them to be as binding as a regular contract, and quite frequently rule them to be invalid or have invalid clauses.
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It is simple. That's the way mail order has been working for close to 200 years, and I don't see any reason for it to change.
"Each country already has its own DNS."
I could have made that clearer. What I meant was to give each country its own root server for use within its own borders. Others could access domains on that server if it were open, but a country could choose to close it off if it wanted... it's theirs, let them do as they please.
But yes, each country would have its own TLD like now, except that every domain would be within that TLD.
I don't get your point about the laws... they need not be any different than they are now: buy from a US site, obey the laws that are applicable to the company that owns that site. Same with other countries. The intervening servers have, or should have, nothing to do with it. That would not make any sense, either now or under my proposed scheme.
Frankly, I don't see that many problems with the idea. I certainly don't think the things you brought up are actual problems.
"That's not to say however that your primary nation of residence will not override those records legally belonging to another nation."
Precisely. But who cares? Let each nation do whatever it wants within its own borders. The idiots will sink themselves. The others will prosper.
Give each country its own DNS. Then create a simple, automated, neutral central hub that connects all those servers together.
That way, they can all play their own little games, and who the hell cares? The free and open parts of the network will still win out in the long run.
"I don't even really know what it's about. I heard "protesting corporate greed in America", but I mean that's a tough thing to protest.. you're basically protesting capitalism.."
Um... no.
I don't know who started this BS, but there is nothing about capitalism that requires corporate greed of exploitation of others. On the contrary: the very basis of capitalism is the idea that two people will naturally trade in ways that are mutually beneficial. If they aren't, then it isn't capitalism.
Blaming distortions of capitalism by corporations and government on capitalism itself, is like living in the boondocks where you only get distorted cell phone and television reception, and blaming it all on the whole concept of radio.
But the low probability is the whole POINT of the exercise. Something that, apparently, he did not understand.
You missed nothing. This is just an exercise in BS. As you point out, it simply doesn't do what it purports to do. It is a cheat, nothing more.
"I wish I'd thought of it - and what a neat way to go about it."
Not really... since the way he goes about it invalidates it.
The "million monkey" principle is about random generation of long sequences of text. However, what he is doing is generating short sequences of text, then pasting them into his "generated text" if they pass his fitness test (match existing text).
But the fact that he is selecting short bits of text means that the whole text is no longer random at all. Rather, all the pieces of it were selected out of a pool by an "intelligent" selection mechanism. So it is not even close to random anymore.
This would be cool, if it actually did what it is purported to do. But it doesn't. It is nothing short of cheating. Anybody could do that, and it proves nothing.
Pardon me: I meant the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of all blocks.
I stand corrected. GP did write blocks; I was thinking cells.
On the other hand, large block sizes detract enormously from both the write efficiency and the lifetime of the unit. The smaller the block size, the faster the write time (in general), and also longer life. But the smaller the block size, the greater the overhead of keeping track of the health of any block.
"BTW, I've been running a server entirely on a mixture of SD cards and USB Flash for a couple of years so far, so good."
Unless you have some kind of RAID-style paralleling arrangement, that has to be slow as molasses.
"If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles"
You would have to be very lucky, since such a creature does not exist.
Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.
Instead, what they do is over-provision, so that a detected bad block is replaced with a spare. (Most hard drives do much the same thing.) However, there are only so many spares.
As someone else mentioned: with any real luck your firmware might report what percentage of those "spare" cells are left. If it doesn't, then you are left with sudden unexpected failure when the last of them is used up and another cell goes bad.
That would seem to be a useful answer to the problem. It will be interesting to see how long they do indeed last under normal use.
"That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early."
I am aware of how they are constructed and how they work, thank you very much. None of that changes the essential point: they can and do wear out, and probably cannot be expected to last as long as a modern hard drive, depending of course on usage.
The amount of I/O required to break an SSD (if one is doing it deliberately) is nowhere near as much as you seem to think. One only has to do it intelligently.
I can envision a simple virus that could break SSDs willy-nilly, although its operation would be transparent to anyone who knew what to look for.
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
/. (against vociferous claims to the contrary) that I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly. The wear-leveling is better today, but since then such applications have actually been written and tested, and they work.
When SSDs were newer, I argued here on
Dictionaries list common usage; they often do not contain technical definitions.
A pure (or direct as you say) democracy is a government in which everybody votes on everything. What we have can be called "representative democracy", but that is not technically accurate. Its true name is "republic".
I did not make that up, or pull it from thin air. Look it up yourself.
By the way: if you want to nitpick about definitions, a "phallacy" would actually mean "a quality of, or state of being, penis". I think you meant fallacy.
Switzerland does not have a true direct democracy. It is supplemented by a representative Parliament.
Historically, true direct democracies have always quickly collapsed. They never lasted long at all. And there is no reason to believe they would last any longer today than they have in the past.
Democracies have always failed, and always quickly. We do not have a democracy. And I don't mean that in a snide way... it simply isn't. It's a representative Republic.
GM has officially announced that it is going to track people with OnStar devices, regardless of whether they have an active account. Which means they are going to sell the data... that is the ONLY plausible motive they have for doing so.
I told you so ^2.
"According to that very link, difference engine != analytical engine. The former is a special-purpose calculator, the latter a general-purpose computer."
That's true, but it misses the point.
The fact is that the Difference Engine worked on exactly the same principles and used the same basic (although slightly improved by Babbage) mechanisms to perform its calculations.
That, and other studies and partial builds of the Analytical Engine have already proven that not only would it work, but that it could have been done in Babbage's time, despite earlier claims that it would have been technologically impossible to build at the time.
So this is a pointless exercise. We already know it would work. If somebody wants to actually make one for a museum piece, fine. But expensive.
As far as proving anything though: it would not.
While violations of TOS have ended up in court a bit too much lately, that is the result of overzealous corporations and prosecutors who are kissing their asses.
In general, courts have consistently found that violations of TOS are not criminal... if for no other reason than that would allow corporations (or anybody else for that matter) to write their own law... which is completely ridiculous.
What this bill, with the amendment, does is keep these cases out of court in the first place. Which is A Good Thing.
DHS would probably put you in Guantanamo for terrorist activities.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is missing the point.
The question is not whether a contract agreeing to binding arbitration, etc. is enforceable. The questions is whether that kind of clause in a EULA is enforceable. And the answer is: probably not.
You missed the point, which was whether a EULA is binding.
The point here is that in a case like this, the EULA or TOS is a "contract of adhesion", which are weak contracts. (Courts have sometimes found them to be not contracts at all.)
The whole point of contract law is that contracts are supposed to be a freely negotiated, mutually understood agreements. If only one side is dictating the terms of the agreement, then it is a bit of a stretch to be calling it a "contract" at all, and courts generally do not hold them to be as binding as a regular contract, and quite frequently rule them to be invalid or have invalid clauses.
The London Science Museum built a working Difference Engine in 1991.