They're well defined now. AFAIK, they were nonstandard when initially proposed. Every time someone wants to deviate from accepted standards, there should be a darn good reason why, and I'm just not seeing any reasonable justification for creating a whole separate transport-layer protocol for something that basically behaves like a normal, connected stream.
And it isn't just explicit blocking that's a problem. Firewalls and NAT often make life miserable for users even when those firewalls aren't trying to block the VPNs. That's why as far as I'm concerned, if you're passing traffic, you should use TCP if you need the data to be robust and reliable, UDP if delayed delivery would make the data worthless, and ICMP for the usual network management purposes. IMO, everything else is anathema.:-)
My point was that there was no valid reason for each of these VPNs to each use its own transport-layer protocol. A normal, connected TCP socket would have done the job just as easily. Every time someone strays from the expectation that all packets are either TCP, UDP, or ICMP, it means every hardware-based firewall maker (and every software-based firewall IT person) has to do extra work to deal with it, and hardware that worked before suddenly doesn't work or (if you're lucky) requires firmware updates. The fact that using a different protocol makes it easier to block is just another in a long list of reasons why the proliferation of transport-layer protocols is a bad idea.
Okay, fair enough. I usually lump firewalls and routers in the same bucket, because outside of backbone hardware, most routers also act as firewalls. The point is that a lot of (badly designed) consumer routers (firewalls) do stupid things like routing only TCP and UDP, or treating those other protocols as "special" under the assumption that VPNs will always be used from the inside out, never from the outside in, resulting in all sorts of fun.
It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.
Nah, it's more like whining that Chryslers should be able to burn the same 87 octane gas as Fords without having to buy overpriced filler necks on license from GM. Or that GE lightbulbs should be allowed to work on ConEd electricity. Standards exist for a reason. Letting monopolists enforce their own whims without accomodating the competition is bad for everyone in the long run. Ask JP Morgan what happened to Standard Oil in the courts.
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no. Standards can only go so far. Suppose you design a laptop that has an innovative power storage system that can power it for a week, but in order to get the energy density high enough, you had to run the battery packs at 48VDC. Could you design it to be compatible with an existing 12–18V power supply? Sure. Would it be energy efficient? No.
The same goes for software. If you're designing a new OS, you could ostentibly add the necessary hooks to let it run Android apps, but your OS probably won't run them as efficiently, and you'd prefer folks to develop apps for your own native APIs anyway, because that results in a better, more consistent user experience.
There is no fundamental difference other than the webpages are standardized and the interface between apps and the OS is not standardized. They are fundamentally the same -- apps can be converted to websites and vice versa.
There is no fundamental difference between ice and steam other than the temperature. I don't recommend trying to walk on steam or clean your carpets with ice.
The reality is that the layout system and DOM programming interfaces available for web programming are positively primitive compared with app programming. (I'm deliberately ignoring WebGL for the moment, which though powerful, is low-level enough that it isn't practical except for games, and still isn't broadly available.) And networking is even more limited (same-origin restrictions) without cooperation from every destination site.
So in theory, yes, but in practice, not even close. And the fact that even relatively straightforward stuff like HTML editing isn't fully standardized (or, frankly, fully working) across major browsers should give you serious pause when considering standardizing anything as complex as a full-blown collection of application APIs across multiple platforms.
OS companies go to great lengths to create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes to prevent developers from developing platform-independent apps.
Uh... no. OS companies build their systems using entirely different programming languages, for philosophical reasons that diverged decades back. Because of that difference, they create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes because it would not be feasible to create APIs that aren't. Additionally, there are a number of fundamental differences between the two platforms (including their security model) that require platform-specific handling. Those differences have nothing to do with wanting to be incompatible, and everything to do with designing APIs to meet their specific goals and ideals.
In fact, platform vendors have gone to a great deal of effort to reduce portability problems. That's why both Android and iOS support cross-platform APIs such as POSIX and OpenGL ES. By taking advantage of those technologies, developers can write much of their code in a platform-independent way (with lots of caveats, of course).
But where he is being completely batshit illogical is where he argues that once app platforms are common carriers, the users must give equal treatment to the platforms rather than the other way around. To use the previous example, it would be as if the government mandated that if you offered to ship something via UPS, you must also offer to ship it via FedEx. Such a mandate has never happened, and probably never will.
Not offer to ship it. Ship it. With physical products, the analogy can't really work, but the closest equivalent would be mandating that companies take bids when working government contracts....
Either way, though, the idea is absurd for several reasons: platforms can't easily be compatible with one another, you can't realistically expect companies to design software for platforms that they're unfamiliar with, and there's not even a guarantee that it would be possible for a company like Apple to port their software to Blackberry, because the OS may lack required functionality under the hood. Add to that the risk of giving anyone who creates a platform with ten users the right to demand that Apple port iMessage to their token platform, and you can see how such a law would quickly spiral out of control.
What the Blackberry CEO should really be asking for is a law mandating that all protocols and exchange formats be open (with reasonable documentation) and free of any patent encumbrances that are fundamental to any implementation of the protocol. Such a law would ensure that Blackberry could freely implement iMessage compatibility themselves. And the right way to argue for such a law is twofold:
Communications technologies must be standard if you want people to communicate with one another. It's harmful to the consumer when a text message either costs money or doesn't, depending on what phone the other person happens to use. After all, the recipient's hardware platform could change at any time. And it is doubly problematic when you factor in protocols like FaceTime, where you have to run entirely different apps and contact the other user in entirely different ways depending on what kind of phone the other person is using (e.g. Skype if the other person is running Android).
Protocols and file formats contain copyrighted material created by users. To the extent that those protocols and file formats are controlled solely by a single company, they have the effect of taking the users' creations and locking them up. If that company goes out of business, the users' creative works could be permanently lost.
The extent to which the second argument applies depends to some degree on the ephemerality of the communication, of course.
As a happy side effect, such a law would have the benefit of putting an end to patents on technologies like GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc. for the same reasons.
Sorry. I can't take any solution that runs on PHP seriously. Especially one with such a history of horrid bugs and remote exploits.
If you're talking about WordPress, then I would agree. It has a long history of security problems, mainly because it was written in an era when PHP was too popular for its own good.
Anyone suggesting PHP as a solution is quite obviously a moron.
The problem isn't PHP. The problem is PHP coders. When PHP was in its heyday, it made basic website CGI coding simple enough to attract a lot of coders who didn't have much experience. A lot of PHP code was written during that period. The result is that a lot of PHP software (much of which is still in common use) was written by people with minimal programming experience.
To make matters worse, the initial MySQL API in PHP was disastrous. (That's not PHP's fault, mind you; the same API was used in C and every other language at the time.) Most PHP software out there was written before the modern, parameterized syntax became available, so statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of PHP code that uses MySQL probably contains security holes.
If you take a group of people who have solid programming backgrounds today, give them a two-week training course on PHP, then spend another two weeks on PHP-specific security and design issues, and insist that they use parameterized queries exclusively, you'll end up with good software. Unfortunately, this approach precludes the use of any software currently available unless you're willing to spend the time to do a detailed security audit.
I've done just that - only from the back row. You can easily attach teleconverters if you want zoom...
Okay, six pixels was an exaggeration—in a small hall, by my math (based on photos I've taken with other cameras), an 8MP iPhone would yield faces ranging from 26 to 50 pixels tall. With a 6D, a full-pixel crop at 40mm isn't great, but it is usable for people near the front of the stage By the time you get down to a 10MP APS-C sensor, it is barely usable for people at the front of the stage, and is useless for people near the back. Scale that down to 8 MP and it won't be. Add in the extra noise from a tiny sensor, and it wouldn't even be close to usable.
And there's also the shutter speed problem. By my math, if I'd used an iPhone to shoot photos of a stage last week instead of my 6D, at the iPhone's maximum usable ISO, I'd have been limited to a 1/50th of a second shutter speed, which without optical IS is way too slow for my taste.
Once you start adding teleconverters, yes, a phone can be a serviceable tool, albeit with a long list of caveats—the inability to quickly change the zoom length (AFAIK, they're all prime teleconverters, not true zooms), manual focus, fragility, focal plane inconsistency because of mount flex, and so on—none of which are show-stoppers, but all of which lead to significantly diminished "keeper rates". It's the difference between 20% of your shots being keepers and 95% of them being keepers. Mind you, I enjoy playing with manual focus primes every so often, but I'd never use one as my main lens. It's just too much work for the reward you get.
... and frankly lots of people are willing to use digital zoom also.
Don't get me started on digital zooms. You might as well just crop the photo afterwards; you'll get the same result, but you might actually get other interesting stuff in the photo if you don't use one.:-)
It doesn't matter how good the sensor, camera, or lens are really - because the entire non-smartphone camera market is shrinking rapidly.
I think you're misinterpreting the numbers. The market at the low end is contracting because cell phones are cutting into it. The market at the high end is contracting because neither Canon nor Nikon is really innovating much. If each generation has only small, incremental improvements, people are going to upgrade their gear less and less frequently.
Nobody is replacing their DSLRs with cell phones, within some small epsilon. At best, cell phones can replace DSLRs for outdoor portrait photography, when you're within a few feet from the subject. On the opposite extreme, if you try to use a cell phone to take photos of your kid's stage play, you'll annoy everyone by standing up in the front row, and you'll still only get shots with blown-out faces that are six pixels by six pixels in size and so severely smeared by motion blur that nobody would be recognizable even if you could fix those first three problems.... All the while, the parent with the real camera might be taking amazing close-ups with a 300mm (or longer) lens on a full-frame camera from the back of the auditorium.
Of course, half the time, the parent with the real camera has a lens that's too short to be usable and hasn't learned enough about the camera to avoid getting blown-out shots. Unfortunately, some of those folks get discouraged and never upgrade their gear. Fortunately, there's a steady supply of people who can't be bothered to learn the basics, so them getting discouraged isn't a big problem market-wise.:-)
To be fair, I never said it was a good idea.:-) In fact, it's a terrible idea, and the issue you mention is just the tip of the iceberg. If you give in to one world government by providing a back door, then all the others will come to you expecting the same treatment.
So you decide that you need to hold those keys in escrow, and use them to decrypt only specific messages upon a court order. After all, you really shouldn't be providing those keys to nearly two-hundred different governments, for the reasons listed above. But now you have a different problem—one of how to keep that key protected yourself, knowing that if it ever gets out, the entire security model of your software is broken, both for new messages and existing ones.
If you try hard enough, you can come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to minimize the risk of disclosure, such as keeping those encrypted session keys yourself rather than attaching them to the message (and now you have a colossal storage problem), having multiple public keys that have to be used in combination to decrypt a message (and now you have a hit-by-a-car problem), etc.
Basically, it's an awful idea, with far too many problems to enumerate. But the fact that the software is Open Source really isn't one of those problems.:-)
The problem is that you can't give the capability to decrypt by law... it's open source software, so no backdoors, and if you don't have the key you can't decipher.
Nothing is stopping them from requiring that all software encrypt a copy of the session key (or whatever) with a second public key (which the government can decrypt with their private key). OSS can do that just as easily as closed-source software. Sure, it would be obvious to anyone looking at the code, but the law wouldn't exactly be a secret, either.
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite.
Let's substitute "Ferrari" for "Fiber" and try that on for size: "I want a Ferrari. Take my money! Here is my $5000! Why aren't greedy corporations giving me my Ferrari for $5000? We need a law to force greedy corporations to give everybody a Ferrari for $5000! Then the poor will finally get the same transportation as the rich! It's a question of fairness!"
All right. Let's do that. I say "I want a Ferrari. I'm willing to pay the entire cost of the Ferrari, and I'm willing to pay the costs for you to stick a Ferrari on a truck and bring it to me. And they said, "No, we don't sell Ferraris to people who live in your area because there are too many people who can't afford one." See how irrational your argument just became when you use an accurate analogy?
Besides, a car is not an educational tool in any meaningful sense. The poor are not harmed in their ability to stop being poor by being able to buy an overpriced automobile. That makes the entire analogy irrelevant.
Keep pace with??? Sunnyvale has average download speeds of 40 Mbps, far above G8, EU and world-wide averages.
But it hasn't kept pace with nearby communities. And until just a few months back, my neighborhood was stuck at 3 Mbps, which is far behind just about everybody. I'm not sure what Comcast is offering, now that they've moved in, but... well, they're Comcast—a single viable option from a monopoly that sets all the rules, take it or leave it.
Besides, you're focusing on a single community, which keeps you from having to acknowledge the pattern of abuse that prevents the poor from having real options. Choice is good.
Is your Latin a little rusty? An "argumentum ad hominem" would be to say "your argument is wrong because you are a greedy and ignorant human being". That is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you are a greedy and ignorant human being because of the arguments you make.
One implies the other. Your argument that I'm a greedy and ignorant being is making assumptions based on my position, and you're using those an assumptions to attack me personally as a means to attack the position. The latter half is effectively an ad hominem, and the reasoning is also basically circular.
(I did learn, however, that you have a lousy taste in music.)
Actually, no, you didn't. You only think you did, because you jumped to wrong conclusions based on incomplete information—specifically, you're assuming that all liturgical music is bad music. A lot of it is, sure, and particularly a lot of the modern stuff, but....:-)
I was referring to the Citizens United case but...
So was I. Citizens United was about overturning part of McCain-Feingold/BCRA.
And isn't it wonderful that they actually had blackout periods restricting when we are allowed to make political speech? I guess I am supposed to rejoice at the 270 days they still allowed free speech instead of focusing on the 90 where they removed it.
AFAIK, it isn't 90 days around any election; it's 90 days around an election that the person in question is running in. So not 270 days, but rather 640 days for the House, 1370 for the President, and 2100 for the Senate. In relative terms, that's a pretty small window.
That's simply not true. News organizations were explicitly excluded from limits by McCain-Feingold. If anything, their exception was probably too broad, as it potentially allowed them to editorially declare their support for a candidate during the blackout period while denying that right to non-media companies.
Free speech has limits. It always has. Companies can't lie in ads. You can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And so on. One particular category of limits is frequently not a first amendment violation: time, place, and manner restrictions. Examples include limits on sale of porn mags within a block of an elementary school (place), bans on protests near cemeteries during funerals (place and time), and limits on size and style of signage for businesses (manner). Those restrictions are allowable if the law is:
Content neutral. This doesn't discriminate among candidates, nor among affected third-party groups, so it meets this criterion.
Be narrowly tailored. This affects exactly one thing: ads that mention a candidate by name. That's pretty darn narrow. Okay still.
Serve a significant governmental interest. This prevents outside parties from effectively subverting election contribution laws. Still good.
Leave open ample alternative channels for communication. In my view, the law as written applied only to advertising, not to news coverage or other non-advertising channels of communication, so in my view, it passes this test as well. However, others disagreed, and the result was the CU decision, which I view as a serious error on the part of the SCOTUS.
My opinion has nothing to do with ignoring the first amendment, and everything to do with having a deep understanding of it and of how the courts have interpreted it for several decades. Come back when you've taken at least one class on communications law or constitutional law, and we can have a serious conversation on the subject.
Exactly, it's about you wanting others to give you money. All the rest is a smokescreen. It's no different when Blackwater, the cable companies, or the prison union go to Congress with their hands open. They also say "but it's for everybody's good!".
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite. I'd willingly pay the entire cost of running a fiber to my house up front if anyone would do it.
No, it's because right now, they'd make less money on it than elsewhere and because they have limited capacity to put in fiber and backbone. Rushing out service to your area is going to cost them dearly, both in opportunity cost and inefficiency. They are not going to accept lower profits, they are going to raise prices; the simplest way for them to raise prices is to charge a premium for the new fiber service and to eliminate all low-cost, slower services. And so your "poor kids" now have to pay $70/month for fiber, instead of $12.95/month for basic DSL.
First, most parts of the world can't get DSL for $12.95 per month. Even Earthlink's horrible offering isn't that cheap.
Second, a sizable percentage of poor areas are either outside the reach of DSL or don't have DSL-enabled COs, which means they already pay a higher bill for cable Internet.
Third, what makes you think that the people running the fiber have any say whatsoever in the cost or availability of DSL? Most of those cheap DSL services aren't provided by the phone company; they're provided by CLECs. And thanks to government regulations, once that DSLAM is set up for DSL service, the phone company is generally required to lease line access to third parties, and the cost of that lease is usually limited by law. Yes, there are some exceptions, like if you allow the phone company to rewire you for FTTN, but that's your individual decision, and is unaffected by the availability of fiber.
Basically, the results you're afraid of are simply impossible. They can't happen. And even if they could, it's really, really easy to provide tax credits to fix the problem if it happens, making your argument based on completely irrational fear rather than any sort of realistic concern.
What policies like this really end up doing is redistributing money from the politically weak (mostly poor folks) to an educated intellectual elite like you. And you add insult to injury by pretending that enriching yourself that way is for everybody else's good.
Enriching myself? How is expecting the quality of Internet service in my community to keep pace with the rest of the world "enriching myself"? There's a difference between enriching yourself and refusing to let yourself and your neighbors get walked on by a bunch of greedy corporate f**ks. I guarantee that the things I propose will not cause poor people to be unfairly burdened. How can I say that? Because we ALREADY DID IT TWICE—ONCE WITH PHONE LINES, AND AGAIN WITH DSL. The poor were not unfairly burdened by having access to either of those technologies, both of which had the properties that I described.
This discussion is seriously making me mad at this point. Your reasoning is unsound, and about half of your argument seems to be ad hominem attacks on someone who regularly writes software and gives it away, who composes music and gives at least some of it away, who spends nine hours a week doing liturgical music rehearsals and performances (unpaid), and so on. I use my talents to for the benefit of others. A lot. Before you go attacking me and claiming that I'm somehow greedy and trying to steal from the poor, you might want to get your facts straight. I fight for the poor because I believe everyone deserves the chances that I had. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not precisely. Any intolerant philosophy can be countered by rational argument, but first you have to get the person to actually start listening. In the case of terrorists (foreign or domestic, religious or otherwise), that doesn't work because the second part can't be done for various reasons. However, in the case of people thinking about joining a terrorist group, that can work to some degree, because they haven't yet closed themselves off to argument.
Unfortunately, most governments don't even try. For example, the U.S. government's war on terror primarily fans the flames rather than countering the philosophy. They fight unnecessary wars that kill innocent people, thus turning those innocents' friends and relatives against them, resulting in a steady stream of people who are angry at the western world, who are then prime targets for radicalization. They lock innocent people up for decades without a trial, thus giving people even more reason to hate them. Then, when they find out that someone might be becoming radicalized, they monitor them, often going so far as to encourage them to commit fake crimes so that they'll get caught and can spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than attacking the rot of hate by countering it with rational argument. All of these things make people hate the West even more.
In short, I'm pretty sure the U.S. government is doing almost everything it possibly can to encourage extremist behavior. What I don't understand is why. Are they trying to bring about the end of the world, or are they really that clueless?
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to justify the horrible actions of people who use bombs to try to kill as many people as possible, most of whom likely had little or nothing to do with whatever they're angry about, many of whom might even agree with them, at least in principle. I'm just saying that many of the attacks are undeniably at least partially the fault of the western world for fomenting hatred among the people of the Middle East and for failing to take even the slightest actions to counter that hatred among people that it knew were heading down that path. It's a bit like not locking your doors and then wondering why your insurance company won't pay for your missing widescreen TV....
The only true way to fight hate is to face it head on, by teaching people not to hate. If you manage to do that—if the very idea of hating others becomes so antithetical to everyone's core beliefs that nobody joins hate groups—then eventually they'll go away by attrition.
I have yet to have one single person who hates the Citizen's United case tell me that they knew that.
We all knew it. That was the whole point of the act—preventing anyone other than the candidate from making ads that name a particular candidate close to the election. By preventing that, you prevent what amounts to an infinite amount of support for candidates by the rich, thus removing a giant loophole that negated all the benefits of having campaign finance limits in the first place.
The reality is that the CU decision ensured that only establishment candidates could campaign, because they're the ones with rich friends who can help them out by running independent TV ads when their coffers start to run dry.
In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo.
I.e. I'm right: many of the people living there don't want it, so it's not cost-effective for companies to put it in. Furthermore, the reason you advocate this policy is because after buying into Sunnyvale because it's cheap, you now want it to become just like the rest of Silicon Valley.
It is just like the rest of Silicon Valley, or at least within the margin of error. The other half of the people in the neighborhood work for tech companies. And when I moved here almost fourteen years ago, our Internet service was also approximately as good as the rest of the valley. Since then, our quality of service (by every metric) has fallen further and further behind the rest of the region, because DSL just hasn't kept up. I advocate this policy because I don't feel it's right to be limited to low-quality service simply because of where I can afford to live.
It's textbook special interests (like yourself) pretending to look out for the poor when actually they just want to enrich themselves.
Special interests? Special interests are something that applies to a few percent of the public at most. Every single man, woman, and child in this country should have great Internet service available to them, and should have choices of providers to ensure that those companies truly compete. And the fact that non-poor people (including myself) would also benefit from having fiber available, with multiple choices of ISPs running over that fiber, would not in any way negate the fact that the poor would benefit considerably from not being stuck a choice between DSL and satellite (ugh).
They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.
Yes, that is exactly the same as taking a loss: they need to make a huge capital investment now and take out a loan for that.
If that's your definition of a loss (which would cause any economics professor to rupture an aneurysm, BTW), then these companies shouldn't roll out fiber anywhere. After all, anywhere you roll out fiber, you have to make a huge capital investment and take out a loan. Try again.
Furthermore, the loss is magnified because it isn't just how much they are losing relative to break-even, it's how much they are losing compared to what they would get if they invested that money better.
Only the last half of that statement is correct. That's not magnifying a loss. If I buy a share of AAPL at $70, and the price goes up to $120 before falling back to $100, and I sell at $100, I made $30; I didn't lose $20. If a share of GOOG would have gone from $70 to $110 on that time, I didn't lose $10 by buying AAPL. A failure to gain is not the same thing as a loss. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling something... like financial advisory services.:-)
Either way, I'm not arguing that their reasons for staying out of poorer neighborhoods isn't profit-based. Of course it is. Anybody with half a brain knows that. What I'm arguing is that much like basic telephone service has been a requirement for holding and keeping a job, Internet service is becoming a similarly crucial service, both for that purpose and for our kids' education. It isn't something that can be made available only for people who have a certain amount of money, who live in certain neighborhoods, etc. The ability to get good Internet service should be a fundamental right, no different from the right to be served by th
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Including the people taking the survey, I suspect.
They're well defined now. AFAIK, they were nonstandard when initially proposed. Every time someone wants to deviate from accepted standards, there should be a darn good reason why, and I'm just not seeing any reasonable justification for creating a whole separate transport-layer protocol for something that basically behaves like a normal, connected stream.
And it isn't just explicit blocking that's a problem. Firewalls and NAT often make life miserable for users even when those firewalls aren't trying to block the VPNs. That's why as far as I'm concerned, if you're passing traffic, you should use TCP if you need the data to be robust and reliable, UDP if delayed delivery would make the data worthless, and ICMP for the usual network management purposes. IMO, everything else is anathema. :-)
My point was that there was no valid reason for each of these VPNs to each use its own transport-layer protocol. A normal, connected TCP socket would have done the job just as easily. Every time someone strays from the expectation that all packets are either TCP, UDP, or ICMP, it means every hardware-based firewall maker (and every software-based firewall IT person) has to do extra work to deal with it, and hardware that worked before suddenly doesn't work or (if you're lucky) requires firmware updates. The fact that using a different protocol makes it easier to block is just another in a long list of reasons why the proliferation of transport-layer protocols is a bad idea.
Okay, fair enough. I usually lump firewalls and routers in the same bucket, because outside of backbone hardware, most routers also act as firewalls. The point is that a lot of (badly designed) consumer routers (firewalls) do stupid things like routing only TCP and UDP, or treating those other protocols as "special" under the assumption that VPNs will always be used from the inside out, never from the outside in, resulting in all sorts of fun.
It doesn't help that most VPNs are so easy to detect and block at the IP header level. PPTP depends on the GRE IP protocol (47), and L2TP is usually tunneled over IPSec, which depends on the ESP IP protocol (50). By using different protocol numbers in the IP headers, the designers of these protocols made it mindlessly easy to block them, and made them harder to support, because routers have to explicitly know how to handle those nonstandard protocol numbers.
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, no. Standards can only go so far. Suppose you design a laptop that has an innovative power storage system that can power it for a week, but in order to get the energy density high enough, you had to run the battery packs at 48VDC. Could you design it to be compatible with an existing 12–18V power supply? Sure. Would it be energy efficient? No.
The same goes for software. If you're designing a new OS, you could ostentibly add the necessary hooks to let it run Android apps, but your OS probably won't run them as efficiently, and you'd prefer folks to develop apps for your own native APIs anyway, because that results in a better, more consistent user experience.
There is no fundamental difference between ice and steam other than the temperature. I don't recommend trying to walk on steam or clean your carpets with ice.
The reality is that the layout system and DOM programming interfaces available for web programming are positively primitive compared with app programming. (I'm deliberately ignoring WebGL for the moment, which though powerful, is low-level enough that it isn't practical except for games, and still isn't broadly available.) And networking is even more limited (same-origin restrictions) without cooperation from every destination site.
So in theory, yes, but in practice, not even close. And the fact that even relatively straightforward stuff like HTML editing isn't fully standardized (or, frankly, fully working) across major browsers should give you serious pause when considering standardizing anything as complex as a full-blown collection of application APIs across multiple platforms.
Uh... no. OS companies build their systems using entirely different programming languages, for philosophical reasons that diverged decades back. Because of that difference, they create system APIs that are incompatible with other OSes because it would not be feasible to create APIs that aren't. Additionally, there are a number of fundamental differences between the two platforms (including their security model) that require platform-specific handling. Those differences have nothing to do with wanting to be incompatible, and everything to do with designing APIs to meet their specific goals and ideals.
In fact, platform vendors have gone to a great deal of effort to reduce portability problems. That's why both Android and iOS support cross-platform APIs such as POSIX and OpenGL ES. By taking advantage of those technologies, developers can write much of their code in a platform-independent way (with lots of caveats, of course).
Sounds like a buying opportunity... for put options....
Not offer to ship it. Ship it. With physical products, the analogy can't really work, but the closest equivalent would be mandating that companies take bids when working government contracts....
Either way, though, the idea is absurd for several reasons: platforms can't easily be compatible with one another, you can't realistically expect companies to design software for platforms that they're unfamiliar with, and there's not even a guarantee that it would be possible for a company like Apple to port their software to Blackberry, because the OS may lack required functionality under the hood. Add to that the risk of giving anyone who creates a platform with ten users the right to demand that Apple port iMessage to their token platform, and you can see how such a law would quickly spiral out of control.
What the Blackberry CEO should really be asking for is a law mandating that all protocols and exchange formats be open (with reasonable documentation) and free of any patent encumbrances that are fundamental to any implementation of the protocol. Such a law would ensure that Blackberry could freely implement iMessage compatibility themselves. And the right way to argue for such a law is twofold:
The extent to which the second argument applies depends to some degree on the ephemerality of the communication, of course.
As a happy side effect, such a law would have the benefit of putting an end to patents on technologies like GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc. for the same reasons.
If you're talking about WordPress, then I would agree. It has a long history of security problems, mainly because it was written in an era when PHP was too popular for its own good.
The problem isn't PHP. The problem is PHP coders. When PHP was in its heyday, it made basic website CGI coding simple enough to attract a lot of coders who didn't have much experience. A lot of PHP code was written during that period. The result is that a lot of PHP software (much of which is still in common use) was written by people with minimal programming experience.
To make matters worse, the initial MySQL API in PHP was disastrous. (That's not PHP's fault, mind you; the same API was used in C and every other language at the time.) Most PHP software out there was written before the modern, parameterized syntax became available, so statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of PHP code that uses MySQL probably contains security holes.
If you take a group of people who have solid programming backgrounds today, give them a two-week training course on PHP, then spend another two weeks on PHP-specific security and design issues, and insist that they use parameterized queries exclusively, you'll end up with good software. Unfortunately, this approach precludes the use of any software currently available unless you're willing to spend the time to do a detailed security audit.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that those pixel counts were for adult-size heads. Scale accordingly for younger kids. :-)
Okay, six pixels was an exaggeration—in a small hall, by my math (based on photos I've taken with other cameras), an 8MP iPhone would yield faces ranging from 26 to 50 pixels tall. With a 6D, a full-pixel crop at 40mm isn't great, but it is usable for people near the front of the stage By the time you get down to a 10MP APS-C sensor, it is barely usable for people at the front of the stage, and is useless for people near the back. Scale that down to 8 MP and it won't be. Add in the extra noise from a tiny sensor, and it wouldn't even be close to usable.
And there's also the shutter speed problem. By my math, if I'd used an iPhone to shoot photos of a stage last week instead of my 6D, at the iPhone's maximum usable ISO, I'd have been limited to a 1/50th of a second shutter speed, which without optical IS is way too slow for my taste.
Once you start adding teleconverters, yes, a phone can be a serviceable tool, albeit with a long list of caveats—the inability to quickly change the zoom length (AFAIK, they're all prime teleconverters, not true zooms), manual focus, fragility, focal plane inconsistency because of mount flex, and so on—none of which are show-stoppers, but all of which lead to significantly diminished "keeper rates". It's the difference between 20% of your shots being keepers and 95% of them being keepers. Mind you, I enjoy playing with manual focus primes every so often, but I'd never use one as my main lens. It's just too much work for the reward you get.
Don't get me started on digital zooms. You might as well just crop the photo afterwards; you'll get the same result, but you might actually get other interesting stuff in the photo if you don't use one. :-)
I think you're misinterpreting the numbers. The market at the low end is contracting because cell phones are cutting into it. The market at the high end is contracting because neither Canon nor Nikon is really innovating much. If each generation has only small, incremental improvements, people are going to upgrade their gear less and less frequently.
Nobody is replacing their DSLRs with cell phones, within some small epsilon. At best, cell phones can replace DSLRs for outdoor portrait photography, when you're within a few feet from the subject. On the opposite extreme, if you try to use a cell phone to take photos of your kid's stage play, you'll annoy everyone by standing up in the front row, and you'll still only get shots with blown-out faces that are six pixels by six pixels in size and so severely smeared by motion blur that nobody would be recognizable even if you could fix those first three problems.... All the while, the parent with the real camera might be taking amazing close-ups with a 300mm (or longer) lens on a full-frame camera from the back of the auditorium.
Of course, half the time, the parent with the real camera has a lens that's too short to be usable and hasn't learned enough about the camera to avoid getting blown-out shots. Unfortunately, some of those folks get discouraged and never upgrade their gear. Fortunately, there's a steady supply of people who can't be bothered to learn the basics, so them getting discouraged isn't a big problem market-wise. :-)
Or, more simply, "... if Samsung sold their sensors to third parties like Sony does..."
To be fair, I never said it was a good idea. :-) In fact, it's a terrible idea, and the issue you mention is just the tip of the iceberg. If you give in to one world government by providing a back door, then all the others will come to you expecting the same treatment.
So you decide that you need to hold those keys in escrow, and use them to decrypt only specific messages upon a court order. After all, you really shouldn't be providing those keys to nearly two-hundred different governments, for the reasons listed above. But now you have a different problem—one of how to keep that key protected yourself, knowing that if it ever gets out, the entire security model of your software is broken, both for new messages and existing ones.
If you try hard enough, you can come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to minimize the risk of disclosure, such as keeping those encrypted session keys yourself rather than attaching them to the message (and now you have a colossal storage problem), having multiple public keys that have to be used in combination to decrypt a message (and now you have a hit-by-a-car problem), etc.
Basically, it's an awful idea, with far too many problems to enumerate. But the fact that the software is Open Source really isn't one of those problems. :-)
Nothing is stopping them from requiring that all software encrypt a copy of the session key (or whatever) with a second public key (which the government can decrypt with their private key). OSS can do that just as easily as closed-source software. Sure, it would be obvious to anyone looking at the code, but the law wouldn't exactly be a secret, either.
All right. Let's do that. I say "I want a Ferrari. I'm willing to pay the entire cost of the Ferrari, and I'm willing to pay the costs for you to stick a Ferrari on a truck and bring it to me. And they said, "No, we don't sell Ferraris to people who live in your area because there are too many people who can't afford one." See how irrational your argument just became when you use an accurate analogy?
Besides, a car is not an educational tool in any meaningful sense. The poor are not harmed in their ability to stop being poor by being able to buy an overpriced automobile. That makes the entire analogy irrelevant.
But it hasn't kept pace with nearby communities. And until just a few months back, my neighborhood was stuck at 3 Mbps, which is far behind just about everybody. I'm not sure what Comcast is offering, now that they've moved in, but... well, they're Comcast—a single viable option from a monopoly that sets all the rules, take it or leave it.
Besides, you're focusing on a single community, which keeps you from having to acknowledge the pattern of abuse that prevents the poor from having real options. Choice is good.
One implies the other. Your argument that I'm a greedy and ignorant being is making assumptions based on my position, and you're using those an assumptions to attack me personally as a means to attack the position. The latter half is effectively an ad hominem, and the reasoning is also basically circular.
Actually, no, you didn't. You only think you did, because you jumped to wrong conclusions based on incomplete information—specifically, you're assuming that all liturgical music is bad music. A lot of it is, sure, and particularly a lot of the modern stuff, but.... :-)
So was I. Citizens United was about overturning part of McCain-Feingold/BCRA.
AFAIK, it isn't 90 days around any election; it's 90 days around an election that the person in question is running in. So not 270 days, but rather 640 days for the House, 1370 for the President, and 2100 for the Senate. In relative terms, that's a pretty small window.
That's simply not true. News organizations were explicitly excluded from limits by McCain-Feingold. If anything, their exception was probably too broad, as it potentially allowed them to editorially declare their support for a candidate during the blackout period while denying that right to non-media companies.
Free speech has limits. It always has. Companies can't lie in ads. You can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And so on. One particular category of limits is frequently not a first amendment violation: time, place, and manner restrictions. Examples include limits on sale of porn mags within a block of an elementary school (place), bans on protests near cemeteries during funerals (place and time), and limits on size and style of signage for businesses (manner). Those restrictions are allowable if the law is:
My opinion has nothing to do with ignoring the first amendment, and everything to do with having a deep understanding of it and of how the courts have interpreted it for several decades. Come back when you've taken at least one class on communications law or constitutional law, and we can have a serious conversation on the subject.
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite. I'd willingly pay the entire cost of running a fiber to my house up front if anyone would do it.
First, most parts of the world can't get DSL for $12.95 per month. Even Earthlink's horrible offering isn't that cheap.
Second, a sizable percentage of poor areas are either outside the reach of DSL or don't have DSL-enabled COs, which means they already pay a higher bill for cable Internet.
Third, what makes you think that the people running the fiber have any say whatsoever in the cost or availability of DSL? Most of those cheap DSL services aren't provided by the phone company; they're provided by CLECs. And thanks to government regulations, once that DSLAM is set up for DSL service, the phone company is generally required to lease line access to third parties, and the cost of that lease is usually limited by law. Yes, there are some exceptions, like if you allow the phone company to rewire you for FTTN, but that's your individual decision, and is unaffected by the availability of fiber.
Basically, the results you're afraid of are simply impossible. They can't happen. And even if they could, it's really, really easy to provide tax credits to fix the problem if it happens, making your argument based on completely irrational fear rather than any sort of realistic concern.
Enriching myself? How is expecting the quality of Internet service in my community to keep pace with the rest of the world "enriching myself"? There's a difference between enriching yourself and refusing to let yourself and your neighbors get walked on by a bunch of greedy corporate f**ks. I guarantee that the things I propose will not cause poor people to be unfairly burdened. How can I say that? Because we ALREADY DID IT TWICE—ONCE WITH PHONE LINES, AND AGAIN WITH DSL. The poor were not unfairly burdened by having access to either of those technologies, both of which had the properties that I described.
This discussion is seriously making me mad at this point. Your reasoning is unsound, and about half of your argument seems to be ad hominem attacks on someone who regularly writes software and gives it away, who composes music and gives at least some of it away, who spends nine hours a week doing liturgical music rehearsals and performances (unpaid), and so on. I use my talents to for the benefit of others. A lot. Before you go attacking me and claiming that I'm somehow greedy and trying to steal from the poor, you might want to get your facts straight. I fight for the poor because I believe everyone deserves the chances that I had. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not precisely. Any intolerant philosophy can be countered by rational argument, but first you have to get the person to actually start listening. In the case of terrorists (foreign or domestic, religious or otherwise), that doesn't work because the second part can't be done for various reasons. However, in the case of people thinking about joining a terrorist group, that can work to some degree, because they haven't yet closed themselves off to argument.
Unfortunately, most governments don't even try. For example, the U.S. government's war on terror primarily fans the flames rather than countering the philosophy. They fight unnecessary wars that kill innocent people, thus turning those innocents' friends and relatives against them, resulting in a steady stream of people who are angry at the western world, who are then prime targets for radicalization. They lock innocent people up for decades without a trial, thus giving people even more reason to hate them. Then, when they find out that someone might be becoming radicalized, they monitor them, often going so far as to encourage them to commit fake crimes so that they'll get caught and can spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than attacking the rot of hate by countering it with rational argument. All of these things make people hate the West even more.
In short, I'm pretty sure the U.S. government is doing almost everything it possibly can to encourage extremist behavior. What I don't understand is why. Are they trying to bring about the end of the world, or are they really that clueless?
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to justify the horrible actions of people who use bombs to try to kill as many people as possible, most of whom likely had little or nothing to do with whatever they're angry about, many of whom might even agree with them, at least in principle. I'm just saying that many of the attacks are undeniably at least partially the fault of the western world for fomenting hatred among the people of the Middle East and for failing to take even the slightest actions to counter that hatred among people that it knew were heading down that path. It's a bit like not locking your doors and then wondering why your insurance company won't pay for your missing widescreen TV....
The only true way to fight hate is to face it head on, by teaching people not to hate. If you manage to do that—if the very idea of hating others becomes so antithetical to everyone's core beliefs that nobody joins hate groups—then eventually they'll go away by attrition.
Just saying.
We all knew it. That was the whole point of the act—preventing anyone other than the candidate from making ads that name a particular candidate close to the election. By preventing that, you prevent what amounts to an infinite amount of support for candidates by the rich, thus removing a giant loophole that negated all the benefits of having campaign finance limits in the first place.
The reality is that the CU decision ensured that only establishment candidates could campaign, because they're the ones with rich friends who can help them out by running independent TV ads when their coffers start to run dry.
It is just like the rest of Silicon Valley, or at least within the margin of error. The other half of the people in the neighborhood work for tech companies. And when I moved here almost fourteen years ago, our Internet service was also approximately as good as the rest of the valley. Since then, our quality of service (by every metric) has fallen further and further behind the rest of the region, because DSL just hasn't kept up. I advocate this policy because I don't feel it's right to be limited to low-quality service simply because of where I can afford to live.
Special interests? Special interests are something that applies to a few percent of the public at most. Every single man, woman, and child in this country should have great Internet service available to them, and should have choices of providers to ensure that those companies truly compete. And the fact that non-poor people (including myself) would also benefit from having fiber available, with multiple choices of ISPs running over that fiber, would not in any way negate the fact that the poor would benefit considerably from not being stuck a choice between DSL and satellite (ugh).
If that's your definition of a loss (which would cause any economics professor to rupture an aneurysm, BTW), then these companies shouldn't roll out fiber anywhere. After all, anywhere you roll out fiber, you have to make a huge capital investment and take out a loan. Try again.
Only the last half of that statement is correct. That's not magnifying a loss. If I buy a share of AAPL at $70, and the price goes up to $120 before falling back to $100, and I sell at $100, I made $30; I didn't lose $20. If a share of GOOG would have gone from $70 to $110 on that time, I didn't lose $10 by buying AAPL. A failure to gain is not the same thing as a loss. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling something... like financial advisory services. :-)
Either way, I'm not arguing that their reasons for staying out of poorer neighborhoods isn't profit-based. Of course it is. Anybody with half a brain knows that. What I'm arguing is that much like basic telephone service has been a requirement for holding and keeping a job, Internet service is becoming a similarly crucial service, both for that purpose and for our kids' education. It isn't something that can be made available only for people who have a certain amount of money, who live in certain neighborhoods, etc. The ability to get good Internet service should be a fundamental right, no different from the right to be served by th