Building/plant maintenance is a LOT like software maintenance. Go read How buildings learn: what happens after they're built . In contrast to the claim that, "maintenance is performed... to achieve homeostatis", actual maintenance of all but the most trivial buildings and plants is much closer to the realm of changing functionality than most people realize. The difference is in the time scales, and in the amount of change. Software rewrites are akin to demolition/new construction cycles, with all the disruption they cause. Large remodels are disruptive too. Building evolution comes from time and a slow but continual addtion of changes that result in things ending up very different than they started.
Smart property owners understand and accept this too.
When you buy a $100 cubic-zirconium ring, and then take it home only to find out it's a real diamond... do you take it back? If you don't it's stealing.
One day, Kevin is working on his homework in the store partly owned by his uncle. The uncle looks at Kevin frowning, and says, "what are you studying?"
"Ethics," says the boy.
"You don't need to read any books about that," says the uncle. "I'll tell you all you even need to know about ethics."
"OK"
"Imagine a customer comes in here and buys a pack of gum, and gives me a dollar bill. I give him change, and he leaves. When I'm checking the register before closing, I finger the bill, and discover that there is a twenty stuck to it.", says the uncle. "What is the ethical question, Kevin?"
"Should I keep the money or try to find the customer to give it back?"
"No, Kevin. The ethical question is, 'should I tell my partner?'"
Yes, according to current law if you play your DVD on linux with an unlicensed player, or read an ebook on your PDA with unlicensed software, your are breaking the law and stealing from the copyright owners. Observing this fact does not make the law good, but it appears to be what the law is. That's why it is necessary to take action to change the law.
Write, vote, contribute, work for candidates who Get It.
I have read your thoughtful and lengthy reply considering the merits of my arguments, and will strongly consider altering my rhetorical style in appreciation of your stunning insights.
Your article makes a number of assertions that reasonable
people could dispute. First is that there is anything illegal
about using NAT; Second is that what NAT is being used for is
unintentional. The gist of my complaint is that you could have
addressed the real issues without waving the red flags of "illegal"
behaviour and "unintentional" consequences.
To the first incorrect assertion: You claim that it is "illegal"
to use NAT. This has never been suggested or proven in a court of
law. It is not a "theft of service" in any event -- the service
of a single ip address to the subscriber is not being stolen from
the service provider. There remains only the single publicly
visible IP address. If there are restrictions in the SP ToS
limiting single computers to be connected, they would need to
be pretty carefully worded to rule out NAT use, and would at
worst create a ToS violation.
To the second point 8 years ago when NAT was created, there was
great concern about IP address shortage, which remains true today.
Contrary to your article, people were at the time very concerned
about the trend towards every electronic appliance in a house needing its
own IP address. NAT was one of the solutions to the problem.
Creating "sort of private, sub-network running datagrams to and
from invisible end devices" as you put it was the point of NAT.
The real issues for connectivity providers are (a) bandwidth
utilization by subscribers; (b) market penetration/revenue. (c) abuse
accountability. We can agree that a huge network hidden behind a NAT,
using a home cable connection provisioned for fractional use can use a lot
of unexpected bandwidth, but so can a spammer using a single machine, or
a teenager dedicated to downloading mp3s. So to address
issue (a) the problem is regulating traffic use in a way that offers
reasonable service to customers on low priced tiers with low provisioning.
This is a ToS issues with price/demand curve and competitive implications.
You don't have to drag NAT into the bandwidth hog issue at all.
Issue (b) is the penetration/revenue question: if one house buys the
connection and 802.11's the neighborhood, how does the installation pay
for itself? The answer is cruel: the service providers need to provide
enough value to justify subscriptions. If a shared connection using 802.11
is acceptable and worth $5/month, the service provider should provide a
supported, reliable $5/month service, not a $29.95 service.
In this case, tiered pricing (see issue (a)) may stabilize the
situation - if the neghborhood 802.11 connection is saturating the cable
connection
For abuse issue (c), the problem is that if someone drops into a private
802.11 domain and disrupts the network, who do you blame, and how do you
sanction them? The same as before, under ToS/bandwidth conditions.
In conclusion, NAT isn't a problem for which service providers need a solution.
SPs need bandwidth and abuse controls, and pricing commensurate to the
perceived value of their product in an area of rapid change. If one had
bandwith control, and the extra $4.95 month bought an additional increment
of allowed utilization, then there might be a value proposition that could
be tolerated by the public.
For the record, I had no access to ADSL or cable modem. I have a 144k
IDSL connection behind which I use NAT to attach 10 computers on my property.
I'm already paying for 24/7 use of my 144k, and I am completely guilt free.
using an example cited in the article, what airline in the world is going to let me on a plane with a laptop powered by 4 fluid ounces of liquid hydrogen and a 20w microturbine? Sounds pretty close to a walking, talking, potential incindiary to me. Just turn off the CPU fan and much merriment may ensue.
(similar issue with fuel cells, too, for that matter.)
simply has to be Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, with second place honors to the text "Star Trek". Source was available, and it spang forth in viral fashion on every machine I ever used up to about 1990. While all the OS vendor's source was available, you couldn't carry it somewhere and port it.
The scientific guys hadn't gotten it (they are still trying to get license fees for NASTRAN). But these silly text games got carried forth like weeds by people carrying 9 track or DECtapes from site to site. This is a lot closer to the model we really have for open source now, and there was no stinkin license debate either.
Reasonably preserved film and paper can easily last centuries, and pass through hands of generations that don't know what to do with them. We digerati blandly assert that will be true with our archives, but we can't prove it by experience. I can't read my 9 track tapes very easily anymore, much less those cute DECtape spools from undergraduate days.
When you think about how much time you spend with the 'delete' button on your email, how many insightful letters are going to be left for that biographer of your important friend in 40 years?
The same is true of digital pix -- having no need to ever get to 'fixed' form, they are going to be at the whimsy of haphazard archivists. Is Moore's law for storage going to hold indefinately? I suspect not, and at some point it is going to be very hard to archive things. Especially if DMCA flavored 'protections' result in everything being unarchivable.
I think our future history is going to be less accessible than that of the Krell.
often because it visually bloats code, and obscures the "beauty" of the underlying algorithm. How often have you seen a published fragment that says, "error handling omitted for clarity?". The big difference I seen in good commercial application code is that the error handling code is often 1/4 to 1/2 the code bulk. Yes, exceptions can help reduce that. But the key point is being willing to go in and "uglify" your code to do all the error handling. It is unglamourous, and appears to be non-functional, so it is easy to blow off.
Two things I've learned are that (a) every "if" has an implied "else" clause that often represents an unconsidered error, and (b) those else cases, and other unexpected situations shouldn't be logged, they should be "asserted" in a way that makes the program stop dead, now. That forces you to fix them when they happen. The business the author cites of getting all these messages is truly evil, as it really helps no one, neither the programmer nor the end-user.
is whether AMD is going to convince anyone to make servers out of Hammers. Who is around? Dell, uh huh. HP/Compaq, right. IBM? Na ga da. Unless some player from left field does something that is seen as compelling, the hammer is going to be as relevant as the F-20 tigershark or the YF-23. It's great technology, but maybe the window has already closed.
Since the actual speaker diaphragm is going to be displacing air, the inflatable membrane behind is also going to vibrate as the air moves. You can probably calculate pretty easily the displacement, based on cone travel -> the amount of air being moved, plugged into the air pressure, and over the area of the bladder. My suspicion is that you get a very low-Q result, with perhaps +3db out the direction of the driver. It sounds like a bad idea to put on stage because of feedback effects, as you'll be bleeding into the proscenium space tremendously. But what do I know, I'm from god damned New Jersey.
We used to think that the evolution from pictograms to symbolic language was an advance, but which required much teaching to be effective; there are arguments while the full chinese ideogram set is awkward in advancing literacy through society.
So first, I'd posit the 'I part of WIMP is not necessarily the best thing, and that symbolics have a place. When we look at mathematical notation, we see a broader variety of symbols somewhere between plain text and icons. There is milage to be found in the space between text and icons.
Second, the problem with the 'MP' part of WIMP is that it is indirect. What we have always wanted is what we used to have: a crayon, pencil on pen that we directly manipulate. The correct display device for interactive use is almost certainly a flat panel on your desk that has the effect of those science fiction displays -- you can touch "buttons" that are indicated with your gross motor skill fat fingers, and you can pick up a sharp pointing device, like a pen, pencil or crayon to write with when you want to. In a perfect world, this pointing device has a tip that literally changes color and shape when you change what you want to do with it. Touch the greep chip, it goes green, etc; touch the point and it gets sharp, and touch the brush it goes soft and blunt. Then you get it to read handwriting better than a palm when you need that. I've long thought of this as the "electric whiteboard." On the walls, on your desk, in 100dpi resolution for square meters.
Third, the real problem is figuring out how to get high bandwidth, high accuracy entry of words, words, words. Right now, the best we have is the keyboard, and it sucks, as does voice entry.
I remember a Mad magazine talking about teen-idol singers making a record. The studio had so much echo, the producer said in the strip, that the guy didn't even need to sing the words, he could just think them. The answer will be something that we can jack in to, from which well formed strings of words and punctuation will appear as we think them up. We don't need the Matrix all-encompasing VR -- we do need some way of transferring thoughts out of our heads into language accessible by others without physical instrumentalities.
(Then we will crawl where the Krell once stood).
None of the moderated up comments are addressing the fact, pointed out in the response, that the IETF has a similar RAND position? --> it is already the case that the IETF -could- put patented, RAND technology in IPvX, and free software would be out of luck.
rail is vital for bulk, non-time critical items. For things where time matters, trucks rule. You can get coast-to-coast in 3 days with a truck, which is hard to get by rail by the time you take it to the railhead and pick it up. Trucking is cheaper now that it has ever been, due to low fuel prices and rate deregulation. If you want the best of all worlds, you ship intermodal, with: containers ship->truck->rail->your dock. Hail Malcom McLean, inventor of the container.
What comes out of the transcript is the same thing that has just happened in a case involving a perceived conflict of interest with a utility regulator in California. Activist demanded a court remove him from a post for a violation of a conflict rule. The judge held that the rule was badly written, and the proof offerered was not clear enough to make the case. His soundbite was, "if you want to hang someone on a technicality, you've got to cross all your 'T's".
In this case, it appears Paetecs original contract was vague about the 'bulk' that constituted spam; the addendum on 2% was unclear; and their termination letter was not consistent with the terms of the contract on the 30 day cure provision. Paetec did not cross its 'T's on this.
You can be sure that the AOL handling of TOSing people is a -lot- more tightly done. ISPs who deal with "bulk emailers" need to be airtight too.
if it delayed ignition after it exited the barrel, it slowed down. you really need to know the velocity at the time it lit, not as it left the end of the gun to know the acceleration. Assuming it slowed down any at all, 10k G is not out of line with the data reported.
Not to me; he comes off as amusing and amused. As he notes, most humour comes at the expense of something, so if one of your oxes is being gored, you may think he's a jerk.
for the recyclers-- instead of tossing the 386 and 486es, stash them in inventory and sell back to the embedded market. The problem is that the labor to extract the chip and toss it in storage is probably more than the cost of the chips when in mass production. There's a lot of.59 to $4.00 cpus when you look at the z80 derivitives through the 486 equivalents.
SIMM memory isn't getting cheaper either, if you haven't notices.
there's not that much practical difference between 50 000 and 100 000 foot altitude for a human. Death isn't instant -- you get the 5-15 seconds of consciousness accurately exploited by Dave Bowman in 2001 before all the oxygen dissolves out of your lungs and your brain computer goes on the blink for lack of power.
The thing that makes the FPS games annoyingly unrealistic to me is the general impossibility of damaging the game field. Except for special walls, if you shoot a rocket in Doom or Quake, nothing happens to the wall, or stairs or whatever. Where does this leave these games for representing real tactical assaults? As games. You can't lay a grenade next to any old wall and blast a whole in it, as would be SOP in an urban environment. Bummer, man. I don't care about the progressively more realistic lighting and shadows possible, I want to blow stuff up!
Let's face that enabling wholesale environmental damage is a massive pain to the geometry. You'd need failure models with some randomization, and you'd need to recalculate things on the fly that map preparation tools now do off-line because things don't change. However, I think there are cheats possible to reduce the numbers somewhat-
precompute a few failures in the the vicinity,
throw some dust, and compute more while the dust is settling and the weapons recycle, perhaps. At some point near stasis is reached, and you can just fractalize the remaining rock and debris.
I want to be able to take a rocket launcher and reduce a building to rubble in Doom3/Quake4. I want a scored frag when the roof goes in on a sniper. Screw the personal combat and call in the firepower. Small arms are for people who can't afford artillery or CAS. Flatten trees and flora for fun, oh yeah.
Justice should apply for a temporary restraining order to prevent XP from being shipped. This would maintain the status quo, and strong arguments can be made that they are likely to win on the merits.
There has got to be a way around the calender chicken that is being played out here.
Staying for the fight only works if you have the resources necessary to do the job. If you look at a recent counter example, consider Keith Henson (site ironically in.ru), who did not have the resources he needed to carry on his legal defense, and has fled to Canada claiming political sanctuary. Henson had good lines of defense and appeal, but finances forced him into bad choices at trial, and he abandoned an appeal he also could on afford with flight.
There is a good question whether this is a good case to challenge the DMCA with, or whether it will have to do as the only one of this kind we've got. An expensive legal proceeding may ultimately turn on mundane issues such as whether Dimity sold the program, or the company. Since he didn't do the sales, how could he be traffiking? So is this the one the EFF and ACLU should fund as the Great DMCA test? If not, Dimitry may be at the mercy of his employer's willingness to keep the funding going.
We should also recall that the legality in the other country is irrelevant in the eyes of the US courts. The US has been cheerfully prosecuting foreign nationals for violation of US laws for actions taking place elsewhere for a long time.
The U.S. is the only country in the history of the
world to have been in the situation of knowing it could conquer the rest of the world and yet not do it.
Incinerate, maybe. I don't think even Curtis LeMay imagined conquering (as in occupying) the USSR or China. When the US had a nuclear monopoly, it didn't have enough of them to do a very good job of incinerating, either. By the time the US had enough warheads to do a decent job, the Red team had enough to make it no-cost possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Smart property owners understand and accept this too.
-dB
"Ethics," says the boy.
"You don't need to read any books about that," says the uncle. "I'll tell you all you even need to know about ethics."
"OK"
"Imagine a customer comes in here and buys a pack of gum, and gives me a dollar bill. I give him change, and he leaves. When I'm checking the register before closing, I finger the bill, and discover that there is a twenty stuck to it.", says the uncle. "What is the ethical question, Kevin?"
"Should I keep the money or try to find the customer to give it back?"
"No, Kevin. The ethical question is, 'should I tell my partner?'"
-dB
Write, vote, contribute, work for candidates who Get It.
-dB
Dear Honorable AC,
I have read your thoughtful and lengthy reply considering the merits of my arguments, and will strongly consider altering my rhetorical style in appreciation of your stunning insights.
Most sincerely and respectfully,
-dB
people could dispute. First is that there is anything illegal
about using NAT; Second is that what NAT is being used for is
unintentional. The gist of my complaint is that you could have
addressed the real issues without waving the red flags of "illegal"
behaviour and "unintentional" consequences.
To the first incorrect assertion: You claim that it is "illegal"
to use NAT. This has never been suggested or proven in a court of
law. It is not a "theft of service" in any event -- the service
of a single ip address to the subscriber is not being stolen from
the service provider. There remains only the single publicly
visible IP address. If there are restrictions in the SP ToS
limiting single computers to be connected, they would need to
be pretty carefully worded to rule out NAT use, and would at
worst create a ToS violation.
To the second point 8 years ago when NAT was created, there was
great concern about IP address shortage, which remains true today.
Contrary to your article, people were at the time very concerned
about the trend towards every electronic appliance in a house needing its
own IP address. NAT was one of the solutions to the problem.
Creating "sort of private, sub-network running datagrams to and
from invisible end devices" as you put it was the point of NAT.
The real issues for connectivity providers are (a) bandwidth
utilization by subscribers; (b) market penetration/revenue. (c) abuse
accountability. We can agree that a huge network hidden behind a NAT,
using a home cable connection provisioned for fractional use can use a lot
of unexpected bandwidth, but so can a spammer using a single machine, or
a teenager dedicated to downloading mp3s. So to address
issue (a) the problem is regulating traffic use in a way that offers
reasonable service to customers on low priced tiers with low provisioning.
This is a ToS issues with price/demand curve and competitive implications.
You don't have to drag NAT into the bandwidth hog issue at all.
Issue (b) is the penetration/revenue question: if one house buys the
connection and 802.11's the neighborhood, how does the installation pay
for itself? The answer is cruel: the service providers need to provide
enough value to justify subscriptions. If a shared connection using 802.11
is acceptable and worth $5/month, the service provider should provide a
supported, reliable $5/month service, not a $29.95 service.
In this case, tiered pricing (see issue (a)) may stabilize the
situation - if the neghborhood 802.11 connection is saturating the cable
connection
For abuse issue (c), the problem is that if someone drops into a private
802.11 domain and disrupts the network, who do you blame, and how do you
sanction them? The same as before, under ToS/bandwidth conditions.
In conclusion, NAT isn't a problem for which service providers need a solution.
SPs need bandwidth and abuse controls, and pricing commensurate to the
perceived value of their product in an area of rapid change. If one had
bandwith control, and the extra $4.95 month bought an additional increment
of allowed utilization, then there might be a value proposition that could
be tolerated by the public.
For the record, I had no access to ADSL or cable modem. I have a 144k
IDSL connection behind which I use NAT to attach 10 computers on my property.
I'm already paying for 24/7 use of my 144k, and I am completely guilt free.
cheers,
-dB
(similar issue with fuel cells, too, for that matter.)
-dB
-dB
When you think about how much time you spend with the 'delete' button on your email, how many insightful letters are going to be left for that biographer of your important friend in 40 years?
The same is true of digital pix -- having no need to ever get to 'fixed' form, they are going to be at the whimsy of haphazard archivists. Is Moore's law for storage going to hold indefinately? I suspect not, and at some point it is going to be very hard to archive things. Especially if DMCA flavored 'protections' result in everything being unarchivable.
I think our future history is going to be less accessible than that of the Krell.
-dB
Two things I've learned are that (a) every "if" has an implied "else" clause that often represents an unconsidered error, and (b) those else cases, and other unexpected situations shouldn't be logged, they should be "asserted" in a way that makes the program stop dead, now. That forces you to fix them when they happen. The business the author cites of getting all these messages is truly evil, as it really helps no one, neither the programmer nor the end-user.
-dB
-dB
-dB
So first, I'd posit the 'I part of WIMP is not necessarily the best thing, and that symbolics have a place. When we look at mathematical notation, we see a broader variety of symbols somewhere between plain text and icons. There is milage to be found in the space between text and icons.
Second, the problem with the 'MP' part of WIMP is that it is indirect. What we have always wanted is what we used to have: a crayon, pencil on pen that we directly manipulate. The correct display device for interactive use is almost certainly a flat panel on your desk that has the effect of those science fiction displays -- you can touch "buttons" that are indicated with your gross motor skill fat fingers, and you can pick up a sharp pointing device, like a pen, pencil or crayon to write with when you want to. In a perfect world, this pointing device has a tip that literally changes color and shape when you change what you want to do with it. Touch the greep chip, it goes green, etc; touch the point and it gets sharp, and touch the brush it goes soft and blunt. Then you get it to read handwriting better than a palm when you need that. I've long thought of this as the "electric whiteboard." On the walls, on your desk, in 100dpi resolution for square meters.
Third, the real problem is figuring out how to get high bandwidth, high accuracy entry of words, words, words. Right now, the best we have is the keyboard, and it sucks, as does voice entry.
I remember a Mad magazine talking about teen-idol singers making a record. The studio had so much echo, the producer said in the strip, that the guy didn't even need to sing the words, he could just think them. The answer will be something that we can jack in to, from which well formed strings of words and punctuation will appear as we think them up. We don't need the Matrix all-encompasing VR -- we do need some way of transferring thoughts out of our heads into language accessible by others without physical instrumentalities.
(Then we will crawl where the Krell once stood).
-dB
-dB
-dB
-dB
-dB
In this case, it appears Paetecs original contract was vague about the 'bulk' that constituted spam; the addendum on 2% was unclear; and their termination letter was not consistent with the terms of the contract on the 30 day cure provision. Paetec did not cross its 'T's on this.
You can be sure that the AOL handling of TOSing people is a -lot- more tightly done. ISPs who deal with "bulk emailers" need to be airtight too.
-dB
-dB
-dB
SIMM memory isn't getting cheaper either, if you haven't notices.
-dB
-dB
Let's face that enabling wholesale environmental damage is a massive pain to the geometry. You'd need failure models with some randomization, and you'd need to recalculate things on the fly that map preparation tools now do off-line because things don't change. However, I think there are cheats possible to reduce the numbers somewhat- precompute a few failures in the the vicinity, throw some dust, and compute more while the dust is settling and the weapons recycle, perhaps. At some point near stasis is reached, and you can just fractalize the remaining rock and debris.
I want to be able to take a rocket launcher and reduce a building to rubble in Doom3/Quake4. I want a scored frag when the roof goes in on a sniper. Screw the personal combat and call in the firepower. Small arms are for people who can't afford artillery or CAS. Flatten trees and flora for fun, oh yeah.
-dB
There has got to be a way around the calender chicken that is being played out here.
-dB
There is a good question whether this is a good case to challenge the DMCA with, or whether it will have to do as the only one of this kind we've got. An expensive legal proceeding may ultimately turn on mundane issues such as whether Dimity sold the program, or the company. Since he didn't do the sales, how could he be traffiking? So is this the one the EFF and ACLU should fund as the Great DMCA test? If not, Dimitry may be at the mercy of his employer's willingness to keep the funding going.
We should also recall that the legality in the other country is irrelevant in the eyes of the US courts. The US has been cheerfully prosecuting foreign nationals for violation of US laws for actions taking place elsewhere for a long time.
-dB
-dB