How exactly is it "so terrible"; facts please, not campaign lies.
It's all terrible. Every last bit.
Except for the "pre-existing conditions" ban. And keeping kids on their parents' insurance until age 27. The new transparency of equivalent policies isn't really that bad. And you know, even Mitch McConnell likes the exchanges - he'd keep the web sites.
But everything else: the making people buy insurance, limiting the profit companies can make, forcing companies to care for their employees...bad, bad, bad. We've got to remove all of these bits that pay for the features that are actually kind of not terrible.
The 84% success rate is for Minotaur and Pegasus rockets (old US ICBMs and a fancy cruise missile) The 50-75% success rate is for Antares (surplus Soviet space rockets). To get all the way down to 50%, you have to include events where the surplus engines failed during testing without destroying a payload. But honestly, given sample sizes of 20 and 4, I don't think anyone would claim that 84% and 75% are actually different.
If it was reported, dismissed, and something bad happens, then it was something that was preventable.
This is the single worst notion that ever wormed its way into a decision-making process. It is the foundation of authoritarianism. It justifies any excess. It provides a cover of legitimacy for any surveillance or intrusion. It is the cancer that is killing freedom in the US.
It isn't even that. The ineptitude of those looking for the AP is astounding. You stop the plane. You open up your wifi analyzer app and walk down the isle. Then you check all the devices in those few rows (4 tops) , and boot the asshole playing the joke. 1/2 hour tops.
Why on earth would you make 200 people sit on the tarmac for even half an hour? This kind of event requires absolutely no response. Any acknowledgement of goofy AP name, even out of "an abundance of caution," amounts to hysteria.
It seems we've forgotten, but it is actually possible to have no official response to trivial events. It is possible for law enforcement not to "do something." Picking on the methods used in tracking down the offending wifi is like criticizing the validity of polygraph testimony at a witch trial.
Women are also majority of voters and control an overwhelming majority of household wealth and income, to say a majority of voters are "discouraged" from using their rights is beyond bullshit and into the realm of pure absurdity.
Women tend to vote against the wrong lizard. 75% of candidates are men. Candidates are chosen by the existing political structure - I don't mean primaries - I mean the party structure and establishment that supports fundraising by the candidates in those primaries. This bias is acknowledged by leadership in both parties. It's harder for a woman to get on the ballot than it is for a Libertarian. (Once she gets there, she has a higher chance of being elected than the Libertarian - women make up almost the same proportion of elected officials as they do of candidates.)
What difference does it make whether women choose career X because of the bed time stories their mothers told them or because their brains are genetically different?
Because, in this case, it seems like social pressures may be pushing a group out of lucrative, high-benefit career paths. We, as a society, may consequently be excluding a large number of highly talented people from those jobs and making [CS or other male-dominated field] less productive. Remember how blacks were excluded from professional football because they lacked strategic thinking skills? Does anyone think football was better back in the segregation days?
More importantly, "the establishment" has a long history of justifying their position with generally unsupported claims that [group] is just not naturally suited or inclined to [leadership position]. The aristocracy knew that their magical blood entitled them to rule. The Europeans knew that Africans were unsuited to proper education. Men know that women are unsuited to rigorous logic. Historically, these claims have frequently been found untrue, and it's appropriate to be skeptical with the party in power claims that an identifiably different group "just doesn't want" some path to success or power.
Now, certainly there are differences between the sexes. I don't think anyone is questioning that. What I think we need to do is figure out to what extent extraordinarily subtle social pressures (the very forces that men claim to be insensitive to) might be skewing the data. Maybe girls play with dolls and boys play with trains because of built-in genetic programming. I only know that, when my friends' daughters go for the dolls, my friends coo just a little louder and say things like 'We didn't encourage that at all - she just naturally prefers the dolls." When their sons go for the dolls, they don't make any special noises of approval and say things like, "You know, he's got an uncle who's gay, and we're totally cool with that."
" Do you know how many terrorists that wanted to kill me I have come face to face with? 0.
Remove the "I have come face to face with" and that answer will certainly not be zero.
No, that answer will almost certainly still be zero. The answer to "Do you know how many terrorists want to kill a generic Westerner?" would not be zero, but who fucking cares? There's a few white people who would be happy to see a generic black person dead (and vice versa); there's a few Irish who would be happy to see a generic Englishman dead.
The relevant question is not whether there exist some people willing to kill your countrymen, because that will never be an empty set. The relevant question is whether those people are likely to actually kill more of your countrymen than moose, sharks, or bed sheets. The answer is that you should be much more frightened of bed sheets than either terrorists or sharks.
So taxes "set back the country's technological development by some 20 years", and when it's the internet the Slashdot crowd agrees.
But if it's anything else, taxes are so great. "Pay your share!"
Taxes are about degree: too much and you strangle the economy; too little and your country decays into anarchy. The "tax the rich" crowd see the government spending 50% more than it takes in, sees a bunch of people who save or invest 80% of their income (or loan it to the government), and thinks that's a bunch of money not circulating in the economy. Hoarding doesn't really create jobs, and discouraging hoarding isn't going to strangle anything.
Hungary is talking about imposing a $0.63/GB tax on internet traffic that currently costs something like $0.0002. That's like raising the (US) tax on gasoline to $9000/gallon. Not even the most aggressive sin-taxer would suggest that, because it would absolutely destroy the economy. Hungary is proposing to assess this tax on ISPs while denying them the power to raise their own prices. To sell bandwidth at $0.003/GB, or even $0.20/GB, and get taxed $0.60/GB, is not a viable business model.
To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 50%, or even 90%, like it was in the 1960s, still lets people take home more dollars when they earn more dollars. To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 5000% would be ridiculous, and no one has ever suggested it.
My question is why a $0.62 USD tax on 1GB when a $1/month of 1mb/s can transfer 300GB? $186 of tax on $1 of service. That's a 18600% tax.
That's the most shocking thing, to me, about this proposal. It's a HUGE potential cost. It would make 'modern' web pages, with their kilobytes (or megabytes) of never-executed, embedded javascript, massive stylesheets, fancy images, and ads-ads-ads, extremely expensive. I would expect every Hungarian to immediately cancel any streaming service and to turn off "Auto load images" and "precache links." I would expect that Hungarian web sites would return to 1990's style terse HTML. That could be a good way to drastically reduce bandwith use in any country that implemented it and dramatically increase the pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks.
Of course, applying it to the ISPs, rather than to the users, means that none of the bandwidth-conservation pressure will be applied to the people actually capable of affecting consumption, so it's likely to have no effect whatsoever. Except, maybe, to force all of the ISPs into bankruptcy
These are not really the largest ship ever built, just the largest container ships. The Knock Nevis was a full 200 feet longer and 30 feet wider, and many in-service ULCCs are larger. The triple-E has a capacity of 165k DWT, where the 'standard' size for VLCC supertankers is 280k DWT. The first Triple-E was launched in 2013, so I don't know why they're talking about this like it's a future event.
Yes, I know Bush did a lot of spying, but that's different than encryption. Did any of Bush's honchos run around saying people shouldn't use encryption because the government needs to see it? Or pushing for laws banning the use of encryption, or trying to force everyone to have government-approved encryption chips with NSA backdoors built-in?
The Bush administration was running on the hope that the secrecy of their widespread wiretapping and the technical hurdles to encryption would result in few people using encryption. Which, of course, is exactly how it worked. Once the public became aware that the government was monitoring literally every phone call, text, and email, the public backlash has greatly expanded encryption. Don't imagine that a republican administration would be any more willing to let you keep your communication private. They might use different tactics, but secretly putting back doors in software is not really any better than a public campaign to install government backdoors in software.
Personally, I think one of two things is going on here. 1) The administration actually is trying to gauge or influence people to accept the Glasshouse in exchange for "security." 2) Encryption is a red herring, and an actual counter based on a different technology/strategy has already implemented.
To add to this - probably best not to mention any patents you are holding, unless you believe this is specifically what the prospective employer is looking for. From the hiring perspective, I don't want to hire somebody who might reasonably be expected to tell me "I'm leaving to pursue my own independent business prospects now", and I sure don't want to hear "I'm leaving to become your competitor now".
If I hire someone, the last thing I want to hear is "I can write this program for you, but only if you license my existing patent." People leave jobs for greener pastures all the time. People have outside interests. If the job I'm offering can't hold your interest, then I'll find someone else. If you use your employment to try to extort IP fees from me, you better damn well expect to lose that employment. And probably expect a lawsuit to recoup any wages or signing bonus already paid.
If I tell you that my password contains 7 words (contained in my/usr/share/dict/words which is 99171 lines long), with a comma after the 3rd and a full stop at the end, you will still have to search through 94,339,343,028,749,422,154,850,189,341,666,091 (9.4E34) combinations - best get cracking.
If you also tell me that your password is a semantically valid English language phrase, then the vast majority of those 9e34 combinations can be excluded. So, "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is less random than "reconform uncharitable caldera poorly" The phrase is easier to remember; has more characters, but is drawn from a smaller space.
I would love to see a password validator that just runs some of the common dictionary attacks on the password, and tells the user how long it took to break. If it breaks within 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, reject the password. People are terrible at estimating randomness, but giving them direct feedback will help them understand what really makes a hard to guess password.
It's insane. It's not possible for my coworkers to remember them all, so they get written down, which certainly doesn't increase security. Many times people keep their passwords in their phones. Some write them down on paper and keep them in their wallet. Some folks leave them on notes in their cubicle.
The question whether this increases or reduces security depends on what kind of attack you expect. If you expect to be specifically targeted, by a human being that can gain access to your personal space in such a way as to read the notes on your keyboard or cubicle walls, then writing down passwords is Bad. Making a conspicuous display of user/pass combinations could certainly make you a specific 'target of opportunity.' But if your primary security concerns are compromise of some bank/website's database or scripted attacks on internet services, then it hardly matters if a physical representation of your password exists, and it really helps to have different codes.
I imagine that any decent system, once it finds a valid user/pass combination, promptly runs off and tries that everywhere: every bank, every ISP, every email service, every social networking site, every game server. Site-specific passwords will hugely reduce the damage due to a successful hack. Storing your user/pass combinations on a hackable device might not be the best solution, but for most of us semi-anonymous internet denizens, a system that a human would rapidly recognize may still defeat a script.
He has the device. He doesn't need investors. All he needs to do is hook up to the net and start selling energy.
He has, at best, a device that generates excess heat. That's a long way from generating excess electricity. Or energy in any saleable form. Now, one might argue that extracting the heat from such a device to run a steam turbine (or some such) is simply an engineering problem, but it's an engineering problem that has well-defined losses associated. If his excess heat isn't greater than the conversion losses, then his device is still pretty useless.
Hunting a troll down and gutting them, while not smart personally, might send a message to the rest of them. You're not as anonymous on the internet as you think you are.
Curiously, the troll believed to be targetting Medeleine McCann's family was found dead in a hotel earlier this week
What you have just described is the sole and singular reason corporations were formed in the first place. That is to limit the risk to an investor to the amount of money they have put into it. ie the value of the stocks they hold.
No, limited liability is a rather newer invention than incorporation. Only by about a millennium and a half.
Are you sure you're reading that wiki right, dude? It sure looks like they're claiming that Rome defined corporate entities as separate legal structures with their own liability in the mid 6th century. The unlimited liability the wiki refers to seems to be specific to UK law, and especially to companies created by royal charter, as the establishment of modern stock-based corporations was followed rapidly by the Limited Liability Act.
To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.
That's because you can't create permanent jobs from temporary funding. No individual researcher has the power to create a tenure-track position, because those positions are created by the university. In the case of state universities, tenure track positions come directly from the state budget. Over the last 40 years, states have uniformly decided that providing a college education is not the state's job. State allocations have not kept up with inflation or student body growth. Since 1980, universities have had to meet a 95% increase in student body growth in parallel with a 40% decline in state funding. They've done this by raising tuition and hiring non-tenure-track lecturers.
Research is amplifies that trend. Research grants are nominally to the university, but they will generally move with the principal investigator. Research grants actually take away from faculty's ability to teach classes, and the shortfall is made up by hiring temporary, non-tenure-track lecturers. So, now you have the state commitment to long-term faculty being bought out with short-term contracts.
If you want to increase full-time, tenure-track faculty growth, you need to get state taxpayers to commit to the socialistic principle of state-funded education, raise taxes, and hire faculty. Research contracts won't teach your children.
You don't need net neutrality for that. All you need is for the PUC/PSCs (for telcos) and the local Franchise Authorities (for cable) to mandate competitive wholesale access to last-mile facilities.
Your minimal-government-intervention solution is for the government to force the incumbent ISPs to lease their privately-owned infrastructure to their competitors, and at government-regulated prices? I am interested to see how you justify that as a lower regulatory burden than forbidding the prioritization of packets based on origin.
As far as I know anyone who occupies the public right of way, has to pay a fee for that usage: http://www.texaspolicy.com/cen...
Most cable companies pass those user fees on to customers explicitly, "Regulatory Recovery Fee." Obviously, all expenses of the cable company are eventually paid by subscribers, but they choose to account for those right-of-way fees in the same way as they account for the Universal Connectivity Fee and State Sales/911 Tax, as though it's not a part of their doing business.
You buy a connection that is supposed to be 10meg and if they purposely slow it down for any reason they are intentionally defraudint the consumer by not delivering the services they charged for. And the up to language does not save them because you can never get up to 10megs if they are purposely limiting it to 2 megs.
They can deliver you 10 MB/s even while they throttle the connection between you and Netflix to 2 MB/s or less. This is, in fact, what was done during the "negotiations." Bandwidth is throttled upstream of the client link, so the client, if he tried, could run a "speedtest" in parallel with his crappy, stuttering video, that would show healthy, full-bandwidth connection to other upstream sites. He could, if he tried, see a perfectly fluid Hulu video in one window, next to a crappy, stuttering Netflix video in another. The client has no way of knowing whether that's because Netflix's servers are overloaded, Netflix's ISP is overloaded, or if Verizon is throttling Netflix: they all look the same to the end viewer. This also makes it essentially impossible to determine fraud (aside from the fact that your contract with your ISP does not - can not - guarantee you a bandwidth to any particular service.
I don't see how "the ISP should treat every packet the same" is unreasonable. The ISP should guarantee latency, throughput, jitter, availability, etc. per their SLAs. The end user can do their own QOS and decide whether they want netflix or remote robotic surgeries to take priority. If the user needs a stronger guarantee, they should get a better connection with a better SLA. None of this is illegal or unreasonable.
That's fine for the client ISP and the server ISP, but their packets will traverse an unknown number of intermediates whose networks are completely out of the control of server, server's ISP, client, and client's ISP. In fact, one of the internet design principles is that the physical network is unreliable and subject to congestion. This is unavoidable: traffic grows to fill the available bandwidth, and during times of peak demand, every network can be congested
This is why the internet has different protocols. Compare Email and VOIP: for VOIP it is essential that each packet be delivered, in order, and as quickly as possible. Delays of even 100ms create audible distortion. For email, your message is still understandable if it's delivered 5 minutes late. SMTP has that resiliency built-in: if it fails to deliver a packet right now, it will keep trying, periodically, for a day. Eventually, it will find a time when the network is uncontested and it can transfer that terabyte attachment. If your VOIP packet has to wait around until SMTP has delivered that attachment, you're going to think someone has hung up on you.
I know, now that everything is a browser plug-in, that it's easy to forget that HTTP is only one of many protocols on the internet. It's completely appropriate prioritize RTP/RTCP (VoIP) over SMTP or FTP. The problem is when an internet middleman decides it should be able to prioritize YouTube's HTTP over Hulu's HTTP, just because YouTube has paid a ransom.
As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
No, that's not ok. Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery. If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose. It's not the job of every internet middleman between here and Beijing to rank the moral value of each IP packet or source.
Note that this is different from an ISP determining that an email source is "spam" and blacklisting that source.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ?
Aside from the technical fact that the client only finds the ads in the web page text, it is (again) not appropriate for the internet middlemen to determine whether the client is more interested in images from doubleclick or images from slashdot. If the client chooses to prioritize which images it requests, that's a completely different question. The point of net neutrality is that, within a recognized communication stream, people who transfer the data should not look at the data to determine whether or how quickly to forward it. The post office accepts your letter, looks at the postage you've paid, and delivers it. It will deliver my Priority Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes, but it will not deliver Netflix Media Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes.
And what kind of "legitimate packet priorization" would that be? Because I can't really think of any right now. If you have trouble delivering your real time dependent services, you can either up your bandwidth or not offer them rather than keep overselling 1:1000 and throttle everything else into oblivion.
Legitimate packet prioritization is based on the service, not on the vendor. "Quality of Service" is already part of TCP/IP, and lets routers know how to balance latency and throughput. For example, it is more important to deliver VOIP or streaming video packets on time than to deliver SYN/ACK packets quickly. You should let VOIP packets skip ahead of SYN packets or FTP packets. However, it is not appropriate to let Verizon VOIP packets skip ahead of Nextiva VOIP packets, just because Verizon has paid for that prioritization.
Common carrier rules mean that the carrier can't discriminate among its clients, they can still distinguish between "First class" and "Book rate" services.
Here's the problem: the person who takes your order is not the person who delivers your order. There needs to be some way for server A to identify you to server B. Possible solutions:
Assign a number to customer, and expect customer to answer to that number. Problems: depersonalizing, customers forget their numbers, "thirteen" sounds like "thirty"
Let the customer assign an identifier for his order, providing some illusion of personal service. Problems: customer identifier may be confusing, customers may get annoyed if server A does not use the mystical spelling customer has in mind, servers may spend more time massaging the identifier than actually preparing product, server B may not pronounce the same identifier as server A recorded
Photograph customers for product delivery. Problems: privacy fanatics, bad pictures, servers turn incidental photodocumentation into DMV-like picture-taking ritual
In sum, there is no good way to make high-volume service look like personal service. People pretty quickly see through efforts to disguise it. While many people are willing to play along, occasional servers and customers will both manipulate these systems for their personal amusement. Misspelling your name is the barista equivalent of building paper-clip animals. Giving a fake name is the equivalent of painting your stapler purple. Try not to get bent out of shape when they call you "Susquehannah" instead of "Susquanna" or "Todd" instead of "Tom": they aren't trying to annoy you; they aren't trying to learn your name; They aren't likely to remember you next time; the content of your name is irrelevant to the process; and and effort to "get it right" only delays people around you.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly is it "so terrible"; facts please, not campaign lies.
It's all terrible. Every last bit.
Except for the "pre-existing conditions" ban. And keeping kids on their parents' insurance until age 27. The new transparency of equivalent policies isn't really that bad. And you know, even Mitch McConnell likes the exchanges - he'd keep the web sites.
But everything else: the making people buy insurance, limiting the profit companies can make, forcing companies to care for their employees...bad, bad, bad. We've got to remove all of these bits that pay for the features that are actually kind of not terrible.
The 84% success rate is for Minotaur and Pegasus rockets (old US ICBMs and a fancy cruise missile) The 50-75% success rate is for Antares (surplus Soviet space rockets). To get all the way down to 50%, you have to include events where the surplus engines failed during testing without destroying a payload. But honestly, given sample sizes of 20 and 4, I don't think anyone would claim that 84% and 75% are actually different.
If it was reported, dismissed, and something bad happens, then it was something that was preventable.
This is the single worst notion that ever wormed its way into a decision-making process. It is the foundation of authoritarianism. It justifies any excess. It provides a cover of legitimacy for any surveillance or intrusion. It is the cancer that is killing freedom in the US.
It isn't even that. The ineptitude of those looking for the AP is astounding. You stop the plane. You open up your wifi analyzer app and walk down the isle. Then you check all the devices in those few rows (4 tops) , and boot the asshole playing the joke. 1/2 hour tops.
Why on earth would you make 200 people sit on the tarmac for even half an hour? This kind of event requires absolutely no response. Any acknowledgement of goofy AP name, even out of "an abundance of caution," amounts to hysteria.
It seems we've forgotten, but it is actually possible to have no official response to trivial events. It is possible for law enforcement not to "do something." Picking on the methods used in tracking down the offending wifi is like criticizing the validity of polygraph testimony at a witch trial.
Women are also majority of voters and control an overwhelming majority of household wealth and income, to say a majority of voters are "discouraged" from using their rights is beyond bullshit and into the realm of pure absurdity.
Women tend to vote against the wrong lizard. 75% of candidates are men. Candidates are chosen by the existing political structure - I don't mean primaries - I mean the party structure and establishment that supports fundraising by the candidates in those primaries. This bias is acknowledged by leadership in both parties. It's harder for a woman to get on the ballot than it is for a Libertarian. (Once she gets there, she has a higher chance of being elected than the Libertarian - women make up almost the same proportion of elected officials as they do of candidates.)
What difference does it make whether women choose career X because of the bed time stories their mothers told them or because their brains are genetically different?
Because, in this case, it seems like social pressures may be pushing a group out of lucrative, high-benefit career paths. We, as a society, may consequently be excluding a large number of highly talented people from those jobs and making [CS or other male-dominated field] less productive. Remember how blacks were excluded from professional football because they lacked strategic thinking skills? Does anyone think football was better back in the segregation days?
More importantly, "the establishment" has a long history of justifying their position with generally unsupported claims that [group] is just not naturally suited or inclined to [leadership position]. The aristocracy knew that their magical blood entitled them to rule. The Europeans knew that Africans were unsuited to proper education. Men know that women are unsuited to rigorous logic. Historically, these claims have frequently been found untrue, and it's appropriate to be skeptical with the party in power claims that an identifiably different group "just doesn't want" some path to success or power.
Now, certainly there are differences between the sexes. I don't think anyone is questioning that. What I think we need to do is figure out to what extent extraordinarily subtle social pressures (the very forces that men claim to be insensitive to) might be skewing the data. Maybe girls play with dolls and boys play with trains because of built-in genetic programming. I only know that, when my friends' daughters go for the dolls, my friends coo just a little louder and say things like 'We didn't encourage that at all - she just naturally prefers the dolls." When their sons go for the dolls, they don't make any special noises of approval and say things like, "You know, he's got an uncle who's gay, and we're totally cool with that."
" Do you know how many terrorists that wanted to kill me I have come face to face with? 0.
Remove the "I have come face to face with" and that answer will certainly not be zero.
No, that answer will almost certainly still be zero. The answer to "Do you know how many terrorists want to kill a generic Westerner?" would not be zero, but who fucking cares? There's a few white people who would be happy to see a generic black person dead (and vice versa); there's a few Irish who would be happy to see a generic Englishman dead.
The relevant question is not whether there exist some people willing to kill your countrymen, because that will never be an empty set. The relevant question is whether those people are likely to actually kill more of your countrymen than moose, sharks, or bed sheets. The answer is that you should be much more frightened of bed sheets than either terrorists or sharks.
So taxes "set back the country's technological development by some 20 years", and when it's the internet the Slashdot crowd agrees.
But if it's anything else, taxes are so great. "Pay your share!"
Taxes are about degree: too much and you strangle the economy; too little and your country decays into anarchy. The "tax the rich" crowd see the government spending 50% more than it takes in, sees a bunch of people who save or invest 80% of their income (or loan it to the government), and thinks that's a bunch of money not circulating in the economy. Hoarding doesn't really create jobs, and discouraging hoarding isn't going to strangle anything.
Hungary is talking about imposing a $0.63/GB tax on internet traffic that currently costs something like $0.0002. That's like raising the (US) tax on gasoline to $9000/gallon. Not even the most aggressive sin-taxer would suggest that, because it would absolutely destroy the economy. Hungary is proposing to assess this tax on ISPs while denying them the power to raise their own prices. To sell bandwidth at $0.003/GB, or even $0.20/GB, and get taxed $0.60/GB, is not a viable business model.
To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 50%, or even 90%, like it was in the 1960s, still lets people take home more dollars when they earn more dollars. To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 5000% would be ridiculous, and no one has ever suggested it.
My question is why a $0.62 USD tax on 1GB when a $1/month of 1mb/s can transfer 300GB? $186 of tax on $1 of service. That's a 18600% tax.
That's the most shocking thing, to me, about this proposal. It's a HUGE potential cost. It would make 'modern' web pages, with their kilobytes (or megabytes) of never-executed, embedded javascript, massive stylesheets, fancy images, and ads-ads-ads, extremely expensive. I would expect every Hungarian to immediately cancel any streaming service and to turn off "Auto load images" and "precache links." I would expect that Hungarian web sites would return to 1990's style terse HTML. That could be a good way to drastically reduce bandwith use in any country that implemented it and dramatically increase the pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks.
Of course, applying it to the ISPs, rather than to the users, means that none of the bandwidth-conservation pressure will be applied to the people actually capable of affecting consumption, so it's likely to have no effect whatsoever. Except, maybe, to force all of the ISPs into bankruptcy
These are not really the largest ship ever built, just the largest container ships. The Knock Nevis was a full 200 feet longer and 30 feet wider, and many in-service ULCCs are larger. The triple-E has a capacity of 165k DWT, where the 'standard' size for VLCC supertankers is 280k DWT. The first Triple-E was launched in 2013, so I don't know why they're talking about this like it's a future event.
Yes, I know Bush did a lot of spying, but that's different than encryption. Did any of Bush's honchos run around saying people shouldn't use encryption because the government needs to see it? Or pushing for laws banning the use of encryption, or trying to force everyone to have government-approved encryption chips with NSA backdoors built-in?
The Bush administration was running on the hope that the secrecy of their widespread wiretapping and the technical hurdles to encryption would result in few people using encryption. Which, of course, is exactly how it worked. Once the public became aware that the government was monitoring literally every phone call, text, and email, the public backlash has greatly expanded encryption. Don't imagine that a republican administration would be any more willing to let you keep your communication private. They might use different tactics, but secretly putting back doors in software is not really any better than a public campaign to install government backdoors in software.
Personally, I think one of two things is going on here. 1) The administration actually is trying to gauge or influence people to accept the Glasshouse in exchange for "security." 2) Encryption is a red herring, and an actual counter based on a different technology/strategy has already implemented.
To add to this - probably best not to mention any patents you are holding, unless you believe this is specifically what the prospective employer is looking for. From the hiring perspective, I don't want to hire somebody who might reasonably be expected to tell me "I'm leaving to pursue my own independent business prospects now", and I sure don't want to hear "I'm leaving to become your competitor now".
If I hire someone, the last thing I want to hear is "I can write this program for you, but only if you license my existing patent." People leave jobs for greener pastures all the time. People have outside interests. If the job I'm offering can't hold your interest, then I'll find someone else. If you use your employment to try to extort IP fees from me, you better damn well expect to lose that employment. And probably expect a lawsuit to recoup any wages or signing bonus already paid.
If I tell you that my password contains 7 words (contained in my /usr/share/dict/words which is 99171 lines long), with a comma after the 3rd and a full stop at the end, you will still have to search through 94,339,343,028,749,422,154,850,189,341,666,091 (9.4E34) combinations - best get cracking.
If you also tell me that your password is a semantically valid English language phrase, then the vast majority of those 9e34 combinations can be excluded. So, "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is less random than "reconform uncharitable caldera poorly" The phrase is easier to remember; has more characters, but is drawn from a smaller space.
I would love to see a password validator that just runs some of the common dictionary attacks on the password, and tells the user how long it took to break. If it breaks within 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, reject the password. People are terrible at estimating randomness, but giving them direct feedback will help them understand what really makes a hard to guess password.
It's insane. It's not possible for my coworkers to remember them all, so they get written down, which certainly doesn't increase security. Many times people keep their passwords in their phones. Some write them down on paper and keep them in their wallet. Some folks leave them on notes in their cubicle.
The question whether this increases or reduces security depends on what kind of attack you expect. If you expect to be specifically targeted, by a human being that can gain access to your personal space in such a way as to read the notes on your keyboard or cubicle walls, then writing down passwords is Bad. Making a conspicuous display of user/pass combinations could certainly make you a specific 'target of opportunity.' But if your primary security concerns are compromise of some bank/website's database or scripted attacks on internet services, then it hardly matters if a physical representation of your password exists, and it really helps to have different codes.
I imagine that any decent system, once it finds a valid user/pass combination, promptly runs off and tries that everywhere: every bank, every ISP, every email service, every social networking site, every game server. Site-specific passwords will hugely reduce the damage due to a successful hack. Storing your user/pass combinations on a hackable device might not be the best solution, but for most of us semi-anonymous internet denizens, a system that a human would rapidly recognize may still defeat a script.
He has the device. He doesn't need investors. All he needs to do is hook up to the net and start selling energy.
He has, at best, a device that generates excess heat. That's a long way from generating excess electricity. Or energy in any saleable form. Now, one might argue that extracting the heat from such a device to run a steam turbine (or some such) is simply an engineering problem, but it's an engineering problem that has well-defined losses associated. If his excess heat isn't greater than the conversion losses, then his device is still pretty useless.
Hunting a troll down and gutting them, while not smart personally, might send a message to the rest of them. You're not as anonymous on the internet as you think you are.
Curiously, the troll believed to be targetting Medeleine McCann's family was found dead in a hotel earlier this week
What you have just described is the sole and singular reason corporations were formed in the first place. That is to limit the risk to an investor to the amount of money they have put into it. ie the value of the stocks they hold.
No, limited liability is a rather newer invention than incorporation. Only by about a millennium and a half.
Are you sure you're reading that wiki right, dude? It sure looks like they're claiming that Rome defined corporate entities as separate legal structures with their own liability in the mid 6th century. The unlimited liability the wiki refers to seems to be specific to UK law, and especially to companies created by royal charter, as the establishment of modern stock-based corporations was followed rapidly by the Limited Liability Act.
To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.
That's because you can't create permanent jobs from temporary funding. No individual researcher has the power to create a tenure-track position, because those positions are created by the university. In the case of state universities, tenure track positions come directly from the state budget. Over the last 40 years, states have uniformly decided that providing a college education is not the state's job. State allocations have not kept up with inflation or student body growth. Since 1980, universities have had to meet a 95% increase in student body growth in parallel with a 40% decline in state funding. They've done this by raising tuition and hiring non-tenure-track lecturers.
Research is amplifies that trend. Research grants are nominally to the university, but they will generally move with the principal investigator. Research grants actually take away from faculty's ability to teach classes, and the shortfall is made up by hiring temporary, non-tenure-track lecturers. So, now you have the state commitment to long-term faculty being bought out with short-term contracts.
If you want to increase full-time, tenure-track faculty growth, you need to get state taxpayers to commit to the socialistic principle of state-funded education, raise taxes, and hire faculty. Research contracts won't teach your children.
You don't need net neutrality for that. All you need is for the PUC/PSCs (for telcos) and the local Franchise Authorities (for cable) to mandate competitive wholesale access to last-mile facilities.
Your minimal-government-intervention solution is for the government to force the incumbent ISPs to lease their privately-owned infrastructure to their competitors, and at government-regulated prices? I am interested to see how you justify that as a lower regulatory burden than forbidding the prioritization of packets based on origin.
As far as I know anyone who occupies the public right of way, has to pay a fee for that usage: http://www.texaspolicy.com/cen...
Most cable companies pass those user fees on to customers explicitly, "Regulatory Recovery Fee." Obviously, all expenses of the cable company are eventually paid by subscribers, but they choose to account for those right-of-way fees in the same way as they account for the Universal Connectivity Fee and State Sales/911 Tax, as though it's not a part of their doing business.
You buy a connection that is supposed to be 10meg and if they purposely slow it down for any reason they are intentionally defraudint the consumer by not delivering the services they charged for. And the up to language does not save them because you can never get up to 10megs if they are purposely limiting it to 2 megs.
They can deliver you 10 MB/s even while they throttle the connection between you and Netflix to 2 MB/s or less. This is, in fact, what was done during the "negotiations." Bandwidth is throttled upstream of the client link, so the client, if he tried, could run a "speedtest" in parallel with his crappy, stuttering video, that would show healthy, full-bandwidth connection to other upstream sites. He could, if he tried, see a perfectly fluid Hulu video in one window, next to a crappy, stuttering Netflix video in another. The client has no way of knowing whether that's because Netflix's servers are overloaded, Netflix's ISP is overloaded, or if Verizon is throttling Netflix: they all look the same to the end viewer. This also makes it essentially impossible to determine fraud (aside from the fact that your contract with your ISP does not - can not - guarantee you a bandwidth to any particular service.
I don't see how "the ISP should treat every packet the same" is unreasonable. The ISP should guarantee latency, throughput, jitter, availability, etc. per their SLAs. The end user can do their own QOS and decide whether they want netflix or remote robotic surgeries to take priority. If the user needs a stronger guarantee, they should get a better connection with a better SLA. None of this is illegal or unreasonable.
That's fine for the client ISP and the server ISP, but their packets will traverse an unknown number of intermediates whose networks are completely out of the control of server, server's ISP, client, and client's ISP. In fact, one of the internet design principles is that the physical network is unreliable and subject to congestion. This is unavoidable: traffic grows to fill the available bandwidth, and during times of peak demand, every network can be congested
This is why the internet has different protocols. Compare Email and VOIP: for VOIP it is essential that each packet be delivered, in order, and as quickly as possible. Delays of even 100ms create audible distortion. For email, your message is still understandable if it's delivered 5 minutes late. SMTP has that resiliency built-in: if it fails to deliver a packet right now, it will keep trying, periodically, for a day. Eventually, it will find a time when the network is uncontested and it can transfer that terabyte attachment. If your VOIP packet has to wait around until SMTP has delivered that attachment, you're going to think someone has hung up on you.
I know, now that everything is a browser plug-in, that it's easy to forget that HTTP is only one of many protocols on the internet. It's completely appropriate prioritize RTP/RTCP (VoIP) over SMTP or FTP. The problem is when an internet middleman decides it should be able to prioritize YouTube's HTTP over Hulu's HTTP, just because YouTube has paid a ransom.
As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
No, that's not ok. Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery. If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose. It's not the job of every internet middleman between here and Beijing to rank the moral value of each IP packet or source.
Note that this is different from an ISP determining that an email source is "spam" and blacklisting that source.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ?
Aside from the technical fact that the client only finds the ads in the web page text, it is (again) not appropriate for the internet middlemen to determine whether the client is more interested in images from doubleclick or images from slashdot. If the client chooses to prioritize which images it requests, that's a completely different question. The point of net neutrality is that, within a recognized communication stream, people who transfer the data should not look at the data to determine whether or how quickly to forward it. The post office accepts your letter, looks at the postage you've paid, and delivers it. It will deliver my Priority Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes, but it will not deliver Netflix Media Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes.
And what kind of "legitimate packet priorization" would that be? Because I can't really think of any right now. If you have trouble delivering your real time dependent services, you can either up your bandwidth or not offer them rather than keep overselling 1:1000 and throttle everything else into oblivion.
Legitimate packet prioritization is based on the service, not on the vendor. "Quality of Service" is already part of TCP/IP, and lets routers know how to balance latency and throughput. For example, it is more important to deliver VOIP or streaming video packets on time than to deliver SYN/ACK packets quickly. You should let VOIP packets skip ahead of SYN packets or FTP packets. However, it is not appropriate to let Verizon VOIP packets skip ahead of Nextiva VOIP packets, just because Verizon has paid for that prioritization.
Common carrier rules mean that the carrier can't discriminate among its clients, they can still distinguish between "First class" and "Book rate" services.
Here's the problem: the person who takes your order is not the person who delivers your order. There needs to be some way for server A to identify you to server B. Possible solutions:
Assign a number to customer, and expect customer to answer to that number. Problems: depersonalizing, customers forget their numbers, "thirteen" sounds like "thirty"
Let the customer assign an identifier for his order, providing some illusion of personal service. Problems: customer identifier may be confusing, customers may get annoyed if server A does not use the mystical spelling customer has in mind, servers may spend more time massaging the identifier than actually preparing product, server B may not pronounce the same identifier as server A recorded
Photograph customers for product delivery. Problems: privacy fanatics, bad pictures, servers turn incidental photodocumentation into DMV-like picture-taking ritual
In sum, there is no good way to make high-volume service look like personal service. People pretty quickly see through efforts to disguise it. While many people are willing to play along, occasional servers and customers will both manipulate these systems for their personal amusement. Misspelling your name is the barista equivalent of building paper-clip animals. Giving a fake name is the equivalent of painting your stapler purple. Try not to get bent out of shape when they call you "Susquehannah" instead of "Susquanna" or "Todd" instead of "Tom": they aren't trying to annoy you; they aren't trying to learn your name; They aren't likely to remember you next time; the content of your name is irrelevant to the process; and and effort to "get it right" only delays people around you.