Considering that the neutrinos are generated as a direct product of the nuclear reactions which produce the light and heat which keep us all alive, reactions which to the best of our knowledge (which could be wrong, but it's a long shot) proceed at a rate which changes only very slowly over time, I think it's reasonable to consider the solar neutrino flux as being essentially constant. Especially when carbon dating is only useful over timespans of tens of thousands of years, and the observed error is only about 0.1%.
I'm guessing you haven't played many modern shooters over DSL which often provides significantly less peak bandwidth than 250GB/month, which people seem to manage to do without any problems at all.
This seems to be one of those things that "everybody knows" but which isn't actually true. I hit up comcast.com and can't find any mention that their internet offerings are "unlimited".
Oh please. Phone calls use something in the neighborhood of 20 kilobits per second of bandwidth. They are utterly insignificant consumers of network resources. Come back when you're not such a frickin moron.
If you have a contract with them, then they shouldn't be able to apply their cap to you until the contract runs out. If you don't have a contract, you have absolutely no right to expect them to give you the same service next month as they gave you this month.
Why does everybody bring up the example of gaming? Are you all that fucking clueless than you think games take up enough bandwidth to add up to 1Mbit of continuous 24/7 data traffic?
If you get DDoSed, I imagine your provider will work something out with you. After all, you were the victim of an illegal act. Get the police involved.
As for the P2P scenario, that's just ridiculous. The worst that will happen is that you'll be the target of a bunch of TCP SYN packets, which will be refused or ignored by your computer. If the other side is particularly persistent then you may end up getting a bunch of these. But there's no way that it's going to amount to any visible fraction of a 250GB monthly limit. No P2P protocol that I'm aware of will continue to blast data at an IP address that is no longer responding, or is actively refusing connections.
I'm pretty sure that there is a significant minority (majority?) on this site which absolutely will not be happy in any capacity until their internet connection is faster than their LAN, has no cap whatsoever, and is free.
How do you think broadcast/multicast from a small number of prearranged sources impacts the network differently from unicast to and from arbitrary destinations?
And if they continue to advertise it as "unlimited" then you have a good reason to complain. Until that happens, it just makes you look like a turd. Complaining about things before people actually do them never does anything but reflect badly on the complainer.
3) You make it sound like throwing away an obscene amount of money with virtually no results to show for it is a good thing. If this is an intelligence contest, I'd award points to the guys who got out of that game as early as possible.
I can be argued that the sharp discontinuities produced by war are not drivers of overall progress, and in fact take away from it in the long run. There are really two possibilities (at least):
War pushes more funding, people, effort, and motivation into research, resulting in the obvious consequences. (This is effectively what you're claiming.)
War pushes researchers out of long-term pie-in-the-sky theoretical areas and into instant-gratification practical areas which produce the things that the generals need yesterday. This gives the appearance of vastly advancing the state of the art, while actually doing nothing for overall progress, or even hurting it.
As a practical example, consider the Manhattan Project. These high powered physicists spent years as effectively glorified engineers. A lot of really practical knowledge was gained on nuclear technology, which drove both bomb and power technology for decades to follow. But no new physics were discovered there, and that is the real driver in the long term.
Now of course you could go the other way. You could say that physics has advanced as much as it has since 1945 because these practical results gave the theorists something to strive for. It's certainly not cut and dried. I don't really even know which way I lean on the question. But it's interesting to consider whether the sharp upticks in technological advancement due to war are really as beneficial as they look at first glance.
Yeah, don't give me these "what if" scenarios, give me your actual usage.
250GB is one sixth of what you'd get if you used comcast's low-end connection at full blast, 24/7, with no gaps, slowdowns, or breaks. In other words, it's five days straight of non-stop downloading at maximum speed.
I really doubt you're coming anywhere close to the limit. Will you exceed it someday? Probably, demand always goes up. But then once that happens, perhaps you should consider paying extra for your extra usage.
As long as Comcast is up-front about the limit, I have no problem with it. If you start to go over, pay them more money! The idea that internet connections shouldn't cost more just because you use them more makes no sense to me. If you're going to download over 250GB of stuff to support your television habit, then perhaps you should be paying more money than granny down the street who only uses it for e-mail.
Bandwidth is only a zero-sum game when it's at 100%. If a cable is sitting at 50%, then using more of it has an incremental cost of zero. To put it another way: each byte you use at peak time costs a whole lot, but each byte you use at off-peak time is free. This severely complicates pricing and cost analysis.
I agree that the 250GB cap is exceedingly generous, however. Just so long as they're up-front about it and no longer try to sell this as "unlimited", I have no problem with it whatsoever.
Have you actually measured your usage? I'd be pretty surprised if it really was over 250GB. If you have a 4Mbit connection then you'd have to be at 25% utilization for the entire month to hit it. If you're all torrenting stuff constantly then I could see it, but there's no way you're going to hit it with just streaming video, music, and games.
Australians and New Zealanders seem to be the only people on the planet who think that the entire world's internet connections should be as bad as theirs. Why is that?
iTunes doesn't contact DRM servers every time you play a file. It contacts them once, when you purchase and download a file. If you move the file to a new computer which has never seen your iTunes account before, then you have to contact the servers again to authorize that computer on your iTunes account.
So you'd be prevented from moving the files to a new computer, but you wouldn't be prevented from playing them back on the equipment that you had already authorized.
Cows are pretty damn big. And GPS does not penetrate water very well at all. You can have signal trouble simply from a forest canopy. A bunch of cow is going to cause all sorts of trouble.
And what kind of batteries are going to power a GPS unit for years?
You appear to be missing the fact that sending money to Washington, DC is not optional. When you stop doing it, large men with guns come and take you away.
I spelled out the alternative in the rest of my post, which you conveniently did not quote and perhaps did not read.
You accept the cert the first time you connect (with an option to verify the fingerprint OOB). Each time afterwards, the browser compares the fingerprint with what you saw previously. If the fingerprint ever fails, red alert, alarms sound, screen flashes, etc.
Yes, you still have the risk that someone does an MITM attack the first time you connect. But that's very tough to arrange, and you'll still be detected on subsequent connections unless you keep up your MITM attack constantly forever.
In most parts of the world, the difference between true and magnetic north is under 15 degrees. Not the sort of difference you're going to be picking up when looking at cows on aerial photography.
But in any case, my street is aligned with neither. It simply happens to be pointed in that direction at this particular location. But it most certainly wasn't laid out to point straight north or anything of the sort.
I don't think anyone thinks that self-signed certs should be blindly accepted.
What should be done is that self-signed certs should be acceptable, with the right handling. The way ssh does this is a good one; it alerts you when you initially connect, and throws up an extremely loud and nasty warning if the host's cert has changed from the last time you connect. This gives you the opportunity to verify the cert out of band if you should care to, and forces an attacker to hit you on your very first access to a given site.
Properly signed certs should be given higher priority, but a self -signed cert is still vastly better than nothing. The problem is that current browsers treat self-signed certs as being the worst of the three, when in reality they're much better than a naked HTTP connection.
You're probably right. Which is why an explicit law would be a good thing, even if a judge is already likely to throw out the clause. If it's codified in law instead of just legal precedent, people are much more likely to know and stand up for their rights.
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Considering that the neutrinos are generated as a direct product of the nuclear reactions which produce the light and heat which keep us all alive, reactions which to the best of our knowledge (which could be wrong, but it's a long shot) proceed at a rate which changes only very slowly over time, I think it's reasonable to consider the solar neutrino flux as being essentially constant. Especially when carbon dating is only useful over timespans of tens of thousands of years, and the observed error is only about 0.1%.
I'm guessing you haven't played many modern shooters over DSL which often provides significantly less peak bandwidth than 250GB/month, which people seem to manage to do without any problems at all.
This seems to be one of those things that "everybody knows" but which isn't actually true. I hit up comcast.com and can't find any mention that their internet offerings are "unlimited".
Oh please. Phone calls use something in the neighborhood of 20 kilobits per second of bandwidth. They are utterly insignificant consumers of network resources. Come back when you're not such a frickin moron.
If you have a contract with them, then they shouldn't be able to apply their cap to you until the contract runs out. If you don't have a contract, you have absolutely no right to expect them to give you the same service next month as they gave you this month.
Why does everybody bring up the example of gaming? Are you all that fucking clueless than you think games take up enough bandwidth to add up to 1Mbit of continuous 24/7 data traffic?
If you get DDoSed, I imagine your provider will work something out with you. After all, you were the victim of an illegal act. Get the police involved.
As for the P2P scenario, that's just ridiculous. The worst that will happen is that you'll be the target of a bunch of TCP SYN packets, which will be refused or ignored by your computer. If the other side is particularly persistent then you may end up getting a bunch of these. But there's no way that it's going to amount to any visible fraction of a 250GB monthly limit. No P2P protocol that I'm aware of will continue to blast data at an IP address that is no longer responding, or is actively refusing connections.
Ta-da! Everybody happy.
You must be new here!
I'm pretty sure that there is a significant minority (majority?) on this site which absolutely will not be happy in any capacity until their internet connection is faster than their LAN, has no cap whatsoever, and is free.
How do you think broadcast/multicast from a small number of prearranged sources impacts the network differently from unicast to and from arbitrary destinations?
And if they continue to advertise it as "unlimited" then you have a good reason to complain. Until that happens, it just makes you look like a turd. Complaining about things before people actually do them never does anything but reflect badly on the complainer.
3) You make it sound like throwing away an obscene amount of money with virtually no results to show for it is a good thing. If this is an intelligence contest, I'd award points to the guys who got out of that game as early as possible.
I can be argued that the sharp discontinuities produced by war are not drivers of overall progress, and in fact take away from it in the long run. There are really two possibilities (at least):
As a practical example, consider the Manhattan Project. These high powered physicists spent years as effectively glorified engineers. A lot of really practical knowledge was gained on nuclear technology, which drove both bomb and power technology for decades to follow. But no new physics were discovered there, and that is the real driver in the long term.
Now of course you could go the other way. You could say that physics has advanced as much as it has since 1945 because these practical results gave the theorists something to strive for. It's certainly not cut and dried. I don't really even know which way I lean on the question. But it's interesting to consider whether the sharp upticks in technological advancement due to war are really as beneficial as they look at first glance.
Yeah, don't give me these "what if" scenarios, give me your actual usage.
250GB is one sixth of what you'd get if you used comcast's low-end connection at full blast, 24/7, with no gaps, slowdowns, or breaks. In other words, it's five days straight of non-stop downloading at maximum speed.
I really doubt you're coming anywhere close to the limit. Will you exceed it someday? Probably, demand always goes up. But then once that happens, perhaps you should consider paying extra for your extra usage.
As long as Comcast is up-front about the limit, I have no problem with it. If you start to go over, pay them more money! The idea that internet connections shouldn't cost more just because you use them more makes no sense to me. If you're going to download over 250GB of stuff to support your television habit, then perhaps you should be paying more money than granny down the street who only uses it for e-mail.
Bandwidth is only a zero-sum game when it's at 100%. If a cable is sitting at 50%, then using more of it has an incremental cost of zero. To put it another way: each byte you use at peak time costs a whole lot, but each byte you use at off-peak time is free. This severely complicates pricing and cost analysis.
I agree that the 250GB cap is exceedingly generous, however. Just so long as they're up-front about it and no longer try to sell this as "unlimited", I have no problem with it whatsoever.
Have you actually measured your usage? I'd be pretty surprised if it really was over 250GB. If you have a 4Mbit connection then you'd have to be at 25% utilization for the entire month to hit it. If you're all torrenting stuff constantly then I could see it, but there's no way you're going to hit it with just streaming video, music, and games.
Australians and New Zealanders seem to be the only people on the planet who think that the entire world's internet connections should be as bad as theirs. Why is that?
Mods on crack, I suppose. Anyhow I appreciate your reply. Such common politeness is all too rare on this site.
iTunes doesn't contact DRM servers every time you play a file. It contacts them once, when you purchase and download a file. If you move the file to a new computer which has never seen your iTunes account before, then you have to contact the servers again to authorize that computer on your iTunes account.
So you'd be prevented from moving the files to a new computer, but you wouldn't be prevented from playing them back on the equipment that you had already authorized.
Cows are pretty damn big. And GPS does not penetrate water very well at all. You can have signal trouble simply from a forest canopy. A bunch of cow is going to cause all sorts of trouble.
And what kind of batteries are going to power a GPS unit for years?
You appear to be missing the fact that sending money to Washington, DC is not optional. When you stop doing it, large men with guns come and take you away.
I spelled out the alternative in the rest of my post, which you conveniently did not quote and perhaps did not read.
You accept the cert the first time you connect (with an option to verify the fingerprint OOB). Each time afterwards, the browser compares the fingerprint with what you saw previously. If the fingerprint ever fails, red alert, alarms sound, screen flashes, etc.
Yes, you still have the risk that someone does an MITM attack the first time you connect. But that's very tough to arrange, and you'll still be detected on subsequent connections unless you keep up your MITM attack constantly forever.
In most parts of the world, the difference between true and magnetic north is under 15 degrees. Not the sort of difference you're going to be picking up when looking at cows on aerial photography.
But in any case, my street is aligned with neither. It simply happens to be pointed in that direction at this particular location. But it most certainly wasn't laid out to point straight north or anything of the sort.
I don't think anyone thinks that self-signed certs should be blindly accepted.
What should be done is that self-signed certs should be acceptable, with the right handling. The way ssh does this is a good one; it alerts you when you initially connect, and throws up an extremely loud and nasty warning if the host's cert has changed from the last time you connect. This gives you the opportunity to verify the cert out of band if you should care to, and forces an attacker to hit you on your very first access to a given site.
Properly signed certs should be given higher priority, but a self -signed cert is still vastly better than nothing. The problem is that current browsers treat self-signed certs as being the worst of the three, when in reality they're much better than a naked HTTP connection.
How is this GPS device going to receive a signal through several feet of cow, and what's going to power it?
You're probably right. Which is why an explicit law would be a good thing, even if a judge is already likely to throw out the clause. If it's codified in law instead of just legal precedent, people are much more likely to know and stand up for their rights.