Sounds like you know what you're doing, and it's sad how rare this kind of behavior is.
It would be great to have a study which takes this sort of thing into account. You hear things like "adjusting the radio is as dangerous as talking on a cell phone", with no qualifications. I'm sure if you're staring at the radio and twiddling the dial then it's worse, but that's certainly not what I do. And I'm sure that you and I are much safer than the average person while talking on the phone in the car, due to being willing to stop the conversation when needed.
Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources?
Yes, god damn it! Give me the choice, at least! If you want simple computing, fine, but why should the device be forcibly limited using code signing? Have a little switch somewhere that lets me load any software I want onto the thing, then I can hack around the limits I don't want. But instead I'm only allowed to load Apple-approved code onto the device, crippling it far beyond what the hardware would otherwise allow.
And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.
Yeah, those are great for the two or three classes of applications that can actually use that technique. They're total crap for background music playing or maintaining an ssh connection or any of a dozen other tasks that maintaining a real persistent connection would be useful for.
You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.
I can't speak for the other guy, but I watched it live. The iPhone is great hardware and a great OS but it's completely crippled by artificial restrictions.
What makes you think that the class of drivers who are unable to prioritize tasks properly are limited exclusively to those using a mobile phone whilst driving?
Absolutely nothing at all! There are plenty of worthless drivers out there, both with and without cell phones.
However, most people using cell phones on the road will be this worthless sort. Why? Well, first, because most drivers are this worthless sort, period. Secondly, because people like you and I will generally make short calls out of necessity, whereas this worthless sort of driver will make constant long calls. Thus the odds are extremely high that any given driver on a cell phone is a worthless moron who can't prioritize.
Yes, there are people who can do it responsibly, but they make up a vanishingly small proportion of the population.
I think the problem you are having though is you're assuming that when I say 'overselling' I mean selling more bandwidth than $total_isp_bandwidth/$number_of_customers. I'm not, I mean selling more bandwidth than they can provide, given normal usage patterns.
Well then that's your problem for abusing the terminology. This is not what "overselling" means. Please use a different word.
Actually, your sperm does not have the potential to become human. It has the ability to fertilize an egg and turn it into a zygote, but neither an egg nor a sperm will ever become human.
Nonsense. You can say that a sperm can't become human without an egg. And I can say that an embryo can't become human without its mother. In both cases, take the object away from what it needs and it will die, never having become human. So there has to be something else to distinguish them, if you're going to distinguish them. What is it?
Heres a question: What makes it wrong to kill you? You have a heartbeat and brain activity, but at the end of the day we're all just blobs of cells. Science hasn't discovered any sort of 'soul,' so what scientific justification separates you from an embryo, cattle, or the roach? Besides humanity in the case of the last two and current form in the case of the embryo, not a whole lot.
That's a pretty damn difficult question, and I don't have an answer. You'll notice that I'm not making any claims here as to where to draw the line. I just think that not only do I not have the answer, but nobody else does either.
All that is required to make something wrong to kill is its humanity. Basically, as someone way up in the thread said, if its got human DNA, its human.
Except that we thoroughly debunked that earlier when noting that cancer has human DNA. You accepted this when you added the criteria of having a heartbeat and brain activity. Do those three things, human DNA, heartbeat, and brain activity, then make up your full criteria for considering something to be "human"?
I'm not saying that I'm safe while other people are not. I'm saying that there are things you can do to limit your distraction and reduce the danger of the activity. The problem is that people who talk on cell phones while driving by and large do not do these things. Some of them do, and are thereby reasonably safe, and I have no problem with them.
It fails with more than one person in the car, it fails if more than one person owns the car, it fails if someone who doesn't own the car is driving it. In short, it fails.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Seriously, I would like to know. The principle is extremely simple, and should be well within the grasp of anyone who can operate a computer well enough to post on Slashdot.
Let me explain it to you.
Let's say you're selling 10Mbit connections. I choose this number simply because it's a nice, round number and easy to work with. The same principle applies to any speed.
Now, let's say you have 1000 customers. The theoretical maximum bandwidth requirement with 1000 customers is 10GBit. Now you call up your upstream ISP and ask them how much for a 10GBit connection. After you collect yourself off the ground, you start looking for a way to reduce the price, because that 10GBit connection is going to cost far more than you can possibly afford.
So you look at your network use statistics. You discover that even at the peak times, when people are using their connections the most, your connections are still only 10% used. Lots of people aren't home at peak times, and lots of people who are home don't use their full connection. You never go above 10% usage even at the busiest times of the day, so you get to thinking.
What if you buy a 1GBit connection and serve everyone with that? Actually let's make it a 1.2GBit connection just so you have some headroom. With the original plan of a 10GBit connection, you'd be paying an untenable amount of money and you'd have 9GBit of bandwidth sitting there idle 24/7. With a 1.2GBit connection, you still have 200Mbit sitting idle ready to take up the slack even at the worst times of the day, and you save a pile of money, which you can then pass on to your customers.
(If you don't believe the "pass on to your customers" bit, ask yourself this: how much would your DSL or cable connection cost if the ISP provisioned bandwidth equal to the full theoretical maximum? Hint: it's not going to be two digits, probably not even three. Call your local telco and ask for a T1 line and you'll start to see just how much savings does get passed on to you with DSL and cable.)
So you're serving 1000 10Mbit customers off a 1.2GBit line. Is there anything wrong with this? Hell no! You have enough bandwidth to support actual usage. Any one of your customers can start downloading full blast at 10MBit with no problems. What they can't do is have everyone do this at the same time, but that doesn't matter, because they never do this.
This is overselling. This is what everyone criticizes here. And it's nonsense. It's standard, it works great, and it saves everyone a whole pile of money.
The problem comes in a few years later, when usage starts to rise and suddenly you begin to exceed that 1.2GBit link. Now you have three options. First, you can upgrade the link. This is the normal thing to do, and it's what ISPs usually do in this situation. Second, you can cut back on usage. Raise prices, introduce plans with quotas, whatever you need to do. Of course you can't do this to existing customers until their contracts run out, but that's fine, because people behave predictably in large numbers; your usage will grow smoothly with clear long-term trends, giving you plenty of time to adjust.
Third, you can continue to advertise "unlimited" connections at the same price as always, but implement various underhanded schemes to attack the heavy users. This is what Comcast and others are doing. This is not OK.
Overselling is fine. You can call it "selling bandwidth they don't have" if you like, but that just exposes your ignorance. The problem is when usage exceeds capacity. And even this is not a problem if they take one of the two reasonable courses of action in response to it. The real problem is when usage exceeds capacity and they refuse to upgrade and refuse to change their pricing structure, but instead carry on a campaign of false advertising and fraud to keep usage down.
You drastically overestimate the driving population. Forcing people into a manual transmission car will merely result in them letting go of the steering wheel to shift, or if they're particularly conscientious, using their cell phone hand to temporarily stabilize the wheel while they shift with their free hand.
How about a ban on cell-phone use for anyone who has less than, say, 5 years driving experience, *any* demerit points, or was responsible for accident within the last decade?
How do you plan to enforce this? Are the police going to look for people on the phone, and then run every single license plate to see if they fall within the "banned" category? What about cars owned by more than one person, or being driven by a friend?
Grandparent's problem happens when neither party is willing to take control of the conversation. If you want to make a quick call, you must be willing to take control. Say what you need to say, hear what you need to hear, and then tell the other person that you need to go.
Most of the people I communicate with either don't know how to read text messages or don't like them, so it's not an option in most cases anyway. Text messaging is also godawful expensive, so I just don't see the point unless you're in an environment where you literally cannot speak or hear.
People who use their phones while driving don't grasp how dangerous it is.
I'll tune my radio on the road, but only when I'm in a clear patch when nothing is happening at the moment. I also take as little time as possible to do so; all of my favorite stations are programmed into buttons, so it just takes a moment, and doesn't take much attention.
The same is true with my passengers. When the driving gets tough, I will stop talking to them, often in mid-sentence.
But people who use cell phones on the road don't seem to understand these ideas. They will frequently place the cell phone first, driving second. They won't interrupt their conversation for a difficult section of driving, they won't try to minimize their conversation, and to compound it all they frequently have only one hand free for actual driving, which means less steering control and poor or nonexistent use of turn signals.
Really? Mine eats every insect it can catch. It seems like a logical thing to me. They're small enough to handle. They move in ways which fascinate cats. They're reasonably nutritious and, I assume, taste good if you're a cat. And they're crunchy! He is particularly fond of bugs which both walk and fly, he'll leave them on the ground and wait for them to take off, then bat them out of the air. Eventually all I'll find of the insect is a leg or a wing.
A six-week-old embryo is just a blob, not identifiably human in any way. It has the potential to become human, but so does my sperm, and nobody ever gets upset when I kill hundreds of millions of those. It has a heartbeat and brain activity, but so do all sorts of animals that nobody has a problem with killing. (Well, nobody except the Jainists, anyway.) Is it the combination of human potential and heartbeat/brain activity that makes it bad to kill? If so, why? If not, what else is required?
You might be aborting Einstein. Or you might be aborting Hitler. Given history, I'd say the odds are better that you're giving the axe to an evil fuck than that you're murdering a future genius.
What if you were aborted because you have a "defect"? That would have sucked huh? I am sure your friends and loved ones would think so now, after you have bee a part of their life.
This is a stupid argument. Replace it with "What if your parents used a condom?" Does this then become a convincing argument against birth control? Hell no! So it's not a convincing argument against abortion either.
Remember, for every child who is conceived, about half a billion sperm died in the same event, most of which could have become perfectly viable children if given the chance. It's nonsensical to use "what if you hadn't been born?" as an argument in this context. There have been trillions of "unborn" potential children, ultimately no different from the proposed situation.
I'm pro-choice, but I can see why anti-abortion advocates hold their position. But this sure isn't it.
So does that cockroach I just fed to my cat. What's your point?
If it were as easy as saying that entities with a heartbeat and brain activity are human and deserving of protection, this whole debate wouldn't even happen.
I've used Tor from China (Beijing, specifically) a lot and never had any problems with it. Well, I should qualify that. I've had a lot of problems with it being slow because of crappy, crappy Chinese internet connections, which Tor tends to exacerbate, but I've never had any problems with Tor being blocked. I recommend that you try it again. And remember to wait a while after you turn it on, it can take Tor several minutes to gain enough information about the anonymity network to allow communication through it.
True, enough, but the only way for the one to happen without the other is if the other guesses stay equally far away but hop back and forth on either side of the correct value. However it happens, it's something that you would not expect to see.
You're confusing "random" with "random along an even distribution". There are many random distributions, and most of them won't put the probability of 1 equal to the probability of 1 million.
From my naive grasp of statistics I'd expect an individual's guesses to be randomly distributed along a bell curve, with the center of the bell curve based on that person's knowledge of the situation. The more he knows, the more accurate his guesses will be, and the closer the center of that curve will be to reality.
But with this naive view, the first guess will be as good as any other. This study shows people getting closer to the true value with subsequent guesses, which does not make sense to me.
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Sounds like you know what you're doing, and it's sad how rare this kind of behavior is.
It would be great to have a study which takes this sort of thing into account. You hear things like "adjusting the radio is as dangerous as talking on a cell phone", with no qualifications. I'm sure if you're staring at the radio and twiddling the dial then it's worse, but that's certainly not what I do. And I'm sure that you and I are much safer than the average person while talking on the phone in the car, due to being willing to stop the conversation when needed.
Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources?
Yes, god damn it! Give me the choice, at least! If you want simple computing, fine, but why should the device be forcibly limited using code signing? Have a little switch somewhere that lets me load any software I want onto the thing, then I can hack around the limits I don't want. But instead I'm only allowed to load Apple-approved code onto the device, crippling it far beyond what the hardware would otherwise allow.
And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.
Yeah, those are great for the two or three classes of applications that can actually use that technique. They're total crap for background music playing or maintaining an ssh connection or any of a dozen other tasks that maintaining a real persistent connection would be useful for.
You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.
I can't speak for the other guy, but I watched it live. The iPhone is great hardware and a great OS but it's completely crippled by artificial restrictions.
What makes you think that the class of drivers who are unable to prioritize tasks properly are limited exclusively to those using a mobile phone whilst driving?
Absolutely nothing at all! There are plenty of worthless drivers out there, both with and without cell phones.
However, most people using cell phones on the road will be this worthless sort. Why? Well, first, because most drivers are this worthless sort, period. Secondly, because people like you and I will generally make short calls out of necessity, whereas this worthless sort of driver will make constant long calls. Thus the odds are extremely high that any given driver on a cell phone is a worthless moron who can't prioritize.
Yes, there are people who can do it responsibly, but they make up a vanishingly small proportion of the population.
I think the problem you are having though is you're assuming that when I say 'overselling' I mean selling more bandwidth than $total_isp_bandwidth/$number_of_customers. I'm not, I mean selling more bandwidth than they can provide, given normal usage patterns.
Well then that's your problem for abusing the terminology. This is not what "overselling" means. Please use a different word.
Actually, your sperm does not have the potential to become human. It has the ability to fertilize an egg and turn it into a zygote, but neither an egg nor a sperm will ever become human.
Nonsense. You can say that a sperm can't become human without an egg. And I can say that an embryo can't become human without its mother. In both cases, take the object away from what it needs and it will die, never having become human. So there has to be something else to distinguish them, if you're going to distinguish them. What is it?
Heres a question: What makes it wrong to kill you? You have a heartbeat and brain activity, but at the end of the day we're all just blobs of cells. Science hasn't discovered any sort of 'soul,' so what scientific justification separates you from an embryo, cattle, or the roach? Besides humanity in the case of the last two and current form in the case of the embryo, not a whole lot.
That's a pretty damn difficult question, and I don't have an answer. You'll notice that I'm not making any claims here as to where to draw the line. I just think that not only do I not have the answer, but nobody else does either.
All that is required to make something wrong to kill is its humanity. Basically, as someone way up in the thread said, if its got human DNA, its human.
Except that we thoroughly debunked that earlier when noting that cancer has human DNA. You accepted this when you added the criteria of having a heartbeat and brain activity. Do those three things, human DNA, heartbeat, and brain activity, then make up your full criteria for considering something to be "human"?
You know what else is dangerous? Driving.
I'm not saying that I'm safe while other people are not. I'm saying that there are things you can do to limit your distraction and reduce the danger of the activity. The problem is that people who talk on cell phones while driving by and large do not do these things. Some of them do, and are thereby reasonably safe, and I have no problem with them.
It fails with more than one person in the car, it fails if more than one person owns the car, it fails if someone who doesn't own the car is driving it. In short, it fails.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Seriously, I would like to know. The principle is extremely simple, and should be well within the grasp of anyone who can operate a computer well enough to post on Slashdot.
Let me explain it to you.
Let's say you're selling 10Mbit connections. I choose this number simply because it's a nice, round number and easy to work with. The same principle applies to any speed.
Now, let's say you have 1000 customers. The theoretical maximum bandwidth requirement with 1000 customers is 10GBit. Now you call up your upstream ISP and ask them how much for a 10GBit connection. After you collect yourself off the ground, you start looking for a way to reduce the price, because that 10GBit connection is going to cost far more than you can possibly afford.
So you look at your network use statistics. You discover that even at the peak times, when people are using their connections the most, your connections are still only 10% used. Lots of people aren't home at peak times, and lots of people who are home don't use their full connection. You never go above 10% usage even at the busiest times of the day, so you get to thinking.
What if you buy a 1GBit connection and serve everyone with that? Actually let's make it a 1.2GBit connection just so you have some headroom. With the original plan of a 10GBit connection, you'd be paying an untenable amount of money and you'd have 9GBit of bandwidth sitting there idle 24/7. With a 1.2GBit connection, you still have 200Mbit sitting idle ready to take up the slack even at the worst times of the day, and you save a pile of money, which you can then pass on to your customers.
(If you don't believe the "pass on to your customers" bit, ask yourself this: how much would your DSL or cable connection cost if the ISP provisioned bandwidth equal to the full theoretical maximum? Hint: it's not going to be two digits, probably not even three. Call your local telco and ask for a T1 line and you'll start to see just how much savings does get passed on to you with DSL and cable.)
So you're serving 1000 10Mbit customers off a 1.2GBit line. Is there anything wrong with this? Hell no! You have enough bandwidth to support actual usage. Any one of your customers can start downloading full blast at 10MBit with no problems. What they can't do is have everyone do this at the same time, but that doesn't matter, because they never do this.
This is overselling. This is what everyone criticizes here. And it's nonsense. It's standard, it works great, and it saves everyone a whole pile of money.
The problem comes in a few years later, when usage starts to rise and suddenly you begin to exceed that 1.2GBit link. Now you have three options. First, you can upgrade the link. This is the normal thing to do, and it's what ISPs usually do in this situation. Second, you can cut back on usage. Raise prices, introduce plans with quotas, whatever you need to do. Of course you can't do this to existing customers until their contracts run out, but that's fine, because people behave predictably in large numbers; your usage will grow smoothly with clear long-term trends, giving you plenty of time to adjust.
Third, you can continue to advertise "unlimited" connections at the same price as always, but implement various underhanded schemes to attack the heavy users. This is what Comcast and others are doing. This is not OK.
Overselling is fine. You can call it "selling bandwidth they don't have" if you like, but that just exposes your ignorance. The problem is when usage exceeds capacity. And even this is not a problem if they take one of the two reasonable courses of action in response to it. The real problem is when usage exceeds capacity and they refuse to upgrade and refuse to change their pricing structure, but instead carry on a campaign of false advertising and fraud to keep usage down.
I didn't say they won't know how, I said that they will deliberately take stupid actions so that they can stay on the phone. There's a big difference.
You drastically overestimate the driving population. Forcing people into a manual transmission car will merely result in them letting go of the steering wheel to shift, or if they're particularly conscientious, using their cell phone hand to temporarily stabilize the wheel while they shift with their free hand.
How about a ban on cell-phone use for anyone who has less than, say, 5 years driving experience, *any* demerit points, or was responsible for accident within the last decade?
How do you plan to enforce this? Are the police going to look for people on the phone, and then run every single license plate to see if they fall within the "banned" category? What about cars owned by more than one person, or being driven by a friend?
Grandparent's problem happens when neither party is willing to take control of the conversation. If you want to make a quick call, you must be willing to take control. Say what you need to say, hear what you need to hear, and then tell the other person that you need to go.
Most of the people I communicate with either don't know how to read text messages or don't like them, so it's not an option in most cases anyway. Text messaging is also godawful expensive, so I just don't see the point unless you're in an environment where you literally cannot speak or hear.
People who use their phones while driving don't grasp how dangerous it is.
I'll tune my radio on the road, but only when I'm in a clear patch when nothing is happening at the moment. I also take as little time as possible to do so; all of my favorite stations are programmed into buttons, so it just takes a moment, and doesn't take much attention.
The same is true with my passengers. When the driving gets tough, I will stop talking to them, often in mid-sentence.
But people who use cell phones on the road don't seem to understand these ideas. They will frequently place the cell phone first, driving second. They won't interrupt their conversation for a difficult section of driving, they won't try to minimize their conversation, and to compound it all they frequently have only one hand free for actual driving, which means less steering control and poor or nonexistent use of turn signals.
Really? Mine eats every insect it can catch. It seems like a logical thing to me. They're small enough to handle. They move in ways which fascinate cats. They're reasonably nutritious and, I assume, taste good if you're a cat. And they're crunchy! He is particularly fond of bugs which both walk and fly, he'll leave them on the ground and wait for them to take off, then bat them out of the air. Eventually all I'll find of the insect is a leg or a wing.
A six-week-old embryo is just a blob, not identifiably human in any way. It has the potential to become human, but so does my sperm, and nobody ever gets upset when I kill hundreds of millions of those. It has a heartbeat and brain activity, but so do all sorts of animals that nobody has a problem with killing. (Well, nobody except the Jainists, anyway.) Is it the combination of human potential and heartbeat/brain activity that makes it bad to kill? If so, why? If not, what else is required?
You might be aborting Einstein. Or you might be aborting Hitler. Given history, I'd say the odds are better that you're giving the axe to an evil fuck than that you're murdering a future genius.
What if you were aborted because you have a "defect"? That would have sucked huh? I am sure your friends and loved ones would think so now, after you have bee a part of their life.
This is a stupid argument. Replace it with "What if your parents used a condom?" Does this then become a convincing argument against birth control? Hell no! So it's not a convincing argument against abortion either.
Remember, for every child who is conceived, about half a billion sperm died in the same event, most of which could have become perfectly viable children if given the chance. It's nonsensical to use "what if you hadn't been born?" as an argument in this context. There have been trillions of "unborn" potential children, ultimately no different from the proposed situation.
I'm pro-choice, but I can see why anti-abortion advocates hold their position. But this sure isn't it.
So does that cockroach I just fed to my cat. What's your point?
If it were as easy as saying that entities with a heartbeat and brain activity are human and deserving of protection, this whole debate wouldn't even happen.
I've used Tor from China (Beijing, specifically) a lot and never had any problems with it. Well, I should qualify that. I've had a lot of problems with it being slow because of crappy, crappy Chinese internet connections, which Tor tends to exacerbate, but I've never had any problems with Tor being blocked. I recommend that you try it again. And remember to wait a while after you turn it on, it can take Tor several minutes to gain enough information about the anonymity network to allow communication through it.
I didn't say on the correct value, I said near. I should have said nearer.
There's no real meaningful difference. "Estimate" implies that more thought and evidence went into the result but it does not require it.
How to argue on slashdot:
Grandparent has this down cold, but you clearly need some more work.
You kill them. Duh.
True, enough, but the only way for the one to happen without the other is if the other guesses stay equally far away but hop back and forth on either side of the correct value. However it happens, it's something that you would not expect to see.
You're confusing "random" with "random along an even distribution". There are many random distributions, and most of them won't put the probability of 1 equal to the probability of 1 million.
From my naive grasp of statistics I'd expect an individual's guesses to be randomly distributed along a bell curve, with the center of the bell curve based on that person's knowledge of the situation. The more he knows, the more accurate his guesses will be, and the closer the center of that curve will be to reality.
But with this naive view, the first guess will be as good as any other. This study shows people getting closer to the true value with subsequent guesses, which does not make sense to me.