It doesn't matter that the man didn't explicitly represent himself as an engineer, the fact that he could be mistaken for one here is enough.
So, you're allowed to argue with the government, as long as it looks sloppy and unprofessional?
Sounds like a nice catch-22 to me: you can either do a half-assed job (and be dismissed for not knowing what you're talking about), or you can do a proper job (and be charged with Unlicensed Smartness).
These boards exist for a reason. While it's perfectly OK to protest and speak out, if you want your detailed analysis to be held up and considered against that of other certified, licensed professionals, hire one to review & sign off on it.
I think that's the problem, though - they're not arguing that his analysis is flawed. They're saying it's too good for a layman, and Making Them Look Bad Must Be Punished.
Basically, they're saying he's not qualified to have the right answer. (And if that argument applied to politicians, I might actually support it.)
I use a wi-fi iPad coupled with a MiFi (which has a GPS built-in). Works decently well (again, I use it for the overview, not the turn-by-turn), but every so often it picks up a hotspot and skews the results (apparently Google Maps trusts it's database more than the raw GPS feed).
While the big players had bandwidth caps, the smaller ones did their math and offered no-limit options. The new/proposed rules allow the big players to force the smaller folks to charge the same overages, eliminating that option.
If people can use streaming media in place of over the air or cable delivered broadcasting, we will no longer be able to ensure that Canadian artists can fairly compete in the market place. Canadian culture, as we know it, may be in jeopardy. If we make it too expensive for Canadians to stream all of their media from the United States, we can protect Canadian culture.
Which is hilarious, since I find it *easier* to find CanCon online than finding where the networks buried it on the schedule. Hell, National Film Board has an iApp that lets me stream (or download!) all sorts of fun Canadian Content.
The one (and really, it's just the one) good thing I can say about Harper is that he knows which way the political wind blows. He'll have this reversed - not because he disagrees with it, or supports telecoms, or any ideological view. It'll be reversed solely because there's been enough outrage to possibly make this an election issue. And the one thing Harper stands for is being re-elected.
Imagine these two situations:
1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
Two counterarguments:
1. Slower speeds during peak times should be expected. It's as much a fact of life on the internet as rush hour is on the streets.
2. If the ISP can't supply that 10 Mbps connection consistently, that's false advertising on their part. I'm amazed how long they've gotten away with "up to (stupid speeds)" as is - no manufacturer would get away with making a toaster that "toasts up to 100 pieces of bread at one time" and only has two slots.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
In this scenario, why are we capping the speed at all? If I'm paying for the bit (and not a piece of the pipe), what reason is there not to push them downstream as fast as they can?
Also, by placing the cap, you've effectively cut how much data I can have regardless of speed. Even if I'm only getting a tenth of that 10Mbps "advertised speed", I'll get way more actual data that way (at 1 Mbps, it'll take 9 days 6 hours to hit a 100Gb cap, which means you've cut my effective internet by one-third.)
Which is why I already pay extra for higher bandwidth.
As for "the real formula", I'm gonna throw a big [citation needed] on that - it'd be good to know how much it "really costs" to get a bit down the ol' information dirtroad.
But I do think bandwidth should be metered. Gasoline is metered. Diesel is metered. Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Phonecalls are metered (well mine are- 18c/minute). Why not megabytes?
I'd actually be OK with by-the-bit internet, *if* they dropped the bandwidth caps. (So, instead of paying for 5 Mbps, I get the best speed available, but I pay for each bit.). It's getting squeezed both ways that irks me. Using your comparisons, all of those are charged by volume, not flow-rate (your water flows at the best rates the pipes can handle). What UBB is doing with billing is charging you for the water, and then charging you *again* based on how much water pressure you want.
* Yes, there is inefficient bureaucracy in Canadian government as well, which is mostly a byproduct of transparency and accountability, but there are many public services in Canada that just work.
And it's worth noting that it's only worth privatizing if (% profit margin)
Put another way, it's great to say that private industry will streamline everything, but then you have to remember that they'll take a percentage off the top to make it worth their while. And if the cut is more than the "pork", then we're worse off than we were before.
Back at the topic in hand, I think it'll get reversed, simply because the telecoms botched the presentation so badly - the holes in the argument are painfully transparent (the private ISP that pointed out that they're being charged the "penalty rate", not the actual cost of production, for instance.)
And some free advice for the cable companies - why aren't you offering these services online, then? I'm with Shaw, and I don't have cable so I can't have the VOD and whatnot. But they're still obviously the closest link on my net-chain. If they offer those shows streaming over the internet, they'd have to screw up pretty badly to be worse than iTunes and NetFlix.
Let me phrase it another way - how does the judge distinguish between "doesn't exist" and "can't find"? (Say, if I don't have a Facebook account?)
I presume that in the first case, it wouldn't be considered a penalty (to say, not be able to produce your non-existent Facebook account).
I was wondering how that works - how can the judge "make the plaintiff" do anything? If there's a penalty for refusing, doesn't that make the whole "consent" invalid? (As in, signed under duress)?
The judge cannot make the plaintiff do anything. However, if in a civil case one side asks for information that is relevant to the case, and the other side refuses to give that information, then the judge is required by law that the information would be evidence against the person who refuses to give the information.
Thanks for the info. But that strikes me as terribly abusable - "Your honor, we'd like to see all sex photos involving the plaintiff entered into the public record, as evidence that his body parts are in fact fully functional."
Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.
It is wrong people to compare the two, but not for the reason you're thinking. Egypt blocked off it's *own* country, which is undeniably inside it's realm of control. (It's their country, they can do what they want there). The only people really affected by Egypt's internet outage were Egyptian citizens.
The US efforts are multi-national - they're pushing their rule of law into other countries. The site discussed is in Spain. It's been found to be non-infringing in their court of law. By seizing the domain name, the US is showing a few simple truths:
1. They can't be trusted with control over the "generic" domains (.com,.org, etc).
2. They believe that the US rule of law extends everywhere they can reach, and that other jurisdictions are subservient. (Contrast: if.com was controlled by China, and they decided to "seize" microsoft.com or google.com, do you think the US would quietly twiddle their thumbs?)
In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.
And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.
And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)
I was wondering how that works - how can the judge "make the plaintiff" do anything? If there's a penalty for refusing, doesn't that make the whole "consent" invalid? (As in, signed under duress)?
Maybe Google could deny Microsoft's servers access to their website. Or maybe get real clever and set up an algorithm that sends MS servers bogus information when they inquire to make their search results completely irrelevant.
Since Bing is grabbing the data from the end user, there isn't really a way to "poison the well" that doesn't also screw all the users.
Not that I would personally do such a thing, but I'd love to see a toolbar/script that just happens to send Microsoft some bogus information... maybe the aforementioned "everything links to goatse"?
Quote the whole phrase. If Bing uses Google, it's less legitimate as an innovative search provider. Obviously, using (and improving upon) someone else's technology doesn't reduce the usefulness of your own technology. It just makes you a fork.
Or worse, one of those meta-engines. Only difference is that Bing has it's own engine (that it doesn't trust enough to use solo).
Also, the SEO folks will avoid Bing now, since they can get the same result by targeting Google (if you make it on Google, Bing will pick you up as well for free!)
This is more like if the editor of the New York Post had a spy in the printing press at the Daily News and found out what stories their competitor had cooked up for the following day.
It's one better - in this example, the NYP not only knows what stories the Daily News has in line, they also get to see which ones the readership likes as well.
That's the devilish part of this trick - if MS was just pinging Google's servers for results, there would be the opportunity for Google to block or otherwise prevent this. But by bringing the toolbars and browsers into play, MS sets themselves up as man in the middle and largely immune from anything Google can do technically. (Notice that Google had to poison their own well even to prove it was happening: they can't mess with MS's data without also messing with what their own customers get.)
I think they're going a bit further than that. My reading is that they're taking the Google results, then tracking which ones the user clicks on, and using *that* into your test results. (Which is pretty close to "peeking at your neighbor's test and noting which answer they check off").
Comparing yourself to your competition is fine (Google even points out they use comparisons of top 10 results in their tracking). But this sounds fairly close to trying to build a "best of Google" search - no logic on it's own, just the tracking of what other people are doing.
Case in point: Google *could* be doing this right now, by wrapping one of those annoying shortURLs around all it's results (so it can capture what you actually clicked on). But people would scream bloody murder, and that's Google tracking it's own searches. MS is using their browser to spy on other engines.
This reminds me of certain American Universities, that require you to install an application as admin to gain access to their campus network.
While the initial list of reasons for the app seem reasonable enough (Verify antivirus is installed, try to verify no infections, and make sure network harming apps are either not installed or are at least configured properly), they do provide auto-update ability to the application and so at any time can have any other commands added, which run under the same privileged level.
If there is no "All's OK" message from this app, the switches don't grant you access to the network.
I'll bet you $5 that anyone in Computing Science, Computing Engineering, or friends with people in those groups have a lovely "replacement" for that app that gives the appropriate answers without doing any of the work.
The people I went to school with would do that out of the sheer principle, not to mention because it would be fun.
I think the government does owe them something - the school was listed as an approved site by the government, after all:
SEVIS is a web-based technology maintained by the US to track and monitor schools and programs, students, exchange visitors and their dependents, while they are legally enrolled in the US education system. Indeed, Tri-Valley University is among the SEVIS Approved Schools listed on the US ICE website. Authorities have since shut down the university.
So they came here, partly because the Government lists them as an approved school. Not their fault that the school is no longer approved.
But sending them home does seem preferable to the electronic-ball-and-chain. But then, American government is fond of the Guilty Until We Decide You're Guilty method...
That was my thought as well. I figure we'll see two things in short order:
1. Hackers figure out how to access the backdoor, opening the PS3 for their *own* software.
2. Crackers figure out how to change the backdoor so that Sony code gets ignored (and whatever responses Sony is looking for are auto-generated - "yep, did that. *snicker*")
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It doesn't matter that the man didn't explicitly represent himself as an engineer, the fact that he could be mistaken for one here is enough.
So, you're allowed to argue with the government, as long as it looks sloppy and unprofessional?
Sounds like a nice catch-22 to me: you can either do a half-assed job (and be dismissed for not knowing what you're talking about), or you can do a proper job (and be charged with Unlicensed Smartness).
These boards exist for a reason. While it's perfectly OK to protest and speak out, if you want your detailed analysis to be held up and considered against that of other certified, licensed professionals, hire one to review & sign off on it.
I think that's the problem, though - they're not arguing that his analysis is flawed. They're saying it's too good for a layman, and Making Them Look Bad Must Be Punished.
Basically, they're saying he's not qualified to have the right answer. (And if that argument applied to politicians, I might actually support it.)
I use a wi-fi iPad coupled with a MiFi (which has a GPS built-in). Works decently well (again, I use it for the overview, not the turn-by-turn), but every so often it picks up a hotspot and skews the results (apparently Google Maps trusts it's database more than the raw GPS feed).
However, we do not provide police and fire too far away from town for free or in some cases at all.
Wireless or Satellite makes this easier for internet of course.
Can't say for certain about fire, but pretty sure the RCMP covers anywhere in Canada that there isn't a local (provincial or muni) force.
While the big players had bandwidth caps, the smaller ones did their math and offered no-limit options. The new/proposed rules allow the big players to force the smaller folks to charge the same overages, eliminating that option.
If people can use streaming media in place of over the air or cable delivered broadcasting, we will no longer be able to ensure that Canadian artists can fairly compete in the market place. Canadian culture, as we know it, may be in jeopardy. If we make it too expensive for Canadians to stream all of their media from the United States, we can protect Canadian culture.
Which is hilarious, since I find it *easier* to find CanCon online than finding where the networks buried it on the schedule. Hell, National Film Board has an iApp that lets me stream (or download!) all sorts of fun Canadian Content.
The one (and really, it's just the one) good thing I can say about Harper is that he knows which way the political wind blows. He'll have this reversed - not because he disagrees with it, or supports telecoms, or any ideological view. It'll be reversed solely because there's been enough outrage to possibly make this an election issue. And the one thing Harper stands for is being re-elected.
Well, those bits don't translate themselves, you know. There's costs associated with making sure that Quebec gets francophone internet.
Imagine these two situations: 1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times.
Two counterarguments:
1. Slower speeds during peak times should be expected. It's as much a fact of life on the internet as rush hour is on the streets.
2. If the ISP can't supply that 10 Mbps connection consistently, that's false advertising on their part. I'm amazed how long they've gotten away with "up to (stupid speeds)" as is - no manufacturer would get away with making a toaster that "toasts up to 100 pieces of bread at one time" and only has two slots.
2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
In this scenario, why are we capping the speed at all? If I'm paying for the bit (and not a piece of the pipe), what reason is there not to push them downstream as fast as they can?
Also, by placing the cap, you've effectively cut how much data I can have regardless of speed. Even if I'm only getting a tenth of that 10Mbps "advertised speed", I'll get way more actual data that way (at 1 Mbps, it'll take 9 days 6 hours to hit a 100Gb cap, which means you've cut my effective internet by one-third.)
Which is why I already pay extra for higher bandwidth.
As for "the real formula", I'm gonna throw a big [citation needed] on that - it'd be good to know how much it "really costs" to get a bit down the ol' information dirtroad.
But I do think bandwidth should be metered. Gasoline is metered. Diesel is metered. Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Phonecalls are metered (well mine are- 18c/minute). Why not megabytes?
I'd actually be OK with by-the-bit internet, *if* they dropped the bandwidth caps. (So, instead of paying for 5 Mbps, I get the best speed available, but I pay for each bit.). It's getting squeezed both ways that irks me. Using your comparisons, all of those are charged by volume, not flow-rate (your water flows at the best rates the pipes can handle). What UBB is doing with billing is charging you for the water, and then charging you *again* based on how much water pressure you want.
And 'police', and 'fire and ambulance', etc etc.
* Yes, there is inefficient bureaucracy in Canadian government as well, which is mostly a byproduct of transparency and accountability, but there are many public services in Canada that just work.
And it's worth noting that it's only worth privatizing if (% profit margin)
Put another way, it's great to say that private industry will streamline everything, but then you have to remember that they'll take a percentage off the top to make it worth their while. And if the cut is more than the "pork", then we're worse off than we were before.
Back at the topic in hand, I think it'll get reversed, simply because the telecoms botched the presentation so badly - the holes in the argument are painfully transparent (the private ISP that pointed out that they're being charged the "penalty rate", not the actual cost of production, for instance.)
And some free advice for the cable companies - why aren't you offering these services online, then? I'm with Shaw, and I don't have cable so I can't have the VOD and whatnot. But they're still obviously the closest link on my net-chain. If they offer those shows streaming over the internet, they'd have to screw up pretty badly to be worse than iTunes and NetFlix.
Let me phrase it another way - how does the judge distinguish between "doesn't exist" and "can't find"? (Say, if I don't have a Facebook account?)
I presume that in the first case, it wouldn't be considered a penalty (to say, not be able to produce your non-existent Facebook account).
I was wondering how that works - how can the judge "make the plaintiff" do anything? If there's a penalty for refusing, doesn't that make the whole "consent" invalid? (As in, signed under duress)?
The judge cannot make the plaintiff do anything. However, if in a civil case one side asks for information that is relevant to the case, and the other side refuses to give that information, then the judge is required by law that the information would be evidence against the person who refuses to give the information.
Thanks for the info. But that strikes me as terribly abusable - "Your honor, we'd like to see all sex photos involving the plaintiff entered into the public record, as evidence that his body parts are in fact fully functional."
Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.
It is wrong people to compare the two, but not for the reason you're thinking. Egypt blocked off it's *own* country, which is undeniably inside it's realm of control. (It's their country, they can do what they want there). The only people really affected by Egypt's internet outage were Egyptian citizens.
The US efforts are multi-national - they're pushing their rule of law into other countries. The site discussed is in Spain. It's been found to be non-infringing in their court of law. By seizing the domain name, the US is showing a few simple truths:
1. They can't be trusted with control over the "generic" domains (.com, .org, etc).
2. They believe that the US rule of law extends everywhere they can reach, and that other jurisdictions are subservient. (Contrast: if .com was controlled by China, and they decided to "seize" microsoft.com or google.com, do you think the US would quietly twiddle their thumbs?)
In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.
And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.
And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)
I was wondering how that works - how can the judge "make the plaintiff" do anything? If there's a penalty for refusing, doesn't that make the whole "consent" invalid? (As in, signed under duress)?
Maybe Google could deny Microsoft's servers access to their website. Or maybe get real clever and set up an algorithm that sends MS servers bogus information when they inquire to make their search results completely irrelevant.
Since Bing is grabbing the data from the end user, there isn't really a way to "poison the well" that doesn't also screw all the users.
Not that I would personally do such a thing, but I'd love to see a toolbar/script that just happens to send Microsoft some bogus information... maybe the aforementioned "everything links to goatse"?
Quote the whole phrase. If Bing uses Google, it's less legitimate as an innovative search provider. Obviously, using (and improving upon) someone else's technology doesn't reduce the usefulness of your own technology. It just makes you a fork.
Or worse, one of those meta-engines. Only difference is that Bing has it's own engine (that it doesn't trust enough to use solo).
Also, the SEO folks will avoid Bing now, since they can get the same result by targeting Google (if you make it on Google, Bing will pick you up as well for free!)
This is more like if the editor of the New York Post had a spy in the printing press at the Daily News and found out what stories their competitor had cooked up for the following day.
It's one better - in this example, the NYP not only knows what stories the Daily News has in line, they also get to see which ones the readership likes as well.
That's the devilish part of this trick - if MS was just pinging Google's servers for results, there would be the opportunity for Google to block or otherwise prevent this. But by bringing the toolbars and browsers into play, MS sets themselves up as man in the middle and largely immune from anything Google can do technically. (Notice that Google had to poison their own well even to prove it was happening: they can't mess with MS's data without also messing with what their own customers get.)
I think they're going a bit further than that. My reading is that they're taking the Google results, then tracking which ones the user clicks on, and using *that* into your test results. (Which is pretty close to "peeking at your neighbor's test and noting which answer they check off").
Comparing yourself to your competition is fine (Google even points out they use comparisons of top 10 results in their tracking). But this sounds fairly close to trying to build a "best of Google" search - no logic on it's own, just the tracking of what other people are doing.
Case in point: Google *could* be doing this right now, by wrapping one of those annoying shortURLs around all it's results (so it can capture what you actually clicked on). But people would scream bloody murder, and that's Google tracking it's own searches. MS is using their browser to spy on other engines.
In all, not illegal, but douche for sure.
This reminds me of certain American Universities, that require you to install an application as admin to gain access to their campus network.
While the initial list of reasons for the app seem reasonable enough (Verify antivirus is installed, try to verify no infections, and make sure network harming apps are either not installed or are at least configured properly), they do provide auto-update ability to the application and so at any time can have any other commands added, which run under the same privileged level.
If there is no "All's OK" message from this app, the switches don't grant you access to the network.
I'll bet you $5 that anyone in Computing Science, Computing Engineering, or friends with people in those groups have a lovely "replacement" for that app that gives the appropriate answers without doing any of the work.
The people I went to school with would do that out of the sheer principle, not to mention because it would be fun.
If I owned a PS3, I'd be looking to exactly what extent my applicable laws permitted this sort of thing...
I think the government does owe them something - the school was listed as an approved site by the government, after all:
SEVIS is a web-based technology maintained by the US to track and monitor schools and programs, students, exchange visitors and their dependents, while they are legally enrolled in the US education system. Indeed, Tri-Valley University is among the SEVIS Approved Schools listed on the US ICE website. Authorities have since shut down the university.
So they came here, partly because the Government lists them as an approved school. Not their fault that the school is no longer approved.
But sending them home does seem preferable to the electronic-ball-and-chain. But then, American government is fond of the Guilty Until We Decide You're Guilty method...
That was my thought as well. I figure we'll see two things in short order:
1. Hackers figure out how to access the backdoor, opening the PS3 for their *own* software.
2. Crackers figure out how to change the backdoor so that Sony code gets ignored (and whatever responses Sony is looking for are auto-generated - "yep, did that. *snicker*")