Many of these problems can be solved by lots of people dying.
Like I say:
How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
None.
Free market economists don't change light bulbs. They write their papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand to change it.
Economists and economics can be useful. But going around chanting "market forces will solve the problem" and the "invisible hand is the quickest way to fix it", is kind of useless for actually providing solutions.
It's similar to the sort of thing a PHB would say to employees. And guess what actually does the work after the PHB spouts his BS? The Invisible Employee's Hands.
Oh dear me we have a food shortage, will the Invisible Hand let millions of poor people starve? Oh the Invisible Hand has decided to do some charity work and save some of those millions of poor people from starving. Unfortunately the rest had to die, as the market has sinned and fallen short of 100% efficiency... blah blah blah.
Do we call it the Cult of the Invisible Hand or is it a Religion already?
Sounds just like normal mining to me. Mining around the world is hazardous and often produces toxic waste.
The concentration of gold on a PCB is quite a lot higher than in many gold mines around the world.
Perhaps someone knows a way to do the landfill equivalent of the fractional distillation stuff in oil refining.
e.g. landfill crap goes in to the "landfill refinery" and the various desired metals (or oxides or other compounds) come out at different points in sufficient purity (some naturally will need further processing).
"Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought,"
Is it really to do about being informed or not?
Just check out a typical spam: 1) From address - fake 2) Subject line often has nothing to do with the content or is nonsensical 3) Much of the content after the "sell" is often nothing to do with the spammer's sell line. 4) Sometimes even the dates are forged 5) The headers are often forged (but nobody really looks)
So who buys? Someone who is willing to give out money to someone who is telling them > 90% lies or garbage.
AFAIK even politicians tell the truth more than 10% of the time.
I guess some of the spam is due to stupid PHBs who pay spammers money to send out spam to sell stuff. So even if it doesn't work they don't know for sure. A bit like advertising - you never know how much of it really works.
I thought you had democracy? You're already voting whatever candidates you want. I mean you guys are doing stuff like reelecting Bush. Of course it may well be that your elections are diebolded, but the last I checked, most people in the USA don't care.
Careful what you wish for, if the country goes to the shitter, you might get one of those african style revolutions.
Once you have a dictator on the top it's quite hard to get rid of them. You'll have to wait for them to get old and either die or willingly pass it to the next generation. And even then you'd have to wait for the next generation to let go of the reins. Fortunately the next generation tend to grip less tightly to power.
AFAIK the UK style law thing (which we also have in my country) is "reasonable man".
So if a "reasonable man" would do what you did in those circumstances, the judge is to look more favorably at you, even if you did something illegal.
I've heard a high ranking US judge say that judges are to apply the law and not aim for justice.
If you have lots of judges like that then the US legal system is in big trouble.
There are lots of laws, many overlapping and applicable. If you do not aim for justice, what guides you as a judge? Expedience and convenience if you are a lazy judge. Money and power if you are a corrupt judge.
If judges are just to apply the law without aiming for justice, then some time in the _near_ future we would be better off sacking all of them and replacing them with computers.
It's just as bad as having doctors that just apply what's in the medical books without aiming to improve their patients welfare.
a) get a group of people who regularly go through the laws and remove the crap. b) have most of your laws expire after a certain time unless manually renewed - the lifespan is linked to how many legislators required to pass that sort of law. c) all of the above.
Don't need to. Most nonP2P users don't do much uploading while downloading.
The multiple destination stuff is only for quicker detection. Otherwise you'll have to wait a bit longer to see if it's just some corp guy sending a huge bunch of uncompressed xls and ppt files whilst surfing a porn site over the corporate VPN. If they're still sending at a high rate > 20 minutes later it's probably P2P or he's infected with spam malware or DoS malware.
Hiding P2P in a VPN works for naive detection methods (that require "Deep Inspection" and other bullshit), but not for what I suggested. Nice try though.
They don't upload as much though. Sure those corp types send out huge emails every now and then but it's nothing like P2P - a short burst of upload, then it's done, few minutes later, a short burst and so on.
If P2P clients are all leechers the P2P stuff breaks down. I don't see how you can evolve P2P to have all clients just download and only upload once in a while - where are they going to download from?
So like I said it's trivial to detect P2P.
If ISPs were allowed to automatically fetch and cache P2P and be "super peers" without trouble from the **AA, things could be different.
Or if ISPs had just used the USD 200 billion bucks properly. Oh well...
More like if there's evidence they didn't show up for work when they should, or showed up drunk.
I'm not a big drinker (I behave silly enough sober;) ), but I know a fair number of people who get drunk once in a while. If they still do the job fine then no big deal.
And it's sometimes part of business even - for example in Japan you often have to go out drinking with the bosses/suppliers/customers, get drunk, do what drunk people do, build rapport etc.
Of course if she's supposed to be a nun that might be a career limiting move.
Or if she's supposed to be an employee of a really boring and crappy company to work for.
1) Those plugins don't do very much uploading whereas bittorrent users do. 2) Those plugins that do "fetch ahead" tend to stick to fetching from the same few sites - they may make lots of connections but they are to the same few sites (ad webserver, content webserver, icon/widget server etc), and they stop at some point - otherwise your browser would be downloading the entire internet (and AFAIK they don't do that). And really they definitely don't upload much.
Personally I think the US ISPs are scumbags not because they throttle, but because it seems they took USD 200 billion and promised to deliver 45Mbps up/down.
But after taking that 200 billion, more than ten years later their users have still only got DSL and cable, and they're getting throttled.
Too bad most of the users don't appear to know how screwed they really got. They should ask for the ISPs to build the infrastructure NOW.
But I suppose given a big enough crime, you are more likely to get away with it:).
Cheat one person of money and it's jail time. Cheat 10 people and it's longer jail time. Cheat 100000 people, and you become a rich CEO and the board gives you a big fat bonus.
Kill one person you get a life sentence or death row. Kill 20 people, people start asking for you to be executed. Get thousands of people killed, who knows you might get elected president:).
Such users will just take longer to put on the blacklist by the heuristics I suggest.
But basically the ISPs want to reduce traffic, so whether you're talking to one IP or not, if you've uploaded at > 3Mbps and also downloaded at > 3Mbps for hours and you do that sort of thing everyday, it doesn't take any fancy technology or math to decide you belong on the list of "Those To Be Throttled and sent to competitors".
Well the way I'd do it is you'd get full speed on connections to the first X sites, then when they're done loading you get the next sites and so on. So it shouldn't affect most people's websurfing. My assumption is most people would just read the sites that ge loaded first, rather than wait for all sites to be loaded before starting to read.
What's happening to you is probably a blanket "throttle all connections of anyone with lots of connections".
So far with most multiplayer online games, one machine is the server and the rest are the clients.
Go look at the traffic if you don't believe me. I've monitored the traffic on my connection as I play various online games - but not Xbox Live though.
In theory the server might get throttled affecting the game BUT online game traffic seldom adds up to gigabytes a day - all you are usually sending is "changes in state". In some cases yes game assets do get downloaded - but the clients seldom upload that much back to the server;). So it'll look like http traffic.
This is because in practice it is rather hard to have all the game clients as equal peers in deciding on "What is Reality" in the game. It is simpler to have one machine being the final decider on what is reality, and the rest of the machines can only request changes to reality (and be denied - "Sorry you can't shoot - you ran out of bullets 2 seconds ago".
Having all the machines vote to decide reality will take too much time - imagine the latency and chaos that will occur.
That'll mess up corporate vpn users with clout, and https connections to banks etc.
Anyway it doesn't take a genius to detect p2p.
See the user. See the user after 1 hour. See how many bytes up and down. Check how many different IP destinations the user is connected with.
If they are downloading a lot up and down, and connected to lots of host, chances are they are using P2P. Put them on a watch list. If they are still doing it much later, you put them on a black list where from then on if they are doing something similar you throttle them immediately (you can do it in a way that would in most cases still allow that user's web surfing to work reasonably - since most users don't websurf 20 different sites at the same time AND read those pages at the same time - it doesn't matter if pages come in one by one ).
If they aren't downloading or uploading much, why throttle?:)
No need for fancy math. No need for "deep packet inspection" or fancy "Dumb Investors Hand Over Your Money" phrases.
Then again maybe I should write a "research" paper, mmm $$$$;).
"How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?"
Not if you could get cancer from someone else along with their blood.
Which won't be surprising since if you're getting a transfusion: 1) You're probably not in good shape in the first place. 2) Your immune system isn't supposed to be going "Red Alert!" and blasting away what you just got transfused with.
Yeah, and so many countries are worried about aging populations.
How about stop making it so hard for adults to choose to smoke heavily taxed stuff and die early then? If you set the taxes high enough and the adjust medical payouts accordingly, the smokers should be able to pay for themselves and more.
More than 20% of nonsmokers will eventually die of cancer and other expensive to treat diseases, a lot of "costs of smoking studies" ignore the fact that nonsmokers eventually die too - they just tend to die later after receiving more pensions and senior benefits, whereas smokers tend to die soon after their most productive years.
I'm a nonsmoker, and I think some of the things people and governments do to discourage smokers from smoking are rather offensive and some even stupid.
If you want to discourage smoking in bars and pubs, don't ban it, just tax bars and pubs that allow smoking more. If you ban it you reduce tax revenue.
And how about give the top smokers in the civil service who keel over before collecting a pension the "Purple Lung" award for their contributions to society;).
"it's generally somewhat painful the first time she has sex"
I think it'll depend on what you mean by sex and how its done.
Naturally I wouldn't have any practical experience in it (I'm one of those slashdotters). But from what I know of the theory, you can have what is legally considered sex in some places (maybe not where Bill Clinton was:) )without hurting the girl.
I think a better test would be - do you see any company secrets in that person's info? Does he talk a lot about his company, or about what he does day to day? He could make a mistake one day.
As for ramifications, some people might think they have a higher chance of reproducing by posting their "plumage" for all to see.
Let's see "working for you" vs "having a better chance at reproducing"... I suppose might be a tough choice for many slashdotters.:)
"people tend leave the option checked "anyone in my network" can see my profile without realizing the ramifications"
Right and the peacock unfurls its huge tail without realizing the full ramifications either.
A lot of animals do silly or risky stuff to try to show off to potential mates.
The people using facebook, myspace etc are no different.
If some grey suit doesn't hire some girl just because she or someone posted a pic of her half naked and drunk on facebook, despite her proven skills in the line of work, she's probably better off working elsewhere.
Other bosses might just hire people who'd make their company a more fun place to be in.
Now if you see that person has a big problem with alcohol (there might be other clues or signs) then sure don't hire.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of these problems can be solved by lots of people dying.
Like I say:
How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
None.
Free market economists don't change light bulbs. They write their papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand to change it.
Economists and economics can be useful. But going around chanting "market forces will solve the problem" and the "invisible hand is the quickest way to fix it", is kind of useless for actually providing solutions.
It's similar to the sort of thing a PHB would say to employees. And guess what actually does the work after the PHB spouts his BS? The Invisible Employee's Hands.
Oh dear me we have a food shortage, will the Invisible Hand let millions of poor people starve? Oh the Invisible Hand has decided to do some charity work and save some of those millions of poor people from starving. Unfortunately the rest had to die, as the market has sinned and fallen short of 100% efficiency... blah blah blah.
Do we call it the Cult of the Invisible Hand or is it a Religion already?
Well for fun the rich can pretend to make babies, watch Youtube, play golf for fun, or actually make babies.
Whereas for fun, the really poor can erm make babies.
OK I'm generalizing a bit.
Sounds just like normal mining to me. Mining around the world is hazardous and often produces toxic waste.
The concentration of gold on a PCB is quite a lot higher than in many gold mines around the world.
Perhaps someone knows a way to do the landfill equivalent of the fractional distillation stuff in oil refining.
e.g. landfill crap goes in to the "landfill refinery" and the various desired metals (or oxides or other compounds) come out at different points in sufficient purity (some naturally will need further processing).
"Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought,"
Is it really to do about being informed or not?
Just check out a typical spam:
1) From address - fake
2) Subject line often has nothing to do with the content or is nonsensical
3) Much of the content after the "sell" is often nothing to do with the spammer's sell line.
4) Sometimes even the dates are forged
5) The headers are often forged (but nobody really looks)
So who buys? Someone who is willing to give out money to someone who is telling them > 90% lies or garbage.
AFAIK even politicians tell the truth more than 10% of the time.
I guess some of the spam is due to stupid PHBs who pay spammers money to send out spam to sell stuff. So even if it doesn't work they don't know for sure. A bit like advertising - you never know how much of it really works.
I thought you had democracy? You're already voting whatever candidates you want. I mean you guys are doing stuff like reelecting Bush. Of course it may well be that your elections are diebolded, but the last I checked, most people in the USA don't care.
Careful what you wish for, if the country goes to the shitter, you might get one of those african style revolutions.
Once you have a dictator on the top it's quite hard to get rid of them. You'll have to wait for them to get old and either die or willingly pass it to the next generation. And even then you'd have to wait for the next generation to let go of the reins. Fortunately the next generation tend to grip less tightly to power.
AFAIK the UK style law thing (which we also have in my country) is "reasonable man".
So if a "reasonable man" would do what you did in those circumstances, the judge is to look more favorably at you, even if you did something illegal.
I've heard a high ranking US judge say that judges are to apply the law and not aim for justice.
If you have lots of judges like that then the US legal system is in big trouble.
There are lots of laws, many overlapping and applicable. If you do not aim for justice, what guides you as a judge? Expedience and convenience if you are a lazy judge. Money and power if you are a corrupt judge.
If judges are just to apply the law without aiming for justice, then some time in the _near_ future we would be better off sacking all of them and replacing them with computers.
It's just as bad as having doctors that just apply what's in the medical books without aiming to improve their patients welfare.
a) get a group of people who regularly go through the laws and remove the crap.
b) have most of your laws expire after a certain time unless manually renewed - the lifespan is linked to how many legislators required to pass that sort of law.
c) all of the above.
Don't need to. Most nonP2P users don't do much uploading while downloading.
The multiple destination stuff is only for quicker detection. Otherwise you'll have to wait a bit longer to see if it's just some corp guy sending a huge bunch of uncompressed xls and ppt files whilst surfing a porn site over the corporate VPN. If they're still sending at a high rate > 20 minutes later it's probably P2P or he's infected with spam malware or DoS malware.
Hiding P2P in a VPN works for naive detection methods (that require "Deep Inspection" and other bullshit), but not for what I suggested. Nice try though.
They don't upload as much though. Sure those corp types send out huge emails every now and then but it's nothing like P2P - a short burst of upload, then it's done, few minutes later, a short burst and so on.
If P2P clients are all leechers the P2P stuff breaks down. I don't see how you can evolve P2P to have all clients just download and only upload once in a while - where are they going to download from?
So like I said it's trivial to detect P2P.
If ISPs were allowed to automatically fetch and cache P2P and be "super peers" without trouble from the **AA, things could be different.
Or if ISPs had just used the USD 200 billion bucks properly. Oh well...
More like if there's evidence they didn't show up for work when they should, or showed up drunk.
;) ), but I know a fair number of people who get drunk once in a while. If they still do the job fine then no big deal.
I'm not a big drinker (I behave silly enough sober
And it's sometimes part of business even - for example in Japan you often have to go out drinking with the bosses/suppliers/customers, get drunk, do what drunk people do, build rapport etc.
Of course if she's supposed to be a nun that might be a career limiting move.
Or if she's supposed to be an employee of a really boring and crappy company to work for.
I doubt those games even hit 1Mbps up and down sustained for more than even 1 minute :).
If bittorrent users looked like RTS game players there won't be much traffic to throttle.
For example it seems like it's 24kbps per opponent for Supreme Commander. So 20 opponents won't even saturate a 512kbps upstream.
Do many people play Supreme Commander with 40 opponents at a time and expect good performance?
1) Those plugins don't do very much uploading whereas bittorrent users do.
:).
:).
2) Those plugins that do "fetch ahead" tend to stick to fetching from the same few sites - they may make lots of connections but they are to the same few sites (ad webserver, content webserver, icon/widget server etc), and they stop at some point - otherwise your browser would be downloading the entire internet (and AFAIK they don't do that). And really they definitely don't upload much.
Personally I think the US ISPs are scumbags not because they throttle, but because it seems they took USD 200 billion and promised to deliver 45Mbps up/down.
But after taking that 200 billion, more than ten years later their users have still only got DSL and cable, and they're getting throttled.
Too bad most of the users don't appear to know how screwed they really got. They should ask for the ISPs to build the infrastructure NOW.
But I suppose given a big enough crime, you are more likely to get away with it
Cheat one person of money and it's jail time. Cheat 10 people and it's longer jail time. Cheat 100000 people, and you become a rich CEO and the board gives you a big fat bonus.
Kill one person you get a life sentence or death row. Kill 20 people, people start asking for you to be executed. Get thousands of people killed, who knows you might get elected president
Such users will just take longer to put on the blacklist by the heuristics I suggest.
But basically the ISPs want to reduce traffic, so whether you're talking to one IP or not, if you've uploaded at > 3Mbps and also downloaded at > 3Mbps for hours and you do that sort of thing everyday, it doesn't take any fancy technology or math to decide you belong on the list of "Those To Be Throttled and sent to competitors".
The sweet smell of unbridled Capitalism.
Well the way I'd do it is you'd get full speed on connections to the first X sites, then when they're done loading you get the next sites and so on. So it shouldn't affect most people's websurfing. My assumption is most people would just read the sites that ge loaded first, rather than wait for all sites to be loaded before starting to read.
:).
What's happening to you is probably a blanket "throttle all connections of anyone with lots of connections".
Which of course is easier to implement
So far with most multiplayer online games, one machine is the server and the rest are the clients.
;). So it'll look like http traffic.
Go look at the traffic if you don't believe me. I've monitored the traffic on my connection as I play various online games - but not Xbox Live though.
In theory the server might get throttled affecting the game BUT online game traffic seldom adds up to gigabytes a day - all you are usually sending is "changes in state". In some cases yes game assets do get downloaded - but the clients seldom upload that much back to the server
This is because in practice it is rather hard to have all the game clients as equal peers in deciding on "What is Reality" in the game. It is simpler to have one machine being the final decider on what is reality, and the rest of the machines can only request changes to reality (and be denied - "Sorry you can't shoot - you ran out of bullets 2 seconds ago".
Having all the machines vote to decide reality will take too much time - imagine the latency and chaos that will occur.
That'll mess up corporate vpn users with clout, and https connections to banks etc.
:)
;).
Anyway it doesn't take a genius to detect p2p.
See the user. See the user after 1 hour. See how many bytes up and down. Check how many different IP destinations the user is connected with.
If they are downloading a lot up and down, and connected to lots of host, chances are they are using P2P. Put them on a watch list. If they are still doing it much later, you put them on a black list where from then on if they are doing something similar you throttle them immediately (you can do it in a way that would in most cases still allow that user's web surfing to work reasonably - since most users don't websurf 20 different sites at the same time AND read those pages at the same time - it doesn't matter if pages come in one by one ).
If they aren't downloading or uploading much, why throttle?
No need for fancy math. No need for "deep packet inspection" or fancy "Dumb Investors Hand Over Your Money" phrases.
Then again maybe I should write a "research" paper, mmm $$$$
"It still seems to me like you'd have to do quite a bit of DPI to determine which connections are being used for Bittorrent,"
I think you don't even need to inspect the contents of the packets to detect torrent or other p2p.
All I think you need is:
If you see an IP with active connections to more than X different destinations with the connections lasting for more than > 15 seconds.
Throttle/kill some connections.
Make X larger for corporate users (put corps on a different network or IP range to make it easier).
I and lots of people still call me by the same name even though most of the cells have been changed :).
And I even look a bit different now from back then.
"a lot of stuff works in mice but not in humans."
Maybe it's because mice tend to die of cancers after 2-5 years while humans tend to die of cancers after 30-60 years.
Those weak 2-5 year "mice style" cancers are nothing to our super human immune system.
Now what we need is a superhuman immune system.
"How about a retrospective study of blood transfusion recipients? Shouldn't this population, on average, have a lower incidence of cancer relative to a comparable control population?"
Not if you could get cancer from someone else along with their blood.
Which won't be surprising since if you're getting a transfusion:
1) You're probably not in good shape in the first place.
2) Your immune system isn't supposed to be going "Red Alert!" and blasting away what you just got transfused with.
"What you need is a document which indicates you are over a certain age, and nothing else"
You still need more info on it so that someone else can't take it and use it.
Yeah, and so many countries are worried about aging populations.
;).
How about stop making it so hard for adults to choose to smoke heavily taxed stuff and die early then? If you set the taxes high enough and the adjust medical payouts accordingly, the smokers should be able to pay for themselves and more.
More than 20% of nonsmokers will eventually die of cancer and other expensive to treat diseases, a lot of "costs of smoking studies" ignore the fact that nonsmokers eventually die too - they just tend to die later after receiving more pensions and senior benefits, whereas smokers tend to die soon after their most productive years.
I'm a nonsmoker, and I think some of the things people and governments do to discourage smokers from smoking are rather offensive and some even stupid.
If you want to discourage smoking in bars and pubs, don't ban it, just tax bars and pubs that allow smoking more. If you ban it you reduce tax revenue.
And how about give the top smokers in the civil service who keel over before collecting a pension the "Purple Lung" award for their contributions to society
"it's generally somewhat painful the first time she has sex"
:) )without hurting the girl.
I think it'll depend on what you mean by sex and how its done.
Naturally I wouldn't have any practical experience in it (I'm one of those slashdotters). But from what I know of the theory, you can have what is legally considered sex in some places (maybe not where Bill Clinton was
Personal info does not belong to the company.
:)
I think a better test would be - do you see any company secrets in that person's info? Does he talk a lot about his company, or about what he does day to day? He could make a mistake one day.
As for ramifications, some people might think they have a higher chance of reproducing by posting their "plumage" for all to see.
Let's see "working for you" vs "having a better chance at reproducing"... I suppose might be a tough choice for many slashdotters.
"people tend leave the option checked "anyone in my network" can see my profile without realizing the ramifications"
Right and the peacock unfurls its huge tail without realizing the full ramifications either.
A lot of animals do silly or risky stuff to try to show off to potential mates.
The people using facebook, myspace etc are no different.
If some grey suit doesn't hire some girl just because she or someone posted a pic of her half naked and drunk on facebook, despite her proven skills in the line of work, she's probably better off working elsewhere.
Other bosses might just hire people who'd make their company a more fun place to be in.
Now if you see that person has a big problem with alcohol (there might be other clues or signs) then sure don't hire.