"I have heard that outside of Tokyo it's not nearly as foreigner friendly though."
If outside of Tokyo is not as friendly to foreigners, I never experienced it during the two weeks I was traveling around central Japan. People were very friendly helpful, including one instance when a convenience store clerk walked a couple of blocks with me to guide me to a post office as soon as I asked for directions. I never saw any "no foreigner" signs. (Before you ask, I was not doing the "tour group thing".)
In that case, the only net neutral way to do that is to offer this for any given application. At that point, you would just be taking statistics of where those customers paying for lower latency are connecting, and adapting your peering agreements (including construction of links) accordingly.
Thanks for the insight on the balance of latency and utilization. I think it is safe to say that an when an ISP advertises x Mbps, they should be able to provide that within reason, gauging what they actually need to purchase (both in hardware and backbone connections) based on how people are actually using the network. What gets lost is that even with a high latency, if enough bits are making it through each second, the ISP is fulfilling their end of the bargain.
Quick question. Let's say an ISP purchased JUST enough to accommodate the random, (ie "on/off" when looked at per customer, but probably a consistent throughput when aggregating a lot of customers) requests at the advertised tier speeds on average. I imagine they do that to keep them well utilized. Does that mean that someone deciding to use their connection predominately for latency sensitive traffic actually will achieve faster throughput speeds on this prioritizing network then someone who is not?
I guess in a LAN there's still the potential for an individual machine to use up all the capacity, so this could still be an issue.
How a customer manages utilization of the pipe they purchase is not the business of the ISP. It's not like the ISP is going to let them suck up more total capacity than what they purchased because of that individual machine. If a customer fails to implement QoS on their perimeter for the pipe they buy, it is their problem.
And this is part of what needs to be dealt with, and part what the FCC has been investigating. The actual guarantees (or lack there of) are buried in fine print. Someone is paying extra money to actually get a faster connection, not possibly get a faster connection. You can't just bury anything you want to in the fine print and have it stick. Imagine an ISP has oversold their network, and customers were consistently not achieving the "up to" speeds of even a lower tier as a result. Do you think an ISP would be able to use the fine print to defend that? It would probably fall into false advertising, despite that fine print. (And make some lawyers very rich, while giving each subscriber a $5 settlement for the ISP not having to admit wrong doing.)
Truth in advertising should require the ISP being able to provide the customer with some high probability (high as in at least 95%) of achieving that "up to" speed at any given time. That does not require dedicated lines.
"I see it as more of a QOS feature than as a neutrality violation"
I have QOS on my router. Why should I have to pay an extra fee for it. If they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize traffic to get the performance for which they are charging this extra fee. If this stopped at being a service fee for setting QoS on a single customer's connection for the services of their choice, and it did not include peering agreements guided by specific types of services for which they are charging consumers a premium, I might agree.
The service is between the ISP and its customer, not a bribe paid by a customer to someone else's ISP.
I could be "someone else" on the same ISP. So yes, that is "bribing" for priority on "someone else's ISP". Besides, Net Neutrality rules don't distinguish between who is paying, or whether that other network happens to be an ISP, a corporate network, or even someone's home network.
It's sensitive to protocol (e.g. gaming vs. HTTP/HTTPS/etc), not to the identity of the party on the other end (e.g. MSNBC vs. Fox News or YouTube vs. Dailymotion).
Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic (that's protocol based, not "identity" based) was a Net Neutrality violation. Favoring specific applications IS a Net Neutrality violation, unless it falls under "reasonable network management". As I said before, if they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize. Reasonable network management would be limited to times of unusually high spikes in traffic, and would be a fail-safe for time sensitive or safety critical services, not for people who have paid for some special prioritization.
Even then, this Google/Verizon agreement allows them to segment their network for other "non-public Internet" services. People still purchase wireless Internet as a separate service. That should leave them open to reserving capacity for their voice network, for example.
Otherwise, about the furthest you can take that argument is an exemption for prioritizing delay sensitive applications on the wireless Internet. As you say, on a wired network, there are no physical capacity limits. The wired infrastructure should be able to grow to reasonably support the "pipes" people purchase, and customers can prioritize those to suit their needs. Since, in contrast, wireless capacity has some real physical limitations, I agree that more the "Reasonable Network Management" arguments have merit on that network.
Still, the suggested FCC neutrality principles make clear that they apply to "non-harmful" devices. Maybe instead making some blanket statement that wireless should be exempt from Neutrality regulation, we should allow different standards of what are considered "non-harmful" devices and applications on those networks.
If I have to go through all of this effort to obtain an equivalent quality copy that does not shove ads in my face, the studio should have to reimburse me for my time and effort. The money I don't give the studio by not buying the DVD makes it so they don't need to spend time writing me a check.
I don't care what the box says. (In small fine print, no less.) First sale is one of those few rights spelled out specifically in our copyright law. It should not be some right of the publisher to diminish your rights as a purchaser. Should writing on a box magically change that?
Even if the DLC did not come with the game, you should have the right to sell it with (or without) the game. This would not be hard to facilitate on the current consoles.
That is a very big and potentially misleading simplification. You make it sound as if simply writing your code in or porting to OpenCL . It is not like that.
Typically, "threaded stuff" only implies Task Parallelism, a set of tasks that can run in parallel, and they are usually not the same operation. Grand Central Dispatch is more suited to that model. OpenCL is more suited for Data Parallelism, doing the SAME SET OF OPERATIONS on a number of items AT THE SAME TIME. There is a lot of overhead in passing data to and from the GPU, so that number of items needs to be high to offset that cost. (Typically in the thousands.)
Solutions have to be reworked quite a bit to adopt that data parallel, and that is assuming they can be a good fit for that model in the first place. If you can, then there can be a very substantial performance increase,
Now, as you said, you can run OpenCL on the CPU (and it is part of the model), but if you are not taking advantage of the GPU, than why not just do standard multi-threaded code? (I am just getting started with OpenCL, so there might be a good reason of which I am not yet aware.)
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is not some magic bullet that "deals with the cores", as you put it. The big thing it adds is a system wide tasking and scheduling component accessible to individual applications, making it easier to designate blocks of code (ie tasks) that can run in parallel, and spread those tasks among the available CPUs. Programmers still have the burden creating task parallel algorithms to solve their problems, and that is usually the tricky part. Creating a Thread Pool (GCD like functionality) component for an application (or using one someone else built, of which there have been many long before GCD), in both Windows and OS X is very easy in comparison.
Don't get me wrong, GCD is a nice optimization and has some good features, but it is a relatively small and trivial part of the bigger problem.
Hopefully this will not try to shove KB971033, the one that periodically phones home to verify that your copy is "genuine", onto unsuspecting users who thought they dodged it in the normal updates. However, if this is a lump collection of all previous "patches and hotfixes", I fear the worst.
The funny thing about the far right Jews is that most of the guys are in some form of learning program, so the women are often the primary breadwinners. This leads to the average Jewish woman on the far right having more education and job training than her husband.
... and, as a result, the oppression of a disproportionate burden of the real world labor and effort required to support a household and a family. Education and job training does not negate the oppression element, especially in a culture where much of one's social status comes from performing rituals, many of which women are forbidden from carrying out.
Even among Orthodox Jews, it is not common to have the women be the primary breadwinner so the man can afford to spend all his waking hours studying Torah.
It does happen though. I went to school with a kid who was a poster child of laziness. He essentially took shelter from real world responsibilities in his intense study of Torah. In typical matchmaker fashion, they found him the perfect wife. The rest, including the many children for which the wife also earn money to support and take care of, is history....
"They've got some cheek, acting like letting us view the same content on multiple devices is an amazing new revolution. We could do that before DRM, and it would've been easy for them to manage DRM such that people could grab more authorised, licenced copies in different formats.
Very much agreed!!
"That's the whole point of having a licence instead of a physical product."
License has a very different implication from a physical product, or purchase. If anything, licensing is a work around that allows companies to deny you rights you would otherwise have if you really purchased. If content providers were required by law to treat permanent content acquisition as a purchase, and were forbidden from using technology to prevent you from exercising rights you have as a purchaser, such as making copies for personal use, we might already have a DRM system like the one you suggested.
First, since when was being a lesbian illicit?! You say "No, we won't help you hide." as if she has done something despicable that the public has a right to know about. All the information likely you have about this person is that she is a lesbian, yet you conclude she engages "illicit sexual escapades" and "lesbian romps".
But let us forget the fact for a moment that you have drawn a lot of conclusions based on very limited information. You then talk as if her use of a voluntary service is something that gives the company providing that service the right to indiscriminately publicize details of that use.
"If you want to hide the things you do, try being more discreet next time."
Existing privacy laws require companies to be discreet when it comes personally identifiable rental histories. It is a reasonable for her to expect that a company with which she is doing business will obey the law. It was the company's failure to be discreet, not hers.
Even on an anonymous P2P network, the data must make one last hop, and be decrypted into its original form after that hop. That makes the account holder of that last hop node a clear distributor, even if they don't know it, and even if it is small pieces.
The account holder is responsible for other peoples' uses of his account. That could just as easily be interpreted to include users of a P2P node transmitting and receiving via that account as it could to include users of a router on that account. I suspect this "ignorance" defense is part of what they are trying to avoid. The account holder is essentially stripped of "safe harbor" protections. Of course, the entertainment industry does not care about the burden this places on account holders, nor the other ramifications. No cost is too great when plugging potential distribution holes.
"originally they were going to do it by strong arming the bandwidth auctions but that fell through and they weren't prepared to actually bid and implement the system themselves."
I thought that the winner of that auction was required to open up the network on that spectrum, no matter who it was. Google should be creating an open phone, and using their large legal muscle and position in the public spotlight to force Verizon to fulfill that obligation of openness that came with the spectrum. Even if they can't open the cell market in general, they should at least be able to open up Verizon.
All an alternative DNS server will do is give you the IP of any work blacklisted sites, where as your work's DNS sever might not. That will not get around work blocking actual communication to those sites.
If you really want to get around work filtering, you should set up a secure VPN at home and tunnel through that. It is also great for preventing work from having records of your browsing habits.
"They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it."
There is a distinction between deciding which uses they want to support versus them being able to tell you, as a purchaser, what uses are allowed.
A company owning the copyright means they can make copies and sell those copies. It does not mean they have the right to tell me what I may legally do with something I have purchased, and calling a sale a license does not change that.
Now, whether you want to call Apple evil or not for the uses they decide to support is a different story.
First of all, you have to buy a pipe that can support the applications you run on your network. On the flip side, your service provider should be able to reliably provide the upstream and downstream data rates of the pipe you purchase, even during peak hours. That is not to say some prioritization might not be necessary by the ISP during pathological spikes, but if that is a regular occurrence, they need to upgrade their network so it can uphold their end of the bargain.
At that point it is up to you to configure your router to prioritize latency sensitive traffic. Most come either pre-configured to do so, or make it easy to apply for common applications.
At least on most wired connections, bandwidth is not as scarce a commodity as the telecoms would like you to believe.
Strange, I cannot get onto the site. I hope this is because this letter has called Network Neutrality proponents to action in the time being, and not because the telecoms are prioritizing access to their employees, or blocking non-employees completely.
If I wanted ESPN, I'd subscribe to cable or FIOS TV. It seems that that those subscriptions are less appealing because of the Internet, so instead of adapting, companies are slowly trying to lump the cable subscription into the Internet subscription.
Just like I shouldn't be forced to buy Windows with a new computer, I should not be forced to essentially purchase cable with my Internet connection. This development is troubling to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have heard that outside of Tokyo it's not nearly as foreigner friendly though."
If outside of Tokyo is not as friendly to foreigners, I never experienced it during the two weeks I was traveling around central Japan. People were very friendly helpful, including one instance when a convenience store clerk walked a couple of blocks with me to guide me to a post office as soon as I asked for directions. I never saw any "no foreigner" signs. (Before you ask, I was not doing the "tour group thing".)
In that case, the only net neutral way to do that is to offer this for any given application. At that point, you would just be taking statistics of where those customers paying for lower latency are connecting, and adapting your peering agreements (including construction of links) accordingly.
Thanks for the insight on the balance of latency and utilization. I think it is safe to say that an when an ISP advertises x Mbps, they should be able to provide that within reason, gauging what they actually need to purchase (both in hardware and backbone connections) based on how people are actually using the network. What gets lost is that even with a high latency, if enough bits are making it through each second, the ISP is fulfilling their end of the bargain.
Quick question. Let's say an ISP purchased JUST enough to accommodate the random, (ie "on/off" when looked at per customer, but probably a consistent throughput when aggregating a lot of customers) requests at the advertised tier speeds on average. I imagine they do that to keep them well utilized. Does that mean that someone deciding to use their connection predominately for latency sensitive traffic actually will achieve faster throughput speeds on this prioritizing network then someone who is not?
Thanks for your further insight!
I guess in a LAN there's still the potential for an individual machine to use up all the capacity, so this could still be an issue.
How a customer manages utilization of the pipe they purchase is not the business of the ISP. It's not like the ISP is going to let them suck up more total capacity than what they purchased because of that individual machine. If a customer fails to implement QoS on their perimeter for the pipe they buy, it is their problem.
And this is part of what needs to be dealt with, and part what the FCC has been investigating. The actual guarantees (or lack there of) are buried in fine print. Someone is paying extra money to actually get a faster connection, not possibly get a faster connection. You can't just bury anything you want to in the fine print and have it stick. Imagine an ISP has oversold their network, and customers were consistently not achieving the "up to" speeds of even a lower tier as a result. Do you think an ISP would be able to use the fine print to defend that? It would probably fall into false advertising, despite that fine print. (And make some lawyers very rich, while giving each subscriber a $5 settlement for the ISP not having to admit wrong doing.)
Truth in advertising should require the ISP being able to provide the customer with some high probability (high as in at least 95%) of achieving that "up to" speed at any given time. That does not require dedicated lines.
"I see it as more of a QOS feature than as a neutrality violation"
I have QOS on my router. Why should I have to pay an extra fee for it. If they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize traffic to get the performance for which they are charging this extra fee. If this stopped at being a service fee for setting QoS on a single customer's connection for the services of their choice, and it did not include peering agreements guided by specific types of services for which they are charging consumers a premium, I might agree.
The service is between the ISP and its customer, not a bribe paid by a customer to someone else's ISP.
I could be "someone else" on the same ISP. So yes, that is "bribing" for priority on "someone else's ISP". Besides, Net Neutrality rules don't distinguish between who is paying, or whether that other network happens to be an ISP, a corporate network, or even someone's home network.
It's sensitive to protocol (e.g. gaming vs. HTTP/HTTPS/etc), not to the identity of the party on the other end (e.g. MSNBC vs. Fox News or YouTube vs. Dailymotion).
Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic (that's protocol based, not "identity" based) was a Net Neutrality violation. Favoring specific applications IS a Net Neutrality violation, unless it falls under "reasonable network management". As I said before, if they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize. Reasonable network management would be limited to times of unusually high spikes in traffic, and would be a fail-safe for time sensitive or safety critical services, not for people who have paid for some special prioritization.
Even then, this Google/Verizon agreement allows them to segment their network for other "non-public Internet" services. People still purchase wireless Internet as a separate service. That should leave them open to reserving capacity for their voice network, for example.
Otherwise, about the furthest you can take that argument is an exemption for prioritizing delay sensitive applications on the wireless Internet. As you say, on a wired network, there are no physical capacity limits. The wired infrastructure should be able to grow to reasonably support the "pipes" people purchase, and customers can prioritize those to suit their needs. Since, in contrast, wireless capacity has some real physical limitations, I agree that more the "Reasonable Network Management" arguments have merit on that network.
Still, the suggested FCC neutrality principles make clear that they apply to "non-harmful" devices. Maybe instead making some blanket statement that wireless should be exempt from Neutrality regulation, we should allow different standards of what are considered "non-harmful" devices and applications on those networks.
"And frankly, the ten minutes of promos and trailers never bothered me. I simply go to the bathroom or do something else during them..."
If I could spontaneously make myself need to take a dump, the forced promos would not bother me either.
And then copyright law would become applicable for that very reason, and DRM would become edible because even food would need it.
My justification for pirating:
If I have to go through all of this effort to obtain an equivalent quality copy that does not shove ads in my face, the studio should have to reimburse me for my time and effort. The money I don't give the studio by not buying the DVD makes it so they don't need to spend time writing me a check.
I don't care what the box says. (In small fine print, no less.) First sale is one of those few rights spelled out specifically in our copyright law. It should not be some right of the publisher to diminish your rights as a purchaser. Should writing on a box magically change that?
Even if the DLC did not come with the game, you should have the right to sell it with (or without) the game. This would not be hard to facilitate on the current consoles.
That is a very big and potentially misleading simplification. You make it sound as if simply writing your code in or porting to OpenCL . It is not like that.
Typically, "threaded stuff" only implies Task Parallelism, a set of tasks that can run in parallel, and they are usually not the same operation. Grand Central Dispatch is more suited to that model. OpenCL is more suited for Data Parallelism, doing the SAME SET OF OPERATIONS on a number of items AT THE SAME TIME. There is a lot of overhead in passing data to and from the GPU, so that number of items needs to be high to offset that cost. (Typically in the thousands.)
Solutions have to be reworked quite a bit to adopt that data parallel, and that is assuming they can be a good fit for that model in the first place. If you can, then there can be a very substantial performance increase,
Now, as you said, you can run OpenCL on the CPU (and it is part of the model), but if you are not taking advantage of the GPU, than why not just do standard multi-threaded code? (I am just getting started with OpenCL, so there might be a good reason of which I am not yet aware.)
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is not some magic bullet that "deals with the cores", as you put it. The big thing it adds is a system wide tasking and scheduling component accessible to individual applications, making it easier to designate blocks of code (ie tasks) that can run in parallel, and spread those tasks among the available CPUs. Programmers still have the burden creating task parallel algorithms to solve their problems, and that is usually the tricky part. Creating a Thread Pool (GCD like functionality) component for an application (or using one someone else built, of which there have been many long before GCD), in both Windows and OS X is very easy in comparison.
Don't get me wrong, GCD is a nice optimization and has some good features, but it is a relatively small and trivial part of the bigger problem.
Hopefully this will not try to shove KB971033, the one that periodically phones home to verify that your copy is "genuine", onto unsuspecting users who thought they dodged it in the normal updates. However, if this is a lump collection of all previous "patches and hotfixes", I fear the worst.
The funny thing about the far right Jews is that most of the guys are in some form of learning program, so the women are often the primary breadwinners. This leads to the average Jewish woman on the far right having more education and job training than her husband.
... and, as a result, the oppression of a disproportionate burden of the real world labor and effort required to support a household and a family. Education and job training does not negate the oppression element, especially in a culture where much of one's social status comes from performing rituals, many of which women are forbidden from carrying out.
Even among Orthodox Jews, it is not common to have the women be the primary breadwinner so the man can afford to spend all his waking hours studying Torah.
It does happen though. I went to school with a kid who was a poster child of laziness. He essentially took shelter from real world responsibilities in his intense study of Torah. In typical matchmaker fashion, they found him the perfect wife. The rest, including the many children for which the wife also earn money to support and take care of, is history....
"They've got some cheek, acting like letting us view the same content on multiple devices is an amazing new revolution. We could do that before DRM, and it would've been easy for them to manage DRM such that people could grab more authorised, licenced copies in different formats.
Very much agreed!!
"That's the whole point of having a licence instead of a physical product."
License has a very different implication from a physical product, or purchase. If anything, licensing is a work around that allows companies to deny you rights you would otherwise have if you really purchased. If content providers were required by law to treat permanent content acquisition as a purchase, and were forbidden from using technology to prevent you from exercising rights you have as a purchaser, such as making copies for personal use, we might already have a DRM system like the one you suggested.
First, since when was being a lesbian illicit?! You say "No, we won't help you hide." as if she has done something despicable that the public has a right to know about. All the information likely you have about this person is that she is a lesbian, yet you conclude she engages "illicit sexual escapades" and "lesbian romps".
But let us forget the fact for a moment that you have drawn a lot of conclusions based on very limited information. You then talk as if her use of a voluntary service is something that gives the company providing that service the right to indiscriminately publicize details of that use.
"If you want to hide the things you do, try being more discreet next time."
Existing privacy laws require companies to be discreet when it comes personally identifiable rental histories. It is a reasonable for her to expect that a company with which she is doing business will obey the law. It was the company's failure to be discreet, not hers.
Even on an anonymous P2P network, the data must make one last hop, and be decrypted into its original form after that hop. That makes the account holder of that last hop node a clear distributor, even if they don't know it, and even if it is small pieces.
The account holder is responsible for other peoples' uses of his account. That could just as easily be interpreted to include users of a P2P node transmitting and receiving via that account as it could to include users of a router on that account. I suspect this "ignorance" defense is part of what they are trying to avoid. The account holder is essentially stripped of "safe harbor" protections. Of course, the entertainment industry does not care about the burden this places on account holders, nor the other ramifications. No cost is too great when plugging potential distribution holes.
"originally they were going to do it by strong arming the bandwidth auctions but that fell through and they weren't prepared to actually bid and implement the system themselves."
I thought that the winner of that auction was required to open up the network on that spectrum, no matter who it was. Google should be creating an open phone, and using their large legal muscle and position in the public spotlight to force Verizon to fulfill that obligation of openness that came with the spectrum. Even if they can't open the cell market in general, they should at least be able to open up Verizon.
All an alternative DNS server will do is give you the IP of any work blacklisted sites, where as your work's DNS sever might not. That will not get around work blocking actual communication to those sites. If you really want to get around work filtering, you should set up a secure VPN at home and tunnel through that. It is also great for preventing work from having records of your browsing habits.
"They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it." There is a distinction between deciding which uses they want to support versus them being able to tell you, as a purchaser, what uses are allowed. A company owning the copyright means they can make copies and sell those copies. It does not mean they have the right to tell me what I may legally do with something I have purchased, and calling a sale a license does not change that. Now, whether you want to call Apple evil or not for the uses they decide to support is a different story.
First of all, you have to buy a pipe that can support the applications you run on your network. On the flip side, your service provider should be able to reliably provide the upstream and downstream data rates of the pipe you purchase, even during peak hours. That is not to say some prioritization might not be necessary by the ISP during pathological spikes, but if that is a regular occurrence, they need to upgrade their network so it can uphold their end of the bargain. At that point it is up to you to configure your router to prioritize latency sensitive traffic. Most come either pre-configured to do so, or make it easy to apply for common applications. At least on most wired connections, bandwidth is not as scarce a commodity as the telecoms would like you to believe.
Strange, I cannot get onto the site. I hope this is because this letter has called Network Neutrality proponents to action in the time being, and not because the telecoms are prioritizing access to their employees, or blocking non-employees completely.
If I wanted ESPN, I'd subscribe to cable or FIOS TV. It seems that that those subscriptions are less appealing because of the Internet, so instead of adapting, companies are slowly trying to lump the cable subscription into the Internet subscription. Just like I shouldn't be forced to buy Windows with a new computer, I should not be forced to essentially purchase cable with my Internet connection. This development is troubling to say the least.