I guess I just don't get the point of this article.
Here's the point: my Dad. He sits in front of his fire-breathing Pentium II 400 Mhz, running Windows 98. He counts how long he waits after he turns on the computer before he can type his letters in. He looks at my fancy smancy dual-core hyper super jigawhiz computer, and it takes about the same amount of time to boot before I can type letters in.
So which is really faster? Granted, the comparison is like comparing a dirt bike to a school bus in terms of worked performed, but both go about the same speed down the highway.
As with firearms, it's the shooter that commits a murder, not the gun. In this case, it's hackers that commit hacking, not the tool.
Yep. Standard mantra posted various times in various forms on this page.
But what's interesting for me is that viruses and worms, especially polymorphic ones, have the potential to commit hacking of their own accord. How long will it be until a polymorphic virus is written with a recombinant genetic algorithm (not unlike DNA) that achieves long-term viability? Somehow, such a virus combined with the tremendous (and largely wasted) computing resources now available online strikes me as the most likely candidate for true, "artificial intelligence" and/or "artificial life".
So, in this case, wouldn't a GA polymorphic virus actually be "doing the hacking"?
Sigh. Did you not read the part of my comment where I specifically talked about the laptops?
Uh, NO. This is Slashdot! I saw only the piece I wanted to comment on, then stopped there! This is Slashdot and I don't NEED TO READ THE FREAKIN' WHOLE THING IN ORDER TO FORM AN OPINION, MAN! Get that straight. I don't get facts get in the way, and real logic isn't all that relevant!
A few years back (well, nearly a decade actually), I did my master's thesis in a lab that among other things did work on face recognition. The experts there assured me that perhaps in 50 years or so computers might be able to approach human face recognition capabilities. Apparently the development was far quicker than they could have imagined.
This is very typical - it's really hard to understand the real implications of the technology singularity when we're so used to thinking and seeing things as a linear progression. Exponential progression is just hard to grasp.
Will this exponential curve go on forever? Definitely not - there's only so many bits of information that we can process in a single unit of space limited by the bounds of a black hole. But that number, the maximum number of bits of information per unit of space, is a very, very high number. No doubt, to reach anywhere close to it, the very definition of humanity must change. And it can be argued, that it already HAS changed.
We will merge with our machines, and become a new species. How appropriate is it that at this edge of singularity, that issues such as global climate change and peak oil seem to be coming together to form a grand nexus of crisis? It seems that the post-singularity man will have leverage the technology available to him in a very cohesive way, or face extinction.
What this means for me and my 6 children, I can only guess. But I sure am trying.
Wouldn't this also be abusable? Pick a stock, short it, spam the hell out of everybody, watch Ameritrade or whoever blacklist it, and watch the price drop.
Thoughts like this are the kind of thoughts that convince Libertarians that the marketplace will ALWAYS correct itself. Notice that a protection against one type of unscrupulous behavior becomes an enabler for another type of behavior - which is then protected against.
The net effect of this continuous spy-vs-spy type war is a balanced marketplace that does an amazingly good job of equating equity and earnings. What few Libertarians really grasp, however, is the role of infrastructure on the enablement of the marketplace.
Every American is born with almost half a million dollars in pre-existing infrastructure that is directly available to him/her. This includes roads, schools, etc. This infrastructure is what's used to generate the earnings - society usually gets about 8% return on investment for its infrastructure, based on the national average income.
But who wants to WORK for a living? Despite having the highest standard of living in human history, people would rather cheat and game the system to avoid even the pitiful 40-hour work week. And so the spy-vs-spy game continues, people try to get money for nothing, and the inherent laziness of mankind, which is our never-ending drive to resource efficiency, continues.
We have one of those "$50,000 SANs". Actually, with the expansion, ours cost closer to $110,000, but whatever. For one, it's got more drives (I think we're up to 30). For two, they're 10k RPM SCSI drives. For three, it's fibrechannel, and all the servers that it's connected to get full speed access to the drives. For four, we have a service level agreement with Dell/EMC (It's an EMC array, rebranded under Dell's name) that says if we have a dead drive, we get a dell service hobbit on site within 4 hours with a new drive. We also get high level support from them for things like firmware upgrades (we had to go through that recently to install the expansion).
While I agree with your "Solly Cholly" comment, I've steered clear of the SAN/NAS solution for once simple reason: it's a single point. Maybe I'm just paranoid or unreasonable, but having ANY single point of failure creeps me out, even if it has excellent numbers, etc. Any SINGLE point will have the following problems:
1) Uptime: if it goes down, so does everything else. Is there more to add here?
2) Scalability: Any single point limits the performance of the system at large. Sure, your SAN/NAS might be mighty quick, and mighty fast. But given its current workload, can you sustain 100x growth annually for a few years without re-architecting your entire information infrastructure?
3) Price: It costs lots of cash upfront. Yes, expensive. But it gets even more expensive as your system grows beyond the performance of a single NAS.
4) Locality: Less of an issue than it used to be, but still an issue. If your IT infrastructure depends on the existence of a single-point SAN/NAS, your ability to spread to other geographical regions is limited. Sure, there's the WAN. But WANs are slow, unreliable, riddled with hiccups, and anybody who has to move very much data becomes acutely aware of these inconveniences!
I choose to be expensive in another way - intelligent system design. When architecting a software stack, it should immediately be able to scale up or down to virtually any size, from a $100 second-hand P3 to a 100-node cluster of servers, and handle it with minimal fuss. Thus, I've designed my softwares to scale up linearly. We started our hosted web-based product on a single P4 1U server. Now running on a 4-node, 16-core Opteron cluster.
Maybe you're not expecting to handle 100x growth annually. But I AM anticipating this kind of growth. Growth over the past 3-4 years has been between 40% and 100% annually, and there's every reason to believe that the next year will see a severe hockey-stick as a few potentially landmark-scale agreements have just been made.
We're ready to grow FAST to basically any size, modeling after the/. supreme being, Google. Are you?
Re:Public DNS is corrupt, but Private DNS is subli
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DNS Complexity
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· Score: 3, Funny
Internally, I use DNS and I would never replace it. Just secure it. All my Internal Updates for my home DNS System work like this. Using the LDAPDNS system, my reverse lookup zones become distinguished containers, like
You set this up for your freakin' home network!?!?!? Brother, there's this wild and wonderful thing out there called the world and you really, REALLY need to get a taste of it!
Some of the highlights that you'd do well to consider:
First, there's the Woman. Life with a good woman is a life with greater extremes. Good moments are way better, bad moments are way worse.
Put the two together under the right circumstances, and you just might be able to experience perhaps the greatest pleasure of them all: SEX! Many would argue that this is the point of having a woman. I'd argue instead that basic physiology has the point belonging to the man, but I digress...
Seriously, implementing an LDAP backend to DNS for a home network is about like using a jet engine for a ceiling fan. I'd love to know all the details of your implementation, since it would likely make a good candidate for submission to another good website.
Lastly, to do "secure" DNS updates is pretty simple. I keep the DNS zone files on my laptop. All my DNS nameservers are configured identically, as master servers. I use a script to SCP the files to the nameservers when I do a DNS update. Stupid simple, excellent security a la SSH.
DNS DNS DNS DNS
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DNS Complexity
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While technically well written and clear, this is one of the most uninspiring pieces of work imaginable describing the values of DNS. It's so bad that I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon. Highly technical and detailed while still being abstract, it's 100% accurate while still managing to be utterly devoid of any usefulness whatsoever.
Oh yeah, this is DNS we're talking about. Implementing it IS uninspiring and so abstract, it does make you rather gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon.
But what DNS does is extremely exciting, and forms the foundation of what makes the Internet actually WORK for people. Think about it - when's the last time there was any major DNS failure? Never? Me too. Damned reliable, damned powerful, and damned easy to get you hooked up to the geek blogs, tunes, IRC, and whatever else we all crave.
Read this if:
A) You work with DNS regularly and want to know if you know enough for it to make some sense to you. (That's me)
B) You are thinking about implementing a DNS server.
Otherwise, move along, find something that might interest you, but take just a moment to reflect how difficult Internet life would be if DNS wasn't so well designed and crafted.
But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.
$7/month is cheap, folks. Here's an explanation:
I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.
Alrighty, then. Let's grind the numbers:
1) $50/month DSL Connection, fixed-IP plan. (average price) 2) $14/month computer cost. ($500 desktop computer, split over 3 years) 3) $14.40/month power cost. (That's 100 watts, 24x7, $0.20/Kwh) 4) $78.40 per month, not including DNS charges, admin overhead, repairs, etc.
Isn't that 10x your $7/month fee? Doesn't that make it cheaper than hosting yourself?
That $7 times thousands of customers should be able to buy some redundant power supplies, for example. Thousands of customers? That's pretty optimistic, isn't it? I'd guess probably more like 300-1,000 customers per server. A good quality whitebox server starts at around $3,500 and goes up very rapidly from there. Then there's bandwidth, sysadmin fees (A decent sysadmin should pull > $50,000/year) and it's easy to see how the numbers aren't as rosy as you'd think.
It's not the $7/month pricing that's making their sites unreliable, it's their own past decisions.
Spoken with authority! Perhaps you're a system administrator or something?
If anything, shared hosting should be more reliable than a dedicated server. You're not fucking up things yourself as root. There'll be measures in place to prevent sites from using up all the bandwidth. Some one's keeping an eye out on the server 24h
Even LOUSY shared hosting is going to be a damned site more reliable than your DSL line. But, it's not going to hold a candle to dedicated hardware running in a high-quality hosting farm. Get the right tool for the job.
Let's put it this way; buying dedicated hosting at the likes of dreamhost won't help you the next time the power for their entire facility goes down. Or when the (single, non-redundant) connection to their secondary datacenter, which actually happens to host dedicated servers, goes down.
So, that's where the GP comes in - ever heard of an SLA? Surely somebody as experienced (cough) as you would know what that is???
$7/month is damned cheap. And if your business is making money, you'd do well to spend a tad more than that, and get a decent hosting environment.
Cell phones are usually made out of soft, easily scratched plastic. Keys are made out of metal. Not a good combination(I mean, obviously, but people really put their keys and cell phone in the same pocket?).
So don't buy crappy phones made of soft, easily scratched plastic! My phone has a metal / hardened rubber exterior and has held up quite nicely to being knocked around in my pocket along with my keys, loose change, etc. It's not like I paid jack for it - I got it as a "freebie phone" with a contract at Verizon.
The numbers are all guesses, but like I said, the intent of the gp is probably pretty much right. The current distribution system for groceries (in the US anyway) is not sufficient to handle also providing fuel needs for the public on top of the food.
Perhaps you don't realize how little that actually matters. It's one thing to build an infrastructure that's inherently incompatible with existing infrastructure. It's another thing entirely to extend and amplify an existing infrastructure.
Let's take your "tank a week" scenario. It's roughly on par with Gasoline per unit of weight (Kg) so we're talking about a 10-gallon tank in your average 4-5 seater car. Gasoline weighs about 6 pounds per gallon, so that's about 60 lbs per week to meet a not-atypical situation. I buy a 50-lb bag of dogfood every other week thanks to my large golden retriever.
What's important is the cost of entry - not the total cost. It doesn't really matter what the total cost is, as long as the initial cost can be made up in profits quickly. Once the enterprise is profitable, it doesn't really matter much what the costs are, since the enterprise is, by definition, profitable and thus has the means to grow.
Here, we're talking about starch as merely an additional product that I can buy, along with the 50-lb bag of dog food. The initial cost of entry to sell starch to early adopters is so low as to be inconsequential.
Compare/contrast that with typical hydrogen scenarios, with expensive retrofits of existing fuel stations, special tanks, special dispensation stations, etc. See the difference?
Yes, your local grocery mart probably isn't going to provide enough fuel for everybody in town next to the dog food aisle. But they can start there, and then as the profits grow, roll out more specialized stations as the demand justifies it. See the difference?
What's odd for me is that my experiences here are the reverse - frequently there are items that I want that are on sale for significantly cheaper than the website!
I bought my Canon digital camera at Circuit City for almost $100 cheaper than was available on the website - simply because it was "already opened". It's worked great, despite the abuse that me and my 6 kids put it thru, for almost three years.
Sorry you're having bad experiences, but I've so consistently found stuff on sale in the local CC that I don't even bother with the website anymore.
On another note, I've only been able to successfully buy ANYTHING at Best Buy once without returning it. I've gone there perhaps a half dozen times and they have universally had one or more of:
A) Crappy prices - 25% higher than Circuit City, and CC is closer.
B) Not what I want/need.
C) Shoddy or sub-par products.
The single item I purchased? A 12v -> 110v adapter. They had them for almost $20 cheaper at Circuit City, but were out of stock, and I needed it right then.
Dell got its name by selling direct. Dell == Direct. After spending 20 years proving to everybody that "direct is better and cheaper", them selling direct thru a major distributor like Wally World is a major, major change in their product placement and emphasis.
They must be REALLY HURTING to go for a deal like this! For premium brands, it seems like selling thru Wal-Mart is the kiss of death. You could almost say it's like a TV show "jumping the shark" - either your company just sells cruddy products thru Wal-Mart or you have a flagging premium brand and you just want to cash in on what's left of your good name.
ICANN is the organisation we should turn to: perhaps make a rule that the owner of a domain has to actually do something with it within a set period of time (say 6 months to a year). If all they've done in that time is plaster it in advertising (or have done nothing) it should return to the pool, perhaps with a bar disallowing the ghastly spammer from buying it again for a year.
There are too many problems with suggestions like these to name.
2) Who is going to police it? Really? With the bazillions of domain names expiring every year, policing this is just an absurd task.
3) Just because I haven't done anything yet with a domain, EG: doesn't mean I don't have plans for it. Granted, the plans may be a year or more before completion, but that's not to say that nothing is happening!
4) And even if problems 1 to 3 could be addressed, whose standard are you going to apply? Remember, the Internet is INTERNATIONAL and ICAAN is more of a technical body than a regulatory or legislative one.
Personally, I think that the way to handle this is to take out some of the profit potential for being a sleazebag like TFA is about. Domain squatting is a civil offense, and the loser is the person who can't own an otherwise useful domain because the squatter has, in a classic case of "tragedy of the commons", already taken the domain name.
So I suggest that
A) ICANN publish a set of rules for what determines a legitimate use of the domain. These rules would allow for defense of trademarks, and parking for intended future development.
B) Provides a procedure for arbitration, where there are fees which are paid by the LOSER of the arbitration.
Thus, if I need the domain Watermelon.com and find it squatted, I could initiate proceedings with a reasonable expectation of getting the domain free of charge if the domain is legitimately squatted according to ICANN rules.
This would drastically deflate the profit potential of the domain-name land-grab that's been going on and provide a reasonable expectation that domain names have something to do with who registers them. This would effectively shift the cost of dealing with the scumbags onto the 'bags themselves.
I'm not convinced that any sort of software algorithm should be patentable, but if we are going to allow patents on some narrowly-defined "implementations," which might involve software at some point in them (but not being wholly comprised of software), I think it's pretty clear that the term of the patents needs to be substantially reduced.
What's perhaps funny about this (very long run-on) sentence is that, at its heart, EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE. Listen to particle physicists nowadays - they all talk about "information entropy". Heck, the big deal about Hawking radiation is that it allows for (gasp!) information leaks at the event horizon of a black hole, and thus the eventual collapse of the black hole back into "normal" space!
The entire universe can now be narrowly (and apparently, quite accurately) defined as a massive information machine. Perhaps Douglas Adams, for all his absurd literature, was actually pretty close to the mark?
Anyhow, if the entire universe is definable in the same terms as software is, fundamentally nothing more than bits of information, what is really the line between software and other "physical" processes?
...people who can sit outside a baseball stadium or concert from some vantage point and watch the game/performance for free are also commiting a felony.
No. In your example, there's no computer involved.
Really, there are two contradictory laws at stake, here.
1) According to the FCC, it's perfectly legal to receive ANY BROADCAST TRANSMISSION. I can set up a radio receiver and pick up whatever happens to be in the air. This includes wifi broadcasts, which are really nothing more than a cordless phone combined with a MODEM.
2) But, it's also illegal in most areas to "access computers or computer networks without permission". They stand in contradiction to each other. The part that's odd here is that the WIFI spot announces itself as unencrypted, sort of like a welcome sign. How did this guy not have permission to access the network?
I personally think that wireless networks, even those that are being broadcast in unlicensed spectrums (like wifi) should be illegal to access if the "digital doorknob" is locked. If you have to enter in a password or decryption key, even a weak one like WEP, it's illegal to access. But, if it's open/unencrypted, then you should be free to act with impunity.
This is how we interpret things more physically. AFAIK here in California, if you approach my house and the front door is closed such that you have to turn the doorknob to enter it, it's illegal to enter without a specific invitation. (EG: "Come on in" sign, me hollering for you to, whatever) But if the door is open, you can enter with impunity - having the door open can be considered an invitation to enter.
(IANAL, etc)
So why would wireless networks be any different? Don't want people accessing your network? Put up a password/encryption key. Otherwise, your door is open, and people can (and probably will) enter.
PS: More than once, I've trolled middle-class neighborhoods for a hotspot in a pinch. It seems that the best neighborhoods are the straight-up middle class ones - lower classes don't tend to have high-speed connections, upper classes tend to hire tech weenies to set up their networks, and they usually secure them. But the guys in the middle buy their Linksys routers at Best Buy, take them home, plug them in, they work, and they stop there.
They're not checking documents now, and that's a legal requirement already. They think that the existence of a database will somehow make people care any more?
This will only be compounded by the general ineffectiveness of the database solution. As somebody whose name (Ben Smith) is suspiciously similar to somebody else who was a bad boy enough to get them on the do-not-fly list, it just doesn't work.
I've spent years having to go through additional security checks at airports - fingerprinting, etc - because somebody, somewhere, has a name or alias that sounds an awful lot like (ahem) Ben Smith. A system like this is a recipe for a disastrous sea of false positives!
I can just see it now, at the side of the road:
Guy drives up in a truck. "You looking for work?"
"Si, senor!"
"Wutcher name? Lemme lookit up..."
"Jose Jiminez, senor".
"Hmmm... Says here on my newfangled wireless cellular wifi laptop thang that you could be one of about 35,000 people with your name who are here illegally! Any of thems is you?"
"No senor!"
"Hop in the back o'da truck - get down under the tarp so nobody sees ye"...
When you add the amount of time, money, kit and effort that'd go into either burning that many optical disks or filling that many harddrives, then connecting them on the other end and reading it out makes it less attractive than fiber optics.
Do we really need a 747? Well, let's see. 15 PB of data, how many 1TB hard drives would that actually be? According to Wikipedia:
1 PB = 10^15. 1 TB = 10^12
Thus, 1 PB could be written as 1,000 TB of data. So 15,000 TB hard drives will do it. Use RAID 5, say 4/5 (where 5 disks replicate 4 images) so we'll add 25%. That brings us to 18,500 HDD with decent redundancy.
Fiber optics nowadays can be pushed closed to 1 Tb per second. That's certainly in the range of what we're talking about. Actual numbers looks like 1 Tb per second could conceivably transfer 15 TB every 5.5 days or so, assuming optimal conditions. How much "dark fiber" is there under the ocean? Not much, I'd wager. Meaning this may likely require another cable to be laid == big, expensive, long project.
So the 727 is probably the best bet, since they can get started pretty much right away, and won't have to put together a 5 year project to run cables under the ocean...
is it going to read my address book and email itself to other people? No, OO does not have access to my Thunderbird address book.
Why not? Ostensibly, OO will run as user YOU, and YOU have access to your Tbird address book, and so would OO. Unless you're running SE Linux like a bat out of hell (most people don't) or have chroot or suid set up. Most *nix users however, don't have this kind of set up.
If someone else has unlimited text messaging they could effectively start spamming people (everyone remember the old pager bombs?) with the consequence of massive phone bills.
I was chatting with a chick down at the local airport, with my flight instructor. She was complaining about her ex-boyfriend who would call her randomly from different phones and harass her. So, I cracked a joke, offering to write a quick program to send 10,000 text messages to his phone "don't freaking call me you farkquad" or something. I didn't even think about the 10,000 - as a software engineer I routinely have to deal with algorithms working with millions to billions of possibilities or data elements, so 10,000 just seemed like a "get his attention" sorta small number.
But then they ran the numbers on it, and figured that 10,000 messages would probably cost the guy $1,500 bucks! (As I've posted elsewhere I've had unlimited text messaging since forever, so the cost of it never actually occurred to me)
Oh shiznit! But it's such a stupid simple hack, I could do it in about 3 lines of code! It would take my midrange laptop perhaps 20 minutes to run and send all the messages! To make it 10 times worse would only take one additional keystroke!
Sometimes it amazes me how truly vulnerable we all are to knowledgeable people with malicious intent.
No, I'm not advocating any "mob justice" or anything - but like a pimply teen, those of us "with the power" of knowledge need to understand our true strength and behave accordingly.
But seriously, why is a phone call cheaper than an SMS message? It's all a digital network, so in cost per bit, SMS messages are something like 66 times more expensive than a phone call.
Let's compare: Digital cell phones use about 14.4 Kbps of bandwidth. (which explains their clarity) Figure about 30 seconds of talking to get the equivalent of a text message, with the "Hello, is SO AND SO there? Yeah. Yeah. It's Billie. 'O, o joy ur so kul'. -CHUCKLE- Ok, see you later. By by. ".
That works out to a total of 54,000 bytes, or 108,000 Bytes/minute. I get about 1,000 minutes at $70/month, a la Verizon. Each minute therefore costs $0.07. So the cost per 30 seconds of conversation is something like 3.5 cents, for 56,000 bytes.
An SMS message is, at its longest, 160 Bytes long. Include headers, let's be generous and say it's double that. (it's not) 320 bytes in an SMS message. Here, we're asking for 15 cents for just 360 bytes?!?!?
Voice 54,000/3.5 cents =.00006 cents per byte ($0.000006 / byte)
If you were buying soda, it'd be like buying a 12 oz can of soda for about $20 while a 2 liter bottle costs $1.
Does that seem like good math to you? BTW: I bought into "unlimited text messaging" back when Verizon offered it, and have refused to upgrade plans until I get it. I've got a network monitor, and when something goes wrong I can get tons of messages all at once if I'm not careful.
Then can I ask you something? Why did you click the Read More link on the front page, read the summary, click Reply, and type out an entire post if you don't fucking care?
- ahem -
It's the "totem pole" effect, often called the "social ladder". By feigning a lack of care, a human can insult another human and make like he/she/they are better than the party being insulted. Other examples of this type of behavior:
If a guy dumps a girlfriend, he's automatically "one up" the social ladder from her. Conversely, if she dumps him, it's the other way around.
If a guy quits a job, he can be one-up. If a guy gets fired, he's one-down.
Quiz question: I've been a Linux user since 1999, and have had Linux as my primary desktop since about 2001. Where does that put me on the social ladder with respect to Microsoft?
Listen, I want to make a living off of creating content as much as any other artist, but unless I create something that people feel they want, and offer it at a price they think is fair, I won't. I'm not entitled to make $2 per piece of artwork unless the consumer agrees my work is worth $2. Simple as that.
I agree 100%.
That's how a "free market" works. This sort of reasoning is also why the RIAA wants to make selling used CDs illegal, or enough of a hassle that stores won't want to do it. They want to be the sole arbiter of price. But in an actual free market, you don't sell anything if the consumer doesn't like what you're offering and at what price you're offering it.
That's shady practice, and perhaps the RIAA should be prosecuted under Sherman Act or RICO laws.
And the consumer isn't changing any deal when "pirating" something. Aside from the untested EULA/clickwrap ideas, they haven't agreed to anything at all.
And this is where you go south. They absolutely ARE changing a deal. They are acting to deny the producer legal rights to control the distribution of content they legitimately created.
Put another way, if I think that a scribble of mine is worth $1,000,000 and market it as such, and someone copies it, have they stolen $1,000,000 worth of potential revenue from me?
Yes and no. Accounting 101: profit is made when the product is sold. If the act of unapproved copying reduces the likelyhood of a sale (and it does) then the potential for profit is reduced. You can never know what the actual profit would be, because by pirating the material, the profit potential is reduced or eliminated. Asking for an example where piracy clearly cost the profits of a movie is like asking for a single example of a valuable scientist who never benefited society because of abortion.
Piracy == economic abortion. It kills the possibility of a sale, and with it motivation to produce quality works that society can benefit from. And, if you pirate enough, the bogeymen will come after you and you will be prosecuted, and rightly so.
That's not to say that I think the RIAA are angels - their stupidity is only outclassed by their lack of intelligence - but even the power of the GPL comes at the strength of Intellectual Property laws that allow the producer to determine the terms of distribution of their works.
If you don't like the terms of distribution offered by the producer, then you have no rights to the material. The ethical thing to do is find a producer who provides material under terms you find suitable. That is a free market. What you propose is called the Black Market.
I can argue that competition is theft, since they take away the potential profits of a creator.
Competitors in an intellectual property domain create their own content to compete with you with. A consumer might ask "Am I going to buy the Britney Spears album or the Celine Dion album?" That's perfectly ok, and is what happens in a free, open marketplace.
But rampant piracy/copyright infringement makes artists compete with themselves: Am I going to buy the Britney Spears album, or am I going to steal it?
If it's very easy/cheap to download/pirate/copyright-infringe the album, then the likelyhood of the sale goes down. That's a form of theft, and everybody loses, not just the artist.
Why is that so hard for you to understand?
I'm not saying that the RIAA are angels. They're idiots too, and most of their idiocy simply comes from fear of the unknown. All I'm saying is that if you don't like what they're doing, don't buy, and the marketplace will sort itself out. But copyright infringement only gives them more social/political ammunition to come after you, and leaves you on a very compromised social/ethical footing.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I just don't get the point of this article.
Here's the point: my Dad. He sits in front of his fire-breathing Pentium II 400 Mhz, running Windows 98. He counts how long he waits after he turns on the computer before he can type his letters in. He looks at my fancy smancy dual-core hyper super jigawhiz computer, and it takes about the same amount of time to boot before I can type letters in.
So which is really faster? Granted, the comparison is like comparing a dirt bike to a school bus in terms of worked performed, but both go about the same speed down the highway.
As with firearms, it's the shooter that commits a murder, not the gun. In this case, it's hackers that commit hacking, not the tool.
Yep. Standard mantra posted various times in various forms on this page.
But what's interesting for me is that viruses and worms, especially polymorphic ones, have the potential to commit hacking of their own accord. How long will it be until a polymorphic virus is written with a recombinant genetic algorithm (not unlike DNA) that achieves long-term viability? Somehow, such a virus combined with the tremendous (and largely wasted) computing resources now available online strikes me as the most likely candidate for true, "artificial intelligence" and/or "artificial life".
So, in this case, wouldn't a GA polymorphic virus actually be "doing the hacking"?
Sigh. Did you not read the part of my comment where I specifically talked about the laptops?
/.
Uh, NO. This is Slashdot! I saw only the piece I wanted to comment on, then stopped there! This is Slashdot and I don't NEED TO READ THE FREAKIN' WHOLE THING IN ORDER TO FORM AN OPINION, MAN! Get that straight. I don't get facts get in the way, and real logic isn't all that relevant!
Oh wait, this is
Eh.... Touche?
A few years back (well, nearly a decade actually), I did my master's thesis in a lab that among other things did work on face recognition. The experts there assured me that perhaps in 50 years or so computers might be able to approach human face recognition capabilities. Apparently the development was far quicker than they could have imagined.
This is very typical - it's really hard to understand the real implications of the technology singularity when we're so used to thinking and seeing things as a linear progression. Exponential progression is just hard to grasp.
Will this exponential curve go on forever? Definitely not - there's only so many bits of information that we can process in a single unit of space limited by the bounds of a black hole. But that number, the maximum number of bits of information per unit of space, is a very, very high number. No doubt, to reach anywhere close to it, the very definition of humanity must change. And it can be argued, that it already HAS changed.
We will merge with our machines, and become a new species. How appropriate is it that at this edge of singularity, that issues such as global climate change and peak oil seem to be coming together to form a grand nexus of crisis? It seems that the post-singularity man will have leverage the technology available to him in a very cohesive way, or face extinction.
What this means for me and my 6 children, I can only guess. But I sure am trying.
Ironically, Apple doesn't even sell a one-button mouse anymore.
Except on their laptops. I almost bought one - but the missing mouse button is an issue since I wouldn't only be running OSX...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin!
OMG you are so KOOL! Try this:
2 Degrees of separation from George W. Bush. (No, I voted for the other guy both times)
2 Degrees of separation from "Govornator" Arnold. (Voted once)
3 Degrees of separation from Johny Cash.
As if it matters. Which it doesn't. Who are YOU again?
Wouldn't this also be abusable? Pick a stock, short it, spam the hell out of everybody, watch Ameritrade or whoever blacklist it, and watch the price drop.
/QUIT
Thoughts like this are the kind of thoughts that convince Libertarians that the marketplace will ALWAYS correct itself. Notice that a protection against one type of unscrupulous behavior becomes an enabler for another type of behavior - which is then protected against.
The net effect of this continuous spy-vs-spy type war is a balanced marketplace that does an amazingly good job of equating equity and earnings. What few Libertarians really grasp, however, is the role of infrastructure on the enablement of the marketplace.
Every American is born with almost half a million dollars in pre-existing infrastructure that is directly available to him/her. This includes roads, schools, etc. This infrastructure is what's used to generate the earnings - society usually gets about 8% return on investment for its infrastructure, based on the national average income.
But who wants to WORK for a living? Despite having the highest standard of living in human history, people would rather cheat and game the system to avoid even the pitiful 40-hour work week. And so the spy-vs-spy game continues, people try to get money for nothing, and the inherent laziness of mankind, which is our never-ending drive to resource efficiency, continues.
Was I saying something?
We have one of those "$50,000 SANs". Actually, with the expansion, ours cost closer to $110,000, but whatever. For one, it's got more drives (I think we're up to 30). For two, they're 10k RPM SCSI drives. For three, it's fibrechannel, and all the servers that it's connected to get full speed access to the drives. For four, we have a service level agreement with Dell/EMC (It's an EMC array, rebranded under Dell's name) that says if we have a dead drive, we get a dell service hobbit on site within 4 hours with a new drive. We also get high level support from them for things like firmware upgrades (we had to go through that recently to install the expansion).
/. supreme being, Google. Are you?
While I agree with your "Solly Cholly" comment, I've steered clear of the SAN/NAS solution for once simple reason: it's a single point. Maybe I'm just paranoid or unreasonable, but having ANY single point of failure creeps me out, even if it has excellent numbers, etc. Any SINGLE point will have the following problems:
1) Uptime: if it goes down, so does everything else. Is there more to add here?
2) Scalability: Any single point limits the performance of the system at large. Sure, your SAN/NAS might be mighty quick, and mighty fast. But given its current workload, can you sustain 100x growth annually for a few years without re-architecting your entire information infrastructure?
3) Price: It costs lots of cash upfront. Yes, expensive. But it gets even more expensive as your system grows beyond the performance of a single NAS.
4) Locality: Less of an issue than it used to be, but still an issue. If your IT infrastructure depends on the existence of a single-point SAN/NAS, your ability to spread to other geographical regions is limited. Sure, there's the WAN. But WANs are slow, unreliable, riddled with hiccups, and anybody who has to move very much data becomes acutely aware of these inconveniences!
I choose to be expensive in another way - intelligent system design. When architecting a software stack, it should immediately be able to scale up or down to virtually any size, from a $100 second-hand P3 to a 100-node cluster of servers, and handle it with minimal fuss. Thus, I've designed my softwares to scale up linearly. We started our hosted web-based product on a single P4 1U server. Now running on a 4-node, 16-core Opteron cluster.
Maybe you're not expecting to handle 100x growth annually. But I AM anticipating this kind of growth. Growth over the past 3-4 years has been between 40% and 100% annually, and there's every reason to believe that the next year will see a severe hockey-stick as a few potentially landmark-scale agreements have just been made.
We're ready to grow FAST to basically any size, modeling after the
Internally, I use DNS and I would never replace it. Just secure it. All my Internal Updates for my home DNS System work like this. Using the LDAPDNS system, my reverse lookup zones become distinguished containers, like
relativeDomainName=1+zoneName=0.168.192.in-addr.a
You set this up for your freakin' home network!?!?!? Brother, there's this wild and wonderful thing out there called the world and you really, REALLY need to get a taste of it!
Some of the highlights that you'd do well to consider:
First, there's the Woman. Life with a good woman is a life with greater extremes. Good moments are way better, bad moments are way worse.
Another good thing to try while roaming the wild, real world: Beer! This can be a good way to land a woman, if only for a night.
Put the two together under the right circumstances, and you just might be able to experience perhaps the greatest pleasure of them all: SEX! Many would argue that this is the point of having a woman. I'd argue instead that basic physiology has the point belonging to the man, but I digress...
Seriously, implementing an LDAP backend to DNS for a home network is about like using a jet engine for a ceiling fan. I'd love to know all the details of your implementation, since it would likely make a good candidate for submission to another good website.
Lastly, to do "secure" DNS updates is pretty simple. I keep the DNS zone files on my laptop. All my DNS nameservers are configured identically, as master servers. I use a script to SCP the files to the nameservers when I do a DNS update. Stupid simple, excellent security a la SSH.
While technically well written and clear, this is one of the most uninspiring pieces of work imaginable describing the values of DNS. It's so bad that I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon. Highly technical and detailed while still being abstract, it's 100% accurate while still managing to be utterly devoid of any usefulness whatsoever.
Oh yeah, this is DNS we're talking about. Implementing it IS uninspiring and so abstract, it does make you rather gouge your eyes out with a rusty spoon.
But what DNS does is extremely exciting, and forms the foundation of what makes the Internet actually WORK for people. Think about it - when's the last time there was any major DNS failure? Never? Me too. Damned reliable, damned powerful, and damned easy to get you hooked up to the geek blogs, tunes, IRC, and whatever else we all crave.
Read this if:
A) You work with DNS regularly and want to know if you know enough for it to make some sense to you. (That's me)
B) You are thinking about implementing a DNS server.
Otherwise, move along, find something that might interest you, but take just a moment to reflect how difficult Internet life would be if DNS wasn't so well designed and crafted.
But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.
/month is damned cheap. And if your business is making money, you'd do well to spend a tad more than that, and get a decent hosting environment.
$7/month is cheap, folks. Here's an explanation:
I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.
Alrighty, then. Let's grind the numbers:
1) $50/month DSL Connection, fixed-IP plan. (average price)
2) $14/month computer cost. ($500 desktop computer, split over 3 years)
3) $14.40/month power cost. (That's 100 watts, 24x7, $0.20/Kwh)
4) $78.40 per month, not including DNS charges, admin overhead, repairs, etc.
Isn't that 10x your $7/month fee? Doesn't that make it cheaper than hosting yourself?
That $7 times thousands of customers should be able to buy some redundant power supplies, for example.
Thousands of customers? That's pretty optimistic, isn't it? I'd guess probably more like 300-1,000 customers per server. A good quality whitebox server starts at around $3,500 and goes up very rapidly from there. Then there's bandwidth, sysadmin fees (A decent sysadmin should pull > $50,000/year) and it's easy to see how the numbers aren't as rosy as you'd think.
It's not the $7/month pricing that's making their sites unreliable, it's their own past decisions.
Spoken with authority! Perhaps you're a system administrator or something?
If anything, shared hosting should be more reliable than a dedicated server. You're not fucking up things yourself as root. There'll be measures in place to prevent sites from using up all the bandwidth. Some one's keeping an eye out on the server 24h
Even LOUSY shared hosting is going to be a damned site more reliable than your DSL line. But, it's not going to hold a candle to dedicated hardware running in a high-quality hosting farm. Get the right tool for the job.
Let's put it this way; buying dedicated hosting at the likes of dreamhost won't help you the next time the power for their entire facility goes down. Or when the (single, non-redundant) connection to their secondary datacenter, which actually happens to host dedicated servers, goes down.
So, that's where the GP comes in - ever heard of an SLA? Surely somebody as experienced (cough) as you would know what that is???
$7
Cell phones are usually made out of soft, easily scratched plastic. Keys are made out of metal. Not a good combination(I mean, obviously, but people really put their keys and cell phone in the same pocket?).
So don't buy crappy phones made of soft, easily scratched plastic! My phone has a metal / hardened rubber exterior and has held up quite nicely to being knocked around in my pocket along with my keys, loose change, etc. It's not like I paid jack for it - I got it as a "freebie phone" with a contract at Verizon.
The numbers are all guesses, but like I said, the intent of the gp is probably pretty much right. The current distribution system for groceries (in the US anyway) is not sufficient to handle also providing fuel needs for the public on top of the food.
Perhaps you don't realize how little that actually matters. It's one thing to build an infrastructure that's inherently incompatible with existing infrastructure. It's another thing entirely to extend and amplify an existing infrastructure.
Let's take your "tank a week" scenario. It's roughly on par with Gasoline per unit of weight (Kg) so we're talking about a 10-gallon tank in your average 4-5 seater car. Gasoline weighs about 6 pounds per gallon, so that's about 60 lbs per week to meet a not-atypical situation. I buy a 50-lb bag of dogfood every other week thanks to my large golden retriever.
What's important is the cost of entry - not the total cost. It doesn't really matter what the total cost is, as long as the initial cost can be made up in profits quickly. Once the enterprise is profitable, it doesn't really matter much what the costs are, since the enterprise is, by definition, profitable and thus has the means to grow.
Here, we're talking about starch as merely an additional product that I can buy, along with the 50-lb bag of dog food. The initial cost of entry to sell starch to early adopters is so low as to be inconsequential.
Compare/contrast that with typical hydrogen scenarios, with expensive retrofits of existing fuel stations, special tanks, special dispensation stations, etc. See the difference?
Yes, your local grocery mart probably isn't going to provide enough fuel for everybody in town next to the dog food aisle. But they can start there, and then as the profits grow, roll out more specialized stations as the demand justifies it. See the difference?
Circuit City tried to pull that shit with me.
What's odd for me is that my experiences here are the reverse - frequently there are items that I want that are on sale for significantly cheaper than the website!
I bought my Canon digital camera at Circuit City for almost $100 cheaper than was available on the website - simply because it was "already opened". It's worked great, despite the abuse that me and my 6 kids put it thru, for almost three years.
Sorry you're having bad experiences, but I've so consistently found stuff on sale in the local CC that I don't even bother with the website anymore.
On another note, I've only been able to successfully buy ANYTHING at Best Buy once without returning it. I've gone there perhaps a half dozen times and they have universally had one or more of:
A) Crappy prices - 25% higher than Circuit City, and CC is closer.
B) Not what I want/need.
C) Shoddy or sub-par products.
The single item I purchased? A 12v -> 110v adapter. They had them for almost $20 cheaper at Circuit City, but were out of stock, and I needed it right then.
Dell got its name by selling direct. Dell == Direct. After spending 20 years proving to everybody that "direct is better and cheaper", them selling direct thru a major distributor like Wally World is a major, major change in their product placement and emphasis.
They must be REALLY HURTING to go for a deal like this! For premium brands, it seems like selling thru Wal-Mart is the kiss of death. You could almost say it's like a TV show "jumping the shark" - either your company just sells cruddy products thru Wal-Mart or you have a flagging premium brand and you just want to cash in on what's left of your good name.
And, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, take a look at The Wal-Mart You Don't Know...
ICANN is the organisation we should turn to: perhaps make a rule that the owner of a domain has to actually do something with it within a set period of time (say 6 months to a year). If all they've done in that time is plaster it in advertising (or have done nothing) it should return to the pool, perhaps with a bar disallowing the ghastly spammer from buying it again for a year.
There are too many problems with suggestions like these to name.
1) What if the POINT of the business is advertising? Hey, I might want to buy an airplane, or rent a room - being able to find one is a legitimate service!
2) Who is going to police it? Really? With the bazillions of domain names expiring every year, policing this is just an absurd task.
3) Just because I haven't done anything yet with a domain, EG: doesn't mean I don't have plans for it. Granted, the plans may be a year or more before completion, but that's not to say that nothing is happening!
4) And even if problems 1 to 3 could be addressed, whose standard are you going to apply? Remember, the Internet is INTERNATIONAL and ICAAN is more of a technical body than a regulatory or legislative one.
Personally, I think that the way to handle this is to take out some of the profit potential for being a sleazebag like TFA is about. Domain squatting is a civil offense, and the loser is the person who can't own an otherwise useful domain because the squatter has, in a classic case of "tragedy of the commons", already taken the domain name.
So I suggest that
A) ICANN publish a set of rules for what determines a legitimate use of the domain. These rules would allow for defense of trademarks, and parking for intended future development.
B) Provides a procedure for arbitration, where there are fees which are paid by the LOSER of the arbitration.
Thus, if I need the domain Watermelon.com and find it squatted, I could initiate proceedings with a reasonable expectation of getting the domain free of charge if the domain is legitimately squatted according to ICANN rules.
This would drastically deflate the profit potential of the domain-name land-grab that's been going on and provide a reasonable expectation that domain names have something to do with who registers them. This would effectively shift the cost of dealing with the scumbags onto the 'bags themselves.
I'm not convinced that any sort of software algorithm should be patentable, but if we are going to allow patents on some narrowly-defined "implementations," which might involve software at some point in them (but not being wholly comprised of software), I think it's pretty clear that the term of the patents needs to be substantially reduced.
What's perhaps funny about this (very long run-on) sentence is that, at its heart, EVERYTHING IS SOFTWARE. Listen to particle physicists nowadays - they all talk about "information entropy". Heck, the big deal about Hawking radiation is that it allows for (gasp!) information leaks at the event horizon of a black hole, and thus the eventual collapse of the black hole back into "normal" space!
The entire universe can now be narrowly (and apparently, quite accurately) defined as a massive information machine. Perhaps Douglas Adams, for all his absurd literature, was actually pretty close to the mark?
Anyhow, if the entire universe is definable in the same terms as software is, fundamentally nothing more than bits of information, what is really the line between software and other "physical" processes?
In reality, they are the same thing!
...people who can sit outside a baseball stadium or concert from some vantage point and watch the game/performance for free are also commiting a felony.
No. In your example, there's no computer involved.
Really, there are two contradictory laws at stake, here.
1) According to the FCC, it's perfectly legal to receive ANY BROADCAST TRANSMISSION. I can set up a radio receiver and pick up whatever happens to be in the air. This includes wifi broadcasts, which are really nothing more than a cordless phone combined with a MODEM.
2) But, it's also illegal in most areas to "access computers or computer networks without permission". They stand in contradiction to each other. The part that's odd here is that the WIFI spot announces itself as unencrypted, sort of like a welcome sign. How did this guy not have permission to access the network?
I personally think that wireless networks, even those that are being broadcast in unlicensed spectrums (like wifi) should be illegal to access if the "digital doorknob" is locked. If you have to enter in a password or decryption key, even a weak one like WEP, it's illegal to access. But, if it's open/unencrypted, then you should be free to act with impunity.
This is how we interpret things more physically. AFAIK here in California, if you approach my house and the front door is closed such that you have to turn the doorknob to enter it, it's illegal to enter without a specific invitation. (EG: "Come on in" sign, me hollering for you to, whatever) But if the door is open, you can enter with impunity - having the door open can be considered an invitation to enter.
(IANAL, etc)
So why would wireless networks be any different? Don't want people accessing your network? Put up a password/encryption key. Otherwise, your door is open, and people can (and probably will) enter.
PS: More than once, I've trolled middle-class neighborhoods for a hotspot in a pinch. It seems that the best neighborhoods are the straight-up middle class ones - lower classes don't tend to have high-speed connections, upper classes tend to hire tech weenies to set up their networks, and they usually secure them. But the guys in the middle buy their Linksys routers at Best Buy, take them home, plug them in, they work, and they stop there.
They're not checking documents now, and that's a legal requirement already. They think that the existence of a database will somehow make people care any more?
This will only be compounded by the general ineffectiveness of the database solution. As somebody whose name (Ben Smith) is suspiciously similar to somebody else who was a bad boy enough to get them on the do-not-fly list, it just doesn't work.
I've spent years having to go through additional security checks at airports - fingerprinting, etc - because somebody, somewhere, has a name or alias that sounds an awful lot like (ahem) Ben Smith. A system like this is a recipe for a disastrous sea of false positives!
I can just see it now, at the side of the road:
Guy drives up in a truck. "You looking for work?"
"Si, senor!"
"Wutcher name? Lemme lookit up..."
"Jose Jiminez, senor".
"Hmmm... Says here on my newfangled wireless cellular wifi laptop thang that you could be one of about 35,000 people with your name who are here illegally! Any of thems is you?"
"No senor!"
"Hop in the back o'da truck - get down under the tarp so nobody sees ye"...
When you add the amount of time, money, kit and effort that'd go into either burning that many optical disks or filling that many harddrives, then connecting them on the other end and reading it out makes it less attractive than fiber optics.
Do we really need a 747? Well, let's see. 15 PB of data, how many 1TB hard drives would that actually be? According to Wikipedia:
1 PB = 10^15.
1 TB = 10^12
Thus, 1 PB could be written as 1,000 TB of data. So 15,000 TB hard drives will do it. Use RAID 5, say 4/5 (where 5 disks replicate 4 images) so we'll add 25%. That brings us to 18,500 HDD with decent redundancy.
The weight of a 3.5" HDD is apparently as much as about 700 grams so we'll say that's around 25 ounces per drive. That's 375,000 ounces, or 23,437 pounds. But a Boeing 747 can carry about 10x that much!
Methinks you've seriously overbuilt your solution. Heck even a little 727 is still way overbuilt. (max load 58,000 pounds) And 727s are dirt cheap nowadays.
But is that actually better?
Fiber optics nowadays can be pushed closed to 1 Tb per second. That's certainly in the range of what we're talking about. Actual numbers looks like 1 Tb per second could conceivably transfer 15 TB every 5.5 days or so, assuming optimal conditions. How much "dark fiber" is there under the ocean? Not much, I'd wager. Meaning this may likely require another cable to be laid == big, expensive, long project.
So the 727 is probably the best bet, since they can get started pretty much right away, and won't have to put together a 5 year project to run cables under the ocean...
Hmm. more curiosity - a 727 burns about 1,800 gallons of fuel every hour - costing around $1.84 per gallon. 3800 miles, about 3000 knots, or 10 hours at 300 Knots... around $65,000 per round trip. Since the budget of the entire project is 6.7 Billion dollars, it would take over 10,000 such trips to equal 10% of the total CERN budget.
In short, it's a deal at twice the price!
is it going to read my address book and email itself to other people? No, OO does not have access to my Thunderbird address book.
Why not? Ostensibly, OO will run as user YOU, and YOU have access to your Tbird address book, and so would OO. Unless you're running SE Linux like a bat out of hell (most people don't) or have chroot or suid set up. Most *nix users however, don't have this kind of set up.
If someone else has unlimited text messaging they could effectively start spamming people (everyone remember the old pager bombs?) with the consequence of massive phone bills.
I was chatting with a chick down at the local airport, with my flight instructor. She was complaining about her ex-boyfriend who would call her randomly from different phones and harass her. So, I cracked a joke, offering to write a quick program to send 10,000 text messages to his phone "don't freaking call me you farkquad" or something. I didn't even think about the 10,000 - as a software engineer I routinely have to deal with algorithms working with millions to billions of possibilities or data elements, so 10,000 just seemed like a "get his attention" sorta small number.
But then they ran the numbers on it, and figured that 10,000 messages would probably cost the guy $1,500 bucks! (As I've posted elsewhere I've had unlimited text messaging since forever, so the cost of it never actually occurred to me)
Oh shiznit! But it's such a stupid simple hack, I could do it in about 3 lines of code! It would take my midrange laptop perhaps 20 minutes to run and send all the messages! To make it 10 times worse would only take one additional keystroke!
Sometimes it amazes me how truly vulnerable we all are to knowledgeable people with malicious intent.
No, I'm not advocating any "mob justice" or anything - but like a pimply teen, those of us "with the power" of knowledge need to understand our true strength and behave accordingly.
But seriously, why is a phone call cheaper than an SMS message? It's all a digital network, so in cost per bit, SMS messages are something like 66 times more expensive than a phone call.
.00006 cents per byte ($0.000006 / byte)
.04 cents per byte. ($0.0004 / byte)
Let's compare: Digital cell phones use about 14.4 Kbps of bandwidth. (which explains their clarity) Figure about 30 seconds of talking to get the equivalent of a text message, with the "Hello, is SO AND SO there? Yeah. Yeah. It's Billie. 'O, o joy ur so kul'. -CHUCKLE- Ok, see you later. By by. ".
That works out to a total of 54,000 bytes, or 108,000 Bytes/minute. I get about 1,000 minutes at $70/month, a la Verizon. Each minute therefore costs $0.07. So the cost per 30 seconds of conversation is something like 3.5 cents, for 56,000 bytes.
An SMS message is, at its longest, 160 Bytes long. Include headers, let's be generous and say it's double that. (it's not) 320 bytes in an SMS message. Here, we're asking for 15 cents for just 360 bytes?!?!?
Voice
54,000/3.5 cents =
SMS
360 bytes/15 cents =
If you were buying soda, it'd be like buying a 12 oz can of soda for about $20 while a 2 liter bottle costs $1.
Does that seem like good math to you? BTW: I bought into "unlimited text messaging" back when Verizon offered it, and have refused to upgrade plans until I get it. I've got a network monitor, and when something goes wrong I can get tons of messages all at once if I'm not careful.
Then can I ask you something? Why did you click the Read More link on the front page, read the summary, click Reply, and type out an entire post if you don't fucking care?
- ahem -
It's the "totem pole" effect, often called the "social ladder". By feigning a lack of care, a human can insult another human and make like he/she/they are better than the party being insulted. Other examples of this type of behavior:
If a guy dumps a girlfriend, he's automatically "one up" the social ladder from her. Conversely, if she dumps him, it's the other way around.
If a guy quits a job, he can be one-up. If a guy gets fired, he's one-down.
Quiz question: I've been a Linux user since 1999, and have had Linux as my primary desktop since about 2001. Where does that put me on the social ladder with respect to Microsoft?
Let's cut to the chase.
Listen, I want to make a living off of creating content as much as any other artist, but unless I create something that people feel they want, and offer it at a price they think is fair, I won't. I'm not entitled to make $2 per piece of artwork unless the consumer agrees my work is worth $2. Simple as that.
I agree 100%.
That's how a "free market" works. This sort of reasoning is also why the RIAA wants to make selling used CDs illegal, or enough of a hassle that stores won't want to do it. They want to be the sole arbiter of price. But in an actual free market, you don't sell anything if the consumer doesn't like what you're offering and at what price you're offering it.
That's shady practice, and perhaps the RIAA should be prosecuted under Sherman Act or RICO laws.
And the consumer isn't changing any deal when "pirating" something. Aside from the untested EULA/clickwrap ideas, they haven't agreed to anything at all.
And this is where you go south. They absolutely ARE changing a deal. They are acting to deny the producer legal rights to control the distribution of content they legitimately created.
Put another way, if I think that a scribble of mine is worth $1,000,000 and market it as such, and someone copies it, have they stolen $1,000,000 worth of potential revenue from me?
Yes and no. Accounting 101: profit is made when the product is sold. If the act of unapproved copying reduces the likelyhood of a sale (and it does) then the potential for profit is reduced. You can never know what the actual profit would be, because by pirating the material, the profit potential is reduced or eliminated. Asking for an example where piracy clearly cost the profits of a movie is like asking for a single example of a valuable scientist who never benefited society because of abortion.
Piracy == economic abortion. It kills the possibility of a sale, and with it motivation to produce quality works that society can benefit from. And, if you pirate enough, the bogeymen will come after you and you will be prosecuted, and rightly so.
That's not to say that I think the RIAA are angels - their stupidity is only outclassed by their lack of intelligence - but even the power of the GPL comes at the strength of Intellectual Property laws that allow the producer to determine the terms of distribution of their works.
If you don't like the terms of distribution offered by the producer, then you have no rights to the material. The ethical thing to do is find a producer who provides material under terms you find suitable. That is a free market. What you propose is called the Black Market.
I can argue that competition is theft, since they take away the potential profits of a creator.
Competitors in an intellectual property domain create their own content to compete with you with. A consumer might ask "Am I going to buy the Britney Spears album or the Celine Dion album?" That's perfectly ok, and is what happens in a free, open marketplace.
But rampant piracy/copyright infringement makes artists compete with themselves: Am I going to buy the Britney Spears album, or am I going to steal it?
If it's very easy/cheap to download/pirate/copyright-infringe the album, then the likelyhood of the sale goes down. That's a form of theft, and everybody loses, not just the artist.
Why is that so hard for you to understand?
I'm not saying that the RIAA are angels. They're idiots too, and most of their idiocy simply comes from fear of the unknown. All I'm saying is that if you don't like what they're doing, don't buy, and the marketplace will sort itself out. But copyright infringement only gives them more social/political ammunition to come after you, and leaves you on a very compromised social/ethical footing.