To your example of IRC, individual IRC servers could be at risk IF they are there primarily for piracy, not that piracy happens on them (For instance, YouTube vs. Pirate Bay - Infringement happens on youtube, it is encouraged on TPB).
While I can see that for individual servers, IRC is a distributed system, and doesn't generally utilize a single server. It's not inconceivable that a majority of file traffic transmitted via irc is infringing on copyright, and if how something is being used to a significant measure is sufficient criteria to consider that use as its primary purpose, then it would seem to me that they may be compelled to shut down IRC. Of course, that would mean blocking many hundreds of servers, very few of which could ever be said to have been party to the infringement, but if they were to try to prevent irc file sharing, how would SOPA assist them?
The issue mostly involves image file formats. Some use pvrtc, while others use s3tc. Switching between them can take a very long time as the original assets need to be reprocessed.
Of course not... the problem is not the different models by the same manufacturer, the problem is really the sheer number of manufacturers.
This, itself, would not be a problem if there was a unified standard that all would use, the problems are that each manufacturer has its own peculiarities, and that they don't all use the same type of connector (although most are pretty good, standardizing on micro USB), and also that one has to install nearly a dozen different device drivers to support them all (which I can't actually do on one machine, because in my experience, some drivers don't play nicely with some other ones, and if you try to have both drivers installed on one machine that conflict, then neither device type will be recognized when it is plugged in).
I compare what I have working experience with... I don't get to choose the tools and devices I use at work. And my point is that we have to support a "critical market share", which because of the diversity of android devices, makes it very difficult to do multiplatform development.
Aleph numbers represent the cardinality of particular sets, but they are not numbers on which arithmetic operations such as '+' have any meaning because they have inifinite magnitude. You can neither add to nor subtract from infinity meaningfully.
What if you can't stabilize it? Never mind that you might not or can't imagine what might happen that such an incident could ever occur... what happens in the event of an all-out catastrophic failure, where absolutely nobody can stabilize the system? Bear in mind that every nuclear plant that ever had a meltdown in history was not expected to do so when it was first designed either.
My point is that trying to predict the future or only accommodate what are considered "likely" scenarios, regardless of how good your odds might happen to be on paper, is futile... and still amounts to rolling dice, with people's lives at stake. It's an arrogance about what we think we know about what can happen to the point that is almost makes me sick... particularly since passive systems exist and have proven themselves to be economically viable.
Passive systems require absolutely *NO* powered systems for emergency cooling, and thus even in the event of a complete catastrophic failure (regardless of what could cause such a failure), there will not be any meltdown, and the worst that will happen is that the power plant will simply go dark instead of leaking radiation everywhere, which would cost *FAR* more in cleanup expenses than any additional resources you would have spent using a passive safety system in the first place.
You are correct... there are many unstated assumptions. The problem is that if you discard too many of those implied properties, then even the notion of the thing actually existing ends up being meaningless, as I attempted to show, above.
It's still a pain in the arse... and as I'm not self-employed, I'm required to use the tools that my employer provides... no matter how much I might happen to prefer other ones.
No... there's not a problem with multiple vendors. The problem is multiple standards. Multiple vendors are a problem only in the sense that they don't agree or play nice with eachother.
A single standard driver that worked for all android devices would be a *HUGE* deal, and between that using uniform native image file formats, instead of 4 different standard ones, I would be totally all over Android as superior to iOS, regardless of how many different types of tablets there were.
No... with iOS we only have to support certain generations that satisfy a certain critical threshold of users. This is quite easy to do and the number of devices that we typically have to test for is on the order of 4 or 5. Only two devices when we are targetting the iPad.
The android environment, however, is so finely divided that the number of distinctly different devices that must be supported to reach that same threshold of users is several times larger. Plus, as I said... device drivers have to separately be installed for each one, which complicates setup tremendously. I've even seen issues where different drivers ended up conflicting with eachother and could not both be installed on the same machine at the same time.
You can readily prove the non-existence of something that satisfies a particular set of properties... for example, finding a real number that satisfies being equivalent to the square root of negative 1. The properties are "real" and "square root of -1". And it is fully provable that absolutely no number exists with both of those properties. While a complex number that is the square root of negative 1 exists, and one might want to argue that the ascribed property of being real was arbitrary and unncessary, one could equally argue the the property of being the square root of negative 1 was arbitrary as well... yet clearly real numbers exist, so what make one property distinctive and the other not?
It is even possible to prove the nonexistence of something with only a single property... such as the existence of a number that is equivalent to itself plus 1. There is absolutely no number, in any number system defined by mathematics, that satisfies this criteria. People who challenge even this would have to leave the domain of mathematics entirely, making the argument that it might still plausibly exist wholly meaningless... since, after all, outside of mathematics, what would it even mean to "add 1" to something?
Of course, one might then point out that this could work within a domain of mathematics because it is built on such rigidly defined principles, and those principles are well understood. In the real world, however, we do not necessarily know all the physical principles that govern the universe's operation... we may believe we understand them well enough to have demonstrated predictive power in the past, but that does not mean our understanding is anywhere near complete. Because of this ambiguity, some doubt can always remain about the existence of certain things. The only way you can remove this doubt is by ascribing properties to the thing you are intending to disprove, and then systematically showing that the satisfaction of those properties creates a logical contradiction, thereby disproving the existence of that thing with those properties.
And that additional robustness won't be worth dick all if something completely unprecedented occurs. Seriously... how many more meltdowns do we have to see before people get a friggen clue? And all these meltdowns do is scare people away from nuclear power being generally used, rather than providing any incentives to simply build the nuclear reactors safely in the first place.
Nobody *expects* a meltdown to occur when they build a nuclear reactor, but one only has to look at history to realize that we make mistakes, and sometimes stuff we haven't ever anticipated happens. With passive safety systems, it doesn't matter what happens - even a 100% catastrophic failure, regardless of cause, will result in the system cooling down instead of continuing to heat up, which is the cause of meltdowns and has historically been the cause for serious widespread radiation issues, and is what has made so many people antsy about nuclear power usage in the first place.
I write video games for a living, and lately, we've been using Unity. Whenever we do an android build, it has to be tested on a wide array of devices just to be certain that there are no issues related to screen layout or any problematic performance problems. To top it all off, we also have to make multiple builds so that the data can be stored efficiently on each type of platform. This is problematic because it requires separate repositories of the same code-base, because trying to switch between different builds on a single repository within Unity can take several hours as all of the art assets of the work must be reprocessed. To top it all off, drivers for each indiivdual device must be installed, because there is no single general android driver that works for all android devices, which complicates setup tremendously.
On iOS, we can simply test on each generation of the iPhone we are intending to support, and also on the iPad1 and iPad2... and there is absolutely no reprocessing of assets required, as all iOS devices store their data in the exact same way. Finally, supporting the iOS device for development only requires having a mac. No additional drivers are required... one is good to go as soon as they have XCode installed on their system and have installed the necessary provision profiles for uploading to a physical device.
1) Site has to be dedicated to promoting piracy...
Yes... I can see that as well. The sticky part is what is the metric that they use to determine that the site is dedicated to that purpose, and not merely incidentally used for that purpose by a lot of people? If more than a certain majority percentage of its usage is piracy related? This could be problematic for something like IRC, which has a huge amount of illegitimate content being traded on it between its users, but also has a significant legitimate use as well.
Secondly, is SOPA only dedicated to blocking internet sites? Or can it also block individual protocols as well? The ratio of illegal to legitimate torrent traffic, for instance, is huge... and could arguably provide a case for the blocking of any traffic using that protocol, although again... there is still significant legitimate use as well, even though it might happen to be only trace amounts when compared to the illegal usage. If SOPA empowers the US government to block protocols that have significant illegal use, then this I can see this being enormously problematic, as the government and the pirates start to play a virtual game of "whack a mole", and a significant number of legitimate users start getting impacted by the government's efforts.
Yes... but what does it take to make a site worthy of getting that court order in the first place? Is there no metric, and could it be absolutely any website that somebody in the US government dislikes?
Purely passive systems have virtually no chance of meltdown, even on a theoretical level, since if the system should ever fail, for absolutely *ANY* reason, all the way up to and including total systems failure, the core will immediately start to cool down.
The cost for this safety is a small compromise in reactor efficiency, and I am at a complete loss as to why anyone would ever want to build a nuclear reactor that was not designed around a passive safety system... it might not ever be needed, and ideally, it never will... but if something completely unprecedented or however unlikely does actually occur, that small compromise more than pays for itself.
Anything else is just a man-made disaster that, regardless of how good your odds are, you can still only hope will never actually happen.
Passive design reactors are, by far, the safest type of reactor in the world (in fact, a meltdown is virtually impossible, because even catastrophic failure results in the core cooling down instead of heating up), and IMO, building *ANY* other type of reactor is just setting yourself up for a possible incident that's going to lead to eventual regret.
You said that "a) half of the Xbox experience doesn't work if not on a XBL Gold account". It appeared to me that you were inferring this was something reflected specifically by the new TOS, and not something that was always the case.
Sorry.... I meant the most recent version of the hosts file spec was RFC 952, not the current one, which is somewhat modified from that, and does not, I think, have any formal RFC spec. Nonetheless, it was still utilized for quite a few years before Windows first used it.
Slashdot Mirror
While I can see that for individual servers, IRC is a distributed system, and doesn't generally utilize a single server. It's not inconceivable that a majority of file traffic transmitted via irc is infringing on copyright, and if how something is being used to a significant measure is sufficient criteria to consider that use as its primary purpose, then it would seem to me that they may be compelled to shut down IRC. Of course, that would mean blocking many hundreds of servers, very few of which could ever be said to have been party to the infringement, but if they were to try to prevent irc file sharing, how would SOPA assist them?
That is correct.
The issue mostly involves image file formats. Some use pvrtc, while others use s3tc. Switching between them can take a very long time as the original assets need to be reprocessed.
Of course not... the problem is not the different models by the same manufacturer, the problem is really the sheer number of manufacturers.
This, itself, would not be a problem if there was a unified standard that all would use, the problems are that each manufacturer has its own peculiarities, and that they don't all use the same type of connector (although most are pretty good, standardizing on micro USB), and also that one has to install nearly a dozen different device drivers to support them all (which I can't actually do on one machine, because in my experience, some drivers don't play nicely with some other ones, and if you try to have both drivers installed on one machine that conflict, then neither device type will be recognized when it is plugged in).
I compare what I have working experience with... I don't get to choose the tools and devices I use at work. And my point is that we have to support a "critical market share", which because of the diversity of android devices, makes it very difficult to do multiplatform development.
Because I get paid to... duh.
I like my job... I just can't say I appreciate every little thing I'm expected to do.
Aleph numbers represent the cardinality of particular sets, but they are not numbers on which arithmetic operations such as '+' have any meaning because they have inifinite magnitude. You can neither add to nor subtract from infinity meaningfully.
What if you can't stabilize it? Never mind that you might not or can't imagine what might happen that such an incident could ever occur... what happens in the event of an all-out catastrophic failure, where absolutely nobody can stabilize the system? Bear in mind that every nuclear plant that ever had a meltdown in history was not expected to do so when it was first designed either.
My point is that trying to predict the future or only accommodate what are considered "likely" scenarios, regardless of how good your odds might happen to be on paper, is futile... and still amounts to rolling dice, with people's lives at stake. It's an arrogance about what we think we know about what can happen to the point that is almost makes me sick... particularly since passive systems exist and have proven themselves to be economically viable.
Passive systems require absolutely *NO* powered systems for emergency cooling, and thus even in the event of a complete catastrophic failure (regardless of what could cause such a failure), there will not be any meltdown, and the worst that will happen is that the power plant will simply go dark instead of leaking radiation everywhere, which would cost *FAR* more in cleanup expenses than any additional resources you would have spent using a passive safety system in the first place.
You are correct... there are many unstated assumptions. The problem is that if you discard too many of those implied properties, then even the notion of the thing actually existing ends up being meaningless, as I attempted to show, above.
It's still a pain in the arse... and as I'm not self-employed, I'm required to use the tools that my employer provides... no matter how much I might happen to prefer other ones.
No... there's not a problem with multiple vendors. The problem is multiple standards. Multiple vendors are a problem only in the sense that they don't agree or play nice with eachother.
A single standard driver that worked for all android devices would be a *HUGE* deal, and between that using uniform native image file formats, instead of 4 different standard ones, I would be totally all over Android as superior to iOS, regardless of how many different types of tablets there were.
No... with iOS we only have to support certain generations that satisfy a certain critical threshold of users. This is quite easy to do and the number of devices that we typically have to test for is on the order of 4 or 5. Only two devices when we are targetting the iPad.
The android environment, however, is so finely divided that the number of distinctly different devices that must be supported to reach that same threshold of users is several times larger. Plus, as I said... device drivers have to separately be installed for each one, which complicates setup tremendously. I've even seen issues where different drivers ended up conflicting with eachother and could not both be installed on the same machine at the same time.
You can readily prove the non-existence of something that satisfies a particular set of properties... for example, finding a real number that satisfies being equivalent to the square root of negative 1. The properties are "real" and "square root of -1". And it is fully provable that absolutely no number exists with both of those properties. While a complex number that is the square root of negative 1 exists, and one might want to argue that the ascribed property of being real was arbitrary and unncessary, one could equally argue the the property of being the square root of negative 1 was arbitrary as well... yet clearly real numbers exist, so what make one property distinctive and the other not?
It is even possible to prove the nonexistence of something with only a single property... such as the existence of a number that is equivalent to itself plus 1. There is absolutely no number, in any number system defined by mathematics, that satisfies this criteria. People who challenge even this would have to leave the domain of mathematics entirely, making the argument that it might still plausibly exist wholly meaningless... since, after all, outside of mathematics, what would it even mean to "add 1" to something?
Of course, one might then point out that this could work within a domain of mathematics because it is built on such rigidly defined principles, and those principles are well understood. In the real world, however, we do not necessarily know all the physical principles that govern the universe's operation... we may believe we understand them well enough to have demonstrated predictive power in the past, but that does not mean our understanding is anywhere near complete. Because of this ambiguity, some doubt can always remain about the existence of certain things. The only way you can remove this doubt is by ascribing properties to the thing you are intending to disprove, and then systematically showing that the satisfaction of those properties creates a logical contradiction, thereby disproving the existence of that thing with those properties.
And that additional robustness won't be worth dick all if something completely unprecedented occurs. Seriously... how many more meltdowns do we have to see before people get a friggen clue? And all these meltdowns do is scare people away from nuclear power being generally used, rather than providing any incentives to simply build the nuclear reactors safely in the first place.
Nobody *expects* a meltdown to occur when they build a nuclear reactor, but one only has to look at history to realize that we make mistakes, and sometimes stuff we haven't ever anticipated happens. With passive safety systems, it doesn't matter what happens - even a 100% catastrophic failure, regardless of cause, will result in the system cooling down instead of continuing to heat up, which is the cause of meltdowns and has historically been the cause for serious widespread radiation issues, and is what has made so many people antsy about nuclear power usage in the first place.
I write video games for a living, and lately, we've been using Unity. Whenever we do an android build, it has to be tested on a wide array of devices just to be certain that there are no issues related to screen layout or any problematic performance problems. To top it all off, we also have to make multiple builds so that the data can be stored efficiently on each type of platform. This is problematic because it requires separate repositories of the same code-base, because trying to switch between different builds on a single repository within Unity can take several hours as all of the art assets of the work must be reprocessed. To top it all off, drivers for each indiivdual device must be installed, because there is no single general android driver that works for all android devices, which complicates setup tremendously.
On iOS, we can simply test on each generation of the iPhone we are intending to support, and also on the iPad1 and iPad2... and there is absolutely no reprocessing of assets required, as all iOS devices store their data in the exact same way. Finally, supporting the iOS device for development only requires having a mac. No additional drivers are required... one is good to go as soon as they have XCode installed on their system and have installed the necessary provision profiles for uploading to a physical device.
How is that different from any other year?
Yes... I can see that as well. The sticky part is what is the metric that they use to determine that the site is dedicated to that purpose, and not merely incidentally used for that purpose by a lot of people? If more than a certain majority percentage of its usage is piracy related? This could be problematic for something like IRC, which has a huge amount of illegitimate content being traded on it between its users, but also has a significant legitimate use as well.
Secondly, is SOPA only dedicated to blocking internet sites? Or can it also block individual protocols as well? The ratio of illegal to legitimate torrent traffic, for instance, is huge... and could arguably provide a case for the blocking of any traffic using that protocol, although again... there is still significant legitimate use as well, even though it might happen to be only trace amounts when compared to the illegal usage. If SOPA empowers the US government to block protocols that have significant illegal use, then this I can see this being enormously problematic, as the government and the pirates start to play a virtual game of "whack a mole", and a significant number of legitimate users start getting impacted by the government's efforts.
The parallels between what it seems to propose and China's famous firewall seem obvious.
Yes... but what does it take to make a site worthy of getting that court order in the first place? Is there no metric, and could it be absolutely any website that somebody in the US government dislikes?
Could the USA shut slashdot down if an AC's posted some torrent links for content that infringed on copyright?
What metric does the US government use to determine if some content is infringing that makes it worth shutting down access to the entire website?
Will the USA also be shutting down irc, which is also used by many people to send copyrighted content to others illegally?
Famous last words, I'm sure.
Purely passive systems have virtually no chance of meltdown, even on a theoretical level, since if the system should ever fail, for absolutely *ANY* reason, all the way up to and including total systems failure, the core will immediately start to cool down.
The cost for this safety is a small compromise in reactor efficiency, and I am at a complete loss as to why anyone would ever want to build a nuclear reactor that was not designed around a passive safety system... it might not ever be needed, and ideally, it never will... but if something completely unprecedented or however unlikely does actually occur, that small compromise more than pays for itself.
Anything else is just a man-made disaster that, regardless of how good your odds are, you can still only hope will never actually happen.
Passive design reactors are, by far, the safest type of reactor in the world (in fact, a meltdown is virtually impossible, because even catastrophic failure results in the core cooling down instead of heating up), and IMO, building *ANY* other type of reactor is just setting yourself up for a possible incident that's going to lead to eventual regret.
You said that "a) half of the Xbox experience doesn't work if not on a XBL Gold account". It appeared to me that you were inferring this was something reflected specifically by the new TOS, and not something that was always the case.
But, pray tell, what can you not do now that you used to be able to do?
Sorry.... I meant the most recent version of the hosts file spec was RFC 952, not the current one, which is somewhat modified from that, and does not, I think, have any formal RFC spec. Nonetheless, it was still utilized for quite a few years before Windows first used it.