I personally favor the god who will throw anyone who believed in him without proof into hell, while letting those who were sceptical into heaven.
Considering that god must be pretty intelligent to create the universe, I think that such a god is more likely than a god that throws you into hell for not believing without proof.
The idea that anonymous rude assholes in game chats are spoiled children is one of the worst stereotypes I have encountered on the internet.
Age seems to have little to no relation to behavior as long as anonymity is involved. Of course, I havn't done have any real scientific research, so I could be mistaken, but I doubt it.
As a "hardcore" pirate (mostly anime), I can say that a 4TB doesn't really cover my needs today, so I doubt it will cover my needs in five years.
Let's say that you download 25GB a month, which is not that much compared to a hardcore pirate like me, and probably quite common among young people. 25*12=300. 4000/300 = 13. That 4TB disk will be able to contain 13 years of your downloads. Sounds like a lot? Well, humans in general love to keep things, and 13 years isn't that long compared to the human life span.
And that isn't even taking into consideration the increasing size of data, especially HD video, but also uncompressed music and high quality images.
What you really want is a hard drive that is big enough that it contain all your data, while cheap enough that you can buy a few without going over budget. That way it is easier to make backups, as well as implementing a redundant RAID.
Agreed. The free market is just another tool. Recognizing how to utilize it is important to make the best of it.
That is why free market fundamentalists are a pain in the ass to deal with. They point to all the examples where the free market succeeded and use that to claim that the free market always is superior. Religious faith in a system can't be argued with.
Free market has its flaws. A well known one is that of natural monopolies. It is wasteful and costly to have each competitor draw lines to each house. It is however still possible to use free market for the service part of the equation. This includes customer support, billing and communication with the monopoly. (even with a monopoly, a business that is specialized to deal with it will do much better than powerless end consumers)
Another flaw with the free market is that it requires good information. When consumers are less informed or even deliberatly mislead, the free market suffers in efficency. This was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, where someone mentioned how difficult it was to get actual information about the prices of the services in the US. Regulations that improve the flow of information and the correctness thereof is usually very helpful to improve the efficency of the free market.
Finally, I just want to point out that just because I recognize the flaws with the free market, doesn't mean that I think the free market is bad. Everything has flaws. It is when you can't see the flaws that you should be worried, because then you are halfway to being scammed.
Re:Read an article to this effect....
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Except that humans are reding 100 moves ahead. Well, they aren't actually reading that far ahead, but their moves take into account what could happen in a 100 moves.
I may make a two space extension on the side, and after that nothing will happen there for 30-40 moves. I do however know that in the future when the opponents biggest move is to try and threaten my group, it is more difficult for him to do so.
Min-Max may be useful to read out local situations but it is pretty much worthless for looking at a go game strategically.
To extend on what you are saying. Using Min-Max or any derivative algorithm is bound to failure.
The big difference between chess and go isn't the number of game states. The real difference is the purpose of the game. Chess is a killing game, where you try to outmaneuver your opponent to get the final kill.
Go is a trading game where you balance efficency vs weaknesses left behind in your shape. These weaknesses often don't come into play until 50 or 100 moves later. Before that, they simply aren't big enough to consider for a min-max algorithm, and a Min-Max AI simply can't read that far. (faster computers won't really help. They would have to be incredibly much faster, and the optimal/minimum energy needed to run them would be able to power the earth for a long time)
This is why the new Monte Carlo algorithms are more interesting. They can atleast theoretically take these weaknesses into account. There is still a long way to go though.
I think the real way to improve go AI is a mix of expert (or self learning) systems and a brute force algorithm like Monte Carlo. How long it will take is anyones guess. 5 years or 100 years. I wouldn't gamble on it.
Having watched the best Monte Carlo program (MoGo) make decisions on a 9x9 as well as a 19x19 board, I can confidently say that you are incorrect.
Even if I give MoGo 32 times the time to think it will still play much worse on 19x19. It clearly overestimates the value of influence compared to territory.
Except that Fox News isn't a news channel. Telling the truth, however biased, should be a requirement to be called a news channel. And Fox News have openly admitted that they have no intention of telling the truth.
They are a propaganda/entertainment channel, no more, no less.
"How do you know you have that ability? And if you do have that that ability, what if you reason incorrectly (say after being outfitted with the helmet device from the article or getting some brain parasite) how is that different than believing in a sky daddy. You'll appear just as crazy to those around you."
I don't, which is the sole reason why I have to have faith in it. All philosophical views are based on axioms that can't be proven. Religions are what I would called faith based philosophies. They require you to have faith of things outside of the philosophical axioms.
Of course, there are some religions that aren't philosophical, because their complete set of rules causes contradictions. There are of course also philosophies that are a mix of religion and other value sets. Some of these are also contradictory.
The problem I have with believing in a god is that you are extending faith further than you have to. Faith is the opposite of reasoning. Actually, phrasing it like that, I am beginning to wonder if I am really having faith in the axioms. Since axioms are nescessary for reasoning, does it really count as faith to set up a minimal set of axioms to do the reasoning, even if they are incorrect.
A deist doesn't have to have faith just to believe in a god. It is just part of his philosophical axioms. The faith occurs when you tries to go beyond axioms, like placing a personality on the god that isn't supported by the axioms.
"Right, well then you are just as crazy because your rational Atheism is exactly what was endorsed by the commies."
Typical black and white view. Just because one thing someone does is wrong doesn't mean that everything is wrong.
Commies in the USSR may have been atheists, but as I said in my first post, they were faith based, which isn't exactly rational. Believing that you can turn a believer to your side with torture is as irrational as it goes. I don't believe that this post will turn a believer either. It isn't the point of it . If I wanted to turn believers I would take a much more calm stance that tried to show the positives of atheism instead of the negatives of faith. I know enough of psychology to know that taking an offensive stance doesn't work. It just threatens the "opponent" and make them less likely to change their opinion.
Of course, the best way to get people to not believe in harmful religion is to not have them believe in it in the first place. IN other words, go after the children just like the religious people do.
"The fact still remains that the commies (=rational atheists) killed more people (yes, even more than the Nazis) then all the religious fanatics taken together."
Faith based is faith based. Doesn't matter if they are communists, christians or anything else.
" instead your militant Atheism and belief in your 'own' reasoning abilities."
My militant atheism? I have never hurt anyone, and I don't want to. If I have to I will, but violence is seldom a good choice.
My own reasoning abilities would be the philosophy of the scientific method that has given you the computer you used to post this. I suggest you throw it in the trash so you don't have to associate with it.
And the third largest genocide was perpetrated by someone who believed that killing jews was god's wish.
USSR and PRoC are nothing more than two examples of Faith. Faith in ideologies instead of a sky daddy, but faith nontheless. Faith is a mechanism that turns of intelligence and reason and makes people do immoral things they never would do otherwise.
Faith may have had some evolutionary advantage, because as described in other posts, it unites groups. Faith is nothing more than blind obedience to the leader/group.
Oh, and before someone says that I have faith in a lot of things, I don't. The only thing I have faith in is my ability to reason. It may not be perfect, but I trust it far more than anything else.
If I make a mistake I learn from it, instead of blaming it on Zeus. If something good happens to me, it isn't because of Oden. And I am definitly not going to let Allah tell me what to do. That Jesus character had some interesting ideas, but telling me that I should have faith in a sadist wasn't one of the best ones. If I had faith in him, I couldn't cherry pick the good ideas from the bad. Fortunally I don't have faith him. Unfortunally there are a lot of people who do.
Actually, schools doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. The always cater to somewhere in the middle.
This of course has the effect that those are above the level being catered to get bored, while those below the level fall behind, and never even learn to read or do basic math.
You are right in that learning needs to be made more interesting/fun.
Actually, it should probably be tought from several viewpoints.
The biggest problem with history is that it is tought as facts. The main reason (in my opinion) to learn history is so that you don't repeat the mistakes of the past. However, if you only learn facts, you will never learn to see why bad things happened.
Take the second world war for example. Why did the germans support Hitler? How could we best prevent it from happening again. Did the US really have to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan? Britain leaders knew of many german attacks before they happened, beacuse they broke the ciphers. Was it ethical too still let them happen, so that the germans wouldn't know?
If you only teach facts, those questions will never be asked. And that is sad, because those questions are the ones that make it worth knowing history in the first place. And they are also much more interesting than just memorizing boring facts.
Videos are a very good idea. I don't think youtube is a good idea though. The video taped lessons should probably be a little more interactive than that. Allowing each individual student to decide what he needs to have a more detailed explanation of.
I don't think it is wise to remove teachers from the class though. A teacher should be availible to answer questions if they aren't answered in the videos. Having these videos would just free up a lot of time for the teacher to do the more useful interactive teaching.
The best part is of course that everyone can learn at their own rate, so the (study)smart ones wouldn't have to sit listening to things they already understood, while those that learn slower don't have to fall behind.
I disagree with you completly. It is an incredibly inefficent way of teaching.
First of all, it forces teachers all over the country to repeat the same material, instead of having a single recording. That decreases the time that teachers are availible to answer questions and do real teaching.
Secondly, the argument that it is interactive isn't really true. Yes, a person can ask a question while you are talking, and then the rest of class has to sit there and relisten to something they already understood. If several people have questions on a certain subject, it should most likely have been better explained in the original presentation.
Finally, the biggest disadvantage with black board teaching. It is based on the idea of "class" schooling, which is an incredibly terrible way of teaching. Different people learn different subjects at different rates. Class schooling assumes that everyone learns at the same rate. If someone learns to fast they will get bored, and if someone learns to slow they will fall behind and not learn anything, because the material builds on the old material that the person newer got to learn.
The class schooling system used to be a nescessary evil, but with todays technology it is finally possible to remove it. With the possibility to give each student his own screen and headset and have them advance at their own pace. The teacher must of course still be nearby to answer questions, but that kind of teaching would be much more interactive than the current black board style eduction.
To handle common questions, it could even be possible to include answers to those questions by using interactive videos where you can click on a button to get a more thorough explanation on a specific subject.
The video files should be availible in flv format in your browser cache. Also, if you want to avoid having to look into cache, you can use a user javascript to insert a download link directly into the page, using opera (Set the javascript under site preferences/scripting) or firefox (using the greasemonkey extension). A very simple working youtube userscript can be found at http://www.openjs.com/scripts/greasemonkey/download_youtube_videos/
The only problem is if your mobile doesn't support the flv format. In that case you would have to reencode the video before loading it onto the mobile phone. That is beyond this post though.
"why is it even remotely okay that the government can make laws that dictate how a private organization trades money for labor?"
The same reason why the goverment ensures that companies follow employee safety laws. Because every time the company and a an employee engages in a deal, the employee is at a disadvantage because he is smaller.
Between unions and goverment regulations I am personally in favor of the regulations.
"What if there was a law that set a maximum salary for workers in your field?"
I so wish there was. I am tired of seeing CEOs earning millions and millions of dollars. I can agree that some people are more important than others, but the current earning differences is just plain robbery from society.
"And I don't want to hear any garbage about "wage slavery" or "no options" or "corporate greed." If you don't want to trade your labor for what you are willing to convince someone to pay for it, then don't do it."
I know that hearing the truth hurts. Libertarians and market anarchists constantly ignore societal issues when discussing economy, because their ideology doesn't have any solutions for it. "The rich win and the poor die" may be a nice ideology to you, but I don't like the prospects of it. The free market is a nice tool for distribution and should be exploited to the advantage of the society (even the chinese have learned that). Worshipping it like a god however is just plain old fundamentalism.
"Also the problem you suggest with bandwidth limits is that it makes things worse for everyone. Right now on campus people can get gig connections. You can have a gigabit link all the way up to our edge. Our external connections are then several hundred mbps. Now what this means is that generally you get things very fast. When I last grabbed a Linux ISO I got about 3 megabytes/second download. Had that shit done in a few minutes. However, it can work that way because we can monitor and deal with people using more than their fair share."
I don't get this whole paragraph. First you claim that bandwidth limits makes everything worse. But later on you specifically say that you deal that people using more than their fair share, which sounds a lot like a type of bandwidth limiting.
I think you have misunderstood me. Bandwidth limiting doesn't mean that you divide everything equally every second of the day. If someone is using his connection 24/7, his priority gets reduced, while those who only download once in a while have priority when they do so.
There is no need to look at the packet content for that to work.
I am probably spoiled since I am live in Sweden and have a pretty decent ISP. I understand you regarding the deal with VoIP and especially 911 calls. I actually don't mind VoIP having higher priority that much. I am more afraid of the opposite, that certain types of traffic gets deprioritized by giving all other traffic higher priorities.
While filtering on content type isn't as bad filtering on destination, but it is similar.
Ok, I know that this is a bad example that would never happen, but imagine if an ISP decided to deprioritize all World of Warcraft packets and demand blizzard to pay up money unless they wanted it to continue. Not much different than the google example is it.
Prioritizing acks is nice if you are using up all your bandwidth.
However, there is no need for the ISP to get involved. QoS software like cFosSpeed is all that is needed to ensure that everything works nicely.
I agree with you in general though. My data is just as important to me as my neighbours data is to him. The only fair measure is the volume transferred and what you pay for the bandwidth.
I disagree with that. As soon as you start to look at the content of packets, be it their destination or their content, you are violating the concept of neutrality. Neutrality is about not caring what you deliver and just making sure that it gets delivered at a fair price per packet.
Sure, you can claim that "net neutrality" has a specific meaning that is defined differently, but in that case "net neutrality" is about neutrality as much as the "us patriot act" is about patriotism.
And my reply still stands. More specifically the comment.
"Why are you allowed to download video at such a high rate that it interfers with your opponents p2p traffic?". I can tell you for sure that users on ISP that shape bittorrent traffic shaped does notice it.
Using bandwidth limits is in my opinion the only fair compromise. Anything else is basically claiming that your information is more important than my information. In the few cases where that is true, that information should probably be transmitted via a more expensive connection, or be small enough that it fits the within bandwidth limits (like a call to the police over VoIP).
If there isn't enough total bandwidth to even be able to handle the bandwidth of a VoIP call for each user you would have a point. However, in that case, I think the ISP needs to upgrade before trying to sell VoIP.
Pretty much all the advantages of QoS is best done at the endpoint using a QoS enabled router or QoS software. If the ISP wants to do QoS it should be an optional addon for customers that don't have the know-how themselves.
I am strongly for complete net neutrality, and not the watered out version that the grand parent represents. ISPs should not be allowed to filter packets based on destination nor content. The only exception being if it is provided as an optional service.
If I use too much bandwidth I should be capped, independent of what I am using it for.
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Rats have morals. Is that proof enough that morals have nothing to do with religioh?
http://csharris.blogspot.com/2007/06/moral-superiority-of-rats.html
Actually, to be completly accurate, it is empathy that rats have, but I don't think it is difficult to see the connection between empathy and morals.
I personally favor the god who will throw anyone who believed in him without proof into hell, while letting those who were sceptical into heaven.
Considering that god must be pretty intelligent to create the universe, I think that such a god is more likely than a god that throws you into hell for not believing without proof.
The idea that anonymous rude assholes in game chats are spoiled children is one of the worst stereotypes I have encountered on the internet.
Age seems to have little to no relation to behavior as long as anonymity is involved. Of course, I havn't done have any real scientific research, so I could be mistaken, but I doubt it.
My bad. I was specifically trying to not include RAID 0 which doesn't provide any fault tolerance.
As a "hardcore" pirate (mostly anime), I can say that a 4TB doesn't really cover my needs today, so I doubt it will cover my needs in five years.
Let's say that you download 25GB a month, which is not that much compared to a hardcore pirate like me, and probably quite common among young people. 25*12=300. 4000/300 = 13. That 4TB disk will be able to contain 13 years of your downloads. Sounds like a lot? Well, humans in general love to keep things, and 13 years isn't that long compared to the human life span.
And that isn't even taking into consideration the increasing size of data, especially HD video, but also uncompressed music and high quality images.
Hard drives will always crash eventually.
What you really want is a hard drive that is big enough that it contain all your data, while cheap enough that you can buy a few without going over budget. That way it is easier to make backups, as well as implementing a redundant RAID.
Agreed. The free market is just another tool. Recognizing how to utilize it is important to make the best of it.
That is why free market fundamentalists are a pain in the ass to deal with. They point to all the examples where the free market succeeded and use that to claim that the free market always is superior. Religious faith in a system can't be argued with.
Free market has its flaws. A well known one is that of natural monopolies. It is wasteful and costly to have each competitor draw lines to each house. It is however still possible to use free market for the service part of the equation. This includes customer support, billing and communication with the monopoly. (even with a monopoly, a business that is specialized to deal with it will do much better than powerless end consumers)
Another flaw with the free market is that it requires good information. When consumers are less informed or even deliberatly mislead, the free market suffers in efficency. This was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, where someone mentioned how difficult it was to get actual information about the prices of the services in the US. Regulations that improve the flow of information and the correctness thereof is usually very helpful to improve the efficency of the free market.
Finally, I just want to point out that just because I recognize the flaws with the free market, doesn't mean that I think the free market is bad. Everything has flaws. It is when you can't see the flaws that you should be worried, because then you are halfway to being scammed.
Except that humans are reding 100 moves ahead. Well, they aren't actually reading that far ahead, but their moves take into account what could happen in a 100 moves.
I may make a two space extension on the side, and after that nothing will happen there for 30-40 moves. I do however know that in the future when the opponents biggest move is to try and threaten my group, it is more difficult for him to do so.
Min-Max may be useful to read out local situations but it is pretty much worthless for looking at a go game strategically.
To extend on what you are saying. Using Min-Max or any derivative algorithm is bound to failure.
The big difference between chess and go isn't the number of game states. The real difference is the purpose of the game. Chess is a killing game, where you try to outmaneuver your opponent to get the final kill.
Go is a trading game where you balance efficency vs weaknesses left behind in your shape. These weaknesses often don't come into play until 50 or 100 moves later. Before that, they simply aren't big enough to consider for a min-max algorithm, and a Min-Max AI simply can't read that far. (faster computers won't really help. They would have to be incredibly much faster, and the optimal/minimum energy needed to run them would be able to power the earth for a long time)
This is why the new Monte Carlo algorithms are more interesting. They can atleast theoretically take these weaknesses into account. There is still a long way to go though.
I think the real way to improve go AI is a mix of expert (or self learning) systems and a brute force algorithm like Monte Carlo. How long it will take is anyones guess. 5 years or 100 years. I wouldn't gamble on it.
Having watched the best Monte Carlo program (MoGo) make decisions on a 9x9 as well as a 19x19 board, I can confidently say that you are incorrect.
Even if I give MoGo 32 times the time to think it will still play much worse on 19x19. It clearly overestimates the value of influence compared to territory.
Except that Fox News isn't a news channel. Telling the truth, however biased, should be a requirement to be called a news channel. And Fox News have openly admitted that they have no intention of telling the truth.
They are a propaganda/entertainment channel, no more, no less.
"How do you know you have that ability? And if you do have that that ability, what if you reason incorrectly (say after being outfitted with the helmet device from the article or getting some brain parasite) how is that different than believing in a sky daddy. You'll appear just as crazy to those around you."
I don't, which is the sole reason why I have to have faith in it. All philosophical views are based on axioms that can't be proven. Religions are what I would called faith based philosophies. They require you to have faith of things outside of the philosophical axioms.
Of course, there are some religions that aren't philosophical, because their complete set of rules causes contradictions. There are of course also philosophies that are a mix of religion and other value sets. Some of these are also contradictory.
The problem I have with believing in a god is that you are extending faith further than you have to. Faith is the opposite of reasoning. Actually, phrasing it like that, I am beginning to wonder if I am really having faith in the axioms. Since axioms are nescessary for reasoning, does it really count as faith to set up a minimal set of axioms to do the reasoning, even if they are incorrect.
A deist doesn't have to have faith just to believe in a god. It is just part of his philosophical axioms. The faith occurs when you tries to go beyond axioms, like placing a personality on the god that isn't supported by the axioms.
"Right, well then you are just as crazy because your rational Atheism is exactly what was endorsed by the commies."
Typical black and white view. Just because one thing someone does is wrong doesn't mean that everything is wrong.
Commies in the USSR may have been atheists, but as I said in my first post, they were faith based, which isn't exactly rational. Believing that you can turn a believer to your side with torture is as irrational as it goes. I don't believe that this post will turn a believer either. It isn't the point of it . If I wanted to turn believers I would take a much more calm stance that tried to show the positives of atheism instead of the negatives of faith. I know enough of psychology to know that taking an offensive stance doesn't work. It just threatens the "opponent" and make them less likely to change their opinion.
Of course, the best way to get people to not believe in harmful religion is to not have them believe in it in the first place. IN other words, go after the children just like the religious people do.
"The fact still remains that the commies (=rational atheists) killed more people (yes, even more than the Nazis) then all the religious fanatics taken together."
Faith based is faith based. Doesn't matter if they are communists, christians or anything else.
" instead your militant Atheism and belief in your 'own' reasoning abilities."
My militant atheism? I have never hurt anyone, and I don't want to. If I have to I will, but violence is seldom a good choice.
My own reasoning abilities would be the philosophy of the scientific method that has given you the computer you used to post this. I suggest you throw it in the trash so you don't have to associate with it.
And the third largest genocide was perpetrated by someone who believed that killing jews was god's wish.
USSR and PRoC are nothing more than two examples of Faith. Faith in ideologies instead of a sky daddy, but faith nontheless. Faith is a mechanism that turns of intelligence and reason and makes people do immoral things they never would do otherwise.
Faith may have had some evolutionary advantage, because as described in other posts, it unites groups. Faith is nothing more than blind obedience to the leader/group.
Oh, and before someone says that I have faith in a lot of things, I don't. The only thing I have faith in is my ability to reason. It may not be perfect, but I trust it far more than anything else.
If I make a mistake I learn from it, instead of blaming it on Zeus. If something good happens to me, it isn't because of Oden. And I am definitly not going to let Allah tell me what to do. That Jesus character had some interesting ideas, but telling me that I should have faith in a sadist wasn't one of the best ones. If I had faith in him, I couldn't cherry pick the good ideas from the bad. Fortunally I don't have faith him. Unfortunally there are a lot of people who do.
Actually, schools doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. The always cater to somewhere in the middle.
This of course has the effect that those are above the level being catered to get bored, while those below the level fall behind, and never even learn to read or do basic math.
You are right in that learning needs to be made more interesting/fun.
Actually, it should probably be tought from several viewpoints.
The biggest problem with history is that it is tought as facts. The main reason (in my opinion) to learn history is so that you don't repeat the mistakes of the past. However, if you only learn facts, you will never learn to see why bad things happened.
Take the second world war for example. Why did the germans support Hitler? How could we best prevent it from happening again. Did the US really have to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan? Britain leaders knew of many german attacks before they happened, beacuse they broke the ciphers. Was it ethical too still let them happen, so that the germans wouldn't know?
If you only teach facts, those questions will never be asked. And that is sad, because those questions are the ones that make it worth knowing history in the first place. And they are also much more interesting than just memorizing boring facts.
Videos are a very good idea. I don't think youtube is a good idea though. The video taped lessons should probably be a little more interactive than that. Allowing each individual student to decide what he needs to have a more detailed explanation of.
I don't think it is wise to remove teachers from the class though. A teacher should be availible to answer questions if they aren't answered in the videos. Having these videos would just free up a lot of time for the teacher to do the more useful interactive teaching.
The best part is of course that everyone can learn at their own rate, so the (study)smart ones wouldn't have to sit listening to things they already understood, while those that learn slower don't have to fall behind.
I disagree with you completly. It is an incredibly inefficent way of teaching.
First of all, it forces teachers all over the country to repeat the same material, instead of having a single recording. That decreases the time that teachers are availible to answer questions and do real teaching.
Secondly, the argument that it is interactive isn't really true. Yes, a person can ask a question while you are talking, and then the rest of class has to sit there and relisten to something they already understood. If several people have questions on a certain subject, it should most likely have been better explained in the original presentation.
Finally, the biggest disadvantage with black board teaching. It is based on the idea of "class" schooling, which is an incredibly terrible way of teaching. Different people learn different subjects at different rates. Class schooling assumes that everyone learns at the same rate. If someone learns to fast they will get bored, and if someone learns to slow they will fall behind and not learn anything, because the material builds on the old material that the person newer got to learn.
The class schooling system used to be a nescessary evil, but with todays technology it is finally possible to remove it. With the possibility to give each student his own screen and headset and have them advance at their own pace. The teacher must of course still be nearby to answer questions, but that kind of teaching would be much more interactive than the current black board style eduction.
To handle common questions, it could even be possible to include answers to those questions by using interactive videos where you can click on a button to get a more thorough explanation on a specific subject.
The video files should be availible in flv format in your browser cache. Also, if you want to avoid having to look into cache, you can use a user javascript to insert a download link directly into the page, using opera (Set the javascript under site preferences/scripting) or firefox (using the greasemonkey extension). A very simple working youtube userscript can be found at http://www.openjs.com/scripts/greasemonkey/download_youtube_videos/
The only problem is if your mobile doesn't support the flv format. In that case you would have to reencode the video before loading it onto the mobile phone. That is beyond this post though.
"why is it even remotely okay that the government can make laws that dictate how a private organization trades money for labor?"
The same reason why the goverment ensures that companies follow employee safety laws. Because every time the company and a an employee engages in a deal, the employee is at a disadvantage because he is smaller.
Between unions and goverment regulations I am personally in favor of the regulations.
"What if there was a law that set a maximum salary for workers in your field?"
I so wish there was. I am tired of seeing CEOs earning millions and millions of dollars. I can agree that some people are more important than others, but the current earning differences is just plain robbery from society.
"And I don't want to hear any garbage about "wage slavery" or "no options" or "corporate greed." If you don't want to trade your labor for what you are willing to convince someone to pay for it, then don't do it."
I know that hearing the truth hurts. Libertarians and market anarchists constantly ignore societal issues when discussing economy, because their ideology doesn't have any solutions for it. "The rich win and the poor die" may be a nice ideology to you, but I don't like the prospects of it. The free market is a nice tool for distribution and should be exploited to the advantage of the society (even the chinese have learned that). Worshipping it like a god however is just plain old fundamentalism.
"Also the problem you suggest with bandwidth limits is that it makes things worse for everyone. Right now on campus people can get gig connections. You can have a gigabit link all the way up to our edge. Our external connections are then several hundred mbps. Now what this means is that generally you get things very fast. When I last grabbed a Linux ISO I got about 3 megabytes/second download. Had that shit done in a few minutes. However, it can work that way because we can monitor and deal with people using more than their fair share."
I don't get this whole paragraph. First you claim that bandwidth limits makes everything worse. But later on you specifically say that you deal that people using more than their fair share, which sounds a lot like a type of bandwidth limiting.
I think you have misunderstood me. Bandwidth limiting doesn't mean that you divide everything equally every second of the day. If someone is using his connection 24/7, his priority gets reduced, while those who only download once in a while have priority when they do so.
There is no need to look at the packet content for that to work.
I am probably spoiled since I am live in Sweden and have a pretty decent ISP. I understand you regarding the deal with VoIP and especially 911 calls. I actually don't mind VoIP having higher priority that much. I am more afraid of the opposite, that certain types of traffic gets deprioritized by giving all other traffic higher priorities.
While filtering on content type isn't as bad filtering on destination, but it is similar.
Ok, I know that this is a bad example that would never happen, but imagine if an ISP decided to deprioritize all World of Warcraft packets and demand blizzard to pay up money unless they wanted it to continue. Not much different than the google example is it.
Prioritizing acks is nice if you are using up all your bandwidth.
However, there is no need for the ISP to get involved. QoS software like cFosSpeed is all that is needed to ensure that everything works nicely.
I agree with you in general though. My data is just as important to me as my neighbours data is to him. The only fair measure is the volume transferred and what you pay for the bandwidth.
I disagree with that. As soon as you start to look at the content of packets, be it their destination or their content, you are violating the concept of neutrality. Neutrality is about not caring what you deliver and just making sure that it gets delivered at a fair price per packet.
Sure, you can claim that "net neutrality" has a specific meaning that is defined differently, but in that case "net neutrality" is about neutrality as much as the "us patriot act" is about patriotism.
And my reply still stands. More specifically the comment.
"Why are you allowed to download video at such a high rate that it interfers with your opponents p2p traffic?". I can tell you for sure that users on ISP that shape bittorrent traffic shaped does notice it.
Using bandwidth limits is in my opinion the only fair compromise. Anything else is basically claiming that your information is more important than my information. In the few cases where that is true, that information should probably be transmitted via a more expensive connection, or be small enough that it fits the within bandwidth limits (like a call to the police over VoIP).
If there isn't enough total bandwidth to even be able to handle the bandwidth of a VoIP call for each user you would have a point. However, in that case, I think the ISP needs to upgrade before trying to sell VoIP.
Pretty much all the advantages of QoS is best done at the endpoint using a QoS enabled router or QoS software. If the ISP wants to do QoS it should be an optional addon for customers that don't have the know-how themselves.
I am strongly for complete net neutrality, and not the watered out version that the grand parent represents. ISPs should not be allowed to filter packets based on destination nor content. The only exception being if it is provided as an optional service.
If I use too much bandwidth I should be capped, independent of what I am using it for.