>>Try buying a house. If you're really going to read the entire stack of morgage papers, you're going to need a few days.
Here in California, real estate agents and escrow companies are required by law to go over every line in the stack of papers and explain what they mean. It takes hours, but it's well worth the time.
Having someone look at a valuable contract is ALWAYS a good idea. People try to shaft you all the time, even your employers. This story reminds me of the same scam that College Club used to run in the 90s - they'd promise stock options, would "vest" after a year or two, at which point people would try to quit and leave and find they got nothing.
One manager got a fist to the face for fucking over an ex-employee in this manner, which I thought was reasonably appropriate. Dude got arrested, but at least he got some satisfaction, eh?
>>Our government (arguably that means our society) values people more than it values the environment.
Uh, a lot of this sort of stuff is banned now. Hydraulic mining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining) for example is now illegal. Doesn't really fit well into your thesis.
Hell, we can't even build dams or canals these days due to environmental laws. I hope you like all of the water you're putting into reservoirs now - that's going to be all you get for a while.
>>Lots of these are jokes, and I'd like to see some evidence that they ever actually appeared in manuals.
No, our world really is that stupid.
When I was at the gym, I noticed that there is a warning label on the bench (the bench!) saying that people should consult with their doctor before using it.
I wish Travelocity would do this. The last time I was in Europe, and burned through the entire hour of prepaid minutes I'd bought for my disposable phone waiting on hold with the Travelocity "VIP" line. Added two more hours of airtime, than called their normal number and got through in "only" 20 minutes. I wanted to kill the guy on the phone when he finally got to me.
It also doesn't help that nobody at Travelocity ever has better than a 50/50 grasp of the English language, or that they have static on their "VIP" line, but that's a story for a different time.
Honestly, it's bad enough that I've been moving my twice-monthly airfare purchases to other services. Travelocity, pay attention.
Yeah, I'm regretting upgrading to 4, even though, like you, I had occasional problems with 3 freezing. Or worse, after closing all the windows, still running in the background and refusing to launch new windows without being killed in the task manager.
But FF4 doesn't support tab killer, and I hate tabs.
>>This is why the founding fathers were so against a central banking firm in America
The debate of Federalists vs. Anti-federalists is still going strong today. The Tea Party vs. Obamacare is a great example of this.
In the case of the national bank, it may interest you that Madison (who was firmly opposed to the First National Bank) became convinced of the necessity of it when the Second National Bank issue rolled around. Quite simply, it was too hard to run a nation without one. It was a pragmatic decision that went against his strict constitutionalist ideals. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison#Bank_of_the_United_States)
>>RTFA. Each time you rip from a disk, the rip is slightly different. If twenty people have the exact same file, they'll know that at least 19 of them didn't get it by ripping disks.
For analogue sources, sure. From a digital source, you will get the same result each time.
The RIAA thugs would have no way of knowing which songs were pirated unless they created a mp3 themselves (with custom encoding or other means of uniquely tagging it) and then sharing it on the internet. Which would be illegal, I guess?
More likely, they could just subpoena the iCloud to find all mp3s with the ID3 of "Downloaded from Demonoid.com". I expect ID3 tag cleaners to become more popular in the near future.
>>There is such a thing as modifying the product in ways which improve efficient user interaction and use of system resources. Why shouldn't such an approach be considered a valid Full Release, rather than cramming in more "New" and unwanted/unnecessary "features"?
It's the difference between how Google has been versioning Chrome, and, well, how everyone else does it. Remember how excited people were for Firefox 4? Nationwide rollout? Interactive map showing you where all the downloads were coming from? Now try to imagine this excitement over a product whose changelog is: "We sped up javascript and 3D stuff 10% and broke some of your addons."
>>Calling it a major release and incrementing the primary version number for what is essentially a security update is confusing to the point of making version numbers useless. This release doesn't even deserve a 4.1 IMO
Agreed.
I think the FF devs are just trying to be like Google, and use major version numbers for every minor update they conduct. Terrible, terrible.
>>Comcast and Verizon that are developing faster and faster technologies, but cap the amount of data that their users can consume.
3G isn't a faster or new technology, but they're dropping their unlimited plans for it anyway.
Classic bait and switch. Before, they offered 31 days of heavy data use. Now they offer about 2. But they've got lock-in from their customers, so they feel they can fuck them over.
2GB is a laughably low limit for a month of data service, even without tethering.
>>Yes, it's true, you pay in form of taxes which cover ER visits that never get paid by poor people (who are often also unhealthy, go figure
No. EMTALA is an unfunded mandate that fucks hospital ERs over. Up to 50% of people don't pay their bills for ER visits (they don't have to, so why should they?) which results in the astronomically high health bills for people that are honest and can pay, as the hospitals go rent-seeking.
Hospitals fuck over people without insurance the most, since insurance companies will generally balk at paying $5000 for room and board on a newborn baby, as happened to a friend of mine. (Hint: the mom was providing all the board, and the 'room' was a cradle.)
Our system is great for people that work in large corporations and get their health care paid for, or subsidized, by the business as part of their employment. The poor and elderly are also covered. The people that get fucked the most are the working poor (that don't get health care benefits) and small businesses / independent contractors that are disallowed from the discounts coming from group health care plans. You end up having to buy individual health care, which is about twice as expensive as if you were part of a large group, and you can be disallowed from picking up coverage.
Sure it does. There is the supply side of network neutrality (affecting content providers) but there is also the demand side affecting consumers. We're talking about the demand side here. Any time a carrier shapes traffic they are necessarily choosing to prioritize one customer's data over another customer's data. The only difference is the party affected. By your logic we since Google sends the most data, we should throttle data from Google if there is saturation of the pipe. The logic is the same but you have to consider both the sender AND the receiver of any data.
The shaping would be conducted solely on the basis of packet usage, not on singling out specific hosts to prioritize or deprioritize. It's equality in practice - all customers and hosts are treated identically - with the only difference being that people that request data over the pipe capacity at peak times get deprioritized. Not really very much different from how task schedulers work in most OSes, and a lot of the lessons carry over (an identified ssh connection that's not tunneling could be prioritized for the small number of packets it is using, akin to how processes on a linux box receiving terminal input get temporarily deniced).
Whether you throttle traffic or not, there is a cost to someone being forced to wait. If the carrier doesn't provision enough services, quality of service will be impacted negatively and customers will (when possible) seek out competing services. However provisioning more services costs very significant amounts of capital.
I'll set aside the issue of underprovisioning/overselling capacity and just focus on the real problem, which is data caps applying to times when the pipes are not running at full capacity. You can still run into network congestion and fairness issues thereof when all the customers are running under their cap limit. Comicon has this problem every year, with AT&T crapping out from all the iPhones running at once in downtown San Diego. If just a few of those people are running video streaming, they're possibly knocking off hundreds of low data use customers at the same time.
Traffic shaping is really the only sane way to go, from both a customer and carrier perspective.
You have your history wrong. The EPA was sued by environmental group and lost, meaning that they were forced to begin regulating CO2 as a chemical hazardous to human life under the Clean Air Act. Which is a perversion of the law, as it was only intended to regulate emissions with more acute toxicologies - not the vague in-a-hundred years it will kinda-sorta indirectly be hazardous thing that CO2 is.
But the Supreme Court ruled they had to regulate it, so the current case (environmental lawyers looking for a payday by being able to sue every power plant in the country) was rightfully tossed out.
>>Having played AD&D 2nd ed., and loved it at the time... I'd recommened holding onto those fond memories tightly and never letting go... but don't ever go back.
You make a good point about Pathfinder. I was involved in the beta testing process for it, and it's a really well designed system by Jason Buhlman (who used to be Iuz in the Living Greyhawk days).
But just as a bit of historical interest, it could be fun for someone to play AD&D who has never tried it before. The casual brutality, even in the intro mod, is something that I find missing in more recent systems (4th edition in particular making it very difficult to kill PCs): DM: "You see a dining table, covered with moldy food" Player: "I loot the silverware!" DM: "It was yellow mold. Roll a d20, and get a 16 or higher." Player: "...I didn't". DM: Ok, you're dead.
>>Specifically with regard to Apple Computers, it's an arbitrary term
Geek is a term for people who like computers and other nerdy things. It would be like Best Buy trying to trademark "The Computer Guys". I.e., I don't think they can. But it depends on how much money Newegg has for lawyers, I guess.
>>I was out having sex while my geek friends were playing D&D.
Some of my geek friends in the area are married and have at least one kid each, so the odds are pretty good they've had sex along the way, while maintaining weekly D&D games since they were in middle school.
To each his own. I'd recommend giving it a shot, though, if you've never played it. Forget 4th edition D&D - it's for kindergarteners. Go with either 1st or 2nd edition if you want to get a feel for the game how Gygax designed it (lots of random tables for everything - want to know what sort of artwork you just looted? There's a table for that), but it can be rather arbitrarily lethal, too. I'd recommend 3rd edition really as the high point of the system. You need a few house rules to fix the broken stuff (wizards, clerics, and druids outshine all the other classes in the game past 11th level or so if you allow shapechanging magic and improved metamagic), but it's a very powerful system that really lets you turn loose your inner nerd on creating an optimized character.
Find an experienced DM who is not a dick, and you should have a great time. No computer RPGs can capture the experience of pen and paper roleplaying when you have a good group together, though the Baldur's Gate games gave it a good try.
>>Depends entirely on how high the data cap is. A properly calculated data cap will be so high that few users will ever run into it.
And yet every data cap we've seen is pathetically low. AT&T's "DataPro" service is... 2GB/month, and then data is $10/GB after that. This is a far cry from the unlimited plans they used to offer. Their U-Verse service is rolling out 250GB/month caps, which can be saturated quite quickly on a 32mbit connection.
>>You are only considering bandwidth that goes unused but you also have to consider bandwidth that is not available for use because the pipe is full.
No. I talked about both situations. If their pipes are open, there should be no data caps, and no throttling (and they should be required to have a certain degree of provisioning as well, as a truth in advertising thing). If their pipes are clogged, then you throttle traffic from the people that have used the most data in the last time epoch (for whatever time duration you choose - one hour, one day, one week, one month).
This is really the only sane network policy.
>>And how do you decide that Customer A's traffic is more important than Customer B's? You are basically arguing against network neutrality.
It has nothing to do with network neutrality. I don't care if they're getting data from Netflix or what - if Customer A has used 100GB in the last epoch, but Customer B has used 10, then Customer B gets priority and Customer A gets a slow link as long as the pipes are full.
>>Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. And when Microsoft took over Hotmail, they had a ton of problems when they tried to move it over to MS-only infrastructure.
And moved it back. I had a friend working at Hotmail from 2004-2009 or so. He was hired as a UNIX programmer, to work on their backend stuff.
You can use adblockers to remove the ads from Hotmail. It's not bad - they have copied a lot of features from gmail by now. =)
>>More of a "all use between 0 and 150 GB per month you pay $0.10 per GB
At what rate?
Also, making people pay for patches and advertisements doesn't seem particularly fair to me (Win7 SP1 is up to 7GB in size), and is likely to cause people to start shutting down all their background data transfers, leading to security problems from unpatched machines.
It will also (as TFA says) likely kill Steam, iTunes, and the like. I don't want to pay a $2 surcharge every time I download a game on a new computer, or download a new set of lectures on iTunesU.
It absolutely will have a chilling effect on the internet, and stifle all the good things that have come out of it.
>>Since we know that the telecom providers have a large but finite amount of bandwidth available, opportunity costs matter. Hence data caps.
Data cap still don't make any sense. If you've hit your cap, but want to use the network at night when the pipes aren't running at full capacity, then there's something wrong going on. Those bits that you didn't use are gone forever (there's no pumped storage for gigabytes), but the customer still can't watch his Tudou or whatever.
Deprioritization of traffic for people making bulk transfers is the proper way of handling things. If I've been running torrents for a week, I'm not going to care if I get throttled during peak operating hours. But I will absolutely care when my TV (Tudou / Youtube / Netflix) shuts off arbitrarily in the middle of the night.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Try buying a house. If you're really going to read the entire stack of morgage papers, you're going to need a few days.
Here in California, real estate agents and escrow companies are required by law to go over every line in the stack of papers and explain what they mean. It takes hours, but it's well worth the time.
Having someone look at a valuable contract is ALWAYS a good idea. People try to shaft you all the time, even your employers. This story reminds me of the same scam that College Club used to run in the 90s - they'd promise stock options, would "vest" after a year or two, at which point people would try to quit and leave and find they got nothing.
One manager got a fist to the face for fucking over an ex-employee in this manner, which I thought was reasonably appropriate. Dude got arrested, but at least he got some satisfaction, eh?
Hmm, my house meets all the criteria. Sweet!
It was 90 today, but that's reasonable enough to deal with.
>>this stuff? Thanks for the point-by-point refutation of my statements.
I love it when an AC responds to my response to a named person.
Troll, much?
>>Our government (arguably that means our society) values people more than it values the environment.
Uh, a lot of this sort of stuff is banned now. Hydraulic mining (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining) for example is now illegal. Doesn't really fit well into your thesis.
Hell, we can't even build dams or canals these days due to environmental laws. I hope you like all of the water you're putting into reservoirs now - that's going to be all you get for a while.
>>Win7 has XP mode, and they supported XP right up until then.
XP mode is an emulated version of XP - it is not fully compatible, not by a long shot.
>>These companies know exactly what they're doing, and they're making insane profits, so they'll continue to do it.
Didn't TF2 just move to a free to play model?
>>Lots of these are jokes, and I'd like to see some evidence that they ever actually appeared in manuals.
No, our world really is that stupid.
When I was at the gym, I noticed that there is a warning label on the bench (the bench!) saying that people should consult with their doctor before using it.
I wish Travelocity would do this. The last time I was in Europe, and burned through the entire hour of prepaid minutes I'd bought for my disposable phone waiting on hold with the Travelocity "VIP" line. Added two more hours of airtime, than called their normal number and got through in "only" 20 minutes. I wanted to kill the guy on the phone when he finally got to me.
It also doesn't help that nobody at Travelocity ever has better than a 50/50 grasp of the English language, or that they have static on their "VIP" line, but that's a story for a different time.
Honestly, it's bad enough that I've been moving my twice-monthly airfare purchases to other services. Travelocity, pay attention.
Yeah, I'm regretting upgrading to 4, even though, like you, I had occasional problems with 3 freezing. Or worse, after closing all the windows, still running in the background and refusing to launch new windows without being killed in the task manager.
But FF4 doesn't support tab killer, and I hate tabs.
>>This is why the founding fathers were so against a central banking firm in America
The debate of Federalists vs. Anti-federalists is still going strong today. The Tea Party vs. Obamacare is a great example of this.
In the case of the national bank, it may interest you that Madison (who was firmly opposed to the First National Bank) became convinced of the necessity of it when the Second National Bank issue rolled around. Quite simply, it was too hard to run a nation without one. It was a pragmatic decision that went against his strict constitutionalist ideals. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison#Bank_of_the_United_States)
>>RTFA. Each time you rip from a disk, the rip is slightly different. If twenty people have the exact same file, they'll know that at least 19 of them didn't get it by ripping disks.
For analogue sources, sure. From a digital source, you will get the same result each time.
The RIAA thugs would have no way of knowing which songs were pirated unless they created a mp3 themselves (with custom encoding or other means of uniquely tagging it) and then sharing it on the internet. Which would be illegal, I guess?
More likely, they could just subpoena the iCloud to find all mp3s with the ID3 of "Downloaded from Demonoid.com". I expect ID3 tag cleaners to become more popular in the near future.
>>There is such a thing as modifying the product in ways which improve efficient user interaction and use of system resources. Why shouldn't such an approach be considered a valid Full Release, rather than cramming in more "New" and unwanted/unnecessary "features"?
It's the difference between how Google has been versioning Chrome, and, well, how everyone else does it. Remember how excited people were for Firefox 4? Nationwide rollout? Interactive map showing you where all the downloads were coming from? Now try to imagine this excitement over a product whose changelog is: "We sped up javascript and 3D stuff 10% and broke some of your addons."
>>Calling it a major release and incrementing the primary version number for what is essentially a security update is confusing to the point of making version numbers useless. This release doesn't even deserve a 4.1 IMO
Agreed.
I think the FF devs are just trying to be like Google, and use major version numbers for every minor update they conduct. Terrible, terrible.
>>Comcast and Verizon that are developing faster and faster technologies, but cap the amount of data that their users can consume.
3G isn't a faster or new technology, but they're dropping their unlimited plans for it anyway.
Classic bait and switch. Before, they offered 31 days of heavy data use. Now they offer about 2. But they've got lock-in from their customers, so they feel they can fuck them over.
2GB is a laughably low limit for a month of data service, even without tethering.
>>Yes, it's true, you pay in form of taxes which cover ER visits that never get paid by poor people (who are often also unhealthy, go figure
No. EMTALA is an unfunded mandate that fucks hospital ERs over. Up to 50% of people don't pay their bills for ER visits (they don't have to, so why should they?) which results in the astronomically high health bills for people that are honest and can pay, as the hospitals go rent-seeking.
Hospitals fuck over people without insurance the most, since insurance companies will generally balk at paying $5000 for room and board on a newborn baby, as happened to a friend of mine. (Hint: the mom was providing all the board, and the 'room' was a cradle.)
Our system is great for people that work in large corporations and get their health care paid for, or subsidized, by the business as part of their employment. The poor and elderly are also covered. The people that get fucked the most are the working poor (that don't get health care benefits) and small businesses / independent contractors that are disallowed from the discounts coming from group health care plans. You end up having to buy individual health care, which is about twice as expensive as if you were part of a large group, and you can be disallowed from picking up coverage.
The shaping would be conducted solely on the basis of packet usage, not on singling out specific hosts to prioritize or deprioritize. It's equality in practice - all customers and hosts are treated identically - with the only difference being that people that request data over the pipe capacity at peak times get deprioritized. Not really very much different from how task schedulers work in most OSes, and a lot of the lessons carry over (an identified ssh connection that's not tunneling could be prioritized for the small number of packets it is using, akin to how processes on a linux box receiving terminal input get temporarily deniced).
I'll set aside the issue of underprovisioning/overselling capacity and just focus on the real problem, which is data caps applying to times when the pipes are not running at full capacity. You can still run into network congestion and fairness issues thereof when all the customers are running under their cap limit. Comicon has this problem every year, with AT&T crapping out from all the iPhones running at once in downtown San Diego. If just a few of those people are running video streaming, they're possibly knocking off hundreds of low data use customers at the same time.
Traffic shaping is really the only sane way to go, from both a customer and carrier perspective.
You have your history wrong. The EPA was sued by environmental group and lost, meaning that they were forced to begin regulating CO2 as a chemical hazardous to human life under the Clean Air Act. Which is a perversion of the law, as it was only intended to regulate emissions with more acute toxicologies - not the vague in-a-hundred years it will kinda-sorta indirectly be hazardous thing that CO2 is.
But the Supreme Court ruled they had to regulate it, so the current case (environmental lawyers looking for a payday by being able to sue every power plant in the country) was rightfully tossed out.
"Global Warming Benefits Archeology!"
-Headline from the next issue of The Petroleum Times
>>Having played AD&D 2nd ed., and loved it at the time... I'd recommened holding onto those fond memories tightly and never letting go... but don't ever go back.
You make a good point about Pathfinder. I was involved in the beta testing process for it, and it's a really well designed system by Jason Buhlman (who used to be Iuz in the Living Greyhawk days).
But just as a bit of historical interest, it could be fun for someone to play AD&D who has never tried it before. The casual brutality, even in the intro mod, is something that I find missing in more recent systems (4th edition in particular making it very difficult to kill PCs):
DM: "You see a dining table, covered with moldy food"
Player: "I loot the silverware!"
DM: "It was yellow mold. Roll a d20, and get a 16 or higher."
Player: "...I didn't".
DM: Ok, you're dead.
>>Specifically with regard to Apple Computers, it's an arbitrary term
Geek is a term for people who like computers and other nerdy things. It would be like Best Buy trying to trademark "The Computer Guys". I.e., I don't think they can. But it depends on how much money Newegg has for lawyers, I guess.
>>I was out having sex while my geek friends were playing D&D.
Some of my geek friends in the area are married and have at least one kid each, so the odds are pretty good they've had sex along the way, while maintaining weekly D&D games since they were in middle school.
To each his own. I'd recommend giving it a shot, though, if you've never played it. Forget 4th edition D&D - it's for kindergarteners. Go with either 1st or 2nd edition if you want to get a feel for the game how Gygax designed it (lots of random tables for everything - want to know what sort of artwork you just looted? There's a table for that), but it can be rather arbitrarily lethal, too. I'd recommend 3rd edition really as the high point of the system. You need a few house rules to fix the broken stuff (wizards, clerics, and druids outshine all the other classes in the game past 11th level or so if you allow shapechanging magic and improved metamagic), but it's a very powerful system that really lets you turn loose your inner nerd on creating an optimized character.
Find an experienced DM who is not a dick, and you should have a great time. No computer RPGs can capture the experience of pen and paper roleplaying when you have a good group together, though the Baldur's Gate games gave it a good try.
>>Depends entirely on how high the data cap is. A properly calculated data cap will be so high that few users will ever run into it.
And yet every data cap we've seen is pathetically low. AT&T's "DataPro" service is... 2GB/month, and then data is $10/GB after that. This is a far cry from the unlimited plans they used to offer. Their U-Verse service is rolling out 250GB/month caps, which can be saturated quite quickly on a 32mbit connection.
>>You are only considering bandwidth that goes unused but you also have to consider bandwidth that is not available for use because the pipe is full.
No. I talked about both situations. If their pipes are open, there should be no data caps, and no throttling (and they should be required to have a certain degree of provisioning as well, as a truth in advertising thing). If their pipes are clogged, then you throttle traffic from the people that have used the most data in the last time epoch (for whatever time duration you choose - one hour, one day, one week, one month).
This is really the only sane network policy.
>>And how do you decide that Customer A's traffic is more important than Customer B's? You are basically arguing against network neutrality.
It has nothing to do with network neutrality. I don't care if they're getting data from Netflix or what - if Customer A has used 100GB in the last epoch, but Customer B has used 10, then Customer B gets priority and Customer A gets a slow link as long as the pipes are full.
>>Hotmail was running on FreeBSD. And when Microsoft took over Hotmail, they had a ton of problems when they tried to move it over to MS-only infrastructure.
And moved it back. I had a friend working at Hotmail from 2004-2009 or so. He was hired as a UNIX programmer, to work on their backend stuff.
You can use adblockers to remove the ads from Hotmail. It's not bad - they have copied a lot of features from gmail by now. =)
>>More of a "all use between 0 and 150 GB per month you pay $0.10 per GB
At what rate?
Also, making people pay for patches and advertisements doesn't seem particularly fair to me (Win7 SP1 is up to 7GB in size), and is likely to cause people to start shutting down all their background data transfers, leading to security problems from unpatched machines.
It will also (as TFA says) likely kill Steam, iTunes, and the like. I don't want to pay a $2 surcharge every time I download a game on a new computer, or download a new set of lectures on iTunesU.
It absolutely will have a chilling effect on the internet, and stifle all the good things that have come out of it.
>>Since we know that the telecom providers have a large but finite amount of bandwidth available, opportunity costs matter. Hence data caps.
Data cap still don't make any sense. If you've hit your cap, but want to use the network at night when the pipes aren't running at full capacity, then there's something wrong going on. Those bits that you didn't use are gone forever (there's no pumped storage for gigabytes), but the customer still can't watch his Tudou or whatever.
Deprioritization of traffic for people making bulk transfers is the proper way of handling things. If I've been running torrents for a week, I'm not going to care if I get throttled during peak operating hours. But I will absolutely care when my TV (Tudou / Youtube / Netflix) shuts off arbitrarily in the middle of the night.