Well, of course. Absolute freedom is it's own punishment. In international waters, certain laws do apply but enforcing them is extremely difficult and would be almost impossible for a permanent base out to sea. Whilst the crew still couldn't legally provide failing innovators with concrete boots, and could be prosecuted if they ever landed, nothing would require them to ever land.
The US lacks education and lacks a risk-taking culture. Secondly, insularism is never a sane policy. It's almost always smarter to keep a flow of fresh talent coming in.
However, I'm not convinced the US is the best place for this. America is superb at taking pre-existing ideas and turning them into a commercially viable product. No question about it. Only Japan rivals the US in that department. However, the US simply doesn't have a culture or a history of coming up with the original ideas in the first place. That's fine. You don't need it.
I would much rather see nations that ARE famous for discovery and truly original invention getting injections of talent and money in those directions, then countries like the US and Japan getting that fraction of the talent that can make the idea sellable.
Now, I freely admit the idea isn't wholly original. The idea of national specialization was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and the rather infamous Trade Triangle. It likely dates back before then. However, the point is that the method works. Instead of everyone operating at the lowest common denominator, over-competing and under-performing, you could have nations operating at the highest standards within their local specialties, competing with only those who are in the same specialties, forcing standards higher (to add value) rather than lower (to cut costs).
That's an act international piracy ("Piracy on the High Seas"). The US might not be too worried by it, but neither will the lawyers who will see $ signs sprout before their eyes like weeds.
That means that you can remove a bridge from the system since you could write a firmware image that supported Xorp or Quagga. If a JetDirect card uses chips supported under LinuxBIOS^WCoreboot, then you can load an OS on it.
The truly important news that everyone so far has missed is that the original submission had a typo that the editors fixed. THAT is absolutely staggering news!
Or... "any programmable computing device can be attacked, and any hardware attached to it can be used to cause damage", except that would be longer. More honest, though.
Want to trash a computable device? Upload something akin to CPUBurn onto it, styled and compiled for that specific processor. Want to trash a monitor? Set the timings to something totally screwball until it screams or fries. Want to wreck a hard-drive? The 80s computer virus "headbanger" smashed read heads into the end buffers until they misaligned or broke off - chances are you can still do that especially if you mangle any firmware safeguards first, only hardware safeguards would stop it and nobody adds hardware that doesn't add to what they can make the sticker price.
Since we know that darknets of zombie machines are the "in thing", it would seem more obvious for printer hackers to expand such darknets to other devices. The CPU power isn't massive, but you don't need much to be able to send spam, push virus updates to infected machines, etc. Malicious attacks for the purpose of causing actual damage are relatively far and few between compared to hijacking of systems for remote use.
That doesn't mean there are no cases of malicious attacks. Even in situations where I'm sympathetic to the principle espoused, I'd still consider almost all hacktivism to be malicious in nature. (The "almost" is because there are bound to be exceptions to any rule.) Hacktivism has been on the rise, including by nation states, and in some such cases physical damage is already the goal. That is bound to get worse.
That's why you need both the science and the engineering aspects of computer programming. Combined, they tell you how to use abstraction to get from the core logic to the order of a function, or how to deduce what the order will be given some form of abstract notation. (Teaching 5 year olds Z is probably a but much, but they can certainly handle flow charts.)
Strong security only affects the probability of getting the information. And even a one-in-a-million chance is going to happen. However, as Kevin Mitnick demonstrated, "sufficiently strong" means bugger all because humans are so incredibly naff at security measures. That include TS/SCI labs. I'm sure you're aware that such labs HAVE been penetrated by viruses on USB sticks that were able to use sneaker-net connections to ferry top secret data back out. That's public knowledge.
It's likely many nations have thermonuclear weapons design knowledge. What good is it going to do them, though? It's not like any nation can build the damn things. North Korea has working nuclear warhead plans and a working nuclear reactor but one of its tests was a dud and the other barely had any nuclear component in the reaction at all. And that's after being advised and supplied by a nation that had such weapons working. Every one of their missiles has disintegrated in flight. You expect them to be able to get a hydrogen bomb functional, given that?
What if, say, Easter Island was privvy to the design of hydrogen bombs. They don't even have a reactor to obtain the plutonium needed to initiate the reaction. They certainly don't have the metalworking skills or the high-precision parts needed. They would be exactly as they are today.
Bin Laden could have obtained off the Internet designs for $5000 cruise missiles. He might well have actually done so. Don't see them being used a whole lot. Perhaps because crude mortars are easy to build and RPGs are easy to buy, but finely-engineered systems of moderately high complexity require skills to build - skills that simply don't exist outside of a few nations - and the kind of grade of parts needed is something you're not going to find on the black market. So although anyone COULD have those plans and COULD use those systems, nobody actually does.
But that's nothing compared to the difficulty of genetic engineering. Geneticists aren't exactly thick on the ground and the outright fraud in South Korea a few years back demonstrates that merely being a geneticist doesn't mean you're a competent one. And then you've got to persuade them to move. Relocation costs to Somalia shouldn't be too bad, but I don't think that would be the hold-up. You've then got to consider a lab. Genetics labs are "clean room environments". Want to tell me how many construction workers in Pakistan have the faintest idea about how to assemble one of those? Buying the equipment wouldn't be easy, either. There aren't that many manufacturers working in gene modification technology. Gene decoding - dime a dozen. Splicing - costs a bit more. Unlike the cruise missile, this isn't stuff you can throw together in your garage in a spare evening after a long day's jihadding. This is stuff you need the experts to do and - y'know - the experts are probably not going to deliver to #1, Blow 'Em Up Road, Boomtown. They'd likely not deliver to any address at all that wasn't certified as a legit business involved in genetics.
So, probably no equipment, probably no expert who knows how to use such equipment, probably no expert who knows what genes to splice and probably no samples of the specific flu virus (there's a lot of flu viruses) or the specific genes you want to splice in. Oh, and given how difficult it is to replicate viruses outside of a host cell, probably no means of turning the single viral strand into any kind of weapons. There are standard methods of cloning viruses, but researchers already know that these methods weaken the virus and eventually renders it harmless. Nobody quite knows why. The Spanish Flu labs currently experiment with is NOT the Spanish Flu that actually killed millions, it is a very tame version that has mutated through the many iterations it has been through. If it were to ever escape, it might cause people to sneeze a little more than usual. To be able to create a viral bio-weapon, you also need a mad genius who can develop new techniques for creating enough of the stuff.
I do not agree that government powers are delegated by "the people", for to define "the people" you have to define a collective and assign it the right as a collective entity to assign powers to the government. Which is impossible if only people have rights, since the collective can therefore have none. It's a paradox that can only be broken if you throw away that absurd notion that only people have rights. Your argument is premised on the very thing it seeks to invalidate.
Good maths is absolutely essential. Without it, you can't understand the relationship between the theory and the practice. I'd say that academic writing skills are also valuable, as that teaches people how to be clear, organized, link appropriately and yet be efficient -- skills essential to quality computing and skills absolutely lacking with today's dweebs.
There's a big dispute over what the terms "computer science" and "software engineering" really mean. I would argue that it doesn't matter, that a quality programmer is both scientist and engineer. Lacking one skill or the other is a major mistake and is in part the cause of the shambolic state of IT at the moment. And, yes, that means going to elementary/primary schools and teaching the core skills of both fields there.
I would also urge such courses to be multi-lingual. There is ample evidence that kids as young as 3 can learn multiple natural languages and keep them separate, so I think we can expect kids who are 7 or 8 to learn multiple programming languages and not get them confused. I'd suggest one procedural language, one functional language and one object-oriented language. (For the sake of argument, let's call them "Scotch", "Bourbon" and "Beer".) This will address the unfortunately common problem of thinking one way -- always a major mistake -- and will teach kids to think about how the problem might best be solved, what tools are right for what jobs. It will also increase their flexibility, since the languages popular today aren't necessarily going to survive until the time today's youngsters are graduates and certainly won't survive until they're retiring. Education, to be effective, has to be usable for the next 70 years. Most employees don't have time to study up and learn new programming languages AND new programming techniques, especially if the stuff is only going to be good for a few years at a time. You have to learn how to do things, not replicate results.
The only way to be safe is to assume a full-information game. You have to assume that the other side (be it an enemy nation, a terrorist, a tax collector, or whatever) can obtain the information if they wanted it. It's stupid to assume they can't know (they're capable of spying) and it's even stupider to assume you'd know when they know (they're hardly going to tweet the fact), so what's left?
Publishing the paper gives them data they can't use and gives a lot of geneticists data that could help in finding out how to deal with super flu strains -- knowledge we need anyway because they do arise naturally.
Well? Not going to respond to the data? Not even going to respond to me calling you on your bogus claim of straw man? Sheesh. Well, at least apologize for questioning that the data existed.
Firstly, a service is not a property. It is a service. All services have laws which regulate those services. They sometimes even obey them. The banks didn't. They wanted to play favourites. Guess what -- didn't work too well, did it? You can call well-regulated industries "slavery" until you're blue in the mouth but no sane, rational person would support you.
Secondly, Common Carrier status grants carriers legal protection ONLY if they are indeed Common Carriers - ie: traffic-neutral. If you want to run a service with no Common Carrier protection, fine. Just be aware of what you are volunteering to sacrifice in the name of your "freedom".
Thirdly, no, "private property" does NOT trump customers "rights". Again, a service is NOT a property. (There is also no law or Constitutional amendment guaranteeing not being offended, so I have bugger all idea where you dredged that crap from.) The successful gay rights campaigns have produced case law (which is the law whether you like it or not) that states that customers DO have the right to obtain a service where, when it is denied, it is denied for discriminatory reasons alone. The law is the law. If you don't like it, move out. Your forefathers did when they didn't like European law. What's your problem?
Fourthly, it is most definitely not slavery. Nobody owns you, nobody can buy or sell you, get over yourself, you pathetic piece of shit.
Fifthly, you have the right to tailor your services all you like. You merely have NO right to discriminate as to who uses them.
Sixthly, the peering agreements of the Internet mean that violation of Network Neutrality is a breech of contract. Those who have broken with neutrality could potentially be sued to within an inch of their existence for such violations. They haven't been (for the most part, although there have been a few cases) because the major vendors want to see how this plays out in Congress first. If Congress sides with neutrality, expect the neutral vendors to become the ONLY vendors, having driven the others out of business with lawsuits or forcing them to hand over fibre and network centres as part of a settlement. Even if Congress doesn't side with it, expect lawsuits - it's just that the rewards will merely be in the tens of millions, not the tens of billions.
This is the information any of us have to work with, when it comes to understanding the ruling. Bearing in mind that none of us (except for three sheep and a hedgehog) are lawyers, a definite answer is impossible. I read it that ISPs are absolutely required to be common carriers, at least within the EU, and that common carrier status may not be infringed even at the request of a major corporation or pressure group.
It's hardly a straw man if that's your control group. You chose it, you produce data showing that the most efficient cars are a legitimate control group. I'm putting in various cars because you have declined to give that information, making that comparison alone worthless. God, what do they teach in science these days if you can't manage even the most basic stuff?
Below are figures from this data (we'll ignore the aircraft part), and I'll give additional services not just the two under discussion. For cars, there is no modifier given per passenger. For trains, no modifier is given per coach. However, if we assume the norm is that everyone drives themselves and the cost per passenger is correct for a full coach, whatever that is.
(The 390 seems to seat a median of 48 passengers, so to compare apples with apples, you'd have to compare the efficiency of a 390 with 48 passengers on board vs 48 cars where the cars match the distribution actually found on the road. If you're factoring in busses as well, then the Volvo B10L will handle 48 if there's standing - which is common on single-deckers. For double deckers, then the Volvo B10TL has a capacity of 83 seated and 42 standing, so to get apples-with-apples you'd need to scale up the numbers of each until you got a good enough fit.)
The data itself:
Car (large models, SUVs etc): maximum efficiency = 25 miles per gallon per car (9 kilometers per litre), minimum emissions = 250 grams CO2 per kilometre Car (average model): maximum efficiency = 45 miles per gallon per car (16 kilometers per litre), minimum emissions = 145 grams CO2 per kilometre Car (most efficient): maximum efficiency = 60 miles per gallon per car (23 kilometres per litre), minimum emissions = 100 grams CO2 per kilometre Rail (normal suburban): maximum efficiency = 150 miles per gallon per passenger (52 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 45 grams CO2 per kilometre Rail (high speed, few stops): maximum efficiency = 80 miles per gallon per passenger (28 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 80 grams CO2 per kilometre Bus (well used service): maximum efficiency = 140 miles per gallon per passenger (50 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 45 grams CO2 per kilometre
Remember, you have to scale everything so that it's a fair comparison.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with what services the ISP can carry. It merely states that if you DO carry a specific service, you can't play favourites - all suppliers and all users should have equitable access to that service. However, net neutrality places no constraints on what types of services are carried, what total bandwidth is made available for that service, or whether that bandwidth can be reduced if higher-priority traffic needs it. It would equally be entirely fair under network neutrality to dictate that unresponsive flows (eg: multimedia streams that won't throttle back if you sent ECN notices or other such notifications) should be put in their own class and given a very limited fraction of the bandwidth to chew on.
DiffServ (differentiated services) with different policies per service is ENTIRELY in keeping with network neutrality.
Well, that depends. The EU's court recently ruled that ISPs are forbidden from inspecting for torrents. If packet inspection was used, it's in violation of EU rules which the UK is subordinate to. If the filesharers (or those doing legal fileshares, ideally) take the ISP to court for violating an EU directive and win - which they might well - then ISP disconnections will cease. At least until the corporations persuade there to be a new ruling - something Microsoft found the EU is not always amenable to.
How do you explain the Obama-era advocacy of arresting reporters for attempting to cover #OWS?
Hence the bit about it being dubious as to whether it's legal to criticize the government or head of State today. I don't even remotely pretend to condone or excuse the Obama-era attempts to suppress criticism and regard them as being equal in every respect to the very same attempts made by the prior administration.
Athens was considered the birthplace of democracy even though they didn't have it
Democracy does not imply that everyone has a vote. Modern Western democracies are "representational democracies" in that you do NOT have a vote except in choosing the person who represents you. The vast majority of voting is done only by the representatives. Well, except in "proportional representation" democracies, where you choose the affiliation and they choose the representatives for you. (PR has its strengths, such as more honestly representing how the population thinks, but personal accountability isn't one of them.)
So while what you say it's true, the USA is still not a democracy, and never has been
Oh, absolutely true! The Founding Fathers disliked the flaws in the democratic systems they'd seen and, instead of fixing things like education and responsibility, opted to go for a republic instead. To be fair, fixing the flaws would have been expensive and they didn't have the money. Nonetheless, the flaws are precisely why a republic won't work either. They minimized the initial breakage, which is sensible and rational enough if you can't afford to make things work well, but at the price of making a system that had the clout to ensure it was never fixed.
I completely agree. Exactly how much better the education would need to be and exactly what's needed to make it better are all subject to debate, but there's no question that corrupt, incompetent politicians rely heavily on the ignorance of others to remain any of the three.
Yes. The multiplexer would need to be a chip that took analogue inputs (which is fine, mixed signals is old tech), run them through ADCs and emit via a semiconductor laser. You'd need a similar device that did the reverse. But because the multiplexer/demultiplexer are unidirectional and some nerves are bidirectional (not a vast number), you would need to make sure that only one circuit was active at a time. Which is actually good - you can then put them onto the same die because there's no possibility of an inactive circuit interfering with an active one.
It's not a particularly big deal, especially as the suggested alternative is to multiplex over RF. You've still got the multiplexer/demultiplexer, the digitization, etc, but you've now got tuned circuits and an aerial as well. A semiconductor laser is compact and embedding it within the die itself is a non-issue these days. Something like that could easily be stuffed into a vertebra for spinal injuries or onto the fused end of a bone for simpler amputations.
In the long run, anything that deters people from polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive would have to be a good thing for the country. Well, assuming rational people. But then would rational people have opted for polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive?
If we're dealing with irrational people, all bets are off.
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Well, of course. Absolute freedom is it's own punishment. In international waters, certain laws do apply but enforcing them is extremely difficult and would be almost impossible for a permanent base out to sea. Whilst the crew still couldn't legally provide failing innovators with concrete boots, and could be prosecuted if they ever landed, nothing would require them to ever land.
The US lacks education and lacks a risk-taking culture. Secondly, insularism is never a sane policy. It's almost always smarter to keep a flow of fresh talent coming in.
However, I'm not convinced the US is the best place for this. America is superb at taking pre-existing ideas and turning them into a commercially viable product. No question about it. Only Japan rivals the US in that department. However, the US simply doesn't have a culture or a history of coming up with the original ideas in the first place. That's fine. You don't need it.
I would much rather see nations that ARE famous for discovery and truly original invention getting injections of talent and money in those directions, then countries like the US and Japan getting that fraction of the talent that can make the idea sellable.
Now, I freely admit the idea isn't wholly original. The idea of national specialization was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and the rather infamous Trade Triangle. It likely dates back before then. However, the point is that the method works. Instead of everyone operating at the lowest common denominator, over-competing and under-performing, you could have nations operating at the highest standards within their local specialties, competing with only those who are in the same specialties, forcing standards higher (to add value) rather than lower (to cut costs).
That's an act international piracy ("Piracy on the High Seas"). The US might not be too worried by it, but neither will the lawyers who will see $ signs sprout before their eyes like weeds.
That means that you can remove a bridge from the system since you could write a firmware image that supported Xorp or Quagga. If a JetDirect card uses chips supported under LinuxBIOS^WCoreboot, then you can load an OS on it.
The truly important news that everyone so far has missed is that the original submission had a typo that the editors fixed. THAT is absolutely staggering news!
Or... "any programmable computing device can be attacked, and any hardware attached to it can be used to cause damage", except that would be longer. More honest, though.
Want to trash a computable device? Upload something akin to CPUBurn onto it, styled and compiled for that specific processor. Want to trash a monitor? Set the timings to something totally screwball until it screams or fries. Want to wreck a hard-drive? The 80s computer virus "headbanger" smashed read heads into the end buffers until they misaligned or broke off - chances are you can still do that especially if you mangle any firmware safeguards first, only hardware safeguards would stop it and nobody adds hardware that doesn't add to what they can make the sticker price.
Since we know that darknets of zombie machines are the "in thing", it would seem more obvious for printer hackers to expand such darknets to other devices. The CPU power isn't massive, but you don't need much to be able to send spam, push virus updates to infected machines, etc. Malicious attacks for the purpose of causing actual damage are relatively far and few between compared to hijacking of systems for remote use.
That doesn't mean there are no cases of malicious attacks. Even in situations where I'm sympathetic to the principle espoused, I'd still consider almost all hacktivism to be malicious in nature. (The "almost" is because there are bound to be exceptions to any rule.) Hacktivism has been on the rise, including by nation states, and in some such cases physical damage is already the goal. That is bound to get worse.
That's why you need both the science and the engineering aspects of computer programming. Combined, they tell you how to use abstraction to get from the core logic to the order of a function, or how to deduce what the order will be given some form of abstract notation. (Teaching 5 year olds Z is probably a but much, but they can certainly handle flow charts.)
Strong security only affects the probability of getting the information. And even a one-in-a-million chance is going to happen. However, as Kevin Mitnick demonstrated, "sufficiently strong" means bugger all because humans are so incredibly naff at security measures. That include TS/SCI labs. I'm sure you're aware that such labs HAVE been penetrated by viruses on USB sticks that were able to use sneaker-net connections to ferry top secret data back out. That's public knowledge.
It's likely many nations have thermonuclear weapons design knowledge. What good is it going to do them, though? It's not like any nation can build the damn things. North Korea has working nuclear warhead plans and a working nuclear reactor but one of its tests was a dud and the other barely had any nuclear component in the reaction at all. And that's after being advised and supplied by a nation that had such weapons working. Every one of their missiles has disintegrated in flight. You expect them to be able to get a hydrogen bomb functional, given that?
What if, say, Easter Island was privvy to the design of hydrogen bombs. They don't even have a reactor to obtain the plutonium needed to initiate the reaction. They certainly don't have the metalworking skills or the high-precision parts needed. They would be exactly as they are today.
Bin Laden could have obtained off the Internet designs for $5000 cruise missiles. He might well have actually done so. Don't see them being used a whole lot. Perhaps because crude mortars are easy to build and RPGs are easy to buy, but finely-engineered systems of moderately high complexity require skills to build - skills that simply don't exist outside of a few nations - and the kind of grade of parts needed is something you're not going to find on the black market. So although anyone COULD have those plans and COULD use those systems, nobody actually does.
But that's nothing compared to the difficulty of genetic engineering. Geneticists aren't exactly thick on the ground and the outright fraud in South Korea a few years back demonstrates that merely being a geneticist doesn't mean you're a competent one. And then you've got to persuade them to move. Relocation costs to Somalia shouldn't be too bad, but I don't think that would be the hold-up. You've then got to consider a lab. Genetics labs are "clean room environments". Want to tell me how many construction workers in Pakistan have the faintest idea about how to assemble one of those? Buying the equipment wouldn't be easy, either. There aren't that many manufacturers working in gene modification technology. Gene decoding - dime a dozen. Splicing - costs a bit more. Unlike the cruise missile, this isn't stuff you can throw together in your garage in a spare evening after a long day's jihadding. This is stuff you need the experts to do and - y'know - the experts are probably not going to deliver to #1, Blow 'Em Up Road, Boomtown. They'd likely not deliver to any address at all that wasn't certified as a legit business involved in genetics.
So, probably no equipment, probably no expert who knows how to use such equipment, probably no expert who knows what genes to splice and probably no samples of the specific flu virus (there's a lot of flu viruses) or the specific genes you want to splice in. Oh, and given how difficult it is to replicate viruses outside of a host cell, probably no means of turning the single viral strand into any kind of weapons. There are standard methods of cloning viruses, but researchers already know that these methods weaken the virus and eventually renders it harmless. Nobody quite knows why. The Spanish Flu labs currently experiment with is NOT the Spanish Flu that actually killed millions, it is a very tame version that has mutated through the many iterations it has been through. If it were to ever escape, it might cause people to sneeze a little more than usual. To be able to create a viral bio-weapon, you also need a mad genius who can develop new techniques for creating enough of the stuff.
You can't have life created in a Universe if the laws of physics are being constantly modified, because the basics are changing all the time.
You'll be glad to know, then, that the invariance of the laws of physics with respect to either space or time is now questioned.
I do not agree that government powers are delegated by "the people", for to define "the people" you have to define a collective and assign it the right as a collective entity to assign powers to the government. Which is impossible if only people have rights, since the collective can therefore have none. It's a paradox that can only be broken if you throw away that absurd notion that only people have rights. Your argument is premised on the very thing it seeks to invalidate.
Good maths is absolutely essential. Without it, you can't understand the relationship between the theory and the practice. I'd say that academic writing skills are also valuable, as that teaches people how to be clear, organized, link appropriately and yet be efficient -- skills essential to quality computing and skills absolutely lacking with today's dweebs.
There's a big dispute over what the terms "computer science" and "software engineering" really mean. I would argue that it doesn't matter, that a quality programmer is both scientist and engineer. Lacking one skill or the other is a major mistake and is in part the cause of the shambolic state of IT at the moment. And, yes, that means going to elementary/primary schools and teaching the core skills of both fields there.
I would also urge such courses to be multi-lingual. There is ample evidence that kids as young as 3 can learn multiple natural languages and keep them separate, so I think we can expect kids who are 7 or 8 to learn multiple programming languages and not get them confused. I'd suggest one procedural language, one functional language and one object-oriented language. (For the sake of argument, let's call them "Scotch", "Bourbon" and "Beer".) This will address the unfortunately common problem of thinking one way -- always a major mistake -- and will teach kids to think about how the problem might best be solved, what tools are right for what jobs. It will also increase their flexibility, since the languages popular today aren't necessarily going to survive until the time today's youngsters are graduates and certainly won't survive until they're retiring. Education, to be effective, has to be usable for the next 70 years. Most employees don't have time to study up and learn new programming languages AND new programming techniques, especially if the stuff is only going to be good for a few years at a time. You have to learn how to do things, not replicate results.
The only way to be safe is to assume a full-information game. You have to assume that the other side (be it an enemy nation, a terrorist, a tax collector, or whatever) can obtain the information if they wanted it. It's stupid to assume they can't know (they're capable of spying) and it's even stupider to assume you'd know when they know (they're hardly going to tweet the fact), so what's left?
Publishing the paper gives them data they can't use and gives a lot of geneticists data that could help in finding out how to deal with super flu strains -- knowledge we need anyway because they do arise naturally.
Well? Not going to respond to the data? Not even going to respond to me calling you on your bogus claim of straw man? Sheesh. Well, at least apologize for questioning that the data existed.
Firstly, a service is not a property. It is a service. All services have laws which regulate those services. They sometimes even obey them. The banks didn't. They wanted to play favourites. Guess what -- didn't work too well, did it? You can call well-regulated industries "slavery" until you're blue in the mouth but no sane, rational person would support you.
Secondly, Common Carrier status grants carriers legal protection ONLY if they are indeed Common Carriers - ie: traffic-neutral. If you want to run a service with no Common Carrier protection, fine. Just be aware of what you are volunteering to sacrifice in the name of your "freedom".
Thirdly, no, "private property" does NOT trump customers "rights". Again, a service is NOT a property. (There is also no law or Constitutional amendment guaranteeing not being offended, so I have bugger all idea where you dredged that crap from.) The successful gay rights campaigns have produced case law (which is the law whether you like it or not) that states that customers DO have the right to obtain a service where, when it is denied, it is denied for discriminatory reasons alone. The law is the law. If you don't like it, move out. Your forefathers did when they didn't like European law. What's your problem?
Fourthly, it is most definitely not slavery. Nobody owns you, nobody can buy or sell you, get over yourself, you pathetic piece of shit.
Fifthly, you have the right to tailor your services all you like. You merely have NO right to discriminate as to who uses them.
Sixthly, the peering agreements of the Internet mean that violation of Network Neutrality is a breech of contract. Those who have broken with neutrality could potentially be sued to within an inch of their existence for such violations. They haven't been (for the most part, although there have been a few cases) because the major vendors want to see how this plays out in Congress first. If Congress sides with neutrality, expect the neutral vendors to become the ONLY vendors, having driven the others out of business with lawsuits or forcing them to hand over fibre and network centres as part of a settlement. Even if Congress doesn't side with it, expect lawsuits - it's just that the rewards will merely be in the tens of millions, not the tens of billions.
Well, here's the press reports on the ruling.
More importantly, here is the summary from the EU Court of Justice, the judgement of the court, the directives involved and the opinion of the court, but in French ad the English translation isn't up yet.
This is the information any of us have to work with, when it comes to understanding the ruling. Bearing in mind that none of us (except for three sheep and a hedgehog) are lawyers, a definite answer is impossible. I read it that ISPs are absolutely required to be common carriers, at least within the EU, and that common carrier status may not be infringed even at the request of a major corporation or pressure group.
It's hardly a straw man if that's your control group. You chose it, you produce data showing that the most efficient cars are a legitimate control group. I'm putting in various cars because you have declined to give that information, making that comparison alone worthless. God, what do they teach in science these days if you can't manage even the most basic stuff?
www.aef.org.uk/downloads/Howdoesairtravelcompare.doc
Below are figures from this data (we'll ignore the aircraft part), and I'll give additional services not just the two under discussion. For cars, there is no modifier given per passenger. For trains, no modifier is given per coach. However, if we assume the norm is that everyone drives themselves and the cost per passenger is correct for a full coach, whatever that is.
(The 390 seems to seat a median of 48 passengers, so to compare apples with apples, you'd have to compare the efficiency of a 390 with 48 passengers on board vs 48 cars where the cars match the distribution actually found on the road. If you're factoring in busses as well, then the Volvo B10L will handle 48 if there's standing - which is common on single-deckers. For double deckers, then the Volvo B10TL has a capacity of 83 seated and 42 standing, so to get apples-with-apples you'd need to scale up the numbers of each until you got a good enough fit.)
The data itself:
Car (large models, SUVs etc): maximum efficiency = 25 miles per gallon per car (9 kilometers per litre), minimum emissions = 250 grams CO2 per kilometre
Car (average model): maximum efficiency = 45 miles per gallon per car (16 kilometers per litre), minimum emissions = 145 grams CO2 per kilometre
Car (most efficient): maximum efficiency = 60 miles per gallon per car (23 kilometres per litre), minimum emissions = 100 grams CO2 per kilometre
Rail (normal suburban): maximum efficiency = 150 miles per gallon per passenger (52 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 45 grams CO2 per kilometre
Rail (high speed, few stops): maximum efficiency = 80 miles per gallon per passenger (28 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 80 grams CO2 per kilometre
Bus (well used service): maximum efficiency = 140 miles per gallon per passenger (50 kilometers per liter), minimum emissions = 45 grams CO2 per kilometre
Remember, you have to scale everything so that it's a fair comparison.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with what services the ISP can carry. It merely states that if you DO carry a specific service, you can't play favourites - all suppliers and all users should have equitable access to that service. However, net neutrality places no constraints on what types of services are carried, what total bandwidth is made available for that service, or whether that bandwidth can be reduced if higher-priority traffic needs it. It would equally be entirely fair under network neutrality to dictate that unresponsive flows (eg: multimedia streams that won't throttle back if you sent ECN notices or other such notifications) should be put in their own class and given a very limited fraction of the bandwidth to chew on.
DiffServ (differentiated services) with different policies per service is ENTIRELY in keeping with network neutrality.
Well, that depends. The EU's court recently ruled that ISPs are forbidden from inspecting for torrents. If packet inspection was used, it's in violation of EU rules which the UK is subordinate to. If the filesharers (or those doing legal fileshares, ideally) take the ISP to court for violating an EU directive and win - which they might well - then ISP disconnections will cease. At least until the corporations persuade there to be a new ruling - something Microsoft found the EU is not always amenable to.
Sure. And you can produce data that shows that the mean standard of automobile in California is equal to one of the efficient vehicles you name?
How do you explain the Obama-era advocacy of arresting reporters for attempting to cover #OWS?
Hence the bit about it being dubious as to whether it's legal to criticize the government or head of State today. I don't even remotely pretend to condone or excuse the Obama-era attempts to suppress criticism and regard them as being equal in every respect to the very same attempts made by the prior administration.
Athens was considered the birthplace of democracy even though they didn't have it
Democracy does not imply that everyone has a vote. Modern Western democracies are "representational democracies" in that you do NOT have a vote except in choosing the person who represents you. The vast majority of voting is done only by the representatives. Well, except in "proportional representation" democracies, where you choose the affiliation and they choose the representatives for you. (PR has its strengths, such as more honestly representing how the population thinks, but personal accountability isn't one of them.)
So while what you say it's true, the USA is still not a democracy, and never has been
Oh, absolutely true! The Founding Fathers disliked the flaws in the democratic systems they'd seen and, instead of fixing things like education and responsibility, opted to go for a republic instead. To be fair, fixing the flaws would have been expensive and they didn't have the money. Nonetheless, the flaws are precisely why a republic won't work either. They minimized the initial breakage, which is sensible and rational enough if you can't afford to make things work well, but at the price of making a system that had the clout to ensure it was never fixed.
I completely agree. Exactly how much better the education would need to be and exactly what's needed to make it better are all subject to debate, but there's no question that corrupt, incompetent politicians rely heavily on the ignorance of others to remain any of the three.
Well, yes. It's no different from any individual falling in with the wrong crowd, except that individuals have alternative crowds they can hang with.
Yes. The multiplexer would need to be a chip that took analogue inputs (which is fine, mixed signals is old tech), run them through ADCs and emit via a semiconductor laser. You'd need a similar device that did the reverse. But because the multiplexer/demultiplexer are unidirectional and some nerves are bidirectional (not a vast number), you would need to make sure that only one circuit was active at a time. Which is actually good - you can then put them onto the same die because there's no possibility of an inactive circuit interfering with an active one.
It's not a particularly big deal, especially as the suggested alternative is to multiplex over RF. You've still got the multiplexer/demultiplexer, the digitization, etc, but you've now got tuned circuits and an aerial as well. A semiconductor laser is compact and embedding it within the die itself is a non-issue these days. Something like that could easily be stuffed into a vertebra for spinal injuries or onto the fused end of a bone for simpler amputations.
In the long run, anything that deters people from polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive would have to be a good thing for the country. Well, assuming rational people. But then would rational people have opted for polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive?
If we're dealing with irrational people, all bets are off.