But if I could impress on PJ one thing, it would be to write a book on the case. What I'm picturing is a two-part book, the first basically a collection of her postings in order of publication together with the court's publications (copyright permitting) so that there's a single resource that can be referred to that isn't subject to servers being pulled or data being archived and taken offline. The second part would be a retrospective, an analysis of the analysis, so to speak, comparing hypotheses and expectations with actualities, illustrating what has been added to case law versus what was simply a restatement of existing case law.
This would be of enormous benefit to armchair enthusiasts without doubt, but by being formally presented in such a manner it may also be of benefit to law shools as a case study.
I don't know what PJ thinks on the matter, or if she'd take such an idea seriously, but in lieu of a decent honors system I'd argue she deserves professional recognition in some form or other and typically that means being referred to as an inspiring source.
Glen Beck is usually pretty specific on the person and Sarah Palin wasn't exactly vague about identities with those photos, it's their threats that tend to be vague. That and celebrities are usually rich enough to win court cases. It's just safer to allow talk-show hosts to rant than to antagonize them. The police and secret service know much better than to kick a wasp's nest and sadly they haven't a whole list of alternatives when it comes to dealing with agent provocateurs.
The threat is less from Google shutting the development down but in data mining (which is their only real specialty anyway) and the potential threats to privacy that may result. Firewall policies are of no interest here if the information is published (even if only to paying customers).
Well, in this case, it looks like the guy is mentally unstable. Well, I suspect a lot in prison are. (The criminally insane are the ones that likely can't be treated but are the only ones to get treatment. Oooooohhhhhkay. That makes sense. I'd rather pay a couple extra cents a year to see someone like this in a hospital than pay a fortune for the layers of security that will accumulate from incidents like this. Prevention pays off better than revenge, even if it's less fun for the media.)
Rubbish. IPv6 is heirarchical with fixed-size subnets, which means that the absolute largest routing table you can EVER have in IPv6 is 512 entries (256 upstream, 256 downstream).
Secondly, I'd said nothing about address space, which is an incidental feature of IPv6 and largely irrelevant - particularly in this discussion.
IPv6 addresses don't need summarizing. You have two possible bytes that can change, one marking upstream, one marking downstream. In principle, a router need only know its address and then store just those two bytes and the corresponding port as the routing table. (Basically, this is a result of inheriting addressing ideas from TUBA - a better protocol in some respects, though a bugger to use in hardware.) In practice, you need 512x128 bits to store all the addresses you can ever directly see. The remaining gigabytes of memory you suggest are needed would then come in handy for a router-based Quake server, but that's about it.
You should differentiate. Nuclear fission (the existing method) is the cleanest and safest at the moment, although nuclear waste is a rather big problem especially without any recycling permitted in the US. Nuclear fusion (the method we damn well should be using) is FAR FAR cleaner and safer than fission, has no waste problem beyond contamination of the facility, and desperately needs governments to invest in to get it going.
Base systems such as coal and oil are a major problem, not just because they're dangerous and heavily polluting, but because the tycoons have been highly successful in crippling funding for fusion reactor development and have also been very successful in making power grids far less efficient than they need be.
To put this in one perspective, the Industrial Revolution's heavy use of coal resulted in the entire Peak District being contaminated by metal-eating bacteria which are causing massive destruction and will continue to do so for centuries. The Irish Sea is the most radioactive in the world because of dumping of uncontained plutonium in the ocean and will continue to be for tens of millenia. In this sense, 30 years is nothing.
To put it in a different perspective, using the same example: These same examples of contamination were caused through ignorance of long-term effects and a willingness to assume there weren't going to be any. Smoke went up the chimney and was forgotten about. The sea would surely dissipate the radioactive waste to harmless levels in no time. The reality was very different from the perception.
And this is my concern (mine! you can't have!) - industrialists are notorious for being complacent, assuming that once something was not their problem that it wouldn't be any problem at all. This simply isn't reality. Without a full chemical breakdown, I don't know if this 30 year estimate is remotely plausible -- and not one single person on Slashdot can be any more certain than I, one way or the other. It may be safe in 30 years, it might be safe in 30 days, it might take 30 decades. Without knowing what's in the water, and only knowing one or two (of probably a great many) contaminants with only a vague idea of actual levels of even those, any estimate is just whistling in the dark. And That I Do Not Like.
I want facts, quantitative data, something I can actually use. All I'm seeing are TEPCO theories and speculation, along with media hyperbole. I'm not seeing anything usable or any evidence that these theories are even based on anything usable.
IPv6 creates an interesting problem, as it is fundamental to the protocol that you can transition from one ISP to another without loss of any connections and without having to use a packet forwarder. This means that under some circumstances a more accurate picture can be built with enough data (since you have to be on the border of the two ISPs) but equally it means that for the same amount of data the calculation will be less accurate because routing assumptions won't hold up. You're no longer comparing like with like.
ICMP isn't significantly buffered (although all packets are buffered to some extent) and the law of large numbers suggests that the cable length issue will be the same for all possible paths given enough hops and enough paths, so will simply fall out of the equation given enough directions. You couldn't use triangulation on two paths, but the errors caused by such variation should fall off (albeit asymptotically to some minimum error - which seems to be 1 Km) as the paths increases.
My guess is that, in practice, you'd have to square the number of paths to halve the error (above the minimum error obtainable) in the calculation.
In other words, interesting in theory, but due to a lack of redundancy a totally useless in practice observation.
There haven't been competing providers for a VERY long time. Not in any serious sense. Most of the Internet is one gigantic spanning tree with no redundant connections anywhere. Because of a design flaw in the BGP4+ protocol, alternative routes can also cause router flaps.
As for your other points, use Pathchar or PChar some time. It reports to you not only the time it takes to bounce packets but the pipe congestion at each link as well. You also want to look up "Internet Weather", which reports the overall picture of congestion on the backbone.
Combine the Internet Weather reports with the PChar findings and you can factor out all the congestion, prioritization and OS issues.
It doesn't sound bad, it sounds abusable. Whenever there's two conflicting policies over nominally the same thing (since speech is digitized, is it a voice network or a data network?), the companies most in need of enforcing it are the companies most likely to weasel-word their way out.
I'd love it if sharing happened. Actual, true, bi-directional sharing. AT&T didn't get where they were, though, by sharing, playing nice, playing by the rules, or playing anything but the customer and the FCC for fools.
True, as noted by another poster, it's a good decision rather than the "best possible" decision. My fear is that the very same forces that make the "best possible" decision impossible will now use what should be a good decision to cripple smaller competitors in favour of those who can afford to buy the odd politician or three.
It's a tough call - as always. When do you push for more and when do you accept the compromise? I don't pretend to know enough about the current dynamics to say that holding out would certainly be better, and I'm no Tea Partier, insisting on my way or the highway. What I am is fearful of is that in the current climate these decisions are getting made more with an eye to power-plays in Congress and the White House than to the consumer.
...the FCC can start by abolishing all policies, abandoning all stances and cancelling all position papers that distinguish between a voice network and the Internet. That includes imposing any regulations from regular phone services, such as common carrier constraints, monitoring constraints, price gouging constraints and peering obligations.
Stone De Croze, the Original Guernseyman. The rest had the benefit of education, textbooks and suppliers. Stone De Croze invented stuff before inventing had been invented.
There's a lot of networking protocols (especially dealing with real-time TCP, networking over slow connections - eg DTP, QoS functions) that are missing and why the hell aren't things like Web100 and KTAU integrated with mainstream yet?!
Documentation (eg: LARTC) is horribly out-of-date and usually sucks.
The VAX port is missing.
A number of newer filesystems (eg: btrfs, nilfs) still need work and there's a few good filesystems (eg: Polyserve's fs) that we don't have clean-room implementations of.
More of the hooks that will be needed to provide a standard baseline for computer clustering (eg: MOSIX, Kerrighd, bproc) still need to be written out and implemented.
QA. Variants of the kernel are FAA-approved, other variants are Carrier-Grade. It's doubtful the mainstream kernel can be either - at least for very long - but narrowing the gap will increase the number of people interested in high-end usage.
More drivers. Not just for home stuff, but also for special-purpose stuff. I don't recall seeing any specific SCADA support, for example. There's way more crypto boards out there than there's drivers, and don't give me that nonsense that crypto should be in userspace - you can't drive a hardware accelerator at decent speed if you're context switching all the time. As for what a userspace driver does to security... *shudder* No, some things HAVE to be in the kernel even if it's not some people's preferences on policy grounds.
I've been around from before the time of UIDs on Slashdot, but my memory of the early days is just not good enough to be able to comment on the case or offer any kind of opinion on what happened.
What I can say, though, unfortunately, is that no board - indeed no organization involving one person or more - is going to be free of politics, controversy or undeserved consequences. That is extremely unfortunate, doubly as most "social" venues (Slashdot included) have no form of appeal and even in those places where appeal exists, it is usually limited to whether the decision was made fairly, NOT whether the decision was right. (The UK claims to be the sole exception in the world, which frightens me on so many levels.)
This means that there will be inevitable cases of ostracization and/or punishment of the innocent, rejection of their views and observations, and support for those who would inflict such on the innocent. It is inescapable. All you can do is make such cases as rare as humanly possible.
I believe (right or wrong) that Slashdot does better than almost any other social venue in this regard. Way better than Kuro5hin. That doesn't help if you've personally experienced one of the inevitable failures in the system, and my sympathies (for what it's worth) if you have, and in some ways it can hurt far more to be one of a far smaller group in systems which do function extremely well.
I wish I had an answer to that. I've plenty of wild theories on social issues (not that anyone is ever likely to give a damn about them) but I have failed even to come close to imagining a system that has 100% social justice, and even if I had, there's bugger all chance of it being implemented. All I can do is what I have been doing, reading the AC replies for the occasional gem, and offering sympathy for the pointless stupid stuff in life.
Now that is very true. It has become way too cluttered with stuff that really adds no value and/or subtracts from it. It's top-heavy. Which means, incidentally, that it's going to become increasingly hard to maintain.
The really, really, really sad part -- there still isn't a single discussion/forum/BBS system out there that comes even close to the quality of Slashcode. I use a lot of different systems and Slashcode has them beat hands-down for quality of features and degree of flexibility.
When a ten tonne lump of granite becomes the most agile, most dynamic, most responsive option by an astronomical margin, you know just how crap the alternatives really are.
*starts a sing-along* And the postgrads of the thesis of the paper of the article of the blog of the boys who put the scintilating stitches in the britches of the witches who put the powders on the noses of the ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus were just passing by...
I could say something smark-alec about gravity wave detectors (which are the same experiment, only bigger and more expensive), but I'll limit myself to saying something smart-alec about how you can't get much more dissapeared than that.
OS in ROM is easy enough - use CoreBoot (and/or OpenBIOS) to install the kernel. The equivalent of the old BASIC chip (which was really more than just BASIC, it was also your system shell) would be to have a mini root disk in the same prom as the OS - your minimal/bin,/sbin,/lib stuff. It just needs to be enough to boot from. You can have a more complete image file (compressed or whatever) elsewhere, or if you want to use the BBC style of sideways ROM then have each application plus non-editable supplemental files as a root-jailed disk image file that is mounted when you switch to that ROM.
Nobody views under a 2 any more, so if you want a link to be seen you have to post non-AC. No choice. Too b. noisy with trash talk otherwise. I'd not have seen your link at all if I didn't have a habit of expanding hidden replies on the offchance they're important.
(And because very few people mod ACs - why bother, it won't alter their karma - important AC posts often vanish into the ether.)
...to the paper, as opposed to the commentary by PopSci on the article written by NYT by someone who really didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear!
But if I could impress on PJ one thing, it would be to write a book on the case. What I'm picturing is a two-part book, the first basically a collection of her postings in order of publication together with the court's publications (copyright permitting) so that there's a single resource that can be referred to that isn't subject to servers being pulled or data being archived and taken offline. The second part would be a retrospective, an analysis of the analysis, so to speak, comparing hypotheses and expectations with actualities, illustrating what has been added to case law versus what was simply a restatement of existing case law.
This would be of enormous benefit to armchair enthusiasts without doubt, but by being formally presented in such a manner it may also be of benefit to law shools as a case study.
I don't know what PJ thinks on the matter, or if she'd take such an idea seriously, but in lieu of a decent honors system I'd argue she deserves professional recognition in some form or other and typically that means being referred to as an inspiring source.
Or after. There's bound to be zombie cases to take up.
You keep the banana peel, I'll take Emma Peel.
Glen Beck is usually pretty specific on the person and Sarah Palin wasn't exactly vague about identities with those photos, it's their threats that tend to be vague. That and celebrities are usually rich enough to win court cases. It's just safer to allow talk-show hosts to rant than to antagonize them. The police and secret service know much better than to kick a wasp's nest and sadly they haven't a whole list of alternatives when it comes to dealing with agent provocateurs.
The threat is less from Google shutting the development down but in data mining (which is their only real specialty anyway) and the potential threats to privacy that may result. Firewall policies are of no interest here if the information is published (even if only to paying customers).
Well, in this case, it looks like the guy is mentally unstable. Well, I suspect a lot in prison are. (The criminally insane are the ones that likely can't be treated but are the only ones to get treatment. Oooooohhhhhkay. That makes sense. I'd rather pay a couple extra cents a year to see someone like this in a hospital than pay a fortune for the layers of security that will accumulate from incidents like this. Prevention pays off better than revenge, even if it's less fun for the media.)
Rubbish. IPv6 is heirarchical with fixed-size subnets, which means that the absolute largest routing table you can EVER have in IPv6 is 512 entries (256 upstream, 256 downstream).
Secondly, I'd said nothing about address space, which is an incidental feature of IPv6 and largely irrelevant - particularly in this discussion.
IPv6 addresses don't need summarizing. You have two possible bytes that can change, one marking upstream, one marking downstream. In principle, a router need only know its address and then store just those two bytes and the corresponding port as the routing table. (Basically, this is a result of inheriting addressing ideas from TUBA - a better protocol in some respects, though a bugger to use in hardware.) In practice, you need 512x128 bits to store all the addresses you can ever directly see. The remaining gigabytes of memory you suggest are needed would then come in handy for a router-based Quake server, but that's about it.
You should differentiate. Nuclear fission (the existing method) is the cleanest and safest at the moment, although nuclear waste is a rather big problem especially without any recycling permitted in the US. Nuclear fusion (the method we damn well should be using) is FAR FAR cleaner and safer than fission, has no waste problem beyond contamination of the facility, and desperately needs governments to invest in to get it going.
Base systems such as coal and oil are a major problem, not just because they're dangerous and heavily polluting, but because the tycoons have been highly successful in crippling funding for fusion reactor development and have also been very successful in making power grids far less efficient than they need be.
To put this in one perspective, the Industrial Revolution's heavy use of coal resulted in the entire Peak District being contaminated by metal-eating bacteria which are causing massive destruction and will continue to do so for centuries. The Irish Sea is the most radioactive in the world because of dumping of uncontained plutonium in the ocean and will continue to be for tens of millenia. In this sense, 30 years is nothing.
To put it in a different perspective, using the same example: These same examples of contamination were caused through ignorance of long-term effects and a willingness to assume there weren't going to be any. Smoke went up the chimney and was forgotten about. The sea would surely dissipate the radioactive waste to harmless levels in no time. The reality was very different from the perception.
And this is my concern (mine! you can't have!) - industrialists are notorious for being complacent, assuming that once something was not their problem that it wouldn't be any problem at all. This simply isn't reality. Without a full chemical breakdown, I don't know if this 30 year estimate is remotely plausible -- and not one single person on Slashdot can be any more certain than I, one way or the other. It may be safe in 30 years, it might be safe in 30 days, it might take 30 decades. Without knowing what's in the water, and only knowing one or two (of probably a great many) contaminants with only a vague idea of actual levels of even those, any estimate is just whistling in the dark. And That I Do Not Like.
I want facts, quantitative data, something I can actually use. All I'm seeing are TEPCO theories and speculation, along with media hyperbole. I'm not seeing anything usable or any evidence that these theories are even based on anything usable.
IPv6 creates an interesting problem, as it is fundamental to the protocol that you can transition from one ISP to another without loss of any connections and without having to use a packet forwarder. This means that under some circumstances a more accurate picture can be built with enough data (since you have to be on the border of the two ISPs) but equally it means that for the same amount of data the calculation will be less accurate because routing assumptions won't hold up. You're no longer comparing like with like.
ICMP isn't significantly buffered (although all packets are buffered to some extent) and the law of large numbers suggests that the cable length issue will be the same for all possible paths given enough hops and enough paths, so will simply fall out of the equation given enough directions. You couldn't use triangulation on two paths, but the errors caused by such variation should fall off (albeit asymptotically to some minimum error - which seems to be 1 Km) as the paths increases.
My guess is that, in practice, you'd have to square the number of paths to halve the error (above the minimum error obtainable) in the calculation.
In other words, interesting in theory, but due to a lack of redundancy a totally useless in practice observation.
There haven't been competing providers for a VERY long time. Not in any serious sense. Most of the Internet is one gigantic spanning tree with no redundant connections anywhere. Because of a design flaw in the BGP4+ protocol, alternative routes can also cause router flaps.
As for your other points, use Pathchar or PChar some time. It reports to you not only the time it takes to bounce packets but the pipe congestion at each link as well. You also want to look up "Internet Weather", which reports the overall picture of congestion on the backbone.
Combine the Internet Weather reports with the PChar findings and you can factor out all the congestion, prioritization and OS issues.
It doesn't sound bad, it sounds abusable. Whenever there's two conflicting policies over nominally the same thing (since speech is digitized, is it a voice network or a data network?), the companies most in need of enforcing it are the companies most likely to weasel-word their way out.
I'd love it if sharing happened. Actual, true, bi-directional sharing. AT&T didn't get where they were, though, by sharing, playing nice, playing by the rules, or playing anything but the customer and the FCC for fools.
True, as noted by another poster, it's a good decision rather than the "best possible" decision. My fear is that the very same forces that make the "best possible" decision impossible will now use what should be a good decision to cripple smaller competitors in favour of those who can afford to buy the odd politician or three.
It's a tough call - as always. When do you push for more and when do you accept the compromise? I don't pretend to know enough about the current dynamics to say that holding out would certainly be better, and I'm no Tea Partier, insisting on my way or the highway. What I am is fearful of is that in the current climate these decisions are getting made more with an eye to power-plays in Congress and the White House than to the consumer.
...the FCC can start by abolishing all policies, abandoning all stances and cancelling all position papers that distinguish between a voice network and the Internet. That includes imposing any regulations from regular phone services, such as common carrier constraints, monitoring constraints, price gouging constraints and peering obligations.
Rube Goldberg wasn't as good as Heath Robinson, in my honest opinion, and the best Professor of all time has to be Professor Brainstawm.
Stone De Croze, the Original Guernseyman. The rest had the benefit of education, textbooks and suppliers. Stone De Croze invented stuff before inventing had been invented.
There's a lot of networking protocols (especially dealing with real-time TCP, networking over slow connections - eg DTP, QoS functions) that are missing and why the hell aren't things like Web100 and KTAU integrated with mainstream yet?!
Documentation (eg: LARTC) is horribly out-of-date and usually sucks.
The VAX port is missing.
A number of newer filesystems (eg: btrfs, nilfs) still need work and there's a few good filesystems (eg: Polyserve's fs) that we don't have clean-room implementations of.
More of the hooks that will be needed to provide a standard baseline for computer clustering (eg: MOSIX, Kerrighd, bproc) still need to be written out and implemented.
QA. Variants of the kernel are FAA-approved, other variants are Carrier-Grade. It's doubtful the mainstream kernel can be either - at least for very long - but narrowing the gap will increase the number of people interested in high-end usage.
More drivers. Not just for home stuff, but also for special-purpose stuff. I don't recall seeing any specific SCADA support, for example. There's way more crypto boards out there than there's drivers, and don't give me that nonsense that crypto should be in userspace - you can't drive a hardware accelerator at decent speed if you're context switching all the time. As for what a userspace driver does to security... *shudder* No, some things HAVE to be in the kernel even if it's not some people's preferences on policy grounds.
I've been around from before the time of UIDs on Slashdot, but my memory of the early days is just not good enough to be able to comment on the case or offer any kind of opinion on what happened.
What I can say, though, unfortunately, is that no board - indeed no organization involving one person or more - is going to be free of politics, controversy or undeserved consequences. That is extremely unfortunate, doubly as most "social" venues (Slashdot included) have no form of appeal and even in those places where appeal exists, it is usually limited to whether the decision was made fairly, NOT whether the decision was right. (The UK claims to be the sole exception in the world, which frightens me on so many levels.)
This means that there will be inevitable cases of ostracization and/or punishment of the innocent, rejection of their views and observations, and support for those who would inflict such on the innocent. It is inescapable. All you can do is make such cases as rare as humanly possible.
I believe (right or wrong) that Slashdot does better than almost any other social venue in this regard. Way better than Kuro5hin. That doesn't help if you've personally experienced one of the inevitable failures in the system, and my sympathies (for what it's worth) if you have, and in some ways it can hurt far more to be one of a far smaller group in systems which do function extremely well.
I wish I had an answer to that. I've plenty of wild theories on social issues (not that anyone is ever likely to give a damn about them) but I have failed even to come close to imagining a system that has 100% social justice, and even if I had, there's bugger all chance of it being implemented. All I can do is what I have been doing, reading the AC replies for the occasional gem, and offering sympathy for the pointless stupid stuff in life.
Now that is very true. It has become way too cluttered with stuff that really adds no value and/or subtracts from it. It's top-heavy. Which means, incidentally, that it's going to become increasingly hard to maintain.
The really, really, really sad part -- there still isn't a single discussion/forum/BBS system out there that comes even close to the quality of Slashcode. I use a lot of different systems and Slashcode has them beat hands-down for quality of features and degree of flexibility.
When a ten tonne lump of granite becomes the most agile, most dynamic, most responsive option by an astronomical margin, you know just how crap the alternatives really are.
*starts a sing-along*
And the postgrads of the thesis of the paper of the article of the blog of the boys who put the scintilating stitches in the britches of the witches who put the powders on the noses of the ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus were just passing by...
I could say something smark-alec about gravity wave detectors (which are the same experiment, only bigger and more expensive), but I'll limit myself to saying something smart-alec about how you can't get much more dissapeared than that.
OS in ROM is easy enough - use CoreBoot (and/or OpenBIOS) to install the kernel. The equivalent of the old BASIC chip (which was really more than just BASIC, it was also your system shell) would be to have a mini root disk in the same prom as the OS - your minimal /bin, /sbin, /lib stuff. It just needs to be enough to boot from. You can have a more complete image file (compressed or whatever) elsewhere, or if you want to use the BBC style of sideways ROM then have each application plus non-editable supplemental files as a root-jailed disk image file that is mounted when you switch to that ROM.
Nobody views under a 2 any more, so if you want a link to be seen you have to post non-AC. No choice. Too b. noisy with trash talk otherwise. I'd not have seen your link at all if I didn't have a habit of expanding hidden replies on the offchance they're important.
(And because very few people mod ACs - why bother, it won't alter their karma - important AC posts often vanish into the ether.)
...to the paper, as opposed to the commentary by PopSci on the article written by NYT by someone who really didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
Ah, but does your brain exist? If not, then maybe the universe was never there to begin with.