A large data center should not have one big massive UPS anyway. It should all be divided out into various load sections, each with its own UPS+battery system. Once you do that, then you can have cooling on its own UPS without any risk of the cooling system impacting the UPS feeding the computers... if you really want cooling on UPS (it can be done, but generally is not the best way). Surely you would have the cooling on it's own three phase circuits.
Perhaps a better approach is a smart cooling system that rotates the starting of compressors on various units so you always have some number of units running and some number not running, at the ratio needed for the current thermal demands. Then where there is an outage that has to go to generators, only a limit number of units will have been recently started just before the outage and need to be thermally protected. The controller skips those and starts the idle units (unless you are already maxxed out in which case you'd have no idle units). But you will need to have the cooling on the generators.
If you are going to have a backup distribution circuit from the utility, it should be physically separate from the primary circuit so that it is not necessary to shut down both to deal with things like a traffic accident.
... they stopped buying CDs not because CD releases are crap, but because you can get all that goodness for free online instead of paying money.
That may be true for many people, but it is not the only reason. One reason is, of course, because what they sell is mostly crap. But that reason has been around for a long time and while I believe it is a big reason for not having the level of sales they could have, it is not a reason for their sales level to decline in the past decade.
However, there is one reason I do know to be true for not only myself, but for a few other people I know. Long ago when I bought music, I had little or no way to preview what it was I was buying. Radio played almost as much crap back then as they do today, without covering any of the alternatives. So I ended up buying albums (before CDs) and CDs on speculation based on the cover material, or other factors that never really was accurate about what music I'd be getting. Buying things this way did get some great gems. But it also got a lot of crap (to me... it was still alternative that maybe someone else would have loved). I was buying more music than what I ended up liking.
Today, I can sample it. I can sample just about everything. I can figure out what I like and what I dislike ahead of time, without wasteful buying. The level of purchasing I do is now less than what I used to do. A lot less. I only buy about 40% as much. But now I know that 100% of what I buy I like, even before I buy it, whereas before I was only liking about 40% of what I bought.
Some component of the decline in CD sales is from people not specifically buying less... but buying smarter. But my guess is the RIAA members can't even grasp that concept.
That's not to say there isn't a whole lot of people who download and keep at least some of what they download (or all to trade for more), and just don't buy any CDs at all and just accept the lesser quality of the MP3 encodings they get online. I'm just saying that such theft is not the entire cause of the decline in legal purchasing.
Any rot13 joke is pointless. We all know rot13 is reversable. What hashing is all about is non-reversability. That is, given some large string of content, produce a smaller string that cannot re-create the original content. So why not combine things: md5 -> triple-rot13
If Sony really wants Blu-Ray to win, it will "bite the bullet" and sell players for $100 and recorders for $200 during the 2007 Christmas holiday shopping season and make up the loss in future volume. Since products have already shipped to stores, they will need to do a rebate. To avoid annoying potential customers, it will need to be an "in store instant rebate". Otherwise most people (these are the people that don't give a damn about technical issues) will buy what is cheapest, and that is now HD-DVD.
It has to continuously operate circuitry to detect the video signal to know when to come back on in full. The electrical cost of this over some period of time is the same whether that power is obtained from capacitors or from a continuous trickle from the mains power connection.
If the only means to come on full is from a switch the user operates that dumps the capacitor power to the relay in the power supply, and video detection is not part of this, then that may save power. But now the power supply has to keep a relay activated to stay in the on state. This of the relay as another device in side the monitor that gets hot and stays hot and dissipates this heat to the environment.
The best savings is still a mechanical contact switch that controls the mains voltage directly... as long as someone is willing to operate it and remember to do so when quitting.
That's why we need to raise the bar and make more and more traffic encrypted in general. The more that comes about, the more it converts Rogers into a provider that just throttles everything.
By spying on the certificate exchange, I think they can see what the site you connected to claims to be (unless it does a D-H exchange first). They can make a 2nd connection to the same site and carry out their own TLS protocol to get a certificate exchange if spying on your connection doesn't do it. They certainly have the IP address and can look that up in various ways, such as reverse DNS, WHOIS, Google, and see what might be there. Combine that with a lot of access patterns and there is a lot that can be figured out about what you are doing.
If you are worried they can figure out this is a torrent connection... they will pretty much figure out which IPs are most popular about the heaviest users that are not popular among the non-heavy users and could play shoot-the-packet on those, even if also encrypted with IPsec (bypassing the proxy). With HTTPS alone (no proxy) they can still do the RST thing. With IPsec they can't do RST, but they can still throw some away (harder that RST, but still possible). The fact that Comcast is doing RST suggests they are trying to keep the costs of their efforts low and not encumber the routers to make them drop select packets. More likely they might try deliberate route flapping next if IPsec gets popular.
You understand how HTTPS works, but not how a proxy works for HTTPS.
When your browser connects to a proxy for an HTTPS method, it makes a CONNECT request. The proxy makes a TCP connection to the IP address and port requested and passes the traffic both ways unchanged and uncached. The browser then performs the usual certificate validation on the contents received from the remote web site.
An ISP could force the use of a proxy. An ISP could disable HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could slow down HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could monitor your traffic volume through their proxy (or their routers). An ISP could record every encrypted bit going both ways. An ISP could also corrupt the encrypted traffic bits. But an ISP cannot interpret the bits in your encrypted traffic, nor modify them, in any meaningful way, without cracking the encryption.
Do we really think open market operations won't solve the issue?
As long as there is too much monopoly, especially by big corporations, and especially cable/telco corporations, then, yes, I think the open market cannot solve this because it (the open market) actually won't exist.
Many companies have a big installed instructure (e.g. all the wired coax or twisted pair) that was acquired through either them or a predecessor operating as a monopoly. Do you think these companies would have been willing to install such an infrustructure had they originally been faced with (to pick a random number) 4 competitors that were also installing an "overbuild" infrastructure? The company that owns it today is at an advantage because the public gave up the right to competition in the past (and maybe even in the present to some degree).
In order for there to be true competition good enough for the market to ensure that the network will remain neutral, there will have to be quite many providers. That number needs to be fairly large and would be at a level where that many duplicate infrastructures would be extremely wasteful of finances. Imagine 8 different phone companies and 4 different cable companies running their own wires everywhere and each dropping one of theirs to your home for you to choose from. It's just not going to happen. A few towns have 2 infrastructure based competitors in various services. But even that gets expensive.
What is ultimately needed is a single company that builds, maintains, and operates the infrastructure, and allows other companies to lease it out as needed to provide various services. Think of that original phone company breakup but instead of being broken at the boundary between local and long distance calling, imagine it being broken between infrastructure ownership and all calling (one company owns the wires and a different company provides dial tone). This is the way to do it with a minimum of regulation. The infrastructure owner would be a regulated monopoly, required to provide access to the wiring as needed (e.g. whichever phone company you want to use, they get cross patched to your phone pair). The phone companies providing services would then have less regulation since more companies would be able to enter the business cheaply. We need to do internet and cable TV the same way, and effectively merge it all together. The infrastructure needs to be upgraded to fiber with each fiber running all the way from each individual subscriber to the central facility where many companies can host their equipment. Each home should have more than one dark fiber which they get to choose which provider lights it up. I suggest 3 or 4 such fibers per home. Businesses might need more. Then any company you choose to sign up with can provide whatever combination of switched telephony, cable TV, internet, or dedicated communications links, through that fiber. Then we can have real competition, real innovation, and minimum regulations applied to the businesses that matter.
One idea I propose is for the federal government to permit local governments to build these new infrastructures themselves, if they wish. This would basically be protection against lawsuits by the incumbents that choose not to break themselves up according to this idea (if we don't force them to break up). You know if any city did build such an infrastructure, the incumbent telco and cable companies would sue.
If you are going to live in a non-free lawyer-infested country, you need to host your blog anonymously in a far removed country somewhere else.
FYI... I have had to deal with school boards and school administrators in various circumstances, several times. I have observed a nature that fits every one of them I have dealt with, and seems to fit every one that makes it to the news. That nature is that the people who run them are people that wanted to be politicians because they enjoyed being in positions of power that control other people, but were unable to make it in a world where they have to deal with adults, and found this niche where they can carry out their desire to control other people... on children... and in general on people less familiar with their rights. Think of them as "wanna be politicians" that are too incompetent to make it as true politicians.
OK, there's one exception. My junior high school vice-principal actually made it into real politics.
The whole point of the REAL ID program was that the IDs the terrorists did have did not enable sufficient tracking to figure out that they were terrorists. REAL ID is not about establishing IDs for the very first time. It is not about establishing more IDs. It's not about assuming someone is a terrorist because they lack an ID. It is about establishing IDs that work together to allow more tracking.
If you want to knock down the whole REAL ID program, please do so on a basis that is correct. I'm among the many who do, not because of the impact, or more specifically the lack thereof, it will have on terrorism, but rather, the impact it will have on the citizens of the USA who are supposed to be free of such things (per the Bill of Rights).
"What the data does show is that there is a relationship between those who do downloading and those who buy CDs. It also shows that those who download more also buy more."
Which is exactly the point! Yes!
But this only shows that the same people who buy music also download. It doesn't show anything to support or refute the claim of the music industry that P2P is the cause of reduced CD sales. It merely shows that there exists a segment of the population that is more into music. Yet there is a true decline in CD sales that is still not accounted for, and as long as that is the case, the music industry will exploit that to make these claims.
An interesting experiment would be to select groups of people who don't buy or download music and then expose them to P2P in order to determine if they then would begin to purchase music. Also of interest would be people who used to buy music in their 20s and 30s, who stopped buying music in their 40s or 50s or so. Would exposure rekindle their interest in music?
That might be an interesting experiment. If they end up buying more music after being exposed to P2P than before, it would show a timeline (with respect to P2P) relationship which is more helpful. But would it explain the decline in CD sales?
My point was that some people used to buy more music by taking risks in buying things they had no idea if they liked or not. Now with P2P they don't need to take such risks. They just download a sample and if they don't like it, delete it and don't buy that CD. I bring up this point because it does give some explanation to the declining sales. I don't know that it can explain it all (and I doubt so, too). But I believe it can at least explain some.
Then it seems the hospitals need to be informed of this. At least one (where I was able to talk with people) said they had to buy special software to view the images. They bought both through the same sales person. So maybe this is all a case of FUD from the makers of this equipment?
I don't think Americans pay more for medicine because they feel good about it. A few pay more because they are filthy rich and it has no effect on their finances. Many more "pay" for it through employer health plans, some of which have group bargaining power to get lower prices. Some more PAY for it and can't afford to eat. The rest don't pay for it because they don't have the money and don't qualify for the confusing maze of programs that help fund medicines for the very poor.
"What the market can bear" really means that some will always be forced to do without because there are enough that can barely manage to pay. If everyone had exactly equal finances, then a "what the market can bear" principle would be fair to all. When you're talking about luxuries like having the latest dual quad-core computer, people can at least live without, and these days they live with the 400 MHz P-II "hand me downs". Some people live in mansions but others have to do without and live in a small trailer. But at least they have a roof over their heads. Medicines essential to someone with a particular illness are either available or not; there's no "non-luxury" version that has the same healt care properties.
Yes, the corruption of law making through the lobby system is a major cause of the high medicine and health care costs in the USA.
Yes, I know several people that are unable to obtain sufficient health care. They are forced to do things like lose their homes or endure the stress of bankrupcy (it ruins your financial life for 10 to 15 years at the time you need it most to do things like buy medicine).
It's the richest country in the world because its citizens can and do take care of their basic needs themselves.
If the basic needs of its citizens were actually being taken care of, then I'd agree with you. But, in fact, they are not. The cost of health care is beyond the ability of too many citizens to take care of that themselves. The cost of some medical needs can exceed the lifetime take home pay of the median citizen.
The health care costs are up for a number of reasons:
Insurance bargains for lower than average (an average that goes up for other reasons) prices for their covered clients and members. This results in the costs for uninsured going up even further.
Insurance burdens the health care providers with extensive paperwork, increasing the overall costs of running a health care operation.
Lawsuits that result in ridiculous awards (something rather unique to this "richest country") burden the overall health care system. As a result, insurance for hospitals and health care practitioners is enourmous: doctors often pay more than 100K dollars a year for malpractice insurance.
Lots of major health care devices cannot be directly purchased, but must be rented, often on the basis of incidents of usage, with minimums required by the companies that provide them.
The health care equipment market is full of proprietary lockins that prevent health care providers from interoperating equipment and software. For example, certain MRI results can only be viewed via expensive proprietary software.
Drug costs are entirely rigged so the USA is fully burdened with the cost of the research and development, while other countries have bargained for better pricing (which still makes a fair net profit for the drug manufacturers).
This may well be the richest country in the world. But it achieves that for the rich few on the backs of the many.
I genuinely do believe we would be far far better off with universal health care (covering everything, including dentistry). I'm just seriously worried that our government is entirely incapable of managing such a task.
The data is NOT showing a causal relationship between doing downloading and doing CD buying. It merely shows a relationship. The cause could be the reverse. Or the cause could be something else not shown (and both doing downloading and doing CD buying are effects of that cause).
What the data does show is that there is a relationship between those who do downloading and those who buy CDs. It also shows that those who download more also buy more. But the cause could simply be that some people like music a lot more than other people (we already know this to be true). The data shows that there is a fairly uniform relationship between the amount of downloading and the amount of buying (e.g. 100:44).
What we do NOT know is what the behaviour of this segment of the population (various levels of people that like music more than others) would be if there was no P2P for them to gravitate to. That is something that a survey cannot readily test because it cannot create the condition of no P2P access in any practical way with a large enough sampling of the whole population to retain statistical significance. Thus we can only speculate on just how many CDs these people would buy (and why) if they had no P2P access (either because it is denied to them, or the whole concept never came about... differing conditions that even themselves could produce different results). Maybe they would buy more or maybe they would buy less.
Someone who likes music a whole lot more than someone else might download 10 times as much and also buy 10 times as much. But we don't know if that buying would be more or less without the P2P for either those who like music or those who like music a whole lot. All we can readily conclude is that something (such as liking music more) causes some people to be more into music than others, and that this results in both downloading more and buying more. We cannot conclude that depriving this particular segment of the population (those who like music at various levels) of the P2P downloading would result in more buying or less buying. What we do know is that buying overall is down.
There are reasons to buy more as well as reasons to buy less (given a constant of how much one likes music). The primary reason to buy more is because one discovers more to buy through the exposure of P2P. Another reason to buy more is that P2P gives greater confidence in buying (e.g. you're sure it is what you like). Reasons to buy less include not needing to buy because one already has the music as downloaded, as well as knowing from the P2P exposure what music the buyer doesn't like. The TWO big questions are: How does this balance out (which reasons are more influential)... and: How has this changed over time as P2P has become more popular or available. And there is also the boycott factor: how many are intentionally reducing their buying due to behaviour of the industry.
What many want to know is whether P2P is the cause of the decline of CD sales, or is the cause of it not decline as much as it would for other reasons. I have the belief (for reasons other than this study) that P2P is a contributing factor to the decline of CD sales and that those sales would have declined anyway without P2P in the picture. But my point is that only some of that P2P contribution to the decline is the result of theft (people keeping the illegal download... or the legal reduced quality sample that is available in some cases... copy to listen to rather than buying a legal copy of what they find they like). I suggest that a significant portion of that decline is due to smarter shoppers being less wasteful of their money and limiting their purchases to what they are now more sure they will like. That does not rule out that much of the decline is mitigated by new buying opportunities due to the P2P exposure.
The decline in sales of CDs (beyond just what is made up for in legal download purchases) could very well be the result of people being more selective about what they buy. In the past, people didn't have much opportunity to sample music in advance. They could hear a small subset of highly promoted music on the radio, or get suggestions from friends. But in the end, lots of people bought lots of music they discovered later, after playing it, that they didn't like. Now we have a way to sample just about everything. So why even buy CDs on speculation anymore? CD sales would go down because people are buying exactly what they already know they will like, and no longer buying the CDs they don't like because they now know that in advance.
It could very well be that P2P downloaders are sampling their music to make better buying decisions. As a result of that, they now know exactly what they like (and buy only that) and what they don't like (and don't buy that). The question here is how many CDs they would have bought without access to P2P and found they did not like... vs.... how many CDs they never would have bought on speculation but discovered the music through P2P.
So it could be the case that much of the decline of CD sales is the result of people just being smarter shoppers.
I do know in the past, buying music was hard to do. Finding what you liked and avoiding what you didn't was hard. I never liked the "top hits" on the radio, so radio generally offered little help for me. I had to buy on speculation and I found that I was partially good at this, ultimately liking about 60% of what I bought. But that means 40% I would not have bought had I been able to sample the music ahead of time. Well, now I can do that sampling. But I actually buy only slightly less (90%) music than before. I sometimes get aggressive in sampling and pull 2 or 3 tracks from every album in a genre I like, and end up discovering some music that I like that I may have missed otherwise. While this added benefit doesn't cause my buying to be greater than it was before, it does mean my music collection is a more accurate representation of what I do like.
The correlation here is that the more you download via P2P the more you buy CDs or legal downloads to the tune of 100 (more) downloads to 44 (more) CDs. But does that mean that the act of P2P downloading causes, or enables, buying more CDs? NO! The data does NOT show this at all. It MAY be that a particular segment of the population that would have purchased 72 CDs and done no P2P downloading at all, had P2P downloading never happened, has reduced their number to 44. My choice of 72 here is fictional for the purpose of illustration.
What the data COULD be showing is that the segment of the population that buys more CDs and legal downloads than the rest of the population has gravitated to doing P2P downloading and buying less music, but still buys more music than the rest of the population.
And that is not necessarily an indication of theft.
One plausible explanation is that this segment of the population is using P2P downloading as a means to sample music so they can be more selective about what music they buy. So, using my fictional number of 72, this explanation says that without P2P downloading, they would have bought 72 CDs and found they did not really like 28 which they would sell, store, or maybe even dispose of, and kept the 44 they found they do like. But with P2P downloading, they can discover better what they do like and dislike, and avoid buying those 28 CDs they know in advance they don't like.
And this will result in a decline of CD sales... not because theft in the form of illegal downloading is replacing those sales... but instead, because the buyers are no longer doing speculative buying in the hope that they might like it based on things like the cover art or the descriptions of the music or the say-so of some friends.
I'd also like to think that P2P downloading could include the ability to discover music that one does like, that they would never have purchased speculatively, but just started grabbing more and more tracks in a particular genre category because it was free. Then they buy a CD they would never have considered buying had they not sampled the track. So the number 44 may consist of some quantity that would not have been purchased without download sampling of 100 tracks.
BTW, I also count the free samples of most of the music you can get under the above term "P2P downloading" from sites like Magnatune and CD Baby. And maybe it is the case that more and more people are buying their music from these places, too.
No... the IT sector has NOT been wrong... we're just different. It's a base 2 world, not a base 10 world, for a great many things in IT. We have our own standards system for base 2 stuff that does not involve creating a whole new set of prefixes. Where a base 10 system applies, a base 10 notation system is used. But where a base 2 system is needed, that is what is used.
That said, let's have a closer look at what this means. First, not everything in IT is handled as base 2. RAM memory certainly is. But disk space capacity does not have to be. But the point raised in the legal case is that because the software on Windows REPORTS TO THE USER the capacity in the base 2 units system, and presumably Seagate knows this, then Seagate's use of the base 10 units system for advertising purposes constituted the misrepresentation.
What frame rate are you assuming the 1080p content is in? Standard formats have only one frame rate for 1080i (30 frames/sec, 60 fields/sec, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates) but have 3 choices for 1080p (24, 30, and 60, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates). For content originating in 24 fps motion picture film, or its digital equivalent, encoding it as 24 fps onto the disc is best.
If you are converting 1080i30/60 to 1080p60, that works fine. But the source material may not be in that format. It might be in 1080p24. Upconverting that to 1080i30/60 would add the motion judder artifact. That can be easily fixed if the upconversion were to any progressive frame rate. Fixing it after interlacing is next to impossible (the weaving together method doesn't fix judder).
What we really need is a player that either leaves the content unconverted (e.g. send it as 1080p24 to the display) or upconverts to something a multiple of the 24 fps (1080p48 or 1080p72... non-standards, unfortunately). More likely we'll see upconversion to 1080p60 from players in the future, and then TVs will have to have "judder correction" or "3:2 film correction". But it would be better to just pass the video from the player to the display in the 24 fps format. An LCD display can simply update pixels at that rate and you won't see flicker anyway. Other display technology would have to engage the conversion circuits.
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A large data center should not have one big massive UPS anyway. It should all be divided out into various load sections, each with its own UPS+battery system. Once you do that, then you can have cooling on its own UPS without any risk of the cooling system impacting the UPS feeding the computers ... if you really want cooling on UPS (it can be done, but generally is not the best way). Surely you would have the cooling on it's own three phase circuits.
Perhaps a better approach is a smart cooling system that rotates the starting of compressors on various units so you always have some number of units running and some number not running, at the ratio needed for the current thermal demands. Then where there is an outage that has to go to generators, only a limit number of units will have been recently started just before the outage and need to be thermally protected. The controller skips those and starts the idle units (unless you are already maxxed out in which case you'd have no idle units). But you will need to have the cooling on the generators.
If you are going to have a backup distribution circuit from the utility, it should be physically separate from the primary circuit so that it is not necessary to shut down both to deal with things like a traffic accident.
So no one is allowed to call home to the family when on the job in a government position?
What I'd like to see in a 45-nm process is an ARM architecture based SoC (System on a Chip).
That may be true for many people, but it is not the only reason. One reason is, of course, because what they sell is mostly crap. But that reason has been around for a long time and while I believe it is a big reason for not having the level of sales they could have, it is not a reason for their sales level to decline in the past decade.
However, there is one reason I do know to be true for not only myself, but for a few other people I know. Long ago when I bought music, I had little or no way to preview what it was I was buying. Radio played almost as much crap back then as they do today, without covering any of the alternatives. So I ended up buying albums (before CDs) and CDs on speculation based on the cover material, or other factors that never really was accurate about what music I'd be getting. Buying things this way did get some great gems. But it also got a lot of crap (to me ... it was still alternative that maybe someone else would have loved). I was buying more music than what I ended up liking.
Today, I can sample it. I can sample just about everything. I can figure out what I like and what I dislike ahead of time, without wasteful buying. The level of purchasing I do is now less than what I used to do. A lot less. I only buy about 40% as much. But now I know that 100% of what I buy I like, even before I buy it, whereas before I was only liking about 40% of what I bought.
Some component of the decline in CD sales is from people not specifically buying less ... but buying smarter. But my guess is the RIAA members can't even grasp that concept.
That's not to say there isn't a whole lot of people who download and keep at least some of what they download (or all to trade for more), and just don't buy any CDs at all and just accept the lesser quality of the MP3 encodings they get online. I'm just saying that such theft is not the entire cause of the decline in legal purchasing.
Any rot13 joke is pointless. We all know rot13 is reversable. What hashing is all about is non-reversability. That is, given some large string of content, produce a smaller string that cannot re-create the original content. So why not combine things: md5 -> triple-rot13
If Sony really wants Blu-Ray to win, it will "bite the bullet" and sell players for $100 and recorders for $200 during the 2007 Christmas holiday shopping season and make up the loss in future volume. Since products have already shipped to stores, they will need to do a rebate. To avoid annoying potential customers, it will need to be an "in store instant rebate". Otherwise most people (these are the people that don't give a damn about technical issues) will buy what is cheapest, and that is now HD-DVD.
It has to continuously operate circuitry to detect the video signal to know when to come back on in full. The electrical cost of this over some period of time is the same whether that power is obtained from capacitors or from a continuous trickle from the mains power connection.
If the only means to come on full is from a switch the user operates that dumps the capacitor power to the relay in the power supply, and video detection is not part of this, then that may save power. But now the power supply has to keep a relay activated to stay in the on state. This of the relay as another device in side the monitor that gets hot and stays hot and dissipates this heat to the environment.
The best savings is still a mechanical contact switch that controls the mains voltage directly ... as long as someone is willing to operate it and remember to do so when quitting.
That's why we need to raise the bar and make more and more traffic encrypted in general. The more that comes about, the more it converts Rogers into a provider that just throttles everything.
By spying on the certificate exchange, I think they can see what the site you connected to claims to be (unless it does a D-H exchange first). They can make a 2nd connection to the same site and carry out their own TLS protocol to get a certificate exchange if spying on your connection doesn't do it. They certainly have the IP address and can look that up in various ways, such as reverse DNS, WHOIS, Google, and see what might be there. Combine that with a lot of access patterns and there is a lot that can be figured out about what you are doing.
If you are worried they can figure out this is a torrent connection ... they will pretty much figure out which IPs are most popular about the heaviest users that are not popular among the non-heavy users and could play shoot-the-packet on those, even if also encrypted with IPsec (bypassing the proxy). With HTTPS alone (no proxy) they can still do the RST thing. With IPsec they can't do RST, but they can still throw some away (harder that RST, but still possible). The fact that Comcast is doing RST suggests they are trying to keep the costs of their efforts low and not encumber the routers to make them drop select packets. More likely they might try deliberate route flapping next if IPsec gets popular.
You understand how HTTPS works, but not how a proxy works for HTTPS.
When your browser connects to a proxy for an HTTPS method, it makes a CONNECT request. The proxy makes a TCP connection to the IP address and port requested and passes the traffic both ways unchanged and uncached. The browser then performs the usual certificate validation on the contents received from the remote web site.
An ISP could force the use of a proxy. An ISP could disable HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could slow down HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could monitor your traffic volume through their proxy (or their routers). An ISP could record every encrypted bit going both ways. An ISP could also corrupt the encrypted traffic bits. But an ISP cannot interpret the bits in your encrypted traffic, nor modify them, in any meaningful way, without cracking the encryption.
As long as there is too much monopoly, especially by big corporations, and especially cable/telco corporations, then, yes, I think the open market cannot solve this because it (the open market) actually won't exist.
Many companies have a big installed instructure (e.g. all the wired coax or twisted pair) that was acquired through either them or a predecessor operating as a monopoly. Do you think these companies would have been willing to install such an infrustructure had they originally been faced with (to pick a random number) 4 competitors that were also installing an "overbuild" infrastructure? The company that owns it today is at an advantage because the public gave up the right to competition in the past (and maybe even in the present to some degree).
In order for there to be true competition good enough for the market to ensure that the network will remain neutral, there will have to be quite many providers. That number needs to be fairly large and would be at a level where that many duplicate infrastructures would be extremely wasteful of finances. Imagine 8 different phone companies and 4 different cable companies running their own wires everywhere and each dropping one of theirs to your home for you to choose from. It's just not going to happen. A few towns have 2 infrastructure based competitors in various services. But even that gets expensive.
What is ultimately needed is a single company that builds, maintains, and operates the infrastructure, and allows other companies to lease it out as needed to provide various services. Think of that original phone company breakup but instead of being broken at the boundary between local and long distance calling, imagine it being broken between infrastructure ownership and all calling (one company owns the wires and a different company provides dial tone). This is the way to do it with a minimum of regulation. The infrastructure owner would be a regulated monopoly, required to provide access to the wiring as needed (e.g. whichever phone company you want to use, they get cross patched to your phone pair). The phone companies providing services would then have less regulation since more companies would be able to enter the business cheaply. We need to do internet and cable TV the same way, and effectively merge it all together. The infrastructure needs to be upgraded to fiber with each fiber running all the way from each individual subscriber to the central facility where many companies can host their equipment. Each home should have more than one dark fiber which they get to choose which provider lights it up. I suggest 3 or 4 such fibers per home. Businesses might need more. Then any company you choose to sign up with can provide whatever combination of switched telephony, cable TV, internet, or dedicated communications links, through that fiber. Then we can have real competition, real innovation, and minimum regulations applied to the businesses that matter.
One idea I propose is for the federal government to permit local governments to build these new infrastructures themselves, if they wish. This would basically be protection against lawsuits by the incumbents that choose not to break themselves up according to this idea (if we don't force them to break up). You know if any city did build such an infrastructure, the incumbent telco and cable companies would sue.
If you are going to live in a non-free lawyer-infested country, you need to host your blog anonymously in a far removed country somewhere else.
FYI ... I have had to deal with school boards and school administrators in various circumstances, several times. I have observed a nature that fits every one of them I have dealt with, and seems to fit every one that makes it to the news. That nature is that the people who run them are people that wanted to be politicians because they enjoyed being in positions of power that control other people, but were unable to make it in a world where they have to deal with adults, and found this niche where they can carry out their desire to control other people ... on children ... and in general on people less familiar with their rights. Think of them as "wanna be politicians" that are too incompetent to make it as true politicians.
OK, there's one exception. My junior high school vice-principal actually made it into real politics.
The whole point of the REAL ID program was that the IDs the terrorists did have did not enable sufficient tracking to figure out that they were terrorists. REAL ID is not about establishing IDs for the very first time. It is not about establishing more IDs. It's not about assuming someone is a terrorist because they lack an ID. It is about establishing IDs that work together to allow more tracking.
If you want to knock down the whole REAL ID program, please do so on a basis that is correct. I'm among the many who do, not because of the impact, or more specifically the lack thereof, it will have on terrorism, but rather, the impact it will have on the citizens of the USA who are supposed to be free of such things (per the Bill of Rights).
But this only shows that the same people who buy music also download. It doesn't show anything to support or refute the claim of the music industry that P2P is the cause of reduced CD sales. It merely shows that there exists a segment of the population that is more into music. Yet there is a true decline in CD sales that is still not accounted for, and as long as that is the case, the music industry will exploit that to make these claims.
That might be an interesting experiment. If they end up buying more music after being exposed to P2P than before, it would show a timeline (with respect to P2P) relationship which is more helpful. But would it explain the decline in CD sales?
My point was that some people used to buy more music by taking risks in buying things they had no idea if they liked or not. Now with P2P they don't need to take such risks. They just download a sample and if they don't like it, delete it and don't buy that CD. I bring up this point because it does give some explanation to the declining sales. I don't know that it can explain it all (and I doubt so, too). But I believe it can at least explain some.
Then it seems the hospitals need to be informed of this. At least one (where I was able to talk with people) said they had to buy special software to view the images. They bought both through the same sales person. So maybe this is all a case of FUD from the makers of this equipment?
I don't think Americans pay more for medicine because they feel good about it. A few pay more because they are filthy rich and it has no effect on their finances. Many more "pay" for it through employer health plans, some of which have group bargaining power to get lower prices. Some more PAY for it and can't afford to eat. The rest don't pay for it because they don't have the money and don't qualify for the confusing maze of programs that help fund medicines for the very poor.
"What the market can bear" really means that some will always be forced to do without because there are enough that can barely manage to pay. If everyone had exactly equal finances, then a "what the market can bear" principle would be fair to all. When you're talking about luxuries like having the latest dual quad-core computer, people can at least live without, and these days they live with the 400 MHz P-II "hand me downs". Some people live in mansions but others have to do without and live in a small trailer. But at least they have a roof over their heads. Medicines essential to someone with a particular illness are either available or not; there's no "non-luxury" version that has the same healt care properties.
Yes, the corruption of law making through the lobby system is a major cause of the high medicine and health care costs in the USA.
Yes, I know several people that are unable to obtain sufficient health care. They are forced to do things like lose their homes or endure the stress of bankrupcy (it ruins your financial life for 10 to 15 years at the time you need it most to do things like buy medicine).
If the basic needs of its citizens were actually being taken care of, then I'd agree with you. But, in fact, they are not. The cost of health care is beyond the ability of too many citizens to take care of that themselves. The cost of some medical needs can exceed the lifetime take home pay of the median citizen.
The health care costs are up for a number of reasons:
This may well be the richest country in the world. But it achieves that for the rich few on the backs of the many.
I genuinely do believe we would be far far better off with universal health care (covering everything, including dentistry). I'm just seriously worried that our government is entirely incapable of managing such a task.
The data is NOT showing a causal relationship between doing downloading and doing CD buying. It merely shows a relationship. The cause could be the reverse. Or the cause could be something else not shown (and both doing downloading and doing CD buying are effects of that cause).
What the data does show is that there is a relationship between those who do downloading and those who buy CDs. It also shows that those who download more also buy more. But the cause could simply be that some people like music a lot more than other people (we already know this to be true). The data shows that there is a fairly uniform relationship between the amount of downloading and the amount of buying (e.g. 100:44).
What we do NOT know is what the behaviour of this segment of the population (various levels of people that like music more than others) would be if there was no P2P for them to gravitate to. That is something that a survey cannot readily test because it cannot create the condition of no P2P access in any practical way with a large enough sampling of the whole population to retain statistical significance. Thus we can only speculate on just how many CDs these people would buy (and why) if they had no P2P access (either because it is denied to them, or the whole concept never came about ... differing conditions that even themselves could produce different results). Maybe they would buy more or maybe they would buy less.
Someone who likes music a whole lot more than someone else might download 10 times as much and also buy 10 times as much. But we don't know if that buying would be more or less without the P2P for either those who like music or those who like music a whole lot. All we can readily conclude is that something (such as liking music more) causes some people to be more into music than others, and that this results in both downloading more and buying more. We cannot conclude that depriving this particular segment of the population (those who like music at various levels) of the P2P downloading would result in more buying or less buying. What we do know is that buying overall is down.
There are reasons to buy more as well as reasons to buy less (given a constant of how much one likes music). The primary reason to buy more is because one discovers more to buy through the exposure of P2P. Another reason to buy more is that P2P gives greater confidence in buying (e.g. you're sure it is what you like). Reasons to buy less include not needing to buy because one already has the music as downloaded, as well as knowing from the P2P exposure what music the buyer doesn't like. The TWO big questions are: How does this balance out (which reasons are more influential) ... and: How has this changed over time as P2P has become more popular or available. And there is also the boycott factor: how many are intentionally reducing their buying due to behaviour of the industry.
What many want to know is whether P2P is the cause of the decline of CD sales, or is the cause of it not decline as much as it would for other reasons. I have the belief (for reasons other than this study) that P2P is a contributing factor to the decline of CD sales and that those sales would have declined anyway without P2P in the picture. But my point is that only some of that P2P contribution to the decline is the result of theft (people keeping the illegal download ... or the legal reduced quality sample that is available in some cases ... copy to listen to rather than buying a legal copy of what they find they like). I suggest that a significant portion of that decline is due to smarter shoppers being less wasteful of their money and limiting their purchases to what they are now more sure they will like. That does not rule out that much of the decline is mitigated by new buying opportunities due to the P2P exposure.
The decline in sales of CDs (beyond just what is made up for in legal download purchases) could very well be the result of people being more selective about what they buy. In the past, people didn't have much opportunity to sample music in advance. They could hear a small subset of highly promoted music on the radio, or get suggestions from friends. But in the end, lots of people bought lots of music they discovered later, after playing it, that they didn't like. Now we have a way to sample just about everything. So why even buy CDs on speculation anymore? CD sales would go down because people are buying exactly what they already know they will like, and no longer buying the CDs they don't like because they now know that in advance.
It could very well be that P2P downloaders are sampling their music to make better buying decisions. As a result of that, they now know exactly what they like (and buy only that) and what they don't like (and don't buy that). The question here is how many CDs they would have bought without access to P2P and found they did not like ... vs. ... how many CDs they never would have bought on speculation but discovered the music through P2P.
So it could be the case that much of the decline of CD sales is the result of people just being smarter shoppers.
I do know in the past, buying music was hard to do. Finding what you liked and avoiding what you didn't was hard. I never liked the "top hits" on the radio, so radio generally offered little help for me. I had to buy on speculation and I found that I was partially good at this, ultimately liking about 60% of what I bought. But that means 40% I would not have bought had I been able to sample the music ahead of time. Well, now I can do that sampling. But I actually buy only slightly less (90%) music than before. I sometimes get aggressive in sampling and pull 2 or 3 tracks from every album in a genre I like, and end up discovering some music that I like that I may have missed otherwise. While this added benefit doesn't cause my buying to be greater than it was before, it does mean my music collection is a more accurate representation of what I do like.
The correlation here is that the more you download via P2P the more you buy CDs or legal downloads to the tune of 100 (more) downloads to 44 (more) CDs. But does that mean that the act of P2P downloading causes, or enables, buying more CDs? NO! The data does NOT show this at all. It MAY be that a particular segment of the population that would have purchased 72 CDs and done no P2P downloading at all, had P2P downloading never happened, has reduced their number to 44. My choice of 72 here is fictional for the purpose of illustration.
What the data COULD be showing is that the segment of the population that buys more CDs and legal downloads than the rest of the population has gravitated to doing P2P downloading and buying less music, but still buys more music than the rest of the population.
And that is not necessarily an indication of theft.
One plausible explanation is that this segment of the population is using P2P downloading as a means to sample music so they can be more selective about what music they buy. So, using my fictional number of 72, this explanation says that without P2P downloading, they would have bought 72 CDs and found they did not really like 28 which they would sell, store, or maybe even dispose of, and kept the 44 they found they do like. But with P2P downloading, they can discover better what they do like and dislike, and avoid buying those 28 CDs they know in advance they don't like.
And this will result in a decline of CD sales ... not because theft in the form of illegal downloading is replacing those sales ... but instead, because the buyers are no longer doing speculative buying in the hope that they might like it based on things like the cover art or the descriptions of the music or the say-so of some friends.
I'd also like to think that P2P downloading could include the ability to discover music that one does like, that they would never have purchased speculatively, but just started grabbing more and more tracks in a particular genre category because it was free. Then they buy a CD they would never have considered buying had they not sampled the track. So the number 44 may consist of some quantity that would not have been purchased without download sampling of 100 tracks.
BTW, I also count the free samples of most of the music you can get under the above term "P2P downloading" from sites like Magnatune and CD Baby. And maybe it is the case that more and more people are buying their music from these places, too.
No ... the IT sector has NOT been wrong ... we're just different. It's a base 2 world, not a base 10 world, for a great many things in IT. We have our own standards system for base 2 stuff that does not involve creating a whole new set of prefixes. Where a base 10 system applies, a base 10 notation system is used. But where a base 2 system is needed, that is what is used.
That said, let's have a closer look at what this means. First, not everything in IT is handled as base 2. RAM memory certainly is. But disk space capacity does not have to be. But the point raised in the legal case is that because the software on Windows REPORTS TO THE USER the capacity in the base 2 units system, and presumably Seagate knows this, then Seagate's use of the base 10 units system for advertising purposes constituted the misrepresentation.
What frame rate are you assuming the 1080p content is in? Standard formats have only one frame rate for 1080i (30 frames/sec, 60 fields/sec, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates) but have 3 choices for 1080p (24, 30, and 60, plus the 1000/1001 ratio rates). For content originating in 24 fps motion picture film, or its digital equivalent, encoding it as 24 fps onto the disc is best.
If you are converting 1080i30/60 to 1080p60, that works fine. But the source material may not be in that format. It might be in 1080p24. Upconverting that to 1080i30/60 would add the motion judder artifact. That can be easily fixed if the upconversion were to any progressive frame rate. Fixing it after interlacing is next to impossible (the weaving together method doesn't fix judder).
What we really need is a player that either leaves the content unconverted (e.g. send it as 1080p24 to the display) or upconverts to something a multiple of the 24 fps (1080p48 or 1080p72 ... non-standards, unfortunately). More likely we'll see upconversion to 1080p60 from players in the future, and then TVs will have to have "judder correction" or "3:2 film correction". But it would be better to just pass the video from the player to the display in the 24 fps format. An LCD display can simply update pixels at that rate and you won't see flicker anyway. Other display technology would have to engage the conversion circuits.