You only have one or a few choices of phone service or ISP, but every hoosting provider in the world to choose from. Huge difference. Hosting companies need protection from secondary liability, otherwise they would have to self-police their content. But beyond that, why create more regulation than necessary in a market that is well functioning and competitive? I doubt they'll have trouble finding other hosting.
That sounds trivial to defeat if you're willing to accept collateral damage by blocking any single IP that makes many requests. The most likely use case for that - an enterprise behind a NAT - is irrelevant to a torrent site. One of the sites I read simply suggested this:
I think this article should be published far and wide, it's anti-product placement for the MAFIAA. Stop denial of service attacks on the Internet, abolish copyright today. Do not support organized crime, boycott MPAA today.
That's the mile high view. At least when I followed the telecom directive, which was before the Lisbon treaty mind you, there were many variations of many of the paragraphs going back and forth and being voted on in between those readings. As coalitions approved of the various paragraphs, the votes turned from against to for between readings. I suppose you can bet on the treaty being rejected in its entirety, but it's a risky bet. If eventually enough of the MEP are convinced that we do need a trade agreement and that they've given the commission enough flak over the process, it might pass in the end and then it's all about how these paragraphs are worded and what's left. It's not entirely unlike the riders to US laws, pass the bad with the good. The parliament and commission are in a bit of a pissing match sometimes but they often tend to find a compromise rather than end a year-long process with nothing at all.
In my understanding yes the parliament now have more power to reject the commission, but it can't really stop what the commission is doing until there's a proposal on the table. This is as I understand it mostly a statement of intent that they will, because the way it's been handled.
What is likely to happen is that the commission will propose something, have it rejected, revise it again, get rejected again ad infinitum. They've been known to fight wars of attrition - or failing that - slowly giving in to demands until it finally passes with a small margin.
Long story short, I believe eventually they will pass some form of ACTA, but hopefully most of the bad bits will be gone by then.
Forget $75k as a number, it's well above average pay. What it also means is that you can afford well above average of other people's time. The only reason rich people can afford to have a personal assistant and trainer and driver and gardener and housecleaner is because they make much more than those people. Have you ever been on vacation to a really cheap country? I have, and the reason I could live like a king there is because I was making about 50 times what the hotel receptionist did. Items can be produced and bought in any number, but time is a limited resource where really only the relative wealth matters. That is why I think most people would not be happy until they had over average pay, no matter what "average" was.
I'd love to see you try again only to see computers and networks merge into the Internet somewhere else, the US information economy would have fallen before it had even properly risen. Like that quote people pull out about the MPAA and RIAA, you don't have the right to halt progress just to preserve your profits and that goes for countries too. The rest of the world would have moved on and the US would be the one left behind.
They're not pretending it is the only factor or even the most important factor, I think you're the one doing the oversimplification. And it's statistics about feelings, if you feel different it's not a "wrong" answer just that you don't feel the same as most other people. Most people would be happier to earn more, you'd have a bigger budget and need to think less about money - up to a point.
Also, there's such a thing as choice, if you purposely arranged with work hours and an at-home wife so you'd earn what you earn it's different and you're probably much happier than a couple where both work and still make no more than you do, or one is unemployed and can't get work. They probably wished they could earn more. That may again mean, you're not typical of the people making the amount of money that you do.
Statistics is not an absolute, that's why it involves probabilities and confidence intervals. There are "red" and "blue" states in the US even if you in every state can find someone who votes libertarian. They're the exception. You might be an exception. That doesn't make the statistics false, nor are you supposed to adjust your happiness level to the "appropriate" for your income. Sheesh.
The real question is if there's some significant use case not already covered by current methods, like RSA and AES for encryption. Sure quantum encryption have some nice theoretical properties, but most things are not 110% secure. You can still bribe people, extort people, plant spys, record passwords and so on. I doubt for almost any system that pure crypto is the weakest link in the chain anymore. Maybe, just maybe there's a quantum code cracking computer deep in the halls of the NSA but it won't be any of the "regular" attackers no matter how well funded and organized they are. Seriously, it's nice to be paranoid but the idea of a quantum attack on your encryption seems as unlikely as an asteroid impact taking out your main office.
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what's there. (...) its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
I think you have the cause and effect mixed up. People are willing to share on TPB because because the police can't even hit fish in a barrel, the barrel is so big, the fish too many and the bullets too precious to waste on it. It's not just to start mass issuing tickets by IP, I'm sure you know all the issues with that and they'd clog up both the police and the courts if they tried. It's not a tactic to win, it's a tactic to say we haven't completely given up trying to enforce the law.
Well I think it's more the "in your face" factor. Don't slam me for invalid analogies here, but if rapists put up therapistbay.org and was sharing out vids of their rapes and was all like "you can't stop us, hahahahaha" attitude the police would react. They try taking down the arrogant ones to prove that nobody's untouchable and that they can in fact catch you. Piracy is probably the violation of the law I see happening the most openly, perhaps with the exception of speeding but it's a close call.
By the way, very excited to see what the Pirate Party will make of this... it's election day the 19th in Sweden and I think they just got a much needed PR booster.
Umm does TPB *have* trackers anymore? I thought they only used openbittorrent, which is officially a separate organization and open to non-TPB torrents too. I know the MAFIAA has been looking for way to link them together, but as far as I know they never could...
I don't think being a good executive in some ways and thinking too much with your dick in other ways is mutually exclusive. It might be just be business in that Ellison sees him on "fire sale" and figure the PR hit is worth it...
I'm sorry... but either 21st century scientists are really lame, or we humans know *shit* about the universe and the laws that rule it. Wonder which one it is...
No, it's more like this: There's billions of stars out there, and when you investigate billions of something you'll find oddities. Kinda like if you observed one child birth, you'd probably get the normal one. If you looked at many you'd find twins, triplets, quadruplets = binary/trinary/???nary star systems. You'd find handicapped children, one-egged twins, two-egged twins, handicapped children, siamese twins, stillborns, people borne with extra limbs and whatnot. We have, and have had, a pretty good idea of how a normal star is formed, lives and dies. We're still working on cataloging all the exceptions and oddities, but I don't think we're that clueless.
True, but you can get speeds above what you would get from 56k dialup modems on current designs [which] is not completely useless.
Absolutely, but if you look at what is popular in P2P it's large media files. Assuming the goal is to make something a large part of the population would use, it's not exactly a winner.
In the case of Freenet [...] due to the fact that data insertion/retrieval is asynchronous, timing/correlation attacks are not trivial even if you control several nodes.
That one was mostly aimed at TOR, where you have interactive services. For Freenet statistical attacks are more likely, but you also lost pretty much all interactivity. It's all static data, static "freesites" and message groups as slow as Usenet on sleep drugs. That kills the interest for things you would run over a 56k modem.
Depends on your threat model, but even assuming a powerful attacker which can see all data flowing between ALL nodes (a very strong assumption), garlic routing, adding chaff and increasing latencies can help.
Depends on network, with TOR you can do pattern attacks (send bursts of data in a pattern, if each node fowards instantly you can recognize it with a delay) and in Freenet if you insert/download a big file will lead to hundreds or thousands of pieces being inserted/requested and you can try following it "upstream" to see where it gets thicker. There are many tricks.
This depends on the network design and on the threat model. If the network follows a darknet topology (as is the case for Freenet in "darknet mode")
Darknets are a two-edged sword. By being a darknet peer, you claim to trust that person which brings forth all sorts of suspicion or guilt by association. Allowing someone you don't know to be a darknet peer will reveal your IP to them. Just that you're trying to build a darknet will raise eyebrows, it's not something that will catch on.
Also, you forgot about "intersection attacks".
Not really, I just consider them a variation of latency attacks. Nodes come and go all the time, it's pretty weak evidence. It's actually much stronger evidence if you can show that each time you bombard this node with traffic, this hidden service gets very slow and if you stop bombarding, it returns to normal speed.
Actually I kinda like the first comment though I'd probably just shorten it to "// find needle". Why? Because when I go back to some old code it's probably to find something, I'm in search mode not looking to relearn everything. Even if it's a function that's only a screenful, if it has three lines of comment like
// find needle ... // bend needle ... // place needle in bin
More often than not, I know the problem I'm looking for. We're finding screws where there should have been needles. Some needles break in the bending. Now we're doing recycling and needles go in another bin. The comments allow me to at a glance discard 2/3rds of the code focusing on just what I need.
Here's my take on comments: In-code: Short, short description of flow. If you're doing anything "clever", explain why.but otherwise leave it at that. Functions: Good for API reference but remember most of the time I'm reading other code calling the function, not the function description. Classes: Yes please.
I've found that good variable and function names are very important. It's really, really annoying to write because it becomes a typing job and after the n'th time you type neelde or needel instead of needle you'd love to just call it "n". I did that programming my T-81 as I was typing on the calculator, it was the greatest clusterfuck of no-comment, one-letter variable code ever. Even I couldn't understand anything a month later.
The worst possible sin you can make in my opinion is to create functions that also have secret side effects. For example a "load" function that also tries to fix some broken input formats or an output function that secretly is trying to rewrite the page to switch between A4 and US Letter size (first hand experience on that one). For the love of $deity, either put it in a separate function or if it really needs on-the-fly fixing in the loading, COMMENT in the API. Otherwise I'll just see the load() function being called and assume it does exactly that, nothing more. The same goes for changing state, if it's not obvious from the function name that this would or could happen don't do it there.
Encrypted is not really complicated, use https sites and turn encryption on in your torrent client. Anonymity is hard, really hard. For open P2P networks encryption without anonymity doesn't really help anything, everyone can connect and collect data as a peer. Some of the issues are:
1. Anything like TOR and Freenet has lots of overhead due to relaying 2. Latency is also hurt, and it's also dangerous for timing attacks 3. You can collect statistical data, it's difficult to hide patterns 4. You can "isolate" nodes and then track all their traffic
On top of that, you get endless amounts of flak for being a "free haven" for all sorts of $boogeymen. That drives away developers, users, funding, everything. Many people would actually prefer they caught "real" criminals rather than create the true information anarchy. Total anonymity means no consequences, so on top of those you get endless waves of spam and trolls and they can post far more offensive things than they could on slashdot. If someone created it, you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy.
I don't see how anyone could say we wouldn't have at least come to the aid of Britain, considering Americans were already dying coming to the aid of the Brits during the German first happy time which was a full year and a half before Pearl. One could also argue that the Battle of Britain may have gone far differently if America wasn't keeping Britain supplied.
Running supply lines is a whole different story than sending large military troops, if Britain's defenses had broken it is unlikely the US would have time to declare war and send enough troops across the Atlantic to repel them. And it's a different thing coming to the aid of someone holding their island compared to one with the back against the sea with a good chance of your troops ending up there too. Fortunately we don't need to find out...
How is it a 'shameless' abuse to do something nice for an old veteran? Hint: it's not.
It's not nice in the same way robbing a bank to buy him a really nice present isn't. Endless spamming and abuse of a forum, even of such a craptastic place as/b/ is not good behavior and it hardly seems the means justify the ends to give a 90 year old birthday greetings. It might be a fun thing to do once, but I wouldn't want to visit a board where it has caught on. Then again, I don't like hanging out at/b/ anyway so what do I know...
I think you'll find pretty much all of Europe appreciates the US war effort, we consider them liberators. The countries of the Axis generally consider their part in WWII a dark chapter of their history. But some people bug me when they pretend the US valiantly and selflessly threw itself into battle for freedom and justice. The US only entered WWII after Pearl Harbor, it was forced into the war and it's all speculation what would have happened otherwise but it is far from certain the US would have come to our rescue. At the end of the war the allied forced rushed to take land just as much to not give it to the Soviet Union and communism as to liberate Europe. Certainly something we should be grateful for, but hardly selfless. Likewise when they speak of US losses, the US brought lots of military might that was crucial but it was Europeans doing most of the dying. Of course those people were dying for their country while the US forces were mostly dying for someone else's country, but it's also a bit like a person who lost his toes complaining to a guy who had to amputate both legs. But that beef is with all those that commentate in retrospect, full respect to each and every one of those who picked up a gun and went to fight for us. Each man has only one life and he put his on the line for us. A very happy 90th birthday to him.
If you go to the very bottom of the list, yes. If you look at the full executive summary (PDF), the top 115 countries are doing quite ok with fixed broadband being up to 21% of average monthly income. The last of those are countries like Philippines, Vietnam and Morocco. Of the remaining 45, most are dirt poor mostly having a GDP below $1000/person and the bottom 15 countries have an average of $440/person. Also some of those at the bottom are in addition to being poor also island states, the domestic prices are much lower than an Internet connection requiring sea cable or satellite.. And the situation is improving, the title of chart 4 is "Fixed broadband Internet prices are dropping sharply but remain unaffordable in many developing countries".
What I got out of the summary is that you can get broadband at somewhat affordable prices in relatively many countries compared to what I thought. Also that being a poor country in a relatively less poor area helps for broadband prices. Most of the countries that really suck for broadband are those south of Sahara, apparently there's no short way to hook up to a rich country's backbone nearby, while those in Central America and SE Asia mostly manage to hook up to a decent country. You can call it a digital divide here, but it seems to have a physical form very much like a desert...
Well, without getting into too much detail it depends on whether broadband is a tradable or non-tradable good. A tradable good is something like say gold - worth pretty much the same all over the world, because otherwise there'd be arbitrage. A non-tradable good would be something like getting a haircut, which is why most can afford to get haircuts despite living on mere dollars a day. The wages are much lower so the prices are much lower.
A lot of it is equipment, but a lot of it is also people to lay down cables, wire houses, set up wireless antennas, do support, maintenance, configuration, billing and so on. If you didn't take into consideration local costs, you'd reach a lot of crazy conclusions. And regarding the things they do have to buy, it's profit-maximizing to sell cheaper in poor countries than in rich countries as long as it doesn't hurt the other sales. That is why for example you can find a cheap Chinese or Thai-only phone, because it's only usable in that country and won't hurt your US and other English-speaking sales. I'm sure you could make some sort of deal or to purchase obsolete equipment from a western ISP for cheap.
All in all, I think it's better to compare to monthly income because they could probably sell it for considerably less and still break even. A far bigger issue I think is penetration, the cost of building out a network is not linear to the number of people on it. Even if only 20% of a town wants broadband you have to wire almost as much as if 80% would want it. That is why you often se rates in third world countries that are much, much higher than what I get even on an absolute scale, despite that everything should be cheaper to do down there.
At least here in Norway it's about $40 for basic broadband (1-2 Mbit), $60 (1% of average full time income) for medium broadband (5-10 Mbit) while about $80 will get you a top line (20-30 Mbit). Almost everyone who wants it has broadband, which really keeps the costs per customer down. Sure it could probably get even cheaper but compared to many poorer countries we pay little and get a lot. Things like broadband thrive on volume of many people signing up.
Look to Youtube, a certain country said "pull this video, pull that, setup office here, pay taxes". You know what Youtube did? Ignored! Don't they lose money/marketshare? Of course they do.
YouTube got it easy, they don't have to "shut down" anything. It's highly unlikely users will get harassed for finding a way to visit YouTube. I think there's even legislation in place to prevent a US-based service from being arsed by foreign libel lawsuits and the like. RIM is a physical product, they probably have offices with a lease, people with work contracts and most of all if they'd harass everyone with a Blackberry or worse, confiscate them then that would have a rather big business impact. It might still be the right decision, but I don't think the situations are that comparable.
Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
If it was just the OS, not so much. But it also includes all the applications and there's always some applications that have had huge upgrades in the last six months. You can maybe find some backports in a PPA somewhere or try rolling your own but by far the easiest is if your distro has packaged it. The same goes if you want support for new hardware as most drivers live in the kernel, again you can find a newer kernel for an old distro but it's a bit complicated.
Being on a six month cycle is by far not the most experimental you get, six months is a loooong feedback loop if you're actually interested in what a project is doing and want to file bug reports and feature requests and in general keep up with the development. A six month release cycle fits well for those of us that are interested in new stuff, but don't want to deal with changes on a day to day basis like those on rolling distros. The LTS fits for those that more want to use it, but don't expect any developer to get excited about a bug he fixed upstream a year and a half ago...
Slashdot Mirror
You only have one or a few choices of phone service or ISP, but every hoosting provider in the world to choose from. Huge difference. Hosting companies need protection from secondary liability, otherwise they would have to self-police their content. But beyond that, why create more regulation than necessary in a market that is well functioning and competitive? I doubt they'll have trouble finding other hosting.
Perhaps something like Slowloris
That sounds trivial to defeat if you're willing to accept collateral damage by blocking any single IP that makes many requests. The most likely use case for that - an enterprise behind a NAT - is irrelevant to a torrent site. One of the sites I read simply suggested this:
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m connlimit --connlimit-above 20 --connlimit-mask 40 -j DROP
Any IP making more than 20 connections to port 80 -> drop. I'm sure there's something similar you can do for an IP range.
I think this article should be published far and wide, it's anti-product placement for the MAFIAA. Stop denial of service attacks on the Internet, abolish copyright today. Do not support organized crime, boycott MPAA today.
That's the mile high view. At least when I followed the telecom directive, which was before the Lisbon treaty mind you, there were many variations of many of the paragraphs going back and forth and being voted on in between those readings. As coalitions approved of the various paragraphs, the votes turned from against to for between readings. I suppose you can bet on the treaty being rejected in its entirety, but it's a risky bet. If eventually enough of the MEP are convinced that we do need a trade agreement and that they've given the commission enough flak over the process, it might pass in the end and then it's all about how these paragraphs are worded and what's left. It's not entirely unlike the riders to US laws, pass the bad with the good. The parliament and commission are in a bit of a pissing match sometimes but they often tend to find a compromise rather than end a year-long process with nothing at all.
In my understanding yes the parliament now have more power to reject the commission, but it can't really stop what the commission is doing until there's a proposal on the table. This is as I understand it mostly a statement of intent that they will, because the way it's been handled.
What is likely to happen is that the commission will propose something, have it rejected, revise it again, get rejected again ad infinitum. They've been known to fight wars of attrition - or failing that - slowly giving in to demands until it finally passes with a small margin.
Long story short, I believe eventually they will pass some form of ACTA, but hopefully most of the bad bits will be gone by then.
Forget $75k as a number, it's well above average pay. What it also means is that you can afford well above average of other people's time. The only reason rich people can afford to have a personal assistant and trainer and driver and gardener and housecleaner is because they make much more than those people. Have you ever been on vacation to a really cheap country? I have, and the reason I could live like a king there is because I was making about 50 times what the hotel receptionist did. Items can be produced and bought in any number, but time is a limited resource where really only the relative wealth matters. That is why I think most people would not be happy until they had over average pay, no matter what "average" was.
I'd love to see you try again only to see computers and networks merge into the Internet somewhere else, the US information economy would have fallen before it had even properly risen. Like that quote people pull out about the MPAA and RIAA, you don't have the right to halt progress just to preserve your profits and that goes for countries too. The rest of the world would have moved on and the US would be the one left behind.
They're not pretending it is the only factor or even the most important factor, I think you're the one doing the oversimplification. And it's statistics about feelings, if you feel different it's not a "wrong" answer just that you don't feel the same as most other people. Most people would be happier to earn more, you'd have a bigger budget and need to think less about money - up to a point.
Also, there's such a thing as choice, if you purposely arranged with work hours and an at-home wife so you'd earn what you earn it's different and you're probably much happier than a couple where both work and still make no more than you do, or one is unemployed and can't get work. They probably wished they could earn more. That may again mean, you're not typical of the people making the amount of money that you do.
Statistics is not an absolute, that's why it involves probabilities and confidence intervals. There are "red" and "blue" states in the US even if you in every state can find someone who votes libertarian. They're the exception. You might be an exception. That doesn't make the statistics false, nor are you supposed to adjust your happiness level to the "appropriate" for your income. Sheesh.
The real question is if there's some significant use case not already covered by current methods, like RSA and AES for encryption. Sure quantum encryption have some nice theoretical properties, but most things are not 110% secure. You can still bribe people, extort people, plant spys, record passwords and so on. I doubt for almost any system that pure crypto is the weakest link in the chain anymore. Maybe, just maybe there's a quantum code cracking computer deep in the halls of the NSA but it won't be any of the "regular" attackers no matter how well funded and organized they are. Seriously, it's nice to be paranoid but the idea of a quantum attack on your encryption seems as unlikely as an asteroid impact taking out your main office.
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what's there. (...) its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
I think you have the cause and effect mixed up. People are willing to share on TPB because because the police can't even hit fish in a barrel, the barrel is so big, the fish too many and the bullets too precious to waste on it. It's not just to start mass issuing tickets by IP, I'm sure you know all the issues with that and they'd clog up both the police and the courts if they tried. It's not a tactic to win, it's a tactic to say we haven't completely given up trying to enforce the law.
Well I think it's more the "in your face" factor. Don't slam me for invalid analogies here, but if rapists put up therapistbay.org and was sharing out vids of their rapes and was all like "you can't stop us, hahahahaha" attitude the police would react. They try taking down the arrogant ones to prove that nobody's untouchable and that they can in fact catch you. Piracy is probably the violation of the law I see happening the most openly, perhaps with the exception of speeding but it's a close call.
By the way, very excited to see what the Pirate Party will make of this... it's election day the 19th in Sweden and I think they just got a much needed PR booster.
Umm does TPB *have* trackers anymore? I thought they only used openbittorrent, which is officially a separate organization and open to non-TPB torrents too. I know the MAFIAA has been looking for way to link them together, but as far as I know they never could...
I don't think being a good executive in some ways and thinking too much with your dick in other ways is mutually exclusive. It might be just be business in that Ellison sees him on "fire sale" and figure the PR hit is worth it...
Fastest slashdotting *ever*
Ever since they started giving subscribers early peeks, the weakest sites have been slashdotted before the story hit the front page. Oh well...
I'm sorry... but either 21st century scientists are really lame, or we humans know *shit* about the universe and the laws that rule it. Wonder which one it is...
No, it's more like this: There's billions of stars out there, and when you investigate billions of something you'll find oddities. Kinda like if you observed one child birth, you'd probably get the normal one. If you looked at many you'd find twins, triplets, quadruplets = binary/trinary/???nary star systems. You'd find handicapped children, one-egged twins, two-egged twins, handicapped children, siamese twins, stillborns, people borne with extra limbs and whatnot. We have, and have had, a pretty good idea of how a normal star is formed, lives and dies. We're still working on cataloging all the exceptions and oddities, but I don't think we're that clueless.
True, but you can get speeds above what you would get from 56k dialup modems on current designs [which] is not completely useless.
Absolutely, but if you look at what is popular in P2P it's large media files. Assuming the goal is to make something a large part of the population would use, it's not exactly a winner.
In the case of Freenet [...] due to the fact that data insertion/retrieval is asynchronous, timing/correlation attacks are not trivial even if you control several nodes.
That one was mostly aimed at TOR, where you have interactive services. For Freenet statistical attacks are more likely, but you also lost pretty much all interactivity. It's all static data, static "freesites" and message groups as slow as Usenet on sleep drugs. That kills the interest for things you would run over a 56k modem.
Depends on your threat model, but even assuming a powerful attacker which can see all data flowing between ALL nodes (a very strong assumption), garlic routing, adding chaff and increasing latencies can help.
Depends on network, with TOR you can do pattern attacks (send bursts of data in a pattern, if each node fowards instantly you can recognize it with a delay) and in Freenet if you insert/download a big file will lead to hundreds or thousands of pieces being inserted/requested and you can try following it "upstream" to see where it gets thicker. There are many tricks.
This depends on the network design and on the threat model. If the network follows a darknet topology (as is the case for Freenet in "darknet mode")
Darknets are a two-edged sword. By being a darknet peer, you claim to trust that person which brings forth all sorts of suspicion or guilt by association. Allowing someone you don't know to be a darknet peer will reveal your IP to them. Just that you're trying to build a darknet will raise eyebrows, it's not something that will catch on.
Also, you forgot about "intersection attacks".
Not really, I just consider them a variation of latency attacks. Nodes come and go all the time, it's pretty weak evidence. It's actually much stronger evidence if you can show that each time you bombard this node with traffic, this hidden service gets very slow and if you stop bombarding, it returns to normal speed.
Actually I kinda like the first comment though I'd probably just shorten it to "// find needle". Why? Because when I go back to some old code it's probably to find something, I'm in search mode not looking to relearn everything. Even if it's a function that's only a screenful, if it has three lines of comment like
More often than not, I know the problem I'm looking for. We're finding screws where there should have been needles. Some needles break in the bending. Now we're doing recycling and needles go in another bin. The comments allow me to at a glance discard 2/3rds of the code focusing on just what I need.
Here's my take on comments:
In-code: Short, short description of flow. If you're doing anything "clever", explain why.but otherwise leave it at that.
Functions: Good for API reference but remember most of the time I'm reading other code calling the function, not the function description.
Classes: Yes please.
I've found that good variable and function names are very important. It's really, really annoying to write because it becomes a typing job and after the n'th time you type neelde or needel instead of needle you'd love to just call it "n". I did that programming my T-81 as I was typing on the calculator, it was the greatest clusterfuck of no-comment, one-letter variable code ever. Even I couldn't understand anything a month later.
The worst possible sin you can make in my opinion is to create functions that also have secret side effects. For example a "load" function that also tries to fix some broken input formats or an output function that secretly is trying to rewrite the page to switch between A4 and US Letter size (first hand experience on that one). For the love of $deity, either put it in a separate function or if it really needs on-the-fly fixing in the loading, COMMENT in the API. Otherwise I'll just see the load() function being called and assume it does exactly that, nothing more. The same goes for changing state, if it's not obvious from the function name that this would or could happen don't do it there.
Encrypted is not really complicated, use https sites and turn encryption on in your torrent client. Anonymity is hard, really hard. For open P2P networks encryption without anonymity doesn't really help anything, everyone can connect and collect data as a peer. Some of the issues are:
1. Anything like TOR and Freenet has lots of overhead due to relaying
2. Latency is also hurt, and it's also dangerous for timing attacks
3. You can collect statistical data, it's difficult to hide patterns
4. You can "isolate" nodes and then track all their traffic
On top of that, you get endless amounts of flak for being a "free haven" for all sorts of $boogeymen. That drives away developers, users, funding, everything. Many people would actually prefer they caught "real" criminals rather than create the true information anarchy. Total anonymity means no consequences, so on top of those you get endless waves of spam and trolls and they can post far more offensive things than they could on slashdot. If someone created it, you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy.
I don't see how anyone could say we wouldn't have at least come to the aid of Britain, considering Americans were already dying coming to the aid of the Brits during the German first happy time which was a full year and a half before Pearl. One could also argue that the Battle of Britain may have gone far differently if America wasn't keeping Britain supplied.
Running supply lines is a whole different story than sending large military troops, if Britain's defenses had broken it is unlikely the US would have time to declare war and send enough troops across the Atlantic to repel them. And it's a different thing coming to the aid of someone holding their island compared to one with the back against the sea with a good chance of your troops ending up there too. Fortunately we don't need to find out...
How is it a 'shameless' abuse to do something nice for an old veteran? Hint: it's not.
It's not nice in the same way robbing a bank to buy him a really nice present isn't. Endless spamming and abuse of a forum, even of such a craptastic place as /b/ is not good behavior and it hardly seems the means justify the ends to give a 90 year old birthday greetings. It might be a fun thing to do once, but I wouldn't want to visit a board where it has caught on. Then again, I don't like hanging out at /b/ anyway so what do I know...
I think you'll find pretty much all of Europe appreciates the US war effort, we consider them liberators. The countries of the Axis generally consider their part in WWII a dark chapter of their history. But some people bug me when they pretend the US valiantly and selflessly threw itself into battle for freedom and justice. The US only entered WWII after Pearl Harbor, it was forced into the war and it's all speculation what would have happened otherwise but it is far from certain the US would have come to our rescue. At the end of the war the allied forced rushed to take land just as much to not give it to the Soviet Union and communism as to liberate Europe. Certainly something we should be grateful for, but hardly selfless. Likewise when they speak of US losses, the US brought lots of military might that was crucial but it was Europeans doing most of the dying. Of course those people were dying for their country while the US forces were mostly dying for someone else's country, but it's also a bit like a person who lost his toes complaining to a guy who had to amputate both legs. But that beef is with all those that commentate in retrospect, full respect to each and every one of those who picked up a gun and went to fight for us. Each man has only one life and he put his on the line for us. A very happy 90th birthday to him.
If you go to the very bottom of the list, yes. If you look at the full executive summary (PDF), the top 115 countries are doing quite ok with fixed broadband being up to 21% of average monthly income. The last of those are countries like Philippines, Vietnam and Morocco. Of the remaining 45, most are dirt poor mostly having a GDP below $1000/person and the bottom 15 countries have an average of $440/person. Also some of those at the bottom are in addition to being poor also island states, the domestic prices are much lower than an Internet connection requiring sea cable or satellite.. And the situation is improving, the title of chart 4 is "Fixed broadband Internet prices are dropping sharply but remain unaffordable in many developing countries".
What I got out of the summary is that you can get broadband at somewhat affordable prices in relatively many countries compared to what I thought. Also that being a poor country in a relatively less poor area helps for broadband prices. Most of the countries that really suck for broadband are those south of Sahara, apparently there's no short way to hook up to a rich country's backbone nearby, while those in Central America and SE Asia mostly manage to hook up to a decent country. You can call it a digital divide here, but it seems to have a physical form very much like a desert...
Well, without getting into too much detail it depends on whether broadband is a tradable or non-tradable good. A tradable good is something like say gold - worth pretty much the same all over the world, because otherwise there'd be arbitrage. A non-tradable good would be something like getting a haircut, which is why most can afford to get haircuts despite living on mere dollars a day. The wages are much lower so the prices are much lower.
A lot of it is equipment, but a lot of it is also people to lay down cables, wire houses, set up wireless antennas, do support, maintenance, configuration, billing and so on. If you didn't take into consideration local costs, you'd reach a lot of crazy conclusions. And regarding the things they do have to buy, it's profit-maximizing to sell cheaper in poor countries than in rich countries as long as it doesn't hurt the other sales. That is why for example you can find a cheap Chinese or Thai-only phone, because it's only usable in that country and won't hurt your US and other English-speaking sales. I'm sure you could make some sort of deal or to purchase obsolete equipment from a western ISP for cheap.
All in all, I think it's better to compare to monthly income because they could probably sell it for considerably less and still break even. A far bigger issue I think is penetration, the cost of building out a network is not linear to the number of people on it. Even if only 20% of a town wants broadband you have to wire almost as much as if 80% would want it. That is why you often se rates in third world countries that are much, much higher than what I get even on an absolute scale, despite that everything should be cheaper to do down there.
At least here in Norway it's about $40 for basic broadband (1-2 Mbit), $60 (1% of average full time income) for medium broadband (5-10 Mbit) while about $80 will get you a top line (20-30 Mbit). Almost everyone who wants it has broadband, which really keeps the costs per customer down. Sure it could probably get even cheaper but compared to many poorer countries we pay little and get a lot. Things like broadband thrive on volume of many people signing up.
Look to Youtube, a certain country said "pull this video, pull that, setup office here, pay taxes". You know what Youtube did? Ignored! Don't they lose money/marketshare? Of course they do.
YouTube got it easy, they don't have to "shut down" anything. It's highly unlikely users will get harassed for finding a way to visit YouTube. I think there's even legislation in place to prevent a US-based service from being arsed by foreign libel lawsuits and the like. RIM is a physical product, they probably have offices with a lease, people with work contracts and most of all if they'd harass everyone with a Blackberry or worse, confiscate them then that would have a rather big business impact. It might still be the right decision, but I don't think the situations are that comparable.
Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
If it was just the OS, not so much. But it also includes all the applications and there's always some applications that have had huge upgrades in the last six months. You can maybe find some backports in a PPA somewhere or try rolling your own but by far the easiest is if your distro has packaged it. The same goes if you want support for new hardware as most drivers live in the kernel, again you can find a newer kernel for an old distro but it's a bit complicated.
Being on a six month cycle is by far not the most experimental you get, six months is a loooong feedback loop if you're actually interested in what a project is doing and want to file bug reports and feature requests and in general keep up with the development. A six month release cycle fits well for those of us that are interested in new stuff, but don't want to deal with changes on a day to day basis like those on rolling distros. The LTS fits for those that more want to use it, but don't expect any developer to get excited about a bug he fixed upstream a year and a half ago...