There are (at least) two sides to this story and I for one am not going to arbitrarily silence one side of the discussion just because you don't think their argument has merit. A dialogue is the sharing of information, not one side beating the other over the head with their side.
I believe that everyone should be heard, even the crazies. Heck, maybe I'm crazy, but I can dismiss the crazies without using using degrading or inflammatory language, which it seems you cannot. Real scientists don't hide dissent behind a wall of insults.
We can agree to disagree. I will get my science directly from scientists, you can get your science from bloggers. Enjoy your day.
Both sides are distorting and cherry picking the facts to make their side look more plausible. Linking to the blogs of condescending one-sided pundits doesn't help convince anyone of the other side's position. Links to more neutral articles are preferable, rather than obviously one-sided diatribes that belittle others who don't believe in their way.
Scientists are usually pretty good at writing summaries and showing pretty graphs that the average person (myself included) can digest, so linking to accessible articles at the UN, NOAA, Journal of Climate, or even Nature magazine is preferable. There are many wiki articles that have active links to these articles. Or even just link to the wiki article on the global warming controversy
Au contraire, mon ami. I did not espouse any political agenda in my previous comment, but I can see how you think that I did, so I will be more direct. I do not disagree with the facts of global warming. The planet is warming, the global climate is changing, and global warming is certainly happening. Is that clear now? See any political agenda there?
However, as my previous comment suggested, I do agree with proven science done by actual scientists, rather than unscientific bloggers, pundits, or commentators. Anyone and everyone can talk about global warming, but if you want to get your "facts" from bloggers and the like rather than scientists, hey, more power to ya. To be even more direct, I should have added that a better response would have been to link to the actual scientific articles and graphs, rather than a poorly written and arranged blog by some random person who is not a climate scientist.
Your links to Coby Beck's blog leave much to be desired. The headline above all of the linked articles says, "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming." The "answers" come from the compiled opinions of a software engineer, not a geologist/climatologist/scientist.
Coby Beck. Age: 45. Stuff I Like: climate change, cosmology, music, photography. Former musician, turned tree planter, turned software engineer. Same old story... I have been blogging about climate change since 2006 at A Few Things Ill Considered.
As a tech support agent, this is a question I ask myself every day.
If a customer says, "My internet is broken," the very first thing I ask is "what error message do you see?" 9/10 times I can fix the issue based on the error message alone, without knowing anything else. But, if instead they throw some random words at me like "it says it doesn't work," then I ask them to reproduce the error. If they can't do that then it's time to shotgun troubleshoot, and I know it's going to be a long, painful phone call.
The people who act like reading error messages is unnecessary, bothersome, or uninformative are the same ones who for some reason lie about everything. "Reboot your computer please," (one second later...) "Ok it's rebooted." Sigh.
I wish error messages on computers were more like tv set top box errors. They stay on the screen, saying blandly, "Error 14" (for example) and so customers do tend to let us know what the error number is, because there's no way around that screen. I get the error message, look it up, and a few minutes later the issue is resolved. I say take the information about what's actually going on out of the hands of the user, since they don't care anyway, they just want it fixed. Any informed user who wants to know what "Error 14" is just needs to (gasp!) look it up on our website, and then they can fix it on their own if they so choose.
I work for a large ISP, and for residential accounts, we don't particularly care if you're a "bandwidth hog," as long as you're not affecting other customers around you. If we see that one person is causing significant congestion, then that's a problem that we'll address (but only when it happens repeatedly and consistently). Most of the time the customer is either unaware, has an open router, or has a virus/worm/trojan.
I have used both Photoshop and Gimp, and I curse at both. I rarely need to use photo editing software, but when I do I want to get the task done quickly with an intuitive interface. Neither Photoshop nor Gimp fits this bill.
The other side of the coin is the customer experience. Think about the average internet user. They cannot tell the difference between a 404 error and a 504 error.
People often unknowingly mistype URLs and automatically believe that their internet is broken and they need to call their ISP in order to get it working again. My personal experience working tech support for a large ISP is that mistyping domain names is a huge call driver, and this service is meant to address that.
Respectfully, you're missing the point. Their point is that full disclosure helps the exploiters exploit more. Anti-sec is pointing out that there are two main ways that full disclosure is a bad thing:
1. Full disclosure allows cut and paste script kiddies to wreak continual havoc with detailed and fully documented exploits from the whitehat security industry.
2. The whitehat security industry (antivirus, firewalls, auditing services) profit hugely from full disclosure by scare tactics.
They are pushing for change in the whitehat security industry itself, so that script kiddies and security companies stop exploiting the consequences of full disclosure.
"Comcast Digital Voice uses Internet Protocol and not the Internet. Comcast Digital Voice calls travel on our private, managed network -- not over the public Internet. That makes it superior to other 'Best Effort' services delivering phone traffic over the public Internet."
Ash will rise high into the atmosphere and fall for months if not years after such an eruption.
Mt. St. Helens erupted in May 1980. Seven months later, my family visited my uncle in Basalt Colorado that December, and a very light dusting of ash was still falling, covering all the snow in a thin blanket of grey.
I'd hate to see how the people who wrote this article would respond to a report of the symptoms of a trojan horse/rootkit that I saw firsthand this last weekend...
Good tech support isn't about knowing more than the user, it's about taking a new set of symptoms you haven't seen before and logically working through the possibilities to get to the solution.
I can see by all the superfluous caps and bold text see how upset you are, and I'm sorry that you're so riled up over this. I do understand and sympathize with your point of view, but the issue is not as simple as you are supposing.
The channel providers are all rapidly shutting off their analog feeds as quickly as they can. They are the ones who are in control of the content, format and delivery of their channels, not any cable or satellite company. Go ahead and complain to the channels themselves and demand that they provide an unencrypted digital signal to everyone who subscribes to their channel. Heck, ask the same of your cable provider. See how far that gets you. Good luck.
Since you're not being specific about what channels you're talking about, my point still stands true. Contracts are the main limiting factor here. Contracts are not imaginary boundaries, they are backed up by hundreds of years of case law.
I'll use my example from earlier: the NFL Network. On certain cable providers, per contract specifications, the NFLN channel is broadcast "free and clear" as you say, unencrypted. On other providers, it is specified as a digital (and encrypted) signal in digital packages. NFLN is trying very hard to do two things: 1. to force all cable providers to carry their channel no matter what the cost, and 2. to force all of them to carry NFLN in a basic unencrypted package, thus breaking NFLN's own contracts.
Make no mistake, NFLN is one of the most expensive channels out there. NFLN is suing not to get their channel seen, since 3/4 of the year nobody watches it, but for the tens of millions of dollars it would collect in weekly in subscriber fees. If this happens, your cable bill will go up, guaranteed.
It's easy to blame cable companies, but some of the blame of this ridiculousness lies also in the lap of the channels themselves.
P.S. for the record, I love NFLN and watch it every day during football season. I just think they're being silly trying to break their own contracts that they themselves wrote and signed.
Just because the technology exists to broadcast free and clear doesn't mean companies should violate their contracts just because you say they should.
I could (but won't) help all my friends and family get free cable and free satellite since I know how it works. For many reasons I refuse to do so. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If life was as simple as you think it is, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. The situation is a lot more complicated than you are implying. For obvious reasons I will not go into specifics.
The FCC should be going after the channels and their silly contract requirements, not the cable companies. Check out the litigation history of the NFL Network and their failed history of suing several cable companies for some fun examples.
I'm sorry you're so pissed off by all this. It really is a mess. Without going into specifics, I know full well how screwed up it all is. Really I do.
You'd think I'd be pissed off too, since I'm on the inside. I've worked for a cable company going on 3 years now, and I've gotten to the point that while I do care, I don't get worked up about it much anymore. If you saw it from my perspective, and I'm not talking about brainwashing, I think you'd agree that you'd see it a bit differently.
As you say, the internet is indeed the future, and cable companies are embracing this. On demand services have completely changed the way that people watch TV, and cable/satellite/internet/whatever companies know this quite well. Many companies are scrambling to add on demand services to their lineups to meet the high demand for it. I think it's great.
Honestly, I could do without TV. I did for 8 years and didn't miss it. But now I have one and love my Monsterquest. However, I visit their website more often than I watch the show. Go figure.
The regulation in question covers over-the-air "local" stations ONLY, which have never been encrypted. These are stations you'd get even if you didn't have cable. Get it now? The FCC already forces cable companies to do this. Unless you mean channels like MTV or LOGO. Then you'll have to convince those stations to broadcast over-the-air for free to everyone. Good luck with that.
If only I had the motivation to muck through the horror that is the FCC website. Oh well, with your "heavy" research, I'm sure you'll do it for me to try and prove your point. Have fun.
I can't tell if you drank too much coffee or if you're failing at trolling. Either way your inflammatory tone and language detracts from your message.
Digital cable signals are encrypted so that people cannot easily steal cable from the cable company. Cable companies don't care if you download torrents or stream from NBC or steal satellite signals.
Video on demand services are exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned the future of television. Video on demand is an idea that isn't limited to cable. Satellite and internet companies are doing it too. Nobody has to use cable's on demand services. Folks can use whatever services they want. Or not. Up to you.
Nobody needs TV. TV is a luxury. I lived without it for 8 years and didn't own a TV before I started working for a cable company. Now I own a TV, get free cable, and mostly use my TV to play on my PS3.
Cable is an "always on" technology. To turn it off you need to physically unhook or trap the coax itself.
The analog channels that are provided to the cable companies (NBC, PBS, etc.) are not encrypted and so do not need a box to decrypt the signal. Plug the cable directly into your tv, and you get analog channels.
The digital channels (Biography, NFL Network, etc.) are encrypted, and so they need a box to decrypt the signal so you can watch it on your tv. To decrypt a channel, you must subscribe to that tier of service. Similar to how your cable modem has a boot file that carries your subscribed speed of service, your tv box has a boot file that carries your level of service and what channels you subscribe to.
All cable companies (including the one I work for) have had the ability to add and use customer-purchased set top boxes with their cable services for over 2 years. You don't have to rent a box from any cable company. Buy your own box and we'll give you a free cable card to put in it. The cable card (instead of the box) carries the boot file so you get the channels you want.
Also, by FCC regulation, from February 2009 all cable companies must convert the local digital channels to analog and carry the resulting analog signal for the next 3 years. I'd get the link from the FCC website but it's Saturday morning and I'm too lazy.
The future of television is watching whatever show you want whenever you want after it is released. Nobody will ever wait for a show to "be on" at 8pm Monday night anymore since all you have to do is download the file and watch it the day it becomes available.
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There are (at least) two sides to this story and I for one am not going to arbitrarily silence one side of the discussion just because you don't think their argument has merit. A dialogue is the sharing of information, not one side beating the other over the head with their side.
I believe that everyone should be heard, even the crazies. Heck, maybe I'm crazy, but I can dismiss the crazies without using using degrading or inflammatory language, which it seems you cannot. Real scientists don't hide dissent behind a wall of insults.
We can agree to disagree. I will get my science directly from scientists, you can get your science from bloggers. Enjoy your day.
Both sides are distorting and cherry picking the facts to make their side look more plausible. Linking to the blogs of condescending one-sided pundits doesn't help convince anyone of the other side's position. Links to more neutral articles are preferable, rather than obviously one-sided diatribes that belittle others who don't believe in their way.
Scientists are usually pretty good at writing summaries and showing pretty graphs that the average person (myself included) can digest, so linking to accessible articles at the UN, NOAA, Journal of Climate, or even Nature magazine is preferable. There are many wiki articles that have active links to these articles. Or even just link to the wiki article on the global warming controversy
Au contraire, mon ami. I did not espouse any political agenda in my previous comment, but I can see how you think that I did, so I will be more direct. I do not disagree with the facts of global warming. The planet is warming, the global climate is changing, and global warming is certainly happening. Is that clear now? See any political agenda there?
However, as my previous comment suggested, I do agree with proven science done by actual scientists, rather than unscientific bloggers, pundits, or commentators. Anyone and everyone can talk about global warming, but if you want to get your "facts" from bloggers and the like rather than scientists, hey, more power to ya. To be even more direct, I should have added that a better response would have been to link to the actual scientific articles and graphs, rather than a poorly written and arranged blog by some random person who is not a climate scientist.
Your links to Coby Beck's blog leave much to be desired. The headline above all of the linked articles says, "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming." The "answers" come from the compiled opinions of a software engineer, not a geologist/climatologist/scientist.
Why do they lie!??!?
As a tech support agent, this is a question I ask myself every day.
If a customer says, "My internet is broken," the very first thing I ask is "what error message do you see?" 9/10 times I can fix the issue based on the error message alone, without knowing anything else. But, if instead they throw some random words at me like "it says it doesn't work," then I ask them to reproduce the error. If they can't do that then it's time to shotgun troubleshoot, and I know it's going to be a long, painful phone call.
The people who act like reading error messages is unnecessary, bothersome, or uninformative are the same ones who for some reason lie about everything. "Reboot your computer please," (one second later...) "Ok it's rebooted." Sigh.
I wish error messages on computers were more like tv set top box errors. They stay on the screen, saying blandly, "Error 14" (for example) and so customers do tend to let us know what the error number is, because there's no way around that screen. I get the error message, look it up, and a few minutes later the issue is resolved. I say take the information about what's actually going on out of the hands of the user, since they don't care anyway, they just want it fixed. Any informed user who wants to know what "Error 14" is just needs to (gasp!) look it up on our website, and then they can fix it on their own if they so choose.
I work for a large ISP, and for residential accounts, we don't particularly care if you're a "bandwidth hog," as long as you're not affecting other customers around you. If we see that one person is causing significant congestion, then that's a problem that we'll address (but only when it happens repeatedly and consistently). Most of the time the customer is either unaware, has an open router, or has a virus/worm/trojan.
I have used both Photoshop and Gimp, and I curse at both. I rarely need to use photo editing software, but when I do I want to get the task done quickly with an intuitive interface. Neither Photoshop nor Gimp fits this bill.
You mean the modem macid they already have? As I understand it, all they're doing is putting your macid on a list so your browser isn't redirected.
The other side of the coin is the customer experience. Think about the average internet user. They cannot tell the difference between a 404 error and a 504 error.
People often unknowingly mistype URLs and automatically believe that their internet is broken and they need to call their ISP in order to get it working again. My personal experience working tech support for a large ISP is that mistyping domain names is a huge call driver, and this service is meant to address that.
That's the other side, now flame on.
I wear clothes to protect my skin from sunburn. Buying a case for my phone isn't much of a stretch beyond that.
Playing devil's advocate here...
Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly broke the law with their peaceful protests.
By your logic, we shouldn't admire or revere Gandhi or MLK because they broke the law hundreds of times.
I disagree.
I was pointing out what their reasons were based on their manifesto. Nothing more.
Respectfully, you're missing the point. Their point is that full disclosure helps the exploiters exploit more. Anti-sec is pointing out that there are two main ways that full disclosure is a bad thing:
1. Full disclosure allows cut and paste script kiddies to wreak continual havoc with detailed and fully documented exploits from the whitehat security industry.
2. The whitehat security industry (antivirus, firewalls, auditing services) profit hugely from full disclosure by scare tactics.
They are pushing for change in the whitehat security industry itself, so that script kiddies and security companies stop exploiting the consequences of full disclosure.
"Comcast Digital Voice uses Internet Protocol and not the Internet. Comcast Digital
Voice calls travel on our private, managed network -- not over the public Internet. That makes
it superior to other 'Best Effort' services delivering phone traffic over the public Internet."
Source (emphasis mine): http://www.comcast.com/MediaLibrary/1/1/About/PressRoom/Documents/ProductsAndServices/digital_voice.pdf
Ash will rise high into the atmosphere and fall for months if not years after such an eruption.
Mt. St. Helens erupted in May 1980. Seven months later, my family visited my uncle in Basalt Colorado that December, and a very light dusting of ash was still falling, covering all the snow in a thin blanket of grey.
I'd hate to see how the people who wrote this article would respond to a report of the symptoms of a trojan horse/rootkit that I saw firsthand this last weekend...
Good tech support isn't about knowing more than the user, it's about taking a new set of symptoms you haven't seen before and logically working through the possibilities to get to the solution.
I can see by all the superfluous caps and bold text see how upset you are, and I'm sorry that you're so riled up over this. I do understand and sympathize with your point of view, but the issue is not as simple as you are supposing.
The channel providers are all rapidly shutting off their analog feeds as quickly as they can. They are the ones who are in control of the content, format and delivery of their channels, not any cable or satellite company. Go ahead and complain to the channels themselves and demand that they provide an unencrypted digital signal to everyone who subscribes to their channel. Heck, ask the same of your cable provider. See how far that gets you. Good luck.
Since you're not being specific about what channels you're talking about, my point still stands true. Contracts are the main limiting factor here. Contracts are not imaginary boundaries, they are backed up by hundreds of years of case law.
I'll use my example from earlier: the NFL Network. On certain cable providers, per contract specifications, the NFLN channel is broadcast "free and clear" as you say, unencrypted. On other providers, it is specified as a digital (and encrypted) signal in digital packages. NFLN is trying very hard to do two things: 1. to force all cable providers to carry their channel no matter what the cost, and 2. to force all of them to carry NFLN in a basic unencrypted package, thus breaking NFLN's own contracts.
Make no mistake, NFLN is one of the most expensive channels out there. NFLN is suing not to get their channel seen, since 3/4 of the year nobody watches it, but for the tens of millions of dollars it would collect in weekly in subscriber fees. If this happens, your cable bill will go up, guaranteed.
It's easy to blame cable companies, but some of the blame of this ridiculousness lies also in the lap of the channels themselves.
P.S. for the record, I love NFLN and watch it every day during football season. I just think they're being silly trying to break their own contracts that they themselves wrote and signed.
Just because the technology exists to broadcast free and clear doesn't mean companies should violate their contracts just because you say they should.
I could (but won't) help all my friends and family get free cable and free satellite since I know how it works. For many reasons I refuse to do so. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If life was as simple as you think it is, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. The situation is a lot more complicated than you are implying. For obvious reasons I will not go into specifics.
You're pointing the FCC in the wrong direction.
The FCC should be going after the channels and their silly contract requirements, not the cable companies. Check out the litigation history of the NFL Network and their failed history of suing several cable companies for some fun examples.
I'm sorry you're so pissed off by all this. It really is a mess. Without going into specifics, I know full well how screwed up it all is. Really I do.
You'd think I'd be pissed off too, since I'm on the inside. I've worked for a cable company going on 3 years now, and I've gotten to the point that while I do care, I don't get worked up about it much anymore. If you saw it from my perspective, and I'm not talking about brainwashing, I think you'd agree that you'd see it a bit differently.
As you say, the internet is indeed the future, and cable companies are embracing this. On demand services have completely changed the way that people watch TV, and cable/satellite/internet/whatever companies know this quite well. Many companies are scrambling to add on demand services to their lineups to meet the high demand for it. I think it's great.
Honestly, I could do without TV. I did for 8 years and didn't miss it. But now I have one and love my Monsterquest. However, I visit their website more often than I watch the show. Go figure.
The regulation in question covers over-the-air "local" stations ONLY, which have never been encrypted. These are stations you'd get even if you didn't have cable. Get it now? The FCC already forces cable companies to do this. Unless you mean channels like MTV or LOGO. Then you'll have to convince those stations to broadcast over-the-air for free to everyone. Good luck with that.
If only I had the motivation to muck through the horror that is the FCC website. Oh well, with your "heavy" research, I'm sure you'll do it for me to try and prove your point. Have fun.
I can't tell if you drank too much coffee or if you're failing at trolling. Either way your inflammatory tone and language detracts from your message.
Digital cable signals are encrypted so that people cannot easily steal cable from the cable company. Cable companies don't care if you download torrents or stream from NBC or steal satellite signals.
Video on demand services are exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned the future of television. Video on demand is an idea that isn't limited to cable. Satellite and internet companies are doing it too. Nobody has to use cable's on demand services. Folks can use whatever services they want. Or not. Up to you.
Nobody needs TV. TV is a luxury. I lived without it for 8 years and didn't own a TV before I started working for a cable company. Now I own a TV, get free cable, and mostly use my TV to play on my PS3.
It's actually simpler than this.
Cable is an "always on" technology. To turn it off you need to physically unhook or trap the coax itself.
The analog channels that are provided to the cable companies (NBC, PBS, etc.) are not encrypted and so do not need a box to decrypt the signal. Plug the cable directly into your tv, and you get analog channels.
The digital channels (Biography, NFL Network, etc.) are encrypted, and so they need a box to decrypt the signal so you can watch it on your tv. To decrypt a channel, you must subscribe to that tier of service. Similar to how your cable modem has a boot file that carries your subscribed speed of service, your tv box has a boot file that carries your level of service and what channels you subscribe to.
All cable companies (including the one I work for) have had the ability to add and use customer-purchased set top boxes with their cable services for over 2 years. You don't have to rent a box from any cable company. Buy your own box and we'll give you a free cable card to put in it. The cable card (instead of the box) carries the boot file so you get the channels you want.
Also, by FCC regulation, from February 2009 all cable companies must convert the local digital channels to analog and carry the resulting analog signal for the next 3 years. I'd get the link from the FCC website but it's Saturday morning and I'm too lazy.
The future of television is watching whatever show you want whenever you want after it is released. Nobody will ever wait for a show to "be on" at 8pm Monday night anymore since all you have to do is download the file and watch it the day it becomes available.
The article summary says...
The page linked in the article says...