If I'm a cable TV company with 10,000 Internet customer who are mostly idle, I can afford
to spend a lot less on overhead than if I have 10,000 customers who are maxing out their bandwidth.
Agreed - And I will also agree that the current broadband model has one major flaw, in that
the average user comes in far below the peak users, but the infrastructure needs to
support the peak users.
I wouldn't even object to increased stratification of broadband sevice based on peak bandwidth.
Hell, I think I currently pay for a peak somewhere around 15Mbps, and really don't need
anywhere near that (and I consider myself a fairly high-volume user).
I only objected to the pay-per-byte suggested by the GG(G?)P, where regardless of the capacity
of the network, each individual byte costs nothing at all.
Except for the "idiots" who actually do want to get promoted to an executive position
If you don't consider that explicitly idiotic, you clearly need to turn in your geek
license.
Geeks can manage. We don't wan't to. We like working in the pits.
Except for the people who actually like to be team players
"Team" has no "I" in it. Funny, that.
and hold up their share of the workload when all their teammates think
it important enough to put in evening and weekend hours.
Y'know, my mother had a pretty good comeback for that one, which I learned
somewhere around age 6... "If all your friends jumped off a bridge,
would you do it too?". If all your coworkers work themselves to death... Well,
need I continue?
You accomplish nothing but set yourself up for a never-ending spiral: You need
to work harder to get ahead, but everyone else does it too so you need to work
harder just to keep up. Race harder, little rat! Your cheese keeps moving!
Except for those who feel that their company is actually innovating a valuable
contribution to society
"There will be poor always, pathetically struggling. Look at the good things
you've got!"
Yes, if you're not one of those, you can certainly just go home and turn the beeping thing off.
Okay.
Let's compare notes in the afterlife and see which of us thinks we spent our lives better,
you for working harder, or me for enjoying the short time I have on this planet.
Walk through any major network centre and try to count the dollars for the machinery, fibre, and operating labour.
All fixed costs. NOCs, and the lines between them, cost $X in overhead whether they push 5Kb or 5Pb per
day. The actual use costs nothing (except perhaps electricity, but even then, virtually all modern signalling
protocols preferentially use electrically-off states).
Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts
from the hardware vendors
With the exception of peerage, which I mentioned (and for end users, basically means paying your ISP
bill), the rest just amounts to overhead. Same no matter how much traffic you have, up to your peak
capacity. You can try to inflate the numbers however you want, but they still stay flat with respect
to throughput when you factor in everything above you.
This is such horseshit.
Really, now? So, which tier-1 do you work for, that you wish to justify your profits?
The internet amounts to one big LAN, divided into a bunch of fiefdoms with petty
little corporate barons charging fees at every drawbridge and intersection. Take away
all the troll bridges, and you end up with fees based on the overhead (hardware and human
maintenance) for a given capacity, totally uncorrelated with actual throughput.
If more ISPs would drop the "all you can eat unless you exceed the secret
cap" plans and adopt real $/TB pricing, we'd be a lot better off and ISPs
could better plan for growth.
Except, bandwidth doesn't cost anything. Seriously. My home network costs
me the same whether I keep it saturated, or almost idle. The same goes for
every later of telecomm all the way to the top.
Sure, you have to pay to get access outside the network you control (which applies
whether you talk about your LAN, your local ISP, TW, or a tier-2). But that amounts
to pissing in your own well - Your side of the network means nothing if you can't get
to the other side.
The sooner everyone realizes this, the sooner we can all have FTTP for a pittance
similar to the cost of an analog phone line 20 years ago.
Until then, "all you can eat" at the local level sure as hell beats the sort of "the rich get
the bandwidth, the poor get dialup" scheme we once had (and you suggest bringing back).
Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary?
Yes, on two conditions - First, such "limiting" occurs on a fair, rotating schedule
such that I can surf unimpeded for at least two four-hour blocks a day. And second,
that my broadband provider drops my monthly fee by a proportional amount (eg, for only
8hrs a day, it should drop to a third of the current price).
Since I don't see either of those as likely (especially not the second point), I think we can
safely answer "no way in hell" to the initial question.
How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage?
"Global bandwidth shortage" really amounts to a meaningless phrase, boiling down
to one of three concepts: Do we mean the "last miles" have saturated? If so,
upgrade them, entirely a local ISP problem (and changing ISPs might help). Do
we mean the backbones have reached capacity? If so, upgrade them, entirely a problem
of the Tier 1 and 2 providers (and changing ISPs might help). Do we mean a few
key endpoints (such as Google) have reached capacity? They'd damned well better
upgrade to handle the load, or people will naturally switch to their competition.
So in two of those three scenarios, the right answer amounts to "call my ISP and
bitch loudly".
many employees feel obligated by employers who have handed out the devices
With whom does the fault rest here? The employers, or the idiots who make themselves
available 24/7 at the whim of their workplace?
People, do us all a favor, and stop putting up with this bullshit. Just say no.
If enough of us do it, "on call" will go back to a paid status (yes, "back" - Companies
used to pay damned good money to have trained monkeys available at 3am).
It really disgusts me that people often tell me they need to actually "go away" on their
vacations, or they'll get called in to work. Hello, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Stand up for yourselves! "Sorry,
Dave, that third margarita looks damned good right now, so I'll talk to you when my vacation
ends, on Monday morning. Beach? No, sitting in my living room, five minutes' drive from you.
Buh-Bye."
As for whether or not you can "get away" with that - Yes, you most certainly can. Just do it
right from day one, rather than giving in a bit at first to make yourself look more
useful. Deluding your employer just sets you up for unhappyness later - Let them know right
where you stand on such issues. A decent employer will even respect you for it.
Not to say I wouldn't honestly help out my coworkers, if convenient for me... I have
gone in at bizarre hours to deal with emergencies - And damn well comp'ed the time the
next day. But I do that at my pleasure, not as a condition of employment.
If responding off-hours became a requirement of the job, we'd have a problem, and
they would need to find someone else for the position. And no, paying me more would
not count as an option, because I work to live, not live to work, end of
discussion.
If the user's ISP cooperates - which they will if they have a subpoena sent to
their legal department or equivalent - then they will be able to determine who had
that IP at what time. Easy peasy. Hope this doesn't come as a surprise to you.
No, not at all surprising.
It would, however, surprise me if someone intent on uploading prerelease content
to YouTube did it from any machine directly tied to him. Library computer, Starbucks WiFi,
even a hotel's link under a fake name. But as himself?
Oh, good! They had me worried that I could no longer keep my DRAM in the water cooler. And how could I get
through my day without a bit of chipless DRAM floating in midair above my keyboard?
Goodness. What next? They'll try to take away my off-chip flatware?
Many a/.er treats/. as a social nw site where you might try to build karma, bitch about MS etc etc.
You've just nailed (accidentally or not) what I see as the second biggest problem here (after the blatant
unconstitutionality of the proposed legislation)...
What does count as a "social networking" site? Would SlashDot count? Would most blogs
that allow comment posting? Would USENET, for that matter? The full text of the bill basically
sounds like it violates Free (online) Assembly rather than Free Speech.
The concept of "social networking", as used here, really has no meaning except by example. When you outlaw
meaningless ideas, you open the door for overly aggressive AGs and DAs to start creatively interpreting the
law to apply in areas not even the most paranoid of the beanie-wearing crowd could have predicted. Case
in point, the DOJ (in)famously held a series of lectures on how to apply the patriot act and subsequent
antiterrorism legislation to your friendly neighborhood weed dealer. Riiiiiiiight, protection from Osama.
I think the problem is this might ruin the LoTR name or story line.
Oh, no worries there.
For actual literate fans of the works of a great fantasy writer,
neither this nor Peter Jackson nor even JRR's bastard(izing) offspring can
spoil the original.
I thought the whole EU had some sort of "fair dealing" exemptions.
If they do, I can't believe that Google's lawyers lost this.
Except that Google exists as a primarily American company, a
"condition" as dangerous as the traditional Mafia "kiss of
death" in any EU court.
Just look at the fun Microsoft has had with them...
"Roll over!"
"okay..."
"Play dead!"
[drool drool drool]
"open your formats"
"here, have the goddamned sourcecode and leave us alone!"
"not good enough, write your competitors' products or we'll fine you!"
Does this mean that in your local area, you will be more of a
threat than the flu?
It means I won't contribute to the problem or the solution.
You seem very eager to shoot people
I have no intention of going around hunting people for sport, if you
thought I meant to imply that. I also have no intention, however, of
sharing my supplies with masses of people lacking similar foresight.
while others work to keep society going in your absence.
Meh. Take it or leave it, all the same to me. If I won the lottery
tomorrow, I'd buy my own island (with at least a few acres of arable
land and a reliable source of fresh water) and voluntarily drop out
of society. If a worst-case-scenario pandemic removed the
"buy" part of that, you wouldn't see me crying over my Cheerios.
Exactly who do you think will be making the anti-virals that
you're going to stock up on?
Well, the three in my collection come from Roche and GSK...
Who is going to do the research to work out what particular
strain of virus we're looking at?
I didn't say "vaccine", I said "antiviral". We already have
several families of these available. Unfortunately the goddamned
Chinese have made amantidine useless by feeding it directly to
their poultry, but neuraminase and viral DNA polymerase inhibitors
still work fairly well.
If everyone takes the attitude that someone else will sort it
out for them then we're doomed.
A lot of people seem to have confused a flu pandemic for an end-of-the-world
scenario. It just means a month or two of serious inconvenience with a
higher-than-normal chance of death. The biggest risk, by
far, would come from panicked humans. Thus, you don't need to
worry about the long-term survival of the species; only surviving
three threats: The virus, most humans, and starvation. Anyone
who weathers those past the peak of the pandemic, can look forward
to dying of Big Mac induced heart failure 40 years down the road.
It's great that you have the savings (in cash, at hand)
I keep enough for a last-minute luxury-food shopping trip, but seriously...
Bunnies and edible wild plants don't take AmEx or cash.
You do understand, right, that such a pandemic would last
for many weeks at least, and probably many months
Weeks, yes. Months, no.
The 1918 pandemic lasted just under a year.
The 1957 and 1968 pandemics lasted roughly three months (despite much
lower mortality rate) because they spread MUCH faster through a more
densely packed population.
Most computer models of a pandemic in today's world have it spreading
in basically three weeks. Within a month, people will have either
died or survived it, and the world can resume as normal.
What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of
millions of other people
Who said anything about tens of millions of other people? Most
people would rather die at home than spend a month away from their
TVs (whether it shows nothing but static or not) - I say, "let them".
I have no intention of trying to save everyone. And I did
mention ammo to deal with the few that get a hunger-inspired clue at
the last minute.
(who will be bringing the virus with them)
I also mentioned antiviral drugs. Not talkin' bout "Captain Trips"
here, just a plain ol' flu. Direct deaths will amount to 3% tops, mostly
of the weak, very young, and elderly. Indirect deaths will depend entirely
on how much society panics at having our thin veil of dominance over
nature ripped to shreds for the first time in 30 years. I suspect,
though, that deaths from secondary causes (starvation, rioting, the
military response thereto, etc) could easily top actual deaths
from the flu. Thus my preferred response, stay the hell out of the
way until it all blows over.
but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff
is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are
prepared to even consider.
Agreed, and most will fail. Some of us have already considered the
task at length, however, and can survive, for a month or more,
without electricity or a convenient supermarket.
Survival of the fittest, my friend. I say, "bring it on!"
In the past, epidemics did NOT cause the shutdown
of business and commerce.
The last real pandemic, in 1918, occurred at a time when we didn't
have anywhere near the population density common today. Dense
urban areas more closely resembled modern rural suburbs. And it killed
35 million people.
Compare that to the more recent pandemic of 1968. It had a MUCH
lower body count (less than seven million dead), but with the
more dense cities of the time, spread considerably faster - A matter
of three months rather than nearly a year for 1918. And computer
models in today's world suggest a pandemic could saturate the population
within three weeks. Given the same mortality rate as the 1918
flu, that would mean 140 million dead in the span of a month.
The institute I work for will be sequestered by
the government in the event of a pandemic.
Sounds like a good place to avoid in an emergency, then.
It doesn't take much contention on a DSL circuit to make video
conferencing or IP telephony unusable, theses are the sorts of
collaboration tool that will be required in this event.
What???
Perhaps, in the event of an emergency, you could get by with, y'know,
plain ol' fashioned voice-over-analog-line telephony? God forbid you
can't see a stuttery low-quality image of the person on the other end
of the line, right?
Amazing. This whole topic simply blows me away. Work from home?
Government restriction of YouTube? Gimme a frickin' break. I love
computers, spend all of my workdays and a sizeable chunk of my free
time on them, and you can bet your ass that in a real pandemic, I
won't waste time on YouTube OR working remotely.
Step 0, keep a suitable supply of antivirals (and other drugs)
on hand for everyone you intend to keep alive.
Step 1, secure a large supply of food and ammo at the first
warning signs (some people, myself included, will already have
this covered to some extent, making it step 0b).
Step 2, get the hell out of Dodge (flee cities and even suburbs).
Step 3, fortify your location against inevitable attack by starving idiots.
Step 4, catch up on my backlog of reading material.
Notice that nowhere in there do I intend to "work". If I can
still surf the net from wherever I hole-up, I may well do so, but even
that falls pretty low on the list of priorities.
That's the difference. Apparently some sites which they
dedicate employees to help may not be legal.
So if a car dealership "dedicates employees" (eg, an on-call
salesmen) to a local front-organization for the mob, has
the car dealership acted illegally or even unethically?
As for the sites in question dealing in copyrighted material - So
does Amazon. Would you require Google to make sure Amazon has the
right to resell every book and CD they list?
First they say there's a bug with telnet passing switches through to
login. Then they start a tirade against sending passwords in the clear.
I would not suggest overlooking that GLARING flaw with telnet.
Yes, we should consider this particular bug a serious flaw in need
of repair. But it seems like something of an absurdity to worry about
one critical security flaw while ignoring another just because it counts
as a "feature" rather than a "bug".
I've got to say that not using something because it's broken is never
a fix (unless you're a manager). The fix is to mend the problem.
But what do you do when the problem exists by design?
Perhaps someone would kindly post a quick explanation of the context for this FP?
I get the idea that "Perplex city" uses some sort of MTG-like gaming system, but how does
that make it an "alternate reality" game, and where does this cube thing fit in?
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs
to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast.
Why?
DRM-less music has existed for longer than its DRM-encumbered counterpart. The web, Napster (v1), Kazaa,
AllOfMP3 all made every album ever released fairly easy to get free or cheap, without any DRM.
And yet... The music industry still manages billions of dollars in sales per year.
How can that happen? It only takes one copy, right?
What the RIAA, MPAA, and apparently you need to understand, most people
consider themselves basically honest. People want to "do the right thing", and
they want to support their favorite artists.
People do not, however, like getting "burned" buying an album of crap with one
overhyped single on it.
You basically have two kinds of music downloaders... The first group (which I consider
the vast majority) downloads a few tracks to check them out, and if they enjoy the
music, they'll buy the album. The music industry should court these people,
not take them to court, because they count as customers (if they don't get too
pissed off at the antipiracy measures put in their way). The second group will download
anything and everything the can, and wouldn't dream of paying for music. You can fairly
call them parasites, but their behavior (and how little they actually buy) wouldn't change in
the least if the MP3 fairy came along and made it physically impossible to pirate music. So, as
much as the industry may hate them, they have no effect on sales, whether given free
reign to download, or whether DRM eventually proves effective in stopping them.
I would actually add to that one more pseudocategory, the "potential" customers... These people
fall into the first group but currently can't afford to actually buy much music. Many
college students fall into this category. Although they may superficially look like group
#2 at their present station in life, in a decade they will start replacing their collection
with legally obtained copies, to the great profit of the music industry.
So, does the industry need to address the "problem" of try-before-you-buy, or embrace it?
Since we don't already all have a complete collection of every song ever made, despite the
ready availability of them, I'd say "no". This problem exists only in the closets and under the
beds of media company CEOs.
So I doubt you'll run into such cases very often (unless you're using deny permissions
which makes everything more complicated).
So... ACLs don't get complicated... unless... we use the complicated features thereof?
"Riiight"
Developers can read and write (two). Users (the two people who can program the machine
accessed with this system) can read and execute the code. Nobody else can touch it. How do
you handle that with just an owner-group-all system?
"chown -R whoever:developers devpath"
"chmod -R g+rw,o-rwx devpath"
"chown -R whoever:users usepath"
"chmod -R g-w,g+r,o-rwx usepath" (you probably wouldn't want to force g+x, but could)
"make install" (copies the resulting executables from devpath to usepath).
You do realize Microsoft hired Dave Cutler (the guy who created VMS) to design NT, right?
Yes, actually, I do. And I'd say most of the same complaints about VMS - Except
that Windows doesn't have the rock-solid stability to make up for the hellishness
of use.
Yeah, because right-clicking a file or folder, selecting Properties, then
choosing the confusingly labeled Security tab is difficult.
Hypothetical situation for you...
You have Domain Admin (but not EA) on a standard mid-sized multi-site corporate
network. A finance-related folder on your NAS has users, local groups, domain groups,
and forest groups set on it, including possibly-contradictory local and inherited
permissions.
Quick, in 15 seconds or less, tell me who in the Dallas Accounting office has
write permission to the 2006 internal audit folder.
You can fairly plead that you couldn't even have such a situation under
Linux (not with the stock FS permission system, anyway), but I would say the same
thing in support of my stance.
I wonder if the author's used chmod, chown, etc.? What's the essential difference
between Unix style permissions and other permission systems?
Well, Windows uses the ACL system of permissions it stole from VMS. It actually
does provide more control (that you don't need 99.9% of the time), such as multiple
groups having different levels of permissions.
Increasingly complex file-level security does come with one major drawback, however...
I can look at a file under Linux and instantly tell (possibly with a quick check
of the members of a single group) who has what access to it. Under Windows,
good luck with that. XP actually has an advanced security tab, "Effective
Permissions", solely for the purpose of testing what access a given user has to
a file or directory. Short of that tool, some of the more complex possible configurations
(which don't take any sort of unrealistically contrived setups to get, such as a
combination of local and domain groups having both inherited and locally set permissions)
would leave you feeling very uncomfortable guessing who has access to a given
file. And of course, that tab only lets you check one user or group at a time, so it
proves utterly useless in answering the simple question "Who can overwrite this file".
In fairness, you could write a script to test every user and group against a given set of
files and directories and generate a report off the output, but seriously, would anyone really
consider that "better" than "0750, yup, that looks good"?
Did you actually read what you quoted??? "the Attorney General shall issue regulations".
Not "congress", not even "the FCC", but Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzalez.
Second, the regulations are to deal with record retention, not tracking.
How does the AG saying "retain all traffic for three years or we execute you" (which the bill,
as written, would technically allow) not count as "tracking"? Retention vs tracking
amounts to nothing more than a game of semantics - If ISPs need to retain something for longer
than zero days, even if they don't already, they damned well better start or face hanging
out with Sami Al-Arian (you know, that shining example of Justice(tm) under Bush's DOJ, the
Florida CS professor who spent four years in solitary before the DOJ even charged him, had
his day in court and won, yet to this day he still rots in prison?)
Scary. Don't defend this shit - Whatever sadistic implementation of bad laws like this we
may fear, the DOJ will find a way to take it a step further.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm a cable TV company with 10,000 Internet customer who are mostly idle, I can afford to spend a lot less on overhead than if I have 10,000 customers who are maxing out their bandwidth.
Agreed - And I will also agree that the current broadband model has one major flaw, in that the average user comes in far below the peak users, but the infrastructure needs to support the peak users.
I wouldn't even object to increased stratification of broadband sevice based on peak bandwidth. Hell, I think I currently pay for a peak somewhere around 15Mbps, and really don't need anywhere near that (and I consider myself a fairly high-volume user).
I only objected to the pay-per-byte suggested by the GG(G?)P, where regardless of the capacity of the network, each individual byte costs nothing at all.
Except for the "idiots" who actually do want to get promoted to an executive position
If you don't consider that explicitly idiotic, you clearly need to turn in your geek license.
Geeks can manage. We don't wan't to. We like working in the pits.
Except for the people who actually like to be team players
"Team" has no "I" in it. Funny, that.
and hold up their share of the workload when all their teammates think it important enough to put in evening and weekend hours.
Y'know, my mother had a pretty good comeback for that one, which I learned somewhere around age 6... "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?". If all your coworkers work themselves to death... Well, need I continue?
You accomplish nothing but set yourself up for a never-ending spiral: You need to work harder to get ahead, but everyone else does it too so you need to work harder just to keep up. Race harder, little rat! Your cheese keeps moving!
Except for those who feel that their company is actually innovating a valuable contribution to society
"There will be poor always, pathetically struggling. Look at the good things you've got!"
Yes, if you're not one of those, you can certainly just go home and turn the beeping thing off.
Okay.
Let's compare notes in the afterlife and see which of us thinks we spent our lives better, you for working harder, or me for enjoying the short time I have on this planet.
<beep>
Walk through any major network centre and try to count the dollars for the machinery, fibre, and operating labour.
All fixed costs. NOCs, and the lines between them, cost $X in overhead whether they push 5Kb or 5Pb per day. The actual use costs nothing (except perhaps electricity, but even then, virtually all modern signalling protocols preferentially use electrically-off states).
Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors
With the exception of peerage, which I mentioned (and for end users, basically means paying your ISP bill), the rest just amounts to overhead. Same no matter how much traffic you have, up to your peak capacity. You can try to inflate the numbers however you want, but they still stay flat with respect to throughput when you factor in everything above you.
This is such horseshit.
Really, now? So, which tier-1 do you work for, that you wish to justify your profits?
The internet amounts to one big LAN, divided into a bunch of fiefdoms with petty little corporate barons charging fees at every drawbridge and intersection. Take away all the troll bridges, and you end up with fees based on the overhead (hardware and human maintenance) for a given capacity, totally uncorrelated with actual throughput.
If more ISPs would drop the "all you can eat unless you exceed the secret cap" plans and adopt real $/TB pricing, we'd be a lot better off and ISPs could better plan for growth.
Except, bandwidth doesn't cost anything. Seriously. My home network costs me the same whether I keep it saturated, or almost idle. The same goes for every later of telecomm all the way to the top.
Sure, you have to pay to get access outside the network you control (which applies whether you talk about your LAN, your local ISP, TW, or a tier-2). But that amounts to pissing in your own well - Your side of the network means nothing if you can't get to the other side.
The sooner everyone realizes this, the sooner we can all have FTTP for a pittance similar to the cost of an analog phone line 20 years ago.
Until then, "all you can eat" at the local level sure as hell beats the sort of "the rich get the bandwidth, the poor get dialup" scheme we once had (and you suggest bringing back).
Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary?
Yes, on two conditions - First, such "limiting" occurs on a fair, rotating schedule such that I can surf unimpeded for at least two four-hour blocks a day. And second, that my broadband provider drops my monthly fee by a proportional amount (eg, for only 8hrs a day, it should drop to a third of the current price).
Since I don't see either of those as likely (especially not the second point), I think we can safely answer "no way in hell" to the initial question.
How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage?
"Global bandwidth shortage" really amounts to a meaningless phrase, boiling down to one of three concepts: Do we mean the "last miles" have saturated? If so, upgrade them, entirely a local ISP problem (and changing ISPs might help). Do we mean the backbones have reached capacity? If so, upgrade them, entirely a problem of the Tier 1 and 2 providers (and changing ISPs might help). Do we mean a few key endpoints (such as Google) have reached capacity? They'd damned well better upgrade to handle the load, or people will naturally switch to their competition.
So in two of those three scenarios, the right answer amounts to "call my ISP and bitch loudly".
many employees feel obligated by employers who have handed out the devices
With whom does the fault rest here? The employers, or the idiots who make themselves available 24/7 at the whim of their workplace?
People, do us all a favor, and stop putting up with this bullshit. Just say no. If enough of us do it, "on call" will go back to a paid status (yes, "back" - Companies used to pay damned good money to have trained monkeys available at 3am).
It really disgusts me that people often tell me they need to actually "go away" on their vacations, or they'll get called in to work. Hello, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Stand up for yourselves! "Sorry, Dave, that third margarita looks damned good right now, so I'll talk to you when my vacation ends, on Monday morning. Beach? No, sitting in my living room, five minutes' drive from you. Buh-Bye."
As for whether or not you can "get away" with that - Yes, you most certainly can. Just do it right from day one, rather than giving in a bit at first to make yourself look more useful. Deluding your employer just sets you up for unhappyness later - Let them know right where you stand on such issues. A decent employer will even respect you for it.
Not to say I wouldn't honestly help out my coworkers, if convenient for me... I have gone in at bizarre hours to deal with emergencies - And damn well comp'ed the time the next day. But I do that at my pleasure, not as a condition of employment.
If responding off-hours became a requirement of the job, we'd have a problem, and they would need to find someone else for the position. And no, paying me more would not count as an option, because I work to live, not live to work, end of discussion.
If the user's ISP cooperates - which they will if they have a subpoena sent to their legal department or equivalent - then they will be able to determine who had that IP at what time. Easy peasy. Hope this doesn't come as a surprise to you.
No, not at all surprising.
It would, however, surprise me if someone intent on uploading prerelease content to YouTube did it from any machine directly tied to him. Library computer, Starbucks WiFi, even a hotel's link under a fake name. But as himself?
Doubtful.
Unless youre a system administrator, programmer, or uber-geek
So, you posted this on Slashdot, where the vast majority of readers will fall into one or more of those categories, why?
DRAM will also continue to be used off the chip.
Oh, good! They had me worried that I could no longer keep my DRAM in the water cooler. And how could I get through my day without a bit of chipless DRAM floating in midair above my keyboard?
Goodness. What next? They'll try to take away my off-chip flatware?
Many a /.er treats /. as a social nw site where you might try to build karma, bitch about MS etc etc.
You've just nailed (accidentally or not) what I see as the second biggest problem here (after the blatant unconstitutionality of the proposed legislation)...
What does count as a "social networking" site? Would SlashDot count? Would most blogs that allow comment posting? Would USENET, for that matter? The full text of the bill basically sounds like it violates Free (online) Assembly rather than Free Speech.
The concept of "social networking", as used here, really has no meaning except by example. When you outlaw meaningless ideas, you open the door for overly aggressive AGs and DAs to start creatively interpreting the law to apply in areas not even the most paranoid of the beanie-wearing crowd could have predicted. Case in point, the DOJ (in)famously held a series of lectures on how to apply the patriot act and subsequent antiterrorism legislation to your friendly neighborhood weed dealer. Riiiiiiiight, protection from Osama.
But, but, but... Think of the children!
I think the problem is this might ruin the LoTR name or story line.
Oh, no worries there.
For actual literate fans of the works of a great fantasy writer, neither this nor Peter Jackson nor even JRR's bastard(izing) offspring can spoil the original.
I thought the whole EU had some sort of "fair dealing" exemptions. If they do, I can't believe that Google's lawyers lost this.
Except that Google exists as a primarily American company, a "condition" as dangerous as the traditional Mafia "kiss of death" in any EU court.
Just look at the fun Microsoft has had with them...
"Roll over!"
"okay..."
"Play dead!"
[drool drool drool]
"open your formats"
"here, have the goddamned sourcecode and leave us alone!"
"not good enough, write your competitors' products or we'll fine you!"
Cheese-eating surrender- monkeys, indeed.
Does this mean that in your local area, you will be more of a threat than the flu?
It means I won't contribute to the problem or the solution.
You seem very eager to shoot people
I have no intention of going around hunting people for sport, if you thought I meant to imply that. I also have no intention, however, of sharing my supplies with masses of people lacking similar foresight.
while others work to keep society going in your absence.
Meh. Take it or leave it, all the same to me. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd buy my own island (with at least a few acres of arable land and a reliable source of fresh water) and voluntarily drop out of society. If a worst-case-scenario pandemic removed the "buy" part of that, you wouldn't see me crying over my Cheerios.
Exactly who do you think will be making the anti-virals that you're going to stock up on?
Well, the three in my collection come from Roche and GSK...
Who is going to do the research to work out what particular strain of virus we're looking at?
I didn't say "vaccine", I said "antiviral". We already have several families of these available. Unfortunately the goddamned Chinese have made amantidine useless by feeding it directly to their poultry, but neuraminase and viral DNA polymerase inhibitors still work fairly well.
If everyone takes the attitude that someone else will sort it out for them then we're doomed.
A lot of people seem to have confused a flu pandemic for an end-of-the-world scenario. It just means a month or two of serious inconvenience with a higher-than-normal chance of death. The biggest risk, by far, would come from panicked humans. Thus, you don't need to worry about the long-term survival of the species; only surviving three threats: The virus, most humans, and starvation. Anyone who weathers those past the peak of the pandemic, can look forward to dying of Big Mac induced heart failure 40 years down the road.
It's great that you have the savings (in cash, at hand)
I keep enough for a last-minute luxury-food shopping trip, but seriously... Bunnies and edible wild plants don't take AmEx or cash.
You do understand, right, that such a pandemic would last for many weeks at least, and probably many months
Weeks, yes. Months, no.
The 1918 pandemic lasted just under a year.
The 1957 and 1968 pandemics lasted roughly three months (despite much lower mortality rate) because they spread MUCH faster through a more densely packed population.
Most computer models of a pandemic in today's world have it spreading in basically three weeks. Within a month, people will have either died or survived it, and the world can resume as normal.
What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of millions of other people
Who said anything about tens of millions of other people? Most people would rather die at home than spend a month away from their TVs (whether it shows nothing but static or not) - I say, "let them". I have no intention of trying to save everyone. And I did mention ammo to deal with the few that get a hunger-inspired clue at the last minute.
(who will be bringing the virus with them)
I also mentioned antiviral drugs. Not talkin' bout "Captain Trips" here, just a plain ol' flu. Direct deaths will amount to 3% tops, mostly of the weak, very young, and elderly. Indirect deaths will depend entirely on how much society panics at having our thin veil of dominance over nature ripped to shreds for the first time in 30 years. I suspect, though, that deaths from secondary causes (starvation, rioting, the military response thereto, etc) could easily top actual deaths from the flu. Thus my preferred response, stay the hell out of the way until it all blows over.
but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are prepared to even consider.
Agreed, and most will fail. Some of us have already considered the task at length, however, and can survive, for a month or more, without electricity or a convenient supermarket.
Survival of the fittest, my friend. I say, "bring it on!"
In the past, epidemics did NOT cause the shutdown of business and commerce.
The last real pandemic, in 1918, occurred at a time when we didn't have anywhere near the population density common today. Dense urban areas more closely resembled modern rural suburbs. And it killed 35 million people.
Compare that to the more recent pandemic of 1968. It had a MUCH lower body count (less than seven million dead), but with the more dense cities of the time, spread considerably faster - A matter of three months rather than nearly a year for 1918. And computer models in today's world suggest a pandemic could saturate the population within three weeks. Given the same mortality rate as the 1918 flu, that would mean 140 million dead in the span of a month.
If that doesn't shut down most commerce...
The institute I work for will be sequestered by the government in the event of a pandemic.
Sounds like a good place to avoid in an emergency, then.
It doesn't take much contention on a DSL circuit to make video conferencing or IP telephony unusable, theses are the sorts of collaboration tool that will be required in this event.
What???
Perhaps, in the event of an emergency, you could get by with, y'know, plain ol' fashioned voice-over-analog-line telephony? God forbid you can't see a stuttery low-quality image of the person on the other end of the line, right?
Amazing. This whole topic simply blows me away. Work from home? Government restriction of YouTube? Gimme a frickin' break. I love computers, spend all of my workdays and a sizeable chunk of my free time on them, and you can bet your ass that in a real pandemic, I won't waste time on YouTube OR working remotely.
Step 0, keep a suitable supply of antivirals (and other drugs) on hand for everyone you intend to keep alive.
Step 1, secure a large supply of food and ammo at the first warning signs (some people, myself included, will already have this covered to some extent, making it step 0b).
Step 2, get the hell out of Dodge (flee cities and even suburbs).
Step 3, fortify your location against inevitable attack by starving idiots.
Step 4, catch up on my backlog of reading material.
Notice that nowhere in there do I intend to "work". If I can still surf the net from wherever I hole-up, I may well do so, but even that falls pretty low on the list of priorities.
That's the difference. Apparently some sites which they dedicate employees to help may not be legal.
So if a car dealership "dedicates employees" (eg, an on-call salesmen) to a local front-organization for the mob, has the car dealership acted illegally or even unethically?
As for the sites in question dealing in copyrighted material - So does Amazon. Would you require Google to make sure Amazon has the right to resell every book and CD they list?
First they say there's a bug with telnet passing switches through to login. Then they start a tirade against sending passwords in the clear.
I would not suggest overlooking that GLARING flaw with telnet.
Yes, we should consider this particular bug a serious flaw in need of repair. But it seems like something of an absurdity to worry about one critical security flaw while ignoring another just because it counts as a "feature" rather than a "bug".
I've got to say that not using something because it's broken is never a fix (unless you're a manager). The fix is to mend the problem.
But what do you do when the problem exists by design?
Perhaps someone would kindly post a quick explanation of the context for this FP?
I get the idea that "Perplex city" uses some sort of MTG-like gaming system, but how does that make it an "alternate reality" game, and where does this cube thing fit in?
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast.
Why?
DRM-less music has existed for longer than its DRM-encumbered counterpart. The web, Napster (v1), Kazaa, AllOfMP3 all made every album ever released fairly easy to get free or cheap, without any DRM.
And yet... The music industry still manages billions of dollars in sales per year.
How can that happen? It only takes one copy, right?
What the RIAA, MPAA, and apparently you need to understand, most people consider themselves basically honest. People want to "do the right thing", and they want to support their favorite artists.
People do not, however, like getting "burned" buying an album of crap with one overhyped single on it.
You basically have two kinds of music downloaders... The first group (which I consider the vast majority) downloads a few tracks to check them out, and if they enjoy the music, they'll buy the album. The music industry should court these people, not take them to court, because they count as customers (if they don't get too pissed off at the antipiracy measures put in their way). The second group will download anything and everything the can, and wouldn't dream of paying for music. You can fairly call them parasites, but their behavior (and how little they actually buy) wouldn't change in the least if the MP3 fairy came along and made it physically impossible to pirate music. So, as much as the industry may hate them, they have no effect on sales, whether given free reign to download, or whether DRM eventually proves effective in stopping them.
I would actually add to that one more pseudocategory, the "potential" customers... These people fall into the first group but currently can't afford to actually buy much music. Many college students fall into this category. Although they may superficially look like group #2 at their present station in life, in a decade they will start replacing their collection with legally obtained copies, to the great profit of the music industry.
So, does the industry need to address the "problem" of try-before-you-buy, or embrace it? Since we don't already all have a complete collection of every song ever made, despite the ready availability of them, I'd say "no". This problem exists only in the closets and under the beds of media company CEOs.
So I doubt you'll run into such cases very often (unless you're using deny permissions which makes everything more complicated).
So... ACLs don't get complicated... unless... we use the complicated features thereof?
"Riiight"
Developers can read and write (two). Users (the two people who can program the machine accessed with this system) can read and execute the code. Nobody else can touch it. How do you handle that with just an owner-group-all system?
"chown -R whoever:developers devpath"
"chmod -R g+rw,o-rwx devpath"
"chown -R whoever:users usepath"
"chmod -R g-w,g+r,o-rwx usepath" (you probably wouldn't want to force g+x, but could)
"make install" (copies the resulting executables from devpath to usepath).
You do realize Microsoft hired Dave Cutler (the guy who created VMS) to design NT, right?
Yes, actually, I do. And I'd say most of the same complaints about VMS - Except that Windows doesn't have the rock-solid stability to make up for the hellishness of use.
Yeah, because right-clicking a file or folder, selecting Properties, then choosing the confusingly labeled Security tab is difficult.
Hypothetical situation for you...
You have Domain Admin (but not EA) on a standard mid-sized multi-site corporate network. A finance-related folder on your NAS has users, local groups, domain groups, and forest groups set on it, including possibly-contradictory local and inherited permissions.
Quick, in 15 seconds or less, tell me who in the Dallas Accounting office has write permission to the 2006 internal audit folder.
You can fairly plead that you couldn't even have such a situation under Linux (not with the stock FS permission system, anyway), but I would say the same thing in support of my stance.
I wonder if the author's used chmod, chown, etc.? What's the essential difference between Unix style permissions and other permission systems?
Well, Windows uses the ACL system of permissions it stole from VMS. It actually does provide more control (that you don't need 99.9% of the time), such as multiple groups having different levels of permissions.
Increasingly complex file-level security does come with one major drawback, however... I can look at a file under Linux and instantly tell (possibly with a quick check of the members of a single group) who has what access to it. Under Windows, good luck with that. XP actually has an advanced security tab, "Effective Permissions", solely for the purpose of testing what access a given user has to a file or directory. Short of that tool, some of the more complex possible configurations (which don't take any sort of unrealistically contrived setups to get, such as a combination of local and domain groups having both inherited and locally set permissions) would leave you feeling very uncomfortable guessing who has access to a given file. And of course, that tab only lets you check one user or group at a time, so it proves utterly useless in answering the simple question "Who can overwrite this file".
In fairness, you could write a script to test every user and group against a given set of files and directories and generate a report off the output, but seriously, would anyone really consider that "better" than "0750, yup, that looks good"?
The sky is not falling.
Did you actually read what you quoted??? "the Attorney General shall issue regulations". Not "congress", not even "the FCC", but Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzalez.
Second, the regulations are to deal with record retention, not tracking.
How does the AG saying "retain all traffic for three years or we execute you" (which the bill, as written, would technically allow) not count as "tracking"? Retention vs tracking amounts to nothing more than a game of semantics - If ISPs need to retain something for longer than zero days, even if they don't already, they damned well better start or face hanging out with Sami Al-Arian (you know, that shining example of Justice(tm) under Bush's DOJ, the Florida CS professor who spent four years in solitary before the DOJ even charged him, had his day in court and won, yet to this day he still rots in prison?)
Scary. Don't defend this shit - Whatever sadistic implementation of bad laws like this we may fear, the DOJ will find a way to take it a step further.