Physical voting is not immune from error and malice, but it DOES limit the ability to do damage, because one person can only affect a very small number of votes, and it's possible to audit to detect them, and recount to correct them.
In the example that you give of a judge sneaking in putting in an extra vote every day, I'll point out that the impact was only a few votes, and he got caught. It's unfortunate that he wasn't prosecuted, but hopefully the humiliation will serve as a deterrent. I'll also point out that there was clearly a process problem, because in a well designed process the ballot boxes should be sealed at night, and only unsealed in the presence of multiple observers from multiple parties, with multiple, competing observers throughout the voting process, and re-sealed in front of the observers. The process should, of course, not rely on trusting any individual, but in the competing observers distrusting each other enough to keep each other honest.
"The protocol is invulnerable. The people executing the protocol aren't perfect, so in practice, real security on a well-designed e-ballot system greatly exceeds the current paper system."
Not even close. A well designed (people) process includes oversight sufficient to prevent any one person from succeeding, requiring large numbers of people to collude to affect more than a very small number of votes, which is easier to detect, and the presence of paper ballots allows for auditing and recounting, which will detect and correct for corrupt vote counting.
Digital voting mechanisms, on the other hand, lack any physical ballot, making cheating relatively easy, auditing impossible, and of course making recounts meaningless. And because it can be done in software, and the software is "proprietary" and cannot be audited, it's an obvious vulterability.
One good system that has the advantages of electronic voting (preventing overvoting, warning on undervoting, support for spoken prompts for the seeing impaired, efficient vote counting, etc.) and the advanages of paper ballots (validated record of votes, for auditing and recounting) is the one invented by the Open Voting Consortium, http://www.openvotingconsortium.org./
It's interesting to compare Makerbot and its more recent competitor, Cubify, as they do very similar things but with completely different business models, and that makes all the difference.
Cubify is a "consumer" service from a large, 3D printing company from the "enterprise" space, which views their cheap 3D printer as a way to grow their business by adding a content commerce chain, and adding a low cost home printer, so they're primarily focusing on making a commerce-enabled web site for loading 3D models that people pay to access and then print, with DRM, etc. The idea is that designers will put their work into their library because they get paid when people print their designs, which is a competitive, rather than collaborative, space. They also offer higher end printing services (a la Shapeways) using high end 3D printers, so they view the home 3D printer as just the "cheap option", which means that they didn't invest much effort into it (it looks like a rebadged Up! printer) and are not working too hard on making it better, just "cheap and easy" as an entryway for consumers, who they hope will then start buying high end print services. Another constrast, caused by this business model, is that their printer is a sealed device, with supplies sold in pre-packaged cartridges, so you can only buy supplies from them. It's such a closed box that they won't even tell how much plastic is in a cartridge. Their community is currently nearly invisible, though to be fair they aren't shipping their printer until the Fall, so there's not much to do there except create models that people might pay to access in six months.
Makerbot is a Maker/DIY company, focused on their 3D printer as their product, and it's all done in a very open way - their designs are open sourced, anyone can download the designs and manufacture their own, people contribute their own improvements to the hardware and software, which MBI can adopt, competing 3D printer products share many components with MBI, other companies sell replacement parts and even complete "clones" of their designs, etc., so it's a very open, flexible, competitive arena. MBI sells parts and supplies for their printers, but you're free to print your own parts, and to buy supplies from anywhere else that you like, and there are plenty of reviews comparing competing suppliers. Makerbot runs a site, Thingiverse, that is a collection of 3D models, with people actively contributing and collaborating. Of course, if you want paid 3D models, you have to go elsewhere (and you can, no lock-in) but there's a powerful collaborative dynamic in Thingiverse, where designs are contributed by one person, enhanced by others, merged into mash-ups, etc. so there are now so many new posts a day on Thingiverse that it's nearly impossible to keep up. And it's not limited to Makerbot customers - there are people with any kind of 3D printer, from completely DIY RepRaps to $100K Z-Corp printers, all working together and sharing ideas. It very much reminds me of the early days of software, when everyone helped each other out, because the challenge was in figuring this new stuff out and making it work to get something done.
I suspect that 3D printing is fundamentally a creative market. That is, people won't be satisfied just printing what others have designed, because most of the potential of home 3D printing isn't just in being able to print in your home, it's in being able to 3D print things that are uniquely yours. For example, if you want a standard measuring cup, you can easily buy them in a store. But if you want to print your own, in exactly the sizes that you need, with your name embossed in it, there's an easily customizable design (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17174) on Thingiverse. And to illustrate the power of open collaboration, that design was derived from someone else's, where I added the printed labels, and someone else can come along and add a handle, or put Stephen Colbert's face onto them, etc., whatever weird and cool thing they want. That is admittedly a
The analysis was great. They used some very clever techniques, and wrote it up thoroughly.
The reporting is absurdly overhyped, with statements like "one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload private data back to the apps' creators " Almost all of the "privacy leaking" was simply apps capturing device ID's (UDID), which is routine piece of data collected for issue resolution, and isn't "privacy" any more than a web server logging your IP address is violating your privacy. If you're worried about that, you probably should change your IP address every day, and disable browser cookies. A few apps ask for location data (which requires user acceptance) and send it to the server, which is under user control so isn't "leaking".
The only "bad" apps that they found were a "few cases in which the address book, the browser history, and the photo gallery is leaked." Those are (at least potentially) evil. They found 5 in iUS and 4 in Cydia, which was well under 1% of the apps checked. Those apps should be "outed" so that people can at least make an informed decision about whether there's a good need for that kind of data access.
Remember, the code of Mac OS X was NeXTSTEP, which ran on a wide range of CPUs (MIPS, 680x0, x86, SPARC, HP PA RISC). Mac OS X _always_ ran on x86. Mac OS X has always made multi-architecture support easy - resources are all portable, and for developers it's only a check box, which defaults to being checked. And given that iOS runs on ARM, and it's the same compiler and naerly the same code and dev tools, it's a safe bet that Mac OS X could be running on ARM fairly easily. I could see a really smart intern pulling that off.
The only hard part would be getting developers to recompile their apps, and for users to install the new versions. Given that a few people complained about Apple dropping PPC emulation last year, after 7 years of warnings, there are clearly some long-abandoned apps out there that at least a few people still run.
After running a MacBook AIR (and loving it) I'm not sure that it would benefit much from moving to ARM. Longer battery life (or smaller battery) is good, of course, but more power is consumed by the display than the CPU. And the ARM is fairly slow, compared even to the CPUs in the MacBook AIR. Of course, if the next generation ARM were dramatically faster, I don't think anyone would complain about faster and longer battery life.
Weirdly, the biggest impact would probably be the price - ARM chips cost much, much less than x86 chips. They're much smaller/simpler, so cost less to make, and ARM sells mainly to embedded/consumer electronics device manufacturers, who are extremely price sensitive, much more so than PC manufacturers. So going from x86 to ARM could drop Apple's costs significantly. Woot!
Interesting argument, but usually in Mac OS X apps the resources are much larger than the executable binaries, and the resources are reused on all platforms, so the overhead for the extra binaries in downloads (and install CD's, if anyone uses them) isn't too bad. The installer can strip out the binaries that are unneeded, saving your local disk space, if you want.
Exactly. This extreme portability is all inherited from NeXTSTEP, which ran native on 680x0, x86, HP PA RISC, PowerPC, and SPARC. Rumor has it that while Apple doesn't ship for all of those OSs, they keep the builds working across all of those CPUs in order to make sure that they don't break portability, keeping their options open for the future.
Given that, I think that you are right - adding more architectures basically means using the existing compiler and adding the back-end to generate the new CPU's binaries, and recompiling everything.
I'd argue that it _is_ Siri, but indirectly. That is, Siri is efficient, but it improves the usability of web services. By making it easier to look up directions, check flights, etc., it increases usage, leading users to consume more data. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
The 4S is selling in volumes that are hard to think are just early adopters.
My guess is that Siri makes using web services much easier for normal people, and improved usability leads to increased usage. That's a great thing, not inefficiency.
Keep in mind that it's far more efficient for a city to provide a universal service paid for by taxes than to waste a fortune building access controls and billing systems in order to keep people out until they pay. For example, look at telephony - the accounting and billing systems that control, track, and charge for the phone calls costs far, far more than the actual cost of providing the phone calls. Is it really that important to triple the cost of phone calls just to make sure that nobody gets free phone calls?
Historically, privatized services provide lower quality service at higher cost than the same services run by public utilities. This has happened thousands of times, all over the planet, with the same effect. The only good argument for privatizing public utilities is profit to a small number of people doing the deal, generated by extracting the money from the public. Not a good argument, IMO.
Can't the city start a private company and be the sole customer? Are there laws preventing that?
That private company wouldn't be much of a municipal public broadband provider, they'd merely be a really small ISP.
That's exactly what many cities have done. That is, rather then staffing up the municipal IT staff to run a small ISP, some cities contract with an ISP to provide the service to the city. It's more efficient because the ISP has one, big customer to manage instead of billing thousands of individuals, so much lower administrative overhead. So the people "win" because they get internet access provided as a service paid for by their taxes, at much lower cost than if they were individually billed.
"the mere existence of a government provider would prevent the situation ever improving"
Sure, because FedEx and Perrier don't exist, because it's impossible to compete with the Post Office and municipal water. If private industries are unable to provide competitive broadband services with municipal broadband, it's not clear to me that the right response is to outlaw their competition.
"broadband is not essential"
Sure, and roads aren't essential either, nor a standing army, firemen or police. Luckily, the people of the United States formed a government to provide for the common good, which is not limited to things that you think are "essential".
"the allure of municipal broadband lies with the vision of free internet. Just like free public pasture land it never works out that way"
If broadband were an absolutely limited resource, like a pasture, you might have the problem of it running out. Luckily you can expand capacity with no limit, so if people use more bandwidth you can grow capacity to suit.
You're right that some cities might contract broadband out to service providers, just as they do (for many cities) for water, power generation, telephony, etc., granting regulated monopolies.
Unlike pure competition, regulated companies are forced to provide quality service and invest in infrastructure, in return for a guaranteed return - if their service level is below requirements, they don't get paid. Of course, if you deregulate the companies, they are short sighted and strip their infrastructure to make short term profits. For example, look at how deregulated power companies stripped the safety margins from the US power grid, leading to failures and brownouts. The proper response, of course, is to restore proper regulations so that the US infrastructure is properly maintained.
Wow, you're looking at a 2,000 year trend, showing near-perfect coorelation between human CO2 production and global temperature, and complaining that this year's numbers are a little lower than the year before? Perhaps the economy tanking decreased CO2 production?:-)
"American constitution atleast guarantees free speech with virtually no restrictions applied I believe"
That's long gone. As an extreme example, look at how for the last several elections' political conventions all protesters were forced into "free speech zones" out of site of the convention attendees and the press (i.e. you have free speech, but only where nobody can hear you). And the police arrested thousands of people to get them off the streets, for the same reason. Of course, all of those people were then released, because they hadn't broken any laws, but only after the conventions were over and the press was gone.
I'm not saying that the US is the most restrictive country - there are some that are much worse - but the constitutional rights have been heavily cut back in the last decade. Strangely, we had much stronger respect for civil rights when we were fighting the UK, the most powerful empire on the planet, than we do now, fighting a small number of desperate terrorists. George Washington, for example, expressly forbade torturing captured British soldiers, even though the British tortured captured American soldiers.
"In 1776," wrote historian David Hackett Fischer in "Washington's Crossing," "American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution."
This commitment to our principles was how we won the war against a much larger, more powerful empire. Everywhere they went, pillaging, torturing and killing, they created more opposition. Or, as one of their soldiers wrong "Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate."
Our modern leaders have less foresight. But then, I'm sure that the British in 1776 thought that they were right, too.
"Some of the data. It's very seldom that a peer gets the entirety of even a single file from one particular peer."
Of course. But if they ask for 5 random 4KB chunks of the data, and all of them match the copyrighted data exactly, and the swarm hash matches exactly, it's pretty hard to argue that you're not downloading and serving the copyrighted data. I've never heard anyone argue that because you downloaded pieces of a file from 100 different peers that there was no copyright violation. I'll point out that you can copy less than an entire work to violate copyright; in music, even a few notes or a sound clip, if they're distinct, can be a copyright violation. It's also incorrect to say that unless you have all of the pieces of the file that it's unusable; it would be better to say that it's incomplete. If the file were encrypted until it were completely downloaded, then you could argue that you don't have a copy of the data, but that's not the case here. Copyright law doesn't say anything about intentions, it says that if you make copies of a work you need permission of the copyright holder (or fall under Fair Use).
My main point is that using BitTorrent, you're broadcasting your IP address and notifying your peers on the network as you download the data, and offering to upload the data to anyone who asks, so you're in a weak legal position. IMO.
I do agree, though, that the weak point (as I said in my original post) is that the media company has to get the person's identity from the ISP, based on the IP address. So you can argue that the ISP got the wrong customer, or someone used your network without your permission, or used your computer without permission, or a virus triggered the download. Which seems plausible. There's one case where "grandma" paid the ISP bill, and one of the grandkids was likely downloading stuff, which of course the ISP couldn't know.
The technology is already there to release info in ways that can't be stopped. They're going after Bradley Manning in order to deter future leaks from making it out to the network. Of course, the WikiLeaks info was also vetted and published by newspapers and magazines, but you don't see the government going after them.:-)
You're right - I was thinking of the eMule search 'fan' problem, which is much worse than DHTs as optimized by Kademlia (cool stuff). Still, turning one query into O(40) queries, which have to be done sequentially, is still a pretty big performance hit, and you're still not guaranteed 100% coverage (in the real world), so if you can have a reliable central tracker it's much better than DHTs. Though if you can't have a central tracker for non-technical reasons, a DHT is better than nothing.:-)
Many ISPs are already doing packet inspection triggering traffic shaping. This is creepy, IMO, because it penalizes people based on the network protocol used by an app, which seems weird. For example, if you use a P2P network that uses HTTP for everything you're better off than if it uses a P2P protocol, which IMO encourages bad behavior (i.e. if all apps use HTTP for everything, it's hard to manage traffic when you want to).
Speed throttling, on the other hand, seems fair. That is, if you're paying for X data rate, you get it, no matter what protocol your software happens to use.
You need to travel more. Since 9/11 the US government is much more heavy-handed than the governments of most other countries, and social mobility here (i.e. you can work hard and succeed) is less than elsewhere. So while we like to think of ourselves as free men on the rugged frontier, the reality has changed.
Sensible from a consumer's perspective, and it's certainly what many people do (so their boxed sets stay "good as new"), but at least in the US I wouldn't say that it's legal. The media companies' position is that owning a copy of a work in one form doesn't give you the legal right to freely download the work. You can buy some disks that put all formats into one box/purchase - I've bought many Blu Ray disks that included DVD and digital copies. Those cost a bit more, because the media companies have to pay the artists and composers once for each of the formats. That is, if you buy a Blu Ray/DVD/Digital version of a movie, the director, actors, composers, musicians, etc., get paid three times, once for the Blu Ray copy, once for the DVD copy, and once for the digital copy. And, of course, there's the additional production and manufacturing cost of making the additional disks/downloads.
"1) Smaller bandwidth footprint due to the size. Each small file adds up. Making the files smaller helps a lot. If the Pirate Bay has to resort to another ISP with lower quality bandwidth."
Note that while the magnet link is smaller than the torrent file, saving TPB bandwidth, it uses DHT's to locate and retrieve the torrent file, which uses thousands to millions of times more bandwidth than the torrent file. Admittedly it's peer bandwidth, which TPB doesn't have to pay for, but it shouldn't be ignored completely.
"2) If the entirety of Pirate Bay can be hosted on a thumb drive then it is hard to simply nuke the Pirate Bay. Just give a few trusted people thumb drive copies as backups."
TPB (or any other tracker) isn't really a web site that can be 'hosted on a thumb drive', it's a dynamic database of torrents, which is searchable, etc. Any copy on a USB drive would immediately be out of date. Better to use database replication, so there could be multiple mirrors of the database in different places, each running a copy of TPB.
"But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a.magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a.torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a.torrent."
Downloading a.torrent file gives you all of the info needed to start the swarm in one file transfer.
Downloading a magnet link uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is a distributed mechanism that does a huge amount of work in order to spread information across a huge swarm of peers in a resilient way, with tons of redundancy and checking, such that there's no dependency on any one server. That means that, for example, if the Tracker is shut down, the system keeps working. Resiliency is great, but the cost is that instead of a single action to retrieve the torrent file, you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file. Aside from being slower, it's also less reliable, in that there's a limit to how many times the query message gets repeated (so that each query doesn't spawn off an infinite number of queries) you might be downloading something obscure that your peers, their peers, etc., don't know about.
"Can someone explain how a.magnet bypasses.torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that."
Magnet links aren't links to files ending in.magnet, they're URLs with a different protocol label (magnet: instead of http:) which are passed to a BitTorrent client to handle. If the blocking is looking for an HTTP request of a filename ending in.torrent, it won't see one.
Of course, if a firewall is blocking the BitTorrent protocol, then it'll be blocked whether the transfer is started by a.torrent file or a magnet link.
You curse the gods of probability, because the odds of torrent ID collisions is pretty low. Torrent IDs are 160 bit hashes, so there are 2^160 values, which is 1.46150164 × 10^48. If there were 100m torrents, the odds of a collision would be 1 out of 1^40th, which is a number so big that it doesn't have a name.
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Physical voting is not immune from error and malice, but it DOES limit the ability to do damage, because one person can only affect a very small number of votes, and it's possible to audit to detect them, and recount to correct them.
In the example that you give of a judge sneaking in putting in an extra vote every day, I'll point out that the impact was only a few votes, and he got caught. It's unfortunate that he wasn't prosecuted, but hopefully the humiliation will serve as a deterrent. I'll also point out that there was clearly a process problem, because in a well designed process the ballot boxes should be sealed at night, and only unsealed in the presence of multiple observers from multiple parties, with multiple, competing observers throughout the voting process, and re-sealed in front of the observers. The process should, of course, not rely on trusting any individual, but in the competing observers distrusting each other enough to keep each other honest.
"The protocol is invulnerable. The people executing the protocol aren't perfect, so in practice, real security on a well-designed e-ballot system greatly exceeds the current paper system."
Not even close. A well designed (people) process includes oversight sufficient to prevent any one person from succeeding, requiring large numbers of people to collude to affect more than a very small number of votes, which is easier to detect, and the presence of paper ballots allows for auditing and recounting, which will detect and correct for corrupt vote counting.
Digital voting mechanisms, on the other hand, lack any physical ballot, making cheating relatively easy, auditing impossible, and of course making recounts meaningless. And because it can be done in software, and the software is "proprietary" and cannot be audited, it's an obvious vulterability.
One good system that has the advantages of electronic voting (preventing overvoting, warning on undervoting, support for spoken prompts for the seeing impaired, efficient vote counting, etc.) and the advanages of paper ballots (validated record of votes, for auditing and recounting) is the one invented by the Open Voting Consortium, http://www.openvotingconsortium.org./
Exactly.
It's interesting to compare Makerbot and its more recent competitor, Cubify, as they do very similar things but with completely different business models, and that makes all the difference.
Cubify is a "consumer" service from a large, 3D printing company from the "enterprise" space, which views their cheap 3D printer as a way to grow their business by adding a content commerce chain, and adding a low cost home printer, so they're primarily focusing on making a commerce-enabled web site for loading 3D models that people pay to access and then print, with DRM, etc. The idea is that designers will put their work into their library because they get paid when people print their designs, which is a competitive, rather than collaborative, space. They also offer higher end printing services (a la Shapeways) using high end 3D printers, so they view the home 3D printer as just the "cheap option", which means that they didn't invest much effort into it (it looks like a rebadged Up! printer) and are not working too hard on making it better, just "cheap and easy" as an entryway for consumers, who they hope will then start buying high end print services. Another constrast, caused by this business model, is that their printer is a sealed device, with supplies sold in pre-packaged cartridges, so you can only buy supplies from them. It's such a closed box that they won't even tell how much plastic is in a cartridge. Their community is currently nearly invisible, though to be fair they aren't shipping their printer until the Fall, so there's not much to do there except create models that people might pay to access in six months.
Makerbot is a Maker/DIY company, focused on their 3D printer as their product, and it's all done in a very open way - their designs are open sourced, anyone can download the designs and manufacture their own, people contribute their own improvements to the hardware and software, which MBI can adopt, competing 3D printer products share many components with MBI, other companies sell replacement parts and even complete "clones" of their designs, etc., so it's a very open, flexible, competitive arena. MBI sells parts and supplies for their printers, but you're free to print your own parts, and to buy supplies from anywhere else that you like, and there are plenty of reviews comparing competing suppliers. Makerbot runs a site, Thingiverse, that is a collection of 3D models, with people actively contributing and collaborating. Of course, if you want paid 3D models, you have to go elsewhere (and you can, no lock-in) but there's a powerful collaborative dynamic in Thingiverse, where designs are contributed by one person, enhanced by others, merged into mash-ups, etc. so there are now so many new posts a day on Thingiverse that it's nearly impossible to keep up. And it's not limited to Makerbot customers - there are people with any kind of 3D printer, from completely DIY RepRaps to $100K Z-Corp printers, all working together and sharing ideas. It very much reminds me of the early days of software, when everyone helped each other out, because the challenge was in figuring this new stuff out and making it work to get something done.
I suspect that 3D printing is fundamentally a creative market. That is, people won't be satisfied just printing what others have designed, because most of the potential of home 3D printing isn't just in being able to print in your home, it's in being able to 3D print things that are uniquely yours. For example, if you want a standard measuring cup, you can easily buy them in a store. But if you want to print your own, in exactly the sizes that you need, with your name embossed in it, there's an easily customizable design (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17174) on Thingiverse. And to illustrate the power of open collaboration, that design was derived from someone else's, where I added the printed labels, and someone else can come along and add a handle, or put Stephen Colbert's face onto them, etc., whatever weird and cool thing they want. That is admittedly a
Sure, and that's exactly what web sites do now with browser cookies. So there's really nothing new to worry about.
Let's focus on the real evil behavior, such as apps scooping up users' address books. That needs to be stopped.
The analysis was great. They used some very clever techniques, and wrote it up thoroughly.
The reporting is absurdly overhyped, with statements like "one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload private data back to the apps' creators " Almost all of the "privacy leaking" was simply apps capturing device ID's (UDID), which is routine piece of data collected for issue resolution, and isn't "privacy" any more than a web server logging your IP address is violating your privacy. If you're worried about that, you probably should change your IP address every day, and disable browser cookies. A few apps ask for location data (which requires user acceptance) and send it to the server, which is under user control so isn't "leaking".
The only "bad" apps that they found were a "few cases in which the address book, the browser history, and the photo gallery is leaked." Those are (at least potentially) evil. They found 5 in iUS and 4 in Cydia, which was well under 1% of the apps checked. Those apps should be "outed" so that people can at least make an informed decision about whether there's a good need for that kind of data access.
Remember, the code of Mac OS X was NeXTSTEP, which ran on a wide range of CPUs (MIPS, 680x0, x86, SPARC, HP PA RISC). Mac OS X _always_ ran on x86. Mac OS X has always made multi-architecture support easy - resources are all portable, and for developers it's only a check box, which defaults to being checked. And given that iOS runs on ARM, and it's the same compiler and naerly the same code and dev tools, it's a safe bet that Mac OS X could be running on ARM fairly easily. I could see a really smart intern pulling that off.
The only hard part would be getting developers to recompile their apps, and for users to install the new versions. Given that a few people complained about Apple dropping PPC emulation last year, after 7 years of warnings, there are clearly some long-abandoned apps out there that at least a few people still run.
After running a MacBook AIR (and loving it) I'm not sure that it would benefit much from moving to ARM. Longer battery life (or smaller battery) is good, of course, but more power is consumed by the display than the CPU. And the ARM is fairly slow, compared even to the CPUs in the MacBook AIR. Of course, if the next generation ARM were dramatically faster, I don't think anyone would complain about faster and longer battery life.
Weirdly, the biggest impact would probably be the price - ARM chips cost much, much less than x86 chips. They're much smaller/simpler, so cost less to make, and ARM sells mainly to embedded/consumer electronics device manufacturers, who are extremely price sensitive, much more so than PC manufacturers. So going from x86 to ARM could drop Apple's costs significantly. Woot!
Interesting argument, but usually in Mac OS X apps the resources are much larger than the executable binaries, and the resources are reused on all platforms, so the overhead for the extra binaries in downloads (and install CD's, if anyone uses them) isn't too bad. The installer can strip out the binaries that are unneeded, saving your local disk space, if you want.
Exactly. This extreme portability is all inherited from NeXTSTEP, which ran native on 680x0, x86, HP PA RISC, PowerPC, and SPARC. Rumor has it that while Apple doesn't ship for all of those OSs, they keep the builds working across all of those CPUs in order to make sure that they don't break portability, keeping their options open for the future.
Given that, I think that you are right - adding more architectures basically means using the existing compiler and adding the back-end to generate the new CPU's binaries, and recompiling everything.
I'd argue that it _is_ Siri, but indirectly. That is, Siri is efficient, but it improves the usability of web services. By making it easier to look up directions, check flights, etc., it increases usage, leading users to consume more data. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
The 4S is selling in volumes that are hard to think are just early adopters.
My guess is that Siri makes using web services much easier for normal people, and improved usability leads to increased usage. That's a great thing, not inefficiency.
Keep in mind that it's far more efficient for a city to provide a universal service paid for by taxes than to waste a fortune building access controls and billing systems in order to keep people out until they pay. For example, look at telephony - the accounting and billing systems that control, track, and charge for the phone calls costs far, far more than the actual cost of providing the phone calls. Is it really that important to triple the cost of phone calls just to make sure that nobody gets free phone calls?
Historically, privatized services provide lower quality service at higher cost than the same services run by public utilities. This has happened thousands of times, all over the planet, with the same effect. The only good argument for privatizing public utilities is profit to a small number of people doing the deal, generated by extracting the money from the public. Not a good argument, IMO.
Can't the city start a private company and be the sole customer? Are there laws preventing that?
That private company wouldn't be much of a municipal public broadband provider, they'd merely be a really small ISP.
That's exactly what many cities have done. That is, rather then staffing up the municipal IT staff to run a small ISP, some cities contract with an ISP to provide the service to the city. It's more efficient because the ISP has one, big customer to manage instead of billing thousands of individuals, so much lower administrative overhead. So the people "win" because they get internet access provided as a service paid for by their taxes, at much lower cost than if they were individually billed.
"the mere existence of a government provider would prevent the situation ever improving"
Sure, because FedEx and Perrier don't exist, because it's impossible to compete with the Post Office and municipal water. If private industries are unable to provide competitive broadband services with municipal broadband, it's not clear to me that the right response is to outlaw their competition.
"broadband is not essential"
Sure, and roads aren't essential either, nor a standing army, firemen or police. Luckily, the people of the United States formed a government to provide for the common good, which is not limited to things that you think are "essential".
"the allure of municipal broadband lies with the vision of free internet. Just like free public pasture land it never works out that way"
If broadband were an absolutely limited resource, like a pasture, you might have the problem of it running out. Luckily you can expand capacity with no limit, so if people use more bandwidth you can grow capacity to suit.
You're right that some cities might contract broadband out to service providers, just as they do (for many cities) for water, power generation, telephony, etc., granting regulated monopolies.
Unlike pure competition, regulated companies are forced to provide quality service and invest in infrastructure, in return for a guaranteed return - if their service level is below requirements, they don't get paid. Of course, if you deregulate the companies, they are short sighted and strip their infrastructure to make short term profits. For example, look at how deregulated power companies stripped the safety margins from the US power grid, leading to failures and brownouts. The proper response, of course, is to restore proper regulations so that the US infrastructure is properly maintained.
Wow, you're looking at a 2,000 year trend, showing near-perfect coorelation between human CO2 production and global temperature, and complaining that this year's numbers are a little lower than the year before? Perhaps the economy tanking decreased CO2 production? :-)
"American constitution atleast guarantees free speech with virtually no restrictions applied I believe"
That's long gone. As an extreme example, look at how for the last several elections' political conventions all protesters were forced into "free speech zones" out of site of the convention attendees and the press (i.e. you have free speech, but only where nobody can hear you). And the police arrested thousands of people to get them off the streets, for the same reason. Of course, all of those people were then released, because they hadn't broken any laws, but only after the conventions were over and the press was gone.
I'm not saying that the US is the most restrictive country - there are some that are much worse - but the constitutional rights have been heavily cut back in the last decade. Strangely, we had much stronger respect for civil rights when we were fighting the UK, the most powerful empire on the planet, than we do now, fighting a small number of desperate terrorists. George Washington, for example, expressly forbade torturing captured British soldiers, even though the British tortured captured American soldiers.
"In 1776," wrote historian David Hackett Fischer in "Washington's Crossing," "American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution."
This commitment to our principles was how we won the war against a much larger, more powerful empire. Everywhere they went, pillaging, torturing and killing, they created more opposition. Or, as one of their soldiers wrong "Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate."
Our modern leaders have less foresight. But then, I'm sure that the British in 1776 thought that they were right, too.
Rather than me quote the whole thing, go read it http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1217-30.htm.
"Some of the data. It's very seldom that a peer gets the entirety of even a single file from one particular peer."
Of course. But if they ask for 5 random 4KB chunks of the data, and all of them match the copyrighted data exactly, and the swarm hash matches exactly, it's pretty hard to argue that you're not downloading and serving the copyrighted data. I've never heard anyone argue that because you downloaded pieces of a file from 100 different peers that there was no copyright violation. I'll point out that you can copy less than an entire work to violate copyright; in music, even a few notes or a sound clip, if they're distinct, can be a copyright violation. It's also incorrect to say that unless you have all of the pieces of the file that it's unusable; it would be better to say that it's incomplete. If the file were encrypted until it were completely downloaded, then you could argue that you don't have a copy of the data, but that's not the case here. Copyright law doesn't say anything about intentions, it says that if you make copies of a work you need permission of the copyright holder (or fall under Fair Use).
My main point is that using BitTorrent, you're broadcasting your IP address and notifying your peers on the network as you download the data, and offering to upload the data to anyone who asks, so you're in a weak legal position. IMO.
I do agree, though, that the weak point (as I said in my original post) is that the media company has to get the person's identity from the ISP, based on the IP address. So you can argue that the ISP got the wrong customer, or someone used your network without your permission, or used your computer without permission, or a virus triggered the download. Which seems plausible. There's one case where "grandma" paid the ISP bill, and one of the grandkids was likely downloading stuff, which of course the ISP couldn't know.
The technology is already there to release info in ways that can't be stopped. They're going after Bradley Manning in order to deter future leaks from making it out to the network. Of course, the WikiLeaks info was also vetted and published by newspapers and magazines, but you don't see the government going after them. :-)
You're right - I was thinking of the eMule search 'fan' problem, which is much worse than DHTs as optimized by Kademlia (cool stuff). Still, turning one query into O(40) queries, which have to be done sequentially, is still a pretty big performance hit, and you're still not guaranteed 100% coverage (in the real world), so if you can have a reliable central tracker it's much better than DHTs. Though if you can't have a central tracker for non-technical reasons, a DHT is better than nothing. :-)
Many ISPs are already doing packet inspection triggering traffic shaping. This is creepy, IMO, because it penalizes people based on the network protocol used by an app, which seems weird. For example, if you use a P2P network that uses HTTP for everything you're better off than if it uses a P2P protocol, which IMO encourages bad behavior (i.e. if all apps use HTTP for everything, it's hard to manage traffic when you want to).
Speed throttling, on the other hand, seems fair. That is, if you're paying for X data rate, you get it, no matter what protocol your software happens to use.
"Land of the free-est perhaps?"
You need to travel more. Since 9/11 the US government is much more heavy-handed than the governments of most other countries, and social mobility here (i.e. you can work hard and succeed) is less than elsewhere. So while we like to think of ourselves as free men on the rugged frontier, the reality has changed.
Sensible from a consumer's perspective, and it's certainly what many people do (so their boxed sets stay "good as new"), but at least in the US I wouldn't say that it's legal. The media companies' position is that owning a copy of a work in one form doesn't give you the legal right to freely download the work. You can buy some disks that put all formats into one box/purchase - I've bought many Blu Ray disks that included DVD and digital copies. Those cost a bit more, because the media companies have to pay the artists and composers once for each of the formats. That is, if you buy a Blu Ray/DVD/Digital version of a movie, the director, actors, composers, musicians, etc., get paid three times, once for the Blu Ray copy, once for the DVD copy, and once for the digital copy. And, of course, there's the additional production and manufacturing cost of making the additional disks/downloads.
Outside the US the situation may be different.
"1) Smaller bandwidth footprint due to the size. Each small file adds up. Making the files smaller helps a lot. If the Pirate Bay has to resort to another ISP with lower quality bandwidth."
Note that while the magnet link is smaller than the torrent file, saving TPB bandwidth, it uses DHT's to locate and retrieve the torrent file, which uses thousands to millions of times more bandwidth than the torrent file. Admittedly it's peer bandwidth, which TPB doesn't have to pay for, but it shouldn't be ignored completely.
"2) If the entirety of Pirate Bay can be hosted on a thumb drive then it is hard to simply nuke the Pirate Bay. Just give a few trusted people thumb drive copies as backups."
TPB (or any other tracker) isn't really a web site that can be 'hosted on a thumb drive', it's a dynamic database of torrents, which is searchable, etc. Any copy on a USB drive would immediately be out of date. Better to use database replication, so there could be multiple mirrors of the database in different places, each running a copy of TPB.
"But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent."
Downloading a .torrent file gives you all of the info needed to start the swarm in one file transfer.
Downloading a magnet link uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is a distributed mechanism that does a huge amount of work in order to spread information across a huge swarm of peers in a resilient way, with tons of redundancy and checking, such that there's no dependency on any one server. That means that, for example, if the Tracker is shut down, the system keeps working. Resiliency is great, but the cost is that instead of a single action to retrieve the torrent file, you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file. Aside from being slower, it's also less reliable, in that there's a limit to how many times the query message gets repeated (so that each query doesn't spawn off an infinite number of queries) you might be downloading something obscure that your peers, their peers, etc., don't know about.
"Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that."
Magnet links aren't links to files ending in .magnet, they're URLs with a different protocol label (magnet: instead of http:) which are passed to a BitTorrent client to handle. If the blocking is looking for an HTTP request of a filename ending in .torrent, it won't see one.
Of course, if a firewall is blocking the BitTorrent protocol, then it'll be blocked whether the transfer is started by a .torrent file or a magnet link.
You curse the gods of probability, because the odds of torrent ID collisions is pretty low. Torrent IDs are 160 bit hashes, so there are 2^160 values, which is 1.46150164 × 10^48. If there were 100m torrents, the odds of a collision would be 1 out of 1^40th, which is a number so big that it doesn't have a name.