> This just in: Having a weird fetish means there is little free porn for you.
And that accounts for more than half of the porn *sold*. In another life, I wrote the security system that was used by most "pay sites", sites like GirlsGoneWild and NetvideoGirls with a monthly subscription. There is a lot of free^H^H^H^H^H ripped off tits and ass on the web. People pay for it when there's something special about the site. Either "weird fetish" or just "hook", a gimmick, something a bit different about the site.
In my role, I could see how many subscribers each site had, so I got a good gauge of what sells well. I also got to hear about once a week a customer asking me how they could stop people from ripping off their stuff and posting it on tube sites. DRM doesn't work, I had to tell them. All the music companies spent a hundred million dollars trying to create DRM that would work, but they are stuck selling mp3s for 99 cents because DRM doesn't work. "But Ray, you're the smartest security guy ever, I'm sure you can figure out a way to secure my content. I pay $5,000 for a shoot and 24 hours after I put it on the site some asshole puts it on the tubes! " Nope, can't fix that.
There's no such thing as a leprechaun. There's no such thing as a unicorn. There's no such thing as a gaseous solid. There's no such thing as a dollarback. There's no such thing as a purple patent. There's no such thing as a software patent.
Ps, my apologies to the chemists here, who know that dimethyl carbonate would *not* actually be a very good extinguishing agent. I wasn't going to *actually* invent a brand-new extinguishing agent just to make my post, so I named a random chemical that most people aren't familar with.
I've read a lot of patents, and written a lot of software (I've spent far more time programming though).
I've read some *extremely* specific "software patents"*, and some very general ones. The company I work for has a patent so specific that it would be hard to infringe it. If you tried, you'dv probably accidentally do something slightly differently, so your implementation wouldn't be covered by our patent.
There are about 40 MILLION commercial airplane flights each year. Of those 40 million, about 2 have fatal crashes. So 39,999,998 safe flights, 2 crashes. We all know which flights end up all over the news.
Patents are similar. Bad ones end up on the news, often being the subject of extensive litigation. If someone didn't know anything about commercial aviation, they'd never been on a plane or at at airport, just watching the news they might reasonably be very afraid of flying. Every flight they've ever heard about crashed. If you know something about aviation, you know that's not even a million-to-one chance, it's a twenty-million-to-one chance. If you've never had reason to read patents, and never been in any kind of court trial, you might reasonably think most of them are like the ones you hear about in the news.
There ARE some patents that are overly broad, which sucks. There are some plane flights that crash, which also sucks.
Actually even the patents you hear about in the news are frequently *not* actually like what you hear in the news, especially on Slashdot - patent law is a big clickbait item on Slashdot. Most of us know that half the tech-related headlines and summaries we see on Slashdot are basically BS. The same is true of patents.
Some company will apply for a patent related to new type of fire extinguisher for cars that uses a new compound they've developed, which requires a new kind of valve they've invented to handle it. They've *applied for* a patent to cover "toroidal double monkey valve inverted for use in automotive fire extinguishers using dry dimethyl carbonate extinguishing agent". The Slashdot headline will most assuredly be "Company Patents Fire Extinguishers". The summary will mention fire extinguishers in cars, but won't mention the newly invented valve which is the thing they are actually trying to patent. Slashdot commenters go wild posting about "prior art - Nascar". You can't really blame them, the summary didn't even mention the patent is for a special valve the company invented, to use with a brand new type of extingushing agent. Commenters react to the headline, not having any way to know it's BS unless they take time to research it.
* There's no such thing as a "software patent", but that's a topic for another day.
The people who actually read the patents, multiple juries, disagree with your claims of fact, 1, 3, and 4. If you'd care to point to even one *possible* instance of prior art, an interesting discussion might be possible. If you just keep saying random stuff, with absolutely no idea what the patents even cover - well that's just boring. We'd be watching Trump if we wanted to hear someone say random stuff from their ass. (Though he at least gets a five minute briefing first, most of the time.)
On 2 (math), you've been trolled. The law is: -- The laws of nature, including the laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, aren't patentable [because they aren't invented]. --
You can't patent gravity, you can patent a new elevator design. You can't patent momentum, you can patent a newly invented braking system. You can't patent multiplication, you can patent a time machine which happens to use gears (multiplication), levers (more multiplication), etc. You can't patent addition, you can patent a newly invented system for detecting spam, which happens to use addition and other things.
What's not patentable, and I'm quoting the law, are "the laws of nature".
I'm fairly certain insurance companies will require protection against that before they issue a policy.
I've been hoping we could get something like Underwriters Laboratories (UL) or the National Fire Protection Association (who authors the fire code) for security, and someone to get companies to follow the standards. Insurance companies created UL and NFPA and require corporate clients to mitigate risks that could result in a payout. I have hope they will be a very good thing for security. Insurance companies evaluate and manage risk for a living, and they are good at it.
I've been on Boost for a many years, so I haven't dealt with the high prices, poor customer service, and questionable billing practices that people complain about with the major carriers. I do remember, though, that when I left Sprint, it was because there prices were too high for the four MEGABYTES I went over. 28 GIGABYTES is more than a thousand times as much data as they offered when I last used a major carrier. The speed is 100X times faster than it was a few years ago.
The complaints about billing practices probably have merit, but I see that they've upgraded their networks to provide a thousand times as much data, a hundred times as fast, I don't quite relate to the whining I hear about speeds and data thresholds.
> the incentive for the insurance company is to pay the ransom
What insurance companies actually do is set conditions that *reduce* risk for their customers, so They don't have to pay anyone. They also create organizations such as Underwriters Laboratories and the National Fire Protection Association (who write the fire code).
In this case, the insurance company will require that in order to get converage, you'll need to have *proper* backups, with a checklist of requirements for *proper* backup. Then they never have to pay out, and collect (small) premiums basically in exchange for forcing companies to test their backups quarterly.
"This is a shining example", you said. Which of the three patents is a shining example and why? What issue do you see in whichever patent you're talking about?
> Anyone able to dig up just stats on support emails for Pidgin? I would hope that is 100% responses due to it being a support email. I can tell you within my support department, it doesn't matter what I end my email in; We have 100% response rate.
Based on my experience with corporate support email addresses, I'd venture to guess a typical "good" response rate is more like 90%-95%; emails get lost in all sorts of ways, before amd after they can make it to ticket system. Some get caught up in spam filters.
Anyway, I suspect you get *paid* to reply to support emails. Nobody gets paid on the Pidgin list. Requesters are asking other users to do them a favor by helping them out. Given the typical quality of support questions, if *most* get an answer I'd call that pretty good. I'm not going to take time out of my day to reply to someone who sends: Subject: HELP! Urgent! Body: I need to Pidgin. My friend message. Email me dumbass@aol.com today plese!
Check out the openings at AlertLogic.com Some of the positions listed as Houston may also be available in Dallas. Look real close at my nick and see if you can't guess my name. Put me down as a referral (I've read your posts).
You'd fit in pretty well in College Station too, but there aren't a lot of high-paying jobs there. The ratio of masters and phd students to businesses is too high.
RS-485 is still used quite a bit in industrial process control. It's also part of the standard used to control stage lighting and such. At a concert, when the lights are moving around and flashing that's RS-485 carrying a very simple protocol called DMX. I still build DMX stuff as a hobby these days.
It's advertised as not having a monthly data cap, nobody sais it's infinitely fast, that you can download the whole internet in less than a milisecond.
Would you propose that a cell phone which downloads at 10Gbps all month can't be advertised as an unlimited data plan?
Now that we've got two ridiculous ideas out of the way, what *is* the minimum speed they have to provide? There are three possibilities, depending on how they advertise it.
The simplest would be if they guaranteed a certain speed. Of course they don't, but if they said "unlimited 10 Mbps data all month", they'd need to provide that. Wired providers can make that guarantee (at a cost of $5/Mbps), wireless carriers can't, at any reasonable cost.
The next possibility, which doesn't apply in this case, would be if they sold an "NFL Edition" phone and data plan, which includes a subscription to NFL Game Pass, and id marketed with phrases like "watch every game, every game, every week." In that case, they would need to provide enough data to watch all the games (or most of them). That's called "warranty of fitness for a particular purpose." If you advertise it as being designed to X, it needs to actually be able to do X.
Without specific advertising, what's left is "warranty of merchantability." That means it works well enough that some purchasers will want to buy it. Lots of people have small phones. I rarely watch video on my phone if I'm not on wifi. . My mom never watches video on her phone. She doesn't even know how. Therefore, we like to pay only $25/month, which of course gets us service that isn't super fast all the time. We don't watch multiple simultaneous HD streams on our phones, amd we don't want to pay for the ability to do so. Merchantability requires only that it's fast enough to keep people like us reasonably happy.
It may be interesting to note here what one of the finite resources *is*, as it points to a clear solution.
Suppose a wireless carrier had unlimited money to spend running 10Gb fiber lines to each tower, so the wired infrastructure was unlimited. What *is* limited, if we're willing to spend unlimited money, to pay $5,000/month for LTE data service?
"Bandwidth" is a term that predates computers. It means literally the width of the frequency band a system operates on. For example, a particular wireless carrier may be licensed to operate in the frequencies between 1,000Mhz and 1,100Mhz. Their band is 100Mhz wide - 100Mhz bandwidth. (For reasons of RF physics, phones have to communicate with the tower using a radio frequency around 1 Ghz or so.) Anyway, the carrier has 100Mhz of wireless bandwidth.
90 years ago, a guy named Harry Nyquist did some math and proved that with 100Mhz of bandwidth, you can 200 ones or zeroes per second. In other words, 200 Mbps of ones and zeroes can flow over 100 Mhz of radio frequencies. That's called the Nyquist limit. (Purposely simplifying here by ignoring multiple-bit symbols because the point still stands, though the numbers change).
So we see that the carrier can move 200 Mbps using the radio band they are licensed for. If 200 customers are served by each group of non-overlapping towers, each customer can have 1Mbps. Math and physics are a bit stubborn on this point, though clever people have found ways to cheat a little bit.
Wow 1Mbps, but some people want to stream multiple HD Netflix movies simultaneously. What can you do? Well you can have fewer customers per tower. With 20 customers per tower, 200Mbps/20 is 10Mbps per customer. Kinda expensive to have a tower for every 20 customers, but we're pretending that customers, and carriers, are willing to spend as much as it takes. Still, 10 Mbps isn't quite enough for three simultaneous 1080p streams on your three TVs. So let's try installing a separate tower for each customer.
200 Mbps for each tower (actually each group of towers on non-overlapping frequencies) is enough if every customer has their own tower on their house (or in it). Let's do that! We'd need to write down some standard so that your phone or whatever device knows how to talk to the tower, a specification. That specification would probably best be somewhere under the data network section of the IEEE standards, the 802 section. Maybe we'll call it 802.11. Different versions can be 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, etc.:)
Seriously the physics is such that if you want many Mbps for each house, and they are all going to be using it at the same time, you *have* to run cabling to a seperate tower for each house. That's called wifi. There's just not enough radio bandwidth available for hundreds or thousands of customers to transfer HD video at the same time if they are sharing a tower.
Just the other day, there was a story about a research team that set up a multi Gbps wireless data connection, and the summary pointed out that like all such efforts, it has a range of about 3 meters due to the extremely high frequencies required to have that kind of bandwidth. (Remember bandwidth is defined as the range of frequencies the channel covers).
True, there's no such thing as unlimited resources, but of course you knew that already.
As far as "go hungry", I see there are plenty of beans, potatoes, and 3G casserole left, so you don't have to leave hungry just because you would have preferred a (fourth) chicken wing.
Walmart knows that by the time they caught you stealing $100 of stuff, you probably already stole $500 they didn't catch you for. So having you in the store has cost them $500 or more.
Walmart's profit margin is 3%, so just to break even they'd have to bet you'd buy at least $16,500 from them without stealing anything else. Since you're known to be thief, the odds of that happening are not good.
Well sorta. I have a similar plan (though with much less than 22GB, and at much lower cost.) There is no "limit" per se - it won't stop working, and there will be no charge for going over. It does get slower if I use more than the x GB I get at high speed. It's NOT "unlimited high speed data", it's "unlimited data, and 22GB at high speed".
Half of this makes perfect sense. If you have a family-style dinner, everyone gets a plate before anyone gets "seconds". You don't take four or five pieces of chicken until other people have a chance to get one. Commercial data connections are similar - you're guaranteed a certain minimum share of the bandwidth (your "committed information rate"), and you can use more *if and when it's available*. That means if you and I both sign up for 100 Mbps CIR, and I want to use 150Mbps, I can use the extra 50 Mbps only when you're not using it. If you're only using 80Mbps, your traffic takes priority because we each paid for 100 Mbps guaranteed. Does that make sense? That, I believe, is what TFS means by deprioritized after you go over 22GB. If I've used 100 GB and you've used 4 GB, your traffic gets priority over mine so that everyone can have their fair share. That just makes sense.
If they are throttling it down to 3G speeds *even when extra 4G capacity is available*, that would be silly because it would be wasteful, leaving 4G capacity idle.
Writing secure software has a lot to do with a frame of mind. A group of programmers can be really smart, but if they aren't thinking defensively, they'll write a bunch of vulnerabilities into the code. On the other hand, I've been mentoring a guy who is just starting to learn PHP, and one of the first things he asked me to help him understand was prepared statements with bound variables. He's trying very hard to make sure his very first program doesn't get hacked, and he'll probably succeed.
When I've pointed out security flaws in Wordpress and suggested solutions, the project leaders haven't taken it seriously. 18 months *after* I pointed out one flaw, it was used in large scale attacks that were covered by the press. Only then did they do something about it.
They may have gotten into a more security-oriented mindset since then, I don't know. Even if they have, they're sitting on a huge amount of legacy code written without security in mind.
As example of the general kind of thing I'm asking for, early in his first term Obama said something like "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for... well you should think real hard about who to vote for."
It was fairly obvious he has started to say "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for me for re-election", then decided halfway through the sentence to change his words slightly. Anyway, he gave a clear, objective number by which to judge his performance. Many Republicans would probably have agreed that 5% unemployment was one reasonable, somewhat fair, standard to judge his economic policies by. Can anyone come up with a similarly fair and objective measure by which we will be able to judge the results of these UBI experiments, a pass/fail mark both sides might agree on?
* I don't remember the exact number Obama said - 4%, 5%, or 6%. The point is, he did specify a number by which his policies could later be judged.
Some people think it will work very well, some people think it'll be a total failure, and of course some people are in-between.
For anyone here in EITHER of the first two groups, you both think the results would be pretty clear cut - the result won't be ambiguous. Here we have an actual experiment to test it, and there are other similar experiments being done or planned. Here's a chance to prove that you're right, and possibly in a measureable way such that those who disagreed have to admit their prediction was wrong.
Are you smart enough, and do you understand the issues well enough, to come up with some fair criteria by which to judge the outcome of these experiments? Can you mark a goal line and say "the experiment will show that UBI does A by x%, without doing B by y%"?
Since you understand the issues, that means of course that you understand the opposing viewpoint, you understand what their concerns are. Since you're pretty sure you are very much right, you should be able to be a bit generous in marking the goal lines. If anyone can come up with some fair measures we can later use to see who is right and wrong, I'll post my prediction and if I turn out to be wrong I'll freely admit it.
That would be really cool if we could do that. I don't have too much hope - I think a lot of people shooting their mouth off don't understand at all what people who disagree are saying, and have no interest in understanding anything other than their own guess. The ad hominem attacks which are already so prevalent on very page strongly suggest that some commenters haven't a clue what the other group is trying to warn them about, and don't care to know.
Anyway, there are experiments in progress. Anyone have an idea of some fair to generous criteria by which to judge the results when it's done, can you set a goal line which those who disagree might think is a fair goal line that captures their concerns?
Slashdot Mirror
> This just in: Having a weird fetish means there is little free porn for you.
And that accounts for more than half of the porn *sold*.
In another life, I wrote the security system that was used by most "pay sites", sites like GirlsGoneWild and NetvideoGirls with a monthly subscription. There is a lot of free^H^H^H^H^H ripped off tits and ass on the web. People pay for it when there's something special about the site. Either "weird fetish" or just "hook", a gimmick, something a bit different about the site.
In my role, I could see how many subscribers each site had, so I got a good gauge of what sells well. I also got to hear about once a week a customer asking me how they could stop people from ripping off their stuff and posting it on tube sites. DRM doesn't work, I had to tell them. All the music companies spent a hundred million dollars trying to create DRM that would work, but they are stuck selling mp3s for 99 cents because DRM doesn't work. "But Ray, you're the smartest security guy ever, I'm sure you can figure out a way to secure my content. I pay $5,000 for a shoot and 24 hours after I put it on the site some asshole puts it on the tubes! " Nope, can't fix that.
There's no such thing as a leprechaun.
There's no such thing as a unicorn.
There's no such thing as a gaseous solid.
There's no such thing as a dollarback.
There's no such thing as a purple patent.
There's no such thing as a software patent.
Ps, my apologies to the chemists here, who know that dimethyl carbonate would *not* actually be a very good extinguishing agent. I wasn't going to *actually* invent a brand-new extinguishing agent just to make my post, so I named a random chemical that most people aren't familar with.
I've read a lot of patents, and written a lot of software (I've spent far more time programming though).
I've read some *extremely* specific "software patents"*, and some very general ones. The company I work for has a patent so specific that it would be hard to infringe it. If you tried, you'dv probably accidentally do something slightly differently, so your implementation wouldn't be covered by our patent.
There are about 40 MILLION commercial airplane flights each year. Of those 40 million, about 2 have fatal crashes. So 39,999,998 safe flights, 2 crashes. We all know which flights end up all over the news.
Patents are similar. Bad ones end up on the news, often being the subject of extensive litigation. If someone didn't know anything about commercial aviation, they'd never been on a plane or at at airport, just watching the news they might reasonably be very afraid of flying. Every flight they've ever heard about crashed. If you know something about aviation, you know that's not even a million-to-one chance, it's a twenty-million-to-one chance. If you've never had reason to read patents, and never been in any kind of court trial, you might reasonably think most of them are like the ones you hear about in the news.
There ARE some patents that are overly broad, which sucks. There are some plane flights that crash, which also sucks.
Actually even the patents you hear about in the news are frequently *not* actually like what you hear in the news, especially on Slashdot - patent law is a big clickbait item on Slashdot. Most of us know that half the tech-related headlines and summaries we see on Slashdot are basically BS. The same is true of patents.
Some company will apply for a patent related to new type of fire extinguisher for cars that uses a new compound they've developed, which requires a new kind of valve they've invented to handle it. They've *applied for* a patent to cover "toroidal double monkey valve inverted for use in automotive fire extinguishers using dry dimethyl carbonate extinguishing agent". The Slashdot headline will most assuredly be "Company Patents Fire Extinguishers". The summary will mention fire extinguishers in cars, but won't mention the newly invented valve which is the thing they are actually trying to patent. Slashdot commenters go wild posting about "prior art - Nascar". You can't really blame them, the summary didn't even mention the patent is for a special valve the company invented, to use with a brand new type of extingushing agent. Commenters react to the headline, not having any way to know it's BS unless they take time to research it.
* There's no such thing as a "software patent", but that's a topic for another day.
The people who actually read the patents, multiple juries, disagree with your claims of fact, 1, 3, and 4. If you'd care to point to even one *possible* instance of prior art, an interesting discussion might be possible. If you just keep saying random stuff, with absolutely no idea what the patents even cover - well that's just boring. We'd be watching Trump if we wanted to hear someone say random stuff from their ass. (Though he at least gets a five minute briefing first, most of the time.)
On 2 (math), you've been trolled. The law is:
--
The laws of nature, including the laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, aren't patentable [because they aren't invented].
--
You can't patent gravity, you can patent a new elevator design.
You can't patent momentum, you can patent a newly invented braking system.
You can't patent multiplication, you can patent a time machine which happens to use gears (multiplication), levers (more multiplication), etc.
You can't patent addition, you can patent a newly invented system for detecting spam, which happens to use addition and other things.
What's not patentable, and I'm quoting the law, are "the laws of nature".
That's interesting. Thinking about it now, I've only needed to call customer service once, and that was probably before Sprint bought them.
I'm fairly certain insurance companies will require protection against that before they issue a policy.
I've been hoping we could get something like Underwriters Laboratories (UL) or the National Fire Protection Association (who authors the fire code) for security, and someone to get companies to follow the standards. Insurance companies created UL and NFPA and require corporate clients to mitigate risks that could result in a payout. I have hope they will be a very good thing for security. Insurance companies evaluate and manage risk for a living, and they are good at it.
Yep, this is good to see.
I've been on Boost for a many years, so I haven't dealt with the high prices, poor customer service, and questionable billing practices that people complain about with the major carriers. I do remember, though, that when I left Sprint, it was because there prices were too high for the four MEGABYTES I went over. 28 GIGABYTES is more than a thousand times as much data as they offered when I last used a major carrier. The speed is 100X times faster than it was a few years ago.
The complaints about billing practices probably have merit, but I see that they've upgraded their networks to provide a thousand times as much data, a hundred times as fast, I don't quite relate to the whining I hear about speeds and data thresholds.
> the incentive for the insurance company is to pay the ransom
What insurance companies actually do is set conditions that *reduce* risk for their customers, so They don't have to pay anyone. They also create organizations such as Underwriters Laboratories and the National Fire Protection Association (who write the fire code).
In this case, the insurance company will require that in order to get converage, you'll need to have *proper* backups, with a checklist of requirements for *proper* backup. Then they never have to pay out, and collect (small) premiums basically in exchange for forcing companies to test their backups quarterly.
"This is a shining example", you said. Which of the three patents is a shining example and why? What issue do you see in whichever patent you're talking about?
I'm now anxiously awaiting expert legal opinions by people who didn't even read the article, much less the patent.
> Anyone able to dig up just stats on support emails for Pidgin? I would hope that is 100% responses due to it being a support email. I can tell you within my support department, it doesn't matter what I end my email in; We have 100% response rate.
Based on my experience with corporate support email addresses, I'd venture to guess a typical "good" response rate is more like 90%-95%; emails get lost in all sorts of ways, before amd after they can make it to ticket system. Some get caught up in spam filters.
Anyway, I suspect you get *paid* to reply to support emails. Nobody gets paid on the Pidgin list. Requesters are asking other users to do them a favor by helping them out. Given the typical quality of support questions, if *most* get an answer I'd call that pretty good. I'm not going to take time out of my day to reply to someone who sends:
Subject: HELP! Urgent!
Body: I need to Pidgin. My friend message. Email me dumbass@aol.com today plese!
In my experience, a specific variation on "thank you" has an even higher response rate than any in the study. Faster responses, too.
At least for business emails, there is a very high response rate if I say:
Thanks, dickhead.
Of course there is also a very high irate rate, but they sure do respond!
And this is the opposite - use a lot of space to store a little bit of energy. Something like 1/10,000 the energy density of gasoline or so.
Check out the openings at AlertLogic.com
Some of the positions listed as Houston may also be available in Dallas. Look real close at my nick and see if you can't guess my name. Put me down as a referral (I've read your posts).
You'd fit in pretty well in College Station too, but there aren't a lot of high-paying jobs there. The ratio of masters and phd students to businesses is too high.
RS-485 is still used quite a bit in industrial process control. It's also part of the standard used to control stage lighting and such. At a concert, when the lights are moving around and flashing that's RS-485 carrying a very simple protocol called DMX. I still build DMX stuff as a hobby these days.
It's advertised as not having a monthly data cap, nobody sais it's infinitely fast, that you can download the whole internet in less than a milisecond.
Would you propose that a cell phone which downloads at 10Gbps all month can't be advertised as an unlimited data plan?
Now that we've got two ridiculous ideas out of the way, what *is* the minimum speed they have to provide? There are three possibilities, depending on how they advertise it.
The simplest would be if they guaranteed a certain speed. Of course they don't, but if they said "unlimited 10 Mbps data all month", they'd need to provide that. Wired providers can make that guarantee (at a cost of $5/Mbps), wireless carriers can't, at any reasonable cost.
The next possibility, which doesn't apply in this case, would be if they sold an "NFL Edition" phone and data plan, which includes a subscription to NFL Game Pass, and id marketed with phrases like "watch every game, every game, every week." In that case, they would need to provide enough data to watch all the games (or most of them). That's called "warranty of fitness for a particular purpose." If you advertise it as being designed to X, it needs to actually be able to do X.
Without specific advertising, what's left is "warranty of merchantability." That means it works well enough that some purchasers will want to buy it. Lots of people have small phones. I rarely watch video on my phone if I'm not on wifi. . My mom never watches video on her phone. She doesn't even know how. Therefore, we like to pay only $25/month, which of course gets us service that isn't super fast all the time. We don't watch multiple simultaneous HD streams on our phones, amd we don't want to pay for the ability to do so. Merchantability requires only that it's fast enough to keep people like us reasonably happy.
It may be interesting to note here what one of the finite resources *is*, as it points to a clear solution.
Suppose a wireless carrier had unlimited money to spend running 10Gb fiber lines to each tower, so the wired infrastructure was unlimited. What *is* limited, if we're willing to spend unlimited money, to pay $5,000/month for LTE data service?
"Bandwidth" is a term that predates computers. It means literally the width of the frequency band a system operates on. For example, a particular wireless carrier may be licensed to operate in the frequencies between 1,000Mhz and 1,100Mhz. Their band is 100Mhz wide - 100Mhz bandwidth. (For reasons of RF physics, phones have to communicate with the tower using a radio frequency around 1 Ghz or so.) Anyway, the carrier has 100Mhz of wireless bandwidth.
90 years ago, a guy named Harry Nyquist did some math and proved that with 100Mhz of bandwidth, you can 200 ones or zeroes per second. In other words, 200 Mbps of ones and zeroes can flow over 100 Mhz of radio frequencies. That's called the Nyquist limit. (Purposely simplifying here by ignoring multiple-bit symbols because the point still stands, though the numbers change).
So we see that the carrier can move 200 Mbps using the radio band they are licensed for. If 200 customers are served by each group of non-overlapping towers, each customer can have 1Mbps. Math and physics are a bit stubborn on this point, though clever people have found ways to cheat a little bit.
Wow 1Mbps, but some people want to stream multiple HD Netflix movies simultaneously. What can you do? Well you can have fewer customers per tower. With 20 customers per tower, 200Mbps/20 is 10Mbps per customer. Kinda expensive to have a tower for every 20 customers, but we're pretending that customers, and carriers, are willing to spend as much as it takes. Still, 10 Mbps isn't quite enough for three simultaneous 1080p streams on your three TVs. So let's try installing a separate tower for each customer.
200 Mbps for each tower (actually each group of towers on non-overlapping frequencies) is enough if every customer has their own tower on their house (or in it). Let's do that! We'd need to write down some standard so that your phone or whatever device knows how to talk to the tower, a specification. That specification would probably best be somewhere under the data network section of the IEEE standards, the 802 section. Maybe we'll call it 802.11. Different versions can be 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, etc. :)
Seriously the physics is such that if you want many Mbps for each house, and they are all going to be using it at the same time, you *have* to run cabling to a seperate tower for each house. That's called wifi. There's just not enough radio bandwidth available for hundreds or thousands of customers to transfer HD video at the same time if they are sharing a tower.
Just the other day, there was a story about a research team that set up a multi Gbps wireless data connection, and the summary pointed out that like all such efforts, it has a range of about 3 meters due to the extremely high frequencies required to have that kind of bandwidth. (Remember bandwidth is defined as the range of frequencies the channel covers).
True, there's no such thing as unlimited resources, but of course you knew that already.
As far as "go hungry", I see there are plenty of beans, potatoes, and 3G casserole left, so you don't have to leave hungry just because you would have preferred a (fourth) chicken wing.
Walmart knows that by the time they caught you stealing $100 of stuff, you probably already stole $500 they didn't catch you for. So having you in the store has cost them $500 or more.
Walmart's profit margin is 3%, so just to break even they'd have to bet you'd buy at least $16,500 from them without stealing anything else. Since you're known to be thief, the odds of that happening are not good.
Well sorta. I have a similar plan (though with much less than 22GB, and at much lower cost.) There is no "limit" per se - it won't stop working, and there will be no charge for going over. It does get slower if I use more than the x GB I get at high speed. It's NOT "unlimited high speed data", it's "unlimited data, and 22GB at high speed".
Half of this makes perfect sense. If you have a family-style dinner, everyone gets a plate before anyone gets "seconds". You don't take four or five pieces of chicken until other people have a chance to get one. Commercial data connections are similar - you're guaranteed a certain minimum share of the bandwidth (your "committed information rate"), and you can use more *if and when it's available*. That means if you and I both sign up for 100 Mbps CIR, and I want to use 150Mbps, I can use the extra 50 Mbps only when you're not using it. If you're only using 80Mbps, your traffic takes priority because we each paid for 100 Mbps guaranteed. Does that make sense? That, I believe, is what TFS means by deprioritized after you go over 22GB. If I've used 100 GB and you've used 4 GB, your traffic gets priority over mine so that everyone can have their fair share. That just makes sense.
If they are throttling it down to 3G speeds *even when extra 4G capacity is available*, that would be silly because it would be wasteful, leaving 4G capacity idle.
In this case, it's a junk junk-fighting cable.
Writing secure software has a lot to do with a frame of mind. A group of programmers can be really smart, but if they aren't thinking defensively, they'll write a bunch of vulnerabilities into the code. On the other hand, I've been mentoring a guy who is just starting to learn PHP, and one of the first things he asked me to help him understand was prepared statements with bound variables. He's trying very hard to make sure his very first program doesn't get hacked, and he'll probably succeed.
When I've pointed out security flaws in Wordpress and suggested solutions, the project leaders haven't taken it seriously. 18 months *after* I pointed out one flaw, it was used in large scale attacks that were covered by the press. Only then did they do something about it.
They may have gotten into a more security-oriented mindset since then, I don't know. Even if they have, they're sitting on a huge amount of legacy code written without security in mind.
As example of the general kind of thing I'm asking for, early in his first term Obama said something like "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for ... well you should think real hard about who to vote for."
It was fairly obvious he has started to say "if unemployment isn't below 5% by 2012, you shouldn't vote for me for re-election", then decided halfway through the sentence to change his words slightly. Anyway, he gave a clear, objective number by which to judge his performance. Many Republicans would probably have agreed that 5% unemployment was one reasonable, somewhat fair, standard to judge his economic policies by. Can anyone come up with a similarly fair and objective measure by which we will be able to judge the results of these UBI experiments, a pass/fail mark both sides might agree on?
* I don't remember the exact number Obama said - 4%, 5%, or 6%. The point is, he did specify a number by which his policies could later be judged.
Some people think it will work very well, some people think it'll be a total failure, and of course some people are in-between.
For anyone here in EITHER of the first two groups, you both think the results would be pretty clear cut - the result won't be ambiguous. Here we have an actual experiment to test it, and there are other similar experiments being done or planned. Here's a chance to prove that you're right, and possibly in a measureable way such that those who disagreed have to admit their prediction was wrong.
Are you smart enough, and do you understand the issues well enough, to come up with some fair criteria by which to judge the outcome of these experiments? Can you mark a goal line and say "the experiment will show that UBI does A by x%, without doing B by y%"?
Since you understand the issues, that means of course that you understand the opposing viewpoint, you understand what their concerns are. Since you're pretty sure you are very much right, you should be able to be a bit generous in marking the goal lines. If anyone can come up with some fair measures we can later use to see who is right and wrong, I'll post my prediction and if I turn out to be wrong I'll freely admit it.
That would be really cool if we could do that. I don't have too much hope - I think a lot of people shooting their mouth off don't understand at all what people who disagree are saying, and have no interest in understanding anything other than their own guess. The ad hominem attacks which are already so prevalent on very page strongly suggest that some commenters haven't a clue what the other group is trying to warn them about, and don't care to know.
Anyway, there are experiments in progress. Anyone have an idea of some fair to generous criteria by which to judge the results when it's done, can you set a goal line which those who disagree might think is a fair goal line that captures their concerns?