We're talking about two different things. You're talking about what IS happening. My comment was about what CAN happen, what's POSSIBLE by the laws of physics.
If 10 million windmills magically appeared tomorrow, that wouldn't provide for most of our energy needs, because most of the time, the wind isn't blowing at the right speed.
Similarly, there is a certain amount of water in the rivers. Those rivers start at a certain altitude. The weight of the water multiplied by the distance it falls is the potential energy. To capture the energy in the water, you have to build dams. To capture more energy, you build bigger dams, holding bigger reservoirs (more tons of water). In order to have enough energy to meet our needs, the reservoirs would need to cover 1/3rd of the United States. It simply isn't possible.
I'm not saying it's unlikely, or that it's not politically viable, I'm talking about what's physically possible. The physics is such that there are two/three sources that have enough energy. Nuclear can, mathematically, provide enough. Old fashioned fossil fuels DO provide the majority. Clean fossil (natural gas and clean coal) can, at least for awhile. Wind cannot. It doesn't matter how many windmills you have, because at the moment it's not windy out.
Fukushima was nasty. It killed about two people. Hydroelectric killed 160,000 when Banqiao failed. When the original Niagra Falls dam failed, it wiped out a couple of towns. I don't know the inflation-adjusted cost off hand, but it wasn't minor. Coal mining accidents have killed thousands. There's liability risk for any workable option. For some reason , the safest option (by several orders of magnitude) is the one the government wants billions in liability reserve for.
Have you ever heard of a hydroelectric operator being required to deposit billions of dollars in case they have an accident? No, which is interesting since hydro has FAR more accidents.
In the last two years, natural gas has provided cheap, stable power. That's not why for decades new nuclear plants weren't built. The problem with nuclear is political, and yes those political hurdles create costs, but when the federal government IGNORES nuclear paperwork for years at a time, that's not that nuclear isn't competitive, that's the federal government choosing not to do its job.
Wind power is good. It does not compete with nuclear. Wind provides clean, safe power about half the time, and no power half the time. Wind allows you to throttle down your nuclear, gas, or coal plant sometimes. It doesn't replace the stable, reliable power supply of nuclear or older technologies. In the best case, solar is the same - it provides power for several hours per day. The other 18 hours, you can choose nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Unfortunately, solar now has a lot of worst case, since it's the industry chosen as a front for graft and corruption at the moment.
It doesn't matter how regulated nuclear is, or the capital required. The physics is such that it's one of two options that can provide the majority of our power. Unless you plan to flood 1/3rd of the United States, hydro can't do it. Unless the sun starts shining at night, and there are no more cloudy days, solar can't do it. These things aren't politically bad, they are physically incapable of providing more than 4%-6% of the need.
"No, removing power from the democracy..." Did you just call the US federal government "the democracy"? Wow. Just wow. Obama's pen would like to have a word with you.
At the local level, I can vote for certain laws in my city. So locally, we have some democracy. There is a reason that the Constitution says all powers other than those listed powers specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people.
You're right, only fossil fuels or nuclear have the capacity to provide the majority of our energy needs. Nuclear is historically the safest energy source as well - hydro has had quite a few disasters, for example. ALSO, we should acknowledge that the greenies have a good idea - use wind power when the wind happens to be blowing at the proper speed. If you happen to live on a fault line, geothermal is pretty good. For the 80% of of our energy needs that can't met by "alternatives" sources, we can choose nuclear or fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we should be anti-hydro, we should acknowledge that hydro is great. We just don't have any more 200 mile stretches of wilderness to flood, so we can't increase our hydro by much .
(I put solar in a separate category because the 95% of the solar industry that are scammers give the 5% who are honest a bad name.)
Solar / wind / geo / hydro INSTEAD OF nuclear is a "people who can't do arithmetic" thing. Together, they can reasonably provide about 20% of our energy needs. The founder of Greenpeace agrees - the other 80% can come from fossil fuels, or from nuclear. Those are the two options that can provide the majority of our power. We need power at night, we need power when the wind isn't blowing, and when it's blowing too strong and windmills have to be "turned off". If you'd like , I can point you to a paper that gives all the detailed facts in 10 pages.
That's an interesting point. As a Linux user for many years, I never cared about boot or resume time. That's only mattered recently, as handheld devices have become quite useful. My servers and desktop stay powered on for years at a time, so I never cared how many seconds a reboot takes. Obviously a tablet is different. With a tablet, I do care, I want it to start up and shutdown quickly.
Computer programming is 70% troubleshooting, 20% problem solving, 8% pure logic, and 2% typing. I'd think troubleshooting and problem solving would be VERY useful. Of course, I'm thinking of programmers who are actually good at what their doing, not copy-paste people.
I don't have enough information to have an opinion on the bill, but your argument is null. Virtually EVERYspecific item the government spends money on is small compared to the total of all of them put together. That's called "parts" and "total" - the total is always much bigger, and it's always the result of the parts.
The cost of a few tanks is a rounding error. A hundred million to a campaign contributor's solar company is a tiny piece. A hundred million over budget on a fighter plane is a pittance compared to billions.
Budget issues are "death by a thousand cuts" problems. With the breadth of the federal budget, that's even more true for Washington than it is for your own home budget. Even for a household, $5 for Starbucks is nothing, right? A cup of coffee is a "rounding error", you'd say. Yet, $5 / day adds up to over $100,000 at retirement. The government wastes a trillion dollars the same way a household wastes a hundred thousand - a little bit at a time.
On a side note, regarding advantage of there being "thousands of eyeballs" verifying its correctness" - ESR's famous quote is "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow - the fix will be obvious to someone."
The quote doesn't say anything about correctness. It says that when strange behavior is noticed, someone will see a clear fix. A shallow bug is one that's right there on the surface, where you can see the source of the problem. That's in contrast to one where you have to spend hours searching for what's causing the problem. It makes no claim of how quickly or easily a bug will be discovered - just how it can be fixed once it's discovered.
Another thing that came my mind when reading that the people who are most motivated are the ones who most need to hear the truth. Optimizing for the majority, who is unmotivated, i optimizing for those who are lowest priority.
An example that came to mind is alcoholism, hardcore, chronic alcoholism. There is a process by which a hopeless alcoholic can recover, but it's extremely hard. 95% of people who are "interested in cutting down on their drinking" won't do it. The other 5% have had their lives so utterly destroyed by alcoholism that they'll do ANYTHING to stop.
Those few who are at the end of their rope, who have been hospitalized repeatedly, probably thrown in jail a couple of times, their families have been torn apart, these are a small majority - if the study is small, these people are not even statistically significant. They are also the people whose very lives depend on hearing the unvarnished truth - if they don't take some very difficult advice to heart, the disease will kill them. We should tell these people the truth - the fact that the message will be lost on moderate drinkers doesn't matter.
That's true, you did point out you can put two pieces of advice together, as we did in the "if security is a high priority" scenario. I guess I'm taking it a little further. WABR, measuring _effectiveness_, is certainly a valid and important way of measuring how "good" a suggestion is. I'm thinking also that correctness, accuracy, is also an important measure of goodness, separate from it's part in effectiveness.
Some correct, accurate advice could be nearly impossible to follow, so it might have no effect on WABR or even a negative effect. However, especially in the realm of technology, what's almost impossible today may simple to do next week. Similarly, what's very difficult in the given scenario maybe easy to do in a similar scenario. Therefore giving someone an accurate mental picture has goodness that's not measured with WABR.
In the weight-loss scenario, a diet book written in 1983* wouldn't mention the dangers of sacharrin if they were following WABR. However, in 1985, Nutrasweet showed up. The "ineffective" advice to limit one's consumption of sacharrin would suddenly become effective two years _after_ it was given.
* I don't know what year Nutrasweet hit the mass market, but you get the point.
> If you were correct in your analogy we would not have our current stagnation. At present, Compete.net decides
At present, Compete.net does not exist. ISPs have government granted monopolies. That's true of both telephone company providers and cable providers.
> We still need... regulation to keep the playing field open
Regulation is why it's closed. You don't solve a problem by doubling up on what caused the problem. It's illegal, in most areas, to compete. Just remove that regulation against competition- so simple. In some places it's less obvious that competition is illegal. In New York, for example, the city government grants monopolies on a NEIGHBORHOOD basis, there is a map of where each company is allowed to provide service. So you see two companies providing service a few blocks from each other, but neither is allowed to cross the street into the other's territory.
A company that gives it's money away, goes away, if it doesn't have a special position protected by the government. Of course, even with special government protection, if you give half a billion dollars to your executives and their friends, the company may eventually run out government favors.
I actually read the whole thing because I'm killing time waiting for something. I think the conclusion is mistaken, though it does have a kernel of a good idea in it. Taken strictly, his sugggestion is dangerous.
It may be that more people will follow the advice of "wear your seatbelt while you text and drive" than "don't text and drive" . Still, the former is bad advice.
Both measures are actually important - what gets the best results (best practice) AND what's most likely to be followed. In the example of avoiding viruses, it would be false to teach that running Avast is the best security from viruses. Running FreeBSD is several orders of magnitude more secure from viruses. The best advice, therefore, acknowledges that fact:
For security-sensitive systems, consider a secure OS such as FreeBSD or Linux. (The national security agency uses Linux for their top-secret systems). If you decide security isn't important enough to leave Windows, then AT LEAST run up-to-date antivirus. For Windows users, we recommend the following anti-virus.
That, I think, is the best advice. In security, I regularly encounter people who have been confused, been taught the "at a minimum, do this" in a way that lead them to believe that minimum is the best that can be done.
To address the weight loss analogy, the best advice would consider both, as follows: Try to exercise 1-10 hours per week. A morning jog EVERY morning is great. At minimum, park in the back of the parking lot at work and walk two minutes to the door.
The simplest case is that they aren't required to upgrade. The slightly less simple case is that, like with phone service prior to 1984, regulators set upgrade targets based on information provided by the companies. In the first step, the second case is exactly like the first: a rational actor will blow smoke at regulators trying very hard to avoid significant upgrades (because further investment in upgrades by definition reduces their ROI in a defined-profit model).
When it becomes clear that some upgrade will be needed, the same calculations apply to the marginal cost of different upgrade options. The difference between a $10 million upgrade to the copper vs. a $80 million switch to fiber is $70 million, and far more risk. As above, the extra $70 million and extra risk is a bad thing for the company, so they should fight to only do the $10 million upgrade. In other words, choosing between a $10 million upgrade and a $80 million upgrade is exactly the same as choosing between no upgrade and a $70 million upgrade: a non-stupid company will spend as little as possible, and risk as little as possible, because either way the get the government-mandated profit. Look at the history of (minimal) AT&T service upgrades during the decades they were fully regulated.
Contrast this with removing the government mandated monopoly, in which case a $80 million upgrade will allow the ISP to offer service with 10 times the speed of their competition, resulting profits increasing by $180 million.
Further, consider these two sets of choices: Compete.net has $80 million to spend on upgrades. They can either spend $80 million on fiber, or $65 million on fresh copper. If they buy fresh copper, outages will be reduced, increasing profit by 2%. If they buy fiber, service will be WAY better, increasing profit by 50%. Acme should of course spend the money on fiber.
Regulated.net must spend $80 million on upgrades. They can either spend that $80 million buying fresh copper or spend it on fiber.If they buy fresh copper, profits are unaffected. If they buy fiber, profits are unaffected. If they buy $65M worth of copper from the CEO's bother-in-law for $80M, there's an extra $15M profit to the company run by the brother-in-law, to be shared with the family.
Regulated.net doesn't CARE that they've wasted millions of dollars by essentially giving it away to friends and relatives - their profit is the same either way. In Compete.net tried the same thing, shareholders would be in an uproar and their CEO would soon be sharing a jail cell with Bernie.
There is no need to imagine what might happen, we've had regulated industries and we know how they work. An example you probably remember is long distance phone service. The government set the cost recovery rate at $0.40/minute USD1980 ($2 / minute in 2014 dollars).
If you want to ponder about similarly situated ISPs and their upgrade plans, imagine you are on the board. You have two choices:
a) Issue more stock to raise $80 million and risk your reputation attempting a difficult upgrade, the split get the government-mandated $10 million profit with the new stockholders.
b) do nothing and have the mandated $10 million profit all to yourself.
When your profit is set by law, the only rational course of action is to not rock the boat and spend your days on the golf course.
Can you rephrase that, I'm not understanding what you mean. As far as what I'm sure of, I said, "they May have a good idea, we won't know until..."
I didn't say they don't have an awesome idea (or that they do). I'm saying there is no reason to think it's good or bad, based on the researchers not knowing how to decrypt it. Anyone can string together a series of mathematical operations that they don't know how to undo.
The author's claim that it's very hard to break only means that THEY don't know how to break it. That's meaningless, because anyone and everyone can come up with a puzzle they don't know how to solve. That doesn't mean it's hard, just that they don't know how it's done.
A trivial example would be a kindergartener who might observe that if you encode a message by writing it with letters, they don't kow how to read that message. That's only because the kid doesn't know how to read. It in no way suggests that reading is impossible. For many Slashdot readers, compiling a message into a Windows resource file makes unreadable _to_them. Windows resource files are of course quite easy to read, if you know how. These researchers don't know how to read their own encoding. So what? That doesn't mean _I_ don't know how to read their stuff.
Their scheme does have one attribute that's good - it can generate long keys. So can a random number generator. They MAY have a good idea, but we won't know until alot of other people try to break their encryption and fail.
That would be interesting. I once licensed some software I wrote like that. My license specified it could be freely distributed by anyone other than Microsoft, their employees and affiliates.
Blender CAN sue for compensation. Maybe if the law specified treble damages for negligent filing the initial complaint, Sony might be more careful next time.
Under DMCA, the video or other content is supposed to be immediately restored if you respond, saying it's not infringing. The DMCA calls this a counterclaim. It stays up unless the claimant files suit in federal court.
The law should definitely be adjusted to reduce automated takedown notices, perhaps by strengthening the penalty for a reckless claim or requiring that the claimant investigate beyond "good faith belief". Other than that, the procedure defined in DMCA is actually pretty reasonable.
I submitted your email address, which I assume triggers their system to send you a link, or a real person from WGU will email you.
Full disclosure:You get the application fee waived , I get $20 credit for the school store, where I could get a WGU T-shirt or something if I wanted one. No thanks, I'll get a Texas Task Force One shirt from work.:)
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We're talking about two different things. You're talking about what IS happening. My comment was about what CAN happen, what's POSSIBLE by the laws of physics.
If 10 million windmills magically appeared tomorrow, that wouldn't provide for most of our energy needs, because most of the time, the wind isn't blowing at the right speed.
Similarly, there is a certain amount of water in the rivers. Those rivers start at a certain altitude. The weight of the water multiplied by the distance it falls is the potential energy. To capture the energy in the water, you have to build dams. To capture more energy, you build bigger dams, holding bigger reservoirs (more tons of water). In order to have enough energy to meet our needs, the reservoirs would need to cover 1/3rd of the United States. It simply isn't possible.
I'm not saying it's unlikely, or that it's not politically viable, I'm talking about what's physically possible. The physics is such that there are two/three sources that have enough energy. Nuclear can, mathematically, provide enough. Old fashioned fossil fuels DO provide the majority. Clean fossil (natural gas and clean coal) can, at least for awhile. Wind cannot. It doesn't matter how many windmills you have, because at the moment it's not windy out.
Fukushima was nasty. It killed about two people. Hydroelectric killed 160,000 when Banqiao failed. When the original Niagra Falls dam failed, it wiped out a couple of towns. I don't know the inflation-adjusted cost off hand, but it wasn't minor. Coal mining accidents have killed thousands. There's liability risk for any workable option. For some reason , the safest option (by several orders of magnitude) is the one the government wants billions in liability reserve for.
Have you ever heard of a hydroelectric operator being required to deposit billions of dollars in case they have an accident? No, which is interesting since hydro has FAR more accidents.
In the last two years, natural gas has provided cheap, stable power. That's not why for decades new nuclear plants weren't built. The problem with nuclear is political, and yes those political hurdles create costs, but when the federal government IGNORES nuclear paperwork for years at a time, that's not that nuclear isn't competitive, that's the federal government choosing not to do its job.
Wind power is good. It does not compete with nuclear. Wind provides clean, safe power about half the time, and no power half the time. Wind allows you to throttle down your nuclear, gas, or coal plant sometimes. It doesn't replace the stable, reliable power supply of nuclear or older technologies. In the best case, solar is the same - it provides power for several hours per day. The other 18 hours, you can choose nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Unfortunately, solar now has a lot of worst case, since it's the industry chosen as a front for graft and corruption at the moment.
It doesn't matter how regulated nuclear is, or the capital required. The physics is such that it's one of two options that can provide the majority of our power. Unless you plan to flood 1/3rd of the United States, hydro can't do it. Unless the sun starts shining at night, and there are no more cloudy days, solar can't do it. These things aren't politically bad, they are physically incapable of providing more than 4%-6% of the need.
"No, removing power from the democracy ..."
Did you just call the US federal government "the democracy"? Wow. Just wow. Obama's pen would like to have a word with you.
At the local level, I can vote for certain laws in my city. So locally, we have some democracy. There is a reason that the Constitution says all powers other than those listed powers specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people.
You're right, only fossil fuels or nuclear have the capacity to provide the majority of our energy needs. Nuclear is historically the safest energy source as well - hydro has had quite a few disasters, for example. ALSO, we should acknowledge that the greenies have a good idea - use wind power when the wind happens to be blowing at the proper speed. If you happen to live on a fault line, geothermal is pretty good. For the 80% of of our energy needs that can't met by "alternatives" sources, we can choose nuclear or fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we should be anti-hydro, we should acknowledge that hydro is great. We just don't have any more 200 mile stretches of wilderness to flood, so we can't increase our hydro by much .
(I put solar in a separate category because the 95% of the solar industry that are scammers give the 5% who are honest a bad name.)
Solar / wind / geo / hydro INSTEAD OF nuclear is a "people who can't do arithmetic" thing. Together, they can reasonably provide about 20% of our energy needs. The founder of Greenpeace agrees - the other 80% can come from fossil fuels, or from nuclear. Those are the two options that can provide the majority of our power. We need power at night, we need power when the wind isn't blowing, and when it's blowing too strong and windmills have to be "turned off". If you'd like , I can point you to a paper that gives all the detailed facts in 10 pages.
That's an interesting point. As a Linux user for many years, I never cared about boot or resume time. That's only mattered recently, as handheld devices have become quite useful. My servers and desktop stay powered on for years at a time, so I never cared how many seconds a reboot takes. Obviously a tablet is different. With a tablet, I do care, I want it to start up and shutdown quickly.
Computer programming is 70% troubleshooting, 20% problem solving, 8% pure logic, and 2% typing. I'd think troubleshooting and problem solving would be VERY useful. Of course, I'm thinking of programmers who are actually good at what their doing, not copy-paste people.
I don't have enough information to have an opinion on the bill, but your argument is null. Virtually EVERYspecific item the government spends money on is small compared to the total of all of them put together. That's called "parts" and "total" - the total is always much bigger, and it's always the result of the parts.
The cost of a few tanks is a rounding error. A hundred million to a campaign contributor's solar company is a tiny piece. A hundred million over budget on a fighter plane is a pittance compared to billions.
Budget issues are "death by a thousand cuts" problems. With the breadth of the federal budget, that's even more true for Washington than it is for your own home budget. Even for a household, $5 for Starbucks is nothing, right? A cup of coffee is a "rounding error", you'd say. Yet, $5 / day adds up to over $100,000 at retirement. The government wastes a trillion dollars the same way a household wastes a hundred thousand - a little bit at a time.
On a side note, regarding advantage of there being "thousands of eyeballs" verifying its correctness" -
ESR's famous quote is "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow - the fix will be obvious to someone."
The quote doesn't say anything about correctness. It says that when strange behavior is noticed, someone will see a clear fix. A shallow bug is one that's right there on the surface, where you can see the source of the problem. That's in contrast to one where you have to spend hours searching for what's causing the problem. It makes no claim of how quickly or easily a bug will be discovered - just how it can be fixed once it's discovered.
Another thing that came my mind when reading that the people who are most motivated are the ones who most need to hear the truth. Optimizing for the majority, who is unmotivated, i optimizing for those who are lowest priority.
An example that came to mind is alcoholism, hardcore, chronic alcoholism. There is a process by which a hopeless alcoholic can recover, but it's extremely hard. 95% of people who are "interested in cutting down on their drinking" won't do it. The other 5% have had their lives so utterly destroyed by alcoholism that they'll do ANYTHING to stop.
Those few who are at the end of their rope, who have been hospitalized repeatedly, probably thrown in jail a couple of times, their families have been torn apart, these are a small majority - if the study is small, these people are not even statistically significant. They are also the people whose very lives depend on hearing the unvarnished truth - if they don't take some very difficult advice to heart, the disease will kill them. We should tell these people the truth - the fact that the message will be lost on moderate drinkers doesn't matter.
That's true, you did point out you can put two pieces of advice together, as we did in the "if security is a high priority" scenario.
I guess I'm taking it a little further. WABR, measuring _effectiveness_, is certainly a valid and important way of measuring how "good" a suggestion is. I'm thinking also that correctness, accuracy, is also an important measure of goodness, separate from it's part in effectiveness.
Some correct, accurate advice could be nearly impossible to follow, so it might have no effect on WABR or even a negative effect.
However, especially in the realm of technology, what's almost impossible today may simple to do next week.
Similarly, what's very difficult in the given scenario maybe easy to do in a similar scenario. Therefore giving someone an accurate mental picture has goodness that's not measured with WABR.
In the weight-loss scenario, a diet book written in 1983* wouldn't mention the dangers of sacharrin if they were following WABR. However, in 1985, Nutrasweet showed up. The "ineffective" advice to limit one's consumption of sacharrin would suddenly become effective two years _after_ it was given.
* I don't know what year Nutrasweet hit the mass market, but you get the point.
> If you were correct in your analogy we would not have our current stagnation. At present, Compete.net decides
At present, Compete.net does not exist. ISPs have government granted monopolies. That's true of both telephone company providers and cable providers.
> We still need ... regulation to keep the playing field open
Regulation is why it's closed. You don't solve a problem by doubling up on what caused the problem.
It's illegal, in most areas, to compete. Just remove that regulation against competition- so simple. In some places it's less obvious that competition is illegal. In New York, for example, the city government grants monopolies on a NEIGHBORHOOD basis, there is a map of where each company is allowed to provide service. So you see two companies providing service a few blocks from each other, but neither is allowed to cross the street into the other's territory.
A company that gives it's money away, goes away, if it doesn't have a special position protected by the government.
Of course, even with special government protection, if you give half a billion dollars to your executives and their friends, the company may eventually run out government favors.
I actually read the whole thing because I'm killing time waiting for something. I think the conclusion is mistaken, though it does have a kernel of a good idea in it. Taken strictly, his sugggestion is dangerous.
It may be that more people will follow the advice of "wear your seatbelt while you text and drive" than "don't text and drive" . Still, the former is bad advice.
Both measures are actually important - what gets the best results (best practice) AND what's most likely to be followed. In the example of avoiding viruses, it would be false to teach that running Avast is the best security from viruses. Running FreeBSD is several orders of magnitude more secure from viruses. The best advice, therefore, acknowledges that fact:
For security-sensitive systems, consider a secure OS such as FreeBSD or Linux. (The national security agency uses Linux for their top-secret systems). If you decide security isn't important enough to leave Windows, then AT LEAST run up-to-date antivirus. For Windows users, we recommend the following anti-virus.
That, I think, is the best advice. In security, I regularly encounter people who have been confused, been taught the "at a minimum, do this" in a way that lead them to believe that minimum is the best that can be done.
To address the weight loss analogy, the best advice would consider both, as follows:
Try to exercise 1-10 hours per week. A morning jog EVERY morning is great. At minimum, park in the back of the parking lot at work and walk two minutes to the door.
Indeed it was 1973-1974 that it was .40 ($2 / minute).
In 1980, the rate was $2.17 ($6.18 in today's money) for a five-minute call, or $1.23 / minute.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Bure...
In 1950, it was was just over $5 / minute, inflation adjusted.
The simplest case is that they aren't required to upgrade. The slightly less simple case is that, like with phone service prior to 1984, regulators set upgrade targets based on information provided by the companies. In the first step, the second case is exactly like the first: a rational actor will blow smoke at regulators trying very hard to avoid significant upgrades (because further investment in upgrades by definition reduces their ROI in a defined-profit model).
When it becomes clear that some upgrade will be needed, the same calculations apply to the marginal cost of different upgrade options. The difference between a $10 million upgrade to the copper vs. a $80 million switch to fiber is $70 million, and far more risk. As above, the extra $70 million and extra risk is a bad thing for the company, so they should fight to only do the $10 million upgrade. In other words, choosing between a $10 million upgrade and a $80 million upgrade is exactly the same as choosing between no upgrade and a $70 million upgrade: a non-stupid company will spend as little as possible, and risk as little as possible, because either way the get the government-mandated profit. Look at the history of (minimal) AT&T service upgrades during the decades they were fully regulated.
Contrast this with removing the government mandated monopoly, in which case a $80 million upgrade will allow the ISP to offer service with 10 times the speed of their competition, resulting profits increasing by $180 million.
Further, consider these two sets of choices:
Compete.net has $80 million to spend on upgrades. They can either spend $80 million on fiber, or $65 million on fresh copper.
If they buy fresh copper, outages will be reduced, increasing profit by 2%. If they buy fiber, service will be WAY better, increasing profit by 50%. Acme should of course spend the money on fiber.
Regulated.net must spend $80 million on upgrades. They can either spend that $80 million buying fresh copper or spend it on fiber.If they buy fresh copper, profits are unaffected. If they buy fiber, profits are unaffected. If they buy $65M worth of copper from the CEO's bother-in-law for $80M, there's an extra $15M profit to the company run by the brother-in-law, to be shared with the family.
Regulated.net doesn't CARE that they've wasted millions of dollars by essentially giving it away to friends and relatives - their profit is the same either way. In Compete.net tried the same thing, shareholders would be in an uproar and their CEO would soon be sharing a jail cell with Bernie.
There is no need to imagine what might happen, we've had regulated industries and we know how they work. An example you probably remember is long distance phone service. The government set the cost recovery rate at $0.40/minute USD1980 ($2 / minute in 2014 dollars).
If you want to ponder about similarly situated ISPs and their upgrade plans, imagine you are on the board. You have two choices:
a) Issue more stock to raise $80 million and risk your reputation attempting a difficult upgrade, the split get the government-mandated $10 million profit with the new stockholders.
b) do nothing and have the mandated $10 million profit all to yourself.
When your profit is set by law, the only rational course of action is to not rock the boat and spend your days on the golf course.
"Why are you so sure it's not the not step"
Can you rephrase that, I'm not understanding what you mean. As far as what I'm sure of, I said, "they May have a good idea, we won't know until ..."
I didn't say they don't have an awesome idea (or that they do). I'm saying there is no reason to think it's good or bad, based on the researchers not knowing how to decrypt it. Anyone can string together a series of mathematical operations that they don't know how to undo.
The author's claim that it's very hard to break only means that THEY don't know how to break it. That's meaningless, because anyone and everyone can come up with a puzzle they don't know how to solve. That doesn't mean it's hard, just that they don't know how it's done.
A trivial example would be a kindergartener who might observe that if you encode a message by writing it with letters, they don't kow how to read that message. That's only because the kid doesn't know how to read. It in no way suggests that reading is impossible. For many Slashdot readers, compiling a message into a Windows resource file makes unreadable _to_them. Windows resource files are of course quite easy to read, if you know how. These researchers don't know how to read their own encoding. So what? That doesn't mean _I_ don't know how to read their stuff.
Their scheme does have one attribute that's good - it can generate long keys. So can a random number generator. They MAY have a good idea, but we won't know until alot of other people try to break their encryption and fail.
That would be interesting. I once licensed some software I wrote like that. My license specified it could be freely distributed by anyone other than Microsoft, their employees and affiliates.
Blender CAN sue for compensation. Maybe if the law specified treble damages for negligent filing the initial complaint, Sony might be more careful next time.
Under DMCA, the video or other content is supposed to be immediately restored if you respond, saying it's not infringing. The DMCA calls this a counterclaim. It stays up unless the claimant files suit in federal court.
The law should definitely be adjusted to reduce automated takedown notices, perhaps by strengthening the penalty for a reckless claim or requiring that the claimant investigate beyond "good faith belief". Other than that, the procedure defined in DMCA is actually pretty reasonable.
I submitted your email address, which I assume triggers their system to send you a link, or a real person from WGU will email you.
Full disclosure :You get the application fee waived , I get $20 credit for the school store, where I could get a WGU T-shirt or something if I wanted one. No thanks, I'll get a Texas Task Force One shirt from work. :)