Do you want to bet your life on me having an insurance ?
No, I want you to call the fire department like a normal person would.
So you want me to take an action which will benefit you, but you don't want to pay any of the bill. And I'll be punished by law if I don't. Careful, you're starting to sound like a socialist.
Hardly. Where on earth did you get the idea that socialists are the only people who will do things that benefit others?
You call the fire department because it is the right thing to do. Unfortunately there are some number of assholes in the world who will consider their own interests above all, even when there's a huge potential that another human being will die. So for those people we have laws like manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter. Those aren't new concepts.
You might also note that for those assholes who are totally self-involved it becomes the case that calling the fire department is in their best interest because if they don't they will be hurting themselves by going to prison. It's a shame we even have to have a law like that but that's how it is. Welcome to humanity, some people are just like that.
It is indeed typical of libertarian and other anti-socialism types to try to mask socialized institutions as private ones. A truly non-socialized fire department can't work, since me letting my old shed burn risks my neighbours; but a libertarian can't accept that, since it's contrary to his ideology, so he'll mask a socialized fire department a private one, with the main effects of letting middlemen take a share of its operating funds and slapping random people with the bill, rather than spreading it evenly as a normal tax would.
Why do you think that if you're responsible for starting a fire that the cost should be spread evenly? Yes, it's my ideal that if you start a fire, even accidently, you foot the bill for putting it out. Your insurance pays for it. If you don't have insurance then the fire department will try to collect. If you can't afford to pay then perhaps the fire department has insurance or underwrites themselves such that they can account for the loss.
Socialism does not magically change anything about this. An expense is still incurred on the fire department's ledgers. It still has to be written off as a loss. Except now the fire department is always responsible for writing it off as a loss. Perhaps they have a massive insurance policy and so they don't take a loss but transfer it to the insurance carrier. Or perhaps they underwrite themselves rather than using an insurance carrier. With any luck they'll have invested a sizable chunk of money into stocks or bonds or something of the sort such that they can draw against that to cover the loss. If they don't then the taxpayers are going to be hit with a huge burden.
The only thing socialism does is keep the expense off of your (mr. firestarter's) books. So now instead of seeing that your actions cost a few hundred thousand dollars you remain completely oblivious to this fact. How exactly is this an improvement?
Any normal person, even one who knows full well he'll be getting a bill from the fire department, will call the fire department. It is criminal to not do so. If you ever find yourself in this situation I wouldn't bet your life on being able to avoid the law. It's very likely that someone will see you leaving the scene which will be very good evidence of your negligence and liability. Have fun in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
So if I don't pay this fire department's bills, I'll be thrown into a prison. How is this different from a tax again ?
Where do you get this from? It's not 1) report the fire and pay it, or 2) don't report the fire and go to prison. If you are responsible for the fire and can't pay it then you won't go to prison. You will be in debt to the fire depart
Do you want to bet your life on me having an insurance ?
No, I want you to call the fire department like a normal person would.
Your theories about why we should fully socialize the fire department are mildly interesting but it looks like you're just grasping at straws trying to find a justification for increased socialism. Typical.
Any normal person, even one who knows full well he'll be getting a bill from the fire department, will call the fire department. It is criminal to not do so. If you ever find yourself in this situation I wouldn't bet your life on being able to avoid the law. It's very likely that someone will see you leaving the scene which will be very good evidence of your negligence and liability. Have fun in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Yes, and if it was a large enough fire that any reasonable person would have known it would spread then you had better damn well hope that no one gets killed.
If someone does get killed in that situation you may very well be on the hook for manslaughter if someone finds out that you didn't call the fire department because you were worried about getting the bill.
Also, as I said, you should not worry about getting the bill. You most likely already have fire insurance.
Uhh, no. The taxes you pay go to the city which pays the firefighters to be on-call. The city does not pay the fire department to actually fight fires, but to be on-call and ready to fight fires.
When an actual fire occurs, they bill it to the responsible party, if any, and typically it would be covered by fire insurance.
I am not a lawyer but my advice to you is to very methodically contact any companies involved.
You should identify yourself in any communications as "Joe Blow acting at the request of the executor of the estate of John Doe." Don't expect an e-mail to customer service to gain you access to accounts. Ask what you need to do. Most likely they'll want you to mail or fax a copy of a death certificate to a specific group within their company.
If they stonewall you, then go to a judge and get a court order. Keep in mind that in this particular case you are investigating whether or not he killed himself. This means that a subpoena would be very appropriate and should be very easy to come by. If you have money but not time, hire a lawyer to do this. If you have time but not money then do a little preliminary research on how to file a subpoena then go to your local courthouse during a down time and chat up the clerks. Most of the time they are nice middle-aged to older ladies. Dress appropriately. That means at least a shirt and tie, maybe a sport coat. If you do not keep facial hair, be clean shaven. If you do keep facial hair, be sure it is cleanly trimmed. They should be able to help you file the documents with the court and have a judge consider them. It is very likely that the judge will issue the subpoena after reviewing your brief.
Remember that at this point the wishes of your dead friend are determined by the executor of his estate which is most likely one or both of his parents. So if they say to do something then what they say is considered to be his wishes.
This "PC EFI" vs. non-EFI dichotomy is stupid. The bootloader should work on any PC and it should perform its most useful function which is to find the ACPI and SMBIOS tables and hand them off to xnu via the "/efi" node in the device tree.
I am well aware of 10.5.2's little issue with "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext" The problem is that like many Apple updates, 10.5.2 requires a double reboot. The first reboot runs a few scripts in single-user mode. Single-user mode only loads kernel extensions needed to find the root (e.g. disks) and to supply the console (e.g. Video, USB controllers/hubs, and USB keyboard). Notably it does not load Dont Steal Mac OS X. So Apple loads it from the script manually using kextload.
On a real Apple, that works fine. On a fake Mac, it does not. Of course all you have to do to fix it is make sure that the alternative kext (e.g. dsmos.kext) is loaded by the bootloader rather than post-boot by kextd which does not get run in single-user mode.
How to accomplish this is left as an exercise to the reader but it's not particularly difficult. Of course if you are dealing with a virtualizer instead of a real x86 you can more easily virtualize the SMC as Alex Graf did for QEMU. In that case, AppleSMC works as does Apple's "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext".
If I were selling Mac clones I'd probably just build a PCI card with an SMC-equivalent on it. That way everything would just work.
Again, absolute bullshit. What Software Update and some other Apple programs do is look for a few keys in the "/efi" node of the IODeviceTree registry plane.
Early hackintosh modifications to xnu added some code to the IORegistry lookup function to munge queries for "/efi" into "/rom" which is totally wrong but was a quick stupid hack so that "IODeviceTree:/efi" existed from the point of view of some things that needed it. This of course fails miserably for other things and was just an outright stupid hack. Is it any wonder that programs that expect certain keys to exist there break?
That is why I modified the bootloader. But it's not EFI emulation. All it is is providing some structures, some function pointers, and some I/O Registry nodes that the kernel, some kernel extensions, and some userland programs want to see.
The bottom line is that OS X does not need EFI. What it needs is a bootloader that works like Apple's loader and passes in the correct information to the OS. As long as you give the OS all the info it needs, everything works.
And yes, if you fail to provide it then shit breaks. What a surprise. Providing some data does not make it EFI emulation, no matter how much Netkas wants to market it as such.
What you don't realize is that you don't have to modify kexts on disk to modify their behavior at runtime.
The way Apple has structured the IOKit you can do everything that needs to be done purely by adding kernel extensions. It is never actually necessary to remove or modify kernel extensions but the hackintosh scene hasn't figured this out yet.
I plan to update my website in due time with the specifics of how exactly you accomplish this. Aside from the issue of the kernel simply not being able to boot unmodified on a P4 I have an otherwise completely update-proof test box with hardware that is not supported out of the box by OS X. It's no different from any other OS really. Add drivers for hardware support. Add drivers that support hardware better than the OS-supplied drivers and keep the OS-supplied drivers from loading when they would cause problems.
For example, consider a typical Windows installation. Microsoft provides a driver for basic ATA support. Once you install a more appropriate driver, it matches the hardware and drives it in lieu of the MS-supplied driver. The biggest difference is that on Windows NT (and derivatives) the plug'n'play aspect is done once when installing the driver. The system records which driver needs to load for a given piece of hardware. In OS X the plug'n'play happens upon each boot. The kernel builds up the IOCatalogue with information about available drivers and then passively matches the hardware using that information. That usually reduces it down to 1 or 2 potentials, usually just one. Then active matching occurs where each driver has a chance to probe the hardware and actively test whether or not it is able to drive it.
All of this is fully documented by Apple. Once you read the effing manual you realize that the current hackintosh methods are insanely stupid.
As an aside, this is why Windows fails to boot on a different machine to that which it was installed on. The Windows bootloader will not load drivers except those declared in the configuration control set registry hive. An OS X installation, if actually done properly, is able to boot on anything. But so far no one has really done an OS X installation properly which is why we see all these stupid machine-specific installation options in hackintosh spins.
As for the ACPI tables, I'm theorizing on that now. I think the clear answer is to write an open ACPI platform expert as such an animal is needed for Darwin to really be considered an open platform. Doing a fully open ACPI PE kext means that various ACPI hacks employed in Linux can be ported to Darwin. Not having a fully open ACPI PE means that it's somewhat questionable as to whether Darwin can be used freely, depending mostly on whether you consider the Apple-supplied kexts to be parts of OS X or parts of Darwin.
What "EFI layer"? Netkas's PC EFI is a marketing name that Netkas put on his branch of my branch of the Apple-supplied Darwin/x86 bootloader.
The only thing EFI about it is that he supplies some of the runtime services functions. I do this as well except in my version everything returns EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED. It is enough that the EFI system and runtime services tables exist and have halfway-valid information and that where a function pointer is expected that it point to some function. The implementation can be as simple as mov $EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED, %eax; ret.
Nothing bad happens when the runtime services functions do not exist. Even if the one for rebooting the system instead returns EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED the system will still reboot because Apple still has legacy code to do this without EFI runtime services.
The point of my booter is to allow Apple to focus on their own systems and to not maintain legacy code yet still continue to provide open source code that will work unmodified on non-Apple machines. The idea is that anyone can take the code they do release as Darwin and boot it unmodified on most PCs. As a side-effect anyone can also take the Apple-compiled binaries from OS X and do the same. That is, after all, the point of it.
Of course, what I provide does not enable you to run OS X. You still have to provide a decryption engine and decryption keys and I don't help with that. Nor does Netkas PC EFI since the decryption engine, as explained by Amit Singh, is in the "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext"
None of this has anything to do with EFI. Once the kernel is going, EFI is gone except for two tables and a handful of runtime services functions.
This is complete bullshit. The software update tool does check the model name and internally (e.g. without sending data to Apple) displays additional model-specific updates.
For instance, if you have an iMac with a particular firmware version then Software Update will display the firmware update for it. If you don't have that particular model of iMac then it will hide it from you. But the program still knows it exists because it grabs the full list of updates from Apple.
Download the full update from the Apple developer site, do some major moving and backup magic with some of the kext's (apples loadable modules), and run the install. Some people have scripts out that will resolve the issue, but its a doable manual process.
This is stupid. There are very few things that require continual modification of OS X after each update. The one big one is if your CPU is not supported.
Psystar as far as I know ships a machine with a supported CPU and a supported chipset. So why the hell can't they make it update proof?
I keep a Pentium 4 box around for research purposes. It is almost upgradeable without thinking about it. The only issue it ever has is that Apple's kernel source has checks for an Intel CPU with family 6. The Pentium 4 reports itself as family 0xf so you have to change the source and recompile or alternatively binary patch the kernel to nuke the check against family 6.
Everything else, including the GMA900 video (note: NOT 950) and ICH6 (note: NOT ICH7) ATA controller, can be handled with additional kernel extensions. That is, I don't ever patch an Apple kernel extension.
It is supremely stupid to patch Apple kexts. They are "owned" by Apple which is to say that Apple supplies them and keeps them updated. If you don't modify them but instead add new ones that are not owned by Apple then you don't have problems when Apple updates their kexts.
Here's another tidbit: The precursor to IOKit was NeXT's DriverKit. DriverKit was written in Objective-C. Yes, Objective-C can be and has been used in a kernel.
The upgrade wording has apparently been removed from the retail box so I suppose a reasonable person could assume it's not an upgrade version but a full version. And in that case you are correct that the SMC check cannot be reasonably considered to be an upgrade check.
If the box did in fact say upgrade and was sold specifically as an upgrade to an existing version of OS X then I think a reasonable person would consider it to be an upgrade regardless of what Apple does or does not do to prevent you from installing it as a full version.
My point was that your assertion that there is no upgrade check is blatantly false. Let me try to state it more logically
All Macs come with a copy of OS X.
All Intel Macs have an SMC.
OS X will not run on an Intel machine unless the SMC is present.
Therefore, OS X will not install or run on any Intel machine that did not have a prior version of OS X.
Now, try this one:
OS X is sold as an upgrade (this is false but I had thought it was true)
OS X will only install on Intel machines with a prior version of OS X
Therefore, OS X does effectively do an upgrade check.
I can't find the box right this second but I seem to remember it actually has the word "Upgrade" printed on it. It is a "full installer" because there is no reason for it to check for a previous version. If you are installing it on a Mac it can only be the case that at some point that Mac had a previous version of Mac OS on it.
Furthermore, all Intel macs have in their SMC a copyrighted key. The OS will not run without that key. This is the check that the Intel version of OS X uses to ensure you are upgrading. There is no need to check for a previous version installed on the hard drive. If those keys are present in the SMC then you must have had a previous version of Mac OS because the computer would have been sold with one.
The bottom line is that even though it is a "full installer" it still has an upgrade check, you just don't notice it normally since Apple has built it into the hardware.
Fedora 8 is currently defaulting to ath5k as well. Fortunately, atrpms provides madwifi including regularly updating the kernel modules.
To use it though you have to force the ath_pci module to load for the card. The way I did it was to start by locating the card in the/sys filesystem. If you do lspci you should be able to find the card pretty easily then look for the matching number in/sys/bus/pci/devices. An ls of that directory will show a list of symlinks to the real device directories. Find the matching one and cat/sys/bus/pci/devices/____/modalias. That will give you a rather long string of various letters and numbers beginning with pci:. Once you have that, add alias pci:____ ath_pci to/etc/modprobe.conf.
There's probably some GUI tool for it somewhere I guess but the particular machine I did this for is a pure server. I actually use the madwifi driver as an access point and for that the easiest method I came across was to set options ath_pci autocreate=ap in/etc/modprobe.conf. It seems that the madwifi drivers predate Fedora's built-in wireless config tools so there's no real great way to use the nice system-config-network tool to get AP mode with madwifi.
Then again, as far as I know there's no way at all to get AP mode with ath5k so I figure I'm ahead of the game.
A lot of what libertarians say makes sense (I for one am a big advocate of use taxes), but I can never get past their apparent insistence on the idea that they lack any kind of moral responsibility to their fellow human beings.
This is flat out untrue. The libertarian ideal is that the government shall not be responsible for the complete well-being of all citizens. It varies with the particular libertarian how much responsibility the government should have but the typical answer is as little as is reasonably necessary. A traditional view of what is reasonably necessary is that the federal government shall keep us from being invaded and attacked and that our local governments shall handle the day to day minutia of keeping the streets sanitary and enforcing the laws.
That is, a libertarian desires the smallest government possible. The reason is that there is no such thing as the government being responsible for anything, it always falls to the citizens. It is no huge problem to see it purely financially because money is nothing more than a means of easy exchange. It exchanges one thing for another. That's it.
When you claim that the government has a moral responsibility to nanny all of its citizens you are always claiming that the rest of the citizens have a financial responsibility to pay for it. There is no other way to look at it. It is what it is.
The libertarian says to himself "I have a moral responsibility to help out my fellow human beings." Therefore, he will help a random person on the street, or give to charities, or do any other number of things to meet his moral obligations as he sees them.
The socialist says to himself "The government has a moral responsibility to help out its citizens." Therefore he will fight in the legislature to get other people to pay for it.
The first is actually being responsible. The second is forcing other people to take on your moral responsibilities as their financial responsibilities by making them pay for it.
This is why a lot of actors are socialists. It's acting like you're being responsible without actually doing it.
or pointing it to 127.0.0.1 and giving it a TTL of a few decades)
That's more or less what they actually do. Unfortunately, returning 127.x.y.z to
a DNS request ist a DNS-RBL's way of saying "SPAM".
I think what GPP was trying to say is that the only thing necessary is to add relays IN NS localhost to the ordb.org zone file. That means that a recursing resolver (e.g. a caching nameserver) will query one of the root servers and be redirected to the.org nameservers by virtue of the glue records which will be queried and redirected to ordb.org by virtue of those glue records which will then be redirected to localhost by ordb.org by virtue of its "glue" records for relays. Since the recursing nameserver will not be authoritative for the relays.ordb.org zone it will fail to look up anything. Assuming the TTL is set high enough on the relays glue record, the recursing server will cache this for quite some time and thus all further queries to *.relays.ordb.org will immediately fail without banging on the ordb.org nameservers.
This is also quite different from returning IN A 127.0.0.1 to the query of a name. What will happen instead is that the ordb.org nameservers will explicitly disown the relays.ordb.org zone in much the same way that the root nameservers explicitly disown the GTLDs and the GTLDs explicitly disown the domains within them.
Doing it this way, the ordb.org servers will be hit very infrequently. Really only once by any given caching nameserver which upon seeing the relays IN NS record delegating authority to localhost will remember it and stop asking ordb.org for anything in relays.ordb.org. It's a really really simple solution that wouldn't break anything and wouldn't put much if any burden on the ordb.org nameservers. Too bad they didn't think of this before adding *.relays IN A 127.0.0.2 to the ordb.org zone file.
I read the first text and immediately thought of a cup of coffee or a piece of hot food or something. It's not that hard to read if you simply consider some simple example of "an object at an elevated temperature." What else does the author mean by "an object at an elevated temperature?" I then immediately looked to the cold beer sitting on my desk and considered the inverse case and realized that I had better finish it before the internal energy of the surrounding atmosphere migrated to my beer until equilibrium was reached. Or put another way, I had better drink the damn thing before it gets warm.
Since I thought of the example myself it was not hard at all for me to understand the first text. Is it really necessary for the textbook to spell out one particularly obvious example? Were you simply unable to imagine one? Or is it that you did not even attempt to imagine an example?
Have you considered the case that there is no problem with the writer but that the problem lies in the reader? That is to say the dead tree equivalent of Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
Now you may or may not immediately think of the example the first time you read it. If you don't you need to go back and start parsing the words more carefully. Dissect it until you start replacing "an object of elevated temperature" with a hot cup of coffee. That is the reader's responsibility, not the writer's. It may even take you two or three reads before you start doing this.
Coincidentally it was my high school physics teacher who quite bluntly told us that most of us would need to read a given textbook passage three times before understanding it. I am not sure I agree it is true for everything one reads but I figure that for any text just beyond one's current grasp three times is a good estimate. He actually had a more detailed method whereby each read was done for a different purpose. Something like the first read through just read it and keep going. Plow through the text and ignore what you don't know just to let it sink in. Then leave it alone for a while. Preferably over a night. Then you can go back and read it in a more detailed and deliberate fashion. By this time you ought to understand it and if you don't you do need to ask for help with it. Sadly I cannot even remember the specifics so that is merely my distillation of the method.
It was only later on that I wondered why it is that no one had told me this until I was less than two years away from graduating high school. Obviously by then I'd basically figured it out but no one bothered to just bluntly lay down the truth. What I perhaps didn't appreciate at the time was that he was not just teaching us entry level physics but rather teaching us how to teach ourselves.
It only began to occur to me when I read The Lost Tools of Learning. Every so often I go back and reread it because it is so very applicable to any discussion of the educational system. The author's point is mainly that we are failing to teach students how to think and instead merely teaching subjects. When one knows how to think, one can read the supposedly difficult passage you provide with ease.
So my only answer to the problem is that for the time being teaching yourself how to think is something you're going to have to mostly do yourself. The education system we have is not going to do it because it is explicitly not designed to do it.
If you have a moment, I definitely suggest reading that essay and perhaps even delving into other Sayers works. She is one of those rare authors whose works will make you think.
But if you told me that a person, a religious guide that is dear to me, that is Muhammad, is a terrorist, or like a terrorist, or a suicide bomber, just as the cartoons suggest, it's certainly hateful... full of hate... as a Muslim, to me, those cartoons spew nothing but hate...
That was not my interpretation of the cartoon at all. Perhaps it was the author's interpretation and intention. I don't know. But perhaps not and I am personally inclined to think not. Any writing or work of art is necessarily interpreted by the reader or viewer often times in ways the author did not even consider.
My thought upon seeing the cartoon was not that it was intended to depict Muhammad as a suicide bomber but to show that many Muslims must think of him as one since they justify their suicide bombings in His name. In other words, the cartoon is not intended to show the author's thoughts about Muhammed but to show what the author thinks radical Muslims must be thinking about Muhammed.
Consider an equivalent work of art for Christianity: The Piss Christ. At first glance it is disgusting that my religion's most important prophet, the one we consider to be no ordinary prophet but actually god in the flesh, is depicted defiled in a jar of urine. But the artist succeeded in making a very profound statement with the work, namely that the actions of some christians are tantamount to pissing on the image of Christ. Was this the artist's intention? I don't know. To me it seems the guy just likes vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity and he may not have had any deeper meaning for it other than wanting to take a picture of a jar of urine and call it art. That said, I am not alone in interpreting the work as a statement not against Christ but instead against those who would use his name to justify their bad actions.
There was, inevitably, a huge media uproar regarding this work of art. But no bombs went off. No cars or houses were burned. No one fired off rockets. No one threatened the artist's life and if someone had he would have been arrested. In fact, the biggest uproar and the real meat of the story was not so much that the artist created it. After all, we live in a free society and this artist's speech is protected by the first amendment. No, the meat of the story was that this artist was actually paid by the U.S. government to create it! Some argue that because of "separation of church and state" the government has violated that very same amendment by producing (or rather paying to produce) this work.
I would not be one of them though. Our constitution, in the first amendment, does not say "separation of church and state" as many like to claim it does. What it does say is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and continues "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." To me the text is quite clear and quite specific. It's actually the latter half of the first part that applies in this case: "prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The artist can very easily claim that he is exercising his religion by creating this work and thus congress can do nothing to prohibit it.
In the end nothing was done and some number of people have used it as a starting point for philosophical thought. Those who view the Piss Christ purely as an example of anti-Christian hate do so to their own detriment. Likewise those who view the Muhammad cartoon as an example of anti-Muslim hate do so to their own detriment. Think about it.
Sure, the Eee PC is an extremely cheap laptop but at the same time there are all kinds of other laptops on the market. For instance, as the article points out, Asus itself makes the MacBook Pro. In between those extremes there are all sorts of other laptops on the market.
And so what? The Eee PC is specifically designed to be a cheap commodity item made of other cheap commodity items with no significant value add. And there's no real race to the bottom because the commoditization of one thing makes adding value easier up the chain. We are only just starting to see the beginning of what can be done with the Eee. Geeks will pick up 10 of them and do something with them in their garage.
One thing that might come out of this though is that the laptops just above its price range will have to add significant functionality in order to sell. As I understand it, they do. A lot of people are pointing out that for $100 more you can get significantly higher specs although with the tradeoff of a heavier laptop. This is good though as it sets the bar higher for the higher-end equipment. For instance, no one is going to confuse a MacBook Air for an Eee PC even though they have the common theme of being small.
There are other companies out there. Where I live the incumbent cable company is Cox. I have no trouble with them. I pay a bit less than $45/mo (not this $55/mo comcast bullshit) without purchasing any other services from them except cable modem service. I use an antenna to get broadcast TV and I have a cell phone.
Oh, cool, I'll just switch to Cox. Oh... wait. I *can't*. Where is this "competition" you refer to? Doesn't really seem to be working for most of us.
Point taken. Perhaps then you should be focusing on Comcast instead of trying to force the same rules on all ISPs? The way I see it, Cox isn't the exception in a sea of extremely bad cable ISPs. Comcast is the exception in a sea of fairly decent cable ISPs.
Maybe the FTC instead of the FCC should be looking at Comcast. A lot of people are claiming that it's because Comcast sees internet content providers as competitors since it has its own content-providing business. Maybe we need some trade rules that subject companies like Comcast to more regulatory scrutiny. Then again, maybe not. I still think that Comcast will get their act together eventually, probably in a few years.
And the ISPs are right IMO. BitTorrent is a nasty protocol that sucks up as much bandwidth as it can. I can definitely see why ISPs would want to target it specifically. I used BitTorrent a few times at work to grab new Fedora ISOs. Or at least I started to. It soaked up pretty much all the bandwidth on our T1 and left the internet slow for everyone else. So I found a regular mirror (Georgia Tech was particularly good since Sprint routed our connection through Atlanta). What do you know, it downloaded at a pretty good clip (nearly as fast as BitTorrent) and didn't screw everyone else in the company.
So sorry, I have no love for BT. If I were running a network of cable modems I'd implement some sort of QoS for it as well. Granted Comcast's solution is really crappy wanna-be QoS but it still has that effect when applied to the BT protocol. Resetting the TCP connection just causes BT to try again so what would be DoS for any normal protocol actually becomes poor-man's QoS for BT.
You are looking at telecom history through rose colored glasses. Remember that the telephone network was built up over about half a century to handle voice calling needs. It's circuit switched and really isn't equipped to handle always-on connections. Local calls in most of the U.S. are free from per-minute usage charges. For most customers, that's not a problem. They call someone, talk for a few minutes, and hang up. You need far less circuits to handle this than calls which last for hours at a time or are left on 24/7.
Let's also not forget that the phone company had a nationwide federally granted monopoly with locally mandated tariffed service rates. Their purpose was to provide voice service to everyone at a reasonable cost. They did that well. Local service was locally regulated and cheap although they did charge fairly hefty rates for long-distance which is where they were allowed to make more profits. Notice I say allowed because the whole thing was really a government operation. Those hefty rates also reflected that originally it really did cost a lot to send your voice long distance. The rates discouraged you from making lengthy long distance calls and thus tying up circuits.
What forced them to change their model was the introduction of the internet. The geeks wanted faster connections. Once they got them, they showed their neighbors how they could just jump onto the net and find something. The non-geeks started catching on and demanded connections too. But who provided these? In most markets, two companies competed. The cable company was able to introduce cable modems, and the telephone company was able to introduce DSL. It should be noted that DSL does not work at all like a phone line despite running for the last mile on top of an existing phone line. Nor does a cable modem really work anything like cable TV despite allocating frequency bandwidth from the same piece of coax.
The cable companies started with a broadcast network and pushed a packet network out as far as they could. Over the years they pushed the barrier between the broadcast (e.g. coax) network and the packet (e.g. fiber) network further and further towards their customers. The phone companies started with a circuit-switched network and added a packet-switched network on top of it except for the last mile where they ran atop the last leg of the old circuit switched network. Neither one magically flipped a switch and had internet working.
You correctly point out that today we are in a similar situation as we were before. People are beginning to demand more from their internet connections. They want enough speed to be able to watch good-looking video in real time, not tiny windows. Some of the incumbent companies (like Comcast) are resisting the change. Others (like Cox) are not. More bandwidth is not going to happen overnight but it will happen. We continue to find new ways of using communications infrastructure that require the infrastructure to be upgraded. The phone companies will probably have to give up on twisted pair entirely and move to something like fiber. In-house phone lines are usually of such low quality that you can't even use them to go the last little bit from the pole to the house. The cable companies will have to keep pushing the barrier between fiber and coax closer to the home until maybe only a handful of subscribers share a physical broadcast domain.
I could get dial up for $10 a month (yea, plus phone line). Now I pay like $55/month, and it would be $15 more if I also didn't buy their "cable TV" service.
Before I got my first cable modem, dial-up was more like $15-20/month if you went with someone respectable. I think my first cable modem was like $35/mo from what was then AT&T Cable. I actually worked for them through a local contracting outfit to install new cable modems. The overriding policy was to upgrade the infrastructure when needed. If you had to run new RG-6 to get the cable modem working, AT&T paid for it. If you had to replace splitters and barrels to avoid signal leakage, AT&T paid for it. If signal was barely passable to make the cable modem work, you called in an order to have a trunk-line guy come out and reconfigure the taps. I believe the area I was in at that time is now actually Comcast and apparently Comcast is not quite as diligent about these things.
The sad fact is that what we have now is more or less what we can collectively afford. It's easy to point to more socialized states and say that a handful of them have faster internet connections. What you seem to fail to consider is that those faster connections were paid for. Most likely it costs the average person in one of those states a lot more for their internet connection, they just don't see it as a separate internet bill. If they do get an internet bill it's not really reflecting the true cost of providing the service.
This is speculative and complete bullshit. Just because other countries don't have schizophrenic policies ("it's a phone - no it's a data service - no it falls under this other rule") and corporations writing the laws so they favor their own monopolistic pricing doesn't mean they are subsidizing the costs. Those countries are just more *efficient*. The US is falling behind in data communication infrastructure - and it's not just anecdotal evidence that demonstrates it - it's a troubling trend.
That's even more speculative bullshit than my assertion. You are claiming that these countries installed the new infrastructure with more efficiency. I am claiming that they are likely not to have done it any more efficiently than the companies here do it. Neither one of us really has any data to back up our claims although that in and of itself sort of bolsters mine that there is probably not a huge efficiency gap.
Comcast alone makes about $1.2 Billion dollars in profit a year. Billion with a "B". Not revenue - *PROFIT*. I think they're doing just fine - maybe they should invest in a little more infrastructure instead of bitching about having to keep up with demand.
Hell yes they should invest some of that in infrastructure. If they don't then someone else will eventually come along and eat their lunch. And who's to say they do or do not plan to use this cash to invest in infrastructure?
I'm no socialist - but Internet infrastructure needs to be either regulated or state supported. It's too critical to be left to these corporations that just want to slow everybody down!! If there was real competition, it might work to motivate these guys to make their customers happy. But there's not, so it doesn't.
That is complete bullshit. It's just traditional anti-corporate rhetoric. There are other companies out there. Where I live the incumbent cable company is Cox. I have no trouble with them. I pay a bit less than $45/mo (not this $55/mo comcast bullshit) without purchasing any other services from them except cable modem service. I use an antenna to get broadcast TV and I have a cell phone.
Now that's an anecdote. But so is everyone complain about Comcast. The plural of anecdote is not data. I'll give you that Comcast seems to not be taking its infrastructure seriously. That's a shame because AT&T did when they were in that business and by the looks of it Cox does down
The same could be said about all those jerks that want graphics sent across their internet connections. Really what needs to be done is to get us back to only sending green screen updates. All that wasteful html traffic has just caused needless upgrades. If you need to consume more than a what a 1200 baud modem can offer, perhaps what you need is a dedicated line. Not a consumer internet connection.
That's ridiculous. About 10 years ago you could as an average person get at best a dial-up connection that might (theoretically) be able to download at up to 56kbps (actually 53). If you wanted a little better you could pay for ISDN. If you wanted better than that you could pay for a T1.
Today you can get a cable modem or DSL for not much more than you'd have paid for dial-up and probably less if you had a second phone line dedicated to your internet access. Technology advanced. The providers improved their infrastructure. Costs came down.
The sad fact is that what we have now is more or less what we can collectively afford. It's easy to point to more socialized states and say that a handful of them have faster internet connections. What you seem to fail to consider is that those faster connections were paid for. Most likely it costs the average person in one of those states a lot more for their internet connection, they just don't see it as a separate internet bill. If they do get an internet bill it's not really reflecting the true cost of providing the service.
If you can live with forcing everyone to pay several times what they're paying now for internet access we can do this too. But don't sit there and spout that we could do better without pointing out that it does actually cost more to do so. I personally find that my cable modem is fast enough and I don't want to pay more than I do per month. I especially don't want to have the money effectively hidden in a bunch of federal budget documents.
I'll admit up front: I have things to hide. Dirty little secrets that are none of your business, and that the government doesn't need to know. Things that are embarrassing, things that could be used to damage my reputation, nothing particularly dangerous, but stuff that should be between me, myself, and I, and no one else.
Unless the government has come up with some way to read your mind I think you're safe.
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Do you want to bet your life on me having an insurance ?
No, I want you to call the fire department like a normal person would.
So you want me to take an action which will benefit you, but you don't want to pay any of the bill. And I'll be punished by law if I don't. Careful, you're starting to sound like a socialist.
Hardly. Where on earth did you get the idea that socialists are the only people who will do things that benefit others?
You call the fire department because it is the right thing to do. Unfortunately there are some number of assholes in the world who will consider their own interests above all, even when there's a huge potential that another human being will die. So for those people we have laws like manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter. Those aren't new concepts.
You might also note that for those assholes who are totally self-involved it becomes the case that calling the fire department is in their best interest because if they don't they will be hurting themselves by going to prison. It's a shame we even have to have a law like that but that's how it is. Welcome to humanity, some people are just like that.
It is indeed typical of libertarian and other anti-socialism types to try to mask socialized institutions as private ones. A truly non-socialized fire department can't work, since me letting my old shed burn risks my neighbours; but a libertarian can't accept that, since it's contrary to his ideology, so he'll mask a socialized fire department a private one, with the main effects of letting middlemen take a share of its operating funds and slapping random people with the bill, rather than spreading it evenly as a normal tax would.
Why do you think that if you're responsible for starting a fire that the cost should be spread evenly? Yes, it's my ideal that if you start a fire, even accidently, you foot the bill for putting it out. Your insurance pays for it. If you don't have insurance then the fire department will try to collect. If you can't afford to pay then perhaps the fire department has insurance or underwrites themselves such that they can account for the loss.
Socialism does not magically change anything about this. An expense is still incurred on the fire department's ledgers. It still has to be written off as a loss. Except now the fire department is always responsible for writing it off as a loss. Perhaps they have a massive insurance policy and so they don't take a loss but transfer it to the insurance carrier. Or perhaps they underwrite themselves rather than using an insurance carrier. With any luck they'll have invested a sizable chunk of money into stocks or bonds or something of the sort such that they can draw against that to cover the loss. If they don't then the taxpayers are going to be hit with a huge burden.
The only thing socialism does is keep the expense off of your (mr. firestarter's) books. So now instead of seeing that your actions cost a few hundred thousand dollars you remain completely oblivious to this fact. How exactly is this an improvement?
Any normal person, even one who knows full well he'll be getting a bill from the fire department, will call the fire department. It is criminal to not do so. If you ever find yourself in this situation I wouldn't bet your life on being able to avoid the law. It's very likely that someone will see you leaving the scene which will be very good evidence of your negligence and liability. Have fun in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
So if I don't pay this fire department's bills, I'll be thrown into a prison. How is this different from a tax again ?
Where do you get this from? It's not 1) report the fire and pay it, or 2) don't report the fire and go to prison. If you are responsible for the fire and can't pay it then you won't go to prison. You will be in debt to the fire depart
No, I want you to call the fire department like a normal person would.
Your theories about why we should fully socialize the fire department are mildly interesting but it looks like you're just grasping at straws trying to find a justification for increased socialism. Typical.
Any normal person, even one who knows full well he'll be getting a bill from the fire department, will call the fire department. It is criminal to not do so. If you ever find yourself in this situation I wouldn't bet your life on being able to avoid the law. It's very likely that someone will see you leaving the scene which will be very good evidence of your negligence and liability. Have fun in pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Yes, and if it was a large enough fire that any reasonable person would have known it would spread then you had better damn well hope that no one gets killed.
If someone does get killed in that situation you may very well be on the hook for manslaughter if someone finds out that you didn't call the fire department because you were worried about getting the bill.
Also, as I said, you should not worry about getting the bill. You most likely already have fire insurance.
Uhh, no. The taxes you pay go to the city which pays the firefighters to be on-call. The city does not pay the fire department to actually fight fires, but to be on-call and ready to fight fires.
When an actual fire occurs, they bill it to the responsible party, if any, and typically it would be covered by fire insurance.
I am not a lawyer but my advice to you is to very methodically contact any companies involved.
You should identify yourself in any communications as "Joe Blow acting at the request of the executor of the estate of John Doe." Don't expect an e-mail to customer service to gain you access to accounts. Ask what you need to do. Most likely they'll want you to mail or fax a copy of a death certificate to a specific group within their company.
If they stonewall you, then go to a judge and get a court order. Keep in mind that in this particular case you are investigating whether or not he killed himself. This means that a subpoena would be very appropriate and should be very easy to come by. If you have money but not time, hire a lawyer to do this. If you have time but not money then do a little preliminary research on how to file a subpoena then go to your local courthouse during a down time and chat up the clerks. Most of the time they are nice middle-aged to older ladies. Dress appropriately. That means at least a shirt and tie, maybe a sport coat. If you do not keep facial hair, be clean shaven. If you do keep facial hair, be sure it is cleanly trimmed. They should be able to help you file the documents with the court and have a judge consider them. It is very likely that the judge will issue the subpoena after reviewing your brief.
Remember that at this point the wishes of your dead friend are determined by the executor of his estate which is most likely one or both of his parents. So if they say to do something then what they say is considered to be his wishes.
This "PC EFI" vs. non-EFI dichotomy is stupid. The bootloader should work on any PC and it should perform its most useful function which is to find the ACPI and SMBIOS tables and hand them off to xnu via the "/efi" node in the device tree.
I am well aware of 10.5.2's little issue with "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext" The problem is that like many Apple updates, 10.5.2 requires a double reboot. The first reboot runs a few scripts in single-user mode. Single-user mode only loads kernel extensions needed to find the root (e.g. disks) and to supply the console (e.g. Video, USB controllers/hubs, and USB keyboard). Notably it does not load Dont Steal Mac OS X. So Apple loads it from the script manually using kextload.
On a real Apple, that works fine. On a fake Mac, it does not. Of course all you have to do to fix it is make sure that the alternative kext (e.g. dsmos.kext) is loaded by the bootloader rather than post-boot by kextd which does not get run in single-user mode.
How to accomplish this is left as an exercise to the reader but it's not particularly difficult. Of course if you are dealing with a virtualizer instead of a real x86 you can more easily virtualize the SMC as Alex Graf did for QEMU. In that case, AppleSMC works as does Apple's "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext".
If I were selling Mac clones I'd probably just build a PCI card with an SMC-equivalent on it. That way everything would just work.
Again, absolute bullshit. What Software Update and some other Apple programs do is look for a few keys in the "/efi" node of the IODeviceTree registry plane.
Early hackintosh modifications to xnu added some code to the IORegistry lookup function to munge queries for "/efi" into "/rom" which is totally wrong but was a quick stupid hack so that "IODeviceTree:/efi" existed from the point of view of some things that needed it. This of course fails miserably for other things and was just an outright stupid hack. Is it any wonder that programs that expect certain keys to exist there break?
That is why I modified the bootloader. But it's not EFI emulation. All it is is providing some structures, some function pointers, and some I/O Registry nodes that the kernel, some kernel extensions, and some userland programs want to see.
The bottom line is that OS X does not need EFI. What it needs is a bootloader that works like Apple's loader and passes in the correct information to the OS. As long as you give the OS all the info it needs, everything works.
And yes, if you fail to provide it then shit breaks. What a surprise. Providing some data does not make it EFI emulation, no matter how much Netkas wants to market it as such.
What you don't realize is that you don't have to modify kexts on disk to modify their behavior at runtime.
The way Apple has structured the IOKit you can do everything that needs to be done purely by adding kernel extensions. It is never actually necessary to remove or modify kernel extensions but the hackintosh scene hasn't figured this out yet.
I plan to update my website in due time with the specifics of how exactly you accomplish this. Aside from the issue of the kernel simply not being able to boot unmodified on a P4 I have an otherwise completely update-proof test box with hardware that is not supported out of the box by OS X. It's no different from any other OS really. Add drivers for hardware support. Add drivers that support hardware better than the OS-supplied drivers and keep the OS-supplied drivers from loading when they would cause problems.
For example, consider a typical Windows installation. Microsoft provides a driver for basic ATA support. Once you install a more appropriate driver, it matches the hardware and drives it in lieu of the MS-supplied driver. The biggest difference is that on Windows NT (and derivatives) the plug'n'play aspect is done once when installing the driver. The system records which driver needs to load for a given piece of hardware. In OS X the plug'n'play happens upon each boot. The kernel builds up the IOCatalogue with information about available drivers and then passively matches the hardware using that information. That usually reduces it down to 1 or 2 potentials, usually just one. Then active matching occurs where each driver has a chance to probe the hardware and actively test whether or not it is able to drive it.
All of this is fully documented by Apple. Once you read the effing manual you realize that the current hackintosh methods are insanely stupid.
As an aside, this is why Windows fails to boot on a different machine to that which it was installed on. The Windows bootloader will not load drivers except those declared in the configuration control set registry hive. An OS X installation, if actually done properly, is able to boot on anything. But so far no one has really done an OS X installation properly which is why we see all these stupid machine-specific installation options in hackintosh spins.
As for the ACPI tables, I'm theorizing on that now. I think the clear answer is to write an open ACPI platform expert as such an animal is needed for Darwin to really be considered an open platform. Doing a fully open ACPI PE kext means that various ACPI hacks employed in Linux can be ported to Darwin. Not having a fully open ACPI PE means that it's somewhat questionable as to whether Darwin can be used freely, depending mostly on whether you consider the Apple-supplied kexts to be parts of OS X or parts of Darwin.
What "EFI layer"? Netkas's PC EFI is a marketing name that Netkas put on his branch of my branch of the Apple-supplied Darwin/x86 bootloader.
The only thing EFI about it is that he supplies some of the runtime services functions. I do this as well except in my version everything returns EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED. It is enough that the EFI system and runtime services tables exist and have halfway-valid information and that where a function pointer is expected that it point to some function. The implementation can be as simple as mov $EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED, %eax; ret.
Nothing bad happens when the runtime services functions do not exist. Even if the one for rebooting the system instead returns EFI_NOT_SUPPORTED the system will still reboot because Apple still has legacy code to do this without EFI runtime services.
The point of my booter is to allow Apple to focus on their own systems and to not maintain legacy code yet still continue to provide open source code that will work unmodified on non-Apple machines. The idea is that anyone can take the code they do release as Darwin and boot it unmodified on most PCs. As a side-effect anyone can also take the Apple-compiled binaries from OS X and do the same. That is, after all, the point of it.
Of course, what I provide does not enable you to run OS X. You still have to provide a decryption engine and decryption keys and I don't help with that. Nor does Netkas PC EFI since the decryption engine, as explained by Amit Singh, is in the "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext"
None of this has anything to do with EFI. Once the kernel is going, EFI is gone except for two tables and a handful of runtime services functions.
This is complete bullshit. The software update tool does check the model name and internally (e.g. without sending data to Apple) displays additional model-specific updates.
For instance, if you have an iMac with a particular firmware version then Software Update will display the firmware update for it. If you don't have that particular model of iMac then it will hide it from you. But the program still knows it exists because it grabs the full list of updates from Apple.
Download the full update from the Apple developer site, do some major moving and backup magic with some of the kext's (apples loadable modules), and run the install. Some people have scripts out that will resolve the issue, but its a doable manual process.
This is stupid. There are very few things that require continual modification of OS X after each update. The one big one is if your CPU is not supported.
Psystar as far as I know ships a machine with a supported CPU and a supported chipset. So why the hell can't they make it update proof?
I keep a Pentium 4 box around for research purposes. It is almost upgradeable without thinking about it. The only issue it ever has is that Apple's kernel source has checks for an Intel CPU with family 6. The Pentium 4 reports itself as family 0xf so you have to change the source and recompile or alternatively binary patch the kernel to nuke the check against family 6.
Everything else, including the GMA900 video (note: NOT 950) and ICH6 (note: NOT ICH7) ATA controller, can be handled with additional kernel extensions. That is, I don't ever patch an Apple kernel extension.
It is supremely stupid to patch Apple kexts. They are "owned" by Apple which is to say that Apple supplies them and keeps them updated. If you don't modify them but instead add new ones that are not owned by Apple then you don't have problems when Apple updates their kexts.
Here's another tidbit: The precursor to IOKit was NeXT's DriverKit. DriverKit was written in Objective-C. Yes, Objective-C can be and has been used in a kernel.
The upgrade wording has apparently been removed from the retail box so I suppose a reasonable person could assume it's not an upgrade version but a full version. And in that case you are correct that the SMC check cannot be reasonably considered to be an upgrade check.
If the box did in fact say upgrade and was sold specifically as an upgrade to an existing version of OS X then I think a reasonable person would consider it to be an upgrade regardless of what Apple does or does not do to prevent you from installing it as a full version.
My point was that your assertion that there is no upgrade check is blatantly false. Let me try to state it more logically
Therefore, OS X will not install or run on any Intel machine that did not have a prior version of OS X.
Now, try this one:
Therefore, OS X does effectively do an upgrade check.
I can't find the box right this second but I seem to remember it actually has the word "Upgrade" printed on it. It is a "full installer" because there is no reason for it to check for a previous version. If you are installing it on a Mac it can only be the case that at some point that Mac had a previous version of Mac OS on it.
Furthermore, all Intel macs have in their SMC a copyrighted key. The OS will not run without that key. This is the check that the Intel version of OS X uses to ensure you are upgrading. There is no need to check for a previous version installed on the hard drive. If those keys are present in the SMC then you must have had a previous version of Mac OS because the computer would have been sold with one.
The bottom line is that even though it is a "full installer" it still has an upgrade check, you just don't notice it normally since Apple has built it into the hardware.
Fedora 8 is currently defaulting to ath5k as well. Fortunately, atrpms provides madwifi including regularly updating the kernel modules.
To use it though you have to force the ath_pci module to load for the card. The way I did it was to start by locating the card in the /sys filesystem. If you do lspci you should be able to find the card pretty easily then look for the matching number in /sys/bus/pci/devices. An ls of that directory will show a list of symlinks to the real device directories. Find the matching one and cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/____/modalias. That will give you a rather long string of various letters and numbers beginning with pci:. Once you have that, add alias pci:____ ath_pci to /etc/modprobe.conf.
There's probably some GUI tool for it somewhere I guess but the particular machine I did this for is a pure server. I actually use the madwifi driver as an access point and for that the easiest method I came across was to set options ath_pci autocreate=ap in /etc/modprobe.conf. It seems that the madwifi drivers predate Fedora's built-in wireless config tools so there's no real great way to use the nice system-config-network tool to get AP mode with madwifi.
Then again, as far as I know there's no way at all to get AP mode with ath5k so I figure I'm ahead of the game.
A lot of what libertarians say makes sense (I for one am a big advocate of use taxes), but I can never get past their apparent insistence on the idea that they lack any kind of moral responsibility to their fellow human beings.
This is flat out untrue. The libertarian ideal is that the government shall not be responsible for the complete well-being of all citizens. It varies with the particular libertarian how much responsibility the government should have but the typical answer is as little as is reasonably necessary. A traditional view of what is reasonably necessary is that the federal government shall keep us from being invaded and attacked and that our local governments shall handle the day to day minutia of keeping the streets sanitary and enforcing the laws.
That is, a libertarian desires the smallest government possible. The reason is that there is no such thing as the government being responsible for anything, it always falls to the citizens. It is no huge problem to see it purely financially because money is nothing more than a means of easy exchange. It exchanges one thing for another. That's it.
When you claim that the government has a moral responsibility to nanny all of its citizens you are always claiming that the rest of the citizens have a financial responsibility to pay for it. There is no other way to look at it. It is what it is.
The libertarian says to himself "I have a moral responsibility to help out my fellow human beings." Therefore, he will help a random person on the street, or give to charities, or do any other number of things to meet his moral obligations as he sees them.
The socialist says to himself "The government has a moral responsibility to help out its citizens." Therefore he will fight in the legislature to get other people to pay for it.
The first is actually being responsible. The second is forcing other people to take on your moral responsibilities as their financial responsibilities by making them pay for it.
This is why a lot of actors are socialists. It's acting like you're being responsible without actually doing it.
I think what GPP was trying to say is that the only thing necessary is to add relays IN NS localhost to the ordb.org zone file. That means that a recursing resolver (e.g. a caching nameserver) will query one of the root servers and be redirected to the .org nameservers by virtue of the glue records which will be queried and redirected to ordb.org by virtue of those glue records which will then be redirected to localhost by ordb.org by virtue of its "glue" records for relays. Since the recursing nameserver will not be authoritative for the relays.ordb.org zone it will fail to look up anything. Assuming the TTL is set high enough on the relays glue record, the recursing server will cache this for quite some time and thus all further queries to *.relays.ordb.org will immediately fail without banging on the ordb.org nameservers.
This is also quite different from returning IN A 127.0.0.1 to the query of a name. What will happen instead is that the ordb.org nameservers will explicitly disown the relays.ordb.org zone in much the same way that the root nameservers explicitly disown the GTLDs and the GTLDs explicitly disown the domains within them.
Doing it this way, the ordb.org servers will be hit very infrequently. Really only once by any given caching nameserver which upon seeing the relays IN NS record delegating authority to localhost will remember it and stop asking ordb.org for anything in relays.ordb.org. It's a really really simple solution that wouldn't break anything and wouldn't put much if any burden on the ordb.org nameservers. Too bad they didn't think of this before adding *.relays IN A 127.0.0.2 to the ordb.org zone file.
I read the first text and immediately thought of a cup of coffee or a piece of hot food or something. It's not that hard to read if you simply consider some simple example of "an object at an elevated temperature." What else does the author mean by "an object at an elevated temperature?" I then immediately looked to the cold beer sitting on my desk and considered the inverse case and realized that I had better finish it before the internal energy of the surrounding atmosphere migrated to my beer until equilibrium was reached. Or put another way, I had better drink the damn thing before it gets warm.
Since I thought of the example myself it was not hard at all for me to understand the first text. Is it really necessary for the textbook to spell out one particularly obvious example? Were you simply unable to imagine one? Or is it that you did not even attempt to imagine an example?
Have you considered the case that there is no problem with the writer but that the problem lies in the reader? That is to say the dead tree equivalent of Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
Now you may or may not immediately think of the example the first time you read it. If you don't you need to go back and start parsing the words more carefully. Dissect it until you start replacing "an object of elevated temperature" with a hot cup of coffee. That is the reader's responsibility, not the writer's. It may even take you two or three reads before you start doing this.
Coincidentally it was my high school physics teacher who quite bluntly told us that most of us would need to read a given textbook passage three times before understanding it. I am not sure I agree it is true for everything one reads but I figure that for any text just beyond one's current grasp three times is a good estimate. He actually had a more detailed method whereby each read was done for a different purpose. Something like the first read through just read it and keep going. Plow through the text and ignore what you don't know just to let it sink in. Then leave it alone for a while. Preferably over a night. Then you can go back and read it in a more detailed and deliberate fashion. By this time you ought to understand it and if you don't you do need to ask for help with it. Sadly I cannot even remember the specifics so that is merely my distillation of the method.
It was only later on that I wondered why it is that no one had told me this until I was less than two years away from graduating high school. Obviously by then I'd basically figured it out but no one bothered to just bluntly lay down the truth. What I perhaps didn't appreciate at the time was that he was not just teaching us entry level physics but rather teaching us how to teach ourselves.
It only began to occur to me when I read The Lost Tools of Learning. Every so often I go back and reread it because it is so very applicable to any discussion of the educational system. The author's point is mainly that we are failing to teach students how to think and instead merely teaching subjects. When one knows how to think, one can read the supposedly difficult passage you provide with ease.
So my only answer to the problem is that for the time being teaching yourself how to think is something you're going to have to mostly do yourself. The education system we have is not going to do it because it is explicitly not designed to do it.
If you have a moment, I definitely suggest reading that essay and perhaps even delving into other Sayers works. She is one of those rare authors whose works will make you think.
That was not my interpretation of the cartoon at all. Perhaps it was the author's interpretation and intention. I don't know. But perhaps not and I am personally inclined to think not. Any writing or work of art is necessarily interpreted by the reader or viewer often times in ways the author did not even consider.
My thought upon seeing the cartoon was not that it was intended to depict Muhammad as a suicide bomber but to show that many Muslims must think of him as one since they justify their suicide bombings in His name. In other words, the cartoon is not intended to show the author's thoughts about Muhammed but to show what the author thinks radical Muslims must be thinking about Muhammed.
Consider an equivalent work of art for Christianity: The Piss Christ. At first glance it is disgusting that my religion's most important prophet, the one we consider to be no ordinary prophet but actually god in the flesh, is depicted defiled in a jar of urine. But the artist succeeded in making a very profound statement with the work, namely that the actions of some christians are tantamount to pissing on the image of Christ. Was this the artist's intention? I don't know. To me it seems the guy just likes vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity and he may not have had any deeper meaning for it other than wanting to take a picture of a jar of urine and call it art. That said, I am not alone in interpreting the work as a statement not against Christ but instead against those who would use his name to justify their bad actions.
There was, inevitably, a huge media uproar regarding this work of art. But no bombs went off. No cars or houses were burned. No one fired off rockets. No one threatened the artist's life and if someone had he would have been arrested. In fact, the biggest uproar and the real meat of the story was not so much that the artist created it. After all, we live in a free society and this artist's speech is protected by the first amendment. No, the meat of the story was that this artist was actually paid by the U.S. government to create it! Some argue that because of "separation of church and state" the government has violated that very same amendment by producing (or rather paying to produce) this work.
I would not be one of them though. Our constitution, in the first amendment, does not say "separation of church and state" as many like to claim it does. What it does say is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and continues "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." To me the text is quite clear and quite specific. It's actually the latter half of the first part that applies in this case: "prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The artist can very easily claim that he is exercising his religion by creating this work and thus congress can do nothing to prohibit it.
In the end nothing was done and some number of people have used it as a starting point for philosophical thought. Those who view the Piss Christ purely as an example of anti-Christian hate do so to their own detriment. Likewise those who view the Muhammad cartoon as an example of anti-Muslim hate do so to their own detriment. Think about it.
God be with you.
Sure, the Eee PC is an extremely cheap laptop but at the same time there are all kinds of other laptops on the market. For instance, as the article points out, Asus itself makes the MacBook Pro. In between those extremes there are all sorts of other laptops on the market.
And so what? The Eee PC is specifically designed to be a cheap commodity item made of other cheap commodity items with no significant value add. And there's no real race to the bottom because the commoditization of one thing makes adding value easier up the chain. We are only just starting to see the beginning of what can be done with the Eee. Geeks will pick up 10 of them and do something with them in their garage.
One thing that might come out of this though is that the laptops just above its price range will have to add significant functionality in order to sell. As I understand it, they do. A lot of people are pointing out that for $100 more you can get significantly higher specs although with the tradeoff of a heavier laptop. This is good though as it sets the bar higher for the higher-end equipment. For instance, no one is going to confuse a MacBook Air for an Eee PC even though they have the common theme of being small.
Oh, cool, I'll just switch to Cox. Oh... wait. I *can't*. Where is this "competition" you refer to? Doesn't really seem to be working for most of us.
Point taken. Perhaps then you should be focusing on Comcast instead of trying to force the same rules on all ISPs? The way I see it, Cox isn't the exception in a sea of extremely bad cable ISPs. Comcast is the exception in a sea of fairly decent cable ISPs.
Maybe the FTC instead of the FCC should be looking at Comcast. A lot of people are claiming that it's because Comcast sees internet content providers as competitors since it has its own content-providing business. Maybe we need some trade rules that subject companies like Comcast to more regulatory scrutiny. Then again, maybe not. I still think that Comcast will get their act together eventually, probably in a few years.
And the ISPs are right IMO. BitTorrent is a nasty protocol that sucks up as much bandwidth as it can. I can definitely see why ISPs would want to target it specifically. I used BitTorrent a few times at work to grab new Fedora ISOs. Or at least I started to. It soaked up pretty much all the bandwidth on our T1 and left the internet slow for everyone else. So I found a regular mirror (Georgia Tech was particularly good since Sprint routed our connection through Atlanta). What do you know, it downloaded at a pretty good clip (nearly as fast as BitTorrent) and didn't screw everyone else in the company.
So sorry, I have no love for BT. If I were running a network of cable modems I'd implement some sort of QoS for it as well. Granted Comcast's solution is really crappy wanna-be QoS but it still has that effect when applied to the BT protocol. Resetting the TCP connection just causes BT to try again so what would be DoS for any normal protocol actually becomes poor-man's QoS for BT.
You are looking at telecom history through rose colored glasses. Remember that the telephone network was built up over about half a century to handle voice calling needs. It's circuit switched and really isn't equipped to handle always-on connections. Local calls in most of the U.S. are free from per-minute usage charges. For most customers, that's not a problem. They call someone, talk for a few minutes, and hang up. You need far less circuits to handle this than calls which last for hours at a time or are left on 24/7.
Let's also not forget that the phone company had a nationwide federally granted monopoly with locally mandated tariffed service rates. Their purpose was to provide voice service to everyone at a reasonable cost. They did that well. Local service was locally regulated and cheap although they did charge fairly hefty rates for long-distance which is where they were allowed to make more profits. Notice I say allowed because the whole thing was really a government operation. Those hefty rates also reflected that originally it really did cost a lot to send your voice long distance. The rates discouraged you from making lengthy long distance calls and thus tying up circuits.
What forced them to change their model was the introduction of the internet. The geeks wanted faster connections. Once they got them, they showed their neighbors how they could just jump onto the net and find something. The non-geeks started catching on and demanded connections too. But who provided these? In most markets, two companies competed. The cable company was able to introduce cable modems, and the telephone company was able to introduce DSL. It should be noted that DSL does not work at all like a phone line despite running for the last mile on top of an existing phone line. Nor does a cable modem really work anything like cable TV despite allocating frequency bandwidth from the same piece of coax.
The cable companies started with a broadcast network and pushed a packet network out as far as they could. Over the years they pushed the barrier between the broadcast (e.g. coax) network and the packet (e.g. fiber) network further and further towards their customers. The phone companies started with a circuit-switched network and added a packet-switched network on top of it except for the last mile where they ran atop the last leg of the old circuit switched network. Neither one magically flipped a switch and had internet working.
You correctly point out that today we are in a similar situation as we were before. People are beginning to demand more from their internet connections. They want enough speed to be able to watch good-looking video in real time, not tiny windows. Some of the incumbent companies (like Comcast) are resisting the change. Others (like Cox) are not. More bandwidth is not going to happen overnight but it will happen. We continue to find new ways of using communications infrastructure that require the infrastructure to be upgraded. The phone companies will probably have to give up on twisted pair entirely and move to something like fiber. In-house phone lines are usually of such low quality that you can't even use them to go the last little bit from the pole to the house. The cable companies will have to keep pushing the barrier between fiber and coax closer to the home until maybe only a handful of subscribers share a physical broadcast domain.
It will happen. Give it a few years.
I could get dial up for $10 a month (yea, plus phone line). Now I pay like $55/month, and it would be $15 more if I also didn't buy their "cable TV" service.
Before I got my first cable modem, dial-up was more like $15-20/month if you went with someone respectable. I think my first cable modem was like $35/mo from what was then AT&T Cable. I actually worked for them through a local contracting outfit to install new cable modems. The overriding policy was to upgrade the infrastructure when needed. If you had to run new RG-6 to get the cable modem working, AT&T paid for it. If you had to replace splitters and barrels to avoid signal leakage, AT&T paid for it. If signal was barely passable to make the cable modem work, you called in an order to have a trunk-line guy come out and reconfigure the taps. I believe the area I was in at that time is now actually Comcast and apparently Comcast is not quite as diligent about these things.
The sad fact is that what we have now is more or less what we can collectively afford. It's easy to point to more socialized states and say that a handful of them have faster internet connections. What you seem to fail to consider is that those faster connections were paid for. Most likely it costs the average person in one of those states a lot more for their internet connection, they just don't see it as a separate internet bill. If they do get an internet bill it's not really reflecting the true cost of providing the service.
This is speculative and complete bullshit. Just because other countries don't have schizophrenic policies ("it's a phone - no it's a data service - no it falls under this other rule") and corporations writing the laws so they favor their own monopolistic pricing doesn't mean they are subsidizing the costs. Those countries are just more *efficient*. The US is falling behind in data communication infrastructure - and it's not just anecdotal evidence that demonstrates it - it's a troubling trend.
That's even more speculative bullshit than my assertion. You are claiming that these countries installed the new infrastructure with more efficiency. I am claiming that they are likely not to have done it any more efficiently than the companies here do it. Neither one of us really has any data to back up our claims although that in and of itself sort of bolsters mine that there is probably not a huge efficiency gap.
Comcast alone makes about $1.2 Billion dollars in profit a year. Billion with a "B". Not revenue - *PROFIT*. I think they're doing just fine - maybe they should invest in a little more infrastructure instead of bitching about having to keep up with demand.
Hell yes they should invest some of that in infrastructure. If they don't then someone else will eventually come along and eat their lunch. And who's to say they do or do not plan to use this cash to invest in infrastructure?
I'm no socialist - but Internet infrastructure needs to be either regulated or state supported. It's too critical to be left to these corporations that just want to slow everybody down!! If there was real competition, it might work to motivate these guys to make their customers happy. But there's not, so it doesn't.
That is complete bullshit. It's just traditional anti-corporate rhetoric. There are other companies out there. Where I live the incumbent cable company is Cox. I have no trouble with them. I pay a bit less than $45/mo (not this $55/mo comcast bullshit) without purchasing any other services from them except cable modem service. I use an antenna to get broadcast TV and I have a cell phone.
Now that's an anecdote. But so is everyone complain about Comcast. The plural of anecdote is not data. I'll give you that Comcast seems to not be taking its infrastructure seriously. That's a shame because AT&T did when they were in that business and by the looks of it Cox does down
That's ridiculous. About 10 years ago you could as an average person get at best a dial-up connection that might (theoretically) be able to download at up to 56kbps (actually 53). If you wanted a little better you could pay for ISDN. If you wanted better than that you could pay for a T1.
Today you can get a cable modem or DSL for not much more than you'd have paid for dial-up and probably less if you had a second phone line dedicated to your internet access. Technology advanced. The providers improved their infrastructure. Costs came down.
The sad fact is that what we have now is more or less what we can collectively afford. It's easy to point to more socialized states and say that a handful of them have faster internet connections. What you seem to fail to consider is that those faster connections were paid for. Most likely it costs the average person in one of those states a lot more for their internet connection, they just don't see it as a separate internet bill. If they do get an internet bill it's not really reflecting the true cost of providing the service.
If you can live with forcing everyone to pay several times what they're paying now for internet access we can do this too. But don't sit there and spout that we could do better without pointing out that it does actually cost more to do so. I personally find that my cable modem is fast enough and I don't want to pay more than I do per month. I especially don't want to have the money effectively hidden in a bunch of federal budget documents.
Unless the government has come up with some way to read your mind I think you're safe.