I do remember Carnivore. That was like ten years ago in the Clinton administration, was it not? When there was a Republican congress? Seems like partisan politics took precedence over national security. except the roles were reversed from where they are today.
Congress can pass any law it likes telling the executive branch he can and cannot do something. The executive can choose to ignore it. Pretty simple really. That's where the Court comes in although they only decide whether the president is working within the limits of the constitution.
This guy (and I wish I could think of his name) ought to be tried for treason for revealing this, not trumpeted as a hero.
Mark Klein, and he *IS* a national hero. The President is in direct violation of federal law. There is no one iota of doubt about this.
Sorry, I should be more clear. By his own account he admits to taking part in installing equipment capable of eavesdropping on all conversations. He does not know and he did not state as to whether it was actually used to eavesdrop on domestic conversations. Prior to the advent of electronic switches any phone line could be tapped so long as you knew where to do so which was presumably part of the phone companies records otherwise they'd have a hell of a time keeping their network maintained. Clearly, law enforcement needs to be able to tap phones. When Mohammed Al Foobari comes into the U.S. from Saudi Arabia you can bet that any phone call he makes or receives is recorded. You really want to stop that?
The only practical way to allow for that is to install equipment capable of tapping any domestic phone conversation. One then hopes that the government only uses it to eavesdrop on suspect foreigners with or without a warrant and/or U.S. citizens so long as a warrant was obtained. But there's no guarantee of that. There can't be. It's not possible to determine. Issuing a subpoena for all records of taps is insane. That would make public way too much information that must be kept secret. It's awfully hard to eavesdrop on the bad guys when the bad guys know you're doing it. And yes, it means the good guys such as you and I can't know reliably whether or not law enforcement is listening to us. Deal with it. One would hope since we're not doing anything illegal and since tapping the phone of every person in the U.S. would be impossible then we have nothing to fear.
So, keeping that in mind I suppose Klein is pretty much a nobody. I would hope everyone already assumes that law enforcement is capable of listening in on phone conversations. I don't think we really needed Mark Klein to tell us he installed some equipment to do so. So in the end, he didn't really reveal anything that wasn't already assumed to be occurring by any person with half a brain. Still, it would have been nice had he not reminded our foreign enemies that we can and do spy on their phone calls, even if neither endpoint is in the U.S. and even if both endpoints are in the U.S.
My civil liberties are not affected if every phone call I make is listened to personally by an FBI agent. And man, I gotta tell you, I would hate to have that guy's job.
You don't seem to know what civil liberties are. If the government who can send people to your house to kill you is listening to everything you say over the phone, you don't honestly believe that has a chilling affect on any dissent against that government? This is how it worked in Soviet Russia. This is the very essence of totalitarianism, the inability to speak freely.
Excuse me? I know perfectly well what civil liberties are. They are written in quite plain language in the amendments to the constitution. That being said I am aware that the list was not intended to be complete but rather generalizations. I have the right to speak freely, especially against the government. I can even do it publicly where everyone can hear m
Have you looked into a Comcast business cable modem? At the company I used to work for we replaced a fractional T1 at a satellite office with a Comcast business cable modem. Not only was it at least 10 times faster, I believe it had a minimum bandwidth guarantee roughly equivalent to what we were getting with the frac T1. Uptime was not an issue (really so long as it was up during business hours that's all we needed). I believe it was somewhere around $120/mo.
Wow, your intelligent rhetoric really has me shaking in my boots.
Not only did you resort to name calling ("un-American ankle grabber") but you simply don't have history on your side if you think that communications going to and from the U.S. haven't been monitored. Where this belief comes from, I have no idea, but it's really dangerous.
This is patently false. Do you REALLY think the ACLU immediately leaps to expensive litigation to resolve civil rights issues, especially give their limited budget? Of course they don't. One thing that makes it seem that way is that most often the ACLU is suing the government, and since the government has UNLIMITED budgets for litigation, they are often very reluctant to negotiate seriously with the ACLU (especially in recent years). Examples would include the warrantless wiretapping program and the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the ACLU had to sue to get ANY information AT ALL. Initially, the government refused to admit the wiretapping program existed or that any prisoners were being kept at Guantanamo Bay.
To be on the ACLU's side on this one you have to first believe that the government listening in on phone calls to or from overseas endpoints or foreign suspected terrorists in the U.S. is a civil liberties issue. I don't happen to believe it is. If I start talking up my plans for crashing planes into the world trade center over the phone with my buddy from Uzbekistan, I really hope I get caught.
The EFF is in on this one too and has really trumpeted the testimony of a former AT&T engineer about installing equipment to do wiretaps at the exchanges. Their claim is that it could be used to spy on domestic calls between two American citizens, not that it has been. Well, no shit it COULD be used for that. So could a tape recorder attached on the right set of terminals in the old days.
This guy (and I wish I could think of his name) ought to be tried for treason for revealing this, not trumpeted as a hero.
That is the nature of the court system. One side or the other is declared the winner. Everybody loses.
So we shouldn't have a court system? I don't understand what you're saying here. If one or bother sides are completely intransigent to negotiation, how is dispute resolution supposed to work? How does this apply to criminal law?
Of course we should have a court system. And I suppose you're right, when both sides are intransigent (nice word BTW) then there is no choice but to take it to the courts. And the ACLU is way wrong on a lot of things, especially this wire tapping thing. My civil liberties are not affected if every phone call I make is listened to personally by an FBI agent. And man, I gotta tell you, I would hate to have that guy's job. I don't discuss anything illegal on the phone nor do I discuss information of a sensitive nature. I assume anyone could be listening in, and the government would be the least of my worries.
Same situation with email. What happens to e-mails if they happen to double-bounce? Oh yeah, they go to the postmaster. What happens when the administrator needs to diagnose why e-mails are failing? He looks in the queue. I've been in the position of having had to read some e-mails. I make a point of not doing it but I imagine the people who run the mail servers at various ISPs wind up in the same situation. If you expect communication that goes over third party infrastructure (e.g. phone lines, internet) to be 100% private, you're an idiot.
My apologies. I still disagree with the assertion that actively sending RST is not a legitimate way to filter. A lot of filter products have used it for a long time. It's not the best practice but it's reasonably standard. Certainly not illegal IMO.
I might believe this if Comcast had been transparent in what they are attempting. By using forged RST packets to drop connections instead of using ICMP Source Quench or other means while simultaneously playing the deny game, I find it very difficult to trust anything they say and I find their motives questionable.
Some other poster pointed out that they apparently use some off the shelf cheap and shitty wanna-be QoS boxes. I think their motive was not to pay more than necessary to implement the QoS needed to keep their network running smoothly. Unfortunately, they paid a little less than necessary and so now they pay the price for being a little too cheap.
I still don't think they deserve legal action against them. If I were Comcast I'd right now be working to implement a real QoS solution and I'd be asking for a refund from the company that makes these boxes. If I were on Comcast's board of directors I'd be wanting to know who approved the cheap solution and I'd be wanting to see procedures put in place so that such a mistake does not happen again.
Bottom line: BitTorrent is a tool to achieve a result, and it does its own QoS shaping. ISP's like Comcast want to do different QoS shaping and break BitTorrent in the process. I say to hell with the jackass ISP. They're supposed to be selling a functioning service, and if that means throttling, fine. But if that means flat out banning a particular tool, they can meet with my lawyer.
Why do you pay them for service then? Why not just, oh, I dunno, try DSL? Satellite internet? Nothing like that available? Shit, if Comcast is doing such a bad job it ought to be cake to compete with them, you ought to try starting your own ISP! Figure out the costs and take it to several VCs. One of them will bite if there's any chance a buck can be made.
That would of course make way too much sense. It's so much better if the lawyers are immediately called in to action.
Nobody gets cable internet to check email. This isn't 1999.
What the hell are you talking about? My parents have cable internet and about all they do is check email and browse the web. Every so often my dad's PC or my mom's Mac will need some software updates. That's about it.
I hardly use my connection any more than that myself. Mostly email and web browsing and downloading of the latest Apple seeds. LEGALLY I might add since I'm an ADC member.
Have you ever worked in an ISP? If you did, you would know that "bad" traffic has ALWAYS made up the majority of traffic going through ISPs. Before bittorrent it was other P2P, like Kazaa and Napster, before P2P it was Usenet, FTP, and IRC. Right now the majority of the web traffic flowing through most ISPs is STILL porn. What about streaming media like YouTube or online games like World of Warcraft? They eat up shitloads of bandwidth as well. Think nobody is interested in that?
Duh. I've not worked for an ISP myself but have known several people who have. I also used to be on the opposite end of that equation. No surprise really since home dial-up with mom and pop ISPs really grew out of the BBS scene. I mean, some people, myself included, liked and used Fidonet but we all know the real reason people used BBSes.
And why shouldn't they buy real QoS equipment? They're using this TCP RST crap because Sandvine underbid the people selling REAL QoS equipment. It's not like it's that difficult, I know that most ISPs already prioritize SMTP, VPN, and VoIP traffic. Comcast makes billions, they shouldn't be so cheap.
Ah hah! Mystery solved. I suspected it was a cheap wanna-be QoS since I'd seen the technique in several cheap wanna-be filters. That doesn't make it illegal or even necessarily wrong, just dumb. There's really no need to sue Comcast over it. At some point (sooner rather than later) they'll figure it out and they'll have to trash all of those "cheap" Sandvine boxes and buy real QoS equipment. That will cost them more than if they'd have done it right in the first place. Which is fine by me, let the market sort it out.
What amazes me most about Comcast is that it seems no one gets a cable modem from them for any less than $60/mo. Cox (Hampton Roads) charges $40/mo and I see none of this stupidness. I assure you though that BitTorrent is indeed throttled, apparently properly. I can download the latest Fedora spin from a nearby university far faster than I can get it via BitTorrent.
Then again, Cox is a huge player in the local communications market. They don't just do cable but also T1s and a number of other things that would traditionally only be available from the local baby bell. Clearly they made a smart business decision to diversify into general telecommunications.
You've been watching too much Bill O'Reilly. Go to their web sites and read their case records and tell me if you disagree with the vast majority of cases they pursue.
I disagree with the vast majority of cases they (the ACLU) pursue. Why? Because unlike civilized rational people who attempt to resolve their differences, they immediately bring out the heavy artillery (i.e. the lawyers). That means that instead of trying to understand the opposing viewpoint they have decided that their viewpoint is the correct one and that the opposing viewpoint is wrong. That is the nature of the court system. One side or the other is declared the winner. Everybody loses.
There is no more perfect example of this than the one we're discussing right now except this time it's the EFF instead of the ACLU. Apparently, the EFF has decided that issuing protocol control commands like Comcast is doing should not be legal. I'll agree with you it's a dumb way to do things, and I'll bet you're right that it was a perceived cost-cutting measure. But that doesn't mean it requires a court fight. The EFF is twisting facts and likening Comcast's actions to those of the Chinese government. Aside from the technical similarity, there is no comparison.
Unlimited internet since the days of dial-up has always meant that you would not be charged usage fees aside from the flat monthly rate. It has never meant that you could fully saturate your bandwidth 100% of the time. No ISP could even approach profitability if they guaranteed that at the current price levels.
If you want it though, it's available. Simply pay about 5 to 10 times as much for 5 to 10 times less bandwidth and you can have it. It's called a guaranteed bandwidth, guaranteed uptime T1 line.
Not only is sending forged RST's rude, immoral (possibly illegal?) but its also ineffective. It's possible for clients to ignore RST's and to continue to send traffic despite Comcast's efforts.
Well, no shit. I didn't claim it was a superb technique they were using, merely a clever hack and not an uncommon one (I've seen it before). That said, I'm not about ready to call it immoral or illegal. They have every right to implement QoS on their network and if the cheapest way to do that at this point in time is to depend on BitTorrent-specific behavior (since BitTorrent is currently the largest if not only offender) then I don't see what is wrong with it.
The real story here is the EFF gathering an army of lawyers and the mob here on slashdot complaining that they simply can't believe that their unlimited connection doesn't allow them to fully saturate it 100% of the time.
The advertisements typically say "Speeds may vary." Often times this is not only written at the bottom (in the fine print) but also spoken at the end of the advertisement.
I hate to break it to you, but Comcast didn't invent "overselling" bandwidth. It's a standard part of ISP operations and has been since their inception. Do you really think back in the old days that one 1.544 Mbps T1 had any chance of saturating a pool of 100 28.8k modems?
Of course, you're probably too young to even know this and I almost cringe saying that because I'm not that old (not even 30 yet).
Have you ever wondered why a T1 often costs $500 or more? Granted some of it is stupid phone company overhead but a lot of it has to do with things like 99.999% uptime guarantees including bandwidth guarantees. That is, you are guaranteed to be able to saturate your 1.544 Mbps all the time. If you are not able to do that, then you're considered to be experiencing down time. If that happens, you get a credit.
Of course, you started out paying 5 to 10 times as much so the credit isn't to save you money but intended to be a slap on the wrist that the T1 provider gives itself for screwing up.
I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass if Comcast limits BitTorrent use, filters anything they want, and generally cuts the balls off my connection. But they better goddamn well tell me ahead of time. And they better have a good reason other than "you filthy pirates are using up our bandwidth!"
They do tell you ahead of time. It's in the fine print. Don't blame Comcast because you failed to read it. Your unlimited connection is still unlimited but it is not guaranteed bandwidth. That's available and if you want it you can pay 10 to 20 times what you pay Comcast to get it.
It's usually not even in the real fine print. Normally it's one simple asterisk and a phrase like "Speeds not guaranteed." That's not false advertising, particularly when they specifically mention it in the ad!
I understood your original message to mean you believed that QoS and tampering were two different and mutually exclusive things. You seemed to fail to realize was that Comcast is doing QoS by sending RST to both ends of the BitTorrent connections.
On the other hand, maybe you did understand that what Comcast is doing is poor-man's QoS and you simply object to their implementation. In which case you should have just said so. I have a feeling though that you didn't understand it at all and hopefully if you read my message you do now. That's why I said I thought you had a limited concept of network equipment. Several popular filtering programs do exactly what Comcast is doing. Including, most notably, the Great Firewall of China. But believe me, the Chinese government didn't invent that technique.
What the EFF article is trying to do is state that because the same technical implementation is being used (sending TCP RST to both sides) that what Comcast is doing is morally equivalent to what China is doing. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
The bandwidth limiter is the uplink to the internet, not the link from the headend to your cable modem. No ISP in existence has enough bandwidth from their headend to the rest of the internet to cover every user fully saturating it all the time. That is exactly what BitTorrent does. It is what it is designed to do.
For instance, they have 10 Gb/s of bandwidth from the headend to the internet. They give each of their customer 10 Mb/s. They have 10,000 customers. That would mean 100,000 Mb/s or 100 Gb/s of potential bandwidth usage if every customer fully saturated his link. The only common protocol that does that is BitTorrent. When you saturate your connection with BitTorrent you can and do take bandwidth away from other customers. It is no longer available for them to use.
For comparison, a T1 with guaranteed bandwidth of a meager 1.544 Mbps will run you around a grand a month. You pay $40/mo. Unlimited usage is not guaranteed bandwidth. The ISP has the capability and the legal right to throttle your traffic. It's in your contract and god help us if the courts ever override that. The only issue here is that Comcast is doing it with TCP RST packets instead of more traditional QoS techniques. Most protocols would balk at having their connections closed, but BT retries meaning that the TCP RST technique which would ordinarily be denial of service to other protocols is merely a clever way to implement quality of service.
4. Comcast likes to enjoy the legal protections of being a "common carrier" (i.e a dumb pipe). This behavior shows that they are not a dumb pipe at all. Once a provider starts manipulating the traffic flowing across their network, they lose common carrier status, and are now responsible for ALL the traffic on their network.
Common carrier is often misinterpreted to mean that the network must allow all traffic. It is more accurately interpreted to mean that the network can't drop your traffic because they don't like what you say.
So why is Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic? Some people are saying it's because they're conspiring with the RIAA and the MPAA. Sounds good, but that's not the simplest explanation. A far simpler explanation is that they simply don't have the available bandwidth to support BitTorrent and maintain decent service for their other customers.
Imagine if we weren't talking about the packet-switched internet but the circuit-switch telephone system. TCP basically creates virtual circuits overtop a packet network. There's still a limit to how much traffic can flow through. Say that I purchase 1000 lines from the phone company. They give me 1000 lines and depending on my call patterns it might be possible for me to use all 1000 lines without tying up all circuits. On the other hand, if I use all 1000 lines in such a way that my traffic ties up all available circuits you can bet that the phone company is going to want to have some words with me Probably those words are going to be something along the lines of: look, you can call whoever you want and say whatever you want, but don't call 1000 people in the same exchange (e.g. neighborhood) at the same time, our network does not handle that. You can slow your calls down, spread them out so that you call 100 people in 10 different exchanges, or do any other number of things. But if you continue to tie up all available lines in one exchange we're going to have to drop your service.
Do you think in that case that the phone company has violated their common-carrier status? Or do you think that instead they are trying to allocate a limited pool of resources in the most efficient manner?
I suppose it's not modded up yet since I didn't post it all that long ago.
As for the EFF rant, I don't mean to demonize them so much as point out that just like any other organization the EFF needs to be watched so that it doesn't do stupid things. Just because the EFF is an electronic liberties watchdog group does not mean that they themselves don't need watching.
I feel a little bad lumping them in with the ACLU although they sort of do that themselves. The EFF has most of the time avoided favoring one group's liberties over those of another group whereas the ACLU has a track record of doing this. I just want to make sure the EFF stays on the moral high ground.
Oh, and by the way. I'm a dude, like probably 90% of Slashdot. Besides, your usage of the compound pronoun s/he is really disconcerting to the group of people who are unsure of their sex. Just think, I could have been one of them, how would you have known? For maximum political correctness it's now recommended that you use the compound pronoun s/h/it.
Sure. You're right. They could use proper QoS and no one would know the difference. But in the specific cast of BitTorrent, sending RST to both sides effectively does QoS without really breaking the protocol. BT will simply retry. You will get your 200MB patch, just more slowly.
The thing I take issue with is the idea that something with basically the same end result is somehow illegal because you are able to observe that it's being done as opposed to real QoS which no one would have noticed except for slower BT connections.
Spoken like someone with only a limited concept of network equipment. Let's roughly break down filtering techniques into two broad categories:
Physically between the two endpoints
Able to see both endpoints but not stop them from communicating
Both techniques have their plusses and minuses. In the first case, the filter can literally filter the packets. That is, it simply drops them rather than forwarding them on. The downside is that if the filter machine goes down then the two endpoints cannot communicate. This is a useful technique when you really do want to filter packets. For instance, you generally don't want CIFS/SMB traffic ingress or egress from a private network to the internet. You do not want to allow even one packet to do this.
In the second case you're usually doing it not for security reasons but to filter traffic. The EFF mentions that the Great Firewall of China uses this technique. How sensationalist. So do a number of other web filters. I know of at least one dating back to like 1997 or so that uses this technique. The idea is that you can effectively block the traffic by forging a RST in both directions. So when your employee goes to playboy.com you can hit both sides with a RST and stop that from happening. This technique has the advantage that if the filter goes down, traffic can still pass because it doesn't pass through the filter.
Now, here's Comcast's issue. BitTorrent as a protocol is specifically designed to suck up all available bandwidth. The problem is that by necessity it does that to the exclusion of all other traffic which is more well behaved. Although we'd all love to live in a dreamworld where bandwidth is unlimited, reality is different. In reality, there are a lot of people who just want to check their e-mail and browse the web quickly. When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
So, the only fix is to stop BitTorrent from sucking up all available bandwidth. That means you need some sort of a filter. Now, you can do it the first way by putting a filter in between the endpoints. The filter could presumably receive the packets then delay sending them for a bit. TCP window sizes are usually only so large so delaying the packets will delay them from reaching the other endpoint which will thus cause ACK messages to be delayed. The problem with this is that you have to have real QoS equipment to get all this done.
The other method is to realize that while most protocols would be disrupted due to forcibly closing the connection, BitTorrent will not be. The receiving peer will just go hunt for a different peer and the sending peer now has another slot open for a new receiving peer. Thus, closing BitTorrent connections doesn't prevent anyone from using BitTorrent, it just makes it slower.
That, of course, is reasoned and intelligent debate without stupid emphasis on various words to make the story more sensational. The EFF is ridiculous. Like the ACLU, it's a good idea in principle. In practice both of those organizations aren't protecting anyone's liberties because they aren't having an open discussion about what is and what is not an infringement on one's liberties. They pre-decide what they consider to be infringements then hire armies of lawyers to ram their decisions down everyone else's throat.
No one, of course, is going to discuss the idea that maybe your neighbor deserves to be able to check his e-mail without you clogging up the connection and that maybe the ISP has the obligation to ensure a good level of service for all of their users. Nope, none of that. Instead we've already decided that blocking any traffic for any reason is bad and is of course just like Chinese censorship and so Comcast must be the devil. Typical group think.
Fantastic thought. After you spend more than a trillion dollars buying the right of way for this super train, let's get right on that.
Not necessarily that big of a problem. You may be able to lease right of ways and you may be able to pick some of them up at firesale prices. On the other hand, you may not. With gas prices going through the roof you can be quite sure that the big railways are wanting to capitalize on their sunk costs. I'm starting to see ads on TV for Norfolk Southern. They do freight. Presumably they want to get the attention of people in charge of shipping at various companies and let them know that the railroad is a viable option.
I'm still waiting for the Norfolk and Waypal overnight by train service.
I specifically mentioned in the comment that it was working with Apple's FireWire SDK. That includes a program called VirtualDVHS. Presumably it doesn't handle encrypted streams so I _assume_ that they must not be encrypted on the FireWire even though I am reasonably sure that they are encrypted on the coax, even for the HD locals.
For reference, the provider here is Cox Hampton Roads. Other than their high prices ($45 for basic cable??) I have no problems with them. I personally only subscribe to their high speed internet service and they do a great job. They don't have any bundling requirements so I pay the same for it as anyone else. Of course, you get a discount if you pick up any 2 services and more if you go for the triple-play. My parents have the cable/internet/phone and their phone service is stellar.
Right now, I'm happy with OTA HD using a WinTV HVR-950 in connection with EyeTV on a Mac. HD looks absolutely gorgeous on a 23" cinema display. Seeing as how I get this for free I see no need to part with over $40/mo for cable TV. Only thing I miss is Fox News and now USA since the new L&O: CI are only on USA. Oh well. Still not worth $40/mo to me.
If I wasn't a cheap ass bastard I'd probably get my own HD box and just plug it into the Mac to watch in HD. But that's like another $10 or $15 box rental on top of the access fee and I just don't watch that much TV. Granted, I'm probably not in their target demographic. I'm single and work from home so I have other things to do than become a couch potato.
You know, your statement, while I think ultimately inaccurate, is at least somewhat well informed. Bill Clinton was a great do-nothing President. He did what was popular and it mostly worked out. I wouldn't put him on the list of greatest Presidents of all time but he was definitely above average. Right man for the right time.
However, I think your extension of that to Jobs is wrong. Perhaps I'm a sucker but I really have the feeling that Jobs has vision. Or perhaps more accurately that he actually listens to his developers about what can and cannot be done in an allotted amount of time and finds a way to market that. That makes him look like he has vision when in reality he's just really good at collecting the ideas of his employees.
To be honest, and if we're going to compare to Presidents, I think that makes him much more like a George W. Bush. Far from being a cowboy, Bush listens to the advice of his cabinet (stocked with a lot of conservative thinkers) and executes the plan. Likewise, I think Jobs has stocked his company with a lot of very talented developers and designers and executes the plan.
What's particularly impressive in Jobs's case is that he gets development and marketing to work together. Apple markets software like they know what they're doing. Features make their way into various parts of the OS or various Apple applications (e.g. iLife, iWork, etc) before being distilled into a class with a good public API. A number of iLife features made their way down to the official GUI toolkit (Cocoa) in subsequent releases of OS X. Very few developers have the discipline to test something for real and work the kinks out of the API before making it public. See Microsoft Windows for a great example where you have billions of DoFooBar and DoFooBarEx (i.e. extended) and sometimes DoFooBarExEx.
And now we have the iPhone. They released it locked down as much as possible. They released it with no official SDK. Everything runs as root. Subsequent releases broke all third-party software. It has all the markings of an internal software development project that is simply not designed to be a long-lived API. But that was fine. The point of the iPhone was not to start out by competing with other environments like Symbian or Windows Mobile. The point was to start out by doing a cool phone. Trying to make it a real OS would likely have tripled development time. The amazing thing is that unlike the companies you hear about in all the horror stories (and there are many of them) the marketing guys were on board with this. Once the phone is field tested, you can start thinking about making it a platform.
This is where, IMO, Microsoft goes wrong. They're always thinking of Windows as a development platform first and foremost. Apple, instead, thinks of the user and prototypes things and only after they're proven to work well does Apple make it part of the platform.
The odd thing is that if you listen to the prevailing "wisdom" of software engineering Microsoft is doing it right. That is, you design an API and then you implement it. On a small scale, that works. On a large scale, it fails miserably. Interactions between components often necessitate API redesigns and occasionally radical API redesigns. That's why the whole "Extreme Programming" caught on for a while and the good aspects of it are starting to be incorporated into mainstream software development methodologies. Developers finally started realizing that software is really like any other engineering discipline. You have to prototype. However, unlike other disciplines, you have a lot of interaction between components and prototypes are cheap as hell. Every time you compile and run after making a change you've refined your prototype. You don't design a bridge by simply drawing it on a piece of paper and hoping it works because it looks good. See Tacoma Narrows bridge for an example. No, you have to instead prototype it and test it in wind tunnels and try to simulate earthquakes and all
Hmm, that's weird. My parent's box they got like 3 years ago has a firewire port (actually 2 like most devices). I've connected my (Apple) laptop to it and used the tools included with Apple's FireWire SDK to successfully capture video from it and even control it.
The online manuals (PDF) for the newer Motorola boxes seem to indicate that IEEE-1394 is considered a standard connection that you would make to a TV. In fact, they more or less seem to recommend it because not only does it include audio and video like HDMI but it obviates the need to do any setup of the box (e.g. video resolution, etc.) because the Firewire feed is an MPEG-2 transport stream.
That is, your TV then does all of the MPEG-2 decompression. I didn't try it with pay TV channels (my parents have none) but it worked fine with everything else. For reference, I tried a clear QAM tuner and even after flipping through all the available channels I was not able to find standard stuff like the HD feed for the local NBC affiliate (though I did find it for the local CBS affiliate). So apparently, the box must be decrypting the MPEG-2 TS and then sending it unencrypted to the TV.
This whole CableCARD thing is a sham. Firewire works. So what if you can't use a different box? You can get the firewire feed straight out of the cable-company provided box, connect it to another box and then connect your TV to that box. All of your navigation can be done from your box, the cable-company provided box just decrypts the channels for you.
What the FCC should have done, if anything, is mandate that cable companies provide a dumb box that supports FireWire. The box makers already have the technology for this, they would simply strip off the control panels and all the video/audio outputs and leave only the core functionality that supports receiving from cable, decrypting the signal if authorized, and outputting to firewire. To support VOD and other "two way" services they might simply leave in the application libraries (e.g. Motorola with their DCT and now OSAP libraries) and provide the VOD system through FireWire as if it were just another channel.
For instance, normal channel tuning could be accomplished by your own box simply telling the semi-dumb box to give it channel 10. When you want to access VOD your own box knows that channel 499 (or whatever) has the dumb-box provided VOD interface. All of the OSAP or DCT or whatever code runs on the cable-company provided box. All the decryption is done in the cable-company provided box. And you know what, if you DO want to use the cable-company's provided guide, why not make that a channel like 1 or something?
Better yet, Firewire can easily support multiple streams (0 through 63 from what I understand). It would not be hard to say lock 0 to the first tuner, 1 to a second tuner (if the dumb box is dual-tuner) and 3 to special stuff like the built-in program guide which would, when you select something from it, tell your computer to jump over to either 0 or 1. For VOD you probably need an underlying tuner to support it anyway so it may as well just be a special channel on one of the tuners streams.
All of this is really relatively simple to implement because it's all nearly already working technology. You don't have to define APIs that TVs or set top boxes must support (e.g. OSAP) to support VOD features because you leave running of those special applications to the dumb box. You don't have to deal with encryption because you simply send the stream out unencrypted.
If you really really really need to have encryption between the CPE (customer provided equipment) and the cable-company provided dumb box you simply use something like CableCARD in the TV. But instead of trying to make it some highly complex two-way protocol you make it a highly simple decryption protocol only. This decryption card would not know how to resolve QAM channels to logical channel numbers (that's done by the cable-company provided box), it would not know how to run cabl
And in the fallout, wxWindows had to be renamed wxWidgets because Microsoft's lawyers started going after anything with Windows in the name. Under U.S. and probably even U.K. trademark law, I don't think the project could have lost. But Microsoft really wanted the name badly and was threatening to sue several of the core developers who could never afford such a thing. In the end, the developers who had no resources to fight anyone, let alone Microsoft, followed legal advice and more or less sold the name to Microsoft.
So now you can do a whois wxwindows.org and see that Microsoft owns it. I believe the agreement was to keep it forwarding to wxwidgets.org for two years but it's been over that now and it still remains forwarded. So in the end I suppose things did not work out too badly since the project got some money and Microsoft got an example they could use against Lindows.
I have to say, I don't blame Microsoft much. I blame Lindows. The name was a publicity stunt from the beginning and IMO clearly violated Microsoft's trademark of the name Windows to refer to a computer operating system. Microsoft had to defend that trademark and their legal strategy was to defend the name Windows in the much broader category of anything relating to computers, not just a computer operating system. None of it would have happened if Lindows hadn't caused trouble in the first place.
An authorisation to use force is not a declaration of war. It should have been, but the US Congress hasn't declared war since 1941. They have not been doing their job.
Yeah, you're right, it should have been a declaration of war. Actually, it should have been a simple one too. Hmm, let's see. We've got members of the terrorist group who attacked us on 9/11 running around the region. We've got a guy who lost a war to us a decade prior telling us he doesn't have to abide by our weapons treaties. We think not only that he's starting to rebuild his weapons arsenal but that he's starting to harbor terrorists.
Should have been a no brainer really. And basically it was, nearly ever member voted for the authorization of force. Why not a declaration of war? Frankly I think it's because wishy-washy language has become the norm these days. That's a whole other topic but suffice to say that I think you're splitting hair and that I also think that Congress votes on resolutions with imperfect language so they have a political out in case things go badly. Oh, and guess what? Yeah, that's exactly what they did. Claims like "Well, I didn't really think it was a war resolution" have actually been uttered by Hillary Clinton at campaign stops. I really only have one response to that: Lady, then you're pretty stupid.
I realize that sounds "harsh" in today's modern say a lot of words but really say nothing culture but I'm really beginning to feel like I'm living with 1984's doublespeak lately.
As for ignoring Congress, I was talking about the war; I was talking about how US presidents behave as elected kings or prime ministers, not as the executives of the republic. When running for election they promise all manner of things that aren't in their power; when elected they pursue all manner of initiatives which aren't in their power.
The president's job is to approve, veto & execute the laws, negotiate treaties and a few other items (all neatly listed in the Constitution). It's not to lead the country. The country doesn't need to be led: the people send their representatives; the states send their senators (whoops, not since the asinine Seventeenth Amendment); the people appoint a president to execute the law.
This is a tradition that goes back at least to Jefferson, the first president to take military action without consulting Congress. Search for the Barbary Pirates. It is true that the President was not meant to be a monarch. There's no question about that. However, what you describe as the presidency is not an executive position, but more like a chairman of the board. We're not England. We don't have a prime minister. We have a president.
Do I also need to point out that it's actually in the president's sworn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"? Do I further need to point out that while the Constitution goes into quite a bit of detail about Congressional procedure, it's fairly sparse on what the president may or may not do. Compared to Article I, with its laundry list of dos and don'ts for Congress, Article II is surprisingly sparse and only contains must-dos and shall-dos.
That has historically (except by very recent scholars) been interpreted to mean that the President has a huge amount of leeway. But it's worth pointing out that even though history suggests that Bush did have the power to go into Iraq without asking Congress, he did so only after asking and receiving approval from Congress.
I do, however, note that your quip about "it's not to lead the country" is at least founded in some amount of reason. Indeed, the President's job is to preserve, protect, and defend the country. However, in order to accomplish that, the President will find it necessary most of the time to be a leader who is able to convince the electorate and Congress that he needs to do something in order to fulfill his oath. Thus while his job description isn't to be a lea
Of course he doesn't do it as well. He's a straw man meant to reinforce your prejudices about liberals as being effete and incompetent. You don't think Fox would actually hire a competent liberal who could show up Hannity as the trollish buffoon he is, do you? Come on! Fox have an agenda to sell and competent liberals can get a better job than as a punching bag on Fox News.
Perhaps that's what he's meant to do. I'm not sure. I'm actually glad that he doesn't seem to believe most of the stuff he says. Every so often he seems to forget the script and make a reasoned argument. Occasionally he does make Hannity look like the trollish buffoon he is. Hannity bothers me because he comes off as actually believing some really asinine things. Alan works precisely because he comes off as scripted.
Say FNC instead had Hannity&Olbermann. Then we'd have two trollish buffoons toeing the party line. That would certainly not help the show at all.
I'll tell you what would be a better show though: a moderate conservative and a moderate liberal. Maybe Fiorina (assuming she's a moderate conservative) and Powers?
O'Reilly regularly hosts a Malkin/Powers debate. Powers always appears very moderate and very reasoned. Unfortunately, Malkin is worse than Hannity. O'Reilly/Powers would be a great combination (and in fact, O'Reilly does sometimes have Powers on one-on-one) but of course O'Reilly isn't going to do a O'Reilly&* show when he's got his own show. Maybe Miller/Powers?
You know, it's problematic that I can't think of any popular moderate conservative commentators other than Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller. Boortz would be a good fit as well but he's really a radio guy. That's not to say that there aren't moderate conservatives. I would say that most of the personalities on FNC are moderate conservatives. But none of them have the personality it would take to do a __&__ type of show.
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I do remember Carnivore. That was like ten years ago in the Clinton administration, was it not? When there was a Republican congress? Seems like partisan politics took precedence over national security. except the roles were reversed from where they are today.
Congress can pass any law it likes telling the executive branch he can and cannot do something. The executive can choose to ignore it. Pretty simple really. That's where the Court comes in although they only decide whether the president is working within the limits of the constitution.
This guy (and I wish I could think of his name) ought to be tried for treason for revealing this, not trumpeted as a hero.
Mark Klein, and he *IS* a national hero. The President is in direct violation of federal law. There is no one iota of doubt about this.
Sorry, I should be more clear. By his own account he admits to taking part in installing equipment capable of eavesdropping on all conversations. He does not know and he did not state as to whether it was actually used to eavesdrop on domestic conversations. Prior to the advent of electronic switches any phone line could be tapped so long as you knew where to do so which was presumably part of the phone companies records otherwise they'd have a hell of a time keeping their network maintained. Clearly, law enforcement needs to be able to tap phones. When Mohammed Al Foobari comes into the U.S. from Saudi Arabia you can bet that any phone call he makes or receives is recorded. You really want to stop that?
The only practical way to allow for that is to install equipment capable of tapping any domestic phone conversation. One then hopes that the government only uses it to eavesdrop on suspect foreigners with or without a warrant and/or U.S. citizens so long as a warrant was obtained. But there's no guarantee of that. There can't be. It's not possible to determine. Issuing a subpoena for all records of taps is insane. That would make public way too much information that must be kept secret. It's awfully hard to eavesdrop on the bad guys when the bad guys know you're doing it. And yes, it means the good guys such as you and I can't know reliably whether or not law enforcement is listening to us. Deal with it. One would hope since we're not doing anything illegal and since tapping the phone of every person in the U.S. would be impossible then we have nothing to fear.
So, keeping that in mind I suppose Klein is pretty much a nobody. I would hope everyone already assumes that law enforcement is capable of listening in on phone conversations. I don't think we really needed Mark Klein to tell us he installed some equipment to do so. So in the end, he didn't really reveal anything that wasn't already assumed to be occurring by any person with half a brain. Still, it would have been nice had he not reminded our foreign enemies that we can and do spy on their phone calls, even if neither endpoint is in the U.S. and even if both endpoints are in the U.S.
My civil liberties are not affected if every phone call I make is listened to personally by an FBI agent. And man, I gotta tell you, I would hate to have that guy's job.
You don't seem to know what civil liberties are. If the government who can send people to your house to kill you is listening to everything you say over the phone, you don't honestly believe that has a chilling affect on any dissent against that government? This is how it worked in Soviet Russia. This is the very essence of totalitarianism, the inability to speak freely.
Excuse me? I know perfectly well what civil liberties are. They are written in quite plain language in the amendments to the constitution. That being said I am aware that the list was not intended to be complete but rather generalizations. I have the right to speak freely, especially against the government. I can even do it publicly where everyone can hear m
Have you looked into a Comcast business cable modem? At the company I used to work for we replaced a fractional T1 at a satellite office with a Comcast business cable modem. Not only was it at least 10 times faster, I believe it had a minimum bandwidth guarantee roughly equivalent to what we were getting with the frac T1. Uptime was not an issue (really so long as it was up during business hours that's all we needed). I believe it was somewhere around $120/mo.
Wow, your intelligent rhetoric really has me shaking in my boots.
Not only did you resort to name calling ("un-American ankle grabber") but you simply don't have history on your side if you think that communications going to and from the U.S. haven't been monitored. Where this belief comes from, I have no idea, but it's really dangerous.
To be on the ACLU's side on this one you have to first believe that the government listening in on phone calls to or from overseas endpoints or foreign suspected terrorists in the U.S. is a civil liberties issue. I don't happen to believe it is. If I start talking up my plans for crashing planes into the world trade center over the phone with my buddy from Uzbekistan, I really hope I get caught.
The EFF is in on this one too and has really trumpeted the testimony of a former AT&T engineer about installing equipment to do wiretaps at the exchanges. Their claim is that it could be used to spy on domestic calls between two American citizens, not that it has been. Well, no shit it COULD be used for that. So could a tape recorder attached on the right set of terminals in the old days.
This guy (and I wish I could think of his name) ought to be tried for treason for revealing this, not trumpeted as a hero.
That is the nature of the court system. One side or the other is declared the winner. Everybody loses.So we shouldn't have a court system? I don't understand what you're saying here. If one or bother sides are completely intransigent to negotiation, how is dispute resolution supposed to work? How does this apply to criminal law?
Of course we should have a court system. And I suppose you're right, when both sides are intransigent (nice word BTW) then there is no choice but to take it to the courts. And the ACLU is way wrong on a lot of things, especially this wire tapping thing. My civil liberties are not affected if every phone call I make is listened to personally by an FBI agent. And man, I gotta tell you, I would hate to have that guy's job. I don't discuss anything illegal on the phone nor do I discuss information of a sensitive nature. I assume anyone could be listening in, and the government would be the least of my worries.
Same situation with email. What happens to e-mails if they happen to double-bounce? Oh yeah, they go to the postmaster. What happens when the administrator needs to diagnose why e-mails are failing? He looks in the queue. I've been in the position of having had to read some e-mails. I make a point of not doing it but I imagine the people who run the mail servers at various ISPs wind up in the same situation. If you expect communication that goes over third party infrastructure (e.g. phone lines, internet) to be 100% private, you're an idiot.
My apologies. I still disagree with the assertion that actively sending RST is not a legitimate way to filter. A lot of filter products have used it for a long time. It's not the best practice but it's reasonably standard. Certainly not illegal IMO.
Some other poster pointed out that they apparently use some off the shelf cheap and shitty wanna-be QoS boxes. I think their motive was not to pay more than necessary to implement the QoS needed to keep their network running smoothly. Unfortunately, they paid a little less than necessary and so now they pay the price for being a little too cheap.
I still don't think they deserve legal action against them. If I were Comcast I'd right now be working to implement a real QoS solution and I'd be asking for a refund from the company that makes these boxes. If I were on Comcast's board of directors I'd be wanting to know who approved the cheap solution and I'd be wanting to see procedures put in place so that such a mistake does not happen again.
Why do you pay them for service then? Why not just, oh, I dunno, try DSL? Satellite internet? Nothing like that available? Shit, if Comcast is doing such a bad job it ought to be cake to compete with them, you ought to try starting your own ISP! Figure out the costs and take it to several VCs. One of them will bite if there's any chance a buck can be made.
That would of course make way too much sense. It's so much better if the lawyers are immediately called in to action.
What the hell are you talking about? My parents have cable internet and about all they do is check email and browse the web. Every so often my dad's PC or my mom's Mac will need some software updates. That's about it.
I hardly use my connection any more than that myself. Mostly email and web browsing and downloading of the latest Apple seeds. LEGALLY I might add since I'm an ADC member.
Have you ever worked in an ISP? If you did, you would know that "bad" traffic has ALWAYS made up the majority of traffic going through ISPs. Before bittorrent it was other P2P, like Kazaa and Napster, before P2P it was Usenet, FTP, and IRC. Right now the majority of the web traffic flowing through most ISPs is STILL porn. What about streaming media like YouTube or online games like World of Warcraft? They eat up shitloads of bandwidth as well. Think nobody is interested in that?Duh. I've not worked for an ISP myself but have known several people who have. I also used to be on the opposite end of that equation. No surprise really since home dial-up with mom and pop ISPs really grew out of the BBS scene. I mean, some people, myself included, liked and used Fidonet but we all know the real reason people used BBSes.
And why shouldn't they buy real QoS equipment? They're using this TCP RST crap because Sandvine underbid the people selling REAL QoS equipment. It's not like it's that difficult, I know that most ISPs already prioritize SMTP, VPN, and VoIP traffic. Comcast makes billions, they shouldn't be so cheap.Ah hah! Mystery solved. I suspected it was a cheap wanna-be QoS since I'd seen the technique in several cheap wanna-be filters. That doesn't make it illegal or even necessarily wrong, just dumb. There's really no need to sue Comcast over it. At some point (sooner rather than later) they'll figure it out and they'll have to trash all of those "cheap" Sandvine boxes and buy real QoS equipment. That will cost them more than if they'd have done it right in the first place. Which is fine by me, let the market sort it out.
What amazes me most about Comcast is that it seems no one gets a cable modem from them for any less than $60/mo. Cox (Hampton Roads) charges $40/mo and I see none of this stupidness. I assure you though that BitTorrent is indeed throttled, apparently properly. I can download the latest Fedora spin from a nearby university far faster than I can get it via BitTorrent.
Then again, Cox is a huge player in the local communications market. They don't just do cable but also T1s and a number of other things that would traditionally only be available from the local baby bell. Clearly they made a smart business decision to diversify into general telecommunications.
You've been watching too much Bill O'Reilly. Go to their web sites and read their case records and tell me if you disagree with the vast majority of cases they pursue.I disagree with the vast majority of cases they (the ACLU) pursue. Why? Because unlike civilized rational people who attempt to resolve their differences, they immediately bring out the heavy artillery (i.e. the lawyers). That means that instead of trying to understand the opposing viewpoint they have decided that their viewpoint is the correct one and that the opposing viewpoint is wrong. That is the nature of the court system. One side or the other is declared the winner. Everybody loses.
There is no more perfect example of this than the one we're discussing right now except this time it's the EFF instead of the ACLU. Apparently, the EFF has decided that issuing protocol control commands like Comcast is doing should not be legal. I'll agree with you it's a dumb way to do things, and I'll bet you're right that it was a perceived cost-cutting measure. But that doesn't mean it requires a court fight. The EFF is twisting facts and likening Comcast's actions to those of the Chinese government. Aside from the technical similarity, there is no comparison.
Unlimited internet since the days of dial-up has always meant that you would not be charged usage fees aside from the flat monthly rate. It has never meant that you could fully saturate your bandwidth 100% of the time. No ISP could even approach profitability if they guaranteed that at the current price levels.
If you want it though, it's available. Simply pay about 5 to 10 times as much for 5 to 10 times less bandwidth and you can have it. It's called a guaranteed bandwidth, guaranteed uptime T1 line.
Well, no shit. I didn't claim it was a superb technique they were using, merely a clever hack and not an uncommon one (I've seen it before). That said, I'm not about ready to call it immoral or illegal. They have every right to implement QoS on their network and if the cheapest way to do that at this point in time is to depend on BitTorrent-specific behavior (since BitTorrent is currently the largest if not only offender) then I don't see what is wrong with it.
The real story here is the EFF gathering an army of lawyers and the mob here on slashdot complaining that they simply can't believe that their unlimited connection doesn't allow them to fully saturate it 100% of the time.
The advertisements typically say "Speeds may vary." Often times this is not only written at the bottom (in the fine print) but also spoken at the end of the advertisement.
I hate to break it to you, but Comcast didn't invent "overselling" bandwidth. It's a standard part of ISP operations and has been since their inception. Do you really think back in the old days that one 1.544 Mbps T1 had any chance of saturating a pool of 100 28.8k modems?
Of course, you're probably too young to even know this and I almost cringe saying that because I'm not that old (not even 30 yet).
Have you ever wondered why a T1 often costs $500 or more? Granted some of it is stupid phone company overhead but a lot of it has to do with things like 99.999% uptime guarantees including bandwidth guarantees. That is, you are guaranteed to be able to saturate your 1.544 Mbps all the time. If you are not able to do that, then you're considered to be experiencing down time. If that happens, you get a credit.
Of course, you started out paying 5 to 10 times as much so the credit isn't to save you money but intended to be a slap on the wrist that the T1 provider gives itself for screwing up.
I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass if Comcast limits BitTorrent use, filters anything they want, and generally cuts the balls off my connection. But they better goddamn well tell me ahead of time. And they better have a good reason other than "you filthy pirates are using up our bandwidth!"
They do tell you ahead of time. It's in the fine print. Don't blame Comcast because you failed to read it. Your unlimited connection is still unlimited but it is not guaranteed bandwidth. That's available and if you want it you can pay 10 to 20 times what you pay Comcast to get it.
It's usually not even in the real fine print. Normally it's one simple asterisk and a phrase like "Speeds not guaranteed." That's not false advertising, particularly when they specifically mention it in the ad!
I understood your original message to mean you believed that QoS and tampering were two different and mutually exclusive things. You seemed to fail to realize was that Comcast is doing QoS by sending RST to both ends of the BitTorrent connections.
On the other hand, maybe you did understand that what Comcast is doing is poor-man's QoS and you simply object to their implementation. In which case you should have just said so. I have a feeling though that you didn't understand it at all and hopefully if you read my message you do now. That's why I said I thought you had a limited concept of network equipment. Several popular filtering programs do exactly what Comcast is doing. Including, most notably, the Great Firewall of China. But believe me, the Chinese government didn't invent that technique.
What the EFF article is trying to do is state that because the same technical implementation is being used (sending TCP RST to both sides) that what Comcast is doing is morally equivalent to what China is doing. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
The bandwidth limiter is the uplink to the internet, not the link from the headend to your cable modem. No ISP in existence has enough bandwidth from their headend to the rest of the internet to cover every user fully saturating it all the time. That is exactly what BitTorrent does. It is what it is designed to do.
For instance, they have 10 Gb/s of bandwidth from the headend to the internet. They give each of their customer 10 Mb/s. They have 10,000 customers. That would mean 100,000 Mb/s or 100 Gb/s of potential bandwidth usage if every customer fully saturated his link. The only common protocol that does that is BitTorrent. When you saturate your connection with BitTorrent you can and do take bandwidth away from other customers. It is no longer available for them to use.
For comparison, a T1 with guaranteed bandwidth of a meager 1.544 Mbps will run you around a grand a month. You pay $40/mo. Unlimited usage is not guaranteed bandwidth. The ISP has the capability and the legal right to throttle your traffic. It's in your contract and god help us if the courts ever override that. The only issue here is that Comcast is doing it with TCP RST packets instead of more traditional QoS techniques. Most protocols would balk at having their connections closed, but BT retries meaning that the TCP RST technique which would ordinarily be denial of service to other protocols is merely a clever way to implement quality of service.
4. Comcast likes to enjoy the legal protections of being a "common carrier" (i.e a dumb pipe). This behavior shows that they are not a dumb pipe at all. Once a provider starts manipulating the traffic flowing across their network, they lose common carrier status, and are now responsible for ALL the traffic on their network.
Common carrier is often misinterpreted to mean that the network must allow all traffic. It is more accurately interpreted to mean that the network can't drop your traffic because they don't like what you say.
So why is Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic? Some people are saying it's because they're conspiring with the RIAA and the MPAA. Sounds good, but that's not the simplest explanation. A far simpler explanation is that they simply don't have the available bandwidth to support BitTorrent and maintain decent service for their other customers.
Imagine if we weren't talking about the packet-switched internet but the circuit-switch telephone system. TCP basically creates virtual circuits overtop a packet network. There's still a limit to how much traffic can flow through. Say that I purchase 1000 lines from the phone company. They give me 1000 lines and depending on my call patterns it might be possible for me to use all 1000 lines without tying up all circuits. On the other hand, if I use all 1000 lines in such a way that my traffic ties up all available circuits you can bet that the phone company is going to want to have some words with me Probably those words are going to be something along the lines of: look, you can call whoever you want and say whatever you want, but don't call 1000 people in the same exchange (e.g. neighborhood) at the same time, our network does not handle that. You can slow your calls down, spread them out so that you call 100 people in 10 different exchanges, or do any other number of things. But if you continue to tie up all available lines in one exchange we're going to have to drop your service.
Do you think in that case that the phone company has violated their common-carrier status? Or do you think that instead they are trying to allocate a limited pool of resources in the most efficient manner?
I suppose it's not modded up yet since I didn't post it all that long ago.
As for the EFF rant, I don't mean to demonize them so much as point out that just like any other organization the EFF needs to be watched so that it doesn't do stupid things. Just because the EFF is an electronic liberties watchdog group does not mean that they themselves don't need watching.
I feel a little bad lumping them in with the ACLU although they sort of do that themselves. The EFF has most of the time avoided favoring one group's liberties over those of another group whereas the ACLU has a track record of doing this. I just want to make sure the EFF stays on the moral high ground.
Oh, and by the way. I'm a dude, like probably 90% of Slashdot. Besides, your usage of the compound pronoun s/he is really disconcerting to the group of people who are unsure of their sex. Just think, I could have been one of them, how would you have known? For maximum political correctness it's now recommended that you use the compound pronoun s/h/it.
Sure. You're right. They could use proper QoS and no one would know the difference. But in the specific cast of BitTorrent, sending RST to both sides effectively does QoS without really breaking the protocol. BT will simply retry. You will get your 200MB patch, just more slowly.
The thing I take issue with is the idea that something with basically the same end result is somehow illegal because you are able to observe that it's being done as opposed to real QoS which no one would have noticed except for slower BT connections.
Spoken like someone with only a limited concept of network equipment. Let's roughly break down filtering techniques into two broad categories:
Both techniques have their plusses and minuses. In the first case, the filter can literally filter the packets. That is, it simply drops them rather than forwarding them on. The downside is that if the filter machine goes down then the two endpoints cannot communicate. This is a useful technique when you really do want to filter packets. For instance, you generally don't want CIFS/SMB traffic ingress or egress from a private network to the internet. You do not want to allow even one packet to do this.
In the second case you're usually doing it not for security reasons but to filter traffic. The EFF mentions that the Great Firewall of China uses this technique. How sensationalist. So do a number of other web filters. I know of at least one dating back to like 1997 or so that uses this technique. The idea is that you can effectively block the traffic by forging a RST in both directions. So when your employee goes to playboy.com you can hit both sides with a RST and stop that from happening. This technique has the advantage that if the filter goes down, traffic can still pass because it doesn't pass through the filter.
Now, here's Comcast's issue. BitTorrent as a protocol is specifically designed to suck up all available bandwidth. The problem is that by necessity it does that to the exclusion of all other traffic which is more well behaved. Although we'd all love to live in a dreamworld where bandwidth is unlimited, reality is different. In reality, there are a lot of people who just want to check their e-mail and browse the web quickly. When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
So, the only fix is to stop BitTorrent from sucking up all available bandwidth. That means you need some sort of a filter. Now, you can do it the first way by putting a filter in between the endpoints. The filter could presumably receive the packets then delay sending them for a bit. TCP window sizes are usually only so large so delaying the packets will delay them from reaching the other endpoint which will thus cause ACK messages to be delayed. The problem with this is that you have to have real QoS equipment to get all this done.
The other method is to realize that while most protocols would be disrupted due to forcibly closing the connection, BitTorrent will not be. The receiving peer will just go hunt for a different peer and the sending peer now has another slot open for a new receiving peer. Thus, closing BitTorrent connections doesn't prevent anyone from using BitTorrent, it just makes it slower.
That, of course, is reasoned and intelligent debate without stupid emphasis on various words to make the story more sensational. The EFF is ridiculous. Like the ACLU, it's a good idea in principle. In practice both of those organizations aren't protecting anyone's liberties because they aren't having an open discussion about what is and what is not an infringement on one's liberties. They pre-decide what they consider to be infringements then hire armies of lawyers to ram their decisions down everyone else's throat.
No one, of course, is going to discuss the idea that maybe your neighbor deserves to be able to check his e-mail without you clogging up the connection and that maybe the ISP has the obligation to ensure a good level of service for all of their users. Nope, none of that. Instead we've already decided that blocking any traffic for any reason is bad and is of course just like Chinese censorship and so Comcast must be the devil. Typical group think.
Fantastic thought. After you spend more than a trillion dollars buying the right of way for this super train, let's get right on that.
Not necessarily that big of a problem. You may be able to lease right of ways and you may be able to pick some of them up at firesale prices. On the other hand, you may not. With gas prices going through the roof you can be quite sure that the big railways are wanting to capitalize on their sunk costs. I'm starting to see ads on TV for Norfolk Southern. They do freight. Presumably they want to get the attention of people in charge of shipping at various companies and let them know that the railroad is a viable option.
I'm still waiting for the Norfolk and Waypal overnight by train service.
I specifically mentioned in the comment that it was working with Apple's FireWire SDK. That includes a program called VirtualDVHS. Presumably it doesn't handle encrypted streams so I _assume_ that they must not be encrypted on the FireWire even though I am reasonably sure that they are encrypted on the coax, even for the HD locals.
For reference, the provider here is Cox Hampton Roads. Other than their high prices ($45 for basic cable??) I have no problems with them. I personally only subscribe to their high speed internet service and they do a great job. They don't have any bundling requirements so I pay the same for it as anyone else. Of course, you get a discount if you pick up any 2 services and more if you go for the triple-play. My parents have the cable/internet/phone and their phone service is stellar.
Right now, I'm happy with OTA HD using a WinTV HVR-950 in connection with EyeTV on a Mac. HD looks absolutely gorgeous on a 23" cinema display. Seeing as how I get this for free I see no need to part with over $40/mo for cable TV. Only thing I miss is Fox News and now USA since the new L&O: CI are only on USA. Oh well. Still not worth $40/mo to me.
If I wasn't a cheap ass bastard I'd probably get my own HD box and just plug it into the Mac to watch in HD. But that's like another $10 or $15 box rental on top of the access fee and I just don't watch that much TV. Granted, I'm probably not in their target demographic. I'm single and work from home so I have other things to do than become a couch potato.
You know, your statement, while I think ultimately inaccurate, is at least somewhat well informed. Bill Clinton was a great do-nothing President. He did what was popular and it mostly worked out. I wouldn't put him on the list of greatest Presidents of all time but he was definitely above average. Right man for the right time.
However, I think your extension of that to Jobs is wrong. Perhaps I'm a sucker but I really have the feeling that Jobs has vision. Or perhaps more accurately that he actually listens to his developers about what can and cannot be done in an allotted amount of time and finds a way to market that. That makes him look like he has vision when in reality he's just really good at collecting the ideas of his employees.
To be honest, and if we're going to compare to Presidents, I think that makes him much more like a George W. Bush. Far from being a cowboy, Bush listens to the advice of his cabinet (stocked with a lot of conservative thinkers) and executes the plan. Likewise, I think Jobs has stocked his company with a lot of very talented developers and designers and executes the plan.
What's particularly impressive in Jobs's case is that he gets development and marketing to work together. Apple markets software like they know what they're doing. Features make their way into various parts of the OS or various Apple applications (e.g. iLife, iWork, etc) before being distilled into a class with a good public API. A number of iLife features made their way down to the official GUI toolkit (Cocoa) in subsequent releases of OS X. Very few developers have the discipline to test something for real and work the kinks out of the API before making it public. See Microsoft Windows for a great example where you have billions of DoFooBar and DoFooBarEx (i.e. extended) and sometimes DoFooBarExEx.
And now we have the iPhone. They released it locked down as much as possible. They released it with no official SDK. Everything runs as root. Subsequent releases broke all third-party software. It has all the markings of an internal software development project that is simply not designed to be a long-lived API. But that was fine. The point of the iPhone was not to start out by competing with other environments like Symbian or Windows Mobile. The point was to start out by doing a cool phone. Trying to make it a real OS would likely have tripled development time. The amazing thing is that unlike the companies you hear about in all the horror stories (and there are many of them) the marketing guys were on board with this. Once the phone is field tested, you can start thinking about making it a platform.
This is where, IMO, Microsoft goes wrong. They're always thinking of Windows as a development platform first and foremost. Apple, instead, thinks of the user and prototypes things and only after they're proven to work well does Apple make it part of the platform.
The odd thing is that if you listen to the prevailing "wisdom" of software engineering Microsoft is doing it right. That is, you design an API and then you implement it. On a small scale, that works. On a large scale, it fails miserably. Interactions between components often necessitate API redesigns and occasionally radical API redesigns. That's why the whole "Extreme Programming" caught on for a while and the good aspects of it are starting to be incorporated into mainstream software development methodologies. Developers finally started realizing that software is really like any other engineering discipline. You have to prototype. However, unlike other disciplines, you have a lot of interaction between components and prototypes are cheap as hell. Every time you compile and run after making a change you've refined your prototype. You don't design a bridge by simply drawing it on a piece of paper and hoping it works because it looks good. See Tacoma Narrows bridge for an example. No, you have to instead prototype it and test it in wind tunnels and try to simulate earthquakes and all
Hmm, that's weird. My parent's box they got like 3 years ago has a firewire port (actually 2 like most devices). I've connected my (Apple) laptop to it and used the tools included with Apple's FireWire SDK to successfully capture video from it and even control it.
The online manuals (PDF) for the newer Motorola boxes seem to indicate that IEEE-1394 is considered a standard connection that you would make to a TV. In fact, they more or less seem to recommend it because not only does it include audio and video like HDMI but it obviates the need to do any setup of the box (e.g. video resolution, etc.) because the Firewire feed is an MPEG-2 transport stream.
That is, your TV then does all of the MPEG-2 decompression. I didn't try it with pay TV channels (my parents have none) but it worked fine with everything else. For reference, I tried a clear QAM tuner and even after flipping through all the available channels I was not able to find standard stuff like the HD feed for the local NBC affiliate (though I did find it for the local CBS affiliate). So apparently, the box must be decrypting the MPEG-2 TS and then sending it unencrypted to the TV.
This whole CableCARD thing is a sham. Firewire works. So what if you can't use a different box? You can get the firewire feed straight out of the cable-company provided box, connect it to another box and then connect your TV to that box. All of your navigation can be done from your box, the cable-company provided box just decrypts the channels for you.
What the FCC should have done, if anything, is mandate that cable companies provide a dumb box that supports FireWire. The box makers already have the technology for this, they would simply strip off the control panels and all the video/audio outputs and leave only the core functionality that supports receiving from cable, decrypting the signal if authorized, and outputting to firewire. To support VOD and other "two way" services they might simply leave in the application libraries (e.g. Motorola with their DCT and now OSAP libraries) and provide the VOD system through FireWire as if it were just another channel.
For instance, normal channel tuning could be accomplished by your own box simply telling the semi-dumb box to give it channel 10. When you want to access VOD your own box knows that channel 499 (or whatever) has the dumb-box provided VOD interface. All of the OSAP or DCT or whatever code runs on the cable-company provided box. All the decryption is done in the cable-company provided box. And you know what, if you DO want to use the cable-company's provided guide, why not make that a channel like 1 or something?
Better yet, Firewire can easily support multiple streams (0 through 63 from what I understand). It would not be hard to say lock 0 to the first tuner, 1 to a second tuner (if the dumb box is dual-tuner) and 3 to special stuff like the built-in program guide which would, when you select something from it, tell your computer to jump over to either 0 or 1. For VOD you probably need an underlying tuner to support it anyway so it may as well just be a special channel on one of the tuners streams.
All of this is really relatively simple to implement because it's all nearly already working technology. You don't have to define APIs that TVs or set top boxes must support (e.g. OSAP) to support VOD features because you leave running of those special applications to the dumb box. You don't have to deal with encryption because you simply send the stream out unencrypted.
If you really really really need to have encryption between the CPE (customer provided equipment) and the cable-company provided dumb box you simply use something like CableCARD in the TV. But instead of trying to make it some highly complex two-way protocol you make it a highly simple decryption protocol only. This decryption card would not know how to resolve QAM channels to logical channel numbers (that's done by the cable-company provided box), it would not know how to run cabl
And in the fallout, wxWindows had to be renamed wxWidgets because Microsoft's lawyers started going after anything with Windows in the name. Under U.S. and probably even U.K. trademark law, I don't think the project could have lost. But Microsoft really wanted the name badly and was threatening to sue several of the core developers who could never afford such a thing. In the end, the developers who had no resources to fight anyone, let alone Microsoft, followed legal advice and more or less sold the name to Microsoft.
So now you can do a whois wxwindows.org and see that Microsoft owns it. I believe the agreement was to keep it forwarding to wxwidgets.org for two years but it's been over that now and it still remains forwarded. So in the end I suppose things did not work out too badly since the project got some money and Microsoft got an example they could use against Lindows.
I have to say, I don't blame Microsoft much. I blame Lindows. The name was a publicity stunt from the beginning and IMO clearly violated Microsoft's trademark of the name Windows to refer to a computer operating system. Microsoft had to defend that trademark and their legal strategy was to defend the name Windows in the much broader category of anything relating to computers, not just a computer operating system. None of it would have happened if Lindows hadn't caused trouble in the first place.
An authorisation to use force is not a declaration of war. It should have been, but the US Congress hasn't declared war since 1941. They have not been doing their job.
Yeah, you're right, it should have been a declaration of war. Actually, it should have been a simple one too. Hmm, let's see. We've got members of the terrorist group who attacked us on 9/11 running around the region. We've got a guy who lost a war to us a decade prior telling us he doesn't have to abide by our weapons treaties. We think not only that he's starting to rebuild his weapons arsenal but that he's starting to harbor terrorists.
Should have been a no brainer really. And basically it was, nearly ever member voted for the authorization of force. Why not a declaration of war? Frankly I think it's because wishy-washy language has become the norm these days. That's a whole other topic but suffice to say that I think you're splitting hair and that I also think that Congress votes on resolutions with imperfect language so they have a political out in case things go badly. Oh, and guess what? Yeah, that's exactly what they did. Claims like "Well, I didn't really think it was a war resolution" have actually been uttered by Hillary Clinton at campaign stops. I really only have one response to that: Lady, then you're pretty stupid.
I realize that sounds "harsh" in today's modern say a lot of words but really say nothing culture but I'm really beginning to feel like I'm living with 1984's doublespeak lately.
As for ignoring Congress, I was talking about the war; I was talking about how US presidents behave as elected kings or prime ministers, not as the executives of the republic. When running for election they promise all manner of things that aren't in their power; when elected they pursue all manner of initiatives which aren't in their power.
The president's job is to approve, veto & execute the laws, negotiate treaties and a few other items (all neatly listed in the Constitution). It's not to lead the country. The country doesn't need to be led: the people send their representatives; the states send their senators (whoops, not since the asinine Seventeenth Amendment); the people appoint a president to execute the law.
This is a tradition that goes back at least to Jefferson, the first president to take military action without consulting Congress. Search for the Barbary Pirates. It is true that the President was not meant to be a monarch. There's no question about that. However, what you describe as the presidency is not an executive position, but more like a chairman of the board. We're not England. We don't have a prime minister. We have a president.
Do I also need to point out that it's actually in the president's sworn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"? Do I further need to point out that while the Constitution goes into quite a bit of detail about Congressional procedure, it's fairly sparse on what the president may or may not do. Compared to Article I, with its laundry list of dos and don'ts for Congress, Article II is surprisingly sparse and only contains must-dos and shall-dos.
That has historically (except by very recent scholars) been interpreted to mean that the President has a huge amount of leeway. But it's worth pointing out that even though history suggests that Bush did have the power to go into Iraq without asking Congress, he did so only after asking and receiving approval from Congress.
I do, however, note that your quip about "it's not to lead the country" is at least founded in some amount of reason. Indeed, the President's job is to preserve, protect, and defend the country. However, in order to accomplish that, the President will find it necessary most of the time to be a leader who is able to convince the electorate and Congress that he needs to do something in order to fulfill his oath. Thus while his job description isn't to be a lea
Perhaps that's what he's meant to do. I'm not sure. I'm actually glad that he doesn't seem to believe most of the stuff he says. Every so often he seems to forget the script and make a reasoned argument. Occasionally he does make Hannity look like the trollish buffoon he is. Hannity bothers me because he comes off as actually believing some really asinine things. Alan works precisely because he comes off as scripted.
Say FNC instead had Hannity&Olbermann. Then we'd have two trollish buffoons toeing the party line. That would certainly not help the show at all.
I'll tell you what would be a better show though: a moderate conservative and a moderate liberal. Maybe Fiorina (assuming she's a moderate conservative) and Powers?
O'Reilly regularly hosts a Malkin/Powers debate. Powers always appears very moderate and very reasoned. Unfortunately, Malkin is worse than Hannity. O'Reilly/Powers would be a great combination (and in fact, O'Reilly does sometimes have Powers on one-on-one) but of course O'Reilly isn't going to do a O'Reilly&* show when he's got his own show. Maybe Miller/Powers?
You know, it's problematic that I can't think of any popular moderate conservative commentators other than Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller. Boortz would be a good fit as well but he's really a radio guy. That's not to say that there aren't moderate conservatives. I would say that most of the personalities on FNC are moderate conservatives. But none of them have the personality it would take to do a __&__ type of show.
Is this, then, where Fiorina comes in? Could be.