The authors go out of their way to say that moral condemnation of piracy doesn't make sense but I wonder if that also applies to the moral satisfaction that some people take in "punishing" greedy copyright holders by pirating their stuff? I tend to think that people that get off on giving a middle finger to copyright holders would pirate no matter what the price and therefore their moral self-righteousness is just as much bullshit as the moral indignation of the copyright holders.
YThe worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
I don't think they will be so lucky. I'd bet the government will require it for some communication and account access. Over time it will become more inconvenient to have multiple email accounts and people will just default to using de-mail.
The phrase "Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network." Sounds pretty universal to me. I just hope the author wasn't paraphrasing a document that specified Internet video only from certain providers and not others, i.e. youtube, netflix, hulu, etc.
Amtrak runs on commercial rails. They've always been a second class citizen. But I agree you can't run passenger rail on freight tracks and expect either high speed or prompt routing.
But you needn't worry about it, because this is never going to happen. Someone should point out to Mr. Obama that he already spent all the money. We couldn't possibly afford this now.
His arguments just don't hold water unless you assume that all networks are connected to every other network. There are choke points and all the government needs to do is control them. I certainly don't think it's beyond the government to be able to do so. It always surprises me that people either dramatically over-estimate or under-estimate the Internet's resilience. It's tough but not indestructible and it does have some serious weak spots.
Every science is based on certain axioms so is this. We must not say that it is fake. Rather, we should say that "we dont know". Someone please read Vaastu Shastra and comment below here.
You're confused. Empirical science is inductive and is concerned with material truths. What you are describing is a deductive science like logic or mathematics. Neither of which produce material truths. The key difference is falsifiability.
Yeah, poorly configured and managed firewalls can't handle a big DDoS attack. Duh, neither could a poorly configured server of any kind (eg. web server or whatever).
Nothing to see here.
Nothing you can afford can handle a "Big DDOS attack".
No need to pick nits about how it is managed or configured.
of joblessness. The only way we can compete for manufacturing jobs that currently go to other countries is to do them more efficiently by automating them. In other words productivity must increase by an appropriate amount or we aren't going to win the job. So a job that at one time required 1000 people in the US is now being done by 1000 people in China for 50% of the cost to do it in the US. In order to win it back we're going to have to do the job with 100 people. That's still a net loss of 900 but it's better than nothing. We are going to have to create brand-new highly profitable work-intensive industries in which the US has a competitive advantage (education, infrastructure, etc) in order to get the jobless rates down.
I feel the same way and would only vote D just to keep the R's away. I do NOT want D's; I want less R's.
Wow. If people think this way, then I've just thought of a way it could be exploited. All I would have to do would be to pick what I wanted to happen and have it supported by group A, and then just make sure that alternative B was horribly worse. For added refinement to stop people getting wise to it, I could divide up what I wanted to achieve between both A and B and alternate which appeared worse.
Phew. I'm glad no-one else has ever thought of that. Can you imagine what America would be like if they had...?
OMG. You are a genius!:-) The illusion of choice is the most powerful illusion of all because we want to believe we have control. I think the corporate types and their lackeys (i.e. politicians) have forgotten this rule. They are acting with impunity and rubbing our faces into the fact that we don't have control. Thus breaking the illusion. They are playing with fire. Arrogance before the fall and all of that...
I am not going for flames, I am being honest here. I teach at what would be called a "rich kids" school (in a medium sized metro area of 1.2 million), even though the real rich kids schools are even higher up the tuition scale than my school. I bring this up to point out what seems to be most important to a vast majority of "elite" families: playing, starting and excelling on sports teams. Science club? What kind of dork does that!? Focus most time on studies? Loser! I fear much of our nation is stuck in a trap where parents are reliving their lives and the kids are feeding like crack addicts off of this behavior. What the hell kind of future do we have when the "top" young people of the future will sit around at board meetings talking about the time they caught the game winning touchdown in a flag football game played in 8th grade?
Those kids are not the future leaders of our country. They occupy one niche in the social ecosystem and are likely to stay there for their whole lives. It's just like a small town. Who said these kids were the top? Are they the "top" young people just because their parents are rich? I don't think so. They are the future middle-managers of our country. And, that's ok. We need those, too.
"Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions."
Really? The author, Norm Augustine, provides zero evidence that this is true. I didn't choose my job because of other people's impression of it. I chose it because I enjoy and I get paid good money to do it.
He then goes on to say the usual things about lack of investment, bad teachers, bad parents, etc. I'm not sure how those exactly relate to his above thesis but presumably he means that if we paid more attention to Engineering people would have a positive impression of it. Maybe so. But none of these explain why parents are not directing their children to be Engineers and children are not interested in Engineering.
If you want parents to direct their children to be Engineers, tell them how much Engineers make per year. If it's not enough, they won't care. Also, that means that Engineers must grow the market for Engineers through innovation otherwise flooding the market with Engineers will just drive down salaries and thus would be counter-productive. So, it's not just any old kind of Engineers we want but entrepreneurial Engineers and, for the most part, that means a change in the way educate Engineers (i.e. Engineering needs to be more than computation). Which leads me to my next point.
If you want children to become interested in Engineering, then the curriculum needs to be reformed. Science and math curriculum for the most part sucks. Mathematics is often taught by the TERC method which is better than the axiomatic method of rote memorization that preceeded it (i.e. math curriculum from the 60's to the 90's) but doesn't spend enough time showing kids why the short-cuts we normally use in mathematics actually work. For those that are unfamiliar with TERC, TERC emphasizes process and making mathematics intuitive. To grossly simplify, where as most people would just say there are five blocks on the floor in the case where there are five blocks on the floor but TERC would require you to count each block. That's a horrible example but if you are interested wikipedia is your friend. Anyhow, the point is that there is no way to make math and science easy, they are hard, but we don't have to make them easy to make them interesting. We must make them inspire wonder and excitement.
How do we do that? That's a good question and if I had the answer I'd write a book but I do know it's possible because I've found it on my own while studying mathematics and science. I can't count the number of times I've said to myself: "Wow, that's so cool!". So it can be done. Can it be done consistently at scale? I have no idea.
The article has some legitimate observations but the conclusions it draws don't follow logically nor do they fit past trends. Yes, Intel and Microsoft have little motivation to get into the low-margin tablet/smartphone market, if they are only thinking about short-term profits (which they may have been) but if they are thinking strategically they'd know that by giving ARM oxygen eventually it will grow into a company that can compete for the notebook market (which will probably be the biggest single market for consumers) and the same goes for Microsoft with Android.
Also, one technology never completely supplants another technology. Each will fit into its niche but since the tablet better fits one niche (i.e. media consumption) it will dominate it. Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers are not going away any time soon because they fit other niches. It's not clear where the equilibrium point is going to be but it's also not an either/or scenario. I have a desktop, laptop, and I will have a tablet if the iPad 2 lives up to the hype.
I'd rather they made their integrated graphics fast than simply support new DirectX capabilities. I don't really see the point of supporting certain features if the whole thing is going to be slow. I suppose it's easier to implement something than it is to implement it well.
It will include DirectX 11 *and* theoretically be twice as fast as Sandy Bridge. Not much to complain about there.
P.S. By theoretically I mean it will have twice as many stream processors.
No. In fact there are some quotes from Lucasfilm that these are being sourced from 2K masters made for HD broadcast some years ago, and that no additional remastering will take place until it is done for the 3D versions.
These will look better than the DVDs, but there will be a better looking version later.
We need either Network Neutrality or Mandatory Line-sharing. Network neutrality (real Network Neutrality, not the abomination that was disgorged by the FCC yesterday) is essential to ensure all legitimate traffic is treated equally because most ISPs are monopolies. If they were forced to share their last mile lines with potential competitors we wouldn't need Network Neutrality because if our ISP did something we didn't like we could switch. Unfortunately there is less of a chance that mandatory line-sharing will happen than a real Network Neutrality Order. It's a shame because I'd rather leave it up to the market than the government because the government produces crap like yesterday's Order that tries to please everyone where as the market tries to please me, the consumer. The question posed by the WSJ is nothing more than a straw man at best and at worst ideological masturbation and neither is worthy of discussion. Network Neutrality would not "grant control over the internet to political appointees." It would simply establish rules for the game, just like any other regulation. Not to mention that it would be impossible for such appointees to control the whole internet.
Would that prevent a network from blocking DDOS traffic to a hosted server on its network?
No.
Putting a cap on how many communications are sent to a destination is not discrimination. So, yes, a network can block a DDOS attack. Unless that DDOS somehow consists of no more data or signals than normal use of the site, which would indicate a DDOS that is triggering a bug on the site's server and should be fixed by the site themselves.
Next wild attempt to make NN sound bad, please...
Hey, get off your high horse I'm not trying to make NN look bad. I'm poking holes in the parent's definition of NN. By specifically calling out endpoints he's making the definition needlessly complex. And your response doesn't address the issue. It just makes the definition of "discrimination" the issue.
It would be illegal under your scheme to give real time or streaming applications priority. Try again. How about, "No Internet provider shall discriminate based on end-points." Discriminate by type of traffic, sure. Discriminate based on where it came from or where it is going, no.
Would that prevent a network from blocking DDOS traffic to a hosted server on its network?
How do three graphs show Comcast is not delivering the promised bandwidth and committing fraud? Two graphs are for a ONE day period for TWO separate interfaces and the third graph is ANOTHER interface over a 30 day period. 30Gb at this ONE location. The ONLY thing shown here is that the links were nearly 100% utilized for the time shown. That's it.
I didn't say that the graphs did. I'm assuming Comcast is doing what they have been accused of doing because it fits a previous pattern of behviour.
Except they do an end run around that by offering server co-location inside their network for $$$ so they don't have to go through the clogged pipe to the rest of the world.
Different means, same effect.
Not really. Different means and different effect. It's a much more coarse means and is not as lucrative for Comcast. Imagine if Comcast could charge every single content provider and not just the networks/CDNs?
I think it would be a delicious irony if as result of the scrutiny Comcast is receiving due to their proposed acquisition of NBC regulators not only to denied the acquisition but further split the company in half. One half would be Comcast cable and the other half would be Xfinity broadband. Comcast cable would be forced to lease the last mile lines to Xfinity as well as any other broadband provider that is interested. That would be justice and therefore it will never happen. We're just going to see a ban on charging for traffic that terminates in their network.
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The authors go out of their way to say that moral condemnation of piracy doesn't make sense but I wonder if that also applies to the moral satisfaction that some people take in "punishing" greedy copyright holders by pirating their stuff? I tend to think that people that get off on giving a middle finger to copyright holders would pirate no matter what the price and therefore their moral self-righteousness is just as much bullshit as the moral indignation of the copyright holders.
It's a software problem.
YThe worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
I don't think they will be so lucky. I'd bet the government will require it for some communication and account access. Over time it will become more inconvenient to have multiple email accounts and people will just default to using de-mail.
The phrase "Comcast can't interfere with Internet video traffic flowing over its broadband network." Sounds pretty universal to me. I just hope the author wasn't paraphrasing a document that specified Internet video only from certain providers and not others, i.e. youtube, netflix, hulu, etc.
I don't think we'll be so lucky.
Amtrak runs on commercial rails. They've always been a second class citizen.
But I agree you can't run passenger rail on freight tracks and expect either high speed or prompt routing.
But you needn't worry about it, because this is never going to happen.
Someone should point out to Mr. Obama that he already spent all the money. We couldn't possibly afford this now.
s/he/we It's not just his doing.
His arguments just don't hold water unless you assume that all networks are connected to every other network. There are choke points and all the government needs to do is control them. I certainly don't think it's beyond the government to be able to do so. It always surprises me that people either dramatically over-estimate or under-estimate the Internet's resilience. It's tough but not indestructible and it does have some serious weak spots.
Every science is based on certain axioms so is this. We must not say that it is fake. Rather, we should say that "we dont know". Someone please read Vaastu Shastra and comment below here.
You're confused. Empirical science is inductive and is concerned with material truths. What you are describing is a deductive science like logic or mathematics. Neither of which produce material truths. The key difference is falsifiability.
Yeah, poorly configured and managed firewalls can't handle a big DDoS attack. Duh, neither could a poorly configured server of any kind (eg. web server or whatever).
Nothing to see here.
Nothing you can afford can handle a "Big DDOS attack".
No need to pick nits about how it is managed or configured.
Unless you use a CDN.
of joblessness. The only way we can compete for manufacturing jobs that currently go to other countries is to do them more efficiently by automating them. In other words productivity must increase by an appropriate amount or we aren't going to win the job. So a job that at one time required 1000 people in the US is now being done by 1000 people in China for 50% of the cost to do it in the US. In order to win it back we're going to have to do the job with 100 people. That's still a net loss of 900 but it's better than nothing. We are going to have to create brand-new highly profitable work-intensive industries in which the US has a competitive advantage (education, infrastructure, etc) in order to get the jobless rates down.
I feel the same way and would only vote D just to keep the R's away. I do NOT want D's; I want less R's.
Wow. If people think this way, then I've just thought of a way it could be exploited. All I would have to do would be to pick what I wanted to happen and have it supported by group A, and then just make sure that alternative B was horribly worse. For added refinement to stop people getting wise to it, I could divide up what I wanted to achieve between both A and B and alternate which appeared worse.
Phew. I'm glad no-one else has ever thought of that. Can you imagine what America would be like if they had...?
OMG. You are a genius! :-) The illusion of choice is the most powerful illusion of all because we want to believe we have control. I think the corporate types and their lackeys (i.e. politicians) have forgotten this rule. They are acting with impunity and rubbing our faces into the fact that we don't have control. Thus breaking the illusion. They are playing with fire. Arrogance before the fall and all of that...
I am not going for flames, I am being honest here. I teach at what would be called a "rich kids" school (in a medium sized metro area of 1.2 million), even though the real rich kids schools are even higher up the tuition scale than my school. I bring this up to point out what seems to be most important to a vast majority of "elite" families: playing, starting and excelling on sports teams. Science club? What kind of dork does that!? Focus most time on studies? Loser! I fear much of our nation is stuck in a trap where parents are reliving their lives and the kids are feeding like crack addicts off of this behavior. What the hell kind of future do we have when the "top" young people of the future will sit around at board meetings talking about the time they caught the game winning touchdown in a flag football game played in 8th grade?
Those kids are not the future leaders of our country. They occupy one niche in the social ecosystem and are likely to stay there for their whole lives. It's just like a small town. Who said these kids were the top? Are they the "top" young people just because their parents are rich? I don't think so. They are the future middle-managers of our country. And, that's ok. We need those, too.
only treats the symptoms, not the cause.
First unjustified assumption:
"Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions."
Really? The author, Norm Augustine, provides zero evidence that this is true. I didn't choose my job because of other people's impression of it. I chose it because I enjoy and I get paid good money to do it.
He then goes on to say the usual things about lack of investment, bad teachers, bad parents, etc. I'm not sure how those exactly relate to his above thesis but presumably he means that if we paid more attention to Engineering people would have a positive impression of it. Maybe so. But none of these explain why parents are not directing their children to be Engineers and children are not interested in Engineering.
If you want parents to direct their children to be Engineers, tell them how much Engineers make per year. If it's not enough, they won't care. Also, that means that Engineers must grow the market for Engineers through innovation otherwise flooding the market with Engineers will just drive down salaries and thus would be counter-productive. So, it's not just any old kind of Engineers we want but entrepreneurial Engineers and, for the most part, that means a change in the way educate Engineers (i.e. Engineering needs to be more than computation). Which leads me to my next point.
If you want children to become interested in Engineering, then the curriculum needs to be reformed. Science and math curriculum for the most part sucks. Mathematics is often taught by the TERC method which is better than the axiomatic method of rote memorization that preceeded it (i.e. math curriculum from the 60's to the 90's) but doesn't spend enough time showing kids why the short-cuts we normally use in mathematics actually work. For those that are unfamiliar with TERC, TERC emphasizes process and making mathematics intuitive. To grossly simplify, where as most people would just say there are five blocks on the floor in the case where there are five blocks on the floor but TERC would require you to count each block. That's a horrible example but if you are interested wikipedia is your friend. Anyhow, the point is that there is no way to make math and science easy, they are hard, but we don't have to make them easy to make them interesting. We must make them inspire wonder and excitement.
How do we do that? That's a good question and if I had the answer I'd write a book but I do know it's possible because I've found it on my own while studying mathematics and science. I can't count the number of times I've said to myself: "Wow, that's so cool!". So it can be done. Can it be done consistently at scale? I have no idea.
Agreed.
The article has some legitimate observations but the conclusions it draws don't follow logically nor do they fit past trends. Yes, Intel and Microsoft have little motivation to get into the low-margin tablet/smartphone market, if they are only thinking about short-term profits (which they may have been) but if they are thinking strategically they'd know that by giving ARM oxygen eventually it will grow into a company that can compete for the notebook market (which will probably be the biggest single market for consumers) and the same goes for Microsoft with Android.
Also, one technology never completely supplants another technology. Each will fit into its niche but since the tablet better fits one niche (i.e. media consumption) it will dominate it. Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers are not going away any time soon because they fit other niches. It's not clear where the equilibrium point is going to be but it's also not an either/or scenario. I have a desktop, laptop, and I will have a tablet if the iPad 2 lives up to the hype.
executed. Seriously.
I'd rather they made their integrated graphics fast than simply support new DirectX capabilities. I don't really see the point of supporting certain features if the whole thing is going to be slow. I suppose it's easier to implement something than it is to implement it well.
It will include DirectX 11 *and* theoretically be twice as fast as Sandy Bridge. Not much to complain about there.
P.S. By theoretically I mean it will have twice as many stream processors.
No. In fact there are some quotes from Lucasfilm that these are being sourced from 2K masters made for HD broadcast some years ago, and that no additional remastering will take place until it is done for the 3D versions.
These will look better than the DVDs, but there will be a better looking version later.
Don't have a cite handy, so Google it.
Interesting. Thanks for the tip!
I am sure they are coming and I am sure the 2D versions will be just as good as these. In fact these will probably be the sources for the 3D versions.
The market is big enough for both of them.
We need either Network Neutrality or Mandatory Line-sharing. Network neutrality (real Network Neutrality, not the abomination that was disgorged by the FCC yesterday) is essential to ensure all legitimate traffic is treated equally because most ISPs are monopolies. If they were forced to share their last mile lines with potential competitors we wouldn't need Network Neutrality because if our ISP did something we didn't like we could switch. Unfortunately there is less of a chance that mandatory line-sharing will happen than a real Network Neutrality Order. It's a shame because I'd rather leave it up to the market than the government because the government produces crap like yesterday's Order that tries to please everyone where as the market tries to please me, the consumer. The question posed by the WSJ is nothing more than a straw man at best and at worst ideological masturbation and neither is worthy of discussion. Network Neutrality would not "grant control over the internet to political appointees." It would simply establish rules for the game, just like any other regulation. Not to mention that it would be impossible for such appointees to control the whole internet.
Would that prevent a network from blocking DDOS traffic to a hosted server on its network?
No.
Putting a cap on how many communications are sent to a destination is not discrimination. So, yes, a network can block a DDOS attack. Unless that DDOS somehow consists of no more data or signals than normal use of the site, which would indicate a DDOS that is triggering a bug on the site's server and should be fixed by the site themselves.
Next wild attempt to make NN sound bad, please...
Hey, get off your high horse I'm not trying to make NN look bad. I'm poking holes in the parent's definition of NN. By specifically calling out endpoints he's making the definition needlessly complex. And your response doesn't address the issue. It just makes the definition of "discrimination" the issue.
Next presumptuous inadequate response, please...
It would be illegal under your scheme to give real time or streaming applications priority. Try again. How about, "No Internet provider shall discriminate based on end-points." Discriminate by type of traffic, sure. Discriminate based on where it came from or where it is going, no.
Would that prevent a network from blocking DDOS traffic to a hosted server on its network?
How do three graphs show Comcast is not delivering the promised bandwidth and committing fraud? Two graphs are for a ONE day period for TWO separate interfaces and the third graph is ANOTHER interface over a 30 day period. 30Gb at this ONE location. The ONLY thing shown here is that the links were nearly 100% utilized for the time shown. That's it.
I didn't say that the graphs did. I'm assuming Comcast is doing what they have been accused of doing because it fits a previous pattern of behviour.
Except they do an end run around that by offering server co-location inside their network for $$$ so they don't have to go through the clogged pipe to the rest of the world.
Different means, same effect.
Not really. Different means and different effect. It's a much more coarse means and is not as lucrative for Comcast. Imagine if Comcast could charge every single content provider and not just the networks/CDNs?
I think it would be a delicious irony if as result of the scrutiny Comcast is receiving due to their proposed acquisition of NBC regulators not only to denied the acquisition but further split the company in half. One half would be Comcast cable and the other half would be Xfinity broadband. Comcast cable would be forced to lease the last mile lines to Xfinity as well as any other broadband provider that is interested. That would be justice and therefore it will never happen. We're just going to see a ban on charging for traffic that terminates in their network.