I don't know how they actually do it, but one easy scheme comes to mind. The network is kept open, but unidentified users are blocked. Any port 80 requests are redirected to their authentication server which asks for your username and password. It also has a signup page where you can give your credit card number and get a username instantly.
I've thought about this before and came to the same conclusion. It's so straightforward that I'll bet you some company's already patented it.
As I said, cops can only dream of the day we have ten times as many gun incidents as the UK. And considering our population is less than five times that of the UK, that's no laughing matter.
From another post above:
Last year, in a population of around 60 million, the UK had approximately 168 firearms killings. In the USA with a population of around 300 million there were 11,168 killings.
Do the math and see if adjusting for population difference explains the discrepancy.
you can also end it with knifes, bats, crowbars, bar stools, bricks, forks, spoons, a creditcard, or a fist(if you have been traind to do so)
Except that most people haven't been trained to kill with their fists or with spoons, so explosive violence that isn't abetted by a gun tends not to be as deadly.
I'm sure that that premeditated murders are just about as common, but that's a smaller chunk of the total.
and jsut so you know...most gun crimes...I would say a great majority, are commited by people weilding illagal arms or stolen arms...legal owners do not normaly comit crimes.
Yup. Which is the chief argument against gun control in the US-- it'd take us years to take enough guns out of circulation that illegal guns could be mopped up, if we could even do that. England has the advantage of a history of gun-control and being an island with a much tighter control on the weapons supply (despite the sensational stories of.22 handguns being available if you know the right Armenian gangster and have a relatively large wad of cash.)
England has plenty of fighting and violence. But whether it's due to the lack of availability or to the absence of guns as a cultural icon, there are fewer people carrying guns and thus things don't explode into violence as often.
Criminal use of handguns since the 1997 ban has jumped by
40 percent
Horrifying.
But wait, here it is from a slightly better news source (and when USA Today is better than your news source, you need to get a new one):
In a study released late last month, researchers found that the criminal use of handguns in Britain had increased by almost 40% in three years, to 3,685 incidents from 2,648
3,685 incidents? In the entire country? And that's all gun incidents, of which only the tiniest fraction are actual murders?
US cops can only dream of the day we see as few as 3,685 gun incidents in a year (or hell, even 10 times that number.)
Insignificant sample sizes, and if I recall correctly, the numbers went back down again after the three year period was up.
In a study released late last month, researchers found that the criminal use of handguns in Britain had increased by almost 40% in three years, to
3,685 incidents from 2,648. The study was sponsored by the Countryside Alliance, which represents farmers, rural landowners and the hunting community. (my emphasis)
Are you suggesting that the US had fewer than 3,658 gun incidents in any year of the past decade?
Even adjusting for population differences, that would give the US many, many times the rate of gun violence that the UK enjoys.
By far the most potent vault of gun facts on the Internet is GunCite [guncite.com]
I'm on the fence with regards to gun control, but I shun statistical analysis like the plague. Especially the analysis from Guncite, which is loaded with partial interpretations, spin, and all the rest of it. Don't consider it anything approaching an objective source.
For instance, one particular graph on the site contrasts the increasing number of guns in the public's hands with gun-homocide rates. Because the homocide rates don't rise with the number of guns in society, the conclusion is that gun "supply" has nothing to do with homocide rates*.
I've thought of drawing a similar example in which I would graph kids' intake of milk on one axis and their rate of growth on the other. My conclusion? As you increase the amount of milk the kids drink to amounts like 10 gallons a day, you don't see a corresponding increase in the kids' rate of growth. Therefore, I've demonstrated that calcium intake has no effect on growth rates in kids. I'll call it the "Calcium Supply Myth".
Of course that's a nonsensical conclusion-- I've just shown that if you're already providing enough calcium, adding excess doesn't necessarily have give you eight-foot tall kids. But if kids weren't getting enough calcium, would their growth rates slow down? Ditto for guns. Once there are enough guns in society to thorougly satisfy criminals' demands for weaponry, it doesn't matter so much how many more you add. Certainly it demonstrates that adding more guns to our already phenomenal supply doesn't seem to "turn people into murderers." But that's about all I can draw from that graph.
What would happen if you actually reduced the number of guns in public hands to the point where criminals were going without? I don't know, and clearly neither does GunCite. Personally, I'm increasingly of the opinion that our liberal attitude towards gun ownership, combined with lack of regulation and training, does indeed result in deaths. That doesn't necessarily mean I want guns outlawed, however; there are good constitutional and moral arguments for gun ownership. But the "we can have it all" argument that our armed society comes without a price is just wishful thinking.
* Incidentally, there are other problems with this graph: it doesn't say how the guns are distributed-- if one person buys a hundred guns, it's a little different from a hundred people each buying one gun. It also doesn't say how many guns are dropping out of supply, etc, and I'm not clear if it includes military/police purchases.
In another example, England apparently has a decent chunk of gun violence, yet strict gun control laws
I hate to get involved in gun-control arguments, but...
Could anyone post a link supporting this? I've seen lots of England-vs-America gun arguments and the one conclusion I always noted was that England has a pretty low rate of gun violence. Despite their relatively high crime rates in other areas.
The book "More Guns, Less Crime" does a pretty good job of just looking at the numbers. When you look at the numbers, the spin the other groups put on a particular incident is lessened.
Why should you even look at the numbers... Doesn't the title of the book tell you everything you need to know?:)
What kind of economic benefits? The only thing that'll change for me is that I'll have to pay more for a NIC every time I buy one, whether or not I use wireless (which I don't).
Why will you have to pay more for your NIC? If you use wireless, you'll have it built in to your machine at commodity prices (and presumably external card manufacturers will have to lower prices to compete.) Integrated video chipsets have hardly caused an explosion in the price of AGP/PCI graphics cards. If you don't use wireless, I hardly think that the prices of Ethernet NICs are going to skyrocket (how much are they costing you now, anyway?)
Ubiquitous wireless networks will accelerate the development of standards that provide higher bandwidth and better security. WEP sucks. If everyone used wireless, the need for real security would become pretty damn obvious and maybe we'd even see people finally adopting serious security protocols for general use (rather than for specialized applications as they're used now.) Securing your machine might actually become a whole lot easier as a result.
As far as saving your business money, I think there are a lot of things that'd be useful. For instance, I'd love to buy an office printer, plug it in and have it ready to go-- no cabling, no print servers, etc. I'd like to be able to use my laptop (or hopefully smaller PC) to connect to my office from anywhere. I'd love to be able to set up a business without waiting for someone to show up and install the DSL line. And that's all just the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile, Intel is planning to have every device that uses an Intel chip Wi-Fi enabled which will make it difficult for companies that sell Wi-Fi as an accessory to prosper
This is definitely one case in which the prosperity of third party companies should be secondary to the economic benefits that'll be afforded by ubiquitous Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
There's still money to be made providing Wi-Fi services and equipment. Somebody's going to have to provide Internet connectivity, and the hardware will be necessary there. But the only thing that's going to really kick that business along is a dirt-cheap Wi-Fi chip in every device, from laptops down to vending machines.
A high-margin client-side business is the enemy of the spread of Wi-Fi networks. The Wi-Fi "card" was an interesting stage, but it needs to go the way of the external modem.
I have not read the book. I agree that the film did not do this as well as it could have (or the story/concept deserves), but there were 3 or 4 scenes where they actively discuss this theme rather pointedly. It's clearly supposed to be the driving theme.
The film presents it as an interesting concept that might give you something to contemplate. But it's not presented strongly, and you're left to meditate on that yourself after the movie's over-- there's very little time or room to put yourself into the movie while it's going on. I think this is one of the reasons that Tarkovsky chose to make his movie so slow and long-- he hoped that it would draw people in and give them a chance to steep in Lem's emotional world. I don't think it worked properly though, and this movie didn't either.
See, the book forces you into contemplation as you read it. It's similar to the way that an author like Tolkein uses hundreds of words to paint a physical environment in great detail until you can almost touch it. In Solaris, Lem put a similar effort into creating emotional environments. That's why there's so little in the way of story, and yet the novel is still so rich. The novel also leaves you enough room to identify with the character (or at least, I did.) I couldn't get there with Mr. Clooney; he wasn't human enough.
Unfortunately, because Solaris the novel offered relatively little else beyond the emotional and metaphysical, the movie suffered as an independent work. I'm glad you got so much out of it, though; this is definitely a credit to you.
Anybody who missed that shouldn't be writing a review. Then again, I'm not surprised; most of the people in the theater were too distracted by what they thought the movie was about (ooh! Clooney!).
Don't get me wrong, this movie isn't great, but the concept is interesting. It requires a bit of thought OUTSIDE what's on the celluloid. People, I've discovered, are wholly incapable of that.
And if you really want to be drawn into that question, the only way to do it is to read the book.
This movie is notable in that it fails to pull people into that state of mind in the way Lem's novel did; that's why people can come out of this movie shaking their heads and wondering why anyone would want tell this story.
Don't shoot the messenger-- he's just telling it like it is.
Unfortunatly, they are growing considerably more stealthy as a result of these legal attacks and the effects of packet-shapers. This may be a good thing for those who want their 1337 WAR3Z, D00D!!, but is rather unfortunate for those who want to create secure systems.
Sure, but there's a flipside: the technical attacks by the RIAA et al. may also have the effect of making the networks a little bit more robust in security terms. A poorly secured p2p technology will tend to quickly become a well-secured p2p technology after a few targeted attacks.
In any case, p2p ain't the only app with these problems. It's just the one we consider least "necessary".
I would only say that a handful of Asimov's books are really worthy of great praise. Many of the rest, if not quite so formulaic as the Clancies and Chrichtons, are just nothing special.
Wouldn't evolution have constructed lifeforms of this kind long ago if they were stable and competetive in a natural environment?
Who says they'd be stable and competitive? Nanomonsters, grey goo, and most other hypothetical boogymen are the antithesis of "stable and competitive". They only have to exist long enough to devour the entire food supply (us) before becoming extinct.
Similarly, Bengal tigers would probably not thrive if you dropped a bunch of them off in northern Vermont. But they could still do a lot of damage in the short-term.
In a situation where QoS is being monitored closely, you could use this system to dynamically reduce the bandwidth of a signal travelling over a busy link on the way to its final destination. Currently the only way to adjust signal bandwidth is to throw away packets, which is rarely ideal.
Note that the difference between both of the above scenarios and the one you proposed is that here we're talking about network bandwidth rather than storage space. While it might be cheap to keep many different versions of a file on a server's hard drive, bandwidth is frequently a more precious commodity-- especially if you're talking about live events where constraints are generally even greater than under other circumstances.
In a streaming situation, the server would store only one high quality stream, and dynamically peel it down to the client's bandwidth. Not useful. If you instead stored a hundred separate files, each optimized for its bitrate, with each being half the bitrate of the previous one, you'd still have a set of files less than twice the size of the largest file. Plus, you'd have no bit-peeling overhead. If you're streaming 100GB audio files, maybe there's a benefit, but if you're doing that, you can probably afford a second 100GB file for all the smaller files.
It would be great for multicast-type situations (including, but not limited to IP multicast.) You could send one high-quality signal out from a central point and then shave off bits to fit the stream down to the quality needed by the end-user.
For instance, users on a 56k modem could listen to the same multicast stream as a broadband user (ie, no need to send out multiple, separate versions from the source)-- this assumes the presence of routers (or conversion boxes) capable of doing the peeling as needed.
The only interesting thing in that article is the notion that companies will use location info as a security measure to insure that you really are where you say you are, or to track people down when they do illegal stuff over their phone.
I can just picture it now-- I get my PIN wrong three times trying to check my bank balance, and two cops come over and arrest me.
Two quick points - one, you don't mention what the quality of the tracks were... were they non-watermarked AIFF or WAVs (44.1k, 16bit), or were they some compressed and altered format, with its attendant artifacts?
Nobody's going to be shipping around uncompressed tracks for a long time yet. They're just way too big, even for your average broadband user.
Well, the good news is that they won't have trouble finding a set for Captain Haddock's Chateau de Moulinsarart-- it already exists. Of course, in real life it's known as the Chateau Cheverny and has a couple of large additions on the sides.
But I'm sure a little digital editing magic and they'll have a great set.
I also want to get a monitor-hidden-in-sunglasses and chording keyboard to walk around mobile computing with. Wonder if it'll work:)
I think it'll be about 5 years until that's worthwhile. In-glasses displays are almost-there, battery technology is almost good enough, PDAs are almost powerful/small enough to do cool stuff, and of course, ubiquitous wireless networking is just starting to take off.
But it'd still be fun to try if you've got the extra dough.
So then I get a CE device from work. I thought I would give PDA's another chance
On top of that, the PocketPC devices-- despite being way more powerful and generally cooler-- are much less suited to the basic tasks of a PDA (storing numbers, calendar, etc.) They're just too big, eat too much battery, and the software isn't as concise as Palm's.
I really thought my shiny iPaq would be a great replacement for my Palm and my laptop, with it's ability to handle an 802.11 card (and Ricochet back when that existed). Turned out that it was an enormous and inferior substitute for both, and it crashed a lot with the network card in. Now I don't use either, because I'm dissatisfied with the inflexibility of my Palm and the flaws of the PocketPC.
Too bad vasectomies are not reversable, as that would be the safe way to go. Isn't the primary reason they are not reversable the fact that the sperm is dumped into the bloodstream and your body produces antobodies which then kill them? So if you have it reversed, your body still kills the little guys? Anyway, I'm no doctor, but I play one sometimes.
Vasectomies are entirely reversible. It can be a little tricky because the procedure is extremely delicate, and thus there isn't a 100% success rate, but it's fairly routine.
As for all that nonsense about antibodies... Are you serious? What do you think happens to sperm when you don't have sex or masturbate for a while? Pretty much the same thing as what happens when you've had a vasectomy. I've never heard of anyone becoming sterile as a result of being celibate for a while.
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I've thought about this before and came to the same conclusion. It's so straightforward that I'll bet you some company's already patented it.
From another post above:
Do the math and see if adjusting for population difference explains the discrepancy.Except that most people haven't been trained to kill with their fists or with spoons, so explosive violence that isn't abetted by a gun tends not to be as deadly.
I'm sure that that premeditated murders are just about as common, but that's a smaller chunk of the total.
Yup. Which is the chief argument against gun control in the US-- it'd take us years to take enough guns out of circulation that illegal guns could be mopped up, if we could even do that. England has the advantage of a history of gun-control and being an island with a much tighter control on the weapons supply (despite the sensational stories of .22 handguns being available if you know the right Armenian gangster and have a relatively large wad of cash.)
England has plenty of fighting and violence. But whether it's due to the lack of availability or to the absence of guns as a cultural icon, there are fewer people carrying guns and thus things don't explode into violence as often.
But wait, here it is from a slightly better news source (and when USA Today is better than your news source, you need to get a new one):
3,685 incidents? In the entire country? And that's all gun incidents, of which only the tiniest fraction are actual murders?
US cops can only dream of the day we see as few as 3,685 gun incidents in a year (or hell, even 10 times that number.)
Insignificant sample sizes, and if I recall correctly, the numbers went back down again after the three year period was up.
And if, as the above poster said, England just includes more things in their crime rate, there's not much left to say.
Even adjusting for population differences, that would give the US many, many times the rate of gun violence that the UK enjoys.
I'm on the fence with regards to gun control, but I shun statistical analysis like the plague. Especially the analysis from Guncite, which is loaded with partial interpretations, spin, and all the rest of it. Don't consider it anything approaching an objective source.
For instance, one particular graph on the site contrasts the increasing number of guns in the public's hands with gun-homocide rates. Because the homocide rates don't rise with the number of guns in society, the conclusion is that gun "supply" has nothing to do with homocide rates*.
I've thought of drawing a similar example in which I would graph kids' intake of milk on one axis and their rate of growth on the other. My conclusion? As you increase the amount of milk the kids drink to amounts like 10 gallons a day, you don't see a corresponding increase in the kids' rate of growth. Therefore, I've demonstrated that calcium intake has no effect on growth rates in kids. I'll call it the "Calcium Supply Myth".
Of course that's a nonsensical conclusion-- I've just shown that if you're already providing enough calcium, adding excess doesn't necessarily have give you eight-foot tall kids. But if kids weren't getting enough calcium, would their growth rates slow down? Ditto for guns. Once there are enough guns in society to thorougly satisfy criminals' demands for weaponry, it doesn't matter so much how many more you add. Certainly it demonstrates that adding more guns to our already phenomenal supply doesn't seem to "turn people into murderers." But that's about all I can draw from that graph.
What would happen if you actually reduced the number of guns in public hands to the point where criminals were going without? I don't know, and clearly neither does GunCite. Personally, I'm increasingly of the opinion that our liberal attitude towards gun ownership, combined with lack of regulation and training, does indeed result in deaths. That doesn't necessarily mean I want guns outlawed, however; there are good constitutional and moral arguments for gun ownership. But the "we can have it all" argument that our armed society comes without a price is just wishful thinking.
* Incidentally, there are other problems with this graph: it doesn't say how the guns are distributed-- if one person buys a hundred guns, it's a little different from a hundred people each buying one gun. It also doesn't say how many guns are dropping out of supply, etc, and I'm not clear if it includes military/police purchases.
I hate to get involved in gun-control arguments, but...
Could anyone post a link supporting this? I've seen lots of England-vs-America gun arguments and the one conclusion I always noted was that England has a pretty low rate of gun violence. Despite their relatively high crime rates in other areas.
Why should you even look at the numbers... Doesn't the title of the book tell you everything you need to know? :)
Why will you have to pay more for your NIC? If you use wireless, you'll have it built in to your machine at commodity prices (and presumably external card manufacturers will have to lower prices to compete.) Integrated video chipsets have hardly caused an explosion in the price of AGP/PCI graphics cards. If you don't use wireless, I hardly think that the prices of Ethernet NICs are going to skyrocket (how much are they costing you now, anyway?)
Ubiquitous wireless networks will accelerate the development of standards that provide higher bandwidth and better security. WEP sucks. If everyone used wireless, the need for real security would become pretty damn obvious and maybe we'd even see people finally adopting serious security protocols for general use (rather than for specialized applications as they're used now.) Securing your machine might actually become a whole lot easier as a result.
As far as saving your business money, I think there are a lot of things that'd be useful. For instance, I'd love to buy an office printer, plug it in and have it ready to go-- no cabling, no print servers, etc. I'd like to be able to use my laptop (or hopefully smaller PC) to connect to my office from anywhere. I'd love to be able to set up a business without waiting for someone to show up and install the DSL line. And that's all just the tip of the iceberg.
This is definitely one case in which the prosperity of third party companies should be secondary to the economic benefits that'll be afforded by ubiquitous Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
There's still money to be made providing Wi-Fi services and equipment. Somebody's going to have to provide Internet connectivity, and the hardware will be necessary there. But the only thing that's going to really kick that business along is a dirt-cheap Wi-Fi chip in every device, from laptops down to vending machines.
A high-margin client-side business is the enemy of the spread of Wi-Fi networks. The Wi-Fi "card" was an interesting stage, but it needs to go the way of the external modem.
The film presents it as an interesting concept that might give you something to contemplate. But it's not presented strongly, and you're left to meditate on that yourself after the movie's over-- there's very little time or room to put yourself into the movie while it's going on. I think this is one of the reasons that Tarkovsky chose to make his movie so slow and long-- he hoped that it would draw people in and give them a chance to steep in Lem's emotional world. I don't think it worked properly though, and this movie didn't either.
See, the book forces you into contemplation as you read it. It's similar to the way that an author like Tolkein uses hundreds of words to paint a physical environment in great detail until you can almost touch it. In Solaris, Lem put a similar effort into creating emotional environments. That's why there's so little in the way of story, and yet the novel is still so rich. The novel also leaves you enough room to identify with the character (or at least, I did.) I couldn't get there with Mr. Clooney; he wasn't human enough.
Unfortunately, because Solaris the novel offered relatively little else beyond the emotional and metaphysical, the movie suffered as an independent work. I'm glad you got so much out of it, though; this is definitely a credit to you.
And if you really want to be drawn into that question, the only way to do it is to read the book.
This movie is notable in that it fails to pull people into that state of mind in the way Lem's novel did; that's why people can come out of this movie shaking their heads and wondering why anyone would want tell this story.
Don't shoot the messenger-- he's just telling it like it is.
Sure, but there's a flipside: the technical attacks by the RIAA et al. may also have the effect of making the networks a little bit more robust in security terms. A poorly secured p2p technology will tend to quickly become a well-secured p2p technology after a few targeted attacks.
In any case, p2p ain't the only app with these problems. It's just the one we consider least "necessary".
I would only say that a handful of Asimov's books are really worthy of great praise. Many of the rest, if not quite so formulaic as the Clancies and Chrichtons, are just nothing special.
Who says they'd be stable and competitive? Nanomonsters, grey goo, and most other hypothetical boogymen are the antithesis of "stable and competitive". They only have to exist long enough to devour the entire food supply (us) before becoming extinct.
Similarly, Bengal tigers would probably not thrive if you dropped a bunch of them off in northern Vermont. But they could still do a lot of damage in the short-term.
Note that the difference between both of the above scenarios and the one you proposed is that here we're talking about network bandwidth rather than storage space. While it might be cheap to keep many different versions of a file on a server's hard drive, bandwidth is frequently a more precious commodity-- especially if you're talking about live events where constraints are generally even greater than under other circumstances.
It would be great for multicast-type situations (including, but not limited to IP multicast.) You could send one high-quality signal out from a central point and then shave off bits to fit the stream down to the quality needed by the end-user.
For instance, users on a 56k modem could listen to the same multicast stream as a broadband user (ie, no need to send out multiple, separate versions from the source)-- this assumes the presence of routers (or conversion boxes) capable of doing the peeling as needed.
All in all, very useful.
I can just picture it now-- I get my PIN wrong three times trying to check my bank balance, and two cops come over and arrest me.
Nobody's going to be shipping around uncompressed tracks for a long time yet. They're just way too big, even for your average broadband user.
Well, the good news is that they won't have trouble finding a set for Captain Haddock's Chateau de Moulinsarart-- it already exists. Of course, in real life it's known as the Chateau Cheverny and has a couple of large additions on the sides.
But I'm sure a little digital editing magic and they'll have a great set.
I think it'll be about 5 years until that's worthwhile. In-glasses displays are almost-there, battery technology is almost good enough, PDAs are almost powerful/small enough to do cool stuff, and of course, ubiquitous wireless networking is just starting to take off.
But it'd still be fun to try if you've got the extra dough.
On top of that, the PocketPC devices-- despite being way more powerful and generally cooler-- are much less suited to the basic tasks of a PDA (storing numbers, calendar, etc.) They're just too big, eat too much battery, and the software isn't as concise as Palm's.
I really thought my shiny iPaq would be a great replacement for my Palm and my laptop, with it's ability to handle an 802.11 card (and Ricochet back when that existed). Turned out that it was an enormous and inferior substitute for both, and it crashed a lot with the network card in. Now I don't use either, because I'm dissatisfied with the inflexibility of my Palm and the flaws of the PocketPC.
Vasectomies are entirely reversible. It can be a little tricky because the procedure is extremely delicate, and thus there isn't a 100% success rate, but it's fairly routine.
As for all that nonsense about antibodies... Are you serious? What do you think happens to sperm when you don't have sex or masturbate for a while? Pretty much the same thing as what happens when you've had a vasectomy. I've never heard of anyone becoming sterile as a result of being celibate for a while.