If you're going to recall that quote then you should also recall his open acknowledgement that our understanding of physics is no different in kind from the Mayan priests' understanding of astronomy. We have better mathematical machinery, better physical machinery, better training at avoiding unproductive lines of reasoning. Listen to him say so. Start 20 minutes in, listen for 15 minutes. tl;dr version: "I don't understand it either".
And Feyerabend seems to have had a lot of support for his position:
To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend provides counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to a certain fixed method. He took some examples of episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress, e.g. the Copernican revolution), and showed that all common prescriptive rules of science are violated in such circumstances. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution.
Sounds like that point could easily be mis-taken as "there is no such thing as the scientific method".
Debug code that didn't get turned off or something. 30-50MB bulk uploads in a kinda-regular pattern, and when she turns on airplane mode it seems to save them up.
#2 suspect: somebody found a hole, it's been botted right out of the gate.
Just set up POP access and use any client that uses mbox format. It's bog-standard. Thunderbird does it. I'm sure opinions differ on what's best but this certainly works for me. Been using it for almost a decade now, one big archive, no slowdown, a high-traffic mailing list for my searching pleasure.
At least several indie games are under continuous development. AI War and M&B Warband are two of my favorites anyway, and they're almost continuously upgraded. The (huge community of) modders on Warband actually complain about the pace. Diffidently. Fully aware of how good they have it. But they do at times, because it's hard to keep up. AI War changes even more dramatically -- since it's 2D sprite art they can move quicker on the game itself. And move quicker they do, there are huge additions and rebalancings. Both of those games absolutely rocked when I bought them, and they're f'ing awesome now. Warband, for instance, is constantly in the top-20 active games on Steam and that's not where most people play it.
So, no, don't take it for granted that indie developers have moved on or are just raking in the dough. The good ones got that way because their developers loved them, and many still do. So go halfies on a nice meal for them, ok? They're busting their butts for you.
Aww, jeez. There was a post saying they didn't know Moore's Law meant transistors, which I figured wsa ridiculous for a Presidential Commission, so I fetched the report and snipped it. Seemed to me the text must be buried a few link-layers or pages deep. It didn't occur to me it would be front dead center and about two thirds of the blog article. This is slashdot. I have no defense. .
Everyone knows Moore’s Law – a prediction made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the
density of transistors in integrated circuits would continue to double every 1 to 2 years.
Fewer people appreciate the extraordinary innovation that is needed to translate increased transistor den-
sity into improved system performance. This effort requires new approaches to integrated circuit design,
and new supporting design tools, that allow the design of integrated circuits with hundreds of millions or
even billions of transistors, compared to the tens of thousands that were the norm 30 years ago. It requires
new processor architectures that take advantage of these transistors, and new system architectures that
take advantage of these processors. It requires new approaches for the system software, programming
languages, and applications that run on top of this hardware. All of this is the work of computer scientists
and computer engineers.
Even more remarkable – and even less widely understood – is that in many areas, performance gains due
to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased
processor speed.
The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess
playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It’s difficult to quantify the
improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one
example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin.
Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved
using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear
programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in
roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was
due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algo-
rithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming
between 1991 and 2008.
The design and analysis of algorithms, and the study of the inherent computational complexity of prob-
lems, are fundamental subfields of computer science.
You're talking about covert channels, which not even the highest of the old Orange Book security ratings contemplates forbidding. The most they required, even for an A1 rating, was formal bandwidth analysis and mitigation, and an explanation of why the remaining channels couldn't be reduced. They've been superseded, but I don't think any commercial system ever got an A1 rating.
You don't have to try to put such weaknesses into cryptographic code, and they (mostly) are vulnerable only to very, very high-precision and high-s/n-ratio timing data on the responses (i.e. an extremely close-range tap or such a huge volume of data that statistical analysis can eliminate the noise). The only other one I think might apply (I call it cache-pulse, I don't know another term) would, I think, show up even on an uninformed audit: flooding the cache in a timed pattern an unprivileged program can detect and decode.
At one point, Enzyte customers seeking a refund were told they needed to obtain a notarized document
indicating that they had experienced “no size increase.” The admittedly ingenious idea behind the policy
was that nobody “would actually go and have anything notarized that said that they had a small penis.”
That service amounts to me using my bandwidth to sit down and have a video chat with my son every morning.
We know what a fair price for that is. People run the numbers, see they could make a good living providing good service, and try to start a company doing it. In other countries, we see that this works. Here, people who try that get sued into oblivion. Note: they are not left to fail on their own.
And the big isp's are openly angling to refuse to offer that at all: note that if BigCorp wants to charge Netflix for video-stream access to BigCorp's customers, those customers must be unable to get enough bandwidth otherwise. What the big ISPs say they want to achieve does not match what they're proposing as a means to achieve it. What they're proposing as a means to achieve it will not work at all unless they can also refuse to reliably deliver even 10Mb/s from any other source.
He rebuilt the Hayden Planetarium's exhibit to account for the new stuff being discovered. They wanted to present generally what's out there, so they grouped like with like: the inner planets, the gas giants and the Kuiper belt. Pluto plainly is not a gas giant at all and looks a lot like what's in the Kuiper belt, so wtd?
Apparently, when you're looking at how much crap really is in orbit around our sun , there isn't much question what to do, but it seems like a much bigger deal to people who haven't yet looked. .
perhaps worth considering when the issue is reduced to a matter of trust, i.e. when you have no other basis to decide.
For instance, I've seen enough of Glenn Beck to reflexively reject anything he says, not as false but as meaningless. I could investigate, but I no longer do.
It's applied ad hominem in its purest form, but there are distinctions to be made: first, I'm not arguing it to anyone else, and second the ad hominem part isn't based on the source, but on my character assessment of the source: because Glenn Beck frequently makes stunningly stupid arguments that I simply do not believe anyone in his position could actually believe, I regard him as personally dishonest and do not bother investigating anything he says. The thing to remember is that ad hominem isn't conclusive, not in the usual sense. It's a rejection of thought.
Not everyone has made the same assessments of {Glenn Beck, the New York Times, Karl Rove, Jerry Brown} as I have.
GGP skipped every argument, even ad hominem, and advocated rejecting articles purely because of their source. It isn't argument, it isn't even discussion, it's groupthink. It's tribalism.
Fact is, there is a tribe on slashdot that has accepted the need for net neutrality and rejects most arguments from the usual sources advocating against it. I'm in that tribe by choice, I've made the same assessment: I find the corporate arguments not merely wrong but actively dishonest.
But just as there's a distinction between having a monopoly and being a monopolist or being in the military and practicing militarism, there's a distinction between being in a tribe and practicing tribalism.
Here is an argument, not ad hominem but actual argument, for a particular kind of net neutrality, source-neutral routing.
Either my ISP's network has the bandwidth to feed me (and, simultaneously, every household in my neighborhood) a stutter-free video stream or it doesn't. I pay for "up to" enough to receive that. If they have enough to deliver it for hulu, they also have enough to deliver it for any other source, and if my video isn't coming from one of their paid sources and they refuse to deliver it from the source I chose, then they are forcibly idling available bandwidth rather than deliver what they have and I've paid for. Done.
That is a valid basis for an ad hominem argument: these corporations make transparently false arguments in support of paid-source routing, and to make those arguments one must (or so I believe) be dishonest, cretinous or credulous. People don't get to be CEOs of major corporations by being stupid or gullible. I don't pay much attention to their arguments for content-type prioritization either, just a cursory "if they can do stutter-free video at the bandwidth I paid for, they can deliver anything else at the same rate", plus the ad hominem, is enough for me.
But it would be wrong to make that ad hominem argument against this or any other position that matters, because we're discussing national policy and even untrustworthy sources sometimes have subtle and valid points. It would be even more wrong to suggest, without even making the argument, that others should reject what they say simply because it's them saying it, and most wrong of all, fully savage tribalism, to reject anyone's views based solely on whether they have or have not accepted any particular ad hominem. If you refuse to engage with anyone merely because they're "republican", you might as well tear up your decency card.
No, I think there is a basis. I chased your links..
TurboHercules asked to license IBM's OSes for production use on an emulator running on unspecified hardware. IBM's main selling point for those systems is extreme reliability. Did IBM ever raise so much as a mild objection to Hercules themselves? Not that I can see. "We think [...] you will understand that IBM could not reasonably be expected to license its operating systems for use on infringing platforms" is as far as they go, even when prompted on the subject. They declined to endorse the use of their OS on it. How anyone could be more restrained is utterly beyond me. They didn't drag any dramatic accusations onto the public stage.
the FSFE lobbies hand in hand for "open standards" with companies pursuing proprietary lock-in in their core businesses
So? Those companies can't lock in the format, because it's an actual standard: an open document containing sufficient information that anyone can implement a product meeting it. The FSFE want open standards and the companies advocating ODF along with the FSFE want it too. Some other people are paid to openly advocate for it.
Commercial motives are not reprehensible.
What Microsoft did to get OOXML through the ISO also had commercial motives. Those motives were also not reprehensible.
I find what they actually did reprehensible in the extreme. I would find choosing to castigate open advocacy, undertaken with the actual intent of achieving its stated intent, as "hypocrisy" objectionable even in isolation. I find choosing to do so in the face of what Microsoft was doing at the time reprehensible in the extreme.
So I think there's a basis for the assertions.
Please consider the effect of what you're doing, and that "a person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act."
I haven't noticed any 64-bit related issues. There's a 64bit flash prerelease now. Works real nice. Never needed Adobe's reader. The stuff I use wine for still works, it keeps improving. I needed to dpkg --configure -a to get the upgrade to finish, my grub config changes hung the gui'd one so hard I had to reboot, into an all but completely unconfigured (as in, X didn't work) system.. I don't think anything has changed since the rc I upgraded to so if you've shoved things around in/etc maybe apt or aptitude would work better than update-manager did for me, but maverick is definitely snappier than lucid. I'm glad I did the upgrade.
I find myself wondering exactly what it should take to get a "health certificate" for any system that could operate as a NAT router.
How frequently should health certificates be rechecked?
You'd need the active equivalent of an SSL session with every device to make substituting your real computer after validation at least a little harder, maybe even as hard as it is to crack DRM now.
That's for people who want to plug arbitrary devices onto the Internet. Auntie chatting and tubing and filling out marketing surveys would have to stay current on whatever OS could get a key.
DNS permits everything in domain names. You can implement any restrictions you want on names you issue on your own authority, but
Implementations of the DNS protocols must not place any restrictions
on the labels that can be used. In particular, DNS servers must not
refuse to serve a zone because it contains labels that might not be
acceptable to some DNS client programs.
It's simple. If ISPs can prioritize traffic for money, they will become video service for whoever pays the most. They'll *call* it Internet service, but that will merely give them an excuse to not actually *deliver* Internet Service: they'll stuff actual internet traffic into whatever dribs and drabs are left over. If the other end isn't paying, too, it will be severely throttled regardless of actual network conditions.
They say they need to charge for "priority access" (or whatever the nom du jour) to deliver video streams reliably. That means that if Netflix pays for priority access, Netflix's video streams will be delivered to Netflix's standards. And that means that if everyone in your neighborhood is watching Netflix (in 1080p, at 50Mb/s), your ISP can deliver it.
And that means they have the bandwidth available. Why should Netflix be the only company paying if anyone else can use that bandwidth free? Ergo, you won't be allowed to use it except to get to Netflix (or whoever else is paying for access to you). And how will Netflix and whoever else cover what they're paying for this premium service? That doesn't even require guessing, does it?
No service that needs as much bandwidth as decent video will ever be allowed to operate over the real Internet (outside their "premium VoI" channels).
Any amount of thought will lead you to realize that these people had nothing to do with producing the media we're discussing. Giving them extra money doesn't help those who did produce the media -- actual productive people -- at all. Companies elsewhere -- profitable, fast-growing companies -- deliver more bandwidth more reliably and less expensively than here, and their service is constantly improving. Media is just bits. There aren't any "expensive bits", there is no "cost of streaming media".
So these guys' entire actual argument is that people who don't give them money are bad people.
Bad people don't give them money. Good people give them money. You don't give them money, therefore you're a bad person. If you don't want to be a bad person, give them money. Don't talk to anyone who doesn't give them money, or you're a bad person too.
================
Some affluent-and-well-educated-sounding person is likely to arrive soon talking about "latency" or "jitter" or "packet loss" or something similar that really means "technical-sounding gobbledygook you don't know enough about to understand it doesn't actually apply to the situation at hand". Every bad symptom except insufficient bandwidth can be covered by a one-time delay of maybe three seconds for startup buffering. It isn't an issue.
Yeah. Crappy military, subpar weather prediction, useless satellite data, a white elephant of an interstate highway system, needless food- and drug- and transportation-safety regulations. JPL is a complete waste, the NSA and CIA and FBI should have been privatized long ago, and what exactly is the point of having U.S. Attorneys? Commercial interests would've managed our National Parks so much better. We should have waited for commercial enterprise to invent and deploy GPS. And the Internet. Head Start hurts young children, Pell grants hurt older ones, SBA loans are crutches for incompetent businessmen who should starve on the streets.
Take them all away. Make them never have been. Miraculously shiny-clean profitable and wholesome businesses would spring up to replace them! Let one thousand flowers bloom!
There are no bad managers or incompetent employees in corporation-land! Only good people are executives and business owners! *No* one works for the Government for the good of us all! Good people only work to make themselves rich and rich people richer! The rich only give lots of money to good people! There's no other reason to do anything at all! Bring back 14 hour workdays and six day workweeks! Get some use out of your children again! No need to pay taxes, the company provides! See you in the company town, at the company store!
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to recall that quote then you should also recall his open acknowledgement that our understanding of physics is no different in kind from the Mayan priests' understanding of astronomy. We have better mathematical machinery, better physical machinery, better training at avoiding unproductive lines of reasoning. Listen to him say so. Start 20 minutes in, listen for 15 minutes. tl;dr version: "I don't understand it either".
And Feyerabend seems to have had a lot of support for his position:
Sounds like that point could easily be mis-taken as "there is no such thing as the scientific method".
I think private was meant as "non-commercial", not "don't cache". Hard to imagine he'd serve it with a no-cache tag.
Debug code that didn't get turned off or something. 30-50MB bulk uploads in a kinda-regular pattern, and when she turns on airplane mode it seems to save them up.
#2 suspect: somebody found a hole, it's been botted right out of the gate.
Just set up POP access and use any client that uses mbox format. It's bog-standard. Thunderbird does it. I'm sure opinions differ on what's best but this certainly works for me. Been using it for almost a decade now, one big archive, no slowdown, a high-traffic mailing list for my searching pleasure.
End users gain nothing
... except of course the software itself ...
At least several indie games are under continuous development. AI War and M&B Warband are two of my favorites anyway, and they're almost continuously upgraded. The (huge community of) modders on Warband actually complain about the pace. Diffidently. Fully aware of how good they have it. But they do at times, because it's hard to keep up. AI War changes even more dramatically -- since it's 2D sprite art they can move quicker on the game itself. And move quicker they do, there are huge additions and rebalancings. Both of those games absolutely rocked when I bought them, and they're f'ing awesome now. Warband, for instance, is constantly in the top-20 active games on Steam and that's not where most people play it.
So, no, don't take it for granted that indie developers have moved on or are just raking in the dough. The good ones got that way because their developers loved them, and many still do. So go halfies on a nice meal for them, ok? They're busting their butts for you.
Aww, jeez. There was a post saying they didn't know Moore's Law meant transistors, which I figured wsa ridiculous for a Presidential Commission, so I fetched the report and snipped it. Seemed to me the text must be buried a few link-layers or pages deep. It didn't occur to me it would be front dead center and about two thirds of the blog article. This is slashdot. I have no defense. .
Progress in Algorithms Beats Moore’s Law
Everyone knows Moore’s Law – a prediction made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the density of transistors in integrated circuits would continue to double every 1 to 2 years.
Fewer people appreciate the extraordinary innovation that is needed to translate increased transistor den- sity into improved system performance. This effort requires new approaches to integrated circuit design, and new supporting design tools, that allow the design of integrated circuits with hundreds of millions or even billions of transistors, compared to the tens of thousands that were the norm 30 years ago. It requires new processor architectures that take advantage of these transistors, and new system architectures that take advantage of these processors. It requires new approaches for the system software, programming languages, and applications that run on top of this hardware. All of this is the work of computer scientists and computer engineers.
Even more remarkable – and even less widely understood – is that in many areas, performance gains due to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased processor speed.
The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It’s difficult to quantify the improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time. In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algo- rithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.
The design and analysis of algorithms, and the study of the inherent computational complexity of prob- lems, are fundamental subfields of computer science.
You don't have to try to put such weaknesses into cryptographic code, and they (mostly) are vulnerable only to very, very high-precision and high-s/n-ratio timing data on the responses (i.e. an extremely close-range tap or such a huge volume of data that statistical analysis can eliminate the noise). The only other one I think might apply (I call it cache-pulse, I don't know another term) would, I think, show up even on an uninformed audit: flooding the cache in a timed pattern an unprivileged program can detect and decode.
For comparison, the mass of the earth is 5.9e24 kg. So that's about one IPv6 address for every five nanograms of mass on the entire planet.
In fact I would rather that every device have loadable (or at least flashable) firmware so that I can upgrade it or get bugfixes
So say we all.
from the vendor.
That's the trouble right there.
At one point, Enzyte customers seeking a refund were told they needed to obtain a notarized document indicating that they had experienced “no size increase.” The admittedly ingenious idea behind the policy was that nobody “would actually go and have anything notarized that said that they had a small penis.”
Please, Slashdot, please may I have just one teensy little mod point? I promise to spend it on this.
That service amounts to me using my bandwidth to sit down and have a video chat with my son every morning.
We know what a fair price for that is. People run the numbers, see they could make a good living providing good service, and try to start a company doing it. In other countries, we see that this works. Here, people who try that get sued into oblivion. Note: they are not left to fail on their own.
And the big isp's are openly angling to refuse to offer that at all: note that if BigCorp wants to charge Netflix for video-stream access to BigCorp's customers, those customers must be unable to get enough bandwidth otherwise. What the big ISPs say they want to achieve does not match what they're proposing as a means to achieve it. What they're proposing as a means to achieve it will not work at all unless they can also refuse to reliably deliver even 10Mb/s from any other source.
'nuff said.
See the guy who did it talk about how it happened.
He rebuilt the Hayden Planetarium's exhibit to account for the new stuff being discovered. They wanted to present generally what's out there, so they grouped like with like: the inner planets, the gas giants and the Kuiper belt. Pluto plainly is not a gas giant at all and looks a lot like what's in the Kuiper belt, so wtd?
Apparently, when you're looking at how much crap really is in orbit around our sun , there isn't much question what to do, but it seems like a much bigger deal to people who haven't yet looked. .
Ad hominem attacks are
perhaps worth considering when the issue is reduced to a matter of trust, i.e. when you have no other basis to decide.
For instance, I've seen enough of Glenn Beck to reflexively reject anything he says, not as false but as meaningless. I could investigate, but I no longer do.
It's applied ad hominem in its purest form, but there are distinctions to be made: first, I'm not arguing it to anyone else, and second the ad hominem part isn't based on the source, but on my character assessment of the source: because Glenn Beck frequently makes stunningly stupid arguments that I simply do not believe anyone in his position could actually believe, I regard him as personally dishonest and do not bother investigating anything he says. The thing to remember is that ad hominem isn't conclusive, not in the usual sense. It's a rejection of thought.
Not everyone has made the same assessments of {Glenn Beck, the New York Times, Karl Rove, Jerry Brown} as I have.
GGP skipped every argument, even ad hominem, and advocated rejecting articles purely because of their source. It isn't argument, it isn't even discussion, it's groupthink. It's tribalism.
Fact is, there is a tribe on slashdot that has accepted the need for net neutrality and rejects most arguments from the usual sources advocating against it. I'm in that tribe by choice, I've made the same assessment: I find the corporate arguments not merely wrong but actively dishonest.
But just as there's a distinction between having a monopoly and being a monopolist or being in the military and practicing militarism, there's a distinction between being in a tribe and practicing tribalism.
Here is an argument, not ad hominem but actual argument, for a particular kind of net neutrality, source-neutral routing.
Either my ISP's network has the bandwidth to feed me (and, simultaneously, every household in my neighborhood) a stutter-free video stream or it doesn't. I pay for "up to" enough to receive that. If they have enough to deliver it for hulu, they also have enough to deliver it for any other source, and if my video isn't coming from one of their paid sources and they refuse to deliver it from the source I chose, then they are forcibly idling available bandwidth rather than deliver what they have and I've paid for. Done.
That is a valid basis for an ad hominem argument: these corporations make transparently false arguments in support of paid-source routing, and to make those arguments one must (or so I believe) be dishonest, cretinous or credulous. People don't get to be CEOs of major corporations by being stupid or gullible. I don't pay much attention to their arguments for content-type prioritization either, just a cursory "if they can do stutter-free video at the bandwidth I paid for, they can deliver anything else at the same rate", plus the ad hominem, is enough for me.
But it would be wrong to make that ad hominem argument against this or any other position that matters, because we're discussing national policy and even untrustworthy sources sometimes have subtle and valid points. It would be even more wrong to suggest, without even making the argument, that others should reject what they say simply because it's them saying it, and most wrong of all, fully savage tribalism, to reject anyone's views based solely on whether they have or have not accepted any particular ad hominem. If you refuse to engage with anyone merely because they're "republican", you might as well tear up your decency card.
No, I think there is a basis. I chased your links..
TurboHercules asked to license IBM's OSes for production use on an emulator running on unspecified hardware. IBM's main selling point for those systems is extreme reliability. Did IBM ever raise so much as a mild objection to Hercules themselves? Not that I can see. "We think [...] you will understand that IBM could not reasonably be expected to license its operating systems for use on infringing platforms" is as far as they go, even when prompted on the subject. They declined to endorse the use of their OS on it. How anyone could be more restrained is utterly beyond me. They didn't drag any dramatic accusations onto the public stage.
the FSFE lobbies hand in hand for "open standards" with companies pursuing proprietary lock-in in their core businesses
So? Those companies can't lock in the format, because it's an actual standard: an open document containing sufficient information that anyone can implement a product meeting it. The FSFE want open standards and the companies advocating ODF along with the FSFE want it too. Some other people are paid to openly advocate for it.
Commercial motives are not reprehensible.
What Microsoft did to get OOXML through the ISO also had commercial motives. Those motives were also not reprehensible.
I find what they actually did reprehensible in the extreme. I would find choosing to castigate open advocacy, undertaken with the actual intent of achieving its stated intent, as "hypocrisy" objectionable even in isolation. I find choosing to do so in the face of what Microsoft was doing at the time reprehensible in the extreme.
So I think there's a basis for the assertions.
Please consider the effect of what you're doing, and that "a person is presumed to intend the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his voluntary act."
Runner-up for my .sig was "When the going gets tough, the tough specialize." Thank you for that link.
I haven't noticed any 64-bit related issues. There's a 64bit flash prerelease now. Works real nice. Never needed Adobe's reader. The stuff I use wine for still works, it keeps improving. I needed to dpkg --configure -a to get the upgrade to finish, my grub config changes hung the gui'd one so hard I had to reboot, into an all but completely unconfigured (as in, X didn't work) system.. I don't think anything has changed since the rc I upgraded to so if you've shoved things around in /etc maybe apt or aptitude would work better than update-manager did for me, but maverick is definitely snappier than lucid. I'm glad I did the upgrade.
I find myself wondering exactly what it should take to get a "health certificate" for any system that could operate as a NAT router.
How frequently should health certificates be rechecked?
You'd need the active equivalent of an SSL session with every device to make substituting your real computer after validation at least a little harder, maybe even as hard as it is to crack DRM now.
That's for people who want to plug arbitrary devices onto the Internet. Auntie chatting and tubing and filling out marketing surveys would have to stay current on whatever OS could get a key.
Implementations of the DNS protocols must not place any restrictions on the labels that can be used. In particular, DNS servers must not refuse to serve a zone because it contains labels that might not be acceptable to some DNS client programs.
It's simple. If ISPs can prioritize traffic for money, they will become video service for whoever pays the most. They'll *call* it Internet service, but that will merely give them an excuse to not actually *deliver* Internet Service: they'll stuff actual internet traffic into whatever dribs and drabs are left over. If the other end isn't paying, too, it will be severely throttled regardless of actual network conditions.
They say they need to charge for "priority access" (or whatever the nom du jour) to deliver video streams reliably. That means that if Netflix pays for priority access, Netflix's video streams will be delivered to Netflix's standards. And that means that if everyone in your neighborhood is watching Netflix (in 1080p, at 50Mb/s), your ISP can deliver it.
And that means they have the bandwidth available. Why should Netflix be the only company paying if anyone else can use that bandwidth free? Ergo, you won't be allowed to use it except to get to Netflix (or whoever else is paying for access to you). And how will Netflix and whoever else cover what they're paying for this premium service? That doesn't even require guessing, does it?
No service that needs as much bandwidth as decent video will ever be allowed to operate over the real Internet (outside their "premium VoI" channels).
Any amount of thought will lead you to realize that these people had nothing to do with producing the media we're discussing. Giving them extra money doesn't help those who did produce the media -- actual productive people -- at all. Companies elsewhere -- profitable, fast-growing companies -- deliver more bandwidth more reliably and less expensively than here, and their service is constantly improving. Media is just bits. There aren't any "expensive bits", there is no "cost of streaming media".
So these guys' entire actual argument is that people who don't give them money are bad people.
Bad people don't give them money. Good people give them money. You don't give them money, therefore you're a bad person. If you don't want to be a bad person, give them money. Don't talk to anyone who doesn't give them money, or you're a bad person too.
================
Some affluent-and-well-educated-sounding person is likely to arrive soon talking about "latency" or "jitter" or "packet loss" or something similar that really means "technical-sounding gobbledygook you don't know enough about to understand it doesn't actually apply to the situation at hand". Every bad symptom except insufficient bandwidth can be covered by a one-time delay of maybe three seconds for startup buffering. It isn't an issue.
If it started in 1976, play by mail counts as online, right?
It's up there with Diplomacy.
Yeah. Crappy military, subpar weather prediction, useless satellite data, a white elephant of an interstate highway system, needless food- and drug- and transportation-safety regulations. JPL is a complete waste, the NSA and CIA and FBI should have been privatized long ago, and what exactly is the point of having U.S. Attorneys? Commercial interests would've managed our National Parks so much better. We should have waited for commercial enterprise to invent and deploy GPS. And the Internet. Head Start hurts young children, Pell grants hurt older ones, SBA loans are crutches for incompetent businessmen who should starve on the streets.
Take them all away. Make them never have been. Miraculously shiny-clean profitable and wholesome businesses would spring up to replace them! Let one thousand flowers bloom!
There are no bad managers or incompetent employees in corporation-land! Only good people are executives and business owners! *No* one works for the Government for the good of us all! Good people only work to make themselves rich and rich people richer! The rich only give lots of money to good people! There's no other reason to do anything at all! Bring back 14 hour workdays and six day workweeks! Get some use out of your children again! No need to pay taxes, the company provides! See you in the company town, at the company store!
</sarcasm>.