other people are actively campaigning for candidates/running for office themselves/getting things done
Sure, people are running for office and campaigning and whatnot... But, from what I've seen, they get precious few things done.
Are you suggesting that absolutely every single person who has a complaint ought to be running for office somewhere? And who's going to get all the day-to-day work done while everyone's out campaigning? If we all become politicians who's going to take out the trash?
The whole argument "It's broken and everyone is dumb" is just a crutch for the lazy to fall back on when things don't go their way.
Yeah, sometimes it's an excuse... But entirely too often it's true.
We've got a problem in the city where I live... Salaries for government employees are completely out of whack. Folks working for the city government are making about twice what someone in a similar position anywhere nearby is making. Obviously the fix is to raise taxes, so that you can afford to pay these crazy salaries. But taxes are so high right now that people are moving out of the city and into surrounding towns. So, obviously, you need to raise taxes even higher to make up for the lost revenue. This is actually happening in my city.
We've had people try to run against these entrenched politicians... Try to cut back spending... And folks just keep voting the same idiots back into office.
It is, in fact, broken. And everyone is, in fact, dumb.
Move somewhere else, found your own nation, or revolt.
Yeah, that's going to work just great.
Can you name a single nation that isn't currently run by entrenched politicians who are more concerned about staying in power than doing their job?
Can you point to a plot of un-owned land where someone could found a new nation?
Can you explain how I'm supposed to revolt and not wind up behind bars?
The real problem here is that people become disenfranchised because they don't involve
People get disenfranchised because various political groups intentionally disenfranchise them - at least here in the U.S. that's how it works. Look at just about any national election in the last 20 years or so... There'll be some precinct somewhere that's trying to disenfranchise some segment of the voting population.
When you say people don't have a political clue, I would argue what you are saying is that people don't have a clue because they don't agree with you.
When I say that people don't have a political clue it has nothing to do with whether they agree with me or not... It has to do with people voting directly against their best interests. It has to do with people voting someone back into office who has proven to be unreliable or incompetent. It has to do with people voting the same kind of politicians into office year after year and continually complaining that nothing changes.
Here in the U.S. elections are not won on policies or records. It has nothing to do with who is actually going to do the best job in the position. All that matters is how good you look on TV.
Well guess what this is a democracy (representative in most) and if you don't make yourself heard then it is your FAULT, not the politicians, nor the "clueless" voters who do vote and make themselves heard.
How much of a democracy is it when the two big entrenched parties make sure their voices are the only ones that get heard?
The fact of the matter is that if you want to run for anything more than city-level government you have to be either a Democrat or a Republican. Nobody else has a chance at an important office. And by the time anyone makes it into a significant position they owe hundreds of people dozens of favors. There's no way they're going to make waves.
The fact of the matter is that when you're voting for your Senator, Representative, or President you rarely have a good choice. It's just varying degrees of bad.
1) Most politicians are lawyers, philosphers, judges, etc. Thus they will see these sorts of things from their perspective.
Any lawyer, philosopher, or judge that doesn't bother to learn what they're talking about is an idiot and shouldn't be in a position where they can do other people harm.
No, I don't expect my politicians (or lawyers, or judges) to know an awful lot about IT. But when something comes up that involves IT I do expect them to dredge up enough information to make an informed decision.
What do you expect a judge (or lawyer, or politician) to do if a medical malpractice suit wanders their way? Simply declare that they're not an MD and flip a coin?
Ignorance is no excuse.
2) Techies have a serious communication problem. They believe in free without copyright, right to pirate, etc, etc. Take that attitude to lawyers and guess what answer you are going to get.
Not true - or, at least, not true in any relevant way.
Sure, there are some techies that can't communicate their way out of a paper sack and honestly believe that everything should be free... But there are also plenty of techies who can communicate just fine and believe in all sorts of reasonable copyrights.
3) Techies don't get the business world. They don't think in terms of ROI, etc. And last I looked that is how the world turns, ROI, etc.
I dunno... I'm sure there are some techies who understand the business world just fine... And I'm sure there are techies that don't understand the business world... But that isn't really relevant here. We're talking about a national Internet filtering policy.
Techies need to start policing themselves. Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
Techies are probably about the only folks out there who use BT for something other than piracy. I use BT all the time to download new distributions... You think Joe Sixpack has ever downloaded a Linux distribution over BT? If some random user ever uses BT it'll likely be to pirate something - saying that "techies need to start policing themselves" is pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
Besides which... HTTP and FTP can be used for piracy, are you suggesting those get blocked as well? What about VPNs? Hell, why don't we just block IP in general?
What these folks are doing is using a sledgehammer to pound in a thumbtack. It works, I guess, but it isn't exactly the best way to do things.
Here is the thing, I hate the drug laws, despise them actually. But I can't go out and start smoking pot because today it is STILL ILLEGAL....
It's great that you're such a law-abiding citizen... But that doesn't stop anyone from smoking pot - it just makes the pot-smokers criminals. And folks who want to pirate software are going to keep on pirating software, regardless of whether BT is blocked. They'll just tunnel their traffic or cook up a new protocol or something. Just like DRM in general - it won't hurt the pirates, just the folks who try to play by the rules.
Work with the system and get it legalized.
That's great, in theory... But if we were talking about a functioning democratic process then we wouldn't be talking about blocking BT at all.
If these politicians had done their jobs they would have had some independent IT folks examine whether their proposal would actually work. And those folks would undoubtably have come to the conclusion that blocking the BT protocol in general was a pretty bad idea.
But, obviously, these politicians didn't listen to any independent IT folks. They only listened to their media company lobbyists... Or maybe some clueless safe-the-children groups...
You got that right. Apple, being the marketing gods that they are, will get by this easily.
Marketing has nothing to do with it. Most folks don't even know what DRM is, and even if they're aware of DRM they seldom care.
Folks buy a song on the iTunes Music Store and try to play it...it works. They put it on their iPod...it works. They burn it to a CD...it works. As far as they're concerned the music works just fine.
S3 suspend cuts power use by 95% and the PC resumes *INSTANTLY*.
I can S3 suspend my laptop and have it run off the battery for over a week - open it up and I am back where I left off in about 2-3 seconds.
There is no argument against having an IT policy MANDATING S3 suspend. Hell you can even automate it to do it by default every day at 6 PM unless the PC is in use (easily checked by screensaver APIs).
I still have issues suspending/waking computers. Generally it works fine... But sometimes you run into odd issues.
One client we support has a piece of software that hates waking from suspend. Pitches a huge fit. All sorts of errors.
And I still have problems with some computers/OSes that really should handle S3 just fine simply choking on it. Won't resume reliably or whatever.
The real problem I have with power saving options is rolling out the settings consistently across multiple computers. Last time I checked (and it has been a little while since I checked, so I could be wrong) there was no way to push out power settings with a GPO. Sure, you can set screensaver options... Turn off the monitor or something... But that doesn't get you a suspended computer. You can set options on the individual computer, in their motherboard settings... But that isn't easy to update/change across a network. You can throw together a pile of scripts to shut down machines...maybe try to use wake-on-LAN to power them back up in the morning...
I'm not saying it can't be done. And I'm not going to say that you can't save any power by doing it. But there doesn't seem to be a simple way of managing these settings across a network yet. It still seems that power management is a hacked-together feature that was tacked on after the fact.
I'd love to be able to push out a group policy that made all the computers on my network suspend after an hour idle.
That's great in theory, but the problem with Netflix is that the selection of movies that they let you stream is, shall we say... poor.
That really depends on what you're looking for.
No, the recent blockbuster titles aren't generally available... But there's tons of good sci-fi and horror, and lots of independent and foreign films, and tons of documentaries, and lots of old TV... Enough stuff that my wife and I make very good use of the streaming stuff.
When Obama takes office, I think that makes 3 US presidents in a row that have (at least off the record, but perhaps on tape) admitted to using or been caught using illegal recreational drugs. It does seem to make the laws hard to defend morally.
There's a difference between drug use and drug abuse.
The way it stands now, we're being told that there's no way to use a substance like marijuana. That any and all use of marijuana is abuse which serves no good purpose. That it is pure harm. Obviously, that is not true.
Some substances are easier to abuse than others... But pretty much anything can be abused. Look around the U.S. - obesity is rampant, alcohol and tobacco claim lives left and right, folks are in debt up to their eyeballs. Food, alcohol, tobacco, and money - all being abused.
What we need to do, as a society, is start looking at the real problems - not just the symptoms. We need to look at why people are abusing these substances in the first place. And we need to look at why they're not getting the help they need. And we need to look at the damage that our reaction to the abuse is causing.
if something like marijuana would legalized, the taxes collected on that would be staggeringly huge
if you want to argue profit (for the government), you argue for legalization
sure there are entrenched interests, but there is no larger entrenched interest than the taxman
Yes, the government could make lots of money on taxes... But it isn't like they aren't making money now.
The government is constantly seizing/freezing assets. And because there's a war on drugs various police departments and governmental agencies get huge piles of money to fight the problem.
Do you seriously think that drug use wouldn't balloon if it was made legal?
It probably would, initially, in the short term.
There's a lot of people who currently use drugs who'd run right out and exercise their new rights to excess...
And there's a lot of people right now who are curious about drugs but are unwilling to risk the criminal consequences, who'd run right out and exercise their new rights...
But the newness will wear off before too long. One of the major reasons people are so interested in drugs is because they're taboo. Just look at how cool smoking and drinking are until folks reach the legal age. You can't tell me that the average 50-year-old gets as excited about lighting up a cigarette or drinking a beer as the average 15-year-old.
Look around the world. There are plenty of places where various substances are more legal than they are here. They manage to get along pretty well.
But you don't speak about the abyss of drug addiction, the income-sapping expense, the parents of kids that forget parenting while doing drugs, the accidents on the freeway, the madness of things like meth addiction and its incredible debilitating affects on the body.
Yeah, drugs are bad. I've got a son who's really messed himself up with drugs. He's spent the last 5 years in jail because of drugs. He lost custody of his daughter because of drugs. I'm certainly not pro-drugs in any way...
But these harmful effects aren't limited to simply those drugs currently listed in the U.S. as illegal.
Folks ruin their lives with alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, food, uncontrollable spending, MMOGs, sex... Just about anything that can be done to excess has ruined someone's life.
The problem isn't really the substance that's being abused... It's all the other factors surrounding the abuse - that make people seek escape in the first place, and keep them from getting the help they need, and then punish them so harshly.
Or how the drug cartels live in lawlessness just below the border in muderous droves.
Which is a terrific reason to legalize, or at lest de-criminalize, all kinds of drugs.
If you could produce and distribute these drugs legally you wouldn't have murderous cartels just over the border... You'd have respectable corporations and small businesses right here in the U.S. Just like we currently have bars, breweries, distilleries, and wineries.
I know that alcohol's not going to get banned again, but you wonder how many lives it would save if it did?
It's hard to say...
Making alcohol less accessible would certainly reduce fatalities. There are plenty of people killed in drunk driving accidents... Or folks who drink themselves to death... Or folks who do colossally stupid/violent things while drunk... I don't doubt for a moment that banning alcohol would save lives.
The problem is that it won't just go away though - we have ample proof of that. We tried prohibition once before. People still got their alcohol. The difference was that now criminals were manufacturing and transporting the stuff. There was no quality control, no regulation, and lots of violence associated with the production and distribution.
When is it that the artists that sponsor the RIAA psychopaths, will say "enough, I don't want to be tainted with this shit"? When will they distance themselves from the RIAA? Or is the bling that the racket money gets them so important?
That's something I keep wondering myself...
I suppose there's some artists who really think the RIAA has their best interests at heart. Who really think copyright infringement is costing them millions of dollars. Who'd really like to be getting every cent that they deserve. And I really don't hold anything against these artists - I assume they're just ignorant or misinformed.
But there's ample evidence that the RIAA really aren't helping their artists much. There's evidence that alternative distribution methods - including giving stuff away free - actually works pretty well. I know NIN has had a lot of luck releasing albums on-line.
It seems to me that some of these artists would just get sick of seeing their label associated with this kind of crap. Or maybe that's the problem... You don't generally see labels associated with it. You see "RIAA", not the member labels. And certainly no mention of the individual artists who are being represented, ultimately, by the RIAA. Maybe there's enough distance there that they don't care.
Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?
Not many. Certainly not enough to make even simple web browsing do-able over IPv6. Anyone with IPv6 connectivity right now is tunneling most of their traffic.
Do I need to make some change to my router? My computer? Should I be calling my ISP demanding that they make the change?
Yes.
You'd need a computer capable of dealing with IPv6. For the most part, currently-available operating systems are ok. Windows XP, Vista, just about any flavor of Linux/BSD, and Mac OS X all support IPv6.
You'll also need a router that can deal with IPv6. I have yet to see any home-grade router that supports IPv6.
You'll also need an ISP that will give you IPv6 service. There are precious few of them out there.
You'll also need sites that support IPv6, unless you just want to tunnel everything.
Try LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, or something similar. I manage nearly 100 remote PCs thru LogMeIn, and only 3 of them have static IPs.
I think you're kind of missing the point of my post.
I use LogMeIn for quite a few things. I've got it installed on my home computer, my work computer, and dozens of client computers. It works very well for me. It's a great solution for folks who can't or won't pay for a static IP address. But LogMeIn doesn't somehow magically negate the need for an IP address.
If you've got bandwidth, you've got an IP address. And more and more devices have bandwidth these days. Which means more and more IP addresses in use. And once you run out of IP addresses it won't much matter whether you need a static or dynamic address, there won't be any available.
I'm not sure why but I was always under the impression that an ipv6 ip looked more like ipv4, ie, 192.168.1.1.1.1. The way it actually looks, why not just use MAC addresses?
You could, probably, represent both IPv4 and IPv6 identically if you really wanted to... I mean, ultimately, they're both binary numbers. It isn't like the computer is actually dealing with dotted decimals - that's just to make it human-readable.
IPv6 uses hexadecimal instead of just plain decimal to make things shorter. Otherwise the addresses would be simply ginormous. And it uses colons, instead of periods, to unambiguously distinguish it from IPv4.
As far as using MAC addresses... The only reason they look at all similar is because MAC addresses are also typically written using hexadecimal. Beyond that there isn't much similarity. MAC addresses are relatively short, and wouldn't provide anywhere near the address space that IPv6 does. I don't think they're routable either. And they aren't necessarily unique - just unique enough to make sure you aren't likely to have duplicates on your own network.
If I recall correctly, IPv6 auto-configuration does make use of your MAC address. The idea is that you'd get a static IP block from your ISP, and instead of each device on your LAN getting a private IP address that isn't globally routable your router would generate globally routable IP addresses by appending the device's MAC address to the static IP block your ISP gave you.
Of course you wouldn't have to do that... You could still take a single IPv6 address and NAT everything behind it if you really wanted to... And I guess it might make sense from the standpoint of providing a basic level of security... But there's no reason you couldn't just implement a real firewall instead.
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
That really isn't entirely true.
NAT and uPnP may work well for your average home user... But it causes some headaches in larger networks. And if you've got a pile of servers that need to be globally accessible - like webservers - you don't really have an alternative to multiple IP addresses.
That's not even getting into all the millions of unused IP's being held by the early internet companies.
This is certainly true. There are several huge blocks of IP addresses sitting unused. Freeing these up would go a long way towards keeping IPv4 alive. At least for a while...
IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.
It might very well vanish overnight... But it'll return eventually. The fact of the matter is that we keep coming up with new reasons to route information over the Internet. And all these new devices and gadgets require an IP address.
One of the cities that we support recently bought a new chiller for their ice rink. Their old one was just managed in-house. You had to be standing in front of the device to do much of anything. And if it was malfunctioning they had to send someone out to eyeball the machine. Their new one has a network jack and can be monitored remotely through a web interface. So we had to get them bandwidth and a static IP address so they could keep an eye on things even when nobody was physically at the civic center.
Sure, there are some absolutely stupid and frivolous things we're doing these days. Folks don't need to be able to surf the Internet from their microwave oven. But it is getting to the point where we expect to be able to gather information from just about everything, and view it just about everywhere. Folks expect to be able to hit Google or Wikipedia from their cell phones. Lots of industrial equipment can be managed remotely. I know I routinely troubleshoot issues remotely.
To a certain degree we can hide these devices behind NAT... I can have a dozen web-enabled appliances in my house and just use different ports forwarded through a single NAT'ed IP address to access them. But what about devices that don't necessarily sit behind a router? What about my web-enabled phone?
And what happens when the ISPs start running out of addresses? Are they going to install giant NAT routers themselves? Are we going to wind up with several layers of NAT?
It's just part of the mounting evidence that username/password combinations for banks is inherently flawed. "Somthing you know" can always easily be known by someone else. Bank security should (IMO) be also based on "something you have", like an ATM card.
If banks really wanted two-way authentication to work properly, they'd use a hardware device (USB-key) that had to be present in the machine to login to your account. The hardware device would be implemented in such a way to make it impossible to copy the functionality of it without physical access to it.
It is certainly do-able.
Software manufacturers have been using dongles of various types for years now. I've got a couple clients with software installed that requires a USB dongle to be plugged into their PC in order to run. Shouldn't be too hard to do something like that for your banking site.
Or how about the VPN keychain fob things? Folks have been using those RSA keychain fobs to secure VPN logins for ages... Even Blizzard is using them now. Why not use them to log in to your bank's website?
The bittorrent protocol itself checks packets to see if they were delivered correctly. If not it rerequests them, probably from some other server. In effect, bittorrent implements the reliability of TCP with the additional knowledge that the packet is available from several different places. It will probably work better over UDP.
True. I wasn't really thinking in terms of BT, but rather a standard file transfer over HTTP. You're right, you wouldn't need to re-implement TCP.
As far as I can tell, from my admittedly-limited knowledge, the only downside to making BT use UDP is keeping the ISPs from messing with your traffic.
Problem is most ISPs aren't setup to pay for new equipment at the needed rates. They are setup to only replace equipment as it fails or as it reaches the end of tax deductibility( 3- 5 years in the US ). Around here, we replace everything every third year and figure that 20% of the gear will fail in any given year.
Thus to change to an every year update plan would probably require a doubling (which the ISPs would see as their chance to triple) the existing rates, with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth. No speed or reliability improvements without adding yet another multiple to the cost.
Personally, I don't really care how the ISP is set up. I don't care what hardware they run, how often they replace it, or how they pay for it. That's not my problem. All I care about is the service that I pay them to provide.
If I pay them $50/month for "unlimited" bandwidth, I want my unlimited bandwidth. If they tell me that "unlimited" actually means 100 Gb/month, I want my 100 Gb/month. I don't care if it puts an additional burden on them or not - that isn't my problem. If they can't provide 100 Gb/month for $50, they shouldn't sell it to me.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does. TCP has years of work behind it, so the odds of you coming up with something just as good as TCP are fairly slim. So I can certainly understand why folks out there would be somewhat apprehensive about this decision... There is a distinct possibility that the new protocol will waste tons of bandwidth or do something horrible to existing equipment or summon up a shoggoth. There is certainly the possibility that damage will be done.
But is that necessarily bad for the Internet? ISPs are regulating the hell out of TCP traffic. They're shaping and compressing virtually every packet that crosses their networks. They're blocking ports and resetting connections. They are intentionally preventing their customers from using the bandwidth they've bought in the way they want. Doesn't that count as damage?
Maybe this is exactly what the Internet needs to drive home the point of network neutrality. Maybe if ISPs get stuck with a new, horribly inefficient protocol that they can't mangle they'll realize it was a bad idea to abuse TCP.
Microsoft had Vista Capable and Premium Ready as their two qualifiers for Vista. Boxes read "'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista"... oh so if you wanted to run premium you needed the Premium Ready tag? That seems to make sense to me. I dont think microsoft is wrong this time.
That'd be fine... Except that Microsoft changed the definition of "Vista Capable" midway through. And they certainly didn't advertise the differences between "Capable" and "Premium". And almost all the advertising showed the shiny new Aero stuff... So that's what folks expected to see when they fired up their brand new Vista box...
Imagine going to the jeweler and buying a box of diamonds. After watching all those commercials on TV you're expecting the box to be full of sparkly crystals. Instead the box is full of rough diamonds that look like any other rock. Obviously you'd be a little surprised, if nothing else.
Yes, but this is the first time I recall that OEMs sold machines that were seriously underpowered. The difference between XP Home and XP Pro requirements were small. In previous versions, if you upgraded an old machine, you had to double the MS requirements but most new machines met the requirements. In this case, you had a whole lot of new machines that could only run Vista Basic. Add this to whole mess of other problems Vista had at launch and it adds to the negative image of MS.
I disagree.
I've seen entirely too many XP machines for sale with only 256 MB RAM. Sure, technically that's more than enough... But in reality it is horribly underpowered.
Load up the OS, throw on some sort of antivirus, fire up a web browser and email client... Now try to get some work done. Your machine will crawl.
We've always told our clients that 512 MB is really the minimum RAM to be productive, and I've been recommending 1 GB or more for a while now. Especially if folks want to do anything even remotely interesting on their computers.
Although it seems misleading.. Vista Basic is still vista. Why is this still going on?
Because people feel like Aero was a major selling feature? And that without Aero, Vista is not distinguisable from XP? I'd say that the difference is major, and is very much public knowledge, much to Microsoft's chagrin.
So what's the argument? That MS's ad campaign led you to believe anything over the "vista-sucks" hype? I don't think so.
Initially, "Vista Capable" meant that you'd be able to run pretty much any flavor of Vista you might want to. It meant that you could run Aero and all the other shiny stuff.
Microsoft then redefined "Vista Capable" to mean simply capable of running the most basic version of Vista - not all the shiny stuff.
Further, the minimum requirements to get a "Vista capable" sticker are truly minimal. I'm not sure I'd even want to run XP on some of the systems that qualify. I've been recommending 1GB RAM or more for XP installs for a while now. So these systems are underpowered by just about any measure.
Finally, most of Microsoft's advertising focused on the shiny new features. There were lots of commercials showing the fancy new visual effects. They were intentionally trying to make it look at least as good as Mac OS X. Lots of people bought computers expecting those pretty visual effects, and didn't get them. As far as these folks are concerned they didn't get the OS they thought they were buying.
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other people are actively campaigning for candidates/running for office themselves/getting things done
Sure, people are running for office and campaigning and whatnot... But, from what I've seen, they get precious few things done.
Are you suggesting that absolutely every single person who has a complaint ought to be running for office somewhere? And who's going to get all the day-to-day work done while everyone's out campaigning? If we all become politicians who's going to take out the trash?
The whole argument "It's broken and everyone is dumb" is just a crutch for the lazy to fall back on when things don't go their way.
Yeah, sometimes it's an excuse... But entirely too often it's true.
We've got a problem in the city where I live... Salaries for government employees are completely out of whack. Folks working for the city government are making about twice what someone in a similar position anywhere nearby is making. Obviously the fix is to raise taxes, so that you can afford to pay these crazy salaries. But taxes are so high right now that people are moving out of the city and into surrounding towns. So, obviously, you need to raise taxes even higher to make up for the lost revenue. This is actually happening in my city.
We've had people try to run against these entrenched politicians... Try to cut back spending... And folks just keep voting the same idiots back into office.
It is, in fact, broken. And everyone is, in fact, dumb.
Move somewhere else, found your own nation, or revolt.
Yeah, that's going to work just great.
Can you name a single nation that isn't currently run by entrenched politicians who are more concerned about staying in power than doing their job?
Can you point to a plot of un-owned land where someone could found a new nation?
Can you explain how I'm supposed to revolt and not wind up behind bars?
This is a crap attitude...
The real problem here is that people become disenfranchised because they don't involve
People get disenfranchised because various political groups intentionally disenfranchise them - at least here in the U.S. that's how it works. Look at just about any national election in the last 20 years or so... There'll be some precinct somewhere that's trying to disenfranchise some segment of the voting population.
When you say people don't have a political clue, I would argue what you are saying is that people don't have a clue because they don't agree with you.
When I say that people don't have a political clue it has nothing to do with whether they agree with me or not... It has to do with people voting directly against their best interests. It has to do with people voting someone back into office who has proven to be unreliable or incompetent. It has to do with people voting the same kind of politicians into office year after year and continually complaining that nothing changes.
Here in the U.S. elections are not won on policies or records. It has nothing to do with who is actually going to do the best job in the position. All that matters is how good you look on TV.
Well guess what this is a democracy (representative in most) and if you don't make yourself heard then it is your FAULT, not the politicians, nor the "clueless" voters who do vote and make themselves heard.
How much of a democracy is it when the two big entrenched parties make sure their voices are the only ones that get heard?
The fact of the matter is that if you want to run for anything more than city-level government you have to be either a Democrat or a Republican. Nobody else has a chance at an important office. And by the time anyone makes it into a significant position they owe hundreds of people dozens of favors. There's no way they're going to make waves.
The fact of the matter is that when you're voting for your Senator, Representative, or President you rarely have a good choice. It's just varying degrees of bad.
1) Most politicians are lawyers, philosphers, judges, etc. Thus they will see these sorts of things from their perspective.
Any lawyer, philosopher, or judge that doesn't bother to learn what they're talking about is an idiot and shouldn't be in a position where they can do other people harm.
No, I don't expect my politicians (or lawyers, or judges) to know an awful lot about IT. But when something comes up that involves IT I do expect them to dredge up enough information to make an informed decision.
What do you expect a judge (or lawyer, or politician) to do if a medical malpractice suit wanders their way? Simply declare that they're not an MD and flip a coin?
Ignorance is no excuse.
Not true - or, at least, not true in any relevant way.
Sure, there are some techies that can't communicate their way out of a paper sack and honestly believe that everything should be free... But there are also plenty of techies who can communicate just fine and believe in all sorts of reasonable copyrights.
3) Techies don't get the business world. They don't think in terms of ROI, etc. And last I looked that is how the world turns, ROI, etc.
I dunno... I'm sure there are some techies who understand the business world just fine... And I'm sure there are techies that don't understand the business world... But that isn't really relevant here. We're talking about a national Internet filtering policy.
Techies need to start policing themselves. Yes BitTorrent has a real need, but until these protocols are managed to stop piracy nothing will change.
Techies are probably about the only folks out there who use BT for something other than piracy. I use BT all the time to download new distributions... You think Joe Sixpack has ever downloaded a Linux distribution over BT? If some random user ever uses BT it'll likely be to pirate something - saying that "techies need to start policing themselves" is pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
Besides which... HTTP and FTP can be used for piracy, are you suggesting those get blocked as well? What about VPNs? Hell, why don't we just block IP in general?
What these folks are doing is using a sledgehammer to pound in a thumbtack. It works, I guess, but it isn't exactly the best way to do things.
Here is the thing, I hate the drug laws, despise them actually. But I can't go out and start smoking pot because today it is STILL ILLEGAL....
It's great that you're such a law-abiding citizen... But that doesn't stop anyone from smoking pot - it just makes the pot-smokers criminals. And folks who want to pirate software are going to keep on pirating software, regardless of whether BT is blocked. They'll just tunnel their traffic or cook up a new protocol or something. Just like DRM in general - it won't hurt the pirates, just the folks who try to play by the rules.
Work with the system and get it legalized.
That's great, in theory... But if we were talking about a functioning democratic process then we wouldn't be talking about blocking BT at all.
If these politicians had done their jobs they would have had some independent IT folks examine whether their proposal would actually work. And those folks would undoubtably have come to the conclusion that blocking the BT protocol in general was a pretty bad idea.
But, obviously, these politicians didn't listen to any independent IT folks. They only listened to their media company lobbyists... Or maybe some clueless safe-the-children groups...
What makes you think that they'd listen to you?
No
You got that right. Apple, being the marketing gods that they are, will get by this easily.
Marketing has nothing to do with it. Most folks don't even know what DRM is, and even if they're aware of DRM they seldom care.
Folks buy a song on the iTunes Music Store and try to play it...it works. They put it on their iPod...it works. They burn it to a CD...it works. As far as they're concerned the music works just fine.
Any modern PC can S3 suspend.
S3 suspend cuts power use by 95% and the PC resumes *INSTANTLY*.
I can S3 suspend my laptop and have it run off the battery for over a week - open it up and I am back where I left off in about 2-3 seconds.
There is no argument against having an IT policy MANDATING S3 suspend. Hell you can even automate it to do it by default every day at 6 PM unless the PC is in use (easily checked by screensaver APIs).
I still have issues suspending/waking computers. Generally it works fine... But sometimes you run into odd issues.
One client we support has a piece of software that hates waking from suspend. Pitches a huge fit. All sorts of errors.
And I still have problems with some computers/OSes that really should handle S3 just fine simply choking on it. Won't resume reliably or whatever.
The real problem I have with power saving options is rolling out the settings consistently across multiple computers. Last time I checked (and it has been a little while since I checked, so I could be wrong) there was no way to push out power settings with a GPO. Sure, you can set screensaver options... Turn off the monitor or something... But that doesn't get you a suspended computer. You can set options on the individual computer, in their motherboard settings... But that isn't easy to update/change across a network. You can throw together a pile of scripts to shut down machines...maybe try to use wake-on-LAN to power them back up in the morning...
I'm not saying it can't be done. And I'm not going to say that you can't save any power by doing it. But there doesn't seem to be a simple way of managing these settings across a network yet. It still seems that power management is a hacked-together feature that was tacked on after the fact.
I'd love to be able to push out a group policy that made all the computers on my network suspend after an hour idle.
That's great in theory, but the problem with Netflix is that the selection of movies that they let you stream is, shall we say... poor.
That really depends on what you're looking for.
No, the recent blockbuster titles aren't generally available... But there's tons of good sci-fi and horror, and lots of independent and foreign films, and tons of documentaries, and lots of old TV... Enough stuff that my wife and I make very good use of the streaming stuff.
And then you bring in universal health care.
Are you happy about having your pocket picked to rehabilitate those who've turned themselves into potted plants of the sort that they smoke?
Legalize it in, say, Nevada, and see whether everything goes haywire. We certainly can't worsen the baggage Nevada sends to Congress.
What about the health costs of other substances that are currently being abused?
What about the health costs of food, tobacco, and alcohol?
When Obama takes office, I think that makes 3 US presidents in a row that have (at least off the record, but perhaps on tape) admitted to using or been caught using illegal recreational drugs. It does seem to make the laws hard to defend morally.
There's a difference between drug use and drug abuse.
The way it stands now, we're being told that there's no way to use a substance like marijuana. That any and all use of marijuana is abuse which serves no good purpose. That it is pure harm. Obviously, that is not true.
Some substances are easier to abuse than others... But pretty much anything can be abused. Look around the U.S. - obesity is rampant, alcohol and tobacco claim lives left and right, folks are in debt up to their eyeballs. Food, alcohol, tobacco, and money - all being abused.
What we need to do, as a society, is start looking at the real problems - not just the symptoms. We need to look at why people are abusing these substances in the first place. And we need to look at why they're not getting the help they need. And we need to look at the damage that our reaction to the abuse is causing.
if something like marijuana would legalized, the taxes collected on that would be staggeringly huge
if you want to argue profit (for the government), you argue for legalization
sure there are entrenched interests, but there is no larger entrenched interest than the taxman
Yes, the government could make lots of money on taxes... But it isn't like they aren't making money now.
The government is constantly seizing/freezing assets. And because there's a war on drugs various police departments and governmental agencies get huge piles of money to fight the problem.
Do you seriously think that drug use wouldn't balloon if it was made legal?
It probably would, initially, in the short term.
There's a lot of people who currently use drugs who'd run right out and exercise their new rights to excess...
And there's a lot of people right now who are curious about drugs but are unwilling to risk the criminal consequences, who'd run right out and exercise their new rights...
But the newness will wear off before too long. One of the major reasons people are so interested in drugs is because they're taboo. Just look at how cool smoking and drinking are until folks reach the legal age. You can't tell me that the average 50-year-old gets as excited about lighting up a cigarette or drinking a beer as the average 15-year-old.
Look around the world. There are plenty of places where various substances are more legal than they are here. They manage to get along pretty well.
But you don't speak about the abyss of drug addiction, the income-sapping expense, the parents of kids that forget parenting while doing drugs, the accidents on the freeway, the madness of things like meth addiction and its incredible debilitating affects on the body.
Yeah, drugs are bad. I've got a son who's really messed himself up with drugs. He's spent the last 5 years in jail because of drugs. He lost custody of his daughter because of drugs. I'm certainly not pro-drugs in any way...
But these harmful effects aren't limited to simply those drugs currently listed in the U.S. as illegal.
Folks ruin their lives with alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, food, uncontrollable spending, MMOGs, sex... Just about anything that can be done to excess has ruined someone's life.
The problem isn't really the substance that's being abused... It's all the other factors surrounding the abuse - that make people seek escape in the first place, and keep them from getting the help they need, and then punish them so harshly.
Or how the drug cartels live in lawlessness just below the border in muderous droves.
Which is a terrific reason to legalize, or at lest de-criminalize, all kinds of drugs.
If you could produce and distribute these drugs legally you wouldn't have murderous cartels just over the border... You'd have respectable corporations and small businesses right here in the U.S. Just like we currently have bars, breweries, distilleries, and wineries.
I know that alcohol's not going to get banned again, but you wonder how many lives it would save if it did?
It's hard to say...
Making alcohol less accessible would certainly reduce fatalities. There are plenty of people killed in drunk driving accidents... Or folks who drink themselves to death... Or folks who do colossally stupid/violent things while drunk... I don't doubt for a moment that banning alcohol would save lives.
The problem is that it won't just go away though - we have ample proof of that. We tried prohibition once before. People still got their alcohol. The difference was that now criminals were manufacturing and transporting the stuff. There was no quality control, no regulation, and lots of violence associated with the production and distribution.
When is it that the artists that sponsor the RIAA psychopaths, will say "enough, I don't want to be tainted with this shit"? When will they distance themselves from the RIAA? Or is the bling that the racket money gets them so important?
That's something I keep wondering myself...
I suppose there's some artists who really think the RIAA has their best interests at heart. Who really think copyright infringement is costing them millions of dollars. Who'd really like to be getting every cent that they deserve. And I really don't hold anything against these artists - I assume they're just ignorant or misinformed.
But there's ample evidence that the RIAA really aren't helping their artists much. There's evidence that alternative distribution methods - including giving stuff away free - actually works pretty well. I know NIN has had a lot of luck releasing albums on-line.
It seems to me that some of these artists would just get sick of seeing their label associated with this kind of crap. Or maybe that's the problem... You don't generally see labels associated with it. You see "RIAA", not the member labels. And certainly no mention of the individual artists who are being represented, ultimately, by the RIAA. Maybe there's enough distance there that they don't care.
Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?
Not many. Certainly not enough to make even simple web browsing do-able over IPv6. Anyone with IPv6 connectivity right now is tunneling most of their traffic.
Does Slashdot even have IPv6 connectivity?
Do I need to make some change to my router? My computer? Should I be calling my ISP demanding that they make the change?
Yes.
You'd need a computer capable of dealing with IPv6. For the most part, currently-available operating systems are ok. Windows XP, Vista, just about any flavor of Linux/BSD, and Mac OS X all support IPv6.
You'll also need a router that can deal with IPv6. I have yet to see any home-grade router that supports IPv6.
You'll also need an ISP that will give you IPv6 service. There are precious few of them out there.
You'll also need sites that support IPv6, unless you just want to tunnel everything.
Try LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, or something similar. I manage nearly 100 remote PCs thru LogMeIn, and only 3 of them have static IPs.
I think you're kind of missing the point of my post.
I use LogMeIn for quite a few things. I've got it installed on my home computer, my work computer, and dozens of client computers. It works very well for me. It's a great solution for folks who can't or won't pay for a static IP address. But LogMeIn doesn't somehow magically negate the need for an IP address.
If you've got bandwidth, you've got an IP address. And more and more devices have bandwidth these days. Which means more and more IP addresses in use. And once you run out of IP addresses it won't much matter whether you need a static or dynamic address, there won't be any available.
I'm not sure why but I was always under the impression that an ipv6 ip looked more like ipv4, ie, 192.168.1.1.1.1. The way it actually looks, why not just use MAC addresses?
You could, probably, represent both IPv4 and IPv6 identically if you really wanted to... I mean, ultimately, they're both binary numbers. It isn't like the computer is actually dealing with dotted decimals - that's just to make it human-readable.
IPv6 uses hexadecimal instead of just plain decimal to make things shorter. Otherwise the addresses would be simply ginormous. And it uses colons, instead of periods, to unambiguously distinguish it from IPv4.
As far as using MAC addresses... The only reason they look at all similar is because MAC addresses are also typically written using hexadecimal. Beyond that there isn't much similarity. MAC addresses are relatively short, and wouldn't provide anywhere near the address space that IPv6 does. I don't think they're routable either. And they aren't necessarily unique - just unique enough to make sure you aren't likely to have duplicates on your own network.
If I recall correctly, IPv6 auto-configuration does make use of your MAC address. The idea is that you'd get a static IP block from your ISP, and instead of each device on your LAN getting a private IP address that isn't globally routable your router would generate globally routable IP addresses by appending the device's MAC address to the static IP block your ISP gave you.
Of course you wouldn't have to do that... You could still take a single IPv6 address and NAT everything behind it if you really wanted to... And I guess it might make sense from the standpoint of providing a basic level of security... But there's no reason you couldn't just implement a real firewall instead.
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
That really isn't entirely true.
NAT and uPnP may work well for your average home user... But it causes some headaches in larger networks. And if you've got a pile of servers that need to be globally accessible - like webservers - you don't really have an alternative to multiple IP addresses.
That's not even getting into all the millions of unused IP's being held by the early internet companies.
This is certainly true. There are several huge blocks of IP addresses sitting unused. Freeing these up would go a long way towards keeping IPv4 alive. At least for a while...
IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.
It might very well vanish overnight... But it'll return eventually. The fact of the matter is that we keep coming up with new reasons to route information over the Internet. And all these new devices and gadgets require an IP address.
One of the cities that we support recently bought a new chiller for their ice rink. Their old one was just managed in-house. You had to be standing in front of the device to do much of anything. And if it was malfunctioning they had to send someone out to eyeball the machine. Their new one has a network jack and can be monitored remotely through a web interface. So we had to get them bandwidth and a static IP address so they could keep an eye on things even when nobody was physically at the civic center.
Sure, there are some absolutely stupid and frivolous things we're doing these days. Folks don't need to be able to surf the Internet from their microwave oven. But it is getting to the point where we expect to be able to gather information from just about everything, and view it just about everywhere. Folks expect to be able to hit Google or Wikipedia from their cell phones. Lots of industrial equipment can be managed remotely. I know I routinely troubleshoot issues remotely.
To a certain degree we can hide these devices behind NAT... I can have a dozen web-enabled appliances in my house and just use different ports forwarded through a single NAT'ed IP address to access them. But what about devices that don't necessarily sit behind a router? What about my web-enabled phone?
And what happens when the ISPs start running out of addresses? Are they going to install giant NAT routers themselves? Are we going to wind up with several layers of NAT?
It's just part of the mounting evidence that username/password combinations for banks is inherently flawed. "Somthing you know" can always easily be known by someone else. Bank security should (IMO) be also based on "something you have", like an ATM card.
If banks really wanted two-way authentication to work properly, they'd use a hardware device (USB-key) that had to be present in the machine to login to your account. The hardware device would be implemented in such a way to make it impossible to copy the functionality of it without physical access to it.
It is certainly do-able.
Software manufacturers have been using dongles of various types for years now. I've got a couple clients with software installed that requires a USB dongle to be plugged into their PC in order to run. Shouldn't be too hard to do something like that for your banking site.
Or how about the VPN keychain fob things? Folks have been using those RSA keychain fobs to secure VPN logins for ages... Even Blizzard is using them now. Why not use them to log in to your bank's website?
The bittorrent protocol itself checks packets to see if they were delivered correctly. If not it rerequests them, probably from some other server. In effect, bittorrent implements the reliability of TCP with the additional knowledge that the packet is available from several different places. It will probably work better over UDP.
True. I wasn't really thinking in terms of BT, but rather a standard file transfer over HTTP. You're right, you wouldn't need to re-implement TCP.
As far as I can tell, from my admittedly-limited knowledge, the only downside to making BT use UDP is keeping the ISPs from messing with your traffic.
Problem is most ISPs aren't setup to pay for new equipment at the needed rates. They are setup to only replace equipment as it fails or as it reaches the end of tax deductibility( 3- 5 years in the US ). Around here, we replace everything every third year and figure that 20% of the gear will fail in any given year.
Thus to change to an every year update plan would probably require a doubling (which the ISPs would see as their chance to triple) the existing rates, with no other benefits than the ability to use your paid for bandwidth. No speed or reliability improvements without adding yet another multiple to the cost.
Personally, I don't really care how the ISP is set up. I don't care what hardware they run, how often they replace it, or how they pay for it. That's not my problem. All I care about is the service that I pay them to provide.
If I pay them $50/month for "unlimited" bandwidth, I want my unlimited bandwidth. If they tell me that "unlimited" actually means 100 Gb/month, I want my 100 Gb/month. I don't care if it puts an additional burden on them or not - that isn't my problem. If they can't provide 100 Gb/month for $50, they shouldn't sell it to me.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does. TCP has years of work behind it, so the odds of you coming up with something just as good as TCP are fairly slim. So I can certainly understand why folks out there would be somewhat apprehensive about this decision... There is a distinct possibility that the new protocol will waste tons of bandwidth or do something horrible to existing equipment or summon up a shoggoth. There is certainly the possibility that damage will be done.
But is that necessarily bad for the Internet? ISPs are regulating the hell out of TCP traffic. They're shaping and compressing virtually every packet that crosses their networks. They're blocking ports and resetting connections. They are intentionally preventing their customers from using the bandwidth they've bought in the way they want. Doesn't that count as damage?
Maybe this is exactly what the Internet needs to drive home the point of network neutrality. Maybe if ISPs get stuck with a new, horribly inefficient protocol that they can't mangle they'll realize it was a bad idea to abuse TCP.
Microsoft had Vista Capable and Premium Ready as their two qualifiers for Vista. Boxes read "'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista"... oh so if you wanted to run premium you needed the Premium Ready tag? That seems to make sense to me. I dont think microsoft is wrong this time.
That'd be fine... Except that Microsoft changed the definition of "Vista Capable" midway through. And they certainly didn't advertise the differences between "Capable" and "Premium". And almost all the advertising showed the shiny new Aero stuff... So that's what folks expected to see when they fired up their brand new Vista box...
Imagine going to the jeweler and buying a box of diamonds. After watching all those commercials on TV you're expecting the box to be full of sparkly crystals. Instead the box is full of rough diamonds that look like any other rock. Obviously you'd be a little surprised, if nothing else.
Yes, but this is the first time I recall that OEMs sold machines that were seriously underpowered. The difference between XP Home and XP Pro requirements were small. In previous versions, if you upgraded an old machine, you had to double the MS requirements but most new machines met the requirements. In this case, you had a whole lot of new machines that could only run Vista Basic. Add this to whole mess of other problems Vista had at launch and it adds to the negative image of MS.
I disagree.
I've seen entirely too many XP machines for sale with only 256 MB RAM. Sure, technically that's more than enough... But in reality it is horribly underpowered.
Load up the OS, throw on some sort of antivirus, fire up a web browser and email client... Now try to get some work done. Your machine will crawl.
We've always told our clients that 512 MB is really the minimum RAM to be productive, and I've been recommending 1 GB or more for a while now. Especially if folks want to do anything even remotely interesting on their computers.
Although it seems misleading.. Vista Basic is still vista. Why is this still going on?
Because people feel like Aero was a major selling feature? And that without Aero, Vista is not distinguisable from XP? I'd say that the difference is major, and is very much public knowledge, much to Microsoft's chagrin.
So what's the argument? That MS's ad campaign led you to believe anything over the "vista-sucks" hype? I don't think so.
Initially, "Vista Capable" meant that you'd be able to run pretty much any flavor of Vista you might want to. It meant that you could run Aero and all the other shiny stuff.
Microsoft then redefined "Vista Capable" to mean simply capable of running the most basic version of Vista - not all the shiny stuff.
Further, the minimum requirements to get a "Vista capable" sticker are truly minimal. I'm not sure I'd even want to run XP on some of the systems that qualify. I've been recommending 1GB RAM or more for XP installs for a while now. So these systems are underpowered by just about any measure.
Finally, most of Microsoft's advertising focused on the shiny new features. There were lots of commercials showing the fancy new visual effects. They were intentionally trying to make it look at least as good as Mac OS X. Lots of people bought computers expecting those pretty visual effects, and didn't get them. As far as these folks are concerned they didn't get the OS they thought they were buying.