Here is how it looked dangerously close (warning, the people taking this video were way too close so if you can't stomach listening to young girl in complete fear, don't watch that video all the way through) I'm guessing and hoping those people are okay being that the video is on YouTube.
They were mostly OK. One of them got a flash burn, one got some broken ribs, otherwise they had some cuts and bruises, but survived the experience.
Still, interesting that it was picked up that far away. I still cant grasp how big the bang must have been.
your typical terrorist bomb (like Mcveigh, or the trade center bomber) is going to be on the order of several hundred pounds of explosives. Maybe 500 to 1000 pounds.
These idiots had 54,000 Lbs of the stuff on site, and managed to let it catch fire, and then explode. To help put that in perspective, the myth busters used 800 Lbs of high explosive and vaporized a cement truck. This explosion was at least an order of magnitude more powerful.
PS: The bomb attack on the world trade center was also a fertilizer bomb. Fertilizer bombs have been extensively used by terrorists across the globe.
The world trade center bomb used about 800 Lbs of fertilizer. This refinery had 54 Thousand pounds of the stuff on site. This wasn't a small explosion. If something like this had gone off in the basement of the twin towers, the question would not have been whether the buildings would have collapsed, it would have been: How far away would they find pieces. I would be very surprised if parts of this refinery aren't found at least a county away from where the building was.
The question is: how big is the effect. Even a small effect will cause significant distortions in battery metering, but if the effect is large enough, it will cause the batteries not to last any where near as many cycles as originally believed. This could really suck for electric car owners. Any '07 Roadster owners out there care to share how well the batteries are holding up?
But you're both right and wrong - the problem is not that inventors would sit with their thumbs up their butts and make no money if they couldn't have patent protection. The problem is that, instead, they would keep everything under NDA and trade secret protection, with more DRM and harsh licensing systems to prevent copies from ever falling into the hands of a competitor. And that problem was the specific reason for the existence of patents: the rulers of Florence granted the first patent to Brunelleschi in exchange for him publicly disclosing his invention. All of the merchants wanted access to it, and this was in the era where you hire mercenary guards to protect your stuff and/or raid your competitors' warehouses. Rather than have a bloody and expensive conflict, Florence gave him a time-limited monopoly, in exchange for teaching everyone else how to do his invention.
To which invention are you referring? perspective? That silly barge thing? Some feature of architecture? I find it unlikely that not one other person could look at the works and figure out how it was done. Methinks they were dabbling a little much with their leaded paint, and held a little too much belief in the mystical arts to be doing any real thinking anyways... Otherwise I cant understand why duplicating any of those would be so difficult. If I put a block and tackle arrangement in front of my 5 year old and told him to make something similar, I'm sure he could, it just isn't that hard.
Oh, no, 20 years! We might as well all go back to living in caves, because, clearly we are in a dark age of invention.
Also, if true, then your story is really about bad legal and economic advice, not patents. Damages for patent infringement are limited to a reasonable royalty, which, by definition couldn't ever be more than your profits. As you correctly noted at the beginning of your post, people do things that make them money. If you can bring a product to market and pay an outrageous 10% royalty on your profits, you're still making profits. If you don't bring the product to market, as an intelligent commenter stated, you "are guaranteed not to make any money". So, the reason for not bringing the tech to market was, at most, bad legal and economic advice, or much more likely, other reasons such as market size, cost of parts, etc.
When each little incremental improvement costs 20 years, then progress is being impeded. Furthermore, it is not the "cost of damages" that stopped competitors in the field, it was the massive legal costs associated with defending against BS patent trolling. The offending company was started and owned by two attorneys who used their knowledge of the patent process to get patents, and then litigated themselves. The legal cost of defending was prohibitive, even if they were going to win, they couldn't survive long enough to get to that point, so they simply did not use the electronic triggers. This rendered the vast majority of other incremental improvements impossible. All because of two lawyers, and a badly flawed patent system.
Perhaps people understand intuitively that patents are bad because they believe in false histories like "patents were designed so that novel inventions would end up being cataloged", as opposed to the real reasons involving trade secrets.
A patent (/pætnt/ or/petnt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention.
Sounds to me like patents were designed to allow public cataloging of inventions in exchange for limited monopolies. Not sure what part of that you feel is a "false history", but perhaps you're not speaking the same English the rest of us are.
It is sickening in the extreme to think that it's possible to deny other people access to information, simply because you thought of it first.
The default is to deny other people access to information because you thought of it first.
The patent system exists to help get the information into the public domain quickly, instead of having it kept as a trade secret for decades.
So when you're trolling on the patent system, try to understand its primary function first.
No one reads patents to try to figure out how things work. They simply reverse engineer them instead. Patents have mutated into such convoluted legalese as to be nearly impenetrable to someone wishing to learn how the invention actually works. It is faster and easier to simply buy a copy of the product you wish to duplicate, and figure out how it works on your own. This is especially effective for software, as the compiled code reduces down to a procedural description of the algorithm that is simply stunning in its precision. If source code were required it might have some value, but as it stands, the stated purpose of the patent system is null and void by virtue of deliberate obfuscation. The patent database is hopelessly corrupted, and is so thoroughly worthless as an engineering resource as to be ignored almost universally by everyone outside of the legal profession.
he existence of patents do not "hamstring the march of human knowledge." I can't speak for everyone, but the fact is that there are a lot of creative people out there who don't create just for the joy of creating, or for altruistic reasons-- they do it for the money. I'm sure that altruism and personal accomplishment are high on the list, but the fact remains that if an invention is beneficial and its development was performed morally, we shouldn't care why it was done.
I call BS. If there were no patent system, then inventors would bring their products to market anyways. Inventors don't bring products to market because the patent system protects them, they do it because if they don't, they are guaranteed not to make any money. Patents, like copyright are an archaic solution to a problem that doesn't really exist anymore, and possibly never did. A company that brings a novel product to market, will have at least a year before a competitor can copy it and bring the copies to market. This is all the protection an inventor should need. Anything more is a cancer to be removed.
On the other side of the coin, I can think of at least a few products which have not made it to market because of patents, and the inventors will not even try until the offending patents expire in another 10 years. For example, Touch sensitive trigger for paintball guns would be a very neat idea, but until recently were not viable because they required the paintball gun to use an electronic triggering mechanism, the patent for which was granted almost 20 years ago. The company that owned the patent was charging outrageous fees to use their technology, which was obvious technology to virtually every engineer that ever touched a paintball gun. Because of that one company and the patent system that supported them, paintball guns have remained largely in the dark ages for 20 years. The company itself long ago stopped innovating, and it wasn't until they went out of business under the weight of their own ineptitude that everyone else started making better products again. (They also managed to keep the cost of paintball equipment an order of magnitude higher than it should have been, and largely strangled the sport as a result).
Patents are bad. Most people with an IQ in the triple digits understand this intuitively, even if they cant put an explanation to it. They were designed so that novel inventions would end up being cataloged in such a way that the designs could be used for further development, but now they are used as a weapon to prevent companies from having to compete on their merits, and have far outlived their usefulness.
This was a smurf amplification attack, so no you won't be ending the ddos threat permanently. Or more accurately, a distributed smurf amplification attack. Your ideas might work to prevent the smurf amplification, but there is nothing which can be done to prevent a simple, direct DDoS. Except to have more bandwidth and processing capability than the attacker does.
Smurf attacks are easy to stop, and are not terribly effective anymore thanks to various changes made to the IP standard in the last 15 years. IP validation eliminates all possibility of smurf attacks, because smurf attacks only work if IP spoofing works. Properly configured networks are immune.
People have spent billions trying to classify email messages as spam vs legitimate and they are still no closer to getting that right.
That is because whether or not a particular e-mail is spam, is a very subjective analysis. One persons spam is another's monthly coupons. Personally, I would identify the entire Sunday paper coupon section as spam, but my wife reads it like the bible...
Malicious packets on the other hand are fairly easy to identify, and there isn't much gray area. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action.
LOL I think most ISPs would pass unless your volunteering to sit there and pick up the phone for free.
I think most of them will do this if the alternative is willfully ignoring a criminal act, which in most countries in the world is still conspiracy to commit... Answering the phone once in a while is a small price to pay, especially since, with these protections in place, ddos' will become practically non-existant: Because they would no longer work, no one would bother.
It has their actual IP address in it. If it didn't the anti spoofing would have prevented the packet from getting anywhere near the target anyways
Why ten minutes? What if I have IPv6 and a number of IPs equal to 4 billion IPv4 Internets? Will it still target single hosts?
Ten minutes was just an initial figure to put something there. Testing will give a better range for the temporary blocking of packets.
So in other words your idea only works if the network is trustworthy and we all know that aint so.
No, the idea works two-fold. First, it works perfectly if the network is trustworthy, but it also identifies the parts that aren't and can be used to correct the broken parts...
What is IP validation?
IP validation is checking to see if the return IP address on a packet is actually down a trunc from which the packet came. This normally doesn't work terribly well at tier 1 and some tier 2 routers, but at tier 3 it works dynamite. If every router is using it, then it renders it impossible to send packets anonymously (There are no legitimate reasons to send anonymous packets across the internet anyway). You always know where a packet came from, or else it didn't reach you anyways.
It is fine to dream up solutions to things but the only way to learn and make your ideas better is to be its most vigorous opponent.
Which is why I love testbedding my ideas here. I have ready access to a large contingent of very savvy people with a (sometimes rabid) desire to poke holes in any idea. I have gotten some very complicated responses attempting to demonstrate flaws with my proposed solution, but all of them boil down to being able to spoof IPs. without that, the proposed system works.
Can you explain to me how to progmatically tell the difference between your "spoof" shutdown request and a real one?
The sanity checks that prevent spoofing IP address will also prevent spoofed kill requests from making it to their destination. Even if the spoofed request makes it to the hosts routers, all it will do is shutdown their ability to send packets to the one ip address. the rest of their connection will remain unaffected. Again, if someone along the line is not doing spoof checking, this will highlight that very quickly, and they will fix it.
From a programming point of view, the routers can be set up to watch traffic. If a kill request comes in for an IP address, but there hasn't been a packet sent from the "offending IP" to the requesting IP recently, then there is clearly something else going on. There is a very simple sanity check that a source (and destination) router can perform. The ISPs at both ends have all of the information to algorithmically detect false alerts, and even a false alert will do relatively little damage. As in all of the other cases, the anti spoofing will make it very clear, very quickly where the infected machines are.
What if someone - say one of the millions of compromised computers out there - were to send a shutdown request against a large player - say spamhaus. By your example, spamhaus would be taken offline until someone at spamhaus' IT department called their ISP to get the block cleared. At which point another compromised computer sends a new shutdown request. Sure, you loose a few bots, but at the cost of one bot per 5 minutes downtime for a large vendor, you can get a pretty big bang out of a small bot network.
Kind of. In your example, what happens is that spamhouse looses the ability to send packets to that IP address The rest of their connection remains unaffected. Their ISP gets an indication that spamhaus is sending malicious traffic, and the routers have automatically blocked packets to the victims IP address. Everyone else is unaware that anything is going on. Spamhaus is relatively unaffected. It all depends what their ISP does with the information. Institutional services probably wont get disconnected right away, but a private connection might get closed down after a relatively few offenses.
A technical solution would require redefining the IP standard.
Not really, Two things would go a long way towards ending the ddos threat permanently. First, Implementing gateway sanity checks that already exist. If a provider is forwarding packets with spoofed IP address', then un-peer them until they fix their configurations.
Second, is an out of band feature which provides a mechanism where the recipient of a packet can flag that packet as malicious and ask the upstream connection to shut them down at their source. This feature should be recursive, and with the same sanity checks to make sure the requests are legitimate.
As a result of these two, a ddos begins: The recipient computer starts flagging IP address and requesting that their host provider shut off the flows from each IP as they are identified. Host provider filters everything from that IP. for a random interval between 10 minutes and a half hour. The host IP also passes the filter request upstream to the next link in the chain. This process continues until it backtracks all the way to each source machine, which finds itself disconnected for 10 minutes. If the owner is private, then they will call their ISP to find out why their connection sucks, at which point the ISP tells them, your machine is taking part in an illegal ddos. If you don't know how to fix it, take your computer to the local shop to have it cleaned, and have them explain internet security to you while they're at it. If the computer is institutional, then their IT department is going to have one heck of lot of explaining to do, being as they have compromised servers and had to be told by their ISP that they have a problem... Either way, no bot net operator will risk having their botnet dismantled automatically without a very long thought about what they are trying to accomplish. Additionally, no ddos would be effective for more than a few minutes as the requests filtered back upstream and shut it down at its distributed sources.
The biggest complaint I always hear about this plan, is what if someone spoofs shutdown requests to get someone disconnected. That kind of spoofing could only work if one of the intermediate nodes is compromised, or the IP validation is not enabled. either way, it requires that the network be broken in easily fixable ways, which presumably will be fixed as soon as discovered. Think of the whole system as an autoimmune reaction to infection. Terribly effective and largely automatic.
From 2009-2013, these charts show unemployment rates (as measured by US standards) dropped in the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan.
Unemployment statistics are particularly misleading, especially in the US, where all of the various measures are flawed in major ways. For example, the numbers you cited are calculated using the US standards. Under this standard, unemployment is measured from the total number of claims for unemployment benefits. This fails to take a large number of scenarios into account, and is not a good measure of true unemployment. It also completely fails to account for underemployment (i.e. someone who gets a part time job, but is not making their full expected wages). In all, a much better indicator (but one which is not tracked), is the total employed hours vs the available man hours available in the market. By this measure, the best guess approximation has the United States running Close to 20% This is a massive labor oversupply. In that same time frame, we barely see an interruption in GDP growth. This means that all of that reduction in employment did not affect GDP significantly, and therefore is unlikely to ever recover. The point of the matter is that the growth in GDP is due to increases in efficiency from the very causes I cited, and as the theory predicts, this is causing an oversupply of labor that cannot be corrected for in the long term.
The number of poor people (living on under $1.25 per day 2005 price level) declined pretty much everywhere [economist.com] from 2005 to 2008. China has taken 660 million people out of poverty since 1981. Even in Africa, from 2005 to 2008, poverty fell by 12 million to 47% - the first time less than half of Africans have been below the poverty line.
Large parts of the world are still either pre-industrial, or very early in the industrialization process. That means that they will not see the effects of this process for another couple of generations. They will see it earlier when/if the cost point of complete automation decreases significantly below the cost of the cheapest manual labor in the world. When that happens, then all of the delaying factors that have been sustaining our market economy will collapse in a depression to end all depressions. 5% of the worlds population will be employed, and the rest will starve to death. The necessary result will be revolution and civil war. This can still be fixed now, if we recognize the problem for what it is and work towards a solution. Marx caught a glimpse of the problem, but failed to see the whole problem, and tried a solution that was premature, and hopelessly naive. Since that time, I have heard of nothing better.
So really, what you said here has very little to what you said in the previous post, which talks about a theoretical far off future that is markedly different than today (in that regards to that question, yes indeed khallow missed the point, but if I was him I'd just say that future is way too far off for us to care about today)
Not so theoretical, and definitely not that far off. There are large portions of manufacturing that are already done by robot., and the only reason there isn't more is because we keep finding new labor that is marginally cheaper, but that won't last forever. We are less than 3 generations away from a society where the robots build, and the robots maintain the robots. Once computers can program computers, and AI reaches a certain critical mass, the process is self sustaining. After that human input will only be needed for new types of designs. Everything from agriculture to sales clerks will be replaced by robots and computers, and there will be effectively no real need for humans to work in any form. We are closer to the end of that transition than we are to the beginning.
You misunderstand what this all implies. Think of it this way. In the "bad old days" TM, people had to spend most of their day farming/foraging, what have you, just to support themselves. Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+. Over the past 50 years, we have seen an increase in the work-week, with the only real improvements in lifestyle coming from the personal computer, and health care. The personal computer has improved overall efficiency of the economy (Total producible goods and services divided by man hours required to make them), but despite that, there has been an increase in the work week. Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts. This will result in increased work weeks to make the same paycheck, and / or a decrease in standard of living. Meanwhile, the powers that own the manufacturing will increase their wealth faster and faster, until the system collapses under the imbalance. Our country survived one such set of events in the industrial revolution, but ever since that point, there has been increasing political and economic instability. The only reason we can keep the thing going is because we have been able to find ways to increase the standard of living by using excess labor (i.e. new gadgets and things to spend money on). When we run out of new things for people to buy, then the system collapses like the pyramid scheme that it is. For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead. The capitalists will hate any such idea and actively fight it because any idea along those lines will necessarily be contrary to profits, and undercut their power and money. It is too easy under capitalism to work harder to make more money, thereby forcing everyone else to work harder, and rendering others completely unemployable. This fundamental tenet of capitalism is our worst enemy, and must be overcome if we are to move forward as a nation and a world economy.
How do you expect to solve the world's problems, if your solution isn't profitable or even feasible? Assessing that is what those people are good at.
By the way, no profits mean can still be successful but you'll have to go after government cash. Which is fine, but if there's profit (or mutual benefit) to be had by all parties involved, there's a much greater chance of success.
Not all of the worlds problems can be solved in the framework of capitalism. While it is a useful tool, it also has severe limitations which we haven't even begun to appreciate yet.
If you don't know what I mean, then consider the following gedanken experiment:
If we extrapolate current trends in manufacturing, service, etc, Then you will see that the most likely end result state of technology will be a "utopian" society where robots and computers do all real heavy lifting, and people are free to do as they please. All manufacturing and most design work will be done by autonomous computer controlled systems without the need for human interaction. Less than 1 in every million humans will need to be actively involved in the maintenance of society. The question then becomes: what will the rest of the people do? The answer is "Whatever they want". This is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, but it begs the question, how does this work with society and specifically, what happens to capitalism? Although no one would technically need to work to keep society working, Capitalism would require people to work to earn money for food and the like, but the need would be artificial. What could you possibly have for these people to do to "earn" their pay?
Now, before you claim that this has no bearing on our current situation, remember that this situation wont happen overnight. It will be a gradual progression from where we are now to that point, and along the way, as less and less man-hours of labor are required to maintain society, how do people stay employed? Does everyone work just one hour a year for their yearly salary?
What happens is exactly what we are starting to see worldwide: Rising unemployment, with jobs liquidating but never returning, and accelerating polarization into the rich and the poor. This is a massive problem. I can see two basic outcomes. First, humanity abandons capitalism for something else (hopefully better), or the poor revolt, and automation is banned just so that the masses can have jobs that pay the bills. and in the process a very large portion of the population is likely to starve or die fighting.
As I stated originally, not all solutions can be couched in terms of profit, so be careful narrowing your options to include only this line of thinking.
Second problem: since these are the leading minds and you execute them, the next batch will necessarily be dumber (or at best equal) than the current one.
"Leading Minds" is a highly subjective term. You have to remember that the vast majority of success is opportunity. In any given field there are orders of magnitude more people, that are capable of success, than actually have it because the majority of capable people never get the opportunity to work to their potential. This is the problem that the "tech skills crisis" fails to understand. Past performance is *not* the only indicator of future success, but it is the only one that is easy enough for an HR type person to work with. The root of the problem is that the gatekeepers to STEM jobs are liberal arts people who do not understand the jobs they are trying to fill. Although this works if you have too many candidates and need to weed out, this fails miserably when you have no perfect matches.
I can use myself as a perfect example. I have not held a tech related job in 10 years. I could still pick it up between the time I found out I had an interview, and when I actually had the interview, but no HR department will ever let my resume through because I don't look good on paper. While most of the people on/., and pretty much any hiring manager, would know the right questions to ask, and what the answers meant, the HR people don't, and it is much easier for them to return and say "no candidates met your needs", rather than finding someone who can do the job but didn't match the requirements. The fastest cure for not being able to find capable applicants is eliminating any requirement that has any reference to years of experience in it. Very few people are going to list a skill they don't have; in the tech world it is very easy to tell if someone is lying about their skillset.
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
There is a common misconception that the people at the various carriers are well paid, and should be happy to have good paying jobs, but you have to remember, that only the high seniority people are making anywhere close to top rate. Starting wages are pretty close to minimum wage, and are in fact less than Mcdonalds advertises. When you take out union dues, the amount is actually less than minimum wage. The new employee can look forward to reasonable raises, but its still part time only, and they're going to wait 10+ years before having enough seniority for a full time spot. All that time working part time for peanuts at a job that makes it difficult to hold down another part time job because it leaves you tired and sleep deprived, and you wonder why your packages get treated like crap. Its not the 20+ year veteran making a decent wage doing it, its the same kid that spits on your fries at Mcdonalds. He won't stay more than a few months anyway, so what does he care? Minimum wage in the US is a joke, and every one of these packages going by is a reminder to these guys of a lifestyle they will more than likely never be able to take part in.
Our country needs to re-evaluate its priorities when we lavishly reward banking executives for actively destroying the lives of millions just to increase their own profits, and then getting a bailout from those very same people whose lives they destroyed. Capitalism is as f***ed up as communism for very different reasons. The communists failed to account for greed in their world order, and the system got gamed by the greedy pretty quick. Capitalism survived for more than 200 years before the greedy figured out how to game the system. End result will be the same if we don't figure out how to get the greedy back to working for the system instead of gaming it...
Fire anyone who hold the shipment up, complains about the packaging or manages to lose the package. If your going to work for the postal service you need to show no basis towards any packaging.
The unions have something to say about that, and they are constantly backed at arbitration by the arbiters... As much as people dislike the lazy and the dishonest, Big corporations are hated more, and with good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
How much is that in imperial fuckloads?
That would be 5.4 IFL.
Here is how it looked dangerously close (warning, the people taking this video were way too close so if you can't stomach listening to young girl in complete fear, don't watch that video all the way through) I'm guessing and hoping those people are okay being that the video is on YouTube.
They were mostly OK. One of them got a flash burn, one got some broken ribs, otherwise they had some cuts and bruises, but survived the experience.
-=Geoskd
Still, interesting that it was picked up that far away. I still cant grasp how big the bang must have been.
your typical terrorist bomb (like Mcveigh, or the trade center bomber) is going to be on the order of several hundred pounds of explosives. Maybe 500 to 1000 pounds.
These idiots had 54,000 Lbs of the stuff on site, and managed to let it catch fire, and then explode. To help put that in perspective, the myth busters used 800 Lbs of high explosive and vaporized a cement truck. This explosion was at least an order of magnitude more powerful.
-=Geoskd
PS: The bomb attack on the world trade center was also a fertilizer bomb. Fertilizer bombs have been extensively used by terrorists across the globe.
The world trade center bomb used about 800 Lbs of fertilizer. This refinery had 54 Thousand pounds of the stuff on site. This wasn't a small explosion. If something like this had gone off in the basement of the twin towers, the question would not have been whether the buildings would have collapsed, it would have been: How far away would they find pieces. I would be very surprised if parts of this refinery aren't found at least a county away from where the building was.
The question is: how big is the effect. Even a small effect will cause significant distortions in battery metering, but if the effect is large enough, it will cause the batteries not to last any where near as many cycles as originally believed. This could really suck for electric car owners. Any '07 Roadster owners out there care to share how well the batteries are holding up?
-=Geoskd
But you're both right and wrong - the problem is not that inventors would sit with their thumbs up their butts and make no money if they couldn't have patent protection. The problem is that, instead, they would keep everything under NDA and trade secret protection, with more DRM and harsh licensing systems to prevent copies from ever falling into the hands of a competitor. And that problem was the specific reason for the existence of patents: the rulers of Florence granted the first patent to Brunelleschi in exchange for him publicly disclosing his invention. All of the merchants wanted access to it, and this was in the era where you hire mercenary guards to protect your stuff and/or raid your competitors' warehouses. Rather than have a bloody and expensive conflict, Florence gave him a time-limited monopoly, in exchange for teaching everyone else how to do his invention.
To which invention are you referring? perspective? That silly barge thing? Some feature of architecture? I find it unlikely that not one other person could look at the works and figure out how it was done. Methinks they were dabbling a little much with their leaded paint, and held a little too much belief in the mystical arts to be doing any real thinking anyways... Otherwise I cant understand why duplicating any of those would be so difficult. If I put a block and tackle arrangement in front of my 5 year old and told him to make something similar, I'm sure he could, it just isn't that hard.
Oh, no, 20 years! We might as well all go back to living in caves, because, clearly we are in a dark age of invention. Also, if true, then your story is really about bad legal and economic advice, not patents. Damages for patent infringement are limited to a reasonable royalty, which, by definition couldn't ever be more than your profits. As you correctly noted at the beginning of your post, people do things that make them money. If you can bring a product to market and pay an outrageous 10% royalty on your profits, you're still making profits. If you don't bring the product to market, as an intelligent commenter stated, you "are guaranteed not to make any money". So, the reason for not bringing the tech to market was, at most, bad legal and economic advice, or much more likely, other reasons such as market size, cost of parts, etc.
When each little incremental improvement costs 20 years, then progress is being impeded. Furthermore, it is not the "cost of damages" that stopped competitors in the field, it was the massive legal costs associated with defending against BS patent trolling. The offending company was started and owned by two attorneys who used their knowledge of the patent process to get patents, and then litigated themselves. The legal cost of defending was prohibitive, even if they were going to win, they couldn't survive long enough to get to that point, so they simply did not use the electronic triggers. This rendered the vast majority of other incremental improvements impossible. All because of two lawyers, and a badly flawed patent system.
Perhaps people understand intuitively that patents are bad because they believe in false histories like "patents were designed so that novel inventions would end up being cataloged", as opposed to the real reasons involving trade secrets.
From Wikipedia
A patent (/pætnt/ or /petnt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention.
Sounds to me like patents were designed to allow public cataloging of inventions in exchange for limited monopolies. Not sure what part of that you feel is a "false history", but perhaps you're not speaking the same English the rest of us are.
-=Geoskd
It is sickening in the extreme to think that it's possible to deny other people access to information, simply because you thought of it first.
The default is to deny other people access to information because you thought of it first.
The patent system exists to help get the information into the public domain quickly, instead of having it kept as a trade secret for decades.
So when you're trolling on the patent system, try to understand its primary function first.
No one reads patents to try to figure out how things work. They simply reverse engineer them instead. Patents have mutated into such convoluted legalese as to be nearly impenetrable to someone wishing to learn how the invention actually works. It is faster and easier to simply buy a copy of the product you wish to duplicate, and figure out how it works on your own. This is especially effective for software, as the compiled code reduces down to a procedural description of the algorithm that is simply stunning in its precision. If source code were required it might have some value, but as it stands, the stated purpose of the patent system is null and void by virtue of deliberate obfuscation. The patent database is hopelessly corrupted, and is so thoroughly worthless as an engineering resource as to be ignored almost universally by everyone outside of the legal profession.
-=Geoskd
he existence of patents do not "hamstring the march of human knowledge." I can't speak for everyone, but the fact is that there are a lot of creative people out there who don't create just for the joy of creating, or for altruistic reasons-- they do it for the money. I'm sure that altruism and personal accomplishment are high on the list, but the fact remains that if an invention is beneficial and its development was performed morally, we shouldn't care why it was done.
I call BS. If there were no patent system, then inventors would bring their products to market anyways. Inventors don't bring products to market because the patent system protects them, they do it because if they don't, they are guaranteed not to make any money. Patents, like copyright are an archaic solution to a problem that doesn't really exist anymore, and possibly never did. A company that brings a novel product to market, will have at least a year before a competitor can copy it and bring the copies to market. This is all the protection an inventor should need. Anything more is a cancer to be removed.
On the other side of the coin, I can think of at least a few products which have not made it to market because of patents, and the inventors will not even try until the offending patents expire in another 10 years. For example, Touch sensitive trigger for paintball guns would be a very neat idea, but until recently were not viable because they required the paintball gun to use an electronic triggering mechanism, the patent for which was granted almost 20 years ago. The company that owned the patent was charging outrageous fees to use their technology, which was obvious technology to virtually every engineer that ever touched a paintball gun. Because of that one company and the patent system that supported them, paintball guns have remained largely in the dark ages for 20 years. The company itself long ago stopped innovating, and it wasn't until they went out of business under the weight of their own ineptitude that everyone else started making better products again. (They also managed to keep the cost of paintball equipment an order of magnitude higher than it should have been, and largely strangled the sport as a result).
Patents are bad. Most people with an IQ in the triple digits understand this intuitively, even if they cant put an explanation to it. They were designed so that novel inventions would end up being cataloged in such a way that the designs could be used for further development, but now they are used as a weapon to prevent companies from having to compete on their merits, and have far outlived their usefulness.
-=Geoskd
This was a smurf amplification attack, so no you won't be ending the ddos threat permanently. Or more accurately, a distributed smurf amplification attack. Your ideas might work to prevent the smurf amplification, but there is nothing which can be done to prevent a simple, direct DDoS. Except to have more bandwidth and processing capability than the attacker does.
Smurf attacks are easy to stop, and are not terribly effective anymore thanks to various changes made to the IP standard in the last 15 years. IP validation eliminates all possibility of smurf attacks, because smurf attacks only work if IP spoofing works. Properly configured networks are immune.
-=Geoskd
People have spent billions trying to classify email messages as spam vs legitimate and they are still no closer to getting that right.
That is because whether or not a particular e-mail is spam, is a very subjective analysis. One persons spam is another's monthly coupons. Personally, I would identify the entire Sunday paper coupon section as spam, but my wife reads it like the bible...
Malicious packets on the other hand are fairly easy to identify, and there isn't much gray area. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action.
LOL I think most ISPs would pass unless your volunteering to sit there and pick up the phone for free.
I think most of them will do this if the alternative is willfully ignoring a criminal act, which in most countries in the world is still conspiracy to commit... Answering the phone once in a while is a small price to pay, especially since, with these protections in place, ddos' will become practically non-existant: Because they would no longer work, no one would bother.
How do you identify an attack(er)?
It has their actual IP address in it. If it didn't the anti spoofing would have prevented the packet from getting anywhere near the target anyways
Why ten minutes? What if I have IPv6 and a number of IPs equal to 4 billion IPv4 Internets? Will it still target single hosts?
Ten minutes was just an initial figure to put something there. Testing will give a better range for the temporary blocking of packets.
So in other words your idea only works if the network is trustworthy and we all know that aint so.
No, the idea works two-fold. First, it works perfectly if the network is trustworthy, but it also identifies the parts that aren't and can be used to correct the broken parts...
What is IP validation?
IP validation is checking to see if the return IP address on a packet is actually down a trunc from which the packet came. This normally doesn't work terribly well at tier 1 and some tier 2 routers, but at tier 3 it works dynamite. If every router is using it, then it renders it impossible to send packets anonymously (There are no legitimate reasons to send anonymous packets across the internet anyway). You always know where a packet came from, or else it didn't reach you anyways.
It is fine to dream up solutions to things but the only way to learn and make your ideas better is to be its most vigorous opponent.
Which is why I love testbedding my ideas here. I have ready access to a large contingent of very savvy people with a (sometimes rabid) desire to poke holes in any idea. I have gotten some very complicated responses attempting to demonstrate flaws with my proposed solution, but all of them boil down to being able to spoof IPs. without that, the proposed system works.
-=Geoskd
Can you explain to me how to progmatically tell the difference between your "spoof" shutdown request and a real one?
The sanity checks that prevent spoofing IP address will also prevent spoofed kill requests from making it to their destination. Even if the spoofed request makes it to the hosts routers, all it will do is shutdown their ability to send packets to the one ip address. the rest of their connection will remain unaffected. Again, if someone along the line is not doing spoof checking, this will highlight that very quickly, and they will fix it.
From a programming point of view, the routers can be set up to watch traffic. If a kill request comes in for an IP address, but there hasn't been a packet sent from the "offending IP" to the requesting IP recently, then there is clearly something else going on. There is a very simple sanity check that a source (and destination) router can perform. The ISPs at both ends have all of the information to algorithmically detect false alerts, and even a false alert will do relatively little damage. As in all of the other cases, the anti spoofing will make it very clear, very quickly where the infected machines are.
-=Geoskd
What if someone - say one of the millions of compromised computers out there - were to send a shutdown request against a large player - say spamhaus. By your example, spamhaus would be taken offline until someone at spamhaus' IT department called their ISP to get the block cleared. At which point another compromised computer sends a new shutdown request. Sure, you loose a few bots, but at the cost of one bot per 5 minutes downtime for a large vendor, you can get a pretty big bang out of a small bot network.
Kind of. In your example, what happens is that spamhouse looses the ability to send packets to that IP address The rest of their connection remains unaffected. Their ISP gets an indication that spamhaus is sending malicious traffic, and the routers have automatically blocked packets to the victims IP address. Everyone else is unaware that anything is going on. Spamhaus is relatively unaffected. It all depends what their ISP does with the information. Institutional services probably wont get disconnected right away, but a private connection might get closed down after a relatively few offenses.
-=Geoskd
A technical solution would require redefining the IP standard.
Not really, Two things would go a long way towards ending the ddos threat permanently. First, Implementing gateway sanity checks that already exist. If a provider is forwarding packets with spoofed IP address', then un-peer them until they fix their configurations.
Second, is an out of band feature which provides a mechanism where the recipient of a packet can flag that packet as malicious and ask the upstream connection to shut them down at their source. This feature should be recursive, and with the same sanity checks to make sure the requests are legitimate.
As a result of these two, a ddos begins: The recipient computer starts flagging IP address and requesting that their host provider shut off the flows from each IP as they are identified. Host provider filters everything from that IP. for a random interval between 10 minutes and a half hour. The host IP also passes the filter request upstream to the next link in the chain. This process continues until it backtracks all the way to each source machine, which finds itself disconnected for 10 minutes. If the owner is private, then they will call their ISP to find out why their connection sucks, at which point the ISP tells them, your machine is taking part in an illegal ddos. If you don't know how to fix it, take your computer to the local shop to have it cleaned, and have them explain internet security to you while they're at it. If the computer is institutional, then their IT department is going to have one heck of lot of explaining to do, being as they have compromised servers and had to be told by their ISP that they have a problem... Either way, no bot net operator will risk having their botnet dismantled automatically without a very long thought about what they are trying to accomplish. Additionally, no ddos would be effective for more than a few minutes as the requests filtered back upstream and shut it down at its distributed sources.
The biggest complaint I always hear about this plan, is what if someone spoofs shutdown requests to get someone disconnected. That kind of spoofing could only work if one of the intermediate nodes is compromised, or the IP validation is not enabled. either way, it requires that the network be broken in easily fixable ways, which presumably will be fixed as soon as discovered. Think of the whole system as an autoimmune reaction to infection. Terribly effective and largely automatic.
-=Geoskd
From 2009-2013, these charts show unemployment rates (as measured by US standards) dropped in the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan.
Unemployment statistics are particularly misleading, especially in the US, where all of the various measures are flawed in major ways. For example, the numbers you cited are calculated using the US standards. Under this standard, unemployment is measured from the total number of claims for unemployment benefits. This fails to take a large number of scenarios into account, and is not a good measure of true unemployment. It also completely fails to account for underemployment (i.e. someone who gets a part time job, but is not making their full expected wages). In all, a much better indicator (but one which is not tracked), is the total employed hours vs the available man hours available in the market. By this measure, the best guess approximation has the United States running Close to 20% This is a massive labor oversupply. In that same time frame, we barely see an interruption in GDP growth. This means that all of that reduction in employment did not affect GDP significantly, and therefore is unlikely to ever recover. The point of the matter is that the growth in GDP is due to increases in efficiency from the very causes I cited, and as the theory predicts, this is causing an oversupply of labor that cannot be corrected for in the long term.
The number of poor people (living on under $1.25 per day 2005 price level) declined pretty much everywhere [economist.com] from 2005 to 2008. China has taken 660 million people out of poverty since 1981. Even in Africa, from 2005 to 2008, poverty fell by 12 million to 47% - the first time less than half of Africans have been below the poverty line.
Large parts of the world are still either pre-industrial, or very early in the industrialization process. That means that they will not see the effects of this process for another couple of generations. They will see it earlier when/if the cost point of complete automation decreases significantly below the cost of the cheapest manual labor in the world. When that happens, then all of the delaying factors that have been sustaining our market economy will collapse in a depression to end all depressions. 5% of the worlds population will be employed, and the rest will starve to death. The necessary result will be revolution and civil war. This can still be fixed now, if we recognize the problem for what it is and work towards a solution. Marx caught a glimpse of the problem, but failed to see the whole problem, and tried a solution that was premature, and hopelessly naive. Since that time, I have heard of nothing better.
-=Geoskd
So really, what you said here has very little to what you said in the previous post, which talks about a theoretical far off future that is markedly different than today (in that regards to that question, yes indeed khallow missed the point, but if I was him I'd just say that future is way too far off for us to care about today)
Not so theoretical, and definitely not that far off. There are large portions of manufacturing that are already done by robot., and the only reason there isn't more is because we keep finding new labor that is marginally cheaper, but that won't last forever. We are less than 3 generations away from a society where the robots build, and the robots maintain the robots. Once computers can program computers, and AI reaches a certain critical mass, the process is self sustaining. After that human input will only be needed for new types of designs. Everything from agriculture to sales clerks will be replaced by robots and computers, and there will be effectively no real need for humans to work in any form. We are closer to the end of that transition than we are to the beginning.
-=Geoskd
You misunderstand what this all implies. Think of it this way. In the "bad old days" TM, people had to spend most of their day farming/foraging, what have you, just to support themselves. Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+. Over the past 50 years, we have seen an increase in the work-week, with the only real improvements in lifestyle coming from the personal computer, and health care. The personal computer has improved overall efficiency of the economy (Total producible goods and services divided by man hours required to make them), but despite that, there has been an increase in the work week. Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts. This will result in increased work weeks to make the same paycheck, and / or a decrease in standard of living. Meanwhile, the powers that own the manufacturing will increase their wealth faster and faster, until the system collapses under the imbalance. Our country survived one such set of events in the industrial revolution, but ever since that point, there has been increasing political and economic instability. The only reason we can keep the thing going is because we have been able to find ways to increase the standard of living by using excess labor (i.e. new gadgets and things to spend money on). When we run out of new things for people to buy, then the system collapses like the pyramid scheme that it is. For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead. The capitalists will hate any such idea and actively fight it because any idea along those lines will necessarily be contrary to profits, and undercut their power and money. It is too easy under capitalism to work harder to make more money, thereby forcing everyone else to work harder, and rendering others completely unemployable. This fundamental tenet of capitalism is our worst enemy, and must be overcome if we are to move forward as a nation and a world economy.
-=Geoskd
Finding the really brilliant minds is no small task.
That is where you are incorrect. The minds are all around, it only takes a visionary to open his/her eyes to see them...
-=geoskd
u mad?
Can you give me a good reason he shouldn't be?
The Capitalists are ruining our world. The shame is that they're slightly less bad than all the alternatives.
-=Geoskd
How do you expect to solve the world's problems, if your solution isn't profitable or even feasible? Assessing that is what those people are good at. By the way, no profits mean can still be successful but you'll have to go after government cash. Which is fine, but if there's profit (or mutual benefit) to be had by all parties involved, there's a much greater chance of success.
Not all of the worlds problems can be solved in the framework of capitalism. While it is a useful tool, it also has severe limitations which we haven't even begun to appreciate yet.
If you don't know what I mean, then consider the following gedanken experiment:
If we extrapolate current trends in manufacturing, service, etc, Then you will see that the most likely end result state of technology will be a "utopian" society where robots and computers do all real heavy lifting, and people are free to do as they please. All manufacturing and most design work will be done by autonomous computer controlled systems without the need for human interaction. Less than 1 in every million humans will need to be actively involved in the maintenance of society. The question then becomes: what will the rest of the people do? The answer is "Whatever they want". This is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, but it begs the question, how does this work with society and specifically, what happens to capitalism? Although no one would technically need to work to keep society working, Capitalism would require people to work to earn money for food and the like, but the need would be artificial. What could you possibly have for these people to do to "earn" their pay?
Now, before you claim that this has no bearing on our current situation, remember that this situation wont happen overnight. It will be a gradual progression from where we are now to that point, and along the way, as less and less man-hours of labor are required to maintain society, how do people stay employed? Does everyone work just one hour a year for their yearly salary?
What happens is exactly what we are starting to see worldwide: Rising unemployment, with jobs liquidating but never returning, and accelerating polarization into the rich and the poor. This is a massive problem. I can see two basic outcomes. First, humanity abandons capitalism for something else (hopefully better), or the poor revolt, and automation is banned just so that the masses can have jobs that pay the bills. and in the process a very large portion of the population is likely to starve or die fighting.
As I stated originally, not all solutions can be couched in terms of profit, so be careful narrowing your options to include only this line of thinking.
-=Geoskd
Second problem: since these are the leading minds and you execute them, the next batch will necessarily be dumber (or at best equal) than the current one.
"Leading Minds" is a highly subjective term. You have to remember that the vast majority of success is opportunity. In any given field there are orders of magnitude more people, that are capable of success, than actually have it because the majority of capable people never get the opportunity to work to their potential. This is the problem that the "tech skills crisis" fails to understand. Past performance is *not* the only indicator of future success, but it is the only one that is easy enough for an HR type person to work with. The root of the problem is that the gatekeepers to STEM jobs are liberal arts people who do not understand the jobs they are trying to fill. Although this works if you have too many candidates and need to weed out, this fails miserably when you have no perfect matches.
I can use myself as a perfect example. I have not held a tech related job in 10 years. I could still pick it up between the time I found out I had an interview, and when I actually had the interview, but no HR department will ever let my resume through because I don't look good on paper. While most of the people on /., and pretty much any hiring manager, would know the right questions to ask, and what the answers meant, the HR people don't, and it is much easier for them to return and say "no candidates met your needs", rather than finding someone who can do the job but didn't match the requirements. The fastest cure for not being able to find capable applicants is eliminating any requirement that has any reference to years of experience in it. Very few people are going to list a skill they don't have; in the tech world it is very easy to tell if someone is lying about their skillset.
-=Geoskd
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
There is a common misconception that the people at the various carriers are well paid, and should be happy to have good paying jobs, but you have to remember, that only the high seniority people are making anywhere close to top rate. Starting wages are pretty close to minimum wage, and are in fact less than Mcdonalds advertises. When you take out union dues, the amount is actually less than minimum wage. The new employee can look forward to reasonable raises, but its still part time only, and they're going to wait 10+ years before having enough seniority for a full time spot. All that time working part time for peanuts at a job that makes it difficult to hold down another part time job because it leaves you tired and sleep deprived, and you wonder why your packages get treated like crap. Its not the 20+ year veteran making a decent wage doing it, its the same kid that spits on your fries at Mcdonalds. He won't stay more than a few months anyway, so what does he care? Minimum wage in the US is a joke, and every one of these packages going by is a reminder to these guys of a lifestyle they will more than likely never be able to take part in.
Our country needs to re-evaluate its priorities when we lavishly reward banking executives for actively destroying the lives of millions just to increase their own profits, and then getting a bailout from those very same people whose lives they destroyed. Capitalism is as f***ed up as communism for very different reasons. The communists failed to account for greed in their world order, and the system got gamed by the greedy pretty quick. Capitalism survived for more than 200 years before the greedy figured out how to game the system. End result will be the same if we don't figure out how to get the greedy back to working for the system instead of gaming it...
-=Geoskd
Fire anyone who hold the shipment up, complains about the packaging or manages to lose the package. If your going to work for the postal service you need to show no basis towards any packaging.
The unions have something to say about that, and they are constantly backed at arbitration by the arbiters... As much as people dislike the lazy and the dishonest, Big corporations are hated more, and with good reason.
-=Geoskd
The government works?
Only the corrupt parts