If the author doesn't like the deal, he needs to find out about it, and he may be living in isolation in a jungle somewhere, and then he needs to opt out by a deadline.
As copyright was explicitly established for the public good, what societal or constitutional interest is served in allowing an uninterested author to effectively lock up books they no longer care about? I'm about as conservative as you can get, but I can't see why anyone should be able to prevent Google (or any other group) from making abandoned works available. Society gets access to more information, and the authors and publishers don't lose a single penny that they hadn't already written off.
'We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print "orphan" works [...] will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power.'
Translation: it's no fair that Google got off their butts and created a market we weren't interested in, and now we want in on it!
Seriously, someone please explain to me why I should feel any sympathy for the ex-publishers of abandonware? If it was so dang valuable to them, why'd they walk away from it in the first place?
The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it.
There are crimes of opportunity all the time. No, checking ID won't stop the determined crook, but it might turn away the guy who saw an easy chance but isn't willing to risk more than a little bit.
I guess I don't see the downside. It's not perfect protection, obviously, but it can help and there's no cost for doing it. Why not?
They dont necesarily go out of their way, they just have no dress sense, or dont care about looks.
Wait, you thought I was talking about his clothing? That might explain the disconnect. I've had preppy, skater, hippie, and homeless friends over the years and never cared much about what they were wearing. I'm talking about the man's expression and attitude, not anything else.
BTW, I understand what someone else said about having a bunch of reporters in your driveway making you cranky. Still, that guy was well past the "slightly annoyed" phase and well into the range of what you get when you've been pissed off for about 20 years straight.
Are you defective? What's so hard or tough about asking for ID? My father-in-law retired from working for the gas company, and he said people used to ask for his ID all the time. If they didn't, he'd tell them they ought to next time. You're not accusing the person or anything; you're just asking them to prove that they're who they say they are. Anyone who works on-site has been IDed hundreds of times and won't think a thing of it.
He didn't say anything about race just the guy looked "mean as hell"
I guess you missed this line from the post I was replying to:
But good job jumping to the conclusion the paper wanted you to jump to, all black men are thugs who just finished doing a bid.
The article didn't say anything about the man's race. No one even brought it up until posters started whining about it. Go ahead: find one single reply to this story saying that the guy looked scary because he was black and not because he looks like a crackhead.
I let people in without asking for ID. If I'm expecting them to be there, then that's good enough.
Whatever floats your boat, but you're still an idiot. Yes, the person will be legitimate 99.99% of the time. Given that it takes no time at all to verify ID, though, and that on-site workmen are used to being asked to do so, what valid excuse do you have for falling back to "security through coincidence"?
But good job jumping to the conclusion the paper wanted you to jump to, all black men are thugs who just finished doing a bid.
You're an asshole for assuming this is about race. If you look at that picture and the only thing you notice about it is his skin color, then you're far more racist than the GP. Either your first reaction was "black guy! Run!" and you're defending him out of guilt, or you thought "black guy's being oppressed!" and you're defending him against some giant (nonexistent) racist conspiracy.
Yea, I cant really defend his actions, but that customer was probably the 15th straight guy who saw a black guy come to his door and ask for ID.
I'd ask for ID if I saw Eminem rolling up on my sidewalk. You're pretty much an idiot if you don't ID everyone who shows up at your door asking to come inside, whether black or white, young or old, rich or poor. That you want to paint this as a race issue says a lot more about you than it does the person you were replying to.
What seems to have happened here is that a somewhat hot-headed tech who was already having a bad day went out to a house, just trying to do his job, and had some smartass give him all sorts of attitude for no reason and get in the way of him trying to get his job done.
Nope. Much as I've wanted to punch certain customers when I worked tech support, there's no way this is the victim's fault. If I saw that particular crackhead look-a-like sauntering up to my door, I'd also ask to see his ID before letting him in. How much could the victim possibly have egged him on considering the tech hadn't even made it in the front door yet?
The first major brand of malware. I worked tech support at an ISP in the late 90s, and occasionally you'd get a call from someone whose computer would no longer dial in. When pressed, they'd admit that they tried out "that AOL disk I got in the mail / found on the mall floor / found under my windshield wiper", and we'd sigh and tell them to find their Windows installation disk. There was no known way of uninstalling that junk other than by reinstalling Windows.
A few stalwart customers would insist on re-trying the experiment every six months or so to see if the situation had improved, that is, whether the inferior dialup software to a substandard provider had suddenly stopped horking systems. It hadn't. We'd tell them that it was reinstall time again, they'd cuss, then we'd be good for another half year.
No, but effectively everything you ingest is detectable in your excreta, including sweat, and, therefore, should be present on nearly everything you touch.
I'd imagine there's a huge quantitative difference between sweating out picograms of one substance and dipping a rolled-up bill into a pile of another.
A lot of people wanted to stick with 98, thought Me sucked, and didn't want to upgrade to XP until they absolutely needed to. Same shit, different decade.
Me did suck, objectively and massively. XP had a lot of problems when migrating from 9x systems - app compatibility was imperfect, it required activation, it was slower on the same hardware, etc. You make it sound like people are avoiding upgrades just for the sake of avoiding upgrades, but there have been plenty of legitimate reasons for doing exactly that in the past. Reversing your argument: what compelling reason would someone have had to moving from XP to Vista?
It's nice here! Real estate is relatively cheap, the city is nice, quality of life is outstanding, and my kids go to the Montessori public school for free. There's not a lot you could improve on.
Interestingly, that's precisely what I said in the top-level post in this thread. People are complaining about traffic shaping because they're mad at Comcast, but what Comcast did had nothing to do with traffic shaping. People should quit confusing the two because one is good and useful and the other is borderline wire fraud.
Yep, completely certain. There may be specialy boutique ISPs that buy their calculated aggregate capacity, but that's an extremely niche market for customers like stock trading houses.
Did you even read my original top-level post where I pointed out the difference, and then someone replied that traffic shaping is bad, too, and then I replied to that thread? Your argument is precisely what I said in the first place.
Why, if we both pay for the same service level, should your packets get priority just because your protocol wants less latency?
Because he's using latency-sensitive protocols and you're not. If you used them, the shaping would make your stuff more responsive, too.
If you want more of the pipe more of the time, then you should pay for the privilege.
Repeat after me: latency != bandwidth. You're both getting full use of the pipe. The only difference is that protocols that humans use are handled more quickly than protocols that computers use. If you send an IM, do you really want its packet queued up behind an emailed Powerpoint presentation of a dog peeing on something? If the email server takes an extra 1/1500th of a second to receive, no one will notice. If the IM client takes an extra 10 seconds to receive, you'll notice the heck out of it.
With the individual user's max bandwidth limited, there should be no need for this shaping, unless, of course, their network simply can't support what they are selling.
There is no standard-issue ISP or backbone provider in the world that is not oversold. That's how they make money: by estimating the margins they need to maintain. If they oversell too much, their service will suck and customers will flee. If they don't oversell enough, they'll be paying much more per-customer for their capacity than their competitors and won't be able to stay in business.
For example, suppose an ISP's historic utilization is 10% of their total customers' bandwidth if they were all to start downloading at once. If they buy enough bandwidth to support 5%, then downloads will take forever and everyone will hate it. If they go over 10%, though, they're throwing money down the drain. Suppose they paid for the full 100% of capacity. Customers won't faster speeds than if they bought 11%, because in either case they'd have enough to support actual demand.
Oblig. car analogy: roads are built for average flow, not maximum possible demand. Otherwise you'd have an 8-lane freeway direct to your cul-de-sac. If your hometown overbuilds roads, then they've wasted tax money that could've been spent on other stuff (or not collected in the first place (that was hard to type with a straight face)).
So all that is why we have traffic shaping. At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging. Traffic shaping seems like it would be bad, up until you're stuck using a connection that doesn't use it.
But if you're in an area where Comcast has been given a monopoly on cable service and your phone company can't/won't provide DSL (or FIOS), do they have the right to be a bad ISP?
Well, the FCC doesn't (or at least didn't) seem to think so, hence the fact that this article was written in the first place.
On another note it would be way cool to be able to have whichever company's box has the broadcast channels on it that you associate with your home town, in my case New York and San Francisco. Do particular broadcast company stations have monopolies as well for geographic areas?
I live equidistant to Omaha, NE and Sioux City, IA. The FCC has declared that my city is part of Sioux City's viewing area. No matter what we tried, the FCC would not allow us to get Omaha channels from Dish Network, even though Omaha is much larger than Sioux City, has more interesting news, and is actually in the same state I live in.
So, no. What you're asking for is unthinkable to the FCC, and they will talk to you like a kindergartener with air-spread tapeworms if you have the audacity to ask them to let you do it.
Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for? Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
In fairness, the data could be pre-encrypted and login could be with a one-time password. Why you'd do want all that and still have to dick around with FTP's nightmarish unwillingness to be easy firewalled instead of just installing an SFTP server is beyond me, but you could do it if you really, really wanted to for some bizarre reason.
How do you figure that traffic shaping is good when the ISP has no idea what the traffic is used for?
My goal was to use a simple illustrative example. More sophisticated shaping uses token buckets and other structures that can prioritize interactive traffic over bulk traffic.
Case in point: I work for an IT shop that supports many physicians offices. one of the primary methods of moving data between offices and hospitals is through EMR applications that USE FTP. Who is the ISP to tell me that my FTP traffic is less important than Disney's HTTP traffic?
Traffic shaping isn't about importance. It's about responsiveness. Again, the idea is that interactive protocols like SSH, Jabber, etc. send relatively tiny amounts of time-sensitive data. Next up are bulkier protocols like HTTP that are still fairly interactive. Least sensitive are bulk transfers like FTP, P2P, and so on.
Your transfers are important, and traffic shaping won't prevent them from going through. It will prevent each keystroke of my SSH session from taking 10 seconds to respond just because you happen to be using your connection at the same time I am. Put this in a computer context: would you run Folding@home at the exact same priority as your mouse driver, or do you enjoy having a responsive pointer (while still allowing your heavy background processes to run at full speed)? Modern OSes spend a lot of effort on traffic shaping, except they call it process scheduling.
Your "common carrier" rant isn't applicable either. Shaping is not the same as filtering as it involves managing data flows and not rejection of unwanted traffic.
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If the author doesn't like the deal, he needs to find out about it, and he may be living in isolation in a jungle somewhere, and then he needs to opt out by a deadline.
As copyright was explicitly established for the public good, what societal or constitutional interest is served in allowing an uninterested author to effectively lock up books they no longer care about? I'm about as conservative as you can get, but I can't see why anyone should be able to prevent Google (or any other group) from making abandoned works available. Society gets access to more information, and the authors and publishers don't lose a single penny that they hadn't already written off.
'We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print "orphan" works [...] will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power.'
Translation: it's no fair that Google got off their butts and created a market we weren't interested in, and now we want in on it!
Seriously, someone please explain to me why I should feel any sympathy for the ex-publishers of abandonware? If it was so dang valuable to them, why'd they walk away from it in the first place?
The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it.
There are crimes of opportunity all the time. No, checking ID won't stop the determined crook, but it might turn away the guy who saw an easy chance but isn't willing to risk more than a little bit.
I guess I don't see the downside. It's not perfect protection, obviously, but it can help and there's no cost for doing it. Why not?
They dont necesarily go out of their way, they just have no dress sense, or dont care about looks.
Wait, you thought I was talking about his clothing? That might explain the disconnect. I've had preppy, skater, hippie, and homeless friends over the years and never cared much about what they were wearing. I'm talking about the man's expression and attitude, not anything else.
BTW, I understand what someone else said about having a bunch of reporters in your driveway making you cranky. Still, that guy was well past the "slightly annoyed" phase and well into the range of what you get when you've been pissed off for about 20 years straight.
I see, so you can judge a book by its cover.
Yes. Several million years of evolution have wired our brains to avoid people who look violently insane.
Some of the nicest and funniest people I have met looked just as bad or worse than this guy.
They're otherwise nice but go out of their way to look antisocial? Why would they do that?
Are you defective? What's so hard or tough about asking for ID? My father-in-law retired from working for the gas company, and he said people used to ask for his ID all the time. If they didn't, he'd tell them they ought to next time. You're not accusing the person or anything; you're just asking them to prove that they're who they say they are. Anyone who works on-site has been IDed hundreds of times and won't think a thing of it.
He didn't say anything about race just the guy looked "mean as hell"
I guess you missed this line from the post I was replying to:
The article didn't say anything about the man's race. No one even brought it up until posters started whining about it. Go ahead: find one single reply to this story saying that the guy looked scary because he was black and not because he looks like a crackhead.
I let people in without asking for ID. If I'm expecting them to be there, then that's good enough.
Whatever floats your boat, but you're still an idiot. Yes, the person will be legitimate 99.99% of the time. Given that it takes no time at all to verify ID, though, and that on-site workmen are used to being asked to do so, what valid excuse do you have for falling back to "security through coincidence"?
But good job jumping to the conclusion the paper wanted you to jump to, all black men are thugs who just finished doing a bid.
You're an asshole for assuming this is about race. If you look at that picture and the only thing you notice about it is his skin color, then you're far more racist than the GP. Either your first reaction was "black guy! Run!" and you're defending him out of guilt, or you thought "black guy's being oppressed!" and you're defending him against some giant (nonexistent) racist conspiracy.
Yea, I cant really defend his actions, but that customer was probably the 15th straight guy who saw a black guy come to his door and ask for ID.
I'd ask for ID if I saw Eminem rolling up on my sidewalk. You're pretty much an idiot if you don't ID everyone who shows up at your door asking to come inside, whether black or white, young or old, rich or poor. That you want to paint this as a race issue says a lot more about you than it does the person you were replying to.
Did you look at the guy's picture? I'd be just as unwilling to let a white guy into my house who looked like that. Forget race - he looks like a thug.
What seems to have happened here is that a somewhat hot-headed tech who was already having a bad day went out to a house, just trying to do his job, and had some smartass give him all sorts of attitude for no reason and get in the way of him trying to get his job done.
Nope. Much as I've wanted to punch certain customers when I worked tech support, there's no way this is the victim's fault. If I saw that particular crackhead look-a-like sauntering up to my door, I'd also ask to see his ID before letting him in. How much could the victim possibly have egged him on considering the tech hadn't even made it in the front door yet?
What the heck is AOL?
The first major brand of malware. I worked tech support at an ISP in the late 90s, and occasionally you'd get a call from someone whose computer would no longer dial in. When pressed, they'd admit that they tried out "that AOL disk I got in the mail / found on the mall floor / found under my windshield wiper", and we'd sigh and tell them to find their Windows installation disk. There was no known way of uninstalling that junk other than by reinstalling Windows.
A few stalwart customers would insist on re-trying the experiment every six months or so to see if the situation had improved, that is, whether the inferior dialup software to a substandard provider had suddenly stopped horking systems. It hadn't. We'd tell them that it was reinstall time again, they'd cuss, then we'd be good for another half year.
No, but effectively everything you ingest is detectable in your excreta, including sweat, and, therefore, should be present on nearly everything you touch.
I'd imagine there's a huge quantitative difference between sweating out picograms of one substance and dipping a rolled-up bill into a pile of another.
A lot of people wanted to stick with 98, thought Me sucked, and didn't want to upgrade to XP until they absolutely needed to. Same shit, different decade.
Me did suck, objectively and massively. XP had a lot of problems when migrating from 9x systems - app compatibility was imperfect, it required activation, it was slower on the same hardware, etc. You make it sound like people are avoiding upgrades just for the sake of avoiding upgrades, but there have been plenty of legitimate reasons for doing exactly that in the past. Reversing your argument: what compelling reason would someone have had to moving from XP to Vista?
It's nice here! Real estate is relatively cheap, the city is nice, quality of life is outstanding, and my kids go to the Montessori public school for free. There's not a lot you could improve on.
Okay, how?
During the day, lift heavy rocks upward. During the night, lower them.
Interestingly, that's precisely what I said in the top-level post in this thread. People are complaining about traffic shaping because they're mad at Comcast, but what Comcast did had nothing to do with traffic shaping. People should quit confusing the two because one is good and useful and the other is borderline wire fraud.
Yep, completely certain. There may be specialy boutique ISPs that buy their calculated aggregate capacity, but that's an extremely niche market for customers like stock trading houses.
Did you even read my original top-level post where I pointed out the difference, and then someone replied that traffic shaping is bad, too, and then I replied to that thread? Your argument is precisely what I said in the first place.
Why, if we both pay for the same service level, should your packets get priority just because your protocol wants less latency?
Because he's using latency-sensitive protocols and you're not. If you used them, the shaping would make your stuff more responsive, too.
If you want more of the pipe more of the time, then you should pay for the privilege.
Repeat after me: latency != bandwidth. You're both getting full use of the pipe. The only difference is that protocols that humans use are handled more quickly than protocols that computers use. If you send an IM, do you really want its packet queued up behind an emailed Powerpoint presentation of a dog peeing on something? If the email server takes an extra 1/1500th of a second to receive, no one will notice. If the IM client takes an extra 10 seconds to receive, you'll notice the heck out of it.
With the individual user's max bandwidth limited, there should be no need for this shaping, unless, of course, their network simply can't support what they are selling.
There is no standard-issue ISP or backbone provider in the world that is not oversold. That's how they make money: by estimating the margins they need to maintain. If they oversell too much, their service will suck and customers will flee. If they don't oversell enough, they'll be paying much more per-customer for their capacity than their competitors and won't be able to stay in business.
For example, suppose an ISP's historic utilization is 10% of their total customers' bandwidth if they were all to start downloading at once. If they buy enough bandwidth to support 5%, then downloads will take forever and everyone will hate it. If they go over 10%, though, they're throwing money down the drain. Suppose they paid for the full 100% of capacity. Customers won't faster speeds than if they bought 11%, because in either case they'd have enough to support actual demand.
Oblig. car analogy: roads are built for average flow, not maximum possible demand. Otherwise you'd have an 8-lane freeway direct to your cul-de-sac. If your hometown overbuilds roads, then they've wasted tax money that could've been spent on other stuff (or not collected in the first place (that was hard to type with a straight face)).
So all that is why we have traffic shaping. At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging. Traffic shaping seems like it would be bad, up until you're stuck using a connection that doesn't use it.
But if you're in an area where Comcast has been given a monopoly on cable service and your phone company can't/won't provide DSL (or FIOS), do they have the right to be a bad ISP?
Well, the FCC doesn't (or at least didn't) seem to think so, hence the fact that this article was written in the first place.
On another note it would be way cool to be able to have whichever company's box has the broadcast channels on it that you associate with your home town, in my case New York and San Francisco. Do particular broadcast company stations have monopolies as well for geographic areas?
I live equidistant to Omaha, NE and Sioux City, IA. The FCC has declared that my city is part of Sioux City's viewing area. No matter what we tried, the FCC would not allow us to get Omaha channels from Dish Network, even though Omaha is much larger than Sioux City, has more interesting news, and is actually in the same state I live in.
So, no. What you're asking for is unthinkable to the FCC, and they will talk to you like a kindergartener with air-spread tapeworms if you have the audacity to ask them to let you do it.
Yikes, what the fuck hospitals and doctors do you work for? Can we say major HIPAA violation? Clear text passwords, no data encryption for EMR?!?
In fairness, the data could be pre-encrypted and login could be with a one-time password. Why you'd do want all that and still have to dick around with FTP's nightmarish unwillingness to be easy firewalled instead of just installing an SFTP server is beyond me, but you could do it if you really, really wanted to for some bizarre reason.
How do you figure that traffic shaping is good when the ISP has no idea what the traffic is used for?
My goal was to use a simple illustrative example. More sophisticated shaping uses token buckets and other structures that can prioritize interactive traffic over bulk traffic.
Case in point: I work for an IT shop that supports many physicians offices. one of the primary methods of moving data between offices and hospitals is through EMR applications that USE FTP. Who is the ISP to tell me that my FTP traffic is less important than Disney's HTTP traffic?
Traffic shaping isn't about importance. It's about responsiveness. Again, the idea is that interactive protocols like SSH, Jabber, etc. send relatively tiny amounts of time-sensitive data. Next up are bulkier protocols like HTTP that are still fairly interactive. Least sensitive are bulk transfers like FTP, P2P, and so on.
Your transfers are important, and traffic shaping won't prevent them from going through. It will prevent each keystroke of my SSH session from taking 10 seconds to respond just because you happen to be using your connection at the same time I am. Put this in a computer context: would you run Folding@home at the exact same priority as your mouse driver, or do you enjoy having a responsive pointer (while still allowing your heavy background processes to run at full speed)? Modern OSes spend a lot of effort on traffic shaping, except they call it process scheduling.
Your "common carrier" rant isn't applicable either. Shaping is not the same as filtering as it involves managing data flows and not rejection of unwanted traffic.