OK, you're right. Analogies are misleading. Let's drop analogies. That means you need to drop the car analogies, which are far less apt than the drinking fountain analogy, let alone the Web server analogy. You can't castigate me for using lame analogies, and then follow up with lamer ones.
The real issue is presuming, in the vacuum of these norms, on the "provider" doing so in good faith and with no issue... defies logic.
OK, that's a cheap trick. What you're saying is that there are no rules, and therefore a "closed" rule should be followed. The result of that is that a "closed" rule would automatically get established as the norm... after which legislators and judges would follow that lead. Not good.
Let's look at the situation on the ground and decide what the norms should be.
The technology was designed in a certain way... the 802.11 protocols define ways to advertise networks as available, and both the protocols and the design of the actual equipment also provide ways to not advertise networks as available.
Unfortunately, consumer AP vendors made the decision to have their equipment, by default, advertise all networks as available. What they should have done was to force every user to explicitly make a choice at installation time, but they weren't willing to take the service calls from that.
So we're left with a situation where many installed networks advertise their public availability, even though their operators don't understand that fact.
What's to be done about it?
Many people here, apparently including you, seem to think that we should just forget that the technology provides ways to close networks, as well as ways to open them. We should make it the norm to assume that a network isn't available, even though it claims to be, unless you have explicit, out-of-band authorization to use that network. The underlying idea is that unsophisticated AP operators should not be responsible for things they don't understand.
There are several problems with that.
First of all, it ignores another bad vendor decision. Most computers on the market will, unless configured otherwise, associate with any open network they find. The technical sophistication needed to prevent your computer from doing that is similar to the technical sophistication needed to lock down a network. As a result, a lot of unsophisticated computer users are going to end up joining open networks without understanding what they're doing. If we end up with legal systems that punish that, we're going to be screwing the unsophisticated computer users to protect the unsophisticated access point operators.
Therefore, I claim that the argument of protecting naive people is just as much on the side of "open means open" as it is on the side of "you need other authorization".
In my mind, that pretty much balances out the only positive argument you, or anybody else, has advanced for the "closed" position. In either case, somebody is going to have to change a default configuration in a relatively sophisticated way in order to comply with the rules.
Then we come to a bunch of other arguments that tip the balance way over in favor of the "open" position:
It's the way the technology was designed to work.
It requires reconfiguring only relatively few APs,
as opposed to relatively many computers.
It provides relatively simple ways to operate both
open and closed networks.
It makes it easy for small, private entitities to
supply Internet service to other small, private
entities without the undue burden of somehow
figuring out how to indicate that their networks
are open.
Indeed, it makes it easier for large
entities to provide service.
It favors a world in which Internet connnectivity is
ubiquitous, which I, at least, think is a good thing.
It favors more efficient use of communication resources
So, I assume that you call the operator of every Web server and get permission before you connect to it, right?
No. You don't. You don't because setting up a Web server, and not doing anything to restrict access to it, implicitly authorizes people to use it, at least in any "normal" way.
You also don't look around for an "OK to drink" sign before you use a public drinking fountain. Not even when that fountain is on private property. Also, by the way, you don't go around inquiring whether the drinking fountain operator has an agreement with the water company that permits her to give away the water. You just drink the damned water.
We're talking about what norms should be established in a relatively new case. I claim that the norms should be consistent (meaning that the same norms that apply to T-Mobile should apply to me), that they should be practical (meaning that there's a reasonable way to have an open network and an reasonable way to have a closed one), and that they should comport with the way the installed technology behaves (meaning that, since the default configuration of practically every computer is to connect with any available open network, that behavior should be expected).
The people who want closed networks already have methods available to them. It's trivial to mark a network as not being available-- don't beacon the SSID, or turn on MAC filtering, or turn on authentication or encryption. Those are simple, reasonable ways of marking the network as closed, and they work within the technological framework. Asking me to talk to every user or post a sign goes outside the technological framework and is an unreasonable burden.
In fact, I am just the "keeper of the pipe" in the same way that my upstream ISP is. I AM a service provider for my wireless users, and all the protections applied to service providers apply to me. I have as much legal right, and certainly as much moral right, to act as a service provider as does any large, for-profit corporate entity.
The basic moral truth here is that I have an absolute right to provide any communication service I want to anybody. Where I am, the law doesn't forbid that right now. Changing or reinterpreting the law to forbid it, or to make it impractical by loading on a lot of stupid administrative and data retention requirements, would be evil and illegitimate.
You are factually, legally, and morally in the wrong.
You don't really "own" an account with anybody. It's not
a possession.
My agreement with my upstream ISP explicitly allows me to
share bandwidth with wireless users.
Incorporation has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Corporations and individuals are treated essentially
the same under the law, practically everywhere.
Since we're talking about what the law should
say, whether I legally qualify as an ISP isn't
important. Anyway, there really isn't a single,
well-defined legal category of "ISPs" in most places
in the world... who's a service provider depends on
the particular legal requirement in question. For
instance, it's possible that I'd be (stupidly) required to
respond to a wiretapping order if law enforcement
came to me with one (and, yes, I could do that).
That requirement comes because I provide service,
and providing service is the only thing that makes
me an ISP. I don't have to incorporate or register.
Maybe in Singapore I'd have to register...
but, if so, Singapore should
change its laws.
The user agreement for virtually all ISPs does not allow their users to share their internet connection wirelessly, no matter how generous your neighbors feel.
False. Yes, most consumer ISP service agreements forbid this. There are significant exceptions. And almost any ISP that has any non-consumer operations will sell you a connection that you can share if you're willing to give them enough money. I have a "legal" open wireless network, with the permission of my ISP, and so do lots of other people. There is no reason my users should assume my network isn't legitimate.
If you leave a network wide open, you are doing the only thing you can to invite people to use it. Absent information to the contrary, there's no reason it should be forbidden to assume the good faith of such an invitation. If your ISP service agreement doesn't permit you to share the bandwidth, then you need to close down the network, or somehow put people on notice that they can't use it. Only you, not the users, are in the wrong if you don't.
I think that you will find you are wrong. My ISP explicitly permits and encourages me to run a wireless network, which I may run as either paid or open. The agreements are in order all the way up the chain.
And it's a service agreement, by the way, not a license agreement.
I will be continuing to run my intentionally "unsecured" wireless network.
How come every random carrier gets to run a wireless network that anybody can use for $10/hour (and, yes, that can be paid anonymously in cash), but I should be punished if I choose to do the same thing for free? For that matter, how come the backbone ISPs get to carry traffic for everybody, everywhere, without asking any questions, but I shouldn't? How come (I suspect you think) they're not responsible for what their users do, but I am?
If you don't like freedom of communication, then get off the Internet.
... and I'm sorry you can't learn to configure your computer properly. Sucks to be you, I guess.
Oh, and the kid was in the wrong only if he was somehow on notice that the network wasn't intended to be public. Otherwise my right to run an open network would be compromised.
Um, get a smarter provider? I know they're mostly pretty stupid, but they can't all be
that stupid. Your clients didn't all do anything really dumb, like signing up for a long-term contract with a crummy provider, did they?
As for self-help, it makes no sense to say that they don't want to invest in inline bandwidth management, and then suggest that they invest in an equally expensive packet-sniffing, RST-sending hack. That hack is going to be just as hard to administer, and is going to involve just as much equipment, as doing the shaping the right way. If you think the inline bandwidth management gear is more expensive, you're not looking for it in the right places. If you think administering the hack is easier, you're just insane.
The right way to do the bandwidth management, by the way, is per-endpoint fairness, not anything that looks at port numbers.
... and it sort of sounds like maybe these networks are under-engineered in the first place...
You know, right after I posted it, I knew that somebody would miss the point of that. The point was that sexual experience, in and of itself, is not harmful to teenagers. Although I may have been taking a risk with what I did, the matter under discussion is IM. It's not possible to rape anybody over IM. Maybe you can talk them into meeting you, but that can happen in any medium, including face to face, and the costs of cutting kids off from all contact with the world far exceed the small risk.
Also, just so you know, at 16 I was bigger and probably stronger than this guy, and dozens of people were within shouting distance... and I was fully cognizant of those facts.
When I was the age of those pages (16 or so), I got picked up by a guy at an event in a park. It got as far as him licking my balls, and I started feeling uncomfortable, partly because of the new, intense experience, partly because of a bunch of silly baggage people had put on me about sex with other guys. He noticed my getting uncomfortable, asked if he should stop, I said yes, he was cool about it.
It took me a day or two fully process the whole thing, and at the end of that I was more annoyed that I'd chickened out than anything else. After that, the whole memory was a big nonissue. Whoopee. A small learning experience. Intense at the time, as a lot of things are when you're a kid. Nothing world-shattering. I've never regretted the experience (as opposed to the chickening-out), either then or now.
It's a good thing it was a long time ago and I didn't tell my parents. Nowadays they'd probably crucify him and institutionalize me or something. In fact, I think I'm gonna go anonymous with this posting, because I wouldn't put it past the fascists to try to find the guy through me even now.
Around the same age, a teacher made some obviously suggestive suggestions about a camping trip. I wasn't interested, so I said no. I also thought a bit about what I might have been doing to lead him on, and that modified my future behavior. Another small learning experience. Another non-issue in terms of causing me any problems.
Yeah, they said the address space would be exhausted AND THEY WERE RIGHT. The only reason we're not out of addresses now is that people made a fundamental change in the network architecture by deploying NAT (primarily because IPv6/IPng wasn't ready), and using RFC1918 private addresses. NAT is a nasty kludge that breaks all kinds of things. Furthermore, NAT has been done, so it's not going to save us again.
Wrong. I am contracted with the ISP. My having an account with them obligates them to deliver my traffic under reasonable and customary assumptions about their service.
That is not, by the way, modified by any fine print in their service agreements, unless they can show that customers in general read and understand the agreements. You cannot morally or (in the US or other former British possessions) legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
ISPs routinely rely on, and indeed encourage, their customers' technical and legal ignorance.
They also prey on people's basic good nature, people's bizzarre respect for arbitrary corporate "policies", and people's unwillingness or lack of energy to assert their rights. They should not be allowed to get away with it. The ISP industry has become a really, really dirty one, and needs cleaning up.
When ISPs start putting these restrictions in all their advertising, with the same prominence as their rates and (alleged) bandwidth, they can restrict customers' traffic. Until then, they are obligated to carry traffic in the reasonable and customary way... which means at least not blocking traffic to competitors, and arguably treating every packet exactly the same with no filtering, QoS, transparent proxies, restrictions on servers (how many customers understand the definition of a "server") or anything of the kind.
"Someone has replied to a thread you posted in" or "Your package has been shipped" or "XYZ updated his blog today." Those are things for which email is not as useful as IM is.
Those all strike me as things for which e-mail
is vastly superior to IM. I don't want
to be interrupted by an asynchronous notification
of a low-priority event that doesn't require
an immediate response.
Breeders are the primary reason why we have such a terrible overpopulation problem in this country.
No, the primary reasons for pet overpopulation are feral breeding (for cats, mostly), "accidental" breeding of household pets, and home breeding by owners who aren't by any reasonable definition breeders. There aren't enough breeders out there to make that much impact. Not that I entirely approve of breeding cats or dogs, but the claim that breeders are a "primary" overpopulation cause doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Not only do they encourage people to buy, instead of rescuing, but they usually dump off "bad" litters on the side of the road or at your local pound.
I've met dozens of high-end show cat breeders, and been in a position to have a general idea of the structure of their breeding programs and the fates of their litters. I've never seen any evidence of even one of them doing any such thing. In fact, most of the ones I've met volunteer for purebred rescue in addition to placing or keeping every animal they breed. Where's your evidence for this assertion?
DNA sequencing is usually done on sequence fragments and not the entire genome.
In fact, most forensic DNA work was originally done using RFLP mapping,
which doesn't involve sequencing anything at all. Sequencing is relatively
recent. Most (all?) of the databases are still based on RFLP.
Therefore it's not as unique as one might be led to believe.
If you bothered to read the literature, you'd find that there's been a
great deal of study of exactly how reliable it is in various circumstances.
Also, if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that there's
no a priori reason to care about what percentage of the genome is examined;
the question is how much variability there is in the part that is
examined. Additional variability in the unexamined parts has nothing
to do with the reliability of the test.
Most criminologists (with a moral conscience) know this and many feel
that this a useful tool to rule someone out, but it is not reliable
enough to single someone out. Take the case of identical twins:
identical genomes; you would have to rely on fingerprints.
A criminologist is a social scientist who deals with the motivations and
social contexts of crimes. You are thinking of "criminalists", or
"forensic DNA examiners", who are the people who do crime lab work.
I know a lot of these people personally; it so happens
that one of my parents was involved in the
development of forensic DNA from the beginning. Some of the people
I know are involved with things like the
Innocence Project.
Some of them are private practitioners who typically testify for
the defense; if those people have a bias, it's toward clearing
people, not toward nailing the innocent.
I have never heard any of them say that they would never
use DNA evidence to uniquely identify somebody. Not once.
I have heard many of them say, loudly and repeatedly, that
there are circumstances under which they wouldn't use DNA to
"finger" anybody, including, but probably not limited to, cases where
there's a possibility that a close relative of the suspect was involved,
cases where samples were degraded or contaminated. I've never heard them say
that they'd never do it. I have heard them say, rather
vehemently, that DNA is a lot more reliable than the old serological
tests that put a lot of people into prison in the 1970s and 1980s.
Of course, DNA is also more reliable than eyewitnesses, but then almost
anything is more reliable than an eyewitness.
No, you can't apply DNA, or any other technique, mechanically, but to
say that it's intrinsically unusable is just silly. It's about the most
reliable thing out there.
And since fingerprints can distinguish beteen identical twins, it should
be obvious even to the casual observer that physical uniqueness is
determined by more than the entire DNA sequence. Moreover, we already
have fingerprinting, so what's the need for DNA?
Think about how you're using it.
Criminals don't leave fingerprint cards at crime scenes; in fact,
they seem oddly reluctant to leave anything at all if they can avoid
it. You may have hair, or a blood spatter,
or semen, or saliva, and no fingerprint, or no decent fingerprint.
You want to find out if the
person who committed this crime is in your database or not; you can't
query on a fingerprint, because you don't have one. DNA is another
completely independent way for you to find a suspect.
I don't know if it's still true, but coding fingerprints for database
lookups used to be a time-consuming, error-prone manual process. Don't
be misled by the biometric authentication systems you see on computers.
First of all, those systems don't work as well as advertised. Secondly,
they're usually trying to confirm an identity, not find one in a mass
of candidat
If Toyota sold a car that would prevent my friends from wrecking it when I lent it to them, whereas Ford cars were easily wrecked by non-expert drivers, then, all other things being equal, I would buy the Toyota.
First of all, the "sum" part of that makes no
sense at all.
Secondly, all that says is that the species
has value contingent on its ability to keep
individuals going (and I'd restrict that to
actual individuals, by the way, not potential
individuals). That says nothing about the
intrinsic value of the species. It might
be more correct to say that the species was
"useful" than that it was "valuable".
Actually, provocative rhetoric aside,
I think the species does
have intrinsic value... just not the same
sort of intrinsic value as an individual,
and not the sort of value that necessarily
makes it
desirable to keep it around and largely
unchanged for the indefinite future.
There's a certain beauty in the way that
species wax and wane. Think of me as Leon Kass
for species.
Now, to tease out individual versus species
value...
Suppose (yes, I know this is unrealistic;
it's a thought experiment) that some disease
had made everybody
sterile, thus ensuring a near-term end to
the species... but that an antidote could be made
from the body of one specific person. However,
you'd have to kill the person to do it. Do you
kill that person? Does it matter whether the
person is willing?
If you're the sole survivor of an event that
wipes out every other person on Earth, and a space
colony exists, but doesn't know about you,
can't be communicated with, and won't discover
you, is your situation qualitatively
better than if there were no colony? Has the
survival of the species benefited you as
an individual?
The relative value of humans and animals isn't
very interesting here. It happens I don't
think they're equally valuable. However, if
you believe that species are valuable, then
you yourself have to answer the question of
whether you think that the last breeding
population of some animal is more valuable
than a random individual human. Not everybody
gets the same answer to that one.
Er, no. I'm not saying "don't do anything". I'm
saying "don't do huge, expensive, time-consuming
sideshows when there are other things you can
do that will probably get a lot more results per
unit resource expenditure". Especially when
you're working with public money, which, after
all, really
means "other people's money".
I'm more like the guy arguing that we should
look into figuring out how this "fire" thing
works, and maybe have
a whack at learning to cut and sew the
bearskins into shapes other than bear-shaped,
before we try to explore Siberia.
Hey, you read Analog! At least you
think like the author of a rather fatuous
story they published recently on that very premise.
So, then, what would have been so bad about
Columbus staying in Europe, exactly? Would
the world have ended?
Anyway, Columbus wasn't worrying about species
survival. He was looking for spices or some
such silly thing, and he wanted them for
internal European purposes. I'd use
different arguments on him.
"Space-tourist" was name calling... not the
best form of discourse, I admit, but nonetheless
meant as a
characterization of you, not your position.
The point is that the people who drag out the
"species survival" argument are, in fact,
usually space-tourist wannabees (or lovers
of "exploration" and "the human spirit", which
are just romanticized words for tourism), who
know that their simple desire to go to space,
or see others go to space, just to go,
won't convince other people, so they try for
something else.
A huge asteroid could hit the Earth next
Tuesday, but it won't.
The interarrival time for asteroids big enough
to cause mass extinctions has historically been
in the tens of millions of years... and it's
unlikely that even a Cretacious-sized
impact would cause the complete extinction of
the human species. A hundred years, or a
thousand, is not a significant time on that
sort of scale, and you have to start to worry
about other factors... like what you're giving
up if you devote resources to manned space
flight, and who you're taking those resources
from.
The second point is relevant on the same
timescale you have already introduced. There's
a much better than even chance that,
if you were to check back right before the next
Cretacious-sized asteroid impact, you wouldn't
find any species that you'd recognize as
"human" just because of normal evolutionary
drift. You'd therefore have nothing to protect.
You did not, of course, read my third point
at all, since you missed the direct statement
that "individuals are inherently valuable".
Let me spell it out for you again.
INDIVIDUALS ARE INHERENTLY VALUABLE. Species are not, or at
least don't fall into the same class.
Sit down and think about it for a while;
it's not that difficult a distinction.
That means that not only am I not going
to kill myself, but I wouldn't let you
kill anybody to preserve an abstraction
like a species.
Ladies and gentlemen, idiotic space-tourist
argument number one has
made an appearance.
If by "long term", you mean "billions of years",
then you're right. However, a hundred years or so
of delay, so that we can get the enabling
technologies right, will have zero meaningful effect
on the chances of species survival.
Species change over time no matter what.
Who gives a rat's ass about species survival,
anyway? Individual humans are
inherently valuable. The human species is no
more valuable than any other.
The human species will go away eventually, and
that's a good thing, because change is good.
The only annoying thing about it is that so
many individuals will die in the process. Moving
people to space may slow down the death of
the species, but it does nothing at all about the
important problem.
I forgot to mention in all the talk about
LEO that a space elevator actually gets you
beyond LEO, and even beyond geosynchronous,
to or beyond escape. The cable is centered
at geosynchronous.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, you're right. Analogies are misleading. Let's drop analogies. That means you need to drop the car analogies, which are far less apt than the drinking fountain analogy, let alone the Web server analogy. You can't castigate me for using lame analogies, and then follow up with lamer ones.
OK, that's a cheap trick. What you're saying is that there are no rules, and therefore a "closed" rule should be followed. The result of that is that a "closed" rule would automatically get established as the norm... after which legislators and judges would follow that lead. Not good.
Let's look at the situation on the ground and decide what the norms should be.
The technology was designed in a certain way... the 802.11 protocols define ways to advertise networks as available, and both the protocols and the design of the actual equipment also provide ways to not advertise networks as available.
Unfortunately, consumer AP vendors made the decision to have their equipment, by default, advertise all networks as available. What they should have done was to force every user to explicitly make a choice at installation time, but they weren't willing to take the service calls from that.
So we're left with a situation where many installed networks advertise their public availability, even though their operators don't understand that fact.
What's to be done about it?
Many people here, apparently including you, seem to think that we should just forget that the technology provides ways to close networks, as well as ways to open them. We should make it the norm to assume that a network isn't available, even though it claims to be, unless you have explicit, out-of-band authorization to use that network. The underlying idea is that unsophisticated AP operators should not be responsible for things they don't understand.
There are several problems with that.
First of all, it ignores another bad vendor decision. Most computers on the market will, unless configured otherwise, associate with any open network they find. The technical sophistication needed to prevent your computer from doing that is similar to the technical sophistication needed to lock down a network. As a result, a lot of unsophisticated computer users are going to end up joining open networks without understanding what they're doing. If we end up with legal systems that punish that, we're going to be screwing the unsophisticated computer users to protect the unsophisticated access point operators.
Therefore, I claim that the argument of protecting naive people is just as much on the side of "open means open" as it is on the side of "you need other authorization".
In my mind, that pretty much balances out the only positive argument you, or anybody else, has advanced for the "closed" position. In either case, somebody is going to have to change a default configuration in a relatively sophisticated way in order to comply with the rules.
Then we come to a bunch of other arguments that tip the balance way over in favor of the "open" position:
So, I assume that you call the operator of every Web server and get permission before you connect to it, right?
No. You don't. You don't because setting up a Web server, and not doing anything to restrict access to it, implicitly authorizes people to use it, at least in any "normal" way.
You also don't look around for an "OK to drink" sign before you use a public drinking fountain. Not even when that fountain is on private property. Also, by the way, you don't go around inquiring whether the drinking fountain operator has an agreement with the water company that permits her to give away the water. You just drink the damned water.
We're talking about what norms should be established in a relatively new case. I claim that the norms should be consistent (meaning that the same norms that apply to T-Mobile should apply to me), that they should be practical (meaning that there's a reasonable way to have an open network and an reasonable way to have a closed one), and that they should comport with the way the installed technology behaves (meaning that, since the default configuration of practically every computer is to connect with any available open network, that behavior should be expected).
The people who want closed networks already have methods available to them. It's trivial to mark a network as not being available-- don't beacon the SSID, or turn on MAC filtering, or turn on authentication or encryption. Those are simple, reasonable ways of marking the network as closed, and they work within the technological framework. Asking me to talk to every user or post a sign goes outside the technological framework and is an unreasonable burden.
I'm sorry; I missed the second part.
In fact, I am just the "keeper of the pipe" in the same way that my upstream ISP is. I AM a service provider for my wireless users, and all the protections applied to service providers apply to me. I have as much legal right, and certainly as much moral right, to act as a service provider as does any large, for-profit corporate entity.
The basic moral truth here is that I have an absolute right to provide any communication service I want to anybody. Where I am, the law doesn't forbid that right now. Changing or reinterpreting the law to forbid it, or to make it impractical by loading on a lot of stupid administrative and data retention requirements, would be evil and illegitimate.
False. Yes, most consumer ISP service agreements forbid this. There are significant exceptions. And almost any ISP that has any non-consumer operations will sell you a connection that you can share if you're willing to give them enough money. I have a "legal" open wireless network, with the permission of my ISP, and so do lots of other people. There is no reason my users should assume my network isn't legitimate.
If you leave a network wide open, you are doing the only thing you can to invite people to use it. Absent information to the contrary, there's no reason it should be forbidden to assume the good faith of such an invitation. If your ISP service agreement doesn't permit you to share the bandwidth, then you need to close down the network, or somehow put people on notice that they can't use it. Only you, not the users, are in the wrong if you don't.
I think that you will find you are wrong. My ISP explicitly permits and encourages me to run a wireless network, which I may run as either paid or open. The agreements are in order all the way up the chain.
And it's a service agreement, by the way, not a license agreement.
You know what? Fuck you.
I will be continuing to run my intentionally "unsecured" wireless network.
How come every random carrier gets to run a wireless network that anybody can use for $10/hour (and, yes, that can be paid anonymously in cash), but I should be punished if I choose to do the same thing for free? For that matter, how come the backbone ISPs get to carry traffic for everybody, everywhere, without asking any questions, but I shouldn't? How come (I suspect you think) they're not responsible for what their users do, but I am?
If you don't like freedom of communication, then get off the Internet.
Oh, and the kid was in the wrong only if he was somehow on notice that the network wasn't intended to be public. Otherwise my right to run an open network would be compromised.
Um, get a smarter provider? I know they're mostly pretty stupid, but they can't all be that stupid. Your clients didn't all do anything really dumb, like signing up for a long-term contract with a crummy provider, did they?
As for self-help, it makes no sense to say that they don't want to invest in inline bandwidth management, and then suggest that they invest in an equally expensive packet-sniffing, RST-sending hack. That hack is going to be just as hard to administer, and is going to involve just as much equipment, as doing the shaping the right way. If you think the inline bandwidth management gear is more expensive, you're not looking for it in the right places. If you think administering the hack is easier, you're just insane.
The right way to do the bandwidth management, by the way, is per-endpoint fairness, not anything that looks at port numbers.
Also, just so you know, at 16 I was bigger and probably stronger than this guy, and dozens of people were within shouting distance... and I was fully cognizant of those facts.
Damn right.
When I was the age of those pages (16 or so), I got picked up by a guy at an event in a park. It got as far as him licking my balls, and I started feeling uncomfortable, partly because of the new, intense experience, partly because of a bunch of silly baggage people had put on me about sex with other guys. He noticed my getting uncomfortable, asked if he should stop, I said yes, he was cool about it.
It took me a day or two fully process the whole thing, and at the end of that I was more annoyed that I'd chickened out than anything else. After that, the whole memory was a big nonissue. Whoopee. A small learning experience. Intense at the time, as a lot of things are when you're a kid. Nothing world-shattering. I've never regretted the experience (as opposed to the chickening-out), either then or now.
It's a good thing it was a long time ago and I didn't tell my parents. Nowadays they'd probably crucify him and institutionalize me or something. In fact, I think I'm gonna go anonymous with this posting, because I wouldn't put it past the fascists to try to find the guy through me even now.
Around the same age, a teacher made some obviously suggestive suggestions about a camping trip. I wasn't interested, so I said no. I also thought a bit about what I might have been doing to lead him on, and that modified my future behavior. Another small learning experience. Another non-issue in terms of causing me any problems.
It has a monopoly on auctions.
Except for some specific niche markets, eBay is The Place to go for online auctions. It's as dominant as Microsoft is in operating systems.
You don't get to use a monopoly in one area to manipulate the market in another.
Yeah, they said the address space would be exhausted AND THEY WERE RIGHT. The only reason we're not out of addresses now is that people made a fundamental change in the network architecture by deploying NAT (primarily because IPv6/IPng wasn't ready), and using RFC1918 private addresses. NAT is a nasty kludge that breaks all kinds of things. Furthermore, NAT has been done, so it's not going to save us again.
That is not, by the way, modified by any fine print in their service agreements, unless they can show that customers in general read and understand the agreements. You cannot morally or (in the US or other former British possessions) legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
ISPs routinely rely on, and indeed encourage, their customers' technical and legal ignorance. They also prey on people's basic good nature, people's bizzarre respect for arbitrary corporate "policies", and people's unwillingness or lack of energy to assert their rights. They should not be allowed to get away with it. The ISP industry has become a really, really dirty one, and needs cleaning up.
When ISPs start putting these restrictions in all their advertising, with the same prominence as their rates and (alleged) bandwidth, they can restrict customers' traffic. Until then, they are obligated to carry traffic in the reasonable and customary way... which means at least not blocking traffic to competitors, and arguably treating every packet exactly the same with no filtering, QoS, transparent proxies, restrictions on servers (how many customers understand the definition of a "server") or anything of the kind.
Those all strike me as things for which e-mail is vastly superior to IM. I don't want to be interrupted by an asynchronous notification of a low-priority event that doesn't require an immediate response.
Ayn Rand is in the movie. Accent, silly cigarette holder, polemics, and all.
No, the primary reasons for pet overpopulation are feral breeding (for cats, mostly), "accidental" breeding of household pets, and home breeding by owners who aren't by any reasonable definition breeders. There aren't enough breeders out there to make that much impact. Not that I entirely approve of breeding cats or dogs, but the claim that breeders are a "primary" overpopulation cause doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I've met dozens of high-end show cat breeders, and been in a position to have a general idea of the structure of their breeding programs and the fates of their litters. I've never seen any evidence of even one of them doing any such thing. In fact, most of the ones I've met volunteer for purebred rescue in addition to placing or keeping every animal they breed. Where's your evidence for this assertion?
Furthermore, mixed-breed animals are more likely to end up in shelters than purebred animals.
Don't believe everything you hear from PETA, or even down at the local shelter.
In fact, most forensic DNA work was originally done using RFLP mapping, which doesn't involve sequencing anything at all. Sequencing is relatively recent. Most (all?) of the databases are still based on RFLP.
If you bothered to read the literature, you'd find that there's been a great deal of study of exactly how reliable it is in various circumstances. Also, if you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that there's no a priori reason to care about what percentage of the genome is examined; the question is how much variability there is in the part that is examined. Additional variability in the unexamined parts has nothing to do with the reliability of the test.
A criminologist is a social scientist who deals with the motivations and social contexts of crimes. You are thinking of "criminalists", or "forensic DNA examiners", who are the people who do crime lab work.
I know a lot of these people personally; it so happens that one of my parents was involved in the development of forensic DNA from the beginning. Some of the people I know are involved with things like the Innocence Project. Some of them are private practitioners who typically testify for the defense; if those people have a bias, it's toward clearing people, not toward nailing the innocent.
I have never heard any of them say that they would never use DNA evidence to uniquely identify somebody. Not once.
I have heard many of them say, loudly and repeatedly, that there are circumstances under which they wouldn't use DNA to "finger" anybody, including, but probably not limited to, cases where there's a possibility that a close relative of the suspect was involved, cases where samples were degraded or contaminated. I've never heard them say that they'd never do it. I have heard them say, rather vehemently, that DNA is a lot more reliable than the old serological tests that put a lot of people into prison in the 1970s and 1980s.
Of course, DNA is also more reliable than eyewitnesses, but then almost anything is more reliable than an eyewitness.
No, you can't apply DNA, or any other technique, mechanically, but to say that it's intrinsically unusable is just silly. It's about the most reliable thing out there.
Think about how you're using it.
If Toyota sold a car that would prevent my friends from wrecking it when I lent it to them, whereas Ford cars were easily wrecked by non-expert drivers, then, all other things being equal, I would buy the Toyota.
Secondly, all that says is that the species has value contingent on its ability to keep individuals going (and I'd restrict that to actual individuals, by the way, not potential individuals). That says nothing about the intrinsic value of the species. It might be more correct to say that the species was "useful" than that it was "valuable".
Actually, provocative rhetoric aside, I think the species does have intrinsic value... just not the same sort of intrinsic value as an individual, and not the sort of value that necessarily makes it desirable to keep it around and largely unchanged for the indefinite future. There's a certain beauty in the way that species wax and wane. Think of me as Leon Kass for species.
Now, to tease out individual versus species value...
Suppose (yes, I know this is unrealistic; it's a thought experiment) that some disease had made everybody sterile, thus ensuring a near-term end to the species... but that an antidote could be made from the body of one specific person. However, you'd have to kill the person to do it. Do you kill that person? Does it matter whether the person is willing?
If you're the sole survivor of an event that wipes out every other person on Earth, and a space colony exists, but doesn't know about you, can't be communicated with, and won't discover you, is your situation qualitatively better than if there were no colony? Has the survival of the species benefited you as an individual?
The relative value of humans and animals isn't very interesting here. It happens I don't think they're equally valuable. However, if you believe that species are valuable, then you yourself have to answer the question of whether you think that the last breeding population of some animal is more valuable than a random individual human. Not everybody gets the same answer to that one.
Er, no. I'm not saying "don't do anything". I'm saying "don't do huge, expensive, time-consuming sideshows when there are other things you can do that will probably get a lot more results per unit resource expenditure". Especially when you're working with public money, which, after all, really means "other people's money".
I'm more like the guy arguing that we should look into figuring out how this "fire" thing works, and maybe have a whack at learning to cut and sew the bearskins into shapes other than bear-shaped, before we try to explore Siberia.
So, then, what would have been so bad about Columbus staying in Europe, exactly? Would the world have ended?
Anyway, Columbus wasn't worrying about species survival. He was looking for spices or some such silly thing, and he wanted them for internal European purposes. I'd use different arguments on him.
"Space-tourist" was name calling... not the best form of discourse, I admit, but nonetheless meant as a characterization of you, not your position. The point is that the people who drag out the "species survival" argument are, in fact, usually space-tourist wannabees (or lovers of "exploration" and "the human spirit", which are just romanticized words for tourism), who know that their simple desire to go to space, or see others go to space, just to go, won't convince other people, so they try for something else.
A huge asteroid could hit the Earth next Tuesday, but it won't. The interarrival time for asteroids big enough to cause mass extinctions has historically been in the tens of millions of years... and it's unlikely that even a Cretacious-sized impact would cause the complete extinction of the human species. A hundred years, or a thousand, is not a significant time on that sort of scale, and you have to start to worry about other factors... like what you're giving up if you devote resources to manned space flight, and who you're taking those resources from.
The second point is relevant on the same timescale you have already introduced. There's a much better than even chance that, if you were to check back right before the next Cretacious-sized asteroid impact, you wouldn't find any species that you'd recognize as "human" just because of normal evolutionary drift. You'd therefore have nothing to protect.
You did not, of course, read my third point at all, since you missed the direct statement that "individuals are inherently valuable". Let me spell it out for you again. INDIVIDUALS ARE INHERENTLY VALUABLE. Species are not, or at least don't fall into the same class. Sit down and think about it for a while; it's not that difficult a distinction.
That means that not only am I not going to kill myself, but I wouldn't let you kill anybody to preserve an abstraction like a species.
If by "long term", you mean "billions of years", then you're right. However, a hundred years or so of delay, so that we can get the enabling technologies right, will have zero meaningful effect on the chances of species survival.
Species change over time no matter what.
Who gives a rat's ass about species survival, anyway? Individual humans are inherently valuable. The human species is no more valuable than any other.
The human species will go away eventually, and that's a good thing, because change is good. The only annoying thing about it is that so many individuals will die in the process. Moving people to space may slow down the death of the species, but it does nothing at all about the important problem.
Time to keep our asses off of Mars. There are far too many ways for humans to contaminate the place and make it impossible to learn anything.
I forgot to mention in all the talk about LEO that a space elevator actually gets you beyond LEO, and even beyond geosynchronous, to or beyond escape. The cable is centered at geosynchronous.