Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws.
Depends on the state. In Washington, for example, there are clearly defined exceptions for de minimis use in our ethics laws. Conversion of state resources for personal use is indeed an ethics violation, but there is widespread recognition that sometimes it just doesn't matter for small things.
Make a personal local phone call? Yes, the state paid for it (T1s, infrastructure, etc), but the bill wouldn't be much different without that phone call, so it's deemed de minimis use. Ditto for limited personal web browsing, or using water from the faucet to keep plants at your desk alive.
In this case, especially if the software interfered with power-savings feature of the PC, it's probably not covered by the de minimis use exception.
One of the big problems is that people like using the ZIP code databases for other things (like sales-tax lookups); however, they're often not granular enough for this. In our area, we have two towns in the same ZIP code with different tax rates. This is a huge problem, and when they complained to the USPS about it and requested a ZIP code split, they were told to shove off because the USPS only intends the ZIP code to be used for mail delivery and you hijack that purpose at your peril.
I never did understand why many people cant grasp the concept that system font size is independent of screen resolution. You'd think they'd notice the stupidity of buying a 30" 2560x1600 monitor then running their whole desktop at 1366x768 but noooo....
I thought the same thing: at $DAYJOB, we have a policy to run all 4:3 monitors at 1024x768 because of readability issues. One of the first things I did was to try and change the font sizes instead, hilarity ensued. Not a single business-critical app we used handled the setting correctly. Some ignored it, while some scaled their text up within a fixed-size (x by y pixels) area, which cropped the text on the right edge.
Support for this feature in applications is awful.
That is true and quite silly all at once. Given network A and B with where B is full of servers that want to serve content (and ads of course) and A is full of clients that want to view that content, both networks have been paid by their customers to complete those transactions and both are failing to honor their agreements if they don't do it.
That's true; however, for an ISP there is more to it than that. Depending on which POP generates the traffic, and which one sinks it, hot-potato routing can be unfair. Lets say BigPornSite uses SuperCheapISP (eg Cogent) to reach their customers: BigPornSite is located on the west coast, but most of their viewers aren't. BigPornSite will hand off their traffic to SuperCheapISP in the west-coast data center, and SuperCheapISP will route the traffic to the viewer's ISP. (Let's say its Comcast...) However, if the Comcast customer is located on the East coast, Comcast is stuck paying for the coast-to-coast transport instead of SuperCheapISP.
So, SuperCheapISP got paid by the porn site to route the traffic for maybe 100m or so, and gets rid of it as soon as they can. Would you want to sign a peering agreement with them, knowing that they're going to dump tons of traffic on your network with no regards to where its actually going? Yes, it's silly, but there's a precedent here. Ratio limits are in place to protect against tricks like this.
I doubt its IPv6, but it would be a logical thing to do simply because of network addressing.
They might be using IPv6 soon enough, check out 6lopan, an IETF group working towards getting IPv6 working on low-power networking devices like Xbee modems, etc. IEEE 802.15 transceivers are low-power, will mesh easily, and are very common in power meters.
Having global addressability saves a lot of hassle, and should not be confused with global reachability. Seems to make a lot of sense to me.
No. A lot of studies do exactly what you suggest - work with the *advertized* speeds. But the place where I got my stats, speedtest.net, uses ACTUAL speeds from a wide range of tests all around the world
The users of speedtest.net choose to use the service, so it's a self-selecting sample. This is not a good thing if you're looking for a scientifically rigorous study.
Grandma won't be running speedtest on her 56k: she already knows that it's slow.
It really really pisses me off at the Canadian border.... I cross it frequently and have been stopped several times for the "bonus interrogation". Every single time they run my money through their machine and, of course, it comes up positive for cocaine. Then they try to intimidate me about it.
I live 15min away from the Blaine, WA/BC crossing, and cross the border on a regular basis. While I've never seen money tested for cocaine residue, testing ID cards (eg your driver's license) is quite commonplace. People have been denied entry because they used their ID to cut a line, and it turned up positive for residue at the border.
It's not a "problem" that can be "worked on". It's the character of the author. As any decent psychologist will tell you that character is inborn and cannot be changed or "worked on".
No decent psychologist I know of would ascribe personality (of which character is a part of) to inborn traits, disregarding experience and environment. Character as an inborn trait is an asinine idea: neither the behaviorist nor the biopsychologist would take that statement seriously.
Level3 does have an awesome DNS cloud (I use them for diagnostics all the time), but using them longterm isn't the best idea.
According to (at least someone who claims to be) Paul Vixie, Level3 said in 2008 that they plan to discontinue the service to non-customers:
Note: they also said they would eventually restrict 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 to customer access only, so if you're not a Level(3) customer, you probably need to find another solution. Almost every ISP has recursive name servers, and if yours is honestâ"sends you an error rather than advertising if you type in a nonexistent domain nameâ"you should be using it. If your ISP is dishonest, then you should consider opendns or neustar's dnsadvantage, or do what I do, run your own RDNS. I use BIND, but I've also heard good things about PowerDNS and Unbound. There are also many non-free RDNS servers.
Assuming that these "terms" appear multiple times in the notes, it seems like one could assemble a corpus of them after the initial data entry, and use statistical methods to try and track down mistakes. (eg if SNAP-10A appears 20 times, and SMAP-10A only appears once, its probably worth review by an expert)
Your comments imply you don't know very much about IPv6. Practically noone plans to do stateful DHCP for IPv6.
Comcast, for one, does plan to use stateful DHCPv6. See this presentation from NANOG 46 for more. (Ironically, the very story we're discussing comes from Comcast's announcement at NANOG, including plenty of technical details. ) One must remember that DHCPv6 can also be used for prefix delegation, something an ISP has a need to do for each subscriber.
Release/renew won't do a thing, because the address is generated by your computer, not the DHCP server.
Perhaps, but once a user has a IPv6-capable CPE, the IP address could likely change upon RELEASE/RENEW. (See RFC 4941)
You're right that once a subscriber receives a prefix, they can do whatever they want with it, and perhaps many will end up using SLAAC. But it's really difficult to say without a bunch of consumer devices on the market, and DHCPv6 is needed in most environments to augment SLAAC anyways.
Unless you have a crystal ball as to how CPE devices will behave, I think you could perhaps be a bit more educational in your responses instead of berating someone who is possibly misguided, but genuinely curious.
Keyloggers don't work on ATMs. The ATM's keypad is a "secure keypad". There is a DES chip built into the keypad. When the ATM software calls for PIN entry, the PIN is encrypted in DES and then given to the software.
That isn't entirely true. In the US, secure EPP (Encrypting Pin Pads) were defined and mandated beginning in 2005. Old ATMs don't share this requirement, and assuming that all international ATMs use competent EPPs is probably not accurate.
It's unlicensed mainly because agencies and corporations didn't express any interest in it until fairly recently. They were more than happy to buy bands in more reliable parts of the spectrum.
That's simply not true. Do you even know what ISM stands for?
Saying that the ISM band is unlicensed because there is no commercial interest in it is like saying that they don't build condos on artillery ranges because there is no developer willing to buy the property.
The rules in this part, in accordance with the applicable treaties and agreements to which the United States is a party, are promulgated pursuant to section 302 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, vesting the Federal Communications Commission with authority to regulate industrial, scientific, and medical equipment (ISM) that emits electromagnetic energy on frequencies within the radio frequency spectrum in order to prevent harmful interference to authorized radio communication services. This part sets forth the conditions under which the equipment in question may be operated.
... nice rant against the FCC though, very believable until you actually do the research. You say that "the FCC has always bent over backwards" to sell spectrum, do you realize that the first spectrum auction was in 1994? Prior to that, the licensing model was much different.
I recently saw a presentation from a Rhode Island bank. They were going to allow their business customers to install on-site check scanners [...]
Yup, Check 21 now allows images to substitute for paper in the check clearing process. This can happen just about anywhere: at the retailer, at the bank branch, at their HQ, at the central processor... Pretty nifty legal hack.
It's too bad ACH and EFT and check clearing networks can't just go away in favor of a simpler system.
openSuSE's disk I/O was slower because they enabled an option that the other didn't. Not enabling that option "runs the risk of severe filesystem corruption during a crash". Looks like they changed it to be like the other distros so they wouldn't look so bad during the benchmark.
That's nice. Compromise stability for performance. This is the type of stupid crap that makes people wonder... Gee, why is such and such so much faster?
Since I wrote this, I came across comments by Andrew Morton, and a thread discussing barriers and why he refused a patch to make them a default. The sequential layout of journal, in general means the disk does the writes in right order, except when wrapping round (relatively rare); meaning in general running without barriers is a problem only for the unfortunate.
If I found myself making a different decision than Andrew Morton, I might revisit that choice as well.
The metric system for paper sizing is also rad because the page sizes stay proportional. You can draft a poster on A4 paper and then size it up, or you can print 2-up on A4 without scaling issues. (Cut a piece of letter size paper in two and its no longer proportional, you need to add white space for everything to fit.)
Which is why we all call it the theory of gravity and not the law of gravity......wait.
That's cute, I see what you did there. A line like that might get you a moment of pause in a bar argument, but this is slashdot.
"Laws" aren't privileged in science above theories. It's just a linguistic misnomer, nothing more.
For example, we still refer to the "laws of motion", even though they've been quaint for over a century and are also known as classical physics. In certain contexts, they're throughly incorrect, but scientists have better things to do than to go around striking the word "law" from textbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
A bankers draft is a form of a cheque, it's also known as a cashier's check.
Depends on the state. In Washington, for example, there are clearly defined exceptions for de minimis use in our ethics laws. Conversion of state resources for personal use is indeed an ethics violation, but there is widespread recognition that sometimes it just doesn't matter for small things.
Make a personal local phone call? Yes, the state paid for it (T1s, infrastructure, etc), but the bill wouldn't be much different without that phone call, so it's deemed de minimis use. Ditto for limited personal web browsing, or using water from the faucet to keep plants at your desk alive.
In this case, especially if the software interfered with power-savings feature of the PC, it's probably not covered by the de minimis use exception.
Yup, I'm looking forward to our upgrade to Windows 7 for that very reason. It's too bad that'll probably be sometime around 2019
More. Easily.
One of the big problems is that people like using the ZIP code databases for other things (like sales-tax lookups); however, they're often not granular enough for this. In our area, we have two towns in the same ZIP code with different tax rates. This is a huge problem, and when they complained to the USPS about it and requested a ZIP code split, they were told to shove off because the USPS only intends the ZIP code to be used for mail delivery and you hijack that purpose at your peril.
I thought the same thing: at $DAYJOB, we have a policy to run all 4:3 monitors at 1024x768 because of readability issues. One of the first things I did was to try and change the font sizes instead, hilarity ensued. Not a single business-critical app we used handled the setting correctly. Some ignored it, while some scaled their text up within a fixed-size (x by y pixels) area, which cropped the text on the right edge.
Support for this feature in applications is awful.
That's true; however, for an ISP there is more to it than that. Depending on which POP generates the traffic, and which one sinks it, hot-potato routing can be unfair. Lets say BigPornSite uses SuperCheapISP (eg Cogent) to reach their customers: BigPornSite is located on the west coast, but most of their viewers aren't. BigPornSite will hand off their traffic to SuperCheapISP in the west-coast data center, and SuperCheapISP will route the traffic to the viewer's ISP. (Let's say its Comcast...) However, if the Comcast customer is located on the East coast, Comcast is stuck paying for the coast-to-coast transport instead of SuperCheapISP.
So, SuperCheapISP got paid by the porn site to route the traffic for maybe 100m or so, and gets rid of it as soon as they can. Would you want to sign a peering agreement with them, knowing that they're going to dump tons of traffic on your network with no regards to where its actually going? Yes, it's silly, but there's a precedent here. Ratio limits are in place to protect against tricks like this.
Oh really? How exactly does the law quantify being distracted? [citation needed] I call BS.
They might be using IPv6 soon enough, check out 6lopan, an IETF group working towards getting IPv6 working on low-power networking devices like Xbee modems, etc. IEEE 802.15 transceivers are low-power, will mesh easily, and are very common in power meters.
Having global addressability saves a lot of hassle, and should not be confused with global reachability. Seems to make a lot of sense to me.
The users of speedtest.net choose to use the service, so it's a self-selecting sample. This is not a good thing if you're looking for a scientifically rigorous study.
Grandma won't be running speedtest on her 56k: she already knows that it's slow.
I live 15min away from the Blaine, WA/BC crossing, and cross the border on a regular basis. While I've never seen money tested for cocaine residue, testing ID cards (eg your driver's license) is quite commonplace. People have been denied entry because they used their ID to cut a line, and it turned up positive for residue at the border.
No decent psychologist I know of would ascribe personality (of which character is a part of) to inborn traits, disregarding experience and environment. Character as an inborn trait is an asinine idea: neither the behaviorist nor the biopsychologist would take that statement seriously.
Indeed, you're talking about a Shibboleth. It's a cool word.
According to (at least someone who claims to be) Paul Vixie, Level3 said in 2008 that they plan to discontinue the service to non-customers:
Indeed. Which is why Bush hid the facts.
Assuming that these "terms" appear multiple times in the notes, it seems like one could assemble a corpus of them after the initial data entry, and use statistical methods to try and track down mistakes. (eg if SNAP-10A appears 20 times, and SMAP-10A only appears once, its probably worth review by an expert)
Comcast, for one, does plan to use stateful DHCPv6. See this presentation from NANOG 46 for more. (Ironically, the very story we're discussing comes from Comcast's announcement at NANOG, including plenty of technical details. ) One must remember that DHCPv6 can also be used for prefix delegation, something an ISP has a need to do for each subscriber.
Perhaps, but once a user has a IPv6-capable CPE, the IP address could likely change upon RELEASE/RENEW. (See RFC 4941) You're right that once a subscriber receives a prefix, they can do whatever they want with it, and perhaps many will end up using SLAAC. But it's really difficult to say without a bunch of consumer devices on the market, and DHCPv6 is needed in most environments to augment SLAAC anyways. Unless you have a crystal ball as to how CPE devices will behave, I think you could perhaps be a bit more educational in your responses instead of berating someone who is possibly misguided, but genuinely curious.
That isn't entirely true. In the US, secure EPP (Encrypting Pin Pads) were defined and mandated beginning in 2005. Old ATMs don't share this requirement, and assuming that all international ATMs use competent EPPs is probably not accurate.
That's simply not true. Do you even know what ISM stands for?
Saying that the ISM band is unlicensed because there is no commercial interest in it is like saying that they don't build condos on artillery ranges because there is no developer willing to buy the property.
From CFR Title 47 Part 18:
Bob, is that you? ... I hope that Nemertes Research owns a blender
Yup, Check 21 now allows images to substitute for paper in the check clearing process. This can happen just about anywhere: at the retailer, at the bank branch, at their HQ, at the central processor... Pretty nifty legal hack.
It's too bad ACH and EFT and check clearing networks can't just go away in favor of a simpler system.
It's not quite that simple.
See that openSUSE bug:
If I found myself making a different decision than Andrew Morton, I might revisit that choice as well.
The metric system for paper sizing is also rad because the page sizes stay proportional. You can draft a poster on A4 paper and then size it up, or you can print 2-up on A4 without scaling issues. (Cut a piece of letter size paper in two and its no longer proportional, you need to add white space for everything to fit.)
That's cute, I see what you did there. A line like that might get you a moment of pause in a bar argument, but this is slashdot.
"Laws" aren't privileged in science above theories. It's just a linguistic misnomer, nothing more.
For example, we still refer to the "laws of motion", even though they've been quaint for over a century and are also known as classical physics. In certain contexts, they're throughly incorrect, but scientists have better things to do than to go around striking the word "law" from textbooks.
And gravity? Good luck with that
Damn I love articles like this one: they really help to refine my foe list.
Umm, you do know what cold solder joints are, don't you? They most certainly are not a design choice. They're a problem of quality control.
I agree with everything you say, otherwise.