there is no way in hell you can cause a greater battery drain on a spacecraft that is out of reach by any human ship by changing the computer here on earth that is acting as transmit/receive controller for the earth station. I was giving the guy the benefit of the doubt and figuring that he was speaking hypothetically.
However, your points about the power source and TTL logic are well-taken; TTL logic is a disgusting power hog and we're well to have moved on back here on Earth, even though sometimes I think we've more than made up for our more-powerful, theoretically more-efficient systems by introducing so much software bloat so as to eliminate any efficiency gains that they ought to bring us.
Bonus points for pic with Bush! You mean, like this one? No Halliburton sign, or pile of dead Iraqi babies to stand on (at least not that we can see), but a little Photoshop can fix that right up.
Well, unless it's some proprietary VPN protocol, you could just use a different client program that wasn't as strict about not letting you do things like bridge it. As long as you have the key, there's not a whole lot to stop you.
But I think what the GP was getting at was the risk of somebody having a workstation in the plant, somewhere, that's connected to both networks. If you have two NICs, and have the process-control network plugged into one, and the regular internet-accessible LAN plugged into the other, it's trivial to "accidentally" bridge them together.
Alternately, they could both just get plugged into one router or switch, and suddenly there's a path between them. A lot of weird things could happen if the two networks run alongside each other and there's not constant vigilance to keep people from doing something stupid.
In my office, we have separate subnets for different work areas. It works pretty well in terms of minimizing broadcast traffic and keeping people from accidentally printing to printers at the other end of the office, etc. But every few months they'll end up getting accidentally bridged by someone in a conference room plugging a wire from each subnet (they have separate jacks in the conference rooms, so that people can access their own area's stuff) into a switch. There's not really any malice involved -- people just see an Ethernet cable running from the wall towards a switch and notice it's unplugged, and they have a tendency to just jam it right in there.
The U.S. banned international online gambling because of pressure (read: bribes) from the big domestic casinos. Mainly the Indian tribes and the Vegas / Atlantic City ones. Probably the state lotteries, too.
They made it into a "moral issue," but that's just bullshit that they can sell to a few Evangelical hicks. The real issue was that the casinos felt that international companies were cutting into their business, so they had Congress close it down. It was pretty straightforward protectionism; online betting with U.S.-based B&M casinos (including internet off-track betting on horses, internet purchase of lottery tickets, etc.) is OK, but international ones are not.
The WTO saw this for what it is, and is basically saying, 'either you let everyone compete, or you shut it all down.' So this puts the U.S. in the position of either letting international casinos into the U.S. market, or shutting down all internet gambling (including aforementioned web-based off-track-betting, lottery tickets, sports books, etc.). The casinos -- particularly the Vegas ones -- wouldn't like that much either.
So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I have to give the Antiguans -- and most of all, their lawyer (who is from Texas) -- credit. It takes some brass ones to go eye-to-eye with the USG, even when they're doing something that's so transparently corrupt. I hope they can pull it off.
Excuse me replying to myself, but just wondered about the potential for companies to introduce chemicals as "tracers" into their food and drinks, and then track popularity per suburb, street or house.
That said, it's probably cheaper and easier to just get a majority hooked on store cards and track what they're buying at checkout. I think that's probably a little farfetched, for exactly the reasons you allude to -- there are easier ways to track spending habits, and they're only going to become more plentiful.
However, I think you could do some interesting analysis of people's diets in various areas via sewage. E.g., you could figure out if people from particular areas or demographic areas eat less-healthy foods, even though they might have a significant interest in lying about it when asked outright. Again, possibly easier ways, but I'm sure some researcher will try if they can get good granularity. It'd be interesting to look at 'lifestyle disease' patterns in different populations and then correlate it to diet, via sewage from different areas in a city.
Or, more usefully, if you did have a sewer-contents-monitoring system with fine resolution, that would be a good way to scan for diseases. Particularly ones like food poisoning or e. coli, that produce severe digestive... issues. Rather than just looking at ER reports and trying to correlate them with where people live/work/eat, you'd be able to look at the sewer data and see exactly where the sick people are doing their thing. (So if they're all concentrated around the sketchy Chinese food place, you know where to send the health inspectors.) Again, it's nothing new, but it might be a faster/more-automated way of doing it.
One of the most interesting things (to me, anyway) that Linus talked about in the interview as how proud he was of the technical merits of the kernel and of Linux as an OS in general. I thought that was fairly interesting.
I really don't want to try and turn this into a Linux vs BSD vs [something else] flamewar here, but since I'm not really qualified to comment on things like memory-management algorithms, I wondered if anyone wanted to weigh in on exactly what areas they think Linux really excels at -- from a purely technical perspective. I really like the idea that Linus is getting at, namely that the real confirmation of open source is technical excellence, but I'm curious exactly what areas the Linux kernel is "The Best."
In particular I've always been interested in how some of the different open-source OSes handle different technical problems. Is how Linux handles (just for an example) memory management quantifiably better than how BSD does it? And if so (or not) why?
Here you infer that 1. corporations deserve to be treated as individuals. and 2. that in fact they deserve preferential treatment vis a vis freedom. E.g. you seem to believe that companies are more legitimate possessors of goods than individuals. This is fatally flawed for a number of reasons, most notably that companies are comprised of individuals (sometimes just one or two individuals) and companies are immune to our usual punishments for criminal offenses. Wow, my mouth is full. I think it's because you keep shoving words in there. I didn't say anything about corporations being treated as individuals. And I certainly never said that corporations' rights (whatever we, as a society of individuals, decide that they should be) should take precedence over individuals' rights.
However, since corporations (whether for-profit, the ones people normally think of as "corporations," or non-profit, like the ones that are the legal embodiments of most universities) do most research in this country, it's corporations that are going to be the focus of regulation which ultimately affects individual rights, over what you can research, publish, and examine publicly. Corporations don't exist -- they're a legal fiction, a convenient thought-object -- and are always made up of people. When you place restrictions on a corporation, you are really placing restrictions on people. And when the action that's restricted is one that can only be readily accomplished by a corporation, you have effectively restricted anyone from doing it. Thus, corporate 'rights' issues are inherently individual rights issues.
Don't be so quick to demonize corporations; like anything else, they can be used for good as well as ill. Allowing the government to over-regulate the corporate sphere is a backdoor into over-regulation of individual life as well.
At any rate, you should investigate botulism a little further. The bacteria that causes food poisoning is not, as you seem to correctly understand, very hazardous. You'll probably end up with it in you, once in a while, and feel pretty shitty as a result -- but you probably won't die. That's not really a concern from a terrorism/weaponizability standpoint.
The weapon is the botulinum toxin. That is, a chemical that Clostridium botulinum produces, and what actually makes you feel ill (and the active ingredient in Botox, ironically). It's one of the more potent poisons known to man -- the lethal dosage is a little over a microgram for an adult human. The concern is not that somebody could breed up a batch of Clostridium botulinum bacteria, or even breed some up and sprinkle it on your food (although that would be bad, and would probably be hugely disruptive if it was at key points in the food supply), but that they could use the bacteria to produce the toxin and then extract and concentrate the toxin in significant quantities. That's difficult to do, at least for the moment. (And even if they did, it would take some further work to really weaponize it well -- although dumped into a city water supply it would probably cause significant death before people realized they have to boil their water before drinking.)
But the point is that while isolating a bunch of botulinum toxin is out of the reach of a basement biologist for the moment, it won't be for very long. And that's just one example, and probably not the best one. The greater point is that technology makes it easier and easier for a single person, or group of determined individuals, to kill a whole lot of other people -- and short of just grinding civilization and progress to a halt, that's not a trend that's going to change or reverse itself.
And if every person on earth has the ability to kill a few thousand other people, it's not a question of will someone decide to do it, it's a question of when. And when they do, the public will demand -- rightly or wrongly -- to be protected. And they'll flock to whomever promises them protection. The result is either going to be realistic security handled by people whose goal is protecting freedom and maximizing happiness, or it's going to be more of what we have today: security theater sold to us by a bunch of power-hungry charlatans.
I don't actually think that Linux can do it...but if it can it will likely last forever. Well, I don't think that the 2.x branch of Linux will, either. And if it could, that really wouldn't be a good thing. Even with continual tweaks, that would mean that there's very little overall progress in the big questions of operating system design. It would ultimately mean that we'd be chiseling 1970s Bell Labs concepts into stone, forever. I don't think that's healthy.
I mean, Linux, and the Unixy concepts that underlie many of its basic assumptions, are quite solid. I'm not saying that they don't have a lot of life left in them. But do we really want to be using them from now until the end of time? Certainly not.
The nice thing about the code being both Free software and open source is that, should someone down the road come up with the Next Great Thing, they'll be able to tear out the bits and pieces of the Linux kernel (or the BSD kernel), and use it to help their own project.
There might not be a Linux-kernel 3.0, but it just means that the radical concepts that such a project would involve will end up under some other name.
However, I've always felt that it does the/. community a bit of a service even still, because it provides an archived copy of the article for later perusal. The need for this may be less than it was in the past, but as someone who occasionally goes back and reads "the best of Slashdot" from past years, it's frustrating to have a whole discussion archived but with a dead link to TFA, because somebody didn't think anyone would care about their blog in three years time / had a server crash / changed their URLs.
Slashdot is a better, more stable archive site than most places on the internet (its track record is basically as good as the Internet Archive's), so it does make a certain amount of sense to keep a copy of the article text around. It's one of those areas where copyright law just fails miserably to encourage an outcome that's useful in the long term.
(Personally I've always felt that there should be a de facto standard for posting article text... like it should always be posted as a first-level comment, not into a thread, it should always have the subject "Article Text", should always be posted AC, etc. If you do that, it generally gets buried -- so it doesn't divert traffic from the real site (unless the site gets Slashdotted) -- but it's there for anyone who's really looking, later on.)
Cogent is leasing some number of dark fibers among the fibers that Level3 owns along this route that were shot full of holes. The fiber affected was Level3 fiber, and Cogent was one of the Level3 customers affected by the cut. Interesting. So I guess that would be "Option C, All of the above."
In the book, Posner argues that facing terrorism and the threat of WMDs, the scope of constitutional rights must be adjusted in a pragmatic but rational manner. Using cost-benefit analysis to balance the harm new security measures inflict on personal liberty against the increased security those measures provide, Posner comes down, in most but not quite all respects, on the side of increased government power. Posner argues that terrorist activity is sui generis--it is neither "war" nor "crime"--and it demands a tailored response, one that gives terror suspects fewer constitutional rights than persons suspected of ordinary criminal activity. I'm not sure that's nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. Historically it's been understood that in some cases, the government can act in ways that are normally not considered acceptable. We've seen this happen a few times, and although we can argue as to whether or not particular cases were really advisable, I don't think that there has been much in the way of long-term damage to liberty as a result of actions that were clearly temporary in scope and taken in response to external factors (wars, domestic unrest, etc.). The key is that the steps taken are both truly necessary, and are carefully balanced to have the necessary effect with minimal impact on liberty or personal freedom.
Posner is certainly running a razor's edge here, but I think it's one that we're going to have to navigate. The writing is on the wall as far as WMDs go -- we're never going to get that cat back inside the bag again. In fact, it's going to get easier for a smaller group of people to put together various types of WMDs as we move into the future. Fifty years ago it took a heavily-industrialized nation and most of its military-industrial complex to put together either a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon; within a few decades I think we'll find that even a small group of very determined individuals have it in their power to put together a fairly decent biological or chemical weapon (...not that they don't already -- how's that anthrax mailer case going?).
Within a few generations, I think it'll be possible for pretty much anyone who really wants to, to put together some form of WMD -- or at very least, a severe mass-casualty weapon. Without completely halting progress in any number of industries (which itself would be an affront to freedom), I don't think there's any way to stop this. Therefore, we will have no choice but to decide how best we can keep rogue groups or individuals from paralyzing society while minimizing the danger to individual liberty. If we just put our heads in the sand and refuse to act, eventually we'll be caught unprepared in the face of some truly large-scale incident, and that will be exactly the sort of political ammunition that some fascist needs to put the country on the road to its demise.
(The best treatment of this scenario -- although perhaps not a particularly uplifting one -- that I've read in fiction would be in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Although the book has some outlandish elements, or at least ones that I don't think we'll see in the timeframe it calls for, his treatment of terrorism and cybercrime is a scenario that could quite easily come to pass.)
The weirdest instance of censorship I've ever heard was on a radio station that was playing Live's "Lightning Crashes", and they censored the word placenta. Ironic, considering that I know of a radio station where the DJs once ate a placenta.
In retrospect and after reading the thread on NANOG's mailinglist, I think this is actually what happened.
The cable was somehow damaged, and in order to fix it, a 3600-foot (or whatever it was exactly) section needed to be removed and replaced with another one, which would need to be reblown into the conduit.
So there could conceivably only have been one point of damage, but because of where it occurred it necessitated replacement of a fairly long fiber span.
Over on the NANOG mailing list, which has a lot of people from the major U.S. backbones and networks subscribed to it, it is being reported/said that the line was Cogent's, not Level 3's, and that Cogent at one point had an advisory up about it.
Lots of people posted traceroutes that seem to confirm that it was definitely Cogent that took the hit. Packets were basically going all over the place on their network yesterday, and people who had fixed their routers to prefer Cogent over other backbones (apparently Bell) were having some slowdowns as a result.
Vista sucks rather massively, but I don't think -- unfortunately -- that it really means much of a boost for Linux in the short term.
Windows ME sucked hard, too, and it didn't seem to really push many users off of Windows -- they just skipped that version and Microsoft had to flog their developers a little harder to get something better (XP Home, as memory serves) out quickly. Once Microsoft admits that Vista is a turd and stops trying to polish it, they'll probably grind out something marginally better that they can ram down consumers throats.
As long as the popularity of Linux and other free OSes (or heck, even just alternative OSes that follow reasonable standards and care about interoperability) continues to climb slowly and steadily, Linux can succeed without a "year of."
Is the FCC using "reserve" and "starting price" interchangeably? Or are they two separate things (similar to an eBay auction), where there's a starting price for the bidding, and a much higher, secret reserve price?
It sounds like the FCC did what Google wanted, and are running the auction with the interoperability and open-access mandates in place. And they're starting the price out at a level ($4.6B) that Google said they would pay, given those conditions. So that seems like a good thing. In fact, if that's the case, it seems like the auction would be almost guaranteed to go through with the conditions in place.
But is there a separate, higher reserve price somewhere? Some much higher amount that would let Google bid $4.6B, but still fail to meet the reserve, and let the FCC re-run the auction without the interoperability/open-access conditions?
If there's a spill like this, isn't the EPA supposed to be notified?
I think that nuclear accidents fall under the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is also the licensing authority for nuclear facilities and sites. In this case, it sounds like they did notify the NRC, but that the NRC had decided to classify/FOUO everything that had to do with this particular site (because of its involvement with the Navy's nuclear fuels program, apparently), so their disclosure was never made public or sent to Congress.
It probably either went to, or was accessible to, particular members of Congress, though. Probably the members of some subcommittee (whichever one deals with the NRC -- Energy and Environment, maybe?) who have access to otherwise-classified stuff. It just didn't go out to everyone or become part of the Congressional Record, like it would have if it had been unclassified.
The real question here is why was this company/site's stuff all classified, and was there a real reason why it needed to be? Government bureaucrats have a knee-jerk reaction to stamp the highest-possible classification on everything, just "to be safe." In a place like the DOE, their toilet paper is probably stamped FOUO.
In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.
I haven't really kept up in the world of P2P apps, but I think that there are a few, designed and used mostly on college campuses (which generally have very fast, unregulated intranets but very limited/expensive gateway capacity) that allow for subnetted file sharing. I don't know the name of any, but I've seen some people using one [1]. It basically looked like an idiotproof distributed file system. You put the files you want to share in a directory, and then you point your client program towards a known node (maybe it does autodiscovery somehow, I'm not sure). When you connect, you get a list of all available files from other nodes, and you can download away. Basically the result is that everyone's shared files get dumped into one pool, that everyone can browse through and grab stuff from. Except for the fact that it's illegal, it's pretty neat -- it's not quite distributed file storage (a la Freenet), but it is decentralized, and I suspect it can easily be made into a darknet.
For a lot of the content that people want from P2P networks (movies, music, software), this model works pretty well. Particularly, and not surprisingly, music: take 100 or 1000 people's MP3 collections and dump them together, and you've got a pretty decent music library. I'm not sure how well it would scale for other types of content, though. But from a networking standpoint it's a pretty simple architecture.
But you're right, there's no reason in theory why you couldn't program a P2P client to strongly prefer other nodes within the same subnet, or to ratelimit connections outside the subnet much more harshly than close nodes. (The algorithms that most P2P software use to select nodes should already take into account some measure of network distance, so it would just require some tweaking there.) If what Comcast is doing to Bittorrent becomes the norm, I think you'll see more movement in this direction.
[1] Searching through Wikipedia's list of P2P applications makes me think that I might have seen Retroshare, but I'm not 100% sure.
Well, I think they did say it was a shotgun, so it's not just a single bullet, it's many individual pellets (depending on the type of shotshell).
However I still think that a kilometer -- or anything more than a few feet, really -- is longer than they would move inside the cable. Maybe if you fired at an oblique angle into an empty water pipe or something, so that the pellet could ricochet along inside the tube, but a cable (where the outside is presumably made of some fairly soft material that would absorb energy with each impact)... it seems unlikely.
To wipe out a section of cable that long I think that someone would need to walk along and repeatedly shoot it.
What I find most interesting is that it was deliberate destruction, it wasn't accidental destruction or theft. There have been a lot of cases lately where people have stolen cable or wiring for its scrap or resale value, so I wouldn't have been totally surprised if someone had just cut and then hauled away a large section of cable (although, in the case of fiber, I don't think there's much of a resale value and they'd probably damage it beyond repair during the theft). But to go and destroy it but leave it in place, makes it pretty clear that someone did it quite deliberately, and that the damage was the goal and not just an accidental byproduct.
I think what he means regarding bandwidth being a 'running cost,' is that a low-level consumer ISP has to buy their connectivity from somewhere.
Let me illustrate how it works. I'll use the example of an old dialup ISP, because it's simpler. It used to be, back in the mid-90s, that anybody who wanted to could become a local ISP. You'd go and get a bunch of phone lines, a bank of modems, and a T1 or fractional-T1. Customers would call in, connect to your modems, and then you'd push their packets out the T1 to your ISP, generally a regional carrier, who would take them to a higher-level ISP... who would be big enough to engage in traffic peering with other major networks.
Basically, the money flows up in this scenario. Customers pay you (the rinky-dink local ISP), and you pay your regional ISP for the T1 line, and the regional ISP pays to connect to the higher-tier network. (The highest-tier networks, the Tier 1's, don't pay anybody -- they basically have gentlemen's agreements and pass traffic to each other as peers and equals; hence "peering." But there's not much peering below the Tier 1/2 level, since the traffic is too unidirectional.)
Now, the customers pay a basically flat rate per month ($20/mo or whatever) regardless of how much they use, within reason. But the ISPs usually aren't so lucky. When you buy a T1/T3/OC-x or other significant connection, you pay for the connection itself, and for a certain amount of bandwidth. In many cases (particularly on the faster ones), the amount of transfer that's included is less than 24/7 saturation -- in fact, you'd want it to be less than saturation, because 90% of the time you won't be saturating it. You want to have some burst capacity for the 6PM hour when everyone comes home from work and checks their email, but you don't want to pay for that much bandwidth all the time.
So the cost of your upstream bandwidth is variable, not fixed.* If your customers start using a lot of traffic, suddenly you as the ISP end up paying a lot more to your provider for bandwidth. That cuts directly into your profit margin.
Now... moving up from dialup ISPs to a high-speed provider like Comcast, they have problems that are even more severe, because they oversell their networks even more severely than dialup ISPs do. While a dialup ISP can only ever have (modem speed)*(number of modems) as a maximum, a broadband ISP could conceivably have (connection speed)*(number of customers). If everyone on the network decided to pull down 6Mb/s, everything would grind to a halt -- they don't have the capacity to the upstream providers for that kind of bandwidth. And even if they did have the physical capacity, they couldn't afford it with each customer only paying $60 a month. (Transfer isn't exactly cheap.)
However, depending on how a broadband ISP like Comcast has their network set up, they could probably rig it so that packets that go from one Comcast customer to another are "free," in that they don't go through a higher-tier provider. This requires that Comcast have its own internal network connecting all the neighborhood nodes, instead of just wiring them all directly to upstream ISPs without interconnection. I'm not sure whether they do this or not. I have a suspicion that they might, because I've heard that they're not throttling Bittorrent connections from one Comcast user to another. This makes sense, if those packets cost Comcast less than one going from a Comcast user to a Speakeasy user.
ISPs hate P2P applications like Bittorrent because they're bandwidth hogs, but more specifically because they result in a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their Internet gateways, which means more bandwidth costs for them. If you could set up a P2P app that only peered with other nodes on the same subnet or IP address range, the ISP's might care about them a whole lot less (though it depends how they have th
First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.
Huh?
The big carriers don't shape traffic. Traffic shaping is something that happens at the network edges, not near the core or backbones. The equipment to do deep packet inspection is not cheap, and it gets ridiculously expensive when you start talking about inspecting really fat pipes. The only system I'm aware of that does DPI on big network segments are those ones from the creepy quasi-NSA company Narus. And despite their marketing spiel, they're geared more towards surveillance than network management.
Effective traffic shaping requires pushing the hardware to do the packet inspection as close to the customers as you can get it, because that's where the links are slow enough to do it with reasonable hardware (rather than requiring a whole mess of custom logic) and without slowing things down. By the time the traffic has gotten up to a big Tier 1 or even Tier 2 ISP, you're talking about serious bandwidth. There's a point where it's easier just to get a fast router (which has a lot of custom logic in order to do its job, and just looks at packet headers) and not screw around with trying to pull out all the Bittorrent packets and separate them from the rest of the email/IM/VoIP/pornography.
Traffic shaping is something that low-level ISPs want to do, in order to control their bandwidth bills (because a consumer ISP has to pay to its connectivity to higher-level providers, it's not peering). I don't see why the big backbone providers would care.
This is common in the U.S. as well. In fact, except for places that have well and septic systems (which effectively are just "shitting in your backyard," only in a sanitary way), I think most places in the U.S. have metered service.
And it's a good thing, too. I've heard stories from places where service isn't metered -- it's just a flat rate paid by everyone in town -- and it's a terrible idea. It doesn't give the water company any incentive to fix leaks (because they just take the total cost of all the water that leaves their facilities and divide it by the number of people in town, while a metered system ensures that they only get paid for water delivered to the customer's premises, and water lost from the mains before it hits a meter is a measurable loss), and it encourages people to out-consume each other in order to get the most bang for their buck.
Metering sewer based on water consumption is a kludge, but given that metering the actual amount of waste put down the sewer pipe is difficult to do, it's not a bad idea. The assumption is basically 'whatever water you're using, most of it ends up going down the sewer,' so they charge you a per-1000-gallon rate for water supply and for the disposal of it later, as sewage. In my area (N VA), if you use a lot of water that doesn't end up in the sewer (for lawn watering or other irrigation), you can work with the water company and get a separate meter put on your outdoor tap, so that you don't get charged for its disposal. (Only worthwhile if it's a significant amount of water, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
However, your points about the power source and TTL logic are well-taken; TTL logic is a disgusting power hog and we're well to have moved on back here on Earth, even though sometimes I think we've more than made up for our more-powerful, theoretically more-efficient systems by introducing so much software bloat so as to eliminate any efficiency gains that they ought to bring us.
Well, unless it's some proprietary VPN protocol, you could just use a different client program that wasn't as strict about not letting you do things like bridge it. As long as you have the key, there's not a whole lot to stop you.
But I think what the GP was getting at was the risk of somebody having a workstation in the plant, somewhere, that's connected to both networks. If you have two NICs, and have the process-control network plugged into one, and the regular internet-accessible LAN plugged into the other, it's trivial to "accidentally" bridge them together.
Alternately, they could both just get plugged into one router or switch, and suddenly there's a path between them. A lot of weird things could happen if the two networks run alongside each other and there's not constant vigilance to keep people from doing something stupid.
In my office, we have separate subnets for different work areas. It works pretty well in terms of minimizing broadcast traffic and keeping people from accidentally printing to printers at the other end of the office, etc. But every few months they'll end up getting accidentally bridged by someone in a conference room plugging a wire from each subnet (they have separate jacks in the conference rooms, so that people can access their own area's stuff) into a switch. There's not really any malice involved -- people just see an Ethernet cable running from the wall towards a switch and notice it's unplugged, and they have a tendency to just jam it right in there.
The U.S. banned international online gambling because of pressure (read: bribes) from the big domestic casinos. Mainly the Indian tribes and the Vegas / Atlantic City ones. Probably the state lotteries, too.
They made it into a "moral issue," but that's just bullshit that they can sell to a few Evangelical hicks. The real issue was that the casinos felt that international companies were cutting into their business, so they had Congress close it down. It was pretty straightforward protectionism; online betting with U.S.-based B&M casinos (including internet off-track betting on horses, internet purchase of lottery tickets, etc.) is OK, but international ones are not.
The WTO saw this for what it is, and is basically saying, 'either you let everyone compete, or you shut it all down.' So this puts the U.S. in the position of either letting international casinos into the U.S. market, or shutting down all internet gambling (including aforementioned web-based off-track-betting, lottery tickets, sports books, etc.). The casinos -- particularly the Vegas ones -- wouldn't like that much either.
So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I have to give the Antiguans -- and most of all, their lawyer (who is from Texas) -- credit. It takes some brass ones to go eye-to-eye with the USG, even when they're doing something that's so transparently corrupt. I hope they can pull it off.
That said, it's probably cheaper and easier to just get a majority hooked on store cards and track what they're buying at checkout. I think that's probably a little farfetched, for exactly the reasons you allude to -- there are easier ways to track spending habits, and they're only going to become more plentiful.
However, I think you could do some interesting analysis of people's diets in various areas via sewage. E.g., you could figure out if people from particular areas or demographic areas eat less-healthy foods, even though they might have a significant interest in lying about it when asked outright. Again, possibly easier ways, but I'm sure some researcher will try if they can get good granularity. It'd be interesting to look at 'lifestyle disease' patterns in different populations and then correlate it to diet, via sewage from different areas in a city.
Or, more usefully, if you did have a sewer-contents-monitoring system with fine resolution, that would be a good way to scan for diseases. Particularly ones like food poisoning or e. coli, that produce severe digestive
One of the most interesting things (to me, anyway) that Linus talked about in the interview as how proud he was of the technical merits of the kernel and of Linux as an OS in general. I thought that was fairly interesting.
I really don't want to try and turn this into a Linux vs BSD vs [something else] flamewar here, but since I'm not really qualified to comment on things like memory-management algorithms, I wondered if anyone wanted to weigh in on exactly what areas they think Linux really excels at -- from a purely technical perspective. I really like the idea that Linus is getting at, namely that the real confirmation of open source is technical excellence, but I'm curious exactly what areas the Linux kernel is "The Best."
In particular I've always been interested in how some of the different open-source OSes handle different technical problems. Is how Linux handles (just for an example) memory management quantifiably better than how BSD does it? And if so (or not) why?
However, since corporations (whether for-profit, the ones people normally think of as "corporations," or non-profit, like the ones that are the legal embodiments of most universities) do most research in this country, it's corporations that are going to be the focus of regulation which ultimately affects individual rights, over what you can research, publish, and examine publicly. Corporations don't exist -- they're a legal fiction, a convenient thought-object -- and are always made up of people. When you place restrictions on a corporation, you are really placing restrictions on people. And when the action that's restricted is one that can only be readily accomplished by a corporation, you have effectively restricted anyone from doing it. Thus, corporate 'rights' issues are inherently individual rights issues.
Don't be so quick to demonize corporations; like anything else, they can be used for good as well as ill. Allowing the government to over-regulate the corporate sphere is a backdoor into over-regulation of individual life as well.
At any rate, you should investigate botulism a little further. The bacteria that causes food poisoning is not, as you seem to correctly understand, very hazardous. You'll probably end up with it in you, once in a while, and feel pretty shitty as a result -- but you probably won't die. That's not really a concern from a terrorism/weaponizability standpoint.
The weapon is the botulinum toxin. That is, a chemical that Clostridium botulinum produces, and what actually makes you feel ill (and the active ingredient in Botox, ironically). It's one of the more potent poisons known to man -- the lethal dosage is a little over a microgram for an adult human. The concern is not that somebody could breed up a batch of Clostridium botulinum bacteria, or even breed some up and sprinkle it on your food (although that would be bad, and would probably be hugely disruptive if it was at key points in the food supply), but that they could use the bacteria to produce the toxin and then extract and concentrate the toxin in significant quantities. That's difficult to do, at least for the moment. (And even if they did, it would take some further work to really weaponize it well -- although dumped into a city water supply it would probably cause significant death before people realized they have to boil their water before drinking.)
But the point is that while isolating a bunch of botulinum toxin is out of the reach of a basement biologist for the moment, it won't be for very long. And that's just one example, and probably not the best one. The greater point is that technology makes it easier and easier for a single person, or group of determined individuals, to kill a whole lot of other people -- and short of just grinding civilization and progress to a halt, that's not a trend that's going to change or reverse itself.
And if every person on earth has the ability to kill a few thousand other people, it's not a question of will someone decide to do it, it's a question of when. And when they do, the public will demand -- rightly or wrongly -- to be protected. And they'll flock to whomever promises them protection. The result is either going to be realistic security handled by people whose goal is protecting freedom and maximizing happiness, or it's going to be more of what we have today: security theater sold to us by a bunch of power-hungry charlatans.
I mean, Linux, and the Unixy concepts that underlie many of its basic assumptions, are quite solid. I'm not saying that they don't have a lot of life left in them. But do we really want to be using them from now until the end of time? Certainly not.
The nice thing about the code being both Free software and open source is that, should someone down the road come up with the Next Great Thing, they'll be able to tear out the bits and pieces of the Linux kernel (or the BSD kernel), and use it to help their own project.
There might not be a Linux-kernel 3.0, but it just means that the radical concepts that such a project would involve will end up under some other name.
This is true, it's technically illegal.
/. community a bit of a service even still, because it provides an archived copy of the article for later perusal. The need for this may be less than it was in the past, but as someone who occasionally goes back and reads "the best of Slashdot" from past years, it's frustrating to have a whole discussion archived but with a dead link to TFA, because somebody didn't think anyone would care about their blog in three years time / had a server crash / changed their URLs.
... like it should always be posted as a first-level comment, not into a thread, it should always have the subject "Article Text", should always be posted AC, etc. If you do that, it generally gets buried -- so it doesn't divert traffic from the real site (unless the site gets Slashdotted) -- but it's there for anyone who's really looking, later on.)
However, I've always felt that it does the
Slashdot is a better, more stable archive site than most places on the internet (its track record is basically as good as the Internet Archive's), so it does make a certain amount of sense to keep a copy of the article text around. It's one of those areas where copyright law just fails miserably to encourage an outcome that's useful in the long term.
(Personally I've always felt that there should be a de facto standard for posting article text
All right, so they'll duel first.
Thanks for the clarification.
Posner is certainly running a razor's edge here, but I think it's one that we're going to have to navigate. The writing is on the wall as far as WMDs go -- we're never going to get that cat back inside the bag again. In fact, it's going to get easier for a smaller group of people to put together various types of WMDs as we move into the future. Fifty years ago it took a heavily-industrialized nation and most of its military-industrial complex to put together either a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon; within a few decades I think we'll find that even a small group of very determined individuals have it in their power to put together a fairly decent biological or chemical weapon (...not that they don't already -- how's that anthrax mailer case going?).
Within a few generations, I think it'll be possible for pretty much anyone who really wants to, to put together some form of WMD -- or at very least, a severe mass-casualty weapon. Without completely halting progress in any number of industries (which itself would be an affront to freedom), I don't think there's any way to stop this. Therefore, we will have no choice but to decide how best we can keep rogue groups or individuals from paralyzing society while minimizing the danger to individual liberty. If we just put our heads in the sand and refuse to act, eventually we'll be caught unprepared in the face of some truly large-scale incident, and that will be exactly the sort of political ammunition that some fascist needs to put the country on the road to its demise.
(The best treatment of this scenario -- although perhaps not a particularly uplifting one -- that I've read in fiction would be in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Although the book has some outlandish elements, or at least ones that I don't think we'll see in the timeframe it calls for, his treatment of terrorism and cybercrime is a scenario that could quite easily come to pass.)
In retrospect and after reading the thread on NANOG's mailinglist, I think this is actually what happened.
The cable was somehow damaged, and in order to fix it, a 3600-foot (or whatever it was exactly) section needed to be removed and replaced with another one, which would need to be reblown into the conduit.
So there could conceivably only have been one point of damage, but because of where it occurred it necessitated replacement of a fairly long fiber span.
I think the article may be wrong.
. html or here for the thread index (lots of followups).
Over on the NANOG mailing list, which has a lot of people from the major U.S. backbones and networks subscribed to it, it is being reported/said that the line was Cogent's, not Level 3's, and that Cogent at one point had an advisory up about it.
Lots of people posted traceroutes that seem to confirm that it was definitely Cogent that took the hit. Packets were basically going all over the place on their network yesterday, and people who had fixed their routers to prefer Cogent over other backbones (apparently Bell) were having some slowdowns as a result.
See http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg02483
Vista sucks rather massively, but I don't think -- unfortunately -- that it really means much of a boost for Linux in the short term.
Windows ME sucked hard, too, and it didn't seem to really push many users off of Windows -- they just skipped that version and Microsoft had to flog their developers a little harder to get something better (XP Home, as memory serves) out quickly. Once Microsoft admits that Vista is a turd and stops trying to polish it, they'll probably grind out something marginally better that they can ram down consumers throats.
As long as the popularity of Linux and other free OSes (or heck, even just alternative OSes that follow reasonable standards and care about interoperability) continues to climb slowly and steadily, Linux can succeed without a "year of."
Wait -- can someone clarify this for me:
Is the FCC using "reserve" and "starting price" interchangeably? Or are they two separate things (similar to an eBay auction), where there's a starting price for the bidding, and a much higher, secret reserve price?
It sounds like the FCC did what Google wanted, and are running the auction with the interoperability and open-access mandates in place. And they're starting the price out at a level ($4.6B) that Google said they would pay, given those conditions. So that seems like a good thing. In fact, if that's the case, it seems like the auction would be almost guaranteed to go through with the conditions in place.
But is there a separate, higher reserve price somewhere? Some much higher amount that would let Google bid $4.6B, but still fail to meet the reserve, and let the FCC re-run the auction without the interoperability/open-access conditions?
If there's a spill like this, isn't the EPA supposed to be notified?
I think that nuclear accidents fall under the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is also the licensing authority for nuclear facilities and sites. In this case, it sounds like they did notify the NRC, but that the NRC had decided to classify/FOUO everything that had to do with this particular site (because of its involvement with the Navy's nuclear fuels program, apparently), so their disclosure was never made public or sent to Congress.
It probably either went to, or was accessible to, particular members of Congress, though. Probably the members of some subcommittee (whichever one deals with the NRC -- Energy and Environment, maybe?) who have access to otherwise-classified stuff. It just didn't go out to everyone or become part of the Congressional Record, like it would have if it had been unclassified.
The real question here is why was this company/site's stuff all classified, and was there a real reason why it needed to be? Government bureaucrats have a knee-jerk reaction to stamp the highest-possible classification on everything, just "to be safe." In a place like the DOE, their toilet paper is probably stamped FOUO.
In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.
I haven't really kept up in the world of P2P apps, but I think that there are a few, designed and used mostly on college campuses (which generally have very fast, unregulated intranets but very limited/expensive gateway capacity) that allow for subnetted file sharing. I don't know the name of any, but I've seen some people using one [1]. It basically looked like an idiotproof distributed file system. You put the files you want to share in a directory, and then you point your client program towards a known node (maybe it does autodiscovery somehow, I'm not sure). When you connect, you get a list of all available files from other nodes, and you can download away. Basically the result is that everyone's shared files get dumped into one pool, that everyone can browse through and grab stuff from. Except for the fact that it's illegal, it's pretty neat -- it's not quite distributed file storage (a la Freenet), but it is decentralized, and I suspect it can easily be made into a darknet.
For a lot of the content that people want from P2P networks (movies, music, software), this model works pretty well. Particularly, and not surprisingly, music: take 100 or 1000 people's MP3 collections and dump them together, and you've got a pretty decent music library. I'm not sure how well it would scale for other types of content, though. But from a networking standpoint it's a pretty simple architecture.
But you're right, there's no reason in theory why you couldn't program a P2P client to strongly prefer other nodes within the same subnet, or to ratelimit connections outside the subnet much more harshly than close nodes. (The algorithms that most P2P software use to select nodes should already take into account some measure of network distance, so it would just require some tweaking there.) If what Comcast is doing to Bittorrent becomes the norm, I think you'll see more movement in this direction.
[1] Searching through Wikipedia's list of P2P applications makes me think that I might have seen Retroshare, but I'm not 100% sure.
Well, I think they did say it was a shotgun, so it's not just a single bullet, it's many individual pellets (depending on the type of shotshell).
... it seems unlikely.
However I still think that a kilometer -- or anything more than a few feet, really -- is longer than they would move inside the cable. Maybe if you fired at an oblique angle into an empty water pipe or something, so that the pellet could ricochet along inside the tube, but a cable (where the outside is presumably made of some fairly soft material that would absorb energy with each impact)
To wipe out a section of cable that long I think that someone would need to walk along and repeatedly shoot it.
What I find most interesting is that it was deliberate destruction, it wasn't accidental destruction or theft. There have been a lot of cases lately where people have stolen cable or wiring for its scrap or resale value, so I wouldn't have been totally surprised if someone had just cut and then hauled away a large section of cable (although, in the case of fiber, I don't think there's much of a resale value and they'd probably damage it beyond repair during the theft). But to go and destroy it but leave it in place, makes it pretty clear that someone did it quite deliberately, and that the damage was the goal and not just an accidental byproduct.
I think what he means regarding bandwidth being a 'running cost,' is that a low-level consumer ISP has to buy their connectivity from somewhere.
... who would be big enough to engage in traffic peering with other major networks.
... moving up from dialup ISPs to a high-speed provider like Comcast, they have problems that are even more severe, because they oversell their networks even more severely than dialup ISPs do. While a dialup ISP can only ever have (modem speed)*(number of modems) as a maximum, a broadband ISP could conceivably have (connection speed)*(number of customers). If everyone on the network decided to pull down 6Mb/s, everything would grind to a halt -- they don't have the capacity to the upstream providers for that kind of bandwidth. And even if they did have the physical capacity, they couldn't afford it with each customer only paying $60 a month. (Transfer isn't exactly cheap.)
Let me illustrate how it works. I'll use the example of an old dialup ISP, because it's simpler. It used to be, back in the mid-90s, that anybody who wanted to could become a local ISP. You'd go and get a bunch of phone lines, a bank of modems, and a T1 or fractional-T1. Customers would call in, connect to your modems, and then you'd push their packets out the T1 to your ISP, generally a regional carrier, who would take them to a higher-level ISP
Basically, the money flows up in this scenario. Customers pay you (the rinky-dink local ISP), and you pay your regional ISP for the T1 line, and the regional ISP pays to connect to the higher-tier network. (The highest-tier networks, the Tier 1's, don't pay anybody -- they basically have gentlemen's agreements and pass traffic to each other as peers and equals; hence "peering." But there's not much peering below the Tier 1/2 level, since the traffic is too unidirectional.)
Now, the customers pay a basically flat rate per month ($20/mo or whatever) regardless of how much they use, within reason. But the ISPs usually aren't so lucky. When you buy a T1/T3/OC-x or other significant connection, you pay for the connection itself, and for a certain amount of bandwidth. In many cases (particularly on the faster ones), the amount of transfer that's included is less than 24/7 saturation -- in fact, you'd want it to be less than saturation, because 90% of the time you won't be saturating it. You want to have some burst capacity for the 6PM hour when everyone comes home from work and checks their email, but you don't want to pay for that much bandwidth all the time.
So the cost of your upstream bandwidth is variable, not fixed.* If your customers start using a lot of traffic, suddenly you as the ISP end up paying a lot more to your provider for bandwidth. That cuts directly into your profit margin.
Now
However, depending on how a broadband ISP like Comcast has their network set up, they could probably rig it so that packets that go from one Comcast customer to another are "free," in that they don't go through a higher-tier provider. This requires that Comcast have its own internal network connecting all the neighborhood nodes, instead of just wiring them all directly to upstream ISPs without interconnection. I'm not sure whether they do this or not. I have a suspicion that they might, because I've heard that they're not throttling Bittorrent connections from one Comcast user to another. This makes sense, if those packets cost Comcast less than one going from a Comcast user to a Speakeasy user.
ISPs hate P2P applications like Bittorrent because they're bandwidth hogs, but more specifically because they result in a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their Internet gateways, which means more bandwidth costs for them. If you could set up a P2P app that only peered with other nodes on the same subnet or IP address range, the ISP's might care about them a whole lot less (though it depends how they have th
First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.
Huh?
The big carriers don't shape traffic. Traffic shaping is something that happens at the network edges, not near the core or backbones. The equipment to do deep packet inspection is not cheap, and it gets ridiculously expensive when you start talking about inspecting really fat pipes. The only system I'm aware of that does DPI on big network segments are those ones from the creepy quasi-NSA company Narus. And despite their marketing spiel, they're geared more towards surveillance than network management.
Effective traffic shaping requires pushing the hardware to do the packet inspection as close to the customers as you can get it, because that's where the links are slow enough to do it with reasonable hardware (rather than requiring a whole mess of custom logic) and without slowing things down. By the time the traffic has gotten up to a big Tier 1 or even Tier 2 ISP, you're talking about serious bandwidth. There's a point where it's easier just to get a fast router (which has a lot of custom logic in order to do its job, and just looks at packet headers) and not screw around with trying to pull out all the Bittorrent packets and separate them from the rest of the email/IM/VoIP/pornography.
Traffic shaping is something that low-level ISPs want to do, in order to control their bandwidth bills (because a consumer ISP has to pay to its connectivity to higher-level providers, it's not peering). I don't see why the big backbone providers would care.
This is common in the U.S. as well. In fact, except for places that have well and septic systems (which effectively are just "shitting in your backyard," only in a sanitary way), I think most places in the U.S. have metered service.
And it's a good thing, too. I've heard stories from places where service isn't metered -- it's just a flat rate paid by everyone in town -- and it's a terrible idea. It doesn't give the water company any incentive to fix leaks (because they just take the total cost of all the water that leaves their facilities and divide it by the number of people in town, while a metered system ensures that they only get paid for water delivered to the customer's premises, and water lost from the mains before it hits a meter is a measurable loss), and it encourages people to out-consume each other in order to get the most bang for their buck.
Metering sewer based on water consumption is a kludge, but given that metering the actual amount of waste put down the sewer pipe is difficult to do, it's not a bad idea. The assumption is basically 'whatever water you're using, most of it ends up going down the sewer,' so they charge you a per-1000-gallon rate for water supply and for the disposal of it later, as sewage. In my area (N VA), if you use a lot of water that doesn't end up in the sewer (for lawn watering or other irrigation), you can work with the water company and get a separate meter put on your outdoor tap, so that you don't get charged for its disposal. (Only worthwhile if it's a significant amount of water, though.)