Unless they want to disallow encrypted traffic (i.e. any traffic that they cannot decipher) entirely or squelch the amounts then what are they going to do about it? Probably nothing. It is also useful to look at the whole P2P blocking issue from an economic standpoint. What are the interests of the ISPs in this? They would like to preserve, to the extent possible, the perception of "good speed" for all of their users which might imply some mitigation measures merely to improve that value proposition for their customers...up to a point. However, the mitigation measures will have increasing marginal costs as more and more detection, protocol analysis, and monitoring hardware and software is purchased and installed until it gets to a point where it is cheaper to add more bandwidth (i.e. network capacity) than it is to invest in ever more expensive mitigation and monitoring equipment. The ISPs would also like to be protected from liability for what happens on their networks (or at least they should want this if they are smart...the MAFIAA lawyers would LOVE to be able to sue AT&T and Verizon for "allowing" P2P to continue on their networks) both as a hedge against expensive copyright infringement lawsuits AND even MORE burdensome government regulation of their business (i.e they are regulated already but additional regulation and the attendant costs would be unwelcome indeed to the ISPs and their investors). Finally, they would like to increase their customer base and if "content" is what brings in more paying ISP customers then secretly (although these companies would never admit it publicly) they would probably prefer to preserve the status quo of P2P if that keeps their subscribers coming back each month with those fees.
How was this post moded insightful? Has the poster even used.NET? You could just as well argue that Java ripped off C++ and that C++ ripped of C and so on all the way back to Algol which could be argued to have ripped off previous languages. All programming environments and languages owe a debt to the ones that have come before. However, even putting that part of the argument aside the major innovation of.NET was the the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Common Type System (CTS). The IL assembly idea was implemented in Java as well, but Java was limited to well Java and although there were attempts to compile other languages into Java assembly byte codes they were a limited success at best because of the lack of a common type loading and description mechanism which made it difficult to reproduce types that could be reused in a Java program at the programming language level (i.e. it might run in the VM even though you wrote it in Eifel and compiled it to Java bytecode, but try adding that compiled library back into your Java solution and using the "classes" and "methods" in Java code and you will see the potential shortcomings). It was not enough to have a common virtual assembly. In order to achieve meaningful cross platform and cross language programming there needed to be a common type description and initialization system built on top of the virtual assembly language and that is the idea that.NET brought to the table.
Precisely. The Chinese are NOT dunces when it comes to reverse engineering chip designs or other technology to get around restrictions. Why do people suppose that the US government was so concerned about our spy aircraft falling into their hands in even a semi-intact state? They will bypass these restrictions just as easily as a hot knife bypasses a lock made of butter which it might as well be for all the good that this "lock" will do.
how about NO welfare for individuals OR corporations (private charity is alright...it is your money after all) and let the chips fall where they may? Obviously some people (the stronger ones probably) survived before the age of tax and spend big government or we wouldn't be here now. I am a small government Libertarian btw, not a Republican, but the Dems control Congress right now and Congress controls the purse, so it is really up to the Dems who gets bailed out...or not.
Maybe I am way off base here but it seems to me that the value of the real property (i.e. land plus fixed buildings) should be the present value of the expected rents, perhaps taking into account the possibility of periods of vacancy and variable rents for greater accuracy, OR if one is planning on living in the buildings (i.e. primary residence) then the value should be compared against the present value of expected rents that one would pay for an alternative perhaps also weighed against what one could earn by investing the difference between purchasing and renting (i.e. the opportunity cost).
If a house is costing you money each month instead of putting money in your pocket then you have to weigh the value of home ownership against alternative uses for that money (i.e. investing in something else) over a similar time period, which in housing is generally long term. The historic average return for residential real estate in the United States during the twentieth century, adjusted for inflation, was something like 1-2% which is actually pretty bad compared with alternative investments. A lot of people, as it turns out, overpaid for their primary residences in recent years and now they are screaming for the government to bail them so that they can 'stay in their home' except it was never really their home in the first place once you factor in all of the negative amortization, high purchase prices, and adjustable rate interest only loan payments...they were basically renters. Hopefully the government will not reward the the unscrupulous mortgage brokers (who knew what they were doing all along), but just as important they shouldn't reward people for signing stupid loans by bailing them out of their mortgage with taxpayer money. The whole 'predatory lending' thing is utter bullcrap, nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to sign the loan and if they couldn't understand the terms then they should have hired a CPA or independent professional to get a second opinion on the contract before they signed on the dotted line. If they find themselves in trouble now then they need to declare bankruptcy and learn a tough lesson about life.
My concern is that the Dems will bail people out with my tax money, once again rewarding the spendthrifts and fools while punishing the honest, hardworking, and diligent people who try to save and invest their money instead of rushing headlong into a bad deal and then screaming for the government to throw them a life preserver when they get in over their heads. Reward the spenders and punish the savers. It never fails in the United States and especially not during an election year...sigh.
Now you understand what we supporters of the second amendment have being saying all along. It is right and indeed patriotic for the citizens to question and even to mistrust the government, our founders certainly did. In an age where elections can be stolen and the constitution is ignored we are falling ever farther away from the principles upon which this nation was founded. Hopefully we will find a way to slow and reverse our descent into tyranny, but I tell you that there are times when the situation appears grim.
I think his death qualifies as Death From Old Age and Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection True, but wish or miracle might still be efficacious given the circumstances. However, one must be careful with the wording or risk being transported back to a time when the subject was still living or to whatever plane matched the alignment of the subject in life or in other words, be careful what you wish for.
I have no problem with elitism, it's a central component of hereditary capitalism, our beloved system. But not when the winners are being subsidized by the losers, that just strikes me as wrong. This is quite correct and it is one of the reasons why I am also against taxpayers subsidizing college tuition in public universities. In effect, those who are going to college or getting into "elite" programs are being subsidized by those who did or could NOT attend the subsidized university. Some people attempt to use the "diamond in the rough" argument as a rebuttal to the anti-subsidy crowd (i.e. the brilliant student raised in poverty), but that one falls flat on its face, at least IMHO, because the "diamond in the rough", presuming that he or she commonly exists (which is debatable), can take out a privately financed loan, based upon expectation of high productivity and future earnings following the successful completion of their degree, and use that to fund their education. It may not be "fair" that he or she has to take out a loan, but when you get right down to it is it "fair" that they have genius level IQ while the wealthier student, who maybe doesn't have to take out a loan, does not? What is unfair is to maintain the expectation of a "right" to a particular good or service, paid for out of the pocket of another man by taxes, simply because you really want it but don't want to pay the full price. The students who really want it would find a way to make it happen, subsidy or not, and they are the ones who really should be at the university.
Plus, you can make believe you are a jet fighter pilot! Just make sure that you don't pull back to hard on the "stick" or you might pass out from the *ahem* G-Forces.
It only requires administrative rights to use if you are trying to use it on another computer besides your own laptop while traveling, but anyone who does that without the dip switch set to write protect and the entire volume encrypted is just asking for trouble anyway. The ideal solution is to simply encrypt the entire volume on the USB thumb drive and then set the dip switch to write protect when it is not plugged into your laptop OR you are not using it for writes. That way if the thumb drive is lost it will be useless, other than as a storage device, to anyone who finds it (i.e. they may format it and use it themselves but your data will be safe). Why would you want to trust the closed source USB thumb drive vendor's encryption software when TrueCrypt is usable, powerful, proven, and open source? In fact, if I were a thumb drive manufacturer then I would simply distribute TrueCrypt with my thumb drives and be done with it.
The amazing thing is that many students are learning occupations that are dependent on IP and yet continue to ignore it. Lets be honest here, most undergraduate degrees earned at universities today do not translate directly into any marketable jobs skills with the possible exception of basic writing and the ability (hopefully) to think critically and solve problems. Unless your major is business administration or some form of hard science (i.e. chemistry, physics, engineering, etc) you are either going on to graduate school to teach once you complete your PhD OR you are going to end up in some marginal "white collar" job selling insurance, running a franchise, or pushing paper in some cookie-cutter business park surrounded by urban sprawl. The old mantra of work hard, get a college education, and land a high paying job has been broken for at least a decade now. A college education, for the most part, no longer gets you ahead but rather merely affords you the opportunity NOT to fall too far behind.
Yes, the artists will receive a "fair" share of the NET profits which will be either zero or asymptotically as close as they can get to zero (i.e. one (1) cent cheques for each artist under contract w/an RIAA member label) after the expenses are subtracted from the total lawsuit revenues.
And that's why other countries don't have punitive damages. How then do they punish gross negligence or wanton disregard for the harms caused to others or do they just not distinguish between those and accidental harms? The USA may have more than its fair share of asshats, but we don't have a monopoly on bad behavior.
in practice, the policies sold as "free market" amount to letting a narrow group, backed by the coercive power of public institutions acting to protect their narrow interests under the flag of "property rights", The reason that narrow groups, special interests if you will, are able to do this is because of the government NOT the free market. If there was limited government there would be no government to take over and use for purposes of coercion. I often find that when people are complaining about the free market they are in fact complaining about something which is the indirect or even the direct result of government incursion into the free market. They falsely attribute perceived wrongs to the free market or market failure because they cannot or will not believe that the root of the problem lies in poor government policy and not the marketplace.
This is especially true of "deregulation" efforts, which usually are, in fact, efforts which recast regulations into the form preferred by the leading firms in the regulated industry, and serve largely to protect them from competition and protect and reinforce their dominant position. Again, it the existence of extensive and powerful government agencies which allows this regulatory capture and rent seeking to occur. If the market place were REALLY de-regulated and private property rights actually ENFORCED by the courts then you would not have these problems.
Adam Smith, warned must always be particularly distrusted when advocating policies because they can be counted on to do so out of narrow interests that will almost invariably be opposed to the public interest, organizations of merchants and manufacturers in particular industries. Which is why government should be strictly limited in size and scope. If there is no power or right of government to step in and arbitrarily meddle in the marketplace whenever it feels like it then there will be no need to be constantly "on guard" against people taking over the apparatus of government for their own economic ends because even if they took it over it would have very limited ability to interfere in the marketplace and any takeover attempt would be easily spotted by the people due to the small size of that government.
So what is your point? That two people should not be able to enter into a private contract for the exchange of goods and services simply because you don't like what is being bought or sold or because "they would make too much money"? Who gave you or I the right to interfere with those two people? Provided that they are not trampling on the Bill of Rights by engaging in their transactions then I have no problem with that and neither should you. The world is a f***ed up place because nosey people, religious conservatives on the right and tax and spend liberals on the left, go around poking their collective noses into the personal affairs and business of other people when, frankly, it is none of their damn business. There are very few transactions that should be outright prohibited (i.e. no WMDs, slavery, contract killing, and the like) and other than those limited prohibitions, by mutual agreement of rational people everywhere, there should be no undue encumbrances or restrictions on private commerce.
We already have hear of that the extremly abrasive qualities of the lunar soil. That soil that will find its way into the telescope (especially bad for any moving parts.) I was going to mention the exact problem and it does has the potential to be a problem because, as you mention, lunar dust is extremely abbrasive and fine (imagine sub micron rock particulate with razor sharp and hooked edges because it has never been eroded by wind or water) so it tends to damage or compromise any softer materials that it comes into contact with. However, upon further reflection I believe that the problem, in this case, would be manageable for the following reasons:
(a) The telescopes and related equipment, or at least the parts directly in conctact with the lunar surface, will not be moving around after touchdown so the amount of dust that gets disturbed should be minimal and landing air bags (ala the mars missions) should help shield any sensitive parts during the landing cycle. the parts that do move will not disturb the dust because they will not be in direct contact with the lunar surface AND there are no air currents or other atmospheric effects on the moon to whip up dust from parts moving around (even if they are only millimeters above average surface elevation) which are not in direct contact with the lunar surface.
(b) radio telescopes can be made out of metals and durable plastics without the need for sensitive optics such as finely ground glass lenses so the danger from abbrasive lunar dust could be minimized in this regard by judicious use of durable and hardened parts.
The micrometeorites are a more serious issue. There have been subsequent pictures taken by probes of known Apollo landing sites which reveal new small craters (i.e. craters which occurred near the landing sites in between the time when the probes took the pictures and when the Apollo astronauts left the moon on the ascent stages of their landing vehicles). It is possible that many smaller meteorites have struck the Apollo lander descent stages that were left behind on the moon (although nobody can be sure because they are too small to resolve individually on the lunar surface by telescope and nobody has gone back since to check on their condition). However, even with this potential problem the radio telescope offers an interesting solution.
The individual telescope elements of the radio telescope are less important than the network of them which makes up the whole. This why radio telescopes on earth, such as the very long baseline array, with stations on different continents aggregated together into a single "picture", are distributed rather then building one VERY large singular dish (i.e. one half the size of earth). The individual telescope elements on the moon could be replaced with new ones as needed if individual units, for whatever reason, become non-operable.
They could make a think tank like Xerox PARC with all the engineers they could hire for a fraction of the cost. And it would be a safer investment because what's to stop those engineers from just quiting after the buyout? $40 billion could be better spent. That may be true, but one additional advantage of buying Yahoo outright, as opposed to simply poaching their top talent, is that a very large competitor ceases to be a competitor and the market becomes more consolidated between two (2) major players (i.e. Google and Microsoft + Yahoo) which creates substantial barriers to entry to new competitors of the garage startup kind. Buying out the competition to control the market is a time honored tradition in American business with a fairly good track record at least as far as future profits are concerned.
What does capitalism and competitiveness drive us to do? Cut corners, often. Perhaps, but there are two sides to that coin. It is only through new problems or challenges and the competition to solve or overcome them that we move forward as a species. If there is no competition, no risk taking, and no ambition then we are just as likely to become overly cautious naval gazers, afraid undertake even the most trivial of tasks or miniscule riks in the name of progress. I agree with the ideas in Feynman's paper and Gustavo's blog, but the problem is not capitalism or competitiveness per se but rather foolishness on the part of the uninformed, whether they be NASA managers, corporate executives, or software engineers, and that can happen under any system. So why discount competitiveness entirely when a balanced approach has higher expected value? We can have more of both innovation and quality, provided that we are wise enough to navigate the optimal course.
Perhaps the astronauts use the mosquito ringtone to prevent those pesky grown up ground controllers from knowing when a text message with the answer rings through...
Someone needs to explain how distribution channels can legally divert these phones away. The real world, and particularly the world outside of North America, the British Isles, and Western Europe, is not very much concerned about what the laws say, but rather where to make a profit and how much. In many of those other parts of the world the only laws are the law of the gun and the law of money. How can they legally divert the phones away? They just do it and don't worry about the legality of the matter. What is Apple going to do? Move production away from China? Where else would they move it to that is even remotely as profitable for them even with the knockoffs, smuggling, and all of the rest?
I would imagine all that they would have to do is take a small random sampling of the traffic from any one customer, and if it finds P2P packets, simply throttle everything on that line. Encryption makes that impossible, that is the point. The only part of the TCP or UDP packet that is open to inspection is the generic header which tells the ISP nothing about the contents of the packet since the payload is encrypted (could be FTP, HTTPS, Bittorrent, SMTP, or anything...the payload is gobbly gooked and seemingly random...it is encrypted). The ISP could try and cut off all of the "high volume" users (which they are doing already) but as people become acustomed to youtube and other video on demand services they will not put up with quantity filtering. Encryption forces the ISP to take a hard line against ALL high volume users, not just P2P users, because it will be impossible to seperate out who exactly is doing what with all of the encryption.
The bittorent devs have the upper hand, at least for the forseable future, because of strong crypto like AES, Serpent, and Twofish for symmetric session traffic and strong public key crypto like RSA to handle the handshakes and symmetric key exchanges. The only response of the ISP is to try and automate Man in the Middle (MITM), but that will be extremely difficult and expensive to implement in practice. Remember that Comcast was throttling bandwidth to cut costs on network upgrades so why would they spend exponentially more on new specialized crypto hardware and software to MITM the handshakes on bittorent sessions if they are too cheap to even upgrade their network? Unless and until there are substantial advances in cryptanalyis (as far as I know there have been no substantial improvements on known attacks in recent years, minor optimizations here and there but not enough to really put a dent in the crypto) or quantum computers become cheap and practical, encryption will provide a very strong defense against network filtering, particularly when it is combined with port randomization. That is why it is in the best Interests of Comcast and other ISPs NOT to escalate by engaging in packet filtering. They will only hasten the development of bittorent clients with strong crypto, as they are doing here, AND draw attention to these new "super" clients that are not "slow".
Ah, no. I think they have been doing what they can do deter non-paying people from accessing adult material. Bingo. This is a clear case of rent seeking on the part of Vivid. They don't like all of the competition in their industry so they are lobbying the government to throw up barriers to entry by imposing regulation and licensing. This is the same reason why cosmetologists are licensed, taxicabs have medallions, and labor unions lobby for the minimum wage. They claim to be concerned about workers, customers, or even the children but in reality they are concerned with protecting themselves from competition and using the power of the government to do it.
Defending an idea because some people deserve it is like saying because some adults are terrorists we should all be watched The UK is among the most "watched" countries in the world. There are thousands of automated video surveillance cameras in public places all over London and in other populated areas linked to facial recognition technology and databases of known "trouble makers". The police watch these cameras constantly and anyone can be recorded at any time. So this is apparently a fairly common defense in the UK or else why is half of London under constant surveillance by the authorities? Big brother is watching.
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Unless they want to disallow encrypted traffic (i.e. any traffic that they cannot decipher) entirely or squelch the amounts then what are they going to do about it? Probably nothing. It is also useful to look at the whole P2P blocking issue from an economic standpoint. What are the interests of the ISPs in this? They would like to preserve, to the extent possible, the perception of "good speed" for all of their users which might imply some mitigation measures merely to improve that value proposition for their customers...up to a point. However, the mitigation measures will have increasing marginal costs as more and more detection, protocol analysis, and monitoring hardware and software is purchased and installed until it gets to a point where it is cheaper to add more bandwidth (i.e. network capacity) than it is to invest in ever more expensive mitigation and monitoring equipment. The ISPs would also like to be protected from liability for what happens on their networks (or at least they should want this if they are smart...the MAFIAA lawyers would LOVE to be able to sue AT&T and Verizon for "allowing" P2P to continue on their networks) both as a hedge against expensive copyright infringement lawsuits AND even MORE burdensome government regulation of their business (i.e they are regulated already but additional regulation and the attendant costs would be unwelcome indeed to the ISPs and their investors). Finally, they would like to increase their customer base and if "content" is what brings in more paying ISP customers then secretly (although these companies would never admit it publicly) they would probably prefer to preserve the status quo of P2P if that keeps their subscribers coming back each month with those fees.
How was this post moded insightful? Has the poster even used .NET? You could just as well argue that Java ripped off C++ and that C++ ripped of C and so on all the way back to Algol which could be argued to have ripped off previous languages. All programming environments and languages owe a debt to the ones that have come before. However, even putting that part of the argument aside the major innovation of .NET was the the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Common Type System (CTS). The IL assembly idea was implemented in Java as well, but Java was limited to well Java and although there were attempts to compile other languages into Java assembly byte codes they were a limited success at best because of the lack of a common type loading and description mechanism which made it difficult to reproduce types that could be reused in a Java program at the programming language level (i.e. it might run in the VM even though you wrote it in Eifel and compiled it to Java bytecode, but try adding that compiled library back into your Java solution and using the "classes" and "methods" in Java code and you will see the potential shortcomings). It was not enough to have a common virtual assembly. In order to achieve meaningful cross platform and cross language programming there needed to be a common type description and initialization system built on top of the virtual assembly language and that is the idea that .NET brought to the table.
Precisely. The Chinese are NOT dunces when it comes to reverse engineering chip designs or other technology to get around restrictions. Why do people suppose that the US government was so concerned about our spy aircraft falling into their hands in even a semi-intact state? They will bypass these restrictions just as easily as a hot knife bypasses a lock made of butter which it might as well be for all the good that this "lock" will do.
how about NO welfare for individuals OR corporations (private charity is alright...it is your money after all) and let the chips fall where they may? Obviously some people (the stronger ones probably) survived before the age of tax and spend big government or we wouldn't be here now. I am a small government Libertarian btw, not a Republican, but the Dems control Congress right now and Congress controls the purse, so it is really up to the Dems who gets bailed out...or not.
Maybe I am way off base here but it seems to me that the value of the real property (i.e. land plus fixed buildings) should be the present value of the expected rents, perhaps taking into account the possibility of periods of vacancy and variable rents for greater accuracy, OR if one is planning on living in the buildings (i.e. primary residence) then the value should be compared against the present value of expected rents that one would pay for an alternative perhaps also weighed against what one could earn by investing the difference between purchasing and renting (i.e. the opportunity cost).
If a house is costing you money each month instead of putting money in your pocket then you have to weigh the value of home ownership against alternative uses for that money (i.e. investing in something else) over a similar time period, which in housing is generally long term. The historic average return for residential real estate in the United States during the twentieth century, adjusted for inflation, was something like 1-2% which is actually pretty bad compared with alternative investments. A lot of people, as it turns out, overpaid for their primary residences in recent years and now they are screaming for the government to bail them so that they can 'stay in their home' except it was never really their home in the first place once you factor in all of the negative amortization, high purchase prices, and adjustable rate interest only loan payments...they were basically renters. Hopefully the government will not reward the the unscrupulous mortgage brokers (who knew what they were doing all along), but just as important they shouldn't reward people for signing stupid loans by bailing them out of their mortgage with taxpayer money. The whole 'predatory lending' thing is utter bullcrap, nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to sign the loan and if they couldn't understand the terms then they should have hired a CPA or independent professional to get a second opinion on the contract before they signed on the dotted line. If they find themselves in trouble now then they need to declare bankruptcy and learn a tough lesson about life.
My concern is that the Dems will bail people out with my tax money, once again rewarding the spendthrifts and fools while punishing the honest, hardworking, and diligent people who try to save and invest their money instead of rushing headlong into a bad deal and then screaming for the government to throw them a life preserver when they get in over their heads. Reward the spenders and punish the savers. It never fails in the United States and especially not during an election year...sigh.
Now you understand what we supporters of the second amendment have being saying all along. It is right and indeed patriotic for the citizens to question and even to mistrust the government, our founders certainly did. In an age where elections can be stolen and the constitution is ignored we are falling ever farther away from the principles upon which this nation was founded. Hopefully we will find a way to slow and reverse our descent into tyranny, but I tell you that there are times when the situation appears grim.
It only requires administrative rights to use if you are trying to use it on another computer besides your own laptop while traveling, but anyone who does that without the dip switch set to write protect and the entire volume encrypted is just asking for trouble anyway. The ideal solution is to simply encrypt the entire volume on the USB thumb drive and then set the dip switch to write protect when it is not plugged into your laptop OR you are not using it for writes. That way if the thumb drive is lost it will be useless, other than as a storage device, to anyone who finds it (i.e. they may format it and use it themselves but your data will be safe). Why would you want to trust the closed source USB thumb drive vendor's encryption software when TrueCrypt is usable, powerful, proven, and open source? In fact, if I were a thumb drive manufacturer then I would simply distribute TrueCrypt with my thumb drives and be done with it.
Yes, the artists will receive a "fair" share of the NET profits which will be either zero or asymptotically as close as they can get to zero (i.e. one (1) cent cheques for each artist under contract w/an RIAA member label) after the expenses are subtracted from the total lawsuit revenues.
So what is your point? That two people should not be able to enter into a private contract for the exchange of goods and services simply because you don't like what is being bought or sold or because "they would make too much money"? Who gave you or I the right to interfere with those two people? Provided that they are not trampling on the Bill of Rights by engaging in their transactions then I have no problem with that and neither should you. The world is a f***ed up place because nosey people, religious conservatives on the right and tax and spend liberals on the left, go around poking their collective noses into the personal affairs and business of other people when, frankly, it is none of their damn business. There are very few transactions that should be outright prohibited (i.e. no WMDs, slavery, contract killing, and the like) and other than those limited prohibitions, by mutual agreement of rational people everywhere, there should be no undue encumbrances or restrictions on private commerce.
(a) The telescopes and related equipment, or at least the parts directly in conctact with the lunar surface, will not be moving around after touchdown so the amount of dust that gets disturbed should be minimal and landing air bags (ala the mars missions) should help shield any sensitive parts during the landing cycle. the parts that do move will not disturb the dust because they will not be in direct contact with the lunar surface AND there are no air currents or other atmospheric effects on the moon to whip up dust from parts moving around (even if they are only millimeters above average surface elevation) which are not in direct contact with the lunar surface.
(b) radio telescopes can be made out of metals and durable plastics without the need for sensitive optics such as finely ground glass lenses so the danger from abbrasive lunar dust could be minimized in this regard by judicious use of durable and hardened parts.
The micrometeorites are a more serious issue. There have been subsequent pictures taken by probes of known Apollo landing sites which reveal new small craters (i.e. craters which occurred near the landing sites in between the time when the probes took the pictures and when the Apollo astronauts left the moon on the ascent stages of their landing vehicles). It is possible that many smaller meteorites have struck the Apollo lander descent stages that were left behind on the moon (although nobody can be sure because they are too small to resolve individually on the lunar surface by telescope and nobody has gone back since to check on their condition). However, even with this potential problem the radio telescope offers an interesting solution.
The individual telescope elements of the radio telescope are less important than the network of them which makes up the whole. This why radio telescopes on earth, such as the very long baseline array, with stations on different continents aggregated together into a single "picture", are distributed rather then building one VERY large singular dish (i.e. one half the size of earth). The individual telescope elements on the moon could be replaced with new ones as needed if individual units, for whatever reason, become non-operable.
This must be what they mean when they say, "The fool and his money are soon parted."
Perhaps the astronauts use the mosquito ringtone to prevent those pesky grown up ground controllers from knowing when a text message with the answer rings through...
The bittorent devs have the upper hand, at least for the forseable future, because of strong crypto like AES, Serpent, and Twofish for symmetric session traffic and strong public key crypto like RSA to handle the handshakes and symmetric key exchanges. The only response of the ISP is to try and automate Man in the Middle (MITM), but that will be extremely difficult and expensive to implement in practice. Remember that Comcast was throttling bandwidth to cut costs on network upgrades so why would they spend exponentially more on new specialized crypto hardware and software to MITM the handshakes on bittorent sessions if they are too cheap to even upgrade their network? Unless and until there are substantial advances in cryptanalyis (as far as I know there have been no substantial improvements on known attacks in recent years, minor optimizations here and there but not enough to really put a dent in the crypto) or quantum computers become cheap and practical, encryption will provide a very strong defense against network filtering, particularly when it is combined with port randomization. That is why it is in the best Interests of Comcast and other ISPs NOT to escalate by engaging in packet filtering. They will only hasten the development of bittorent clients with strong crypto, as they are doing here, AND draw attention to these new "super" clients that are not "slow".