Your final point is an important one: people who grow up accustomed to low quality (or reliability) will tolerate far more than those who grew up with higher quality.
I've worked in telecom for 15 years and I frequently hear people spout that they switched to VoIP/SIP and saved lots of money. You talk to their staff people (who use the service daily, not the ones who make the financial decisions) and they'll admit to inconsistent quality. For a personal/home account, that loss of quality is a viable trade-off. But if you're running a business, you have to consider the affect on your communications with your clients. If your client calls regularly and half the time gets a low quality voice connection, in a subtle way, their opinion of your company declines.
Ultimately, just how a low a quality can we tolerate? (note that I am NOT talking about the speed of the service the voice runs over, just the voice connection quality) I am often appalled at the quality of cell calls - I struggle to understand words that are cut short or experience some sort of distortion, reducing me to guess based on context. Isn't this a race to the bottom, where everyone eventually will lose, except those who control the services from on-high? (Don't forget that downward pressure on prices eventually leads to downward pressure on your wages)
[further analogies can be made to low cost (and thus low quality) electronics that are only designed to last a short time before you have to pay again for a replacement]
OK, but a 'robot' that was small enough to carry around with you would seem unlikely to produce much power. (The article implied a small robot - maybe I'm incorrect.) Maybe just enough to occasionally charge your cellphone? You're gonna carry around a bag of pee to charge your cell?
I somehow hoped for something (ultimately) on a larger scale.
I didn't realize that compounds found in urine (a waste product, after all) contained enough convertible energy to make the net work output worthwhile. After all, you have to take into consideration the energy expended in gathering and transporting the urine to the robot. The article also mentions using waste water - waste water from what? Is the world just full of all kinds of energy sources that are being discarded, or are we finally realizing that what was once considered 'marginal' capacity for energy harvesting is worth pursuing, since much of the low-hanging fruit (e.g. easily-accessible oil deposits) has already been picked?
(Obligatory comment: I, for one, welcome our new urine-sipping robot overlords. What's that you say? You need several samples for my employment pre-screening?)
OK, so you've had your genome sequenced (or whatever) and determined there might be a problem. Isn't that nature's way of saying 'sit this one out'?
Rather than encourage society to devote so many resources to finding new ways to let you make a baby, how about adopting? There are soooo many deserving children out there who are aching for a home. They already exist - they already have the need.
Don't fiddle with nature - do the simpler thing and bring an existing child into your life.
"The wave is being considered 'complex' and is believed to have been caused 'the slumping at the continental shelf east of New Jersey' or a strong storm according to the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center."
How is it that they need a center on the West Coast to determine that it was something off the coast of Jersey that caused it?
Are they spending too much time watching the Jersey Shore and not enough time watching the shore of Jersey?
Wouldn't it have been better if they did NOT announce to the world that they found this new city until they *knew* that the gov't could secure it against looters?
I mean, now that this 'unlooted site' has been announced, isn't it just a matter of time before someone loots it?
Banks used a motif in his Culture books that I wish we saw more of in Sci-Fi: a future where (almost) everyone's basic needs of life were taken care of. No poverty or war (most of the time). You didn't have to take a crappy job just to put food on the table and live in some tiny apartment.
This allows the author to explore the potential the human mind and society have if you remove the day-to-day worry of survival. We are, as a species, capable of so much more than just 'survival' and 'business efficiencies' and minimal laws governing what large corporations/governments can do to us. Banks pondered new ideas about what we could dream up if freed from daily worry. New ways of living, thinking in very broad vistas (over time and space), exploring what is possible beyond the body we were born with. Wondering what it would be like to be another gender or species? Make the change! Want to enjoy (truly) exotic adventures, but still maintain a good chance of surviving it? The Culture's got you covered!
I believe that our (unfortunately necessary) focus on survival in our present world draws off energy and creativity that could be applied to expanding what it means to be human. It's nice to read an author who wants to speculate about what might lie beyond our present existence.
Why are you continuing to run a set-up that, by your own admission, is a great hassle ameliorated by a once in blue moon event?
Part of the reason is granular control of incoming mail filtering (before my POP client - where I prefer it), part is a desire to feel like my personal mail is not sitting on someone else's machine.
Both reasons are more personal/subjective rather than rational/objective. Not advocating that everyone do it, just something I feel is the best choice for me.
I've hosted my own mail server for about 15 years and I regularly think to myself, 'I'm tired of worrying about hardware and my circuit. Maybe I should let somebody else host it.'
Then it seems there's always an article like this that clears my head.
For decades, Kodak was a technology company. Maybe not 'high tech' by a slashdot definition, but their film and paper production and (at one time) optics tech was world renowned. Even today, any company, anywhere in the world, would be hard-pressed to create a production line with the tight controls that Kodak insisted on. They did ongoing research in materials and chemistry for almost 100 years.
Assuming they stay in a slide, what becomes of all that tech? Will the patents just get distributed to the highest bidders? And will the tech ever get used again?
OK, so I'm labeling myself as a throw-back to earlier times, but it is sad to see any venture, that attained such a height, brought low and then just... dissipated.
I think that being a publicly-traded company also hemmed them in.
One (unlikely) path would have been to decide to become a niche player in much smaller markets. Film and paper are NOT going away entirely - there have been other companies (Ilford/Harmon, Fuji, Foma) that have offered (and continue to offer) competition in the film space. But Kodak is big, and shareholders are not going to respond well to being told that management believes there is a niche market in which Kodak could continue for years, albeit as a much smaller company with much smaller value. (Kodak has some of the best film manufacturing technology, equipment and expertise in the world, all but the ongoing labor already paid for)
The 'needs' of shareholders force corp management in some directions, which may have short-term but not long-term benefit. Jobs was able to turn Apple around because he could bully everyone - if management had listened to shareholders, would Apple have survived?
I work for a telecom company with thousands of miles of fiber and you'd be surprised how 'tasty' some cable seems to be to other rodents like squirrels. While not common, a year going by without squirrel damage would seem very odd.
Of course, drunk hunters do far more damage during hunting season. You'd think the cable had little bulls-eyes printed on the sheathing...
Maybe I'm the exception, and maybe it's because my requirements are minimal. But I've admin'd email systems for 15+ years and lately, just for myself and a few friends/family.
Piece of cake. Run EIMS on an old Mac, sit it behind a big firewall, big UPS. I have been way aggressive when writing filter rules regarding other countries. (I probably block 200M IP addresses permanently.) I was lucky to get virgin IP space years ago and have clung to it. (I've had a T1 to the house for over a decade.)
No fancy interface (I only use POP), very simple software, no frills, but very dependable.
"If current rates hold, only 6% of the U.S. population will still be served by the public switched telephone network by the end of 2018.
(Disclaimer: I work for a landline company)
You are assuming that 'everyone' wants this, including retirees, people in rural areas, people who just don't need broadband and know it. You assume that the cellular/VoIP offerings will be as robust as the PSTN. You also assume that, if the landline business is 'dissolved', these other networks can take over the load.
Do you know who connects those cell towers? Those towers don't talk to each other wirelessly, they use terrestrial copper/fiber. If you sunset the network that keeps the copper/fiber infrastructure in reasonably good shape, the economics of maintaining the cellular network change, driving up costs significantly.
And please, don't maintain that there is quality parity between these types of services/networks: I have had so many conversations with business owners who tried using VoIP-based services for their dialtone and came running back to the PSTN because their customers complained about voice quality and dropped calls. Also note that while many government agencies have adopted VoIP internally, they recognize that they must have a reliable network to serve the public, especially for emergency services, and thus the vast majority stick with the PSTN for dialtone.
The PSTN and the Internet are both great networks, but they were built on different premises and with different (internal) priorities. One is really good at low-latency communications, one is very good at network survivability.
I'm not a Luddite suggesting that we throw away new technologies, but I'm also not some knee-jerk hype-meister of What's Hot Now. Both networks have their place and will coexist for many years to come.
For those of you who are not familiar with Apple history, they already did this. I think it was 1993. They created an all-in-one model that included a TV tuner. 32MHz cpu and 8MB of RAM, IIRC. 14" monitor and all-black case.
If we can detect broadcast emissions that indicate that sitcoms, game shows and reality shows were once broadcast, but have all now disappeared, that would seem to indicate a 'civilization' has finally developed.
There will be instances where it makes sense to be open and honest in your online dealings (close friends, your bank account, your work accounts). Trying to cover up your real identity in those instances could have negative consequences. (explaining to your bank that you really are the Rip Torn on the account...)
But in instances where you are dealing with strangers, and you may never deal with them again, obfuscate as much as possible.
I (like many here) run my own mail server. I must have 250 accounts on it right now, as I make up a new account for each online entity. (allows you to delete that account if you start getting spam, etc.) Having that many accounts also dilutes the meta data about you in large databases.
If you don't have one already, get a P.O. Box. If you sign up to have some piece of lit delivered, have it sent to the P.O. Box and use an alias for a name. I get lots of mail addressed to many different names - the Post Office gets used to it. Again, it dilutes the info about you in databases.
Think about how you are going to interact with each new online entity (entity meaning store, blog, media, etc.) before you type your first word. There are few places online that really need to know about you - they may want to know about you, but they don't need to.
I think it goes without saying to watch your cookies and javascript at new sites. (I am always amazed how a single site can have 15 javascripts from other sites. Gives me the creeps.)
I'm not saying you can escape entirely, but, like an earlier poster said, it's not about whether they know, but how they use that info. And if the info is less accurate and more diffuse, it is less valuable and slightly less likely to be used in a way you don't like.
I've run mail servers for 15 years and always struggle with how to filter out the mountains of spam. One way is to selectively block IP blocks based on the history of that space. For Comcast, I find out the IP space of their legit mail servers and whitelist that space. Then, I blacklist all their other IP space.
Why? Just as folks looking to build a botnet look to Comcast for fresh meat, those of us protecting mail servers from spam look to Comcast as the first place to block. There's just too much crud that comes in from that space.
To be fair, many of us block a *lot* of other IP space in our quest to control spam. I block entire countries - why accept mail from a country you are 99.999% unlikely to be sent legit mail from?
Your best bet might be to convince Verizon to allow port 25 out. You may have to pay for that privilege - welcome to the work of real mail servers.
Without naming names, I work for a telecom that supplies Google with bandwidth in Oregon. It is absolutely the case that every year we have to repair some sort of long-haul infrastructure that has been shot up by hunters/drunk idiots/whoever. It doesn't relate directly to Google - these morons will shoot at anything handy that makes an easy target. It's usually in a rural or wilderness type area, and it can takes hours or days to get it repaired. It's one of the (small) reasons that maintaining a long-haul fiber network is expensive - you're buying new fiber/enclosures/electronics whether you want to or not.
VoIP, while an interesting and disruptive technology, is not quite ready for ALL voice applications. Some thoughts;
It is frequently easy to tell when you are speaking to someone using VoIP. Clipped high and low tones, often choppy like a bad cell call. Most businesses will not want their customers having that experience talking to them. Residential is fine - those customers are just looking for cheap, cheap, cheap. Many businesses are concerned with appearances, and a bad call experience can sour a sale in a competitive marketplace.
Many (most?) alarm companies cannot successfully run alarms (fire, elevator, burglar) over VoIP lines. Not sure if it's latency, compression or what, but I have heard this complaint MANY times from various security (alarm) company people. In some states, doing so is actually against the law.
911 routinng - have all the 911 PSAP routing issues been resolved with VoIP? This is a biggie that most people switching to VoIP don't consider.
Your Internet connection goes down, your voice is gone. One thing you can say about the PSTN is that it is pretty dependable. In all my years (I have some gray hair) it has been rare that I have trouble with a POTS line.
VoIP has its uses - I'm not denying that. But the landline network will not disappear overnight, this year, or even this decade.
Does anyone know which brand(s) of PBX were 'hacked'? Were these 'traditional' PBX's or were many (most?) of them VoIP systems?
I work for a telco and we notice that the vendors who have IT backgrounds often decide that voice is just another kind of data, and frequently have trouble setting up PBX's (like Asterisk). (You ask them if they'd like that PRI as NI-2 Standard and they just mumble at you.)
Slashdot Mirror
Your final point is an important one: people who grow up accustomed to low quality (or reliability) will tolerate far more than those who grew up with higher quality.
I've worked in telecom for 15 years and I frequently hear people spout that they switched to VoIP/SIP and saved lots of money. You talk to their staff people (who use the service daily, not the ones who make the financial decisions) and they'll admit to inconsistent quality. For a personal/home account, that loss of quality is a viable trade-off. But if you're running a business, you have to consider the affect on your communications with your clients. If your client calls regularly and half the time gets a low quality voice connection, in a subtle way, their opinion of your company declines.
Ultimately, just how a low a quality can we tolerate? (note that I am NOT talking about the speed of the service the voice runs over, just the voice connection quality) I am often appalled at the quality of cell calls - I struggle to understand words that are cut short or experience some sort of distortion, reducing me to guess based on context. Isn't this a race to the bottom, where everyone eventually will lose, except those who control the services from on-high? (Don't forget that downward pressure on prices eventually leads to downward pressure on your wages)
[further analogies can be made to low cost (and thus low quality) electronics that are only designed to last a short time before you have to pay again for a replacement]
Your robot is also your urinal.
OK, but a 'robot' that was small enough to carry around with you would seem unlikely to produce much power. (The article implied a small robot - maybe I'm incorrect.) Maybe just enough to occasionally charge your cellphone? You're gonna carry around a bag of pee to charge your cell?
I somehow hoped for something (ultimately) on a larger scale.
I didn't realize that compounds found in urine (a waste product, after all) contained enough convertible energy to make the net work output worthwhile. After all, you have to take into consideration the energy expended in gathering and transporting the urine to the robot. The article also mentions using waste water - waste water from what? Is the world just full of all kinds of energy sources that are being discarded, or are we finally realizing that what was once considered 'marginal' capacity for energy harvesting is worth pursuing, since much of the low-hanging fruit (e.g. easily-accessible oil deposits) has already been picked?
(Obligatory comment: I, for one, welcome our new urine-sipping robot overlords. What's that you say? You need several samples for my employment pre-screening?)
I guess I'm still stuck asking why?
OK, so you've had your genome sequenced (or whatever) and determined there might be a problem. Isn't that nature's way of saying 'sit this one out'?
Rather than encourage society to devote so many resources to finding new ways to let you make a baby, how about adopting? There are soooo many deserving children out there who are aching for a home. They already exist - they already have the need.
Don't fiddle with nature - do the simpler thing and bring an existing child into your life.
"The wave is being considered 'complex' and is believed to have been caused 'the slumping at the continental shelf east of New Jersey' or a strong storm according to the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center."
How is it that they need a center on the West Coast to determine that it was something off the coast of Jersey that caused it?
Are they spending too much time watching the Jersey Shore and not enough time watching the shore of Jersey?
Wouldn't it have been better if they did NOT announce to the world that they found this new city until they *knew* that the gov't could secure it against looters?
I mean, now that this 'unlooted site' has been announced, isn't it just a matter of time before someone loots it?
Banks used a motif in his Culture books that I wish we saw more of in Sci-Fi: a future where (almost) everyone's basic needs of life were taken care of. No poverty or war (most of the time). You didn't have to take a crappy job just to put food on the table and live in some tiny apartment.
This allows the author to explore the potential the human mind and society have if you remove the day-to-day worry of survival. We are, as a species, capable of so much more than just 'survival' and 'business efficiencies' and minimal laws governing what large corporations/governments can do to us. Banks pondered new ideas about what we could dream up if freed from daily worry. New ways of living, thinking in very broad vistas (over time and space), exploring what is possible beyond the body we were born with. Wondering what it would be like to be another gender or species? Make the change! Want to enjoy (truly) exotic adventures, but still maintain a good chance of surviving it? The Culture's got you covered!
I believe that our (unfortunately necessary) focus on survival in our present world draws off energy and creativity that could be applied to expanding what it means to be human. It's nice to read an author who wants to speculate about what might lie beyond our present existence.
Banks will be sorely missed.
Welcome our new Giant Robot Jellyfish Overloads and... oh never mind
I believe the article alludes to the diameter of the eyes having a 6mm difference, not the radius.
A 6mm radial difference would be a 12mm diameter difference, which would be... practically Manga.
Why are you continuing to run a set-up that, by your own admission, is a great hassle ameliorated by a once in blue moon event?
Part of the reason is granular control of incoming mail filtering (before my POP client - where I prefer it), part is a desire to feel like my personal mail is not sitting on someone else's machine.
Both reasons are more personal/subjective rather than rational/objective. Not advocating that everyone do it, just something I feel is the best choice for me.
I've hosted my own mail server for about 15 years and I regularly think to myself, 'I'm tired of worrying about hardware and my circuit. Maybe I should let somebody else host it.'
Then it seems there's always an article like this that clears my head.
For decades, Kodak was a technology company. Maybe not 'high tech' by a slashdot definition, but their film and paper production and (at one time) optics tech was world renowned. Even today, any company, anywhere in the world, would be hard-pressed to create a production line with the tight controls that Kodak insisted on. They did ongoing research in materials and chemistry for almost 100 years.
Assuming they stay in a slide, what becomes of all that tech? Will the patents just get distributed to the highest bidders? And will the tech ever get used again?
OK, so I'm labeling myself as a throw-back to earlier times, but it is sad to see any venture, that attained such a height, brought low and then just ... dissipated.
I think that being a publicly-traded company also hemmed them in.
One (unlikely) path would have been to decide to become a niche player in much smaller markets. Film and paper are NOT going away entirely - there have been other companies (Ilford/Harmon, Fuji, Foma) that have offered (and continue to offer) competition in the film space. But Kodak is big, and shareholders are not going to respond well to being told that management believes there is a niche market in which Kodak could continue for years, albeit as a much smaller company with much smaller value. (Kodak has some of the best film manufacturing technology, equipment and expertise in the world, all but the ongoing labor already paid for)
The 'needs' of shareholders force corp management in some directions, which may have short-term but not long-term benefit. Jobs was able to turn Apple around because he could bully everyone - if management had listened to shareholders, would Apple have survived?
I work for a telecom company with thousands of miles of fiber and you'd be surprised how 'tasty' some cable seems to be to other rodents like squirrels. While not common, a year going by without squirrel damage would seem very odd.
Of course, drunk hunters do far more damage during hunting season. You'd think the cable had little bulls-eyes printed on the sheathing...
Maybe I'm the exception, and maybe it's because my requirements are minimal. But I've admin'd email systems for 15+ years and lately, just for myself and a few friends/family.
Piece of cake. Run EIMS on an old Mac, sit it behind a big firewall, big UPS. I have been way aggressive when writing filter rules regarding other countries. (I probably block 200M IP addresses permanently.) I was lucky to get virgin IP space years ago and have clung to it. (I've had a T1 to the house for over a decade.)
No fancy interface (I only use POP), very simple software, no frills, but very dependable.
Uh-oh, I've become an EIMS fanboy...
"If current rates hold, only 6% of the U.S. population will still be served by the public switched telephone network by the end of 2018.
(Disclaimer: I work for a landline company)
You are assuming that 'everyone' wants this, including retirees, people in rural areas, people who just don't need broadband and know it. You assume that the cellular/VoIP offerings will be as robust as the PSTN. You also assume that, if the landline business is 'dissolved', these other networks can take over the load.
Do you know who connects those cell towers? Those towers don't talk to each other wirelessly, they use terrestrial copper/fiber. If you sunset the network that keeps the copper/fiber infrastructure in reasonably good shape, the economics of maintaining the cellular network change, driving up costs significantly.
And please, don't maintain that there is quality parity between these types of services/networks: I have had so many conversations with business owners who tried using VoIP-based services for their dialtone and came running back to the PSTN because their customers complained about voice quality and dropped calls. Also note that while many government agencies have adopted VoIP internally, they recognize that they must have a reliable network to serve the public, especially for emergency services, and thus the vast majority stick with the PSTN for dialtone.
The PSTN and the Internet are both great networks, but they were built on different premises and with different (internal) priorities. One is really good at low-latency communications, one is very good at network survivability.
I'm not a Luddite suggesting that we throw away new technologies, but I'm also not some knee-jerk hype-meister of What's Hot Now. Both networks have their place and will coexist for many years to come.
For those of you who are not familiar with Apple history, they already did this. I think it was 1993. They created an all-in-one model that included a TV tuner. 32MHz cpu and 8MB of RAM, IIRC. 14" monitor and all-black case.
They did not sell well.
If we can detect broadcast emissions that indicate that sitcoms, game shows and reality shows were once broadcast, but have all now disappeared, that would seem to indicate a 'civilization' has finally developed.
OK, so maybe History was not my best subject in school, but I don't recall there being cars rolling around the roads back during the Civil War.
Oh wait, there was that DeLorean...
There will be instances where it makes sense to be open and honest in your online dealings (close friends, your bank account, your work accounts). Trying to cover up your real identity in those instances could have negative consequences. (explaining to your bank that you really are the Rip Torn on the account...)
But in instances where you are dealing with strangers, and you may never deal with them again, obfuscate as much as possible.
I (like many here) run my own mail server. I must have 250 accounts on it right now, as I make up a new account for each online entity. (allows you to delete that account if you start getting spam, etc.) Having that many accounts also dilutes the meta data about you in large databases.
If you don't have one already, get a P.O. Box. If you sign up to have some piece of lit delivered, have it sent to the P.O. Box and use an alias for a name. I get lots of mail addressed to many different names - the Post Office gets used to it. Again, it dilutes the info about you in databases.
Think about how you are going to interact with each new online entity (entity meaning store, blog, media, etc.) before you type your first word. There are few places online that really need to know about you - they may want to know about you, but they don't need to.
I think it goes without saying to watch your cookies and javascript at new sites. (I am always amazed how a single site can have 15 javascripts from other sites. Gives me the creeps.)
I'm not saying you can escape entirely, but, like an earlier poster said, it's not about whether they know, but how they use that info. And if the info is less accurate and more diffuse, it is less valuable and slightly less likely to be used in a way you don't like.
Why? Just as folks looking to build a botnet look to Comcast for fresh meat, those of us protecting mail servers from spam look to Comcast as the first place to block. There's just too much crud that comes in from that space.
To be fair, many of us block a *lot* of other IP space in our quest to control spam. I block entire countries - why accept mail from a country you are 99.999% unlikely to be sent legit mail from?
Your best bet might be to convince Verizon to allow port 25 out. You may have to pay for that privilege - welcome to the work of real mail servers.
Without naming names, I work for a telecom that supplies Google with bandwidth in Oregon. It is absolutely the case that every year we have to repair some sort of long-haul infrastructure that has been shot up by hunters/drunk idiots/whoever. It doesn't relate directly to Google - these morons will shoot at anything handy that makes an easy target. It's usually in a rural or wilderness type area, and it can takes hours or days to get it repaired. It's one of the (small) reasons that maintaining a long-haul fiber network is expensive - you're buying new fiber/enclosures/electronics whether you want to or not.
VoIP, while an interesting and disruptive technology, is not quite ready for ALL voice applications. Some thoughts;
It is frequently easy to tell when you are speaking to someone using VoIP. Clipped high and low tones, often choppy like a bad cell call. Most businesses will not want their customers having that experience talking to them. Residential is fine - those customers are just looking for cheap, cheap, cheap. Many businesses are concerned with appearances, and a bad call experience can sour a sale in a competitive marketplace.
Many (most?) alarm companies cannot successfully run alarms (fire, elevator, burglar) over VoIP lines. Not sure if it's latency, compression or what, but I have heard this complaint MANY times from various security (alarm) company people. In some states, doing so is actually against the law.
911 routinng - have all the 911 PSAP routing issues been resolved with VoIP? This is a biggie that most people switching to VoIP don't consider.
Your Internet connection goes down, your voice is gone. One thing you can say about the PSTN is that it is pretty dependable. In all my years (I have some gray hair) it has been rare that I have trouble with a POTS line.
VoIP has its uses - I'm not denying that. But the landline network will not disappear overnight, this year, or even this decade.
Yes, the journalist was a tourist.
I work for a telco and we notice that the vendors who have IT backgrounds often decide that voice is just another kind of data, and frequently have trouble setting up PBX's (like Asterisk). (You ask them if they'd like that PRI as NI-2 Standard and they just mumble at you.)