The same is actually true when you pick up a rock and throw it, if you approximate the earth with a completely uniform sphere (which isn't a bad approximation).:)
The only thing is that the fact that lots of people are dying in Iraq isn't exactly front-page news. Sure, the details of any particular incident may come out, and I'm fine with that getting out as long as informants/etc aren't put in danger, or active operations aren't endangered.
However, nothing that wikileaks published really changed my view of what was happening in Iraq. I knew it was messed up.
So, I'd rather that they move on and hit the banks or whatever - at least that might trigger reform.
That said, I'd never go so far as to say that they wasted their time on Iraq, either.
It's so different that we know it cannot possibly be related to all of the other Earth life that we've known about thus far, as there is nothing in common.
Uh, so far I just see speculation that its DNA backbone is different.
Just the fact that it uses DNA at all makes me think that this has a lot more in common than not.
I think the jury is still out on multiple rounds of abiogenesis. What happens if they sequence its DNA and find out that half of it is sequentially similar to existing bacterial DNA, once you swap out the phosphorous atoms? Certainly you're not going to argue parallel evolution at the sequence level, right?
This is certainly news. However, for all we know some bacteria over time evolved a way to change its DNA chemistry. That isn't independent abiogenesis.
they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.
Citation, please. Not the part about discovering the new form of DNA. The part where scientists (and not just 1-3 of them) have already concluded that it is impossible for life to be based on this new form of DNA.
I've never heard any discussions on arsenate-based DNA, let alone that it is impossible for it to exist. Then again, I'm not an astrobiologist.
I don't think that anybody here is really suggesting that wikileaks shouldn't have published all of that stuff.
What annoys me with the site is that they UNPUBLISHED a bunch of stuff when they relased the Iraq war documents, and they remain offline to this day. It seems almost like a marketing decision (no need to distract the public with more than one scandal at a time).
It seems like the organization is more about marketing than getting info out.
I don't think anybody was sentenced by Nuremburg for shooting at armed soldiers who took cover around a corner after receiving fire from them, under the principle that they might or might not have run out of ammo.
Sure, if we were talking about soldiers walking around executing unarmed civilians, then I'd be happy to talk about lawful orders and all that.
These are soldiers returning fire after having been fired upon. If you don't want to get shot at, try not shooting first.
I guess that depends on your definition of drop. If you define it as accellerating towards the center of the earth, then they drop. If you define it has having their altitude decrease, then they may drop or ascend at various points in their orbit.
I'm certainly not a BGP expert, but I also agree that IPv6 is likely to compound the problem. More routable IPs means it is harder to route them.
This sounds a lot like all the issues that went into local-number-portability with the phone company.
It used to be that a phone number was basically a heirarchical routing system. If the number was 123-456-7890 the telco would look up who handles 123, and pass along the call. Then that switch would figure out who has 456, and so on.
Now that there is local number portability his breaks down. I can keep my area-code 123 number from Maine and use it in California. The result is that any time you dial a phone number there needs to be a central database lookup to figure out who owns the number, and where it might be. If the number is mobile it gets even more complicated, though I suspect that this becomes the wireless provider's headache.
Now, with phone numbers the problem is managable since there are only 32-bits worth in the US, and relatively few of those are actually ported. Numbers aren't portable internationally, so that is where it ends. Also, phone calls tend to be more channel-based, so the routing only happens once to open the channel, and then packets follow the same route (at least it used to work that way).
With IPv6 you can have WAY more address space than you could ever store in a database, so you need to limit route propagation even fairly high up the tree.
I think that we need to get rid of the concept of IPs as property, or as personal identifiers. That is what leads to route fragmentation in the first place.
I don't see flat namespace being that big a deal. If the distributed model just got you to the second-level domain it would probably be enough to cut out 99% of abuse. From there you just do a conventional DNS request to get the rest.
Sure, that does mean that the government can shutdown poor.boy.some.isp.com. However, they can't shut down wikileaks.org or any other second-level domain, which is of course where all the action tends to be.
Trust is the big problem. So, who is the legitimate owner of wikileaks.org ten years after it has been banned? Once you get rid of the central registry you end up with everybody having their own opinion, and at best you can do a weighted majority.
I suspect his concern is the fact that they took down everything but the Iraq and Cablegate documents. They used to have a huge variety of stuff on their website, but when I looked at it a week ago they did not.
That does tend to come across as being anti-US, even if that wasn't the intent.
The easiest solution is to just put back up the other stuff. By all means categorize it...
I meant that they could have put out a white flag before they ever fired a shot. Do you think a military platoon would shoot at somebody who just walked up to them carrying a white flag and no guns, following any instructions that they were given?
Once the fire started, then the burden is on the insurgents to figure out some way to effectively surrender, not on the soldier to figure out whether they may or may not be inclined to do so.
The storyteller probably did what he was trained to do - when you're shot at take cover and figure out how to kill the person who is shooting at you. That doesn't preclude accepting surrender, but it doesn't mean that you need to slow down your attack to allow for it.
I don't know if any war in history that was fought differently. If you shoot at a bunch of people that have guns then you better kill them, because otherwise they will probably kill you. If you're not happy with that, then don't buy a gun.
I won't argue with that, but if you're going to send troops to war, then you might as well equip them to win. Otherwise you're just wasting even more money, and lives.
For whatever reason nobody seems to be willing to stop the wars, so the only thing that remains is fighting them more effectively.
Don't blame me - I voted for people who were against the wars, and would have been likely to have greatly scaled them back by now. Alas, they didn't win...
Well, if their goal was to surrender then they should have stuck a white flag around the corner and not their rifles in the first place.
There is no requirement under international law to give somebody a chance to surrender. The insurgents chose to get into a fire-fight, and they lost. If they had instead surrendered then I'm sure that any applicable geneva convention rights would be respected.
And the reason that competition never materializes is that there is no possibility of competition. This is a natural monopoly. Comcast has already paid for all the local lines to the houses (usually on the taxpayer's dime). For another company to step in they need to:
1. Overcome legal barriers. There usually are many. 2. Run a TON of local infrastructure to every house in the area. 3. To do #2, take out a ton of loans, or spend a lot of cash that would otherwise be profits. 4. Try to make back enough money to make #3 worthwhile.
The problem with #4 is that Comcast will simply lower their rates closer to their marginal cost to compete. Then nobody bothers to sign up with the newcomer, or very few do. Then the newcomer either goes out of business, or sustains the business but never really makes any money as a result, showing a loss.
Sure, consumers IN THAT AREA do benefit from the lower rates. However, this is all just a fantasy since the potential competitor has accountants who can work out that #4 won't ever happen, so they never do #1-3 in the first place.
The cleanest solution is to treat natural monopolies like public utilities in the 1980s. They don't get to bundle services, and they don't get to make large profits. They still make money - more than enough to feed the owners' families.
Actually, there is a straightforward solution, which has worked moderately well both for phone service and electric supply. You need to separate the natural monopoly from the rest of the stack.
The natural monopoly in the ISP business is the last mile. The local provider runs a wire to every house. Users pay the cost of maintaining this wire. If the wire is shared then they pay a per-GB rate for transmission over the wire. If the wire is dedicated (one pair per house / etc) then they can't be billed for use. Rates are PUC-regulated, at a strict cost-plus rate. Oh, and the local provider can't be owned by any other company, especially a content provider.
The wire starts at the house, and ends at a central office. That is the sole involvement of the local provider in the business. They terminate the wire at an ISP of the customer's choice, and from there they provide internet access, or AOL, or "Comcast Enhanced Internet," or whatever. Since this isn't a natural monopoly there will likely be plenty of choices.
The company that runs the local cable line won't make much money. They'll never have double-digit profit growth. They will, however, make money - plenty to pay for the operation of the business and a decent dividend for the shareholders - just like any utility company.
This model has worked fine for all kinds of natural monopolies, and it will work fine for ISPs as well.
If Comcast thinks their customers are using too much bandwidth, then they should increase their rates. Perhaps put a cap at 1GB and charge per GB over that, and see how that goes.
Of course, the utility comission should also recognize this as unfair bundling and require Comcast to separate their last-mile data business from the rest of the company, with customers being able to pick any connection point to the internet, much as happens with electric utilities in much of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The same is actually true when you pick up a rock and throw it, if you approximate the earth with a completely uniform sphere (which isn't a bad approximation). :)
The only thing is that the fact that lots of people are dying in Iraq isn't exactly front-page news. Sure, the details of any particular incident may come out, and I'm fine with that getting out as long as informants/etc aren't put in danger, or active operations aren't endangered.
However, nothing that wikileaks published really changed my view of what was happening in Iraq. I knew it was messed up.
So, I'd rather that they move on and hit the banks or whatever - at least that might trigger reform.
That said, I'd never go so far as to say that they wasted their time on Iraq, either.
Apparently their protection is to terminate your contract.
Granted, that might still be preferable to getting stuck with a million dollar bill.
It's so different that we know it cannot possibly be related to all of the other Earth life that we've known about thus far, as there is nothing in common.
Uh, so far I just see speculation that its DNA backbone is different.
Just the fact that it uses DNA at all makes me think that this has a lot more in common than not.
I think the jury is still out on multiple rounds of abiogenesis. What happens if they sequence its DNA and find out that half of it is sequentially similar to existing bacterial DNA, once you swap out the phosphorous atoms? Certainly you're not going to argue parallel evolution at the sequence level, right?
This is certainly news. However, for all we know some bacteria over time evolved a way to change its DNA chemistry. That isn't independent abiogenesis.
they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.
Citation, please. Not the part about discovering the new form of DNA. The part where scientists (and not just 1-3 of them) have already concluded that it is impossible for life to be based on this new form of DNA.
I've never heard any discussions on arsenate-based DNA, let alone that it is impossible for it to exist. Then again, I'm not an astrobiologist.
I don't think that anybody here is really suggesting that wikileaks shouldn't have published all of that stuff.
What annoys me with the site is that they UNPUBLISHED a bunch of stuff when they relased the Iraq war documents, and they remain offline to this day. It seems almost like a marketing decision (no need to distract the public with more than one scandal at a time).
It seems like the organization is more about marketing than getting info out.
All above, which isn't good, and hence my use of the words "best you can do" and "trust is the big problem."
I don't think anybody was sentenced by Nuremburg for shooting at armed soldiers who took cover around a corner after receiving fire from them, under the principle that they might or might not have run out of ammo.
Sure, if we were talking about soldiers walking around executing unarmed civilians, then I'd be happy to talk about lawful orders and all that.
These are soldiers returning fire after having been fired upon. If you don't want to get shot at, try not shooting first.
I guess that depends on your definition of drop. If you define it as accellerating towards the center of the earth, then they drop. If you define it has having their altitude decrease, then they may drop or ascend at various points in their orbit.
You left off the required #!/usr/bin/perl at the start.
Yup. I'm not sure Obama would be safe if he announced his next target was the banks... :)
I do agree with some of your points. An IP for every refrigerator on the planet isn't really a big problem.
An IP for every shoe or wristwatch on the plant, however, is. The difference is mobility - since mobility tends to cause route fragmentation.
I'm certainly not a BGP expert, but I also agree that IPv6 is likely to compound the problem. More routable IPs means it is harder to route them.
This sounds a lot like all the issues that went into local-number-portability with the phone company.
It used to be that a phone number was basically a heirarchical routing system. If the number was 123-456-7890 the telco would look up who handles 123, and pass along the call. Then that switch would figure out who has 456, and so on.
Now that there is local number portability his breaks down. I can keep my area-code 123 number from Maine and use it in California. The result is that any time you dial a phone number there needs to be a central database lookup to figure out who owns the number, and where it might be. If the number is mobile it gets even more complicated, though I suspect that this becomes the wireless provider's headache.
Now, with phone numbers the problem is managable since there are only 32-bits worth in the US, and relatively few of those are actually ported. Numbers aren't portable internationally, so that is where it ends. Also, phone calls tend to be more channel-based, so the routing only happens once to open the channel, and then packets follow the same route (at least it used to work that way).
With IPv6 you can have WAY more address space than you could ever store in a database, so you need to limit route propagation even fairly high up the tree.
I think that we need to get rid of the concept of IPs as property, or as personal identifiers. That is what leads to route fragmentation in the first place.
Can I use the same procedure to file a civil lawsuit against government property?
Sure. Uh, assuming congress passes a law to allow you to sue them (sovereign immunity and all that)...
I don't see flat namespace being that big a deal. If the distributed model just got you to the second-level domain it would probably be enough to cut out 99% of abuse. From there you just do a conventional DNS request to get the rest.
Sure, that does mean that the government can shutdown poor.boy.some.isp.com. However, they can't shut down wikileaks.org or any other second-level domain, which is of course where all the action tends to be.
Trust is the big problem. So, who is the legitimate owner of wikileaks.org ten years after it has been banned? Once you get rid of the central registry you end up with everybody having their own opinion, and at best you can do a weighted majority.
Cost to send a bazillion spam emails from other people's computers:? Pretty close to zero.
Benefit from doing so:? Not much, but greater than zero.
Cost:benefit ratio:? Probably better than buying blue chip stocks.
Well, those are very good questions for the idiots who sent the soldier to war - not for the soldier...
I suspect his concern is the fact that they took down everything but the Iraq and Cablegate documents. They used to have a huge variety of stuff on their website, but when I looked at it a week ago they did not.
That does tend to come across as being anti-US, even if that wasn't the intent.
The easiest solution is to just put back up the other stuff. By all means categorize it...
I meant that they could have put out a white flag before they ever fired a shot. Do you think a military platoon would shoot at somebody who just walked up to them carrying a white flag and no guns, following any instructions that they were given?
Once the fire started, then the burden is on the insurgents to figure out some way to effectively surrender, not on the soldier to figure out whether they may or may not be inclined to do so.
The storyteller probably did what he was trained to do - when you're shot at take cover and figure out how to kill the person who is shooting at you. That doesn't preclude accepting surrender, but it doesn't mean that you need to slow down your attack to allow for it.
I don't know if any war in history that was fought differently. If you shoot at a bunch of people that have guns then you better kill them, because otherwise they will probably kill you. If you're not happy with that, then don't buy a gun.
Actually, objects at orbital speed drop like rocks too. That is why they don't go flying out tangentially into space. :)
I won't argue with that, but if you're going to send troops to war, then you might as well equip them to win. Otherwise you're just wasting even more money, and lives.
For whatever reason nobody seems to be willing to stop the wars, so the only thing that remains is fighting them more effectively.
Don't blame me - I voted for people who were against the wars, and would have been likely to have greatly scaled them back by now. Alas, they didn't win...
Well, if their goal was to surrender then they should have stuck a white flag around the corner and not their rifles in the first place.
There is no requirement under international law to give somebody a chance to surrender. The insurgents chose to get into a fire-fight, and they lost. If they had instead surrendered then I'm sure that any applicable geneva convention rights would be respected.
And the reason that competition never materializes is that there is no possibility of competition. This is a natural monopoly. Comcast has already paid for all the local lines to the houses (usually on the taxpayer's dime). For another company to step in they need to:
1. Overcome legal barriers. There usually are many.
2. Run a TON of local infrastructure to every house in the area.
3. To do #2, take out a ton of loans, or spend a lot of cash that would otherwise be profits.
4. Try to make back enough money to make #3 worthwhile.
The problem with #4 is that Comcast will simply lower their rates closer to their marginal cost to compete. Then nobody bothers to sign up with the newcomer, or very few do. Then the newcomer either goes out of business, or sustains the business but never really makes any money as a result, showing a loss.
Sure, consumers IN THAT AREA do benefit from the lower rates. However, this is all just a fantasy since the potential competitor has accountants who can work out that #4 won't ever happen, so they never do #1-3 in the first place.
The cleanest solution is to treat natural monopolies like public utilities in the 1980s. They don't get to bundle services, and they don't get to make large profits. They still make money - more than enough to feed the owners' families.
Actually, there is a straightforward solution, which has worked moderately well both for phone service and electric supply. You need to separate the natural monopoly from the rest of the stack.
The natural monopoly in the ISP business is the last mile. The local provider runs a wire to every house. Users pay the cost of maintaining this wire. If the wire is shared then they pay a per-GB rate for transmission over the wire. If the wire is dedicated (one pair per house / etc) then they can't be billed for use. Rates are PUC-regulated, at a strict cost-plus rate. Oh, and the local provider can't be owned by any other company, especially a content provider.
The wire starts at the house, and ends at a central office. That is the sole involvement of the local provider in the business. They terminate the wire at an ISP of the customer's choice, and from there they provide internet access, or AOL, or "Comcast Enhanced Internet," or whatever. Since this isn't a natural monopoly there will likely be plenty of choices.
The company that runs the local cable line won't make much money. They'll never have double-digit profit growth. They will, however, make money - plenty to pay for the operation of the business and a decent dividend for the shareholders - just like any utility company.
This model has worked fine for all kinds of natural monopolies, and it will work fine for ISPs as well.
If Comcast thinks their customers are using too much bandwidth, then they should increase their rates. Perhaps put a cap at 1GB and charge per GB over that, and see how that goes.
Of course, the utility comission should also recognize this as unfair bundling and require Comcast to separate their last-mile data business from the rest of the company, with customers being able to pick any connection point to the internet, much as happens with electric utilities in much of the US.