Yes I think this whole B&E and store analogy is off. A much truer way of looking at this is this:
If I printed this report at work and left it somewhere in the office and you found it, is that legal or not. I suppose it would depend on exactly where and how obviously it was left.
Had I left said report on a table in the waiting area it would obviously be fair game, even if it were hidden under a stack of magazines or otherwise not labled, or even marked "confidential".
However if i left it on a table within the office and you were just walking through and saw it...that would probably be in the grey area.
If I left it inside someones office and you looked in and saw it, that would be even greyer.
If it was inside an unlocked cabinet I'd say we are entering the illegal area because you'd need to go snooping *inside* things at that point.
I think the real discussion point here is trying to establish some relation between the possible scenarios of how "openly" it is left on the webserver and the real world situation. This really will make for an interesting case I think.
The reason technical services such as this roll out faster and cheaper in most asian markets and ESPECIALLY japan is population density. 90% of the population of japan lives jam packed together. To cover the same 90% of the US population means that you need to install hundreds of thousands of miles of cable + far more DSLAMS and other access points. The economies of scale are completely different. If you want to compare you need to do so only to major cities such as NYC, SF, Chicago, etc. All these cities get services faster and generally there is more competition cutting the price.
ok assuming you have access to the router on your end you should be able to do a ping with large packets. Assuming nothing else is going on you should be able to send approximately 1.536Mbits of traffic (minus overhead) every second. So turn off your outbound routes and do your ping flood to establisha baseline for max return. Then trace out from your site to some nice high bandwidth site on the net and repeat this test at every hop. You should be able to determine which IP's are within your hosting providers network. You should get full T1 rate from any of these IP's. Once you figure out the IP's of the other end of your upstream providers network you'll be able to accurately figure out how oversold your provider is. Just do your ping flood for 24 hours and see if you always get near max or if it varies with time of day. If it gets slow at peak times you can gauge how oversold your ISP is. This will get more complicated if you have a large upstream provider with multiple links who is using BGP since you'll have to take that all into account. Perhaps if you can determine how many outbound links your upstream has you can do this test with a ping flood through all the links that way an individual link saturating wont skew the results.
all this other talk about watching mrtg or cricket for general use is bullshit - you wont be able to seperate out the internet general problems from the oversold problem. Take a scientific approach to things rather than just looking at some pretty graphs.
Look I understand that there are better ways to do it. I'm not saying there aren't better solutions. But as a business TWC is pretty much allowed to do anything they want in this respect. If they do too much, customers leave they hurt financially and change policies. You want them to do a certain thing because *you* believe it's better. They have every right to choose what they think is the best. Contrary to what you may think TWC doesn't sell internet access for the betterment of the world but to make a profit and as stated above they can and will do whatever they feel leads to the most profit.
what on earth makes you think a cable company should have to open up it's network to competitors. Just because they happened to be there first or win out by having a better business doesn't mean that later on when the small companies complain they should get a free ride.
furthermore, it bothers me that ppl buy a certain service then complain they can't do what they want with it. Well what you should do is cancel that service, and subscribe to one that does. Then 2 months later when you can't afford it anymore you'll come running back. The real problem is that many of us can't seem to think like a business (and of course many of us think capitalism is bad and refuse to admit that companies don't do things for the good of the ppl they do it to make money).
One would assume you are trying to portray TWC as some hideous corporate entity. But in reality for security reasons you absolutely should not be allowing everyone in the world to use your access point. I think the threat of legal action is a bit much, however, if I were going to do some deeds online I didn't want to be traced to the first thing I would do is wander around NYC using ppl's home wireless bridges to cable/DSL. Furthermore the reason cable companies are capping bandwidth is because it's too expensive. If everyone re-shares the connection there will be no manageable traffic it'll just be 100% utilization 24x7 so there's nothing wrong with trying to curtail this.
It's not just the raw component cost you have to add up. You have to take into account all the R&D and marketing that is spent on it before day 1. In effect if MS spent $500M and on day 1 had 1Million consoles available each one costs $500! The loss/console is based on the expected number of total cost sold over the initial projections.
order from chaos? Not exactly. The Sierpinski Triangle is a great fractal, however it isn't chaos which forms it. Once you understand how the fractal is generated it's easy to show that for any given spot outside one of the "cleared" areas it will never migrate into a cleared area. Also it's very easy to show that any starting point from within a "cleared" area will quickly migrate outside never to return. The random picking of the next point only serves to show that we can use a random number in the algorithm to derive the same picture that we would get if one just kept disecting the triangle into 1/4's.
Now if you came up with some function where you were not able to predict anything at all about the placement of the next dot (in the Sierpinski we know much about the next dot - namely that it will lie on the midpoint of the line drawn to the next vertex chosen) and still ended up with some deep fractal pattern that would be pretty cool.
I remember playing around with the mandlebrot fractal too and seem to remember that it is a bit harder to predict that shape ahead of time (but I could just not be remembering right).
It works great. It's a bit wide so it seems weird as a flip phone, but I'll take looking a bit geeky to be that much more connected:)
The single biggest problem with this device is that it's not GPRS ready yet. I think it was a mistake releasing it without this capability - especially if you live in one of the big urban areas like I do (NYC) where gprs is available already. I don't think they should have delayed it just should have made at least a beta patch available.
I really would have preferred keeping my sprint service, but bit the bullet and changed to voicestream only to find out less than a month later that sprint will have the treo in the summer (probably the color one). *poof* there goes another $600...
Perhaps it's because I went to an engineering school, but not only did my Fraternity have a LAN (which I installed) I also got the ISDN up and running back when the phone company sales reps didn't even know they SOLD ANYTHING CALLED ISDN. Unfortunately we have more data on tap than beer now:(
Do you know how much more productive you could be with this sort of information at your fingertips. The point of this device is not to list info about ppl you see specifically, but to give you instant access to any publicly available information. I can NOT wait for the day when this type of thing because feasible in reality.
Privacy concerns in general, it's a losing battle. Personally I don't really care if you can find out what my preferences are, what I really want though is for the SPAM etc that comes my way be truly worth it. Could you imagine if little stories popped into your display that you actually wanted to read. Who would be annoyed if slashdot-esque information came and found you?
Exactly!
As humans we strive to improve everything around us. We want to build faster processors, we study to become smarter, we want to make things faster and we want them cheaper. There is nothing we can do that we don't try and do better. Why wouldn't you want to make your children better??? Hell I hope before I die they figure out how to do gene therepy for a bunch of things so at least I can benefit from genetic engineering some if not as much as future generations. And for those of you who are about to say something about creative types not being for this that's not true either. Every artist I know strives to represent something in the best possible way, hence if I could help him do that better he would go for it.
I however don't want to explode...
I think there is nothing wrong with screening or genetic modification for wanted traits. While it is true that this kind of leaves darwin out of the survival of the fitest race the simple fact is that darwinism doesn't drive human evolution anymore. Humans are way too good at altering their environment to have natural selection play a role in expressing genes.
As far as another comment on "Gattaca" while there could be some discrimination in the future I believe that would only be a transitory time just like for anything else. Once science gets good enough at it EVERYONE will be smart and healthy. Will this be such a bad thing? I don't think so it's not as if we will all be clones, there will still be "more genius" amongst all the "normal genius":) People will still have areas of specialty and it may well be shown that creativity can't be programmed leaving plenty of room for valuable traits that you can't pre-plan. If that's the case everyone being strong/smart/etc wont be that great if they all long to be able to paint but can't.
"Internet users received an average of 571 pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail in 2001"
so there are several hundred folks out there that get absolutely no spam at all to account for the 10,000 or so pieces I get a year...
If one of the problems is they don't want people to record video without even knowing what channel it's on shouldn't they logically file suit against any medium that distributes channel guides? You could conceivably use OCR to read the print from of TV Guide then put that in a computer and use that to program your VCR (note this applies even to VCR's let alone PVR's). You'd never know what channel anything is on. I suppose the TV industry would have us randomly bounce around through channels looking for something interesting to watch, sounds like hell to me.
Nah more data never makes for bad advertising. Advertisers are desperate for this kind of exact data. All it will help to do (hopefully:) is make the commercials interesting enough to watch. The feedback loop that would ensue from advertisers knowing exactly what percent of the populous skips the commercials would be invaluable. I know that when it comes time for a commercial occassionally one will be interesting enough for me to hit the >
Why is it that every large corporation or entrenched business needs to be so afraid of change. Did 8-track kill music revenues? How about tape? MD? CD? MP3? Nope nope nope nope. It simply amazes me how afraid most folks are of change. Don't they realize that without change things don't get better? I see this time and again in all facets of life.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with charging for a good product. No matter how you cut it nothing is free to develop. Opensource projects might be given away for free, but they still cost much money in the form of time spent. Hopefully google will provide a trial or some sort of free version for those of us without $20K to spend though.
The advertising they speak of is in the top line responses that always come back (for instance - search for any reviews etc and you'll always get a few links to meta pages devoted to deals). Then there are also the highlighted (and usually more relevant than the top line links) links on the right hand side of the page.
Re:Larry Ellison pops up at any moment
on
Berlin's Robotic Pub
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I think it's got something to do with no bill of rights over there!
It boggles my mind that anyone thinks $80/month for a fast connection is too much to pay. First off if you are reading this and know what a decent fat pipe costs (T3, OC-3), and by decent I mean DECENT, you know it's hard to make money reselling bandwidth.
Even with the glut of installed pipes/bandwidth in this continent and the world prices have simply not come down enough to really make bandwidth a commodity. The collapse of the telecom industry over the last couple of years in a shining example of this.
A good comparison here is to all you can eat sushi. Typically the sushi you are allowed to eat is just the "regular" stuff. IE you don't get the neat-o really good tasting stuff. Also service tends to be limited. And last but not least out of all the all you can eat sushi places you can find in NYC perhaps a few of them are truly worth the money. Yet they all stay in business cause when it comes down to it sometimes I want to pig out on sushi and not have a $60 bill for one meal!
I agree that the companies should not raise prices without warning and without disclosure of this possibility at signing. I haven't read the canadian contracts, however I would bet dollars to donuts somewhere in there there's a clause that allows this.
Stop whining and learn that you get what you pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I think this whole B&E and store analogy is off. A much truer way of looking at this is this: If I printed this report at work and left it somewhere in the office and you found it, is that legal or not. I suppose it would depend on exactly where and how obviously it was left. Had I left said report on a table in the waiting area it would obviously be fair game, even if it were hidden under a stack of magazines or otherwise not labled, or even marked "confidential". However if i left it on a table within the office and you were just walking through and saw it...that would probably be in the grey area. If I left it inside someones office and you looked in and saw it, that would be even greyer. If it was inside an unlocked cabinet I'd say we are entering the illegal area because you'd need to go snooping *inside* things at that point. I think the real discussion point here is trying to establish some relation between the possible scenarios of how "openly" it is left on the webserver and the real world situation. This really will make for an interesting case I think.
The reason technical services such as this roll out faster and cheaper in most asian markets and ESPECIALLY japan is population density. 90% of the population of japan lives jam packed together. To cover the same 90% of the US population means that you need to install hundreds of thousands of miles of cable + far more DSLAMS and other access points. The economies of scale are completely different. If you want to compare you need to do so only to major cities such as NYC, SF, Chicago, etc. All these cities get services faster and generally there is more competition cutting the price.
ok assuming you have access to the router on your end you should be able to do a ping with large packets. Assuming nothing else is going on you should be able to send approximately 1.536Mbits of traffic (minus overhead) every second. So turn off your outbound routes and do your ping flood to establisha baseline for max return. Then trace out from your site to some nice high bandwidth site on the net and repeat this test at every hop. You should be able to determine which IP's are within your hosting providers network. You should get full T1 rate from any of these IP's. Once you figure out the IP's of the other end of your upstream providers network you'll be able to accurately figure out how oversold your provider is. Just do your ping flood for 24 hours and see if you always get near max or if it varies with time of day. If it gets slow at peak times you can gauge how oversold your ISP is. This will get more complicated if you have a large upstream provider with multiple links who is using BGP since you'll have to take that all into account. Perhaps if you can determine how many outbound links your upstream has you can do this test with a ping flood through all the links that way an individual link saturating wont skew the results. all this other talk about watching mrtg or cricket for general use is bullshit - you wont be able to seperate out the internet general problems from the oversold problem. Take a scientific approach to things rather than just looking at some pretty graphs.
Look I understand that there are better ways to do it. I'm not saying there aren't better solutions. But as a business TWC is pretty much allowed to do anything they want in this respect. If they do too much, customers leave they hurt financially and change policies. You want them to do a certain thing because *you* believe it's better. They have every right to choose what they think is the best. Contrary to what you may think TWC doesn't sell internet access for the betterment of the world but to make a profit and as stated above they can and will do whatever they feel leads to the most profit.
what on earth makes you think a cable company should have to open up it's network to competitors. Just because they happened to be there first or win out by having a better business doesn't mean that later on when the small companies complain they should get a free ride.
furthermore, it bothers me that ppl buy a certain service then complain they can't do what they want with it. Well what you should do is cancel that service, and subscribe to one that does. Then 2 months later when you can't afford it anymore you'll come running back. The real problem is that many of us can't seem to think like a business (and of course many of us think capitalism is bad and refuse to admit that companies don't do things for the good of the ppl they do it to make money).
One would assume you are trying to portray TWC as some hideous corporate entity. But in reality for security reasons you absolutely should not be allowing everyone in the world to use your access point. I think the threat of legal action is a bit much, however, if I were going to do some deeds online I didn't want to be traced to the first thing I would do is wander around NYC using ppl's home wireless bridges to cable/DSL. Furthermore the reason cable companies are capping bandwidth is because it's too expensive. If everyone re-shares the connection there will be no manageable traffic it'll just be 100% utilization 24x7 so there's nothing wrong with trying to curtail this.
It's not just the raw component cost you have to add up. You have to take into account all the R&D and marketing that is spent on it before day 1. In effect if MS spent $500M and on day 1 had 1Million consoles available each one costs $500! The loss/console is based on the expected number of total cost sold over the initial projections.
Heck I wrote the mandlebrot fractal on my TI-85:) It's not hard at all to program...however it was slow as sh*t on a calculator!
Now if you came up with some function where you were not able to predict anything at all about the placement of the next dot (in the Sierpinski we know much about the next dot - namely that it will lie on the midpoint of the line drawn to the next vertex chosen) and still ended up with some deep fractal pattern that would be pretty cool.
I remember playing around with the mandlebrot fractal too and seem to remember that it is a bit harder to predict that shape ahead of time (but I could just not be remembering right).
The single biggest problem with this device is that it's not GPRS ready yet. I think it was a mistake releasing it without this capability - especially if you live in one of the big urban areas like I do (NYC) where gprs is available already. I don't think they should have delayed it just should have made at least a beta patch available.
I really would have preferred keeping my sprint service, but bit the bullet and changed to voicestream only to find out less than a month later that sprint will have the treo in the summer (probably the color one). *poof* there goes another $600...
Perhaps it's because I went to an engineering school, but not only did my Fraternity have a LAN (which I installed) I also got the ISDN up and running back when the phone company sales reps didn't even know they SOLD ANYTHING CALLED ISDN. Unfortunately we have more data on tap than beer now:(
Privacy concerns in general, it's a losing battle. Personally I don't really care if you can find out what my preferences are, what I really want though is for the SPAM etc that comes my way be truly worth it. Could you imagine if little stories popped into your display that you actually wanted to read. Who would be annoyed if slashdot-esque information came and found you?
Exactly! As humans we strive to improve everything around us. We want to build faster processors, we study to become smarter, we want to make things faster and we want them cheaper. There is nothing we can do that we don't try and do better. Why wouldn't you want to make your children better??? Hell I hope before I die they figure out how to do gene therepy for a bunch of things so at least I can benefit from genetic engineering some if not as much as future generations. And for those of you who are about to say something about creative types not being for this that's not true either. Every artist I know strives to represent something in the best possible way, hence if I could help him do that better he would go for it. I however don't want to explode...
I think there is nothing wrong with screening or genetic modification for wanted traits. While it is true that this kind of leaves darwin out of the survival of the fitest race the simple fact is that darwinism doesn't drive human evolution anymore. Humans are way too good at altering their environment to have natural selection play a role in expressing genes. As far as another comment on "Gattaca" while there could be some discrimination in the future I believe that would only be a transitory time just like for anything else. Once science gets good enough at it EVERYONE will be smart and healthy. Will this be such a bad thing? I don't think so it's not as if we will all be clones, there will still be "more genius" amongst all the "normal genius":) People will still have areas of specialty and it may well be shown that creativity can't be programmed leaving plenty of room for valuable traits that you can't pre-plan. If that's the case everyone being strong/smart/etc wont be that great if they all long to be able to paint but can't.
"Internet users received an average of 571 pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail in 2001" so there are several hundred folks out there that get absolutely no spam at all to account for the 10,000 or so pieces I get a year...
If one of the problems is they don't want people to record video without even knowing what channel it's on shouldn't they logically file suit against any medium that distributes channel guides? You could conceivably use OCR to read the print from of TV Guide then put that in a computer and use that to program your VCR (note this applies even to VCR's let alone PVR's). You'd never know what channel anything is on. I suppose the TV industry would have us randomly bounce around through channels looking for something interesting to watch, sounds like hell to me.
Nah more data never makes for bad advertising. Advertisers are desperate for this kind of exact data. All it will help to do (hopefully:) is make the commercials interesting enough to watch. The feedback loop that would ensue from advertisers knowing exactly what percent of the populous skips the commercials would be invaluable. I know that when it comes time for a commercial occassionally one will be interesting enough for me to hit the >
Why is it that every large corporation or entrenched business needs to be so afraid of change. Did 8-track kill music revenues? How about tape? MD? CD? MP3? Nope nope nope nope. It simply amazes me how afraid most folks are of change. Don't they realize that without change things don't get better? I see this time and again in all facets of life.
true, now all I have to do is build a tunnel through my firewall and point google.com at it...
There's absolutely nothing wrong with charging for a good product. No matter how you cut it nothing is free to develop. Opensource projects might be given away for free, but they still cost much money in the form of time spent. Hopefully google will provide a trial or some sort of free version for those of us without $20K to spend though.
The advertising they speak of is in the top line responses that always come back (for instance - search for any reviews etc and you'll always get a few links to meta pages devoted to deals). Then there are also the highlighted (and usually more relevant than the top line links) links on the right hand side of the page.
I think it's got something to do with no bill of rights over there!
It boggles my mind that anyone thinks $80/month for a fast connection is too much to pay. First off if you are reading this and know what a decent fat pipe costs (T3, OC-3), and by decent I mean DECENT, you know it's hard to make money reselling bandwidth.
Even with the glut of installed pipes/bandwidth in this continent and the world prices have simply not come down enough to really make bandwidth a commodity. The collapse of the telecom industry over the last couple of years in a shining example of this.
A good comparison here is to all you can eat sushi. Typically the sushi you are allowed to eat is just the "regular" stuff. IE you don't get the neat-o really good tasting stuff. Also service tends to be limited. And last but not least out of all the all you can eat sushi places you can find in NYC perhaps a few of them are truly worth the money. Yet they all stay in business cause when it comes down to it sometimes I want to pig out on sushi and not have a $60 bill for one meal!
I agree that the companies should not raise prices without warning and without disclosure of this possibility at signing. I haven't read the canadian contracts, however I would bet dollars to donuts somewhere in there there's a clause that allows this.
Stop whining and learn that you get what you pay for.