This is a tangent, but is it really that difficult to guarantee a certain minimum throughput? E.g. when the neighborhood's segment is fully loaded, throttle traffic to & from the IPs or MACs that are using the most bandwidth. You could guarantee (total_capacity / houses_in_neighborhood) bits per second, anyhow.
Gimme a Linux box and a two weeks and I'll whip up a prototype[1]. We'll be rich.
[1] Ordinarily I'd delegate this sort of task to my grandmother, but she'd need three weeks.
This is very different from pulling down a jpg. Images go away when you move on to another page. Scumware sticks around to phuc with every new web page you download. Images do not have the ability to crash your browser (barring spectacularly (and uncommonly)) bad browser code. Images have limited ability to invade your privacy by reporting personally identifying information to persons unknown. Images don't consume hard drive space, except perhaps in the cache for a day or three if you want them to.
Most importantly, no image file ever came with a security hole that allowed a third party to hijack the computer that downloaded it. I do not have the same confidence in software written by an ad agencies out to make a buck by hijacking my computer in the first place.
Sure, in a sense it's just another HTTP request, no different than the one that brought the HTML itself. But then again a bullet is just another projectile, no different than a tennis ball really.
There is a world of different between downloading simple data like text or images and downloading executable code. Clue yourself in.
The problem isn't how to 'magically change the license.' The problem is creating a new SMB implementation. Admittedly not a trivial task, but not impossible either.
Read the article, people. This is about aiming missiles, not firing them. No speech recognition involved.
Something else to consider.
on
When Looks Can Kill
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If the US doesn't build it, someone else will, and that will cost us. If you don't like the way the US goes about fighting disease,starvation, and poverty, look at the way Iraq does it. Or North Korea. Or China.
Could the US do more? Sure. If someone defeats the US with superior firepower, will they do better? Not a chance. Power acquired though violent means is rarely employed for the good of the majority.
I would prefer to see the US retain its abililty to defend itself against aggressors. If the US is defeated in war, the victor is not likely to be someone who does a better job fighting the "very serious problems of disease, starvation, and poverty." If that matters to you, you should be glad for the United States' military superiority.
We have superiority today, but if we stop developing bigger, better, badder weapons, that will change. Superiority is a process, not a result.
DigiPen has 2-year and 4-year degree programs (AS or BS) in "real time interactive simulation" which they readily admit is basically an euphemism for "game development."
I'm not a spammer, honest, it just happens that DigiPen is located just a few blocks from my house.
Flight sims, yeah, there's some realism there. And it's only a good thing.
But FPS? Oh please. As long as "first person shooter" gaming means sitting on your ass twiddling a joystick and some little buttons, any concerns about "realism" are grossly exaggerated.
Or the XBox snowboarding game - hella fun, but... front-flip to back-flip with the flick of a stick? Or kung fu games where the key is to twiddle a few tiny buttons really really fast... what's realistic about this? Oh, the PICTURES. Riiiight.
This is not a problem. You are still free to create a NAS device that uses a GPL'ed OS and speaks Samba. The only restriction is that your Samba implementation must be licensed under non-GPL terms. BSD terms would work.
"If you want random pseudonymous people putting arbitrary files on your machine, be my guest, but don't cry to me when they put on your machine files which you don't want."
Back when 99% of the 'random pseudonymous people' turned out to be people who were contacting me to discuss something I'd posted somewhere, there was no problem. When spammers started abusing this system for their own gain, a "tragedy of the commons" ensued.
Your "well established protocol" analogy is utterly useless. The well established protocol for email is that it is NOT for the mass distribution of unsolicited email on an opt-out basis. No mind reading necessary. Wake the fsck up and read your own ISP's acceptable usage policy. (whois, traceroute, and ARIN suggest that Verio is your ISP, if I'm wrong you'll have to find the AUP yourself...) The "protocol" hss been in writing ever since spammers started pissing in the pool. Smaller ISPs caught on early, but even giants like MCI were catching on by 1996 and now you'd be hard-pressed to find an ISP that doesn't subscribe to the same "protocol." And if your ISP doesn't, you can expect most of your outgoing mail to bounce.
That said, as a practical matter, the only way to be free from spam is to make it difficult for 'random pseudonymous people' to get into your mailbox. Unless junk email gets regulated like junk fax, I expect whitelisting to catch on in a big way. In a few years, people will simply expect their first email to someone to bounce back with a message that says something like "please reply to this message with the subject line intact, unless you are a spammer." Three-way handshake will be the norm, not the exception.
Yeah, but I doubted that it would even get this far. I am also fairly optimistic about the appeal, but the fact that it got as far as it did is still worrying. Along with there rest of the slashdotters, I'd like to see the text of the decision. It sounds so wrong, I wonder if there's more to it.
There will be an appeal. When the name of the judge who will be hearing the appeal becomes public, we must find his fax number. We must sign the judge up for every source of commercial fax that we can find. Bury that machine in its own spew. Give the judge a preview of what is to come.
Or, just forward every bit of junk email you get to his/her fax machine via jfax.com or some such. Same difference.
But seriously, this is doubly depressing because I was really hoping that a clueful senator would expand the TCPA to cover junk email some day soon. If the appeal fails I shall weep openly. Advertisers are entitled to burn up my resources when they pay me for the privilege and not a moment sooner.
I used to work for a company called Connectsoft, whose flagship product was Email Connection. We had a couple others, like Font Connection, Clip-Art Connection, we had an idea called Grocery Connection and demo of (I kid you not) Pizza Connection. One of my fellow employees once lamented that we couldn't trademark a regular expression. Like maybe ".+\ Connection"
So now I have to wonder. According to Intel, we could have.
Seems to me that you could mold in some ductwork to get good cooling (with directed flow, you could maybe even do better than a standard case), and mold in some spars to allow more interesting shapes (not blob-like), and use the longest cables you can find (again, more interesting shapes), and sand the thing to to get rid of the brain/sheep/whipcream/meringue look, and then fiberglass the exterior... You could put Chihuly to shame!
(assuming that's possible (the part about Chihuly having a sense of shame (I know Seattlites will understand me here, but I've heard he's left his mark elsewhere in the world too (and on behalf of all Seattle, I apologize))))
Also, it is not unconceivable that there is code somewhere in the kernel or some other crucial part of the distribution that is encumbered by a patent. [...] What will happen to your operations when someone has a court order saying "stop what you're doing, you're using my code illegally?"
Same thing you would do if it came to light that something inside Windows NT or Solaris or _____ was found to infringe on a patent.
This just sounds like FUD to me....
Unless maybe you can persuade me that this scenario is for some reason conceivable ONLY under Linux?
That is exactly what I expect to see over the next few years. It seems that the only artists who actually like the major labels are Britney Spears, Metallica, and their ilk. Meanwhile less "pop" artists mostly bitch about getting ripped off by the major labels.
I look forward to seeing all (or almost all) of the artists I listen to simply ignoring RIAA, retaining the rights to their works, and licensing them (via minor labels) in a way that permits them to use internet distribution to their advantage with ____casting and the like.
The major labels made big money on music distribution, back when distribution was difficult. Distribution is now trivial for anyone with a PC and a modem (read: 99 44/100% of the people who used to buy lots of CDs), so it looks to me like most of the revenue will soon be coming from performance, not distribution.
I think listeners will gravitate to 'internet radio' (yeah, silly term) from airwave radio. There's less commercials (typically none on the channels I listen to), and the music suits my tastes far better than anything on the air. Maybe I'm atypical, but if I'm not, the artists drawing the biggest crowds to performances will be the ones with the most "internet radio" play. Wouldn't it be ironic if RIAA's recent tactics just amounted to a shot in the foot with a hollow-point round?
Or, on the other hand... Copyright has been a dead issue for a very long time for the music of Beethoven and Bach. There just is none. The rights expired a LONG time ago. The last time I saw Bach played live, I read that ticket sales cover something like 75% of the cost of the performance, with sponsors and donors picking up the rest. I could be jumping to conclusions here, but what if there's a correlation between the absence of copyright protection and the business model you see in classical music? Will the pop music industry will go the way of the classical music industry?
Yeah, you could be wrong. I've been wrong before too, but I think it's only a matter of time before performance revenues eclipse distribution revenues (read: CD sales). I wonder how RIAA will react to that.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
My money is on (3), at least the latter half of it. I find it much easier to believe that a person omitted a word or two than to believe that someone actually wants to bring charges against a stream of ones and zeroes.
However, I must admit that it was wrong of me to assume that you are new to typewritten interactivity. It could just be that you are a slow learner, and (3) is just a specific instance of the more general (2).
Or, even worse, it could be that you actually derive some sort of perverse enjoyment from calling attention to others' typing errors. Horrors. I'd better stop now befor I mak3 a typo myselfg.
physical simulation, collision detection
on
Deep Algorithms?
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· Score: 1
My $0.02: LCP, penalty method, lagrange multiply, impluse method... some such physical simulation algorithm will belong in the list eventually (or maybe a few of them will). Probably a collision detection algorithm too, maybe nice fast polygon soup algorithm.
This stuff is pretty niche right now (mostly just games and high-end simulations), but I think it will get find more widespread application as computing power increases.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 1
Let's play multiple choice, shall we?
He meant 'sue the maker of the snooper software.' (That might appear to be quite a leap of reasoning, but is possible.)
You are a fscking idiot.
All your typo are belong to us.
You are new to this whole typewritten interactivity concept. After a while, you'll learn to recognize hasty typing, and maybe even learn to fill in the blanks all by yourself.
"Put forward in fiction, these ideas can be quite interesting, but to see these ideas put forward by someone who's supposed to be a serious theorist...."
Agreed. I'm going to be installing TMDA or a similar whitelist system on my server after I've had time to investigate the options out there. One 'confirmation' email per person the each time they try to contact me is a small price to pay for near-perfect spam filtration.
I wonder how long until major ISPs offer whitelisting with an autoreply confirmation feature as a way to satisfy spammed customers and/or attract new customers.
I wonder how long until whitelisting becomes the norm - how long until people EXPECT to jump through a confirmation hoop each time they email someone for the first time.
And I wonder how long until spammers start databasing whitelisted recipients and confirmed 'from' addresses. I expect whitelisting to give me peace for a few years... But I wonder if even just "a few years" is too optimistic.
Spam itself doesn't need to actually BE profitable. The companies who send spam only need to be able to make suckers THINK that spamming is profitable. When the suckers are porn site operators who were told that internet porn was a quick way to get rick, or when they're just plain old scam artists, it doesn't take much convincing.
This is half the reason why mlknowle's reason #2 (above) is irrelevant. The revenue that comes from spamvertising your product or service is already pretty close to zero - what matters is the revenue that comes from selling spamming services to idiots. There is a never-ending supply of people who want to believe that they can get rich quick, and spam service providers tell these people exactly what they want to hear.
The other half of the reason mlknowle's point #2 is irrelevant is that sending spam is cheap. If it takes one hour to send three bigillion messages and it costs $20 for a throwaway dialup account, and your scam costs victims $5 to participate, you only need six returns to make $10 per hour at it. Response percentages might drop, but the number of messages sent will probably increase just as quickly, if not more quickly.
This is not a problem that will take care of itself. There's too much positive feedback going on. Blacklists are RBLs help, but they're just a band-aid measure, the spammers are undeterred. The spam problem will be solved only via significant negative feedback, in the form of civil suits or (ideally) public beheadings.
Slashdot Mirror
Gimme a Linux box and a two weeks and I'll whip up a prototype[1]. We'll be rich.
[1] Ordinarily I'd delegate this sort of task to my grandmother, but she'd need three weeks.
Most importantly, no image file ever came with a security hole that allowed a third party to hijack the computer that downloaded it. I do not have the same confidence in software written by an ad agencies out to make a buck by hijacking my computer in the first place.
Sure, in a sense it's just another HTTP request, no different than the one that brought the HTML itself. But then again a bullet is just another projectile, no different than a tennis ball really.
There is a world of different between downloading simple data like text or images and downloading executable code. Clue yourself in.
The problem isn't how to 'magically change the license.' The problem is creating a new SMB implementation. Admittedly not a trivial task, but not impossible either.
Read the article, people. This is about aiming missiles, not firing them. No speech recognition involved.
Could the US do more? Sure. If someone defeats the US with superior firepower, will they do better? Not a chance. Power acquired though violent means is rarely employed for the good of the majority.
I would prefer to see the US retain its abililty to defend itself against aggressors. If the US is defeated in war, the victor is not likely to be someone who does a better job fighting the "very serious problems of disease, starvation, and poverty." If that matters to you, you should be glad for the United States' military superiority.
We have superiority today, but if we stop developing bigger, better, badder weapons, that will change. Superiority is a process, not a result.
I'm not a spammer, honest, it just happens that DigiPen is located just a few blocks from my house.
Flight sims, yeah, there's some realism there. And it's only a good thing.
But FPS? Oh please. As long as "first person shooter" gaming means sitting on your ass twiddling a joystick and some little buttons, any concerns about "realism" are grossly exaggerated.
Or the XBox snowboarding game - hella fun, but... front-flip to back-flip with the flick of a stick? Or kung fu games where the key is to twiddle a few tiny buttons really really fast... what's realistic about this? Oh, the PICTURES. Riiiight.
This is not a problem. You are still free to create a NAS device that uses a GPL'ed OS and speaks Samba. The only restriction is that your Samba implementation must be licensed under non-GPL terms. BSD terms would work.
I have doubts about the efficacy of solar power during a storm. I've only dabbled in IT though, so this is a bit beyond me.
Back when 99% of the 'random pseudonymous people' turned out to be people who were contacting me to discuss something I'd posted somewhere, there was no problem. When spammers started abusing this system for their own gain, a "tragedy of the commons" ensued.
Your "well established protocol" analogy is utterly useless. The well established protocol for email is that it is NOT for the mass distribution of unsolicited email on an opt-out basis. No mind reading necessary. Wake the fsck up and read your own ISP's acceptable usage policy. (whois, traceroute, and ARIN suggest that Verio is your ISP, if I'm wrong you'll have to find the AUP yourself...) The "protocol" hss been in writing ever since spammers started pissing in the pool. Smaller ISPs caught on early, but even giants like MCI were catching on by 1996 and now you'd be hard-pressed to find an ISP that doesn't subscribe to the same "protocol." And if your ISP doesn't, you can expect most of your outgoing mail to bounce.
That said, as a practical matter, the only way to be free from spam is to make it difficult for 'random pseudonymous people' to get into your mailbox. Unless junk email gets regulated like junk fax, I expect whitelisting to catch on in a big way. In a few years, people will simply expect their first email to someone to bounce back with a message that says something like "please reply to this message with the subject line intact, unless you are a spammer." Three-way handshake will be the norm, not the exception.
Yeah, but I doubted that it would even get this far. I am also fairly optimistic about the appeal, but the fact that it got as far as it did is still worrying. Along with there rest of the slashdotters, I'd like to see the text of the decision. It sounds so wrong, I wonder if there's more to it.
Or, just forward every bit of junk email you get to his/her fax machine via jfax.com or some such. Same difference.
But seriously, this is doubly depressing because I was really hoping that a clueful senator would expand the TCPA to cover junk email some day soon. If the appeal fails I shall weep openly. Advertisers are entitled to burn up my resources when they pay me for the privilege and not a moment sooner.
Got Lawyers?
So now I have to wonder. According to Intel, we could have.
Is it to late to trademark "Virtual\ .+" ?
(assuming that's possible (the part about Chihuly having a sense of shame (I know Seattlites will understand me here, but I've heard he's left his mark elsewhere in the world too (and on behalf of all Seattle, I apologize))))
Same thing you would do if it came to light that something inside Windows NT or Solaris or _____ was found to infringe on a patent.
This just sounds like FUD to me....
Unless maybe you can persuade me that this scenario is for some reason conceivable ONLY under Linux?
I look forward to seeing all (or almost all) of the artists I listen to simply ignoring RIAA, retaining the rights to their works, and licensing them (via minor labels) in a way that permits them to use internet distribution to their advantage with ____casting and the like.
The major labels made big money on music distribution, back when distribution was difficult. Distribution is now trivial for anyone with a PC and a modem (read: 99 44/100% of the people who used to buy lots of CDs), so it looks to me like most of the revenue will soon be coming from performance, not distribution.
I think listeners will gravitate to 'internet radio' (yeah, silly term) from airwave radio. There's less commercials (typically none on the channels I listen to), and the music suits my tastes far better than anything on the air. Maybe I'm atypical, but if I'm not, the artists drawing the biggest crowds to performances will be the ones with the most "internet radio" play. Wouldn't it be ironic if RIAA's recent tactics just amounted to a shot in the foot with a hollow-point round?
Or, on the other hand... Copyright has been a dead issue for a very long time for the music of Beethoven and Bach. There just is none. The rights expired a LONG time ago. The last time I saw Bach played live, I read that ticket sales cover something like 75% of the cost of the performance, with sponsors and donors picking up the rest. I could be jumping to conclusions here, but what if there's a correlation between the absence of copyright protection and the business model you see in classical music? Will the pop music industry will go the way of the classical music industry?
Yeah, you could be wrong. I've been wrong before too, but I think it's only a matter of time before performance revenues eclipse distribution revenues (read: CD sales). I wonder how RIAA will react to that.
However, I must admit that it was wrong of me to assume that you are new to typewritten interactivity. It could just be that you are a slow learner, and (3) is just a specific instance of the more general (2).
Or, even worse, it could be that you actually derive some sort of perverse enjoyment from calling attention to others' typing errors. Horrors. I'd better stop now befor I mak3 a typo myselfg.
This stuff is pretty niche right now (mostly just games and high-end simulations), but I think it will get find more widespread application as computing power increases.
a cool LCP implementation
a fun toy (yes, I'm biased) that uses the above
We all know how important it is for your CPU cooler to have a the best power-to-weight ratio possible.
The hired help in DC have set up web site for comments, and the comments are, at the moment, unanimously opposed to the bill. Check it out.
"Put forward in fiction, these ideas can be quite interesting, but to see these ideas put forward by someone who's supposed to be a serious theorist...."
I wonder how long until major ISPs offer whitelisting with an autoreply confirmation feature as a way to satisfy spammed customers and/or attract new customers.
I wonder how long until whitelisting becomes the norm - how long until people EXPECT to jump through a confirmation hoop each time they email someone for the first time.
And I wonder how long until spammers start databasing whitelisted recipients and confirmed 'from' addresses. I expect whitelisting to give me peace for a few years... But I wonder if even just "a few years" is too optimistic.
This is half the reason why mlknowle's reason #2 (above) is irrelevant. The revenue that comes from spamvertising your product or service is already pretty close to zero - what matters is the revenue that comes from selling spamming services to idiots. There is a never-ending supply of people who want to believe that they can get rich quick, and spam service providers tell these people exactly what they want to hear.
The other half of the reason mlknowle's point #2 is irrelevant is that sending spam is cheap. If it takes one hour to send three bigillion messages and it costs $20 for a throwaway dialup account, and your scam costs victims $5 to participate, you only need six returns to make $10 per hour at it. Response percentages might drop, but the number of messages sent will probably increase just as quickly, if not more quickly.
This is not a problem that will take care of itself. There's too much positive feedback going on. Blacklists are RBLs help, but they're just a band-aid measure, the spammers are undeterred. The spam problem will be solved only via significant negative feedback, in the form of civil suits or (ideally) public beheadings.