“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
I read an interesting short story once where the protagonist died and before being reincarnated was surprised to learn that you could be born before you died. That in fact, you could be born at any point in time and might be interacting with yourself if you happened to be born twice in the same time period, and you wouldn't know because you forget everything when you're born. Then it was slowly revealed that not only could you be born multiple times in one time period, you absolutely were. Moreover, it was revealed that you were in fact the only soul, being born over and over throughout time, interacting with nobody but yourself and literally making your own karma by being the person you were kind to and also the person you were cruel to.
Wish I could remember the name of that story. Or a previous life so I'd know if karma applies to the next life or not. Maybe it's more immediate... sort of insta-karma, which would be a good name for a powdered coffee.
I can't believe I'm going to contribute to this side of the discussion. "Loathe" is the mildest word I can think of for how I feel about a government accessible decryption system, but I'm going to explain why it's not infeasible to maintain security and have government access, unlike so many posters seem to assume.
Lets take cell phones as a starting example. The encryption of my phone isn't done with the password I put into the phone when I reboot it, the encryption is done with a randomly generated key which my password decrypts. There is no reason the same key that is actually decrypting the phone couldn't be encrypted with a phone manufacturer password. That government mandated password would encrypt the real decryption key just like my password does, but the government password wouldn't change when I change the password I'm using.
Note the government password isn't the same for multiple phones, it's unique to each phone. The government password is a randomly generated complex string of numbers, letters and symbols and it's not stored on the phone.
The government password for my phone is created at OS installation time and then the phone manufacturer encrypts it with the public key provided by the government. Those encrypted password media are sent to the companies selling the phones and those companies keep that media physically secured.
The government must subpoena the key for a specific phone in order to decrypt its contents.
The government password is now protected by:
A) A PKI private key stored by a government agency
B) Physical security at a non-governmental agency
C) The somewhat abused but best available legal processes of our government
Encrypted computer drives work the same. The assumption in both scenarios is that people fall into one of these groups:
A) don't know it is there
B) use the system their device came with
C) don't understand how to change the system
That covers 99.999% of people, probably even 99.99% of criminals. I may repartition my drive and install varying operating systems, and I may install a different OS on my phone, but normal people don't. Even drug dealers and terrorists are unlikely to do that when there are far easier ways to avoid incrimination. The fact is we could have such a "backdoor" already in play and we wouldn't necessarily know about it. I'm geekier than most by far, and I don't recompile the kernel on my boot partition to make sure it matches the one that is actually there. Granted, I do tend to wipe drives and start fresh, but if Redhat and Canonical are compromised, the NSA is good enough at their jobs, that I'll probably never notice. Do you know for sure the signature of your running kernel matches the one that you could compile for yourself?
Which is kind of the point isn't it? I'm not usually taking pictures for the enjoyment of the public, I'm taking them so that I can someday enjoy the memory more clearly.
We're subjected constantly to rules and laws that make no sense and most of them aren't enforced; Even the cops often don't know what the laws are and they're supposed to enforce them. It makes me think of the cop who was writing tickets to everyone with a GPS. It was a stupid law but he decided to enforce it and caught hell for it, but isn't that what we want? Don't we want cops to enforce the actual laws regardless of their own opinions? But instead, we've all come to accept an environment where it's practically impossible to follow all the laws all the time, not to mention all the rules. We're literally being trained to ignore the rules.
And of course, people act like the solution is to make more rules.
I remember and it was terrible! The OS was never designed to keep applications from talking to other applications on the system. (As an AS/400 novitiate and SE adherent, I should say "practically never.")
OS application management is something that is not as secure as a virtual machine or a jail or a container, so if you miss the days when the OS was doing it, you didn't have the problems these things are designed to solve.
Containers aren't just virtual machines running a single application either. VMs are a full OS with all the overhead that comes with it, including hardware abstraction layers, boot times and a bunch of stuff you don't need for your application but you get anyway because you need it to run a full OS.
Ideally you should be able to have a virtual machine that only needs a sliver of resources because you only need it running one thing but that's not what VMs provide. (Though Xen came closer than most and I miss it.) An ideal VM should be fast to spin up, but with VMs you were typically booting a whole OS.
Jails on the other hand... Well jails are what you wish a VM running a single application would be. A jail gives you an application and only what it actually needs in order to run in an isolated package. You don't get the benefits of having an image you can snapshot or move around like you do with virtual machines, but it dramatically cuts down on resource requirements.
Containers are basically what people want from jails and what they want from virtual machines with desirable features of each and without the drawbacks of either. They're not the solution to every problem and they're not a replacement for chroot jails or virtual machine servers, but they do have their place.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question isn't:
"Why should I pay.. will [never] relate to them?"
or even "How do we fight this stupid decision?"
The *right* question is: How do I get a business model where everybody is taxed to pay me?
Note: this post assumes you aren't already a politician and that you don't have ethics.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who would dope a horse to win a race, but every loser would want to prove the winner had been doped if they could. So while there may be motivation to dope horses, there is intense testing and motivation to prevent it as well.
Lasix is commonly used to prevent EIPH (Exercise Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhage.) Basically race horses bleed from broken capillaries in their lungs due to the tremendous increase in blood pressure they exhibit during a race. (It happens in people and other animals too, but most things I've read are about it happening in horses, particularly race horses.) Essentially horses have been bred to run fast as a primary objective and success comes with health consequences.
So giving Lasix to horses may come with a performance benefit, (since the diuretic causes them to be several pounds lighter) but not giving it to them comes with a known health detriment. Not everyone believes that the bleeding is something that should be treated that way and some horse owners choose not to use it, but there is no doubt that it is an effective treatment to prevent a common ailment. Since Lasix also acts as a diuretic, the counter argument is that the dehydration it causes is worse than the ailment it prevents.
There's an interesting parallel in human olympic athletes: asthma inhalers. They are allowed by the Olympics because they've been exhaustively studied and found to not give performance gains, despite the fact that more and more athletes have been using them and performing better. It turns out that humans at extreme exercise levels also tend to experience issues with their lungs, so top performers can benefit from something to counteract the damages their extreme performances cause.
"The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. 'Make it evil,' he'd been told. 'Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.'"
What banner ads? Between directly supporting/. and Adblock, I don't see any. Of course since I'm paying them, I do have some expectation of professionalism. This seems like the sort of thing the sainted Commander Taco himself would have done, up to a point, except I'm not sure the saint himself would have been as patient and understanding of the asshattery I've seen in this thread.
I want *blood* because the site which I use regularly but don't pay money for doesn't meet my exacting standards
To which I'd say: I actually do pay. I've supported/. directly for years. I do expect a certain level of professionalism and editorial freedom from them, not only because that's what I pay for, but because that's the honorable thing to do.
With that said, I don't think SK is being unprofessional or unreasonable. I think that the concern that dice might hurt what is good about/. is a legitimate one, but not necessarily one I'd consider supported by this single instance of a delay.
If you actually meant to say that people who are paying money don't deserve to get what they paid for, then I'm very confused by your post.
I'm not well versed and it sounds like you are. So is it against the law for me to get a text from a friend who says he'll give me $20 to drive him to his dental appointment? How about if I refer him to someone else I trust? Where does the line get drawn?
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be rules or laws or lines in the sand. I'm just curious what separates legal behavior from illegal behavior since I can't really tell from what I've read so far.
Any breach of this Agreement may cause Amazon irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law. As a result, Amazon will be entitled to the issuance by a court of competent jurisdiction of an injunction, restraining order, or other equitable relief in favor of itself, without the necessity of posting a bond, restraining Employee from committing or continuing to commit any such violation.
You assume I'm outraged. I do understand the need for non-compete, non-disclosure and intellectual property ownership transfer clauses in contracts; in the right place and circumstances. I even understand the difference between enforceable and unenforceable contracts.
I'm not outraged.
I think it is silly and expect it to be unenforceable, and I doubt they have any intent of enforcing it. That doesn't mean it isn't a threat. There is no real contract without some threat of enforcement, and that's the key word: threat.
Whether Amazon takes action or not, it is a threat which discourages specific actions. It doesn't matter whether it is actively enforced or not. That's the real danger, the threat discourages specific actions. That's a threat, even if they choose not to follow through on it.
There is a place for those types of clauses. This is obviously not the place and it is good that people are bothered by it. I may not be particularly bothered, certainly not outraged, but I'm glad that unreasonable contracts get negative attention.
People value a stable government. They won't stop paying taxes until they fear their government more than the anarchy that would replace it. They don't fear this enough.
My experience is similar. I have appreciated how easy it is to work with. I point one domain at my home server, a sub-domain of that at Google AppEngine and my other domain at Google Sites.
Your needs will determine who the best host is for you. Here's what works for me:
Self hosting: this allows me to build complex things and access very large amounts of data at no per-month cost, but bandwidth cannot go too high without causing a problem
Thanks, you may be right, but I was certainly wrong, I was actually thinking of the Netflix vs Verizon issue:
Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.
Emphasis mine.
The Comcast deal may be entirely different, I have little doubt the technical aspects were at least partially different, but I suspect the motivations were the same.
See, that's what they *did* and that's what pushed this change. Netflix didn't want to pay to put rack space in because it costs more, that raises their prices and their customers don't care about latency at all. A half second is huge in internet response times but customers couldn't care less if it their movie took an extra half second to start. Rather than give Netflix the bigger connection it needed to make it's customers happy, even when Netflix offered to pay for it, Comcast refused. That way they could force Netflix to pay Comcast extra money in order for Comcast customers to get decent Netflix service.
Your average consumer believes that the bandwidth they pay for each month reflects how fast their ISP will carry traffic to them. Comcast realized that they could sell that idea to the consumer and then not provide it and the average consumer wouldn't know or blame them. Then they could demand money from content providers.
We do want CDNs, but we want them provided because they improve service that people care about, not because ISPs refuse to give their customers sufficient access to content providers in order to make more money.
The courts have recently been unkind to software patents. Google has lots of money for lawyers and they could spend less on lawyers than they're paying Microsoft if some (any?) of the patents were to be invalidated. Google has agreements with MS that may hinge partially on not going to court with them. However, a win for Kyocera could save them mucho dinero.
Google may be able to support Kyocera without breaking their agreements and it could be a big win for them without jeopardizing anything except money. They have money to spare.
In the 1980's, a think tank with access to classified information and all the data they could put their hands on about oil and food calculated that when US oil access decreased to a certain threshold there would be a cycle of problems ending in wide spread starvation. They also realized that it would be possible to minimize the starvation deaths if enough land and equipment were dedicated to corn production, but at the same time realized that there was no way the market profit margins would entice anyone to make the investments. So they had the necessary secret meetings and ethanol fuel additives were the result; essentially they created a government incentive to ramp up the capability to produce food in an environment where the food isn't needed.
That's my guess anyway.
Or else, you know, it's just government bureaucracy making poor decisions, but that seems unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never read that story, and I consider myself an Asimov fan. Thank you!
I was thinking of this one http://www.galactanet.com/oneo...
So do you remember or are you just guessing?
I read an interesting short story once where the protagonist died and before being reincarnated was surprised to learn that you could be born before you died. That in fact, you could be born at any point in time and might be interacting with yourself if you happened to be born twice in the same time period, and you wouldn't know because you forget everything when you're born. Then it was slowly revealed that not only could you be born multiple times in one time period, you absolutely were. Moreover, it was revealed that you were in fact the only soul, being born over and over throughout time, interacting with nobody but yourself and literally making your own karma by being the person you were kind to and also the person you were cruel to.
Wish I could remember the name of that story. Or a previous life so I'd know if karma applies to the next life or not. Maybe it's more immediate... sort of insta-karma, which would be a good name for a powdered coffee.
I can't believe I'm going to contribute to this side of the discussion. "Loathe" is the mildest word I can think of for how I feel about a government accessible decryption system, but I'm going to explain why it's not infeasible to maintain security and have government access, unlike so many posters seem to assume.
Lets take cell phones as a starting example. The encryption of my phone isn't done with the password I put into the phone when I reboot it, the encryption is done with a randomly generated key which my password decrypts. There is no reason the same key that is actually decrypting the phone couldn't be encrypted with a phone manufacturer password. That government mandated password would encrypt the real decryption key just like my password does, but the government password wouldn't change when I change the password I'm using.
Note the government password isn't the same for multiple phones, it's unique to each phone. The government password is a randomly generated complex string of numbers, letters and symbols and it's not stored on the phone.
The government password for my phone is created at OS installation time and then the phone manufacturer encrypts it with the public key provided by the government. Those encrypted password media are sent to the companies selling the phones and those companies keep that media physically secured.
The government must subpoena the key for a specific phone in order to decrypt its contents.
The government password is now protected by:
A) A PKI private key stored by a government agency
B) Physical security at a non-governmental agency
C) The somewhat abused but best available legal processes of our government
Encrypted computer drives work the same. The assumption in both scenarios is that people fall into one of these groups:
A) don't know it is there
B) use the system their device came with
C) don't understand how to change the system
That covers 99.999% of people, probably even 99.99% of criminals. I may repartition my drive and install varying operating systems, and I may install a different OS on my phone, but normal people don't. Even drug dealers and terrorists are unlikely to do that when there are far easier ways to avoid incrimination. The fact is we could have such a "backdoor" already in play and we wouldn't necessarily know about it. I'm geekier than most by far, and I don't recompile the kernel on my boot partition to make sure it matches the one that is actually there. Granted, I do tend to wipe drives and start fresh, but if Redhat and Canonical are compromised, the NSA is good enough at their jobs, that I'll probably never notice. Do you know for sure the signature of your running kernel matches the one that you could compile for yourself?
Which is kind of the point isn't it? I'm not usually taking pictures for the enjoyment of the public, I'm taking them so that I can someday enjoy the memory more clearly.
You nailed it.
We're subjected constantly to rules and laws that make no sense and most of them aren't enforced; Even the cops often don't know what the laws are and they're supposed to enforce them. It makes me think of the cop who was writing tickets to everyone with a GPS. It was a stupid law but he decided to enforce it and caught hell for it, but isn't that what we want? Don't we want cops to enforce the actual laws regardless of their own opinions? But instead, we've all come to accept an environment where it's practically impossible to follow all the laws all the time, not to mention all the rules. We're literally being trained to ignore the rules.
And of course, people act like the solution is to make more rules.
Observe all warning signs.
I remember and it was terrible! The OS was never designed to keep applications from talking to other applications on the system. (As an AS/400 novitiate and SE adherent, I should say "practically never.")
OS application management is something that is not as secure as a virtual machine or a jail or a container, so if you miss the days when the OS was doing it, you didn't have the problems these things are designed to solve.
Containers aren't just virtual machines running a single application either. VMs are a full OS with all the overhead that comes with it, including hardware abstraction layers, boot times and a bunch of stuff you don't need for your application but you get anyway because you need it to run a full OS.
Ideally you should be able to have a virtual machine that only needs a sliver of resources because you only need it running one thing but that's not what VMs provide. (Though Xen came closer than most and I miss it.) An ideal VM should be fast to spin up, but with VMs you were typically booting a whole OS.
Jails on the other hand... Well jails are what you wish a VM running a single application would be. A jail gives you an application and only what it actually needs in order to run in an isolated package. You don't get the benefits of having an image you can snapshot or move around like you do with virtual machines, but it dramatically cuts down on resource requirements.
Containers are basically what people want from jails and what they want from virtual machines with desirable features of each and without the drawbacks of either. They're not the solution to every problem and they're not a replacement for chroot jails or virtual machine servers, but they do have their place.
Imax Imax Imax Imax Imax Imax Imax Imax Hodor... dammit.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question isn't:
"Why should I pay.. will [never] relate to them?"
or even "How do we fight this stupid decision?"
The *right* question is: How do I get a business model where everybody is taxed to pay me?
Note: this post assumes you aren't already a politician and that you don't have ethics.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who would dope a horse to win a race, but every loser would want to prove the winner had been doped if they could. So while there may be motivation to dope horses, there is intense testing and motivation to prevent it as well.
Lasix is commonly used to prevent EIPH (Exercise Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhage.) Basically race horses bleed from broken capillaries in their lungs due to the tremendous increase in blood pressure they exhibit during a race. (It happens in people and other animals too, but most things I've read are about it happening in horses, particularly race horses.) Essentially horses have been bred to run fast as a primary objective and success comes with health consequences.
So giving Lasix to horses may come with a performance benefit, (since the diuretic causes them to be several pounds lighter) but not giving it to them comes with a known health detriment. Not everyone believes that the bleeding is something that should be treated that way and some horse owners choose not to use it, but there is no doubt that it is an effective treatment to prevent a common ailment. Since Lasix also acts as a diuretic, the counter argument is that the dehydration it causes is worse than the ailment it prevents.
There's an interesting parallel in human olympic athletes: asthma inhalers. They are allowed by the Olympics because they've been exhaustively studied and found to not give performance gains, despite the fact that more and more athletes have been using them and performing better. It turns out that humans at extreme exercise levels also tend to experience issues with their lungs, so top performers can benefit from something to counteract the damages their extreme performances cause.
Makes this spring to mind:
RIP Mr. Adams.
During development, this pistol was called the Walther PPK after its real-world counterpart. The name was presumably changed for legal reasons.
See: http://goldeneye.wikia.com/wik...
and: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Walt...
Me neither.
What banner ads? Between directly supporting /. and Adblock, I don't see any. Of course since I'm paying them, I do have some expectation of professionalism. This seems like the sort of thing the sainted Commander Taco himself would have done, up to a point, except I'm not sure the saint himself would have been as patient and understanding of the asshattery I've seen in this thread.
I think you meant:
To which I'd say: I actually do pay. I've supported /. directly for years. I do expect a certain level of professionalism and editorial freedom from them, not only because that's what I pay for, but because that's the honorable thing to do.
With that said, I don't think SK is being unprofessional or unreasonable. I think that the concern that dice might hurt what is good about /. is a legitimate one, but not necessarily one I'd consider supported by this single instance of a delay.
If you actually meant to say that people who are paying money don't deserve to get what they paid for, then I'm very confused by your post.
I'm not well versed and it sounds like you are. So is it against the law for me to get a text from a friend who says he'll give me $20 to drive him to his dental appointment? How about if I refer him to someone else I trust? Where does the line get drawn?
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be rules or laws or lines in the sand. I'm just curious what separates legal behavior from illegal behavior since I can't really tell from what I've read so far.
It is explicitly stated in the contract:
https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/uploa...
You assume I'm outraged. I do understand the need for non-compete, non-disclosure and intellectual property ownership transfer clauses in contracts; in the right place and circumstances. I even understand the difference between enforceable and unenforceable contracts.
I'm not outraged.
I think it is silly and expect it to be unenforceable, and I doubt they have any intent of enforcing it. That doesn't mean it isn't a threat. There is no real contract without some threat of enforcement, and that's the key word: threat.
Whether Amazon takes action or not, it is a threat which discourages specific actions. It doesn't matter whether it is actively enforced or not. That's the real danger, the threat discourages specific actions. That's a threat, even if they choose not to follow through on it.
There is a place for those types of clauses. This is obviously not the place and it is good that people are bothered by it. I may not be particularly bothered, certainly not outraged, but I'm glad that unreasonable contracts get negative attention.
Yes. Yes they did. That's exactly what a non-compete contract is: a threat.
People value a stable government. They won't stop paying taxes until they fear their government more than the anarchy that would replace it. They don't fear this enough.
My experience is similar. I have appreciated how easy it is to work with. I point one domain at my home server, a sub-domain of that at Google AppEngine and my other domain at Google Sites.
Your needs will determine who the best host is for you. Here's what works for me:
Thanks, you may be right, but I was certainly wrong, I was actually thinking of the Netflix vs Verizon issue:
Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.
Emphasis mine.
The Comcast deal may be entirely different, I have little doubt the technical aspects were at least partially different, but I suspect the motivations were the same.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
See, that's what they *did* and that's what pushed this change. Netflix didn't want to pay to put rack space in because it costs more, that raises their prices and their customers don't care about latency at all. A half second is huge in internet response times but customers couldn't care less if it their movie took an extra half second to start. Rather than give Netflix the bigger connection it needed to make it's customers happy, even when Netflix offered to pay for it, Comcast refused. That way they could force Netflix to pay Comcast extra money in order for Comcast customers to get decent Netflix service.
Your average consumer believes that the bandwidth they pay for each month reflects how fast their ISP will carry traffic to them. Comcast realized that they could sell that idea to the consumer and then not provide it and the average consumer wouldn't know or blame them. Then they could demand money from content providers.
We do want CDNs, but we want them provided because they improve service that people care about, not because ISPs refuse to give their customers sufficient access to content providers in order to make more money.
The courts have recently been unkind to software patents. Google has lots of money for lawyers and they could spend less on lawyers than they're paying Microsoft if some (any?) of the patents were to be invalidated. Google has agreements with MS that may hinge partially on not going to court with them. However, a win for Kyocera could save them mucho dinero.
Google may be able to support Kyocera without breaking their agreements and it could be a big win for them without jeopardizing anything except money. They have money to spare.
Not so much "demand" as "cite."
It helps if you're humming A-Team theme music while you read it.
In the 1980's, a think tank with access to classified information and all the data they could put their hands on about oil and food calculated that when US oil access decreased to a certain threshold there would be a cycle of problems ending in wide spread starvation. They also realized that it would be possible to minimize the starvation deaths if enough land and equipment were dedicated to corn production, but at the same time realized that there was no way the market profit margins would entice anyone to make the investments. So they had the necessary secret meetings and ethanol fuel additives were the result; essentially they created a government incentive to ramp up the capability to produce food in an environment where the food isn't needed.
That's my guess anyway.
Or else, you know, it's just government bureaucracy making poor decisions, but that seems unlikely.