Unfortunately, there is a big flaw in your reasoning.
Courts have ruled, that anytime you had your information over to a 3rd party, it isn't subject to constitutional protections preventing search and seizure -- based on the the theory that 3rd party's are not 100% trustworthy.
Based on that, if you store something in the cloud -- courts have already ruled that it's NOT your private stuff anymore -- so theoretically, 'anyone' could make a copy, though most obviously anyone in the employ of the 3rd party (a music cloud service could provide a gigantic DB for discrete employees to obtain all sorta of digital information that could be resold or made available over on unrelated servers -- not to mention anyone in law enforcement wouldn't need a court order to obtain their own copy of 1000's of customer's songs -- again something that might find itself duplicated before it's stored in the evidence locker.
Sure -- these situations are based on unethical or illegal actions by others, but if the cloud storage wasn't allowed, they wouldn't have had the opportunity. Such large quantities of digital 'goods' might be too tempting for someone to siphon off copies on the side.
Of course, I think such arguments are *bull*, and are similar to arguments against legalizing cannabis cultivation -- because it would increase the crime of people stealing it (so does allowing people to own cars & stereos)!...
Unfortunately, there are idiots who believe that if you have a freedom that tempts others to do crime, then that's enough to restrict you from having that freedom. How that attitude passes as acceptable in a 'free' society, is beyond me, but the laws are there and there are stupid court rulings to support these stupid laws.
Someone wrote: Yet the most powerful argument against net neutrality is that it could (and likely would) result in government censorship. Net neutrality is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to put the Internet under the purview of the government, packaged such that it sells to geeks.
How do you equate non-discrimination with government censorship?
As for the government seeking to put the Internet under the purview of the government: the US constitution already gives the government control over interstate commerce and traffic - so it constitutionally already has "purview"... i.e. that's a moot point. The issue is, always, what they do with that control -- just like the job market. There, they implement non-discrimination policies which people also rally against, because it limits their right to discriminate.
Gee, really sad.
Those that provide services will continue to want to have unethical control for the purpose of exploiting and gouging customers in a non-competitive market. The only thing stopping them are governments "by and for the people". Corporations will continue to lie and deceive people by telling them that complete nonsense like: non-discrimination=censorship! It's obvious propaganda, attempting to deceive people into supporting policies that are really very harmful to those people.
Have a throughput problem? Comcast's method of determining IP throughput ? Send a tech out to measure the cable's signal strength. If it's ok, then there's no problem!!!
That's the extent of the network diagnostics -- doing the same stuff they'd due to detect cable signal quality problems.
!!!!
I thought AT&T was bad when they tried to diagnose throughput problems using whether or not 'ping' worked.
I dunno....if you look at the actions of Bush and Cheney, with their being 'ok', and actually encouraging torture, and MANY practices that had previously been considered 'heinous' and worthy of 'war criminal prosecution', it seems that the US has easily started to fall into the category of an oppressive government.
Many of these acts were covered up -- and there's likely many more that we'll never know of or hear of. That seems like 'censorship' by the government of information that the *rulers* would have rather kept under raps.
So just because it's now the US, how is this different?
Unfortunately, Cheney, and many conservatives are "end justifies the means" type people -- this isn't the way the US has traditionally been. Evidence that was collected improperly -- wasn't allowed to be used to prosecute people. Now -- that's no longer the case. Corporations can now spend unlimited funds to sway public opinion to whatever suits corporate interests -- even it involves starting a war to secure corporate interests OR stir up needed corporate business. As near as I can tell Halliburton made billions -- all paid for by the US tax payer on a war that was generated under multiple false pretenses. IT appears it was done purely for profit and business motives. Of course moving from there to using military means that were also unethical is no big change. It's all part of a huge corruption that was allowed and to some extent is still being allowed to grow in influence in the US -- and it's being billed by the propaganda machine as being "OK".
Large numbers of Americans think horrible acts are now 'ok'...the moral sensibilities of US citizens have been horribly jaded -- and it will take strong and unpleasant remedies to get people to back to ethical government -- likely not possible in this generation without government collapse or revolution -- something that is unlikely to happen. But with the current education systems being bought out and corrupted by 'no child left behind' nonsense, that really means no-child is allowed ahead, the US's internal ability to recover very dim.
What wikileaks did was *GOOD* -- the truth about what we did needs to be brought out in the light. That's the only way people in the US will have a remote chance of understanding what the government is doing in our name. MANY won't care, and feel it's more important to "look good", But that's a very strong indication that those people are part of the problem.
Obama sold the people out to save the conservatives -- he claims he did it to bury the hatchet -- but that didn't happen. Those people have cranked up the rhetoric against all his policies. Unfortunately, it's hard to fight the wacko's as they, themselves are evidence. They have become the hated 'perpetrators of atrocities' that they fought against and 'hated' so much. Indeed, it's another classic case of becoming what you hate.
So is showing Americans what they have become, 'wrong'? Isn't what wikileaks did entirely what they were doing all along? Getting out word about atrocities done by governments that try to keep such information secret?
This nonsense is trotted out everytime there's any law that comes in to control outrageous behavior. Just like saying you can't yell "fire" in a packed theater anymore -- oh my, next they will take away your right to talk about the weather!
Laws are a balance between curtailing freedoms that do more harm than good. That balance itself changes over time. That's why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If we didn't have police, we wouldn't have the freedom to goto the store without getting robbed, but if we have too many, we become a police state and lose other freedoms (IMO, we're closer to the 2nd right now than now, but if I lived in some more dangerous areas of the country, I might have a different opinion).
This is a law that simply says parents have to get involved to buy certain 'extremely violent' games for their children -- same as for porn or alcohol. But really, do we really think some older kids won't find ways around this law (if it sticks) the way they do with booze and skin mags? It's a line in the sand. Nothing more.
But the effect on Ubuntu's spread into the business server marketplace might be stunted, if key-apps to control Ubuntu server's are written using Wayland since most business's will be using Windows desktops. They might have some other 'X' solution than cygwin, but whatever solution they have it will be an impediment to acceptance if they can't access server-control apps on Ubuntu, but they can, on Redhat or SuSE...
That was my main point -- fragmentation often causes interoperability problems even though it may benefit the Ubuntu platform. ***Hopefully*** application writers will be smart enough to offer "slick" functionality under Ubuntu, but just as functional (though maybe not as 'pretty'?) operation under 'X'. Too often app writers don't like the excess baggage of writing for the older standards...(understandably)...
So you agree that it will cause fragmentation...only problem is the forking issue... will it become X12? If it does, then that's great, but how long before it's supported on Windows -- or more specifically, 'cygwin on windows'. From what I've read it's heavily dependent on linux-only kernel features, so that would require a huge rewrite to emulate on windows with a huge question mark for performance. Right now Cygwin on Windows is maintained by about maybe 2 people at most. You think they can do that port in their spare time when it's stuff that might take someone who's fluent in both Windows and Linux 'internals' to write?
How about the Mac platform? Same problem. Right now, X works because it runs everywhere. Any solution that's considered for X12, also has to meet the "runs everywhere" requirement to be a true replacement. And how long before that happens? I would *love* to see it happen -- and see 3D app acceleration over the net, but right now, OpenGL over a 1Gbit network sucks for performance, Maybe this will optimize remote traffic and that would help, but more than likely it will result in new apps that only run on Ubuntu-enabled platforms. If those apps don't run on windows, it will shut those apps out of the workplace and severely limit their adoption. It may harm Ubuntu's adoption if those apps become important in the management of an Ubuntu server.
Since MS, has never offered such a product before, I can't see how *anyone* would "know that you can't rely on a Microsoft product alone to solve your virus/trojan/keylogger/spyware/whatever problems".
Considering I've run for well over a decade without ANY such product -- and doing so solved my 'problems' (non-existent) just fine, then how can adding such a product not create benefit (providing one doesn't mind the inevitable hit in performance for real-time/on-access scanning malware scanning.
It's networked, and name me one software vendor who has their software running on more computers than MS. MS collects malware reports from a large number of those running MS-software, since being able to detect 'malware' problems is a high priority issue if they want to verify the integrity of their licensing mechanisms. MS has a high interest in keeping their systems clean and has are in a better position to collect and act on information about malware infestations than any other vendor.
It's always been my opinion that the need for 3rd party apps to deal with malware is due to a flaw in the OS and that the OS is in the best position to deal with such problems. A well designed OS would have malware protection built-in. And sure, MS could screw it up -- but they do have a financial incentive to get it right -- so much so, that they *GIVE* it away for free. I'd call that a rather high motivation.
Conversely, if they charged to protect their systems from things that are essentially bugs in their system -- that would be something akin to blackmail or 'protection money'... But then that's how I see much of the for-pay malware industry -- "pay us, or your system's toast"...
Third party anti-malware companies have formed their entire existence on *flaws* in MS products. MS providing free malware protection for their own product is ethically, the right thing to do. It's hard to argue that MS shouldn't be doing this or that it shouldn't be included as part of the OS.
So there's no potential problem with people developing apps that only work on 'wayland' that won't be accessible on non-Ubuntu platforms?
How is this different than when MS, creates a new feature set above the standard. The problem is that if people code to the extensions, then the resulting programs won't work on the standard -- anywhere... Isn't that called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?" Initially X is embraced by Ubuntu for remote display of apps. Now they are extending it through Wayland -- of course if developers code only to the 'X' standard, they'll be fine, but if devs write code to take advantage of the new features, then it won't run anywhere else.
How is this harmful? How was IE6 harmful to the internet, or MS's now defunct JSCRIPT (?) that extended Java?
Working to extend 'X' and OpenGL -- something that all platforms could partake of is difficult -- and sure it's easier to go off and do your own thing. Might be the best thing for Ubuntu, but it IS a compatibility problem and it does have the effect of segmenting the market.
That said -- if Ubuntu was my world, and I just wanted the best functionality in that world, trying to update the rest of the world to accommodate new features might be something that could delay new stuff for years, so it might be the best way to achieve an outstanding product. But no one should be deluded that it won't have an effect on app development in general, since there will be those who will develop for Wayland who would have developed generally useful apps that run under 'X'. That will have some negative (maybe small) impact on the 'application market' as a whole (primarily due to fragmentation).
Let the parents decide what is and isn't appropriate, not the government.
That is EXACTLY what this law is doing.
The law would NOT prevent parents from purchasing those games and giving them to their children. It prevents children from circumventing parental guidance. Since this is what you explicitly state that you want, then what is the problem?
How is restricting violent video games any different?
It shouldn't be. We don't restrict violent movies, it is a voluntary rating system backed by company policy. Not law.
This comment was made in the comments on the original post, but shows his naivete, or deliberate obfuscation.
While the rating itself is voluntary, governments at ALL levels make *laws* the sale of items based on these 'voluntary ratings'. So, yes, the ratings are voluntary, but how those ratings are used is by governments in law across the country. In california (and many states) the selling of 'X' rated material to minors is illegal, and this has stood legal challenges, so I see no difference why this should be different than video games.
If the rating system for movies and games threw up their hands and rated everything 'G', then the laws would have no teeth, but I would most definitely want the same people (MPAA) who rate movies to apply the same standards to movies as to video games.
That said, I think the standards applied to movies are bogus, BUT, games shouldn't get a special exemption. If you want to change things, then change the system. It's bogus to carve out special exemptions for games.
As for your other comments about causality -- that's *irrelevant* to the discussion about fairness in how the law is applied, wouldn't you agree?
AS a separate issue, I'm quite willing to discuss that point -- since the body of information involving people viewing violent acts goes back to the 70's and the results are **universally** consistent involving children (which is who these laws would affect). The idea that "children" can apply "rationality" and separate seen and played behavior from real life just isn't born out by any study. With adults, the correlation is weaker, but in children, such rational thought centers are not yet developed -- the brain doesn't fully mature until in *some* areas until the mid 30's, which is why the minimum age for president was set at 35. That was true 200 years ago, and is still true today. I.e. that brains are not fully matured in children was noticed and taken as a truth 200 years ago and inscribed in our constitution. Even the right to vote, was originally limited to those over 20 due to this same brain maturity factor. Only the pressure of our desire to send 18 (originally, younger) year olds into war created pressure to push the age for voting down to 18 -- it wasn't based on 'maturity' studies.
But the issue of whether or not exposure to violence affects subsequent behavior is NOT relevant to the idea of making the laws for restricting 'minor's access to material deemed "potentially harmful" (including attending strip clubs, and maybe even ingestion of potentially harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco), **CONSISTENT** makes a great deal of logical sense that is really hard to argue against (at least from a logical point of view). Most of the people arguing for an inconsistent treatment are either in the affected group, OR are mixing the two separate issues above (whether or not any of those activities should be restricted). I would argue that the inability to separate the issues, itself, is a sign of incomplete development, by some definition, though realistically, the latter is more likely based in habit or education than in biology.
'R' or 'X', or 'XXX' -- any of them. How is restricting violent video games any different?
For that matter, why not just apply the same scale to video games as is applied to movies? I think that would make arguments of legality more clear if they were treated as any other age-restricted activity, such as alcohol or X/XXX rated movies. or renting 'X' and 'XXX' rated movies.- an advertising rating more than a real rating, as 'XXX' isn't a real rating -- they just used it as a superlative of the old 'X' rating (now NC17).
Someone should definitely mod the parent up...
The other part of this argument. Why is it, in the US, that scenes of violence and murder (that are often illegal if actually done in person) get the PG, PG-13 or R rating, while sex -- usually a legal activity gets the R, NC17(X), & XXX?
My perception is that in other modern, countries, with similar standards of living, those things that are 'illegal' are the ones getting the more restrictive ratings. How did we end up with such a perverse system?
I don't know about how default conditions apply, but with CFQ, you should learn how to use 'ionice'. When an I/O bound process is assigned, "idle", it goes completely 'idle' when any other process competitively wants I/O. So complaining about I/O processes swamping userland, is showing a configuration problem, not a problem with the scheduler.
What more do you want? This is the whole reason different I/O schedulers were added.
If you don't want the I/O to go into cache, then make sure your I/O heavy processes use the posix_fadvice( fd, , , POSIX_FADVIS_DONTNEED);
So what's the problem. You have a way to control priority as well as usage. What more do you want?
A refinement, of possible benefit, would be a param to limit the cache-pages/process in memory at any point. That could be another way to address the issue. Hmmm...
I wish your story was surprising, but cops these days go after 'low hanging fruit' -- that includes going after basically 'honest' citizens for nuisance or moral violations that have nothing to do with crime or violence.
Police have really had motive to get much more corrupt with Bush the First's 'Zero Tolerance' laws that allow properties to be seized without conviction, trial or due-process and the proceeds of sale of that property to go to the arresting police group. WAY too much profit motive to file false reports now -- with budgets being tight, calls for crackdown on crime -- best way is to instill fear in the populace by random enforcement and, in some cases "accidental deaths" of the civilian population at large -- that way the police can do what they want and collect money when crime goes up.
I hear of conservatives pushing for teachers being held accountable for teaching -- how about police being held accountable for crime going up or down over a long term? Makes as much sense.
So your choice is a Comcraptic DNSSEC testbed, or targeted ads?
While I am forced (alternatives are 5 times slower or 10x as expensive for the same speed) to connect through Comcast, I run my own DNS server -- I wonder how long that will be allowed.
Comcast is so messed up, though the US broadband as a whole is messed up and getting worse...wonder time to live in the US, in it's twilight years...
Since pollution in the atmosphere is enough to change climate. In fact the lowering of particulate matter in the the air over Europe, is considered to be one of the factors why it's been hit (maybe more so?) with "Global[sic] warming problems... The effect of cleaner air was also observed in the US, but to a lesser extent, I believe.
However, in places like China, particulate matter is 'up' and likely to increase further since they didn't (or haven't) implemented the same controls as was done in the US and Europe and aren't likely to jump on board as quickly due to the increased cost and their desire to catchup and exceed in the short-term.
If a country's particulate matter really affected global temps that much though, we might expect to see further global cooling as China and India (basically with many people, all increasing use of higher-particulate matter-generating products and technologies) expand their industrial base and continue to bring the whole population up to the levels of the US and Europe.
Particulate matter can affect global temps (Krakatoa -- a few degrees cooler, globally for 3-4 years following), so it may depend on size of the particles among other factors.
Who knows, if China and India increase the output of the same pollutions that Europe and the US decreased in, with their significantly higher population, they may have a much larger cooling effect in the short term and CO2's potential, in the short term.
The faster the most modern nations can move to renewable energy sources, and the cheaper we can make such energy, the more easy it will be to get less rich nations to use such energy -- in fact, ideally, if renewable energy can be made such that it is cheaper than non-renewables, the problem will solve itself. While that will almost be guaranteed to happen in the long term, it may not be soon enough for climate effects to outweigh cost factors in energy selection and is certainly not soon enough for *prudent* management of the planets limited reserves. What took thousands of times as long to create as human civilization has been in existence, is being spent in a time period that is a small fraction of the time humans have been around and might be able to 'be around'.
Those resources have other user than just for 'fuel', and almost certainly more uses over the future of human civilization, than we've discovered so far. If we consume all of them now, just as 'fuel', it would be disastrous planning for the human race.
In the US (and elsewhere), the ability to host your own data is greatly limited by small caps on upload bandwidth. That resource is still owned by ISP's who also, coincidentally will agree to host your 'content' for a price (and for terms of their 'agreement'). Seems like ISP's have a strong incentive to NOT allow you a good upload bandwidth, to make you dependent on remote hosting of your stuff.
Until that problem is addressed, home location of data is mostly a dream except for very small amounts of stuff.
On top of the above is the US-court view that at soon as you locate your stuff with any 3rd party, you lose your constitutional rights to have your stuff be safe without a warrant. That's the a large problem right there unless you want to add the overhead of encrypting everything -- but then forget easy access to 3rd party apps through conventional API's...
Sue who for what? They have no case (not that this is a barrier to SLAPP-down lawsuits).
Development forks of projects happen all the time, and many times, those forks are very useful ways to explore other options to do things. In some cases those alternates are dead-ends, in other cases, useful work comes out of the forks and is folded back into the mainstream. In no case that I'm aware of, has a well-run, established, project been obsoleted by some disgruntled, baseless faction out to seize control.
Either Oracle is extremely ignorant of how forks have gone in the past, or they are extremely 'insecure' about their position w/respect to OpenOffice (ie. as soon as any 'open group' comes up with a fork, then it would be the default 'Open Office', since by 'definition', an 'office product owned by single corporate entity who has closed their product (as compared to the 'forked project') would be painted in 'lesser light'). It could be more telling about Oracles intentions for the future of OO, than any current actions of the non-corporate members of the OO committee -- i.e. they don't want anyone to have a more 'real' claim to the OO.org 'name' -- so they are attempting to curtail any involvement of non-Oracle people with the OO project.
If they had intentions of truly being open source and pushing forward in a positive way, they would have shepherded or promoted the "competing' projects for the benefit it would bring to the community as a whole.
By their own actions, they are telegraphing their malevolent intentions well in advance. Truly, this is very sad of them. They had a chance to better their name and reputation and are really blowing it in such a transparent way.
That's exactly what GOP policy has been for the past few decades. They couldn't get rid of entrenched government bureaucrats, so they put complete incompetent people into government. Result: government falls apart, and suddenly we need 3-5x as many people to do the same work, government blooms and drains tax dollars: society goes down. You don't accomplish anything buy encouraging destructive or stupid behavior. If we had efficient people in government, you wouldn't need as much government, taxes would be less, there would be more economic prosperity and less crime.
Government inefficiency and *imprisonment* rate have gone up hand in hand; the imprisonment rate didn't go up significantly even in the tumultuous 60's or early 70's.
1) So-so wages compared to other professions that will decline relative to the cost-of-living over you career
2) long working hours with no social life
3) working for people who don't have a clue about programming, what you do, or what it takes to do what you do
4) dealing with internal company politics that have nothing to do with your core competencies or the actual product (just interpersonal likes/dislikes/favorites/biases...many of which won't be admitted but will come into play behind the scenes).
5) having your skill-set be outdated every 3-4 years; you have to self-educate yourself in new technologies and must keep up on the new tech, or you will become less valuable and become outdated. That's a quick way to maintenance, but more than likely the door.
6) company insecurity (no game companies seem stable)....
With skills requiring you to be an artist, you will have no benefits or protections accorded to artists in other professions (visual or audio). With skills in mathematics and physics, or understanding of game theory, you'll still be accorded the respect of a monkey (a 'code monkey')...
Sounds like an attractive field, if you live in Japan and expect to live with your parents for the rest of your life. No wonder they have such a thriving game/manga/anime market.
Yes, I'm looking at the downsides, but even if you love the job, eventually, reality will hit, and you will have to find something to do other than what you love (or you will be forced to change what you love doing).
Don't think that you will succeed by excellence. Can anyone name a game designer who has made a career on that and made it to a comfortable retirement age (whether they've retired or not). The same can be said for programming in general -- the number of those who have made it on excellence? I can't think of any -- the ones who are the names in programming, seem to be those who publish books -- and among the heaviest weight names usually seem to be professors.
But I'm temporarily in a mental funk and am more than willing to have statistical counter examples (not 1-of) posted to the contrary...please!
Not very impressive. 1) (as others have pointed out) I don't see how it's any different than IP lookup. 2) First attempted - nothing worked, (need to temporarily allow scripts on samy.pl 3) Then I get prompt "samy.pl wants you to share information about your location. Share (y/n) [ ] - remember this decision?"... (ok, no, don't remember) 4) It returned my location accurate within 120km (75miles). Not very impressive.
For wide spread distribution needs, any requirement that one maintain open ports for incoming 'upload' requests needs to be dropped. There are a significantly large number of sites, in fact, I would say that the majority of business and corporate downloads would require this before this method can be suggested for wide spread deployment.
As I see it, that's the major issue.
The 2nd major issue will be the perception that such 'upload' ports being open, is required, to make it work (even if the distributor uses server's that don't require or pay attention to connecting client's upload ability or even whether or not such ability is present).
The 3rd issue is that large corporations will likely demand a client where the upload channel is disabled before they will run it on their network. They won't just want the assurance that it can be prevented or that their firewall will block it -- more than likely there will be many that will want assurances about the program before it is given a green light to execute anywhere on their network. These are the environments were program execution policy has the 'Default' set to 'Block', unless it's on a list of permitted programs (most stringently controlled by some binary-checksum algorithm before being allowed to run). Some likely requirements:
1) They will want to ensure that such a program can't be configured to allow uploading.
2) It needs to work through in a firewalled, proxied environment (i.e. will it work through an http proxy? If it requires a specialized proxy program that will sit on their firewall, that's a security risk for such a specialized benefit that's already met by existing infrastructure. Can such a program, its evaluation and maintenance cost be justified given the added functionality.
3) Proxy needs to allow security by user/station so only authorized users can download programs.
4) Proxy needs to allow list of allowed sites that can be downloaded from -- and this is stickler -- as it forces bit-torrent using download vendors to provide a list of their download-servers that will be used to stream to clients. Not insurmountable, but a larger list than giving out 1 download address.
5) Perceptions. Even if the technical hurdles are overcome and security needs met, there will still be a large number of companies that may see Bit-torrent as a peer-to-peer protocol used primarily by pirates. They won't want to be associated with such -- and even if they allowed it, if the fact that they were using bit-torrent to perform system maintenance was released to the press and stockholders, then stockholders and the press would have to be convinced that due-diligence was being performed and that this was not something that would be sharing company data. That would require a complete re-education of how bit-torrent is perceived in the public arena -- going *against*, the current *propaganda* machine that tries to portray it as only being used, or at best, being used for 'shady' purposes, and certainly not something that can't be better replaced by other protocols.
Overcoming obstacle 5 will be the hardest, as it involves changing public perception.
Even though the majority of customers won't have such stringent requirements for use of a bit-torrent client, any publicly held company runs the risk of needing to convince the 'uneducated, propaganda-fed masses', so for the most profitable customers, companies providing downloads would still have to provide considerable resources to allow such companies to continue to download via current methods or risk alienating some of their most profitable customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there is a big flaw in your reasoning.
Courts have ruled, that anytime you had your information over to a 3rd party, it isn't subject to constitutional protections preventing search and seizure -- based on the the theory that 3rd party's are not 100% trustworthy.
Based on that, if you store something in the cloud -- courts have already ruled that it's NOT your private stuff anymore -- so theoretically, 'anyone' could make a copy, though most obviously anyone in the employ of the 3rd party (a music cloud service could provide a gigantic DB for discrete employees to obtain all sorta of digital information that could be resold or made available over on unrelated servers -- not to mention anyone in law enforcement wouldn't need a court order to obtain their own copy of 1000's of customer's songs -- again something that might find itself duplicated before it's stored in the evidence locker.
Sure -- these situations are based on unethical or illegal actions by others, but if the cloud storage wasn't allowed, they wouldn't have had the opportunity. Such large quantities of digital 'goods' might be too tempting for someone to siphon off copies on the side.
Of course, I think such arguments are *bull*, and are similar to arguments against legalizing cannabis cultivation -- because it would increase the crime of people stealing it (so does allowing people to own cars & stereos)!...
Unfortunately, there are idiots who believe that if you have a freedom that tempts others to do crime, then that's enough to restrict you from having that freedom. How that attitude passes as acceptable in a 'free' society, is beyond me, but the laws are there and there are stupid court rulings to support these stupid laws.
Someone wrote: Yet the most powerful argument against net neutrality is that it could (and likely would) result in government censorship. Net neutrality is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to put the Internet under the purview of the government, packaged such that it sells to geeks.
How do you equate non-discrimination with government censorship?
As for the government seeking to put the Internet under the purview of the government: the US constitution already gives the government control over interstate commerce and traffic - so it constitutionally already has "purview"... i.e. that's a moot point. The issue is, always, what they do with that control -- just like the job market. There, they implement non-discrimination policies which people also rally against, because it limits their right to discriminate.
Gee, really sad.
Those that provide services will continue to want to have unethical control for the purpose of exploiting and gouging customers in a non-competitive market. The only thing stopping them are governments "by and for the people". Corporations will continue to lie and deceive people by telling them that complete nonsense like: non-discrimination=censorship! It's obvious propaganda, attempting to deceive people into supporting policies that are really very harmful to those people.
Have a throughput problem? Comcast's method of determining IP throughput ? Send a tech out to measure the cable's signal strength. If it's ok, then there's no problem!!!
That's the extent of the network diagnostics -- doing the same stuff they'd due to detect cable signal quality problems.
!!!!
I thought AT&T was bad when they tried to diagnose throughput problems using whether or not 'ping' worked.
I didn't know how bad it could get.
I dunno....if you look at the actions of Bush and Cheney, with their being 'ok', and actually encouraging torture, and MANY practices that had previously been considered 'heinous' and worthy of 'war criminal prosecution', it seems that the US has easily started to fall into the category of an oppressive government.
Many of these acts were covered up -- and there's likely many more that we'll never know of or hear of. That seems like 'censorship' by the government of information that the *rulers* would have rather kept under raps.
So just because it's now the US, how is this different?
Unfortunately, Cheney, and many conservatives are "end justifies the means" type people -- this isn't the way the US has traditionally been. Evidence that was collected improperly -- wasn't allowed to be used to prosecute people. Now -- that's no longer the case. Corporations can now spend unlimited funds to sway public opinion to whatever suits corporate interests -- even it involves starting a war to secure corporate interests OR stir up needed corporate business. As near as I can tell Halliburton made billions -- all paid for by the US tax payer on a war that was generated under multiple false pretenses. IT appears it was done purely for profit and business motives. Of course moving from there to using military means that were also unethical is no big change. It's all part of a huge corruption that was allowed and to some extent is still being allowed to grow in influence in the US -- and it's being billed
by the propaganda machine as being "OK".
Large numbers of Americans think horrible acts are now 'ok'...the moral sensibilities of US citizens have been horribly jaded -- and it will take strong and unpleasant remedies to get people to back to ethical government -- likely not possible in this generation without government collapse or revolution -- something that is unlikely to happen. But with
the current education systems being bought out and corrupted by 'no child left behind' nonsense, that really means no-child is allowed ahead, the US's internal ability to recover very dim.
What wikileaks did was *GOOD* -- the truth about what we did needs to be brought out in the light. That's the only way people in the US will have a remote chance of understanding what the government is doing in our name. MANY won't care, and feel it's more important to "look good", But that's a very strong indication that those people are part of the problem.
Obama sold the people out to save the conservatives -- he claims he did it to bury the hatchet -- but that didn't happen. Those people have cranked up the rhetoric against all his policies. Unfortunately, it's hard to fight the wacko's as they, themselves are evidence. They have become the hated 'perpetrators of atrocities' that they fought against and 'hated' so much. Indeed, it's another classic case of becoming what you hate.
So is showing Americans what they have become, 'wrong'? Isn't what wikileaks did entirely what they were doing all along? Getting out word about atrocities done by governments that try to keep such information secret?
This nonsense is trotted out everytime there's any law that comes in to control outrageous behavior. Just like saying you can't yell "fire" in a packed theater anymore -- oh my, next they will take away your right to talk about the weather!
Laws are a balance between curtailing freedoms that do more harm than good. That balance itself changes over time. That's why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If we didn't have police, we wouldn't have the freedom to goto the store without getting robbed, but if we have too many, we become a police state and lose other freedoms (IMO, we're closer to the 2nd right now than now, but if I lived in some more dangerous areas of the country, I might have a different opinion).
This is a law that simply says parents have to get involved to buy certain 'extremely violent' games for their children -- same as for porn or alcohol. But really, do we really think some older kids won't find ways around this law (if it sticks) the way they do with booze and skin mags? It's a line in the sand. Nothing more.
Freedom of speech is a something the government is not supposed to infringe upon.
People infringe upon other people's free speech all the time.
How do we get from anti-compete against AMD to 6 years if support for PCIe?
Joyful! :-)
I agree...
But the effect on Ubuntu's spread into the business server marketplace might be stunted, if key-apps to control Ubuntu server's are written using Wayland since most business's will be using Windows desktops. They might have some other 'X' solution than cygwin, but whatever solution they have it will be an impediment to acceptance if they can't access server-control apps on Ubuntu, but they can, on Redhat or SuSE...
That was my main point -- fragmentation often causes interoperability problems even though it may benefit the Ubuntu platform. ***Hopefully*** application writers will be smart enough to offer "slick" functionality under Ubuntu, but just as functional (though maybe not as 'pretty'?) operation under 'X'. Too often app writers don't like the excess baggage of writing for the older standards...(understandably)...
So you agree that it will cause fragmentation...only problem is the forking issue ... will it become X12? If it does, then that's great, but how long before it's supported on Windows -- or more specifically, 'cygwin on windows'. From what I've read it's heavily dependent on linux-only kernel features, so that would require a huge rewrite to emulate on windows with a huge question mark for performance. Right now Cygwin on Windows is maintained by about maybe 2 people at most. You think they can do that port in their spare time when it's stuff that might take someone who's fluent in both Windows and Linux 'internals' to write?
How about the Mac platform? Same problem. Right now, X works because it runs everywhere. Any solution that's considered for X12, also has to meet the "runs everywhere" requirement to be a true replacement. And how long before that happens? I would *love* to see it happen -- and see 3D app acceleration over the net, but right now, OpenGL over a 1Gbit network sucks for performance, Maybe this will optimize remote traffic and that would help, but more than likely it will result in new apps that only run on Ubuntu-enabled platforms. If those apps don't run on windows, it will shut those apps out of the workplace and severely limit their adoption. It may harm Ubuntu's adoption if those apps become important in the management of an Ubuntu server.
Something to consider...
Since MS, has never offered such a product before, I can't see how *anyone* would "know that you can't rely on a Microsoft product alone to solve your virus/trojan/keylogger/spyware/whatever problems".
Considering I've run for well over a decade without ANY such product -- and doing so solved my 'problems' (non-existent) just fine, then how can adding such a product not create benefit (providing one doesn't mind the inevitable hit in performance for real-time/on-access scanning malware scanning.
It's networked, and name me one software vendor who has their software running on more computers than MS. MS collects malware reports from a large number of those running MS-software, since being able to detect 'malware' problems is a high priority issue if they want to verify the integrity of their licensing mechanisms. MS has a high interest in keeping their systems clean and has are in a better position to collect and act on information about malware infestations than any other vendor.
It's always been my opinion that the need for 3rd party apps to deal with malware is due to a flaw in the OS and that the OS is in the best position to deal with such problems. A well designed OS would have malware protection built-in. And sure, MS could screw it up -- but they do have a financial incentive to get it right -- so much so, that they *GIVE* it away for free. I'd call that a rather high motivation.
Conversely, if they charged to protect their systems from things that are essentially bugs in their system -- that would be something akin to blackmail or 'protection money'... But then that's how I see much of the for-pay malware industry -- "pay us, or your system's toast"...
Third party anti-malware companies have formed their entire existence on *flaws* in MS products.
MS providing free malware protection for their own product is ethically, the right thing to do. It's hard to argue that MS shouldn't be doing this or that it shouldn't be included as part of the OS.
So there's no potential problem with people developing apps that only work on 'wayland' that won't be accessible on non-Ubuntu platforms?
How is this different than when MS, creates a new feature set above the standard. The problem is that if people code to the extensions, then the resulting programs won't work on the standard -- anywhere... Isn't that called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?" Initially X is embraced by Ubuntu for remote display of apps. Now they are extending it through Wayland -- of course if developers code only to the 'X' standard, they'll be fine, but if devs write code to take advantage of the new features, then it won't run anywhere else.
How is this harmful? How was IE6 harmful to the internet, or MS's now defunct JSCRIPT (?) that extended Java?
Working to extend 'X' and OpenGL -- something that all platforms could partake of is difficult -- and sure it's easier to go off and do your own thing. Might be the best thing for Ubuntu, but it IS a compatibility problem and it does have the effect of segmenting the market.
That said -- if Ubuntu was my world, and I just wanted the best functionality in that world, trying to update the rest of the world to accommodate new features might be something that could delay new stuff for years, so it might be the best way to achieve an outstanding product. But no one should be deluded that it won't have an effect on app development in general, since there will be those who will develop for Wayland who would have developed generally useful apps that run under 'X'. That will have some negative (maybe small) impact on the 'application market' as a whole (primarily due to fragmentation).
That is EXACTLY what this law is doing.
The law would NOT prevent parents from purchasing those games and giving them to their children. It prevents children from circumventing parental guidance. Since this is what you explicitly state that you want, then what is the problem?
Bingo!
'R' or 'X', or 'XXX' -- any of them. How is restricting violent video games any different?
For that matter, why not just apply the same scale to video games as is applied to movies? I think that would make arguments of legality more clear if they were treated as any other age-restricted activity, such as alcohol or X/XXX rated movies. or renting 'X' and 'XXX' rated movies.- an advertising rating more than a real rating, as 'XXX' isn't a real rating -- they just used it as a superlative of the old 'X' rating (now NC17).
Someone should definitely mod the parent up...
The other part of this argument. Why is it, in the US, that scenes of violence and murder (that are often illegal if actually done in person) get the PG, PG-13 or R rating, while sex -- usually a legal activity gets the R, NC17(X), & XXX?
My perception is that in other modern, countries, with similar standards of living, those things that are 'illegal' are the ones getting the more restrictive ratings. How did we end up with such a perverse system?
I don't know about how default conditions apply, but with CFQ, you should learn how to use 'ionice'. When an I/O bound process is assigned, "idle", it goes completely 'idle' when any other process competitively wants I/O. So complaining about I/O processes swamping userland, is showing a configuration problem, not a problem with the scheduler.
What more do you want? This is the whole reason different I/O schedulers were added.
If you don't want the I/O to go into cache, then make sure your I/O heavy processes use the posix_fadvice( fd, , , POSIX_FADVIS_DONTNEED);
So what's the problem. You have a way to control priority as well as usage. What more do you want?
A refinement, of possible benefit, would be a param to limit the cache-pages/process in memory at any point. That could be another way to address the issue. Hmmm...
I wish your story was surprising, but cops these days go after 'low hanging fruit' -- that includes going after basically 'honest' citizens for nuisance or moral violations that have nothing to do with crime or violence.
Police have really had motive to get much more corrupt with Bush the First's 'Zero Tolerance' laws that allow properties to be seized without conviction, trial or due-process and the proceeds of sale of that property to go to the arresting police group. WAY too much profit motive to file false reports now -- with budgets being tight, calls for crackdown on crime -- best way is to instill fear in the populace by random enforcement and, in some cases "accidental deaths" of the civilian population at large -- that way the police can do what they want and collect money when crime goes up.
I hear of conservatives pushing for teachers being held accountable for teaching -- how about police being held accountable for crime going up or down over a long term? Makes as much sense.
So your choice is a Comcraptic DNSSEC testbed, or targeted ads?
While I am forced (alternatives are 5 times slower or 10x as expensive for the same speed) to connect through Comcast, I run my own DNS server -- I wonder how long that will be allowed.
Comcast is so messed up, though the US broadband as a whole is messed up and getting worse...wonder time to live in the US, in it's twilight years...
Since pollution in the atmosphere is enough to change climate. In fact the lowering of particulate matter in the the air over Europe, is considered to be one of the factors why it's been hit (maybe more so?) with "Global[sic] warming problems... The effect of cleaner air was also observed in the US, but to a lesser extent, I believe.
However, in places like China, particulate matter is 'up' and likely to increase further since they didn't (or haven't) implemented the same controls as was done in the US and Europe and aren't likely to jump on board as quickly due to the increased cost and their desire to catchup and exceed in the short-term.
If a country's particulate matter really affected global temps that much though, we might expect to see further global cooling as China and India (basically with many people, all increasing use of higher-particulate matter-generating products and technologies) expand their industrial base and continue to bring the whole population up to the levels of the US and Europe.
Particulate matter can affect global temps (Krakatoa -- a few degrees cooler, globally for 3-4 years following), so it may depend on size of the particles among other factors.
Who knows, if China and India increase the output of the same pollutions that Europe and the US decreased in, with their significantly higher population, they may have a much larger cooling effect in the short term and CO2's potential, in the short term.
The faster the most modern nations can move to renewable energy sources, and the cheaper we can make such energy, the more easy it will be to get less rich nations to use such energy -- in fact, ideally, if renewable energy can be made such that it is cheaper than non-renewables, the problem will solve itself. While that will almost be guaranteed to happen in the long term, it may not be soon enough for climate effects to outweigh cost factors in energy selection and is certainly not soon enough for *prudent* management of the planets limited reserves. What took thousands of times as long to create as human civilization has been in existence, is being spent in a time period that is a small fraction of the time humans have been around and might be able to 'be around'.
Those resources have other user than just for 'fuel', and almost certainly more uses over the future of human civilization, than we've discovered so far. If we consume all of them now, just as 'fuel', it would be disastrous planning for the human race.
In the US (and elsewhere), the ability to host your own data is greatly limited by small caps on upload bandwidth. That resource is still owned by ISP's who also, coincidentally will agree to host your 'content' for a price (and for terms of their 'agreement'). Seems like ISP's have a strong incentive to NOT allow you a good upload bandwidth, to make you dependent on remote hosting of your stuff.
Until that problem is addressed, home location of data is mostly a dream except for very small amounts of stuff.
On top of the above is the US-court view that at soon as you locate your stuff with any 3rd party, you lose your constitutional rights to have your stuff be safe without a warrant. That's the a large problem right there unless you want to add the overhead of encrypting everything -- but then forget easy access to 3rd party apps through conventional API's...
Sue who for what? They have no case (not that this is a barrier to SLAPP-down lawsuits).
Development forks of projects happen all the time, and many times, those forks are very useful ways to explore other options to do things. In some cases those alternates are dead-ends, in other cases, useful work comes out of the forks and is folded back into the mainstream. In no case that I'm aware of, has a well-run, established, project been obsoleted by some disgruntled, baseless faction out to seize control.
Either Oracle is extremely ignorant of how forks have gone in the past, or they are extremely 'insecure' about their position w/respect to OpenOffice (ie. as soon as any 'open group' comes up with a fork, then it would be the default 'Open Office', since by 'definition', an 'office product owned by single corporate entity who has closed their product (as compared to the 'forked project') would be painted in 'lesser light'). It could be more telling about Oracles intentions for the future of OO, than any current actions of the non-corporate members of the OO committee -- i.e. they don't want anyone to have a more 'real' claim to the OO.org 'name' -- so they are attempting to curtail any involvement of non-Oracle people with the OO project.
If they had intentions of truly being open source and pushing forward in a positive way, they would have shepherded or promoted the "competing' projects for the benefit it would bring to the community as a whole.
By their own actions, they are telegraphing their malevolent intentions well in advance. Truly, this is very sad of them. They had a chance to better their name and reputation and are really blowing it in such a transparent way.
That's exactly what GOP policy has been for the past few decades. They couldn't get rid of entrenched government bureaucrats, so they put complete incompetent people into government. Result: government falls apart, and suddenly we need 3-5x as many people to do the same work, government blooms and drains tax dollars: society goes down. You don't accomplish anything buy encouraging destructive or stupid behavior. If we had efficient people in government, you wouldn't need as much government, taxes would be less, there would be more economic prosperity and less crime.
The GOP policy has been documented in books like 'The Wrecking Machine', and if you look at the noticeable effect (see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg/693px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg.png). Note how the graph turns sharply up just after 1980 and has been on the upswing ever since. The economy was in the pit in 1980, and the GOP came into office and have dominated for most of the past 3 decades.
Government inefficiency and *imprisonment* rate have gone up hand in hand; the imprisonment rate didn't go up significantly even in the tumultuous 60's or early 70's.
How do you send a corporate entity to jail?
1) So-so wages compared to other professions that will decline relative to the cost-of-living over you career
2) long working hours with no social life
3) working for people who don't have a clue about programming, what you do, or what it takes to do what you do
4) dealing with internal company politics that have nothing to do with your core competencies or the actual product (just interpersonal likes/dislikes/favorites/biases...many of which won't be admitted but will come into play behind the scenes).
5) having your skill-set be outdated every 3-4 years; you have to self-educate
yourself in new technologies and must keep up on the new tech, or you will become
less valuable and become outdated. That's a quick way to maintenance, but more than likely the door.
6) company insecurity (no game companies seem stable)....
With skills requiring you to be an artist, you will have no benefits or protections accorded to artists in other professions (visual or audio). With skills in mathematics and physics, or understanding of game theory, you'll still be accorded the respect of a monkey (a 'code monkey')...
Sounds like an attractive field, if you live in Japan and expect to live with your parents for the rest of your life. No wonder they have such a thriving game/manga/anime market.
Yes, I'm looking at the downsides, but even if you love the job, eventually, reality will hit, and you will have to find something to do other than what you love (or you will be forced to change what you love doing).
Don't think that you will succeed by excellence. Can anyone name a game designer who has made a career on that and made it to a comfortable retirement age (whether they've retired or not). The same can be said for programming in general -- the number of those who have made it on excellence? I can't think of any -- the ones who are the names in programming, seem to be those who publish books -- and among the heaviest weight names usually seem to be professors.
But I'm temporarily in a mental funk and am more than willing to have statistical counter examples (not 1-of) posted to the contrary...please!
Not very impressive.
1) (as others have pointed out) I don't see how it's any different than IP lookup.
2) First attempted - nothing worked, (need to temporarily allow scripts on samy.pl
3) Then I get prompt "samy.pl wants you to share information about your location. Share (y/n) [ ] - remember this decision?"... (ok, no, don't remember)
4) It returned my location accurate within 120km (75miles). Not very impressive.
As I see it, that's the major issue.
The 2nd major issue will be the perception that such 'upload' ports being open, is required, to make it work (even if the distributor uses server's that don't require or pay attention to connecting client's upload ability or even whether or not such ability is present).
The 3rd issue is that large corporations will likely demand a client where the upload channel is disabled before they will run it on their network. They won't just want the assurance that it can be prevented or that their firewall will block it -- more than likely there will be many that will want assurances about the program before it is given a green light to execute anywhere on their network. These are the environments were program execution policy has the 'Default' set to 'Block', unless it's on a list of permitted programs (most stringently controlled by some binary-checksum algorithm before being allowed to run). Some likely requirements:
1) They will want to ensure that such a program can't be configured to allow uploading.
2) It needs to work through in a firewalled, proxied environment (i.e. will it work through an http proxy? If it requires a specialized proxy program that will sit on their firewall, that's a security risk for such a specialized benefit that's already met by existing infrastructure. Can such a program, its evaluation and maintenance cost be justified given the added functionality.
3) Proxy needs to allow security by user/station so only authorized users can download programs.
4) Proxy needs to allow list of allowed sites that can be downloaded from -- and this is stickler -- as it forces bit-torrent using download vendors to provide a list of their download-servers that will be used to stream to clients. Not insurmountable, but a larger list than giving out 1 download address.
5) Perceptions. Even if the technical hurdles are overcome and security needs met, there will still be a large number of companies that may see Bit-torrent as a peer-to-peer protocol used primarily by pirates. They won't want to be associated with such -- and even if they allowed it, if the fact that they were using bit-torrent to perform system maintenance was released to the press and stockholders, then stockholders and the press would have to be convinced that due-diligence was being performed and that this was not something that would be sharing company data. That would require a complete re-education of how bit-torrent is perceived in the public arena -- going *against*, the current *propaganda* machine that tries to portray it as only being used, or at best, being used for 'shady' purposes, and certainly not something that can't be better replaced by other protocols.
Overcoming obstacle 5 will be the hardest, as it involves changing public perception.
Even though the majority of customers won't have such stringent requirements for use of a bit-torrent client, any publicly held company runs the risk of needing to convince the 'uneducated, propaganda-fed masses', so for the most profitable customers, companies providing downloads would still have to provide considerable resources to allow such companies to continue to download via current methods or risk alienating some of their most profitable customers.
All in all, a steep hill to climb.