Persistance of effort is certainly a key in the search for intellegent life. While the likelihood of finding an interesting signal is small for this year it greatly improves over time. Compare SETI to the annual revnue and tangeble results of the movie or video game industry. Why not kick in at least the price of a movie ticket or game app? We can't win if you don't pay. Economically we are talking about a small fraction of the budget of a single hollywood production. Arguments that we can't afford this effort as a society are seriously laughable.
An interuption in the SETI instutue effort would not be at all logical despite "limited resources." I am cyical about nearly everything. I still believe strongly that a continued and refining effort is likely to find an interesting signal at some point and from this invalueable lessons will be learned. We can't really determine the probability since we don't know how many signals there are in our space-time neigborhood but we will never know the answer to that if we don't look.
Just like anything encryption has a cost. This cost is actually pretty low. Keeping the government loop and comply with regulations so that terrorist plots are detected early is simply part of this cost.
There is an optimal use of encryption where it's marginal costs are equal to it's marginal benefits. We may fall short of this optimum if among other things there is imperfect Information about the costs and benefits.
#1 The the benefits are hard to measure and unknown.
#2 There are social concerns because of a lack of consensus about what constitutes The Greater Good and this undermines trust. People want their communications encrypted but not the communications of others.
The costs of encryption are very low and the technical knowledge is common and equipment is ubiquitous. The problem is not primarily technical.
The largest technical problem is related to benefit estimates. Other security holes may allow breaches. Encrypted channels must be decrypted at the end points. If the end points are spyware invested sieves then encryption is irrelevant.
Encryption use is not promoted. It's better to have most channels open and encrypt only the necessary information. A start would be to create a collection of ROI and Cost/ Benefit analysis for enterprises over type, industry and size, and for various individuals and households over education level, income, and wealth. Create public policy briefs about encryption.
There is a lot of communication people can't exploit and so people don't care about it. For example who cares if someone finds out I am reading web pages to try to prevent razor burn and read a web page on gentle ex-foliation. At least the office would know I am trying !
Who pays to disseminate the marginal cost and benefit information?
You don't know when encrypted conversations would have been breached or the costs that would have been incurred from the breach. The costs of breaches are a large part of the benefits of security and must be estimated.
I compained about this story. I watch the newshour daily and i was very disapointed and so i went to pbs.org and complained about the story and requested better coverage This is what I said:
The story on Network Neutrality did not offer the usual depth of coverage the news hour usually provides. It's big vs big theme was wrong minded from the start and offered no substantive information about either the underlining technological framework or economic issues evolved. These factual areas need to be reported. They can be expressed in layman's terms by articulate people that understand that there are trade offs evolved. The debate between the industry representatives left me wondering what program or station I was watching. Jeffery Brown is usually much more thorough. Please select less polarized guests that have more insight and nuance. Please follow this story with more substantive reporting on this issue.
I am encouraging others that are disappointed with this story to comment.
You have presented a list of talking points of telecom represenatives all of which are misleading. This tiered service is an effort to create a toll system at the heart of the internet in addtion to connection fees that internet users (companies and people) currently pay. The real board room idea here is to create a controled market where people bid for data flow speed through central routers on the internet.
Answers to your questions:
>>>> 1. does not worsen my connection *at all*
While your connection is not worse, your data rate, what really matters when you use the internet to access specific data will be effected. It will be difficult to tell if it's regular internet congestion, QoS or a slow webserver but some of the time you get a slow response to a website or get droped from IM or an online game it will be because of a surge in demand for QoS traffic that by priority has caused one of the telecom routers to dump your packets. If they were delivered your connection could handel the capacity. The bottle neck that is under discussion is at the point of interconnnection to, within and from the backbone of the internet. These services have been provided without discrimination, financed by fees charged to internet service providers that sell connections. Disatisfied with these fees and seeing a vein of gold at the heart of the internet the telecom companies want to add new charges.
>>>> 2. does not cost me *any* more money (assuming I am not benefiting from it), either directly or indirectly
You are using services right now that will cost more. Companies are mainly intermediaries and will pass on costs to consumers. Consumers will be incouraged to use high bandwith budled services that will make your data flows slow. You will want to pay more so they go faster and eventually will. The telecoms are banking on it ! There goal is to create a controled market for data flow.
>>>>> 3. is *entirely* paid for by people or companies that can benefit from it
There are externalites and in the end, the,net result is a network dominated by a controled market where everyone must bid for bandwith and the telecoms raise thier profits and extend thier market control in data trasfer, and connection delevery into a prime postion to influence entertainment media markets. They also might raise thier profit margin at the expense of the profit margin of content providers and online vendors but some costs will be pasted on.
Explainations:
Everyone currently pays for a connection to the Internet at a particular capacity. The connectivity of the Internet, the switches and routers and fiber optic equipment that links all the networks of all the isps together, is owned by the telecom companies. In addition to the connection charges charged through ISPs for internect interconnection they want to start making money on interconnection charges for data flow. Their model of how to start charging is to charge for quality of service. In explaining this qos technology it's easy to make it sound like new equipment but it's not. The packets just have a higher priority on existing equipment and achieve this by delaying other data traffic. This can all be made more complicated and further exploited because thier are several priorites but I am going to I am writing in terms of two, high priority, and regular or by implication low priority.
Internet users are not simply divided into 'consumers' and 'content providers' as someone with a connection to the Internet may be both sender and receiver. For example if you are a Voip subscriber you would be both not one or the other.
Telecom reps argue that 'content providers' will be charged these new charges and that this will lower the cost to 'consumers'. The truth of finance and the economics of this is less clear than they would have you believe. Someone must pay them these new fees and these fees will likely be pas
I commmend your analysis of this discussion slashdot folks, and for that mater many nerds are interested in poltics and movies, thus the considerable participation in this thread. Its really curious that we are not discussing any of the substansive issues touched on by the movie. We can raise the level of discussion beyond love/hate of George and Michael, by introducing threads about themes and technical aspects of the film rather than foucsing on the personalities involved.
I agree. Some spam will get through. I just delete it or mark it for spam training... depending on whats available.
I believe that it is possible to thrwart the efforts of email spammers. For example many search engines do a good job with webspam and they deal with much larger datasets. Depending what you use email for and how much time you spend using it, each person has to strike a balance between training the filters and getting a bit o spam. Large internet service providers are making an effort to block a bulk of identical messages from being sent.
My objective is to not waste time or money....Sue? Errrrrer? no. Write a letter to congress?...I want to *save* time. I also don't want to set prescidents making internet controling laws.
Cheers + + + + + +
That has been my experience. No matter what you do you get email spam. From your argument it clearly follows Fear Of Spam is not a good reason to avoid, contributing to oss or online discussions. : )
Can you also conclude that Email is a horrible anachronistic kluge and must be fixed ?
Practically no one is lining up to give reseahers data ! This is a hotpoint of mine. I find it particularly outragous, that the research that is excluded by law is usually that which is in the public interest, while many private and comerical studies are well funded and leagal.
Many areas of the law are purposefully made to protect commercial interests and "simulate the economy." Politcians are still at it! That this also seems in corporate interests is no accident since a great deal of commerce is conducted by corporations.
Consider some alternatives.
Do you really want to analyse all of that data?
How reliable do you beleive the body of the database to be for your purposes? Deletions omissions moderation and changes in policies over time all contribute to a less than clean situation.
Could you use a subset of the data obtained through getting some individual group archives available elsewhere?
Could you propose that their resarch team colaborate with you and run the analysis on the data at google thus not theating them with another existant copy? Its not like they aren't into text analysis and internet use!
Could you analyse/. instead? Inquiring minds want to know ! Thus far your research is stimulating internet activity !
The polictical problem is a lack of clout.
Watch out for the researcher lobby ! They are armed with regression and have infinitely many means !
So I argue that although its not what i would like the law is clearly on google's side.
Posting to the public usenet groups clearly implies the expectation of users freely copying and archiving the 'works' by third parties since the architechture of the technology rely on copying. Archiving was even a practice of indiviual users and definitely of sys admins.
Usenet is a means of communicating to those in the public at large who have the interest to read it. For it to be an effective means of communicating with the public the information is not only carried on the public networks (like a phone conversation)but clearly remains accessable intertemporally to the general public, and private users individually.
As i said in a reply to another comment, No law allows the publisher to require copies to be burned on a certain date by all copyholders even by liberaries with the sole exception of the authors mauscript. Finally all copyrights do* eventually expire, with the intention of enriching the public domain.
The full database (and prehaps some missing posts a la the google deletion policy) could theroretically be reconstructed from other sources. The database is a convience that they offer to the public.
If a compeditor compiled an equally useful database then they could in effect create the same service. To do so without directly copying the database under discussion would be a fairly large and costly undertaking. Directly copying useful large useful portions directly from their website would be much cheaper and could easily be scripted. The terms of the tos simply protect the service (value added) that was created by deja by creating a "home" in the new protcol "web". It not only collected the posts in one place but also transfered the information formerly on nntp to http making it more accessable to many users without harming or taking away value from the those that use tradtional clients.
Since folks vist their database pages and click thier ads simulating commerce the laws are serving intended goals but prehaps at the expense of public interest. (That is assuming that your study is in that interest.)
Good luck with your study.
Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) writes on on 22:50 Monday 28 July 2003 (#6556019):
Archiving is a somewhat dicey proposition, since it was neither the original purpose of Usenet nor something provided for within its normal protocols, but you could possibly make a case for it on public interest grounds. I'm not sure what effect (or otherwise) I think the "x-no-archive" header should have here.
The intention of the user's use of the x-no-archive tag can not be fully deterimined however, the original purpose for the tag had to do with limiting the size of the archive and had nothing to do with copyright laws. If you have posts from the 80's you remeber the infamous single sided single density 5.25 inch floppy disk that was actually floppy. Huh dude 2megs was a frickn hard drive.
The tag did not imply "do not print". Addtionally thier is no precedent of tradtion. No laws have ever alowed publishers to print a book under copyright and be required to be burned on a certain date by all copyholders even by liberaries with the sole exception of the authors mauscript, and remember that copyrights do eventually expire.
Your best posts are probally in basements and attics , in the cabinet under night stands accross the land on yello jagged torn scraps of fan folded paper with some of the little perferated tracks still attached.
Our very discussion of the x-no-archive header btw
fruitfully negates assertion that archiving was not supported by usenet protocols etc.
Finally the copyright holder must inforce copyright through civil litigation...i think damage assesment would be in mills if not ziltch.
Anyway.... come on you are just playing devils [rria] advocate here! These are not presidents that most at/. really want to set at least in quite this way.
I am using 1.4 on RH9 and have had no problems reading/. but something has seemed funny. It think its the fonts. Maybe i have seen weird fonts? If this is the case and bugging you then set up a css or change the default serif/sansserif fonts. The defaults might have changed in the build./. is also one of the few sites that seems to never make firebird 0.6 freeze. I often use firebird as well as mozilla. I sometimes wonder if my bird is compatiable with my rh9 version of glibc.
Slashdot Mirror
Persistance of effort is certainly a key in the search for intellegent life. While the likelihood of finding an interesting signal is small for this year it greatly improves over time. Compare SETI to the annual revnue and tangeble results of the movie or video game industry. Why not kick in at least the price of a movie ticket or game app? We can't win if you don't pay. Economically we are talking about a small fraction of the budget of a single hollywood production. Arguments that we can't afford this effort as a society are seriously laughable. An interuption in the SETI instutue effort would not be at all logical despite "limited resources." I am cyical about nearly everything. I still believe strongly that a continued and refining effort is likely to find an interesting signal at some point and from this invalueable lessons will be learned. We can't really determine the probability since we don't know how many signals there are in our space-time neigborhood but we will never know the answer to that if we don't look.
Just like anything encryption has a cost. This cost is actually pretty low. Keeping the government loop and comply with regulations so that terrorist plots are detected early is simply part of this cost. There is an optimal use of encryption where it's marginal costs are equal to it's marginal benefits. We may fall short of this optimum if among other things there is imperfect Information about the costs and benefits. #1 The the benefits are hard to measure and unknown. #2 There are social concerns because of a lack of consensus about what constitutes The Greater Good and this undermines trust. People want their communications encrypted but not the communications of others. The costs of encryption are very low and the technical knowledge is common and equipment is ubiquitous. The problem is not primarily technical. The largest technical problem is related to benefit estimates. Other security holes may allow breaches. Encrypted channels must be decrypted at the end points. If the end points are spyware invested sieves then encryption is irrelevant. Encryption use is not promoted. It's better to have most channels open and encrypt only the necessary information. A start would be to create a collection of ROI and Cost/ Benefit analysis for enterprises over type, industry and size, and for various individuals and households over education level, income, and wealth. Create public policy briefs about encryption. There is a lot of communication people can't exploit and so people don't care about it. For example who cares if someone finds out I am reading web pages to try to prevent razor burn and read a web page on gentle ex-foliation. At least the office would know I am trying ! Who pays to disseminate the marginal cost and benefit information? You don't know when encrypted conversations would have been breached or the costs that would have been incurred from the breach. The costs of breaches are a large part of the benefits of security and must be estimated.
I compained about this story. I watch the newshour daily and i was very disapointed and so i went to pbs.org and complained about the story and requested better coverage This is what I said:
The story on Network Neutrality did not offer the usual depth of coverage the news hour usually provides. It's big vs big theme was wrong minded from the start and offered no substantive information about either the underlining technological framework or economic issues evolved. These factual areas need to be reported. They can be expressed in layman's terms by articulate people that understand that there are trade offs evolved. The debate between the industry representatives left me wondering what program or station I was watching. Jeffery Brown is usually much more thorough. Please select less polarized guests that have more insight and nuance. Please follow this story with more substantive reporting on this issue.
I am encouraging others that are disappointed with this story to comment.
Answers to your questions:
>>>> 1. does not worsen my connection *at all*
While your connection is not worse, your data rate, what really matters when you use the internet to access specific data will be effected. It will be difficult to tell if it's regular internet congestion, QoS or a slow webserver but some of the time you get a slow response to a website or get droped from IM or an online game it will be because of a surge in demand for QoS traffic that by priority has caused one of the telecom routers to dump your packets. If they were delivered your connection could handel the capacity. The bottle neck that is under discussion is at the point of interconnnection to, within and from the backbone of the internet. These services have been provided without discrimination, financed by fees charged to internet service providers that sell connections. Disatisfied with these fees and seeing a vein of gold at the heart of the internet the telecom companies want to add new charges.
>>>> 2. does not cost me *any* more money (assuming I am not benefiting from it), either directly or indirectly
You are using services right now that will cost more. Companies are mainly intermediaries and will pass on costs to consumers. Consumers will be incouraged to use high bandwith budled services that will make your data flows slow. You will want to pay more so they go faster and eventually will. The telecoms are banking on it ! There goal is to create a controled market for data flow.
>>>>> 3. is *entirely* paid for by people or companies that can benefit from it
There are externalites and in the end, the ,net result is a network dominated by a controled market where everyone must bid for bandwith and the telecoms raise thier profits and extend thier market control in data trasfer, and connection delevery into a prime postion to influence entertainment media markets. They also might raise thier profit margin at the expense of the profit margin of content providers and online vendors but some costs will be pasted on.
Explainations:
Everyone currently pays for a connection to the Internet at a particular capacity. The connectivity of the Internet, the switches and routers and fiber optic equipment that links all the networks of all the isps together, is owned by the telecom companies. In addition to the connection charges charged through ISPs for internect interconnection they want to start making money on interconnection charges for data flow. Their model of how to start charging is to charge for quality of service. In explaining this qos technology it's easy to make it sound like new equipment but it's not. The packets just have a higher priority on existing equipment and achieve this by delaying other data traffic. This can all be made more complicated and further exploited because thier are several priorites but I am going to I am writing in terms of two, high priority, and regular or by implication low priority.
Internet users are not simply divided into 'consumers' and 'content providers' as someone with a connection to the Internet may be both sender and receiver. For example if you are a Voip subscriber you would be both not one or the other.
Telecom reps argue that 'content providers' will be charged these new charges and that this will lower the cost to 'consumers'. The truth of finance and the economics of this is less clear than they would have you believe. Someone must pay them these new fees and these fees will likely be pas
I commmend your analysis of this discussion slashdot folks, and for that mater many nerds are interested in poltics and movies, thus the considerable participation in this thread. Its really curious that we are not discussing any of the substansive issues touched on by the movie. We can raise the level of discussion beyond love/hate of George and Michael, by introducing threads about themes and technical aspects of the film rather than foucsing on the personalities involved.
great minds talk about ideas
I agree. Some spam will get through. I just delete it or mark it for spam training... depending on whats available. I believe that it is possible to thrwart the efforts of email spammers. For example many search engines do a good job with webspam and they deal with much larger datasets. Depending what you use email for and how much time you spend using it, each person has to strike a balance between training the filters and getting a bit o spam. Large internet service providers are making an effort to block a bulk of identical messages from being sent. My objective is to not waste time or money. ...Sue? Errrrrer? no. Write a letter to congress? ...I want to *save* time. I also don't want to set prescidents making internet controling laws.
Cheers + + + + + +
That has been my experience. No matter what you do you get email spam. From your argument it clearly follows Fear Of Spam is not a good reason to avoid, contributing to oss or online discussions. : ) Can you also conclude that Email is a horrible anachronistic kluge and must be fixed ?
Many areas of the law are purposefully made to protect commercial interests and "simulate the economy." Politcians are still at it! That this also seems in corporate interests is no accident since a great deal of commerce is conducted by corporations.
Consider some alternatives.
The polictical problem is a lack of clout. Watch out for the researcher lobby ! They are armed with regression and have infinitely many means ! So I argue that although its not what i would like the law is clearly on google's side. Posting to the public usenet groups clearly implies the expectation of users freely copying and archiving the 'works' by third parties since the architechture of the technology rely on copying. Archiving was even a practice of indiviual users and definitely of sys admins.
Usenet is a means of communicating to those in the public at large who have the interest to read it. For it to be an effective means of communicating with the public the information is not only carried on the public networks (like a phone conversation)but clearly remains accessable intertemporally to the general public, and private users individually.
As i said in a reply to another comment, No law allows the publisher to require copies to be burned on a certain date by all copyholders even by liberaries with the sole exception of the authors mauscript. Finally all copyrights do* eventually expire, with the intention of enriching the public domain.
The full database (and prehaps some missing posts a la the google deletion policy) could theroretically be reconstructed from other sources. The database is a convience that they offer to the public.
If a compeditor compiled an equally useful database then they could in effect create the same service. To do so without directly copying the database under discussion would be a fairly large and costly undertaking. Directly copying useful large useful portions directly from their website would be much cheaper and could easily be scripted. The terms of the tos simply protect the service (value added) that was created by deja by creating a "home" in the new protcol "web". It not only collected the posts in one place but also transfered the information formerly on nntp to http making it more accessable to many users without harming or taking away value from the those that use tradtional clients.
Since folks vist their database pages and click thier ads simulating commerce the laws are serving intended goals but prehaps at the expense of public interest. (That is assuming that your study is in that interest.) Good luck with your study.
The tag did not imply "do not print". Addtionally thier is no precedent of tradtion. No laws have ever alowed publishers to print a book under copyright and be required to be burned on a certain date by all copyholders even by liberaries with the sole exception of the authors mauscript, and remember that copyrights do eventually expire.
Your best posts are probally in basements and attics , in the cabinet under night stands accross the land on yello jagged torn scraps of fan folded paper with some of the little perferated tracks still attached.
Our very discussion of the x-no-archive header btw fruitfully negates assertion that archiving was not supported by usenet protocols etc. Finally the copyright holder must inforce copyright through civil litigation...i think damage assesment would be in mills if not ziltch.
Anyway .... come on you are just playing devils [rria] advocate here! These are not presidents that most at /. really want to set at least in quite this way.
I am using 1.4 on RH9 and have had no problems reading /. but something has seemed funny. It think its the fonts. Maybe i have seen weird fonts? If this is the case and bugging you then set up a css or change the default serif /sansserif fonts. The defaults might have changed in the build. /. is also one of the few sites that seems to never make firebird 0.6 freeze. I often use firebird as well as mozilla. I sometimes wonder if my bird is compatiable with my rh9 version of glibc.