It involved AT&T and Cogent, if I recall, and it lasted a few days. It sectioned off a subset of Web sites and completely prevented access until it was resolved. Someone told me it wasn't the first time it had happened.
The Internet is common shared infrastructure, and as such is exactly where one would want a socialistic system rather than some allegedly well-functioning market: the people should retain ownership of it.
We haven't allowed (generally) road construction crews to own the sections of physical roads that they built and maintained, have we? We at least correctly identified roads as shared infrastructure and acted accordingly, but we screwed up with AT&T back in the Nineteenth Century; we failed to recognize what they were doing as shared infrastructure and set a bad precedent that led to more trouble in this century. An even bigger mistake was made 25 years ago when some idiots thought the way to correct the original stupidity was to "break up" AT&T... and consequently ownership of all that shared infrastructure as well. We've been paying for that compounded stupidity ever since. That infrastructure should have been returned to public ownership instead, and AT&T returned to contractor status. (I can't decide whether AT&T should have been left a monopoly but forced to go non-profit or pseudo-governmental.)
Sorry for the rant. I wouldn't have learned anything at all about peering disputes this year if AT&T had been asked to sell its telegraph wires to We The People 125 years ago.
Sounds like Mr. Raindeer has never been the innocent victim of a peering dispute. I have. Sure, the system mostly works, but it's hardly a socialist's or open-sourcer's dream.
I have magnetic media drives that are 15 years old and still work fine. Would I be able to say the same about any SSD "drive"? I doubt it. Unlike magnetic media, flash RAM technology is known to have a finite, limited, and unpredictable lifespan; it will only tolerate so many rewrites and then begin to fail, and you'll never know exactly when that will be. That sad day will come sooner than 15 years down the road, and you'll have paid a premium for it. Same for phase-change optical media, really. That doesn't really happen with magnetic media ever, AFAIK, unless the heads drag and shear off material.
It's been a decade since I first began hearing the proclamations about the rise of SSDs and the fall of magnetics, yet still magnetics rule supreme. This is marketing hype, not progress.
'Web's evolving needs' my patootie!
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The "Web's evolving needs" to which he refers isn't consumer-driven evolution at all: it's driven by advertisers and commercial interests, notably the continued push to re-brand software as "content" that can be pushed as a subscription service... what we now know as "Web apps". Both Google and Microsoft are in the thick of it, though for now Microsoft also plays the other side of the fence with its traditional software. Sadly, this has actually been the case with most of the evolution of the Web and browsers; it was driven mostly by commercial interests and not those of consumers. The specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, XHTML, Flash, and the like are rife with examples of features that fulfill corporate rather than consumer needs.
If actual consumers had a forward-looking brain, they'd reject these "evolving needs" and demand things that benefit them rather than a corporate minority.
These "evolving needs" are anything but open source and consumer-centric, that's for sure. I'm sticking with Firefox... how about you?
The fact that some Americans are now worried about the effects of OTHER countries' pollution on the local American environment seems hypocritical, at best. I wonder: did the Chinese press publish articles in the past century decrying the effects of American and European pollution on their local environment? The globe was first awash in American and European pollution for nearly a century (or more, depending on whether one assumes pollution only began with the industrial revolution). How can we expect them to not repeat our actions when we've never shown sufficient remorse or reparations for those actions? This article sounds a bit like the ex-Hippie parent trying to convince their child not to try LSD.
You really don't know much about lotteries as they pertain to jury selection, do you? We would in fact have some "fucking clue", at least as much as we have now. Since the process would also in fact guarantee that the hyper-ambitious would be virtually denied a seat at that initial table, that initial pool would be a much more accurate cross-section of the citizenry; in particular, it would be a more accurate ethical cross-section. The hyper-ambitious are ethically dubious, including Obama - follow FactCheck much? - and in almost no case are they ever ethically representative of the populace; they tend to be willing to do ANYTHING to first get and then keep public - or corporate - office. That includes forsaking ethics when it's convenient. McCain has been doing this in spades, but so too has Obama. He's no Messiah for any Party.
I'm not saying there aren't rare exceptions to this rule - Dennis Kucinich and perhaps Jim McDermott (D-WA) I'd count among those - but they are in fact exceptions. You're uninformed if you think can reverse that dynamic without first having some sort of revolution first, especially since the self-centered people in office now aren't going to implement anything that truly eliminates their advantage.
Electoral lotteries would remove that advantage. We'll have to start the revolution first. I'm throwing the first stone.
... rather than part of the political solution. He isn't even remotely like a free-thinking independent-minded hand-feed-biting Dennis Kucinich. Obama is part of the Political Old Boys' Club, not an outsider or reformer who's gonna shake things up... THAT would be what Kucinich would have done (with a little cooperation).
We need a majority of Kuciniches in office, not Obamas. Obamas are far too ambitious and self-centered to truly work "for the people". The people only get the occasional bone tossed their way once Obama's own desires have been sufficiently satiated. Obama doesn't have the ethical backbone to bite the hand that feeds him when it's warranted; Dennis Kucinich did and does. Remember that.
What we need is an electoral lottery. An initial lottery breaks the cycle of political influence and manipulation perpetrated by the Bushes, Kennedys, McCains, and Obamas of the world. Mere campaign finance reform doesn't really solve anything. We need a true revolution that will oust these hyper-ambitious abusers en masse and give us that lottery.
If only 38 of every 100,000 people fall victim to this sort of mistake, I suspect that I'm more likely to fall victim to a car accident than this. It figures that some people might freak out at any suggestion that they give up even the slightest degree of personal control (read: micromanagement).
I use my Bank's automated bill payment system. I lose some small degree of control, but in fact that is indeed the entire point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas? I don't want that monthly control of those bills nor the time and mental distraction that the process of paying them would require. The bank's system handles it one of two ways, depending upon whether a relationship with the payee exists: either it's transmitted electronically or an actual check is cut in my name and mailed in advance of the due date. I retain full control to monitor, modify, or cancel those payments at any time; I have limits set on them to prevent unexpectedly large bills from causing overdrafts, and I receive e-mail reminders for every single one.
I frankly don't see the problem, done the way I'm doing it. I agree that allowing direct drafts or using credit cards are bad ideas, but only an ignorant uninformed person would consider or agree to such mechanisms.
It sounds arrogant because I am "arrogant"... or just confident. I tend to trust that I know what I need to know unless shown otherwise. I'm not saying whether this has or has not been one of those instances. Clearly I substituted Mr. Palmer for this other chap because in fact he at least was an enormously important figure in comedy.;-)
I guess this is one of those situations where you had to be there... in the U.K., that is? I'm fairly well versed in movies and social memes and even some of what goes on outside my own country's borders, but I had no idea who Geoffrey Palmer was. The OP seems to presume that in fact we all knew who he was and agreed with his alleged importance. If he was that important, I think his influence would have penetrated even my bubble of American isolation.
Hey, does this mean, if I croak from playing too much AD&D and the resulting malnutrition and poor hygiene, that they'll pay my family a big fat payout to enshrine me and my platinum-plated D-10 dice?
Way to go, DNC, once again looking and sounding like carbon copies of your Republican foes. Can anyone discern a tangible difference any more? Excessive ambition and self-interest lead to pretty much the same results and consequences, regardless which Party's groupthink they claim to worship.
Are all you humans this histrionic and emotionally narcissistic, or is it only the subclass of the species that lives in the United States? If it's the latter, what is it about your food supply or environment that makes you deserving of one of Bill Engvall's signs? Perhaps you should stop fluoridating your water?
"Emotionally narcissistic" is the best term I can conceive to describe the irrational stupidity of people who would overreact to iconoclastic art... or games.
Yup... and Bill Engvall and I got signs for each and every one of 'em! We had to corner the market on tagboard and inkjet cartridges to do it, by gum.
"Irrefutable certainties" are precisely what religion is all about because, as you alluded and a friend of mine said, religion is all about feeling good, not comprehending reality as it exists.
"... and my middle-school English teacher Mrs. Young was smart enough to include "All Summer in a Day" in her curriculum."
My last high school English teacher, by contrast, declared that science fiction didn't merit being called literature and refused to even let us submit books reports about any SF novels. Several of us eloquently argued the matter with her, but to no avail. This same teacher gave birth to not one but two thoroughly gifted sons who both scored close to a perfect 1600 on the SAT, and who both appreciated science fiction unlike their mother; the entire family was eligible for Mensa, but in spite of it she held fast to this weird illogical notion.
Had this occurred after Bill Engvall's famous "Here's Your Sign" routine(s), I'd have offered dear Constance Pencall her own custom one.
Inseparably so! You can't have science or Scientific Method without falsifiability; anything else would just be... a religion.
I know, I know... the question was just rhetorical preaching to the choir, but the answer bears repeating nonetheless. There's still a few billion humans who haven't grokked it yet. 8-/
... I'm turning off the auto-update feature for the time being. Let's see them nag me then. I'm well enough aware of the new version and I don't need to be nagged; when all my critical extensions have been updated (even if I have to tweak them myself), then and only then will I consider the upgrade.
Since all photos used to create a synth are public, does that also mean that Microsoft usurps a right to further use them however it sees fit? Use of the service also requires an account, which just happens to require a Windows Live ID.
It's all an evil conspiracy to bring back MS Passport, steal your photos, and serve you ads.
It must suck to be a fossilized aphid. The life of an aphid was already pretty sucky in the first place, but then to get entombed and sold on eBay? Oh the humiliation!
I was involved with tele-radiology back in the mid-Ninties, when I worked for one of the small companies trying to pioneer that particular subset of this field, RADMAN/Radiology Management Systems. That company isn't even in business any longer.
Arrrrrgh! MORE delusion, not less, in our advanced digital and scientific and technological age? It's depressing that technology would be used to merely further enable the delusional behavior, rather than eliminate it.
Slashdot Mirror
It involved AT&T and Cogent, if I recall, and it lasted a few days. It sectioned off a subset of Web sites and completely prevented access until it was resolved. Someone told me it wasn't the first time it had happened.
The Internet is common shared infrastructure, and as such is exactly where one would want a socialistic system rather than some allegedly well-functioning market: the people should retain ownership of it.
We haven't allowed (generally) road construction crews to own the sections of physical roads that they built and maintained, have we? We at least correctly identified roads as shared infrastructure and acted accordingly, but we screwed up with AT&T back in the Nineteenth Century; we failed to recognize what they were doing as shared infrastructure and set a bad precedent that led to more trouble in this century. An even bigger mistake was made 25 years ago when some idiots thought the way to correct the original stupidity was to "break up" AT&T... and consequently ownership of all that shared infrastructure as well. We've been paying for that compounded stupidity ever since. That infrastructure should have been returned to public ownership instead, and AT&T returned to contractor status. (I can't decide whether AT&T should have been left a monopoly but forced to go non-profit or pseudo-governmental.)
Sorry for the rant. I wouldn't have learned anything at all about peering disputes this year if AT&T had been asked to sell its telegraph wires to We The People 125 years ago.
Sounds like Mr. Raindeer has never been the innocent victim of a peering dispute. I have. Sure, the system mostly works, but it's hardly a socialist's or open-sourcer's dream.
I have magnetic media drives that are 15 years old and still work fine. Would I be able to say the same about any SSD "drive"? I doubt it. Unlike magnetic media, flash RAM technology is known to have a finite, limited, and unpredictable lifespan; it will only tolerate so many rewrites and then begin to fail, and you'll never know exactly when that will be. That sad day will come sooner than 15 years down the road, and you'll have paid a premium for it. Same for phase-change optical media, really. That doesn't really happen with magnetic media ever, AFAIK, unless the heads drag and shear off material.
It's been a decade since I first began hearing the proclamations about the rise of SSDs and the fall of magnetics, yet still magnetics rule supreme. This is marketing hype, not progress.
The "Web's evolving needs" to which he refers isn't consumer-driven evolution at all: it's driven by advertisers and commercial interests, notably the continued push to re-brand software as "content" that can be pushed as a subscription service... what we now know as "Web apps". Both Google and Microsoft are in the thick of it, though for now Microsoft also plays the other side of the fence with its traditional software. Sadly, this has actually been the case with most of the evolution of the Web and browsers; it was driven mostly by commercial interests and not those of consumers. The specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, XHTML, Flash, and the like are rife with examples of features that fulfill corporate rather than consumer needs.
If actual consumers had a forward-looking brain, they'd reject these "evolving needs" and demand things that benefit them rather than a corporate minority.
These "evolving needs" are anything but open source and consumer-centric, that's for sure. I'm sticking with Firefox... how about you?
The fact that some Americans are now worried about the effects of OTHER countries' pollution on the local American environment seems hypocritical, at best. I wonder: did the Chinese press publish articles in the past century decrying the effects of American and European pollution on their local environment? The globe was first awash in American and European pollution for nearly a century (or more, depending on whether one assumes pollution only began with the industrial revolution). How can we expect them to not repeat our actions when we've never shown sufficient remorse or reparations for those actions? This article sounds a bit like the ex-Hippie parent trying to convince their child not to try LSD.
You really don't know much about lotteries as they pertain to jury selection, do you? We would in fact have some "fucking clue", at least as much as we have now. Since the process would also in fact guarantee that the hyper-ambitious would be virtually denied a seat at that initial table, that initial pool would be a much more accurate cross-section of the citizenry; in particular, it would be a more accurate ethical cross-section. The hyper-ambitious are ethically dubious, including Obama - follow FactCheck much? - and in almost no case are they ever ethically representative of the populace; they tend to be willing to do ANYTHING to first get and then keep public - or corporate - office. That includes forsaking ethics when it's convenient. McCain has been doing this in spades, but so too has Obama. He's no Messiah for any Party.
I'm not saying there aren't rare exceptions to this rule - Dennis Kucinich and perhaps Jim McDermott (D-WA) I'd count among those - but they are in fact exceptions. You're uninformed if you think can reverse that dynamic without first having some sort of revolution first, especially since the self-centered people in office now aren't going to implement anything that truly eliminates their advantage.
Electoral lotteries would remove that advantage. We'll have to start the revolution first. I'm throwing the first stone.
... rather than part of the political solution. He isn't even remotely like a free-thinking independent-minded hand-feed-biting Dennis Kucinich. Obama is part of the Political Old Boys' Club, not an outsider or reformer who's gonna shake things up... THAT would be what Kucinich would have done (with a little cooperation).
We need a majority of Kuciniches in office, not Obamas. Obamas are far too ambitious and self-centered to truly work "for the people". The people only get the occasional bone tossed their way once Obama's own desires have been sufficiently satiated. Obama doesn't have the ethical backbone to bite the hand that feeds him when it's warranted; Dennis Kucinich did and does. Remember that.
What we need is an electoral lottery. An initial lottery breaks the cycle of political influence and manipulation perpetrated by the Bushes, Kennedys, McCains, and Obamas of the world. Mere campaign finance reform doesn't really solve anything. We need a true revolution that will oust these hyper-ambitious abusers en masse and give us that lottery.
It's Bacchus Obama, silly. He's the Liberator.
If only 38 of every 100,000 people fall victim to this sort of mistake, I suspect that I'm more likely to fall victim to a car accident than this. It figures that some people might freak out at any suggestion that they give up even the slightest degree of personal control (read: micromanagement).
I use my Bank's automated bill payment system. I lose some small degree of control, but in fact that is indeed the entire point of the exercise, n'est-ce pas? I don't want that monthly control of those bills nor the time and mental distraction that the process of paying them would require. The bank's system handles it one of two ways, depending upon whether a relationship with the payee exists: either it's transmitted electronically or an actual check is cut in my name and mailed in advance of the due date. I retain full control to monitor, modify, or cancel those payments at any time; I have limits set on them to prevent unexpectedly large bills from causing overdrafts, and I receive e-mail reminders for every single one.
I frankly don't see the problem, done the way I'm doing it. I agree that allowing direct drafts or using credit cards are bad ideas, but only an ignorant uninformed person would consider or agree to such mechanisms.
It sounds arrogant because I am "arrogant"... or just confident. I tend to trust that I know what I need to know unless shown otherwise. I'm not saying whether this has or has not been one of those instances. Clearly I substituted Mr. Palmer for this other chap because in fact he at least was an enormously important figure in comedy. ;-)
I guess this is one of those situations where you had to be there... in the U.K., that is? I'm fairly well versed in movies and social memes and even some of what goes on outside my own country's borders, but I had no idea who Geoffrey Palmer was. The OP seems to presume that in fact we all knew who he was and agreed with his alleged importance. If he was that important, I think his influence would have penetrated even my bubble of American isolation.
Because I'm not... I'm just a tourist from Vulcan. I'll be leaving to go home just as soon as I can find where I've misplaced my return ticket.
From the Google employee benefits page:
- Life and AD&D Insurance
Hey, does this mean, if I croak from playing too much AD&D and the resulting malnutrition and poor hygiene, that they'll pay my family a big fat payout to enshrine me and my platinum-plated D-10 dice?
... but rather technologically proprietary, eh?
Way to go, DNC, once again looking and sounding like carbon copies of your Republican foes. Can anyone discern a tangible difference any more? Excessive ambition and self-interest lead to pretty much the same results and consequences, regardless which Party's groupthink they claim to worship.
Are all you humans this histrionic and emotionally narcissistic, or is it only the subclass of the species that lives in the United States? If it's the latter, what is it about your food supply or environment that makes you deserving of one of Bill Engvall's signs? Perhaps you should stop fluoridating your water?
"Emotionally narcissistic" is the best term I can conceive to describe the irrational stupidity of people who would overreact to iconoclastic art... or games.
Yup... and Bill Engvall and I got signs for each and every one of 'em! We had to corner the market on tagboard and inkjet cartridges to do it, by gum.
"Irrefutable certainties" are precisely what religion is all about because, as you alluded and a friend of mine said, religion is all about feeling good, not comprehending reality as it exists.
"... and my middle-school English teacher Mrs. Young was smart enough to include "All Summer in a Day" in her curriculum."
My last high school English teacher, by contrast, declared that science fiction didn't merit being called literature and refused to even let us submit books reports about any SF novels. Several of us eloquently argued the matter with her, but to no avail. This same teacher gave birth to not one but two thoroughly gifted sons who both scored close to a perfect 1600 on the SAT, and who both appreciated science fiction unlike their mother; the entire family was eligible for Mensa, but in spite of it she held fast to this weird illogical notion.
Had this occurred after Bill Engvall's famous "Here's Your Sign" routine(s), I'd have offered dear Constance Pencall her own custom one.
Inseparably so! You can't have science or Scientific Method without falsifiability; anything else would just be... a religion.
I know, I know... the question was just rhetorical preaching to the choir, but the answer bears repeating nonetheless. There's still a few billion humans who haven't grokked it yet. 8-/
"California, here's your sign."
... I'm turning off the auto-update feature for the time being. Let's see them nag me then. I'm well enough aware of the new version and I don't need to be nagged; when all my critical extensions have been updated (even if I have to tweak them myself), then and only then will I consider the upgrade.
Since all photos used to create a synth are public, does that also mean that Microsoft usurps a right to further use them however it sees fit? Use of the service also requires an account, which just happens to require a Windows Live ID.
It's all an evil conspiracy to bring back MS Passport, steal your photos, and serve you ads.
It must suck to be a fossilized aphid. The life of an aphid was already pretty sucky in the first place, but then to get entombed and sold on eBay? Oh the humiliation!
The real proof of this theory, it seems to me, would be also verifying that women in POLYAMOROUS relationships also live longer.
I was involved with tele-radiology back in the mid-Ninties, when I worked for one of the small companies trying to pioneer that particular subset of this field, RADMAN/Radiology Management Systems. That company isn't even in business any longer.
Arrrrrgh! MORE delusion, not less, in our advanced digital and scientific and technological age? It's depressing that technology would be used to merely further enable the delusional behavior, rather than eliminate it.