To me, it does not make sense that an election should last 4 years and require the kind of funding only mega-corporations can provide.
Why shouldn't it last 4 years - or longer - and cost a large fraction of the GNP. Civil wars do.
Republics are designed to model civil wars accurately enough that they can be "fought" to their conclusion without all that nasty dying, burning of crops and towns, and so on.
They do a good enough job of it (except for assasinations B-( ) that the US hasn't had to hold a full-scale civil war in well over a century (though there hace been a few small ones when the the elections were corrupted or a significant power group was disenfranchised and oppressed).
You can detect many things, but not eavesdropping. Your little wifi card broadcasts all kinds of data, in all directions. I can listen in and say nothing. How are you going to detect that?
Your firmware might react to being associated with a network enough to eavesdrop it by also responding to low-level configuration traffic. If that happens, even if you don't send any data the firmware may respond to probes, letting the network know you're listening.
If you're truly eavesdropping you're undetectable. But do you know what the vendor put in the binary blob?
So, basically, they are just triangulating every node on the network, and detecting when a node is outside a given range (outside the building?), or seems to suddenly jump to another location (session hijacking)? Would this still work if the attacker is using a directional, high-gain antenna to prevent effective triangulation?
Sounds like they're not "triangulating" - computing the DIRECTION to a station from two monitoring locations in order to identify the station's location as the third point of a triangle. Instead they're measuring the round-trip time for a probe/response, which measures the distance (plus internal delays in the remote station) without identifying direction.
Adding delay can make a station appear to be farther than it is, but not nearer. So short of finding a way to send signals backward in time (or responding enough faster than the standard firmware to fool the montior) you can't spoof being closer than you are.
Which does nothing for a pure eavesdropper. But if the "eavesdropper"'s firmware associates with the eavesdropped network enough that it turns on its transmitter and responds to low-level protocol probes, it CAN be detected even if the user sends no traffic.
They're also using signal strength measurement - perhaps to work around unknown firmware response time. That might make them subject to spoofing by using a directional antenna and/or increasing transmit power to make the signal appear stronger, and thus closer, than it actually is.
(Another approach would be using multiple receivers at known (or self-measured relative) locations to do a LORAN-style triangulation on particular transmissions from the remote station, measuring the arrival-time differences at three or more stations to locate the remote station at the intersection of two or more hyperbolas. But that involves synchronizing time-bases between the monitoring stations in a way that would be beyond normal firmware's capabilities. It would also become less accurate as the distance to the remote station increases.)
None are interested in your privacy.... Privacy means less control,...
You missed Ron Paul.
His overriding interest is getting the government back within the constitutional limits and his voting record reflects that. (You may not always agree with his idea of what the limits are. But I bet his idea is a lot closer to yours than those of the rest of the field.)
Right to Privacy is a constitutional issue - with explicit components in the Bill of Rights and a generalization drawn by the Supreme Court from those plus the 10th and 9th Amendment limits and the Framers' writings.
Circumstantial evidence suggests, though, that she's just obsessive about her privacy, in a way that puts even the tin-foil hat crowd at Slashdot to shame.
Given that she was sticking pins in a corporation full of lawyers that felt competent to take on IBM and would love to have killed the message by discrediting or ruining the messenger, being obsessive about her privacy seems rational to me. No tinfoil required.
Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.
I can. Easily. B-)
Seriously, though. I can also imagine a GOOD lawyer reading Slashdot - for leads, ideas, arguments, legal theories, and inspiration (just for starters). But then he'd CHECK them - with dependable source and reference documents, credible witnesses, traceable, certified experts, etc.
Slashdot is a rumor mill. Sometimes it's mostly mist and mirrors. But often where there's smoke there's fire.
This reminds me of one of the several oopsies that led to the demise of Weitek. (This one wasn't the last straw. But it was a pretty big bale.)
An administrator decided that, to save money, those darned resource-wasting engineers would be limited to one new floppy disk per week.
So floppies got reused a lot. And of course eventually somebody got sloppy.
The master for one of their graphics driver distributions was built on a recycled floppy disk. Of course the old files were deleted, rather than the disk being reformatted with a surface-analysis (and data wiping) pass. And of course this master was sector-cloned for production.
Turns out the entire source code for the drivers had previously lived on that disk - and many of the algorithms that made the product cutting-edge were either in the driver or had enough info in the driver source about what the chip was up to that it made reverse-engineering a snap.
So just apply any of several "undelete the lost files" tools to any copy of the distribution disks and you could recover pretty much the whole source code, comments and all.
Shortly after this, the best of Weitek's cutting-edge algorithms became industry standards.
That's one of the characteristics of Trade Secrets. Once it's no longer a secret (especially if the owner managed to leak it himself), it's public domain.
Actually, [windmills take] only about half a year [to pay back the energy cost of making them - mainly making their aluminum towers].
Also: The energy output of windmills is high-quality electricity (i.e. the output end of the carnot cycle) but much of the energy of construction is heat. Comparing the two is apples-to-oranges.
On a related note: Solar panels take longer to repay the energy cost. But they are used primarily to provide off-grid power. So they need to be compared to the energy cost of installing a grid at the location: Cutting trees for poles, smelting metal for transformers, wiring, switches, meters, guy cables, bolts,... Melting sand into glass for insulators. Fuel to haul construction workers, clear the brush, dig the holes, install the poles, string the wires. A share of the energy to construct the plant. And the energy going INTO the plant's heat engine to make and transport the energy to the load at far less than 100% efficiency.
When you add this all up the energy costs of the alternative grid power, solar panels can be an energy bargain.
Attempting to store many multiple MWs of power is extremely difficult. If we had better battery technology, we would have solved the electric car range sufficiency problem already.
Actually we have the capacity - for stationary plants at least. It's called "vanadium redox". Long-lived, low-toxicity, efficient. It's been in initial deployments for several years now - mainly down in Oz and/or New Zeland. It has the interesting property that the energy is stored in the electrolytes, like a fuel cell - so you can store "charged" and "discharged" electrolytes in big tanks and separately size the electrode structures for max power level and the tanks for storage capacity. Further, the electrolyte from multiple cells can be pooled, allowing for some very useful properties. For instance, you can charge and discahrge at different (or even multiple) voltages, just by tapping the stack of cells as appropriate. Bingo: DC Transformer.
Cars are a different kettle of fish: The heavier the battery the more power it takes to move it around, which gives you nasty issues similar to those of rocket vehicles. Automobile applications requrie very low losses at high charge and discharge rates to avoid overheating, "refuel" qiickly, and efficiently scavenge braking power for later re-use. And you need to be safe in collisions, be stable though vibration, G-forces, and at various tilts, and have failure modes that don't take out the whole battery pack and disable the car if a cell fails.
New cells for this are coming along, too. Best one I'm aware of is the carbon nanofiliment electrode lithium-ion cell, also going into production, though there may be others.
My understanding is that virus blocking is done either by wholesale port blocks (e.g. blocking port 80 to stop all the IIS worms which many ISPs did or blocking port 25 to stop spam zombies) or (in the case of email viruses) is done via scanners that scan each email message looking for viruses and stripping the content or message)
Fine except for the last: Editing a message on-the-fly chews up a bunch of precious resources - crunch and state storage - on the ISP's boxen. Much easier to kill the connection as soon as you recognize it as a virus (and before enough it gets through to cause trouble). Then the box can discard the state, recover the resources, and forget about it, rather than understanding how to edit and taking a bunch of its RAM out of service until the virus has gone by.
Also the latter approach would let viruses DoS the filters by having some of their connection attempts start up and pause a while, leaving connections open until the RAM was all in use. Then the filter box would have to either let viruses through or cut off mail, web surfing, etc.
Editing messages - like to put "**** spam ****" in the subject line - is an OK approach on a mail server, with lots of crunch and a big disk. But doing it on-the-fly in a RAM-based edge router with gigabytes of traffic per blade is the pits.
Try the new Gutsy Gibbon release. The install is very slick (and will preserve your Windows as a dual-boot if you want.)
The only problem I had with it was when I tried to use the Gnu replacement for Flash and it would hang the machine. Uninstalling that and installing the real shockwave product fixed that.
Also: How old is your laptop and how much RAM does it have? After I migrated to Gutsy on my 2-year-old Toshiba Tecra I tried to install Feisty or Gutsy on the old (1999) Thinkpad 600E (mainly to wipe the disk before returning it to the company IT department) - and found that the installer would hang. I believe that's because the live CD is a pretty full-blown version that keeps its must-be-variable files on a filesystem in RAM and the old machine didn't have enough.
I would say that the beacon and authentication process would communicate that permission is granted:
For decades much of the computer using community has taken the settings of things like file permissions as not just a technical access control, but an expression of intent.
For instance:
- If a file's permission is read-group or read-world and it is sitting in a directory that is also group or world accessible, anyone might chose to examine it at any time, without notice to, or explicit permission from, the owner.
- If it (or the containing directories) is not read-enabled, users with adequate system permission or knowledge of system internals may be ABLE to read it. But (if they behaved ethically) they would normally NOT do so unless the had either explicitly obtained permission from the file owner or were performing the access as something necessary to their job function - in which case they'd read it as little as possible.
Tools (such as mail readers) were normally designed to set the permissions of files they created in accordance with the likely wishes of the users.
IMHO continuing that logic makes perfect sense.
A significant number of people deliberately make their access points available to any non-disruptive transient user, as a community service. This is often done by leaving them at their default settings. Meanwhile, access points have a fine mechanism for putting up a "no trespassing" sign: WEP encryption. It's very weak and can be trivially broken. But turning it on makes it clear that the AP's owner did not intend for the AP to be used without explicit permission, and breaking the encryption makes it clear that a user intended to disregard the owner's wishes. So it's like the latch on a screen door: Trivially bypassed - but clearly expressing intent.
Granted most APs are shipped with WEP turned off, so a lot of users leave them open out of ignorance rather than as an expression of intent. But IMHO the user of an open AP can plausibly deny any intent to trespass on the AP and that the user had failed to post the property as private.
So it seems to me that the appropriate stand for the legal system to take is that the WEP setting and key distribution practices of an AP's owner are an expression of the owner's intent.
The difference between blocking SPAM and what Comcast are doing is that SPAM blocking doesn't involve sending messages from one IP address crafted to look like they are coming from a totally different IP address.
Actually, yes, it does.
The ISP's boxes can't afford to remember, forever, every flow that has ever been detected to contain a virus, just so they can continue dropping the packets. Instead doing a "fire and forget" of a forged RST to tear down the link before the virus finishes propagating is the way to go. (At least the receiving end will honor it, which will do the trick.)
The difference between blocking SPAM and what Comcast is doing is that using the technique to block SPAM can be done with the permission of the customer. (Indeed, with his encouragement, perhaps even in the form of a fee for the service.)
What Comcast is doing is cutting off the service the customer wants.
Shooting the wolf at the door (when you've been hired as an armed guard to defend against wolves) is one thing. Shooting the delivery man is quite another.
Discard the traffic and generate a forged reply? Not fine.
Actually:
Discard an occasional packet? Fine.
Forge a "connection reset" reply? Not fine.
Delivery of individual packets is (explicitly) not guaranteed, and is normally, and unavoidably, caused by congestion. The prioritization decisions made to implement Quality of Service guarantees, favoring some packets over others, will result in increased dropping of the less-favored packets. That also is OK.
It's the silent loss of packets that TCP uses to detect congestion and adjust its transmission rate to fairly divide the available bandwidth between multiple connections. UDP itself is just an interface to the underlying unreliable transmission mechanism. But protocols built on it may (and some do) also use the same mechanism to sniff for congestion and work around it.
So dropping packets to force the connection to slow down is just fine. It's the correct and natural thing to do to regulate traffic to conform to bandwidth allocation rules.
Forging the packet that the far end uses to tell you that the connection must be torn down, in order to break the connection completely, is a whole different can of worms. It's is NOT something that a carrier claiming to be providing "internet service" should ever do, with two exceptions:
- If the carrier has explicitly contracted with the customer to police his traffic (i.e. for viruses and the like) and deliberately break connections to prevent their transfer to him, as a service. Then it's just fine.
- If the carrier has terms of service that exclude particular behavior on the part of the customer's computer (for instance: propagation of known viruses in order to protect other customers and/or the net at large) and has notified him that such connections will be terminated.
But expanding that second exception to completely tearing down perfectly legitimate connections just because they are expensive to maintain is a big no-no.
Can you imagine Tim Russert's or Lou Dobbs' headless body occupying those comfortable chairs after heading the news? Rush Limbaugh's lie factory all over his little switchboard? (heh, slurp up the juice for a quick high, be careful though, narcotics are dangerous)
You don't have to wait for Rush' head to explode. He keeps half his brain tied behind his back. B-)
Most of the power in a CRT goes into the H/V beam deflection electromagnets, not the electron gun. The H/V scanning electronics operate regardless of which color is being rendered.
Not only that: With a flyback system the sweep pumps energy into the mag fields of the flyback transformer and yoke - then that energy has to be dumped rapidly when the beam is swept back. It has to go somewhere.
Monitors scavenge this "must be dumped NOW" energy for several purposes. Most notable: It's what provides the main accelleration power for the electron beam. In older sets it also provided the power for the high-voltage rectifier tube's filament, the vertical sweep mechanism, the audio amplifier. (Haven't examined the circuitry of transistor monitors but I bet it also gets salvaged for more than CRT high voltage there, too. Or perhaps gets dumped back into the power supply for re-use on the next sweep and elsewhere.)
Re:Dang! I just got Gutsy Gibbon configured....
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
If this posts I got office WiFi and SSH working...
Dang! I just got Gutsy Gibbon configured....
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
(Well, I'll be done once AT&T dialup in San Jose actually accepts my authentication credentials and I've checked that the wireless will pass traffic after associating with the office WiFi LAN...)
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the`RAMAC`predates whiteout. Also xerographic copiers.
To me, it does not make sense that an election should last 4 years and require the kind of funding only mega-corporations can provide.
Why shouldn't it last 4 years - or longer - and cost a large fraction of the GNP. Civil wars do.
Republics are designed to model civil wars accurately enough that they can be "fought" to their conclusion without all that nasty dying, burning of crops and towns, and so on.
They do a good enough job of it (except for assasinations B-( ) that the US hasn't had to hold a full-scale civil war in well over a century (though there hace been a few small ones when the the elections were corrupted or a significant power group was disenfranchised and oppressed).
See the "Battle of Athens" for one example.
You can detect many things, but not eavesdropping. Your little wifi card broadcasts all kinds of data, in all directions. I can listen in and say nothing. How are you going to detect that?
Your firmware might react to being associated with a network enough to eavesdrop it by also responding to low-level configuration traffic. If that happens, even if you don't send any data the firmware may respond to probes, letting the network know you're listening.
If you're truly eavesdropping you're undetectable. But do you know what the vendor put in the binary blob?
So, basically, they are just triangulating every node on the network, and detecting when a node is outside a given range (outside the building?), or seems to suddenly jump to another location (session hijacking)? Would this still work if the attacker is using a directional, high-gain antenna to prevent effective triangulation?
Sounds like they're not "triangulating" - computing the DIRECTION to a station from two monitoring locations in order to identify the station's location as the third point of a triangle. Instead they're measuring the round-trip time for a probe/response, which measures the distance (plus internal delays in the remote station) without identifying direction.
Adding delay can make a station appear to be farther than it is, but not nearer. So short of finding a way to send signals backward in time (or responding enough faster than the standard firmware to fool the montior) you can't spoof being closer than you are.
Which does nothing for a pure eavesdropper. But if the "eavesdropper"'s firmware associates with the eavesdropped network enough that it turns on its transmitter and responds to low-level protocol probes, it CAN be detected even if the user sends no traffic.
They're also using signal strength measurement - perhaps to work around unknown firmware response time. That might make them subject to spoofing by using a directional antenna and/or increasing transmit power to make the signal appear stronger, and thus closer, than it actually is.
(Another approach would be using multiple receivers at known (or self-measured relative) locations to do a LORAN-style triangulation on particular transmissions from the remote station, measuring the arrival-time differences at three or more stations to locate the remote station at the intersection of two or more hyperbolas. But that involves synchronizing time-bases between the monitoring stations in a way that would be beyond normal firmware's capabilities. It would also become less accurate as the distance to the remote station increases.)
None are interested in your privacy. ... Privacy means less control, ...
You missed Ron Paul.
His overriding interest is getting the government back within the constitutional limits and his voting record reflects that. (You may not always agree with his idea of what the limits are. But I bet his idea is a lot closer to yours than those of the rest of the field.)
Right to Privacy is a constitutional issue - with explicit components in the Bill of Rights and a generalization drawn by the Supreme Court from those plus the 10th and 9th Amendment limits and the Framers' writings.
Does it matter?
Even if that is a pseudonym for a real person or not it really doesn't matter because the result is what counts.
I don't care who or what she is. PJ passes the Turing Test.
(On the internet nobody can tell you're a 'bot. B-) )
Circumstantial evidence suggests, though, that she's just obsessive about her privacy, in a way that puts even the tin-foil hat crowd at Slashdot to shame.
Given that she was sticking pins in a corporation full of lawyers that felt competent to take on IBM and would love to have killed the message by discrediting or ruining the messenger, being obsessive about her privacy seems rational to me. No tinfoil required.
Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.
I can. Easily. B-)
Seriously, though. I can also imagine a GOOD lawyer reading Slashdot - for leads, ideas, arguments, legal theories, and inspiration (just for starters). But then he'd CHECK them - with dependable source and reference documents, credible witnesses, traceable, certified experts, etc.
Slashdot is a rumor mill. Sometimes it's mostly mist and mirrors. But often where there's smoke there's fire.
This reminds me of one of the several oopsies that led to the demise of Weitek. (This one wasn't the last straw. But it was a pretty big bale.)
An administrator decided that, to save money, those darned resource-wasting engineers would be limited to one new floppy disk per week.
So floppies got reused a lot. And of course eventually somebody got sloppy.
The master for one of their graphics driver distributions was built on a recycled floppy disk. Of course the old files were deleted, rather than the disk being reformatted with a surface-analysis (and data wiping) pass. And of course this master was sector-cloned for production.
Turns out the entire source code for the drivers had previously lived on that disk - and many of the algorithms that made the product cutting-edge were either in the driver or had enough info in the driver source about what the chip was up to that it made reverse-engineering a snap.
So just apply any of several "undelete the lost files" tools to any copy of the distribution disks and you could recover pretty much the whole source code, comments and all.
Shortly after this, the best of Weitek's cutting-edge algorithms became industry standards.
That's one of the characteristics of Trade Secrets. Once it's no longer a secret (especially if the owner managed to leak it himself), it's public domain.
Actually, [windmills take] only about half a year [to pay back the energy cost of making them - mainly making their aluminum towers].
Also: The energy output of windmills is high-quality electricity (i.e. the output end of the carnot cycle) but much of the energy of construction is heat. Comparing the two is apples-to-oranges.
On a related note: Solar panels take longer to repay the energy cost. But they are used primarily to provide off-grid power. So they need to be compared to the energy cost of installing a grid at the location: Cutting trees for poles, smelting metal for transformers, wiring, switches, meters, guy cables, bolts,... Melting sand into glass for insulators. Fuel to haul construction workers, clear the brush, dig the holes, install the poles, string the wires. A share of the energy to construct the plant. And the energy going INTO the plant's heat engine to make and transport the energy to the load at far less than 100% efficiency.
When you add this all up the energy costs of the alternative grid power, solar panels can be an energy bargain.
Attempting to store many multiple MWs of power is extremely difficult. If we had better battery technology, we would have solved the electric car range sufficiency problem already.
Actually we have the capacity - for stationary plants at least. It's called "vanadium redox". Long-lived, low-toxicity, efficient. It's been in initial deployments for several years now - mainly down in Oz and/or New Zeland. It has the interesting property that the energy is stored in the electrolytes, like a fuel cell - so you can store "charged" and "discharged" electrolytes in big tanks and separately size the electrode structures for max power level and the tanks for storage capacity. Further, the electrolyte from multiple cells can be pooled, allowing for some very useful properties. For instance, you can charge and discahrge at different (or even multiple) voltages, just by tapping the stack of cells as appropriate. Bingo: DC Transformer.
Cars are a different kettle of fish: The heavier the battery the more power it takes to move it around, which gives you nasty issues similar to those of rocket vehicles. Automobile applications requrie very low losses at high charge and discharge rates to avoid overheating, "refuel" qiickly, and efficiently scavenge braking power for later re-use. And you need to be safe in collisions, be stable though vibration, G-forces, and at various tilts, and have failure modes that don't take out the whole battery pack and disable the car if a cell fails.
New cells for this are coming along, too. Best one I'm aware of is the carbon nanofiliment electrode lithium-ion cell, also going into production, though there may be others.
My understanding is that virus blocking is done either by wholesale port blocks (e.g. blocking port 80 to stop all the IIS worms which many ISPs did or blocking port 25 to stop spam zombies) or (in the case of email viruses) is done via scanners that scan each email message looking for viruses and stripping the content or message)
Fine except for the last: Editing a message on-the-fly chews up a bunch of precious resources - crunch and state storage - on the ISP's boxen. Much easier to kill the connection as soon as you recognize it as a virus (and before enough it gets through to cause trouble). Then the box can discard the state, recover the resources, and forget about it, rather than understanding how to edit and taking a bunch of its RAM out of service until the virus has gone by.
Also the latter approach would let viruses DoS the filters by having some of their connection attempts start up and pause a while, leaving connections open until the RAM was all in use. Then the filter box would have to either let viruses through or cut off mail, web surfing, etc.
Editing messages - like to put "**** spam ****" in the subject line - is an OK approach on a mail server, with lots of crunch and a big disk. But doing it on-the-fly in a RAM-based edge router with gigabytes of traffic per blade is the pits.
I couldn't get Ubuntu to run on my laptop ...
Try the new Gutsy Gibbon release. The install is very slick (and will preserve your Windows as a dual-boot if you want.)
The only problem I had with it was when I tried to use the Gnu replacement for Flash and it would hang the machine. Uninstalling that and installing the real shockwave product fixed that.
Also: How old is your laptop and how much RAM does it have? After I migrated to Gutsy on my 2-year-old Toshiba Tecra I tried to install Feisty or Gutsy on the old (1999) Thinkpad 600E (mainly to wipe the disk before returning it to the company IT department) - and found that the installer would hang. I believe that's because the live CD is a pretty full-blown version that keeps its must-be-variable files on a filesystem in RAM and the old machine didn't have enough.
I would say that the beacon and authentication process would communicate that permission is granted:
For decades much of the computer using community has taken the settings of things like file permissions as not just a technical access control, but an expression of intent.
For instance:
- If a file's permission is read-group or read-world and it is sitting in a directory that is also group or world accessible, anyone might chose to examine it at any time, without notice to, or explicit permission from, the owner.
- If it (or the containing directories) is not read-enabled, users with adequate system permission or knowledge of system internals may be ABLE to read it. But (if they behaved ethically) they would normally NOT do so unless the had either explicitly obtained permission from the file owner or were performing the access as something necessary to their job function - in which case they'd read it as little as possible.
Tools (such as mail readers) were normally designed to set the permissions of files they created in accordance with the likely wishes of the users.
IMHO continuing that logic makes perfect sense.
A significant number of people deliberately make their access points available to any non-disruptive transient user, as a community service. This is often done by leaving them at their default settings. Meanwhile, access points have a fine mechanism for putting up a "no trespassing" sign: WEP encryption. It's very weak and can be trivially broken. But turning it on makes it clear that the AP's owner did not intend for the AP to be used without explicit permission, and breaking the encryption makes it clear that a user intended to disregard the owner's wishes. So it's like the latch on a screen door: Trivially bypassed - but clearly expressing intent.
Granted most APs are shipped with WEP turned off, so a lot of users leave them open out of ignorance rather than as an expression of intent. But IMHO the user of an open AP can plausibly deny any intent to trespass on the AP and that the user had failed to post the property as private.
So it seems to me that the appropriate stand for the legal system to take is that the WEP setting and key distribution practices of an AP's owner are an expression of the owner's intent.
The difference between blocking SPAM and what Comcast are doing is that SPAM blocking doesn't involve sending messages from one IP address crafted to look like they are coming from a totally different IP address.
Actually, yes, it does.
The ISP's boxes can't afford to remember, forever, every flow that has ever been detected to contain a virus, just so they can continue dropping the packets. Instead doing a "fire and forget" of a forged RST to tear down the link before the virus finishes propagating is the way to go. (At least the receiving end will honor it, which will do the trick.)
The difference between blocking SPAM and what Comcast is doing is that using the technique to block SPAM can be done with the permission of the customer. (Indeed, with his encouragement, perhaps even in the form of a fee for the service.)
What Comcast is doing is cutting off the service the customer wants.
Shooting the wolf at the door (when you've been hired as an armed guard to defend against wolves) is one thing. Shooting the delivery man is quite another.
Discard the traffic and generate a forged reply? Not fine.
Actually:
Discard an occasional packet? Fine.
Forge a "connection reset" reply? Not fine.
Delivery of individual packets is (explicitly) not guaranteed,
and is normally, and unavoidably, caused by congestion. The
prioritization decisions made to implement Quality of Service
guarantees, favoring some packets over others, will result in
increased dropping of the less-favored packets. That also is OK.
It's the silent loss of packets that TCP uses to detect congestion
and adjust its transmission rate to fairly divide the available
bandwidth between multiple connections. UDP itself is just an
interface to the underlying unreliable transmission mechanism.
But protocols built on it may (and some do) also use the same
mechanism to sniff for congestion and work around it.
So dropping packets to force the connection to slow down is
just fine. It's the correct and natural thing to do to regulate
traffic to conform to bandwidth allocation rules.
Forging the packet that the far end uses to tell you that the
connection must be torn down, in order to break the connection
completely, is a whole different can of worms. It's is NOT
something that a carrier claiming to be providing "internet
service" should ever do, with two exceptions:
- If the carrier has explicitly contracted with the customer
to police his traffic (i.e. for viruses and the like) and
deliberately break connections to prevent their transfer to
him, as a service. Then it's just fine.
- If the carrier has terms of service that exclude particular
behavior on the part of the customer's computer (for instance:
propagation of known viruses in order to protect other customers
and/or the net at large) and has notified him that such connections
will be terminated.
But expanding that second exception to completely tearing down
perfectly legitimate connections just because they are expensive
to maintain is a big no-no.
Can you imagine Tim Russert's or Lou Dobbs' headless body occupying those comfortable chairs after heading the news? Rush Limbaugh's lie factory all over his little switchboard? (heh, slurp up the juice for a quick high, be careful though, narcotics are dangerous)
You don't have to wait for Rush' head to explode. He keeps half his brain tied behind his back. B-)
Is the military so stupid they're actually using Windows-based software (or software running ANY consumer OS for that matter) in battlefields?
...
Sure looks like it.
If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
Really?
I seem to recall a battleship that got stalled a few years back
... the bandwidth of a homing pigeon with memory cards strapped to its legs.
Approximately 11.1 [link to wikipedia deleted]
No, that's the index. But thinks for the link.
Looks like it would be about 3,000 bogomips. Not cutting edge, but not too shabby either.
But Linux is good right? But wait...Wal Mart is not good. Unless, they throw me a open-source bone. Then they're good right?
The readership of Slashdot varies drastically. Attempts to use social pressure to homogenize it have failed, with great hilarity.
Apparently you did not get the memo. B-)
Please do not expect all of us to march in step.
How many bogomips are we talking here...
Most of the power in a CRT goes into the H/V beam deflection electromagnets, not the electron gun. The H/V scanning electronics operate regardless of which color is being rendered.
Not only that: With a flyback system the sweep pumps energy into the mag fields of the flyback transformer and yoke - then that energy has to be dumped rapidly when the beam is swept back. It has to go somewhere.
Monitors scavenge this "must be dumped NOW" energy for several purposes. Most notable: It's what provides the main accelleration power for the electron beam. In older sets it also provided the power for the high-voltage rectifier tube's filament, the vertical sweep mechanism, the audio amplifier. (Haven't examined the circuitry of transistor monitors but I bet it also gets salvaged for more than CRT high voltage there, too. Or perhaps gets dumped back into the power supply for re-use on the next sweep and elsewhere.)
If this posts I got office WiFi and SSH working...
(Well, I'll be done once AT&T dialup in San Jose actually accepts my authentication credentials and I've checked that the wireless will pass traffic after associating with the office WiFi LAN...)