US Military: That's our bandwidth! We need all the spectrum we can get to bomb an Afghan hut!
Given that:
Their choice is to view it and bomb it from far away by remote control or view it and bomb it close-up-and-personal.
It's still full of terrorists armed with hi-tek antiaircraft missiles when they need to bomb it.
Doing it by remote control needs a lot more bandwidth. I'd say they have a good case that they DO need all the bandwidth they can get.
Or at least all the bandwidth they currently have MIL-spec remote-sensing and remote-bombing equipment set up to use, so they don't have to go have more designed and built while the terrorists are moving to a new hut and blowing up more skyscrapers.
It [Internet Explorer] was put on to keep their monopoly - not because they thought they had a better browser.
It was also installed because it's a convenient means to report things to Microsoft (like that you've just accepted the click-wrap on a machine with THIS software unique ID and THIS CPU serial number (if applicable) and THIS MAC address on the ethernet card THIS compliment of other hardware and THIS IP address etc.)
No doubt it does similar stuff at lots of other opportunities. (Remember the "developer conference" spam where visiting the "remove me" link with IE would dump your registry into a cgi script on register.microsoft.com?) Removing IE would cripple their visibility into your box and their opportunity to use whatever backdoors they may have in it.
Browsers are the ideal place to hide such stuff. You need a network connection to get them to work. They have all the pieces necessary for finding out where a site moved to, dumping anything they can read about your machine into a server, sucking anything they want into any file or directory they can write to on your machine, downloading and running scripts, etc. All behind your back, of course.
the real cost is provisioning for peak usage.... What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day.
Charging for bandwidth usage is garbage, based on models of consumable resources rather than shared instintaneous resources. Bandwidth disappears when not used. You can't save it up during low usage periods to provide extra during high usage periods.
- If they charge you when you're NOT competing with other users, they pulled money from you when the difference between you having used the bandwidth and having NOT used the bandwidth made no difference to their costs and to their other customers' experiences.
- If they charge you when you ARE competing, they're charging you when you're no more of a problem then any one of the other customers you're allegedly causing a problem for. If they charge you more then those other customers because you used bandwidth when nobody else wanted it, they're just ripping you off.
The proper thing for them to do is:
- Divide the bandwidth evenly between everybody who wants to use it on an instintaneous basis.
- Add more bandwidth if things are too slow during the peaks.
- Charge all the users for their share of the cost of the provisioned bandwidth (times a profit multiplier).
No matter how hard you suck on the pipe, you can't consume any more bandwidth than they chose to give you at any instant. No matter how many packets you blow into the pipe, it won't pass any more packets on than they chose to let it pass. If you blow in more than that it will drop them - and TCP will automatically drop rate and retransmit until you're using the available bandwidth and still getting through. If you can take an "unfair share", it's THEIR fault for using routers that can't divide the bandwidth fairly, not your fault for trying to use what's available.
And if their business model assumed broadband users wouldn't actually use the bandwidth, that's also THEIR fault, not yours.
Bandwidth usage pricing is not a way to be fair. It's a way to gouge the customers with an unpredictable price hike.
Can you imagine the consternation when an email virus, moustrap animated advertisement package, or distributed DOS client gets loaded on a bunch of their customers and runs their bills up to astronomical levels? Or when users bills skyrocket because the ISP didn't filter out spam?
I think it's less about agendas and more about entertainment. [Short movie scenario.]
I can't agree.
If it WASN'T agenda driven, they could have explained the lack of a gun as easily as the lack of a phone and a silent alarm.
A) The previous owner took his gun with him and the newbies just moved in and hadn't replaced it. (Just show the protagonists looking for a gun and finding the empty storage slot - canned food and tools still in place, an obvious gun rack that's empty. It only takes a moment to establish. Or use it for a extra drama: She finds the gun storage, opens it, and finds it empty. Extra moment of cursing and freakout. Additional helplessness, futility, and angst.)
B) For the opposite agenda: If this was New York City, even the rich can't get guns. (Or if it was upstate, set it in Massachusetts instead. Same story statewide.) Kid asks mommy why all this saferoom and no gun. Mommy explains that in this place they've just moved to nobody can have one.
But the anti-gun (and anti-tech) bias of the movie-making establishment is well documented. So my bet is that's the explanation. (And the screenplay DOES match anti-gun bias better than a neutral or pro-gun stance.)
JPEG 2000 looks like the right thing at last.
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I thought this was a good comparasion between JPEG and JPEG2000.
Good one. Thanks for the link.
Looks like JPEG2000 finally got things right for the human eye:
- Higher compression ratios just gently blur details, rather than creating artifacts. Losing the extra information leaves the part that DID get through intact.
- The text says the compression allows for progressive downloading. This implies that the coding scheme does something like working upward in spatial frequency - encoding the basic stuff first then sending progressively finer deltas. For a given compression ratio just stop the downloading (or file saving) when you have enough.
- The compression seems to match eye processing so well that highly compressed (100:1) images actually look BETTER than the basic image. The features important to the eye (facial stuff, especially eyes) gets through or even enhanced, while unnecessary detail - including sampling artifacts - gets selectively blurred out. Something like the soft-focus filter in portrait photography. The only thing in the samples that got noticably worse at high-compression is hair, which just gets a bit blurry. (Meanwhile, JPEG looked like it had pixelated measles.)
Of course the images selected for the demo could have been optimized for the compression scheme. B-)
Gravity warps space - film at 11.
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
Simply take a machine that transports a neuron back a second in time, 2 Neurons will exist then in a second before, put the time machine will still run there "a second time", so 3 Neuron will exist a second before, a second later the time machine will again send a neuron back a secnd. 4 Neurons will exist, so on and so on.
Ring Around the Neutron, Pocket full of photons. Black hole! Black hole! We all fall down!
These are the people that bring you the unlimited submachinegun clips, bullets that must not hurt *too* much, and bad guys who never seem to practice at the target range.
Actually, bad guys generally DON'T practice at the target range. B-) But the rest is right on.
These (the movie makers) are also the people with agendas to push and a message to get across:
1) Guns are useless for defense. Nobody but a lawman or body-builder can use them successfully, except maybe for a counter-attack against a bad guy at the end of a long angst-ridden battle. Small, weak, disabled, or female people can never use them competently as an "equalizer". Or if somehow they do use them that way it leads to a fate-worse-than-rape. So don't buy one, don't take a class, don't practice, don't learn how they REALLY work. Don't bother trying.
2) Nothing an ORDINARY person can do - no weapon, no tech, no strategy, no martial art - will protect you from the bad guys. Even a lifetime of practice for EXTRAordinary people or top-of-the-line stuff inhereted from someone very rich (i.e. that YOU can't afford and can only get hold of by accident) isn't good enough - or just barely suffices when combined with superhuman effort, jackpot-level luck, and after enough suffering that you'll be a post-traumatic basket case when it's over. So don't bother trying.
3) Anything you do to try to prepare makes things worse. So don't bother trying.
Pull your own teeth, claws, and horns. Depend on the authorities, like good little sheep, and die with dignity if they aren't around to protect you from the wolves.
1) is why there's no gun handy. It was never an option, so it never enters the the plot line - or (they hope) the viewer's mind.
2) is why everything fails. (But it DOES make for a movie-length piece of "dramatic conflict".)
3) is the main difference between mainstream and SF/Fantasy art. The latter has the conventional messages: "You can fix or improve anything by thought and directed effort." or "Here's how it can break beyond repair if you let it slide early on." This is why SF so rarely makes it to the Silver Screen in viewable form. Hollywood really doesn't "get it" because the internal structure is different from - and opposed to - the core values of the forms of drama they understand.
But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders?
And back in the 17th century, printers could, with "minimal time and effort" (i.e. no more than for any other printed item), set type to make perfect copies of any book and sell the copies to everyone in the colonies and the frontier beyond who wanted to buy a copy. So what it new?
The copyright laws ALREADY address the issue.
The authors of the laws knew that, even then, finding and punishing all the infringers was impossible. So they compensated by having draconian penalties for those infringers they DID catch. And those draconian penalties are on the books even today.
The problem is that the RIAA and MPAA don't want to bother hunding down a few of the people who make "copies of their books" and make bloody examples of them. Instead they want to make infringement impossible by burning all the printing presses. (Except, of course, for a few that they license. For a fee.)
So: Does the legislator want to sign up for burning all the electronic printing presses?
The FBI isn't stupid enough to "drag net" or "trawl" (indiscriminate monitoring). In fact you **COULD** argue before the judge that it is the FBI agent that should be before the judge because IIRC trawling is a felony for any federal law enforcement officer caught doing it.
Law enforcement agencies routinely get around that sort of things as follows:
Fish with an illegal wiretap, until you find something interesting.
Call in an "anonymous tip" to the guy at the next desk.
Get a warrant for the interesting thing on the basis of the "anonymous tip from a usually reliable source".
Put in the "legal" wiretap. Or just break in and sieze some evidence. (And if you can't find any but you REALLY don't like the guy, or don't want your own butt in a sling, plant a little.)
While I don't know if the FBI is doing any of that these days, they have a long history of doing it that has been repeatedly exposed. (Of course you ALWAYS have only the old stuff that was exposed - because the current stuff hasn't been exposed yet. So there's no real way to tell whether an agency has finally cleaned up its act and stayed clean, except by discovering much later that it hadn't.
Hey, by placing these addresses on a public site like/., they are likely to get harvested by the spammers...
Not likely. All but the most half-assed of spammers will filter their list to remove *@*.gov, webmaster@*, postmaster@*, abuse@*, root@*, and so on.
But alias processing will not be detected.
I have a number of non-accounts that somehow got onto spammer lists - probably due to somebody mis-filling-out forms - that are currently aliased to/dev/null. I think I'll change the alias to uce@ftc.gov and auto-forward them all.
I HAD been thinking about forwarding it to the congresscritters' emails. But this might actually get some response.
Why do all the new broadband technologies limit the upload to a very slow speed? 2.4Mbps is nice and all, but for it to be useful beyond surfing the web 153Kbps doesn't leave for much of anything else.
Collisions. Same reason your upstream is often capped on a cable modem. On shared media you will get a lot of collisions from the individuals on the network as they choose to transmit at random times.
Collisions can be managed by assigning time slots for the inbound direction. There'd be some reduction due to variation in turnaround time among customers sharing the bandwidth, but nothing like a 20:1 degradation. (And it can also be managed by smarter schedulers.) You have to do some of this anyhow.
But the upstream doesn't (or doesn't HAVE to) apply to non-shared services like DSL. There the bandwidth is divided between the upstream and downstream link - currently with a fixed ratio though in principle the modems COULD have dynamically adjusted it.
No, I believe the issue is that the network designers just built networks on the assumption that the customers were mainly browsing the web or pulling down content, rather than serving others. For such a content consumer you want the downstream to be as fat as you can afford, and the upstream to be adequate for TCP ACKs URL references, and keystrokes. Then they massively oversubscribed the (symmetrical) network link feeding the local node (DSLAM, cell, what-have-you) and let the users stat-mux themselves. When they have little competition (which, the carrier hopes, is most of the time) they can fill their fat personal downlink pipe to its capacity. They don't lose packets on the uplink (which would break them badly) beacuse they're throttled back so far that the network link doesn't saturate.
Users running servers break that model. They cost the ISP more to support because he can't oversubscribe the network link to such an extreme - or much at all - without degrading their service. Even with the throttle, a few users hosting servers on a DSLAM can start causing other users to lose upbound packets and see download degradation.
my grandma would be able to get DSL for $3 a month because she just checks email.
And she'd be happy until the first month she gets a screenfull of animated adds, a mailbox full of spam, and a $750 bill for the privilege.
Current internet technology evolved in an unmetered, bandwidth-limit-only enviornment. The content of the web and email - or the intelligence of the browsers and delivery agents - will require major revision before metered broadband internet service becomes practical.
Hear hear! April Fool's are "Funny Once"
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 2
In Hienlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ the mentor of the human-raised-by-Martians ("Smith") spends quite a bit of time trying to explain humor. One of the breakthroughs occurs when he divides jokes into funny-many-times and funny-once.
Funny-once jokes: Tell it once, you're a wit. Tell it twice and you're a half-wit.
Smith responds: "Geometric series?"
Today's Slashdot seems to support Smith's Conjecture.
And that goes DOUBLE if the joke consisted of actually publishing a rootkit-like thing that installs using the apt get mechanism - thus giving the scriptkiddies more insight into it.
It's a holiday dedicated to increasing the entropy of people's minds - just what I spend my whole life fighting.
And of course the media gets bit or plays along. For instance: we have Slashdot posting April Fool's jokes as straight news. So if anything REAL and surprising comes along it gets buried in the noise. (For the mainstream media that's no big change. But for outlets with some credibility left it's a damned shame.)
I swear: If the Former Soviet Union had understood the holiday they could have launched a first strike on April 1 and won.
The reason Australians say "rowter" is that it's not really possible to pronounce it "rooter" in polite company.... So we call it as the Armericans do.
Actually, that pronounciation is regional, and one of the canonical examples of the techniques of mapping of pronounciations for analysis of prevalance, prevalance change, likely origin, etc. (At least it was a canonical example at the University of Michigan in the late '60s, because the rOOt/rAWte isogloss ran through Ann Arbor at the time.)
I grew up on that isogoloss, and tend to use rOOt for the noun (the path) and rAWte for the verb (to chose the path), and thus the box that performs the operation.
One of the texts on IP by some of the pioneers claims that the two pronounciations are interchangable when it comes to networking gear.
I suspect the rAWte pronounciation appears to be the "American" one because it's prevalent in the part of California where the major IP equipment manufacturers are headquartered. So when you hear an American talking about routers on TV you're probably hearing someone who is working on them in California.
The amount of energy required for a car (even a hypothetical "supercar") is orders of magnitude beyond the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits its surface.
Pave your yard with cells and you're starting to approach it.
Or move to a billiard-ball flat planet with no atmosphere.
Hardcopy and (bent) Starplex diskettes
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 2
Sounds interesting. Got any documentation or source?
I recently found the listings (after losing them for a couple years). They're a bit large to OCR.
I've got two copies of the source on damaged Starplex(tm) diskettes - 8" floppies, NOT in CPM format, with bent envelopes.
If you know anyone in the silicon valley area that can read Starplex diskettes or OCR 8 1/2 x (whatever printer paper was) fanfold listings, let me know. (Or if you're feeling like typing in 50ish pages of stuff... B-) )
My favorite AlGoreithm [has] Gotta be inventing the Internet! How could you top that?
Actually what Al Gore invented was Spam.
Really.
(The legislation he supported to open the Internet to commercial exploitation is part of why we can't do much about the spammers without further legislation.)
His wire-all-the-schools-for-internet was also a trojan horse. It gives government an excuse to censor the net down to elementary-school level to "Save the Children".
Djikstra's Communicating Semaphores
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My favorite is Djikstra's Communicating Semaphores, along with the related algorithms documented in Djikstra & Riddle's paper "The 'T.H.E.' multiprogramming System".
With Mark Weiser's addition of the "T" primative (more commonly called "non-blocking P" i.e. "Try to P but if that would block return an error flag instead.") you have a fantastically powerful tool in a tiny amount of code.
For instance: I was able to implement a kernel for an actor-based, real-time, prioritized, preemptive multitasking system, including initialization code, an idle task, and a minimal startup task table (i.e. everything but the application tasks and device drivers):
- In under 512 bytes of code and initialization data.
- On an 8080.
Communicating P, V, and T, (along with a flavor of "V" doubling as a return-from-interrupt) are a complete set of primitives for such work.
For those not familiar, an "actor" in this context is a class such that each instance of that class or any subclass of it is a separate thread of execution. Messages are exchanged between threads via queues on semaphores rather than C++ member function calls / Smalltalk message sends, but otherwise all the object-oriented concepts apply directly.
Communicating Semaphores handle locking (like normal semaphores), message queueing, and resource allocation (by holding a queue of messages, each of which represents, or actually is, a resource).
"T" lets interrupt routines run initially as parasites on the interrupted task, then "T" a free-message-buffer queue, fill in the message, and "V" it to the incoming-work semaphore of the actual service routine as the interrupt exits - provoking a context switch if the service routine is higher priority than whatever was running. The interrupt routine can punt and return to the interrupted task if no buffers are available.
that's the same line that quack used who tried to say plants responded to your tone of voice
Tone of voice, no. CO2 yes. Sweet-talk a plant for a few minutes and you give it a strong shot of a relatively rare gas that it requires for its metabolism.
Why not directly sue Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM? Somewhere along the line one of these companies offered system level encryption.
Or maybe this dinky unknown company saw a way to squeeze money out of little companies who they thought couldn't afford to fight back?
You answered your own question.
To get the most mileage out of a patent, law, etc. that can be applied many times:
- First sue/prosecute a little guy with negligable resources and (if applicable) a bad reputation or history. (For censorship laws, for instance, start with a kiddie pornographer before going after Playboy.)
- With your precedent established, work your way up to deeper pockets and more reputable defendants.
That way you get the most convictions and (if applicable) the most money before somebody manges to spike you - if anybody manages to spike you at all.
We should also (separately) push them to add something like this to the bill under consideration:
(c)(3) PUBLIC DOMAIN USE COPIES. -- No person may apply a security measure that uses a standard security technology to prevent the making of copies of a work or any portion thereof once the copyright on that work has expired.
(under (g)(3)IMPLEMENTATION. -- Any final rule published in such a subsequent rulemaking shall -- )
(g)(3)(C) require all secured copies of a work to carry a machine-readable notice of the copyright date and copyright holder
(g)(3)(D) enable and facilitate the production of unsecured copies of the work, by inexpensive technical means and without any action by the former copyright holder, after the expiration of the copyright
This article completely discounts the obvious innovations coming to market for pushing more bits down the same fibers over time.
You missed the point.
Innovation means you can put more down the fibers. So that means it's even LONGER until you have to lay more FIBER.
But when it comes to the BOXES to LIGHT the fiber, it means you have to BUY A NEW BOX - even to upgrade a fiber you ALREADY LIT with LAST YEAR'S BOX (which you won't do until the dark ones are mostly lit).
He's talking about the lack of capacity in the BOXES. By his numbers (which look right to me) about 5% of the cost is the fiber and the remaining 95% is the boxes and the rest of the infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that:
Their choice is to view it and bomb it from far away by remote control or view it and bomb it close-up-and-personal.
It's still full of terrorists armed with hi-tek antiaircraft missiles when they need to bomb it.
Doing it by remote control needs a lot more bandwidth.
I'd say they have a good case that they DO need all the bandwidth they can get.
Or at least all the bandwidth they currently have MIL-spec remote-sensing and remote-bombing equipment set up to use, so they don't have to go have more designed and built while the terrorists are moving to a new hut and blowing up more skyscrapers.
It [Internet Explorer] was put on to keep their monopoly - not because they thought they had a better browser.
It was also installed because it's a convenient means to report things to Microsoft (like that you've just accepted the click-wrap on a machine with THIS software unique ID and THIS CPU serial number (if applicable) and THIS MAC address on the ethernet card THIS compliment of other hardware and THIS IP address etc.)
No doubt it does similar stuff at lots of other opportunities. (Remember the "developer conference" spam where visiting the "remove me" link with IE would dump your registry into a cgi script on register.microsoft.com?) Removing IE would cripple their visibility into your box and their opportunity to use whatever backdoors they may have in it.
Browsers are the ideal place to hide such stuff. You need a network connection to get them to work. They have all the pieces necessary for finding out where a site moved to, dumping anything they can read about your machine into a server, sucking anything they want into any file or directory they can write to on your machine, downloading and running scripts, etc. All behind your back, of course.
the real cost is provisioning for peak usage. ... What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day.
Charging for bandwidth usage is garbage, based on models of consumable resources rather than shared instintaneous resources. Bandwidth disappears when not used. You can't save it up during low usage periods to provide extra during high usage periods.
- If they charge you when you're NOT competing with other users, they pulled money from you when the difference between you having used the bandwidth and having NOT used the bandwidth made no difference to their costs and to their other customers' experiences.
- If they charge you when you ARE competing, they're charging you when you're no more of a problem then any one of the other customers you're allegedly causing a problem for. If they charge you more then those other customers because you used bandwidth when nobody else wanted it, they're just ripping you off.
The proper thing for them to do is:
- Divide the bandwidth evenly between everybody who wants to use it on an instintaneous basis.
- Add more bandwidth if things are too slow during the peaks.
- Charge all the users for their share of the cost of the provisioned bandwidth (times a profit multiplier).
No matter how hard you suck on the pipe, you can't consume any more bandwidth than they chose to give you at any instant. No matter how many packets you blow into the pipe, it won't pass any more packets on than they chose to let it pass. If you blow in more than that it will drop them - and TCP will automatically drop rate and retransmit until you're using the available bandwidth and still getting through. If you can take an "unfair share", it's THEIR fault for using routers that can't divide the bandwidth fairly, not your fault for trying to use what's available.
And if their business model assumed broadband users wouldn't actually use the bandwidth, that's also THEIR fault, not yours.
Bandwidth usage pricing is not a way to be fair. It's a way to gouge the customers with an unpredictable price hike.
Can you imagine the consternation when an email virus, moustrap animated advertisement package, or distributed DOS client gets loaded on a bunch of their customers and runs their bills up to astronomical levels? Or when users bills skyrocket because the ISP didn't filter out spam?
I think it's less about agendas and more about entertainment. [Short movie scenario.]
I can't agree.
If it WASN'T agenda driven, they could have explained the lack of a gun as easily as the lack of a phone and a silent alarm.
A) The previous owner took his gun with him and the newbies just moved in and hadn't replaced it. (Just show the protagonists looking for a gun and finding the empty storage slot - canned food and tools still in place, an obvious gun rack that's empty. It only takes a moment to establish. Or use it for a extra drama: She finds the gun storage, opens it, and finds it empty. Extra moment of cursing and freakout. Additional helplessness, futility, and angst.)
B) For the opposite agenda: If this was New York City, even the rich can't get guns. (Or if it was upstate, set it in Massachusetts instead. Same story statewide.) Kid asks mommy why all this saferoom and no gun. Mommy explains that in this place they've just moved to nobody can have one.
But the anti-gun (and anti-tech) bias of the movie-making establishment is well documented. So my bet is that's the explanation. (And the screenplay DOES match anti-gun bias better than a neutral or pro-gun stance.)
I thought this was a good comparasion between JPEG and JPEG2000.
Good one. Thanks for the link.
Looks like JPEG2000 finally got things right for the human eye:
- Higher compression ratios just gently blur details, rather than creating artifacts. Losing the extra information leaves the part that DID get through intact.
- The text says the compression allows for progressive downloading. This implies that the coding scheme does something like working upward in spatial frequency - encoding the basic stuff first then sending progressively finer deltas. For a given compression ratio just stop the downloading (or file saving) when you have enough.
- The compression seems to match eye processing so well that highly compressed (100:1) images actually look BETTER than the basic image. The features important to the eye (facial stuff, especially eyes) gets through or even enhanced, while unnecessary detail - including sampling artifacts - gets selectively blurred out. Something like the soft-focus filter in portrait photography. The only thing in the samples that got noticably worse at high-compression is hair, which just gets a bit blurry. (Meanwhile, JPEG looked like it had pixelated measles.)
Of course the images selected for the demo could have been optimized for the compression scheme. B-)
Simply take a machine that transports a neuron back a second in time, 2 Neurons will exist then in a second before, put the time machine will still run there "a second time", so 3 Neuron will exist a second before, a second later the time machine will again send a neuron back a secnd. 4 Neurons will exist, so on and so on.
Ring Around the Neutron,
Pocket full of photons.
Black hole!
Black hole!
We all fall down!
These are the people that bring you the unlimited submachinegun clips, bullets that must not hurt *too* much, and bad guys who never seem to practice at the target range.
Actually, bad guys generally DON'T practice at the target range. B-) But the rest is right on.
These (the movie makers) are also the people with agendas to push and a message to get across:
1) Guns are useless for defense. Nobody but a lawman or body-builder can use them successfully, except maybe for a counter-attack against a bad guy at the end of a long angst-ridden battle. Small, weak, disabled, or female people can never use them competently as an "equalizer". Or if somehow they do use them that way it leads to a fate-worse-than-rape. So don't buy one, don't take a class, don't practice, don't learn how they REALLY work. Don't bother trying.
2) Nothing an ORDINARY person can do - no weapon, no tech, no strategy, no martial art - will protect you from the bad guys. Even a lifetime of practice for EXTRAordinary people or top-of-the-line stuff inhereted from someone very rich (i.e. that YOU can't afford and can only get hold of by accident) isn't good enough - or just barely suffices when combined with superhuman effort, jackpot-level luck, and after enough suffering that you'll be a post-traumatic basket case when it's over. So don't bother trying.
3) Anything you do to try to prepare makes things worse. So don't bother trying.
Pull your own teeth, claws, and horns. Depend on the authorities, like good little sheep, and die with dignity if they aren't around to protect you from the wolves.
1) is why there's no gun handy. It was never an option, so it never enters the the plot line - or (they hope) the viewer's mind.
2) is why everything fails. (But it DOES make for a movie-length piece of "dramatic conflict".)
3) is the main difference between mainstream and SF/Fantasy art. The latter has the conventional messages: "You can fix or improve anything by thought and directed effort." or "Here's how it can break beyond repair if you let it slide early on." This is why SF so rarely makes it to the Silver Screen in viewable form. Hollywood really doesn't "get it" because the internal structure is different from - and opposed to - the core values of the forms of drama they understand.
But with digital content and the Internet, a home computer user can share a perfect copy of any content with potentially millions of other people, with minimal time and effort. Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders?
And back in the 17th century, printers could, with "minimal time and effort" (i.e. no more than for any other printed item), set type to make perfect copies of any book and sell the copies to everyone in the colonies and the frontier beyond who wanted to buy a copy. So what it new?
The copyright laws ALREADY address the issue.
The authors of the laws knew that, even then, finding and punishing all the infringers was impossible. So they compensated by having draconian penalties for those infringers they DID catch. And those draconian penalties are on the books even today.
The problem is that the RIAA and MPAA don't want to bother hunding down a few of the people who make "copies of their books" and make bloody examples of them. Instead they want to make infringement impossible by burning all the printing presses. (Except, of course, for a few that they license. For a fee.)
So: Does the legislator want to sign up for burning all the electronic printing presses?
Whatever happened to the federal bill to extend the anti-unsolicited-FAX law to spam?
Law enforcement agencies routinely get around that sort of things as follows:
Fish with an illegal wiretap, until you find something interesting.
Call in an "anonymous tip" to the guy at the next desk.
Get a warrant for the interesting thing on the basis of the "anonymous tip from a usually reliable source".
Put in the "legal" wiretap. Or just break in and sieze some evidence. (And if you can't find any but you REALLY don't like the guy, or don't want your own butt in a sling, plant a little.)
While I don't know if the FBI is doing any of that these days, they have a long history of doing it that has been repeatedly exposed. (Of course you ALWAYS have only the old stuff that was exposed - because the current stuff hasn't been exposed yet. So there's no real way to tell whether an agency has finally cleaned up its act and stayed clean, except by discovering much later that it hadn't.
Hey, by placing these addresses on a public site like /., they are likely to get harvested by the spammers...
/dev/null. I think I'll change the alias to uce@ftc.gov and auto-forward them all.
Not likely. All but the most half-assed of spammers will filter their list to remove *@*.gov, webmaster@*, postmaster@*, abuse@*, root@*, and so on.
But alias processing will not be detected.
I have a number of non-accounts that somehow got onto spammer lists - probably due to somebody mis-filling-out forms - that are currently aliased to
I HAD been thinking about forwarding it to the congresscritters' emails. But this might actually get some response.
Why do all the new broadband technologies limit the upload to a very slow speed? 2.4Mbps is nice and all, but for it to be useful beyond surfing the web 153Kbps doesn't leave for much of anything else.
Collisions. Same reason your upstream is often capped on a cable modem. On shared media you will get a lot of collisions from the individuals on the network as they choose to transmit at random times.
Collisions can be managed by assigning time slots for the inbound direction. There'd be some reduction due to variation in turnaround time among customers sharing the bandwidth, but nothing like a 20:1 degradation. (And it can also be managed by smarter schedulers.) You have to do some of this anyhow.
But the upstream doesn't (or doesn't HAVE to) apply to non-shared services like DSL. There the bandwidth is divided between the upstream and downstream link - currently with a fixed ratio though in principle the modems COULD have dynamically adjusted it.
No, I believe the issue is that the network designers just built networks on the assumption that the customers were mainly browsing the web or pulling down content, rather than serving others. For such a content consumer you want the downstream to be as fat as you can afford, and the upstream to be adequate for TCP ACKs URL references, and keystrokes. Then they massively oversubscribed the (symmetrical) network link feeding the local node (DSLAM, cell, what-have-you) and let the users stat-mux themselves. When they have little competition (which, the carrier hopes, is most of the time) they can fill their fat personal downlink pipe to its capacity. They don't lose packets on the uplink (which would break them badly) beacuse they're throttled back so far that the network link doesn't saturate.
Users running servers break that model. They cost the ISP more to support because he can't oversubscribe the network link to such an extreme - or much at all - without degrading their service. Even with the throttle, a few users hosting servers on a DSLAM can start causing other users to lose upbound packets and see download degradation.
my grandma would be able to get DSL for $3 a month because she just checks email.
And she'd be happy until the first month she gets a screenfull of animated adds, a mailbox full of spam, and a $750 bill for the privilege.
Current internet technology evolved in an unmetered, bandwidth-limit-only enviornment. The content of the web and email - or the intelligence of the browsers and delivery agents - will require major revision before metered broadband internet service becomes practical.
In Hienlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_ the mentor of the human-raised-by-Martians ("Smith") spends quite a bit of time trying to explain humor. One of the breakthroughs occurs when he divides jokes into funny-many-times and funny-once.
Funny-once jokes: Tell it once, you're a wit. Tell it twice and you're a half-wit.
Smith responds: "Geometric series?"
Today's Slashdot seems to support Smith's Conjecture.
And that goes DOUBLE if the joke consisted of actually publishing a rootkit-like thing that installs using the apt get mechanism - thus giving the scriptkiddies more insight into it.
I HATE April Fool's Day.
It's a holiday dedicated to increasing the entropy of people's minds - just what I spend my whole life fighting.
And of course the media gets bit or plays along. For instance: we have Slashdot posting April Fool's jokes as straight news. So if anything REAL and surprising comes along it gets buried in the noise. (For the mainstream media that's no big change. But for outlets with some credibility left it's a damned shame.)
I swear: If the Former Soviet Union had understood the holiday they could have launched a first strike on April 1 and won.
The reason Australians say "rowter" is that it's not really possible to pronounce it "rooter" in polite company. ... So we call it as the Armericans do.
Actually, that pronounciation is regional, and one of the canonical examples of the techniques of mapping of pronounciations for analysis of prevalance, prevalance change, likely origin, etc. (At least it was a canonical example at the University of Michigan in the late '60s, because the rOOt/rAWte isogloss ran through Ann Arbor at the time.)
I grew up on that isogoloss, and tend to use rOOt for the noun (the path) and rAWte for the verb (to chose the path), and thus the box that performs the operation.
One of the texts on IP by some of the pioneers claims that the two pronounciations are interchangable when it comes to networking gear.
I suspect the rAWte pronounciation appears to be the "American" one because it's prevalent in the part of California where the major IP equipment manufacturers are headquartered. So when you hear an American talking about routers on TV you're probably hearing someone who is working on them in California.
Imagine the uses, spraying it on electric cars.
The amount of energy required for a car (even a hypothetical "supercar") is orders of magnitude beyond the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits its surface.
Pave your yard with cells and you're starting to approach it.
Or move to a billiard-ball flat planet with no atmosphere.
Sounds interesting. Got any documentation or source?
I recently found the listings (after losing them for a couple years). They're a bit large to OCR.
I've got two copies of the source on damaged Starplex(tm) diskettes - 8" floppies, NOT in CPM format, with bent envelopes.
If you know anyone in the silicon valley area that can read Starplex diskettes or OCR 8 1/2 x (whatever printer paper was) fanfold listings, let me know. (Or if you're feeling like typing in 50ish pages of stuff... B-) )
My favorite AlGoreithm [has] Gotta be inventing the Internet! How could you top that?
Actually what Al Gore invented was Spam.
Really.
(The legislation he supported to open the Internet to commercial exploitation is part of why we can't do much about the spammers without further legislation.)
His wire-all-the-schools-for-internet was also a trojan horse. It gives government an excuse to censor the net down to elementary-school level to "Save the Children".
My favorite is Djikstra's Communicating Semaphores, along with the related algorithms documented in Djikstra & Riddle's paper "The 'T.H.E.' multiprogramming System".
With Mark Weiser's addition of the "T" primative (more commonly called "non-blocking P" i.e. "Try to P but if that would block return an error flag instead.") you have a fantastically powerful tool in a tiny amount of code.
For instance: I was able to implement a kernel for an actor-based, real-time, prioritized, preemptive multitasking system, including initialization code, an idle task, and a minimal startup task table (i.e. everything but the application tasks and device drivers):
- In under 512 bytes of code and initialization data.
- On an 8080.
Communicating P, V, and T, (along with a flavor of "V" doubling as a return-from-interrupt) are a complete set of primitives for such work.
For those not familiar, an "actor" in this context is a class such that each instance of that class or any subclass of it is a separate thread of execution. Messages are exchanged between threads via queues on semaphores rather than C++ member function calls / Smalltalk message sends, but otherwise all the object-oriented concepts apply directly.
Communicating Semaphores handle locking (like normal semaphores), message queueing, and resource allocation (by holding a queue of messages, each of which represents, or actually is, a resource).
"T" lets interrupt routines run initially as parasites on the interrupted task, then "T" a free-message-buffer queue, fill in the message, and "V" it to the incoming-work semaphore of the actual service routine as the interrupt exits - provoking a context switch if the service routine is higher priority than whatever was running. The interrupt routine can punt and return to the interrupted task if no buffers are available.
that's the same line that quack used who tried to say plants responded to your tone of voice
Tone of voice, no. CO2 yes. Sweet-talk a plant for a few minutes and you give it a strong shot of a relatively rare gas that it requires for its metabolism.
Why not directly sue Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM? Somewhere along the line one of these companies offered system level encryption.
Or maybe this dinky unknown company saw a way to squeeze money out of little companies who they thought couldn't afford to fight back?
You answered your own question.
To get the most mileage out of a patent, law, etc. that can be applied many times:
- First sue/prosecute a little guy with negligable resources and (if applicable) a bad reputation or history. (For censorship laws, for instance, start with a kiddie pornographer before going after Playboy.)
- With your precedent established, work your way up to deeper pockets and more reputable defendants.
That way you get the most convictions and (if applicable) the most money before somebody manges to spike you - if anybody manages to spike you at all.
We should also (separately) push them to add something like this to the bill under consideration:
(c)(3) PUBLIC DOMAIN USE COPIES. -- No person may apply a security measure that uses a standard security technology to prevent the making of copies of a work or any portion thereof once the copyright on that work has expired.
(under (g)(3)IMPLEMENTATION. -- Any final rule published in such a subsequent rulemaking shall -- )
(g)(3)(C) require all secured copies of a work to carry a machine-readable notice of the copyright date and copyright holder
(g)(3)(D) enable and facilitate the production of unsecured copies of the work, by inexpensive technical means and without any action by the former copyright holder, after the expiration of the copyright
This article completely discounts the obvious innovations coming to market for pushing more bits down the same fibers over time.
You missed the point.
Innovation means you can put more down the fibers. So that means it's even LONGER until you have to lay more FIBER.
But when it comes to the BOXES to LIGHT the fiber, it means you have to BUY A NEW BOX - even to upgrade a fiber you ALREADY LIT with LAST YEAR'S BOX (which you won't do until the dark ones are mostly lit).
He's talking about the lack of capacity in the BOXES. By his numbers (which look right to me) about 5% of the cost is the fiber and the remaining 95% is the boxes and the rest of the infrastructure.