Yeah, getting stuff to be cross-platform worked so well for OS/2 (win32 subsystem) and Mac (getting MS to port all the MS software to Mac)
Those examples work against you. Cross-platformness makes platform irrelevant, so users are freed to choose on cost. Both OS/2 and Mac were MORE expensive than Windows (at the time); but today, Linux is the LESS expensive option.
That's not true, regardless of a few classes of hardware by problem vendors.
If by "classes of hardware" you mean "laptops", then OK. Although technically, my new laptop doesn't give a blue-screen (that would only happen in Windows). It gives me a black screen with a penguin in the corner and a few lines of multicolored text, before hanging there forever.
Why you would take the opportunity to say things that are not true about Knoppix is beyond me.
They are true. I've got access to a lot of computers, and many of them can't run Knoppix. Because I enjoy using Knoppix, I test each new release to see if there are improvements. And in fact, the 3.7 version of last week is better, as it can now recognize a 1024x768 DVI LCD which the prior release couldn't handle.
Prior comment: I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems.
Did you try an actual 64-bit OS, or just the traditional x86 release? There are supposed 64-bit Knoppix ISOs floating around, but I've never got one to boot at all. If you were using a regular disc, then it's hardly impressive that it worked, because the AMD64's 32-bit emulation is really solid.
No point in having tabbed terminal emulators when you use GNU Screen.
"screen" is great, but you didn't mention one big advantage that it provides: you can reconnect to already-running programs when you log back in.
I frequently start a long compile or download inside screen, then connect once I'm back at home and see if it finished correctly. VNC shares this benefit, but X11 does not: if your network goes down, all your applications are instantly gone (often taking the data with them)
I personally hate all these Konsoles, gnome-terminal and others that take forever to load
A further problem is that they actually take a perceptibly longer time to render each line of text. Test out by timing "find/etc |xargs cat" with a few term apps and you might find that RXVT is 20x quicker than gnome-terminal.
Farnsworth's experience is, if anything, a case study for the need to *strengthen* patents and either streamline patent appeals
That's completely backwards. Farnsworth is an emblematic abuser of patents. RCA's team invented television completely on their own, without learning from Farnsworth's half-formed ideas at all... and yet they were eventually forced to pay him millions. How does punishing the people who create practical, marketable products supposed to accelerate innovation?
What's really wrong with taking the Constitution literally and have the jury really be a party of peers, that means people with about the same background than the defendant?
Aspiring Constitutional literalists should remember to READ the Consitution occasionally.
Since there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "a jury of peers", you just sound stupid. (In fact, the word "peer" isn't found at all).
Check 3.2.3 or amendment 6 for text regarding juries. In fact, it says the jury must be "impartial", which actually counts against peers (since people be more willing to favor someone from the same economic/racial/gender categories).
You might point out that it's highly unlikely for the attacker to have planned ahead with a compromised version of your challenge protocol, but in that case your security is from obscurity.
and installing drivers to access it.
That part's no problem. If you build it, it can emulate USB mass-storage, so no custom driver is needed.
However, as I think I've shown, you can only trust an encrypted channel if the whole client was carried with you. That means your own laptop or PDA, running the SSH onboard. The instant you allow unencrypted data onto a computer that's not yours, you're vulnerable.
(And of course, then you just have to watch for hidden cameras zooming in on the PDA screen)
So, configure ssh to use S/Key, generate some one time pass phrases, and carry this live CD with you. Login remotely to your system, be careful not to do anything which is security sensitive, and you are set.
No you're not. If the client machine is compromised, one-time logins cannot protect you. The local SSH client could do evil things in a hidden side-channel to your actual work.
I've seen proof-of-concept modifed SSH clients which secretly download files from the remote homedir whenever anyone connects to anyplace (and that's in addition to logging all the activities of the session, of course).
With work, the operating system could be modified to recognize known popular SSH clients (such as putty.exe on your USB drive, or this X LiveCD thing), and secretly replace it with a compromised version when you attempt to run from your supposedly-trusted removable media.
to do anything which is security sensitive,
Um... if the activity was genuinely insensitive to security, you could run naked telnet. It's true that attacks like I described are probably rare enough that many people would be willing to run the risk, but they should still be aware of the threats and make that choice on their own. Elaborate multi-part attacks will only become more common as time goes by.
Are you kidding? I used to run xterm and Emacs over 2400 baud and it was tolerable,
Your example is inconclusive. Network speed has two independent components: bandwidth and latency. Just because your modem had poor bandwidth doesn't mean the latency was also bad.
And indeed, many aspects of the X11 protocol involve almost gratuitous round-trip queries that can make high latency a killer. Often it's aspects of the GUI toolkits that create this problem- a pretty effect that seems cool & fast on a localbox can be sluggish on the network.
Specific real-life example: in Evolution, you move an email from one folder to another, and the application draws a little translucent icon flying from origin to destination as a feedback indicator. It covers about 200 pixels distance, and for each step, the applcation downloads the remote image of the workspace under that position, alpha-blends a pixmap ontop of it, and sends the pixmap back to the viewer.
On a long-haul link, this can take MINUTES, during which you can't interact with any X11 programs. If you were running the program under VNC, however, the whole animation would be over before a screen update is even transmitted. While the user has missed-out on some eye-candy, this is far better than waiting through all the bidirectional traffic.
On the other hand, TightVNC is not usable for serious work even over a cable modem.
For truely serious work, it's not usable even on a loopback interface to localhost.
Even if everything else was the same, VNC has to refresh the whole screen,
False. VNC is an extensible protocol, so it can support arbitrarily intelligent update mechanisms. But even the original generation of VNC clients were smart enough only to update the screen regions that were actually changing.
(If your VNC experience has primarily been with the Windows server, you might not have noticed this, but that's because it was difficult for them to interface with the server without full screen-scraping and mouse-yanking, as Windows wasn't designed to allow concurrent users)
I was going to ask what the point was, given the number of Live CDs such as Knoppix, etc.
Although it's improved with the recent 3.7 release, there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device. That's especially common if you have a software modem, a newer WiFi card (like 802.11g), or if you need to use a VPN (even if a Linux client does exist, installing it after booting a livecd would be a pain).
The screen device is also unlikely to be utilized fully. Although Cygwin's X11 server is occasionally very slow, the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver, which can't reach the high resolutions expected from a modern desktop.
Finally, rebooting is awkward and inelegant. Don't go around killing your friends' uptimes just to run a few progs on your home machine.
difference between forwarding X and using VNC isn't that much in my experience.
The difference can be huge. VNC tends to give similar performance over many network speeds, while X11 is more extreme: either much better, or much worse. This is easiest to demonstrate when your network is super-fast. X11 programs on localhost loopback are hard to distinguish from native applications, while VNC imposes a level of sluggishness regardless of the connection speed.
The reverse happens too: when I run Qt apps over a medium speed X11 link, they run fine until I open a pulldown menu- then I get a 45 second wait while it renders the elaborate drop-shadow effect.
The Russian space suits being used while doing work on some of the station's extremities vented their exhaust gasses in one direction.
Examples of manned-space flight teaching us more about conducting manned-space flight don't really count.
for short term, we can use a drop tower or aircraft
For long term, we can just pack the experiment in an unmanned rocket and send it into orbit for a few weeks.
In the past 6 years, only a small fraction of experiments conducted by space crews have actually needed non-trivial human interaction; and those occasional exceptions should be viewed as opportunities to invest R&D in laboratory automation. Better robotics will pay dividends in orbit, on Mars, and all over the Earth too.
benefit of a manned mission to Mars: radiation shielding.
That's not a "benefit", that's an obstacle. It's a strong reason why would should do more robotic exploration before trying to send any humans.
Currently the only way to protect people from the solar radiation on that long trip is to put them behind massive metal sheets, tanks of water,
If I were being sent to Mars, I would want to have a tremendous amount of water and massive metal structures along with me. Ya know, something to keep me breathing and hydrated and warm once I get there? So if the stuff that we'll need on arrival is also good protection during the trip, what's the problem?
land surface area nearly the same as that of Earth
That's another obstacle. The reason the land area is almost as large is that the water area is absolutely nothing, which means it will be hard to survive there.
The benefits of those missions were not just political and social.
That would imply such a large change it could no longer be called the same style. A separate reentry vehicle means that the main craft is either discarded, or allowed to make a fairly uncontrolled return for salvage. Doing that means that all kinds of control surfaces are useless and can be removed, and then it looks very different.
If we were willing to use expendable launch vehicle, you wouldn't need anything anything as elaborate as the STS (Shuttle) or SS1. Major design features like wings would be totally useless. And by that point, you're better off to go with a simpler, safer rocket design, something that's worked well since 1957.
(That would be the best approach, but both NASA and the Ansari X-Prize sponsors stipulated reusable vehicles, which is actually more expensive)
Totally wrong. Simple lists ARE COPYRIGHTABLE, even if the individual elements of a list are something uncopyrightable, like phone numbers. (This is a fairly new modification to the law, though, and not yet universal outside the USA)
A dictionary definition, however, is copyrightable even on its own, without being part of a list.
learn to differentiate between simple lists (not copyrightable) and hyperlinked documents (copyrightable)
Done. Now would you please learn the difference between dictionaries and simple lists?
True, but irrelevent. The meanings of the words are public domain, but the written definitions as expressed in a fixed form by the dictionary are entirely copyrightable. One is free to create new definitions expressing the same meaning, but to copy&paste another's definition is illegal.
If your argument held true, then NO non-fiction books could be copyrightable. (Of course, that's already been explained to you, and you didn't care then, so I shouldn't bother to repeat it now... Even the authoritative rules you paste into your own posts show that you're wrong...)
which is a reference of acronyms and their meanings, as well as their history.
That's NOT ANY DIFFERENT. That history is also factual and uncopyrightable. The idea itself is free, but the specific expression of the idea is owned, regardless if it's the definition of "cat" or a 1200-page veterinary textbook.
the actual words and their definitions are not subject to that copyright
Maybe you don't understand that "meaning" and "definition" are different things.
You've already admitted that newspaper reports are copyrightable. But they are (ideally) purely factual, just as a dictionary definition is. Both involve a little creativity in wording the expression but the difference between them is of degree, not kind. You are maintaining multiple contradictory beliefs... doesn't it hurt?
Just a quick point, the national deficit is like 7.5trillion, total cash on the books at all banks combined in usa banks (ie deposits) is 5.1 trillion.
No, you are using the words incorrectly. "National debt" = total debt, which has been piling up for 50 years: $7 trillion. "National deficit" = new debt for just one year: $57 billion.
Given all the bias in their study, I can't assume 36% is even close to the real number.
Correct, 36% is far lower than the real number. This is a GOOD thing, so why are you complaining?
In any moderately complex field, you can't get everyone to agree that the same assumptions are true, and yet you can't even attempt to make predictions without selecting some assumptions to work from. So you take your pick, tell people what you chose, and if they disagree with your result, they can adjust it accordingly.
Consider the problem of the world's dwindling oil supply. People don't agree on how much oil exists underground, or how fast consumers will burn it. But I can make a generous assumption about quantity (twice what the USGS says) and stingy about usage (no increase over current rates), and compute that we run out in 100 years. Since any other likely assumptions will give a worst number, this "bad best case" prediction is a fine starting point to discuss long-term plans.
Log into your router, and assign the port numbers used by gaming applications to have higher packet priority, or set ports used by bulk-download applications or email (where responsiveness doesn't matter) to low priority.
Of course, if your router doesn't have this feature, you'll need to upgrade.
Packet prioritization does not work in the real world beyond the LAN because of the potential for abuse.
Wrong, in 3 ways. You can already modify your TCP and HTTP stacks to abuse the system for an unfair benefit, and yet most people don't.
If ISPs were known to obey packet priority settings, everyone (...) would set all their packets to maximum priority
If airlines were known to offer more comfortable "first class seating", everyone would use it, and enjoy more space at everyone else's expense.
Naturally, packet prioritization only works if the user somehow pays more for the better packets. (There are numerous ways to structure that pricing, some of them simplistic) This requirement is so obvious that advocates of priority levels usually don't bother to mention it.
I believe TCP/IP has always supported packet prioritization
Wrong. (Do not confuse the "Urgent" flag with something that network routers will treat specially- it is only for use of recieving applications)
PS. For more proof (not that you appear swayable by proof), visit the licensing information for one of the several free dictionaries authored by online amateurs, such as Wiktionary or the much-older EDICT.
Both descriptions, written by people who've had a serious need to research the subject accurately, claim that individual dictionary entries are copyrightable. Of course, that should've been obvious anyhow, as it is a direct consequence from the simplest statement of copyright law. Written matter IS COPYRIGHTABLE, even if non-fiction. How you could've imagined otherwise is almost baffling.
False. I've seen torrents give 570 in a few seconds after start. It all depends on the nature of the seeders.
Where I live, downloading music has been ruled by the courts to be legal.
You're switching media... why did you talk about video earlier ("certainly nothing to watch") and then change to music? In Canada, you have some specific permission to copy music, but that's NOT what you were talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, getting stuff to be cross-platform worked so well for OS/2 (win32 subsystem) and Mac (getting MS to port all the MS software to Mac)
Those examples work against you. Cross-platformness makes platform irrelevant, so users are freed to choose on cost. Both OS/2 and Mac were MORE expensive than Windows (at the time); but today, Linux is the LESS expensive option.
Reboot unavailable? What you don't have access to the reset switch?
More likely, she doesn't have the BIOS password that would allow the CD-ROM to be enabled as a bootable device. That's common on public machines.
That's not true, regardless of a few classes of hardware by problem vendors.
If by "classes of hardware" you mean "laptops", then OK. Although technically, my new laptop doesn't give a blue-screen (that would only happen in Windows). It gives me a black screen with a penguin in the corner and a few lines of multicolored text, before hanging there forever.
Why you would take the opportunity to say things that are not true about Knoppix is beyond me.
They are true. I've got access to a lot of computers, and many of them can't run Knoppix. Because I enjoy using Knoppix, I test each new release to see if there are improvements. And in fact, the 3.7 version of last week is better, as it can now recognize a 1024x768 DVI LCD which the prior release couldn't handle.
Prior comment: I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems.
Did you try an actual 64-bit OS, or just the traditional x86 release? There are supposed 64-bit Knoppix ISOs floating around, but I've never got one to boot at all. If you were using a regular disc, then it's hardly impressive that it worked, because the AMD64's 32-bit emulation is really solid.
No point in having tabbed terminal emulators when you use GNU Screen.
/etc |xargs cat" with a few term apps and you might find that RXVT is 20x quicker than gnome-terminal.
"screen" is great, but you didn't mention one big advantage that it provides: you can reconnect to already-running programs when you log back in.
I frequently start a long compile or download inside screen, then connect once I'm back at home and see if it finished correctly. VNC shares this benefit, but X11 does not: if your network goes down, all your applications are instantly gone (often taking the data with them)
I personally hate all these Konsoles, gnome-terminal and others that take forever to load
A further problem is that they actually take a perceptibly longer time to render each line of text. Test out by timing "find
Farnsworth's experience is, if anything, a case study for the need to
*strengthen* patents and either streamline patent appeals
That's completely backwards. Farnsworth is an emblematic abuser of patents. RCA's team invented television completely on their own, without learning from Farnsworth's half-formed ideas at all... and yet they were eventually forced to pay him millions. How does punishing the people who create practical, marketable products supposed to accelerate innovation?
What's really wrong with taking the Constitution literally and have the jury really be a party of peers, that means people with about the same background than the defendant?
Aspiring Constitutional literalists should remember to READ the Consitution occasionally.
Since there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "a jury of peers", you just sound stupid. (In fact, the word "peer" isn't found at all).
Check 3.2.3 or amendment 6 for text regarding juries. In fact, it says the jury must be "impartial", which actually counts against peers (since people be more willing to favor someone from the same economic/racial/gender categories).
The server sends a challenge every second, and the client queries the dongle for the correct response. No dongle, no access.
That method is still vulnerable to the attack I outlined above.
You might point out that it's highly unlikely for the attacker to have planned ahead with a compromised version of your challenge protocol, but in that case your security is from obscurity.
and installing drivers to access it.
That part's no problem. If you build it, it can emulate USB mass-storage, so no custom driver is needed.
However, as I think I've shown, you can only trust an encrypted channel if the whole client was carried with you. That means your own laptop or PDA, running the SSH onboard. The instant you allow unencrypted data onto a computer that's not yours, you're vulnerable.
(And of course, then you just have to watch for hidden cameras zooming in on the PDA screen)
So, configure ssh to use S/Key, generate some one time pass phrases, and carry this live CD with you. Login remotely to your system, be careful not to do anything which is security sensitive, and you are set.
No you're not. If the client machine is compromised, one-time logins cannot protect you. The local SSH client could do evil things in a hidden side-channel to your actual work.
I've seen proof-of-concept modifed SSH clients which secretly download files from the remote homedir whenever anyone connects to anyplace (and that's in addition to logging all the activities of the session, of course).
With work, the operating system could be modified to recognize known popular SSH clients (such as putty.exe on your USB drive, or this X LiveCD thing), and secretly replace it with a compromised version when you attempt to run from your supposedly-trusted removable media.
to do anything which is security sensitive,
Um... if the activity was genuinely insensitive to security, you could run naked telnet. It's true that attacks like I described are probably rare enough that many people would be willing to run the risk, but they should still be aware of the threats and make that choice on their own. Elaborate multi-part attacks will only become more common as time goes by.
Are you kidding? I used to run xterm and Emacs over 2400 baud and it was tolerable,
Your example is inconclusive. Network speed has two independent components: bandwidth and latency. Just because your modem had poor bandwidth doesn't mean the latency was also bad.
And indeed, many aspects of the X11 protocol involve almost gratuitous round-trip queries that can make high latency a killer. Often it's aspects of the GUI toolkits that create this problem- a pretty effect that seems cool & fast on a localbox can be sluggish on the network.
Specific real-life example: in Evolution, you move an email from one folder to another, and the application draws a little translucent icon flying from origin to destination as a feedback indicator. It covers about 200 pixels distance, and for each step, the applcation downloads the remote image of the workspace under that position, alpha-blends a pixmap ontop of it, and sends the pixmap back to the viewer.
On a long-haul link, this can take MINUTES, during which you can't interact with any X11 programs. If you were running the program under VNC, however, the whole animation would be over before a screen update is even transmitted. While the user has missed-out on some eye-candy, this is far better than waiting through all the bidirectional traffic.
On the other hand, TightVNC is not usable for serious work even over a cable modem.
For truely serious work, it's not usable even on a loopback interface to localhost.
Even if everything else was the same, VNC has to refresh the whole screen,
False. VNC is an extensible protocol, so it can support arbitrarily intelligent update mechanisms. But even the original generation of VNC clients were smart enough only to update the screen regions that were actually changing.
(If your VNC experience has primarily been with the Windows server, you might not have noticed this, but that's because it was difficult for them to interface with the server without full screen-scraping and mouse-yanking, as Windows wasn't designed to allow concurrent users)
I was going to ask what the point was, given the number of Live CDs such as Knoppix, etc.
Although it's improved with the recent 3.7 release, there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device. That's especially common if you have a software modem, a newer WiFi card (like 802.11g), or if you need to use a VPN (even if a Linux client does exist, installing it after booting a livecd would be a pain).
The screen device is also unlikely to be utilized fully. Although Cygwin's X11 server is occasionally very slow, the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver, which can't reach the high resolutions expected from a modern desktop.
Finally, rebooting is awkward and inelegant. Don't go around killing your friends' uptimes just to run a few progs on your home machine.
difference between forwarding X and using VNC isn't that much in my experience.
The difference can be huge. VNC tends to give similar performance over many network speeds, while X11 is more extreme: either much better, or much worse. This is easiest to demonstrate when your network is super-fast. X11 programs on localhost loopback are hard to distinguish from native applications, while VNC imposes a level of sluggishness regardless of the connection speed.
The reverse happens too: when I run Qt apps over a medium speed X11 link, they run fine until I open a pulldown menu- then I get a 45 second wait while it renders the elaborate drop-shadow effect.
The public would quickly grow tired of paying for something that no longer does anything for them
NASA hasn't done things for the public in a long time, but their funding hasn't gone down much.
Public support is crucial for NASA.
He's talking about what the public SHOULD want NASA to do. Given that he's correct, the right approach is to convince the public of his correctness.
The Russian space suits being used while doing work on some of the station's extremities vented their exhaust gasses in one direction.
Examples of manned-space flight teaching us more about conducting manned-space flight don't really count.
for short term, we can use a drop tower or aircraft
For long term, we can just pack the experiment in an unmanned rocket and send it into orbit for a few weeks.
In the past 6 years, only a small fraction of experiments conducted by space crews have actually needed non-trivial human interaction; and those occasional exceptions should be viewed as opportunities to invest R&D in laboratory automation. Better robotics will pay dividends in orbit, on Mars, and all over the Earth too.
benefit of a manned mission to Mars: radiation shielding.
That's not a "benefit", that's an obstacle. It's a strong reason why would should do more robotic exploration before trying to send any humans.
Currently the only way to protect people from the solar radiation on that long trip is to put them behind massive metal sheets, tanks of water,
If I were being sent to Mars, I would want to have a tremendous amount of water and massive metal structures along with me. Ya know, something to keep me breathing and hydrated and warm once I get there? So if the stuff that we'll need on arrival is also good protection during the trip, what's the problem?
land surface area nearly the same as that of Earth
That's another obstacle. The reason the land area is almost as large is that the water area is absolutely nothing, which means it will be hard to survive there.
The benefits of those missions were not just political and social.
Nope. Those were very nearly the only benefits.
or just having the reentry vehicle as "cargo"
That would imply such a large change it could no longer be called the same style. A separate reentry vehicle means that the main craft is either discarded, or allowed to make a fairly uncontrolled return for salvage. Doing that means that all kinds of control surfaces are useless and can be removed, and then it looks very different.
If we were willing to use expendable launch vehicle, you wouldn't need anything anything as elaborate as the STS (Shuttle) or SS1. Major design features like wings would be totally useless. And by that point, you're better off to go with a simpler, safer rocket design, something that's worked well since 1957.
(That would be the best approach, but both NASA and the Ansari X-Prize sponsors stipulated reusable vehicles, which is actually more expensive)
The Ansari X-Prize showed that, for 1% of the cost of one shuttle flight
Actually, the investment used to win that prize added up to more than 15% of the cost of a shuttle flight.
simple lists (not copyrightable)
Totally wrong. Simple lists ARE COPYRIGHTABLE, even if the individual elements of a list are something uncopyrightable, like phone numbers. (This is a fairly new modification to the law, though, and not yet universal outside the USA)
A dictionary definition, however, is copyrightable even on its own, without being part of a list.
learn to differentiate between simple lists (not copyrightable) and hyperlinked documents (copyrightable)
Done. Now would you please learn the difference between dictionaries and simple lists?
Nobody can "own" what a word means.
True, but irrelevent. The meanings of the words are public domain, but the written definitions as expressed in a fixed form by the dictionary are entirely copyrightable. One is free to create new definitions expressing the same meaning, but to copy&paste another's definition is illegal.
If your argument held true, then NO non-fiction books could be copyrightable. (Of course, that's already been explained to you, and you didn't care then, so I shouldn't bother to repeat it now... Even the authoritative rules you paste into your own posts show that you're wrong...)
which is a reference of acronyms and their meanings, as well as their history.
That's NOT ANY DIFFERENT. That history is also factual and uncopyrightable. The idea itself is free, but the specific expression of the idea is owned, regardless if it's the definition of "cat" or a 1200-page veterinary textbook.
the actual words and their definitions are not subject to that copyright
Maybe you don't understand that "meaning" and "definition" are different things.
You've already admitted that newspaper reports are copyrightable. But they are (ideally) purely factual, just as a dictionary definition is. Both involve a little creativity in wording the expression but the difference between them is of degree, not kind. You are maintaining multiple contradictory beliefs... doesn't it hurt?
Just a quick point, the national deficit is like 7.5trillion, total cash on the books at all banks combined in usa banks (ie deposits) is 5.1 trillion.
No, you are using the words incorrectly.
"National debt" = total debt, which has been piling up for 50 years: $7 trillion.
"National deficit" = new debt for just one year: $57 billion.
Given all the bias in their study, I can't assume 36% is even close to the real number.
Correct, 36% is far lower than the real number. This is a GOOD thing, so why are you complaining?
In any moderately complex field, you can't get everyone to agree that the same assumptions are true, and yet you can't even attempt to make predictions without selecting some assumptions to work from. So you take your pick, tell people what you chose, and if they disagree with your result, they can adjust it accordingly.
Consider the problem of the world's dwindling oil supply. People don't agree on how much oil exists underground, or how fast consumers will burn it. But I can make a generous assumption about quantity (twice what the USGS says) and stingy about usage (no increase over current rates), and compute that we run out in 100 years. Since any other likely assumptions will give a worst number, this "bad best case" prediction is a fine starting point to discuss long-term plans.
Obviously Halo 2 does.
Well, there is the fact that Halo2 only allows 25% as many players as Quake....
prioritize packets from/to a certain application?
Log into your router, and assign the port numbers used by gaming applications to have higher packet priority, or set ports used by bulk-download applications or email (where responsiveness doesn't matter) to low priority.
Of course, if your router doesn't have this feature, you'll need to upgrade.
Packet prioritization does not work in the real world beyond the LAN because of the potential for abuse.
Wrong, in 3 ways. You can already modify your TCP and HTTP stacks to abuse the system for an unfair benefit, and yet most people don't.
If ISPs were known to obey packet priority settings, everyone (...) would set all their packets to maximum priority
If airlines were known to offer more comfortable "first class seating", everyone would use it, and enjoy more space at everyone else's expense.
Naturally, packet prioritization only works if the user somehow pays more for the better packets. (There are numerous ways to structure that pricing, some of them simplistic) This requirement is so obvious that advocates of priority levels usually don't bother to mention it.
I believe TCP/IP has always supported packet prioritization
Wrong. (Do not confuse the "Urgent" flag with something that network routers will treat specially- it is only for use of recieving applications)
Let's step back for a moment and think of Mozilla as a premium brand
Ok, I'm trying... but I just can't get past the fact that "premium" means "expensive", and Mozilla is completely free.
What if Chevrolet treated their premium Corvette brand the same way? Speeding tickets would balance the national budget deficit!
PS. For more proof (not that you appear swayable by proof), visit the licensing information for one of the several free dictionaries authored by online amateurs, such as Wiktionary or the much-older EDICT.
Both descriptions, written by people who've had a serious need to research the subject accurately, claim that individual dictionary entries are copyrightable. Of course, that should've been obvious anyhow, as it is a direct consequence from the simplest statement of copyright law. Written matter IS COPYRIGHTABLE, even if non-fiction. How you could've imagined otherwise is almost baffling.
However, the torrent will NEVER supply that.
False. I've seen torrents give 570 in a few seconds after start. It all depends on the nature of the seeders.
Where I live, downloading music has been ruled by the courts to be legal.
You're switching media... why did you talk about video earlier ("certainly nothing to watch") and then change to music? In Canada, you have some specific permission to copy music, but that's NOT what you were talking about.