Verayo's use of metaphor -- that of the chip having "DNA" -- makes their claim sound ridiculous. What's not "cloneable" about DNA? It's just a bit more difficult.
I expect this story to end up in Bruce Schneier's "doghouse" file.
I saw this question and Effective Java was the first thing that sprang to mind.
There are a lot of good books out there, and you should read as many of them as you can, but Effective Java will go a long way toward giving you an understanding of Java ways of thinking; useful, highly reusable Java idioms; and an appreciation for good design and coding in Java.
If you can stick to doing push-ups and sit-ups regularly, more power to you, but I wouldn't bother too much with any of the advice regarding work-out routines, weights or even jogging. That stuff is boring, and the average person doesn't stick with working out for very long.
Wanna know the secret to my toned nerd body? Sports. That's right, just like the jocks play. As much as Slashdotters love to play up the pasty-faced, 2-liter-of-Mountain-Dew-and-bag-of-Doritos geek stereotype, it's actually a bunch of horse%$@#. Pick up a sport or two, and you won't have to think about how much cardio you're getting or whether you're sticking to your workout. You'll stay thin and healthy because you have passions that keep you active.
Pick some sports that your friends do and ask if they'll teach you. Or just go for something. Could be an individual thing, like surfing or biking, or a team sport like soccer or softball (you'd be amazed by how active even softball can be). Once you're hooked on it, then you'll lose the pounds and feel better generally.
A) It's a good idea to go into something you're passionate about, or even interested in.
B) I graduated recently (CSE, UC Davis) and found a job easily. It's a great market right now, it will still be decent when Bubble 2.0 bursts, and it will be great down the road, regardless of what country you hail from.
Instead of trying to get kids psyched up by promising to take them to a real-live movie studio in order to teach them about piracy, the Boy Scouts could have a Merit Badge where you actually made a short movie on DV and released for free on a page with Google Ad-words (or similar) on it.
Issue a press release, draw some site traffic and teach kids that the copyright business model isn't the only one that can make money. Each scout could actually keep a percetage of the advertising revenue.
My kid brother is a highschool junior and a huge geek who loves to program (current infatuation: Objective-C and Mac OS GUI apps).
One problem he has run into in terms of taking programming classes at his school is that most of the classes are considered Regional Occupational Program (ROP) courses. The problem is that time spent in ROP classes doesn't count toward state funding here in California when it comes time to tally the hours that kids spend in the classroom. At my brother's school, this has equated to some pretty severe restrictions on the number of ROP courses that students are allowed to take.
An interesting aspect of the logic here is the conceptual difference between classes that teach you how to do stuff (theory) vs. classes that actually teach you to do it (vocational). At the highschool level, most programming-oriented courses seem to fall into the latter category, which happens to be the category that is held to be more important by educators. Hence, actually programming computers is de-emphasized at the highschool level, much to the disappointment of my brother.
Well, the two things that immediately jump out at me in the review are the section on integration with Microsoft Speech Server and the emphasis on "business AI."
While it's certainly true that AI algorithms and structures can be implemented in (most) any language, I would say, yes, this book is about.NET-specific implementation, and, no it's not a pointless exercise for the reader.
Allow me to waste a bit of bandwidth here to plug Nomad Cafe in Oakland, CA.
Not only do they offer free WiFi to the masses, but the owner installed a LAN throughout the cafe, so your never more than a few feet away from an ehternet jack.
They are also active in the community and sling some dope, fair-trade, organic joe.
I'm trying hard not to flame anyone in particular, so bear with me...
I am embarrassed by the majority of the responses to this post. I understand that there will be a few "Chinese prison" jokes as well as a few "follow the rules or go somewhere else" posts, but I think it is sad that nearly every single response to this guy's questions falls along these lines.
It is perfectly legitimate to enquire about ways to circumvent an oppresive government. It's part of the set of freedoms that we should all be demanding, especially if they are not afforded by said government. It's also perfectly legitimate to give such information, FIPO, of course.
It's perfectly depressing to read a bunch of sardonic "best of luck to ya in a Chinese jail" comments. I can only suspect that the vast majority of these are uninformed. How many of these posters can actually speak to the conditions of Chinese prisons or the fairness of the Chinese legal process? I'd wager a lot of them couldn't even have an informed discussion about such conditions in their own countries. What's certainly true is that no one who made such a comment backed it up with any facts whatsoever.
I question the likelyhood that trying to circumvent the so-called Great Firewall is going to get this guy into any real trouble. I could be wrong, but a gorvernment with 1 billion plus citizens would seem to have bigger fish to fry (or at least a million or so eqaully large fish, so what are the odds). He's not asking Slashdot how to use technology to shoplift; he's asking Slashdot how to use technology to read Slashdot.
So, how about we cut the juvenile crap and answer this guy's question?
I am a student at UC Davis in Davis, CA, as well as a web-developer for the accounting department there.
UCD has advocated Mozilla for years, including Mozilla browser and more recently Firefox as part of the suite of applications they recomend to incoming freshmen.
Consequently, use of the various flavors of Mozilla as a percentage of overall browser use is significantly higher for the web applications I develop, which are utilized primarily by staff and students of the university. In general, analysis of our servers' logs show Internet Explorer declining in popularity and Firefox growing in popularily steadily, ever since Mozilla's inception.
We are a very *nix/open source-centric school overall. The CS department (of which I am a part) acts as though Redmond, WA is best known for the timber production, and although I use a W2K machine at work, we are a jEdit/ColdFusion/Oracle/CSS-standards-compliant shop that does more to ensure total browser compatibility than a good many major internet presences I can think of.
That's all. Just wanted to toot my school's horn a bit.
I just attended a Microsoft-sponsored developers' seminar on the technical details and impact of Windows XP SP2. While most of the day was pretty boring, there was one item of interest regarding Microsoft's new security upgrade, Windows Firewall.*
When the Firewall is enabled (and it is by default), any application that tries to bind to a port that is not specified as listenable in the firewall configuration will cause a friendly MS dialog to come up, asking the user if they want to allow incoming traffic on the port to be handled by [name of the application]. If the user clicks yes, a rule will be created, allowing the application to use the port. If the user clicks no, the application will be blacklisted, and will not receive inbound trafic from any network interfaces.
Blacklisted applications are still allowed to bind to ports, so they will not notice anything is wrong; they will just think there is no traffic.
Guess what happens if the application in question is Java? That's right, the Java Virtual Machine gets banned from listening to the network. Any Java app that subsequently tries to access a port will languish behind the firewall without any prompt to the user alerting him or her that their Java-based server or chat program is being blocked.
For the savvy, this issue is remedied fairly easily by configuring open ports for any apps that need them. But savvy users have never been Microsoft's target customer group, and one can easily imagine many SP2 initiates being taught the Microsoft way that Java technology just doesn't work.
Note that.NET applications are not affected by the behavior of Windows Firewall, since they are invoked from distinct executables.
Food for thought.
Nate (dateline Dallas-Ft.Worth on lay-over:( )
* Replaces Internet Connection Firewall, offering simple but relatively (for MS) configurable protection against unsolicited network traffic.
Quite insightful, jea6. The practical application for this technology that the article was predicated upon are silly, and you proved it elegantly: all urban areas have street signs and text recognition is loads easier that the sort of computer vision proof-of-concept being described.
That last bit is what the article is really reporting on--research into intelligent computer vision. The fact that this research is being applied to giving walking directions to stupid humans has far more to do with securing funding than anything else. In other words, if you see people snapping digital photos of office buildings in the near future, you can continue to report them to the Office of Homeland Security.
For an excellent account of Pons & Fleischman and the ongoing [scare-quote]science[/scare-quote] of cold fusion, check out Voodoo Science by Robert L. Park. It's a great insight into how researchers lose their dispassion in the pursuit of knowledge.
V.S. should be required reading in highschool. While I don't agree with him 100% of the time, Park sheds light on many famous and not-so-famous examples of pseudoscience, snake oil, and hysterical ignorance.
V.S. comes to my mind often when reading/. Specifically, consider poor Gilbert Levin, featured in the article linked to by this slashdot story, who, after 28 years, cannot admit to the fact that the 1976 Viking probe found no conclusive evidence of life on Mars.
Less humorous and more thought provoking is the contrast between/.'s take on the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert ruling and Park's writing on the events that led up to it.
Excepting that Levin is hardly a scientist, at least considering his attitudes towards life on Mars. This poor guy is clearly on a religious crusade to prove that his 1976 experiment on the Viking probe found microscopic life on Mars.
That he is still pursuing this is, at best, sad. At worst, it's inaccurate pseudoscience foisted on the general public by someone who has been taken way too seriously. I think that in presenting Levin's views without any rebuttal whatsoever, space.com has done a real diservice to the real science that's being done.
I totally agree with you AshtangiMan, and I think it's also worth pointing out that the assertion of the telecoms that this will open up local governments to legal liability is very troubling. What these local communities are doing is building municipal infrastructure, in the same sense that sewers, water mains and electricity lines are infrastructure.
The telecoms are insinuating that this is somehow legally nebulous. How? Because the telecoms are going to use "grassroots" organizations to sue local governments for misappropriation, most likely. If it comes to that, which I certainly hope it doesn't.
[pet peeve]
Oh, I apologize in advance for this, but K Tanmay has been busted by the Grammar Police for the following:
The lens comprises of a cloud of interstellar gas, and works on the principle of scintillation; where the clumpiness inside a cloud of gas creates a density change thus bending and focusing the light.
Semicolons are used for separating independent clauses, not dependent ones. Use a comma instead.
"...a security system so tight that no other financial institution in the world has it."
As I'm sure Bruce Schneir would fall all over himself to point out, this association actually decreases the likelyhood that the system is actually secure.
...couldn't Orange file a cross-complaint under the tems of the DMCA alleging that Sendo's knowledge of Orange's circuit board design stems from an effort to reverse-engineer said phones?
The Freeshell.org Unix shell/email provider uses a distributed filesystem to provide transparency across their various machines. After a few minutes of searching, I was not able to determine what their method is, but it's worth asking them about it, as Freeshell has over 10,000 users and high traffic.
IMHO, the reason why everybody is pinging on the ISP/bandwidth issue is that there have been stories in the past regarding various ISP's dislike of customers' NAT routers and many people believe that this dislike is a driving force behind research of this type.
And as far as security concerns go, I must not have a very clear grasp of the dilemma. Why is it that a sysadmin, when managing his or her network, would not be able to configure all NAT devices to only forward packets from verified, trusted, statically routed hosts? There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions available, it seems to me.
I just perused my TOS agreement with my DSL provider and three things struck me:
1) Fortunately, my DSL provider (SBC) acknowledges and allows the use of routers to connect multiple home computers to a single DSL router.
2) They disallow users to "forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through the Service." That means that, at least with SBC, reconfiguring your NAT routing device to not decrement the TTL on packets could constitute a breech of contract. YMMV.
3) I could not find any clause prohibiting SBC from inspecting the contents of packets it handles. Theoretically then, in addition to considering the IP ids of received packets as mentioned in the sFlow article, your ISP could perform analysis of any unencrypted traffic from your ip. For instance, If you were playing Counterstrike and your housemate was surfing the web, traffic analysis of the packets originating from your ip could correctly identify the existence of multiple hosts.
Obviously, such analysis would be computationally intense, and could not be performed on an ISP's entire customer base simultaneously, but as a random auditing tool, or a followup to previous suspicion, this type of analysis could be an effective tool for ISP's that wanted to outlaw multiple connections.
That said, I agree with the countless comments to the effect that very few ISP's are going to actively pursue any of these measures; the costs seem to greatly outweigh the benefits. Imagine if my ISP did crack down on my four home computers behind my NAT router: I would still be capable of using the same amount of bandwidth with only one computer, I would be pissed off and looking for another provider, and most importantly, I couldn't give SBC any more money if I tried--it's not as though I can get multiple DSL accounts on the same phone number (and believe me, I certainly wouldn't let SBC charge more for "Platnum NAT Service").
Capital flight and trickle down economics
on
BSA IDC FUD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While MS and pals tout the benefits of reducing piracy internationally, they forget to mention a few, key points:
The vast majority of software pirated by countries that the BSA cite as having small IT sectors is not domestically produced software. Thus, reducing piracy in these countries increases the revenue of coporations based in other countries (e.g. the US, and EU).
Software retail outlets and other industry "middlemen" in the countries in question will benefit from reduced piracy, but this is small potatoes compared to what BSA-affiliates stand to gain.
Thus, digital piracy in countries that are poor, or have small IT sectors, can be seen as sort of an international "trickle down" economic system. Such piracy provides software and entertainment to people who could not otherwise afford it, at the expense of corporations who, emperically speaking, can. Reducing piracy then becomes welfare "reform" for poor countries, more likely to hurt said countries' IT sectors than help them.
While end users are implied by the above paragraph, I would even include resellers of pirated software into this equation. As seedy as that business is, and as ignoble as the resellers' motives are, there's an undeniable Robin Hood component at work. Remember, these criminals reintroduce their ill-gotten wealth largely into their local economies.
Don't dismiss this as a romantic view of digital piracy; it's not. I mean only to provide much-needed devil's advocacy to the BSA's spurious horse hockey.
Slashdot Mirror
Verayo's use of metaphor -- that of the chip having "DNA" -- makes their claim sound ridiculous. What's not "cloneable" about DNA? It's just a bit more difficult.
I expect this story to end up in Bruce Schneier's "doghouse" file.
I saw this question and Effective Java was the first thing that sprang to mind.
There are a lot of good books out there, and you should read as many of them as you can, but Effective Java will go a long way toward giving you an understanding of Java ways of thinking; useful, highly reusable Java idioms; and an appreciation for good design and coding in Java.
Good luck!
If you can stick to doing push-ups and sit-ups regularly, more power to you, but I wouldn't bother too much with any of the advice regarding work-out routines, weights or even jogging. That stuff is boring, and the average person doesn't stick with working out for very long.
Wanna know the secret to my toned nerd body? Sports. That's right, just like the jocks play. As much as Slashdotters love to play up the pasty-faced, 2-liter-of-Mountain-Dew-and-bag-of-Doritos geek stereotype, it's actually a bunch of horse%$@#. Pick up a sport or two, and you won't have to think about how much cardio you're getting or whether you're sticking to your workout. You'll stay thin and healthy because you have passions that keep you active.
Pick some sports that your friends do and ask if they'll teach you. Or just go for something. Could be an individual thing, like surfing or biking, or a team sport like soccer or softball (you'd be amazed by how active even softball can be). Once you're hooked on it, then you'll lose the pounds and feel better generally.
A) It's a good idea to go into something you're passionate about, or even interested in.
B) I graduated recently (CSE, UC Davis) and found a job easily. It's a great market right now, it will still be decent when Bubble 2.0 bursts, and it will be great down the road, regardless of what country you hail from.
Instead of trying to get kids psyched up by promising to take them to a real-live movie studio in order to teach them about piracy, the Boy Scouts could have a Merit Badge where you actually made a short movie on DV and released for free on a page with Google Ad-words (or similar) on it.
Issue a press release, draw some site traffic and teach kids that the copyright business model isn't the only one that can make money. Each scout could actually keep a percetage of the advertising revenue.
My kid brother is a highschool junior and a huge geek who loves to program (current infatuation: Objective-C and Mac OS GUI apps).
One problem he has run into in terms of taking programming classes at his school is that most of the classes are considered Regional Occupational Program (ROP) courses. The problem is that time spent in ROP classes doesn't count toward state funding here in California when it comes time to tally the hours that kids spend in the classroom. At my brother's school, this has equated to some pretty severe restrictions on the number of ROP courses that students are allowed to take.
An interesting aspect of the logic here is the conceptual difference between classes that teach you how to do stuff (theory) vs. classes that actually teach you to do it (vocational). At the highschool level, most programming-oriented courses seem to fall into the latter category, which happens to be the category that is held to be more important by educators. Hence, actually programming computers is de-emphasized at the highschool level, much to the disappointment of my brother.
Well, the two things that immediately jump out at me in the review are the section on integration with Microsoft Speech Server and the emphasis on "business AI."
.NET-specific implementation, and, no it's not a pointless exercise for the reader.
While it's certainly true that AI algorithms and structures can be implemented in (most) any language, I would say, yes, this book is about
Allow me to waste a bit of bandwidth here to plug Nomad Cafe in Oakland, CA.
Not only do they offer free WiFi to the masses, but the owner installed a LAN throughout the cafe, so your never more than a few feet away from an ehternet jack.
They are also active in the community and sling some dope, fair-trade, organic joe.
That's what I call a business model.
Here is a good primer on non-compete clauses and their basis in US (state) law.
I'm trying hard not to flame anyone in particular, so bear with me...
I am embarrassed by the majority of the responses to this post. I understand that there will be a few "Chinese prison" jokes as well as a few "follow the rules or go somewhere else" posts, but I think it is sad that nearly every single response to this guy's questions falls along these lines.
It is perfectly legitimate to enquire about ways to circumvent an oppresive government. It's part of the set of freedoms that we should all be demanding, especially if they are not afforded by said government. It's also perfectly legitimate to give such information, FIPO, of course.
It's perfectly depressing to read a bunch of sardonic "best of luck to ya in a Chinese jail" comments. I can only suspect that the vast majority of these are uninformed. How many of these posters can actually speak to the conditions of Chinese prisons or the fairness of the Chinese legal process? I'd wager a lot of them couldn't even have an informed discussion about such conditions in their own countries. What's certainly true is that no one who made such a comment backed it up with any facts whatsoever.
I question the likelyhood that trying to circumvent the so-called Great Firewall is going to get this guy into any real trouble. I could be wrong, but a gorvernment with 1 billion plus citizens would seem to have bigger fish to fry (or at least a million or so eqaully large fish, so what are the odds). He's not asking Slashdot how to use technology to shoplift; he's asking Slashdot how to use technology to read Slashdot.
So, how about we cut the juvenile crap and answer this guy's question?
I am a student at UC Davis in Davis, CA, as well as a web-developer for the accounting department there.
UCD has advocated Mozilla for years, including Mozilla browser and more recently Firefox as part of the suite of applications they recomend to incoming freshmen.
Consequently, use of the various flavors of Mozilla as a percentage of overall browser use is significantly higher for the web applications I develop, which are utilized primarily by staff and students of the university. In general, analysis of our servers' logs show Internet Explorer declining in popularity and Firefox growing in popularily steadily, ever since Mozilla's inception.
We are a very *nix/open source-centric school overall. The CS department (of which I am a part) acts as though Redmond, WA is best known for the timber production, and although I use a W2K machine at work, we are a jEdit/ColdFusion/Oracle/CSS-standards-compliant shop that does more to ensure total browser compatibility than a good many major internet presences I can think of.
That's all. Just wanted to toot my school's horn a bit.
Does this mean that in six years, Cowboy Neal'll be able to run a Longhorn machine with a mesquite-scented CPU?
I just attended a Microsoft-sponsored developers' seminar on the technical details and impact of Windows XP SP2. While most of the day was pretty boring, there was one item of interest regarding Microsoft's new security upgrade, Windows Firewall.*
.NET applications are not affected by the behavior of Windows Firewall, since they are invoked from distinct executables.
:( )
When the Firewall is enabled (and it is by default), any application that tries to bind to a port that is not specified as listenable in the firewall configuration will cause a friendly MS dialog to come up, asking the user if they want to allow incoming traffic on the port to be handled by [name of the application]. If the user clicks yes, a rule will be created, allowing the application to use the port. If the user clicks no, the application will be blacklisted, and will not receive inbound trafic from any network interfaces.
Blacklisted applications are still allowed to bind to ports, so they will not notice anything is wrong; they will just think there is no traffic.
Guess what happens if the application in question is Java? That's right, the Java Virtual Machine gets banned from listening to the network. Any Java app that subsequently tries to access a port will languish behind the firewall without any prompt to the user alerting him or her that their Java-based server or chat program is being blocked.
For the savvy, this issue is remedied fairly easily by configuring open ports for any apps that need them. But savvy users have never been Microsoft's target customer group, and one can easily imagine many SP2 initiates being taught the Microsoft way that Java technology just doesn't work.
Note that
Food for thought.
Nate (dateline Dallas-Ft.Worth on lay-over
* Replaces Internet Connection Firewall, offering simple but relatively (for MS) configurable protection against unsolicited network traffic.
Quite insightful, jea6. The practical application for this technology that the article was predicated upon are silly, and you proved it elegantly: all urban areas have street signs and text recognition is loads easier that the sort of computer vision proof-of-concept being described.
That last bit is what the article is really reporting on--research into intelligent computer vision. The fact that this research is being applied to giving walking directions to stupid humans has far more to do with securing funding than anything else. In other words, if you see people snapping digital photos of office buildings in the near future, you can continue to report them to the Office of Homeland Security.
For an excellent account of Pons & Fleischman and the ongoing [scare-quote]science[/scare-quote] of cold fusion, check out Voodoo Science by Robert L. Park. It's a great insight into how researchers lose their dispassion in the pursuit of knowledge.
/. Specifically, consider poor Gilbert Levin, featured in the article linked to by this slashdot story, who, after 28 years, cannot admit to the fact that the 1976 Viking probe found no conclusive evidence of life on Mars.
/.'s take on the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert ruling and Park's writing on the events that led up to it.
V.S. should be required reading in highschool. While I don't agree with him 100% of the time, Park sheds light on many famous and not-so-famous examples of pseudoscience, snake oil, and hysterical ignorance.
V.S. comes to my mind often when reading
Less humorous and more thought provoking is the contrast between
Excepting that Levin is hardly a scientist, at least considering his attitudes towards life on Mars. This poor guy is clearly on a religious crusade to prove that his 1976 experiment on the Viking probe found microscopic life on Mars.
...slippery slope leading to life?!? Seriously...
That he is still pursuing this is, at best, sad. At worst, it's inaccurate pseudoscience foisted on the general public by someone who has been taken way too seriously. I think that in presenting Levin's views without any rebuttal whatsoever, space.com has done a real diservice to the real science that's being done.
I totally agree with you AshtangiMan, and I think it's also worth pointing out that the assertion of the telecoms that this will open up local governments to legal liability is very troubling. What these local communities are doing is building municipal infrastructure, in the same sense that sewers, water mains and electricity lines are infrastructure.
The telecoms are insinuating that this is somehow legally nebulous. How? Because the telecoms are going to use "grassroots" organizations to sue local governments for misappropriation, most likely. If it comes to that, which I certainly hope it doesn't.
Oh, I apologize in advance for this, but K Tanmay has been busted by the Grammar Police for the following:
Semicolons are used for separating independent clauses, not dependent ones. Use a comma instead.
Again, sorry. This is just my...
[/pet peeve]
In the bio for Vladimir Levin:
"...a security system so tight that no other financial institution in the world has it."
As I'm sure Bruce Schneir would fall all over himself to point out, this association actually decreases the likelyhood that the system is actually secure.
You would, I assume, be referring to the creative freedom you would have as such?
...couldn't Orange file a cross-complaint under the tems of the DMCA alleging that Sendo's knowledge of Orange's circuit board design stems from an effort to reverse-engineer said phones?
The Freeshell.org Unix shell/email provider uses a distributed filesystem to provide transparency across their various machines. After a few minutes of searching, I was not able to determine what their method is, but it's worth asking them about it, as Freeshell has over 10,000 users and high traffic.
IMHO, the reason why everybody is pinging on the ISP/bandwidth issue is that there have been stories in the past regarding various ISP's dislike of customers' NAT routers and many people believe that this dislike is a driving force behind research of this type.
And as far as security concerns go, I must not have a very clear grasp of the dilemma. Why is it that a sysadmin, when managing his or her network, would not be able to configure all NAT devices to only forward packets from verified, trusted, statically routed hosts? There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions available, it seems to me.
I just perused my TOS agreement with my DSL provider and three things struck me:
1) Fortunately, my DSL provider (SBC) acknowledges and allows the use of routers to connect multiple home computers to a single DSL router.
2) They disallow users to "forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through the Service." That means that, at least with SBC, reconfiguring your NAT routing device to not decrement the TTL on packets could constitute a breech of contract. YMMV.
3) I could not find any clause prohibiting SBC from inspecting the contents of packets it handles. Theoretically then, in addition to considering the IP ids of received packets as mentioned in the sFlow article, your ISP could perform analysis of any unencrypted traffic from your ip. For instance, If you were playing Counterstrike and your housemate was surfing the web, traffic analysis of the packets originating from your ip could correctly identify the existence of multiple hosts.
Obviously, such analysis would be computationally intense, and could not be performed on an ISP's entire customer base simultaneously, but as a random auditing tool, or a followup to previous suspicion, this type of analysis could be an effective tool for ISP's that wanted to outlaw multiple connections.
That said, I agree with the countless comments to the effect that very few ISP's are going to actively pursue any of these measures; the costs seem to greatly outweigh the benefits. Imagine if my ISP did crack down on my four home computers behind my NAT router: I would still be capable of using the same amount of bandwidth with only one computer, I would be pissed off and looking for another provider, and most importantly, I couldn't give SBC any more money if I tried--it's not as though I can get multiple DSL accounts on the same phone number (and believe me, I certainly wouldn't let SBC charge more for "Platnum NAT Service").
The vast majority of software pirated by countries that the BSA cite as having small IT sectors is not domestically produced software. Thus, reducing piracy in these countries increases the revenue of coporations based in other countries (e.g. the US, and EU).
Software retail outlets and other industry "middlemen" in the countries in question will benefit from reduced piracy, but this is small potatoes compared to what BSA-affiliates stand to gain.
Thus, digital piracy in countries that are poor, or have small IT sectors, can be seen as sort of an international "trickle down" economic system. Such piracy provides software and entertainment to people who could not otherwise afford it, at the expense of corporations who, emperically speaking, can. Reducing piracy then becomes welfare "reform" for poor countries, more likely to hurt said countries' IT sectors than help them.
While end users are implied by the above paragraph, I would even include resellers of pirated software into this equation. As seedy as that business is, and as ignoble as the resellers' motives are, there's an undeniable Robin Hood component at work. Remember, these criminals reintroduce their ill-gotten wealth largely into their local economies.
Don't dismiss this as a romantic view of digital piracy; it's not. I mean only to provide much-needed devil's advocacy to the BSA's spurious horse hockey.