So while they're full aware of the problems the mass of the craft can cause, they seem to think it's possible to minimize the effects to a reasonable level.
The simplest thing to do is simply put the expiriment in deep space, start it up, then move the craft away and monitor it from a distance.
Perhaps THAT force that has kep the Verizons of the world at bay should be strengthened, rather than having a bunch of people that poorly understand the fundamentals create new laws that the whole tech insdustry has to keep track of.
Yes, common decency, cooperation, and fair play are forces that have outlived their usefulness. It's just a simple cost-benefit analysis: $extortion_from_google/$lawyer_salaries_to_draw_up _contracts_and_litigate is now greater than 1, so it's the obvious business decision.
Verizon has said they would like to charge large companies like Google money for the bandwith users of those services use. Fine. It's not illegal, so... why have they not done so?
So what stops Verizon from charging you and me for bandwidth too? Your local ISP can just get charged a Verizon Tax, and an AT&T Tax, and a Sprint Tax, etc. You can buy Premium Packages for accessing Google, Yahoo, MSN, and CNN. Good luck finding a premium package for bittorrent, slashdot, craigslist, or anything else remotely associated with freedom. All that traffic can either go to/dev/null or sit around in a queue waiting for everyone else's streaming advertisement packets.
I see no reason to enforce "Net Neutrality" through any law, especially since we've seen what happens when the government regulates any action -- less freedom, not more.
Ah, yes, terrible things like the postal service with the cheapest rates for shipping anything anywhere. Terrible things like highways, power grids, safe airplanes, safe food, safe medicine, and licensed doctors and engineers. All of these have caused problems that were not around in the 1800's with sweat shops and child labor and malpracticing quacks selling snake oil and the inability to travel across country except on a monopolistic train and buildings burning and collapsing from improper design.
The Mises Institute has a great article on why NN is a terrible idea. The article is titled Who Owns the Internet? and it really gives great insight into why the political side of NN is just another fiasco and a tool to control the Internet by those already in power.
I'm sorry, that article is trash. It's written by a graduate student, implying limited experience with the Real World of telecom monopolies. He's from Texas where there are several competing ISPs. But enough with the ad hominem... The article is trash because it is full of falacies such as praising the fair market system for allowing telecoms to own their own pipes while simultaneously lamenting the monopolies granted to the very same companies. Explain to me how letting monopolists get away with brandishing their property helps anyone. The telcos are getting big enough to be broken up again, not big enough to hand private control of the Internet over to. The article also completely ignores the fact that AT&T wants to charge third parties for routers, not just its directly connected peers.
Whether or not proponents of net neutrality want to acknowledge that scarcity exists, it does. Despite continued increase in bandwidth capacity, a router can only handle a certain amount of traffic. Just like a four-lane highway, it can only supply a certain threshold of traffic and is therefore inherently limited.
This is an example of the horrible misunderstanding the author has. The routers are not the problem! Routers can route dozens of gigabytes per second on their backplanes, much more bandwidth than their pipes have available. Routers can be parallelized by traffic shapers that split the load from the pipes across several routers. Increasing bandwidth requires actual physical fiber runs, or better multiplexing equipment. Increasing bandwidth is generally required at the last mile, where it's least lucrative for monopolies to do so. After all, they can't charge customers $1000/month for 1Mb/s speeds. Scarcity is a scam caused by ISPs oversubscribing by several orders of magnitude, and by the insane client-server distribution model that commercial entities embrace. The Internet can literally transfer the entire Library of Congress in under an hour. That's how scarce bandwidth really is.
Birthcontrol, ween of dependence on high energy consumption and colonise the solar system, because we sure aren't going to get along forever on this rock alone.
I'd like to see space ships with low energy consumption with enough people for space colonies from a civilization on birth control. Until we understand the genetic foundations of intelligence or can simply augment intelligence, there's no point in shrinking the population. There are generally a fixed percentage of "smart" people, so the greater the population the more scientists and engineers and doctors, arguably the three classes of people who will really advance the human race. Obviously education helps, but raw ability and desire are just as important, if not more so.
In my opinion, the human race is doomed. Not to die, but to grow into something entirely different. The way I see it, there are two real outcomes for the universe depending on what physics allows. If wormholes can be created, even tiny ones that can only be used to signal an on/off condition, then FTL communication is possible and the entire universe can (and probably will) become a huge hive mind. If the speed of light is the absolute limit for information transfer, then the universe will be populated with lots of relatively small computers that would act somewhat like individuals do now. War will not disappear, there will always be arguments over what to do with the available energy in the universe. Hopefully, they will be intellectual arguments that can afford compromise between activities that have no objective proof of optimality, but are thought to be useful. If the universe is just a small part of a multiverse, either no one will notice because there are no interconnections, or the hive mind will simply grow into the metaverse.
In any case, I think that intelligent life will simply adapt to its own self knowledge and physical understanding of the universe. It may even choose to self terminate, depending on the likely future history of the universe. There may simply be no reason to wait around for the heat death, or there might be a metaverse to expand into. It's always possible that with the vast computational resources available simulations of other intelligence or even the past history of the Earth will be conducted.
Obviously, the most interesting thing that could be done with FTL communication is to resurrect everything on earth by simply looking at it in enough detail from far enough away to catch the last couple billion years of history. Even without FTL communication it might be possible to look at the light refracted by star gravity back toward the Earth (or other sensor locations). It's possible that humanity or its children will simply see this technological ability as the fulfilment of many civilizations' idea of the afterlife. A good thing to remember if you wake up after you think you died is to ask "Is this heaven, hell, or a simulation?" At least it'll show you have a sense of humor.
...cars that are pissing me off on the highway....cell phones of people in the grocery store with those stupid BlueTooth headsets....push-to-talk on cell phones....Blackberries....airplanes flying over my house at night that are too loud.
Hey, I think I know a solution to all of those. EMP!
No -- humans survived and thrived as a species based on our "best practices" (and our natural ability to teach & learn). So it's natural for groups of humans to develop and pass on morality of some kind.
Yet many civilizations embraced human torture and sacrifice, and many embraced peace and understanding. Some civilizations treat their own members as property, and others do not. If anything, the moral landscape is incredibly varied over history. I'd say the range of human behavior has been at least as varied as animal societies, everything from hunter-gatherer loners to small family tribes to large countries where everyone was willing to fight and die for their emperor. Basically any moral you can think of like don't kill, don't steal, or don't sacrifice your children to the gods has been ignored by long lasting societies.
Are you talking about infants as the "initial state"? Sure, at that stage of development, humans aren't yet moral agents. They're basically helpless, and their main job is to make sure Mom remembers to feed them and keep them safe. You can't draw any conclusions about adult humans based on that alone.
That's the entire point, which you seem to have missed. If infants are amoral and can be molded to hold any sort of morality from pure hedonism to self sacrificing altruism, then how can anyone say humans in general are "moral"? Isn't morality simply a behavioral trait of humans within some given society? It would be much better to speak of the morality of specific human societies, not humanity in general. The fact that we have prisons proves that there are individuals who don't hold to today's general morality. Since humans can adapt to any given society, it implies that basically they are amoral and simply take on the morality of their society so that they can survive. Witness the ability of mobs and people lost in the wilderness to abandon all sense of morality and act purely hedonistically. Anonymity and freedom from retribution also allows human amorality to express itself. How else can you explain flame wars and trolls and other completely antisocial behavior on the Internet?
they tend to go self-destructive, or end up like Michael Jackson. Think he's happy?
I imagine Michael Jackson can afford enough medication to feel however he wants whenever he wants. Pure hedonism is possible so long as proper stimulation is involved. All the human body and mind need are goals, obstacles, and rewards. Where does morality fit in?
Did they already clear this guys name, or is the search far too broad? Does anyone else think that most money launderers already knew where to get this list *before* they found it on slashdot?
..will be just like WWI and WWII where people start dropping their family names in preference for good Western names like Smith and Jones. The next generation of Islamic terrorists will be Brads and Jennifers...
Speaking as a homosexual, it has more to do with spousal rights (right to visit your spouse in the hospital, getting on your spouses health insurance if you have none/job does not offer any/job has insurance that sucks and/or is more expensive than your spouses, right to say what happens upon death, etc)...
The extreme conservatives aren't really against homosexual marriage, either. They're actually, fundamentally against homosexuality itself. Thankfully, they are also extremely forgetful and ignorant, so once the media frenzy dies down they'll be surprised in 20 or 30 years when "all those homo couples" are everywhere. Then they'll die, and their children will hopefully have a much lower percentage of prejudice. It's unfortunate, but almost all major social changes take a generation or two to really be accepted.
I've always thought the government should give up trying to tax married people and single people and people with kids differently. Instead, they should simply base taxes on household units which could include everyone in a dorm room, partners, multiple partners, kids, whatever. Just base the tax break on how many dependents are actually supported.
sn't witness protection data Need To Know? Why would the FBI director Need To Know anything at all at a moment's notice from his desktop PC? It would make much more sense to have a separate system, and have him walk down the hall, ask someone to retrieve what he needs, and maybe get ONE record made available for a limited time.
If they tried that, whatever flunky was on the secure system would just email him the entire Excel file full of witness protection data...in plain text, to his home email account by mistake. You don't actually think they run anything but Windows+Office+Lusers, do you? Besides, any lower ranking flunky between the director and sensitive data is one more point of failure. As scary as it sounds, it's probably *safer* having the witness protection data on a server with NT authentication that the director (and other need-to-know persons) can access directly. At least then there are some actual technical barriers to obtaining the information, e.g. someone would have to social engineer the director of the FBI or other staffers instead of just the records department.
If everyone pirated everything we would have no Lord of the Rings movies, no video games like Halo or Grand Theft Auto -- we'd still have small indy films and subscription games like WoW, but piracy only works now because it's a group of parasites feeding off media that the rest of us pay for.
Perhaps we might not even have the Lord of the Rings books. On the other hand, we might have a complete Silmarillion. Is there any way to judge which which outcome is better? So far as I know, JRR Tolkien didn't make nearly as much money as his estate does now, and it's arguable that the amount of money he made wouldn't have impacted what he wrote.
Here's the problem: the new "business model" they talk about is that free music sometimes promotes something else (concerts, merchandise, or something new entirely). Ok, great. What if it's my music, and I don't want you to have it for free, regardless of how else it might "help" me? What if I've voluntarily signed on with a record label because I think that it's in my best interests (and no, I haven't been "brainwashed"), and that record label has a trade group that represents it, and what if the laws of my country support the protections of my creations?
If you don't want anyone to have your music for free, don't play it. Someone could (gasp) overhear it through the walls! The whole point is that a lot of people want to change the laws of many countries to have broader exemptions for fair use. What's wrong with that? You don't want to create? Fine. We probably don't need any more self absorbed artists writing angst songs.
And for those in the "copyright is bad on works that can be effortlessly copied in the digital realm", consider that "art for art's sake" isn't the end-all be-all argument, either. Have you ever considered that since economics isn't a zero-sum game, that there are millions of people who have indirectly benefited economically from the industries that have sprung up around, support, and are supported by, music, television, books, and movies?
Could those millions of people have better jobs? Almost certainly. Being a low paid record or book store clerk isn't exactly glamorous. That's where the majority of people are employed, doing low wage jobs for media cartels. The only ones who profit are the media companies and the few artists who are arbitrarily selected to succeed. I imagine there were millions of buggy drivers and stablehands before the automobile, and I bet they were glad to be done smelling horse shit all day.
I'm not saying the trade groups aren't out for control, and maybe even aren't greedy baby-eating bastards. But this isn't binary opposition: it's not RIAA-like "thuggery", or no ownership rights at all. Where's the middle ground? And no, I'm not saying copyright should be perpetual and infinite, either. But can we ignore A.A. Milne's shit that's 75 years old for a minute as an arguing point, and talk about what's really at issue, which is brand new, current, and popular music and movies?
A lot of people wouldn't have a problem with copyright if it was back to 20 years like it was supposed to be. It's basically worthless to have 95 year copyright with digital copies of media, since digital copies are supposed to be perfect forever... There's actually an alternative to copyright that would let everyone be as free as they want to be. Just have the buyers of "popular media" sign an NDA and contract to not redistribute the media they're getting. It could be just like a EULA, except actually signed by both parties. That fixes all the silly little copyright problems all at once: Rabid consumers with more cash than intelligence can get all the pop they can stomach, the media companies can get all the money they want, and everyone else can build the second Library of Alexandria without worrying about stupid interfering laws. There's really no equivalent situation in the entire world; almost all human knowledge is contained in some form on the Internet. It's only a simple step to include the rest of it if copyright laws can be fixed to allow libraries to digitize all their works. In fact, copyright law become absurd if libraries can simply loan out their digital works. Libraries would only need 10 or 20 copies of everything on earth, and everyone in the world could share those copies, especially if the library chops each work into individual pages and loans each of those out...
Questions like "are we essentially amoral or moral" aren't really answerable just because they don't match up well with the real situation. Morality is the "best practices" we've figured out over time: how to live and cooperate with other people with a minimum of frustration and fighting. A kid might figure out some of that stuff on his own ("damn, I punch just one girl and now nobody wants to talk to me..."), just like he might figure out a hammer is for hitting things with... but without teaching, he's not going to master it any more than he'd master driving a car out into traffic if he found one sitting in the garage one day.
If morals are just best practices, doesn't that imply amorality as the initial state? I think that's basically true: Humans will do whatever triggers their pleasure center, whether it be physical, emotional, or social interaction. Once humans develop the ability to reason and plan, they will plan to do things that result in pleasure. Morality just happens to be what has evolved as a compromise between hedonism and idealism. Just about everything in that range has been the basis for different human societies, and many societies with vastly different morals than typical Western ones have survived as long or longer than a lot of Western societies. Humans have also readily adapted to major changes in morality within, usually, a single generation or two. Just look at rock and roll, the decline of marriage (especially worldwide, not just the US), gay marriage, the death penalty, and a host of other issues that are completely changing the general idea of morality that people had for hundreds of years.
Stevens is known to be very powerful in the Senate ("Dances with Bottomless War Chest"). Despite Alaska's low population (let alone population density), it makes you wonder how it happens...unless you know about this:
The fact that Stevens is an idiot about technology doesn't detract from the fact that the Senate was designed for state representation, not population representation. In those terms, Alaska is the largest state with the most coastline, with a lot more resources than some very populous states. Pure democracy never does take that sort of thing into account, which is one reason we have a split Congress.
The dividend checks are really a small chunk of change compared to annual income. Usually $1000 a year or so, basically what would fall below IRS reporting if it was your only income. The dividend checks are just a portion of dividends paid on the permanent fund, a chunk of money set aside for growing dividends eternally. I'd say $1000 a year is equitable for having to deal with 7 months of snow and ~3 months with less than 8 hours of daylight.
Re:Reasons for corporate setups
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Freedb.org Ending
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While I believe that free, open source software is very good and should be used more widely, this is an example of where corporate solutions can prevail.
Good idea, I'll jump on my brand new Amiga and dial up Genie and Compuserve, download and buy a couple of those cool sidescrollers people call abandonware (ha!) and kill a few hours. When I'm done I think I'll upgrade my Windows 95 box with the latest patches after I buy the commercial version of Trumpet Winsock. When I'm done, I'll rip some CDs with the software that came with my CD ROM drive, and I'm sure there will be some online commercial CD database that has all the indie artists I like to listen to!
The reason that FreeDB stopped is because those in the lead couldn't come to a decision. This would almost never happen in a corporate environment. Any dispute would go up the chain until it hit the CEO or board of directors, where a firm decision one way or another would be made. In the mean time, the product would merely remain unchanged (unless company policy specifies otherwise), so there would be no interruption in service.
Half the time the firm corporate decision is to completely end a project and either auction all the IP off to some lawyer-filled clearinghouse or just let it rot until the backups are no good anymore. Corporations can die just as easily as open source projects too, but unfortunately their corpses aren't easily reanimated like the open projects.
There were some motherboard BIOSes that had built in boot sector virus scanning, but they didn't know anything about Free operating systems. A BIOS watchdog wouldn't be any better, most likely. The other problem with virtualization is that it does cause a slight overhead for any protected mode instructions that need to be virtualized. It doesn't help that the x386 architecture has several unprivileged instructions that can easily tell an OS whether it's being emulated or not (see this paper). Timing privileged instructions will also allow a hosted operating system to detect virtualization unless the entire system is emulated, which is very slow.
The one catch would be defining routing as being at the same encapsulation level as the packets to be processed. Otherwise a frame-relay or leased MPLS virtual link would effectively separate the two. Even ethernet is "routed" at layer 2, and a VLAN trunked through a third ISP would fall under that. Any non-free VPN provider could also have issues. It may be easiest to add an exception for a link or virtual link that is dedicated to transfer only between those two networks.
My statement only prevents charging for routing services done within the entity, it does not prevent third parties from routing packets and charging its own peers. Consider the following scenario:
A and B are customers who want to set up a network tunnel of some sort. A's ISP is X, and B's ISP is Y. X and Y are not directly connected, so they have to go through at least one intermediary named Z. The VLAN trunking can happen at any of A, B, X, Y, and Z. If A and B handle VLAN trunking, they just need to buy a standard connection from X and Y, likewise X and Y have standard connections through Z. If X and Y handle trunking, X is a direct peer of A and can charge for trunking A's packets and untrunking packets arriving from B. It doesn't matter if B handles trunking or not, X still buys standard service to Z to send trunked packets. The only interesting case is if X (or Y) doesn't want to do trunking and instead farms it out to Z. In this case, A is paying X for a standard private connection to Z without trunking, but X has to pay Z for trunking. If Z charges more for trunking a connection than for a standard connection, X can simply charge A more for the A-X connection. X is not charging for Z's trunking, but charging for a more expensive connection to Z. Nothing limits how much networks can charge for routing packets or buying connections, it just limits them to charging within one hop of their own network
Second, if layer 2 routing does not fall under network neutrality then SBC could just stuff all Google's traffic into a VLAN and then charge them for QoS on the VLAN itself. They could even call it the ExtortGoogle VLAN, but it wouldn't fall under a network neutrality law that only regulated layer 3 routing.
Extra dimensions are the epicycles of Modern Physics
On the other hand, quantum mechanics explains gravity about as well as epicycles did. How else were you planning on merging relativety with quantum mechanics? Until there is anything else resembling relativistic QCD, it would probably be wise to study string theory if for no other reason than to know which mistakes to avoid should it prove unworkable.
At first I was all for some kind of "Net Nuetrality" law, but I do agree that really any new "internet regulation" law that is passed regardless of who it favours is going to have long reaching effects. The solution? Keep your damn paws off my Internet, politicos!
The problem is that without network neutrality, IP will be fundamentally broken. Right now routers send packets to their destination network without caring who they are from or to, except for spam or DoS filtering. Once routers start caring about what they can forward, there won't really be an incentive for ISPs to route *anything* unless *everyone* pays for it. You have Comcast, and Google buys straight from Sprint. Comcast isn't going to route packets from Google to you unless you pay your Google Tax and Google pays their Comcast Tax, and then Sprint isn't going to let the packets through unless you pay your Sprint Tax. If Comcast goes through AT&T to reach Sprint, everyone (including Comcast and Sprint) is going to have to pay the AT&T Tax as well. Right now, Sprint and Comcast just pay AT&T to route their traffic, Google pays Sprint, and you pay Comcast. All the costs are averaged into the peer specific contracts, and you don't have to wonder why traceroutes suddenly stop working to Google and spend half an hour with Customer Support at Comcast buying a "Package" of taxes to get to MSN and Yahoo along with Google.
As I posted elsewhere, the only way to guarantee that the Internet keeps working is to completely prohibit any ISP from charging anyone for its routing services except its directly connected peers. They can implement QoS if they want, but they will have to do it directly with their peers, including you. Don't forget that when you get on the Internet, you become a peer just like Google, just with a smaller pipe. There's no reason you should have to pay anyone, including Google, for getting your packets to them. Google can filter your traffic on their own routers if they want, but they sure as hell shouldn't be able to charge you for sending them. BGP still works despite its age and the complexity of the Internet, simply because all the ISPs cooperate. Similarly, QoS will work perfectly fine on a direct peer connection basis. Each ISP buys whatever high priority, low latency service it needs from its peers, and offers its customers a limited amount of QoS traffic based on what they can route out. In most cases, it will probably be a mostly equal sharing of QoS packets flowing each way, making the need for additional contracts pointless. Probably a simple agreement that 5% or 10% of bandwidth both ways will be allocated for QoS packets would suffice. Home users and big Internet sites alike can just choose which 5% or 10% of their traffic they want to have QoS.
Lawmakers don't know enough technically to make a law that wouldn't have unforeseen and damaging consequences, even if they supported net neutrality.
Actually, here's a very simple legal definition of good network neutrality:
No operator of an Internet router shall charge or attempt to charge a third party for routing or otherwise processing packets with a source or destination address belonging to a network owned by the third party unless the third party is a directly connected Internet peer. Two Internet peers are directly connected if there is a data link directly between the peers with no intervening network equipment except nonrouting repeaters
That essentially sums up the net neutrality debate and solves it in one paragraph. I challange anyone to come up with a more succinct statement, or to give an example where Something Bad Happens(TM) because of that statement that couldn't otherwise happen.
They would be a lot better off going through the document in Word (or Notepad/Textedit/vi/EMACS/whatever) and just selecting the regions of text that they want to remove, and replacing it with [-- TEXT REMOVED --] or even [REDACTED]. If they were really slick, I'm sure somebody could write a little macro to replace the text with an equivalent number of characters of whitespace or random text or dashes, to preserve formatting. (Okay, so to really preserve the formatting it would have to be replaced with characters that have the same amount width as the deleted characters; maybe there's a font-set containing various widths of whitespace characters that they could use? In TeX it would be trivial.)
So long as they remember to disable Track Changes.
If the user interface is designed well, you'll know exactly what to do, just as you'll know intuitively how to really redact text.
Basically, the ability to redact text relies upon the ability of a program to forget all previous actions to a file as well as merge changes into a uniform layer. Text editors are great at this: The redo history is destroyed upon program exit and the file is a uniform character array (possibly with formatting). Any sort of graphical design program, unless it's purely pixel based without layer support, will probably allow for occlusion and other methods of hiding information behind elements. Layers and redo logs (ala Word storing previous changes to the document) are easy enough to deal with by merging everything into one layer, but trying to merge vector graphics into a uniform surface with no overlapping elements requires a whole lot of clipping, introducing a whole lot more verices which makes the everything slower to render. It may also be impossible to clip certain types of curves and have the curve segments follow the exact same path as the original curve without specifying the entire curve and then defining a clipping region. That obviously won't work if the curves you're partially obscuring make up the text you're trying to black out
You want to know the real problem with Adobe? Pretending they have a magical special paper-in-all-but-name format that only authorized programs can touch and modify. If everyone knew that PDFs were just vector graphics files, people would probably have no difficulty realizing that they couldn't just cover up existing text with another element to make it go away. Almost everyone who works with graphics or even windowing systems knows that you can obscure an object with a second object, then remove it to reveal the original.
Specifically section 454.c.1.B which requires that a review board create regulations that respect fair use for audio broadcasts. I don't see a reference to a video broadcast flag being enacted by the bill, just a requirement for commissions to make some more rules. It also recommends that the commission investigate abuses of Internet routing under Title 9: "Net Neutrality". The commission will be composed of IT, software, recording, broadcasting, satellite, and consumer electronics industries along with public interest organizations. If anything it's just a wrapper bill around a process to actually work on issues like DRM and net neutrality, not specific regulations.
If anything, I wonder if the submitted article isn't just a shill trying to marginalize rabid Internet users who will oppose any legislation based on hearsay with no references to specific sections of the bill. If you call your senator and claim they are trying to enact a broadcast flag, your senator will not listen to you the next time you call because you obviously did not take the time to actually look at the bill.
I am opposed to bill S.2686, because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag. I am very much opposed to that."
This is a perfect example of rabid, unguided sensationalism. What exactly do you oppose? Would a bill making the broadcast flag illegal fall under that broad statement? More importantly, are you opposed to the broadcast flag in particular, or DRM that prevents fair use in general?
If I was going to try to call my Senator (who happens to be Stevens) the night before a vote, I might try to make a reasoned argument instead of something a staffer will autoreply to. As it is, I don't see any terribly bad things in the bill. On the other hand, Stevens also introduced that bastard child of the DMCA, the SSSCA... He got a long email about that one.
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So while they're full aware of the problems the mass of the craft can cause, they seem to think it's possible to minimize the effects to a reasonable level.
The simplest thing to do is simply put the expiriment in deep space, start it up, then move the craft away and monitor it from a distance.
Perhaps THAT force that has kep the Verizons of the world at bay should be strengthened, rather than having a bunch of people that poorly understand the fundamentals create new laws that the whole tech insdustry has to keep track of.
p _contracts_and_litigate is now greater than 1, so it's the obvious business decision.
/dev/null or sit around in a queue waiting for everyone else's streaming advertisement packets.
Yes, common decency, cooperation, and fair play are forces that have outlived their usefulness. It's just a simple cost-benefit analysis: $extortion_from_google/$lawyer_salaries_to_draw_u
Verizon has said they would like to charge large companies like Google money for the bandwith users of those services use. Fine. It's not illegal, so... why have they not done so?
So what stops Verizon from charging you and me for bandwidth too? Your local ISP can just get charged a Verizon Tax, and an AT&T Tax, and a Sprint Tax, etc. You can buy Premium Packages for accessing Google, Yahoo, MSN, and CNN. Good luck finding a premium package for bittorrent, slashdot, craigslist, or anything else remotely associated with freedom. All that traffic can either go to
Ah, yes, terrible things like the postal service with the cheapest rates for shipping anything anywhere. Terrible things like highways, power grids, safe airplanes, safe food, safe medicine, and licensed doctors and engineers. All of these have caused problems that were not around in the 1800's with sweat shops and child labor and malpracticing quacks selling snake oil and the inability to travel across country except on a monopolistic train and buildings burning and collapsing from improper design.
The Mises Institute has a great article on why NN is a terrible idea. The article is titled Who Owns the Internet? and it really gives great insight into why the political side of NN is just another fiasco and a tool to control the Internet by those already in power.
I'm sorry, that article is trash. It's written by a graduate student, implying limited experience with the Real World of telecom monopolies. He's from Texas where there are several competing ISPs. But enough with the ad hominem... The article is trash because it is full of falacies such as praising the fair market system for allowing telecoms to own their own pipes while simultaneously lamenting the monopolies granted to the very same companies. Explain to me how letting monopolists get away with brandishing their property helps anyone. The telcos are getting big enough to be broken up again, not big enough to hand private control of the Internet over to. The article also completely ignores the fact that AT&T wants to charge third parties for routers, not just its directly connected peers.
This is an example of the horrible misunderstanding the author has. The routers are not the problem! Routers can route dozens of gigabytes per second on their backplanes, much more bandwidth than their pipes have available. Routers can be parallelized by traffic shapers that split the load from the pipes across several routers. Increasing bandwidth requires actual physical fiber runs, or better multiplexing equipment. Increasing bandwidth is generally required at the last mile, where it's least lucrative for monopolies to do so. After all, they can't charge customers $1000/month for 1Mb/s speeds. Scarcity is a scam caused by ISPs oversubscribing by several orders of magnitude, and by the insane client-server distribution model that commercial entities embrace. The Internet can literally transfer the entire Library of Congress in under an hour. That's how scarce bandwidth really is.
Birthcontrol, ween of dependence on high energy consumption and colonise the solar system, because we sure aren't going to get along forever on this rock alone.
I'd like to see space ships with low energy consumption with enough people for space colonies from a civilization on birth control. Until we understand the genetic foundations of intelligence or can simply augment intelligence, there's no point in shrinking the population. There are generally a fixed percentage of "smart" people, so the greater the population the more scientists and engineers and doctors, arguably the three classes of people who will really advance the human race. Obviously education helps, but raw ability and desire are just as important, if not more so.
In my opinion, the human race is doomed. Not to die, but to grow into something entirely different. The way I see it, there are two real outcomes for the universe depending on what physics allows. If wormholes can be created, even tiny ones that can only be used to signal an on/off condition, then FTL communication is possible and the entire universe can (and probably will) become a huge hive mind. If the speed of light is the absolute limit for information transfer, then the universe will be populated with lots of relatively small computers that would act somewhat like individuals do now. War will not disappear, there will always be arguments over what to do with the available energy in the universe. Hopefully, they will be intellectual arguments that can afford compromise between activities that have no objective proof of optimality, but are thought to be useful. If the universe is just a small part of a multiverse, either no one will notice because there are no interconnections, or the hive mind will simply grow into the metaverse.
In any case, I think that intelligent life will simply adapt to its own self knowledge and physical understanding of the universe. It may even choose to self terminate, depending on the likely future history of the universe. There may simply be no reason to wait around for the heat death, or there might be a metaverse to expand into. It's always possible that with the vast computational resources available simulations of other intelligence or even the past history of the Earth will be conducted.
Obviously, the most interesting thing that could be done with FTL communication is to resurrect everything on earth by simply looking at it in enough detail from far enough away to catch the last couple billion years of history. Even without FTL communication it might be possible to look at the light refracted by star gravity back toward the Earth (or other sensor locations). It's possible that humanity or its children will simply see this technological ability as the fulfilment of many civilizations' idea of the afterlife. A good thing to remember if you wake up after you think you died is to ask "Is this heaven, hell, or a simulation?" At least it'll show you have a sense of humor.
...cars that are pissing me off on the highway. ...cell phones of people in the grocery store with those stupid BlueTooth headsets. ...push-to-talk on cell phones. ...Blackberries. ...airplanes flying over my house at night that are too loud.
Hey, I think I know a solution to all of those. EMP!
No -- humans survived and thrived as a species based on our "best practices" (and our natural ability to teach & learn). So it's natural for groups of humans to develop and pass on morality of some kind.
Yet many civilizations embraced human torture and sacrifice, and many embraced peace and understanding. Some civilizations treat their own members as property, and others do not. If anything, the moral landscape is incredibly varied over history. I'd say the range of human behavior has been at least as varied as animal societies, everything from hunter-gatherer loners to small family tribes to large countries where everyone was willing to fight and die for their emperor. Basically any moral you can think of like don't kill, don't steal, or don't sacrifice your children to the gods has been ignored by long lasting societies.
Are you talking about infants as the "initial state"? Sure, at that stage of development, humans aren't yet moral agents. They're basically helpless, and their main job is to make sure Mom remembers to feed them and keep them safe. You can't draw any conclusions about adult humans based on that alone.
That's the entire point, which you seem to have missed. If infants are amoral and can be molded to hold any sort of morality from pure hedonism to self sacrificing altruism, then how can anyone say humans in general are "moral"? Isn't morality simply a behavioral trait of humans within some given society? It would be much better to speak of the morality of specific human societies, not humanity in general. The fact that we have prisons proves that there are individuals who don't hold to today's general morality. Since humans can adapt to any given society, it implies that basically they are amoral and simply take on the morality of their society so that they can survive. Witness the ability of mobs and people lost in the wilderness to abandon all sense of morality and act purely hedonistically. Anonymity and freedom from retribution also allows human amorality to express itself. How else can you explain flame wars and trolls and other completely antisocial behavior on the Internet?
they tend to go self-destructive, or end up like Michael Jackson. Think he's happy?
I imagine Michael Jackson can afford enough medication to feel however he wants whenever he wants. Pure hedonism is possible so long as proper stimulation is involved. All the human body and mind need are goals, obstacles, and rewards. Where does morality fit in?
Did they already clear this guys name, or is the search far too broad? Does anyone else think that most money launderers already knew where to get this list *before* they found it on slashdot?
..will be just like WWI and WWII where people start dropping their family names in preference for good Western names like Smith and Jones. The next generation of Islamic terrorists will be Brads and Jennifers...
Speaking as a homosexual, it has more to do with spousal rights (right to visit your spouse in the hospital, getting on your spouses health insurance if you have none/job does not offer any/job has insurance that sucks and/or is more expensive than your spouses, right to say what happens upon death, etc)...
The extreme conservatives aren't really against homosexual marriage, either. They're actually, fundamentally against homosexuality itself. Thankfully, they are also extremely forgetful and ignorant, so once the media frenzy dies down they'll be surprised in 20 or 30 years when "all those homo couples" are everywhere. Then they'll die, and their children will hopefully have a much lower percentage of prejudice. It's unfortunate, but almost all major social changes take a generation or two to really be accepted.
I've always thought the government should give up trying to tax married people and single people and people with kids differently. Instead, they should simply base taxes on household units which could include everyone in a dorm room, partners, multiple partners, kids, whatever. Just base the tax break on how many dependents are actually supported.
sn't witness protection data Need To Know? Why would the FBI director Need To Know anything at all at a moment's notice from his desktop PC? It would make much more sense to have a separate system, and have him walk down the hall, ask someone to retrieve what he needs, and maybe get ONE record made available for a limited time.
If they tried that, whatever flunky was on the secure system would just email him the entire Excel file full of witness protection data...in plain text, to his home email account by mistake. You don't actually think they run anything but Windows+Office+Lusers, do you? Besides, any lower ranking flunky between the director and sensitive data is one more point of failure. As scary as it sounds, it's probably *safer* having the witness protection data on a server with NT authentication that the director (and other need-to-know persons) can access directly. At least then there are some actual technical barriers to obtaining the information, e.g. someone would have to social engineer the director of the FBI or other staffers instead of just the records department.
If everyone pirated everything we would have no Lord of the Rings movies, no video games like Halo or Grand Theft Auto -- we'd still have small indy films and subscription games like WoW, but piracy only works now because it's a group of parasites feeding off media that the rest of us pay for.
Perhaps we might not even have the Lord of the Rings books. On the other hand, we might have a complete Silmarillion. Is there any way to judge which which outcome is better? So far as I know, JRR Tolkien didn't make nearly as much money as his estate does now, and it's arguable that the amount of money he made wouldn't have impacted what he wrote.
Here's the problem: the new "business model" they talk about is that free music sometimes promotes something else (concerts, merchandise, or something new entirely). Ok, great. What if it's my music, and I don't want you to have it for free, regardless of how else it might "help" me? What if I've voluntarily signed on with a record label because I think that it's in my best interests (and no, I haven't been "brainwashed"), and that record label has a trade group that represents it, and what if the laws of my country support the protections of my creations?
If you don't want anyone to have your music for free, don't play it. Someone could (gasp) overhear it through the walls! The whole point is that a lot of people want to change the laws of many countries to have broader exemptions for fair use. What's wrong with that? You don't want to create? Fine. We probably don't need any more self absorbed artists writing angst songs.
And for those in the "copyright is bad on works that can be effortlessly copied in the digital realm", consider that "art for art's sake" isn't the end-all be-all argument, either. Have you ever considered that since economics isn't a zero-sum game, that there are millions of people who have indirectly benefited economically from the industries that have sprung up around, support, and are supported by, music, television, books, and movies?
Could those millions of people have better jobs? Almost certainly. Being a low paid record or book store clerk isn't exactly glamorous. That's where the majority of people are employed, doing low wage jobs for media cartels. The only ones who profit are the media companies and the few artists who are arbitrarily selected to succeed. I imagine there were millions of buggy drivers and stablehands before the automobile, and I bet they were glad to be done smelling horse shit all day.
I'm not saying the trade groups aren't out for control, and maybe even aren't greedy baby-eating bastards. But this isn't binary opposition: it's not RIAA-like "thuggery", or no ownership rights at all. Where's the middle ground? And no, I'm not saying copyright should be perpetual and infinite, either. But can we ignore A.A. Milne's shit that's 75 years old for a minute as an arguing point, and talk about what's really at issue, which is brand new, current, and popular music and movies?
A lot of people wouldn't have a problem with copyright if it was back to 20 years like it was supposed to be. It's basically worthless to have 95 year copyright with digital copies of media, since digital copies are supposed to be perfect forever... There's actually an alternative to copyright that would let everyone be as free as they want to be. Just have the buyers of "popular media" sign an NDA and contract to not redistribute the media they're getting. It could be just like a EULA, except actually signed by both parties. That fixes all the silly little copyright problems all at once: Rabid consumers with more cash than intelligence can get all the pop they can stomach, the media companies can get all the money they want, and everyone else can build the second Library of Alexandria without worrying about stupid interfering laws. There's really no equivalent situation in the entire world; almost all human knowledge is contained in some form on the Internet. It's only a simple step to include the rest of it if copyright laws can be fixed to allow libraries to digitize all their works. In fact, copyright law become absurd if libraries can simply loan out their digital works. Libraries would only need 10 or 20 copies of everything on earth, and everyone in the world could share those copies, especially if the library chops each work into individual pages and loans each of those out...
Questions like "are we essentially amoral or moral" aren't really answerable just because they don't match up well with the real situation. Morality is the "best practices" we've figured out over time: how to live and cooperate with other people with a minimum of frustration and fighting. A kid might figure out some of that stuff on his own ("damn, I punch just one girl and now nobody wants to talk to me..."), just like he might figure out a hammer is for hitting things with... but without teaching, he's not going to master it any more than he'd master driving a car out into traffic if he found one sitting in the garage one day.
If morals are just best practices, doesn't that imply amorality as the initial state? I think that's basically true: Humans will do whatever triggers their pleasure center, whether it be physical, emotional, or social interaction. Once humans develop the ability to reason and plan, they will plan to do things that result in pleasure. Morality just happens to be what has evolved as a compromise between hedonism and idealism. Just about everything in that range has been the basis for different human societies, and many societies with vastly different morals than typical Western ones have survived as long or longer than a lot of Western societies. Humans have also readily adapted to major changes in morality within, usually, a single generation or two. Just look at rock and roll, the decline of marriage (especially worldwide, not just the US), gay marriage, the death penalty, and a host of other issues that are completely changing the general idea of morality that people had for hundreds of years.
Stevens is known to be very powerful in the Senate ("Dances with Bottomless War Chest"). Despite Alaska's low population (let alone population density), it makes you wonder how it happens...unless you know about this:
The fact that Stevens is an idiot about technology doesn't detract from the fact that the Senate was designed for state representation, not population representation. In those terms, Alaska is the largest state with the most coastline, with a lot more resources than some very populous states. Pure democracy never does take that sort of thing into account, which is one reason we have a split Congress.
The dividend checks are really a small chunk of change compared to annual income. Usually $1000 a year or so, basically what would fall below IRS reporting if it was your only income. The dividend checks are just a portion of dividends paid on the permanent fund, a chunk of money set aside for growing dividends eternally. I'd say $1000 a year is equitable for having to deal with 7 months of snow and ~3 months with less than 8 hours of daylight.
While I believe that free, open source software is very good and should be used more widely, this is an example of where corporate solutions can prevail.
Good idea, I'll jump on my brand new Amiga and dial up Genie and Compuserve, download and buy a couple of those cool sidescrollers people call abandonware (ha!) and kill a few hours. When I'm done I think I'll upgrade my Windows 95 box with the latest patches after I buy the commercial version of Trumpet Winsock. When I'm done, I'll rip some CDs with the software that came with my CD ROM drive, and I'm sure there will be some online commercial CD database that has all the indie artists I like to listen to!
The reason that FreeDB stopped is because those in the lead couldn't come to a decision. This would almost never happen in a corporate environment. Any dispute would go up the chain until it hit the CEO or board of directors, where a firm decision one way or another would be made. In the mean time, the product would merely remain unchanged (unless company policy specifies otherwise), so there would be no interruption in service.
Half the time the firm corporate decision is to completely end a project and either auction all the IP off to some lawyer-filled clearinghouse or just let it rot until the backups are no good anymore. Corporations can die just as easily as open source projects too, but unfortunately their corpses aren't easily reanimated like the open projects.
There were some motherboard BIOSes that had built in boot sector virus scanning, but they didn't know anything about Free operating systems. A BIOS watchdog wouldn't be any better, most likely. The other problem with virtualization is that it does cause a slight overhead for any protected mode instructions that need to be virtualized. It doesn't help that the x386 architecture has several unprivileged instructions that can easily tell an OS whether it's being emulated or not (see this paper). Timing privileged instructions will also allow a hosted operating system to detect virtualization unless the entire system is emulated, which is very slow.
Your sig isn't scary, it just returns an error code of 0 (Success) to DOS. I'd be more worried about INT 13 calls...
Powerful magnets aimed at the motor cortex have been shown to induce muscles to twitch.
Really? Moving magnetic fields can induce electrical potential in the brain? I wonder which psychologist figured that out...
The one catch would be defining routing as being at the same encapsulation level as the packets to be processed. Otherwise a frame-relay or leased MPLS virtual link would effectively separate the two. Even ethernet is "routed" at layer 2, and a VLAN trunked through a third ISP would fall under that. Any non-free VPN provider could also have issues. It may be easiest to add an exception for a link or virtual link that is dedicated to transfer only between those two networks.
My statement only prevents charging for routing services done within the entity, it does not prevent third parties from routing packets and charging its own peers. Consider the following scenario:
A and B are customers who want to set up a network tunnel of some sort. A's ISP is X, and B's ISP is Y. X and Y are not directly connected, so they have to go through at least one intermediary named Z. The VLAN trunking can happen at any of A, B, X, Y, and Z. If A and B handle VLAN trunking, they just need to buy a standard connection from X and Y, likewise X and Y have standard connections through Z. If X and Y handle trunking, X is a direct peer of A and can charge for trunking A's packets and untrunking packets arriving from B. It doesn't matter if B handles trunking or not, X still buys standard service to Z to send trunked packets. The only interesting case is if X (or Y) doesn't want to do trunking and instead farms it out to Z. In this case, A is paying X for a standard private connection to Z without trunking, but X has to pay Z for trunking. If Z charges more for trunking a connection than for a standard connection, X can simply charge A more for the A-X connection. X is not charging for Z's trunking, but charging for a more expensive connection to Z. Nothing limits how much networks can charge for routing packets or buying connections, it just limits them to charging within one hop of their own network
Second, if layer 2 routing does not fall under network neutrality then SBC could just stuff all Google's traffic into a VLAN and then charge them for QoS on the VLAN itself. They could even call it the ExtortGoogle VLAN, but it wouldn't fall under a network neutrality law that only regulated layer 3 routing.
Extra dimensions are the epicycles of Modern Physics
On the other hand, quantum mechanics explains gravity about as well as epicycles did. How else were you planning on merging relativety with quantum mechanics? Until there is anything else resembling relativistic QCD, it would probably be wise to study string theory if for no other reason than to know which mistakes to avoid should it prove unworkable.
At first I was all for some kind of "Net Nuetrality" law, but I do agree that really any new "internet regulation" law that is passed regardless of who it favours is going to have long reaching effects. The solution? Keep your damn paws off my Internet, politicos!
The problem is that without network neutrality, IP will be fundamentally broken. Right now routers send packets to their destination network without caring who they are from or to, except for spam or DoS filtering. Once routers start caring about what they can forward, there won't really be an incentive for ISPs to route *anything* unless *everyone* pays for it. You have Comcast, and Google buys straight from Sprint. Comcast isn't going to route packets from Google to you unless you pay your Google Tax and Google pays their Comcast Tax, and then Sprint isn't going to let the packets through unless you pay your Sprint Tax. If Comcast goes through AT&T to reach Sprint, everyone (including Comcast and Sprint) is going to have to pay the AT&T Tax as well. Right now, Sprint and Comcast just pay AT&T to route their traffic, Google pays Sprint, and you pay Comcast. All the costs are averaged into the peer specific contracts, and you don't have to wonder why traceroutes suddenly stop working to Google and spend half an hour with Customer Support at Comcast buying a "Package" of taxes to get to MSN and Yahoo along with Google.
As I posted elsewhere, the only way to guarantee that the Internet keeps working is to completely prohibit any ISP from charging anyone for its routing services except its directly connected peers. They can implement QoS if they want, but they will have to do it directly with their peers, including you. Don't forget that when you get on the Internet, you become a peer just like Google, just with a smaller pipe. There's no reason you should have to pay anyone, including Google, for getting your packets to them. Google can filter your traffic on their own routers if they want, but they sure as hell shouldn't be able to charge you for sending them. BGP still works despite its age and the complexity of the Internet, simply because all the ISPs cooperate. Similarly, QoS will work perfectly fine on a direct peer connection basis. Each ISP buys whatever high priority, low latency service it needs from its peers, and offers its customers a limited amount of QoS traffic based on what they can route out. In most cases, it will probably be a mostly equal sharing of QoS packets flowing each way, making the need for additional contracts pointless. Probably a simple agreement that 5% or 10% of bandwidth both ways will be allocated for QoS packets would suffice. Home users and big Internet sites alike can just choose which 5% or 10% of their traffic they want to have QoS.
Actually, here's a very simple legal definition of good network neutrality:
That essentially sums up the net neutrality debate and solves it in one paragraph. I challange anyone to come up with a more succinct statement, or to give an example where Something Bad Happens(TM) because of that statement that couldn't otherwise happen.
They would be a lot better off going through the document in Word (or Notepad/Textedit/vi/EMACS/whatever) and just selecting the regions of text that they want to remove, and replacing it with [-- TEXT REMOVED --] or even [REDACTED]. If they were really slick, I'm sure somebody could write a little macro to replace the text with an equivalent number of characters of whitespace or random text or dashes, to preserve formatting. (Okay, so to really preserve the formatting it would have to be replaced with characters that have the same amount width as the deleted characters; maybe there's a font-set containing various widths of whitespace characters that they could use? In TeX it would be trivial.)
So long as they remember to disable Track Changes.
If the user interface is designed well, you'll know exactly what to do, just as you'll know intuitively how to really redact text.
Basically, the ability to redact text relies upon the ability of a program to forget all previous actions to a file as well as merge changes into a uniform layer. Text editors are great at this: The redo history is destroyed upon program exit and the file is a uniform character array (possibly with formatting). Any sort of graphical design program, unless it's purely pixel based without layer support, will probably allow for occlusion and other methods of hiding information behind elements. Layers and redo logs (ala Word storing previous changes to the document) are easy enough to deal with by merging everything into one layer, but trying to merge vector graphics into a uniform surface with no overlapping elements requires a whole lot of clipping, introducing a whole lot more verices which makes the everything slower to render. It may also be impossible to clip certain types of curves and have the curve segments follow the exact same path as the original curve without specifying the entire curve and then defining a clipping region. That obviously won't work if the curves you're partially obscuring make up the text you're trying to black out
You want to know the real problem with Adobe? Pretending they have a magical special paper-in-all-but-name format that only authorized programs can touch and modify. If everyone knew that PDFs were just vector graphics files, people would probably have no difficulty realizing that they couldn't just cover up existing text with another element to make it go away. Almost everyone who works with graphics or even windowing systems knows that you can obscure an object with a second object, then remove it to reveal the original.
Step 0: Read the bill first!
Specifically section 454.c.1.B which requires that a review board create regulations that respect fair use for audio broadcasts. I don't see a reference to a video broadcast flag being enacted by the bill, just a requirement for commissions to make some more rules. It also recommends that the commission investigate abuses of Internet routing under Title 9: "Net Neutrality". The commission will be composed of IT, software, recording, broadcasting, satellite, and consumer electronics industries along with public interest organizations. If anything it's just a wrapper bill around a process to actually work on issues like DRM and net neutrality, not specific regulations.
If anything, I wonder if the submitted article isn't just a shill trying to marginalize rabid Internet users who will oppose any legislation based on hearsay with no references to specific sections of the bill. If you call your senator and claim they are trying to enact a broadcast flag, your senator will not listen to you the next time you call because you obviously did not take the time to actually look at the bill.
I am opposed to bill S.2686, because there is a rider having to do with the broadcast flag. I am very much opposed to that."
This is a perfect example of rabid, unguided sensationalism. What exactly do you oppose? Would a bill making the broadcast flag illegal fall under that broad statement? More importantly, are you opposed to the broadcast flag in particular, or DRM that prevents fair use in general?
If I was going to try to call my Senator (who happens to be Stevens) the night before a vote, I might try to make a reasoned argument instead of something a staffer will autoreply to. As it is, I don't see any terribly bad things in the bill. On the other hand, Stevens also introduced that bastard child of the DMCA, the SSSCA... He got a long email about that one.