Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.
FWIW, this is why people like Google are concerned about publishing AAAA records - people with broken networks will see the sites become very slow.
This is usually caused by one of 2 problems: 1. Your machine has been configured with a default IPv6 route, even though there isn't actually any v6 connectivity. This is reasonably unusual, since in their default configuration machines usually expect to receive an RA to tell them what routes to set up, and in the absence of a router broadcasting RAs they will set no routes (which is correct). Maybe you had a misconfigured IPv6 router on the network that was telling client machines that it was providing an IPv6 internet connection when it wasn't?
2. Some DNS servers are completely broken and drop requests for an AAAA record. If your local caching DNS server is doing this then you basically end up seeing all web requests, etc. being slow since the browser will look up an AAAA record to find out if the website is accessible over v6 and the DNS server won't respond. Worse: I've seen an authoratative DNS server actually return NXDOMAIN when asked for an AAAA record, instead of returning no record. This makes a caching name server decide that the domain doesn't exist at all (i.e. no A record either) until the NTTL expires. Unfortunately in the case where I saw this happen and contacted the website operator (offering them free help debugging the problem), they told me that everything was working fine and refused to fix it, so all I could do was tell my customer (who was experiencing problems accessing the site) that they would have to take their business elsewhere since the service provider was incompetent.
Exactly. Granted, on my own internal network I might not bother with setting up IPV6, and instead do the equivalent of a NAT for my internal servers to give them an IPV4 address and only have my border router deal with IPV6.
Why? One of the really big benefits of IPv6 is the lack of address translation. This means stuff like peer to peer services (e.g. VoIP) can work without having to use unreliable nat traversal technologies such as STUN (peer to peer systems have to exchange addressing information. If there is no NAT then they just look at the local machine's address. If there is NAT then they have to use various techniques to probe the NAT and then make an educated guess as to what IP address and port their traffic will be translated to). If you try to perform some non-standard NAT at the border, you're going to reintroduce a lot of problems that IPv6 was built to avoid, and you also introduce an overhead of having to manage the NAT.
Eventually -- which probably means "the next version of Windows" given how IT seems to work these days -- IPV6 will be phased in even internally.
Why wait for the next version of Windows? Windows newer than XP has supported IPv6 out of the box (XP just involves a driver install), Linux has supported v6 out of the box for over 10 years, OS X supports it out of the box, Android supports it out of the box, lots of Apple hardware Just Works with v6, etc. Just setting the router to send RAs should see most of the clients on an average network automatically start to use v6, no need to upgrade the OS or reconfigure it.
The vast, VAST majority of us only need IPv6 on the Internet. We are perfectly fine with IPv4 internally.
But in order to access IPv6 content on the internet, your local devices are going to have v6 addresses anyway, so they may as well use them...
What is actually going to happen is, DLink, Linksys and the other usual suspects are going to produce $100 "interface/translator" boxes that will "speak" IPv6 where needed.
That would require the boxes to understand high level protocols. For anything more trivial than web proxying, this is probably a recipe for management headaches. If people want single-stack networks, what is more likley is for whole networks to become IPv6-only and place a NAT64 and DNS64 box on the border of the network. Although frankly I'm not sure I can see the point - running a dual stacked setup is probably going to be easier than dealing with translation all over the place when talking to legacy equipment.
The idea that everyone and everything, from your television to your printer to your average small office filled with PCs is going to immediately jump on the IPv6 bandwagon is just silly. It's not going to happen, not for a very long time to come.
Woh there. Why is everyone assuming people are saying things are "immediately" going to happen? I don't think anyone is saying that - migration will be a gradual process, and of course there will be v4-only devices around for a good while that still need to be supported.
Despite technologies such as NAT64, I largely think the best way of handling the transition is to run the entire LAN dual-stacked. RFC1918 addresses on the internal IPv4 side with a NAT gateway on the border (whether that is on the border of your network or your ISP's network will probably depend on how much you're paying the ISP). On the colocated server side, there will probably be proxy servers and DNAT gateways to handle the IPv4 traffic, but at some point the cost of doing that is going to outweigh the benefits, and at that point we'll see v4-only users become second class citizens as money is not invested into these proxy solutions at the datacentres, but that isn't going to happen for a looong time.
I wonder if this is part of the reason for the planned speed doubling - replacing the modems for extra speed is easier to explain to the public (via DOCSIS 3, I expect), but getting IPv6 support as a nice "side-effect".
Possibly, although beyond a bit of management work there's nothing wrong with keeping IPv4 management addresses on the network so long as they can keep the number of addresses low enough, so no particular reason to upgrade existing customers, just a reason to start deploying IPv6 kit to new customers.
Plus, as long as no one advertises it, there's less pressure if it doesn't work, too!
ISTR that Virgin have said they will be rolling out v6 to end users by the end of the year, so that's a good thing. It would be nice to see more ISPs making statements about their position on IPv6 even if it is "we have no plans to implement IPv6" so you'd know which to avoid. (You wouldn't catch me subscribing to an ISP who said they weren't going to deploy IPv6 coz it demonstrates a complete lack of investment in necessary upgrades)
One would think that with all that IPv6-propaganda, that such IPv6-only (please remember the "only"-part here) services would be all over the airwaves.
Your naivety seems to be as large as those of the IPv6-designers.
People are not as stupid as you may believe. They will not just take an IPv6 address and leave out 99% of their customers and wait years/decades until IPv6 happens. No, they will in some way get an IPv4 address, even if (gasp, oh noes) that involves paying some modest fee (which will be probably still be lower than what a domain costs today) or they will work around the problem using NAT.
You clearly don't understand the technologies involved. You cannot just "buy an IP address" from someone else - anything under a/20 won't get any routing on the public network. I'm sure that there will be transfers of address space between providers (for a fee) but none of this is as trivial as you make out.
I fully expect to start seeing _some_ parts of services becoming IPv6-only over the next few years. This will start with certain restricted markets where the service provider can pretty much guarantee that their end-users have IPv6 connectivity (as mentioned, there are already a number of IPv6-only websites in asia where the service provider knows that their target audiance is going to have IPv6 connectivity). Gradually (and yes, very slowly) we will see more and more services becoming IPv6-only.
I have thought for a while that companies wanting do do a "soft launch" of a service could do well from launching it as a v6-only website. For example, Google have a habit of restricting access to their new services by only allowing access by invitation in order to keep the adoption rate manageable. Instead of doing this, they could launch new services as IPv6-only to limit the adoption rate, and only later allow IPv4 access too.
No matter how ugly it's going to be, after some time the bugs are ironed out and it will work (unlike IPv6, which even Google can get to work on all their services).
IPv6 works fine - I've been using it for many years with no problems. I've seen no evidence of gogole being incapable of getting IPv6 working on all their services - it is true that AAAA RRs aren't published for all services at the moment, but that isn't an indication of Google being unable to do this, simply an indication that they haven't bothered to do so yet. No one is saying that the whole world needs to switch in an instant - this will be a gradual process and people saying "I'm not ever going to upgrade" makes them look like idiots. There is no reason to not upgrade over the natural hardware replacement cycle. Are you still running Windows 2 because you refused to upgrade to anything newer?
So you are fully correct when you say that many people are "going to start having problems", but unfortunately IPv6 is not a solution to the problems, because shutting out 99% of users is not a solution, period.
Who has said anything about shutting out 99% of users?
- The first IPv6-only services to have launched, have a restricted target audiance who already have IPv6 connectivity (so not shutting out 99% of their users).
- Over the natural replacement cycle, IPv6 support will be phased in everywhere. In order to avoid this, people would have to actively be avoiding IPv6 which seems like nonsense. Again, this isn't shutting out 99% of users, this will largely go unnoticed by users.
- I certainly envisage dual-stacked services that have more features when accessed over v6. This isn't shutting out 99% of the users, it is just being practical and not giving them such a feature rich service. These could well be features su
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200
But in 10 years' time, after the magic smoke has escaped from all that hardware, you'll have upgraded to kit that supports IPv6.
People saying "I'm never going to upgrade to IPv6" come across the same as people saying "I'm never going to upgrade from IE6" - in short, idiots. And in a few years time, like IE6 users now, they will probably be idiots who can't use some big services.
Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation
IPv6 in OS X, Linux and any Windows newer than XP pretty much Just Works with no configuration needed. You'd have to go out of your way to disable it.
MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
There will be legacy hardware that doesn't supprt IPv6 for some time, but in this restricted case is it a problem? I presume the MagicJack is basically an FXSSIP gateway, so whether you need IPv6 here depends on whether the SIP gateway it is connecting to has a v4 address. No one is saying you need to remove IPv4 from your network entirely.
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
Android has supported IPv6 since Android 2.0.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4
No, an IPv6-only device isn't going to be able to talk to an IPv4-only server (unless it uses a NAT64 gateway to do so). IPv4 is not going to suddenly disappear, dual-stacked clients are the norm, and as IPv4 addresses become harder to get hold of, ISPs will use carrier grade NAT to provision IPv4 to their clients. Talking to IPv4-only servers will still happen over IPv4.
Address exhaustion is largely a problem for servers, where NAT isn't really feasible. For many years to come, clients will have (NATted) IPv4 and (unNATted) IPv6 concurrently. Which is why it makes no sense when ISPs say "we don't need IPv6 because *we* have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses" - it doesn't matter if you have a big stack of spare IPv4 addresses if the people who operate the servers that your customers connect to don't.
What *should* have happened, is the telecoms regulators should have mandated that ISPs implement IPv6 support and sell IPv6 capable routers a good number of years ago since it was clear they were going to wait until crunch-time before bothering to do so without regulatory pressure. If that had happened, most end users would already have IPv6 capable internet connections and hardware.
There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available.
Given that 2^32=4.3 billion, you're wrong. There are a few million addresses locked up in old class A networks. If you bother to look at the consumption rate you'd realise that even if all of these addresses were returned to the pool they would buy a few weeks and then we'd be right back where we started. In short, recovering those addresses is going to be a lot of effort, will not solve the problem and will only postpone it for a very short length of time.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
IANA ran out of addresses at the start of last year. APNIC also ran out of addresses in the first half of last year. RIPE is going to run out of addresses this summer. We are *not* a significant number of years away from exhaustion. We've got maybe 3 years until there are no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate by any RIR. Reclaiming the legacy blocks to buy a few more weeks doesn't make sense.
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
Absolutely, my concern is that only way to curtail the corruption of copyright may be to abolish it completely, because of that I'm not convinced that copyright remains a net good for society. The content industry is always going to try and use it's money to influence legislation to benefit themselves, but I'm not aware of any governments where there is a similarly powerful voice to advocate for the rights of the people. Of course, that may be the real issue that democratic governments need to be redesigned to have a powerful advocate to prevent public goods from being given away to lobbyists.
If you can convince the governments of the world to abolish copyright (i.e. stop listening to the media industry lobbyists) then you could equally convince them to stop bowing to the media industry's demands (i.e. stop listening to the media industry lobbyists).
IMHO the problem is much deeper than copyright or the media industry: the problem is that governments seem to be more interested in listening to big industry and their own political agendas than what the _people_ want. And also the fact that once legislation has been passed, it is extremely difficult to have it repealed.
Many years ago, I used to like the idea of a united planet. These days I support the idea of having many independent sovereign states. The reason: because it is harder for bad laws to be "harmonised" across many independent states. That said, in the EU there has been benefit in that on occasion a foreign MEP stands up and opposes a bad law, preventing it from being passed, whilst the MEPs from my own country are clearly well under the industry thumb, so in these cases I'm glad to see foreign dignitaries standing up for my interests when my own people will not.
Personally, I'm torn on whether there needs to be any copyright at all. On the one hand getting rid of all copyright would allow publishing houses to return to the days where they take an authors work and publish it without paying him a dime. On the other other hand, maybe that would be better handled by non-disclosure contracts and standard civil law.
I can't see how copyright can be replaced with non-disclosure contracts (especially in an age when copying is cheap and easy). Lets take your example of the relationship between author and publisher: The author spends many man-hours writing a book and requires financial compensation from it so he can afford to live (the alternative is that he gets a job and only writes in his spare time, which I'm sure most people would agree would probably be detrimental to the amount of quality literary works being produced). So the author approaches a publisher and signs a contract saying they will pay him for the work. This contract may stipulate a lump sum, an amount per copy sold, or whatever, that's unimportant. The publisher produces the book, sells it, takes a cut of the profit and hands some cash on to the author. Another publisher buys the book from a high-street shop, scans it and starts printing copies themselves and selling them at a lower price. The original publisher can't shift their stock because they can't afford to sell as cheaply as the new publisher since the original publisher is bound by their contract with the author. The copying publisher has no contract with anyone, so is free to do what they like - in your "no-copyright" world, there are no laws to prevent them from doing this.
Essentially, your proposal to use NDAs in place of copyright suffers from the same flaw that prevents DRM from working - at some point you have to make the works available to end customers, and at this point someone can copy it (whether that simply be someone giving a copy to a mate, or a printer publishing 100,000 copies that undercut the original publisher).
The only way I can think of this being enforcible through normal contract law is by also requiring every consumer to also sign an NDA. The practice of requiring consumers to sign away their rights (such as software EULAs do) has the danger of licences progressively taking more and more rights (the consumer is already used to signing a contract, they probably don't read it and don't notice what rights are being revoked). There would be no room for negotiation, so if you don't like it your only option is to do without entirely.
in today's fast paced technological world maybe copyright needs to be no more than a few years after first publication.
I certainly support the idea that copyright shouldn't be as long as it currently is, but I don't think that "today's fast paced technological world" has anything to do with this. Morally, why should the author of a book receive less in a "fast paced technological world" than in years gone by? Its true that technology makes it easier for people to copy and therefore of the people reading the author's book a lower proportion will have paid him for it(*), but this is a reality of what *does* happen rather than what *should* morally happen.
(*) Note that whilst copyright infringement means a lower *proportion* will have paid, it does not necessarily imply that a lower *number* will have paid. Copyright infringement is actually quite good advertising. Anecdotally: I illegally copy music. If I like a song I tend to buy the CD, so the bands which produce music I like actually benefit from my infringement.
I'm increasingly becoming concerned that copyright must be abolished lest we put more people in prison for the crime of enjoying without paying.
I certainly don't think that copyright should be abolished. It serves a useful purpose (not least, it allows licences such as the GPL to work). However, the governments need to stop bowing to the wishes
In Britain, heroin is available by prescription. 50% of those with a prescription are able to quit on their own, compared to the 10% not on the prescription program.
The enforcement regime is already killing people on the peoples' dime.
The people on prescription are largely people who want to quit...
A thief who ignores "no trespassing" signs and breaks into a clearly private area should be viewed as having has given up his right to safety. The law should allow security systems that do bodily harm, problem solved.
I'm sure you'll be happy to go to jail after your automated security system causes bodily harm to someone who accidentally ventures onto your property without seeing the no-tresspassing sign (maybe because they didn't go via the main entrance, or maybe they were blind or don't read English?), or people like the post man, firemen, police, etc. who may well have legitimate business (that is beneficial to you) on your property.
However, given that the judge in a ruling against British Telecom forcing them to use Cleanfeed to block access to websites like Newzbin... Newzbin told BBC news that 93.5% of UK users have downloaded their Cleanfeed circumvention software.
This sounds like a BS statistic to me. Only one ISP has been ordered to block access, there are many ISPs in the UK, why would users who aren't blocked (since they aren't on BT) need circumvention software?
I just noticed that google maps only covers up to 85 degrees latitude. How many school kids are getting a distorted view that the earth stops there? What are the spy satellites not showing us in that 300 mile wide band between 85 north and the north pole, Santa?
Spherical mercator projection can't represent the poles in any sensible way. As you get closer to the poles, the map gets more and more stretched. This is usually ok since there isn't a lot of interest at the poles...
Have one company take over and be responsible for the network infrastructure. BT do this in the UK with broadband and wireline. It's not a stretch for this to happen with wireless as well without a detrimental affect on the customer.
I'm amused that you cite the clusterfuck that is BT as an example of "without a detrimental effect". As an end user, having to use a service provider with whom you have no contract can get really messy - if something breaks on OpenReach's network then your only contact is the ISP (who isn't responsible for the thing that's broken). Playing Chinese whispers with the ISP rather than having the ability to talk to (and if necessary, pressure) BT directly is not the way to get things fixed quickly.
A friend of mine works as a sub-editor for a national newspaper. He says they don't care about copyright. If they have an image, they'll use it. If there's any copyright claim later, they have lawyers to deal with that.
I have previously been told by people in the industry that tracking down the copyright holder for most photos is so onerous that its actually cheaper to just publish them and wait to be sued than to figure out who to pay before hand. Whilst I agree that where it is obvious who holds the copyright then they should be asked first, I can see that there are many situations where it isn't clear who to ask (some would argue that in this case they shouldn't be using the images at all, of course).
You're missing the point, they're small, light, durable and cheap. They also provide bare minimum performance to handle the web and email.
This whole attitude here is one of the main reasons why their not doing well these days. Granted there's a lot of marketing that's gone into convincing people that they need more power and that MS has been leaning hard on manufacturers, but still.
Yes, I think the netbook market has evaporated because the vendors have largely missed the reasons why the original netbooks sold so well: they were cheap low power machines. Then people started saying "I want windows instead of linux" and the vendors dumps linux installs and moved purely to windows. Then people realised that this was rubbish because windows can't run on such low power hardware. The vendors upped the hardware spec so it could run windows satisfactorily and thereby took away the things that made the netbook good in the first place. Basically, they took a good product that filled a niche and ruined it, then wondered why no one wanted them any more.
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Then walk away.
Don't like how Facebook does things? Don't use it.
Sorry, don't see how your point is relevant. The post I was replying to said "I don't see why people complain", not "I don't see why people use it". One sided T&Cs seem like a pretty good reason to _complain_, irrespective of whether or not you ultimately choose to use the service. Complaining that you were unable to use a service because they refused to negotiate reasonable terms seems reasonable to me.
Perhaps use something else with different terms?
This is exactly why we need an open distributed social networking protocol. At the moment, if you want to use a social network you basically don't have a choice other than Facebook (well, ok, you could go use something like Google+ instead, but that would be a waste of time since a social network that doesn't have any of your friends on isn't much use). For email I can use whatever service provider I like and still talk to my friends (who are using whatever service provider they like) - the same needs to happen for social networks.
I think I agree with you. I never understood why people complain about what sites do when all of what they do is in the terms.
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Same. You can only get so many "I clicked X and an error popped up" bug reports with no information beyond that quote in the bug body before you look to a real solution.
You get information like "I clicked X"? The reports I get don't usually even tell me that much.
I tend to get "the internet doesn't work" (I write and manage proxy and email systems). This can mean various things: 1. The whole internet connection is down (why are you calling me? I'm not your ISP...) 2. I can't access my webmail 3. I can't send an email from my MUA 4. Someone on the other side of the planet sent me an email literally 2 seconds ago and I haven't received it!!!! 5. I can't access any web pages (any error messages that are appearing would be helpful... There's a big difference between "your account has been blocked" and "the proxy server has crashed") 6. *no one* on site can access any web pages. 7. I can't access a specific web page. etc.
And inaccurate information also doesn't help - a reoccuring one I get is customers telling me that no one can access any web pages (maybe they think this makes it sound more urgent?) when actually it is one specific site that is down (usually because that third party website is actually down and therefore beyond my control, rather than a fault with the customer's systems).
The ones that bring a smile to my face are the customers who phone me up ranting about how I haven't responded to an email they sent complaining that their internet connection was broken.... (this email usually pops into my inbox shortly after their internet connection is restored and their MTA flushes its queue out onto the internet)
Then once you get the water up to a lake: if it's an open body of water, you're going to have evaporation. That reduces the net efficiency all the same.
A tiny amount of evaporation.. so tiny it isn't really worth caring about. Also, if you're going to start calculating such minor things, rain will improve your efficiency a tiny amount.
Even if you went to heroic efforts in turbine mechanics and used hydrogen cooled motors and generators to reduce loss to air friction, I'd bet net efficiency over 70% would be very, very difficult to achieve, even in the best and most optimistic scenario involving an open body of water.
Dinorwig Power Station averages 74-75% efficiency with open bodies of water. (No where near the 90% that the grand parent suggested, but still better than what you claim would be optimistic).
Not to say that's a bad thing, but whether or not that would be useful is entirely dependent on the needs of the grid and the type of power supply on that grid. If you've got a nuclear station that needs to run at 90%+ 100% of the time (or whatever the case may be), hydro storage might make a lot of sense; use the surplus to store energy during the low demand times.
It makes sense just to cope with demand peaks. The aforementioned Dinorwig power station can hit peak capacity in 6 seconds if they have presynchronised the generators (75 seconds if not). There aren't many "traditional" power stations that can do that (I suspect even gas turbines would struggle to hit the 6 second mark).
Then why am I not hearing proposals to build giant cylinders of water on the coast/out on the water? During the day, you pump sea water into the giant column then let it out at night through the turbine. Is there a cost analysis that says anything like this is a good idea? It seems unintuitive.
I suppose you could build giant pipelines to natural inland lakes/rivers and stick a not-so Dam wall at the bottom just before the delta, during the day you pump water through the pipeline a long way upriver then shut off the pumps at night (solar) or low wind. Still sounds expensive, and less convenient since you can't put them where you actually need them (like batteries).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_mountain Pumps water from Llyn Peris to Marchlyn Mawr during off-peak periods and then lets it flow back through turbines as required. Lots of advantages over traditional power stations - for example, so long as know a high demand period is coming up (and demand periods are quite rigorously planned), they pre-synchronise the generators and can go from 0 to 1800MW generating capacity in only 6 seconds. If the high demand isn't expected, they can synchronise and hit full capacity in 75 seconds.
Nowadays the phone network seems to connect calls extremely reliably and unmetered call packages are common so you can chat as much as you like (provided you keep each individual call less than an hour).
BT's unmetered packages concern me somewhat. They are free up to an hour, but after an hour the per-minute charges are far higher than you'd pay on a metered package. What is the purpose of the hour limit? Presumably to trap people into accidentally overrunning the hour and inadvertently running up their bill. When tariffs are _designed_ to cause people to accidentally incur unexpected charges, I start questioning the ethics of the company involved...
I'm really glad I live in Europe where software patents are invalid. The current setup in the US in relation to patents is a total joke. Patents were originally conceived to encourage innovation. In recent years, companies are almost afraid to innovate because some troll or monopoly hungry public company will immediately jump out of the wood work screaming "SORRY, WE OWN THAT IDEA. WE'RE GONNA SUE YOUR A$$"
The annoyance is that organisations seem to forever bow to the lowest common denominator - if something isn't allowed in the US then Europe tends not to get it either. It would be much nicer if manufacturers produced a version of their devices with lots of functionality for use everywhere except the US, and a "land of the free" version especially crippled for the US market, so the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with the US's crazy laws.
The "savings account" wallet should be backed up in encrypted form only and all plaintext copies of this wallet should be erased. In case someone gains unauthorised access to your computer (either by physically stealing it or by exploiting a system vulnerability via the internet), they will only be able to spend the coins in your "current account" wallet."
I can't think of any other currency where forgetting the password to your bank account actually causes you to irreversibly lose the money contained therein...
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Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.
FWIW, this is why people like Google are concerned about publishing AAAA records - people with broken networks will see the sites become very slow.
This is usually caused by one of 2 problems:
1. Your machine has been configured with a default IPv6 route, even though there isn't actually any v6 connectivity. This is reasonably unusual, since in their default configuration machines usually expect to receive an RA to tell them what routes to set up, and in the absence of a router broadcasting RAs they will set no routes (which is correct). Maybe you had a misconfigured IPv6 router on the network that was telling client machines that it was providing an IPv6 internet connection when it wasn't?
2. Some DNS servers are completely broken and drop requests for an AAAA record. If your local caching DNS server is doing this then you basically end up seeing all web requests, etc. being slow since the browser will look up an AAAA record to find out if the website is accessible over v6 and the DNS server won't respond.
Worse: I've seen an authoratative DNS server actually return NXDOMAIN when asked for an AAAA record, instead of returning no record. This makes a caching name server decide that the domain doesn't exist at all (i.e. no A record either) until the NTTL expires. Unfortunately in the case where I saw this happen and contacted the website operator (offering them free help debugging the problem), they told me that everything was working fine and refused to fix it, so all I could do was tell my customer (who was experiencing problems accessing the site) that they would have to take their business elsewhere since the service provider was incompetent.
Exactly. Granted, on my own internal network I might not bother with setting up IPV6, and instead do the equivalent of a NAT for my internal servers to give them an IPV4 address and only have my border router deal with IPV6.
Why? One of the really big benefits of IPv6 is the lack of address translation. This means stuff like peer to peer services (e.g. VoIP) can work without having to use unreliable nat traversal technologies such as STUN (peer to peer systems have to exchange addressing information. If there is no NAT then they just look at the local machine's address. If there is NAT then they have to use various techniques to probe the NAT and then make an educated guess as to what IP address and port their traffic will be translated to). If you try to perform some non-standard NAT at the border, you're going to reintroduce a lot of problems that IPv6 was built to avoid, and you also introduce an overhead of having to manage the NAT.
Eventually -- which probably means "the next version of Windows" given how IT seems to work these days -- IPV6 will be phased in even internally.
Why wait for the next version of Windows? Windows newer than XP has supported IPv6 out of the box (XP just involves a driver install), Linux has supported v6 out of the box for over 10 years, OS X supports it out of the box, Android supports it out of the box, lots of Apple hardware Just Works with v6, etc. Just setting the router to send RAs should see most of the clients on an average network automatically start to use v6, no need to upgrade the OS or reconfigure it.
The vast, VAST majority of us only need IPv6 on the Internet. We are perfectly fine with IPv4 internally.
But in order to access IPv6 content on the internet, your local devices are going to have v6 addresses anyway, so they may as well use them...
What is actually going to happen is, DLink, Linksys and the other usual suspects are going to produce $100 "interface/translator" boxes that will "speak" IPv6 where needed.
That would require the boxes to understand high level protocols. For anything more trivial than web proxying, this is probably a recipe for management headaches. If people want single-stack networks, what is more likley is for whole networks to become IPv6-only and place a NAT64 and DNS64 box on the border of the network. Although frankly I'm not sure I can see the point - running a dual stacked setup is probably going to be easier than dealing with translation all over the place when talking to legacy equipment.
The idea that everyone and everything, from your television to your printer to your average small office filled with PCs is going to immediately jump on the IPv6 bandwagon is just silly. It's not going to happen, not for a very long time to come.
Woh there. Why is everyone assuming people are saying things are "immediately" going to happen? I don't think anyone is saying that - migration will be a gradual process, and of course there will be v4-only devices around for a good while that still need to be supported.
Despite technologies such as NAT64, I largely think the best way of handling the transition is to run the entire LAN dual-stacked. RFC1918 addresses on the internal IPv4 side with a NAT gateway on the border (whether that is on the border of your network or your ISP's network will probably depend on how much you're paying the ISP). On the colocated server side, there will probably be proxy servers and DNAT gateways to handle the IPv4 traffic, but at some point the cost of doing that is going to outweigh the benefits, and at that point we'll see v4-only users become second class citizens as money is not invested into these proxy solutions at the datacentres, but that isn't going to happen for a looong time.
I wonder if this is part of the reason for the planned speed doubling - replacing the modems for extra speed is easier to explain to the public (via DOCSIS 3, I expect), but getting IPv6 support as a nice "side-effect".
Possibly, although beyond a bit of management work there's nothing wrong with keeping IPv4 management addresses on the network so long as they can keep the number of addresses low enough, so no particular reason to upgrade existing customers, just a reason to start deploying IPv6 kit to new customers.
Plus, as long as no one advertises it, there's less pressure if it doesn't work, too!
ISTR that Virgin have said they will be rolling out v6 to end users by the end of the year, so that's a good thing. It would be nice to see more ISPs making statements about their position on IPv6 even if it is "we have no plans to implement IPv6" so you'd know which to avoid. (You wouldn't catch me subscribing to an ISP who said they weren't going to deploy IPv6 coz it demonstrates a complete lack of investment in necessary upgrades)
One would think that with all that IPv6-propaganda, that such IPv6-only (please remember the "only"-part here) services would be all over the airwaves.
Surely you can name a couple of those?
Couldn't you be bothered to google?
http://ipv6.cybernode.com/list-of-ipv6-only-sites
Your naivety seems to be as large as those of the IPv6-designers.
People are not as stupid as you may believe. They will not just take an IPv6 address and leave out 99% of their customers and wait years/decades until IPv6 happens. No, they will in some way get an IPv4 address, even if (gasp, oh noes) that involves paying some modest fee (which will be probably still be lower than what a domain costs today) or they will work around the problem using NAT.
You clearly don't understand the technologies involved. You cannot just "buy an IP address" from someone else - anything under a /20 won't get any routing on the public network. I'm sure that there will be transfers of address space between providers (for a fee) but none of this is as trivial as you make out.
I fully expect to start seeing _some_ parts of services becoming IPv6-only over the next few years. This will start with certain restricted markets where the service provider can pretty much guarantee that their end-users have IPv6 connectivity (as mentioned, there are already a number of IPv6-only websites in asia where the service provider knows that their target audiance is going to have IPv6 connectivity). Gradually (and yes, very slowly) we will see more and more services becoming IPv6-only.
I have thought for a while that companies wanting do do a "soft launch" of a service could do well from launching it as a v6-only website. For example, Google have a habit of restricting access to their new services by only allowing access by invitation in order to keep the adoption rate manageable. Instead of doing this, they could launch new services as IPv6-only to limit the adoption rate, and only later allow IPv4 access too.
No matter how ugly it's going to be, after some time the bugs are ironed out and it will work (unlike IPv6, which even Google can get to work on all their services).
IPv6 works fine - I've been using it for many years with no problems. I've seen no evidence of gogole being incapable of getting IPv6 working on all their services - it is true that AAAA RRs aren't published for all services at the moment, but that isn't an indication of Google being unable to do this, simply an indication that they haven't bothered to do so yet. No one is saying that the whole world needs to switch in an instant - this will be a gradual process and people saying "I'm not ever going to upgrade" makes them look like idiots. There is no reason to not upgrade over the natural hardware replacement cycle. Are you still running Windows 2 because you refused to upgrade to anything newer?
So you are fully correct when you say that many people are "going to start having problems", but unfortunately IPv6 is not a solution to the problems, because shutting out 99% of users is not a solution, period.
Who has said anything about shutting out 99% of users?
- The first IPv6-only services to have launched, have a restricted target audiance who already have IPv6 connectivity (so not shutting out 99% of their users).
- Over the natural replacement cycle, IPv6 support will be phased in everywhere. In order to avoid this, people would have to actively be avoiding IPv6 which seems like nonsense. Again, this isn't shutting out 99% of users, this will largely go unnoticed by users.
- I certainly envisage dual-stacked services that have more features when accessed over v6. This isn't shutting out 99% of the users, it is just being practical and not giving them such a feature rich service. These could well be features su
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200
But in 10 years' time, after the magic smoke has escaped from all that hardware, you'll have upgraded to kit that supports IPv6.
People saying "I'm never going to upgrade to IPv6" come across the same as people saying "I'm never going to upgrade from IE6" - in short, idiots. And in a few years time, like IE6 users now, they will probably be idiots who can't use some big services.
Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation
IPv6 in OS X, Linux and any Windows newer than XP pretty much Just Works with no configuration needed. You'd have to go out of your way to disable it.
MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
There will be legacy hardware that doesn't supprt IPv6 for some time, but in this restricted case is it a problem? I presume the MagicJack is basically an FXSSIP gateway, so whether you need IPv6 here depends on whether the SIP gateway it is connecting to has a v4 address. No one is saying you need to remove IPv4 from your network entirely.
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
Android has supported IPv6 since Android 2.0.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4
No, an IPv6-only device isn't going to be able to talk to an IPv4-only server (unless it uses a NAT64 gateway to do so). IPv4 is not going to suddenly disappear, dual-stacked clients are the norm, and as IPv4 addresses become harder to get hold of, ISPs will use carrier grade NAT to provision IPv4 to their clients. Talking to IPv4-only servers will still happen over IPv4.
Address exhaustion is largely a problem for servers, where NAT isn't really feasible. For many years to come, clients will have (NATted) IPv4 and (unNATted) IPv6 concurrently. Which is why it makes no sense when ISPs say "we don't need IPv6 because *we* have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses" - it doesn't matter if you have a big stack of spare IPv4 addresses if the people who operate the servers that your customers connect to don't.
What *should* have happened, is the telecoms regulators should have mandated that ISPs implement IPv6 support and sell IPv6 capable routers a good number of years ago since it was clear they were going to wait until crunch-time before bothering to do so without regulatory pressure. If that had happened, most end users would already have IPv6 capable internet connections and hardware.
There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available.
Given that 2^32=4.3 billion, you're wrong. There are a few million addresses locked up in old class A networks. If you bother to look at the consumption rate you'd realise that even if all of these addresses were returned to the pool they would buy a few weeks and then we'd be right back where we started. In short, recovering those addresses is going to be a lot of effort, will not solve the problem and will only postpone it for a very short length of time.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
IANA ran out of addresses at the start of last year. APNIC also ran out of addresses in the first half of last year. RIPE is going to run out of addresses this summer. We are *not* a significant number of years away from exhaustion. We've got maybe 3 years until there are no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate by any RIR. Reclaiming the legacy blocks to buy a few more weeks doesn't make sense.
There are no IPv6-ONLY services
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
Absolutely, my concern is that only way to curtail the corruption of copyright may be to abolish it completely, because of that I'm not convinced that copyright remains a net good for society. The content industry is always going to try and use it's money to influence legislation to benefit themselves, but I'm not aware of any governments where there is a similarly powerful voice to advocate for the rights of the people. Of course, that may be the real issue that democratic governments need to be redesigned to have a powerful advocate to prevent public goods from being given away to lobbyists.
If you can convince the governments of the world to abolish copyright (i.e. stop listening to the media industry lobbyists) then you could equally convince them to stop bowing to the media industry's demands (i.e. stop listening to the media industry lobbyists).
IMHO the problem is much deeper than copyright or the media industry: the problem is that governments seem to be more interested in listening to big industry and their own political agendas than what the _people_ want. And also the fact that once legislation has been passed, it is extremely difficult to have it repealed.
Many years ago, I used to like the idea of a united planet. These days I support the idea of having many independent sovereign states. The reason: because it is harder for bad laws to be "harmonised" across many independent states. That said, in the EU there has been benefit in that on occasion a foreign MEP stands up and opposes a bad law, preventing it from being passed, whilst the MEPs from my own country are clearly well under the industry thumb, so in these cases I'm glad to see foreign dignitaries standing up for my interests when my own people will not.
Personally, I'm torn on whether there needs to be any copyright at all. On the one hand getting rid of all copyright would allow publishing houses to return to the days where they take an authors work and publish it without paying him a dime. On the other other hand, maybe that would be better handled by non-disclosure contracts and standard civil law.
I can't see how copyright can be replaced with non-disclosure contracts (especially in an age when copying is cheap and easy). Lets take your example of the relationship between author and publisher:
The author spends many man-hours writing a book and requires financial compensation from it so he can afford to live (the alternative is that he gets a job and only writes in his spare time, which I'm sure most people would agree would probably be detrimental to the amount of quality literary works being produced). So the author approaches a publisher and signs a contract saying they will pay him for the work. This contract may stipulate a lump sum, an amount per copy sold, or whatever, that's unimportant. The publisher produces the book, sells it, takes a cut of the profit and hands some cash on to the author. Another publisher buys the book from a high-street shop, scans it and starts printing copies themselves and selling them at a lower price. The original publisher can't shift their stock because they can't afford to sell as cheaply as the new publisher since the original publisher is bound by their contract with the author. The copying publisher has no contract with anyone, so is free to do what they like - in your "no-copyright" world, there are no laws to prevent them from doing this.
Essentially, your proposal to use NDAs in place of copyright suffers from the same flaw that prevents DRM from working - at some point you have to make the works available to end customers, and at this point someone can copy it (whether that simply be someone giving a copy to a mate, or a printer publishing 100,000 copies that undercut the original publisher).
The only way I can think of this being enforcible through normal contract law is by also requiring every consumer to also sign an NDA. The practice of requiring consumers to sign away their rights (such as software EULAs do) has the danger of licences progressively taking more and more rights (the consumer is already used to signing a contract, they probably don't read it and don't notice what rights are being revoked). There would be no room for negotiation, so if you don't like it your only option is to do without entirely.
in today's fast paced technological world maybe copyright needs to be no more than a few years after first publication.
I certainly support the idea that copyright shouldn't be as long as it currently is, but I don't think that "today's fast paced technological world" has anything to do with this. Morally, why should the author of a book receive less in a "fast paced technological world" than in years gone by? Its true that technology makes it easier for people to copy and therefore of the people reading the author's book a lower proportion will have paid him for it(*), but this is a reality of what *does* happen rather than what *should* morally happen.
(*) Note that whilst copyright infringement means a lower *proportion* will have paid, it does not necessarily imply that a lower *number* will have paid. Copyright infringement is actually quite good advertising. Anecdotally: I illegally copy music. If I like a song I tend to buy the CD, so the bands which produce music I like actually benefit from my infringement.
I'm increasingly becoming concerned that copyright must be abolished lest we put more people in prison for the crime of enjoying without paying.
I certainly don't think that copyright should be abolished. It serves a useful purpose (not least, it allows licences such as the GPL to work). However, the governments need to stop bowing to the wishes
In Britain, heroin is available by prescription. 50% of those with a prescription are able to quit on their own, compared to the 10% not on the prescription program.
The enforcement regime is already killing people on the peoples' dime.
The people on prescription are largely people who want to quit...
A thief who ignores "no trespassing" signs and breaks into a clearly private area should be viewed as having has given up his right to safety. The law should allow security systems that do bodily harm, problem solved.
I'm sure you'll be happy to go to jail after your automated security system causes bodily harm to someone who accidentally ventures onto your property without seeing the no-tresspassing sign (maybe because they didn't go via the main entrance, or maybe they were blind or don't read English?), or people like the post man, firemen, police, etc. who may well have legitimate business (that is beneficial to you) on your property.
However, given that the judge in a ruling against British Telecom forcing them to use Cleanfeed to block access to websites like Newzbin ...
Newzbin told BBC news that 93.5% of UK users have downloaded their Cleanfeed circumvention software.
This sounds like a BS statistic to me. Only one ISP has been ordered to block access, there are many ISPs in the UK, why would users who aren't blocked (since they aren't on BT) need circumvention software?
I just noticed that google maps only covers up to 85 degrees latitude. How many school kids are getting a distorted view that the earth stops there? What are the spy satellites not showing us in that 300 mile wide band between 85 north and the north pole, Santa?
Spherical mercator projection can't represent the poles in any sensible way. As you get closer to the poles, the map gets more and more stretched. This is usually ok since there isn't a lot of interest at the poles...
Have one company take over and be responsible for the network infrastructure. BT do this in the UK with broadband and wireline. It's not a stretch for this to happen with wireless as well without a detrimental affect on the customer.
I'm amused that you cite the clusterfuck that is BT as an example of "without a detrimental effect". As an end user, having to use a service provider with whom you have no contract can get really messy - if something breaks on OpenReach's network then your only contact is the ISP (who isn't responsible for the thing that's broken). Playing Chinese whispers with the ISP rather than having the ability to talk to (and if necessary, pressure) BT directly is not the way to get things fixed quickly.
A friend of mine works as a sub-editor for a national newspaper. He says they don't care about copyright. If they have an image, they'll use it. If there's any copyright claim later, they have lawyers to deal with that.
I have previously been told by people in the industry that tracking down the copyright holder for most photos is so onerous that its actually cheaper to just publish them and wait to be sued than to figure out who to pay before hand. Whilst I agree that where it is obvious who holds the copyright then they should be asked first, I can see that there are many situations where it isn't clear who to ask (some would argue that in this case they shouldn't be using the images at all, of course).
You're missing the point, they're small, light, durable and cheap. They also provide bare minimum performance to handle the web and email.
This whole attitude here is one of the main reasons why their not doing well these days. Granted there's a lot of marketing that's gone into convincing people that they need more power and that MS has been leaning hard on manufacturers, but still.
Yes, I think the netbook market has evaporated because the vendors have largely missed the reasons why the original netbooks sold so well: they were cheap low power machines. Then people started saying "I want windows instead of linux" and the vendors dumps linux installs and moved purely to windows. Then people realised that this was rubbish because windows can't run on such low power hardware. The vendors upped the hardware spec so it could run windows satisfactorily and thereby took away the things that made the netbook good in the first place. Basically, they took a good product that filled a niche and ruined it, then wondered why no one wanted them any more.
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Then walk away.
Don't like how Facebook does things? Don't use it.
Sorry, don't see how your point is relevant. The post I was replying to said "I don't see why people complain", not "I don't see why people use it". One sided T&Cs seem like a pretty good reason to _complain_, irrespective of whether or not you ultimately choose to use the service. Complaining that you were unable to use a service because they refused to negotiate reasonable terms seems reasonable to me.
Perhaps use something else with different terms?
This is exactly why we need an open distributed social networking protocol. At the moment, if you want to use a social network you basically don't have a choice other than Facebook (well, ok, you could go use something like Google+ instead, but that would be a waste of time since a social network that doesn't have any of your friends on isn't much use). For email I can use whatever service provider I like and still talk to my friends (who are using whatever service provider they like) - the same needs to happen for social networks.
I think I agree with you. I never understood why people complain about what sites do when all of what they do is in the terms.
Because the T&Cs are very one-sided. You don't get to negotiate with a website and come to mutually agreeable terms, the website dictates some terms to you and you have to either accept them or walk away entirely.
Same. You can only get so many "I clicked X and an error popped up" bug reports with no information beyond that quote in the bug body before you look to a real solution.
You get information like "I clicked X"? The reports I get don't usually even tell me that much.
I tend to get "the internet doesn't work" (I write and manage proxy and email systems). This can mean various things:
1. The whole internet connection is down (why are you calling me? I'm not your ISP...)
2. I can't access my webmail
3. I can't send an email from my MUA
4. Someone on the other side of the planet sent me an email literally 2 seconds ago and I haven't received it!!!!
5. I can't access any web pages (any error messages that are appearing would be helpful... There's a big difference between "your account has been blocked" and "the proxy server has crashed")
6. *no one* on site can access any web pages.
7. I can't access a specific web page.
etc.
And inaccurate information also doesn't help - a reoccuring one I get is customers telling me that no one can access any web pages (maybe they think this makes it sound more urgent?) when actually it is one specific site that is down (usually because that third party website is actually down and therefore beyond my control, rather than a fault with the customer's systems).
The ones that bring a smile to my face are the customers who phone me up ranting about how I haven't responded to an email they sent complaining that their internet connection was broken.... (this email usually pops into my inbox shortly after their internet connection is restored and their MTA flushes its queue out onto the internet)
Then once you get the water up to a lake: if it's an open body of water, you're going to have evaporation. That reduces the net efficiency all the same.
A tiny amount of evaporation.. so tiny it isn't really worth caring about. Also, if you're going to start calculating such minor things, rain will improve your efficiency a tiny amount.
Even if you went to heroic efforts in turbine mechanics and used hydrogen cooled motors and generators to reduce loss to air friction, I'd bet net efficiency over 70% would be very, very difficult to achieve, even in the best and most optimistic scenario involving an open body of water.
Dinorwig Power Station averages 74-75% efficiency with open bodies of water. (No where near the 90% that the grand parent suggested, but still better than what you claim would be optimistic).
Not to say that's a bad thing, but whether or not that would be useful is entirely dependent on the needs of the grid and the type of power supply on that grid. If you've got a nuclear station that needs to run at 90%+ 100% of the time (or whatever the case may be), hydro storage might make a lot of sense; use the surplus to store energy during the low demand times.
It makes sense just to cope with demand peaks. The aforementioned Dinorwig power station can hit peak capacity in 6 seconds if they have presynchronised the generators (75 seconds if not). There aren't many "traditional" power stations that can do that (I suspect even gas turbines would struggle to hit the 6 second mark).
Then why am I not hearing proposals to build giant cylinders of water on the coast/out on the water? During the day, you pump sea water into the giant column then let it out at night through the turbine. Is there a cost analysis that says anything like this is a good idea? It seems unintuitive.
I suppose you could build giant pipelines to natural inland lakes/rivers and stick a not-so Dam wall at the bottom just before the delta, during the day you pump water through the pipeline a long way upriver then shut off the pumps at night (solar) or low wind. Still sounds expensive, and less convenient since you can't put them where you actually need them (like batteries).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_mountain
Pumps water from Llyn Peris to Marchlyn Mawr during off-peak periods and then lets it flow back through turbines as required. Lots of advantages over traditional power stations - for example, so long as know a high demand period is coming up (and demand periods are quite rigorously planned), they pre-synchronise the generators and can go from 0 to 1800MW generating capacity in only 6 seconds. If the high demand isn't expected, they can synchronise and hit full capacity in 75 seconds.
Nowadays the phone network seems to connect calls extremely reliably and unmetered call packages are common so you can chat as much as you like (provided you keep each individual call less than an hour).
BT's unmetered packages concern me somewhat. They are free up to an hour, but after an hour the per-minute charges are far higher than you'd pay on a metered package. What is the purpose of the hour limit? Presumably to trap people into accidentally overrunning the hour and inadvertently running up their bill. When tariffs are _designed_ to cause people to accidentally incur unexpected charges, I start questioning the ethics of the company involved...
I'm really glad I live in Europe where software patents are invalid. The current setup in the US in relation to patents is a total joke. Patents were originally conceived to encourage innovation. In recent years, companies are almost afraid to innovate because some troll or monopoly hungry public company will immediately jump out of the wood work screaming "SORRY, WE OWN THAT IDEA. WE'RE GONNA SUE YOUR A$$"
The annoyance is that organisations seem to forever bow to the lowest common denominator - if something isn't allowed in the US then Europe tends not to get it either. It would be much nicer if manufacturers produced a version of their devices with lots of functionality for use everywhere except the US, and a "land of the free" version especially crippled for the US market, so the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with the US's crazy laws.
The "savings account" wallet should be backed up in encrypted form only and all plaintext copies of this wallet should be erased. In case someone gains unauthorised access to your computer (either by physically stealing it or by exploiting a system vulnerability via the internet), they will only be able to spend the coins in your "current account" wallet."
I can't think of any other currency where forgetting the password to your bank account actually causes you to irreversibly lose the money contained therein...