Here, I get 100 megabits, up and down, for $65/mo. There's just that nasty cap. I suppose it's better overall, if there is no cap -- by my calculations, that's about 2 terabytes downloaded per month, vs my current limit of 20 gigs.
I guess that's the tradeoff. I very much like my ability to not have to always have something queued -- I often left my connection idle, but when I wanted it, it went full throttle. But still, even on DSL, I might've used more than 20 gigs/mo.
We'd encrypt standard video files, with commercials in them, give them out freely, and then when the TV show airs, we'd give out the key.
Well, I'd also likely find other ways to distribute the ads -- like, on the site one might go to download the file. And I'd keep them short enough in-stream (see Hulu) that people aren't tempted to skip them.
And, hell, if I had control over the player, I'd add a "skip ad" button. If it's just standard files, I'd make sure the end of the ad is a seekable location (a b-frame, I think it's called?) so that those of us with a "skip 10 seconds ahead" button can easily nail the end of the ad.
You and I would want to actually store the keys, but I can see even the most reasonable network demanding a new download of the key for each viewing,
Well, what I'd likely do is provide an API such that submitting play information is easy. Take last.fm -- I can play all my music in Amarok, including last.fm streams, and with one tweak, I can have Amarok report my listening habits to last.fm.
Being open standards, it could be turned off. But it would provide the data you'd need to make this entirely ad-supported.
However, television networks combine all the copyright paranoia of the RIAA and MPAA with the stupidity of television networks.
And I refuse to cooperate with their stupidity. I refuse to spend extra mental effort coming up with a scheme that I can sell to them as DRM snake-oil, and to the community as kinda-sorta open. I'd much rather show them how it's supposed to work, and if they don't like it, watch them destroy themselves.
Frankly, we're lucky TV networks haven't killed Hulu yet.
In several meaningful ways, they have.
I don't doubt that Hulu has to insert those ads, has to make them unskippable, and has to otherwise be obnoxious, or the networks wouldn't allow it. They certainly wouldn't allow Hulu to provide a download link, as Vimeo does.
But most importantly, they've killed Hulu for anywhere outside the US. That's the kind of move that just screams "I don't want your money! I'm glad you're watching my stuff on BitTorrent!"
At some point, some executive is going to come along and kill Hulu because doing so makes him look better.
I don't get it. How does this make him look better?
Maybe a 'competing' show is getting better Hulu ratings and worse broadcast ratings,
And killing it just makes him look like a jackass, not a brilliant artist.
You have a point, here:
To the outside universe, however, they appear less intelligent than garden slugs.
Your explanation of the reason why they act less intelligent than garden slugs does not change the fact that they really are less intelligent than garden slugs. If they are more intelligent, yet manage to act less intelligent for some reason, that's even dumber.
This is why we are currently seeing the music industry go down in flames. It's not because of piracy, it's because of how profoundly stupidly they reacted to it, and it's because of how absurdly inefficient their structure is.
I don't doubt the same thing will happen to the TV and movie industries, I just think it will take a bit longer -- we lack an iPod-like killer app, for one thing.
One of them is that freedom of speech does not, and never has, been intended to allow an attack on private individuals.
That may not have been its intent, but that is a necessary consequence.
You are free to speak out against a government or other public institution, although you must be able to back up what you say.
Absolutely not. I can (or should be able to) say whatever I want about any government or public institution.
If I say something wrong about said institution, they have precisely the same mechanism to defend themselves -- freedom of speech.
Now, certainly, we have other systems on top of that. For instance, you are free to make whatever claim you like about your home-grown herbal remedy, so long as you include the FDA disclaimer. Similarly, I can say whatever I like about an institution, but I cannot claim to be that institution.
Second, regardless of whether the pictures got distributed, the *names* should NEVER have been without express consent. This is more about the cops who released the photos than it is about the assholes who sent the emails,
I'll agree there.
However, once it's out there, not a lot you can do. At this point, for instance, Slashdot itself has released those names. So, I'd place the blame squarely on the original leak, not for the Internet doing what it always does. Going after individuals who actually screwed up is fine.
Going after the Internet, or anonymous people on the Internet, is just a Streisand effect. Suppose they catch this guy? I imagine they'll get even more harassment because of it.
Saying 'fuck you' to Joe Random on the internet won't meet any reasonable person's idea of causing emotional harm,
Since you mention exes, what if it's to my significant other? Those of us in relationships will know, by now, enough to be able to hit our loved ones hard, where it hurts. Look at any divorce, for example -- or even any healthy marriage, there's bound to be the occasional fight.
This is normal emotional shit that everyone has to go through. And just as we shouldn't run crying to our mommies every time a bully calls us a name, we also shouldn't run crying to our lawyers every time someone on the Internet does something we don't like.
This case was extreme, yes. But where do we draw the line? When is something actually "emotionally distressing", and when is it just someone overreacting? It sounds like the closest you're going to get is the pornography argument -- that is, "I know it when I see it" -- but that's a cop-out, when emotional harm is by definition subjective.
Want proof? Go listen to that dramatic reading I linked to. (Yes, there is audio.) Did you laugh? I did. I laughed hysterically. But to the person who wrote that letter, I'm sure that "dramatic reading" could cause a bit of emotional trauma.
And that's the heart of the matter: Is it trolling, or entertainment? Lighthearted satire, or inflammatory propaganda? Answer: Quite possibly all of these. The point of freedom of speech is so we can leave it up to the individual how to interpret things.
Go and read the 1st amendment to the US constitution (guessing that you're thinking of that) and you'll find it does not say what you assume.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...."
Yeah, it pretty much does. Unless you mean to say a law isn't needed?
If you didn't like that, why did you read it? Your fault, not my problem - at least that's what you seem to think.
Not my fault for reading it, the first time. If I don't want to see things like that from you, I can certainly censor you as far as my own perception goes -- either by avoiding your name, or using technological measures (marking you "foe" and tweaking some Slashdot settings; a Firefox extension / Greasemonkey script, etc.)
However, also not your problem, legally.
Ethically, it probably makes you a dick, and I would not defend you from any direct consequences of that -- like someone else saying, "You're a dick." But there is no law that states "Don't be a dick."
Of course, we're all speaking in hypotheticals. In reality, you have no idea how many exes I have, or who left whom. You're playing a numbers game -- most people would find that offensive.
Very likely. They sold my address, so it's quite possible they owe me something for that. I'm also likely to avoid doing business with them in the future.
You still get all the spam.
That's only with Gmail, and only if they've specifically targeted Gmail.
What is needed is "one-time addresses", or addresses that cease to exist after n messages arrive, where n is some low number suitable for you verification email to be mailed and maybe a couple more.
This should be trivial to write, if you really want it.
But I don't think that's a good solution. Why not just tag email sent to that address, and wait until it starts getting spammed? That way, you know who's likely to sell your address, and you have a bunch more spam to train a statistical filter on. (You do have a statistical filter, don't you?)
And, there's always the off chance that the service might legitimately try to send you other email -- for instance, Slashdot will email me when anyone replies to this message. But you always have the option of deciding it's not worth it and killing a toxic address.
The difference is, with your way, there is no choice -- you've already killed the address after the first few messages.
If ISPs are willing to do something like caching servers, it really doesn't matter what is used. However, I suspect that not only will ISPs not do this, they will actively oppose it, like they currently oppose streaming.
My understanding is, this is precisely what ISPs currently allow, and what CDNs rely on.
The only reason I can think that they would possibly oppose it is that many ISPs also sell television service, and they don't want the Internet to cut into that.
That was the point of torrents, to share among the people on the same ISP so tons of bandwidth isn't being used. And reduce demand on the originating servers.
BitTorrent isn't the best protocol for that -- everyone would try to connect to everyone else, resulting in, if anything, more traffic going outside the ISP, between users of multiple ISPs.
Add to that the fact that ISPs tend to fight BitTorrent...
If you do add enough intelligence to detect who's local to the ISP, you're still going to want a seed at the ISP. But at that point, BitTorrent doesn't buy you much over a CDN, if the ISP is seeding -- that's like trying to do a torrent over a LAN.
Ergo, my proposal was for an interface that isn't hackable before the release date of the file. (Simply because no one's going to crack the encryption in that time.)
That would work, but that's why I suggested GPG. No need for them to keep the software around it proprietary, or attempt to turn it into a DRM scheme after the release date.
For example, much of my personal information is publicly available if you know where to look... that doesn't give you a right to make a phone call and remind me of all of the painful events in my life.
I would say it does. If you don't want that to happen, hang up on me, and don't post those details in the first place.
He sent it to her family with the intent to do emotional harm... that is, or at least should be, a crime.
So, when a bully teases me on the playground, should I sue?
Sorry, but "intent to do emotional harm" is not a crime, and should not be. When I say "fuck you" right now, I should not go to jail for doing so. And yes, fuck you -- I like my civil liberties.
Lastly, brain imaging tools have come a very, very, long way. Did you see a recent article which announced the discovery of a way to increase the sensitivity of micro-MRI machines by over 1,000,000 times?
None of which proves we can actually see what is needed to produce a consciousness. As a simple example: Cut off oxygen to the brain, and it dies. Do we know what would be required to bring it back to life?
It's hip to be skeptical,
Indeed. But with good reason.
There's this whole "geek Rapture" thing going on, where people look at Moore's Law, and watch Terminator, and come up with this "singularity" concept. Which sounds really interesting, and theoretically possible, but when I've talked to people about this, what I generally hear are wild assumptions -- that the machine _will_ have AI, just because once we get a certain amount of hardware, it'll Just Work, and it'll be many thousands of times smarter than we are, because computers are Just Better...
And so on, and so forth.
One example, researchers tied a glowing gene into mice to create glowing brain cells visible in real-time under a microscope. Then they began implanting several different color genes into different parts of the system creating 'rainbow mice'...
In other words, we could engineer a "rainbow human" -- is genetically engineering humans ethical? And then dissect that human's brain and find out how it works.
Or we could build a mouse AI.
This still doesn't indicate the ability to actually scan a human brain. What if some of what essentially makes us who we are is kept as electrical charges, and not neuron pathways?
So, perhaps even you are not quite as up to date on the science as you'd thought.
Granted, it sucks compared to what you'll get via satellite or cable. Last I looked, they were generally all in WMV or some Silverlight crap, and pitiful quality compared to the HD you might be used to. And HD does actually make a difference with sports.
Of course, personally, I agree with Ronald -- sports are pretty boring.
For once, I actually feel sorry for the family, and would much rather the images never made it out. However, the consequences of having an Internet capable of silencing something like this, once it's out, are unacceptable.
When I saw the head of a tiny Iraqi child, cracked open like a bloody egg by 'coalition' bombs I didn't wish that some asshole hadn't posted that to the internet, I wished that some assholes with bombs hadn't killed the child.
Well said.
In this case, we shouldn't wish that the pictures hadn't been posted. We should wish that the girl hadn't taken cocaine, hadn't driven at 100 mph on that road, hadn't lost control, and hadn't died.
in the UK, I imagine it would be an easy case of 'causing alarm or distress'
Here, I disagree. One person's "alarm or distress" is another person's "freedom of speech." We can generally agree in this case, but where do we draw the line? It isn't very far from this to "don't depict Mohammed in a cartoon."
At the end of the day, you can always filter your own mail, and grow a stronger skin. However, once we start censoring, you cannot express certain things, even when they are appropriate.
What they did was an act of singular cruelty, and what I have said should not be misconstrued as a defence of them or their actions.
According to the family, so was publishing the photos at all.
I would not defend their actions, but I would defend their right to take such action. And I find it especially ironic that you close with:
Surely a good reason to oppose censorship.
...except the censoring of sufficiently alarming or distressing things?
OCR is easy, obviously, with all the CAPTCHA news going around.
Bullshit.
OCRs typically boast 99% accuracy -- which sounds good until you realize that this means an error in every line or two of text.
CAPTCHAs only need to be able to solve correctly a small percentage of the time to be effective -- even smaller, given humans can screw them up, too, and that problem is getting worse. So for example, Gmail couldn't just blacklist your IP for trying to register gmail accounts, without seeing quite a lot of abuse -- and botnets make IPs almost irrelevant anyway. But even 10% accuracy, which would result in absolutely unreadable OCR, would still mean that out of every 10 gmail accounts you attempt to sign up for, you get one fully functional account.
Which is damned good, for a spammer.
But, it's though that by about 2025 the number of transistors and speed of processors will be such as to rival the brain and after that point all bets are off. It will be an exciting 15 years in AI research.
I'll place a bet: We don't currently understand the human brain very well. How do you suppose we'll be able to emulate it? And your guess of 15 years seems very optimistic...
Put another way, if I gave you a brand-new, top-of-the-line computer -- for the sake of argument, let's say it's a fully loaded Mac Pro -- only with the hard drive completely formatted, could you make it do anything useful?
I'll make it slightly more realistic. I'll give you what Linus Torvalds had: A copy of Minix and a C compiler. And of course, you've got more hardware than he does. Could you just write a modern OS?
If you assume that the raw power will let us "evolve" an AI, I'm going to suggest that it takes much more hardware to evolve a program into being than it does to run it.
But, if we imagine a conscious program we can imagine a being who can 'image' every moment of life (or of their brain), save it, and even rewind backwards, or stop and start states, easily. If you're an AI and you see something you don't want to remember, just rewind a bit and it's gone forever:P
Yes, the last 15 years or more of science fiction -- cyberpunk, in particular -- make clear just how cool it would be for an AI to exist. That doesn't mean we're anywhere close.
human intelligences uploaded into the machine
Here's the uncomfortable truth: It may well be that we create AI, but no means to "upload" ourselves. Ever. The best we can do is create AI children.
And they might not like us very much. See the other side of cyberpunk -- distopian futures with robotic overlords. (Terminator comes to mind.)
You willing to shell out the additional cash every month that trickles to the companies that will be shelling out the capital expenditure to upgrade those bottlenecks?
Yes, within reason. The current policies are generally not within reason.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch.
Until someone else tells them about a new one. Or the old one got canceled.
The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%
Mostly because Hulu sucks for new content. They'll hit it embedded somewhere, or they'll see it on YouTube, or a blog.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
Not a torrent, some multicast thing. And while we're at it, RSS would suck for that.
But you're right, that would be good for cases where large numbers of users want the exact same thing.
However, one of the big reasons for doing this online is to allow for the cases where this is not the case. I'm talking about things like -- I've discovered I like House, so now I'm going to rent (or download) a ton of past seasons. Or, I'm reading Slashdot or a blog, and I see an embedded video, or a link to a new one.
Or, I browse YouTube. I watch one interesting, informative video, then I look at the video responses, or the next one...
The more permanent solution here is the CDN solution: Just take whatever content you anticipate to be popular in a given area, push it out to massive caches there, and serve it locally. Or, simpler still, run connections through a caching proxy.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that,
If they do that, fuck it, another big point of going online is lost. Those past seasons of House? I can put them in my laptop and watch them on a road trip. I can watch them on Linux. I can plug my laptop into a TV and watch them there. I can basically do whatever I want with them.
They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
Ugh. This is why the early DVDs sucked, until they figured out that people did not like this.
The only reason people tolerate it for Hulu is they're too lazy to find a torrent, and the Hulu ads are generally quick.
ISPs would quickly set up proxy servers that downloaded every TV show available using this method once.... In fact, if the TV networks were clever, they'd have a free service for ISPs to do just that, and give them ability to download a show a hour before everyone else had it, so they'd have it already cached when the nightly downloads started.
Yes, this is called a CDN. It can be done for plain HTTP. It's what I was talking about, minus the proprietary streaming/playing program.
Of course, I still think the better solution might be a more global caching proxy, but that's tricky to do right.
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm
*facepalm* You really don't understand DRM, do you?
Which would mean that no one can get them in advance, and, yes, people would provide cracks to permanently decrypt the files
Again, no DRM needed. Just wrap it up in a plain old GPG file, hell, even an encrypted zip/rar. Let them be distributed via multicast, or bittorrent, or whatever -- it can be a completely open system. Provide the keys via RSS or something.
Of course, this all falls apart for things which are actually live... Then again, those work via multicast.
What I've seen of power grids fluxuating in the summer is, they might go out for a fer hours, maybe a few times. Internet does that too, occasionally, though not as much.
Which is not the same as the power company insisting that I am not allowed to draw that much power, or charging absurd overages. It is certainly not the same as the power company telling me what I am allowed to use my power for -- those are the net neutrality issues.
Following your argument, the net should be built to handle peak load,
Yes. And continually upgraded to handle more peak load.
everybody wants to use the net at those times and expects the subscribed bandwidth.
Well, define "everybody".
Also, not everybody needs the full bandwidth at that time -- in fact, the full bandwidth would often be better spent leaving a download running overnight.
Reasonable volume limits do not provide an incentive not to use your subscribed bandwidth at peak times and neither does flat-price metering. Both only serve to reduce the network load off-peak, but that's pointless.
I would think that both would serve to reduce the network load in general, peak and non-peak.
Otherwise you're looking at a full speed for everybody all the time network, which is just too expensive.
So far. But that is where I think the focus should be.
After all, we're certainly at the point where a dialup user, were it not for the phone line, could go full-throttle all the time, and no one would care. It's not hard to imagine a point in the future where the same is true of the bandwidth we might consider "good" today.
The alternative is the current model: You get a guaranteed last mile bandwidth and everything beyond that is best-effort, which results in significantly reduced "external" bandwidth at peak times, but makes for simple contracts and doesn't impose unnecessary limits on users' off-peak usage.
The unfortunate problem there is: "Significantly" can be very significant, and it's also unpredictable. Just what kind of service am I signing up for? You almost never see a guaranteed minimum external bandwidth, either.
Thus, we're back at the original problem (before we saw real bandwidth caps defined): unclear or outright deceptive contracts. I don't like my current ISP because I'm limited to 20 gigs/mo -- but at least I know that's the limit. I can monitor it, and if I stay within that limit, I'm going to get damn near 100 mbits/sec whenever I need it.
He's only starting to realize now that... there's a huge ecosystem of programmers who have never ever used a single MS API.
Try actually reading the entire article. As he says:
I know, I know, at this point the 2.3% of the world that uses Macintoshes are warming up their email programs to send me a scathing letter about how much they love their Macs. Once again, I'm speaking in large trends and generalizing, so don't waste your time. I know you love your Mac. I know it runs everything you need. I love you, you're a Pepper, but you're only 2.3% of the world, so this article isn't about you.
How about your point here:
You're not helping you if you keep reading the trash there: it contains a lot of bogus and short-sighted information.
Citation needed.
The one point you made is that he's ex-Microsoft, and thus focuses on Microsoft. Duh. But consider also that Microsoft still has massive marketshare, and still matters. He makes some good points here which you haven't refuted, other than to attack his potential bias -- a subtle ad-hominim.
Let me put it this way: When I can walk into a store, pick up a computer game without even looking at the box, and take it home and expect play it on any OS but Windows, you might have a point. When I can develop a website in Firefox, test in Opera and Konqueror (and Chrome when there's a Linux port), and not give a fuck about IE, you might have a point.
I don't think it's quite fair to call the systems Linux unless they actually, you know, consist of Linux
Granted.
The point here was that with Linux dominance, most programs will be source-compatible with these other systems (or will require very little effort). Some of them even contain Linux compatibility layers, thus allowing Linux binaries to run.
Thus, Unix would've been more accurate, but the point stands: Linux dominance doesn't even end competition on kernels.
Alright, but translate it properly, first. The saying is actually "No more than an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
Since as far as I know, none of these doctors were actually killed, that would be considerably more.
how can you think a life like that is worth allowing continuing to exist?
Because people are complicated. Because even assuming all of this is true, those responsible may not be beyond recovery. And because we don't get to kill people just because we don't like them -- we kill people who are actually a threat to society.
Who are you to judge the value of a human life?
Find from. Hang him. Find to. Hang him.
Great, so I can be sentenced to death by someone forging an SMTP header.
Then, find everyone above from and to in the corporate hierarchy and hang them.
Because people above from and to obviously condoned the action? How do you know?
Or, if killings' too salty for you... people who commit physical harm against another should be commited to slavery, and owned by the victim.
You know, I'm all for tracking them down, putting them on trial, even sentencing them to life imprisonment. But this lynch mob thing you've got going... Sorry, you've become what you hate. In fact, I'd rather be associated with their deliberate, premeditated murder than your lynch-mob murder.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh oh..
Upload speed: 5 megabits. Download speed: 8 megabits. Price: $65/mo.
Here, I get 100 megabits, up and down, for $65/mo. There's just that nasty cap. I suppose it's better overall, if there is no cap -- by my calculations, that's about 2 terabytes downloaded per month, vs my current limit of 20 gigs.
I guess that's the tradeoff. I very much like my ability to not have to always have something queued -- I often left my connection idle, but when I wanted it, it went full throttle. But still, even on DSL, I might've used more than 20 gigs/mo.
Well, thanks for the info. I'll keep it in mind.
We'd encrypt standard video files, with commercials in them, give them out freely, and then when the TV show airs, we'd give out the key.
Well, I'd also likely find other ways to distribute the ads -- like, on the site one might go to download the file. And I'd keep them short enough in-stream (see Hulu) that people aren't tempted to skip them.
And, hell, if I had control over the player, I'd add a "skip ad" button. If it's just standard files, I'd make sure the end of the ad is a seekable location (a b-frame, I think it's called?) so that those of us with a "skip 10 seconds ahead" button can easily nail the end of the ad.
You and I would want to actually store the keys, but I can see even the most reasonable network demanding a new download of the key for each viewing,
Well, what I'd likely do is provide an API such that submitting play information is easy. Take last.fm -- I can play all my music in Amarok, including last.fm streams, and with one tweak, I can have Amarok report my listening habits to last.fm.
Being open standards, it could be turned off. But it would provide the data you'd need to make this entirely ad-supported.
However, television networks combine all the copyright paranoia of the RIAA and MPAA with the stupidity of television networks.
And I refuse to cooperate with their stupidity. I refuse to spend extra mental effort coming up with a scheme that I can sell to them as DRM snake-oil, and to the community as kinda-sorta open. I'd much rather show them how it's supposed to work, and if they don't like it, watch them destroy themselves.
Frankly, we're lucky TV networks haven't killed Hulu yet.
In several meaningful ways, they have.
I don't doubt that Hulu has to insert those ads, has to make them unskippable, and has to otherwise be obnoxious, or the networks wouldn't allow it. They certainly wouldn't allow Hulu to provide a download link, as Vimeo does.
But most importantly, they've killed Hulu for anywhere outside the US. That's the kind of move that just screams "I don't want your money! I'm glad you're watching my stuff on BitTorrent!"
At some point, some executive is going to come along and kill Hulu because doing so makes him look better.
I don't get it. How does this make him look better?
Maybe a 'competing' show is getting better Hulu ratings and worse broadcast ratings,
And killing it just makes him look like a jackass, not a brilliant artist.
You have a point, here:
To the outside universe, however, they appear less intelligent than garden slugs.
Your explanation of the reason why they act less intelligent than garden slugs does not change the fact that they really are less intelligent than garden slugs. If they are more intelligent, yet manage to act less intelligent for some reason, that's even dumber.
This is why we are currently seeing the music industry go down in flames. It's not because of piracy, it's because of how profoundly stupidly they reacted to it, and it's because of how absurdly inefficient their structure is.
I don't doubt the same thing will happen to the TV and movie industries, I just think it will take a bit longer -- we lack an iPod-like killer app, for one thing.
One of them is that freedom of speech does not, and never has, been intended to allow an attack on private individuals.
That may not have been its intent, but that is a necessary consequence.
You are free to speak out against a government or other public institution, although you must be able to back up what you say.
Absolutely not. I can (or should be able to) say whatever I want about any government or public institution.
If I say something wrong about said institution, they have precisely the same mechanism to defend themselves -- freedom of speech.
Now, certainly, we have other systems on top of that. For instance, you are free to make whatever claim you like about your home-grown herbal remedy, so long as you include the FDA disclaimer. Similarly, I can say whatever I like about an institution, but I cannot claim to be that institution.
Second, regardless of whether the pictures got distributed, the *names* should NEVER have been without express consent. This is more about the cops who released the photos than it is about the assholes who sent the emails,
I'll agree there.
However, once it's out there, not a lot you can do. At this point, for instance, Slashdot itself has released those names. So, I'd place the blame squarely on the original leak, not for the Internet doing what it always does. Going after individuals who actually screwed up is fine.
Going after the Internet, or anonymous people on the Internet, is just a Streisand effect. Suppose they catch this guy? I imagine they'll get even more harassment because of it.
Nono, not that chef, this chef!
Well, children, cross-distro remote package administration is like making love to a beautiful woman...
Or, better -- have your update script be setuid. Or better yet, have it mentioned in sudoers. Then, your command would be something like:
ssh updates@$address 'sudo /usr/local/sbin/do_updates'
Then, even something as simple as Capistrano to parallize it across machines. As a cap script, this would be even simpler:
Of course, once you get to more than 100 machines, you really need something more sophisticated. Puppet might be one option...
Saying 'fuck you' to Joe Random on the internet won't meet any reasonable person's idea of causing emotional harm,
Since you mention exes, what if it's to my significant other? Those of us in relationships will know, by now, enough to be able to hit our loved ones hard, where it hurts. Look at any divorce, for example -- or even any healthy marriage, there's bound to be the occasional fight.
At what point do we get to sue because you make me touch your hands for stupid reasons?
This is normal emotional shit that everyone has to go through. And just as we shouldn't run crying to our mommies every time a bully calls us a name, we also shouldn't run crying to our lawyers every time someone on the Internet does something we don't like.
This case was extreme, yes. But where do we draw the line? When is something actually "emotionally distressing", and when is it just someone overreacting? It sounds like the closest you're going to get is the pornography argument -- that is, "I know it when I see it" -- but that's a cop-out, when emotional harm is by definition subjective.
Want proof? Go listen to that dramatic reading I linked to. (Yes, there is audio.) Did you laugh? I did. I laughed hysterically. But to the person who wrote that letter, I'm sure that "dramatic reading" could cause a bit of emotional trauma.
And that's the heart of the matter: Is it trolling, or entertainment? Lighthearted satire, or inflammatory propaganda? Answer: Quite possibly all of these. The point of freedom of speech is so we can leave it up to the individual how to interpret things.
Go and read the 1st amendment to the US constitution (guessing that you're thinking of that) and you'll find it does not say what you assume.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...."
Yeah, it pretty much does. Unless you mean to say a law isn't needed?
If you didn't like that, why did you read it? Your fault, not my problem - at least that's what you seem to think.
Not my fault for reading it, the first time. If I don't want to see things like that from you, I can certainly censor you as far as my own perception goes -- either by avoiding your name, or using technological measures (marking you "foe" and tweaking some Slashdot settings; a Firefox extension / Greasemonkey script, etc.)
However, also not your problem, legally.
Ethically, it probably makes you a dick, and I would not defend you from any direct consequences of that -- like someone else saying, "You're a dick." But there is no law that states "Don't be a dick."
Of course, we're all speaking in hypotheticals. In reality, you have no idea how many exes I have, or who left whom. You're playing a numbers game -- most people would find that offensive.
You were planning to call them up
Very likely. They sold my address, so it's quite possible they owe me something for that. I'm also likely to avoid doing business with them in the future.
You still get all the spam.
That's only with Gmail, and only if they've specifically targeted Gmail.
What is needed is "one-time addresses", or addresses that cease to exist after n messages arrive, where n is some low number suitable for you verification email to be mailed and maybe a couple more.
This should be trivial to write, if you really want it.
But I don't think that's a good solution. Why not just tag email sent to that address, and wait until it starts getting spammed? That way, you know who's likely to sell your address, and you have a bunch more spam to train a statistical filter on. (You do have a statistical filter, don't you?)
And, there's always the off chance that the service might legitimately try to send you other email -- for instance, Slashdot will email me when anyone replies to this message. But you always have the option of deciding it's not worth it and killing a toxic address.
The difference is, with your way, there is no choice -- you've already killed the address after the first few messages.
If ISPs are willing to do something like caching servers, it really doesn't matter what is used. However, I suspect that not only will ISPs not do this, they will actively oppose it, like they currently oppose streaming.
My understanding is, this is precisely what ISPs currently allow, and what CDNs rely on.
The only reason I can think that they would possibly oppose it is that many ISPs also sell television service, and they don't want the Internet to cut into that.
That was the point of torrents, to share among the people on the same ISP so tons of bandwidth isn't being used. And reduce demand on the originating servers.
BitTorrent isn't the best protocol for that -- everyone would try to connect to everyone else, resulting in, if anything, more traffic going outside the ISP, between users of multiple ISPs.
Add to that the fact that ISPs tend to fight BitTorrent...
If you do add enough intelligence to detect who's local to the ISP, you're still going to want a seed at the ISP. But at that point, BitTorrent doesn't buy you much over a CDN, if the ISP is seeding -- that's like trying to do a torrent over a LAN.
Ergo, my proposal was for an interface that isn't hackable before the release date of the file. (Simply because no one's going to crack the encryption in that time.)
That would work, but that's why I suggested GPG. No need for them to keep the software around it proprietary, or attempt to turn it into a DRM scheme after the release date.
For example, much of my personal information is publicly available if you know where to look... that doesn't give you a right to make a phone call and remind me of all of the painful events in my life.
I would say it does. If you don't want that to happen, hang up on me, and don't post those details in the first place.
He sent it to her family with the intent to do emotional harm... that is, or at least should be, a crime.
So, when a bully teases me on the playground, should I sue?
Sorry, but "intent to do emotional harm" is not a crime, and should not be. When I say "fuck you" right now, I should not go to jail for doing so. And yes, fuck you -- I like my civil liberties.
Lastly, brain imaging tools have come a very, very, long way. Did you see a recent article which announced the discovery of a way to increase the sensitivity of micro-MRI machines by over 1,000,000 times?
None of which proves we can actually see what is needed to produce a consciousness. As a simple example: Cut off oxygen to the brain, and it dies. Do we know what would be required to bring it back to life?
It's hip to be skeptical,
Indeed. But with good reason.
There's this whole "geek Rapture" thing going on, where people look at Moore's Law, and watch Terminator, and come up with this "singularity" concept. Which sounds really interesting, and theoretically possible, but when I've talked to people about this, what I generally hear are wild assumptions -- that the machine _will_ have AI, just because once we get a certain amount of hardware, it'll Just Work, and it'll be many thousands of times smarter than we are, because computers are Just Better...
And so on, and so forth.
One example, researchers tied a glowing gene into mice to create glowing brain cells visible in real-time under a microscope. Then they began implanting several different color genes into different parts of the system creating 'rainbow mice'...
In other words, we could engineer a "rainbow human" -- is genetically engineering humans ethical? And then dissect that human's brain and find out how it works.
Or we could build a mouse AI.
This still doesn't indicate the ability to actually scan a human brain. What if some of what essentially makes us who we are is kept as electrical charges, and not neuron pathways?
So, perhaps even you are not quite as up to date on the science as you'd thought.
Probably.
Live sports streamed over the Internet.
Granted, it sucks compared to what you'll get via satellite or cable. Last I looked, they were generally all in WMV or some Silverlight crap, and pitiful quality compared to the HD you might be used to. And HD does actually make a difference with sports.
Of course, personally, I agree with Ronald -- sports are pretty boring.
...Streisand Effect.
For once, I actually feel sorry for the family, and would much rather the images never made it out. However, the consequences of having an Internet capable of silencing something like this, once it's out, are unacceptable.
When I saw the head of a tiny Iraqi child, cracked open like a bloody egg by 'coalition' bombs I didn't wish that some asshole hadn't posted that to the internet, I wished that some assholes with bombs hadn't killed the child.
Well said.
In this case, we shouldn't wish that the pictures hadn't been posted. We should wish that the girl hadn't taken cocaine, hadn't driven at 100 mph on that road, hadn't lost control, and hadn't died.
in the UK, I imagine it would be an easy case of 'causing alarm or distress'
Here, I disagree. One person's "alarm or distress" is another person's "freedom of speech." We can generally agree in this case, but where do we draw the line? It isn't very far from this to "don't depict Mohammed in a cartoon."
At the end of the day, you can always filter your own mail, and grow a stronger skin. However, once we start censoring, you cannot express certain things, even when they are appropriate.
What they did was an act of singular cruelty, and what I have said should not be misconstrued as a defence of them or their actions.
According to the family, so was publishing the photos at all.
I would not defend their actions, but I would defend their right to take such action. And I find it especially ironic that you close with:
Surely a good reason to oppose censorship.
...except the censoring of sufficiently alarming or distressing things?
OCR is easy, obviously, with all the CAPTCHA news going around.
Bullshit.
OCRs typically boast 99% accuracy -- which sounds good until you realize that this means an error in every line or two of text.
CAPTCHAs only need to be able to solve correctly a small percentage of the time to be effective -- even smaller, given humans can screw them up, too, and that problem is getting worse. So for example, Gmail couldn't just blacklist your IP for trying to register gmail accounts, without seeing quite a lot of abuse -- and botnets make IPs almost irrelevant anyway. But even 10% accuracy, which would result in absolutely unreadable OCR, would still mean that out of every 10 gmail accounts you attempt to sign up for, you get one fully functional account.
Which is damned good, for a spammer.
But, it's though that by about 2025 the number of transistors and speed of processors will be such as to rival the brain and after that point all bets are off. It will be an exciting 15 years in AI research.
I'll place a bet: We don't currently understand the human brain very well. How do you suppose we'll be able to emulate it? And your guess of 15 years seems very optimistic...
Put another way, if I gave you a brand-new, top-of-the-line computer -- for the sake of argument, let's say it's a fully loaded Mac Pro -- only with the hard drive completely formatted, could you make it do anything useful?
I'll make it slightly more realistic. I'll give you what Linus Torvalds had: A copy of Minix and a C compiler. And of course, you've got more hardware than he does. Could you just write a modern OS?
If you assume that the raw power will let us "evolve" an AI, I'm going to suggest that it takes much more hardware to evolve a program into being than it does to run it.
But, if we imagine a conscious program we can imagine a being who can 'image' every moment of life (or of their brain), save it, and even rewind backwards, or stop and start states, easily. If you're an AI and you see something you don't want to remember, just rewind a bit and it's gone forever :P
Yes, the last 15 years or more of science fiction -- cyberpunk, in particular -- make clear just how cool it would be for an AI to exist. That doesn't mean we're anywhere close.
human intelligences uploaded into the machine
Here's the uncomfortable truth: It may well be that we create AI, but no means to "upload" ourselves. Ever. The best we can do is create AI children.
And they might not like us very much. See the other side of cyberpunk -- distopian futures with robotic overlords. (Terminator comes to mind.)
Linux by itself is "just" a kernel. Solaris has a decent kernel of its own, doesn't need Linux.
There are things about the Linux kernel that I find cool, that I'm not sure if Solaris has.
You willing to shell out the additional cash every month that trickles to the companies that will be shelling out the capital expenditure to upgrade those bottlenecks?
Yes, within reason. The current policies are generally not within reason.
Stop overselling bandwidth?
Stop overselling it by so much that people "abusing it" is a problem. Other industries manage to oversell without problems.
It's overselling that allowed cheap home broadband to exist.
Except that's not really "home broadband", at the rate it's currently oversold.
People, in general, know what TV shows they watch.
Until someone else tells them about a new one. Or the old one got canceled.
The amount of people browsing Hulu looking for new shows is maybe 5%
Mostly because Hulu sucks for new content. They'll hit it embedded somewhere, or they'll see it on YouTube, or a blog.
A trivial solution is to just have them all up as torrent that get downloaded via rss or something.
Not a torrent, some multicast thing. And while we're at it, RSS would suck for that.
But you're right, that would be good for cases where large numbers of users want the exact same thing.
However, one of the big reasons for doing this online is to allow for the cases where this is not the case. I'm talking about things like -- I've discovered I like House, so now I'm going to rent (or download) a ton of past seasons. Or, I'm reading Slashdot or a blog, and I see an embedded video, or a link to a new one.
Or, I browse YouTube. I watch one interesting, informative video, then I look at the video responses, or the next one...
The more permanent solution here is the CDN solution: Just take whatever content you anticipate to be popular in a given area, push it out to massive caches there, and serve it locally. Or, simpler still, run connections through a caching proxy.
If the networks want to retain control over said videos, it would be easy enough to encrypt them and provide proprietary player software. And, if they do that,
If they do that, fuck it, another big point of going online is lost. Those past seasons of House? I can put them in my laptop and watch them on a road trip. I can watch them on Linux. I can plug my laptop into a TV and watch them there. I can basically do whatever I want with them.
They could even not have 'skip' buttons on their interface, so everyone watches commercials.
Ugh. This is why the early DVDs sucked, until they figured out that people did not like this.
The only reason people tolerate it for Hulu is they're too lazy to find a torrent, and the Hulu ads are generally quick.
ISPs would quickly set up proxy servers that downloaded every TV show available using this method once.... In fact, if the TV networks were clever, they'd have a free service for ISPs to do just that, and give them ability to download a show a hour before everyone else had it, so they'd have it already cached when the nightly downloads started.
Yes, this is called a CDN. It can be done for plain HTTP. It's what I was talking about, minus the proprietary streaming/playing program.
Of course, I still think the better solution might be a more global caching proxy, but that's tricky to do right.
It's really hard to see how things would be worse with this system, especially if they used a good encryption algorithm
*facepalm* You really don't understand DRM, do you?
Which would mean that no one can get them in advance, and, yes, people would provide cracks to permanently decrypt the files
Again, no DRM needed. Just wrap it up in a plain old GPG file, hell, even an encrypted zip/rar. Let them be distributed via multicast, or bittorrent, or whatever -- it can be a completely open system. Provide the keys via RSS or something.
Of course, this all falls apart for things which are actually live... Then again, those work via multicast.
What I've seen of power grids fluxuating in the summer is, they might go out for a fer hours, maybe a few times. Internet does that too, occasionally, though not as much.
Which is not the same as the power company insisting that I am not allowed to draw that much power, or charging absurd overages. It is certainly not the same as the power company telling me what I am allowed to use my power for -- those are the net neutrality issues.
The formula is simple: Just charge either enough to deter usage, or enough to invest in the infrastructure required to handle that usage.
That doesn't have to mean "gouging".
Following your argument, the net should be built to handle peak load,
Yes. And continually upgraded to handle more peak load.
everybody wants to use the net at those times and expects the subscribed bandwidth.
Well, define "everybody".
Also, not everybody needs the full bandwidth at that time -- in fact, the full bandwidth would often be better spent leaving a download running overnight.
Reasonable volume limits do not provide an incentive not to use your subscribed bandwidth at peak times and neither does flat-price metering. Both only serve to reduce the network load off-peak, but that's pointless.
I would think that both would serve to reduce the network load in general, peak and non-peak.
Otherwise you're looking at a full speed for everybody all the time network, which is just too expensive.
So far. But that is where I think the focus should be.
After all, we're certainly at the point where a dialup user, were it not for the phone line, could go full-throttle all the time, and no one would care. It's not hard to imagine a point in the future where the same is true of the bandwidth we might consider "good" today.
The alternative is the current model: You get a guaranteed last mile bandwidth and everything beyond that is best-effort, which results in significantly reduced "external" bandwidth at peak times, but makes for simple contracts and doesn't impose unnecessary limits on users' off-peak usage.
The unfortunate problem there is: "Significantly" can be very significant, and it's also unpredictable. Just what kind of service am I signing up for? You almost never see a guaranteed minimum external bandwidth, either.
Thus, we're back at the original problem (before we saw real bandwidth caps defined): unclear or outright deceptive contracts. I don't like my current ISP because I'm limited to 20 gigs/mo -- but at least I know that's the limit. I can monitor it, and if I stay within that limit, I'm going to get damn near 100 mbits/sec whenever I need it.
He's only starting to realize now that... there's a huge ecosystem of programmers who have never ever used a single MS API.
Try actually reading the entire article. As he says:
I know, I know, at this point the 2.3% of the world that uses Macintoshes are warming up their email programs to send me a scathing letter about how much they love their Macs. Once again, I'm speaking in large trends and generalizing, so don't waste your time. I know you love your Mac. I know it runs everything you need. I love you, you're a Pepper, but you're only 2.3% of the world, so this article isn't about you.
How about your point here:
You're not helping you if you keep reading the trash there: it contains a lot of bogus and short-sighted information.
Citation needed.
The one point you made is that he's ex-Microsoft, and thus focuses on Microsoft. Duh. But consider also that Microsoft still has massive marketshare, and still matters. He makes some good points here which you haven't refuted, other than to attack his potential bias -- a subtle ad-hominim.
Let me put it this way: When I can walk into a store, pick up a computer game without even looking at the box, and take it home and expect play it on any OS but Windows, you might have a point. When I can develop a website in Firefox, test in Opera and Konqueror (and Chrome when there's a Linux port), and not give a fuck about IE, you might have a point.
I don't think it's quite fair to call the systems Linux unless they actually, you know, consist of Linux
Granted.
The point here was that with Linux dominance, most programs will be source-compatible with these other systems (or will require very little effort). Some of them even contain Linux compatibility layers, thus allowing Linux binaries to run.
Thus, Unix would've been more accurate, but the point stands: Linux dominance doesn't even end competition on kernels.
How about an eye for a fucking eye.
Alright, but translate it properly, first. The saying is actually "No more than an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
Since as far as I know, none of these doctors were actually killed, that would be considerably more.
how can you think a life like that is worth allowing continuing to exist?
Because people are complicated. Because even assuming all of this is true, those responsible may not be beyond recovery. And because we don't get to kill people just because we don't like them -- we kill people who are actually a threat to society.
Who are you to judge the value of a human life?
Find from. Hang him. Find to. Hang him.
Great, so I can be sentenced to death by someone forging an SMTP header.
Then, find everyone above from and to in the corporate hierarchy and hang them.
Because people above from and to obviously condoned the action? How do you know?
Or, if killings' too salty for you... people who commit physical harm against another should be commited to slavery, and owned by the victim.
Because slavery has always worked out so well in the past.
You know, I'm all for tracking them down, putting them on trial, even sentencing them to life imprisonment. But this lynch mob thing you've got going... Sorry, you've become what you hate. In fact, I'd rather be associated with their deliberate, premeditated murder than your lynch-mob murder.
Looks good, but what does it cost?