Public broadband (and worse yet public WIRELESS broadband) would quickly become unusable, for anything except fetching the weather report, due to massive over use by 2% of the user base. The over-grazers would just deplete the resource quickly.
Of course, municipalities could employ the same measures as private industry does to regulate usage, but just as with welfare programs once government is involved, multiple levels of consumer protection automatically attach (and rightly so, since its government), and you find out that you really can't get rid of the abusers.
And the mere existence of a government provider would prevent the situation ever improving because competition would be stonewalled. Private providers would have to fight the government for tower locations, right of way restrictions, licenses, etc. And the government, far from trying to facilitate (and thereby tax) these providers would have every incentive to block them at every turn.
No local government has any experience in running a large city wide network, and in the end the municipality would be forced to contract this out to the low-bidder. Budget constraints would prevent timely upgrades, (how can we spend one penny on broadband when children are going hungry?), and large sections of the service would fall into disrepair. Federal funds would be sought, state grants would be lobbied for, and in the end, everyone but the local citizens would be paying for that community's experiment in socialism.
The analogy to roadways bound to be raised but its not the same, and broadband is not essential any more than is TV service.
Lets face it, the allure of municipal broadband lies with the vision of free internet. Just like free public pasture land it never works out that way.
Fresh water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius and seawater water freezes at about -2 degrees C, therefore more freshwater would equal more ice formation. 4th grade science.
So after challenging my statement that "The major problem of a moon base, or simply visiting the moon, is the problem of fuel expenditures for lift off. " you launch into a great deal of nonsense about manufacturing fuels on the moon and mass accelerators and have the math all worked out (or so you say)?
Nice to just hand wave 5 years of construction, transport, and assembly into existence.
But hey, you said its easy. so.....
Best perhaps is to take your own advice and leave it to professionals.
With a moon base you have access to that water they mention, and perhaps enough sunlight to actually grow food (although the water seems to be in the wrong place for this). You have shelter by digging into the moon itself, and enough free raw materials to extract an atmosphere, make building materials, etc. You don't have to bring everything from earth. You have gravity as well, which makes for more comfortable living and building. None of that is available in moon orbit.
Although an orbiting moon base makes for a quicker return to earth vicinity, the value of "quick" makes it a fairly meaningless advantage. There is no point in putting a base in moon orbit unless you intend to frequently visit the moon surface. At which time you encounter the assent problem, the same problem you have with a moon base.
The major problem of a moon base, or simply visiting the moon, is the problem of fuel expenditures for lift off. For all the Buck Rogers si-fi we've written, we still can't carry enough fuel to get out of sight. Any system we have for getting off of the surface amounts to a zero-backup, Hail Mary. There is no plan B.
We (barely) got out of the moon program without the horror of stranding people there. Until a more realistic system for getting off the moon is built, putting a base there is just a disaster waiting to happen with our current technology.
Maybe it would be easier to build the often talked about space elevator on the moon.
Sounds like we need some sort of metamoderation for judges... are there no checks or balances against judges who pull shit like rubber stamping warrants and not actually finding out if they're legal or precise enough?
Well SCOTUS just handed down a rather severe metamoderation if you ask me.
Remedial constitutional law classes should be mandatory for any judge who gets over turned on strictly constitutional grounds. Don't expect to see it ever happen.
Even funnier is the fact that his own tenure at CRTC set the policy of openness on the internet of which he now complains: From the wiki article:
Under his leadership, the CRTC decided in 2009 to continue to exempt from its regulation broadcasting content that is distributed over the Internet and through mobile devices.
Looking at his history, I think I'd be willing to overlook this semi ridiculous outburst, as the rest of his record seems rather impressive.
Disclaimer: I have stopped paying attention to Canadian politics some time around the death of John Diefenbaker, and I wouldn't know if this guy is conservative or liberal or even if those labels mean anything like what they do in the US.
Let's hope this is construed to also apply to your cell phone GPS track that is collected by some carriers. Much of the data carriers collect and store can be obtained by police just by asking on letterhead.
Do people expect the military to admit that their drone wasn't hacked and gently landed? Of course they're going to save face here.
Did you read the linked article:
Then many Americans familiar with the RQ-170 carefully studied the pictures of the "captured" RQ-170 and immediately suspected something was off. For one thing, the RQ-170 shown was the right size and shape but the wrong color. Not just a different color from that seen on many photos of the RQ-170s in Afghanistan but also a color unknown in American military service. A closer examination of the Iranian RQ-170 photos indicated that the Iranians had reassembled an RQ-170 that had crashed and broken into three or more pieces.
It wasn't even the military that first noticed the paint job. And the landing gear was always hidden by drapery. If it landed intact why hide it?
The lightweight framework of copyright enforcement it created kept huge workloads away from the courts without creating unworkable levels of abuse
Lightweight framework of enforcement? You mean like having the entire DOJ work for the media giants leaning on every country in the world to violate their own laws and arrest people and surrender them to US authorities?
No unworkable levels of abuse? You mean like millions of take down notices filed every day against thing that have no pirated content what so ever, beyond simply mentioning a word in the title?
Tell me, what hole have you had your head in for the last 5 years?
Why is this even a criminal case? Why not leave it to the civil courts. When the music industry was ripping off artists in Canada, all that happened was a settlement. No people were arrested and extradited.
Exactly. In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry. Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you. Its up to you to defend your patent at your own expense, and you can file a police report about the burglary, but you will likely never see your property again.
Why is the US government acting as a mob enforcer for the Media Giants?
Te MegaUpload take down, not quite carefully timed to give Congress some balls regarding SOPA, is likely to become a circus act of the most grandiose proportions.
Not only did the Feds seize a foreign company, but they did so in the face of several SCOTUS decisions that held harmless the operators of sites that might contain user uploaded content which might violate copyright, in addition to billions of files that did no such thing.
With the government forced withdrawal of Megaupload's attorney Robert Bennett, citing rather insincere claims of conflict of interest, and the Justice department seizing a Foreign company this is far from the normal pattern for these cases. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Chinese government step into the fray any day now.
When the dust clears on this battle there will be some major revelations about how much pressure the DOJ used all over the world to affect this arrest and take down. Eight countries, big and small like New Zealand were leaned on to act, for largely theatrical effect as SOPA goes down to public pressure. The timing couldn't be accidental. But the DOJ miss timed it by three days, and their case is far from certain.
They just use this as a mean of hiding the fact that banks really have no idea if you'll be good for the money they are loaning you.
There may be some science to it, but that does not negate the idea that the banks have no other data about you in these countries. That is, after all, the main tenant of the article. It is precisely because banks have no way of evaluating your repayment potential that they want to surf your phone records.
And of course they have no plans to bring this business model to the North America or the EU precisely because such practices are outlawed in these countries. Even with a signed letter of authorization these companies wouldn't get any such info from the carriers. (Hell you often can't even get your own phone records from the carriers without a huge argument, a letter from law enforcement, or threat of lawyer, etc). The best they can do is demand a copy of your phone bill from you, which in many cases does not even contain detailed call info any more.
But that doesn't mean there is no science to it. Its easy enough to see patterns when you evaluate large numbers of people. Actuarial Science is pretty precise these days. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that if the failure rate of loans shows a huge spike among those people that make calls to certain numbers (bookies, drug pushers, or simply to no-name burner cells), maybe the bank would be better off avoiding those clients.
Bingo. Or the owner just wants to have his mansion be a tax write off.
And the wine cellar potential of that underground data center won't hurt the resale value a bit when the data center goes belly up. The picture in the linked shows a pretty dis-joint structure. Perfect for conversion into a tri-plex.
Most of these PLCs were simply too successful for their own good. Many of these designs were created in the 70s with no real intent of ever having then live in an on-line environment, but rather to be isolated in machinery as simple as pumps, motors, and simple stand along controllers for a variety of machines.
The problem lies not with the PLCs but the questionable decision to wire these things into the network.
Some of these things are extremely simple controllers. Others, like the mentioned D20 ME are micro computers onto themselves. These devices are built from a long line of simple process controllers, which grew to their current state from simply hanging more and more interfaces, better processors, and a mountain of legacy software, onto what started life as a very simple device.
None of them were ever intended to be put directly on the wild and wooly net, even when the did contain Ethernet ports, modems, and radios. Everyone assumed these were on their own in-plant network and that no one would hook them up to even their general purpose lan, let alone to computers accessible to the internet.
Anything less successful would have been replaced by a total redesign and rewrite from the ground up.
Oh, I don't know, profanity and all, I suggest its a sociological gold mine that gets more valuable as time goes on. It costs a little bit of disk space, but realistically the history is worth something.
You still find a lot of stuff posted over there about current products - it seems to be Google's Forum for tech support these days.
If they can this easily kill off Google Message Continuity, something marketed only to Enterprise customers running Exchange, then why would any enterprise consider using any of their services? Their migration path is just to move everyone to Gmail. If that's what the company wanted in the first place, they would've just done that.
This was a money losing proposition from the get go, and one you can easily replicate by doing a proper server backup to any off-site location. "Hundreds of Businesses" use it.
What they found is that user wanted to use Gmail, entirely walking away from exchange. The more success they had selling Google Apps (including paid Gmail customers) the less candidates for GMC. "Millions of Businesses" use Google Apps.
If you missed the bit about Hundreds vs Millions you might be forgiven. It was buried fairly deep.
Buried deeper is the fact that you can walk away from GMC tomorrow morning at 8am and have a competitive solution in place by noon, or operate with your own backup. You find it much tougher walking away from Google Apps or using Gmail for your entire in-house mail. You usually have no backup for that.
Even odder was the announcement about Needlebase:
Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google's other data-related initiatives.
Whoa, shutting down a data management platform they haven't even acquired yet? No, wait, twisted sentence structure!
The sync server being down would most likely have the same result as not having a network connection at all; Dropbox would just wait until it can connect, not affecting your files in any way.
Down is one thing, but the GP postulates that rights holder may be able to force the deletion of files not only on drop box, but also on your computer by simply continuing to run the servers. Anything in your shared area (as opposed to your encrypted area) could be (possibly) be deleted from your hard drive via this method.
Doing so would seem to be a legally risky move, but who you gonna sue? The DOJ?
Of course no one would have any way of knowing what is in your encrypted area. *Cough*.
Sharing copyrighted material via drop-box's un-encrypted public folder seems pretty dumb since it all ties back to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone also forgets the Tragedy of the Commons.
Public broadband (and worse yet public WIRELESS broadband) would quickly become unusable, for anything except fetching the weather report, due to massive over use by 2% of the user base. The over-grazers would just deplete the resource quickly.
Of course, municipalities could employ the same measures as private industry does to regulate usage, but just as with welfare programs once government is involved, multiple levels of consumer protection automatically attach (and rightly so, since its government), and you find out that you really can't get rid of the abusers.
And the mere existence of a government provider would prevent the situation ever improving because competition would be stonewalled. Private providers would have to fight the government for tower locations, right of way restrictions, licenses, etc. And the government, far from trying to facilitate (and thereby tax) these providers would have every incentive to block them at every turn.
No local government has any experience in running a large city wide network, and in the end the municipality would be forced to contract this out to the low-bidder. Budget constraints would prevent timely upgrades, (how can we spend one penny on broadband when children are going hungry?), and large sections of the service would fall into disrepair. Federal funds would be sought, state grants would be lobbied for, and in the end, everyone but the local citizens would be paying for that community's experiment in socialism.
The analogy to roadways bound to be raised but its not the same, and broadband is not essential any more than is TV service.
Lets face it, the allure of municipal broadband lies with the vision of free internet. Just like free public pasture land it never works out that way.
Fresh water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius and seawater water freezes at about -2 degrees C, therefore more freshwater would equal more ice formation.
4th grade science.
So after challenging my statement that "The major problem of a moon base, or simply visiting the moon, is the problem of fuel expenditures for lift off. " you launch into a great deal of nonsense about manufacturing fuels on the moon and mass accelerators and have the math all worked out (or so you say)?
Nice to just hand wave 5 years of construction, transport, and assembly into existence.
But hey, you said its easy. so.....
Best perhaps is to take your own advice and leave it to professionals.
Space Elevator:
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
With a moon base you have access to that water they mention, and perhaps enough sunlight to actually grow food (although the water seems to be in the wrong place for this). You have shelter by digging into the moon itself, and enough free raw materials to extract an atmosphere, make building materials, etc. You don't have to bring everything from earth. You have gravity as well, which makes for more comfortable living and building. None of that is available in moon orbit.
Although an orbiting moon base makes for a quicker return to earth vicinity, the value of "quick" makes it a fairly meaningless advantage. There is no point in putting a base in moon orbit unless you intend to frequently visit the moon surface. At which time you encounter the assent problem, the same problem you have with a moon base.
The major problem of a moon base, or simply visiting the moon, is the problem of fuel expenditures for lift off. For all the Buck Rogers si-fi we've written, we still can't carry enough fuel to get out of sight. Any system we have for getting off of the surface amounts to a zero-backup, Hail Mary. There is no plan B.
We (barely) got out of the moon program without the horror of stranding people there. Until a more realistic system for getting off the moon is built, putting a base there is just a disaster waiting to happen with our current technology.
Maybe it would be easier to build the often talked about space elevator on the moon.
but also the Check of the States upon the central power (tenth amendment).
That would be because the vast majority of the Checks of the States have been eroded or schemed away.
The fed was never supposed to be this powerful.
THIS!!
Sounds like we need some sort of metamoderation for judges... are there no checks or balances against judges who pull shit like rubber stamping warrants and not actually finding out if they're legal or precise enough?
Well SCOTUS just handed down a rather severe metamoderation if you ask me.
Remedial constitutional law classes should be mandatory for any judge who gets over turned on strictly constitutional grounds. Don't expect to see it ever happen.
Even funnier is the fact that his own tenure at CRTC set the policy of openness on the internet of which he now complains:
From the wiki article:
Under his leadership, the CRTC decided in 2009 to continue to exempt from its regulation broadcasting content that is distributed over the Internet and through mobile devices.
Looking at his history, I think I'd be willing to overlook this semi ridiculous outburst, as the rest of his record seems rather impressive.
Disclaimer: I have stopped paying attention to Canadian politics some time around the death of John Diefenbaker, and I wouldn't know if this guy is conservative or liberal or even if those labels mean anything like what they do in the US.
Actually I think the funny part is complaining that CANADIANS are eroding their own cultural by exercising their personal choice.
When an entire culture makes a choice, why would anyone presume to object?
Does your point number 1, above, mean they planted the tracker and only applied for a warrant after they found it yielded incriminating evidence?
Let's hope this is construed to also apply to your cell phone GPS track that is collected by some carriers. Much of the data carriers collect and store can be obtained by police just by asking on letterhead.
Can you not read? It was unanimous.
Do people expect the military to admit that their drone wasn't hacked and gently landed? Of course they're going to save face here.
Did you read the linked article:
Then many Americans familiar with the RQ-170 carefully studied the pictures of the "captured" RQ-170 and immediately suspected something was off. For one thing, the RQ-170 shown was the right size and shape but the wrong color. Not just a different color from that seen on many photos of the RQ-170s in Afghanistan but also a color unknown in American military service. A closer examination of the Iranian RQ-170 photos indicated that the Iranians had reassembled an RQ-170 that had crashed and broken into three or more pieces.
It wasn't even the military that first noticed the paint job.
And the landing gear was always hidden by drapery.
If it landed intact why hide it?
The lightweight framework of copyright enforcement it created kept huge workloads away from the courts without creating unworkable levels of abuse
Lightweight framework of enforcement? You mean like having the entire DOJ work for the media giants leaning on every country in the world to violate their own laws and arrest people and surrender them to US authorities?
No unworkable levels of abuse? You mean like millions of take down notices filed every day against thing that have no pirated content what so ever, beyond simply mentioning a word in the title?
Tell me, what hole have you had your head in for the last 5 years?
Why is this even a criminal case? Why not leave it to the civil courts. When the music industry was ripping off artists in Canada, all that happened was a settlement. No people were arrested and extradited.
Exactly.
In almost no other case does the US government get involved in protecting private property to the extent they rush in and protect the music and film industry. Have your patent ripped off, or your house broken into, they won't even listen to you. Its up to you to defend your patent at your own expense, and you can file a police report about the burglary, but you will likely never see your property again.
Why is the US government acting as a mob enforcer for the Media Giants?
Of course nothing will happen. Since when do crooks convict themselves ?
Agreed, this gets less than lip service.
I loved this line in the summary above:
the White House is obligated to respond
Obligated? Really?. One word response is my prediction: DENIED!
Te MegaUpload take down, not quite carefully timed to give Congress some balls regarding SOPA, is likely to become a circus act of the most grandiose proportions.
Not only did the Feds seize a foreign company, but they did so in the face of several SCOTUS decisions that held harmless the operators of sites that might contain user uploaded content which might violate copyright, in addition to billions of files that did no such thing.
With the government forced withdrawal of Megaupload's attorney Robert Bennett, citing rather insincere claims of conflict of interest, and the Justice department seizing a Foreign company this is far from the normal pattern for these cases. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Chinese government step into the fray any day now.
When the dust clears on this battle there will be some major revelations about how much pressure the DOJ used all over the world to affect this arrest and take down. Eight countries, big and small like New Zealand were leaned on to act, for largely theatrical effect as SOPA goes down to public pressure. The timing couldn't be accidental. But the DOJ miss timed it by three days, and their case is far from certain.
I predict this will drag out for a long time.
They just use this as a mean of hiding the fact that banks really have no idea if you'll be good for the money they are loaning you.
There may be some science to it, but that does not negate the idea that the banks have no other data about you in these countries. That is, after all, the main tenant of the article. It is precisely because banks have no way of evaluating your repayment potential that they want to surf your phone records.
And of course they have no plans to bring this business model to the North America or the EU precisely because such practices are outlawed in these countries. Even with a signed letter of authorization these companies wouldn't get any such info from the carriers. (Hell you often can't even get your own phone records from the carriers without a huge argument, a letter from law enforcement, or threat of lawyer, etc). The best they can do is demand a copy of your phone bill from you, which in many cases does not even contain detailed call info any more.
But that doesn't mean there is no science to it. Its easy enough to see patterns when you evaluate large numbers of people. Actuarial Science is pretty precise these days. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that if the failure rate of loans shows a huge spike among those people that make calls to certain numbers (bookies, drug pushers, or simply to no-name burner cells), maybe the bank would be better off avoiding those clients.
Bingo. Or the owner just wants to have his mansion be a tax write off.
And the wine cellar potential of that underground data center won't hurt the resale value a bit when the data center goes belly up. The picture in the linked shows a pretty dis-joint structure. Perfect for conversion into a tri-plex.
The whole thing seems like a ploy to me.
Witch
Their
Hods.
Spellchecker 3, author 0.
This is an EU operation.
That fact alone pretty much guarantees B612 will be more effective.
Most of these PLCs were simply too successful for their own good. Many of these designs were created in the 70s with no real intent of ever having then live in an on-line environment, but rather to be isolated in machinery as simple as pumps, motors, and simple stand along controllers for a variety of machines.
The problem lies not with the PLCs but the questionable decision to wire these things into the network.
Some of these things are extremely simple controllers. Others, like the mentioned D20 ME are micro computers onto themselves. These devices are built from a long line of simple process controllers, which grew to their current state from simply hanging more and more interfaces, better processors, and a mountain of legacy software, onto what started life as a very simple device.
None of them were ever intended to be put directly on the wild and wooly net, even when the did contain Ethernet ports, modems, and radios. Everyone assumed these were on their own in-plant network and that no one would hook them up to even their general purpose lan, let alone to computers accessible to the internet.
Anything less successful would have been replaced by a total redesign and rewrite from the ground up.
Might as well get rid of Google Groups too.
Oh, I don't know, profanity and all, I suggest its a sociological gold mine that gets more valuable as time goes on. It costs a little bit of disk space, but realistically the history is worth something.
You still find a lot of stuff posted over there about current products - it seems to be Google's Forum for tech support these days.
If they can this easily kill off Google Message Continuity, something marketed only to Enterprise customers running Exchange, then why would any enterprise consider using any of their services? Their migration path is just to move everyone to Gmail. If that's what the company wanted in the first place, they would've just done that.
This was a money losing proposition from the get go, and one you can easily replicate by doing a proper server backup to any off-site location. "Hundreds of Businesses" use it.
What they found is that user wanted to use Gmail, entirely walking away from exchange. The more success they had selling Google Apps (including paid Gmail customers) the less candidates for GMC. "Millions of Businesses" use Google Apps.
If you missed the bit about Hundreds vs Millions you might be forgiven. It was buried fairly deep.
Buried deeper is the fact that you can walk away from GMC tomorrow morning at 8am and have a competitive solution in place by noon, or operate with your own backup. You find it much tougher walking away from Google Apps or using Gmail for your entire in-house mail. You usually have no backup for that.
Even odder was the announcement about Needlebase:
Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google's other data-related initiatives.
Whoa, shutting down a data management platform they haven't even acquired yet? No, wait, twisted sentence structure!
The sync server being down would most likely have the same result as not having a network connection at all; Dropbox would just wait until it can connect, not affecting your files in any way.
Down is one thing, but the GP postulates that rights holder may be able to force the deletion of files not only on drop box, but also on your computer by simply continuing to run the servers. Anything in your shared area (as opposed to your encrypted area) could be (possibly) be deleted from your hard drive via this method.
Doing so would seem to be a legally risky move, but who you gonna sue? The DOJ?
Of course no one would have any way of knowing what is in your encrypted area. *Cough*.
Sharing copyrighted material via drop-box's un-encrypted public folder seems pretty dumb since it all ties back to you.