215 give authority to get records and a gag order. The NSA never had that authority before, still don't. the FBI does, but its a distinction without a difference.
215 is critical, and the Patriot act would not have been passed if there equivalent provisions in "literally hundreds of other laws". You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
Broadly speaking, when a telco can pass five to 65 locations for every mile of outside plant, the cost per home ranges between $4,000 and $5,000 per location. When the number of locations drops below five passings per plant mile, costs escalate quickly, up to $19,000 a location.
The study by Vantage Point Solutions, an engineering firm based in Mitchell, S.D., estimated costs based on site density, especially measured as “passings per linear plant mile.” Overall costs per location were double in the rural areas – $9,286 compared with $4,438 in the “town” portions of the networks.
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
By removing permissions to do those things? How does that get stitched into another agency? You removed the permission, and you add a whole bunch of shall nots, so that there is nothing left to stitch.
Most of these things that you object to, limitless authority, gag orders, etc are the spawn of section 215.
This is the first of 12 such bills waiting in the wings. This bill probably doesn't go near far enough, but Section 215 is one of the most dangerous sections of the entire law. Any amount of crippling that can be done to it is long overdue. I don't trust Sensenbrenner to do enough, and I hope his efforts aren't a sop to divert attention with the appearance of doing something.
State/County Road are one thing, neighborhoods are a whole different issue. The cost accelerates dramatically. Zoom in on Google Maps to developments around any city. You are literately talking about trenching both sides of every street, and rip up every single lawn.
Since you like to pretend you know something about this industry, why not take a shot at figuring the cost.
Yes, but first you would have to condemn all of the existing cable plant franchises that exist in all the neighborhood, or buy the cable plants in these neighborhoods.
Even if you can just trench in your own fiber to each subdivision and plan to pick up that subdivision's entire load after buying out Comcast, you have a motley assembly of various vintages of cable plants to bridge. Its a huge mess of coax plants, fiber plants, cat5 plants, and nothing at all. And in the process if you find one provider that doesn't want to play ball, they can make it very expensive in court.
You can avoid this in Future projects, but rebuilding or even restructuring all existing networks in a country the size of the US is a 100 year task.
My county did lay fiber all over the place to hook up county facilities. They are drowning in bandwidth, and are now slapping up free wifi in various communities. This, or course will become the tragedy of the commons all over again, because given a free resource there are those who will attempt to consume all of it.
Agreed, but I don't buy that it's ok to collect, store, and analyze anything that's publicly observable. With modern technology, that means that only things I do in a sealed, shielded basement room are private.
It maps the location of your router, not what you are doing on your router.
You are saying that Rand McNally can't publish maps because you like to barbecue in your back yard wearing your PJs.
Its the same gas in the same pipe, at the same pressure for everyone on the block. Gas company A has a pumping problem, and the entire load is picked up (unwittingly) by company B's pumps.
Its not exactly the same thing as a data connection. My ISP goes down, my mail stops flowing, I get no packets at all, because unlike a cubic foot of gas, packets can and must be routed.
Telephone is a many-to-many service, using circuit switching to dramatically reduce the number of necessary wires. Why couldn't power lines, water lines, cable lines, and so on do the same using valves, relays, etc.?
What ?
Are you daft? You're streaming music from the web and suddenly it goes silent because your neighbor checked his mail? How to you propose to have water at every tap without a pipe running to the faucet? Bang on the pipe till some operator dressed like Lilly Tomlin working in your basement pulls a hose out of one pipe and plugs it into another?
Bellevue probably made the same deal with comcast et al as did every other city. You put in the wires and you can have a monopoly for X years.
I'm betting X years isn't up, but its so close to being up that Comcast sees no money in doing the last hundred feet for new apartments or pulling more fiber.
Its more a matter of practicality than regulation.
Nobody would stand for yet another cable company trenching through every neighborhood laying new wire or fiber. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it. The only way this gets done is when the neighborhood is built, and there is nothing to disrupt, and not sidewalks or driveways are laid yet. You can trench, pipe, and pedestal a hundred home subdivision in an afternoon and leave it to the home builder to cable each house to the pedestal. Comcast or Verizon will jump at the chance to do that because it means a lot of customers are locked in.
When you build a subdivision, you typically deed the streets, waterlines, sewers, to the city/county at the end of construction. Its long past time to stop subcontracting the bandwidth job to the Telco/Cable companies and make the subdivision contractor put that in and deed that to the city as well. Yes it raises home prices.
Megacities like Tokyo and New York will have great and precise services. Middle-of-nowhere-town with under 50 000 people will have jack squat.
Don't be so sure. Although WiGLE.net is easily slashdotted, try visiting it next week, and zoom the interactive map (link near top) to some dusty bump in the road, and you will probably not believe the number of wifi access points that are mapped. If someone just drives by while running their app, the location isn't too precise (mapped to the middle or the road), but if they spend a little while in the area the mappings become quite precise.
It is trying to build a public (or so it says) database of where there is cell towers and or wifi, all geolocated by GPS.
Skyhook already has their database, mostly of wifi addresses volunteered. Google has their database, which they jump started with Street View cars, but now keep up to date with a bazillion android phones running around. WiggleWIFI has their wifi only database, collected by volunteers, which is public and massive, but not all that usable, although you can probably zoom into your neighborhood and find Wifi routers by the dozen.
But this database is supposed to be available publicly, and will know that if you are connected to Cell Tower XYZ, and your phone can see tower RWC, then you must be located in this particular grid square. Nobody but the cell companies have that data.
This project aims at collecting those tower locations, and wifi locations.
If you don't want to participate, then don't install the app on your smartphone.
But be aware the maps exist already, in a number of disjoint databases. This one hopes to make it a joint one, and a public one. They are late to the party, but at least they claim it will be public. Its not clear just how public, but hinted at is the ability for your laptop, or phone, to pin point its location without a clear view of the sky (no GPS) simply by virtue of what router you are talking to. There isn't a hint about feeding advertisers.
A portion of public science spending should be set aside for replication.
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well. It seems one group does something and everyone else relies on that, until something falls down at some distant point in the future.
At the very least, someone building upon a work that was not replicated should include replication in their proposal as the first step. Often expensive, but not nearly so expensive as finding out later that the original was wrong.
(As for re-running the software, that seems risky at best, especially if the results could have been influenced by buggy software, more so if it is custom software, probably less so if its just off the shelf statistical packages or some such).
I fucking hate this new system. Its a mess of scripts that call on more scripts. Its such a pain in the ass now if you want to have a program run when the system starts. Gone are the days of just adding a line to/etc/rc.local
Half of that is because either SystemD or upstart is really only about half implemented, and the half that is implemented is often trying to replicate sysv just to keep the conversion and learning task to something approaching manageable. Its kind of a mess right now in many distros.
As more of the system targets are properly implemented, and users start to let go of the concept of run levels, and get used to dealing with target files and the concept of units, it will be every bit as tailor-able as run levels were, and a whole lot faster.
I didn't find run levels and rc.d all that intuitive at first (many long years ago) and the scripts were more complex.
Like much in the linux world these days, systemd was rushed into production before it was half completed by too many distros. At least you have to give Debian the credit for waiting until most of it is working, and all the necessary patches have been identified.
(The less charitable way of viewing it is that Debian sat back and let others do the heavy lifting).
Probably the worst case would be for them to choose upstart when the rest of the industry decides on systemd. That kind of divergence makes for much more work patching everything that needs to be patched.
The chart I posted is Gross PROFIT, not Gross revenue. Profit is after you pay your expenses. Gross Profit is definitely of interest.
The fact that Amazon chooses to plow its excess income back into infrastructure instead of hording cash is reflected in the stock price appreciation.
You should read your own posted links, where it clearly says:
The most confounding thing about Amazon is that it doesn't seem to want to amass much, if any profit.
Instead of collecting big profits, CEO Jeff Bezos prefers to take whatever he makes and plow it right back into the company.
The old saying that everything that is known about a company is reflected in the stock price has proven true when looked at over the course of many months or many years. The market knows the value of Amazon, even if it escapes your meager understanding of corporate finance.
Amazon and small corner book store walk into a publisher's office....
Are you claiming that Amazon takes out a steamer trunk full of money and beats the publisher to a bloody pulp with it until they they get a cheaper price?
If the corner book stores get together and order in bulk they too can get the bulk purchase price. It takes a lot more of the publishers time and money to package 15 copies, box and ship them for 500 corner books stores than it takes to fork-lift pallets upon pallets into a semi trailer or rail car.
One electronic order, one printout, one fork lift operator can handle 40 thousand books in half an hour, vs thirty mail clerks picking and packaging weighing, labeling, and mailing 500 different boxes to 500 different stores.
In fact, dealing with corner book stores is such a hassle the publishers don't even do it at all. They farm that task out to jobbers, who get the same prices as Amazon, but those jobbers have salesmen, packers shippers, order clerks to employ. There is a whole additional layer of inefficiency and greed involved in handling the corner book store.
Stop calling it bullying. Its called efficiency of scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the second quote. Over 9k per connection rural.
Nearly 5k in town.
Twice your worst estimate.
Better stick to the shovel work. Accounting is above your pay grade.
215 give authority to get records and a gag order.
The NSA never had that authority before, still don't. the FBI does, but its a distinction without a difference.
215 is critical, and the Patriot act would not have been passed if there equivalent provisions in "literally hundreds of other laws". You can't rail against the Patriot act in one post then dismiss it as inconsequential in the next.
200 per house. You must be joking.
Broadly speaking, when a telco can pass five to 65 locations for every mile of outside plant, the cost per home ranges between $4,000 and $5,000 per location. When the number of locations drops below five passings per plant mile, costs escalate quickly, up to $19,000 a location.
The study by Vantage Point Solutions, an engineering firm based in Mitchell, S.D., estimated costs based on site density, especially measured as “passings per linear plant mile.” Overall costs per location were double in the rural areas – $9,286 compared with $4,438 in the “town” portions of the networks.
http://blog.performantnetworks.com/2012/11/how-much-does-rural-fiber-really-cost.html
Better leave the estimating to the big boys.
Pretty much the entire Act as it currently stands. There's a lot of vaguely-worded clauses that grant nearly limitless authority and do not require disclosure of the reasons for many police actions. It would be relatively easy to stitch together what is being given up by these politicians from other parts of the Act and have yourself a new Franken-agency.
By removing permissions to do those things?
How does that get stitched into another agency?
You removed the permission, and you add a whole bunch of shall nots, so that there is nothing left to stitch.
Most of these things that you object to, limitless authority, gag orders, etc are the spawn of section 215.
This is the first of 12 such bills waiting in the wings.
This bill probably doesn't go near far enough, but Section 215 is one of the most dangerous sections of the entire law. Any amount of crippling that can be done to it is long overdue. I don't trust Sensenbrenner to do enough, and I hope his efforts aren't a sop to divert attention with the appearance of doing something.
State/County Road are one thing, neighborhoods are a whole different issue. The cost accelerates dramatically.
Zoom in on Google Maps to developments around any city.
You are literately talking about trenching both sides of every street, and rip up every single lawn.
Since you like to pretend you know something about this industry, why not take a shot at figuring the cost.
Yes, but first you would have to condemn all of the existing cable plant franchises that exist in all the neighborhood, or buy the cable plants in these neighborhoods.
Even if you can just trench in your own fiber to each subdivision and plan to pick up that subdivision's entire load after buying out Comcast, you have a motley assembly of various vintages of cable plants to bridge. Its a huge mess of coax plants, fiber plants, cat5 plants, and nothing at all.
And in the process if you find one provider that doesn't want to play ball, they can make it very expensive in court.
You can avoid this in Future projects, but rebuilding or even restructuring all existing networks in a country the size of the US is a 100 year task.
My county did lay fiber all over the place to hook up county facilities. They are drowning in bandwidth, and are now slapping up free wifi in various communities. This, or course will become the tragedy of the commons all over again, because given a free resource there are those who will attempt to consume all of it.
Agreed, but I don't buy that it's ok to collect, store, and analyze anything that's publicly observable. With modern technology, that means that only things I do in a sealed, shielded basement room are private.
It maps the location of your router, not what you are doing on your router.
You are saying that Rand McNally can't publish maps because you like to barbecue in your back yard wearing your PJs.
You get to choose who to pay. That's ALL you get.
Its the same gas in the same pipe, at the same pressure for everyone on the block.
Gas company A has a pumping problem, and the entire load is picked up (unwittingly) by company B's pumps.
Its not exactly the same thing as a data connection. My ISP goes down, my mail stops flowing,
I get no packets at all, because unlike a cubic foot of gas, packets can and must be routed.
Telephone is a many-to-many service, using circuit switching to dramatically reduce the number of necessary wires. Why couldn't power lines, water lines, cable lines, and so on do the same using valves, relays, etc.?
What ?
Are you daft? You're streaming music from the web and suddenly it goes silent because your neighbor checked his mail?
How to you propose to have water at every tap without a pipe running to the faucet? Bang on the pipe till some
operator dressed like Lilly Tomlin working in your basement pulls a hose out of one pipe and plugs it into another?
Your wireless router uses the public airwaves.
It was never intended to be a secret.
EVEN if you don't broadcast an SSID, your router's existence is still public knowledge.
How does one hack a location? Is that like breaking into a fortress?
Bellevue probably made the same deal with comcast et al as did every other city. You put in the wires
and you can have a monopoly for X years.
I'm betting X years isn't up, but its so close to being up that Comcast sees no money in doing the last hundred feet for
new apartments or pulling more fiber.
Its more a matter of practicality than regulation.
Nobody would stand for yet another cable company trenching through every neighborhood laying new wire or fiber. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it. The only way this gets done is when the neighborhood is built, and there is nothing to disrupt, and not sidewalks or driveways are laid yet. You can trench, pipe, and pedestal a hundred home subdivision in an afternoon and leave it to the home builder to cable each house to the pedestal. Comcast or Verizon will jump at the chance to do that because it means a lot of customers are locked in.
When you build a subdivision, you typically deed the streets, waterlines, sewers, to the city/county at the end of construction.
Its long past time to stop subcontracting the bandwidth job to the Telco/Cable companies and make the subdivision contractor put that in
and deed that to the city as well. Yes it raises home prices.
Megacities like Tokyo and New York will have great and precise services. Middle-of-nowhere-town with under 50 000 people will have jack squat.
Don't be so sure.
Although WiGLE.net is easily slashdotted, try visiting it next week, and zoom the interactive map (link near top) to some dusty bump in the road, and you will probably not believe the number of wifi access points that are mapped. If someone just drives by while running their app, the location isn't too precise (mapped to the middle or the road), but if they spend a little while in the area the mappings become quite precise.
So you didn't read TFA ? (Of course not).
It is trying to build a public (or so it says) database of where there is cell towers and or wifi, all geolocated by GPS.
Skyhook already has their database, mostly of wifi addresses volunteered.
Google has their database, which they jump started with Street View cars, but now keep up to date with a bazillion android phones running around.
WiggleWIFI has their wifi only database, collected by volunteers, which is public and massive, but not all that usable, although you can probably zoom into your neighborhood and find Wifi routers by the dozen.
But this database is supposed to be available publicly, and will know that if you are connected to Cell Tower XYZ, and your phone can see tower RWC, then you must be located in this particular grid square. Nobody but the cell companies have that data.
This project aims at collecting those tower locations, and wifi locations.
If you don't want to participate, then don't install the app on your smartphone.
But be aware the maps exist already, in a number of disjoint databases. This one hopes to make it a joint one, and a public one. They are late to the party, but at least they claim it will be public. Its not clear just how public, but hinted at is the ability for your laptop, or phone, to pin point its location without a clear view of the sky (no GPS) simply by virtue of what router you are talking to. There isn't a hint about feeding advertisers.
A portion of public science spending should be set aside for replication.
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well.
It seems one group does something and everyone else relies on that, until something falls down at some distant point in the future.
At the very least, someone building upon a work that was not replicated should include replication in their proposal as the first step.
Often expensive, but not nearly so expensive as finding out later that the original was wrong.
(As for re-running the software, that seems risky at best, especially if the results could have been influenced by
buggy software, more so if it is custom software, probably less so if its just off the shelf statistical packages or some such).
with my own owned stuff
You own your own dick too, but there is no point in complaining you can't get it up once you cut it off.
I fucking hate this new system. Its a mess of scripts that call on more scripts. Its such a pain in the ass now if you want to have a program run when the system starts. Gone are the days of just adding a line to /etc/rc.local
Half of that is because either SystemD or upstart is really only about half implemented, and the half that is implemented is often trying to replicate sysv just to keep the conversion and learning task to something approaching manageable. Its kind of a mess right now in many distros.
As more of the system targets are properly implemented, and users start to let go of the concept of run levels, and get used to dealing with target files and the concept of units, it will be every bit as tailor-able as run levels were, and a whole lot faster.
I didn't find run levels and rc.d all that intuitive at first (many long years ago) and the scripts were more complex.
Yeah, well, don't do that. There is a reason its all owned by root.
This is very true.
Like much in the linux world these days, systemd was rushed into production before it was half completed by too many distros.
At least you have to give Debian the credit for waiting until most of it is working, and all the necessary patches have been identified.
(The less charitable way of viewing it is that Debian sat back and let others do the heavy lifting).
Probably the worst case would be for them to choose upstart when the rest of the industry decides on systemd. That kind of divergence
makes for much more work patching everything that needs to be patched.
The chart I posted is Gross PROFIT, not Gross revenue. Profit is after you pay your expenses. Gross Profit is definitely of interest.
The fact that Amazon chooses to plow its excess income back into infrastructure instead of hording cash is reflected in the stock price appreciation.
You should read your own posted links, where it clearly says:
The most confounding thing about Amazon is that it doesn't seem to want to amass much, if any profit.
Instead of collecting big profits, CEO Jeff Bezos prefers to take whatever he makes and plow it right back into the company.
The old saying that everything that is known about a company is reflected in the stock price has proven true when looked at over the course of many months or many years. The market knows the value of Amazon, even if it escapes your meager understanding of corporate finance.
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
It is not bullshit that Amazon is selling at a loss. They have never made a profit.
As long as you don't count 15 billion gross profit as a profit.
In excess of 80,000 titles in stock seems a far cry from vanishing.
...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.
People have been claiming that since Amazon when on line in 1995.
Its been almost 19 years.
It hasn't happened.
Don't you think that when a theory has been wrong for 19 years, its time to look for another theory?
Explain how this bullying works.
Amazon and small corner book store walk into a publisher's office....
Are you claiming that Amazon takes out a steamer trunk full of money and beats the publisher to a bloody pulp with it until they they get a cheaper price?
If the corner book stores get together and order in bulk they too can get the bulk purchase price. It takes a lot more of the publishers time and money to package 15 copies, box and ship them for 500 corner books stores than it takes to fork-lift pallets upon pallets into a semi trailer or rail car.
One electronic order, one printout, one fork lift operator can handle 40 thousand books in half an hour, vs thirty mail clerks picking and packaging weighing, labeling, and mailing 500 different boxes to 500 different stores.
In fact, dealing with corner book stores is such a hassle the publishers don't even do it at all. They farm that task out to jobbers, who get the same prices as Amazon, but those jobbers have salesmen, packers shippers, order clerks to employ. There is a whole additional layer of inefficiency and greed involved in handling the corner book store.
Stop calling it bullying. Its called efficiency of scale.