So what if it's a lot of work? Can't they fucking do the work before yakking about it?! If they did that, then we wouldn't have any reason to suspect they were lying to us, now would we?
It took on a life of it's own because the FSF attacked Novell and claimed the GPLv3 would prevent abuse in the future. Only those drinking the cool aid actually thought the GPLv3 was better then the GPLv2 until that time.
I'm sorry, but that statement rubs me the wrong way: why are you saying that the people who supported the GPLv3 from the beginning were "drinking the cool[sic] aid" when the Novell issue proved that they'd been right all along? I'd call that foresight, not fanaticism!
The box I'm referring is an HLDS OP4 server/torrent downloader that has been running headless for years.
Well, there's your answer: XP has been stable for you because you don't do anything with it! All your two programs touch is the networking stack, which, being adapted from BSD, is probably the most well-tested part of the entire OS. If you were exercising the rest of the OS -- especially the shell/Explorer -- your uptime would probably be a lot less because those areas are both much more complex and much less well-tested.
Regulation doesn't work. Bring on proper competition.
The current, insufficient, unfair, and improper regulation doesn't work. Deregulation (which would promote competition but also cause unnecessary infrastructure due to unrestricted right-of-way) could be a solution, yes, but better regulation (including both enforcing Net Neutrality and forcing the ISPs to actually build out the infrastructure that they promised and received public funds to do) could also be a solution.
The problem we face is finding a viable solution. 'Net Nutrality' may or may not be the answer. Regulation seems to make sense, but with all of the utility deregulation in the past 10 years, it won't be easy to hang regulations on a utility that's not even legally considered a utility yet.
It may not be a utility, but it is already regulated: that's what right-of-way agreements are. The problem is that we need either additional regulation (such as net neutrality), or none whatsoever.
But they are charging enough, right now. The problem is that they're pocketing the profit instead of reinvesting it into infrastructure, and getting away with it because they're a monopoly (or cartel, if you lump the telco and cableco together) and we're failing to regulate them properly.
I don't understand the quotes around free-market... It is a free market.
No, it's not. Local governments hand out exclusive right-of-way agreements to companies like AT&T and Comcast, and prohibit all potential competitors from laying their own wires. Those of us who didn't fail Economics 101 realize that that's exactly the opposite of a free market.
Now, I agree: in this case, a free market is a bad thing (because you don't need 50 different wires in the ground). However, if you don't have a free market then regulation is necessary, and the necessary regulation is failing to happen.
If they don't then someone else will eventually come along and eat their lunch.
Not if the "someone else" is prohibited by the government from accessing the right-of-way, they won't!
I'm no socialist - but Internet infrastructure needs to be either regulated or state supported.
That is complete bullshit. It's just traditional anti-corporate rhetoric.
How about this, then: Internet infrastructure needs to be actually regulated or actually not regulated -- which means no exclusive right-of-way agreements, and no public subsidies. The current situation -- a weird middle ground where telcos and cablecos get all of the benefits and the public gets shafted with all of the drawbacks -- is a corrupt fascist clusterfuck, not regulation!
Where I live the incumbent cable company is Cox...
Well, congratulations: you're the exception. But you need to realize that the existence of an exception does not belie the existence of the problem.
I really, really, don't want the government fucking this up...
The government already fucked it up because they're simultaneously failing to force Comcast to get its shit together and prohibiting anybody else from competing!
The last thing we need is another $200 billion government investment squandered by incumbent telephone companies.
Comcast, an incumbent cable company, is just as bad.
There would possibly be an argument to get the government involved...
The government is already involved. Who the fuck did you think gave Comcast and AT&T exclusive access to right-of-way (for cable and phone lines, respectively)?
What you are seeing now is basically an effort by the content companies to make the government provide their content delivery vehicle instead of leaving it to private corporations.
No, what we're seeing is an effort to force Internet Service Providers to provide actual Internet service instead of providing some subset of Internet service defined by their conflict of interest as content providers themselves.
If you really think this whole net neutrality debate is solely about helping the little guy you're a sucker and a fool.
The little guy benefits from prevention of conflicts of interest: force ISPs to only provide Internet service, and force content providers to only provide content. It is when a single entity tries to do both that the problems start!
You missed the "???" step, which in this case is "trick dumbasses into opposing the regulation that ought to come with the government bailout, in the name of 'protecting the free market' that never existed in the first place."
...they simply do not have the capacity to give everybody 16 Mbps sustained. It just isn't there. And it's not going to be there any time soon.
Alright then, let me ask you this: then what the fuck have we been subsidizing them for (with taxpayer money and exclusive right-of-way agreements) over the past few decades?! They were supposed to be building out the fucking infrastructure to prevent this very problem!
Now, you're about to spout some whiny bullshit about "but America is rural." Fine; I'm not saying that I expect everywhere to have decent service. But you know what? I live in a fucking big city -- within the city proper, not the suburbs -- and I can't get any better access than some bumpkin in Utah! What. The. FUCK?!!
The telcos and cablecos are simply making excuses for their embezzlement of public subsidies. And that's just simply not acceptable!
The "root" of the problem is that the Internet is a shared resource and ISPs oversell their bandwidth to make money. The system isn't setup for users to utilize it full blast 24 hours a day. That is just the way it is.
No, the root of the problem is that telcos were given taxpayer subsidies to improve the infrastructure, failed to do it, and aren't being forced to make good on their promise. And on top of that, the right-of-way monopolies they got as part of the deal are the only bits of regulation that are actually being enforced. They're getting all the benefits (from their perspective) of regulation (the locking-out of meaningful competition) without suffering any of the costs (requirement to serve the public interest), and we're getting the shaft! That's the fucking root of the problem!
In a competitive environment where multiple choices exist...
Sure, but the reality is exactly the opposite of that!
Here's reality:
There is exactly one cable ISP. It is the same company that provides cable TV, and has a government-mandated monopoly on cable right-of-way. Where I live, it's Comcast.
There is exactly one DSL ISP. It is the same company that provides phone service, and has a government-mandated monopoly on phone line right-of-way. Where I live, it's the AT&T.
The cable ISP and DSL ISP collude to provide about the same speed for about the same price. Around here, that's $40/month for 6Mbps download (if your wire is brand new, in pristine condition, and there's nobody else connected to the same CMTS or DSLAM).
Satellite Internet doesn't count as broadband (because upload is via modem).
Cellular Internet is too expensive and slow, and always will be by its inherent nature.
Verizon FiOS doesn't exist. As far as I can tell, it's just a lie perpetuated by Verizon in order to keep the government from demanding all that taxpayer money (that was supposed to be used for upgrading the infrastructure) back.
Non-broadband options, such as satellite and dialup, are entirely irrelevant -- unless, of course, you get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that our situation is slightly better than some rural, 4th-world Hellhole where they've only recently decided that not shitting in the drinking water was a good idea. I, for one, think we ought to hold ourselves to higher standards than that!
Besides, not even cable and DSL count as real broadband! Real broadband, like they have in Europe and (especially) Asia, is in the tens or even hundreds of Mbps range. What we've got here is lies and excuses caused by insufficient regulation of a decidedly non-free market!
In reality, there are two solutions:
Force the telco and cableco monopolies to follow through with their promises by actually regulating them.
Entirely deregulate the industry, including removing all exclusive right-of-way agreements, and demand repayment of the billions of taxpayer dollars the industry has received in infrastructure subsidies over the years.
Wrong - the special null delimiter is needed only for variable-length (and zero-length) fields and records. For fixed-length fields and records, no delimiter is needed.
No shit, Sherlock! My point was that you changed your mind between posts, because you have no design. How the heck are third parties supposed to read your data if you're doing that?!
Wrong - if you know how many fields there are in each record (that's what headers are for, right?), then two nulls side-by-side won't be mistaken for the two-null record delimiter...
If you know how many fields there are in each record, then why did you need a special record delimiter to begin with? Sounds like a design mistake, which isn't surprising since it was ad-hoc...
Also, you can use an ascii 0x20 (a space) for a blank field... there's no problem with semantics there:-)
Yeah there is: What if you actually want your node to contain a single space?
Third, you can always replace a blank (if you're being anal) with a "TOP_NODE" identifier
What if I want to name a node "TOP_NODE," too?
Fourth, if you're using a fixed-width field, the problem never occurs.
But now I have to:
know the maximum length of my data fields before hand, and
never want to distinguish between blank-padded and non-blank-padded data!
Boy, this schema of yours really isn't working out so well, is it? Not only is it not capable of representing everything it might need to represent, it gets more complicated ever time you try to work around the bugs I find in it. Maybe you ought to think it through some more <secret>like the folks who made XML did</secret>. ; )
One field holds the parent node record id, or is blank if its a top-level node.
But if the field is blank, the delimiting nulls (as per your previous post) are adjacent and it becomes indistinguishable from a record delimiter. You've just added an ambiguity! If it's that easy for you, the inventor of the schema, to screw it up, how the heck is any other random dumbass going to manage to deal with it?
Extend your schema as required.
Okay, but how are you going to notify the arbitrary number of unknown third parties that are using your data?
Are you actually only appending? Or could you be "appending to the front," or appending and updating something (e.g. a count) at the beginning of the file?
Presumably, most XML libraries are designed to support arbitrary changes, so they probably work by reading the whole file in, applying the changes, and then writing the whole file back out. The makers probably don't feel the need to optimize for your case. Maybe you should try modifying one?
Obviously, you didn't understand what I said: nothing you do on your end would matter, because the computer on the other end of the connection -- the one you're downloading from or uploading to -- will still receive the fake RST packet that Comcast sends them in your name. In other words, even non-Comcast-users would have to cooperate in order for it to work, and that's not likely to happen (because RST packets are, otherwise, a good thing).
IANAProgrammer, how hard would it be to write a simple program (FF extension?) that basically brute-forced their who-is (not enough to get one in trouble for attempted DOS, but enough to make lots of entries) with bogus domains until they had 10's or 100's of millions of addresses (or more)?
It wouldn't do any good, because it costs them nothing whatsoever to "taste" all those addresses! Not a dollar per domain. Not ten cents per domain. Not even a fraction of a cent per domain! Nothing! Nada! Zilch! Zero! They can "taste" an infinite number of domains for exactly zero cents! And because of that, your script would not hurt them even the slightest little bit, unless it did DOS them. Do you get it now?
Yep. And, conversely, that software didn't need to get made either, because if it did then somebody would have been willing to pay for it! In other words, there was no loss.
Are you sure about that? After all, Best Buy does sell Macs and warranty Macs (with their "Performance Service Plan"). Geek Squad will accept a Mac still under the store warranty/PSP for service.
Actually, what you say is true in the very narrow sense that Geek Squad simply replaces the Mac every time instead of servicing it. (I know this because I had an iMac G5 that was replaced with an iMac Core Duo.) However, you're still left with the issue that the discarded machine has your data on it. And you know Geek Squad isn't going to destroy it; they're going to sell it to a refurbisher that'll do who-knows-what with the data. So even if you're sending your Mac in, knowing it's going to be replaced, Geek Squad still needs to be able to remove the hard drive!
Just curious - Are you suggesting a salary model for musicians? That would be pretty damned novel, but I'm curious if you actually have a model thought out.
Actually, such a model already exists: it's called "playing gigs" or "touring" (for really popular acts). This, along with selling merchandise (i.e., non-copyable physical objects), is the main source of income for all but the most famous bands.
Artists deserve to be compensated for their work [on a per-copy-sold basis].
Why? What's different about "artists" that they deserve such special treatment? In particular, why are they so deserving of this special treatment that public money is spent restricting their otherwise-infinite-supply product at the expense of that same public?
You know, I work for a living -- in other words, I get paid for my time. I don't get paid any sort of royalties for the product I produce even though my work requires thought and creativity too. Why shouldn't these "artists" get compensated the same way?
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So what if it's a lot of work? Can't they fucking do the work before yakking about it?! If they did that, then we wouldn't have any reason to suspect they were lying to us, now would we?
I'm sorry, but that statement rubs me the wrong way: why are you saying that the people who supported the GPLv3 from the beginning were "drinking the cool[sic] aid" when the Novell issue proved that they'd been right all along? I'd call that foresight, not fanaticism!
Well, there's your answer: XP has been stable for you because you don't do anything with it! All your two programs touch is the networking stack, which, being adapted from BSD, is probably the most well-tested part of the entire OS. If you were exercising the rest of the OS -- especially the shell/Explorer -- your uptime would probably be a lot less because those areas are both much more complex and much less well-tested.
The current, insufficient, unfair, and improper regulation doesn't work. Deregulation (which would promote competition but also cause unnecessary infrastructure due to unrestricted right-of-way) could be a solution, yes, but better regulation (including both enforcing Net Neutrality and forcing the ISPs to actually build out the infrastructure that they promised and received public funds to do) could also be a solution.
It may not be a utility, but it is already regulated: that's what right-of-way agreements are. The problem is that we need either additional regulation (such as net neutrality), or none whatsoever.
But they are charging enough, right now. The problem is that they're pocketing the profit instead of reinvesting it into infrastructure, and getting away with it because they're a monopoly (or cartel, if you lump the telco and cableco together) and we're failing to regulate them properly.
No, it's not. Local governments hand out exclusive right-of-way agreements to companies like AT&T and Comcast, and prohibit all potential competitors from laying their own wires. Those of us who didn't fail Economics 101 realize that that's exactly the opposite of a free market.
Now, I agree: in this case, a free market is a bad thing (because you don't need 50 different wires in the ground). However, if you don't have a free market then regulation is necessary, and the necessary regulation is failing to happen.
Not if the "someone else" is prohibited by the government from accessing the right-of-way, they won't!
How about this, then: Internet infrastructure needs to be actually regulated or actually not regulated -- which means no exclusive right-of-way agreements, and no public subsidies. The current situation -- a weird middle ground where telcos and cablecos get all of the benefits and the public gets shafted with all of the drawbacks -- is a corrupt fascist clusterfuck, not regulation!
Well, congratulations: you're the exception. But you need to realize that the existence of an exception does not belie the existence of the problem.
The government already fucked it up because they're simultaneously failing to force Comcast to get its shit together and prohibiting anybody else from competing!
Comcast, an incumbent cable company, is just as bad.
The government is already involved. Who the fuck did you think gave Comcast and AT&T exclusive access to right-of-way (for cable and phone lines, respectively)?
No, what we're seeing is an effort to force Internet Service Providers to provide actual Internet service instead of providing some subset of Internet service defined by their conflict of interest as content providers themselves.
The little guy benefits from prevention of conflicts of interest: force ISPs to only provide Internet service, and force content providers to only provide content. It is when a single entity tries to do both that the problems start!
You missed the "???" step, which in this case is "trick dumbasses into opposing the regulation that ought to come with the government bailout, in the name of 'protecting the free market' that never existed in the first place."
Alright then, let me ask you this: then what the fuck have we been subsidizing them for (with taxpayer money and exclusive right-of-way agreements) over the past few decades?! They were supposed to be building out the fucking infrastructure to prevent this very problem!
Now, you're about to spout some whiny bullshit about "but America is rural." Fine; I'm not saying that I expect everywhere to have decent service. But you know what? I live in a fucking big city -- within the city proper, not the suburbs -- and I can't get any better access than some bumpkin in Utah! What. The. FUCK?!!
The telcos and cablecos are simply making excuses for their embezzlement of public subsidies. And that's just simply not acceptable!
No, the root of the problem is that telcos were given taxpayer subsidies to improve the infrastructure, failed to do it, and aren't being forced to make good on their promise. And on top of that, the right-of-way monopolies they got as part of the deal are the only bits of regulation that are actually being enforced. They're getting all the benefits (from their perspective) of regulation (the locking-out of meaningful competition) without suffering any of the costs (requirement to serve the public interest), and we're getting the shaft! That's the fucking root of the problem!
I live in a large city (500K people within the city limits, 5.1 million in the metro area), and I doubt I'll ever see FiOS either!
Sure, but the reality is exactly the opposite of that!
Here's reality:
Non-broadband options, such as satellite and dialup, are entirely irrelevant -- unless, of course, you get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that our situation is slightly better than some rural, 4th-world Hellhole where they've only recently decided that not shitting in the drinking water was a good idea. I, for one, think we ought to hold ourselves to higher standards than that!
Besides, not even cable and DSL count as real broadband! Real broadband, like they have in Europe and (especially) Asia, is in the tens or even hundreds of Mbps range. What we've got here is lies and excuses caused by insufficient regulation of a decidedly non-free market!
In reality, there are two solutions:
No shit, Sherlock! My point was that you changed your mind between posts, because you have no design. How the heck are third parties supposed to read your data if you're doing that?!
If you know how many fields there are in each record, then why did you need a special record delimiter to begin with? Sounds like a design mistake, which isn't surprising since it was ad-hoc...
Yeah there is: What if you actually want your node to contain a single space?
What if I want to name a node "TOP_NODE," too?
But now I have to:
Boy, this schema of yours really isn't working out so well, is it? Not only is it not capable of representing everything it might need to represent, it gets more complicated ever time you try to work around the bugs I find in it. Maybe you ought to think it through some more <secret>like the folks who made XML did</secret>. ; )
But if the field is blank, the delimiting nulls (as per your previous post) are adjacent and it becomes indistinguishable from a record delimiter. You've just added an ambiguity! If it's that easy for you, the inventor of the schema, to screw it up, how the heck is any other random dumbass going to manage to deal with it?
Okay, but how are you going to notify the arbitrary number of unknown third parties that are using your data?
Two things immediately spring to mind:
Obviously, you didn't understand what I said: nothing you do on your end would matter, because the computer on the other end of the connection -- the one you're downloading from or uploading to -- will still receive the fake RST packet that Comcast sends them in your name. In other words, even non-Comcast-users would have to cooperate in order for it to work, and that's not likely to happen (because RST packets are, otherwise, a good thing).
It wouldn't matter, because the other side of the connection would have to configure their firewall that way too.
No. NetSol is the unethical second party, not third.
It wouldn't do any good, because it costs them nothing whatsoever to "taste" all those addresses! Not a dollar per domain. Not ten cents per domain. Not even a fraction of a cent per domain! Nothing! Nada! Zilch! Zero! They can "taste" an infinite number of domains for exactly zero cents! And because of that, your script would not hurt them even the slightest little bit, unless it did DOS them. Do you get it now?
Yep. And, conversely, that software didn't need to get made either, because if it did then somebody would have been willing to pay for it! In other words, there was no loss.
Are you sure about that? After all, Best Buy does sell Macs and warranty Macs (with their "Performance Service Plan"). Geek Squad will accept a Mac still under the store warranty/PSP for service.
Actually, what you say is true in the very narrow sense that Geek Squad simply replaces the Mac every time instead of servicing it. (I know this because I had an iMac G5 that was replaced with an iMac Core Duo.) However, you're still left with the issue that the discarded machine has your data on it. And you know Geek Squad isn't going to destroy it; they're going to sell it to a refurbisher that'll do who-knows-what with the data. So even if you're sending your Mac in, knowing it's going to be replaced, Geek Squad still needs to be able to remove the hard drive!
Actually, such a model already exists: it's called "playing gigs" or "touring" (for really popular acts). This, along with selling merchandise (i.e., non-copyable physical objects), is the main source of income for all but the most famous bands.
Why? What's different about "artists" that they deserve such special treatment? In particular, why are they so deserving of this special treatment that public money is spent restricting their otherwise-infinite-supply product at the expense of that same public?
You know, I work for a living -- in other words, I get paid for my time. I don't get paid any sort of royalties for the product I produce even though my work requires thought and creativity too. Why shouldn't these "artists" get compensated the same way?