Now I don't know you, and I have no idea how you normally write, but you strike me as someone who likes to read their own meaning into things and then get all worked up over stuff people didn't say.
You might want to watch that, that's all. What you wrote here was barely related to what I said, and what your previous comment wrote was barely related to that before.
Peer review and consensus aren't the same thing. They're barely related.
Consensus is the process of finding a bunch of people who will attest to the same thing, while peer review is a process of criticism for an unproven idea.
I'm not talking about getting myself upstream connectivity (I already have it). I'm talking about setting the table for an environment where everyone has it and everyone can therefore run whatever applications developed to utilize this additional capability.
Firstly, running servers is in violation of the terms of the agreement that most ISPs provide. This has a chilling effect on the entire environment: from developers to users to those who may come up with fantastic innovations, all will be dissuaded from attempting to use incoming connections in a significant way when those incoming connections are not only subject to filtering but even illegal.
We're not just talking plain ol' web servers here. We're talking anything that might have a use for listening for incoming connections. Right now half of the infrastructure coming to our homes is being blocked; who knows what might be possible if we had full communication in both directions.
Even as things stand now people are hampered by this situation. For one, just look at the hoops you've suggested in your comment. Setting false ports to duck the fuzz? Dyndns? Yeah, my grandma is really going to get that. No, Granny, even though you have an always-on connection you're going to have to find somewhere to upload the pictures of your sewing team so I can see them. Even though both of our computers are on high-speed links with plenty of bandwidth for the purpose, your ISP doesn't want you doing things on your own no matter how easy it is.
This common ban on incoming connections (that's what it is, no matter how a technically oriented person to get around it) gives us only half of what we could easily have, discouraging innovation and maintaining a needless hierarchy of consolidated information sources.
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; if we want to share it we must share it through the providers. As a group they become the gatekeepers.
It doesn't have to be this way. If more ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content, people would be able to self-publish in all sorts of new ways. Once we can participate directly in the internet without the middleman of some company with servers we'll unleash an amazing amount of potential and innovation.
Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. Network-centric computing would get a huge boost too. In any case, that small change in SOP has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
In particular it's likely that many things can't be done all that more efficiently, all things considered. Goods will be more expensive and more scarce, while capital will be absorbed into schemes to increase certain measures of efficiency. The economy will therefore slow as money is misallocated, and standards of living will be affected.
Things are done the way they're done now because they tend to have LOWER resource costs than the alternatives. That's how money works. I have no idea what you mean by economic costs to how we do things now; if that was the case we wouldn't be doing them!
There's been entirely too little time to say with a significant degree of certainty what it appears to be! We're running on models and theory here, not observation. It's a very hard problem that has not (and perhaps will never be) solved.
And yet with your response you miss the most important part of my comment: doing our "best guess" might make things far worse! Even if things are clearly changing for the worst, we haven't solved the problem sufficiently to detail the effects of any course of action we might take.
So it's back to my previous comment: we aren't positive of the factors in what is happening, and we are even less sure of the effects of any given solution. Therefore, trying a "best guess" approach has a good chance of making things worse.
That's an incredibly incorrect way of looking at things.
So we "do something" and "try whatever looks like it might work." Great! In the best case we avoid global warming and hug ourselves.
But what about the other cases? They don't come for free; this isn't a no risk deal!
In the moderate case we waste tons of money and resources fighting something that either doesn't exist or can't be averted anyway. That would be pretty lousy!
But then there's the even worse case. Since you propose that we just flail around doing things that look about right, there's always the chance that whatever we do will land us in an even worse position. Then we'll have wasted a ton of money and resources just to shoot ourselves in the foot.
No. When presented a system that's not fully understood, that's clearly very complicated, and that can pose huge risks the answer isn't to poke at it in an effort to avoid a danger that might not even be there.
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; the only way for individuals to express themselves is to partner with some provider.
It doesn't have to be this way. If ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content people would be able to self publish. Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. In any case, that small change in policy has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
Oh, YOU tried both and can therefore answer for the rest of the geographic land mass of the US?
Why oh why do they bother collecting stats and conducting expensive surveys of such things when they can just be asking you?
Re:Running servers@home...
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
and others such as Netmeeting, which lets grandma talk to her grandkids, webfolders, vnc servers, and remote desktop servers, which let businessmen work from home and increase productivity, perhaps even when increasing time with their families, and components of various video games.
Arguably allowing people to run servers encourages them to educate themselves on the basics of what a server is, which then educates them on the security implications of servers. They'll know a little more about what spambots and zombies are and how to protect their computers against infestations. The current one way internet encourages a mindset that can't recognize the existence of these bad things.
Re:How about dealing with blocking of port 80?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 2
From the beginning of time, huh?
Most people probably run servers of some sort and just don't know it. ISPs are doing society a tremendous disservice by labeling personal servers as some sort of business only or power user only device. If people were allowed to run their own servers, properly packaged as user-friendly appliances of course, many of the internet's problems would be solved. It could even have significant positive influence on the entire OS and ways that people use computers.
The server restriction serves only to make the internet into a one way medium, cracking down on pariticpation in a really sad way.
Re:How about dealing with blocking of port 80?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 1
Give users more legitimate (you know, from the polite society's point of view) reasons to upload, and the upload pipes will probably grow.
Once the restricted upload starts keeping video of grandma's birthday party from being distributed to the cousins you better believe ISPs will feel pressue to increase them. For now, though, high upload rates are supposedly only needed for people pirating music.
How about dealing with blocking of port 80?
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It seems to me that a much more important discussion is being completely overlooked. With all the focus on the interdealings of large selfinterested corporations nobody seems to be talking about the evolution of the access that consumers are seeing today.
"The internet" has largely come to mean "the web" with everything else being secondary. This evolution has severe implications for everything from self publication to the value of peer to peer communication. In short, it seems that most ISPs have made it illegal to run any servers or do anything else that results in decentralization of power. This creates an environment where all content MUST be hosted on the servers of some powerhouse, and therefore be subject to whatever costs that involves.
The internet no longer connects people and people. It connects people to businesses that sometimes happen to relay traffic from person to person.
Let people do what they want with traffic and then it doesn't matter quite so much whether YouTube is being slowed down: the big centralized sites won't hold such a monopoly on the content.
We have cryptographic methods, communication infrastructure, and computing power to all but ensure that fraud never happens in electronic elections. We haven't actually installed such systems simply because the governments in charge have not demanded them. They've been forking over money for half-assed setups, so that's what they've been getting.
Done properly, with voting data being archived, duplicated, signed, and overseen automatically and digitally voting can be as reliable as our five nines infrastructural systems. We just have to ask for it.
And for god sake, let paper go! Paper trails are a distraction from really getting somewhere.
You seem to be reading some other words that aren't there. The sentence doesnt end with "but not the rest of the world" for a reason.
The warm period in Europe was, yes, warm in Europe, but this temperature rise is seen globally. The article points this out, though I suppose it could have spent a little more time stressing it.
Nonsense! Not only can slick workers hide it from each other, there's a basic problem with counting the ballots, submitting that count, verifying the honesty of the people who coutned, verifying those who brought together counts from other places. Then there's things like verifying the ballots themselves, and on and on.
Paper balloting is not safe. Neither is digital balloting, but at least digital balloting has a smaller margin of error.
But that doesn't address the heart of the matter: should we have joined these conflicts? If the wars were right then we shouldn't HAVE such a constraint, as they would be a negative drag on our rightful participation in war.
Completely irrelevant. Even if the airports are publicly owned you still can't just walk in and do whatever you want. The simple fact is that public owned airports are owned by 'the people' not you. You still don't own this property, so you still can't demand rights on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Or, more concretely, democracy is a white mob hanging a black man.
You sure you want democracy as your goal there?
Talk about scribbling...
Now I don't know you, and I have no idea how you normally write, but you strike me as someone who likes to read their own meaning into things and then get all worked up over stuff people didn't say.
You might want to watch that, that's all. What you wrote here was barely related to what I said, and what your previous comment wrote was barely related to that before.
Peer review and consensus aren't the same thing. They're barely related.
Consensus is the process of finding a bunch of people who will attest to the same thing, while peer review is a process of criticism for an unproven idea.
You completely miss the point.
I'm not talking about getting myself upstream connectivity (I already have it). I'm talking about setting the table for an environment where everyone has it and everyone can therefore run whatever applications developed to utilize this additional capability.
You don't get it at all.
Firstly, running servers is in violation of the terms of the agreement that most ISPs provide. This has a chilling effect on the entire environment: from developers to users to those who may come up with fantastic innovations, all will be dissuaded from attempting to use incoming connections in a significant way when those incoming connections are not only subject to filtering but even illegal.
We're not just talking plain ol' web servers here. We're talking anything that might have a use for listening for incoming connections. Right now half of the infrastructure coming to our homes is being blocked; who knows what might be possible if we had full communication in both directions.
Even as things stand now people are hampered by this situation. For one, just look at the hoops you've suggested in your comment. Setting false ports to duck the fuzz? Dyndns? Yeah, my grandma is really going to get that. No, Granny, even though you have an always-on connection you're going to have to find somewhere to upload the pictures of your sewing team so I can see them. Even though both of our computers are on high-speed links with plenty of bandwidth for the purpose, your ISP doesn't want you doing things on your own no matter how easy it is.
This common ban on incoming connections (that's what it is, no matter how a technically oriented person to get around it) gives us only half of what we could easily have, discouraging innovation and maintaining a needless hierarchy of consolidated information sources.
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; if we want to share it we must share it through the providers. As a group they become the gatekeepers.
It doesn't have to be this way. If more ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content, people would be able to self-publish in all sorts of new ways. Once we can participate directly in the internet without the middleman of some company with servers we'll unleash an amazing amount of potential and innovation.
Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. Network-centric computing would get a huge boost too. In any case, that small change in SOP has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
See: broken window theory.
In particular it's likely that many things can't be done all that more efficiently, all things considered. Goods will be more expensive and more scarce, while capital will be absorbed into schemes to increase certain measures of efficiency. The economy will therefore slow as money is misallocated, and standards of living will be affected.
Things are done the way they're done now because they tend to have LOWER resource costs than the alternatives. That's how money works. I have no idea what you mean by economic costs to how we do things now; if that was the case we wouldn't be doing them!
Appears to be? No it doesn't appear to be!
There's been entirely too little time to say with a significant degree of certainty what it appears to be! We're running on models and theory here, not observation. It's a very hard problem that has not (and perhaps will never be) solved.
And yet with your response you miss the most important part of my comment: doing our "best guess" might make things far worse! Even if things are clearly changing for the worst, we haven't solved the problem sufficiently to detail the effects of any course of action we might take.
So it's back to my previous comment: we aren't positive of the factors in what is happening, and we are even less sure of the effects of any given solution. Therefore, trying a "best guess" approach has a good chance of making things worse.
No. Try again.
That's an incredibly incorrect way of looking at things.
So we "do something" and "try whatever looks like it might work." Great! In the best case we avoid global warming and hug ourselves.
But what about the other cases? They don't come for free; this isn't a no risk deal!
In the moderate case we waste tons of money and resources fighting something that either doesn't exist or can't be averted anyway. That would be pretty lousy!
But then there's the even worse case. Since you propose that we just flail around doing things that look about right, there's always the chance that whatever we do will land us in an even worse position. Then we'll have wasted a ton of money and resources just to shoot ourselves in the foot.
No. When presented a system that's not fully understood, that's clearly very complicated, and that can pose huge risks the answer isn't to poke at it in an effort to avoid a danger that might not even be there.
In my areas it's around twice to three times as expensive with far lower connection speeds AND they still don't always unblock the ports.
See here for an account of one business trying to get unblocked internet.
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; the only way for individuals to express themselves is to partner with some provider.
It doesn't have to be this way. If ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content people would be able to self publish. Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. In any case, that small change in policy has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
Oh, YOU tried both and can therefore answer for the rest of the geographic land mass of the US?
Why oh why do they bother collecting stats and conducting expensive surveys of such things when they can just be asking you?
and others such as Netmeeting, which lets grandma talk to her grandkids, webfolders, vnc servers, and remote desktop servers, which let businessmen work from home and increase productivity, perhaps even when increasing time with their families, and components of various video games.
Arguably allowing people to run servers encourages them to educate themselves on the basics of what a server is, which then educates them on the security implications of servers. They'll know a little more about what spambots and zombies are and how to protect their computers against infestations. The current one way internet encourages a mindset that can't recognize the existence of these bad things.
From the beginning of time, huh?
Most people probably run servers of some sort and just don't know it. ISPs are doing society a tremendous disservice by labeling personal servers as some sort of business only or power user only device. If people were allowed to run their own servers, properly packaged as user-friendly appliances of course, many of the internet's problems would be solved. It could even have significant positive influence on the entire OS and ways that people use computers.
The server restriction serves only to make the internet into a one way medium, cracking down on pariticpation in a really sad way.
Give users more legitimate (you know, from the polite society's point of view) reasons to upload, and the upload pipes will probably grow.
Once the restricted upload starts keeping video of grandma's birthday party from being distributed to the cousins you better believe ISPs will feel pressue to increase them. For now, though, high upload rates are supposedly only needed for people pirating music.
It seems to me that a much more important discussion is being completely overlooked. With all the focus on the interdealings of large selfinterested corporations nobody seems to be talking about the evolution of the access that consumers are seeing today.
"The internet" has largely come to mean "the web" with everything else being secondary. This evolution has severe implications for everything from self publication to the value of peer to peer communication. In short, it seems that most ISPs have made it illegal to run any servers or do anything else that results in decentralization of power. This creates an environment where all content MUST be hosted on the servers of some powerhouse, and therefore be subject to whatever costs that involves.
The internet no longer connects people and people. It connects people to businesses that sometimes happen to relay traffic from person to person.
Let people do what they want with traffic and then it doesn't matter quite so much whether YouTube is being slowed down: the big centralized sites won't hold such a monopoly on the content.
We have cryptographic methods, communication infrastructure, and computing power to all but ensure that fraud never happens in electronic elections. We haven't actually installed such systems simply because the governments in charge have not demanded them. They've been forking over money for half-assed setups, so that's what they've been getting.
Done properly, with voting data being archived, duplicated, signed, and overseen automatically and digitally voting can be as reliable as our five nines infrastructural systems. We just have to ask for it.
And for god sake, let paper go! Paper trails are a distraction from really getting somewhere.
And how did they show that the CO2 levels and global temperature were related?
As stated in this article, the data seems to indicate that CO2 rises IN RESPONSE TO warming; it does not proceed it.
You seem to be reading some other words that aren't there. The sentence doesnt end with "but not the rest of the world" for a reason.
The warm period in Europe was, yes, warm in Europe, but this temperature rise is seen globally. The article points this out, though I suppose it could have spent a little more time stressing it.
Nonsense! Not only can slick workers hide it from each other, there's a basic problem with counting the ballots, submitting that count, verifying the honesty of the people who coutned, verifying those who brought together counts from other places. Then there's things like verifying the ballots themselves, and on and on.
Paper balloting is not safe. Neither is digital balloting, but at least digital balloting has a smaller margin of error.
But that doesn't address the heart of the matter: should we have joined these conflicts? If the wars were right then we shouldn't HAVE such a constraint, as they would be a negative drag on our rightful participation in war.
The quote presupposes that all war is bad.
Completely irrelevant. Even if the airports are publicly owned you still can't just walk in and do whatever you want. The simple fact is that public owned airports are owned by 'the people' not you. You still don't own this property, so you still can't demand rights on it.
It's quite simple.
All of that is irrelevant. Once you give someone something, it's theirs man. You have no claim on their property just because it was once theirs.