So what, you live in your parents' basement, and your mom still cooks for you? Unfortunately, that's a situation that can't last: your mom is getting older. Eventually you will have to learn how to make your own sandwiches. Sorry, dude.
Actually, I expect to see some interesting work done in small ICEs that can charge electric cars. And it's not true that there's no garage hacking on ICEs; what's true is that it's generally done by people who are geeks, because a lot of it is coding—tweaking the software that controls the timing of the engine for higher performance or higher efficiency, for example. Interestingly, doing this to your car may in fact be illegal, because it screws up the car's emissions. I expect to see a _lot_ of garage hacking going on once Priuses start to age out. There are a lot of opportunities for cool hacks on modern cars. All of which would be illegal if Cory's fears were to become reality.
The War on Drugs has put a lot of harmless people behind bars, cost the country billions of dollars, and put a lot of people in the ground, many of them innocent. It has cost people their homes, their savings, their marriages, and their lives. You may think it would be cool for being a geek to be illegal like being a dealer, but I would prefer that it not be the case that possession of a C compiler could be justification for a no-knock warrant that gets me or my wife shot by some fuckwit with an automatic weapon in body armor.
Apparently you haven't heard about SOPA and PIPA. It's true that a law like this would be butt-stupid, but that hasn't prevented congresscritters from proposing laws in the past. We've seen law after stupid MAFIAA law passed in Europe, Canada and Australia, despite stiff opposition from the electorate. Cory is absolutely right that this is what the MAFIAA want, and they've gotten a lot of what they've wanted in the past. If you want to not have to deal with legal hassles to continue programming in the future, you really do need to pay attention to what's going on now.
Ripping DVDs is illegal, but Bob is talking about audio. The MAFIAA would really, really like to make ripping audio CDs illegal, and in some countries it probably is, but I'm assuming Bob's in the U.S., where it is very definitely _not_ illegal—it's fair use.
So you probably didn't vote, and didn't get involved in trying to change the outcome of elections, because you don't believe you can. You are part of the problem. I don't blame you for your pessimism, but it's what perpetuates this situation.
Huh. I don't suppose it might have anything to do with the drastic drop in population in Detroit and the rapid change in demographics there? Correlation does not imply causation. Detroit has become about 2000% cooler over the past decade, although at the cost of a lot of serious pain for people who live there or lived there.
This is really a gross oversimplification. Even your use of the terms "right" and "left" is absurdly simplistic.
What I believe is that people should generally be free to do what they want if it doesn't hurt anyone else. When what they do does hurt others, they shouldn't be allowed to do it. And then I believe that a happy society has some social services that have to get paid for. The most basic of these is a system of courts and records so that we can keep track of who owns what and who agreed to what, and so that we can adjudicate disputes rather than allowing the law of the jungle to decide who is at fault. Like Adam Smith, I also think that a prosperous society should take care of the unfortunate. I do not think that everybody should get an equal share, but I think that nobody should be allowed to suffer needlessly when there is sufficient surplus to take care of them. I think that a good social safety net encourages risk-taking, and risk-taking encourages innovation, which creates more prosperity. I think that excessive concentration of capital creates forces that work against democracy. I think there are some problems that are best solved through group agreement rather than the random brownian motion of the market.
So what does that make me? A left-winger or a right-winger? A communist would call me a capitalist. A capitalist would call me a socialist. An authoritarian would call me an anarchist. An anarchist would call me a statist. A fresh-water economist would call me a salt-water economist, or, more likely, ignorant. A salt-water economist would probably get along okay with me until we got down to specifics.
The lesson here is that gross oversimplification is useless and harmful. We actually have to talk to each other like grown adults, and not just fling invective in each others' faces and pretend that that is what discourse is.
Sure, AC. You're right. That's why there are crash bars on exits in factories now. It's the fucking government, taking our money and giving it to someone else. Oh wait, no, it's OSHA, and what they do actually saves lives. Nevermind.
There's no reason to assume this. What I think is going on is that they are listening to big media, and big media is telling them what to think, and they are thinking it, and they don't want to be bothered with opposing viewpoints. They genuinely do not understand the issues, because they don't need to. All they need to understand is what position to take, and what the talking points are that justify that position. The reason they push back and start complaining about pencil-necked geeks is precisely because they do not understand the details, and do not want to.
Yes, our country has been in this situation before. Regulatory capture is a well-known problem. Read up on Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busters. Read up on the robber barons. Read up on social darwinism. Read up on the suppression of the communist party in the 1930s (whether or not you think communism is bad, the way the communist party was suppressed was definitely anti-American). Read up on McCarthyism. Then read up on the Pullman Strike, and Hoovervilles, and the New Deal, and the civil rights movement.
The pendulum swings back and forth. I wish it would just stay on "social justice,' but it doesn't, because people get complacent and let things decay until they get bad enough that they feel like they have to do something. This is that time. People feel like they have to do something now. Don't be without hope. Stop thinking you are powerless. Stop trying to hit me, and hit me. Er, sorry, that just slipped out.
Oh bullshit. This is the inevitable result of the expansion of anti-science, anti-reality thinking that has overtaken our country in the past thirty years. We don't check to see if laws actually *work* anymore—we just pass them because they address "emergencies" that are declared in the press to justify them. We don't even read them. We just pass them.
The kind of magical thinking that you're complaining about, where people pass new laws and hope that will make things better, is certainly stupid, but the kind of magical thinking you're engaging in is just as stupid. Your argument is more of the same: "just cut the government's income and force it to..?" What, exactly? This is just more ignorant hand-waving. It is just pure mental laziness to imagine that some easy thing you can do will make everything all better.
What we have to do if we want anything to change is to stop arguing over subtle points of ideology and start punishing legislators who pass stupid laws, and rewarding legislators who pass good laws. We have to start paying attention to whether laws that are passed work, and repealing the ones that don't. We have to make reason and thinking the basis for passing laws, and not prejudice and ignorance. This means we have to pay attention—we actually have to spend some of our precious time studying what the government is doing, and what our representatives are doing, and letting them know that we are paying attention, and that we will punish them if they allow any of the various forms of corruption to flourish, whether it's regulatory capture, simple cronyism, or the kind of contracting that often happens where the contractor promises the world for a really big hunk of money, takes and spends the money over time, and then eventually says "well, I guess it isn't working, sorry."
When we let this kind of crap continue and never factor it into who we vote for, we have only ourselves to blame.
It's part of a new program at the PTO where if something has never been patented, it's assumed never to have been invented. It's an incredible time-saver.
Strictly speaking, if you have an at-fault accident on your record, you just get to bend over and take it—every insurance company is going to give you a bad deal. Insurance companies have no need to compete over people who have had accidents. If you can get someone to write you a policy, you pretty much have to take the deal.
This is why I took up motorcycling when I was in my mid-twenties...:P
Insurance companies will charge higher premiums if they can figure out a way to justify it, because you have to buy insurance. There's no downside. If you read TFA, it's quite likely that the accident that triggered this whole thing was the result of sleep deprivation. Furthermore, the article mostly talks about texting while driving, not talking while driving.
When you talk about the rise in the coincidence of an accident happening while a person is using their cell phone, it's worth paying attention to the fact that the incidence of the use of cell phones has gone up over the same time period, and the availability of phones that are easy to text on has also gone up. So here is a pretty clear case where correlation very definitely does not imply causation.
Doing _anything_ while driving makes driving riskier, but the degree of increase in risk is too small to justify outlawing anything you might do while driving. If mobile phone usage while driving were really making the roads more dangerous in a significant way, we'd see a distinct rise in the number of auto fatalities proportional to the increase in popularity of mobile phones. But we don't.
I think what we have here is someone who sees an opportunity to save some lives, which this definitely is, and no cost to saving them, which there definitely isn't. To him. A more responsible NTSB head would spend some serious time looking into making the roads safer by improving the non-autonomous transportation system: trains, buses, etc. If driving were something we did only occasionally, then we might be more willing to focus totally on driving when we did do it, but since we have to do it every time we need to go somewhere, it becomes routine, and multitasking is the inevitable result.
What you are missing in this analysis is that retransmissions are no more expensive whether they're done by the router or the end node, but when they are done by the end node, the end node has more information. Storing something in a buffer to send later when there's room in the pipe is exactly equivalent to retransmitting, except that there is no way for the router to inform the end node that this has happened.
Buffer and cache are not the same thing. Packets are written to a buffer once and read from it once. Caches are useless if, on average, blocks aren't read from them more than they are written to them. So treating them as analogous is highly misleading.
The deal with throughput is that you can only win by storing packets if there is going to be room to send them without delay. If you buffer every packet that's sent, it does get delivered, but by the time it gets to its destination, it's too late. You can adjust the TCP algorithms to behave somewhat less badly in this situation, but what you can't do is get genuine flow control with big buffers, because the endpoints have no way to determine the throughput of the network.
The only way the endpoints can determine the throughput of the network is if packets get dropped when there's congestion. When packets don't get dropped, what you see is that whenever there is more traffic to send over the link than the link can hold, it just winds up in a buffer. Latency rises. Eventually all the senders give up. Then the buffers start to drain, and packets get delivered. Then the acks start coming back. Now the endpoints think they are on a high latency link, so they crank back up again and fill the buffers again.
So what you see is a network that works great as long as the total load presented to the network is less than the aggregate capacity of the network. As soon as the demand for bandwidth exceeds the supply, every single stream starts to stall. If you've stayed at a hotel recently, you've seen this: a dozen people try to watch video streams over a fairly wimpy connection, and then you can't do _anything_ over the connection, because the buffer fills up.
If you didn't have that giant buffer, all the endpoints would be able to tell that the link was congested, and would slow down. If the total available bandwidth wasn't enough, the video streams would basically fail, but you could still get mail and surf the web. But with bufferbloat, not only can't you watch video streams, you also can't surf the web or get email or ssh to your server.
You can see this by pinging a server somewhere out on the internet. When the link isn't congested, you'll see reasonable round trip times, typically 100ms. Then when it gets congested, you'll see packets dropped, and you'll see the RTT rise to as much as a minute. Then as all the senders notice that their packets aren't being delivered, they back off and suddenly the RTT starts to drop again, and you start to hope the network's been fixed. But it's fool's gold: as soon as the senders notice, they bomb the buffer again, and the RTT goes back up. Rinse and repeat until you give up.
You probably don't see this very often on your home link, because you probably aren't saturating it. But it happens a lot at Wifi hotspots in particular, and also sometimes on 3G networks. It's quite disheartening, particularly when you're paying for the connection. You also see it on big ISPs like Comcast when you try to reach content providers that aren't willing to pay the ransom to Comcast to get on their uncongested link.
Um, yes he is. Massachusetts is not quite as liberal a state as you seem to imagine. And I don't know why you call it Taxachusetts—taxes there are substantially lower than in California.
Why sell a product that requires two FTE to run it for $100k when you can sell a product that requires 1/10 FTE to run it for $1m? You're thinking really small with these numbers.
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This is true, and I would argue that it doesn't contradict the premise you are trying to contradict, because physics and math are related activities.
So what, you live in your parents' basement, and your mom still cooks for you? Unfortunately, that's a situation that can't last: your mom is getting older. Eventually you will have to learn how to make your own sandwiches. Sorry, dude.
Actually, I expect to see some interesting work done in small ICEs that can charge electric cars. And it's not true that there's no garage hacking on ICEs; what's true is that it's generally done by people who are geeks, because a lot of it is coding—tweaking the software that controls the timing of the engine for higher performance or higher efficiency, for example. Interestingly, doing this to your car may in fact be illegal, because it screws up the car's emissions. I expect to see a _lot_ of garage hacking going on once Priuses start to age out. There are a lot of opportunities for cool hacks on modern cars. All of which would be illegal if Cory's fears were to become reality.
The War on Drugs has put a lot of harmless people behind bars, cost the country billions of dollars, and put a lot of people in the ground, many of them innocent. It has cost people their homes, their savings, their marriages, and their lives. You may think it would be cool for being a geek to be illegal like being a dealer, but I would prefer that it not be the case that possession of a C compiler could be justification for a no-knock warrant that gets me or my wife shot by some fuckwit with an automatic weapon in body armor.
Apparently you haven't heard about SOPA and PIPA. It's true that a law like this would be butt-stupid, but that hasn't prevented congresscritters from proposing laws in the past. We've seen law after stupid MAFIAA law passed in Europe, Canada and Australia, despite stiff opposition from the electorate. Cory is absolutely right that this is what the MAFIAA want, and they've gotten a lot of what they've wanted in the past. If you want to not have to deal with legal hassles to continue programming in the future, you really do need to pay attention to what's going on now.
Ripping DVDs is illegal, but Bob is talking about audio. The MAFIAA would really, really like to make ripping audio CDs illegal, and in some countries it probably is, but I'm assuming Bob's in the U.S., where it is very definitely _not_ illegal—it's fair use.
So you probably didn't vote, and didn't get involved in trying to change the outcome of elections, because you don't believe you can. You are part of the problem. I don't blame you for your pessimism, but it's what perpetuates this situation.
Huh. I don't suppose it might have anything to do with the drastic drop in population in Detroit and the rapid change in demographics there? Correlation does not imply causation. Detroit has become about 2000% cooler over the past decade, although at the cost of a lot of serious pain for people who live there or lived there.
This is really a gross oversimplification. Even your use of the terms "right" and "left" is absurdly simplistic.
What I believe is that people should generally be free to do what they want if it doesn't hurt anyone else. When what they do does hurt others, they shouldn't be allowed to do it. And then I believe that a happy society has some social services that have to get paid for. The most basic of these is a system of courts and records so that we can keep track of who owns what and who agreed to what, and so that we can adjudicate disputes rather than allowing the law of the jungle to decide who is at fault. Like Adam Smith, I also think that a prosperous society should take care of the unfortunate. I do not think that everybody should get an equal share, but I think that nobody should be allowed to suffer needlessly when there is sufficient surplus to take care of them. I think that a good social safety net encourages risk-taking, and risk-taking encourages innovation, which creates more prosperity. I think that excessive concentration of capital creates forces that work against democracy. I think there are some problems that are best solved through group agreement rather than the random brownian motion of the market.
So what does that make me? A left-winger or a right-winger? A communist would call me a capitalist. A capitalist would call me a socialist. An authoritarian would call me an anarchist. An anarchist would call me a statist. A fresh-water economist would call me a salt-water economist, or, more likely, ignorant. A salt-water economist would probably get along okay with me until we got down to specifics.
The lesson here is that gross oversimplification is useless and harmful. We actually have to talk to each other like grown adults, and not just fling invective in each others' faces and pretend that that is what discourse is.
Turns out that a lot of email leaks to typo domains. So in fact encrypting the email would have been a really good idea in these cases.
The reason encryption hasn't taken off is that it's not done by default, and can't be enabled by clicking a checkbox.
Sure, AC. You're right. That's why there are crash bars on exits in factories now. It's the fucking government, taking our money and giving it to someone else. Oh wait, no, it's OSHA, and what they do actually saves lives. Nevermind.
There's no reason to assume this. What I think is going on is that they are listening to big media, and big media is telling them what to think, and they are thinking it, and they don't want to be bothered with opposing viewpoints. They genuinely do not understand the issues, because they don't need to. All they need to understand is what position to take, and what the talking points are that justify that position. The reason they push back and start complaining about pencil-necked geeks is precisely because they do not understand the details, and do not want to.
Oh, and read up on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and its aftermath.
Yes, our country has been in this situation before. Regulatory capture is a well-known problem. Read up on Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busters. Read up on the robber barons. Read up on social darwinism. Read up on the suppression of the communist party in the 1930s (whether or not you think communism is bad, the way the communist party was suppressed was definitely anti-American). Read up on McCarthyism. Then read up on the Pullman Strike, and Hoovervilles, and the New Deal, and the civil rights movement.
The pendulum swings back and forth. I wish it would just stay on "social justice,' but it doesn't, because people get complacent and let things decay until they get bad enough that they feel like they have to do something. This is that time. People feel like they have to do something now. Don't be without hope. Stop thinking you are powerless. Stop trying to hit me, and hit me. Er, sorry, that just slipped out.
Oh bullshit. This is the inevitable result of the expansion of anti-science, anti-reality thinking that has overtaken our country in the past thirty years. We don't check to see if laws actually *work* anymore—we just pass them because they address "emergencies" that are declared in the press to justify them. We don't even read them. We just pass them.
The kind of magical thinking that you're complaining about, where people pass new laws and hope that will make things better, is certainly stupid, but the kind of magical thinking you're engaging in is just as stupid. Your argument is more of the same: "just cut the government's income and force it to ..?" What, exactly? This is just more ignorant hand-waving. It is just pure mental laziness to imagine that some easy thing you can do will make everything all better.
What we have to do if we want anything to change is to stop arguing over subtle points of ideology and start punishing legislators who pass stupid laws, and rewarding legislators who pass good laws. We have to start paying attention to whether laws that are passed work, and repealing the ones that don't. We have to make reason and thinking the basis for passing laws, and not prejudice and ignorance. This means we have to pay attention—we actually have to spend some of our precious time studying what the government is doing, and what our representatives are doing, and letting them know that we are paying attention, and that we will punish them if they allow any of the various forms of corruption to flourish, whether it's regulatory capture, simple cronyism, or the kind of contracting that often happens where the contractor promises the world for a really big hunk of money, takes and spends the money over time, and then eventually says "well, I guess it isn't working, sorry."
When we let this kind of crap continue and never factor it into who we vote for, we have only ourselves to blame.
It's part of a new program at the PTO where if something has never been patented, it's assumed never to have been invented. It's an incredible time-saver.
Strictly speaking, if you have an at-fault accident on your record, you just get to bend over and take it—every insurance company is going to give you a bad deal. Insurance companies have no need to compete over people who have had accidents. If you can get someone to write you a policy, you pretty much have to take the deal.
This is why I took up motorcycling when I was in my mid-twenties... :P
Insurance companies will charge higher premiums if they can figure out a way to justify it, because you have to buy insurance. There's no downside. If you read TFA, it's quite likely that the accident that triggered this whole thing was the result of sleep deprivation. Furthermore, the article mostly talks about texting while driving, not talking while driving.
When you talk about the rise in the coincidence of an accident happening while a person is using their cell phone, it's worth paying attention to the fact that the incidence of the use of cell phones has gone up over the same time period, and the availability of phones that are easy to text on has also gone up. So here is a pretty clear case where correlation very definitely does not imply causation.
Doing _anything_ while driving makes driving riskier, but the degree of increase in risk is too small to justify outlawing anything you might do while driving. If mobile phone usage while driving were really making the roads more dangerous in a significant way, we'd see a distinct rise in the number of auto fatalities proportional to the increase in popularity of mobile phones. But we don't.
I think what we have here is someone who sees an opportunity to save some lives, which this definitely is, and no cost to saving them, which there definitely isn't. To him. A more responsible NTSB head would spend some serious time looking into making the roads safer by improving the non-autonomous transportation system: trains, buses, etc. If driving were something we did only occasionally, then we might be more willing to focus totally on driving when we did do it, but since we have to do it every time we need to go somewhere, it becomes routine, and multitasking is the inevitable result.
Yes, but is it in fact, as you say, "good science?" I'm pretty skeptical.
No argument. I'm glad they did it. I just wish they'd worded their statement a bit more strongly.
Might be counterproductive to the public interest? Wow, way to soft-peddle it.
What you are missing in this analysis is that retransmissions are no more expensive whether they're done by the router or the end node, but when they are done by the end node, the end node has more information. Storing something in a buffer to send later when there's room in the pipe is exactly equivalent to retransmitting, except that there is no way for the router to inform the end node that this has happened.
Buffer and cache are not the same thing. Packets are written to a buffer once and read from it once. Caches are useless if, on average, blocks aren't read from them more than they are written to them. So treating them as analogous is highly misleading.
The deal with throughput is that you can only win by storing packets if there is going to be room to send them without delay. If you buffer every packet that's sent, it does get delivered, but by the time it gets to its destination, it's too late. You can adjust the TCP algorithms to behave somewhat less badly in this situation, but what you can't do is get genuine flow control with big buffers, because the endpoints have no way to determine the throughput of the network.
The only way the endpoints can determine the throughput of the network is if packets get dropped when there's congestion. When packets don't get dropped, what you see is that whenever there is more traffic to send over the link than the link can hold, it just winds up in a buffer. Latency rises. Eventually all the senders give up. Then the buffers start to drain, and packets get delivered. Then the acks start coming back. Now the endpoints think they are on a high latency link, so they crank back up again and fill the buffers again.
So what you see is a network that works great as long as the total load presented to the network is less than the aggregate capacity of the network. As soon as the demand for bandwidth exceeds the supply, every single stream starts to stall. If you've stayed at a hotel recently, you've seen this: a dozen people try to watch video streams over a fairly wimpy connection, and then you can't do _anything_ over the connection, because the buffer fills up.
If you didn't have that giant buffer, all the endpoints would be able to tell that the link was congested, and would slow down. If the total available bandwidth wasn't enough, the video streams would basically fail, but you could still get mail and surf the web. But with bufferbloat, not only can't you watch video streams, you also can't surf the web or get email or ssh to your server.
You can see this by pinging a server somewhere out on the internet. When the link isn't congested, you'll see reasonable round trip times, typically 100ms. Then when it gets congested, you'll see packets dropped, and you'll see the RTT rise to as much as a minute. Then as all the senders notice that their packets aren't being delivered, they back off and suddenly the RTT starts to drop again, and you start to hope the network's been fixed. But it's fool's gold: as soon as the senders notice, they bomb the buffer again, and the RTT goes back up. Rinse and repeat until you give up.
You probably don't see this very often on your home link, because you probably aren't saturating it. But it happens a lot at Wifi hotspots in particular, and also sometimes on 3G networks. It's quite disheartening, particularly when you're paying for the connection. You also see it on big ISPs like Comcast when you try to reach content providers that aren't willing to pay the ransom to Comcast to get on their uncongested link.
Um, yes he is. Massachusetts is not quite as liberal a state as you seem to imagine. And I don't know why you call it Taxachusetts—taxes there are substantially lower than in California.
Why sell a product that requires two FTE to run it for $100k when you can sell a product that requires 1/10 FTE to run it for $1m? You're thinking really small with these numbers.