Where do you guys get this stuff? We aren't even to the mid-term elections yet, and you're claiming that Obama set up the regulatory structure that lead to (I presume) the disaster in the Gulf? How exactly did he accomplish this? What regulations did he dismantle that were in place when Bush was in office? Do you have one iota of documentation for this claim? Why am I hearing about this for the first time on/.?
In any case, we weren't even talking about this--we were talking about green building!
This is sort of funny-ish, but really the point of IPv6 is that it gets rid of the end-to-end break that NAT causes. NAT prevents devices from communicating freely on the internet. NAT means that your laptop, at home, typically doesn't have a globally-routable IPv4 address. Which means in turn that you can't connect to your friend Joe's laptop down the street. As long as you only ever need to connect to corporate servers, IPv4 will probably do fine for you. But if you want to break out of that box, you really want IPv6.
Solar sails won't get you to orbit. Nuclear explosions won't either, unless the ecosystem here is already wrecked, in which case it's probably a better investment to re-terraform earth, as someone else suggested.
Oh please, don't be such a defeatist. It *is* possible to do what Hawking proposes. And we *are* making technical progress in that direction. But we have yet to identify the resources and technology we need to get there. The ISS is the pinnacle of our space habitation, and it's held together with bubble gum and bailing wire.
All I'm saying is that right now, we can't do what Hawking proposes. I'm not saying it's nutty to want to do it. I agree that there are a lot of people who see space colonization as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and have entirely unreasonable expectations about it. But the wish to colonize space isn't fundamentally nutty. We just need to be realistic about it.
I didn't say we'd have to bring everything with us. I didn't even mean that. I asked where we will get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable ecosystem. Of course we would use the resources we find at whatever destination we reach, but how would we get to that destination with enough equipment to exploit those resources?
Okay, where are you going to get enough *electricity* to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem? Lift capacity and energy are the same thing. The energy embodied in electrical potential that you get from your wall outlet comes from somewhere--it doesn't just appear by magic.
Huh, what bike shops have you been going to? Carbon fiber is very common--it's just expensive. The latest fashion is the cheap hipster fixie, which costs $300. That's less than the cost of a single carbon wheel. So the reason you don't see carbon wheels is not that people aren't using them--it's that they're not in fashion.
Having said that, your fundamental point is valid--despite being extraordinarily strong, carbon fiber is about an order of magnitude weaker than it needs to be to support a space elevator. More's the pity.
The "friend and regular" problem is trivially solved: you give them a new pin whenever they ask for one. The scammy freeloader knows better than to complain, and if they do, you just look at them patiently until they shut up. Come on, you work in a coffee shop--you haven't perfected the superior stare yet?
Not necessarily. Depends on the city. In LA, possibly true. In New York, people go to coffee shops because they live in tiny apartments, and want to be somewhere a little less tiny, or want to get away from their roommates, or their parents. Or, as was the case for me one really crappy month, their live-in girlfriend with whom they have broken up hasn't yet acquired a new apartment, and wants them out of the apartment because she can't sleep. Life is tough, and coffee shops open earlier than libraries.
Unless there's nobody competing for the table, there is simply no way that a wifi hog is going to be a money maker, even if they continue to buy coffee. You can't drink coffee that fast. Well, maybe you can, but I can't. You're going to walk out of the shop with a brutal headache and a nervous twitch that could break bones.
The bottom line is that people who show up at the coffee shop and sit there all day spread out over a table, not sharing and not socializing, are not good customers. They have every right to *want* to be able to do that, but the coffee shop isn't benefiting from their presence, and *can't* benefit from their presence.
There's no clean way to fix this--another person who sits at the table all day might have friends who drift in and out and socialize with him or her, resulting in many more coffee purchases than would have occurred otherwise. That person might be a real boon to the same cafe that doesn't benefit from the loner who sits there all day.
And of course with the proliferation of decent 3G, the loner could just bring his or her own broadband connection. So there's really no way to deal with this other than on a case-by-case basis. It sounds like this particular coffee shop is in a location where there are a lot of leeches, and they've done what they have to do to re-balance things. It's almost certainly the case that they still occasionally get people who sit around hogging a table all day and don't buy enough coffee, but probably now there are fewer such customers, and so the balance is right again. It's too bad for the other customers, but that's life.
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
This may be true where you live, but I've had quite good experience with building inspectors being thorough. Point being, it's true that merely getting a permit approved and the inspections completed is no guarantee that the building is safe, but it's an additional opportunity for someone to notice a mistake. And a builder who's expecting an inspection and who isn't naturally careful will be more careful in anticipation of the inspection.
E.g., I know of a building project in Oracle, Arizona, where the inspector noticed that the earth at the bottom of a foundation trench was not undisturbed earth, but merely earth that had been lying there for a long while, and insisted that the builder dig it out before building. A great deal of organic matter from an old, buried trash pile was found, and the trench was dug down to actual undisturbed earth. If this mistake hadn't been discovered, the cost for repairing the inevitable damage that would have occurred from settling would have been astronomical.
"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
My big questions about this article are two: why are they setting up TVs for city employees to watch in the first place, and why do they have a monopoly franchise agreement with Comcast? Are the citizens of the town being served by this sweetheart deal?
You're being deliberately obtuse. How about assuming that all information transmitted by an individual over radio waves is private unless he makes an explicit pro-active indication otherwise?
I don't think either of us is being deliberately obtuse, but I do think that you are missing the point.
Requiring that people indicate their information is not private sounds fine to me. How would you indicate that? How about by making no effort whatsoever to ensure that the information is private? For god's sake, man, do you want *actual* privacy, which is easily achieved, or do you want the *pretense* of privacy that such a law would give you? Do you think passing a law saying "thou shalt not do this trivially easy thing" will prevent criminals from doing it? How would you know? The only reason we know what Google did is that they admitted to it.
Nobody's alleged that Google actually used any of this data. Google denies that they did. If they processed it and used it in some "evil" way, then I'd agree that they'd deserve some kind of consequences. But absent any evidence to that effect, we're talking about something very different. So until we hear otherwise, let's talk about what actually happened.
You're entitled to your opinion, but your freedom to do whatever you want ends when your fist contacts my nose. Passing stupid laws is immoral. If you want privacy, act that way--don't pass a law insisting I assume you want it even when you act like you don't.
The Google car *was* in a public place: the road. And what it did was much more equivalent to just shooting a picture that happened to have your face in it than deliberately shooting a portrait of you without your consent.
As for "personal data", how is Google to know that data you've broadcasted for all to see is personal?
If you don't want people to see your data, don't broadcast it.
No, there's a big difference. If I steal your bike, you don't have it. If I receive what you transmit with your radio, you haven't lost anything. You didn't have any privacy, because you were broadcasting your packet, so you haven't lost your privacy.
This is more like if you get the word "loser" tattooed on your forehead, and then you demand that the government pass a law that says that not only can nobody take pictures of you that show the tattoo, and not only can they not comment on it, but they aren't even allowed to register, in the privacy of their own mind, that you have that tattoo on your forehead.
You're wrong;) The fundamental problem is not unencrypted networks. The fundamental problem is that Google can (legally in many places) harvest and use this information for whatever purpose they like - and some people are blaming the people operating the wireless networks. I find that absurd.
Dude, you can make whatever assertions you want, but again, if you tattoo "idiot" on your forehead, you don't get to tell me not to notice.
If we imagined a company, with access to massive computation power, captured encrypted traffic and later brute-forced deciphered everything. Will your reaction be: "Well, it's their own fault. They should have used stronger encryption"?
Well, on the one hand, that's not the same thing, because in this case they have reason to assume that you didn't want to share that information with them; in the case of information you have broadcast in the clear, they have no such reason. I would argue that they should not do this. I would also argue that if you really care about keeping your data private, you should assume that someone, possibly not Google, will be doing this, and choose your keys accordingly.
Now, suppose Google took the data that they got through brute-forcing your keys, and used it to impersonate you and steal money from your bank account. Whether that information was sent in the clear or brute-forced, when they take it and use it to steal from you, they have in fact committed a crime.
We can argue about the moment when they cross over the line from being weirdly creepy to doing something that's actually wrong. I would argue that they cross this line when they take data that's been deliberately kept from them and deliberately gain access to it. Sure, keeping copies of packets they sniffed from your network is a bit creepy if they did it on purpose, but the mere fact of having done it is not itself an indication of wrongdoing--they have to do something inappropriate with it in order to cross that line.
Whether or not they are the good guys, laws that attempt to contravene physics are a bad idea. If the packets had been encrypted, it wouldn't have mattered that Google captured them--without the key, they're just noise. You could pass a law saying that capturing packets broadcast without encryption is illegal, or you could pass a law saying that if you want your packets to be private, you should encrypt them, and if you don't encrypt them, you have no expectation of privacy. Which of these two laws do you honestly think makes the most sense?
Normally wiretapping involves a deliberate act of bypassing some kind of lock, if only the lock on the box that contains the wires. Here there was no lock, and the packets were hitting the antenna without any special effort on Google's part, and Google did have a legitimate purpose in putting up the antenna and listening for packets. Yes, they got more packets than their legitimate purpose required. Maybe they did so deliberately, although I can't see any reason why that would have been useful to them. But making it illegal is a really expensive way to solve the problem, and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that people are sending their personal information over the network in the clear.
This isn't some weird system where space aliens using mind control technology can make things happen without anyone noticing. The basis upon which the FCC would regulate the ISPs is well-understood law, and is how the Internets were run until the Bush administration decided to throw a giant hunk of corporate welfare to the ISPs. That giant hunk of corporate welfare is why you see less competition in the ISP business these days--it pretty much shot all the smaller ISPs in the head.
What these regulations allow is something called common carrier status. What common carrier status does is to say that as long as ISPs don't attempt in any way to control what passes across their lines, they are not liable for what passes across their lines. This is net neutrality. It's a very clear regulation, and it's the diametric opposite of censorship.
So take off your tinfoil hat and let your brain cool off a little. Your blind acceptance of paranoid talking points is what's going to kill our freedom of speech, not some conspiracy on the part of Obama administration cabinet members that you somehow will not be able to detect.
This is a bit unfair, since the reason this situation exists is that the cable and telco operators lobbied for it. It's illegal in many states for a municipality to start an ISP in competition with any commercial operator. And it's not illegal for you to start your own ISP, contrary to your assertion. It's just expensive, and you may not be able to use the public rights of way to do it. Why? It's expensive because you have to dig up every street in a city to put in your cables. And digging up all the streets whenever someone wants to start an ISP is a big hassle for the residents. And that's why you may not be allowed to do it, or may have to jump through some really big hoops to get permission to do it.
But if you want to start an ISP that operates over the air, you can, and it's a lot cheaper. There are a lot of ways to do it, and products you can buy to make it happen. But it's still a tough business to get into, because you're competing with companies that already have existing infrastructure. You have to take away their customers, not just find new customers.
But what's really frustrating about this article is that the authors make it sound like the FCC is trying to regulate the web, when in fact the genesis of this whole discussion was Comcast forging RST packets in TCP streams when it thought you were running bitstream. The FCC, I think very rightly, came down on them like a ton of bricks for doing that. Then the Supremes decided they couldn't do that unless they regulated ISPs as telecommunications providers (which, as it happens, is what they are). Then the FCC decided to regulate them as telecommunications providers. There's nothing underhanded going on here. The FCC is just doing its job.
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Where do you guys get this stuff? We aren't even to the mid-term elections yet, and you're claiming that Obama set up the regulatory structure that lead to (I presume) the disaster in the Gulf? How exactly did he accomplish this? What regulations did he dismantle that were in place when Bush was in office? Do you have one iota of documentation for this claim? Why am I hearing about this for the first time on /.?
In any case, we weren't even talking about this--we were talking about green building!
Don't be silly--of course we have. Torrenting over IPv6 is old, old news.
This is sort of funny-ish, but really the point of IPv6 is that it gets rid of the end-to-end break that NAT causes. NAT prevents devices from communicating freely on the internet. NAT means that your laptop, at home, typically doesn't have a globally-routable IPv4 address. Which means in turn that you can't connect to your friend Joe's laptop down the street. As long as you only ever need to connect to corporate servers, IPv4 will probably do fine for you. But if you want to break out of that box, you really want IPv6.
Solar sails won't get you to orbit. Nuclear explosions won't either, unless the ecosystem here is already wrecked, in which case it's probably a better investment to re-terraform earth, as someone else suggested.
Oh please, don't be such a defeatist. It *is* possible to do what Hawking proposes. And we *are* making technical progress in that direction. But we have yet to identify the resources and technology we need to get there. The ISS is the pinnacle of our space habitation, and it's held together with bubble gum and bailing wire.
All I'm saying is that right now, we can't do what Hawking proposes. I'm not saying it's nutty to want to do it. I agree that there are a lot of people who see space colonization as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and have entirely unreasonable expectations about it. But the wish to colonize space isn't fundamentally nutty. We just need to be realistic about it.
I didn't say we'd have to bring everything with us. I didn't even mean that. I asked where we will get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable ecosystem. Of course we would use the resources we find at whatever destination we reach, but how would we get to that destination with enough equipment to exploit those resources?
Okay, where are you going to get enough *electricity* to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem? Lift capacity and energy are the same thing. The energy embodied in electrical potential that you get from your wall outlet comes from somewhere--it doesn't just appear by magic.
Huh, what bike shops have you been going to? Carbon fiber is very common--it's just expensive. The latest fashion is the cheap hipster fixie, which costs $300. That's less than the cost of a single carbon wheel. So the reason you don't see carbon wheels is not that people aren't using them--it's that they're not in fashion.
Having said that, your fundamental point is valid--despite being extraordinarily strong, carbon fiber is about an order of magnitude weaker than it needs to be to support a space elevator. More's the pity.
What's "expresso?"
The "friend and regular" problem is trivially solved: you give them a new pin whenever they ask for one. The scammy freeloader knows better than to complain, and if they do, you just look at them patiently until they shut up. Come on, you work in a coffee shop--you haven't perfected the superior stare yet?
Not necessarily. Depends on the city. In LA, possibly true. In New York, people go to coffee shops because they live in tiny apartments, and want to be somewhere a little less tiny, or want to get away from their roommates, or their parents. Or, as was the case for me one really crappy month, their live-in girlfriend with whom they have broken up hasn't yet acquired a new apartment, and wants them out of the apartment because she can't sleep. Life is tough, and coffee shops open earlier than libraries.
Unless there's nobody competing for the table, there is simply no way that a wifi hog is going to be a money maker, even if they continue to buy coffee. You can't drink coffee that fast. Well, maybe you can, but I can't. You're going to walk out of the shop with a brutal headache and a nervous twitch that could break bones.
The bottom line is that people who show up at the coffee shop and sit there all day spread out over a table, not sharing and not socializing, are not good customers. They have every right to *want* to be able to do that, but the coffee shop isn't benefiting from their presence, and *can't* benefit from their presence.
There's no clean way to fix this--another person who sits at the table all day might have friends who drift in and out and socialize with him or her, resulting in many more coffee purchases than would have occurred otherwise. That person might be a real boon to the same cafe that doesn't benefit from the loner who sits there all day.
And of course with the proliferation of decent 3G, the loner could just bring his or her own broadband connection. So there's really no way to deal with this other than on a case-by-case basis. It sounds like this particular coffee shop is in a location where there are a lot of leeches, and they've done what they have to do to re-balance things. It's almost certainly the case that they still occasionally get people who sit around hogging a table all day and don't buy enough coffee, but probably now there are fewer such customers, and so the balance is right again. It's too bad for the other customers, but that's life.
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
This may be true where you live, but I've had quite good experience with building inspectors being thorough. Point being, it's true that merely getting a permit approved and the inspections completed is no guarantee that the building is safe, but it's an additional opportunity for someone to notice a mistake. And a builder who's expecting an inspection and who isn't naturally careful will be more careful in anticipation of the inspection.
E.g., I know of a building project in Oracle, Arizona, where the inspector noticed that the earth at the bottom of a foundation trench was not undisturbed earth, but merely earth that had been lying there for a long while, and insisted that the builder dig it out before building. A great deal of organic matter from an old, buried trash pile was found, and the trench was dug down to actual undisturbed earth. If this mistake hadn't been discovered, the cost for repairing the inevitable damage that would have occurred from settling would have been astronomical.
Apparently you have never heard of dilution...
"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
My big questions about this article are two: why are they setting up TVs for city employees to watch in the first place, and why do they have a monopoly franchise agreement with Comcast? Are the citizens of the town being served by this sweetheart deal?
You're being deliberately obtuse. How about assuming that all information transmitted by an individual over radio waves is private unless he makes an explicit pro-active indication otherwise?
I don't think either of us is being deliberately obtuse, but I do think that you are missing the point.
Requiring that people indicate their information is not private sounds fine to me. How would you indicate that? How about by making no effort whatsoever to ensure that the information is private? For god's sake, man, do you want *actual* privacy, which is easily achieved, or do you want the *pretense* of privacy that such a law would give you? Do you think passing a law saying "thou shalt not do this trivially easy thing" will prevent criminals from doing it? How would you know? The only reason we know what Google did is that they admitted to it.
Nobody's alleged that Google actually used any of this data. Google denies that they did. If they processed it and used it in some "evil" way, then I'd agree that they'd deserve some kind of consequences. But absent any evidence to that effect, we're talking about something very different. So until we hear otherwise, let's talk about what actually happened.
You're entitled to your opinion, but your freedom to do whatever you want ends when your fist contacts my nose. Passing stupid laws is immoral. If you want privacy, act that way--don't pass a law insisting I assume you want it even when you act like you don't.
In most countries, less than a dollar. In the U.S., it depends on whether the human in question is insured or not. I.e., you asked a dumb question.
The Google car *was* in a public place: the road. And what it did was much more equivalent to just shooting a picture that happened to have your face in it than deliberately shooting a portrait of you without your consent.
As for "personal data", how is Google to know that data you've broadcasted for all to see is personal?
If you don't want people to see your data, don't broadcast it.
No, there's a big difference. If I steal your bike, you don't have it. If I receive what you transmit with your radio, you haven't lost anything. You didn't have any privacy, because you were broadcasting your packet, so you haven't lost your privacy.
This is more like if you get the word "loser" tattooed on your forehead, and then you demand that the government pass a law that says that not only can nobody take pictures of you that show the tattoo, and not only can they not comment on it, but they aren't even allowed to register, in the privacy of their own mind, that you have that tattoo on your forehead.
Dude, you can make whatever assertions you want, but again, if you tattoo "idiot" on your forehead, you don't get to tell me not to notice.
Well, on the one hand, that's not the same thing, because in this case they have reason to assume that you didn't want to share that information with them; in the case of information you have broadcast in the clear, they have no such reason. I would argue that they should not do this. I would also argue that if you really care about keeping your data private, you should assume that someone, possibly not Google, will be doing this, and choose your keys accordingly.
Now, suppose Google took the data that they got through brute-forcing your keys, and used it to impersonate you and steal money from your bank account. Whether that information was sent in the clear or brute-forced, when they take it and use it to steal from you, they have in fact committed a crime.
We can argue about the moment when they cross over the line from being weirdly creepy to doing something that's actually wrong. I would argue that they cross this line when they take data that's been deliberately kept from them and deliberately gain access to it. Sure, keeping copies of packets they sniffed from your network is a bit creepy if they did it on purpose, but the mere fact of having done it is not itself an indication of wrongdoing--they have to do something inappropriate with it in order to cross that line.
Whether or not they are the good guys, laws that attempt to contravene physics are a bad idea. If the packets had been encrypted, it wouldn't have mattered that Google captured them--without the key, they're just noise. You could pass a law saying that capturing packets broadcast without encryption is illegal, or you could pass a law saying that if you want your packets to be private, you should encrypt them, and if you don't encrypt them, you have no expectation of privacy. Which of these two laws do you honestly think makes the most sense?
Normally wiretapping involves a deliberate act of bypassing some kind of lock, if only the lock on the box that contains the wires. Here there was no lock, and the packets were hitting the antenna without any special effort on Google's part, and Google did have a legitimate purpose in putting up the antenna and listening for packets. Yes, they got more packets than their legitimate purpose required. Maybe they did so deliberately, although I can't see any reason why that would have been useful to them. But making it illegal is a really expensive way to solve the problem, and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that people are sending their personal information over the network in the clear.
This isn't some weird system where space aliens using mind control technology can make things happen without anyone noticing. The basis upon which the FCC would regulate the ISPs is well-understood law, and is how the Internets were run until the Bush administration decided to throw a giant hunk of corporate welfare to the ISPs. That giant hunk of corporate welfare is why you see less competition in the ISP business these days--it pretty much shot all the smaller ISPs in the head.
What these regulations allow is something called common carrier status. What common carrier status does is to say that as long as ISPs don't attempt in any way to control what passes across their lines, they are not liable for what passes across their lines. This is net neutrality. It's a very clear regulation, and it's the diametric opposite of censorship.
So take off your tinfoil hat and let your brain cool off a little. Your blind acceptance of paranoid talking points is what's going to kill our freedom of speech, not some conspiracy on the part of Obama administration cabinet members that you somehow will not be able to detect.
Gah. Bittorrent, not bitstream.
This is a bit unfair, since the reason this situation exists is that the cable and telco operators lobbied for it. It's illegal in many states for a municipality to start an ISP in competition with any commercial operator. And it's not illegal for you to start your own ISP, contrary to your assertion. It's just expensive, and you may not be able to use the public rights of way to do it. Why? It's expensive because you have to dig up every street in a city to put in your cables. And digging up all the streets whenever someone wants to start an ISP is a big hassle for the residents. And that's why you may not be allowed to do it, or may have to jump through some really big hoops to get permission to do it.
But if you want to start an ISP that operates over the air, you can, and it's a lot cheaper. There are a lot of ways to do it, and products you can buy to make it happen. But it's still a tough business to get into, because you're competing with companies that already have existing infrastructure. You have to take away their customers, not just find new customers.
But what's really frustrating about this article is that the authors make it sound like the FCC is trying to regulate the web, when in fact the genesis of this whole discussion was Comcast forging RST packets in TCP streams when it thought you were running bitstream. The FCC, I think very rightly, came down on them like a ton of bricks for doing that. Then the Supremes decided they couldn't do that unless they regulated ISPs as telecommunications providers (which, as it happens, is what they are). Then the FCC decided to regulate them as telecommunications providers. There's nothing underhanded going on here. The FCC is just doing its job.