If that happened to me I'd stop honouring the bills, since the phone company is already charging my line to someone else. No way they'd get to bill it a second time.
Once the carrier has sold the right to making bits pass through their equipment towards your endpoint, they can't sell it a second (and third, and fourth, etc.) time to someone else. No way.
I'm libertarian and in favor of net neutrality, because this net neutrality has value in my necessarily subjective value-scale.
Mr CEO here wants to profit undeservedly from this value net neutrality has for me and millions others by taking our enjoyment of it hostage. And, well, taking hostages does not fit in my libertarian idea of what ethics encompass. I already pay for my carrier to be net neutral, now that I paid for this net neutrality it is mine and they can't take it back forcefully: that's how I see it.
"Malicious routing will only get them so far. If we have packets we want delivered, we will pay whomever is willing to do it fastest and with the least hassle."
Sure, except the same big pseudo-legitimate mob that guarantees this guy that no one will compete with him in certain domains won't let you. These are the same guys who made sure you don't have access to better guns than they have, and demonstrate their willingness and eagerness to make use of those guns to defend their interests every single day.
So I'd say don't be too hopeful about competition pressure. Unless you can find a stealthy way to do it - in which case I and others will happily help you with the funding.
The greatest thing is that, with the record publishing being a market, I don't have to buy at all if I don't approve of it or feel it's not worth it. If I don't care about the specific artist or label or record industry as a whole, there is no way they can get my support - they can't get my money (= my efforts and time) forcefully. And that's why I, too, am libertarian.
But the day they manage to get any form of government/compulsory funding, be it a P2P tax on every DSL/cable line or anything, they win and then there is nothing that stands in their way anymore.
By 2048 the concept of a national currency will have devolved back into a commodity-based token of expected value, and distributed credit social networks will gain popularity on grey- and black-markets, with individual payments turned into a simple authenticated P2P transfer. The single major urge for most people will be securing an income by any mean. Whole regions will be slowly deserted as the new ice age turns them progressively to tundra.
Mass shipping will be a thing of the past. What large scale transportation occurs will either be migration or the preserve of the richest opportunity seekers. The only areas where a mass transportation rich economy continues to exist will be those of the the North Oceania, at least those parts not still ravaged by civil war. Oil will be around 90$ a barrel in constant bucks, and consumption of it will have continually lowered over the previous couple decades. Intensive agriculture will have waned from current rich countries and moved to the current third world as a trend.
Many of the major coastal cities will be struggling as sea levels lower following the accelerating growth of the Greenland, Himalaya and Antarctica glaciers, their dried up sea ports rusting uselessly - when they are not permanently seized under ice. Diseases become more localized as transport slows. There is a general sense of febrility, a drive for grabbing whatever opportunities may present themselves, as future is more and more difficult to anticipate in the changing landscape of mankind. Most do not want to bring children into this world just to play safe and keep open the option of moving out.
In our present configuration, there are two routers: one at Earth, and one at Mars.
Each of them would be discarding the packets as soon as it received them for being expired, unless their TCP handling was altered for the specific Earth-Mars route.
Or, if one router had its time incorrectly set almost 30 minutes late, the other router would discard its packets as being twice as expired as above.
Apple added a "coalesced updates rendering" method of displaying the windows on the screen, back in MacOS 10.4. This display gizmo was documented, publicised and all, back then - litterally years ago. It's meant for economy of resources and not speed, for all I can gather and understand (it avoids untimely repainting of the screen buffer).
Now, it happens that this technique *may* cause window-updates-happy programs to run slower if they try to refresh their windows faster than the display rate, so Apple conveniently provided, back then, a simple method for bypassing it entirely just in case it was degrading performance. And Firefox, one such program that is degraded by it, has started using this bypass too, in its more recent versions - so it is NOT "crippled".
The whole uproar here seems caused by one thing Apple devs did in Webkit, to automatically bypass the coalesced-thing for all applications that use Webkit in a way that does not break them. The submitter apparently thought this was some kind of secret "uncrippling" feature, which it actually is, but also invented a whole conspiracy around it JUST BECAUSE FIREFOX DID NOT, at some point, MAKE USE OF THE BYPASS YET. Even though it has been documented for years !
The "secret uncripling feature" was not publicised because the Apple devs would rather find a different, more elegant way to disable the coalesced stuff in Webkit-using programs, and plan to delete the current fix in the near future.
"You're either renting land, throwing cash into a bizarro stock market, or going to a furry cybersex sim."
In three years sent in Second Life I have not done any of this. I must some weird and very persistent aberration, then. Or maybe you're just wrong.
"As the Linden (the currency of Second Life) is not based on anything"
It is based on the USD, and maintained at a rather fixed rate by LindenLab acting as a central bank. It's not perfect, but it has worked remarkably well so far.
"Linden Labs simply dumps currency into the market whenever they feel like it."
No, they sell some L$ only when they rate drops under 265 L$ per 1 USD to maintain the rate, and they buy back the L$ when the rate goes higher than 266 L$ per 1 USD (though they apparently never have had to do that). That's not "whenever they feel like it".
"So economic problems are pretty common"
Err, no. The L$ has been exceptionnally steady ever since LL introduced the measures I pointed out above, and the vast majority of players have zero problems with it. Only those who want to play games with their money and that of other people are taking risks. You're obviously confusing economy with finance if you conflate financial institutions like the "banks" and "stock exchanges" with the economy itself. But then, that's to be expected on a technology-oriented website like/.
Wow, your attempt at mocking technical speak turned awfully bad. Power is measured in Watts. Energy in Joules. The reactor is 27 MW, that is 27 MJ per second (for a duration of five years, according to the article, but I would think an istope generator like this one would have a declining power rate over time). You're the one confusing energy and power here.
Yes it is. Mr Olivennes redacted the claims that were incorporated in the proposal verbatim.
The idea is to give warnings before the internet connection is shut off (2 I believe).
There is also the principle of tagging and publicly shaming "offenders".
"To those saying just pick random wifi hotspots, I can assure them that if people were to receive one of those warnings, they would start thinking about securing their access point. Internet cafés are in trouble though."
Yeah right. Your typical DSL subscriber is light-years from distinguishing between their PC having been 0wned by a bot, and their wireless box having been cracked. I would bet most of them would blame their own kids or reinstall Windows for the umpteenth time, rather than think about switching from WEP to WPA2 or VPN.
The fight against Scientology is not about censoring kooks. It's about judging people for kidnappings, wrongful deaths and murders, racketeering and what amounts to slavery.
How do you even have property, especially real estate? Hell, how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
The same way millions of humans have done for thousands of years. Without a ruler to impose unwanted rules upon them about all those things.
If I'm not (too) mistaken, the USA originally arose as a reject of an originally rather libertarian society (see the Glorious Revolution episode, compare the Bill of Rights with that of the US constitution) that by then had veered into a more soc-dem sort of parliamentary monarchy. History stuttering ?
I think you're right about Somalia: it has not entered the mix of anarchy and tribal rule it is in now due to the will of the people, but through failure of both the governement and the various rebels that fought it, and as such has a high probability of failing, simply because all those people are not interested in living free and many continue insisting in imposing a ruler (preferably, the ruler of their own choosing) upon others.
"Is not finding the actual truth pragmatic? When one has the actual truth, one can then proceed to the pragmatic solution, no?"
Oh, the solutions they come up with are often very pragmatic and direct, with very concrete proposals like "getting rid of farm subsidies", "striking down laws forbidding the creation of competing currencies", "selling all the public schools". Some of them even have gradual solutions that involve pragmatic changes in current institutions.
It's just that they don't come to it pragmatically: they don't start by thinking "let's see what kind of powers the President has, or what amount of budget this agency can save, etc.", but instead by thinking "how does the whole mess works, and where is the problem", taking a global view from above, seeing the source of the problem, and only then trying to find something that could realistically act upon it.
"I always thought that whole MBTI thing was just a convenient way to poo-poo rational thought as "just another way of thinking", as though solving problems though emotions could possibly be as successful as solving problems though sound rationality and careful observation."
I don't think you understand the untold principle behind "solving problems through emotions": it's not about actually solving the problem, in the general sense of "solve", but rather to feel better about there being a problem. See for example the immigrants problem in the US, or how people pour vast amounts of money into foreign aid schemes that hardly help the third-world. It's not about the solution, but how you feel about it.
One thing I konw about libertarians, is that "profit" has little appeal to them either, whereas "human nature" is hailed by them as all-important in determining what is right and what is wrong.
Nerds are unrealistic when it comes to how human beings actually work.
All the nerds I know that are also libertarians (that's a majority of them) do quite the opposite: if you can provide them with a fact that shows people really do not act liek they think they would, it shakes their belief immediately and they struggle to integrate that new fact in their understanding of people.
One could even say that "fact" is a holy word for them.
It's not that being a nerd makes one a libertarian, or that being a libertarian magically transforms one into a nerd (though I hear it can do wonders to your, err, self-confidence).
There is a common cause to this politicial leaning and that way of life called "the nerd way". One hint is that the overwhelming majority (75% approximately) of all the libertarians I know are categorised in the "*NT*" part of the MBTI, meaning they are all Thinking rather than Feeling, and iNtuitive rather than Sensing. For example INTJ is the archetype of nerd.
That makes them more inclined to think about theory and complex problems, than what their colleague thinks of their look or how a given principle will make them feel about themselves. When you apply this to politics, that means they'll be looking at society, economics, justice, right and law with a mind that is non-pragmatic but dedicated to finding the actual truth. They will often develop complete theoretical structures for explaining their choices, because they are easily swayed by a convincing, rational argument, however obscure ; and not by a popular soundbite or appeals to emotion.
Libertarianism is one such political interpretation: it leaves little to no place to emotional reaction, does not call upon popularity, and instead builds on the strictest rational analysis (it's not a secret that Ayn Rand was obsessed with acting as rationnally as possible, to the point of obsession) and "heavy" theoretical considerations about "what actually is justice", "how economy actually works", etc.
"The acoustic surface plasmon, which will have implications for developments in nano-optics, high-temperature superconductors, and the fundamental understanding of chemical reactions on surfaces."
What about the understanding of nuclear reactions on metal surfaces ?
What good is the right to life if you can't afford food?
If food is so expensive, rare and precious that YOU cannot get any, then I think it shows either that you're totally irresponsible (incapable of taking care of your own most basic needs) - in which case I fail to see why "someone" should hold me or anyone else at gunpoint so you get to be fed forcefully ; or that no one in the world wants you to stay alive (otherwise they'd arrange for you to get food) - in which case you'll never find any such "someone" to help you at the expense of others. In any case, it's not a problem of you being poor. I guess I should ask you "What good is it to have the State take care of feeding people if there is no food at all in the first place ?" but that would be bringing myself down to your level.
Where is liberty if all land is private, and you own none?
As a matter of fact, I do not own any land, and all land on this planet is owned by individuals or by states. Yet, my liberty gets plenty of exercise, so I fail to see your point. Perhaps that is because I am familiar with the concept of homesteading and you're not.
Libertarians forget that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. They want the freedom to do whatever they want without the responsibility that goes with it.
Quite the contrary, actually. If you learn what libertarianism really is about, you'll see how absolutely wrong this affirmation of yours is.
Slashdot Mirror
Why stop at five lashes ? The ancient greeks used to execute any guy whose law project was rejected.
If that happened to me I'd stop honouring the bills, since the phone company is already charging my line to someone else. No way they'd get to bill it a second time.
Once the carrier has sold the right to making bits pass through their equipment towards your endpoint, they can't sell it a second (and third, and fourth, etc.) time to someone else. No way.
"Attention Virgin Media Customer
Your ISP is slowing your connection down to extort money out of you! Click here for more information!"
Actually, they're trying to extort money out of third-parties using their customers' bandwidth as hostages, which is even worse IMO.
Other than that, you're spot on. It's more information that's needed, not less.
I'm libertarian and in favor of net neutrality, because this net neutrality has value in my necessarily subjective value-scale.
Mr CEO here wants to profit undeservedly from this value net neutrality has for me and millions others by taking our enjoyment of it hostage. And, well, taking hostages does not fit in my libertarian idea of what ethics encompass. I already pay for my carrier to be net neutral, now that I paid for this net neutrality it is mine and they can't take it back forcefully: that's how I see it.
"Malicious routing will only get them so far. If we have packets we want delivered, we will pay whomever is willing to do it fastest and with the least hassle."
Sure, except the same big pseudo-legitimate mob that guarantees this guy that no one will compete with him in certain domains won't let you. These are the same guys who made sure you don't have access to better guns than they have, and demonstrate their willingness and eagerness to make use of those guns to defend their interests every single day.
So I'd say don't be too hopeful about competition pressure. Unless you can find a stealthy way to do it - in which case I and others will happily help you with the funding.
The greatest thing is that, with the record publishing being a market, I don't have to buy at all if I don't approve of it or feel it's not worth it. If I don't care about the specific artist or label or record industry as a whole, there is no way they can get my support - they can't get my money (= my efforts and time) forcefully. And that's why I, too, am libertarian.
But the day they manage to get any form of government/compulsory funding, be it a P2P tax on every DSL/cable line or anything, they win and then there is nothing that stands in their way anymore.
By 2048 the concept of a national currency will have devolved back into a commodity-based token of expected value, and distributed credit social networks will gain popularity on grey- and black-markets, with individual payments turned into a simple authenticated P2P transfer. The single major urge for most people will be securing an income by any mean. Whole regions will be slowly deserted as the new ice age turns them progressively to tundra.
Mass shipping will be a thing of the past. What large scale transportation occurs will either be migration or the preserve of the richest opportunity seekers. The only areas where a mass transportation rich economy continues to exist will be those of the the North Oceania, at least those parts not still ravaged by civil war. Oil will be around 90$ a barrel in constant bucks, and consumption of it will have continually lowered over the previous couple decades. Intensive agriculture will have waned from current rich countries and moved to the current third world as a trend.
Many of the major coastal cities will be struggling as sea levels lower following the accelerating growth of the Greenland, Himalaya and Antarctica glaciers, their dried up sea ports rusting uselessly - when they are not permanently seized under ice. Diseases become more localized as transport slows. There is a general sense of febrility, a drive for grabbing whatever opportunities may present themselves, as future is more and more difficult to anticipate in the changing landscape of mankind. Most do not want to bring children into this world just to play safe and keep open the option of moving out.
And the correct thinking is "I have nothing to hide, so you have NO reason to search me."
In our present configuration, there are two routers: one at Earth, and one at Mars.
Each of them would be discarding the packets as soon as it received them for being expired, unless their TCP handling was altered for the specific Earth-Mars route.
Or, if one router had its time incorrectly set almost 30 minutes late, the other router would discard its packets as being twice as expired as above.
Or so I think.
Let's try to summarize all this:
Apple added a "coalesced updates rendering" method of displaying the windows on the screen, back in MacOS 10.4. This display gizmo was documented, publicised and all, back then - litterally years ago. It's meant for economy of resources and not speed, for all I can gather and understand (it avoids untimely repainting of the screen buffer).
Now, it happens that this technique *may* cause window-updates-happy programs to run slower if they try to refresh their windows faster than the display rate, so Apple conveniently provided, back then, a simple method for bypassing it entirely just in case it was degrading performance. And Firefox, one such program that is degraded by it, has started using this bypass too, in its more recent versions - so it is NOT "crippled".
The whole uproar here seems caused by one thing Apple devs did in Webkit, to automatically bypass the coalesced-thing for all applications that use Webkit in a way that does not break them. The submitter apparently thought this was some kind of secret "uncrippling" feature, which it actually is, but also invented a whole conspiracy around it JUST BECAUSE FIREFOX DID NOT, at some point, MAKE USE OF THE BYPASS YET. Even though it has been documented for years !
The "secret uncripling feature" was not publicised because the Apple devs would rather find a different, more elegant way to disable the coalesced stuff in Webkit-using programs, and plan to delete the current fix in the near future.
Thank you for your attention.
"You're either renting land, throwing cash into a bizarro stock market, or going to a furry cybersex sim."
/.
In three years sent in Second Life I have not done any of this. I must some weird and very persistent aberration, then. Or maybe you're just wrong.
"As the Linden (the currency of Second Life) is not based on anything"
It is based on the USD, and maintained at a rather fixed rate by LindenLab acting as a central bank. It's not perfect, but it has worked remarkably well so far.
"Linden Labs simply dumps currency into the market whenever they feel like it."
No, they sell some L$ only when they rate drops under 265 L$ per 1 USD to maintain the rate, and they buy back the L$ when the rate goes higher than 266 L$ per 1 USD (though they apparently never have had to do that). That's not "whenever they feel like it".
"So economic problems are pretty common"
Err, no. The L$ has been exceptionnally steady ever since LL introduced the measures I pointed out above, and the vast majority of players have zero problems with it. Only those who want to play games with their money and that of other people are taking risks. You're obviously confusing economy with finance if you conflate financial institutions like the "banks" and "stock exchanges" with the economy itself. But then, that's to be expected on a technology-oriented website like
Wow, your attempt at mocking technical speak turned awfully bad. Power is measured in Watts. Energy in Joules. The reactor is 27 MW, that is 27 MJ per second (for a duration of five years, according to the article, but I would think an istope generator like this one would have a declining power rate over time). You're the one confusing energy and power here.
"this is not a proposal by FNAC."
Yes it is. Mr Olivennes redacted the claims that were incorporated in the proposal verbatim.
The idea is to give warnings before the internet connection is shut off (2 I believe).
There is also the principle of tagging and publicly shaming "offenders".
"To those saying just pick random wifi hotspots, I can assure them that if people were to receive one of those warnings, they would start thinking about securing their access point. Internet cafés are in trouble though."
Yeah right. Your typical DSL subscriber is light-years from distinguishing between their PC having been 0wned by a bot, and their wireless box having been cracked. I would bet most of them would blame their own kids or reinstall Windows for the umpteenth time, rather than think about switching from WEP to WPA2 or VPN.
The fight against Scientology is not about censoring kooks. It's about judging people for kidnappings, wrongful deaths and murders, racketeering and what amounts to slavery.
How do you even have property, especially real estate? Hell, how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
The same way millions of humans have done for thousands of years. Without a ruler to impose unwanted rules upon them about all those things.
If I'm not (too) mistaken, the USA originally arose as a reject of an originally rather libertarian society (see the Glorious Revolution episode, compare the Bill of Rights with that of the US constitution) that by then had veered into a more soc-dem sort of parliamentary monarchy. History stuttering ?
I think you're right about Somalia: it has not entered the mix of anarchy and tribal rule it is in now due to the will of the people, but through failure of both the governement and the various rebels that fought it, and as such has a high probability of failing, simply because all those people are not interested in living free and many continue insisting in imposing a ruler (preferably, the ruler of their own choosing) upon others.
Interestingly enough, the opposite is true too.
You win !
"Is not finding the actual truth pragmatic? When one has the actual truth, one can then proceed to the pragmatic solution, no?"
Oh, the solutions they come up with are often very pragmatic and direct, with very concrete proposals like "getting rid of farm subsidies", "striking down laws forbidding the creation of competing currencies", "selling all the public schools". Some of them even have gradual solutions that involve pragmatic changes in current institutions.
It's just that they don't come to it pragmatically: they don't start by thinking "let's see what kind of powers the President has, or what amount of budget this agency can save, etc.", but instead by thinking "how does the whole mess works, and where is the problem", taking a global view from above, seeing the source of the problem, and only then trying to find something that could realistically act upon it.
"I always thought that whole MBTI thing was just a convenient way to poo-poo rational thought as "just another way of thinking", as though solving problems though emotions could possibly be as successful as solving problems though sound rationality and careful observation."
I don't think you understand the untold principle behind "solving problems through emotions": it's not about actually solving the problem, in the general sense of "solve", but rather to feel better about there being a problem. See for example the immigrants problem in the US, or how people pour vast amounts of money into foreign aid schemes that hardly help the third-world. It's not about the solution, but how you feel about it.
One thing I konw about libertarians, is that "profit" has little appeal to them either, whereas "human nature" is hailed by them as all-important in determining what is right and what is wrong.
Nerds are unrealistic when it comes to how human beings actually work.
All the nerds I know that are also libertarians (that's a majority of them) do quite the opposite: if you can provide them with a fact that shows people really do not act liek they think they would, it shakes their belief immediately and they struggle to integrate that new fact in their understanding of people.
One could even say that "fact" is a holy word for them.
It's not that being a nerd makes one a libertarian, or that being a libertarian magically transforms one into a nerd (though I hear it can do wonders to your, err, self-confidence).
There is a common cause to this politicial leaning and that way of life called "the nerd way". One hint is that the overwhelming majority (75% approximately) of all the libertarians I know are categorised in the "*NT*" part of the MBTI, meaning they are all Thinking rather than Feeling, and iNtuitive rather than Sensing. For example INTJ is the archetype of nerd.
That makes them more inclined to think about theory and complex problems, than what their colleague thinks of their look or how a given principle will make them feel about themselves. When you apply this to politics, that means they'll be looking at society, economics, justice, right and law with a mind that is non-pragmatic but dedicated to finding the actual truth. They will often develop complete theoretical structures for explaining their choices, because they are easily swayed by a convincing, rational argument, however obscure ; and not by a popular soundbite or appeals to emotion.
Libertarianism is one such political interpretation: it leaves little to no place to emotional reaction, does not call upon popularity, and instead builds on the strictest rational analysis (it's not a secret that Ayn Rand was obsessed with acting as rationnally as possible, to the point of obsession) and "heavy" theoretical considerations about "what actually is justice", "how economy actually works", etc.
"The acoustic surface plasmon, which will have implications for developments in nano-optics, high-temperature superconductors, and the fundamental understanding of chemical reactions on surfaces."
What about the understanding of nuclear reactions on metal surfaces ?
What good is the right to life if you can't afford food?
If food is so expensive, rare and precious that YOU cannot get any, then I think it shows either that you're totally irresponsible (incapable of taking care of your own most basic needs) - in which case I fail to see why "someone" should hold me or anyone else at gunpoint so you get to be fed forcefully ; or that no one in the world wants you to stay alive (otherwise they'd arrange for you to get food) - in which case you'll never find any such "someone" to help you at the expense of others. In any case, it's not a problem of you being poor. I guess I should ask you "What good is it to have the State take care of feeding people if there is no food at all in the first place ?" but that would be bringing myself down to your level.
Where is liberty if all land is private, and you own none?
As a matter of fact, I do not own any land, and all land on this planet is owned by individuals or by states. Yet, my liberty gets plenty of exercise, so I fail to see your point. Perhaps that is because I am familiar with the concept of homesteading and you're not.
Libertarians forget that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. They want the freedom to do whatever they want without the responsibility that goes with it.
Quite the contrary, actually. If you learn what libertarianism really is about, you'll see how absolutely wrong this affirmation of yours is.
In almost any country other than the USA, almost everyone think of democrats as a right party. Republicans are considered ultra-right.
If you think they're all so right, why do you keep calling them wrong ?