they have to deploy new tubes to make up for the discrepancy.
Maybe they should use big trucks instead. IP over rubber can achieve huge transfer rates, though I hear it doesn't work nearly as well for interactive gaming or web surfing.
Because the ISP buys "bandwidth" from another supplier who charges per bit/byte/MByte transferred.
Uhh, are you sure about that? Every time I've ever looked into obtaining major IP transit (read: above a T-3) it's priced for capacity and not bytes transfered. Some of the providers rely on 95th percentile billing but even at that there still isn't a direct link between number of bytes transferred and cost. If your 95th percentile winds up being 1.5gigabits you are going to pay the same amount of money regardless of whether or not that was a series of spikes in traffic (say around peak hours) or 24/7 torrents.
It's not just the ISP, but the last mile technology used.
That excuse only goes so far. There are ways with DOCSIS networks to mitigate this. The easiest way is to allocate more channels on the HFC plant to HSI services. A more expensive option would be to split your network into smaller nodes so less customers are connected to each coax segment.
Cable and DSL came about with the assumption that most people download way more than they upload
That's still a valid assumption, even with p2p. I leave all my torrents running until I've hit at least a 3.0 ratio, but at the end of the day I still download more data then I upload (mainly due to streaming video). I have often wondered why there isn't a provision with DSL (dunno if it would work with cable) to dynamically shift the bandwidth as needed between upload and download. It doesn't seem like that would be technologically impossible to achieve.
A few people paying for 10M/1M service in a cable node can easily take down the entire node.
Hell, even at 5M downstream it takes less then eight users to peg the DOCSIS node. At the end of the day though, the ISP shouldn't be offering that tier of service if they can't actually provide it.
Actually, the argument that I heard about Time Warner is that they are more scared about streaming video undercutting their cable business then they are about being able to provide the bandwidth. If that's actually the case then I find that hugely ironic -- they've been beating up on the telcos pretty badly by pulling people away from POTS and onto their VoIP product. It would be poetic justice if they found one of their key revenue streams threatened by new technology.
They make more money oversubscribing their bandwidth and not giving you what you pay for
There's nothing inherently wrong with over subscription -- it would be pretty stupid to pay your Tier 1 provider to provide a dedicated 3.0mbits for Grandma who only wants to check her e-mail -- the problem starts when they try to cheap out and use a bad oversubscription ratio.
To be fair, a few years ago nobody could have seen the rise of p2p (though foresight should have predicted the rise of streaming video), so that probably changed the ratios they should be using. I lose all sympathy for them though when they whine about how much money upgrades cost.... most of these outfits (here in the states anyway) are literally swimming in profit. It's not as though they are running their businesses in the red and can't afford to invest in upgrades.
Beyond that, I really don't understand this push to "shape" p2p traffic. Wouldn't it be much more fair to just give your customers the highest amount of bandwidth that you can provide them with and allow them to use it as they see fit? What's the damn point of raising the speed again and again if you can't actually provide it to your end users?
Bytes don't cost money. The capacity to transfer them does. That T-1 costs the same amount of money sitting idle as it does running at 100% 24/7.
To be fair, the ISPs wind up paying higher costs because they have to purchase more capacity when their users adopt higher bandwidth applications -- but this idea that bytes have a direct cost that can be calculated is absurd. A byte of data is not the same thing as a kilowatt hour or liter of gasoline.
In any case, I don't see how they think they can get away with not investing in network upgrades. Is innovation on the internet going to stop because ISPs would rather rest on their laurels cashing checks instead of investing in infrastructure upgrades for the next killer app?
The standard response to "increase bandwidth" is "P2P apps consume all available bandwidth, increasing bandwidth won't solve anything", but that response overlooks the fact that you aren't automatically obligated to increase the bandwidth provided to end users. Improve your core network while keeping your customers in the same bandwidth tier they currently have and you'll solve the problem of p2p bogging things down.
It would be a lot more fair to provide a 3.0mbit connection that actually delivered what it promised then it is to provide a 10.0mbit connection that achieves that speed at the expense of your neighbor.
It will get to the point where small networks will be able to compete, because the advantages of a giant infrastructure are of limited use in a local environment.
Hey, I hate the big players too and am as big of a supporter of small business as anybody (I cut my IT teeth working for a small town ISP) but you can't deny that large networks have economy of scale working in their favor.
Your hometown ISP probably isn't going to be able to establish peering relationships with major content providers as easily as a state-wide or national one can. Your hometown ISP is going to have a harder time getting as good of a rate on that OC-12 or OC-48 as the large company that buys dozens of them.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.
I do feel a little bad for them, because nobody could have envisioned the rise of bittorrent or streaming video when they were building these networks. But that sympathy ends when they start trying to limit my functionality of the network instead of upgrading it to support new applications. Did they actually think that bandwidth requirements wouldn't go up over time?
avoiding the need for the ISP to use the more expensive connection to the overall internet
That's why major ISPs peer with major content providers instead of trying to use their main edge connections to pull down all of that traffic. Here in the states I know that Roadrunner at least (possibly others, though I don't have direct experience with them) is working on building out their own nationwide IP network and relying less and less on their Tier 1 provider (Level 3).
I think peering arrangements like this will prove to be more fruitful in the long run then trying to cache the data locally. It's a hellva lot easier to peer with Youtube/Netflix/the BBC/what-have-you then it is to try and mirror terabytes of content on your own network and keep it up to date.
In that case anyone can eavesdrop and subsequently move all your money away.
Not really. What could you do with his telephone (or online) banking PIN? My credit union's online banking allows the following activities: Transfers between sub-accounts (savings, checking, etc), loan payments, bill payments, check images, statements and direct deposit adjustments (this much into savings, this much into checking, etc, etc).
Nothing within my online banking would allow you to "move all of my money away". I suppose you could setup a payee in bill payer for yourself, but even at that my credit union wouldn't allow you to directly supply the ACH information -- they'd mail you a check -- and even at that it would take a few days to get the custom payee setup.
Don't get me wrong. You could screw me pretty badly -- moving all of the funds from my checking account into savings would cause transactions to bounce if I didn't catch it.... But you couldn't drain my account and walk away with the funds for yourself.
No problem, China can just annex and ethnically cleanse North America. Why not? The Europeans got away with doing exactly the same thing, so why can't China?
Because the current inhabitants of North America have nuclear weapons?
we've arrived at a kind of culture whereby you try get as much as debt as possible to buy the biggest house and car possible and fill the house with as much meaningless mindless entertainment as possible
I would agree with your observations here. Having gone through Chapter 7 (caused by a combination of my own stupidity and medical bills beyond my control) I have a somewhat unique perspective on spending. I refuse to live beyond my means and carefully budget every single penny of money that I spend. I think half of the blame for our current woes relates to nothing more then greed -- greed on the part of consumers for wanting to live beyond their means and greed on the part of the credit industry for being so willing to enable this type of behavior.
That said though, I think people are finally waking up to this. It's hardly a scientific study by any means, but go read some of the blog postings/comment sections in some of the stories about the subprime mess. I'd say about half of the comments are people pointing out the fact that consumers bear as much blame for this mess as the lending industry does.
all the while avoiding making babies as far as possible
I think that's less of a problem in the United States then it is in Europe. We are actually having enough children to maintain our population level without immigration. Europe hasn't been able to say that for a long time. As a rule of thumb American's seem much more willing to have larger families and much more accepting of children then Europeans are.
We also don't face as big of a cultural gap with our immigrants as Europe does. Our biggest gap is language. Europe gets to deal with that, plus a religious/values/cultural gap. As much as people complain about Hispanic immigration they might want to stop and think about what Europe is going through. We aren't dealing with waves of disenfranchised Muslim youth inclined towards violence because our soceity rejects them. We share a common history in the New World and (for the most part) religion with our immigrants.
and reward and focus on intelligence/science/technology/engingeering
Ya know what bothers me? We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "special education" for students with disabilities but nowhere near that amount of money on gifted students. IMHO, the gifted student deserves at least as much individual attention and praise as the disabled one. I'm not knocking special education by any means -- just saying we should have a similar focus on the best and the brightest students and a desire to see that they maximize their potential in this World.
You do realized you just showed one method it could work as heat can be converted to energy, which can then be used to a power light.
What part of "You only have 327.8 joules to work with" is so hard to understand? Converting them all into heat is not going to magically provide you with more energy.
For comparison, a joule is equivalent to a watt-second. A 40 watt incandescent bulb will consume 40 joules per second of operation and produce ~12.6 lumens per watt (lm/w). This would allow for a whooping eight seconds of runtime. Even assuming your LEDs are 12 times more efficient (150lm/w has been achieved in lab tests) that still translates into less then two minutes of runtime.
For further comparison, assuming a 2,000 Calorie a day diet, the human body takes in 8,368,000 joules each day. Divide that by 86,400 and you get 96 joules a second. The 327.8 joules provided by this device translate into 0.078 Calories. You could get that amount of energy out of 0.02 grams of sugar (100 grams == 390 Calories).
You'll forgive me if I'm not particularly impressed with this device.
Good luck moving Fat Man (10,200lbs) and Little Boy (8,800lbs) around if you can't bench press more then a hundred pounds;) Or do ya got a B-29 in your toybox too?:P
Give it 50 years or so and China WILL be running all over the world
25 years ago they were saying the same thing about Japan. How did that turn out again? You really think China can maintain double-digit growth rates forever?
The Chinese have their own problems that they will have to contend with before they can "run the World". Like the fact that because of one-child and the preference for male babies they are going to have tens of millions more men then women within a generation. Such an imbalance is virtually unknown in human history and nobody has a clue what the end result will be. They have serious environmental issues to overcome, both locally (air quality in major Chinese cities makes LA, Houston or Athens look downright green by comparison) and internationally (China dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere then the United States does).
Don't get me wrong. The United States can't rest on our laurels and ignore them. We need to get back to a focus on science, technology and engineering if we want to remain competitive. But many of the problems that they are facing (rural poverty, infrastructure improvements, balancing environmental vs practical concerns, etc, etc) were already overcome by the United States in the 30s and 40s. Many of the other problems that they face (overpopulation, the aforementioned demographic imbalance, etc, etc) aren't even a concern for the United States.
With the right leadership and policies I see no reason why the United States can't remain competitive against China for the next century. My wish list for the United States would be to see math and science empathized again (MBAs and Lawyers didn't build Apollo or the Manhattan Project), an expansion of our economic/military alliance with the UKUSA community and a focus on bringing all of the Americas (from Canada to Argentina) together under a free-trade/military arrangement, similar to the EU used to be before somebody got the bright idea of trying to make it into a mega-state.
that US stands by its decision to continue the development and deployment of weapons in space.
It might be useful to learn something about military technology before you make such pronouncements. The weapons system that was used was the RIM-161 SM-3ABM. It was designed to engage and destroy tactical ballistic missiles. It doesn't even have the capability to reach most satellites -- this one was within range because it's orbit was decaying.
This weapons system has nothing to do with the "deployment of weapons in space", unless the USS Lake Erie has some sort of secret warp drive that we don't know about.
ut that is a cultural matter and has nothing to do with the religion
Sorry, but I don't see how you can separate "cultural" from "religion". Religion is an undeniable part of culture. What's the driving reason in some of those countries for oppressing women? In Saudi Arabia the justification is generally the Sharia, or Islamic Law. How you can say that has "nothing to do with religion" is beyond me.
To be fair, the Bible has it's fair share of statements that could be used to oppress women, but the Christian fundamentalists haven't been able to get any of that codified into actual law yet. The Islamic fundamentalists have and that's what we should be scared of.
Sure about that? I've watched how Netflix instant view uses my connection -- it pegs it for about 20-30 seconds at a time (8Mbits) and then idles for a period before downloading again. It never maintains a constant transfer, except for the first two or three minutes of watching (presumably filling up the buffer?).
In the end it averages out to around 2.2Mbps, but the actual transfers themselves usually come in bursts.
I make a movie reference and all I get is a physics Nazi
Don't feel too bad. One time I made a reference to "Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" and wound up spending the next two days explaining to someone that, no, I don't "support" prison rape, it was a reference to Office Space and one that should be known to any self-respecting Geek and/or/. poster.
What kills me is the mods that don't get it either. There should be some sort of test before you get mod points;) Knowledge of common/. themes and jokes should be required:P
I guess I should have wasted "first post" on something obvious like "Sharks with frikin' laser beams attached to their heads"
Nah, that wouldn't have worked either;) I tried and wound up -1 redundant.... how the second post in an article and the first one that brought up sharks could be "redundant" is beyond me, but there you go:P
Unless they happen to break HTTPS, which would make sites like Paypal or web banking stop working. The customers would not be amused
Do you really think an HTTPS connection to your credit union looks anything like an encrypted p2p session? The p2p client is going to make contact with dozens or hundreds of different IPs on drastically different networks. The HTTPS connection will contact a few IPs (or even just one) and only exchange a small amount of traffic.
Why not tell it to drop RST packets from Comcast IP blocks as well?
Because from your perspective the RST packet doesn't come from Comcast -- it comes from the other person you are talking to. They are forging the packets src and dst addresses.
We have -- and not only the Cold War. During the Korean war, for example, we killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers -- China is the reason, North Korea exists today (no crime ever committed by Japanese would match this ongoing atrocity). Air support was provided by USSR, BTW -- in both Korean and Vietnam war...
Yeah, I realized about 10 seconds after I posted that that China intervened in Korea. I don't think you can throw many stones because of the USSR involvement though -- I doubt many Russians are happy about us arming the Afganis, nor are we very happy about the SA-2s that shot down our planes over Vietnam with the assistance of Soviet "technical advisors". Such actions were common on both sides during the Cold War -- though China's sending millions of troops into Korea definitely crossed the line.
that Japan's current liberal democracy is far better, than China's and Russian regimes.
Far better from whose standpoint? I don't happen to think that it's any of our business how other nations choose to govern themselves.
In any case though, you are missing the emotional side of the argument. A nuclear armed Japan would provoke outrage in China -- the Japanese killed millions of Chinese civilians during their war. It would ignite a regional arms race and encourage other nations to seek nuclear weapons just to keep up. You'd be flushing 50 years of US foreign policy down the toilet, and for what benefit?
Do you really think a nuclear armed Japan would be a good thing for international security? You realize they signed the NPT, right? If they can abandon it to get nuclear weapons then why not Iran?
China and Russia are nuclear-armed already (Russia -- to the teeth) already.
And your point is....? If anything, pointing out Russia's formidable nuclear arsenal only strengthens my argument that they would be a more useful counter-weight to China then Japan will.
We already have "picked sides" too -- Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are defended by many thousands of US troops permanently staged in the region.
We haven't really been forced to pick a side with Taiwan. We have a defense agreement with them yet we don't recognize them as an actual state. If that conflict was brought out into the open (let's say encouraged by an avoidable regional arms race) then we'd have to choose between going to war with a major trading partner or allowing a Democratic state to be conquered/destroyed. A lose/lose situation no matter how you slice it.
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Maybe they should use big trucks instead. IP over rubber can achieve huge transfer rates, though I hear it doesn't work nearly as well for interactive gaming or web surfing.
Uhh, are you sure about that? Every time I've ever looked into obtaining major IP transit (read: above a T-3) it's priced for capacity and not bytes transfered. Some of the providers rely on 95th percentile billing but even at that there still isn't a direct link between number of bytes transferred and cost. If your 95th percentile winds up being 1.5gigabits you are going to pay the same amount of money regardless of whether or not that was a series of spikes in traffic (say around peak hours) or 24/7 torrents.
That excuse only goes so far. There are ways with DOCSIS networks to mitigate this. The easiest way is to allocate more channels on the HFC plant to HSI services. A more expensive option would be to split your network into smaller nodes so less customers are connected to each coax segment.
Cable and DSL came about with the assumption that most people download way more than they uploadThat's still a valid assumption, even with p2p. I leave all my torrents running until I've hit at least a 3.0 ratio, but at the end of the day I still download more data then I upload (mainly due to streaming video). I have often wondered why there isn't a provision with DSL (dunno if it would work with cable) to dynamically shift the bandwidth as needed between upload and download. It doesn't seem like that would be technologically impossible to achieve.
A few people paying for 10M/1M service in a cable node can easily take down the entire node.Hell, even at 5M downstream it takes less then eight users to peg the DOCSIS node. At the end of the day though, the ISP shouldn't be offering that tier of service if they can't actually provide it.
Time-Warner Cable (iTunes throttling, byte metering)Actually, the argument that I heard about Time Warner is that they are more scared about streaming video undercutting their cable business then they are about being able to provide the bandwidth. If that's actually the case then I find that hugely ironic -- they've been beating up on the telcos pretty badly by pulling people away from POTS and onto their VoIP product. It would be poetic justice if they found one of their key revenue streams threatened by new technology.
There's nothing inherently wrong with over subscription -- it would be pretty stupid to pay your Tier 1 provider to provide a dedicated 3.0mbits for Grandma who only wants to check her e-mail -- the problem starts when they try to cheap out and use a bad oversubscription ratio.
To be fair, a few years ago nobody could have seen the rise of p2p (though foresight should have predicted the rise of streaming video), so that probably changed the ratios they should be using. I lose all sympathy for them though when they whine about how much money upgrades cost.... most of these outfits (here in the states anyway) are literally swimming in profit. It's not as though they are running their businesses in the red and can't afford to invest in upgrades.
Beyond that, I really don't understand this push to "shape" p2p traffic. Wouldn't it be much more fair to just give your customers the highest amount of bandwidth that you can provide them with and allow them to use it as they see fit? What's the damn point of raising the speed again and again if you can't actually provide it to your end users?
Bingo! You hit the nail on the head.
Bytes don't cost money. The capacity to transfer them does. That T-1 costs the same amount of money sitting idle as it does running at 100% 24/7.
To be fair, the ISPs wind up paying higher costs because they have to purchase more capacity when their users adopt higher bandwidth applications -- but this idea that bytes have a direct cost that can be calculated is absurd. A byte of data is not the same thing as a kilowatt hour or liter of gasoline.
In any case, I don't see how they think they can get away with not investing in network upgrades. Is innovation on the internet going to stop because ISPs would rather rest on their laurels cashing checks instead of investing in infrastructure upgrades for the next killer app?
The standard response to "increase bandwidth" is "P2P apps consume all available bandwidth, increasing bandwidth won't solve anything", but that response overlooks the fact that you aren't automatically obligated to increase the bandwidth provided to end users. Improve your core network while keeping your customers in the same bandwidth tier they currently have and you'll solve the problem of p2p bogging things down.
It would be a lot more fair to provide a 3.0mbit connection that actually delivered what it promised then it is to provide a 10.0mbit connection that achieves that speed at the expense of your neighbor.
Hey, I hate the big players too and am as big of a supporter of small business as anybody (I cut my IT teeth working for a small town ISP) but you can't deny that large networks have economy of scale working in their favor.
Your hometown ISP probably isn't going to be able to establish peering relationships with major content providers as easily as a state-wide or national one can. Your hometown ISP is going to have a harder time getting as good of a rate on that OC-12 or OC-48 as the large company that buys dozens of them.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.I do feel a little bad for them, because nobody could have envisioned the rise of bittorrent or streaming video when they were building these networks. But that sympathy ends when they start trying to limit my functionality of the network instead of upgrading it to support new applications. Did they actually think that bandwidth requirements wouldn't go up over time?
That's why major ISPs peer with major content providers instead of trying to use their main edge connections to pull down all of that traffic. Here in the states I know that Roadrunner at least (possibly others, though I don't have direct experience with them) is working on building out their own nationwide IP network and relying less and less on their Tier 1 provider (Level 3).
I think peering arrangements like this will prove to be more fruitful in the long run then trying to cache the data locally. It's a hellva lot easier to peer with Youtube/Netflix/the BBC/what-have-you then it is to try and mirror terabytes of content on your own network and keep it up to date.
Not really. What could you do with his telephone (or online) banking PIN? My credit union's online banking allows the following activities: Transfers between sub-accounts (savings, checking, etc), loan payments, bill payments, check images, statements and direct deposit adjustments (this much into savings, this much into checking, etc, etc).
Nothing within my online banking would allow you to "move all of my money away". I suppose you could setup a payee in bill payer for yourself, but even at that my credit union wouldn't allow you to directly supply the ACH information -- they'd mail you a check -- and even at that it would take a few days to get the custom payee setup.
Don't get me wrong. You could screw me pretty badly -- moving all of the funds from my checking account into savings would cause transactions to bounce if I didn't catch it.... But you couldn't drain my account and walk away with the funds for yourself.
Because the current inhabitants of North America have nuclear weapons?
I would agree with your observations here. Having gone through Chapter 7 (caused by a combination of my own stupidity and medical bills beyond my control) I have a somewhat unique perspective on spending. I refuse to live beyond my means and carefully budget every single penny of money that I spend. I think half of the blame for our current woes relates to nothing more then greed -- greed on the part of consumers for wanting to live beyond their means and greed on the part of the credit industry for being so willing to enable this type of behavior.
That said though, I think people are finally waking up to this. It's hardly a scientific study by any means, but go read some of the blog postings/comment sections in some of the stories about the subprime mess. I'd say about half of the comments are people pointing out the fact that consumers bear as much blame for this mess as the lending industry does.
all the while avoiding making babies as far as possibleI think that's less of a problem in the United States then it is in Europe. We are actually having enough children to maintain our population level without immigration. Europe hasn't been able to say that for a long time. As a rule of thumb American's seem much more willing to have larger families and much more accepting of children then Europeans are.
We also don't face as big of a cultural gap with our immigrants as Europe does. Our biggest gap is language. Europe gets to deal with that, plus a religious/values/cultural gap. As much as people complain about Hispanic immigration they might want to stop and think about what Europe is going through. We aren't dealing with waves of disenfranchised Muslim youth inclined towards violence because our soceity rejects them. We share a common history in the New World and (for the most part) religion with our immigrants.
and reward and focus on intelligence/science/technology/engingeeringYa know what bothers me? We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "special education" for students with disabilities but nowhere near that amount of money on gifted students. IMHO, the gifted student deserves at least as much individual attention and praise as the disabled one. I'm not knocking special education by any means -- just saying we should have a similar focus on the best and the brightest students and a desire to see that they maximize their potential in this World.
What part of "You only have 327.8 joules to work with" is so hard to understand? Converting them all into heat is not going to magically provide you with more energy.
For comparison, a joule is equivalent to a watt-second. A 40 watt incandescent bulb will consume 40 joules per second of operation and produce ~12.6 lumens per watt (lm/w). This would allow for a whooping eight seconds of runtime. Even assuming your LEDs are 12 times more efficient (150lm/w has been achieved in lab tests) that still translates into less then two minutes of runtime.
For further comparison, assuming a 2,000 Calorie a day diet, the human body takes in 8,368,000 joules each day. Divide that by 86,400 and you get 96 joules a second. The 327.8 joules provided by this device translate into 0.078 Calories. You could get that amount of energy out of 0.02 grams of sugar (100 grams == 390 Calories).
You'll forgive me if I'm not particularly impressed with this device.
Who says I'm wearing any? ;)
Good luck moving Fat Man (10,200lbs) and Little Boy (8,800lbs) around if you can't bench press more then a hundred pounds ;) Or do ya got a B-29 in your toybox too? :P
25 years ago they were saying the same thing about Japan. How did that turn out again? You really think China can maintain double-digit growth rates forever?
The Chinese have their own problems that they will have to contend with before they can "run the World". Like the fact that because of one-child and the preference for male babies they are going to have tens of millions more men then women within a generation. Such an imbalance is virtually unknown in human history and nobody has a clue what the end result will be. They have serious environmental issues to overcome, both locally (air quality in major Chinese cities makes LA, Houston or Athens look downright green by comparison) and internationally (China dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere then the United States does).
Don't get me wrong. The United States can't rest on our laurels and ignore them. We need to get back to a focus on science, technology and engineering if we want to remain competitive. But many of the problems that they are facing (rural poverty, infrastructure improvements, balancing environmental vs practical concerns, etc, etc) were already overcome by the United States in the 30s and 40s. Many of the other problems that they face (overpopulation, the aforementioned demographic imbalance, etc, etc) aren't even a concern for the United States.
With the right leadership and policies I see no reason why the United States can't remain competitive against China for the next century. My wish list for the United States would be to see math and science empathized again (MBAs and Lawyers didn't build Apollo or the Manhattan Project), an expansion of our economic/military alliance with the UKUSA community and a focus on bringing all of the Americas (from Canada to Argentina) together under a free-trade/military arrangement, similar to the EU used to be before somebody got the bright idea of trying to make it into a mega-state.
It might be useful to learn something about military technology before you make such pronouncements. The weapons system that was used was the RIM-161 SM-3 ABM. It was designed to engage and destroy tactical ballistic missiles. It doesn't even have the capability to reach most satellites -- this one was within range because it's orbit was decaying.
This weapons system has nothing to do with the "deployment of weapons in space", unless the USS Lake Erie has some sort of secret warp drive that we don't know about.
Sorry, but I don't see how you can separate "cultural" from "religion". Religion is an undeniable part of culture. What's the driving reason in some of those countries for oppressing women? In Saudi Arabia the justification is generally the Sharia, or Islamic Law. How you can say that has "nothing to do with religion" is beyond me.
To be fair, the Bible has it's fair share of statements that could be used to oppress women, but the Christian fundamentalists haven't been able to get any of that codified into actual law yet. The Islamic fundamentalists have and that's what we should be scared of.
Sure about that? I've watched how Netflix instant view uses my connection -- it pegs it for about 20-30 seconds at a time (8Mbits) and then idles for a period before downloading again. It never maintains a constant transfer, except for the first two or three minutes of watching (presumably filling up the buffer?).
In the end it averages out to around 2.2Mbps, but the actual transfers themselves usually come in bursts.
Don't feel too bad. One time I made a reference to "Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison" and wound up spending the next two days explaining to someone that, no, I don't "support" prison rape, it was a reference to Office Space and one that should be known to any self-respecting Geek and/or /. poster.
What kills me is the mods that don't get it either. There should be some sort of test before you get mod points ;) Knowledge of common /. themes and jokes should be required :P
I guess I should have wasted "first post" on something obvious like "Sharks with frikin' laser beams attached to their heads"Nah, that wouldn't have worked either ;) I tried and wound up -1 redundant.... how the second post in an article and the first one that brought up sharks could be "redundant" is beyond me, but there you go :P
That's no moon.....
Yeah, but can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
Popcorn!
Ah, but will they be able to fit it to Sharks with Frickin' Lasers?
Do you really think an HTTPS connection to your credit union looks anything like an encrypted p2p session? The p2p client is going to make contact with dozens or hundreds of different IPs on drastically different networks. The HTTPS connection will contact a few IPs (or even just one) and only exchange a small amount of traffic.
Because from your perspective the RST packet doesn't come from Comcast -- it comes from the other person you are talking to. They are forging the packets src and dst addresses.
Yeah, I realized about 10 seconds after I posted that that China intervened in Korea. I don't think you can throw many stones because of the USSR involvement though -- I doubt many Russians are happy about us arming the Afganis, nor are we very happy about the SA-2s that shot down our planes over Vietnam with the assistance of Soviet "technical advisors". Such actions were common on both sides during the Cold War -- though China's sending millions of troops into Korea definitely crossed the line.
that Japan's current liberal democracy is far better, than China's and Russian regimes.Far better from whose standpoint? I don't happen to think that it's any of our business how other nations choose to govern themselves.
In any case though, you are missing the emotional side of the argument. A nuclear armed Japan would provoke outrage in China -- the Japanese killed millions of Chinese civilians during their war. It would ignite a regional arms race and encourage other nations to seek nuclear weapons just to keep up. You'd be flushing 50 years of US foreign policy down the toilet, and for what benefit?
Do you really think a nuclear armed Japan would be a good thing for international security? You realize they signed the NPT, right? If they can abandon it to get nuclear weapons then why not Iran?
China and Russia are nuclear-armed already (Russia -- to the teeth) already.And your point is....? If anything, pointing out Russia's formidable nuclear arsenal only strengthens my argument that they would be a more useful counter-weight to China then Japan will.
We already have "picked sides" too -- Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are defended by many thousands of US troops permanently staged in the region.We haven't really been forced to pick a side with Taiwan. We have a defense agreement with them yet we don't recognize them as an actual state. If that conflict was brought out into the open (let's say encouraged by an avoidable regional arms race) then we'd have to choose between going to war with a major trading partner or allowing a Democratic state to be conquered/destroyed. A lose/lose situation no matter how you slice it.