There are many cities and communities with restrictions like this: accept a bandwidth cap or move or disconnect.
But there are also communities where there is a choice available. Providers that offer uncapped bandwidth will gain customers there and earn the revenue needed to expand into other cities and communities. Town after town will then fall in the hands of those uncapped providers, slowly eating into the bottom line of capping providers.
It may not be you that has the choice, but some have. And after some millions of those customers are lost, companies will take note or falter (or claim too big to fail and get tax money).
You cannot win a war without access to information technology, while your enemy still has.
Production quality internet can help banks operating, people coordinating, media reporting. With money and support flowing to private individuals from their family members overseas (and they all have some of them), the right people at the right place and time and public reporting on it, it would help tremendously. When or if Gaddafi finally resorts to using his nerve gas against civilians, the international community needs to know.
Open access to infrastructure, open reporting, free speech can help a forming democracy a whole lot.
Saving energy is only going to delay the problem and won't help much in addressing the root of it. Unless energy saving can reduce expenditure to zero or close to it - and it can't - we still need to find a long-term solution when (not if) oil runs out.
Don't get me wrong, energy saving is a good thing and should always be considered if economical or practical. But while the other half of energy research should be directed at new (shale gas), renewable (sun, wind, water, biomass) or long-term (nuclear) primary energy sources. We invariably need both, but primary energy gain quite a bit more than secondary gains through efficiency.
Hypothetical case:
Assume that this year, cold fusion is reaching industry-scale profitability, for money and energy output. Assume production is so cheap (one plant = 300 GW or more) and its resources so abundant that the price of electrical energy drops to 0,01USD/kWh. Renewable energy (0,10USD/kWh)is and house insulation (1,00USD per kWh/y saved, insulation lifetime is max. 50y) will then be absolutely moot.
One stroke of genius in cold or hot fusion - or any other large-scale energy production - can reduce everything we as a society invested in renewables and efficiency to a foolish and expensive waste of resources, overnight. We'd still need superconductors and high capacity batteries, though.
The very meaning of the word "Civilization" is repressing basic biological urges.
One single day of work cannot be had unless you repress basic biological urges. Don't urinate in the hallway, don't defecate in the staff meeting, don't fart in the restaurant, don't masturbate in the cinema and don't have sex with that sickingly cute coworker if she says "no".
And it goes on: don't kill those who stole your food, don't kill for food, don't take other people's stuff.
People not repressing their basic biological urges when appropriate *are* assholes, usually. No one would ever get out of bed to work.
I'm in skeptical of claims of different levels of fragmentation between file systems. No file system can achieve better performance than by writing files into as few contiguous blocks as it can. As it cannot predict the future, it can only choose the "best" contiguous block of free space to write the next request to, with "best" being determined by any number of heuristics. But no matter which contiguous free block the file system actually chooses, it cannot avoid fragmentation, and with it performance loss, as long as the data simply has to go somewhere on any actual physical surface, no matter if it is rotating, optical and/or magnetic.
10 GB free space on a physical volume. Write 1 file of 1 GB. Contiguous write is fastest, contiguous read is fastest, so write 1 GB contiguous file. Write 1000 files of 1 MB. Again, contiguous operations are fastest, free space should remain as contiguous as possible, so there's 1000 files written adjacent to each other. Write 1x1 GB, then 1000x1MB another 4 times until the disk is full. Delete 1000 of the small 1MB files, but choose them at random. Write another 1 GB contiguous file and watch it get fragmented into 1000 parts. Delete 1 GB file, write 1000 x 1MB files. Rinse, repeat until write and read performance reaches rock bottom.
Unless a file system can predict the future of random deletes and writes, fragmentation will become an issue after a while. Everything else is just a choice on when to actually defragment: on access, when idle, when critical or on demand only.
The whole economy would magically stopped being pushed if the executive salaries at these companies were capped at 10x the lowest paid employee and they had to be non-profits.
Instead of multi-national corporations, it will be all forced-labor camps. You can still send some million people to work there, though.
A good laptop should either - park the heads whenever it senses weightlessness (as in "falling", "floating", "being thrown") - not have a storage medium where delicate metallic parts are floating less than a hair's thickness above an absurdly delicate metal-coated disc at slightly subsonic speeds.
Use an SSD and/or buy a sturdy laptop, with automatic HDD head parking if magnetic platters are your thing.
Toughbook or Thinkpad T/X-Series. You can throw these around (on a carpeted floor) and they don't mind. You get used to picking it them by the screen after a while, trust me:)
Which "not-particularly-repressive country" convicts any Western citizen to 5 years of forced labor camps for possession of a GPS device? And how's that "not particularly repressive"?
Please tell me so I can avoid that hellhole. All phones now have GPS embedded which I can't possibly turn off when crossing the border. And I won't buy a second phone just for a 10 days vacation. I will gladly rewards laws like that by saving them from having to take my dirty Western tourist money.
As much as I like reasonable explanations for reasonable answers, sometimes it is one freshman too many. I would expect the general population to never have at least seen at least one differential and one Bayesian equation and being completely ignorant to what correlation even means at all. I can patiently explain the difference to people half my age or double, no problem. But when it's Geek Card carrying members here on/., it's time to unload. They should know better.
"UK people drive more manuals, have lower road deaths per mile as US people, who drive more automatics. But Italians drive like crazy and they also drive manuals."
"X and Y may or may not be connected by causality and I have an unquantifiable gut feeling about both being true" is useless for a reasonable discussion as the statement "Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued darkness until widely scattered light in the morning." (Thanks Wikipedia). Discussions like these lead to Claude Shannon's ghost beating the shit out of all participants with his bare hands - and we should leave that to the politicians.
This thread is now about the question if Bruce Schneier would win an argument against Claude Shannon.
If "preparedness" includes "natural talent and/or the appropriate amount of training", then in a way yes. But when that lost airliner wheel crashes into an empty backyard instead of your house, it's luck and nothing but. Skill would be noticing the falling debris and a well-timed rush to cover. Preparedness doesn't help there...
This correlation-causation fallacy needs hammered in everyone's minds, since it accounts for so many wrong decisions, prejudices and sheer crazyness.
Of course there might be a possible relation, but when comparing countries so different in terms of traffic and roads like the UK and the USA, it can not yield a single hint of a theory. It can only mislead or confuse, so it has a negative measure of information content.
Don't underestimate skill. As a gamer would say "Skill is when luck becomes a habit".
Of course, everything can be brought down to attitude, since everyone driving 10kph everywhere would reduce accidents and their severity by far. Wouldn't make much sense for overall traffic, though.
Tracking other car's vectors, guessing about driver's intentions, accounting for road conditions, knowing when and how to service the car correctly are skills that invaluable to safe driving. Attitude is not flooring the acceleration even though you have the skills to do so:)
The visual bandwidth is a good point. Games tend to spread important information all around the screen and that helps with real-world cars, since they, too, have a map there, a speedometer there, a radio down there and three mirrors around the other edges of the screen. Being able to track all that without losing focus on the main part is very important. Hard to do for most non-gamers, but trivial for people that have been playing FPS games all their youth.
Being able to track a large number of "opponents" around the "map" is also quite nice. FPS'es and GTA-style games heavily rely on the skill to keep track of action *outside* of the visual field and make correct "guesstimates" on the actions of others.
Answering the question "I've seen this guy a split second ago in that spot, moving over there in that manner - where will he pop up again and what is he actually trying to do?" is an invaluable skill in Counter Strike and on multi-lane highways.
The catch-falling-items-in-mid-air effect is actual. As a (former) avid FPS gamer, I can attest this has everything to do with it. This has brought much fun when things were dropped around friends and family. Average people don't expect someone to catch falling stuff in the blink of an eye and more often than not applauds when seeing that. Depending on the circumstances:) it could be even more fun when not catching that thing but striking an obstacle in the process, since force and momentum of this is impressive. Catching a falling dinner plate or cooking pot is impressive, but completely obliterating it in mid-air or severely denting the pot is even more - depending on the circumstances and ownership of said devices, of course:) Having experienced the speed and force of this rather involuntary action made the tales about Kung Fu at least somewhat plausible - though I was completely unable to repeat any of that consciously or in any other situation:)
As I slowly played less and less, this skill unfortunately diminished:)
Works also for sudden and critical situations in driving. Being able to estimate speeds and vectors of different objects all around the visual field helps tremendously. As does the skill to react correctly in an instant, not overreact by jerking the wheel around, keep cool (until several seconds after, at least).
And GTA works wonders for slippery road conditions, since you've trained thousands of kilometers for them without even knowing it. Steering into the slide when losing traction to let the wheels regain traction and then steering back is a skill that takes some training and guts to do it in the real world. As is knowing how the vehicle will react when suddenly drifting. Saved my hide for a few times now.
I think gaming is a double-edged sword for this. It may lead to risk-seeking or risk-increased driving, but also to much faster and more appropriate responses to sudden incidents. If you're able to keep down the urge to drive like a maniac, it will certainly increase safety because of all these hours spent "training".
It may have everything to do with education required for licenses, wider roads, narrower roads, lower or higher average speeds due to different population density, larger or smaller cars due to individual preferences, taxes, cost of gasoline and/or the insane density of speed trap cameras in the UK.
In short: it is not clear how many cars in the UK have automatic transmission and how many are manual. Neither is it for the US. Both countries differ wildly in so many important aspects of traffic safety that any and all comparisons of singular factors must be ridiculously flawed.
Compare accidents per kilometer between automatic and manual transmissions within ONE country, account for differences in driver age and social stratum (older and / or richer drivers pay the the premium for automatic transmissions) and then we'll draw any conclusions from them.
Being overweight is a matter of input vs. output, no matter the circumstances. It just might be a lot harder for some because of the reasons you mentioned, but not impossible.
People that gained weight on 1500 calories a day could, if anything, save money on food. As long as they're gaining weight, they're not starving.
Ask yourself: would these people lose weight if they'd only be eating a single leaf of lettuce per day? Yes, they would, otherwise we'd have found a simple solution for everyone in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Unless people can starve AND gain weight at the same time, they can lose weight by eating less.
Cut businesses off of electricity or phone lines and yes, they will sue you for millions and billions, if needed.
I'm interested in watching this case evolve, I must admit. Imagine people having important contacts only running through Facebook, they don't know their mail address, their phone number or physical address. In cutting them off of Facebook, they are instantly and actually cut off from their circle of Friends. This is probably hard to value in cash, but it really can be as damaging to one's social life as libel or slander. I don't know what the courts will say about that and I'd really like to hear their reasoning.
Facebook is also paid for by someone. It just happens to be evil advertisers and probably the NSA itself. They could still stop paying for it tomorrow.
Anyway, provide a free service for someone for years or decades and then withdraw it immediately. Hilarity ensues every time, no matter what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many cities and communities with restrictions like this: accept a bandwidth cap or move or disconnect.
But there are also communities where there is a choice available. Providers that offer uncapped bandwidth will gain customers there and earn the revenue needed to expand into other cities and communities. Town after town will then fall in the hands of those uncapped providers, slowly eating into the bottom line of capping providers.
It may not be you that has the choice, but some have. And after some millions of those customers are lost, companies will take note or falter (or claim too big to fail and get tax money).
sssshhhhhhhhh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
You cannot win a war without access to information technology, while your enemy still has.
Production quality internet can help banks operating, people coordinating, media reporting. With money and support flowing to private individuals from their family members overseas (and they all have some of them), the right people at the right place and time and public reporting on it, it would help tremendously. When or if Gaddafi finally resorts to using his nerve gas against civilians, the international community needs to know.
Open access to infrastructure, open reporting, free speech can help a forming democracy a whole lot.
Which is probably one of the reasons they don't have a crazy dictator slaughtering thousands.
Saving energy is only going to delay the problem and won't help much in addressing the root of it. Unless energy saving can reduce expenditure to zero or close to it - and it can't - we still need to find a long-term solution when (not if) oil runs out.
Don't get me wrong, energy saving is a good thing and should always be considered if economical or practical. But while the other half of energy research should be directed at new (shale gas), renewable (sun, wind, water, biomass) or long-term (nuclear) primary energy sources. We invariably need both, but primary energy gain quite a bit more than secondary gains through efficiency.
Hypothetical case:
Assume that this year, cold fusion is reaching industry-scale profitability, for money and energy output. Assume production is so cheap (one plant = 300 GW or more) and its resources so abundant that the price of electrical energy drops to 0,01USD/kWh. Renewable energy (0,10USD/kWh)is and house insulation (1,00USD per kWh/y saved, insulation lifetime is max. 50y) will then be absolutely moot.
One stroke of genius in cold or hot fusion - or any other large-scale energy production - can reduce everything we as a society invested in renewables and efficiency to a foolish and expensive waste of resources, overnight. We'd still need superconductors and high capacity batteries, though.
The very meaning of the word "Civilization" is repressing basic biological urges.
One single day of work cannot be had unless you repress basic biological urges. Don't urinate in the hallway, don't defecate in the staff meeting, don't fart in the restaurant, don't masturbate in the cinema and don't have sex with that sickingly cute coworker if she says "no".
And it goes on: don't kill those who stole your food, don't kill for food, don't take other people's stuff.
People not repressing their basic biological urges when appropriate *are* assholes, usually. No one would ever get out of bed to work.
I'm in skeptical of claims of different levels of fragmentation between file systems. No file system can achieve better performance than by writing files into as few contiguous blocks as it can. As it cannot predict the future, it can only choose the "best" contiguous block of free space to write the next request to, with "best" being determined by any number of heuristics. But no matter which contiguous free block the file system actually chooses, it cannot avoid fragmentation, and with it performance loss, as long as the data simply has to go somewhere on any actual physical surface, no matter if it is rotating, optical and/or magnetic.
10 GB free space on a physical volume. Write 1 file of 1 GB. Contiguous write is fastest, contiguous read is fastest, so write 1 GB contiguous file. Write 1000 files of 1 MB. Again, contiguous operations are fastest, free space should remain as contiguous as possible, so there's 1000 files written adjacent to each other. Write 1x1 GB, then 1000x1MB another 4 times until the disk is full. Delete 1000 of the small 1MB files, but choose them at random. Write another 1 GB contiguous file and watch it get fragmented into 1000 parts. Delete 1 GB file, write 1000 x 1MB files. Rinse, repeat until write and read performance reaches rock bottom.
Unless a file system can predict the future of random deletes and writes, fragmentation will become an issue after a while. Everything else is just a choice on when to actually defragment: on access, when idle, when critical or on demand only.
The whole economy would magically stopped being pushed if the executive salaries at these companies were capped at 10x the lowest paid employee and they had to be non-profits.
Instead of multi-national corporations, it will be all forced-labor camps. You can still send some million people to work there, though.
A good laptop should either
- park the heads whenever it senses weightlessness (as in "falling", "floating", "being thrown")
- not have a storage medium where delicate metallic parts are floating less than a hair's thickness above an absurdly delicate metal-coated disc at slightly subsonic speeds.
Use an SSD and/or buy a sturdy laptop, with automatic HDD head parking if magnetic platters are your thing.
Toughbook or Thinkpad T/X-Series. You can throw these around (on a carpeted floor) and they don't mind. You get used to picking it them by the screen after a while, trust me :)
Hear hear.
Now what would be the right choice if ALL Alaskans would like to be independent? What about only 50.01% of them? Or 49,9%?
Which "not-particularly-repressive country" convicts any Western citizen to 5 years of forced labor camps for possession of a GPS device? And how's that "not particularly repressive"?
Please tell me so I can avoid that hellhole. All phones now have GPS embedded which I can't possibly turn off when crossing the border. And I won't buy a second phone just for a 10 days vacation. I will gladly rewards laws like that by saving them from having to take my dirty Western tourist money.
"unkevlared person" --- "won't contaminate the meat"
Put off the crack. Please. We're not hunting unkevlared persons for meat just yet.
I have this rock that keeps fallacies away. I don't see any of them around, do you?
As much as I like reasonable explanations for reasonable answers, sometimes it is one freshman too many. I would expect the general population to never have at least seen at least one differential and one Bayesian equation and being completely ignorant to what correlation even means at all. I can patiently explain the difference to people half my age or double, no problem. But when it's Geek Card carrying members here on /., it's time to unload. They should know better.
Correlation does not imply causation.
I did not say anything more and wouldn't do so. "No implied causation" also implies "no implied lack of causation".
To fully confuse the thing: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
"UK people drive more manuals, have lower road deaths per mile as US people, who drive more automatics. But Italians drive like crazy and they also drive manuals."
"X and Y may or may not be connected by causality and I have an unquantifiable gut feeling about both being true" is useless for a reasonable discussion as the statement "Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued darkness until widely scattered light in the morning." (Thanks Wikipedia). Discussions like these lead to Claude Shannon's ghost beating the shit out of all participants with his bare hands - and we should leave that to the politicians.
This thread is now about the question if Bruce Schneier would win an argument against Claude Shannon.
If "preparedness" includes "natural talent and/or the appropriate amount of training", then in a way yes. But when that lost airliner wheel crashes into an empty backyard instead of your house, it's luck and nothing but. Skill would be noticing the falling debris and a well-timed rush to cover. Preparedness doesn't help there...
This correlation-causation fallacy needs hammered in everyone's minds, since it accounts for so many wrong decisions, prejudices and sheer crazyness.
Of course there might be a possible relation, but when comparing countries so different in terms of traffic and roads like the UK and the USA, it can not yield a single hint of a theory. It can only mislead or confuse, so it has a negative measure of information content.
Don't underestimate skill. As a gamer would say "Skill is when luck becomes a habit".
Of course, everything can be brought down to attitude, since everyone driving 10kph everywhere would reduce accidents and their severity by far. Wouldn't make much sense for overall traffic, though.
Tracking other car's vectors, guessing about driver's intentions, accounting for road conditions, knowing when and how to service the car correctly are skills that invaluable to safe driving. Attitude is not flooring the acceleration even though you have the skills to do so :)
The visual bandwidth is a good point. Games tend to spread important information all around the screen and that helps with real-world cars, since they, too, have a map there, a speedometer there, a radio down there and three mirrors around the other edges of the screen. Being able to track all that without losing focus on the main part is very important. Hard to do for most non-gamers, but trivial for people that have been playing FPS games all their youth.
Being able to track a large number of "opponents" around the "map" is also quite nice. FPS'es and GTA-style games heavily rely on the skill to keep track of action *outside* of the visual field and make correct "guesstimates" on the actions of others.
Answering the question "I've seen this guy a split second ago in that spot, moving over there in that manner - where will he pop up again and what is he actually trying to do?" is an invaluable skill in Counter Strike and on multi-lane highways.
The catch-falling-items-in-mid-air effect is actual. As a (former) avid FPS gamer, I can attest this has everything to do with it. This has brought much fun when things were dropped around friends and family. Average people don't expect someone to catch falling stuff in the blink of an eye and more often than not applauds when seeing that. Depending on the circumstances :) it could be even more fun when not catching that thing but striking an obstacle in the process, since force and momentum of this is impressive. Catching a falling dinner plate or cooking pot is impressive, but completely obliterating it in mid-air or severely denting the pot is even more - depending on the circumstances and ownership of said devices, of course :) Having experienced the speed and force of this rather involuntary action made the tales about Kung Fu at least somewhat plausible - though I was completely unable to repeat any of that consciously or in any other situation :)
As I slowly played less and less, this skill unfortunately diminished :)
Works also for sudden and critical situations in driving. Being able to estimate speeds and vectors of different objects all around the visual field helps tremendously. As does the skill to react correctly in an instant, not overreact by jerking the wheel around, keep cool (until several seconds after, at least).
And GTA works wonders for slippery road conditions, since you've trained thousands of kilometers for them without even knowing it. Steering into the slide when losing traction to let the wheels regain traction and then steering back is a skill that takes some training and guts to do it in the real world. As is knowing how the vehicle will react when suddenly drifting. Saved my hide for a few times now.
I think gaming is a double-edged sword for this. It may lead to risk-seeking or risk-increased driving, but also to much faster and more appropriate responses to sudden incidents. If you're able to keep down the urge to drive like a maniac, it will certainly increase safety because of all these hours spent "training".
Please, repeat after me:
Correlation does not imply causation
It may have everything to do with education required for licenses, wider roads, narrower roads, lower or higher average speeds due to different population density, larger or smaller cars due to individual preferences, taxes, cost of gasoline and/or the insane density of speed trap cameras in the UK.
In short: it is not clear how many cars in the UK have automatic transmission and how many are manual. Neither is it for the US. Both countries differ wildly in so many important aspects of traffic safety that any and all comparisons of singular factors must be ridiculously flawed.
Compare accidents per kilometer between automatic and manual transmissions within ONE country, account for differences in driver age and social stratum (older and / or richer drivers pay the the premium for automatic transmissions) and then we'll draw any conclusions from them.
Being overweight is a matter of input vs. output, no matter the circumstances. It just might be a lot harder for some because of the reasons you mentioned, but not impossible.
People that gained weight on 1500 calories a day could, if anything, save money on food. As long as they're gaining weight, they're not starving.
Ask yourself: would these people lose weight if they'd only be eating a single leaf of lettuce per day? Yes, they would, otherwise we'd have found a simple solution for everyone in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Unless people can starve AND gain weight at the same time, they can lose weight by eating less.
Cut businesses off of electricity or phone lines and yes, they will sue you for millions and billions, if needed.
I'm interested in watching this case evolve, I must admit. Imagine people having important contacts only running through Facebook, they don't know their mail address, their phone number or physical address. In cutting them off of Facebook, they are instantly and actually cut off from their circle of Friends. This is probably hard to value in cash, but it really can be as damaging to one's social life as libel or slander. I don't know what the courts will say about that and I'd really like to hear their reasoning.
Facebook is also paid for by someone. It just happens to be evil advertisers and probably the NSA itself. They could still stop paying for it tomorrow.
Anyway, provide a free service for someone for years or decades and then withdraw it immediately. Hilarity ensues every time, no matter what it is.