Well I would guess that browser vendors would implement it if DNS records were generally signed and therefore trustworthy. Or at least decent browsers would.
Apparently our common sense was stronger than we gave it credit for. No way were we going to let our kids not learn the three R's. In time, we added the usual history and geography and science and so on, and though we never did subscribe to anybody else's curriculum, ours ended up looking pretty standard.
It seems to me that if this idea of "unschooling" is to have any credibility, it can't simply be "not teaching your kids anything. It would have to be that you still required your kids to learn and study, but not with the traditional setup of having the kids sit at a desk, doing "homework" and taking tests. It seems like adults would have to work very hard to find ways to push the kids to work on their interests.
So for example, you wouldn't just let your kid play video games. You'd have to stop your kid and say, "Oh, you're interested in video games? Let's learn about computers. Let's learn about design. Let's see if we can teach you how to program and create your own video game." Or you might say, "Oh, you want to go to the park and play? Let's pick up a book about plants and, while we're there, see what plants we can find. Then lets sit down and read about how those plants work biologically, and what their place is in the ecosystem."
Of course, that's damned hard. It would require a lot of individual time and attention spent with each child. I bet it could be pulled off, but it's not going to be an easy cure-all for the problems surrounding education.
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
So you're saying "school + extracurricular learning > school", which is a rather silly thing to argue about.
Well that's not quite what he's saying. It seems to me that he's saying that freeform learning + learning about standard subjects could be good. In fact, he seems to be hinting that learning about standard subjects might be something that could be done in an "extracurricular" setting, and therefore the "school" part of things might be unnecessary.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything...
Of course that would help, but are we assuming that your average school teacher knows a particularly large amount about anything? I'm sure that's not always true.
I think you have a good point, but on the other hand, giving everyone very good Internet connections could increase the viability of cloud computing. After all, part of the reason I don't store my music collection online is it's too big, and therefore too difficult to sync and manage over crappy Internet connections.
Even if I had a great connection at home and could set up a home server, it still might be worth it to me to pay for some kind of hosting for the sake of having my data in a real datacenter. I have enough expertise to run my own server (though many people don't), but the conditions in my home are less than ideal. I don't have a lot of space, I don't have great air conditioning or air filtration, I don't have significant fire-surpression, and I don't have good control of the electrical power.
Well first, cell phones didn't become "owned" by the carriers because of the "frog in a pot" principle. It was like that from the outset. We always paid ridiculous fees.
But also, I expect the carriers to charge me some kind of monthly fee, given that they're providing a service. Sure, sell me the phone, but I don't expect to be able to use their network without paying something.
Well "cloud computing" is a bit of a buzzword, but the idea is having big distributed computing available as a service on the Internet. I believe the term comes from Visio diagrams where the Internet is depicted as a mysterious cloud, as if to say "And something happens here, we'll call that the internet." It's sort of like the "step 3: ????" that comes right before "step 4: Profit!" Something happens, we're not sure what, but it gets the job done. Let's call that the cloud.
Why this is helpful is you get services that scale very easily and cleanly, and often you only pay for what you use. Amazon's S3 is a good example. With a dedicated host with so-many gigbytes of storage, you pay for that storage whether you use it or not because it represents actual hard drive space that your hosting service has provisioned for you to use. If you run out of space, you'll have to go through some upgrade process. With Amazon S3, you pay for the number of gigabytes you use. If you're starting your business and you only need 50 GB of online space right now, you can do that. If you need to scale up to 5 TB, no need to really change anything Amazon will keep giving you storage and you'll pay for whatever you use.
Now the reason you might want to use this for your own home data is pretty simple: so it'd be accessible wherever you are. Sure, you could set up a home server, but that means you have to run a server at home. You have to know how to set that up and secure it, and keep it running. You have to worry about losing power, or what happens when your house catches fire, and whatever else.
Now maybe it appeals to you and maybe it doesn't, but certainly it has its uses. From TFA:
That's how I use Amazon's S3 cloud storage: not as an unreliable and slow hard drive, but as a store for encrypted backups of my critical files, which are written to S3 using the JungleDisk tool. This is cheaper and better than anything I could do for myself by way of offsite secure backup, but I'm not going to be working off S3 any time soon.
Yeah, I wasn't under the impression that getting rid of CAs was the purpose of DNSSEC, but it seemed like one possible side effect. Just to spell out my thoughts a bit more, when you say that DNSSEC guarantees that the DNS lookup returns the correct IP, I'm under the impression that "correct" is defined as "whatever the domain owner says is correct", i.e. it enables you to verify that whatever is in the DNS record is actually what the domain holder put in his DNS record.
Now I'm not claiming to understand the intricacies of how DNSSEC works, but it seems to me that once you have a signature that is able to verify that information comes from a given domain owner, you probably have the infrastructure in place for passing other information comes from the domain holder, too. So even if DNSSEC can't do this right now, you've possibly laid the groundwork for someone to stick a public key into the DNS record for a given server. If you can verify that the public key given for a particular server is authentic, then that public key can be used to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack.
I mean, ultimately what CAs are doing in most cases is verifying that a small bit of data, i.e. the public key for SSL encryption, is actually being provided by the domain that it's claiming to come from. If you can do this through your domain registrar and DNS servers, then CAs become unnecessary except for any extended validation of identity that you want to do.
But this would be very important in my mind, because it might allow SSL to become essentially free in cases where extended validation isn't necessary.
One thing that I'm not clear on at all but would like to understand is, is there any chance that DNSSEC will let us get rid of SSL certificate authorities?
Maybe that's a dumb question, but what I have in mind is this: if we can provide authenticated/signed pairing of DNS information to IP addresses, could we also put a SSL certificate into the mix and therefore know that the SSL cert is valid for that domain name? Wouldn't that at least give us SSL certs that verified the site was owned by the person who owned the domain, even if it didn't do any kind of "Extended validation" stuff?
I'm not against *all* patents. Some algorithms have a serious amount of R&D and ingenuity behind them.
I actually find it a bit tough to come up with a good answer to the problem of patents. The first thing that popped into my head when I read about "free software harmed by software patents" is the whole thing about H264/Theora and the HTML 5 "video" tag.
Now I don't really know what's patented in H264, but I could imagine that it may well be some algorithms with a serious amount of R&D behind them. On the other hand, free software can't legally implement those codecs, and so Firefox can't support it. Free software also can't technically (AFAIK) implement MP3 or AAC encoders/decoders without paying a patent fee.
Now I suppose you could say, "so what?" Fair enough. Still, I have it stuck in my head somewhere that these are important standards that we need to be able to use freely in order to promote the arts and sciences (which is the whole point of patents, isn't it?).
Yeah, poor AT&T. After having made loads of money offering a service, they're now expected to spend some of that money providing the service they just sold? And what will they get out of the deal? Nothing. Nothing but profit and a robust infrastructure that they can continue to sell service on. Nothing but profit and assets and a robust business.
I may be wrong, but I think it was an IBM commercial.
But yeah, I think you're even being too generous toward Verizon and AT&T. I'm sure Verizon and AT&T both knew the iPhone was going to be a big hit. The problem was that Verizon has had a history of crippling phones and applying their own software and branding, and those weren't concessions Apple was going to make.
My guess is that AT&T probably (a) didn't expect quite how much web browsing people would use their iPhones for; and (b) didn't really care because they're content to offer crappy service. What are people going to do, switch to Verizon? The iPhone won't work. Switch to Sprint? Ha ha, snort. I suppose they could switch to T-Mobile, but from my experience things won't get much better there.
Now, the 204 year bit sounds impressive, but it isn't like a piece of DNA lasted 204 years without any decay. Instead it was copied repeatedly over that time. If I copied that 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive (assuming that you could keep making them compatible) I don't think that getting the data across 200 years without any bit-flips is really that tall of an order.
Yeah, but can you get the drives to make their own replacement drives every 25 years?
Yeah, the "all humans are mutants" angle doesn't have much to it. Of course we're mutants insofar as we're the product of evolution, and evolution requires mutation. Without mutation, you wouldn't get new genetic differences to be weeded out or passed on. So yes, life is a mutation and we're all mutants.
It will be interesting now that we could be able to sequence your DNA and your parents' DNA, figure out exactly what mutations you have (if any) from the previous generation, and possibly know what those mutations do. Maybe in the future we'll be able to map all of our genetic family trees in detail, figure out when traits were introduced, and see what patterns emerge. Maybe those random mutations aren't so random.
I think this is a good point. It's kind of a brute-force approach to the problem, which isn't the best strategy for everyone, but when you're paying 1/10th the price, you can buy 10 spare parts of everything before you even break even. You can have 4 of these things running at different locations and still be paying half-price. If it does all break down in 5 years, storage will be much cheaper and more dense at that point, and you can replace it really cheaply.
Re:Most people simply don't think about security
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The Myths of Security
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· Score: 0, Troll
Lots of friends and family - people who are otherwise thoughtful, intelligent, and clueful - simply don't think about security.
Well I think there are a few different issues here, and you have to break the issue apart a little to understand why they don't think about security.
At least part of it is just that security issues can be fairly complex in themselves, computers can be complex in themselves, and people generally don't want to deal with complex issues that they're not very knowledgeable about. It's intimidating, and a lot of people understand on an intuitive level that trying to secure your computer without knowing very much about computers or security is a bit pointless. If you don't understand the issues, fiddling with things is just as likely to open new security holes as it is to close any. In some ways it's fairly sensible to refrain from thinking too much about security and leave it to the experts.
Another problem is that security often comes with a trade-off to accessibility. This isn't an absolute universal principle, but often when you make something harder for unauthorized people to access, you're also going to make it more difficult for authorized people to access. Extra layers of security means authorized users have to jump through more hoops, be more mindful of their own actions, and risk losing access due to mistakes or bugs.
What makes it all worse is that many people simply don't understand how accessible their information is or what it means for their data to be accessible. Think, for example, of all the people who have posted information about their crimes on MySpace where the police can read it, or how many have posted about skipping work on Facebook where their boss can read it. So that's pretty obvious, but how many people do you think check to make sure their various online logins are using SSL? How many people actually sign their emails to verify their identity?
So no, this can't all be fixed with technical changes, but there may be things we can do. For example, I think we're underutilizing encryption technologies on the Internet.
If someone went into the store to buy a 2TB disk, only to format it and see that it is only 1.8TB, do you think they are going to call the drive maker, or the OS maker to figure out why it won't format the whole drive?
Yes, they might. I know I've been asked about this from friends, family, and coworkers. "Where does the extra space go?" If you don't understand exactly what's going on (and perhaps even if you do) the whole thing seems confusing and senseless.
Imagine you go to the store and buy a package of 20 cookies, take the package home and open it, and there are only 18. You go back to the grocery store and they say, "Yeah, all packages of cookies are like that. If you buy a package of 1,000 cookies, you get 890 cookies in it. That's just the way it works." Wouldn't that seem a little silly?
I think Apple just is attempting to make it easier for non-computer folks to understand, and less calls for them.
Do you think there's something wrong with that? (I'm seriously asking. I can't tell from your post whether you think it's a bad thing for Apple to be doing.)
Well it really wasn't in line, in a certain sense. I mean, how many bytes are there in a gigabyte? The answer is, it depends on who you're asking and under what circumstances. Ask your OS, and it'll say 1,073,741,824 bytes, and you ask your hard drive manufacturer and they'll say a billion bytes. The prefix "giga" means "billion" in almost all circumstances except in hard drives and RAM. Some people will tell you that 1,073,741,824 bytes is a gibibyte, not a gigabyte.
Doesn't it seem just a little bit silly to have a standard unit of measure that can mean multiple different values?
Well it makes a difference to anyone who cares about how much their hard drive can hold. If you buy a terabyte drive expecting it to have about 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and you get 1 trillion bytes, then you're going to come up 99,511,627,776 bytes short.
Now you're right, most of the people who care very much are also people who understand what the issue is and can calculate what they're actually getting. However, it's still sort of needlessly complicated and disconcerting for users. If you buy a 1TB hard drive (not that rare these days for general consumers) and plug it into your computer, you'll be told that the drive has a.9 TB capacity. So to a large degree, that's the issue. Why should hard drive vendors be using one standard while software vendors use the other? Why should Apple sell you a drive saying it's 160 GB and then have their own OS tell you the drive holds 149 GB?
I think it makes sense to get the terminology in line.
Just to be clear, I think that there probably is a business model for Lost to use only online distribution, but only when the online distribution channels become mature enough that TV networks and cable TV operators are essentially unnecessary. Needless to say, TV networks and cable operators don't have much of an incentive to make that happen.
I would guess that the equation of coming up with a business model is somewhat complicated. How big is the audience? Is your content paid from subscriptions or from advertisers? If subscription, how expensive is the subscription? If ad-supported, who's advertising with you and how much are they willing to pay? How big is your budget for filming?
I would bet that there are a few different business models in there that would work. In this case, I've never heard of "The Guild" before and suspect that their audience can't be all that huge. It sounds like the budget is small, but there are no suscriptions. It looks like there are some banner ads, but not interspersed throughout the show like Hulu. Still, they're getting by, and good for them.
None of this really gives you a good indicator whether web-only shows could have viable business models. The question is, what would happen if the last season of Lost went Hulu-only? Could they make enough from ad revenue there to pay the production costs? What if they went with something like iTunes season-pass? Of course, if it's on TV people are likely to watch it there, and then online viewing will be smaller.
And then of course there's the problem of the distribution channels not being mature. How many people still don't have a good Internet connection? How many people want to watch TV on their big screen TV but don't have set-top boxes?
If you think about it, distributing your show over the Internet should eventually be a no-brainer. If everyone has fast enough Internet, then the show's producers will get to scrap all the overhead of the networks and cable operators and maybe even the studios, and go direct to consumer. Maybe in return they have to deal with someone like Apple or Hulu for distribution, who can then insert commercials or charge subscription fees, replicating the same business models as traditional distribution but with lower overhead.
So for me, while I'm sure things could be improved, they all currently bottleneck at my desk. I'm certain it is the same for virtually everyone, if you look at things from the right perspective.
I assure you that there are many people who can't get those two Internet connections at all, let alone for $30/month. Also, the anecdotal fact that your Gmail account catches most spam is not an indication that there's no spam problems. I get plenty of spam in my Gmail account. What's more, it's still the cause of a lot of trouble for whoever is filtering your spam (Google in this case).
Thanks for the link to the free SSL certs, though. I'll try that out.
Well, the change to ipv6 isn't gonna help any of your problems....and it sounds more like your problem is with your provider.
I didn't say anything about ipv6, though I suppose it might make it easier to get a static IP. The problem I mention with DNS has nothing to do with my particular ISP.
And further, regarding the problems I mention that are particular to my ISP, I don't have a whole lot of choice. Sure, if we all had good high-speed ISPs available in our area, lots of problems with "the Internet" would be improved. However, one of the ideas raised in the summary is how improvements aren't being made by ISPs because they don't have an incentive to do it. I'm on topic here.
It runs fine for me. Frankly, I'm afraid that if anyone gets 'in charge', and 'improves' the internet, it won't be anywhere near as free and useful for any Joe Public to get on, express views, be anonymous, etc.
It doesn't run fine for me. Speed is too expensive, particularly upload speeds. It's too easy to spoof domains because of the separation between DNS and SSL certs. I get tons of spam-- 80-90% of the email I receive is spam. Most gets filtered out, but it's still a problem as far as I'm concerned. It's hard to have a reliable connection to my home servers because my ISP tends to drop the connection, and besides, they won't give me a static IP unless I spend an extra $100 for a "business account".
Now I don't want anyone to be "in charge" of the internet, and I like the option to be anonymous. However, I'd also like better tools for me to be able to say authoritatively "I really am who I say I am" without having to send silly amounts of money to a CA who really isn't doing very much. There are some things that could be improved.
I'm suggesting a way to find (some of) the cost part of that
Yeah, I'm not sure we're really getting anywhere or even disagreeing. However, my point is that you can't even come up with the "cost" part of the cost/benefit analysis unless you know how much a particular user will even spend-- which is something that can vary quite a lot.
I don't subscribe to cable, and don't really watch "over-the-air" TV, mostly because I don't really feel like fiddling with the antennae. I do watch lots of shows on Hulu [hulu.com], which is great from the network standpoint
It's really great from their standpoint, all the way up to the point where people realize that you don't really need "networks" anymore when everyone is watching their shows on services like Hulu. Or at least you don't really need to worry about channels, what channel a show is on, what time it airs, or anything of that sort. The only purpose the channel will have is as an investor who puts up the money for a show to be produced, and anyone willing to put up enough money to produce a show will be able to compete without any peripheral startup costs.
Essentially, television networks are running into the same thing that record companies ran into years ago: their business model is at risk of going obsolete. Lucky for them, they seem to have the sense to experiment with their own new business models-- things like Hulu-- but if they don't hurry up and get with it, someone else is going to drink their milkshake.
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Well I would guess that browser vendors would implement it if DNS records were generally signed and therefore trustworthy. Or at least decent browsers would.
Apparently our common sense was stronger than we gave it credit for. No way were we going to let our kids not learn the three R's. In time, we added the usual history and geography and science and so on, and though we never did subscribe to anybody else's curriculum, ours ended up looking pretty standard.
It seems to me that if this idea of "unschooling" is to have any credibility, it can't simply be "not teaching your kids anything. It would have to be that you still required your kids to learn and study, but not with the traditional setup of having the kids sit at a desk, doing "homework" and taking tests. It seems like adults would have to work very hard to find ways to push the kids to work on their interests.
So for example, you wouldn't just let your kid play video games. You'd have to stop your kid and say, "Oh, you're interested in video games? Let's learn about computers. Let's learn about design. Let's see if we can teach you how to program and create your own video game." Or you might say, "Oh, you want to go to the park and play? Let's pick up a book about plants and, while we're there, see what plants we can find. Then lets sit down and read about how those plants work biologically, and what their place is in the ecosystem."
Of course, that's damned hard. It would require a lot of individual time and attention spent with each child. I bet it could be pulled off, but it's not going to be an easy cure-all for the problems surrounding education.
Obviously, Child A needs to learn his multiplication tables too.
So you're saying "school + extracurricular learning > school", which is a rather silly thing to argue about.
Well that's not quite what he's saying. It seems to me that he's saying that freeform learning + learning about standard subjects could be good. In fact, he seems to be hinting that learning about standard subjects might be something that could be done in an "extracurricular" setting, and therefore the "school" part of things might be unnecessary.
If whoever was helping with the "extracurricular" learning knew a large amount about pretty much everything...
Of course that would help, but are we assuming that your average school teacher knows a particularly large amount about anything? I'm sure that's not always true.
I think you have a good point, but on the other hand, giving everyone very good Internet connections could increase the viability of cloud computing. After all, part of the reason I don't store my music collection online is it's too big, and therefore too difficult to sync and manage over crappy Internet connections.
Even if I had a great connection at home and could set up a home server, it still might be worth it to me to pay for some kind of hosting for the sake of having my data in a real datacenter. I have enough expertise to run my own server (though many people don't), but the conditions in my home are less than ideal. I don't have a lot of space, I don't have great air conditioning or air filtration, I don't have significant fire-surpression, and I don't have good control of the electrical power.
So yeah, I think there can still be use cases.
Well first, cell phones didn't become "owned" by the carriers because of the "frog in a pot" principle. It was like that from the outset. We always paid ridiculous fees.
But also, I expect the carriers to charge me some kind of monthly fee, given that they're providing a service. Sure, sell me the phone, but I don't expect to be able to use their network without paying something.
Well "cloud computing" is a bit of a buzzword, but the idea is having big distributed computing available as a service on the Internet. I believe the term comes from Visio diagrams where the Internet is depicted as a mysterious cloud, as if to say "And something happens here, we'll call that the internet." It's sort of like the "step 3: ????" that comes right before "step 4: Profit!" Something happens, we're not sure what, but it gets the job done. Let's call that the cloud.
Why this is helpful is you get services that scale very easily and cleanly, and often you only pay for what you use. Amazon's S3 is a good example. With a dedicated host with so-many gigbytes of storage, you pay for that storage whether you use it or not because it represents actual hard drive space that your hosting service has provisioned for you to use. If you run out of space, you'll have to go through some upgrade process. With Amazon S3, you pay for the number of gigabytes you use. If you're starting your business and you only need 50 GB of online space right now, you can do that. If you need to scale up to 5 TB, no need to really change anything Amazon will keep giving you storage and you'll pay for whatever you use.
Now the reason you might want to use this for your own home data is pretty simple: so it'd be accessible wherever you are. Sure, you could set up a home server, but that means you have to run a server at home. You have to know how to set that up and secure it, and keep it running. You have to worry about losing power, or what happens when your house catches fire, and whatever else.
Now maybe it appeals to you and maybe it doesn't, but certainly it has its uses. From TFA:
That's how I use Amazon's S3 cloud storage: not as an unreliable and slow hard drive, but as a store for encrypted backups of my critical files, which are written to S3 using the JungleDisk tool. This is cheaper and better than anything I could do for myself by way of offsite secure backup, but I'm not going to be working off S3 any time soon.
Yeah, I wasn't under the impression that getting rid of CAs was the purpose of DNSSEC, but it seemed like one possible side effect. Just to spell out my thoughts a bit more, when you say that DNSSEC guarantees that the DNS lookup returns the correct IP, I'm under the impression that "correct" is defined as "whatever the domain owner says is correct", i.e. it enables you to verify that whatever is in the DNS record is actually what the domain holder put in his DNS record.
Now I'm not claiming to understand the intricacies of how DNSSEC works, but it seems to me that once you have a signature that is able to verify that information comes from a given domain owner, you probably have the infrastructure in place for passing other information comes from the domain holder, too. So even if DNSSEC can't do this right now, you've possibly laid the groundwork for someone to stick a public key into the DNS record for a given server. If you can verify that the public key given for a particular server is authentic, then that public key can be used to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack.
I mean, ultimately what CAs are doing in most cases is verifying that a small bit of data, i.e. the public key for SSL encryption, is actually being provided by the domain that it's claiming to come from. If you can do this through your domain registrar and DNS servers, then CAs become unnecessary except for any extended validation of identity that you want to do.
But this would be very important in my mind, because it might allow SSL to become essentially free in cases where extended validation isn't necessary.
One thing that I'm not clear on at all but would like to understand is, is there any chance that DNSSEC will let us get rid of SSL certificate authorities?
Maybe that's a dumb question, but what I have in mind is this: if we can provide authenticated/signed pairing of DNS information to IP addresses, could we also put a SSL certificate into the mix and therefore know that the SSL cert is valid for that domain name? Wouldn't that at least give us SSL certs that verified the site was owned by the person who owned the domain, even if it didn't do any kind of "Extended validation" stuff?
I'm not against *all* patents. Some algorithms have a serious amount of R&D and ingenuity behind them.
I actually find it a bit tough to come up with a good answer to the problem of patents. The first thing that popped into my head when I read about "free software harmed by software patents" is the whole thing about H264/Theora and the HTML 5 "video" tag.
Now I don't really know what's patented in H264, but I could imagine that it may well be some algorithms with a serious amount of R&D behind them. On the other hand, free software can't legally implement those codecs, and so Firefox can't support it. Free software also can't technically (AFAIK) implement MP3 or AAC encoders/decoders without paying a patent fee.
Now I suppose you could say, "so what?" Fair enough. Still, I have it stuck in my head somewhere that these are important standards that we need to be able to use freely in order to promote the arts and sciences (which is the whole point of patents, isn't it?).
Yeah, poor AT&T. After having made loads of money offering a service, they're now expected to spend some of that money providing the service they just sold? And what will they get out of the deal? Nothing. Nothing but profit and a robust infrastructure that they can continue to sell service on. Nothing but profit and assets and a robust business.
Poor poor AT&T.
I may be wrong, but I think it was an IBM commercial.
But yeah, I think you're even being too generous toward Verizon and AT&T. I'm sure Verizon and AT&T both knew the iPhone was going to be a big hit. The problem was that Verizon has had a history of crippling phones and applying their own software and branding, and those weren't concessions Apple was going to make.
My guess is that AT&T probably (a) didn't expect quite how much web browsing people would use their iPhones for; and (b) didn't really care because they're content to offer crappy service. What are people going to do, switch to Verizon? The iPhone won't work. Switch to Sprint? Ha ha, snort. I suppose they could switch to T-Mobile, but from my experience things won't get much better there.
Now, the 204 year bit sounds impressive, but it isn't like a piece of DNA lasted 204 years without any decay. Instead it was copied repeatedly over that time. If I copied that 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive (assuming that you could keep making them compatible) I don't think that getting the data across 200 years without any bit-flips is really that tall of an order.
Yeah, but can you get the drives to make their own replacement drives every 25 years?
Yeah, the "all humans are mutants" angle doesn't have much to it. Of course we're mutants insofar as we're the product of evolution, and evolution requires mutation. Without mutation, you wouldn't get new genetic differences to be weeded out or passed on. So yes, life is a mutation and we're all mutants.
It will be interesting now that we could be able to sequence your DNA and your parents' DNA, figure out exactly what mutations you have (if any) from the previous generation, and possibly know what those mutations do. Maybe in the future we'll be able to map all of our genetic family trees in detail, figure out when traits were introduced, and see what patterns emerge. Maybe those random mutations aren't so random.
I think this is a good point. It's kind of a brute-force approach to the problem, which isn't the best strategy for everyone, but when you're paying 1/10th the price, you can buy 10 spare parts of everything before you even break even. You can have 4 of these things running at different locations and still be paying half-price. If it does all break down in 5 years, storage will be much cheaper and more dense at that point, and you can replace it really cheaply.
Lots of friends and family - people who are otherwise thoughtful, intelligent, and clueful - simply don't think about security.
Well I think there are a few different issues here, and you have to break the issue apart a little to understand why they don't think about security.
At least part of it is just that security issues can be fairly complex in themselves, computers can be complex in themselves, and people generally don't want to deal with complex issues that they're not very knowledgeable about. It's intimidating, and a lot of people understand on an intuitive level that trying to secure your computer without knowing very much about computers or security is a bit pointless. If you don't understand the issues, fiddling with things is just as likely to open new security holes as it is to close any. In some ways it's fairly sensible to refrain from thinking too much about security and leave it to the experts.
Another problem is that security often comes with a trade-off to accessibility. This isn't an absolute universal principle, but often when you make something harder for unauthorized people to access, you're also going to make it more difficult for authorized people to access. Extra layers of security means authorized users have to jump through more hoops, be more mindful of their own actions, and risk losing access due to mistakes or bugs.
What makes it all worse is that many people simply don't understand how accessible their information is or what it means for their data to be accessible. Think, for example, of all the people who have posted information about their crimes on MySpace where the police can read it, or how many have posted about skipping work on Facebook where their boss can read it. So that's pretty obvious, but how many people do you think check to make sure their various online logins are using SSL? How many people actually sign their emails to verify their identity?
So no, this can't all be fixed with technical changes, but there may be things we can do. For example, I think we're underutilizing encryption technologies on the Internet.
If someone went into the store to buy a 2TB disk, only to format it and see that it is only 1.8TB, do you think they are going to call the drive maker, or the OS maker to figure out why it won't format the whole drive?
Yes, they might. I know I've been asked about this from friends, family, and coworkers. "Where does the extra space go?" If you don't understand exactly what's going on (and perhaps even if you do) the whole thing seems confusing and senseless.
Imagine you go to the store and buy a package of 20 cookies, take the package home and open it, and there are only 18. You go back to the grocery store and they say, "Yeah, all packages of cookies are like that. If you buy a package of 1,000 cookies, you get 890 cookies in it. That's just the way it works." Wouldn't that seem a little silly?
I think Apple just is attempting to make it easier for non-computer folks to understand, and less calls for them.
Do you think there's something wrong with that? (I'm seriously asking. I can't tell from your post whether you think it's a bad thing for Apple to be doing.)
Well it really wasn't in line, in a certain sense. I mean, how many bytes are there in a gigabyte? The answer is, it depends on who you're asking and under what circumstances. Ask your OS, and it'll say 1,073,741,824 bytes, and you ask your hard drive manufacturer and they'll say a billion bytes. The prefix "giga" means "billion" in almost all circumstances except in hard drives and RAM. Some people will tell you that 1,073,741,824 bytes is a gibibyte, not a gigabyte.
Doesn't it seem just a little bit silly to have a standard unit of measure that can mean multiple different values?
Well it makes a difference to anyone who cares about how much their hard drive can hold. If you buy a terabyte drive expecting it to have about 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and you get 1 trillion bytes, then you're going to come up 99,511,627,776 bytes short.
Now you're right, most of the people who care very much are also people who understand what the issue is and can calculate what they're actually getting. However, it's still sort of needlessly complicated and disconcerting for users. If you buy a 1TB hard drive (not that rare these days for general consumers) and plug it into your computer, you'll be told that the drive has a .9 TB capacity. So to a large degree, that's the issue. Why should hard drive vendors be using one standard while software vendors use the other? Why should Apple sell you a drive saying it's 160 GB and then have their own OS tell you the drive holds 149 GB?
I think it makes sense to get the terminology in line.
Just to be clear, I think that there probably is a business model for Lost to use only online distribution, but only when the online distribution channels become mature enough that TV networks and cable TV operators are essentially unnecessary. Needless to say, TV networks and cable operators don't have much of an incentive to make that happen.
I would guess that the equation of coming up with a business model is somewhat complicated. How big is the audience? Is your content paid from subscriptions or from advertisers? If subscription, how expensive is the subscription? If ad-supported, who's advertising with you and how much are they willing to pay? How big is your budget for filming?
I would bet that there are a few different business models in there that would work. In this case, I've never heard of "The Guild" before and suspect that their audience can't be all that huge. It sounds like the budget is small, but there are no suscriptions. It looks like there are some banner ads, but not interspersed throughout the show like Hulu. Still, they're getting by, and good for them.
None of this really gives you a good indicator whether web-only shows could have viable business models. The question is, what would happen if the last season of Lost went Hulu-only? Could they make enough from ad revenue there to pay the production costs? What if they went with something like iTunes season-pass? Of course, if it's on TV people are likely to watch it there, and then online viewing will be smaller.
And then of course there's the problem of the distribution channels not being mature. How many people still don't have a good Internet connection? How many people want to watch TV on their big screen TV but don't have set-top boxes?
If you think about it, distributing your show over the Internet should eventually be a no-brainer. If everyone has fast enough Internet, then the show's producers will get to scrap all the overhead of the networks and cable operators and maybe even the studios, and go direct to consumer. Maybe in return they have to deal with someone like Apple or Hulu for distribution, who can then insert commercials or charge subscription fees, replicating the same business models as traditional distribution but with lower overhead.
So for me, while I'm sure things could be improved, they all currently bottleneck at my desk. I'm certain it is the same for virtually everyone, if you look at things from the right perspective.
I assure you that there are many people who can't get those two Internet connections at all, let alone for $30/month. Also, the anecdotal fact that your Gmail account catches most spam is not an indication that there's no spam problems. I get plenty of spam in my Gmail account. What's more, it's still the cause of a lot of trouble for whoever is filtering your spam (Google in this case).
Thanks for the link to the free SSL certs, though. I'll try that out.
Well, the change to ipv6 isn't gonna help any of your problems....and it sounds more like your problem is with your provider.
I didn't say anything about ipv6, though I suppose it might make it easier to get a static IP. The problem I mention with DNS has nothing to do with my particular ISP.
And further, regarding the problems I mention that are particular to my ISP, I don't have a whole lot of choice. Sure, if we all had good high-speed ISPs available in our area, lots of problems with "the Internet" would be improved. However, one of the ideas raised in the summary is how improvements aren't being made by ISPs because they don't have an incentive to do it. I'm on topic here.
It runs fine for me. Frankly, I'm afraid that if anyone gets 'in charge', and 'improves' the internet, it won't be anywhere near as free and useful for any Joe Public to get on, express views, be anonymous, etc.
It doesn't run fine for me. Speed is too expensive, particularly upload speeds. It's too easy to spoof domains because of the separation between DNS and SSL certs. I get tons of spam-- 80-90% of the email I receive is spam. Most gets filtered out, but it's still a problem as far as I'm concerned. It's hard to have a reliable connection to my home servers because my ISP tends to drop the connection, and besides, they won't give me a static IP unless I spend an extra $100 for a "business account".
Now I don't want anyone to be "in charge" of the internet, and I like the option to be anonymous. However, I'd also like better tools for me to be able to say authoritatively "I really am who I say I am" without having to send silly amounts of money to a CA who really isn't doing very much. There are some things that could be improved.
I'm suggesting a way to find (some of) the cost part of that
Yeah, I'm not sure we're really getting anywhere or even disagreeing. However, my point is that you can't even come up with the "cost" part of the cost/benefit analysis unless you know how much a particular user will even spend-- which is something that can vary quite a lot.
I don't subscribe to cable, and don't really watch "over-the-air" TV, mostly because I don't really feel like fiddling with the antennae. I do watch lots of shows on Hulu [hulu.com], which is great from the network standpoint
It's really great from their standpoint, all the way up to the point where people realize that you don't really need "networks" anymore when everyone is watching their shows on services like Hulu. Or at least you don't really need to worry about channels, what channel a show is on, what time it airs, or anything of that sort. The only purpose the channel will have is as an investor who puts up the money for a show to be produced, and anyone willing to put up enough money to produce a show will be able to compete without any peripheral startup costs.
Essentially, television networks are running into the same thing that record companies ran into years ago: their business model is at risk of going obsolete. Lucky for them, they seem to have the sense to experiment with their own new business models-- things like Hulu-- but if they don't hurry up and get with it, someone else is going to drink their milkshake.