The other way to read it is the legitimate concern that potential investors have when people start throwing around ideas like forcing the ILECs/cableco's to open up their networks to companies that didn't help fund the roll out of those networks. Why should I invest my money to build out a broadband network when I can just wait a few years until Congress forces them to let me use it?
I live and work in a country which recently introduced exactly these measures. The incumbent monopoly Internet provider has been fighting tooth and nail against what a past CEO called a 'cuckoo's egg' - a business that leverages someone else's infrastructure to compete directly with them.
On the face of it, it seems like a reasonable concern, but the moment you begin unpacking the implications, you realise that it's actually quite the opposite. Under the new law, network resources that are unlikely (or impossible) to duplicate are known as 'bottleneck resources'. The Telecommunications Regulator has the right to designate a particular carrier dominant in a given area, and to require them to negotiate in good faith with anyone who comes calling. In fact, the telco's license requires that they provide a 'reference contract' that other businesses can use to prepare themselves.
In practice, what happens is that, far from losing money, the telco actually gains. There are two main reasons for this:
Income. The telco gets its tithe from all traffic that uses its resources. They have the right to ask a fair price, and thus are guaranteed not to lose money on their own traffic as well as everyone else's. Most notably, they profit more as the middleman, because the end-user support costs are borne by their competitor.
Network Effects. Because more people are now encouraged to use the network, and because the competition makes it desirable to maximise the efficiency with which it's run, we end up with a larger pool of customers receiving better service than we would have otherwise.This, in turn, increases the value of the network as a whole, which increases its appeal to customers, and so on.[*]
Rather than reducing profits and creating burdensome regulatory overhead, enforced competition has the reverse effect. In truth, if the government is imposing anything on the telco, it's market forces. By requiring an open, competitive environment, they're allowing the Adam Smith-ian principles to apply themselves. This ensures that the network as a whole is run in the most efficient, most profitable manner possible.
And that is good for everyone.
-----------
[*] I live in a developing country where Internet reaches less than 15% of the population. This argument does not apply to the same extent in an already saturated market, though I suspect that it remains an influence.
I favor the idea of net neutrality that is most often supported on this board, but I have no confidence that that is what we will get from government regulation.
You have every reason to doubt the motives of vested interests and their influence on government. But the problem is this:
How else can you get Net Neutrality except by regulation?
Net Neutrality is in essence a set of basic rules that say, 'Play fair; however you treat them, treat everyone the same.' The role of government is to enforce these rules. Nobody else can.
The fact that much (but not all) of government has been co-opted by moneyed interests is, IMO, largely because people let it happen. The name of the game for politicians is to get re-elected. One criterion for this is to go into every election with a big war chest. The other is not to piss off your constituents. Unfortunately, the electorate these days is so complacent that the moneyed side wins almost every time. Were the voters a little more attentive, no amount of money would suffice.
So, your assignment today is: If you see the government failing in its responsibility to enforce real Net Neutrality, get pissed off and stay pissed off until they fix it. There is, alas, no other way (unless you're a billionaire).
I have heard strange legends, from the lands beyond civilization, were barbarous beast-men devour one another, of places where there are more people than there are computers. Apparently, they are sometimes forced to share computers....
Hello from cannibal-land beyond civilization!
Just wanted to let you know: Problem solved! We just ate everyone who didn't want to share.
Course, now we have too many computers. And those things taste like shit...
I am well aware that AD is little more than LDAP/Kerberos under the hood. When you compose your flames, perhaps you would be so good as to explain exactly how one can manage a network full of Windows workstations with the level of control AD policies offer using nothing but F/OSS software which has reached a reasonable level of stability.
As others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you don't have to. With a proper trust relationship now possible, you can actually use the same MS AD management tools you know so well.
Whatever the motivation for this work, I have to say it makes me feel a little more optimistic. Getting MS software to trust Samba is a decidedly non-trivial accomplishment. The other direction has been possible for some time, but it relegated Samba to a subordinate position. Now, these two implementations can interact as peers.
Bitter experience with closed source software vendors has driven more than a few of us into the arms of FOSS. But virtually all of us work in heterogeneous environments where making MS software work with FOSS continues to frustrate us to this day. The inverse can sometimes be a challenge, but at least the source was always there to diagnose these shortcomings.
Having some degree of assurance that Windows and FOSS (well, Samba, at least) will play nicely together on both sides of the fence is enough to make even die-hard Free Software supporters like me take heart. It's not the end of the war, but it's a sign that peace talks might just work.
... Might, of course, being the operative word in that last sentence.
Anyway - you can't be too sure about anything these days, but if Microsoft doesn't cooperate they will have an even lower respect from the open source community than they have today.
Well, that explains the move to 64-bit. We were at risk of over-running the lower bound of the signed long integer that would have been required to express this new depth of loathing. Now, they're good until at least 2038. 8^)
DISCLAIMER: I bought an iPhone 3GS in July, the first one I've owned. My wife got one in August. We like the phones, but are not Apple zealots.:END DISCLAIMER
Sorry to go all Grammar Nazi on what it otherwise an insightful post, but...
A disclaimer would be something like, "I could be talking out my ass here..." or "I don't have any stats to back this, but my personal observation is..." or "Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt..."
The phrase "Gartner predicts...." is, for example, an implicit disclaimer, warning readers that what follows is going to be the most complete, utter bollocks since... well, since their last prediction.
The application is very impressive, as far as the video goes. It shows that a human process of recombining existing material based on a hunch.
Problem is, searches (for base data set) for CC Share alike / commercially usable is a best spotty (many artists don't care much about explaining the image rights, and most others are jerks).
So in practice, this will only be useful for private entertainment, maybe prototyping, but not for professional use.
Ummm, have you considered the possibility that digital artists might want to use it on their own image collections?
I could see this being a positively revolutionary tool for folks like Weta: Sketch out a story board, make a few wireframe animations, then map it onto existing collections of photographed/filmed material. Magical, says I.
On top of that, who's to say that this wouldn't spur a whole re-use regime, where people would be paid well to create source materials?
Gestures aren't only for "multi-touch". I've been using windows software called "Stroke-it" for years.
I suspect that the majority of slashdotters have been using their computers to 'Stroke It' for years as well. 8^)
And while I'm being silly, did nobody else find themselves saying 'WTF?!?' when reading TFS?:
... each pad housing its own optical sensor for mission-critical pinching gestures...
'Mission Critical?' Dude, I know that Enterprise-ready pinching gestures that maximise the synergies between digits are all the rage, but some of us don't need 5 9's when it comes to our mice. Not all of my clicks are directed at streamlining efficiencies and improving the bottom line. I mean, I appreciate an agile, responsive mouse with good communications skills that knows how to deal with complex challenges in a team-oriented environment as much as the next guy. But most of the time I just want the fucking thing to go 'tick-tack' when I press the button.
Clearly you interact with people who know that top-posting is evil and have no urge to reply to each email before reading the following responses that have been sitting in their inbox for 3 days.
OF course, you have the situation where the Author writes a fantastic novel that would have made him million over the span of his long life, but is tragically killed by a bus before collecting on all that he should have. Not having had a chance to make money off of his works, he leaves nothing to his family and others go on to reap the rewards of his art.
Um, how about she sues the bus company for wrongful death/negligence/whatever, and collects from them the unrealised earnings? They would, after all, be easily quantified.
Not the bus company's fault? No suit, then, and no grounds to complain (more than anyone else) about the tragic circumstances of a life cut short.
I write 2000 words a week for publication, and I have no problem with that.
In short: Yes, there are anti-democratic forces at play, and yet we are still our own worst enemies.
Yes. And the worst offender is Rupert Murdoch....
To Mr Murdoch it is about power. His control over media - on a near-global scale - makes politicians his playthings. If you are suspicious of government, then perhaps you should not be ignoring the man behind the curtain. Nobody fucking elected him.
What I find most curious about this man is that Keith Murdoch, his father, was a legend of early journalism.
Murdoch senior faced arrest and possible trial on sedition/treason charges for breaking the story of the disaster that befell ANZAC and British forces at Gallipoli in WWI.
It's hard to keep perspective now, but journalism has always been prey to government propaganda and the best interests of the moneyed class. Evelyn Waugh's classic 1938 novel Scoop was actually not so much farce as a straight-ahead narrative of the author's own experience covering the Italian conquest of Abyssinia. He released it in a thin layer of fiction in order to avoid Britain's notorious libel laws.
Keith Murdoch's courageous decision to put his countrymen's lives before duty was ground-breaking. It influenced countless others in the years that followed, and led to an entire generation of world-class Aussie/Kiwi reporters. Perhaps the best known of the bunch is Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had the guts to broadcast from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in spite of accusations, threats and widespread establishment opprobrium.
And yet... And yet, here we have the scion of one of the most influential media figures of all time doing everything in his power to debase the very thing his father so loved.
There's a Shakespearian play in there somewhere. Personally, though, I wish it were a Greek tragedy - the old school kind with eyes gouged out and no survivors. 8^)
Re:is there any other way to prevent crowd dispers
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, there is. Too bad most of the people in countries where it is available think little of it. It is called voting, and it works - although not very often. The idea is, basically, that you vote your friends into your parliament and they pass laws that forbid hi-tech crowd control.
My kingdom for a mod point. Human societies often suffer from the Little Red Hen syndrome, wherein everyone wants the bread, but nobody can be bothered to actually help prepare it.
Democracy is a messy, tiresome, boring, downright infuriating system where one is constantly tormented by the most aggravating invention known to man: other people's opinions. It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
A serious coordination effort is needed for that to happen, which would have been facilitated by some electronic medium that allows easy and cheap communication over large distances, by wire or otherwise. Maybe someone can build a prototype of such a medium as well?
The technical means exist. That's never been the problem. The issue here is creating and sustaining a culture of participation. While social networks and other means go a long way to facilitating that process, people still need to actually listen to one another. And that, as I've said, is one of the most exquisite tortures known to man. Except of course for all the other ones.
By the way - and not coincidentally - the Beck-ification of political discourse is neither accidental nor unplanned. Politicians have known for decades that the best way to subvert democracy was simply to shout it down. It's far, far easier to manipulate a population that's splintered, resentful and incapable of conducting an actual dialogue to resolve its differences or find manageable compromise. The knee-jerk name-calling on either side of every issue, when it's echoed, magnified and given focus by mass media, is specifically designed to subvert the kind of processes that sustain democracy.
In short: Yes, there are anti-democratic forces at play, and yet we are still our own worst enemies.
Oh SURE they knew they would eventually release the source. And SURE they would willingly adhere to the license terms. And people don't cheat on their spouses. And nobody cheats on their taxes. And no one ever gets sued over this kind of thing. And I'm dating Megan Fox.
Well, that's where RMS' ninjas come into it. But I told you, we don't talk about them. 8^)
if it's built on open source software, chances are someone will force them to reveal their source code.
Force? There's no force involved[*]. They knew that if they made any changes to the software, they were going to release the source from the moment they decided to distribute a device with Linux on it. Assuming they have customised the code, the decision to release the source was entirely theirs. And it was made when they chose to use Linux in the first place.
[*] Well, except for RMS' ninjas, but we don't talk about them....
Slashdot Mirror
The other way to read it is the legitimate concern that potential investors have when people start throwing around ideas like forcing the ILECs/cableco's to open up their networks to companies that didn't help fund the roll out of those networks. Why should I invest my money to build out a broadband network when I can just wait a few years until Congress forces them to let me use it?
I live and work in a country which recently introduced exactly these measures. The incumbent monopoly Internet provider has been fighting tooth and nail against what a past CEO called a 'cuckoo's egg' - a business that leverages someone else's infrastructure to compete directly with them.
On the face of it, it seems like a reasonable concern, but the moment you begin unpacking the implications, you realise that it's actually quite the opposite. Under the new law, network resources that are unlikely (or impossible) to duplicate are known as 'bottleneck resources'. The Telecommunications Regulator has the right to designate a particular carrier dominant in a given area, and to require them to negotiate in good faith with anyone who comes calling. In fact, the telco's license requires that they provide a 'reference contract' that other businesses can use to prepare themselves.
In practice, what happens is that, far from losing money, the telco actually gains. There are two main reasons for this:
Rather than reducing profits and creating burdensome regulatory overhead, enforced competition has the reverse effect. In truth, if the government is imposing anything on the telco, it's market forces. By requiring an open, competitive environment, they're allowing the Adam Smith-ian principles to apply themselves. This ensures that the network as a whole is run in the most efficient, most profitable manner possible.
And that is good for everyone.
-----------
[*] I live in a developing country where Internet reaches less than 15% of the population. This argument does not apply to the same extent in an already saturated market, though I suspect that it remains an influence.
You have every reason to doubt the motives of vested interests and their influence on government. But the problem is this:
How else can you get Net Neutrality except by regulation?
Net Neutrality is in essence a set of basic rules that say, 'Play fair; however you treat them, treat everyone the same.' The role of government is to enforce these rules. Nobody else can.
The fact that much (but not all) of government has been co-opted by moneyed interests is, IMO, largely because people let it happen. The name of the game for politicians is to get re-elected. One criterion for this is to go into every election with a big war chest. The other is not to piss off your constituents. Unfortunately, the electorate these days is so complacent that the moneyed side wins almost every time. Were the voters a little more attentive, no amount of money would suffice.
So, your assignment today is: If you see the government failing in its responsibility to enforce real Net Neutrality, get pissed off and stay pissed off until they fix it. There is, alas, no other way (unless you're a billionaire).
All Problem solved.
If I had mod points, you'd get +1 Funny.
Given that I used up the last of them yesterday, I'll settle for, "Irony of ironies. All is irony."
What is "the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223?" And I don't believe there's an element known as Oy.
When combined with the element Vey, it forms Exasperatium.
In nature, you see it most often in crystalline form sprinkled through kvetchite.
I have heard strange legends, from the lands beyond civilization, were barbarous beast-men devour one another, of places where there are more people than there are computers. Apparently, they are sometimes forced to share computers....
Hello from cannibal-land beyond civilization!
Just wanted to let you know: Problem solved! We just ate everyone who didn't want to share.
Course, now we have too many computers. And those things taste like shit...
But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content
The only evidence of a "movement toward paid content" that I have seen is Rupert Murdoch telling people that there is a movement toward paid content.
And you think it won't work? It worked with Iraq.
Just sayin'....
As others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you don't have to. With a proper trust relationship now possible, you can actually use the same MS AD management tools you know so well.
Whatever the motivation for this work, I have to say it makes me feel a little more optimistic. Getting MS software to trust Samba is a decidedly non-trivial accomplishment. The other direction has been possible for some time, but it relegated Samba to a subordinate position. Now, these two implementations can interact as peers.
Bitter experience with closed source software vendors has driven more than a few of us into the arms of FOSS. But virtually all of us work in heterogeneous environments where making MS software work with FOSS continues to frustrate us to this day. The inverse can sometimes be a challenge, but at least the source was always there to diagnose these shortcomings.
Having some degree of assurance that Windows and FOSS (well, Samba, at least) will play nicely together on both sides of the fence is enough to make even die-hard Free Software supporters like me take heart. It's not the end of the war, but it's a sign that peace talks might just work.
... Might, of course, being the operative word in that last sentence.
Anyway - you can't be too sure about anything these days, but if Microsoft doesn't cooperate they will have an even lower respect from the open source community than they have today.
Well, that explains the move to 64-bit. We were at risk of over-running the lower bound of the signed long integer that would have been required to express this new depth of loathing. Now, they're good until at least 2038. 8^)
Sorry to go all Grammar Nazi on what it otherwise an insightful post, but...
What you claim is a 'DISCLAIMER' is actually a 'DISCLOSURE'.
A disclaimer would be something like, "I could be talking out my ass here..." or "I don't have any stats to back this, but my personal observation is..." or "Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt..."
The phrase "Gartner predicts...." is, for example, an implicit disclaimer, warning readers that what follows is going to be the most complete, utter bollocks since... well, since their last prediction.
The application is very impressive, as far as the video goes. It shows that a human process of recombining existing material based on a hunch.
Problem is, searches (for base data set) for CC Share alike / commercially usable is a best spotty (many artists don't care much about explaining the image rights, and most others are jerks).
So in practice, this will only be useful for private entertainment, maybe prototyping, but not for professional use.
Ummm, have you considered the possibility that digital artists might want to use it on their own image collections?
I could see this being a positively revolutionary tool for folks like Weta: Sketch out a story board, make a few wireframe animations, then map it onto existing collections of photographed/filmed material. Magical, says I.
On top of that, who's to say that this wouldn't spur a whole re-use regime, where people would be paid well to create source materials?
A single XKCD comic? Apply to all XKCD comics, then turn all the comics into a streaming video. See if you obtain a higher level of conciousness.
So the software's written in EMACS, then? Or just kinda hacked together in Perl?
Now with 50% more irony.
New tourist slogan:
BRITAIN - Ironic Yet Rustic
I suspect that the majority of slashdotters have been using their computers to 'Stroke It' for years as well. 8^)
And while I'm being silly, did nobody else find themselves saying 'WTF?!?' when reading TFS?:
'Mission Critical?' Dude, I know that Enterprise-ready pinching gestures that maximise the synergies between digits are all the rage, but some of us don't need 5 9's when it comes to our mice. Not all of my clicks are directed at streamlining efficiencies and improving the bottom line. I mean, I appreciate an agile, responsive mouse with good communications skills that knows how to deal with complex challenges in a team-oriented environment as much as the next guy. But most of the time I just want the fucking thing to go 'tick-tack' when I press the button.
Portland and San Jose is full of the sort of people who like trains, so the opposition would be less.
Unemployed semiconductor engineers like trains?
Semiconductor engineer? What is that - some guy who pilots a monorail? Or maybe he only collects half the tickets....
Me too LOL
Clearly you interact with people who know that top-posting is evil and have no urge to reply to each email before reading the following responses that have been sitting in their inbox for 3 days.
I envy you.
Same with zippers. What would life be like without zippers?
I have 4 pairs of Levi 501s, you insensitive clod!
(And one pair of 504s - endlessly and sometimes comically confusing, especially in crucial moments.)
Who wants to bet that the publisher's lobby is going to have this bill killed?
"...is going to..."? How about "... probably already has"?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought the phrase 'send a bill to committee' was the congressional equivalent of 'sleep with the fishes.'
Because nothing says a good time like Electrostatic Discharge.
"Don't hit me with an electrostatic discharge, bro."
You're right, it just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Um, how about she sues the bus company for wrongful death/negligence/whatever, and collects from them the unrealised earnings? They would, after all, be easily quantified.
Not the bus company's fault? No suit, then, and no grounds to complain (more than anyone else) about the tragic circumstances of a life cut short.
I write 2000 words a week for publication, and I have no problem with that.
In short: Yes, there are anti-democratic forces at play, and yet we are still our own worst enemies.
Yes. And the worst offender is Rupert Murdoch....
To Mr Murdoch it is about power. His control over media - on a near-global scale - makes politicians his playthings. If you are suspicious of government, then perhaps you should not be ignoring the man behind the curtain. Nobody fucking elected him.
What I find most curious about this man is that Keith Murdoch, his father, was a legend of early journalism.
Murdoch senior faced arrest and possible trial on sedition/treason charges for breaking the story of the disaster that befell ANZAC and British forces at Gallipoli in WWI.
It's hard to keep perspective now, but journalism has always been prey to government propaganda and the best interests of the moneyed class. Evelyn Waugh's classic 1938 novel Scoop was actually not so much farce as a straight-ahead narrative of the author's own experience covering the Italian conquest of Abyssinia. He released it in a thin layer of fiction in order to avoid Britain's notorious libel laws.
Keith Murdoch's courageous decision to put his countrymen's lives before duty was ground-breaking. It influenced countless others in the years that followed, and led to an entire generation of world-class Aussie/Kiwi reporters. Perhaps the best known of the bunch is Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had the guts to broadcast from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in spite of accusations, threats and widespread establishment opprobrium.
And yet... And yet, here we have the scion of one of the most influential media figures of all time doing everything in his power to debase the very thing his father so loved.
There's a Shakespearian play in there somewhere. Personally, though, I wish it were a Greek tragedy - the old school kind with eyes gouged out and no survivors. 8^)
Yes, there is. Too bad most of the people in countries where it is available think little of it. It is called voting, and it works - although not very often. The idea is, basically, that you vote your friends into your parliament and they pass laws that forbid hi-tech crowd control.
My kingdom for a mod point. Human societies often suffer from the Little Red Hen syndrome, wherein everyone wants the bread, but nobody can be bothered to actually help prepare it.
Democracy is a messy, tiresome, boring, downright infuriating system where one is constantly tormented by the most aggravating invention known to man: other people's opinions. It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
A serious coordination effort is needed for that to happen, which would have been facilitated by some electronic medium that allows easy and cheap communication over large distances, by wire or otherwise. Maybe someone can build a prototype of such a medium as well?
The technical means exist. That's never been the problem. The issue here is creating and sustaining a culture of participation. While social networks and other means go a long way to facilitating that process, people still need to actually listen to one another. And that, as I've said, is one of the most exquisite tortures known to man. Except of course for all the other ones.
By the way - and not coincidentally - the Beck-ification of political discourse is neither accidental nor unplanned. Politicians have known for decades that the best way to subvert democracy was simply to shout it down. It's far, far easier to manipulate a population that's splintered, resentful and incapable of conducting an actual dialogue to resolve its differences or find manageable compromise. The knee-jerk name-calling on either side of every issue, when it's echoed, magnified and given focus by mass media, is specifically designed to subvert the kind of processes that sustain democracy.
In short: Yes, there are anti-democratic forces at play, and yet we are still our own worst enemies.
Dude, it's water, not sand. Sand won't run through tubes.
Sheesh.
Oh SURE they knew they would eventually release the source. And SURE they would willingly adhere to the license terms. And people don't cheat on their spouses. And nobody cheats on their taxes. And no one ever gets sued over this kind of thing. And I'm dating Megan Fox.
Well, that's where RMS' ninjas come into it. But I told you, we don't talk about them. 8^)
no no... dont mention the war!!!!!!
--john cleese
What, you mean this war?
(Sorry, couldn't resist, and yes, it's perfectly SFW)
if it's built on open source software, chances are someone will force them to reveal their source code.
Force? There's no force involved[*]. They knew that if they made any changes to the software, they were going to release the source from the moment they decided to distribute a device with Linux on it. Assuming they have customised the code, the decision to release the source was entirely theirs. And it was made when they chose to use Linux in the first place.
[*] Well, except for RMS' ninjas, but we don't talk about them....