Either way everyone in America gets to have lots of plasma TVs and computers and everything else they want, and everyone in China gets jobs so they can buy the stuff they want. The whole point of economics is for everyone to be able to afford as much stuff as possible, so its no surprise that it worked out in the way that achieves that. Who is going to give up half of the stuff they own so that they can buy American-made goods?
Whilst I think that info should be free to be replicated, this bit is wrong:
We have today costless information.
Information does not come out of nowhere. We have costless replication of information, but not costless creation. Someone has to provide a lab and scientists or many hours of a writer's time to produce information. It is the fact that information is expensive to create and yet damn close to free to replicate that is the best argument for free sharing of information. That way, effort does not have to be duplicated. (Think of Newton's famous quote: "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants")
It reached a critical point a long time ago. That is, if you're talking about on slashdot. The problem is that slashdot is not representative of the broader community. Nor, I guess from your comment, is the cross-section of people that you interact with. The truth is, unrest is a long way from reaching a critical point. A long, long, long way. The truth is, a lot of people need to really care about something like this, and a lot of people with money need to poney up for lobbying, before anything will be done. Until that point the same things will dominate voting choices that always have (the economy, interest rates, oil prices, education and to a lesser extent foreign policy). People don't like being spied on, but few people actually care enough to lose money over it.
What do you mean with something stupid. Stumble over a loose paving stone? Drop your icecream? Walk with your fly open?
How about something stupid like being a little kid walking down the street looking vulnerable? How about something stupid like going to a porn shop (especially if you're high profile)? How about having dinner with some other guy's wife?
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place, but if someone wants to watch everything that happens they have always had to sit in a cafe or whatever and get watched themselves.
Those who are saying that it is nothing new, because you can always be watched in a public place are ignoring that by massively changing the way in which people can be watched in the street, a qualitive change in privacy has occured.
How long till someone pairs this with some facial recognition software and gets a database of all your movements? Or all of everyone's movements? That sort of thing was so expensive as to be virtually impossible (you'd have to hire someone to follow everyone you wanted to track), but with this system would be trivial if you could get facial recognition to work.
Some ISPs that advertised unlimited bandwidth here in Australia whilst shaping the traffic of users who downloaded a lot were called to account by the competition regulator here. I don't know if they were prosecuted or not, but no plans here are advertised as "unlimited" unless they truely are unlimited (which is pretty much never).
In Australia, where the cost of backbone connectivity is high since most of it goes back to the US under very long (expensive) undersea cables, just about all home users have a plan with a set download limit.
So you might buy a 1.5 Megabit DSL service with 10 gig of downloads a month, or whatever. Then once you go past that they either shape your traffic (depending on the ISP, some hard-shape to a fixed speed and some just have your traffic as a low priority, so it only gets shaped when the ISPs backbone links are nearly full) or you pay a per gigabyte price for everything past your limit. Some ISPs don't count downloads during their offpeak times (usually midnight to 8am or similar) to encourage people to do big downloads when the ISPs have plenty of backhaul capacity.
How about just a transparent proxy? Could that work?
If a whole bunch of folks at one ISP are streaming the nightly news, couldn't the proxy just pull in one copy of it and then send it out? I have no idea if this works with streaming video, where everyone might be requesting it at exactly the same time rather than more static content where the requests are spaced out, but it would be worth looking into.
The proposal would leave the door open for the state to order implants to track sex offenders or for parents to track their children under an amendment offered by Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford. Such applications are years away because the chips do not yet allow for surveillance tracking.
So you can't be forced to get a chip, unless your parents want it. So in twenty years everyone under the age of 38 could legally have chips in them without their consent? Add to that that the government can chip sex offenders (and its not hard to extend that to other criminals) and you wind up with plenty of people getting compulsory chipping.
Despite all the posts saying basically that employers won't "force" you to get chipped but won't force you to take the job either, I think this bill is in general a move in the right direction, since without it employers would be perfectely allowed to not even try to cover up the fact they were requiring employees to get chipped. This bill may (or may not, I haven't read the text of it) be impotent, but at least it is something.
Get really good at something, and you'll be useful to everybody. Almost doesn't matter what field.
I see a lot of jobs in diverse fields advertising for someone with an engineering degree. This is for engineering positions, and they don't specify whether they want a chemical, civil, software or whatever. They just know that once someone is really good at one field, then they'll be able to learn anything they turn their hand to.
In fact, it is the other way around. Artists have always made far more money from live shows than record sales.
In a way, it was sort of the 'pay-off'. The artist makes a CD for the record company, makes a small amount of money out of it while the record company makes heaps, but gets airplay and publicity and so can make money on the concerts.
So really, MPAA, it is the other way around.
Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there.
I have a friend who is a professional photographer - he regularly takes photos that are well over 10 megapixels, already.
I do think, though, that for the average home user hard drives are growing at a faster rate than the amount of data needing to be stored. 10 years ago, I had a reasonably recent computer with a decent size hard drive for the time, and had to be _very_ careful about what I had on it so that it didn't get full. I regularly cleaned it out and deleted stuff. These days it is hardly an issue for me, because hard drives have grown faster than my appetite for storage. The same might not be true for everybody.
I also hate it that my DVD player often won't even let me skip the Dolby/movie-studio/please-don't-pirate-this-movie ads/messages at the start.
Disallowing me from even changing the channel is even worse.
I often watch programs on TV just because I happen to be there and it saves me having to find them and download them, but if I can't even channel-flick in the ads then I'll probably just end up downloading versions that have all the ads cut out.
My ISP has data limits, but all traffic between users on ISPs that peer through a particular peering point in my city is not counted.
So there are bittorrent trackers and DC hubs and probably all sorts of other things with membership restricted to users on these ISPs. The IP ranges are all published, so its no trouble to set up.
Yeah, I reckon we should invent a network of networks, an inter-network as such.
Everyone just links with people near them, and the data gets routed around until it finds where it needs to go. If part of it goes down, no problem, the network routes around it.
Sounds like a great idea. We could call it the "Internet"
My ISP just inserts [SPAM] at the start of the subject-line of emails their filter deems to be spam. I've found it quite accurate, so I just set my client to filter all emails like that to my spam folder, and so it doesn't download the contents of the emails, just their headers.
It also inserts a header with a spam-likeliness score so you can set the extent to which you filter.
Or just figure that a truck driving at 100 km/hour would take about 1.6hours = 5760 seconds to make the trip.
5760 * 60 DVDs = your truck has to carry 345,600 DVDs. Of course if that doesn't fit on one truck it just means that you need that amount of capacity in total between all your trucks. That doesn't include loading time but I suspect their measurements didn't include the time to load data from a HD into the link, not at that speed. It most likely would have been cached.
Its actually going up to around 600km. They just start the experiment at 35km because then it is already going around about mach 7. So the scramjet kicks in and accelerates it from a starting point of mach 7 until it hits the ground.
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the people who did this study were government operatives, to reduce the use of tinfoil hats, so their mind control satelites could get to us.
Probably because AU has little in the way of a tech development industry, so this is the only kind of story we can get onto slashdot.
Really, we are pretty easy-going. These comments should be taken with the context that the man proposing them (Kim Beazely) is absolutely unelectable.
Basically, got it in one. The Centre-Right party in Australia (the current incumbents) are known as the Liberal Party. The other major party, more left-leaning, are known as the Labor Party (they formed out of the trade union movement ages ago, hence the name). Note that they aren't dominated by crazy-leftists at the moment like the American Democrats seem to be, and the most common complaint here is that they don't really provide a point of difference to the incumbents.
To avoid any confusion, there is also a minor party in Australia called the Democrats.
It's quite true. The Labor party as it is today is just about electorally irrelevant.
If they wind up getting elected, this won't happen, because the party will have changed quite a lot. This is just one in a line of publicity stunts by the labor party in Australia. Nothing to see, move along.
Just give them a slow internet connection and the addresses of a few pr0n sites. Pretty soon I'm sure they'll be whipping up javascripts/shell scripts/whatever to leech their pron faster.
That's how everyone learnt to program, right?
It is fantastic for handling all your music. I use iTunes to manage my music, even though I don't have an iPod (I play some music from my computer).
Its by far the best of all the players I've tried; it is intuitive, works, and looks great.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA wasn't very detailed, so maybe they've just classed anything moving as "video".
The whole point of economics is for everyone to be able to afford as much stuff as possible, so its no surprise that it worked out in the way that achieves that.
Who is going to give up half of the stuff they own so that they can buy American-made goods?
It is the fact that information is expensive to create and yet damn close to free to replicate that is the best argument for free sharing of information. That way, effort does not have to be duplicated. (Think of Newton's famous quote: "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants")
It reached a critical point a long time ago. That is, if you're talking about on slashdot. The problem is that slashdot is not representative of the broader community. Nor, I guess from your comment, is the cross-section of people that you interact with.
The truth is, unrest is a long way from reaching a critical point. A long, long, long way.
The truth is, a lot of people need to really care about something like this, and a lot of people with money need to poney up for lobbying, before anything will be done. Until that point the same things will dominate voting choices that always have (the economy, interest rates, oil prices, education and to a lesser extent foreign policy). People don't like being spied on, but few people actually care enough to lose money over it.
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place, but if someone wants to watch everything that happens they have always had to sit in a cafe or whatever and get watched themselves.
Those who are saying that it is nothing new, because you can always be watched in a public place are ignoring that by massively changing the way in which people can be watched in the street, a qualitive change in privacy has occured.
How long till someone pairs this with some facial recognition software and gets a database of all your movements? Or all of everyone's movements? That sort of thing was so expensive as to be virtually impossible (you'd have to hire someone to follow everyone you wanted to track), but with this system would be trivial if you could get facial recognition to work.
Some ISPs that advertised unlimited bandwidth here in Australia whilst shaping the traffic of users who downloaded a lot were called to account by the competition regulator here. I don't know if they were prosecuted or not, but no plans here are advertised as "unlimited" unless they truely are unlimited (which is pretty much never).
In Australia, where the cost of backbone connectivity is high since most of it goes back to the US under very long (expensive) undersea cables, just about all home users have a plan with a set download limit. So you might buy a 1.5 Megabit DSL service with 10 gig of downloads a month, or whatever. Then once you go past that they either shape your traffic (depending on the ISP, some hard-shape to a fixed speed and some just have your traffic as a low priority, so it only gets shaped when the ISPs backbone links are nearly full) or you pay a per gigabyte price for everything past your limit. Some ISPs don't count downloads during their offpeak times (usually midnight to 8am or similar) to encourage people to do big downloads when the ISPs have plenty of backhaul capacity.
How about just a transparent proxy? Could that work? If a whole bunch of folks at one ISP are streaming the nightly news, couldn't the proxy just pull in one copy of it and then send it out? I have no idea if this works with streaming video, where everyone might be requesting it at exactly the same time rather than more static content where the requests are spaced out, but it would be worth looking into.
Add to that that the government can chip sex offenders (and its not hard to extend that to other criminals) and you wind up with plenty of people getting compulsory chipping.
Despite all the posts saying basically that employers won't "force" you to get chipped but won't force you to take the job either, I think this bill is in general a move in the right direction, since without it employers would be perfectely allowed to not even try to cover up the fact they were requiring employees to get chipped. This bill may (or may not, I haven't read the text of it) be impotent, but at least it is something.
In fact, it is the other way around. Artists have always made far more money from live shows than record sales. In a way, it was sort of the 'pay-off'. The artist makes a CD for the record company, makes a small amount of money out of it while the record company makes heaps, but gets airplay and publicity and so can make money on the concerts. So really, MPAA, it is the other way around.
I do think, though, that for the average home user hard drives are growing at a faster rate than the amount of data needing to be stored. 10 years ago, I had a reasonably recent computer with a decent size hard drive for the time, and had to be _very_ careful about what I had on it so that it didn't get full. I regularly cleaned it out and deleted stuff. These days it is hardly an issue for me, because hard drives have grown faster than my appetite for storage. The same might not be true for everybody.
I also hate it that my DVD player often won't even let me skip the Dolby/movie-studio/please-don't-pirate-this-movie ads/messages at the start. Disallowing me from even changing the channel is even worse. I often watch programs on TV just because I happen to be there and it saves me having to find them and download them, but if I can't even channel-flick in the ads then I'll probably just end up downloading versions that have all the ads cut out.
My ISP has data limits, but all traffic between users on ISPs that peer through a particular peering point in my city is not counted. So there are bittorrent trackers and DC hubs and probably all sorts of other things with membership restricted to users on these ISPs. The IP ranges are all published, so its no trouble to set up.
Yeah, I reckon we should invent a network of networks, an inter-network as such. Everyone just links with people near them, and the data gets routed around until it finds where it needs to go. If part of it goes down, no problem, the network routes around it. Sounds like a great idea. We could call it the "Internet"
My ISP just inserts [SPAM] at the start of the subject-line of emails their filter deems to be spam. I've found it quite accurate, so I just set my client to filter all emails like that to my spam folder, and so it doesn't download the contents of the emails, just their headers. It also inserts a header with a spam-likeliness score so you can set the extent to which you filter.
Or just figure that a truck driving at 100 km/hour would take about 1.6hours = 5760 seconds to make the trip. 5760 * 60 DVDs = your truck has to carry 345,600 DVDs. Of course if that doesn't fit on one truck it just means that you need that amount of capacity in total between all your trucks. That doesn't include loading time but I suspect their measurements didn't include the time to load data from a HD into the link, not at that speed. It most likely would have been cached.
Its actually going up to around 600km. They just start the experiment at 35km because then it is already going around about mach 7. So the scramjet kicks in and accelerates it from a starting point of mach 7 until it hits the ground.
Don't be silly. Everyone knows the people who did this study were government operatives, to reduce the use of tinfoil hats, so their mind control satelites could get to us.
Don't succumb. Keep wearing it.
Probably because AU has little in the way of a tech development industry, so this is the only kind of story we can get onto slashdot. Really, we are pretty easy-going. These comments should be taken with the context that the man proposing them (Kim Beazely) is absolutely unelectable.
To quote someone important, but I cbf googling it to find out who: "I know porn when I see it." (I think it was some judge)
Basically, got it in one. The Centre-Right party in Australia (the current incumbents) are known as the Liberal Party . The other major party, more left-leaning, are known as the Labor Party (they formed out of the trade union movement ages ago, hence the name). Note that they aren't dominated by crazy-leftists at the moment like the American Democrats seem to be, and the most common complaint here is that they don't really provide a point of difference to the incumbents.
To avoid any confusion, there is also a minor party in Australia called the Democrats.
It's quite true. The Labor party as it is today is just about electorally irrelevant. If they wind up getting elected, this won't happen, because the party will have changed quite a lot. This is just one in a line of publicity stunts by the labor party in Australia. Nothing to see, move along.
Just give them a slow internet connection and the addresses of a few pr0n sites. Pretty soon I'm sure they'll be whipping up javascripts/shell scripts/whatever to leech their pron faster. That's how everyone learnt to program, right?
It is fantastic for handling all your music. I use iTunes to manage my music, even though I don't have an iPod (I play some music from my computer). Its by far the best of all the players I've tried; it is intuitive, works, and looks great.