You should move to the south, my friend. Maybe the south is on the same train, and in 20 years politeness will be gone here too. But at least we're moving a lot slower in that direction.
I hold doors for my friends, for whoever I happen to be walking with, for people I've never seen before and will most likely never see again, they just happen to have fallen in 3 steps behind me. Most people I know around here do the same pretty much all the time. I know holding doors isn't everything, but it is just a convenient example; there are tons of others I could have used.
I don't mean in the slightest that the south is perfect. Just that, in general, the people are more polite.
I suppose we have reached the question of which is more fundamental to an American political philosophy: rule by the people, or rule for the people. Our "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is a bit dangerous, because sometimes rule by the people is not rule for the people and vice versa. If 96% of the population wants to do something which hurts a tiny minority, and the government does not do it, then you've broken rule by the people. If the government does do whatever action it is, then you've broken rule for the people.
Rule by the people does not guarantee rule for the people. You've hit the nail on the head by calling it dictatorship by the majority. I agree that this is a Bad Thing, but is it better or worse than a benevolent dictatorship by oligarchy (which is what you essentially have when say Congress overrides the majority will of the people for the common good).
We try to balance things out with our "Checks and Balances", but it is not and never has been perfectly clear quite where that balance ought to best lie.
Or how about this: DON'T USE C. Have a small interpreter for a (provably) safe, high-level language, written in C or something else that you can compile to machine code. Keep the interpreter small enough that you can actually check it over quite thoroughly for all kinds of security holes and bugs. Then write everything else in that high-level language.
The cause of an awful lot of security holes is just the simple fact that people write in a language which is much lower level than what they really need. This forces them to reinvent the wheel constantly, and along with the wheel, they reinvent a lot of security holes.
That actually wasn't the point. The point is that the paper industry is planting new forest for the purpose of later cutting them down to make paper, instead of cutting more old forest. The secondary point is that not only do we keep the remaining old forest this way, but we also have a larger number of living trees on the earth at any given time than we would otherwise. True, the excess trees are not in a wonderful diverse ecosystem (I love forests), but at least they are trees.
Of course it is all down to political and social philosophy. As Americans, we generally believe that "men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Then, based on that, we all got together and said that we wanted to (among other things) protect certain other rights, such as the freedom of the press. So, we might just as well have not protected freedom of the press, and it would not have run into major conflict with our fundamental political philosophy.
Perhaps the Russian people did the same. If 96% of the Russian population said that they wanted to block this group from television access, then a typical American political philosophy (which endorses democracy and populism) would have to say "well, ok then, they'd better block it". That would be a valid reason.
AFAIK, the paper industry actually plants new forest for the purpose of cutting it down 20 years later, rather than cutting any more old forest. So, because of the paper industry, we actually have more forest than we would otherwise. I know hating paper waste is "eco-aware", but really, it is more like "eco-sheeple"... FYI, recycling produces a lot of very nasty pollutants, too. Not that those necessarily outweigh the benefits of not just filling up landfills, but you've got to be aware of these things or you'll end up harming your cause rather than helping it.
Well, to be fair, the GP did ask for likely explanations, and since nobody here is going to go to this "chessonly" guy's house and steal his laptop just to find out what happened and post it on slashdot, this is pretty much the best we're gonna get. Sorry about the world. It sucks sometimes.
Ok, yes, there is a slight chance that someone else reading/. has the same model laptop and the same model usb-serial thing. But even then, it is fairly likely that they haven't run into the same problem, and I for one wouldn't ask them to deliberately try and screw up their bios just so we on slashdot can "get the facts"...
You'd have to implement this in a way which was completely agnostic about the encryption scheme (unless you were using a provably unbreakable scheme...) so that once your scheme is compromised in a bad way, you could move on up to the latest and greatest (now with more digits!) scheme.
Read it very literally: Internet Protocol version 6. We've already revised the Internet in some big ways, and no one even cared.
Yes, but that was a long time ago, when the internet was very small and lonely. From wikipedia:
Version numbers 0 through 3 were development versions of IPv4 used between 1977 and 1979. Version number 5 was used by the Internet Stream Protocol (ST), an experimental stream protocol. Version numbers 6 through 9 were assigned to experimental protocols designed to replace IPv4: SIPP (known nowadays as IPv6), TP/IX, PIP, and TUBA. Except for IPv6, the other ones are not used any more.
Fair enough. Scrolling down the comments, I see a good half dozen highly rated comments that say more or less the same thing as you: Watch out for the corporate and national "security" interests. But here's a different, and perhaps more interesting question:
If they were redoing the internet from scratch, what is wrong with it that ought to be fixed? Can we hear some new-internet wishlists?
The first things I can think of, off the top of my head, are things that are already talked about fairly often: bigger address space (ipv6), and revision to SMTP to make it more difficult to spoof addresses and easier to catch spam.
If someone tailgating you is interfering with your ability to drive safely, then you should either slow down to a speed at which you can drive safely with them that close behind you (which typically makes them go around you or back off) or change lanes and let them go past you. Yes, I agree, you shouldn't have to accommodate a tailgater like that, but to hell with your pride when it comes to safety, both your safety and the safety of those on the road with you.
Red light cameras don't do much for safety. The decrease in right-angle crashes is almost offset by an increase in rear end crashes.
So, perhaps the effect of red light cameras will be that people will begin to feel that tailgating is too dangerous for whatever nonexistent benefits they get from it. This would not be an effect which would be immediately noticeable in a study, but the end result would be that red light cameras had improved safety quite a bit more than even expected.
Far more importantly, lights and sirens "tip off" the rest of the people on the road. Red light laws are not in place to obstruct drivers who have to stop, they are in place to prevent people from getting killed when they are broadsided just because they went when the light was green. If there are no lights or sirens going, then people will still drive through the intersection when they have a green light, and then the cop who is trying to apprehend a criminal undercover as it were will hit them and likely maim or kill them.
Allowing even one person to violate public safety laws without ample notification to everyone around them defeats the entire purpose of the public safety laws: keeping people safe from other people.
Crap. I made a rather stupid mistake: 70000km / 3e8 (m/s) != 0.0002333s. I divided km/m and got 1 instead of 1000. So yes, satellite distance would contribute on the order of hundreds of milliseconds to ping time, rather than tenths of milliseconds as I originally said. Hundreds of milliseconds to ping time is significant for sure. I suspect I would notice a 700ms delay.
You misunderstand the GP, who is not wrong. A distinction must be made between a de jure double standard, that is, a law which makes a distinction between police and non-police, and a de facto double standard, that is, a society in which the police do not follow the written law.
The GP referred to a de facto double standard, which I agree, and I think you will too, we must not have. You refer to a de jure double standard, and say we must have one. I agree with this also, and strongly suspect that the GP does also, particularly based on the GP's language about amending the law when there is compelling evidence that police exemptions are in the public interest. He says (as I understand it) that where there is need for a double standard, it must be a de jure double standard, and not a de facto double standard.
Distance from Earth's surface to a geosync satellite directly overhead is about 35,000 km, giving a round trip distance of 70,000 km. Presumably you were talking to the satellite via some sort of electromagnetic radiation, which travels about 300,000,000 km/s. So, the total round trip time is less than 0.3 milliseconds. Even if the satellite were close to the horizon rather than overhead, this won't increase by all that much.
The bare fact that you are talking to a satellite is not enough to incur noticeable, much less astounding, delays. Now, if IP were stupid and required a reply for every packet before it would send another one, then yes, this would cause immense delays. But, IP isn't stupid (in that way at least).
A far more likely explanation for the delays is just that the satellite service didn't have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate everyone trying to use it.
Sulphur, Silicon, and any far-left or far-right non-noble element can handle the requirements here (namely something that can form long complex structures, and something highly reactive that nonetheless has stable compounds wherein it exists)
Under known conditions, silicon chemistry simply cannot begin to approach the diversity of organic chemistry, a crucial factor in carbon's role in biology.
Also, the article points out that long complex chains of silicon (silanes) are very unstable. Not a good foundational element for life at all.
When the me-tooist is a corporate giant and the me-firsters are still quite small, the me-tooist will typically crush the me-firsters merely by virtue of its size, name recognition, and ability to lose money on a market for a while in order to gain a monopoly of it.
Even if they hadn't ganked anybody's data to do it, shoehorning themselves into a market full of players much smaller than themselves is not very nice.
Gratuitous analogy: Michael Johnson steals a kid's shoes and then wears them to run at a high school track meet.
Could you send me your name, address, floorplan, daily schedule, and also mail me a copy of your housekey, please? I once swore to kill anyone who ever actually said that. Especially if they said it at a time when I actually did have a "case" of the "mondays". \end{tonguecheek*}
Weeeeellllll, Wilson Hall is all well and good. Quite nice, I agree. I work at CDF, though, and so most of my time is spent in the CDF trailers. Pretty much all the physicists (as opposed to engineers and technicians and such) work in aging portable building offices, with usually two, sometimes three people in one fairly small space. Even the CDF spokespeople have their offices in the trailers.
Of course, when I was working on a hardware upgrade for Run IIb, I did spend a significant amount of time on the 14th floor of the high rise (Wilson Hall), but that was actually worse. There was a window just behind my flickery CRT monitor (the brightness contrasted with the crappy monitor made for terrible eyestrain), there were one and sometimes two or three other people working in the same small space, and I was working at a teststand (plus another two teststands, all running at once), which meant that I had to contend with the noise of around a hundred large cooling fans.
The atrium is amazing, though. Also, did you see the buffalo herd?
Slashdot Mirror
You should move to the south, my friend. Maybe the south is on the same train, and in 20 years politeness will be gone here too. But at least we're moving a lot slower in that direction.
I hold doors for my friends, for whoever I happen to be walking with, for people I've never seen before and will most likely never see again, they just happen to have fallen in 3 steps behind me. Most people I know around here do the same pretty much all the time. I know holding doors isn't everything, but it is just a convenient example; there are tons of others I could have used.
I don't mean in the slightest that the south is perfect. Just that, in general, the people are more polite.
I suppose we have reached the question of which is more fundamental to an American political philosophy: rule by the people, or rule for the people. Our "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is a bit dangerous, because sometimes rule by the people is not rule for the people and vice versa. If 96% of the population wants to do something which hurts a tiny minority, and the government does not do it, then you've broken rule by the people. If the government does do whatever action it is, then you've broken rule for the people.
Rule by the people does not guarantee rule for the people. You've hit the nail on the head by calling it dictatorship by the majority. I agree that this is a Bad Thing, but is it better or worse than a benevolent dictatorship by oligarchy (which is what you essentially have when say Congress overrides the majority will of the people for the common good).
We try to balance things out with our "Checks and Balances", but it is not and never has been perfectly clear quite where that balance ought to best lie.
Or how about this: DON'T USE C. Have a small interpreter for a (provably) safe, high-level language, written in C or something else that you can compile to machine code. Keep the interpreter small enough that you can actually check it over quite thoroughly for all kinds of security holes and bugs. Then write everything else in that high-level language.
The cause of an awful lot of security holes is just the simple fact that people write in a language which is much lower level than what they really need. This forces them to reinvent the wheel constantly, and along with the wheel, they reinvent a lot of security holes.
That actually wasn't the point. The point is that the paper industry is planting new forest for the purpose of later cutting them down to make paper, instead of cutting more old forest. The secondary point is that not only do we keep the remaining old forest this way, but we also have a larger number of living trees on the earth at any given time than we would otherwise. True, the excess trees are not in a wonderful diverse ecosystem (I love forests), but at least they are trees.
So the internet must be highly suspect as well. Al Gore probably invented it to cause the spread of red imported fire ants across America!
Of course it is all down to political and social philosophy. As Americans, we generally believe that "men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Then, based on that, we all got together and said that we wanted to (among other things) protect certain other rights, such as the freedom of the press. So, we might just as well have not protected freedom of the press, and it would not have run into major conflict with our fundamental political philosophy.
Perhaps the Russian people did the same. If 96% of the Russian population said that they wanted to block this group from television access, then a typical American political philosophy (which endorses democracy and populism) would have to say "well, ok then, they'd better block it". That would be a valid reason.
AFAIK, the paper industry actually plants new forest for the purpose of cutting it down 20 years later, rather than cutting any more old forest. So, because of the paper industry, we actually have more forest than we would otherwise. I know hating paper waste is "eco-aware", but really, it is more like "eco-sheeple"... FYI, recycling produces a lot of very nasty pollutants, too. Not that those necessarily outweigh the benefits of not just filling up landfills, but you've got to be aware of these things or you'll end up harming your cause rather than helping it.
Does this invoke Godwin's Law? IANALawyer, so I'm not sure of the applicability in this situation.
Well, to be fair, the GP did ask for likely explanations, and since nobody here is going to go to this "chessonly" guy's house and steal his laptop just to find out what happened and post it on slashdot, this is pretty much the best we're gonna get. Sorry about the world. It sucks sometimes.
/. has the same model laptop and the same model usb-serial thing. But even then, it is fairly likely that they haven't run into the same problem, and I for one wouldn't ask them to deliberately try and screw up their bios just so we on slashdot can "get the facts"...
Ok, yes, there is a slight chance that someone else reading
But if we waive them around where people can see them, then won't they... oh, never mind.
You'd have to implement this in a way which was completely agnostic about the encryption scheme (unless you were using a provably unbreakable scheme...) so that once your scheme is compromised in a bad way, you could move on up to the latest and greatest (now with more digits!) scheme.
Fair enough. Scrolling down the comments, I see a good half dozen highly rated comments that say more or less the same thing as you: Watch out for the corporate and national "security" interests. But here's a different, and perhaps more interesting question:
If they were redoing the internet from scratch, what is wrong with it that ought to be fixed? Can we hear some new-internet wishlists?
The first things I can think of, off the top of my head, are things that are already talked about fairly often: bigger address space (ipv6), and revision to SMTP to make it more difficult to spoof addresses and easier to catch spam.
Nah....
And the correct reponse the TFA's question, while not an answer, is really just "wait and see".
So, perhaps the effect of red light cameras will be that people will begin to feel that tailgating is too dangerous for whatever nonexistent benefits they get from it. This would not be an effect which would be immediately noticeable in a study, but the end result would be that red light cameras had improved safety quite a bit more than even expected.
Far more importantly, lights and sirens "tip off" the rest of the people on the road. Red light laws are not in place to obstruct drivers who have to stop, they are in place to prevent people from getting killed when they are broadsided just because they went when the light was green. If there are no lights or sirens going, then people will still drive through the intersection when they have a green light, and then the cop who is trying to apprehend a criminal undercover as it were will hit them and likely maim or kill them.
Allowing even one person to violate public safety laws without ample notification to everyone around them defeats the entire purpose of the public safety laws: keeping people safe from other people.
Crap. I made a rather stupid mistake: 70000km / 3e8 (m/s) != 0.0002333s. I divided km/m and got 1 instead of 1000. So yes, satellite distance would contribute on the order of hundreds of milliseconds to ping time, rather than tenths of milliseconds as I originally said. Hundreds of milliseconds to ping time is significant for sure. I suspect I would notice a 700ms delay.
My apologies.
You misunderstand the GP, who is not wrong. A distinction must be made between a de jure double standard, that is, a law which makes a distinction between police and non-police, and a de facto double standard, that is, a society in which the police do not follow the written law.
The GP referred to a de facto double standard, which I agree, and I think you will too, we must not have. You refer to a de jure double standard, and say we must have one. I agree with this also, and strongly suspect that the GP does also, particularly based on the GP's language about amending the law when there is compelling evidence that police exemptions are in the public interest. He says (as I understand it) that where there is need for a double standard, it must be a de jure double standard, and not a de facto double standard.
Distance from Earth's surface to a geosync satellite directly overhead is about 35,000 km, giving a round trip distance of 70,000 km. Presumably you were talking to the satellite via some sort of electromagnetic radiation, which travels about 300,000,000 km/s. So, the total round trip time is less than 0.3 milliseconds. Even if the satellite were close to the horizon rather than overhead, this won't increase by all that much.
The bare fact that you are talking to a satellite is not enough to incur noticeable, much less astounding, delays. Now, if IP were stupid and required a reply for every packet before it would send another one, then yes, this would cause immense delays. But, IP isn't stupid (in that way at least).
A far more likely explanation for the delays is just that the satellite service didn't have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate everyone trying to use it.
When the me-tooist is a corporate giant and the me-firsters are still quite small, the me-tooist will typically crush the me-firsters merely by virtue of its size, name recognition, and ability to lose money on a market for a while in order to gain a monopoly of it.
Even if they hadn't ganked anybody's data to do it, shoehorning themselves into a market full of players much smaller than themselves is not very nice.
Gratuitous analogy: Michael Johnson steals a kid's shoes and then wears them to run at a high school track meet.
Weeeeellllll, Wilson Hall is all well and good. Quite nice, I agree. I work at CDF, though, and so most of my time is spent in the CDF trailers. Pretty much all the physicists (as opposed to engineers and technicians and such) work in aging portable building offices, with usually two, sometimes three people in one fairly small space. Even the CDF spokespeople have their offices in the trailers.
Of course, when I was working on a hardware upgrade for Run IIb, I did spend a significant amount of time on the 14th floor of the high rise (Wilson Hall), but that was actually worse. There was a window just behind my flickery CRT monitor (the brightness contrasted with the crappy monitor made for terrible eyestrain), there were one and sometimes two or three other people working in the same small space, and I was working at a teststand (plus another two teststands, all running at once), which meant that I had to contend with the noise of around a hundred large cooling fans.
The atrium is amazing, though. Also, did you see the buffalo herd?