The difference becomes prettty fuzzy (Dubya be damned) as admins grow. Admins who are smart and improve themselves become rather good programmers, of the sort that tend not to piss off sysadmins through stupid assumptions about infinite bandwidth, disk IO, or database cycles.
Further, for those who can read code fluently, the code itself is a precise description of what is intended, more than any amount of English.
They are handing an argument on a platter here, in my view. Pages spent saying code is speech, there is no line between code and expression, etc. is subverted right here. At least in debater-ish terms; no idea what a lawyer would make of that.
On a different note, I found it funny that they couldn't get by without a reference to Star Trek:
What SLS has developed is not as advanced as the computer interface on the starship Enterprise, of course, but it is a working example of human speech as the "source code" for a computer
Here you go. The worst part was I had to fix a lot of the "html" they generated. I didn't fix it all - just enough to get the pages to render with modifications. I think I'm going to email it to them next.
I was intentionally being a jerk. Sue me, I was up too late dealing with morons who think they know how to rebuild a network (conquering hero phenomenon). Maybe you're a BGP god.
What I was getting at was that if you take down a link to a given AS, that router will just send traffic to a different community member. If BGP is doing what it is supposed to, that AS will know how to get to you.
Am I wrong?
Um, Bad advice, I think, for mainly business reasons.
Dump That Route and commit an explicit breach of contract, in a lot of cases. People sue over that.
Being a victim of "limitations of the internet" usually means you're not going to be sued, at least when it looks like a serious attack like one "not even Yahoo could handle". Clients may be pissed and make noises at sales reps, but they'll flutter around as much as you do about it instead of talking to lawyers about what they can get because some BOFH at the provider intentionally took them down or degraded routes.
I'm not saying I like this, but it is a fact (at least in the US).* A lot of new contracts I've seen include "we'll slap you down for hosting a hacker, unless you pay us for security services", but a lot of current ones do not.
Plus, it sounds like you may not know BGP as well as you think you do.**
-j
--
*Mandatory Parenthetical Admission of Belonging to a Lawyer Ridden Culture
**Intentional reference to superiority. So mod me down.
Do you realy believe everybody is allowed to spread every stupid shit of his ill attitude under the banner of free speach?
Yes, actually, I do. What part of "free" don't you understand? Don't trot out straw men like "fire in a crowded theater" - Oliver Wendell Holmes later bemoaned the fact that his phrase is so frequently misused by people making the point you are (trying to) now.
I hate to advocate more governmental involvement of any sort, but honestly, my email account is by far more important to my life than my physical mail address. The nature of the capitalist market itself rules out the sort of stability that email requires, and only a government can really provide any sort of long-term guarantee that I believe we need.
Maybe you need it. I don't. I deal with the Government provided mail service often, to a rural town in TN. It doesn't work. I keep trying. I'm a moron, I keep hoping. My mother's a state employed librarian. Go figure, I'm a natual liberal.
What gets through it UPS, FedEx, or a bank transfer. The last one is what happens here.
If you think the federal State ensures reliable delivery, well, send an imortant letter to someone in backwoods TN.
Hm. Maybe I'm a bit more in to free market operations than yer typical liberal after all.
I like what John has to say, most of the time. He doesn't often cover what I care about, but he usually says something interesting about something.
This article pushed me over the top.
Katz is on crack
The technique of the Furby has been a hot topic of computer science for a dozen years; artificial life -- simulation of activity of living systems -- has taught us a lot about how we learn and grow into intelligence. Computers, which just a decade ago seemed useful only for word processors and spreadsheets, are now employed as digital gardens, where the seeds of mind grow into utterly upredictable forms."
Right. That MP3 player at your elbow is about to rip your heart out and giggle while eating it.
Gaming has evolved far beyond play. Arguably the most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now, it's transforming the imaginations, attentions spans, reflexes and strategic thinking of an entire generation, perhaps even our neural systems themselves. Yet few people have bothered to study what this might mean.
Right. Interacting through virtual worlds is warping our minds. Are you not the same man who defended virtual killing as an amusing pass time about a year ago?
With the release of Sony's PlayStation 2, writes Pesce, the founding chair of the Interactive Media Program at the University of California's School of Cinema-Television, "the machinery of infinite realities will be within the grasp of millions of children around the world. Unlike any videogame console released before it, the PS 2 will have the power to create realistic imaginings of breathtaking clarity. Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2, which will challenge our ideas about simulation by making it look at least as real as anything else seen on a television screen."
Right. "Infinite realitys". "[C]hallenge our ideas about simulation". Are you really that obsessed with the Great New Thing, or are you screwing a PR bunny? Really, I'd like to know.
But how many parents, business executives, educators, politicians or journalists recognize that so powerful and creative a force is now available to children? That future ideas about creativity, imagination, work -- and individual relationships to institutions -- will be shaped by such tools, just as they were by the PS2's more primitive predecessors, from the early Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to game-playing computers? As pundits sound alarms about how videogames are ruining children's moral lives, as both major presidential candidates did repeateadly, during the campaign -- who in our culture is preparing for the radical changes in imagination about to be unleashed?
Right. "But what about the children"?
With a twist of, "Corporations are r00tng
your mind!".
Swirl. Serve with a twist of lemon.
Pesce is right, of course. The PS2, designed to connect to the Net, is a window into a larger universe. It could easily simulate a Furby or Mindstorms, and it creates as well a million other interesting forms, if only for the eyes and ears. In fact, says Pesce, the PS2 could well be seen as a spaceship for scouring the universe of ideas.
Um, OK.
I'd tend to call the PS2 a bit better than the last round of kit. Um. What's the problem again?
In fact, that's all that matters. Ask any musician. Or software developers. Better yet, ask that hot marketing bunny down the cube farm.
Spending money to "prime the pipe", then putting the bait in lots of easy-to-reach locations is all this battle is about.
If the vested interests had any idea what to do with MP3+internet, there would be no issue. People would flock to the solution like a... well, like a flock of napster users.
Lawyers are going to determine the landscape for music sharing, based on weird analogies from 1814 case law about cattle jumping onto someone else's land. The rest of us are going to do what we have been: running internal MP3 servers (with my entire collection, about 400 CDs, plus contributions totalling about 700 more) that nobody seems to get upset about.
I agree with everything you said. What you are missing is that the ETLA in question has a wild card - the courts, which seem to be willing, at the moment, to set precedent that makes ownership of bit patterns extremely profitable. So long as that continues, as they say, we have an issue to resolve.
Not entirely true. Do Macs not have superior color calibration capabilities, and thus is the preferred platform for graphics designers?
Today, the field is probably more equal, but in the past, the answer to your question is a no-recount "yes".
I used to work in publishing (Production, although I was more useful as a network admin at the time). Designing in color used to be _so_ much easier on macs that no magazine I knew would touch a PC for anyone other than accountants.
There was simply no contest.
Today, I suspect things are better. I haven't produced a Quark doc with Photoshop tiffs that was going to plate in about 4 years (and I know most mags don't "go to plate" anymore; the publishing world is changing quickly), so I don't actually know. I suspect that there is a lot of inertia here, where people who know what they are doing are not willing to switch platforms to save $200 in sunk costs.
I will say that the whole "properties" orientation of PCs, along with "right click to do anything" frusterates a lot of graphic designers. The mac platform has been a lot more useful for designers due from an interface perspective.
Kahn is a smart man, but this is a classic go-nowhere idea. Too many people are invested in a host-centric model. This is DOA.
"(The) architecture can not write the law, but it provides a technical design that matches the legal structure that is expected to emerge," the Library of Congress says on its Web site.
Heh.
Sure. It becomes warez and hotline.
Life seems not to have changed much after the lawyers attack. There's proscribed data out there, somewhere, on a constantly changing set of servers used by a bunch of 14 year olds (whether or not I'm referring to physical or mental age is left as an exercise for the reader). Boom. Napster is relegated to the category inhabited by USEnet 7 years ago and becomes an annoyance when people like me bring up ("remember when you could post to alt.sex.bondage and not lose your important mail in the hellstorm of spam? I used to carry tapes fulla newsgroups up hill for miles, covered in snow...").
You actually hilight the difference - published (accessible via a known node) vs. unpublished (find it, if you can). And this is really what the current battles are about.
Napster has a single point of failure. Take out the company of the same name, and most of the work-alikes will run away and hide. The few that don't will be attacked, with legal precedent behind the attackers.
Freenet has a chance, but it is still too hard to use, too cryptic, too geeky. It works well, but it is a bit similar to PGP - "understand these things, and you'll be able to use the magic to your advantage". Contrast with "click here for more Metallica".
I do hope these things can be made to work well. The sharing of data between individuals is under attack. Imagine if the telephone had been limited to companies who could pay an intermediary to carry a message. (OK, it isn't quite that bad, but the potential for limiting the evolution new methods of communication is being held ransom to AOL/Warner and Sony.)
OK, enough ranting. Bottom line is, warez doesn't change anything, and directories of user provided data does.
I think there is a solution to metadata distribution similar to Freenet's method, but without an assumption of being global that keeps the Gnutella problem under control. More to come, maybe.
Masanobu Katoh - Stooge of Asian IP. Sony 0w3s her.
Nii Quaynor - I'm desparate. (Sorry, Nii, but it shows)
Andy Mueller-Maguhn - OK, that's really interesting. Maybe Europe isn't as sad as it seems.
Ivan Moura Campos - Shit, she seems a bit cool. And good at what she does.
I'm replying quite late in the thread, I know. But...
You just proved my point. You described hot potato routing, and the reasoning behind it.
What I think you're asking is, why do it any differently?
And the answer is, because you can do it better.
Warning - the analogy approaching you is imperfect, but suited to proving a point.
You send letters through the USPS. Cheap, and they get there, most of the time. But you need something there the next morning. You shell out an order of magnitude more cash to make sure that happens, becuase it is worth it. The people (Fedex, whomever) have a parallel distribution network to make it happen. It gets there faster, because a different distribution chain was designed for different needs, and different cost assessments.
See the difference?
Back to hot Quayle, er, potato, routing. If you just move bits for a living, you optimize for moving most of them, most of the time, as fast as is cost effective. If you run a high performance delivery system, you move most of them, all of the time, as fast as the QOS you signed said you would. There's a big difference there.
So, as Joe Random ISP, I want to minimize costs, so I offload packets as soon as I can. Like a hot potato(e). Make it someone else's responsibility as soon as I can.
As a high performance ISP with QOS contracts to fullfill, I want to keep traffic on my backbone as long as possible so I can control how fast they get there.
Economics happens to have a strangely powerful hand in how people do things. Even in business.
Which brings me to another point. If the user is participating in a legal transfer, how could the payment possibly exceed the cost? If the only service the customer is really providing is bandwidth and nominal storage, you'd pretty much have to expect the cost of bandwidth to be higher. What value does the customer add to the transaction that the ISP cannot do, and do better (i.e., faster and more economical connections)? The only reasonable answer is _illegal goods_ (i.e., pirated stuff). If the ISP cannot partake in facilitating piracy for legal reasons, then one might expect the customer to be "adding value", to speak, which the ISP cannot.
The added value is participation in the network.
That something is available outside a given network doesn't decrease the value within it. Look at Napster - you can go get (at least for now) those same songs elsewhere. FTP sites, pals at work, buy a CD... participation in a network matters more than nonparticipation.
What people are missing is that you aren't storing Metallica CDs for distribution. You're storing random bits that happen to have interesting interactions with other random bits when combined. If you choose to participate, you store unknown stuff. You don't know what you store.
And no, TANSTAASFL. We're all paying for our bandwidth. If we choose to convert it to Mojo, fine. If that pisses off my upstream provider, I negotiate a different deal with them, or stop. There is a feedback mechanism to deal with node abuse called the Real World.
If you let a lot of people spend the night at your place, you start to impose certain costs on yourself and your landlord (I know this isn't perfect). You ask them for compensation. At a certain point, they don't want to pay it, you don't want to offer it, or your landlord gets pissed. Equilibrium is best calculated by the real world.
Of course, Napster has proven to be a really, really serious network burden, but almost nobody's called it enough of a burden to stop it,
on grounds of network abuse (outside a few colleges), have they? Now, add in micropayments that are convertable to bandwidth purchases. What happens? Extra points for considering arbitrage oppurtunities.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference becomes prettty fuzzy (Dubya be damned) as admins grow. Admins who are smart and improve themselves become rather good programmers, of the sort that tend not to piss off sysadmins through stupid assumptions about infinite bandwidth, disk IO, or database cycles.
This _is_ an decentralized set of contributors.
You have have texts you'd like to contribute? Take part!
-j
They are handing an argument on a platter here, in my view. Pages spent saying code is speech, there is no line between code and expression, etc. is subverted right here. At least in debater-ish terms; no idea what a lawyer would make of that.
On a different note, I found it funny that they couldn't get by without a reference to Star Trek:
What SLS has developed is not as advanced as the computer interface on the starship Enterprise, of course, but it is a working example of human speech as the "source code" for a computer
-j
http://www.salempolice.org&arg=3,2,00000001,3232,2 3,01,01,01,3f000dfa@10.0.0.2/salempd/
-j
The link is here.
-j
What I was getting at was that if you take down a link to a given AS, that router will just send traffic to a different community member. If BGP is doing what it is supposed to, that AS will know how to get to you.
Am I wrong?
Dump That Route and commit an explicit breach of contract, in a lot of cases. People sue over that.
Being a victim of "limitations of the internet" usually means you're not going to be sued, at least when it looks like a serious attack like one "not even Yahoo could handle". Clients may be pissed and make noises at sales reps, but they'll flutter around as much as you do about it instead of talking to lawyers about what they can get because some BOFH at the provider intentionally took them down or degraded routes.
I'm not saying I like this, but it is a fact (at least in the US).* A lot of new contracts I've seen include "we'll slap you down for hosting a hacker, unless you pay us for security services", but a lot of current ones do not.
Plus, it sounds like you may not know BGP as well as you think you do.**
-j
--
*Mandatory Parenthetical Admission of Belonging to a Lawyer Ridden Culture
**Intentional reference to superiority. So mod me down.
If you want the dishes to wash them selves, I don't thine a neural network is going to get you anywhere by itself.
So, I ask again, what is the goal?
-j
Yes, actually, I do. What part of "free" don't you understand? Don't trot out straw men like "fire in a crowded theater" - Oliver Wendell Holmes later bemoaned the fact that his phrase is so frequently misused by people making the point you are (trying to) now.
-j
Think about it. This isn't terribly complicated.
-j
Basically, I agree. You agree. We all agree. No discussion is going on.
-j
-j
Maybe you need it. I don't. I deal with the Government provided mail service often, to a rural town in TN. It doesn't work. I keep trying. I'm a moron, I keep hoping. My mother's a state employed librarian. Go figure, I'm a natual liberal.
What gets through it UPS, FedEx, or a bank transfer. The last one is what happens here.
If you think the federal State ensures reliable delivery, well, send an imortant letter to someone in backwoods TN.
Hm. Maybe I'm a bit more in to free market operations than yer typical liberal after all.
-j
This article pushed me over the top.
Katz is on crack
The technique of the Furby has been a hot topic of computer science for a dozen years; artificial life -- simulation of activity of living systems -- has taught us a lot about how we learn and grow into intelligence. Computers, which just a decade ago seemed useful only for word processors and spreadsheets, are now employed as digital gardens, where the seeds of mind grow into utterly upredictable forms."
Right. That MP3 player at your elbow is about to rip your heart out and giggle while eating it.
Gaming has evolved far beyond play. Arguably the most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now, it's transforming the imaginations, attentions spans, reflexes and strategic thinking of an entire generation, perhaps even our neural systems themselves. Yet few people have bothered to study what this might mean.
Right. Interacting through virtual worlds is warping our minds. Are you not the same man who defended virtual killing as an amusing pass time about a year ago?
With the release of Sony's PlayStation 2, writes Pesce, the founding chair of the Interactive Media Program at the University of California's School of Cinema-Television, "the machinery of infinite realities will be within the grasp of millions of children around the world. Unlike any videogame console released before it, the PS 2 will have the power to create realistic imaginings of breathtaking clarity. Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2, which will challenge our ideas about simulation by making it look at least as real as anything else seen on a television screen."
Right. "Infinite realitys". "[C]hallenge our ideas about simulation". Are you really that obsessed with the Great New Thing, or are you screwing a PR bunny? Really, I'd like to know.
But how many parents, business executives, educators, politicians or journalists recognize that so powerful and creative a force is now available to children? That future ideas about creativity, imagination, work -- and individual relationships to institutions -- will be shaped by such tools, just as they were by the PS2's more primitive predecessors, from the early Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to game-playing computers? As pundits sound alarms about how videogames are ruining children's moral lives, as both major presidential candidates did repeateadly, during the campaign -- who in our culture is preparing for the radical changes in imagination about to be unleashed?
Right. "But what about the children"?
With a twist of, "Corporations are r00tng your mind!".
Swirl. Serve with a twist of lemon.
Pesce is right, of course. The PS2, designed to connect to the Net, is a window into a larger universe. It could easily simulate a Furby or Mindstorms, and it creates as well a million other interesting forms, if only for the eyes and ears. In fact, says Pesce, the PS2 could well be seen as a spaceship for scouring the universe of ideas.
Um, OK.
I'd tend to call the PS2 a bit better than the last round of kit. Um. What's the problem again?
-j
In fact, that's all that matters. Ask any musician. Or software developers. Better yet, ask that hot marketing bunny down the cube farm.
Spending money to "prime the pipe", then putting the bait in lots of easy-to-reach locations is all this battle is about.
If the vested interests had any idea what to do with MP3+internet, there would be no issue. People would flock to the solution like a... well, like a flock of napster users.
Lawyers are going to determine the landscape for music sharing, based on weird analogies from 1814 case law about cattle jumping onto someone else's land. The rest of us are going to do what we have been: running internal MP3 servers (with my entire collection, about 400 CDs, plus contributions totalling about 700 more) that nobody seems to get upset about.
Go figure. Economics 101, anyone?
-j
-j
-j
Today, the field is probably more equal, but in the past, the answer to your question is a no-recount "yes".
I used to work in publishing (Production, although I was more useful as a network admin at the time). Designing in color used to be _so_ much easier on macs that no magazine I knew would touch a PC for anyone other than accountants.
There was simply no contest.
Today, I suspect things are better. I haven't produced a Quark doc with Photoshop tiffs that was going to plate in about 4 years (and I know most mags don't "go to plate" anymore; the publishing world is changing quickly), so I don't actually know. I suspect that there is a lot of inertia here, where people who know what they are doing are not willing to switch platforms to save $200 in sunk costs.
I will say that the whole "properties" orientation of PCs, along with "right click to do anything" frusterates a lot of graphic designers. The mac platform has been a lot more useful for designers due from an interface perspective.
-j
Kahn is a smart man, but this is a classic go-nowhere idea. Too many people are invested in a host-centric model. This is DOA.
"(The) architecture can not write the law, but it provides a technical design that matches the legal structure that is expected to emerge," the Library of Congress says on its Web site.
Heh.
Life seems not to have changed much after the lawyers attack. There's proscribed data out there, somewhere, on a constantly changing set of servers used by a bunch of 14 year olds (whether or not I'm referring to physical or mental age is left as an exercise for the reader). Boom. Napster is relegated to the category inhabited by USEnet 7 years ago and becomes an annoyance when people like me bring up ("remember when you could post to alt.sex.bondage and not lose your important mail in the hellstorm of spam? I used to carry tapes fulla newsgroups up hill for miles, covered in snow...").
You actually hilight the difference - published (accessible via a known node) vs. unpublished (find it, if you can). And this is really what the current battles are about.
Napster has a single point of failure. Take out the company of the same name, and most of the work-alikes will run away and hide. The few that don't will be attacked, with legal precedent behind the attackers.
Freenet has a chance, but it is still too hard to use, too cryptic, too geeky. It works well, but it is a bit similar to PGP - "understand these things, and you'll be able to use the magic to your advantage". Contrast with "click here for more Metallica".
I do hope these things can be made to work well. The sharing of data between individuals is under attack. Imagine if the telephone had been limited to companies who could pay an intermediary to carry a message. (OK, it isn't quite that bad, but the potential for limiting the evolution new methods of communication is being held ransom to AOL/Warner and Sony.)
OK, enough ranting. Bottom line is, warez doesn't change anything, and directories of user provided data does.
I think there is a solution to metadata distribution similar to Freenet's method, but without an assumption of being global that keeps the Gnutella problem under control. More to come, maybe.
-j
What you did was create a simple substitution cypher. From those examples, we know
s == a
y == u
. == /
w == e
r == t
x == c
o == p
s == a
q == w
d == s
and probably
e == f,
but I'm not sure what that two letter
command was supposed to be.
Won't take long to figure out the rest.
And if I yank your hard drive and install it
elsewhere, I can still access all the data
easily.
Plus, you're screwing up your keyboard.
Why? I'm being serious.
Masanobu Katoh - Stooge of Asian IP. Sony 0w3s her.
Nii Quaynor - I'm desparate. (Sorry, Nii, but it shows)
Andy Mueller-Maguhn - OK, that's really interesting. Maybe Europe isn't as sad as it seems.
Ivan Moura Campos - Shit, she seems a bit cool. And good at what she does.
See? some of it matters. A bit.
You just proved my point. You described hot potato routing, and the reasoning behind it.
What I think you're asking is, why do it any differently?
And the answer is, because you can do it better.
Warning - the analogy approaching you is imperfect, but suited to proving a point.
You send letters through the USPS. Cheap, and they get there, most of the time. But you need something there the next morning. You shell out an order of magnitude more cash to make sure that happens, becuase it is worth it. The people (Fedex, whomever) have a parallel distribution network to make it happen. It gets there faster, because a different distribution chain was designed for different needs, and different cost assessments.
See the difference?
Back to hot Quayle, er, potato, routing. If you just move bits for a living, you optimize for moving most of them, most of the time, as fast as is cost effective. If you run a high performance delivery system, you move most of them, all of the time, as fast as the QOS you signed said you would. There's a big difference there.
So, as Joe Random ISP, I want to minimize costs, so I offload packets as soon as I can. Like a hot potato(e). Make it someone else's responsibility as soon as I can.
As a high performance ISP with QOS contracts to fullfill, I want to keep traffic on my backbone as long as possible so I can control how fast they get there.
Economics happens to have a strangely powerful hand in how people do things. Even in business.
-j
The added value is participation in the network.
That something is available outside a given network doesn't decrease the value within it. Look at Napster - you can go get (at least for now) those same songs elsewhere. FTP sites, pals at work, buy a CD... participation in a network matters more than nonparticipation.
What people are missing is that you aren't storing Metallica CDs for distribution. You're storing random bits that happen to have interesting interactions with other random bits when combined. If you choose to participate, you store unknown stuff. You don't know what you store.
And no, TANSTAASFL. We're all paying for our bandwidth. If we choose to convert it to Mojo, fine. If that pisses off my upstream provider, I negotiate a different deal with them, or stop. There is a feedback mechanism to deal with node abuse called the Real World.
If you let a lot of people spend the night at your place, you start to impose certain costs on yourself and your landlord (I know this isn't perfect). You ask them for compensation. At a certain point, they don't want to pay it, you don't want to offer it, or your landlord gets pissed. Equilibrium is best calculated by the real world.
Of course, Napster has proven to be a really, really serious network burden, but almost nobody's called it enough of a burden to stop it, on grounds of network abuse (outside a few colleges), have they? Now, add in micropayments that are convertable to bandwidth purchases. What happens? Extra points for considering arbitrage oppurtunities.
-j