What happens if the developer contributed code to a GPL2 project which had the "or later clause". They could do this have no intention of licensing their patents. Then later on the GPL3 is published and users can opt to license the code under GPL3. At that point, the developer has lost the right to their patents.
It's not completely artificial either. Lots of people work for companies with exclusive patent licenses from a third party which apply to their products alone. Finding out that their contributions to some GPL2 project suddenly forces them to license those patents to everyone will be rather bad news. Good luck getting them to contribute to GPL licensed projects in future.
Al-Qaeda is a non-government organization and as such won't sign such treaties. You have to determine a nation that Al-Qaeda is incorporated in (I suggest Saudi Arabia) and look at their international treaties or consider it for each involved individual depending on his nationality.
That's absurd. Terrorists don't get protected by treaties signed by governments they're attacking. Which is more or less true with al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia - they have planted bombs there even if well connected individuals Saudis give them most of their money. In fact if any government that allowed them to 'incorporate' on its territory would be an ally of the terrorists and at war with their enemies. Even before they started to bomb Saudi Arabia, they weren't magically protected by treaties signed by the state.
If what you said was true, some sympathetic government could protect Al Qaeda with treaties while avoiding declaring war on al Qaeda's enemies. And Al Qaeda would have the protection of treaties without any of the obligations. The fact is that non state actors and irregulars don't have much in the way of legal protection. Pirates, saboteurs and spies used to be summarily executed until quite recently, and even soldiers out of uniform could be too as I mentioned above.
If the Saudis want to have treaty protection for their soldiers attacking the US, they need to make sure those soldiers are acting like a regular army, obey treaties themselves and wear uniform. But then they'd be at war with the US, and that wouldn't last very long.
The USA is party to the International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas, which bans members from using non-regular belligerents of any kind in naval combat.
What does the "International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas" say about non signatories? Since Al Qaeda haven't signed it and won't abide by it, it seems unlikely it protects them.
Most sufficiently old treaties have lesser protection for non state actors like irregular fighters too, like the Geneva Conventions requirement that combatants wear a uniform. This predates the illegal combatant controversy - downed RAF airmen would wear their uniforms under civillian clothes to avoid being executed by the Germans (who seemed to stick to the Geneva Convention for UK personnel even if they totally ignored it for USSR ones) Those exemptions are there for a reason - the treaties were signed by European imperial powers who expected to have free hand to deal with insurgents in their colonies. And most sufficiently new ones have notice periods inspired by the US, in which case the US can always withdraw from them.
Congressman Paul advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy that avoids entangling alliances. He believes that when a war must be fought, it must be fought to protect the citizens, be declared by Congress, planned out, won and then left: "The American public deserves clear goals and a definite exit strategy in Iraq."
At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Paul, defining them as an act of "air piracy," introduced the Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, which would have granted Letters of Marque and Reprisal, as authorized by Article One, Section Eight, against the specific terrorists, instead of warring against a foreign state.
Hmm, now that's an interesting idea given that most of the terrorists are essentially pirates.
That being said, it's a bit disconcerting to see them concerned with "who owns reproduction equipment like this". I really don't think that should be a concern of anyone... owning equipment shouldn't be a crime, even if it is professional-quality duplicators.
No one would have suspected that the US in the 21st Century would return to Dark Ages punishments due to the hastily drafted Sony Bono Illegal Reproductive Equipment Removal Amendment tacked unnoticed onto then end of an obscure bill.
Maybe Apple don't care? I can imagine if I were them I'd probably make the browser portable for strategic reasons. But using it IE style to try to control the browser marketspace is probably a waste of time. And they presumably can't sell it, since all the other browsers are free.
Secondly, why wouldn't he share the information with Apple, why bother discovering all these vulnerabilities in the first place? It's not like he's a black hat (AFAIK) so the only other reason I see is the attention you get from such comments.
1) Put up Google Adwords on blog. 2) Flame Apple, the more bogus the better. Let the blogosphere advertise your site. 3) Profit.
One thing I find remarkable about the Founding Fathers is that they were racist and sexist, yet in their writing and in the Constitution their language rises above their own racism. For example, outside of the part about counting the slave population at 3/5th for purposes of representation which was a political compromise to limit the power of the South, you won't find racism codified in the Constitution. If you call an African a Person, slavery was always against the 4th Ammendment. So all that was needed was for the social and political reality to catch up with the document. It is this ability to look past their own prejudices that I think makes the Founding Fathers more than your average political leader. Still flawed, to be sure, but better than can be expected. If you can distinguish "exceptional" from "god-like", then they were exceptional.
Yes exactly - it's almost as if they could see a perfect society as a sort of Platonic ideal and wrote the constitution to describe it but where well aware that society would probably not be anywhere near perfect in the forseeable future. But that doesn't matter in the long run as long as the constitution doesn't justify the imperfections.
My objection to revolutions in general is that most revolutionary leaders will succumb to the temptations of power and an inability to see the flaws in the society around them to a far greater extent than they did. In fact most leaders living in a slave society would have ended up inventing a spurious legal justification for slavery in the constitution. And then later on when things went wrong they'd have engineered some sort of undemocratic succession process to preserve the revolution. So the end result would be far worse for both free people and slaves, because it would be impossible for anyone to ever use the constitution to change the status quo.
The users are free to choose GPL3 if the developer left in the "or later version" clause. Then the developer is not free to stick to GPL2. Or maybe the developer is Liberated a la Iraq rather than free, I'm not sure of the correct GNU/Speak for this case. If I say it in English, it seems like the developer has lost some freedom to keep his patents and keys private, but that can't be correct can it?
I do like Opus Dei - they're absolutely spot on that there is a weird Germanic totalitarianism buried in the "Live is Life" and this skewers it brilliantly.
Life is life! And we're all glad it's over We thought it would last Every minute of the future Is a memory of the past Coz' we gave all the power We gave all the best And everyone lost everything And perished with the rest. Life is life!
Godwined of course, but the idea that Opus have buried fascist tendencies reminds me of the Harry Enfield sketch where Jürgen the German has been taught to be civilised but he can't really avoid being a fascist because fascism taps into his culture in a really profound way. Not that it's completely fair of course, but it's not completely false and hence an inspired piece of trolling.
The few other Laibach tracks I've got don't live up to it. Mind you, the whole idea of using the German name for Ljubljana in communist Yugoslavia and using Nazi/communist imagery at concerts to torment the Communists is cool too. They used totalitarian symbols to subvert totalitarianism. And in the end it worked, there are loads of subversive musicians in Slovenia now, and very few people who believe in either Nazism or Communism.
Umm, the bunch of murderous rebels who broke away 200 years ago were a disaster - for the native inhabitants.
Well they weren't much good for the slaves either. But that's not the point - the point is that Washington could easily have become a King (or at least Caesar), but he chose not to. And the rhetoric of universal rights eventually caught up with the US and forced it to do something about slavery, even that happened too late for the natives.
Too closed is probably as bad as too open though, think Mac vs PC or Beta vs VHS. The technically inferior but more ecosystem friendly system ended up with a much bigger market share.
The current fashion for user created content makes me think that sooner or later the terms for XNA Creator's club will ease up a bit. In fact, I think it's only because the PS3 is doing rather badly compared to previous Playstations that the terms are as tough as they are. I think commercial and user created games are actually orthogonal, and Microsoft can make money by letting user created games be sold on XBox live.
Seriously, I have been going to various stores, every once in a while, asking them when their next batch is due. Most either don't know and tell you, that you have to call almost every day to find out and then they are usually sold in a couple of hours.
I think quoting for critical purposes is a good one. I've often written emails explaining bugs that quote snippets of code, even though some of the people in the CC list don't have access to it. As far as I can tell, since the code is protected by copyright and I'm only quoting a few lines with unimportant details snipped, I'm actually ok on the critical purposes exemption. Of course there's code which embodies trade secrets that I wouldn't even do this with, but most of the time it's not like this.
Usually someone with no access to the source code is complaining about some behaviour, and they want to know that I understand the code I'm fixing. So they know the algortithm already bugs and all - my quotes are just telling them why the bugs are there.
You mean like the American Constitution? Look at the current situation---reject it. Think about what you think should be---write it down. Implement (always a tough bit, difficult to get good program managers).
That only worked because the founders were remarkably principled and selfless individuals. If any of them had been Stalin or Robespierre type figures who believed they should have absolute power, the American revolution would have been a disaster like the French one, or the Russian one. Or pretty much any revolution apart from the American one in fact.
Americans are right to celebrate their founders, particularly George Washington. He could easily have ruled until he died and then found some constitutional device to pass power to his heir. As Jefferson put it
"The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish."
Comparing the first post revolutionary leader to a project manager is disingenous in the extreme. You basically need to have an almost perfect leader in this situation who will allow a system to be set up which will constrain his actions to set a precedent for his successors. It's all to easy to use real and imagined threats to the regime as an excuse to set up a tyranny.
Not at all. I'm no Christian but it seems like gluttony is a sin because it's a lack of self control. I used to worry about things like this being sins because they don't directly harm other people and there is certainly an element of self righteousness about criticising them. And I still think that unlike other sins which do directly harm others they should not be criminalized. But then again, Christians use sin in a different way from the secular golden rule violations that I think laws should be based on. It's more like "doing these things will make you a bad person". Now the secular left will bitch and moan about how the church is full of hypocrites about this and they'd be right,but hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that it is selfish and therfore bad to be a glutton. And pointing out hypocrisy as a way to invalidate arguments is an example of the tu quoque fallacy.
In fact I think you can argue that hogging what is essentially a shared and limited resource does harm other people in this case. But all that is a bit abstract. I think if you look at the business case and the effect it had on other users, you can see the reason for the cap. If you read through a few pages of the link you can see that Time Warner essentially sells a cheap connection based on low average usage. If people max out their connections, if affects the other users in their neighbourhood which is why the cap is in place.
Now don't get me wrong I hate telcos and organized religion as much as the next geek and have maxed out a few connections in my time, but the way this issue is being covered here is incredibly obnoxious. If you spend your whole life downloading pirated stuff as fast as you can, don't be surprised if the RIAA/MPAA, the telcos and the other telco users around you start to complain and/or plot to stop you.
I used the metaphor of the salad bar and the word sin for a reason. Most people here would be critical of people that insist they are in the right when they eat so much at the salad bar that other diners have no salad, but for some reason believe that they have a right to do the online equivalent.
If you don't want your customers to eat an infinite amount of salad at that 'all-you-can-eat' salad bar of yours, don't offer that service. Just sell 'All you can eat, up to a maximum of 50 pounds of salad.'. That way you can still make 90% of your customers happy, and you don't have to lie about 10% of your users.
That's what ISPs are doing as far as I can tell. TW seem to be capping high bandwidth applications, so Torrents and NNTP downloads are slower. I'm not sure if the cap kicks in after you have downloaded some threshold.
Of course most of the bandwidth used by high bandwidth users is actually used to to download pirated stuff too, and the ISPs might get forced by the RIAA/MPAA to block that, but that's a separate issue.
Ok give me a break man, do you work for Comcast or something?
No, I was just annoyed by the slanted coverage.
Greedy has nothing to do with it...it's about paying for a service and getting that service. Would you pay $70 for unlimited minutes on your cell phone only to have them say "yeah....we're gonna limit you to 1000 because you're using too many", come on...
As I said, some things can be unlimited like the salad bar. If the ratio of the resources used by the high consuming users to the low consuming users is low then it doesn't matter. If it's very high and the high consuming users are a small minority then it makes sense to add limits that only affect them.
E.g. if 90% of the minutes on a cell phone network were used by 10% of the users, they'd start to limit too. And it is greed too. Gluttony is a sin for a reason.
The power users don't use an infinite amount of bandwidth, in actuality we use as much as we are allowed to...i.e. what we're paying for. The package I pay for is, 3mbps. That means if they want to provide 3mbps to me, they need to set aside that much bandwidth and that's how much I get...maximum.
So they need 3mpbs * (number of users) total bandwidth to the outside world. And at any point in the network they need to guarantee that there is enough bandwidth for all users to max out their connection?
I think you could buy a service like that but it would cost a lot more than one where they assume that people don't use anywhere near 100% of peak bandwidth on average. T1 lines for example are designed to be maxed out as far as I know. But consumer stuff isn't, hence the lower costs and all the jargon about contention and usage ratios. They basically bet on the fact that people will only use a small percentage of the bandwidth they buy. For the 90% case that's true and for the 10% case it isn't.
So, like someone else said...if they aren't comfortable providing 3mbps to me and all the other customers that are paying for it, they shouldn't even offer it...right? RIGHT.
If you made an attempt to see it from their point of view, you'd be a lot less angry. And you'd also know that they probably don't want people maxing out their consumer service 24/7. You can rant and rave on the internet as much as you want, it doesn't change the economics of a situation.
Which is this. Their 3mbps service makes a profit for 90% of users but without traffic shaping it makes a loss for the greedy 10%. When they put in traffic shaping they probably budgetted on losing a minority of that 10%. The rest of them will just rant about it until they find something more important to complain about. But either way it solves the problem of a greedy minority. And sooner or later their competitors will make the same decision too.
Consider the Pizza Hut salad bar. At the moment, people eat around the same amount of salad at the all you can eat salad bar - maybe the greedy ones eat 2x as much as average, so it sort of works out.
But imagine if a tiny minority cleaned out the salad bar each day - they actually had an infinite capacity for salad. Now the other, less greedy customers start to complain. You can buy more salad, and that's what the greedy customers will suggest. But remember that in this example the greedy customers will use all the salad there is - BitTorrent is designed to saturate pipes. It will use all the additional bandwidth you give it.
So you have a small minority who are basically infintely greedy and using resources to the point where people who use the service to read email are starting to complain. At this point, you might was well implement traffic shaping. The greedy customers can then either live with the restriction or leave for your competitors, but that's no loss.
Sooner or later of course, your competitors will have to implement traffic shaping too. It's better to sacrifice the greedy minority to ensure service continues to be satisfactory to the non greedy majority.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens if the developer contributed code to a GPL2 project which had the "or later clause". They could do this have no intention of licensing their patents. Then later on the GPL3 is published and users can opt to license the code under GPL3. At that point, the developer has lost the right to their patents.
It's not completely artificial either. Lots of people work for companies with exclusive patent licenses from a third party which apply to their products alone. Finding out that their contributions to some GPL2 project suddenly forces them to license those patents to everyone will be rather bad news. Good luck getting them to contribute to GPL licensed projects in future.
Al-Qaeda is a non-government organization and as such won't sign such treaties. You have to determine a nation that Al-Qaeda is incorporated in (I suggest Saudi Arabia) and look at their international treaties or consider it for each involved individual depending on his nationality.
That's absurd. Terrorists don't get protected by treaties signed by governments they're attacking. Which is more or less true with al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia - they have planted bombs there even if well connected individuals Saudis give them most of their money. In fact if any government that allowed them to 'incorporate' on its territory would be an ally of the terrorists and at war with their enemies. Even before they started to bomb Saudi Arabia, they weren't magically protected by treaties signed by the state.
If what you said was true, some sympathetic government could protect Al Qaeda with treaties while avoiding declaring war on al Qaeda's enemies. And Al Qaeda would have the protection of treaties without any of the obligations. The fact is that non state actors and irregulars don't have much in the way of legal protection. Pirates, saboteurs and spies used to be summarily executed until quite recently, and even soldiers out of uniform could be too as I mentioned above.
If the Saudis want to have treaty protection for their soldiers attacking the US, they need to make sure those soldiers are acting like a regular army, obey treaties themselves and wear uniform. But then they'd be at war with the US, and that wouldn't last very long.
The USA is party to the International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas, which bans members from using non-regular belligerents of any kind in naval combat.
What does the "International Treaty on Warfare on the High Seas" say about non signatories? Since Al Qaeda haven't signed it and won't abide by it, it seems unlikely it protects them.
Most sufficiently old treaties have lesser protection for non state actors like irregular fighters too, like the Geneva Conventions requirement that combatants wear a uniform. This predates the illegal combatant controversy - downed RAF airmen would wear their uniforms under civillian clothes to avoid being executed by the Germans (who seemed to stick to the Geneva Convention for UK personnel even if they totally ignored it for USSR ones) Those exemptions are there for a reason - the treaties were signed by European imperial powers who expected to have free hand to deal with insurgents in their colonies. And most sufficiently new ones have notice periods inspired by the US, in which case the US can always withdraw from them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_
Hmm, now that's an interesting idea given that most of the terrorists are essentially pirates.
That being said, it's a bit disconcerting to see them concerned with "who owns reproduction equipment like this". I really don't think that should be a concern of anyone... owning equipment shouldn't be a crime, even if it is professional-quality duplicators.
No one would have suspected that the US in the 21st Century would return to Dark Ages punishments due to the hastily drafted Sony Bono Illegal Reproductive Equipment Removal Amendment tacked unnoticed onto then end of an obscure bill.
Well if they want to report a big figure, they could just use the list price rather than the average selling price which is likely to be discounted.
Because 100,000k security researchers and hackers all typing away at keyboards will eventually write Shakespeare?
No, but we can work out a way for Iago to win.
Maybe Apple don't care? I can imagine if I were them I'd probably make the browser portable for strategic reasons. But using it IE style to try to control the browser marketspace is probably a waste of time. And they presumably can't sell it, since all the other browsers are free.
/.
I wonder how it compares to Opera 9.0x speedwise?
Google cache of www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html because he doesn't want people posting it to
Hmm, Opera 9.01 seems to be a bit faster most of the time.
Secondly, why wouldn't he share the information with Apple, why bother discovering all these vulnerabilities in the first place? It's not like he's a black hat (AFAIK) so the only other reason I see is the attention you get from such comments.
1) Put up Google Adwords on blog.
2) Flame Apple, the more bogus the better. Let the blogosphere advertise your site.
3) Profit.
That explains the Wells/Verne Patent Extension Act I read about a few years ago when I was visiting 2010.
One thing I find remarkable about the Founding Fathers is that they were racist and sexist, yet in their writing and in the Constitution their language rises above their own racism. For example, outside of the part about counting the slave population at 3/5th for purposes of representation which was a political compromise to limit the power of the South, you won't find racism codified in the Constitution. If you call an African a Person, slavery was always against the 4th Ammendment. So all that was needed was for the social and political reality to catch up with the document. It is this ability to look past their own prejudices that I think makes the Founding Fathers more than your average political leader. Still flawed, to be sure, but better than can be expected. If you can distinguish "exceptional" from "god-like", then they were exceptional.
Yes exactly - it's almost as if they could see a perfect society as a sort of Platonic ideal and wrote the constitution to describe it but where well aware that society would probably not be anywhere near perfect in the forseeable future. But that doesn't matter in the long run as long as the constitution doesn't justify the imperfections.
My objection to revolutions in general is that most revolutionary leaders will succumb to the temptations of power and an inability to see the flaws in the society around them to a far greater extent than they did. In fact most leaders living in a slave society would have ended up inventing a spurious legal justification for slavery in the constitution. And then later on when things went wrong they'd have engineered some sort of undemocratic succession process to preserve the revolution. So the end result would be far worse for both free people and slaves, because it would be impossible for anyone to ever use the constitution to change the status quo.
The users are free to choose GPL3 if the developer left in the "or later version" clause. Then the developer is not free to stick to GPL2. Or maybe the developer is Liberated a la Iraq rather than free, I'm not sure of the correct GNU/Speak for this case. If I say it in English, it seems like the developer has lost some freedom to keep his patents and keys private, but that can't be correct can it?
Godwined of course, but the idea that Opus have buried fascist tendencies reminds me of the Harry Enfield sketch where Jürgen the German has been taught to be civilised but he can't really avoid being a fascist because fascism taps into his culture in a really profound way. Not that it's completely fair of course, but it's not completely false and hence an inspired piece of trolling.
The few other Laibach tracks I've got don't live up to it. Mind you, the whole idea of using the German name for Ljubljana in communist Yugoslavia and using Nazi/communist imagery at concerts to torment the Communists is cool too. They used totalitarian symbols to subvert totalitarianism. And in the end it worked, there are loads of subversive musicians in Slovenia now, and very few people who believe in either Nazism or Communism.
Umm, the bunch of murderous rebels who broke away 200 years ago were a disaster - for the native inhabitants.
Well they weren't much good for the slaves either. But that's not the point - the point is that Washington could easily have become a King (or at least Caesar), but he chose not to. And the rhetoric of universal rights eventually caught up with the US and forced it to do something about slavery, even that happened too late for the natives.
Too closed is probably as bad as too open though, think Mac vs PC or Beta vs VHS. The technically inferior but more ecosystem friendly system ended up with a much bigger market share.
The current fashion for user created content makes me think that sooner or later the terms for XNA Creator's club will ease up a bit. In fact, I think it's only because the PS3 is doing rather badly compared to previous Playstations that the terms are as tough as they are. I think commercial and user created games are actually orthogonal, and Microsoft can make money by letting user created games be sold on XBox live.
Seriously, I have been going to various stores, every once in a while, asking them when their next batch is due. Most either don't know and tell you, that you have to call almost every day to find out and then they are usually sold in a couple of hours.
That reminds me of something.
Obviously, those cuddly babies were up to something.
If you gaze into their beautful pale blue eyes, you can just make out the words IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL_TO and a bunch of hex.
Tvashtar is the local name for it in the Iovian language ...
Hold on, there's a Party Van at the door full of dudes in black suits. BRB, MIBs.
I think quoting for critical purposes is a good one. I've often written emails explaining bugs that quote snippets of code, even though some of the people in the CC list don't have access to it. As far as I can tell, since the code is protected by copyright and I'm only quoting a few lines with unimportant details snipped, I'm actually ok on the critical purposes exemption. Of course there's code which embodies trade secrets that I wouldn't even do this with, but most of the time it's not like this.
Usually someone with no access to the source code is complaining about some behaviour, and they want to know that I understand the code I'm fixing. So they know the algortithm already bugs and all - my quotes are just telling them why the bugs are there.
You mean like the American Constitution? Look at the current situation---reject it. Think about what you think should be---write it down. Implement (always a tough bit, difficult to get good program managers).
That only worked because the founders were remarkably principled and selfless individuals. If any of them had been Stalin or Robespierre type figures who believed they should have absolute power, the American revolution would have been a disaster like the French one, or the Russian one. Or pretty much any revolution apart from the American one in fact.
Americans are right to celebrate their founders, particularly George Washington. He could easily have ruled until he died and then found some constitutional device to pass power to his heir. As Jefferson put it
"The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish."
Comparing the first post revolutionary leader to a project manager is disingenous in the extreme. You basically need to have an almost perfect leader in this situation who will allow a system to be set up which will constrain his actions to set a precedent for his successors. It's all to easy to use real and imagined threats to the regime as an excuse to set up a tyranny.
Because it says so in a book?
Not at all. I'm no Christian but it seems like gluttony is a sin because it's a lack of self control. I used to worry about things like this being sins because they don't directly harm other people and there is certainly an element of self righteousness about criticising them. And I still think that unlike other sins which do directly harm others they should not be criminalized. But then again, Christians use sin in a different way from the secular golden rule violations that I think laws should be based on. It's more like "doing these things will make you a bad person". Now the secular left will bitch and moan about how the church is full of hypocrites about this and they'd be right,but hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that it is selfish and therfore bad to be a glutton. And pointing out hypocrisy as a way to invalidate arguments is an example of the tu quoque fallacy.
In fact I think you can argue that hogging what is essentially a shared and limited resource does harm other people in this case. But all that is a bit abstract. I think if you look at the business case and the effect it had on other users, you can see the reason for the cap. If you read through a few pages of the link you can see that Time Warner essentially sells a cheap connection based on low average usage. If people max out their connections, if affects the other users in their neighbourhood which is why the cap is in place.
Now don't get me wrong I hate telcos and organized religion as much as the next geek and have maxed out a few connections in my time, but the way this issue is being covered here is incredibly obnoxious. If you spend your whole life downloading pirated stuff as fast as you can, don't be surprised if the RIAA/MPAA, the telcos and the other telco users around you start to complain and/or plot to stop you.
I used the metaphor of the salad bar and the word sin for a reason. Most people here would be critical of people that insist they are in the right when they eat so much at the salad bar that other diners have no salad, but for some reason believe that they have a right to do the online equivalent.
If you don't want your customers to eat an infinite amount of salad at that 'all-you-can-eat' salad bar of yours, don't offer that service. Just sell 'All you can eat, up to a maximum of 50 pounds of salad.'. That way you can still make 90% of your customers happy, and you don't have to lie about 10% of your users.
That's what ISPs are doing as far as I can tell. TW seem to be capping high bandwidth applications, so Torrents and NNTP downloads are slower. I'm not sure if the cap kicks in after you have downloaded some threshold.
Of course most of the bandwidth used by high bandwidth users is actually used to to download pirated stuff too, and the ISPs might get forced by the RIAA/MPAA to block that, but that's a separate issue.
Ok give me a break man, do you work for Comcast or something?
No, I was just annoyed by the slanted coverage.
Greedy has nothing to do with it...it's about paying for a service and getting that service. Would you pay $70 for unlimited minutes on your cell phone only to have them say "yeah....we're gonna limit you to 1000 because you're using too many", come on...
As I said, some things can be unlimited like the salad bar. If the ratio of the resources used by the high consuming users to the low consuming users is low then it doesn't matter. If it's very high and the high consuming users are a small minority then it makes sense to add limits that only affect them.
E.g. if 90% of the minutes on a cell phone network were used by 10% of the users, they'd start to limit too. And it is greed too. Gluttony is a sin for a reason.
The power users don't use an infinite amount of bandwidth, in actuality we use as much as we are allowed to...i.e. what we're paying for. The package I pay for is, 3mbps. That means if they want to provide 3mbps to me, they need to set aside that much bandwidth and that's how much I get...maximum.
So they need 3mpbs * (number of users) total bandwidth to the outside world. And at any point in the network they need to guarantee that there is enough bandwidth for all users to max out their connection?
I think you could buy a service like that but it would cost a lot more than one where they assume that people don't use anywhere near 100% of peak bandwidth on average. T1 lines for example are designed to be maxed out as far as I know. But consumer stuff isn't, hence the lower costs and all the jargon about contention and usage ratios. They basically bet on the fact that people will only use a small percentage of the bandwidth they buy. For the 90% case that's true and for the 10% case it isn't.
So, like someone else said...if they aren't comfortable providing 3mbps to me and all the other customers that are paying for it, they shouldn't even offer it...right? RIGHT.
If you made an attempt to see it from their point of view, you'd be a lot less angry. And you'd also know that they probably don't want people maxing out their consumer service 24/7. You can rant and rave on the internet as much as you want, it doesn't change the economics of a situation.
Which is this. Their 3mbps service makes a profit for 90% of users but without traffic shaping it makes a loss for the greedy 10%. When they put in traffic shaping they probably budgetted on losing a minority of that 10%. The rest of them will just rant about it until they find something more important to complain about. But either way it solves the problem of a greedy minority. And sooner or later their competitors will make the same decision too.
Consider the Pizza Hut salad bar. At the moment, people eat around the same amount of salad at the all you can eat salad bar - maybe the greedy ones eat 2x as much as average, so it sort of works out.
But imagine if a tiny minority cleaned out the salad bar each day - they actually had an infinite capacity for salad. Now the other, less greedy customers start to complain. You can buy more salad, and that's what the greedy customers will suggest. But remember that in this example the greedy customers will use all the salad there is - BitTorrent is designed to saturate pipes. It will use all the additional bandwidth you give it.
So you have a small minority who are basically infintely greedy and using resources to the point where people who use the service to read email are starting to complain. At this point, you might was well implement traffic shaping. The greedy customers can then either live with the restriction or leave for your competitors, but that's no loss.
Sooner or later of course, your competitors will have to implement traffic shaping too. It's better to sacrifice the greedy minority to ensure service continues to be satisfactory to the non greedy majority.
so the onus of endian-conversion gets dumped back into the lap of the poor soul writing the firmware, just like it always has.
If you can't write code that copes with details like endianness you shouldn't be writing firmware.