This PlayOn thing you mention sounds neat, but if I'm not mistaken it sounds like a piece of proprietary software that you have to pay for in order to stream free Internet content to your TV? Am I missing something?
Boxee looks to have great potential. My friend had a beta of it running on his AppleTV and was using it to stream Hulu content to his TV. It's not publicly released yet, but they promise that it will be open source and the current feature list outshines every proprietary set-top box so far. I'm hoping it will be the media center software that I've been waiting about a decade for.:P
Over the past decade or so, I've noticed a trend. I'm not terribly bright, so I don't think I can be the only one who has noticed it but regardless, nobody is saying anything about it. No Slashdotters or bloggers ever raise this point, no journalists write explicitly about it even though it's right there in the news almost every day.
Let's say you're a huge government entity or industry coalition. You want a law (or series of laws) put into effect that, if passed by congress, would net you huge amounts of cash, power, or both. The problem is that almost everybody who hears about it is going to oppose it because they'll probably see it for what it is. Lobbyists are worth their weight in gold, but lobbyists don't outweigh enormous opposition from the press and public.
How do you get this extremely profitable but unlikely law passed? The solution turns out to be relatively easy:
1) Submit the bill for vote. 2) When the public outcry inevitably happens, reaffirm to the public that the bill must be made into law. Make a couple of unimportant token conciliatory changes and make a big deal about how you're willing to compromise. 3) Resubmit almost the exact same bill. 4) Watch it pass.
I've seen this happen in the U.S. for every almost single major unpopular bill that's been passed recently. The wall street bailout is the number one perfect example. This bill was an undisguised farce from the beginning. As dim as the American public tends to be, even they saw the evil in handing out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street millionaires as a thank-you for screwing the world's economy while those who were *really* hurt (and without homes to boot) received not a single dime out of the deal. They presented the bill, the press and public said, "No effing way!" They presented it again with practically no changes and it passed with flying colors. Tell me, how does that happen?
I haven't been able to figure it out myself, but I wager it's to do with human psychology. You expose someone to an extreme idea once. After they get all done with being shocked and appalled, you expose them to it again (or to a slightly less shocking one) and they'll readily go along with it. Maybe when the idea is presented the second time, they think, "hey, it's not as bad as that first proposal." Or possibly people are just lazy and give up the fight after expending so much energy in the first opposition. I dunno. Another interesting point is that the more shocking the first presentation, the better the chance it has succeeding the second time around.
We're seeing it again with the Detroit bailout. The car companies made such an incredibly poor show the first time around, that Congress will probably say, "Well, they rode over in limousines this time at least, we should probably give them a few billion dollars to keep making shitty cars."
There's definitely a psychological effect and it's one that we, the public, would do well to wise up to soon because this is one tactic that's nearly 100% effective and has no effective counter-strategy because no one seems to be paying attention.
My company uses Checkfree and Checkfree handled this very poorly. Apparently this happened on Monday and they never notified us. We where notified when one of our own customers notified us and and pointed out the suspicious activity. We had to call Checkfree to get the details. It was caused by their own ineptitude in managing their passwords and accounts.
I'm sorry, maybe Checkfree handled it poorly, but they're not the ones ultimately to blame here I think. Look at every high-profile domain hijacking that's happened in the last year or two and you'll notice a common element: Network Solutions. Now in this instance, someone actually got a hold of Checkfree's username and password, but in many previous cases NetSol was directly responsible for handing over their customers' account information to malicious attackers with practically zero questions asked.
If I were a big business that depended on the security of important online assets, I'd be running away from NetSol at this point to some registrar that required more than a single username and password in order to cause millions upon millions of dollars worth of damage and irreparable reputational harm.
I wonder what it's going to take for NetSol to wise up and take notice of the fact that their inept security policies are damaging not only their own business but the business of their customers. Not to mention the scores innocent users who get tricked into submitting their private and/or financial information to fraudsters as a result.
IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.
Ordinarily, I'd be the last person on earth who'd suggest charging a fee for entirely virtual goods. The current domain registration and SSL certificate signing systems are both a complete farce at best and a bloody scam at worst.
But there has to be better management of IPv4. I've worked for (or with) ISPs and web hosting providers who waste IPs like you wouldn't believe. At one ISP, every hosting customer is given four IPs free with their account and only about 20% ever use more than one. Entire/24s are allocated for some goon's project that never sees completion and the IPs are never freed up and reused. Where I currently work, there is not a single 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x network. I've seen more than one shop where every device on the internal office network (including wifi APs and printers) is given an Internet IP and then firewalled off from the Internet.
I know these companies pay something for their IPs, but currently they're cheap enough that they can be wasted left and right. That needs to stop.
Memory exists to be used. If memory is not in use, you are wasting it.
If you swapped "memory" for "disk space", I might agree with you. However, modern operating systems are very good at using whatever amount of memory you throw at them. Whatever isn't used by applications is allocated as disk cache by the kernel, meaning you get better performance overall simply by adding more memory because the kernel doesn't have to go to disk as often for data. The only problem is that as the amount of memory rises, the likelihood of actually being able to perceive a performance improvement declines.
On a desktop system or lightweight server, it's usually not worth it to have more than twice as much memory as your applications actually consume. But on a server running 20 virtual machines, I've documented a huge performance difference between 8GB of memory and 12GB of memory on systems where total memory being used by all VMs is less than 4GB.
The people who modded this "insightful" need a strong dose of realism. Let me preface this by saying that I'm certainly not of the, "take all guns away and make them illegal" mindset. I believe the whole gun issue is being distorted by extremists on both sides: those who want firearms to be illegal to own, shoot, and look at and those who think every 5-year-old should be armed.
But this Major Caudill seems to be stumbling through his own logic. Seriously, this reads more like a religious justification to believe in guns rather than an argument for their possession.
Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
Absolutely true.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction,
Also very well said.
and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
And here's where things fall down. The statement that a gun removes force from the equation sounds paradoxical because it is paradoxical. You're adding force (and the likelihood of death) to the equation by bringing a gun into a situation, whether or not a gun was already present.
Major Caudill's reasoning rings too much of the common argument that the solution to America's gun problem is to simply add more guns.
I think I agree with PJ here. In the first scenario you illustrated, any reasonable person would have returned the iPod to the store for a refund and (unless it's an Apple store) asked the salesperson which device is compatible with their library. A lawsuit, while certainly not outside the realm of possibility in this country, is far less likely.
The post was modded off-topic because his post had nothing to do with the one he replied to.
He should have left a new comment instead of just automatically replying to the first highly-modded post. This is an abuse of the comment system to get his own comment to appear as high-up on the page as possible. I have mod points and I nearly modded him down myself, but I decided that explaining another modder's motives would be of greater help.
Step 1: Get IP address of blocked site Step 2: Enter that IP address
That won't work on the vast majority of sites out there which either use name-based virtual hosting or complicated load balancers, both of which depend on the correct hostname being in the URL.
In the old days, a common trick to get around URL filters was to put a '.' at the end of the TLD as in:
The '.' is the root of the DNS hierarchy. It's optional when specifying an Internet hostname but all software which handles domain names is required to handle it properly. Programmers of early web filters didn't know this so if they put the following URL into their block list:
Adding the dot meant the URL wouldn't match the entry in the blocklist. All the vendors patched this pretty quickly though and then the next workaround discovered was encoding the domain name as its hex equivalent. Took longer for the vendors to patch that, but they finally did. Most of the web filters out there have had plenty of time to come up to speed on all the workarounds by this point, though.
I find it disappointing that ISPs don't meter usage. It would help cut down on spam and viruses for example if users suddenly realized that something was costing them a lot of money and wasting bandwidth.
Okay, here's what we'll do. I know the owner of an ISP. I'll convince him to switch over 10% of his customers to metered bandwidth and we'll have you come in and answer all of the billing-related calls for those customers. Since you're such a huge proponent of metered bandwidth, you should have no problem explaining to customers why it's a good thing that their metered bill increased 500% compared to the previous month because their computer caught a virus. Piece of cake, huh?
Unmetered bandwidth started out as a marketing gimmick and became necessity. Billing someone for metered utilities is easy because water, gas, and electricity are simple concepts to understand, easy to meter, and finite resources. Last-mile bandwidth is none of those. Most people do not understand how their broadband works and are not going to be happy when they see their bill skyrocket because the connection is being utilized by things they don't comprehend. Their default action is going to blame the ISP and the ISP's support costs would triple without a corresponding increase in revenue.
Also:
1) An ISP can't offer both metered and unmetered plans because offering unmetered plans in addition to metered plans defeats the entire reason to do metered bandwidth anyway.
2) They can't just switch everybody to a metered plan either unless they want to see 10% of their customer base walk over to their competition because the competition's unmetered plans became cheaper for them overnight.
3) Many people like having their bills be a consistent amount from month-to-month and will happily pay somewhat more for a consistent bill in order to avoid surprises which might force them to shuffle things around in their budget every other month.
To folks to believe otherwise, I suspect you're not willing to give up your free lunch to the expense of others.
I'm sorry, did you just refer to a $40-$90 per month service as a "free lunch"? Maybe that's close to free for you, but it certainly isn't for me or anyone I know.
The Internet is a limited resource as some ISPs are learning the hard way.
No, it isn't a limited resource. And we're talking about the last-mile connection here, not the entire Internet. I'm starting to think you have no idea how a real ISP actually works.
The cost of any last-mile connection lies entirely within the infrastructure that moves the data, not the data that moves across it. The cost to the ISP of any given customer sending a packet through them is very very VERY close to zero. Packets are extremely cheap and it doesn't make any sense to bill based on their quantity since the other things that an ISP has to pay for (support, administration, overall business costs) greatly outstrip what it costs to send a packet by a huge margin.
You'd essentially be assigning an arbitrary monetary value to something that holds practically no intrinsic value. This gives rise to a number of problems. One is this: suppose you own an ISP and decide that one gigabyte of traffic is worth two dollars and every customer is automatically upgraded to the highest speed their equipment will support. Two of your customers pull down 15 gigabytes in one month, but one of them maxes out at 768K/sec while the other next door to the CO can get 20M/sec. Two customers, two entirely different levels of service, but they get charged the same. How is that fair? Sure you can prorate the 768K guy, but doing so reveals the fact that charging a set amount for a given quantity of data is an inadequate method of billing for the connection in the first place.
(Yes, I realize that the ISP has to pay its own metered bandwidth bill to the upstream provider but since that bandwidth is an aggregate of th
No, you don't. A dedicated 10 Mbps link would run thousands of dollars a month (a T1, which is 1.5 each way, is ~$300 in the US)
A T1 is expensive because of the equipment that it uses and the effort involved in hooking it up. Not because a T1 is some magical guarantee of bandwidth or reliability.
I worked in telecom for ISPs. There's no technical reason that every DSL, cable internet, or wireless ISP can't provide each customer their share of paid-for bandwidth and still oversell. It all comes down to where they keep their oversell threshold and how much they care about pissing off their customers.
I have indeed seen ISPs that keep a close eye on their infrastructure, have happy customers, and still manage to turn a profit.
you knew damn well that you would be sharing it with others in your neighborhood.
If it's a cable connection you speak of, maybe a slashdotter knows but Average Joe does not. Please tell me which cable company puts on all of their advertisements, "10Mbps Unlimited Bandwidth (That you share with everyone in your subdivision and isn't really unlimited either)" because I've never seen it.
Before you get all excited, note that this doesn't appear to be a game at all as the summary implies. ("Editors on crack" alert.)
Instead, it looks like it's just a simulator with one scenario that's used as an educational aid in one class at Duke University. It's not available for download. I don't even know why it's a.org domain. From what I can tell, the site explains this Virtual Peace in a very vague manner and appears to just a way for those involved in the development to get their big faces on the web (and probably in print).
I've heard of many great success stories from people employing a new consumer tactical weapon: the EECB, executive email carpet bomb.
But it's only to be used as a last resort, no matter how justified or important you think you are. After you've tried everything else, dig up the email addresses of Dell executives (which are generally not hard to find, surprisingly) and send *all* of them a well-written, rational letter explaining why you are dissatisfied with their service and what they can do to set things straight if they want to keep you as a customer.
For bonus points, mention tactfully that you have a blog. Good luck, soldier.
Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'"
How do you get to be a doctor by spewing out crap like this? Far from actual justification, it's quite a poor analogy, even on Slashdot.
If you were to go back in time and join a tribal village, everyone else may know everything you do, but you also know everything they do. However in today's world, corporations and governments want to know everything about the populace but keep their own activities a closely-guarded secret.
In tribal communities, knowledge of others' activities is balanced. In "civilized society," the distribution of knowledge (not to mention money and power) is extremely lopsided. Those in power want to keep it that way. If everyone knew about all of their activities, they wouldn't be able to retain their power for very long.
I would actually be in favor of a surveillance state if (and *only* if) the camera points both ways. They get to see what goes on through cameras on our streets and outside every home and we get to see everything that goes on around every police car and inside every government meeting. But since that's never going to happen, the only sensible thing to do is fight for no cameras at all, losing battle though it may be.
Since you're posting on Slashdot, you're already not the primary target demographic of satellite radio. Broadcasters want to reach the Average Joe who listens to radio for pop music, background noise, and the occasional sports updates. They don't want better content, they just want more content and they want it to be easy to get. For Average Joe, satellite *is* competing with regular broadcast radio and self-contained MP3 players.
A co-worker of mine bought a brand-new monstrosity of an SUV to drive herself 15 miles to work every day. It came with a free three-month subscription to XM radio. She went on about how great it was and all the channels that were available and so on. I had to carpool with her for a week and do you know what she listened to every single day? Oldies. In Detroit, a city with like 500 oldies broadcast stations. Except one day where she listened to a sports channel because she's a Red Wings nut. I wish this person were the only example like this that I can think of.
I will say that satellite radio raised the bar a little bit in terms of content quality, but not enough to make any lasting difference. I predict that once iPod Mania settles down a bit, streaming Internet radio will be the next big thing because setting one up is easy and cheap. And with a good broadband connection you have not a handful, not dozens, not even hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of "stations" to choose from for your listening pleasure. But if, and only if, we can keep the RIAA from trying to destroy it with abusive and absurd royalty rates like they're trying to do right now.
I read this exact same article the other day. Only at that time, it only listed the Arduino and it's progeny along with a couple of related projects.
In particular, I'm happy to see the x0xb0x make it to the list. The x0x is one piece of open hardware that doesn't nearly get enough attention. It's a perfect clone of the Roland TB-303 analog synthesizer which spawned an entire musical genre and left its impression on electronica in general. The parts list, build instructions, schematics, and board layouts are all open and free and there's an active community supporting and hacking it.
I consider the x0xb0x to be the perfect example of how to successfully translate the ideals of open source software to hardware hacking.
I can understand how convicts, felons, suspects, and arrestees get their DNA thrown into a federal database, but how do they get the DNA of their family members if crime doesn't happen to run in the family? Where are all these DNA samples coming from?
Normally I stay out of threads like this, but I take exception to the high number of responses so far that have advocated taking supplements and vitamins. But that's what our society has come to these days, I guess. Got a problem? Take a pill!
I'm not that old but like most of us, I'm aging nonetheless. Here is what I'm doing to try to keep my brain in decent shape.
First, keep your body in shape. Recognize that the brain depends on the body. If you aren't eating right and aren't exercising, then your metal facilities are lower than they should be. Every single study that has been evaluated the link between exercise and brain function has found that there is a direct causal relationship. People who exercise regularly are smarter than those that don't, when all other factors are equal.
Second, keep the mind in shape. It needs exercise too. I usually get plenty of intellectual stimulation from daily geeky activities but when I don't, I read like a fiend. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read technical books (even ones you've already read). Keep learning. You'll never learn everything there is to know, but it's incredibly rewarding to learn as much as you can. In the past few years, I've taken interest in music, electronics, and a foreign language (German). All things that I wouldn't have dreamed I'd dabble in 10 years ago.
If it's memory in particular that you're having a problem with, see about getting more sleep. One popular theory for the necessity of sleep is that it gives the brain a chance to shut down the I/O bus while it evaluates, organizes, and stores information received during the day. Sounds plausible to me because I know I don't retain much when operating on minimal sleep.
The press has an ethical obligation to present factual information as it actually exists. Ideally, there should be no bias, no spin, and certainly no fabrication.
This photo was a fabrication, plain and simple.
Put yourself in the AP's shoes for a moment. Would you rather be charged with enforcing a zero-tolerance policy or a partial-tolerance policy where a little bit of doctoring is okay but there are no hard and fast rules about what's inappropriate and each photo has to be taken on a case-by-case basis? With every doctored photo you print, your readers would be wondering, "how far does this photo deviate from what really happened?" It would be an enormous waste of time for the AP and it would diminish reader confidence, both needlessly.
When we see so much of today's mass media choosing and spinning their stories to match the whims of the government and advertisers, we should be giving the AP a standing fucking ovation for at least trying to stick to the basic principles of journalism.
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was a teenager before I understood anything at all about politics, philosophy, or the economy and even then came to the conclusion that "objectivist" was just a euphemism for "asshole."
Slashdot Mirror
This PlayOn thing you mention sounds neat, but if I'm not mistaken it sounds like a piece of proprietary software that you have to pay for in order to stream free Internet content to your TV? Am I missing something?
Boxee looks to have great potential. My friend had a beta of it running on his AppleTV and was using it to stream Hulu content to his TV. It's not publicly released yet, but they promise that it will be open source and the current feature list outshines every proprietary set-top box so far. I'm hoping it will be the media center software that I've been waiting about a decade for. :P
Over the past decade or so, I've noticed a trend. I'm not terribly bright, so I don't think I can be the only one who has noticed it but regardless, nobody is saying anything about it. No Slashdotters or bloggers ever raise this point, no journalists write explicitly about it even though it's right there in the news almost every day.
Let's say you're a huge government entity or industry coalition. You want a law (or series of laws) put into effect that, if passed by congress, would net you huge amounts of cash, power, or both. The problem is that almost everybody who hears about it is going to oppose it because they'll probably see it for what it is. Lobbyists are worth their weight in gold, but lobbyists don't outweigh enormous opposition from the press and public.
How do you get this extremely profitable but unlikely law passed? The solution turns out to be relatively easy:
1) Submit the bill for vote.
2) When the public outcry inevitably happens, reaffirm to the public that the bill must be made into law. Make a couple of unimportant token conciliatory changes and make a big deal about how you're willing to compromise.
3) Resubmit almost the exact same bill.
4) Watch it pass.
I've seen this happen in the U.S. for every almost single major unpopular bill that's been passed recently. The wall street bailout is the number one perfect example. This bill was an undisguised farce from the beginning. As dim as the American public tends to be, even they saw the evil in handing out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street millionaires as a thank-you for screwing the world's economy while those who were *really* hurt (and without homes to boot) received not a single dime out of the deal. They presented the bill, the press and public said, "No effing way!" They presented it again with practically no changes and it passed with flying colors. Tell me, how does that happen?
I haven't been able to figure it out myself, but I wager it's to do with human psychology. You expose someone to an extreme idea once. After they get all done with being shocked and appalled, you expose them to it again (or to a slightly less shocking one) and they'll readily go along with it. Maybe when the idea is presented the second time, they think, "hey, it's not as bad as that first proposal." Or possibly people are just lazy and give up the fight after expending so much energy in the first opposition. I dunno. Another interesting point is that the more shocking the first presentation, the better the chance it has succeeding the second time around.
We're seeing it again with the Detroit bailout. The car companies made such an incredibly poor show the first time around, that Congress will probably say, "Well, they rode over in limousines this time at least, we should probably give them a few billion dollars to keep making shitty cars."
There's definitely a psychological effect and it's one that we, the public, would do well to wise up to soon because this is one tactic that's nearly 100% effective and has no effective counter-strategy because no one seems to be paying attention.
I'm sorry, maybe Checkfree handled it poorly, but they're not the ones ultimately to blame here I think. Look at every high-profile domain hijacking that's happened in the last year or two and you'll notice a common element: Network Solutions. Now in this instance, someone actually got a hold of Checkfree's username and password, but in many previous cases NetSol was directly responsible for handing over their customers' account information to malicious attackers with practically zero questions asked.
If I were a big business that depended on the security of important online assets, I'd be running away from NetSol at this point to some registrar that required more than a single username and password in order to cause millions upon millions of dollars worth of damage and irreparable reputational harm.
I wonder what it's going to take for NetSol to wise up and take notice of the fact that their inept security policies are damaging not only their own business but the business of their customers. Not to mention the scores innocent users who get tricked into submitting their private and/or financial information to fraudsters as a result.
Ordinarily, I'd be the last person on earth who'd suggest charging a fee for entirely virtual goods. The current domain registration and SSL certificate signing systems are both a complete farce at best and a bloody scam at worst.
But there has to be better management of IPv4. I've worked for (or with) ISPs and web hosting providers who waste IPs like you wouldn't believe. At one ISP, every hosting customer is given four IPs free with their account and only about 20% ever use more than one. Entire /24s are allocated for some goon's project that never sees completion and the IPs are never freed up and reused. Where I currently work, there is not a single 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x network. I've seen more than one shop where every device on the internal office network (including wifi APs and printers) is given an Internet IP and then firewalled off from the Internet.
I know these companies pay something for their IPs, but currently they're cheap enough that they can be wasted left and right. That needs to stop.
"Nice university you got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
If you swapped "memory" for "disk space", I might agree with you. However, modern operating systems are very good at using whatever amount of memory you throw at them. Whatever isn't used by applications is allocated as disk cache by the kernel, meaning you get better performance overall simply by adding more memory because the kernel doesn't have to go to disk as often for data. The only problem is that as the amount of memory rises, the likelihood of actually being able to perceive a performance improvement declines.
On a desktop system or lightweight server, it's usually not worth it to have more than twice as much memory as your applications actually consume. But on a server running 20 virtual machines, I've documented a huge performance difference between 8GB of memory and 12GB of memory on systems where total memory being used by all VMs is less than 4GB.
The people who modded this "insightful" need a strong dose of realism. Let me preface this by saying that I'm certainly not of the, "take all guns away and make them illegal" mindset. I believe the whole gun issue is being distorted by extremists on both sides: those who want firearms to be illegal to own, shoot, and look at and those who think every 5-year-old should be armed.
But this Major Caudill seems to be stumbling through his own logic. Seriously, this reads more like a religious justification to believe in guns rather than an argument for their possession.
Absolutely true.
Also very well said.
And here's where things fall down. The statement that a gun removes force from the equation sounds paradoxical because it is paradoxical. You're adding force (and the likelihood of death) to the equation by bringing a gun into a situation, whether or not a gun was already present.
Major Caudill's reasoning rings too much of the common argument that the solution to America's gun problem is to simply add more guns.
I think I agree with PJ here. In the first scenario you illustrated, any reasonable person would have returned the iPod to the store for a refund and (unless it's an Apple store) asked the salesperson which device is compatible with their library. A lawsuit, while certainly not outside the realm of possibility in this country, is far less likely.
The post was modded off-topic because his post had nothing to do with the one he replied to.
He should have left a new comment instead of just automatically replying to the first highly-modded post. This is an abuse of the comment system to get his own comment to appear as high-up on the page as possible. I have mod points and I nearly modded him down myself, but I decided that explaining another modder's motives would be of greater help.
Except of course, death by electrocution.
That won't work on the vast majority of sites out there which either use name-based virtual hosting or complicated load balancers, both of which depend on the correct hostname being in the URL.
In the old days, a common trick to get around URL filters was to put a '.' at the end of the TLD as in:
http://www.example.com./
The '.' is the root of the DNS hierarchy. It's optional when specifying an Internet hostname but all software which handles domain names is required to handle it properly. Programmers of early web filters didn't know this so if they put the following URL into their block list:
http://www.example.com/*
Adding the dot meant the URL wouldn't match the entry in the blocklist. All the vendors patched this pretty quickly though and then the next workaround discovered was encoding the domain name as its hex equivalent. Took longer for the vendors to patch that, but they finally did. Most of the web filters out there have had plenty of time to come up to speed on all the workarounds by this point, though.
Here you go: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433
Okay, here's what we'll do. I know the owner of an ISP. I'll convince him to switch over 10% of his customers to metered bandwidth and we'll have you come in and answer all of the billing-related calls for those customers. Since you're such a huge proponent of metered bandwidth, you should have no problem explaining to customers why it's a good thing that their metered bill increased 500% compared to the previous month because their computer caught a virus. Piece of cake, huh?
Unmetered bandwidth started out as a marketing gimmick and became necessity. Billing someone for metered utilities is easy because water, gas, and electricity are simple concepts to understand, easy to meter, and finite resources. Last-mile bandwidth is none of those. Most people do not understand how their broadband works and are not going to be happy when they see their bill skyrocket because the connection is being utilized by things they don't comprehend. Their default action is going to blame the ISP and the ISP's support costs would triple without a corresponding increase in revenue.
Also:
1) An ISP can't offer both metered and unmetered plans because offering unmetered plans in addition to metered plans defeats the entire reason to do metered bandwidth anyway.
2) They can't just switch everybody to a metered plan either unless they want to see 10% of their customer base walk over to their competition because the competition's unmetered plans became cheaper for them overnight.
3) Many people like having their bills be a consistent amount from month-to-month and will happily pay somewhat more for a consistent bill in order to avoid surprises which might force them to shuffle things around in their budget every other month.
I'm sorry, did you just refer to a $40-$90 per month service as a "free lunch"? Maybe that's close to free for you, but it certainly isn't for me or anyone I know.
No, it isn't a limited resource. And we're talking about the last-mile connection here, not the entire Internet. I'm starting to think you have no idea how a real ISP actually works.
The cost of any last-mile connection lies entirely within the infrastructure that moves the data, not the data that moves across it. The cost to the ISP of any given customer sending a packet through them is very very VERY close to zero. Packets are extremely cheap and it doesn't make any sense to bill based on their quantity since the other things that an ISP has to pay for (support, administration, overall business costs) greatly outstrip what it costs to send a packet by a huge margin.
You'd essentially be assigning an arbitrary monetary value to something that holds practically no intrinsic value. This gives rise to a number of problems. One is this: suppose you own an ISP and decide that one gigabyte of traffic is worth two dollars and every customer is automatically upgraded to the highest speed their equipment will support. Two of your customers pull down 15 gigabytes in one month, but one of them maxes out at 768K/sec while the other next door to the CO can get 20M/sec. Two customers, two entirely different levels of service, but they get charged the same. How is that fair? Sure you can prorate the 768K guy, but doing so reveals the fact that charging a set amount for a given quantity of data is an inadequate method of billing for the connection in the first place.
(Yes, I realize that the ISP has to pay its own metered bandwidth bill to the upstream provider but since that bandwidth is an aggregate of th
A T1 is expensive because of the equipment that it uses and the effort involved in hooking it up. Not because a T1 is some magical guarantee of bandwidth or reliability.
I worked in telecom for ISPs. There's no technical reason that every DSL, cable internet, or wireless ISP can't provide each customer their share of paid-for bandwidth and still oversell. It all comes down to where they keep their oversell threshold and how much they care about pissing off their customers.
I have indeed seen ISPs that keep a close eye on their infrastructure, have happy customers, and still manage to turn a profit.
If it's a cable connection you speak of, maybe a slashdotter knows but Average Joe does not. Please tell me which cable company puts on all of their advertisements, "10Mbps Unlimited Bandwidth (That you share with everyone in your subdivision and isn't really unlimited either)" because I've never seen it.
Before you get all excited, note that this doesn't appear to be a game at all as the summary implies. ("Editors on crack" alert.)
Instead, it looks like it's just a simulator with one scenario that's used as an educational aid in one class at Duke University. It's not available for download. I don't even know why it's a .org domain. From what I can tell, the site explains this Virtual Peace in a very vague manner and appears to just a way for those involved in the development to get their big faces on the web (and probably in print).
I've heard of many great success stories from people employing a new consumer tactical weapon: the EECB, executive email carpet bomb.
But it's only to be used as a last resort, no matter how justified or important you think you are. After you've tried everything else, dig up the email addresses of Dell executives (which are generally not hard to find, surprisingly) and send *all* of them a well-written, rational letter explaining why you are dissatisfied with their service and what they can do to set things straight if they want to keep you as a customer.
For bonus points, mention tactfully that you have a blog. Good luck, soldier.
How do you get to be a doctor by spewing out crap like this? Far from actual justification, it's quite a poor analogy, even on Slashdot.
If you were to go back in time and join a tribal village, everyone else may know everything you do, but you also know everything they do. However in today's world, corporations and governments want to know everything about the populace but keep their own activities a closely-guarded secret.
In tribal communities, knowledge of others' activities is balanced. In "civilized society," the distribution of knowledge (not to mention money and power) is extremely lopsided. Those in power want to keep it that way. If everyone knew about all of their activities, they wouldn't be able to retain their power for very long.
I would actually be in favor of a surveillance state if (and *only* if) the camera points both ways. They get to see what goes on through cameras on our streets and outside every home and we get to see everything that goes on around every police car and inside every government meeting. But since that's never going to happen, the only sensible thing to do is fight for no cameras at all, losing battle though it may be.
Since you're posting on Slashdot, you're already not the primary target demographic of satellite radio. Broadcasters want to reach the Average Joe who listens to radio for pop music, background noise, and the occasional sports updates. They don't want better content, they just want more content and they want it to be easy to get. For Average Joe, satellite *is* competing with regular broadcast radio and self-contained MP3 players.
A co-worker of mine bought a brand-new monstrosity of an SUV to drive herself 15 miles to work every day. It came with a free three-month subscription to XM radio. She went on about how great it was and all the channels that were available and so on. I had to carpool with her for a week and do you know what she listened to every single day? Oldies. In Detroit, a city with like 500 oldies broadcast stations. Except one day where she listened to a sports channel because she's a Red Wings nut. I wish this person were the only example like this that I can think of.
I will say that satellite radio raised the bar a little bit in terms of content quality, but not enough to make any lasting difference. I predict that once iPod Mania settles down a bit, streaming Internet radio will be the next big thing because setting one up is easy and cheap. And with a good broadband connection you have not a handful, not dozens, not even hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of "stations" to choose from for your listening pleasure. But if, and only if, we can keep the RIAA from trying to destroy it with abusive and absurd royalty rates like they're trying to do right now.
I read this exact same article the other day. Only at that time, it only listed the Arduino and it's progeny along with a couple of related projects.
In particular, I'm happy to see the x0xb0x make it to the list. The x0x is one piece of open hardware that doesn't nearly get enough attention. It's a perfect clone of the Roland TB-303 analog synthesizer which spawned an entire musical genre and left its impression on electronica in general. The parts list, build instructions, schematics, and board layouts are all open and free and there's an active community supporting and hacking it.
I consider the x0xb0x to be the perfect example of how to successfully translate the ideals of open source software to hardware hacking.
I can understand how convicts, felons, suspects, and arrestees get their DNA thrown into a federal database, but how do they get the DNA of their family members if crime doesn't happen to run in the family? Where are all these DNA samples coming from?
Normally I stay out of threads like this, but I take exception to the high number of responses so far that have advocated taking supplements and vitamins. But that's what our society has come to these days, I guess. Got a problem? Take a pill!
I'm not that old but like most of us, I'm aging nonetheless. Here is what I'm doing to try to keep my brain in decent shape.
First, keep your body in shape. Recognize that the brain depends on the body. If you aren't eating right and aren't exercising, then your metal facilities are lower than they should be. Every single study that has been evaluated the link between exercise and brain function has found that there is a direct causal relationship. People who exercise regularly are smarter than those that don't, when all other factors are equal.
Second, keep the mind in shape. It needs exercise too. I usually get plenty of intellectual stimulation from daily geeky activities but when I don't, I read like a fiend. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read technical books (even ones you've already read). Keep learning. You'll never learn everything there is to know, but it's incredibly rewarding to learn as much as you can. In the past few years, I've taken interest in music, electronics, and a foreign language (German). All things that I wouldn't have dreamed I'd dabble in 10 years ago.
If it's memory in particular that you're having a problem with, see about getting more sleep. One popular theory for the necessity of sleep is that it gives the brain a chance to shut down the I/O bus while it evaluates, organizes, and stores information received during the day. Sounds plausible to me because I know I don't retain much when operating on minimal sleep.
The press has an ethical obligation to present factual information as it actually exists. Ideally, there should be no bias, no spin, and certainly no fabrication.
This photo was a fabrication, plain and simple.
Put yourself in the AP's shoes for a moment. Would you rather be charged with enforcing a zero-tolerance policy or a partial-tolerance policy where a little bit of doctoring is okay but there are no hard and fast rules about what's inappropriate and each photo has to be taken on a case-by-case basis? With every doctored photo you print, your readers would be wondering, "how far does this photo deviate from what really happened?" It would be an enormous waste of time for the AP and it would diminish reader confidence, both needlessly.
When we see so much of today's mass media choosing and spinning their stories to match the whims of the government and advertisers, we should be giving the AP a standing fucking ovation for at least trying to stick to the basic principles of journalism.
Fixes or solves?
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was a teenager before I understood anything at all about politics, philosophy, or the economy and even then came to the conclusion that "objectivist" was just a euphemism for "asshole."
Ask millions of teenagers.