"I don't know if I am off by a factor of four or a factor of five, so I will assume my answer is correct instead" is somewhere well beyond stupid. Pick 4.5 and go with it.
The odds that the consulting firm interviewed a bunch of whiny/. partisans is nil, so dishonesty was probably not a big problem. Good practices can minimize these effects anyway. Remember, these consultants are professionals who are extremely smart and who have made their careers out of measuring such things. They aren't going to find a lot of novel ideas floating around the slashdot forums.
Quit being lazy and read the fine print. In any case, ISPs do not advertise anything to the contrary of what they provide. It is your false assumption that your ISP is an all-you-can-eat buffet that is flawed. It is not, and they do not pretend otherwise. Actually, most buffets will push people out the door after a while. Heck, here in Japan it is formal, usually with a 90-minute limit.
Just like a buffet, ISPs reserve the right to nuke the 1% of abusers that screw the system for everyone else. They have every right to do this, thank God.
I do not worry about "net neutrality". If my ISP does things I do not like, I will find alternatives. In reality, the people that will get screwed in such a situation are those same 1% of abusers, whose shadowy websites will not / cannot pay for the fast lane. "Legit" sites used by normal people largely will, if they need them. Ultimately, prices for the consumer will come down due to this added source of revenue for the provider (although they will likely go up at the content end!).
Personally, I have no idea what this number is nor how it is estimated, either in this study or in the "standard" situation. I really don't even have a good guess as to HOW you could estimate it. Also, since we don't have access to the math that the consultants used, it is premature to assume that the $6.1 billion figure is a linear function of this estimate.
here with even a whiff of a credible argument against this report.
It is all "Whaaa, MPAA and RIAA are evil, I want my stuff for free, piracy isn't theft, the data MUST be biased, whaa whaaa whaaa!"
I quadruple-dog dare any slashdotter to give a reasoned argument as to why the 6.1 billion dollar figure is incorrect. Given that few slashdotters are going to be able to hold a candle to an experienced consulting firm with respect to economics and statistics, I am pretty confident my dare will stand.
Clearly you did not. Why waste time spewing your ignorance? Worse yet, why waste my time by filling this board with it? Next time, please read the article carefully before commenting.
students. If any of them are recent graduates, they would know the truth. God, our network was loaded with all sorts of music.
Did you hear that, RIAA?
Perhaps some of them read slashdot, too!
It is not a secret that university lans have zillions of copyrighted files for free.
Yep, that is how they katakana-ize "we"
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
but because of that, the their approximation comes out too "long" sounding. This happens with most of their katakana English, which is why then then cut the words short (conbini, depaato, etc) I forget the reason that Japanese does not have wi, we, and wu (wo is quite rare, only wa is a common sound).
flawed and ironically is the same basic argument used by proponents of Intelligent Design - that if just one peice of the puzzle was missing, the whole thing would collapse. This is false.
Remove McNealy, Gates, Ellison, the Pentagon, etc from the history of the internet, and the system simply would have evolved around them, either by creating an equivalent structure or by someone else inventing their key peice just a few months later.
Same is true of all science nowadays. Note how famous Watson and Crick became for discovering the structure of DNA. Did you know that they beat other groups (include that of Nobel winner Linus Pauling) by a matter of mere days, and mostly by virtue of guessing the right to up which to bark?
They, along with the computing gurus noted above, were all weeks from being completely forgotten by history.
that would be a country mile short of anything required for a conviction. Twenty other cops would have to fake various physical evidence. ADDING people to your ridiculous fantasy conspiracy makes it less plausible, not more.
But that is one more hoop such an evil cop would have to leap through, and since it would be stored by a different agency, would require yet another member of the conspiracy.
What is it with/. posters and wing-nut black helicopter fantasies?
We've created a nation were almost everyone is involved in some form of illegal activity, whether it's the harmless storing of prescription drugs past their proscribed use
I have never heard of such an absurd law, and can find no information consistent with such a claim.
If you are rampantly cheating on your taxes, I HOPE you are caught and thrown in the slammer. Yes, I know our government is controlled by right wing religious zealots. Strangly enough, it was controlled by left wing religious zealots a mere 14 years ago. Get past your childish name-calling and grow up, please.
Nope..."we" is not a native Japanese sound
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They took it directly from English. 99% of Japanese under 50 probably know the meaning of the word.
False positives will exist, but so what? Like I said, giving up concrete benefits to avoid problems that will crop up with extremely low frequency is silly. You don't stay inside all of the time to avoid lightning strikes, now do you?
Getting questioned a couple of times in your life by the cops because some clue wrongly pointed in your direction is not a big deal. In any case, the more information the cops have, one could argue they are LESS likely to make false positives, not more. The cruder the information you make them work with, the more mistakes they will make. The cops aren't going to question everyone whose car was within a mile of the hypothetical murder. They are going to question everyone whose car was within a mile of the murder AND some other tidbit or three of information connects them to the crime. The only way to insure no false positives is to have no crime investigation at all, which would be absurd. Assuming you agree, why do you think having the cops work with as little information as possible will make the situation any better?
I would be interested in what you would consider proof. I cannot understand why you do not think it is obvious that the police being able to check if a suspect's car was in the area of a crime would be a huge boost to crime-fighting.
Hell, National Car Tracking would almost eliminate hit and run accidents!
On the other hand, it won't be long before cars are driven by the CPUs anyway.
might erupt because of some random, improbable chain of events. I wouldn't care if I get questioned one per lifetime because the computer said I happened to be near the scene of a crime. Any inconvience that this would cause would be greatly offset by the decrease in the crime rate. So yes, maybe once in a hundred lifetimes, I would be questioned about an innocent-but-embarrassing situation as you described, and once in million lifetimes questioned by her little brother. That is a risk I am willing to take.
Since I am unlikely to call Pakistan and say "nuclear" in Farsi anytime soon, I am not too worried about terrorist investigations. As for corrupt cops, the system is likely to protect me from them as let them accuse me of a crime of which I am innocent, as the system is likely to give good alibis.
Thanks for pointing out another great benefit of the National Car Tracking system (the great reduction in crime rate!). This alone probably offsets the bizarre, low-probability problems you bring up.
Raise the speed limits 5 mph and have computers enforce them rigorously? Sounds like driving heaven to me. As long as my driving history cannot be accessed without a warrant, I really don't care about this information being recorded. You know what? We can use this information to do other wonderful things too, like pay-per-use roads. We can charge more for rush hour driving, for example, reducing congestion.
Now what was the downside again? That a cop with a warrant may be able to snoop where I have been driving? I am not too worried about that.
would have done, or much more than the US. Their numbers look better in some cases due to historical accidents and low-population and economic growth. "Hey, we are committing economic and demographic suicide, but are closer to our Kyoto targets than you" is not much of an argument. It actually makes the anti-Kyoto point.
protect your legs, shoes, and backpack/briefcase. Also, if is hot out (ie, any time from May to September in Japan) you will loathe wearing any clothes at all, let alone a raincoat, even a good "breathable" one. In the winter, you have the opposite problem. Cold is bad, wet and cold is far worse. Couple that with the other problem of it being far hotter in the morning than at night for my regular commute, which makes it necessary to have layered clothing. Because of weather, I can only use my bike about 3-4 days per week. Any way you cut it, you need public transporation to back up your bicycle.
It is a chicken and egg problem. Europe went one way because cars never caught on the first place, and then went through a self-reinforcing positive feed-back loop where public transportation kept reinforcing itself (same is true in Japan). America, Canada, and Australia started on the other side of the tipping point, due to their relative youth and low density. They went through a series of positive feedback loops in the opposite direction, with car transportation reinforcing itself over and over again. Unfortunately, in hindsight, we tipped the wrong way. However, getting to a European-style system from where we currently are is almost impossible. It reminds me of the standard equilibrium diagram we all learn in high school chemistry. The "activation energy" of switching from a less-favored but kinetically favorable state to the lower-energy thermodynamically favored state is, unfortunately, enormous. Europe cannot play "holier than thou" in this matter because they never had to climb that mountain. Rather, they got where they are due to historical accident and favorable demographic and geographic trends.
Building a few more cross-walks is not going to solve the problem.
Of course, I live in Japan, which makes all the difference. I can only use my bike BECAUSE there available public transportation in case of rain or extreme temperatures. When I move back to the states next month, I will live the same distance from work, but be forced to drive. If I road my bike, I would get stuck at work with no way home far too often. I have also lived in Europe, and used public transportation. I also used public transporation every day while I was in grad school in the states. Why? Because I happened to be in a large enough city to support it.
Europe really has two advantages when it comes to public transporation. First, of course, is the density issue. Just as important, however, is that most major European cities were built BEFORE cars. Therefore, the streets are often too narrow to support them. American cities, in contrast, were generally built POST car, and were designed to handle larger numbers of them. From there, it has simply been an issue of positive feedback.
Motorcycles suffer the same problems as bicycles. They require relatively fair weather (or a tolerence for getting a bit wet and/or sweaty) and are increadibly dangerous relative to cars or public transporation.
broke it. They will not meet their targets, and frankly, the only reason they are within a country mile is the annexation of East Germany by West, and the fact that Britain turned out to be sitting on a zillion cubic feet of natural gas. Most European nations are performing terribly, many even worse than the US (in relative terms to 1990 baseline). Also, Europe has had very little population growth, while the US has.
Europeans like to play "holier than thou", but in reality, their lower emissions are largely due to population density and mild climate. Not surprisingly, low-density, harsh-climate nations such as US, Canada, and Australia all have similar emissions profiles.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't know if I am off by a factor of four or a factor of five, so I will assume my answer is correct instead" is somewhere well beyond stupid. Pick 4.5 and go with it.
/. partisans is nil, so dishonesty was probably not a big problem. Good practices can minimize these effects anyway. Remember, these consultants are professionals who are extremely smart and who have made their careers out of measuring such things. They aren't going to find a lot of novel ideas floating around the slashdot forums.
The odds that the consulting firm interviewed a bunch of whiny
Quit being lazy and read the fine print. In any case, ISPs do not advertise anything to the contrary of what they provide. It is your false assumption that your ISP is an all-you-can-eat buffet that is flawed. It is not, and they do not pretend otherwise. Actually, most buffets will push people out the door after a while. Heck, here in Japan it is formal, usually with a 90-minute limit.
Just like a buffet, ISPs reserve the right to nuke the 1% of abusers that screw the system for everyone else. They have every right to do this, thank God.
I do not worry about "net neutrality". If my ISP does things I do not like, I will find alternatives. In reality, the people that will get screwed in such a situation are those same 1% of abusers, whose shadowy websites will not / cannot pay for the fast lane. "Legit" sites used by normal people largely will, if they need them. Ultimately, prices for the consumer will come down due to this added source of revenue for the provider (although they will likely go up at the content end!).
Personally, I have no idea what this number is nor how it is estimated, either in this study or in the "standard" situation. I really don't even have a good guess as to HOW you could estimate it. Also, since we don't have access to the math that the consultants used, it is premature to assume that the $6.1 billion figure is a linear function of this estimate.
here with even a whiff of a credible argument against this report.
It is all "Whaaa, MPAA and RIAA are evil, I want my stuff for free, piracy isn't theft, the data MUST be biased, whaa whaaa whaaa!"
I quadruple-dog dare any slashdotter to give a reasoned argument as to why the 6.1 billion dollar figure is incorrect. Given that few slashdotters are going to be able to hold a candle to an experienced consulting firm with respect to economics and statistics, I am pretty confident my dare will stand.
I would like to "share" some things with you.
Give up on the chilish non-sequiters, please.
likely to be "bogus". Clearly, the exact methodology was not published, so you have no basis for this comment whatsover. Your bias is showing through.
/. party line, however. Most people clearly did not.
I will give you credit for actually reading the article before spewing the
Clearly you did not. Why waste time spewing your ignorance? Worse yet, why waste my time by filling this board with it? Next time, please read the article carefully before commenting.
NO THEY DIDN'T, YOU LAZY TWIT!
Not only are you too cheap to pay for what you use, but you are too lazy to even bother to understand someone when they call you on your BS.
students. If any of them are recent graduates, they would know the truth. God, our network was loaded with all sorts of music. Did you hear that, RIAA? Perhaps some of them read slashdot, too! It is not a secret that university lans have zillions of copyrighted files for free.
but because of that, the their approximation comes out too "long" sounding. This happens with most of their katakana English, which is why then then cut the words short (conbini, depaato, etc) I forget the reason that Japanese does not have wi, we, and wu (wo is quite rare, only wa is a common sound).
flawed and ironically is the same basic argument used by proponents of Intelligent Design - that if just one peice of the puzzle was missing, the whole thing would collapse. This is false.
Remove McNealy, Gates, Ellison, the Pentagon, etc from the history of the internet, and the system simply would have evolved around them, either by creating an equivalent structure or by someone else inventing their key peice just a few months later.
Same is true of all science nowadays. Note how famous Watson and Crick became for discovering the structure of DNA. Did you know that they beat other groups (include that of Nobel winner Linus Pauling) by a matter of mere days, and mostly by virtue of guessing the right to up which to bark?
They, along with the computing gurus noted above, were all weeks from being completely forgotten by history.
that would be a country mile short of anything required for a conviction. Twenty other cops would have to fake various physical evidence. ADDING people to your ridiculous fantasy conspiracy makes it less plausible, not more.
But that is one more hoop such an evil cop would have to leap through, and since it would be stored by a different agency, would require yet another member of the conspiracy.
/. posters and wing-nut black helicopter fantasies?
What is it with
Citation, please
We've created a nation were almost everyone is involved in some form of illegal activity, whether it's the harmless storing of prescription drugs past their proscribed use
I have never heard of such an absurd law, and can find no information consistent with such a claim.
If you are rampantly cheating on your taxes, I HOPE you are caught and thrown in the slammer. Yes, I know our government is controlled by right wing religious zealots. Strangly enough, it was controlled by left wing religious zealots a mere 14 years ago. Get past your childish name-calling and grow up, please.
They took it directly from English. 99% of Japanese under 50 probably know the meaning of the word.
False positives will exist, but so what? Like I said, giving up concrete benefits to avoid problems that will crop up with extremely low frequency is silly. You don't stay inside all of the time to avoid lightning strikes, now do you?
Getting questioned a couple of times in your life by the cops because some clue wrongly pointed in your direction is not a big deal. In any case, the more information the cops have, one could argue they are LESS likely to make false positives, not more. The cruder the information you make them work with, the more mistakes they will make. The cops aren't going to question everyone whose car was within a mile of the hypothetical murder. They are going to question everyone whose car was within a mile of the murder AND some other tidbit or three of information connects them to the crime. The only way to insure no false positives is to have no crime investigation at all, which would be absurd. Assuming you agree, why do you think having the cops work with as little information as possible will make the situation any better?
being tossed in the slammer, I will start to worry. Until then, I am not going to give up convenience to hide from bogeymen.
I would be interested in what you would consider proof. I cannot understand why you do not think it is obvious that the police being able to check if a suspect's car was in the area of a crime would be a huge boost to crime-fighting.
Hell, National Car Tracking would almost eliminate hit and run accidents!
On the other hand, it won't be long before cars are driven by the CPUs anyway.
might erupt because of some random, improbable chain of events. I wouldn't care if I get questioned one per lifetime because the computer said I happened to be near the scene of a crime. Any inconvience that this would cause would be greatly offset by the decrease in the crime rate. So yes, maybe once in a hundred lifetimes, I would be questioned about an innocent-but-embarrassing situation as you described, and once in million lifetimes questioned by her little brother. That is a risk I am willing to take.
Since I am unlikely to call Pakistan and say "nuclear" in Farsi anytime soon, I am not too worried about terrorist investigations. As for corrupt cops, the system is likely to protect me from them as let them accuse me of a crime of which I am innocent, as the system is likely to give good alibis.
Thanks for pointing out another great benefit of the National Car Tracking system (the great reduction in crime rate!). This alone probably offsets the bizarre, low-probability problems you bring up.
Raise the speed limits 5 mph and have computers enforce them rigorously? Sounds like driving heaven to me. As long as my driving history cannot be accessed without a warrant, I really don't care about this information being recorded. You know what? We can use this information to do other wonderful things too, like pay-per-use roads. We can charge more for rush hour driving, for example, reducing congestion.
Now what was the downside again? That a cop with a warrant may be able to snoop where I have been driving? I am not too worried about that.
would have done, or much more than the US. Their numbers look better in some cases due to historical accidents and low-population and economic growth. "Hey, we are committing economic and demographic suicide, but are closer to our Kyoto targets than you" is not much of an argument. It actually makes the anti-Kyoto point.
protect your legs, shoes, and backpack/briefcase. Also, if is hot out (ie, any time from May to September in Japan) you will loathe wearing any clothes at all, let alone a raincoat, even a good "breathable" one. In the winter, you have the opposite problem. Cold is bad, wet and cold is far worse. Couple that with the other problem of it being far hotter in the morning than at night for my regular commute, which makes it necessary to have layered clothing. Because of weather, I can only use my bike about 3-4 days per week. Any way you cut it, you need public transporation to back up your bicycle.
It is a chicken and egg problem. Europe went one way because cars never caught on the first place, and then went through a self-reinforcing positive feed-back loop where public transportation kept reinforcing itself (same is true in Japan). America, Canada, and Australia started on the other side of the tipping point, due to their relative youth and low density. They went through a series of positive feedback loops in the opposite direction, with car transportation reinforcing itself over and over again. Unfortunately, in hindsight, we tipped the wrong way. However, getting to a European-style system from where we currently are is almost impossible. It reminds me of the standard equilibrium diagram we all learn in high school chemistry. The "activation energy" of switching from a less-favored but kinetically favorable state to the lower-energy thermodynamically favored state is, unfortunately, enormous. Europe cannot play "holier than thou" in this matter because they never had to climb that mountain. Rather, they got where they are due to historical accident and favorable demographic and geographic trends.
Building a few more cross-walks is not going to solve the problem.
Of course, I live in Japan, which makes all the difference. I can only use my bike BECAUSE there available public transportation in case of rain or extreme temperatures. When I move back to the states next month, I will live the same distance from work, but be forced to drive. If I road my bike, I would get stuck at work with no way home far too often. I have also lived in Europe, and used public transportation. I also used public transporation every day while I was in grad school in the states. Why? Because I happened to be in a large enough city to support it. Europe really has two advantages when it comes to public transporation. First, of course, is the density issue. Just as important, however, is that most major European cities were built BEFORE cars. Therefore, the streets are often too narrow to support them. American cities, in contrast, were generally built POST car, and were designed to handle larger numbers of them. From there, it has simply been an issue of positive feedback.
Motorcycles suffer the same problems as bicycles. They require relatively fair weather (or a tolerence for getting a bit wet and/or sweaty) and are increadibly dangerous relative to cars or public transporation.
broke it. They will not meet their targets, and frankly, the only reason they are within a country mile is the annexation of East Germany by West, and the fact that Britain turned out to be sitting on a zillion cubic feet of natural gas. Most European nations are performing terribly, many even worse than the US (in relative terms to 1990 baseline). Also, Europe has had very little population growth, while the US has.
Europeans like to play "holier than thou", but in reality, their lower emissions are largely due to population density and mild climate. Not surprisingly, low-density, harsh-climate nations such as US, Canada, and Australia all have similar emissions profiles.