Lowering the barriers to entry is nice, but until quite a few new competitors actually enter the market, I'd like to have some prices capped, service/maintenance standards established, etc.
The cell phone market seems to be in much better shape, though there are still many regional markets with too few suppliers.
What I'd like to see is a large percentage of folks in any monopolised area call and cancel their service for just one month - just long enough to drop off the billing lists.
I would rather not see people suffer through a month of no phone service, no internet service, no running water, no electricity, and no heating.
At the end of the month, folks can either re-up with the monopoly, or try a competitor. I bet there'll be some really sweet deals available.
Whoa! Where did this competitor come from?
You're missing that cities *are* creating monopolies, in most countries
Actually that's what you've been missing with your suggestion that the monopolies could be overthrown -- in most cases they are gov't supported.
but there's absolutely nothing that would prevent us from constructing streets so that new cables could be installed cheaply, or even from having the cables in there in the first place and merely *renting* the cables to the telcos (if the streets belong to whoever lives in the street).
Yes, there really are issues with that. The main issue is money -- no matter how efficiently you think you can do it, setting up any significant-sized infrastructure is expensive. Unless you propose letting live wires sit on the ground in the middle of the road (think of the children!:-P), they must either go above the road (on posts, which requires reconstruction of the road) or below the road (which also requires reconstruction of the road). Then there's the sheer number of wires you need to run. Remember that every phone number needs its own wire pair to carry the signal, and that there are going to be quite a few numbers in a sizable town (not to mention an entire city). Don't forget all of the backup wires you need in case some wire pair goes bad (FCC requires you to restore service very quickly).
Ok, much later AT&T was split up, but that doesn't mean that today's market is free
Very true. For one thing, AT&T seems really into mergers these days.
or that we need regulation *in general*
Why? Is the market going to sort it out? It's fine to let the market sort things out for the products/services with really elastic demand, but phone/internet/utility are not that kind of product.
The whole "to avoid chaos, government did / has to..." line is just to cheap for my taste
I guess this means you couldn't refute his point.
About everything government ever did was a complete failure, putting some chosen few in power at the expense of everybody else. In fact, creating and maintaining such a hierarchical society is the primary *function* of government (as a concept).
Don't knock government as a concept unless you really think you'd be better off in anarchy. The purpose of government is to keep people's freedoms from being violated. This requires finding a middle ground between anarchy and total control, but that's a whole new topic.
Why can't the free market competition decide?
The belief that the telecom market is free is generally confined to the most naïve.
Only when the local choice of the Internet provider is limited to 1 or 2 should the government bother itself -- with anti-trust investigations, that is.
You mean places like almost everywhere in America?
Just like if the school administrator's noticed my kid playing in the park when THEY thought they should be home. They have the right to tell me aboout it, but if I say my kid can stay in the park, they have no right to drag him home.
There are also plenty of things which are legitimately against school rules which have no place being enforced outside of school. Insubordination and dress codes come to mind first.
Libertyville cops enforce Libertyville's laws in Libertyville. Libertyville's cops do not enforce Libertyville's laws in Vernon Hills.
The school is outside its jurisdiction if it tries to apply its own rules outside of school.
The point is that learning without an IDE gives the student better background on how the language works.
Correction: the student gets a better background on how the compiler works. I didn't learn anything about Java as a language by learning to use the javac tool; if I'd learned something about the language itself, I'd write better code as a result of having used javac.
If you use an editor with syntax higlighting then other than some ease of use there is no real advantage to the IDE.
Similarly, other than range, speed and power, a gun has no advantage over a fist.
I'm completely naive as far as IDEs are concerned, but is there a freeware IDE available for these languages?
I don't know about Python, but there are plenty of freeware tools for Java. Most of the people I know use Eclipse; I use BlueJ since I've had trouble getting X11 to run properly on my machine.
FWIW, in my high school classes, we used CodeWarrior. It's not free, but it was on all the lab machines, so students didn't have to own their own copy (I only got my own because I was doing an independent study and didn't always have lab access, but I still had to submit CodeWarrior projects).
My experience, though, is that the main issue for students is what they're writing, not how they write it.
Agreed. In the coursework I've done, students were graded based on how well the program met the requirements. There was a brief discussion at the beginning of each semester about what software would be useful for writing the programming assignments, and suggestions for editors/IDE's were exchanged.
It seems to me that requiring a certain editing environment is much like telling students that they must know the ins and outs of MS Word. Sure, MS Word is good for what it does, but there are other word processors out there -- we don't need people getting confused because they don't know where to find some wizard.
I know vi has the ability to do syntax highlighting
That's still a long way from what you can do with an IDE.
Syntax highlighting is nice, but I also like being able to use some other features found in IDE's:
- Creating individual objects and running specific methods on them
- Statement completion (which you also mentioned)
- Running a debugger
On the other hand when I use a text editor (especially for non-programming work), I don't much care about most features. I generally use gedit or jEdit (yes, jEdit has some interesting features, but I generally don't make use of them).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I use something as bare-bones as a text editor, it's because I'm not concerned with features -- if I am concerned with features, I'll use something more advanced (word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, etc.).
Question for the interested: If they have my private key, can they reconstruct our previous plaintext conversation from the captured packets, if we use DH? If we don't?
DH works by using modular exponents of some primitive root "a" -- the exponents "x" and "y" (one is chosen by each person) are kept secret, but a^x and a^y are both sent publicly. The symmetric session key will be a^xy (which can be found given y and a^x or given x and a^y).
Short version: Given your private DH key and a recording of the key exchange, they can find the symmetric key.
They don't want the keys for decryption. They want the keys for impersonation and evidence collection.
Added note: Given your private key, they can sign any communication as you.
Believe it or not, some people have harder lives than yours. Is it really that difficult to understand that some disabilities might cause people to have trouble typing?
Based on your numbers, that would mean that 95% of the people on the internet should not be on the internet to begin with. There should really be some training required before you can run an internet connection to your computer.
Similarly, nobody should be allowed to drive unless they can name every part of the car and explain what its function is. Then, they shouldn't be allowed to take a car out onto any roads until they've studied civil engineering.
Really, the idea that everyone who uses a service should know what's going on inside the black box is just stupid.
What if those doing the infiltrating are NSA agents?
From the summary: "Furthermore, it allows federal law enforcement agencies to prevent companies from voluntarily disclosing information about breaches to the public...."
They just put a gag order on the company whose database the NSA breached.
The Escort owned by the family next door is basically the same car as the Escort owned by the family across the street. The copy of Microsoft Word used by the family next door is basically the same as the copy of Microsoft Word used by the family across the street. These are mass-produceable products.
The billing software used by the employer of the phone technician who lives next door is quite different from that used by the employer of the gas station attendant who lives across the street across the street. These are not mass-produceable products.
The idea that you're 'mass producing' software because you press a lot of CDs is preposterous. By 'mass production' I mean some production methodology like an assembly line or similar industrial process.
Then the idea that you're 'mass producing' cars because you make a lot of Escorts is also preposterous.
No, but eventually someone will figure out how to do software engineering that produces software components people will put together in the same way people put together hardware today.
There are these things called "libraries." They are basic software components which can be put together by a software developer.
Someone, somewhere will eventually figure out how to grow it or make it on assembly line or whatever.
A car is a replicable solution to a common problem. Thus cars can be mass-produced (manufactured).
A specific piece of software may be a replicable solution to a common problem (MS Word fills the common need for a word processor) or a specific solution to a relatively unique problem (some billing application fills a company's need to automate its own billing procedures). Software of the first type already is mass-produced (copied onto millions of disks). Software of the second type is not mass-produceable like cars are because each piece of software is made to solve a problem so specific that it is not likely to appear again.
And why should they do that? As long as they follow their constituents on a few keys issues and keep the pork money flowing in, they don't have to worry about reelection.
No need to mention how much it costs; to do so says that you'd be okay with such intrusions if they were suddenly free.
Or it could be because the only problem, according to the people promoting this mandate, is that it's not free.
I really wish that IT and CS people these days had the humility to be mentored by people greater than themselves.
I'm sure there are lots who would be willing to learn... if they could find someone willing to teach.
Slashdot Mirror
New era? What's so new about it? AOL has been doing this for years.
How much of the supposedly crippled services can be performed client-side?
Lowering the barriers to entry is nice, but until quite a few new competitors actually enter the market, I'd like to have some prices capped, service/maintenance standards established, etc.
The cell phone market seems to be in much better shape, though there are still many regional markets with too few suppliers.
What I'd like to see is a large percentage of folks in any monopolised area call and cancel their service for just one month - just long enough to drop off the billing lists.
I would rather not see people suffer through a month of no phone service, no internet service, no running water, no electricity, and no heating.
At the end of the month, folks can either re-up with the monopoly, or try a competitor. I bet there'll be some really sweet deals available.
Whoa! Where did this competitor come from?
You're missing that cities *are* creating monopolies, in most countries
:-P), they must either go above the road (on posts, which requires reconstruction of the road) or below the road (which also requires reconstruction of the road). Then there's the sheer number of wires you need to run. Remember that every phone number needs its own wire pair to carry the signal, and that there are going to be quite a few numbers in a sizable town (not to mention an entire city). Don't forget all of the backup wires you need in case some wire pair goes bad (FCC requires you to restore service very quickly).
..." line is just to cheap for my taste
Actually that's what you've been missing with your suggestion that the monopolies could be overthrown -- in most cases they are gov't supported.
but there's absolutely nothing that would prevent us from constructing streets so that new cables could be installed cheaply, or even from having the cables in there in the first place and merely *renting* the cables to the telcos (if the streets belong to whoever lives in the street).
Yes, there really are issues with that. The main issue is money -- no matter how efficiently you think you can do it, setting up any significant-sized infrastructure is expensive. Unless you propose letting live wires sit on the ground in the middle of the road (think of the children!
Ok, much later AT&T was split up, but that doesn't mean that today's market is free
Very true. For one thing, AT&T seems really into mergers these days.
or that we need regulation *in general*
Why? Is the market going to sort it out? It's fine to let the market sort things out for the products/services with really elastic demand, but phone/internet/utility are not that kind of product.
The whole "to avoid chaos, government did / has to
I guess this means you couldn't refute his point.
About everything government ever did was a complete failure, putting some chosen few in power at the expense of everybody else. In fact, creating and maintaining such a hierarchical society is the primary *function* of government (as a concept).
Don't knock government as a concept unless you really think you'd be better off in anarchy. The purpose of government is to keep people's freedoms from being violated. This requires finding a middle ground between anarchy and total control, but that's a whole new topic.
Why can't the free market competition decide?
The belief that the telecom market is free is generally confined to the most naïve.
Only when the local choice of the Internet provider is limited to 1 or 2 should the government bother itself -- with anti-trust investigations, that is.
You mean places like almost everywhere in America?
Just like if the school administrator's noticed my kid playing in the park when THEY thought they should be home. They have the right to tell me aboout it, but if I say my kid can stay in the park, they have no right to drag him home.
There are also plenty of things which are legitimately against school rules which have no place being enforced outside of school. Insubordination and dress codes come to mind first.
Libertyville cops enforce Libertyville's laws in Libertyville. Libertyville's cops do not enforce Libertyville's laws in Vernon Hills.
The school is outside its jurisdiction if it tries to apply its own rules outside of school.
The point is that learning without an IDE gives the student better background on how the language works.
Correction: the student gets a better background on how the compiler works. I didn't learn anything about Java as a language by learning to use the javac tool; if I'd learned something about the language itself, I'd write better code as a result of having used javac.
If you use an editor with syntax higlighting then other than some ease of use there is no real advantage to the IDE.
Similarly, other than range, speed and power, a gun has no advantage over a fist.
I'm completely naive as far as IDEs are concerned, but is there a freeware IDE available for these languages?
I don't know about Python, but there are plenty of freeware tools for Java. Most of the people I know use Eclipse; I use BlueJ since I've had trouble getting X11 to run properly on my machine.
FWIW, in my high school classes, we used CodeWarrior. It's not free, but it was on all the lab machines, so students didn't have to own their own copy (I only got my own because I was doing an independent study and didn't always have lab access, but I still had to submit CodeWarrior projects).
My experience, though, is that the main issue for students is what they're writing, not how they write it. Agreed. In the coursework I've done, students were graded based on how well the program met the requirements. There was a brief discussion at the beginning of each semester about what software would be useful for writing the programming assignments, and suggestions for editors/IDE's were exchanged.
It seems to me that requiring a certain editing environment is much like telling students that they must know the ins and outs of MS Word. Sure, MS Word is good for what it does, but there are other word processors out there -- we don't need people getting confused because they don't know where to find some wizard.
I know vi has the ability to do syntax highlighting
That's still a long way from what you can do with an IDE.
Syntax highlighting is nice, but I also like being able to use some other features found in IDE's:
- Creating individual objects and running specific methods on them
- Statement completion (which you also mentioned)
- Running a debugger
On the other hand when I use a text editor (especially for non-programming work), I don't much care about most features. I generally use gedit or jEdit (yes, jEdit has some interesting features, but I generally don't make use of them).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I use something as bare-bones as a text editor, it's because I'm not concerned with features -- if I am concerned with features, I'll use something more advanced (word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, etc.).
Question for the interested: If they have my private key, can they reconstruct our previous plaintext conversation from the captured packets, if we use DH? If we don't?
DH works by using modular exponents of some primitive root "a" -- the exponents "x" and "y" (one is chosen by each person) are kept secret, but a^x and a^y are both sent publicly. The symmetric session key will be a^xy (which can be found given y and a^x or given x and a^y).
Short version: Given your private DH key and a recording of the key exchange, they can find the symmetric key.
They don't want the keys for decryption. They want the keys for impersonation and evidence collection.
Added note: Given your private key, they can sign any communication as you.
It's also not a complete fix because it still doesn't deal with the problem of overwriting a return address stored on the stack.
Similarly, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
Believe it or not, some people have harder lives than yours. Is it really that difficult to understand that some disabilities might cause people to have trouble typing?
Based on your numbers, that would mean that 95% of the people on the internet should not be on the internet to begin with. There should really be some training required before you can run an internet connection to your computer.
Similarly, nobody should be allowed to drive unless they can name every part of the car and explain what its function is. Then, they shouldn't be allowed to take a car out onto any roads until they've studied civil engineering.
Really, the idea that everyone who uses a service should know what's going on inside the black box is just stupid.
What if those doing the infiltrating are NSA agents?
From the summary: "Furthermore, it allows federal law enforcement agencies to prevent companies from voluntarily disclosing information about breaches to the public...."
They just put a gag order on the company whose database the NSA breached.
The Escort owned by the family next door is basically the same car as the Escort owned by the family across the street. The copy of Microsoft Word used by the family next door is basically the same as the copy of Microsoft Word used by the family across the street. These are mass-produceable products.
The billing software used by the employer of the phone technician who lives next door is quite different from that used by the employer of the gas station attendant who lives across the street across the street. These are not mass-produceable products.
The idea that you're 'mass producing' software because you press a lot of CDs is preposterous. By 'mass production' I mean some production methodology like an assembly line or similar industrial process.
Then the idea that you're 'mass producing' cars because you make a lot of Escorts is also preposterous.
No, but eventually someone will figure out how to do software engineering that produces software components people will put together in the same way people put together hardware today.
There are these things called "libraries." They are basic software components which can be put together by a software developer.
Someone, somewhere will eventually figure out how to grow it or make it on assembly line or whatever.
A car is a replicable solution to a common problem. Thus cars can be mass-produced (manufactured).
A specific piece of software may be a replicable solution to a common problem (MS Word fills the common need for a word processor) or a specific solution to a relatively unique problem (some billing application fills a company's need to automate its own billing procedures). Software of the first type already is mass-produced (copied onto millions of disks). Software of the second type is not mass-produceable like cars are because each piece of software is made to solve a problem so specific that it is not likely to appear again.
Yes, it is very important to remember that employees are not stakeholders.
And why should they do that? As long as they follow their constituents on a few keys issues and keep the pork money flowing in, they don't have to worry about reelection.
No need to mention how much it costs; to do so says that you'd be okay with such intrusions if they were suddenly free.
Or it could be because the only problem, according to the people promoting this mandate, is that it's not free.
I really wish that IT and CS people these days had the humility to be mentored by people greater than themselves.
I'm sure there are lots who would be willing to learn... if they could find someone willing to teach.
Doesn't exactly sound god-like if you've ever videotaped a fencing bout.