You cannot do things that built around X GB cap/usage... Or kicks in after Y Mb, etc.
Sure you can, it's just that nobody will pay for a high enough cap. The problem at the moment is that competition is working against such things. If ISP X offers 100G download for $29.95/month and ISP Y offers 100G download for $89.95/month then the uninformed masses will go with ISP X every time. Of course ISP X can't really deliver that 100G/month because their pipes aren't fat enough. ISP Y can, but nobody wants to pay $89.95/month for something that they can (or think they can) get for $29.95/month, so instead of voting with their wallets they go and pollute forums with childish comments about how much ISP X sucks at pr0n o'clock when all the single guys finish work.
ISP X doesn't care. They have a large customer base and are raking in the profits. ISP Y either goes bust because they don't have enough customers, or drop their prices to match ISP X, with a corresponding decrease in network quality to the point where they are just as bad as ISP X.
The internet is littered with blog posts and forums with people carrying on like babies about how their ISP sucks, but they will never actually go and find a better ISP because it will cost them more and they don't actually want to pay for what they need.
IMHO, a bit of regulation related to disclosure of contention ratios and other network metrics would go a long way towards improving things for everyone.
Therefore even if we burned all of the oil in all of the earth's crust right now, we'd only recreate the athmospheric situation of the age of the dinosaurs
Not so. Lots of CO2 comes from volcanic sources. For millions of years, Earth has been pumping out CO2 and for those same millions of years, animals and plants have been dying and getting burried underground, effectively maintaining an approximate balance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Releasing all the stored CO2 into the atmosphere is going to cause a problem, and some would argue that it is already causing a problem.
I'm not sure that pumping water vapour into the air is a solution though. As I understand it, water vapour is itself a pretty powerful greenhouse gas...
Can TBF handle clients that use UDP with spoofed source headers for each packet (perhaps the source could be a crypto sequence from a previously shared secret).
In the past I've used TBF limits on a per IP basis, which would obviously break under your proposed hack. Doing it per-connection would solve that though, provided the shaping device was located somewhere (in terms of network topology) where it could access that information, which would be harder.
I know what I'd do. I'd use spoofed UDP headers, multi-home my machine for more bit buckets, and other attack-y stuff.
'Terms Of Service' would take care of that. If, somehow, you exceeded the high bandwidth traffic caps ('Interactive' and 'Download' in my scheme), it would be noticed via per port traffic reports, and an excess usage fee of $1/MB would be added to your monthly bill. This would be clearly stated in your contract. You wouldn't do it twice, and if you were smart, you wouldn't do it the first time either:p
I'd love to have an ISP that could do something like the following:
1. My hardware identifies traffic streams as 'Interactive', 'Download', and 'Bulk Download'. 'Interactive' is the obvious ssh, rdp, etc traffic. 'Download' is for stuff I want sooner rather than later, 'Bulk Download' is for stuff that I don't necessarily want so fast (eg torrents).
2. I get 'Interactive' traffic at full speed for the first 10MBytes and then at a much lower speed after that, eg a Token Bucket Filter. The 'much lower speed' is to stop customers just classifying their p2p data as 'Interactive', but the initial 10Mbyte bucket ensures that you'll never hit it otherwise.
3. I get 'Download' traffic at full speed (lower than interactive though) for the first (say) 200MBytes and then at a lower speed after that. I'm not sure how well TBF's scale up to the bucket being 1GByte though...
4. I get 'Bulk Download' traffic at whatever is left over after other customers 'Interactive' and 'Download' traffic is taken into account, up to my monthly download limit (eg 20G or whatever)
This only happens on the customer end of the ISP's business, and because it is done in agreement with the customer (eg the customer nominates the tier of their traffic) I don't think it breaks net neutrality in any way. If an ISP did this sort of thing without customer agreement then the deal is off...
I've done this sort of TBF shaping (eg with a big bucket) on a smaller scale at the local library and it works really really well. They offer free 802.11abg wireless that works at the full 20mbits/second off of the DSL for the first 10MBytes, and then shapes back to 200kbits/second after that. People coming in to surf, chat, or update facebook etc never notice the limit, but anyone using p2p gets shaped down almost immediately. No deep packet inspection or anything required at all. Having the tiers though would mean that your interactive traffic doesn't suffer just because you hit your download limit...
Anyone reminded of Donnie Darko?
on
Blown to Bits
·
· Score: 1
Without reading anything yet, when I first saw the image on the cover of that book I thought I was looking at an orange version of the DVD cover of Donnie Darko
Obviously, looking closer, the cover of "Blown to Bits" is a pair of orange forearms, while the Donnie Darko image is of a translucent demonic rabbit, but still...
Who do you think should be presedent? Gary Lawson?
I couldn't find anyone by that name on wikipedia... did you mean Gary Larson? I'm not sure he'd be a good person to wield such power, but it would be a fun ride all the way down!
99% of the time now, I have the card back before I even sign anything, if I have to sign at all.
The signature on my CC is well and truly rubbed off from just being in my wallet. In the 3 or so times a day I use it for the past 18 months or so since the signature faded from sight, I have only had one checkout chick even comment on it. This is what you get when you don't pay your employees enough to care:)
My bank has just recently sent out material saying that we can use a pin on our VISA card instead of a signature if we want, and one, the other, or both can be nominated as valid on a per card basis.
I wouldn't expect to receive one of these unless you're wealthy and there's material out on the net attesting to the fact.
I disagree. It's far easier (and cheaper) to send email to 1 million addresses than it is to figure out which of those 1 million people might be a good target.
I've received at least one of these (eg one that's actually made it past my spam filters), and while I completely knew it to be a scam, it still made me feel pretty yucky inside for some reason... imagine how you would feel if you were paranoid by nature:(
Something tells me that a lot of people are going to be looking up Oort Cloud on Wikipedia in the next few minutes...
I know I just did:)
I was listening to a radio show last week where listeners phone in with science question and the Oort Cloud was described as a cloud of matter outside the galaxy, which isn't what I thought it was so I meant to look it up a week ago. I missed the question though, so maybe it was about this object.
I hope that all of those people who thought that getting users to blindly accept self signed certs was a good idea are starting to feel a bit stupid now...
An SSL cert signed by a trusted central authority isn't the absolute solution to all mitm attacks, but it's a whole lot closer to 'safer' than not.
Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?
Neither. If I was ever falsely accused and taken to court for something really unsavoury then having my name come up against the charges would not be such a good thing.
Is it the records of the court case itself or the names of the people involved that is the important thing here? I'd say the former, in which case anonymising the names of those involved seems like quite a reasonable thing to do.
Anonymising of email addresses is done all the time on publicly archived mailing lists and I don't hear an outcry about that.
But still pretty smart. They used to show up at the butcher across from the office every day at the same time and knock (peck) on the door until he came out and gave them some meat.
Each Big Bang throws the dice and resets the constants
Until it sets g too low and the universe expands forever instead of collapsing, or time doesn't increment. Or maybe our glorious intelligent designer has put a constraint in to make sure this can't happen:)
If you tell someone you're not interested why do you then wait for their approval?
Politeness mainly. The person on the other end of the phone is just doing their job. If they are going to do it politely them I'm going to be polite back. Some are charities and the callers are volunteers trying to make a difference to the work.
I have a 21 month old and was a stay-at-home dad for 18 months, ringer goes off just before nap time, I make sure that the answering machine isn't getting tons of messages, and the ringer goes off again just before dinner time.
My oldest daughter has aspergers and while she attends a normal school, some days it just gets a bit much for her and we get a call saying she's had a meltdown (she gets stressed really easy too) and so we go and pick her up. A bad day at school can set her back a long way in terms of her ability to handle day to day life, so we take the approach that it's better to just get her home to de-stress a bit and try again tomorrow. As she gets older she's getting better able to cope, but it's still an issue sometimes. Sometimes the school calls about other things though that don't require immediate attention. I can't tell the difference until I answer the call, which is a bit of a pain during nap time for the younger children. Nap time almost isn't an issue anymore though as the youngest child is getting older.
Ditto for work with the cell phone (i think the call priority thing would work better on the cell phone actually). When i'm rostered onto after hours support and my cell phone rings, I'd like it not to ring unless the call is more important than what I'm doing right now. Eg if i'm in the middle of cooking dinner and someone's not getting email then that can probably wait. On the other hand if a critical system has failed and 50 factory workers are now being paid to stand around doing nothing then that's a bit more important.
Or if i'm in a meeting I would normally turn the cell phone off, but there are some calls i'd still like to get, eg when my wife is about to go into labor, or when she's had another gallbladder attack, or one of the kids has had an accident at school or creche.
At the end of the day, these phones are just tools that we use, and I think an ability to convey the urgency of the call would allow me to make better use of them.
Sometimes the drugs can turn people's lives around.
Amen to that. Just because Ritalin (and similar drugs) is over-prescribed doesn't mean that it doesn't do wonders for those that it is correctly prescribed to. As an adult, or at least someone old enough to ask the question, you are the best informed person to know if it's making your life better or worse (as opposed to some parents for whom it makes their life better but not necessarily their childs), so there isn't a lot of harm to be had from giving it a go if it is recommended by a psychiatrist.
Some people live with ADHD without any drugs and wouldn't have it any other way. That's great for them, but if you are miserable, or think that your life could be better, then I think at least trying medication is probably a good idea. The same is true for various other forms of mental 'illness'.
I tried Ritalin for a bit, and found that I became a lot more social. I was actually happy to chat and meet with people as opposed to being a bit of a recluse. In the end though I found the 'come down' afterwards was making me pretty irritable and cranky, so I stopped taking it. I later found I could get roughly the same effect from heavily caffeinated softdrinks:) (I'd never really touched coffee before).
Whether we like it or not, the world needs telemarketers
I think you have a different definition of the word 'need' than I do.
Next time a telemarketer calls during a nice dinner with your family, remember, you don't have to answer the phone, so if you do, you're the one interrupting your dinner
Now you are just being silly. Whether you answer the phone or not, it's still an interruption. And if someone calls around dinner time there is a certain expectation that it's probably an important call (eg 'help! i've fallen and I can't get up'), as that's not really a polite time to call otherwise.
And I hate telemarketers using predictive dialers. If someone calls me up then I expect them to be at the other end of the phone ready to answer when I pick up the phone and say "Hello?". I don't care how many cents they are saving by using a predictive dialer, if I get silence when I answer the phone I wait until a person starts talking and then immediately hang up.
I don't really mind the occasional telemarketing call, provided: . They don't use predictive diallers . They don't call at dinner time (eg between 6 and 8) . They don't call when my young kids are having a nap (eg between 1 and 3) . They respond to the words "I'm not interested" with a "Thankyou. Have a nice day." or something of equal civility.
I would love to see telco's implement a 'call importance' scheme where you append a digit from 0-3 to the end of the dialed number. The numbers would equate to something like:
0. Completely unimportant. Don't even bother getting off the couch to pick up the phone for this one. 1. Normal importance. Nothing urgent. 2. High importance. 3. Really high importance. Lives will be lost if you don't take this call.
Telemarketers would be forced to use 0 on pain of really high penalties. This would reduce the need for a do not call register.
If you didn't want to be disturbed (eg sleep time) you'd set your phone to 2 or 3 and it would only ring if a call of that or higher importance came through.
The normal response to this suggestion is "but telemarketers won't follow the rules", but in the very least, any telemarketer calling me on anything but a 0 importance would get a thorough yelling at, and i'd feel better:)
Before my Asterisk setup failed the WAF (too much echo), I diverted 'private' numbers, and numbers from Queensland (we live in Victoria and the only calls we get from Queensland are telemarketers from outside Australia bouncing in via Queensland numbers) to a call screening message telling them to press '0' to make the phone ring. Given that most telemarketers hang up immediately upon hearing a recorded message it worked wonders:)
As an added bonus you can even blacklist callers so you can get rid of the telemarketers.
That might not be useful in this case. My immediate assumption was that the article was about someone logging into a predictive dialer... I hope I'm wrong, otherwise we're going to have pages of posts helping a telemarketer do his or her job:)
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can, it's just that nobody will pay for a high enough cap. The problem at the moment is that competition is working against such things. If ISP X offers 100G download for $29.95/month and ISP Y offers 100G download for $89.95/month then the uninformed masses will go with ISP X every time. Of course ISP X can't really deliver that 100G/month because their pipes aren't fat enough. ISP Y can, but nobody wants to pay $89.95/month for something that they can (or think they can) get for $29.95/month, so instead of voting with their wallets they go and pollute forums with childish comments about how much ISP X sucks at pr0n o'clock when all the single guys finish work.
ISP X doesn't care. They have a large customer base and are raking in the profits. ISP Y either goes bust because they don't have enough customers, or drop their prices to match ISP X, with a corresponding decrease in network quality to the point where they are just as bad as ISP X.
The internet is littered with blog posts and forums with people carrying on like babies about how their ISP sucks, but they will never actually go and find a better ISP because it will cost them more and they don't actually want to pay for what they need.
IMHO, a bit of regulation related to disclosure of contention ratios and other network metrics would go a long way towards improving things for everyone.
And that's my rant for today :)
Not so. Lots of CO2 comes from volcanic sources. For millions of years, Earth has been pumping out CO2 and for those same millions of years, animals and plants have been dying and getting burried underground, effectively maintaining an approximate balance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Releasing all the stored CO2 into the atmosphere is going to cause a problem, and some would argue that it is already causing a problem.
I'm not sure that pumping water vapour into the air is a solution though. As I understand it, water vapour is itself a pretty powerful greenhouse gas...
In the past I've used TBF limits on a per IP basis, which would obviously break under your proposed hack. Doing it per-connection would solve that though, provided the shaping device was located somewhere (in terms of network topology) where it could access that information, which would be harder.
'Terms Of Service' would take care of that. If, somehow, you exceeded the high bandwidth traffic caps ('Interactive' and 'Download' in my scheme), it would be noticed via per port traffic reports, and an excess usage fee of $1/MB would be added to your monthly bill. This would be clearly stated in your contract. You wouldn't do it twice, and if you were smart, you wouldn't do it the first time either :p
That won't make any difference. Over a long enough period (eg 30 minutes) it won't matter. Look up Token Bucket Filter to find out more.
I'd love to have an ISP that could do something like the following:
1. My hardware identifies traffic streams as 'Interactive', 'Download', and 'Bulk Download'. 'Interactive' is the obvious ssh, rdp, etc traffic. 'Download' is for stuff I want sooner rather than later, 'Bulk Download' is for stuff that I don't necessarily want so fast (eg torrents).
2. I get 'Interactive' traffic at full speed for the first 10MBytes and then at a much lower speed after that, eg a Token Bucket Filter. The 'much lower speed' is to stop customers just classifying their p2p data as 'Interactive', but the initial 10Mbyte bucket ensures that you'll never hit it otherwise.
3. I get 'Download' traffic at full speed (lower than interactive though) for the first (say) 200MBytes and then at a lower speed after that. I'm not sure how well TBF's scale up to the bucket being 1GByte though...
4. I get 'Bulk Download' traffic at whatever is left over after other customers 'Interactive' and 'Download' traffic is taken into account, up to my monthly download limit (eg 20G or whatever)
This only happens on the customer end of the ISP's business, and because it is done in agreement with the customer (eg the customer nominates the tier of their traffic) I don't think it breaks net neutrality in any way. If an ISP did this sort of thing without customer agreement then the deal is off...
I've done this sort of TBF shaping (eg with a big bucket) on a smaller scale at the local library and it works really really well. They offer free 802.11abg wireless that works at the full 20mbits/second off of the DSL for the first 10MBytes, and then shapes back to 200kbits/second after that. People coming in to surf, chat, or update facebook etc never notice the limit, but anyone using p2p gets shaped down almost immediately. No deep packet inspection or anything required at all. Having the tiers though would mean that your interactive traffic doesn't suffer just because you hit your download limit...
Without reading anything yet, when I first saw the image on the cover of that book I thought I was looking at an orange version of the DVD cover of Donnie Darko
Obviously, looking closer, the cover of "Blown to Bits" is a pair of orange forearms, while the Donnie Darko image is of a translucent demonic rabbit, but still...
I couldn't find anyone by that name on wikipedia... did you mean Gary Larson? I'm not sure he'd be a good person to wield such power, but it would be a fun ride all the way down!
The signature on my CC is well and truly rubbed off from just being in my wallet. In the 3 or so times a day I use it for the past 18 months or so since the signature faded from sight, I have only had one checkout chick even comment on it. This is what you get when you don't pay your employees enough to care :)
My bank has just recently sent out material saying that we can use a pin on our VISA card instead of a signature if we want, and one, the other, or both can be nominated as valid on a per card basis.
I disagree. It's far easier (and cheaper) to send email to 1 million addresses than it is to figure out which of those 1 million people might be a good target.
I've received at least one of these (eg one that's actually made it past my spam filters), and while I completely knew it to be a scam, it still made me feel pretty yucky inside for some reason... imagine how you would feel if you were paranoid by nature :(
I think that's why he bold-ed the last digit
I know I just did :)
I was listening to a radio show last week where listeners phone in with science question and the Oort Cloud was described as a cloud of matter outside the galaxy, which isn't what I thought it was so I meant to look it up a week ago. I missed the question though, so maybe it was about this object.
No, but it has a lot to do with the consequences of hijacked BGP peering sessions. Most other people got it.
Stupid is in the eye of the beholder in that case... a stupid idea is only a stupid idea to the people who didn't make money off it.
I hope that all of those people who thought that getting users to blindly accept self signed certs was a good idea are starting to feel a bit stupid now...
An SSL cert signed by a trusted central authority isn't the absolute solution to all mitm attacks, but it's a whole lot closer to 'safer' than not.
or until they actually drive a electric sports car. I think they'll change their minds then :)
Neither. If I was ever falsely accused and taken to court for something really unsavoury then having my name come up against the charges would not be such a good thing.
Is it the records of the court case itself or the names of the people involved that is the important thing here? I'd say the former, in which case anonymising the names of those involved seems like quite a reasonable thing to do.
Anonymising of email addresses is done all the time on publicly archived mailing lists and I don't hear an outcry about that.
About your managers... their names weren't Bob and Bob were they?
But still pretty smart. They used to show up at the butcher across from the office every day at the same time and knock (peck) on the door until he came out and gave them some meat.
And if he does, he needn't worry about birth control...
Until it sets g too low and the universe expands forever instead of collapsing, or time doesn't increment. Or maybe our glorious intelligent designer has put a constraint in to make sure this can't happen :)
Politeness mainly. The person on the other end of the phone is just doing their job. If they are going to do it politely them I'm going to be polite back. Some are charities and the callers are volunteers trying to make a difference to the work.
My oldest daughter has aspergers and while she attends a normal school, some days it just gets a bit much for her and we get a call saying she's had a meltdown (she gets stressed really easy too) and so we go and pick her up. A bad day at school can set her back a long way in terms of her ability to handle day to day life, so we take the approach that it's better to just get her home to de-stress a bit and try again tomorrow. As she gets older she's getting better able to cope, but it's still an issue sometimes. Sometimes the school calls about other things though that don't require immediate attention. I can't tell the difference until I answer the call, which is a bit of a pain during nap time for the younger children. Nap time almost isn't an issue anymore though as the youngest child is getting older.
Ditto for work with the cell phone (i think the call priority thing would work better on the cell phone actually). When i'm rostered onto after hours support and my cell phone rings, I'd like it not to ring unless the call is more important than what I'm doing right now. Eg if i'm in the middle of cooking dinner and someone's not getting email then that can probably wait. On the other hand if a critical system has failed and 50 factory workers are now being paid to stand around doing nothing then that's a bit more important.
Or if i'm in a meeting I would normally turn the cell phone off, but there are some calls i'd still like to get, eg when my wife is about to go into labor, or when she's had another gallbladder attack, or one of the kids has had an accident at school or creche.
At the end of the day, these phones are just tools that we use, and I think an ability to convey the urgency of the call would allow me to make better use of them.
Amen to that. Just because Ritalin (and similar drugs) is over-prescribed doesn't mean that it doesn't do wonders for those that it is correctly prescribed to. As an adult, or at least someone old enough to ask the question, you are the best informed person to know if it's making your life better or worse (as opposed to some parents for whom it makes their life better but not necessarily their childs), so there isn't a lot of harm to be had from giving it a go if it is recommended by a psychiatrist.
Some people live with ADHD without any drugs and wouldn't have it any other way. That's great for them, but if you are miserable, or think that your life could be better, then I think at least trying medication is probably a good idea. The same is true for various other forms of mental 'illness'.
I tried Ritalin for a bit, and found that I became a lot more social. I was actually happy to chat and meet with people as opposed to being a bit of a recluse. In the end though I found the 'come down' afterwards was making me pretty irritable and cranky, so I stopped taking it. I later found I could get roughly the same effect from heavily caffeinated softdrinks :) (I'd never really touched coffee before).
I think you have a different definition of the word 'need' than I do.
Now you are just being silly. Whether you answer the phone or not, it's still an interruption. And if someone calls around dinner time there is a certain expectation that it's probably an important call (eg 'help! i've fallen and I can't get up'), as that's not really a polite time to call otherwise.
And I hate telemarketers using predictive dialers. If someone calls me up then I expect them to be at the other end of the phone ready to answer when I pick up the phone and say "Hello?". I don't care how many cents they are saving by using a predictive dialer, if I get silence when I answer the phone I wait until a person starts talking and then immediately hang up.
I don't really mind the occasional telemarketing call, provided:
. They don't use predictive diallers
. They don't call at dinner time (eg between 6 and 8)
. They don't call when my young kids are having a nap (eg between 1 and 3)
. They respond to the words "I'm not interested" with a "Thankyou. Have a nice day." or something of equal civility.
I would love to see telco's implement a 'call importance' scheme where you append a digit from 0-3 to the end of the dialed number. The numbers would equate to something like:
0. Completely unimportant. Don't even bother getting off the couch to pick up the phone for this one.
1. Normal importance. Nothing urgent.
2. High importance.
3. Really high importance. Lives will be lost if you don't take this call.
Telemarketers would be forced to use 0 on pain of really high penalties. This would reduce the need for a do not call register.
If you didn't want to be disturbed (eg sleep time) you'd set your phone to 2 or 3 and it would only ring if a call of that or higher importance came through.
The normal response to this suggestion is "but telemarketers won't follow the rules", but in the very least, any telemarketer calling me on anything but a 0 importance would get a thorough yelling at, and i'd feel better :)
Before my Asterisk setup failed the WAF (too much echo), I diverted 'private' numbers, and numbers from Queensland (we live in Victoria and the only calls we get from Queensland are telemarketers from outside Australia bouncing in via Queensland numbers) to a call screening message telling them to press '0' to make the phone ring. Given that most telemarketers hang up immediately upon hearing a recorded message it worked wonders :)
These points you speak of... are they redeemable for cash?
That might not be useful in this case. My immediate assumption was that the article was about someone logging into a predictive dialer... I hope I'm wrong, otherwise we're going to have pages of posts helping a telemarketer do his or her job :)