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  1. Re:If they're going literal.... on Undersized Grouper Case Lands In Supreme Court · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up

  2. Re:If they're going literal.... on Undersized Grouper Case Lands In Supreme Court · · Score: 1

    Just because one thing you do is interstate, doesn't mean every part of your job is.

    What if the states did this? "Someone sold your product within state lines, and therefore we get to tax and regulate your product even though it was manufactured it in another country entirely. Pay up."

  3. Re:If they're going literal.... on Undersized Grouper Case Lands In Supreme Court · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A constitutionalist (you know, the supreme law of the land, the thing they all swore to uphold) would also notice that no part of the Constitution granted authority to do such a thing: An application of Sarbanes-Oxley needs to involve interstate commerce in some fashion.

    Fishing is distinctly intrastate commerce (if commerce at all!), and cannot be covered by federal law. Criminal law is supposed to be a state issue.

    The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution also requires "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." I doubt 20 years prison listed in the statute is ever warranted.

  4. Re:The more things changes... on US Midterm Elections Discussion · · Score: 1
  5. Re:End asymmetrical billing on Real Net Neutrality Problem: 'Edge Provider' vs 'End User' · · Score: 1

    Citation needed.

    When you OWN the pipe you don't have marginal costs until the pipe becomes saturated. Get out of your little fantasy world where prices are crapped out by little price pixies.

  6. Re:Finally.. on American Express Seeks To Swap Card Numbers For Secure Tokens · · Score: 1

    Sure we do, it's an RFC even: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc...

  7. Re:End asymmetrical billing on Real Net Neutrality Problem: 'Edge Provider' vs 'End User' · · Score: 1

    "Upload" and "download" here is from the viewpoint of that server.

    Sending data from my computer here on my desk to my AWS instance, AWS bills me nothing. Why? Because it's so under-utilized that it's practically free. People just don't use servers for consuming stuff.

    Upload (from server to my desktop) is what it utilized, and pushes prices upward.

    Residential connections tend to be the opposite, though there's no hard rule that this must be true, as TFA points out. The pricing phenomenon is decided by how people are using their connections, not how the Internet is designed. The Internet doesn't care. And neither should the FCC.

  8. Re:I'm surrounded by morons on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    Um, your solution also only works if you get to choose when you drive home. Work a 10-to-19 job? Sorry, drive home in the dark.

    Most employers choose 9-to-6 or whatever because it's during daylight. Not the other way around!

  9. Re:The more things changes... on US Midterm Elections Discussion · · Score: 2

    Not sure what I'm doing, but I'll bite.

    The House is the chamber that produces the budget; it was controlled by the Republicans who produced budgets, and the Senate kept voting the budgets down. Several budgets were voted down by the Democrat-controlled Senate, actually, and they somehow blamed it on Republicans by saying "See! They won't send us a budget with everything we want, so it's THEIR fault!" Hissy fit drama at its finest.

  10. Re:End asymmetrical billing on Real Net Neutrality Problem: 'Edge Provider' vs 'End User' · · Score: 1

    Amazon is allowing you to upload free because when you upload you are generally going to be buying storage. That doesn't reflect Amazon's underlying network costs.

    Upload (out) is what's expensive. Download (in) is what's nearly free.

    Amazon likely pays for the entire pipe which is rated at a certain capacity; they charge those particular prices because of supply and demand. Same thing with your commercial ISPs. The fixed costs and cost of the pipe is irrelevant; the price they charge is chosen because that is what that market can bear.

    I think you should go back read about supply and demand. The supply curve is a curve which indicates how supply increases as cost increases. The whole point of the intersection point being on that curve is that price is not independent of cost of providing the service. In particular, carriers are not going to give you services for far less than they cost to deliver.

    You're diving into the finer (but equally important) points of a change in supply vs. changing the quantity supplied. Yes, a change in supply can happen as a result of a change in cost, and affects the market price. That's not the phenomenon in question here.

  11. Re:End asymmetrical billing on Real Net Neutrality Problem: 'Edge Provider' vs 'End User' · · Score: 1

    Have you deployed to a data center recently? Like, any data center anywhere? Unless you're in with people doing really bizarre, high-download stuff.. How about how about Amazon's AWS:

    Data Transfer IN To Amazon EC2 From Internet $0.00 per GB

    You can saturate your download speed 24/7 and they won't charge you a penny, whereas "Data Transfer OUT" starts at $0.12/GB, past the first GB.

    In any event, there's this thing called supply and demand, which says (among other things) that prices of products are set completely independently of their cost.

    These prices are what determine costs, and where to most effectively allocate capital (being servers, households, or routers alike).

  12. Re:Political science on Ferguson No-Fly Zone Revealed As Anti-Media Tactic · · Score: 1

    Any position of power is going to get abused by someone. Period. This is why we have checks and balances.

    Checks and balances means that anyone in a long chain can "veto" use of force, and prevent it from being used:

    0. The Constitution has to grant the legislature powers to propose a law
    1. The legislature has to propose a law granting powers to the executive branch
    2. The executive has to sign it into law
    3. The treasurer has to put money towards enforcing the law
    4. The sheriff has to begin enforcement of the law
    3. The prosecutor has to decide to enforce the law
    6. The judge has to be willing to hear a trail for the law (or can decline if any of the above has been done illegally, i.e. unconstitutionally)
    7. The relevant parties (e.g. prisons) have to be willing to impose the judgments ordered

    Ideally, checks and balances means that anyone in this system can say "Nope, I don't agree with that use of force" and veto, and the use of force dies. They shouldn't have to worry about losing their position: This is why Federal judges get life tenure.

  13. Re:End asymmetrical billing on Real Net Neutrality Problem: 'Edge Provider' vs 'End User' · · Score: 1

    Cost is defined as the value of the next-best alternative that was given up.

    In major data centers, download is used very little, to the point of being free.

    Upload to customers is what is costly, and since different channels are used for upload and download, the law of supply and demand dictates higher prices for upload in datacenters.

    The inverse tends to be true (if not as much) for residential connections.

    What you're proposing is eliminating these cost signals that help allocate capital, and keep usage of it efficient and allocated to the most urgently demanded uses.

  14. s/man-made disasters/natural disasters/

  15. Yes, we can deal with the consequences. If there's two things that are always true, it's (1) we always think things are getting worse, and (2) things are actually always getting better.

    Deaths from man-made disasters have dropped greatly over the last century, something like 95%. In present day, the vast majority of deaths are from earthquakes and the effects they cause (especially tsunamis), and even then, only in poorly developed regions.

    Imposing vast costs on the economy for the sake of delaying major effects by just a few years is pointless. Mitigating the effects is much more cost effective.

    Climatologists only tell us what happens to the climate. If you want to find out what to do about it, you have to ask an economist: The chance that we lose our food supply, or the likelihood of natural disaster deaths going up, is virtually nil.

  16. Re:I'm surrounded by morons on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    *headdesk*

    The whole point of the GGGGP is that the number on the clock doesn't change when the sun goes down. It goes down 24 hours after the time it went down yesterday, +-1%.

    DST only makes sense if you turn it on and off during the year as that 1% error builds up/down, but that's still an awful solution: If you want to drive home in the daylight, just drive home earlier.

  17. Re:West Virginia too on Boo! The House Majority PAC Is Watching You · · Score: 1

    So you're proposing criminalizing the re-publication of information that is true?

    No. Just, no. On so many levels.

    Haven't you heard of the Streisand Effect?

  18. Re:Who cares about the W3C on It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard · · Score: 1

    HTML5 isn't an operating system, it's a markup language.

    File API is a different specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

    You're welcome.

  19. Re:Defaults on Researcher Finds Tor Exit Node Adding Malware To Downloads · · Score: 1

    Nit: SSL 3.0 is deprecated and only supports lower-security algorithms. TLS 1.2 is the current, secure version of the standard.

    Since a man-in-the-middle can negotiate TLS connections downward, SSL should be disabled entirely.

  20. Re:This is silly on Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes · · Score: 2

    The majority of minimum wage workers are under 24. The average minimum wage worker is 35.

    See what I did there?

    Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

    Why would you take a proposal that we KNOW hurts people, and continue to force it on them as if it's good for them? Ask any economist; minimum wage hurts the very people it's purported to help. It wasn't introduced to help the poor at all; it was introduced to price minorities out of the job market. That's right, minimum wage is fundamentally racist.

  21. Re:Bytecode not Textcode on JavaScript and the Netflix User Interface · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure that's what Java was supposed to be.

    In any event, the problem they're discussing isn't unique to JavaScript/ECMAScript, it would plague a bytecode solution too... They're deciding to send all the dependencies they could possibly need over the wire before they know they'll need them, instead of deciding which ones to send on the server-side when the page is requested.

  22. Re:language != abuse on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 1

    At the very least, there was some sort of drama around it recently, regarding the DOM and such: DOM is supposed to be a generic data model and API for all XML vocabularies, implementable in a variety of programming languages, though it also defines an extension API for HTML, and SVG defines an extension API too. But someone decided the DOM spec was antiquated (true), and the way to fix that is to redefine it (uhhhh...). They've redefined DOM to be HTML-specific, causing API incompatibilities with generic XML parsers... it's a mess. Same thing for many JavaScript/ECMAScript APIs, merging them them into the single (already very bloated) document defining HTML. Because when all your products are about Web browsers, what's the difference?

    Apparently to Google, the only kind of user agent (nay, software) is a Web browser. (Their crawler operating like an automated web browser, even.)

  23. Re:language != abuse on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 2

    In the parts of the W3C I work in, they're awfully nice and very responsive. They communicate, consensus is a requirement for moving forward (with provisions for voting if and only if there's an impasse - I've never seen it used), and follow-ups will be made several weeks after you make an objection to verify the resolution stayed resolved. Some of the most helpful companies I've worked with recently have been, to my surprise, IBM, Adobe, PayPal, and Oracle (that is to say, their representatives are interested in consensus).

    No, I'm talking specifically about Google (and Mozilla in many cases, I think due to being Google funded). I should have said them instead. Deciding to drop support features when it isn't relevant to their business model - accessibility features, the Link header, alternate stylesheets, new document DTDs, MathML, SVG, DANE, the "http://" in the address bar... Oh, but let's go all out on WebRTC, because that'll be useful to every website ever. Way more useful than DNSSEC (that's sarcasm, yes? You don't need TLSA records when you have your own Certificate Authority.). The problems seem to be caused when they don't get their way, they fork (or rewrite entirely) the relevant specification (like HTML), take all the credit, none of the responsibility (like the royalty-free patent requirement), and then all the blame lands on the WG.

  24. Re:language != abuse on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 1

    Sure, I'll close a bug report after 30 days of waiting for a response, and do it with an invitation to re-open the issue if desired.

    If I close a bug report because I think I fixed the issue, I'll follow up after 30 days and make sure that I really did, in fact, fix the person's problem.

    These "asshat maintainers" don't bother with doing either.

  25. language != abuse on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope it's not just me, I don't really have a problem with the strong language or pointed critique. Linus only really employs it for smart people who should know better, and will actually engage in conversation, and he's typically constructive. And funny.

    The asshats are the people like Pottering, GNOME, and certain figures editing the HTML spec who don't give a damn about users, authors, and/or developers. The people who can't possibly imagine any use-case outside themselves or their company.

    They're the maintainers in Open Source who close your bug reports without any questions because they can't imagine how your use case could possibly be relevant to them. Come on guys, at least ask a question if you don't understand the bug report/feature request.