People contribute to Wikipedia to help other people. There is an implicit agreement that the user provides the information to WP, and thne WP allows anyone to access it. By shutting it down for political reasons, they are violating that understanding. If they think that they can't run WP if SOPA is enacted, then sure, they should protest like hell. If it's just about the admin's ideals, then they are absolutely permitted by law to shut it down, but they may be violating the expectation of many of their more pragmatic contributors.
It's easy to get used to most ads, except the crazy ones that flash red and green every 0.1 second. Don't mind them, and I've clicked a couple of them over the last six months.
The problem is slow third-party servers that take 10 seconds to process a request. Don't you too hate staring at a white screen and a status bar that says "Waiting for google-analytics.com..."? Google and other ad providers have immense global networks which are very hard to manage, and they don't seem to be able to keep all their servers smoothly. That would be extremely expensive, if not impossible.
It would be very useful to have a "temporary adblock" plugin that blocks third-party junk while the page is loading, and fills it in after the page is loaded, while the computer is idle. Maybe Google or its users (including./) have gotten smarter about where they put their javascript, because I haven't seen the 5-10second stops lately.
Most OSes still support rectangular windows as the basic metaphor, but the big players are moving away from them: Apple with the full screen apps, Windows 8 with the tablet-like interface where the desktop is just another app, and to some degree Ubuntu, where the word processor starts in full screen mode by default, and it's not obvious how to make it a normal window. Web browsers have tabs, which duplicates the functions of a window manager, with a different interface. It is generally a pain to use multiple windows and multiple tabs simultaneously (in Windows 7, the tabs show up in the taskbar, but using Windows with more than 5 windows gets annoying anyway). Some text editors even do this: it's nice that I can split the screen in 2 in Eclipse as a kind of in-app window management, but what if I want to view some reference material + one of the Eclipse editors? Not gonna happen.
Is the window losing support as a metaphor? Are we moving away from window managers, making applications become "one-stop", full-screen experiences, which include everything the developer thought that the user would need?
(I'm not afraid of this, because I think that KDE will still do window management right until something comes out that is objectively better, also for demanding users. In the worst case, I could just stay on KDE4 anyway.)
I trust Firefox with my privacy rights more than I trust Google, which is simply an advertising company.
In addition to giving better privacy, the address bar actually presents much more relevant options based only on the sites one has visited. Say I work with an application called Gauss. If I type "gauss" in the Firefox address bar I get that application's page as the first result, not some useless result on Carl Friedrich Gauss. If I need to look up some info about a class called Widget1, I can type "widg" into the firefox bar, and it finds it even if the title of the page is "Member functions for class Widget1", and "Widg" is highlighted to make it easier to see what is the match. It's also really easy, though maybe not necessary, to star a page and add it to the bookmarks. No need to sort the bookmarks, just type a part of the name and you're good to go. That said, Firefox has been crashing every 5 mins on my workstation for the last couple of weeks (maybe due to an add-on, I just have Convergence) and I'm forced to use Opera. I really do miss Firefox.
and spend 10x as much for electricity to it. No thanks.
It's a cost-benefit analysis. A PC can do much more than routing, such as acting as a NAS (with proper firewalling of course), do large downloads that you would otherwise have to leave a PC on for. And there is no practical limit at all on bandwidth or number of connections. It can record TV if you have the right hardware, you can add a webcam to look at the house when away. I think the cost of electricity is overrated, but one should at least consider the advantages and opportunities of having an always-on general purpose device.
If you want to roll your own traffic shaping on Linux, I have an example script. It can't be used as is, as it relies on my dynamic IP update script, and there are some commented out blocks. It implements bandwidth sharing per IP address, but not protocol based. I find that this setup is quite nice, since I don't have wi-fi encryption, so I need to guarantee my hosts some bandwidth. It may give you some ideas. http://www.fa2k.net/2raffic-20111201.py . I sort of recommend it if you have a lot of time, but it makes the most difference on a slow connection.
Windows and Ubuntu seem to have gotten the idea that it's best to "give up", that users don't want a desktop environment, just a fancy app switcher. It's true in some cases, like with document editing, but it baffles me that the *software developers* designing Gnome somehow got the idea that one (full screen) window is all you need for a given task. It may be good for writers and people who just write e-mails (though even these people may need to have something elese open, like reference material). I'm afraid they just saw that it worked on a tablet, and thought "that's a good idea"
Oops, I forgot about slander and libel. In practice, those are probably even greater limitations than copyright. And of course child porn laws, which hopefully doesn't affect that many people, but is still a violation of free speech (of course it should be illegal to molest children, but trading pictures of it is protected by "free speech", and would arguably help the police find the perpetrators)
Free speech is BS - there are always limitations. In pretty much any country you can get jailed for saying "i am going to kill X" even if you deep inside know that you would never do it. There is intellectual property of course, which is the greatest practical limitation on free speech. There is the DMCA, which forbids anyone to *talk about how to break copyright protections*, and also forbids anyone from actually breaking copyright protections, even if the end result would be allowed under normal copyright (fair use). In many European countries there is no protected right to free speech (which would be a lie anyway), but "political speech" is protected. Now these same countries have the balls to ban anyone from starting a Nazi party...
Since the CIA have all this info, they should be allowed to data mine it as much as they please. They get most of this info from people using credit cards (at least in the example). It's entirely optional to use credit cards, and people should be more careful about using them if they think it's creepy that the government can put together the info they are handing over. Alternatively, I think there would be large demand for a financial service that was easier to use than cash, but didn't hand over all the transactions to the CIA. Either way the problem, and the solution, are not related to Palantir.
40 GB is really cutting it short. Windows seems to take up almost 20 GB, and once you add a few restore points and a service pack (these "most people" don't know how to remove those service pack backup files), there's little room for software. There's a good chance that "most people" iwll be handling some video files, and then one really has to micromanage a 40 or 60 GB drive. I also wouldn't be too surprised if by just browsing the web for a year, the HD would fill to 30 GB just because of java updates, a PDF viewer and system updates. This leaves precious little wiggle room for pretty much anything.
Pretty much all AMD desktop chips support unregistered ECC memory. It's great for situations where you load up a desktop with RAM and hard drives instead of building a separate NAS. If Intel has two memory controller designs, I can understand that they don't ship ECC on desktops, but I suspect that they just flip a bit in the microcode, which is really annoying. AMD did it once as well, when they disabled a perfectly good core on quad core chips to get the cheaper 3-core versions, but they don't seem to disable features as much as Intel. I can totally understand that the Pentium ships with worse integrated graphics, because that's a large amount of silicon. The other stuff seems like a failure of capitalism to me -- Companies should be encouraged to make the most of their resources. People who buy i3s may realise that they want to do full disk encryption, why not give them the AES instructions?
I think one important point when dealing with website trolls and spammers is not to delete their messages, but display it only for them if you can log their IPs / username.
The effect on legitimate users if they get banned in this way is very bad, and I consider this practice to be immoral. It should definitely not be automated.
the only hope they'll have is million dollar stat boxes that make lots of wrong guesses and snip VIP VPNs.
Or just to block anything but port 80 and proxy all connections, maybe even keep a whitelist of pages you can access. Imagine for example if only registered businesses were allowed to accept incoming TCP connections. Most people wouldn't notice at all (Skype would have to re-write their software to pass the voice through their servers). These guys are practically able to dictate law, there's no reason they would stop at SOPA.
Why does Android come out as a clear winner for you
Maybe the same reason as for me: you don't have to pay a recurring fee to develop software for your own use! Seriously, I could make Java apps for the Sony Ericsson k500i I bought in 2003, but I have to pay to make iPhone apps? (if it was a one-time fee I could count it towards the price of the phone, but $100/year is just too much). It also doesn't help that iTunes only runs on Mac OS X and (arguably) Windows.
AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cox Cable, Timewarner Cable, Local Telcos, Local Library Systems, Local School Districts, Universities (both public and private), State Governments, the Federal Government, ICANN, CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, to name but a few.
Those don't own "the Internet", they own the Internet infrastructure. The wording is inaccurate, but your point is valid: this law would take away the infrastructure owners' right to deny anyone sevice (i.e. do what they want with their property). It's a pretty huge infraction, but it may make sense to make it a law if some government services are only accessible on the internet. Calling it an "inaliable right" is pure hyperbole, though.
I [don't] own an ISP. I don't own any servers. In fact, I own no part of the Internet.
Not related to your argument, but I'd like to remind all that the intenet isn't some black box that you can "connect" to, but normal users can't participate in. Since you are posting to./, you probably own a device that's connected to the internet, which is thus a part of the internet, just as much as Youtube's servers.
Sorry for bringing up the whole international thing, but we usually get these shows in Europe less than a year after they aired in the US (don't know exactly for comedy shows, but for things like Prison Break it was usually a few months). I wonder how this will play out for the Netflix content, I can only hope they allow others to show it after a while. Also, how hard is it to pirate a netflix stream?
And yes, plenty of people give gifts based on their particular passion. Apple folk will tend to give out iProducts.
Exactly. I give away electronics and gadgets all the time, I hope I'm not a bad person. I subscribe to the idea that I know a lot about some of those things, so I can find something that's useful for the person getting the present.
This is nothing like SOPA. The only similarity one can draw is that they're both using unethical methods to protect domestic businesses. However, the Chinese government is protecting their businesses from legitimate competition, whereas the US government is protecting their businesses from illegitimate competition (piracy).
If you allow each country to define "legitimate" for themselves, there is a great similarity between SOPA and this stuff on such an abstract level.
OK fair enough, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that it's correct to have a feeling of entitlement for a service that one is paying for, but you are right that one can't expect a perfect service 24/7 on a consumer plan.
This seems like an elaborate troll, but I'll bite. Your argument is confusing
[...] Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who [created it]
(emphasis mine) You seem to be arguing that BT or high transfer rates are used mainly for pirating, and throttling only affects self-righteous people who like to get stuff for free,,
No one said you weren't entitled to some perfect level of Internet performance on torrents, regardless of anything. Perish the thought!
Is this supposed to somehow be related to your initial argument? Otherwise, well done, sir, I wasted 5 min trying to parse that argument.
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People contribute to Wikipedia to help other people. There is an implicit agreement that the user provides the information to WP, and thne WP allows anyone to access it. By shutting it down for political reasons, they are violating that understanding. If they think that they can't run WP if SOPA is enacted, then sure, they should protest like hell. If it's just about the admin's ideals, then they are absolutely permitted by law to shut it down, but they may be violating the expectation of many of their more pragmatic contributors.
It's easy to get used to most ads, except the crazy ones that flash red and green every 0.1 second. Don't mind them, and I've clicked a couple of them over the last six months.
The problem is slow third-party servers that take 10 seconds to process a request. Don't you too hate staring at a white screen and a status bar that says "Waiting for google-analytics.com..."? Google and other ad providers have immense global networks which are very hard to manage, and they don't seem to be able to keep all their servers smoothly. That would be extremely expensive, if not impossible.
It would be very useful to have a "temporary adblock" plugin that blocks third-party junk while the page is loading, and fills it in after the page is loaded, while the computer is idle. Maybe Google or its users (including ./) have gotten smarter about where they put their javascript, because I haven't seen the 5-10second stops lately.
Most OSes still support rectangular windows as the basic metaphor, but the big players are moving away from them: Apple with the full screen apps, Windows 8 with the tablet-like interface where the desktop is just another app, and to some degree Ubuntu, where the word processor starts in full screen mode by default, and it's not obvious how to make it a normal window. Web browsers have tabs, which duplicates the functions of a window manager, with a different interface. It is generally a pain to use multiple windows and multiple tabs simultaneously (in Windows 7, the tabs show up in the taskbar, but using Windows with more than 5 windows gets annoying anyway). Some text editors even do this: it's nice that I can split the screen in 2 in Eclipse as a kind of in-app window management, but what if I want to view some reference material + one of the Eclipse editors? Not gonna happen.
Is the window losing support as a metaphor? Are we moving away from window managers, making applications become "one-stop", full-screen experiences, which include everything the developer thought that the user would need?
(I'm not afraid of this, because I think that KDE will still do window management right until something comes out that is objectively better, also for demanding users. In the worst case, I could just stay on KDE4 anyway.)
I trust Firefox with my privacy rights more than I trust Google, which is simply an advertising company.
In addition to giving better privacy, the address bar actually presents much more relevant options based only on the sites one has visited. Say I work with an application called Gauss. If I type "gauss" in the Firefox address bar I get that application's page as the first result, not some useless result on Carl Friedrich Gauss. If I need to look up some info about a class called Widget1, I can type "widg" into the firefox bar, and it finds it even if the title of the page is "Member functions for class Widget1", and "Widg" is highlighted to make it easier to see what is the match. It's also really easy, though maybe not necessary, to star a page and add it to the bookmarks. No need to sort the bookmarks, just type a part of the name and you're good to go. That said, Firefox has been crashing every 5 mins on my workstation for the last couple of weeks (maybe due to an add-on, I just have Convergence) and I'm forced to use Opera. I really do miss Firefox.
and spend 10x as much for electricity to it. No thanks.
It's a cost-benefit analysis. A PC can do much more than routing, such as acting as a NAS (with proper firewalling of course), do large downloads that you would otherwise have to leave a PC on for. And there is no practical limit at all on bandwidth or number of connections. It can record TV if you have the right hardware, you can add a webcam to look at the house when away. I think the cost of electricity is overrated, but one should at least consider the advantages and opportunities of having an always-on general purpose device.
If you want to roll your own traffic shaping on Linux, I have an example script. It can't be used as is, as it relies on my dynamic IP update script, and there are some commented out blocks. It implements bandwidth sharing per IP address, but not protocol based. I find that this setup is quite nice, since I don't have wi-fi encryption, so I need to guarantee my hosts some bandwidth. It may give you some ideas. http://www.fa2k.net/2raffic-20111201.py . I sort of recommend it if you have a lot of time, but it makes the most difference on a slow connection.
Have you tried windows 8 yet? It's shocking bad,
Windows and Ubuntu seem to have gotten the idea that it's best to "give up", that users don't want a desktop environment, just a fancy app switcher. It's true in some cases, like with document editing, but it baffles me that the *software developers* designing Gnome somehow got the idea that one (full screen) window is all you need for a given task. It may be good for writers and people who just write e-mails (though even these people may need to have something elese open, like reference material). I'm afraid they just saw that it worked on a tablet, and thought "that's a good idea"
- governments don't have rights, only individuals have rights.
The government definitely has the ability to infringe on your right to walk around freely (there is such a right, right?), and put you in jail.
Oops, I forgot about slander and libel. In practice, those are probably even greater limitations than copyright. And of course child porn laws, which hopefully doesn't affect that many people, but is still a violation of free speech (of course it should be illegal to molest children, but trading pictures of it is protected by "free speech", and would arguably help the police find the perpetrators)
Free speech is BS - there are always limitations. In pretty much any country you can get jailed for saying "i am going to kill X" even if you deep inside know that you would never do it. There is intellectual property of course, which is the greatest practical limitation on free speech. There is the DMCA, which forbids anyone to *talk about how to break copyright protections*, and also forbids anyone from actually breaking copyright protections, even if the end result would be allowed under normal copyright (fair use). In many European countries there is no protected right to free speech (which would be a lie anyway), but "political speech" is protected. Now these same countries have the balls to ban anyone from starting a Nazi party...
Since the CIA have all this info, they should be allowed to data mine it as much as they please. They get most of this info from people using credit cards (at least in the example). It's entirely optional to use credit cards, and people should be more careful about using them if they think it's creepy that the government can put together the info they are handing over. Alternatively, I think there would be large demand for a financial service that was easier to use than cash, but didn't hand over all the transactions to the CIA. Either way the problem, and the solution, are not related to Palantir.
40 GB is really cutting it short. Windows seems to take up almost 20 GB, and once you add a few restore points and a service pack (these "most people" don't know how to remove those service pack backup files), there's little room for software. There's a good chance that "most people" iwll be handling some video files, and then one really has to micromanage a 40 or 60 GB drive. I also wouldn't be too surprised if by just browsing the web for a year, the HD would fill to 30 GB just because of java updates, a PDF viewer and system updates. This leaves precious little wiggle room for pretty much anything.
Desktops don't have ECC. This does.
Pretty much all AMD desktop chips support unregistered ECC memory. It's great for situations where you load up a desktop with RAM and hard drives instead of building a separate NAS. If Intel has two memory controller designs, I can understand that they don't ship ECC on desktops, but I suspect that they just flip a bit in the microcode, which is really annoying. AMD did it once as well, when they disabled a perfectly good core on quad core chips to get the cheaper 3-core versions, but they don't seem to disable features as much as Intel. I can totally understand that the Pentium ships with worse integrated graphics, because that's a large amount of silicon. The other stuff seems like a failure of capitalism to me -- Companies should be encouraged to make the most of their resources. People who buy i3s may realise that they want to do full disk encryption, why not give them the AES instructions?
BOO! I'm a repeater.
BOO! I'm a repeater.
I think one important point when dealing with website trolls and spammers is not to delete their messages, but display it only for them if you can log their IPs / username.
The effect on legitimate users if they get banned in this way is very bad, and I consider this practice to be immoral. It should definitely not be automated.
Just to check, can anyone see this message?
the only hope they'll have is million dollar stat boxes that make lots of wrong guesses and snip VIP VPNs.
Or just to block anything but port 80 and proxy all connections, maybe even keep a whitelist of pages you can access. Imagine for example if only registered businesses were allowed to accept incoming TCP connections. Most people wouldn't notice at all (Skype would have to re-write their software to pass the voice through their servers). These guys are practically able to dictate law, there's no reason they would stop at SOPA.
Why does Android come out as a clear winner for you
Maybe the same reason as for me: you don't have to pay a recurring fee to develop software for your own use! Seriously, I could make Java apps for the Sony Ericsson k500i I bought in 2003, but I have to pay to make iPhone apps? (if it was a one-time fee I could count it towards the price of the phone, but $100/year is just too much). It also doesn't help that iTunes only runs on Mac OS X and (arguably) Windows.
Let's see. . .
AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cox Cable, Timewarner Cable, Local Telcos, Local Library Systems, Local School Districts, Universities (both public and private), State Governments, the Federal Government, ICANN, CenturyLink, Level 3 Communications, to name but a few.
Those don't own "the Internet", they own the Internet infrastructure. The wording is inaccurate, but your point is valid: this law would take away the infrastructure owners' right to deny anyone sevice (i.e. do what they want with their property). It's a pretty huge infraction, but it may make sense to make it a law if some government services are only accessible on the internet. Calling it an "inaliable right" is pure hyperbole, though.
I [don't] own an ISP. I don't own any servers. In fact, I own no part of the Internet.
Not related to your argument, but I'd like to remind all that the intenet isn't some black box that you can "connect" to, but normal users can't participate in. Since you are posting to ./, you probably own a device that's connected to the internet, which is thus a part of the internet, just as much as Youtube's servers.
Sorry for bringing up the whole international thing, but we usually get these shows in Europe less than a year after they aired in the US (don't know exactly for comedy shows, but for things like Prison Break it was usually a few months). I wonder how this will play out for the Netflix content, I can only hope they allow others to show it after a while. Also, how hard is it to pirate a netflix stream?
And yes, plenty of people give gifts based on their particular passion. Apple folk will tend to give out iProducts.
Exactly. I give away electronics and gadgets all the time, I hope I'm not a bad person. I subscribe to the idea that I know a lot about some of those things, so I can find something that's useful for the person getting the present.
This is nothing like SOPA. The only similarity one can draw is that they're both using unethical methods to protect domestic businesses. However, the Chinese government is protecting their businesses from legitimate competition, whereas the US government is protecting their businesses from illegitimate competition (piracy).
If you allow each country to define "legitimate" for themselves, there is a great similarity between SOPA and this stuff on such an abstract level.
Pfffft! My prosthetic horse cock penis can deliver 500 OPH (orgasms per hour)
"DP" is double precision in this case, not the other one;)
OK fair enough, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that it's correct to have a feeling of entitlement for a service that one is paying for, but you are right that one can't expect a perfect service 24/7 on a consumer plan.
[...] Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who [created it]
(emphasis mine) You seem to be arguing that BT or high transfer rates are used mainly for pirating, and throttling only affects self-righteous people who like to get stuff for free,,
No one said you weren't entitled to some perfect level of Internet performance on torrents, regardless of anything. Perish the thought!
Is this supposed to somehow be related to your initial argument? Otherwise, well done, sir, I wasted 5 min trying to parse that argument.