it was simply part of that pagan stuff that was folded in by the Roman church to allign it with other popular beliefs of the day
Monogamy, now so heavily endorsed by the Christian right ("a marriage is between one man and one woman") was attached to Christianity by Roman society (which was, unusually for its day, monogamous). The Bible contains plenty of references to the proper ways to have many wives.
a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_ Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement says that people that provide voice comm systems in the US must build in features that allow various degrees of FBI wiretapping.
It is possible to make Firefox do this. It is not an enabled-by-default feature.
Microsoft is enabling this *by default* and then forcing users to know about some preference somewhere to disable it. Microsoft understands the power of the default.
(Netscape used to have What's Related enabled by default, to be fair. I think that it was an invasion of privacy too.)
Are these alleged bright people going to be allowed to produce a product at any point in the future?
I'm not being purely sarcastic. Microsoft is financially very successful, but they are not (especially given their huge size) a company that pushes ahead technology. They tend to follow, let someone else lead, and then do a good job of acquiring the right person and making effective business decisions (and using their bulk) to dominate a market. But Microsoft is just not a technical leader.
They *do* have the Microsoft Research division. I'm not saying that they don't put lots of money into paying academics, and they may even have interesting research somewhere, but it's not translating into products that I'm seeing.
I can go to labs.google.com and see all kinds of interesting and clever things that haven't been done before, stuff that not only *can* turn into something cool but is usable right now. research.microsoft.com doesn't exactly do the same thing...
The barrier to installing new software is significant. That's why MS could quash Netscape.
The barrier to using another website is not very significant. Unless Microsoft makes IE just not go to www.google.com or something along those lines, they can't do any monopoly leveraging -- they *have* to come up with a superior product.
I can't think of many things that Microsoft might be able to do here. MS does control the OS and your application software. Maybe it could build an initial profile on you based on scanning all the documents in your "My Documents" folder or something, but I don't know how else they could get much of an edge on Google. I guess they can provide faster/easier access to a search text filed -- maybe tapping the Windows button or something will bring up a "search" dialog that goes to MSN.
Possibly MS could provide better content-filtering than Google and then push for litigation requiring search engines to filter content to some degree that Google doesn't.
I still think that MS has a tough battle -- but I admit that there is nobody better in the industry at stabbing people in the back:
And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
"Toeing the line". Almost every time that someone tries to use this on Slashdot, they misspell it. I don't know why -- it's not *that* unusual a phrase.
The problem is that a libertarians refuse to recognize the existence of natural monpolies. Well, some libertarians do, but the Libertarian Party does not.
Regulation *can* be bad. Regulation is not *always* bad. Until the LP decides to accept that, they're not going to go anywhere as a political party.
Personally, I would not do this through the specific legislation suggested. Crippling the Internet by holding IP traffic hostage is clearly bad for the economy.
The problem is that IP traffic, in the sense that is being talked about, is already held hostage. The network operators, the people that run the backbone, hold a natural monpoly. The way to fix that is regulation of those network operators.
Granted, we should ensure that said regulation doesn't spill out onto things that are *not* natural monpolies -- ISPs do not hold a natural monpoly, nor do application developers or business network admins or any of those sorts of people.
The issue is just what happens when there's one network provider to your area, and he decides to partner with Microsoft (or Yahoo, or whoever). Then the benefits of a free market don't exist any more.
Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance.
Free markets can't solve this problem. That's because, despite the fact that free markets *are* a powerful tool, they break in the presence of a natural monopoly, like telcos and power companies. That's why we regulate said natural monpolies.
One of the other problems with free markets is that they kinda rely on informed consumers (though theoretically mechanisms like Consumer Reports can help fill the gap, they don't even begin to address all the products available to consumers). The typical consumer does not understand routing prioritization schemes.
I don't like the government regulating those areas in which people might want to do research or work (such as restricting use of encryption, or in sending voice over IP, or so forth). However, network providers *do* possess a natural monopoly and as such do need to be regulated to prevent the market from failing to fill the consumer's needs as efficiently as possible.
I support this regulation, forcing network providers to be content-agnostic, wholeheartedly.
Now, if we could *just* take one more step and force cell providers to just be data-agnostic network providers -- so that anyone can provide applications, high-level services and the physical phone product that interoperate with those networks, we'd massively improve the cell phone market.
It's an IP-level feature, not a TCP one, and the flags are the "Type of Service" flags, not the "Quality of Service" flags. You can try to provide quality of service using those ToS flags.
ToS flags are incredibly valuable. Sure, they aren't very useful for end-to-end use (since, obviously, people will abuse it), but they are phenomenally useful for prioritizing traffic in broadband routers. Right now, people often have residential setups with very little upstream bandwidth, heavy downstream bandwidth, and multiple computers hooked up to a broadband router. Sure, maybe you can run a traffic shaper like the one above to fairly allocate upstream bandwidth, but you still have the problem of anyone who wants to actually run both a BitTorrent client and a Web browser on one computer having to deal with incredibly long page load times. Sure, there are horrible hacks, like trying to rate-limit the BitTorrent client, but since the machine running the P2P client doesn't know how much bandwidth is available (that's the responsibility of the broadband router), this means stupid decisions will be made. Not all the available bandwidth will be used some of the time, and if usage spikes up on the network, you'll have the same "overloaded network" symptoms.
ToS flags weren't very useful for end-to-end use, but they allow people to solve the "overloaded upstream" problem on home networks, which means that they can use all their excess bandwidth without impacting the performance of interactive applications (Quake, ssh) and semi-interactive applications (Web browsing).
All you need is either a properly-configured Linux box or a broadband router that understands ToS flags and can prioritize outbound packets based on hard priority bands (so that Minimize Latency packets from host A always get priority over regular packets from host A, and Maximize Throughput packets from host A always get priority below regular packets from host A). And bam -- you can suck down all the bandwidth you can eat.
I remember owning a Power Mac 6100/60. The thing had terminally slow video display, since it used the bottom N amount of main memory as video memory (why systems that do this don't let you resize the amount allocate to video memory is beyond me).
Stuffing a L2 cache into the thing (this was back when L2 was off-die and you stuffed a board containing it into a slot by the bus) let the computer store almost all of a single video image, and significantly improved video performance.
I don't intend to ever get another machine that reduces the price by maybe a couple of dollars by reusing main memory for video display. Yuck.
So, can you convert these specs into practically-useful information?
I can't take much of any data about audio devices and walk away with very useful information. Too many audio vendors have managed to distort what useful information is present, design products around inflating a couple looked-at statistics, and fluffed up their product with totally or largely useless content.
If you're seriously worried about the suitability of an audio product, there isn't really much alternative to listening to it and deciding whether or not you like it. The only data that you can pretty much indisputably use is size and weight numbers (which Apple does include, though you didn't mention it above).
You know, Apple is not the only hardware manufacturer that produces computers that do not make noise. I've no idea whether or not Dell sells silent computers, but the wonderful thing about the PC architecture is that it is open and there are many competitors.
If you block your number in the UK the exchange sends it anyway along with a flag saying "don't display this". And you can buy phones that ignore the flag, so the recipient of the call can still see your number.
Why is it that the computer world understands the concept of not trusting a remote node, but phone people cannot understand this?
Hmm...of course, then again, there's the invisibility-inducing dollar sign at the end of Microsoft's administrative shares...sigh.
Whitelisting. It had to happen. Not just to email, but to phones as well. When you get cheap and ubiqitious communication, keeping an unlisted phone number/email address isn't enough.
Of course, you don't have to be black and white -- you can have devices that trust things increasingly more (this person can leave a message, this person cause your phone to ring, etc), and the whitelists don't have to be manually created.
I expect that making this sort of functionality easily usable to the typical consumer is going to drive a lot of consumer electronics sales...
For a company that purports to "improve" your computer's security, Symantec clearly doesn't have much by way of policy on what actions can be taken based on untrusted data.
This is not the first "personal firewall" product to be attackable, either. BlackICE has had its time up on Slashdot, as well as other packages.
"Personal firewalls" do little to improve computer security, and do add overhead, complexity, and their own collection of security problems.
The real fix is to not start servers that you don't trust to be solid listening for traffic from your computer. Microsoft does (irritatingly) have a collection of servers running by default (unless SP2 disabled or blocked access to them -- dunno).
Worrying about personal firewalls, trying to treat NAT as a "security enhancer", etc...it's all crazy. Just don't open the holes in the computer in the first place and you don't have to worry about it.
Slashdot Mirror
n/t
it was simply part of that pagan stuff that was folded in by the Roman church to allign it with other popular beliefs of the day
Monogamy, now so heavily endorsed by the Christian right ("a marriage is between one man and one woman") was attached to Christianity by Roman society (which was, unusually for its day, monogamous). The Bible contains plenty of references to the proper ways to have many wives.
Maybe he's a hardware guy and not a software guy. :-)
Okay, does the plush toy they're giving away look more like a fox or a racoon?
I mean, even aside from saying +5 Funny things all the time, he constantly bashes Gates.
Larry, we need on on Slashdot. You'd love it. Jump on in -- the water's fine.
"There's this idea that because it's open source people who work in Radio Shack develop the software for free, it's just not true."
Although I didn't know that he didn't like Radio Shack. I like Radio Shack. Hmm. Maybe it just wouldn't work out.
a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_ Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement says that people that provide voice comm systems in the US must build in features that allow various degrees of FBI wiretapping.
It is possible to make Firefox do this. It is not an enabled-by-default feature.
Microsoft is enabling this *by default* and then forcing users to know about some preference somewhere to disable it. Microsoft understands the power of the default.
(Netscape used to have What's Related enabled by default, to be fair. I think that it was an invasion of privacy too.)
Bright people working for them
Are these alleged bright people going to be allowed to produce a product at any point in the future?
I'm not being purely sarcastic. Microsoft is financially very successful, but they are not (especially given their huge size) a company that pushes ahead technology. They tend to follow, let someone else lead, and then do a good job of acquiring the right person and making effective business decisions (and using their bulk) to dominate a market. But Microsoft is just not a technical leader.
They *do* have the Microsoft Research division. I'm not saying that they don't put lots of money into paying academics, and they may even have interesting research somewhere, but it's not translating into products that I'm seeing.
I can go to labs.google.com and see all kinds of interesting and clever things that haven't been done before, stuff that not only *can* turn into something cool but is usable right now. research.microsoft.com doesn't exactly do the same thing...
I read the comment, and I think that it's encouraging that it isn't just me that likes minimalist interfaces.
The barrier to installing new software is significant. That's why MS could quash Netscape.
The barrier to using another website is not very significant. Unless Microsoft makes IE just not go to www.google.com or something along those lines, they can't do any monopoly leveraging -- they *have* to come up with a superior product.
I can't think of many things that Microsoft might be able to do here. MS does control the OS and your application software. Maybe it could build an initial profile on you based on scanning all the documents in your "My Documents" folder or something, but I don't know how else they could get much of an edge on Google. I guess they can provide faster/easier access to a search text filed -- maybe tapping the Windows button or something will bring up a "search" dialog that goes to MSN.
Possibly MS could provide better content-filtering than Google and then push for litigation requiring search engines to filter content to some degree that Google doesn't.
I still think that MS has a tough battle -- but I admit that there is nobody better in the industry at stabbing people in the back:
And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Microsoft gained most of its products by acquiring things that other people had developed and using business strategy to grow.
Google just made something good from an engineering standpoint.
Word of mouth is not your friend when you use marketing.
towing the neo-con line.
"Toeing the line". Almost every time that someone tries to use this on Slashdot, they misspell it. I don't know why -- it's not *that* unusual a phrase.
The problem is that a libertarians refuse to recognize the existence of natural monpolies. Well, some libertarians do, but the Libertarian Party does not.
Regulation *can* be bad. Regulation is not *always* bad. Until the LP decides to accept that, they're not going to go anywhere as a political party.
But then Jack Thompson would whine that realistic consequences aren't being depicted which will train cold blooded killers.
Cartoons, action movies...heck, almost *every* type of mass media would have turned us into serial killers by now if that were the case.
Personally, I would not do this through the specific legislation suggested. Crippling the Internet by holding IP traffic hostage is clearly bad for the economy.
The problem is that IP traffic, in the sense that is being talked about, is already held hostage. The network operators, the people that run the backbone, hold a natural monpoly. The way to fix that is regulation of those network operators.
Granted, we should ensure that said regulation doesn't spill out onto things that are *not* natural monpolies -- ISPs do not hold a natural monpoly, nor do application developers or business network admins or any of those sorts of people.
The issue is just what happens when there's one network provider to your area, and he decides to partner with Microsoft (or Yahoo, or whoever). Then the benefits of a free market don't exist any more.
Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance.
Free markets can't solve this problem. That's because, despite the fact that free markets *are* a powerful tool, they break in the presence of a natural monopoly, like telcos and power companies. That's why we regulate said natural monpolies.
One of the other problems with free markets is that they kinda rely on informed consumers (though theoretically mechanisms like Consumer Reports can help fill the gap, they don't even begin to address all the products available to consumers). The typical consumer does not understand routing prioritization schemes.
I don't like the government regulating those areas in which people might want to do research or work (such as restricting use of encryption, or in sending voice over IP, or so forth). However, network providers *do* possess a natural monopoly and as such do need to be regulated to prevent the market from failing to fill the consumer's needs as efficiently as possible.
I support this regulation, forcing network providers to be content-agnostic, wholeheartedly.
Now, if we could *just* take one more step and force cell providers to just be data-agnostic network providers -- so that anyone can provide applications, high-level services and the physical phone product that interoperate with those networks, we'd massively improve the cell phone market.
It's an IP-level feature, not a TCP one, and the flags are the "Type of Service" flags, not the "Quality of Service" flags. You can try to provide quality of service using those ToS flags.
ToS flags are incredibly valuable. Sure, they aren't very useful for end-to-end use (since, obviously, people will abuse it), but they are phenomenally useful for prioritizing traffic in broadband routers. Right now, people often have residential setups with very little upstream bandwidth, heavy downstream bandwidth, and multiple computers hooked up to a broadband router. Sure, maybe you can run a traffic shaper like the one above to fairly allocate upstream bandwidth, but you still have the problem of anyone who wants to actually run both a BitTorrent client and a Web browser on one computer having to deal with incredibly long page load times. Sure, there are horrible hacks, like trying to rate-limit the BitTorrent client, but since the machine running the P2P client doesn't know how much bandwidth is available (that's the responsibility of the broadband router), this means stupid decisions will be made. Not all the available bandwidth will be used some of the time, and if usage spikes up on the network, you'll have the same "overloaded network" symptoms.
ToS flags weren't very useful for end-to-end use, but they allow people to solve the "overloaded upstream" problem on home networks, which means that they can use all their excess bandwidth without impacting the performance of interactive applications (Quake, ssh) and semi-interactive applications (Web browsing).
All you need is either a properly-configured Linux box or a broadband router that understands ToS flags and can prioritize outbound packets based on hard priority bands (so that Minimize Latency packets from host A always get priority over regular packets from host A, and Maximize Throughput packets from host A always get priority below regular packets from host A). And bam -- you can suck down all the bandwidth you can eat.
I remember owning a Power Mac 6100/60. The thing had terminally slow video display, since it used the bottom N amount of main memory as video memory (why systems that do this don't let you resize the amount allocate to video memory is beyond me).
Stuffing a L2 cache into the thing (this was back when L2 was off-die and you stuffed a board containing it into a slot by the bus) let the computer store almost all of a single video image, and significantly improved video performance.
I don't intend to ever get another machine that reduces the price by maybe a couple of dollars by reusing main memory for video display. Yuck.
So, can you convert these specs into practically-useful information?
I can't take much of any data about audio devices and walk away with very useful information. Too many audio vendors have managed to distort what useful information is present, design products around inflating a couple looked-at statistics, and fluffed up their product with totally or largely useless content.
If you're seriously worried about the suitability of an audio product, there isn't really much alternative to listening to it and deciding whether or not you like it. The only data that you can pretty much indisputably use is size and weight numbers (which Apple does include, though you didn't mention it above).
You know, Apple is not the only hardware manufacturer that produces computers that do not make noise. I've no idea whether or not Dell sells silent computers, but the wonderful thing about the PC architecture is that it is open and there are many competitors.
See, the right way to deal with this would be to just ram everything through an encrypted and authenticated tunnel produced by the phone at each end.
Of course, that would piss the FBI off to no end, and be illegal, but it would solve the problem.
Of course, since this would require a digital connection, it'd probably be easier to just use VoIP than to run everything through a modem.
Something like this.
If you block your number in the UK the exchange sends it anyway along with a flag saying "don't display this". And you can buy phones that ignore the flag, so the recipient of the call can still see your number.
Why is it that the computer world understands the concept of not trusting a remote node, but phone people cannot understand this?
Hmm...of course, then again, there's the invisibility-inducing dollar sign at the end of Microsoft's administrative shares...sigh.
Whitelisting. It had to happen. Not just to email, but to phones as well. When you get cheap and ubiqitious communication, keeping an unlisted phone number/email address isn't enough.
Of course, you don't have to be black and white -- you can have devices that trust things increasingly more (this person can leave a message, this person cause your phone to ring, etc), and the whitelists don't have to be manually created.
I expect that making this sort of functionality easily usable to the typical consumer is going to drive a lot of consumer electronics sales...
For a company that purports to "improve" your computer's security, Symantec clearly doesn't have much by way of policy on what actions can be taken based on untrusted data.
This is not the first "personal firewall" product to be attackable, either. BlackICE has had its time up on Slashdot, as well as other packages.
"Personal firewalls" do little to improve computer security, and do add overhead, complexity, and their own collection of security problems.
The real fix is to not start servers that you don't trust to be solid listening for traffic from your computer. Microsoft does (irritatingly) have a collection of servers running by default (unless SP2 disabled or blocked access to them -- dunno).
Worrying about personal firewalls, trying to treat NAT as a "security enhancer", etc...it's all crazy. Just don't open the holes in the computer in the first place and you don't have to worry about it.
...in what country do you expect to find 60 million rubber sheep?