Is there some forum or wiki, that will will allow for a collaboration of ideas for revamping of the internet?
I have begun a blog to promote discussion of the social and political ramifications of Stanford's Clean Slate program. It links back to this very Slashdot discussion at the end. You ideas and suggestions are welcome. At the bottom of the page you will find a button to send me feedback.
You have some very scary ideas. "Shape political thought." "An establish body of enlightened thought." "Illuminate our collective consciousness." "What should be pre-established principles." Do you know what you sound like? You sound like you want to make other people think the way you do. You sound like Anakin, before he went off the deep end.
My friend - I think you are reading something into my comments, or projecting something onto them, that simply isn't there. What I mean is that we need to educate the public about the issues - to such a degree that to act contrary to enlightened democratic principles would become unthinkable. For an example - I like to believe that Slashdot itself is "establishing a body of enlightened thought" through the thoughtful comments of its well informed participants, and thereby "illuminating the collective consciousness". Certainly I am sure that many times I've seen issues first brought to light on Slashdot before finally making it into popular media (eg: the Sonny DRM fiasco). I personally feel that if Slashdot discussion had more of a hand in "shaping political though" it could only do good in this world. Ceratinly I don't want to tell you "how to think". It is exactly critical thinkers like you that we need more of.
Stanford University states their research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?"
A new internet architecture such as proposed will open vast new markets and endless business opportunities - in short - a potential gold mine for the seven industrial sponsors. The fear is that the Stanford research program will trade off attention to social and political issues for expediency in the impetus to get the new infrastructure up and running quickly.
How do we ensure that those questions don't get switched around to, "...if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a better conduit to more efficiently funnel revenues to our sponsors?" and "How should their profit margins look in 15 years?"
I know this has been a theory for many years now but to have it actually confirmed...
I hate to disillusion you, but this is not "confirmation", only more evidence tending to point in the direction that birds descended from dinosaurs.
From the FA: "He and his colleagues were able to decode seven strings of protein molecules. Those sequences were compared with a large database of collagen data." "Out of seven total sequences, we had three that matched chicken uniquely." "We had another that matched frog uniquely, one that matched newt uniquely, and a couple that matched multiple sequences."
So three out of seven proteins matched the chicken, one matched the frog, and another matched the newt..., etc. or to put it another way, only 3/7ths of that protein, or approx. 43% matched the chicken, while 57% matched up with other proteins from a variety of sources. That was a test of collagen proteins from a single source. I'd say we have a little while to wait yet for actual "confirmation", but I agree with your sentiment, anyhow.
"DRAM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections"
Skipping through the intro quickly, I read that as "DRM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections" and thought it was saying that lack of interest in DRM was a contribution to Vista not selling as well as they hoped.
We have seen more than once - that when some educational institute decided to switch to Linux, M$F came by and offered them a big discount to stay with Windows. That was the end of the school's Linux initiative.
Who's to say Microsoft doesn't have a little chat with Dell executives and say "Look - how much to you expect to make off this Linux nonsense?". The execs will show them some figures and projections. MS will reply - "Ok - look here - we're going to make you a deal you can't refuse. Forget this Linux crap, and starting now, for the next two years, you're getting an additional discount of x.x% on all Vista licences, scaling up with number of seats sold." - the logic being - it's worth millions of dollars to hold off this threat until all the big corporations finally are forced to upgrade to Vista. Once they are on Vista, MS will not be so concerned about Linux. End of Dell Linux initiative.
"There are no technical solutions for stupidity and/or lack of common sense."
Why not? I don't agree at all. That is defeatist thinking. We do it all the time in small every day ways - such as - whenever we develop user interfaces for software. Any good software developer will check user input as far as possible for errors before allowing any action to be taken. For a tiny example, when the user clicks on Quit without having saved his data, we ask him "Quit without saving?" or something to that effect. A good software developer always thinks to protect the user from little mistakes - from his own "stupidity and/or lack of common sense" as you would say. Entire systems are developed with human fail-ability in mind. We take it up as a challenge to developed idiot-proof systems, because we are all idiots at one time or another - that is to say - we all make mistakes.
We - the engineers - put powerful and complex technologies into the hands of people who lack our knowledge of how to use it correctly. Then if a problem arises from this, it is wrong to blame the user. It is the fault of whoever developed the technology.
Thanks for explaining that. It was late at night for me when I wrote that, and I was having a blond moment. I knew someone would straighten me out in time.
CNN certainly is near the top of the food chain in terms of credibility as a news source
Not! For example - compare CNN with the New York Times - CNN comes off as pretty light weight fluff.
What I do like about CNN is their raw feeds - like during a "Breaking news" event. Then I can get the information I need and come to my own interpretation of the events. I wouldn't want to depend on CNN's interpretation
My biggest beef about CNN is that it seems to me that in the last several months they have been trying to compete with Al Jazeera on Middle East reporting. So then - reporters will ask authoritative sources questions like they imagine the person on the street in some Arabic country would ask - but it comes across as phoney. Instead of asking "Well - some might say...", they will ask the question as if it was their own. Why would they want to pretend ownership to stupid questions uniformed people would ask in countries where there is no journalistic integrity? It just makes them look stupid.
Wow! You really don't like journalists, do you? Perhaps you suffered a traumatic experience at the hands of journalists at some point in your life?
Wouldn't you think that perhaps journalists could be fit to a bell curve, like people in all other professions - with the best at the right of the curve, and the worst on the left, and the vast majority clustered around the centre?...and maybe you could fit their qualities like personal integrity, honesty, and dedication to journalistic principles onto that bell curve? Maybe journalists are people, just like you and I? Just a thought...
Bees make their honey comb structure out of hexagonal cells. I believe I read somewhere that the hexagon shape conserves material better than any other kind of shape. I'm not sure what that means here - that the perimeter of a hexagon is less than say - for a square or circle of the same area? Anyhow - the thing is that the hexagon arises quite naturally in many situations, so it's not such a surprise to find it in hurricanes, on the surface of the sun, or at the North pole of Saturn.
Still trying to come to grips with this question, the following just occurred to me...
When I was young, there was a fair grounds not far from where I lived. It wasn't a complete stadium, but it had a full set of bleachers set up and a fence around it. Occasionally there were concerts where you had to pay to get in the gate. Sometimes my friends and I would go and listen outside the fence. Though we couldn't see, and lacked the comfortable seating, we either couldn't afford the entrance fee, or didn't feel it was worth the expenditure. I am absolutely certain that nobody would ever dream of accusing us of 'stealing' music as we listened outside the fence.
Times have changed. Today, with modern technology, we can have a telepresence at a performance in much the same way. A performance can be heard around the world without paying for it thanks to the digital media and the internet. Perhaps for some this is no different than me listening outside the fence? If you pay the entry fee, you get the CD in the jewel case and the inset with the words to the songs, but if you can't afford it or consider it not worth the price, and least you can hear the music while listening outside the fence as a telespectator.
"CD sales are down, but that could be due to people buying the single digital tracks they want instead of entire albums."
Have you seen the amount of utter crap in the charts these days?
Why CD sales are so far down is quite a mystery. Certainly internet music purchases must have an impact on CD sales, but as pointed out in previous discussion/research, it seems on-line purchases cannot account for the total decline. I have seen it suggested many times that the reason is the "utter crap in the charts these days", but the quality of music is subjective and completely unquantifiable. As we mature, and our musical tastes mature, we tend to become more critical (to state the obvious). Then for each person who has passed another milestone on the road to maturity, we will get these comments, but I don't think they help to clarify the question of why CD sales so significantly down. One factor may simply be that the amount of choice in sources of entertainment is growing exponentially.
According to the RIAA, we have millions of 'criminals' stealing their music, and these people deserved to be hunted down and prosecuted - every last one of them - to remove this cancerous scourge from the face of the earth. I believe this issue warrants serious research because it is a significant social issue when so many people are considered to be involved in immorality. There is something wrong here. As a software developer, I wouldn't want people stealing my intellectual property, and I strive to respect the intellectual property of others. However, perhaps music is somehow intrinsically different than software in this regard? I do not pirate music, but at the same time, I am not ready to judge others who do. Though a million wrongs does not make a right, there seems to be some fundamental issue here that we haven't yet gotten to the bottom of. A million wrongs sets up a flag that there is something that requires serious investigation before we begin prosecuting 10 year old children.
For those of you who are hoping we are soon going to see an end to spam via the use of honey pots, gray listing, and the crackdown by SEC, I would suggest you don't get your hopes up too high. Yes - maybe spam could start dropping off, but these people aren't going to give up. These spammers are hooked on their easy money, and don't seem to be bothered by their conscience. They will just move into more evil things such as identity theft.
What I wonder about the problem of bot nets - where is the leadership? Couldn't some - I don't know what - company - organization - government - whatever - start organizing an education campaign with newspaper and multimedia campaigns, speakers at PTA meetings, wherever people congregate to teach people all the things they need to know to reduce the problem? We could organize community volunteer drives, etc - you get the picture. The thing is - these bot nets represent a real evil in this world - and a national security risk. Home many people with p0wnd home machine go on to spread the infection to their offices, etc? How many of these people have sensitive data on their machines that can cause an impact far beyond that single individual? If we all worked together, we could make a huge dent in the problem - don't you think? Like for example, laws should be passed that all ISPs must do whatever minimal monitoring that is necessary to spot bot controlled machines, cut them off in the ways suggested. Why is there no highly organized effort - like a "Take Back the Net" campaign?
I got my ports scanned last week by one of these port scanning services on the internet. Mostly all my ports were locked down and stealthed, so then I started getting my dynamic ports scanned. Now, I know it would take all day to scan them all, but just for the heck of it, I scanned several thousand, thinking I would continue this way until I tired of it. Then I got to port 8701 - and it turned up as opened (TCP connect). I confirmed that with another service. I ran netstat -ano, and it showed no service running on that port. I ran Ethereal, and there was no traffic to or from that port. Actually, I even ran it during the ports scanning process, but I could not see any scanning of that port going on. So what's going on here, can anybody tell me? I run ZoneAlarm on my WinXP Pro system w/DSL modem/NAT, and I certainly haven't knowing allowed anything access to that port. I keep an eye on my processes - nothing there that shouldn't be. I have all the services shutdown that I don't actually need. This is my home computer - no home LAN, no printer even. Can anyone tell me why is that port open?
I found the concept of rebuilding the internet from scratch quite exciting. Now that we have some thirty years of experience with the old one, what a difference we could make with a new one, while at the same time having a much better understanding of how to build a network that will sustain continuing evolution on into the future.
There are a few essential things missing from the Stanford proposal. I didn't see anything to suggest that they are looking for this to be a truly international collaboration. If it isn't, that would be a very short sited omission. Also needed are the inclusion of social scientists capable of making some value judgments and decisions about how the proposed new internet can encourage social inclusion and break down the digital divide, and political scientists who can suggest how the proposed new internet can enhance democracy and international harmony.
Obviously, as the article stated, there will be resistance from current stakeholders who depend on the internet remaining as it is. Advocates of net neutrality are obviously very concerned, but it doesn't have to be the way they imagine. Imagine every packet has fields in the header that indicate its particular needs, whether that is for guaranteed delivery latency, or low jitter, or priority level, (even varying packet sizes may be useful) and every packet priced. Those of you who download entire movies via BitTorrent will be able to save money by just dropping the packet delivery priority. Really, if you want a certain movie, usually it doesn't matter if you get it today or tomorrow or next week. Imagine if you could set the priority - and the corresponding price per packet so low that it takes a whole week to deliver, but costs you only pennies?
The thing is - the current internet IS broken. The article states that current economics can't sustain it as it is, without going into much detail. They do state as evidence, however, that six out of the seven biggest ISPs have had to restructure in an attempt to sustain profitability. Our society (and more to the point, our economies) are growing more dependent on the internet day by day, but we dare not depend on it as we do. In its current state, it is just too vulnerable. It seems quite possible that some country could declare war and launch endless DOS and other attacks to such a degree that it could cripple our economy.
Imagine if our telephones worked the way the internet works now. Over 90% of all the phone calls we receive would be somebody trying to sell us something. We would be getting calls from people in Nigeria asking our help in reclaiming fortunes. When we call our bank, we may actually end up talking to a phisherman trying to steal our money without realizing it. There would be periods when we simply couldn't call out because of endless incoming calls in a denial of service attempt. I am sure many readers could take this analogy a long ways, but I have made my point. In my opinion, only good can come from the Stanford research if they open to broader input.
I developed an application that sends CD quality stereo audio over the internet in real time (one way connection). As input, it takes whatever audio is presented to the input of your sound card (which could be professional microphones, for example) and compresses it to 128 kb mp3 before sending via TCP or UDP packets. TCP requires at least 30% more bandwidth than UDP. For UDP, about 384 Kbits of bandwidth should do, while TCP may need up to 512 Kbits. In UDP mode, some UDP packets are returned to the sender to create a kind of handshaking to inform the sender that his packets are being received.
Audio is send four mp3 frames at a time, resulting in a latency of about one-tenth of a second for both send and receive. In UDP mode, there is the option of selecting some number of buffers so that the audio will be buffered to prevent drop out. Of course then lag will be multiplied by the number of buffers. On top of that you have the latency of your internet connection. Altogether, the lag could be quite acceptable if you have a good connection.
This application worked quite well in all my tests, but you could encounter issues with getting past a firewall or a DSL router/modem. Nothing in the software deals with these issues. I would be willing to "permanently lend" this application to you to experiment with, but you would need a certain level of technical knowledge to get past your router/modem/firewall. To use this application, you would mix the incoming signal from your partner with you own voice and music. Your partner of course will be monitoring the show. This software requires DirectX.
I developed this to teach myself about winsock. I don't know if there is any future in this software since it does not employ the RTP protocol for audio transmission and RTSP for audio signaling like a typical VOIP app, and it depends on mp3. However, it works very solidly and efficiently. I have thoroughly tested it both via the loopback on my computer, and over a computer network, with both TCP and UDP. I never managed to find someone capable of helping me test it over the internet. I would be happy to give a copy of this software to anyone wanting to experiment with it, and especially with anyone that has more than my minimal knowledge about resolving these issues like getting past the router/modem/firewall. If some other programmer thinks this may have a future and would like to colaborate with me on some project, that would be great. You will find my email address on my web site - just click on "Contact me" on the main page.
Try moderating, and you will quickly discover how easy it is to accidentally mod someone -1 troll. When you click to select the desired moderation, then scroll through the page to move on to the other comments, lo and behold, the focus remains in the box you just clicked in, and it scrolls to the end of it's range. If you fail to notice this, in the end when you click the Moderate button, the accidentally chosen mod is locked in. I have reported this behaviour to the "authorities", and suggested that at a minimum there should be some warning about this, but no action taken as far as I could tell. I am really surprised that I have not seen anyone else mention this.
Note: The behaviour I just described was observed on WinXP with Firefox. The work around is to make sure that always after doing a moderation, you immediately click outside the box before scrolling with the cursor keys.
You are correct to point that out, and I am wrong in making assumption that you did not read the scathing criticisms of Ecma OpenXML by most of the inner committee member countries. You say you read the entire document, and we must then accept that you have. If we cannot assume anything about how you arrived at your conclusions, we are left with a complete mystery as to how you could possibly endorse a proposed "standard" that goes completely against the ISO raison d'être, and appears to be designed to further promote Microsoft lock in. The Ecma response to Issue KE11 (5.12.11) does absolutely nothing to "thoroughly debunk" Kenya's complaint, as you state. Your conclusion seems to be a pretty strong endorsement of Microsoft's position. This opens up a real opportunity for you. You should put up a blog elaborating on your support for Microsoft's position, and perhaps they will send you a cool laptop. Furthermore, if you share that blog with us all, perhaps we will realize that we have all been just wrong about Microsoft all this time, and learn to accept them and love them as our overlords
many of the complaints by countries are thoroughly debunked as misunderstandings of the specification. The rest are supposed to be resolved during the 5 month process.
I have to assume that rather than being a paid Microsoft shill, you just don't know what you are saying, and are swallowing the ECMA's position whole, without probably even realizing it. What you missed in the PDF that you probably never read were the actual summarized contradictions, country by country, toward the end of the document. They are really an astonishing condemnation of Ecma OpenXML.
Just take a look at this single item...
Kenya 5.12.11 Issue KE11
ECMA-376 contradicts ISO JTC 1 Directives. The contents of the ECMA-376 draft may be detrimental to the reputation of IEC or ISO if processed by JTC 1 on the fast track. The European Commission's DG Competition is considering whether to initiate an antitrust proceeding into Microsoft's alleged wielding of the ECMA-376 file formats as an anti-competitive weapon[4]. The principal justification offered by ECMA International for standardization of ECMA-376 in direct contradiction of ISO 26300, is to accommodate any tags needed for Microsoft Office's legacy binary file format. This specification for the binary file formats are not included in the ECMA-376 specification. Microsoft's alleged refusal to disclose the specifications[5] for its binary file formats is also the subject of a complaint being considered by DG Competition, and is at least arguably a violation of the 2004 DG Competition order[6].
Were ECMA-376 allowed to continue on the fast track there is grave danger that CMA-376 will become publicly embroiled in antitrust charges and proceedings before the vote is taken on its adoption as an ISO standard. ISO would also be left in the embarrassing position of having fast tracked ECMA-376 through the JTC 1 process without a public record that potential anti-competitive aspects of the draft were carefully considered.
Moreover, adopting ECMA-376 as an ISO standard without those specifications would put ISO in the incredible position of having granted Microsoft a monopoly on the migration of documents stored in its Office legacy binary formats to ECMA-376 formats. That is directly at odds with ISO's mission of ensuring that its standards do not "create unnecessary obstacles to international trade." Therefore, ECMA-376 should be diverted from the fast-track process so that risk of damage to ISO's reputation can be avoided. It is time to go slow and await resolution of the DG Competition investigation.
I won't raise the same worn out objection about slashdotters never reading the TFA, because there was a lot of material to digest, and the PDF simply doesn't allow fast scrolling to skim to the relevant material. It's a real shame that GrokLaw didn't summarize it. At a minimum, it should be made available as HTML - and I am sure, will be made available by Google if not already so. It's also a shame the probably the majority of slashdotters have jobs or families or other such commitments and didn't have the time to read this exteremely important document tonight. This is so important that must be brought up again, with the document properly summarized.
I did a deep scan one day and Symantec found a virus in my inbox. It quarantined the whole thing. When I looked at my in box, which usually has hundreds of emails going back for the past year or so, it was empty.
I simply restored it from quarantine, and went thru the emails, deleting everything I didn't need, but especially some old spam messages that I had never opened. Scanned again, and no more virus.
Now I keep the amount of mail stored in the inbox to a minimum, and back it up from time to time.
WinXP Thunderbird users will find their inbox and other mail folders at...
C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[*].default\Mail\Local Folders\
Mail is stored in files named after the folder.
Better yet, back up your entire profile folder. C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles
You can lose this sometimes when updating Thunderbird - at least - that has happened to me in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there some forum or wiki, that will will allow for a collaboration of ideas for revamping of the internet?
I have begun a blog to promote discussion of the social and political ramifications of Stanford's Clean Slate program. It links back to this very Slashdot discussion at the end. You ideas and suggestions are welcome. At the bottom of the page you will find a button to send me feedback.
You have some very scary ideas. "Shape political thought." "An establish body of enlightened thought." "Illuminate our collective consciousness." "What should be pre-established principles." Do you know what you sound like? You sound like you want to make other people think the way you do. You sound like Anakin, before he went off the deep end.
My friend - I think you are reading something into my comments, or projecting something onto them, that simply isn't there. What I mean is that we need to educate the public about the issues - to such a degree that to act contrary to enlightened democratic principles would become unthinkable. For an example - I like to believe that Slashdot itself is "establishing a body of enlightened thought" through the thoughtful comments of its well informed participants, and thereby "illuminating the collective consciousness". Certainly I am sure that many times I've seen issues first brought to light on Slashdot before finally making it into popular media (eg: the Sonny DRM fiasco). I personally feel that if Slashdot discussion had more of a hand in "shaping political though" it could only do good in this world. Ceratinly I don't want to tell you "how to think". It is exactly critical thinkers like you that we need more of.
Stanford University states their research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?"
A new internet architecture such as proposed will open vast new markets and endless business opportunities - in short - a potential gold mine for the seven industrial sponsors. The fear is that the Stanford research program will trade off attention to social and political issues for expediency in the impetus to get the new infrastructure up and running quickly.
How do we ensure that those questions don't get switched around to, "...if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a better conduit to more efficiently funnel revenues to our sponsors?" and "How should their profit margins look in 15 years?"
See my blog "The Internet is Broken" for an answer.
I know this has been a theory for many years now but to have it actually confirmed...
I hate to disillusion you, but this is not "confirmation", only more evidence tending to point in the direction that birds descended from dinosaurs.
From the FA: "He and his colleagues were able to decode seven strings of protein molecules. Those sequences were compared with a large database of collagen data." "Out of seven total sequences, we had three that matched chicken uniquely." "We had another that matched frog uniquely, one that matched newt uniquely, and a couple that matched multiple sequences."
So three out of seven proteins matched the chicken, one matched the frog, and another matched the newt..., etc. or to put it another way, only 3/7ths of that protein, or approx. 43% matched the chicken, while 57% matched up with other proteins from a variety of sources. That was a test of collagen proteins from a single source. I'd say we have a little while to wait yet for actual "confirmation", but I agree with your sentiment, anyhow.
If T-Rex was a predator (as opposed to a scavenger), it might not have been (or needed to be) 'fast'.
I got it... maybe he could just hide behind a tree and wait for some prey to come ambling by, jump out and byte it's head off!
Hit my funny bone - made me Lol! - thanks.
" DRAM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections"
Skipping through the intro quickly, I read that as " DRM demand has not matched anyone's predictions based on Vista's now failed projections" and thought it was saying that lack of interest in DRM was a contribution to Vista not selling as well as they hoped.
We have seen more than once - that when some educational institute decided to switch to Linux, M$F came by and offered them a big discount to stay with Windows. That was the end of the school's Linux initiative.
Who's to say Microsoft doesn't have a little chat with Dell executives and say "Look - how much to you expect to make off this Linux nonsense?". The execs will show them some figures and projections. MS will reply - "Ok - look here - we're going to make you a deal you can't refuse. Forget this Linux crap, and starting now, for the next two years, you're getting an additional discount of x.x% on all Vista licences, scaling up with number of seats sold." - the logic being - it's worth millions of dollars to hold off this threat until all the big corporations finally are forced to upgrade to Vista. Once they are on Vista, MS will not be so concerned about Linux. End of Dell Linux initiative.
You mean I can finally patent my bubble sort algorithm? Oh boy!
"There are no technical solutions for stupidity and/or lack of common sense."
Why not? I don't agree at all. That is defeatist thinking. We do it all the time in small every day ways - such as - whenever we develop user interfaces for software. Any good software developer will check user input as far as possible for errors before allowing any action to be taken. For a tiny example, when the user clicks on Quit without having saved his data, we ask him "Quit without saving?" or something to that effect. A good software developer always thinks to protect the user from little mistakes - from his own "stupidity and/or lack of common sense" as you would say. Entire systems are developed with human fail-ability in mind. We take it up as a challenge to developed idiot-proof systems, because we are all idiots at one time or another - that is to say - we all make mistakes.We - the engineers - put powerful and complex technologies into the hands of people who lack our knowledge of how to use it correctly. Then if a problem arises from this, it is wrong to blame the user. It is the fault of whoever developed the technology.
Thanks for explaining that. It was late at night for me when I wrote that, and I was having a blond moment. I knew someone would straighten me out in time.
CNN certainly is near the top of the food chain in terms of credibility as a news source
Not! For example - compare CNN with the New York Times - CNN comes off as pretty light weight fluff.
What I do like about CNN is their raw feeds - like during a "Breaking news" event. Then I can get the information I need and come to my own interpretation of the events. I wouldn't want to depend on CNN's interpretation
My biggest beef about CNN is that it seems to me that in the last several months they have been trying to compete with Al Jazeera on Middle East reporting. So then - reporters will ask authoritative sources questions like they imagine the person on the street in some Arabic country would ask - but it comes across as phoney. Instead of asking "Well - some might say...", they will ask the question as if it was their own. Why would they want to pretend ownership to stupid questions uniformed people would ask in countries where there is no journalistic integrity? It just makes them look stupid.
1- be able to grasp when an event is newsworthy
2- to report is accurately
3- to comment on/critique it
4- follow up later with more related news if any
I would add to that...
0- research until you are absolutely certain you have all the facts
(Not that I know anything about it - except that is the important lesson I learned with the only blog I ever wrote)
Wow! You really don't like journalists, do you? Perhaps you suffered a traumatic experience at the hands of journalists at some point in your life?
Wouldn't you think that perhaps journalists could be fit to a bell curve, like people in all other professions - with the best at the right of the curve, and the worst on the left, and the vast majority clustered around the centre? ...and maybe you could fit their qualities like personal integrity, honesty, and dedication to journalistic principles onto that bell curve? Maybe journalists are people, just like you and I? Just a thought...
Now lawyers, on the other hand...
Bees make their honey comb structure out of hexagonal cells. I believe I read somewhere that the hexagon shape conserves material better than any other kind of shape. I'm not sure what that means here - that the perimeter of a hexagon is less than say - for a square or circle of the same area? Anyhow - the thing is that the hexagon arises quite naturally in many situations, so it's not such a surprise to find it in hurricanes, on the surface of the sun, or at the North pole of Saturn.
Still trying to come to grips with this question, the following just occurred to me...
When I was young, there was a fair grounds not far from where I lived. It wasn't a complete stadium, but it had a full set of bleachers set up and a fence around it. Occasionally there were concerts where you had to pay to get in the gate. Sometimes my friends and I would go and listen outside the fence. Though we couldn't see, and lacked the comfortable seating, we either couldn't afford the entrance fee, or didn't feel it was worth the expenditure. I am absolutely certain that nobody would ever dream of accusing us of 'stealing' music as we listened outside the fence.
Times have changed. Today, with modern technology, we can have a telepresence at a performance in much the same way. A performance can be heard around the world without paying for it thanks to the digital media and the internet. Perhaps for some this is no different than me listening outside the fence? If you pay the entry fee, you get the CD in the jewel case and the inset with the words to the songs, but if you can't afford it or consider it not worth the price, and least you can hear the music while listening outside the fence as a telespectator.
"CD sales are down, but that could be due to people buying the single digital tracks they want instead of entire albums."
Have you seen the amount of utter crap in the charts these days?
Why CD sales are so far down is quite a mystery. Certainly internet music purchases must have an impact on CD sales, but as pointed out in previous discussion/research, it seems on-line purchases cannot account for the total decline. I have seen it suggested many times that the reason is the "utter crap in the charts these days", but the quality of music is subjective and completely unquantifiable. As we mature, and our musical tastes mature, we tend to become more critical (to state the obvious). Then for each person who has passed another milestone on the road to maturity, we will get these comments, but I don't think they help to clarify the question of why CD sales so significantly down. One factor may simply be that the amount of choice in sources of entertainment is growing exponentially.
According to the RIAA, we have millions of 'criminals' stealing their music, and these people deserved to be hunted down and prosecuted - every last one of them - to remove this cancerous scourge from the face of the earth. I believe this issue warrants serious research because it is a significant social issue when so many people are considered to be involved in immorality. There is something wrong here. As a software developer, I wouldn't want people stealing my intellectual property, and I strive to respect the intellectual property of others. However, perhaps music is somehow intrinsically different than software in this regard? I do not pirate music, but at the same time, I am not ready to judge others who do. Though a million wrongs does not make a right, there seems to be some fundamental issue here that we haven't yet gotten to the bottom of. A million wrongs sets up a flag that there is something that requires serious investigation before we begin prosecuting 10 year old children.
For those of you who are hoping we are soon going to see an end to spam via the use of honey pots, gray listing, and the crackdown by SEC, I would suggest you don't get your hopes up too high. Yes - maybe spam could start dropping off, but these people aren't going to give up. These spammers are hooked on their easy money, and don't seem to be bothered by their conscience. They will just move into more evil things such as identity theft. What I wonder about the problem of bot nets - where is the leadership? Couldn't some - I don't know what - company - organization - government - whatever - start organizing an education campaign with newspaper and multimedia campaigns, speakers at PTA meetings, wherever people congregate to teach people all the things they need to know to reduce the problem? We could organize community volunteer drives, etc - you get the picture. The thing is - these bot nets represent a real evil in this world - and a national security risk. Home many people with p0wnd home machine go on to spread the infection to their offices, etc? How many of these people have sensitive data on their machines that can cause an impact far beyond that single individual? If we all worked together, we could make a huge dent in the problem - don't you think? Like for example, laws should be passed that all ISPs must do whatever minimal monitoring that is necessary to spot bot controlled machines, cut them off in the ways suggested. Why is there no highly organized effort - like a "Take Back the Net" campaign?
I got my ports scanned last week by one of these port scanning services on the internet. Mostly all my ports were locked down and stealthed, so then I started getting my dynamic ports scanned. Now, I know it would take all day to scan them all, but just for the heck of it, I scanned several thousand, thinking I would continue this way until I tired of it. Then I got to port 8701 - and it turned up as opened (TCP connect). I confirmed that with another service. I ran netstat -ano, and it showed no service running on that port. I ran Ethereal, and there was no traffic to or from that port. Actually, I even ran it during the ports scanning process, but I could not see any scanning of that port going on. So what's going on here, can anybody tell me? I run ZoneAlarm on my WinXP Pro system w/DSL modem/NAT, and I certainly haven't knowing allowed anything access to that port. I keep an eye on my processes - nothing there that shouldn't be. I have all the services shutdown that I don't actually need. This is my home computer - no home LAN, no printer even. Can anyone tell me why is that port open?
I found the concept of rebuilding the internet from scratch quite exciting. Now that we have some thirty years of experience with the old one, what a difference we could make with a new one, while at the same time having a much better understanding of how to build a network that will sustain continuing evolution on into the future.
There are a few essential things missing from the Stanford proposal. I didn't see anything to suggest that they are looking for this to be a truly international collaboration. If it isn't, that would be a very short sited omission. Also needed are the inclusion of social scientists capable of making some value judgments and decisions about how the proposed new internet can encourage social inclusion and break down the digital divide, and political scientists who can suggest how the proposed new internet can enhance democracy and international harmony.
Obviously, as the article stated, there will be resistance from current stakeholders who depend on the internet remaining as it is. Advocates of net neutrality are obviously very concerned, but it doesn't have to be the way they imagine. Imagine every packet has fields in the header that indicate its particular needs, whether that is for guaranteed delivery latency, or low jitter, or priority level, (even varying packet sizes may be useful) and every packet priced. Those of you who download entire movies via BitTorrent will be able to save money by just dropping the packet delivery priority. Really, if you want a certain movie, usually it doesn't matter if you get it today or tomorrow or next week. Imagine if you could set the priority - and the corresponding price per packet so low that it takes a whole week to deliver, but costs you only pennies?
The thing is - the current internet IS broken. The article states that current economics can't sustain it as it is, without going into much detail. They do state as evidence, however, that six out of the seven biggest ISPs have had to restructure in an attempt to sustain profitability. Our society (and more to the point, our economies) are growing more dependent on the internet day by day, but we dare not depend on it as we do. In its current state, it is just too vulnerable. It seems quite possible that some country could declare war and launch endless DOS and other attacks to such a degree that it could cripple our economy.
Imagine if our telephones worked the way the internet works now. Over 90% of all the phone calls we receive would be somebody trying to sell us something. We would be getting calls from people in Nigeria asking our help in reclaiming fortunes. When we call our bank, we may actually end up talking to a phisherman trying to steal our money without realizing it. There would be periods when we simply couldn't call out because of endless incoming calls in a denial of service attempt. I am sure many readers could take this analogy a long ways, but I have made my point. In my opinion, only good can come from the Stanford research if they open to broader input.
I developed an application that sends CD quality stereo audio over the internet in real time (one way connection). As input, it takes whatever audio is presented to the input of your sound card (which could be professional microphones, for example) and compresses it to 128 kb mp3 before sending via TCP or UDP packets. TCP requires at least 30% more bandwidth than UDP. For UDP, about 384 Kbits of bandwidth should do, while TCP may need up to 512 Kbits. In UDP mode, some UDP packets are returned to the sender to create a kind of handshaking to inform the sender that his packets are being received.
Audio is send four mp3 frames at a time, resulting in a latency of about one-tenth of a second for both send and receive. In UDP mode, there is the option of selecting some number of buffers so that the audio will be buffered to prevent drop out. Of course then lag will be multiplied by the number of buffers. On top of that you have the latency of your internet connection. Altogether, the lag could be quite acceptable if you have a good connection.
This application worked quite well in all my tests, but you could encounter issues with getting past a firewall or a DSL router/modem. Nothing in the software deals with these issues. I would be willing to "permanently lend" this application to you to experiment with, but you would need a certain level of technical knowledge to get past your router/modem/firewall. To use this application, you would mix the incoming signal from your partner with you own voice and music. Your partner of course will be monitoring the show. This software requires DirectX.
I developed this to teach myself about winsock. I don't know if there is any future in this software since it does not employ the RTP protocol for audio transmission and RTSP for audio signaling like a typical VOIP app, and it depends on mp3. However, it works very solidly and efficiently. I have thoroughly tested it both via the loopback on my computer, and over a computer network, with both TCP and UDP. I never managed to find someone capable of helping me test it over the internet. I would be happy to give a copy of this software to anyone wanting to experiment with it, and especially with anyone that has more than my minimal knowledge about resolving these issues like getting past the router/modem/firewall. If some other programmer thinks this may have a future and would like to colaborate with me on some project, that would be great. You will find my email address on my web site - just click on "Contact me" on the main page.
Try moderating, and you will quickly discover how easy it is to accidentally mod someone -1 troll. When you click to select the desired moderation, then scroll through the page to move on to the other comments, lo and behold, the focus remains in the box you just clicked in, and it scrolls to the end of it's range. If you fail to notice this, in the end when you click the Moderate button, the accidentally chosen mod is locked in. I have reported this behaviour to the "authorities", and suggested that at a minimum there should be some warning about this, but no action taken as far as I could tell. I am really surprised that I have not seen anyone else mention this.
Note: The behaviour I just described was observed on WinXP with Firefox. The work around is to make sure that always after doing a moderation, you immediately click outside the box before scrolling with the cursor keys.
Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups
Indeed
You are correct to point that out, and I am wrong in making assumption that you did not read the scathing criticisms of Ecma OpenXML by most of the inner committee member countries. You say you read the entire document, and we must then accept that you have. If we cannot assume anything about how you arrived at your conclusions, we are left with a complete mystery as to how you could possibly endorse a proposed "standard" that goes completely against the ISO raison d'être, and appears to be designed to further promote Microsoft lock in. The Ecma response to Issue KE11 (5.12.11) does absolutely nothing to "thoroughly debunk" Kenya's complaint, as you state. Your conclusion seems to be a pretty strong endorsement of Microsoft's position. This opens up a real opportunity for you. You should put up a blog elaborating on your support for Microsoft's position, and perhaps they will send you a cool laptop. Furthermore, if you share that blog with us all, perhaps we will realize that we have all been just wrong about Microsoft all this time, and learn to accept them and love them as our overlords
many of the complaints by countries are thoroughly debunked as misunderstandings of the specification. The rest are supposed to be resolved during the 5 month process.
I have to assume that rather than being a paid Microsoft shill, you just don't know what you are saying, and are swallowing the ECMA's position whole, without probably even realizing it. What you missed in the PDF that you probably never read were the actual summarized contradictions, country by country, toward the end of the document. They are really an astonishing condemnation of Ecma OpenXML.
Just take a look at this single item...
Kenya 5.12.11 Issue KE11
ECMA-376 contradicts ISO JTC 1 Directives. The contents of the ECMA-376 draft may be detrimental to the reputation of IEC or ISO if processed by JTC 1 on the fast track. The European Commission's DG Competition is considering whether to initiate an antitrust proceeding into Microsoft's alleged wielding of the ECMA-376 file formats as an anti-competitive weapon[4]. The principal justification offered by ECMA International for standardization of ECMA-376 in direct contradiction of ISO 26300, is to accommodate any tags needed for Microsoft Office's legacy binary file format. This specification for the binary file formats are not included in the ECMA-376 specification. Microsoft's alleged refusal to disclose the specifications[5] for its binary file formats is also the subject of a complaint being considered by DG Competition, and is at least arguably a violation of the 2004 DG Competition order[6]. Were ECMA-376 allowed to continue on the fast track there is grave danger that CMA-376 will become publicly embroiled in antitrust charges and proceedings before the vote is taken on its adoption as an ISO standard. ISO would also be left in the embarrassing position of having fast tracked ECMA-376 through the JTC 1 process without a public record that potential anti-competitive aspects of the draft were carefully considered. Moreover, adopting ECMA-376 as an ISO standard without those specifications would put ISO in the incredible position of having granted Microsoft a monopoly on the migration of documents stored in its Office legacy binary formats to ECMA-376 formats. That is directly at odds with ISO's mission of ensuring that its standards do not "create unnecessary obstacles to international trade." Therefore, ECMA-376 should be diverted from the fast-track process so that risk of damage to ISO's reputation can be avoided. It is time to go slow and await resolution of the DG Competition investigation.
I won't raise the same worn out objection about slashdotters never reading the TFA, because there was a lot of material to digest, and the PDF simply doesn't allow fast scrolling to skim to the relevant material. It's a real shame that GrokLaw didn't summarize it. At a minimum, it should be made available as HTML - and I am sure, will be made available by Google if not already so. It's also a shame the probably the majority of slashdotters have jobs or families or other such commitments and didn't have the time to read this exteremely important document tonight. This is so important that must be brought up again, with the document properly summarized.
I use Thunderbird and Symantec AntiVirus.
I did a deep scan one day and Symantec found a virus in my inbox. It quarantined the whole thing. When I looked at my in box, which usually has hundreds of emails going back for the past year or so, it was empty.
I simply restored it from quarantine, and went thru the emails, deleting everything I didn't need, but especially some old spam messages that I had never opened. Scanned again, and no more virus.
Now I keep the amount of mail stored in the inbox to a minimum, and back it up from time to time. WinXP Thunderbird users will find their inbox and other mail folders at...
C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[*].default\Mail\Local Folders\
Mail is stored in files named after the folder.
Better yet, back up your entire profile folder. C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles You can lose this sometimes when updating Thunderbird - at least - that has happened to me in the past.