Yes, algea is one good solution. I fear that the real danger isn't running out of energy alternatives... instead it's slagging our planet with waste CO2. The US government studies I've read suggest that algea biofuels might be cost effective if gasoline reaches $2/gallon. I recently fueled up with 10% ethonol... not because anyone was interested in the environment, but because it was more cost effective. Nuclear is a real option. We have alternatives.
Coal is the enemy. At $50/ton, it is way cheaper than any other potential alternative. Coal could destroy the planet.
Ah... slashdot. Good, well informed technical opinions are here to be read, if you can stand wading through the crud.
What is really needed here, however, is a wider adoption of multicast and local cache technology. That is going to be very costly to do.
I couldn't agree more, except for the cost part. Good local caching will come, and it will be free. It's my project, and likely therefore total crud, but what the heck... somebody's got to change the world:-)
I hate agreeing with a guy who can't understand the simple fact that oil production will peak someday (was I missing obvious sarcasm? If so... sorry), but...
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part. We geeks will overcome.
I basically agree. However, there are limited options. Who wants war with a nuclear armed China? Pretty much nobody. I think the best we can do is help China be stable and reasonably prosperous and hope that one day the children or grandchildren of today's leaders in China decide to grant human rights to China's people. It is very likely I will not live long enough to see that day, but I suspect that day will come. I think the path Nixon put us on with China is the right one.
I agree that Yahoo and MSN are in the same bag as Google, but giving away info about Democracy advocates is a small sin IMO compared to helping the world sensor political content on the Internet. With free speech, we can work to gain all the other rights, and therefore free speech should be our most cherished right. It should be illegal for US corporations to help other countries to take away free political speech.
I support China's inclusion into the global economy. It helps raise many millions of people out of poverty, while providing solid incentives to move forward politically. However, let's not fool ourselves... China has a long way to go.
Or, it could just poetic justice. If you do business with the devil, what do you expect? Fair treatment? For supporting China in censoring political content on the Internet, Google has done more evil than 99% of all US companies. If they lose in China anyway, it serves them right.
Step 1: Congress makes it illegal to filter political content, or for any US corporation to aid in political sensorship' Step 2: The bad guys close down their firewalls, but the US, EU, Canada, AU, etc, grow in prosperity and freedom through freedom of speech on the Internet Step 3: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all try to emulate our success, and tear down their firewalls.
The importance of freedom of political speech on the Internet can't be understated. It's the future of the world at stake.
Nope, it's Linux based, and any add-on Google writes will be under the Apache license. The video also seemed to indicate that linux hackers will be comfortable in the system, as well. Compared to just having some crap Java virtual machine, this could be huge. Hacked iPhones made rapid progress partly because they run real *-nix, and Apache was ported before any of the traditional toy web servers, and SSH before telnet, and even a VNC viewer (with a somewhat broken control interface). I guess we'll see in about a week what's under the hood.
I watched the video introduction, and one guy said it would allow a bunch of Unix hackers to develop open applications, and that this would make about 5 guys on slashdot really happy... we'll, I'm one of them!
Yeah, I got one of those, too... OpenMoko put a marketing person in charge of communicating with the open-source community... I feel slimy just thinking about it. I'm kinda waiting on the side-lines, now, waiting for a winning platform I can join. If this Google effort turns out to be a bunch of huge corporations all working together, without involving the community, it'll have trouble even just keeping up with Apple-proprietary software (which is very limited). But, the video-introduction sure makes Android sound open, and I have to love that they're reaching out to developers a whole year before products ship. The statements the Google CEO made about the potential for cell-phones sounds dead-on to me. I think he really gets it. I'm worried about the compute overhead of the virtual machine, though. Cell phones aren't a great place to burn power in freaking emulation. Hopefully, there'll be good native translators.
These super-mice articles are funny, but they keep getting slightly more scary each time. So, now we know how to make tireless regenerating fearless super-long-lived mice... good thing were only playing with mice:-)
I wonder how well it would run Asterisk, or the TrixBox distro in particular? I installed two boxes less powerful than this for Asterisk, and frankly, the lack of a low-end PC like this has hampered it's adoption. If they'd just can the big stupid box, and put it in something cheaper, closer to the Mac Mini, it'd be even cooler.
Azureus is an outstanding BitTorrent client, and I've used it myself in the past. Last I checked (about a year ago), it had many non-standard extensions, and Bram Cohen closed down the community forum for discussing the protocol, and asked that any work on the protocol that he did not bless not use the BitTorrent name. This new P2P protocol isn't being revealed at all, at this point, and it's not clear to me if Bram will publish it. Does he want to muscle out Azureus and the other clients?
Well, as it turns out, I'm kind of a fan of light-weight stream encryption anyway. It adds only trivial computational overhead. I could update the form_friendship messages to use RSA public key encryption for the friend-key exchange.
However, how secure would it be? By analyzing the traffic between a peer and the publisher, an ISP would know what NetFS sites you've visited. He could also know who your peers are. If your ISP secretly (or openly) becomes one of your peers, he'll know what files you request from him. Your ISP could even register with the publisher to be your preferred mirror, and then he'd know everything you download. In general, in any P2P system, you can never count on your peers not being your ISP, so security is pretty limited.
Can you think of a good reason to encrypt streams, even if it is very likely that your ISP is your most reliable and fastest peer to download from?
Absolutely. There will be a command to ask a site what file systems it publishes, and from there, you can crawl it. Creating an index of the file-system web would be quite straight forward, and if the protocol became popular, surely Google and others would take the time to index it.
We see little, if any censorship here in the US. If I could suggest any, it would be a porn filter. I have a funny story about trying to find a futon made with Brazilian hardwood. My friend had this awesome futon, and I wanted one. So, I typed "Brazilian hardwood furniture" into Google. Guess what I got back? Yeah... lots of porn. So, I tried "Brazilian furnature", and still got back lots of porn. Finally, I just tried "Brazil", and guess what? Lots of porn! A whole country was associated with porn.
So, to answer your question, Google is censoring web sites, but only in China, who pay Google for the service. It's about as direct a violation of "Do No Evil" as I can imagine. If you want to see it for yourself, try Googling "tiananmen square" at Google, and then, go to google.cn, and try it again. Very different results!
I'm actually luke-warm to encryption built-in from the start, though I could be convinced otherwise with a good argument. Like Brahmn, I believe it is important to keep the protocol transparent to ISPs, and not piss them off. Encryption is a red-flag that says "Hey, there's something funny here!"
On the other hand, defeating censorship is a goal I'm 100% behind.
Really? Thanks... a bit of encouragement goes a long way with me:-) The spec is currently pretty fluid, but it basically incorporates the btslave friendship mechanism, and instead of Merkel trees (which have been added to BitTorrent), it uses the directory structure itself for the tree of hashes. Then, I'm proposing a Publisher/Mirror/Peer hierarchy that should please ISPs and improve performance, since it allows ISPs to easily act as mirrors to their own users for popular file systems. By incorporating support for publishing dynamic updates to the file system, as well as efficient support for small files, it should be quite good for video streaming, as well. Symbolic links to other NetFS sights will also be supported, creating the potential for a web of NetFS sites. Looks like it's gonna be fun...
Yeah, good names are hard to come by. I poked around and found at least two other NetFS projects, but both are obscure and in different spaces, so I figured I'd use it. If you have any good suggestions, I'd love to hear them:-)
If the protocol is open-sourced, I don't care if he writes a closed-source implementation. However, the current protocol that they claim to be writing isn't published on the wiki. They're keeping it a secret... so, screw BitTorrent.
Consensus on the net seems to be that Google will provide software to cell-phone vendors, and will not make a phone themselves. Computers have changed the world partly because we geeks everywhere can program them. Cell phone companies have, through their evil-genius, restricted application development on phones, holding back the inevitable mobile computing revolution. Microsoft has done such a poor job of Windows CE for so many years, that they kind of killed the demand for mobile computing. The OS-es provided by the cell phone vendors are even worse. I personally suspect that Google has sensed this weakness in Microsoft, and hope to own the mobile OS market. Not that I'm gunning for the downfall of Microsoft, but I can hardly wait to get hold of the software Google could be writing. I just hope they display their legendary vision and get it right.
I think Bill is effectively retired, enjoying his money, and doing charity work for the good of the world. If he weren't, he'd have already done some of the things Google could do for cell phones.
I have to say, I can hardly wait! A open linux based dev platform for phones with the backing and vision of Google could be huge. For example, I want to be able to say "Find a Chinese restaurant" to the phone, and have Google maps show me the nearest three. I want to the touch one of them with my finger, and have my phone turn into a GPS to route me there. That's just one dumb idea... the possibilities are enormous, as is the potential add revenue for Google. Imagine when you can buy location-based Google words... for example "Chinese restaurant", but only within 15 miles. Or how about sorting searches by distance as well as relevance? Google could own the world.
The Romans were no better or worse than any other society on earth before or since
IMO, they had several strikes against them. Before the emperors, Rome became addicted to the spoils of war - partly in the form of slaves, who did most of the manual labor. Common people could not compete, and sold off their land, creating a huge poor class in Rome. The nobles in the Senate eventually became so corrupt that they were incapable of ruling. A famous quote about Rome shortly before Julius Caesar: "A city for sale, and doomed if it finds a buyer" - Jugurtha of Numidia, after a vote buying trip to Rome. Caesar basically had no choice but to convert the Roman Republic into an Empire controlled by an Emperor... Rome was too corrupt to rule itself any longer. According to the book, the nobles in Rome also studied little of Greek literature, but adopted all of Greek's vices. For example, there were actual professional "Orgy Planners" in Rome, yet philosophers where generally disdained.
I'm basically not a social relativist... I think the Golden Rule basically means that the slavery and gladiators of Rome were a bad thing, as was the easily bribed politicians, and the upper-class who lived off of others, doing little or no work of their own. In contrast, here in America, the vast majority of us work quite hard, try to live with integrity, and have adopted few vices. The majority of rich Americans made their own money. Our government could be better, but it's still a government of and by the people. The early history of Rome showed that government of and by the people was a more enduring form than kingdoms, which can be destroyed with one bad ruler. Rome conquered many kingdoms while it grew, but the spoils of war became addicting, and the transition from war-for-protection to war-for-plunder seems to be an underlying cause for the corruption of Rome. The corruption of Rome seems to have led to the need for an Emperor. The conversion to an empire controlled by a single person naturally made it less enduring, and several terrible emperors hastened the downfall.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, algea is one good solution. I fear that the real danger isn't running out of energy alternatives... instead it's slagging our planet with waste CO2. The US government studies I've read suggest that algea biofuels might be cost effective if gasoline reaches $2/gallon. I recently fueled up with 10% ethonol... not because anyone was interested in the environment, but because it was more cost effective. Nuclear is a real option. We have alternatives.
Coal is the enemy. At $50/ton, it is way cheaper than any other potential alternative. Coal could destroy the planet.
I couldn't agree more, except for the cost part. Good local caching will come, and it will be free. It's my project, and likely therefore total crud, but what the heck... somebody's got to change the world
I hate agreeing with a guy who can't understand the simple fact that oil production will peak someday (was I missing obvious sarcasm? If so... sorry), but...
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part. We geeks will overcome.
I basically agree. However, there are limited options. Who wants war with a nuclear armed China? Pretty much nobody. I think the best we can do is help China be stable and reasonably prosperous and hope that one day the children or grandchildren of today's leaders in China decide to grant human rights to China's people. It is very likely I will not live long enough to see that day, but I suspect that day will come. I think the path Nixon put us on with China is the right one.
I agree that Yahoo and MSN are in the same bag as Google, but giving away info about Democracy advocates is a small sin IMO compared to helping the world sensor political content on the Internet. With free speech, we can work to gain all the other rights, and therefore free speech should be our most cherished right. It should be illegal for US corporations to help other countries to take away free political speech.
Give me a break. Just compare Google.com's top "tiananmen square" result to Google.cn:
This one is for China
This one is for the rest of us
I support China's inclusion into the global economy. It helps raise many millions of people out of poverty, while providing solid incentives to move forward politically. However, let's not fool ourselves... China has a long way to go.
Or, it could just poetic justice. If you do business with the devil, what do you expect? Fair treatment? For supporting China in censoring political content on the Internet, Google has done more evil than 99% of all US companies. If they lose in China anyway, it serves them right.
Until Android has a native C/C++ application development framework, I'm staying away from it... this is really a bummer.
Step 1: Congress makes it illegal to filter political content, or for any US corporation to aid in political sensorship'
Step 2: The bad guys close down their firewalls, but the US, EU, Canada, AU, etc, grow in prosperity and freedom through freedom of speech on the Internet
Step 3: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all try to emulate our success, and tear down their firewalls.
The importance of freedom of political speech on the Internet can't be understated. It's the future of the world at stake.
Nope, it's Linux based, and any add-on Google writes will be under the Apache license. The video also seemed to indicate that linux hackers will be comfortable in the system, as well. Compared to just having some crap Java virtual machine, this could be huge. Hacked iPhones made rapid progress partly because they run real *-nix, and Apache was ported before any of the traditional toy web servers, and SSH before telnet, and even a VNC viewer (with a somewhat broken control interface). I guess we'll see in about a week what's under the hood.
I watched the video introduction, and one guy said it would allow a bunch of Unix hackers to develop open applications, and that this would make about 5 guys on slashdot really happy... we'll, I'm one of them!
Yeah, I got one of those, too... OpenMoko put a marketing person in charge of communicating with the open-source community... I feel slimy just thinking about it. I'm kinda waiting on the side-lines, now, waiting for a winning platform I can join. If this Google effort turns out to be a bunch of huge corporations all working together, without involving the community, it'll have trouble even just keeping up with Apple-proprietary software (which is very limited). But, the video-introduction sure makes Android sound open, and I have to love that they're reaching out to developers a whole year before products ship. The statements the Google CEO made about the potential for cell-phones sounds dead-on to me. I think he really gets it. I'm worried about the compute overhead of the virtual machine, though. Cell phones aren't a great place to burn power in freaking emulation. Hopefully, there'll be good native translators.
These super-mice articles are funny, but they keep getting slightly more scary each time. So, now we know how to make tireless regenerating fearless super-long-lived mice... good thing were only playing with mice :-)
I wonder how well it would run Asterisk, or the TrixBox distro in particular? I installed two boxes less powerful than this for Asterisk, and frankly, the lack of a low-end PC like this has hampered it's adoption. If they'd just can the big stupid box, and put it in something cheaper, closer to the Mac Mini, it'd be even cooler.
Azureus is an outstanding BitTorrent client, and I've used it myself in the past. Last I checked (about a year ago), it had many non-standard extensions, and Bram Cohen closed down the community forum for discussing the protocol, and asked that any work on the protocol that he did not bless not use the BitTorrent name. This new P2P protocol isn't being revealed at all, at this point, and it's not clear to me if Bram will publish it. Does he want to muscle out Azureus and the other clients?
Well, as it turns out, I'm kind of a fan of light-weight stream encryption anyway. It adds only trivial computational overhead. I could update the form_friendship messages to use RSA public key encryption for the friend-key exchange.
However, how secure would it be? By analyzing the traffic between a peer and the publisher, an ISP would know what NetFS sites you've visited. He could also know who your peers are. If your ISP secretly (or openly) becomes one of your peers, he'll know what files you request from him. Your ISP could even register with the publisher to be your preferred mirror, and then he'd know everything you download. In general, in any P2P system, you can never count on your peers not being your ISP, so security is pretty limited.
Can you think of a good reason to encrypt streams, even if it is very likely that your ISP is your most reliable and fastest peer to download from?
Absolutely. There will be a command to ask a site what file systems it publishes, and from there, you can crawl it. Creating an index of the file-system web would be quite straight forward, and if the protocol became popular, surely Google and others would take the time to index it.
We see little, if any censorship here in the US. If I could suggest any, it would be a porn filter. I have a funny story about trying to find a futon made with Brazilian hardwood. My friend had this awesome futon, and I wanted one. So, I typed "Brazilian hardwood furniture" into Google. Guess what I got back? Yeah... lots of porn. So, I tried "Brazilian furnature", and still got back lots of porn. Finally, I just tried "Brazil", and guess what? Lots of porn! A whole country was associated with porn.
So, to answer your question, Google is censoring web sites, but only in China, who pay Google for the service. It's about as direct a violation of "Do No Evil" as I can imagine. If you want to see it for yourself, try Googling "tiananmen square" at Google, and then, go to google.cn, and try it again. Very different results!
I'm actually luke-warm to encryption built-in from the start, though I could be convinced otherwise with a good argument. Like Brahmn, I believe it is important to keep the protocol transparent to ISPs, and not piss them off. Encryption is a red-flag that says "Hey, there's something funny here!"
On the other hand, defeating censorship is a goal I'm 100% behind.
Really? Thanks... a bit of encouragement goes a long way with me :-) The spec is currently pretty fluid, but it basically incorporates the btslave friendship mechanism, and instead of Merkel trees (which have been added to BitTorrent), it uses the directory structure itself for the tree of hashes. Then, I'm proposing a Publisher/Mirror/Peer hierarchy that should please ISPs and improve performance, since it allows ISPs to easily act as mirrors to their own users for popular file systems. By incorporating support for publishing dynamic updates to the file system, as well as efficient support for small files, it should be quite good for video streaming, as well. Symbolic links to other NetFS sights will also be supported, creating the potential for a web of NetFS sites. Looks like it's gonna be fun...
Yeah, good names are hard to come by. I poked around and found at least two other NetFS projects, but both are obscure and in different spaces, so I figured I'd use it. If you have any good suggestions, I'd love to hear them :-)
If the protocol is open-sourced, I don't care if he writes a closed-source implementation. However, the current protocol that they claim to be writing isn't published on the wiki. They're keeping it a secret... so, screw BitTorrent.
I vote that we write one of our own. I've written a BitTorrent client before, and have written a protocol extension. I'm just beginning to ponder a completely new protocol. Any interest?
Consensus on the net seems to be that Google will provide software to cell-phone vendors, and will not make a phone themselves. Computers have changed the world partly because we geeks everywhere can program them. Cell phone companies have, through their evil-genius, restricted application development on phones, holding back the inevitable mobile computing revolution. Microsoft has done such a poor job of Windows CE for so many years, that they kind of killed the demand for mobile computing. The OS-es provided by the cell phone vendors are even worse. I personally suspect that Google has sensed this weakness in Microsoft, and hope to own the mobile OS market. Not that I'm gunning for the downfall of Microsoft, but I can hardly wait to get hold of the software Google could be writing. I just hope they display their legendary vision and get it right.
I think Bill is effectively retired, enjoying his money, and doing charity work for the good of the world. If he weren't, he'd have already done some of the things Google could do for cell phones.
I have to say, I can hardly wait! A open linux based dev platform for phones with the backing and vision of Google could be huge. For example, I want to be able to say "Find a Chinese restaurant" to the phone, and have Google maps show me the nearest three. I want to the touch one of them with my finger, and have my phone turn into a GPS to route me there. That's just one dumb idea... the possibilities are enormous, as is the potential add revenue for Google. Imagine when you can buy location-based Google words... for example "Chinese restaurant", but only within 15 miles. Or how about sorting searches by distance as well as relevance? Google could own the world.
IMO, they had several strikes against them. Before the emperors, Rome became addicted to the spoils of war - partly in the form of slaves, who did most of the manual labor. Common people could not compete, and sold off their land, creating a huge poor class in Rome. The nobles in the Senate eventually became so corrupt that they were incapable of ruling. A famous quote about Rome shortly before Julius Caesar: "A city for sale, and doomed if it finds a buyer" - Jugurtha of Numidia, after a vote buying trip to Rome. Caesar basically had no choice but to convert the Roman Republic into an Empire controlled by an Emperor... Rome was too corrupt to rule itself any longer. According to the book, the nobles in Rome also studied little of Greek literature, but adopted all of Greek's vices. For example, there were actual professional "Orgy Planners" in Rome, yet philosophers where generally disdained.
I'm basically not a social relativist... I think the Golden Rule basically means that the slavery and gladiators of Rome were a bad thing, as was the easily bribed politicians, and the upper-class who lived off of others, doing little or no work of their own. In contrast, here in America, the vast majority of us work quite hard, try to live with integrity, and have adopted few vices. The majority of rich Americans made their own money. Our government could be better, but it's still a government of and by the people. The early history of Rome showed that government of and by the people was a more enduring form than kingdoms, which can be destroyed with one bad ruler. Rome conquered many kingdoms while it grew, but the spoils of war became addicting, and the transition from war-for-protection to war-for-plunder seems to be an underlying cause for the corruption of Rome. The corruption of Rome seems to have led to the need for an Emperor. The conversion to an empire controlled by a single person naturally made it less enduring, and several terrible emperors hastened the downfall.