"a second router... My ISP provides the cable modem/router and I hang my own router/wi-fi hub off that..."
That's a really bad idea. Unless you have actually set that modem/router to bridge mode first, you'll be double-NAT'd and the best thing I can say about that is sometimes it works. Best case it's unnecessary latency, worst case it's a huge PITA to troubleshoot. And what do you gain? The compromised hardware is still there and all your packets still have to pass through it.
After stripping out all of the unnecessary bloat, you would be left with BSDinit. There really is no need to go through all that trouble since BSDinit is already available. Stable, robust, sane, and works great on Unix or Linux.
" Well, actually, I use <ecode>, because <code> appears not to honor line breaks and <ecode> appears not to honor indentation, and, for code, the latter sucks less than the former."
Exactly the sort of Hobsons choice that you should NOT have to face, frankly. Text is text. It's absurd that 'designers' have so much trouble dealing with it.
Now that aside, notice you are talking about explicitly tagging your text, which I am not doing. I am only using the posting mode default setting, I rarely insert tags and when I do I switch posting modes.
"Neither of them appear to provide me with any advantages if I'm just posting text."
They are far from perfect but they do indeed suck a little less. I used to use the 'plain text' as my default but there are several cases where that mode will strip and/or add tags in a pseudo-random fashion and it pissed me off one time too many.
If I type in https://google.com/ I dont necessarily want that to converted into a link, for instance. Relatively minor.
If I type:
a b x 4 5 y 3 2 z 1 8
Then I MUST use code or slashdot will simply destroy the entire paragraph. The amount of time I had to spend to make that short snippet of *text* display properly just now is significant and absurd. But if I were posting in any mode other than 'code' it would not have been an absurdly difficulty task to accomplish a simple and obvious result, it would have actually been IMPOSSIBLE.
ALSO I cannot even mention a tag (<tt> for example but there are many others) without switching to code. If I try to say "<tt> sucks" for instance I must do this with 'code' set - otherwise the tag does not appear, it is parsed and changes font for the rest of the post! Absurd.
Again, there should be no problem reading the text. If there is a problem reading the text, then local browser settings need to be corrected. While what slashdot is doing here is certainly not what I would call sane or recommend, it is in fact workable and that one stalker I have attracted is rather more insane for refusing to choose a readable <tt> font.
I have a slightly more ambitious suggestion. We should make a list of every device that uses this 'sercomm' module and make a point never to buy them again.
Actually I was not intending to make any point at all. I still have a recent journal entry up if you want to read it.
The TLDR is I chose the 'code' option after testing the available options and finding it sucks less. As an unintended side-effect of this my posts get wrapped in 'tt' tags which suggest a monospace font. I am fine with that suggestion, although it was not in intentional. If anyone finds this unreadable they only need to go to their browser settings and select a readable font for 'tt' text which they should have done already anyhow.
You know, about 35 years ago now, we invented something called the world wide web. This was an infrastructure which allows documents in a semantic markup language to be delivered all around the world on demand, and for the recipient of the document to see them in whatever form makes the most sense on their equipment.
It's still in use, and you are on it. If the form you are seeing on your screen is displeasing, you can simply change it. Really. A thing called browser settings. You should find out what browser you are using, and investigate the options. It will have a facility that allows you to ensure that all fonts displayed on your screen meet with your approval, all you have to do is use it.
There are fixed costs as well as scaling costs involved. IF as appears to be implied here the utilities involved bill only for the latter - the actual electricity used, then generating your own electricity could expose the error in their billing system. Let's say you are generating as much as you use, and are billed only for usage with a net-metering system, so your bill is... $0.
Well, that would actually be unfair, if it's happening, because obviously they still have fixed costs involved in servicing you, laying and maintaining lines, etc and you really are not paying 'your fair share' in that case. Generally I thought utilities actually split these charges out separately, which avoids that problem entirely - fixed costs are reflected in fixed items on your bill, separate from usage.
If they are billing only for usage, then what they must actually be doing is figuring in a tiny little increase in their rates to cover the fixed costs in aggregate already - it is inconceivable that they simply are not billing for it in any way of course.
So now, they would like - not to start itemized billing for fixed costs (and ever so slightly reduce their rates in the process) - no. Much better to simply charge punitive rates to small generators that they would really rather not have to deal with in the first place, hmm?
"2014 Reporters Without Borders World free press index"
Where the US has fallen ignominiously to nearly 50, so the same argument could be used to criticize anyone that tries to start a conversation with Obama as well?
"The first thing that comes to mind is we wouldn't have even heard of this video if it didn't go according to script."
And this drivel gets +5 insightful?
It was a live call-in show. Yes, they have these things in Russia, and more amazingly, their President has the cajones to go on one and take callers. The Soviet Union fell a long, long time ago you know.
Snowdens question was the first gambit in a line of attack that leads to parsing essentially the same lie the NSA still tries. They actually collect everything, and stick it in a database, but they arent really supposed to pull it back out without a reason, so since most of the stuff in the database never gets looked at by a human, they want to say they arent *really* collecting it all. They only want to admit to collecting the stuff they admit to going back and looking at later, and say it's not mass surveillance, it's targeted. But that's just not how the technology works.
If you want to be able to come back in 6 months and pick out a single call to listen to, you have to record ALL the calls and keep them stored for some time in order to enable this. And maybe there is one call in there that winds up being of use in a criminal investigation, great. Along with 200 that are useful for blackmail or extortion? Do we think the intelligence agents who have access to this information are angels who could never consider doing anything wrong, or incompetents who could work there every day for years but never find a way to get away with anything?
"I find it amusing that Anarchy will supposedly spring forth from a technology that depends on highly refined, multi-disciplinary engineering and built from precision materials that are only manufactured and sold at affordable pricing in the context of a highly ordered society."
Problem with that line of argument (besides the stupid personal attacks which do not contribute) is that this was never on Netflix's end and that has been confirmed over and over again. Problem only affects people on comcast, and only after someone at comcast got the bright idea to shake Netflix down. Comcast customers (the few of them with the technical knowledge that is) could get around the breakage by disguising their traffic and many did so.
I hope you are getting paid well to astroturf here, enough to compensate you for your integrity.
"It is not Comcast's responsibility to provide enough bandwidth for you to stream a 3rd party software at maximum bandwidth"
Yes, if you paid them for that bandwidth, it is indeed their responsibility to provide it. Third party software? Everything on your computer is third party software, what else would you be using?
Your argument appears to make no sense whatsoever.
"The problem here is that people have been using the argument that Open Source is better because these issues can't happen "because" of the visibility."
No, just no. No one with any sort of a clue ever argued these issues cannot happen with Free Software. It's good practice, it helps, but it's no silver bullet. That's just as true as it ever was and this news in no way contradicts that.
"Or at least no such thing as a project that only employs or accepts contributions from such programmers."
You could probably find a few drawing decent salaries in less public areas, but certainly it's a skill that the tech world in general has no appreciation for at all. And even though I hate it I can understand why - if you have two companies developing a similar product, one does it quick and cheap, the other takes the time to do it right - the first one will 'own the market' before the second can get there. And with that position it has the cash flow to keep paying programmers, while the second one closes their doors.
The same dynamic still plagues non-commercial projects as well, a quick but shoddy project can gain mindshare and take off before one that does things right has a product to show at all.
There are a few places where people are willing to pay the price for secure code, and the way things are going I suspect that is increasing, but it's still a tiny minority of available positions.
Netflix is not the comcast customer. Netflix pays their own ISP for their bandwidth already.
It's not Netflix which is using all this bandwidth on comcasts network - it's comcast customers who are using it. And they already paid for it.
Comcast wants to bill twice. I am sure they would bill 20 times if they could get away with it.
And they are the 800lb gorilla with an effective monopoly position in many markets and no scruples whatsoever. Netflix folded to extortion, and the precedent is certainly not one that will benefit any users, unless it's the users that are also comcast stock owners.
"Any and all counter-arguments like "but they voted" are meaningless: first, the voting took place under the "gentle" guidance of Russian military"
By that logic the vote for statehood in Alaska was meaningless as well - in fact it's even worse, because the US troops voted!
If you are just making an abstract point, fine, conceded. If you are implying that there is any legitimate US interest to be pursued through pressing that point and pursuing confrontation with Russia? I do not see one.
Slashdot Mirror
"a second router... My ISP provides the cable modem/router and I hang my own router/wi-fi hub off that..."
That's a really bad idea. Unless you have actually set that modem/router to bridge mode first, you'll be double-NAT'd and the best thing I can say about that is sometimes it works. Best case it's unnecessary latency, worst case it's a huge PITA to troubleshoot. And what do you gain? The compromised hardware is still there and all your packets still have to pass through it.
After stripping out all of the unnecessary bloat, you would be left with BSDinit. There really is no need to go through all that trouble since BSDinit is already available. Stable, robust, sane, and works great on Unix or Linux.
" Well, actually, I use <ecode>, because <code> appears not to honor line breaks and <ecode> appears not to honor indentation, and, for code, the latter sucks less than the former."
Exactly the sort of Hobsons choice that you should NOT have to face, frankly. Text is text. It's absurd that 'designers' have so much trouble dealing with it.
Now that aside, notice you are talking about explicitly tagging your text, which I am not doing. I am only using the posting mode default setting, I rarely insert tags and when I do I switch posting modes.
"Neither of them appear to provide me with any advantages if I'm just posting text."
They are far from perfect but they do indeed suck a little less. I used to use the 'plain text' as my default but there are several cases where that mode will strip and/or add tags in a pseudo-random fashion and it pissed me off one time too many.
If I type in https://google.com/ I dont necessarily want that to converted into a link, for instance. Relatively minor.
If I type:
a b
x 4 5
y 3 2
z 1 8
Then I MUST use code or slashdot will simply destroy the entire paragraph. The amount of time I had to spend to make that short snippet of *text* display properly just now is significant and absurd. But if I were posting in any mode other than 'code' it would not have been an absurdly difficulty task to accomplish a simple and obvious result, it would have actually been IMPOSSIBLE.
ALSO I cannot even mention a tag (<tt> for example but there are many others) without switching to code. If I try to say "<tt> sucks" for instance I must do this with 'code' set - otherwise the tag does not appear, it is parsed and changes font for the rest of the post! Absurd.
Again, there should be no problem reading the text. If there is a problem reading the text, then local browser settings need to be corrected. While what slashdot is doing here is certainly not what I would call sane or recommend, it is in fact workable and that one stalker I have attracted is rather more insane for refusing to choose a readable <tt> font.
Task manager?
Task freaking manager?
You have got to be kidding me. I use process explorer (when in windows) and I STILL know for a fact it does not show me everything. Taskman is a toy.
I have a slightly more ambitious suggestion. We should make a list of every device that uses this 'sercomm' module and make a point never to buy them again.
Actually I was not intending to make any point at all. I still have a recent journal entry up if you want to read it.
The TLDR is I chose the 'code' option after testing the available options and finding it sucks less. As an unintended side-effect of this my posts get wrapped in 'tt' tags which suggest a monospace font. I am fine with that suggestion, although it was not in intentional. If anyone finds this unreadable they only need to go to their browser settings and select a readable font for 'tt' text which they should have done already anyhow.
You know, about 35 years ago now, we invented something called the world wide web. This was an infrastructure which allows documents in a semantic markup language to be delivered all around the world on demand, and for the recipient of the document to see them in whatever form makes the most sense on their equipment.
It's still in use, and you are on it. If the form you are seeing on your screen is displeasing, you can simply change it. Really. A thing called browser settings. You should find out what browser you are using, and investigate the options. It will have a facility that allows you to ensure that all fonts displayed on your screen meet with your approval, all you have to do is use it.
Except it is nothing like that, at all, at all.
Chaos is the mother, not the daughter, of Order.
And this diminishes the point about water containing sexual fluids how?
There are fixed costs as well as scaling costs involved. IF as appears to be implied here the utilities involved bill only for the latter - the actual electricity used, then generating your own electricity could expose the error in their billing system. Let's say you are generating as much as you use, and are billed only for usage with a net-metering system, so your bill is... $0.
Well, that would actually be unfair, if it's happening, because obviously they still have fixed costs involved in servicing you, laying and maintaining lines, etc and you really are not paying 'your fair share' in that case. Generally I thought utilities actually split these charges out separately, which avoids that problem entirely - fixed costs are reflected in fixed items on your bill, separate from usage.
If they are billing only for usage, then what they must actually be doing is figuring in a tiny little increase in their rates to cover the fixed costs in aggregate already - it is inconceivable that they simply are not billing for it in any way of course.
So now, they would like - not to start itemized billing for fixed costs (and ever so slightly reduce their rates in the process) - no. Much better to simply charge punitive rates to small generators that they would really rather not have to deal with in the first place, hmm?
"2014 Reporters Without Borders World free press index"
Where the US has fallen ignominiously to nearly 50, so the same argument could be used to criticize anyone that tries to start a conversation with Obama as well?
"The first thing that comes to mind is we wouldn't have even heard of this video if it didn't go according to script."
And this drivel gets +5 insightful?
It was a live call-in show. Yes, they have these things in Russia, and more amazingly, their President has the cajones to go on one and take callers. The Soviet Union fell a long, long time ago you know.
Snowdens question was the first gambit in a line of attack that leads to parsing essentially the same lie the NSA still tries. They actually collect everything, and stick it in a database, but they arent really supposed to pull it back out without a reason, so since most of the stuff in the database never gets looked at by a human, they want to say they arent *really* collecting it all. They only want to admit to collecting the stuff they admit to going back and looking at later, and say it's not mass surveillance, it's targeted. But that's just not how the technology works.
If you want to be able to come back in 6 months and pick out a single call to listen to, you have to record ALL the calls and keep them stored for some time in order to enable this. And maybe there is one call in there that winds up being of use in a criminal investigation, great. Along with 200 that are useful for blackmail or extortion? Do we think the intelligence agents who have access to this information are angels who could never consider doing anything wrong, or incompetents who could work there every day for years but never find a way to get away with anything?
"The uncomfortable truth is that all the water has pee in it."
Water is filthy, fish have sex in it.
"I find it amusing that Anarchy will supposedly spring forth from a technology that depends on highly refined, multi-disciplinary engineering and built from precision materials that are only manufactured and sold at affordable pricing in the context of a highly ordered society."
Errr, why?
Does not sound like they solved it. Headline should be "Astronomers Ponder Puzzle..." perhaps?
It's called the epoch of Bureaucracy.
http://miriadic.wikia.com/wiki/The_Five_Stages_of_Chaos
Problem with that line of argument (besides the stupid personal attacks which do not contribute) is that this was never on Netflix's end and that has been confirmed over and over again. Problem only affects people on comcast, and only after someone at comcast got the bright idea to shake Netflix down. Comcast customers (the few of them with the technical knowledge that is) could get around the breakage by disguising their traffic and many did so.
I hope you are getting paid well to astroturf here, enough to compensate you for your integrity.
"It is not Comcast's responsibility to provide enough bandwidth for you to stream a 3rd party software at maximum bandwidth"
Yes, if you paid them for that bandwidth, it is indeed their responsibility to provide it. Third party software? Everything on your computer is third party software, what else would you be using?
Your argument appears to make no sense whatsoever.
"The problem here is that people have been using the argument that Open Source is better because these issues can't happen "because" of the visibility."
No, just no. No one with any sort of a clue ever argued these issues cannot happen with Free Software. It's good practice, it helps, but it's no silver bullet. That's just as true as it ever was and this news in no way contradicts that.
"Or at least no such thing as a project that only employs or accepts contributions from such programmers."
You could probably find a few drawing decent salaries in less public areas, but certainly it's a skill that the tech world in general has no appreciation for at all. And even though I hate it I can understand why - if you have two companies developing a similar product, one does it quick and cheap, the other takes the time to do it right - the first one will 'own the market' before the second can get there. And with that position it has the cash flow to keep paying programmers, while the second one closes their doors.
The same dynamic still plagues non-commercial projects as well, a quick but shoddy project can gain mindshare and take off before one that does things right has a product to show at all.
There are a few places where people are willing to pay the price for secure code, and the way things are going I suspect that is increasing, but it's still a tiny minority of available positions.
"Otherwise, Comcast has no contractual obligation to Netflix at all."
That's right. Their contractual obligation is to their customers. Who already paid Comcast for the passage of their packets back and forth to Netflix.
Yeah it sounds to me like you are making some really broad, sweeping comments about a large group of people as if they were all clones.
You have basically everything backwards here.
Netflix is not the comcast customer. Netflix pays their own ISP for their bandwidth already.
It's not Netflix which is using all this bandwidth on comcasts network - it's comcast customers who are using it. And they already paid for it.
Comcast wants to bill twice. I am sure they would bill 20 times if they could get away with it.
And they are the 800lb gorilla with an effective monopoly position in many markets and no scruples whatsoever. Netflix folded to extortion, and the precedent is certainly not one that will benefit any users, unless it's the users that are also comcast stock owners.
The sanctity of treaties? That's your argument? A better argument to quit signing them so promiscuously but let that go for the moment.
The idea that the putsch in Kiev is legitimate successor to the elected government they deposed is... let's just say problematic. At best.
"Any and all counter-arguments like "but they voted" are meaningless: first, the voting took place under the "gentle" guidance of Russian military"
By that logic the vote for statehood in Alaska was meaningless as well - in fact it's even worse, because the US troops voted!
If you are just making an abstract point, fine, conceded. If you are implying that there is any legitimate US interest to be pursued through pressing that point and pursuing confrontation with Russia? I do not see one.