If this star shoots out a gamma ray WMD directly at the Earth RIGHT NOW - won't it take at least 8000years to get here?
As I'm sure others have/will point out, sure, but what if the star shot it out around 6,000 BC our time. All light travels at the speed of light on a vacuum (and gamma rays are light and space is almost a vacuum most of the time) so we are viewing the star 8000 years ago. We won't know what's happened to the star RIGHT NOW for another 8000 years - assuming it doesn't burp before then and we're still here.
Not only that, but the star is 8000 light years distant, and the danger-zone was cited as 6500 light years.
Gamma rays don't suddenly stop dead in their tracks at 6500 light years, nor do they dissipate that fast. Gamma rays are light and the fact that we can see this star (and those thousands of times further away) indicates that if a large burst of gammas was flung in our direction we'd be well in the path. There was a recent episode of The Universe that covered this possibility. Nothing we can do about it however.
The phone system was just good enough, but redundancy was build into the system to make it reliable.
No! The phone system was regulated to force redundancy to be built into it. Government stepped in and mandated a more robust system. Left on its own the market would build POTS phones that would be largely reliable with very little redundancy.
but I guess there is a greater potential for the development of high-quality software if time and costs are not an issue.
This is a distinguishing point about FOSS. Rip out the commercialism and the need to satisfy a boss whom has to satisfy a stock market and you can pay attention to the finer quality and security details of your code. At least, once you get mature and large enough.
If, ten years from now, it worked the same as it does now, I would expect their competition to have passed them by and I'd switch. In the US we're in a free market system.
I'm not trying to be argumentative but why would you expect there competition to have passed them by? You are giving no incentive to another player to offer better service - and I suspect most people won't - so why expect somebody will provide better over time? I suspect this is the reason why our telecommunication systems aren't much better and certainly aren't any more reliable than ten years ago - and won't be ten years hence.
The reasons why Microsoft were so successful (in a business sense) are manifold, but one is not that their products were great, but that they were good enough.
This I agree with whole-heartedly. Its a fundamental basis of a market driven economy. Spending effort on things that are too good for the market wastes resources that could be spent elsewhere on items that the market (ie. people) do want. Capitalism does not - and must not - build the best, merely the just barely good enough.
Most people don't give a crap about quality, and if they do then somebody else should pay for it. Its all about the latest and greatest bling and appearing to be better than your neighbours.
So everything we have in our lives - every product, service, and system - is just good enough to work for most of the people most of the time and no more. Our transport largely gets people from A to B (eventually), our health system keeps most people alive a few years longer with not much discomfort, our communications work most of the time for most people in most places, and our politicians mostly look after us OK.
Oh, and most of us do most of our work most of the time when we have to. And no more!
But a shotgun buy/sell system as you are proposing dramatically favors those with larger revenue streams and ready cash reserves.
This is the crux of any economic solution to the IP problem. Large amounts of cash have a significant advantage in any non-proportional taxation system. The tax has to be proportional to the value of the item and the value of the owner. Linus would pay $0.02 for his IP tax on Linux, Microsoft should be forced to pay, say $200,000,000.
Not equitable I hear? Yes it is, but it blows the notion of a dollar of mine equaling a dollar of yours. A dollar is valued far less by Microsoft than Linus because Microsoft have billions of them. But all economic systems are fundamentally built around a value system of a unit equaling a unit irrespective of who owns it. Blow that and the whole notion of currency goes out the window.
I understand this when it comes to stars and planets. What I don't understand about the curvature of space is how it makes my pencil roll off my desk and fall on the floor.
It doesn't. Curved space is a perfect explanation for why things moving in a straight line curve through space, aka planets, stars, light, etc. But nobody is sure why the gravity attracts to objects together in the first place. The theoretical graviton is supposed to transfer force in the same way that the other forces are transmitted but none has been seen because the energies required are phenomenal. Phenomenal as in about a billion times what the LHC can produce. Gravitons - in theory again - act at Plank lengths (10-33 cm) which is why its hard to test.
Nobody was sure why electromagnetism produced electricity for a while either even though Faraday had proven the relationship through observation. This had to wait for relativity and the concept of electrons to explain. Magnetism is caused by the time dilation of electrons as they travel down the wire - yes its a relevalistic effect of the transmission of electricity.
Curved spacetime is a mathematical model we use to describe the motion of matter in a gravitational field, it doesn't mean space is physically curved. "Spacetime" doesn't really exist...
Spacetime does exist and is very real. There are at least 4 dimensions of space (string theorists suggest 10) and one of time. They are not mathematical models at all - they are very much real.
Gravitational lensing is an example of a physical manifestation of such. Light (ie photons) has no mass and therefore is not subject to gravity as per Newtonian physics (ie gravity acts on mass). Light travels in a straight line in three dimensions (well, two at a time) and appears to curve because those dimensions are curved. There is no "straight" in our universe - its all curves baby.
Also, the expanding universe cannot be happening as observed with only 3 spacial dimensions. There have to be four dimensions in order for everything to move away from us equally in three dimensions. That's why there is not "centre" of the three dimensional universe, any more than there is a "center" for the two-dimensional surface of the Earth.
Its hard for us to "see" spacetime but that does not mean it is a mathematical abstraction. It is as real as gravity and atoms.
You're solving the wrong problem. Most people want to listen to the same music over and over again, but few want to watch the same videos more than a couple of times. Having a store of 300 hours is fine, but it's fixed. People pay huge amounts of money every month not just to watch video, but to watch new video. Storing it locally to watch again doesn't give them anything.
You do have a point, but most vids on commercial TV or DVDs are already reruns. Its all recycled often and people what it over and over again. They just think the are watching new stuff because they haven't seen it in a few months / years.
We do watch new video, often before its on TV or out in the rental store. And we watch it when we want not when we're told to. More than once even, if we are interrupted, distracted or just bored. Likewise, most of what is broadcast these days are reruns. Hell, only 9000 people went on strike and "new" video production ground to a halt, and it was back to prime-time "classic episodes of your favourites" Don't believe the hype.
About one in four homes has at least one HDTV. I bet that's far higher than the number of people willing to watch TV on a 12-17" laptop screen.:)
I call bullshit. Please qualify and back up your claim. I can't believe that 80 million Americans have a TV nor 120 million Europeans. Certainly 5 million Aussies down here do not have HD capable TVs in any way shave or form. Maybe 5-10,000. I know 1 person. I know lots of people talking about it and wondering when and why, but not actually owning.
More to your point: DVD's gave better quality and convenience, too, with convenience being the driving factor.
I like to apply the same logic but observation seems to invalidate extending the hypothesis. Why have video downloads still not penetrated to the average household nearly as much as DVDs?
I'm not talking about legal downloads: the cartels (RIAA and ISPs) are ensuring the commercial side of downloads fails. Torrents however are widely available and easy to use. Hell, even copying a few GB of files from a friend is easier than buying DVDs.
What can be more convenient than a hard drive full of 300 hrs of vid. Bugger getting up to change the disc every 30-60 min, or even at the end of the movie! Easy to scale up to. I have 10,000 vids - that's 6 months of TV and movies (ok, some porn too). All at the reach of a mouse from my lounge.
Why would anybody see it as "convenient" to "only" change the disc every two hours or so? WHy bother with a wall full of discs at all?
Have you seen AI path finding in games lately? How many times have you witnessed the computer running into things at full tilt over and over again, and you want that kind of smarts telling your airplane where to go?
Like DARPA is going to use some of the shelf game as the core of its architecture. NASA probably used the same in the rovers right? Maybe DARPA are a little ahead of the curve on this.
Computers are great for recording and processing data but are absolutely horrible at interperating it or making decisions based on it.
Humans are generally worse at interpreting data. A computer will read the airspeed as exactly xxx.xxx knots, windspeed at yyy.yyy, altitude at xx,000 feet, etc and know that the mountain ahead is xx,500 feet (based on acurrate GPS and topographics and even a range finder or two). Without those instruments the pilot looks a head and sees some snow, maybe.
Think a computer can't interpret that data and decide "increase air speed to xxx, climb to yy,000 feet, and bank ff degrees". Think a computer needs a human to tell it first?
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
And the alternative? Got some clever gorillas you'd rather do it? Space aliens? Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings?
Computers do what they are told - always - until their hardware deteriorates and malfunctions. Humans do what they are told if you coerce them hard enough, aren't lazy and happen to feel like doing it at the moment. Computers are exact and detailed and repeat tasks exactly the same way again and again. People can barely remember important detail and often can't spell their name the same way twice let alone follow the same process repeatedly.
The problem that most people have is that computers do what I the programmer tells it to do; not what you the operator, manager or owner wants it to do.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
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The Future of XML
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Seriously, the argument amounts to "a screwdriver is a great tool for hammering in nails, as long as your screwdriver supports the 'heavy piece of metal taped to the end' specification." Sure, you can probably get that to work, but why did you reach for the screwdriver in the first place?
Because a "Team Leader" with an MBA told him to. After all the screwdriver is "industry standard" and was cheaper than the hammer. Well, our budget covers screw drivers but not hammers, so it will do fine, you'll never notice the difference. God, you can't leave such important decisions to tech people, they just want toys to play with.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
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The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
As to the future of XML, there is one feature I would really like to see added, a BDATA equivalent to the existing CDATA stuff. You can use to insert character data in to XML, but it's a pain trying to use this for binary data...
XML is a text standard. Its not for describing binary data. Some might say XML is for "human readable" text at that and that CDATA has no place (I don't agree). But it is for describing text not binary.
As is email, BTW. That's why email has MIME and base-64 encoding. Come to think of it, so does news. UseNet is for text and aslo has base-64 for binary encoding.
Sounds like for what you are trying to do a standard for describing text is not what the best fit. Try a binary standard / format. I'd suggest not bastardising a standard just because some people are trying to use it for what it was not intended. If you do, you'll end up with non-standard standard (think Javascript).
I'm in OZ and a number of ISPs here don't block any ports. A number do. You have to check the conditions of each before you join and be very careful with the ability to run servers, bit torrent, etc. Lots of gotchas, but you can wend your way around them with a little research on http://whirlpool.net.au/
I also believe its policy in most of Europe not to block ports or filter, except in the UK, though somebody in Europe can clarify that for me. Seems that in the US most ISPs do and most people only have access to a couple of choices so the point is moot. Just my assumption from this side of the ditch.
And unfortunately, down here a lot of ISPs are trending further towards the US model:-( Bye bye Internet, its was fun.
It's not you being a grown-up, it's your idiot neighbors who click everything under the sun without regard to security. I think the solution is to block by default, and have a mechanism to open it up, as other posters have stated.
Oooh, yeah let's regulate it. What would be the mechanism to open it up?
Licences? Pass an exam every two years to prove your qualified to operate your computer?
Or a blue slip for your computer? Only registered computers can connect?
How about turning the Net into consumption only, like your TV. That's safe. Maybe restrict it to qualified software engineers?
Age restriction? Only adults can connect (even dumb ones)?
We had that a while back. It was called ARPANet. Progress is a circle and we improve by going backwards.
How about this: If you are an idiot who clicks on everything GET OFF THE DAMN TRAIN! A leave it for us grown ups.
There is a mechanism already - its called money. Pay more, get more. Nothing to do with security or idiot neighbours, purely about making more profit. Like everything these days.
Actually, you are enforcing my point, not conflicting it. That's exactly what Cox is doing, taking responsibility over their servers and their traffic. Their system is imperfect but better than an open sewer pipe going directly to the public lake (if you'll excuse the metaphor).
Not such a bad analogy and I take your point. Except they are filtering my traffic not theirs. And that's the crux I think. My data is considered their data if it goes through their wires! In the sewer example, ownership of the sewrage does transfer to the pipe owner and it is their responsiblity to clean it before it goes to the lake. But my data is still my data so the sewer example doesn't work!
A better analogy is a tollway (yes, cars really do work for the net metaphors:-)). My car is still my car even on your road. I pay a toll for the priviledge of using your road - and many others - but its still my car. If my car is a defect it can be denied entry to your road with no payment to you. That's wise and safe. Deny access to unauthorised traffic. But don't repaint my car green whilst its on your road just because you have a buinsess model that charges more for red cars!
I find it amusing that there are still people out there trying to fight this silly battle. They came for port 25, and...well, you know the rest of the tale.
I agree with you. You're not bying a real internet connection when you buy through someone like Cox so you shouldn't complain. Just up and leave - if you can - or shut up and take it if you can't. Else go dark. The real Net is still hear for the rest of us.
So it would be better for Cox to allow any old botnetted-computer to spew spam?
No. Kill the connection of those computers. Don't block and filter my computer because Joe Idiot has malware. Cut him off and make it his responsiblity to clean his property. If I had a spiking phone that was causing disruption to the telephone network they'd disconnect my phone not start filtering your phone conversations. If my car was a defect I wouldn't be allowed to drive.
If your mail situation is that important, buy a business-class account.
Come on, are you telling me sending an email is an add on to the basic funtionality of the internet, and optional extra? "Oh, you want "clean" water? Well I suggest you upgrade to our business service. Our residential water pipes only deliver untreated effluent."
Didn't we get the same predicitons in 1990? Wasn't Larry (head honcho of Oracle) spouting the same "network computer" idea back then? Hasn't SciFi been predicting such things for more than 50 years?
Slow news day. For all those 30 or younger: Nothing much as happened in the last decade. No new tech, just small advances in existing tech. There are no ground breaking advances that will be happening in the next decade cause the population is too slow to adopt.
It took 25 years after its invention and promotion for TV to reach acceptance by the public largely because for an entire generation (an a war or two) radio was "good enough and who wants anything else?" Is surround sound really so different from quadraphonic (circa 1978)? Nope.
Most of the good ideas from the 1980s and 1990s won't be accepted by the mainstream until 2010s and 2020s if at all. So the next 25 years, will be the same stuff the tech industry has been pushing for the last, just with fancy new marketing names.
2008 really is the same as 1998, just with more noise, less convenience and more expense. Can't wait for 2018:-(
That's actually been a pretty common net-wide standard for awhile to block port 25.
For a certain segment of the ISP market, ie your "home users who have no choice anyway". Maybe its more widespread in your country. I've never had an ISP that blocks any port. I have no need for a filtered part of the Internet. I'm a grown up and I can take and demand access to the whole thing.
Down here, the big ISPs block lots of things (email, servers, ftp, etc): Telstra, Optus, Dodo, etc. But they are aiming at a market that doesn't actually use the internet for more than reading a web page every now and then and doesn't know or care about anything else. They believe marketing bylines (sic: wow can I really get 1.5MB/s for only $30 a month), and are prepared to throw money down the toilet for something they don't use but "know" they need. So its a business model that works for them.
But there are quite a few other choices. Nobody with a brain uses those ISPs - which is why they are the largest by far:-)
Welcome to 2008. Same as 1998 just more ads, more noise, more expensive and less choice. That's progress. Can us geeks take the Net back now? We let it out and the MBAs fucked it up. Let them build their own.
It would actually be irresponsible for Cox not to filter outbound mail traffic, since they are bound to have customers that run malware infected / zombied host computers.
You know, I'm getting sick of the prevailing attitude that ISPs and other "institutions" should limit legitimate activities with a technology and filter everybody's behaviour because some customers are bad apples (either intentially or through ignorance).
Don't penalise me and limit my activities - limit those who are adversly behaving. ie, block those that do have malware infected machines not mine! I do the right thing and protect my systems. Why should I should I be penalised by the highest common ignorance factor?
You are promoting this attitude by saying "We will do business with them because they bottled up their customers nicely and it saves us work" instead of "They have lower quality customers and have to bottle them. Not going to touch that crowd".
What am I saying? We live in a moddle-coddled world where nobody takes responsibility for they're own actions but instead focuses on fretting and controlling everybody else's actions. Arse above tit. With liberty comes responsibility.
A more accurate title for this story would be: "User in violation of Cox TOS upset over Cox efforts to enforce TOS."
They are not enforcing their TOS; they are blocking legitimate traffic. Does their TOS say "You will not send an email with a URL to your own IP address"? Put another way, should the police be able to block you bragging in an email that you did 100 MPH on the freeway?
Sounds like one of those useless ISPs that block/fake BitTorrenting and force you to use their email servers. ISPs that are only in business because customers have no care, no knowledge or no choice. What do they think they are, a bank?
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As I'm sure others have/will point out, sure, but what if the star shot it out around 6,000 BC our time. All light travels at the speed of light on a vacuum (and gamma rays are light and space is almost a vacuum most of the time) so we are viewing the star 8000 years ago. We won't know what's happened to the star RIGHT NOW for another 8000 years - assuming it doesn't burp before then and we're still here.
Gamma rays don't suddenly stop dead in their tracks at 6500 light years, nor do they dissipate that fast. Gamma rays are light and the fact that we can see this star (and those thousands of times further away) indicates that if a large burst of gammas was flung in our direction we'd be well in the path. There was a recent episode of The Universe that covered this possibility. Nothing we can do about it however.
No! The phone system was regulated to force redundancy to be built into it. Government stepped in and mandated a more robust system. Left on its own the market would build POTS phones that would be largely reliable with very little redundancy.
This is a distinguishing point about FOSS. Rip out the commercialism and the need to satisfy a boss whom has to satisfy a stock market and you can pay attention to the finer quality and security details of your code. At least, once you get mature and large enough.
I'm not trying to be argumentative but why would you expect there competition to have passed them by? You are giving no incentive to another player to offer better service - and I suspect most people won't - so why expect somebody will provide better over time? I suspect this is the reason why our telecommunication systems aren't much better and certainly aren't any more reliable than ten years ago - and won't be ten years hence.
This I agree with whole-heartedly. Its a fundamental basis of a market driven economy. Spending effort on things that are too good for the market wastes resources that could be spent elsewhere on items that the market (ie. people) do want. Capitalism does not - and must not - build the best, merely the just barely good enough.
Most people don't give a crap about quality, and if they do then somebody else should pay for it. Its all about the latest and greatest bling and appearing to be better than your neighbours.
So everything we have in our lives - every product, service, and system - is just good enough to work for most of the people most of the time and no more. Our transport largely gets people from A to B (eventually), our health system keeps most people alive a few years longer with not much discomfort, our communications work most of the time for most people in most places, and our politicians mostly look after us OK.
Oh, and most of us do most of our work most of the time when we have to. And no more!
This is the crux of any economic solution to the IP problem. Large amounts of cash have a significant advantage in any non-proportional taxation system. The tax has to be proportional to the value of the item and the value of the owner. Linus would pay $0.02 for his IP tax on Linux, Microsoft should be forced to pay, say $200,000,000.
Not equitable I hear? Yes it is, but it blows the notion of a dollar of mine equaling a dollar of yours. A dollar is valued far less by Microsoft than Linus because Microsoft have billions of them. But all economic systems are fundamentally built around a value system of a unit equaling a unit irrespective of who owns it. Blow that and the whole notion of currency goes out the window.
It doesn't. Curved space is a perfect explanation for why things moving in a straight line curve through space, aka planets, stars, light, etc. But nobody is sure why the gravity attracts to objects together in the first place. The theoretical graviton is supposed to transfer force in the same way that the other forces are transmitted but none has been seen because the energies required are phenomenal. Phenomenal as in about a billion times what the LHC can produce. Gravitons - in theory again - act at Plank lengths (10-33 cm) which is why its hard to test.
Nobody was sure why electromagnetism produced electricity for a while either even though Faraday had proven the relationship through observation. This had to wait for relativity and the concept of electrons to explain. Magnetism is caused by the time dilation of electrons as they travel down the wire - yes its a relevalistic effect of the transmission of electricity.
Gravity is not cracked yet.
Spacetime does exist and is very real. There are at least 4 dimensions of space (string theorists suggest 10) and one of time. They are not mathematical models at all - they are very much real.
Gravitational lensing is an example of a physical manifestation of such. Light (ie photons) has no mass and therefore is not subject to gravity as per Newtonian physics (ie gravity acts on mass). Light travels in a straight line in three dimensions (well, two at a time) and appears to curve because those dimensions are curved. There is no "straight" in our universe - its all curves baby.
Also, the expanding universe cannot be happening as observed with only 3 spacial dimensions. There have to be four dimensions in order for everything to move away from us equally in three dimensions. That's why there is not "centre" of the three dimensional universe, any more than there is a "center" for the two-dimensional surface of the Earth.
Its hard for us to "see" spacetime but that does not mean it is a mathematical abstraction. It is as real as gravity and atoms.
You do have a point, but most vids on commercial TV or DVDs are already reruns. Its all recycled often and people what it over and over again. They just think the are watching new stuff because they haven't seen it in a few months / years.
We do watch new video, often before its on TV or out in the rental store. And we watch it when we want not when we're told to. More than once even, if we are interrupted, distracted or just bored. Likewise, most of what is broadcast these days are reruns. Hell, only 9000 people went on strike and "new" video production ground to a halt, and it was back to prime-time "classic episodes of your favourites" Don't believe the hype.
I call bullshit. Please qualify and back up your claim. I can't believe that 80 million Americans have a TV nor 120 million Europeans. Certainly 5 million Aussies down here do not have HD capable TVs in any way shave or form. Maybe 5-10,000. I know 1 person. I know lots of people talking about it and wondering when and why, but not actually owning.
I like to apply the same logic but observation seems to invalidate extending the hypothesis. Why have video downloads still not penetrated to the average household nearly as much as DVDs?
I'm not talking about legal downloads: the cartels (RIAA and ISPs) are ensuring the commercial side of downloads fails. Torrents however are widely available and easy to use. Hell, even copying a few GB of files from a friend is easier than buying DVDs.
What can be more convenient than a hard drive full of 300 hrs of vid. Bugger getting up to change the disc every 30-60 min, or even at the end of the movie! Easy to scale up to. I have 10,000 vids - that's 6 months of TV and movies (ok, some porn too). All at the reach of a mouse from my lounge.
Why would anybody see it as "convenient" to "only" change the disc every two hours or so? WHy bother with a wall full of discs at all?
Like DARPA is going to use some of the shelf game as the core of its architecture. NASA probably used the same in the rovers right? Maybe DARPA are a little ahead of the curve on this.
And the alternative? Got some clever gorillas you'd rather do it? Space aliens? Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings?
Computers do what they are told - always - until their hardware deteriorates and malfunctions. Humans do what they are told if you coerce them hard enough, aren't lazy and happen to feel like doing it at the moment. Computers are exact and detailed and repeat tasks exactly the same way again and again. People can barely remember important detail and often can't spell their name the same way twice let alone follow the same process repeatedly.
The problem that most people have is that computers do what I the programmer tells it to do; not what you the operator, manager or owner wants it to do.
Because a "Team Leader" with an MBA told him to. After all the screwdriver is "industry standard" and was cheaper than the hammer. Well, our budget covers screw drivers but not hammers, so it will do fine, you'll never notice the difference. God, you can't leave such important decisions to tech people, they just want toys to play with.
XML is a text standard. Its not for describing binary data. Some might say XML is for "human readable" text at that and that CDATA has no place (I don't agree). But it is for describing text not binary.
As is email, BTW. That's why email has MIME and base-64 encoding. Come to think of it, so does news. UseNet is for text and aslo has base-64 for binary encoding.
Sounds like for what you are trying to do a standard for describing text is not what the best fit. Try a binary standard / format. I'd suggest not bastardising a standard just because some people are trying to use it for what it was not intended. If you do, you'll end up with non-standard standard (think Javascript).
I'm in OZ and a number of ISPs here don't block any ports. A number do. You have to check the conditions of each before you join and be very careful with the ability to run servers, bit torrent, etc. Lots of gotchas, but you can wend your way around them with a little research on http://whirlpool.net.au/
I also believe its policy in most of Europe not to block ports or filter, except in the UK, though somebody in Europe can clarify that for me. Seems that in the US most ISPs do and most people only have access to a couple of choices so the point is moot. Just my assumption from this side of the ditch.
And unfortunately, down here a lot of ISPs are trending further towards the US model :-( Bye bye Internet, its was fun.
Oooh, yeah let's regulate it. What would be the mechanism to open it up?
We had that a while back. It was called ARPANet. Progress is a circle and we improve by going backwards.
How about this: If you are an idiot who clicks on everything GET OFF THE DAMN TRAIN! A leave it for us grown ups.
There is a mechanism already - its called money. Pay more, get more. Nothing to do with security or idiot neighbours, purely about making more profit. Like everything these days.
Not such a bad analogy and I take your point. Except they are filtering my traffic not theirs. And that's the crux I think. My data is considered their data if it goes through their wires! In the sewer example, ownership of the sewrage does transfer to the pipe owner and it is their responsiblity to clean it before it goes to the lake. But my data is still my data so the sewer example doesn't work!
A better analogy is a tollway (yes, cars really do work for the net metaphors :-)). My car is still my car even on your road. I pay a toll for the priviledge of using your road - and many others - but its still my car. If my car is a defect it can be denied entry to your road with no payment to you. That's wise and safe. Deny access to unauthorised traffic. But don't repaint my car green whilst its on your road just because you have a buinsess model that charges more for red cars!
I agree with you. You're not bying a real internet connection when you buy through someone like Cox so you shouldn't complain. Just up and leave - if you can - or shut up and take it if you can't. Else go dark. The real Net is still hear for the rest of us.
No. Kill the connection of those computers. Don't block and filter my computer because Joe Idiot has malware. Cut him off and make it his responsiblity to clean his property. If I had a spiking phone that was causing disruption to the telephone network they'd disconnect my phone not start filtering your phone conversations. If my car was a defect I wouldn't be allowed to drive.
Come on, are you telling me sending an email is an add on to the basic funtionality of the internet, and optional extra? "Oh, you want "clean" water? Well I suggest you upgrade to our business service. Our residential water pipes only deliver untreated effluent."
Didn't we get the same predicitons in 1990? Wasn't Larry (head honcho of Oracle) spouting the same "network computer" idea back then? Hasn't SciFi been predicting such things for more than 50 years?
Slow news day. For all those 30 or younger: Nothing much as happened in the last decade. No new tech, just small advances in existing tech. There are no ground breaking advances that will be happening in the next decade cause the population is too slow to adopt.
It took 25 years after its invention and promotion for TV to reach acceptance by the public largely because for an entire generation (an a war or two) radio was "good enough and who wants anything else?" Is surround sound really so different from quadraphonic (circa 1978)? Nope.
Most of the good ideas from the 1980s and 1990s won't be accepted by the mainstream until 2010s and 2020s if at all. So the next 25 years, will be the same stuff the tech industry has been pushing for the last, just with fancy new marketing names.
2008 really is the same as 1998, just with more noise, less convenience and more expense. Can't wait for 2018 :-(
For a certain segment of the ISP market, ie your "home users who have no choice anyway". Maybe its more widespread in your country. I've never had an ISP that blocks any port. I have no need for a filtered part of the Internet. I'm a grown up and I can take and demand access to the whole thing.
Down here, the big ISPs block lots of things (email, servers, ftp, etc): Telstra, Optus, Dodo, etc. But they are aiming at a market that doesn't actually use the internet for more than reading a web page every now and then and doesn't know or care about anything else. They believe marketing bylines (sic: wow can I really get 1.5MB/s for only $30 a month), and are prepared to throw money down the toilet for something they don't use but "know" they need. So its a business model that works for them.
But there are quite a few other choices. Nobody with a brain uses those ISPs - which is why they are the largest by far :-)
Welcome to 2008. Same as 1998 just more ads, more noise, more expensive and less choice. That's progress. Can us geeks take the Net back now? We let it out and the MBAs fucked it up. Let them build their own.
You know, I'm getting sick of the prevailing attitude that ISPs and other "institutions" should limit legitimate activities with a technology and filter everybody's behaviour because some customers are bad apples (either intentially or through ignorance).
Don't penalise me and limit my activities - limit those who are adversly behaving. ie, block those that do have malware infected machines not mine! I do the right thing and protect my systems. Why should I should I be penalised by the highest common ignorance factor?
You are promoting this attitude by saying "We will do business with them because they bottled up their customers nicely and it saves us work" instead of "They have lower quality customers and have to bottle them. Not going to touch that crowd".
What am I saying? We live in a moddle-coddled world where nobody takes responsibility for they're own actions but instead focuses on fretting and controlling everybody else's actions. Arse above tit. With liberty comes responsibility.
They are not enforcing their TOS; they are blocking legitimate traffic. Does their TOS say "You will not send an email with a URL to your own IP address"? Put another way, should the police be able to block you bragging in an email that you did 100 MPH on the freeway?
Sounds like one of those useless ISPs that block/fake BitTorrenting and force you to use their email servers. ISPs that are only in business because customers have no care, no knowledge or no choice. What do they think they are, a bank?