Nonsense. The push to relax requirements for mortgages may not have been the wisest policy, but it was a minor part of the problem. The root of the problem was on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Scenario 1: Marginal borrowers default. Banks foreclose. Either qualified buyers purchase the property and the housing market shrugs it off, or the bank takes a hit and decides to reduce their risk or raise the rate to compensate for the risk.
Scenario 2: Wall Street packages mortgages into complex derivatives that no one can possibly evaluate, gets the Fed to allow extreme leveraging, and no one on Wall Street cares whether the mortgages will be paid because they expect to sell the derivatives before the first payment is due. Banks are happy to look the other way and ignore the risk because, like Wall Street, they don't intend to own the loans more than a few days; no one intends to make money the old fashioned way by collecting payments on loans, they go for the quick buck by packaging and selling mortgages to some other sucker. Who plans on selling to an even bigger sucker, and so on, in the largest Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen.
If the lending banks had been limited to a leverage of 10, and held the loans, the bad loans would have been handled with little effect on the economy. If commercial banking had remained separate from investment banking, the bad loans would not have effected the economy. If the investment banks had gambled with their own private money, the economy would not have collapsed. But the investment banks went public, and took much greater gambles with shareholder's money than they ever took with their own money. Congress, and Republicans and Democrats deserve blame, removed the firewalls between types of banks that limited the spread of damage from bad investments.
The economy could handle the bad loans. It couldn't handle those loans leveraged 30x. That leverage turned a twitch into a landslide. Multiply that leverage at one step by the number of steps in the Ponzi scheme, and it's huge. Gamblers are smarter than Wall Street; they have an old saying: "Don't bet more than you can afford to lose." Wall Street made HUGE bets, because if housing prices went up, the bankers got the bonuses. If housing prices went down, the shareholders lost their money, not the bankers. And no matter what happens, Wall Street gets bonuses.
The size of the loop makes a difference. Consider two devices connected by a shielded signal cable. If they are plugged into the same power outlet, the loop is no larger than the length of the power cords and the signal cable. The safety grounds come together at the outlet. There should be no significant current flowing in the power cord safety grounds.
Now plug the two devices into different outlets. The outlet safety grounds might not come together any closer than the electrical panel. In theory, safety grounds only carry current during a malfunction. In practice, there are induced currents and leakage. One outlet's ground may carry leakage from a furnace blower motor, and the other does not. Cable TV coax is should be tied to the electrical panel ground where the coax enters the house. This means that the coax shield forms another large ground loop when connected to any single-ended device with a safety ground, for example audio equipment.
Devices powered from different outlets should not be connected by single-ended signal cables. Professional audio uses balanced connections, and the shield is usually only connected at the input side. You can put a ground isolation balun in the cable TV coax where it connects to your TV. If all of your home entertainment devices are plugged into the same outlet, and you isolate the cable TV ground, you should not have hum. Keep the cable short, and you shouldn't have RF problems. Speaker cables are long enough to act as antennas, so if you live near a transmitter, you may want to put ferrite cores on the cables near the amplifier.
You do know that 'byte' is defined as the smallest addressable unit in a system, and is not always 8 bits? There have been computers that used 6, 7, 8, and 9 bit bytes.
Once computers started using integrated circuits, there was motivation to standardize on 8 bit bytes in order to use commodity parts. But byte is ambiguous enough that communications standards use the term octet instead.
If a computer is built with bit-wide parts (tubes, transistors, diodes, early ICs), a byte might not be eight bits. If it is built with parts wider than one bit, it's safe to assume eight bit bytes.
You have it backwards. I've looked at early data sheets and technical documents, and engineers were always careful to distinguish between casual use for powers of two and formal use for powers of ten. The distinction was dropped in marketing literature, not engineering documents. Let me repeat that: marketing used powers of two exclusively, engineers used more precise language.
Powers of two are natural for semiconductor memory, where bus widths are limited by package pin count. I first saw the misuse of prefixes for powers of two in marketing for semiconductor memory. Yes, I am old enough to remember when 1K chips came out. Note that marketing used 1K for 1024, and not the lower case k that SI uses for 1000. But I'm never surprised when marketing mangles or misuses technical terms.
The size of hard drives derives from the number of blocks per track, which is rarely a power of two. Using powers of two for hard drives makes no sense, unlike semiconductor memory.
My research shows that Bell Labs and DEC avoided using prefixes for file sizes or disk space. Either the number of bytes was given, or the number of blocks or records was given, without any prefix. Blocks, of course, are usually powers of two, but it is the number of blocks that is shown. The earliest use of powers of two with prefixes that I've found is in CP/M.
My conclusion is that the use of SI prefixes for powers of two came from semiconductor marketing and personal computer hobbyists, but that older, larger institutions were more careful about using prefixes.
"This is a case of marketing trumping computer science."
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage. Metric prefixes have been in use for centuries, and they are powers of ten. That's how the national and international standards have ALWAYS used them.
Those prefixes are convenient, and have been used for powers of two in casual, informal usage. But powers of two were never part of any official standard until recently, when NEW and DIFFERENT prefixes were added.
Scientists and engineers have always used powers of ten. Manufacturers used to be careful to distinguish between the formal definition (powers of ten) and the casual usage (powers of two). For example, Intel lists the exact number of bytes in parentheses whenever they use the casual meaning of the prefixes, showing that they were aware of the potential for confusion.
But many reporters and hobbyists were not trained in engineering or science, and missed the distinction. So you ended up with what I think of as "AOL prefixes". Microsoft ignored the standards, as they so often do. They may have been confused by earlier systems, such as UNIX and RT-11, which reported space in numbers of disk blocks, rather than bytes. In early UNIX, the ls command lists the number of bytes without prefixes, and the du and df commands list the number of disk blocks, not the number of bytes.
I don't expect hobbyists or journalists to get the prefixes right. I can live with the misuse of the prefixes. But it really bothers me when someone complains when the prefixes are used correctly, in compliance to published international standards.
Once again: Intel's purchase of Wind River could decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is willfully ignoring the operation of markets, not to mention the history of Intel.
The market for processors does not exist "on its own". If it did, Intel would be much, much smaller. Intel did not rise because its processors were better on their own, in isolation, regardless of other factors. Intel is what it is because IBM chose the 8088 for the PC, and Microsoft created a compelling market for sales of software in x86 binary form. Intel rose to that opportunity and deserves credit for it. But Intel's success depended on Microsoft, who does not make processors. Sales of processors do not happen in isolation. They depend on other factors, and Wind River is a market leader in one of those factors. What Wind River does will effect sales of processors. Why else would Intel buy them?
Antitrust law is about interaction between companies and markets. If you put on blinders and only at each action "on its own", there can never be any violations of antitrust law. If you look at each transaction "on its own", you aren't looking at a market. A market is made of all of the transactions, and the power of the free market is that each transaction influences every other transaction.
Looking at Intel's purchase of Wind River as an isolated event divorced from the context of markets denies the significance of free markets.
Does Wind River's support for various processors influence the sale of those processors?
Could Intel use control over Wind River to suppress competition for embedded processors?
Has Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices in the past?
If you want to argue that Intel could use Wind River to suppress competition, but hasn't done so yet, then I'll agree. But at a minimum, that means that Intel should be watched closely. At the most, this potential for abuse, coupled with a history of abuse, is grounds for the government to prevent this sale. Reasonable people can argue which of those positions is appropriate. But to claim that Intel's purchase of Wind River has no impact on the sale of processors is just plain silly.
Wind River sells products that run on non-Intel processors, which helps sell those processors. If Wind River support for ARM or MIPS, for example, stagnates and falls behind its support for Atom, then the effect is to reduce competition against Intel.
Competition means making your own products more attractive: lower price, better performance, etc. Interfering in the market to make competing products less attractive is not competing, it is an attempt to reduce or eliminate competition. Competition is what provides the good aspects of markets or democracy, not the market or elections themselves. A market without competition is like an election with only one party. In both cases, it is the presence of viable alternatives the makes those systems work, and anything that reduces the competition is evil.
Can you have a free election if one party controls the newspaper and radio station? Can you have a free market for processors if one processor vendor controls the tools needed to use those processors? Is Intel trying to make it easier to use Intel processors, or make it harder to use non-Intel processors?
Does Intel's purchase of Wind River increase or decrease the competition for sales of processors?
Yes, it is possible. Just as electrical power is voltage times current, acoustic power is volume times pressure. That's volume as in cubic meters, not 'turn it down!' loudness.
The limiting factor is the volume that the diaphragm sweeps. Area times displacement. A one square meter diaphragm moving ten mm moves the same amount of air as a ten square meter diaphragm moving one mm. If you cover an entire wall, it doesn't have to move very much.
This is ignores directionality. A rough rule of thumb is that if the dimensions of the diaphragm are equal to the wavelength, then the pressure on-axis will be noticeably higher than to the sides. If the diaphragm is less than ten times the wavelength, then for practical purposes the radiation pattern is omnidirectional. Ten times larger than the wavelength, and you get a very narrow beam. Human hearing covers wavelengths from centimeters to meters in length.
I bought a DVD player at Best Buy for $27, and they wanted to sell me an extended warranty for $45. I pointed out that I could buy two, have a spare, and still spend less.
"If IPv6 was something that I had to install only on my router, I would have done it already (or would do when I change my routers software), now, not only do I have to install it on my router, but on all of my devices, for little to no advantage. Yes, all of my PCs would have public IPs, yeas, they would be filtered, so, where is the advantage?"
Every recent OS already has IPv6 installed, so you are complaining about work that you don't need to do. NAT complicates and makes additional work for protocols used for VoIP. Eliminating NAT reduces the extra work NAT requires.
"Also, I have old PCs running Windows NT4 and 2000 which (AFAIK) do not support IPv6, my printer also doesn't. So, I would have to have both versions, remember to map ports correctly, so that my PCs can accept incoming connections (for BitTorrent and other services) from v4 and v6 clients (and that the incoming connections do not end up routed to different PCs)."
You may recall that I mentioned that you might need NAT for legacy systems. New systems support IPv4 and IPv6 and do not need any special setup to work with both. Your legacy systems will look up the printer address by name, and get an IPv4 address. Your new systems will look up the printer by name, and get an IPv4 address. Where's the extra work?
I'll tell you where the extra work is, it's mapping ports to work around NAT for BitTorrent. Port forwarding or mapping is extra work required by NAT. If every device has a public IPv6 address, you don't need to forward ports. You simply add a firewall rule to allow access, exactly as you do with NAT. But a firewall rule isn't enough with NAT, you must ALSO add a mapping or forwarding rule. NAT == more work.
"Now, if I want to access my network from outside, I use VPN (L2TP). L2TP, by the way, works even when both endpoints are behind a NAT, given that appropriate protocols and ports are forwarded to the server (client does not need any forwarding). If I cannot use VPN, I can map a port to some service that I want to access even if I can't use VPN, then I have to remember my IP (or hostname) and the port, instead of having to remember IPs for all of my PCs (and ports too)."
You never need to remember IP addresses. They aren't meant for humans. Use names. Numeric addresses are for routing packets, and only routers should care about them. The only time I deal with IP addresses is when I configure DNS and DHCP for my home network. Every system has a hostname.
I access my home systems from anywhere on the Internet the way it is meant to be done. My ISP allows servers, does no filtering, and provides a static IP. I don't need to remember my IP, I have a domain registered that resolves to it. If I change ISPs, my domain will resolve to my new address.
I use NAT because my ISP doesn't support IPv6. I pay for one static IPv4 address. I'd rather have more, but they charge extra. So I use NAT and know how much extra work that involves. IPv6 would simplify my setup, like it would simplify yours, if you only realized it.
When I ran BitTorrent on my desktop, I had to enter a firewall rule to allow incoming connections, and I had to enter a NAT rule to forward the port. I upgraded my router, and now I run a torrent client on it. No NAT forwarding rule was needed, so instead of two rules, only the firewall rule was needed. NAT adds work.
"I am sure that I am not alone thinking all this, because, as we see, v6 usage is kind of limited."
It's limited because too many ISPs don't support it.
"I like to be able to appear as a single PC (just in case my ISP decides that I should also pay for every PC that I have), also, I do not want anyone to know how many different PCs are in my network and whether those multiple connections are originating from one or more PCs."
Your ISP can look at your port usage and tell that you are using NAT. They probably don't care how many computers you use. They care about about how many IP addresses you use, because IPv4 addresses are in short supply. They have no reason to care how many IPv6 addresses you use, because all of your IPv6 addresses will take up the exact same space in the routing tables as a single address.
NAT has nothing to do with public/private. Stop confusing the two issues.
You stop incoming connections the same way with IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. Stopping incoming connections is the job of a firewall.
A firewall inspects packets and accepts, rejects, or denies them according to the configured policy.
NAT inspects packets and rewrites them to change the source and destination addresses. This has nothing to do with allowing, rejecting, or denying connections, except that NAT may not know where to route a connection. But if it does know, NAT will happily allow the connection.
You don't seem to understand that your router has both firewall and NAT functions, and that the part you like is the firewall. Blocking incoming connections is performed by the firewall part of router. Not the NAT part.
I don't remember numeric addresses, that's what computers are good for. I don't remember IPv4 addresses any better than IPv6 or MAC addresses. I copy and paste. DNS provides names that people can work with.
You have a device that performs two separate functions: NAT and firewall. The design and purpose of a firewall is to control access. The purpose of NAT is to translate addresses.
NAT is not designed to control access. 1:1 NAT doesn't control access. 1:n NAT prevents incoming connections as a side effect of the way that it breaks TCP/IP.
You should control access to systems and services with tools designed for that purpose, where the control is explicit and documented. Depending on a side-effect of something intended for another purpose will eventually bite your ass.
Show me a single device or OS supporting IPv6 which does not include a firewall. You don't need NAT for modern systems. You may need NAT for legacy systems. Both need firewalls.
Re:DRM Music where 'Managing Server' is Gone
on
DMCA Exemption Time
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The solution to this is simple: if the DRM servers are shut down, all content protected by those servers lose copyright unless replaced.
Copyright CAN be revoked when misused. It needs to happen in these cases. Record companies need to know that there is something worse than buyers making casual copies for friends, that if the buyer loses the ability to play their purchase, everyone in world will gain the right to make unlimited legal copies.
There was nothing wrong with earlier US law: 14 years, plus one renewal of 14 years, if you thought the renewal was worth the paperwork. But the US joined the international Berne convention, and changed the laws to bring them into conformance with the rest of the world. This was by and large a good idea, as it included automatic copyright the instant you create something.
The problem is that unlike the US, many European countries have a concept of moral rights. This is the right of an artist to prevent uses that damage his artistic vision. For a timely example, there are several songwriters who are unhappy that their songs are being used for political purposes counter to the meaning and intent of the song. A limited term for royalties makes sense; inalienable moral rights naturally apply for the life of the artist. Those completely separate issues became entangled, and even though the US still does not recognize moral rights, we ended up with copyright lengths appropriate for moral rights. The media cartels were active in sowing confusion and misinformation that allowed the separate issues to be conflated, just as they like to lump copyrights, trademarks, and patents together to muddy the waters. Big media hates moral rights, of course, but were happy to use them as a smokescreen. They got what they wanted: lifetime copyrights. They stripped out what they didn't like: non-transferable moral rights regarding the artist's vision.
A common use for moral rights is when a director prevents distribution of a version of a movie with unauthorized (by him) edits. I've never understood why a movie director has moral rights but the producer, the composer of the score, and the actors don't.
A grade crossing is where a road crosses the tracks at the same grade. In remote areas, there may only be a sign warning traffic on the road to look for trains before crossing. Federal Railroad Administration rules require trains to blow horns when approaching grade crossings. In populated areas, there are usually flashing lights, bells, and gates which drop to block the road when a train approaches. Idiots still find ways to drive through or around gates and be killed when hit by the train.
Grade separation - undercrossings and overcrossings - prevents those collisions. But the bridges are expensive, and bridges need approaches which use more land than grade crossings. Separation eliminates the need for sounding horns and keeps traffic on the road moving, as well as preventing collisions.
Grade crossings are more common in the US than Europe because of the lower population density.
"Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights."...
The GPL specifically places NO restrictions on use. You do not need to agree to the terms of the GPL in order to use GPL software. The terms come into effect only when you redistribute it. In essence, the only restriction imposed by the GPL is to prohibit imposition of any other restrictions. If that is too much of burden for you, what additional restrictions did you want to impose?
Again, the GPL does not limit users in ANY way. It prevents publishers from adding limits, preserving the freedom of the users.
The problem is dust. Arid climates lead to lots of dust. During the rainy season (winter), the dust dies down, and the hills are green. But for most of the year, it doesn't rain, and the hills are brown. There isn't much to keep the fine silt from blowing around. This area is uplifted seabed, so silt is everywhere. Including your clothes, if you hang them outside. Imagine hanging your clothes to dry in a potter's studio.
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Nonsense. The push to relax requirements for mortgages may not have been the wisest policy, but it was a minor part of the problem. The root of the problem was on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Scenario 1: Marginal borrowers default. Banks foreclose. Either qualified buyers purchase the property and the housing market shrugs it off, or the bank takes a hit and decides to reduce their risk or raise the rate to compensate for the risk.
Scenario 2: Wall Street packages mortgages into complex derivatives that no one can possibly evaluate, gets the Fed to allow extreme leveraging, and no one on Wall Street cares whether the mortgages will be paid because they expect to sell the derivatives before the first payment is due. Banks are happy to look the other way and ignore the risk because, like Wall Street, they don't intend to own the loans more than a few days; no one intends to make money the old fashioned way by collecting payments on loans, they go for the quick buck by packaging and selling mortgages to some other sucker. Who plans on selling to an even bigger sucker, and so on, in the largest Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen.
If the lending banks had been limited to a leverage of 10, and held the loans, the bad loans would have been handled with little effect on the economy. If commercial banking had remained separate from investment banking, the bad loans would not have effected the economy. If the investment banks had gambled with their own private money, the economy would not have collapsed. But the investment banks went public, and took much greater gambles with shareholder's money than they ever took with their own money. Congress, and Republicans and Democrats deserve blame, removed the firewalls between types of banks that limited the spread of damage from bad investments.
The economy could handle the bad loans. It couldn't handle those loans leveraged 30x. That leverage turned a twitch into a landslide. Multiply that leverage at one step by the number of steps in the Ponzi scheme, and it's huge. Gamblers are smarter than Wall Street; they have an old saying: "Don't bet more than you can afford to lose." Wall Street made HUGE bets, because if housing prices went up, the bankers got the bonuses. If housing prices went down, the shareholders lost their money, not the bankers. And no matter what happens, Wall Street gets bonuses.
The size of the loop makes a difference. Consider two devices connected by a shielded signal cable. If they are plugged into the same power outlet, the loop is no larger than the length of the power cords and the signal cable. The safety grounds come together at the outlet. There should be no significant current flowing in the power cord safety grounds.
Now plug the two devices into different outlets. The outlet safety grounds might not come together any closer than the electrical panel. In theory, safety grounds only carry current during a malfunction. In practice, there are induced currents and leakage. One outlet's ground may carry leakage from a furnace blower motor, and the other does not. Cable TV coax is should be tied to the electrical panel ground where the coax enters the house. This means that the coax shield forms another large ground loop when connected to any single-ended device with a safety ground, for example audio equipment.
Devices powered from different outlets should not be connected by single-ended signal cables. Professional audio uses balanced connections, and the shield is usually only connected at the input side. You can put a ground isolation balun in the cable TV coax where it connects to your TV. If all of your home entertainment devices are plugged into the same outlet, and you isolate the cable TV ground, you should not have hum. Keep the cable short, and you shouldn't have RF problems. Speaker cables are long enough to act as antennas, so if you live near a transmitter, you may want to put ferrite cores on the cables near the amplifier.
You do know that 'byte' is defined as the smallest addressable unit in a system, and is not always 8 bits? There have been computers that used 6, 7, 8, and 9 bit bytes.
Once computers started using integrated circuits, there was motivation to standardize on 8 bit bytes in order to use commodity parts. But byte is ambiguous enough that communications standards use the term octet instead.
If a computer is built with bit-wide parts (tubes, transistors, diodes, early ICs), a byte might not be eight bits. If it is built with parts wider than one bit, it's safe to assume eight bit bytes.
You have it backwards. I've looked at early data sheets and technical documents, and engineers were always careful to distinguish between casual use for powers of two and formal use for powers of ten. The distinction was dropped in marketing literature, not engineering documents. Let me repeat that: marketing used powers of two exclusively, engineers used more precise language.
Powers of two are natural for semiconductor memory, where bus widths are limited by package pin count. I first saw the misuse of prefixes for powers of two in marketing for semiconductor memory. Yes, I am old enough to remember when 1K chips came out. Note that marketing used 1K for 1024, and not the lower case k that SI uses for 1000. But I'm never surprised when marketing mangles or misuses technical terms.
The size of hard drives derives from the number of blocks per track, which is rarely a power of two. Using powers of two for hard drives makes no sense, unlike semiconductor memory.
My research shows that Bell Labs and DEC avoided using prefixes for file sizes or disk space. Either the number of bytes was given, or the number of blocks or records was given, without any prefix. Blocks, of course, are usually powers of two, but it is the number of blocks that is shown. The earliest use of powers of two with prefixes that I've found is in CP/M.
My conclusion is that the use of SI prefixes for powers of two came from semiconductor marketing and personal computer hobbyists, but that older, larger institutions were more careful about using prefixes.
"This is a case of marketing trumping computer science."
No, this is a case of standards trumping common (mis)usage. Metric prefixes have been in use for centuries, and they are powers of ten. That's how the national and international standards have ALWAYS used them.
Those prefixes are convenient, and have been used for powers of two in casual, informal usage. But powers of two were never part of any official standard until recently, when NEW and DIFFERENT prefixes were added.
Scientists and engineers have always used powers of ten. Manufacturers used to be careful to distinguish between the formal definition (powers of ten) and the casual usage (powers of two). For example, Intel lists the exact number of bytes in parentheses whenever they use the casual meaning of the prefixes, showing that they were aware of the potential for confusion.
But many reporters and hobbyists were not trained in engineering or science, and missed the distinction. So you ended up with what I think of as "AOL prefixes". Microsoft ignored the standards, as they so often do. They may have been confused by earlier systems, such as UNIX and RT-11, which reported space in numbers of disk blocks, rather than bytes. In early UNIX, the ls command lists the number of bytes without prefixes, and the du and df commands list the number of disk blocks, not the number of bytes.
I don't expect hobbyists or journalists to get the prefixes right. I can live with the misuse of the prefixes. But it really bothers me when someone complains when the prefixes are used correctly, in compliance to published international standards.
Once again: Intel's purchase of Wind River could decrease the competition for sales of its processors. Anyone saying otherwise is willfully ignoring the operation of markets, not to mention the history of Intel.
The market for processors does not exist "on its own". If it did, Intel would be much, much smaller. Intel did not rise because its processors were better on their own, in isolation, regardless of other factors. Intel is what it is because IBM chose the 8088 for the PC, and Microsoft created a compelling market for sales of software in x86 binary form. Intel rose to that opportunity and deserves credit for it. But Intel's success depended on Microsoft, who does not make processors. Sales of processors do not happen in isolation. They depend on other factors, and Wind River is a market leader in one of those factors. What Wind River does will effect sales of processors. Why else would Intel buy them?
Antitrust law is about interaction between companies and markets. If you put on blinders and only at each action "on its own", there can never be any violations of antitrust law. If you look at each transaction "on its own", you aren't looking at a market. A market is made of all of the transactions, and the power of the free market is that each transaction influences every other transaction.
Looking at Intel's purchase of Wind River as an isolated event divorced from the context of markets denies the significance of free markets.
Does Wind River's support for various processors influence the sale of those processors?
Could Intel use control over Wind River to suppress competition for embedded processors?
Has Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices in the past?
If you want to argue that Intel could use Wind River to suppress competition, but hasn't done so yet, then I'll agree. But at a minimum, that means that Intel should be watched closely. At the most, this potential for abuse, coupled with a history of abuse, is grounds for the government to prevent this sale. Reasonable people can argue which of those positions is appropriate. But to claim that Intel's purchase of Wind River has no impact on the sale of processors is just plain silly.
Wind River sells products that run on non-Intel processors, which helps sell those processors. If Wind River support for ARM or MIPS, for example, stagnates and falls behind its support for Atom, then the effect is to reduce competition against Intel.
Competition means making your own products more attractive: lower price, better performance, etc. Interfering in the market to make competing products less attractive is not competing, it is an attempt to reduce or eliminate competition. Competition is what provides the good aspects of markets or democracy, not the market or elections themselves. A market without competition is like an election with only one party. In both cases, it is the presence of viable alternatives the makes those systems work, and anything that reduces the competition is evil.
Can you have a free election if one party controls the newspaper and radio station? Can you have a free market for processors if one processor vendor controls the tools needed to use those processors? Is Intel trying to make it easier to use Intel processors, or make it harder to use non-Intel processors?
Does Intel's purchase of Wind River increase or decrease the competition for sales of processors?
Yes, it is possible. Just as electrical power is voltage times current, acoustic power is volume times pressure. That's volume as in cubic meters, not 'turn it down!' loudness.
The limiting factor is the volume that the diaphragm sweeps. Area times displacement. A one square meter diaphragm moving ten mm moves the same amount of air as a ten square meter diaphragm moving one mm. If you cover an entire wall, it doesn't have to move very much.
This is ignores directionality. A rough rule of thumb is that if the dimensions of the diaphragm are equal to the wavelength, then the pressure on-axis will be noticeably higher than to the sides. If the diaphragm is less than ten times the wavelength, then for practical purposes the radiation pattern is omnidirectional. Ten times larger than the wavelength, and you get a very narrow beam. Human hearing covers wavelengths from centimeters to meters in length.
Why don't you look? You're the one who made the false assertion. Would have been nice if you had looked before making false claims.
I bought a DVD player at Best Buy for $27, and they wanted to sell me an extended warranty for $45. I pointed out that I could buy two, have a spare, and still spend less.
"If IPv6 was something that I had to install only on my router, I would have done it already (or would do when I change my routers software), now, not only do I have to install it on my router, but on all of my devices, for little to no advantage. Yes, all of my PCs would have public IPs, yeas, they would be filtered, so, where is the advantage?"
Every recent OS already has IPv6 installed, so you are complaining about work that you don't need to do. NAT complicates and makes additional work for protocols used for VoIP. Eliminating NAT reduces the extra work NAT requires.
"Also, I have old PCs running Windows NT4 and 2000 which (AFAIK) do not support IPv6, my printer also doesn't. So, I would have to have both versions, remember to map ports correctly, so that my PCs can accept incoming connections (for BitTorrent and other services) from v4 and v6 clients (and that the incoming connections do not end up routed to different PCs)."
You may recall that I mentioned that you might need NAT for legacy systems. New systems support IPv4 and IPv6 and do not need any special setup to work with both. Your legacy systems will look up the printer address by name, and get an IPv4 address. Your new systems will look up the printer by name, and get an IPv4 address. Where's the extra work?
I'll tell you where the extra work is, it's mapping ports to work around NAT for BitTorrent. Port forwarding or mapping is extra work required by NAT. If every device has a public IPv6 address, you don't need to forward ports. You simply add a firewall rule to allow access, exactly as you do with NAT. But a firewall rule isn't enough with NAT, you must ALSO add a mapping or forwarding rule. NAT == more work.
"Now, if I want to access my network from outside, I use VPN (L2TP). L2TP, by the way, works even when both endpoints are behind a NAT, given that appropriate protocols and ports are forwarded to the server (client does not need any forwarding). If I cannot use VPN, I can map a port to some service that I want to access even if I can't use VPN, then I have to remember my IP (or hostname) and the port, instead of having to remember IPs for all of my PCs (and ports too)."
You never need to remember IP addresses. They aren't meant for humans. Use names. Numeric addresses are for routing packets, and only routers should care about them. The only time I deal with IP addresses is when I configure DNS and DHCP for my home network. Every system has a hostname.
I access my home systems from anywhere on the Internet the way it is meant to be done. My ISP allows servers, does no filtering, and provides a static IP. I don't need to remember my IP, I have a domain registered that resolves to it. If I change ISPs, my domain will resolve to my new address.
I use NAT because my ISP doesn't support IPv6. I pay for one static IPv4 address. I'd rather have more, but they charge extra. So I use NAT and know how much extra work that involves. IPv6 would simplify my setup, like it would simplify yours, if you only realized it.
When I ran BitTorrent on my desktop, I had to enter a firewall rule to allow incoming connections, and I had to enter a NAT rule to forward the port. I upgraded my router, and now I run a torrent client on it. No NAT forwarding rule was needed, so instead of two rules, only the firewall rule was needed. NAT adds work.
"I am sure that I am not alone thinking all this, because, as we see, v6 usage is kind of limited."
It's limited because too many ISPs don't support it.
"I like to be able to appear as a single PC (just in case my ISP decides that I should also pay for every PC that I have), also, I do not want anyone to know how many different PCs are in my network and whether those multiple connections are originating from one or more PCs."
Your ISP can look at your port usage and tell that you are using NAT. They probably don't care how many computers you use. They care about about how many IP addresses you use, because IPv4 addresses are in short supply. They have no reason to care how many IPv6 addresses you use, because all of your IPv6 addresses will take up the exact same space in the routing tables as a single address.
NAT has nothing to do with public/private. Stop confusing the two issues.
You stop incoming connections the same way with IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. Stopping incoming connections is the job of a firewall.
A firewall inspects packets and accepts, rejects, or denies them according to the configured policy.
NAT inspects packets and rewrites them to change the source and destination addresses. This has nothing to do with allowing, rejecting, or denying connections, except that NAT may not know where to route a connection. But if it does know, NAT will happily allow the connection.
You don't seem to understand that your router has both firewall and NAT functions, and that the part you like is the firewall. Blocking incoming connections is performed by the firewall part of router. Not the NAT part.
I don't remember numeric addresses, that's what computers are good for. I don't remember IPv4 addresses any better than IPv6 or MAC addresses. I copy and paste. DNS provides names that people can work with.
You have a device that performs two separate functions: NAT and firewall. The design and purpose of a firewall is to control access. The purpose of NAT is to translate addresses.
NAT is not designed to control access. 1:1 NAT doesn't control access. 1:n NAT prevents incoming connections as a side effect of the way that it breaks TCP/IP.
You should control access to systems and services with tools designed for that purpose, where the control is explicit and documented. Depending on a side-effect of something intended for another purpose will eventually bite your ass.
Show me a single device or OS supporting IPv6 which does not include a firewall. You don't need NAT for modern systems. You may need NAT for legacy systems. Both need firewalls.
I had no idea Apple produced so much music. Where are their studios? Oh, those third parties...
Why do Brits drink ale at room temperature?
They have Lucas refrigerators.
The solution to this is simple: if the DRM servers are shut down, all content protected by those servers lose copyright unless replaced.
Copyright CAN be revoked when misused. It needs to happen in these cases. Record companies need to know that there is something worse than buyers making casual copies for friends, that if the buyer loses the ability to play their purchase, everyone in world will gain the right to make unlimited legal copies.
There was nothing wrong with earlier US law: 14 years, plus one renewal of 14 years, if you thought the renewal was worth the paperwork. But the US joined the international Berne convention, and changed the laws to bring them into conformance with the rest of the world. This was by and large a good idea, as it included automatic copyright the instant you create something.
The problem is that unlike the US, many European countries have a concept of moral rights. This is the right of an artist to prevent uses that damage his artistic vision. For a timely example, there are several songwriters who are unhappy that their songs are being used for political purposes counter to the meaning and intent of the song. A limited term for royalties makes sense; inalienable moral rights naturally apply for the life of the artist. Those completely separate issues became entangled, and even though the US still does not recognize moral rights, we ended up with copyright lengths appropriate for moral rights. The media cartels were active in sowing confusion and misinformation that allowed the separate issues to be conflated, just as they like to lump copyrights, trademarks, and patents together to muddy the waters. Big media hates moral rights, of course, but were happy to use them as a smokescreen. They got what they wanted: lifetime copyrights. They stripped out what they didn't like: non-transferable moral rights regarding the artist's vision.
A common use for moral rights is when a director prevents distribution of a version of a movie with unauthorized (by him) edits. I've never understood why a movie director has moral rights but the producer, the composer of the score, and the actors don't.
Microsoft thinks that using an Internet kiosk for banking is OK? Are they really that out of touch?
There is no problem with the owner turning over his property.
The librarian isn't the owner.
Based on his record, I find it entirely plausible. Perhaps you are unaware that Colin Powell wrote the report that whitewashed the My Lai Massacre.
A grade crossing is where a road crosses the tracks at the same grade. In remote areas, there may only be a sign warning traffic on the road to look for trains before crossing. Federal Railroad Administration rules require trains to blow horns when approaching grade crossings. In populated areas, there are usually flashing lights, bells, and gates which drop to block the road when a train approaches. Idiots still find ways to drive through or around gates and be killed when hit by the train.
Grade separation - undercrossings and overcrossings - prevents those collisions. But the bridges are expensive, and bridges need approaches which use more land than grade crossings. Separation eliminates the need for sounding horns and keeps traffic on the road moving, as well as preventing collisions.
Grade crossings are more common in the US than Europe because of the lower population density.
"Here's a gift of a book; but you can only read it if you use LED lights." ...
The GPL specifically places NO restrictions on use. You do not need to agree to the terms of the GPL in order to use GPL software. The terms come into effect only when you redistribute it. In essence, the only restriction imposed by the GPL is to prohibit imposition of any other restrictions. If that is too much of burden for you, what additional restrictions did you want to impose?
Again, the GPL does not limit users in ANY way. It prevents publishers from adding limits, preserving the freedom of the users.
As with Debian Sarge, Dapper uses a version that predates the dangerous patch.
The problem is dust. Arid climates lead to lots of dust. During the rainy season (winter), the dust dies down, and the hills are green. But for most of the year, it doesn't rain, and the hills are brown. There isn't much to keep the fine silt from blowing around. This area is uplifted seabed, so silt is everywhere. Including your clothes, if you hang them outside. Imagine hanging your clothes to dry in a potter's studio.