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Well, you're escalating things quite quickly and applying a broad stereotype yourself that a man who does this will be a rapist that is fucking someone unconscious and under-aged after flirting with them...
I mean jeeze, YES RAPE IS BAD. But while he is stupid for applying a broad stereotype you are acting worse for chastising him only to apply another broad stereotype. RAPE happens to people of all age. Because they don't want it! You think there isn't at least 1 person who has ever lied about rape only to cause the "Rapist's" life to be ruined. So long as there is any exemption to the rule you should chill the fuck out and think things through a case by case basis. That is how a just system would work! |
Your misunderstanding of context his idiotic.
"normal adult male" as pertained to the subject of sexual attractiveness or a normal adult's sexual desires are. He also didn't say anything about homosexuality.
On that note I do agree that for survivability homosexuality makes no senses. But for a world that has 21 square meters or 23 square feet per person currently with a growth of 1.3% i don't think we need every person to pass on their genes. |
Yes, you are wrong. Myspace was about social fashion, so is Facebook.
Content, ideas, features, all that, is largely irrelevant.
Why is that so? |
My question is, WHO THE FUCK CLICKS ON BANNER ADDS? I can not remember one time when I thought, "Oooh that looks interesting and I think I might like that, let me just click over here..." I find it so odd that these ads are in any way effective at all. Even the ads on youtube, about 90% of the time fly right over my head. I want to watch a video of of people doing crazy shit on mountain bikes, why do you think I give two fucks about your bathroom cleaner. And an ad for IE8? Oh as if seeing this cutely animated ad with cool dub step over it is going to suddenly make me say, " You know what, Safari doesn't have a cool ad like this and it's Dub step so you know they must be cool." WTF are these guys thinking? |
Something important that the writer fails to mention is that Netflix, as well as others, are tired of waiting for networks to license them content and so are now producing their own. If you haven't heard yet, Arrested Development is getting a new season direct to Netflix and it will be released all at once. Additionally, Youtube has produced H+ and Hulu has The Booth At The End, both great shows.
Right now it's difficult for many people to cord cut because they are tied to shows like Game of Thrones which aren't being offered immediately online. But with online providers becoming content producers people will start choosing netflix, hulu, etc. over showtime or something similar and that will force traditional content providers into making online deals.
One last thing, for any cord cutters out there HBO online is coming to the netherlands which you can get access to if you are willing to get a VPN based out of the netherlands. All in all that'd still be a lot cheaper than ordering a whole cable package and adding HBO. |
note that the OP has editorialized the title and it really says " A Pair of MIT Scientists Try to Transform Nuclear Power "...... but people have been trying the same since the first days of nuclear and thorium has never delivered on the amazing promises
[Thorium Nuclear Information Resources]( -- |
Graph is misleading. It doesn't show that the radiation from the actinides is very small relative to the radiation from fission products in first 100 years. You cant draw "background radiation" on the graph because it isn't in dose-risk to populations near Yucca, but if you did, you'd see that the area where these actinide burners eke out their advantage is of little practical significance. |
It doesn't get rid of actinides. They're still there in some quantity. You say this quantity is low enough so that the public would be fine without long term storage. On what basis do you say this? I don't think the actinides from the existing process are significant enough to warrant much expense. |
I don't think that the GIMP does hinder artists all that much. In this case, open source is irrelevant entirely. Maybe Photoshop also misses some features that artists would like. It's a two way argument. No piece of software is perfect and the GIMP is far from perfect (I don't know about PS because I can't see the code).
Saying that you develop open source but you don't care about freedom is, to say the least, strange. Your ability to view the source (not your action of viewing it) is important. If you want to look at how a feature is implemented, you can! Surely as a developer, you must have looked at the code of one or more free software projects. And even if you haven't, other software developers benefit greatly from looking at code.
You may not care about freedom, because often you don't think of it. Our freedom of speech, for example, doesn't matter 99% of the time. We have and we can say what we want. But the 1% of the time we do need it, it is more crucial then ever.
I still see no reason to compromise usability and the openness of software. You say that you use tools for jobs, not to play with the source. What's there to say that others do not play with the source? You may not want to now, but you may in the future; and when you don't have the ability, you'll be very upset.
Making software open source shows consideration for others. That's the whole point. Some newbie may want to look at your source and learn. If you wrote, say, an application to calculate the values of stocks, a 16 year old high-schooler may not want to do that. But if he's interested, he can look at the code; there might be an interesting implementation of an algorithm in there. |
I don't think Microsoft have considered the potential liability they could end up with.
Consider this little story:
Alice has a small boutique at contoso.com with a page at
It lists the products sold at Contoso, small and big, red and blue,
cheap and expensive, but far far too many to find head nor tail. So that page must
take some parameters like so: - which lists
just the products of the "fluxcapacitor" kind.
It so happens that Alice, being self-taught and inexperienced in the black arts of PHP,
has just inserted the parameters into her SQL like so:
SELECT * FROM products WHERE category = '$_GET[cat]'
for such is written so many places on The Web, so right it must be.
Now Bob, a master wizard with knowlegde of the deepest and darkest secrets held by the computer,
and a good friend of Alice, sees this and realises Alice's mistake. Warn her he must,
and quickly lest all could be lost.
So Bob, being in a hurry, reaches out to Alice using the first and best channel where he can
contact her - which just so happens to be the telepathy network Skype, which is controlled by the
evil kingdom of Microsoft. But it does not worry Bob too much, for why would they care about him or Alice?
And so Bob warns Alice: "Beware, you are defensless against your foes."
Confused Alice asks him: "But how? I have build everything like they told me on The Web".
Bob gives his reply: "I will show thee this, but I warn thee: DO NOT CLICK."
And he shows her the spell by which her world could become undone:
And Bob shares with her the secrets of that spell, and most importantly the secrets of the ward
known to the masters as "parameterized queries".
Heed his advice Alice does, but when she goes to her boutique something is terribly terribly wrong!
Her list of orders are gone! Her fine list of where to send what, when, how and why!
Which Doc was the fluxcapacitor for, and which were the sonic screwdriver for?
How would she ever get her orders delivered without that list? What a catastrophy!
But how did it happen? Who should be blamed? Not trusting the wizards of old, Bob she confronts.
But Bob swears on the Old Gods of Computing, Babbage, Turing and Church, that he would never commit
such an act (at least not towards a friend). But help her he will.
So many a night they spend in the library, looking through the Scrolls of Logs in search for clues
that could lead them to the culprit. And finally they find what they are looking for.
Nothing less than Bob's very own spell, stolen and abused by the evil Microsoft! Bob should have known
better than to speak such a powerful spell where Microsoft could here him, but that is the past now
and can never be undone.
However all might not be lost. They might stand a chance against the hordes of Microsoft by buying
a legion of the finest Lawyers and arming them with their newly found Evidence. And so with nothing to
lose and everything to win, Alice charges right into the dark territory of the evil King Ballmer to meet
an uncertain fate. The outcome would in the end be for the Judge to decide. |
But the reason behind the article was to make a point that a federal court ruled that using a proxy or other IP altering technique to access a site which was explicitly denied you access is illegal in a federal court. This gives a very strong argument to future cases in which you have a similar scenario, leading to the idea that, until the decision is argued in a higher court, changing your IP to access a website which has denied you access should be considered illegal under US law. |
I don't suppose there's a |
Wait wait wait, hold up.
I'm not treating this like a black and white issue. I have moral issues of my own within my field of research. I actually study insecticide control. When I started I had reservations about killing insects (I started study in Entomology because I like insects!). Not to mention the environmental impacts, public image & controversy. My masters involved what is currently the most controversial class of insecticides in the Western world.
Furthermore I am not saying that you should halt all nuclear research because you feel like it challenges your morals. PLEASE don't stop researching improvements in nuclear reactors, new technologies, whatever you are currently doing. We do need it. I'm only laying out the shitty flip-side of it all - preference is given to weaponizable technology (which totally makes sense). And on some level researchers simply must accept that and move ahead.
Ideally, I'd be able to research insects without insecticides at all, but the reality is that the funding comes from companies like Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, etc. (well and also Pest Management Alternatives Program grants and other gov't grants). And ideally you'd be able to work on nuclear physics that doesn't get funded by weapons research programs, right? (I assume it is?) |
I really really tried, I promise! but can we get an ELI5 / |
Wrong? No. But a little sad.
It's just tragic that research into fantastic energy technology generally trends toward the technology that can be further developed into weapons. It happened with the Manhattan Project (we figured out liquid fuel thorium reactors but only two were ever in operation in the 50s and 60s). And it's happening here as well - magnetic confinement fusion is much closer to being successful in achieving ignition than inertial confinement lasers.
I'm still thinking realistically here. You're right, I mean, without funding this wouldn't be developed at all. But you see the real rationale here, between the lines, right? The technology isn't for us , to give all people abundant energy. It's ultimately for developing weapons to kill people. It's a little heart-wrenching to see the choice people make given the option between energy generation technology that can be weaponized vs technology that cannot. |
To be fair any fusion drive would be a nuclear weapon if you removed the magnetic bottle containing the reaction, in the same way a tube full of rocket fuel would be an explosive weapon if you ignited all the fuel instantaneously and forced the tube to rupture. In the same way that a biro is a piercing weapon, if you stab someone with it. Anything can be made into a weapon, that's no reason to been everything and stall progress. |
I don't like it. With self driving cars there will be no more high speed chases, no freedom to drive fast and furious, and no control over where you can and cannot go. Having self driving cars will reduce the amount of collisions and impaired drivers and will contribute to a safer society but I feel it would also mean less freedom when we drive. |
The words "study shows" don't come from the studies themselves, but the journalists who misrepresent them. This post is an example of that misrepresentation because it calls something a "study" when it isn't. A "study" is done by observation, and it's impossible to observe that something will happen in the future.
This is really a market forecast, which some journalist slapped the word "study" onto. It may be based on extrapolated trends-- trends which were measured using a study, but the predictive part is not the direct conclusion of research and observation, so it is not a study. |
That is fine.
Make sure that the website you use, uses post instead of get. Further more, pipe all your online profiles through a service like Tor. And disconect you from it - give a generic address, a generic birthdate, and a generic name. They don't need to know who you are unless you tie a credit card to it.
Disassociate your online and offline profiles wherever possible. Use seperate user names for both. DON'T use facebook, and if you do - use generic content. Don't post images that can be used to pin point where you are, whenever possible or who. The less they know, the better.
And if you really want to make sure you keep yourself separate - have a virtual machine that is piped through a proxy server to the Tor network. That way, everything put through it, is never associated with your own IP and your address / name.
If you WANT to have anonymity, and you want to have privacy - it is possible. It just requires some work.
For voip contacts - use something like mumble. Ya, you can't call people, but it is encrypted traffic. And you control every party of it, and can verify that it is doing what you want it to do.
The |
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks."
I guess we could just start sending bundles of MicroSD cards to each other via USPS.
Actually, a flat rate box can ship a volume a bit more than a VHS tape coast to coast for about $6 in four days. I know that on magnetic media that only fits about four terabytes, but with 64gb MicroSD cards... the math is a bit beyond me but I'm pretty sure you could fit around 1000 of them in the box, for 64 terabytes. Let's round to that.
So, USPS will give a hypothetical max bandwidth of 64 terabytes in 4 days for $6. That's 16 terabytes a day, 2/3tb per hour, ~670 gigabytes per hour, ten per minute. Six seconds per gigabyte, which is about 165 MBPS, or 16 times FIOS's advertised speed. For $1.50 a day, less than half what Verizon charges. |
He didn't strike down net neutrality, he struck down a pseudo-common-carrier statuses that didn't have a basis in law.
The ruling didn't even say net neutrality was bad. He actually seemed to be lobbying for it. What he said is that the government needs to call a spade a spade. If they want to have a net neutrality rule, he said the FCC had the authority for common carriers. All they have to do is declare ISPs to be common carriers.
The FCC has never done that. |
Software Developer here, and a lot of you clearly do not get it. This is a big deal; We should be paid a LOT more.
Software developers are hard to find and hire. The better ones, are even harder to find and hire because there exists a lot of bad software developers that create absolute shit for code and are fully content to do so.
But you know what? The percentage of people who are smart enough to code professionally is very small compared to the number of people who use the products or services that are created by the smaller group of developers. That makes us very valuable, because traditionally you need to be in the top 20 or so percentile to be able to do this stuff professionally, even if you do it BADLY. |
It is, it's so delicious. I find the conventions in C++ style languages to be very esoteric. You can very much see the intelligence of the design but it's mucky.
Originally programming was so much more about direct logic. When I've done projects with small memory requirements it seems to become less philosophical and more about binary math. Seeing what logic you can replace by mashing bits together in shifty ways.
I find C# does a good job of integrating the logic with the philosophy. Good strict cases in somes instances but not so strict as to lose a more human style of language. The syntax I find reads more like a story than a math expression.
Almost any other language I have used seems to lack this balance. I could express feelings and emotions with C# syntax but I could also write a recursive binary search. There are a thousand languages better suited for a thousand tasks but not one so well suited to all thousand. |
How does impersonating work once you have the private key? Won't the reliance on a CA prevent it?
Because of the way a digital certificate works. Basically, asymmetric encryption uses two keys, a "public key" which everyone can see and use and a "private key". An extremely simplified explanation of how this works is "the public key is used to encode and the private key to decode what the public key encodes." So essentially, your bank has it's public key, when you visit their site, you use it to encode your messages to it. The only way the bank can read it is to use their private key.
Now, the way a CA works is it holds a list of all public keys and who owns them So, let's use an example site say "bank.com". The CA has bank.com's public key, so, when you visit bank.com, it gives you the public key so you can encode your messages. Your browser contacts the CA and asks "is this the correct public key for bank.com?" The CA checks, if it is the correct public key, the CA gives you an all clear. Now, suppose someone wanted to spoof bank.com. To read your encoded messages, they need to use a different public key because they have a different private key . So, your browser contacts the CA and goes "is this public key correct?" and the CA tells you "No, this is a bad site."
Of course, this entire scheme relies on the idea that bank.com's private key is well, private. IF someone has the same private key as bank.com (which this exploit could get them) they could then give the real public key on their fake site. You then ask the CA "is this the right public key?" and the CA says "Yes, it matches" meaning your browser thinks you're on the right site, when in fact, it's a forgery. |
Imagine you are going to a website and logging in with your password. Your password is sent to the server (encrypted via of course) and at the server, it is decrypted by openSSL.
Meanwhile, an attacker was having fun firing heartbeat packets at the server with a faked length. This way he keeps getting small parts of the memory back from openSSL.
Now due to the way openSSL's allocator works, there is a rather high chance that the memory which was returned contains data from a previous transaction of the server with another client. And it is very well possible your decrypted password was in that block of memory. |
You think replacing oil is achievable but cheap large scale desalination is not? I think you've got that the wrong way round. If water becomes an issue in the developed world it will be solved. If a cheap alternative to oil is found, ditto. |
I've worked in audio engineering before. Generally speaking, I think the reason vinyl ends up sounding better isn't because it's necessarily a better medium. I mean, it's certainly resilient, but it inherently has some limitations that make the mastering process a little different. Let me explain:
Digital audio has a very clearly defined limit as to how loud it can go. With magnetic tape, you have to consider the saturation point, or for vinyl, what the lathe cutting the master can physically cut, but depending on the conditions, how loud the actual medium can go changes.
With digital formats, it simply goes to 0 dBFS. Period. That's a spot that's clearly marked on most meters. If you exceed it, you'll hear a very nasty sounding audible clipping, and a red light on your meter will turn on to let you know whatever you're recording is too loud.
Anyway, in 1989, Sony came out with a digital "brickwall" limiting device that used a technique called lookahead to anticipate changes in loudness. Compared to conventional compression and limiting, it's very transparent, and produces drastically less artifacts - desirable or otherwise when it works.
So when that happened, a shitton of developers came out with their own versions, and started accelerating what's called the [loudness war]( Fast forward twenty five years, it's very common for someone - whether it be a band member or a record label or somebody to use this tool very aggressively on their releases. You can push a brickwall limiter to quite literally absolute amplitude if you want - as in, the loudness level doesn't change at all for the entire song. Much to the chagrin of some of the engineers who have to actually work the brickwall limiter, people will occasionally want that.
Anyway, back to the world of analog mediums. Without that clearly defined volume limit, it doesn't make much sense to be using a tool like that. That's the biggest difference in how vinyl and CD/mp3 releases are made. Some people don't like it ridiculously loud, others don't like the distortion aggressive brickwall limiting introduces, but I think the physical inability to use brickwall limiting is what's giving vinyl a comeback. Compare a vinyl/CD release of a Foo Fighters song for yourself if you want; |
No. I'm not saying everything is a conspiracy I'm just saying we should be careful to not just jump ship and believe something before we have the evidence. The FBI saying it's true is not enough.
Of course we landed on the moon and of course 9/11 happened. Furthermore, it most likely was NK that did it. I'm just saying we need to be careful before we full heartedly believe something.
And by the way, it's been well over a few times that the government has lied to us and tricked us. Just some instances that come to my head at the moment are Iraq, MK Ultra, Operation Midnight Climax. Also another interesting instance of government fuckery is the debacle with Rick Freeway Ross. There's many more that you could find but I can't remember them right now. These instances are all documented and proven. They're not conspiracy theories because we have the CIA documents proving them! Also, anyone that looks at the Kenedy assassination and studies it will quickly realize that there was some serious fuckery going on. I separated this one from the rest because the government hasn't admitted to it yet but just do some studying on the subject and you'll see the problems for yourself.
This isn't about being a loony conspiracy theorist. This is simply about waiting to receive an adequate amount of evidence before you make a verdict. It's a simple concept. |
Because its impossible to provide a back door to your data that only the "good guys" can access. Not to mention the fact that there are many many cases of the "good guys" accessing private data for fun and pleasure.
The dangers of government oppression, corruption and abuse are far greater than the dangers of some guy selling weed online. The primary target for these kinds of tools are people like Martin Luther King, Snowden, Assange, and other government leakers and whistleblowers or anybody who poses a political threat to those in power.
And finally, people who have stuff they want to keep away from the government can do so, and no laws can prevent them from encrypting their data. The bad guys continue using encryption regardless, and the rest of the public is left vulnerable to hackers, scammers, foreign governments, and corrupt members of our own government. |
What scares me the most about all the online surveillance is the fact that you know there are bugs in their stuff. Since everything is secret, there is no user feedback when it's not working. On top of that, everything is 'top secret' so I'd be willing to bet no one outside the group working on a feature ever looks at it. |
Correct. Lenovo pre-loaded some software called Superfish with the intent of tracking a user's browsing habits and serving ads based on said data. It did however also install a "rouge" root HTTPS certificate to ensure it's ability to inject ads on HTTPS enabled sites. An action that would normally trigger a browser warning saying that some contents were injected and can't be verified/trusted.
The problem was that the key was the same for every user meaning that, once obtained, could easily be used to snoop all traffic coming from infected laptops. Meaning that would-be safely encrypted private info like credit card data, passwords or the like was no longer safe. |
The entire article comes across as crackpot conspiracy theory.
He raises a couple of valid points, sure. But when you start referring to anything and everything that uses the internet as "snooping", you're venturing into tinfoil hat land:
> Amazon’s Kindle e-reader reports what page of what book is being read, plus all notes and underlining the user enters
Yes. Because it's part of a cloud-sync service that automatically keeps your reading progress and notes synced across devices. Amazon is completely, 100% open about this: in fact it's specifically an advertised feature of Kindles. How exactly are they meant to provide that part of the service without reporting your page or notes?
By extension if this particular brand of batshit crazy logic, every http request any machine makes -- incluing Linux-based PCs -- is "reporting" or "snooping". |
This article could be better summed up by: |
Yeah, I noticed that. I also like the part where they sent me to collections for $300, admitted that I paid all my bills on time, had no idea what the charge is for (probably when they double billed me and promised to "take care of it"). They refuse to do anything about it because it's "out of their hands." Now I can't refinance my house with a reasonable rate. |
This is bullshit. It's well beyond what is a reasonable response. Mastercard didn't ruin anybody's livelihood, they aren't suppressing anything, they're merely choosing not to support Wikileaks. While some people, myself included, may not morally agree with Mastercard's decision there's nothing illegal about it. This DDoS attack on the other hand, is clearly against the law and has a huge impact if it actually affects the authentication servers that process CC transactions.
Attacking MasterCard because they decided to stop servicing a highly controversial organization is not only immature, but also hypocritical and honestly beneath what Reddit is capable of doing. There are plenty of ways to draw attention to this issue, holding MasterCard's servers hostage is not one of them.
EDIT: That isn't to say reddit is directly responsible, but we're certainly cheering it on.
If anything, this attack gives both media outlets and governments around the world a specific example where they can point and say "See! Wikileaks is a terrorist organization! Their allies committed cyber terrorism and effectively held MasterCard hostage during the busiest sales event of the year all while our economy struggles!"
Attacking anything here is really a losing move, for the reason I cited above. It makes it seem like Wikileaks supports cyber-terrorism. You disagree with MasterCard? Fine, pay off your bill, cut up your card, and never do business with them again. Convince your friends and family to do the same. Start a campaign showing the various reasons to stop using MC. In the end, these tactics don't give the government anything that exemplifies an attack. While they may seem less successful, I doubt this attack will do much of anything either. MasterCard will beef up their DDoS protection, the website will eventually recover, Wikileaks looks worse coming out of this and still won't get any more money via MasterCard. When news about MasterCard starts to go around people will blame Wikileaks, not MasterCard, for their unprocessed transactions. This attack will only hurt Wikileaks in the end.
In short, good job hackers, you fucking idiots. |
This man speaks the truth. Salt prevents a malicious user from seeing 1a904fg5 and knowing that the password is definitely "potato" from a rainbow table lookup. They would only know that the user "tigersaurus"'s password is hashed to 1a904fg5, so they would need to re-create an entirely new table that included my salt to find the password. |
Just got the following form letter from Colleen Hanabusa (D) Hawaii
>Thank you for your correspondence regarding H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I appreciate your input on this important issue.
>H.R. 3261, introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (TX), allows the Attorney General to seek an injunction that would block access to foreign websites dedicated to intellectual property infringement. Intellectual property is any product conceptualized by an individual that has commercial value. This includes among other things patents, trademarks and trade secrets. Common intellectual property infringement includes pirated software, illegal distribution of music or movies, or counterfeit merchandise.
>Many of these foreign sites appear legitimate to unsuspecting consumers, who are tricked into purchasing shoddy products or downloading pirated content like music, movies or games. Some of these counterfeiters sell imitation goods such as infant formula or baby shampoo that expose children to serious health risks. Illegal online pharmacies market counterfeit drugs to consumers. At best, these drugs may simply be ineffective; but at worst, they can be harmful, or even fatal to consumers. Additionally, individuals put themselves at risk to identity theft, credit card fraud, and exposure to malware and computer viruses by visiting and making transactions on these sites.
>Under this bill, once the Attorney General formally seeks an injunction against a foreign website, the Justice Department must go to a federal judge and lay out the case against the site. If a federal judge agrees that the website in question is dedicated to illegal and infringing activity, then a court order can be issued directing companies to sever ties with the illegal website. Third-party intermediaries, like credit card companies and online ad providers, are only required to stop working with the site. They cannot be held liable for the illegal or infringing actions taken by the foreign website.
>Under existing law, it is already illegal to operate domestic websites that infringe on intellectual property rights, just as it is illegal to operate a brick-and-mortar store selling pirated goods. H.R. 3261 simply extends those prohibitions to foreign infringing websites.
>This legislation elicits vigorous debate on both sides of the issue and I appreciate all the input from constituents I have received on this bill. Unfortunately I believe there are several misconceptions of the bill that I would like to clear up.
>First, H.R. 3261 does not restrict lawful free speech and is not a form of censorship. The fact is the bill establishes judicial review and requires judicial approval for a site to be shut down. Ultimately restricting sites from offering fake designer purses or selling copies of the latest Hollywood movie is not an unlawful restriction of an individual's Constitutional right to freedom of speech.
>Next, the bill would not require an entire site to be shut down if a single page is found to be infringing. H.R. 3261 allows a court to target only the portion of the site that is engaging in criminal activity or infringing, leaving access to or funding of the rest of the site alone.
>Finally, the legislation does not require internet service providers to engage in any monitoring, supervising, or policing of their networks. It only requires them to take action at the direction of the Attorney General if a federal court rules that a foreign site is engaged in criminal activity for which seizure would apply if it were in the U.S. Just like 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, internet service providers are only required to take minimum steps, with no duty to monitor.
>H.R. 3261 has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, where it awaits further consideration. Please be assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should this bill or any similar piece of legislation come to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote during the 112th Congress.
>Again, thank you for expressing your views on this crucial issue. I hope you will continue to contact me on federal matters of concern to you. If you would like regular updates, please sign up for my e-newsletter at
>Sincerely,
>Colleen Hanabusa
>Member of Congress
** |
I guess my point is that your argument lacks traction for me if you aren't actively seeking out the artists that adhere to your model. And I do mean actively - passively waiting for professional advertising to peak your interest in something means that any artist who isn't backed by the supposedly hated establishment has little chance of success.
I think your model might be a good way to do things, but I also think pirating actively hurts it for the above reason - instead of giving real newcomers a chance, people who really would let you have their for free in hopes of securing your patronage later, most pirates just passively consume the next heavily marketed blockbuster and then give their money to the big guys if they like it. If you do that, you are basically still demanding artists jump through hoops to join the Hollywood establishment. Saying that they should also offer it for free on top of that is hypocritical IMO.
Pirate because you're cheap, that I get. But I don't get the self-righteousness - if you really think stuff should be free, give little guys a real chance at least once in awhile. At risk of being hipster, you've got to like stuff before it's cool, man. Otherwise, get off the high horse, you aren't making a statement you just want stuff for free.
Anyways, if I haven't completely alienated you with my rant, why not check out some of these links? I swear to god they are fucking awesome, and genuinely being offered for free.
[Underwood and Flinch](
[We're Alive](
[Escape Pod]( |
Distributors....same difference. They might not BE the creators, but they own the RIGHTS to the content. And that's why we're all here. Their intellectual rights are being abused by a majority.
Production costs are never zero. Good ideas take time and effort. If you can't get paid for that work, why do it in the first place? But it's not just paying for a good idea. It's paying the camera man, the lighting technician, the stuntman, the post-production engineer...if we lose the artists, then we will directly affect a very large chain of talented, hardworking people who depend on creative works being produced. |
In addition, they routinely fudged the rankings in public to make it appear as if user-made content was more popular. The real metrics they kept to themselves. |
FBI has emails between Kim and other Megaupload stakeholders/employees about their involvement in circumventing copyright. From what I recall, they would delete links to content as per DMCA requirements, but not remove the content. Without the uploader filing a DMCA appeal, they would host the same content at a new URL. They also allegedly paid some users to encourage them to upload more content.
Cogent and Carpathia weren't active in piracy. Like Youtube, they may have had content uploaded by their users (Megaupload, the company, was one of their users), but had they been given any notices of infringement, presumably they would have acted. They probably weren't given any notices as those notices would have been given to Megaupload directly. |
Wrong, the Dropbox desktop app has the power to delete files, that's how your local files get deleted when you delete them from the web, another computer running the desktop app or when you stop sharing with someone and force it to delete its copy.
When the government will shut them down, they will tell them to force a delete of all files, in the cloud and local users' copies and they will be forced to comply.
Dropbox should not be used for safety, only convenience. If you want to keep your files, simply copy them in another folder that is not synced to Dropbox so you have your backup when they go down.
They will go down, they have tons of copyright infringing files, everybody does.
Try adding a large file that should take long to upload to Dropbox, like a disc iso, it will create its hash, check the cloud, realize it already has it, and just tell you upload done. You can try this with a Linux iso to test without infringing any copyright.
Want more freaky cloud shit? Cloud antivirus, for that to work, the hypervisor has access to all VM instances' memory. That technically means that they can just snoop on your memory at runtime. The implications of this are totally insane if left in the wrong hands, now you don't just have to encrypt your files, you have to encrypt your ram.
Public clouds are nice, but they are left in the hands of companies that you may be able to trust but are forced to comply with the legal system. |
To address your first concern:
1.) The Pirate Bay mentioned that it did not suspect Anonymous ([source](
2.) Anonymous denied DDOSing the site on its twitter ([source]( However, this does not mean that the person/group responsible for the attack is not affiliated with Anonymous.
3.) There is not a good reason for Anonymous to attack TPB since both can be considered to be on the same side. There would be nothing to gain from the attack. Hurt pride? That doesn't sound like something Anonymous would really start an attack for. |
For the ones that didn't:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c&dn=The+whole+Pirate+Bay+magnet+archive&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80
EDIT: Replaced link with a more recent one.
EDIT2: the newer link was 3GiB, not sure if it's right, pasted the first one back.
EDIT3: How to use it
The format is simple. An example:
7015954|Ubuntu 11.10 Alternate 64-bit|707047424|2|5|5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72
7015954 is the piratebay ID of the torrent
Ubuntu 11.10 Alternate 64-bit is the name (there CAN be "|" in the name)
707047424 is the size in bytes
2 is the number of seeders at the time of the snapshot
5 is the number of leechers
5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72 is the magnet link hash
If you want the magnet link correctly, you have to write
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72 |
OH DEAR GOD I JUST DRAGGED THAT WHOLE LINK INTO THE ADDRESS BAR OF MY BROWSER AND IT STARTED DOWNLOADING IN UTORRENT.
(for once, maybe...all-caps was justified) |
Basically this asshole patented the concept of using a database to determine if someone can access and use a piece of software.
Is now suing Mojang for breeching this patent..
Even though this is a fundamental concept of how people log into systems. |
guy sneaks into house" would actually fall under copyright
if it was patented then any phrase like "man sneaks into an abode" would offend the patent |
Sure but ... did I already talk about Executive Order 13026 in this thread? The US had outlawed strong public encryption from WWII on. It was illegal to use or write about or program certain types of math .
I'm of the opinion that the reason we had internet service providers who were also media gatekeepers (eg, AOL) was that we didn't have strong encryption that would allow independent sites to operate well on their own.
Pretty much every site and internet technology we rely upon - and trillions of dollars of electronic commerce - started not in 1991 when Phil Zimmerman released PGP or when the first national ISPs started, but after 1996, when Bill Clinton signed the executive order that moved public-key encryption off the restricted-list with weapon-grade plutonium and bio/chem agents and the DOJ dropped its prosecution of Mr. Zimmerman that it had been dragging on for years to keep his software tied up. |
Not only is it not going to work, I think people will stop resisting so much just because a new 'internet breaking law' pops up every now and then.
I believe that no matter what will be thrown at the so called internet freedom, there are brilliant minds that will bypass it with what will be perhaps a new internet, a better one and one built on anonymity. |
I mean, they might have made music, but I believe the idea was to have a label meanwhile The Beatles used their own music. More to the point, I believe studios operate recording studios and produce works.
The point is, Apple began selling music. Whether they produced it or not they were distributing it. This is where the line between "digital" and "real" gets fuzzy. Is iTunes a digital storefront that stocks music or a distribution network? In the end, a lot of what iTunes does kind of makes labels obsolete and fulfills the same role. They were now selling music and were a dominant force in the music market, even if they weren't technically a "label" per se .
They had a legal agreement to keep out of each other's markets, and that worked until Apple Computer decided to invest heavily into iPods and iTunes. Of course, there was a lawsuit. The original agreement was invalidated. I imagine the original court, were it able to see into the future, would have made Apple Computer change their name had they known they'd ever get into the music business. |
I guess I have confused pan and tilt. I like how the 3D maps tilts and rotates intuitively which allows me to see a surrounding area. If I am looking for a specific building in a city or I am familarizing myself with the surrounding city block, I can use the 3D feature smoothly on an iPad to learn the surrounding infrastructure. Yea, I know I am different, most people just use the navigation and go straight to their destination, but I like to completely familiarize myself with the surrounding buildings, get a feel of a city that I am traveling to.
Also, I do like the Yelp integration in the Apple maps, I can randomly look at a place and stumble upon restuarants. The Apple maps experience is better on the iPad, but I think it needs to load faster. I also think they should improve the resolution and include more cities. On Apple maps, you cannot see a storefront clearly as you can with Streetview. The Streetview on this new Gmaps app works very well! |
Obviously.
So that's all you're responding to... out of all the things that I said? You still refuse to make any sort of argument to back up your point, and you have yet to give a single reason why something is better.
You don't actually have one, do you? Just trolling along, hating Apple just as blindly as the "fanboys" who blindly love it.
You're a troll, and a bad one at that, in addition to being a hypocrite. I hope others start standing up to ass-hattery like this so we can rid this sub of people with nothing to contribute to the discussion but blind rhetoric, trying to pass off opinions as "facts", and completely fabricated stories. |
Lets for a moment be the devil's advocate here.
On the internet everything is free. We only pay for physical goods and download everything else. Therefore the internet is, apart from a few notable exceptions not very monetizable.
But, here comes an industry and a technology that will revolutionize your world and have a much bigger impact on your lives than the internet did. Because not only is this technology more monetizable than the internet, at least initially, but also this technology will bring about much more fundamental change in the world.
The internet makes all information available to all. 3D printing lets everyone make anything. It makes all manufacturing available to all.
Wake up people. If you do not understand how this will change everything, you are missing the largest and most significant technological development of our time.
Everything that surrounds you sucks. All the products that populate your life suck. Because they were designed for millions of people. Everything you own is made to have a million copies. And long ago companies decided that rather than make the best thing for you or the best product it was easier to make a crappy thing and then spend lots of money on marketing to convince you that this thing is a good thing. This is the age you live in, a world surrounded by things with millions of copies.
With 3D printing you, your neighbors and anyone else can break free from this constricting mass manufacturing paradigm.
We can make the things that fit us better. Things that better fit our hands, our bodies, our esthetics, our moods, our personalities and the uses we have intended for them.
This technology is a wish fulfillment technology that lets you make a thing just as it needs to be, for a use case of one a purpose of one. This thing is not designed by committee to appeal to the largest identifiable group. No, this thing is made just for you by you.
With 3D printing we will be able to make every single product in the world better.
Things will better suit their purpose and better suit us.
IN the long run, as more things will be 3D printed mass production will become less and less viable.
3D printers can spread the cost of their development over many different industries and uses. They are universal making machines just as computers are universal calculation machines.
Developments in 3D printing will therefore eventually outpace mass manufacturing.
Because it is only a 3 factor process: machine, material and file any improvement will be quicker to go to market.
If material becomes 10% cheaper than anything that can be made on the machine that uses that material just became 10% cheaper.
Same with faster speeds or better design software.
Eventually this technology will replace virtually all manufacturing in the world because it dramatically reduces transport, inventory and overall cost by letting you make things closer to the consumer.
Also by being able to iterate quicker and more accurately products will be produced faster and better by 3D printing.
This technology will eventually kill all distribution, all retail and all manufacturing (except for certain low value high complexity businesses).
We will no longer be able to wear anyone else's shoes.
Anything that "touches" a person in some way will be 3D printed.
If it is important to you emotionally, it will be 3D printed.
if it is important to you because you are passionate about it, it will be 3D printed.
if it needs to be right because it is your life on the line it will be 3D printed.
if a significant improvement in comfort means the world to you, it will be 3D printed.
We will 3D print all the meaningful things. The value will migrate towards 3D printed goods & services that cater to a 3D printed world.
The mass produced things with millions of copies will still be made. LVMH will still exist. Sometimes we want to outsource the complicated or unimportant decisions in design. But mass production will be rolled back, pressed into the corner of Happy Meal toys and cheap TVs.
What you design, what you find beautiful, what you discover, what you make, what you remix will determine value for a large amount of people. Creativity, discovery, being first & curation will become crucial.
Smaller markets and smaller target audiences will ever dwindle. Peaks will be higher and valleys deeper. Product development will accelerate. There will be platforms for everything and everyone will be a brand.
Any innovation will instantly be copied, any design instantly recognized. The Long Tail will be longer & the World Flatter than anyone could conceive. There will be no barriers to entry. None.
3D printing is an industry that produces physical goods. This is an industry that's been around since 1989 and has grown by 29% a year since then to become a $1,700,000 industry.
This number only covers the business to business 3D printing industry.
10,000,000 people now have 3D printed hearing aids.
Both the Boeing Dreamliner and Airbus A380 have 3D printed parts.
There are over 100,000 people worldwide that have been helped with 3D printed surgical guides.
By building up an object layer by layer you can make unique shapes in series of one. This lets you make things that precisely fit a particular need.
A hearing aid can be made to comfortably fit one unique ear and a hip cup can be 3D printed in titanium for one single patient with one correspondingly unique shape.
You don't have high start up costs with 3D printing. So you can make very small series and experiment much more aggressively.
It massively lowers barriers to entry for industry because in many cases your prototype is your final product.
You can also prototype quicker and test your prototypes with customers to develop better products.
You can develop products faster and iterate faster in response to feedback from the market.
3D printing lets you make shapes that are not possible with any other technology.
3D printing is a faster and more efficient way to make things. You can design, develop and print things in an afternoon rather than take slow boat from China, mold making and tooling, injection molding process that takes months. |
Where do you get that circlejerk of an idea? Nobody is forcing anybody into any of this stuff.
The fact of the matter is that to the vast majority of people, the relatively harmless price of lost privacy is worth the benefit of using these services.
You're not going to get hauled off to jail if you're "off the grid". Don't get a cell phone, or an email account, or a facebook. Don't want google knowing where you are? Don't tell them. Create your own search engine. Live your life like it's 1991. At the end of the day some people might think you're weird, but that's about it. |
Most likely they didn't screw up. Around here, we have charter, which gives you a cable box even for the absolute basic package (only local channels + a handful of cable networks you've never heard of). I thought this was really odd - so one day I plugged the cable directly into my TV. Bam - all non-digital non-premium content was available. |
Yes, and it will be for a while. HBO is looking to make GO a seperate thing which you can pay monthly for (that is, seperate from if you own it on cable), but that looks to be 3+ years in the future.
But the cable providers are looking to do ANYTHING they can to make HBO happy. They know that HBO and the premium channels make them a lot of money, and HBO really isn't set / looking to go into collecting money and having to set up all of those infrastructures. Right now, they just get money from the cable giants and go from there. |
Google Talk was the only big xmpp provider that did it right: you could message across xmpp providers (potentially message someone using a Facebook account from your Google account). The problem was that no one else did this: Facebook and whatsapp explicitly closed off their service so that you couldn't message to or from other xmpp providers.
That Google is now dropping xmpp makes me so sad. Xmpp had the potential to be the open standard that allowed you to use any client to message to any user that is on any xmpp provider. Just like email , but for IM. Now since even Google is going for yet another closed off protocol that only messages with Google users, we have lost that potential ability and IM will stay closed.
This sucks big time. No systems can be built around IM like is done for email. No alternative clients can be made that could suit users better. No other platforms will be supported. On desktop you have to use Chrome. That sucks, because that means it won't just run on my raspberry pi for instance. The potential to innovate is lost.
It's nowadays not about the features, stability or security of IM but purely the virality. Whatsapp became big because of this by sending them your contact list and matching people on phone number. Others latched onto this idea. Now Google is forcing people to join their Google+ ecosystem: you can't use hangouts without Google+, you can't review apps on Android without Google+, you can't use picasa because Google+. They are funneling their services all to Google+ and by doing so moving people over from other social sites.
Lastly, because we're still not on an open standard for IM we will keep having to switch between closed off IM services. Think about how many accounts for IM you've had? ICQ, AIM, MSN, Facebook, Whatsapp, Google... You aren't using most of those now, those are basically dead. Now do the same for email. I bet the account you made 8 years ago is still being used. You might have a few accounts, but you made them for a purpose, not because its just another IM service. |
I'm glad everything worked out for you! But that |
Not suggesting it's more secure, it can be equally secure.
My primary objection is that it takes a few days and a trip into town (this was back in the days before internet banking, but I guess it's still possible to not have internet banking on an account). I had to pay to travel into town so I could check my account, then after 5 days they wouldn't confirm it still, and wanted to repeat the process. This was a while ago so I don't remember the exact circumstances, it's perfectly possible I did something wrong.
Note: It's cheaper to travel in to town than it would have been to endure a phone service for hours, I don't even know if this type of request is something they'd handle over the phone. |
Depends.
Assuming someone had your OTP - they would still need your password.
If you use a PIN to unlock your phone - they couldn't get to your email or OTP. If you don't use a PIN then they could get your OTP code, but not your password - however they wouldn't want that because they can just launch the email client. |
Well, why not deny the kid his money? It's what they do. Paypal denied me a couple hundred bucks for having the nerve to sell things on eBay faster than PayPal wanted me to. Locked down my account, and wouldn't give me access to my money for over a year.
I filed in small claims at the Justice of the Peace here, and they actually sent a lawyer across the country to show up and give me a verbal beating in front of a judge, at which point the judge ruled in my favor and the fucking company STILL wouldn't give me my money.
Their lawyer sent me an email informing me that it wasn't worth my time to pursue the money any further, because if I tried, they'd get it bumped up to the next court, at which point I'd need a lawyer, who'd cause more in the first half a day than I have in my PayPal account.
Finally, after a year, I got an email "reminding me" that my account was still active and that I still had money in it. Well I fired off an email of my own saying that social networking is a far more powerful tool than their lawyers, and I wouldn't hesitate to tell this story every chance I got for the rest of time.
Suddenly, my account was credited with the exact amount I'd paid in court costs, making us square for every single cent. That's how I know they wanted me not to tell this story, even though they didn't ask. So since PayPal doesn't want it told, here we are. |
Paypal is evil, evil, evil. I've had some run ins with them (too long to post here, but they are frustrating and kafkaesque). It basically amounts to them being able to withhold extreme amounts of money based on their user agreement, and it is really dependent on the local laws whether or not you can actually get anything unlocked.
I ended up doing a lot of research about the policies and practices of Paypal and I was SHOCKED. It's amazing what they get away with. I hate paypal with a passion and refuse to use the service except for very small, occasional transactions (still have a bit of money on the account). I hate giving them any service at all, and I'm glad to hear about google wallet.
I don't use online payment methods that often, but I'm glad to hear about good alternatives! |
All you need is a bitcoin wallet and you are ready to go! You can use the full client - however, it needs to sync first by downloading the [block chain]( which can take about 24 hours. You can use a lighter client wallet like [Electrum]( or [Multibit]( if you don't want to wait for the block chain to sync. Or, if you are looking for something convenient, you could use a web wallet like [blockchain.info]( or [Coinbase]( Coinbase is nice because it allows you to easily exchange USD for BTC by linking a bank account. If you [mine your own coins]( however, and eventually find yourself to be a bitcoin millionaire, you would probably do best to keep the funds in a secure local client, or even a [paper wallet]( for ultimate security. |
Yeah fuck PayPal! They had a requirement to the collection of the reward that the kid didn't meet! How unethical of them to not reward the kid for not making himself aware of that!
Seriously, does anyone actually read the articles? PayPal didn't use discretion here, they followed their policy. You know what I did when I won a few bucks on Keno when I was 17? I have the ticket to my dad and had him cash it. Why? Because the rules said that I wasn't allowed to. So I found a way to get the money. Do you know what would have happened if I had tried to cash it myself? I would have been fined.
The top comment in threads like this so often is just a pitchfork followed by rabbles and torches. The kid was close to 18. This isn't horseshoes tho. Close doesn't cut it. He could have waited, he could have had someone else report it, or he could have reported it anyway knowing that he couldn't collect (wanna talk ethical, ethical is reporting something so that people don't get screwed. Unethical is cheering on criminals who steal money due to a little prissy Internet vendetta they have).
Look, when you play a game, you play by the rules. And everything in life is a game with rules. The rule here is Very clear. Be 18 to collect your prize.
All this said, it would be way cool if PayPal kinda "lost track of that one" until next March and payed the kid. But if they don't, they don't. No lack of ethics, no pitchforks necessary. |
Before I had a full time job I resold items like laptops and electronics on eBay. I've always never had a problem with PayPal until a single incident which led me to boycott PayPal and eBay entirely (at that time PayPal was still running under eBay). Just as a background I was an established seller on ebay with flawless feedback and had the account since 1996.
so i was selling a laptop and had it shipped. ive done it a couple hundred times-never had any issue. Everything went fine until I got a chargeback notice along with a follow up request from PayPal to investigate whether or not I had shipped the item. After forwarding all the pertinent info a PayPal representative indicated that they would look into this and get back to me. The next thing I know someone from paypals collections department called me. I tried to explain the matter but he just wanted me to pay up and was repeatedly yelling at me and making threats to ruin mt credit. Long story short after a few mire calls I paid up and lost the laptop.
I decided to do some undercover research and ended up finding the telephone number of the recipient of the laptop (google is awesome). The person did not answer a couple times but finally i got a hold of someone. Apparently the daughter answered and gave me info that her father had been running some sort of operation that involved scamming eBay sellers into shipping laptops and using paypals fine print to get over it. I didn't trace the company that he was link with but the name of the recipient ended up seemingly to being a fictitious name however it coincided to match with a senior staff person at PayPal. I would not be the least bit surprised if this was somehow a underground operation to scam hundreds if not thousands of people. |
Your statement is crazy, that's practically a shakedown. Hi, I've found a vulnerability with your website. Please reward me with money or I can exploit this vulnerability illegally and extort you via other methods.
Sorry, you aren't entitled to being paid just because you found a bug. That's great that you did but that doesn't mean you deserve to be compensated for not breaking the law. |
Paypal was just the beginning of my disillusion with certain types of financial institutions. Back in 02-03 I sold a friend's $600 coat to a buyer with an unconfirmed address, which, again, I was completely ignorant of because it was new and I was new, and as I remember the option wasn't featured prominently on the site and/or the process was somewhat confusing for a teenager like me. I received the payment, gave it to my friend (it was his coat), and THREE MONTHS later paypal took the money out of my then empty bank account because the card used to pay us had been reported as stolen. We contacted "the authorities" (apparently there was an ongoing investigation) and never heard anything back. I was shocked at their level of access to my account. I definitely felt violated. Out 600 bucks, overdraft charges, and some stupid middle high-end pea coat. |
Or much more likely, they'll just stop operating in the EU, lay off their entire European divisions, and take the hit to move the money home. If they are specifically banned from making money on their EU divisions, they wouldn't bother operating them, and they certainly wouldn't give them the tools to drive the American office out of business.
Since companies are already leaving their European earnings in European tax havens (as much as allowed by law), US tax income wouldn't really suffer by "billions". Might actually help, since the US headquarters would probably cough up the one time reparation if the alternative was to lose it all.
European services would benefit, but mainly in Europe. There would be a vacuum, and services that previously couldn't compete with the pricing/features of the tech giants would fill that. The catch however, is that they'd have to deal with an order of magnitude increase in customer base overnight. No easy way to solve that.
They could buy that much more infrastructure (or buy it from the American companies on their way out), but that would involve tons of cash on hand. The government could subsidize it, but they're in money trouble already. The government could repossess it, but that would create a rapidly escalating international incident. Or they could not do anything, and stick the EU consumer with terrible service as they operate way over capacity.
I say "mainly in Europe" though, because internationally the new EU services would have to compete with the American tech giants. They're experienced, established worldwide, and have enormous infrastructure. Pitting PRISM backlash against aggressive pricing by an established player is not a bet I would take.
So |
OP sensationalizes the article again. The most important paragraph from the article (emphasis mine):
> It said the document showed that the NSA monitored phone calls, text messages, emails and internet chat contributions and has saved the metadata - that is, the connections, not the content - at its headquarters.
This means the NSA is looking at who is contacting who; however they are not looking at or recording what is said in these exchanges. While I believe the NSA should have to show reasonable suspicion to a judge (or even get a warrant) before monitoring this information on someone, it is worth noting that the NSA is not breaking any US laws with this surveillance because they are allowed to look at the contact information, but not the content itself. |
People are well aware of the argument that it's only metadata, and they are still outraged. Don't pawn this off as misplaced anger, people are upset about the entire premise of all this.
The argument that it's legal is similar to the argument that GPS tracking people's movements doesn't require a warrant because no conversations are being recorded. The Supreme Court just recently ruled this to be unconstitutional.
Phone records are even more intrusive since your movements are public knowledge, whereas your phone calls have the expectation of privacy. People quite often get divorced over shit like "you've been calling your ex-girlfriend every night you've told me you had to work late". People commonly delete their call logs to protect their personal privacy. Meanwhile the government is logging it all in gigantic databases.
>The information the NSA is recording does not include the content of these foreign conversations. This is legal under current US law and should be changed but you guys are too busy getting outraged over stuff that isn't actually happening.
It only takes 1 corrupted individual to use that information wrongly, one false flag by a system using bullshit heuristics that nobody understands to come under full surveillance... at which point all these "irrational" fears are realized and some government contractor is listening in on your phone sex calls.
It's not just calls either, it's all the sites you visit, emails, texts.
Even outside of that, there's also content inspection. The government itself said that encrypted communications get stored for up to one year. How do they know your email is encrypted unless they inspect the body of it? Almost assuredly "automated inspection" is not being counted do to loop-holes such as the information not being recorded or view-able by humans, but it's quite likely algorithms are pouring over every word. If that's not the case, the burden is on the government to prove that's the case, but all this software is proprietary government secret shit so it's damn near impossible that'll ever happen. Thus, it should not be allowed in the first place.
This is all very much about automating investigation and legal preceedings, but that's inevitably gonna lead to a large number of false positives which is inevitably gonna lead to people getting violated.
I'm not sure how clear our Constitution has to be about shit like this, but it can and has been legally challenge by the ACLU, and their was also a class-action lawsuit filed almost immediately after the outing. |
We've had the discussion since the 70s here in Germany during the hole [RAF]( story and until now. Back in the day it was called "Rasterfahndung", meaning analysis of big sets of data using filters to sort out certain target groups of people. In short: exactly whats done today, just without internet or significant electronic processing.
I'm not naive enough to believe my government has overlooked the internet. But we still/so far have quite a strong legal basis for privacy right and a constitution thats worth the name. As a matter of fact most of what's done here in terms of internet surveillance is illegal and each time a case sufaces the consequence is public outcry.
Last but not least our police/military funding has by far not gone out of hand as much relatively, not to mention absolutely compared to the US. My guess is that US intelligence on Germany alone is significantly better funded than and thus exceeds domestic intelligence here. |
seeing a lot of people in the comments who take the stance: 'derp this is nothing new DUH everyone knew this already lulz'
actually, that's not accurate. this is a major scandal because it's, well, scandalous .
'all countries do this sort of thing! DUH'
actually, no. rest assured, iceland, greece, italy, japan, france, germany et cetera do not have direct access to the servers of leading Internet companies - nor do they have a program so invasive it immediately notifies NSA agents when ordinary citizens log into their email account, send a message, or use an online chat service (source:
'well, ok, but Americans knew about this. Bush started it, Obama kept it rolling.'
again, not really. if this were the case, why did director of national intelligence james clapper perjure himself before Congress just back in march - three months ago - when senator ron wyden asked him if the NSA was collecting any info at all on US citizens. His reply: 'no sir, not wittingly...' (followed by some sketchy eye movements, what law enforcement would describe as 'furtive glances' hehe)
and when this snowden stuff first leaked, why did clapper say these disclosures were 'literally gut-wrenching' and why did senator lindsey graham, a proponent of NSA spying, say we should go to the 'ends of the earth' to capture snowden.
not exactly the responses you'd expect of an elected government, operating within the confines of US law and the constitution, doing only what US citizens are fully aware they are doing, with proper oversight in place, etc etc. |
The Supreme Court would likely strike it down. Although the censorship cases involved blocking content as opposed to a filter, I think an automatic filter would probably be held unconstitutional. If they offered an opt-in filter it would probably be fine.
The Supreme Court has held on several occasions that child pornography (obscene) is not protected by the First Amendment. However there are ample cases defining obscene as something more than just what people might find disgusting.
For instance in [ Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition ]( the court struck down the provision of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, banning digitally created child pornography as over broad.
In [ United States v. Stevens ]( the Supreme Court and Circuit court refused to add an additional exception category to First Amendment protections for animal cruelty videos. It stated there are already laws against animal cruelty, and although the videos are reprehensible, they were very reluctant to encroach on Constitutional protections prohibiting the speech relating to them. |
China does have a strong export/manufacturing sector, but their economy is also facing major issues. Their future is up in the air, it depends on how well they transition from an export based economy to an internal demand economy. This involves a huge revaluation of their Yuan, which will deal a massive blow to their exporters.
Part of the problem is China does not have the natural resources it needs to grow its economy. The US and Europe are dwarfed by China's consumption of Middle Eastern oil. Much of the metals and coal it uses to fuel its export based economy comes from Australia (although China does have some metals used in the manufacture of electronics, which is obviously a plus).
It fuels much of its growth by building real estate. It has up to 13 cities designed for up to 10 million people each with only several thousand living in them. China has capital controls making it difficult for its wealthy to invest outside of China, so they buy these new empty units at an inflated price. That is why you see a buying frenzy in Vancouver and San Francisco of real estate from Chinese people who got their money out of China.
China has two options, stick with the status quo of an undervalued Yuan and a strong export sector even though it cant go on forever, or transition into a domestic demand economy and make some very painful changes (making it easier to start a small business will help build a middle class, but they have to fight the entrenched corruption pushing back on this as well, bribes are necessary when doing business there). If their domestic consumers' purchasing power rises, they may have some hope in filling their ghost cities. With the current economic set up, I am not so sure it will happen. |
yo, so I don't even own an Apple product but this is kind of a no brainer with what I know about it.
Did you really invest in $200-600 laptop with an OS when you could have spent $20 or 40?
Since you were trying to get Snow Leopard it sounds like you were upgrading from 10.5: Leopard, yeah? The reason why you can't just skip 2 operating systems is because Apple seems to have followed suit and had built in a recovery partition like a lot of laptops were going at the time. This happened in Lion, and also happened in Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard is the last Operating System to require a physical CD to install or access recovery utilities.
While you could have gone out of the way and gone through this entire torrenting thing, why didn't you just use another disk? Any snow leopard disk should work with your specs.
Depending on your macbook model you might have to upgrade your hardware to actually support [Mountain Lion too.]( It's listed right on their website, and if it's 3rd party RAM it may prevent the installation from occurring.
Now... Why are you trapped with resorting to using the App store? The install stays with your AppleID if you purchase it, so similar to a CD you could use your AppleID in the Mac app store on ANY computer to upgrade it.
I ain't even a fangirl since I've stuck with Android and Win 7 for as long as I can; I've just worked with a lot of macs. |
I would like to see your evidence for this being disproved.
This entire legal clusterfuck started when Apple demanded that the Justice Department investigate Amazon's ebook department. The Justice Department investigated Amazon and determined that Amazon was not engaging in any form of illegal price dumping.
Unfortunately for Apple, the Justice Department then decided to look deeper into the rest of the ebook market after they were finished with Amazon. It then became apparent that an illegal price fixing scheme headed by Apple was in the works. Had Apple not tried to get the Justice Department to go after Amazon, they probably would not have been caught.
If you would like to know more details about this, I recommend Ars Technica's articles describing this whole case in detail. It is quite interesting.
Also, you are blowing Amazon's loss leader program out of proportion. Amazon has a small number of loss leader ebooks. This is legal and is common practice in many industries. They were not distorting the market through this practice. I really don't get where your claims of discouraging publishers from producing as many titles comes from. That is simply false. |
Got in an argument with my mom today about this, she doesn't believe it happened. It led to a Apple Vs Other debate... I tried to explain to her that all apple does is charge 3 to 4 times as much for products that are far insuperior to competetors, and they are just about marketing not technology. She responded, "well your computer doesn't have RETINA display!" I tried to explain to her that it is just a marketing term that means high resolution, and that my device does have high enough to meet those standards, and that the term "Retina" is just a way to sell their product to stupid people.
Now she's mad at me because apparently I called her stupid.
I tried to save myself by telling her I didn't think she was dumb, just that she was from a different generation and didn't grow up with computers like I did...
Now she's even more mad because I called her stupid and OLD. |
I realize it's hard to concentrate while your eyes are rolled up in the back of your head and you're foaming at the mouth at the chance of starting up a console war douche infused circle jerk, but if you'll actually read what I typed, I clearly stated that I use WDTV for streaming Netflix without issues. |
All this personal responsibility stuff is a fucking joke. You should just save yourself the trouble and write "HURRR RON PAUL 2012 PERSONAL RESPONSIBLES". It's an attitude fostered by a guilty western society which makes money off other peoples sweat. They justify that attitude by pretending it was not circumstance but individual superiority which got them to that position.
There's a reason why lawyers exist, it's because the law is hard to navigate. Their are so many people who can benefit from social networks. Kids who want to keep in touch with their class mates, older people who want to share pictures with their grand kids, migrant workers who want to see what their family is doing in their absence, disabled people who struggle to socialise in traditional ways etc. Many of these people aren't going to understand fully the implications of online data storage and trading. And it's not unreasonable for them to excpect a reasonable degree of privacy e.g having the OPTION to not be searched by any fucker on the planet, be them pedophile, scam artist or sexual attacker.
There are ways social networks can be good and profitable. They can share data in open and honest way with companies. They could credit your account with more privilidges the more companies you share with, or you could choose from a check list who you would like to share with, a minimum of 10 to have a profile. Also you could select which data is ok to share and again havea minimum requirement. You could explain in clear terms what data is being shared and who is recieving it. Those are two ideas that I pulled right out my ass but I'm just using it as an example. |
So fucking what. I never understood that feature anyway. If you don't want your private things floating around the internet, you probably shouldn't be uploading pictures to facebook in the first place. As if you can trust facebook and your 300+ "closest friends" to keep it private anyway.
Facebook is the absolute least of your problems. You have a choice in that matter. Just go delete your profile.
We live in the age of surveillance. We are being monitored in the stores, the streets and even on our private computer. That is the real problem. The stuff we can't do anything about. Actually, disregard that. The real problem is that population of the world don't really battle it anymore. The governments just keep pushing, and little by little we accept more and more. Merely introducing the thought of video surveillance in the streets in the 70's would have made the public label it as DDR-methods. Now we pretty much just accept it. Maybe we sign an online petition, but that is it.
I live in Denmark. "The happiest people on earth". Yay for us. We are also the country with the highest number of street surveillance cameras per capita. After 9/11 it's like the government just got a carte blanche in this area. We don't do anything about it, because we want to feel safe so we can enjoy our "freedom". Jesus fucking Christ. We have turned into a bunch of opinionless puppets, which is also obvious in the media. All we ever hear about is the scandals. "This politician used tax money on a 100$ bottle of wine." "That politician twisted some numbers, even though he knew the right ones." "This guy cheated on his wife". Big fucking whoop. Fine them, get on with it and give me some news that actually matters to me. Tell me how the latest legislations will actually affect to me. But that shit doesn't sell newspapers, because people are idiots and care about the drama and the entertainment value. It makes me sick. |
It is people who don't respect their own privacy in the first place.
Their own, and those of others as well. That's the issue. I've had to deal with clueless relatives...
Reposting my engagement status change.
Reposting pictures of my fiance and I.
Reposting pictures of me from professional photoshoots -- without permission from the photographer, and without credit.
Using pictures of ME as their default.
Some people just have NO sense of boundaries, specially older parents/relatives, who have taken Facebook as the new equivalent of carrying your picture in their wallet and showing it to strangers on the bus. And FB is trying to push this "Share your life! Be social!" Truman Show agenda, that doesn't let you control who exactly can see your stuff. You post it, and everyone in your circle can share it out! |
This is just an introducton to fusion in general and says nothing about the particular site and there has been no improvment in the containment of the plasma. |
When you connect to a web site using (i.e. encrypted, i.e. not your web browser is doing some cryptography magic to keep your conversation (between you and the web server) secret. Nobody can eavesdrop and see what your web browser and the web server are saying to each other.
This cryptography magic is called TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security.
Some time after TLS was invented and was already widely used by millions of people, some people sat around and said, "Wouldn't it be nice if the two sides of this conversation had a way to say 'Hey, are you still there?' to the other side?" And they designed a way to do this. And they called it heartbeat. (And they wrote down a description of how to do it [here](
Next, the people who make the OpenSSL software said to themselves, "OK, let's add that ability to OpenSSL, since, after all, OpenSSL's purpose in life is to be software that knows how to do the cryptography magic called TLS." So they did.
The only problem is that the OpenSSL people messed up. I oversimplified a bit when I said the heartbeat was one side saying "Hey, are you still there?" to the other side. It's actually one side saying, "I am about to send you 123 bytes of data. Can you send that data to me back exactly as I sent it to you, to prove that you're still alive and OK?" Of course, it doesn't have to 123 bytes of data. It could be 456, or really any number (up to a limit), but I'll use 123 in my explanation.
So how did the OpenSSL people screw up? Well, what if you lied when you said you were going to send 123 bytes of data and instead you only sent 5 bytes of data? The amount/length of data you said you were going to send does not necessarily match the amount you actually sent . But OpenSSL doesn't check if they match.
So, OpenSSL has the entire message you sent sitting around, including the "here comes 123 bytes of stuff" part plus the 5 bytes of stuff you actually sent. So it says to itself, "I'm going to need to know those 123 bytes later when I respond", so it sets aside 123 bytes of space to store that. Then here's where things go wrong: in those 123 bytes of space it set aside, it puts the 5 bytes of data you actually sent, then it thinks there are still 118 bytes of information more to put into the space it set aside, so it keeps going and grabs 118 bytes of information that has nothing to do with whatever you sent, and it remembers all that. Then later it sends you back the whole 123 bytes.
The problem is, who knows what was lying around in those 118 bytes of information it shouldn't have copied and sent back to you but did. It could be your password. It could be someone else's password. It could be a credit card number. It could be even be some of the information used by the cryptography magic that could be used to defeat the cryptography later on, for all users.
The actual amount of data you can get is around 65535 bytes. That may not seem like much, but you can do this trick over and over again, and you don't even need an account on the server. So you can keep fishing for information all day. And, unless you happen to crash the server in the process of doing this, nobody will know you did it or what information you got.
So, what lgats did it to create a tool that connects up to a web server of your choosing and says, "Hey, if I wanted to use this heartbeat stuff, do you even know how to do it?" If the web server answers no, then you're safe. (And it is possible to tell OpenSSL to answer no, and refuse to use heartbeat.) If the web server answers yes, then it's time to check if the server uses a version of OpenSSL that has this bug. |
Its salaried non-exempt, meaning they (the business) are not exempt from paying them overtime. I am salaried exempt which means they are not required to pay me overtime.
Technically the way the org is structured (badly) we are part of completely different departments (Helpdesk and Regional Infrastructure) so there isn't always consistency in how people are paid.
Even more fun fact, I am not actually employed at the site I work at and because of this I am on a different sites holiday schedule. |
You know why this is happening right? MONEY. It does not matter who we elect because EVERY single politician ends up being beholden to those who foot the bill of their million dollar campaigns. Until the people, via taxes, fund elections, this will keep happening. Allowing ANY outside contribution leads to a sense of debt that in turn ends up with pork and other money being funneled to these peoples causes. |
You know why this is happening right? MONEY. It does not matter who we elect because EVERY single politician ends up being beholden to those who foot the bill of their million dollar campaigns. Until the people, via taxes, fund elections, this will keep happening. Allowing ANY outside contribution leads to a sense of debt that in turn ends up with pork and other money being funneled to these peoples causes. |
even if that were a serious problem [it's not, see below], the global police state necessary to actually enforce copyright [by definition every communication would need to be compromised] is overridingly undesirable [not that that's stopping the yanks/brits/etc. from trying to build it]
copyright is logically independent from attribution [beware idiots lumping them together] - copyright, the ability for party c to prevent party a passing on information q to party b, is not required for it to be detectably fraudulent for party a to claim to be the original author of q, even if c has no right to prevent passing on information q, all c really has to do is cryptographically sign+timestamp q. thus the ability to build a rep and work on commission for actual new work done [only facilitated by the internet through crowdsourcing] is not somehow lost when we abolish copyright. |
copyright is logically independent from attribution [beware idiots lumping them together]
No, it isn't. It could be but is not under the current legal definition of copyright. Beware of entitled twits trying to pry them apart.
>all c really has to do is cryptographically sign+timestamp q.
Yes, I'm sure Penguin wouldn't have the resources to overcome that, would they?
At any rate, we still have the problem of Penguin marginalising me. I, as an independent author, could not possibly compete with their vast marketing engine. They would earn all the money and I would be left in obscurity.
And maybe you're okay with this but I'm curious why you think I'd ever write another book after that. What possible motivation would I have?
And shouldn't I get paid? I mean, dentists do, and shopkeepers, and lawyers, and doctors. What is different about a creator that means that they shouldn't be paid for their efforts? Wouldn't society benefit more if creators could earn a living from their craft and therefore continue to do it full time?
Not rhetorical questions. Please answer. If you abolish copyright, you need to deal with the repercussions as well.
> |
This caused a big issue at the time of the 700MHz auction in the US. The FCC wanted operators to let handsets on the 700MHz bands be interoperable i.e. work on each other's frequencies within the 700MHz band. Instead Verizon and AT&T cut up the 700MHz band into sub-bands and refused to offer interoperable handsets. AT&T has relatively recently [promised to support interoperability](
Nonetheless, solutions like Qualcomm's RF360 are making it easier for handsets to support a huge number of bands.
The bigger problem then is the fact that Verizon and Sprint use CDMA2000 2G and 3G networks rather than GSM and WCDMA (like almost all the rest of the world uses). This means regardless of band harmonization, Verizon and Sprint phones will never be able to work on AT&T or T-Mobile. CDMA2000 handsets do not use replaceble SIM cards in the way GSM phones do, meaning it is impossible to "unlock" them to other networks (and vice versa, impossible to get GSM phones to work on CDMA2000 networks as there's no SIM card available to insert).
Verizon and Sprint are moving as quick as they can to 4G LTE and should hopefully be able to shut down their CDMA networks in the next ten years. This should theoretically mean they could start using SIM cards and make their phones interoperable. More likely though, is that soft-SIM options (think an evolved version of the Apple SIM in the new iPads) will be the standard then.
Lastly though, this doesn't solve the biggest problem, which exists in Germany as well in the US. Carriers lock phones to their network to make switching difficult. It's less of an issue in Germany simply because prepay is a bigger portion of the market. |
A simple way you can understand it: the lower the frequency, the bigger obstacles you need to obstruct the signal.
On one end of the spectrum, there is e.g. visible light (yes it's the same kind of thing as radio waves, somewhere around 500 THz). Its frequency is so big that it can't route around any obstacles (... you can't see through solid things), and you actually have to cut holes into walls to get reception (a solution also known as "windows").
Lower down there are the freqs your satellite dish uses (~20 GHz). It still behaves like visible light (you can build mirrors for it: that's what satellite dishes are), but it's a bit more tolerant when going through things (birds, clouds, etc.)
Then there is the mobile spectrum. It can route around small objects, and you need wall-sized things to obscure it. The lower the frequency, the bigger the walls need to be.
And remember AM radio? around ~540 KHz. You built a single tower in the other end of the country, and you had reception everywhere , no matter whether it was in line of sight or not. You can actually get so low in frequency that you'd need an entire planet to mask out the signal. (Of course, half of the planet listening to the same bits isn't what you want when it comes to mobile networks; that's why carriers like big freqs in really crowded situations.) |
In a conventional fixed wing aircraft (aeroplane) your turbofan/prop/jet/combustion engine is going to directly provide thrust to your aircraft. In a helicopter you've usually got a turboshaft engine used to drive the rotors on top. So you've got an engine that is not massively efficient (because its converting most of the exhaust gasses velocity into mechanical power), using fuel at a constant rate no matter whether you're flying at 100mph or 0mph. Also helicopters have to fly at a velocity at which the leading rotor blade does not pass the speed of sound (because the rotor blade is moving you need to add it's velocity to yours). And a few other reasons including servicing, renting hangars etc is also expensive. |
It's a distance and speed thing. You could launch a rocket straight up and pass the ISS and wave to them on the way back down. It's something like ~9km/s delta v for "earth escape" afaik. Even stable orbits degrade over time slowly falling back to earth from low earth orbit ~180km to ~500km or something like that.
So basically: launch rocket straight up for a few, slowly begin to turn rocket so you are trying to obtain LEO of ~400km and your escape velocity in an efficient manner. You want to float away to your favorite space rock that isn't earth? Go up roughly 32,000km with a nice circular orbit, take something with some mass and huck it in the opposite direction and the desired effect should happen! |
Alright. A major issue here is that in general high altitude balloons are designed so that their volume expands as the external atmosphere drops. So the higher a balloon goes, the bigger it gets. This is done to offset the decreasing buoyancy from decreasing atmospheric pressure. However, the thing is that the more the balloon expands, the weaker it gets right until the point it goes pop!
So, weather balloons expand. A lot. Unfortunately I'm not capable enough to simulate their structural integrity. But I can still simulate balloons that don't expand.
I looked up some standard helium weather balloon. The page gave ground level volume of 7.58m^3 which is filled with 7.5889 nm^3 of Helium. At 288K ground temperature that's about 100 kPa, so the balloon is pretty much filled to the atmospheric pressure.
Weight of helium in such a balloon is 1.26 kg and weight of hydrogen is 0.64 kg. Assuming weight of the balloon materials to be 100 grams, we can calculate the maximum altitude for non-expanding balloons to be:
He: 15.3 km
H2: 20.3 km (32% increase)
With a heavier payload, 1 kg, the difference drops quite a bit.
He: 12.2 km
H2: 14.2 km (16% increase)
6 kg would go up to
He: 3.0 km
H2: 3.9 km (30% increase.. interesting) |
In short, the Constitution says that the president must be a natural-born citizen. "The weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion appears to support the notion that 'natural born Citizen' means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship 'at birth' or 'by birth,' including any child born 'in' the United States, the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parents who has met U.S. residency requirements
Musk was born in South Africa to a South African father and a Canadian mother. Totally different situation to Ted Cruz who was entitled to American citizenship at birth due to his parent having American citizenship. So yes, the research has been done. |
First I think your estimates for launch costs are probably accurate but a bit conservative. Instead of 150 lbs per satellite I would guess 300-400. Launching the full 4000 planned satellites would probably cost $1 to 1.5 billion (10-15% of his proposed 10 billion cost)
R&D should actually be pretty cheap since he is really only designing 1 satellite to start. I would imagine a burn rate of $150 million a year would cover it. SO say $750 million over 5 years, covering some early prototyping.
Then with a basic prototype design, you spend say $2 billion on a factory. And if each satellite costs $1.5 million to produce, that gives you $6 billion for the actual product. Getting back to that $10 billion number.
Now a couple observations with these numbers. First, there are synergies to capture with SpaceX related to various systems (mentioned in WSJ report). And rapid prototype testing is possible using CRS missions which have weight free for secondary payloads. That is a huge advantage.
Second, that cost estimate is hugely back-ended. Musk's 5-year target is not for 4000 satellites but for "version 1". For the next 3 years, they are just spending R&D most likely. Then maybe in Year 3 they build a factory and produce some smaller # of sats. Point is that $1 billion in cash from Google would carry the venture through to the point of probably prototyping and beginning factory construction. At that point they should have a robust design tested in space. Financing the rest via debt or additional funding is not so implausible.
Regarding revenue streams. Part of the opportunity of doing space-internet is exactly that you can compete almost everywhere to capture some market share. But note that Musk talks mainly about acting as the long distance backbone. Its not appropriate to talk about his market share of end users for this. Someone like Level 3 Communications (existing backbone provider) touches 80% of internet users traffic in the US. Obviously they arent collecting $80 from each of them per month. Musk's goal seems reasonable in that he hopes to capture a small share of local direct to customer internet service and a much larger share of long distance hauling. I dont know that industry, but I imagine a better measure of market capture would be based on monthly data transfer rates. |
This goes for a bit but I will try to make some fun sense of it.
Mobas are a little more forgiving than FPS becuase there is no strict lag compensation and the easiest way for me to put it, you aren't controlling your character directly in MOBAs, but are watching what the server sees in the birds eye view.. while having input. It's as if you're a spectator having the camera float up there. Sure your Q will go off 500ms late, but it's timable for lagging users.
((That said, if you could get lag compensation for abilities that would be really cool in games. Like, if I have 2000 ping, let my ability come up 2 seconds earlier clientside so when I click it asap, it still works server side ( by the time it gets there) or just have serverside ability queuing.))
With FPS you ARE in the action, you are the first person shooter. You can get headshot before you even know the death-packet came through being half a second late.
I guess I'm trying to say, moba's don't hurt as much as FPS. with MOBAs you hit your ability and use it and that usually helps a lot but in FPS you need to take aim with your weapon and like, aim and shit... all while they do the same with 20ms delay between the trigger rather than your half second.
This all said, the problem with us, the gamers is - 500ms sounds fucking UNPLAYABLE right? It isn't. In this guys case up there in the comments^ they have true 500ms ping, but most likely a solid speed to carry it.
When you encounter lag because your siblings are on youtube or whatever, It's not the same as a true latent ping. Yes, your ping is DIRECTLY AFFECTED by how fast data gets from point A to B and back to A again. The ping. You know, like Ping Pong.
It's like measuring the echo from the mountain far away. /u/Dycondrius has high ping times, but probably a solid stable internet connection ( I hope so you poor soul :< ) but when you 'LAG' because someones using the internet it isn't the.. same. Your ping is a lie when you lag because someones on youtube, because your router starts queuing packets to send when it reaches it's throughput./max usage per second/bandwidth or whatever you want to call it.
In my case,
I get 22ms in most games, but only have a download/upload of roughly 450/120 kb/s.
So when someone steams youtube at 450kb/s (100% of the cables usage) then theres no data left for my game to go through. So the router starts balancing between both services, my game and his youtube steam. Nobody is happy when this happens. But that doesn't make your 'ping' actually higher, it's just being held back until your data's turn is ready.
It sure is annoying, because parents for example don't understand. They think I'm using all the internet all the time for example. But really my game only need's 20kb/s roughly, and teamspeak uses 11kb/s while talking/listening. That's ~31kb/s But youtube and all takes about 400+ if you want to watch in decent quality. It's this lack of understanding that makes being 'the guy who gets it', hard.
Edit: |
Funny thing... For an internship I did a few years ago, I worked at a company developing software for smart gas/water/electricity meters. One of the features I developed here was named "Kilowatt max".
(Note, this is in the Netherlands, I don't know if anything like this exists elsewhere) What was "KW Max"? Well, basically you don't only pay for the energy you use, you also pay for the height of your highest spikes in consumption. Generally when you exceed the height of your maximum spike, you'll have to pay a fine and the electricity company will automatically increase your maximum for the future (which means a price increase).
Generally, this is good good. However there are instances where this lead to a one time spike increasing your bills/plan well beyond what you actually need. Alternatively, it might be that one time a year you perform a procedure that spikes your energy use really high. In that case it might be preferable to pay the fine and otherwise have a much lower maximum.
The tool I made was essentially meant to figure out what the spikes in your consumption are and compare it to your maximum; so that you could intelligently choose the plan that best fits your needs. |
A home cinema can never replace going to the movies. The mass hysteria or whatever in the theater and the whole "event" of going makes it that much more of an experience.
It's unfortunate that people are now so spoiled and stupid by having big TV's at home that they have started treating cinemas like their own living rooms where they chatter away like idiots, play with their phone during the movie they paid big money to see and in general act like scumfilth.
A nice home cinema - with or without Prima - is a great way to relax but it's not the same as a movie. At least in the theater, you don't get a request to to pause the movie because someone needs to go to the bathroom, or wants to go get a snack, or forgot to send that work email and it can't wait another second, etc etc. Any of that pretty much destroys most movies, because a good movie is a two-hour experience where the director and creators of it take the viewer on an emotional ride from start to finish.
Stopping in the middle because someone has to pee utterly breaks that and deflates the whole experience.
Personally, I find watching with other people in a home cinema is often more infuriating than watching it in the theater. In the theater, the others can do wtf they want, I'm watching the movie, and if they want it paused they can go talk to the manager... good luck with that one. :) |
I don't know what lies you've been told, so I'll tell you why this ruling is a bad thing.
The common idea behind the Internet was the free exchange of ideas between people. This is a great thing as it allows the common person to gain knowledge from many sources, some right, some wrong. The knowledge gained helps the person succeed in life and better themselves. Using this free exchange of ideas, any person is allowed to speak their mind, no matter what they say. It allows everyone an equal ground to compete in the market, whether they be a large corporation or a single person.
Net neutrality, the concept the FCC was pushing, is the continuation of this idea. Under the idea of net neutrality, all websites have equal accessibility by users. Connecting to an average joe's website is the same as connecting to a large multinational corporation's website.
Without net neutrality, broadband providers can create a multi-tier system for their customers, similar to cable. At certain price levels, you can access specified websites. [An example of this has been floating around the Internet for a while]( but is a little extreme. However, on this multi-tier plan, smaller websites from common people will be in the higher of plans, preventing access to those sites by people who can not afford the high price of Internet. |
As I read over all the arguments here I don't think people get what is really at stake here.
“William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.” (According to the Washington Post)
What the FCC is trying to enforce is the fact that no one should be able to do this so that there is a "free market" of internet websites. So you can decide to go to google, because it is a better search engine then yahoo not because it payed comcast more, and therefore loads faster.
What this would also do is kill small start-up websites like reddit, youtube, facebook, etc. once were. imagine the world we be in then.
Another provision of Net Neutrality prevents Comcast from filtering your internet to prevent Vonage/Skype connections so that you are forced to buy their Voice over internet service instead. |
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