Deep packet inspection of large amounts of traffic was not possible until fairly recently. The technology did not exist to allow ISP's to treat traffic differently. The peering agreements between providers were born out of the difficulty of accurately accounting and billing for traffic. It was cheaper for everyone with roughly similar amounts of traffic to agree to pass each others traffic for free then to spend millions on systems to try to figure out who was owed what. The only reason this hasn't been an issue until now is purely technical in nature. Because of the huge investment to enter the market, plus the network effect and economies of scale inherent, plus the corruption of politicians, make the telecom industry a natural oligopoly, if not a natural monopoly. WIthout regulation, they will abuse their customers to the maximum extent possible, because their customers have little if any choice. Choosing an ISP is like choosing between getting in a cage with a hungry lion or a hungry bear, either way the outcome is unpleasant, just in slightly different ways. There is no avoiding it in the current environment, every business in this situation is going to act this way. The only solution is to either artificially break them up into small pieces, or to artificially regulate their behavior. I'm willing to bet the companies involved would prefer the latter to the former.

The "if you don't like it, switch to another provider" argument is ridiculous if you look at the reality of the situation. There is no true commodity market for internet access, major markets have 2, maybe 3 options, smaller markets only have 1. Of those 2, they will often rely on different technology, so only one may actually meet your needs. Furthermore the costs to switch can be very large, especially for large companies. Furthermore, it will be mostly invisible to the average end user. The costs are going to be born by the websites that want to get their traffic to the customer (using the connection the customer has paid for). If you are Google, having your search results artifically delayed to be slower then Bing results will cost you Money. If you are trying to run a voip service, and the QoS applied by the ISP artificially slows your packets while giving another service priority, your service will be spotty and drop lots of calls, while the other service will work great, even though you both are using the exact same infrastructure.

Allowing ISP's to treat packets differently is giving them a license for legal extortion. They can abuse the fact that to the end-user slowness caused by their ISP and slowness caused by the site itself is indistinguishable to extort money. Furthermore, they can give sites they have a financial interest in priority, without spending a dime on increasing capacity. Furthermore, it creates a barrier to entry to new players that do not have the funds to pay off the ISP's to carry their traffic.

Neutrality to traffic is a fundamental aspect of the internet that is part of why it has been so successful. Allowing protocols, services, and sites, to live and die on their merits without artificial limitation is what has led the boom of internet development. Imagine if in those early days of servers in cases made of LEGO, Google had to negotiate an agreement with every ISP to carry their traffic to their users before they could offer services. And at any time, someone with a bigger warchest could have offered more money to keep them off.

Congress and the FCC have created these monsters, constantly pouring government funds, preferential treatment, monopoly agreements, etc. into them to keep any real competition from occurring. If they don't have the right to place limits on their abuses of the oligopoly position they gave them, who does?

It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of this old, clueless man, who held an extremely important committee seat, blathering on about something he clearly didn't understand. It sounded like he was repeating an explanation some slick lobbyist had used to explain it to him, that he only half remembered. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Ted Stevens was not a 100%, bought and paid for shill to industry, with no ethics or redeeming value. He treated congress like a smash and grab for money for his supporters. I'm sad he died in a plane crash instead of prison where he would have been if it weren't for the ineptitude of the prosecutors of his corruption investigation.

Windows does allow services to run as different users. it has since at least windows 2000, probably since NT. Services that interact with the network by default login as network service, which has limited permissions compared to the local system account. In a locked down environment (ie an internet facing or dmz server) you can use even more restricted accounts. A poorly configured Linux server is easy to exploit, in the same way a poorly configured Windows server is easy to exploit. The only difference is there's a larger pool of people with jobs as windows administrators without the skills and knowledge to back it up. As linux becomes ever more popular, expect to see the same thing to happen to it.

Presumably pirates will not have internet access on their long plundering trips across the ocean, and not be able to access the new content as it is released.

That's probably why he is an artist, and not a mason.

I used 64-bit XP for years (skipping Vista completely) on my home machine. I never had a problem with drivers. I never get this idea that gets spouted every time it comes up. Even my printer had a driver. Even most apps that require a driver I never had problems finding 64-bit versions for. Granted, I built my machine myself, using parts from vendors with a reputation with supporting their hardware, so if you bought a box from Dell filled with cheapest parts they could get that week, your experience may have varied. I think a lot of people tried xp64 right after it came out, and couldn't find drivers, and gave up. Of course any MS OS is going to be short on drivers at the start.

Firefox started as the browser that wasn't for your grandma. It had rough edges, pages didn't always display properly, but it was fast and tabbed an light weight with an installer in the single digits. This is how it grew it's user base, Trying to shoehorn it into the browser for grandma is retarded (Chrome already is better for that, by a good margin). Fuck your grandma, I don't want to use the best browser for your grandma. Our requirements are completely different. I want Firefox to be the best browser for me. I want separate url and search fields because I know exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I want to stick some search terms through google I will, if I want to go to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org I had a specific reason. I want the url bar to make a best effort at turning what I entered into a working url with as little guessing as possible and run with it.

Let chrome be the browser for grandma, they have the resources and the marketing power behind them. Leave Firefox pure to the roots it came from, and focus on technical aspects. If people want to change the ui, the wonderful extension system lets them do just that.

I really think it's precisely because we are so used to being the ones helping and not the ones being helped. For a long time America was the country that could do anything, make anything possible, build anything that could be built. Of course that has always been more myth then reality, but every culture has it's own conceits. Somewhere along the way our political system morphed from the "great experiment" to a system were everyone is afraid of anything that might imply America right now is the greatest country ever in the history of the universe and anyone talking about change or reform is a communist.

In a few hundred years we conquered an untamed continent, and turned it into an economic and industrial powerhouse capable of making everything from corn to lunar landers. Yet now politicians act like it is some impossible effort to fix a few potholes in the highway system we built 50+ years ago. It's ridiculous.

As a Floridian (living in an area drained by the army core of engineers back when converting swampland to usable land via a massive canal system across an entire state was no big deal) who loves our states natural beauty and marshland, I say bring on the Dutch. There's no doubt they have the best hydrological engineers on the planet, large sections of their country continue to exist only because of their expertise. BP and our politicians have completely failed in every aspect of responding to this mess. Whoever turned the Dutch away should be fired as soon as possible. From the very beginning their response has been 100% PR with no substance. Within a week of it happening Obama should have had the best experts in the world on oil spill cleanup and mitigation here, and given them the full force of his executive authority. As the chief executive THATS HIS FUCKING JOB. Not give speeches, not give tv interviews, not spout vitriol at Britian, or play pin the blame on the regulator, but to react to an emergency like this as quickly as possible in a manner Congress (by its bureaucratic nature) can't.

The people affected by this shit couldn't care less if our elected officials have to go hat in hand to Europe and ask for their help (never mind that help was freely offered). That's the job, and by failing to do it he has failed us.

Meinberg makes a line of products that provide GPS backed NTP servers, as well as PCI/PCI-E cards that give PC's a GPS based clock (with an external antenna). They also make a pretty good NTP server/client for WIndows. It's overkill for most projects, but if you have a large datacenter or need for very accurate time, I would think they could be useful, if nothing else to keep you from having to rely on external time sources (which could be a potential security hole). This research seem more about making an improved and more accurate version of NTP, which is nice I guess, but NTP is already pretty accurate (on a scale of what is actually needed for 99.99% of situations).

This is incredibly naive. The current methods works well, for a very specific reason. MS's real customers are businesses. The home user is an afterthought, so we might as well ignore them. Large businesses have lots of custom applications and integration and scripting. Most of this work was done in a very, very shitty way. The result is things like hard coded paths, relying on unsupported, deprecated, or undocumented functionality of libraries, all sorts of stupid, impossible to maintain bullshit. Most commercial business apps for sale are the same way. The whole thing is held together with bailing wire and happy thoughts. The result is a system that is much, much more likely to break because of patches then a normal system or home user. I have never had a patch break one my personal pc's or one of my apps, but I've seen it happen to corporate pc's all the time. The problem isn't really even Microsoft's, because shitty programmers in shitty conditions making shit can do the same in any os and will.

    In the current patch system, we can test individual updates (making it easier to diagnose the cause of the problem) and once we have identified a problem patch, we can still roll out the rest. In a single cumulative version system, it's all or nothing, so if you have a game breaking patch, you get 0 patches until you have fixed the problem. In a perfect world it wouldn't matter, but in a perfect world we wouldn't need patches in the first place.

Add in the fact not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and you have a major problem. If you have two vulnerabilities, both of which cause problems for you when patched, but one is a vulnerability when you open jpgs in mspaint on the third Tuesday of the month, and the other is a remote code execution in your tcp/ip stack, you will want to prioritize the latter over the former. In a monolithic version environment, chances are most companies would be 6 months minimum behind the curve when that big bad vulnerability hit. They would have no choice but to keep plodding along (and frantically adding more programmers would most likely hurt more then it helped at that point), whereas with individual patches they could skip all the intermediate updates and deal with the first.

So instead of playing harmless games like Farmville, or watching TV to relax, we should be making the latest and greatest burning-man rejects? No thanks. Playing Farmville has exactly as much value as your ridiculous car, and wastes a lot less money and resources to do it. There will always be someone who thinks their entertainment of choice is superior to yours. Some would say you were wasting your time building art cars when you could be reading the world's great literature, or seeing the best painters, or learning to make music, etc. While you were busy fucking around with your car, the founders of Zynga were busy building a company that makes them ridiculously wealthy while bringing millions of people some enjoyment. And for the record, I have never played Farmville, nor do I have any interest in it, and I probably watch a total of 3-4 hours of TV a week. But I realize my hobbies would seem quite boring or uninspired to some, even though I enjoy them, and I realize mocking others for enjoying something I don't enjoy makes me the asshole wasting his time, not them.

Seems to me the first step is designing a new high voltage power line that doesn't look like something out of a science gone horribly amok science fiction movie. I realize the when building these things they consider function over form, but the reality is the complete lack of aesthetics is a big factor in why people fight them so hard. They look like big industrial machinery, and in peoples minds that equates to scary and dangerous, especially from their comfy suburban house. Along I-4 here in Central Florida, near Disney World, there is a large transmission tower that is shaped to look like the iconic 3 circles Mickey Mouse design. They combined form and function in a way that turns an eyesore into an attraction.

In the new version of Office (2010), they did realize that was a problem, and changed the menu to make it more obvious. You are referring to the old version (2007). That said, it's something that could easily be resolved with a little informal user training. upgrade a small test group first, collect the questions they most frequently ask, and whip up a document to answer most questions or show them how to do common tasks. Something concise focused to your users is going to be a lot more useful then the generic tour everyone skips. You are going to have the same problem anytime you do a major upgrade though, it's the way it works and the price of progress. The only alternative is to dig your heels in and refuse to change, and that saves you money and time in the short term, but eventually you wind up with something like emacs, which requires extensive retraining to be able to do anything.

I really don't understand the reluctance some people in IT have in regards to upgrading MS products. When you got on the MS train, this was the inevitable result, it's their business model and always has been. You can hold off for awhile, but eventually you will have to decide to keep riding the train or get off. The more you fight it and delay it the harder the inevitable will be. I'm not saying you need to deploy every new version the week it comes out, but a planned, phased in incremental upgrade procedure over time will be better then waiting until you can't possibly delay any longer because MS is dropping support entirely and you are 3 major revisions behind. MS is in the business of selling software, and they want steady recurring income, not sell it once and support it to the end of time for free. If you don't like the upgrade cycle, I won't bother linking the xkcd comic because someone already has, but the world's tiniest open source violin is playing for you. Jump ship and find another solution or get with it, you can't stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist.

Generally slot machines have a posted maximum jackpot. I don't know about this case but in other cases like this the reported "winnings" have far exceeded the maximum the machine is supposed to possibly give out, as posted on the machine. The real issue here is how crappy the engineering must be on these machines, to allow this to happen so often it routinely makes then news. In my opinion all glitches should require a payout of the maximum possible winnings, which must be clearly posted on the machine, regardless of what it "should" have paid out. That would encourage casinos to invest in machines with actual sound engineering principles, without making them unfairly liable for massive amounts of money when a legitimate freak error occurs (even in the best systems, exceedingly rare circumstances could cause errors). It's a slot machine, it's a simple device, if they spend the money on reasonable robustness they can easily achieve extremely low error rates.