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Comment Re:visibility doesnt matter. (Score 4, Insightful) 241

The problem is that our own government seems to WANT us to be terrified of the "terrorists".

Of course it does - they want people to give them more money and power.

You're eight times more likely to be killed this year by a cop than a terrorist, and that's including 9/11 (and let's not even discuss swimming pools and motor vehicles or the flu).

But do you see Obama scare monger mongering about any of that? Of course not - there's no play for more power on those. There's no campaign coffer to fill with deposits from the military industrial complex from those.

Understand the motivations and then the actions make perfect sense.

Comment Slashbait (Score 1) 188

Rather than reading this article, find something better to do with your time.

You fell for the Slashbait again.

Somebody at Dice enjoys saying, "this is the stupidest fucking thing anybody on the Internet has said today - I'll push it to the front page so everybody can comment about how stupid it is and generate a bunch of page views in the process."

The very best we can do is to leave them alone so it's all GNAA and AC FP's on these.

Comment Re: Aren't retailers going to be upgrading anyway (Score 1) 62

But aren't most retailers going to be upgrading in the near term anyway?

Yes, and Samsung obviously knows that. They probably have patents that can be used either offensively or defensively vs. Apple. Given the transition, now is the time for both companies to get their best deal.

Comment Re:What's "darker" about privizing services? (Score 1) 65

Now there MAY be a FEW services where privatizing them are an issue. But we can discuss those on a case-by-case basis. For the bulk of them, why should the government even be involved?

There's an easy way to draw this line - economists speak of "public goods" - which has a special meaning in economics that's not what a layman might guess it would be, and that is goods that markets can never provide because the economics of producing them is incompatible with markets.

The trick, usually, is that most arguments for most things as "public goods" are missing essential insights or intellectual rigor.

But at least there's a framework for working at the problem.

Comment Re:Guy is a moron. (Score 1) 127

Ponzi schemes. Investment scams. All the classic shit that's been around since the concept of currency itself was created.

So, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin then. Glad that you've proven that.

Oh, and Bernie Madoff. SEC. That is all.

Comment Re:Not surprised (Score 2, Insightful) 127

I'm not sure what the argument will be

Same as for the current fiat currency - "we need to be able to print an unlimited amount of digital currency, but if anybody else does so it's counterfeiting, and your labor* is the collateral for paying back debts against creditors while we give away value to our politically connected friends. Because otherwise terrorists and child pornographers and Muslims."

A primary feature of the currently popular digital currencies is that the politicians can't manipulate it, and so the politicians will never propose one with those features - for the US, holding the world reserve currency is the source of a majority of its power vs. other nations, and it's how political favors are handed out at home (e.g. bankrupting the savings and loan system to benefit the 401(k) regime, driving money out of community savings and investment (stifling bank loans to new businesses, etc.) to benefit Wall Street and the big-box multinational political donors). The money gradient between concentrated and diffuse interests is what powers DC, and currency manipulation is what enables it.

* your labor, your children's labor, your grandchildren's labor, etc.

Comment Re:Not really happy (Score 2) 171

What I have experienced is that SPDY (and therefor also HTTP/2) will only offer more speed if you are Google or are like Google.

This is so worn out it's even in the FAQ.

Multiplexing doesn't offer that much speed increase as some people would like you to believe.

It's good for every high-latency connection, like all the small sites have. I run a server on a VM on a generic Xeon box behind a DSL line, four hops from a backbone, for security and privacy reasons. It'll be great for my use case - I can't really compete with the big guys for responsiveness the way it is now.

Often, the content of a website is located on multiple systems (pictures, advertisements, etc), which still requires that the browser uses more than one connection, even with HTTP/2.

So, every one of those requests will be faster.

Also, HTTP/1 already allows a browser to send multiple requests without waiting for the response of the previous request. This is called request pipelining

Pipelining and multiplexing are different.

So, to me HTTP/2 adds a lot of complexity with almost no benefits in return.

So, don't add HTTP/2 support to your server - if nobody leaves then nobody wanted it. HTTP/1.1 will be supported for the next two decades.

Then why do we have HTTP/2? Well, because it's good for Google. They have all the content for their websites on their own servers.

Install Status4Evar - you'll see Google sites constantly jumping across all their domains, stalling on many of them.

Because IETF failed to come up with a HTTP/2 proposal, a commercial company (Google in this case) used that to take control. HTTP/2 is in fact a protocol by Google, for Google.

That just happens to help everybody else. Your critique of IETF's failure of leadership is quite valid, though. People have been hacking around HTTP/1.1's problems for the past 17 years and if Google hadn't done SPDY, we'd still be in that situation.

In my experience, you are far better off with smart caching. With that, you will be able to get far better speed-increase results than HTTP/2 will ever offer.

Agreed wholeheartedly! Nobody is arguing for not optimizing each layer of the stack. Proper caching can yield whole-number multipliers for responsiveness, not just mere percentages like HTTP/2!

In the last 20 years, a lot has changed. HTTP/1 worked fine for those years.

Read up on so many of the tricks browsers and servers (especially CDN ops) do to make HTTP/1.1 usable. These hacks are what inspired some of the SPDY changes, by people knee-deep in those hacks.

But for where the internet is headed, we need something new. Something completely new and not a HTTP/1 patch.

That would be great too. Do you have a proposal? Incremental approaches are usually easier to find acceptance for because they're more clearly understood and carry less risk of unexpected consequences.

Comment Re:Theory vs Empericism (Score 5, Interesting) 249

The Prisoners' Dilemma is a two-person example of a market failure - a term from economics which basically means that one actor can benefit from doing a thing that is bad for the group. Friedman's go-to example is people burning coal to heat their homes in 18th century London. Each homeowner _correctly_ calculated that coal was their personal best option, but it wasn't the best option for everybody, in aggregate. People who block intersections to avoid waiting for the next green are a more modern example - they save a little bit of time and make everything worse for everybody else.

The follow-up insight is that in natural systems, when rules result in a market failure, the rules slowly wind up changing to eliminate that scenario because those scenarios aren't good for the group (which is needed for reproduction/continuance) and (in the case of evolution) are selected against or (in the case of economics) are driven out of the economy.

Iterative plays resulting in extortion aren't going to be good for the group either and would tend to be eliminated. To be fair, we suffer broadly from the impact of psychopaths and they're only 5% of our population, so even if trends are good, local mischief isn't out of the question.

Comment Re:Spite? (Score 3, Interesting) 249

Spite often benefits the group over time - the individual sacrifices a little bit to increase the group benefit (which should be returned to him in aggregate as a non-zero-sum game). It can also benefit the individual by trading one thing of value for another in order to alter an adversary's value equation (like the legendary nuns who cut off their noses to avoid being raped by the marauders). Sometimes the costs are quite high but it's always a lesser-value for greater-value trade (as far as the individual values those things).

Comment Kansas City Made a Huge Mistake (Score 1) 227

You see what happened by allowing competition? They got two competing gigabit services. Uh, oh - unintended consequences.

Most good governments maintain and regulate the monopoly and reassure us that nobody needs or wants gigabit. Gigabit is too much for people - they could get hurt with that much data. Only people who are doing bad things need that much data.

And now one of them offers a bad deal. This will just create customer confusion - who can be expected to understand that spying on you is a bad thing? No typical consumer will be able to rationally weigh the pros and cons.

Hopefully the State steps in, returns Kansas City to a safe monopoly, and gets those reckless data rates back under control while imposing net neutrality rules to forbid unsafe traffic management practices (like the risky so-called 'settlement-free peering' scheme) and hopefully sets some allowable content rules.

Market forces are dangerous, and this just shows that, once again.

Comment Re:For targeted advertising? (Score 1) 227

How are they planning on delivering that? Through injecting ads in your traffic, email spam or letterbox spam? They don't have an ad network like Google.

Easy - run the AdBlock filter set against a proxy (e.g. squid filter) and replace the web site's ads with their own.

I mean, that would be less scummy than what they're advertising.

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