Comment Re:ISPs are Shady (Score 1) 123
I'm well aware of the term. I'm unsure why it is the entirety of your response.
Do you think _you_ advocate a technocratic approach, or that I do, or that we currently have one, or something else entirely?
I'm well aware of the term. I'm unsure why it is the entirety of your response.
Do you think _you_ advocate a technocratic approach, or that I do, or that we currently have one, or something else entirely?
Would you want your highway/city traffic information management operated by competing corporations?
Yes
Would you want your city and state police run by competing corporations?
Yes.
Please, imagine if you had to deal with Comcast to get from your house to work every day.
Yesterday, my son and I spent an hour dragging a box blade over 2 miles of dirt road with our tractor, in order to fix deep ruts in the road surface that were scraping on the bottom of my car the last time I tried driving that route.
Today, I used that road to drive into work and it was wonderful. I had a need, so I scratched it myself.
I have no idea if it is legal for private citizens to do road maintenance on public roads, but I chose to do so anyway.
By the way, I would love it if Comcast provided internet service in my area. I hate Comcast. But my only other choice is Verizon LTE, which is fast when it works, but which I try to use as little as possible since it is a pay-per-byte connection.
I've lived in urban areas my entire life until only recently. The whining you people do about broadband is hilarious. You have no clue how good you have it.
I think the problem here is that the ISPs want to be big media but they are really only telecoms trying to step out of line and disrupt the flow of information to get more money. They are greedy pigs.
Well, I agree with this.
We should nationalize them all and simply take over their operations.
But your "solution" is terrible. Your plan is to replace the current set of greedy pigs with something much worse -- greedy pigs who are stupid and yet think it is their mission to change the world using other people's money and talent.
No thanks. The last mile problem certainly sucks. But because of my situation, I've been heavily investigating what it takes to get my own WISP off the ground. Do you know what stops me from doing it? Nothing. Just my willingness and money.
Do you think that would be the case if I needed to fight the government? Well, how long does it take to get roads repaired where you live?
As an aside, have you priced buying business-class bandwidth from a local provider? Nobody is offering it where I live, but in the nearest large town, I got quoted $550/mo for a 10 meg connection. Including tower rentals on both ends, the cost to backhaul IP to my area would be over $1000 / mo.
Of course, that's trivial compared to the $12k/mile it costs to dig and lay fiber..
And guess what? If I were in the WISP business, my 10 meg connection for $550/mo would support 2-3 Netflix streams. Yet everyone wants to stream Netflix from 6pm to midnight every night. At the same time. Do you think my 3 Netflix subscribers would agree to split $550/mo three ways? Do you think they'd complain bitterly if I oversold my 10 meg connection and none of them could stream Netflix?
If you think you can do better than the existing oligarchs, I encourage you to consider what barriers prevent you from competing with them and delighting your customers. In many cases, you'll find that Comcast has been granted a local monopoly by local governments. Ooops.
Anyway, if a particular state or municipality wants to do a community/local broadband project, and own the last mile, they should do so within the confines of their local constitution/charter.
But you said "nationalize". Even if I thought the government ought to be building and owning data infrastructure for business/residential use, I wouldn't make it the FEDERAL government's problem. This is Civics 101 stuff...
Kudos on the legendary Slashdot UID, btw.
This is critically important, and, frankly, given the books that Ron Paul (and invariably, Rand Paul) have read and worked on, I'm not sure why he'd say something like this.
Nobody in modern libertarian/an-cap thought thinks there is intrinsic value to any currency or any commodity
So, I'm not sure what he's doing here. He's quoting Hayek.. but the later writers made it pretty clear that intrinsic value was a non-concept... maybe saying "intrinsic value" was a mental gaffe on the part of Rand Paul...and he meant "utility" value..
I use smartphones with prepaid sims and no data plans. I'm usually at home or at the office where there is ample wifi. Smartphones are quite usable without "persistent" internet connections.
Not everyone has or wants a smartphone with a network connection. Of course, even feature phones get their time from the cell network, which is reasonably accurate.
That said, I started wearing a watch again a few years ago when I became a father to twins. I found that I was often getting up in the middle of the night, running a bottle warmer, etc. I found that it was critical to have something with a countdown timer and basic alarm functionality that was physically attached to my body. Also, I needed to be able to see what time it was when I was laying in bed, so a good lighting source was critical.
A smartphone doesn't meet these requirements. A basic Casio digital watch does.
I wore the casio until the battery started to wear out. I took it to a watch repair place and they ruined it. In the interim, I purchased a $10 timex analog watch with an extremely thin case, because the casio (it was a g-shock mudman -- I recall being hard on watches when I was a kid) doesn't fit under the cuff of a dress shirt.
Right now I'm wearing a newer casio digital watch -- one that uses solar charging and reads the radio atomic time signal from Colorado. I hope to never have to open the case to replace the battery, and I don't ever think about setting it. It is cheaper than my phone, more durable, and it is always attached to my arm when I need it.
I think there is a market for a smart watch. I'm sitting at my desk right now with my phone in my pants pocket. It buzzes every now and then with meeting reminders. Which I don't look at.
If my wrist watch buzzed because it knew about my calendar appointments, that's something I would use and appreciate. But, I wouldn't wear such a watch unless it was durable and inexpensive.
There are much better tablets out there for your money.
The problem with all the other non-Apple tablets is that they insist that 16:10 is the perfect aspect ratio because it means that there are no black bars when watching video.
Unfortunately it completely ignores the fact that doing anything in landscape at that aspect ratio means that whenever the keyboard pops up, you lose almost half of the screen. Given a choice between that and some black bars (which I already get on my TV), I'd rather deal with the black bars.
I'd love an Android tablet the size and aspect ratio of the iPad Mini, yet (like high specification handsets with a screen size below 4 inches) no-one in Android land wants to make it.
Very cheap almost to the point of being free.
Text messages are already free.
They may be for you, but they aren't for everyone. The USA != The World.
- 1:1 and group chat support.
Already do that with regular text messages
SMS doesn't support group chat. Messages to more than one person are sent individually, there is no way for the recipients to see all the people who were messaged and therefore there is no way for them to group reply.
- Picture and content sharing.
Already do that with regular text messages
You might want to read up on the specification for "regular text messages". SMS has no provision for much beyond simple plain text messages.
- No additional fees when you're roaming.
"Roaming" doesn't really happen in most of the modern world
Again, the USA != The World. If I go from France to the UK or USA then I'm roaming.
Like I said, it's a small niche, and it's shrinking rapidly as more and more people just get unlimited texts.
A one billion person niche that isn't solved just by a bunch of unlimited text messages.
It seems like the only point is to get around the few remaining billing plans on the planet that don't have unlimited text messaging.
This comes up every single time something is posted on Slashdot about WhatsApp.
Lots of people have packages with tonnes of text messages making them, essentially, free or very low cost - however SMS doesn't do anything beyond 1:1 communication in plain old text. So picture sharing and group chats are out.
MMS can do that, but it's often excluded from SMS packages - so after a few messages it can start to get rather expensive. Even more so when you are sending these things to different countries.
iMessage can do that too and it's nicely integrated into iOS. If your friends aren't using iOS though then it all falls down.
So, combining these all together gets you the following wish list:
- Very cheap almost to the point of being free.
- 1:1 and group chat support.
- Picture and content sharing.
- No additional fees for sending worldwide.
- No additional fees when you're roaming.
- Not tied to users of one operating system.
WhatsApp (and the like) fill this gap.
once they HAVE a car, they will use it because it is simply faster and more convenient than mass transit can ever be.
It's interesting that you believe that mass transit necessarily is slower and less convenient for people, yet still want it any way.
Why do you hate people?
I understand that time is the one asset that is truly finite for all of us, and indeed, we never know how much of it we have left.
Who will say, on their deathbed, "I'm glad I spent an hour a day riding a bus" ?
Busses are a poor form of mass transit because they usually take the same roads that private cars do. A bus will never be faster than a private car unless you factor in the car's time to find a parking spot, and the city in question is terribly congested.
Subways, or any other transit system that is disjoint from the road system, can be MUCH faster than a private car. And I've chosen to use them even when I had a private car available to me.
People will and should use mass transit when it makes their life better -- when it saves them time and lets them do more fulfilling things with their life.
In places like Munich, Germany, it is possible to get most places in the city via very fast u-bahn lines. We lived there for about 2 weeks and didn't have a car. When we did have to go somewhere that u-bahn didn't reach, dealing with the bus system was jarringly bad in comparison. Suddenly we had to become aware of times, schedules, etc.
The Ubahn system is great because it's difficult to get on the wrong train, and you don't need to memorize a schedule... the next train will always be coming in a few moments.
When we toured Germany outside of Munich later on, we had a hired car, but we did not take it into urban core areas (like Berlin). We would park at a free park and-ride on the outside of town -- which were ajoined to s-bahn lines. Then we would take the s-bahn line to the hauptbanhof (centrail rail station) at the city core, and from there we'd take ubahn lines as appropriate to our various destinations.
For areas with high urban density, disjoint mass transit (like subways) is a great option, and having a personal car in the city core is usually a liability because parking it is so frustrating, and ultimately, expensive in terms of dollars and human time.
I love driving and have many days of race track time to my credit. I also built my own RV out of an old school bus and we take long family trips in it. In my family, we like driving and private cars.
However, when there is advantageous public transit available to me, I use it.
It is possible to build transit systems that work with the reality of how people live instead of some central planners idea of how she wishes people lived. Good systems can and will prosper.
Systems that don't improve the lives of their users should simply disappear so that better choices can come about.
My favourite quote comes from Karl Bode of DSLReports:
Before you get too excited, you need to understand that this is a bluff of immense proportion. It's what I affectionately refer to as "fiber to the press release."
In other news, industries where command and use of the English language is the priority will state that it's better to be a 'B' English Grad than an 'A+' CS Grad.
Google's comments don't prove anything new about the value of the degrees of either course - short of the fact that it's generally better to have a degree in the industry you intend on working in.
Ok, I actually think you, me, and Theo all agree
1) We don't think a specific technical change would have _prevented_ the issue.
2) We all agree that better software engineering practices would have found this bug sooner. Maybe even prevented it from ever getting checked in (e.g. suppose the codebase was using malloc primitives that that static analysis tools could "see across", and that the code was analysis clean. Could this bug have existed?)
Who has claimed that using the system allocator, all else being equal, would have prevented heartbleed?
Who has claimed that heartbleed was an allocation bug?
I understand what freelists are and do.
The point here is that rigorous software engineering practices -- including the use of evil allocators or static analyzers that could actually understand they were looking at heap routines -- would have pointed out that the code implicated in heartbleed was unreliable and incorrect.
If you read the link you pointed at, after making a modification to OpenSSL such that coverity could understand that the custom allocator was really just doing memory allocation, Coverity reported 173 additional "use after free" bugs.
There are bugs from years ago showing that openSSL fails with a system allocator.
Don't you suppose that in the process of fixing such bugs, it is likely that correctness issues like this one would have been caught?
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies = 1 Fig-newton to 1 meter per second
