DISQUS

You'll have to excuse the self-promotion, but folks reading this thread might be interested in the partial-to-full conversion tool that I built:

http://labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss

Since then I've struck upon an alternate algorithm (not yet implemented, I'm afraid) that should perform even better.

The point, aside from presenting a useful tool: extracting full-text is a solvable technical problem -- it can be automated. It's therefore a bit silly for feed providers to try to oppose it (although one can hardly blame them given the feed readers' slowness to implement this feature). Doing so will ultimately just force users to extract the full text themselves, which is easy but a waste of network and computational resources. Better to simply offer the full feed from the start and give yourself the ability to place ads within it.

Glad to hear the D-Link's interface is good. You may want to try some custom firmwares, though, to see what the open source community has accomplished on this front. DD-WRT is quite good, and Tomato is a downright joy to use -- you'll immediately be bowled over by the realtime Flash graphs, then slowly come to appreciate the beauties of things like the MAC->DHCPD mapping interface.

"Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility," he says.

Not only that -- some of these bastions of socialism publicly finance tracts of asphalt for collective use by their citizens. Outrageous! Why not just let people drive where they want and let the market sort it out!?

Seriously: it's long past time for us to start treating the pipes that carry our bits in the same manner we treat the pipes that carry our water. There are reasons to doubt the viability of muni wifi as currently conceived, but the CLEC model is hardly without its problems.

But Dave, don't you think it's a little futile to try to divorce the word from how it's commonly used and how it's evolved? Consider the futility of looking at the origins of the names of our political parties given that they've almost completely traded places ideologically since their inception.

Anyway, within the bounds of the problem as you've defined it, the answer is simple: liberals want more of something -- for it to be applied liberally, freely. It's as simple as the opposite of the definition of conservatives -- liberals want more change. But of course, that doesn't tell you much on its own, as Les's answer below shows.

My stab at it:

Conservatives wish to maintain the status quo, or what they perceive to have been the status quo in the recent past (with "recent past" varying by the individual, but potentially dating back to the state of nature described in Leviathan).

Liberals want to see the progressive evolution of society toward a more perfect state, and believe that such a project is feasible enough to be worth pursuing. This generally implies the creation of more complicated or powerful collective institutions (aka bureaucracy).

$300 for a touchscreen tablet that can run Gnome and Mplayer? Yes, this is ludicrous. If Asus or someone else with an impressive system integration resume attempted it, perhaps it would be possible. But a blog? This is so ridiculous that it's kind of adorable.

$300 for a touchscreen tablet that can run Gnome and Mplayer? Yes, this is ludicrous. If Asus or someone else with an impressive system integration resume attempted it, perhaps it would be possible. But a blog? This is so ridiculous that it's kind of adorable.

I'm seeing a lot of rhetorical tricks, and not a lot of explanations of what normalizing the volume costs us. This is not a restriction of speech any more than are the laws saying I can't stand outside your bedroom window with an airhorn all night. The content of speech is protected, not its physical volume.

I'm quite please to hear that action is being taken regarding the loudness problem, which has recently become dramatically worse. Do you really think regulation in this regard is likely to work more efficiently than the market -- that consumers should be relied upon to flock to stations with quieter ads? Or, perhaps, to buy new devices that counteract the loudness?

That seems a bit ridiculous. Mandating some kind of sane RMS normalization criterion on broadcast TV is an obviously more efficient way to address the problem. If enough Americans feel it's a problem that their representatives will enact such legislation, then what's the problem? It should be self-evident that imposing some limits on advertising techniques are necessary and reasonable if we want to have a livable society.

This post is just knee-jerk anti-regulation rhetoric. But that's not enough to constitute an argument, I'm afraid: what is the alleged cost or inefficiency that this proposed rule will introduce?

Oh, and I forgot the most obvious possibility: don't forget that microwave ovens run at 2.4 GHz, too. If someone near you has a poorly-shielded one or is using a 3-to-2 prong power plug adapter to run it ungrounded, it's very possible that that is to blame. Whenever Emily turns on her microwave the network immediately goes down, for instance.

Although a crowded spectrum might degrade speed, I don't think it should cause your connection to drop.

There are a few other possibilities, though. I agree that a flaky card might be to blame -- a flaky router (or router firmware) is even more likely, given that your machine is from Apple. Is there construction near you? If someone's spewing out EM noise by, say, arc welding in a nearby building that's being constructed, that'll kill your connection very quickly, too. That was a constant nuisance when we moved into our present offices.

I probably should have explained a bit more: I was angry (pleasantly so) because a grad student friend of mine had been recounting how her somewhat-famous and certainly well-respected professor had recently opined to her class that computers can't be considered to make decisions because at no point in what might be called their decision-making process is there anything occurring that is anything other than straightforwardly deterministic.

As if there's any evidence that human consciousness is nondeterministic! At that point you get into the usual problem of finding that you want your own decisions to be reliable/nonrandom but also not boringly, mechanically predictable. This is basically incoherent -- all that's left is to retreat into mystery, filing consciousness under other physical processes that we don't yet understand (see e.g. Roger Penrose's belief that quantum weirdness is to blame, which I complain about at length here).

(I should probably mention that none of this falls within the aforementioned professor's particular field, that he probably is a brilliant guy, etc etc).

Anyway as Yglesias will tell you I'm not a huge Dennett fan -- I think the Cartesian theater is incoherent for the reasons he (and you) state, but that the apparent unity of experience (and the very concept of apparentness!) still needs to be accounted for, and that Multiple Drafts' conclusion that there's actually nothing to explain isn't very satisfactory.

But I think the Libet experiment is disconcerting for more than just its disproof of the Cartesian executive. It's a little weird but still basically okay to say that consciousness and the neuronal action of your brain are the same thing observed in different ways. But the time lag demonstrated by these experiments shows that this isn't the case, and strongly implies that our conscious selves are epiphenomenal, entirely the one-way product of the unknowable whims of a three-pound lump of fat and water.

In other words you are a slave to a stranger, the dream of a sleeping beast, and there's nothing you can do about it. That is pretty disconcerting.

Those numbers aren't very compelling to me. Clearly phone penetration is much better than cable (incidentally, why might this be? could it be... big government meddling?). The number of homes that can get cable but not a phone line is almost certainly vanishingly small, making the cable number meaningless.

And 80% doesn't strike me as a particularly great number for penetration -- are we really ready to leave 1 in 5 citizens out of the broadband revolution that's now, what, a decade old? When you consider that those first four quintiles were doubtless from denser areas, allowing for investments to pay off in large numbers of connected customers, it's clear that we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

I'm inclined to surrender to your greater familiarity with copyright law, Tim, but I still don't think this use is very ambiguous. Consider how the picture was originally used (and sold): Wired News purchased the rights to use it to adorn some of their blog posts. It was used in a decorative, illustrative manner.

If the video is fair use, then I don't see why Wired was obliged to pay the photographer for her work in the first place. In other words, I don't see how this could be considered fair use without invalidating the entire freelance news photographer business model.

Preserving business models is not a good way to determine appropriate IP policy, of course, but given that people have made their living selling photographs for quite a while I'm going to go out on a limb and assume they're doing so from a solid legal foundation.

As a parallel case, consider music samples. The use seems similar to me (in fact, the video seems less transformative), but of course artists still have to clear samples and/or pay royalties.

I have to disagree, Tim. It's true that the ISPs are currently stuck playing whack-a-mole with users who violate the TOS. Beyond a certain point it's not worth their time: if I set up a web server on port 80 I'm pretty sure I'd get an angry letter -- but they're not going to find the SSH daemon I run on a non-standard port. Right now it's technical users who find themselves butting up against the TOS. And there's the problem: technical users can find ways around the countermeasures.

But if a popular application ran afoul of an ISP, it would typically be pretty easy for them to block or throttle it -- it'll use an established port or identifiable headers. And the nontechnical users who're using it won't have any recourse.

Of course, the app author can keep issuing new releases, but that cat and mouse game is likely to result in the same situation: technical users do what they want and average users remain stymied.

The exception to all of this is encryption, of course, which the ISPs can't examine. Some, like Rogers, have decided to just throttle all encrypted traffic. I doubt their customers will let them get away with that for too long, though.

I'm having a hard time locating it, but there's an excellent video juxtaposing the studios' statements on this issue. W/r/t the strike they'll say that the internet is too new and the meager ad revenue they get from it can't be counted yet. But when, say, Sumner Redstone is on Charlie Rose, he'll proudly crow that their online business is worth billions of dollars.

Anybody have the link?

I can't pretend I've got the chops to evaluate the argument, but the Slashdot thread was informative -- a number of people making plausible claims to being quantum mechanicists in a professional capacity said that the paper was ludicrous. The idea that consciousness is the only way to collapse quantum states has been pretty well debunked, apparently.

And I'm a little surprised at the Ars article. It's definitely got the stink of something written by someone smart but unqualified who's trying to make clever inferences while sounding "authoritative enough."

Luis is right. And even flat throttling isn't necessary: many home routers can provide dynamic QoS, prioritizing traffic that needs low-latency connections -- VoIP is a red herring. But then, that keeps the pipe fully utilized, which doesn't help Comcast's bottom line. They have to pay for that data on a metered basis once it leaves their network, after all.

This doesn’t conclude the discussion of whether there should be regulation. It allows us to refine the discussion: The proponents of regulation should now be challenged to write the regulation that would suss out this kind of (still alleged) misbehavior, distinguish it from appropriate network management, and ban it - without wrapping provision of Internet service in red tape or creating regulatory capture that suppresses competition. Good luck with that!

I agree that it's a tricky problem, but it doesn't seem appropriate to simply deem it intractable. Requiring Comcast to disclose the limits and measures they're imposing would be a great first step. Prohibiting them from impersonating third parties with whom their users are trying to communicate -- as they are doing when they send these RST packets -- would be another useful measure. These two things are the bare minimum that any solution should include.

From there it might be appropriate to mandate some more transparent pricing -- require that Comcast offer a metered option, perhaps, similar to how they've been required to offer a broadcast-only package. No one's arguing for price controls or for congress to get into the sysadmin business. But right now Comcast is stifling innovation by seeking rent on bandwidth-sipping users who're content to use the web and email their grandkids. There needs to be a way for new technologies to flourish, too.

Ideally the FTC would simply require Comcast to fully disclose what they're up to, then allow the market to decide what the result will be. In practice I doubt there's enough competition for that to work very well. We should at least think about what we can do to improve the situation.

Richard, why are you so convinced that throttling has to involve the destruction of data (and why are you using scare quotes around the word throttling?)? Have a look at the Wikipedia page on the subject. As it makes clear, throttling can be achieved by queuing requests, allowing them through at an appropriate rate. There's no need to throw away the packet or tell the client that the connection has broken. It's destructive and unnecessary. I don't know why you keep insisting that this is the only way to implement traffic shaping.

I think you're incorrect, Richard. Look, it's great that the EFF is doing work to determine if other protocols are affected, but they've also confirmed that Comcast's throttling responds to BT-specific network events. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're capping other forms of P2P, too -- the Sandvine product that they're reportedly using targets other forms of P2P besides BT (it's odd that it's affecting Lotus Notes, which is not P2P, but I'm not at all surprised that some applications are being unintentionally broken by this system).

And until we do know the scope of what Comcast is doing (something we can't gather from a couple of test points on a network of millions of customers) we don't know if it's worth getting excited about.

You seem to be under the impression that the AP broke this story. They didn't -- it's been discussed in the BroadbandReports forums for months. Torrentfreak's been following it closely, and Wired News picked it up in August. Many, many people have confirmed that they're affected. Comcast is applying the measures erratically, but they seem to be widespread. I'm on Verizon, but I've got a neighbor who's now unable to seed; check out BBReports and you'll find hundreds more.

Packet networks like the Internet are built on the assumption of good user behavior, and when this doesn't pan out they provide few administrative tools for enforcement of norms. One method is simply to drop TCP segments, but that simply causes them to be retransmitted. Spoofing Reset is actually the only means of cutting off a flow at its root, and is therefore the most efficient means of throttling P2P.

A few things. First, relatively high network utilization does not constitute a deviation from "good user behavior" — the user has no way of knowing how loaded his or her network segment is, and can't reasonably be expected to manage Comcast's bandwidth for them. The second is flatly incorrect — many if not most ISPs already use per-user throttling to provide high burst speeds that are useful for web browsing, yet manage to put on the brakes for sustained traffic. There are many tools available for handling these sorts of issues.

This is not super-high-tech: I've got throttling turned on for unauthenticated users here on my apartment's WLAN; at work we've got per-protocol throttling to provide priority for VoIP traffic. In both cases the network management is done without breaking TCP connections (and done with cheap hardware and free software, I might add -- Comcast can't plead poverty when they're buying more expensive proprietary products like Sandvine). Forging reset packets is not the sort of thing that network administrators typically do to shape traffic. It's a very, very blunt instrument.

I'm not trying to imply that Comcast should allow unrestricted BT traffic. But they should disclose what they're doing, and use less destructive means of managing their network.

Richard, you seem to misunderstand what Comcast's doing. In most areas the RSTs start firing after the user begins seeding. Your example doesn't show any completed downloads.

And this makes no sense at all:

And also note that the slickest way to throttle BitTorrent is to limit the number of uploads a given user can offer, which is exactly what the TCP Reset (RST flag) spoofing does.

It's not clear that this is an efficient way to limit Bittorrent use. It IS an extremely sneaky and hard-to-detect means of throttling traffic, however. This is consistent with Comcast's other traffic-limiting behavior, like enforcing bandwidth caps that they refuse to disclose. The idea seems to be to scare away unprofitable consumers without actually admitting that their service is limited.

As Jerry points out, this is a pretty lousy way to treat your customers. Comcast should disclose what they think their customers' subscription fees do and don't entitle them to. Unfortunately even if they do, most users will only have one alternative for broadband. Is that good enough? I hope so.

You know Don, you might want to check out the testimony -- your Troll Force idea is pretty much included. They actually use the word troll, and suggest enlisting American citizens to disrupt these online forums. They didn't think to televise it, though.

I don't think that example does answer my question though, Tim -- obviously that rocket would probably be fired without the contest. Weighing the technical difficulty of such a setup against the benefit that a new stylesheet provides to the cause of global jihad, it's still not obvious to me that the online operation is providing anything meaningful other than propaganda value.

What happens when a lower-profile or less popular organization is censored by Verizon? It's wonderful that market pressure forced Verizon to change their policy so quickly in this case. What I don't understand is why Verizon needs or ought to censor SMSes that I intentionally elected to receive.

Believe me, SMS is a world where the market is decidedly not working -- particularly not premium SMS, where carriers take up to a 50% cut (and inexplicably disallow charities from using it, at least in this country).

Fortunately relatively neutral data services seem likely to replace the laughably expensive and limited SMS standard, so I can't get *too* worked up about this. But it really is a pretty bad situation. A very few gatekeepers continue to increase prices (despite increasing demand and no practical limit on supply) and prevent small players from using the medium.

It shouldn't be too hard to brute-force the word numbers problem. You'd just have to segment your sorting algorithm so that it shuttles data to and from your disk smartly. In practice you could probably just allocate a ton of memory and count on your OS to make a swap disk half-cleverly.

Better still, just shove everything into MySQL and then ask it to sort it. Hey, it might work! Of course, I doubt that's the sort of approach ITA is looking for.

I suspect that the Right Way to tackle the problem is to break the spelled-out numbers into the word-tokens that will comprise them (e.g. "eight", "forty", "million", etc). Those'll be easy to alphabetize -- you'll know what the first column of a properly-sorted list would look like.

If you can develop an algorithm that can fully explore the space underneath a given token (not simple, but not mind-bendingly difficult I don't think), then proceed through that space while counting letters (and ignoring order) you can eliminate chunks of the problem's space, token by token. Narrow it down to the left-most token that contains the 51 billionth letter -- the order of the elements belonging to the tokens before it doesn't matter, thanks to the commutative property. This lets you simply keep a count of total letters instead of keeping each word in memory. Once you hit the target letter, you'll know the left-most token in whose neighborhood the answer resides. You can repeat the process with the next-to-left-most token; then do it with the next-to-next-to-left-most token; etc. Eventually you'll have a set of possible answers that's small enough to sort easily.

In practice this would be pretty tedious to code (and I'd hate to risk missing a token while defining the first step), so I can't say I'm champing at the bit to try implementing it. I bet there's a more elegant solution.