A quick media dump - 3-5 December 2010
Dec. 6th, 2010 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood day, readers, writers, and awesome people - A letter from one Leonard Bernstein about the opening success of one of his musicals. Would that we could get that kind of good reviews for our own materials and lives.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind - a veteran was charged with several counts of misdemeanor use of a firearm and stalking when he followed members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Some part of me says "Well, they have it coming" and the other part says "But it's still not okay to do it".
NASA announces that they have discovered a new bacteria here on Terra that uses arsenic as a building block rather than phosphorous, which makes the possibilities of weird life expand dramatically. It's not necessarily completely alien, and there's no way of knowing whether it will replicate outside the lab or the conditions it was found in, but if substitutions like this are possible, then SETI likely has their work cut out for them...
And finally, meet Ballet Black, a ballet troupe composed entirely of African-American women who want to bring the dance out of the lily-white enclave it normally exists in.
Out in the world today, poring over the Wikileaks cables brings to light yet more things that deserve to be there, instead of shrouded in the dark, like an airstrike that killed children, and the fiction around it that made the Yemeni government take credit/blame for United States air atatcks, attempted squashing of stories that made contractors in Afghanistan look out of control, even as they detailed the level of graft and corruption in the country by both contractors and government officials. It becomes more clear that places like Saudi Arabia are both friendly and hostile to us, which presents rounds of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, question mark?" when you have to make decidions.
Of course, even as we get this information and pore over it, governments are applying severe pressure to anyone willing to host Wikileaks data to have them banned or disconnected, and there are at least a few people who find the process leading to the arrest warrant for Mr. Assange to be far too convenient to have been organic.
An INTERPOL arrest warrant has been issued for Richard Cheney in connection to a bribery case in Nigeria from his company, Haliburton. I do not know whether the United States will honor it and turn over Mr. Cheney, but my bets are against, even as the calls for arrest warrants against Julian Assange grow.
Finally, Israel receives aid from interanational groups to help fight a very large forest fire. Anyone close to the action that can give us more details on how big it is?
Domestically, rumblings of a deal on the matter of tax cuts, allowing Republicans to make good on their threat that the tax cuts had to be dealt with in a manner they find agreeable before they would get back to the work of delaying everything else. Mr. Rove's column here is instructional in how it passes all the blame onto the Democrats for not giving the Republicans everything they want and making the Dems out to be the monsters for "raising taxes on the middle class". The truth of the matter comes from Represenative Grayson, pointing out just how much money the advocates for a blanket tax cut stand to gain if they are successful. It's pretty big.
Speaking of making money at the expense of others, JP Morgan Chase suspected Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind, or fraudulent investments, but continued to do business with him anyway, probably because the profits for them were pretty good, too.
Cumulatively speaking, during the course of a fund set up to lend money overnight from the Fed, almost $9 trillion USD was lent to keep banks propped up and with sufficient cash to continue operating. And, as you crunch the numbers, you find only six companies, even though they were borrowing with acquisitions and ancilliaries, are responsible for almost all of that borrowing.
IAVA throws their support behind the repeal of the ban on opely gay military members, as a reminder that even though the report is out, the action still has to happen. And that's not always a smooth sail. After all, you can have the paper advocate for this long-overdue change and have the comment section not only miss the point, but proudly display their phobias. And both the Army and the Marine Corps chiefs think that gay soldiers shouldn't be allowed to serve openly, at least not now, because it will affect the troops, even though the troops have already said it won't affect them or their missions. They also said that the study didn't ask what the troops thought of the policy - in response to that, the document itself said "We do not do these things by referendum, so asking the troops what they think is out of scope. All we want to know is whether they will be hindered should the policy be repealed."
After examining its effectiveness, the mayor of New Orleans pulled funding for the city's video surveillance program, leaving the cameras but not providing maintenance for them. We're rather surprised that something was chopped because it was ineffective without someone raising the spectre of "national security" or some other boggart.
In technology and the sciences, in addition to the NASA report, shall we peer in a bit at the conditions of making electronics in China to see how much they resemble the world of Dickens?
Additionally, the continued popularity of streaming video services may mean that ISPs enforce bandwidth caps, throttles, and other "network shaping" measures even more zealously in response.
Google admits to trespassing on property to get a Street View picture, pays $1 USD in fines, and reminds us that while their ideal is "Don't Be Evil", sometimes they fall short of the practical implementation. And sometimes they hit it square on by implementing data that tells their engine what kind of reputation someone has instead of just ranking pages by whether or not someone has a huge reputation, after seeing how a troll got his PageRank up by insulting, threatening, bullying, and otherwise making people write about him, promoting his reputation and his rank.
Into opinions, where Mr. Mauro feels that the Green Revolution might be ramping up again, with the public defection of a military officer to the opposite side. As with all things regarding the situation, there may be mountains out of molehills if one expects a full-fledged "Away with the State!" movement.
Having learned about what kind of electoral stomping can be generated if your candidate doesn't reach out to Latino and Spanish-speaking voters, Heritage launches their Spanish-language site, Libertad.org. Whether this means the conservative movement will start trying to actively court Latinos and have positions on immigration and other issues that will appeal is as yet indeterminate. But now at least they're trying.
Mr. Krguman smashes a hammer on the thumb of the Beltwawy class by explaining why politicians are all about cutting Social Security when they won't make a peep about Medicaid or Medicare - most of the affluent could do without Social Security, but they understand full well what Medicare does. Because changes to Social Security don't affect the people in that strata, they don't know firsthand what those changes do to people.
Getting out of opinions, the Slacktivist points out that asking whether all paths lead to God is not the right question, because all paths run in at least two directions, and it depends on the orientation of the traveler where they go.
Last for tonight, the Someone Else's Problem field at work - read how quarterback John Elway goes about his life in plain sight, Escher via LEGO, and BoingBoing asks the same question a Reddit article does - what are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases? For those looking for the original, Reddit has the thread, ready for you to contribute.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind - a veteran was charged with several counts of misdemeanor use of a firearm and stalking when he followed members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Some part of me says "Well, they have it coming" and the other part says "But it's still not okay to do it".
NASA announces that they have discovered a new bacteria here on Terra that uses arsenic as a building block rather than phosphorous, which makes the possibilities of weird life expand dramatically. It's not necessarily completely alien, and there's no way of knowing whether it will replicate outside the lab or the conditions it was found in, but if substitutions like this are possible, then SETI likely has their work cut out for them...
And finally, meet Ballet Black, a ballet troupe composed entirely of African-American women who want to bring the dance out of the lily-white enclave it normally exists in.
Out in the world today, poring over the Wikileaks cables brings to light yet more things that deserve to be there, instead of shrouded in the dark, like an airstrike that killed children, and the fiction around it that made the Yemeni government take credit/blame for United States air atatcks, attempted squashing of stories that made contractors in Afghanistan look out of control, even as they detailed the level of graft and corruption in the country by both contractors and government officials. It becomes more clear that places like Saudi Arabia are both friendly and hostile to us, which presents rounds of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, question mark?" when you have to make decidions.
Of course, even as we get this information and pore over it, governments are applying severe pressure to anyone willing to host Wikileaks data to have them banned or disconnected, and there are at least a few people who find the process leading to the arrest warrant for Mr. Assange to be far too convenient to have been organic.
An INTERPOL arrest warrant has been issued for Richard Cheney in connection to a bribery case in Nigeria from his company, Haliburton. I do not know whether the United States will honor it and turn over Mr. Cheney, but my bets are against, even as the calls for arrest warrants against Julian Assange grow.
Finally, Israel receives aid from interanational groups to help fight a very large forest fire. Anyone close to the action that can give us more details on how big it is?
Domestically, rumblings of a deal on the matter of tax cuts, allowing Republicans to make good on their threat that the tax cuts had to be dealt with in a manner they find agreeable before they would get back to the work of delaying everything else. Mr. Rove's column here is instructional in how it passes all the blame onto the Democrats for not giving the Republicans everything they want and making the Dems out to be the monsters for "raising taxes on the middle class". The truth of the matter comes from Represenative Grayson, pointing out just how much money the advocates for a blanket tax cut stand to gain if they are successful. It's pretty big.
Speaking of making money at the expense of others, JP Morgan Chase suspected Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind, or fraudulent investments, but continued to do business with him anyway, probably because the profits for them were pretty good, too.
Cumulatively speaking, during the course of a fund set up to lend money overnight from the Fed, almost $9 trillion USD was lent to keep banks propped up and with sufficient cash to continue operating. And, as you crunch the numbers, you find only six companies, even though they were borrowing with acquisitions and ancilliaries, are responsible for almost all of that borrowing.
IAVA throws their support behind the repeal of the ban on opely gay military members, as a reminder that even though the report is out, the action still has to happen. And that's not always a smooth sail. After all, you can have the paper advocate for this long-overdue change and have the comment section not only miss the point, but proudly display their phobias. And both the Army and the Marine Corps chiefs think that gay soldiers shouldn't be allowed to serve openly, at least not now, because it will affect the troops, even though the troops have already said it won't affect them or their missions. They also said that the study didn't ask what the troops thought of the policy - in response to that, the document itself said "We do not do these things by referendum, so asking the troops what they think is out of scope. All we want to know is whether they will be hindered should the policy be repealed."
After examining its effectiveness, the mayor of New Orleans pulled funding for the city's video surveillance program, leaving the cameras but not providing maintenance for them. We're rather surprised that something was chopped because it was ineffective without someone raising the spectre of "national security" or some other boggart.
In technology and the sciences, in addition to the NASA report, shall we peer in a bit at the conditions of making electronics in China to see how much they resemble the world of Dickens?
Additionally, the continued popularity of streaming video services may mean that ISPs enforce bandwidth caps, throttles, and other "network shaping" measures even more zealously in response.
Google admits to trespassing on property to get a Street View picture, pays $1 USD in fines, and reminds us that while their ideal is "Don't Be Evil", sometimes they fall short of the practical implementation. And sometimes they hit it square on by implementing data that tells their engine what kind of reputation someone has instead of just ranking pages by whether or not someone has a huge reputation, after seeing how a troll got his PageRank up by insulting, threatening, bullying, and otherwise making people write about him, promoting his reputation and his rank.
Into opinions, where Mr. Mauro feels that the Green Revolution might be ramping up again, with the public defection of a military officer to the opposite side. As with all things regarding the situation, there may be mountains out of molehills if one expects a full-fledged "Away with the State!" movement.
Having learned about what kind of electoral stomping can be generated if your candidate doesn't reach out to Latino and Spanish-speaking voters, Heritage launches their Spanish-language site, Libertad.org. Whether this means the conservative movement will start trying to actively court Latinos and have positions on immigration and other issues that will appeal is as yet indeterminate. But now at least they're trying.
Mr. Krguman smashes a hammer on the thumb of the Beltwawy class by explaining why politicians are all about cutting Social Security when they won't make a peep about Medicaid or Medicare - most of the affluent could do without Social Security, but they understand full well what Medicare does. Because changes to Social Security don't affect the people in that strata, they don't know firsthand what those changes do to people.
Getting out of opinions, the Slacktivist points out that asking whether all paths lead to God is not the right question, because all paths run in at least two directions, and it depends on the orientation of the traveler where they go.
Last for tonight, the Someone Else's Problem field at work - read how quarterback John Elway goes about his life in plain sight, Escher via LEGO, and BoingBoing asks the same question a Reddit article does - what are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases? For those looking for the original, Reddit has the thread, ready for you to contribute.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 09:25 am (UTC)Consider that we probably wouldn't have needed international aid if it wasn't so fucking massive.
The dry weather, mass public cuts to the fire department and general negligence are the real causes of the fire. I have no doubt that it was started by accident. Unlike the fire that was started in Jerusalem back in July, that really should have been our fucking wake up call.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 11:47 am (UTC)That article? Bollocks - it's founded on a fundamental misunderstanding (if you want to be generous) or misrepresentation (if you don't) of the actual problem.
The tech connecting you to the backbone is complicated and somewhat arcane, hence why I allow for the 'misunderstand' up there. I'll give a summary for DSL over telephone, as it's easier - cable is similar but has a few extra wrinkles.
Start with your DSL modem. That communicates, through the copper cable serving your phone line, with a piece of hardware (called a DSLAM) sat in the local exchange - there will often be multiple DSLAMS in larger exchanges. This connection from the home to the exchange is sometimes called the "Last Mile" or "First Mile" (in reality it can be more than a mile...) That piece of hardware then connects into the telco's communication backbone with the data being routed by the telco to your ISP's customer gateway servers. The ISP routes your data through its network to backbone connections - connections to national level network systems, essentially your ISP's ISP.
Now, the issue here is that ISPs have to pay for the data going in and out of their network. They will often also have to pay the telco for the use of their hardware if they are not the telco themselves. This means that, among other things, ISPs employ a number of tricks to get as many customers connected to the least hardware possible - this is the "contention ratio", the number of customers contending for access to a particular customer gateway server or the number of users connected to a given DSLAM. Higher contention ratios mean that the ISP has to pay for less hardware, but each gateway and DSLAM has a finite amount of resources: the more users there are using the system at a given time, the less bandwidth each has available to it, and the worse the response time. If there's just one user, they have potentially all the available bandwidth, two users have to share so they might only have half each, and so on. Common contention ratios are 10:1 (10 users per gateway, usually only found on higher cost 'business' products), 20:1, 50:1 and even 100:1 or more.
So, the more users there are using their connection at any given time, the worse each individual user's experience will be. ISPs have to balance user experience with cost: better quality ISPs will have lower contention ratios, and higher costs; lower quality ISPs bank on the fact that most users won't actually be using their connections most of the time, and traditionally could get away with high contention. Essentially, they banked on users not actually using the service they were advertising to them - which is no longer the case.
Worse, as mentioned above, ISPs have to buy bandwidth on the backbone. In order to maximise their profits, they will generally rely on the fact that most users will not actually use the theoretical maximum bandwidth available to them: if a user has a 1Mbps DSL line, with a theoretical maximum monthly transfer of about 316GB, they won't expect them to use anything like that, and build their entire business model around that assumption. Usage caps were introduced as a direct result of this assumption failing, and as more and more users are actually using the package they are paying for, it becomes more of a problem for ISPs.
So, basically, the problem isn't something inherent in the architecture of the system - it's that ISPs have based their businesses around the assumption that users aren't going to use the services they are paying for, and deliberately underbuy hardware for the Last Mile, and bandwidth on th ebackbone. And now that users have actually started to use the service they were advertised, the ISPs are collectively crapping themselves and wondering how they can keep making a profit without raising prices and actually buying enough hardware and bandwidth to support their users.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-07 06:28 pm (UTC)