Comcast blocking of P2P traffic

I read a report on Comcast stopping peer to peer traffic by detecting and send falsified packets to the end users. I think this is very alarming move and have a great impact the Internet for all users.

This brings up the net neutrality issue, where some political leaders believe that companies should set up preferential traffic flow for some user. Ted Kennedy voiced his support to net neutrality in his YouTube ad in the last election. I do not fully support net neutrality, because it limits companies ability to manage their resources. If someone wants to pay more to ISP to get better traffic his or her users, they should be able to. Net band width is no different than any other services, that you pay more and you should be able to get more. It should be up the ISP to decide what kind of pricing make sense to its customers needs.

However Comcast's action is bad because they do not openly state what kind of traffic they want filter, block. Another reason I am worried more about this is because I think P2P is a very promising technology. Today P2P programs like BitTorret are used primarily for sharing pirated media contents, such as copy righted movies and music. Also some the companies used unethical means to push ad to users, e.g. Gator. But all these are fault on the users of technology, not the fault of the technology itself. If ISPs follow Comcast's lead, they can kill a very promising technology.

The internet has millions of PC connected to it and vast amount of storage spaces from all of these PCs. All these make sense for P2P. Internet is build for interaction, so relying old method of broadcasting from a single source is not the best use of this resouce. If people like to use this method and Comcast see it increases the burden on its network, it should upgrade its network to meet with the customer needs.

There could be some efficiency issue with P2P when the same information is send directly between two parties. The IP protocol must have a broadcast mechanism, so I can see why ISP does not like P2P. But that means the burden is on individual provider, small content providers cannot compete.

If P2P is really more costly than IP broadcast, it does make sense for ISPs to charge more or restrict it. But I would like to see ISP providers to work on the technology to make it more efficient than just blocking it. There maybe applications only make sense from using P2P.

I have been able to understand the feeling a painting or a drawing can bring to a viewer. But I had a hard time to under why do we associate feeling with music. Music can certainly mimic the sounds of the nature. However, most of the classic music have well passed mimicking bird, water sounds, yet it brings out more emotion than natural sounds can.

I watched a YouTube video made by Lasse Gjertsen, that he basic created a video from a few short segments of drum and piano play. Yet, the mix of such sequences is very compelling.

I lost my line of thought. I thought I see something in the video to explain about the power of music, but I now lost that. All I can think about the video is that this guy has a good feel of music, basically play out the sequence in his head.

Oh, I now remember, the idea was that our feeling of music depends how much we know about how the music is made. For example, Lasse's end product may not match the quality of a real band, but by watching what he used to put together the piece, we appreciate more about the work. This also why to understand music more one has to learn to play an instrument. And this is also why life concert always provides more to the listeners.

Pop music makes more sense to the mass because everyone can sing. The vocal cord is the music instrument everyone has and can appreciate more from other's voices.

DNA

One area biochemists and genetists have not understood is how the same DNA sequence can produce so many different types of cells in our bodies. They know there are inhibitors that stops some genes in certain cells. By removing the inhibitors, the hope is that one can grow any other types of cells from any one cell in the body. The only way do that today is the embryonic cells or other cells get returned to the embryonic state. But how did the inhibitors get created in the first place? Especially think about the inhibitors has to be enabled in such an orderly fashion, that all fertilized eggs grows arms and legs in the exact same places.

So I think the DNA is actually a much complicated program, much harder to understand. It is great that we can decode all the DNAs in a human, but a single gene does not necessarily mean the same thing in different cells. At least the way I viewed about the genes is that they are like blue prints, that once a cell use a gene to create a protien, it always creates the same protiens. That may be true for a lot of genes, but the real key part of the genetic information is actually in the genes that can mean different things. Rather than viewing DNA as a blue print of an organism, I would view DNA as a program. Much like the separation between instructions and data in an computer architecture, DNAs are instructions. The cell is the machine, food and external inputs to the cell are data. What the organism behaves is the output. The key difference here is that computer does not grow. Maybe if we can understand more about how DNA works with raw material to grow an organism, we will also be
able to aplly it to a self constructing machine or computer.

What is missing is an environment that a computer can grow in. Maybe the environment has to start with a factory.

Talking about moral make most of people think about religion. But I really think we should be able to understand moral by looking at action and consequence. The fundamental good and bad is what make the people live long and feel good. This feel good does not mean smoke some joints and get high for a few hours, but the long lasting feeling that we go back to in our memory. Also drugs shortens your life, which is bad and immoral. If someone argue live short is good, they ought to just kill themselves right away. I guess natural selection selected us this way, so for human live longer is better.

Everything is can be argued on top of these two goodnesses. Why is stealing from others is bad? Because it incites more stealing by others, eventual you would be the victim and feel bad about losing you position. Someone could argue that if I am so good with stealing, I would not get caught. The problem is that it is not possible. It is the one against the rest of the world game. Because people does like being stolen from, they will try to protect themselves. So one thief is to against all people's wisdom. So it is not god that punishes us, but rather human being's own nature punish the wrong doer.

I can try to explain a lot more cases, but I need some sleep.

Saw a girl's nude and some more sexually explicit photos on a photo site. It looks like some guy she knew, maybe an ex, posted them there. The guy actually used the girl's real name and it was easy to find her myspace site. I warned her about the photos, and looks like the photos are finally gone.

She is just 20 years old and looks like have a pretty life, from her myspace site. I just think with the internet, it is a lot easy to dump this kind of personal stuff out these days. There has to be a way to protect people on the net against this kind of action. I am not that against pornography on the web, as long as the models and all parties are willing participants. However, taking someone's private photos and show them on the web must be against some kind of laws. If there are no existing laws, then there ought to be one.

When we see things like Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson sex tape on the web, it is easy to just view them as some celebrity craziness. However, people fail to know that this can happen to anyone. When money is not involved, it is even harder to get people doing this.

Also, this makes me to think that kids at 20 are too naive. I must say, I felt I knew everything when I was 20. I believed I could do anything and should be able to any I wanted. But it is very easy for some crazy person to ruin your day, if not your life. I think this incident is still a small thing. It is mostly embarrassing. She did not do anything wrong, or illegal. Other than allowing an untrustworthy person take the photo, you can't call it stupid. Most college kids have sex these days.

Another thing is that someone who pamper you with all the sweet talks and make you feel good and enjoy the time can really hurt you. I guess the girl learned a hard lesson. It also shows sometimes young girls get attracted by the wrong property of a man. Anyway, things to tell my daughter to avoid and be smart with.