Cemetech Contest #20, Transit Time is all about different modes of transport. The development of transportation technologies has facilitated modern life by enabling the spread of people, goods, and ideas. Computerization has further advanced transportation, improving safety, efficiency, and ease of operation, along with many other aspects. By encouraging Cemetech members to create programs centered around a multitude of transportation modes, Transit Time celebrates the positive impact that transportation has on our lives.
Transit Time will be divided into three two-week segments, each focusing on one of the three realms in which transportation commonly takes place (land, water, and air). For each segment of the contest, you must choose a mode of transport for that realm, and create a program that is somehow related to your choice. Additionally, contestants may choose to create an entry for the realm of space, in lieu of one of the three traditional realms.
At the end of each two-week period, contestants must submit their programs for the respective realm. The winning program for each realm will be selected by a poll of Cemetech users, with the creator receiving a $10 Steam credit. At the conclusion of the contest, an overall winner will be selected by a panel of judges. The overall winner will receive a (additional) $20 gift certificate. Entries for all platforms, and in any programming language will be accepted.
Contest timeline
▪ June 24th: Contest begins
▪ July 8th: Land submissions due
▪ July 22nd: Water submissions due
▪ August 5th: Air submissions due
Notes
▪ Please maintain a contest thread documenting the progress of your entries.
▪ Entries must be submitted by 11:59 PM Eastern Time on the dates listed above.
▪ You may receive help from other Cemetech members, provided that communication is done publicly through the forum or through SAX/IRC.
▪ Fine print rules can be found here.
EDIT: Winners can opt to receive a different gift card or item of equivalent value.
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Two weeks ago, Mojang released Minecraft 1.12, the so-called "World of Color Update". After waiting for Spigot's CraftBukkit clone and our relevant plugins to be updated, I'm happy to say that the server is now running version 1.12. If you enjoy playing our "Intellectual Survival" style, you now have access to more material options like Terra Cotta and Concrete, recipe and knowledge books, and the Illusioner and Parrot mobs. In addition, to celebrate the upgrade and give you a source for the new materials available, moderator Daniel "tifreak8x" Thorneycroft has opened a Mesa Mining World, accessible from spawn, for a limited one-week mining period.
Unfortunately, the upgrade was not without a hiccup or two. Specifically, we discovered that town, nation, and player balances appeared to have been cleared, and weren't able to intercede soon enough to prevent towns from falling. Our postmortem revealed that the problem was that iConomy Recreation, our economy plugin, uses a space in its plugin name in an important internal file, plugin.yml. Unfortunately, Spigot 1.12 now disallows this, so iConomy was not loaded, which we didn't notice. This made Essentials use its built-in file-based economy system, defaulting everyone to starting balances and currency ($0 for towns/nations, $30 for players) instead. The entire server has been restored to its state as of the morning of June 19th, so a few players who cashed in Lapis Ore and deposited it lost that, and all signs that were in towns that fell are no longer recorded as proper signshops. We have been actively working to restore the lost signshops. Because players were restored along with the world, there will be no discrepancies between inventories and town contents. Please privately contact any moderator or administrator if you think you've spotted an issue of some sort.
As always, we welcome you on mc.cemetech.net to build cool structures and machines and engage with a lively, intelligent community of creative Minecrafters. Be sure to keep your eyes out for our many exciting special events as well!
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Play @ Cemetech: Minecraft, UT2004, and more
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Over ten years ago, SourceCoder 2 was released on Cemetech, allowing community members to view and edit their TI-BASIC programs online. In a move that put it significantly ahead of the curve, one of SourceCoder 2's flagship features was the ability to share projects with other users: you could share a particular project with everyone, or just a few specific people, and allow them to view and/or edit those projects. As of the release of SourceCoder 3, however, this feature was removed. We had seen very few Cemetechians actually make use of these features, and the effort required to maintain them was deemed excessive. Since the first open beta release of SourceCoder 3, however, we have seen a resurgence of collaboration in the graphing calculator community. Therefore, in an effort spearheaded by Cemetech global administrator extraordinaire Peter "PT_" Tillema, a form of sharing has returned to SourceCoder 3.
We reached out to our membership to understand exactly what kind of project sharing they wanted, and heard a helpful consensus. Our members largely were not interested in realtime collaboration with other members, or even being able to trade off projects with others. Instead, they wanted to be able to show the current state of a project to someone else, for help, feedback, or even as a learning tool. Therefore, we have added a sharing tool that works like this:
- Click the "Share" button in an SC3 project to get a shareable link.
- Anyone to whom you give that link will then be able to view your project in its current state. If people don't have the link, they still won't be able to view the project.
- People with the link can choose to clone the project into their own SourceCoder projects folder, allowing them to edit a copy (not the original).
- At any time, you can choose to "Unshare" your project by clicking the appropriate button. The link you got will be (permanently) invalidated, no one will be able to see the current and future progress of your project, although any cloned copies of your project will remain in their owners' projects folder.
Try It Out
SourceCoder 3
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On May 18th, 2017 the FCC voted to kill Title II regulations under the Communications Act of 1934 for ISPs. More widely known as Net Neutrality. (But don't worry, there's time to save it!) Back in June 2015, the FCC classified ISPs as Title II Utilities and even successfully defended the classification in court several times. Wait. What?
The FCC Classified then Unclassified ISPs as Title II?
Yes. In December 2016, then FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced he'll step down on January 20th. According to the article, it's normal for the FCC Chairman to step down when a new President is elected. This left President Trump another spot to fill just days into his presidency. Three days later, on January 23rd, Trump put Ajit Pay in charge. Where did he come from? Ajit was already on the board at the FCC and was critical of Net Neutrality during the planning stages. Since he was promoted to the top spot, he made it his goal - and thus the FCC's - to undue these protections.
What is "Title II"?
On bottom of Page 35 of the "Communications Act of 1934" PDF is this text:
What does that mean?
This means services cannot prioritize traffic above others. In other words, all traffic is equal. The traffic from Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Vudu and, any other video/audio streaming site is treated equally. Not just streaming sites, but e-commerce, social networks, etc. If you have a 40mbps download then you can retrieve any and all internet data up to 40mbps. The ISP can't prioritize any service over another.
Now that Net Neutrality has been struck down by the FCC ISPs can prioritize traffic. This doesn't mean they'll throttle existing connections as there's no telling what they will do. Instead, the common theory is they'll likely use it to promote specific services. If ISP A wants to compete with Netflix all ISP A has to do is prioritize themselves. Instead of watching 4K HDR content at 40Mbps on a 1TB monthly data cap, you can steam ISP A's VOD service at 400Mbps and those videos won't count towards your data cap. That 1TB isn't pulled out of my rear, Comcast has a 1TB cap for all it's customers now. That number is very real.
"Now, Alex..." you're thinking, "who watches 4K HDR content?" Well, I don't know. I do, but I certainly do not stream it. Those are huge files and I don't trust that the quality over the bandwidth of my internet. On average, 1080p video eats through about 5GB of data an hour, while 4K content can eat through as much as 20GB, remember that 4K content is twice the width and twice the height as 1080p thus the amount of pixels are quadrupled. The source goes on to say that the estimate is for a video streamed with the x264 codec. On x265 (or HEVC) the size could be 7GB an hour for 4K but HEVC is an incredibly resource intensive codec and may not be implemented across all shows on a service or even every streaming service.
So, if you're binge watching one of Marvels' Netflix shows on your brand new 4K TV, just imagine it's 20GB an episode. And 13 episodes a season makes for about 260GB of data. So four seasons. Luke Cage, Iron Fist and, the two seasons of Daredevil puts you over that 1TB data cap. That's completely ignoring other services such as: YouTube, your video game downloads, streaming music, OS and app updates, etc.
ISPs can devastate streaming video with inferior experiences. We all already hate our ISPs and we have to put up with their awful customer service to boot. They have awful customer service because, honestly, who else are we going to switch to? I'm lucky where I live in a market with 2 ISP companies but unfortunately both their customer service departments suck. Imagine this mentality with their ideas of VOD. I hate the DVR experience on my cable box, and it's the same company that gives me my internet. Knowing how cheap these companies can be, they'll likely just repurpose the DVR interface into a VOD service. It'll be slow, it'll be confusing and, any web and streaming box would be severely behind or non existent. But, at least you can stream media faster than Netflix AND it doesn't count towards your data cap for the month.
Now. Netflix and services could theoretically pay for access to this fast lane. We have no idea what it would cost but those services would have to increase their monthly subscription to cover that cost. And just like internet rates, I'm sure ISPs would demand more money year over year from these companies thus forcing those companies to increase their prices. Eventually, those services can't keep subscribers as more people move to the ISPs' service because it's faster and cheaper.
This doesn't affect big companies. If big companies like Netflix can pay, that puts smaller companies at a disadvantage. Perhaps it's a startup trying to compete with Netflix. Netflix can afford to pay for a fast lane, this smaller company can't. There's no innovation to be had if companies can pay their way to your door faster that other companies. Like I said, ISP A may have an inferior VOD service but they'll simply include their service as a "fast lane" in the bundle of their services. If Netflix doesn't play ball they'll start to lose subscribers. This affects everyone.
Who is already classified as a Title II?
Utility companies who transport goods, also known as Common Carriers. Such as the water company and the natural gas companies. Most importantly, Telecommunications carriers are classified as Title II; telecommunications is transmission of signs, signals, messages, words, writings, images and sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire, radio, optical or other electromagnetic systems. This means AT&T/Verizon cell towers are under Title II but AT&T/Verizon ISP lines are not. The key argument by the FCC back in June 2016 was that ISPs are telecommunication carriers and thus common carriers. They won.
What can I do to ensure the continuation of Net Neutrality?
Contact your state rep! We cannot let the FCC take this back. We have until August 16th before the final verdict. FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, remember Ajit was once a commissioner, said that Net Neutrality is doomed if we're silent, just two days before the FCC voted to dismantle Net Neutrality today and after weeks of public comments.
Click the images to go to the true source, the links below the images provide context, also where I got the images from.
I'm taking these links directly from a Reddit post on /r/Technology:
Quote:
If you want to help protect NN you can support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU and Free Press who are fighting to keep Net Neutrality.
- https://www.eff.org/
- https://www.aclu.org/
- https://www.freepress.net/
- https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
- https://www.publicknowledge.org/
- https://demandprogress.org/
- also you can set them as your charity on https://smile.amazon.com/
- also write to your House Representative and senators
- http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
- https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/
- and the FCC https://www.fcc.gov/about/contact
- You can now add a comment to the repeal here
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC- here a easier URL you can use thanks to John Oliver
www.gofccyourself.com
(its down right now but will likely be back up after today)- you can also use this that help you contact your house and congressional reps, its easy to use and cuts down on the transaction costs with writing a letter to your reps.
https://resistbot.io/- also check out https://democracy.io/
which was made by the EFF and is a low transactioncost tool for writing all your reps in one fell swoop
Major tech companies are for Net Neutrality (open in incognito mode to skip wall), And Senate Democrats are for Net Neutrality.
Seriously, if you shop on Amazon for anything. Please consider using http://smile.amazon.com It doesn't work on the App but you can put items in your cart then jump onto a PC to finish the transaction from http://smile.amazon.com If it's your first time on http://smile.amazon.com you'll need to set up a charity to donate to. It's only 0.5% of your transaction total but it's 0.5% more than a charity would get if you didn't use http://smile.amazon.com
We defeated everything the old politicians have created, crafted and, reworded in their attempts to make the internet profitable. Let's win this battle too. We've defeated:
- SOPA
- PIPA
- CISPA
- ACTA
- TPP
- ITU
- CISPA again
- TAFTA
Let's be strong and be heard.
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