Slashdot Mirror

http://kitesareevil.livejournal.com/257387.html?fo rmat=light
http://www.my2centences.com/my2c_new/FanLib_info.p df

That is what we fanfic writers are upset about. The PDF is evidence and proof of their corporate ulterior motives and the first link explains a lot of this better than the given link and the connection between my2centences and fanlib.

This is the most comprehensive and informative link I've seen on that. And Boingboing picked the story up this morning. I heard from a friend in a fanfic community there that they were deleting journals just because the keywords "rape" or "incest" were used in the interests field. So the journals of some rape victims and incest survivors were suddenly terminated.

I don't know why slashdot hasn't picked it up. This place is so slow. Digg and Reddit already have stories about it which are getting voted up and should be on the front page by this evening

Warriors for Innocence and other vigilantes, that's who. Guess what they could do with Google Street Views.

Take a look here: http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/

Livejournal has apparently been shutting down journals and communities with "questionable" subject matter, under pressure from an outside group. It's not clear how far they're taking it.

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/

Please know that even though you provided your e-mail address only to Ameritrade, it does still sit on a server that other people can see and may gain access to. If you receive an e-mail from one of the following addresses, it is ours:

...

In the case you are speaking of, we have not yet been able to rid ourselves of the spam. The issue is still being worked on.

To view Ameritrade's privacy policy, please click the link below:

http://www.ameritrade.com/privacy.html

Terrence B.
Client Services, TD AMERITRADE
Division of TD AMERITRADE, Inc.

Meh. SQLite is in fact rather nice. What I want them to get rid of is Mork (if they haven't already): http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html

"Bullshit!"

You ought to read this great blog by a former wikipedia admin. He details the powers a wikipedia admin gets and the methods by which admins connected to partisan debates, or just assholes who managed to get an admin bit, abuse people.

They get to be as abusive as they want language-wise, and if anyone chides them on it, the other admin-cultists will back them up.

They get to block anyone, for any reason, at any time, and the "procedures" wikipedia has for an appeal are a joke.

They can block someone indefinitely, lock down the user page and talk page so that filing for an appeal can't even be done, and just walk away. The appeals email list is locked down and non-archived, so nobody can see what they're doing (not that they ever did anything but rubber-stamp abuse by admins anyways).

Wikipedia's admin-cultists exist by trying to control the debate. They control who can speak, and when. They control whether or not a source or fact can even be mentioned in an article. They extend this behavior to mailing lists, to IRC channels; in short, if an admin decides you ought to be "banned", even if the admin is just doing it because they disagree with something that you posted that meets all the other sourcing/NPOV criteria, they WILL do it and they WILL get away with it.

I'm gonna quote him here because he said it better than anyone:

Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism.

Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.

Just send the message from the free website that most companies provide to send SMS from the internet. I do that to my friends all the time at work because I'm online anyway. Suppose that doesn't work if you have to do it on the road, but get a Treo like I have and bookmark the SMS pages, and you've got free outbound TXT messages. I have free incoming text and voice with my plan, so it's completely free for me, though I generally use less than 100 mins of talk time and less than 100 messages a month, so no big deal. Verizon: https://www.vtext.com/customer_site/jsp/messaging_ lo.jsp US Cellular: http://usc.ztango.com/uscwmss Cingular: No page, but email goes through to number@mobile.mycingular.com I found this nifty page ( http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?m ode=details ) with a whole lot of others as well.

Yep they are. (Or at least so they say):

According to their "public development" blog, they have presold some 75 keyboards in the first 45 minutes of taking preorders. If they continue to sell 'em at this rate, they should already be out of december batch keyboards :)

By the way, here is the production schedule...

The hysteria thus goes from both sides. On one hand, we have the Russian government trying to declare the guy who died in the riots in Tallinn (stabbed to death during the looting of the shops, presumably in a fight over the loot) a national hero, a "martyr who died for the cause of his grandfathers". They're planning to name a street in Moscow after him. Regional governments are following the suit - in Tambov region, for example, a law has recently gone into effect which requites all shops to provide special labelling for Estonian goods, combined with a massive propaganda campaign to boycott everything Estonian. On the other hand, the Russians themselves catch up quickly - have a look. The text is in Russian, on the photos as well, but I'm sure there are enough people on /. who can read it to verify my claims. Basically, it's a plate on the entrance to a restaurant in Yaroslavl, which says "No dogs or Estonians allowed". Put there on the 9th of May, the Victory Day, as a response to the events in Estonia.

So, who are the fascists, then?..

Define mentally stable? George Bush apparently fits that bill as does Jerry Falwell. Technically, those who have taken the time to SEE a psychological professional are those who care enough about their mental well being. Should they be punished by societys stigmatization of this? Just because you refuse to see a mental health care professional or have never seen one, does this necessarily mean that you are stable? No, it just means that you have never seen one. But that is not the conclusion that will be drawn.

I suggest Google starting to create secure opensource automatized and self contained services.

This way it could regain the trust, by letting everyone look at the code, and get reassured this way.

--
http://id3as.livejournal.com/

The open source ATI folks have a tool for the r300 chipsets called revenge and another tool imaginatively called radeondump which I gather do something similar. However tools like the mmiotrace are useful for both efforts so I think both projects are as "sophisticated" as each other.

The open source ATI folks have a tool for the r300 chipsets called revenge and another tool imaginatively called radeondump which I gather do something similar. However tools like the mmiotrace are useful for both efforts so I think both projects are as "sophisticated" as each other.

• Microsoft - Conspiracy theorists find a way to blame Microsoft for every problem in Linux. This time they point out when Microsoft decided to use a vendor's chip in the XBox consoles or chipset vendors puts DirectX 8.0 support you don't get specs any more.
  
• ??? - Patents and fear of competitors or patent scumsucking companies bringing infringement. Vendors claim releasing chipset docs to the public may make it easier for these things to be found; however, most X.org developers have no problem signing suitable NDAs .
  
• Profit - Graphics card manufacturing is a very competitive industry, especially in the high-end gaming, 3-6 month development cycle, grind-out-
  as-many-different-cards-as-you-can. Quake 3 speeds are spotted in binary drivers any way and it doesn't explain fglrx which are some of the most unsuitable drivers for gaming on Linux.

Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.

• Someone contacts ATI's sales about this announcement and is told to hold tight for more news (this is consistent with what was posted to German news site heise.de link found via liquidat)
  
• Thank you for your current drivers ATI
  
• Slashdot shouldn't speculate on what ATI's roadmap
  
• We want open source ATI drivers, not Linux drivers
  
• ATI don't support vblank in their binary drivers (open source drivers do support vblank but it's hard to find the cards)..
  
• ATI? You mean AMD!
  
• Marketing... Ha!
  
• This is because of Dell starting a Linux push
  
• Doing a Windows graphics driver wrapper wouldn't be feasible...
  
• Reverse engineering modern graphics cards is hard... because the API driving them is complex.
  
• Intel have released open source graphics drivers BEFORE their next card was released!
  

I have a co-worker who just completed a Theremin, built from scratch, using an original RCA design (that is, Leo).
I was playing with it a few minutes ago.

http://bedsidestory.livejournal.com/37706.html

Gaak. You can do a hell of a lot better than that. Tricia Helfer

At this stage, to buy anything except an Intel GMA X3000 is madness. Intel are delivering fully Free/Open solutions that are powerful enough for anyone except hard core gamers (and said games don't exist on Linux anyway) and CAD people.

They're also significantly cheaper and more power efficient than the stuff being put out by Nvidia and ATI.

I'm my opinion KVM will flush Xen away... But it will take some time.

The free and open Xen is super-slow for anything I/O related when running hardware-virtualized systems (eg Windows or unmodified Linux). Super-slow as in network and disk I/O is basically unusable for anything but single-user desktop use. It's actually so slow that VMWare's VMplayer under Linux that is *not* using hardware-virt is faster than Xen's hardware-virtualization, on the same hardware (pathetic, but true... I've tested it with a ten users Windows 2003 Server tested both under Xen 3.0.4 then under VMplayer).

The bad news: the drivers that makes hardware-virtualized guest I/O not-suck are closed-source and $$$.

The good news? For para-virtualization Xen rocks. Bad news: only modified OSes run as para-virt guests. I've got my SVN / Samba / Squid / NFS servers running as Xen para-virtualized guests. Rock stable and super fast.

PCI device forwarding is nice but AFAIK it only works for para-virtualized guests: in other words, you're not forwarding that super-fast GFX card to your Windows guest, which is stuck with a lame emulated (by QEMU) videocard.

Here's a summary from a few months ago as to why KVM beats Xen easily, and I completely agree with the article. KVM is a little bit new but I expect to switch to KVM very soon. It simply has to many advantages over Xen.

http://udrepper.livejournal.com/15795.html

Simply put: Xen is driven by XenSource and they're out to try to make a buck. They're not playing nice with the community. Their developers base is shrinking and shrinking, with already quite some transfugees that went to KVM. Also there are some big-Linux-kernel-developers-names behind KVM. The XenSource guys are fighting a battle lost in advance for the "hardware-virtualization" side for sure. For para-virt I don't know. There are so many drawbacks with Xen and hardware-virt CPUs will just keep getting better and better at doing hardware-virt (hence minimizing the difference between para-virt and hardware-virt).

KVM made it into the Linux kernel. It's not easy to beat that. Technically Xen isn't "linux only" (it runs on Solaris too, for example) but, still, I don't see Xen as a viable alternative for long. (and this is coming from a huge Xen fan: as I told you, I've got several servers running as Xen VMs).

http://jwz.livejournal.com/

It even has a focus on bitter nostalgia and griping about the lack of the future.

You are making the mistake of believing that since Apple Customer Service is rated highly in general, that they can't also completely screw customers over from time to time also.

Not that anyone really wants to read such long drawn out (and usually personal), tales of woe but...

here: http://jeremy-bee.livejournal.com/2516.html#cutid1

Is a long detailed account of my own customer service nightmare with Apple (on my very first order ever!)

The upshot of the thing is that I got screwed, and through the process identified a couple of clear problems with the customer service they provide, yet they don't even provide mechanisms to report bad service other than the telephone number. I know telephone support is fairly standard, but if you don't want to or can't hang on that phone for them to get to you, (for me it would cost a bit of money I wasn't prepared to spend), there are simply no other options.

I am a strong supporter and advocate of Apple, but my first experience with their customer service left me cold and angry. Their communication in particular leaves a great deal to be desired. Now because they don't seem to want to even know about my experience, I am probably going to just go around bad mouthing them to everyone.

That's just dumb on their part.

As much as I hate IE, it still bugs me how I stumble into Firefox rendering bugs (or in the case of map not accepting id tags under text/html, "features"), usually with something that works just fine in IE6.

The point isn't that OPSEC is necessary, as many are simplistically framing this argument. This issue -- which isn't really denied -- is largely tangental to the new regulation changes. Rather, it's the fact that soldiers, contractors, their families, friends, etc. are no longer trusted to apply what they already know about OPSEC. Rather, they are being compelled into draconian security measures which do little to increase OPSEC, and much to increase censorship.

Every soldier knows that OPSEC is necessary and has been trained thoroughly on how to comply with OPSEC regulations. Soldiers in a combat zone know very well what they can and cannot say to people back home, and are professionals about it. Whenever there's even a smidgen of a potential OPSEC issue on a military forum, I have seen other soldiers chime in "OPSEC!" quite loudly, usually resulting in a thoughtful explanation of why the issue in question wasn't an OPSEC violation, or, in rare cases, an editing of the original post. Oftentimes the reason is that the media has already disclosed the information in question, which is, therefore, a matter of public record.

I run an online weblogging community for soldiers, and have interacted with hundreds of soldiers over the past few years. During that time period, not a single soldier has said anything so glaringly in violation of OPSEC. They don't telegraph their actions in such a detailed, explicit manner. Frankly, they rarely talk about where they are going until after they've arrived.

The wording of this new policy makes little to no difference in the level of OPSEC for soldiers who are currently deployed overseas, as compared to the previous policies. Rather, it specifically expands the level of OPSEC for soldiers and civilians who are at home. Under these new regulations, returned soldiers, contractors, families, and friends (i.e. me) of soldiers are all required to have everything they say pre-screened.

Well, as a civilian with free speech rights and a friend of many soldiers, I have to say no. Not just no, but hell no.

I have been maintaining a blog for over seven years now, and because of my unique situation, I have been in touch with numerous soldiers. I have also had the priviledge of making blog posts which matter, such as this one, where a friend of mine in the military specifically told me about this issue of Field Artillery Magazine, where it specifically says that white phosphorus was used in Fallujah for lethal "shake and bake" missions.

Prior to my "discovery" of this article, the U.S. State Department loudly proclaimed from their website that claims of WP attacks on Fallujah were merely enemy propaganda, and that it had been used for illumination purposes only. Afterwards -- and after I commented / spread the news to every blog on Technorati I could find that was discussing Fallujah -- the media picked up the story and the State Department corrected their statement.

In other words, your government lied to you, and it took an honest soldier citing public -- yet not widely known -- information to correct that lie.

This, by the way, is usually the way most of us get access to the truth. It took soldiers coming forward to bring out the truth of Abu Ghraib. It took soldiers and their families coming forward to expose the fact that they were being sent into harm's way without proper body armor. It took a soldier coming forward in a speech by Donald Rumsfeld to put an end to improvised "hillbilly armor" on Humvees.

So, if you want to defend proactively requiring them -- and I, as a friend of such soldiers -- from posting anything without prior approval from the powers that be, fine. Just expect to be kept in the dark and lied to a *LOT* more than you already are, and expect the negative, scandalously dangerous, unsafe, and irresponsible effects of poor government policies to get swept unde

Your comment is an overstated generalization that isn't particularly relevant to the issue at hand.

The point isn't that OPSEC is necessary. Every soldier knows that OPSEC is necessary and has been trained thoroughly on how to comply with OPSEC regulations. Soldiers in a combat zone know very well what they can and cannot say to people back home, and are professionals about it. Whenever there's even a smidgen of a potential OPSEC issue on a military forum, I have seen other soldiers chime in "OPSEC!" quite loudly, usually resulting in a thoughtful explanation of why the issue in question wasn't an OPSEC violation, or, in rare cases, an editing of the original post. Oftentimes the reason is that the media has already disclosed the information in question, which is, therefore, a matter of public record.

I run an online weblogging community for soldiers, and have interacted with hundreds of soldiers over the past few years. During that time period, not a single soldier has said anything so glaringly in violation of OPSEC. They don't telegraph their actions in such a detailed, explicit manner. Frankly, they rarely talk about where they are going until after they've arrived.

The wording of this new policy makes little to no difference in the level of OPSEC for soldiers who are currently deployed overseas, as compared to the previous policies. Rather, it specifically expands the level of OPSEC for soldiers and civilians who are at home. Under these new regulations, returned soldiers, contractors, families, and friends (i.e. me) of soldiers are all required to have everything they say pre-screened.

Well, as a civilian with free speech rights and a friend of many soldiers, I have to say no. Not just no, but hell no.

I have been maintaining a blog for over seven years now, and because of my unique situation, I have been in touch with numerous soldiers. I have also had the priviledge of making blog posts which matter, such as this one, where a friend of mine in the military specifically told me about this issue of Field Artillery Magazine, where it specifically says that white phosphorus was used in Fallujah for lethal "shake and bake" missions.

Prior to my "discovery" of this article, the U.S. State Department loudly proclaimed from their website that claims of WP attacks on Fallujah were merely enemy propaganda, and that it had been used for illumination purposes only. Afterwards -- and after I commented / spread the news to every blog on Technorati I could find that was discussing Fallujah -- the media picked up the story and the State Department corrected their statement.

In other words, your government lied to you, and it took an honest soldier citing public -- yet not widely known -- information to correct that lie.

This, by the way, is usually the way most of us get access to the truth. It took soldiers coming forward to bring out the truth of Abu Ghraib. It took soldiers and their families coming forward to expose the fact that they were being sent into harm's way without proper body armor. It took a soldier coming forward in a speech by Donald Rumsfeld to put an end to improvised "hillbilly armor" on Humvees.

So, if you want to defend proactively requiring them -- and I, as a friend of such soldiers -- from posting anything without prior approval from the powers that be, fine. Just expect to be kept in the dark and lied to a *LOT* more than you already are, and expect the negative, scandalously dangerous, unsafe, and irresponsible effects of poor government policies to get swept under the rug.

So yes, go ahead and argue for censorship. You might as well be arguing for security through obscurity, however, and we all know how well that argument holds up around here.

Yes, there is a place for secrecy regarding security matters, but that place is limited. You don't announce the gaping hole in

You are pretty much right.

However, while earlier versions used only web browser User-Agent checks, recent CCA Server software uses TCP/IP fingerprinting techniques to be more or less impervious to simple browser-based bypasses; though any emulated OSes that can gain network access are sufficient, or the software that I pointed out (which changes Windows TCP/IP settings, uses OpenSSL, and spoofs a browser).

I've talked about much of this before on my own web page, as my university (UC Irvine) has installed the Cisco product, I (and others) have spoken out against it, and have been accused of policy violations under similar "rules". Of course three graduate students in three different computer science disciplines (different department chairs) have a better chance against a (clueless) administrator than the undergrad listed in this story. Joe Feise talks about this: http://www.feise.com/~jfeise/blogs/ As do I on my blog: http://chouyu-31.livejournal.com/243263.html and on a web page devoted to this kind of bullshit: https://nerp.net/~jcarlson/cca_.html

If the kid would have gone to a UC, he would be able to submit a public records act request for records of every email sent between those that were working on his case. He could verify his suspicions that the people who ultimately decided were overly influenced by the admin, etc. Of course, had they spoken with him before throwing the book at him, they may have been able to get their desired result (the student not using or distributing the software) without needing to suspend him and put his university funding in jeopardy.

Interesting website ..

Though it may be... I do not agree, and I've done far more research into the military aspects of this. The facts disagree with the media reports, because it doesn't suit the media's need for ratings. I've links to these facts all over my blog if you would like to drop in and take a look...http://jhohanna.livejournal.com/tag/iraq. Including links to the actual translation documents of the Saddam Hussein regime discussing utilizing them on US troops. Not to mention the Plamegate controversy that was all for naught - and obtaining yellowcake was attempted by Iraq in 1999. Again, those links exist and are all over the place for those who chose to look.

A referendum under oath to get all of this out in the open would be a good thing, but it would not serve any benefit to the American people. It would create a nasty atmosphere for the remaining 18 months of lame - ducketry that we have to contend with.

Please don't misunderstand me, I am in in no way a Cheney or Bush apologist. I have enough reasons to hate them of my own - but the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan and the ongoing fight against Islamofascism have NOTHING to do with that. :)

The author of that peice has something on Livejournal explaining it. http://vebelfetzer.livejournal.com/ Also seems that the grassroots entries defending Todd on the Wired's forums are all coming from the same IP.

The image for which Goldman attracted a substantial amount of press and fame and upon which he built his profitable David And Goliath Tees company--the "Boys Are Stupid, Throw Rocks At Them" work--appears to have been partially copied from the portfolio of Chip Wass:

http://chris-san.livejournal.com/49035.html

I am the Tyler Wagner from the article. At the risk of exposing myself (further) to the flames of Slashdot, I'd be happy to answer questions.

Pictures:
http://www.tolaris.com/gallery/Iraq

The Mohammed story:
http://giantlaser.livejournal.com/56797.html
http://giantlaser.livejournal.com/56863.html

I am the Tyler Wagner from the article. At the risk of exposing myself (further) to the flames of Slashdot, I'd be happy to answer questions.

Pictures:
http://www.tolaris.com/gallery/Iraq

The Mohammed story:
http://giantlaser.livejournal.com/56797.html
http://giantlaser.livejournal.com/56863.html

• DSDT's are buggy (go figure)
  
• The common method for fixing a broken DSDT is to patch it after the machine has booted via some driver
  

The improved wireless support comes from network-manager not avahi, avahi is a service for automatically discovering network services on your local network.

Tomboy and f-spot at least, were included in Ubuntu 6.10.

There are *lots* of small incremental improvements in Ubuntu, that's the benefit of 6 month release plan. Some of them are detailed here: http://philbull.livejournal.com/34930.html There are also a list of improvements from Gnome 2.18 here: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.18/notes/en/

I imagine the new kernel release adds support for new hardware and things too.

There are some rumors circulating on various forums (I found it on the GameSpot Off-Topic forum, strangely enough) that the guy who has posted on the above LiveJournal may be the shooter.

Look at the facts: this "Mr. Chiang" is Asian, a grad student in IT who apparently hates Virginia Tech and pretty much everyone else, he is obsessed with guns, he broke up with his girlfriend late last month... It could be a coincidence, but I guess we will find out soon enough.

I have heard reports that the shooter's livejournal page is here.

From the profile:
Birthdate: 1984-02-22

NBC5 quotes a Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed as saying the shooter was a 24 year old male student on a student visa from China.

Plus the livejournal I point to above is all about guns, killing, shooting, depression, etc... so it is a pretty decent first guess as to who the shooter might me?

A gallery of news photos from the event may help to understand the story better. I am not going to try explaining the backgrounds of all the opposition groups, but one of them is called "national-bolsheviks" and even a quick glance at their symbols may suggest that the West would not want the leaders of this movement to rule in Russia. Some "national-bolshevik" events have turned violent in the past, so the Russian Federal and Moscow City governments may have a legitimate security concern when considering the location and type of these events.

In this case, the authorities actually did allow the opposition meeting on one of squares in Moscow, but not the preceding march starting from a different square. So there was no total ban, but the opposition did not get everything they wanted. The response of Western governments to the anti-globalization marches may be a reasonable analogy.

You might want to watch the video - a report on a Russian TV station (as far as I know, the only one that even mentioned the whole thing). It's more telling than the pictures, even if you can't understand Russian. Here's another one (not normally available in Russia), though that one is hardly impartial. Still worth watching for the pictures, though. Also, here are a few more photos, made by a participant, that show just how many forces were involved in quelling this. Note the army trucks with people in the uniform inside on the photo with McDonalds.

• http://www.lenta.ru/info/license.htm
• http://www.rbc.ru/
• http://www.mail.ru/
• http://www.gazeta.ru/
• ...

• http://www.livejournal.com/ which has Russian-speaking abuse team controlled by a Russian company
• http://www.liveinternet.ru/
• ...

The Radeon Xpress onboard GPU should be up and running with the r300 DRI driver any day now...

Whoa - all that "national" stuff is paid for, either directly by taxpayers, or indirectly through bond-holders, or as "consumers." There is no such thing as "government-paid" anything - it all ends up coming out of your pockets, or your kids pockets.

In other words, taxing transactions that don't involve the exchange of legal tender - you know - REAL money - is pure BS, because nothing or REAL value has changed hands. Or will the IRS start accepting payment in Linden Dollars and WoW points?

They'd be totally unaffected if our national government laid down its arms, gave up having a military budget, and let other countries invade at will.

Go look at New Jersey (google for "new jersey the armpit of the world"). Then tell me that letting another country invade it wouldn't be a "Good Thing". Heck, they're probably praying for a hurricane or other natural disaster. http://gilded-messiah.livejournal.com/2004/12/06/0

I'm from New Jersey. That's right, New Jersey. The Armpit of America. The sewage capital of the world. New York's retarded little brother. You can keep your pity, however, because I'm here to defend it, mostly. Like many escaped New Jersey inmates, I have a unique variant of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to my home state. I've fallen in love with my captor.

Don't get me wrong. New Jersey is a cesspool, just as you might have suspected. There really are girls with big hair and awful accents living in malls, women so awful that they turned the governor gay. These women really do have 400 pound boyfriends with hairy backs and low IQs. Turn signals are considered worthless luxury features, and, God help me, the whole state really does smell. However, it's New Jersey's consummate crappiness that ultimately makes it so great.

Radio personality Jean Shepard once said that New Jersey was "the most American of all states. It has everything from wilderness to the Mafia. All the great things and all the worst. For example, Route 22." Route 22, for those of you who don't know, is- I kid you not- a 24 hour strip mall that runs the length of the state. What is more quintessentially New Jersey- nay, more quintessentially American- than that? It's also the only place to go at 3 AM when you decide it's a good time to get some coffee and disco fries, or perhaps visit White Castle, the only burger joint with the gall to call their visibly greasy laxative rat-patties "Sliders."

While not unique to the state, White Castle's hamburgers share a few characteristics with New Jersey: they're both guilty pleasures, they only appeal to a small portion of the population, and they're both ironically nicknamed. New Jersey is, after all, the "Garden State," which in New Jersey-speak means "densely populated paved hellscape." In fact, New Jersey is the most densely populated state of the union, which might lead you to believe that the state is crowded and polluted. It is. But the large population isn't all bad. Because of its population density, New Jersey serves as a cultural microcosm of America as a whole. It is the proverbial "melting pot," where Godless, homosexual, French hippie crackheads live just a stone's throw away from inbred, racist, unwashed redneck crackheads. I know, because they're throwing stones at each other all the time.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking ,"This still sounds completely awful." Like I said earlier, it is awful, and everyone there knows it. For a while, New Jersey considered changing its state song to Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." Not only would this have been the only state song to contain the word "suicide," but also the only one about trying desperately to get the hell out of the state.

I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?

About weekly, I'll check out http://amasci.com/ (amateur science and electricity stuff), http://en.wikipedia.org/ (duh), http://www.cray-cyber.org/ (free supercomputer access), http://www.hpcalc.org/ (HP48/49/etc calculator stuff), etc., to check for new stuff. I'll check my http://facebook.com/ and http://myspace.com/orangesquid (shuddup) messages about weekly. From time to time I might browse http://www.amazing1.com/ (catalog which has Tesla coils and stuff, though they're not actually the best place for parts/kits/devices) or search for scientific equipment or old unix systems on http://www.ebay.com/ (see the Used SGI Buying Guide FAQ, etc).

I also check up on some of my friends via http://os.livejournal.com/friends every few days.

Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.

Your question is not so much "How does your ISP handle top-usage customers?" as much as it is, "How do I pick an ISP that doesn't suck?"

I work with and sometimes for the major local DSL provider in my area. I enjoy giving people tips on how to find and maintain good broadband service because I remember what it was like not having any clue how DSL, cable, or even ISPs in general worked. So, assuming that you're living in the US, here are some things you'll need to know.

1) Do not order cable Internet access unless there is absolutely no other alternative.

2) Flip through the phone book, talk to people, and go online to get a list of all of the providers who can deliver broadband Internet to your door. But when you talk to people, don't make the mistake of discarding a provider just because a few people had a bad experience. There are a lot of people who bad-mouth my ISP but they've always been awesome to me. Their support people are always happy to help and have even more of a clue than I do sometimes. (Plus, for almost one year solid I was paying for 768kbps down and actually getting 5mbps.)

3) Cross out all the cable providers and telephone monopolies.

4) Call up the sales department of each ISP and ask them all of the questions that are important to you. Such as their policy on top-usage customers, whether they give you a real Internet IP address or force you in behind a NAT, whether they use PPPoE, what their response time is when a link goes down, if they block any ports in or out, and so on.

5) Hang up on sales once you've gotten your answers and dial into their support queue. When someone picks up, ask them the same questions as above. No, really. The support folks are the ones that literally keep the ISP running and they'll definitely give you a more honest answer than the person whose job it is to sell you something. Besides, most of them are happy to have an "easy" phone call and will gladly drag it on for as long as you like rather than have to answer another "Halp! My Internets are borken!" call.

6) Pick your ISP. BTW, any provider worth their own weight won't make you sign a one or two-year contract and won't stick you with cancellation fees. That way you aren't stuck with them if it turns out that they suck.

7) If you found a good ISP, please let other people know, especially those who are looking for broadband. It's extremely difficult for a local provider to compete with cable and incumbent telcos who literally spend millions per month getting their brand name burned into the public consciousness. On top of that, the local providers usually have to go through the incumbent telcos to have your DSL hooked up and lets just say that the telcos seem to experience a high degree of human error when connecting up phone lines for their competitors.

I would agree with you on this (and I do agree on the rest) but my point is not that their rights are unimportant. I merely propose that there are more important things. And I realize what others pointed out about postponing the lesser stuff, the tyranny of the urgent, etc.

So we are on the same page, only you might have overlooked it because of my wording.

I wrote this on that very topic a while ago. If you manage to get past the rambling style you might understand why I place animal rights in an important but lower category of human endeavor. I believe that rights are a fragile thing and we must protect them at all times because they don't exist per se as demonstrated by other humans that constantly trample those "inalienable" rights.

Omg this stuff hit slashdot ? OMG OMG !

But before we panic and look at the bandwidth bills, let me congratulate the perverted genius of Mr spo0nman (and KingDiamond, indirectly). All in all, I think Yahoo! deserves the most credit for boring the hell out of us "cheap indian labour" to make things like this worth our time ;)

I've created http://alex-ponosov-en.livejournal.com/ and started translating Alexander's journal. Any help from the Russian-English translators would be highly appreciated. I know my English is not perfect, so any corrections are more than welcome.

Hahahaha. Then why don't you pop on over to livejournal.com and get your news of the day? You can find out how much bulemic_brandy had for lunch today. Yay!

Tool.