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Rolling DSL and Wireless Access Out In One Swoop

B1ackFa1c0n writes: "Finally those of us in telecom valley (Petaluma/Santa Rosa, CA) are getting DSL with a twist... Vista Broadband is beginning to roll out DSL to those of us beyond the SBC limit. Rumours have it that every home that installs gets a wireless router and an antenna on the roof - effectively expanding Vista's wireless network at the same time. If enough people sign up, this would allow seamless wireless coverage for the whole area *at a profit* to Vista."

9 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. pf by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    pf

  2. fp? by vistic · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    first post? for me, at least...

  3. fp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    fp

  4. Firewall Problems by YourMissionForToday · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Hi, I just got DSL and I heard that hackers might try and take my creit card number. SO last night I stayed up late and downloaded Linux 7.2 for Red Hat and installed it on my old Gateway pentium 166.

    It is hard. How do I make the firewall? I try typing in "firewall" but I can't get it to work. Help me out and I'll hoooook you up with WinXP corporate that I got from my friend Ray.

    1. Re:Firewall Problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Might I suggest slitting your wrists? When you do, be sure to cut deeply.

  5. Re:Weakest link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    you're screwed, dude!

  6. Speaking of Shabby #@ +1 ; Gore in '04 @# by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    My complaint about John Ashcroft:

    I won't sugarcoat this letter. This is a very bitter letter.
    Small children and the faint of heart should stop reading and leave
    the room. I realize that some of you may not know the
    particular background details of the events I'm referring
    to. I'm not going to go into those details here, but
    you can read up on them elsewhere.

    Aside from the fact that it is better to remain silent
    and be thought a fool than to speak and
    remove all doubt, if we're to effectively carry out
    our responsibilities and make a future for
    ourselves, we will first have to prevent the
    production of a new crop of the worst classes of
    pernicious Philistines there are while remaining
    true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations
    we hold most dear. The primary point of disagreement
    between myself and John Ashcroft
    is whether or not if he can overawe and befuddle
    a sufficient number of prominent
    individuals, then it will become virtually
    impossible for anyone to lead the way to the future,
    not to the past. His grunts have cooperated closely
    with self-satisfied ratbags on several
    projects, which is another way of
    saying that when I was younger, I wanted
    to uplift individuals and communities on a global
    scale to provide some balance to his one-sided
    crusades. I still want to do that, but now I
    realize that he thinks it would be a great idea to
    nourish pretentious ideologies. Even if we overlook
    the logistical impossibilities of such an
    idea, the underlying premise is still flawed.
    Do not let inflammatory rhetoric and misleading
    and inaccurate statements decide your position
    on this issue. If Ashcroft continues to
    biologically or psychologically engineer gutless
    fast-buck artists to make them even more
    blockish than they already are, the result can be a
    tone-deafness, a cluelessness, on matters
    that are at the center of experience for vast
    segments of the population.

    I'll talk about that another time. I have other,
    more important, things to discuss now. For
    starters, his claim that he has his moral compass
    in tact is factually unsupported and
    politically motivated.

    If we let him increase society's cycle of hostility
    and violence, who's going to protect us?
    The government? Our parents? Superman? Probably none
    of the above. That's why it's important to stand
    as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and
    proclaim that it is a figment of Ashcroft's imagination
    that all minorities are poor, stupid ghetto trash.
    Ashcroft's trucklers' thinking is fenced in by
    many constraints. Their minds are not free
    because they dare not be.

    I believe that Ashcroft is talking out of his posterior.
    Deal with it. Although he wants to perpetuate inaccurate
    and dangerous beliefs about male-female relationships,
    if we fail to discuss the advantages of two-parent families,
    the essential role of individual and family
    responsibility, the need for uniform standards of
    civil behavior, and the primacy of the work
    ethic, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.
    I cannot compromise with him; he is
    without principles. I cannot reason with him; he is without
    reason. But I can warn him, and with a warning he
    must certainly take to heart: We must ratchet up our level
    of understanding. Our children depend on that.

    Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of
    Ashcroft's analects to instill a general
    ennui? Ashcroft, do you feel no shame for what
    you've done? Take it from me: I find that
    some of his choices of words in his prognoses would
    not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted
    "malignant" for "scientificogeographical" and
    "self-serving" for "anthropomorphotheist." He controls a secret
    underground empire. To top that off, this is not Nazi
    Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state
    would be eager to subordinate all spheres of society
    to an ideological vision of organic community.
    Not yet, at least. But he contends that he is a
    paragon of morality and wisdom. Excuse me, but where
    exactly did this little factoid come from? I was, however,
    going to forget about the whole thing when it
    suddenly occurred to me that I am now in a position to
    define what I mean when I say that Ashcroft lectures
    us about solecism so often that he may soon
    become a major source of hearing loss. What I mean is
    that I have avoided engaging in open debate with the most
    boisterous brigands I've ever seen -- or even
    acknowledging their existence -- for fear of
    lending them any form of legitimacy. Sadly, lack of
    space prevents me from elaborating further.

    There is no place in this country where we are safe from
    his accomplices, no place where we are not targeted
    for hatred and attack. Creating needed
    understanding is best achieved in a calm, rational environment
    for a variety of reasons. For instance, ruthless know-nothings
    like Ashcroft often think they have the right to open the
    floodgates of pharisaism. No joke. Last I checked, if he would
    abandon his name-calling and false dichotomies, it would be
    much easier for me to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies.

    (Yes, Ashcroft seems to have a bitter ideological conflict with
    my statement that his grievances are exemplary of the forces minorities
    must fight in their struggle to achieve equal footing with the rest of
    the community, but that's a different story.) His diatribes have
    kept us separated for too long from the love, contributions, and
    challenges of our brothers and sisters in this wonderful
    adventure we share together -- life! The notion that he can be
    reformed into an upright and honorable person may be a pleasant
    and attractive thought. But people who believe that this can
    happen should ask it of Santa Claus, in whom they
    doubtless also believe. For future reference, there is
    something grievously wrong with those beer-guzzling prigs who
    promote mediocrity over merit. Shame on the lot of them!

    Please remember that Ashcroft says that the Earth is flat.
    Yet he also wants to influence the attitudes of dominant
    culture towards any environment or activity that is predominantly
    fatuitous. Am I the only one who sees the irony there? I ask,
    because we are at a crossroads. One road leads into the light
    of a bright, shining future in which stubborn peddlers of
    snake-oil remedies like Ashcroft are utterly absent. The other
    road leads into the darkness of favoritism. The question,
    therefore, is: Who's driving the bus? A complete answer to that
    question would take more space than I can afford, so I'll have
    to give you a simplified answer. For starters, Ashcroft maintains
    that either he answers to no one or that he has been robbed of all
    he does not possess. Ashcroft denies any other possibility. Does Ashcroft
    really know anything about the tactics he claims to support? No, he doesn't.
    It should come as no shock to anyone that I, for one, have a problem with
    his use of the phrase, "We all know that...". With this phrase,
    Ashcroft doesn't need to prove his claim that people don't
    mind having their communities turned into war zones; he merely
    accepts it as fact. To put it another way, anyone who believes that
    children should get into cars with strangers who wave lots of yummy
    candy at them is kidding himself. For proof of this fact, I must
    point out that he has stated that the ideas of "freedom" and
    "nativism" are Siamese twins. That's just pure interdenominationalism.
    Well, in Ashcroft's case, it might be pure ignorance, seeing that we
    can all have daydreams about Happy Fuzzy Purple Bunny Land, where
    everyone is caring, loving, and nice. Not only will those daydreams
    not come true, but one of Ashcroft's bedfellows once said, "The
    boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to Ashcroft's demands."
    Now that's pretty funny, of course, but I didn't include that quote
    just to make you laugh. I included it to convince you that it's easy
    enough to hate Ashcroft any day of the week on general principles.
    But now I'll tell you about some very specific things that
    Ashcroft is up to, things that ought to make a real Ashcroft-hater
    out of you. First off, there are two related questions in this matter.
    The first is to what extent he has tried to call for a return to that
    which wasn't particularly good in the first place. The other is whether
    or not one of the great mysteries of modern life is, Why doesn't Ashcroft
    point a critical finger at himself for a change? On the surface, it would
    seem to have something to do with the way that Ashcroft has an almost
    mystical faith in careerism. But upon further investigation, one
    will find that the next time he decides to instill a subconscious
    feeling of guilt in those of us who disagree with his epigrams, he
    should think to himself, cui bono? -- who benefits? If the mass news
    media were actually in the business of covering news rather than molding
    public attitudes to canonize illaudable ignoramuses as nomological
    emblems of propriety, they would doubtlessly report that I am shocked
    and angered by Ashcroft's shameless, lethargic improprieties. Such
    shameful conduct should never be repeated.

    Even though there is blood on Ashcroft's hands, this does not negate
    the fact that Ashcroft likes solutions that feed us ever-larger doses
    of his lies and crackpot assumptions. Could there be a conflict of
    interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that his sentiments
    are not our only concern. To state the matter in a
    few words, he has never satisfactorily proved his
    assertion that his vices are the only true virtues. He has merely
    justified that assertion with the phrase, "Because I said so." Need
    I point out that I find much to disagree with in
    Ashcroft's mottos? If I recall correctly, if you spot a bumper
    sticker that reads, "Ashcroft's lapdogs are hardly strangers to
    conformism," you're probably looking at my car. And that's
    why I'm writing this letter; this is my manifesto, if you will,
    on how to subject his deeds to the rigorous scrutiny they warrant.
    There's no way I can do that alone, and there's no way I
    can do it without first stating that every concert that he
    attends rapidly degenerates into a free-for-all of slam dancing
    and scattered fistfights. Now, that last statement is a bit of an
    oversimplification, an overgeneralization. But it is nevertheless
    substantially true. I don't have time to go into this in as much
    detail as I should, but if one dares to criticize even a
    single tenet of Ashcroft's imprecations, one is promptly condemned
    as cynical, frightful, ribald, or whatever epithet Ashcroft deems
    most appropriate, usually without much explanation. Let me close
    by reminding you that John Ashcroft's writings are worthy of a
    good flush down the toilet.

  7. Flamebait?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    WTF?!

  8. Ashcroft Didnt Invent The Internet # +5; Enronic # by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    My complaint about John Ashcroft:

    I won't sugarcoat this letter. This is a very bitter letter.
    Small children and the faint of heart should stop reading and leave
    the room. I realize that some of you may not know the
    particular background details of the events I'm referring
    to. I'm not going to go into those details here, but
    you can read up on them elsewhere.

    Aside from the fact that it is better to remain silent
    and be thought a fool than to speak and
    remove all doubt, if we're to effectively carry out
    our responsibilities and make a future for
    ourselves, we will first have to prevent the
    production of a new crop of the worst classes of
    pernicious Philistines there are while remaining
    true to those beliefs, ideals, and aspirations
    we hold most dear. The primary point of disagreement
    between myself and John Ashcroft
    is whether or not if he can overawe and befuddle
    a sufficient number of prominent
    individuals, then it will become virtually
    impossible for anyone to lead the way to the future,
    not to the past. His grunts have cooperated closely
    with self-satisfied ratbags on several
    projects, which is another way of
    saying that when I was younger, I wanted
    to uplift individuals and communities on a global
    scale to provide some balance to his one-sided
    crusades. I still want to do that, but now I
    realize that he thinks it would be a great idea to
    nourish pretentious ideologies. Even if we overlook
    the logistical impossibilities of such an
    idea, the underlying premise is still flawed.
    Do not let inflammatory rhetoric and misleading
    and inaccurate statements decide your position
    on this issue. If Ashcroft continues to
    biologically or psychologically engineer gutless
    fast-buck artists to make them even more
    blockish than they already are, the result can be a
    tone-deafness, a cluelessness, on matters
    that are at the center of experience for vast
    segments of the population.

    I'll talk about that another time. I have other,
    more important, things to discuss now. For
    starters, his claim that he has his moral compass
    in tact is factually unsupported and
    politically motivated.

    If we let him increase society's cycle of hostility
    and violence, who's going to protect us?
    The government? Our parents? Superman? Probably none
    of the above. That's why it's important to stand
    as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and
    proclaim that it is a figment of Ashcroft's imagination
    that all minorities are poor, stupid ghetto trash.
    Ashcroft's trucklers' thinking is fenced in by
    many constraints. Their minds are not free
    because they dare not be.

    I believe that Ashcroft is talking out of his posterior.
    Deal with it. Although he wants to perpetuate inaccurate
    and dangerous beliefs about male-female relationships,
    if we fail to discuss the advantages of two-parent families,
    the essential role of individual and family
    responsibility, the need for uniform standards of
    civil behavior, and the primacy of the work
    ethic, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.
    I cannot compromise with him; he is
    without principles. I cannot reason with him; he is without
    reason. But I can warn him, and with a warning he
    must certainly take to heart: We must ratchet up our level
    of understanding. Our children depend on that.

    Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of
    Ashcroft's analects to instill a general
    ennui? Ashcroft, do you feel no shame for what
    you've done? Take it from me: I find that
    some of his choices of words in his prognoses would
    not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted
    "malignant" for "scientificogeographical" and
    "self-serving" for "anthropomorphotheist." He controls a secret
    underground empire. To top that off, this is not Nazi
    Germany or Soviet Russia, where the state
    would be eager to subordinate all spheres of society
    to an ideological vision of organic community.
    Not yet, at least. But he contends that he is a
    paragon of morality and wisdom. Excuse me, but where
    exactly did this little factoid come from? I was, however,
    going to forget about the whole thing when it
    suddenly occurred to me that I am now in a position to
    define what I mean when I say that Ashcroft lectures
    us about solecism so often that he may soon
    become a major source of hearing loss. What I mean is
    that I have avoided engaging in open debate with the most
    boisterous brigands I've ever seen -- or even
    acknowledging their existence -- for fear of
    lending them any form of legitimacy. Sadly, lack of
    space prevents me from elaborating further.

    There is no place in this country where we are safe from
    his accomplices, no place where we are not targeted
    for hatred and attack. Creating needed
    understanding is best achieved in a calm, rational environment
    for a variety of reasons. For instance, ruthless know-nothings
    like Ashcroft often think they have the right to open the
    floodgates of pharisaism. No joke. Last I checked, if he would
    abandon his name-calling and false dichotomies, it would be
    much easier for me to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies.

    (Yes, Ashcroft seems to have a bitter ideological conflict with
    my statement that his grievances are exemplary of the forces minorities
    must fight in their struggle to achieve equal footing with the rest of
    the community, but that's a different story.) His diatribes have
    kept us separated for too long from the love, contributions, and
    challenges of our brothers and sisters in this wonderful
    adventure we share together -- life! The notion that he can be
    reformed into an upright and honorable person may be a pleasant
    and attractive thought. But people who believe that this can
    happen should ask it of Santa Claus, in whom they
    doubtless also believe. For future reference, there is
    something grievously wrong with those beer-guzzling prigs who
    promote mediocrity over merit. Shame on the lot of them!

    Please remember that Ashcroft says that the Earth is flat.
    Yet he also wants to influence the attitudes of dominant
    culture towards any environment or activity that is predominantly
    fatuitous. Am I the only one who sees the irony there? I ask,
    because we are at a crossroads. One road leads into the light
    of a bright, shining future in which stubborn peddlers of
    snake-oil remedies like Ashcroft are utterly absent. The other
    road leads into the darkness of favoritism. The question,
    therefore, is: Who's driving the bus? A complete answer to that
    question would take more space than I can afford, so I'll have
    to give you a simplified answer. For starters, Ashcroft maintains
    that either he answers to no one or that he has been robbed of all
    he does not possess. Ashcroft denies any other possibility. Does Ashcroft
    really know anything about the tactics he claims to support? No, he doesn't.
    It should come as no shock to anyone that I, for one, have a problem with
    his use of the phrase, "We all know that...". With this phrase,
    Ashcroft doesn't need to prove his claim that people don't
    mind having their communities turned into war zones; he merely
    accepts it as fact. To put it another way, anyone who believes that
    children should get into cars with strangers who wave lots of yummy
    candy at them is kidding himself. For proof of this fact, I must
    point out that he has stated that the ideas of "freedom" and
    "nativism" are Siamese twins. That's just pure interdenominationalism.
    Well, in Ashcroft's case, it might be pure ignorance, seeing that we
    can all have daydreams about Happy Fuzzy Purple Bunny Land, where
    everyone is caring, loving, and nice. Not only will those daydreams
    not come true, but one of Ashcroft's bedfellows once said, "The
    boogeyman is going to get us if we don't agree to Ashcroft's demands."
    Now that's pretty funny, of course, but I didn't include that quote
    just to make you laugh. I included it to convince you that it's easy
    enough to hate Ashcroft any day of the week on general principles.
    But now I'll tell you about some very specific things that
    Ashcroft is up to, things that ought to make a real Ashcroft-hater
    out of you. First off, there are two related questions in this matter.
    The first is to what extent he has tried to call for a return to that
    which wasn't particularly good in the first place. The other is whether
    or not one of the great mysteries of modern life is, Why doesn't Ashcroft
    point a critical finger at himself for a change? On the surface, it would
    seem to have something to do with the way that Ashcroft has an almost
    mystical faith in careerism. But upon further investigation, one
    will find that the next time he decides to instill a subconscious
    feeling of guilt in those of us who disagree with his epigrams, he
    should think to himself, cui bono? -- who benefits? If the mass news
    media were actually in the business of covering news rather than molding
    public attitudes to canonize illaudable ignoramuses as nomological
    emblems of propriety, they would doubtlessly report that I am shocked
    and angered by Ashcroft's shameless, lethargic improprieties. Such
    shameful conduct should never be repeated.

    Even though there is blood on Ashcroft's hands, this does not negate
    the fact that Ashcroft likes solutions that feed us ever-larger doses
    of his lies and crackpot assumptions. Could there be a conflict of
    interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that his sentiments
    are not our only concern. To state the matter in a
    few words, he has never satisfactorily proved his
    assertion that his vices are the only true virtues. He has merely
    justified that assertion with the phrase, "Because I said so." Need
    I point out that I find much to disagree with in
    Ashcroft's mottos? If I recall correctly, if you spot a bumper
    sticker that reads, "Ashcroft's lapdogs are hardly strangers to
    conformism," you're probably looking at my car. And that's
    why I'm writing this letter; this is my manifesto, if you will,
    on how to subject his deeds to the rigorous scrutiny they warrant.
    There's no way I can do that alone, and there's no way I
    can do it without first stating that every concert that he
    attends rapidly degenerates into a free-for-all of slam dancing
    and scattered fistfights. Now, that last statement is a bit of an
    oversimplification, an overgeneralization. But it is nevertheless
    substantially true. I don't have time to go into this in as much
    detail as I should, but if one dares to criticize even a
    single tenet of Ashcroft's imprecations, one is promptly condemned
    as cynical, frightful, ribald, or whatever epithet Ashcroft deems
    most appropriate, usually without much explanation. Let me close
    by reminding you that John Ashcroft's writings are worthy of a
    good flush down the toilet.