If they really want to free up bandwidth, block porn.
No. If they want to free up bandwidth, then make sure each office has a large local cache for pr0n. LAN traffic might increase, but WAN traffic would plummet.
It seems that Monticello's FTTH initiative must have succeeded, as they now provide fiber to the home, and with fairly reasonable residential pricing, such as 30/30 Mbps for about $50/month.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Even major cities in American typically have only 2-3 available internet service providers, and they tend to implement very similar metering policies at roughly the same time, so there's no easy alternative.
OK, I'll bite. What you're saying is that there is an effective cartel whose members do not compete; a gross failure of the market. In this case, why would you need "alternatives" and how do you think they would help? If the existing ISPs are ripping off customers and getting away with it, why would any others do differently? What is needed is a little cartel-breaking legislation (or maybe just enforce existing legislation).
Here in Finland, I have one ISP to choose from; yes, they have a local monopoly. We have 100/10 fiber to the house, but if we wanted internet via cable or phone it would have to come from the same company (actually, our house only has fiber and they're reluctant to lay down any more copper). There are no caps, however, just a given bandwidth to the house, with no limits on how many bits we consume. When I do a bandwidth check, it always comes in at above 90Mbit down and better than 9Mbit up. In usage, I don't think we have ever gone past 1TByte in a month, but we have probably come close a few times. Even if we used several TB every month, we would not be billed any extra.
Competition might put some downward pressure on prices here (which are better than most places in the US, despite our taxes), but would certainly not put downward pressure on service. However, this area is probably not densely enough populated to support multiple ISPs or duplicated fiber infrastructure. Anyway, competition is not actually needed to ensure that the consumer is served without being molested, provided the market is properly regulated.
Amazon shows dozens of different choices for 25GB BD-R packs, some for as low as about $1/disk.
I'm I the only one that finds it mildly pathetic that, especially when you factor in the cost of swapping disks, it'd be cheaper for consumers to back to up to LTO-5 media in spite of how long Blu-Ray has been on the market?
Well, the 1.5TB LTO-5 tape cartridges for $70-ish each are similar in price per GB to the 25GB BD-R disks at $1-ish each, and possibly needing only a single tape would avoid a lot of disk swapping. Unfortunately, the $2500-ish price for the LTO-5 drive is a bit of an impediment for home use. So is the need for a SAS interface on the PC (or backup server).
Even more pathetic is the fact that 2TB USB drives also cost $80-ish nowadays, and a USB interface has been fairly standard for a while. So the cheapest archival per GB is to buy a fresh 2TB USB disk each time instead of the LTO-5 tape or pile of BD-R disks. For rolling backups (i.e. not archived), a handful of USB drives can be cycled for each 2TB of backup space needed.
I recall starting out with tapes, when I used a QIC-80 tape drive to back up my home PC-XT in the 1980s. It was cheaper per MB than the alternatives of the day (Iomega zip drives and suchlike), and a whole backup would easily fit on a single 80MB tape. The advent of CDs, rapid growth in fixed disk capacity, and the incompatibility of the QIC's ISA-bus SCSI card with later PC hardware led to it being dumped. It was replaced first by CD-R, then by DVD-R, and now by multi-TB USB drives.
Backups of the home systems (server, 3 PCs) are still done three times weekly, and automated.
And the almost automatic "loser pays" as it exists in the UK (for instance) causes an arms race between litigants in increasing legal fees. After all, another few thousand quid on legal arguments and legal research might just tip the case in your favor, and your opponent will have to pay. The lack of an automatic "loser pays" in the US leads to fear of Pyrrhic victory, in which you prevail in court, but are crippled by legal fees which you must cover yourself.
Why not have a "loser pays lesser of loser's and winner's legal costs"? This would not completely eliminate being burdened with legal fees whether one wins or loses, but would allow one to control the cost of losing against a deep-pocketed opponent. It would thus empower more people to defend themselves against litigation which smacks of extortion or which appears frivolous but is expensively prosecuted.
In a debate on the matter, I once posted an image featuring not just a naked woman, but provocative posing and implied bestiality with a swan. Draw that today, it'd be called porn. But this painting was drawn by no less than Leonado da Vinci, and obviously someone so famous would never draw porn.
Leda and the Swan could be considered mildly risque by senile nuns, I suppose. Leonardo could also be explicit in his medical drawings of human coitus. You'd need to be living in a herd of retards and zealots to get that sort of stuff classed as porn, of course.
Of all the abusive monopolies they choose to go after, this is who they pick?
They've got to start small and work their way up (one can hope). After all, they're really out of practice - the big cartels and abusive monpopolies would eat the DoJ for breakfast.
Yeah if I found a device on my car, I'd damn keep it for my own amusement.
Or just mail it to a putative "returned devices" desk at FBI HQ in Washington, clearly marked "returned FBI property". Presumably their security screening would have either identified it or blown it up before it got close to the building. You'd likely avoid any consequences, since you were merely returning what's theirs.
The UK already has such a tax. It is called Stamp Duty Reserve Tax, and is charged at 0.5%.
Not sure if you're trying for a funny mod or not. Anyway, you forgot that in the UK, the stamp duty has an explicit exemption for 'qualifying intermediaries' such as so-called market makers. In other words, the person who buys and holds the shares has to pay the tax, but all of the high-speed trading intermediaries who leeched some money out of the transaction do not.
And I measure the speed of my car in fractions of parsec.
So do I.
One femtoparsec per second is about 111km/h (nearly 70mph for the traditionalists). Go faster than that, and you risk getting a ticket on the highway here.
Still waiting for the first Mac OS X virus in the wild...
McAfee lists 48 known "viruses" for OSX. Most appear to be Trojans giving remote access or subverting DNS. I perused a few of the McAfee descriptions, and it was not immediately clear whether these infections would be self-propagating (as one would ordinarily expect of viruses). Just like other *nix threats, they require the user to actively run the infecting program and enter a privilege-escalating password.
While not a Mac user or fan (Linux user, mostly), I am also mystified by the characterization of OSX as being less secure then Windows. Even turning to social engineering as a security hole, it's not certain that Mac users would be easier to subborn than Windows users.
It's a tiny bit dishonest to say "the X administration" unless it was a conscious policy of X, not something that you can expect to see from X-1 and x+1.
In that case, administrations X-1, X, and X+1 would all be equally deserving of our contempt and criticism. There is no dishonesty involved: each functionary is acting on guidelines or instructions or policy formed by their superior, who in turn is acting on guidelines or instructions or policy formed by their superior. And so it goes, each level escaping responsibility until we remember where Harry Truman said the buck stopped.
No doubt there were some shows that got canned deservedly. In other cases, however, the mis-handling of the show by SciFi channel was a major factor in causing audience dislike. The extent of mis-handling suggests that the scheduling decision-makers lacked any understanding of SciFi, and were likely completely alienated by it. Why else would they do things which were almost certain to decrease audiences?
One example is Lexx, a pretty good series if you get it on DVD. In its "wisdom", the SciFi channel decided not to show the first season at all [*]. This guaranteed that the audience would be a bit mystified, as the first season provided the context for subsequent seasons, and was excellent in itself. The SciFi channel then aired the second season shows out of their intended sequence. Audience confusion was complete, and the series bombed in North America, largely due to the actions of the SciFi channel morons.
[*] Maybe they were scared of the jiggling tits shown in one of the episodes. I doubt this, however, as they could easily have cut a minute from the episode and stuffed another ad in the gap.
Pretty much a civil war? Hell, at the rate it's going, the civil war will be over before the UN even forms a committee on it.
Not true!
They are already assembling a multicultural expert group who will advise on protocols for forming a selection committee and procedures for assessing candidates for the selection committee. Once formed, this selection committee will propose a geographically balanced membership for the steering committee, and will select them after extensive interviews. The steering committee will, of course, determine the terms of reference for the advisory committee to be formed to inform a UN special high council on the Libyan internal strife. A process has not yet been proposed for selecting members of a working group which will dynamically propose and adjust (based on changing alliances) membership of the advisory committee. Progress is expected soon on protocols for nominating members to the special high council, and perhaps also for the reporting path from the special high council to the general assembly.
Yes, I miss the days of journalists, like William Randolph Hearst
So, about how old are you? Considering that Hearst lost control of his publishing empire in 1937 (and died in 1951), I suspect your slashdot ID should be a negative number...
I'm fairly certain we've turned our arm of the galaxy into the cosmic equivalent of a Florida trailer park.
Not yet, but we've only just started.
And that's the key point in the "OMG where are the intelligent aliens?" type of thinking. Earth has existed for about 4.5 billion years, and acquired some sort of life early in its existence. It's only in the last century that it has emitted anything which could be recognized from a distance as a sign of quasi-intelligent life (50/60Hz AC beacon, radio, TV, etc.). So there is a radius of about a hundred light years where our existence could be just barely detected; that's about one thousanth of the diameter of the Galaxy we live in. And maybe we just happen to be one of the fast developers; it may take another few billion years for comparable development on other suitable planets. And then, we have no data on the longevity of such developed societies. Maybe we're a slow developer, and the others are already mostly radioactive ashes.
BTW, don't bother citing the stupid Drake equation - it applies only to probabilities at steady-state, not to those in an evolving universe.
So I ask for a Facebook login, but I never look, the only correct answer is 'i don't have one'
But what if the answer is "I made a load of them, all with my correct name, and abandoned each leaving it empty"?
That's what I did a couple of years ago, as I have an unusual (and fairly memorable) name. It gives me deniability if some sleaze bag (or another person with the same unusual name) associates a facebook stinkbomb with that name. Mind you, I'd probably just say I don't have a facebook account, anyway, as I've forgotten the passwords and throwaway email addresses that were used to create those accounts. But I suppose facebook still counts them among their $hugenumber of users.
As soon as they get this working (or half working), the sleaze-bags will be promoting the same technology for "enhancements". After the burn treatment, we can give you bigger privates, private!
Slashdot Mirror
If they really want to free up bandwidth, block porn.
No. If they want to free up bandwidth, then make sure each office has a large local cache for pr0n. LAN traffic might increase, but WAN traffic would plummet.
Already happened in some locales: Telco wouldn't install fiber network, sued to prevent city from doing so (Another Article: we sue because we care)
It seems that Monticello's FTTH initiative must have succeeded, as they now provide fiber to the home, and with fairly reasonable residential pricing, such as 30/30 Mbps for about $50/month.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps. From a swedish perspective it seems kind of backwards, I don't really know of any ISPs here that have caps and it really seems like a concept take from the early days of consumer broadband (mid-to-late 90s there were a few swedish ISPs that tried the whole thing with caps but they were pretty much forced into obscurity since most ISPs didn't cap).
Even major cities in American typically have only 2-3 available internet service providers, and they tend to implement very similar metering policies at roughly the same time, so there's no easy alternative.
OK, I'll bite. What you're saying is that there is an effective cartel whose members do not compete; a gross failure of the market. In this case, why would you need "alternatives" and how do you think they would help? If the existing ISPs are ripping off customers and getting away with it, why would any others do differently? What is needed is a little cartel-breaking legislation (or maybe just enforce existing legislation).
Here in Finland, I have one ISP to choose from; yes, they have a local monopoly. We have 100/10 fiber to the house, but if we wanted internet via cable or phone it would have to come from the same company (actually, our house only has fiber and they're reluctant to lay down any more copper). There are no caps, however, just a given bandwidth to the house, with no limits on how many bits we consume. When I do a bandwidth check, it always comes in at above 90Mbit down and better than 9Mbit up. In usage, I don't think we have ever gone past 1TByte in a month, but we have probably come close a few times. Even if we used several TB every month, we would not be billed any extra.
Competition might put some downward pressure on prices here (which are better than most places in the US, despite our taxes), but would certainly not put downward pressure on service. However, this area is probably not densely enough populated to support multiple ISPs or duplicated fiber infrastructure. Anyway, competition is not actually needed to ensure that the consumer is served without being molested, provided the market is properly regulated.
Amazon shows dozens of different choices for 25GB BD-R packs, some for as low as about $1/disk.
I'm I the only one that finds it mildly pathetic that, especially when you factor in the cost of swapping disks, it'd be cheaper for consumers to back to up to LTO-5 media in spite of how long Blu-Ray has been on the market?
Well, the 1.5TB LTO-5 tape cartridges for $70-ish each are similar in price per GB to the 25GB BD-R disks at $1-ish each, and possibly needing only a single tape would avoid a lot of disk swapping. Unfortunately, the $2500-ish price for the LTO-5 drive is a bit of an impediment for home use. So is the need for a SAS interface on the PC (or backup server).
Even more pathetic is the fact that 2TB USB drives also cost $80-ish nowadays, and a USB interface has been fairly standard for a while. So the cheapest archival per GB is to buy a fresh 2TB USB disk each time instead of the LTO-5 tape or pile of BD-R disks. For rolling backups (i.e. not archived), a handful of USB drives can be cycled for each 2TB of backup space needed.
I recall starting out with tapes, when I used a QIC-80 tape drive to back up my home PC-XT in the 1980s. It was cheaper per MB than the alternatives of the day (Iomega zip drives and suchlike), and a whole backup would easily fit on a single 80MB tape. The advent of CDs, rapid growth in fixed disk capacity, and the incompatibility of the QIC's ISA-bus SCSI card with later PC hardware led to it being dumped. It was replaced first by CD-R, then by DVD-R, and now by multi-TB USB drives.
Backups of the home systems (server, 3 PCs) are still done three times weekly, and automated.
We don't have 'loser pays' in the USA
And the almost automatic "loser pays" as it exists in the UK (for instance) causes an arms race between litigants in increasing legal fees. After all, another few thousand quid on legal arguments and legal research might just tip the case in your favor, and your opponent will have to pay. The lack of an automatic "loser pays" in the US leads to fear of Pyrrhic victory, in which you prevail in court, but are crippled by legal fees which you must cover yourself.
Why not have a "loser pays lesser of loser's and winner's legal costs"? This would not completely eliminate being burdened with legal fees whether one wins or loses, but would allow one to control the cost of losing against a deep-pocketed opponent. It would thus empower more people to defend themselves against litigation which smacks of extortion or which appears frivolous but is expensively prosecuted.
In a debate on the matter, I once posted an image featuring not just a naked woman, but provocative posing and implied bestiality with a swan. Draw that today, it'd be called porn. But this painting was drawn by no less than Leonado da Vinci, and obviously someone so famous would never draw porn.
Leda and the Swan could be considered mildly risque by senile nuns, I suppose. Leonardo could also be explicit in his medical drawings of human coitus. You'd need to be living in a herd of retards and zealots to get that sort of stuff classed as porn, of course.
Of all the abusive monopolies they choose to go after, this is who they pick?
They've got to start small and work their way up (one can hope). After all, they're really out of practice - the big cartels and abusive monpopolies would eat the DoJ for breakfast.
Yeah if I found a device on my car, I'd damn keep it for my own amusement.
Or just mail it to a putative "returned devices" desk at FBI HQ in Washington, clearly marked "returned FBI property". Presumably their security screening would have either identified it or blown it up before it got close to the building. You'd likely avoid any consequences, since you were merely returning what's theirs.
The UK already has such a tax. It is called Stamp Duty Reserve Tax, and is charged at 0.5%.
Not sure if you're trying for a funny mod or not. Anyway, you forgot that in the UK, the stamp duty has an explicit exemption for 'qualifying intermediaries' such as so-called market makers. In other words, the person who buys and holds the shares has to pay the tax, but all of the high-speed trading intermediaries who leeched some money out of the transaction do not.
And I measure the speed of my car in fractions of parsec.
So do I.
One femtoparsec per second is about 111km/h (nearly 70mph for the traditionalists). Go faster than that, and you risk getting a ticket on the highway here.
Still waiting for the first Mac OS X virus in the wild...
McAfee lists 48 known "viruses" for OSX. Most appear to be Trojans giving remote access or subverting DNS. I perused a few of the McAfee descriptions, and it was not immediately clear whether these infections would be self-propagating (as one would ordinarily expect of viruses). Just like other *nix threats, they require the user to actively run the infecting program and enter a privilege-escalating password.
While not a Mac user or fan (Linux user, mostly), I am also mystified by the characterization of OSX as being less secure then Windows. Even turning to social engineering as a security hole, it's not certain that Mac users would be easier to subborn than Windows users.
It's a tiny bit dishonest to say "the X administration" unless it was a conscious policy of X, not something that you can expect to see from X-1 and x+1.
In that case, administrations X-1, X, and X+1 would all be equally deserving of our contempt and criticism. There is no dishonesty involved: each functionary is acting on guidelines or instructions or policy formed by their superior, who in turn is acting on guidelines or instructions or policy formed by their superior. And so it goes, each level escaping responsibility until we remember where Harry Truman said the buck stopped.
His credibility is outweighed by the irony of the blog's phrasing.
It referred to the "Courage to Resist PayPal" account!
How DARE they cancel that show that nobody liked
No doubt there were some shows that got canned deservedly. In other cases, however, the mis-handling of the show by SciFi channel was a major factor in causing audience dislike. The extent of mis-handling suggests that the scheduling decision-makers lacked any understanding of SciFi, and were likely completely alienated by it. Why else would they do things which were almost certain to decrease audiences?
One example is Lexx, a pretty good series if you get it on DVD. In its "wisdom", the SciFi channel decided not to show the first season at all [*]. This guaranteed that the audience would be a bit mystified, as the first season provided the context for subsequent seasons, and was excellent in itself. The SciFi channel then aired the second season shows out of their intended sequence. Audience confusion was complete, and the series bombed in North America, largely due to the actions of the SciFi channel morons.
[*] Maybe they were scared of the jiggling tits shown in one of the episodes. I doubt this, however, as they could easily have cut a minute from the episode and stuffed another ad in the gap.
Even in Aus we have more then one provider.....
Yeah, but the whinger may have been in the US, where even big cities are sometimes divided up into monopoly areas.
We should of finished the job while he was talking in front of his bombed house. I'm sure Regan was in his grave trying to push a launch button.
Ironically, the corrupt guy who allegedly tipped off Gadaffi about the US raid, ended his days an exile in Tunisia.
Pretty much a civil war? Hell, at the rate it's going, the civil war will be over before the UN even forms a committee on it.
Not true!
They are already assembling a multicultural expert group who will advise on protocols for forming a selection committee and procedures for assessing candidates for the selection committee. Once formed, this selection committee will propose a geographically balanced membership for the steering committee, and will select them after extensive interviews. The steering committee will, of course, determine the terms of reference for the advisory committee to be formed to inform a UN special high council on the Libyan internal strife. A process has not yet been proposed for selecting members of a working group which will dynamically propose and adjust (based on changing alliances) membership of the advisory committee. Progress is expected soon on protocols for nominating members to the special high council, and perhaps also for the reporting path from the special high council to the general assembly.
And further readings shows Paypal now says it was a misunderstanding and all is well now.
Amusingly, their statement refers to the "Courage to Resist PayPal" account...
large numbers of corporate desktops still have IE 6
Hah! We don't use that old shit where I work, buddy. We upgraded to IE 6.5 years ago...
LOFAR will find a stream of information from an extraterrestrial source. When we decode it, we'll find that it's archives of extraterrestrial warez.
Or alien pr0n. Which might be less fascinating than we hope
It is unlikely that real aliens resemble humans in dorky Hollywood outfits.
Yes, I miss the days of journalists, like William Randolph Hearst
So, about how old are you? Considering that Hearst lost control of his publishing empire in 1937 (and died in 1951), I suspect your slashdot ID should be a negative number...
I'm fairly certain we've turned our arm of the galaxy into the cosmic equivalent of a Florida trailer park.
Not yet, but we've only just started.
And that's the key point in the "OMG where are the intelligent aliens?" type of thinking. Earth has existed for about 4.5 billion years, and acquired some sort of life early in its existence. It's only in the last century that it has emitted anything which could be recognized from a distance as a sign of quasi-intelligent life (50/60Hz AC beacon, radio, TV, etc.). So there is a radius of about a hundred light years where our existence could be just barely detected; that's about one thousanth of the diameter of the Galaxy we live in. And maybe we just happen to be one of the fast developers; it may take another few billion years for comparable development on other suitable planets. And then, we have no data on the longevity of such developed societies. Maybe we're a slow developer, and the others are already mostly radioactive ashes.
BTW, don't bother citing the stupid Drake equation - it applies only to probabilities at steady-state, not to those in an evolving universe.
So I ask for a Facebook login, but I never look, the only correct answer is 'i don't have one'
But what if the answer is "I made a load of them, all with my correct name, and abandoned each leaving it empty"?
That's what I did a couple of years ago, as I have an unusual (and fairly memorable) name. It gives me deniability if some sleaze bag (or another person with the same unusual name) associates a facebook stinkbomb with that name. Mind you, I'd probably just say I don't have a facebook account, anyway, as I've forgotten the passwords and throwaway email addresses that were used to create those accounts. But I suppose facebook still counts them among their $hugenumber of users.
As soon as they get this working (or half working), the sleaze-bags will be promoting the same technology for "enhancements". After the burn treatment, we can give you bigger privates, private!
Replying to self after following some of the links. Just noticed that the Canuck stores have discontinued them also...