Computers crash because of people, especially some people in Redmond. You know, the folks who push that OS with a binary, one bit changes and it dies, registry, an email client that gives mail root access to hardware automatically, a web browwer with similar problems and a kernel that may still not keep track of background processes.
It's never the user's fault. No matter what the user does, the program should recover gracefully. Code that crashes is pathetic. Take my wife. She's managed to uncover all sorts of bugs and flaws in software, but she and my baby girl have had a hard time busting Debian.
I'm shocked when an application dies. I've never had an OS crash since moving to Debian two years ago. I never turn my computers off. They just work and everything should be like that.
this was the exclusive realm of the highly trained engineer, not some wannabe type that pervades the current service market.
Let's hear it for the "wannabes". I'm not a highly trained engineer by a long shot, but I've got computers that don't go down except for power outages. Then they come right back up. As ERS is so fond of pointing out, complexity kills traditional software. Cosed source can't keep up.
Free software has the answer. Debian has 8,710 packages available to do anything a comercial comercial software does, mostly better. Not just one or two pieces of it, every piece. My systems never crash under their stable release and I run all sorts of services. How is this? It's easy. Free code get's used, fixed, improved and reviewed all the time. The pace of improvement is astounding. I could go on and on about things free software does that common comercial code does not. Code that never sees the light of day is dead.
Most computers are like that, yet some still have to be restarted every day and "rebuilt" every month. Go figure, my computers go down when I want to change hardware, take them to a friend's, or the power goes out. They never crash, despite the worst efforts of some mail clients to add nasty stuff to mail I get. Debian stable is stable.
>...he had chained up his ^unique motorized two wheel walking machine. Ballentine indicated that he was the only one to have the machine in South Puget Sound.
>>...where the word "unique" was crammed above the flow of the rest of the text as an afterthought.
Uhhh, no it might have a few mods or other identifying marks. Not special, just differnt so that the police know what to look for. As Beavis said with a bucket full of stollen golf balls, "It's amazing how mass produced things are nearly identical."
>>Can't ya just see the owner having a hissy fit over how amazingly special he and his Segway are, and how this is no ordinary theft, and the cop wedging the "unique" commentary in there just to shup him up?
Yes, I can imagine that but the thought came from you. Look for the sissy within and discover the source of your loathing.
each code used once per million Segways, so the odds are really small that even your buddy's keys would activate another Segway. By the way, there are 3 keys, each activating a different max speed. (Source for all this: guy came to school to demo the Segway =D )
Brute force busted in less than two weeks with the right set up. You would think that they would use more than that number of keys with 64 bits. I hope they are not using an NSA style 64 bit key, 0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x
"Yer right, Cletis. That IS one fancy-pants lookin' push-mower. If'n ya only had the keys..."
Funy thing is that a slight modification might make a nice riding mower. What kind of a slope can it take? I'm waiting for someone to invent a "flowbee" style hovercraft riding mower. The faster the better.
Why is it that our government wants to do *completley* evil things that make dystopian futures depicted in movies like Brazil and 1984 look pleasant ?
Because they can. That their means surpass the vision of Orwell is not much of a surprise. It's not the ability to monitor and control that must be checked, it is the will and acceptance. There's nothing wrong with cameras, emotion detectors and networks. There's something terribly wrong with the the way some people would use and force them on others.
Those idiots have no clue. Who else would suffer the repeated failure of operating systems, infections by viruses written by computer science drop-outs in the Philipines, and Windoze's poor performance, yet still think of it as "American" and good? Microsoft is a disgrace to US all, a graphic demonstration of marketing over knowledge and best practices and monopoly abuse over free trade and competition. Yet these three morons have some warped idea that M$ junk has something to do with technical excellence in a competitive marketplace.
It is impossible to reach people who are so ignorant and strident. They will twist any fact you offer them to their world view or colapse in confuseion when presented with evidence of how wrong they are.
It sure would have been easier for M$ to have ported hotmail to SCO Unix or Caldera Linux than M$ crap. It's so nice to see how M$ values it's shills on their one way trip out of business. It's obvious that M$ still has in mind the destruction of Unix, comercial or free, as it is a superior system to their own.
It's not going to work. Free software can only be destroyed by elimnating the fisrt and fourth amendments to the US Constitution.
A clueless AC writes, " I tried to start soffice. 5 minutes to `install', 5 minutes to load, 5 seconds to crash. Please try again."
Hmmm, must be a new XP feature. Star Office 6.0 works fine for me on Debian and I imagine it works on any Linux distro. Sun is reasonable proof that you don't have to be evil to make a profit.
This project is a plan to incorporate the three primary uses of the existing nationwide cable network, voice, data and video, into one convenient and easy-to-use package that will satisfy most consumers' communication needs at a fair price.
Business school translator: turn cable internet into propriatory equivalent of cable TV and pay per minute phone service. Don't believe me? Read on.
# A better infrastructure in the future that will act as a stronger barrier to entry for new and existing competitors.
No competitors, self explanatory. I suppose they mean monopoly rape when they say "fair price".
Also built into the new digital cable box is a small camera which would allow for video conferencing, perhaps with other cable customers, over the cable network.
Ha Ha we will be seeing more of these clowns, I'm sure.
Phone service will also be delivered through the cable network. The existing cable network can easily accommodate the added bandwidth for several voice-data devices, such as telephones, which currently operates over an RJ-45 line. With a nationwide network, the cost of providing long distance phone calls for consumers is greatly reduced. Essentially, calls to anywhere inside the US would essentially be "local calls" as it would not cost anymore on the side of cable companies to offer the service. However, cable companies can still charge competitive rates for local and long distance calling.
What a grasp of technology they have. Voice over IP paid by the minute, just like the expensive antiquated system it will replace. Let's pay for infrastructure we don't have!
Oh yeah, they want to own internet gamming too. I wonder if they recomend only letting xbox connect? No, not that smart, they recomend developing IR joy sticks.
I love their mathematical proof of profit. Was a large business venture ever launched without such promisses? As Ikaos pointed out, a total media monopoly would make money. It's just funny to see them write it out they way they did without considering operating costs! The great power point using brains who thought this up would probably recomend M$/intel to hit the estimated cost of $650/house. Way to go guys.
Here's a clue stick: all of the above services are available now at no additional cost besides privately owned equipment. Figure out ways to offer these services without fucking your customers, who you so deridingly call "consumers" of the shit you would like to push.
PS, Star Office can save your M$ presentation as HTML and your.DOC paper in PDF or HTML so that anyone can look at it and you won't have to rewrite your work in Front Page. It's cheaper than all that monopoly priced Micro$oft stuff too.
They have been a reasonable host. With a little begging, they provide ssh access. They lost my data once and my root password was changed on me due to lack of ssh before I begged hard enough. No big deal though, it was not my machine and fixing it was as easy of putting a tar file back up.
Still, I miss being able to host on my own system. My little 486 never saw much traffic, even after posting it in +5 moderated Slashdot posts. Even when the cable people crimped the speed down to 31K/second on the upload, the response was reasonable. I liked having my information available without space considerations and it's been difficult for me to trim down what I once offered the world to fit into my new confines. I would only want to use a hosting solution like powerhoster for a large organization or comercial site. Everyone paying $45/month for cable internet should have a static IP and be alowed to run personal and small organization pages. There's no technical reasons for it to be any other way and it's so much easier for all parties involved.
The resulting simulation may appear to be an unbiased account of what truly happened, but we really don't know that -- the system used to decode them is a closely guarded trade secret.
That nasty little thought poped up in my mind too, but the case is more evident in automobiles than it is in airplanes. The Federal Government can demand black box details if it determines such are needed to investigate a crash but car owners don't have that kind of clout.
A thrid party which looks trustworthy for automobiles might not be and the data from black boxes should be suspect unless the details of how that daat is stored is known. If auto makers only license their "readers" to one or two companies, those one or two companies will then own their income to that knowledge and are manipulable. Insurance companies as well as automobile makers can colude to defraud everyone else. The only way to assure data integrity is to have a mechanism everyone knows how to work and a public verification repository to defeat tampering.
This, of course, ignores the problems of other data being stored in automotive black boxes. I don't need or want Detroit or anyone else keeping tabs on the location of my car in exchange for working airbags. Free software, once again, provides the answer to such problems and this is what we should demand for all out little black boxes like cellphones and dvd players.
>Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements.
>>I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
You mean like Geocities, Yahoo, M$N or AOL "personal" web pages? The only place your corporate masters will allow you to post infromation? Yeah, that's true. Shame I can't use my 486 to serve web content over DSL or cable modem anymore. Just as I was learning to use the free software that makes such sharing easy, and getting over the FUD propaganda against it, poof, the rules change. Now I pay $8/month for a virtual Red Hat server in Canada some place. Shame on the USA, land of the free and home of the brave.
When you and I don't think of ourselves as peers on the internet, there is no internet just terminals and servers.
OK, ten years ago there was this big last mile problem with the telcos. Things got better that's for sure. But today they are getting much worse and fast.
Three years ago, I had my choice of two providers of fixed IP service neither of which restricted what I did with the bandwith outside of a few simple respect your neighbor, no spam clauses. Neither was a Bell company.
Today, that's gone. Telocity and @home are dead. In their place I have my choice of dial up, dhcp cable, and dsl that never becomes "available" from the local bell. Would you believe that they charge more for their inferior service? Monopoly rates are what we've got. Yep, I get to pay someone $8/month to have a web server to host 1% oh what I used to on a 486.
Tomorrow, as smaller ISPs are shut down and all the big boys merge under Disney/AOL/Mc$oft there will be fewer places to host your refugee content.
The internet as a network designed to share information and computing resources between peer machines is quickly dying as the ends are extinguished. The old world is triumphing over the new.
A community supported wireless network is the only viable alternative. The wires, running over public lands, have proved too easy a resource to co-opt and dominate. Build the new network and let the old morons revel in their owership of wires. The faster they lose cutormers the quicker they will be replaced by those more willing to serve the public. The wireless network will have to stick around to keep them humble.
Don't worry, AOL won't kill it's chat service, so ladies such as my wife can continue to chat away with relatives. Popups will flouish. The internet is saved, I tell you.
What? You want competition? Wow, there's lots of that. I have my choice of two providers with independent copper wires, a cable and phone network. The driving competition has forced all the Bells to offer restricted, dhcp, no servers alowed DSL lines. While in the other direction you can get AOL/MSN/McDisney cable and be charged for voice over IP, just like the old bells do it! Yeah! Who could want more? You want to run a server or something? What are you, a hacker?
No, I don't mean any of the above is a good thing. The whole freaking network is being consolidated, along with the music and film publishers, broadcasters and news print burger stands. Barf. Changes are occuring and they are backed by rotten laws like the DMCA. The tighter things get, the less possible it will be to publish inteligent opinion and the worse things will get. It's not so much a sighting as it is a continuing decay.
The internet as a collection of peer computers is indeed going away. People are being told that their computers are "clients" and that they are "consumers" and that they should never try to serve on the scarry world of the internet. Those who would stand against this are derided as dreamers without business sense, pasty faced geeks who need to get a life, perverts and even child molesters.
RIAA, MPAA are only two collections of publishers threatened by a free internet. They have plenty of cash to spend and can influence public opinion, but there are others just as loud and rich. Traditional news and book publishers who deal in pulp, realize that they can not extend pulp limitations into a free internet. Those who have made it to the internet have still don't like the competition, though they would stick up for them if they knew what was good for themselves. Traditional broadcasters fear free internet more than they do cable TV.
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
An AC invents several false analogies and asks, "Machines are often built in such a way that they either cannot be used in dangerous or unlawful ways, or that such use is very difficult. Computers are no different."
There is nothing dangerous or unlawful about my the files on my computer. For you or anyone else to search them would be unlawful as I run free software and have not granted anyone permission to bother me.
It astounds me how people who threaten others with all the force of law over file copying turn around and call those engaged in such activites violent. The felony convictions they have aranged for copyright violation include loss of livelyhood, loss of life savings and jail time. Yet proponents of these insane copyright laws refer to their victims as "dangerous", "pirates" and all that. Try as they might, copying a file against the wishes of a publisher will never be the moral equivalent of murder on the high seas or any other violent act.
The AC then states that DRM will have no effect on journalism or free press. Think about it some more AC. When DRM gets to the point that your post to any electronic network must pass a copyright violation filter that's embeded in your hardware in some mysterious way, you might understand. Yes, your silly post to Slashdot might one day be filtered by your own computer to make sure it's "safe" for public consumption and violates no copyrights. If your computer is smart enough, you won't even know your post did not make it through. If you don't control your press and someone else does, you have no free press.
PBS is the voice of Big Brother and he has a big intrest in IP ownership. Copyright are created rights which require positive government action to exist. One of the reasons we have such screwy copyright and patent laws is that they feed the federal government. You realize, of course, that property that's only owned by virtue of govenment intervention belongs to the government, don't you? The more locked down IP gets the more powerful Big Brother is and the more the government can charge to fool with it. Taxes grow where money is made. Mickey Mouse is Big Brother's bitch and you should not expect impartial news from the government.
Notice that this is unAmerican. Hatred of privalige and exclusive franchises are what the American revolution were all about. Throughout history, people trap themselves with Byzantine guilds and societies where no one outside the society is allowed to practice the art. They have the mistaken notion that by extorting their neighbors with monopoly prices for their particular wares they can maximize their incomes. Typically, the govenment implements regulations and eventually price controls and everyone ends up paying monopoly prices for everything. Adam Smith and others at the time realized the folly of this and expressed it strongly. Press and speech rights were especially important things to the US founders. Today, through bogus patent and copyright laws, we are slipping back into the Byzantine mould. Governments love being in that position and ours will be that way if we don't remember what copyrights and patents are supposed to be - reasonable and temporary (less than 20 year) restraints on free speech and trade to encourage individual inventors and artists.
Witness the ownership of electronic publication, aka broadcast, by three or four large companies. This is a thing the federal government likes because it's easier to control. The government will extend this ownership to the internet, unless we stop them.
You can only get accurate news when you have many independent third party reporters. A single state run news agency, or two, is what the Soviet Union had. What we have is infinitley better, but still flawed. It is only internet reporting that is keeping the big broadcasters reasonably honest. Make noise to keep it that way.
Ask useful questions. If there's enough interest, of course they will set up an interview. Lessing, hmmm, think deep thoughts about the purpose of copyright. "US Copyright law was designed to encourage artists before the industrial revolution. How is it that the period of exclusivity has increased while publishing costs have decreased until today where they are practically zero?" and about ownership in general.
Microsoft's new EULA demands the use of "Windows Updater" and grants Microsoft the ability to search for and remove files they consider copyright infinging. The music and film industry has demanded the same "protection" for all digital devices. Do I really own a computer that I can't write files on and that's run by someone else? What does this kind of ownership do to journalism and free press?
Faking it does not work. Most of these techniques are the pathetic kind of thing that only fools the person playing the trick. Notice the dummy remote controling their windoze desktop got canned. This also made me laugh:
"If you're a boss, and you send e-mails at all of hours of the night, the subtle message you're sending employees is, 'I'm working, why aren't you,' " says Anne Warfield, a career coach in Edina, Minn.
Poop. If I believe the email time was not caused by exchange choking all day on viruses, I conclude that the boss does not have his shit together. These days everyone is just hanging on to their job at companies and you are lucky if your company is at 60% capacity. The only reason to work late is make work, usually the kind that's laid down to make life hell before firing a bunch of people.
There is no substitute for real work and everyone knows the difference between it, slacking and make work.
I'm not recomending that everyone "wipe the counter" whenever they are underutilized, but cleaning the desk is not a bad idea. Everyone has some down time, and NYC desks are filthy. When that five minute's worth of work is done, there are plenty of things to do with yourself besides sit in a dinner for three hours. You might read trade publications, email your family, hit slashdot and do other normal things. Sitting in a dinner for three hours, that's like punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's never the user's fault. No matter what the user does, the program should recover gracefully. Code that crashes is pathetic. Take my wife. She's managed to uncover all sorts of bugs and flaws in software, but she and my baby girl have had a hard time busting Debian.
I'm shocked when an application dies. I've never had an OS crash since moving to Debian two years ago. I never turn my computers off. They just work and everything should be like that.
Let's hear it for the "wannabes". I'm not a highly trained engineer by a long shot, but I've got computers that don't go down except for power outages. Then they come right back up. As ERS is so fond of pointing out, complexity kills traditional software. Cosed source can't keep up.
Free software has the answer. Debian has 8,710 packages available to do anything a comercial comercial software does, mostly better. Not just one or two pieces of it, every piece. My systems never crash under their stable release and I run all sorts of services. How is this? It's easy. Free code get's used, fixed, improved and reviewed all the time. The pace of improvement is astounding. I could go on and on about things free software does that common comercial code does not. Code that never sees the light of day is dead.
Most computers are like that, yet some still have to be restarted every day and "rebuilt" every month. Go figure, my computers go down when I want to change hardware, take them to a friend's, or the power goes out. They never crash, despite the worst efforts of some mail clients to add nasty stuff to mail I get. Debian stable is stable.
>...he had chained up his ^unique motorized two wheel walking machine. Ballentine indicated that he was the only one to have the machine in South Puget Sound.
>>...where the word "unique" was crammed above the flow of the rest of the text as an afterthought.
Uhhh, no it might have a few mods or other identifying marks. Not special, just differnt so that the police know what to look for. As Beavis said with a bucket full of stollen golf balls, "It's amazing how mass produced things are nearly identical."
>>Can't ya just see the owner having a hissy fit over how amazingly special he and his Segway are, and how this is no ordinary theft, and the cop wedging the "unique" commentary in there just to shup him up?
Yes, I can imagine that but the thought came from you. Look for the sissy within and discover the source of your loathing.
1 (attempts/second) * 3,600 (seconds/hour) * 24 (hours/day) * 14 (days) = 1,209,600 attempts
Brute force busted in less than two weeks with the right set up. You would think that they would use more than that number of keys with 64 bits. I hope they are not using an NSA style 64 bit key, 0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x
the accord has been the number one selling car for years. They are everywhere.
Funy thing is that a slight modification might make a nice riding mower. What kind of a slope can it take? I'm waiting for someone to invent a "flowbee" style hovercraft riding mower. The faster the better.
Because they can. That their means surpass the vision of Orwell is not much of a surprise. It's not the ability to monitor and control that must be checked, it is the will and acceptance. There's nothing wrong with cameras, emotion detectors and networks. There's something terribly wrong with the the way some people would use and force them on others.
It is impossible to reach people who are so ignorant and strident. They will twist any fact you offer them to their world view or colapse in confuseion when presented with evidence of how wrong they are.
It's not going to work. Free software can only be destroyed by elimnating the fisrt and fourth amendments to the US Constitution.
Hmmm, must be a new XP feature. Star Office 6.0 works fine for me on Debian and I imagine it works on any Linux distro. Sun is reasonable proof that you don't have to be evil to make a profit.
Operating costs! Wiizzz-bang!
This project is a plan to incorporate the three primary uses of the existing nationwide cable network, voice, data and video, into one convenient and easy-to-use package that will satisfy most consumers' communication needs at a fair price.
Business school translator: turn cable internet into propriatory equivalent of cable TV and pay per minute phone service. Don't believe me? Read on.
# A better infrastructure in the future that will act as a stronger barrier to entry for new and existing competitors.
No competitors, self explanatory. I suppose they mean monopoly rape when they say "fair price".
Also built into the new digital cable box is a small camera which would allow for video conferencing, perhaps with other cable customers, over the cable network.
Ha Ha we will be seeing more of these clowns, I'm sure.
Phone service will also be delivered through the cable network. The existing cable network can easily accommodate the added bandwidth for several voice-data devices, such as telephones, which currently operates over an RJ-45 line. With a nationwide network, the cost of providing long distance phone calls for consumers is greatly reduced. Essentially, calls to anywhere inside the US would essentially be "local calls" as it would not cost anymore on the side of cable companies to offer the service. However, cable companies can still charge competitive rates for local and long distance calling.
What a grasp of technology they have. Voice over IP paid by the minute, just like the expensive antiquated system it will replace. Let's pay for infrastructure we don't have!
Oh yeah, they want to own internet gamming too. I wonder if they recomend only letting xbox connect? No, not that smart, they recomend developing IR joy sticks.
I love their mathematical proof of profit. Was a large business venture ever launched without such promisses? As Ikaos pointed out, a total media monopoly would make money. It's just funny to see them write it out they way they did without considering operating costs! The great power point using brains who thought this up would probably recomend M$/intel to hit the estimated cost of $650/house. Way to go guys.
Here's a clue stick: all of the above services are available now at no additional cost besides privately owned equipment. Figure out ways to offer these services without fucking your customers, who you so deridingly call "consumers" of the shit you would like to push.
PS, Star Office can save your M$ presentation as HTML and your .DOC paper in PDF or HTML so that anyone can look at it and you won't have to rewrite your work in Front Page. It's cheaper than all that monopoly priced Micro$oft stuff too.
They go through ensim. Plans are cheaper now than when I signed up:
Plan Schedule
They have been a reasonable host. With a little begging, they provide ssh access. They lost my data once and my root password was changed on me due to lack of ssh before I begged hard enough. No big deal though, it was not my machine and fixing it was as easy of putting a tar file back up.
Still, I miss being able to host on my own system. My little 486 never saw much traffic, even after posting it in +5 moderated Slashdot posts. Even when the cable people crimped the speed down to 31K/second on the upload, the response was reasonable. I liked having my information available without space considerations and it's been difficult for me to trim down what I once offered the world to fit into my new confines. I would only want to use a hosting solution like powerhoster for a large organization or comercial site. Everyone paying $45/month for cable internet should have a static IP and be alowed to run personal and small organization pages. There's no technical reasons for it to be any other way and it's so much easier for all parties involved.
That nasty little thought poped up in my mind too, but the case is more evident in automobiles than it is in airplanes. The Federal Government can demand black box details if it determines such are needed to investigate a crash but car owners don't have that kind of clout.
A thrid party which looks trustworthy for automobiles might not be and the data from black boxes should be suspect unless the details of how that daat is stored is known. If auto makers only license their "readers" to one or two companies, those one or two companies will then own their income to that knowledge and are manipulable. Insurance companies as well as automobile makers can colude to defraud everyone else. The only way to assure data integrity is to have a mechanism everyone knows how to work and a public verification repository to defeat tampering.
This, of course, ignores the problems of other data being stored in automotive black boxes. I don't need or want Detroit or anyone else keeping tabs on the location of my car in exchange for working airbags. Free software, once again, provides the answer to such problems and this is what we should demand for all out little black boxes like cellphones and dvd players.
>>I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
You mean like Geocities, Yahoo, M$N or AOL "personal" web pages? The only place your corporate masters will allow you to post infromation? Yeah, that's true. Shame I can't use my 486 to serve web content over DSL or cable modem anymore. Just as I was learning to use the free software that makes such sharing easy, and getting over the FUD propaganda against it, poof, the rules change. Now I pay $8/month for a virtual Red Hat server in Canada some place. Shame on the USA, land of the free and home of the brave.
When you and I don't think of ourselves as peers on the internet, there is no internet just terminals and servers.
Three years ago, I had my choice of two providers of fixed IP service neither of which restricted what I did with the bandwith outside of a few simple respect your neighbor, no spam clauses. Neither was a Bell company.
Today, that's gone. Telocity and @home are dead. In their place I have my choice of dial up, dhcp cable, and dsl that never becomes "available" from the local bell. Would you believe that they charge more for their inferior service? Monopoly rates are what we've got. Yep, I get to pay someone $8/month to have a web server to host 1% oh what I used to on a 486.
Tomorrow, as smaller ISPs are shut down and all the big boys merge under Disney/AOL/Mc$oft there will be fewer places to host your refugee content.
The internet as a network designed to share information and computing resources between peer machines is quickly dying as the ends are extinguished. The old world is triumphing over the new.
A community supported wireless network is the only viable alternative. The wires, running over public lands, have proved too easy a resource to co-opt and dominate. Build the new network and let the old morons revel in their owership of wires. The faster they lose cutormers the quicker they will be replaced by those more willing to serve the public. The wireless network will have to stick around to keep them humble.
What? You want competition? Wow, there's lots of that. I have my choice of two providers with independent copper wires, a cable and phone network. The driving competition has forced all the Bells to offer restricted, dhcp, no servers alowed DSL lines. While in the other direction you can get AOL/MSN/McDisney cable and be charged for voice over IP, just like the old bells do it! Yeah! Who could want more? You want to run a server or something? What are you, a hacker?
No, I don't mean any of the above is a good thing. The whole freaking network is being consolidated, along with the music and film publishers, broadcasters and news print burger stands. Barf. Changes are occuring and they are backed by rotten laws like the DMCA. The tighter things get, the less possible it will be to publish inteligent opinion and the worse things will get. It's not so much a sighting as it is a continuing decay.
The internet as a collection of peer computers is indeed going away. People are being told that their computers are "clients" and that they are "consumers" and that they should never try to serve on the scarry world of the internet. Those who would stand against this are derided as dreamers without business sense, pasty faced geeks who need to get a life, perverts and even child molesters.
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
There is nothing dangerous or unlawful about my the files on my computer. For you or anyone else to search them would be unlawful as I run free software and have not granted anyone permission to bother me.
It astounds me how people who threaten others with all the force of law over file copying turn around and call those engaged in such activites violent. The felony convictions they have aranged for copyright violation include loss of livelyhood, loss of life savings and jail time. Yet proponents of these insane copyright laws refer to their victims as "dangerous", "pirates" and all that. Try as they might, copying a file against the wishes of a publisher will never be the moral equivalent of murder on the high seas or any other violent act.
The AC then states that DRM will have no effect on journalism or free press. Think about it some more AC. When DRM gets to the point that your post to any electronic network must pass a copyright violation filter that's embeded in your hardware in some mysterious way, you might understand. Yes, your silly post to Slashdot might one day be filtered by your own computer to make sure it's "safe" for public consumption and violates no copyrights. If your computer is smart enough, you won't even know your post did not make it through. If you don't control your press and someone else does, you have no free press.
Notice that this is unAmerican. Hatred of privalige and exclusive franchises are what the American revolution were all about. Throughout history, people trap themselves with Byzantine guilds and societies where no one outside the society is allowed to practice the art. They have the mistaken notion that by extorting their neighbors with monopoly prices for their particular wares they can maximize their incomes. Typically, the govenment implements regulations and eventually price controls and everyone ends up paying monopoly prices for everything. Adam Smith and others at the time realized the folly of this and expressed it strongly. Press and speech rights were especially important things to the US founders. Today, through bogus patent and copyright laws, we are slipping back into the Byzantine mould. Governments love being in that position and ours will be that way if we don't remember what copyrights and patents are supposed to be - reasonable and temporary (less than 20 year) restraints on free speech and trade to encourage individual inventors and artists.
Witness the ownership of electronic publication, aka broadcast, by three or four large companies. This is a thing the federal government likes because it's easier to control. The government will extend this ownership to the internet, unless we stop them.
You can only get accurate news when you have many independent third party reporters. A single state run news agency, or two, is what the Soviet Union had. What we have is infinitley better, but still flawed. It is only internet reporting that is keeping the big broadcasters reasonably honest. Make noise to keep it that way.
Ask useful questions. If there's enough interest, of course they will set up an interview. Lessing, hmmm, think deep thoughts about the purpose of copyright. "US Copyright law was designed to encourage artists before the industrial revolution. How is it that the period of exclusivity has increased while publishing costs have decreased until today where they are practically zero?" and about ownership in general.
Microsoft's new EULA demands the use of "Windows Updater" and grants Microsoft the ability to search for and remove files they consider copyright infinging. The music and film industry has demanded the same "protection" for all digital devices. Do I really own a computer that I can't write files on and that's run by someone else? What does this kind of ownership do to journalism and free press?
"If you're a boss, and you send e-mails at all of hours of the night, the subtle message you're sending employees is, 'I'm working, why aren't you,' " says Anne Warfield, a career coach in Edina, Minn.
Poop. If I believe the email time was not caused by exchange choking all day on viruses, I conclude that the boss does not have his shit together. These days everyone is just hanging on to their job at companies and you are lucky if your company is at 60% capacity. The only reason to work late is make work, usually the kind that's laid down to make life hell before firing a bunch of people.
There is no substitute for real work and everyone knows the difference between it, slacking and make work.
I'm not recomending that everyone "wipe the counter" whenever they are underutilized, but cleaning the desk is not a bad idea. Everyone has some down time, and NYC desks are filthy. When that five minute's worth of work is done, there are plenty of things to do with yourself besides sit in a dinner for three hours. You might read trade publications, email your family, hit slashdot and do other normal things. Sitting in a dinner for three hours, that's like punishment.