Road Runner decides this stuff on a (small) regional basis. In many places, they do cap upload bandwidth.
In Central Florida, they block inbound port 80.
And once again... it doesn't cost them a dime to send data from their local office to you.
It costs them a lot of dimes, but not any more than if you weren't using the connection, that's true.
But it costs them a hell of a lot of dimes to transfer data from the Internet to you, and from you to the Internet. And it costs them a lot of dimes to transfer data from their servers that aren't in your backyard to you.
In this case it's public knowledge that you are not going to get unlimited access to newsgroups, not a problem. They aren't hiding this somewhere.
'zackly. If folks don't like it, nobody is putting a gun to their hands and forcing them to buy broadband. It's a luxury, not a necessity. Most people don't have it at all, even most people with Internet access.
When you pay for access... it's all covered. USENET, web, ftp... no matter what you are using.
No. When you pay for service, whatever the person or company providing that service chooses to offer is what is "covered".
Unless your contract with them said "absolutely no restrictions whatsoever, and this contract cannot be changed at any time by either party", you don't have a case here. You signed an agreement that, I'm willing to bet, said there were certain restrictions, and that either these restrictions or the entire contract could be changed.
If you don't like it, don't get your service from them. And don't pull the "but there's no other access in my area" bullshit; you can go get yourself a T1 and do whatever the hell you please with it.
But before you say "that's too expensive", remember that the people giving you that cheap broadband connection are paying a much higher rate to transport your packets out to the Internet, and they have an absolute right to make however much profit they want on this transaction, because you are using their resources to purchase what is a LUXURY, not a necessity.
If you don't think they're doing business properly, go start your own.
The problem is they are setting the market up for these caps, not going with the norm.
EVERYBODY has some kind of restrictions on bandwidth or usage. EVERYBODY. Even the backbone providers. The "norm" is all over the map on this. Show me some statistical data proving your "norm" claims are the mean and I'll pay attention, but until then, this is just whining for a freebie.
When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.
An email saying "I'm looking for work. May I send you a resume?" is an attempt to contact you.
A huge Word attachment sent to names you harvested from contact lists on web pages is theft of service.
If you sent me a snail-mail unsolicited with your resume, addressed directly to me instead of to our Human Resources department, and I didn't know you, I'd probably throw it in the trash. I wouldn't complain about it, though, because it cost you money to send it, and didn't cost me anything but a small amount of time to receive it. My time is worth money, but not so much that a few seconds of it bothers me.
Hey, Taco; this is my third attempt at sending this. The goddamn lameness filter is really pissing me off, and I still don't see any signs of it preventing actual lameness; just preventing one-line comebacks and inconveniencing fast typists.
For lengthy and no-longer-applicable configuration reasons, I used to receive a ton of misdirected email intended for staff at The Economist magazine's "Economist Intelligence Unit", including all their writers.
Whenever I discovered a new one, I'd write a procmail rule bouncing their mail to them, and telling the sender to update his address book.
The primary discovery tool I had for finding the names I needed to bounce was people sending the Nigerian scam spam to them; I think every writer on their masthead got at least one of these. I don't know for sure how many they each got after I created the procmail rule, of course, since I was deliberately not tracking such things.
I sort of miss those days; I used to get dozens of Rush Limbaugh's misdirected emails every day, too. Many of them virus-infected.
Suppose you have a private and public key. When you download a.NAP, it's encrypted by the client on the other end with your public key. The only box that can decrypt the.NAP is yours, as only your box has the private key.
Assuming this is the implementation, in order to crack.NAP, you'd need a mechanism of sending your private key along with any.NAP file you send to another user.
No, you'd need a mechanism to use the private key to decrypt the file into a "plaintext" MP3.
And, conveniently, the code to do that is in the Napster player.
any attempt to implement an open-source whatusedtobenapster client will run afoul of the DMCA.
No, any attempt by citizens of the US or a handful of other countries will run afoul of the DMCA.
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars.
Oh, and yes, I do recognize the irony in the commonly-made grammatical error in that sentence.
That is indeed one of the definitions of dictionary.com, but it isn't a great one since it lacks a part about the incongruity containing a somewhat "humorous/sad" taste which is present in a real ironic case (pardon me for not being able to eloquently explain it, english isn't my native language).
One case of a definition isn't great because it isn't the same as another case?
Since English isn't your native language, how about a university where it is:
Do a little searching for "dramatic irony" and "tragic irony". BTW, most places I've seen the "humor" definition, it relies on the other definitions. For example, Merriam-Webster Collegiate defines the usage you're championing as:
"2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance"
Note that in order for humor to be ironic in this sense, it must be ironic in one of the other senses.
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars.
Why not just store each line in a file named with the line's number and let the filesystem do all that ugly work for you? Oh, wait, I guess reiserfs [namesys.com] isn't that ubiquitous yet.
Wow, you think a lightweight text editor should be bound to a specific filesystem?
While you're at it, how about if he re-writes it in hand-optimized Alpha assembly code, so it only runs on one processor too?
Saying that is akin to saying we should send the 86 Jetta to the crusher because it isn't an 02 Passat.
No, exactly the opposite; it's saying that we should stick a better engine or a supercharger or dual exhaust and a bigger throttle body on that Jetta, instead of trying to make it faster by removing the bumpers and back seat to decrease the weight.
I have a toshiba laptop that has taken many beatings and continues to be my primary travelling machine -- new dells and even a new toshiba have failed to meet my requirements of
battery life off the AC and resilience to abuse.
And I have a slow laptop, too, with a too-small hard drive. But instead of giving up on a powerful desktop, I'm sticking in a bigger hard drive and more RAM, and if it were possible I'd put in a faster processor. Laptops are a weird case, though. Most PCs are desktops, and desktops are way more upgradeable. When it's a matter of a hundred dollars to make your machine more powerful, it doesn't make sense to give up functionality instead of adding power.
By the way, if you have a 64-65 mustang with or without back seats, send it to AZ care of me.
Sorry, 2001 Convertible, and you can't have it. You're welcome to a ride if you're ever in Orlando, though.:-)
'stangs were beautiful from 64.5 to 78, ugly but powerful from 79 to 93, ok from 94 to 98, and effing gorgeous from 99 to present.
As a datapoint, IBM shipped all of their corp machines dualboot OS/2 and Windows 3.1 for a while back in the day, and both the OS/2 and the Windows customers bitched to high heaven.
The Windows customers may have bitched, but most of the OS/2 customers didn't, because WinOS/2 worked better with Windows under it.
If you define "better" as "applications were less likely to go down in flames".
Even AmiPro worked better on WinOS/2 if you had Windows under it, and IBM liked shipping that even before they owned it.
I doubt that the CIA/FBI/NSA even uses windows XP for any sort of confidential information.
It's amazing what one word can do. People are telling you you're right, because they're not seeing the word "confidential", which is what made you wrong.
Using a stripped-down desktop because your box doesn't have enough horsepower is like ripping the back seats out of your Mustang instead of putting in a Paxton Novi 2000 supercharger.
Don't take functionality or looks out; stuff horsepower in!
I really haven't seen Intel thanked by any of the Kernel hackers/developers the way AMD is constantly thanked for being so helpful. Just goes to show you what the better processor really is.
I wasn't aware the industry had switched to a "how nicely they responded to email" benchmark for processors.
Unless you think the Intel processors automatically change the contents of emails or delete them or something, I don't see the technical link between "bunch of dicks" and "products don't work".
I'm not taking a stand here on which processor is better, but you are making an assertion that a point of corporate culture is proof of a qualitative technical opinion, and I believe the term the industry uses for that is "bullshit".
Oh, maybe for an ATM, where it's more secure than a four-digit PIN, it'd be secure enough, but it's still unworkable.
Most ATMs use very low-res displays; in fact, many are text-only displays. (I believe a large number of them are actual Hercules monochrome cards, with the ATM running OS/2, for instance.)
If you use a touch-screen, it'll become impossible to hide what you're typing, so you pretty much have to stick numbers up there and have people type the number of the correct picture. You'll have to swap the pictures around if you want to prevent people from just writing the numbers down, so you'll end up with it being harder to remember because the pictures are all on screen at once and in a different place every time.
In the end, you'll have to keep the number of pictures low, and the length of the password low, or people won't be able to remember. Hell, people forget their 4-digit PINs now.
At least with a PIN you can disguise it when writing it down; put it in your address book as Uncle Luigi, with the last four digits of his bullshit phone number being your PIN. What are you gonna do if you need a reminder for this, take a Polaroid of the screen and put it in your wallet?
I'm sure there are applications where this technology will work, but I don't think ATMs are it, and I'm REALLY skeptical about using it for locking PCs.
Biometrics are the future of easy-to-remember identification.
Slashdot Mirror
Road Runner doesn't restrict access to anything.
Road Runner decides this stuff on a (small) regional basis. In many places, they do cap upload bandwidth.
In Central Florida, they block inbound port 80.
And once again... it doesn't cost them a dime to send data from their local office to you.
It costs them a lot of dimes, but not any more than if you weren't using the connection, that's true.
But it costs them a hell of a lot of dimes to transfer data from the Internet to you, and from you to the Internet. And it costs them a lot of dimes to transfer data from their servers that aren't in your backyard to you.
In this case it's public knowledge that you are not going to get unlimited access to newsgroups, not a problem. They aren't hiding this somewhere.
'zackly. If folks don't like it, nobody is putting a gun to their hands and forcing them to buy broadband. It's a luxury, not a necessity. Most people don't have it at all, even most people with Internet access.
When you pay for access... it's all covered. USENET, web, ftp... no matter what you are using.
No. When you pay for service, whatever the person or company providing that service chooses to offer is what is "covered".
Unless your contract with them said "absolutely no restrictions whatsoever, and this contract cannot be changed at any time by either party", you don't have a case here. You signed an agreement that, I'm willing to bet, said there were certain restrictions, and that either these restrictions or the entire contract could be changed.
If you don't like it, don't get your service from them. And don't pull the "but there's no other access in my area" bullshit; you can go get yourself a T1 and do whatever the hell you please with it.
But before you say "that's too expensive", remember that the people giving you that cheap broadband connection are paying a much higher rate to transport your packets out to the Internet, and they have an absolute right to make however much profit they want on this transaction, because you are using their resources to purchase what is a LUXURY, not a necessity.
If you don't think they're doing business properly, go start your own.
The problem is they are setting the market up for these caps, not going with the norm.
EVERYBODY has some kind of restrictions on bandwidth or usage. EVERYBODY. Even the backbone providers. The "norm" is all over the map on this. Show me some statistical data proving your "norm" claims are the mean and I'll pay attention, but until then, this is just whining for a freebie.
Broadband is not available everywhere in the US.
Yes it is.
When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.
An email saying "I'm looking for work. May I send you a resume?" is an attempt to contact you.
A huge Word attachment sent to names you harvested from contact lists on web pages is theft of service.
If you sent me a snail-mail unsolicited with your resume, addressed directly to me instead of to our Human Resources department, and I didn't know you, I'd probably throw it in the trash. I wouldn't complain about it, though, because it cost you money to send it, and didn't cost me anything but a small amount of time to receive it. My time is worth money, but not so much that a few seconds of it bothers me.
I was counting on "Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe".
Hey, Taco; this is my third attempt at sending this. The goddamn lameness filter is really pissing me off, and I still don't see any signs of it preventing actual lameness; just preventing one-line comebacks and inconveniencing fast typists.
For lengthy and no-longer-applicable configuration reasons, I used to receive a ton of misdirected email intended for staff at The Economist magazine's "Economist Intelligence Unit", including all their writers.
Whenever I discovered a new one, I'd write a procmail rule bouncing their mail to them, and telling the sender to update his address book.
The primary discovery tool I had for finding the names I needed to bounce was people sending the Nigerian scam spam to them; I think every writer on their masthead got at least one of these. I don't know for sure how many they each got after I created the procmail rule, of course, since I was deliberately not tracking such things.
I sort of miss those days; I used to get dozens of Rush Limbaugh's misdirected emails every day, too. Many of them virus-infected.
Nah, they're using a table based on the Library of Congress.
So it compresses 100 to 1, but the decompressor program is a hundred terabytes...
I never really thought about it until now, but Luke had nothing to do with the destruction of the Death Star and the defeat of the Empire in ROTJ!!!
Wow, what an amazing discovery you've made!
It's just too bad that nobody on Slashdot has ever thought of this before.
Suppose you have a private and public key. When you download a .NAP, it's encrypted by the client on the other end with your public key. The only box that can decrypt the .NAP is yours, as only your box has the private key.
.NAP, you'd need a mechanism of sending your private key along with any .NAP file you send to another user.
Assuming this is the implementation, in order to crack
No, you'd need a mechanism to use the private key to decrypt the file into a "plaintext" MP3.
And, conveniently, the code to do that is in the Napster player.
any attempt to implement an open-source whatusedtobenapster client will run afoul of the DMCA.
No, any attempt by citizens of the US or a handful of other countries will run afoul of the DMCA.
Ogg is to mp3 as Gnome was to QT/KDE.
Ogg is in use on more desktops than mp3, and being adopted by the commercial Unix vendors?
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars.
Oh, and yes, I do recognize the irony in the commonly-made grammatical error in that sentence.
That is indeed one of the definitions of dictionary.com, but it isn't a great one since it lacks a part about the incongruity containing a somewhat "humorous/sad" taste which is present in a real ironic case (pardon me for not being able to eloquently explain it, english isn't my native language).
One case of a definition isn't great because it isn't the same as another case?
Since English isn't your native language, how about a university where it is:
The definition at Princeton's Wordnet page.
Do a little searching for "dramatic irony" and "tragic irony". BTW, most places I've seen the "humor" definition, it relies on the other definitions. For example, Merriam-Webster Collegiate defines the usage you're championing as:
"2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance"
Note that in order for humor to be ironic in this sense, it must be ironic in one of the other senses.
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars.
Usenet equivalent? Mainstream? Hardly. The BBS community was *tiny*, and mainly geeks, certainly nowhere the penetration that Usenet has today.
Only if you very narrowly define "BBS".
In any sensible definition, Compuserve and AOL are BBSes, and AOL's got 30-million-plus users.
Why not just store each line in a file named with the line's number and let the filesystem do all that ugly work for you? Oh, wait, I guess reiserfs [namesys.com] isn't that ubiquitous yet.
Wow, you think a lightweight text editor should be bound to a specific filesystem?
While you're at it, how about if he re-writes it in hand-optimized Alpha assembly code, so it only runs on one processor too?
How come people constantly fail to "get" the GPL?
How come FSF people constantly assume that anybody who doesn't agree with the GPL doesn't understand it?
I thought the "scientific inevitability" of the dialectic was a fad that had safely passed.
With the GPL everybody is equal.
Whereas, in the real world...
Yes:
this very Slashdot discussion.
XP, would most certainly NOT be used for any confidential info.
Witnesses have posted that it is.
Saying that is akin to saying we should send the 86 Jetta to the crusher because it isn't an 02 Passat.
:-)
No, exactly the opposite; it's saying that we should stick a better engine or a supercharger or dual exhaust and a bigger throttle body on that Jetta, instead of trying to make it faster by removing the bumpers and back seat to decrease the weight.
I have a toshiba laptop that has taken many beatings and continues to be my primary travelling machine -- new dells and even a new toshiba have failed to meet my requirements of
battery life off the AC and resilience to abuse.
And I have a slow laptop, too, with a too-small hard drive. But instead of giving up on a powerful desktop, I'm sticking in a bigger hard drive and more RAM, and if it were possible I'd put in a faster processor. Laptops are a weird case, though. Most PCs are desktops, and desktops are way more upgradeable. When it's a matter of a hundred dollars to make your machine more powerful, it doesn't make sense to give up functionality instead of adding power.
By the way, if you have a 64-65 mustang with or without back seats, send it to AZ care of me.
Sorry, 2001 Convertible, and you can't have it. You're welcome to a ride if you're ever in Orlando, though.
'stangs were beautiful from 64.5 to 78, ugly but powerful from 79 to 93, ok from 94 to 98, and effing gorgeous from 99 to present.
As a datapoint, IBM shipped all of their corp machines dualboot OS/2 and Windows 3.1 for a while back in the day, and both the OS/2 and the Windows customers bitched to high heaven.
The Windows customers may have bitched, but most of the OS/2 customers didn't, because WinOS/2 worked better with Windows under it.
If you define "better" as "applications were less likely to go down in flames".
Even AmiPro worked better on WinOS/2 if you had Windows under it, and IBM liked shipping that even before they owned it.
I doubt that the CIA/FBI/NSA even uses windows XP for any sort of confidential information.
It's amazing what one word can do. People are telling you you're right, because they're not seeing the word "confidential", which is what made you wrong.
Have some pride, people.
Using a stripped-down desktop because your box doesn't have enough horsepower is like ripping the back seats out of your Mustang instead of putting in a Paxton Novi 2000 supercharger.
Don't take functionality or looks out; stuff horsepower in!
I really haven't seen Intel thanked by any of the Kernel hackers/developers the way AMD is constantly thanked for being so helpful. Just goes to show you what the better processor really is.
I wasn't aware the industry had switched to a "how nicely they responded to email" benchmark for processors.
Unless you think the Intel processors automatically change the contents of emails or delete them or something, I don't see the technical link between "bunch of dicks" and "products don't work".
I'm not taking a stand here on which processor is better, but you are making an assertion that a point of corporate culture is proof of a qualitative technical opinion, and I believe the term the industry uses for that is "bullshit".
This just won't work for most applications.
Oh, maybe for an ATM, where it's more secure than a four-digit PIN, it'd be secure enough, but it's still unworkable.
Most ATMs use very low-res displays; in fact, many are text-only displays. (I believe a large number of them are actual Hercules monochrome cards, with the ATM running OS/2, for instance.)
If you use a touch-screen, it'll become impossible to hide what you're typing, so you pretty much have to stick numbers up there and have people type the number of the correct picture. You'll have to swap the pictures around if you want to prevent people from just writing the numbers down, so you'll end up with it being harder to remember because the pictures are all on screen at once and in a different place every time.
In the end, you'll have to keep the number of pictures low, and the length of the password low, or people won't be able to remember. Hell, people forget their 4-digit PINs now.
At least with a PIN you can disguise it when writing it down; put it in your address book as Uncle Luigi, with the last four digits of his bullshit phone number being your PIN. What are you gonna do if you need a reminder for this, take a Polaroid of the screen and put it in your wallet?
I'm sure there are applications where this technology will work, but I don't think ATMs are it, and I'm REALLY skeptical about using it for locking PCs.
Biometrics are the future of easy-to-remember identification.
Free/cheap information has to be eliminated if the media wish to continue to make a buck!
"Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be one million US dollars per mile."
- Shawn McMahon