The report said instructions for terrorist activities also are posted on the sites, which the officials declined to name.
"To a greater and greater degree, terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and bin Laden's al Qaeda group, are using computerized files, e-mail and encryption to support their operations," CIA Director George Tenet wrote last March to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Surprise, America's Chief Spook doesn't like encryption, and won't give details to back up his claims. I'm sure someone would have noticed PGP blocks on cnnsi.com's discussion boards (or wherever).
Course, it's probably all a smokescreen. If he wandered around saying things like 'Oh, encryption doesn't really bother us. We just send it to our boys at Ft. Mead, and they tell us what it said.' it'd raise a few eyebrows.
That's what they said when we added this nifty alphabet thing. "Kids today," they said, "Next thing you know, they won't be able to recite 10,000 line epics from memory."
To use an OS on such a simple system is just an additional layer of complexity and a security risk. Its best just to run the browser on the metal, and elliminate these difficulties.
Unless, like myself and most of the people here, you are also a content provider. Be it your music, your short stories, your collection of perl scripts, whatever, a lot of people can and do want to use their fat xDSL/Cable/whathaveyou bandwidth to serve content directly rather than host it elsewhere. I spend a good deal of time on a web BBS that sits on a friend's cable-modem-connected box. We talk about all sorts of stuff there, but those conversations would be a lot tamer if we didn't know exactly who had access to the server.
That's just one example. There are many, many more..NET will fail to achieve total domination for the same reason M$ always has in the past, because it is impossible to be all things to all people, and where there is a lack, there is a potential market.
Sadly, all you have to do here is follow the dollar.
DSL was invented at Bell Labs in the '80s, and promptly put on the shelf because they saw no practical application for the technology. And difficult as it is to imagine, they were right.
Why? Because when there are very few home PCs (compared to today) and those PCs don't store or push a whole lot of information, then you won't have people willing to pay for fat pipes. When most of your information is text, an 80MB hard drive is an unspeakable luxury for a desktop box, and a 14.4 modem will do just fine. If you have a lot of people who want to connect to you simultaneously, and you can afford it, ISDN was available, and didn't have the 12,000 foot line limit.
Now, we have a need, and that need is being filled. I wish I lived in a world in which technology was available because it ought to be rather than because people would pay to satisfy a need.
As for me, I like my DSL just fine, and had it transfering packets within two weeks of my order. (Not that SBC actually sent me the necessary software or anything, but there are ways around that for the resourceful...)
I was more an impression than anything. In rereading I notice that I went a bit hard on privacy end of things. That said, it is generally more profitable to know as much about your customers and potential customers as you can, and to that end assimilate a great deal of information that your customer doesn't necessarily want assimilated.
He spends the first half of the article building his case with kiddie pr0n as the raison d'etre, and the second half failing to understand the difference between information and ideas, or at least the fact that they are made available via the net in exactly the same way, and sweeping regulation of one will undoubtable stifle the other - untolerably so.
This is a shame, since his points about the historical inability of corps to self-regulate (without the fear of government regulation to motivate them) are very valid, and his concerns about the erosion of privacy are well founded.
Further, we already have laws in place which regulate to some extent what content can be viewed by which people in which circumstances, and we will undoubtably have more in the future. Requiring passwords and some form of identity checking beyond what we already have would erode privacy even further, which he seems to be opposed to overall.
In all, his arguments, while understandable, lack internal consistancy. He just hasn't thought hard enough about the parts where the edges don't quite line up.
He should spend a couple of months reading/. He'd at least have a better grasp of the arguments and technical challenges his opinions will have to reckon with.
With a 500Mhz PB G3 running LinuxPPC, you'll have the fastest notebook available, with impressive battery life, and the bonus of non-dongle ethernet.
Right now, that is the PPC world's only real area of advantage. (...grumble, grumble, Moto, grumble, fscking incompetent, grumble...)
If the speeds go up, then you can start looking at real price/performance advantages on the desktop again. And of course, you can always buy old hardware and stick a faster processor card in it, I've found that works really well. $300 dollar used PowerComputing box + $300 G3 card -- you get the picture.
The FAA has never had any problem issuing my medicals, ADD diagnosis, ritalin scipt and all.
Of course, when I was in puberty, ritalin made me damned near psychotic -- angry all the time and prone to violent outbursts that left me wondering what was going on, even as they were occuring. So I got off of it, but got a new prescription sophomore year of college. It is a really useful tool for adult ADDs, but taking it regularly, 2 or 3 times a day would be somewhat counterproducitve, for me at least, because coming down leaves your brain as numb as a 7 hour cross-country.
Ritalin is really useful for people who are ADD. The problem is that only maybe 25% of ADD diagnoses are accurate.
Incidentally, I had a miserable time in most of middle school, and now I think of all the stuff I could have learned if I had been given the opportunity then.
Preach it, preach it, preach it.
Of all the things I regret about my childhood, those lost years are the worst. You simply have a higher capacity to learn when you're 10, 11, 12, ect.
The kid sounds a lot like me, I had my Novice ham radio license when I was 10, and my Tech soon after. You are there to be his mentor, not his sole educator. Help him, make suggestions, including social skills suggestions, but encourage him to learn as much as he can about everything he's interested in, and do what you can to make that learning possible.
Bandwidth *is* increasing, but not at the geometric rate that storage has been (~50x over the last 5 years). Not only that, we've hit the first of the infrastucture bottlenecks with broadband (Quick show of hands - How many of you are getting your Broadband via DSL _through a DSLAM_? Not many, huh? Didn't think so.) If you can't get broadband now, odds are good that you won't have it for at least another year. (18-30 months where I live, a hour from Austin in the I-35 corridor. God help you if you're in the sticks.)
But that's just last mile stuff. 3 years ago, the combined US backbones (OC-48s at best) could handle ~300,000 simultaneous 16kbps RA streams given the exclusion of all other traffic. It's way larger than that now, but so is the online popluation, and if you want to stream audio and have enough listeners to make it worthwhile, you're gonna need a thin stream and a shitload of bandwidth. In real terms we still don't have the infrastructure. A T-3 will only handle ~2800 16kbps streams, and that's not a lot of listeners for the money. Many novel solutions have been proposed to this dilemma, but you always end up looking at a bandwidth problem at the backbone or the last mile.
Any technology that reduces the bandwidth required will quickly find a home. If a ogg/vorbis encoded song is 30% smaller, streaming or absolute, it signifigantly changes the economics of the bandwidth equation and lowers the time cost for any user who's not fortunate enough to have broadband.
IANAL, but I got to round one of angel funding for streaming audio start-up before DMCA made it illegal, and I spoke a great deal with one about Title 17 and musical copyrights in general.
What you get when you buy a music CD is *not* a license to the content. You buy, and own, one copy of that recording. It's known in legal circles as the Right of First Purchase. You own that copy, you can play it, you can sell it, you can bury it in your back yard. If not for right of first purchase, used record and CD shops would be illegal, and despite what the RIAA says (and they get up in a huff about this every few years) they are not. You can't copy it legally, because then you would have two copies and you only own one. (Though the law allows you to make a copy for archival purposes, so long as you don't use both of them at once.)
Now, since you don't own the content (assuming you are not the copyright holder) you can't use it to make money (like radio ad revenue) without paying the copyright holder a royalty, generally via ASCAP or BMI. Similarly you can't record your own version of the music without paying the copyright holder a royalty, generally via the RIAA's Harry Fox Agency.
What the DMCA did was bring US copyright law into compliance with the World Intellectual Property Orgaization Performances and Phonograms Treaty which established a new copyright for the producers of a phonogram (i.e. the record companies). This new and additional copyright gives the producer control of digital distribution, with explicit control over on-demand distribution of the content of the phonogram. So, for the first time, the record companies have a legal right to the music just by virtue of owning the studio and paying the engineers. (In less enlightened times, they would get similar control by forcing the artist to sign over part or all of the copyright in exchange for money or distribution access.) The Librarian of Congress is tasked with the duty to determine fair license fees for copyrights, and the discussion is underway. The record companies are lobbying for exorbitant rates for the phonogram producer copyright, but are strangely reluctant to use their political muscle to lobby for higher rates for the copyrights traditionally held by artists (which can be fairly described as a pittance).
So, when they say it's about protecting the artists, they are lying through their teeth.
Who cares if they patent it. 17 years later it's public domain. (Unlike, say, the formula for Coca-Cola, which is just a secret.) It'll take 17 years to implement this develop and implement this tech.
Besides, judging from the text that whizzes past when I load a kernel, The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley are pretty cool about licensing their IP. [Rimshot.]
Linus really didn't have a choice when you think about it. If he'd ever said 'Yes, what I do for Transmeta is Linux-based.' It would not have been very hard to conjecture what he really was doing.
Think about it. If it's x86 compatible, what does he need to do? Combine the knowledge that he's doing 'something' with the knowledge that it's portable/embedded/low-power, and right there you've got a pretty good picture of the market Transmeta is going for; other's could have moved to cut them off at the pass.
So he *had* to say that his job wasn't Linux-related. To do otherwise would have been to tip Transmeta's hand.
He did give us enough clues, though. In every interview I've read in the last 9 months, he's mentioned how interested he was in the embedded market, and how cool it would be to see Linux going in that direction.
I'm a RoadRunner subscriber, because the phone lines to my apartment are 26 gauge cable, which somewhat truncates DSLs normal 14000 ft. limit. If they were 24 gauge, I'd be laughing, but they're not, and as a result I'm now contemplating the possibility that I'll have to get/use AOL in order to have the fat bandwidth which I now enjoy.
The more I think about it, the less I care. AOL is an annoyance, but I *have* to have the bandwidth. If it's a choice between a dial-up and AOL cable access, I'll suck it up and go with AOL every time.
Now, AOL has two choices in this matter.
1) They can leverage my heroine-like addiction to bandwidth, force me to exclusively use the MacOS half of my Mac/LinuxPPC dual-boot, make me give up my IPMasq/Firewall, make my roommate use the Win98 half of his dual boot, and ensure that the instant Southwestern Bell gets the tech to push DSL out to 14000 ft (or 12000 on that damned 26 gauge cable) from the fiber-fed sac boxes rather than the CO, I switch and my bandwidth dollars go to SBC for the foreseeable future, or
2) they can treat me like RoadRunner does now, with no login scripts, no proprietary clients, just a hot IP address at the end of my Cat5, a mere dhcpcd away, and maybe I'll stay for a while.
Good weather. An abundance of nearby lakes and empty stretches of hill country - for those who share my desolation aesthetic - (in one of which I'll be spending Y2K, with 20 bottles of champange and hydroelectric power from dams built in the 30s. Oh, and an MCSE, it'll be fun to watch him as things unfold.)
Lot's o' bandwidth. Cable and DSL. For US$27.50 a month each, my roommate and I Cable IP access with average downloads in the neighborhood of 150-170 K/sec. Not too shabby.
Lots of cool bars, excellent selection of wine and liquor in the stores, Central Market for every good foodstuff under the sun.
Insane amounts of startups and web companies. And if things go south, there's always Dell, who'll hire a geek in a heartbeat to jock the phones. Not the best work, but it'll pay the bills until another venture comes along. And if Dell's not your style, there's Apple, which does most of it's North American support in Austin.
The price of living is abyssmal, but that's supply and demand. If you need cheap rent, there's always San Marcos, 30 minutes south on I-35. They're starting to get DSL, and rent is stupidly cheap. 2 bedroom houses for $300/month are common.
This town rocks. We who live here gripe about it a lot, but very few of us move.
Slashdot Mirror
"To a greater and greater degree, terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and bin Laden's al Qaeda group, are using computerized files, e-mail and encryption to support their operations," CIA Director George Tenet wrote last March to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Surprise, America's Chief Spook doesn't like encryption, and won't give details to back up his claims. I'm sure someone would have noticed PGP blocks on cnnsi.com's discussion boards (or wherever).
Course, it's probably all a smokescreen. If he wandered around saying things like 'Oh, encryption doesn't really bother us. We just send it to our boys at Ft. Mead, and they tell us what it said.' it'd raise a few eyebrows.
Sometimes I worry, I really do.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Yeah, like that happened...
Don Negro
Let's get on the ball here, people.
Don Negro
Unless, like myself and most of the people here, you are also a content provider. Be it your music, your short stories, your collection of perl scripts, whatever, a lot of people can and do want to use their fat xDSL/Cable/whathaveyou bandwidth to serve content directly rather than host it elsewhere. I spend a good deal of time on a web BBS that sits on a friend's cable-modem-connected box. We talk about all sorts of stuff there, but those conversations would be a lot tamer if we didn't know exactly who had access to the server.
That's just one example. There are many, many more.
Don Negro
DSL was invented at Bell Labs in the '80s, and promptly put on the shelf because they saw no practical application for the technology. And difficult as it is to imagine, they were right.
Why? Because when there are very few home PCs (compared to today) and those PCs don't store or push a whole lot of information, then you won't have people willing to pay for fat pipes. When most of your information is text, an 80MB hard drive is an unspeakable luxury for a desktop box, and a 14.4 modem will do just fine. If you have a lot of people who want to connect to you simultaneously, and you can afford it, ISDN was available, and didn't have the 12,000 foot line limit.
Now, we have a need, and that need is being filled. I wish I lived in a world in which technology was available because it ought to be rather than because people would pay to satisfy a need.
As for me, I like my DSL just fine, and had it transfering packets within two weeks of my order. (Not that SBC actually sent me the necessary software or anything, but there are ways around that for the resourceful...)
Don Negro
Dude, you've been sniffing those Lubbock feed lots too long.
Don Negro
Any manager who took an employee to task for it, especially in public, would be ignored.
Don Negro
Don Negro
He spends the first half of the article building his case with kiddie pr0n as the raison d'etre, and the second half failing to understand the difference between information and ideas, or at least the fact that they are made available via the net in exactly the same way, and sweeping regulation of one will undoubtable stifle the other - untolerably so.
This is a shame, since his points about the historical inability of corps to self-regulate (without the fear of government regulation to motivate them) are very valid, and his concerns about the erosion of privacy are well founded.
Further, we already have laws in place which regulate to some extent what content can be viewed by which people in which circumstances, and we will undoubtably have more in the future. Requiring passwords and some form of identity checking beyond what we already have would erode privacy even further, which he seems to be opposed to overall.
In all, his arguments, while understandable, lack internal consistancy. He just hasn't thought hard enough about the parts where the edges don't quite line up.
He should spend a couple of months reading
Don Negro
With a 500Mhz PB G3 running LinuxPPC, you'll have the fastest notebook available, with impressive battery life, and the bonus of non-dongle ethernet.
Right now, that is the PPC world's only real area of advantage. (...grumble, grumble, Moto, grumble, fscking incompetent, grumble...)
If the speeds go up, then you can start looking at real price/performance advantages on the desktop again. And of course, you can always buy old hardware and stick a faster processor card in it, I've found that works really well. $300 dollar used PowerComputing box + $300 G3 card -- you get the picture.
Don Negro
The only difference was that they ran it via email solicitation rather than by the more conventional classified ad route.
BTW, there are no jobs stuffing envelopes. Pitney-Bowes makes very nice envelope stuffing machines, which operate very efficiently in the >$.01 range.
Don Negro
Of course, when I was in puberty, ritalin made me damned near psychotic -- angry all the time and prone to violent outbursts that left me wondering what was going on, even as they were occuring. So I got off of it, but got a new prescription sophomore year of college. It is a really useful tool for adult ADDs, but taking it regularly, 2 or 3 times a day would be somewhat counterproducitve, for me at least, because coming down leaves your brain as numb as a 7 hour cross-country.
Ritalin is really useful for people who are ADD. The problem is that only maybe 25% of ADD diagnoses are accurate.
Don Negro
I would take its results with the appropriate seasoning.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Preach it, preach it, preach it.
Of all the things I regret about my childhood, those lost years are the worst. You simply have a higher capacity to learn when you're 10, 11, 12, ect.
The kid sounds a lot like me, I had my Novice ham radio license when I was 10, and my Tech soon after. You are there to be his mentor, not his sole educator. Help him, make suggestions, including social skills suggestions, but encourage him to learn as much as he can about everything he's interested in, and do what you can to make that learning possible.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Breathlessly awaiting when AAPL = $0 !!!
I'm going throw a huge party that day.
Pretty ironic that, just before you pass out, your face will turn a downright iMac shade of blue.
It'd almost be worth my losing ten grand to see it.
It's not about storage, it's about bandwidth.
Bandwidth *is* increasing, but not at the geometric rate that storage has been (~50x over the last 5 years). Not only that, we've hit the first of the infrastucture bottlenecks with broadband (Quick show of hands - How many of you are getting your Broadband via DSL _through a DSLAM_? Not many, huh? Didn't think so.) If you can't get broadband now, odds are good that you won't have it for at least another year. (18-30 months where I live, a hour from Austin in the I-35 corridor. God help you if you're in the sticks.)
But that's just last mile stuff. 3 years ago, the combined US backbones (OC-48s at best) could handle ~300,000 simultaneous 16kbps RA streams given the exclusion of all other traffic. It's way larger than that now, but so is the online popluation, and if you want to stream audio and have enough listeners to make it worthwhile, you're gonna need a thin stream and a shitload of bandwidth. In real terms we still don't have the infrastructure. A T-3 will only handle ~2800 16kbps streams, and that's not a lot of listeners for the money. Many novel solutions have been proposed to this dilemma, but you always end up looking at a bandwidth problem at the backbone or the last mile.
Any technology that reduces the bandwidth required will quickly find a home. If a ogg/vorbis encoded song is 30% smaller, streaming or absolute, it signifigantly changes the economics of the bandwidth equation and lowers the time cost for any user who's not fortunate enough to have broadband.
Don Negro
IANAL, but I got to round one of angel funding for streaming audio start-up before DMCA made it illegal, and I spoke a great deal with one about Title 17 and musical copyrights in general.
What you get when you buy a music CD is *not* a license to the content. You buy, and own, one copy of that recording. It's known in legal circles as the Right of First Purchase. You own that copy, you can play it, you can sell it, you can bury it in your back yard. If not for right of first purchase, used record and CD shops would be illegal, and despite what the RIAA says (and they get up in a huff about this every few years) they are not. You can't copy it legally, because then you would have two copies and you only own one. (Though the law allows you to make a copy for archival purposes, so long as you don't use both of them at once.)
Now, since you don't own the content (assuming you are not the copyright holder) you can't use it to make money (like radio ad revenue) without paying the copyright holder a royalty, generally via ASCAP or BMI. Similarly you can't record your own version of the music without paying the copyright holder a royalty, generally via the RIAA's Harry Fox Agency.
What the DMCA did was bring US copyright law into compliance with the World Intellectual Property Orgaization Performances and Phonograms Treaty which established a new copyright for the producers of a phonogram (i.e. the record companies). This new and additional copyright gives the producer control of digital distribution, with explicit control over on-demand distribution of the content of the phonogram. So, for the first time, the record companies have a legal right to the music just by virtue of owning the studio and paying the engineers. (In less enlightened times, they would get similar control by forcing the artist to sign over part or all of the copyright in exchange for money or distribution access.) The Librarian of Congress is tasked with the duty to determine fair license fees for copyrights, and the discussion is underway. The record companies are lobbying for exorbitant rates for the phonogram producer copyright, but are strangely reluctant to use their political muscle to lobby for higher rates for the copyrights traditionally held by artists (which can be fairly described as a pittance).
So, when they say it's about protecting the artists, they are lying through their teeth.
Who cares if they patent it. 17 years later it's public domain. (Unlike, say, the formula for Coca-Cola, which is just a secret.) It'll take 17 years to implement this develop and implement this tech.
Besides, judging from the text that whizzes past when I load a kernel, The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley are pretty cool about licensing their IP. [Rimshot.]
Don Negro
Linus really didn't have a choice when you think about it. If he'd ever said 'Yes, what I do for Transmeta is Linux-based.' It would not have been very hard to conjecture what he really was doing.
Think about it. If it's x86 compatible, what does he need to do? Combine the knowledge that he's doing 'something' with the knowledge that it's portable/embedded/low-power, and right there you've got a pretty good picture of the market Transmeta is going for; other's could have moved to cut them off at the pass.
So he *had* to say that his job wasn't Linux-related. To do otherwise would have been to tip Transmeta's hand.
He did give us enough clues, though. In every interview I've read in the last 9 months, he's mentioned how interested he was in the embedded market, and how cool it would be to see Linux going in that direction.
Don Negro
[nudge]
I'm a RoadRunner subscriber, because the phone lines to my apartment are 26 gauge cable, which somewhat truncates DSLs normal 14000 ft. limit. If they were 24 gauge, I'd be laughing, but they're not, and as a result I'm now contemplating the possibility that I'll have to get/use AOL in order to have the fat bandwidth which I now enjoy.
The more I think about it, the less I care. AOL is an annoyance, but I *have* to have the bandwidth. If it's a choice between a dial-up and AOL cable access, I'll suck it up and go with AOL every time.
Now, AOL has two choices in this matter.
1) They can leverage my heroine-like addiction to bandwidth, force me to exclusively use the MacOS half of my Mac/LinuxPPC dual-boot, make me give up my IPMasq/Firewall, make my roommate use the Win98 half of his dual boot, and ensure that the instant Southwestern Bell gets the tech to push DSL out to 14000 ft (or 12000 on that damned 26 gauge cable) from the fiber-fed sac boxes rather than the CO, I switch and my bandwidth dollars go to SBC for the foreseeable future, or
2) they can treat me like RoadRunner does now, with no login scripts, no proprietary clients, just a hot IP address at the end of my Cat5, a mere dhcpcd away, and maybe I'll stay for a while.
It's their choice, really.
Don Negro
I think you mean Franklin Roosevelt. He was the one in the wheelchair.
Teddy Roosevelt was very fit, though he did have bad eyesight, and consequently very thick glasses.
Don Negro
Austin is a great place to live.
Good weather. An abundance of nearby lakes and empty stretches of hill country - for those who share my desolation aesthetic - (in one of which I'll be spending Y2K, with 20 bottles of champange and hydroelectric power from dams built in the 30s. Oh, and an MCSE, it'll be fun to watch him as things unfold.)
Lot's o' bandwidth. Cable and DSL. For US$27.50 a month each, my roommate and I Cable IP access with average downloads in the neighborhood of 150-170 K/sec. Not too shabby.
Lots of cool bars, excellent selection of wine and liquor in the stores, Central Market for every good foodstuff under the sun.
Insane amounts of startups and web companies. And if things go south, there's always Dell, who'll hire a geek in a heartbeat to jock the phones. Not the best work, but it'll pay the bills until another venture comes along. And if Dell's not your style, there's Apple, which does most of it's North American support in Austin.
The price of living is abyssmal, but that's supply and demand. If you need cheap rent, there's always San Marcos, 30 minutes south on I-35. They're starting to get DSL, and rent is stupidly cheap. 2 bedroom houses for $300/month are common.
This town rocks. We who live here gripe about it a lot, but very few of us move.
Don Negro
At between 250 and 270.
Must be nice.
Don Negro