Gaming consoles to do graphics processing, makes sense. They must have quite some specialised graphics related horse power, considering their planned output.
Pactpub link I almost closed as the price that I saw first was over USD 45; only upon looking again I realised they automatically put me to the bundle offer! Great marketing. One would expect them to promote e-books more these days. I'm considering now. USD 30.59 is not that bad; that's about the same cost as lunch for a whole week (7 days).
Just reading this story when finishing some Android programming work... and it sounds very interesting to me. Especially as UI design is not my strongest point.
Unfortunately USD 45 is quite steep, will have to add international shipping costs to it even, for a book that I can't check out first.
Now if they were selling this for a few bucks as e-book, I'd be digging up my credit card instead of writing this comment. Besides, it's a bit strange these days that a book about computers and programming does not come in e-book format.
So the result could have been very different if the publisher of the news paper or whatever where the article was published first had filed suit? Interesting.
2,500 devices - are there really that many models of smart phone out there? I know there are a lot but not that many. Or do they mean that 2,500 users have this app installed?
Also I wonder how that "accessible free of data charges" is supposed to work. Is that a special contract or so? I have seen phone companies offering pretty cheap data plans with small amount of data, plus unlimited data for Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Something like that, details I forgot, not interested myself, just interesting that such contracts exist. And then limited to the mobile versions of those sites, like m.facebook.com.
So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason.
So anyone who presents fiction in a manner so as to make it appear factual loses copyright? And, if someone believes it to be factual, they have carte blanche to copy it freely? I doubt it.
In this specific case the phony numbers were introduced with the specific goal of looking like facts, just to detect copying. No carte blanche here; case by case; as is fair use.
Presumably it would be the responsibility of the one doing the copying to ensure that what they were copying was, in fact, factual...
In case of a phone book, I would say "that IS the reference for the fact". Short of calling each number to ask whether the name/number is correct, this is your fact check. The telephone book lists numbers and implicitly tells you "this are the numbers; this are the facts; to our best knowledge they are correct". Yet they add a few fakes in between the million or so real ones - how would we be able to detect this? To find out which are fakes and which are accidental error? When a work says "this is factual information" then I would say for all copyright related issues that is to be treated as a collection of facts.
Or how about facts presented in text books: like "the melting point of iron". An interesting example actually, as the first two search results in Google give different answers: the first gives 1536C, the second 1535C. How can we check the fact? Look at other resources. But how can we be sure this is a fact? Would you measure it? When can you be sure enough that the answer to a factual question is the actual fact? Which source is more reliable?
The problem with damages is the proof. How can you prove you did not receive something? Or that you received less than you otherwise would have?
Take a patent holder who has made an interesting invention, tries to find a partner to help him build/market this product, but instead someone else takes the patent, starts producing the stuff, and the inventor sees his market swamped by infringing products before they get a chance to sell some themselves. So they sue. But for how much damages? How much could he have made if the others didn't jump in? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing (due to poor business decisions). We don't know, can't tell.
Or music copyrights: many people argue that file sharing is part of advertising for music, and may help increase sales. So that would mean there is no damage at all, on the contrary. Or is it? So one could infringe copyright but evade penalties because they "helped" the copyright holder?
Not to defend those obvious patent trolls, but actually proving a loss is pretty hard. Proving you have the intention to use the patent may be a better direction, but also that is pretty hard to do. And it would erode the patent protection, which is not a good thing I think. There are plenty of inventors around who develop stuff without the intention to make it themselves - think ARM. They only design processors, and then sell those designs for others to produce (I guess these fall under copyright though, not patent right). They don't produce any processor by themselves (other than prototypes maybe).
And anyway for such a patent troll also the obvious proof of losses would be "look I have this link patent, I offer to license it for $0.10 for each web browser user that uses it, so with about one billion browsers that's a loss of $100 mln on license alone".
Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
If fact may not be copyrighted, fiction certainly can - so would the phony entries not be considered "creative"? Why not?
While they may be considered creative works; in this case they were presented as facts: they were part of a factual work, which was distributed as being factual information only. So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason. Someone trying to (legally) copy the factual information from the work, when sued for infringement on those phony entries, might even argue illegal entrapment and misleading by the original author.
Still it surprised me that this is fair use as it was a complete reprint and redistribution of an article; usually it's about excerpts or quotes for redistribution, or for private copies.
I heard about that mmm well, half year ago or so already, if not longer.
"Rumour"... "going to"... there's the problem. Afaik at this moment Google's official market is still the best Android market around. Which probably says more about the quality of the rest of the markets though.
I do love the quick publishing on their market; last Friday I released a new version of my app; a day or so later got a crash report from user; yesterday found and fixed the bug and released an update. Happy I don't have to wait two weeks or so for re-approval of a bugfix update, like Apple's store needs.
Honest question: are any of those reliable and trustworthy? Set up by respectable businesses? This question as I'd love to see some real competition for Google's market place.
Thinking of the regular stories of malware being distributed through those third-party markets...
Not that the quality of Googles Android market is that great, at least they have SOME measures in place including the small fee that a developer has to pay (in effect identifying themselves) and the signing requirements (linking an app uniquely to a developer).
You may be right for domestic waste, not for industrial. EPS is a common material in the recycling market. I'm dealing with it regularly. Volume can be reduced easily with a compressor. The real issue is cleaning it, it's almost impossible to wash due to the light weight. That's why food contaminated EPS is not recycled.
Recycling of EPS (expandable polystyrene; styrofoam) is technically not harder or easier than most other plastics. It's just polystyrene.
The problem specific for this material is volume versus weight. You can have huge truck full of it, and only carry about two tonnes. That's the problem. It needs compacting before transport, which is fine when you're a factory that produces EPS because you have a lot of waste, and the waste is clean. Then you would buy a compactor, sell out the compacted bricks to recyclers, and the machine pays for itself in no time.
From domestic the problem is again volume, and contamination. It's darn hard to wash this stuff, as it floats on top of the water. Virtually nothing of it becomes submerged. Even light plastics like PE will float at the surface, but almost completely submerged so washing is still OK.
As someone active in the recycling trade, I'm worried about this development. I don't know what the final plastic is they're going to use though - technically you can make syn gas from all kinds of carbohydrates, and create all kinds of other carbohydrates out of that. But I don't think they'll go such a roundabout way.
Currently soda bottles are PET. Some mineral water bottles are PVC, and that's a big problem because they're hard to sort out, and have to be sorted out well pretty much perfectly. No more than 100-200 ppm of PVC is accepted in the end product. PET is easy to recycle, and as all bottles are PET, the material is easy to sort out of domestic waste. Which currently is done on a large scale worldwide. Many countries do not use PVC bottles at all, so there all those transparent bottles in the waste simply are PET which makes recycling really efficient and commercially viable. Bottles are one of the very few post consumer products (i.e. recovered from domestic waste) that can be recycled on a purely commercial basis.
Now if Pepsi starts to use a different plastic for their bottles, we're going to have a problem. Even if Pepsi's products account for only say 10% of the world bottle use, that's 10% contamination overall, and that's enough to kill the whole recycling of bottles as we know it. I'm not exaggerating here. PVC is easy to recognise as it turns white upon bending, which most other plastics don't do. Sorting out those other plastics may become a true headache.
Plastics are easy to recycle in general - Pepsi's new bottles may also be easy to recycle - but only so if the material is pure. Plastics, as a rule of thumb, do not mix. There are a few exceptions to this rule, sure, but still the final product value is always lower than if the plastics were separate.
Introducing a new plastic to make plastic bottles is a bad idea environmentally, even though that one plastic may have advantages. It's going to cause trouble in the recycling industry: costs go up, product quality down, may even cause a fall in recycling rates if it gets too hard to do commercially like it's done now.
I have a little personal experience in Hong Kong, as I live there.
A few years ago there was the Taiwan quake, that basically severed all cables between Hong Kong and Taiwan, and effectively all but cutting us off from the rest of the world. Local and mainland China based sites worked fine; the rest was cut off for a few days. That included e-mail of course. Not really a "single" point of failure as there were multiple cables involved, still "single" enough to fail. Pretty bad. Luckily within a few days emergency routes were connected (yes that took days and a lot of human intervention - the net infrastructure did NOT route around id automatically!).
Now the Japan quake: again we were seriously affected, to my surprise. Service is back to normal now but it took almost three days. Sunday evening I still had problems with the Internet. Not only Japanese sites: Facebook for example was completely unreachable at times, and slow for the rest of the time. European sites I also couldn't reach. Slashdot didn't have much problems though; some Japanese sites that I tried to visit were out.
Torrents that I was running those days worked at normal speeds, of course there are many connections for a single torrent and the best will be used, all in all giving normal speeds.
And "couple of hours" to restore? Well, no. Three days more likely. With again a lot of human intervention to make it work again.
Why Japan is so important to Hong Kong's Internet connection even when connecting to European web sites, I don't know. Our main outgoing lines are via Taiwan, and there are some direct cables across the ocean to the US. And of course direct links to the mainland, which again routes a lot of its traffic via Hong Kong's network. Taiwan I learned these days again has part of it's connection via to Japan, and part direct to the US and Australia.
From the face of it (I'm by far an expert - my info comes mainly from news paper charts and graphics) I don't understand why Facebook would be completely unreachable, let alone European sites. I can understand it may be slower than normal - when you lose a large chunk of your connections that only makes sense. Still it's supposed to continue to work: sites should remain reachable and so. E-mail is definitely more resilient as the amount of data in a mail is smaller, and servers will automatically retry connections so if one is done for a short while it will only give a slowdown, not a direct failure.
Instead of virtualising ten servers on a single physical box, you could of course consider running a single server on a single piece of hardware again. And still win power/flexibility wise if you can get your "low-power" ARM board to cost much less than your souped up x86 board. If only because if a single board fails, just one server goes down. Not all ten.
Most servers do not do heavy computing work: they serve up (dynamic) web pages, handle SQL queries, process e-mail, serve files. That sounds to me like lots and lots of threads that each have relatively little work to do.
For example/.: the serving of a single page to a single visitor will take a few dozen SQL queries and the running of a Perl script to stitch it all together. This takes, say, 0.001 seconds of time of an x86 core - a wild guess, may be an order of magnitude off, good enough for the sake of the argument. An ARM core is maybe a tenth of that speed, so that single page would need 0.01 seconds of processing power to build up. And that is assuming the processor is the bottleneck. Likely the network to access the SQL servers is the bottleneck, which may end up the same overall time to build up that web page.
But now there are thousands upon thousands of visitors - all requesting pages. As this all goes parallel, it would simply require ten ARM cores to replace one x86 core and retain the same overall output.
Indeed when you're doing heavy scientific calculations - then ARM definitely won't stand a chance. But web pages won't even need you to do any floating point arithmetic. The same for handling an e-mail queue. It's I/O that's important, the capacity of moving the correct bits from A to B. And from what I've learned about these processors I don't think ARM is doing that so much worse than x86. So depending on the server load, there may really be something to it. Especially as those ten ARM cores use just a fraction of the power of a single x68 core.
The option you mention is not there in my Firefox installation (this may be a Ubuntu "fix"?). Only stuff about history and location bar, and an option to manually delete individual cookies.
Well I agree with you that a cookie may not physically harm you; and that they are very useful tools for web site programming.
Yet the primary problem with cookies is the third-party cookies that ad networks place on your computer. So this ad network can track which web sites you visit. This has no use for you as end user; it only servers to give the ad network more information about you. They can see you visit slashdot, they can see you visit certain lolcat related sites, they see you visit amazon, they follow you whenever you hit a web site where their ads (and cookies) are served. And that is the problem they most likely want to tackle as that is where privacy is an issue.
The old Mozilla suit made it very easy to set cookies acceptance to "visited site only". No third-party cookies. So if I visit say slashdot.org I only accept cookies from slashdot.org and not from say adnetwork.com who happens to put an ad on that page. I like that option. Cookies have their use, keeping you logged in for example - often needed even within a single session - or storing certain personal preferences, yet ad networks have no business in tracking me.
Later Firefox only had an all-or-nothing option when it came to cookies: accept all, or block all (with option for exceptions).
Firefox may still have it but it's buried; now in FF 3.6.15 I can not even find a cookies setting in the preferences at all! The only way I can find to get to the cookies configuration is via about:config. I may miss something but it certainly is not very obvious.
In my experience with ADSL and cable you have a fixed address already. It is just not guaranteed to be fixed but a new IP every few months is fixed enough for lots of tracking purposes. Just leave your own router connected; usually DHCP will give you the current IP address upon renewal. There is no reason it would have to change to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Gaming consoles to do graphics processing, makes sense. They must have quite some specialised graphics related horse power, considering their planned output.
Thanks for the links.
Pactpub link I almost closed as the price that I saw first was over USD 45; only upon looking again I realised they automatically put me to the bundle offer! Great marketing. One would expect them to promote e-books more these days. I'm considering now. USD 30.59 is not that bad; that's about the same cost as lunch for a whole week (7 days).
Just reading this story when finishing some Android programming work... and it sounds very interesting to me. Especially as UI design is not my strongest point.
Unfortunately USD 45 is quite steep, will have to add international shipping costs to it even, for a book that I can't check out first.
Now if they were selling this for a few bucks as e-book, I'd be digging up my credit card instead of writing this comment. Besides, it's a bit strange these days that a book about computers and programming does not come in e-book format.
So the result could have been very different if the publisher of the news paper or whatever where the article was published first had filed suit? Interesting.
Tx, I never heard of that expression before.
2,500 devices - are there really that many models of smart phone out there? I know there are a lot but not that many. Or do they mean that 2,500 users have this app installed?
Also I wonder how that "accessible free of data charges" is supposed to work. Is that a special contract or so? I have seen phone companies offering pretty cheap data plans with small amount of data, plus unlimited data for Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Something like that, details I forgot, not interested myself, just interesting that such contracts exist. And then limited to the mobile versions of those sites, like m.facebook.com.
So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason.
So anyone who presents fiction in a manner so as to make it appear factual loses copyright? And, if someone believes it to be factual, they have carte blanche to copy it freely? I doubt it.
In this specific case the phony numbers were introduced with the specific goal of looking like facts, just to detect copying. No carte blanche here; case by case; as is fair use.
Presumably it would be the responsibility of the one doing the copying to ensure that what they were copying was, in fact, factual...
In case of a phone book, I would say "that IS the reference for the fact". Short of calling each number to ask whether the name/number is correct, this is your fact check. The telephone book lists numbers and implicitly tells you "this are the numbers; this are the facts; to our best knowledge they are correct". Yet they add a few fakes in between the million or so real ones - how would we be able to detect this? To find out which are fakes and which are accidental error? When a work says "this is factual information" then I would say for all copyright related issues that is to be treated as a collection of facts.
Or how about facts presented in text books: like "the melting point of iron". An interesting example actually, as the first two search results in Google give different answers: the first gives 1536C, the second 1535C. How can we check the fact? Look at other resources. But how can we be sure this is a fact? Would you measure it? When can you be sure enough that the answer to a factual question is the actual fact? Which source is more reliable?
The problem with damages is the proof. How can you prove you did not receive something? Or that you received less than you otherwise would have?
Take a patent holder who has made an interesting invention, tries to find a partner to help him build/market this product, but instead someone else takes the patent, starts producing the stuff, and the inventor sees his market swamped by infringing products before they get a chance to sell some themselves. So they sue. But for how much damages? How much could he have made if the others didn't jump in? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing (due to poor business decisions). We don't know, can't tell.
Or music copyrights: many people argue that file sharing is part of advertising for music, and may help increase sales. So that would mean there is no damage at all, on the contrary. Or is it? So one could infringe copyright but evade penalties because they "helped" the copyright holder?
Not to defend those obvious patent trolls, but actually proving a loss is pretty hard. Proving you have the intention to use the patent may be a better direction, but also that is pretty hard to do. And it would erode the patent protection, which is not a good thing I think. There are plenty of inventors around who develop stuff without the intention to make it themselves - think ARM. They only design processors, and then sell those designs for others to produce (I guess these fall under copyright though, not patent right). They don't produce any processor by themselves (other than prototypes maybe).
And anyway for such a patent troll also the obvious proof of losses would be "look I have this link patent, I offer to license it for $0.10 for each web browser user that uses it, so with about one billion browsers that's a loss of $100 mln on license alone".
Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
If fact may not be copyrighted, fiction certainly can - so would the phony entries not be considered "creative"? Why not?
While they may be considered creative works; in this case they were presented as facts: they were part of a factual work, which was distributed as being factual information only. So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason. Someone trying to (legally) copy the factual information from the work, when sued for infringement on those phony entries, might even argue illegal entrapment and misleading by the original author.
Still it surprised me that this is fair use as it was a complete reprint and redistribution of an article; usually it's about excerpts or quotes for redistribution, or for private copies.
I heard about that mmm well, half year ago or so already, if not longer.
"Rumour"... "going to"... there's the problem. Afaik at this moment Google's official market is still the best Android market around. Which probably says more about the quality of the rest of the markets though.
I do love the quick publishing on their market; last Friday I released a new version of my app; a day or so later got a crash report from user; yesterday found and fixed the bug and released an update. Happy I don't have to wait two weeks or so for re-approval of a bugfix update, like Apple's store needs.
Honest question: are any of those reliable and trustworthy? Set up by respectable businesses? This question as I'd love to see some real competition for Google's market place.
Thinking of the regular stories of malware being distributed through those third-party markets...
Not that the quality of Googles Android market is that great, at least they have SOME measures in place including the small fee that a developer has to pay (in effect identifying themselves) and the signing requirements (linking an app uniquely to a developer).
You may be right for domestic waste, not for industrial. EPS is a common material in the recycling market. I'm dealing with it regularly. Volume can be reduced easily with a compressor. The real issue is cleaning it, it's almost impossible to wash due to the light weight. That's why food contaminated EPS is not recycled.
Recycling of EPS (expandable polystyrene; styrofoam) is technically not harder or easier than most other plastics. It's just polystyrene.
The problem specific for this material is volume versus weight. You can have huge truck full of it, and only carry about two tonnes. That's the problem. It needs compacting before transport, which is fine when you're a factory that produces EPS because you have a lot of waste, and the waste is clean. Then you would buy a compactor, sell out the compacted bricks to recyclers, and the machine pays for itself in no time.
From domestic the problem is again volume, and contamination. It's darn hard to wash this stuff, as it floats on top of the water. Virtually nothing of it becomes submerged. Even light plastics like PE will float at the surface, but almost completely submerged so washing is still OK.
As someone active in the recycling trade, I'm worried about this development. I don't know what the final plastic is they're going to use though - technically you can make syn gas from all kinds of carbohydrates, and create all kinds of other carbohydrates out of that. But I don't think they'll go such a roundabout way.
Currently soda bottles are PET. Some mineral water bottles are PVC, and that's a big problem because they're hard to sort out, and have to be sorted out well pretty much perfectly. No more than 100-200 ppm of PVC is accepted in the end product. PET is easy to recycle, and as all bottles are PET, the material is easy to sort out of domestic waste. Which currently is done on a large scale worldwide. Many countries do not use PVC bottles at all, so there all those transparent bottles in the waste simply are PET which makes recycling really efficient and commercially viable. Bottles are one of the very few post consumer products (i.e. recovered from domestic waste) that can be recycled on a purely commercial basis.
Now if Pepsi starts to use a different plastic for their bottles, we're going to have a problem. Even if Pepsi's products account for only say 10% of the world bottle use, that's 10% contamination overall, and that's enough to kill the whole recycling of bottles as we know it. I'm not exaggerating here. PVC is easy to recognise as it turns white upon bending, which most other plastics don't do. Sorting out those other plastics may become a true headache.
Plastics are easy to recycle in general - Pepsi's new bottles may also be easy to recycle - but only so if the material is pure. Plastics, as a rule of thumb, do not mix. There are a few exceptions to this rule, sure, but still the final product value is always lower than if the plastics were separate.
Introducing a new plastic to make plastic bottles is a bad idea environmentally, even though that one plastic may have advantages. It's going to cause trouble in the recycling industry: costs go up, product quality down, may even cause a fall in recycling rates if it gets too hard to do commercially like it's done now.
'destroy the Revolution through the use of communication systems out of the control of authorities.'
And I always thought that a revolution by definition involves total loss of control by authorities...
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
This redundant redundancy event is brought to you by the department of redundancy department, and is organised by Chaos, Inc.
I have a little personal experience in Hong Kong, as I live there.
A few years ago there was the Taiwan quake, that basically severed all cables between Hong Kong and Taiwan, and effectively all but cutting us off from the rest of the world. Local and mainland China based sites worked fine; the rest was cut off for a few days. That included e-mail of course. Not really a "single" point of failure as there were multiple cables involved, still "single" enough to fail. Pretty bad. Luckily within a few days emergency routes were connected (yes that took days and a lot of human intervention - the net infrastructure did NOT route around id automatically!).
Now the Japan quake: again we were seriously affected, to my surprise. Service is back to normal now but it took almost three days. Sunday evening I still had problems with the Internet. Not only Japanese sites: Facebook for example was completely unreachable at times, and slow for the rest of the time. European sites I also couldn't reach. Slashdot didn't have much problems though; some Japanese sites that I tried to visit were out.
Torrents that I was running those days worked at normal speeds, of course there are many connections for a single torrent and the best will be used, all in all giving normal speeds.
And "couple of hours" to restore? Well, no. Three days more likely. With again a lot of human intervention to make it work again.
Why Japan is so important to Hong Kong's Internet connection even when connecting to European web sites, I don't know. Our main outgoing lines are via Taiwan, and there are some direct cables across the ocean to the US. And of course direct links to the mainland, which again routes a lot of its traffic via Hong Kong's network. Taiwan I learned these days again has part of it's connection via to Japan, and part direct to the US and Australia.
From the face of it (I'm by far an expert - my info comes mainly from news paper charts and graphics) I don't understand why Facebook would be completely unreachable, let alone European sites. I can understand it may be slower than normal - when you lose a large chunk of your connections that only makes sense. Still it's supposed to continue to work: sites should remain reachable and so. E-mail is definitely more resilient as the amount of data in a mail is smaller, and servers will automatically retry connections so if one is done for a short while it will only give a slowdown, not a direct failure.
Instead of virtualising ten servers on a single physical box, you could of course consider running a single server on a single piece of hardware again. And still win power/flexibility wise if you can get your "low-power" ARM board to cost much less than your souped up x86 board. If only because if a single board fails, just one server goes down. Not all ten.
Most servers do not do heavy computing work: they serve up (dynamic) web pages, handle SQL queries, process e-mail, serve files. That sounds to me like lots and lots of threads that each have relatively little work to do.
For example /.: the serving of a single page to a single visitor will take a few dozen SQL queries and the running of a Perl script to stitch it all together. This takes, say, 0.001 seconds of time of an x86 core - a wild guess, may be an order of magnitude off, good enough for the sake of the argument. An ARM core is maybe a tenth of that speed, so that single page would need 0.01 seconds of processing power to build up. And that is assuming the processor is the bottleneck. Likely the network to access the SQL servers is the bottleneck, which may end up the same overall time to build up that web page.
But now there are thousands upon thousands of visitors - all requesting pages. As this all goes parallel, it would simply require ten ARM cores to replace one x86 core and retain the same overall output.
Indeed when you're doing heavy scientific calculations - then ARM definitely won't stand a chance. But web pages won't even need you to do any floating point arithmetic. The same for handling an e-mail queue. It's I/O that's important, the capacity of moving the correct bits from A to B. And from what I've learned about these processors I don't think ARM is doing that so much worse than x86. So depending on the server load, there may really be something to it. Especially as those ten ARM cores use just a fraction of the power of a single x68 core.
The option you mention is not there in my Firefox installation (this may be a Ubuntu "fix"?). Only stuff about history and location bar, and an option to manually delete individual cookies.
Well I agree with you that a cookie may not physically harm you; and that they are very useful tools for web site programming.
Yet the primary problem with cookies is the third-party cookies that ad networks place on your computer. So this ad network can track which web sites you visit. This has no use for you as end user; it only servers to give the ad network more information about you. They can see you visit slashdot, they can see you visit certain lolcat related sites, they see you visit amazon, they follow you whenever you hit a web site where their ads (and cookies) are served. And that is the problem they most likely want to tackle as that is where privacy is an issue.
You mean like Firefox's Private Browsing mode?
The old Mozilla suit made it very easy to set cookies acceptance to "visited site only". No third-party cookies. So if I visit say slashdot.org I only accept cookies from slashdot.org and not from say adnetwork.com who happens to put an ad on that page. I like that option. Cookies have their use, keeping you logged in for example - often needed even within a single session - or storing certain personal preferences, yet ad networks have no business in tracking me.
Later Firefox only had an all-or-nothing option when it came to cookies: accept all, or block all (with option for exceptions).
Firefox may still have it but it's buried; now in FF 3.6.15 I can not even find a cookies setting in the preferences at all! The only way I can find to get to the cookies configuration is via about:config. I may miss something but it certainly is not very obvious.
In my experience with ADSL and cable you have a fixed address already. It is just not guaranteed to be fixed but a new IP every few months is fixed enough for lots of tracking purposes. Just leave your own router connected; usually DHCP will give you the current IP address upon renewal. There is no reason it would have to change to begin with.