As it's in the main kernel, reiserfs isn't going anywhere soon. It'll be supported for years, yet. (In fact, that was one of the problems getting reiser4 in, since Namesys didn't want to continue updating the in-kernel reiserfs to stay upto date with the rest of the kernel, forcing other kernel devs to maintain it... which they did and continue to do; the kernel devs didn't want stuck with the same problem for reiser4, at least until it met more of the standard kernel code maintainability standards, which was happening, gradually, but the murder trial rather sidetracked things.) It's pretty close to certain that it'll be another computer upgrade cycle, likely two or more, before existing reiserfs goes unsupported, and there's no hint of it yet.
There are good upgrade choices on the horizon, btfs, etc, but they aren't ready yet, and there's nothing else currently that fills the hole reiserfs does. Thus, if it's working for you (as it is for me, 100% reiserfs here too), there's little reason to get itchy about upgrading/right/ now. Stay calm, wait further developments, and in a few years there should be one and possibly several good choices to switch to.
Meanwhile, the problems with XFS on a non-UPS backed system are well known. If you are going to do XFS, BE SURE YOU HAVE IT ON A UPS! That should cure most of the problems there. (I've considered switching to it myself, but until recently when I switched from dual 21" CRTs to LCD monitors, a UPS for the system I was running wasn't usefully within my budget. Now that electricity usage is reasonable, UPSs are on my list and I'll reexamine XFS after that, but not until as it's simply not safe without them.)
The California version of this contract change has bold screaming letters that say I have to hold NSAT&T harmless for any invasion of my privacy on their part. And why does AT&T feel the need to reserve the option to *break the law* without consequences?
They're CYAing for future versions of the warrantless wiretapping should they lose on that, plus "pretexting".
Slimy dogs!
If I don't cancel my phone service this agreement kicks automatically on Oct. 1. Given that my local government has handed monopoly rights to the copper wires to AT&T, I don't actually have many realistic options if I want to maintain a landline, which is still a practical necessity for most of us in modern life.
I'm not sure how it's still a necessity. Many have cell phones today and can depend on them. Others (me) have VoIP and cut the traditional telco landline when I got it. The one may be more expensive but can go wherever you do, while the other one isn't quite as portable but is/much/ less costly, with/way/ more features. Many have both of the above.
Yes, I'd call some sort of remote voice communication a practical general necessity now days, but it can take many forms beyond the traditional land line. In fact, I was reading recently that for young people especially (and this was referring to mainline young people, not tech-heads, altho arguably most young people today would have been yesteryear's tech-heads), a landline is now often considered optional. Cellphones are displacing them to the degree that it's causing problems for opinion polls and the like, since people tend to be far more sensitive (in part due to receiver-pays, here in the US) about calls to their cell than to their landline. It's the cellphone that's almost mandatory, now.
OTOH, if voice-piggyback-DSL is your only >dialup Internet option... and with more people considering decent Internet connectivity mandatory... but even then, one doesn't/have/ to use that voice line, and some don't.
Perhaps it's good for my physical freedom that I'm not into audio books, but if I had to hassle killing the DRM, I think I'd take the little bit longer to get the drm-free version distributed as far and wide as possible while I was at it. If they weren't DRMed, tho, I'd not hassle it, so they'd be worse off from the point of view of my activities if they DRMed it than not, at least if they were actually trying to/prevent/ its free spread.
As for my computers, I emigrated from the land of software slavery after getting a push from that beast you mentioned, in the form of eXPrivacy, and like a defector, while I may have friends and relatives that haven't made the crossing yet, I know I can and will never go back, unless or until there's a revolution and my former land of imprisonment is itself freed. Much like that defector, I look back on that old life as dead to me now, thankful that I got out, and happy to do what I can to help others make the transition as well.
The problem is, I've yet to see a candidate or party that I agree with 100%. With policies I know of, I could support a Lawrence Lessig, but I'm sure by the time he got ran thru the mill, there'd be/something/ he supported that I opposed. Thus, there's no way to vote 100% my heart/head unless I was to chose to run, myself. That's clearly impractical, so any way I vote, or if I don't vote, it's a compromise. Therefore, the challenge is to find the least compromise; the most likely to support and try to implement things the way I like in most major areas, without implementing things I don't like in more areas, or areas I consider more important.
But civil liberties rank pretty high up there in importance here, and Obama pretty much killed that one with the warrantless wiretapping and immunity bill, unless he somehow rights his wrong, which I've not seen yet. If he doesn't see what's wrong with that or sees it as so low value it's something he can compromise on, he's not what we need right now, to right the wrongs of the present administration.
That's because Cox doesn't enforce their "limits", which are effectively more recommended guidelines than limits. On the newsgroups there's people using well over 100 GB/mo, month after month, supposedly subject to the same 40 GB/mo limit, that have never heard a peep from Cox. Their actual limit where they'd actually send you a letter is probably more like the 250 GB/mo announced by Comcast than the 40 GB they mention in connection with the "preferred" service tier level.
At one point Cox DID/try/ to enforce GB caps, at that time 30 GB/mo. A number of folks on the newsgroups reported getting letters. Of course, we don't know if any were finally disconnected, but that wasn't until the 4th time, with just an email the first two times, email and snail-mail the third time, and at least threatened cutoff on the 4th... but since it only seemed to last maybe 6-8 months...
It wasn't long after that, that widely available DSL speeds started increasing beyond the original 1.5 Mbps "DSL lite" standard, and started actually giving Cox (which at that time was either 3 or 4 Mbps, don't remember the timing exactly) some decent competition. Suddenly, nobody seemed to get the nasty warning letters any more!
But in addition to that, at the time, Cox neither had a user trackable meter (which people pointed out they really needed if they were going to enforce, and they still don't have, but they haven't tried enforcing since then either), nor a viable upgrade path. The only possible "upgrade" they offered was switching to business service, at about twice the money for half the speed. We pointed out that wasn't an "upgrade" but rather a serious downgrade, and that at least if they were going to enforce caps, they'd be wise to offer some sort of decent upgrade path, at least.
Low and behold, shortly thereafter, they had a real upgrade plan as well. Now, there's the premeire grade service, ~$15 more/mo, but at least arguably worth it, as the speeds are much higher as well as the (unenforced) bytecaps.
It's unknown if it was our protests or competition; I'd like to think our protests had/something/ to do with it, tho, and Cox/has/ always seemed a bit better than Comcast in such things, but the situation since has been that the bytecap "recommendations" have been just that, recommendations, not enforced caps, and there's/actually/ a decent upgrade path from "preferred" (aka standard) to "premeire" (aka premium", and even a SOHO option between no-server residential, and full privs but much more expensive full biz service. AFAIK, the SOHO option is slightly slower than residential for the money, but comes with no bytecaps or server restrictions, tho you still have a DHCP assigned dynamic IP. (To get the static IP you need the expensive full business class service.)
Thanks for the questions. They make me think. =:^)
To me, it's a game of odds. If we had preference-voting, it'd be different, but we don't, so one must weigh their chances and vote accordingly.
Obama's part of one of the two dominant parties of our two-party system. As such, if I vote for him despite not agreeing with a position he took in an issue of major importance to me and he wins, I just seriously increased the chances of more of the same things I disagree with occurring.
OTOH, if I vote for a third party candidate, say Barr, and they (against odds) win, it WOULD shake up Washington that a third party candidate won, but even if other Libertarians against even stronger odds won a majority of the US Congressional seats they are running for, simple practicality is they couldn't do too much damage the first term. For one thing, in the Senate, only a third of the seats are up for election every two years, so even if every Senate seat open for a vote this year went Libertarian along with the presidency, there'd still be roughly 2/3s of the senate still in current majority two-party hands. Further, the senate's 3/5s majority vote to overcome a filibuster would make anything seriously resisted by the two currently dominant parties and their remaining 2/3s majority even MORE difficult to get thru the senate. And the senate confirms federal judges and justices too.
Put simply, the founding fathers made it all but impossible for a single two-year-cycle election to massively change the direction of Washington even under mathematically extreme odds. Over a four-year presidential term, if the mid-term elections go the same way, it's mathematically possible to change things radically, but even then, it's not likely. In reality, it's going to take at least a full 6-year senate voting cycle to get to to the point of no return. (This is why I was so disillusioned when Bush got a second term with the Republicans in control of both houses of congress as well, but luckily things turned around by the critical 6-year mark.)
Given that, and the fact that it's unlikely I'll completely agree with any candidate or party, plus the fact that the Republicans seemed to be running away with things and when they got control, the Democrats seemed rather less than enthused about actually stopping the stuff they were elected on the basis of stopping, that third party "shake up Washington" even if I don't agree with everything said third party espouses option looks pretty good, certainly better than a Republicrat duopoly where the Republicans seem intent on throwing civil liberties and our national reputation to the terrorists, and the Democrats don't seem all that interested in stopping them from doing so, even when they DO get the numeric majority and ran on a platform of just that, stopping the Republicans. Then you have a guy win the Democratic nomination who looks willing to stop them, but then on a critical vote, surprise surprise (NOT) after the Democratic behavior of the last two years, reverses himself and decides to go along with throwing yet more civil liberties to the terrorists.
Like I said, I may not agree with everything on the Libertarian platform, but these days, it seems I agree with as much of it as I do anyone else's platform, and the shake-up-Washington angle looks rather good compared to the possible damage they could do -- especially when the immediate effect of much of what might be damaging in the long term is a reversal of the current administration's (and the ones before that as well, altho it's the current administration that has been most damaging, IMO) policies. The immediate effect would be positive even if left to run, the ultimate effect would arguably be negative. We'd have multiple elections to correct it before it got to that point.
It doesn't bother me. Why? Because I'm an ad-blocker using privoxy and I know exactly what sorts of filter code the blocker is using, because I customized the filters as necessary.
Nearly all of those filters are on things like URLs with the substring "ad" (but using look-ahead/behind to allow adsl, road, etc, thru) or "track" or the like. Often, whole sections of the page are set-off with comments "begin xxx-ad", "end xxx-ad". It's very obvious that in many cases they are deliberately making it/easy/, for people to block the ads, or even filter out that entire bit of the page including all its formatting so it's displayed as if the ad wasn't even there.
But why would they do that? Simple, really. In general, advertisers tend to target the easily programmable zombies, those who don't ask/why/ they need whatever's advertised, those who if programmed by being shown an ad often enough, will happily trade in their car, say, you know, the one that was new just a year or two ago that's only now getting a bluebook value more than they still owe on the thing, for an even newer car, and the privilege to/again/ owe more on their car than it's worth. The don't/what/ the people that will be pointing out how stupid that is, the people that can/actually//think//for//themselves/, that despise the efforts to program them into witless zombies only doing the commercial bidding of the ads they happen to see the most.
People who can actually think for themselves not only aren't very likely to buy whatever's so forcefully pushed on them, but they're an actual waste of bandwidth, driving the click-track statistics down, lowering the per-view rates for everyone and increasing bandwidth costs for no reason on the per-click ads. Site owners therefore not only don't care if people like this -- like me -- actually view the ads, they DON'T WANT us viewing the ads, because all we do is make the click-thru rates lower than they'd otherwise be, or if we do click (possibly accidentally, we were just trying to bring the window back to the top, or whatever), even adding the additional bandwidth costs of that, without ultimately purchasing anything.
So they actually make it easy for ad-blockers to function, since at least at this point, the very fact that one's actually running an ad-blocker self-selects for one who can think for themselves, and not only isn't so likely to be programmed into buying something, but might actually avoid it or spread their negative opinion of it to others. This is the sort of person advertisers actually prefer NOT see the ads, thus explaining why they obviously make it so easy to block them, even going so far as inserting helpful begin-ad end-ad comments to make it even easier. (Or, as I've seen recently, even ad-class css, whcih can be simply set to no-display, IMPORTANT, in the browser's accessibility CSS or rewritten to no-display in privoxy.)
Now, making this ad-blocker technology available to the programmable and uncaring masses that actually support all this "free" content/can/ be a bit disturbing. However, not entirely so to those of us already in the freedom software movement. After all, there's other forms of payment than ad-dollars, and the entire freedom software movement has come a long way on what some would believe impractical dreams. If people will code for the peer recognition and/or simple joy of doing so, if others will spend long unpaid hours in the the various technical forums, lists, and newsgroups, helping others for the simple pleasure of it, and even people who get more negative peer recognition than positive if people here it, will still sing in the shower, then there's obviously other reasons to exercise one's creativity and share one's knowledge than for ad-dollars, or even money at all!
Some would even argue, and it's quite popular on this site to do so, that the music labels and
Actually, the entire fact that you're complaining about it means not enough are POed about it to make a difference. Maybe slightly perturbed, but not enough to have them looking for blockers or to keep them from coming back.
And you're part of the problem, not the solution, since if you're complaining about it, you obviously go back to the sites often enough for it to be a big deal to you. While it's possible you can't load privoxy or the like, or firefox, and block the popovers that way, you can certainly choose not to visit the site again, and if enough people did that, the problem would disappear, either because the abusive sites went under, or because they changed their ways, one or the other. That it isn't happening indicates that too few people actually care about it to do something about it, either by blocking or by going elsewhere for the content, and if you are one of the people continuing to figuratively take it up the ass crosswise and going back again and again for it, you're part of the reason those sites continue to exist!
The history of that bill is otherwise. While the vote was a lopsided 68/29/3 (y/n/not-voting), one must remember that it was filibustered, and overcoming a filibuster takes a 3/5 super-majority (on the US Senate base of 100), so the margin was more like 8 votes than 18, and wasn't a sure thing at all. It had previously failed, and the supporters had to "deal" in ordered to get the votes they needed. One wonders what deal Obama cut in ordered to get him to change is vote after an original pledge to oppose it if it included telecom immunity.
By contrast, as one of the drafters of the original FISA this bill was updating, Biden was opposed to the bill with the telecom immunity provision from the beginning, and remained so. He pointed out that McCain's (and Obama's as well, after he switched, tho that wasn't pointed out) position on this put him in the company of both Bush and Nixon in taking the position that the President is above the law. Further, he quoted himself from the original FISA debate in 1978, "it is not necessary to compromise civil liberties in the name of national security", saying that's as true today, in a time of war, as it was then, and calling the bill including the telecom immunity provision "a false choice -- national security or civil liberties."
While Biden's record on civil liberties isn't perfect (while he voted to extend PATRIOT in 2005, bad for civil liberties, he did at least vote against reauthorizing its wiretap provision in 2006, and he sponsored legislation that unfortunately died in committee that would have banned torture and interrogation techniques not authorized by the US Army Field Manual, which is pretty reasonable), it's actually more good than bad, better than most, unfortunately.
I'm on record as hoping Obama might either reverse himself or satisfactorily explain himself on this, so I could again support him. I had been as close as I'd ever been to donating to his campaign, before this, but that vote ended all thought of that, and I was seriously looking into third party candidates and even considering for the first time since I could vote, just saying home for this presidential election, as I couldn't vote for McCain, Obama wasn't leaving me reason to vote FOR him (as opposed to against McCain) either (tho as I posted in response to someone else on another story, I'd have probably voted third party, likely Barr, because altho I don't agree with much of that platform, it'd shake up Washington and the still dominant two parties would have killed anything too radical, at least the first term... and because I take voting as a duty and would have felt guilty not voting... but writing in none-of-the-above as a protest would have been an option as well). While I don't believe Biden was chosen primarily for his position on this, the choice/does/ start the process, or at least signal that it might happen. I'm still not all that hopeful, but it's possible, and at least I have the option of voting Obama/Biden now, where before it was beginning to look like my only options would be third party or a none-of-the-above write-in.
Because proprietary does/not/ work better than the alternative, for some of us. Open does, because that's what xorg/gnome/kde support first, while the NVidia users of the community complain that the new software either doesn't work or is so slow as to be unusable. (See for example any of the recent xorg updates, where the proprietary drivers were holding back inclusion or stabilizing of the latest xorg, or KDE 4.1, where NVidia cards are simply unworkably slow for many users.)
That, and with the Dells and Asuses and Acers of the world now releasing and supporting computers with Linux installed, proprietary driver hardware just isn't as practical for them as open driver hardware. That's/got/ to be putting a pinch on NVidia right now, as they're now the only one refusing to cooperate with the community and provide at least specs, if not sponsor developers to provide open drivers.
Not everybody's so focused on games, you know. Some people want 3D and etc for the latest 3D desktop effects. While NVidia has arguably dominated the proprietary/gaming Linux market, they don't even have a horse in the open/desktop market yet, and their announced policy is that they don't intend to, either. The market changed and NVidia, like MS with the Internet and Intel with x86_64, was late to the game. Only MS and Intel both hugely dominated the market and had enough resources to survive the dry spell that resulted. NVidia neither dominates the market nor has the MS/Intel resources. While Linux is still low market share, it has taken advantage of the MS Vista misstep and the explosion of the netbook phenomenon and if Intel's projections are to be believed, that's a HUGE opening, that NVidia is all set to miss out on. Couple that with the GPU/CPU synergy that's all the rage now, and NVidia's looking pretty lonely out there by itself, missing two changes that could either one or both be as significant as the X86_64 thing has been.
> You expect people to whip that monstrosity up every > fucking time they want to match for addresses?
"No, Mr. Bond, I expect them to die."
More seriously, while that was to some extent my reaction as well (no less handy? WTF are you smokin'?), every sysadmin worth the name has his own little collection of scriptlets that he uses over and over that make his job easier, and this would be no different. How many do you think are reading this now, and noting it for later googling when it comes time to make the switch and they decide they need it? Write once, source it many times. It doesn't take a programmer to be able to do that, only a sysadmin too lazy to want to whip it up and test it every time it's needed, because why should they when it's already done and they can look it up?
After the first time, they even have it locally, in the script they used it in last time, so they don't even have to go to the net for it.
Hmm, possible/. referrer block? Depending on how your browsers are setup, of course, but presumably you loaded konqueror for the link directly so it wouldn't have had the/. referrer, while you were using firefox to view/. first, and clicking the link directly then had/. as your referrer, while manually changing the address bar didn't.
FWIW it's working in both browsers here, but both are running thru privoxy, with referrer conditional-block (delete header if coming from a different server), so clicking thru from/. to a different site would appear as if I typed or copied the link in, or used a bookmark -- no referrer header. WTF do they need to know what other site I was coming from? Thus, they don't get that info from me!
> I really wish there were a viable third party to vote for.
Your wish is your command. Seriously, while the rules are certainly stacked for a two-party system, the only thing keeping it that way is the widely held belief that voting for anyone else is throwing your vote away. If you believe that a your single vote counts at all, as you evidently do, then it should be self-evident that the only thing keeping third parties from mattering is the believe that they don't matter. Self-fulfilling prophesy.
And it's not entirely hopeless from a numbers perspective, either. While the system is indeed stacked to maintain two-party dominance and unfortunately many third party candidates do seem half crazy, it doesn't take an outright win or even getting a directly significant number of elected representatives of a particular party in ordered to get a change. Ross Perot could have made a difference and did for a short time, but didn't maintain the organization or do much of anything with what he had, so he lost it. At the state level, who would have thought Jesse Ventura could have done what he did? The dominant parties can and do adjust their positions to appeal to significant segments of voters, and should the defeatists change their mind and believe a third party candidate/can/ achieve something, they most certainly can, even if they don't get the position they were running for right away or indeed at all.
Me? I think I'm somewhat opposite you, in that there's a whole stack of reasons I couldn't vote McCain. I was cautiously supporting Obama earlier, and still expect him to win as long as he keeps the optimistic position (political analysts and historians note that it's extremely seldom that a pestimistic or negative candidate wins against a positive/optimistic one, and I believe Obama likely to win based on that alone), but I don't believe I can vote for him unless he adequately explains his anti-human-rights anti-law vote re warrantless wiretapping. Unless he reverses his position there or otherwise convinces me he had a decent reason for that vote, I'll likely vote third party if I can find someone I'm reasonably comfortable with, or write-in none-of-the-above, if not, simply because there's nothing better. However, not expecting them to win, even if they are crazy to some extent, I can probably find a third party to vote for in the hopes that it'll at least get enough votes to significantly influence things, and if they/do/ win, to shake things up, knowing there'll be enough resistance from the entrenched two-party system to keep things from getting much crazier than they already are, even in the unlikely event the possibly somewhat crazy third party candidate I'll likely vote for does win. That's pretty much what happened to Jesse Ventura, too -- the entrenched resistance kept him from going too far out, and unfortunately there wasn't enough depth there to provide a lasting change. But again, if one believes an individual vote makes any difference at all, as one must if they believe it's almost treasonous not to vote (a position I definitely sympathize with), then one must also believe that change is possible, should we quit prophesying and self-fulfilling the prophesy that it's not.
I had that happen to me once. I typoed a starred box and never did figure out what I had put there. Actually, I think I must have typoed the same thing twice as I believe it DID have a confirm.
That's why every time I get one of those now, I open up a text-editor window or something, where I can see what I'm doing, put it in there, then select it, check klipper's select/copy list to verify it's in there correctly, paste it back into my scratch window to verify I'm pasting what I expect,/then/ paste it directly into the starred box and confirm.
This will be coming out about the time the Acer Aspire One refreshes... They're supposed to make the 6-cell standard on some or all of the 150s, and offer a 120 gig SATA based hard drive -- the current 11- version uses a ZIF attached IDE for the SSD, and according to the reviews, the place for the SATA attachment onboard isn't active, so unless you want to do some soldering...
If you couldn't tell by now, I'm looking strongly at the AOA 150s, here. I'd be fine with whatever size disk they put in as I may well be upgrading it anyway, but I DO want that SATA active. SuperTalent has a 120 gig MDL Flash SATA SDD that looks interesting to put in if I decide to go SDD, or I can replace it with a 200 gig plus... or decide the 120 gig is enough.
I'm NOT going to buy it with XPrivacy on it tho. No, this will be the first whole computer I've bought in a decade (I normally upgrade a piece or two at a time on my desktop/workstation), and I'm not going to have it be an MSWormOS statistic. It's Linux (I'll be installing Gentoo as build in a 32-bit chroot created especially for the purpose on my dual-dual-core Opteron, so either way I'm overwriting, but it's going to be a Linux statistic not an MSWormOS statistic) or nothing.
The usage idea here is somewhat different than most. For years I've wanted a 100 gig plus MP3 player. First, they simply didn't have them. Then they did, but none that ran a decent rockbox or Linux, and by then that's what I wanted. So that's mainly what I'm getting this for, but it'll double as a nice mininote, full keyboard and 1024 px width display, while I'm at it. Still, I'm going to continue using my big workstation as my main @home computer, and just use this one for its portable convenience in addition to the 100+ gigs of music and movies that's my primary use for it. I figure with the 6-cell with wifi and the screen turned off most of the time I'm playing MP3s, I should get a fairly decent run on the battery life. I had hoped the SATA would be active on the first gen and was planning to install the 120 gig SSD mentioned above to go along with the 8 gig built-in, but that was unfortunately not to be. But the 150s look more like what I want, and should be out in Sept/Oct timeframe, so before the end of the year and about time this already non-starter (due to eXPrivacy only here in the US their choice) from Lenovo gets here. We'll see.
What you've apparently missed (as you mentioned.org but not this) is that the.org folks (PIR) just got ICANN board approval to deploy DNSSEC at their gTLD level. This occurred at the 32nd Annual ICANN meeting in Paris (in June, I believe). Apparently PIR has been pushing DNSSEC for some time and is pretty much ready to go, altho it'll still take some time to actually get up and running.
Here's one informative link I found on Google. Google for dnssec.org icann for more:
I recently switched to VoIP here, and deliberately did/not/ transfer my old phone number. The VoIP provider has an (optional) service that sends anon CID calls to an answerer that asks them to dial a random set of numbers to prove they are human. If they don't, they don't get thru.
Of course, as about all VoIP providers, they bundle CID (along with all sorts of other fancy stuff the former monopolists charge extra for) at no additional charge. When I upgraded to VoIP I took the opportunity to upgrade my home system as well, and got a "Speaking CallerID" setup. It's GREAT!! Where previously I had found CID almost useless and had therefore canceled it as it cost more, choosing instead to let everything go to answerer and I'd only answer it if I recognized the caller, now I get the announcement of who it is. Some still come up "Cell Phone ", but once I put them in the phone book it announces that name instead. After a few weeks, I was able to ignore anything generic as everyone I wanted to take calls from was already in its phone book and thus no longer generic.
I've had the system for about a year now, and in that time, have only gotten three apparent phone-spammer calls. Those three were using automated dialers and faked CIDs, aaaa, bbbb and jjjj or some such (BTW, it can be rather "interesting" to hear the phone's interpretation of say, initials), to bypass the random number dial intelligence test. As I also have a phone-zapper (what was originally advertised for $50 I picked up at the dollar store), set to play the "disconnected tri-tone" error on answer (I tell anyone I/want/ to call to expect it), all I did was pickup and at the tone the other end immediately hung up -- it was a bot, as I said. That was a couple months ago so it was 10 months with ZERO phone-spammers, the three in quick succession, and another couple months without. Thus, the speaking CID hasn't been nearly as useful as I expected it to be, but it has still been worth it, as I don't even have to look to know who's calling, now.
Since VoIP is actually competitive, prices only run about $20/mo (e911 and regulatory fees included, a bit more than that, $25-30, if paid month to month, a bit less, $15-20, if prepaid a year at a time, again including all the "extra" fees) including full US long distance coverage and all the other stuff the former monopolists want to charge an arm and a leg for, caller-id, three-way-calling, call-waiting, voice mail, etc. In fact, due to the competition, most providers add either even fancier features -- scheduled do-not-disturb, automated-wakeup-calls, the random-number-human-test thing I mentioned for no-CID calls above -- or limited international calling, sometimes including not only Canada but much of Western Europe in the same unlimited calling $20-ish/mo fee.
Sure I have the occasional echo or dropout, but unlike the former monopolists or the cableco's phone offering, these guys actually know how to treat a customer, and because one can now shop nationwide or even worldwide for providers, they don't forget it either, or their customers today simply end up someone else's customers tomorrow! There's no way I'd go back!
(FWIW, unlike Internet, I consider phone service including 911 service a luxury, and I keep e911 service altho it's not quite as direct now, so dropping the wired provider wasn't a problem. I've never had a cellphone as I've simply never been able to cost-justify the additional cost given my usage. Some may prefer keeping minimal measured-call service or the like, if they are uncomfortable losing the security of conventional 911 service.)
I'm not going to say who my provider is as this isn't about selling them. There's several providers out there with similar offerings. Just do your research. FWIW, I started with the commercial VoIP provider listing at Wikipedia tho I ended up with someone not listed there. If you REALLY want to know who it is, post a request and I'll say, but you really SHOULD do at least some o
FON network router: It depends on what you are calling the "public" and "private" networks in this case, AFAIK.
FWIR (from what I read), the FON network is semi-public, public to you as you don't know who's using it, private to the FON network, as only participants get to use it, with FON effectively standing in the role of ISP, taking responsibility for what travels over their network, banning abusive users, etc.
Thus, if you're calling the FON side "public", you/should/ be able to simply point to FON and have them deal with it (altho I'm unaware how much responsibility they actually take in practice, or of any actual legal decisions ruling one way or the other, thus the italicized/should/). If you have a fully unrestricted public access network, then the previous reply, that bandwidth capping is evidence that you knew it was there and that makes you/more/ liable, is most likely (IANAL, etc) correct.
Of course, with a FON network router, the entire purpose of the network being to share, if it/does/ come down to your responsibility, it's going to be pretty hard to argue you didn't know it was happening.
Until days ago MS had a face, Gates' face (borged or not). Without Gates, without that face...
But it's still not entirely faceless. There's Balmer, altho some may argue they'd be better without/that/ face.
Anyway, the rest may indeed have already been the case, but like 'em or hate 'em, there's little good argument to be made in the statement that Gates really was synonymous in many ways with MS, and that really, they could have done a lot worse.
... or said/.er only runs freedomware, and thus cares less about a slaveryware game release than about, say, the latest KDE or GNOME release. Now/that's/ the sort of thing that keeps/this//.er immobile for a day or so, up-merging from the last -rc on Gentoo/~amd64, or used to before I upgraded to a an 8-gig quad-core quad-spindle RAID system workstation set to compile to tmpfs. Now it's only 2-4 hours, depending on how much has changed and how much is still in ccache since my last up-merge, and during that time I'm catching up on/., etc, as well. =8^)
[Replying mostly to GP, extending the ideas in parent]
Watts are energy per unit time (as parent stated). The electric company charges you (in the simple case) for energy used, so time must appear as a multiplier as well (thus kilowatt-hours), in ordered to get energy used.
Conversions of that nature, knowing your units and what you needed, thus allowing one to figure out whether the quantity went above (multiplied by X units) or below (divided by X units), while at the same time telling you which of several supplied figures you needed to plug in, instead of rote-memorizing arbitrary formulas, was basic high school physics and chemistry, where I went to school.
Put a different way, taking that 1 joule per second figure for a watt, times 1 hour which is 3600 seconds, and factoring in 1000 for the kilo in kiloJoule, and you have (imagine this in pen on a scratch paper, show your work and all that, with a line between the top and bottom that I removed due to the lameness filter, seconds and hours cancel so imagine them crossed out...):
1 J | 1 hr | 3600 s | 1 k = 3.6 kJ. 1 s | | 1 hr | 1000
So 1 watt (1 joule per second, energy per time) used for a period of one hour (time, multiplier) equals 3.6 kJ, (plain energy).
As for the electric bill, FWIW, here in Phoenix, AZ, using APS (two electric companies in Phoenix, APS is one), residential users get a choice of three billing plans.
Standard is a simple per-kW-hour charge. Nothing fancy. Easy to calculate. No particular worries about timing your usage, but comparatively expensive if you can manage your usage using either of the plans below.
Demand based calculates the kW-hour rate based on the peak usage. This is what commercial rates commonly are in much of the country and what makes sense for those who can manage their peak usage, putting say the water heater and A/C on an interlock so the water heater kicks off if the A/C comes on, thus keeping their peak usage low.
Time based changes the rate based on the time of day -- the meter will track usage based on multiple time periods, with a rate for each. Here in Phoenix, peak/expensive usage is day-time and into evening, 10 AM to 7 PM or so, AFAIK. Those who are out of the house and can leave the A/C off during most of this period for at least six days a week, and/or who have ice reservoir or similar cooling systems (make ice at nite, thaw it during the day to cool the building using only fans and the salt-slurry coolant pumps) can take advantage of this plan to dramatically lower their bills.
> It's quite a dangerous endeavour to ride bike > in Wintertime. Your wheels may suddenly just > jerk sideways and completely slip away from > under you, slamming you in the ground.
I used to ride in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I was in college there. It's not quite as bad as much of Canada probably, but there was certainly snow, and I remember riding in traffic-and-salt-slush. It was a street/racing 14-speed too, not a mountain bike or the like. One just had to be rather more careful. You get used to it.
I'd still consider doing it now, too, but would want a knobby-tire mountain bike at least, not a 1.25" 100 PSI smooth tire.
I wonder if they have studded bike tires...? Seems that'd be the way to go.
> Besides, dangerous or not, riding a bike by > minus 10, minus 20 is just very damn uncomfortable.
You can always add more layers, and that's what I'd do, too, tho it wasn't quite that cold, maybe 20F, -7C (ish). I'd wear a sweat shirt, a windbreaker, a sweater, and another windbreaker, then sometimes a coat on top if it were really cold but it would always come off after a few minutes of riding. Jeans and long underwear, snow boots. As I road, first the coat if I wore one would come off, then the sweater (take off windbreaker and sweater, put back on windbreaker, then the windbreaker, then sometimes the inner windbreaker as well, or keep it but doff the sweat shirt, depending on the wind. Once one got riding, the single layer tended to be enough.
But I'm in Phoenix, now. Winter's no big deal, but summer is another thing entirely. Try riding in the hot sun when it's 115+F 46+C in the shade! You can't peal off more layers when you get down to skin, shorts and tank! I did it a year or so, but ride the bus or stay inside in the A/C during the day now. That said, the key is staying hydrated -- your clothes too. A wet shirt and hat is a personal portable swamp cooler, and if you rewet them every few miles and take care to keep drinking and eating enough salt to keep up your electrolytes, yes, you/can/ still ride in that heat! I know because I've done it.
'Round here, it's not even summer until it's hitting triple digits F (38C). We read the news about people dieing in "heatwaves" of a "mere" 90-some degrees F (35-ish C) highs... and don't know whether to laugh or cry or just shake our heads. Some days here in the summer, that's lower than our LOW for the day, with a temp that may barely break 100F/38C for an hour or two, about 6 or 7 in the morning! And people are DYING from those "heat waves" that wouldn't even be summer here, in this metropolis of over four million people? WTF?
"Phoenix, the city that air conditioning built!" Seriously, I'm sure the population would only be perhaps a third what it is (but that'd still be greather than a million people), without A/C.
"You know, they tell you not to die in the summer here in Phoenix, because it's late September or early October before you figure out whether you're in hell or not!" =8^)
Bank of America has this now. I don't use it as I don't have a cell phone for them to text info to, but they have it as a second-path authentication option.
I had read about the European key fob type things and wondered when something like that would show up here. I guess BofA decided to take the cheaper for them route since many now have cell phones, but personally, I've simply never been able to justify the additional cost for a cell phone over (formerly) a landline, and the hurdle got higher recently when I switched to VoIP, so mobe connectivity isn't looking likely any time soon, here. ($99/mo including text/data/voice, what I understand T-Mobils unlimited offer is, looks interesting, but the available bandwidth on the data side isn't going to compare too well to my cable connection, so...)
Top and bottom units canceling: sec, meg, bit, byte, gig. That leaves hours on top. Looks like it's setup correctly as that's what we want, so do the math (work it from the right or alternating, if using a typical calculator's limited precision floating point)...
1/15/3600*8*1024*40 = (just under) 6.07 hours. Call it six hours, so you could download nearly 4X the allowance per day.
However, in reality, it's quite likely that those busting the limit will be doing enough uploading to make that the bottleneck much of the time, due to the two-way ACK nature of TCP and the fact that most cable links, at least here in the US, have a vastly higher download than upload bandwidth cap. It's likely to be.5-1 Mbps. Here, my upstream cap is.5 Mbps, so that's the figure I did the math with when I saw the story earlier. I didn't do the hours to overload, but rather took the approach of max possible upstream usage if I had it saturated 24/7.
@.5 Mbps, max bandwidth was just over 158 GByte/mo. This is what someone seeding a torrent might do. If in that month they spent the 40 gigs allowance on download (I picked that just to make it easier), the total overage fee in dollars would equal the upload gigabytes, $158. So the total bill for a person maxing their upstream bandwidth seeding and using the 40 gig allowance on download would be $213/mo. @ 1 Mbps upstream, it'd be $316 overage and $371 total. So in practice, we're looking at (low) hundreds of dollars per month, not thousands.
Now that's making some assumptions, but it does serve to prove a point. $200-300/mo is about what the uncapped gigs/mo biz accounts run around here, given similar speed caps. That's the going rate for "pessimistic" assumptions about oversell ratio as used on business (close to 1:1), as compared to the "optimistic" assumptions (10:1 maybe 20:1) they use on residential accounts. Of course, in addition to unrestricted bandwidth usage, they can run servers (against the AUP/TOS for residential users) and get much better support, even an SLA in some cases.
Thus, an active user can choose. If they are running near that level anyway, they might as well get the biz account and be able to run servers and get the SLA. If they are running somewhat less, say 100 gigs a month ($115 total), it'll be more of a tradeoff, save the money, pay more for unrestricted but get the SLA and server privs, or settle for a lower speed unrestricted, with the SLA and server privs. If their usage is spotty, they can keep the residential and only pay the $55 on the months they don't use more than 40 gigs, while paying more when they do use it.
It's not perfect and the per gig rate could arguably be cheaper, but it's better than cutting off people, giving them little or no alternative, or throttling them, again giving them little or no alternative.
It should also be noted that currently, there's a certain level of mixed motivivation, since heavy users cost them more but don't pay more. Turn this into a standard profit motivation, where they make a bit on each gig, and they now have a much bigger incentive to side with the computer tech firms instead of the media companies in their lobbying efforts.
Of course, this all assumes the "gas guage" they say they are providing, allowing folks to track their usage is accurate and kept working and up-to-date.
Mac I have no idea, but on MS platforms, if there's no there's speed graphing shareware that will do it (back when I would still sign away my rights in the form of a EULA, DUM, Download/Upload Meter, had this feature and was IIRC $15).
On Linux, it's part of Netfilter/IPTables, and therefore should be part of pretty much any firewall software built on top of it. YMMV, but here, I tried various supposedly "easier" software, and found it very difficult to do the sorts of stuff I wanted to do, so eventually got around to reading a couple Netfilter/IPTables itself tutorials, and found (as I by then expected) that it was way easier for me to configure directly, than it was to try to figure out how to do advanced stuff thru all the supposedly "easier" interfaces.
As a bonus, once you know the basics, it's dead-simple to setup even such "advanced" stuff as TCP-RESET filters (log, drop, or both) that only apply to your torrent ports, for those on ISPs who apparently think pretending to be the server at the other end when sending the things is good customer relations.
Of course, that's a per-computer solution and without additional configuration (again, easy with Netfilter, perhaps not so easy with proprietaryware), would include LAN traffic in the overall totals, unhelpful if you do much LAN at all. The way around that would be to put a suitably customizable router between the modem and the LAN... one running Linux and Netfilter/IPTables would fit the bill perfectly... maybe one of the commercial routers loaded with an appropriate community authored firmware...
Slashdot Mirror
As someone below titled their post...
As it's in the main kernel, reiserfs isn't going anywhere soon. It'll be supported for years, yet. (In fact, that was one of the problems getting reiser4 in, since Namesys didn't want to continue updating the in-kernel reiserfs to stay upto date with the rest of the kernel, forcing other kernel devs to maintain it... which they did and continue to do; the kernel devs didn't want stuck with the same problem for reiser4, at least until it met more of the standard kernel code maintainability standards, which was happening, gradually, but the murder trial rather sidetracked things.) It's pretty close to certain that it'll be another computer upgrade cycle, likely two or more, before existing reiserfs goes unsupported, and there's no hint of it yet.
There are good upgrade choices on the horizon, btfs, etc, but they aren't ready yet, and there's nothing else currently that fills the hole reiserfs does. Thus, if it's working for you (as it is for me, 100% reiserfs here too), there's little reason to get itchy about upgrading /right/ now. Stay calm, wait further developments, and in a few years there should be one and possibly several good choices to switch to.
Meanwhile, the problems with XFS on a non-UPS backed system are well known. If you are going to do XFS, BE SURE YOU HAVE IT ON A UPS! That should cure most of the problems there. (I've considered switching to it myself, but until recently when I switched from dual 21" CRTs to LCD monitors, a UPS for the system I was running wasn't usefully within my budget. Now that electricity usage is reasonable, UPSs are on my list and I'll reexamine XFS after that, but not until as it's simply not safe without them.)
The California version of this contract change has bold screaming letters that say I have to hold NSAT&T harmless for any invasion of my privacy on their part. And why does AT&T feel the need to reserve the option to *break the law* without consequences?
They're CYAing for future versions of the warrantless wiretapping should they lose on that, plus "pretexting".
Slimy dogs!
If I don't cancel my phone service this agreement kicks automatically on Oct. 1. Given that my local government has handed monopoly rights to the copper wires to AT&T, I don't actually have many realistic options if I want to maintain a landline, which is still a practical necessity for most of us in modern life.
I'm not sure how it's still a necessity. Many have cell phones today and can depend on them. Others (me) have VoIP and cut the traditional telco landline when I got it. The one may be more expensive but can go wherever you do, while the other one isn't quite as portable but is /much/ less costly, with /way/ more features. Many have both of the above.
Yes, I'd call some sort of remote voice communication a practical general necessity now days, but it can take many forms beyond the traditional land line. In fact, I was reading recently that for young people especially (and this was referring to mainline young people, not tech-heads, altho arguably most young people today would have been yesteryear's tech-heads), a landline is now often considered optional. Cellphones are displacing them to the degree that it's causing problems for opinion polls and the like, since people tend to be far more sensitive (in part due to receiver-pays, here in the US) about calls to their cell than to their landline. It's the cellphone that's almost mandatory, now.
OTOH, if voice-piggyback-DSL is your only >dialup Internet option... and with more people considering decent Internet connectivity mandatory... but even then, one doesn't /have/ to use that voice line, and some don't.
Perhaps it's good for my physical freedom that I'm not into audio books, but if I had to hassle killing the DRM, I think I'd take the little bit longer to get the drm-free version distributed as far and wide as possible while I was at it. If they weren't DRMed, tho, I'd not hassle it, so they'd be worse off from the point of view of my activities if they DRMed it than not, at least if they were actually trying to /prevent/ its free spread.
As for my computers, I emigrated from the land of software slavery after getting a push from that beast you mentioned, in the form of eXPrivacy, and like a defector, while I may have friends and relatives that haven't made the crossing yet, I know I can and will never go back, unless or until there's a revolution and my former land of imprisonment is itself freed. Much like that defector, I look back on that old life as dead to me now, thankful that I got out, and happy to do what I can to help others make the transition as well.
The problem is, I've yet to see a candidate or party that I agree with 100%. With policies I know of, I could support a Lawrence Lessig, but I'm sure by the time he got ran thru the mill, there'd be /something/ he supported that I opposed. Thus, there's no way to vote 100% my heart/head unless I was to chose to run, myself. That's clearly impractical, so any way I vote, or if I don't vote, it's a compromise. Therefore, the challenge is to find the least compromise; the most likely to support and try to implement things the way I like in most major areas, without implementing things I don't like in more areas, or areas I consider more important.
But civil liberties rank pretty high up there in importance here, and Obama pretty much killed that one with the warrantless wiretapping and immunity bill, unless he somehow rights his wrong, which I've not seen yet. If he doesn't see what's wrong with that or sees it as so low value it's something he can compromise on, he's not what we need right now, to right the wrongs of the present administration.
That's because Cox doesn't enforce their "limits", which are effectively more recommended guidelines than limits. On the newsgroups there's people using well over 100 GB/mo, month after month, supposedly subject to the same 40 GB/mo limit, that have never heard a peep from Cox. Their actual limit where they'd actually send you a letter is probably more like the 250 GB/mo announced by Comcast than the 40 GB they mention in connection with the "preferred" service tier level.
At one point Cox DID /try/ to enforce GB caps, at that time 30 GB/mo. A number of folks on the newsgroups reported getting letters. Of course, we don't know if any were finally disconnected, but that wasn't until the 4th time, with just an email the first two times, email and snail-mail the third time, and at least threatened cutoff on the 4th... but since it only seemed to last maybe 6-8 months...
It wasn't long after that, that widely available DSL speeds started increasing beyond the original 1.5 Mbps "DSL lite" standard, and started actually giving Cox (which at that time was either 3 or 4 Mbps, don't remember the timing exactly) some decent competition. Suddenly, nobody seemed to get the nasty warning letters any more!
But in addition to that, at the time, Cox neither had a user trackable meter (which people pointed out they really needed if they were going to enforce, and they still don't have, but they haven't tried enforcing since then either), nor a viable upgrade path. The only possible "upgrade" they offered was switching to business service, at about twice the money for half the speed. We pointed out that wasn't an "upgrade" but rather a serious downgrade, and that at least if they were going to enforce caps, they'd be wise to offer some sort of decent upgrade path, at least.
Low and behold, shortly thereafter, they had a real upgrade plan as well. Now, there's the premeire grade service, ~$15 more /mo, but at least arguably worth it, as the speeds are much higher as well as the (unenforced) bytecaps.
It's unknown if it was our protests or competition; I'd like to think our protests had /something/ to do with it, tho, and Cox /has/ always seemed a bit better than Comcast in such things, but the situation since has been that the bytecap "recommendations" have been just that, recommendations, not enforced caps, and there's /actually/ a decent upgrade path from "preferred" (aka standard) to "premeire" (aka premium", and even a SOHO option between no-server residential, and full privs but much more expensive full biz service. AFAIK, the SOHO option is slightly slower than residential for the money, but comes with no bytecaps or server restrictions, tho you still have a DHCP assigned dynamic IP. (To get the static IP you need the expensive full business class service.)
Thanks for the questions. They make me think. =:^)
To me, it's a game of odds. If we had preference-voting, it'd be different, but we don't, so one must weigh their chances and vote accordingly.
Obama's part of one of the two dominant parties of our two-party system. As such, if I vote for him despite not agreeing with a position he took in an issue of major importance to me and he wins, I just seriously increased the chances of more of the same things I disagree with occurring.
OTOH, if I vote for a third party candidate, say Barr, and they (against odds) win, it WOULD shake up Washington that a third party candidate won, but even if other Libertarians against even stronger odds won a majority of the US Congressional seats they are running for, simple practicality is they couldn't do too much damage the first term. For one thing, in the Senate, only a third of the seats are up for election every two years, so even if every Senate seat open for a vote this year went Libertarian along with the presidency, there'd still be roughly 2/3s of the senate still in current majority two-party hands. Further, the senate's 3/5s majority vote to overcome a filibuster would make anything seriously resisted by the two currently dominant parties and their remaining 2/3s majority even MORE difficult to get thru the senate. And the senate confirms federal judges and justices too.
Put simply, the founding fathers made it all but impossible for a single two-year-cycle election to massively change the direction of Washington even under mathematically extreme odds. Over a four-year presidential term, if the mid-term elections go the same way, it's mathematically possible to change things radically, but even then, it's not likely. In reality, it's going to take at least a full 6-year senate voting cycle to get to to the point of no return. (This is why I was so disillusioned when Bush got a second term with the Republicans in control of both houses of congress as well, but luckily things turned around by the critical 6-year mark.)
Given that, and the fact that it's unlikely I'll completely agree with any candidate or party, plus the fact that the Republicans seemed to be running away with things and when they got control, the Democrats seemed rather less than enthused about actually stopping the stuff they were elected on the basis of stopping, that third party "shake up Washington" even if I don't agree with everything said third party espouses option looks pretty good, certainly better than a Republicrat duopoly where the Republicans seem intent on throwing civil liberties and our national reputation to the terrorists, and the Democrats don't seem all that interested in stopping them from doing so, even when they DO get the numeric majority and ran on a platform of just that, stopping the Republicans. Then you have a guy win the Democratic nomination who looks willing to stop them, but then on a critical vote, surprise surprise (NOT) after the Democratic behavior of the last two years, reverses himself and decides to go along with throwing yet more civil liberties to the terrorists.
Like I said, I may not agree with everything on the Libertarian platform, but these days, it seems I agree with as much of it as I do anyone else's platform, and the shake-up-Washington angle looks rather good compared to the possible damage they could do -- especially when the immediate effect of much of what might be damaging in the long term is a reversal of the current administration's (and the ones before that as well, altho it's the current administration that has been most damaging, IMO) policies. The immediate effect would be positive even if left to run, the ultimate effect would arguably be negative. We'd have multiple elections to correct it before it got to that point.
It doesn't bother me. Why? Because I'm an ad-blocker using privoxy and I know exactly what sorts of filter code the blocker is using, because I customized the filters as necessary.
Nearly all of those filters are on things like URLs with the substring "ad" (but using look-ahead/behind to allow adsl, road, etc, thru) or "track" or the like. Often, whole sections of the page are set-off with comments "begin xxx-ad", "end xxx-ad". It's very obvious that in many cases they are deliberately making it /easy/, for people to block the ads, or even filter out that entire bit of the page including all its formatting so it's displayed as if the ad wasn't even there.
But why would they do that? Simple, really. In general, advertisers tend to target the easily programmable zombies, those who don't ask /why/ they need whatever's advertised, those who if programmed by being shown an ad often enough, will happily trade in their car, say, you know, the one that was new just a year or two ago that's only now getting a bluebook value more than they still owe on the thing, for an even newer car, and the privilege to /again/ owe more on their car than it's worth. The don't /what/ the people that will be pointing out how stupid that is, the people that can /actually/ /think/ /for/ /themselves/, that despise the efforts to program them into witless zombies only doing the commercial bidding of the ads they happen to see the most.
People who can actually think for themselves not only aren't very likely to buy whatever's so forcefully pushed on them, but they're an actual waste of bandwidth, driving the click-track statistics down, lowering the per-view rates for everyone and increasing bandwidth costs for no reason on the per-click ads. Site owners therefore not only don't care if people like this -- like me -- actually view the ads, they DON'T WANT us viewing the ads, because all we do is make the click-thru rates lower than they'd otherwise be, or if we do click (possibly accidentally, we were just trying to bring the window back to the top, or whatever), even adding the additional bandwidth costs of that, without ultimately purchasing anything.
So they actually make it easy for ad-blockers to function, since at least at this point, the very fact that one's actually running an ad-blocker self-selects for one who can think for themselves, and not only isn't so likely to be programmed into buying something, but might actually avoid it or spread their negative opinion of it to others. This is the sort of person advertisers actually prefer NOT see the ads, thus explaining why they obviously make it so easy to block them, even going so far as inserting helpful begin-ad end-ad comments to make it even easier. (Or, as I've seen recently, even ad-class css, whcih can be simply set to no-display, IMPORTANT, in the browser's accessibility CSS or rewritten to no-display in privoxy.)
Now, making this ad-blocker technology available to the programmable and uncaring masses that actually support all this "free" content /can/ be a bit disturbing. However, not entirely so to those of us already in the freedom software movement. After all, there's other forms of payment than ad-dollars, and the entire freedom software movement has come a long way on what some would believe impractical dreams. If people will code for the peer recognition and/or simple joy of doing so, if others will spend long unpaid hours in the the various technical forums, lists, and newsgroups, helping others for the simple pleasure of it, and even people who get more negative peer recognition than positive if people here it, will still sing in the shower, then there's obviously other reasons to exercise one's creativity and share one's knowledge than for ad-dollars, or even money at all!
Some would even argue, and it's quite popular on this site to do so, that the music labels and
Actually, the entire fact that you're complaining about it means not enough are POed about it to make a difference. Maybe slightly perturbed, but not enough to have them looking for blockers or to keep them from coming back.
And you're part of the problem, not the solution, since if you're complaining about it, you obviously go back to the sites often enough for it to be a big deal to you. While it's possible you can't load privoxy or the like, or firefox, and block the popovers that way, you can certainly choose not to visit the site again, and if enough people did that, the problem would disappear, either because the abusive sites went under, or because they changed their ways, one or the other. That it isn't happening indicates that too few people actually care about it to do something about it, either by blocking or by going elsewhere for the content, and if you are one of the people continuing to figuratively take it up the ass crosswise and going back again and again for it, you're part of the reason those sites continue to exist!
The history of that bill is otherwise. While the vote was a lopsided 68/29/3 (y/n/not-voting), one must remember that it was filibustered, and overcoming a filibuster takes a 3/5 super-majority (on the US Senate base of 100), so the margin was more like 8 votes than 18, and wasn't a sure thing at all. It had previously failed, and the supporters had to "deal" in ordered to get the votes they needed. One wonders what deal Obama cut in ordered to get him to change is vote after an original pledge to oppose it if it included telecom immunity.
By contrast, as one of the drafters of the original FISA this bill was updating, Biden was opposed to the bill with the telecom immunity provision from the beginning, and remained so. He pointed out that McCain's (and Obama's as well, after he switched, tho that wasn't pointed out) position on this put him in the company of both Bush and Nixon in taking the position that the President is above the law. Further, he quoted himself from the original FISA debate in 1978, "it is not necessary to compromise civil liberties in the name of national security", saying that's as true today, in a time of war, as it was then, and calling the bill including the telecom immunity provision "a false choice -- national security or civil liberties."
While Biden's record on civil liberties isn't perfect (while he voted to extend PATRIOT in 2005, bad for civil liberties, he did at least vote against reauthorizing its wiretap provision in 2006, and he sponsored legislation that unfortunately died in committee that would have banned torture and interrogation techniques not authorized by the US Army Field Manual, which is pretty reasonable), it's actually more good than bad, better than most, unfortunately.
See this article at the Daily Kos, from which I borrowed somewhat liberally for the above, for more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/23/112722/071
I'm on record as hoping Obama might either reverse himself or satisfactorily explain himself on this, so I could again support him. I had been as close as I'd ever been to donating to his campaign, before this, but that vote ended all thought of that, and I was seriously looking into third party candidates and even considering for the first time since I could vote, just saying home for this presidential election, as I couldn't vote for McCain, Obama wasn't leaving me reason to vote FOR him (as opposed to against McCain) either (tho as I posted in response to someone else on another story, I'd have probably voted third party, likely Barr, because altho I don't agree with much of that platform, it'd shake up Washington and the still dominant two parties would have killed anything too radical, at least the first term... and because I take voting as a duty and would have felt guilty not voting... but writing in none-of-the-above as a protest would have been an option as well). While I don't believe Biden was chosen primarily for his position on this, the choice /does/ start the process, or at least signal that it might happen. I'm still not all that hopeful, but it's possible, and at least I have the option of voting Obama/Biden now, where before it was beginning to look like my only options would be third party or a none-of-the-above write-in.
We'll see.
Because proprietary does /not/ work better than the alternative, for some of us. Open does, because that's what xorg/gnome/kde support first, while the NVidia users of the community complain that the new software either doesn't work or is so slow as to be unusable. (See for example any of the recent xorg updates, where the proprietary drivers were holding back inclusion or stabilizing of the latest xorg, or KDE 4.1, where NVidia cards are simply unworkably slow for many users.)
That, and with the Dells and Asuses and Acers of the world now releasing and supporting computers with Linux installed, proprietary driver hardware just isn't as practical for them as open driver hardware. That's /got/ to be putting a pinch on NVidia right now, as they're now the only one refusing to cooperate with the community and provide at least specs, if not sponsor developers to provide open drivers.
Not everybody's so focused on games, you know. Some people want 3D and etc for the latest 3D desktop effects. While NVidia has arguably dominated the proprietary/gaming Linux market, they don't even have a horse in the open/desktop market yet, and their announced policy is that they don't intend to, either. The market changed and NVidia, like MS with the Internet and Intel with x86_64, was late to the game. Only MS and Intel both hugely dominated the market and had enough resources to survive the dry spell that resulted. NVidia neither dominates the market nor has the MS/Intel resources. While Linux is still low market share, it has taken advantage of the MS Vista misstep and the explosion of the netbook phenomenon and if Intel's projections are to be believed, that's a HUGE opening, that NVidia is all set to miss out on. Couple that with the GPU/CPU synergy that's all the rage now, and NVidia's looking pretty lonely out there by itself, missing two changes that could either one or both be as significant as the X86_64 thing has been.
> You expect people to whip that monstrosity up every
> fucking time they want to match for addresses?
"No, Mr. Bond, I expect them to die."
More seriously, while that was to some extent my reaction as well (no less handy? WTF are you smokin'?), every sysadmin worth the name has his own little collection of scriptlets that he uses over and over that make his job easier, and this would be no different. How many do you think are reading this now, and noting it for later googling when it comes time to make the switch and they decide they need it? Write once, source it many times. It doesn't take a programmer to be able to do that, only a sysadmin too lazy to want to whip it up and test it every time it's needed, because why should they when it's already done and they can look it up?
After the first time, they even have it locally, in the script they used it in last time, so they don't even have to go to the net for it.
Hmm, possible /. referrer block? Depending on how your browsers are setup, of course, but presumably you loaded konqueror for the link directly so it wouldn't have had the /. referrer, while you were using firefox to view /. first, and clicking the link directly then had /. as your referrer, while manually changing the address bar didn't.
FWIW it's working in both browsers here, but both are running thru privoxy, with referrer conditional-block (delete header if coming from a different server), so clicking thru from /. to a different site would appear as if I typed or copied the link in, or used a bookmark -- no referrer header. WTF do they need to know what other site I was coming from? Thus, they don't get that info from me!
> I really wish there were a viable third party to vote for.
Your wish is your command. Seriously, while the rules are certainly stacked for a two-party system, the only thing keeping it that way is the widely held belief that voting for anyone else is throwing your vote away. If you believe that a your single vote counts at all, as you evidently do, then it should be self-evident that the only thing keeping third parties from mattering is the believe that they don't matter. Self-fulfilling prophesy.
And it's not entirely hopeless from a numbers perspective, either. While the system is indeed stacked to maintain two-party dominance and unfortunately many third party candidates do seem half crazy, it doesn't take an outright win or even getting a directly significant number of elected representatives of a particular party in ordered to get a change. Ross Perot could have made a difference and did for a short time, but didn't maintain the organization or do much of anything with what he had, so he lost it. At the state level, who would have thought Jesse Ventura could have done what he did? The dominant parties can and do adjust their positions to appeal to significant segments of voters, and should the defeatists change their mind and believe a third party candidate /can/ achieve something, they most certainly can, even if they don't get the position they were running for right away or indeed at all.
Me? I think I'm somewhat opposite you, in that there's a whole stack of reasons I couldn't vote McCain. I was cautiously supporting Obama earlier, and still expect him to win as long as he keeps the optimistic position (political analysts and historians note that it's extremely seldom that a pestimistic or negative candidate wins against a positive/optimistic one, and I believe Obama likely to win based on that alone), but I don't believe I can vote for him unless he adequately explains his anti-human-rights anti-law vote re warrantless wiretapping. Unless he reverses his position there or otherwise convinces me he had a decent reason for that vote, I'll likely vote third party if I can find someone I'm reasonably comfortable with, or write-in none-of-the-above, if not, simply because there's nothing better. However, not expecting them to win, even if they are crazy to some extent, I can probably find a third party to vote for in the hopes that it'll at least get enough votes to significantly influence things, and if they /do/ win, to shake things up, knowing there'll be enough resistance from the entrenched two-party system to keep things from getting much crazier than they already are, even in the unlikely event the possibly somewhat crazy third party candidate I'll likely vote for does win. That's pretty much what happened to Jesse Ventura, too -- the entrenched resistance kept him from going too far out, and unfortunately there wasn't enough depth there to provide a lasting change. But again, if one believes an individual vote makes any difference at all, as one must if they believe it's almost treasonous not to vote (a position I definitely sympathize with), then one must also believe that change is possible, should we quit prophesying and self-fulfilling the prophesy that it's not.
I had that happen to me once. I typoed a starred box and never did figure out what I had put there. Actually, I think I must have typoed the same thing twice as I believe it DID have a confirm.
That's why every time I get one of those now, I open up a text-editor window or something, where I can see what I'm doing, put it in there, then select it, check klipper's select/copy list to verify it's in there correctly, paste it back into my scratch window to verify I'm pasting what I expect, /then/ paste it directly into the starred box and confirm.
I've not had the problem again.
This will be coming out about the time the Acer Aspire One refreshes... They're supposed to make the 6-cell standard on some or all of the 150s, and offer a 120 gig SATA based hard drive -- the current 11- version uses a ZIF attached IDE for the SSD, and according to the reviews, the place for the SATA attachment onboard isn't active, so unless you want to do some soldering...
If you couldn't tell by now, I'm looking strongly at the AOA 150s, here. I'd be fine with whatever size disk they put in as I may well be upgrading it anyway, but I DO want that SATA active. SuperTalent has a 120 gig MDL Flash SATA SDD that looks interesting to put in if I decide to go SDD, or I can replace it with a 200 gig plus... or decide the 120 gig is enough.
I'm NOT going to buy it with XPrivacy on it tho. No, this will be the first whole computer I've bought in a decade (I normally upgrade a piece or two at a time on my desktop/workstation), and I'm not going to have it be an MSWormOS statistic. It's Linux (I'll be installing Gentoo as build in a 32-bit chroot created especially for the purpose on my dual-dual-core Opteron, so either way I'm overwriting, but it's going to be a Linux statistic not an MSWormOS statistic) or nothing.
The usage idea here is somewhat different than most. For years I've wanted a 100 gig plus MP3 player. First, they simply didn't have them. Then they did, but none that ran a decent rockbox or Linux, and by then that's what I wanted. So that's mainly what I'm getting this for, but it'll double as a nice mininote, full keyboard and 1024 px width display, while I'm at it. Still, I'm going to continue using my big workstation as my main @home computer, and just use this one for its portable convenience in addition to the 100+ gigs of music and movies that's my primary use for it. I figure with the 6-cell with wifi and the screen turned off most of the time I'm playing MP3s, I should get a fairly decent run on the battery life. I had hoped the SATA would be active on the first gen and was planning to install the 120 gig SSD mentioned above to go along with the 8 gig built-in, but that was unfortunately not to be. But the 150s look more like what I want, and should be out in Sept/Oct timeframe, so before the end of the year and about time this already non-starter (due to eXPrivacy only here in the US their choice) from Lenovo gets here. We'll see.
What you've apparently missed (as you mentioned .org but not this) is that the .org folks (PIR) just got ICANN board approval to deploy DNSSEC at their gTLD level. This occurred at the 32nd Annual ICANN meeting in Paris (in June, I believe). Apparently PIR has been pushing DNSSEC for some time and is pretty much ready to go, altho it'll still take some time to actually get up and running.
Here's one informative link I found on Google. Google for dnssec .org icann for more:
http://blog.nominet.org.uk/insight/2008/06/icann-paris-dnssec/
I recently switched to VoIP here, and deliberately did /not/ transfer my old phone number. The VoIP provider has an (optional) service that sends anon CID calls to an answerer that asks them to dial a random set of numbers to prove they are human. If they don't, they don't get thru.
Of course, as about all VoIP providers, they bundle CID (along with all sorts of other fancy stuff the former monopolists charge extra for) at no additional charge. When I upgraded to VoIP I took the opportunity to upgrade my home system as well, and got a "Speaking CallerID" setup. It's GREAT!! Where previously I had found CID almost useless and had therefore canceled it as it cost more, choosing instead to let everything go to answerer and I'd only answer it if I recognized the caller, now I get the announcement of who it is. Some still come up "Cell Phone ", but once I put them in the phone book it announces that name instead. After a few weeks, I was able to ignore anything generic as everyone I wanted to take calls from was already in its phone book and thus no longer generic.
I've had the system for about a year now, and in that time, have only gotten three apparent phone-spammer calls. Those three were using automated dialers and faked CIDs, aaaa, bbbb and jjjj or some such (BTW, it can be rather "interesting" to hear the phone's interpretation of say, initials), to bypass the random number dial intelligence test. As I also have a phone-zapper (what was originally advertised for $50 I picked up at the dollar store), set to play the "disconnected tri-tone" error on answer (I tell anyone I /want/ to call to expect it), all I did was pickup and at the tone the other end immediately hung up -- it was a bot, as I said. That was a couple months ago so it was 10 months with ZERO phone-spammers, the three in quick succession, and another couple months without. Thus, the speaking CID hasn't been nearly as useful as I expected it to be, but it has still been worth it, as I don't even have to look to know who's calling, now.
Since VoIP is actually competitive, prices only run about $20/mo (e911 and regulatory fees included, a bit more than that, $25-30, if paid month to month, a bit less, $15-20, if prepaid a year at a time, again including all the "extra" fees) including full US long distance coverage and all the other stuff the former monopolists want to charge an arm and a leg for, caller-id, three-way-calling, call-waiting, voice mail, etc. In fact, due to the competition, most providers add either even fancier features -- scheduled do-not-disturb, automated-wakeup-calls, the random-number-human-test thing I mentioned for no-CID calls above -- or limited international calling, sometimes including not only Canada but much of Western Europe in the same unlimited calling $20-ish/mo fee.
Sure I have the occasional echo or dropout, but unlike the former monopolists or the cableco's phone offering, these guys actually know how to treat a customer, and because one can now shop nationwide or even worldwide for providers, they don't forget it either, or their customers today simply end up someone else's customers tomorrow! There's no way I'd go back!
(FWIW, unlike Internet, I consider phone service including 911 service a luxury, and I keep e911 service altho it's not quite as direct now, so dropping the wired provider wasn't a problem. I've never had a cellphone as I've simply never been able to cost-justify the additional cost given my usage. Some may prefer keeping minimal measured-call service or the like, if they are uncomfortable losing the security of conventional 911 service.)
I'm not going to say who my provider is as this isn't about selling them. There's several providers out there with similar offerings. Just do your research. FWIW, I started with the commercial VoIP provider listing at Wikipedia tho I ended up with someone not listed there. If you REALLY want to know who it is, post a request and I'll say, but you really SHOULD do at least some o
FON network router: It depends on what you are calling the "public" and "private" networks in this case, AFAIK.
FWIR (from what I read), the FON network is semi-public, public to you as you don't know who's using it, private to the FON network, as only participants get to use it, with FON effectively standing in the role of ISP, taking responsibility for what travels over their network, banning abusive users, etc.
Thus, if you're calling the FON side "public", you /should/ be able to simply point to FON and have them deal with it (altho I'm unaware how much responsibility they actually take in practice, or of any actual legal decisions ruling one way or the other, thus the italicized /should/). If you have a fully unrestricted public access network, then the previous reply, that bandwidth capping is evidence that you knew it was there and that makes you /more/ liable, is most likely (IANAL, etc) correct.
Of course, with a FON network router, the entire purpose of the network being to share, if it /does/ come down to your responsibility, it's going to be pretty hard to argue you didn't know it was happening.
You missed a word.
Until days ago MS had a face, Gates' face (borged or not). Without Gates, without that face...
But it's still not entirely faceless. There's Balmer, altho some may argue they'd be better without /that/ face.
Anyway, the rest may indeed have already been the case, but like 'em or hate 'em, there's little good argument to be made in the statement that Gates really was synonymous in many ways with MS, and that really, they could have done a lot worse.
... or said /.er only runs freedomware, and thus cares less about a slaveryware game release than about, say, the latest KDE or GNOME release. Now /that's/ the sort of thing that keeps /this/ /.er immobile for a day or so, up-merging from the last -rc on Gentoo/~amd64, or used to before I upgraded to a an 8-gig quad-core quad-spindle RAID system workstation set to compile to tmpfs. Now it's only 2-4 hours, depending on how much has changed and how much is still in ccache since my last up-merge, and during that time I'm catching up on /., etc, as well. =8^)
[Replying mostly to GP, extending the ideas in parent]
Watts are energy per unit time (as parent stated). The electric company charges you (in the simple case) for energy used, so time must appear as a multiplier as well (thus kilowatt-hours), in ordered to get energy used.
Conversions of that nature, knowing your units and what you needed, thus allowing one to figure out whether the quantity went above (multiplied by X units) or below (divided by X units), while at the same time telling you which of several supplied figures you needed to plug in, instead of rote-memorizing arbitrary formulas, was basic high school physics and chemistry, where I went to school.
Put a different way, taking that 1 joule per second figure for a watt, times 1 hour which is 3600 seconds, and factoring in 1000 for the kilo in kiloJoule, and you have (imagine this in pen on a scratch paper, show your work and all that, with a line between the top and bottom that I removed due to the lameness filter, seconds and hours cancel so imagine them crossed out...):
So 1 watt (1 joule per second, energy per time) used for a period of one hour (time, multiplier) equals 3.6 kJ, (plain energy).As for the electric bill, FWIW, here in Phoenix, AZ, using APS (two electric companies in Phoenix, APS is one), residential users get a choice of three billing plans.
Standard is a simple per-kW-hour charge. Nothing fancy. Easy to calculate. No particular worries about timing your usage, but comparatively expensive if you can manage your usage using either of the plans below.
Demand based calculates the kW-hour rate based on the peak usage. This is what commercial rates commonly are in much of the country and what makes sense for those who can manage their peak usage, putting say the water heater and A/C on an interlock so the water heater kicks off if the A/C comes on, thus keeping their peak usage low.
Time based changes the rate based on the time of day -- the meter will track usage based on multiple time periods, with a rate for each. Here in Phoenix, peak/expensive usage is day-time and into evening, 10 AM to 7 PM or so, AFAIK. Those who are out of the house and can leave the A/C off during most of this period for at least six days a week, and/or who have ice reservoir or similar cooling systems (make ice at nite, thaw it during the day to cool the building using only fans and the salt-slurry coolant pumps) can take advantage of this plan to dramatically lower their bills.
> It's quite a dangerous endeavour to ride bike
> in Wintertime. Your wheels may suddenly just
> jerk sideways and completely slip away from
> under you, slamming you in the ground.
I used to ride in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I was in college there. It's not quite as bad as much of Canada probably, but there was certainly snow, and I remember riding in traffic-and-salt-slush. It was a street/racing 14-speed too, not a mountain bike or the like. One just had to be rather more careful. You get used to it.
I'd still consider doing it now, too, but would want a knobby-tire mountain bike at least, not a 1.25" 100 PSI smooth tire.
I wonder if they have studded bike tires...? Seems that'd be the way to go.
> Besides, dangerous or not, riding a bike by
> minus 10, minus 20 is just very damn uncomfortable.
You can always add more layers, and that's what I'd do, too, tho it wasn't quite that cold, maybe 20F, -7C (ish). I'd wear a sweat shirt, a windbreaker, a sweater, and another windbreaker, then sometimes a coat on top if it were really cold but it would always come off after a few minutes of riding. Jeans and long underwear, snow boots. As I road, first the coat if I wore one would come off, then the sweater (take off windbreaker and sweater, put back on windbreaker, then the windbreaker, then sometimes the inner windbreaker as well, or keep it but doff the sweat shirt, depending on the wind. Once one got riding, the single layer tended to be enough.
But I'm in Phoenix, now. Winter's no big deal, but summer is another thing entirely. Try riding in the hot sun when it's 115+F 46+C in the shade! You can't peal off more layers when you get down to skin, shorts and tank! I did it a year or so, but ride the bus or stay inside in the A/C during the day now. That said, the key is staying hydrated -- your clothes too. A wet shirt and hat is a personal portable swamp cooler, and if you rewet them every few miles and take care to keep drinking and eating enough salt to keep up your electrolytes, yes, you /can/ still ride in that heat! I know because I've done it.
'Round here, it's not even summer until it's hitting triple digits F (38C). We read the news about people dieing in "heatwaves" of a "mere" 90-some degrees F (35-ish C) highs... and don't know whether to laugh or cry or just shake our heads. Some days here in the summer, that's lower than our LOW for the day, with a temp that may barely break 100F/38C for an hour or two, about 6 or 7 in the morning! And people are DYING from those "heat waves" that wouldn't even be summer here, in this metropolis of over four million people? WTF?
"Phoenix, the city that air conditioning built!" Seriously, I'm sure the population would only be perhaps a third what it is (but that'd still be greather than a million people), without A/C.
"You know, they tell you not to die in the summer here in Phoenix, because it's late September or early October before you figure out whether you're in hell or not!" =8^)
Bank of America has this now. I don't use it as I don't have a cell phone for them to text info to, but they have it as a second-path authentication option.
I had read about the European key fob type things and wondered when something like that would show up here. I guess BofA decided to take the cheaper for them route since many now have cell phones, but personally, I've simply never been able to justify the additional cost for a cell phone over (formerly) a landline, and the hurdle got higher recently when I switched to VoIP, so mobe connectivity isn't looking likely any time soon, here. ($99/mo including text/data/voice, what I understand T-Mobils unlimited offer is, looks interesting, but the available bandwidth on the data side isn't going to compare too well to my cable connection, so...)
No, you didn't do your math correctly. =8^)
.5-1 Mbps. Here, my upstream cap is .5 Mbps, so that's the figure I did the math with when I saw the story earlier. I didn't do the hours to overload, but rather took the approach of max possible upstream usage if I had it saturated 24/7.
.5 Mbps, max bandwidth was just over 158 GByte/mo. This is what someone seeding a torrent might do. If in that month they spent the 40 gigs allowance on download (I picked that just to make it easier), the total overage fee in dollars would equal the upload gigabytes, $158. So the total bill for a person maxing their upstream bandwidth seeding and using the 40 gig allowance on download would be $213/mo. @ 1 Mbps upstream, it'd be $316 overage and $371 total. So in practice, we're looking at (low) hundreds of dollars per month, not thousands.
15 Mbit/second, not Mbyte.
We want hours, and the time is on the bottom so flip the units so the time ends up on top:
sec/15 megabit * hr/3600 sec * 8 bit/byte * 1024 meg/gig * 40 gigabyte =...
Top and bottom units canceling: sec, meg, bit, byte, gig. That leaves hours on top. Looks like it's setup correctly as that's what we want, so do the math (work it from the right or alternating, if using a typical calculator's limited precision floating point)...
1/15/3600*8*1024*40 = (just under) 6.07 hours. Call it six hours, so you could download nearly 4X the allowance per day.
However, in reality, it's quite likely that those busting the limit will be doing enough uploading to make that the bottleneck much of the time, due to the two-way ACK nature of TCP and the fact that most cable links, at least here in the US, have a vastly higher download than upload bandwidth cap. It's likely to be
@
Now that's making some assumptions, but it does serve to prove a point. $200-300/mo is about what the uncapped gigs/mo biz accounts run around here, given similar speed caps. That's the going rate for "pessimistic" assumptions about oversell ratio as used on business (close to 1:1), as compared to the "optimistic" assumptions (10:1 maybe 20:1) they use on residential accounts. Of course, in addition to unrestricted bandwidth usage, they can run servers (against the AUP/TOS for residential users) and get much better support, even an SLA in some cases.
Thus, an active user can choose. If they are running near that level anyway, they might as well get the biz account and be able to run servers and get the SLA. If they are running somewhat less, say 100 gigs a month ($115 total), it'll be more of a tradeoff, save the
money, pay more for unrestricted but get the SLA and server privs, or settle for a lower speed unrestricted, with the SLA and server privs. If their usage is spotty, they can keep the residential and only pay the $55 on the months they don't use more than 40 gigs, while paying more when they do use it.
It's not perfect and the per gig rate could arguably be cheaper, but it's better than cutting off people, giving them little or no alternative, or throttling them, again giving them little or no alternative.
It should also be noted that currently, there's a certain level of mixed motivivation, since heavy users cost them more but don't pay more. Turn this into a standard profit motivation, where they make a bit on each gig, and they now have a much bigger incentive to side with the computer tech firms instead of the media companies in their lobbying efforts.
Of course, this all assumes the "gas guage" they say they are providing, allowing folks to track their usage is accurate and kept working and up-to-date.
Mac I have no idea, but on MS platforms, if there's no there's speed graphing shareware that will do it (back when I would still sign away my rights in the form of a EULA, DUM, Download/Upload Meter, had this feature and was IIRC $15).
On Linux, it's part of Netfilter/IPTables, and therefore should be part of pretty much any firewall software built on top of it. YMMV, but here, I tried various supposedly "easier" software, and found it very difficult to do the sorts of stuff I wanted to do, so eventually got around to reading a couple Netfilter/IPTables itself tutorials, and found (as I by then expected) that it was way easier for me to configure directly, than it was to try to figure out how to do advanced stuff thru all the supposedly "easier" interfaces.
As a bonus, once you know the basics, it's dead-simple to setup even such "advanced" stuff as TCP-RESET filters (log, drop, or both) that only apply to your torrent ports, for those on ISPs who apparently think pretending to be the server at the other end when sending the things is good customer relations.
Of course, that's a per-computer solution and without additional configuration (again, easy with Netfilter, perhaps not so easy with proprietaryware), would include LAN traffic in the overall totals, unhelpful if you do much LAN at all. The way around that would be to put a suitably customizable router between the modem and the LAN... one running Linux and Netfilter/IPTables would fit the bill perfectly... maybe one of the commercial routers loaded with an appropriate community authored firmware...