OK, agreed, tax & SS-related forms are legitimate.
Now: what abou the whole "credit check" thing? Let's ask a more fundamental question--why is the SSN required for this sort of thing at all? Or for transcript verification?
Simple answer: It's a unique identifier, you said it. Funny thing that, doesn't the Social Security Act specify that the SSN is not meant to be used as identification except for Social Security purposes?
You hit the nail on the head with the word "easy". It's easy. "Easy" is not always good, and in this case, it is shit. "Easy" is what made some plank store this sort of crap on a laptop, probably in Excel, probably unencrypted. "Easy" in this case is bad.
As this link mentions, one of the problems is that there is no law _preventing_ business (including schools) from requiring this supposedly private piece of information as a precondition for delivering services, without making allowance for an alternative.
So I think in this case we can replace "easy" with "unprofessional", "lazy", "unethical" even.
As we all know, playing D&D and computer games leads to mental deformity, satanism, inbreeding, communism, and foreign beer consumption.
In a similar vein, your son could be a computer hacker!!! Parents beware, do not allow your children to turn into the Columbine trench coat mafia. Lock them indoors with some truly wholesome literature. Make sure that our country does not succumb to this dark menace.
Fun idea, useless with those numbers. Companies file patents to (a) protect themselves against lawsuits ("if you sue me for patent infringement, I'm likely to have something in my archive based on which I can sue you back") and (b) make money through licensing.
The monetary gain for a company, in the case of (a) through avoided legal costs, and for (b) in actual revenues far exceeds the trivial amounts you specify.
Make the scale geometric and it starts having teeth:)
Very good points, but a minor issue--what happens when the estate of the author is actually a corporation?
IANAL but I believe "estate" is defined as the legal collection of heirs, and you can definitely will your property to a commercial entity, or as is done more commonly, a foundation...
Re:Women aren't interested in IT?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, most of the women I've personally worked with in IT fell into a very limited set of categories, personality-wise:
The managers, hence fuckwits (just like men.) Very few managers are not fuckwits. Unfortunately, with one possible exception, on which the jury's still out, the female managers I dealt with were as bad as the usual male manager. By virtue of having contact with more male managers than with female ones, the chances of meeting a non-fuckwit female manager was greatly reduced.
The uninterested--as another poster described, these were the sort of trend-drones seen during the dot-com boom. Once again, fuckwits. Fewer women percentually means fewer non-fuckwits, absolutely. In my case, the non-fuckwit female trend-drone share was nil.
The intimidated--because of the (real or perceived) disadvantages faced by women in IT, these were the mousy, quiet types who never had anything to say. Happens with men too, but as men usually tend to be at least a bit more assertive, it's less common. Not unpleasant to work with, mainly since you never encounter them (they're hiding.) "Oh no I could never do this, I might break it."
The intimidating--taking the previous class a step further, these are the ones who treat every personal encounter as a confrontation. Not man-haters, just insecure people afraid of being fucked by god-knows-what, or unsure of their ability to deal with people trying to fuck them (in a professional manner, mind--no, not that kind of professional manner.) See managers.
The officious--an offshoot of the last category. One of my dearly held stereotypes is that women care more about rules than men do (as in Dilbert's Wally vs. Alice.) These are the types who will throw rules and roadblocks in your face out of principle, because you COULD BE TRYING TO PULL A FAST ONE OH MY GOD. See managers.
The cool ones--don't care, are professional and competent, have the self-confidence to ignore harassment or hit back with wit and style, and understand that there's a job to be done and hey, can't we all just get along. Very rare, but oh so incredibly appreciated. They get things done, are more responsible than the guys, come up with cool, creative solutions, and basically combine all the good sides of a "typical" female personality with a few characteristics making it easy for guys to work with them. Once again, I realize that most of these stereotypes apply to men as well. I love working with women, if they fall into the latter class. It's just been my experience that a far higher percentage of men tend to be competently agreeable to work with than women.
The main points that I make to women (as with anyone) when talking about IT careers are: (a) don't be intimidated, and (b) don't do this job if you don't love it, and can deal with technical and human shit a lot of the time. Rule #1? Relax, it's a job, get it done and that's it.
Erm, I've been doing this for nearly two years now. I own about 600 CDs, and got sick of it all after a combination of **AA/government excesses, broken copyright (and IP in general) laws, and specifically, my inability to rip my girlfriend's Herbert Groenemeyer Live CD to my mp3 player.
Said last incident was what really set me off--I wrote the guy in charge of their stupid bullshit copy protection group a nastygram, basically informing him that I would never buy from EMI Germany again, and would tell all my friends not to as well. He wrote back a very civil, well-reasoned (but wrong, using all the known arguments for copy protection) mail. I have not bought music for a long time now.
Copy protection, raids for copyright infringement, whatever. I am exercising my right as a customer (NOT "CONSUMER", NOTE THE DAMN DIFFERENCE!) to not buy their shit, not watch their TV, not see their movies, and generally try to do my little bit to remove as much commerce as possible from their filthy little fingers.
In summary, why a boycott? Just tell all your friends and family...
I spent a few days at a customer's in Germany watching two guys from n.runs take apart a highly proprietary medical system.
It was the most awe-inspiring thing I've ever seen--these guys went through it like a hot knife through butter, starting from _zero_ knowledge of the box. In the process, they even found solutions to a few bugs which had been annoying the actual support & development staff for ages.
They essentially spent a few hours playing with the system, finding enormous amounts of horrible shit security-wise based on what looked like a pretty superficial audit--their plan was to spend the rest of the week they were scheduled to be there to learn that manufacturer's cpu architecture, to be able to "audit" SAN components based on the same hardware in the future.
So no, obscurity is not necessarily a bad thing, if it does not replace real security (which you simply cannot realistically achieve without the kind of peer review accomplished by having a reasonably open architecture, so there's your catch-22.)
I live in Switzerland, and we pay a similar, although outrageously priced, tax. Our government-run stations, like many other 'services' offered by gov.ch, are continually looking for new ways to justify their outdated existence in a changing world.
We have two small 14" TVs which we mainly use to watch a bit of CNN or MTV while getting ready to go ot work or as background noise while eating dinner (yes, I know, I know.) Neither my girlfriend nor I have enough time off from work and our rare social bits of freedom to watch a lot of the horse shit that passes for entertainment these days. I work a bit less than her, and I've found it far more rewarding to either read a book, see some friends or play online games (for which I already pay via broadband bills, thank you very much.) My computer-based entertainment is covered by the money I pay to **AA for the rare CD I buy.
That said, the blanket TV tax is bad, as it punishes those, like myself and my girlfriend, who don't use its "benefits" (i.e. we don't like the stations that are actually publicly funded); nor does it go to actually give us value for our money, as it's mainly used to produce crap which is, honestly, not much above what you get on (private) brain-cell-killing German cable TV.
Thankfully,.ch doesn't (to my knowledge) have detector vans, and I feel no remorse lying to them about our second TV set.
Nonono 2017 is the date when they review the existing TV licensing laws under the BBC's charter review. This means that the existing TV tax will continue until then. The article's implication is that by then there may not be any TVs to tax anymore
Taxing computers is independent of this and could be done right now as an additional measure.
That said, stupidity is found everywhere. This is yet another reason why I loathe politicians...
What a lot of the "this isn't fair, this is criminal, this is predatory" posts seem to be predicated around is the mistaken belief that life is fair and that the stupid should have the same good life as the intelligent.
This is not a life insurance-selling shill forcing his way into some poor ignorant grandma's house, putting pressure tactics on her to buy into scam xyz. Much like people caught up in ponzi scams, Tom Vu seminars, what have you, it is entirely up to the user what he sees. Remember that truism about lotteries being a tax on people who're bad at math? Well there you go.
Nor are these guys pushing (for the most part) spyware, trojans, credit card theft, viruses, what-have-you, on unsuspecting PC users who've taken all reasonable precautions. I understand that your post is facetious (at least I hope it is) but referring to what I wrote above, the stupid, ignorant and lazy have exactly the same chances as everyone else. What they make of them is entirely up to them, including learning how to spell slsahdot.
Movies are out of print, they don't sell them in your artificially imposed region of the world, they don't sell the version you want in your artificially imposed region of the world, just to name 3 examples.
It's not about pirating. I just bought a Gmini and I want to watch my movies on it. I want to copy my movies onto my Thinkpad X31, which doesn't have a built-in DVD player, so I can watch them on the plane. I want to back up my DVDs so that when I take them over to my friend's house and his 3 year old decides to take a screwdriver to them, I don't lose my original.
And you know what, I shouldn't even have to justify _why_ I make a copy of my movie--I'm not breaking any laws, and for a company to treat me, a private citizen who is as innocent as the driven snow, and a potential customer (i.e. someone who MIGHT GIVE THEM MONEY) to boot, as a criminal and someone to be, ohmygosh, prevented from, goodness, doing bad things, because I might just, is the ultimate pinnacle of insolence.
If I start getting dvds I can't play, then I guess I won't be such a good customer (I legitimately own 500+ dvds)
THANK YOU. I had exactly this attitude with a German EMI CD my girlfriend brought home from a concert. While ripping our collected piles of CDs so she could take them to work on her laptop and I could put them on my mp3 player, I noticed that these guys had some third-rate safedisc "protection" on it.
Alcohol 120% made pretty short shrift of it, but I wrote a (fairly civil) nastygram to the head of their copy protection program to the extent that I will (a) never buy another disc from them again, and (b) tell all my friends to do the same, especially the non-technical ones, because EMI Germany produces broken CDs which you may not be able to play on your new iPod.
There's an axiom out there to the extent that every pissed off customer means, through his/her network, between 7 and 14 additional lost customers. I received a very politely worded letter back, trying to explain and justify why they're doing this, the tone of which I appreciated, but the contents of which didn't change my mind.
I wrote my original mail because of a suggestion to do so which I found on a blog when searching for solutions to my problem, and have been offering the same suggestion to other people when I hear of a legitimate owner of some form of media being inconvenienced by copy protection. I have washed my hands of the affair, I have loads of good albums, and I don't really need anything from that particular vendor.
The outcome of this will be either that nothing changes, in which case neither I nor the vendor care, or that I've done my little bit to contribute to EMI Germany losing enough business to think again about treating potential customers like potential criminals. In this scenario, I have also not been inconvenienced, but have maybe helped others have an easier time of backing up their discs.
Your attitude is superb--I encourage anyone who objects to the idea of purchasing something and then being told what they can or cannot do with it , to just vote with your wallet--it's the most effective vote you have.
Of course you have to memorize the key. ...and actually have a random number. This is one of the main problems at the core of most key generation methods--the random numbers used usually aren't, allowing some predictability. It's difficult to generate a truly random number, or at least to do so in a manner easy to use by a casual encryption routine (hooking a lava lamp up to your cell phone isn't all too practical:-)
An issue with one-time pads comes up more through usage than through the technology--if you ever, ever, ever re-use one (well, I guess then it wouldn't be a OTP any more) your security is probably shot. Sounds like a pretty obvious consideration, but it has happened. True OTPs are a bitch and a half to handle in production, leading people to get lazy and take shortcuts.
The way I see it, if a private company owns the network - they should decide what services will be provided on that network.
Yes, we are in agreement, but you are talking about the 'last mile'. Cable network providers generally don't send Internet data traffic over the same coax past a neighborhood substation, but rather over sort of dedicated wire (yes, this is a terrible generalization, but usually applies in some very high level form or another.)
Also, a lot of cable ISPs maintain their own backbone networks between components of the actual cable net, a number of which your traffic can/may/will traverse before it hits the ISP's upstream. Who paid for that wire?
You're absolutely correct; if the entire infrastructure (at least that part used by your data traffic) of the company doing the technical limiting was paid for by the company, they can do what they want, insofar as it's not against any laws. That's a good thing too--in such situations I don't want my government being a bureaucratic wet blanket. Call your congressman if you feel otherwise, that's what he's there for. Otherwise, if there's a cent of your own tax money involved, wa-hey.
Having this stuff mandated on our isp will just about kill our connection. ( and raise costs )
Wow, *puts on tinfoil hat*, what a great way for **AA to remove opposition from big ISPs like SBC, giving them a great way to swallow up mom & pop providers driven out of business by massively costly new monitoring requirements?
One (of several) paths I could see this taking is (a) connectivity turning more and more into a regulated utility (b) services convergence means large ISPs' primary source of revenue no longer is broadband, but rather value added services such as multimedia content streaming and telephony, so actual IP connections are a loss-making business area which allows them to provide much higher revenue-generating products.
The moment localisp.com can no longer profitably provide DSL to East Podunk, Iowa, you'll see grandma Jones screaming about it to her local congressman, who yells at the FCC to do something about it, removing any vestiges of antitrust barriers to the takeover of the (now defunct) localisp.com. Voila, monopoly.
Your political opinions aside, the SS also had an English division (which numbered something around 12 members), etc. etc. etc.
With a bit of research, you may find that the examples you state all (a) stretched the concept of "division", and (b) weren't exactly the first choice of troops for the nazis, only being tapped as the war progressed and simply serving to evolve the Waffen SS from a monoethnic gang of armed thugs into a multiethnic one.
You will, however, find no documentation beyond crackpot fantasies cooked up by maniacs like Alfred Rosenberg, of plans for a Persian/Iranian troop contingent--by the time the Germans were actually putting together units of "non-teutonic" origin, the war had progressed far enough that both OKW and Himmler were more concerned with getting enough warm bodies from still-occupied territories under arms than extending their imperial claws any further.
As for your "haters" (quotes yours), I witness a fair number of them waving NPD flags nowadays, so I don't quite see the distinction, to be honest.
And thanks for the unfounded insult, I'm quite well-versed in the topic.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, agreed, tax & SS-related forms are legitimate.
Now: what abou the whole "credit check" thing? Let's ask a more fundamental question--why is the SSN required for this sort of thing at all? Or for transcript verification?
Simple answer: It's a unique identifier, you said it. Funny thing that, doesn't the Social Security Act specify that the SSN is not meant to be used as identification except for Social Security purposes?
You hit the nail on the head with the word "easy". It's easy. "Easy" is not always good, and in this case, it is shit. "Easy" is what made some plank store this sort of crap on a laptop, probably in Excel, probably unencrypted. "Easy" in this case is bad.
As this link mentions, one of the problems is that there is no law _preventing_ business (including schools) from requiring this supposedly private piece of information as a precondition for delivering services, without making allowance for an alternative.
So I think in this case we can replace "easy" with "unprofessional", "lazy", "unethical" even.
I couldn't resist posting this.
As we all know, playing D&D and computer games leads to mental deformity, satanism, inbreeding, communism, and foreign beer consumption.
In a similar vein, your son could be a computer hacker!!! Parents beware, do not allow your children to turn into the Columbine trench coat mafia. Lock them indoors with some truly wholesome literature. Make sure that our country does not succumb to this dark menace.
So make up a geometric sliding scale of registration fees for new companies too :-)
Fun idea, useless with those numbers. Companies file patents to (a) protect themselves against lawsuits ("if you sue me for patent infringement, I'm likely to have something in my archive based on which I can sue you back") and (b) make money through licensing.
:)
The monetary gain for a company, in the case of (a) through avoided legal costs, and for (b) in actual revenues far exceeds the trivial amounts you specify.
Make the scale geometric and it starts having teeth
Very good points, but a minor issue--what happens when the estate of the author is actually a corporation?
IANAL but I believe "estate" is defined as the legal collection of heirs, and you can definitely will your property to a commercial entity, or as is done more commonly, a foundation...
The managers, hence fuckwits (just like men.) Very few managers are not fuckwits. Unfortunately, with one possible exception, on which the jury's still out, the female managers I dealt with were as bad as the usual male manager. By virtue of having contact with more male managers than with female ones, the chances of meeting a non-fuckwit female manager was greatly reduced.
The uninterested--as another poster described, these were the sort of trend-drones seen during the dot-com boom. Once again, fuckwits. Fewer women percentually means fewer non-fuckwits, absolutely. In my case, the non-fuckwit female trend-drone share was nil.
The intimidated--because of the (real or perceived) disadvantages faced by women in IT, these were the mousy, quiet types who never had anything to say. Happens with men too, but as men usually tend to be at least a bit more assertive, it's less common. Not unpleasant to work with, mainly since you never encounter them (they're hiding.) "Oh no I could never do this, I might break it."
The intimidating--taking the previous class a step further, these are the ones who treat every personal encounter as a confrontation. Not man-haters, just insecure people afraid of being fucked by god-knows-what, or unsure of their ability to deal with people trying to fuck them (in a professional manner, mind--no, not that kind of professional manner.) See managers.
The officious--an offshoot of the last category. One of my dearly held stereotypes is that women care more about rules than men do (as in Dilbert's Wally vs. Alice.) These are the types who will throw rules and roadblocks in your face out of principle, because you COULD BE TRYING TO PULL A FAST ONE OH MY GOD. See managers.
The cool ones--don't care, are professional and competent, have the self-confidence to ignore harassment or hit back with wit and style, and understand that there's a job to be done and hey, can't we all just get along. Very rare, but oh so incredibly appreciated. They get things done, are more responsible than the guys, come up with cool, creative solutions, and basically combine all the good sides of a "typical" female personality with a few characteristics making it easy for guys to work with them.
Once again, I realize that most of these stereotypes apply to men as well. I love working with women, if they fall into the latter class. It's just been my experience that a far higher percentage of men tend to be competently agreeable to work with than women.
The main points that I make to women (as with anyone) when talking about IT careers are: (a) don't be intimidated, and (b) don't do this job if you don't love it, and can deal with technical and human shit a lot of the time. Rule #1? Relax, it's a job, get it done and that's it.
Erm, I've been doing this for nearly two years now. I own about 600 CDs, and got sick of it all after a combination of **AA/government excesses, broken copyright (and IP in general) laws, and specifically, my inability to rip my girlfriend's Herbert Groenemeyer Live CD to my mp3 player.
Said last incident was what really set me off--I wrote the guy in charge of their stupid bullshit copy protection group a nastygram, basically informing him that I would never buy from EMI Germany again, and would tell all my friends not to as well. He wrote back a very civil, well-reasoned (but wrong, using all the known arguments for copy protection) mail. I have not bought music for a long time now.
Copy protection, raids for copyright infringement, whatever. I am exercising my right as a customer (NOT "CONSUMER", NOTE THE DAMN DIFFERENCE!) to not buy their shit, not watch their TV, not see their movies, and generally try to do my little bit to remove as much commerce as possible from their filthy little fingers.
In summary, why a boycott? Just tell all your friends and family...
I spent a few days at a customer's in Germany watching two guys from n.runs take apart a highly proprietary medical system.
It was the most awe-inspiring thing I've ever seen--these guys went through it like a hot knife through butter, starting from _zero_ knowledge of the box. In the process, they even found solutions to a few bugs which had been annoying the actual support & development staff for ages.
They essentially spent a few hours playing with the system, finding enormous amounts of horrible shit security-wise based on what looked like a pretty superficial audit--their plan was to spend the rest of the week they were scheduled to be there to learn that manufacturer's cpu architecture, to be able to "audit" SAN components based on the same hardware in the future.
So no, obscurity is not necessarily a bad thing, if it does not replace real security (which you simply cannot realistically achieve without the kind of peer review accomplished by having a reasonably open architecture, so there's your catch-22.)
Your approval is appreciated; I will humbly withdraw to my corner and consider the depth of my succumbing to this unapproved behavior.
Been tried already. Unfortunately, all the AOL users were let out among the rest of us a few years ago.
I live in Switzerland, and we pay a similar, although outrageously priced, tax. Our government-run stations, like many other 'services' offered by gov.ch, are continually looking for new ways to justify their outdated existence in a changing world.
.ch doesn't (to my knowledge) have detector vans, and I feel no remorse lying to them about our second TV set.
We have two small 14" TVs which we mainly use to watch a bit of CNN or MTV while getting ready to go ot work or as background noise while eating dinner (yes, I know, I know.) Neither my girlfriend nor I have enough time off from work and our rare social bits of freedom to watch a lot of the horse shit that passes for entertainment these days. I work a bit less than her, and I've found it far more rewarding to either read a book, see some friends or play online games (for which I already pay via broadband bills, thank you very much.) My computer-based entertainment is covered by the money I pay to **AA for the rare CD I buy.
That said, the blanket TV tax is bad, as it punishes those, like myself and my girlfriend, who don't use its "benefits" (i.e. we don't like the stations that are actually publicly funded); nor does it go to actually give us value for our money, as it's mainly used to produce crap which is, honestly, not much above what you get on (private) brain-cell-killing German cable TV.
Thankfully,
Nonono 2017 is the date when they review the existing TV licensing laws under the BBC's charter review. This means that the existing TV tax will continue until then. The article's implication is that by then there may not be any TVs to tax anymore
Taxing computers is independent of this and could be done right now as an additional measure.
That said, stupidity is found everywhere. This is yet another reason why I loathe politicians...
What a lot of the "this isn't fair, this is criminal, this is predatory" posts seem to be predicated around is the mistaken belief that life is fair and that the stupid should have the same good life as the intelligent.
This is not a life insurance-selling shill forcing his way into some poor ignorant grandma's house, putting pressure tactics on her to buy into scam xyz. Much like people caught up in ponzi scams, Tom Vu seminars, what have you, it is entirely up to the user what he sees. Remember that truism about lotteries being a tax on people who're bad at math? Well there you go.
Nor are these guys pushing (for the most part) spyware, trojans, credit card theft, viruses, what-have-you, on unsuspecting PC users who've taken all reasonable precautions. I understand that your post is facetious (at least I hope it is) but referring to what I wrote above, the stupid, ignorant and lazy have exactly the same chances as everyone else. What they make of them is entirely up to them, including learning how to spell slsahdot.
Dude. My sympathies.
Unless of course she was looking for "sex partners" on barely legal buxom teen slut sites.
In which case, *high five*, get a camera!
So, why pirate?
Movies are out of print, they don't sell them in your artificially imposed region of the world, they don't sell the version you want in your artificially imposed region of the world, just to name 3 examples.
It's not about pirating. I just bought a Gmini and I want to watch my movies on it. I want to copy my movies onto my Thinkpad X31, which doesn't have a built-in DVD player, so I can watch them on the plane. I want to back up my DVDs so that when I take them over to my friend's house and his 3 year old decides to take a screwdriver to them, I don't lose my original.
And you know what, I shouldn't even have to justify _why_ I make a copy of my movie--I'm not breaking any laws, and for a company to treat me, a private citizen who is as innocent as the driven snow, and a potential customer (i.e. someone who MIGHT GIVE THEM MONEY) to boot, as a criminal and someone to be, ohmygosh, prevented from, goodness, doing bad things, because I might just, is the ultimate pinnacle of insolence.
nobody ever stops me on the street to sell me copies of "Girls Gone Dildo"
You must be hanging out on the wrong streets then.
If I start getting dvds I can't play, then I guess I won't be such a good customer (I legitimately own 500+ dvds)
THANK YOU. I had exactly this attitude with a German EMI CD my girlfriend brought home from a concert. While ripping our collected piles of CDs so she could take them to work on her laptop and I could put them on my mp3 player, I noticed that these guys had some third-rate safedisc "protection" on it.
Alcohol 120% made pretty short shrift of it, but I wrote a (fairly civil) nastygram to the head of their copy protection program to the extent that I will (a) never buy another disc from them again, and (b) tell all my friends to do the same, especially the non-technical ones, because EMI Germany produces broken CDs which you may not be able to play on your new iPod.
There's an axiom out there to the extent that every pissed off customer means, through his/her network, between 7 and 14 additional lost customers. I received a very politely worded letter back, trying to explain and justify why they're doing this, the tone of which I appreciated, but the contents of which didn't change my mind.
I wrote my original mail because of a suggestion to do so which I found on a blog when searching for solutions to my problem, and have been offering the same suggestion to other people when I hear of a legitimate owner of some form of media being inconvenienced by copy protection. I have washed my hands of the affair, I have loads of good albums, and I don't really need anything from that particular vendor.
The outcome of this will be either that nothing changes, in which case neither I nor the vendor care, or that I've done my little bit to contribute to EMI Germany losing enough business to think again about treating potential customers like potential criminals. In this scenario, I have also not been inconvenienced, but have maybe helped others have an easier time of backing up their discs.
Your attitude is superb--I encourage anyone who objects to the idea of purchasing something and then being told what they can or cannot do with it , to just vote with your wallet--it's the most effective vote you have.
Of course you have to memorize the key.
...and actually have a random number. This is one of the main problems at the core of most key generation methods--the random numbers used usually aren't, allowing some predictability. It's difficult to generate a truly random number, or at least to do so in a manner easy to use by a casual encryption routine (hooking a lava lamp up to your cell phone isn't all too practical :-)
An issue with one-time pads comes up more through usage than through the technology--if you ever, ever, ever re-use one (well, I guess then it wouldn't be a OTP any more) your security is probably shot. Sounds like a pretty obvious consideration, but it has happened. True OTPs are a bitch and a half to handle in production, leading people to get lazy and take shortcuts.
The way I see it, if a private company owns the network - they should decide what services will be provided on that network.
Yes, we are in agreement, but you are talking about the 'last mile'. Cable network providers generally don't send Internet data traffic over the same coax past a neighborhood substation, but rather over sort of dedicated wire (yes, this is a terrible generalization, but usually applies in some very high level form or another.)
Also, a lot of cable ISPs maintain their own backbone networks between components of the actual cable net, a number of which your traffic can/may/will traverse before it hits the ISP's upstream. Who paid for that wire?
You're absolutely correct; if the entire infrastructure (at least that part used by your data traffic) of the company doing the technical limiting was paid for by the company, they can do what they want, insofar as it's not against any laws. That's a good thing too--in such situations I don't want my government being a bureaucratic wet blanket. Call your congressman if you feel otherwise, that's what he's there for. Otherwise, if there's a cent of your own tax money involved, wa-hey.
...to what does it feed them?
That's great, now you have fifteen million overweight slashdot geeks dumping tons of cat food on the guy's floor.
I hope he's come up with a good exercise program for the poor animals. I wonder how Cotton and Tulip would hold up under a prolongued DDoS...
Well, he wouldn't need the horse's lower waist, just the...er...yeah.
I can just imagine the pr0n spams now...
Having this stuff mandated on our isp will just about kill our connection. ( and raise costs )
Wow, *puts on tinfoil hat*, what a great way for **AA to remove opposition from big ISPs like SBC, giving them a great way to swallow up mom & pop providers driven out of business by massively costly new monitoring requirements?
One (of several) paths I could see this taking is (a) connectivity turning more and more into a regulated utility (b) services convergence means large ISPs' primary source of revenue no longer is broadband, but rather value added services such as multimedia content streaming and telephony, so actual IP connections are a loss-making business area which allows them to provide much higher revenue-generating products.
The moment localisp.com can no longer profitably provide DSL to East Podunk, Iowa, you'll see grandma Jones screaming about it to her local congressman, who yells at the FCC to do something about it, removing any vestiges of antitrust barriers to the takeover of the (now defunct) localisp.com. Voila, monopoly.
Your political opinions aside, the SS also had an English division (which numbered something around 12 members), etc. etc. etc.
With a bit of research, you may find that the examples you state all (a) stretched the concept of "division", and (b) weren't exactly the first choice of troops for the nazis, only being tapped as the war progressed and simply serving to evolve the Waffen SS from a monoethnic gang of armed thugs into a multiethnic one.
You will, however, find no documentation beyond crackpot fantasies cooked up by maniacs like Alfred Rosenberg, of plans for a Persian/Iranian troop contingent--by the time the Germans were actually putting together units of "non-teutonic" origin, the war had progressed far enough that both OKW and Himmler were more concerned with getting enough warm bodies from still-occupied territories under arms than extending their imperial claws any further.
As for your "haters" (quotes yours), I witness a fair number of them waving NPD flags nowadays, so I don't quite see the distinction, to be honest.
And thanks for the unfounded insult, I'm quite well-versed in the topic.
Or, in the case of IE, we call it "shit". :-)
I actually didn't catch that the author goes on to mention SiteFinger two lines down...