If you note, the original post was correct in its use of "ironic" except for the quoting of the Alanis Morrisette (sic) song in the subject. The singer is Canadian, however, and whether or not that fits your definition of "American" is up to you.
It is slightly ironic that the same people who one day were saying digital art is still art are the next day saying that animation on the level of a movie that took thousands of man-hours to create can be generated by a computer. Thus stripping away the art value of the movie (or at least the animation in the movie).
It does piss me off when people misuse words, especially words that are very nuanced and clever. But there you go. People are stupid.
because I was leaning more toward ambivalence (sic? it's too early...).
Until I read this Salon article posted today about Internet centralization (http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/26/locking_ up_the_web/index.html for those who are sick of goatse.cx), and realized that I should do whatever I can to help the "little guy".
We need to support people running independent projects and work-alikes so that the entire breed does not die out before the net restabilizes. Unfortunately I posted this too late for anyone to mod it up so people can read it... blargh.
I find myself frustrated by their literature comparing the relative speeds of DSL, Cable Modem, etc.
Me too. For one, the use of Napster as a benchmark is laughable, as the referenced post mentioned.
As many slashdot users probably know, another problem with comparing Cable with DSL is that bandwidth is almost completely dependent on the provider. Granted, for most heavy-bandwidth and low-latency applications symmetric service is preferable (straight out web surfing and Napster leeching aside). So certainly look for a provider that provides symmetric service (I have found that these also tend to be more oriented towards people who like to *use* their bandwidth, none of the classic Verizon DSL uptime of about 15 days/month).
In my area, cable modems are just plain *faster* than DSL. None of this balogna about "if you hav a lot of people accessing in your neighborhood...". This is because we have AT&T Broadband for a cable provider and Verizon for a DSL provider. With my cable connection I get downloads comparable to a T1 and uploads of about half that (give or take). However, the uploads are fast enough that I do not have to worry about having an asymmetric connection, because 1/2 of An Awful Lot is still A Lot.
So okay, I believe that these folks got the speeds they posted, and obviously having Gigabit Ethernet is superior, but Your Mileage May Vary to the point where you get oppposite results.
It is the "proper" pronounciation tought in public school to children. Until the late 80's the BBC would not let anyone on their news broadcasts who could not speak in this way. It is also called "BBC English".
I am not trying to defend American actors who butcher British accents, I am simply saying that there is a very prominent accent in Britain which has no direct regional analogue. I find it hard to believe that someone in Britain has not heard of RP, even if he or she hasn't gone to a public school. Look it up sometime, the teaching of RP has a very interesting history.
Am I the only/. reader who didn't interpret this article ("Lord of the Geeks") as a slam against all that is geekdom? I think we should all remember the audience for whom _The Village Voice_ is intended. It's written for people who consider themselves "intellectuals". Truth to tell I think most of these people are just trying to comfort themselves that they majored in Liberal Arts in undergrad and wrote their graduate thesis on something like "Symbolism in the Later Works of George Carlin" or some such thing (disclaimer: I just graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics, but I also consider myself fairly geeky).
The article was aiming at its audience and identifying their common view of Tolkien, but was also disputing that view. The author identified one of the common views of geeks (that they/we are nothing but antisocial losers stuck in childhood), but then noted that even if you hold that view you had to admit that there was something to geekiness. He was trying to show the people who think geeks and J.R.R. Tolkien are just silly that his work really *does* have significance even if you aren't a geek. Also, as far as him talking about Tolkien appealing to people's (is that a word?) inner childishness... well of course it does!! Do you REALLY want to act completely "grown up"? I think most of the fun we manage to derive from our dreary jobs (well some of us) and boring lives (okay, well maybe just me;-)) comes from moments of pure childishness. There is nothing wrong with being childish, indeed, if you take Tolkien's philosphy there is much to be said about preserving something precious that is fading from our lives
Now damn you all for stopping me from moderating up some really good posts just so I could post this silly reply to ungrounded rants.
As wonderful as I find technology and information, when people pontificate about "This or that will happen in the next 20 years.." etc., I find the need to paraphrase Robert Heinlein in _Starship Troopers_.
While you are busy fooling around with all your high tech gadgets of war, someone will come up behind you and bash your head in with a rock.
Sometimes a simple solution is better and more direct than one that incorporates wonderful new technology and computing power. That is not to say that these things will not change the way we view the world and much of the way we act. Obviously there will be some major cultural upheaval as the current young generation gets into power already accustomed to the current tech and use it for things its inventors never even imagined. However, I think it will take a LONG time for some things. A few examples:
Cash. the more I hear people say that credit cards will take over the more certain I am about how important plain old cash is to our economy and culture. There are simply innumerable areas where a universal credit system would suck
Manual overrides on almost anything that involves danger. This one is a no brainer. The power situation in CA should illustrate that nicely. This includes cars.
Incidentally, the comment about cars tracking drivers' safe (unmentioned: unsafe) driving really does scare me, because insurance companies would definitely try that. It's stuff like that which makes me hope that there will either be some major regulation of the current insurance-companies-as-lord-and-master situation or just a complete collapse of the current stucture. Plain old large corporations are going to become almost silly to worry about in comparison.
I have recently gotten started DJing and through it I have really started to notice the usefulness of "community" file sharing networks such as Napster and Gnutella.
People pooh-pooh the idea of the "music community" that Napster(tm) is trying to put forward, but when the music isn't being "stolen" (can music be stolen? or is it always given... but that's for a whole different discussion), meaning that it is freely given, as many electronic musicians are doing these days to promote themselves, the networks really do turn into a community.
I can't count the number of times I've had someone downloading a track from me on napster (or opennap, or what have you) where we've started up a conversation about the track and recommended stuff to each other. Many of the times the person would then point me to some of his own music or sets that were also on Napster. I've found a lot of good music this way, and I'd be really miffed to miss out on that opportunity to find new music.
Another use that I've only touched on here is that of DJs trading their sets on P2P systems. Almost every DJ I know who isn't already a superstar wants more exposure, and p2p networks are great for that.
Yes. Cuba. Russia. Switzerland. Sweden. Hell, Sealand/Seahaven. As long as there are a few nodes left in the network it won't die.
Also, there is no such thing as a "standing warrant" in most democratic countries based on either US or UK modes of justice. A warrant has to be issued individually. That is not to say that you might not be watched by the FBI, etc. (hell, you might be right now for all you know; just because you're paranoid doesn't mean...:-)~ ).
I could see people running FreeNet servers being issued cease-and-desists by the RIAA or MPAA or even the USDoJ (kiddie porn, methamphetamine anti-proliferation act, etc.), but these would not hold up in countries that either have poor relations with the US or are netural like Switzerland or Sweden. And that is totally discounting Sealand.
Am I the only one who has thought of this? I do realize that the whole combination (if you buy the newest Ipaq) would cost about USD 1200, but can you imagine using that with Mp3s or Mpeg movies/TV shows?
Anyone with a digital tuner on their video card could record their favorite TV shows, compress them and watch them the next day on the train to work (or write a script that compresses and uplinks to the microdrive automatically...). Also, the Microdrives are interchangeable, so you have effectively unlimited storage (well it is limited by the size of your wallet of course).
If you ask me, this stuff's starting to get simply insane, if we can do this *now*, imagine a year, or even two years from now.
The Supremes are hearing this case? Dear me, what is our nation coming to when MoTown legends start making legal decisions. Soon they'll be interviewing Jennifer Lopez and Puff Daddy to get their opinions on DeCSS.
That's exactly right. Copyright is effectively infinite for huge corporations now. The reason? So Disney can hold on to the copyrights for Mickey Mouse cartoons. Mickey himself is a trademark so (ianal) is effective through the life of the company, but normally by now the first animated films featuring him would be far into the public domain. It's a shame, really... imagine what could be done with all that great stuff that isn't even being marketed anymore.
Disclaimer: I do not approve of huge cross-industry monopolies (e.g. AOL-TW).
I'm sorry you're getting such shitty bandwidth, but I'm afraid it depends almost completely on the company rather than the technology.
I have been a faithful and happy customer of MediaOne (now AT&T, who would have thought I'd *ever* say something like that?) for about 2 years now. The reason is that my cable modem has consistently given me speeds to rival those of a T1 on downloads and about half that on uploads. When downloading from university ftp sites, I will consistently get speeds of approx. 1.5 Mb/s. As far os uploads go, the best indicator I've seen is Napster uploads; people get transfer rates of about 120 KB/s (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's Bytes not bits, feel free to correct me, I don't feel like firing up napster to check which units it uses).
On the other side, I used to work for Bell Atlantic/Verizon in their DSL department, and I can attest that it is about the shittiest broadband service I have ever seen. I know however that there are many good DSL providers out there (although I don't think any of their customers get speeds like mine). It all depends on the company.
Now to keep the post at least moderately on-topic; this business with allowing Cable providers over *40* percent market penetration seems completely insane. Do people have no memories? Well, stupid question...
As a college wrestler who has had to lose as much as 10 lbs in a week, I must take issue with some of what you say.
This article deals with a special kind of "weight loss" that is brought about by calorie deprivation. Many different studies have found that when the human body (and also the rat and now the fruit fly) is routinely denied the amount of calories it is supposed to need, for whatever reason it lives much longer. We are talking say 75% of needed calories, *every day*. I guarantee that anyone who does this *will lose weight*. If my body burns at 3500 calories a day at my current metabolism, and I only eat 2600 a day, it is not able to adjust the metabolism down enough to deal with the difference (normally the metabolism can change as much as 15% or so). My body will then look to process muscle and fat for its energy needs. On an active person (also depending on other nutrition), fat is the first to go.
The new idea that the calorie deprivation theory introduces is that after all the fat and all the excess muscle is consumed (no I am not saying it is healthy to lose this muscle), we don't just die. If we have proper nutrition otherwise (which means enough protein, vitamins, minerals, and fats) our body seems to adapt further to allow for the low caloric intake. How the body does this is still murky in scientific fields, but it has been shown true in countless cases. One side effect of this also seems to be increased longevity. In lab rats lifespan has been incresed by more than 150%; obviously, YMMV;-).
Also, yes, the brain does regulate the appetite, and many people can't control their appetites. It is simply a matter of discipline. I know this, I have done it. You can tell your body to starve itself, and after it gets used to it you don't even have to try hard. Realize, too, that I am not saying this is necessarily a healthy thing to do. You must consult with a nutritionist to develop a diet that is healthy for you, and I do admit that I had a nutritionist's advice for wrestling. My priorities were also different; I was simply looking for a way to lose massive amounts of weight quickly without getting sick or adversely affecting performance. Most people are looking to enrich their lives.
The guns the Sardaukar had create the same problem you have in Jackie Chan movies; if you give the enemy guns, then your hero's hand-to-hand abilities are kind of moot. I'm not sure what they could have done about this, because it's tough to convince a savvy American audience of a world where they have interstellar travel without high velocity projectile weapons.
I agree, more care needed to be taken to introduce the shields properly. The properties of the shields were the whole thing that allowed such a pleasing combination between sword-fighting and interstellar travel. Why else would Paul be trained better than a black belt in knife fighting? Perhaps, though, the director thought it would be too difficult to examine the whole dynamic between the las-guns (sp?), the shields, the worms, and hand fighting. I think perhaps it could have been plausible if just the hand fighting part was used (meaning why didn't they just use machine guns; of course that would lead to the question of why didn't they just use lasers... but here we go again).
I thought the series was pretty well done, especially for a Sci Fi production. It was very aesthetically pleasing. Also, on an interesting note, I thought it actually got *better* as it went along, with better imagery, storyline, acting and just plain overall aesthetics. A couple things:
-Feyd was perfect. Foppish, cunning, and deadly all in the same breath. Bravo.
-Paul is a Bad Ass in the second and third installments. In the first episode he was a whiny Luke Sywalker character, but he is one of th main reasons the series got better as it went along.
-Chani (sp, it's been too long) is also a Bad Ass, and she is HOT. My kind of woman.
On another note:
-The Fremen "army" looks more like the rabble from the Life Of Brion than any kind of army. They are supposed to be deadly warriors, not kids with knives.
-The Sardaukar berets just serve to make them silly. It's an interesting style, but they have to look as potent and menacing as possible.
Overall, a great series. I can't wait until the next one comes out.
First of all; some people on slashdot are saying that bugging the keyboard buffer constitutes a wiretap. After looking into it, I find that I agree. The only possible way of getting the information to the bug device is by tapping electronic wires, even though they are between the keyboard port and the motherboard rather than between houses. However, the court order spcifically allowed for using hardware and/or software means to surveil the computer. I think the only way to figh this would be to fight the court order, because a simple search warrant should not legally cover such surveillance. Let me restate that I think the FBI did act within the bounds of the law, just that I think the law as defined by the courts, but also that the law was misinterpretted by the courts.
On to my second, completely different point. There are three ways for the government to retrieve the information stored in the bug.
1. Leave it in the computer and retrieve it later with a search warrant. They did not seem to do this, although it may have been the best idea for them. One problem with this method would be if the bug detector was discovered in any way, they would have no data at all, rather than just a halt in the stream. Also, he may destroy the computer upon getting searched (a mor likely problem).
2. Broadcast it over the Internet. Not likely at all. If this guy was "computer literate" as the article says, he would be monitoring all ports into and out of his system, and would almost have to be using NT, Linux or a BSD (to support encrypted filesystems, unless he went with the whole route of no-swap (info is never stored on disk), which I'm not sure can be impleneted in windows 9x). So this would be a dumb methd, too.
3. Radio. They can send the information out over radio waves. This would allow for a stream of information that would still be evidence even if it were interrupted. The thing with this is that what kind of organized crime don does not use a bug detector?!? They are not expensive, and monitor almost all frequencies commonly used by bugs. The only way around this would be burts transmission, which the article does hint at.
To top it off, you can't think a computer is unbugged unless it never leaves your side (or the side of someone you trust; trust is as necessary in this kind of security as in encryption). Oh well, this post will never get read because it is now at the bottom of a heap of posts, and moderators never browse newest first. Blah.
I worked for a company with a contract to provide support to Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) for DSL. I was one of the ones who "burned out". I suppose you could consider me one of the ones who "learned out" perhaps, because I simply quit and got a better job that used more of my skills. The situation at this company was ridiculous.
We didn't have anything as ominous sounding as "The HotCube" watching over us, just the knowledge that we were being watched and timed for everything tht we did. Our calls were constantly monitered, and our sign-in times were constantly watched.
At first the job was a good one. I got it to pay the bills over the summer between semesters at school. At the time, it was ideal. I would get about 3 to 4 calls an hour, with time to surf the Net in between. Many of the calls were obnoxious, but you could deal with it. The problem did not come about until Bell Atlantic switched over to Verizon.
This caused two things to happen contemporaneously: Verizon put out a major marketing push for their DSL, and at the same time there was a strike. So the problem was that all these people were signing up for DSL all at the same time, and there was NO ONE to hook them up or fix any problems. Sure, there were us mooks in the tech support department, but we could only do so much over the phone. With DSL it is almost always either a line problem, a modem problem, a CO (central Office) problem, or an idiot problem. We could only take care of the idiot problems. There were a few calls where I actually got to troubleshoot something, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
So the strike sucked, but that could be dealt with, and it wasn't too long. It turned out to be the increasing amount of customers that was the real source of the problem. Verizon's network just couldn't handle it, and their support structure was not even half as big as it needed to be. I don't know what sort of equipment they use at Verizon in terms of routers, CO modems, etc., but for whatever reason their stuff goes down more than any other provider. I don't know if I remember a time during that latter part of my stay there where one part of the country or another wasn't down.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues.
That was the big problem. Forget the high call volume where there weren't less than 50 people queued up for support in a department of 30 or so (yes, that's fifty, five zero) as a result of constant problems. The real problem is that we couldn't *do* anything. We couldn't even dispatch a tech to the house! We had to submit a ticket to another department that may or may not decide to dispatch the tech. Could we *call* over to that department and talk to them about it? No! Of course not! They were union, and they had their own rules. We couldn't resolve billing problems, we couldn't do line tests, we couldn't do anything.
I even moved up to the Tier 2 level of support, and we were still just as hogtied. We at least got to get rid of most of the idiot factor, but that led to getting a higher percentage of problems that were just out of scope. I eventually quit without even finding another job because I got so sick of it. Luckily for me, I live around 128 outside of Boston, so that wasn't a problem.
I see no need to relegate dialups to "second class" citizen status, only perhaps the need to treat them differently.
The article suggested using the clip2 Reflector Server (or is it servent) for dialups to connect to. An interesting way to propogate this further would be to restrict dialups to *only* be able to connect to reflector servers and also encourage the operation of the reflectors at node with a lot of bandwidth to spare.
This would also allow someone to develop a client that only allows peers of a certain bandwidth (say 144Kbps as was previously suggested) to connect to the network; then the dialups (and really slow DSL customers, sorry Verizon;-)) could connect to reflector proxies. This would ensure that the network as a whole would remain low-latency and high bandwidth but that it would still be accessable to all.
Another suggestion for a GSM provider in the US is VoiceStream. They are the company who just bought out OmniPoint. They are having some *great* promotions on services, and adding new towers all over the place (as well as good existing coverage around the country).
I can't speak for them on a reliability level yet; one of my friends just switched over from Sprint PCS and has been very satisfied with VoiceStream thus far. Definitely check them out. I totally agree that using a GSM phone is key if you plan on going anywhere outside the continental US.
It's amusing to make fun of Al Gore for saying that he invented the Internet, but the problem is that it just isn't true. As much as he may exaggerate, this is one place where he actually told the truth and the media decided to twist what he said.
He said that he had been on committees that had appropriated funds for the Internet, etc. The funny thing is, when you look at the evidence, he really has. He really did appropriate more funds and encourage government adoption of the Internet back when pushing that kind of stuff actually made a difference (when it was still small enough to be squashed).
I like making fun of Gore as much as the next man, but some things just aren't true.
He hardly had *any* studio material. His site consisted almost entirely of live/rare/acoustic stuff.
That certainly does change the way that I see the issue, at least. From what I gathered in the article, there were also many full length films on the server. Can you confirm or deny this?
I am very much in favor of the widespread online bootleg and rare track community, as there is often no other way of keeping this information around long enough so it will still be around when the tapes fall apart.
Obviously, as far as the police and the RIAA are concerned, there only needs to be *one* piece of copyrighted material on the server for it to be a violation, but I know *I* for one do not hold that view. Also, it would still be a violation of the school's internet policy, but that sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of federally funded university internet connections.
"We welcome 3G". How much ya wanna bet this guy doesn't even know what 3G stands for, much less what 2G and 1G even were. These buzzwords are starting to give me headaches. I think that marketing drones are under the assumption that as soon as you give something a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) it becomes significant.
I'm sure the new WAP is going to be useful, but come on, is it really news that it should use TCP? The XHTML stuff seems cool though, it'd be good to have a lingua franca. (See, even I'm doing it; at some sub-concious level, I give XHTML more credibility because it's a FIVLA).
Copyright laws are laws of the federal government, they can be changed if enough citizens don't like it. Your opinion is not the majority opinion no matter how loud you bitch about it.
The thing that many people are complaining about is that current legislative process does not necessarily mean majority rules. Professional lobbying and campaign donations have diluted the laws passed from being good for the nation to being good for one's supporters.
Granted, the above post was a little bit juvinile(sic), but that does not necessarily make all the opinions expressed wrong. It is most certainly possible to buy votes, and that is the way our legislative system works now and will work for some time. I think the time that it will stop is about the same time that the people living in a country cease to be known as "consumers" and start being called "citizens" again. Maybe that day is still a long way away...
Why is this a problem? This is what we've been asking that they do for a long time. This is just some W4R3Z d00d who got caught. I'm not really sure why this got posted to Slashdot, maybe because it was a slow news day or something. This is the old fashioned way to combat copyright infringement; go after the people who are actually *distributing* the material, rather than those who enable it.
The fact that this guy was advertising in chat rooms for his wares (*cough*) makes me lose any sympathy. It's one thing to copy some movies and songs and share them with your friends on an ftp server, I do it and I'm sure many other slashdotters do the same. But the wholesale distribution to anonymous people is just plain silly. And I'm sure that the university's computer policy doesn't allow people to run ftp servers or distribute copyrighted material.
Slashdot Mirror
It is slightly ironic that the same people who one day were saying digital art is still art are the next day saying that animation on the level of a movie that took thousands of man-hours to create can be generated by a computer. Thus stripping away the art value of the movie (or at least the animation in the movie).
It does piss me off when people misuse words, especially words that are very nuanced and clever. But there you go. People are stupid.
BTW, good examples.
Send five bucks to the paypal address. I am and you should, too.
Until I read this Salon article posted today about Internet centralization (http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/26/locking_ up_the_web/index.html for those who are sick of goatse.cx), and realized that I should do whatever I can to help the "little guy".
We need to support people running independent projects and work-alikes so that the entire breed does not die out before the net restabilizes. Unfortunately I posted this too late for anyone to mod it up so people can read it... blargh.
Me too. For one, the use of Napster as a benchmark is laughable, as the referenced post mentioned.
As many slashdot users probably know, another problem with comparing Cable with DSL is that bandwidth is almost completely dependent on the provider. Granted, for most heavy-bandwidth and low-latency applications symmetric service is preferable (straight out web surfing and Napster leeching aside). So certainly look for a provider that provides symmetric service (I have found that these also tend to be more oriented towards people who like to *use* their bandwidth, none of the classic Verizon DSL uptime of about 15 days/month).
In my area, cable modems are just plain *faster* than DSL. None of this balogna about "if you hav a lot of people accessing in your neighborhood...". This is because we have AT&T Broadband for a cable provider and Verizon for a DSL provider. With my cable connection I get downloads comparable to a T1 and uploads of about half that (give or take). However, the uploads are fast enough that I do not have to worry about having an asymmetric connection, because 1/2 of An Awful Lot is still A Lot.
So okay, I believe that these folks got the speeds they posted, and obviously having Gigabit Ethernet is superior, but Your Mileage May Vary to the point where you get oppposite results.
It is the "proper" pronounciation tought in public school to children. Until the late 80's the BBC would not let anyone on their news broadcasts who could not speak in this way. It is also called "BBC English".
I am not trying to defend American actors who butcher British accents, I am simply saying that there is a very prominent accent in Britain which has no direct regional analogue. I find it hard to believe that someone in Britain has not heard of RP, even if he or she hasn't gone to a public school. Look it up sometime, the teaching of RP has a very interesting history.
The article was aiming at its audience and identifying their common view of Tolkien, but was also disputing that view. The author identified one of the common views of geeks (that they/we are nothing but antisocial losers stuck in childhood), but then noted that even if you hold that view you had to admit that there was something to geekiness. He was trying to show the people who think geeks and J.R.R. Tolkien are just silly that his work really *does* have significance even if you aren't a geek. Also, as far as him talking about Tolkien appealing to people's (is that a word?) inner childishness... well of course it does!! Do you REALLY want to act completely "grown up"? I think most of the fun we manage to derive from our dreary jobs (well some of us) and boring lives (okay, well maybe just me ;-)) comes from moments of pure childishness. There is nothing wrong with being childish, indeed, if you take Tolkien's philosphy there is much to be said about preserving something precious that is fading from our lives
Now damn you all for stopping me from moderating up some really good posts just so I could post this silly reply to ungrounded rants.
While you are busy fooling around with all your high tech gadgets of war, someone will come up behind you and bash your head in with a rock.
Sometimes a simple solution is better and more direct than one that incorporates wonderful new technology and computing power. That is not to say that these things will not change the way we view the world and much of the way we act. Obviously there will be some major cultural upheaval as the current young generation gets into power already accustomed to the current tech and use it for things its inventors never even imagined. However, I think it will take a LONG time for some things. A few examples:
Cash. the more I hear people say that credit cards will take over the more certain I am about how important plain old cash is to our economy and culture. There are simply innumerable areas where a universal credit system would suck
Manual overrides on almost anything that involves danger. This one is a no brainer. The power situation in CA should illustrate that nicely. This includes cars.
Incidentally, the comment about cars tracking drivers' safe (unmentioned: unsafe) driving really does scare me, because insurance companies would definitely try that. It's stuff like that which makes me hope that there will either be some major regulation of the current insurance-companies-as-lord-and-master situation or just a complete collapse of the current stucture. Plain old large corporations are going to become almost silly to worry about in comparison.
Okay, time for some dinner.
People pooh-pooh the idea of the "music community" that Napster(tm) is trying to put forward, but when the music isn't being "stolen" (can music be stolen? or is it always given... but that's for a whole different discussion), meaning that it is freely given, as many electronic musicians are doing these days to promote themselves, the networks really do turn into a community.
I can't count the number of times I've had someone downloading a track from me on napster (or opennap, or what have you) where we've started up a conversation about the track and recommended stuff to each other. Many of the times the person would then point me to some of his own music or sets that were also on Napster. I've found a lot of good music this way, and I'd be really miffed to miss out on that opportunity to find new music.
Another use that I've only touched on here is that of DJs trading their sets on P2P systems. Almost every DJ I know who isn't already a superstar wants more exposure, and p2p networks are great for that.
Yes. Cuba. Russia. Switzerland. Sweden. Hell, Sealand/Seahaven. As long as there are a few nodes left in the network it won't die.
Also, there is no such thing as a "standing warrant" in most democratic countries based on either US or UK modes of justice. A warrant has to be issued individually. That is not to say that you might not be watched by the FBI, etc. (hell, you might be right now for all you know; just because you're paranoid doesn't mean... :-)~ ).
I could see people running FreeNet servers being issued cease-and-desists by the RIAA or MPAA or even the USDoJ (kiddie porn, methamphetamine anti-proliferation act, etc.), but these would not hold up in countries that either have poor relations with the US or are netural like Switzerland or Sweden. And that is totally discounting Sealand.
Anyone with a digital tuner on their video card could record their favorite TV shows, compress them and watch them the next day on the train to work (or write a script that compresses and uplinks to the microdrive automatically...). Also, the Microdrives are interchangeable, so you have effectively unlimited storage (well it is limited by the size of your wallet of course).
If you ask me, this stuff's starting to get simply insane, if we can do this *now*, imagine a year, or even two years from now.
The Supremes are hearing this case? Dear me, what is our nation coming to when MoTown legends start making legal decisions. Soon they'll be interviewing Jennifer Lopez and Puff Daddy to get their opinions on DeCSS.
That's exactly right. Copyright is effectively infinite for huge corporations now. The reason? So Disney can hold on to the copyrights for Mickey Mouse cartoons. Mickey himself is a trademark so (ianal) is effective through the life of the company, but normally by now the first animated films featuring him would be far into the public domain. It's a shame, really... imagine what could be done with all that great stuff that isn't even being marketed anymore.
I'm sorry you're getting such shitty bandwidth, but I'm afraid it depends almost completely on the company rather than the technology.
I have been a faithful and happy customer of MediaOne (now AT&T, who would have thought I'd *ever* say something like that?) for about 2 years now. The reason is that my cable modem has consistently given me speeds to rival those of a T1 on downloads and about half that on uploads. When downloading from university ftp sites, I will consistently get speeds of approx. 1.5 Mb/s. As far os uploads go, the best indicator I've seen is Napster uploads; people get transfer rates of about 120 KB/s (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's Bytes not bits, feel free to correct me, I don't feel like firing up napster to check which units it uses).
On the other side, I used to work for Bell Atlantic/Verizon in their DSL department, and I can attest that it is about the shittiest broadband service I have ever seen. I know however that there are many good DSL providers out there (although I don't think any of their customers get speeds like mine). It all depends on the company.
Now to keep the post at least moderately on-topic; this business with allowing Cable providers over *40* percent market penetration seems completely insane. Do people have no memories? Well, stupid question...
This article deals with a special kind of "weight loss" that is brought about by calorie deprivation. Many different studies have found that when the human body (and also the rat and now the fruit fly) is routinely denied the amount of calories it is supposed to need, for whatever reason it lives much longer. We are talking say 75% of needed calories, *every day*. I guarantee that anyone who does this *will lose weight*. If my body burns at 3500 calories a day at my current metabolism, and I only eat 2600 a day, it is not able to adjust the metabolism down enough to deal with the difference (normally the metabolism can change as much as 15% or so). My body will then look to process muscle and fat for its energy needs. On an active person (also depending on other nutrition), fat is the first to go.
The new idea that the calorie deprivation theory introduces is that after all the fat and all the excess muscle is consumed (no I am not saying it is healthy to lose this muscle), we don't just die. If we have proper nutrition otherwise (which means enough protein, vitamins, minerals, and fats) our body seems to adapt further to allow for the low caloric intake. How the body does this is still murky in scientific fields, but it has been shown true in countless cases. One side effect of this also seems to be increased longevity. In lab rats lifespan has been incresed by more than 150%; obviously, YMMV ;-).
Also, yes, the brain does regulate the appetite, and many people can't control their appetites. It is simply a matter of discipline. I know this, I have done it. You can tell your body to starve itself, and after it gets used to it you don't even have to try hard. Realize, too, that I am not saying this is necessarily a healthy thing to do. You must consult with a nutritionist to develop a diet that is healthy for you, and I do admit that I had a nutritionist's advice for wrestling. My priorities were also different; I was simply looking for a way to lose massive amounts of weight quickly without getting sick or adversely affecting performance. Most people are looking to enrich their lives.
I agree, more care needed to be taken to introduce the shields properly. The properties of the shields were the whole thing that allowed such a pleasing combination between sword-fighting and interstellar travel. Why else would Paul be trained better than a black belt in knife fighting? Perhaps, though, the director thought it would be too difficult to examine the whole dynamic between the las-guns (sp?), the shields, the worms, and hand fighting. I think perhaps it could have been plausible if just the hand fighting part was used (meaning why didn't they just use machine guns; of course that would lead to the question of why didn't they just use lasers... but here we go again).
-Feyd was perfect. Foppish, cunning, and deadly all in the same breath. Bravo.
-Paul is a Bad Ass in the second and third installments. In the first episode he was a whiny Luke Sywalker character, but he is one of th main reasons the series got better as it went along.
-Chani (sp, it's been too long) is also a Bad Ass, and she is HOT. My kind of woman.
On another note:
-The Fremen "army" looks more like the rabble from the Life Of Brion than any kind of army. They are supposed to be deadly warriors, not kids with knives.
-The Sardaukar berets just serve to make them silly. It's an interesting style, but they have to look as potent and menacing as possible.
Overall, a great series. I can't wait until the next one comes out.
On to my second, completely different point. There are three ways for the government to retrieve the information stored in the bug.
1. Leave it in the computer and retrieve it later with a search warrant. They did not seem to do this, although it may have been the best idea for them. One problem with this method would be if the bug detector was discovered in any way, they would have no data at all, rather than just a halt in the stream. Also, he may destroy the computer upon getting searched (a mor likely problem).
2. Broadcast it over the Internet. Not likely at all. If this guy was "computer literate" as the article says, he would be monitoring all ports into and out of his system, and would almost have to be using NT, Linux or a BSD (to support encrypted filesystems, unless he went with the whole route of no-swap (info is never stored on disk), which I'm not sure can be impleneted in windows 9x). So this would be a dumb methd, too. 3. Radio. They can send the information out over radio waves. This would allow for a stream of information that would still be evidence even if it were interrupted. The thing with this is that what kind of organized crime don does not use a bug detector?!? They are not expensive, and monitor almost all frequencies commonly used by bugs. The only way around this would be burts transmission, which the article does hint at.
To top it off, you can't think a computer is unbugged unless it never leaves your side (or the side of someone you trust; trust is as necessary in this kind of security as in encryption). Oh well, this post will never get read because it is now at the bottom of a heap of posts, and moderators never browse newest first. Blah.
We didn't have anything as ominous sounding as "The HotCube" watching over us, just the knowledge that we were being watched and timed for everything tht we did. Our calls were constantly monitered, and our sign-in times were constantly watched.
At first the job was a good one. I got it to pay the bills over the summer between semesters at school. At the time, it was ideal. I would get about 3 to 4 calls an hour, with time to surf the Net in between. Many of the calls were obnoxious, but you could deal with it. The problem did not come about until Bell Atlantic switched over to Verizon.
This caused two things to happen contemporaneously: Verizon put out a major marketing push for their DSL, and at the same time there was a strike. So the problem was that all these people were signing up for DSL all at the same time, and there was NO ONE to hook them up or fix any problems. Sure, there were us mooks in the tech support department, but we could only do so much over the phone. With DSL it is almost always either a line problem, a modem problem, a CO (central Office) problem, or an idiot problem. We could only take care of the idiot problems. There were a few calls where I actually got to troubleshoot something, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
So the strike sucked, but that could be dealt with, and it wasn't too long. It turned out to be the increasing amount of customers that was the real source of the problem. Verizon's network just couldn't handle it, and their support structure was not even half as big as it needed to be. I don't know what sort of equipment they use at Verizon in terms of routers, CO modems, etc., but for whatever reason their stuff goes down more than any other provider. I don't know if I remember a time during that latter part of my stay there where one part of the country or another wasn't down.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. That was the big problem. Forget the high call volume where there weren't less than 50 people queued up for support in a department of 30 or so (yes, that's fifty, five zero) as a result of constant problems. The real problem is that we couldn't *do* anything. We couldn't even dispatch a tech to the house! We had to submit a ticket to another department that may or may not decide to dispatch the tech. Could we *call* over to that department and talk to them about it? No! Of course not! They were union, and they had their own rules. We couldn't resolve billing problems, we couldn't do line tests, we couldn't do anything.
I even moved up to the Tier 2 level of support, and we were still just as hogtied. We at least got to get rid of most of the idiot factor, but that led to getting a higher percentage of problems that were just out of scope. I eventually quit without even finding another job because I got so sick of it. Luckily for me, I live around 128 outside of Boston, so that wasn't a problem.
The article suggested using the clip2 Reflector Server (or is it servent) for dialups to connect to. An interesting way to propogate this further would be to restrict dialups to *only* be able to connect to reflector servers and also encourage the operation of the reflectors at node with a lot of bandwidth to spare.
This would also allow someone to develop a client that only allows peers of a certain bandwidth (say 144Kbps as was previously suggested) to connect to the network; then the dialups (and really slow DSL customers, sorry Verizon ;-)) could connect to reflector proxies. This would ensure that the network as a whole would remain low-latency and high bandwidth but that it would still be accessable to all.
I can't speak for them on a reliability level yet; one of my friends just switched over from Sprint PCS and has been very satisfied with VoiceStream thus far. Definitely check them out. I totally agree that using a GSM phone is key if you plan on going anywhere outside the continental US.
He said that he had been on committees that had appropriated funds for the Internet, etc. The funny thing is, when you look at the evidence, he really has. He really did appropriate more funds and encourage government adoption of the Internet back when pushing that kind of stuff actually made a difference (when it was still small enough to be squashed).
I like making fun of Gore as much as the next man, but some things just aren't true.
That certainly does change the way that I see the issue, at least. From what I gathered in the article, there were also many full length films on the server. Can you confirm or deny this?
I am very much in favor of the widespread online bootleg and rare track community, as there is often no other way of keeping this information around long enough so it will still be around when the tapes fall apart.
Obviously, as far as the police and the RIAA are concerned, there only needs to be *one* piece of copyrighted material on the server for it to be a violation, but I know *I* for one do not hold that view. Also, it would still be a violation of the school's internet policy, but that sort of thing has been happening since the dawn of federally funded university internet connections.
"We welcome 3G". How much ya wanna bet this guy doesn't even know what 3G stands for, much less what 2G and 1G even were. These buzzwords are starting to give me headaches. I think that marketing drones are under the assumption that as soon as you give something a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) it becomes significant.
I'm sure the new WAP is going to be useful, but come on, is it really news that it should use TCP? The XHTML stuff seems cool though, it'd be good to have a lingua franca. (See, even I'm doing it; at some sub-concious level, I give XHTML more credibility because it's a FIVLA).
The thing that many people are complaining about is that current legislative process does not necessarily mean majority rules. Professional lobbying and campaign donations have diluted the laws passed from being good for the nation to being good for one's supporters.
Granted, the above post was a little bit juvinile(sic), but that does not necessarily make all the opinions expressed wrong. It is most certainly possible to buy votes, and that is the way our legislative system works now and will work for some time. I think the time that it will stop is about the same time that the people living in a country cease to be known as "consumers" and start being called "citizens" again. Maybe that day is still a long way away...
The fact that this guy was advertising in chat rooms for his wares (*cough*) makes me lose any sympathy. It's one thing to copy some movies and songs and share them with your friends on an ftp server, I do it and I'm sure many other slashdotters do the same. But the wholesale distribution to anonymous people is just plain silly. And I'm sure that the university's computer policy doesn't allow people to run ftp servers or distribute copyrighted material.
No sympathy at all.