(For those of you who don't know, ChexQuest was a very cheesy and nonviolent version of Doom.)
More seriously though, Worms AFAIK doesn't require the CD to play, just to start, so you could just start all the computers ahead of time running it...
Or, you could get virtual CD drive software, create virtual drives for every game you want to play, and not have to worry about CDs at all. You'll need a lot of hard drive space, but I can't imagine that would be a problem.
I don't know about other universities (though I expect they'd do the same), but Oxford in Britain allows you to get into a MSc compsci program solely on the basis of work experience instead of previous degrees. British schools also has the advantage that a MSc degree only takes 1 year to complete, tuition is far lower than at a US school (because all schools there are public), and there's no requirements for physics, math, or anything except compsci.
Phone lines running to your house are natural monopolies. Phone companies providing services and billing you for your calls are not. Before making any regulation, make a distinction between the two. The phone lines and dial tone can be provided best either by a single company that's heavily regulated, or by a municipal line-rental company (think Tacoma's municipal cable). The service and billing of calls, however, is in no way a natural monopoly, and eliminating choice in this will not help anyone.
Another interesting thought, though - phoneline-providing companies are not completely natural monopolies. I have AT&T Broadband for my local phone company, which means that my phone service comes over cable lines, which I'd have running to my house anyway; so if Verizon didn't have any competition in local phone that used its lines, or if there were no local phone lines at all, I could still have AT&T.
We shouldn't have to pay to hear uncensored talk shows or music. Freedom of speech is supposed to be a right, not a privilege; the FCC can't take that away from us. We need to correct the problem at its source, the FCC, rather than make a workaround (satellite radio) that has its own problems and will eventually have the same problems as the original medium. Notice how the FCC decency rules apply to standard cable, but not HBO... I bet that within 5 years they'll apply to HBO too.
Every cable company has made a deal with Excite@Home, either to continue service for the time being or to transition service away from @Home... except for one company, AT&T Broadband. This would be nothing special, except that AT&T is also bidding for Excite's assets. Why does AT&T want to buy a company that they used to use for their cable network, but will, in a week's time, have completely transitioned away from? Either AT&T is going to drop their bid for Excite@Home (if that's possible), or something's wrong here.
AT&T has moved 10% of their customers over from Excite@Home to their own service, but that's an understatement. AT&T Broadband, as it now exists, was formed from the merger of TCI and MediaOne under the AT&T Broadband brand name. TCI was one of the three Excite@Home core companies (also Comcast and Cox). MediaOne was using their own network, but the RoadRunner portal; as part of the purchase agreement, AT&T would switch MediaOne over to the Excite@Home portal by 31 December 2001, which they did this summer, but they kept MediaOne on its own network. About 50% of AT&T's customers were already using this network, so when AT&T extended the network and switched 10% of the old TCI customers over to it, they really have about 60% of their cable customers already running fine. (I'm running off a MediaOne connection in Boston now, and I had no downtime at all.)
I would definitely recommend Gandi.net. I've been using them for 6 months now, everything's worked flawlessly since signup, and they don't spam. Better yet, it costs 12 per year (about $10).
The United States hasn't been the land of the free since the 1960s, and the DMCA just puts us one step closer towards not having freedom of speech. If Alan Cox feels that he needs to block all Americans from seeing the Linux changelogs to make his point, so be it. It's not like he's blocking people who live in free countries from viewing the changelogs. And if the US repeals the DMCA and doesn't pass a similar law, Cox will open up the changelogs again - he believes in keeping them open but doesn't want to get arrested for it, unlike Microsoft who wants to keep them closed as a business strategy.
History shows that eventually the country will become independent. Look at India, Australia, Canada, all the Latin American countries, etc. There was a huge distance between the ruler and the territory, and eventually the ruler (Spain, Portugal or Britain) just gave up and let the territory rule itself. Seeing how few people would want to live in Antarctica (climate) anyway, few countries would care about keeping it as long as they had scientific observation rights.
First, remember that the Council of Europe is not the EU. It doesn't even have the same members. Just because this organisation passes a stupid law, doesn't mean the EU is evil, and doesn't mean the EU is contradicting itself.
Second, the Council of Europe didn't write this law, the US did; as such, I wouldn't expect many (if any) continental EU countries to sign it, especially considering it may contradict some of their EU responsibilities and they'd rather be part of the EU than pass this law.
Third, if they somehow did pass this law, we could always create a country in Antarctica.
I also live in a town of 8,000, neighboring a town of 6,000. Both towns were test sites for MediaOne Express when it first came out; that plus the fact that we're suburbs of Boston means that we get any form of new cable service almost first in the country. DSL sucks around here, but more people have cable than dialup now.
Don't know about you, but I'm still urgently awaiting the release of Enlightenment 0.17, so I can finally use a file manager for Linux that's not a Windows 95 look-alike, but doesn't look like Windows 3.1 either.
Intel/IBM used to be a monopoly; in fact, AMD made Intel processors. Then AMD decided to terminate their contract with Intel and make their own processors, and they've become a very sizable force. Not only that, unlike Microsoft where you need to have Windows to run Windows software, you can run Intel software equally well, if not better, on AMD than Intel's own processors. There will always be a market for someone to make non-Intel processors that can be thrown straight in an Intel motherboard and work. That's how AMD started, by letting people put K5's into Socket 7, and if they die another company can start making Socket 426 (something like that) processors that can be used in Pentium 4 mobos.
Bush constantly describes the terrorist attacks as being "attacks on freedom". Apparently, what he envisions as a free state is a 1984-esque totalitarian society, except that one can vote between two candidates who barely waver on the issues, and carry a gun. Is this really the only freedom we should be fighting for, and should we be prepared to give up all our other freedoms to try to kill bin Laden?
Perhaps the argument should be whether or not there should be age restrictions on things like alcohol, liquor, porn et al.
I agree completely, and I see no reason why porn and alcohol, which are no worse physically or psychologically to minors than they are to adults, should have age restrictions (that should be left for the minor's parents to decide). However, that's not what the Supreme Court is deciding, and with people like George Bush representing mainstream America, chances are we'll stop age discrimination the same time Europeans start liking the US.
The Supreme Court may not have jurisdiction over the whole Internet, but they do over all exclusively U.S.-based web sites. Regarding your post, there won't be a problem if the Supreme Court decides in favor of the government, only if the government then attemps to shut down porn sites based overseas that continue to let minors in.
As far as the online age-verification is concerned, the government should only be allowed to require that if they could also require real-world stores to do the same. As far as I know, they can't. Anyway, credit cards won't work very well on the Internet, especially with the advent of Visa Buxx and similar cards that are designed for 13-17 year olds. I don't think the federal government should have any say in who stores do business with as long as they're not harming anyone or denying them their rights, and the Supreme Court has tended to rule against the federal government in the past (Boy Scouts, for example). There's a growing number of people who believe that porn does not ruin the lives of older children (myself included), and it should be the parents', not the government's, decision on whether or not your child can look at porn.
As for the virtual child-porn, I think the main issue at stake is whether or not the virtual porn leads to real children being harmed. To the best of my knowledge there's no evidence showing that virtual porn does lead to the real thing, so the only way the government can win is at least 5 of the justices ignore the evidence and vote based on "Child porn is bad." It's the harming of innocent kids that's bad, not the porn itself. Can the Supreme Court see past that? We'll have to wait and see.
I wouldn't, seeing as AT&T itself is going to be gobbled up by [Comcast | AOLTW | Charter | Cox | Disney] by Q3 2001, and the top 5 cable providers right now are AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Charter, Cox, in that order. Notice the lack of Adelphia from that list (although they could be #6).
First, AFAIK we actually moved over from AT&T RoadRunner, before which we had been MediaOne RoadRunner, before which we had been MediaOne Express, before which we had been Continental Cablevision Highway1 (or something like that).
Second, what do you mean TCI had swapped our market with MediaOne? I never remember having TCI for a cable provider, and I've had cable (Internet) since Continental Cablevision merged with US West the cable company.
Actually, that does mean that Excite@Home dropped off the face of the earth, at least as a company, because they already agreed to sell all their assets; I think the only reason they filed Chapter 11 instead of 7 is so people wouldn't lose service while the assets were being transitioned. More interesting, though, is what will happen to the assets. Obviously @Home's network will be merged with AT&T Broadband, but what will happen to Excite? AT&T has three real options:
Sell it off. Yahoo!, MSN or AOL could buy Excite to gain customers, Viacom or Disney could buy it to gain a (better) web presence, but chances are no one would pay enough to make it worth the effort for AT&T.
Turn it into an AT&T Broadband-only network. Essentially, AT&T could take the current http://home.excite.com/ page, turn that into http://www.attathome.com/, merge the user databases, and ditch the rest of Excite (so you'd have to be a paying customer to use it). This is probably more likely, but if AT&T's planning on selling off Broadband anyway, it may only take time away from negotiations with another cable company.
Don't do anything yet. AT&T would pretty much make an Excite@Home group inside AT&T Broadband, and not merge the services at all, instead spending effort on negotiations with Comcast. Then, once Comcast and AT&T Broadband merge, it's Comcast's problem.
I think that AT&T will try for about a month to sell Excite, and if they're unsuccessful, they'll just wait until the merger.
If every editor of Slashdot got up and left, and started a new site based on Slashcode (with a different name of course) that had the same content as the old Slashdot but with lots of anti-VA propaganda, I think VA would give CmdrTaco the rights to Slashdot back fast.
Once you leave, it'll start a vicious cycle. Less people will advertise on OSDN because of the smaller userbase, and more sites will leave OSDN because they make no profit from it, until OSDN collapses and VA Linux is nothing but yet another proprietary software dot-bomb.
I'm not naive enough to think that IBM's in open source for the good of the community. On the contrary, IBM simply wants to make life easier for themselves; it takes a much smaller team of people to adapt open-source software to a mainframe than to write entirely new software. Thereby saving IBM time and money, thereby making them a market leader.
Slashdot Mirror
ChexQuest!
(For those of you who don't know, ChexQuest was a very cheesy and nonviolent version of Doom.)
More seriously though, Worms AFAIK doesn't require the CD to play, just to start, so you could just start all the computers ahead of time running it...
Or, you could get virtual CD drive software, create virtual drives for every game you want to play, and not have to worry about CDs at all. You'll need a lot of hard drive space, but I can't imagine that would be a problem.
I don't know about other universities (though I expect they'd do the same), but Oxford in Britain allows you to get into a MSc compsci program solely on the basis of work experience instead of previous degrees. British schools also has the advantage that a MSc degree only takes 1 year to complete, tuition is far lower than at a US school (because all schools there are public), and there's no requirements for physics, math, or anything except compsci.
Phone lines running to your house are natural monopolies. Phone companies providing services and billing you for your calls are not. Before making any regulation, make a distinction between the two. The phone lines and dial tone can be provided best either by a single company that's heavily regulated, or by a municipal line-rental company (think Tacoma's municipal cable). The service and billing of calls, however, is in no way a natural monopoly, and eliminating choice in this will not help anyone.
Another interesting thought, though - phoneline-providing companies are not completely natural monopolies. I have AT&T Broadband for my local phone company, which means that my phone service comes over cable lines, which I'd have running to my house anyway; so if Verizon didn't have any competition in local phone that used its lines, or if there were no local phone lines at all, I could still have AT&T.
We shouldn't have to pay to hear uncensored talk shows or music. Freedom of speech is supposed to be a right, not a privilege; the FCC can't take that away from us. We need to correct the problem at its source, the FCC, rather than make a workaround (satellite radio) that has its own problems and will eventually have the same problems as the original medium. Notice how the FCC decency rules apply to standard cable, but not HBO... I bet that within 5 years they'll apply to HBO too.
Every cable company has made a deal with Excite@Home, either to continue service for the time being or to transition service away from @Home... except for one company, AT&T Broadband. This would be nothing special, except that AT&T is also bidding for Excite's assets. Why does AT&T want to buy a company that they used to use for their cable network, but will, in a week's time, have completely transitioned away from? Either AT&T is going to drop their bid for Excite@Home (if that's possible), or something's wrong here.
AT&T has moved 10% of their customers over from Excite@Home to their own service, but that's an understatement. AT&T Broadband, as it now exists, was formed from the merger of TCI and MediaOne under the AT&T Broadband brand name. TCI was one of the three Excite@Home core companies (also Comcast and Cox). MediaOne was using their own network, but the RoadRunner portal; as part of the purchase agreement, AT&T would switch MediaOne over to the Excite@Home portal by 31 December 2001, which they did this summer, but they kept MediaOne on its own network. About 50% of AT&T's customers were already using this network, so when AT&T extended the network and switched 10% of the old TCI customers over to it, they really have about 60% of their cable customers already running fine. (I'm running off a MediaOne connection in Boston now, and I had no downtime at all.)
the best game based on the doom engine ever was made: ChexQuest!
I would definitely recommend Gandi.net. I've been using them for 6 months now, everything's worked flawlessly since signup, and they don't spam. Better yet, it costs 12 per year (about $10).
The United States hasn't been the land of the free since the 1960s, and the DMCA just puts us one step closer towards not having freedom of speech. If Alan Cox feels that he needs to block all Americans from seeing the Linux changelogs to make his point, so be it. It's not like he's blocking people who live in free countries from viewing the changelogs. And if the US repeals the DMCA and doesn't pass a similar law, Cox will open up the changelogs again - he believes in keeping them open but doesn't want to get arrested for it, unlike Microsoft who wants to keep them closed as a business strategy.
History shows that eventually the country will become independent. Look at India, Australia, Canada, all the Latin American countries, etc. There was a huge distance between the ruler and the territory, and eventually the ruler (Spain, Portugal or Britain) just gave up and let the territory rule itself. Seeing how few people would want to live in Antarctica (climate) anyway, few countries would care about keeping it as long as they had scientific observation rights.
First, remember that the Council of Europe is not the EU. It doesn't even have the same members. Just because this organisation passes a stupid law, doesn't mean the EU is evil, and doesn't mean the EU is contradicting itself.
Second, the Council of Europe didn't write this law, the US did; as such, I wouldn't expect many (if any) continental EU countries to sign it, especially considering it may contradict some of their EU responsibilities and they'd rather be part of the EU than pass this law.
Third, if they somehow did pass this law, we could always create a country in Antarctica.
I also live in a town of 8,000, neighboring a town of 6,000. Both towns were test sites for MediaOne Express when it first came out; that plus the fact that we're suburbs of Boston means that we get any form of new cable service almost first in the country. DSL sucks around here, but more people have cable than dialup now.
Don't know about you, but I'm still urgently awaiting the release of Enlightenment 0.17, so I can finally use a file manager for Linux that's not a Windows 95 look-alike, but doesn't look like Windows 3.1 either.
Intel/IBM used to be a monopoly; in fact, AMD made Intel processors. Then AMD decided to terminate their contract with Intel and make their own processors, and they've become a very sizable force. Not only that, unlike Microsoft where you need to have Windows to run Windows software, you can run Intel software equally well, if not better, on AMD than Intel's own processors. There will always be a market for someone to make non-Intel processors that can be thrown straight in an Intel motherboard and work. That's how AMD started, by letting people put K5's into Socket 7, and if they die another company can start making Socket 426 (something like that) processors that can be used in Pentium 4 mobos.
Bush constantly describes the terrorist attacks as being "attacks on freedom". Apparently, what he envisions as a free state is a 1984-esque totalitarian society, except that one can vote between two candidates who barely waver on the issues, and carry a gun. Is this really the only freedom we should be fighting for, and should we be prepared to give up all our other freedoms to try to kill bin Laden?
I agree completely, and I see no reason why porn and alcohol, which are no worse physically or psychologically to minors than they are to adults, should have age restrictions (that should be left for the minor's parents to decide). However, that's not what the Supreme Court is deciding, and with people like George Bush representing mainstream America, chances are we'll stop age discrimination the same time Europeans start liking the US.
The Supreme Court may not have jurisdiction over the whole Internet, but they do over all exclusively U.S.-based web sites. Regarding your post, there won't be a problem if the Supreme Court decides in favor of the government, only if the government then attemps to shut down porn sites based overseas that continue to let minors in.
As far as the online age-verification is concerned, the government should only be allowed to require that if they could also require real-world stores to do the same. As far as I know, they can't. Anyway, credit cards won't work very well on the Internet, especially with the advent of Visa Buxx and similar cards that are designed for 13-17 year olds. I don't think the federal government should have any say in who stores do business with as long as they're not harming anyone or denying them their rights, and the Supreme Court has tended to rule against the federal government in the past (Boy Scouts, for example). There's a growing number of people who believe that porn does not ruin the lives of older children (myself included), and it should be the parents', not the government's, decision on whether or not your child can look at porn.
As for the virtual child-porn, I think the main issue at stake is whether or not the virtual porn leads to real children being harmed. To the best of my knowledge there's no evidence showing that virtual porn does lead to the real thing, so the only way the government can win is at least 5 of the justices ignore the evidence and vote based on "Child porn is bad." It's the harming of innocent kids that's bad, not the porn itself. Can the Supreme Court see past that? We'll have to wait and see.
I wouldn't, seeing as AT&T itself is going to be gobbled up by [Comcast | AOLTW | Charter | Cox | Disney] by Q3 2001, and the top 5 cable providers right now are AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Charter, Cox, in that order. Notice the lack of Adelphia from that list (although they could be #6).
First, AFAIK we actually moved over from AT&T RoadRunner, before which we had been MediaOne RoadRunner, before which we had been MediaOne Express, before which we had been Continental Cablevision Highway1 (or something like that).
Second, what do you mean TCI had swapped our market with MediaOne? I never remember having TCI for a cable provider, and I've had cable (Internet) since Continental Cablevision merged with US West the cable company.
- Sell it off. Yahoo!, MSN or AOL could buy Excite to gain customers, Viacom or Disney could buy it to gain a (better) web presence, but chances are no one would pay enough to make it worth the effort for AT&T.
- Turn it into an AT&T Broadband-only network. Essentially, AT&T could take the current http://home.excite.com/ page, turn that into http://www.attathome.com/, merge the user databases, and ditch the rest of Excite (so you'd have to be a paying customer to use it). This is probably more likely, but if AT&T's planning on selling off Broadband anyway, it may only take time away from negotiations with another cable company.
- Don't do anything yet. AT&T would pretty much make an Excite@Home group inside AT&T Broadband, and not merge the services at all, instead spending effort on negotiations with Comcast. Then, once Comcast and AT&T Broadband merge, it's Comcast's problem.
I think that AT&T will try for about a month to sell Excite, and if they're unsuccessful, they'll just wait until the merger.They'll request legislation that would make it illegal for hackers to use the backdoors.
If every editor of Slashdot got up and left, and started a new site based on Slashcode (with a different name of course) that had the same content as the old Slashdot but with lots of anti-VA propaganda, I think VA would give CmdrTaco the rights to Slashdot back fast.
Once you leave, it'll start a vicious cycle. Less people will advertise on OSDN because of the smaller userbase, and more sites will leave OSDN because they make no profit from it, until OSDN collapses and VA Linux is nothing but yet another proprietary software dot-bomb.
I'm not naive enough to think that IBM's in open source for the good of the community. On the contrary, IBM simply wants to make life easier for themselves; it takes a much smaller team of people to adapt open-source software to a mainframe than to write entirely new software. Thereby saving IBM time and money, thereby making them a market leader.