If they "license" the software in the embedded code, yup. The Maytag man can disable your clothes dryer... or worse yet, Cisco would be able to disable your router, etc. etc.
I was talking about the superslim notebooks.... a person in my office has one, and I helped him put Linux on it. I could hardly type at the thing, since it was so small -- there isn't much room for key travel when the computer itself is almost as thick as the keyboard on my Dell. He got the low-end model (although they only offer 2 models) so maybe the high-end one is better; I don't know.
The only upside about the Sony (that I can see) is that it's ULTRA-portable. If you weren't feature/power hungry, and just wanted something for coding or writing papers on the go, then it's great. As for me, though, I'm power and feature-hungry, and the Superslim didn't have enough bells-and-whistles for me to justify paying its higher price.
I just got a Dell Inspiron 7000 with the 15" display, and I think it's great. The machine has a couple gotchas though, all of which (I think anyway) stem from the huge screen. I have no idea how a 16.5" screen would work but I'll speak from experience about the I7K:
1. The notebook weighs 9 pounds. If you have to walk real far with this, it will kill your shoulder.
2. The physical case is huge. Frankly I like that part, because it gives the notebook a nice solid feel (not like those Sony ones which feel as flimsy as a matchbook). It still fits comfortably on a lap, but I think if it were any bigger, it would be uncomfortable.
3. The bigger the screen, the more chance you have to end up with dead pixels. I remember reading on Dell's customer service discussion board that the 15" displays on the I7K notebooks have 2.3 million transistors in them... statistically, the chances of any one of those failing is higher since there are more to 'possibly' fail. What this translates to is more possibility of having dead pixels on your screen. My notebook came with one dead pixel, and from what other people have told me it's a common thing on such big screens. Luckily if the problem gets worse, the warranty covers it.
4. Just where would the screen go? The I7K screen is actually as big as the base of the laptop, so when the lid is shut, the lid actually hangs over the edge. I'd hate to see how they can wrangle a 16.5" screen into it.
5. Think of the power consumption... the I7K has a huge battery which (according to the Linux APM meter) still holds 3 hours worth of power, as long as you're not playing Half-Life. Another inch and a half's worth of backlight could eat into your power requirements and require a bigger battery... adding more weight.
I'm sure someone will make a laptop with a 16.5" screen. It might be great for graphic artists to show things to clients, or in other situations where portability doesn't matter. But I wouldn't expect this thing to go far in the normal portable PC market, it's just *too* big.
Blockbuster Entertainment or Theatres, Inc. is not the moral authority. Frankly I wonder why they continue to ask for drivers' licenses, because I've looked all over mine and I cannot find where on that little card it says whether or not I have the maturity to see a movie.
I went to purchase tickets for South Park on opening day for 4 people. Since the post-Columbine kneejerk policy seems to card anyone who looks like they're younger than 35, I was carded. I gladly pulled out my drivers' license, since frankly I think keeping 8-year-olds out of this particular movie is a Good Thing.
Then though, the guy in the booth told me I needed to show 3 more IDs. I asked him how I was supposed to go back and collect drivers' licenses from everyone before I came. I'm buying MOVIE TICKETS, not beer. We argued for a few minutes and he finally decided to sell me the ticket. Of course, when he went to the computer terminal to print out the tickets, it beeped at him -- the movie had sold out. "Oh, I just forgot to put up the sign." As I was walking out he final
Later, though, I heard from a few other people who DID manage to get in, that they got carded again once they entered the theatre lobby, and then were carded yet again when they went into the actual auditorium to sit down.
OTOH, though, when I went to see Eyes Wide Shut last Saturday, I went to the one of the smaller theatres that weren't owned by one of these giant corporations. Didn't get carded once, and it was one of the better movie theatres I had ever been to... none of the junk you have to put up with at the mega-googolplex theatres.
Seems like the common thread here is just to avoid the mega-multiplex theatres. Every town has some smaller theatres (not owned by these worldwide congolmerates) that could definitely use your support. And (at least in my city, anyway) these sort of smaller theatres are in the more culturally rich parts of town. You can get some great ethnic food, visit a club or two, and catch a great movie all on the same street.
Think about it: The Matrix was one of those movies that would only work well on DVD. Sound and picture quality on VHS, compared to DVD, really does suck.
When you saw The Matrix in the theatres, the soundtrack and FX was one of the things that made the whole movie what it was. If you don't watch it on DVD with digital surround and great picture quality, you're missing out on a lot.
Plus think of all the "Special Features" they could pack onto a DVD like that. DVDs can hold 18 gigs, and a lot of movies only take up 7 or 8 of them. Think about the sort of fun stuff they can shove on that other 10 gig.
Reminds me of something I read somewhere...
on
Penguin Pets
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· Score: 3
...about how Air Force pilots would fly over flocks of penguins on the ground. The penguins would turn their heads up to look at the plane, and the penguins weren't bright enough to realize that if they turned their heads back too far, they'd fall over. Supposedly these pilots would do this a lot just to watch an entire flock of penguins fall over on their backs.
Was this just an urban legend? Anyone else know anything about this?
Remember what your father told you, and I just recently realized he was right: 1) You get what you pay for 2) There's no such thing as a free lunch. 3) If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
You're paying $40 a month for Internet service. How can a bandwidth provider give multi-megabit access to an entire city, peer on a backbone, and still be able to turn a profit? By oversubscribing and limiting bandwidth for everyone.
This is what I've realized when my own ISP, Charter Communications, pulled the rug out from under me. I rented their Windows-Only ISA-card cable modem last December since they promised 50 times faster speed than my 28.8 modem, for $34/month. And I had 200-300KB/sec downloads from it all the time.
Now they have a Linux-friendly external modem, but if I take the new modem, I have to go for their new pricing plan, which all new subscribers get thrown into: 256Kbps DOWN for $29/month, 512Kbps for $39/month, or 768Kbps for $79/month. And right now it's not even 2-way service. I can keep the Cable Winmodem and my better-than-T1 downloads until they go 2-way in my neighborhood, and then I'd have to fork over my old modem and take the new pricing. So it's a choice between "Use windows and get high speed" or "Use Linux and get ripped off." I should have expected this from a company owned by Paul Allen... protecting his Microsoft interests.
The gravy train's going to end soon, folks. Like someone else said, the cable modem is a system that's going to come back and haunt you. It did for me. If you want guranteed T1 speeds, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and get a T1. Otherwise you're going to pay $40/month for $40-quality Internet access.
On an unrelated note, I gotta love the Office 2000 ad on/. which claims "Now applications will know how to repair themselves." I think adage #3 certainly holds true here.....
There is a REALLY NICE spreadsheet app for the Pilot, called QuickSheet.... it also has a conduit to pipe your spreadsheets into Excel, if you're into that sort of thing.
I can't remember who made it but check around on pilotgear...
Apple has proven themselves to be able to make a product that the average Joe Six-Pack can sit down and be able to use relatively easily without much training (that and some Mac hardware/software integration is very sweet, while other aspects of it we all loathe).
Apple has always also proven themselves in the content production industry - magazine, TV, movies, etc. Most reputable media shops will at least have a Mac somewhere.
Apple has also got a unique marketing push, and as much as I can't stand most of Apple's products, I do admire the way they marketed products such as the iMac. Their push was to get these products into the home, and they did it in record amounts because they tried approaches that had never been done before. It was sort of a no-nonsense approach: "you could really use this product, here's what you can do with it, and look it's so cheap!"
Apple's perfect niche would be the consumer media market. You have the backing of the content producers, since Apple dominates that market. All they need now is a cheap consumer product to display that content, and it has to have the Apple trademark ease-of-use.
Most people I bet would just want something they could look up sports scores, check the news, and maybe blast out an email or two, without the expensive overhead of a PC. Apple could make a thin-client box that people could keep on their kitchen table and read it while having their morning coffee, and if they marketed it well enough, it'd sell like crazy.
Apple would need to align with some media corporation to make this successful though - I don't think a total sellout would be necessary, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off without a media giant's backing as well. Who better than the Disney media empire to help Apple out? Again, I don't think they'd need to sell out, but for them to have the Disney AND Apple branding on the system thanks to an alliance of some sort, then it might be pretty successful.
Wow, over 40% of Win95 users reported that their PC quit working at least once a month... 15% on NT Workstation.
The SPARC Solaris machine I use at work has been running for 2 1/2 months straight (and that reboot was because of a power outage). On the other hand, if our NT server doesn't BSOD at least twice a day, it's a red-letter day.
"By using this ISP, I agree to take full personal responsibility for any obscene or libellous material I post within it's domain. In the case that the material personally posted by myself or a dependent is libellous and is pursued by the authorities, I hereby relieve the ISP of all responsibility for these actions."
Most ISP usage agreements (or at least the ones I've seen anyway) already have similar clauses, here in the U.S. My lack of any law education though tells me that I have no clue if it holds water. The best publishing-related analogy I can think of is a magazine company saying "Our editors are not responsible, all we do is print words on paper. Our authors are responsible for their content."
This is like suing the phone company because I said something about someone else I didn't like over a phone conversation.
If this becomes any sort of legal precedent, then I will go right out and sue my own phone company for libel when all my friends talk about me behind my back.
As if it's any more of a tribute to the world's messed up legal systems, I also love how Demon was caught in a lawsuit vs. AOL over the name "Number One ISP." Funny, the court ruled in favor of AOL even though AOL isn't even an ISP...
1) First, you can do it too. check out the DNA-o-gram generator:
Encode your own secret messages in DNA code. Now all you need is a synthesis machine to create your encoded ladder, and someone to give it to whose got some good biology knowhow and a gene sequencer machine. (I'm sure there are plenty of people in column A, but not column B)
Borrowing wrong thing from iMac.
on
Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 1
This "stylish case" thing won't last since people don't care about looks. The iMac was a Good Thing(TM) since it rolled everything into one and sold it at a cheap price.
Exactly what is the problem with beige, anyway? I always thought most people shoved their computers under their desk to free up desktop space and forgot about it. Black would be better than beige, though.
What we should be doing is focusing on making them smaller, not prettier. If it weren't for the fact that I had just bought a brand new PC last summer, I'd be using a laptop exclusively now since having a flat-panel laptop screen frees up so much desk space. The industry should make something small and easy to take with you when your family goes on a long car trip, etc.
If we are looking for good cases, though, I want mine in a 5 foot tall by maybe 1 foot wide black shiny marble tower.... lots of blinky lights.
If you have a 'original' satellite dish and not a DSS dish, you can pick up the pre-feeds to all your favorite network programs without having to deal with local info since if you want local info that bad, you can just pick up a newspaper. Plus you can watch all sorts of crazy international shows.
If I recall DIVX is triple-DES encrypted... which could force export restrictions on the DIVX players, and DIVX discs are somewhat useless w/o a player to attach them to.
Luckily my cable company tells me that if I want to run my cable modem under Linux I can, but they're not going to support it and I have to configure and secure it myself... no big deal. I use Unix/Linux 90% of the time; I know what I'm doing. There are a lot who don't, and that's a liability many ISPs might not want to take on.
Here's the problem though with people running Linux machines on broadband connections like DSL/cable -- if people don't configure their machines correctly, they can become a massive spam relay or warez haven and never notice. This is more of a problem for cable than DSL, since the cable co. is both the ISP & the line provider, and one guy unwittingly running a server can soak up a lot of the pipe. In a lot of cases, though, too, the phone company is also the ISP behind the DSL lines, as well.
Look at your typical Red Hat install -- you have more services running then you'll ever need. Couple that with a user who doesn't know what he's doing and is running a misconfigured box, and you've got trouble. If anything he might have his machine rooted, which is his problem, but when crackers start wreaking havoc across the net from that machine, it becomes the ISP's problem. And since now ISPs can be sued when their users are caught harboring massive warez dumps, that adds one more layer onto the ISP's liability.
Plus don't forget that Linux users fit into the equation the same way Mac users do - as far as the general numbers go, we are too insignificant to require the ISP/phone/cable co. techs to have Linux or Unix training.
Remember that the ISP *can* control what you do, since they do own the network to which you are connecting. This is a business; they are operating to make money, not as a public service. They made considerable investments in their infrastructure to make DSL possible, they want to protect that.
Some apartment building owners won't let you rent from them if you're going to have a dog or if you smoke -- they own the building and want to protect their investment.
Then if computers can take on human characteristics through "taking living brains from dead bodies," we'd first need to figure out how to shut down or control parts of the brain that control aspects of the human personality.
We've all seen The Matrix, 2001, Terminator, etc, and all have to do with machines becoming sentient and destroying their operators when they threaten to pull the plug. It's a natural aspect built into our personality - logically a machine with a human brain would inherit that characteristic as well.
Imagine if you're trying to reboot your human-brain computer and it doesn't want to? Will it lash out at you by doing whatever it can to stop you? ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL.")
Slashdot Mirror
If they "license" the software in the embedded code, yup. The Maytag man can disable your clothes dryer... or worse yet, Cisco would be able to disable your router, etc. etc.
Who can forget the Compaq Portables....
the slide-out panels on the sides were cool, especially since you could shove the power cord in there.
Forget the fact, though, that the "Portable" is far larger than the case of my desktop machine... don't try hauling this thing onto a plane.
I was talking about the superslim notebooks.... a person in my office has one, and I helped him put Linux on it. I could hardly type at the thing, since it was so small -- there isn't much room for key travel when the computer itself is almost as thick as the keyboard on my Dell. He got the low-end model (although they only offer 2 models) so maybe the high-end one is better; I don't know.
The only upside about the Sony (that I can see) is that it's ULTRA-portable. If you weren't feature/power hungry, and just wanted something for coding or writing papers on the go, then it's great. As for me, though, I'm power and feature-hungry, and the Superslim didn't have enough bells-and-whistles for me to justify paying its higher price.
I just got a Dell Inspiron 7000 with the 15" display, and I think it's great. The machine has a couple gotchas though, all of which (I think anyway) stem from the huge screen. I have no idea how a 16.5" screen would work but I'll speak from experience about the I7K:
1. The notebook weighs 9 pounds. If you have to walk real far with this, it will kill your shoulder.
2. The physical case is huge. Frankly I like that part, because it gives the notebook a nice solid feel (not like those Sony ones which feel as flimsy as a matchbook). It still fits comfortably on a lap, but I think if it were any bigger, it would be uncomfortable.
3. The bigger the screen, the more chance you have to end up with dead pixels. I remember reading on Dell's customer service discussion board that the 15" displays on the I7K notebooks have 2.3 million transistors in them... statistically, the chances of any one of those failing is higher since there are more to 'possibly' fail. What this translates to is more possibility of having dead pixels on your screen. My notebook came with one dead pixel, and from what other people have told me it's a common thing on such big screens. Luckily if the problem gets worse, the warranty covers it.
4. Just where would the screen go? The I7K screen is actually as big as the base of the laptop, so when the lid is shut, the lid actually hangs over the edge. I'd hate to see how they can wrangle a 16.5" screen into it.
5. Think of the power consumption... the I7K has a huge battery which (according to the Linux APM meter) still holds 3 hours worth of power, as long as you're not playing Half-Life. Another inch and a half's worth of backlight could eat into your power requirements and require a bigger battery... adding more weight.
I'm sure someone will make a laptop with a 16.5" screen. It might be great for graphic artists to show things to clients, or in other situations where portability doesn't matter. But I wouldn't expect this thing to go far in the normal portable PC market, it's just *too* big.
OK, I'll try it again. Obviously greater-than/less-than characters don't work well here....
Blockbuster Entertainment or (Insert mega googolplex theatre name here) Theatres, Inc.
Oops... sorry 'bout the typos. Stupid HTML filters choked on my text.
I meant Blockbuster Entertainment or Theatres Inc.
I also meant "As I was walking out he finally put the SOLD OUT sign up."
Blockbuster Entertainment or Theatres, Inc. is not the moral authority. Frankly I wonder why they continue to ask for drivers' licenses, because I've looked all over mine and I cannot find where on that little card it says whether or not I have the maturity to see a movie.
I went to purchase tickets for South Park on opening day for 4 people. Since the post-Columbine kneejerk policy seems to card anyone who looks like they're younger than 35, I was carded. I gladly pulled out my drivers' license, since frankly I think keeping 8-year-olds out of this particular movie is a Good Thing.
Then though, the guy in the booth told me I needed to show 3 more IDs. I asked him how I was supposed to go back and collect drivers' licenses from everyone before I came. I'm buying MOVIE TICKETS, not beer. We argued for a few minutes and he finally decided to sell me the ticket. Of course, when he went to the computer terminal to print out the tickets, it beeped at him -- the movie had sold out. "Oh, I just forgot to put up the sign." As I was walking out he final
Later, though, I heard from a few other people who DID manage to get in, that they got carded again once they entered the theatre lobby, and then were carded yet again when they went into the actual auditorium to sit down.
OTOH, though, when I went to see Eyes Wide Shut last Saturday, I went to the one of the smaller theatres that weren't owned by one of these giant corporations. Didn't get carded once, and it was one of the better movie theatres I had ever been to... none of the junk you have to put up with at the mega-googolplex theatres.
Seems like the common thread here is just to avoid the mega-multiplex theatres. Every town has some smaller theatres (not owned by these worldwide congolmerates) that could definitely use your support. And (at least in my city, anyway) these sort of smaller theatres are in the more culturally rich parts of town. You can get some great ethnic food, visit a club or two, and catch a great movie all on the same street.
Think about it: The Matrix was one of those movies that would only work well on DVD. Sound and picture quality on VHS, compared to DVD, really does suck.
When you saw The Matrix in the theatres, the soundtrack and FX was one of the things that made the whole movie what it was. If you don't watch it on DVD with digital surround and great picture quality, you're missing out on a lot.
Plus think of all the "Special Features" they could pack onto a DVD like that. DVDs can hold 18 gigs, and a lot of movies only take up 7 or 8 of them. Think about the sort of fun stuff they can shove on that other 10 gig.
...about how Air Force pilots would fly over flocks of penguins on the ground. The penguins would turn their heads up to look at the plane, and the penguins weren't bright enough to realize that if they turned their heads back too far, they'd fall over. Supposedly these pilots would do this a lot just to watch an entire flock of penguins fall over on their backs.
Was this just an urban legend? Anyone else know anything about this?
Remember what your father told you, and I just recently realized he was right:
/. which claims "Now applications will know how to repair themselves." I think adage #3 certainly holds true here.....
1) You get what you pay for
2) There's no such thing as a free lunch.
3) If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
You're paying $40 a month for Internet service. How can a bandwidth provider give multi-megabit access to an entire city, peer on a backbone, and still be able to turn a profit? By oversubscribing and limiting bandwidth for everyone.
This is what I've realized when my own ISP, Charter Communications, pulled the rug out from under me. I rented their Windows-Only ISA-card cable modem last December since they promised 50 times faster speed than my 28.8 modem, for $34/month. And I had 200-300KB/sec downloads from it all the time.
Now they have a Linux-friendly external modem, but if I take the new modem, I have to go for their new pricing plan, which all new subscribers get thrown into: 256Kbps DOWN for $29/month, 512Kbps for $39/month, or 768Kbps for $79/month. And right now it's not even 2-way service. I can keep the Cable Winmodem and my better-than-T1 downloads until they go 2-way in my neighborhood, and then I'd have to fork over my old modem and take the new pricing. So it's a choice between "Use windows and get high speed" or "Use Linux and get ripped off." I should have expected this from a company owned by Paul Allen... protecting his Microsoft interests.
The gravy train's going to end soon, folks. Like someone else said, the cable modem is a system that's going to come back and haunt you. It did for me. If you want guranteed T1 speeds, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and get a T1. Otherwise you're going to pay $40/month for $40-quality Internet access.
On an unrelated note, I gotta love the Office 2000 ad on
ROTFLMAO!!
So what does this mean? Microsoft is hoping that NT eventually only be up 138 out of the total 168 hours in a week?
23x6 availability is the only correct fact in the entire article -- just do the math:
Let's see - 30 hours missing, ~2 minutes for a reboot (based on the NT server I occasionally use) - that's 900 reboots, or around 5-6 reboots an hour.
There is a REALLY NICE spreadsheet app for the Pilot, called QuickSheet.... it also has a conduit to pipe your spreadsheets into Excel, if you're into that sort of thing.
I can't remember who made it but check around on pilotgear...
Apple has proven themselves to be able to make a product that the average Joe Six-Pack can sit down and be able to use relatively easily without much training (that and some Mac hardware/software integration is very sweet, while other aspects of it we all loathe).
Apple has always also proven themselves in the content production industry - magazine, TV, movies, etc. Most reputable media shops will at least have a Mac somewhere.
Apple has also got a unique marketing push, and as much as I can't stand most of Apple's products, I do admire the way they marketed products such as the iMac. Their push was to get these products into the home, and they did it in record amounts because they tried approaches that had never been done before. It was sort of a no-nonsense approach: "you could really use this product, here's what you can do with it, and look it's so cheap!"
Apple's perfect niche would be the consumer media market. You have the backing of the content producers, since Apple dominates that market. All they need now is a cheap consumer product to display that content, and it has to have the Apple trademark ease-of-use.
Most people I bet would just want something they could look up sports scores, check the news, and maybe blast out an email or two, without the expensive overhead of a PC. Apple could make a thin-client box that people could keep on their kitchen table and read it while having their morning coffee, and if they marketed it well enough, it'd sell like crazy.
Apple would need to align with some media corporation to make this successful though - I don't think a total sellout would be necessary, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off without a media giant's backing as well. Who better than the Disney media empire to help Apple out? Again, I don't think they'd need to sell out, but for them to have the Disney AND Apple branding on the system thanks to an alliance of some sort, then it might be pretty successful.
Wow, over 40% of Win95 users reported that their PC quit working at least once a month... 15% on NT Workstation.
The SPARC Solaris machine I use at work has been running for 2 1/2 months straight (and that reboot was because of a power outage). On the other hand, if our NT server doesn't BSOD at least twice a day, it's a red-letter day.
"By using this ISP, I agree to take full personal responsibility for any obscene or libellous material I post within it's domain. In the case that the material personally posted by myself or a dependent is libellous and is pursued by the authorities, I hereby relieve the ISP of all responsibility for these actions."
Most ISP usage agreements (or at least the ones I've seen anyway) already have similar clauses, here in the U.S. My lack of any law education though tells me that I have no clue if it holds water. The best publishing-related analogy I can think of is a magazine company saying "Our editors are not responsible, all we do is print words on paper. Our authors are responsible for their content."
This is like suing the phone company because I said something about someone else I didn't like over a phone conversation.
If this becomes any sort of legal precedent, then I will go right out and sue my own phone company for libel when all my friends talk about me behind my back.
As if it's any more of a tribute to the world's messed up legal systems, I also love how Demon was caught in a lawsuit vs. AOL over the name "Number One ISP." Funny, the court ruled in favor of AOL even though AOL isn't even an ISP...
There was a plugin for sendmail that could filter out the Melissa virus email transmissions, I'm not sure about this one.
1) First, you can do it too. check out the DNA-o-gram generator:
Encode your own secret messages in DNA code. Now all you need is a synthesis machine to create your encoded ladder, and someone to give it to whose got some good biology knowhow and a gene sequencer machine. (I'm sure there are plenty of people in column A, but not column B)
This "stylish case" thing won't last since people don't care about looks. The iMac was a Good Thing(TM) since it rolled everything into one and sold it at a cheap price.
Exactly what is the problem with beige, anyway? I always thought most people shoved their computers under their desk to free up desktop space and forgot about it. Black would be better than beige, though.
What we should be doing is focusing on making them smaller, not prettier. If it weren't for the fact that I had just bought a brand new PC last summer, I'd be using a laptop exclusively now since having a flat-panel laptop screen frees up so much desk space. The industry should make something small and easy to take with you when your family goes on a long car trip, etc.
If we are looking for good cases, though, I want mine in a 5 foot tall by maybe 1 foot wide black shiny marble tower.... lots of blinky lights.
If you have a 'original' satellite dish and not a DSS dish, you can pick up the pre-feeds to all your favorite network programs without having to deal with local info since if you want local info that bad, you can just pick up a newspaper. Plus you can watch all sorts of crazy international shows.
If I recall DIVX is triple-DES encrypted... which could force export restrictions on the DIVX players, and DIVX discs are somewhat useless w/o a player to attach them to.
And that's the exact reason why many IRC servers won't let you on until they've portscanned you to make sure that you're not running Wingate.
Luckily my cable company tells me that if I want to run my cable modem under Linux I can, but they're not going to support it and I have to configure and secure it myself... no big deal. I use Unix/Linux 90% of the time; I know what I'm doing. There are a lot who don't, and that's a liability many ISPs might not want to take on.
Here's the problem though with people running Linux machines on broadband connections like DSL/cable -- if people don't configure their machines correctly, they can become a massive spam relay or warez haven and never notice. This is more of a problem for cable than DSL, since the cable co. is both the ISP & the line provider, and one guy unwittingly running a server can soak up a lot of the pipe. In a lot of cases, though, too, the phone company is also the ISP behind the DSL lines, as well.
Look at your typical Red Hat install -- you have more services running then you'll ever need. Couple that with a user who doesn't know what he's doing and is running a misconfigured box, and you've got trouble. If anything he might have his machine rooted, which is his problem, but when crackers start wreaking havoc across the net from that machine, it becomes the ISP's problem. And since now ISPs can be sued when their users are caught harboring massive warez dumps, that adds one more layer onto the ISP's liability.
Plus don't forget that Linux users fit into the equation the same way Mac users do - as far as the general numbers go, we are too insignificant to require the ISP/phone/cable co. techs to have Linux or Unix training.
Remember that the ISP *can* control what you do, since they do own the network to which you are connecting. This is a business; they are operating to make money, not as a public service. They made considerable investments in their infrastructure to make DSL possible, they want to protect that.
Some apartment building owners won't let you rent from them if you're going to have a dog or if you smoke -- they own the building and want to protect their investment.
Then if computers can take on human characteristics through "taking living brains from dead bodies," we'd first need to figure out how to shut down or control parts of the brain that control aspects of the human personality.
We've all seen The Matrix, 2001, Terminator, etc, and all have to do with machines becoming sentient and destroying their operators when they threaten to pull the plug. It's a natural aspect built into our personality - logically a machine with a human brain would inherit that characteristic as well.
Imagine if you're trying to reboot your human-brain computer and it doesn't want to? Will it lash out at you by doing whatever it can to stop you? ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL.")