You said you don't have anything at home to tunnel through. Assuming that VPN really isn't a viable option, you can use ssh with a hosting provider like dreamhost (or a buddy's state-side server) to run a SOCKS proxy. The downside is that whatever app you're running (afaik) needs to understand how to use a SOCKS proxy, which Firefox/Safari/IE all do, as well as several of the more well-known IM apps like GAIM.
from your local system: $ ssh -D1080 yourserver.dreamhost.com
(or use PuTTY if you're on windows, and set up a dynamic port forward)
If you're in OS X, use your system>network settings to set up a global SOCKS proxy, which Safari will automagically use. If you're in Windows, use Firefox's proxy settings (Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings > Manual Proxy Config)
your SOCKS host is localhost, and the port is 1080 (or whatever you pick when you're creating the tunnel).
There are a couple of tricks to this. One is that you can't connect to anything as long as your settings specify to use a SOCKS proxy and the tunnel isn't open. For the places that have the "welcome to our intarweb access" redirects, you'll want to disable the SOCKS proxy settings until you get through that finished. Otherwise, you won't be able to open the tunnel, and it will appear as if you can't connect to anything. Firefox has a QuickProxy addon which makes this easier.
The second is that you can make sure that the proxy is active by a) visiting a "check my IP address" site to make sure it is showing up as your hosting provider or b) killing the tunnel and all web traffic should stop working.
ADS-B, the next generation of ATC tracking/radar systems was brought online recently over Louisville, KY and has been in testing in several other areas as well.
They are also phasing in more GPS approaches (nav systems specifically designed for landing) and phasing out the NDBs (non-directional beacon) and taking failing VORs out of service that are often used at fields which have (ILS) instrument approach runways.
That said, it is a very slow process. If your car's speedo goes out, who cares. If the airspeed indicator in your plane fails, you could be in deep shit. (GPS only measures your speed across the ground, not your airspeed - which includes factors for wind. Too slow and you stall, crash. Too fast you rip the wings off, crash.) Upgrading the avionics in even the most inexpensive aircraft is not cheap.
Are they worth it? How many great inventions are not coming to market, either because of fear of being sued or because some asshole is sitting on a patent for the one thing you need to make your new invention work - and if you try to make anything even resembling his widget, boy you're in deep shit? How much more expensive are everyday products we buy because of patent trolls? This really isn't that much different than malpractice lawyers (ambulance chasers). Doctors have to get insanely expensive insurance because you know some dumbass is going to sue you for something really stupid and the trial lawyer is going to take 60%+ of the extortion money.
Seems the same when developing *any* tech these days. It is a damn mine field. Some obscure firm or individual is going to come out of the woodwork *after* the technology is common place, and claim they have a really vague patent on some really obscure sub-assembly that just happens to be critical to your invention - which you came up with, completely unaware anyone else had any similar ideas. I don't know that this is the case here specifically, but it seems like this is the operating procedure for patent trolls.
So companies like Intel, IBM, etc have to spend insane amounts of money - passed onto us in the form of higher unit costs - patenting sometimes really stupid things so no one can sue them, and hiring armies of lawyers to either try to defend the company from trolls or waste time trying to figure out if the hanging chad which really is nothing like joe troll's patent your researchers dug up, could come back to bite the company in the ass.
Look, I get that inventors aren't going to always have the capital to build something now, or the manufacturing capabilities, so it takes time to get either one of those things together to get your invention from concept to product. But for crying out loud, to claim damages for patent infringement, shouldn't you have to be able to actually show that you lost something, that you have damages, that you at least have paperwork demonstrating your effort to bring your product to market? Isn't that the point of a patent, so that you have the right to market your idea without someone stealing it? These asshats who are nothing more than shell organizations and no assets beyond a cellphone and a patent portfolio are ridiculous.
It saddens me to think that if the patent system was as screwed up today as it was when Edison and Westinghouse were vying to bring electricity to homes, we'd all still be sitting in the dark - because the discovery/inventions would have been lost to the energy of fighting over patents, and probably still be tied up in litigation.
Here's a choice quote: "If the court sides with Vernor, the fundamental economics of Autodesk's business will be upset, [Autodesk's lawyer] said."
Autodesk can cry me a river. The fundamental economics of their business are not the jurisdiction of the court, the law is. The premise is that their fundamental model is so weak that someone, otherwise legally, selling to another party a product the purchaser legally owns can be so disruptive as to injure their business - which again, is not something the courts are supposed to be involved with unless there is clear theft or fraud.
I don't license my car, or my fridge, or even things containing supposedly licensed software like my DVD player or my TiVo. I bought it legally, I can resell it if I want to. Before you say something about "software isn't hardware" - I recall a story from not too long ago about a hair products company going after someone for re-selling their products.
Prior to cases like Kelo v New London, I would have thought this would have passed the "obviously dumb" test and Autodesk would have been told to knock it off. Anymore, I'm not sure.
There are plenty of people who don't start out with all the advantages, or all the smarts, or even any real support from the adults around them - but they work really damn hard and they make something of themselves. Granted, a little luck never hurts. I'm thinking of Edison and Einstein, Jordan and Woods. People who came from very humble means to do great things.
I'll never be a rocket scientist because I'm better at blowing things up than I am making them fly, but that doesn't mean I can't be damn good at what I do. I'm not even the best programmer, but I work hard and I try to make up for my lack of direct skill by being more customer-oriented and working harder at it.
However, your point about making technical and skilled trades more accessible and appealing is a good one. I saw an interview with Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame this morning where he was talking about wanting to make "dirty" jobs and trade schools, etc not seem like they're such an inferior choice to a 4-year degree. He has a website to this end: mikeroweworks.com which I haven't really explored.
Wait, isn't it Microsoft that silently installs a plugin into Firefox during a Windows update session, and disables the "uninstall" functionality? Guy has some nerve to stand around and wag his finger at Google.
Troll? No, because I had the same thought - and wondered if this was a step in that direction. I don't think it is, but to your point: don't believe the Republicans. Believe the words of the FCC diversity czar himself, Mark Lloyd. Among other things, he believes the first amendment is an exaggeration:
"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press," [Lloyd] said. "This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies." (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53055)
Notice he first says that his focus is not freedom of speech, but then dismisses it as unimportant and irrelevant. Lloyd apparently, by his own words (read the rest of the article in which he outlines his plan) believes the federal government, through the FCC and other satellite offices should be carefully controlling not just ownership (which in itself is an issue) but also the *content* of the media.
Something I've been wondering about for a while in these discussions of comparison... it seems like the population density of America is fairly low compared to other places. A lot of folks tend to live outside the major metropolitan areas - does it make it much more expensive to deliver fat pipes to all those places? It is easy to give 33mb service in a densely populated area because you have far fewer lines to run and can locate the infrastructure fairly close to your customers?
Is anyone nowadays interesting in something more than getting, or providing, the cheapest deal. Is there room left nowadays for an ISP that seeks to provide the fastest and widest piplines for people that are willing to pay that much extra. I know I would be.
Have you even looked at options outside of the typical consumer-level "broadband" providers? There are plenty of options if you really feel like paying out your ass. I'm pretty confident that if you called Sprint and said you wanted a T3 with an SLA and money was no object, they would dig a trench and get you the service. Speakeasy offers dedicated ADSL starting at $150/month. I'm going to guess that you're talking out of your ass, rather than willing to pay.
Typically when I am shopping for a purchase, I look at the most expensive thing, the cheapest thing, and try to shoot for something in the middle. To me, this typically represents the best value. Often the cheap thing is made from inferior parts, with manufacturing tolerances you could drive a truck through. In my experience, cheap things tend to break easily. The expensive thing tends to be only marginally better than the midrange thing - at twice the cost with features I'll mostly never have a use for.
If we're lucky enough to have a choice of residential broadband providers, there really aren't very many "features" to compare them on - except speed and price. ATT has DSL for $15/mo - but then you figure out it is 384K for a cost of about $0.04/Kbps. T/W offers 1.5Kbps for $50 at a cost of about $0.03/Kbps. They mostly all offer things I never use: a free email account or 5, maybe a little bit of webspace, a portal (either their own or in partnership with ie yahoo), and maybe some re-branded AV software. Most of the time you'll get the same crappy tech support.
Once we move to business-class "broadband" we start having more things we can use to compare them: dedicated line, static IPs, SLA, etc.
These distortions of statistics are already used by the government to great effect in other areas, such as unemployment and GDP, and the public eat it up.
I know the govt does it in education statistics, because part of my job used to be analyzing, aggregating, and reporting school building and district test scores - trying to show year-over-year changes in the trends etc. Not only did the figures occasionally seem falsified for bizarre reasons ("the vast majority of the students scored very well, as did most of the minority groups - but a single ethnic/racial minority group did not score as well - so we (the state dept of education) are ignoring all formulas and manually lowering your school district's overall rating"), but also kept changing the testing and district scoring standards every year - so it was nearly impossible to make a valid comparison.
On the global scale geographical routing could be used, with a registry mapping the public keys to their general spatial neighborhood (General so it was less of a privacy concern, say 16-256 km^2)
That would never work in the United States. We have no idea how to measure this "km^2" thing you speak of.
I'm looking at my iPhone running TwitterPhone right now. It supports adding my location to my tweets, and letting me search for anyone posting within a certain radius of my location. Is this just an old story, or is there something new here I'm missing?
You're not hallucinating about twitter. Maybe about the girlfriend, this is/. after all.
The MTA is a government run entity, right? I didn't think the gov't was allowed to copyright it's work? The idea being that the funding for said work was derived from the taxpayers? If it was a privately owned limo company or something of that nature, I could start to see the argument.
On the other hand, wouldn't you want anything that made it easier for "customers" to purchase and use your product? Apparently not when you're the government with no real incentive to actually do things right or have to compete with another company.
This is Flickr (a US based company) telling its users that they aren't entitled to express political opinions. Does Flickr have the right? It is their site, so yes they do.
I agree. However, hiding behind "copyright" laws as a way of suppressing speech is wrong. This thinly veiled approach uses the threat of sanctions by the gov't (copyright infringement either through civil or criminal proceedings) to chill dissent. This is pretty clearly fair use/parody if there ever was. If you disagree with the content of the message, and that is why you're taking it down, at least have the rocks to say so.
Comcast forges RST packets and intercept DNS requests using man in the middle attacks.
This is where my problem is - Comcast is committing fraud by doing this and then denying/obfuscating/lying to their customers about it. I don't necessarily think new laws or regulations are the answer. I think we should prosecute them under existing fraud statutes. Blaming your customer or their personal equipment when they call and complain that things aren't working, knowing full well the customer's equipment is not at fault? This is fraud. I'm a libertarian who thinks we have too much government. But the moment you as an individual intentionally mislead, attempt to defraud, or otherwise deceive a party to which you have an agreement or contract, I expect you to be prosecuted and pay dearly for this.
I believe this especially when it comes to situations like Comcast where they have a significant portion of knowledge about the technical details of the network that is not accessible to the vast majority of their customers. Comcast uses this divide in the knowledge and technical skill to mask their activities and further the deception.
At that point, you won't get the option to restore from backup however, which means you have to jump through hoops if you had apps with important data to restore. iTunes still seems to be the best way to restore a phone.
hmm, I've been pondering a mobileme subscription. what kind of hoops do you mean? do you just not get prompted to restore from backup after manually re-entering your mobileme account info on a "blank" phone? seems like you could force a restore from backup in iTunes regardless of what mobileme did, no?
There are some apps that (not sure why or what the difference is) will not restore their application data from a backup. It might be that the app wasn't written in a way to take advantage of the backup/restore process.
but if you receive a call while you're driving then the app does cut out -- it will restart once you've finished the conversation
My Garmin, when connected to my phone (any phone, not just iPhone) via bluetooth does exactly the same thing. It supresses the nav prompts until you complete the call. I don't understand why this is a complaint? Especially for this particular situation since you're running this app on a PHONE whose primary purpose is to receive CALLS. Or have I missed something obvious?
No, because TFA actually says "For those of you wondering what happens when you get a call, the app turns off but restarts as soon as you finish the call, so it's not too bad."
I've had to get my iPhone replaced twice. Neither time did I have any issues transferring my purchased items. The store (Apple or AT&T) will not transfer any settings, contacts, music, apps etc for you. However, iTunes (OS X, I assume Windows version will behave the same) recognizes this is a phone it hasn't seen and asks you if you want to restore this new phone from the last backup.
civil disobedience works and is justified here. ignore any bad laws passed. they don't apply to you. they were corrupt and so are null and void. use your own good common sense! the understanding of what's right and wrong is inside you; you don't need to look at BOUGHT AND PAID FOR laws for your morality.
once the media industry decided to play fair, we'll take off the mitts and also play fair. until then, its lawlessness. on both sides.
(emphasis mine) I think you nailed it. Unfortunately, "[any bad laws] don't apply to you" is a quick trip to anarchy. The RIAA and the other groups have no power without the government intervening on their behalf. Which is another in a long list of arguments for small government with limited power, positioned just barely to the left of anarchy.
Because after all, if I don't use their DNS, why should I care where they are directing non-existant domain traffic to?
Using OpenDNS, Treewalk, ns1.sprintlink.net, etc doesn't matter because a) Returning the A record when the domain does not exist blatantly violates the RFCs: the established commonly agreed upon standards without which the internet would cease to function and b) some ISPs redirect your DNS traffic to their servers whether you like it or not. Some outright block DNS servers that don't belong to them, and others silently redirect your requests. c) In the README file of your latest application, you shouldn't have to tell everyone that they need to use your DNS servers just to get a *correct* response.
It isn't just you at home with your pr0n that has to deal with this BS. I have to deal with it where I work, because my company's ISP is a cable provider who does this redirect crap. So when I go to write an app that *might* use DNS, I have to screw with this nonsense because the cableco can't be bothered to return an NX - but instead always returns an A record for their server - subject to change without notification. So when they change to redirect to another server, wtf am I supposed to do then? The only way my app could possibly tell there was a problem is to see if the response matches this redirect server. And no, it isn't an option for my application to just willy nilly pick a DNS server of its choice to use. My application requests a lookup from the OS's network layer, but has no particular knowledge of the DNS servers - exactly how it is supposed to be.
If I give my app to other people, are they supposed to put into the app's configuration the A record information that would correspond to their particular ISP's "redirect" host? My app needs to know when the DNS lookup failed. I have no way to tell when every damn name returns an A record. I count on the DNS server to respond in the way the RFCs set out. Comcast and the other ISPs are saying "fuck your rules"
As has been said until we're blue in the face:The internet is not the web. If the ISPs and the browser folks want to sit down and see what the RFC permits and figure out how to return a url in the NX that the browser would recognize and could handle, then I have no problem with that. As long as it doesn't interfere with the normal operation of an NX response. As I'm sitting here thinking about it, the place for this information seems to be either in the DHCP lease, or in the wpad.dat auto-proxy configuration file. But Comcast and the others like them have decided they don't have to play well with others.
oh great, so that BS carries over too. unless an installing app is replacing system libraries (!?) or modifying the shell in some significant way (ie tortoisesvn) then it should never, ever need to force the computer to reboot. ever.
There are valid reasons to scorn Apple for being evil, especially lately with the iPhone stuff. But you can't really beat most of the OSX application installs being as simple as dragging it from the archive to the "Applications" folder.
We tested four 32-bit Windows operating systems: Windows 7 RTM build 7600, Windows 7 Release Candidate build 7100
I'm trying to understand why the 32-bit? If we're going to have to make the transition because stuff is going to be broken intentionally or otherwise for XP going forward, then do the 64bit stuff right and stop screwing around. Is anyone still making 32bit processors? Is anyone intentionally buying machines with 32bit processors?
Windows XP x64 can be a nightmare because while most stuff works, lots of things still don't - which includes a lot of hardware because the drivers don't work or just aren't available. That is mostly on the product vendors, but at the same time - I have to run x64 or a good part of my system's memory is inaccessible and unusable to Windows. I also, however, blame MSFT. XP x64 is really just server 2003 with some of the components torn out and some of the desktop-y UI stuff added back in - (I could be wrong about this) rather than being a 64bit version of the XP kernel it seems.
So while they continue to play around, we're stuck with either having wasted our money > ~2G of memory, or wasted time on hardware (occasionally software) that doesn't work. For some reason I don't remember the transition from 16 to 32 bit being this much of a pain in the ass. Except that I haven't been able to get my copy of Redneck Rampage to run on anything since Windows98.
Can iPhone users buy the app in another store? I hope so; buying a (smart?)phone for a couple hundred dollars which can *only* run apps from a single store is not very appealing to me.
I am not an iPhone user, but from what I've heard it's either Apple's App Store or a jailbroken iPhone with no official warranty or support.
This is correct. The only place to get apps for your iPhone is from the app store - aside from jailbreaking it. If you jailbreak your phone, you are not only voiding your warranty, but also taking the risk of having it bricked either coincidentally by a software update, or intentionally by some combination of Apple/ATT discovering the "rogue" device. No big deal if it is your xbox that gets bricked (you're out $200, but that's about it). I only have one phone and having it bricked is not an option.
I have the iPhone and I'm starting to get pissed off with the stories of Apple taking months to respond, and then rejecting apps arbitrarily. I signed up and paid for the iPhone devkit, but have mostly avoided dealing with it because of the app submission nonsense. Why put all that effort into it when they and AT&T play these stupid games? Com'on Apple, you're killing us out here.
This is true of Lost Planet and Halo. My buddy has an HD set while I have SD, and he is always wondering why I can't see the minimap clearly - because it apparently renders much crisper in HD - almost to the point of all detail being lost in the SD view.
Slashdot Mirror
You said you don't have anything at home to tunnel through. Assuming that VPN really isn't a viable option, you can use ssh with a hosting provider like dreamhost (or a buddy's state-side server) to run a SOCKS proxy. The downside is that whatever app you're running (afaik) needs to understand how to use a SOCKS proxy, which Firefox/Safari/IE all do, as well as several of the more well-known IM apps like GAIM.
from your local system: $ ssh -D1080 yourserver.dreamhost.com (or use PuTTY if you're on windows, and set up a dynamic port forward)
If you're in OS X, use your system>network settings to set up a global SOCKS proxy, which Safari will automagically use. If you're in Windows, use Firefox's proxy settings (Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings > Manual Proxy Config)
your SOCKS host is localhost, and the port is 1080 (or whatever you pick when you're creating the tunnel).
There are a couple of tricks to this. One is that you can't connect to anything as long as your settings specify to use a SOCKS proxy and the tunnel isn't open. For the places that have the "welcome to our intarweb access" redirects, you'll want to disable the SOCKS proxy settings until you get through that finished. Otherwise, you won't be able to open the tunnel, and it will appear as if you can't connect to anything. Firefox has a QuickProxy addon which makes this easier.
The second is that you can make sure that the proxy is active by a) visiting a "check my IP address" site to make sure it is showing up as your hosting provider or b) killing the tunnel and all web traffic should stop working.
more info
ADS-B, the next generation of ATC tracking/radar systems was brought online recently over Louisville, KY and has been in testing in several other areas as well.
They are also phasing in more GPS approaches (nav systems specifically designed for landing) and phasing out the NDBs (non-directional beacon) and taking failing VORs out of service that are often used at fields which have (ILS) instrument approach runways.
That said, it is a very slow process. If your car's speedo goes out, who cares. If the airspeed indicator in your plane fails, you could be in deep shit. (GPS only measures your speed across the ground, not your airspeed - which includes factors for wind. Too slow and you stall, crash. Too fast you rip the wings off, crash.) Upgrading the avionics in even the most inexpensive aircraft is not cheap.
Are they worth it? How many great inventions are not coming to market, either because of fear of being sued or because some asshole is sitting on a patent for the one thing you need to make your new invention work - and if you try to make anything even resembling his widget, boy you're in deep shit? How much more expensive are everyday products we buy because of patent trolls? This really isn't that much different than malpractice lawyers (ambulance chasers). Doctors have to get insanely expensive insurance because you know some dumbass is going to sue you for something really stupid and the trial lawyer is going to take 60%+ of the extortion money.
Seems the same when developing *any* tech these days. It is a damn mine field. Some obscure firm or individual is going to come out of the woodwork *after* the technology is common place, and claim they have a really vague patent on some really obscure sub-assembly that just happens to be critical to your invention - which you came up with, completely unaware anyone else had any similar ideas. I don't know that this is the case here specifically, but it seems like this is the operating procedure for patent trolls.
So companies like Intel, IBM, etc have to spend insane amounts of money - passed onto us in the form of higher unit costs - patenting sometimes really stupid things so no one can sue them, and hiring armies of lawyers to either try to defend the company from trolls or waste time trying to figure out if the hanging chad which really is nothing like joe troll's patent your researchers dug up, could come back to bite the company in the ass.
Look, I get that inventors aren't going to always have the capital to build something now, or the manufacturing capabilities, so it takes time to get either one of those things together to get your invention from concept to product. But for crying out loud, to claim damages for patent infringement, shouldn't you have to be able to actually show that you lost something, that you have damages, that you at least have paperwork demonstrating your effort to bring your product to market? Isn't that the point of a patent, so that you have the right to market your idea without someone stealing it? These asshats who are nothing more than shell organizations and no assets beyond a cellphone and a patent portfolio are ridiculous.
It saddens me to think that if the patent system was as screwed up today as it was when Edison and Westinghouse were vying to bring electricity to homes, we'd all still be sitting in the dark - because the discovery/inventions would have been lost to the energy of fighting over patents, and probably still be tied up in litigation.
Here's a choice quote: "If the court sides with Vernor, the fundamental economics of Autodesk's business will be upset, [Autodesk's lawyer] said."
Autodesk can cry me a river. The fundamental economics of their business are not the jurisdiction of the court, the law is. The premise is that their fundamental model is so weak that someone, otherwise legally, selling to another party a product the purchaser legally owns can be so disruptive as to injure their business - which again, is not something the courts are supposed to be involved with unless there is clear theft or fraud.
I don't license my car, or my fridge, or even things containing supposedly licensed software like my DVD player or my TiVo. I bought it legally, I can resell it if I want to. Before you say something about "software isn't hardware" - I recall a story from not too long ago about a hair products company going after someone for re-selling their products.
Prior to cases like Kelo v New London, I would have thought this would have passed the "obviously dumb" test and Autodesk would have been told to knock it off. Anymore, I'm not sure.
There are plenty of people who don't start out with all the advantages, or all the smarts, or even any real support from the adults around them - but they work really damn hard and they make something of themselves. Granted, a little luck never hurts. I'm thinking of Edison and Einstein, Jordan and Woods. People who came from very humble means to do great things.
I'll never be a rocket scientist because I'm better at blowing things up than I am making them fly, but that doesn't mean I can't be damn good at what I do. I'm not even the best programmer, but I work hard and I try to make up for my lack of direct skill by being more customer-oriented and working harder at it.
However, your point about making technical and skilled trades more accessible and appealing is a good one. I saw an interview with Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame this morning where he was talking about wanting to make "dirty" jobs and trade schools, etc not seem like they're such an inferior choice to a 4-year degree. He has a website to this end: mikeroweworks.com which I haven't really explored.
Wait, isn't it Microsoft that silently installs a plugin into Firefox during a Windows update session, and disables the "uninstall" functionality? Guy has some nerve to stand around and wag his finger at Google.
Troll? No, because I had the same thought - and wondered if this was a step in that direction. I don't think it is, but to your point: don't believe the Republicans. Believe the words of the FCC diversity czar himself, Mark Lloyd. Among other things, he believes the first amendment is an exaggeration:
"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press," [Lloyd] said. "This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies." (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53055)
Notice he first says that his focus is not freedom of speech, but then dismisses it as unimportant and irrelevant. Lloyd apparently, by his own words (read the rest of the article in which he outlines his plan) believes the federal government, through the FCC and other satellite offices should be carefully controlling not just ownership (which in itself is an issue) but also the *content* of the media.
Something I've been wondering about for a while in these discussions of comparison ... it seems like the population density of America is fairly low compared to other places. A lot of folks tend to live outside the major metropolitan areas - does it make it much more expensive to deliver fat pipes to all those places? It is easy to give 33mb service in a densely populated area because you have far fewer lines to run and can locate the infrastructure fairly close to your customers?
Is anyone nowadays interesting in something more than getting, or providing, the cheapest deal. Is there room left nowadays for an ISP that seeks to provide the fastest and widest piplines for people that are willing to pay that much extra. I know I would be.
Have you even looked at options outside of the typical consumer-level "broadband" providers? There are plenty of options if you really feel like paying out your ass. I'm pretty confident that if you called Sprint and said you wanted a T3 with an SLA and money was no object, they would dig a trench and get you the service. Speakeasy offers dedicated ADSL starting at $150/month. I'm going to guess that you're talking out of your ass, rather than willing to pay.
Typically when I am shopping for a purchase, I look at the most expensive thing, the cheapest thing, and try to shoot for something in the middle. To me, this typically represents the best value. Often the cheap thing is made from inferior parts, with manufacturing tolerances you could drive a truck through. In my experience, cheap things tend to break easily. The expensive thing tends to be only marginally better than the midrange thing - at twice the cost with features I'll mostly never have a use for.
If we're lucky enough to have a choice of residential broadband providers, there really aren't very many "features" to compare them on - except speed and price. ATT has DSL for $15/mo - but then you figure out it is 384K for a cost of about $0.04/Kbps. T/W offers 1.5Kbps for $50 at a cost of about $0.03/Kbps. They mostly all offer things I never use: a free email account or 5, maybe a little bit of webspace, a portal (either their own or in partnership with ie yahoo), and maybe some re-branded AV software. Most of the time you'll get the same crappy tech support.
Once we move to business-class "broadband" we start having more things we can use to compare them: dedicated line, static IPs, SLA, etc.
These distortions of statistics are already used by the government to great effect in other areas, such as unemployment and GDP, and the public eat it up.
I know the govt does it in education statistics, because part of my job used to be analyzing, aggregating, and reporting school building and district test scores - trying to show year-over-year changes in the trends etc. Not only did the figures occasionally seem falsified for bizarre reasons ("the vast majority of the students scored very well, as did most of the minority groups - but a single ethnic/racial minority group did not score as well - so we (the state dept of education) are ignoring all formulas and manually lowering your school district's overall rating"), but also kept changing the testing and district scoring standards every year - so it was nearly impossible to make a valid comparison.
On the global scale geographical routing could be used, with a registry mapping the public keys to their general spatial neighborhood (General so it was less of a privacy concern, say 16-256 km^2)
That would never work in the United States. We have no idea how to measure this "km^2" thing you speak of.
I'm looking at my iPhone running TwitterPhone right now. It supports adding my location to my tweets, and letting me search for anyone posting within a certain radius of my location. Is this just an old story, or is there something new here I'm missing?
/. after all.
You're not hallucinating about twitter. Maybe about the girlfriend, this is
The MTA is a government run entity, right? I didn't think the gov't was allowed to copyright it's work? The idea being that the funding for said work was derived from the taxpayers? If it was a privately owned limo company or something of that nature, I could start to see the argument. On the other hand, wouldn't you want anything that made it easier for "customers" to purchase and use your product? Apparently not when you're the government with no real incentive to actually do things right or have to compete with another company.
This is Flickr (a US based company) telling its users that they aren't entitled to express political opinions. Does Flickr have the right? It is their site, so yes they do.
I agree. However, hiding behind "copyright" laws as a way of suppressing speech is wrong. This thinly veiled approach uses the threat of sanctions by the gov't (copyright infringement either through civil or criminal proceedings) to chill dissent. This is pretty clearly fair use/parody if there ever was. If you disagree with the content of the message, and that is why you're taking it down, at least have the rocks to say so.
You will be excluded from winning if you commit a crime in your efforts to find me, contact my family, or physically harm me.
Man, talk about taking all the fun of a game.
Comcast forges RST packets and intercept DNS requests using man in the middle attacks.
This is where my problem is - Comcast is committing fraud by doing this and then denying/obfuscating/lying to their customers about it. I don't necessarily think new laws or regulations are the answer. I think we should prosecute them under existing fraud statutes. Blaming your customer or their personal equipment when they call and complain that things aren't working, knowing full well the customer's equipment is not at fault? This is fraud. I'm a libertarian who thinks we have too much government. But the moment you as an individual intentionally mislead, attempt to defraud, or otherwise deceive a party to which you have an agreement or contract, I expect you to be prosecuted and pay dearly for this.
I believe this especially when it comes to situations like Comcast where they have a significant portion of knowledge about the technical details of the network that is not accessible to the vast majority of their customers. Comcast uses this divide in the knowledge and technical skill to mask their activities and further the deception.
At that point, you won't get the option to restore from backup however, which means you have to jump through hoops if you had apps with important data to restore. iTunes still seems to be the best way to restore a phone.
hmm, I've been pondering a mobileme subscription. what kind of hoops do you mean? do you just not get prompted to restore from backup after manually re-entering your mobileme account info on a "blank" phone? seems like you could force a restore from backup in iTunes regardless of what mobileme did, no?
There are some apps that (not sure why or what the difference is) will not restore their application data from a backup. It might be that the app wasn't written in a way to take advantage of the backup/restore process.
but if you receive a call while you're driving then the app does cut out -- it will restart once you've finished the conversation
My Garmin, when connected to my phone (any phone, not just iPhone) via bluetooth does exactly the same thing. It supresses the nav prompts until you complete the call. I don't understand why this is a complaint? Especially for this particular situation since you're running this app on a PHONE whose primary purpose is to receive CALLS. Or have I missed something obvious?
No, because TFA actually says "For those of you wondering what happens when you get a call, the app turns off but restarts as soon as you finish the call, so it's not too bad."
I've had to get my iPhone replaced twice. Neither time did I have any issues transferring my purchased items. The store (Apple or AT&T) will not transfer any settings, contacts, music, apps etc for you. However, iTunes (OS X, I assume Windows version will behave the same) recognizes this is a phone it hasn't seen and asks you if you want to restore this new phone from the last backup.
civil disobedience works and is justified here. ignore any bad laws passed. they don't apply to you. they were corrupt and so are null and void. use your own good common sense! the understanding of what's right and wrong is inside you; you don't need to look at BOUGHT AND PAID FOR laws for your morality.
once the media industry decided to play fair, we'll take off the mitts and also play fair. until then, its lawlessness. on both sides.
(emphasis mine) I think you nailed it. Unfortunately, "[any bad laws] don't apply to you" is a quick trip to anarchy. The RIAA and the other groups have no power without the government intervening on their behalf. Which is another in a long list of arguments for small government with limited power, positioned just barely to the left of anarchy.
Because after all, if I don't use their DNS, why should I care where they are directing non-existant domain traffic to?
Using OpenDNS, Treewalk, ns1.sprintlink.net, etc doesn't matter because a) Returning the A record when the domain does not exist blatantly violates the RFCs: the established commonly agreed upon standards without which the internet would cease to function and b) some ISPs redirect your DNS traffic to their servers whether you like it or not. Some outright block DNS servers that don't belong to them, and others silently redirect your requests. c) In the README file of your latest application, you shouldn't have to tell everyone that they need to use your DNS servers just to get a *correct* response.
It isn't just you at home with your pr0n that has to deal with this BS. I have to deal with it where I work, because my company's ISP is a cable provider who does this redirect crap. So when I go to write an app that *might* use DNS, I have to screw with this nonsense because the cableco can't be bothered to return an NX - but instead always returns an A record for their server - subject to change without notification. So when they change to redirect to another server, wtf am I supposed to do then? The only way my app could possibly tell there was a problem is to see if the response matches this redirect server. And no, it isn't an option for my application to just willy nilly pick a DNS server of its choice to use. My application requests a lookup from the OS's network layer, but has no particular knowledge of the DNS servers - exactly how it is supposed to be.
If I give my app to other people, are they supposed to put into the app's configuration the A record information that would correspond to their particular ISP's "redirect" host? My app needs to know when the DNS lookup failed. I have no way to tell when every damn name returns an A record. I count on the DNS server to respond in the way the RFCs set out. Comcast and the other ISPs are saying "fuck your rules"
As has been said until we're blue in the face:The internet is not the web. If the ISPs and the browser folks want to sit down and see what the RFC permits and figure out how to return a url in the NX that the browser would recognize and could handle, then I have no problem with that. As long as it doesn't interfere with the normal operation of an NX response. As I'm sitting here thinking about it, the place for this information seems to be either in the DHCP lease, or in the wpad.dat auto-proxy configuration file. But Comcast and the others like them have decided they don't have to play well with others.
oh great, so that BS carries over too. unless an installing app is replacing system libraries (!?) or modifying the shell in some significant way (ie tortoisesvn) then it should never, ever need to force the computer to reboot. ever.
There are valid reasons to scorn Apple for being evil, especially lately with the iPhone stuff. But you can't really beat most of the OSX application installs being as simple as dragging it from the archive to the "Applications" folder.
We tested four 32-bit Windows operating systems: Windows 7 RTM build 7600, Windows 7 Release Candidate build 7100
I'm trying to understand why the 32-bit? If we're going to have to make the transition because stuff is going to be broken intentionally or otherwise for XP going forward, then do the 64bit stuff right and stop screwing around. Is anyone still making 32bit processors? Is anyone intentionally buying machines with 32bit processors?
Windows XP x64 can be a nightmare because while most stuff works, lots of things still don't - which includes a lot of hardware because the drivers don't work or just aren't available. That is mostly on the product vendors, but at the same time - I have to run x64 or a good part of my system's memory is inaccessible and unusable to Windows. I also, however, blame MSFT. XP x64 is really just server 2003 with some of the components torn out and some of the desktop-y UI stuff added back in - (I could be wrong about this) rather than being a 64bit version of the XP kernel it seems.
So while they continue to play around, we're stuck with either having wasted our money > ~2G of memory, or wasted time on hardware (occasionally software) that doesn't work. For some reason I don't remember the transition from 16 to 32 bit being this much of a pain in the ass. Except that I haven't been able to get my copy of Redneck Rampage to run on anything since Windows98.
Can iPhone users buy the app in another store? I hope so; buying a (smart?)phone for a couple hundred dollars which can *only* run apps from a single store is not very appealing to me.
I am not an iPhone user, but from what I've heard it's either Apple's App Store or a jailbroken iPhone with no official warranty or support.
This is correct. The only place to get apps for your iPhone is from the app store - aside from jailbreaking it. If you jailbreak your phone, you are not only voiding your warranty, but also taking the risk of having it bricked either coincidentally by a software update, or intentionally by some combination of Apple/ATT discovering the "rogue" device. No big deal if it is your xbox that gets bricked (you're out $200, but that's about it). I only have one phone and having it bricked is not an option.
I have the iPhone and I'm starting to get pissed off with the stories of Apple taking months to respond, and then rejecting apps arbitrarily. I signed up and paid for the iPhone devkit, but have mostly avoided dealing with it because of the app submission nonsense. Why put all that effort into it when they and AT&T play these stupid games? Com'on Apple, you're killing us out here.
This is true of Lost Planet and Halo. My buddy has an HD set while I have SD, and he is always wondering why I can't see the minimap clearly - because it apparently renders much crisper in HD - almost to the point of all detail being lost in the SD view.