because if I understand correctly, installing and "Activating" Windows XP requires that you have a Passport ID.
Sounds to me as if they're using their OS monopoly (now a matter of Fact, and Law) to leverage a monopoly in the emerging Network Authentication industry. It gets all the worse, because there is no Network Authentication industry yet, and if MS has their way, it will never truly emerge because they'll own it from Day1.
To be fair, in Boy Scouts I didn't get to go bouncing around platforms floating in space or in castles, either. Though there were a few barns, which can be almost as neat as the castles.
I look at the idea of playing Capture the Flag on Quake-family games, and see the quest for ever-more-real 3D, and wonder why people just don't go for the Ultimate. Pick a decent night, go outside, and play Capture the Flag. Real Reality, the Ultimate in Virtual Reality. I remember real Capture the Flag from Boy Scout campouts, and the nights weren't always that decent, but that was part of the fun.
The 3D gaming is getting just a bit bizarre, but I'm still reasonably happy with Quake3 on my Matrox G400 - bought on the strength of 2D image quality as well as Open Source 3D support. Unfortunately the latest'n'greatest drivers seem to be headed back to closed source.
It's just a little too old to be getting dragged under trucks, behind submarines, etc. There's nothing wrong with getting to be 59, (I'm a bit over a decade from there, yet.) it's certainly better than not.
The last Roger Moore Bond flix were downright laughable. This core collections of people in their 60's with makeup piled on to make them look decades younger, acting more decades younger.
Presumably with age comes experience, so those lines on his face might also indicate that he has learned better ways to go about things. STtNG was criticized for being to cerebral, and 'talking the enemy to death'.
I suspect our society is hooked on its own brain chemicals, and the adrenaline rush of the action movie is the delivery mechanism.
The problem with getting your own kernel is that you then have to be intelligent and responsible about picking a good release, especially with 2.0 and 2.4 series. (Wasn't 2.2 generally better more stable than either of the before and after releases?) Then you have to choose which, if any, patches you want or need.
Then comes the simple stuff you mention. That's the easy part. Selecting the kernel and patches to build is the hard part.
Or, if you don't feel like putting the time and energy into it at the moment, have a little trust in your distribution. At that point, there's usually little difference between 'rpm -i' (or -U) and walking through the build steps yourself, except that you build a bunch of unneeded modules.
>Verilog is easier to write, but VHDL is (seems) more typesafe and is easier to debug.
About a year back I began doing some work in Verilog, because it was common in the area. Next chance I got, I switched to VHDL. Both languages were learned from scratch. The C vs Pascal comparison for Verilog vs VHDL is rather apt. I found that mistakes in my Verilog design would lurk much later into the build process, whereas most mistakes in my VHDL design would show up much sooner. With conventional programming, the difference may not be that great, because compilation isn't that 'thick' a process. With hardware design its much worse, with several stages of synthesis, timing, and only after that do you get into place and route. Some of my Verilog mistakes didn't show up until place an route, where I never had a VHDL mistake make it past synthesis. These are even mistakes that make it through simulation. HDL can be subtle indeed, especially for a newbie.
To some extent this comes back to the old C vs Pascal debate. Unfortunately Pacal was crippled by the limited library and other factors of its definition, so the debate could never be truly intelligently done. There's a tremendous amount of "Real Programmers..." macho crap in the debate too, further reducing the intelligence level. (training wheels references, and all that.)
Today we gripe over and over about buffer overflows, and wonder why they keep happening. It comes down to this: The C language is perfectly happy to let it happen, so preventing buffer overflows is completely up to programmer diligence. While you can probably come up with a buffer overflow in Pascal descendents (Gotta include that 'descendents', since pure Pascal is *practically* useless, I agree.) it almost takes work. No doubt there would have been no end of griping about that max_length on the strings, but then that's pretty much what needs to be done by hand for C.
Ada currently carries the Pascal-descendent banner, and is still alive with a reasonably vital community. Oddly enough, the US DOD has largely abandoned it, thinking C/C++ leads to cheaper development. Much of the new Ada community appears to be European, by the way.
The insiders' view appears to be, "Yes, it's more of a pain to develop the code, and that takes longer. But you buy all that back and more when it comes to debug and maintenance."
Forgetting to run lilo is only one problem. As I said, I had one RedHat errata kernel that wouldn't boot on one machine. Even lilo issues aside, I would have been in trouble had I done a '-U' that time.
Is it grub that's smart, or does the RedHat postinstall add some grub configuration? If the latter, why don't they add a stanza and rerun lilo on lilo boxen?
Rather gutsy of you, doing a '-U' on a kernel upgrade. I sure hope you didn't forget to run lilo, and had your boot/rescue disk handy.
Most of us '-i' the new kernel, and check it out a bit before removing the old one. One of the errata kernels under RedHat 7.x (I forget the exact time, I think it was 7.1.) simply wouldn't boot on one of my systems, though the one issued shortly after did.
So far most arguments (mine included) based on this line in the constitution center on the word, "limited>'
For a moment, take a look instead at the phrase starting with the word, "promote...". IMHO, the original intent here was to supply the artist or inventor with a reasonable reward for the effort and investment of invention. The current copyright situation has completely distorted that goal, and I would argue that it is retarding "progress of the... Arts."
Essentially, long copyrights places artists in competition with all artists whose copyrights have not yet expired. This non-expiry means that they share shelf-space, stamping and packaging priority, etc, with a HUGE number of works. In essence, they're drowned in the crowd. The ones who "make it" are frequently 'sponsored' by the big labels - I liked someone else's comparison to Soviet Planning. But musical artistic emergence based on pure merit is rare. Perhaps thinning the ranks of commercial music by expiring copyrights would allow newer artists a better opportunity to shine.
In tactical deference to Disney, I wouldn't mind some sort of policy to allow extensions for 'maintained series', so they can keep their silly Steamboat Willie, as long as they keep adding to the Mickey Mouse franchise in significant ways. But don't take down the concept of public domain just to protect Mickey.
DirectX runs on Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, and is presumably source-compatible with XBox. Sounds like all the *desired and significant* platforms are covered.
I agree. I wasn't making a value judgement, only an observation.
The best adder in the movie was the cameo by Clarke. I know Lucas took a ton of flak about the NSync cameo, and IMHO it was deserved. But the Clarke cameo was appropriate, as were the cameos Hitchcock used to do. Timeless and related are OK, IMHO. Cultural might be OK, if the cultural reference is related to the movie. NSync was neither.
The other neat thing about the movie was the inclusion of aerobraking, though probably overdramatized. Plus I liked the friendly relation that develped between the American and Soviet astro/cosmo-nauts.
Other than those, it wasn't worth the eyeball-wear, like so much of what Hollywood does.
Joe Sixpak was found dead in his home today, of dehydration. Apparently in the process of reinstalling his HomeStation after it had been cracked, he passed away awaiting new activation codes from User Support. Without the activation codes, faucets.Net wouldn't deliver water, refrigerator.Net wouldn't open to provide fluids, and lock.Net wouldn't let him out of the house.
It's impossible in the US, if not the world, to talk about space and antimatter propulsion, and not come up with a Star Trek reference or two. The surprising thing here is that we had only a dilithium crystal and a Scotty reference.
No references to:
Warp core breach imminent, and ejection is offline!
Captain! She canna take any more of this!
He's dead, Jim.
Let alone the polysyllabic technobabble of Voyageur.
I wonder how many people would have the foggiest idea of what antimatter is without Star Trek. Sure foggy is about as close as it gets, but at least everyone knows it releases a LOT of energy and is touchier than all get-out.
>Come ON. Microsoft will not start artificially limiting what hardware it's product will run on. Why would they?
>That would be like throwing away customers!
Because Microsoft always takes the long view, and are willing to throw away money in the short term. Look at their products - they are pretty much always the best short-term decision to make.
>And why would hardware manufacturers start doing this otherwise? Customer pressure? If anything, limiting their BIOS in this way would dramatically LOWER the value of their
>BIOS! Think about it, if 75% of motherboards
Not so. The purpose of BIOS is to get you far enough to start Windows. (in most peoples' view) If a crippled BIOS somehow made the system cheaper to support or manufacture, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
That's why widescale Linux preloads are not going to happen - it increases manufacturing cost by introducing another process flow. Even dual-boot introduces another process step - and increases cost. This is worse than a basic chicken-and-egg problem, because there's no room anywhere for the baby chick.
One possible way out of this Catch-22 would be to enable Linux as a better manufacturing platform than Windows. Enable it as a diagnostic program, essentially. Then it becomes a valuable part of the manufacturing flow, and Windows becomes simply something you stick on for the customer, instead of an integral part of the build.
There's a decent argument to say that MS just does the Mac ports to keep monopoly-hounds at bay. The Mac ports have frequently been day-late/dollar-short.
I'd really like to believe this, but there is a critical time factor. First off, there is a generation here who has no comprehension of the public domain. Copyright law has been so perverted that most likely nothing done since Steamboat Willie will expire in my lifetime and go into the public domain. The chain is broken, unless it's rolled back to pre-Bono or beyond.
Second is the critical issue of getting media protection into electronics. The moment it becomes Standard, and the moment TV is marked copyrighted, then non-protected media will wither. We're the Geek Fringe, and the other obviously affected area will be the Artistic Fringe. Joe Sixpak won'e notice it, because the non-copy TV will stage in with HDTV. Since it's HDTV, it won't go onto a VHS VCR, and the new hardware that could "just won't happen".
If this gets to the point where non-protected media withers, we're toast.
OTOH, we've been on a long run of pro-money, pro-business, greed-is-good, ordinary people are merely consumers. I suspect the liberal/conservative pendulum is at or near its limit. Ironically, the Geek Rights issues we harp over may well be the final tap that starts pushing the other directionc combined with many of the post-9/11 actions.
Absolutely right, except for one problem. At the moment, the business which must fail have a LOT of money and that wonderful thing that follows, the ears of congress.
The classic new tech vs old tech is the buggy-whip manufacturer. Buggy whips went out with the coming of the automobile, and the buggy whip makers who survived were those who adapted, and transformed into something else.
Except now the buggy whip makers are the RIAA and the MPAA, and through their amassed capital they have apparent dominion over the new tech - the Internet. It's still not clear to me that as a society we won't throw out the baby with the bathwater, keep the media cartels through more and more restrictive information laws, and move to universal 'untamperable media-restricting hardware'.
In essence, MAKE KNOWLEDGE A CRIME.
Takes the cake for me, as far as bit parts go. You can tell the guy always wanted to get into movies, and this was his BIG CHANCE. He crammed as much of his life as possible into those three words. But ya know, three words just doesn't have enough space to pack that much into, especially those three.
At the moment, the first and greatest good in the USA is money. The default state of affairs is that which generates revenue, jobs, and taxes. Wasn't always this way, won't always either, but it is now.
Only when a problem rises in enough minds to tickle the conscience of the legislators do counter-monetary things happen.
There are two types of people: Those who use money to live, and those who use money to measure their self-esteem. The 1% who own over half the country are in the latter camp, and subscribe to the Golden Rule.
Pings already blocked, both in/proc and the firewall. For that matter, sshd only listens to places I might connect from, and that's also done both by config and firewall.
Because of the news TOS change, I've moved from leafnode to noffle, and have changed things around to make its behavior act like a conventional news client. And it stinks. I've seen leafnode wrapper scripts that give finer control to its downloads, and I may try that with noffle. At the very least, I still get the cache, so I can look back.
They can't find me by scanning, but that's not the point. I'm really trying to stick by the spirit of the TOS, yet not turn into an inet luser. I have ssh crammed down as tight as I can make it, and still have it *usable by me.* I'm working at tuning down my news cache to as 'interactive-like' as possible, and still get acceptable news response. (Right now it's interactive-like, but not acceptable.)
I just hope they don't get a clue about VPNs. There's been the discussion about business use. But my VPN use is occasional, normally my bandwidth is dominated by personal use. If the ratio were the other way around, I could see the requirement to get a business account. But the moment you get the Company to spring for it, they want to see Cost Justification, and you have to forswear your family even when at home.
Fundamentally, software is BROKEN as a "product".
on
Sunset Clauses in Software
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You have to look a little deeper for the real problem. As a society, we are used to selling *things*. *Things* eventually wear out, require repair, get consumed, etc. Then you have to go out and buy another *thing* to replace it. Some *things* last longer than others, but all are essentially ephemeral.
Even though the concepts embodied in a book are eternal, the book itself is ephemeral, so in the public mind it became a *thing*, just like any other *thing*.
Enter the electronic age, and the liberation of the idea from the containing physical medium.
Aside from all the copyright brou-ha-ha, look at the implications on a software industry. Simply put, bits don't wear out. They may become obsolete; their physical expression may wear out; but the bits themselves don't.
So how do you build a "Software Industry". Either you force obsolescence, so that what you just sold will 'wear out' after a while, and you can once again treat it like a *thing*, or you strive for a newer, more appropriate model.
From what I can tell, software actually began on a 'non-*thing*' model, with revenue largely derived through service. But once the dollar potential got big enough, the *thing* model came in and took over.
OTOH, now we're nearing the end of the exponential growth curve in many areas, and maybe there's a chance for a newer, more sane model to re-emerge. People are getting tired of the upgrade churn of forced obsolescence.
Their TOS are terrible, and getting worse every rev. They have always had a 'no servers for the use of others' policy, and I've always run sshd because it's a server for my own use. On the last rev they disallowed 'any servers at all', which I didn't take seriously because IRC is broken without ident. Besides, technically ICMP could be considered both client and server, and the whole freakin' net is broken without it. Finally, my sshd is for my use only, and is configured and firewalled that way.
Also on the last TOS update they disallowed sucking feeds on their mostly-broken newsservers. They really don't know what they're doing, because in the grand scheme of things, they're just pushing those people to a sucking feed on an external newsserver, and eating their head-end bandwidth. Besides, an off-hours sucking feed would probably be more benign, and I'd be happy to adjust my cron setup to cooperate.
AFAIK they have no anti-VPN wording in their TOS, but IMHO that's only because they aren't clued in to its existence to forbid it.
IMHO, Adelphia wants to be in the 'TV for your computer' business.
Have any of your pizza delivery boys ended up with their vehicles in a neighbor's swimming pool, and ended up giving your pizza to a skatboarding girl to make the final delivery?
Slashdot Mirror
because if I understand correctly, installing and "Activating" Windows XP requires that you have a Passport ID.
Sounds to me as if they're using their OS monopoly (now a matter of Fact, and Law) to leverage a monopoly in the emerging Network Authentication industry. It gets all the worse, because there is no Network Authentication industry yet, and if MS has their way, it will never truly emerge because they'll own it from Day1.
To be fair, in Boy Scouts I didn't get to go bouncing around platforms floating in space or in castles, either. Though there were a few barns, which can be almost as neat as the castles.
I look at the idea of playing Capture the Flag on Quake-family games, and see the quest for ever-more-real 3D, and wonder why people just don't go for the Ultimate. Pick a decent night, go outside, and play Capture the Flag. Real Reality, the Ultimate in Virtual Reality. I remember real Capture the Flag from Boy Scout campouts, and the nights weren't always that decent, but that was part of the fun.
The 3D gaming is getting just a bit bizarre, but I'm still reasonably happy with Quake3 on my Matrox G400 - bought on the strength of 2D image quality as well as Open Source 3D support. Unfortunately the latest'n'greatest drivers seem to be headed back to closed source.
It's just a little too old to be getting dragged under trucks, behind submarines, etc. There's nothing wrong with getting to be 59, (I'm a bit over a decade from there, yet.) it's certainly better than not.
The last Roger Moore Bond flix were downright laughable. This core collections of people in their 60's with makeup piled on to make them look decades younger, acting more decades younger.
Presumably with age comes experience, so those lines on his face might also indicate that he has learned better ways to go about things. STtNG was criticized for being to cerebral, and 'talking the enemy to death'.
I suspect our society is hooked on its own brain chemicals, and the adrenaline rush of the action movie is the delivery mechanism.
The problem with getting your own kernel is that you then have to be intelligent and responsible about picking a good release, especially with 2.0 and 2.4 series. (Wasn't 2.2 generally better more stable than either of the before and after releases?) Then you have to choose which, if any, patches you want or need.
Then comes the simple stuff you mention. That's the easy part. Selecting the kernel and patches to build is the hard part.
Or, if you don't feel like putting the time and energy into it at the moment, have a little trust in your distribution. At that point, there's usually little difference between 'rpm -i' (or -U) and walking through the build steps yourself, except that you build a bunch of unneeded modules.
>Verilog is easier to write, but VHDL is (seems) more typesafe and is easier to debug.
About a year back I began doing some work in Verilog, because it was common in the area. Next chance I got, I switched to VHDL. Both languages were learned from scratch. The C vs Pascal comparison for Verilog vs VHDL is rather apt. I found that mistakes in my Verilog design would lurk much later into the build process, whereas most mistakes in my VHDL design would show up much sooner. With conventional programming, the difference may not be that great, because compilation isn't that 'thick' a process. With hardware design its much worse, with several stages of synthesis, timing, and only after that do you get into place and route. Some of my Verilog mistakes didn't show up until place an route, where I never had a VHDL mistake make it past synthesis. These are even mistakes that make it through simulation. HDL can be subtle indeed, especially for a newbie.
To some extent this comes back to the old C vs Pascal debate. Unfortunately Pacal was crippled by the limited library and other factors of its definition, so the debate could never be truly intelligently done. There's a tremendous amount of "Real Programmers..." macho crap in the debate too, further reducing the intelligence level. (training wheels references, and all that.)
Today we gripe over and over about buffer overflows, and wonder why they keep happening. It comes down to this: The C language is perfectly happy to let it happen, so preventing buffer overflows is completely up to programmer diligence. While you can probably come up with a buffer overflow in Pascal descendents (Gotta include that 'descendents', since pure Pascal is *practically* useless, I agree.) it almost takes work. No doubt there would have been no end of griping about that max_length on the strings, but then that's pretty much what needs to be done by hand for C.
Ada currently carries the Pascal-descendent banner, and is still alive with a reasonably vital community. Oddly enough, the US DOD has largely abandoned it, thinking C/C++ leads to cheaper development. Much of the new Ada community appears to be European, by the way.
The insiders' view appears to be, "Yes, it's more of a pain to develop the code, and that takes longer. But you buy all that back and more when it comes to debug and maintenance."
Forgetting to run lilo is only one problem. As I said, I had one RedHat errata kernel that wouldn't boot on one machine. Even lilo issues aside, I would have been in trouble had I done a '-U' that time.
Is it grub that's smart, or does the RedHat postinstall add some grub configuration? If the latter, why don't they add a stanza and rerun lilo on lilo boxen?
Rather gutsy of you, doing a '-U' on a kernel upgrade. I sure hope you didn't forget to run lilo, and had your boot/rescue disk handy.
Most of us '-i' the new kernel, and check it out a bit before removing the old one. One of the errata kernels under RedHat 7.x (I forget the exact time, I think it was 7.1.) simply wouldn't boot on one of my systems, though the one issued shortly after did.
So far most arguments (mine included) based on this line in the constitution center on the word, "limited>'
... Arts."
For a moment, take a look instead at the phrase starting with the word, "promote...". IMHO, the original intent here was to supply the artist or inventor with a reasonable reward for the effort and investment of invention. The current copyright situation has completely distorted that goal, and I would argue that it is retarding "progress of the
Essentially, long copyrights places artists in competition with all artists whose copyrights have not yet expired. This non-expiry means that they share shelf-space, stamping and packaging priority, etc, with a HUGE number of works. In essence, they're drowned in the crowd. The ones who "make it" are frequently 'sponsored' by the big labels - I liked someone else's comparison to Soviet Planning. But musical artistic emergence based on pure merit is rare. Perhaps thinning the ranks of commercial music by expiring copyrights would allow newer artists a better opportunity to shine.
In tactical deference to Disney, I wouldn't mind some sort of policy to allow extensions for 'maintained series', so they can keep their silly Steamboat Willie, as long as they keep adding to the Mickey Mouse franchise in significant ways. But don't take down the concept of public domain just to protect Mickey.
Whaddya mean, isn't cross-platform?
DirectX runs on Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, and is presumably source-compatible with XBox. Sounds like all the *desired and significant* platforms are covered.
The MS definition of cross-platform.
(Sarcasm, if you can't tell)
I agree. I wasn't making a value judgement, only an observation.
The best adder in the movie was the cameo by Clarke. I know Lucas took a ton of flak about the NSync cameo, and IMHO it was deserved. But the Clarke cameo was appropriate, as were the cameos Hitchcock used to do. Timeless and related are OK, IMHO. Cultural might be OK, if the cultural reference is related to the movie. NSync was neither.
The other neat thing about the movie was the inclusion of aerobraking, though probably overdramatized. Plus I liked the friendly relation that develped between the American and Soviet astro/cosmo-nauts.
Other than those, it wasn't worth the eyeball-wear, like so much of what Hollywood does.
Dateline 2005:
Joe Sixpak was found dead in his home today, of dehydration. Apparently in the process of reinstalling his HomeStation after it had been cracked, he passed away awaiting new activation codes from User Support. Without the activation codes, faucets.Net wouldn't deliver water, refrigerator.Net wouldn't open to provide fluids, and lock.Net wouldn't let him out of the house.
In another announcement,
Microsoft has recruited as a new Research Associate, Edward Nigma, of Gotham City.
I see you prefer the book version. You left off the movie's adders:
"Use them together, use them in peace."
Take a break and read something else.
It's impossible in the US, if not the world, to talk about space and antimatter propulsion, and not come up with a Star Trek reference or two. The surprising thing here is that we had only a dilithium crystal and a Scotty reference.
No references to:
Warp core breach imminent, and ejection is offline!
Captain! She canna take any more of this!
He's dead, Jim.
Let alone the polysyllabic technobabble of Voyageur.
I wonder how many people would have the foggiest idea of what antimatter is without Star Trek. Sure foggy is about as close as it gets, but at least everyone knows it releases a LOT of energy and is touchier than all get-out.
>Come ON. Microsoft will not start artificially limiting what hardware it's product will run on. Why would they?
>That would be like throwing away customers!
Because Microsoft always takes the long view, and are willing to throw away money in the short term. Look at their products - they are pretty much always the best short-term decision to make.
>And why would hardware manufacturers start doing this otherwise? Customer pressure? If anything, limiting their BIOS in this way would dramatically LOWER the value of their
>BIOS! Think about it, if 75% of motherboards
Not so. The purpose of BIOS is to get you far enough to start Windows. (in most peoples' view) If a crippled BIOS somehow made the system cheaper to support or manufacture, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
That's why widescale Linux preloads are not going to happen - it increases manufacturing cost by introducing another process flow. Even dual-boot introduces another process step - and increases cost. This is worse than a basic chicken-and-egg problem, because there's no room anywhere for the baby chick.
One possible way out of this Catch-22 would be to enable Linux as a better manufacturing platform than Windows. Enable it as a diagnostic program, essentially. Then it becomes a valuable part of the manufacturing flow, and Windows becomes simply something you stick on for the customer, instead of an integral part of the build.
NT-Alpha is DEAD.
There's a decent argument to say that MS just does the Mac ports to keep monopoly-hounds at bay. The Mac ports have frequently been day-late/dollar-short.
I'd really like to believe this, but there is a critical time factor. First off, there is a generation here who has no comprehension of the public domain. Copyright law has been so perverted that most likely nothing done since Steamboat Willie will expire in my lifetime and go into the public domain. The chain is broken, unless it's rolled back to pre-Bono or beyond.
Second is the critical issue of getting media protection into electronics. The moment it becomes Standard, and the moment TV is marked copyrighted, then non-protected media will wither. We're the Geek Fringe, and the other obviously affected area will be the Artistic Fringe. Joe Sixpak won'e notice it, because the non-copy TV will stage in with HDTV. Since it's HDTV, it won't go onto a VHS VCR, and the new hardware that could "just won't happen".
If this gets to the point where non-protected media withers, we're toast.
OTOH, we've been on a long run of pro-money, pro-business, greed-is-good, ordinary people are merely consumers. I suspect the liberal/conservative pendulum is at or near its limit. Ironically, the Geek Rights issues we harp over may well be the final tap that starts pushing the other directionc combined with many of the post-9/11 actions.
Absolutely right, except for one problem. At the moment, the business which must fail have a LOT of money and that wonderful thing that follows, the ears of congress.
The classic new tech vs old tech is the buggy-whip manufacturer. Buggy whips went out with the coming of the automobile, and the buggy whip makers who survived were those who adapted, and transformed into something else.
Except now the buggy whip makers are the RIAA and the MPAA, and through their amassed capital they have apparent dominion over the new tech - the Internet. It's still not clear to me that as a society we won't throw out the baby with the bathwater, keep the media cartels through more and more restrictive information laws, and move to universal 'untamperable media-restricting hardware'.
In essence, MAKE KNOWLEDGE A CRIME.
Yecchh.
Takes the cake for me, as far as bit parts go. You can tell the guy always wanted to get into movies, and this was his BIG CHANCE. He crammed as much of his life as possible into those three words. But ya know, three words just doesn't have enough space to pack that much into, especially those three.
At the moment, the first and greatest good in the USA is money. The default state of affairs is that which generates revenue, jobs, and taxes. Wasn't always this way, won't always either, but it is now.
Only when a problem rises in enough minds to tickle the conscience of the legislators do counter-monetary things happen.
There are two types of people: Those who use money to live, and those who use money to measure their self-esteem. The 1% who own over half the country are in the latter camp, and subscribe to the Golden Rule.
Pings already blocked, both in /proc and the firewall. For that matter, sshd only listens to places I might connect from, and that's also done both by config and firewall.
Because of the news TOS change, I've moved from leafnode to noffle, and have changed things around to make its behavior act like a conventional news client. And it stinks. I've seen leafnode wrapper scripts that give finer control to its downloads, and I may try that with noffle. At the very least, I still get the cache, so I can look back.
They can't find me by scanning, but that's not the point. I'm really trying to stick by the spirit of the TOS, yet not turn into an inet luser. I have ssh crammed down as tight as I can make it, and still have it *usable by me.* I'm working at tuning down my news cache to as 'interactive-like' as possible, and still get acceptable news response. (Right now it's interactive-like, but not acceptable.)
I just hope they don't get a clue about VPNs. There's been the discussion about business use. But my VPN use is occasional, normally my bandwidth is dominated by personal use. If the ratio were the other way around, I could see the requirement to get a business account. But the moment you get the Company to spring for it, they want to see Cost Justification, and you have to forswear your family even when at home.
You have to look a little deeper for the real problem. As a society, we are used to selling *things*. *Things* eventually wear out, require repair, get consumed, etc. Then you have to go out and buy another *thing* to replace it. Some *things* last longer than others, but all are essentially ephemeral.
Even though the concepts embodied in a book are eternal, the book itself is ephemeral, so in the public mind it became a *thing*, just like any other *thing*.
Enter the electronic age, and the liberation of the idea from the containing physical medium.
Aside from all the copyright brou-ha-ha, look at the implications on a software industry. Simply put, bits don't wear out. They may become obsolete; their physical expression may wear out; but the bits themselves don't.
So how do you build a "Software Industry". Either you force obsolescence, so that what you just sold will 'wear out' after a while, and you can once again treat it like a *thing*, or you strive for a newer, more appropriate model.
From what I can tell, software actually began on a 'non-*thing*' model, with revenue largely derived through service. But once the dollar potential got big enough, the *thing* model came in and took over.
OTOH, now we're nearing the end of the exponential growth curve in many areas, and maybe there's a chance for a newer, more sane model to re-emerge. People are getting tired of the upgrade churn of forced obsolescence.
Their TOS are terrible, and getting worse every rev. They have always had a 'no servers for the use of others' policy, and I've always run sshd because it's a server for my own use. On the last rev they disallowed 'any servers at all', which I didn't take seriously because IRC is broken without ident. Besides, technically ICMP could be considered both client and server, and the whole freakin' net is broken without it. Finally, my sshd is for my use only, and is configured and firewalled that way.
Also on the last TOS update they disallowed sucking feeds on their mostly-broken newsservers. They really don't know what they're doing, because in the grand scheme of things, they're just pushing those people to a sucking feed on an external newsserver, and eating their head-end bandwidth. Besides, an off-hours sucking feed would probably be more benign, and I'd be happy to adjust my cron setup to cooperate.
AFAIK they have no anti-VPN wording in their TOS, but IMHO that's only because they aren't clued in to its existence to forbid it.
IMHO, Adelphia wants to be in the 'TV for your computer' business.
Have any of your pizza delivery boys ended up with their vehicles in a neighbor's swimming pool, and ended up giving your pizza to a skatboarding girl to make the final delivery?