I've been an Adelphia/Comcast customer for quite a few years, and my results mostly mirror yours.
But think just a moment about the way DHCP is supposed to work! When you are given a lease, you store away the address you've been given. When you next request a lease, either at renewal time or after you've been offline for a while, you request the last address you had. In general, if that address is available and valid for your subnet, it's the address you're given. On the other hand, if you've been offline for a while, say for an ice-storm power outage, and in the meantime say a new customer comes online, they might get your old IP. Then when you reconnect, your old IP won't be available, and they'll give you a new one, which will then be as stable as the old one was. The other reason I've seen for IP changes is when they reconfigure their network, juggling subnet sizes, or just plain moving subnets around different prefixes.
THAT is why our DHCP addresses are so stable. They're actually doing a good job of implementing DHCP as it's meant to be implemented. Amazing, isn't it? If they wanted to be pricks about it, they could tweak their DHCP servers to rotate IP leases every renewal, plus they could also shorten the renewal interval. Places like DynDNS.org might even crumble under the load of cable/dsl subscribers updating their IPs so frequently.
I'm a little surprised that they don't simply block incoming SYN packets (and "new" incoming UDP connections (I know, UDP is stateless, but IPTables pretends for conntrack, and so could they)) - they'd be perfectly within their TOS rights to do so. IMHO it's another example of the "New York State Thruway speeding ticket" effect. They have "laws" (TOS) in place that they don't generally enforce, yet pretty much everyone breaks. Then when they have reason to not like you, chances are overwhelming that they can get your for *something*.
It strikes me that we sit here on/. and say, "Nyah, nyah, no DRM, icky-ick," and in passing realize that we're not in the target market, and any so-called boycotts we attempt to do will be meaningless.
But there is another side to it...
This guy is an early-adopter, and he's just been screwed. The next tier of customers frequently don't jump until they've gotten a warm fuzzy feeling from the early adopters. This guy's friends and acquaintances aren't going to get that feeling, and hold off a bit longer.
Originally one of the scary things about DRM was that most of it was going to be turned off - at first. My sinister presumption was that that would let the early adopters have their day - and make their recommendations. By the time they started turning the DRM on they would hopefully have significant market penetration, and assuming they were careful with their staging of turning it on, they'd likely get away with it.
If this is any sign, that plan hasn't come to pass.
If this were made in the US instead of China, we could have some real DHS paranoid ramblings...
Imagine a secret partition on the hard drive that holds (profiled) characteristics of terrorists faces. So the laptop keeps track of whoever is using it, checks it against its secret database, and next time it's connected to the internet, files a report with DHS.
I could have sworn that in Ashcroft vs Eldred, the Supremes said that though the Constitution said, "temporary," Congress had such sweeping control that they could in essence define it as "eternity minus 1 day." But they DID say that Congress could yank works out of the Public Domain and put them back under copyright.
That particular problem was with the iptables line that opened a pinhole in the firewall so I could ssh in from my home. I'd set things up at her house, and couldn't test until I was home, again. It turned out to be a udev persistent naming problem. Her hard drive was failing (Thanks for the warning, SMART.) and I'd preinstalled a new one at my home. When I installed it in her system, eth0 turned into eth2. I fixed her firewall script so it all worked, but forgot about the script in another spot that opened the ssh pinhole. It found my home IP address, and opened the hole for eth0. I've since learned more about udev, and would have solved the problem by sticking with eth0.
In other words, I didn't have a way to fully test it before saving.
Try it on your mother's system from 600 miles away, and the only "console" is a cousin on the telephone typing at her machine, because your mom is too uncomfortable doing anything but a few basics on the computer, and pretty much forget an xterm.
Heck, and this point I'd even be happy to go back to the original copyright terms. Was it 14+14 years, or 28+28 years? Either is better than the "eternity minus 1 day" that we're working our way towards, now.
Does anyone here (On/., you've got to be kidding!) believe that Disney won't have another patsy to fill Bono's shoes when it's time to extend copyrights again? and again? and again? I suspect it will be quite interesting when they go for the real wording of "perpetuity," because "temporary" is quite explicit in the Constitution. However the Supremes have said that "eternity minus 1 day" fills the bill for "temporary," so I expect to see weasel-words. I also never expect to see this legislation, because I expect them to wait for the coup de grace until we have a generation that has never seen a copyright expire.
Of course by that time, there will be more fundamental changes afoot. It's entirely possible that Hollywood will have become so hidebound that Bollywood will actually manage to learn to make better films. At some point I expect the "copyright menace" to begin directly hurting the US, instead of directly benefiting it as it does today. When that comes to pass, we'll have to see what the shifting definition of "copyright reform" looks like. Of course some of us think that today copyrights are indirectly hurting the US, in spite of the apparent direct benefits.
I've thought about it, but what I really wish for is an event-driven synchronization. With something like Unison the first thing that needs doing is to check which files have changed. With some sort of hook (inotify/dnotify?) into the filesystem, the write itself triggers/queues the synchronization, just for that file.
My current raid-1 only protects me from hardware problems. I'm thinking of running "cp -al" on a nightly cron job for online archival purposes.
>Have your entire home network be the distributed backup server.
I've wondered about this for some time. For the moment, let's focus on/home...
I imagine several systems, each with its own copy of/home. Typically you're sitting at one system at a time, and if you're ssh'ed into another one, you're probably compiling on one and doing email/browsing on the other. In other words, there is a kind of working-set locality. So why not turn every system on your lan into a mirror of the others. Keep track of writes, and queue them to the other systems. On file opens, do a quick cross-check to make sure no other system has a more recent copy. Assuming you can have at least 1 other system always up, you've got a golden copy squirreled away. At the moment I'm serving a raid-1 over NFS for/home, but that means the data squeezes over a 100baseT pipe. I don't know how much bandwidth would get lost with a cluster and synchronization checking.
I've wondered if any of the clustered filesystems like OCFS2 can abused do this, but haven't had time to dig.
Any suggestions for how to phrase it if you're not a New York resident?
This is a New York government function, they would be perfectly within their rights to throw away all input that isn't from New York residents....except of course for the "expert testimony" from Redmond, WA.
The fun will come when they convince government organizations that SharePoint is an "open standard." The phrase "lock-in" for Office formats is simply nothing at all compared to the way it applies to SharePoint.
By the way, the New Slashdot Meme is to insist that Slashdot is full of knee-jerk anti-Microsofties, that Microsoft products really are the best available for the purposes they're used, and infer that Microsoft business practices really ain't Evil. No doubt they'll also revise things so that chair-throwing is just a friendly fatherly game of catch.
None of it matters.
Modern companies don't transcend their Creators. They survive, true, but they're never what they were under their Creators. Nobody drove IBM the way Watson drove it. Nobody drove Apple the way Jobs drove it. It takes time to fall, but remember, Gates isn't driving Microsoft any more.
Microsoft WILL get OOXML approved as an ISO standard. They WILL lock-in governments all over the place into their formats. They will no doubt do some other dastardly things. But it just won't matter, in the long run. The fact is, they're big, they're fat, and they have company politics all over the place. They make *acceptable* products, but they compete based on their overwhelming market strength, not on their merit.
The marketplace simply hasn't shifted enough yet to render their current impenetrable dominance irrelevant. Kind of like IBM and mainframes back in the 80's and 90's.
It's also worth mentioning that of the 2001 Bush administration, the only higher-up who had front-rank military service was Sec'y of State Colin Powell, and though he eventually went along with the "slam-dunk" arguments for invading Iraq, he was also the only higher-up who dragged his feet on the issue. Other members of the Bush administration generally served in the National Guard or had other means of draft deferment. In the 60's and 70's, even though the US had many times more soldiers in Viet Nam, the National Guards were not sent, at least not in any big way. There have been those who called them "chicken-hawks."
To be fair, Bill Clinton didn't serve in Viet Nam either, having an educational draft deferment. But though a few minor skirmishes (Balkans, Somalia) happened on his watch, he did not advocate major military action. Also to be fair, I didn't serve in Viet Nam. I was classified 1-H, had a draft card, and was in one lottery before it was all shut down. (The Clinton administration was accused of "wagging the dog" when they bombed Al Quaeda in Afghanistan, and was preparing Afghanistan invasion plans in 2000, but didn't want to saddle the incoming administration with a war as it entered office.)
Don't give them any ideas. We're already being told that skipping commercials on a recording is theft. Next thing it'll be reclassified as (economic) terrorism.
Just remember... You (This means YOU! (or even ME!)) can be reclassified as an "unlawful enemy combatant" by the executive branch with no judicial review, no checks, no balances. Once you're reclassified, there are no rules.
But the moment you're using TrueCrypt and it's "plausible deniability" has become well-known, then you're under the gun to divulge, whether you've used the feature or not.
>What eliminates a race that focuses all of its agression against others not of their race?
The ability to call someone of your own race "other", that's what. You can always make dividing lines between "us" and "them", and set out to kill "them", even if you're basically the same. We're doing a splendid job of it. As long as we're in science fiction, try "Pandora's Star" for an example with super-homogeneous aliens.
We're also victims of too much Star Trek and Star Wars. Heck, we're not even really an "orbital" society yet, let alone interplanetary. Forget interstellar for quite a while.
When I first moved to Vermont, Christmas was approaching and I knew I was going to want to ship some packages via UPS. But there was no local phone number for UPS in the book, no address, only an 800 number. (Nor was there even a web, let alone mapquest or google maps.) So one evening I was out on the road, and happened to see a UPS truck ahead of me. I followed it, and found the UPS place. I suppose I could have called the 800 number and asked, but I hadn't around gotten to that before seeing the truck and following it.
Years ago, my wife got me an indoor/outdoor thermometer that also included a radio-synced clock that works with WWV. Between that and NTP on my computers, time is kept close enough.
Besides, the only time that *really* matters down to the minute is when you're trying to record a TV show, and *they* aren't that accurate.
So it just doesn't matter.
Makes me think of the line by the disillusioned engineer in Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine," "I'm going to a commune in Vermont where I don't have to deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
> We can fix that with a small eugenics program. No political support needed, > just one or more of the following: > > 1) sex and a more... relaxed.. morality. > > 2) drugs (to make those D2 receptors more active)
So has anyone performed a similar analysis of the 2000 or 2004 US Presidential elections. At the national level I can believe any skulduggery would be buried in the noise, but how about in select spots??? (Forida, Ohio, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been an Adelphia/Comcast customer for quite a few years, and my results mostly mirror yours.
But think just a moment about the way DHCP is supposed to work! When you are given a lease, you store away the address you've been given. When you next request a lease, either at renewal time or after you've been offline for a while, you request the last address you had. In general, if that address is available and valid for your subnet, it's the address you're given. On the other hand, if you've been offline for a while, say for an ice-storm power outage, and in the meantime say a new customer comes online, they might get your old IP. Then when you reconnect, your old IP won't be available, and they'll give you a new one, which will then be as stable as the old one was. The other reason I've seen for IP changes is when they reconfigure their network, juggling subnet sizes, or just plain moving subnets around different prefixes.
THAT is why our DHCP addresses are so stable. They're actually doing a good job of implementing DHCP as it's meant to be implemented. Amazing, isn't it? If they wanted to be pricks about it, they could tweak their DHCP servers to rotate IP leases every renewal, plus they could also shorten the renewal interval. Places like DynDNS.org might even crumble under the load of cable/dsl subscribers updating their IPs so frequently.
I'm a little surprised that they don't simply block incoming SYN packets (and "new" incoming UDP connections (I know, UDP is stateless, but IPTables pretends for conntrack, and so could they)) - they'd be perfectly within their TOS rights to do so. IMHO it's another example of the "New York State Thruway speeding ticket" effect. They have "laws" (TOS) in place that they don't generally enforce, yet pretty much everyone breaks. Then when they have reason to not like you, chances are overwhelming that they can get your for *something*.
It strikes me that we sit here on /. and say, "Nyah, nyah, no DRM, icky-ick," and in passing realize that we're not in the target market, and any so-called boycotts we attempt to do will be meaningless.
But there is another side to it...
This guy is an early-adopter, and he's just been screwed. The next tier of customers frequently don't jump until they've gotten a warm fuzzy feeling from the early adopters. This guy's friends and acquaintances aren't going to get that feeling, and hold off a bit longer.
Originally one of the scary things about DRM was that most of it was going to be turned off - at first. My sinister presumption was that that would let the early adopters have their day - and make their recommendations. By the time they started turning the DRM on they would hopefully have significant market penetration, and assuming they were careful with their staging of turning it on, they'd likely get away with it.
If this is any sign, that plan hasn't come to pass.
This is Good News.
If this were made in the US instead of China, we could have some real DHS paranoid ramblings...
Imagine a secret partition on the hard drive that holds (profiled) characteristics of terrorists faces. So the laptop keeps track of whoever is using it, checks it against its secret database, and next time it's connected to the internet, files a report with DHS.
I could have sworn that in Ashcroft vs Eldred, the Supremes said that though the Constitution said, "temporary," Congress had such sweeping control that they could in essence define it as "eternity minus 1 day." But they DID say that Congress could yank works out of the Public Domain and put them back under copyright.
That particular problem was with the iptables line that opened a pinhole in the firewall so I could ssh in from my home. I'd set things up at her house, and couldn't test until I was home, again. It turned out to be a udev persistent naming problem. Her hard drive was failing (Thanks for the warning, SMART.) and I'd preinstalled a new one at my home. When I installed it in her system, eth0 turned into eth2. I fixed her firewall script so it all worked, but forgot about the script in another spot that opened the ssh pinhole. It found my home IP address, and opened the hole for eth0. I've since learned more about udev, and would have solved the problem by sticking with eth0.
In other words, I didn't have a way to fully test it before saving.
Try it on your mother's system from 600 miles away, and the only "console" is a cousin on the telephone typing at her machine, because your mom is too uncomfortable doing anything but a few basics on the computer, and pretty much forget an xterm.
Heck, and this point I'd even be happy to go back to the original copyright terms. Was it 14+14 years, or 28+28 years? Either is better than the "eternity minus 1 day" that we're working our way towards, now.
/., you've got to be kidding!) believe that Disney won't have another patsy to fill Bono's shoes when it's time to extend copyrights again? and again? and again? I suspect it will be quite interesting when they go for the real wording of "perpetuity," because "temporary" is quite explicit in the Constitution. However the Supremes have said that "eternity minus 1 day" fills the bill for "temporary," so I expect to see weasel-words. I also never expect to see this legislation, because I expect them to wait for the coup de grace until we have a generation that has never seen a copyright expire.
Does anyone here (On
Of course by that time, there will be more fundamental changes afoot. It's entirely possible that Hollywood will have become so hidebound that Bollywood will actually manage to learn to make better films. At some point I expect the "copyright menace" to begin directly hurting the US, instead of directly benefiting it as it does today. When that comes to pass, we'll have to see what the shifting definition of "copyright reform" looks like. Of course some of us think that today copyrights are indirectly hurting the US, in spite of the apparent direct benefits.
I've thought about it, but what I really wish for is an event-driven synchronization. With something like Unison the first thing that needs doing is to check which files have changed. With some sort of hook (inotify/dnotify?) into the filesystem, the write itself triggers/queues the synchronization, just for that file.
My current raid-1 only protects me from hardware problems. I'm thinking of running "cp -al" on a nightly cron job for online archival purposes.
>Have your entire home network be the distributed backup server.
/home...
/home. Typically you're sitting at one system at a time, and if you're ssh'ed into another one, you're probably compiling on one and doing email/browsing on the other. In other words, there is a kind of working-set locality. So why not turn every system on your lan into a mirror of the others. Keep track of writes, and queue them to the other systems. On file opens, do a quick cross-check to make sure no other system has a more recent copy. Assuming you can have at least 1 other system always up, you've got a golden copy squirreled away. At the moment I'm serving a raid-1 over NFS for /home, but that means the data squeezes over a 100baseT pipe. I don't know how much bandwidth would get lost with a cluster and synchronization checking.
I've wondered about this for some time. For the moment, let's focus on
I imagine several systems, each with its own copy of
I've wondered if any of the clustered filesystems like OCFS2 can abused do this, but haven't had time to dig.
But apparently some can.
No problem, even if they shoot themselves in both feet with this radio-play play, they'll still blame their problems on downloading and filesharing.
Any suggestions for how to phrase it if you're not a New York resident?
...except of course for the "expert testimony" from Redmond, WA.
This is a New York government function, they would be perfectly within their rights to throw away all input that isn't from New York residents.
If Woz had been at the wheel alone, I think Apple would have failed, but with some interesting products.
If Woz had continued with Jobs, I think Apple would be bigger and better than it is, today.
The fun will come when they convince government organizations that SharePoint is an "open standard." The phrase "lock-in" for Office formats is simply nothing at all compared to the way it applies to SharePoint.
By the way, the New Slashdot Meme is to insist that Slashdot is full of knee-jerk anti-Microsofties, that Microsoft products really are the best available for the purposes they're used, and infer that Microsoft business practices really ain't Evil. No doubt they'll also revise things so that chair-throwing is just a friendly fatherly game of catch.
None of it matters.
Modern companies don't transcend their Creators. They survive, true, but they're never what they were under their Creators. Nobody drove IBM the way Watson drove it. Nobody drove Apple the way Jobs drove it. It takes time to fall, but remember, Gates isn't driving Microsoft any more.
Microsoft WILL get OOXML approved as an ISO standard. They WILL lock-in governments all over the place into their formats. They will no doubt do some other dastardly things. But it just won't matter, in the long run. The fact is, they're big, they're fat, and they have company politics all over the place. They make *acceptable* products, but they compete based on their overwhelming market strength, not on their merit.
The marketplace simply hasn't shifted enough yet to render their current impenetrable dominance irrelevant. Kind of like IBM and mainframes back in the 80's and 90's.
It's also worth mentioning that of the 2001 Bush administration, the only higher-up who had front-rank military service was Sec'y of State Colin Powell, and though he eventually went along with the "slam-dunk" arguments for invading Iraq, he was also the only higher-up who dragged his feet on the issue. Other members of the Bush administration generally served in the National Guard or had other means of draft deferment. In the 60's and 70's, even though the US had many times more soldiers in Viet Nam, the National Guards were not sent, at least not in any big way. There have been those who called them "chicken-hawks."
To be fair, Bill Clinton didn't serve in Viet Nam either, having an educational draft deferment. But though a few minor skirmishes (Balkans, Somalia) happened on his watch, he did not advocate major military action. Also to be fair, I didn't serve in Viet Nam. I was classified 1-H, had a draft card, and was in one lottery before it was all shut down. (The Clinton administration was accused of "wagging the dog" when they bombed Al Quaeda in Afghanistan, and was preparing Afghanistan invasion plans in 2000, but didn't want to saddle the incoming administration with a war as it entered office.)
Whoosh!
Whoever modded this post "Offtopic" obviously never saw Shatner's appearance on SNL.
So surely there must be at least on Slashdot reader who's a millionaire, is annoyed by this too, and isn't the one doing it.
Please SUE them!
Don't give them any ideas. We're already being told that skipping commercials on a recording is theft. Next thing it'll be reclassified as (economic) terrorism.
Just remember... You (This means YOU! (or even ME!)) can be reclassified as an "unlawful enemy combatant" by the executive branch with no judicial review, no checks, no balances. Once you're reclassified, there are no rules.
Ain't it great!
But the moment you're using TrueCrypt and it's "plausible deniability" has become well-known, then you're under the gun to divulge, whether you've used the feature or not.
>What eliminates a race that focuses all of its agression against others not of their race?
The ability to call someone of your own race "other", that's what. You can always make dividing lines between "us" and "them", and set out to kill "them", even if you're basically the same. We're doing a splendid job of it. As long as we're in science fiction, try "Pandora's Star" for an example with super-homogeneous aliens.
We're also victims of too much Star Trek and Star Wars. Heck, we're not even really an "orbital" society yet, let alone interplanetary. Forget interstellar for quite a while.
When I first moved to Vermont, Christmas was approaching and I knew I was going to want to ship some packages via UPS. But there was no local phone number for UPS in the book, no address, only an 800 number. (Nor was there even a web, let alone mapquest or google maps.) So one evening I was out on the road, and happened to see a UPS truck ahead of me. I followed it, and found the UPS place. I suppose I could have called the 800 number and asked, but I hadn't around gotten to that before seeing the truck and following it.
Years ago, my wife got me an indoor/outdoor thermometer that also included a radio-synced clock that works with WWV. Between that and NTP on my computers, time is kept close enough.
Besides, the only time that *really* matters down to the minute is when you're trying to record a TV show, and *they* aren't that accurate.
So it just doesn't matter.
Makes me think of the line by the disillusioned engineer in Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine," "I'm going to a commune in Vermont where I don't have to deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
> We can fix that with a small eugenics program. No political support needed, ... relaxed .. morality.
> just one or more of the following:
>
> 1) sex and a more
>
> 2) drugs (to make those D2 receptors more active)
You forgot...
3) Rock and Roll
So has anyone performed a similar analysis of the 2000 or 2004 US Presidential elections. At the national level I can believe any skulduggery would be buried in the noise, but how about in select spots??? (Forida, Ohio, etc.)