The average S/390 is capable of running numerous virtual Linux boxes at once (several thousand I read). For major software developers (read megabucks budget), any or all of the distros could be loaded into a VM to test the product.
Having thousands of concurrent Linux boxes running offers another option. Web server software to date has been developed on the basis of multiple users using a single server. OK, there is load balancing, but this doesn't alter the paradigm, it merely loosens a few of the constraints. The S/390 opens up the option of each user connected to the site having one (or more) virtual Linux boxes of their very own to process their transactions (or whatever). What could your e-commerce site do with that ?
how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences? how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?
Welcome to the world of Information Technology my friend. The truth is that most users notice nothing and appreciate less. That is, until it goes wrong. Then the purveyors of the service get villified....
BTW, I am in the UK, and it does seem quicker to me. Well done.
My fear is that increasing amounts of resource will be poured into maintaining these academic papers for posterity, when many are nothing more than a rehash of earlier work, or turn out to be pure crap anyway.
OK, storage and networking costs are coming down all the time. This may be so, but the infrastructure has to be provided and maintained, for an open ended volume of data. In addition, there is a cost to each researcher in the future who may have to trawl through a load of lame crap to find the paper they need.
In short, it needs moderating. Books and papers going out of print, or the final copies getting lost, are natures way of moderating irrelevant crap. Because, if it wasn't irrelevant, someone would have invested in preserving it.
Once these papers are moderated out of usage through neglect, a future generation may indeed be interested in them. We have a name for such people - archaeologists. These are people who sift through the discarded, irrelevant crap of civilizations, to find out about the civilizations who went before them, the ones who valued these discarded things.
I still love Metallica but I think they've been talking to the wrong crowd and are ill informed as to the real developments that are occuring. I think some industry execs figured that recruiting a Metalica or a Dr. Dre to carry out their delay tactics would have more credibility than the RIAA could attacking directly.
An interesting notion.....
It is obvious that Metallica are having real problems anyway. They are entering into that 'mid-life crisis' area which old rock bands enter into, with declining audiences and interest. Only a few great bands, like the Stones and Aerosmith come out of the other side of it intact. Perhaps they record industry think they are suitably dispensible to sacrifice them on an issue like this. As for Dr Dre - can't comment. I don't know his music, and now care about it even less.......
Re:Why tackle Go instead of Chess?
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 2
As I mentioned before, Go has a even larger branching factor than chess which does some implications. A brute-force search method cannot be used in Go.
We are nowhere being able to 'solve chess' by brute force methods either.
Computer chess then can be based on pattern recognizationWhy is this not true of Go ? The answer here is that chess has been studied systematically, by more people, and for longer. It has a much more active press, with more published works by several orders of magnitude than Go. There are more players studying chess than Go. Programmers of chess computers have much more to work with than programmers of Go programs. Hence a chess machine that can give Kasparov a hard time on a good day. The equivalent published body of work does not currently exist for Go.
Computer chess then can be based on pattern recognization.
This is an amazing statement ! Have you ever played chess, or even seen it from a distance ? Or are you suggesting that there are no patterns in Go to recognise ? Or are the patterns not so well understood outside a small elite who are shy of publication ?
Would this be the same MI5 building that needed pulling down and rebuilding, because the contractors had hired IRA sympathisers to help build it ? I wonder.........
Will there be special lap-top docking stations, linked to an alarm system making 'whoop whoop' noises when a lap-top is unaccounted for ?.
I am a UK citizen. Henceforth, I will be using encryption on *all* my personal e-mails, irrespective of content. If they are snooping on me, I'll find out when some policeman or some chinless wonder from the spook bureau (Cambridge educated - works part-time for the KGB) arrives on my doorstep with a warrant for my encryption key.
I thought Margaret Thatcher was a right wing extremist. This Labour government will do more in one term of office to destroy civil liberties in the UK than three terms of Thatcher ever did. May all these New Labour dictators, thugs, MI5 spooks and lackeys all spin in hell. They want to build the e-economy in the UK - no f**king way !!!! It will emigrate ! BTW MI5 - did you get this ?
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite. So what is it?
It is neither ! Mitnick was convicted of commiting a crime. He should not profit from his crime. Agreed. But why shouldn't he profit by passing on his knowledge legally, in a way that allows people to build safer and more secure systems.
The scary thing about this whole thing is that, having released Mitnick from prison, they are creating a virtual prison by severely circumscribing the things he can do to make a living. They are virtually forcing him to reoffend, or die of frustration ! OK, I believe in punishing people for their crimes. But to continue to torment this man in this way, is pure state sponsored vindictiveness.
What happened in the old days
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 1
Two of these spook lap-tops have gone missing in the UK. Now this one has vanished in the US. This raises a number of questions:
What did spooks do before lap-tops ?
Did they walk around the streets with briefcases (or carrier bags ?) full of confidential files ?
Wouldn't carrying all these file make him stand out in public ?
Weren't there rules about carrying this stuff in public ?
The problem is not a technology problem. It is not to do with lap tops. Nice portable high value things will always get stolen. This is almost axiomatic !. The problem is a 'spook business process' problem. The advent of laptops has made them get sloppy over security. Since we pay these reptiles to look after our security (allegedly......), it is time for someone in authority to ask serious questions related to their competence, remit and funding.
While we are on the subject of bashing BT (because they do deserve it) for those of us outside the ADSL trial areas (read - most of the UK) I note also that the software they bundle with their ISDN doesn't work with Win2K.
"If it turns out that there are people who have huge hard drives and actually are downloading copyrighted materials and transmitting (them) on the Internet, we may very well go after them because they are engaged in theft," said Dr. Dre attorney Howard King. The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, follows a similar suit by heavy-metal group Metallica. Both suits were filed by King.
He wouldn't be related to boxing promoter Don King by any chance, would he ? That would explain everything.........
Your average CD costs what, $3? So sell them for $5 and people will buy more
What do we value here, the medium, or the talent of the artist.
There is a position which is tenable for artist and listener here. Most people are prepared to pay for music, so long as the money goes to the artist. The artists are cool with this too.
The problem is the intermediaries. The record producers, 'talent management', other miscellaneous hangers-on, distribution, packaging, inventory management, profit of resellers and all the other crap which goes with a CD. For an artists talent to reach my front room, it passes through the hands of a lot of intermediaries. Of the £15 I pay for my CD, the artist gets a few pennies.
The great thing is, the internet can ultimately create a communication channel between artist and listener, bypassing the intermediaries, resulting in cheaper music for the listener, and better reward for the artist, and indeed for more artists. In this respect, Napster has an opportunity to position itself as the enabler in this revolution.
The only losers are ther intermediaries. Tough. The artist doesn't need them, neither do we. But they have money, taken from people like us paying to listen to artists we want to support, and access to lawyers. They have the RIAA, so they are organised. They will fight tooth and nail to retain their stranglehold, and it will be a bloody battle. But they will lose. It will be in my lifetime as well.
To win this battle, we need a business model which distributes the music to the paying customer, with a bit creamed off for technology costs, but the rest going back to the artist, and we need to keep the artists on-side.
Rather than being far sighted, Dr Dre and the RIAA are defending their outmoded hegemony to the last. They are dinosaurs, doomed to extinction. What we are hearing is the frightened bellows of a soon to be extinct species, who are watching the sky, waiting for the meteorite.
There are a number of problems with the Data Protection Act.
Firstly, to sign up with the ISP, you have given them name, address, date of birth and probably your phone number, as condition of using them.
Since most of them require your e-mail address and password when you sign on, they effectively have, via their logs, who you are, demographics (unless you lied), phone number (because you are phoning them) and everywhere you went. All of this is quite legitimate within the terms of the Data Protection Act. Indeed, under the Regulation of Investigtory Powers Act, it will probably become mandatory.
Note on the Freeserve new user registration page, you have the normal 'opt out' boxes (jury is out on their legality in the UK AFAIK). It mentions 'Terms and Conditions' too, but this link doesn't work (ha ha ha ROFL). When it works, I bet it mentions that the data they collect will be processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act.
In short, I don't believe that the Data Protection Act will offer much of a defence to ISPs using their logs to market at you, as you will have to give them this right under the Data Protection Act when you sign up with them in the first place.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will treat ISPs as telcos. It will require them to put the monitoring apparatus in place, so the government can watch what its taxpayers are doing. More detailed discussion of this hideous legislation can be found at the STAND site.
Once the telcos, sorry, ISPs put this apparatus in place, thy might as well get some return on their 'investment' by gleaning marketing info about their customers in passing.
Britain is a broken country. We are an envious, unimaginative, reactive, bigotted, bitter society. We do not reward success; rather we punish it. We do not understand ideas of freedom and self-expression, but we attack their proponents bitterly.
I am British. I feel angry when I read this article. My anger is not at the article, because it is accurate. We have created a society in the UK where mediocrity is rewarded. And you always get the behaviours you reward.
I am unsure about the government view on the Internet in the UK. I don't know whether its policies are borne of ignorance, or some darker motive. Place the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill alongside the new Terrorism Bill, and the proposed new offence of 'Tax Evasion', then we have a Ceaucescu type of police state in the making.
Governments, once elected, ignore the people and do their own thing
Unfortunately, the governments have to act through 'government employees' - civil servants and the like. In practice, politicians never understand enough to gontrol these people
In most western democracies, government employees get crap wages, but a job for life. It doesn't encourage the 'brightest and best' to join. Once in, staff tend not to leave
In other words, the 'people' are at least two steps removed from control of anything. Those who can control it are working under a government mandate. Government is often ill-informed, or has an agenda. The government employees are often not the sharpest tools in the box, and sometimes have their own agenda. If my car had steering like 'the people' had control, I'd scrap it and take the bus. I apologise for this being totally off-topic (lasers aren't mentioned once).
Does research need to have a "point" or "application"? Is there anything wrong with pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake?
(*irony*)Hooray for tenure !!!!! Hooray for academic freedom - and the right to challenge received wisdom !!!!(*/irony*)
Research is important. Research for no reason, for the 'pursuit of knowledge for its own sake' is less justifiable, particularly when public money is being spent on it. 'Pickled sheep' come to mind. Problem is, in a society where a smaller and shrinking percentage are actually inputting tax-bucks into the system, accountability will become more of an issue to academics in future. Tub-thumping and rhetoric will not make this go away - the golden rule is that "The man with the gold makes the rules".
"-protect technology allowing in-store customers to listen to parts of songs at a kiosk, or to hear the music through a computer, before deciding whether to buy."
Oh no ! I was in a Virgin Megastore last night. Better ring Richard Branson and tell him he is in *big* trouble with these patent guys.......
Powdered Milk - a brilliant invention for supporting the Third World.
Instead of encouraging the feeding of babies on their mother's milk, which is by far the best food for them, at least one company encouraged the use of powdered baby milk amongst Third World mothers. This crap was purchased by those who swallowed the slick hype, and mixed with the local, unclean water supply. It spread disease and death amongst the babies.
I'll not mention the name of the company, but they are a well known very large conglomerate, and I don't eat their chocolate any more.
It is one thing for your style to match your readership, it is an entirely different thing when everything the "journalist" writes agrees with his audience's dogma.
Mr Katz has written stuff which disagreed with his audience. He got flamed. He then wrote a number of pieces inspired by all the flames he received. That is journalism - you get paid by the word. Intellectual honesty is nice, but money is the prime motivator for most journos.
BTW, I would be interested to hear the motivation of the Slashdot 'powers-that-be' for bringing Mr Katz to prominence.
Mr Katz is, and always has been, billed as a 'journalist'. This is what journalists do. They find an audience, and write the type of prose that the audience will pay for. This is entirely consistent behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
The average S/390 is capable of running numerous virtual Linux boxes at once (several thousand I read). For major software developers (read megabucks budget), any or all of the distros could be loaded into a VM to test the product.
Having thousands of concurrent Linux boxes running offers another option. Web server software to date has been developed on the basis of multiple users using a single server. OK, there is load balancing, but this doesn't alter the paradigm, it merely loosens a few of the constraints. The S/390 opens up the option of each user connected to the site having one (or more) virtual Linux boxes of their very own to process their transactions (or whatever). What could your e-commerce site do with that ?
how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences? how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?
....
Welcome to the world of Information Technology my friend. The truth is that most users notice nothing and appreciate less. That is, until it goes wrong. Then the purveyors of the service get villified
BTW, I am in the UK, and it does seem quicker to me. Well done.
We already know he has 5000 mindless slaves, how many more before before we step in?
.......
Mindless droid - a state of being which is a prerequisite for enjoying any of Metallica's stuff from the last five years.
Boy, have they lost it
They might as well pursue Napster, because they are artistically bankrupt. I wonder how many albums they have left ?
My fear is that increasing amounts of resource will be poured into maintaining these academic papers for posterity, when many are nothing more than a rehash of earlier work, or turn out to be pure crap anyway.
OK, storage and networking costs are coming down all the time. This may be so, but the infrastructure has to be provided and maintained, for an open ended volume of data. In addition, there is a cost to each researcher in the future who may have to trawl through a load of lame crap to find the paper they need.
In short, it needs moderating. Books and papers going out of print, or the final copies getting lost, are natures way of moderating irrelevant crap. Because, if it wasn't irrelevant, someone would have invested in preserving it.
Once these papers are moderated out of usage through neglect, a future generation may indeed be interested in them. We have a name for such people - archaeologists. These are people who sift through the discarded, irrelevant crap of civilizations, to find out about the civilizations who went before them, the ones who valued these discarded things.
Amen to this !!!!!!!
A powerful and accurate point, well made. Thanks br4dh4x0r.
I still love Metallica but I think they've been talking to the wrong crowd and are ill informed as to the real developments that are occuring. I think some industry execs figured that recruiting a Metalica or a Dr. Dre to carry out their delay tactics would have more credibility than the RIAA could attacking directly.
.......
An interesting notion.....
It is obvious that Metallica are having real problems anyway. They are entering into that 'mid-life crisis' area which old rock bands enter into, with declining audiences and interest. Only a few great bands, like the Stones and Aerosmith come out of the other side of it intact. Perhaps they record industry think they are suitably dispensible to sacrifice them on an issue like this. As for Dr Dre - can't comment. I don't know his music, and now care about it even less
As I mentioned before, Go has a even larger branching factor than chess which does some implications. A brute-force search method cannot be used in Go.
We are nowhere being able to 'solve chess' by brute force methods either.
Computer chess then can be based on pattern recognizationWhy is this not true of Go ? The answer here is that chess has been studied systematically, by more people, and for longer. It has a much more active press, with more published works by several orders of magnitude than Go. There are more players studying chess than Go. Programmers of chess computers have much more to work with than programmers of Go programs. Hence a chess machine that can give Kasparov a hard time on a good day. The equivalent published body of work does not currently exist for Go.
Computer chess then can be based on pattern recognization.
This is an amazing statement ! Have you ever played chess, or even seen it from a distance ? Or are you suggesting that there are no patterns in Go to recognise ? Or are the patterns not so well understood outside a small elite who are shy of publication ?
*RANT alert*
.........
Would this be the same MI5 building that needed pulling down and rebuilding, because the contractors had hired IRA sympathisers to help build it ? I wonder
Will there be special lap-top docking stations, linked to an alarm system making 'whoop whoop' noises when a lap-top is unaccounted for ?.
I am a UK citizen. Henceforth, I will be using encryption on *all* my personal e-mails, irrespective of content. If they are snooping on me, I'll find out when some policeman or some chinless wonder from the spook bureau (Cambridge educated - works part-time for the KGB) arrives on my doorstep with a warrant for my encryption key.
I thought Margaret Thatcher was a right wing extremist. This Labour government will do more in one term of office to destroy civil liberties in the UK than three terms of Thatcher ever did. May all these New Labour dictators, thugs, MI5 spooks and lackeys all spin in hell. They want to build the e-economy in the UK - no f**king way !!!! It will emigrate ! BTW MI5 - did you get this ?
*end of rant*
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite. So what is it?
It is neither ! Mitnick was convicted of commiting a crime. He should not profit from his crime. Agreed. But why shouldn't he profit by passing on his knowledge legally, in a way that allows people to build safer and more secure systems.
The scary thing about this whole thing is that, having released Mitnick from prison, they are creating a virtual prison by severely circumscribing the things he can do to make a living. They are virtually forcing him to reoffend, or die of frustration ! OK, I believe in punishing people for their crimes. But to continue to torment this man in this way, is pure state sponsored vindictiveness.
What did spooks do before lap-tops ?
Did they walk around the streets with briefcases (or carrier bags ?) full of confidential files ?
Wouldn't carrying all these file make him stand out in public ?
Weren't there rules about carrying this stuff in public ?
......), it is time for someone in authority to ask serious questions related to their competence, remit and funding.
The problem is not a technology problem. It is not to do with lap tops. Nice portable high value things will always get stolen. This is almost axiomatic !. The problem is a 'spook business process' problem. The advent of laptops has made them get sloppy over security. Since we pay these reptiles to look after our security (allegedly
While we are on the subject of bashing BT (because they do deserve it) for those of us outside the ADSL trial areas (read - most of the UK) I note also that the software they bundle with their ISDN doesn't work with Win2K.
So, what price Linux ??????
"If it turns out that there are people who have huge hard drives and actually are downloading copyrighted materials and transmitting (them) on the Internet, we may very well go after them because they are engaged in theft," said Dr. Dre attorney Howard King. The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, follows a similar suit by heavy-metal group Metallica. Both suits were filed by King.
.........
He wouldn't be related to boxing promoter Don King by any chance, would he ? That would explain everything
Your average CD costs what, $3? So sell them for $5 and people will buy more
What do we value here, the medium, or the talent of the artist.
There is a position which is tenable for artist and listener here. Most people are prepared to pay for music, so long as the money goes to the artist. The artists are cool with this too.
The problem is the intermediaries. The record producers, 'talent management', other miscellaneous hangers-on, distribution, packaging, inventory management, profit of resellers and all the other crap which goes with a CD. For an artists talent to reach my front room, it passes through the hands of a lot of intermediaries. Of the £15 I pay for my CD, the artist gets a few pennies.
The great thing is, the internet can ultimately create a communication channel between artist and listener, bypassing the intermediaries, resulting in cheaper music for the listener, and better reward for the artist, and indeed for more artists. In this respect, Napster has an opportunity to position itself as the enabler in this revolution.
The only losers are ther intermediaries. Tough. The artist doesn't need them, neither do we. But they have money, taken from people like us paying to listen to artists we want to support, and access to lawyers. They have the RIAA, so they are organised. They will fight tooth and nail to retain their stranglehold, and it will be a bloody battle. But they will lose. It will be in my lifetime as well.
To win this battle, we need a business model which distributes the music to the paying customer, with a bit creamed off for technology costs, but the rest going back to the artist, and we need to keep the artists on-side.
Rather than being far sighted, Dr Dre and the RIAA are defending their outmoded hegemony to the last. They are dinosaurs, doomed to extinction. What we are hearing is the frightened bellows of a soon to be extinct species, who are watching the sky, waiting for the meteorite.
There are a number of problems with the Data Protection Act.
Firstly, to sign up with the ISP, you have given them name, address, date of birth and probably your phone number, as condition of using them.
Since most of them require your e-mail address and password when you sign on, they effectively have, via their logs, who you are, demographics (unless you lied), phone number (because you are phoning them) and everywhere you went. All of this is quite legitimate within the terms of the Data Protection Act. Indeed, under the Regulation of Investigtory Powers Act, it will probably become mandatory.
The trick is to check the Data Protection registration of the ISP. If they are not registered to use this data for marketing purposes, you have them by the short and curlies. You can search for this on the Data Protection Registrar web site . For instance, here is the registration made by the UKs favourite ISP, Freeserve. Note the first purpose is marketing to individuals. I also saw an article in Computing magazine where Freeserve stated that they intend to do exactly that.
Note on the Freeserve new user registration page, you have the normal 'opt out' boxes (jury is out on their legality in the UK AFAIK). It mentions 'Terms and Conditions' too, but this link doesn't work (ha ha ha ROFL). When it works, I bet it mentions that the data they collect will be processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act.
In short, I don't believe that the Data Protection Act will offer much of a defence to ISPs using their logs to market at you, as you will have to give them this right under the Data Protection Act when you sign up with them in the first place.
In the UK, the government will get there first.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will treat ISPs as telcos. It will require them to put the monitoring apparatus in place, so the government can watch what its taxpayers are doing. More detailed discussion of this hideous legislation can be found at the STAND site.
Once the telcos, sorry, ISPs put this apparatus in place, thy might as well get some return on their 'investment' by gleaning marketing info about their customers in passing.
Who's up for a /. book of the 'Thousand favourite Jon Katz flames' ? Perhaps someone could sacrifice a decade of their lives sorting through them ?
Britain is a broken country. We are an envious, unimaginative, reactive, bigotted, bitter society. We do not reward success; rather we punish it. We do not understand ideas of freedom and self-expression, but we attack their proponents bitterly.
I am British. I feel angry when I read this article. My anger is not at the article, because it is accurate. We have created a society in the UK where mediocrity is rewarded. And you always get the behaviours you reward.
I am unsure about the government view on the Internet in the UK. I don't know whether its policies are borne of ignorance, or some darker motive. Place the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill alongside the new Terrorism Bill, and the proposed new offence of 'Tax Evasion', then we have a Ceaucescu type of police state in the making.
Really ?????? Since when ??????
Reality check time
People elect governments
Governments, once elected, ignore the people and do their own thing
Unfortunately, the governments have to act through 'government employees' - civil servants and the like. In practice, politicians never understand enough to gontrol these people
In most western democracies, government employees get crap wages, but a job for life. It doesn't encourage the 'brightest and best' to join. Once in, staff tend not to leave
In other words, the 'people' are at least two steps removed from control of anything. Those who can control it are working under a government mandate. Government is often ill-informed, or has an agenda. The government employees are often not the sharpest tools in the box, and sometimes have their own agenda. If my car had steering like 'the people' had control, I'd scrap it and take the bus.
I apologise for this being totally off-topic (lasers aren't mentioned once).
Does research need to have a "point" or "application"? Is there anything wrong with pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake?
(*irony*)Hooray for tenure !!!!! Hooray for academic freedom - and the right to challenge received wisdom !!!!(*/irony*)
Research is important. Research for no reason, for the 'pursuit of knowledge for its own sake' is less justifiable, particularly when public money is being spent on it. 'Pickled sheep' come to mind. Problem is, in a society where a smaller and shrinking percentage are actually inputting tax-bucks into the system, accountability will become more of an issue to academics in future. Tub-thumping and rhetoric will not make this go away - the golden rule is that "The man with the gold makes the rules".
"-protect technology allowing in-store customers to listen to parts of songs at a kiosk, or to hear the music through a computer, before deciding whether to buy."
Oh no ! I was in a Virgin Megastore last night. Better ring Richard Branson and tell him he is in *big* trouble with these patent guys.......
Powdered Milk - a brilliant invention for supporting the Third World.
Instead of encouraging the feeding of babies on their mother's milk, which is by far the best food for them, at least one company encouraged the use of powdered baby milk amongst Third World mothers. This crap was purchased by those who swallowed the slick hype, and mixed with the local, unclean water supply. It spread disease and death amongst the babies.
I'll not mention the name of the company, but they are a well known very large conglomerate, and I don't eat their chocolate any more.
It is one thing for your style to match your readership, it is an entirely different thing when everything the "journalist" writes agrees with his audience's dogma.
Mr Katz has written stuff which disagreed with his audience. He got flamed. He then wrote a number of pieces inspired by all the flames he received. That is journalism - you get paid by the word. Intellectual honesty is nice, but money is the prime motivator for most journos.
BTW, I would be interested to hear the motivation of the Slashdot 'powers-that-be' for bringing Mr Katz to prominence.
What is the ratio of men to women that use it for their daily pr0n needs?
None - it is a well known fact that women look at 'erotica' instead.
Are you surprised ?
Mr Katz is, and always has been, billed as a 'journalist'. This is what journalists do. They find an audience, and write the type of prose that the audience will pay for. This is entirely consistent behaviour.
Find or create people on Usenet who don't like you
Wait until they say something nasty about you
Sue their ISP and live off the proceeds
You could spend your life surfing the Internet, looking for sites and Usenet groups saying bad things about you, and never have to work again.
BTW, I am a UK citizen and this is being published on a site in the USA. I haven't mentioned any names or defamed anyone. So tough !