How do you expect people to get out of a slum if they can't get a job, because a phone costs too much; and nobody will hire them unless they are reachable by phone?
The problems of poverty go well beyond not having a POTS line for $20 per month. As we have seen, the cross-subsidization of telephone service for the past 75 years has not lowered poverty rates, and the lack of subsidies have not prevented the presumably inner-city poor I encounter from having cell phones, either.
As for farming; ariculture is an industry we all are customers of, so it's not like not subsidizing those costs will prevent you from paying for their lines anyhow.
In addition to subsidizing their farming activity directly (farm aid, various price supports and import penalties), electricity, and roadways, I'd like to avoid at least one direct farm subsidy involving telephone infrastructure. I'll even support electrical and roadway subsidies in rural areas, just not cheap POTS service.
I agree that these services need regulation, but not for the reasons you specify, but because they are natural monopolies that must not be allowed to flex their monopoly power. Regulation allows for their corporate business decisions to better reflect needs, and not just where the best buck is. Finding the best buck is OK in my book as well, but you aren't allowed to use a monopoly to do it.
Do you want guaranteed availability of telephone service at uniform and reasonable rates, even if you live on a farm or in a slum?
Actually no. Smart regulation reflects the varying costs of delivering a service to those getting it. Needing a lot of expensive infrastructure built to service a small number of people or very high fraud costs *should* increase purchase costs. Cross-subsidizing them to make a phone $25/month, everywhere, is idiotic. I'd have a T1 to my office (urban areas, lots of facilities), but its $500. Not because it costs $500 to deliver it, but because many of those costs help subsidize other more expensive POTS deliveries elsewhere.
The semi-scary VOIP thing is that instead of smartly regulating it like we should, we'll instead just slap the old regulations onto VOIP.
Re:Acid trips in movies and books
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 1
It would help if the authors had taken it themselves.
Now, if the book is about heavy drinking, I'd wager that most authors could do a masterful job of it...
Acid trips in movies and books
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...Are almost unwatchable/unreadable, since you cannot ever get the experience right. It's a psychological (and in some ways physical) experience, not some cheesy handheld-camera with a soft-focus effect with lightshow.
The best written examples of LSD are attempts at factual description by people who experienced them, and even they have difficulty describing the experience well. The best writing on it is actually nearly 40 years old -- "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience".
It used to be that the utilities were highly regulated entities that had their profit margins basically regulated by the states they were in. They had to provide a given amount of reliability, and rate increases (and occasionally refunds!) were carefully scrutinized as to where the money went. You couldn't raise rates without showing some meaningful improvement that resulted from it.
Then along came degregulation, where the power seller and the power generator became two different things (which makes even less sense than the deregulated-but-shared local phone loop). Utility companies wanted out of the power generation arena -- too expensive, too many regulations, it was better to be in the new "commodity" end of the business, arbitraging power. So they split themselves into trading companies and generation companies, taking all the cash into the trading companies, who were deregulated and could spend it freely.
And then 10 years later, Enron and the whole deregulated power "market" has collapsed, and we wonder why we're 15-20 years behind the curve on power grid and other key infrastructure elements. All the money got spent on speculating in the newly deregulated power markets, and its all gone.
Nobody really pays any less for electricity, I don't have a bunch of people knocking on my door offering me their window electricity or biodiesel electricity or their pig shit methane electricity for that matter.
I only have the sheepish looking local utility trying to explain to me how they're trying to fix the power infrastructure built in the 1970s with the cash made in the 1980s which was spent in the 1990s on the promise of getting rich in the new millenium. When in fact, they actually need me to pay the prices of the next millenium for the service delivered in the 1990s, and, oh, would I please only use as much power as I did in the 1970s?
Monopoly vendors aren't interested in providing a better value; only competition ensures that. Monopoly vendors are only interested in how to get (more) of your money. If there was another organization called the IARA that "represented" (as if the RIAA represents anything other than top execs at dominant labels, but I digress) the other half of the recording labels and artists, then you would see something like this.
As for right now, you don't, because there is no IARA and RIAA just looks for ways to make their profits an automatic deducation from Americans paychecks.
When did a better user experience get lost? Even BIOS used to get better over time (more flexible boot options, software jumper settings, etc).
Now it seems the "magic money" isn't in making it better, but in making it more crippled. Unfortunately I can think of a lot more things that should be done before that one.
Some minor corrections. The DMR-HS2 has for the most part been replaced by the DMR-E80 and the E-100/120. All have HDDs, the the much higher priced E100 series have firewire for camcorders. Panny always supported DVD-R and -RAM, but never the + format or the -RW format.
What I want/expect is DVD writing ability, but not just basic 1x real-time copy:
1) High-speed copies to removable media to HDD
2) Multi-program batch saving
3) Selectable downsampling to lower bitrates for maximum programs/disc (good for trips or where quality is less important).
4) DVD to HDD copying for region 0 and unencrypted discs (the panny's with HDDs will copy DVD-RAM to HDD, but not DVD-R). Yes, CSS and region locked discs should be copyable, but I'll give the MPAA a freebie here.
5) Basic editing for unwanted portion deletion. I collect music clips from TV shows, and I don't want or need the whole fsckin' Leno show for one 5 minute music spot. Commercial deletion would be nice, too.
And this of course is above and beyond the usual requirements of Tivo features, good UI, and "just plug it in" appliance-like setup.
Shills for Myth TV may claim all of this, but until someone releases a bootable Myth TV distribution that installs and configs in an hour or less, I'm too busy enjoying my Tivo and Panny to do Myth TV. My time is worth more than the money at this point.
Your roll-up wall-sized screen will be priced like drapery fabric at the local craft store.
It's not hard to spend thousands of dollars on drapes, if you want good (quality materials, non-white-trash styles) drapes. Add features like heat-reflecting fabric or motorization and it only goes up..
Or does that mean that if I want a big screen I have a choice of thousands of dollars for a good one, or $50 for a shit one?
Duvel and Stella Artois are both too mass-produced to make them interesting. Chimay almost is as well, but the fact that the brothers still brew it makes it worthwhile.
I prefer several of the saisons: Fantome Saison, Saison Dupont Vieille Provision, and Foret (an organic also brewed by Brasserie Dupont).
The more general farmhouse ale style (which the saisons are but a subset of) is actually still done by some of the breweries in northern France. I pick up random bottles of this here and there. I personally like the saisons better, but this are good as well.
Although lately I've been drinking more liquor for some reason. There's been a bankruptcy among All Saints, a major US importer of small-label beers, and the local supply has been kind of quirky; they've been stuffing some American beers in the Belgian/French section lately. Yuck.
It's all a question of lifestyle. Cars factor into it; live without a car, and you salvage anywhere from $200-400 a month even at the low end.
I know single men that get by on $500 month, but they live a lifestyle that few people would tolerate; buying 5 lbs hamburger at the wholesale club on sale and then eating hamburgers 2 of 3 nights for two weeks. Repeat cycle for pasta, etc.
Never buy anything but the dingiest used furniture. Buy your clothes at the used clothing store. Don't update your house (paint, modernize/fix bathroom or kitchen). Drive the junkiest car you can.
But they also largely live alone, no girlfriend or wife and they have few social activities. Add any of those in and you can't live like that.
The 2400 is a "real" RAID card (i960 CPU, RAM SIMM, full-length PCI form factor) and is transparently supported by the asr driver in FreeBSD, the same driver used with Adaptec SCSI RAID cards. In other words, it is a SCSI RAID card with an IDE controller instead of a SCSI controller on the back end of it.
The 1200 is nothing like it and is, like the Promise and many of the other cards, essentially a hardware/software RAID card that relies on the driver to do much of the heavy lifting associated with RAID1/0.
I wonder how many people really rely on blacklists anymore. I've tried using them before only to find out that over half of my legitimate email was being filtered and a significant amount of spam was still getting through.
Rely is too strong a word. Even Osirusoft's RBL wasn't effective by itself, but we used it where I work (~500 people, marketing industry) and it was flagging 1/4-1/3 of our incoming (~5k messages per day) as SPAM with a scant dozen complaints from end-users and people who tried to mail us (bounces included a "WTF???" explanation URL).
I used to think that the complaints about RBLs were somewhat valid, but with nearly a year of Osirusoft under our belts I'm not so sure anymore.
I do agree that they're not wholly adequate, and that a Bayesian screening technique is much better; unfortunately it's not a technique easy to apply to a gateway MTA handling many users.
you start noticing that morons thinking Spamcop is blocking their mail is somewhat common.
But aren't those likely to be the same morons that think 2^10 people they've never heard of are sending them a "Wicked screensaver" and they just *have* to open it?
I'm sorry, but I have no faith that the average computer user can interpret even the most obvious mail reject notification. As an example, at least a couple of times per week the users I support will get a bounce message back from some Exchange system with a very obvious description of why it couldn't be delivered (User doesn't exist, Mailbox over storage limit, etc). These are almost always accompanied by a voicemail or email from them asking what's wrong with *our* mail system.
If they can't understand those messages, how are they to be expected to understand anything more esorteric? As for who's responsible for blocking the message, it's "our" doing, but we're not responsible for the content of the RBL.
For RBL rejects, I have a line that redirects them to a web page with a "small words, big pictures" description of why their mail was rejected and alternatate contact means for us to override the blockage for them. But we're also pretty clear that we're *not* responsible for their listing in a given RBL, either as a source of their membership or a way out.
If you want real fun, bring up your concerns about flouridation to somoene with a dental education. Good friends of ours are Orthodontists, and when I questioned flouridation to them I thought I was questioning the holocaust in a synagogue, such was their reaction.
Oddly, the anti-flouride people seem to show some good evidence for not flouridating, the anti-flouride stance of several European countries adds a lot of credibility. The idea that flouridation got started as a way to get rid of excess toxic waste even seems compelling.
But you won't have a reasoned discussion with a dentist about it.
Flouride is (if you believe the ADA) used as a preventative against dental carries, not as a purification element. Flouride, as you suggest, is actually a poison in and of itself.
Surprisingly, there a number of European countries that do not flouridate their water.
That aside, I have knew someone that lived on a farm with high levels of some diarhhea inducing organism in their well water. They were essentially immune to it, but they found they had to keep a few gallons of bottled water on hand for guests who always got sick.
I wish this were so funny. The last two VARs that a business I know of has gotten accounting systems from have configured the systems so that all of the users did log in as root.
If you've ever installed systems (of any kind) for small businesses (~50 people), you'd know why this was such a temptation and often a functional necessity.
Many of them have no full-time technical staff. The typical scenerio is a "operations manager" who spends most of their time dealing with production issues; a "back office" person (who's usually the consumer of the system, often the head financial person); and then whoever ends up being the technial liason, which in my experience is whatever office flunky can get WebShots installed the best or who has the copier repair phone number.
It's sad, but I've done a ton of installs where basically everyone who uses the system is root/wheel/administrator and there are no permissions. If I'm lucky and can figure out there's no one to even reliably change tapes before the equipment is set up, I have it do alternate full backups on different physical disks; I figure it's better than a burned up tape.
It keeps you in business, but it kind of sucks, since it's apparent that nobody really gives a shit...
I've tried to replace most of my lights with CFs, and where the fixture has enough room, I've found the hidden benefit is dramatic upwatting of my lights while still using much less power than the properly sized incandescent. In a number of rooms I've been able to double or triple the lumens. This is helped by the monster 150-watt equivilents, although these need a pretty large fixture.
I also use 2-3 digital timers on lamps throughout the house, and these all get wattage-equivilent CF bulbs. The advantage here is that they run a lot cooler and use such insignificant power that you can set the timer to a wide range and not have to worry about turning the lights on or off.
You don't want filtered ISP service. It will eventually devolve into cable TV style service, where you get transparent proxied HTTP and Xbox/PS2 game nets and nothing else.
And, idiotically, the unfiltered service, which costs less to deliver, will end up costing much more, and the funds used to pay for the filtering costs, which will be high (equipment, people, updates, etc).
I have dozens of audio CD-Rs in my car, all from generic spindlepacks, burned on a mish-mash of writers at 4x that are still going strong in spite being frozen/thawed all winter long (MN winters, frequent temps below 20 F), baked in the sun in the summer (I have the cheapo ramp spot on the roof deck, avg daily in-car temp ~120F), jammed into and out of the visor CD holder, chucked in the floor, and all other kinds of manhandling.
I did have some Kodak CD-Rs in '98 that crapped out on me; the dye appeared to fade over time and ultimately they became unreadable. Dunno what the deal was.
I do notice that CD-Rs burned at 8x (on a 8x max burner) tend to skip more than CD-Rs burned at 4x on the same burner. Does the dye "burn" better at slower speeds?
Just like each copied CD is worth $100 in revenue to the record industry, each infected computer costs $1000 to fix (which, oddly, is more than it would cost to throw out the entire machine!).
Spam is predominantly a marketing method for fraudulent or otherwise illegal business enterprises. Without a source of business, the people performing the spamming will be forced to move on.
You *can* easily catch the people running the businesses behind the spam; they collect money, and the money trail is easily followable. Lean on these people, and you can probably get the spammers if someone decides to make spamming illegal as well.
The key point is to not try to attack spam; it's only a symptom. The real cause is fraudulent business entperprises, and I'm mystified why the FTC or the FBI doesn't make them a higher priority. Even the DMA should back this, since it would make them look more reputable without a direct attack on a business practice they'd *like* to use.
I don't think many ISPs have metered service from their upstreams. Our net connection at work is dual T1, and I've never been offered a metered circuit from our ISP or any other. Considering the next logical step in performance is fractional DS-3, I would have expected our ISP to offer us a "deal" based on metering of a higher bandwidth circuit. Metering is common on colo situations, but that has more to do with the pricing structure of the cage vs. dedicated facilities at the customer location.
But even if they were metered, the ISPs whose performance data I'm familiar with don't show measurable increases on their upstreams during virus/worm periods. So there isn't a direct cost to ISPs from these things other than customer support blips from the clueless.
You're right about liabilities, but anything other than a public statement about the filtering of customer connectivity would be a disaster and another potential liability as people who are *expecting* unfiltered connectivity. The only thing for an ISP to do would be to announce they *are* filtering to prevent/stop worms/virii, and that in and of itself would be a potential liability, which is why selling it as a seperate service with a seperate service agreement (with appropriate CYAs for liability) would make some sense.
Even if you were able to construct an argument as to why filtering would be beneficial to ISPs, you still run into the problem of the management headache and whack-a-mole that filtering presents.
Beyond that the biggest benefit of Firewire over USB is it's daisy chaining capability (peer-to-peer) capability. This really can't be exploited in small expansion cards.
The advantage to firewire over "nexgen" or whatever the new standard for PC cards is that you wouldn't need a seperate bus protocol and all the support for it.
Plus the cards would be usable outside of the slot by a simple adapter on an external firewire bus, enabling backwards compatibility with non-firewire PC card systems (pc card -> fw adapter -> fw bus pc card).
And it doesn't have to be firewire or just in an Apple context, either. It could be USB2 or anything else. But just ONE bus protocol, with perhaps many interconnects (A, B, compact, whatever).
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How do you expect people to get out of a slum if they can't get a job, because a phone costs too much; and nobody will hire them unless they are reachable by phone?
The problems of poverty go well beyond not having a POTS line for $20 per month. As we have seen, the cross-subsidization of telephone service for the past 75 years has not lowered poverty rates, and the lack of subsidies have not prevented the presumably inner-city poor I encounter from having cell phones, either.
As for farming; ariculture is an industry we all are customers of, so it's not like not subsidizing those costs will prevent you from paying for their lines anyhow.
In addition to subsidizing their farming activity directly (farm aid, various price supports and import penalties), electricity, and roadways, I'd like to avoid at least one direct farm subsidy involving telephone infrastructure. I'll even support electrical and roadway subsidies in rural areas, just not cheap POTS service.
I agree that these services need regulation, but not for the reasons you specify, but because they are natural monopolies that must not be allowed to flex their monopoly power. Regulation allows for their corporate business decisions to better reflect needs, and not just where the best buck is. Finding the best buck is OK in my book as well, but you aren't allowed to use a monopoly to do it.
Do you want guaranteed availability of telephone service at uniform and reasonable rates, even if you live on a farm or in a slum?
Actually no. Smart regulation reflects the varying costs of delivering a service to those getting it. Needing a lot of expensive infrastructure built to service a small number of people or very high fraud costs *should* increase purchase costs. Cross-subsidizing them to make a phone $25/month, everywhere, is idiotic. I'd have a T1 to my office (urban areas, lots of facilities), but its $500. Not because it costs $500 to deliver it, but because many of those costs help subsidize other more expensive POTS deliveries elsewhere.
The semi-scary VOIP thing is that instead of smartly regulating it like we should, we'll instead just slap the old regulations onto VOIP.
It would help if the authors had taken it themselves.
Now, if the book is about heavy drinking, I'd wager that most authors could do a masterful job of it...
...Are almost unwatchable/unreadable, since you cannot ever get the experience right. It's a psychological (and in some ways physical) experience, not some cheesy handheld-camera with a soft-focus effect with lightshow.
The best written examples of LSD are attempts at factual description by people who experienced them, and even they have difficulty describing the experience well. The best writing on it is actually nearly 40 years old -- "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience".
Been there, done that.
It used to be that the utilities were highly regulated entities that had their profit margins basically regulated by the states they were in. They had to provide a given amount of reliability, and rate increases (and occasionally refunds!) were carefully scrutinized as to where the money went. You couldn't raise rates without showing some meaningful improvement that resulted from it.
Then along came degregulation, where the power seller and the power generator became two different things (which makes even less sense than the deregulated-but-shared local phone loop). Utility companies wanted out of the power generation arena -- too expensive, too many regulations, it was better to be in the new "commodity" end of the business, arbitraging power. So they split themselves into trading companies and generation companies, taking all the cash into the trading companies, who were deregulated and could spend it freely.
And then 10 years later, Enron and the whole deregulated power "market" has collapsed, and we wonder why we're 15-20 years behind the curve on power grid and other key infrastructure elements. All the money got spent on speculating in the newly deregulated power markets, and its all gone.
Nobody really pays any less for electricity, I don't have a bunch of people knocking on my door offering me their window electricity or biodiesel electricity or their pig shit methane electricity for that matter.
I only have the sheepish looking local utility trying to explain to me how they're trying to fix the power infrastructure built in the 1970s with the cash made in the 1980s which was spent in the 1990s on the promise of getting rich in the new millenium. When in fact, they actually need me to pay the prices of the next millenium for the service delivered in the 1990s, and, oh, would I please only use as much power as I did in the 1970s?
Monopoly vendors aren't interested in providing a better value; only competition ensures that. Monopoly vendors are only interested in how to get (more) of your money. If there was another organization called the IARA that "represented" (as if the RIAA represents anything other than top execs at dominant labels, but I digress) the other half of the recording labels and artists, then you would see something like this.
As for right now, you don't, because there is no IARA and RIAA just looks for ways to make their profits an automatic deducation from Americans paychecks.
When did a better user experience get lost? Even BIOS used to get better over time (more flexible boot options, software jumper settings, etc).
Now it seems the "magic money" isn't in making it better, but in making it more crippled. Unfortunately I can think of a lot more things that should be done before that one.
Some minor corrections. The DMR-HS2 has for the most part been replaced by the DMR-E80 and the E-100/120. All have HDDs, the the much higher priced E100 series have firewire for camcorders. Panny always supported DVD-R and -RAM, but never the + format or the -RW format.
What I want/expect is DVD writing ability, but not just basic 1x real-time copy:
1) High-speed copies to removable media to HDD
2) Multi-program batch saving
3) Selectable downsampling to lower bitrates for maximum programs/disc (good for trips or where quality is less important).
4) DVD to HDD copying for region 0 and unencrypted discs (the panny's with HDDs will copy DVD-RAM to HDD, but not DVD-R). Yes, CSS and region locked discs should be copyable, but I'll give the MPAA a freebie here.
5) Basic editing for unwanted portion deletion. I collect music clips from TV shows, and I don't want or need the whole fsckin' Leno show for one 5 minute music spot. Commercial deletion would be nice, too.
And this of course is above and beyond the usual requirements of Tivo features, good UI, and "just plug it in" appliance-like setup.
Shills for Myth TV may claim all of this, but until someone releases a bootable Myth TV distribution that installs and configs in an hour or less, I'm too busy enjoying my Tivo and Panny to do Myth TV. My time is worth more than the money at this point.
Your roll-up wall-sized screen will be priced like drapery fabric at the local craft store.
It's not hard to spend thousands of dollars on drapes, if you want good (quality materials, non-white-trash styles) drapes. Add features like heat-reflecting fabric or motorization and it only goes up..
Or does that mean that if I want a big screen I have a choice of thousands of dollars for a good one, or $50 for a shit one?
Duvel and Stella Artois are both too mass-produced to make them interesting. Chimay almost is as well, but the fact that the brothers still brew it makes it worthwhile.
I prefer several of the saisons: Fantome Saison, Saison Dupont Vieille Provision, and Foret (an organic also brewed by Brasserie Dupont).
The more general farmhouse ale style (which the saisons are but a subset of) is actually still done by some of the breweries in northern France. I pick up random bottles of this here and there. I personally like the saisons better, but this are good as well.
Although lately I've been drinking more liquor for some reason. There's been a bankruptcy among All Saints, a major US importer of small-label beers, and the local supply has been kind of quirky; they've been stuffing some American beers in the Belgian/French section lately. Yuck.
It's all a question of lifestyle. Cars factor into it; live without a car, and you salvage anywhere from $200-400 a month even at the low end.
I know single men that get by on $500 month, but they live a lifestyle that few people would tolerate; buying 5 lbs hamburger at the wholesale club on sale and then eating hamburgers 2 of 3 nights for two weeks. Repeat cycle for pasta, etc.
Never buy anything but the dingiest used furniture. Buy your clothes at the used clothing store. Don't update your house (paint, modernize/fix bathroom or kitchen). Drive the junkiest car you can.
But they also largely live alone, no girlfriend or wife and they have few social activities. Add any of those in and you can't live like that.
The 2400 is a "real" RAID card (i960 CPU, RAM SIMM, full-length PCI form factor) and is transparently supported by the asr driver in FreeBSD, the same driver used with Adaptec SCSI RAID cards. In other words, it is a SCSI RAID card with an IDE controller instead of a SCSI controller on the back end of it.
The 1200 is nothing like it and is, like the Promise and many of the other cards, essentially a hardware/software RAID card that relies on the driver to do much of the heavy lifting associated with RAID1/0.
Save your pennies and buy a 3ware card.
I wonder how many people really rely on blacklists anymore. I've tried using them before only to find out that over half of my legitimate email was being filtered and a significant amount of spam was still getting through.
Rely is too strong a word. Even Osirusoft's RBL wasn't effective by itself, but we used it where I work (~500 people, marketing industry) and it was flagging 1/4-1/3 of our incoming (~5k messages per day) as SPAM with a scant dozen complaints from end-users and people who tried to mail us (bounces included a "WTF???" explanation URL).
I used to think that the complaints about RBLs were somewhat valid, but with nearly a year of Osirusoft under our belts I'm not so sure anymore.
I do agree that they're not wholly adequate, and that a Bayesian screening technique is much better; unfortunately it's not a technique easy to apply to a gateway MTA handling many users.
you start noticing that morons thinking Spamcop is blocking their mail is somewhat common.
But aren't those likely to be the same morons that think 2^10 people they've never heard of are sending them a "Wicked screensaver" and they just *have* to open it?
I'm sorry, but I have no faith that the average computer user can interpret even the most obvious mail reject notification. As an example, at least a couple of times per week the users I support will get a bounce message back from some Exchange system with a very obvious description of why it couldn't be delivered (User doesn't exist, Mailbox over storage limit, etc). These are almost always accompanied by a voicemail or email from them asking what's wrong with *our* mail system.
If they can't understand those messages, how are they to be expected to understand anything more esorteric? As for who's responsible for blocking the message, it's "our" doing, but we're not responsible for the content of the RBL.
For RBL rejects, I have a line that redirects them to a web page with a "small words, big pictures" description of why their mail was rejected and alternatate contact means for us to override the blockage for them. But we're also pretty clear that we're *not* responsible for their listing in a given RBL, either as a source of their membership or a way out.
If you want real fun, bring up your concerns about flouridation to somoene with a dental education. Good friends of ours are Orthodontists, and when I questioned flouridation to them I thought I was questioning the holocaust in a synagogue, such was their reaction.
Oddly, the anti-flouride people seem to show some good evidence for not flouridating, the anti-flouride stance of several European countries adds a lot of credibility. The idea that flouridation got started as a way to get rid of excess toxic waste even seems compelling.
But you won't have a reasoned discussion with a dentist about it.
Flouride is (if you believe the ADA) used as a preventative against dental carries, not as a purification element. Flouride, as you suggest, is actually a poison in and of itself.
Surprisingly, there a number of European countries that do not flouridate their water.
That aside, I have knew someone that lived on a farm with high levels of some diarhhea inducing organism in their well water. They were essentially immune to it, but they found they had to keep a few gallons of bottled water on hand for guests who always got sick.
I wish this were so funny. The last two VARs that a business I know of has gotten accounting systems from have configured the systems so that all of the users did log in as root.
If you've ever installed systems (of any kind) for small businesses (~50 people), you'd know why this was such a temptation and often a functional necessity.
Many of them have no full-time technical staff. The typical scenerio is a "operations manager" who spends most of their time dealing with production issues; a "back office" person (who's usually the consumer of the system, often the head financial person); and then whoever ends up being the technial liason, which in my experience is whatever office flunky can get WebShots installed the best or who has the copier repair phone number.
It's sad, but I've done a ton of installs where basically everyone who uses the system is root/wheel/administrator and there are no permissions. If I'm lucky and can figure out there's no one to even reliably change tapes before the equipment is set up, I have it do alternate full backups on different physical disks; I figure it's better than a burned up tape.
It keeps you in business, but it kind of sucks, since it's apparent that nobody really gives a shit...
I've tried to replace most of my lights with CFs, and where the fixture has enough room, I've found the hidden benefit is dramatic upwatting of my lights while still using much less power than the properly sized incandescent. In a number of rooms I've been able to double or triple the lumens. This is helped by the monster 150-watt equivilents, although these need a pretty large fixture.
I also use 2-3 digital timers on lamps throughout the house, and these all get wattage-equivilent CF bulbs. The advantage here is that they run a lot cooler and use such insignificant power that you can set the timer to a wide range and not have to worry about turning the lights on or off.
In high school I went to a SciFi convention and they served Blog in the Con Suite.
It was a mixture of vodka, grenadine, and some juices. It tasted pretty good, especially when I was 17.
You don't want filtered ISP service. It will eventually devolve into cable TV style service, where you get transparent proxied HTTP and Xbox/PS2 game nets and nothing else.
And, idiotically, the unfiltered service, which costs less to deliver, will end up costing much more, and the funds used to pay for the filtering costs, which will be high (equipment, people, updates, etc).
I have dozens of audio CD-Rs in my car, all from generic spindlepacks, burned on a mish-mash of writers at 4x that are still going strong in spite being frozen/thawed all winter long (MN winters, frequent temps below 20 F), baked in the sun in the summer (I have the cheapo ramp spot on the roof deck, avg daily in-car temp ~120F), jammed into and out of the visor CD holder, chucked in the floor, and all other kinds of manhandling.
I did have some Kodak CD-Rs in '98 that crapped out on me; the dye appeared to fade over time and ultimately they became unreadable. Dunno what the deal was.
I do notice that CD-Rs burned at 8x (on a 8x max burner) tend to skip more than CD-Rs burned at 4x on the same burner. Does the dye "burn" better at slower speeds?
Just like each copied CD is worth $100 in revenue to the record industry, each infected computer costs $1000 to fix (which, oddly, is more than it would cost to throw out the entire machine!).
And Linux is $700 a throw too.
Spam is predominantly a marketing method for fraudulent or otherwise illegal business enterprises. Without a source of business, the people performing the spamming will be forced to move on.
You *can* easily catch the people running the businesses behind the spam; they collect money, and the money trail is easily followable. Lean on these people, and you can probably get the spammers if someone decides to make spamming illegal as well.
The key point is to not try to attack spam; it's only a symptom. The real cause is fraudulent business entperprises, and I'm mystified why the FTC or the FBI doesn't make them a higher priority. Even the DMA should back this, since it would make them look more reputable without a direct attack on a business practice they'd *like* to use.
I don't think many ISPs have metered service from their upstreams. Our net connection at work is dual T1, and I've never been offered a metered circuit from our ISP or any other. Considering the next logical step in performance is fractional DS-3, I would have expected our ISP to offer us a "deal" based on metering of a higher bandwidth circuit. Metering is common on colo situations, but that has more to do with the pricing structure of the cage vs. dedicated facilities at the customer location.
But even if they were metered, the ISPs whose performance data I'm familiar with don't show measurable increases on their upstreams during virus/worm periods. So there isn't a direct cost to ISPs from these things other than customer support blips from the clueless.
You're right about liabilities, but anything other than a public statement about the filtering of customer connectivity would be a disaster and another potential liability as people who are *expecting* unfiltered connectivity. The only thing for an ISP to do would be to announce they *are* filtering to prevent/stop worms/virii, and that in and of itself would be a potential liability, which is why selling it as a seperate service with a seperate service agreement (with appropriate CYAs for liability) would make some sense.
Even if you were able to construct an argument as to why filtering would be beneficial to ISPs, you still run into the problem of the management headache and whack-a-mole that filtering presents.
Beyond that the biggest benefit of Firewire over USB is it's daisy chaining capability (peer-to-peer) capability. This really can't be exploited in small expansion cards.
The advantage to firewire over "nexgen" or whatever the new standard for PC cards is that you wouldn't need a seperate bus protocol and all the support for it.
Plus the cards would be usable outside of the slot by a simple adapter on an external firewire bus, enabling backwards compatibility with non-firewire PC card systems (pc card -> fw adapter -> fw bus pc card).
And it doesn't have to be firewire or just in an Apple context, either. It could be USB2 or anything else. But just ONE bus protocol, with perhaps many interconnects (A, B, compact, whatever).