Hey, if you're looking for ugly "little" facts that ruin the guy's theory, you could point that
"instructions for how to manufacture the information by combining the numbers that are stored in our boxes" = "shared-dictionary-encryption ciphertext"...So there's only the opposite of new here.
My initial reaction to this article is that it looks like propaganda. If you read each of the quotes from the scientist in it, you'll noticed that the qualifying adjectives around each of the stated facts in quotations minimize the importance of any observable facts that can't be denied, and the attributive verbs for the quotes are chosen to slant the reader's perception as well.
Climate change experts, like most scientists, tend to be pretty circumspect with their public statements and avoid hyperbole, so the quotes calling Gore "pathetic" and "an embarrassment" are a red flag as well.
Any "feature" article is going to have something of a slant--and there's nothing wrong with that--but the words in article seemed so consistently well-chosen that they seemed vetted by some PR flack versed in the art of using words to sell your opinions to stupid people.
While that's not enough, in itself, to make me disregard the article, it did make me want to see what I could find out about this "Tom Harris" guy who wrote it. Turns out this guy has made something of a cottage industry out of "debunking" global warming, and in at least one case has co-written an article with the Patterson he quotes in this article. He doesn't disclose this fact, although, in fairness, it was written for a "journal" that, amazingly for 2006, has no web presence.
Harris also wrote another article along the same lines as this one, entitled "The Gods Are Laughing", which you can find here:
This one starts out with a lead paragraph that points out that *real* scientists disagree with "liberal arts graduate" Gore about global warming. More red flags here, because people with a good case to make generally don't have to resort to challenging the scientific credentials of their opponents.
The fact that Gore has no PhD in climatology isn't really germane to the debate, although it seems to be a major focus of these pairs of articles. Although once certainly needs some advanced training to conduct climatology research, one would hope that you wouldn't need to go to school for eight years just to be able to read the conclusions section of a peer-reviewed paper. Else, what's the point of doing research, if your findings can only be conveyed to other scientist who are already working from 99.9% of the same knowledge base as you? And one certainly doesn't need a PhD to talk to climatologists and build a consensus view of their opinions.
The director of the atmosphere and energy bits of the Sierra Club of Canada wrote a missive below that explains in more detail a few of the shady rhetorical tricks Harris uses, and which I have alluded to above:
I think it was really nice of Intel to actually use AMD's pre-existing instruction set standard, making life easier for EVERYBODY, and bad form and a bad example to set to criticize them for it.
hey! i'm turned on by pantyhose, and a freak, not a pervert!
also, to the guy that praised apple's HID-centric design: their empahasis is more consumer design, sort of a modern-day frog design; in terms of sex appeal, sort of a next cube or sparcstation 1 type o' thing. beautiful, but not necessarily centered around good design of the interaction between the box and the user. in terms of the actual physical box, this isn't much of an issue, and the tilty display *is* a particularly good thing, from an HID point of view. aqua isn't the HID or ergonomic disaster that some people predicted it would be, but it does have its faults on an interactive level, and it seems to me that their emphasis is more on "beauty in the eye of the consumer" rather than "ease in the the hand of the consumer".
from a CHI professor's point of view, this is a bad thing; from the point of view of a company that needs to survive in today's marketplace, and do so by attracting a loyal band of customers who love its products as much for their beauty as their functionality (and i'm not implying that aqua isn't functional, just not theoretically optimally so), it's not necessarily a bad thing.
it's easy to say that battle.net *provides* access contro for wciii (and starcraft). however, its primary purpose is to allow SC players to play online.
therefore, if bnetd is a battle.net "clone", then its primary purpose is *also* to allow SC players to play online. this is a logical conclusion, but also one grounded in pragmatic observation: do you think people use bnetd *primarily* to facilitate piracy of a program you can pick up at electronics boutique for five bucks, or to play legal (and/or illegal) versions online?
blizzard even implies that there are legitimate reasons for using servers other than battle.net by saying that they hope to eliminate those reasons.
bnetd certainly isn't *marketed* as a piracy-enabling technology, and inasmuch as it has any commercial application, a significant portion of that application is certainly non-infringing (i.e., providing alternative places to play online).
so, it seems to me that bnetd fails all three tests, and is therefore not in violation. IMHO, IANAL, just my $2/100
ummmmm....no. if i have a warhead that will obliterate anything within, say, a 100-ft. radius, then all i have to do is get within 100 feet of my target. i don't believe most SAMs and AAMs are designed to hit their target: just get close enough, and blow up, which is a lot simpler.
the point is that you *can* decide to poison your body in america, as long as you decide to poison it with alcohol or tobacco, rather than any of an array of healthier (and lotz more fun:) substances which the government (thanks in no small part to the liquor industry) deems not acceptable for such use. -k. ^-^
umm, hey, i'm not Big Corp's bitch or anything, but stealing cable/satellite doesn't seem to me to be very valiant. slick, maybe, kewl, maybe, but hardly valiant.
personally, i think DirecTV showed a very hackish mentality by beating tha hackin' hordes at their own game. technical solutions to technical problems deserve some sort of respect, it seems to me.
ah, but will it ensure the future of e-books, or ebooks? (i'm sure a profoundly literate and anal-retentive person such as your anonocowardly, spell-flaming self will catch that reference)
Well lets see, the person buying the car is more then likely buying it because they can't afford the new one. However parts and stuff still puts money in the companies pocket.
actually, a lot of people who buy used cars get the their parts from wrecking yards, where they are indexed and made available for instant purchase (call up any junkyard and ask them if they have an alternator for an '87 accord; you'll get an immediate answer)
Now we go to an online bookstore, instead of buying a new book and giving my money to the author I am in fact giving it to Amazon.com
no, you are in fact giving it mostly to the bookseller who's selling the book, who has in turn spent money to acquire it from someone who bought it new from another bookseller, who bought it from a distributor, who bought it from the publisher, who gave the author a cut.
authors make money on that first transaction, even if it's from amazon.com; what's at issue here is whether or not they make money off the transactions that follow. they never have before, and I don't think the fact that those transactions have become easier for the consumer is reason enough for them to start doing so.
Now I know for a fact a few bookstores sell second hand books but they don't offer the instant indexing and offering of 2nd hand books.
before you had to call around to each individual store to ask if they had it, but each store tracks inventory and generally knows what they have. and there are a *lot* of used book stores out there, each selling a lot of the same bestsellers that the publishing companies (and authors) are worried about
yeah, but you *know* more
on
CS vs CIS
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a lot of IS/MIS-type jobs are open to both majors, and probably relatively few engineering type jobs are open only to CS people, but if you study computer science, you'll probably actually learn to program, and learn how to Do Things Right, because you'll understand how things work, and the rest of us would really appreciate that.
> Umm, any notion of "property" exists because it's been defined legally as such.
Fair enough--notions of property certainly do vary widely from culture to culture and from one economic ideology to the next, but to clarify what I *meant* to say: having defined one sort of physical object as property, it is easy to see how another physical object might by simple analogy be considered property. If you have something physical, and I take it from you, then you don't have it any more.
Most notions of personal property revolve around the simple fact that if one person is considered to possess said property, then that property cannot at the same time be possessed by another.
The problem with "Intellectual Property" is that this is not true; if I steal the words from the book you wrote, then you still possess those words. There is no barrier to multiple possession, except for artificial ones created by law and cultural regard.
I think you'll find that notions of physical theft don't vary widely from country to country: even in the old USSR, you can steal bread from me while I'm carrying it back from the commissary, and you're still a thief, even in the most Marxist of minds.
If, on the other hand, you copied a script that I was carrying back from the ministry of information, then I think you'd find that whether or not you had done something wrong (and to what extent, and whether or not I should be flattered, regardless) varies widely from country to country. Not to make any generalizations about places I've never been, but from what I've read, it seems to me that attitudes toward the right to copy have historically varied *widely* from place to place; witness china and at least a couple of southeast asian countries vs., say, europe.
i don't think the SPA and RIAA would have to spend so as much money as they do on anti-piracy efforts in asia if they were merely trying to inform people of a semi-universal value; instead, what they're doing is trying to change one arbitrary set of norms with respect to the right to copy for another. and that's harder.
> If Intellectual Property wasn't property, then there'd be no need for the GPL...
umm, it's property because and only because it's been defined that way, legally speaking. also, "intellectual property" is a term that's become popular with the holders of such because it implies parity with "real" property, which, legally speaking, it doesn't have (otherwise, your estate would revert to the public domain twenty, no, fifty, no, seventy years after you die.
i'm not saying that people who copy copyrighted works aren't doing bad things that hurt the creators of said works, but your argument is silly and spurious.
(i do believe that "IP" protection has been extended to wholly stupid lengths, largely in the name of protecting one damned mouse, but that's another story...)
also the RIAA is guilty of a litany of sins that don't even relate to copyright; they're evil regardless of what you think about "intellectual property". (IMNSHO)
yeah, i'm sure rob & co. sit around all the time saying to themselves, "ya know, this a pretty damned interesting story, but i'm just gonna hafta leave it out so's we can put in another cuecat story!"
DISCLAIMER: I work for a data competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC)/DSL provider, who shall go unnamed because i want to make it clear that this is my personal opinion and not related in any way to any position taken at any time since the beginning thereof by my employer. these are *my* opinions, and my employer can't have them.
If you want to know where a lot of ridiculously long lead times come from with DSL service, I'd say that you OFTEN need to look at your local phone company (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, ILEC).
The situation you have when buying DSL from anyone but your phone company is that the company you're contracting with (Rythms, Northpoint, Covad, etc.) has to set up your DSL line in conjunction with your local phone company. The problem is that your local phone company would prolly like to sell you DSL, either now or when they can, and they don't feel any particular need to cooperate with the CLEC. Sure, the CLEC can go to court and sue the ILEC for X million dollars for non-cooperation, but the CLEC is likely to just take the hit and file it under costs for maintaining their market share (and these awards are generally not large enough to make an ILEC blink an eye).
Add that to the general phone company principle that it's a bad idea to ever cooperate with anybody, and you get things like trouble tickets that mysteriously get closed with no action being taken, orders that get dropped, never acted upon, or acted upon weeks after they're placed, transmission techs who have trouble getting access to ILEC central offices in order to fix or install equipment, etc., etc.
If, on the other hand, you ordered DSL from your local phone company, you probably have a nicer experience, one tempered only by the incompetence of your ILEC (these are the same people who made ISDN such a smashing success, and who insisted for years that connecting third-party equipment to your wall jack would single-handedly bring down phone service in entire neighborhoods).
Now, you might think that since ILECS were supposed to implement line sharing in all their central offices by 6/6/2000, that some of these problems are going to go away in the near future.
Essentially, this means that you can put DSL on the same voice line that you already have. So, it's a lot less work for the ILECs. My personal prediction, though, is that they'll just find ways to screw the CLECs. I mean, they still have to run the wire pair through a splitter and from there punch it down to a bundle that goes to the CLEC equipment, and I bet they find plenty of excuses to delay even that tiny bit of labor.
i tell you how i've saved myself a lot of pain and time this election season: i haven't paid any attention at all to the presidential campaigns.
it's not that i'm not going to vote; i am. it's just that the republicans chose bush over mccain, and thereby deprived me of any significant choice to make.
it's not even that i like gore. i abhor his stance on privacy issues and freedom of speech. but bush is, for me, simply unacceptable.
is this wrong of me? i feel like i'm cheating or something, but it makes my life so much easier...
...must have something like jumpstart or kickstart, only better.
I've been doing *a* *lot* of work with kickstart lately, and it's not very robust. it is, however, pretty flexible. If you've got an array of 40 or 80 or 200 machines backending your ISP services, then you need an absolutely painless way to install.
...the same one you use as a workstation, if you don't think it will hurt performance too much. you can allow unlimited traffice to/from the local net and host, and reject stuff from all the script kiddies on RR.
i once did a project in high school where i wrote (in turbo pascal 6 + BGI) a graphical, event-driven object-oriented calculator. in retrospect, it looks pretty trivial (i think it was 700 or so lines of code), but i prolly learned more from writing it than i had from anything i had done prior; I built my own event-handling and mouse-handling system, wrote a sort of OO GUI toolkit, and learned a lot about object-oriented programming.
of course, in today's environment, parts of that fail to work (why do high school programmers need to know how to create event-driven environments when chances are they already program in/for one? who cares about how to make a mouse work? it's done for you! these are interesting subjects to me, but they're systems, as opposed to applications, programming topics). however, it seems to me that something that laid a bit more emphasis on the the application (maybe an RPN or programmable calculator?) or GUI design could still work in today's environment.
I think the most important things any high school project should concentrate on, at an advanced level, are:
GUI design -- It's obvious from using a lot of proggies today that some people aren't putting a lot of thought into the design of their UI, which is often one of, if not the, most important aspects of modern applications programs. It's also terribly underaddressed, not only in high school but in college. CHI was a senior-level elective so small it was cross-listed as a grad course when i went to school (and this was at TAMU, a 43,000+ student institution with a fairly large CS department, so no excuse there). That's not good.
Reusable code -- world needs more of this, too.
Working in groups -- programmers tend to be a solitary sort, but it's important that they learn to work in groups. That's addressed in college, to some extent, but advanced high school students could almost certainly benefit from working in an environment of two or three coders inna group.
...our guys, the DeCSS guys, the 2600 guys, have been a bunch of layabouts until it came to their attention that they might actually have to do something for the trial, then they try to get the judge recused because
a) he *might* have thought that garbus did something wrong 20 years ago, and
b) his *firm* once represented time-warner with regard to something vaguely related to DVDs (actually, WRT antitrust WRT DVDs)?
And this, considering that Garbus' law firm is *currently* representing Time-Warner in a seperate case?
It just goes to prove that all lawyers are slimy fucks who should be shot in the head.
umm, well, yeah, okay, i can accept that, that in 20 years, there won't be any such thing as a "computer geek" (although i might point out, in reference to your analogy, today's world still has "auto mechanics", "auto racers", and your rather more mundane "auto driver").
however, i really don't see how that changes the fact that "computer geeks" and "normal people" today represent two distinct market segments. they do. today, we have "computer geeks", which represent a small but wealthy-ish demographic, and "normal people", who, for the purposes of the computer-hardware market, a merely what you might call a "superdemographic" made up of several different market groups.
listen, you silly fuck. nobody gives a shit about their intellectual property. the issue here is that they acted all open and shit to get people to support USB (which they did), *then* they yanked the fucking docs, after everybody's made a big-ass commitment and basically we're fucking stick with it. (Playstation 2 and the Dreamcast include USB ports, as well as practically every PC manufactured today). That is just fucking wrong. wrong wrong wrong. So, basically, fuck'em. screw'em. i 100% seriously hope all these people get lung cancer and their families have to watch them die painful fucking deaths.
... For one thing, they're way too interconnected to apply a nasty old geographical term like continents to them. They're more like parts of Houston: there's no zoning, so you get large commercial districts (yahoo.com) that are next to (link to) little residential areas. Sure, you've got your super kickass, not-overly-commericial clubs (www.fray.org), and online, geeks even get to have they're own super kickass clubs (slashdot.org).
You've got your online IKEAs (my.mp3.com, www.real.com, www.ikea-usa.com), where you can get inexpensive, cool, functional, personality-free home (computer) furniture for the lifestyle you'd like to become accustomed to. Right next to them, you've got your Starbucks (www.salon.com).
Really, in terms of link-lengths, you don't even have adult bookstores and strip clubs sitting next to churches, although both establishments are a lot easier to find than they are in the real world, and the homeboy shoppin' network's got their own storefront now, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because as a wireless ISP you can totally require your clients to support IPv6. Wait, no, that's not right.
Hey, if you're looking for ugly "little" facts that ruin the guy's theory, you could point that
...So there's only the opposite of new here.
"instructions for how to manufacture the information by combining the numbers that are stored in our boxes" = "shared-dictionary-encryption ciphertext"
My initial reaction to this article is that it looks like propaganda. If you read each of the quotes from the scientist in it, you'll noticed that the qualifying adjectives around each of the stated facts in quotations minimize the importance of any observable facts that can't be denied, and the attributive verbs for the quotes are chosen to slant the reader's perception as well.
s tory.html?id=d0235a70-33f1-45b3-803b-829b1b3542ef
e -skeptic-response.html
Climate change experts, like most scientists, tend to be pretty circumspect with their public statements and avoid hyperbole, so the quotes calling Gore "pathetic" and "an embarrassment" are a red flag as well.
Any "feature" article is going to have something of a slant--and there's nothing wrong with that--but the words in article seemed so consistently well-chosen that they seemed vetted by some PR flack versed in the art of using words to sell your opinions to stupid people.
While that's not enough, in itself, to make me disregard the article, it did make me want to see what I could find out about this "Tom Harris" guy who wrote it. Turns out this guy has made something of a cottage industry out of "debunking" global warming, and in at least one case has co-written an article with the Patterson he quotes in this article. He doesn't disclose this fact, although, in fairness, it was written for a "journal" that, amazingly for 2006, has no web presence.
Harris also wrote another article along the same lines as this one, entitled "The Gods Are Laughing", which you can find here:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/
This one starts out with a lead paragraph that points out that *real* scientists disagree with "liberal arts graduate" Gore about global warming. More red flags here, because people with a good case to make generally don't have to resort to challenging the scientific credentials of their opponents.
The fact that Gore has no PhD in climatology isn't really germane to the debate, although it seems to be a major focus of these pairs of articles. Although once certainly needs some advanced training to conduct climatology research, one would hope that you wouldn't need to go to school for eight years just to be able to read the conclusions section of a peer-reviewed paper. Else, what's the point of doing research, if your findings can only be conveyed to other scientist who are already working from 99.9% of the same knowledge base as you? And one certainly doesn't need a PhD to talk to climatologists and build a consensus view of their opinions.
The director of the atmosphere and energy bits of the Sierra Club of Canada wrote a missive below that explains in more detail a few of the shady rhetorical tricks Harris uses, and which I have alluded to above:
http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/postings/climat
Personally, I'm starting to lean toward the this-guy-is-a-shill theory, myself.
I think it was really nice of Intel to actually use AMD's pre-existing instruction set standard, making life easier for EVERYBODY, and bad form and a bad example to set to criticize them for it.
hey! i'm turned on by pantyhose, and a freak, not a pervert!
also, to the guy that praised apple's HID-centric design: their empahasis is more consumer design, sort of a modern-day frog design; in terms of sex appeal, sort of a next cube or sparcstation 1 type o' thing. beautiful, but not necessarily centered around good design of the interaction between the box and the user. in terms of the actual physical box, this isn't much of an issue, and the tilty display *is* a particularly good thing, from an HID point of view. aqua isn't the HID or ergonomic disaster that some people predicted it would be, but it does have its faults on an interactive level, and it seems to me that their emphasis is more on "beauty in the eye of the consumer" rather than "ease in the the hand of the consumer".
from a CHI professor's point of view, this is a bad thing; from the point of view of a company that needs to survive in today's marketplace, and do so by attracting a loyal band of customers who love its products as much for their beauty as their functionality (and i'm not implying that aqua isn't functional, just not theoretically optimally so), it's not necessarily a bad thing.
it's easy to say that battle.net *provides* access contro for wciii (and starcraft). however, its primary purpose is to allow SC players to play online.
therefore, if bnetd is a battle.net "clone", then its primary purpose is *also* to allow SC players to play online. this is a logical conclusion, but also one grounded in pragmatic observation: do you think people use bnetd *primarily* to facilitate piracy of a program you can pick up at electronics boutique for five bucks, or to play legal (and/or illegal) versions online?
blizzard even implies that there are legitimate reasons for using servers other than battle.net by saying that they hope to eliminate those reasons.
bnetd certainly isn't *marketed* as a piracy-enabling technology, and inasmuch as it has any commercial application, a significant portion of that application is certainly non-infringing (i.e., providing alternative places to play online).
so, it seems to me that bnetd fails all three tests, and is therefore not in violation. IMHO, IANAL, just my $2/100
ummmmm....no. if i have a warhead that will obliterate anything within, say, a 100-ft. radius, then all i have to do is get within 100 feet of my target. i don't believe most SAMs and AAMs are designed to hit their target: just get close enough, and blow up, which is a lot simpler.
the point is that you *can* decide to poison your body in america, as long as you decide to poison it with alcohol or tobacco, rather than any of an array of healthier (and lotz more fun :) substances which the government (thanks in no small part to the liquor industry) deems not acceptable for such use. -k. ^-^
umm, hey, i'm not Big Corp's bitch or anything, but stealing cable/satellite doesn't seem to me to be very valiant. slick, maybe, kewl, maybe, but hardly valiant.
personally, i think DirecTV showed a very hackish mentality by beating tha hackin' hordes at their own game. technical solutions to technical problems deserve some sort of respect, it seems to me.
ah, but will it ensure the future of e-books, or ebooks? (i'm sure a profoundly literate and anal-retentive person such as your anonocowardly, spell-flaming self will catch that reference)
Well lets see, the person buying the car is more then likely buying it because they can't afford the new one. However parts and stuff still puts money in the companies pocket.
actually, a lot of people who buy used cars get the their parts from wrecking yards, where they are indexed and made available for instant purchase (call up any junkyard and ask them if they have an alternator for an '87 accord; you'll get an immediate answer)
Now we go to an online bookstore, instead of buying a new book and giving my money to the author I am in fact giving it to Amazon.com
no, you are in fact giving it mostly to the bookseller who's selling the book, who has in turn spent money to acquire it from someone who bought it new from another bookseller, who bought it from a distributor, who bought it from the publisher, who gave the author a cut.
authors make money on that first transaction, even if it's from amazon.com; what's at issue here is whether or not they make money off the transactions that follow. they never have before, and I don't think the fact that those transactions have become easier for the consumer is reason enough for them to start doing so.
Now I know for a fact a few bookstores sell second hand books but they don't offer the instant indexing and offering of 2nd hand books.
before you had to call around to each individual store to ask if they had it, but each store tracks inventory and generally knows what they have. and there are a *lot* of used book stores out there, each selling a lot of the same bestsellers that the publishing companies (and authors) are worried about
a lot of IS/MIS-type jobs are open to both majors, and probably relatively few engineering type jobs are open only to CS people, but if you study computer science, you'll probably actually learn to program, and learn how to Do Things Right, because you'll understand how things work, and the rest of us would really appreciate that.
> Umm, any notion of "property" exists because it's been defined legally as such.
Fair enough--notions of property certainly do vary widely from culture to culture and from one economic ideology to the next, but to clarify what I *meant* to say: having defined one sort of physical object as property, it is easy to see how another physical object might by simple analogy be considered property. If you have something physical, and I take it from you, then you don't have it any more.
Most notions of personal property revolve around the simple fact that if one person is considered to possess said property, then that property cannot at the same time be possessed by another.
The problem with "Intellectual Property" is that this is not true; if I steal the words from the book you wrote, then you still possess those words. There is no barrier to multiple possession, except for artificial ones created by law and cultural regard.
I think you'll find that notions of physical theft don't vary widely from country to country: even in the old USSR, you can steal bread from me while I'm carrying it back from the commissary, and you're still a thief, even in the most Marxist of minds.
If, on the other hand, you copied a script that I was carrying back from the ministry of information, then I think you'd find that whether or not you had done something wrong (and to what extent, and whether or not I should be flattered, regardless) varies widely from country to country. Not to make any generalizations about places I've never been, but from what I've read, it seems to me that attitudes toward the right to copy have historically varied *widely* from place to place; witness china and at least a couple of southeast asian countries vs., say, europe.
i don't think the SPA and RIAA would have to spend so as much money as they do on anti-piracy efforts in asia if they were merely trying to inform people of a semi-universal value; instead, what they're doing is trying to change one arbitrary set of norms with respect to the right to copy for another. and that's harder.
newayz....
> If Intellectual Property wasn't property, then there'd be no need for the GPL...
umm, it's property because and only because it's been defined that way, legally speaking. also, "intellectual property" is a term that's become popular with the holders of such because it implies parity with "real" property, which, legally speaking, it doesn't have (otherwise, your estate would revert to the public domain twenty, no, fifty, no, seventy years after you die.
i'm not saying that people who copy copyrighted works aren't doing bad things that hurt the creators of said works, but your argument is silly and spurious.
(i do believe that "IP" protection has been extended to wholly stupid lengths, largely in the name of protecting one damned mouse, but that's another story...)
also the RIAA is guilty of a litany of sins that don't even relate to copyright; they're evil regardless of what you think about "intellectual property". (IMNSHO)
yeah, i'm sure rob & co. sit around all the time saying to themselves, "ya know, this a pretty damned interesting story, but i'm just gonna hafta leave it out so's we can put in another cuecat story!"
DISCLAIMER: I work for a data competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC)/DSL provider, who shall go unnamed because i want to make it clear that this is my personal opinion and not related in any way to any position taken at any time since the beginning thereof by my employer. these are *my* opinions, and my employer can't have them.
L LLLTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you want to know where a lot of ridiculously long lead times come from with DSL service, I'd say that you OFTEN need to look at your local phone company (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, ILEC).
The situation you have when buying DSL from anyone but your phone company is that the company you're contracting with (Rythms, Northpoint, Covad, etc.) has to set up your DSL line in conjunction with your local phone company. The problem is that your local phone company would prolly like to sell you DSL, either now or when they can, and they don't feel any particular need to cooperate with the CLEC. Sure, the CLEC can go to court and sue the ILEC for X million dollars for non-cooperation, but the CLEC is likely to just take the hit and file it under costs for maintaining their market share (and these awards are generally not large enough to make an ILEC blink an eye).
Add that to the general phone company principle that it's a bad idea to ever cooperate with anybody, and you get things like trouble tickets that mysteriously get closed with no action being taken, orders that get dropped, never acted upon, or acted upon weeks after they're placed, transmission techs who have trouble getting access to ILEC central offices in order to fix or install equipment, etc., etc.
If, on the other hand, you ordered DSL from your local phone company, you probably have a nicer experience, one tempered only by the incompetence of your ILEC (these are the same people who made ISDN such a smashing success, and who insisted for years that connecting third-party equipment to your wall jack would single-handedly bring down phone service in entire neighborhoods).
Now, you might think that since ILECS were supposed to implement line sharing in all their central offices by 6/6/2000, that some of these problems are going to go away in the near future.
Essentially, this means that you can put DSL on the same voice line that you already have. So, it's a lot less work for the ILECs. My personal prediction, though, is that they'll just find ways to screw the CLECs. I mean, they still have to run the wire pair through a splitter and from there punch it down to a bundle that goes to the CLEC equipment, and I bet they find plenty of excuses to delay even that tiny bit of labor.
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i tell you how i've saved myself a lot of pain and time this election season: i haven't paid any attention at all to the presidential campaigns.
it's not that i'm not going to vote; i am. it's just that the republicans chose bush over mccain, and thereby deprived me of any significant choice to make.
it's not even that i like gore. i abhor his stance on privacy issues and freedom of speech. but bush is, for me, simply unacceptable.
is this wrong of me? i feel like i'm cheating or something, but it makes my life so much easier...
...must have something like jumpstart or kickstart, only better.
I've been doing *a* *lot* of work with kickstart lately, and it's not very robust. it is, however, pretty flexible. If you've got an array of 40 or 80 or 200 machines backending your ISP services, then you need an absolutely painless way to install.
yeah. or something.
...the same one you use as a workstation, if you don't think it will hurt performance too much. you can allow unlimited traffice to/from the local net and host, and reject stuff from all the script kiddies on RR.
i once did a project in high school where i wrote (in turbo pascal 6 + BGI) a graphical, event-driven object-oriented calculator. in retrospect, it looks pretty trivial (i think it was 700 or so lines of code), but i prolly learned more from writing it than i had from anything i had done prior; I built my own event-handling and mouse-handling system, wrote a sort of OO GUI toolkit, and learned a lot about object-oriented programming.
of course, in today's environment, parts of that fail to work (why do high school programmers need to know how to create event-driven environments when chances are they already program in/for one? who cares about how to make a mouse work? it's done for you! these are interesting subjects to me, but they're systems, as opposed to applications, programming topics). however, it seems to me that something that laid a bit more emphasis on the the application (maybe an RPN or programmable calculator?) or GUI design could still work in today's environment.
I think the most important things any high school project should concentrate on, at an advanced level, are:
GUI design -- It's obvious from using a lot of proggies today that some people aren't putting a lot of thought into the design of their UI, which is often one of, if not the, most important aspects of modern applications programs. It's also terribly underaddressed, not only in high school but in college. CHI was a senior-level elective so small it was cross-listed as a grad course when i went to school (and this was at TAMU, a 43,000+ student institution with a fairly large CS department, so no excuse there). That's not good.
Reusable code -- world needs more of this, too.
Working in groups -- programmers tend to be a solitary sort, but it's important that they learn to work in groups. That's addressed in college, to some extent, but advanced high school students could almost certainly benefit from working in an environment of two or three coders inna group.
newayz...
...our guys, the DeCSS guys, the 2600 guys, have been a bunch of layabouts until it came to their attention that they might actually have to do something for the trial, then they try to get the judge recused because
a) he *might* have thought that garbus did something wrong 20 years ago, and
b) his *firm* once represented time-warner with regard to something vaguely related to DVDs (actually, WRT antitrust WRT DVDs)?
And this, considering that Garbus' law firm is *currently* representing Time-Warner in a seperate case?
It just goes to prove that all lawyers are slimy fucks who should be shot in the head.
umm, well, yeah, okay, i can accept that, that in 20 years, there won't be any such thing as a "computer geek" (although i might point out, in reference to your analogy, today's world still has "auto mechanics", "auto racers", and your rather more mundane "auto driver").
however, i really don't see how that changes the fact that "computer geeks" and "normal people" today represent two distinct market segments. they do. today, we have "computer geeks", which represent a small but wealthy-ish demographic, and "normal people", who, for the purposes of the computer-hardware market, a merely what you might call a "superdemographic" made up of several different market groups.
oh, you bagged more than your fair share with this one....
listen, you silly fuck. nobody gives a shit about their intellectual property. the issue here is that they acted all open and shit to get people to support USB (which they did), *then* they yanked the fucking docs, after everybody's made a big-ass commitment and basically we're fucking stick with it. (Playstation 2 and the Dreamcast include USB ports, as well as practically every PC manufactured today). That is just fucking wrong. wrong wrong wrong. So, basically, fuck'em. screw'em. i 100% seriously hope all these people get lung cancer and their families have to watch them die painful fucking deaths.
this is a betrayal.
... For one thing, they're way too interconnected to apply a nasty old geographical term like continents to them. They're more like parts of Houston: there's no zoning, so you get large commercial districts (yahoo.com) that are next to (link to) little residential areas. Sure, you've got your super kickass, not-overly-commericial clubs (www.fray.org), and online, geeks even get to have they're own super kickass clubs (slashdot.org).
You've got your online IKEAs (my.mp3.com, www.real.com, www.ikea-usa.com), where you can get inexpensive, cool, functional, personality-free home (computer) furniture for the lifestyle you'd like to become accustomed to. Right next to them, you've got your Starbucks (www.salon.com).
Really, in terms of link-lengths, you don't even have adult bookstores and strip clubs sitting next to churches, although both establishments are a lot easier to find than they are in the real world, and the homeboy shoppin' network's got their own storefront now, too.
That's how I look at it, anyway.