This thread has lots of good suggestions for storage. I have a distant business relationship with Drobo, and think they're an interesting choice. I have a Windows Home Server as well, and find it to be a step-up from my previous Buffalo Terastation NAS box from a reliability and performance standpoint. I happen to also have a full-size tower and appreciate the simplicity of throwing lots of hard drives at the problem.
However, as formats switched from DVD to Blu-Ray and equivalent HD content, the economics shifted IMO as well. Given the both my Sony TV's, as well as both Tivo's can stream on-demand HD directly (Sony does it without annoying buffering by the way), and considering that I only rarely watch a movie more than once or twice, it's actually become more economically feasible to simply rent HD on demand for $4.99 a shot. There are still going to be a few Blu-Ray discs worth buying to own the content, and more than half of those seem to ship with a free digital copy for import into Window Media Player or iTunes. Even if you own all your HD content on disc now, it's probably worth your while to look into a hybrid model where you rent what you have a passing interest in, and buy/store those few things that either aren't available on demand, or that you have a more long-term interest in retaining.
Oh, and for the porn, a 2TB drive in a large tower should be more than sufficient. Windows 7 and Bit-locker full drive encryption doesn't impede HD playback on a reasonably speedy system. Although it is debatable whether or not 1080p is actually a good thing in some cases. Anyone want to go into business with me creating a unique line of porn-star body make-up to deal with pimples, waxing irritation, and razor-burn?
Of all the things in the world to worry about, a fingerprint reading timeclock is very close to the bottom of the list. Your fingerprints are not stored, nor are they uploaded to some evil master government database. You fingerprints are not DNA. They can't be used to predict if you'll get colon cancer by age 50. Quite frankly, they're not even private. You leave them all over the place every single day. I don't think this rises to the level of concern of someone taking a picture of you and putting it on an ID card. And we all know about how much evil has been done with misappropriated badge ID photos.
First off, I don't have any skin in the game and don't care which OS you select. There are a number of fine choices. Of course, the topic itself invites a lot of trash-talk, but I would say most of it without proper context. I'm not hearing a whole lot about why one solution is better given that it will be run by non-technical people, and yet supported by you.
In an effort to be constructive, here's what I suggest. Assuming you run Windows now, if you don't already have a copy, download (for trial at least - but I think a purchase would be money well spent) a copy of VMware Workstation. Then you can install and compare a number of different Linux distros from the comfort of your own PC. I will also be good to have a reference version of the OS you choose installed and available to you if you'll be supporting folks who run it. I'd stick with mainstream distros purely from a pragmatic standpoint and a belief that popular distros like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE will continue to get a lot of care and attention. The top 3 or 4 distros are usually on most vendors hardware or software compatibility lists.
If it's not about cost, then Windows 7 is still an option you should keep on the table. Look and feel only speak to 'where is the calculator icon' type of questions. Where I find most non-technical people struggling is lacking in concepts and therefore lacking in context. The basic ideas behind Windows remain unchanged.
Anecdotally, in the distant past I helped migrate a small office of about a hundred folks from Mac OS 6.x to Windows as part of a larger corporate initiative. The Monday morning following the migration, one of the users had created a folder called "System" at the root of C:\, and dragged as much of the Windows folder as possible over to the new System folder. Thankfully, those were the days when you could still boot to DOS and clean up fairly simply. Still, we had never anticipated someone doing that, because we were focused on simply teaching them how to use the new systems. And yes, it was evil to migrate 100 Mac users to Windows, but that is beside the point.
Just curious.... Is the company name changing or is this just branding of services? Will their various sports networks change as well? At least initially the commercials aren't saying "Comcast is now Xfinity". They're saying "Xfinity by Comcast". It mat be splitting hairs, but i think it worth understanding. Will subscribers with @comcast.net addresses get new @xfinity addresses? So far there hasn't been much to this discussion beyond the expected bashing Comcast takes upon mention @/.
It's incomprehensible that the question is even contemplated 'does it exist?' - Of course it does. However, the 'where' is the easiest part of the equation. The more important questions of 'when to start looking for it' and 'what to do when you locate it' are never even mentioned in passing.
But would you agree that it's just not feasible with current technology to replace the textbook? I mean e-ink displays with color can't be that far off.
Yes and no. I think you make a valid point, and yet the hybrid technology proposed in the article is an important step in the right direction. What I'm resistant to is the argument against moving in the direction of digital textbooks altogether in the absence of a perfect product. Color e-ink certainly sounds like a nice future, but in the meantime I think we need to get products in people's hands that start to turn the battleship. There will be a lot of infrastructure and process required to convert the textbook market into a viable digital system. What are we waiting for?
I think we're losing sight of the bigger picture here. What we're talking about is the possibility to make a significant change in the delivery of classroom text, and unbelievably the arguments against the *potential* for doing so are sounding much like the argument in favor of postal mail versus email. What about the tons of paper saved every year? The reduced barrier to publishing material? The ability to update inaccurate information mid-semester? I'm just a little speechless that people are readily naysayers about the matter, and/or are having a technology discussion instead of a discussion of the use case.
How exactly does the cost evaporate when you factor in the cost of an e-reader? Doesn't it seem that should this idea come to fruition that market forces will make this a no-brainer? It seems to me that the cost of an e-reader is on par with about a single semester's worth of textbooks. Subtract the cost of printing and distribution from the price of each e-book and you'll have no problem finding a way to make more money for the publisher and yet cost less money overall for the student assuming an e-reader can survive an average of four semesters or so.
I think the main theme is that laptops, netbooks, or tablets alone aren't perfectly suited for e-books and the needs of the student. Ideally, we'll have a solution someday that combines everything the student needs into one device. This article shows signs that the industry is finally acknowledging the need for a specialty product.
Why even get that when I can take a book out of the library for a lot less?
Because students tend to not check textbooks out of libraries. They buy them for the semester at considerable expense, and then have to lug them around all day. Or did you miss the use-case that this article is about?
Einstein's theory led to the atomic bomb. The most tangible output from any subsequent theory is "Stargate:Atlantis" at best. I doubt we'll have a satisfactory understanding of space, time, or gravity in my lifetime, and I'm not closing in on social security anytime soon.
...are the notorious 'employee discount codes' that vendors such as Dell and other have employed. A few years back I was looking to buy a new LCD and had a Dell in mind when I remembered my company had a discount code. So I dug it up, and used the instructions provided to logon to the 'discount' site (the mechanics of doing so may be different today.) To my surprise, I found that the 'discounted' price of the monitor was several hundred dollars more than just the plain ol' Dell site. WTF? How do you advertise a code and process as a discount, and then the merchandise therein is actually priced higher than your regular price from your main site? I'm glad I double checked before hitting the purchase button.
Currently, the entirety of the American people are helping to prop up this '8th largest economy'.
How exactly is that? The federal government wouldn't even extend a $7B loan to California recently, while Californian federal income taxes spent propping up AIG alone have far exceeded that sum. Cite one extra penny that's been diverted to California if you can.
Here's an honest question, why is a laser better than a high caliber bullet?
Speed of light. No need to lead the target. You can use a low powered aiming laser to paint the target. Whenever you shoot something painted, you hit it. 186K Mps > 1K Mph
By the way, we could make a boatload of money selling these things in Afghanistan. Economy problems solved.
I know that a few years back at my previous employer the only reason I was able to get HP blades into the DC was due to the inclusion of Cisco switches in the blade enclosures. I wonder if HP will continue offering Cisco switches, and if not how badly will it hurt their sales? I think it's a lot easier for a networking guy to bring in a foreign x86 server than it is for a server guy to bring in a foreign switch to the DC. Round 1 goes to Cisco.
People tend to love government tinkering and interfering and generally overstepping their bounds a whole lot when the result happens to coincide with their own personal views and feelings. The criteria that should be considered are the laws and the constitutions concerning each governing body, no more or less. The last thing in the world I want are politicians violating their charter because they know what's best for the rest of us.
That's a valid point, but has no relevance on what a government body should use for criteria when deciding a matter such as this. Potential is everything you haven't done. Taking it to the extreme, there's no law or principle that dictates that Oracle may not buy Sun and promptly dismantle MySQL entirely. With the presence of IBM's DB2/UDB and MS SQL in the marketplace, there's no rational argument that Oracle+Sun with MySQL creates the risk of a monopoly. It's easy to argue that the marketplace is 'better off' with MySQL independent from Oracle, and it's valid to point out that 'someday' MySQL could rival Oracle. Neither of those arguments are valid decision making criteria for governmental restrictions. Businesses have the right to buy out the competition so long as in doing so they don't create a monopoly. The EC is trying to play Robin Hood instead of acting like a responsible, by-the-book government entity.
This is somewhat like preventing Mercedes-Benz from buying Kia in order to prevent a monopoly. As well-stated earlier, Oracle doesn't compete against MySQL often if at all. IBM and Microsoft appear to be the most legitimate competition Oracle has in their DBMS space, and MySQL wouldn't seem to impact the competitive balance all that much. Having said that, who would want MySQL? Cisco, HP, and EMC don't seem like good choices because they all have product families that each would hate to have to tie to a 'Runs Best with MySQL' campaign. Red Hat makes sense from a certain point of view, but I'm not sure they want to diversify into the DBMS space.
There are several common themes presented in the collective wisdom above. Here are my 2 cents.
You are not a sysadmin. You are a businessman and a salesman. Never lose sight of those two responsibilities. Your company is not in business to run computers. Your company uses computers to run business. Everything must have a relationship to your business mission.
Everyone is in sales. Period. You have to sell your skills, projects, ideas, worth, etc. every single day, no matter what job you have. Your goal is to ensure the business leaders understand the value you contribute, not by the details you provide, but by your insightful way of connecting the techie stuff (irrelevant) to the business goals (important).
My advice is to keep the reports high level, with a structured format that makes them time-efficient and easy to digest. Include a project summary dashboard - what is going on and how is it going? Red, yellow, and green are excellent status indicators. Highlight any items that cause a business risk, especially to revenue. Understand how to express opportunity costs. How much more revenue or productivity could be driven if your ideas are implemented.
Quite simply, at some point you hope your 20 person company is a 50 person company (and beyond.) At some point the executives will look at you and decide if you are the right person to continue to connect with the business, or are you a techie person who needs to be managed by someone who can more adequately bridge the gap between business and technology. Your own self-impression can influence this greatly. If you wake up every morning feeling like a sysadmin, then you will soon find yourself with a new IT manager that you report to who basically makes twice what you do and yet you still do all the 'work'. Or you could become an essential business partner who knows how to communicate with the executives using language they speak.
It sounds to me like you're in an ideal spot to manage your career forward given your hands-on activity and yet your interfacing with pure business folks. My advice is to take this as a wake-up call to become more fully-rounded by better understanding the business and sales aspects of your role. If you don't fit into those shoes, someone else will sooner or later.
Winkey+L is your friend. BitLocker + a printed sign on the outside of your CPU case 'contents copyright [yourname / date]. Now you've made it a crime to circumvent your encryption of copyrighted materials. All my illegal stuff is on an external USB drive, labeled 'illegal stuff'. It is of course encrypted and every time the SWAT team rolls through my neighborhood I pull the USB cable so that if plugged back in I have to unlock the illegal stuff with a strong password (that I have written down on a sticky note so that I don't forget it.)
I'm a charter member of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals), and have to express my outrage at this insensitive comment. I am a devout 50% vegetarian. Please support my online initiative to have bacon reclassified as a vegetable by the FDA at www.baconmakeseverythingbetter.org.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that when you attempt to resolve 'foo.com' through the domain name system, that you are returned an address that was in fact registered properly as 'foo.com' using the accepted methods for doing so. I think there's a reasonable expectation when you use the DNS protocol that protocol compliance is expected. Substituting a DNS query response with an IP address that is not registered under the name queried breaks protocol and is fraudulent. The fact that in the use case described the activity is for merely annoying advertising is somewhat beside the point. By participating in DNS your ISP is part of the Internet, and certain standards should be upheld. If your ISP wants to run a private namespace they should either sell it as such or make it obvious that it's not the world wide domain name system we all expect it to be.
So should the phone company be allowed to redirect my calls? Does the ISP own the DNS data, or does it merely forward requests? Is DNS governed on the Internet or is it anarchy? And no, a DNS response isn't executable code. Would it be OK for my ISP to redirect me to the highest bidder when I typed 'www.bankofamerica.com' into my browser, or should I have a reasonable expectation that a browser is a pull technology, not a push technology?
Agreed. Isn't failure to return an NXDOMAIN pretty much the same as any other exploit? I would say that the laws that protect against circumventing the security on a computing system should apply to this false-reply injection technique. Why should some random web operator be given access to download code to my computer when I didn't expressly visit their site?
Yes, a few people talk of the myths of lost sales and such, but honestly that's all retrospective crap.
I politely disagree. Ripping and downloading music illegally and freely nearly killed the industry with lost sales of CD's *long before* the industry figured out how to make money on music downloads. Most dedicated music outlets went out of business well before legitimate, online music retail really took off. While I don't agree with the way the MPAA and RIAA go after the little people, I can certainly understand why the entertainment industry got nervous.
Perhaps you're forgetting the fundamental law of free markets: The customer is always right.
Yes, but shoplifters aren't customers. No doubt that the entertainment industry needs to respond to the needs of customers. However, we can't legitimize illegal activity and consider it a market force. At the macro level, if the behavior isn't curtailed, there won't be enough revenue to fund the variety of quality entertainment that we enjoy today, such as the aforementioned masterpiece known as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'm all in favor of letting people vote with their dollars (or whatever currency they use) for entertainment. I'm all in favor of companies becoming creative and adapting to new market forces. I'm very much in favor of fair use and think that the DMCA is horseshit. However, having said that I still think people who steal copyrighted material suck, and are much more the cause of all the DRM PITA than all the mega-corporate executives put together.
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This thread has lots of good suggestions for storage. I have a distant business relationship with Drobo, and think they're an interesting choice. I have a Windows Home Server as well, and find it to be a step-up from my previous Buffalo Terastation NAS box from a reliability and performance standpoint. I happen to also have a full-size tower and appreciate the simplicity of throwing lots of hard drives at the problem.
However, as formats switched from DVD to Blu-Ray and equivalent HD content, the economics shifted IMO as well. Given the both my Sony TV's, as well as both Tivo's can stream on-demand HD directly (Sony does it without annoying buffering by the way), and considering that I only rarely watch a movie more than once or twice, it's actually become more economically feasible to simply rent HD on demand for $4.99 a shot. There are still going to be a few Blu-Ray discs worth buying to own the content, and more than half of those seem to ship with a free digital copy for import into Window Media Player or iTunes. Even if you own all your HD content on disc now, it's probably worth your while to look into a hybrid model where you rent what you have a passing interest in, and buy/store those few things that either aren't available on demand, or that you have a more long-term interest in retaining.
Oh, and for the porn, a 2TB drive in a large tower should be more than sufficient. Windows 7 and Bit-locker full drive encryption doesn't impede HD playback on a reasonably speedy system. Although it is debatable whether or not 1080p is actually a good thing in some cases. Anyone want to go into business with me creating a unique line of porn-star body make-up to deal with pimples, waxing irritation, and razor-burn?
Of all the things in the world to worry about, a fingerprint reading timeclock is very close to the bottom of the list. Your fingerprints are not stored, nor are they uploaded to some evil master government database. You fingerprints are not DNA. They can't be used to predict if you'll get colon cancer by age 50. Quite frankly, they're not even private. You leave them all over the place every single day. I don't think this rises to the level of concern of someone taking a picture of you and putting it on an ID card. And we all know about how much evil has been done with misappropriated badge ID photos.
First off, I don't have any skin in the game and don't care which OS you select. There are a number of fine choices. Of course, the topic itself invites a lot of trash-talk, but I would say most of it without proper context. I'm not hearing a whole lot about why one solution is better given that it will be run by non-technical people, and yet supported by you.
In an effort to be constructive, here's what I suggest. Assuming you run Windows now, if you don't already have a copy, download (for trial at least - but I think a purchase would be money well spent) a copy of VMware Workstation. Then you can install and compare a number of different Linux distros from the comfort of your own PC. I will also be good to have a reference version of the OS you choose installed and available to you if you'll be supporting folks who run it. I'd stick with mainstream distros purely from a pragmatic standpoint and a belief that popular distros like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE will continue to get a lot of care and attention. The top 3 or 4 distros are usually on most vendors hardware or software compatibility lists.
If it's not about cost, then Windows 7 is still an option you should keep on the table. Look and feel only speak to 'where is the calculator icon' type of questions. Where I find most non-technical people struggling is lacking in concepts and therefore lacking in context. The basic ideas behind Windows remain unchanged.
Anecdotally, in the distant past I helped migrate a small office of about a hundred folks from Mac OS 6.x to Windows as part of a larger corporate initiative. The Monday morning following the migration, one of the users had created a folder called "System" at the root of C:\, and dragged as much of the Windows folder as possible over to the new System folder. Thankfully, those were the days when you could still boot to DOS and clean up fairly simply. Still, we had never anticipated someone doing that, because we were focused on simply teaching them how to use the new systems. And yes, it was evil to migrate 100 Mac users to Windows, but that is beside the point.
never use the email address provided by your ISP *and* Web portal email works much better
It's a little presumptuous to make up random rules of thumb and offer them out as advice. Try a little supporting evidence such as...
"Web portal email works better because..."
"Portal xyz's offering was clearly viable and sustainable since your email address was first established so you should have gone with them instead..."
Sounds like your suggestions are aimed at someone who just bought their first PC at Best Buy yesterday. Give a little credit to the community.
Just curious.... Is the company name changing or is this just branding of services? Will their various sports networks change as well? At least initially the commercials aren't saying "Comcast is now Xfinity". They're saying "Xfinity by Comcast". It mat be splitting hairs, but i think it worth understanding. Will subscribers with @comcast.net addresses get new @xfinity addresses? So far there hasn't been much to this discussion beyond the expected bashing Comcast takes upon mention @ /.
It's incomprehensible that the question is even contemplated 'does it exist?' - Of course it does. However, the 'where' is the easiest part of the equation. The more important questions of 'when to start looking for it' and 'what to do when you locate it' are never even mentioned in passing.
But would you agree that it's just not feasible with current technology to replace the textbook? I mean e-ink displays with color can't be that far off.
Yes and no. I think you make a valid point, and yet the hybrid technology proposed in the article is an important step in the right direction. What I'm resistant to is the argument against moving in the direction of digital textbooks altogether in the absence of a perfect product. Color e-ink certainly sounds like a nice future, but in the meantime I think we need to get products in people's hands that start to turn the battleship. There will be a lot of infrastructure and process required to convert the textbook market into a viable digital system. What are we waiting for?
I think we're losing sight of the bigger picture here. What we're talking about is the possibility to make a significant change in the delivery of classroom text, and unbelievably the arguments against the *potential* for doing so are sounding much like the argument in favor of postal mail versus email. What about the tons of paper saved every year? The reduced barrier to publishing material? The ability to update inaccurate information mid-semester? I'm just a little speechless that people are readily naysayers about the matter, and/or are having a technology discussion instead of a discussion of the use case.
How exactly does the cost evaporate when you factor in the cost of an e-reader? Doesn't it seem that should this idea come to fruition that market forces will make this a no-brainer? It seems to me that the cost of an e-reader is on par with about a single semester's worth of textbooks. Subtract the cost of printing and distribution from the price of each e-book and you'll have no problem finding a way to make more money for the publisher and yet cost less money overall for the student assuming an e-reader can survive an average of four semesters or so.
I think the main theme is that laptops, netbooks, or tablets alone aren't perfectly suited for e-books and the needs of the student. Ideally, we'll have a solution someday that combines everything the student needs into one device. This article shows signs that the industry is finally acknowledging the need for a specialty product.
Why even get that when I can take a book out of the library for a lot less?
Because students tend to not check textbooks out of libraries. They buy them for the semester at considerable expense, and then have to lug them around all day. Or did you miss the use-case that this article is about?
Einstein's theory led to the atomic bomb. The most tangible output from any subsequent theory is "Stargate:Atlantis" at best. I doubt we'll have a satisfactory understanding of space, time, or gravity in my lifetime, and I'm not closing in on social security anytime soon.
...are the notorious 'employee discount codes' that vendors such as Dell and other have employed. A few years back I was looking to buy a new LCD and had a Dell in mind when I remembered my company had a discount code. So I dug it up, and used the instructions provided to logon to the 'discount' site (the mechanics of doing so may be different today.) To my surprise, I found that the 'discounted' price of the monitor was several hundred dollars more than just the plain ol' Dell site. WTF? How do you advertise a code and process as a discount, and then the merchandise therein is actually priced higher than your regular price from your main site? I'm glad I double checked before hitting the purchase button.
Currently, the entirety of the American people are helping to prop up this '8th largest economy'.
How exactly is that? The federal government wouldn't even extend a $7B loan to California recently, while Californian federal income taxes spent propping up AIG alone have far exceeded that sum. Cite one extra penny that's been diverted to California if you can.
Here's an honest question, why is a laser better than a high caliber bullet?
Speed of light. No need to lead the target. You can use a low powered aiming laser to paint the target. Whenever you shoot something painted, you hit it. 186K Mps > 1K Mph
By the way, we could make a boatload of money selling these things in Afghanistan. Economy problems solved.
I know that a few years back at my previous employer the only reason I was able to get HP blades into the DC was due to the inclusion of Cisco switches in the blade enclosures. I wonder if HP will continue offering Cisco switches, and if not how badly will it hurt their sales? I think it's a lot easier for a networking guy to bring in a foreign x86 server than it is for a server guy to bring in a foreign switch to the DC. Round 1 goes to Cisco.
People tend to love government tinkering and interfering and generally overstepping their bounds a whole lot when the result happens to coincide with their own personal views and feelings. The criteria that should be considered are the laws and the constitutions concerning each governing body, no more or less. The last thing in the world I want are politicians violating their charter because they know what's best for the rest of us.
That's a valid point, but has no relevance on what a government body should use for criteria when deciding a matter such as this. Potential is everything you haven't done. Taking it to the extreme, there's no law or principle that dictates that Oracle may not buy Sun and promptly dismantle MySQL entirely. With the presence of IBM's DB2/UDB and MS SQL in the marketplace, there's no rational argument that Oracle+Sun with MySQL creates the risk of a monopoly. It's easy to argue that the marketplace is 'better off' with MySQL independent from Oracle, and it's valid to point out that 'someday' MySQL could rival Oracle. Neither of those arguments are valid decision making criteria for governmental restrictions. Businesses have the right to buy out the competition so long as in doing so they don't create a monopoly. The EC is trying to play Robin Hood instead of acting like a responsible, by-the-book government entity.
This is somewhat like preventing Mercedes-Benz from buying Kia in order to prevent a monopoly. As well-stated earlier, Oracle doesn't compete against MySQL often if at all. IBM and Microsoft appear to be the most legitimate competition Oracle has in their DBMS space, and MySQL wouldn't seem to impact the competitive balance all that much. Having said that, who would want MySQL? Cisco, HP, and EMC don't seem like good choices because they all have product families that each would hate to have to tie to a 'Runs Best with MySQL' campaign. Red Hat makes sense from a certain point of view, but I'm not sure they want to diversify into the DBMS space.
There are several common themes presented in the collective wisdom above. Here are my 2 cents.
You are not a sysadmin. You are a businessman and a salesman. Never lose sight of those two responsibilities. Your company is not in business to run computers. Your company uses computers to run business. Everything must have a relationship to your business mission.
Everyone is in sales. Period. You have to sell your skills, projects, ideas, worth, etc. every single day, no matter what job you have. Your goal is to ensure the business leaders understand the value you contribute, not by the details you provide, but by your insightful way of connecting the techie stuff (irrelevant) to the business goals (important).
My advice is to keep the reports high level, with a structured format that makes them time-efficient and easy to digest. Include a project summary dashboard - what is going on and how is it going? Red, yellow, and green are excellent status indicators. Highlight any items that cause a business risk, especially to revenue. Understand how to express opportunity costs. How much more revenue or productivity could be driven if your ideas are implemented.
Quite simply, at some point you hope your 20 person company is a 50 person company (and beyond.) At some point the executives will look at you and decide if you are the right person to continue to connect with the business, or are you a techie person who needs to be managed by someone who can more adequately bridge the gap between business and technology. Your own self-impression can influence this greatly. If you wake up every morning feeling like a sysadmin, then you will soon find yourself with a new IT manager that you report to who basically makes twice what you do and yet you still do all the 'work'. Or you could become an essential business partner who knows how to communicate with the executives using language they speak.
It sounds to me like you're in an ideal spot to manage your career forward given your hands-on activity and yet your interfacing with pure business folks. My advice is to take this as a wake-up call to become more fully-rounded by better understanding the business and sales aspects of your role. If you don't fit into those shoes, someone else will sooner or later.
Winkey+L is your friend. BitLocker + a printed sign on the outside of your CPU case 'contents copyright [yourname / date]. Now you've made it a crime to circumvent your encryption of copyrighted materials. All my illegal stuff is on an external USB drive, labeled 'illegal stuff'. It is of course encrypted and every time the SWAT team rolls through my neighborhood I pull the USB cable so that if plugged back in I have to unlock the illegal stuff with a strong password (that I have written down on a sticky note so that I don't forget it.)
I'm a charter member of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals), and have to express my outrage at this insensitive comment. I am a devout 50% vegetarian. Please support my online initiative to have bacon reclassified as a vegetable by the FDA at www.baconmakeseverythingbetter.org.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that when you attempt to resolve 'foo.com' through the domain name system, that you are returned an address that was in fact registered properly as 'foo.com' using the accepted methods for doing so. I think there's a reasonable expectation when you use the DNS protocol that protocol compliance is expected. Substituting a DNS query response with an IP address that is not registered under the name queried breaks protocol and is fraudulent. The fact that in the use case described the activity is for merely annoying advertising is somewhat beside the point. By participating in DNS your ISP is part of the Internet, and certain standards should be upheld. If your ISP wants to run a private namespace they should either sell it as such or make it obvious that it's not the world wide domain name system we all expect it to be.
So should the phone company be allowed to redirect my calls? Does the ISP own the DNS data, or does it merely forward requests? Is DNS governed on the Internet or is it anarchy? And no, a DNS response isn't executable code. Would it be OK for my ISP to redirect me to the highest bidder when I typed 'www.bankofamerica.com' into my browser, or should I have a reasonable expectation that a browser is a pull technology, not a push technology?
Agreed. Isn't failure to return an NXDOMAIN pretty much the same as any other exploit? I would say that the laws that protect against circumventing the security on a computing system should apply to this false-reply injection technique. Why should some random web operator be given access to download code to my computer when I didn't expressly visit their site?
Yes, a few people talk of the myths of lost sales and such, but honestly that's all retrospective crap.
I politely disagree. Ripping and downloading music illegally and freely nearly killed the industry with lost sales of CD's *long before* the industry figured out how to make money on music downloads. Most dedicated music outlets went out of business well before legitimate, online music retail really took off. While I don't agree with the way the MPAA and RIAA go after the little people, I can certainly understand why the entertainment industry got nervous.
Perhaps you're forgetting the fundamental law of free markets: The customer is always right.
Yes, but shoplifters aren't customers. No doubt that the entertainment industry needs to respond to the needs of customers. However, we can't legitimize illegal activity and consider it a market force. At the macro level, if the behavior isn't curtailed, there won't be enough revenue to fund the variety of quality entertainment that we enjoy today, such as the aforementioned masterpiece known as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'm all in favor of letting people vote with their dollars (or whatever currency they use) for entertainment. I'm all in favor of companies becoming creative and adapting to new market forces. I'm very much in favor of fair use and think that the DMCA is horseshit. However, having said that I still think people who steal copyrighted material suck, and are much more the cause of all the DRM PITA than all the mega-corporate executives put together.