One reason that a tax can be imposed on VoIP users is because there is a central entity that is being paid to provide a service. If we can get rid of that entity, we get rid of the tax (at least for the voice component). Unfortunately, as long as there are people using switched telephone only for voice, if you want to talk to those people, you have to go through some means to get out to that switched network. But for the ever increase numbers of people able to use voice over the internet, direct peer to peer communications is fully possible, as long as we have some means to find people. Eventually, just about all voice communication will go the way of the internet, so why not work out the means to make it all direct? I'd suggest something based on DNS to find people.
Of course greedy politians will want to find some way to drain our wallets, so we'll eventually end up with a tax on internet connections, and even on packets sent (and maybe even on those received).
And then there's all the voice spam we will get if we don't make it tight from the outset.
... how about a new Windows architecture (something that maintains the same 0wn35h1p).
... how about a new brain architecture for the masses (something that won't give out banking and PayPal passwords to every phishing email).
We have many, many fundamental problems in our society. Most of the problems of the internet are not really caused by the internet itself, but are instead reflections of ourselves, our society, and the morons that surround us.
But I wouldn't mind having an internet the way it was back around 1990, before the web thing started. Yeah, we did have morons online even then, but everone knew who both of them were.
If cable is an information service then I guess I am not obligated to exchange any TCP/IP traffic directly with any of its end user customers. I'll start with port 25 and put an end to the bulk of the zombie spam.
If enough people started blocking ads, Smith warned that publishers would start charging for content.
I remember a case a few years ago in Dallas Texas. The Dallas Morning News was threatening to sue a local web site operator for deep linking into the Dallas Morning News web site for interesting stories. Their claim was this was stealing from them and depriving them of ad revenues.
Out of curiosity I checked out the newspaper's web site and the linked stories. The web site main page was full of ads. About half the main page was ads. Too many ads for me to want to come back to read news. But then I went to the story pages and found no ads at all. Each story page was totally ad-free.
Maybe the newspaper was right that deep linking would deprive them of the revenue. But they were sure dumb as hell setting things up that way. If they truly wanted to get ad revenue, they would put a reasonable number of ads on each page of the site, including the stories. Then they could attract deep linkers and make money from that, instead of reject them and lose out.
OTOH, if the big newspapers all switch to pre-paid content, maybe that would open the way for more indy news, which knows more about using non-intrusive advertising, isn't interesting in collecting everyone's personal data, and doesn't have the "stockholder tax" to siphon off funds.
External Firewire drives are in my plans. The ability to expand is there, too... maybe not as big as a real SAN you might see a huge business database running on, but half a dozen 300 GB drives is certainly nothing to sneeze at (about 180 hours). USB isn't ruled out, either. I haven't decided on the video i/out method, yet, as the video standards are still not (IMHO) quite mature (principle choices right now are DV-1394 vs. an SDI card).
I guess we are a bit different about the things we want. I prefer tape over DVD any day. But I also prefer high quality tape like DVCPRO over low quality like VHS. Unfortunately, DVCPRO is expensive.
Since I am usually recording my own programming, anyway, tape tends to work better, since DVD would treat it as one big long seamless stream. I think recording to hard drive would be better as step 1. Edit out all the commercials, then dub it down to whatever media you like, or compress it to MPEG and put it on a video server (something I'm planning to build).
One thing VHS can do that DVD cannot do is remember where in the program you are when you want to take the medium out and move to another room and resume in another player.
Of course someone will suggest I should be playing things through a wireless TCP/IP network so I can watch it on any computer or appropriately equipped TV anywhere in the house. I'm sure that will eventually happen.
Of course someone will suggest I should use the fast forward search.
In the end, I will have all my movies on hard disk, anyway. Then the video server can remember where I was with frame accuracy.
When politicians lie to their constituents to get elected and re-elected, there is nothing wrong with informing those constituents about those lies, and fill in the truth, then let them decide. It's not like we're going to vote in your district; we're just going to tell the voters there what's really going on so they can make their decision a more enlightened one.
Why do we even need device drivers at all? I've worked on (used, administered) two different kinds of major operating systems (and a couple more smaller ones) that did not use device drivers at all. The answer to thise question reflects a condition that those two major OSes did not have to deal with: lack of standardized hardware.
The original IBM System 360, released in the 1960s, effectively had relatively standardized hardware. That was because IBM made all the hardware. When other manufacturers eventually made their own hardware, they were forced to make that hardware compatible. A manufacturer of a disk drive had to make it accept every hardware command that IBM's own models accepted, or it would not work. No provision existed in the operating systems for these machine to install or load a special device driver, short of modifying the source directly (which was all in assembly code for the mainframe CPU architecture).
I/O operations in the original System 360, and to a great extend in the 370 and 390 that followed, is quite uniform compared to the PC architecture. Although IBM popularized this architecture, it was actually the design of the 8088 CPU that caused things to be quite non-uniform due to it's lack of any I/O architecture (it only had a simplistic in/out CPU instruction set, which effectively functioned like fetch/store instructions in a private address space). This meant every peripheral (like a serial port) had to operate its own way. Microsoft's DOS operating system furthered the dependency on device drivers being added by making it relatively easy to do. So by combining an architecture that was very poor at I/O, absent of an I/O standard, and an OS that made discrete device drivers easy, we have this become dependent on this.
A computer architecture could still be built that includes a standardized I/O infrastructure (e.g. all devices interface the same way) and standardized I/O command set (e.g. all operations of the same class operate identically), and would not need individual device drivers. Each different class of device (e.g. a hard drive is an example of one class) would have its own I/O handling code in the OS which can be referred to as the device driver, but it would be one set of code that handles every device of that class. A command from the "hard drive handler" code in the OS to read a specific sector of storage would be exactly identical regardless of the size of the drive (if it accesses a non-existant sector, it always gets a standard error), the maker of the drive, and whether or not there is a gateway controller to interconnect legacy hardware (e.g. SCSI, IDE, SATA, etc). The same principle would be applied for all other classes of devices. All random accessible devices could then be bootable with merely the issuance of a basic "read a sector from offset N" command generated by a very simple firmware system... for some standardized value of N for booting purposes.
Oh, you mean the lawyer with the 89 IQ that said not to worry about non-corporations complaining about Yahoo being a vehicle for privacy invasions? My post was really meant as a funny. Of course in reality they would have seen through the letterhead ruse. But the basis of it being funny is that if it really were a copyright or trademark infringement, I bet they really would have done a takedown in less than 24 hours. But let it be a non-corporation, which they perhaps assumed would not sue (which obviously comes to pass as a wrong assumption), then don't bother to check to see what is going on.
Yahoo's "safe harbor" defense would be to take down the pictures and the whole profile immediately upon notification. They failed to do that. They failed for at least two months and two additional notifications. If it is a scam, now Yahoo is stuck with the burden of proving that, since the focus of the suit is not that the pictures were ever present, but that Yahoo simply failed to take them down in a reasonable and timely manner.
I do agree the boyfriend needs to have criminal charges brough against him and spend some time in jail (as long as she didn't create this whole thing herself).
The boyfriend should also face criminal charges of fraud. But Yahoo did commit a tort by failing... for way too long... to take the images and access down once notified of the issue.
Wanna bet they'd respond a whole lot faster had it been a copyright issue brought up by the MPAA or RIAA?
$3 million is extravagant if Yahoo delayed a few days in taking down the profiles. But... 2 months... are you serious? It's a $3 million dollar lesson they need to learn... and absorb. If they lose (and I sure hope they do) they will surely want to avoid that again, and will make sure staff will handle things properly from now on. Then I think the winning plaintiff should donate most of the money to good causes, keeping enough to live on for a few years.
All Yahoo had to do to avoid risk was to just take down the profiles the very same day they received the letter, and block those user names forever. If the boyfriend creates new ones and the problem re-occurs, then Yahoo would track where these postings were from and block that ISP from creating new profiles temporarily until that ISP tells Yahoo that the offending user has been cut off.
Where Yahoo's real risk is at, is by being understaffed. Most likely no one read this. I'd even bet they haven't even read the lawsuit against them, yet.
You should have been relaying the mail via your own colocated server, but instead of using port 25 to do that, you should be using port 587, encrypted, and authenticated.
I do agree with you about the big phone companies. That includes probably all ILECs and a great many CLECs as well.
Just cut off port 25. In fact, just cut it off before anything happens. If they are some BSD/Linux geek, they'll call in and demand port 25 be unblocked. Listen for the key "port 25" or "SMTP" in the caller's request; if they say that, they know what they are doing well enough they probably won't be much of a problem... open all ports for them. It's the idiots using Windows you need to have in padded cells.
If your users can't send mail because port 25 is blocked by their ISP, then their configuration is wrong to begin with. They should be configured to relay through their ISP's smarthost mail server, or if you are providing outbound mail for them, it should be using port 587 for secure submission (and you must be doing encrypted authentication to be sure it's really them).
They are trying to flood the candidate pool with paper techies to help drive down the salaries so managers will see IBM's and Red Hat's products as lower cost than the others. You might not get some job because of not knowing all the magic keywords or menu layout for application X, but when you do get a job, you can be sure your new boss will tell you, when you try to negotiate the lowball pay up a bit, that he has 50 other fully qualified candidates and that you should consider yourself lucky to be getting the offer (as if he picked your resume out of a hat).
Slashdot Mirror
But does it work properly, including no radio interference to any radio service band?
One reason that a tax can be imposed on VoIP users is because there is a central entity that is being paid to provide a service. If we can get rid of that entity, we get rid of the tax (at least for the voice component). Unfortunately, as long as there are people using switched telephone only for voice, if you want to talk to those people, you have to go through some means to get out to that switched network. But for the ever increase numbers of people able to use voice over the internet, direct peer to peer communications is fully possible, as long as we have some means to find people. Eventually, just about all voice communication will go the way of the internet, so why not work out the means to make it all direct? I'd suggest something based on DNS to find people.
Of course greedy politians will want to find some way to drain our wallets, so we'll eventually end up with a tax on internet connections, and even on packets sent (and maybe even on those received).
And then there's all the voice spam we will get if we don't make it tight from the outset.
... how about a new Windows architecture (something that maintains the same 0wn35h1p).
... how about a new brain architecture for the masses (something that won't give out banking and PayPal passwords to every phishing email).
We have many, many fundamental problems in our society. Most of the problems of the internet are not really caused by the internet itself, but are instead reflections of ourselves, our society, and the morons that surround us.
But I wouldn't mind having an internet the way it was back around 1990, before the web thing started. Yeah, we did have morons online even then, but everone knew who both of them were.
If cable is an information service then I guess I am not obligated to exchange any TCP/IP traffic directly with any of its end user customers. I'll start with port 25 and put an end to the bulk of the zombie spam.
Next thing you know the RIAA and MPAA will be setting up offices in Lagos, Nigeria.
I remember a case a few years ago in Dallas Texas. The Dallas Morning News was threatening to sue a local web site operator for deep linking into the Dallas Morning News web site for interesting stories. Their claim was this was stealing from them and depriving them of ad revenues.
Out of curiosity I checked out the newspaper's web site and the linked stories. The web site main page was full of ads. About half the main page was ads. Too many ads for me to want to come back to read news. But then I went to the story pages and found no ads at all. Each story page was totally ad-free.
Maybe the newspaper was right that deep linking would deprive them of the revenue. But they were sure dumb as hell setting things up that way. If they truly wanted to get ad revenue, they would put a reasonable number of ads on each page of the site, including the stories. Then they could attract deep linkers and make money from that, instead of reject them and lose out.
OTOH, if the big newspapers all switch to pre-paid content, maybe that would open the way for more indy news, which knows more about using non-intrusive advertising, isn't interesting in collecting everyone's personal data, and doesn't have the "stockholder tax" to siphon off funds.
That won't be a problem, as long as I can still pay hackers for other people's credit card data.
External Firewire drives are in my plans. The ability to expand is there, too ... maybe not as big as a real SAN you might see a huge business database running on, but half a dozen 300 GB drives is certainly nothing to sneeze at (about 180 hours). USB isn't ruled out, either. I haven't decided on the video i/out method, yet, as the video standards are still not (IMHO) quite mature (principle choices right now are DV-1394 vs. an SDI card).
I guess we are a bit different about the things we want. I prefer tape over DVD any day. But I also prefer high quality tape like DVCPRO over low quality like VHS. Unfortunately, DVCPRO is expensive.
Since I am usually recording my own programming, anyway, tape tends to work better, since DVD would treat it as one big long seamless stream. I think recording to hard drive would be better as step 1. Edit out all the commercials, then dub it down to whatever media you like, or compress it to MPEG and put it on a video server (something I'm planning to build).
That would be a nice trick. But it would end up being hacked by spammers.
One thing VHS can do that DVD cannot do is remember where in the program you are when you want to take the medium out and move to another room and resume in another player.
Of course someone will suggest I should be playing things through a wireless TCP/IP network so I can watch it on any computer or appropriately equipped TV anywhere in the house. I'm sure that will eventually happen.
Of course someone will suggest I should use the fast forward search.
In the end, I will have all my movies on hard disk, anyway. Then the video server can remember where I was with frame accuracy.
When politicians lie to their constituents to get elected and re-elected, there is nothing wrong with informing those constituents about those lies, and fill in the truth, then let them decide. It's not like we're going to vote in your district; we're just going to tell the voters there what's really going on so they can make their decision a more enlightened one.
Why do we even need device drivers at all? I've worked on (used, administered) two different kinds of major operating systems (and a couple more smaller ones) that did not use device drivers at all. The answer to thise question reflects a condition that those two major OSes did not have to deal with: lack of standardized hardware.
The original IBM System 360, released in the 1960s, effectively had relatively standardized hardware. That was because IBM made all the hardware. When other manufacturers eventually made their own hardware, they were forced to make that hardware compatible. A manufacturer of a disk drive had to make it accept every hardware command that IBM's own models accepted, or it would not work. No provision existed in the operating systems for these machine to install or load a special device driver, short of modifying the source directly (which was all in assembly code for the mainframe CPU architecture).
I/O operations in the original System 360, and to a great extend in the 370 and 390 that followed, is quite uniform compared to the PC architecture. Although IBM popularized this architecture, it was actually the design of the 8088 CPU that caused things to be quite non-uniform due to it's lack of any I/O architecture (it only had a simplistic in/out CPU instruction set, which effectively functioned like fetch/store instructions in a private address space). This meant every peripheral (like a serial port) had to operate its own way. Microsoft's DOS operating system furthered the dependency on device drivers being added by making it relatively easy to do. So by combining an architecture that was very poor at I/O, absent of an I/O standard, and an OS that made discrete device drivers easy, we have this become dependent on this.
A computer architecture could still be built that includes a standardized I/O infrastructure (e.g. all devices interface the same way) and standardized I/O command set (e.g. all operations of the same class operate identically), and would not need individual device drivers. Each different class of device (e.g. a hard drive is an example of one class) would have its own I/O handling code in the OS which can be referred to as the device driver, but it would be one set of code that handles every device of that class. A command from the "hard drive handler" code in the OS to read a specific sector of storage would be exactly identical regardless of the size of the drive (if it accesses a non-existant sector, it always gets a standard error), the maker of the drive, and whether or not there is a gateway controller to interconnect legacy hardware (e.g. SCSI, IDE, SATA, etc). The same principle would be applied for all other classes of devices. All random accessible devices could then be bootable with merely the issuance of a basic "read a sector from offset N" command generated by a very simple firmware system ... for some standardized value of N for booting purposes.
Oh, you mean the lawyer with the 89 IQ that said not to worry about non-corporations complaining about Yahoo being a vehicle for privacy invasions? My post was really meant as a funny. Of course in reality they would have seen through the letterhead ruse. But the basis of it being funny is that if it really were a copyright or trademark infringement, I bet they really would have done a takedown in less than 24 hours. But let it be a non-corporation, which they perhaps assumed would not sue (which obviously comes to pass as a wrong assumption), then don't bother to check to see what is going on.
This is one reason I blocked Yahoo from the kid's (14,11,8,6) computer.
Yahoo's "safe harbor" defense would be to take down the pictures and the whole profile immediately upon notification. They failed to do that. They failed for at least two months and two additional notifications. If it is a scam, now Yahoo is stuck with the burden of proving that, since the focus of the suit is not that the pictures were ever present, but that Yahoo simply failed to take them down in a reasonable and timely manner.
I do agree the boyfriend needs to have criminal charges brough against him and spend some time in jail (as long as she didn't create this whole thing herself).
She could have gotten Yahoo to act much faster on this by putting the takedown demand on RIAA or MPAA letterhead :-)
The boyfriend should also face criminal charges of fraud. But Yahoo did commit a tort by failing ... for way too long ... to take the images and access down once notified of the issue.
Wanna bet they'd respond a whole lot faster had it been a copyright issue brought up by the MPAA or RIAA?
$3 million is extravagant if Yahoo delayed a few days in taking down the profiles. But... 2 months ... are you serious? It's a $3 million dollar lesson they need to learn ... and absorb. If they lose (and I sure hope they do) they will surely want to avoid that again, and will make sure staff will handle things properly from now on. Then I think the winning plaintiff should donate most of the money to good causes, keeping enough to live on for a few years.
All Yahoo had to do to avoid risk was to just take down the profiles the very same day they received the letter, and block those user names forever. If the boyfriend creates new ones and the problem re-occurs, then Yahoo would track where these postings were from and block that ISP from creating new profiles temporarily until that ISP tells Yahoo that the offending user has been cut off.
Where Yahoo's real risk is at, is by being understaffed. Most likely no one read this. I'd even bet they haven't even read the lawsuit against them, yet.
If your ISP can't support the email submission protocol properly, get an ISP that can.
You should have been relaying the mail via your own colocated server, but instead of using port 25 to do that, you should be using port 587, encrypted, and authenticated.
I do agree with you about the big phone companies. That includes probably all ILECs and a great many CLECs as well.
Just cut off port 25. In fact, just cut it off before anything happens. If they are some BSD/Linux geek, they'll call in and demand port 25 be unblocked. Listen for the key "port 25" or "SMTP" in the caller's request; if they say that, they know what they are doing well enough they probably won't be much of a problem ... open all ports for them. It's the idiots using Windows you need to have in padded cells.
If your users can't send mail because port 25 is blocked by their ISP, then their configuration is wrong to begin with. They should be configured to relay through their ISP's smarthost mail server, or if you are providing outbound mail for them, it should be using port 587 for secure submission (and you must be doing encrypted authentication to be sure it's really them).
They are trying to flood the candidate pool with paper techies to help drive down the salaries so managers will see IBM's and Red Hat's products as lower cost than the others. You might not get some job because of not knowing all the magic keywords or menu layout for application X, but when you do get a job, you can be sure your new boss will tell you, when you try to negotiate the lowball pay up a bit, that he has 50 other fully qualified candidates and that you should consider yourself lucky to be getting the offer (as if he picked your resume out of a hat).