I saw this too, quite long ago. Where I saw it was on a television show (maybe even as far back as Walter Cronkite's "The 21st Century". And yes, there really was such a show, not "The 20th Century" one that also ran. "The 21st Century" was shorter-lived and dealt with science and technology stories. One story was on playing this amazing 'space war' game using an oscilloscope driven by a huge mainframe computer at MIT.) It was probably at least 30 years ago. Perhaps a search for histories of particle physics would turn something up. And it's a dim memory now, but it could have been in England where it was taking place.
But waiting for it to expire is some weird kind of brinksmanship I don't understand
In my particular case, it was because some idiot had 'helped' us by registering the.com version of our.org domain. Then he promptly left his company and no one there knew anything about it. Had to wait for it to expire to get control of it, but NSI waited a good 6 months after it expired to finally make it available. Luckily it was such a peculiar name that no else wanted it. But I've borne a grudge against NSI ever since. Their responses to my emails about the situation look like someone put a retarded child at the keyboard to amuse itself by sending out random snippets of their policy manual.
I had a domain w/NetworkSolutions and wanted to re-buy it with another company because they were ripping me off. So I let the site expire and guess what, i can't get it now.
Kids, don't try this at home. I learned this same lesson the hard way myself. The next time the situation came up, I simply had my new registrar (verio) transfer the domain from NSI to them while it was still active. No problemo. Of course, this was a while back, so perhaps it was before NSI got completely up to speed on it obstructionism.
Re:did Taco write the article?
on
IBMs CMOS 9S
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· Score: 1
If you're going to attack someone else's grammar, check your own first. Jeez.
Uh, he deliberately wrote it that way as a joke. It's making a humorous point by imitating the thing he was commenting on. Get it now?
It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
It's all very well to criticize politicians as a bunch of technological lunkheads, but what are we doing to remedy the situation? How about getting some techies to run for office? As it is, lawyers are seriously overrepresented, and their basic instinct is to have more of what they're familiar with: laws. Another path would be for the technologically-inclined to get themselves appointed to the various advisory and governing boards that grow up like kudzu around government. If we can't stop them, at least we can try to nudge them a little closer to the proper path.
One comment regarding the forecasts of Microsoft's earnings made in the article. Analyst ability to forecast with any hope of accuracy has been greatly hindered by recent SEC regs. Companies are now not allowed to talk to analysts on background (i.e. no members of the public at large included) in order to 'guide' their estimates. Analysts are having a great deal of difficulty replacing this sub-rosa 'guidance' with other sources, so I'd take that into account when looking at any analyst estimates, particularly more than one quarter out. (IMO, the new regs are a contributing factor for the market's high volatility lately. It's leading to lots of 'surprises' in earnings announcements.)
The new plant has shorter stacks which will concentrate the pollutants in the town even further. That is combined with the stacks disrupting the scenic coast (Morro Bay is on the Pacific Ocean) which hurts tourism.
Wait a minute. This implies that the new plant will emit the same amount of pollutants as the old. Given the current environmental regulatory climate in CA, I'm going to say that that's a flat-out impossibility. And no doubt dirt would be less visually blighting than shorter stacks, but power doesn't get generated by magic, so the plants have to go somewhere. What you're saying is 'elsewhere', the very definition of NIMBYism.
I recently completed an Arbitron book that listed all of my radio listening. A significant part of it was via the internet, listening to a radio station that's across the country from me. Did this count toward their ratings, or are out-of-market listeners ignored by Arbitron? If the former, then presumably the station is being compensated by increased ad rates, so they'd have somewhat less to complain about if they have to pay additional money for internet broadcasting. Which brings up another question: does a station have to pay higher fees if it obtains a larger listenership on its over-the-air broadcast?
Don't ask, just do it. Buy up all the wind turbines you can and put them online - modern turbines run about 4.5 to 6.5 cents, only gas turbines are cheaper.
You know what the enviros call wind turbines here in California? Condor Cuisinarts. Propose a new turbine and the only thing you're going to produce is bitching and lawsuits about it until the end of time.
Companies shouldn't need to build their own power stations to get power. It should be supplied as needed, and if there is not enough it should be imported.
Yeah, right. Just try to get a new power plant approved in the Worker's Paradise of California. Or a power transmission line. The enviros kick up such a fuss that no politician or judge will allow it. The only thing that's going to fix this is when the public starts getting inconvenienced, or industry departs the state, threatening to decrease the flow of tax dollars to our free-spending legislature.
the larger companies were required to sell off some of their plants to new competitors. Now, this shouldn't make a difference for anything but the cost of power. So what's to blame?
The means by which the industry was 'deregulated' is to blame. The present system requires that power be sold at the highest price being offered by any generator, no matter how inefficient or badly-run. If A is offering power at 10 cents per KWH and B is offering it at 25 cents per KWH, both A and B are paid 25 cents per KWH. It's an insane way to ave 'competition'. And the companies knew that the new system would result in incredible profits, as witnessed by the much-higher-than-expected prices that were gotten when the generating plants were sold off. Not to mention that California hasn't built any new generating plants in ten years.
Fully one-third of California's power-generating capacity is off-line right now. The excuses being given are maintenance, malfunction, having reached the maximum allowable days under air-quality laws, etc. Regulators are attempting to visit the off-line plants to check on the validity of these claims, but under deregulation, the plants aren't obligated to tell them squat, so several of the plants have told them to take a hike. The suspicion grows that much of the capacity is off-line in order to jack up the rates. It's been reported that a power transmission line that would bring in power from Arizona was shut down for several days, reason unstated. A new power transmission line is being built to California, where it will pass thru and end up in... Mexico! Couple all this with the fact that California hasn't built a new generating facility in ten years, while demand has been steadily growing, and you get the present situation. And now we're being asked to conserve because of the incompetence (and I dare say corruption) of our politicians and power-generation companies. Well, screw that. I'm turning on what I want to turn on. Perhaps some rolling blackouts are what it will take to wake up the public and get it to put some pressure in the right places. Nothing like no soap operas or traffic lights to get their attention.
By the way, futures contracts for power delivered in California are going as high as 25 cents per kilowatthour. Last May we were getting it for around 4. If you think power is expensive now, just wait till next summer. And you in the rest of the nation, your turn is coming. California-style 'deregulation' is being pushed in many states. If they succeed, get ready to see your rates quadruple.
It's nice to know that Larry Ellison has a pool sized subwoofer while a bunch of poor people will either freeze or starve to death this winter.
But not the employees of the speaker manufacturing company. And nobody in the U.S. is going to either freeze or starve this winter unless they're actively working at it. The only people who have died of freezing in recent years have been substance-abusers who were unconscious, or people (generally elderly) who were too proud or stubborn to go to a shelter and died in their unheated homes.
I thought I was high-tech for having a couple of x10'd lights, and the ability to watch and control my TV from my kitchen or living room.
Speaking of which, I'm hoping the advent of Bluetooth will finally get the manufacturers of TVs, VCRs, and other infrared-controlled devices off the dime. Controlling these things from other rooms means having to put one of those bloody IR-forwarding devices anywhere you're likely to want to do the controlling. What a pain, even when they do work. If Bluetooth lives up to its billing, maybe this situation will finally change and we'll be using RF like God intended.
To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.
Someone's going to hack this and figure out how to spoof the MP3 software into thinking that the CD has been inserted. I know that MP3.com samples certain areas of the CD in order to determine that it's genuine. I suspect that it's the same area of a given CD each time. The first attack I'd investigate is to simply capture the sampling the first time, store it, and then on subsequent attempts, replay it to MP3.com. I'll bet software to do this will exist within a week after MP3.com makes this change. (And I'll bet the first lawsuit against distributors exists on day 8.)
I think Jon Katz' thoughts on games are very well-made, but he as well as his readers should keep in mind the context this is all happening in. Moral panic is something America has experienced time and again throughout our history, but it seems to be at a heightened level lately.
I have to agree completely. I'm old enough to be the grandfather of some of these gamers, so I've lived thru a few 'crises' in my time. I recall how the adult world went into hysterics when we started questioning the sense of fighting and dying in a war which we didn't seem inclined to win. I remember how the nation started hiding under the bed when Sputnik was launched and we thought the Russians had a huge leg up in space. We immediately started castigating ourselves for our youth's sloth in the hard sciences and quickly launched programs to address these perceived deficiencies. When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, we went through a long period of national soul searching regarding "what sort of people we've become." These panics are a natural response to an unwelcome surprise. Unfortunately, the latest responses have become increasingly draconian, as the urge to "do something" becomes irresistable. The present zero-tolerance policies in force at many schools and businesses, not to mention determinate-sentencing laws are the over-reactive efforts to try to fix the unfixable. We're increasingly taking independent judgement out of the equation, likely because we've come to distrust our ourselves and our institutions, and have started to substitute unwavering policies for common sense.
Re:HAM radio enthusiasts have been doing it for ye
on
Open Networking
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· Score: 1
Last time I looked, APR was still stuck in the dark ages, technology-wise. People were still running at 9600 bps, and you had to use explicit routing ("send this to A and from there to B and from there to C..."). Unless vast technological strides have been made lately, I wouldn't even consider it usable for anything but email.
Most (if not all) 802.11b wireless products allow you tp specify that only certain MAC addresses can use it, so you can just mkae sure the MAC addresses of your wireless NICs are in the access list.
Making only certain MACs privileged would still leave the network vulnerable to impersonation of those MACs, which would be visible to the sniffer. This is the same vulnerability that allows cell phones to be cloned. You'd need to encrypt everything to prevent this, in which case it wouldn't be necessary to allow only certain MACs (but it certainly wouldn't hurt anything).
I wonder if widespread use of such technologies would lead to such overutilization that the network would get bogged down to the point of unusability. Call it the Gnutella effect. Anyone have an opinion?
By the way, I'd like to hear more about cruising the streets with a sniffer looking for open networks. How's that done, and what does one do to 'lock down' the network? I've been thinking of putting in a wireless network, but I hadn't thought about this hazard.
What's interesting here is that inadverently, GWB's case has transferred a significant amount of power from the States to the Federal Government
This is faulty analysis. This ruling by the US Supreme Court is effectively a 'get out of jail free' card to the FL Supreme Court. The USSC is gently telling the FLSC that they don't know how the hell they came to their decision, and to explain its origins to the USSC's satisfaction or change it. This is the USSC's way of not embarrassing the FLSC by simply overturning them. How you can interpret this as onsolidating further power in the Federal judiciary is beyond me.
I'm a C++ coder, but I also love Java. I can whip out a GUI-type Java app in a fraction of the time it takes me using, say, Visual C++ (I have to admit that I haven't done any apps under GUIs other than Java and Windows. Maybe others are just as easy.) One advantage Java has is that someone has written an API for virtually anything that you can think of, so throwing together an app is mostly coding some stuff in the interstices.
The only possible way to encrypt any sort of content that is intended for mass-distribution is by encrypting it on a per user basis. Each user must be given a key. Every song file must be encrypted using public/private key encryption tailored to a specific user.
"Thank you for purchasing 'Simply Irresistable' by Robert Palmer. Enclosed is your custom key which you will need to program into every playback device you own in order to listen to your purchase. Be sure to keep it safe, alongside your other 683,426 keys, as the music is unplayable without it, and we cannot furnish a replacement. You might consider storing your new key with all of your unique website, brokerage, and ATM passwords which you change regularly."
I ran across this site after entering "radio telemetry" in the google search engine. It might have what you need: http://www.woodanddouglas.co.uk/telemetr/te l1.htm
Considering how Yahoo has caved in in the past in areas like subpoenas for the identities of stock chat board posters, I wouldn't trust them with anything that I really really didn't want other parties to be able to read. At the moment, my preference would be for ZeroKnowledge Freedom. It's designed not only to encrypt, but routes traffic thru multiple servers and doesn't retain records, making tracing extremely difficult (I suspect that if you're under surveillance by the NSA and the incentive was high enough, they'd find a way, but not many people would warant that level of effort).
Slashdot Mirror
"Shades." Wear sunglasses. A little problematic in dim environments, but I'm willing to risk fracturing a shinbone to stick it to Big Brother.
I saw this too, quite long ago. Where I saw it was on a television show (maybe even as far back as Walter Cronkite's "The 21st Century". And yes, there really was such a show, not "The 20th Century" one that also ran. "The 21st Century" was shorter-lived and dealt with science and technology stories. One story was on playing this amazing 'space war' game using an oscilloscope driven by a huge mainframe computer at MIT.) It was probably at least 30 years ago. Perhaps a search for histories of particle physics would turn something up. And it's a dim memory now, but it could have been in England where it was taking place.
In my particular case, it was because some idiot had 'helped' us by registering the .com version of our .org domain. Then he promptly left his company and no one there knew anything about it. Had to wait for it to expire to get control of it, but NSI waited a good 6 months after it expired to finally make it available. Luckily it was such a peculiar name that no else wanted it. But I've borne a grudge against NSI ever since. Their responses to my emails about the situation look like someone put a retarded child at the keyboard to amuse itself by sending out random snippets of their policy manual.
Kids, don't try this at home. I learned this same lesson the hard way myself. The next time the situation came up, I simply had my new registrar (verio) transfer the domain from NSI to them while it was still active. No problemo. Of course, this was a while back, so perhaps it was before NSI got completely up to speed on it obstructionism.
Uh, he deliberately wrote it that way as a joke. It's making a humorous point by imitating the thing he was commenting on. Get it now?
It's all very well to criticize politicians as a bunch of technological lunkheads, but what are we doing to remedy the situation? How about getting some techies to run for office? As it is, lawyers are seriously overrepresented, and their basic instinct is to have more of what they're familiar with: laws. Another path would be for the technologically-inclined to get themselves appointed to the various advisory and governing boards that grow up like kudzu around government. If we can't stop them, at least we can try to nudge them a little closer to the proper path.
One comment regarding the forecasts of Microsoft's earnings made in the article. Analyst ability to forecast with any hope of accuracy has been greatly hindered by recent SEC regs. Companies are now not allowed to talk to analysts on background (i.e. no members of the public at large included) in order to 'guide' their estimates. Analysts are having a great deal of difficulty replacing this sub-rosa 'guidance' with other sources, so I'd take that into account when looking at any analyst estimates, particularly more than one quarter out. (IMO, the new regs are a contributing factor for the market's high volatility lately. It's leading to lots of 'surprises' in earnings announcements.)
Wait a minute. This implies that the new plant will emit the same amount of pollutants as the old. Given the current environmental regulatory climate in CA, I'm going to say that that's a flat-out impossibility. And no doubt dirt would be less visually blighting than shorter stacks, but power doesn't get generated by magic, so the plants have to go somewhere. What you're saying is 'elsewhere', the very definition of NIMBYism.
I recently completed an Arbitron book that listed all of my radio listening. A significant part of it was via the internet, listening to a radio station that's across the country from me. Did this count toward their ratings, or are out-of-market listeners ignored by Arbitron? If the former, then presumably the station is being compensated by increased ad rates, so they'd have somewhat less to complain about if they have to pay additional money for internet broadcasting. Which brings up another question: does a station have to pay higher fees if it obtains a larger listenership on its over-the-air broadcast?
You know what the enviros call wind turbines here in California? Condor Cuisinarts. Propose a new turbine and the only thing you're going to produce is bitching and lawsuits about it until the end of time.
Yeah, right. Just try to get a new power plant approved in the Worker's Paradise of California. Or a power transmission line. The enviros kick up such a fuss that no politician or judge will allow it. The only thing that's going to fix this is when the public starts getting inconvenienced, or industry departs the state, threatening to decrease the flow of tax dollars to our free-spending legislature.
The means by which the industry was 'deregulated' is to blame. The present system requires that power be sold at the highest price being offered by any generator, no matter how inefficient or badly-run. If A is offering power at 10 cents per KWH and B is offering it at 25 cents per KWH, both A and B are paid 25 cents per KWH. It's an insane way to ave 'competition'. And the companies knew that the new system would result in incredible profits, as witnessed by the much-higher-than-expected prices that were gotten when the generating plants were sold off. Not to mention that California hasn't built any new generating plants in ten years.
By the way, futures contracts for power delivered in California are going as high as 25 cents per kilowatthour. Last May we were getting it for around 4. If you think power is expensive now, just wait till next summer. And you in the rest of the nation, your turn is coming. California-style 'deregulation' is being pushed in many states. If they succeed, get ready to see your rates quadruple.
But not the employees of the speaker manufacturing company. And nobody in the U.S. is going to either freeze or starve this winter unless they're actively working at it. The only people who have died of freezing in recent years have been substance-abusers who were unconscious, or people (generally elderly) who were too proud or stubborn to go to a shelter and died in their unheated homes.
Speaking of which, I'm hoping the advent of Bluetooth will finally get the manufacturers of TVs, VCRs, and other infrared-controlled devices off the dime. Controlling these things from other rooms means having to put one of those bloody IR-forwarding devices anywhere you're likely to want to do the controlling. What a pain, even when they do work. If Bluetooth lives up to its billing, maybe this situation will finally change and we'll be using RF like God intended.
Someone's going to hack this and figure out how to spoof the MP3 software into thinking that the CD has been inserted. I know that MP3.com samples certain areas of the CD in order to determine that it's genuine. I suspect that it's the same area of a given CD each time. The first attack I'd investigate is to simply capture the sampling the first time, store it, and then on subsequent attempts, replay it to MP3.com. I'll bet software to do this will exist within a week after MP3.com makes this change. (And I'll bet the first lawsuit against distributors exists on day 8.)
I have to agree completely. I'm old enough to be the grandfather of some of these gamers, so I've lived thru a few 'crises' in my time. I recall how the adult world went into hysterics when we started questioning the sense of fighting and dying in a war which we didn't seem inclined to win. I remember how the nation started hiding under the bed when Sputnik was launched and we thought the Russians had a huge leg up in space. We immediately started castigating ourselves for our youth's sloth in the hard sciences and quickly launched programs to address these perceived deficiencies. When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, we went through a long period of national soul searching regarding "what sort of people we've become." These panics are a natural response to an unwelcome surprise. Unfortunately, the latest responses have become increasingly draconian, as the urge to "do something" becomes irresistable. The present zero-tolerance policies in force at many schools and businesses, not to mention determinate-sentencing laws are the over-reactive efforts to try to fix the unfixable. We're increasingly taking independent judgement out of the equation, likely because we've come to distrust our ourselves and our institutions, and have started to substitute unwavering policies for common sense.
Last time I looked, APR was still stuck in the dark ages, technology-wise. People were still running at 9600 bps, and you had to use explicit routing ("send this to A and from there to B and from there to C ..."). Unless vast technological strides have been made lately, I wouldn't even consider it usable for anything but email.
Making only certain MACs privileged would still leave the network vulnerable to impersonation of those MACs, which would be visible to the sniffer. This is the same vulnerability that allows cell phones to be cloned. You'd need to encrypt everything to prevent this, in which case it wouldn't be necessary to allow only certain MACs (but it certainly wouldn't hurt anything).
By the way, I'd like to hear more about cruising the streets with a sniffer looking for open networks. How's that done, and what does one do to 'lock down' the network? I've been thinking of putting in a wireless network, but I hadn't thought about this hazard.
This is faulty analysis. This ruling by the US Supreme Court is effectively a 'get out of jail free' card to the FL Supreme Court. The USSC is gently telling the FLSC that they don't know how the hell they came to their decision, and to explain its origins to the USSC's satisfaction or change it. This is the USSC's way of not embarrassing the FLSC by simply overturning them. How you can interpret this as onsolidating further power in the Federal judiciary is beyond me.
I'm a C++ coder, but I also love Java. I can whip out a GUI-type Java app in a fraction of the time it takes me using, say, Visual C++ (I have to admit that I haven't done any apps under GUIs other than Java and Windows. Maybe others are just as easy.) One advantage Java has is that someone has written an API for virtually anything that you can think of, so throwing together an app is mostly coding some stuff in the interstices.
"Thank you for purchasing 'Simply Irresistable' by Robert Palmer. Enclosed is your custom key which you will need to program into every playback device you own in order to listen to your purchase. Be sure to keep it safe, alongside your other 683,426 keys, as the music is unplayable without it, and we cannot furnish a replacement. You might consider storing your new key with all of your unique website, brokerage, and ATM passwords which you change regularly."
I ran across this site after entering "radio telemetry" in the google search engine. It might have what you need:e l1.htm
http://www.woodanddouglas.co.uk/telemetr/t
Considering how Yahoo has caved in in the past in areas like subpoenas for the identities of stock chat board posters, I wouldn't trust them with anything that I really really didn't want other parties to be able to read. At the moment, my preference would be for ZeroKnowledge Freedom. It's designed not only to encrypt, but routes traffic thru multiple servers and doesn't retain records, making tracing extremely difficult (I suspect that if you're under surveillance by the NSA and the incentive was high enough, they'd find a way, but not many people would warant that level of effort).