So,... you have no credit cards, don't own a house or a car either, as far as I can tell, because all these things have insanely complicated contracts that the banks can change willy-nilly if they please.
I'd also have to say that you don't own a cell-phone either, as most phone contracts are bigger than the phone book. And I'll bet you don't have cable-TV either. Or Health Insurance.
In fact, here in America, almost everything comes with an insanely complicated contract that grants all kinds of rights to the giant-mega-corp, and almost nothing to you. And you're paying them for that priviledge. Ain't capitalism grand?
To be fair it isn't ALL that bad. I'm not the GP, but I live a similar life style (or try to)
Credit cards: nope (Debit though, through a checking account used just for that purpose) Own a house: nope, though that one is a downside IMHO. I rent a house now. Own a car: Yes, I've owned all my cars. Never had a bank loan to do so however thankfully. Cell Phone: Only lately did I go with an at&t contract (I was prepaid prior to that, which has a 30 day contract, so any evil changes can not possibly last past 30 days) so I fail at this one. Cable TV: Actually at least in my city, those are month to month contracts too. Now I should admit I only have 'basic cable' enough to have cable modem data services, which is all I actually use. So there may very well be TV programming related changes being made that I would not like... But not watching TV that way, I guess we should just say I'm a bad example for this one personally.
So really the only two I see as a downside I have are the expense of a place to live ($rent > $own), and my new smart phone being on a 2 year contract (Thankfully it is up in June!), I've managed to live quite easily and well, usually without even trying too hard, avoiding unfair contracts.
Of course I won't claim to be the average person, so your argument still stands when qualified as 'most people in America'. My only point being, even in America, the "U$ofA", it's still not that hard to avoid if you care about that, and other than having gotten used to spending cash (or rather preparing ahead of time by bringing the needed cash with me, and thus setting a limit to my spending - again Personally i think this is a better way) nothing else needed adjustment
Money laundering? Legalize victimless activities and the "money laundering" problem goes away. As do most of the other problems associated with those activities.
What an astute observation. Legalize identity theft, online fraud, and credit card theft,
... Just the very fact you think identity theft, fraud, and credit card theft has NO VICTIMS - That pretty much rules out any weight to your opinions or comments on the subject I'd say
Thank you, dozens of people who highlighted "The most important things in life are friends"; I'm glad that if you forget this pearl of wisdom in the future, you can return to the convenient highlight marker and be re-enlightened.
LOL, that so reminds me of back in college, where I would actually see people highlighting entire paragraphs covering over 1/3rd of each page, for multiple pages...
It would be quicker and give you the same reference accuracy to just write down the start and end page numbers on the book cover:P
"I just highlighted every last word from page 95 to 103" never made sense to me as a workable study or reminder technique.
Don't you dare to compare PDF with ASCII! ASCII is a character-encoding scheme, PDF is a file format. Apples and oranges.
So you are seriously trying to argue that PDF existed as long as ASCII or Postscript?
Seeing as that is the only way they were compared (year released to public), and you are arguing, that seems to be your stance.
So I will dare to compare them, and will say it once again. ASCII and postscript will remain usable and displayable LONG LONG after PDF has disappeared. You will need to provide more of an argument as to WHY that is not true to convince me otherwise.
But you can extract the postscript from a PDF (For 99% of them, you don't even have to do that) and dump it straight into any laser printer to get a printout.
Ironically in that case, ascii is less useful to a printer since sending text to a printer will require it to map it to a font and then translate that into postscript before it can be printed.
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
That complaint about.DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010. Those formats are very temporary in their usability.
To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.
PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or.ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.
As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable. This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.
Can a TSA employee be arrested for child porn if the cops catch him just as a minor is walking through the scanner?
I don't know about the UK (Or even AU), but in the USA the answer is no.
American TSA agents are exempt from most of those laws while in their line of duty.
To them, it is not a crime to have child pornography at work (Barring a second job of course) This also assumes you can convince a judge or jury that a picture of a 7 year old naked is even pornography in the first place.
The only two reasons this particular agent got arrested was: 1) The beating was in the parking lot not indoors, and 2) The person he assaulted was also a TSA agent and not a non-law-enforcement person.
I'm guessing #2 is the main reason. Assaulting anyone else would be legal if done on his shift when he could claim it was in the line of duty. If he attacked a nobody instead of his superior, there is a decent chance he wouldn't have even been asked to leave for a day with pay.
Of course not, but pictures of your naked body ARE online after passing through a body scan machine at the airport. There is no reason networking comes built in and enabled if it wasn't to be used.
So lets see. Naked pictures taken, transfered over networking (online), and used in ways against your will (rights)
And keep in mind, the law doesn't say "Only protect against what Coren22 cares about", so the fact you don't care is not a relevant issue.
They can also say people in red shirts have to pay double. That doesn't make it enforcible or even correct.
That rule is only there because there's a much smaller window of opportunity to get money from a red shirt, before they are called to the bridge or on an away mission and their spending days are over!
and the decision to drop it is a setback for those who argue that the cameras slow speeders, reduce accidents, and free up police for more serious matters.
You do realize simply murdering every last person that is not a police officer, would ALSO stop speeders, reduce accidents (and all crime in general), and free up the police for more serious matters.
Just because my examples form of wrong is way way worse than Arizonas form of wrong is not an excuse.
(cheap & energy efficient Atom nettop would be fine too, of course...but WiFi routers are somewhat closer to the "independent" webcams you mentioned)
Not for the mass market or 'end user' at all, but for those interested in the DIY approach: http://www.plugcomputer.org/
These little things are awesome. 2.5" usb powered external HD + a sheevaplug = teeny fileserver that can tuck away almost anywhere.
This plus two usb cameras could make a great webserver stream of the video. Just plug it in the wall, give it ethernet or a wifi usb stick, and hang a camera off it.
Protip: In debian (and I assume any debian-like distro) you are just an apt-get install webcam-server away
Ummmm....the point isn't that you can disable it. It's that it's extra advertising that's automatically inserted by default. If I buy a product, the company should be happy enough about that, not make strong suggestions that I continue advertising their product. Most consumers leave their gadgets at default settings, and Apple is relying on that tendency.
Yea:/
Now I should say up front, I do like Apples products. But that advertising thing even bugs me.
However in one case, specifically with my iPhone, I've discovered it's actually better for me to keep that there. Sorta. One of the first things I did after setting up email on my phone, was delete the signature.
I noticed that when sending email from my iphone, I would compose the emails totally differently than I would at any computer (Be it from home or in the office), and people would actually read that as being too snippy to them, or are pissed off at something.
Re-reading my sentbox, I could see why. They had no idea i was adjusting my replies to be quick, for the trade off of getting a response in minutes instead of when I am next back in the office (Possibly 12 hours later if they send it right after I leave the building, or worse if that is on a friday)
I went in and re-added that signature, slightly modified:
-- Thanks, Dissy [Sent from cellphone]
(Well, I do use my real name for work)
Now people know I am typing on a teeny crappy onscreen keyboard that thinks it knows better than i what word I meant, and its just the quick 'text message' type thing. They know if it isn't that important it can wait until I am at a computer and can compose a more helpful reply. If it is an emergency, they now know to stop paging me on the loudspeakers and either call my cell, or I would be calling them directly.
But sure, the sig mentioning the iphone specifically is borderline spamming my friends family and coworkers. They do not need to know which device that sim card is in anyway, they ALL have tiny crappy keyboards for composing long email replies with:P
How about all the students microwave their ID cards for 5 seconds destroying the RFID chip? When the attendance for every class reads 0 they will get the message.
I'm not sure if it is sad or not, but my first thoughts after reading the summary were along the lines of "Wow, how do I set up something like that in my house, and put tags on all my stuff so I never lose things again!"
I think the school is thinking the same way, they only have a very disturbing definition of 'inventory' to track...
The freshman at my institution are mostly 18 years old. That means they can vote, and they can risk their lives in our foreign wars. In my opinion, that makes them adults, and that gives them responsibility over their use of time.
Yet the opinion of the state is those same adults are not yet old enough adults to purchase alcohol.
No, I don't disagree with you (Even that last bit about considering them adults)
Just seems like something 'insightful' is hiding in the fact that everyone has different opinions of what adult means, I just can't find it.
To some, it's being a minute over a certain age. To others, it's a level of maturity. In most all cases, those two things are not related;}
Since you brought it up: From your own badly linked article: "However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires."
I can't say I've ever seen a dot matrix (or any) printer catch fire from friction, my own first personal experience with that was the error messages in the Linux LPT driver source, warning you on the console messages that the printer was indeed on fire!
If we (humanity) figures out how to perform construction tasks on the nano-scale level in large scale (Ok, large for the nano scale), we can surpass the physical limits you posted.
A big *if* of course, but we are making progress even now. Most people don't ponder 'if' anymore, only 'when'.
Scientists feel much more comfortable stating the limits of physics, which we mostly know (and any inaccuracies will just raise the bar, not lower it)
Only so much matter and energy can be in a given space at a time, and the more energy involves more heat and disposal of such, and basically the other problems stem out from those.
We are FAR from using a single atom as a transistor in bulk scale now. In a hundred years? Assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the meantime, that is not really too unrealistic a goal.
We are still far from the limits physics imposes on us. We are still consistently making progress in our learning and abilities.
Those two will converge at some point as you say, but at far far smaller scales than 10x our current transistor density.
Moore's law will not be debunked, but we will surely go past it sooner or later.
Moore's law is not a law, nor even a theory. It is an observation, nothing more.
It can't be debunked by definition, as debunking (proving wrong) can only happen when a statement claims to prove something in the first place.
An observation always remains true no matter (and despite of) its predictive powers.
If I see a blue butterfly today, and tomorrow something happens to cause all blue butterflies to go extinct or something, that 100% will change any future predictions based on my observation. It does not change the truth of the observation in the first place.
Moore's law can only be proven wrong, if you prove that transistor count has NOT actually doubled any of the prior years it observed it doing so.
If the earth blew up today, halting transistor development fully, it would still not prove Moores law wrong, as at the time it claims the observations were made, it was actually true.
The problem is that if you try to advertise a route for a/24 all those big routers will just ignore you.
Very true.
But it seems the article is referring more to companies that own a/8 (or at least larger than a/16) and selling off large blocks out of it.
The smaller blocks will definitely have the problems you describe. But that might just be a condition of the 'black market' sale, left to the buyer to figure out. A/24 would most likely be useless as far as core routers go, but a/20 or/21 might work Most places, or at least enough for the intended use of the buyer.
How do you secretly buy something that only works, by definition, if the public routing table knows it belongs to you?
A similar way that little chinese ISP ended up routing half of the worlds networks to them for a few hours.
Any core routers willing to advertise the route will get traffic for that IP block.
This only causes a problem when two route entries are 'out there' and the wrong one ends up taking control and everyone notices. In a case like this, the original owners won't be filing complaints and there shouldn't be two routes, just the one new one.
Why would the ISP of the new-ip-block-owners question it if they have a valid ASN and it is not currently being advertised (routed, or in use) on the internet now?
The only thing that might stop this if ARIN choose to, is their IP contracts specifically ban reselling entire IP blocks (You can only reallocate blocks out of it, not reassign)
Now I've never owned more than a/20 through ARIN, so not exactly a big player here, and I've never heard of or seen that policy being enforced, but that doesn't mean they can't start doing so if this black market thingy starts annoying them.
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE/tmp ON BOOT option! Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in/tmp, but still no excuse.
To be fair, I blame this on a lack of good Linux documentation.
Referencing the gentoo howto titled "Production database environment on tmpfs ramdisk" section 3 subsection 2a, they provide clear and simple wiring guides for attaching a car battery to your RAM, thus removing the need to reboot and preserving your/tmp data.
To summarize, get yourself a car battery and a set of old jumper cables. Cut the connectors off one end of the cables, and strip about 1/8th inch of insulation off the end, twisting the stranded wires together.
Then, take the exposed wire end of the jumper cables, and carefully align it with the 5 volt pin 134 of your first DIMM.
Take care not to touch either of the pins next to it, or any other exposed surfaces! The 3/4th inch diameter wire of the jumper cables will make this especially tricky, but persistence is a virtue. Keep trying, it will fit eventually!
Just duct tape the negative wire to the metal of the case.
Then attach the jumper cables to the battery following normal car jumping procedures (Ground first, then hot, with the engine running) and crank gentoo over.
If you would like to help others avoid this simple mistake and many hours of frustration, you should join my freshmeat project group to form a policy to vote on the wording of the bug report to raise this documentation files priority for inclusion with the official documentation.
No, it's like people are complaining that their refrigerator can't keep chicken cold, it only works with beef.
To be fair, its more like apple haters saying these refrigerators can't keep chicken cold it only works with beef, and thus no one in the world should ever buy one and wanting one makes you stupid... even if you despise chicken and only eat beef.
Slashdot Mirror
So,... you have no credit cards, don't own a house or a car either, as far as I can tell, because all these things have insanely complicated contracts that the banks can change willy-nilly if they please.
I'd also have to say that you don't own a cell-phone either, as most phone contracts are bigger than the phone book. And I'll bet you don't have cable-TV either. Or Health Insurance.
In fact, here in America, almost everything comes with an insanely complicated contract that grants all kinds of rights to the giant-mega-corp, and almost nothing to you. And you're paying them for that priviledge. Ain't capitalism grand?
To be fair it isn't ALL that bad. I'm not the GP, but I live a similar life style (or try to)
Credit cards: nope (Debit though, through a checking account used just for that purpose)
Own a house: nope, though that one is a downside IMHO. I rent a house now.
Own a car: Yes, I've owned all my cars. Never had a bank loan to do so however thankfully.
Cell Phone: Only lately did I go with an at&t contract (I was prepaid prior to that, which has a 30 day contract, so any evil changes can not possibly last past 30 days) so I fail at this one.
Cable TV: Actually at least in my city, those are month to month contracts too.
Now I should admit I only have 'basic cable' enough to have cable modem data services, which is all I actually use. So there may very well be TV programming related changes being made that I would not like... But not watching TV that way, I guess we should just say I'm a bad example for this one personally.
So really the only two I see as a downside I have are the expense of a place to live ($rent > $own), and my new smart phone being on a 2 year contract (Thankfully it is up in June!), I've managed to live quite easily and well, usually without even trying too hard, avoiding unfair contracts.
Of course I won't claim to be the average person, so your argument still stands when qualified as 'most people in America'. My only point being, even in America, the "U$ofA", it's still not that hard to avoid if you care about that, and other than having gotten used to spending cash (or rather preparing ahead of time by bringing the needed cash with me, and thus setting a limit to my spending - again Personally i think this is a better way) nothing else needed adjustment
Money laundering? Legalize victimless activities and the "money laundering" problem goes away. As do most of the other problems associated with those activities.
What an astute observation. Legalize identity theft, online fraud, and credit card theft,
...
Just the very fact you think identity theft, fraud, and credit card theft has NO VICTIMS - That pretty much rules out any weight to your opinions or comments on the subject I'd say
Thank you, dozens of people who highlighted "The most important things in life are friends"; I'm glad that if you forget this pearl of wisdom in the future, you can return to the convenient highlight marker and be re-enlightened.
LOL, that so reminds me of back in college, where I would actually see people highlighting entire paragraphs covering over 1/3rd of each page, for multiple pages...
It would be quicker and give you the same reference accuracy to just write down the start and end page numbers on the book cover :P
"I just highlighted every last word from page 95 to 103" never made sense to me as a workable study or reminder technique.
Your post is quite insightful and in depth.
I still fail however to see any points you raise that would make it a BAD thing (for everyone else) for the BSA to report said numbers anyway ;}
Don't you dare to compare PDF with ASCII! ASCII is a character-encoding scheme, PDF is a file format. Apples and oranges.
So you are seriously trying to argue that PDF existed as long as ASCII or Postscript?
Seeing as that is the only way they were compared (year released to public), and you are arguing, that seems to be your stance.
So I will dare to compare them, and will say it once again. ASCII and postscript will remain usable and displayable LONG LONG after PDF has disappeared. You will need to provide more of an argument as to WHY that is not true to convince me otherwise.
But you can extract the postscript from a PDF (For 99% of them, you don't even have to do that) and dump it straight into any laser printer to get a printout.
Ironically in that case, ascii is less useful to a printer since sending text to a printer will require it to map it to a font and then translate that into postscript before it can be printed.
Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?
That complaint about .DOC is very correct. Just a couple weeks ago someone at the company I worked for received a Word 2.0 document and was asking for my help opening it as he only had Word 2010.
Those formats are very temporary in their usability.
To be fair however PDF has a reasonable chance of surviving way past your requirement of 25 years.
PDF was made in 1993 by Adobe, which was only 17 years ago yes. But PDF is just a bunch of additions to PostScript ( or .ps files) which has been a widely used format since 1982, which was 28 years ago.
As long as one avoids the worst of the PDF specific features like DRM and scripting, the bulk of the content and markup will be readable.
This is one format that will probably remain around next to forever, just like ASCII.
Can a TSA employee be arrested for child porn if the cops catch him just as a minor is walking through the scanner?
I don't know about the UK (Or even AU), but in the USA the answer is no.
American TSA agents are exempt from most of those laws while in their line of duty.
To them, it is not a crime to have child pornography at work (Barring a second job of course)
This also assumes you can convince a judge or jury that a picture of a 7 year old naked is even pornography in the first place.
The only two reasons this particular agent got arrested was:
1) The beating was in the parking lot not indoors, and
2) The person he assaulted was also a TSA agent and not a non-law-enforcement person.
I'm guessing #2 is the main reason. Assaulting anyone else would be legal if done on his shift when he could claim it was in the line of duty.
If he attacked a nobody instead of his superior, there is a decent chance he wouldn't have even been asked to leave for a day with pay.
You fly online? ?
Of course not, but pictures of your naked body ARE online after passing through a body scan machine at the airport.
There is no reason networking comes built in and enabled if it wasn't to be used.
So lets see. Naked pictures taken, transfered over networking (online), and used in ways against your will (rights)
And keep in mind, the law doesn't say "Only protect against what Coren22 cares about", so the fact you don't care is not a relevant issue.
They can also say people in red shirts have to pay double. That doesn't make it enforcible or even correct.
That rule is only there because there's a much smaller window of opportunity to get money from a red shirt, before they are called to the bridge or on an away mission and their spending days are over!
and the decision to drop it is a setback for those who argue that the cameras slow speeders, reduce accidents, and free up police for more serious matters.
You do realize simply murdering every last person that is not a police officer, would ALSO stop speeders, reduce accidents (and all crime in general), and free up the police for more serious matters.
Just because my examples form of wrong is way way worse than Arizonas form of wrong is not an excuse.
(cheap & energy efficient Atom nettop would be fine too, of course...but WiFi routers are somewhat closer to the "independent" webcams you mentioned)
Not for the mass market or 'end user' at all, but for those interested in the DIY approach:
http://www.plugcomputer.org/
These little things are awesome.
2.5" usb powered external HD + a sheevaplug = teeny fileserver that can tuck away almost anywhere.
This plus two usb cameras could make a great webserver stream of the video.
Just plug it in the wall, give it ethernet or a wifi usb stick, and hang a camera off it.
Protip: In debian (and I assume any debian-like distro) you are just an apt-get install webcam-server away
Why no officer, I ah*chooo*
SHIT! Cheese it!
Ummmm....the point isn't that you can disable it. It's that it's extra advertising that's automatically inserted by default. If I buy a product, the company should be happy enough about that, not make strong suggestions that I continue advertising their product. Most consumers leave their gadgets at default settings, and Apple is relying on that tendency.
Yea :/
Now I should say up front, I do like Apples products. But that advertising thing even bugs me.
However in one case, specifically with my iPhone, I've discovered it's actually better for me to keep that there. Sorta.
One of the first things I did after setting up email on my phone, was delete the signature.
I noticed that when sending email from my iphone, I would compose the emails totally differently than I would at any computer (Be it from home or in the office), and people would actually read that as being too snippy to them, or are pissed off at something.
Re-reading my sentbox, I could see why. They had no idea i was adjusting my replies to be quick, for the trade off of getting a response in minutes instead of when I am next back in the office (Possibly 12 hours later if they send it right after I leave the building, or worse if that is on a friday)
I went in and re-added that signature, slightly modified:
-- Thanks, Dissy [Sent from cellphone]
(Well, I do use my real name for work)
Now people know I am typing on a teeny crappy onscreen keyboard that thinks it knows better than i what word I meant, and its just the quick 'text message' type thing. They know if it isn't that important it can wait until I am at a computer and can compose a more helpful reply. If it is an emergency, they now know to stop paging me on the loudspeakers and either call my cell, or I would be calling them directly.
But sure, the sig mentioning the iphone specifically is borderline spamming my friends family and coworkers. They do not need to know which device that sim card is in anyway, they ALL have tiny crappy keyboards for composing long email replies with :P
How about all the students microwave their ID cards for 5 seconds destroying the RFID chip? When the attendance for every class reads 0 they will get the message.
I'm not sure if it is sad or not, but my first thoughts after reading the summary were along the lines of "Wow, how do I set up something like that in my house, and put tags on all my stuff so I never lose things again!"
I think the school is thinking the same way, they only have a very disturbing definition of 'inventory' to track...
The freshman at my institution are mostly 18 years old. That means they can vote, and they can risk their lives in our foreign wars. In my opinion, that makes them adults, and that gives them responsibility over their use of time.
Yet the opinion of the state is those same adults are not yet old enough adults to purchase alcohol.
No, I don't disagree with you (Even that last bit about considering them adults)
Just seems like something 'insightful' is hiding in the fact that everyone has different opinions of what adult means, I just can't find it.
To some, it's being a minute over a certain age. To others, it's a level of maturity. ;}
In most all cases, those two things are not related
Doh!
Well, that would be a 'no'. However, more accurately a 'I did try!'
I'm not quite sure which tab I hit 'parent' in, but it was decidedly not the tab with your post in it.
Let's chalk this one up to I didn't sleep last night, so it's still a Monday ;}
Sorry!
Since you brought it up: From your own badly linked article: "However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires."
I can't say I've ever seen a dot matrix (or any) printer catch fire from friction, my own first personal experience with that was the error messages in the Linux LPT driver source, warning you on the console messages that the printer was indeed on fire!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
One could trigger this error in hardware by bringing a couple status bits on the port high as well ;}
What, not Cooters Rat Semen? ;}
If we (humanity) figures out how to perform construction tasks on the nano-scale level in large scale (Ok, large for the nano scale), we can surpass the physical limits you posted.
A big *if* of course, but we are making progress even now. Most people don't ponder 'if' anymore, only 'when'.
Scientists feel much more comfortable stating the limits of physics, which we mostly know (and any inaccuracies will just raise the bar, not lower it)
Only so much matter and energy can be in a given space at a time, and the more energy involves more heat and disposal of such, and basically the other problems stem out from those.
We are FAR from using a single atom as a transistor in bulk scale now. In a hundred years? Assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the meantime, that is not really too unrealistic a goal.
We are still far from the limits physics imposes on us.
We are still consistently making progress in our learning and abilities.
Those two will converge at some point as you say, but at far far smaller scales than 10x our current transistor density.
Moore's law will not be debunked, but we will surely go past it sooner or later.
Moore's law is not a law, nor even a theory. It is an observation, nothing more.
It can't be debunked by definition, as debunking (proving wrong) can only happen when a statement claims to prove something in the first place.
An observation always remains true no matter (and despite of) its predictive powers.
If I see a blue butterfly today, and tomorrow something happens to cause all blue butterflies to go extinct or something, that 100% will change any future predictions based on my observation. It does not change the truth of the observation in the first place.
Moore's law can only be proven wrong, if you prove that transistor count has NOT actually doubled any of the prior years it observed it doing so.
If the earth blew up today, halting transistor development fully, it would still not prove Moores law wrong, as at the time it claims the observations were made, it was actually true.
The problem is that if you try to advertise a route for a /24 all those big routers will just ignore you.
Very true.
But it seems the article is referring more to companies that own a /8 (or at least larger than a /16) and selling off large blocks out of it.
The smaller blocks will definitely have the problems you describe. But that might just be a condition of the 'black market' sale, left to the buyer to figure out. /24 would most likely be useless as far as core routers go, but a /20 or /21 might work Most places, or at least enough for the intended use of the buyer.
A
How do you secretly buy something that only works, by definition, if the public routing table knows it belongs to you?
A similar way that little chinese ISP ended up routing half of the worlds networks to them for a few hours.
Any core routers willing to advertise the route will get traffic for that IP block.
This only causes a problem when two route entries are 'out there' and the wrong one ends up taking control and everyone notices.
In a case like this, the original owners won't be filing complaints and there shouldn't be two routes, just the one new one.
Why would the ISP of the new-ip-block-owners question it if they have a valid ASN and it is not currently being advertised (routed, or in use) on the internet now?
The only thing that might stop this if ARIN choose to, is their IP contracts specifically ban reselling entire IP blocks (You can only reallocate blocks out of it, not reassign)
Now I've never owned more than a /20 through ARIN, so not exactly a big player here, and I've never heard of or seen that policy being enforced, but that doesn't mean they can't start doing so if this black market thingy starts annoying them.
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option! /tmp, but still no excuse.
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in
To be fair, I blame this on a lack of good Linux documentation.
Referencing the gentoo howto titled "Production database environment on tmpfs ramdisk" section 3 subsection 2a, they provide clear and simple wiring guides for attaching a car battery to your RAM, thus removing the need to reboot and preserving your /tmp data.
To summarize, get yourself a car battery and a set of old jumper cables.
Cut the connectors off one end of the cables, and strip about 1/8th inch of insulation off the end, twisting the stranded wires together.
Then, take the exposed wire end of the jumper cables, and carefully align it with the 5 volt pin 134 of your first DIMM.
Take care not to touch either of the pins next to it, or any other exposed surfaces!
The 3/4th inch diameter wire of the jumper cables will make this especially tricky, but persistence is a virtue. Keep trying, it will fit eventually!
Just duct tape the negative wire to the metal of the case.
Then attach the jumper cables to the battery following normal car jumping procedures (Ground first, then hot, with the engine running) and crank gentoo over.
If you would like to help others avoid this simple mistake and many hours of frustration, you should join my freshmeat project group to form a policy to vote on the wording of the bug report to raise this documentation files priority for inclusion with the official documentation.
No, it's like people are complaining that their refrigerator can't keep chicken cold, it only works with beef.
To be fair, its more like apple haters saying these refrigerators can't keep chicken cold it only works with beef, and thus no one in the world should ever buy one and wanting one makes you stupid... even if you despise chicken and only eat beef.