FedEx and UPS could EASILY pick up this traffic. Yes, they'd have to hire a bunch of people. Good thing there will be lots of postal workers becoming unemployed! I'd be perfectly OK with my mail carrier only showing up once a week for regular mail and dropping it off in a big bundle in order to save money, and only make a special trip for packages if the sender pays normal FedUps rates to get it there within X days. They only pick up my trash twice a week, and I'm OK with that.
Hell, for regular mail (non-packages), UPS/FedEx could charge a small monthly fee to deliver to people's houses at all - if you don't want to pay, pick your mail up at the office. These companies could also sell a mail-digitization service like Earth Class Mail - let them scan all my dead-tree-spam and send me PDF's via email.
I'm also perfectly OK with hiking the crap out of the cost to mail a letter. People are bitching that it's gone up to 40-some cents. Make it $3. Why? All the people who chop down forests to tell me I can save money on breast implants and Bright House cable will knock it off, and the people I actually do business with (credit card companies, the power company, etc.) will be incentivized to make it easier to get electronic billing.
The postal service was a great idea, and we should all thank Ben Franklin for it. Used to be that milk delivery was a good idea too, and it got outmoded. Society moves on. This service has long outlived its usefulness and consumers have been telling it to go away loud and clear for over a decade. Get the hint. Government and government-backed agencies (yes, I know USPS is self-funded now) should NOT be competing with private industry. Where private industry can do it, and do it better, we should let them.
They hired professional investigators, what, last night to track down who did this, and then this morning, ta-da, it's Anonymous!
Anon is becoming the al-Qaeda of the Internet - the generic name used for "anybody who does this sort of thing." Hackers ARE Anonymous, in the same way Curads ARE "Band-Aids" and Puffs Plus ARE "Kleenex" and Sharp copiers ARE "Xerox machines".
The point is, all these methods work, but they're all a royal pain in the ass. I don't want to go drop to a Linux command shell to get rid of cookies; that's why every browser has UI to do that for me. If a browser manufacturer knows there is crap cached on my machine related to my Internet browsing history, then when I ask it to delete all the Internet browsing history, it should delete it. Note that Windows doesn't have a "format my hard drive, but leave the porn alone" button (although this might be useful). Users have a right to expect that a browser's UI will do everything that it says it will, and that there is UI for all of the reasonable activities that might need to be done to keep themselves safe on the Internet.
One of the stories indicated the US has DNA samples. It is very bad in Islamic culture to show pictures of the dead (indeed, you rarely even see that of rank and file terrorists) on the news, so dragging his body to the CNN office would certainly inspire more terrorism than ending him will solve. You can bet, if you haven't heard some high ranking Republican at a podium by the end of the day Monday saying it's a fake, that the president has evidence, and is showing it quietly to the people who matter, including foreign governments.
So switch the thing off for the last 3-4 miles to get to your house, or securely fit your tinfoil hat over it. If you need navigation assistance to get home from 3 miles away, you need to just take the bus.
I don't have a TomTom (got an Android and TomTom in the same birthday), but I don't believe you have to register for any TomTom service, you just buy the thing, plug it in, and it does map-stuff. Unless you sign up for their map update service, I doubt they HAVE your information to give to LEOs. What can they tell you, the serial number of the unit in your car? I'm sure law enforcement, with the ten minutes a month they don't spend trying to hunt down people with insignificant personal quantities of marijuana, will set up a checkpoint so they can check the serial numbers of every TomTom looking for that bastard with serial #93824920535326469 who went 5 miles over the speed limit last week at 4am.
Hence making a new one, and convincing all the agencies to switch to it (possibly with some help from government, as a compromise - use a rating scale that is consistent and makes sense, and we won't regulate you.
I'm saying the "chart" should factor both the sum total of "offensiveness", as well as the high-water mark. I agree whole-heartedly with your premise that a game that's 5/5 in anything should be more closely scrutinized than a game with 5 1's. The reason I propose listing the specific reasons is lifted from the TV rating guides, which tell you WHY a show is rated what it is - that way, if a parent is worried about their kid seeing drug imagery, but is OK with violence, they can make informed decisions based on that.
A merged rating scale would also allow for more effective parental monitoring software - in the age where a PC can be an all-media device, content filtering that says, "You can't watch DVDs, or look at web sites, or play games, in which the total rating is above 12 or the sex rating is above 3" would be very useful for parents. The same logic could be built into DVD players, consoles, and even smartphones. It just makes sense. I know the/. community is very heavily anti-content filtering, and for grown adults I agree 100%, parents need some ability to control what goes on when they can't be there every minute and I am all for giving parents any tools they need (even oppressive ones) to effectively do the difficult job of parenting a 21st century child.
I have no problem with self-regulation, however, it needs to be simplified. There is one rating system for movies, one for TV, and one for games. Let's make one common scale, and something easy, and then have all the boards work together - I mean, TV shows are like movies. Games are like movies. TV shows are sometimes about movies, and games are sometimes about both. It only makes sense.
How about a rating system like what Xbox Arcade uses?
Sex: 0/5 Violence: 3/5 Language: 1/5 Drug References: 0/5
Then, add up the numbers and apply to a chart to determine overall age appropriateness, and say, "Not appropriate for children under X." Do that for all three types of media (hell, even books). Only makes sense.
Superior security!? From a company who has to patch their shit software once a week for YEARS as they find more crap wrong with it? From the company who basically invented Web-based attacks with the barn door they call Internet Explorer? Are you on crack?
I will so quit my job if I can get some free tights.
I like this from a motivational standpoint, as long as they aren't also encouraging laid-off accountants to become crime-fighting vigilantes. If nothing else, it will keep them dry when they're living under an overpass when the recruiting company doesn't find them a job.
Can't speak to the expense, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to turn off NAT on the home routers, and give people 10 IPs with every connection, and charge an extra dollar for every IP needed after 10?
Guys, I am sure there's 100 reasons why this is a dumb idea, but let me just ask.
Why couldn't every ISP that offers consumer-grade connectivity (that doesn't allow serving) do NAT at the ISP level, and give you a few IPs out of their internal Class A? Why couldn't portable devices on a wireless network (looking at smartphones and other 3G stuff) have a NATted IP from Verizon/Sprint/AT&T? Yes, I know it's not as cool to have a NAT address, but you could pay a couple bucks extra for a static, public IP as many broadband customers do now. As far as I understand, for any day-to-day web surfing, chat, media, etc., that would work just fine, unless you wanted to create a public server (at which point you'd buy a static/public IP).
Seems to me this would allow everybody's IPv4 routers and stuff to continue to work just fine, and reclaim tens of millions of IPs from ISPs that would no longer need them (as they could drop to a small number of public IPs to share across the NAT users).
I'm sure I'm missing something, as this scenario seems entirely too convenient to have been ignored. But it should make for good discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get a letter from the italian post office, is it a poste.it note?
*ducks incoming tomatoes*
FedEx and UPS could EASILY pick up this traffic. Yes, they'd have to hire a bunch of people. Good thing there will be lots of postal workers becoming unemployed! I'd be perfectly OK with my mail carrier only showing up once a week for regular mail and dropping it off in a big bundle in order to save money, and only make a special trip for packages if the sender pays normal FedUps rates to get it there within X days. They only pick up my trash twice a week, and I'm OK with that.
Hell, for regular mail (non-packages), UPS/FedEx could charge a small monthly fee to deliver to people's houses at all - if you don't want to pay, pick your mail up at the office. These companies could also sell a mail-digitization service like Earth Class Mail - let them scan all my dead-tree-spam and send me PDF's via email.
I'm also perfectly OK with hiking the crap out of the cost to mail a letter. People are bitching that it's gone up to 40-some cents. Make it $3. Why? All the people who chop down forests to tell me I can save money on breast implants and Bright House cable will knock it off, and the people I actually do business with (credit card companies, the power company, etc.) will be incentivized to make it easier to get electronic billing.
The postal service was a great idea, and we should all thank Ben Franklin for it. Used to be that milk delivery was a good idea too, and it got outmoded. Society moves on. This service has long outlived its usefulness and consumers have been telling it to go away loud and clear for over a decade. Get the hint. Government and government-backed agencies (yes, I know USPS is self-funded now) should NOT be competing with private industry. Where private industry can do it, and do it better, we should let them.
Eat your heart out, OLPC. This is 10 PC's per pocket.
They hired professional investigators, what, last night to track down who did this, and then this morning, ta-da, it's Anonymous!
Anon is becoming the al-Qaeda of the Internet - the generic name used for "anybody who does this sort of thing." Hackers ARE Anonymous, in the same way Curads ARE "Band-Aids" and Puffs Plus ARE "Kleenex" and Sharp copiers ARE "Xerox machines".
The point is, all these methods work, but they're all a royal pain in the ass. I don't want to go drop to a Linux command shell to get rid of cookies; that's why every browser has UI to do that for me. If a browser manufacturer knows there is crap cached on my machine related to my Internet browsing history, then when I ask it to delete all the Internet browsing history, it should delete it. Note that Windows doesn't have a "format my hard drive, but leave the porn alone" button (although this might be useful). Users have a right to expect that a browser's UI will do everything that it says it will, and that there is UI for all of the reasonable activities that might need to be done to keep themselves safe on the Internet.
One of the stories indicated the US has DNA samples. It is very bad in Islamic culture to show pictures of the dead (indeed, you rarely even see that of rank and file terrorists) on the news, so dragging his body to the CNN office would certainly inspire more terrorism than ending him will solve. You can bet, if you haven't heard some high ranking Republican at a podium by the end of the day Monday saying it's a fake, that the president has evidence, and is showing it quietly to the people who matter, including foreign governments.
Sure - that worked wonders at Waco.
So switch the thing off for the last 3-4 miles to get to your house, or securely fit your tinfoil hat over it. If you need navigation assistance to get home from 3 miles away, you need to just take the bus.
I don't have a TomTom (got an Android and TomTom in the same birthday), but I don't believe you have to register for any TomTom service, you just buy the thing, plug it in, and it does map-stuff. Unless you sign up for their map update service, I doubt they HAVE your information to give to LEOs. What can they tell you, the serial number of the unit in your car? I'm sure law enforcement, with the ten minutes a month they don't spend trying to hunt down people with insignificant personal quantities of marijuana, will set up a checkpoint so they can check the serial numbers of every TomTom looking for that bastard with serial #93824920535326469 who went 5 miles over the speed limit last week at 4am.
Yes, I know nothing about cloud-based services, having only designed and authored four of them. It's called a joke, ass.
What Do I Do When The Cloud Disappears?
Call me when I can buy a Nintendo 3DS for fifty cents.
Self-checkout machine: "You have purchased forty-five pounds of spare ribs. You must throw the best barbecue in [your hometown here]."
Consistency across all media.
Nothing wrong with adding these to the proposed system:
Violence (3/5) - cartoon, sexual
etc.
Hence making a new one, and convincing all the agencies to switch to it (possibly with some help from government, as a compromise - use a rating scale that is consistent and makes sense, and we won't regulate you.
I'm saying the "chart" should factor both the sum total of "offensiveness", as well as the high-water mark. I agree whole-heartedly with your premise that a game that's 5/5 in anything should be more closely scrutinized than a game with 5 1's. The reason I propose listing the specific reasons is lifted from the TV rating guides, which tell you WHY a show is rated what it is - that way, if a parent is worried about their kid seeing drug imagery, but is OK with violence, they can make informed decisions based on that.
A merged rating scale would also allow for more effective parental monitoring software - in the age where a PC can be an all-media device, content filtering that says, "You can't watch DVDs, or look at web sites, or play games, in which the total rating is above 12 or the sex rating is above 3" would be very useful for parents. The same logic could be built into DVD players, consoles, and even smartphones. It just makes sense. I know the /. community is very heavily anti-content filtering, and for grown adults I agree 100%, parents need some ability to control what goes on when they can't be there every minute and I am all for giving parents any tools they need (even oppressive ones) to effectively do the difficult job of parenting a 21st century child.
I have no problem with self-regulation, however, it needs to be simplified. There is one rating system for movies, one for TV, and one for games. Let's make one common scale, and something easy, and then have all the boards work together - I mean, TV shows are like movies. Games are like movies. TV shows are sometimes about movies, and games are sometimes about both. It only makes sense.
How about a rating system like what Xbox Arcade uses?
Sex: 0/5
Violence: 3/5
Language: 1/5
Drug References: 0/5
Then, add up the numbers and apply to a chart to determine overall age appropriateness, and say, "Not appropriate for children under X." Do that for all three types of media (hell, even books). Only makes sense.
Superior security!? From a company who has to patch their shit software once a week for YEARS as they find more crap wrong with it? From the company who basically invented Web-based attacks with the barn door they call Internet Explorer? Are you on crack?
No chance your dog eats your homework now.
I will so quit my job if I can get some free tights.
I like this from a motivational standpoint, as long as they aren't also encouraging laid-off accountants to become crime-fighting vigilantes. If nothing else, it will keep them dry when they're living under an overpass when the recruiting company doesn't find them a job.
Serve with the C4 recipe on the next page, and BAM! Kick it up a notch!
what if I've got nasal congestion? This stuff ought to eat through that lickety-split if I inhale the fumes, right?
Can't speak to the expense, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to turn off NAT on the home routers, and give people 10 IPs with every connection, and charge an extra dollar for every IP needed after 10?
Guys, I am sure there's 100 reasons why this is a dumb idea, but let me just ask.
Why couldn't every ISP that offers consumer-grade connectivity (that doesn't allow serving) do NAT at the ISP level, and give you a few IPs out of their internal Class A? Why couldn't portable devices on a wireless network (looking at smartphones and other 3G stuff) have a NATted IP from Verizon/Sprint/AT&T? Yes, I know it's not as cool to have a NAT address, but you could pay a couple bucks extra for a static, public IP as many broadband customers do now. As far as I understand, for any day-to-day web surfing, chat, media, etc., that would work just fine, unless you wanted to create a public server (at which point you'd buy a static/public IP).
Seems to me this would allow everybody's IPv4 routers and stuff to continue to work just fine, and reclaim tens of millions of IPs from ISPs that would no longer need them (as they could drop to a small number of public IPs to share across the NAT users).
I'm sure I'm missing something, as this scenario seems entirely too convenient to have been ignored. But it should make for good discussion.