Officials said the agency is taking bids from companies interesting in creating the registry.
The registry will likely cost about $16 million in its first year and would be paid for with fees collected from telemarketers, officials said. The agency has not decided how those fees will be imposed and still needs congressional approval to collect them.
I'll do it. I want $2.5 million to set it up and $1 million a year to run it. They can keep the rest of the $16 million.
Seriously, what's going to cost $16 million? All you need is a half million in equipment, 3 to 5 people, and some good software. With that you could easily handle a half billion phone numbers and thousands of requests a month for a copy of the list. Maybe I found my next business opportunity.
Do what math? All I did was point out that your provided statistic was irrelevant without additional information. Your comment was meaningless, yet written in a way to imply meaning. Similarly, my comment was meaningless, and you fell for your own type of propaganda. Even from your statistic and my (made up) statistic combined, you could not derive any useful information mathematically because you lack too much information. You can, however imply either poor marketing skills of beverage compaines PR departments or a vast conspiracy to get children to drink just as easily as I implied that you were talking nonsense.
Also, the last two releases of debian have included both the 2.2 kernel and the 2.4 kernel. One of the two is the default and the other reqires some typing in to syslinux. The default is determined by which images you download.
Of course there's nothing current about an old release.
I guess they didn't finish their Linux roll-out yet.
Enough speculation.
They were the first big company to come out and announce that the were going linux. It happened years ago... 1997 I think. The reason there were no icons on the desktop was likely because it was fvwm95 on redhat 5.something. There was no desktop.
I can easily mail an unsealed empty envelope to myself (with enough postage to cover additional non-existent weight)... then down the line, just drop something into the envelope and seal it.
That's why you use certified mail. It costs more, but it's sealed by the post office to provide proof of mailing. They also have a new service where you can e-mail them a document and they'll mail it for you. You don't even have to go to the post office.
Take out a classified ad in the newspaper each day (that you have a file to timestamp) with the filename and MD5 of the file (good luck getting the paper to print the MD5 correctly)
Cheaper and more reliable is certified mail. Mail the hash to yourself, and you'll have a trusted timestamp that is tested and valid in court. Just don't open the envelope when it arrives.:)
Better yet, mail a CD with all the data on it to yourself. Then you don't have to explain MD5 to the judge.
So even if you treat and compensate people fairly, and trust everybody you hire, you must monitor people's activity, investigate suspicious behavior, and, when necessary, prosecute wrongdoers to the fullest extent of the law.
You forgot the most important part. If you can't deal with the remaining bit of uncertanty, BUY INSURANCE! Insurance companies exist to protect against exactly this kind of risk. The more you do to prevent sabotage, the less your insurance will cost, and then if the worst happens you're covered.
Really, do you think this guy's got enough cash on hand to cover the damages? You can't garnish his wages when he's in jail because he won't be making any money.
You don't need complete control to do what this guy did. You only need access to the code. If you write the code, and you're familliar with the code review procedures or smarter than the guy reviewing your code, you don't need access to the systems at all. The other hard working honest admins with software installation access will do the rest of the dirty work for you.
Anyway, the point is that you don't need 'root' access, or lots of privlidges to sabotage a system. You don't even necicarily need cooperation for another admin.
For all you know, they already did what you described.
Debian is now so far behind that I wouldn't feel confident trying it on new hardware.
You haven't even looked at Debian lately. Admit it. If you had you wouldn't make such an incorrect comment.
Just out of curiosity, what do you consider behind about Debian but not about redhat or suse? Redhat and suse both ship 9 month old hacked to deat kernels while debian has 2.4.19.
You can, however, send them to a fundamentalist workbook "school", where their faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics.
I went to a catholic high school. Not all of the students were catholic. There was no pressure to be catholic. We learned about Biology (including evolution and AP level courses. I got a 5 on the exam.), geology, and physics. We also learned alot about various religions (not just Christian religions) that would not have been allowed to be taught in a public school. In fact, public schools help parents decide their children's religious beliefs by shielding them from other options, while the religous school I went to actually gave the students enough information do decide for themselves which religion (if any) was right for them. The only other significant differences between the catholic school I went to and the public high school were that the teachers actually took interest in every student, the standards for grading were higher, 95% of the students went on to college, we had to follow a dress code, and they didn't teach us about birth control (that's what parents are for anyway). The school met state curriculum requirements, and was ranked in the top 10% of schools in the state. I don't doubt that there are religously affiliated schools out there that have an adgenda other than giving their students a first rate education, but they're not all like that.
Oh, by the way, the tuition was $4800 per year. The school recieved no funding from the church. All the money came from tuition and alumni donations.
Now, if a private school can run so well on such a tight budget, why can't public schools do the same with twice as much? (Hint: think unions)
ok, but for a movie theater, how often will an error like this come up? or other troubles? Probably not that often. Likewise for most other businesses. Any idea on how they (card companies) measure things like this?
Even one disputed charge can cause the percentage of the charge the bank keeps as a fee to increase.
on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002 plus use emulator of almost every platform
Nice in theory. I practice, the average person isn't getting any game made before 1998 to run on their PC with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. They'll even have trouble with pre 1995 games with windows 9x. Emulators are great in theory, but they can be hard to get working, and you have to obtain ROMs illegaly which will hardly boost PC software sales (that is what this story is about, right?). Playstation 2 can play games from 1995 without problems, so there's hradly any advantage here.
on PC you can buy very cheap games from "classic packs" or cover CDs, classic games are for example Fallout, Unreal, Thief or Railroad Tycoon 2 - are these games really worse than current "hits"?
You can do the same thing on consoles.
on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles
Shareware games have sucked since things went 3D. Besides, if you're not buying the game it doesn't have anything to do with this story...
last but not least - abandonware, or you can call it "piracy" if you want
See all comments above.
Your "simple facts" are ill placed in a story that sys things aren't as simple as you claim. If it's so simple, why are console games sales growing while PC games sales are shrinking?
--
I think the real problem PC games have lately is that 90% of the new games are FPS type games, and there's only so many of those you can buy.
You don't need it anymore because your new PC is still able to play the old games. You can't get new games for N64 anymore just like you can't get any new games for your P133.
Think about it, burning at 2x means having the CPU move 352800 bytes pr. second, any CPU ought to handle that, burning at 50x means moving 8613 KB/s, not exactly high-throughput in todays world
On any modern machine with a bus-mastering PCI I/O controler, the CPU doesn't have to move any of that data. It's all done using DMA. The CPU tells the Hard disk controller to put some blocks in memory somewhere, and then it tells the CD-R drive controller to read some memory addresses. You're framerate probably sucked because your disk was using most of the PCI bus cycles for DMA, and the PCI bus was probably shared with your video and sound cards. Your CPU was probably starved and mostly idle. Your pentium 133 almost certainly had a DMA capable IDE controller. Windows' CD burning problems were usually because Windows 9x didn't come with DMA aware IDE drivers, and most people didn't install the DMA drivers for their motherboard. Without DMA the CPU bus was a bottleneck (at only 66 Mhz back then). Linux has had DMA capable IDE drivers in the kernel for a very long time, so people typically don't have problems buring under linux. Newer versions of windows are also less problematic.
Also, scheduling latency likely has less to do with the problems of buring CDs than interrupt latency.
Can you read the data on the discs ten years from now?
The sad reality is that nobody can burn a CD-R and use it regularly and still have it work everywhere in ten years. Not on any drive, not on any media.
High quality media burned at 8x is just as good as one burned at 2x. The laser is pulsed for exactly the same amount of time, but they've figured out how to reduce the amount of time the laser needs to be off so it can be pulsed again.
If longevity is important to you you need to keep the media in a dark, dry, 60 degree vault and not touch the disks. Any regular use will reduce the lifespan of any currently available disk to less than 5 years.
I'm sure the exectives sit around in smoke-filled conference rooms coming up with clever ways to keep technology out of the hands of people and make LESS money by NOT selling it. Give me a break.
Nope, but journalists sit around and think of ways to make statistics sound scandalous so that people will read their articles and they'll continue to get a paycheck...
Unfortunatly, I have to weigh my desire to be close to my family and the availability of employment against my potential desire to own a gun. The inability to own a gun is a price I'm currently willing to pay in exchange for the prior needs.
You're unwilling to break the law??? Have you downloaded any mp3s lately?
No. I haven't downloaded any mp3s, but that's not the point. I am unwilling to break the gun control law. I'm not talking about other laws right now.
In my life I do what I feel is right, not what is the law. I will freely break laws that I feel are unjust whether or not they are unconstitutional. If I ever get caught and go to court I will tell them I broke that law, however I feel that that law is unjust and why. It's what the civil rights activists did, its what ghandi did. Don't change the way you live your life because some company paid some old man to sign a piece of paper.
You have to balance your activism against the consequences. I am not so adamant about gun control that I'm willing to spend years in jail to make my point. No matter who is correct and who is wrong, the people who made the law have the power to strip all your freedoms from you and put you behind bars, and you would be unable to do anything about it. You have to manage your risks and choose your battles.
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
That's a joke, right? It's pathetically easy to get a drivers license. In many towns and states it is already MUCH harder to get a gun permit than a drivers license.
And I don't mean to put more police on the street, I mean things like education, and drug rehab, etc...
I think that the problem in the US stems not from a lack of education or rehab, but educational programs the flat out lie to the people it is trying to teach. If things like the D.A.R.E. program told kids the truth about drugs then kids might not get involved with drugs and the potentially violent lifestyle that goes along with addiction.
Unlike Americans, we can't just walk in to the local Guns'R'Us and buy a handgun.
I don't know which Americans you're talking about, but I live in Acton Massachusets, USA, and I cannot legally obtain a handgun. Period. Ever. You need a handgun permit to posess a handgun in my town, and they are handed out at the discression of the chief of police. He won't sign your permit unless you're a personal friend or a friend of one. I just moved here, and I don't know anybody in town, so I'm out. No hand gun for me. Of course I can illegaly obtain one without too much effort, which is why I'm anti-gun-control. Gun control means you can't legally obtain a gun, but you can illegaly obtain a gun. That means the guy robbing my house can have a gun (since he's willing to break the law), but I can't (since I am unwilling to break the law).
Now, I can go down to K-mart and pick up a rifle without a problem, but that's another story...
Slashdot Mirror
Officials said the agency is taking bids from companies interesting in creating the registry.
The registry will likely cost about $16 million in its first year and would be paid for with fees collected from telemarketers, officials said. The agency has not decided how those fees will be imposed and still needs congressional approval to collect them.
I'll do it. I want $2.5 million to set it up and $1 million a year to run it. They can keep the rest of the $16 million.
Seriously, what's going to cost $16 million? All you need is a half million in equipment, 3 to 5 people, and some good software. With that you could easily handle a half billion phone numbers and thousands of requests a month for a copy of the list. Maybe I found my next business opportunity.
Do what math? All I did was point out that your provided statistic was irrelevant without additional information. Your comment was meaningless, yet written in a way to imply meaning. Similarly, my comment was meaningless, and you fell for your own type of propaganda. Even from your statistic and my (made up) statistic combined, you could not derive any useful information mathematically because you lack too much information. You can, however imply either poor marketing skills of beverage compaines PR departments or a vast conspiracy to get children to drink just as easily as I implied that you were talking nonsense.
I in no way strengthened your argument.
What is the difference?
You managed to find the point. Debian is just as up-to-date as redhat and suse.
Progeny is not the latest debian.
Also, the last two releases of debian have included both the 2.2 kernel and the 2.4 kernel. One of the two is the default and the other reqires some typing in to syslinux. The default is determined by which images you download.
Of course there's nothing current about an old release.
I guess they didn't finish their Linux roll-out yet.
Enough speculation.
They were the first big company to come out and announce that the were going linux. It happened years ago... 1997 I think. The reason there were no icons on the desktop was likely because it was fvwm95 on redhat 5.something. There was no desktop.
25 percent of the alcohol advertisements on TV were more likely to be viewed by minors than adults.
This just in... 25% of people are more likely to be minors than adults.
I can easily mail an unsealed empty envelope to myself (with enough postage to cover additional non-existent weight) ... then down the line, just drop something into the envelope and seal it.
That's why you use certified mail. It costs more, but it's sealed by the post office to provide proof of mailing. They also have a new service where you can e-mail them a document and they'll mail it for you. You don't even have to go to the post office.
http://www.usps.com/netpost/certifiedmail_faq.htm
Take out a classified ad in the newspaper each day (that you have a file to timestamp) with the filename and MD5 of the file (good luck getting the paper to print the MD5 correctly)
:)
Cheaper and more reliable is certified mail. Mail the hash to yourself, and you'll have a trusted timestamp that is tested and valid in court. Just don't open the envelope when it arrives.
Better yet, mail a CD with all the data on it to yourself. Then you don't have to explain MD5 to the judge.
So even if you treat and compensate people fairly, and trust everybody you hire, you must monitor people's activity, investigate suspicious behavior, and, when necessary, prosecute wrongdoers to the fullest extent of the law.
You forgot the most important part. If you can't deal with the remaining bit of uncertanty, BUY INSURANCE! Insurance companies exist to protect against exactly this kind of risk. The more you do to prevent sabotage, the less your insurance will cost, and then if the worst happens you're covered.
Really, do you think this guy's got enough cash on hand to cover the damages? You can't garnish his wages when he's in jail because he won't be making any money.
Here's why you're wrong:
You don't need complete control to do what this guy did. You only need access to the code. If you write the code, and you're familliar with the code review procedures or smarter than the guy reviewing your code, you don't need access to the systems at all. The other hard working honest admins with software installation access will do the rest of the dirty work for you.
Anyway, the point is that you don't need 'root' access, or lots of privlidges to sabotage a system. You don't even necicarily need cooperation for another admin.
For all you know, they already did what you described.
Now we know that people are willing to pay $800 not to have to compile things (bad news for gentoo).
Turns out we had the whole business model idea wrong. Don't charge for support, charge for compilation!
Debian is now so far behind that I wouldn't feel confident trying it on new hardware.
You haven't even looked at Debian lately. Admit it. If you had you wouldn't make such an incorrect comment.
Just out of curiosity, what do you consider behind about Debian but not about redhat or suse? Redhat and suse both ship 9 month old hacked to deat kernels while debian has 2.4.19.
You can, however, send them to a fundamentalist workbook "school", where their faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics.
I went to a catholic high school. Not all of the students were catholic. There was no pressure to be catholic. We learned about Biology (including evolution and AP level courses. I got a 5 on the exam.), geology, and physics. We also learned alot about various religions (not just Christian religions) that would not have been allowed to be taught in a public school. In fact, public schools help parents decide their children's religious beliefs by shielding them from other options, while the religous school I went to actually gave the students enough information do decide for themselves which religion (if any) was right for them. The only other significant differences between the catholic school I went to and the public high school were that the teachers actually took interest in every student, the standards for grading were higher, 95% of the students went on to college, we had to follow a dress code, and they didn't teach us about birth control (that's what parents are for anyway). The school met state curriculum requirements, and was ranked in the top 10% of schools in the state. I don't doubt that there are religously affiliated schools out there that have an adgenda other than giving their students a first rate education, but they're not all like that.
Oh, by the way, the tuition was $4800 per year. The school recieved no funding from the church. All the money came from tuition and alumni donations.
Now, if a private school can run so well on such a tight budget, why can't public schools do the same with twice as much? (Hint: think unions)
ok, but for a movie theater, how often will an error like this come up? or other troubles? Probably not that often. Likewise for most other businesses. Any idea on how they (card companies) measure things like this?
Even one disputed charge can cause the percentage of the charge the bank keeps as a fee to increase.
This way even if the BIOS won't let you boot a firewire drive, you can still do it.
Unlikely. If the BIOS can't see and boot the disk, than grub or lilo won't be able to read the disk to boot from it.
on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002 plus use emulator of almost every platform
Nice in theory. I practice, the average person isn't getting any game made before 1998 to run on their PC with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. They'll even have trouble with pre 1995 games with windows 9x. Emulators are great in theory, but they can be hard to get working, and you have to obtain ROMs illegaly which will hardly boost PC software sales (that is what this story is about, right?). Playstation 2 can play games from 1995 without problems, so there's hradly any advantage here.
on PC you can buy very cheap games from "classic packs" or cover CDs, classic games are for example Fallout, Unreal, Thief or Railroad Tycoon 2 - are these games really worse than current "hits"?
You can do the same thing on consoles.
on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles
Shareware games have sucked since things went 3D. Besides, if you're not buying the game it doesn't have anything to do with this story...
last but not least - abandonware, or you can call it "piracy" if you want
See all comments above.
Your "simple facts" are ill placed in a story that sys things aren't as simple as you claim. If it's so simple, why are console games sales growing while PC games sales are shrinking?
--
I think the real problem PC games have lately is that 90% of the new games are FPS type games, and there's only so many of those you can buy.
Guess where's my 133 MHz PC?
You don't need it anymore because your new PC is still able to play the old games. You can't get new games for N64 anymore just like you can't get any new games for your P133.
Think about it, burning at 2x means having the CPU move 352800 bytes pr. second, any CPU ought to handle that, burning at 50x means moving 8613 KB/s, not exactly high-throughput in todays world
On any modern machine with a bus-mastering PCI I/O controler, the CPU doesn't have to move any of that data. It's all done using DMA. The CPU tells the Hard disk controller to put some blocks in memory somewhere, and then it tells the CD-R drive controller to read some memory addresses. You're framerate probably sucked because your disk was using most of the PCI bus cycles for DMA, and the PCI bus was probably shared with your video and sound cards. Your CPU was probably starved and mostly idle. Your pentium 133 almost certainly had a DMA capable IDE controller. Windows' CD burning problems were usually because Windows 9x didn't come with DMA aware IDE drivers, and most people didn't install the DMA drivers for their motherboard. Without DMA the CPU bus was a bottleneck (at only 66 Mhz back then). Linux has had DMA capable IDE drivers in the kernel for a very long time, so people typically don't have problems buring under linux. Newer versions of windows are also less problematic.
Also, scheduling latency likely has less to do with the problems of buring CDs than interrupt latency.
Can you read the data on the discs ten years from now?
The sad reality is that nobody can burn a CD-R and use it regularly and still have it work everywhere in ten years. Not on any drive, not on any media.
High quality media burned at 8x is just as good as one burned at 2x. The laser is pulsed for exactly the same amount of time, but they've figured out how to reduce the amount of time the laser needs to be off so it can be pulsed again.
If longevity is important to you you need to keep the media in a dark, dry, 60 degree vault and not touch the disks. Any regular use will reduce the lifespan of any currently available disk to less than 5 years.
I'm sure the exectives sit around in smoke-filled conference rooms coming up with clever ways to keep technology out of the hands of people and make LESS money by NOT selling it. Give me a break.
Nope, but journalists sit around and think of ways to make statistics sound scandalous so that people will read their articles and they'll continue to get a paycheck...
Move to Kentucky.
Unfortunatly, I have to weigh my desire to be close to my family and the availability of employment against my potential desire to own a gun. The inability to own a gun is a price I'm currently willing to pay in exchange for the prior needs.
You're unwilling to break the law??? Have you downloaded any mp3s lately?
No. I haven't downloaded any mp3s, but that's not the point. I am unwilling to break the gun control law. I'm not talking about other laws right now.
In my life I do what I feel is right, not what is the law. I will freely break laws that I feel are unjust whether or not they are unconstitutional. If I ever get caught and go to court I will tell them I broke that law, however I feel that that law is unjust and why. It's what the civil rights activists did, its what ghandi did. Don't change the way you live your life because some company paid some old man to sign a piece of paper.
You have to balance your activism against the consequences. I am not so adamant about gun control that I'm willing to spend years in jail to make my point. No matter who is correct and who is wrong, the people who made the law have the power to strip all your freedoms from you and put you behind bars, and you would be unable to do anything about it. You have to manage your risks and choose your battles.
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
That's a joke, right? It's pathetically easy to get a drivers license. In many towns and states it is already MUCH harder to get a gun permit than a drivers license.
If anything the drivers test needs to be harder.
And I don't mean to put more police on the street, I mean things like education, and drug rehab, etc...
I think that the problem in the US stems not from a lack of education or rehab, but educational programs the flat out lie to the people it is trying to teach. If things like the D.A.R.E. program told kids the truth about drugs then kids might not get involved with drugs and the potentially violent lifestyle that goes along with addiction.
Unlike Americans, we can't just walk in to the local Guns'R'Us and buy a handgun.
I don't know which Americans you're talking about, but I live in Acton Massachusets, USA, and I cannot legally obtain a handgun. Period. Ever. You need a handgun permit to posess a handgun in my town, and they are handed out at the discression of the chief of police. He won't sign your permit unless you're a personal friend or a friend of one. I just moved here, and I don't know anybody in town, so I'm out. No hand gun for me. Of course I can illegaly obtain one without too much effort, which is why I'm anti-gun-control. Gun control means you can't legally obtain a gun, but you can illegaly obtain a gun. That means the guy robbing my house can have a gun (since he's willing to break the law), but I can't (since I am unwilling to break the law).
Now, I can go down to K-mart and pick up a rifle without a problem, but that's another story...