This box, while looking pretty flexible in most areas, does not have a positioner so cannot control a motorised dish directly. There is also no mention of DiSEqC 1.2 (explained here along with lots of other things) compatibility which would be an alternative to a positioner (the specs only mention LNB switching which is DiSEqC 1.0). The specs *do* mention an I2C connection for an external control and there is Linux support for it in the kernel apparently.
Oh, and the twin SCART sockets may be ideal for European users, but there is no mention of composite or S-VHS socketry for the US - so Americans will have to get a SCART-to-S-VHS cable to use this box.
Better still, go to your local Scientologist "personality assessment" centre, fill one in using his name (remember to act rich and stupid) and let them spam and sue each other!
Scientologists and spammers - a marriage made by Moonies!
In the UK there used to be a digital terrrestrial broadcaster (ONdigital/ITV Digital). They faced a lot of problems, some of which were caused by themselves, but one issue that didn't help was that they were strictly regulated and Sky, who broadcast out of Luxembourg, were not.
If by "regulation" you mean content control, Sky are (and have always been) regulated by the Independent Television Commission. While it is true to say that the satellites are run from Luxembourg (by SES-Astra), Sky rents space on the transponders and is UK-based in order to be able to run its subscription service (with their main call centre being in Livingston, Scotland if I remember rightly).
ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts
If you mean regional news channels, Sky does those as well. Not being a subscriber, I cannot comment on subtitling but its cost should be quite small compared to the programming cost (you can do with only one person and relatively straightforward equipment).
OnDigital's failure has been mostly ascribed to a single, naively-negotiated contract for footballing rights, for which they paid an amount they could not afford. I would also suggest that their consumer approach (where you could only *rent* a box with a full-channel subscription rather than buy one to sample the free channels) was flawed. The new regime with Freeview seems more promising with no subscription needed, and cheaper (£99) set-top boxes.
The problem here is that UK (and Europe) satellite broadcasting has been a 'natural' monopoly due to the very high entry costs, plus competing brings the extra costs of a "bidding war" for film rights (this was a major reason for British Satellite Broadcasting's "merger" with Sky in 1990 as well as the demise of u>direct, an independent film channel broadcasting on the Sky platform). For Europe, replace Sky with Canal (in its various incarnations).
Despite this monopoly, Sky is still making a loss (football rights plus the subsidy on supplying free Digiboxes to new subscribers) and I believe that Canal has only recently started to show a profit.
Wandering back on top, for de-regulation it is not what you do but how you do it that is the key issue. It can only be beneficial if the consumer has control, and that means having the opportunity to make a choice and the information to make a "good" choice. The de-regulation of the financial industry in the UK during the 1980s gave people a wider choice for pensions, savings policies and loans but, because of the complexity and lack of independent information, unscrupulous and dishonest salesmen were able to "sell" (ie in many cases lie about) inappropriate and unnecessary products resulting in a multi-billion pound misselling scandal. Enron paupers, you are not alone...
Asetek's Vapochill system has been available since 2000, has been extensively reviewed on dozens of hardware lists (get a list here) and Asetek themselves have redone their website so that it will only work with browsers claiming to be Internet Explorer (lamers).
A better overclocking solution is the Prometia from chip.con (whose server seems to be down at the moment) which cools the processor down to -40C rather than Vapochills comparatively tame -20C. Get a list of reviews comparing them here.
This does not speak well of your knowledge of history. When the American War of Independence finished in 1783, Europe was a collection of monarchies with only some starting to devolve power to "elected" assemblies. The French Revolution of 1789 replaced their monarchy with a dictatorship with democracies only slowly evolving thereafter.
As for the current state of affairs in Europe, parties are either given seats in direct relation to their voter numbers (proportional representation - used in most European democracies) or using the winner-takes-all system (single-member district plurality system, used in the US and Britain).
Both have downsides, neither is ideal. However having just two major parties does lead to a convergence of policies as both try to appeal to a broad "centre ground" spectrum of voters - as seen in both the US (where both candidates were accused of being in the pockets of business/media corporations) and the UK (the current Labour government being seen as following many of the previous Conservative policies). This results in a denial of choice to the voter, with low turnouts being a typical sympton. Another possibility is that of extremists gaining votes simply by virtue of being of only ones to offer something new.
As for dullards, the US has had an undistinguished record recently with Clinton being the only one who seemed to know what he was talking about policy-wise (as long as he kept his trouser zipper shut). Bush Snr and Reagan had their policies pretty much set by unelected advisors, and as for Bush Jnr...well saying he seems an improvement over Dan Quayle is the only compliment I can pay him. Europe's problem has been more with corruption rather than talent(German ex-Chancellor Kohl, French President Chirac and Italian President Berlusconi being examples).
By requiring a key to activate XP, Microsoft has the ability to force an OS upgrade simply by no longer issuing them. Therefore if (say) Windows YP is released and sells abysmally, MS can announce the withdrawal of keys for XP, forcing users to get YP should they need to reactivate. Instant sales boost, instant share price surge.
"Nobody does this," Ellison snapped. Then he looked at the paperwork again. "Is it really the biggest?" he asked. "Bigger than Gates'?"
Green assured him that it was.
"Really?" Ellison asked. "Let's do it."
Here we have a supposedly smart CEO blowing money on a system simply because it is bigger, pricier and more bloated than one of Bill Gates creations? He deserves to end up with a home that has to be rebooted every hour, demands reactivation every day, needs a security patch every week and a rebuild/reinstall/upgrade every year!
Kudos to the installer (Rich Green) for psychologically exploiting this though.
By logging usage, the order specifically refers to storing URL's of visited web sites. Depending on the naming/directory structure of individual sites, it is possible to have a good guess at what you may be up to (e.g. guess what I am looking at with http://www.euro.dell.com/countries/uk/enu/dhs/prod ucts/model_inspn_inspn_8200.htm). With many search engines, the search terms themselves are included with the returned URL (e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot&sourceid=o pera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8).
As such, this sort of logging will give a good idea of your activities online and when you consider that the UK government has not only leaked copious amounts of personal data in the past (it was possible to buy the name and address for any given National Insurance number for just £10 at one point) but that all this information is now held and maintained by EDS.
There is a solution to this - use software that encrypts your web traffic and URLs and routes them via a proxy server outside the UK. One I have used and can recommend (outside of peak times) is the Java Anonymising Proxy described here. Currently free...
...It is extremely likely that this person had been feeding a psychological abnormality with pornography until this mental disease had taken over.
It is also extremely likely that this person had drank milk in their youth - will you now advocate banning cows? Seriously - if you wish to draw a valid conclusion about an activity/substance you have to look at groups of people (not individuals) to reduce/average out other influences, and compare users with non-users. Picking and choosing individual cases simply allows the intellectually lazy to draw the conclusion of their choice.
If you want counter-examples, how about the millions who view porn without going out and abducting someone?
90% of spam originates from about 100 individuals/companies. Details on the biggest offenders can be found on Spamhaus'sROKSO list.
Deterring these "professional" spammers (many of whom have previous convictions for fraud) should therefore have a far greater effect than the numbers would suggest. Most would probably take their "talents" to greener pastures (anyone short of a few dodgy executives?)
I have practiced ju-jitsu for over five years (currently brown belt) with contact lenses (gas permeable) and I can assure you that they will *not* fall out from you simply hitting the ground hard. The only time I have had a lens drop out was when sweat got in my eye. Generally, as long as you do not get water or other liquids in your eye you should be OK wearing lenses with any sport.
Cleaning is a once-a-day ritual and solutions (in the UK) cost me £10/$15 per month (prices should be less in the US). If you do have glasses and feel uncomfortable with them, contact lenses are well worth considering - the biggest downside I have found is if any grit gets in your eye, it can stick to the lens making it difficult to remove.
Since Bluetooth and 802.11b run in the same frequency space (~2.4 Ghz), having the two running together causes interference, resulting in slower connections (discussed here and here). The effect does drop off with distance - having a 10 metre distance between the sources could result in a 10% performance hit for Bluetooth. Obviously, having both on the same card is asking for trouble... Further information (with lots of pretty mathematical formulae) can be found in this ugly looking PDF.
To be theft, there needs to be an element of deprivation on the victims's part - this could be argued on the basis that bandwidth is being taken from the network that could otherwise be used by its intended users.
A more relevant question to ask is "Is it authorised or unauthorised access?" and the answer should come down to the network setup. If the wireless network is handing out IP addresses to all and sundry using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) then it should be argued that any access is authorised.
One item only partly addressed in the document has been the increasingly burdensome requirements of Microsoft licenses (product keys in manuals, product keys stuck to the back of PCs - good idea MS!, online product activation and shotgun EULAs giving MS the "right" to alter your system). In combination with the increased cost of licensing, this is prodding all Windows consumers to re-evaluate their options. Not to mention MS's famed security...
If this had been raised a fortnight or so before launch then yes, this would be a valid point. However this announcement has come only a couple of days before (launch date was 26/5 was it not?) - only a showstopper would cause a company to delay at that sort of notice (remember Intel and the 820 fiasco with the memory corruption problem with 3 Rambus RIMMs?).
At the very least this suggests unrealistically tight testing schedules at 3DFX, at worst - well how does Voodoogate sound?
OK, you can have the joy of explaining to a first timer the difference between indexed-indirect and indirect-indexed addressing then...
From what I remember (heavy head-scratching here), with indexed-indirect the instruction would have an absolute memory address opcode, add the value of an index register to it and then return the value of the memory location with the modified address (useful for pointer tables).
With indirect-indexed, the instruction would look up the value of the memory location specified in the opcode and *then* return this value plus the value of the index register.
Hear, hear! But don't forget those other 31337 tools of illegality which should be banned too... ftp (warez), cp (copying *anything*) and http (Slashdotting and other DDoS attacks).
Obviously no-one trades legal MP3s like bootleg concert copies (which Metallica allow - obviously uncool) or privately produced soundtracks.
In fact, maybe phone lines should be banned too - that would take care of all those nasty 'phone phreakers'.
As far as firewalls go, you could do worse than try AtGuard. Privacy should be less of an issue since WRQ (rhe creators) have given up on it and sold it to Symantec. An original copy would still send info (if it did at all) off to WRQ...
The best solution would be for all "executable" attachments to be treated as untrusted code with a sandbox like a Java Virtual Machine - considering Microsoft's "expertise" in "enhancing" Java this should not be to difficult a solution to implement.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and the twin SCART sockets may be ideal for European users, but there is no mention of composite or S-VHS socketry for the US - so Americans will have to get a SCART-to-S-VHS cable to use this box.
Scientologists and spammers - a marriage made by Moonies!
If by "regulation" you mean content control, Sky are (and have always been) regulated by the Independent Television Commission. While it is true to say that the satellites are run from Luxembourg (by SES-Astra), Sky rents space on the transponders and is UK-based in order to be able to run its subscription service (with their main call centre being in Livingston, Scotland if I remember rightly).
ONdigital had to meet targets for subtitling, they had to do regional and sub-regional broadcasts
If you mean regional news channels, Sky does those as well. Not being a subscriber, I cannot comment on subtitling but its cost should be quite small compared to the programming cost (you can do with only one person and relatively straightforward equipment).
OnDigital's failure has been mostly ascribed to a single, naively-negotiated contract for footballing rights, for which they paid an amount they could not afford. I would also suggest that their consumer approach (where you could only *rent* a box with a full-channel subscription rather than buy one to sample the free channels) was flawed. The new regime with Freeview seems more promising with no subscription needed, and cheaper (£99) set-top boxes.
The problem here is that UK (and Europe) satellite broadcasting has been a 'natural' monopoly due to the very high entry costs, plus competing brings the extra costs of a "bidding war" for film rights (this was a major reason for British Satellite Broadcasting's "merger" with Sky in 1990 as well as the demise of u>direct, an independent film channel broadcasting on the Sky platform). For Europe, replace Sky with Canal (in its various incarnations).
Despite this monopoly, Sky is still making a loss (football rights plus the subsidy on supplying free Digiboxes to new subscribers) and I believe that Canal has only recently started to show a profit.
Wandering back on top, for de-regulation it is not what you do but how you do it that is the key issue. It can only be beneficial if the consumer has control, and that means having the opportunity to make a choice and the information to make a "good" choice. The de-regulation of the financial industry in the UK during the 1980s gave people a wider choice for pensions, savings policies and loans but, because of the complexity and lack of independent information, unscrupulous and dishonest salesmen were able to "sell" (ie in many cases lie about) inappropriate and unnecessary products resulting in a multi-billion pound misselling scandal. Enron paupers, you are not alone...
A better overclocking solution is the Prometia from chip.con (whose server seems to be down at the moment) which cools the processor down to -40C rather than Vapochills comparatively tame -20C. Get a list of reviews comparing them here.
C'mon Cowboy Neal, this is a waste of space.
"Note: Allow One minute to download. Requires IE5."
After Slashdotting:
"Note: Go to bed and have a nap. Still requires IE5".
As for the current state of affairs in Europe, parties are either given seats in direct relation to their voter numbers (proportional representation - used in most European democracies) or using the winner-takes-all system (single-member district plurality system, used in the US and Britain).
Both have downsides, neither is ideal. However having just two major parties does lead to a convergence of policies as both try to appeal to a broad "centre ground" spectrum of voters - as seen in both the US (where both candidates were accused of being in the pockets of business/media corporations) and the UK (the current Labour government being seen as following many of the previous Conservative policies). This results in a denial of choice to the voter, with low turnouts being a typical sympton. Another possibility is that of extremists gaining votes simply by virtue of being of only ones to offer something new.
As for dullards, the US has had an undistinguished record recently with Clinton being the only one who seemed to know what he was talking about policy-wise (as long as he kept his trouser zipper shut). Bush Snr and Reagan had their policies pretty much set by unelected advisors, and as for Bush Jnr...well saying he seems an improvement over Dan Quayle is the only compliment I can pay him. Europe's problem has been more with corruption rather than talent(German ex-Chancellor Kohl, French President Chirac and Italian President Berlusconi being examples).
By requiring a key to activate XP, Microsoft has the ability to force an OS upgrade simply by no longer issuing them. Therefore if (say) Windows YP is released and sells abysmally, MS can announce the withdrawal of keys for XP, forcing users to get YP should they need to reactivate. Instant sales boost, instant share price surge.
Here we have a supposedly smart CEO blowing money on a system simply because it is bigger, pricier and more bloated than one of Bill Gates creations? He deserves to end up with a home that has to be rebooted every hour, demands reactivation every day, needs a security patch every week and a rebuild/reinstall/upgrade every year!
Kudos to the installer (Rich Green) for psychologically exploiting this though.
As such, this sort of logging will give a good idea of your activities online and when you consider that the UK government has not only leaked copious amounts of personal data in the past (it was possible to buy the name and address for any given National Insurance number for just £10 at one point) but that all this information is now held and maintained by EDS.
There is a solution to this - use software that encrypts your web traffic and URLs and routes them via a proxy server outside the UK. One I have used and can recommend (outside of peak times) is the Java Anonymising Proxy described here. Currently free...
It is also extremely likely that this person had drank milk in their youth - will you now advocate banning cows? Seriously - if you wish to draw a valid conclusion about an activity/substance you have to look at groups of people (not individuals) to reduce/average out other influences, and compare users with non-users. Picking and choosing individual cases simply allows the intellectually lazy to draw the conclusion of their choice.
If you want counter-examples, how about the millions who view porn without going out and abducting someone?
Deterring these "professional" spammers (many of whom have previous convictions for fraud) should therefore have a far greater effect than the numbers would suggest. Most would probably take their "talents" to greener pastures (anyone short of a few dodgy executives?)
Cleaning is a once-a-day ritual and solutions (in the UK) cost me £10/$15 per month (prices should be less in the US). If you do have glasses and feel uncomfortable with them, contact lenses are well worth considering - the biggest downside I have found is if any grit gets in your eye, it can stick to the lens making it difficult to remove.
Since Bluetooth and 802.11b run in the same frequency space (~2.4 Ghz), having the two running together causes interference, resulting in slower connections (discussed here and here). The effect does drop off with distance - having a 10 metre distance between the sources could result in a 10% performance hit for Bluetooth. Obviously, having both on the same card is asking for trouble...
Further information (with lots of pretty mathematical formulae) can be found in this ugly looking PDF.
Ceck out the update on The Inquirer here. According to AMD, TCPA support will be optional, with users being able to opt out.
A more relevant question to ask is "Is it authorised or unauthorised access?" and the answer should come down to the network setup. If the wireless network is handing out IP addresses to all and sundry using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) then it should be argued that any access is authorised.
One item only partly addressed in the document has been the increasingly burdensome requirements of Microsoft licenses (product keys in manuals, product keys stuck to the back of PCs - good idea MS!, online product activation and shotgun EULAs giving MS the "right" to alter your system). In combination with the increased cost of licensing, this is prodding all Windows consumers to re-evaluate their options. Not to mention MS's famed security...
Tsk, tsk, criticising Mattel's Cyber Patrol is a sure way to get onto its banned list. Of course, Slashdot may already be there..
At the very least this suggests unrealistically tight testing schedules at 3DFX, at worst - well how does Voodoogate sound?
Setting up up a network connection to the island should be no problem as long as the volcano stays active. How? Adapt RFC 1149 - A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers to use flying rocks instead!
From what I remember (heavy head-scratching here), with indexed-indirect the instruction would have an absolute memory address opcode, add the value of an index register to it and then return the value of the memory location with the modified address (useful for pointer tables).
With indirect-indexed, the instruction would look up the value of the memory location specified in the opcode and *then* return this value plus the value of the index register.
OK, you can take that strait-jacket back now...
Hear, hear! But don't forget those other 31337 tools of illegality which should be banned too
Obviously no-one trades legal MP3s like bootleg concert copies (which Metallica allow - obviously uncool) or privately produced soundtracks.
In fact, maybe phone lines should be banned too - that would take care of all those nasty 'phone phreakers'.
<Massive sarcasm=off>
As far as firewalls go, you could do worse than try AtGuard. Privacy should be less of an issue since WRQ (rhe creators) have given up on it and sold it to Symantec. An original copy would still send info (if it did at all) off to WRQ...
The best solution would be for all "executable" attachments to be treated as untrusted code with a sandbox like a Java Virtual Machine - considering Microsoft's "expertise" in "enhancing" Java this should not be to difficult a solution to implement.
Joe Baptista's domain is on the Realtime Blackhole List for spamming. Check this for full details.