guy you talked to but he obviously didn't have a fucking clue!
He knew enough to know that ALL customers can't use ALL of their bandwidth ALL of the time. In my book, that's not clueless.
Clueless is taking advertising at it's word. Clueless is buying something without asking pertinant qestions. Clueless is thinking that NTL really gives a toss about what it sells - they only give a damn about HOW MUCH they sell.
Nor did they say that you could not download as much as your connection could handle,
Actually, they did. I asked them about contention. The guy didn't know but he did say that I "obviously can't download 24/7, as I have to share".
and it is more reasonable to assume that you can download as much as you like
I would say that it's more reasonable to expect limits on downloads. All ISPs sell more bandwidth than they buy. It's a fact of life. They get away with it because network traffic tends to be bursty.
ADSL has a contention of 50:1 - It's published, everyone knows it. If everyone connected to your DSLAM tried to download at the same time you'd get about 2kbps.
If I have any problems with NTL is that they don't publish the sorts of network information that would allow people to work out contrention ratios.
My doctor has just told me I need at leas 8 hours of sleep a night. This is totally unfair. What use is existance if you can only use it for two-thirds of the time.
This is not what I paid for, and I will be writing to my MP. Just because Good is an omnipitent entity it does not give him the right to impose such limits on me.;-j
Andromeda Strain... most people not interested in science thought the movie was mostly boring.
The Andromeda Strain has to be one of my all time favourite SF Movies. Last time it was on I managed to get my wife to watch it - she was pleasantly suprised.
Now you've pointed it out the similarities with RWR are blindingly obvious. It's just a shame that the other three books contain the kind of "sexy SF" Hollywood goes for. A film of just the first book would indeed be awesome.
In fact, it's one of the two books that I've read in a single day (the other being the first book of Hitchiker's Guide).
It's one of three books I've read in a day too. As is HHGTTG. The other is Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
I have met only one person who thinks identity cards are a good idea. But as he was a right-wing bigot who was attempting to tell me why asylum seekers were "the scum of the earth", I choose to discount his opinion.
I would only support an identity card if I was not required to carry it at all times, if I did not have to pay for it, and if the system was not administered by the current bunch of arseholes playing at government.
Indeed, I'm of the opinion that the government collect far too much information on it's citizens. Every new tax credit involves a 30 page form that asks all sorts of strange questions. I'm sure they only do it because they can, not because it's necissary. The identity card idea is just more of the same.
no but we have national insurance numbers which would appear to be the same thing to most extents.
Would you be suprised to know that NI numbers are not guarenteed to be unique? I certainly was when my wife discovered her NI contributions had been credited to the wrong account.
I use FreeBSD_STABLE, I cvsup and recompile once a month. As the STABLE branch is "not vulnerable after 20021111" I'm happy to say I'd closed this particular hole 2 weeks before the FreeBSD authorities team had been informed of it's existance.
I use FreeBSD. I work in an office with 7 other people who all use RedHat. Out of the 8 of us, over the past 2 years, I'm the only one never to have been hacked.
The job I had before this was with an ISP which used FreeBSD for all their core systems. And in their whole history they had only ever had one FreeBSD system hacked, and that turned out to be an ex-employee who had added his public key to someobody elses authorized_keys file.
Linux has a presence BSD exists only on Slashdot and other geek forums.
I use FreeBSD, so I read BSD on slashdot - I don't bother reading very much Linux. It doesn't interest me.
Yet for some reason Linux users are drawn to BSD stories like moths to a flame. Perhaps they are so insecure that they can only feel good when are knocking some other OS.
Not that I mind. The BSD Trolls are some of the best in the world. Always worth browsing BSD posts at -1.
Funny that. I use FreeBSD over RH for exactly the same reason.
BSD really needs binary updates.
No, it doesn't. The installation program has an update option if you really insist. But you can't beat a CVSup and make world. And portupgrade is funky too.
When there's a security issue on my RH box, I can just rpm -U the new package
I do a portupgrade every week, and make world every month. So, when there is a security issue on my FreeBSD box, the chances are I've already fixed it without realising it.
So, yes, a society in which handguns are eliminated will have much lower gun death rates.
Not necissarily so. The Swiss are fairly liberal about their gun laws. Indeed IIRC everone is REQUIRED to have a gun in the house. Gun deaths there are comparable to those in the rest of Europe.
But don't let inconvenient facts get in the way of your self-satisfied ignorance.
Right, so you are so unsure of your beliefs that you have to resort to insults to make your point. I happen to believe that guns are a bad idea. You want to argue the point? Do it with facts - just leave the value-judgements, unsafe correlations, and urban-myths at home. As to ignorance, well as I don't know it all I must be ignorant. But at least I'm willing to tackle my ignorance head-on in open discussion with others of opposing views.
Some facts:
private ownership of handguns is now illegal
True/False. The 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act owtlawed certain classes of firearm - not handguns. The stated aim of the act was to restrict the ability to carry concealed weapons, so obviously this affected handguns more than rifles, however, some classes of handguns are still permitted.
crime rate has skyrocketed
True. But gun related crime is down. Your suggestion that there exists a correlation between harsher gun laws and the rise in violent crime is statistical game playing. The statistics show that there is a link between the number of people killed by drunken drivers and the number of qualified teachers - amusing, but that's all. Besides as a percentage of total population the number of people holding gun licences has increased (less than 1 in 100).
illegal for their victims to defend themselve
False. I can use reasonable force. In other words I can kill the psycopath attacking me, but I'll have to explain my actions and show they were reasonable. Interestingly, "reasonable force" is the same legal benchmark UK Armed Police are judged by when they discharge a weapon. However, I will admit that the judicial interpretation of "reasonable" has been a bit suspect of late.
This... So either we get rid of people, or we get rid of guns.....gets moderated "TROLL".
Whereas this...Legally owned guns are part of the solution to violent crime..... gets moderated "INFORMATIVE".
So, this....
I'm off to get tooled up. Who's up for some of that ultra-violence - start off with a bit of sniping at random to get the right mind set - then close-up with a sawn-off to make it personal.
Other people had glided before, but no one had powered themselves off of the ground.
Erm, yes they had.
Do a google on
"John Stringfellow"
"Clément Ader"
"Gustav Albin Weißkopf"
All of whom flew before both Richard Pearse and the Wright brothers.
The history of why the Wright Brothers are considered to be the first is almost as interesting as the history of aviation. For instance, this sounds plausible:
Dr. Peter Jakab, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., doesn't deny that Pearse got off the ground. "But what he flew was essentially a powered glider flying into a ravine. So it wasn't a true powered flight. He's just one of many pre-Wright claimants."
But as the Smithsonian can keep hold of the Wright Flyer only as long as the Smithsonian never claim that somebody else got there first, one has to say Dr. Jakab isn't exactly impartial.
If you ask me who was first is irrelivant. It was an idea whose time had come.
"There are only two kinds of hard drives -- Those that have failed and those that will fail."
True. But if you plug the drive in once a month and rsynch with your live machine, then store it safely in a nice moisture free environment, the chances the backup will die a death is low.
When the HDD in your live box dies, promote the backup, and buy a new one. If you do the odd incremental backup to tape you can resurect a dead machine in a few hours.
Hard drives are not non-volatile storage.
But truly, how much information is "non-volatile". With periodic pruning and archiving my crucial data has fitted onto a single CD for several years now.
I've been seeing a marked increase in the number of articles claiming we're all going to be knee deep in spam any day now. Most of these stories seem to be based on information comming out of a press release from MessageLabs - who interestingly sell services to defeat spam.
So IMHO I think the story should really be...
FUD increases sales of SPAM related services by 50%
SPAM is annoying, it's true. However, filtering it out is not rocket science - but then most people pull out the cheque book before engaging their brain.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I'm planning to change my name to "X"
I'll still pronounce it the same, but it would mean I'd have pigeon-hole to myself.
guy you talked to but he obviously didn't have a fucking clue!
He knew enough to know that ALL customers can't use ALL of their bandwidth ALL of the time. In my book, that's not clueless.
Clueless is taking advertising at it's word. Clueless is buying something without asking pertinant qestions. Clueless is thinking that NTL really gives a toss about what it sells - they only give a damn about HOW MUCH they sell.
Caveat Emptor.
Nor did they say that you could not download as much as your connection could handle,
Actually, they did. I asked them about contention. The guy didn't know but he did say that I "obviously can't download 24/7, as I have to share".
and it is more reasonable to assume that you can download as much as you like
I would say that it's more reasonable to expect limits on downloads. All ISPs sell more bandwidth than they buy. It's a fact of life. They get away with it because network traffic tends to be bursty.
ADSL has a contention of 50:1 - It's published, everyone knows it. If everyone connected to your DSLAM tried to download at the same time you'd get about 2kbps.
If I have any problems with NTL is that they don't publish the sorts of network information that would allow people to work out contrention ratios.
They sold you the bandwidth as unlimited
They didn't do any such thing. They sold me an unlimited INTERNET CONNECTION.
My unix box is on 27/7, that's unlimited.
I can use it when I like - that's unlimited
I can stay online for as long as I want - that's unlimited.
Not once have NTL ever told me I can download as much as my connection can handle - if they had I would have called them liars.
Everyone who's pissed with NTL made an assumption about what UNLIMITED actually meant. And they got screwed.
Advertising and marketing that misleads the consumer - wow, who'd have thought.
I am so glad I ignored the hype and just got a 128K connection. No way on earth I can break 1GB/day.
With Windows you actually do need the "format and re-install" approach.
But with Linux?
Find a LUG, ask questions.
My doctor has just told me I need at leas 8 hours of sleep a night. This is totally unfair. What use is existance if you can only use it for two-thirds of the time.
;-j
This is not what I paid for, and I will be writing to my MP. Just because Good is an omnipitent entity it does not give him the right to impose such limits on me.
Andromeda Strain... most people not interested in science thought the movie was mostly boring.
The Andromeda Strain has to be one of my all time favourite SF Movies. Last time it was on I managed to get my wife to watch it - she was pleasantly suprised.
Now you've pointed it out the similarities with RWR are blindingly obvious. It's just a shame that the other three books contain the kind of "sexy SF" Hollywood goes for. A film of just the first book would indeed be awesome.
In fact, it's one of the two books that I've read in a single day (the other being the first book of Hitchiker's Guide).
It's one of three books I've read in a day too. As is HHGTTG. The other is Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
80% public support
I have met only one person who thinks identity cards are a good idea. But as he was a right-wing bigot who was attempting to tell me why asylum seekers were "the scum of the earth", I choose to discount his opinion.
I would only support an identity card if I was not required to carry it at all times, if I did not have to pay for it, and if the system was not administered by the current bunch of arseholes playing at government.
Indeed, I'm of the opinion that the government collect far too much information on it's citizens. Every new tax credit involves a 30 page form that asks all sorts of strange questions. I'm sure they only do it because they can, not because it's necissary. The identity card idea is just more of the same.
no but we have national insurance numbers which would appear to be the same thing to most extents.
Would you be suprised to know that NI numbers are not guarenteed to be unique? I certainly was when my wife discovered her NI contributions had been credited to the wrong account.
Now I can run my computers 24x7.
And when the wife moans about the waste of electricity I can tell her it's the "wall cavity heater" I installed to help reduce the damp.
"FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS"
I love open-source.
Indeed.
I use FreeBSD_STABLE, I cvsup and recompile once a month. As the STABLE branch is "not vulnerable after 20021111" I'm happy to say I'd closed this particular hole 2 weeks before the FreeBSD authorities team had been informed of it's existance.
if I use FreeBSD then I will be hacked.
Not exactly a reprasentative poll but...
I use FreeBSD. I work in an office with 7 other people who all use RedHat. Out of the 8 of us, over the past 2 years, I'm the only one never to have been hacked.
The job I had before this was with an ISP which used FreeBSD for all their core systems. And in their whole history they had only ever had one FreeBSD system hacked, and that turned out to be an ex-employee who had added his public key to someobody elses authorized_keys file.
I saw an item on The Sky at Night which detailed the sucesses of cheap digital equipment used for astronomy purposes.
In all the discussions about the lack of cost, and the detail on the final photos, ease of use, etc., nobody actually bothered to mention that....
You'd also need a telescope.
just like Latin is a dead language.
Well, I learnt latin at school (only language I was any good at).
And many languages have Latin roots.
And Latin is used in the taxonomy of may things.
And I believe Latin is still used in the legal profession.
So if, in death, *BSD is destined to end up just like Latin all I can say is....
Great!
Linux has a presence BSD exists only on Slashdot and other geek forums.
I use FreeBSD, so I read BSD on slashdot - I don't bother reading very much Linux. It doesn't interest me.
Yet for some reason Linux users are drawn to BSD stories like moths to a flame. Perhaps they are so insecure that they can only feel good when are knocking some other OS.
Not that I mind. The BSD Trolls are some of the best in the world. Always worth browsing BSD posts at -1.
4. Easy updates.
Funny that. I use FreeBSD over RH for exactly the same reason.
BSD really needs binary updates.
No, it doesn't. The installation program has an update option if you really insist. But you can't beat a CVSup and make world. And portupgrade is funky too.
When there's a security issue on my RH box, I can just rpm -U the new package
I do a portupgrade every week, and make world every month. So, when there is a security issue on my FreeBSD box, the chances are I've already fixed it without realising it.
So, yes, a society in which handguns are eliminated will have much lower gun death rates.
Not necissarily so. The Swiss are fairly liberal about their gun laws. Indeed IIRC everone is REQUIRED to have a gun in the house. Gun deaths there are comparable to those in the rest of Europe.
But don't let inconvenient facts get in the way of your self-satisfied ignorance.
Right, so you are so unsure of your beliefs that you have to resort to insults to make your point. I happen to believe that guns are a bad idea. You want to argue the point? Do it with facts - just leave the value-judgements, unsafe correlations, and urban-myths at home. As to ignorance, well as I don't know it all I must be ignorant. But at least I'm willing to tackle my ignorance head-on in open discussion with others of opposing views.
Some facts:
private ownership of handguns is now illegal
True/False. The 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act owtlawed certain classes of firearm - not handguns. The stated aim of the act was to restrict the ability to carry concealed weapons, so obviously this affected handguns more than rifles, however, some classes of handguns are still permitted.
crime rate has skyrocketed
True. But gun related crime is down. Your suggestion that there exists a correlation between harsher gun laws and the rise in violent crime is statistical game playing. The statistics show that there is a link between the number of people killed by drunken drivers and the number of qualified teachers - amusing, but that's all. Besides as a percentage of total population the number of people holding gun licences has increased (less than 1 in 100).
illegal for their victims to defend themselve
False. I can use reasonable force. In other words I can kill the psycopath attacking me, but I'll have to explain my actions and show they were reasonable. Interestingly, "reasonable force" is the same legal benchmark UK Armed Police are judged by when they discharge a weapon. However, I will admit that the judicial interpretation of "reasonable" has been a bit suspect of late.
This... So either we get rid of people, or we get rid of guns. ....gets moderated "TROLL".
.... gets moderated "INFORMATIVE".
... should improve my karma considerably.
Whereas this...Legally owned guns are part of the solution to violent crime.
So, this....
I'm off to get tooled up. Who's up for some of that ultra-violence - start off with a bit of sniping at random to get the right mind set - then close-up with a sawn-off to make it personal.
Legally owned guns are part of the solution to violent crime.
You're wrong.
But as my views on the causes and solutions of violent crime are way off topic, let's just agree to differ.
guns don't kill people, but people kill people...
Guns don't kill people. People WITH GUNS kill people.
So either we get rid of people, or we get rid of guns.
Your choice.
Well 'scuse me, I just happen to thing that shooting at people is not something you do to get your own way.
Yep, it's something you do back to the people who are shooting at you to get their own way.
But if you can temp them into shootiong first?
Other people had glided before, but no one had powered themselves off of the ground.
Erm, yes they had.
Do a google on
"John Stringfellow"
"Clément Ader"
"Gustav Albin Weißkopf"
All of whom flew before both Richard Pearse and the Wright brothers.
The history of why the Wright Brothers are considered to be the first is almost as interesting as the history of aviation. For instance, this sounds plausible:
Dr. Peter Jakab, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., doesn't deny that Pearse got off the ground. "But what he flew was essentially a powered glider flying into a ravine. So it wasn't a true powered flight. He's just one of many pre-Wright claimants."
But as the Smithsonian can keep hold of the Wright Flyer only as long as the Smithsonian never claim that somebody else got there first, one has to say Dr. Jakab isn't exactly impartial.
If you ask me who was first is irrelivant. It was an idea whose time had come.
"There are only two kinds of hard drives -- Those that have failed and those that will fail."
True. But if you plug the drive in once a month and rsynch with your live machine, then store it safely in a nice moisture free environment, the chances the backup will die a death is low.
When the HDD in your live box dies, promote the backup, and buy a new one. If you do the odd incremental backup to tape you can resurect a dead machine in a few hours.
Hard drives are not non-volatile storage.
But truly, how much information is "non-volatile". With periodic pruning and archiving my crucial data has fitted onto a single CD for several years now.
I've been seeing a marked increase in the number of articles claiming we're all going to be knee deep in spam any day now. Most of these stories seem to be based on information comming out of a press release from MessageLabs - who interestingly sell services to defeat spam.
So IMHO I think the story should really be...
FUD increases sales of SPAM related services by 50%
SPAM is annoying, it's true. However, filtering it out is not rocket science - but then most people pull out the cheque book before engaging their brain.