We can only hope that Katz is right insofar as the "Corporate Republic" is powerful enough to shut him up. Then we can fight back, and maybe even find people who have something insightful and relevant to say on a subject to publish in our new netzines.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as Katz gets published (on and off line), we don't have to worry one bit about the average (or really really below average) person's ability to display to the world the depth of their brilliance.
Yes, the minimum ADSL protocol - the one allowing for 18000 feet to the fiber - supports 1.5Mbps per line. That's limited by the providers as it's not necessary for most subscribers. It also can be limited by dynamic bandwidth allocation for poorer lines. However, once your line is trained and your agreement is settled on, as a DSL subscriber you know your minimum connection rate. As a cable modem subscriber you know your maximum.
So let's look at those numbers. Downloading from a fast ftp site, you get 100-200KBps, depending on time of day, on your "up to 100X faster than 28.8" line. That's 28-56% of advertised rate. Downloading from the same site, at any time of day, I get around 56KBps on my 512Kbps ADSL line. That's 88% of advertised capacity - far more easily accounted for by internet latency than any of the numbers you're getting, and it doesn't matter to me who's watching Friends or playing Everquest next door.
Yes, you have the value add of having a faster (if inconsistantly so) connection for those locations that can make use of it. I have the value add of not having to send my data through a few dozen other people's homes. I also don't have a company that's trying (or will be trying) to get all of its customers to toss another 64KBps of digital voice data onto the same piece of coax with a voice-over-ip service.
Of course, as I noted in another post, it really comes down to what's available in a particular area and how well it works. DSL beat cable modem into Minneapolis by 3 years, and works just fine. You've had a cable modem for two years on a ring that hasn't added more than a handful of users in that time. Lucky you.
However, additional users will slow your line down if they're allowed on. Perhaps your provider is being judicious and only allowing so many on - if so, great. You're set. However, I've seen nothing from the two biggies (AOL/TW and AT&T) to indicate that they'd be opposed to overloading lines, at least for "reasonable" periods of time. And it wouldn't take "10,000,00 on one cable drop" to make a difference. 3 guys downloading an IE update at the same time and you're under DSL bandwidth left for you. It's just the physics of the line.
True. But it's a lot simpler matter to control bandwidth in such a situation (as evidenced by the fact that even though the DSL protocols support at minimum 1.5MB inbound, the service is generally sold with 1/2 to 1/3rd of that). Being on the same Cable Modem ring is effectively the same as being on the same dumb hub.
And, frankly, if the 2MB/sec maximum touted by cable modem companies is already down the the 100-200MB/sec experienced by the previous replyer, I'd start getting REALLY worried, since only a small percentage of cable subscribers on the line are currently using the broadband service. Keep in mind that these rates are being achieved on wires that have just been put in over the last couple years. How likely do you think AOL/TW (or AT&T, for that matter) is going to be to augement their existing digital cable lines for existing customers when those actual rates drop to 3-5MB/sec during peak times? And how long will it take once they start? It took them around a year just to lease more of an existing telephone infrastruture for their AOL service. This'll take laying still more cable. The permission to dig up the streets again could take a year or two itself in itself (especially when reps from Qwest or Verizon or whomever can go into the city council meeting show them just how much of a community need there isn't for more cable modem lines in 2 years).
Fiber's expensive. Really expensive. Way too expensive to run to people's homes. It's an unfortunate reality, but it will be a long time before we get rid of that 24 gauge twisted pair running out of our phones.
On a non-bandwidth-related issue, however, this is a good thing. We're in for a summer of proving that our power grid (at least here in the US) isn't up to snuff. Put in fiber to the home (at least in place of twisted pair) and your phone only works if youhave power. I, personally, want that 56 milliapres being sent to me by a big battery at the phone company.
Plenty of people talk about Cable Modem. Personally, I don't care much for a service that advertizes maximum achievable performance knowing full well that if it takes off like they want it to, that performance will drop through the toilet because the guy right before you decides to set up a macro to download porn 24/7, but hey, maybe you'll get lucky and the cable company will refuse to install faster than they can provide the service. Of course, given that the cable company where I'm at is now owned by AOL, I wouldn't hold my breath. Maybe AT&T is better.
The central issue, however, is what's available when you're looking. In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, there are numerous pockets without DSL availablity that do have Digital Cable/Cable Modem. In my part of town, DSL went in 3 years ago and Digital Cable just hit my high-rent apartment building sometime between Sunday night and whenever the last time I watched TV before that. Thus, I use DSL and have no plans of switching.
and it might be even possible one day to have a phone line as fast as a DSL, of course, then it would BE a dsl.
More correct than you probably realised. All a DSL does (well, "all" is a bit negative...it's actually quite a bit) is modulate your TCP/IP (or whatever is coming out of your nic) to a high frequency analog signal which it then amplifies the hell out of to get it across that up-to-18000 feet of low-grade twisted-pair phone line running to a DSL demodulator connected to a fiber line. Of course, it adds a bunch of error correction as well, but it is a pretty good hack of a 100 year old phone system. Once it's there it's probably sent via ATM to your ISP, where it's changed back into a TCP/IP signal and sent out over whatever connection your ISP has to the net.
Both DSL (and the UHF-ranged VDSL) and Digital Cable/Cable-modem suffer from the same difficulty - infrastructure costs. Whether one "wins" or the other depends on which can provide the service quickly enough in a particular area, and keep the costs of recouping the investment from preventing people from buying into the service. Once those initial costs are covered, and the roll-out of, say, DSL is fairly complete, the pricing can be rolled back (if there is sufficient economic or regulatory reason for the phone companies to do so) - rather like the cost of a 3 minute coast-to-coast long distance call dropping from around $25 in the first years of the service to around $.20 now (in NON-adjusted dollars).
Here in Qwest territory (I know, it's more in Bell South and Verizon territory) DSL is only about $10/month more than a second line. This goes to the availability point made earlier - if you're someone who is on line more than a half hour to an hour a day, DSL makes the whole experience better and isn't that much more expensive than the second line you'd likely want for your phone anyway.
As far as content goes, there's certainly some out there. I've gotten high-speed realvideo from quite a number of sites and, of course, www.nakednews.com has a broadband feed that's quite good.:)
Since when is it that internet sites do not have the right to choose what language they want to have their sites in, that they must make it French accessible, but yet Quebeccers have every right to be able to access the site in French?
Basically since internet sites have been required to operate under the same laws as non-internet businesses in their same jurisdiction. Which has been forever. There's nothing special about internet businesses that makes them exempt from the laws of whatever land they are in.
Now, you can disagree with any particular law as much as you wish. In this case, while I have some hesitation about the official reasoning of "protecting the language", I see nothing wrong with the goal of protecting the speakers of that language from some sort of forced assimilation into an anglo culture through lack of open access to commercial ventures in the native language of the province (or, in the case of France, which has a similar law, the country). In the US, those of us speaking English don't really see much of an issue. However, in the major French-speaking enclave in the Western Hemesphere, speaking French is a REALLY big deal. Protecting one's abilty to unfettered access to government and commerce while speaking French would be akin to the US protecting those rights of someone wearing a particular clothing or hair style for religious reasons.
Finally, there is a great deal of history of linguistic assimilation of one people into another (or, more often, attempts at it). People have been imprisoned for speaking Polish or Czech (or, indeed, French) at numerous points in history. While the law is a bit paranoid, it's not an unfounded paranoia.
Well, since we're judging Canadians by the US Constitution (What? You mean the rest of the world ISN'T governed by the US Constitution??? Gasp!), I suppose I wouldn't be out of line pointing out the Mr. Coward that, in the US, the 1st amendment CAN be trumped. Were Quebec governed by the US Constitution, the Commerce Clause, in connection with the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment would not only allow for a law requiring that all commercial statements be made in both English and French, it would practically require it.
Substancial portions of Quebec speak either English or French, but not the other (at least, not to any great extent). To conduct business in only one of those languages is to discriminate against those who only speak the other - particularly given that both are the official languages of Quebec. The Commerce Clause gives the federal government the ability to regulate any commerce that in any way crosses state lines or is international (and was used, before the 14th amendment, to regulate discrimination in commerce - even seemingly local commerce). In Quebec, this would equate to having the authority to regulate commercial activity within the province (and with entities outside of the province). This power, I presume, is one a Canadian province has. The Equal Protection Clause guarantees that all persons within and state and among the states are treated equally by the law.
It is the law which governs the practice of commerce, and those engaging in commerce perform legal functions - such as the collection of taxes and regulatory information on customers. In the US it is the prevailing view in all three of our governmental branches at all levels that the government has a responsibility to ensure the extension of Equal Protection to the activities of commerce. That means that one can't refuse to enter into a commercial arrangement with someone else merely because they are, say, of a particular race. In Quebec, this applies to people who speak only French or English. Failing to communicate items essential to engaging in commerce in a language understandable by the customer is refusing to engage in commerce with them. Indeed, in the US, simply ignoring a customer in one's store because of their race (demonstrated by pattern of behavior) is discriminating against them and is illegal, despite "not speaking" being protected speech.
Further, there is nothing at all silly about the applicaiton of the law, nor does it "miss the point of the internet". As long as French speaking people in Quebec can access the site and the site is operated within the province, it's subject to the law, and the Quebec authorities have the responsibility to ensure access to the site by French speakers. As a parallel, if someone had a shop just outside of Quebec (the city) that sold really cheesy tourist stuff to English-speaking Americans, they wouldn't be exempt either.
The only stupidity that this action shows is the stupidity typical of people running internet businesses and thinking that they are somehow "special" or above the commercial laws of their jurisdiction because they're a "virtual" company and people in Addis Ababa can do business with them without having any idea where they're located.
No, love them and you hardly have to concern yourself with "hoping". Loving a child isn't some sort of passive well-wishing. It's reading to him instead of plopping him down in front of "Barney" videos for 4 hours. It's taking what he has to say seriously, even if it's the inane chatter of a 4 year old, because HE takes it seriously. It's giving his growing brain some reason to be predisposed to actually talk to you and trust you to care about what he has to say. And it works really really well, but only if you actually do it. "Love" is a verb, after all.
My son's behaviour at school has increased greatly since I've started recieving detailed daily reports.
Started receiving detailed daily reports??? My parents got those 20 years ago, without computers, every day, from me. Usually at the dinner table. You've got all the information you need about your kid's day at school already. It's in your kid. The single best "positive reinforcement" a kid can get is parents who listen to him and have taught him, throught their own actions, that they WILL listen to him. And this doesn't mean "always take his side" or "coddle him". I can recall exactly one case where my mother, a former teacher, took my side when I complained about a teacher. It was, however, the one case where she should have taken my side.
Oddly enough, once I was out of school and in college, and grad school, and "real life", my parents still heard (and hear) from me a couple times a week, and still know what's going on in my life, because I know they care about what goes on in my life and I like them for that. All without reports from my company, landlord or friends.
This sort of shit is only necessary in a world where parents have spent the previous however-many years of their child's life ignoring them 99.98% of the time and teaching them that the last thing in the world they should do is communicate honestly with their parents.
You need more control over your kids? Try having a bit of LOVE for them, dumbshit!
While I suppose one could argue that Apple hasn't significantly changed or improved the interface of MacOS with OS-X, they were somewhat busy re-writing the whole thing. And your claim is ridiculous with regard to Microsoft. Windows XP is a rather radical shift, interface-wise, from the Win95 paradigm (which, of course, was at least a significant shift in many ways from the Win 3.11 paradigm).
Merely competing well in a server environment is likely to be the downfall of any operating system. As much as they need applications and robustness for their suitable purposes, OSes need two things: Exposure and interoperability with the desktop.
Exposure is that intangible need for people in decision-making positions, who, even if they are the ones with the best technical expertise, still only know what they know (if you know what I mean...). MS has exposure, and works very hard - through advertisement, certification and partnerships - to maintain and grow that exposure. But more than those efforts, MS is on damned near every desktop. If you're an MCSE, everyone in your business at least thinks they have a clue as to what that means.
Linux, Sun and AIX have exposure too, of course, but there is much less momentum for their maintaining that exposure. If you doubt this, just ask around among your technical brethern to see who all has worked on a VMS system recently (or ever), or who has done work in Prolog (a fabulous logic-processing language with interfaces to C++ for those non-specialised apps). If these technologies are dying, is is most certainly not from being ill-suited to their task - it's because they're less and less known.
One very easy way to maintain exposure is to maintain some presense on the desktop. Both Solarus and Linux are viable desktop solutions, and even if not everyone in one's office uses them, they can know that they're used and have some understanding of what the people who admin them are all about. The more the office in general realises what technology is being used, the more management realises it, and the less likely it is to be tossed aside because some PHB never heard of it (whatever "reasons" are put forth for such a decision).
Compliance with the desktop is also critical for the server market. It has long been understood - and at times even admitted by some MS people - that control of the desktop can be parlayed into control of the servers. That this is a strategy at MS - and a damned good one - isn't in doubt. Any of the studies showing how well IIS serves up pages to IE (the number one web browser) confirm it. If Linux and Solarus drop off our desktops forever, businesses would be harder and harder pressed to justify them on servers. The shifting of the desktop environment ever-so-slightly away from the standards of communication used by everyone else would eventually make MSes server OSes the only viable choise, because for the task at hand - coordinating, supporting, and serving for MS clients - they would be the best choice. Only by maintaining as much as possible of the business desktop world off of MS Windows can that be averted. When even 5% of business desktops aren't Windows, businesses have to take those into account.
While it may ultimately be true that the Linux Desktop is dead (or, I suppose, is stillborn), I cannot agree with the author's conclusion that this is an OK thing for Linux. If the desktop is dead, the server will follow.
First, as of course you realized, appeals to the US 1st amendment make very little difference in other countries. It is also of very little use when debating how things "should" be to appeal to how they happen to be.
That said, your point has merit. The right to speak anonymously has been upheld in this country - and for the Klan specifically - and there are solid reasons behind that. However, there are a couple of differences here. First, the circumstances of, say, a klan march are somewhat different than an untracked internet usage. If a Klansman wlaking through a black neighborhood shouts a threat at a specific protester, the police may nab the marcher and take his pillow case off. As a matter of practical usage, this is exactly what the police have instituted. Second, the action in question is not merely speech, but also commerce, and even in the good old USA there are much stricter controls on commerce than on pure speech - even though the Supreme Court has held that the use of money is protected speech in many contexts. You can't buy a car without the state knowing who you are, for instance. Well, here you can't rent internet access from a cybercafe without the state at least being able to know who you are.
The suggestions that a method not involving login cards could be used - say, supplying identification to the cafe, which would then track who used what computer and when - do have merit, and are much closer to other commercial tracking methods. However, the system they propose is actually less intrusive. Unless and until the police need to track who used a computer, only the user and the computer need know. If the system were done using normal identification and registration, everyone who worked at the cybercafe or had access to the log books (licitly or not) would know who was using what computers when and for how long.
The primary concerns sited had nothing to do with pornography. They had to do with the fact that the cybercafes are being frequented for the purposes of hostile computer attacks and threats.
Where did this idea come from? Where was it decided that the internet is an inherantly, unrestricted, unrestrictable, utterly anonymous place where people have complete and unassailably privacy? That's utter crap. It started for two reasons: so well-identified and verified military personnel could communicate and so well identified and verified academics could communicate.
Anonymity only exists in certain corners - corners like Slashdot that people like us hang in. But I'm hardly anonymous as far as the net is concerned. All the information needed to find my seat is flowing back and forth through my connection. That is the natural state of the net. We can put up various blocks and spoofs to try to fool it, or set up systems that purpously ignore it, but it's all there, wide out in the open.
Some student popping into a cybercafe is still going to be able to post to his favorate newsgroups, discussion sites, and maybe even BBSs if he knows they exist with all the anonymity he had before. Just now, if someone wants to put a lot of work into it, his comments can be traced back to him to the same degree that mine can be traced back to me. The only "privacy" that is lost, is the same kind of privacy that walking around with a sheet on and a pillow case over your head affords - and, like in real life, that's neither the normal state of affairs, nor one very many people intentionally seek out.
And this is a good thing. Whether it's Klan hoods or taped over badge numbers, the perception of anonymity has an overwhelming tendancy to bring out the absolute worst in people. The fact that other people do (or, at least, conceivably can) watch us is indespensable in a society. What causes problems is when some members of the society can't be watched. It doesn't sound like this is the case with the police in question.
I seem to recall the original article (or was it a related one?) being quite clear about the "need to educate legislators" about the dangers of the GPL, Open Source, and Napster (which, of course, are all the same thing). Just what is the goal of spending money on such "education" if not to get "the right of the open-sourse software model to compete in the marketplace" restricted?
The Establishment clause of the first amendment was to protect the states from the federal governement. None of the states (and it was the states, not the people, who ratified the Constitution) wanted a federal government that could establish a national religion. Maryland was still Catholic and Pennsylvania was still Quaker.Yes, scientology is protected (despite insisting in its early years that it was a science, not a religion). But protection as a religion does not entail protection from criticism. Scientology has always been of the position that it does. Indeed, its very declaration of itself as a religion was in order to be free from the peer review of legitimate psychology that continuing to claim to be a science would entail.
Manual suction cups for climbing windows or such have been around for quite some time. I'm wondering what they've done to those pads to allow them to get suction on surfaces like concrete. Best I could pick up for the site is that there is some level of tolerance for porousness in the surface, and if it gets too bad, it won't work. Plus, it seems the suction unit on the climbers back can keep increasing the suction as air filters into the pad. So the remaining question is "What did they do to the pads themselves to make even that possible?" and, perhaps more importantly, how durable is that modification? Does it require a coating that rubs off after a while? Does it wear down quickly?
Nevermind that I've never seen a cordless vacuum cleaner that both had good suction and decent battery life...
Every major world religion - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, and all of the major divisions within those religions have one glaring difference with Scientology. They are all open and direct about their beliefs and positions. Even television preachers freely share what they see as the truth. Sure, there are fringe movements within all major religions that like the idea of the "mystery cult" and like feeling like they understand some truth that others don't, but they are generally dismissed as cults (in, of course, the negative sense of the word) by their own parent religions.
Even when Christianity was controling Europe or Islam was conquering North Africa, they preached their doctrines in the open for all to see and here, and acted by the light of day. Scientology, on the other hand, is a religion of sewer rats hiding in the cracks and the shadows, ready to swarm out on anyone who happens to get uncomfortably close to them. In a bitter irony to their professed interest in liberating the human mind, their behaviour is as programed and predictable as a caged animal that strikes at anything it sees.
This is the Secret Service's financial crimes page. It links to (lower in the same page) the 4-1-9 (the Nigerian Bank scam) scam page, and clicking on the advisory triangle brings you to a fuller description, contact information and an email link for reporting. The Secret Service estimates losses due to this scam in the 100s of millions annually.
This is a fun one. Unless you get killed or have your life's savings taken away. The FBI has an ongoing investigation of these scams, as they are quite dangerous, and the Secret Service keeps information on all reports of the scam. People have been fleeced, kidnapped and killed in this one. If you run into it, drop a line to the FBI and the Secret Service and help their tracking.
They did include a date stamp. It's in the URL - 20010514, today. While you may be right, don't assume that a Microsoft security hole isn't there just because there was reported to be a similar one a year ago. (Again, you may be right, that it's just Yahoo being yahoos, but I don't see any reason to assume that there isn't another - real this time - backdoor just because there was a false alarm 13 months ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
We can only hope that Katz is right insofar as the "Corporate Republic" is powerful enough to shut him up. Then we can fight back, and maybe even find people who have something insightful and relevant to say on a subject to publish in our new netzines.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as Katz gets published (on and off line), we don't have to worry one bit about the average (or really really below average) person's ability to display to the world the depth of their brilliance.
Yes, the minimum ADSL protocol - the one allowing for 18000 feet to the fiber - supports 1.5Mbps per line. That's limited by the providers as it's not necessary for most subscribers. It also can be limited by dynamic bandwidth allocation for poorer lines. However, once your line is trained and your agreement is settled on, as a DSL subscriber you know your minimum connection rate. As a cable modem subscriber you know your maximum.
So let's look at those numbers. Downloading from a fast ftp site, you get 100-200KBps, depending on time of day, on your "up to 100X faster than 28.8" line. That's 28-56% of advertised rate. Downloading from the same site, at any time of day, I get around 56KBps on my 512Kbps ADSL line. That's 88% of advertised capacity - far more easily accounted for by internet latency than any of the numbers you're getting, and it doesn't matter to me who's watching Friends or playing Everquest next door.
Yes, you have the value add of having a faster (if inconsistantly so) connection for those locations that can make use of it. I have the value add of not having to send my data through a few dozen other people's homes. I also don't have a company that's trying (or will be trying) to get all of its customers to toss another 64KBps of digital voice data onto the same piece of coax with a voice-over-ip service.
Of course, as I noted in another post, it really comes down to what's available in a particular area and how well it works. DSL beat cable modem into Minneapolis by 3 years, and works just fine. You've had a cable modem for two years on a ring that hasn't added more than a handful of users in that time. Lucky you.
However, additional users will slow your line down if they're allowed on. Perhaps your provider is being judicious and only allowing so many on - if so, great. You're set. However, I've seen nothing from the two biggies (AOL/TW and AT&T) to indicate that they'd be opposed to overloading lines, at least for "reasonable" periods of time. And it wouldn't take "10,000,00 on one cable drop" to make a difference. 3 guys downloading an IE update at the same time and you're under DSL bandwidth left for you. It's just the physics of the line.
True. But it's a lot simpler matter to control bandwidth in such a situation (as evidenced by the fact that even though the DSL protocols support at minimum 1.5MB inbound, the service is generally sold with 1/2 to 1/3rd of that). Being on the same Cable Modem ring is effectively the same as being on the same dumb hub.
And, frankly, if the 2MB/sec maximum touted by cable modem companies is already down the the 100-200MB/sec experienced by the previous replyer, I'd start getting REALLY worried, since only a small percentage of cable subscribers on the line are currently using the broadband service. Keep in mind that these rates are being achieved on wires that have just been put in over the last couple years. How likely do you think AOL/TW (or AT&T, for that matter) is going to be to augement their existing digital cable lines for existing customers when those actual rates drop to 3-5MB/sec during peak times? And how long will it take once they start? It took them around a year just to lease more of an existing telephone infrastruture for their AOL service. This'll take laying still more cable. The permission to dig up the streets again could take a year or two itself in itself (especially when reps from Qwest or Verizon or whomever can go into the city council meeting show them just how much of a community need there isn't for more cable modem lines in 2 years).
Fiber's expensive. Really expensive. Way too expensive to run to people's homes. It's an unfortunate reality, but it will be a long time before we get rid of that 24 gauge twisted pair running out of our phones.
On a non-bandwidth-related issue, however, this is a good thing. We're in for a summer of proving that our power grid (at least here in the US) isn't up to snuff. Put in fiber to the home (at least in place of twisted pair) and your phone only works if youhave power. I, personally, want that 56 milliapres being sent to me by a big battery at the phone company.
Plenty of people talk about Cable Modem. Personally, I don't care much for a service that advertizes maximum achievable performance knowing full well that if it takes off like they want it to, that performance will drop through the toilet because the guy right before you decides to set up a macro to download porn 24/7, but hey, maybe you'll get lucky and the cable company will refuse to install faster than they can provide the service. Of course, given that the cable company where I'm at is now owned by AOL, I wouldn't hold my breath. Maybe AT&T is better.
The central issue, however, is what's available when you're looking. In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, there are numerous pockets without DSL availablity that do have Digital Cable/Cable Modem. In my part of town, DSL went in 3 years ago and Digital Cable just hit my high-rent apartment building sometime between Sunday night and whenever the last time I watched TV before that. Thus, I use DSL and have no plans of switching.
and it might be even possible one day to have a phone line as fast as a DSL, of course, then it would BE a dsl.
More correct than you probably realised. All a DSL does (well, "all" is a bit negative.. .it's actually quite a bit) is modulate your TCP/IP (or whatever is coming out of your nic) to a high frequency analog signal which it then amplifies the hell out of to get it across that up-to-18000 feet of low-grade twisted-pair phone line running to a DSL demodulator connected to a fiber line. Of course, it adds a bunch of error correction as well, but it is a pretty good hack of a 100 year old phone system. Once it's there it's probably sent via ATM to your ISP, where it's changed back into a TCP/IP signal and sent out over whatever connection your ISP has to the net.
Both DSL (and the UHF-ranged VDSL) and Digital Cable/Cable-modem suffer from the same difficulty - infrastructure costs. Whether one "wins" or the other depends on which can provide the service quickly enough in a particular area, and keep the costs of recouping the investment from preventing people from buying into the service. Once those initial costs are covered, and the roll-out of, say, DSL is fairly complete, the pricing can be rolled back (if there is sufficient economic or regulatory reason for the phone companies to do so) - rather like the cost of a 3 minute coast-to-coast long distance call dropping from around $25 in the first years of the service to around $.20 now (in NON-adjusted dollars).
Here in Qwest territory (I know, it's more in Bell South and Verizon territory) DSL is only about $10/month more than a second line. This goes to the availability point made earlier - if you're someone who is on line more than a half hour to an hour a day, DSL makes the whole experience better and isn't that much more expensive than the second line you'd likely want for your phone anyway.
As far as content goes, there's certainly some out there. I've gotten high-speed realvideo from quite a number of sites and, of course, www.nakednews.com has a broadband feed that's quite good. :)
Since when is it that internet sites do not have the right to choose what language they want to have their sites in, that they must make it French accessible, but yet Quebeccers have every right to be able to access the site in French?
Basically since internet sites have been required to operate under the same laws as non-internet businesses in their same jurisdiction. Which has been forever. There's nothing special about internet businesses that makes them exempt from the laws of whatever land they are in.
Now, you can disagree with any particular law as much as you wish. In this case, while I have some hesitation about the official reasoning of "protecting the language", I see nothing wrong with the goal of protecting the speakers of that language from some sort of forced assimilation into an anglo culture through lack of open access to commercial ventures in the native language of the province (or, in the case of France, which has a similar law, the country). In the US, those of us speaking English don't really see much of an issue. However, in the major French-speaking enclave in the Western Hemesphere, speaking French is a REALLY big deal. Protecting one's abilty to unfettered access to government and commerce while speaking French would be akin to the US protecting those rights of someone wearing a particular clothing or hair style for religious reasons.
Finally, there is a great deal of history of linguistic assimilation of one people into another (or, more often, attempts at it). People have been imprisoned for speaking Polish or Czech (or, indeed, French) at numerous points in history. While the law is a bit paranoid, it's not an unfounded paranoia.
Well, since we're judging Canadians by the US Constitution (What? You mean the rest of the world ISN'T governed by the US Constitution??? Gasp!), I suppose I wouldn't be out of line pointing out the Mr. Coward that, in the US, the 1st amendment CAN be trumped. Were Quebec governed by the US Constitution, the Commerce Clause, in connection with the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment would not only allow for a law requiring that all commercial statements be made in both English and French, it would practically require it.
Substancial portions of Quebec speak either English or French, but not the other (at least, not to any great extent). To conduct business in only one of those languages is to discriminate against those who only speak the other - particularly given that both are the official languages of Quebec. The Commerce Clause gives the federal government the ability to regulate any commerce that in any way crosses state lines or is international (and was used, before the 14th amendment, to regulate discrimination in commerce - even seemingly local commerce). In Quebec, this would equate to having the authority to regulate commercial activity within the province (and with entities outside of the province). This power, I presume, is one a Canadian province has. The Equal Protection Clause guarantees that all persons within and state and among the states are treated equally by the law.
It is the law which governs the practice of commerce, and those engaging in commerce perform legal functions - such as the collection of taxes and regulatory information on customers. In the US it is the prevailing view in all three of our governmental branches at all levels that the government has a responsibility to ensure the extension of Equal Protection to the activities of commerce. That means that one can't refuse to enter into a commercial arrangement with someone else merely because they are, say, of a particular race. In Quebec, this applies to people who speak only French or English. Failing to communicate items essential to engaging in commerce in a language understandable by the customer is refusing to engage in commerce with them. Indeed, in the US, simply ignoring a customer in one's store because of their race (demonstrated by pattern of behavior) is discriminating against them and is illegal, despite "not speaking" being protected speech.
Further, there is nothing at all silly about the applicaiton of the law, nor does it "miss the point of the internet". As long as French speaking people in Quebec can access the site and the site is operated within the province, it's subject to the law, and the Quebec authorities have the responsibility to ensure access to the site by French speakers. As a parallel, if someone had a shop just outside of Quebec (the city) that sold really cheesy tourist stuff to English-speaking Americans, they wouldn't be exempt either.
The only stupidity that this action shows is the stupidity typical of people running internet businesses and thinking that they are somehow "special" or above the commercial laws of their jurisdiction because they're a "virtual" company and people in Addis Ababa can do business with them without having any idea where they're located.
Love and hope for the best?
No, love them and you hardly have to concern yourself with "hoping". Loving a child isn't some sort of passive well-wishing. It's reading to him instead of plopping him down in front of "Barney" videos for 4 hours. It's taking what he has to say seriously, even if it's the inane chatter of a 4 year old, because HE takes it seriously. It's giving his growing brain some reason to be predisposed to actually talk to you and trust you to care about what he has to say. And it works really really well, but only if you actually do it. "Love" is a verb, after all.
My son's behaviour at school has increased greatly since I've started recieving detailed daily reports.
Started receiving detailed daily reports??? My parents got those 20 years ago, without computers, every day, from me. Usually at the dinner table. You've got all the information you need about your kid's day at school already. It's in your kid. The single best "positive reinforcement" a kid can get is parents who listen to him and have taught him, throught their own actions, that they WILL listen to him. And this doesn't mean "always take his side" or "coddle him". I can recall exactly one case where my mother, a former teacher, took my side when I complained about a teacher. It was, however, the one case where she should have taken my side.
Oddly enough, once I was out of school and in college, and grad school, and "real life", my parents still heard (and hear) from me a couple times a week, and still know what's going on in my life, because I know they care about what goes on in my life and I like them for that. All without reports from my company, landlord or friends.
This sort of shit is only necessary in a world where parents have spent the previous however-many years of their child's life ignoring them 99.98% of the time and teaching them that the last thing in the world they should do is communicate honestly with their parents.
You need more control over your kids? Try having a bit of LOVE for them, dumbshit!
Yo! Moderators! When someone writes that CompUSA is a wonderful place with great prices, THEY'RE TROLLING. Sheesh!
While I suppose one could argue that Apple hasn't significantly changed or improved the interface of MacOS with OS-X, they were somewhat busy re-writing the whole thing. And your claim is ridiculous with regard to Microsoft. Windows XP is a rather radical shift, interface-wise, from the Win95 paradigm (which, of course, was at least a significant shift in many ways from the Win 3.11 paradigm).
Merely competing well in a server environment is likely to be the downfall of any operating system. As much as they need applications and robustness for their suitable purposes, OSes need two things: Exposure and interoperability with the desktop.
Exposure is that intangible need for people in decision-making positions, who, even if they are the ones with the best technical expertise, still only know what they know (if you know what I mean...). MS has exposure, and works very hard - through advertisement, certification and partnerships - to maintain and grow that exposure. But more than those efforts, MS is on damned near every desktop. If you're an MCSE, everyone in your business at least thinks they have a clue as to what that means.
Linux, Sun and AIX have exposure too, of course, but there is much less momentum for their maintaining that exposure. If you doubt this, just ask around among your technical brethern to see who all has worked on a VMS system recently (or ever), or who has done work in Prolog (a fabulous logic-processing language with interfaces to C++ for those non-specialised apps). If these technologies are dying, is is most certainly not from being ill-suited to their task - it's because they're less and less known.
One very easy way to maintain exposure is to maintain some presense on the desktop. Both Solarus and Linux are viable desktop solutions, and even if not everyone in one's office uses them, they can know that they're used and have some understanding of what the people who admin them are all about. The more the office in general realises what technology is being used, the more management realises it, and the less likely it is to be tossed aside because some PHB never heard of it (whatever "reasons" are put forth for such a decision).
Compliance with the desktop is also critical for the server market. It has long been understood - and at times even admitted by some MS people - that control of the desktop can be parlayed into control of the servers. That this is a strategy at MS - and a damned good one - isn't in doubt. Any of the studies showing how well IIS serves up pages to IE (the number one web browser) confirm it. If Linux and Solarus drop off our desktops forever, businesses would be harder and harder pressed to justify them on servers. The shifting of the desktop environment ever-so-slightly away from the standards of communication used by everyone else would eventually make MSes server OSes the only viable choise, because for the task at hand - coordinating, supporting, and serving for MS clients - they would be the best choice. Only by maintaining as much as possible of the business desktop world off of MS Windows can that be averted. When even 5% of business desktops aren't Windows, businesses have to take those into account.
While it may ultimately be true that the Linux Desktop is dead (or, I suppose, is stillborn), I cannot agree with the author's conclusion that this is an OK thing for Linux. If the desktop is dead, the server will follow.
Slashdot provides anonymous remailing? Wow. Why doesn't that show up on the left side?
First, as of course you realized, appeals to the US 1st amendment make very little difference in other countries. It is also of very little use when debating how things "should" be to appeal to how they happen to be.
That said, your point has merit. The right to speak anonymously has been upheld in this country - and for the Klan specifically - and there are solid reasons behind that. However, there are a couple of differences here. First, the circumstances of, say, a klan march are somewhat different than an untracked internet usage. If a Klansman wlaking through a black neighborhood shouts a threat at a specific protester, the police may nab the marcher and take his pillow case off. As a matter of practical usage, this is exactly what the police have instituted. Second, the action in question is not merely speech, but also commerce, and even in the good old USA there are much stricter controls on commerce than on pure speech - even though the Supreme Court has held that the use of money is protected speech in many contexts. You can't buy a car without the state knowing who you are, for instance. Well, here you can't rent internet access from a cybercafe without the state at least being able to know who you are.
The suggestions that a method not involving login cards could be used - say, supplying identification to the cafe, which would then track who used what computer and when - do have merit, and are much closer to other commercial tracking methods. However, the system they propose is actually less intrusive. Unless and until the police need to track who used a computer, only the user and the computer need know. If the system were done using normal identification and registration, everyone who worked at the cybercafe or had access to the log books (licitly or not) would know who was using what computers when and for how long.
The primary concerns sited had nothing to do with pornography. They had to do with the fact that the cybercafes are being frequented for the purposes of hostile computer attacks and threats.
Where did this idea come from? Where was it decided that the internet is an inherantly, unrestricted, unrestrictable, utterly anonymous place where people have complete and unassailably privacy? That's utter crap. It started for two reasons: so well-identified and verified military personnel could communicate and so well identified and verified academics could communicate.
Anonymity only exists in certain corners - corners like Slashdot that people like us hang in. But I'm hardly anonymous as far as the net is concerned. All the information needed to find my seat is flowing back and forth through my connection. That is the natural state of the net. We can put up various blocks and spoofs to try to fool it, or set up systems that purpously ignore it, but it's all there, wide out in the open.
Some student popping into a cybercafe is still going to be able to post to his favorate newsgroups, discussion sites, and maybe even BBSs if he knows they exist with all the anonymity he had before. Just now, if someone wants to put a lot of work into it, his comments can be traced back to him to the same degree that mine can be traced back to me. The only "privacy" that is lost, is the same kind of privacy that walking around with a sheet on and a pillow case over your head affords - and, like in real life, that's neither the normal state of affairs, nor one very many people intentionally seek out.
And this is a good thing. Whether it's Klan hoods or taped over badge numbers, the perception of anonymity has an overwhelming tendancy to bring out the absolute worst in people. The fact that other people do (or, at least, conceivably can) watch us is indespensable in a society. What causes problems is when some members of the society can't be watched. It doesn't sound like this is the case with the police in question.
I seem to recall the original article (or was it a related one?) being quite clear about the "need to educate legislators" about the dangers of the GPL, Open Source, and Napster (which, of course, are all the same thing). Just what is the goal of spending money on such "education" if not to get "the right of the open-sourse software model to compete in the marketplace" restricted?
The Establishment clause of the first amendment was to protect the states from the federal governement. None of the states (and it was the states, not the people, who ratified the Constitution) wanted a federal government that could establish a national religion. Maryland was still Catholic and Pennsylvania was still Quaker.Yes, scientology is protected (despite insisting in its early years that it was a science, not a religion). But protection as a religion does not entail protection from criticism. Scientology has always been of the position that it does. Indeed, its very declaration of itself as a religion was in order to be free from the peer review of legitimate psychology that continuing to claim to be a science would entail.
Manual suction cups for climbing windows or such have been around for quite some time. I'm wondering what they've done to those pads to allow them to get suction on surfaces like concrete. Best I could pick up for the site is that there is some level of tolerance for porousness in the surface, and if it gets too bad, it won't work. Plus, it seems the suction unit on the climbers back can keep increasing the suction as air filters into the pad. So the remaining question is "What did they do to the pads themselves to make even that possible?" and, perhaps more importantly, how durable is that modification? Does it require a coating that rubs off after a while? Does it wear down quickly?
Nevermind that I've never seen a cordless vacuum cleaner that both had good suction and decent battery life...
Every major world religion - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, and all of the major divisions within those religions have one glaring difference with Scientology. They are all open and direct about their beliefs and positions. Even television preachers freely share what they see as the truth. Sure, there are fringe movements within all major religions that like the idea of the "mystery cult" and like feeling like they understand some truth that others don't, but they are generally dismissed as cults (in, of course, the negative sense of the word) by their own parent religions.
Even when Christianity was controling Europe or Islam was conquering North Africa, they preached their doctrines in the open for all to see and here, and acted by the light of day. Scientology, on the other hand, is a religion of sewer rats hiding in the cracks and the shadows, ready to swarm out on anyone who happens to get uncomfortably close to them. In a bitter irony to their professed interest in liberating the human mind, their behaviour is as programed and predictable as a caged animal that strikes at anything it sees.
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/index.htm?financial_ cr imes.htm&1
This is the Secret Service's financial crimes page. It links to (lower in the same page) the 4-1-9 (the Nigerian Bank scam) scam page, and clicking on the advisory triangle brings you to a fuller description, contact information and an email link for reporting. The Secret Service estimates losses due to this scam in the 100s of millions annually.
This is a fun one. Unless you get killed or have your life's savings taken away. The FBI has an ongoing investigation of these scams, as they are quite dangerous, and the Secret Service keeps information on all reports of the scam. People have been fleeced, kidnapped and killed in this one. If you run into it, drop a line to the FBI and the Secret Service and help their tracking.
They did include a date stamp. It's in the URL - 20010514, today. While you may be right, don't assume that a Microsoft security hole isn't there just because there was reported to be a similar one a year ago. (Again, you may be right, that it's just Yahoo being yahoos, but I don't see any reason to assume that there isn't another - real this time - backdoor just because there was a false alarm 13 months ago.)