So what if there are multiple implementations? The vendor simply supplies a cable that goes from Mini-USB to standard USB B connector, like the 6-in-one card reader I bought last week (and returned because it wouldn't mount any media under Linux, but I digress).
Actually, its conceivable to fit a really, really stripped down boot image on a floppy that would load drivers for a usb device and load an OS from there, no?
No, the browser made the World Wide Web a medium. Funny that even on/., where the geek population is supposed to be more concentrated, people still mistake the internet for a *thing*. Those people need to go reread this 5 or 6 times.
A brain-dead entity on life support is still "alive", though arguably less useful than a fully functioning carbon-based unit. So it may be with the internet when, as other posters have so elequently pointed out, access to the net itself has been consolidated into the hands of a very few media giants.
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration") Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
I've received many rebates over the years. And yes, I paid sales tax, but that's not the purchase price. It's just the local gangsters taking their rake.
I "borrowed" a stamp. Had I not, the total out-of-pocket cost would have been $0.32, which is still a good deal. Surely anything under $1 is in the noise. But no, it hasn't arrived yet, so I may have been retroactively ripped off.
Nit: 'Johnny Mnemonic' was a short story in the collection entitled 'Burning Chrome'. The title story was originally published in Omni, was my first introduction to Gibson, and kicked ass IMHO. I think it would make a great screenplay.
'New Rose Hotel', also a story from BC, was also movified. Don't waste the rental fee.
There's nothing wrong with "just providing encryption", but that doesn't address the problem at hand. TRIPOLI uses encryption and identity-based authentication and TTP certificate issuers so that responsibility for sending email can be backtraced to a specific (though not necessarily meatspace-correlated) identity. This is the key to the whole system. To send mail, you must have an authenticatable identity. Spammers' authentications should have half-lives measured in seconds, assuming systems like Razor grow to meet the new requirements. So unless a spammer wants to shell out the big bucks for thousands or millions of PCA certs, he'll soon find himself unable to send mail to anyone at all. Good riddance.
And your example of real-time authentication won't stop a spammer. Won't even slow him down much. SSBs (Spam Service Bureaus) will just go out to Best Buy and pick up a couple of quad-P4 boxes to handle the authentication traffic, lie during the authentication (ethically no different than forging From: and Received: headers) and life will go on as before. Remember, spammers' servers are already online for the duration of a spam run. Without a Trusted Third Party involved in the authentication chain, you have to trust the (possibly unknown and/or unknowable) other party not to lie to you.
I've seen this happen to me. While working on a driver inf file for Win2k. On Friday, the install worked perfectly. On the following Monday, it barfed. Friday afternoon, I'd done the Critical Update Tango once again. Afterward, it seems that what was once a recommendation (the driver's Service Name should be the same as the filename of the driver) is now a requirement.
In Minneapolis, a bunch of places have tossed in with SurfThing to offer kiosk access along with Wi-Fi. For the price of a coffee at several Dunn Bros. coffee houses, I can use the provided computers to surf with a crippled IE (is that an oxymoron?) through a SafeSurf filter and watch the ads in the left column. Or I can fire up the lappie, turn off WEP, set the SSID to "SurfThing" and get a pipe with no ads and no restrictions (that I was able to find... SSH worked just dandy). With that deal available, I'll probably pass on the Starbucks' offer.
I'm guessing a lot of other people will pass, too. Starbucks needs to offer a one-day (or even hourly) rate before things will take off. They could use it for promotions... fill up your Starbucks card, get an hour online. That $30/mo is going to wave a lot of people off.
Yeah, those display machines always catch hell. I see more and more of them with passwords on the BIOS setup (finally) to thwart people (surely not me!) setting one. And back when some BIOS' had MFM formatting capability, well... lets just say (insert major retailer here)'s electronics floor manager may have had a busier weekend than he expected.
Not yet, it isn't. But the advertising racket would dearly love to turn the net into TV because they understand passive media, and more importantly, because passive media don't offer the opportunity to block pop-ups and media types. Advertising's entire business model is based on cognitive intrusion. They must force their impressions on their victims, because no rational human will willingly accept a sales pitch they didn't ask for (modulo the general entertainment value of some ads, of course).
Well some of us have gotten over the GeeWiz factor of running your own servers on the internet.
And some of us never had a GeeWiz factor in the first place, but just need to be able to access the home network from an away point to Get Things Done. So, yes, I "really need those services", like using my own mail servers to handle my own domains' mail. In short, I "really need" my ISP to give me a bitpipe, one or more IP addresses (usually one is sufficient), routing to and from that address and... nothing else!
Service level counts, too. 'Round here, cable means RoadRunner/TWC, and that means Earthlink is your ISP. No servers, not NAT-friendly, blocked ports, etc...
DSL lets you pick your own ISP, so you can select one that's a bit friendlier to geeklike usage. That can easily be worth a 160 Kbps speed deficit. (Qwest offers 640d/256u)
All the RDF/RSS feed grabbers/users that I have seen are fairly involved perl (or other language) scripts that require a nice chunk of work on the webmaster's side.
If a webmaster can handle HTML::Template, Syndic Lite offers a clean method of presenting RSS on a web page.
Wouldn't that mean that anytime I changed or upgraded my computer, hardware or software, then I would need to re-obtain express authorization from my ISP to use it to connect?
You are correct, sir! More to the point, don't count on your current kit being grandfathered in. Under these laws, your ISP can demand that you run a 300 MHz Compaq Presario with Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack X, IE 6.5, 64MB of RAM and no programs installed beyond the original image. (third-party sound driver? that's outta here...)
Or AOL could make your Free Hours CD bootable and require that you use that boot environment (you know, the one that doesn't recognize any local drives so you can't load anything else) to connect.
Like I said, the net as television... back to read-only media. Except in this scenario, you don't even get to use the remote and your browser doesn't block pop-ups, it seeks them out.
What's to stop grass-roots cooperatives forming wi-fi networks?
Nothing at all... until you want to hook up to the greater internet, at which point you are at the mercy of the Communications Service Provider. And the way these laws are written, that CSP will have absolute jurisdiction over what you can attach to its network interface. An ad hoc parallel network is an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to reach internet scale. (unless Wi-Fi can skip, but what about the ping times?)
One day you will pay one company $39.95 for flat-rate long distance.... Whenever, wherever.
Got that (or very nearly so) on my cell phone now. And with cell plans getting more and more generous, I expect that within a year or two, you'll see unlimited minutes and free LD at a reasonable flat rate. Then the old copper outside plant will be carrying mostly DSL, and analog phones will fade away.
Considering that articles from the infamous Dacron Republican-Democrat were known to have shown up in clipping services, it's not so suprising to find people accepting the WWN as an authoratative source. Good enough for J and K, right?
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So what if there are multiple implementations? The vendor simply supplies a cable that goes from Mini-USB to standard USB B connector, like the 6-in-one card reader I bought last week (and returned because it wouldn't mount any media under Linux, but I digress).
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration") Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
Thanks for the HTTPS tip. I was wondering why a brand-new install didn't need anything updated.
I've received many rebates over the years. And yes, I paid sales tax, but that's not the purchase price. It's just the local gangsters taking their rake.
I "borrowed" a stamp. Had I not, the total out-of-pocket cost would have been $0.32, which is still a good deal. Surely anything under $1 is in the noise. But no, it hasn't arrived yet, so I may have been retroactively ripped off.
#include <clue.h>
#include
What would the above list of languages use for an equivalent?
Perl: use Clue; /etc/clue
bash: .
Pascal: uses Clue
Java: public class main extends clue
What else?
</lamejoke>
'New Rose Hotel', also a story from BC, was also movified. Don't waste the rental fee.
And your example of real-time authentication won't stop a spammer. Won't even slow him down much. SSBs (Spam Service Bureaus) will just go out to Best Buy and pick up a couple of quad-P4 boxes to handle the authentication traffic, lie during the authentication (ethically no different than forging From: and Received: headers) and life will go on as before. Remember, spammers' servers are already online for the duration of a spam run. Without a Trusted Third Party involved in the authentication chain, you have to trust the (possibly unknown and/or unknowable) other party not to lie to you.
I've seen this happen to me. While working on a driver inf file for Win2k. On Friday, the install worked perfectly. On the following Monday, it barfed. Friday afternoon, I'd done the Critical Update Tango once again. Afterward, it seems that what was once a recommendation (the driver's Service Name should be the same as the filename of the driver) is now a requirement.
I'm guessing a lot of other people will pass, too. Starbucks needs to offer a one-day (or even hourly) rate before things will take off. They could use it for promotions... fill up your Starbucks card, get an hour online. That $30/mo is going to wave a lot of people off.
Yeah, those display machines always catch hell. I see more and more of them with passwords on the BIOS setup (finally) to thwart people (surely not me!) setting one. And back when some BIOS' had MFM formatting capability, well... lets just say (insert major retailer here)'s electronics floor manager may have had a busier weekend than he expected.
DSL lets you pick your own ISP, so you can select one that's a bit friendlier to geeklike usage. That can easily be worth a 160 Kbps speed deficit. (Qwest offers 640d/256u)
Or AOL could make your Free Hours CD bootable and require that you use that boot environment (you know, the one that doesn't recognize any local drives so you can't load anything else) to connect.
Like I said, the net as television... back to read-only media. Except in this scenario, you don't even get to use the remote and your browser doesn't block pop-ups, it seeks them out.
It's coming...
Considering that articles from the infamous Dacron Republican-Democrat were known to have shown up in clipping services, it's not so suprising to find people accepting the WWN as an authoratative source. Good enough for J and K, right?
s/heretofore/hereinafter/