including for Mr. Murphy himself, who most likely has been trying to stay very low profile for decades, and who now sees his hopes of finally not being associated with this calamitous law utterly vanish with a single Slashdot article.
It begs the question why goverments around the world are encouraging everyone to use the internet, but is there really enough of a reason for everybody to need to? Is the internet suitable for everybody? Will it ever be?
Governments want the people to use the Internet for several reasons:
- Their representatives can go to world conferences and claim "we're the most advanced country in the world"
- They want to save money on forms (read: let citizens print their own forms on their printers, or avoid having to pay millions on printing tax forms by having people file online)
- They generally want to lubricate the top-to-bottom communication between them and their citizens/subjects (good thing).
Individuals, on the other hand, need the Internet because it is one answer that helps satisfy one of the most basic human needs : communicate. People need to communicate, all the time, for good or bad reasons. That's part of the human psyche. Before the Net, there was (1) direct speech (doesn't go very far), (2) mail (slow but ubiquitous), (3) telephone (fast, ubiquitous but expensive). The Net can easily replace all three for dirt cheap, which makes it very compelling for everybody but the most rebellious hermits.
So, with all this goodness, why won't the Internet replace every other mean of communication? because it's inherently unsafe. No matter how you slice it, it is not safe. My general rule is to always assume anything you send to the IP cloud is public and never forgotten, which I have verified many times. Encryption helps secure things, but it's only a band-aid on a wooden leg. What the various countried in the world will eventually end up with, IMHO, is a secure government-operated data trunk for voting, tax filing, financial transaction,... and the Net as we know it for everything else. That technology exists already by the way : it's in France and it's called the Minitel. That's the reason this old inefficient 1200/75 terminal thingy is still alive and doing very well indeed : it's the only secure way to pay for anything electronically in France, and it's proven to work very securely, and French people trust it.
The keyword is trust. The Net, all great that it is, isn't, and will never be trustworthy. It'll stay around for sure, but I believe it'll be supplemented by national physically-separate networks everywhere in the world eventually.
Just as a point of observation wrt NAT for security
For the nth time, NAT has nothing to do with security. NAT is essentially an IP address multiplexer. If used to be for people who didn't want to pay for more than one IP but wanted several computers to access the Net several years back, and it used to be frowned upon by ISPs, if not outright prohibited by them. Now it has become a necessity due to IP shortage, and you'll notice most ISPs don't mind anymore for that very reason.
SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)
When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend in Canada:)
It's a simple money matter : if you d/l a lot of music, at $15, $20 or whatever a pop at the music store, even if you get sued, you settle with the RIAA and you're still winning.
Besides, the chance of getting caught is minimal : there are dozens of millions of file swappers around the world and maybe 1000 at most get supoenaed, and even better, in the US only (for now anyway). I would think it's more risky to die crossing the street than getting caught sharing files by the RIAA.
So, why on earth would people stop swapping ? the risk/benefit ratio is tiny indeed. Which means that the RIAA's tactic is not effective, which also means that the only thing they achieve are (1) ruining poor students, single-moms's daughters and causing anguish and misery to all of them for nothing, and (2) generate a lot of shitty press for themselves. Not that I complain about the latter of course...
With all the neat technical things I learn on Slashdot about hacking, viruses and Canadia, I have to ask the question: is there a chance I can get an SSH shell on Tom Green's cellphone to plant the Blaster worm on it? Then I'll chop his head off with a Mandrake-enabled light saber.
Louis Burns of Intel displayed a "high-definition video stream running on a 'mystery' desktop processor.
Gosh, one of these days I'll have to take a sneak peak at the hardware they run in that mystery little room in my local theater. The monitor is so big, the soundcard is great, and I can see it all for a buck!
What's the deal with this article summary? Some random person comments on his comments? Only slightly better than an editor doing it.
Nobody said Slashdot had quality editorials :/. is a bunch of random dudes selecting articles from thousands such articles submitted by thousands of other random anonymous dudes. What do you expect? If you want impartial news, listen to Fox.
This said, I agree: this particular article is exceedingly painful to read.
'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings,
Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish. No need for retarded hitmen analogies...
I lived in the US on an H1B visa before 9/11. I first got it in 10 months, which is considered fast normally. When I applied for a renewal after 9/11, it was denied, although the first renewal was granted to me without problem and reasonably fast, and I never had so much as a speeding ticket in the US. I thought, well, the US of A doesn't want me no more, so I went back to the EC.
Now friends who have applied recently told me it's a matter of 2 or 3 years, and that quotas have gone down drastically (read: they can't get one).
I've started my company in France. So are my friends. We're all experiencing huge pains in the rectal area because the taxman in France is voracious, but we have to stay here (or perhaps go to Canada later, but right now we're staying here) because it seems Uncle Sam can do without enterprising people willing to go to great length and make sacrifices to try to succeed, and eventually pay taxes to the IRS.
I think the INS is right : there should be a barrier to entry in the US that's high enough to winnow out slackers and let worthy people in only. But when the barrier is too high, Uncle Sam deprives itself of workers who already have an education that didn't cost a cent to the country, are provably willing to work hard to make it, and willing to play the US economy game and pay their taxes. If I was a decision maker, I'd welcome such a population in the country.
Too bad your current administration doesn't see farther than its nose-tip...
Eolas could become very rich, or be made to look very stupid in a jiffy since, at core, an operating system loading an application can be seen as a plugin-based system (i.e. separately loadable piece of code that extends the functionality of the base software). The only software that can't be seen as having the ability to load plugins is a monolithic application, for embedded devices for example, that have everything they need inside to run on a given platform.
In short, I don't think it'd be too hard to prove prior art...
The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1
The day the RIAA will be such a threat to peaceful P2P that people will start reading aloud file hex printouts byte by byte over the phone to share data, I think the trend will reverse. But I might be wrong...
I used the same mouse throughout that time, both for applications and gaming
I used then for hours on end every day to draw under Degas Elite and Spectrum 512. I'd say that's more heavy usage than apps and gaming. Sure they were okay to do this and that, take your hand off it and back on it, but for heavy use, they weren't adequate.
You lost. I've used many of the hateful gray boxes (many because they would stop working okay and I'd have to buy another one). Until I bough one of the first nice replacement mice that was available for it, an infrared mouse if I remember.
They were uncomfortable (square shape), the buttons felt light and cheap (and they were), the plastic eroded with sweat in no time, the button switches would fail over time, the rollers would clog up more and more often (well, okay, that's all mechanical mice), and using it long enough to draw made my hand stuffy and hot.
The Atari ST was not a contemporary machine from the era of the ZX81
Thanks for the history lesson, but I was designing memory extensions for the ZX81 at the time. The point is that I can only compare the ST mouse to a POS keyboard like the ZX81's.
The only way to make it better would have be to make it wireless
Hell no! Wireless mice/trackballs chew batteries like there's no tomorrow. I actually purchased their newer TrackMan model when I realized mine got discontinued, because it had the same ball and overall shape, only it was wireless and grey in color, and I figured I could live with changing the batteries. Boy! was I wrong. But I guess I wasn't alone thinking that, that new model was phased out quickly afterward.
I hate batteries. A cable is fine for me. One of the advantages of a trackball is that you just don't drag the cord around anyway, so what's the point of a cordless trackball ?
Slashdot Mirror
"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong"
:-)
including for Mr. Murphy himself, who most likely has been trying to stay very low profile for decades, and who now sees his hopes of finally not being associated with this calamitous law utterly vanish with a single Slashdot article.
Hi Ed
is that where he took a dump ?
If I were you, I'd watch myself real close, in case I turned out to be a real terrorist.
It begs the question why goverments around the world are encouraging everyone to use the internet, but is there really enough of a reason for everybody to need to? Is the internet suitable for everybody? Will it ever be?
... and the Net as we know it for everything else. That technology exists already by the way : it's in France and it's called the Minitel. That's the reason this old inefficient 1200/75 terminal thingy is still alive and doing very well indeed : it's the only secure way to pay for anything electronically in France, and it's proven to work very securely, and French people trust it.
Governments want the people to use the Internet for several reasons:
- Their representatives can go to world conferences and claim "we're the most advanced country in the world"
- They want to save money on forms (read: let citizens print their own forms on their printers, or avoid having to pay millions on printing tax forms by having people file online)
- They generally want to lubricate the top-to-bottom communication between them and their citizens/subjects (good thing).
Individuals, on the other hand, need the Internet because it is one answer that helps satisfy one of the most basic human needs : communicate. People need to communicate, all the time, for good or bad reasons. That's part of the human psyche. Before the Net, there was (1) direct speech (doesn't go very far), (2) mail (slow but ubiquitous), (3) telephone (fast, ubiquitous but expensive). The Net can easily replace all three for dirt cheap, which makes it very compelling for everybody but the most rebellious hermits.
So, with all this goodness, why won't the Internet replace every other mean of communication? because it's inherently unsafe. No matter how you slice it, it is not safe. My general rule is to always assume anything you send to the IP cloud is public and never forgotten, which I have verified many times. Encryption helps secure things, but it's only a band-aid on a wooden leg. What the various countried in the world will eventually end up with, IMHO, is a secure government-operated data trunk for voting, tax filing, financial transaction,
The keyword is trust. The Net, all great that it is, isn't, and will never be trustworthy. It'll stay around for sure, but I believe it'll be supplemented by national physically-separate networks everywhere in the world eventually.
The government regulates the size of toilet tanks.
...
Yes, but you can protest peacefully against this orwellian state and declare yourself in civil desobedience by putting a brick in your toilet tank.
Gandhi would have approved
- Vonage gets sued to oblivion by phone companies
...
- People start using P2P VoIP phone applications en masse
- Phone companies start sending out subpoenas to ISPs to discover the real name/addresses of these evil phone call thieves.
- Phone companies sue 12 year old girl who was calling his grandfather and ask $15000 per stolen phone call
- Phone companies say VoIP technology is full of kiddie porn
Deja vu anybody ?
Just as a point of observation wrt NAT for security
For the nth time, NAT has nothing to do with security. NAT is essentially an IP address multiplexer. If used to be for people who didn't want to pay for more than one IP but wanted several computers to access the Net several years back, and it used to be frowned upon by ISPs, if not outright prohibited by them. Now it has become a necessity due to IP shortage, and you'll notice most ISPs don't mind anymore for that very reason.
Again : NAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SECURITY.
I tried contacting 192.168.0.1 and I keep getting larsen. Disappointing really ...
SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)
:)
When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend in Canada
It's a simple money matter : if you d/l a lot of music, at $15, $20 or whatever a pop at the music store, even if you get sued, you settle with the RIAA and you're still winning.
...
Besides, the chance of getting caught is minimal : there are dozens of millions of file swappers around the world and maybe 1000 at most get supoenaed, and even better, in the US only (for now anyway). I would think it's more risky to die crossing the street than getting caught sharing files by the RIAA.
So, why on earth would people stop swapping ? the risk/benefit ratio is tiny indeed. Which means that the RIAA's tactic is not effective, which also means that the only thing they achieve are (1) ruining poor students, single-moms's daughters and causing anguish and misery to all of them for nothing, and (2) generate a lot of shitty press for themselves. Not that I complain about the latter of course
any DSL modem or router is probably at least a hundred times faster than a C64.
With all the neat technical things I learn on Slashdot about hacking, viruses and Canadia, I have to ask the question: is there a chance I can get an SSH shell on Tom Green's cellphone to plant the Blaster worm on it? Then I'll chop his head off with a Mandrake-enabled light saber.
...
I really can't stand Tom Green
I struggle to tax it with anything I do, including some of the more intensive games.
...
Try "nice -n 20 dd bs=1 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null"
Louis Burns of Intel displayed a "high-definition video stream running on a 'mystery' desktop processor.
Gosh, one of these days I'll have to take a sneak peak at the hardware they run in that mystery little room in my local theater. The monitor is so big, the soundcard is great, and I can see it all for a buck!
[NO CARRIER]
Russ at NTBugtraq is proposing fines for those whose computers allow the propagation of viruses, worms, etc., knowingly or unknowingly...
...
- Russ Cooper is editor at NTBugTraq
- NTBugTraq is a division of TruSecure Corporation
- Russ Cooper is chief scientist at TruSecure Corporation
- TruSecure Corporation sells security solutions and services.
In other news, the Haagen Das corporation is pushing a proposal to hasten global warming
Another fine impartial article brought to you by Slashdot.
Who didn't see this coming? Of course, you're a law-abiding citizen, so you have nothing to worry about, right?
I'm not afraid of FBI agent storming my place, because I'm not only paranoid, I'm also schizophrenic, which means I outnumber my ennemies 2 to 1!
What's the deal with this article summary? Some random person comments on his comments? Only slightly better than an editor doing it.
/. is a bunch of random dudes selecting articles from thousands such articles submitted by thousands of other random anonymous dudes. What do you expect? If you want impartial news, listen to Fox.
Nobody said Slashdot had quality editorials :
This said, I agree: this particular article is exceedingly painful to read.
'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings,
...
Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish. No need for retarded hitmen analogies
I lived in the US on an H1B visa before 9/11. I first got it in 10 months, which is considered fast normally. When I applied for a renewal after 9/11, it was denied, although the first renewal was granted to me without problem and reasonably fast, and I never had so much as a speeding ticket in the US. I thought, well, the US of A doesn't want me no more, so I went back to the EC.
...
Now friends who have applied recently told me it's a matter of 2 or 3 years, and that quotas have gone down drastically (read: they can't get one).
I've started my company in France. So are my friends. We're all experiencing huge pains in the rectal area because the taxman in France is voracious, but we have to stay here (or perhaps go to Canada later, but right now we're staying here) because it seems Uncle Sam can do without enterprising people willing to go to great length and make sacrifices to try to succeed, and eventually pay taxes to the IRS.
I think the INS is right : there should be a barrier to entry in the US that's high enough to winnow out slackers and let worthy people in only. But when the barrier is too high, Uncle Sam deprives itself of workers who already have an education that didn't cost a cent to the country, are provably willing to work hard to make it, and willing to play the US economy game and pay their taxes. If I was a decision maker, I'd welcome such a population in the country.
Too bad your current administration doesn't see farther than its nose-tip
Eolas could become very rich, or be made to look very stupid in a jiffy since, at core, an operating system loading an application can be seen as a plugin-based system (i.e. separately loadable piece of code that extends the functionality of the base software). The only software that can't be seen as having the ability to load plugins is a monolithic application, for embedded devices for example, that have everything they need inside to run on a given platform.
...
In short, I don't think it'd be too hard to prove prior art
The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1
...
The day the RIAA will be such a threat to peaceful P2P that people will start reading aloud file hex printouts byte by byte over the phone to share data, I think the trend will reverse. But I might be wrong
I used the same mouse throughout that time, both for applications and gaming
I used then for hours on end every day to draw under Degas Elite and Spectrum 512. I'd say that's more heavy usage than apps and gaming. Sure they were okay to do this and that, take your hand off it and back on it, but for heavy use, they weren't adequate.
I bet you've never even used an Atari ST mouse.
You lost. I've used many of the hateful gray boxes (many because they would stop working okay and I'd have to buy another one). Until I bough one of the first nice replacement mice that was available for it, an infrared mouse if I remember.
They were uncomfortable (square shape), the buttons felt light and cheap (and they were), the plastic eroded with sweat in no time, the button switches would fail over time, the rollers would clog up more and more often (well, okay, that's all mechanical mice), and using it long enough to draw made my hand stuffy and hot.
The Atari ST was not a contemporary machine from the era of the ZX81
Thanks for the history lesson, but I was designing memory extensions for the ZX81 at the time. The point is that I can only compare the ST mouse to a POS keyboard like the ZX81's.
The only way to make it better would have be to make it wireless
Hell no! Wireless mice/trackballs chew batteries like there's no tomorrow. I actually purchased their newer TrackMan model when I realized mine got discontinued, because it had the same ball and overall shape, only it was wireless and grey in color, and I figured I could live with changing the batteries. Boy! was I wrong. But I guess I wasn't alone thinking that, that new model was phased out quickly afterward.
I hate batteries. A cable is fine for me. One of the advantages of a trackball is that you just don't drag the cord around anyway, so what's the point of a cordless trackball ?