I look at it another way, by which I assume that one pays for it one way or the other.
1. One does not offer the greatest benefit to Mozilla by purchasing through the Firefox affiliate link; instead, their revenue would probably be a lot higher if you just donated to them directly. There would be fewer accountants to pay, and fewer books for them to keep. By donating directly, one can eliminate entire fucking corporations from the money trail (*cough* Amazon), and displace any of the needless workers they most assuredly pay (with your money) to fondle your money before passing it onto Mozilla.
2. One does not throw away money by not using the Firefox affiliate links. If nobody used affiliate links, Amazon would be able to afford to broadly lower their prices, through decreased payouts and staff reassignment/downsizing. Once prices are lower, one has more money by which to directly donate to Mozilla.
There's no such thing as a free lunch/discount/clearance/sale/donation/kickback -- at the end of the day, the consumer always pays. Personally, I'd rather pay as little as possible.
What about being a productive member of society ? With your approach to life what happens to treating other people with respect? Easy: I also find pleasure in being socially productive in certain aspects of life. Not on any grand scale, I'm afraid, but I take a firm interest in helping people close to me overcome their problems and inabilities, and will help them out with whatever they ask of me. I don't expect anything but their gratitude in exchange for my labor, which I find very rewarding.
I also, generally, try to be polite and courteous to the more random people around me. The resultant smiles and brief, friendly conversations are more than enough payoff, for me.
The rest of my social producivity comes from my day job. And while I don't enjoy very many aspects of my job, I do enjoy the paycheck at the end of the week.
This paycheck affords me a decent home, which I enjoy living and entertaining in. It lets me buy food for my family, whom I enjoy cooking for. It provides me with funds to procure my more frivolous indulgancies, like a fine Belgian ale, deliciously-cured cigar, or a (back to the topic) good cup of coffee.
I drive an older BMW. It is not a modest car: Bright red. Big wheels. Performance tires. Stability control. Heated leather. It wasn't an expensive car, though a similarly-aged Toyota would've been a bit less money. But, unlike a Toyota, the Bimmer transforms the automobile from a burdensome transportation necessity into something that makes me grin from ear-to-ear every time I even look at the car. Driving it even to the grocery store is a religious experience for me. And maintaining it is an absolute pleasure; the way it fits together just makes so much sense that it's like a lesson in idealist engineering every time it needs some work (which is surprisingly seldom, for such a complicated vehicle with 160k miles on the clock).
It's like good coffee. Pricier, harder to find, and a bit fickle sometimes, but the payoff when it's done right is sheer ecstacy.
But the point is: Just because I'm a self-serving prick, does not mean that I do not care for others, because I also enjoy a feeling of mutual respect, and so will take steps to encourage it.
I also enjoy a good flame session on Slashdot. I get to see inside of other people in ways not normally possible, and learn a lot of new and interesting things. So it, too, simply feels good.:)
Er. Uh. The world is here for my own personal joy, and I'd be remiss if I did not attempt to maximize that joy.
To see it any other way is to realize that life, itself, is ultimately futile and without purpose. And since the only thing left to do after that grand realization is to die, I think I'll stick with the personal pleasure attitude for a good while longer instead.
Good coffee brings me happiness and joy, and thus provides some (however minor) establishment of purpose for my stay here.
Further: Some people drink decaf, occasionally with carefully-selected and quite tasty roasts, and enjoy it just fine.
I suppose you drive a 15-year-old Hyundai, and feed it the cheapest available oil and gasoline. If you smoke, you probably indulge in whatever unknown floor-sweep cigar[ette] is cheapest today, and finish the whole mess with a snifter of Old Dan Tucker and/or a couple of cans of skunky Natural Ice at the end of the day.
Your matress probably consists largely of cardboard. Your furniture is probably all flat-pack. You've heard that 128kbps MP3s suck, but it's all you can stand to download with your dialup modem, and you can fit a lot more of them onto your 6-gigabyte hard drive.
Your computer mouse has a ball in it. Your sound card is integrated on your Pentium 3 motherboard.
It's all just minutia, after all. Nothing to get uppity about.
I applaud you for your ability to be completely satisfied, living in absolute mediocrity.
*sigh*
For the rest of us, if we're going to consume something, we'd rather enjoy that consumption as much as possible. Even if the two coffees/cars/motor oils are chemically identical but sold at different prices, if one feels better about spending more on that thing (and so enjoys it more), it will result in increased enjoyment.
I mean: If the whole point is just to increase alertness, then there's a number of inexpensive OTC caffeine pills which will do just fine. If the point, however, is to *drink coffee*, then you're doing yourself a disservice by drinking whatever acrid swill you can get your hands on.
And if you really can't tell the difference, I do feel sorry for you. You're missing out.
To hell with the "current climate." I'm still an American, and I am sure as fuck going to enjoy every right that follows during my brief stay here on Earth -- no matter what the expense is.
And the reason is simple: If, for some reason, I become afraid to exploit every right afforded to me as an American citizen, then the terrorists/government will have already won.
I'm obviously not looking forward to taking up arms to take back my right to be free, and so I defend it while I've still got it.
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Ben Franklin
Please remember that the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution applies to all citizens. This, in combination with established law, requires an establishment of probable cause before detaining a suspected shoplifter.
Just keep walking.
The alarm at the door going off is not probable cause to suspect a person of a crime. Instead, it probably (ie, usually, almost always, nearly every fucking time) means that a clerk failed to properly deactivate a tag: It is not probable cause to suspect someone of a crime, but is rather probable cause to believe that a human being has made an error.
Just keep walking.
They have no cause to physically detain you, and you've done nothing wrong. You have no reason to actually stop. It's your stuff: You just paid for it, and the goon by the door probably even watched you pay for it. Even the receipt belongs to you, and you cannot be compelled to submit it for inspection without probable cause. That a clerk made a mistake is not a factor -- the transaction is done.
Just keep walking.
If they attempt to detain you by blocking your path, without establishing probable cause, they are committing false imprisonment. As an American, you cannot be unlawfully detained (however briefly) against your own free will.
Just keep walking.
If they attempt to touch, grab, or otherwise physically restrain you, they are committing assault. This entitles you to engage in a reasonable amount of self defense. This doesn't mean that you get to pull your well-honed Cold Steel blade and begin carving them up like sushi, but it does mean that you can at least counter whatever tactics they're attempting to use. Minimize your effort, and focus on the goal: Leaving the store with your stuff.
Just keep walking.
Most of this shouldn't ever matter. A properly-trained store employee will know these things, and will not attempt to pursue the effort as long as you just keep walking. A typical confrontation goes something like this:
Greeter: "Sir, may I see your receipt?"
Patron: *keeps walking*
Greeter: "Sir?"
Patron: *keeps walking*
Greeter: "SIR!"
At this point, as long as you just keep walking, the automatic door will shut between you and them and you'll no longer hear their vacant pleas.
It's your stuff, which you own. It's nobody's business but yours. So take that stuff that you just paid for, and just keep walking.
There is no reason for a non-casual, professional thief to ever steal a single, physical DVD from a retail store. So if the system prevents casual theft, then it stops almost all theft:
1. If the goal is mass-replication, including jacket and silkscreen, then they'll just buy the fucking thing with cash. Spending just $2 to $20 is a very cheap way to replace an entire layer of real risk with genuine anonymity.
2. If the goal is mass-replication without a high-quality jacket and silkscreen, they'll just grab a torrent and cut a fresh DVD -- probably long before the movie is ever released.
The potential goal of direct sale of stolen DVDs to the public is a point that I intentionally ignore, because it lacks profit motivation compared to the two points above. Since we're talking about moderately-intelligent professionals here, it's all about the money, and they're going to pick the best risk-reward ratio that they can.
There is, of course, a vast profit motive in obtaining (and activating) large-ish quantities of DVDs all at once (think pallets of cartons of movies "falling off the truck"), but that's not a theft that is likely to occur at the retail level. And given the difficulty of such a heist, it's likely that such thefts occur infrequently, and that the total loss is really pretty low compared to that incurred by the armies of casual thieves with big coats and lined pockets.
So, I forecast that such a system, if economical to implement and reasonably secure, will eliminate the vast majority of shrinkage in DVD stocks, and will be with us for a long time to come.
True. But a modern GPU* uses more energy when it is performing work than when it is not, just like a modern CPU.
I mean: Just because it's offloaded from the CPU does not mean that it is free*. The ATI X300 in my laptop sure does make a lot more heat, and accordingly uses a lot more energy, when running 3D OpenGL applications than when sitting at a text-mode prompt, at any given clock speed.
But it probably doesn't matter much. I note an increase in battery life on my Inspiron 6000d of about 25% by running Vista (complete with Aero) instead of XP, with very similar power management settings To me, this has meant the difference between occasionally needing to plug the computer in on a client site, and never needing to (so far, anyway).
I could kill Aero and get some more life out of it, but I like the pretties.:)
[*]: Obvious, glaring exceptions like 3dfx's earlier lines of Voodoo card do exist. The Voodoo3 2000, for example, is known to run blisteringly hot ALL THE TIME, whether or not it has anything productive to do. But hardware of this ilk isn't going to be used with Vista, anyway.
Eh? Just because there's a button physically on the drive, does not mean that said button overrides the wishes of the OS.
The eject button of a CD-ROM drive in Vista behaves as it should: It simply notifies the OS that the user would like to eject the media. After that, Windows finishes any pending writes and does whatever else needs done, and then ejects the media.
Which is, I'd guess, about how OS X works. Except that, on a PC, the eject button is where it belongs instead of on the keyboard.
I'm from a part of Ohio that suffers from a general lack of black people, but we sure do have plenty of niggers. They talk like niggers, act like niggers, and look like niggers. They even drive niggermobiles like only a nigger can: Up high on polished 24s, all leaned over the center console so their head looks to be almost in line with the rearview mirror but yet somehow tilted back so far that they're nearly sitting in the back seat, hanging onto the steering wheel with one limp-wristed hand wrapped up in a heavy gold bracelet, with a stereo booming atonally, just loud enough to attact attention.
(Alternatively, there is the poor nigger, in a middle-90s Oldsmobile that is either off-white, maroon, or teal with a cracked tail light, a failing headliner, a dent in the side, and unusually high levels of body rust. The posture and jewelry are the same, though.)
It really is the funniest fucking thing, watching these pasty white niggers roll around town. It's even funnier to watch them try to walk, yammer into a cell phone, and try to keep their pants from falling the rest of the way down - all at the same time.
The point is: Just because a word is used in racist speech does not mean that the word itself is racist. My stereotypical Ohioan whiteboy nigger is just one example of that, as the term applies equally to the few black niggers that we have, too.
To me, at least, the word has got nothing to do with skin color, but is instead about my perception of people's personal choices and actions.
Application designers then have to come around with the kind of tricks you mention in order to boost their performance in an environment that is at best uncooperative and at worst plain hostile.
*nod*
Vista's SuperFetch feature seems to level that playing field a bit with regards to preloading and cache-stuffing by not requiring applications to do it themselves. But it will obviously take awhile before those applications themselves stop behaving in this fashion (and it's anyone's guess, of course, if Microsoft's own applications ever will stop).
What a lousy reason to use a stand-alone MUA, let alone POP3. If that's all you're after, just use gmail's forwarding, filtering, and multiple account settings.
I've got 4 addresses in my main Gmail account (which is the only one I ever log into). 3 of them are forwarded from other Gmail accounts, and another is for the address I use on Slashdot.
It works well. Replies are automatically sent from the appropriate address, and the From line on original messages is a drop-down list of the four different addresses.
If you're talking point-to-point (say, with a pair of WRT54GLs loaded with dd-wrt or openwrt and set up to bridge (not WDS)), you're allowed to do get away with quite a lot more. Scroll down a bit on the page I linked to for another chart.
The practical difference, of course, is that it's a directional antenna. So you'll only be stepping on people in the relatively narrow path (who are hopefully few), instead of everyone in a radius of the antenna.
1km shouldn't be a problem even with very low power, as long as there aren't too many trees or rooftops in the way and you pick your channel carefully, but YMMV, especially in Canada. (I'm completely unfamiliar with CRTC rules.)
and it is not normal to have to reboot more than a 1-2 times a year
Right, sure. I primarily run Ubuntu on my desktop at home, and it needs rebooted way more often than that. Usually it seems to be something related to nvidia's drivers (nvidia-glx-legacy being far less stable than nvidia-glx), but even the security updates pushed by Ubuntu are frequent enough to require booting more often than 1-2 times yearly.
Meanwhile, I have two full-time XP machines here. One of them is my wife's computer, which usually only runs Warcraft, Thunderbird, Firefox, and not much else, but that's not atypical for a home machine these days. It seldom even hiccups, let alone requires a reboot, though Automatic Updates does kick it over every month or two at night when it's not doing anything (roughly on parity with Ubuntu's required reboots, it seems).
The other XP box shouldn't even exist[1], but works fine. It's sole purpose is to program and power a Soundblaster Live's EMU10k1 chip using the free kX drivers, which serves as a custom DSP for the computer room's audio system. It's a passively-cooled K6-2, undervolted and underclocked on an 8-year-old Soyo board with 512 megs of RAM. It has no hard drive, and runs from a 2-gigabyte CompactFlash card which is hanging directly off of the IDE bus. Automatic updates are disabled on this machine, and so it never gets rebooted. The only moving part is the low-speed PSU Arctic Cooling PSU fan.
It spends all of its time (ie, 100% CPU) drawing 8 different VU meters on the screen as fast as it can, and it has never glitched, despite always performing useful work.
YMMV, but XP seems stable enough to me.
[1]: The box should not exist, because there should be an OSS tool capable of setting up that chip in a visual fashion, but sadly there is not.
What I've found about the thrashing: It happens only at first boot, and when closing programs or otherwise freeing large amounts of RAM. Also: If you, Joe Fucking User, stop trying to fix the fucking computer and just use the thing, it will eventually stop thrashing.
After that, programs tend load fast. It's called SuperFetch, and it's supposed help[1]. Quit being paranoid.
[1]: Of course it seems like it's not helping, but that's not been Vista's fault in my experience. Rather, it seems to be a competition at boot time between SuperFetch intelligently trying to load data for applications that I'm actually likely to use, and those applications themselves doing their own foolhardy preload[2]. Since the hard drive head can only be in one place at a time, this presents a problem. It should be noted that Vista rather uniquely supports several priority levels for disk IO, and that SuperFetch appears to operate at low priority. It doesn't seem to get in the way at all, once you kill the third-party preloads and try to ignore the disk activity.[3]
[2]: OpenOffice is a horrible example of this, trying to push its bloated self into RAM at boot time by default. Other common offenders are, of course, Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Reader.
[3]: Also: Almost all of this activity (including indexing) stops cold when running on battery, where runtime is generally preferred over performance. The whole thing is really pretty well behaved. Try it sometime. (incidentally, I get about an extra hour of real run-time from my Inspiron 6000 when running Vista instead of XP.)
Indeed. Easier just to keep to oneself, with deadbolt set and the blinds shut tight.
While we're at it, we ought to get rid of the rest of the public telephones, too. And any public trash cans. Roadside rests! There's no telling what sort of evil that people might accomplish with these facilities (face it... you'll be held responsible).
In fact, I'm never even inviting the neighbors over for barbecue anymore. I never thought of it before, but the liability is huge. What if one of them chokes on a bone? Or, worse, sends dirty emails on my home computer while I'm tending to the grill?
Yes, better to stay indoors and by oneself, where it's safe. The world is a big, dirty, nasty place, and one must take every measure to defend oneself from the Bad People out There.
*sigh*
Congrats to your Mum, though. She made sure you always knew how to feel safe, even though you only have one testicle.
The FCC regulates effective isotropic radiated power (which is a measure of the total amount of signal you're broadcasting), NOT amplifier power. In the case of the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b and g, a transmitter is limited to 4 Watts EIRP in point-to-multipoint applications.
Which means, according to a cheater chart, your 24dBi antenna can be driven with, at most, 15milliwatts, legally.
You propose to drive it with more than 200 times the legal power for that antenna, equating to an EIRP of 251 Watts, which is way fucking more than 4 Watts EIRP permitted by law in the US.
why go to the trouble of having to prove yourself innocent (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply securing your WAP can largely eliminate the risk?
That, Sir, would be fucking hilarious if you'd bothered to write a punchline. But since you didn't...
It's about as absurd as saying: "Why go to the trouble of keeping your seat (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply moving to the back of the bus can largely eliminate the risk?"
Of course, you're probably not a black woman in 1955 Alabama, so maybe that doesn't mean much for you. Hmm.
Maybe this one: "Why go to the trouble of being Jewish (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply fleeing the country can largely eliminate the risk?"
Of course, you're probably not a Jew in '40s, either.
So this one, then: "Why go to the trouble of resisting an illegal search of your belongings when a Wal-Mart checkout clerk fails to deactivate a security tag and sets off the door alarms, when simply submitting will largely eliminate the bother?"
People have a right to broadcast radio signals within the confines of FCC rules, just like they have a right to be black, Jewish, or black Jews. They even have a right to provide Internet access by way of these signals.
What's the big fucking problem about exercising one's rights?
If law permits (or doesn't forbid) me to do something, then I ought to be doing that thing, whatever it is, whenever I feel like it, and as often as I like. I don't think people should move to the back of the bus, when they have the right to stay where they are.
I squarely believe that Thomas Jefferson rolls in his grave every time I hear "We're sorry you have activated the Wal-Mart inventory control system. Please step back and a Wal-Mart associate will assist you" only to see a law-abiding person sheepishly comply with that Orwellian machine's request. American people have a fifth-amendment right to avoid situations like this, but they don't bother with any of that because it's too much hassle to just keep walking. (Of course, in this situation, if Wal-Mart really had probable cause to suspect me of a crime against them, they'd detain me with force. This never happens.)
Well, fuck you. I have a right (which is not Constitutionally-guaranteed, but is a right nonetheless by virtue of the fact that it has yet to be taken away) to broadcast Internet access to my neighbors, and to people in the street, and anyone else that wants some, at least in the US.
If anyone has a problem with my choice of seating or religion, or of my comprehension of the Constitution, or of my wide-open access point, then they had better be prepared for battle.
But there's highly-visible instructions and labeling to secure it. There is even a button on the front, and a special CD to reduce the pain of setting up WPA for the uninitiated.
Most routers, at least recently, are similar.
I do not think, therefore, that Linksys (or whomever) is at fault here[1].
1: As long everyone is doing bad analogies: Blaming Linksys for something like this is like blaming Smith and Wesson, after you leave your unsecured rifle laying loaded on the street and someone uses it to blow their own face off.
Anyone afflicted with this problem who has a Windows box to toy with can easily make a backup using a recent version of anydvd and DVD Shrink. The free trial of anydvd will suffice, for a week or two anyway, and dvdshrink is free. DVD Shrink will happily produce a directory full of IFOs and VOBs for burning with the utility of your choice, or it can use DVD Decryptor (also free) or Nero to burn automatically.
The backup will be functionally-identical to the original, except for such features as copy protection, CSS encryption, and regional coding, all of which will be gone.
Anyone care to offer a similar workaround for Linux and/or OSX? (BitTorrent doesn't count.)
It requires power, and probably won't be happy with the 500mA of 5 Volt DC that the USB ports on my laptop provide. So my "portable computer" is required to be near a wall outlet if I want to use the network -- which is, of course, a stupid idea.
Also, too: Just because it's an external device does not mean that it's secure. Almost universally, these days, small "dedicated" devices like this are made using general-purpose computers and general-purpose operating systems, replete with hardware drivers (and their bugs), HTTP daemons (and their bugs), and so on. It's likely that these boxes run Linux, even.
Using a dedicated external hardware device to solve a software problem is, therefore, a lot more like burying one's head in the sand than about actually solving a security problem.
If that's the case, I'm impressed with Ubuntu -- it would almost be as "good" as windows.
It's a computer. It just runs code.
It could be Windows, or Ubuntu, Slackware, or Fedora, or RHEL. It OpenBSD. It could be Minix. VMS. It could be a classic Macintosh, a new Macintosh, or an Amiga. It could be a Treo 650.
If it speaks IP on a public network, receives email, and permits users to run programs, then it can do any of the things you quote.
Slashdot Mirror
I look at it another way, by which I assume that one pays for it one way or the other.
1. One does not offer the greatest benefit to Mozilla by purchasing through the Firefox affiliate link; instead, their revenue would probably be a lot higher if you just donated to them directly. There would be fewer accountants to pay, and fewer books for them to keep. By donating directly, one can eliminate entire fucking corporations from the money trail (*cough* Amazon), and displace any of the needless workers they most assuredly pay (with your money) to fondle your money before passing it onto Mozilla.
2. One does not throw away money by not using the Firefox affiliate links. If nobody used affiliate links, Amazon would be able to afford to broadly lower their prices, through decreased payouts and staff reassignment/downsizing. Once prices are lower, one has more money by which to directly donate to Mozilla.
There's no such thing as a free lunch/discount/clearance/sale/donation/kickback -- at the end of the day, the consumer always pays. Personally, I'd rather pay as little as possible.
I also, generally, try to be polite and courteous to the more random people around me. The resultant smiles and brief, friendly conversations are more than enough payoff, for me.
The rest of my social producivity comes from my day job. And while I don't enjoy very many aspects of my job, I do enjoy the paycheck at the end of the week.
This paycheck affords me a decent home, which I enjoy living and entertaining in. It lets me buy food for my family, whom I enjoy cooking for. It provides me with funds to procure my more frivolous indulgancies, like a fine Belgian ale, deliciously-cured cigar, or a (back to the topic) good cup of coffee.
I drive an older BMW. It is not a modest car: Bright red. Big wheels. Performance tires. Stability control. Heated leather. It wasn't an expensive car, though a similarly-aged Toyota would've been a bit less money. But, unlike a Toyota, the Bimmer transforms the automobile from a burdensome transportation necessity into something that makes me grin from ear-to-ear every time I even look at the car. Driving it even to the grocery store is a religious experience for me. And maintaining it is an absolute pleasure; the way it fits together just makes so much sense that it's like a lesson in idealist engineering every time it needs some work (which is surprisingly seldom, for such a complicated vehicle with 160k miles on the clock).
It's like good coffee. Pricier, harder to find, and a bit fickle sometimes, but the payoff when it's done right is sheer ecstacy.
But the point is: Just because I'm a self-serving prick, does not mean that I do not care for others, because I also enjoy a feeling of mutual respect, and so will take steps to encourage it.
I also enjoy a good flame session on Slashdot. I get to see inside of other people in ways not normally possible, and learn a lot of new and interesting things. So it, too, simply feels good.
Er. Uh. The world is here for my own personal joy, and I'd be remiss if I did not attempt to maximize that joy.
To see it any other way is to realize that life, itself, is ultimately futile and without purpose. And since the only thing left to do after that grand realization is to die, I think I'll stick with the personal pleasure attitude for a good while longer instead.
Good coffee brings me happiness and joy, and thus provides some (however minor) establishment of purpose for my stay here.
Further: Some people drink decaf, occasionally with carefully-selected and quite tasty roasts, and enjoy it just fine.
It's not always about the caffeine.
Ah. So you are what happened to Mozilla!
*shun*
Right.
I suppose you drive a 15-year-old Hyundai, and feed it the cheapest available oil and gasoline. If you smoke, you probably indulge in whatever unknown floor-sweep cigar[ette] is cheapest today, and finish the whole mess with a snifter of Old Dan Tucker and/or a couple of cans of skunky Natural Ice at the end of the day.
Your matress probably consists largely of cardboard. Your furniture is probably all flat-pack. You've heard that 128kbps MP3s suck, but it's all you can stand to download with your dialup modem, and you can fit a lot more of them onto your 6-gigabyte hard drive.
Your computer mouse has a ball in it. Your sound card is integrated on your Pentium 3 motherboard.
It's all just minutia, after all. Nothing to get uppity about.
I applaud you for your ability to be completely satisfied, living in absolute mediocrity.
*sigh*
For the rest of us, if we're going to consume something, we'd rather enjoy that consumption as much as possible. Even if the two coffees/cars/motor oils are chemically identical but sold at different prices, if one feels better about spending more on that thing (and so enjoys it more), it will result in increased enjoyment.
I mean: If the whole point is just to increase alertness, then there's a number of inexpensive OTC caffeine pills which will do just fine. If the point, however, is to *drink coffee*, then you're doing yourself a disservice by drinking whatever acrid swill you can get your hands on.
And if you really can't tell the difference, I do feel sorry for you. You're missing out.
Do you enjoy being herded like sheep?
I sure don't. And I won't stand for it.
To hell with the "current climate." I'm still an American, and I am sure as fuck going to enjoy every right that follows during my brief stay here on Earth -- no matter what the expense is.
And the reason is simple: If, for some reason, I become afraid to exploit every right afforded to me as an American citizen, then the terrorists/government will have already won.
I'm obviously not looking forward to taking up arms to take back my right to be free, and so I defend it while I've still got it.
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Ben Franklin
If being asked to have your stuff searched by a Best Buy employee offends you, then don't submit to the search.
Just keep walking.
There's no law requiring you to stop, and the search is completely voluntary. So simply don't volunteer.
Just keep walking.
Please remember that the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution applies to all citizens. This, in combination with established law, requires an establishment of probable cause before detaining a suspected shoplifter.
Just keep walking.
The alarm at the door going off is not probable cause to suspect a person of a crime. Instead, it probably (ie, usually, almost always, nearly every fucking time) means that a clerk failed to properly deactivate a tag: It is not probable cause to suspect someone of a crime, but is rather probable cause to believe that a human being has made an error.
Just keep walking.
They have no cause to physically detain you, and you've done nothing wrong. You have no reason to actually stop. It's your stuff: You just paid for it, and the goon by the door probably even watched you pay for it. Even the receipt belongs to you, and you cannot be compelled to submit it for inspection without probable cause. That a clerk made a mistake is not a factor -- the transaction is done.
Just keep walking.
If they attempt to detain you by blocking your path, without establishing probable cause, they are committing false imprisonment . As an American, you cannot be unlawfully detained (however briefly) against your own free will.
Just keep walking.
If they attempt to touch, grab, or otherwise physically restrain you, they are committing assault. This entitles you to engage in a reasonable amount of self defense. This doesn't mean that you get to pull your well-honed Cold Steel blade and begin carving them up like sushi, but it does mean that you can at least counter whatever tactics they're attempting to use. Minimize your effort, and focus on the goal: Leaving the store with your stuff.
Just keep walking.
Most of this shouldn't ever matter. A properly-trained store employee will know these things, and will not attempt to pursue the effort as long as you just keep walking. A typical confrontation goes something like this:
Greeter: "Sir, may I see your receipt?"
Patron: *keeps walking*
Greeter: "Sir?"
Patron: *keeps walking*
Greeter: "SIR!"
At this point, as long as you just keep walking, the automatic door will shut between you and them and you'll no longer hear their vacant pleas.
It's your stuff, which you own. It's nobody's business but yours. So take that stuff that you just paid for, and just keep walking .
Uh.
There is no reason for a non-casual, professional thief to ever steal a single, physical DVD from a retail store. So if the system prevents casual theft, then it stops almost all theft:
1. If the goal is mass-replication, including jacket and silkscreen, then they'll just buy the fucking thing with cash. Spending just $2 to $20 is a very cheap way to replace an entire layer of real risk with genuine anonymity.
2. If the goal is mass-replication without a high-quality jacket and silkscreen, they'll just grab a torrent and cut a fresh DVD -- probably long before the movie is ever released.
The potential goal of direct sale of stolen DVDs to the public is a point that I intentionally ignore, because it lacks profit motivation compared to the two points above. Since we're talking about moderately-intelligent professionals here, it's all about the money, and they're going to pick the best risk-reward ratio that they can.
There is, of course, a vast profit motive in obtaining (and activating) large-ish quantities of DVDs all at once (think pallets of cartons of movies "falling off the truck"), but that's not a theft that is likely to occur at the retail level. And given the difficulty of such a heist, it's likely that such thefts occur infrequently, and that the total loss is really pretty low compared to that incurred by the armies of casual thieves with big coats and lined pockets.
So, I forecast that such a system, if economical to implement and reasonably secure, will eliminate the vast majority of shrinkage in DVD stocks, and will be with us for a long time to come.
True. But a modern GPU* uses more energy when it is performing work than when it is not, just like a modern CPU.
:)
I mean: Just because it's offloaded from the CPU does not mean that it is free*. The ATI X300 in my laptop sure does make a lot more heat, and accordingly uses a lot more energy, when running 3D OpenGL applications than when sitting at a text-mode prompt, at any given clock speed.
But it probably doesn't matter much. I note an increase in battery life on my Inspiron 6000d of about 25% by running Vista (complete with Aero) instead of XP, with very similar power management settings To me, this has meant the difference between occasionally needing to plug the computer in on a client site, and never needing to (so far, anyway).
I could kill Aero and get some more life out of it, but I like the pretties.
[*]: Obvious, glaring exceptions like 3dfx's earlier lines of Voodoo card do exist. The Voodoo3 2000, for example, is known to run blisteringly hot ALL THE TIME, whether or not it has anything productive to do. But hardware of this ilk isn't going to be used with Vista, anyway.
Eh? Just because there's a button physically on the drive, does not mean that said button overrides the wishes of the OS.
The eject button of a CD-ROM drive in Vista behaves as it should: It simply notifies the OS that the user would like to eject the media. After that, Windows finishes any pending writes and does whatever else needs done, and then ejects the media.
Which is, I'd guess, about how OS X works. Except that, on a PC, the eject button is where it belongs instead of on the keyboard.
I'm from a part of Ohio that suffers from a general lack of black people, but we sure do have plenty of niggers. They talk like niggers, act like niggers, and look like niggers. They even drive niggermobiles like only a nigger can: Up high on polished 24s, all leaned over the center console so their head looks to be almost in line with the rearview mirror but yet somehow tilted back so far that they're nearly sitting in the back seat, hanging onto the steering wheel with one limp-wristed hand wrapped up in a heavy gold bracelet, with a stereo booming atonally, just loud enough to attact attention.
(Alternatively, there is the poor nigger, in a middle-90s Oldsmobile that is either off-white, maroon, or teal with a cracked tail light, a failing headliner, a dent in the side, and unusually high levels of body rust. The posture and jewelry are the same, though.)
It really is the funniest fucking thing, watching these pasty white niggers roll around town. It's even funnier to watch them try to walk, yammer into a cell phone, and try to keep their pants from falling the rest of the way down - all at the same time.
The point is: Just because a word is used in racist speech does not mean that the word itself is racist. My stereotypical Ohioan whiteboy nigger is just one example of that, as the term applies equally to the few black niggers that we have, too.
To me, at least, the word has got nothing to do with skin color, but is instead about my perception of people's personal choices and actions.
Where is this $50 converter box?
I, for one, would like to purchase one today, but they don't seem to exist.
Application designers then have to come around with the kind of tricks you mention in order to boost their performance in an environment that is at best uncooperative and at worst plain hostile.
*nod*
Vista's SuperFetch feature seems to level that playing field a bit with regards to preloading and cache-stuffing by not requiring applications to do it themselves. But it will obviously take awhile before those applications themselves stop behaving in this fashion (and it's anyone's guess, of course, if Microsoft's own applications ever will stop).
What a lousy reason to use a stand-alone MUA, let alone POP3. If that's all you're after, just use gmail's forwarding, filtering, and multiple account settings.
I've got 4 addresses in my main Gmail account (which is the only one I ever log into). 3 of them are forwarded from other Gmail accounts, and another is for the address I use on Slashdot.
It works well. Replies are automatically sent from the appropriate address, and the From line on original messages is a drop-down list of the four different addresses.
YMMV.
Actually...
If you're talking point-to-point (say, with a pair of WRT54GLs loaded with dd-wrt or openwrt and set up to bridge (not WDS)), you're allowed to do get away with quite a lot more. Scroll down a bit on the page I linked to for another chart.
The practical difference, of course, is that it's a directional antenna. So you'll only be stepping on people in the relatively narrow path (who are hopefully few), instead of everyone in a radius of the antenna.
1km shouldn't be a problem even with very low power, as long as there aren't too many trees or rooftops in the way and you pick your channel carefully, but YMMV, especially in Canada. (I'm completely unfamiliar with CRTC rules.)
and it is not normal to have to reboot more than a 1-2 times a year
Right, sure. I primarily run Ubuntu on my desktop at home, and it needs rebooted way more often than that. Usually it seems to be something related to nvidia's drivers (nvidia-glx-legacy being far less stable than nvidia-glx), but even the security updates pushed by Ubuntu are frequent enough to require booting more often than 1-2 times yearly.
Meanwhile, I have two full-time XP machines here. One of them is my wife's computer, which usually only runs Warcraft, Thunderbird, Firefox, and not much else, but that's not atypical for a home machine these days. It seldom even hiccups, let alone requires a reboot, though Automatic Updates does kick it over every month or two at night when it's not doing anything (roughly on parity with Ubuntu's required reboots, it seems).
The other XP box shouldn't even exist[1], but works fine. It's sole purpose is to program and power a Soundblaster Live's EMU10k1 chip using the free kX drivers, which serves as a custom DSP for the computer room's audio system. It's a passively-cooled K6-2, undervolted and underclocked on an 8-year-old Soyo board with 512 megs of RAM. It has no hard drive, and runs from a 2-gigabyte CompactFlash card which is hanging directly off of the IDE bus. Automatic updates are disabled on this machine, and so it never gets rebooted. The only moving part is the low-speed PSU Arctic Cooling PSU fan.
It spends all of its time (ie, 100% CPU) drawing 8 different VU meters on the screen as fast as it can, and it has never glitched, despite always performing useful work.
YMMV, but XP seems stable enough to me.
[1]: The box should not exist, because there should be an OSS tool capable of setting up that chip in a visual fashion, but sadly there is not.
Anecdotes, anecdotes.
What I've found about the thrashing: It happens only at first boot, and when closing programs or otherwise freeing large amounts of RAM. Also: If you, Joe Fucking User, stop trying to fix the fucking computer and just use the thing, it will eventually stop thrashing.
After that, programs tend load fast. It's called SuperFetch, and it's supposed help[1]. Quit being paranoid.
[1]: Of course it seems like it's not helping, but that's not been Vista's fault in my experience. Rather, it seems to be a competition at boot time between SuperFetch intelligently trying to load data for applications that I'm actually likely to use, and those applications themselves doing their own foolhardy preload[2]. Since the hard drive head can only be in one place at a time, this presents a problem. It should be noted that Vista rather uniquely supports several priority levels for disk IO, and that SuperFetch appears to operate at low priority. It doesn't seem to get in the way at all, once you kill the third-party preloads and try to ignore the disk activity.[3]
[2]: OpenOffice is a horrible example of this, trying to push its bloated self into RAM at boot time by default. Other common offenders are, of course, Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Reader.
[3]: Also: Almost all of this activity (including indexing) stops cold when running on battery, where runtime is generally preferred over performance. The whole thing is really pretty well behaved. Try it sometime. (incidentally, I get about an extra hour of real run-time from my Inspiron 6000 when running Vista instead of XP.)
Gee, that sure clears things up.
Next time I need instructions on passing the buck and/or otherwise avoiding responsibility, do you mind if I drop you a line?
Indeed. Easier just to keep to oneself, with deadbolt set and the blinds shut tight.
... you'll be held responsible).
While we're at it, we ought to get rid of the rest of the public telephones, too. And any public trash cans. Roadside rests! There's no telling what sort of evil that people might accomplish with these facilities (face it
In fact, I'm never even inviting the neighbors over for barbecue anymore. I never thought of it before, but the liability is huge. What if one of them chokes on a bone? Or, worse, sends dirty emails on my home computer while I'm tending to the grill?
Yes, better to stay indoors and by oneself, where it's safe. The world is a big, dirty, nasty place, and one must take every measure to defend oneself from the Bad People out There.
*sigh*
Congrats to your Mum, though. She made sure you always knew how to feel safe, even though you only have one testicle.
Er. Uh. No. You've got it all wrong.
The FCC regulates effective isotropic radiated power (which is a measure of the total amount of signal you're broadcasting), NOT amplifier power. In the case of the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b and g, a transmitter is limited to 4 Watts EIRP in point-to-multipoint applications.
Which means, according to a cheater chart, your 24dBi antenna can be driven with, at most, 15milliwatts, legally.
You propose to drive it with more than 200 times the legal power for that antenna, equating to an EIRP of 251 Watts, which is way fucking more than 4 Watts EIRP permitted by law in the US.
So, please don't do it. Thank you.
why go to the trouble of having to prove yourself innocent (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply securing your WAP can largely eliminate the risk?
That, Sir, would be fucking hilarious if you'd bothered to write a punchline. But since you didn't...
It's about as absurd as saying: "Why go to the trouble of keeping your seat (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply moving to the back of the bus can largely eliminate the risk?"
Of course, you're probably not a black woman in 1955 Alabama, so maybe that doesn't mean much for you. Hmm.
Maybe this one: "Why go to the trouble of being Jewish (not an easy or painless process nowadays) when simply fleeing the country can largely eliminate the risk?"
Of course, you're probably not a Jew in '40s, either.
So this one, then: "Why go to the trouble of resisting an illegal search of your belongings when a Wal-Mart checkout clerk fails to deactivate a security tag and sets off the door alarms, when simply submitting will largely eliminate the bother?"
People have a right to broadcast radio signals within the confines of FCC rules, just like they have a right to be black, Jewish, or black Jews. They even have a right to provide Internet access by way of these signals.
What's the big fucking problem about exercising one's rights?
If law permits (or doesn't forbid) me to do something, then I ought to be doing that thing, whatever it is, whenever I feel like it, and as often as I like. I don't think people should move to the back of the bus, when they have the right to stay where they are.
I squarely believe that Thomas Jefferson rolls in his grave every time I hear "We're sorry you have activated the Wal-Mart inventory control system. Please step back and a Wal-Mart associate will assist you" only to see a law-abiding person sheepishly comply with that Orwellian machine's request. American people have a fifth-amendment right to avoid situations like this, but they don't bother with any of that because it's too much hassle to just keep walking. (Of course, in this situation, if Wal-Mart really had probable cause to suspect me of a crime against them, they'd detain me with force. This never happens.)
Well, fuck you. I have a right (which is not Constitutionally-guaranteed, but is a right nonetheless by virtue of the fact that it has yet to be taken away) to broadcast Internet access to my neighbors, and to people in the street, and anyone else that wants some, at least in the US.
If anyone has a problem with my choice of seating or religion, or of my comprehension of the Constitution, or of my wide-open access point, then they had better be prepared for battle.
Linksys routers are, indeed, shipped unsecure.
But there's highly-visible instructions and labeling to secure it. There is even a button on the front, and a special CD to reduce the pain of setting up WPA for the uninitiated.
Most routers, at least recently, are similar.
I do not think, therefore, that Linksys (or whomever) is at fault here[1].
1: As long everyone is doing bad analogies: Blaming Linksys for something like this is like blaming Smith and Wesson, after you leave your unsecured rifle laying loaded on the street and someone uses it to blow their own face off.
FWIW:
Anyone afflicted with this problem who has a Windows box to toy with can easily make a backup using a recent version of anydvd and DVD Shrink. The free trial of anydvd will suffice, for a week or two anyway, and dvdshrink is free. DVD Shrink will happily produce a directory full of IFOs and VOBs for burning with the utility of your choice, or it can use DVD Decryptor (also free) or Nero to burn automatically.
The backup will be functionally-identical to the original, except for such features as copy protection, CSS encryption, and regional coding, all of which will be gone.
Anyone care to offer a similar workaround for Linux and/or OSX? (BitTorrent doesn't count.)
The other issues:
It requires power, and probably won't be happy with the 500mA of 5 Volt DC that the USB ports on my laptop provide. So my "portable computer" is required to be near a wall outlet if I want to use the network -- which is, of course, a stupid idea.
Also, too: Just because it's an external device does not mean that it's secure. Almost universally, these days, small "dedicated" devices like this are made using general-purpose computers and general-purpose operating systems, replete with hardware drivers (and their bugs), HTTP daemons (and their bugs), and so on. It's likely that these boxes run Linux, even.
Using a dedicated external hardware device to solve a software problem is, therefore, a lot more like burying one's head in the sand than about actually solving a security problem.
If that's the case, I'm impressed with Ubuntu -- it would almost be as "good" as windows.
It's a computer. It just runs code.
It could be Windows, or Ubuntu, Slackware, or Fedora, or RHEL. It OpenBSD. It could be Minix. VMS. It could be a classic Macintosh, a new Macintosh, or an Amiga. It could be a Treo 650.
If it speaks IP on a public network, receives email, and permits users to run programs, then it can do any of the things you quote.