Think mesh networking. Slow and difficult? Right now, you might be right. But if I'm not mistaken, there are still (hardware, software) people in the world working on making this sort of thing fly. And, AFAIK, the US Army seems to be doing pretty well with it...
Now, think distributed caching. Slow and difficult? Naah. We've got squid, which is anything but slow, and already proven. All we need is automatic, logical selection of appropriately-close peers - see above.
Think that's too cumbersome? How about a more proactive, distributed approach? BitTorrent and Freenet may be a bit new and unrefined to work on such scale, but they're, well, new and unrefined. Have folks stopped developing this sort of thing? Has it dead-ended already?
So. Where are we?
We've got massive redundancy, and good caching.
Network speed will taper off with distance, but that's OK. By increasing network efficiency, long-haul bandwidth requirements will be a fraction of what they are currently. Chances are, there's someone within a few blocks of me with a current cache of Slashdot that can zap it my way in a few hundred milliseconds. Functionally, this is the same to me as a user as it is now, as I pull Slashdot from an Exodus cage on the other side of the continent within a few hundred milliseconds.
And IMs and email and other low-bandwidth, realtime tasks will still flow freely, courtesy of some already-extant QoS goodness. Low-bandwidth codecs like G.723, I conject, would work fine for some VOIP fun. And if you need lower latency than the network provides, you can still lift a handset and use a landline - Ma Bell is anything but finished.
Robustness? Would you rather have hundreds of spread-spectrum radio links, or a couple of OC48s side-by-side underground, waiting for a backhoe to rip them to shreds?
I don't think you understand the value of a free (no, not beer) network. OC48s with BGP routing are good ideas to solve problems associated with centralized resources, but not very useful in such an amorphous beast as I describe. Once packets don't have to travel thousands of miles to get to the other side of the fucking street, as is usually the case right now, everything changes.
If people stopped going down to Fry's and buying wireless routers which utilize unratified almost-standards, manufacturers would stop trying to sell them because there'd be no profit potential.
Which is also to say that if everyone stopped buying non-standard gear, only standardized gear would exist.
Meanwhile, your DVDs are safe. With the massive investment people have in the software, which they'd presumably like to keep using, it would be foolish for manufacturers to stop selling players, because the money from replacement players flows in like water.
How many people get rich? Not you - you're obviously not in the hardware business. Pick a a number and subtract 1 for yourself.
Does MythTV have reliable support for hardware encode/decode? And do the scanlines match up from end to end, or are things de-interlaced, massaged, stretched, and re-interlaced until they have no semblence of their original being?
Not much point in another DVR system, if completely fucks up any video recorded with it, or crashes randomly due to bad drivers.
But I don't think spam has much to do with it, these days.
I used to get irate about spam. I read mail with pine, I kept numerous email aliases, and I spent a lot of time sorting and noting and being pissed off about the conglomeration.
And then the dictionaries came, spamming names in alphabetical order. It wasn't long before my sanctified, prized, un-uttered address was being spammed with some frequency, once it got added to a few lists of successful targets.
After that, I decided the whole thing was wasting a lot of my life, with no tangible benefit, except to produce a plethora of email aliases which had no functional purpose in the world.
I dropped the aliases altogether, and now only have one address, using Mozilla. Sure, it gets a lot of spam (50-60/day). However, Mozilla ensures that almost none of it ever sees the light of day.
Meanwhile, I can be quite indiscriminate about who I give the address to. I never have to dig for the "opt out" checkbox, and I don't worry about spam-proofing it when posting to things like Usenet.
And if Joe Random decides to drop me a line for some reason, Joe can do that without it disappearing into some forgotten >/dev/null email alias.
It even seems to do a good job of filtering otherwise-unwanted mail - dumb jokes, chain letters, pictures of cats, whatever.
All I do is tag a couple of mis-identified messages as junk every couple of days, and drop them in the spam folder. Meanwhile, a few hundred others find their way there automagically.
And believe it or not, being able to see HTML-ized email and deal with attachments sanely is often convenient, too.
You're still needlessly poring over logfiles to see who to point your finger at this week? Give it a rest. Complain about something worthwhile and less-easily evaded, like TigerDirect's spamming of the Histroy Channel during 0400, interrupting my attempts at sleep with shouted marketing drivel about their "Window to the Future".
It is apparent the mods are still deep in the depths of an intense crack binge.
So you enter your username and password, and are authenticated as a valid user; then what?
Some little shred of magical software says to the magical routing gear, "Hey, that guy who just popped up, you know, 00:A0:CC:21:9D:CD, aka 10.5.27.98? Let's let him use the network for a bit, OK?"
And lo, you have access.
And awhile after you've been silent (ie, you go home for the day), the magical widgets forget about you. Next day, you start over again.
Now suppose that awhile = 5 minutes. That's a 5 minute window, after you close your laptop and head for the car, for me to instruct my NIC to assume 00:A0:CC:21:9D:CD as its MAC address, and my IP stack to become 10.5.27.98.
After that, I can silently and discretely assume your identity, until you return.
Questions and answers:
How do I know your MAC address? You broadcast it over the fucking radio with every packet you send.
How do I know you're headed out for the day? You broadcast that over the fucking radio too, when you -thought- you were having a quick, private chat with your girlfriend about dinner.
Thank you for flying 802.11. We hope you've enjoyed the security of the public airwaves.
And since NPR (the only station I cared about recording) has their clocks set set correctly, I was able to nail the start/stop times with ease, using NTP.
The whole thing was seamless, once cron was set up for it on my FreeBSD router (it happened to have a PCI slot available for a dedicated sound card, and it -never- fucks up). Every now and then, I'd burn a CD with a few months worth of of lovely mid-side encoded LAME VBR Car Talk MP3s and archive it on the shelf.
At $0.15 per CD and a few seconds to run a script, why not archive things forever?
The only iffy part was that, since the machine was particularly slow, I recorded to wav, and then had lame encode an mp3 of that. Without any queueing mechanism, this sometimes meant that several nice'd LAME processes were running concurrently, and that perhaps a couple of gigabytes of space might be tied up in/tmp. But the machine never felt any slower, and I never ran out of disk. *shrug*
I stopped when I moved into an apartment, and lost any semblence of a "real antenna." Now I get the standard-issue 3 Clear Channel stations, a college station, and a top 40 station, none of which ever play anything memorable.
I assume that the gentleman recieved 86 mil, personally, in the Nullsoft sale.
I assume the gentleman is still sitting on the majority of 86 mil.
I assume that men in the United States are still expected to live an average of ~76 years.
Given these assumptions, it would be easy to declare that, with $86 mil, he'd be doing justfine by banking it (even with the terrible interest rates these days) and giving himself respectable salary, and maybe employ a couple of other good people out-of-pocket.
I fail to realize how eighty-six million dollars would not sustain him, and any reasonable endeavor, through death, while also providing a non-shabby inheritance for his grandchildren.
.5mil/year from the stock market?
*shrug*
Re:Some problems that I see
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
It is self-evident that here on Slashdot, there is a substandard level of comprehension of such basic, common human characteristics as sarcasm and mockery.
To wit, the preface:
"As long as we're being purely conjective and drawing irrational conclusions"
Translation for the language-inept:
"I'm making this up. And even though I know it's not true, I'm posting it anyway."
You were warned, in advance, of the intentionally insipid writings below. Yet, your understanding of the warning was in such misery that you felt compelled to post the above tirade (a fantastic display of arrogant cranial obesity, that).
It is as if you're walking down the street, and happen upon a fish hook tied to a bit of string. You peer down for a closer look, and see a note attached: "Warning: Do Not Eat."
Immediately, you thrust it into your mouth.
I think this is the first example I've ever seen of someone trolling themself. Congratulations! Good luck at the Darwins next year, eh?
Re:Some problems that I see
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
As long as we're being purely conjective and drawing irrational conclusions:
What do you put between your aluminum heatsink and your CPU?
Handset manufacturers != cell phone manufacturers. Just because it uses an antenna does not mean that it must be branded Nokia and come with a six-year contract.
Spectralink offers 802.11 VoIP handsets. Cisco is supposedly implementing one of their own, as well.
Have you forgotten about the huge world of telephony that exists outside of marketing-driven, pay-per-minute cellular phones?
And Bluetooth? Who cares. It's another overlapping standard that nobody cares to implement fully. The state of its current application reminds me quite a bit of IrDA, in that by the time software support becomes good enough to be useful, the requisite hardware will begin disappearing from the market.
If we use less uranium per kilowatt-hour (or calorie, BTU, joule, or whatever unit of energy) by feeding it to a reactor than we do by burning alongside coal, then why not just release reactor waste into the atmosphere?
This would eliminate any (new) large concentrations of depleted uranium, thus making nuclear waste security and storage a non-issue.
It may not be perfect, but if what you say is true, it is clearly a step in the right direction.
As it stands currently, I'm no more likely to be downloading from my next-door neighbor than I am from someone in China. This seems like a glaringly inefficient way to go about things.
Even a flurry of DNS requests and traceroute-esque prodding upon opening a.torrent is likely to be less burdensome on the network than the intensely chaotic nature in which things currently operate.
Ultimately, it is the users who pay for the network, even if it is "owned" by monstrous corporations. It is therefore in everyone's best interest to use it as nicely as possible.
Are there any plans to add features to BitTorrent which will automatically select (or give preference to) sources which are nearby?
The Company has an arrangement with Novell, Inc. ("Novell") in which it acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for customers who deploy SVRx technology.
Bruce, if this is the case, is not SCO merely acting contractually responsible by attempting to collect royalties on Novell's behalf? In this event, it doesn't matter if it's thier IP, or not - it's their job to fetch money from it, and keep 5% of the take.
Acid? From paper? Attacking polycarbonate (see also: "safety glasses") discs? Hilarious.
Here's what really happened:
Surface of CD rests against abrasive paper. They rub together a little bit in transit. When this happens, the paper roughens areas on the CD, like fine sandpaper. No chemistry needed.
Next time, try tyvek sleeves. They cost insignificantly more money, resist tearing extremely well, and don't have such abrasive qualities as paper sleeves.
Meanwhile, you can restore playability to your CDs. Try automotive carnuba wax, Brasso, or peanut butter - whichever you happen to have handy.
Have you tried plugging an RJ45 in backwards (or sideways, or shifted one row to the left, or...)?
It is essentially impossible, approaching non-issue status. And nevermind that ethernet is specified to withstand multi-kilovolt fuckups between random pins, unlike massively-parallel/easy-to-crossconnect SCSI - ethernet devices don't mind seeing voltage potential where it doesn't belong.
Here's a larger problem that standardized POE solves:
User has two cables running to desktop IP phone. User unplugs cables to re-arrange desk, and upon plugging things back in, their IP phone smells funny and their external modem won't work.
Upon investigation, it turns out that the 12VAC power supply for their Sportster is not interchangable with the 13.6VDC PSU for their IP-600 phone.
Therein lies the problem with multiple incompatible, anonymous-looking power supplies at the desktop.
(In other news: Licking light sockets can be hazardous to your health. Also, this just in: Consuming too much water may cause accidental drowning.)
When you have new parts installed on your car (or your lawnmower, or your house, or your own body), you do not lose ownership of the old parts. They are indisputably yours. "Buying a new RKE module" != "Trading a broken RKE module and a pile of cash for one which is non-broken."
Generally speaking, folks don't want their parts back, and the shop's disposal of them is viewed as a service. And most of the time, the shop gets a (sometimes modest, sometimes large) refund for returning the old part to whoever they got the new one from, so it can be remanufactured and again re-sold.
But security? You've got such a module installed in your car -right now- which you could take out and reverse engineer, if you wanted to explore potential security problems. Giving you your old parts back has no effect on this aspect.
And any data that's there? Unless they've licensed it, it's yours, too. Your car; your box; your data. End of fucking story.
The primary mover of self-destructive media will not be Blockbuster and friends, but Wal-Mart and other department stores.
Such retail outlets could care less about people coming back to the store to return rented media, because folks are already due back in a few days when they need to buy more condoms, beer, food, and - if they liked the movie - a real DVD of it at 5x the price.
Besides increasing same-store sales, it gives them a part of the rental market, without them having to actually rent/clean/repair/chase/bill anything. Retail inventory control is cake compared to that which a rental business must go through.
In closing, I'd like to submit that your assertion of reduced turnaround business at Blockbuster as being somehow indicative of a "loser" product is completely baseless, unsupportable, and lacking of any attachment to reality.
Here's to fair-use DVD-R backups of $2.99 Disney films, paid for with good ol' anonymous cash.
Start shopping somewhere more expensive, and notice how workers start acting differently.
[Note, however, that finding such a place is increasingly difficult, with an increasingly braindead, unskilled population driving up demand for low prices at any cost.]
Where I work, we've got 768/160 DSL from Ameritech. It seems to work just fine for web browsing, but it has a tendancy to hop addresses at least daily.
We're in the process of eliminating it. When we needed a static address, they refused to sell us one without moving the DSL loop off of its own pair to piggyback it on one of our POTS lines. And since none of the four POTS lines passed their line test, the problem became circular. After six weeks of dealing with this sort of bullshit on a daily basis, told them to get fucked.
Now, then:
Roadrunner/AOLTW was quite happy to sell us a package including one static and five dynmaic addresses. When we called them, they had a guy out within a couple of hours to look at our cabling needs, and had the service installed in less than 48.
No complaints about latency. We're doing VOIP over this connection, with fabulous results.
I've also got standard, plain-jane cable at home. The IP address has never changed in the year that I've had it.
While I am perfectly willing to accept your prose as gospel, I'm interested in knowing some background information about why doing what you say is a Good Thing.
I've been running Slackware for eight years, with/usr/src/linux symlinked to whatever kernel I happen to be running this week. Nary a problem.
So, please educate - even if it is for the billionth+1 time.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon?
Think mesh networking. Slow and difficult? Right now, you might be right. But if I'm not mistaken, there are still (hardware, software) people in the world working on making this sort of thing fly. And, AFAIK, the US Army seems to be doing pretty well with it...
Now, think distributed caching. Slow and difficult? Naah. We've got squid, which is anything but slow, and already proven. All we need is automatic, logical selection of appropriately-close peers - see above.
Think that's too cumbersome? How about a more proactive, distributed approach? BitTorrent and Freenet may be a bit new and unrefined to work on such scale, but they're, well, new and unrefined. Have folks stopped developing this sort of thing? Has it dead-ended already?
So. Where are we?
We've got massive redundancy, and good caching.
Network speed will taper off with distance, but that's OK. By increasing network efficiency, long-haul bandwidth requirements will be a fraction of what they are currently. Chances are, there's someone within a few blocks of me with a current cache of Slashdot that can zap it my way in a few hundred milliseconds. Functionally, this is the same to me as a user as it is now, as I pull Slashdot from an Exodus cage on the other side of the continent within a few hundred milliseconds.
And IMs and email and other low-bandwidth, realtime tasks will still flow freely, courtesy of some already-extant QoS goodness. Low-bandwidth codecs like G.723, I conject, would work fine for some VOIP fun. And if you need lower latency than the network provides, you can still lift a handset and use a landline - Ma Bell is anything but finished.
Robustness? Would you rather have hundreds of spread-spectrum radio links, or a couple of OC48s side-by-side underground, waiting for a backhoe to rip them to shreds?
I don't think you understand the value of a free (no, not beer) network. OC48s with BGP routing are good ideas to solve problems associated with centralized resources, but not very useful in such an amorphous beast as I describe. Once packets don't have to travel thousands of miles to get to the other side of the fucking street, as is usually the case right now, everything changes.
If people stopped going down to Fry's and buying wireless routers which utilize unratified almost-standards, manufacturers would stop trying to sell them because there'd be no profit potential.
Which is also to say that if everyone stopped buying non-standard gear, only standardized gear would exist.
Meanwhile, your DVDs are safe. With the massive investment people have in the software, which they'd presumably like to keep using, it would be foolish for manufacturers to stop selling players, because the money from replacement players flows in like water.
How many people get rich? Not you - you're obviously not in the hardware business. Pick a a number and subtract 1 for yourself.
Right. Which is precisely not what I want when watching them on my interlaced American TV.
Thanks anyway. HAND.
Does MythTV have reliable support for hardware encode/decode? And do the scanlines match up from end to end, or are things de-interlaced, massaged, stretched, and re-interlaced until they have no semblence of their original being?
Not much point in another DVR system, if completely fucks up any video recorded with it, or crashes randomly due to bad drivers.
Scum? Yeah, probably.
But I don't think spam has much to do with it, these days.
I used to get irate about spam. I read mail with pine, I kept numerous email aliases, and I spent a lot of time sorting and noting and being pissed off about the conglomeration.
And then the dictionaries came, spamming names in alphabetical order. It wasn't long before my sanctified, prized, un-uttered address was being spammed with some frequency, once it got added to a few lists of successful targets.
After that, I decided the whole thing was wasting a lot of my life, with no tangible benefit, except to produce a plethora of email aliases which had no functional purpose in the world.
I dropped the aliases altogether, and now only have one address, using Mozilla. Sure, it gets a lot of spam (50-60/day). However, Mozilla ensures that almost none of it ever sees the light of day.
Meanwhile, I can be quite indiscriminate about who I give the address to. I never have to dig for the "opt out" checkbox, and I don't worry about spam-proofing it when posting to things like Usenet.
And if Joe Random decides to drop me a line for some reason, Joe can do that without it disappearing into some forgotten >/dev/null email alias.
It even seems to do a good job of filtering otherwise-unwanted mail - dumb jokes, chain letters, pictures of cats, whatever.
All I do is tag a couple of mis-identified messages as junk every couple of days, and drop them in the spam folder. Meanwhile, a few hundred others find their way there automagically.
And believe it or not, being able to see HTML-ized email and deal with attachments sanely is often convenient, too.
You're still needlessly poring over logfiles to see who to point your finger at this week? Give it a rest. Complain about something worthwhile and less-easily evaded, like TigerDirect's spamming of the Histroy Channel during 0400, interrupting my attempts at sleep with shouted marketing drivel about their "Window to the Future".
Like I really want to wait for QuickTime to load, just so I can see a big, alpha-blended button that says "CLICK HERE!".
It is apparent the mods are still deep in the depths of an intense crack binge.
So you enter your username and password, and are authenticated as a valid user; then what?
Some little shred of magical software says to the magical routing gear, "Hey, that guy who just popped up, you know, 00:A0:CC:21:9D:CD, aka 10.5.27.98? Let's let him use the network for a bit, OK?"
And lo, you have access.
And awhile after you've been silent (ie, you go home for the day), the magical widgets forget about you. Next day, you start over again.
Now suppose that awhile = 5 minutes. That's a 5 minute window, after you close your laptop and head for the car, for me to instruct my NIC to assume 00:A0:CC:21:9D:CD as its MAC address, and my IP stack to become 10.5.27.98.
After that, I can silently and discretely assume your identity, until you return.
Questions and answers:
How do I know your MAC address? You broadcast it over the fucking radio with every packet you send.
How do I know you're headed out for the day? You broadcast that over the fucking radio too, when you -thought- you were having a quick, private chat with your girlfriend about dinner.
Thank you for flying 802.11. We hope you've enjoyed the security of the public airwaves.
I've done this. It works well.
/tmp. But the machine never felt any slower, and I never ran out of disk. *shrug*
And since NPR (the only station I cared about recording) has their clocks set set correctly, I was able to nail the start/stop times with ease, using NTP.
The whole thing was seamless, once cron was set up for it on my FreeBSD router (it happened to have a PCI slot available for a dedicated sound card, and it -never- fucks up). Every now and then, I'd burn a CD with a few months worth of of lovely mid-side encoded LAME VBR Car Talk MP3s and archive it on the shelf.
At $0.15 per CD and a few seconds to run a script, why not archive things forever?
The only iffy part was that, since the machine was particularly slow, I recorded to wav, and then had lame encode an mp3 of that. Without any queueing mechanism, this sometimes meant that several nice'd LAME processes were running concurrently, and that perhaps a couple of gigabytes of space might be tied up in
I stopped when I moved into an apartment, and lost any semblence of a "real antenna." Now I get the standard-issue 3 Clear Channel stations, a college station, and a top 40 station, none of which ever play anything memorable.
I assume the gentleman is in his 20s, somewhere.
.5mil/year from the stock market?
I assume that the gentleman recieved 86 mil, personally, in the Nullsoft sale.
I assume the gentleman is still sitting on the majority of 86 mil.
I assume that men in the United States are still expected to live an average of ~76 years.
Given these assumptions, it would be easy to declare that, with $86 mil, he'd be doing justfine by banking it (even with the terrible interest rates these days) and giving himself respectable salary, and maybe employ a couple of other good people out-of-pocket.
I fail to realize how eighty-six million dollars would not sustain him, and any reasonable endeavor, through death, while also providing a non-shabby inheritance for his grandchildren.
*shrug*
It is self-evident that here on Slashdot, there is a substandard level of comprehension of such basic, common human characteristics as sarcasm and mockery.
To wit, the preface:
"As long as we're being purely conjective and drawing irrational conclusions"
Translation for the language-inept:
"I'm making this up. And even though I know it's not true, I'm posting it anyway."
You were warned, in advance, of the intentionally insipid writings below. Yet, your understanding of the warning was in such misery that you felt compelled to post the above tirade (a fantastic display of arrogant cranial obesity, that).
It is as if you're walking down the street, and happen upon a fish hook tied to a bit of string. You peer down for a closer look, and see a note attached: "Warning: Do Not Eat."
Immediately, you thrust it into your mouth.
I think this is the first example I've ever seen of someone trolling themself. Congratulations! Good luck at the Darwins next year, eh?
As long as we're being purely conjective and drawing irrational conclusions:
What do you put between your aluminum heatsink and your CPU?
Silicon.
What is glass made from?
Silicon.
HTH. HAND.
Handset manufacturers != cell phone manufacturers. Just because it uses an antenna does not mean that it must be branded Nokia and come with a six-year contract.
Spectralink offers 802.11 VoIP handsets. Cisco is supposedly implementing one of their own, as well.
Have you forgotten about the huge world of telephony that exists outside of marketing-driven, pay-per-minute cellular phones?
And Bluetooth? Who cares. It's another overlapping standard that nobody cares to implement fully. The state of its current application reminds me quite a bit of IrDA, in that by the time software support becomes good enough to be useful, the requisite hardware will begin disappearing from the market.
If we use less uranium per kilowatt-hour (or calorie, BTU, joule, or whatever unit of energy) by feeding it to a reactor than we do by burning alongside coal, then why not just release reactor waste into the atmosphere?
This would eliminate any (new) large concentrations of depleted uranium, thus making nuclear waste security and storage a non-issue.
It may not be perfect, but if what you say is true, it is clearly a step in the right direction.
As it stands currently, I'm no more likely to be downloading from my next-door neighbor than I am from someone in China. This seems like a glaringly inefficient way to go about things.
.torrent is likely to be less burdensome on the network than the intensely chaotic nature in which things currently operate.
Even a flurry of DNS requests and traceroute-esque prodding upon opening a
Ultimately, it is the users who pay for the network, even if it is "owned" by monstrous corporations. It is therefore in everyone's best interest to use it as nicely as possible.
Are there any plans to add features to BitTorrent which will automatically select (or give preference to) sources which are nearby?
Bruce, if this is the case, is not SCO merely acting contractually responsible by attempting to collect royalties on Novell's behalf? In this event, it doesn't matter if it's thier IP, or not - it's their job to fetch money from it, and keep 5% of the take.
At least, that's how I read it.
Acid? From paper? Attacking polycarbonate (see also: "safety glasses") discs? Hilarious.
Here's what really happened:
Surface of CD rests against abrasive paper. They rub together a little bit in transit. When this happens, the paper roughens areas on the CD, like fine sandpaper. No chemistry needed.
Next time, try tyvek sleeves. They cost insignificantly more money, resist tearing extremely well, and don't have such abrasive qualities as paper sleeves.
Meanwhile, you can restore playability to your CDs. Try automotive carnuba wax, Brasso, or peanut butter - whichever you happen to have handy.
Have you tried plugging an RJ45 in backwards (or sideways, or shifted one row to the left, or...)?
It is essentially impossible, approaching non-issue status. And nevermind that ethernet is specified to withstand multi-kilovolt fuckups between random pins, unlike massively-parallel/easy-to-crossconnect SCSI - ethernet devices don't mind seeing voltage potential where it doesn't belong.
Here's a larger problem that standardized POE solves:
User has two cables running to desktop IP phone. User unplugs cables to re-arrange desk, and upon plugging things back in, their IP phone smells funny and their external modem won't work.
Upon investigation, it turns out that the 12VAC power supply for their Sportster is not interchangable with the 13.6VDC PSU for their IP-600 phone.
Therein lies the problem with multiple incompatible, anonymous-looking power supplies at the desktop.
(In other news: Licking light sockets can be hazardous to your health. Also, this just in: Consuming too much water may cause accidental drowning.)
You are paranoid, but justifiably so.
When you have new parts installed on your car (or your lawnmower, or your house, or your own body), you do not lose ownership of the old parts. They are indisputably yours. "Buying a new RKE module" != "Trading a broken RKE module and a pile of cash for one which is non-broken."
Generally speaking, folks don't want their parts back, and the shop's disposal of them is viewed as a service. And most of the time, the shop gets a (sometimes modest, sometimes large) refund for returning the old part to whoever they got the new one from, so it can be remanufactured and again re-sold.
But security? You've got such a module installed in your car -right now- which you could take out and reverse engineer, if you wanted to explore potential security problems. Giving you your old parts back has no effect on this aspect.
And any data that's there? Unless they've licensed it, it's yours, too. Your car; your box; your data. End of fucking story.
The primary mover of self-destructive media will not be Blockbuster and friends, but Wal-Mart and other department stores.
Such retail outlets could care less about people coming back to the store to return rented media, because folks are already due back in a few days when they need to buy more condoms, beer, food, and - if they liked the movie - a real DVD of it at 5x the price.
Besides increasing same-store sales, it gives them a part of the rental market, without them having to actually rent/clean/repair/chase/bill anything. Retail inventory control is cake compared to that which a rental business must go through.
In closing, I'd like to submit that your assertion of reduced turnaround business at Blockbuster as being somehow indicative of a "loser" product is completely baseless, unsupportable, and lacking of any attachment to reality.
Here's to fair-use DVD-R backups of $2.99 Disney films, paid for with good ol' anonymous cash.
One issue:
Diamonds aren't particularly strong; the only meaningful industrial aspect of them is that they're very, very hard.
Hardness != strength.
A diamond-coated fuel cell, I might surmise, would perform about as well at the application as the same fuel cell would without diamonds.
Properly-trained cashiers command more-proper wages.
More-proper wages command higher sticker prices.
Start shopping somewhere more expensive, and notice how workers start acting differently.
[Note, however, that finding such a place is increasingly difficult, with an increasingly braindead, unskilled population driving up demand for low prices at any cost.]
I find your assertions to be puzzling.
Where I work, we've got 768/160 DSL from Ameritech. It seems to work just fine for web browsing, but it has a tendancy to hop addresses at least daily.
We're in the process of eliminating it. When we needed a static address, they refused to sell us one without moving the DSL loop off of its own pair to piggyback it on one of our POTS lines. And since none of the four POTS lines passed their line test, the problem became circular. After six weeks of dealing with this sort of bullshit on a daily basis, told them to get fucked.
Now, then:
Roadrunner/AOLTW was quite happy to sell us a package including one static and five dynmaic addresses. When we called them, they had a guy out within a couple of hours to look at our cabling needs, and had the service installed in less than 48.
No complaints about latency. We're doing VOIP over this connection, with fabulous results.
I've also got standard, plain-jane cable at home. The IP address has never changed in the year that I've had it.
Would anyone care to post an English translation of the copyright.gov page?
This just in: By using multiple CPUs, you can get more work done, faster!
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of...naah, fuck it. Keep the Mac and give me a quad Xeon. Thanks.
While I am perfectly willing to accept your prose as gospel, I'm interested in knowing some background information about why doing what you say is a Good Thing.
/usr/src/linux symlinked to whatever kernel I happen to be running this week. Nary a problem.
I've been running Slackware for eight years, with
So, please educate - even if it is for the billionth+1 time.