I would like to buy a cellular phone (actually, I don't, but that's not the point). Just a phone. I don't want a camera, or MP3s, garage door opener, sex toy, videocamera, or on demand movies. Just a phone. Do you have one?
I've got an Audiovox 8600 which *almost* fits the bill... Unfortunately, I think you'll have a very hard time finding a phone that doesn't have vibrate mode these days.:)
Why is it that everything from my toaster to can opener can decode mp3's....But it takes machines found mostly on the space shuttle or data center to decode OGG's?
Because there's a chip you can buy for $1.50 at Radio Shack that provides hardware decoding for MP3. OGG isn't mainstream enough to warrant such a chip being mass produced for the format.
In your world view. Frankly, I pity you. It's worth having a cellular phone for a myriad of reasons, but a person is no less valid if they decide they don't need one. I have a few good reasons to own one that outweigh any benefeit from getting a land line. A lot of my more established friends have a pager and nothing else. If I spent more time around land-line phones or computers, or in places where they are easy to access, I'd probably go that route myself. I dislike my cellular phone, but it's a necessary evil.
Frankly if you live in an area with good coverage you're being grossly inconsiderate to your friends and family by NOT having a phone and forcing them to leave messages. (you do have voicemail right?
Bullshit. It is not inconsiderate to want to be out of reach. It is not inconsiderate to turn your cellular phone off when you're in a movie or a restaurant. In fact, I consider it extremely insulting and annoying when some asshole is yakking on his cell in a movie theater or a restaurant, and on more than one occasion I've taken batteries away for it. You can have the damned thing back when the movie is over or when you leave, whichever's first.
It is not inconsiderate to make your friends leave a message. Contrary to what you seem to think, the meaning of life is not to be on call 24/7 for any joker that wants to talk.
Frankly not owning a phone (and carrying it with you charged and on) in areas they work is downright rude.
Bullshit. It is not rude to be out of communication. It is rude to expect that I'm going to rearrange my life so that you can always contact me. If it's important, leave me a message or send an e-mail and I'll return your call when I get a chance. Believe it or not, I have a life that doesn't revolve around my phone, and I have responsibilities that are more important than talking to my friends.
We've had red-light cameras in this city for a long time. It's not so much about trying to punish people, though. The thing of it is that the red-light camera acts as a deterrent. There are far fewer accidents at the intersections where the cameras are known to be than there were before the cameras were installed, and it's because people are afraid of getting caught doing something stupid.
Safety through paranoia, but safety none the less.
As to an earlier question at hand, the example of the wireless network would be fine, as long as you've made some effort to secure the network. Even if all you're doing is enabling WEP, you've "secured" the wireless net enough to be able to disclaim any responsibility if somebody wardrives your network and uses it to commit an illegal act. The person has, at that point, committed another act of computer crime to enable them to achieve their main objective, and the victim of the hacking is not responsible.
When I add in the extra costs for accessories I need in a computer, convert it to Canadian dollars, and then remember that I'm a full time student who quit his job in December, yes, that's unaffordable. Especially since I already spent my tax refund on a car repair.... Quite aside from the fact that that particular computer is a downgrade from *both* of the computers I currently use. One's an Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 1024MB of RAM, a 360GB hard drive, and a 256MB Radeon 9600Ultra, and the other is a 1.4GHz Athlon M laptop w/ 512MB of RAM, 40GB HDD, and a 32MB Radeon mobility card.
Besides, both run Slackware perfectly. I don't need a new computer at the moment. When I'm better positioned to buy a new computer, I'll likely buy a mac. Right now, I can't afford to buy one that's actually an upgrade. Hence, I'll wait until somebody writes a 3d-accelerated UI and releases it under the GPL or BSD license.
Here's as good a place as any to point this out...
I keep looking for a 3d-accelerated desktop. I could get what I want from Mac, but quite frankly, I can't afford to buy one. Otherwise, I probably would buy one for my next computer.
See, the major advantage, to me, from having a 3d-accelerated desktop is eye candy. I would find floating around on a 2d screen extremely annoying. But I would very much like to have decent transparency effects, and nicely rendered windows. Properly anti-aliased fonts would be nice, as would having a "real" lighting source to throw shadow on rendered buttons/user interface (maybe one that moves and changes colour to indicate the time of day). All of it is eye candy, and doesn't actually affect the usability of my computer at all.
*but*, it's something that I think would look cool, and would make using the computer a little less mundane. Extensions that do some of this are available for Windows and Linux, of course, but none of them actually *use* my graphics card's rendering capability. The last time I used transparency on my Windows machine, it was a nightmare. You wouldn't believe the graphics lag once I had more than one window open. I've got a 256MB ATI Radeon 9600Ultra video card in that system, but the windows weren't being rendered by it at all. It was all CPU-based graphics rendering, and would have looked the same on a 1MB video card using a VESA interface.
The real benefeit of using a 3d-accelerated user interface isn't so that you can create a 3d user environment, it's so that you can use the graphics card's capabilities to offload processing of eye candy and free up system ticks.
In Linux, run as a user. A malicious script destroys your files and "toasts" your system, the only thing you've lost is your user account. As root, you can then destroy the user and user's files, and recreate the user. You've lost maybe 5 minutes of your time, and don't have to reinstall/recompile/reupdate your system.
If you're running as root, however, the script can access the *entire* system. If it runs amok, you're completely lost, and are out several hours of reformatting, reinstalling, recompiling, and reupdating the system.
This is especially important if you're running a multi-user system. When there's 3 people using the computer, if one of them gets a malicious script and runs it as root, then the entire system is pooped, and all 3 users are out of luck. When they're running as users, they can't touch each others' files, and as such, they can't screw each other over.
Title says it all. This is a proposal from SOCAN, which represents some Canadian musicians. It's just a proposal. As long as the government is still collecting the tariff on blank media, there's no way this would ever actually happen, because organisations like SOCAN are *already* receiving funds as anti-pirating compensation.
The government's already decided that the blank media tax more than pays for lost revenue from the artists, and I doubt very much that SOCAN et al. will ever be willing to give that up.
Maybe you're not proactive enough? My quad-band was stolen in France [hence my comment about them being a target]. I had my parents cancel the phone back in Canada.
My phone didn't get stolen, somebody sniffed the signal and programmed a second phone to identify itself as mine. I still had my phone, and didn't know anything was wrong until Rogers sent me the bill.
I was more incensed at Rogers expecting me to pay the full $1500 in fraudulent charges, despite their own records showing that it was impossible that at least some of the calls could have been made by the same phone. (unless you can figure out a way to get a phone from Ottawa to Vancouver in 2 seconds)
In itself, it wouldn't have been the final nail in the coffin. No, that was when, after resolving that issue (took a year and a lot of letters from my lawyer, that), I told Rogers to cancel the service. They said ok, and that was the end of it. Until another year later, when they sent me to collections again for not having paid them in the last year, because somewhere along the line, they never cancelled my service. I'm still fighting them in court because of the damage they did to my credit rating.
As for "bend over this won't hurt"... ALL CELL PROVIDERS rip you off. What? You think Bell is any better?
My brother wanted to get a new phone to replace his v120c... they told him his plan that HE IS CURRENTLY ON is "no longer available" with a new phone... So he would HAVE TO sign up for a new three year plan that costs ten dollars more a month....
Bell hasn't asked me to pay them $1500 in obviously fraudulent charges, and Bell hasn't sent me to collections for their own billing fuckup. In my books, that puts them ahead of Rogers.
And as for your brother's woes in replacing the cell phone, I can think of an easy way he could have replaced the phone and stayed on his plan: he could have actually bought the phone.
You don't honestly believe that a new cell phone costs $50? What about the ones that the companies are giving away for free? The phones actually cost between $350 and $600, and some of the PDA phones cost upwards of $1000. The reason they're so inexpensive is because they're heavily subsidised by the cell phone company, on the condition that you sign up for a term contract. If he'd offered to pay the full price for the phone, instead of the subsidised price, they would have let him keep his existing plan.
OTOH, if you want GSM in Ottawa, you're stuck with Rogers "bend over and this won't hurt much" AT&T.
No thanks. You couldn't pay me enough to put up with their crap again. Between a cell phone that got jacked, a couple of customer "service" people who didn't believe that I hadn't been making long distance calls from Vancouver to Lebanon, middle management after middle management that couldn't possibly grok the fact that their own records showed concurrent usage from the "same" phone in Ottawa and Vancouver, them taking a year to cancel the service, only to not actually cancel it and send me to collections instead, and a year's worth of fighting with them in small claims court, no thanks. And then they wondered why I cancelled my video rental, TV, and Internet with them. Fuckers still call me to offer me bundles on the service, despite being asked to put me on the do-not-call list repeatedly. Ted Rogers can go to hell.
Service was great when it was Cantel. Then they merged with AT&T. Coverage was still good, but customer service was nonexistant. Then Rogers bought Cantel, and the whole shebang went to shit.
I'll stick with CDMA. The coverage map is less than half the story, and besides, I have much better reception and coverage with Bell than I ever did with Cantel/Rogers/AT&T.
Incidentally... you do realise that it's *far* cheaper to buy a phone and use pay-as-you-go when you're in Europe than it is to bring your phone from home?
Maybe it's just you.... In one of my computers, the CD drive is my first CDR drive: a 6x4 (no CDRW support) Panasonic drive. Thing still works. I used it for years without any problem, and have probably burned somewhere around 600 discs with it, and the only reason it isn't in my main computer is that I spent 40 bucks on a Ricoh 40x12x40 drive a couple years ago. On that one, I've burned close to 200 discs without a single coaster.
As for DVD players, my first DVD player still works, too. Bought that in 1997, and it doesn't even support dual layer discs. It isn't my main DVD player, but it is the one I bring with me when I go up to my gf's cottage.
In the many years that I've been using optical drives, and the many optical drives that went with it, I've only ever had one drive/player actually cack, and that was a 4X IDE CDROM drive that had been stored in a musty basement for 3 years.
Maybe it's the luck of the draw, but maybe it's got something to do with how/where the devices are stored/treated?
My party wasn't loud, we didn't have music outside. We had maybe 15 people.
And the fact remains that somebody felt it necessary to call the police. If it really wasn't loud enough to be heard outside, how did they know there was a party in the first place?
As for the fight, I pushed the guy down to stop him from beating me up.
Technically, that could be viewed as assault. Did you first tell the guy that you didn't want to fight him, that you had no beef with him? Were there witnesses who can back that story up? Even if you did this, did you strike first? The law is pretty fuzzy in cases of self-defense as to what you can get away with, but you need to be able to prove an imminent threat if you're going to strike first, and you need to be able to prove that you used the minimum force necessary in cases where you injure or kill your assailant.
I realise this is hypothetical, since the event in question is over and gone, but there's something worth pointing out: when it's your word against my word in a case of assault, whoever's hurt is the one that the police are going to believe in the absence of a witness. This being a party, there should be no shortages of witnesses, so you need to ask yourself: are these witnesses going to say that I tried to avoid the fight and only struck back when I had no choice, or are they going to say that I pushed the guy down?
And what you do after the fact is just as important as what you do during the event, btw. If you stick around, you're basically inviting a repeat. If you walk away from it, it shows you are trying to avoid a fight. And if you didn't have time to do either of those, then what you say next is complete and utter bullshit:
I could just die, but I like life.
You know as well as I do that it's very unlikely that a fight would have come to that. It is extremely hard to actually kill somebody, for one, and for two, at a party, I doubt that everybody would have stood around while that sort of thing happened. Besides, self defense doesn't mean striking first, but it also doesn't mean standing there when somebody's giving you no choice.
If you're really concerned about it, I suggest you take some self defense. Truly, though, if you're in a situation where you actually need to use it at a party, you should probably be reconsidering who your friends are, and which parties you go to. Martial arts are something you learn so that you never need to use them.
The snowboard team was obviously illegal, but there were lots of parties going on.
And?
The police were not going to help me.
I'm assuming you're talking about the death threats, and not the kid who got beaten up... Did you know this for absolute, 100% certain? Would it have cost you anything other than time to file a report with the police?
I knew this based on experience in that town. They were accepting payoffs from bars, and doing all sorts of illegal things. They had accepted payoffs to overlook lots of criminal activities, and the students were endangered by their actions.
That's a very serious accusation.
What's your evidence? Were you a party to this, or is this hearsay? If you can back this claim up, then I suggest you talk to your lawyer, who can get you in touch with the appropriate authorities to discuss the matter. There's no sense grousing about something when you have the power to stop it.
I say something a little rude (but justified) about the situation. The officer in the car proceeds to arrest me.
What, exactly, did you say?
Incidentally, it's well within their rights to arrest you if they have reason to believe that you are belligerent, a threat, or intoxicated. Was it something minor, like "you've got to be ******* kidding me", or "this is bullshit"? Was it something a little more aggressive, like directly insulting the arresting officer?
In either case, you brought it on yourself. You aren't going to get a lot of sympathy from me on that one, because as you've portrayed it, the police did not infringe on your rights at all. You didn't have to fight back, but you apparently chose to.
2: Police come onto my property to break up a party. The party is hidden from the street, obscured by 2 large buildings surrounding my yard. I am told that I am tresspassing (people are entering the yard from my house, through the only door that leads into the yard, the neighbors had no yards). We called the only good cop I knew and had the police called away.
3: The only good cop I knew gets fired.
So, you were having a party that was loud enough for the police to break it up? Just because it's hidden from the street does not make it legal. You should know that the police don't come to a party on the first noise complaint. It usually takes 5 or 6 before the police will actually go to the party, because they have a whole lot of stuff on their plate that's more important.
And then, to make matters worse, you called in a friend to circumvent the rules and get the police to leave you alone, and are even remotely surprised that this friend got fired for their actions?
I'm getting the feeling that there's something rather important to this story that you aren't telling us.
4: A kid gets severely beaten at a local party. I take him back to my place and call 911. I get patched through to the police, who refuse to come out and take care of the situation. This kid had all of his teeth broken, had a broken nose, and was bleeding pretty steadily. I feared for his life. It gets worse, while I'm on the phone with the police, I lose him! The police refuse to come out and look for him. After many phone calls, I find out that the kid had been brought to the hospital by some friends who saw him wandering the street.
What the hell are you doing calling the police when you think this kid's life is in danger from his injuries? I've called 911 about a dozen times (happens when you're a lifeguard), and every single time I've called that number, the first thing out of the operator's mouth is "911, Do you need Police, Ambulance, or Fire?" How the hell did you get routed to Police after that?
Furthermore, are you at all surprised that the police refused to come out and take care of the situation? The kid was injured badly enough that you think he's in danger of dying. Do some first aid, and get a friggin' ambulance. The police can't treat the injuries, and the more time you spend arguing with the police, the longer it's going to take before EMT's get there. Ever hear of the Golden Hour? Short version is that 60 minutes is how long you've got to get the kid to the hospital, or their chance of survival will drop significantly.
And in case it ever happens again, get the kid to the hospital, and worry about whether a law has been broken after the injuries have been treated.
4: I get a death threat. An officer comes out, listens to it, tells me its a prank. I said I thought not, and asked to have my phone calls traced for a few days. The officer refuses. I stay in a friends house for a few days.
That's because the police don't do that. If you were really worried about it, you could have used *69 to trace the call immediately after receiving the death threat. If that fails, record the time of the incident and call the phone company. Most importantly, rec
You appear to have never watched a stewardess opening a door on a large airliner.... It does depend on the plane design, but a lot of them actually have a double hinge that opens inwards but allows the door to be put outside so that it isn't in the way during disembarking.
On some planes, it also depends whether you're using the fore, mid, or aft door.
You also appear to have missed the part of the original post where the author worried about breathing in the dust....
Keeping a survivable environment on the moon is a difficult task, but I don't think I'm too worried about the dust getting in my lungs as the description suggests. Any habitat on the moon will be pressurized. I should hope so, at least.
Anyway, I'm not too worried about that dust getting in my lungs if I ever go to the moon, because of the very same force that keeps an airplane's door closed, and maintains the security of a level 5 biohazard area: air pressure. The pressure in a biohazard area is kept negative, relative to the outside pressure. That way, if there's ever a breach, the outside air will be gushing in, so the viruses won't be able to escape. Likewise, an airplane's door is held closed by the force of the higher air pressure inside the cabin.
The same laws of physics apply on the moon. If I'm wearing a space suit that develops a micro-hole because of this abrasion, I'm not going to be sucking vacuum as it won't be a big enough hole to depressurize the suit. I'm also not going to be worrying about any of this dust getting in the suit, because of the pressure from the air escaping the suit. The same goes for a habitat that's breached. And if the hole is big enough to depressurize the suit, I've got bigger worries than dust in my lungs.:)
As for the initial problem of the abrasiveness, I can think of a possible solution that may or may not work... If there's an outer shell of some kind of flowing liquid held to the structure with electrostatic or magnetic force, would you be all that worried about abrasion? Or if you could generate that electrostatic force in the first place, couldn't you use that to repel the dust?
but would the other 90% understand what/where/how to conifugre WPA on an AP or gateway?
A better question would be "Would the other 90% want to configure WPA?".
Personally, my own network has WEP enabled. I'm well aware of the level of "security" that provides, but it's there as a deterrent to the neighbourhood brats; all of the important stuff is secured through other methods. If a wardriver manages to borrow some bandwidth, so be it. They get a free internet connection for a bit, and it doesn't really cost me anything since the firewall gives first priority to wired clients, and second to known MAC addresses.
They'll also have a hard time doing that in the first place, since the siding on my house makes it an effective faraday cage. Cellular reception goes from 5 bars to 1 bar when you enter the house, and wireless signal drops to zero about 5 feet away from it.:-)
Don't get me wrong. I can understand coroprations wanting to protect their IP, but the average home user probably doesn't have a good reason to worry about securing their wireless network, WEP, WPA, or whatever's next.
Ahem. Doesn't research show that most spam is sent from the US?
My point exactly. If spam were to become illegal in the US, there would be a sharp decrease in the amount of spam being sent from the US, especially if they were to implement a punishment that fit the crime, such as being hung from the nearest yardarm by the testicles. Spammers would find other, less significant countries from which to send their drivel,
I would feel less bothered about blocking all mail from Uzbekistan than from the USA. The unspoken ellispis is that presumably, if spammers had to find somewhere other than the US from where to operate, they'd most likely end up in a country where I don't have a problem blanket blocking, since all of my legitimate incoming mail that doesn't come from the US comes from Canada, France, Germany, England, Japan, and Australia, and spamming is already illegal in all of those countries.
With IPv6, however, it's really easy to block all mail coming from any specific country.
I dunno about you, but I'd feel less bothered about blocking all mail from Uzbekistan than from the USA. And if the ISPs in the country have a problem with it, they can lobby their government to criminalize spam, too. Personally, I'd rather operate universal blacklisting with explicit whitelisting, but there's just too many ISP's in the USA, with new ones popping up daily, for that to work.
Spam is unsolvable by technical means, and it's unsolvable by legal suits, civil or criminal. It will disappear when the Internet has matured to the point where business is more than a one-shot affair, and tit-for-tat becomes the rule, not the exception.
I'm far more pessimistic about it than you. Personally, I think that spam will continue to grow as long as the spammers think they can get away with it. There have *always* been get-rich-quick schemes, and there *always* will be as long as there's enough people gullible enough to get sucked in. Sometimes, a one-shot business is all you need to be set for life.
The only way to stamp it out is to go on the aggressive. I personally receive about 3,200 spams a week. This is increasing, not decreasing. It is costing me money, because I have to pay for my bandwidth usage. I am not going to just sit around and wait until they grow out of it, because that isn't going to happen in my lifetime. Sorry if it doesn't jive with your rosy view of the world, but I'm doing everything in my power to fight the spammers, and I'm not going to stop until the bastards leave me alone. Criminalizing it in the USA will take an enormous chunk out of the amount of work I need to do to fight it, and I, for one, would welcome that.
Ah... yeah, that does make sense. I blame my grade 9 biology teacher for that blunder: being the only male in a class of 31, with a militant lesbian for a teacher can really ruin a guy's liking for a subject. I wonder why...
Solar sells can use approx 20-50% of that 1020 watts.
Which is why the first thing in my mind was "who cares what it's made of, how efficient is it?"
That said: The the basal metabolic rate (at rest) is appr 1.2 W per kg of body weight I weigh 57 kg. Which means I need 70.8 W resting. If I was laying on the ground at sea level I would be receiving 950 more watts that I need to stay alive.
I think your numbers are off. 70.8W is 70.8 joules/second, at rest. Multiply by 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, and you're telling me that you require a shade over 6 megajoules of energy on a day, just to exist at a vegetative level. Here's the thing... that's about 1.5 million calories of energy daily. The RDI is somewhere around 2500 calories for a woman, and 3500 calories for a man. Something doesn't add up.... I'd believe 70.8 milliwatts, but not 70.8 watts.
Even so, plants are nowhere near 100% efficiency. Photosynthesis is actually one of the least efficient reactions around, and it couldn't provide anywhere near the amount of energy I need on a daily basis. I'm burning a lot of calories each day in active exercise, not counting what I need just to get around and survive. All told, even though I'm consuming somewhere around 4500 calories a day, I'm still losing weight. That's 19kJ, which, if I was 100% efficient (and had a surface area of 1m^2), I could recoup in less than 20 seconds. I actually have a surface area closer to 2m^2, but even so, I can't just stand in the sun for 10 seconds a day to get my daily energy intake.
Likewise, a plant simply can't photosynthesize with anywhere near the level of efficiency needed to sustain active movement. It isn't a question of convenience that explains why animals eat things, it's a question of it being far more efficient for me to let a plant do the standing around in the sun.
Please also remember that a plant takes months to reach a level of maturity where it can be eaten. Think a moment about how much energy the plant gets bombarded with over the course of months, and compare that to how much you get from eating it....
[quote]So, what's the problem? What does canada care if Americans use Canadian servers to break US laws?[/quote]
As a Canadian, I'd have to say fsck-all.
It's also worth pointing out that while downloading isn't illegal in Canada, distributing copyrighted material without paying royalties *is* illegal. And very expensive if you get caught.
Re:The grass is always greener on the other side
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Canada Says No To DMCA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
... Ernst Zundel was deported after about 30 years' worth of extradition requests from Germany, where he was wanted for publishing documents that denied the holocaust.
Now, the last thing I want to do is give somebody a reason to invoke Godwin's law, but for crying out quietly, 30 years' worth of extradition requests and we only now get rid of the jackass?
Free Speech (tm) exists in Canada, and I have *never* had cause to believe that we're more draconian than anybody else. For one thing, we never produced a Joe McCarthy....
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I would like to buy a cellular phone (actually, I don't, but that's not the point). Just a phone. I don't want a camera, or MP3s, garage door opener, sex toy, videocamera, or on demand movies. Just a phone. Do you have one?
:)
I've got an Audiovox 8600 which *almost* fits the bill... Unfortunately, I think you'll have a very hard time finding a phone that doesn't have vibrate mode these days.
Why is it that everything from my toaster to can opener can decode mp3's....But it takes machines found mostly on the space shuttle or data center to decode OGG's?
Because there's a chip you can buy for $1.50 at Radio Shack that provides hardware decoding for MP3. OGG isn't mainstream enough to warrant such a chip being mass produced for the format.
Where's ObviousMan when you need him?
Everyone who is anyone my friend.
In your world view. Frankly, I pity you. It's worth having a cellular phone for a myriad of reasons, but a person is no less valid if they decide they don't need one. I have a few good reasons to own one that outweigh any benefeit from getting a land line. A lot of my more established friends have a pager and nothing else. If I spent more time around land-line phones or computers, or in places where they are easy to access, I'd probably go that route myself. I dislike my cellular phone, but it's a necessary evil.
Frankly if you live in an area with good coverage you're being grossly inconsiderate to your friends and family by NOT having a phone and forcing them to leave messages. (you do have voicemail right?
Bullshit. It is not inconsiderate to want to be out of reach. It is not inconsiderate to turn your cellular phone off when you're in a movie or a restaurant. In fact, I consider it extremely insulting and annoying when some asshole is yakking on his cell in a movie theater or a restaurant, and on more than one occasion I've taken batteries away for it. You can have the damned thing back when the movie is over or when you leave, whichever's first.
It is not inconsiderate to make your friends leave a message. Contrary to what you seem to think, the meaning of life is not to be on call 24/7 for any joker that wants to talk.
Frankly not owning a phone (and carrying it with you charged and on) in areas they work is downright rude.
Bullshit. It is not rude to be out of communication. It is rude to expect that I'm going to rearrange my life so that you can always contact me. If it's important, leave me a message or send an e-mail and I'll return your call when I get a chance. Believe it or not, I have a life that doesn't revolve around my phone, and I have responsibilities that are more important than talking to my friends.
Safety through paranoia, but safety none the less.
As to an earlier question at hand, the example of the wireless network would be fine, as long as you've made some effort to secure the network. Even if all you're doing is enabling WEP, you've "secured" the wireless net enough to be able to disclaim any responsibility if somebody wardrives your network and uses it to commit an illegal act. The person has, at that point, committed another act of computer crime to enable them to achieve their main objective, and the victim of the hacking is not responsible.
When I add in the extra costs for accessories I need in a computer, convert it to Canadian dollars, and then remember that I'm a full time student who quit his job in December, yes, that's unaffordable. Especially since I already spent my tax refund on a car repair. ... Quite aside from the fact that that particular computer is a downgrade from *both* of the computers I currently use. One's an Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 1024MB of RAM, a 360GB hard drive, and a 256MB Radeon 9600Ultra, and the other is a 1.4GHz Athlon M laptop w/ 512MB of RAM, 40GB HDD, and a 32MB Radeon mobility card.
Besides, both run Slackware perfectly. I don't need a new computer at the moment. When I'm better positioned to buy a new computer, I'll likely buy a mac. Right now, I can't afford to buy one that's actually an upgrade. Hence, I'll wait until somebody writes a 3d-accelerated UI and releases it under the GPL or BSD license.
Here's as good a place as any to point this out...
I keep looking for a 3d-accelerated desktop. I could get what I want from Mac, but quite frankly, I can't afford to buy one. Otherwise, I probably would buy one for my next computer.
See, the major advantage, to me, from having a 3d-accelerated desktop is eye candy. I would find floating around on a 2d screen extremely annoying. But I would very much like to have decent transparency effects, and nicely rendered windows. Properly anti-aliased fonts would be nice, as would having a "real" lighting source to throw shadow on rendered buttons/user interface (maybe one that moves and changes colour to indicate the time of day). All of it is eye candy, and doesn't actually affect the usability of my computer at all.
*but*, it's something that I think would look cool, and would make using the computer a little less mundane. Extensions that do some of this are available for Windows and Linux, of course, but none of them actually *use* my graphics card's rendering capability. The last time I used transparency on my Windows machine, it was a nightmare. You wouldn't believe the graphics lag once I had more than one window open. I've got a 256MB ATI Radeon 9600Ultra video card in that system, but the windows weren't being rendered by it at all. It was all CPU-based graphics rendering, and would have looked the same on a 1MB video card using a VESA interface.
The real benefeit of using a 3d-accelerated user interface isn't so that you can create a 3d user environment, it's so that you can use the graphics card's capabilities to offload processing of eye candy and free up system ticks.
That's Windows logic.
In Linux, run as a user. A malicious script destroys your files and "toasts" your system, the only thing you've lost is your user account. As root, you can then destroy the user and user's files, and recreate the user. You've lost maybe 5 minutes of your time, and don't have to reinstall/recompile/reupdate your system.
If you're running as root, however, the script can access the *entire* system. If it runs amok, you're completely lost, and are out several hours of reformatting, reinstalling, recompiling, and reupdating the system.
This is especially important if you're running a multi-user system. When there's 3 people using the computer, if one of them gets a malicious script and runs it as root, then the entire system is pooped, and all 3 users are out of luck. When they're running as users, they can't touch each others' files, and as such, they can't screw each other over.
Title says it all. This is a proposal from SOCAN, which represents some Canadian musicians. It's just a proposal. As long as the government is still collecting the tariff on blank media, there's no way this would ever actually happen, because organisations like SOCAN are *already* receiving funds as anti-pirating compensation.
The government's already decided that the blank media tax more than pays for lost revenue from the artists, and I doubt very much that SOCAN et al. will ever be willing to give that up.
Maybe you're not proactive enough? My quad-band was stolen in France [hence my comment about them being a target]. I had my parents cancel the phone back in Canada.
... ALL CELL PROVIDERS rip you off. What? You think Bell is any better?
... they told him his plan that HE IS CURRENTLY ON is "no longer available" with a new phone... So he would HAVE TO sign up for a new three year plan that costs ten dollars more a month....
My phone didn't get stolen, somebody sniffed the signal and programmed a second phone to identify itself as mine. I still had my phone, and didn't know anything was wrong until Rogers sent me the bill.
I was more incensed at Rogers expecting me to pay the full $1500 in fraudulent charges, despite their own records showing that it was impossible that at least some of the calls could have been made by the same phone. (unless you can figure out a way to get a phone from Ottawa to Vancouver in 2 seconds)
In itself, it wouldn't have been the final nail in the coffin. No, that was when, after resolving that issue (took a year and a lot of letters from my lawyer, that), I told Rogers to cancel the service. They said ok, and that was the end of it. Until another year later, when they sent me to collections again for not having paid them in the last year, because somewhere along the line, they never cancelled my service. I'm still fighting them in court because of the damage they did to my credit rating.
As for "bend over this won't hurt"
My brother wanted to get a new phone to replace his v120c
Bell hasn't asked me to pay them $1500 in obviously fraudulent charges, and Bell hasn't sent me to collections for their own billing fuckup. In my books, that puts them ahead of Rogers.
And as for your brother's woes in replacing the cell phone, I can think of an easy way he could have replaced the phone and stayed on his plan: he could have actually bought the phone.
You don't honestly believe that a new cell phone costs $50? What about the ones that the companies are giving away for free? The phones actually cost between $350 and $600, and some of the PDA phones cost upwards of $1000. The reason they're so inexpensive is because they're heavily subsidised by the cell phone company, on the condition that you sign up for a term contract. If he'd offered to pay the full price for the phone, instead of the subsidised price, they would have let him keep his existing plan.
OTOH, if you want GSM in Ottawa, you're stuck with Rogers "bend over and this won't hurt much" AT&T.
No thanks. You couldn't pay me enough to put up with their crap again. Between a cell phone that got jacked, a couple of customer "service" people who didn't believe that I hadn't been making long distance calls from Vancouver to Lebanon, middle management after middle management that couldn't possibly grok the fact that their own records showed concurrent usage from the "same" phone in Ottawa and Vancouver, them taking a year to cancel the service, only to not actually cancel it and send me to collections instead, and a year's worth of fighting with them in small claims court, no thanks. And then they wondered why I cancelled my video rental, TV, and Internet with them. Fuckers still call me to offer me bundles on the service, despite being asked to put me on the do-not-call list repeatedly. Ted Rogers can go to hell.
Service was great when it was Cantel. Then they merged with AT&T. Coverage was still good, but customer service was nonexistant. Then Rogers bought Cantel, and the whole shebang went to shit.
I'll stick with CDMA. The coverage map is less than half the story, and besides, I have much better reception and coverage with Bell than I ever did with Cantel/Rogers/AT&T.
Incidentally... you do realise that it's *far* cheaper to buy a phone and use pay-as-you-go when you're in Europe than it is to bring your phone from home?
Maybe it's just you.... In one of my computers, the CD drive is my first CDR drive: a 6x4 (no CDRW support) Panasonic drive. Thing still works. I used it for years without any problem, and have probably burned somewhere around 600 discs with it, and the only reason it isn't in my main computer is that I spent 40 bucks on a Ricoh 40x12x40 drive a couple years ago. On that one, I've burned close to 200 discs without a single coaster.
As for DVD players, my first DVD player still works, too. Bought that in 1997, and it doesn't even support dual layer discs. It isn't my main DVD player, but it is the one I bring with me when I go up to my gf's cottage.
In the many years that I've been using optical drives, and the many optical drives that went with it, I've only ever had one drive/player actually cack, and that was a 4X IDE CDROM drive that had been stored in a musty basement for 3 years.
Maybe it's the luck of the draw, but maybe it's got something to do with how/where the devices are stored/treated?
My party wasn't loud, we didn't have music outside. We had maybe 15 people.
And the fact remains that somebody felt it necessary to call the police. If it really wasn't loud enough to be heard outside, how did they know there was a party in the first place?
As for the fight, I pushed the guy down to stop him from beating me up.
Technically, that could be viewed as assault. Did you first tell the guy that you didn't want to fight him, that you had no beef with him? Were there witnesses who can back that story up? Even if you did this, did you strike first? The law is pretty fuzzy in cases of self-defense as to what you can get away with, but you need to be able to prove an imminent threat if you're going to strike first, and you need to be able to prove that you used the minimum force necessary in cases where you injure or kill your assailant.
I realise this is hypothetical, since the event in question is over and gone, but there's something worth pointing out: when it's your word against my word in a case of assault, whoever's hurt is the one that the police are going to believe in the absence of a witness. This being a party, there should be no shortages of witnesses, so you need to ask yourself: are these witnesses going to say that I tried to avoid the fight and only struck back when I had no choice, or are they going to say that I pushed the guy down?
And what you do after the fact is just as important as what you do during the event, btw. If you stick around, you're basically inviting a repeat. If you walk away from it, it shows you are trying to avoid a fight. And if you didn't have time to do either of those, then what you say next is complete and utter bullshit:
I could just die, but I like life.
You know as well as I do that it's very unlikely that a fight would have come to that. It is extremely hard to actually kill somebody, for one, and for two, at a party, I doubt that everybody would have stood around while that sort of thing happened. Besides, self defense doesn't mean striking first, but it also doesn't mean standing there when somebody's giving you no choice.
If you're really concerned about it, I suggest you take some self defense. Truly, though, if you're in a situation where you actually need to use it at a party, you should probably be reconsidering who your friends are, and which parties you go to. Martial arts are something you learn so that you never need to use them.
The snowboard team was obviously illegal, but there were lots of parties going on.
And?
The police were not going to help me.
I'm assuming you're talking about the death threats, and not the kid who got beaten up... Did you know this for absolute, 100% certain? Would it have cost you anything other than time to file a report with the police?
I knew this based on experience in that town. They were accepting payoffs from bars, and doing all sorts of illegal things. They had accepted payoffs to overlook lots of criminal activities, and the students were endangered by their actions.
That's a very serious accusation.
What's your evidence? Were you a party to this, or is this hearsay? If you can back this claim up, then I suggest you talk to your lawyer, who can get you in touch with the appropriate authorities to discuss the matter. There's no sense grousing about something when you have the power to stop it.
I say something a little rude (but justified) about the situation. The officer in the car proceeds to arrest me.
What, exactly, did you say?
Incidentally, it's well within their rights to arrest you if they have reason to believe that you are belligerent, a threat, or intoxicated. Was it something minor, like "you've got to be ******* kidding me", or "this is bullshit"? Was it something a little more aggressive, like directly insulting the arresting officer?
In either case, you brought it on yourself. You aren't going to get a lot of sympathy from me on that one, because as you've portrayed it, the police did not infringe on your rights at all. You didn't have to fight back, but you apparently chose to.
2: Police come onto my property to break up a party. The party is hidden from the street, obscured by 2 large buildings surrounding my yard. I am told that I am tresspassing (people are entering the yard from my house, through the only door that leads into the yard, the neighbors had no yards). We called the only good cop I knew and had the police called away.
3: The only good cop I knew gets fired.
So, you were having a party that was loud enough for the police to break it up? Just because it's hidden from the street does not make it legal. You should know that the police don't come to a party on the first noise complaint. It usually takes 5 or 6 before the police will actually go to the party, because they have a whole lot of stuff on their plate that's more important.
And then, to make matters worse, you called in a friend to circumvent the rules and get the police to leave you alone, and are even remotely surprised that this friend got fired for their actions?
I'm getting the feeling that there's something rather important to this story that you aren't telling us.
4: A kid gets severely beaten at a local party. I take him back to my place and call 911. I get patched through to the police, who refuse to come out and take care of the situation. This kid had all of his teeth broken, had a broken nose, and was bleeding pretty steadily. I feared for his life. It gets worse, while I'm on the phone with the police, I lose him! The police refuse to come out and look for him. After many phone calls, I find out that the kid had been brought to the hospital by some friends who saw him wandering the street.
What the hell are you doing calling the police when you think this kid's life is in danger from his injuries? I've called 911 about a dozen times (happens when you're a lifeguard), and every single time I've called that number, the first thing out of the operator's mouth is "911, Do you need Police, Ambulance, or Fire?" How the hell did you get routed to Police after that?
Furthermore, are you at all surprised that the police refused to come out and take care of the situation? The kid was injured badly enough that you think he's in danger of dying. Do some first aid, and get a friggin' ambulance. The police can't treat the injuries, and the more time you spend arguing with the police, the longer it's going to take before EMT's get there. Ever hear of the Golden Hour? Short version is that 60 minutes is how long you've got to get the kid to the hospital, or their chance of survival will drop significantly.
And in case it ever happens again, get the kid to the hospital, and worry about whether a law has been broken after the injuries have been treated.
4: I get a death threat. An officer comes out, listens to it, tells me its a prank. I said I thought not, and asked to have my phone calls traced for a few days. The officer refuses. I stay in a friends house for a few days.
That's because the police don't do that. If you were really worried about it, you could have used *69 to trace the call immediately after receiving the death threat. If that fails, record the time of the incident and call the phone company. Most importantly, rec
I've patented random no-sex-life jokes pay up.
The RIAA holds the copyright on frivolous lawsuits, and as I understand it, only SCO has a valid license. Are you sure you want to go down that route?
Insert random Slashdot-nerd-sex-life-joke.01
You appear to have never watched a stewardess opening a door on a large airliner.... It does depend on the plane design, but a lot of them actually have a double hinge that opens inwards but allows the door to be put outside so that it isn't in the way during disembarking.
On some planes, it also depends whether you're using the fore, mid, or aft door.
You also appear to have missed the part of the original post where the author worried about breathing in the dust....
Keeping a survivable environment on the moon is a difficult task, but I don't think I'm too worried about the dust getting in my lungs as the description suggests. Any habitat on the moon will be pressurized. I should hope so, at least.
:)
Anyway, I'm not too worried about that dust getting in my lungs if I ever go to the moon, because of the very same force that keeps an airplane's door closed, and maintains the security of a level 5 biohazard area: air pressure. The pressure in a biohazard area is kept negative, relative to the outside pressure. That way, if there's ever a breach, the outside air will be gushing in, so the viruses won't be able to escape. Likewise, an airplane's door is held closed by the force of the higher air pressure inside the cabin.
The same laws of physics apply on the moon. If I'm wearing a space suit that develops a micro-hole because of this abrasion, I'm not going to be sucking vacuum as it won't be a big enough hole to depressurize the suit. I'm also not going to be worrying about any of this dust getting in the suit, because of the pressure from the air escaping the suit. The same goes for a habitat that's breached. And if the hole is big enough to depressurize the suit, I've got bigger worries than dust in my lungs.
As for the initial problem of the abrasiveness, I can think of a possible solution that may or may not work... If there's an outer shell of some kind of flowing liquid held to the structure with electrostatic or magnetic force, would you be all that worried about abrasion? Or if you could generate that electrostatic force in the first place, couldn't you use that to repel the dust?
but would the other 90% understand what/where/how to conifugre WPA on an AP or gateway?
:-)
A better question would be "Would the other 90% want to configure WPA?".
Personally, my own network has WEP enabled. I'm well aware of the level of "security" that provides, but it's there as a deterrent to the neighbourhood brats; all of the important stuff is secured through other methods. If a wardriver manages to borrow some bandwidth, so be it. They get a free internet connection for a bit, and it doesn't really cost me anything since the firewall gives first priority to wired clients, and second to known MAC addresses.
They'll also have a hard time doing that in the first place, since the siding on my house makes it an effective faraday cage. Cellular reception goes from 5 bars to 1 bar when you enter the house, and wireless signal drops to zero about 5 feet away from it.
Don't get me wrong. I can understand coroprations wanting to protect their IP, but the average home user probably doesn't have a good reason to worry about securing their wireless network, WEP, WPA, or whatever's next.
Ahem. Doesn't research show that most spam is sent from the US?
My point exactly. If spam were to become illegal in the US, there would be a sharp decrease in the amount of spam being sent from the US, especially if they were to implement a punishment that fit the crime, such as being hung from the nearest yardarm by the testicles. Spammers would find other, less significant countries from which to send their drivel,
I would feel less bothered about blocking all mail from Uzbekistan than from the USA. The unspoken ellispis is that presumably, if spammers had to find somewhere other than the US from where to operate, they'd most likely end up in a country where I don't have a problem blanket blocking, since all of my legitimate incoming mail that doesn't come from the US comes from Canada, France, Germany, England, Japan, and Australia, and spamming is already illegal in all of those countries.
With IPv6, however, it's really easy to block all mail coming from any specific country.
I dunno about you, but I'd feel less bothered about blocking all mail from Uzbekistan than from the USA. And if the ISPs in the country have a problem with it, they can lobby their government to criminalize spam, too. Personally, I'd rather operate universal blacklisting with explicit whitelisting, but there's just too many ISP's in the USA, with new ones popping up daily, for that to work.
Spam is unsolvable by technical means, and it's unsolvable by legal suits, civil or criminal. It will disappear when the Internet has matured to the point where business is more than a one-shot affair, and tit-for-tat becomes the rule, not the exception.
I'm far more pessimistic about it than you. Personally, I think that spam will continue to grow as long as the spammers think they can get away with it. There have *always* been get-rich-quick schemes, and there *always* will be as long as there's enough people gullible enough to get sucked in. Sometimes, a one-shot business is all you need to be set for life.
The only way to stamp it out is to go on the aggressive. I personally receive about 3,200 spams a week. This is increasing, not decreasing. It is costing me money, because I have to pay for my bandwidth usage. I am not going to just sit around and wait until they grow out of it, because that isn't going to happen in my lifetime. Sorry if it doesn't jive with your rosy view of the world, but I'm doing everything in my power to fight the spammers, and I'm not going to stop until the bastards leave me alone. Criminalizing it in the USA will take an enormous chunk out of the amount of work I need to do to fight it, and I, for one, would welcome that.
Ah... yeah, that does make sense. I blame my grade 9 biology teacher for that blunder: being the only male in a class of 31, with a militant lesbian for a teacher can really ruin a guy's liking for a subject. I wonder why...
Solar sells can use approx 20-50% of that 1020 watts.
Which is why the first thing in my mind was "who cares what it's made of, how efficient is it?"
That said: The the basal metabolic rate (at rest) is appr 1.2 W per kg of body weight I weigh 57 kg. Which means I need 70.8 W resting. If I was laying on the ground at sea level I would be receiving 950 more watts that I need to stay alive.
I think your numbers are off. 70.8W is 70.8 joules/second, at rest. Multiply by 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, and you're telling me that you require a shade over 6 megajoules of energy on a day, just to exist at a vegetative level. Here's the thing... that's about 1.5 million calories of energy daily. The RDI is somewhere around 2500 calories for a woman, and 3500 calories for a man. Something doesn't add up.... I'd believe 70.8 milliwatts, but not 70.8 watts.
Even so, plants are nowhere near 100% efficiency. Photosynthesis is actually one of the least efficient reactions around, and it couldn't provide anywhere near the amount of energy I need on a daily basis. I'm burning a lot of calories each day in active exercise, not counting what I need just to get around and survive. All told, even though I'm consuming somewhere around 4500 calories a day, I'm still losing weight. That's 19kJ, which, if I was 100% efficient (and had a surface area of 1m^2), I could recoup in less than 20 seconds. I actually have a surface area closer to 2m^2, but even so, I can't just stand in the sun for 10 seconds a day to get my daily energy intake.
Likewise, a plant simply can't photosynthesize with anywhere near the level of efficiency needed to sustain active movement. It isn't a question of convenience that explains why animals eat things, it's a question of it being far more efficient for me to let a plant do the standing around in the sun.
Please also remember that a plant takes months to reach a level of maturity where it can be eaten. Think a moment about how much energy the plant gets bombarded with over the course of months, and compare that to how much you get from eating it....
[quote]So, what's the problem? What does canada care if Americans use Canadian servers to break US laws?[/quote]
As a Canadian, I'd have to say fsck-all.
It's also worth pointing out that while downloading isn't illegal in Canada, distributing copyrighted material without paying royalties *is* illegal. And very expensive if you get caught.
... Ernst Zundel was deported after about 30 years' worth of extradition requests from Germany, where he was wanted for publishing documents that denied the holocaust.
Now, the last thing I want to do is give somebody a reason to invoke Godwin's law, but for crying out quietly, 30 years' worth of extradition requests and we only now get rid of the jackass?
Free Speech (tm) exists in Canada, and I have *never* had cause to believe that we're more draconian than anybody else. For one thing, we never produced a Joe McCarthy....
A former coworker of mine owns and operates the website http://www.hiphopcanada.com ... I wrote the php script that's running their links section.
Hip Hop is alive around here. Some of it is actually good, too.