"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is. These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me."
Aww... cry me a river, jackass. The only difference between this and what you're doing is that this is using paper. (pity there isn't a more environmental solution available). What makes you think that the rest of the world likes the crap that you're sending out, hmm?
So... um... if he actually succeeds with his harrassment lawsuit, where do I send the cheque for the harrassment counter-suit?
SWG is being developped by Sony Online Entertainment/Verant Interactive, not LucasArts.
You may remember SoE/VI from the craptacular service they give on Everquest. You'd think that on a company that's pulling $2million+/month profits they'd be able to afford a better support staff...../rant off. sorry.
But yeah. SWG isn't LucasArts.... For LucasArts... somebody tell me where I can get a nudie mod for Jedi Knight II? Oh yeah... I wanna shoot at naked clones of Jengo Fett....
But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I'm not going to spend my hard-earned money on crap. If I find an artist I like, I buy the CD and others like it. If I find I don't like it, I'm only out about a minute of my time to download the MP3. I'd say a good half of the CD's and all of the DVD's in my collection (numbering over 600 CD's legitimately bought, and over 200 DVD's) were bought after I had previewed them so I knew I was getting something I liked. Do the math. That's a crapload of money that wouldn't have been spent on supporting the artists if I hadn't previewed them.
Downloading MP3's is no different from listening to the radio, except that I get to choose the playlist.
Incidentally, listening to the music in the stores is all well and good, but as a red-blooded otaku, I hate shopping and try to minimize the time I spend in stores.
Sorry, RIAA and MPAA, but given the consistent mediocrity that you people have been getting away with for years, I simply don't trust you to give me the product I'm paying for.
What that means for you is that I will download movies on Kazaa or Imesh, and I will get MP3's before I pay one red cent to you. It doesn't mean that I want to rip you off, it means I don't want you to rip me off. It's basic economics that you don't seem to be understanding: I download 100 MP3's. Of those MP3's I find 4 or 5 that come from artists I decide I like. The rest get deleted because I decide they suck. I buy CD's that have been released by those artists to see if I like everything else they've done. I'd say that aside from a couple anthologies from 70's and 80's bands, and the copy of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" that I had to replace, I haven't bought a CD in the last 5 years that I didn't preview somehow.
Movies... same deal. I don't even trust Hollywood not to fsck up "Lord of the Rings", and won't see it until I'm done downloading it. If you people hadn't been consistently passing off crap for the last quarter century, I might be more willing to spend money on you, but as it is I'm not spending anything on you until I know that I'm getting what I pay for.
Have you ever watched Farscape? One of the best TV shows ever produced, IM-not so-HO.
I'll admit that I didn't really like Farscape when it started out. A few months later, all I was hearing about at work was Farscape-this, Farscape-that, interspersed with the occasional bit of Everquest trivia. I decided to give the show another chance, and you know what? I liked it. I liked it a lot. It's involving, and they have fun with the story lines. When was the last time the Enterprise stopped at a pleasure planet and the crew dumped T'Pol and Captain what's-his-name off, insisting they don't come back for 10 days?
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. A lot of people do like it, and think it's worth saving.
Incidentally, I'm glad that SG-1 is getting a reprieve, too. Others have said it, but it's not the best sci-fantasy, but it's at least it's consistently not-bad.
"That fiction, however, would have enormous consequences," Alder says. "If the metric system is today used by 95 percent of the people of the world, it is in no small measure due to the 'grand fiction' that the meter was based on nature....
"It would hardly have been adopted everywhere if the French had simply 'made it up.' In that sense the expedition proved to be essential to the 'selling' of the metric system, as well as for all the scientific discoveries it unexpectedly produced."
The Metric system of measurement hasn't been adopted so much throughout the world because of its supposed basis in nature, buddy. It's been adopted because of two things: The world needed a standardized measurement that could be agreed upon *everywhere*, and it needed a system of measurement that was easy to do math with.
Multiples of ten, Sparky. It's a hell of a lot easier to remember 1000 meters in the kilometer than it is to remember 1536 (or however many there are) yards in the mile, and a damned sight easier to do the math.
SEQ doesn't really harm the game, as long as you don't play on a PvP server. On the blue servers, the main uses for SEQ are mapping, and knowing how many hitpoints a MOB has/where they are. Most of those feats can easily be accomplished using resources that are online.
The reason SEQ is "cheating" is that in PvP, it can also be used to tell player stats, which works as a major advantage over players without this information. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to beat the wizard you're duelling, it just means that you know where they're coming from. I can definitely see why people don't like it in PvP: my main tactic when I was duelling was to shadow step (think "Blink" in D&D/GURPS), nuke, repeat. It kept people questioning where I was, which was basically all the time I needed to nuke them without retribution. On the PvP servers, when you kill somebody, you can take one of their items.
It's for the better if they can prevent SEQ from working. The problem, though, is that this may ultimately lead to their downfall. They can't treat SEQ one way, while programs like EQWindows (which allow the user to play EQ in a window instead of fullscreen) get different treatment. Programs like EQWindows allow players to do things like play multiple accounts at the same time, which can't hurt their pocketbooks. SOE would do themselves a world of good if they just accepted that this exists, and satisfied themselves that it's on the fringe at the moment.
Incidentally, PoP was the reason I quit EQ. I couldn't stomach levelling my wizard from 60 to 65, so I parked her in her hometown, and cancelled billing the day that PoP launched.
If it wasn't for ADSL internet access, I'd have done something productive in the last three years, instead of playing Everquest and surfing/. about 18 hours a day....
FWIW, Everquest, with all the expansions up to Planes of Power (I gave up on EQ about a month before the buggers released it) ran alright on my laptop, even with all the newer models on. NeverWinter Nights plays great, as does No One Lives Forever and NOLF2. I ran all of these games at 1024x768 resolution, and the only concession I had to make was reducing the effects on NOLF2.
The only reason I'm saying this is that my laptop is a Compaq EVO N115. It was absolute entry level when I bought it in September: 1.2GHz Athlon 4, 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 16MB Shared video (up to 32MB, S3 Twister K).
I didn't buy it specifically for gaming, and I scoff at anybody who does buy it specifically for gaming, as the framerate on the LCD is the limiting factor: you'll never get as high a framerate on an LCD as you can currently get on a CRT, because the LCD technology relies on moving of crystals in suspension to draw a pixel.
What I found, though, was that most games are playable if I made a few concessions. They're nowhere near as good as they are on my desktop, with a GF3 Ti500 64MB video card, and I don't expect them to be. But if I'm on the road, or at school, and I get bitten by the desire to play NOLF, I can. And I got that ability without having to shell out $6,000 for a high end laptop. In the end, I paid $2,000 CDN.
how most of you would react if it was anonymous tracking with no way to connect you specifically to the account. Say, for example, they tracked that a particular client made 3 calls in a day: one from a pizza parlour, one from a gas station, and one from a dry cleaners, but did not keep any information about that client except the age and gender. I don't think I would mind that at all, to be honest, and I would probably allow them to associate my age and gender with the information. I can't be tracked by it. I mean, do you have any idea how many 21 year old males there are in my city alone? And I'm not even in that big a city, only having 760,000 inhabitants.
It's actually within the company's rights to sell that information, because all they're tracking is what hardware was used to connect to their networks, and where the connection was made. It's their information to sell. The point that most of you are concerned about, I think, is not that they're tracking where the hardware was used, but that they have the potential to track who belongs to that hardware.
From the article.... "We completely concede that customers' privacy must be protected," They also say that Verizon... does not share call-detail outside its companies and needs to monitor calling habits to offer customers better deals on phone service. While I don't know if it's a particularly trustworthy source, it seems to me that they're on the level, since it would be counterproductive for them to sell information about your calling habits to the competition....
I'd still insist on anonymity, but I don't think I would object to my phone company tracking my calling habits if it meant that I could save 5 bucks a month on my phone bill.
For those of you who don't work near the ISP industry, bandwidth is --VERY EXPENSIVE--. $200 per megabit per month is an absolute STEAL (to get that rate, you need to be buying it on the DS3 level). $400 per meg is more realistic on lower levels.
Two words for you. <b>Shared Bandwidth</b>. If bandwidth was *really* that expensive, you wouldn't see 3MBit DSL connections for $70 CDN/month, including the modem rental.
As a "normal" home user, I have to wonder why other people in my situation are trying to go out of their way to ensure that their porn is backed up properly. Anything that's actually important gets stored on a network fileserver to begin with, and that's really all the backing up I need.
The fileserver is running a redundant RAID1 hard drive with 20GB of storage, and anything that I value gets stored on that. As an added bonus, the RAID in the fileserver is purely storage, and can be disconnected without affecting the system at all. (If I have to reinstall, for example.) I don't backup that RAID because I don't need to. Frankly, if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than preserving my MP3 collection.
Likewise, my main box, and all my other boxes, use the network fileserver for storing anything important. If I have to, I just wipe the hard drive and reinstall without thinking twice.
It amazes me, though, that so many people want to have 15 dozen redundant backups stored at 5 different locations, so that they don't lose their english paper. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'd rather they back up their important data somehow than leave it without backup, but it's bordering on ridiculous to think that your average joe needs anything more than a network fileserver to store the important stuff on. And that's all that really needs to be backed up. You don't need a recursive backup of the last five days of (800MB Office suite), (Operating System), etc.
Such fileservers exist on the Internet, and price range varies. I'm reasonably sure you could get by with something like Geocities for your backup if you really need to, but there's also stuff like XDrive (www.xdrive.com), and failing all that, who among us doesn't know at least one geek with highspeed internet and a Linux or BSD box to set up an FTP/filespace?
If you're really in a position where your life will end if you lose a certain file, then you can afford the 5 bucks a month for XDrive.
As for a small company, toss a removable hard drive in the network fileserver. Back up the RAID onto that hard drive every night at closing, or every 24 hours for a 24/7 operation and put it in a fireproof safe, or better yet take it to a different location. It's not rocket science, and the whole thing can be set up for less than $1,000 with pennies a month maintenance.
An even lighter touch is evident in recent work that demonstrates the femtosecond laser's potential for gene therapy. In the July 18 Nature, Uday K. Tirlapur and Karsten König of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, described vaporizing tiny spots in the membranes of rodent cells immersed in a solution containing the gene for a fluorescent protein. The cells quickly repaired the holes--but not before the genes had apparently sneaked in, yielding cells that appeared normal except for their green glow
All the technology in the world, and what do they use it for? To make glow-in-the-dark rats.
Bah... that guy's a wuss. The great author, Farley Mowatt, actually shot at an American military plane once (ok, was a 0.22 squirrel rifle, and it was from over a mile away, but still....), and former Prime Minister Trudeau (featured on our $5 bills) once paddled a canoe to Cuba....
course people take EQ too seriously. Mudflation affects it moreso, though. In EQ you reach a point where there's nothing that can be bought that will upgrade your existing equipment. When you reach that point, the platinum just sort of collects. It's almost like they're paying interest for keeping it in your bank. In the two weeks leading up to my quitting the game (had a level 60 wizard), I accumulated close to 50,000 platinum with minimal effort. Had two options... I could sell the 50k on e-bay and make some money off some nitwit, or I could spend it in-game and outfit a level one toon with endgame gear.
That was about the time I decided that the game had lost all meaning....
Seriously, though... it's a perfect example of Mudflation. Inflation in the game happens not because there's more demand, but because there's more and more platinum being put into the game without any being removed. It would be like the US Bank kept printing 1's and 5's, but didn't destroy any. Sooner or later, $1 USD would be worth less than a cat turd.
Seriously. How do you plan on enforcing this? Not only is it a huge expenditure of resources to track down the number of computers used in the attacks, to track down their IP addies, to obtain the needed court orders to obtain their ISP's logs, the resources to parse those logs to find out who was logged on, and *then* go about prosecuting the offenders, what would it accomplish?
If Code Red taught us anything, it's that the dumb won't change a thing about the way they work, regardless of how much the internet community ridicules them. It's also completely nuts to punish the ISPs for this... where does it stop? I'm pretty sure that some AOL clients were responsible (and while I wouldn't complain about no AOL'ers for a while, I bet they would). How about people who buy their access directly from UUNet? Gonna block out UUNet for a month?
Even if you could implement that punishment of the ISPs, it wouldn't accomplish much. It wouldn't hurt me at all if I was blocked from direct access to the TLD servers, because inside my network I'm running a mirror. My ISP is running a mirror. I know of a dozen open DNS servers on the internet. I'm betting I could find at least one that wouldn't block me.
Seriously, though. It's great to say we should punish these people for not securing their systems, but you have to understand just how many computers would be needed for this attack. The TLD servers aren't running on 64k ISDN: they're on OC48 at least. There's 13 of them. The kind of bandwidth needed to adequately DoS them is obscene. You either do it the dumb way and use 50 computers running on the fastest connection available, or you use *hundreds* of computers, possibly thousands or tens of thousands.
Looks great on paper, but realistically there's not much point in ranting like this. Besides... if it wasn't for the article, I'm betting that most of the world wouldn't have noticed.
I'm not too sure I'd call the USA the most democratic nation in the world, but that's a discussion for a totally different time and place.
The Internet's roots have nothing to do with democracy. Quite the opposite, your military wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear holocaust so that it would be the first to rebuild and conquer the world when the evil reds launched the first nuke.
Most of the TLDs are in the USA because the DNS system was created in the USA, and was largely hosted by US providers. It's too much trouble to move them, and of limited benefeit. If they ever decide to add new ones, it's likely that they'll put at least one in Japan, and probably a couple in Europe.
Even so, though, the main reason for their dispersal is to survive a nuclear attack that takes out one or two. I don't know if you've looked at a map recently, but the USA is big. It's not like all 13 of the TLD servers are located in a trailer in rural Kentucky. You'd have to carpet bomb the entire USA to be sure of taking out all 13 of them, and frankly, if somebody had the resources to turn the entire country into a self-illuminating glass-floored parking lot, the Internet would be the least of my worries.
It wouldn't recharge, though... It would work for 50 years from the day it was manufactured. If you buy your UPS at your friendly neighbourhood Radio Shack, that could be as much as 15 years ago.
It is, however, the closest thing we have to a "pocket" fission reactor, and still veddy cool, IMO. But Nickel 63 (Marketing Fluff, sorry, was only doc I could find that mentionned production early) isn't cheap or easy to produce, so I doubt it'll be seeing commercial applications in the immediate future. It takes at least 3 years of irradiation to manufacture a usable quantity of it.
Slashdot Mirror
"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is. These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me."
Aww... cry me a river, jackass. The only difference between this and what you're doing is that this is using paper. (pity there isn't a more environmental solution available). What makes you think that the rest of the world likes the crap that you're sending out, hmm?
So... um... if he actually succeeds with his harrassment lawsuit, where do I send the cheque for the harrassment counter-suit?
5 mil revenue, 2 mil is profit. And that's *just* from EQ.
SWG is being developped by Sony Online Entertainment/Verant Interactive, not LucasArts.
/rant off. sorry.
You may remember SoE/VI from the craptacular service they give on Everquest. You'd think that on a company that's pulling $2million+/month profits they'd be able to afford a better support staff.....
But yeah. SWG isn't LucasArts.... For LucasArts... somebody tell me where I can get a nudie mod for Jedi Knight II? Oh yeah... I wanna shoot at naked clones of Jengo Fett....
But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I'm not going to spend my hard-earned money on crap. If I find an artist I like, I buy the CD and others like it. If I find I don't like it, I'm only out about a minute of my time to download the MP3. I'd say a good half of the CD's and all of the DVD's in my collection (numbering over 600 CD's legitimately bought, and over 200 DVD's) were bought after I had previewed them so I knew I was getting something I liked. Do the math. That's a crapload of money that wouldn't have been spent on supporting the artists if I hadn't previewed them.
Downloading MP3's is no different from listening to the radio, except that I get to choose the playlist.
Incidentally, listening to the music in the stores is all well and good, but as a red-blooded otaku, I hate shopping and try to minimize the time I spend in stores.
Sorry, RIAA and MPAA, but given the consistent mediocrity that you people have been getting away with for years, I simply don't trust you to give me the product I'm paying for.
What that means for you is that I will download movies on Kazaa or Imesh, and I will get MP3's before I pay one red cent to you. It doesn't mean that I want to rip you off, it means I don't want you to rip me off. It's basic economics that you don't seem to be understanding: I download 100 MP3's. Of those MP3's I find 4 or 5 that come from artists I decide I like. The rest get deleted because I decide they suck. I buy CD's that have been released by those artists to see if I like everything else they've done. I'd say that aside from a couple anthologies from 70's and 80's bands, and the copy of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" that I had to replace, I haven't bought a CD in the last 5 years that I didn't preview somehow.
Movies... same deal. I don't even trust Hollywood not to fsck up "Lord of the Rings", and won't see it until I'm done downloading it. If you people hadn't been consistently passing off crap for the last quarter century, I might be more willing to spend money on you, but as it is I'm not spending anything on you until I know that I'm getting what I pay for.
Have you ever watched Farscape? One of the best TV shows ever produced, IM-not so-HO.
I'll admit that I didn't really like Farscape when it started out. A few months later, all I was hearing about at work was Farscape-this, Farscape-that, interspersed with the occasional bit of Everquest trivia. I decided to give the show another chance, and you know what? I liked it. I liked it a lot. It's involving, and they have fun with the story lines. When was the last time the Enterprise stopped at a pleasure planet and the crew dumped T'Pol and Captain what's-his-name off, insisting they don't come back for 10 days?
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's bad. A lot of people do like it, and think it's worth saving.
Incidentally, I'm glad that SG-1 is getting a reprieve, too. Others have said it, but it's not the best sci-fantasy, but it's at least it's consistently not-bad.
"That fiction, however, would have enormous consequences," Alder says. "If the metric system is today used by 95 percent of the people of the world, it is in no small measure due to the 'grand fiction' that the meter was based on nature. ...
"It would hardly have been adopted everywhere if the French had simply 'made it up.' In that sense the expedition proved to be essential to the 'selling' of the metric system, as well as for all the scientific discoveries it unexpectedly produced."
The Metric system of measurement hasn't been adopted so much throughout the world because of its supposed basis in nature, buddy. It's been adopted because of two things: The world needed a standardized measurement that could be agreed upon *everywhere*, and it needed a system of measurement that was easy to do math with.
Multiples of ten, Sparky. It's a hell of a lot easier to remember 1000 meters in the kilometer than it is to remember 1536 (or however many there are) yards in the mile, and a damned sight easier to do the math.
SEQ doesn't really harm the game, as long as you don't play on a PvP server. On the blue servers, the main uses for SEQ are mapping, and knowing how many hitpoints a MOB has/where they are. Most of those feats can easily be accomplished using resources that are online.
The reason SEQ is "cheating" is that in PvP, it can also be used to tell player stats, which works as a major advantage over players without this information. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to beat the wizard you're duelling, it just means that you know where they're coming from. I can definitely see why people don't like it in PvP: my main tactic when I was duelling was to shadow step (think "Blink" in D&D/GURPS), nuke, repeat. It kept people questioning where I was, which was basically all the time I needed to nuke them without retribution. On the PvP servers, when you kill somebody, you can take one of their items.
It's for the better if they can prevent SEQ from working. The problem, though, is that this may ultimately lead to their downfall. They can't treat SEQ one way, while programs like EQWindows (which allow the user to play EQ in a window instead of fullscreen) get different treatment. Programs like EQWindows allow players to do things like play multiple accounts at the same time, which can't hurt their pocketbooks. SOE would do themselves a world of good if they just accepted that this exists, and satisfied themselves that it's on the fringe at the moment.
Incidentally, PoP was the reason I quit EQ. I couldn't stomach levelling my wizard from 60 to 65, so I parked her in her hometown, and cancelled billing the day that PoP launched.
If it wasn't for ADSL internet access, I'd have done something productive in the last three years, instead of playing Everquest and surfing /. about 18 hours a day....
Hmm. I fail to see the downside.
FWIW, Everquest, with all the expansions up to Planes of Power (I gave up on EQ about a month before the buggers released it) ran alright on my laptop, even with all the newer models on. NeverWinter Nights plays great, as does No One Lives Forever and NOLF2. I ran all of these games at 1024x768 resolution, and the only concession I had to make was reducing the effects on NOLF2.
The only reason I'm saying this is that my laptop is a Compaq EVO N115. It was absolute entry level when I bought it in September: 1.2GHz Athlon 4, 256MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 16MB Shared video (up to 32MB, S3 Twister K).
I didn't buy it specifically for gaming, and I scoff at anybody who does buy it specifically for gaming, as the framerate on the LCD is the limiting factor: you'll never get as high a framerate on an LCD as you can currently get on a CRT, because the LCD technology relies on moving of crystals in suspension to draw a pixel.
What I found, though, was that most games are playable if I made a few concessions. They're nowhere near as good as they are on my desktop, with a GF3 Ti500 64MB video card, and I don't expect them to be. But if I'm on the road, or at school, and I get bitten by the desire to play NOLF, I can. And I got that ability without having to shell out $6,000 for a high end laptop. In the end, I paid $2,000 CDN.
how most of you would react if it was anonymous tracking with no way to connect you specifically to the account. Say, for example, they tracked that a particular client made 3 calls in a day: one from a pizza parlour, one from a gas station, and one from a dry cleaners, but did not keep any information about that client except the age and gender. I don't think I would mind that at all, to be honest, and I would probably allow them to associate my age and gender with the information. I can't be tracked by it. I mean, do you have any idea how many 21 year old males there are in my city alone? And I'm not even in that big a city, only having 760,000 inhabitants.
... does not share call-detail outside its companies and needs to monitor calling habits to offer customers better deals on phone service. While I don't know if it's a particularly trustworthy source, it seems to me that they're on the level, since it would be counterproductive for them to sell information about your calling habits to the competition....
It's actually within the company's rights to sell that information, because all they're tracking is what hardware was used to connect to their networks, and where the connection was made. It's their information to sell. The point that most of you are concerned about, I think, is not that they're tracking where the hardware was used, but that they have the potential to track who belongs to that hardware.
From the article.... "We completely concede that customers' privacy must be protected," They also say that Verizon
I'd still insist on anonymity, but I don't think I would object to my phone company tracking my calling habits if it meant that I could save 5 bucks a month on my phone bill.
For those of you who don't work near the ISP industry, bandwidth is --VERY EXPENSIVE--. $200 per megabit per month is an absolute STEAL (to get that rate, you need to be buying it on the DS3 level). $400 per meg is more realistic on lower levels.
Two words for you. <b>Shared Bandwidth</b>. If bandwidth was *really* that expensive, you wouldn't see 3MBit DSL connections for $70 CDN/month, including the modem rental.
As a "normal" home user, I have to wonder why other people in my situation are trying to go out of their way to ensure that their porn is backed up properly. Anything that's actually important gets stored on a network fileserver to begin with, and that's really all the backing up I need.
The fileserver is running a redundant RAID1 hard drive with 20GB of storage, and anything that I value gets stored on that. As an added bonus, the RAID in the fileserver is purely storage, and can be disconnected without affecting the system at all. (If I have to reinstall, for example.) I don't backup that RAID because I don't need to. Frankly, if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than preserving my MP3 collection.
Likewise, my main box, and all my other boxes, use the network fileserver for storing anything important. If I have to, I just wipe the hard drive and reinstall without thinking twice.
It amazes me, though, that so many people want to have 15 dozen redundant backups stored at 5 different locations, so that they don't lose their english paper. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'd rather they back up their important data somehow than leave it without backup, but it's bordering on ridiculous to think that your average joe needs anything more than a network fileserver to store the important stuff on. And that's all that really needs to be backed up. You don't need a recursive backup of the last five days of (800MB Office suite), (Operating System), etc.
Such fileservers exist on the Internet, and price range varies. I'm reasonably sure you could get by with something like Geocities for your backup if you really need to, but there's also stuff like XDrive (www.xdrive.com), and failing all that, who among us doesn't know at least one geek with highspeed internet and a Linux or BSD box to set up an FTP/filespace?
If you're really in a position where your life will end if you lose a certain file, then you can afford the 5 bucks a month for XDrive.
As for a small company, toss a removable hard drive in the network fileserver. Back up the RAID onto that hard drive every night at closing, or every 24 hours for a 24/7 operation and put it in a fireproof safe, or better yet take it to a different location. It's not rocket science, and the whole thing can be set up for less than $1,000 with pennies a month maintenance.
Don't you read Spider Robinson? Tunguska wasn't caused by an asteroid, it was caused by Nikola Tesla's death ray device!
An even lighter touch is evident in recent work that demonstrates the femtosecond laser's potential for gene therapy. In the July 18 Nature, Uday K. Tirlapur and Karsten König of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, described vaporizing tiny spots in the membranes of rodent cells immersed in a solution containing the gene for a fluorescent protein. The cells quickly repaired the holes--but not before the genes had apparently sneaked in, yielding cells that appeared normal except for their green glow
All the technology in the world, and what do they use it for? To make glow-in-the-dark rats.
I would assume they'll either remove the wings all together, or use spoilers of some sort. To weathervane, they don't need wings: just the tail.
...getting a fixed IP costs way more than a .mac account.
.mac account, no?
I'm paying $5 CDN/month for a static IP addy. Somewhat less than the 100 bucks US/year for a
bah... sue me. I've had a few too many Molsons today....
Bah... that guy's a wuss. The great author, Farley Mowatt, actually shot at an American military plane once (ok, was a 0.22 squirrel rifle, and it was from over a mile away, but still....), and former Prime Minister Trudeau (featured on our $5 bills) once paddled a canoe to Cuba....
Canadians have been terrorists for a while now... this proves it...
No, really. Something is seriously wrong.... Who did I go down on, and why don't I remember it?
Braille buttons on a drive-in ATM... Not a joke... they really are like that around here.
course people take EQ too seriously. Mudflation affects it moreso, though. In EQ you reach a point where there's nothing that can be bought that will upgrade your existing equipment. When you reach that point, the platinum just sort of collects. It's almost like they're paying interest for keeping it in your bank. In the two weeks leading up to my quitting the game (had a level 60 wizard), I accumulated close to 50,000 platinum with minimal effort. Had two options... I could sell the 50k on e-bay and make some money off some nitwit, or I could spend it in-game and outfit a level one toon with endgame gear.
That was about the time I decided that the game had lost all meaning....
Seriously, though... it's a perfect example of Mudflation. Inflation in the game happens not because there's more demand, but because there's more and more platinum being put into the game without any being removed. It would be like the US Bank kept printing 1's and 5's, but didn't destroy any. Sooner or later, $1 USD would be worth less than a cat turd.
How do you plan on enforcing this, sir?
Seriously. How do you plan on enforcing this? Not only is it a huge expenditure of resources to track down the number of computers used in the attacks, to track down their IP addies, to obtain the needed court orders to obtain their ISP's logs, the resources to parse those logs to find out who was logged on, and *then* go about prosecuting the offenders, what would it accomplish?
If Code Red taught us anything, it's that the dumb won't change a thing about the way they work, regardless of how much the internet community ridicules them. It's also completely nuts to punish the ISPs for this... where does it stop? I'm pretty sure that some AOL clients were responsible (and while I wouldn't complain about no AOL'ers for a while, I bet they would). How about people who buy their access directly from UUNet? Gonna block out UUNet for a month?
Even if you could implement that punishment of the ISPs, it wouldn't accomplish much. It wouldn't hurt me at all if I was blocked from direct access to the TLD servers, because inside my network I'm running a mirror. My ISP is running a mirror. I know of a dozen open DNS servers on the internet. I'm betting I could find at least one that wouldn't block me.
Seriously, though. It's great to say we should punish these people for not securing their systems, but you have to understand just how many computers would be needed for this attack. The TLD servers aren't running on 64k ISDN: they're on OC48 at least. There's 13 of them. The kind of bandwidth needed to adequately DoS them is obscene. You either do it the dumb way and use 50 computers running on the fastest connection available, or you use *hundreds* of computers, possibly thousands or tens of thousands.
Looks great on paper, but realistically there's not much point in ranting like this. Besides... if it wasn't for the article, I'm betting that most of the world wouldn't have noticed.
I'm not too sure I'd call the USA the most democratic nation in the world, but that's a discussion for a totally different time and place.
The Internet's roots have nothing to do with democracy. Quite the opposite, your military wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear holocaust so that it would be the first to rebuild and conquer the world when the evil reds launched the first nuke.
Most of the TLDs are in the USA because the DNS system was created in the USA, and was largely hosted by US providers. It's too much trouble to move them, and of limited benefeit. If they ever decide to add new ones, it's likely that they'll put at least one in Japan, and probably a couple in Europe.
Even so, though, the main reason for their dispersal is to survive a nuclear attack that takes out one or two. I don't know if you've looked at a map recently, but the USA is big. It's not like all 13 of the TLD servers are located in a trailer in rural Kentucky. You'd have to carpet bomb the entire USA to be sure of taking out all 13 of them, and frankly, if somebody had the resources to turn the entire country into a self-illuminating glass-floored parking lot, the Internet would be the least of my worries.
It wouldn't recharge, though... It would work for 50 years from the day it was manufactured. If you buy your UPS at your friendly neighbourhood Radio Shack, that could be as much as 15 years ago.
It is, however, the closest thing we have to a "pocket" fission reactor, and still veddy cool, IMO. But Nickel 63 (Marketing Fluff, sorry, was only doc I could find that mentionned production early) isn't cheap or easy to produce, so I doubt it'll be seeing commercial applications in the immediate future. It takes at least 3 years of irradiation to manufacture a usable quantity of it.