At least to some extent. There is a "climate tax" being charged from guests to resorts mainly in the mountain regions of Poland. Those taxes are very small (like 50 cents for a week of stay) so most people don't even notice them. This form of taxation gets more and more popular in some areas as it is one of few taxes that can be imposed by local goverment.
The source of the problem is the fact that the candidates were very similar, so similar that people voted 50/50. Even if the votes were counted by a super-fast technologically advanced crypto based system you would have the same accusations of fraud, double and triple checking, lawsuits etc. when the difference is so small and the stake is so high. This is human and I don't think any reform can easily change that.
You hear one song, you like it, you punch keys on your phone and before you know it you have whole CD - probably full of songs you don't like (they allways play the best song on the radio, don't they?). That's a great deal indeed.
Some additional information - flat rate access is now available here either via cable or a form or DSL.
Cable companies in bigger cities offer Internet access for some time now (example) - rates vary, but it is quite inexpensive even by local standards - no more than $25 a month and a reasonable installation fee. Disadvantages: you don't get real IP addresses (clients are behind an IP masquerading router), quality of service varies (mostly 2 MB within the cable company network which in turn has 2 MB to a backbone operator) and it is available only in limited areas.
Other form of access is Home Internet Solution (based on Ericson's hardware) which is sold by TP S.A. (local telco monopolist) as SDI for $225 installation and $35 monthly fee. It is available in all bigger cities and is becoming quite popular despite being expensive initially. Advantages: you get real IP address (just one, but it's possible to set up a server on this kind of connection), speed - 128 kbps.
Simply no one cares here. For the record companies pirate CD's are a bigger problem than MP3s - those CDs are mass produced in former USSR countries, brought here and sold on the flea markets for $2 - $3. However, mp3s are getting more and more popular and we might see some moves from the record companies soon. There are some MP3 portals (example) and some quite huge FTP servers with music. Also napster and gnutella are quite popular.
On the other hand legal CDs with music are sold for around $10 - $20 - and this is very expensive, especially for young people. Average monthly income here is (according to official government data) $415 and minimal wage is $156. That puts those prices into prospective.
How they were able to "pinpoint the location" based on what ICMP probes returned? OK, you can guess much from the names of the routers that IP datagrams go through on their way to the target, but not much more as to which country and possibly big city the packets are going. An ICMP echo (ping) won't tell you much more than simple information that the host is alive and possibly which TCP/IP stack implementation it is using. But anyway, it could be possible to at least tell in which country given IP is.
But then you have dialups - which give same IP again and again to people in quite large areas. Then you have various forms of encapsulation used on transport layer - FR or ATM links don't appear in the traceroute. Then you have corporate networks where users either appear under same IP from all the offices in the world or appear using IP's from class (classes) who have access point in the US but are used throughout the world. Then you have VPNs of various kinds.
I really don't get it - how they are able to get around all those problem and "pinpoint the location"? Because in my opinion knowing which country (or state) the datagrams are coming from is far from "pinpointing".
Despite how much we have changed the world around us and despite all the scientific discoveries, all ages of philosophy an culture: humans have not significantly changed as beings for thousands of years. I've seen the other day on "Discovery" that a 100.000 years old pair of skeletons was discovered - a female and a child - and those skeletons are no different from our own. It's hard to say when civilizations started, but some buildings built 2000 years ago are still in use (for example Pont du Gard) and others built up to 8000 years ago still exist. Writings about social problems that were created at that times and made it to ours are still valid, still interesting. Just a short example - a quotation I received today:
"We trained hard--but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up
into teams, we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend
to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it
can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing
confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."
Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.
Isn't this still valid today?
Someone may ask why did I write all this and what is the connection between ancient civilizations and the topic of the article. I think that before we will speculate about huge changes in the way our society would be organized we should have a proper prospective. We have to realize that for thousands of years our ancestors lived first as cavemen and then in various forms of society - and that those years have formed us, not those few mere years that passed since computers were invented, Internet was created or even liberal, media-backed democracy became dominant form of social organization. I don't think those few years can outweigh those thousands of years of human history. It is really stupid to expect for example, that suddenly society would not be composed of many people being led by few who have power and vision to do so. It is really funny to expect that the role of wealth and money would change - since it didn't for at least 60 centuries.
I think that it's the toys we play with that change - not the way we play.
Whether you like it or not the only people capable of stopping them are those who have real power - politicians. So the only answer is either to get directly involved in politics or to influence those already involved - supporting those who think like we do (that it is insane) and lobbying others (who don't think yet as we do).
I know that it fashionable to turn away from politics as something dirty and evil. However, such attitude doesn't help because it is the political process that shapes the situation. And it is true for every country - not only US.
It would be meaningful only if ISS would be self-supporting and would not require any shipments from Earth to sustain its crew. As we all know this is not the case - in fact ISS isn't that different from MIR or Skylab - it is just bigger. In fact its significance is not as big as one could judge from all the media attention it gets.
Read Zubrin's book about his project of Mars exploration - that's just one example of something that would be really innovative and meaningful. There were other ideas of this kind, but none was implemented so far.
Hm... maybe I've missed the point in time when Tripwire stopped to be available as source code, but I remember than 5-6 years ago and earlier I used to download and install it on various Unix boxes at the Univ. It was nothing more than checksum checker capable that was nice, because it checked many files and could be run automatically. Of course, it was available in source code (in the pre-RPM days even on Linux distros of that time - SLS, Slackware - everything installed with make install).
Anyway - glad to hear that this nice tool is living and is returning to the open source status.
One of the major banks in Poland - Peako S.A. - has a web banking solution that one of my friends even uses with SSL-enabled Lynx. No Java, no ActiveX, just pure, standard HTML.
Their web banking solution was first in that country (they operate it for at least three years), it's quite secure (token-based) and very popular.
I know that won't help much the original poster, but I thought it might be of interest...
I hope I'm not the only person in the USA who is bothered by the status of the government. Not neccisarly their "injustices to Americans" or the widespread corruption that you see on the news, but the fact that we're listening to a bunch of 50, 60 year old people who probably don't know what modem stands for. It's sad that it's going to take another 30 or 40 years before college people today get into the government. Sometimes I wonder if it will even happen in my lifetime.
It would be interesting to know how old are you? I have turned 30 recently and I'm just beginning to understand how much the experience you accumulate when you live longer counts. During whole recorded history older people were governing our society because they have more experience about something much more important than any modern technology - people, contacts with people, relationships between people, dynamics of groups of people etc. I know it can be hard to appreciate when you concentrate too much on technology, which changes so fast that experience doesn't count that much. But keep in mind that human beings have not changed signifficantly for at least 100.000 years.
My problem with Mojo Nation concept is that some people indeed download much and don't contribute adequately, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they do so because they are selfish or bad. On the other end of the scale are people who have huge file collections and share them with others without expecting anything in return - and that doesn't mean that they are better humans than the others.
In my opinion it is so because not all net users have equal resources - fast machines, huge disk arrays, fast and permanent network connections. Although the average speed of CPUs and capacity of hard drives has increased recently still most people have relatively small disks and access the net with dial-up connections (and in EU local connections are charged per time).
Mojo Nation's design favours those who have huge infrastructure - those who can afford huge disks and fast network connections - or can use one for free (network administrators in big companies or on universities are the easiest example). In other words Mojo Nation's design favours those who are already better of - in contrast with more democratic and equal design of Gnutella and Napster.
I'm not against free market economy, but it is not applicable to every problem on the planet. I think that file sharing on the Internet is one of those problems that don't fit into market concept - it would be called file selling then.
I'm too lazy to walk around computer and hi-fi stores asking "killer question" and hoping that this would work. I have a simpler way around this whole bad idea.
I simply don't have a DVD player and I don't plan to buy one. So I don't have and don't rent any DVD movies. I stick with my VCR and traditional cassettes when I really have to watch something (and come on, the difference is not worth all the trouble). And going to the movies instead of sitting in front of a computer has some other, added benefits.
And I hope that some day another medium would appear that would not require me to go through an in-depth study (finding suitable player, finding suitable software I could use on Linux etc.etc.) just to use.
Do you remember Monty Python's song "I like Chinese"? It looks like there would be one more reason to like them - they don't give a damn about all this copy-"right" madness going on in the US. They will keep on manufacturing region-free DVD players and the only thing MPA would be able to do about it is cry.
Opera is useless for me as both Windows and Linux versions can't display properly ISO-8859-2 encoded text on pages. It ignores appropriate METAs setting the encoding and there is no way for changing encoding manually. And it's a bit of a problem for me as I live in Poland and most local pages are - not surprisingly - in Polish, which I can easily read provided that those few special characters it requires are displayed properly.
IE, Netscape and Mozilla (especially nightly build from 3rd of October which I use in preference of M17 as it is more stable and much faster) handle ISO-8859-2 pages very well. It puzzles me why folks at Operasoft can't implement something so simple as support for various encodings.
The choice is pretty obvious - either our civilization would develop means to move substantial number of people out of Earth - or our race will perish. There is no other possible solution.
Being careful not to destroy environment is a good attitude but it is not a solution to the problem - it just gives us more time to develop technology necessary to seriously explore space.
Saying that our race is evil because it multiplies and uses natural resources is plainly stupid - unless you are an alien. We don't know of any other intelligent race that we could compare to.
Yes, I also don't like his way of thinking regarding payment for content - and especially analogies to the printing/publishing world. I'm afraid that Kahle strongly believes in current copyright laws and he doesn't notice systems like Napster or even more Gnutella (where people share things without any "revenue model") in his publication concentrated vision.
And by the way - why does he think that all web pages are made for profit and would disappear without it?
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you surprised? Logic has nothing to do with tax law.
At least to some extent. There is a "climate tax" being charged from guests to resorts mainly in the mountain regions of Poland. Those taxes are very small (like 50 cents for a week of stay) so most people don't even notice them. This form of taxation gets more and more popular in some areas as it is one of few taxes that can be imposed by local goverment.
Practice safe sex! Not only you can avoid numerous diseases - but also paying royalties...
The source of the problem is the fact that the candidates were very similar, so similar that people voted 50/50. Even if the votes were counted by a super-fast technologically advanced crypto based system you would have the same accusations of fraud, double and triple checking, lawsuits etc. when the difference is so small and the stake is so high. This is human and I don't think any reform can easily change that.
You hear one song, you like it, you punch keys on your phone and before you know it you have whole CD - probably full of songs you don't like (they allways play the best song on the radio, don't they?). That's a great deal indeed.
Some additional information - flat rate access is now available here either via cable or a form or DSL.
Cable companies in bigger cities offer Internet access for some time now (example) - rates vary, but it is quite inexpensive even by local standards - no more than $25 a month and a reasonable installation fee. Disadvantages: you don't get real IP addresses (clients are behind an IP masquerading router), quality of service varies (mostly 2 MB within the cable company network which in turn has 2 MB to a backbone operator) and it is available only in limited areas.
Other form of access is Home Internet Solution (based on Ericson's hardware) which is sold by TP S.A. (local telco monopolist) as SDI for $225 installation and $35 monthly fee. It is available in all bigger cities and is becoming quite popular despite being expensive initially. Advantages: you get real IP address (just one, but it's possible to set up a server on this kind of connection), speed - 128 kbps.
Simply no one cares here. For the record companies pirate CD's are a bigger problem than MP3s - those CDs are mass produced in former USSR countries, brought here and sold on the flea markets for $2 - $3. However, mp3s are getting more and more popular and we might see some moves from the record companies soon. There are some MP3 portals (example) and some quite huge FTP servers with music. Also napster and gnutella are quite popular.
On the other hand legal CDs with music are sold for around $10 - $20 - and this is very expensive, especially for young people. Average monthly income here is (according to official government data) $415 and minimal wage is $156. That puts those prices into prospective.
How they were able to "pinpoint the location" based on what ICMP probes returned? OK, you can guess much from the names of the routers that IP datagrams go through on their way to the target, but not much more as to which country and possibly big city the packets are going. An ICMP echo (ping) won't tell you much more than simple information that the host is alive and possibly which TCP/IP stack implementation it is using. But anyway, it could be possible to at least tell in which country given IP is.
But then you have dialups - which give same IP again and again to people in quite large areas. Then you have various forms of encapsulation used on transport layer - FR or ATM links don't appear in the traceroute. Then you have corporate networks where users either appear under same IP from all the offices in the world or appear using IP's from class (classes) who have access point in the US but are used throughout the world. Then you have VPNs of various kinds.
I really don't get it - how they are able to get around all those problem and "pinpoint the location"? Because in my opinion knowing which country (or state) the datagrams are coming from is far from "pinpointing".
They were not that much wrong after all - Solaris and HPUX are alive and well.
Despite how much we have changed the world around us and despite all the scientific discoveries, all ages of philosophy an culture: humans have not significantly changed as beings for thousands of years. I've seen the other day on "Discovery" that a 100.000 years old pair of skeletons was discovered - a female and a child - and those skeletons are no different from our own. It's hard to say when civilizations started, but some buildings built 2000 years ago are still in use (for example Pont du Gard) and others built up to 8000 years ago still exist. Writings about social problems that were created at that times and made it to ours are still valid, still interesting. Just a short example - a quotation I received today:
"We trained hard--but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."
Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.
Isn't this still valid today?
Someone may ask why did I write all this and what is the connection between ancient civilizations and the topic of the article. I think that before we will speculate about huge changes in the way our society would be organized we should have a proper prospective. We have to realize that for thousands of years our ancestors lived first as cavemen and then in various forms of society - and that those years have formed us, not those few mere years that passed since computers were invented, Internet was created or even liberal, media-backed democracy became dominant form of social organization. I don't think those few years can outweigh those thousands of years of human history. It is really stupid to expect for example, that suddenly society would not be composed of many people being led by few who have power and vision to do so. It is really funny to expect that the role of wealth and money would change - since it didn't for at least 60 centuries.
I think that it's the toys we play with that change - not the way we play.
Whether you like it or not the only people capable of stopping them are those who have real power - politicians. So the only answer is either to get directly involved in politics or to influence those already involved - supporting those who think like we do (that it is insane) and lobbying others (who don't think yet as we do).
I know that it fashionable to turn away from politics as something dirty and evil. However, such attitude doesn't help because it is the political process that shapes the situation. And it is true for every country - not only US.
It would be meaningful only if ISS would be self-supporting and would not require any shipments from Earth to sustain its crew. As we all know this is not the case - in fact ISS isn't that different from MIR or Skylab - it is just bigger. In fact its significance is not as big as one could judge from all the media attention it gets.
Read Zubrin's book about his project of Mars exploration - that's just one example of something that would be really innovative and meaningful. There were other ideas of this kind, but none was implemented so far.
Hm... maybe I've missed the point in time when Tripwire stopped to be available as source code, but I remember than 5-6 years ago and earlier I used to download and install it on various Unix boxes at the Univ. It was nothing more than checksum checker capable that was nice, because it checked many files and could be run automatically. Of course, it was available in source code (in the pre-RPM days even on Linux distros of that time - SLS, Slackware - everything installed with make install).
Anyway - glad to hear that this nice tool is living and is returning to the open source status.
Ok, however 5 inch floppies were much more reliable than 3.5s are. And those were supposed to be better, as each is enclosed in a protective case.
I've submitted about this study 4 days ago, but then it got rejected. Nice to see that it was about me, not the US-centered bias of the ./
One of the major banks in Poland - Peako S.A. - has a web banking solution that one of my friends even uses with SSL-enabled Lynx. No Java, no ActiveX, just pure, standard HTML.
Their web banking solution was first in that country (they operate it for at least three years), it's quite secure (token-based) and very popular.
I know that won't help much the original poster, but I thought it might be of interest...
Naaah... it's already not there... they seem to change the URL each time. Nasty trick...
However, Yahoo doesn't do that. Story is here.
I hope I'm not the only person in the USA who is bothered by the status of the government. Not neccisarly their "injustices to Americans" or the widespread corruption that you see on the news, but the fact that we're listening to a bunch of 50, 60 year old people who probably don't know what modem stands for. It's sad that it's going to take another 30 or 40 years before college people today get into the government. Sometimes I wonder if it will even happen in my lifetime.
It would be interesting to know how old are you? I have turned 30 recently and I'm just beginning to understand how much the experience you accumulate when you live longer counts. During whole recorded history older people were governing our society because they have more experience about something much more important than any modern technology - people, contacts with people, relationships between people, dynamics of groups of people etc. I know it can be hard to appreciate when you concentrate too much on technology, which changes so fast that experience doesn't count that much. But keep in mind that human beings have not changed signifficantly for at least 100.000 years.
They just want to be closer to their customers, like in the familly. The want to be your good, older brother. Big brother.
My problem with Mojo Nation concept is that some people indeed download much and don't contribute adequately, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they do so because they are selfish or bad. On the other end of the scale are people who have huge file collections and share them with others without expecting anything in return - and that doesn't mean that they are better humans than the others.
In my opinion it is so because not all net users have equal resources - fast machines, huge disk arrays, fast and permanent network connections. Although the average speed of CPUs and capacity of hard drives has increased recently still most people have relatively small disks and access the net with dial-up connections (and in EU local connections are charged per time).
Mojo Nation's design favours those who have huge infrastructure - those who can afford huge disks and fast network connections - or can use one for free (network administrators in big companies or on universities are the easiest example). In other words Mojo Nation's design favours those who are already better of - in contrast with more democratic and equal design of Gnutella and Napster.
I'm not against free market economy, but it is not applicable to every problem on the planet. I think that file sharing on the Internet is one of those problems that don't fit into market concept - it would be called file selling then.
I'm too lazy to walk around computer and hi-fi stores asking "killer question" and hoping that this would work. I have a simpler way around this whole bad idea.
I simply don't have a DVD player and I don't plan to buy one. So I don't have and don't rent any DVD movies. I stick with my VCR and traditional cassettes when I really have to watch something (and come on, the difference is not worth all the trouble). And going to the movies instead of sitting in front of a computer has some other, added benefits.
And I hope that some day another medium would appear that would not require me to go through an in-depth study (finding suitable player, finding suitable software I could use on Linux etc.etc.) just to use.
Do you remember Monty Python's song "I like Chinese"? It looks like there would be one more reason to like them - they don't give a damn about all this copy-"right" madness going on in the US. They will keep on manufacturing region-free DVD players and the only thing MPA would be able to do about it is cry.
Opera is useless for me as both Windows and Linux versions can't display properly ISO-8859-2 encoded text on pages. It ignores appropriate METAs setting the encoding and there is no way for changing encoding manually. And it's a bit of a problem for me as I live in Poland and most local pages are - not surprisingly - in Polish, which I can easily read provided that those few special characters it requires are displayed properly.
IE, Netscape and Mozilla (especially nightly build from 3rd of October which I use in preference of M17 as it is more stable and much faster) handle ISO-8859-2 pages very well. It puzzles me why folks at Operasoft can't implement something so simple as support for various encodings.
You are wrong. Simply.
The choice is pretty obvious - either our civilization would develop means to move substantial number of people out of Earth - or our race will perish. There is no other possible solution.
Being careful not to destroy environment is a good attitude but it is not a solution to the problem - it just gives us more time to develop technology necessary to seriously explore space.
Saying that our race is evil because it multiplies and uses natural resources is plainly stupid - unless you are an alien. We don't know of any other intelligent race that we could compare to.
URANOS
Yes, I also don't like his way of thinking regarding payment for content - and especially analogies to the printing/publishing world. I'm afraid that Kahle strongly believes in current copyright laws and he doesn't notice systems like Napster or even more Gnutella (where people share things without any "revenue model") in his publication concentrated vision.
And by the way - why does he think that all web pages are made for profit and would disappear without it?