Re:Having SF Bay Area experience, not surprised...
on
DSL Amidst Phone Wars
·
· Score: 2
Federal Fine for you if they find it.
Heh heh. Yeah, I know. Trust me, they'll NEVER find it. I clipped the last violet-slate pair from each relevant incoming cable and spliced them behind the terminal board. Even if it is found (unlikely), it's easy to say "I didn't do it. some verizon guy did."
Re:Having SF Bay Area experience, not surprised...
on
DSL Amidst Phone Wars
·
· Score: 2
Why couldn't _you_ get a dry pair from your apartment to Covad's facility?
Because they won't give anyone a dry pair anymore. None of the local telcos will, it seems. I tried every which way to get one from Verizon for one of my client's, but in the end the best I could get was a dedicated ringdown either way for $80/mo. (I said no and secretly tied the dry pairs from each end together myself at the B-box in the street, but don't tell THEM that...)
Legitimate \Le*git"i*mate\ a. 1. Accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements; lawful.
I think he was talking about the way the word is so often used. For example: "there's no legitimate reason for allowing P2P apps, therefore it should be banned". This statement uses the word in a very subjective way, since clearly if P2P isn't banned, then it is by definition "legitimate". No, sadly, the word has come to be used to mean something like "reasonable, in my opinion". It has drifted in meaning from "codified in law" to "worthy of codifying in law".
How about "reverse PGP authentication"? Where everyone can decrypt the payload with a public key, but only the real sender can encrypt it?
Just for clarification, PGP employs this already. Encrypting content with your private key (which allows it to be decrypted with your public key) is called "signing".
it would only cut one hour off the flight time from LA - NYC.
Can you imagine what is does with the flight from La to Amsterdam, London, Paris or Berlin...
Stop being so US centric please. There is a whole world outside the US of A
So it only cuts off a little over 2 hours from an LA to (european city) flight. He was giving an example based on what he knew (LA-NYC is 5 hrs) as an illustration that shaving %20 off flight time isn't a big deal for any one flight. The only real advantage would be the cumulative time savings for the airlines.
So what exactly IS Boeing's business strategy for commercial airliners? Do they plan to just give up competing with Airbus
Well, they're not really quitting competing with Airbus. In fact, what they're doing could be described as increasing competition with Airbus, rather than pursuing wacky pie-in-the-sky designs that no airline can afford. Airbus might want to do the same vis-a-vis its A380. I think the A380 is a cool plane (double decked!), but I just don't see the increased demand for long-range air transport the airlines would need to support purchasing such a HUGE plane.
Or do they have some secret plan (a blended-wing-body design perhaps) dramatic enough to break them out of their current rut, and are just waiting for the right time to announce it? Cause the way Boeing is going they won't be a factor in commercial sales in 5-7 years.
There's a time for revolutionary designs, and a time for sitting back and polishing the ones you've already got. These are pretty lean times for the airlines, so it's likewise a lean time for aircraft manufacturers. The only time airlines upgrade their fleets is when they have money to burn. Aircraft aren't like computers. An airline can keep an aircraft for 20-30 years, so they can afford to wait. Besides, I don't think Boeing is dumping their R&D department on the street; they're just cancelling a project whose time has not yet come.
Re:Masturbatory reading (warning.. way off topic)
on
Deadly Perversions
·
· Score: 2
I've done a lot of things that most people have nightmares about, but it is all part of the job.
Isn't that what the NAZIs said?
no, the problem with the Nazis was that they didn't have nightmares about the things they did...
Re:DNS is broken, let's just kill it
on
Plans For New TLDs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A number based system is the only practical alternative: people and companies would publicise their "web number" just as they do their phone...
I don't think moving towards the "phone # model" is all that great an idea. It may be familiar, but it only exists because phones are a legacy system that, as originally designed, could only handle addressing serially and very low speed (pulse dialing). Phones themselves have been moving away from the "phone # model" lately. Between on-board phone # directories and voice recognition dialing, how many people still dial the actual number on the keypad anymore? I know I only enter numbers directly to dial if I'm calling a person/business I've never called before.
This kills almost all the problems with the current crap system of trademarked names and squatting...
Yeah, but it's really a strategy of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. People are fiercly competetive over recognizable domain names, so the solution is to make all domain addresses equally grim and abstract? That's a soviet communism solution. <hyperbole>
While we're at it, lets apply this theory to art. Masterpieces of fine art are in finite supply, with not enough for everyone. The price of fine art is so high that many can't afford it. I propose we destroy all art and replace it with sequentially serial numbered sheets of framed (but blank) newsprint paper. That way, everyone will have their own distinct piece of art and no one will have the advantage of better art just because they have more money.
</hyperbole>
I don't think porn sites should be forced into it. It's better to somehow make it cool for porn sites to have a.porn address.
"Cool"? Pornography on the internet isn't a high-school popularity contest-- it's about making money. Making.porn "cool" might get a few porn site operators who still idolize Fonzie, but for the rest of 'em you're going to have to appeal to their pocketbooks.
The phone industry had one task to do - get data over wires from point A to B
Hah! Using the term "data" is overstating their task. They only needed to get an analog audio signal from point A to B, and the customer wasn't all that picky about signal quality.
and however they did that was fine - users wouldn't have to be retrained if you replace old cables with fiber optic. That task is relatively simple
It's particularly simple when you're a monopoly and you own all your own R&D and manufacturing and everything you deploy is built to work for exactly the task you required it to do. I'm totally with you on it: the analogy Andreesen used with the telephone network is totally bogus.
Lots of voice mail systems too. Though lately NT/2000 (blech) have popular. Stupid Dialogic. porting their API to win32 just so they could "sell more" and "make money"! What's this world coming to!;)
So why not ports this stuff to Linux or *BSD?
Well, for one thing, I only install voice mail systems. Porting them over to Linux is something only the manufacturer can do. My point is, the ones that used to use OS/2 are now starting to use WinNT/2000, and I (as an installer) find it a bit irritating because they've shown a tendency to concentrate less on improving the systems and more on building a "new and improved" GUI that does everything you don't need a voice-mail unit to do. There are companies that make Linux-based voice mail systems, but that's a seperate issue entirely.
You are still running OS/2. Many ATMs and cash registers still run OS/2.
Lots of voice mail systems too. Though lately NT/2000 (blech) have popular. Stupid Dialogic. porting their API to win32 just so they could "sell more" and "make money"! What's this world coming to!;)
Of course, the idea of giving a person today's concealable automatic ceramic-barreled teflon-round armed killing machines would have been complete anathema even to Patrick Henry, and it is likely that the Supreme Court will get around to upholding a ban on everything but black powder smoothbore, but until then we'll have to tolerate the nutjobs.
I'm afraid I must disagree. The founding fathers wanted an armed populace that was capable of defeating a represive government. Therefore, they'd want them to be armed equally well, yes? The 1776 Revolution wasn't won by colonists armed with match-lock arquebusses or hand-gonnes. Why on earth would they "intend" for people to be armed with weapons that became outdated within their own lifetimes? No, by all rational accounts, they'd have preferred that the people be armed with the same small arms as the military. Not hunting rifles, nor target guns, but military-grade small arms.
be careful of what you say online these days. if you're against our capitalistic lifestyle, you might be considered a terrorist.
Capitalism is based upon Free Markets (i.e. competition). The recording idustry is Monopolistic, which is the opposite of the Free Market. What we have is the government bolstering the position of a monopoly, which is more akin to socialism than capitalism.
Yes, that's right, tuck your tail between your legs and tell the kids to shut up. No wonder they don't respect you, they see you for the spineless twit that you are. Rather than doing something to help change the conditions in the factories that you worked at, instead you are tucking your tail between your legs and happily enforcing status quo.
Fuckwit, nobody asked you for your political opinion. What should we have done? "Seized their means of production" perhaps? Form a "Vanguard" of our "smartest" and led the poor proles out of their servitude? Nobody worked those factory jobs more than 4-6 months. The positions were filled by temp agencies, and the turnover was outrageous. If you didn't want the job, you could easily find another that paid better, because everyone did. Essentially, the plastic bucket factory served as a quick, easy job for people new in town. In a way, I think it's GOOD that they don't pay more, because then people might be tempted to stick around. So go back to your Karl Marx Fan Club meetings and belittle the unenlightened proles from the safety of your student union coffee bar. You obviously don't get it. Take your insulting comments and shove 'em up your ass, pal. I hope you're not a union organizer, because your attitude fucking sucks.
I can go buy a gun... and have the potential to kill dozens of chidren, and it isn't illegal.
Yes, birdbrain, and you can also buy a car and have potential to kill dozens of children, buy a bottle of rat poison and have the potential to kill dozens of children, and buy a swimming pool and have the potential to kill dozens of children. You see, we are ALL "potential" murderers; morality/ethics and resposibility are what keep most people from committing crimes, not laws. Laws are there to punish/segregate those who behave immorally/unethically and/or irresponsibly. You cannot legislate good behavior; you can only punish bad behavior.
And as far as the background check goes, we do have those in the US, and they are quite extensive.
Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire.
Even assuming that most shops do use mostly Macs, this proves nothing regarding the current superiority of one platform over another. With all their employees already trained on Macs, most established studios choose to stick with the platform, incrementally upgrading and hand-me-down-ing their Macs rather than pitching the entire installed base (both hardware and software) and starting over from scratch in order to gain a slight technical performance increase. No, where you have to look to see what is currently the best is in the new start-up studio. When you look there, You see a lot of PCs.
DigitalConsumer.com is two dot.com millionaires claiming to represent "the people." They represent nothing more than a free website.
Now everything makes sense! In our Capitalist society, everything that's Free is Devoid of Value. DigitalConsumer.com is "nothing more than a free website", after all. People who offer something for free can't possibly have an intelligent opinion, or else they'd be using their intelligence to make more money!
By pointing out that it's a "free website", he may even have been trying to imply complicity. Sounds like he was making the spurious allusion "the only way one can offer only free stuff is by stealing it first".
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future.
The same could be said about oil and munitions.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but it doesn't really work. There currently are no adequate rechnological replacements for oil, and munitions? I'd say that unless one can somehow change human nature, there will be a perpetual market for munitions of all kinds.
I think everyone is looking at this wrong. Those of you who think this is going to show how evil the DMCA is have it backwards: It's going to show that the DMCA is fine
This one aspect of the DMCA may be properly balanced, but there are a lot of other parts that are bad. The anti-circumvention portions (for example) are clearly an end-run around the fair-use issue. "Sure, you can fair-use all you want, you're just not allowed open the box to actually USE the content" sounds pretty evil to me.
The way I see it, every place of business that plays something other than Muzak will be charged for the privilege of advertising the cartel's content.
Actually, Muzak isn't free either. Muzak is a company that provides customized background music for businesses. Part of what you pay to Muzak goes towards paying the appropriate ASCAP fees.
We measure temperature by observing the effect of energy on matter, but the energy is there whether the thermometer is there or not.
Which brings us to my original point: you can't have temperature without matter. The Inky Blackness of Space cannot be said to have any temperature, much less an exact temperature like 4degK. Presumably, matter floating in space will stabilize at 4degK, but that's doesn't mean that the space itself is 4degK. Therefore, the argument that one would freeze to death if exposed to the vacuum of space because it "has a temperature of 4degK" is invalid based on the fact that empty space has no temperature. In fact, I'd say that one would freeze to death faster in a walk-in freezer chilled to 270degK, since in space heat loss is almost entirely radiative and the air in the freezer is sapping your heat conductively as well.
But whatever it is that kills you, I'd say being ejected out of the airlock doesn't leave you a whole lot of time for analysis...
Much more efficient with its 100 million transistors (compared to 54 million transistors on the P4)?
Yes. Efficiency isn't about transistor count. I have a halogen light bulb with NO transistors and it draws 200W. Opteron is more efficient even with more transistors because its Silicon-On-Insulator design allows it to run at lower voltage.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh. Yeah, I know. Trust me, they'll NEVER find it. I clipped the last violet-slate pair from each relevant incoming cable and spliced them behind the terminal board. Even if it is found (unlikely), it's easy to say "I didn't do it. some verizon guy did."
Because they won't give anyone a dry pair anymore. None of the local telcos will, it seems. I tried every which way to get one from Verizon for one of my client's, but in the end the best I could get was a dedicated ringdown either way for $80/mo. (I said no and secretly tied the dry pairs from each end together myself at the B-box in the street, but don't tell THEM that...)
Same reason ebay will never be slashdotted. Plenty of servers and bandwidth.
I love that word; it's so... subjective.
Huh?
Legitimate \Le*git"i*mate\ a. 1. Accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements; lawful.
I think he was talking about the way the word is so often used. For example: "there's no legitimate reason for allowing P2P apps, therefore it should be banned". This statement uses the word in a very subjective way, since clearly if P2P isn't banned, then it is by definition "legitimate". No, sadly, the word has come to be used to mean something like "reasonable, in my opinion". It has drifted in meaning from "codified in law" to "worthy of codifying in law".
How about "reverse PGP authentication"? Where everyone can decrypt the payload with a public key, but only the real sender can encrypt it?
Just for clarification, PGP employs this already. Encrypting content with your private key (which allows it to be decrypted with your public key) is called "signing".
it would only cut one hour off the flight time from LA - NYC.
Can you imagine what is does with the flight from La to Amsterdam, London, Paris or Berlin...
Stop being so US centric please. There is a whole world outside the US of A
So it only cuts off a little over 2 hours from an LA to (european city) flight. He was giving an example based on what he knew (LA-NYC is 5 hrs) as an illustration that shaving %20 off flight time isn't a big deal for any one flight. The only real advantage would be the cumulative time savings for the airlines.
So what exactly IS Boeing's business strategy for commercial airliners? Do they plan to just give up competing with Airbus
Well, they're not really quitting competing with Airbus. In fact, what they're doing could be described as increasing competition with Airbus, rather than pursuing wacky pie-in-the-sky designs that no airline can afford. Airbus might want to do the same vis-a-vis its A380. I think the A380 is a cool plane (double decked!), but I just don't see the increased demand for long-range air transport the airlines would need to support purchasing such a HUGE plane.
Or do they have some secret plan (a blended-wing-body design perhaps) dramatic enough to break them out of their current rut, and are just waiting for the right time to announce it? Cause the way Boeing is going they won't be a factor in commercial sales in 5-7 years.
There's a time for revolutionary designs, and a time for sitting back and polishing the ones you've already got. These are pretty lean times for the airlines, so it's likewise a lean time for aircraft manufacturers. The only time airlines upgrade their fleets is when they have money to burn. Aircraft aren't like computers. An airline can keep an aircraft for 20-30 years, so they can afford to wait. Besides, I don't think Boeing is dumping their R&D department on the street; they're just cancelling a project whose time has not yet come.
I've done a lot of things that most people have nightmares about, but it is all part of the job.
Isn't that what the NAZIs said?
no, the problem with the Nazis was that they didn't have nightmares about the things they did...
A number based system is the only practical alternative: people and companies would publicise their "web number" just as they do their phone...
I don't think moving towards the "phone # model" is all that great an idea. It may be familiar, but it only exists because phones are a legacy system that, as originally designed, could only handle addressing serially and very low speed (pulse dialing). Phones themselves have been moving away from the "phone # model" lately. Between on-board phone # directories and voice recognition dialing, how many people still dial the actual number on the keypad anymore? I know I only enter numbers directly to dial if I'm calling a person/business I've never called before.
This kills almost all the problems with the current crap system of trademarked names and squatting...
Yeah, but it's really a strategy of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. People are fiercly competetive over recognizable domain names, so the solution is to make all domain addresses equally grim and abstract? That's a soviet communism solution.
<hyperbole>
While we're at it, lets apply this theory to art. Masterpieces of fine art are in finite supply, with not enough for everyone. The price of fine art is so high that many can't afford it. I propose we destroy all art and replace it with sequentially serial numbered sheets of framed (but blank) newsprint paper. That way, everyone will have their own distinct piece of art and no one will have the advantage of better art just because they have more money.
</hyperbole>
Count me out of this movement.
I don't think porn sites should be forced into it. It's better to somehow make it cool for porn sites to have a .porn address.
.porn "cool" might get a few porn site operators who still idolize Fonzie, but for the rest of 'em you're going to have to appeal to their pocketbooks.
"Cool"? Pornography on the internet isn't a high-school popularity contest-- it's about making money. Making
The phone industry had one task to do - get data over wires from point A to B
Hah! Using the term "data" is overstating their task. They only needed to get an analog audio signal from point A to B, and the customer wasn't all that picky about signal quality.
and however they did that was fine - users wouldn't have to be retrained if you replace old cables with fiber optic. That task is relatively simple
It's particularly simple when you're a monopoly and you own all your own R&D and manufacturing and everything you deploy is built to work for exactly the task you required it to do. I'm totally with you on it: the analogy Andreesen used with the telephone network is totally bogus.
Lots of voice mail systems too. Though lately NT/2000 (blech) have popular. Stupid Dialogic. porting their API to win32 just so they could "sell more" and "make money"! What's this world coming to! ;)
So why not ports this stuff to Linux or *BSD?
Well, for one thing, I only install voice mail systems. Porting them over to Linux is something only the manufacturer can do. My point is, the ones that used to use OS/2 are now starting to use WinNT/2000, and I (as an installer) find it a bit irritating because they've shown a tendency to concentrate less on improving the systems and more on building a "new and improved" GUI that does everything you don't need a voice-mail unit to do. There are companies that make Linux-based voice mail systems, but that's a seperate issue entirely.
You are still running OS/2. Many ATMs and cash registers still run OS/2.
;)
Lots of voice mail systems too. Though lately NT/2000 (blech) have popular. Stupid Dialogic. porting their API to win32 just so they could "sell more" and "make money"! What's this world coming to!
Of course, the idea of giving a person today's concealable automatic ceramic-barreled teflon-round armed killing machines would have been complete anathema even to Patrick Henry, and it is likely that the Supreme Court will get around to upholding a ban on everything but black powder smoothbore, but until then we'll have to tolerate the nutjobs.
I'm afraid I must disagree. The founding fathers wanted an armed populace that was capable of defeating a represive government. Therefore, they'd want them to be armed equally well, yes? The 1776 Revolution wasn't won by colonists armed with match-lock arquebusses or hand-gonnes. Why on earth would they "intend" for people to be armed with weapons that became outdated within their own lifetimes? No, by all rational accounts, they'd have preferred that the people be armed with the same small arms as the military. Not hunting rifles, nor target guns, but military-grade small arms.
be careful of what you say online these days. if you're against our capitalistic lifestyle, you might be considered a terrorist.
Capitalism is based upon Free Markets (i.e. competition). The recording idustry is Monopolistic, which is the opposite of the Free Market. What we have is the government bolstering the position of a monopoly, which is more akin to socialism than capitalism.
Yes, that's right, tuck your tail between your legs and tell the kids to shut up. No wonder they don't respect you, they see you for the spineless twit that you are. Rather than doing something to help change the conditions in the factories that you worked at, instead you are tucking your tail between your legs and happily enforcing status quo.
Fuckwit, nobody asked you for your political opinion. What should we have done? "Seized their means of production" perhaps? Form a "Vanguard" of our "smartest" and led the poor proles out of their servitude? Nobody worked those factory jobs more than 4-6 months. The positions were filled by temp agencies, and the turnover was outrageous. If you didn't want the job, you could easily find another that paid better, because everyone did. Essentially, the plastic bucket factory served as a quick, easy job for people new in town. In a way, I think it's GOOD that they don't pay more, because then people might be tempted to stick around. So go back to your Karl Marx Fan Club meetings and belittle the unenlightened proles from the safety of your student union coffee bar. You obviously don't get it. Take your insulting comments and shove 'em up your ass, pal. I hope you're not a union organizer, because your attitude fucking sucks.
I can go buy a gun... and have the potential to kill dozens of chidren, and it isn't illegal.
Yes, birdbrain, and you can also buy a car and have potential to kill dozens of children, buy a bottle of rat poison and have the potential to kill dozens of children, and buy a swimming pool and have the potential to kill dozens of children. You see, we are ALL "potential" murderers; morality/ethics and resposibility are what keep most people from committing crimes, not laws. Laws are there to punish/segregate those who behave immorally/unethically and/or irresponsibly. You cannot legislate good behavior; you can only punish bad behavior.
And as far as the background check goes, we do have those in the US, and they are quite extensive.
Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire.
Even assuming that most shops do use mostly Macs, this proves nothing regarding the current superiority of one platform over another. With all their employees already trained on Macs, most established studios choose to stick with the platform, incrementally upgrading and hand-me-down-ing their Macs rather than pitching the entire installed base (both hardware and software) and starting over from scratch in order to gain a slight technical performance increase. No, where you have to look to see what is currently the best is in the new start-up studio. When you look there, You see a lot of PCs.
they are the WWF of News.
I think you mean the WWE of news. World Wildlife Fund "0wnz" the WWF.
DigitalConsumer.com is two dot.com millionaires claiming to represent "the people." They represent nothing more than a free website.
Now everything makes sense! In our Capitalist society, everything that's Free is Devoid of Value. DigitalConsumer.com is "nothing more than a free website", after all. People who offer something for free can't possibly have an intelligent opinion, or else they'd be using their intelligence to make more money!
By pointing out that it's a "free website", he may even have been trying to imply complicity. Sounds like he was making the spurious allusion "the only way one can offer only free stuff is by stealing it first".
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future.
The same could be said about oil and munitions.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but it doesn't really work. There currently are no adequate rechnological replacements for oil, and munitions? I'd say that unless one can somehow change human nature, there will be a perpetual market for munitions of all kinds.
I think everyone is looking at this wrong. Those of you who think this is going to show how evil the DMCA is have it backwards: It's going to show that the DMCA is fine
This one aspect of the DMCA may be properly balanced, but there are a lot of other parts that are bad. The anti-circumvention portions (for example) are clearly an end-run around the fair-use issue. "Sure, you can fair-use all you want, you're just not allowed open the box to actually USE the content" sounds pretty evil to me.
The way I see it, every place of business that plays something other than Muzak will be charged for the privilege of advertising the cartel's content.
Actually, Muzak isn't free either. Muzak is a company that provides customized background music for businesses. Part of what you pay to Muzak goes towards paying the appropriate ASCAP fees.
We measure temperature by observing the effect of energy on matter, but the energy is there whether the thermometer is there or not.
Which brings us to my original point: you can't have temperature without matter. The Inky Blackness of Space cannot be said to have any temperature, much less an exact temperature like 4degK. Presumably, matter floating in space will stabilize at 4degK, but that's doesn't mean that the space itself is 4degK. Therefore, the argument that one would freeze to death if exposed to the vacuum of space because it "has a temperature of 4degK" is invalid based on the fact that empty space has no temperature. In fact, I'd say that one would freeze to death faster in a walk-in freezer chilled to 270degK, since in space heat loss is almost entirely radiative and the air in the freezer is sapping your heat conductively as well.
But whatever it is that kills you, I'd say being ejected out of the airlock doesn't leave you a whole lot of time for analysis...
Hammer is a much more efficient chip.
Much more efficient with its 100 million transistors (compared to 54 million transistors on the P4)?
Yes. Efficiency isn't about transistor count. I have a halogen light bulb with NO transistors and it draws 200W. Opteron is more efficient even with more transistors because its Silicon-On-Insulator design allows it to run at lower voltage.