You forgot 4, make a sequel and try and reproduce steps 1 thru 3:)
Seriously though, Charlie's Angels 1 sucked bad enough, I don't care what they say but friggin Drew Barrymore is no angel and with her having executive producer credits what would anyone expect but some bimbo flick with her try to get similarly strung out chicks to work with her.
The Hulk animated character isn't Lou Ferigno either, it looked bad in the previews so why waste money to see it when it will hit basic cable in 12 months anyway.
Then there's Gigli, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had enough of "J.Lo" let alone wants to see another Ben Affleck flick. Add to that the chances of a film with a French name making it big in the US is pretty slim these days anyway:)
No, Hollywood just better get used to reduced revenue if a great percentage of their produce is sequels to mediocre movies, movies based on old TV series but ruined by questionable actors and remakes of old movies. I mean how many versions of "Freaky Friday" do we need?
This is an industry only around 100 years old and already they're running out of story ideas, it makes me wonder what our decendants will be watching 1000 years from now, might just be archives of old materials since Hollywood will have long shut down due to running out of original story ideas entirely. Then again, they'll likely just live off the old materials by lobbying infinite copyright protection.
Let's also keep in mind that many trucking companies have been using GPS and satellite navigation for many years, more than 10 for sure since the last time I worked at a truckstop.
Many of these companies know exactly where their drivers are at all times, they know what speed they are going, they know milage, they know a lot about the truck itself.
In turn the drivers will have had to learn quite a bit of the computer installed in their trucks, of course sometimes it's just how to circumvent them, especially those not being satellite tracked, but they'll catch on to using a laptop pretty quickly, especially if it gives them an added communication method for not only the head office but friends and family back at home base.
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
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150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
He's serious and that's CHEAP in Canada.
For example, Bell ExpressVu DirecPC service, one-way satellite connection, you get 4GB/month and anything over that is $100/GB!! Yes, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS per GB!
I'm in a rural area, I have no landline broadband options available (f'in cable is 1 mile away from my house though!), so my only choice right now is satellite. Needless to say, I refuse to use Bell for that rate so I've signed up with c-band.net.
That being said, cband.net have a rather scary TOS as well, you get 400kb/s down (one way connection), but, if you download between 500MB-1000MB they can cut your speed next month to 300kb/s (small bits btw), 1000-1500MB 200kb/s next month, etc.
Meaning, they expect you to only download about 17MB/day with their service, but here's the kicker, at full speed that takes 5 minutes.
Luckily, they only seem to enforce the TOS for the hogs right now, I downloaded over 1500MB last month and this month I'm still at full speed, mind you I hardly hook it up right now as if you are just surfing the net then 56K works just as fast or faster if the cband.net proxy servers are too busy.
Chances are I'll dump the satellite connection anyway, with the restrictions it's almost useless for much of anything, I'd be better off buying off cheapbytes or waiting the 2 days it takes my 56K to grab a Linux ISO.
Why do some humans find it so hard to grasp that life more than likely exists elsewhere and likely close than we think?
My mother-in-law is that kind of person, she said one night that we are the only living planet in the universe, I had to point out how would she explain the sheer diversity of life on this planet alone? Whereever life can survive it seems to do so.
The more we look, the more we find, we've looked deep underground and found life, we've looked at cold arctic areas and found life, we have found life floating high in the atmosphere.
So, life on Mars? You bet some microbes are doing just fine there, and who knows what else.
Let's also not forget that life existed LONG before humanity ever came into being, of course some people refuse to accept that fact too.
BBC World is the actual raw feed from the BBC in London, it is owned/operated by them and intended for worldwide distribution. Indeed, even though it is available BBC World News is still shown on CBC Newsworld a couple times a day.
BBC Canada is owned/operated by Alliance Atlantis and therefore must obey the rather retarded Canadian content rules that forces them to play drivel like Due South and other crap nobody watches anyway.
TechTV Canada's issue with airing anime is it goes against their Canadian license, they simply are not allowed to air that type of programming, same for all the other drama and non-tech type stuff the US parent now airs. In essence TechTV Canada cannot air anime as it would compete with TeleToon, Canada's lame answer to Cartoon Network.
Canadian TV licensing is silly at best as it attempts to enforce "cultural" identity in a country that is very multi-cultural making it very hard to pull off, plus the Canadian broadcasters go out of their way to simply buy up US programming during primetime just so they can block the incoming US network feeds of said programming.
Add to that the built in license protection that blocks stations from actually improving themselves to gain viewers since they are tied to their original format with little leeway to adjust in case ratings tank. So you end up with a pretty mediocre broadcasting system with terrible homegrown content that's just there to fulfill various quotas.
Take Discovery Canada, during primetime it's 75% Canadian content, which means that the good stuff from the US parent channel is usually airing early afternoon or at 2am or something, while during primtetime you're stuck with drivel mostly.
It's kinda like someone licensing a McDonald's location but only selling Big Mac's between midnight and 8am while the rest of the day they only have pancakes and maple syrup to enforce "Canadianization" of the menu.
Some people just don't have the attention span required to enjoy long term story arcs, for you people they have shows like Enterprise and Voyager.
For those of us who like to think a bit with our television viewing, B5 is perfect. I for one used to dread the wait for each new episode of B5 during the original run, sometimes that wait was weeks and months and it was agonizing.
B5 is a bonafide scifi hit, the DVD set is selling very well, I know lots of people not into scifi normally have really enjoyed B5 because of the very reason you say doesn't work.
Sorry, but many of us do feel we need a little more than a storyline that wraps up at the end of every episode in a neat little bundle with no major character dead.
Your post is interesting, personally I feel that too many people discount alien visitation to our planet as nothing more than mass halucinations or weather anomolies.
We aren't far away from improving technology allowing us to reach other star systems within a few hundred years in some cases.
On the other hand, we aren't that far ahead in time from our recent past when we still thought the earth was flat, when we thought the earth was the center of the universe, when we thought our star system was the only one with planets, when we had to travel for months or years to discover just another land mass on our own planet, etc. etc.
I tend to actually hope that we have been visited, because that gives us a chance at longevity by being able to leave our home planet if needed should it become uninhabitable (and it will eventually).
There are certainly enough *hints* left in the past that some type of visitation events may have happened, ancient pictures and artwork have some peculiarly familiar ships in the sky for example, many years before "flying saucers" were coined as a name for them.
We live on a funny world, a good number laugh at the notion of alien visitations and pass it off as fairy tales, yet at the same time these same folks believe in an invisible "God" like creator who apparently watches out for them and created the Earth just for our use, conveniently ignoring the fact that reptilian based lifeforms ruled the planet for millions of years before us (oh yeah, God planted these fossils there just for us to have something to do by digging them up, convenient for their storybooks no doubt).
Then again, we could be just a giant computer simulation in some huge universal mainframe, after all, just try and fathom the very notion anything exists in the first place and what it is we exist in, it's tough to come up with a how scenario, but just because we can't figure out how/why it happened doesn't mean we should start praying to a creator.
In a universe as vast as ours seems to be, the notion that who/whatever created this (if it was created) pays any particular attention to every grain of sand in our universe (apparently there are likely more stars than grains of sand on all of our beaches on earth), the chances of us being noticed, beyond passing interest in "how is my Build your Own Universe kit doing?", is to me laughable.
Why not offer to help them out, a small 200 seat ISP probably isn't making a whole lotta moola but if it improves YOUR speed that's all that matters:)
I'd start with a nice Linux box at the front end to handle gateway, firewall and transparent squid duties, you won't need to get overly fancy, especially if you skip the cache (although it would really be in their best interests).
For a couple G in hardware you could likely save them 25% in bandwidth at the proxy, plus you could use iptables etc. for traffic shaping, throttle using iptables or squid, etc.
I've done it, I've installed 2 headend gateways for small cable/wireless ISPs here in BC, works like a dream and it does save about 25% at the proxy. Mind you, they also have the luxury of being able to throttle users at the cable modem, so they only offer 384/128 service residentially but it beats dialup, although they also own the only dialup service in town too.
Indeed, most humans seem to have blinders on when it comes to a bigger reality, those blinders are usually put in place by religious beliefs pounded into their heads since birth to the point they believe the stories themselves.
Animals are certainly more than just a set of inate biological robots as many people seem to think. We have a pet starling, he's a very bright bird and I know that many of his personality traits are unique to him as an individual starling, sure he has built in inate stuff, but so do we as well.
As we grow more technological we are making more discoveries that are showing us we are indeed very closely related to the rest of the life on the planet, we aren't special other than we can out think most other species on the planet in most respects and have developed tools and languages.
We're not unique in using language though, other species communicate to each other with sound, we're not unique in using tools either, other primates have been known to use them and indeed birds also use tools to get at food.
This is one of the reasons I don't buy into religion, it makes no sense that there's this special "heaven" for us and apparently not for the literally billions of lifeforms that have existed on this rock we call Earth before us. Of course many religions fail to recognize Earth existed before about 6000 years ago too, convenient for them to help their fables have some sort of ring of truth.
Was there a creator? Yes, it's called the Sun and without that we wouldn't be here, but it's hardly something we need to pray to either, it just happened to be required to get us to our current incarnation.
Was there a creator of the universe? We'll never know, possibly yes, maybe this is just some beings science experiment, maybe we're just a computer simulation of some sort, but it's unlikely we'll ever have the technology or lifespan to reach the edge of our universe and see what may lie beyond.
Regardless, if there was a universe creator of some sort I doubt he paid any particular attention to any point in the universe, especially one with as many stars as ours, when was the last time you paid much attention to an individual grain of sand on your last visit to the beach?
Lastly, I don't know how anyone could have faith in any church that has representatives molesting young boys and girls, to me this says if there is a God he simply doesn't care or the truth is there is no God and these assholes need to be taken out and burned at the stake like they used to do to non-believers in past times.:)
Most nights I can sit out on my deck and watch the satellites cruise across the sky, they take 2-5 minutes to traverse this most of the time.
One night I noticed one that was moving a little faster than normal, it was also bluish, and like you I witnessed this thing do a 90-degree turn and speed off.
It was weird to see, I'm generally used to weird things in the sky, but that made my draw drop. If it's out tech, then we have stuff now that the public isn't aware off, if it's not our tech, who is it?
The UK recently decriminalized pot for these same reasons. Canada is also looking at doing the same, although I feel it will be tougher for Canada to do this because of pressure from the anal neighbour to the south.
I would imagine the day the Canada decriminalizes pot is the day the each and every vehicle travelling south is stripped down to the core for searching.
My question though, whatever happened to the hippy generation down south from the '60's? Shouldn't they be in power by now, and if so, shouldn't they be relaxing the rather archaic laws on drug use?
Up here in Canada the cops must first read you your rights to search a vehicle if they suspect anything, in essence you are under arrest while they search (happened to me once).
I agree, MOST cops are doing their jobs, but let's not forget that not all cops are created equal. From what I see on US television there are quite a few GI Joe type cops down there, but then again is may be needed since you guys happily let folks carry concealed firearms.
I have had a few friends who went on to be cops, most were great, but it's the jock types that scare me, the ones who think they know it all and know what's good for everyone else. The ones who went into the force simply to weild power upon those they approach, etc.
Then there's that joke "war on drugs" the yanks are playing with, give up already, treat your addicts not arrest them. Of course most cops don't want to see drugs legalized, why they get to sell the houses, cars, boats and other possessions of those they arrest, basically it's an incentive program to harrass citizens. And let's not forget about the other stupid rule down there that gives informants 25% of the property seized if they turn someone in for drugs.
At least up here in Canada we can grow a couple plants in our backyards and the most that usually happens is the cops may come remove them, mostly we just end up smoking it though. And we don't have to fear our neighbour in case they need more property one day and turn us in.
Religion basically drives me batty, I don't care what others believe in, but they certainly don't need to try and get me to believe in their stories either.
Things the religious nuts believe in:
1) God 2) The Bible 3) Jeebus:)
Things they don't believe in, but let their kids believe in up to a certain age, and yet have as much proof of their existence that they have for God and Jesus:
1) Santa Claus 2) The tooth fairy
In my mind, if you're gonna believe in one mythical being and proclaim him/her/it your God, then ya may as well believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy as well, you have just as much proof (zero) that they exist.
It is little wonder that the brightest minds on our planet didn't/don't belive in a God, both Einstein and Stephen Hawking have both said they see no room for such an entity in the universe.
Religion is there to serve the weak, the folks who simply cannot grasp the idea of just being here without tying it to some unknown entity who created everything.
Then of course each religion says they are the correct religion, who is right?
Personally, I don't completely disagree that some being may have played a hand in creating the universe, since we do not know what lies outside our universe anything is possible, this universe could be some childs science experiment, this might all just be a huge computer program, who knows. I just don't think a God of any sort sat down and created the Earth specifically and all the beings that inhabit this place, paying special attention to the homo-sapien population, and wiping out the other races of humans that evolved along with homo-sapiens.
Indeed, the ancients who worshipped the sun as a God were likely more accurate than today's scriptures, after all, we are all made of star stuff, every atom in us once existed in a star at some point. We are certainly more sure that the stars came before the planets, and that Earth has not existed for as long as the universe itself, what was their God up to for those first 5-10 billion years? Drawing up plans?
If you deliver something to me and I happen to make use of what you are delivering then I can hardly be called a thief, especially if I never ordered this product/service in the first place.
I lived in an apartment one time where the cable company came and rewired the building, at the time they did this they hooked our line back up fine, but they also hooked us into the premium tier. We had free movie channels for 2 years, we didn't ask for this, but we certainly watched.
Just because we watched doesn't mean we can be branded thieves IMO. This would be like saying watching sports in a bar would make us thieves too, of course they would love that as well.
My BUD sits proudly out front of my house just waiting for the RCMP to come raid me for my illegal activities, I also purchase programming from HBO and Starz for it, which according to some in Canada makes me a criminal.
Frankly, I don't care what they think, if they ever did bust down the door to see what I'm watching on TV I will likely be exiting this country shortly thereafter, for somewhere else as I feel my freedoms are too restricted if the government decides what I can and cannot watch on television.
Some are struggling, Group Telecom for instance is in the red deep and bleeding like crazy, they laid of a good portion of their workforce a couple months ago.
These are the guys who took over Shaw Fiberlink's network, only to be secretly screwed over by Shaw who decided to then create their own "Big Pipe" service, which is also struggling now.
I have one server on a Group Telecom network, I'm phasing it out, their bandwidth is dirty and unreliable and generally slow. Their tech support are generally clueless, one time I called them at 3am due to a network outage, the guy had no clue about our location or who we were and claimed the network was fine.
Plus, Group Telecom are one of the few trying to charge per GB for usage, they want $7/GB on a 10mbps pipe, can add up real quick.
The old outfit I used to work for was 10-12 months behind in their payments before GT decided to call them on it, by that point the company was so far behind it was only a matter of time before it went under, I quit to save them money, it didn't help, the owner used the savings to buy himself some new Mac equipment! Point is, GT shouldn't have waited until this guy owed them $10,000, they should have a 60 day policy and you're toast. They never collected from my old boss either, he gassed himself in the basement one day, the company lasted about 3 more months until attempts to find a buyer proved fruitless and they suddenly shut down the servers.
Have no fear, you will see some of the large Canadian carriers go under soon I imagine.
You noticed that too eh? I stopped using ATI for serious 3D a long time ago, back in the Rage Pro days when they claimed decent 3D was coming anyday now, just keep watching for that new beta driver.... then all of a sudden, "hey, buy our Rage128 instead, it's got much better 3D anyway! Oh, and we aren't releasing another driver for that old card of yours"
I never liked their 3D anyway, their cards are great for 2D and their TV cards aren't bad, but without decent drivers they aren't worth it.
Oh yeah, I'll jump all over a deal like that, put my trust in a registrar selling registrations at just above their actual costs (they still must pay NSI $6-$6.50/yr).
With their cut-rate pricing I fully expect them to be around in 10 years... NOT!
Anyone with any business sense knows that these guys will get themselves in trouble eventually when they are only make $2 from someone every 10 years or so.
Re:Is slashdot looking over my shoulder?
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 1
I'm thinking of getting a couple of these, send one to my sister in England and we've got free phone calling. I likely would not be interested in the POTS ability myself.
I don't understand these US outfits and their unreal shipping charges. $26US should mean I can expect that item on my doorstep tomorrow morning.
A few companies out there aren't too bad and at least charge close to cost for shipping, but for some reason a lot think shipping to Canada is "International" and requires triple the shipping fee, often more than the cost of the item.
Yet I've had people ship me items from the US via USPS and it's less that $10US.
Shipping is what is hurting online retailers, sure the consumer doesn't mind paying a LITTLE extra, but it must be reasonable, when the actual shipping cost is $8 there shouldn't be a $18 "handling" fee on there too. Isn't the profit margin in the products themselves enough? You're already at an advantage in many cases since you no longer need an expensive retail store front.
Well said, I feel the same way, this is getting pathetic. I have a ton of old CD's sitting here and don't listen to now, maybe one day I'll get around to ripping the good tracks from them and making one cd, but basically I have stopped buying music because most of the recent shit produced has the listening lifespan equal to the shelf life of a quart of milk in a desert.
At the same time I understand the greed involved here, the suits at the top don't want to see change, mostly because it might put them out of work entirely.
Personally I get by with more than 100 channels of commercial free audio on DMX (from Canada and the US), Galaxie (Canada) and Music Choice. In the vehicle FM is fine for me, in our area the dial is chock full of stations to choose from.
Of course these are both areas the record companies want to get rid of as well, if these folks have their way you'll pay for every time you even listen to the media in question.
All of this just proves how fucked up mankind really is after all, I mean this is really all a petty issue in the larger scheme of life but overall it's a step backwards in our society as this will eventually hurt the artists these corps were formed to promote in the first place.
I think our sun should do the universe a favour and go supernova now, frankly mankind is too fucked up to be of much use anyway. We're all just gonna sit here and fight each other until our planet dies anyway, why prolong the misery we're causing to the other species we share our world with.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot 4, make a sequel and try and reproduce steps 1 thru 3 :)
:)
Seriously though, Charlie's Angels 1 sucked bad enough, I don't care what they say but friggin Drew Barrymore is no angel and with her having executive producer credits what would anyone expect but some bimbo flick with her try to get similarly strung out chicks to work with her.
The Hulk animated character isn't Lou Ferigno either, it looked bad in the previews so why waste money to see it when it will hit basic cable in 12 months anyway.
Then there's Gigli, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had enough of "J.Lo" let alone wants to see another Ben Affleck flick. Add to that the chances of a film with a French name making it big in the US is pretty slim these days anyway
No, Hollywood just better get used to reduced revenue if a great percentage of their produce is sequels to mediocre movies, movies based on old TV series but ruined by questionable actors and remakes of old movies. I mean how many versions of "Freaky Friday" do we need?
This is an industry only around 100 years old and already they're running out of story ideas, it makes me wonder what our decendants will be watching 1000 years from now, might just be archives of old materials since Hollywood will have long shut down due to running out of original story ideas entirely. Then again, they'll likely just live off the old materials by lobbying infinite copyright protection.
Let's also keep in mind that many trucking companies have been using GPS and satellite navigation for many years, more than 10 for sure since the last time I worked at a truckstop.
Many of these companies know exactly where their drivers are at all times, they know what speed they are going, they know milage, they know a lot about the truck itself.
In turn the drivers will have had to learn quite a bit of the computer installed in their trucks, of course sometimes it's just how to circumvent them, especially those not being satellite tracked, but they'll catch on to using a laptop pretty quickly, especially if it gives them an added communication method for not only the head office but friends and family back at home base.
He's serious and that's CHEAP in Canada.
For example, Bell ExpressVu DirecPC service, one-way satellite connection, you get 4GB/month and anything over that is $100/GB!! Yes, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS per GB!
I'm in a rural area, I have no landline broadband options available (f'in cable is 1 mile away from my house though!), so my only choice right now is satellite. Needless to say, I refuse to use Bell for that rate so I've signed up with c-band.net.
That being said, cband.net have a rather scary TOS as well, you get 400kb/s down (one way connection), but, if you download between 500MB-1000MB they can cut your speed next month to 300kb/s (small bits btw), 1000-1500MB 200kb/s next month, etc.
Meaning, they expect you to only download about 17MB/day with their service, but here's the kicker, at full speed that takes 5 minutes.
Luckily, they only seem to enforce the TOS for the hogs right now, I downloaded over 1500MB last month and this month I'm still at full speed, mind you I hardly hook it up right now as if you are just surfing the net then 56K works just as fast or faster if the cband.net proxy servers are too busy.
Chances are I'll dump the satellite connection anyway, with the restrictions it's almost useless for much of anything, I'd be better off buying off cheapbytes or waiting the 2 days it takes my 56K to grab a Linux ISO.
Why do some humans find it so hard to grasp that life more than likely exists elsewhere and likely close than we think?
My mother-in-law is that kind of person, she said one night that we are the only living planet in the universe, I had to point out how would she explain the sheer diversity of life on this planet alone? Whereever life can survive it seems to do so.
The more we look, the more we find, we've looked deep underground and found life, we've looked at cold arctic areas and found life, we have found life floating high in the atmosphere.
So, life on Mars? You bet some microbes are doing just fine there, and who knows what else.
Let's also not forget that life existed LONG before humanity ever came into being, of course some people refuse to accept that fact too.
Get c-band and a 4Dtv receiver ...
:)
MTV2 = Free, unscrambled in glorious analogue
TechTV = Free, unscrambled in glorious analogue
Porn? Well there are some (12 channels) there too but hidden
BBC World is the actual raw feed from the BBC in London, it is owned/operated by them and intended for worldwide distribution. Indeed, even though it is available BBC World News is still shown on CBC Newsworld a couple times a day.
BBC Canada is owned/operated by Alliance Atlantis and therefore must obey the rather retarded Canadian content rules that forces them to play drivel like Due South and other crap nobody watches anyway.
TechTV Canada's issue with airing anime is it goes against their Canadian license, they simply are not allowed to air that type of programming, same for all the other drama and non-tech type stuff the US parent now airs. In essence TechTV Canada cannot air anime as it would compete with TeleToon, Canada's lame answer to Cartoon Network.
Canadian TV licensing is silly at best as it attempts to enforce "cultural" identity in a country that is very multi-cultural making it very hard to pull off, plus the Canadian broadcasters go out of their way to simply buy up US programming during primetime just so they can block the incoming US network feeds of said programming.
Add to that the built in license protection that blocks stations from actually improving themselves to gain viewers since they are tied to their original format with little leeway to adjust in case ratings tank. So you end up with a pretty mediocre broadcasting system with terrible homegrown content that's just there to fulfill various quotas.
Take Discovery Canada, during primetime it's 75% Canadian content, which means that the good stuff from the US parent channel is usually airing early afternoon or at 2am or something, while during primtetime you're stuck with drivel mostly.
It's kinda like someone licensing a McDonald's location but only selling Big Mac's between midnight and 8am while the rest of the day they only have pancakes and maple syrup to enforce "Canadianization" of the menu.
http://www.channelcanada.com/baghdad/
.. quite often it's the camera shots from Baghdad you see on the major news outlets.
Close, it's a still image feed taken from a CONUS satellite
Some people just don't have the attention span required to enjoy long term story arcs, for you people they have shows like Enterprise and Voyager.
For those of us who like to think a bit with our television viewing, B5 is perfect. I for one used to dread the wait for each new episode of B5 during the original run, sometimes that wait was weeks and months and it was agonizing.
B5 is a bonafide scifi hit, the DVD set is selling very well, I know lots of people not into scifi normally have really enjoyed B5 because of the very reason you say doesn't work.
Sorry, but many of us do feel we need a little more than a storyline that wraps up at the end of every episode in a neat little bundle with no major character dead.
Your post is interesting, personally I feel that too many people discount alien visitation to our planet as nothing more than mass halucinations or weather anomolies.
We aren't far away from improving technology allowing us to reach other star systems within a few hundred years in some cases.
On the other hand, we aren't that far ahead in time from our recent past when we still thought the earth was flat, when we thought the earth was the center of the universe, when we thought our star system was the only one with planets, when we had to travel for months or years to discover just another land mass on our own planet, etc. etc.
I tend to actually hope that we have been visited, because that gives us a chance at longevity by being able to leave our home planet if needed should it become uninhabitable (and it will eventually).
There are certainly enough *hints* left in the past that some type of visitation events may have happened, ancient pictures and artwork have some peculiarly familiar ships in the sky for example, many years before "flying saucers" were coined as a name for them.
We live on a funny world, a good number laugh at the notion of alien visitations and pass it off as fairy tales, yet at the same time these same folks believe in an invisible "God" like creator who apparently watches out for them and created the Earth just for our use, conveniently ignoring the fact that reptilian based lifeforms ruled the planet for millions of years before us (oh yeah, God planted these fossils there just for us to have something to do by digging them up, convenient for their storybooks no doubt).
Then again, we could be just a giant computer simulation in some huge universal mainframe, after all, just try and fathom the very notion anything exists in the first place and what it is we exist in, it's tough to come up with a how scenario, but just because we can't figure out how/why it happened doesn't mean we should start praying to a creator.
In a universe as vast as ours seems to be, the notion that who/whatever created this (if it was created) pays any particular attention to every grain of sand in our universe (apparently there are likely more stars than grains of sand on all of our beaches on earth), the chances of us being noticed, beyond passing interest in "how is my Build your Own Universe kit doing?", is to me laughable.
Why not offer to help them out, a small 200 seat ISP probably isn't making a whole lotta moola but if it improves YOUR speed that's all that matters :)
I'd start with a nice Linux box at the front end to handle gateway, firewall and transparent squid duties, you won't need to get overly fancy, especially if you skip the cache (although it would really be in their best interests).
For a couple G in hardware you could likely save them 25% in bandwidth at the proxy, plus you could use iptables etc. for traffic shaping, throttle using iptables or squid, etc.
I've done it, I've installed 2 headend gateways for small cable/wireless ISPs here in BC, works like a dream and it does save about 25% at the proxy. Mind you, they also have the luxury of being able to throttle users at the cable modem, so they only offer 384/128 service residentially but it beats dialup, although they also own the only dialup service in town too.
Lucky bastard! I just got a 1/2 ounce and no new pipe this year, had to clean the old one!
:)
This should help my yearly xmas vacation which I feel should extend from around today until around sometime in January.
Being your own boss is great
Indeed, most humans seem to have blinders on when it comes to a bigger reality, those blinders are usually put in place by religious beliefs pounded into their heads since birth to the point they believe the stories themselves.
:)
Animals are certainly more than just a set of inate biological robots as many people seem to think. We have a pet starling, he's a very bright bird and I know that many of his personality traits are unique to him as an individual starling, sure he has built in inate stuff, but so do we as well.
As we grow more technological we are making more discoveries that are showing us we are indeed very closely related to the rest of the life on the planet, we aren't special other than we can out think most other species on the planet in most respects and have developed tools and languages.
We're not unique in using language though, other species communicate to each other with sound, we're not unique in using tools either, other primates have been known to use them and indeed birds also use tools to get at food.
This is one of the reasons I don't buy into religion, it makes no sense that there's this special "heaven" for us and apparently not for the literally billions of lifeforms that have existed on this rock we call Earth before us. Of course many religions fail to recognize Earth existed before about 6000 years ago too, convenient for them to help their fables have some sort of ring of truth.
Was there a creator? Yes, it's called the Sun and without that we wouldn't be here, but it's hardly something we need to pray to either, it just happened to be required to get us to our current incarnation.
Was there a creator of the universe? We'll never know, possibly yes, maybe this is just some beings science experiment, maybe we're just a computer simulation of some sort, but it's unlikely we'll ever have the technology or lifespan to reach the edge of our universe and see what may lie beyond.
Regardless, if there was a universe creator of some sort I doubt he paid any particular attention to any point in the universe, especially one with as many stars as ours, when was the last time you paid much attention to an individual grain of sand on your last visit to the beach?
Lastly, I don't know how anyone could have faith in any church that has representatives molesting young boys and girls, to me this says if there is a God he simply doesn't care or the truth is there is no God and these assholes need to be taken out and burned at the stake like they used to do to non-believers in past times.
I saw something similar one night.
Most nights I can sit out on my deck and watch the satellites cruise across the sky, they take 2-5 minutes to traverse this most of the time.
One night I noticed one that was moving a little faster than normal, it was also bluish, and like you I witnessed this thing do a 90-degree turn and speed off.
It was weird to see, I'm generally used to weird things in the sky, but that made my draw drop. If it's out tech, then we have stuff now that the public isn't aware off, if it's not our tech, who is it?
The UK recently decriminalized pot for these same reasons. Canada is also looking at doing the same, although I feel it will be tougher for Canada to do this because of pressure from the anal neighbour to the south.
I would imagine the day the Canada decriminalizes pot is the day the each and every vehicle travelling south is stripped down to the core for searching.
My question though, whatever happened to the hippy generation down south from the '60's? Shouldn't they be in power by now, and if so, shouldn't they be relaxing the rather archaic laws on drug use?
Up here in Canada the cops must first read you your rights to search a vehicle if they suspect anything, in essence you are under arrest while they search (happened to me once).
I agree, MOST cops are doing their jobs, but let's not forget that not all cops are created equal. From what I see on US television there are quite a few GI Joe type cops down there, but then again is may be needed since you guys happily let folks carry concealed firearms.
I have had a few friends who went on to be cops, most were great, but it's the jock types that scare me, the ones who think they know it all and know what's good for everyone else. The ones who went into the force simply to weild power upon those they approach, etc.
Then there's that joke "war on drugs" the yanks are playing with, give up already, treat your addicts not arrest them. Of course most cops don't want to see drugs legalized, why they get to sell the houses, cars, boats and other possessions of those they arrest, basically it's an incentive program to harrass citizens. And let's not forget about the other stupid rule down there that gives informants 25% of the property seized if they turn someone in for drugs.
At least up here in Canada we can grow a couple plants in our backyards and the most that usually happens is the cops may come remove them, mostly we just end up smoking it though. And we don't have to fear our neighbour in case they need more property one day and turn us in.
Religion basically drives me batty, I don't care what others believe in, but they certainly don't need to try and get me to believe in their stories either.
:)
Things the religious nuts believe in:
1) God
2) The Bible
3) Jeebus
Things they don't believe in, but let their kids believe in up to a certain age, and yet have as much proof of their existence that they have for God and Jesus:
1) Santa Claus
2) The tooth fairy
In my mind, if you're gonna believe in one mythical being and proclaim him/her/it your God, then ya may as well believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy as well, you have just as much proof (zero) that they exist.
It is little wonder that the brightest minds on our planet didn't/don't belive in a God, both Einstein and Stephen Hawking have both said they see no room for such an entity in the universe.
Religion is there to serve the weak, the folks who simply cannot grasp the idea of just being here without tying it to some unknown entity who created everything.
Then of course each religion says they are the correct religion, who is right?
Personally, I don't completely disagree that some being may have played a hand in creating the universe, since we do not know what lies outside our universe anything is possible, this universe could be some childs science experiment, this might all just be a huge computer program, who knows. I just don't think a God of any sort sat down and created the Earth specifically and all the beings that inhabit this place, paying special attention to the homo-sapien population, and wiping out the other races of humans that evolved along with homo-sapiens.
Indeed, the ancients who worshipped the sun as a God were likely more accurate than today's scriptures, after all, we are all made of star stuff, every atom in us once existed in a star at some point. We are certainly more sure that the stars came before the planets, and that Earth has not existed for as long as the universe itself, what was their God up to for those first 5-10 billion years? Drawing up plans?
My thoughts too .. is this even stealing?
If you deliver something to me and I happen to make use of what you are delivering then I can hardly be called a thief, especially if I never ordered this product/service in the first place.
I lived in an apartment one time where the cable company came and rewired the building, at the time they did this they hooked our line back up fine, but they also hooked us into the premium tier. We had free movie channels for 2 years, we didn't ask for this, but we certainly watched.
Just because we watched doesn't mean we can be branded thieves IMO. This would be like saying watching sports in a bar would make us thieves too, of course they would love that as well.
My BUD sits proudly out front of my house just waiting for the RCMP to come raid me for my illegal activities, I also purchase programming from HBO and Starz for it, which according to some in Canada makes me a criminal.
Frankly, I don't care what they think, if they ever did bust down the door to see what I'm watching on TV I will likely be exiting this country shortly thereafter, for somewhere else as I feel my freedoms are too restricted if the government decides what I can and cannot watch on television.
Some are struggling, Group Telecom for instance is in the red deep and bleeding like crazy, they laid of a good portion of their workforce a couple months ago.
These are the guys who took over Shaw Fiberlink's network, only to be secretly screwed over by Shaw who decided to then create their own "Big Pipe" service, which is also struggling now.
I have one server on a Group Telecom network, I'm phasing it out, their bandwidth is dirty and unreliable and generally slow. Their tech support are generally clueless, one time I called them at 3am due to a network outage, the guy had no clue about our location or who we were and claimed the network was fine.
Plus, Group Telecom are one of the few trying to charge per GB for usage, they want $7/GB on a 10mbps pipe, can add up real quick.
The old outfit I used to work for was 10-12 months behind in their payments before GT decided to call them on it, by that point the company was so far behind it was only a matter of time before it went under, I quit to save them money, it didn't help, the owner used the savings to buy himself some new Mac equipment! Point is, GT shouldn't have waited until this guy owed them $10,000, they should have a 60 day policy and you're toast. They never collected from my old boss either, he gassed himself in the basement one day, the company lasted about 3 more months until attempts to find a buyer proved fruitless and they suddenly shut down the servers.
Have no fear, you will see some of the large Canadian carriers go under soon I imagine.
You noticed that too eh? I stopped using ATI for serious 3D a long time ago, back in the Rage Pro days when they claimed decent 3D was coming anyday now, just keep watching for that new beta driver .... then all of a sudden, "hey, buy our Rage128 instead, it's got much better 3D anyway! Oh, and we aren't releasing another driver for that old card of yours"
I never liked their 3D anyway, their cards are great for 2D and their TV cards aren't bad, but without decent drivers they aren't worth it.
Oh yeah, I'll jump all over a deal like that, put my trust in a registrar selling registrations at just above their actual costs (they still must pay NSI $6-$6.50/yr).
... NOT!
With their cut-rate pricing I fully expect them to be around in 10 years
Anyone with any business sense knows that these guys will get themselves in trouble eventually when they are only make $2 from someone every 10 years or so.
I'm thinking of getting a couple of these, send one to my sister in England and we've got free phone calling. I likely would not be interested in the POTS ability myself.
I don't understand these US outfits and their unreal shipping charges. $26US should mean I can expect that item on my doorstep tomorrow morning.
A few companies out there aren't too bad and at least charge close to cost for shipping, but for some reason a lot think shipping to Canada is "International" and requires triple the shipping fee, often more than the cost of the item.
Yet I've had people ship me items from the US via USPS and it's less that $10US.
Shipping is what is hurting online retailers, sure the consumer doesn't mind paying a LITTLE extra, but it must be reasonable, when the actual shipping cost is $8 there shouldn't be a $18 "handling" fee on there too. Isn't the profit margin in the products themselves enough? You're already at an advantage in many cases since you no longer need an expensive retail store front.
Well said, I feel the same way, this is getting pathetic. I have a ton of old CD's sitting here and don't listen to now, maybe one day I'll get around to ripping the good tracks from them and making one cd, but basically I have stopped buying music because most of the recent shit produced has the listening lifespan equal to the shelf life of a quart of milk in a desert.
At the same time I understand the greed involved here, the suits at the top don't want to see change, mostly because it might put them out of work entirely.
Personally I get by with more than 100 channels of commercial free audio on DMX (from Canada and the US), Galaxie (Canada) and Music Choice.
In the vehicle FM is fine for me, in our area the dial is chock full of stations to choose from.
Of course these are both areas the record companies want to get rid of as well, if these folks have their way you'll pay for every time you even listen to the media in question.
All of this just proves how fucked up mankind really is after all, I mean this is really all a petty issue in the larger scheme of life but overall it's a step backwards in our society as this will eventually hurt the artists these corps were formed to promote in the first place.
I think our sun should do the universe a favour and go supernova now, frankly mankind is too fucked up to be of much use anyway. We're all just gonna sit here and fight each other until our planet dies anyway, why prolong the misery we're causing to the other species we share our world with.
I'm using SpamAssassin for my hosting clients. Also running the mail through F-Prot for some basic virus protection.