But exactly what are they supposed to do when Bush would veto anything meaningful? Remember they need 2/3 of both the House and the Senate, they currently have 1/2 (barely), and the Republicans in the House and Senate will never vote for anything that would contradict or rein in their Great Leader in the War on Terror. That's the thing, the Republicans are getting away with merely THREATENING to Filibuster. They're not actually doing it. The Democrats aren't playing hardball. If the Republicans want to filibuster campaign reform, Iraq definancing, etc, let them do it. It would be political suicide for them. But the Democrats always flinch when the Republicans stamp their feet, so they DON'T have to do what they're threatening to.
Why do you think people hate Vista so much? It breaks more older apps... there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista. I thought the fact that you need a small supercomputer just to open Vista + Office + IE at the same time had something to do with everyone hating Vista? Or is that just me?
It really comes down to this, we'd need a constitutional amendment to change our 2 party system, and good luck getting that though congress. You'd need a united congress, which doesn't happen very often. Please show me the spot in the constitution that says this two party nightmare we have is mandated.
What you described so far would be a GODSEND. I would absolutely LOVE to see the Democrats and Republicans have to cut deals with the Libertarians and Green party. It would be even better if these deals were enforced -- if we switched to a parliamentary system.
As the first 6 years of the Bush administration showed, when 1 party has unchecked power, things break. (Someone would argue the last 7, as the Democrats idea of an opposition party is to do sternly worded finger waggling and then eek when someone growls, but I digress.)
The Bush administration doesn't speak for every Republican or Conservative in America. You might have noticed his dismal approval rating...to get that low he ticked off a lot of Republicans too. Not enough, cause they still haven't impeached him, or you know, made ANY EFFORT TO REIGN HIM IN. In fact, they're the ones fighting tooth and nail to STOP the Democrats from preventing him from giving the telecoms retroactive immunity and whatnot.
In short -- Dear Sir, I fear thou doth protest not enough.
Card counting isn't a scam, but some of the tricks they used to keep the house from twigging to what they were doing comes pretty close -- disguises, aliases, having lookouts stationed at different tables waiting for a hot deck, at which point they'd signal a team-mate to come over and law down the big bucks. None of that sounds overly disingenuous to me -- all of that sounds like standard teamwork and strategy. The casinos are just upset that someone is outsmarting them, and have enough money themselves to make an issue of it.
I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant. And both of them have epic class A freakouts when someone smart enough to see through them tries to outsmart them.
Well, spammers/squatters generally need a lot of domain names to build the fake referencing networks to game Google, so the costs would add up. A few bucks here, a few bucks there, soon, you are talking about real money.
Yes, but the way I understand it, they use a trick that lets them register domain names for a few days at a time for essentially nothing to get most of their domain names.
New modules could be sold post-launch, keeping revenue streams strong. A modular approach could also allow the company to make functionality available on a time-limited basis, potentially allowing users to 'rent' a feature if it's needed on a one-off basis. Microsoft is already testing 'pay as you go' consumer subscriptions in developing countries."
This just in: Microsoft gives us even more reasons not to upgrade past Windows XP. Film at 11.
So seagate, are they violating your patent? If so, proof please, if not, you yield all rights in case they are found to at a later date I think you may be confusing patents with trademarks. Trademarks must be actively defended, where I believe patents on the other hand can be sat on for awhile. No doubt. Otherwise we wouldn't have NEAR the kinda problems we have with Submarine Patent Trolls.
Comcast: "The FCC can bite my shiny metal ass. Nyah, nyah, nyah!!!!"
Yeah, is it just me, or did Comcast just dare the FCC to just TRY and stop them?
If they weren't ran by clueless Bush appointees I'd wager this would piss some people off. Now they'll probably just send a nasty memo to Comcast's CEO to remind his peons to be more discreet.
(I guess I should add </conspiracy-nuttery> so that people don't think I was serious.) Too late, you already created a new conspiracy theory about the alien communists of Saturn's Moon Empire.
But I'd rather see a Congressman who can write sensible legislature. He could write bills in Assembly, and they'd STILL make more sense. So wait. I point out that ASM code makes more sense then the average government bill / legal document / etc, and it's... -1 troll not +1 funny?
... Which caused a stir on digg, when they yanked all articles with that key in the text. ... Which caused them to be reposted to Digg en mass, then to half the Internet, as well as allowing us poor ol' Slashdot fogeys to laugh at all the Digg-trolls who constantly mocked Slashdot for, well, not being Digg.
They were thinking: "The patent office is ran by understaffed fools, and if we're lucky, we can sucker a few hundred thousand out of Apple, Microsoft, Creative, etc before someone shuts us down."
The RIAA and cohorts now change strategy: make massive amounts of bandwidth expensive.
They're trying to take out the mules for software groups, who spread around the warez, and the people who hoard and distribute music and movies.
And as a free bonus, it means that only THEY will be able to afford to do the digital music thing. Bye bye Indy Digital Music Labels, bye bye Indy Internet Radio, bye bye Radiohead-style "Download it and pay us directly what you want", etc.
Hey now, this is slashdot. You can't honestly expect the same technical knowledge and math skills that you see in abundance on such sites as digg!
Bah, Digg's not THAT good at math. I asked a few of them to add up the following random hex numbers and half the site freaked out: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
If you look here , it indicats that Italian courts have decided that if the content is availble in Italy, then Italian courts have jurisdiction. And now they just have to get everyone ELSE to believe that, and they'll be golden.
What is it with Italy and that, btw? First the Pope (who has as much authority as he can get people to believe he has) and now the Judges (who seemingly want everyone to believe that everyone on Earth has to obey them, presuming they've ever touched an Internet connection). Is it something in the wine?
What are they being punished for? Using a photo that Chris Gregerson willfully posted on the web? So, um. Wait.
You're honestly saying... that... by posting this photo to the web... he gave up all copyright on it? That by allowing people to see a piece of art that he created, he somehow gave up all rights to it?
Think about what you're saying carefully, because if you honestly believe that, you are a complete and utter fool.
3) "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
False. Nothing modern and creative is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant this to the public domain." Those exact words or words very much like them.
Exactly. It's for this very reason public betas/RCs are given out... for devs to make sure their software will work with the final release and to give them time to fix and test. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't Microsoft fix their OS so it doesn't break the software everyone's already using?
NAT really. Except you can't NAT a NATted connection. What happens when your ISP gets the bright idea to give you a "simulated private IP address" and charge $20 a month for one of their few remaining real ones?
What happens when server farms start having to do the same? Last I heard, two NATted clients can't talk to each other.
This article may be crying wolf, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the very real problem.
Broadband, like dialup, is subsidized by the low use casual customers. Come to think of it, so's World of Warcraft, which I wish more of those "ubers" would realize before it's too late.
There is nothing trollish in what _KiTA_ says. In fact, it's quite insightful. The "low use casual customers" are the ones who are subsidizing broadband for the rest of us. And that includes you, me, and the "college assclowns".
BTW, I specifically call out college students as assclowns as they tend to have that oh so magical combination of:
1. Ignorance 2. Entitlement Syndrome (You "owe" me a huge unlimited connection) 3. EXTREMELY high usage patterns (Napster, BRO!) 4. Arrogance.
We had SOME assclowns that were just retired people who were bored, or alpha users, but by and large it was college aged students who somehow saw nothing wrong with stealing thousands of dollars worth of music and somehow felt we owed them a 5 megabit connection (used 100% 24/7) when they were paying for a 128k connection.
Perhaps calling them "college assclowns" was a bit harsh, but you have to understand, I've been on both sides of the fence, as an ISP technician, and as a user that was overusing our service so much that the owner of the company had to come up to me and tell me to knock it off.
The myth of unlimited bandwidth is just that, a myth. I donno if my ISP was unique as it was somewhat smaller than, say, Comcast (although, we weren't going billions in debt as a business plan in hopes of being bought out later like the big boys like Comcast do, either), but our set up, well, as such:
We had a series of very large antennas with Motorola Canopy Wifi equipment and large antennas on them. At a client side, we had a Wireless bridge hooked up to a 12" antenna pointing at our tower. This setup allowed us to get about a 10 mile range out of them, give or take, which is how we solved the "last mile" problem -- we could get 128k connections out to people who won't have Cable or DSL in the next 10 years.
The problem was, we didn't actually have any way to cap people at 128k. Which means, you paid for 128k, but you got whatever the tower gave you. I usually clocked around 2 megabit myself, and I was pretty far from the tower.
The downside to this is if you were an assclown, like I myself was, you could fire up eMule, Gnutella, or Bittorrent, all of which are designed to break through bandwidth throttles by simply DDOSing the network into submission, and get 2-3megabit, guaranteed. The problem is, anyone else on that tower would be getting jack and squat.
Given that Cable works on a similar system -- a set amount of bandwidth is sent to a neighborhood, you pay for a certain minimum level of service but get whatever you actually can get from the neighborhood's pipe, etc -- I imagine that Comcast has the same problem with assclowns that we did.
Now, you have to understand, for the most part, it's not the assclowns we were upset with. Most of the initial assclowns were happy to dial it in -- for example, eMule, Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc, they're all set up out of box to open up hundreds (and in some Gnutella clients, thousands) of concurrent connections in order to break past individual connection throttles. If we contacted these guys and walked them through setting their Bittorrent to say, 1 file at a time, 30 max connections, their impact on the tower was much less than if they refused to do anything and were just going to queue up 7 or 8 thousand copies of P-diddle's latest until they got a real one off eMule.
The real problem wasn't these assclowns. Remember, I was an assclown myself. The problem was when their assclowning around caused the grandmas to notice that their internet was slow or outright offline, and when we went out to fix it, realized that they were connecting to the tower just fine, it's just that the tower's full. "Sorry, we can't do anything, just live with it... oh wait, you
Or, perhaps, modifications to theory regarding the nature of space itself. But why muck up a perfectly good theory based on observation of reality? Seems counterproductive to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Very nice! Yup. "Do no Evil" does not mean "Don't screw your opponents".
Brilliant!
What you described so far would be a GODSEND. I would absolutely LOVE to see the Democrats and Republicans have to cut deals with the Libertarians and Green party. It would be even better if these deals were enforced -- if we switched to a parliamentary system.
As the first 6 years of the Bush administration showed, when 1 party has unchecked power, things break. (Someone would argue the last 7, as the Democrats idea of an opposition party is to do sternly worded finger waggling and then eek when someone growls, but I digress.)
In short -- Dear Sir, I fear thou doth protest not enough.
I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant. And both of them have epic class A freakouts when someone smart enough to see through them tries to outsmart them.
Well, spammers/squatters generally need a lot of domain names to build the fake referencing networks to game Google, so the costs would add up. A few bucks here, a few bucks there, soon, you are talking about real money.
Yes, but the way I understand it, they use a trick that lets them register domain names for a few days at a time for essentially nothing to get most of their domain names.
"Video game...? THIS... IS... SWEDEN!"
New modules could be sold post-launch, keeping revenue streams strong. A modular approach could also allow the company to make functionality available on a time-limited basis, potentially allowing users to 'rent' a feature if it's needed on a one-off basis. Microsoft is already testing 'pay as you go' consumer subscriptions in developing countries."
This just in: Microsoft gives us even more reasons not to upgrade past Windows XP. Film at 11.
Comcast: "The FCC can bite my shiny metal ass. Nyah, nyah, nyah!!!!"
Yeah, is it just me, or did Comcast just dare the FCC to just TRY and stop them?
If they weren't ran by clueless Bush appointees I'd wager this would piss some people off. Now they'll probably just send a nasty memo to Comcast's CEO to remind his peons to be more discreet.
Weird.
... Which caused a stir on digg, when they yanked all articles with that key in the text. ... Which caused them to be reposted to Digg en mass, then to half the Internet, as well as allowing us poor ol' Slashdot fogeys to laugh at all the Digg-trolls who constantly mocked Slashdot for, well, not being Digg.What are they thinking?
They were thinking: "The patent office is ran by understaffed fools, and if we're lucky, we can sucker a few hundred thousand out of Apple, Microsoft, Creative, etc before someone shuts us down."
The RIAA and cohorts now change strategy: make massive amounts of bandwidth expensive.
They're trying to take out the mules for software groups, who spread around the warez, and the people who hoard and distribute music and movies.
And as a free bonus, it means that only THEY will be able to afford to do the digital music thing. Bye bye Indy Digital Music Labels, bye bye Indy Internet Radio, bye bye Radiohead-style "Download it and pay us directly what you want", etc.
Brilliant. Dirty as all getout, but brilliant.
Hey now, this is slashdot. You can't honestly expect the same technical knowledge and math skills that you see in abundance on such sites as digg!
Bah, Digg's not THAT good at math. I asked a few of them to add up the following random hex numbers and half the site freaked out:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
What is it with Italy and that, btw? First the Pope (who has as much authority as he can get people to believe he has) and now the Judges (who seemingly want everyone to believe that everyone on Earth has to obey them, presuming they've ever touched an Internet connection). Is it something in the wine?
You're honestly saying... that... by posting this photo to the web... he gave up all copyright on it? That by allowing people to see a piece of art that he created, he somehow gave up all rights to it?
Think about what you're saying carefully, because if you honestly believe that, you are a complete and utter fool.
3) "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
False. Nothing modern and creative is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant this to the public domain." Those exact words or words very much like them.
Fool, educate thyself.
NAT really. Except you can't NAT a NATted connection. What happens when your ISP gets the bright idea to give you a "simulated private IP address" and charge $20 a month for one of their few remaining real ones?
What happens when server farms start having to do the same? Last I heard, two NATted clients can't talk to each other.
This article may be crying wolf, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the very real problem.
Imagine that you are one of those sick ones. I don't get it, I have no problem with him being one of the sick ones.
There is nothing trollish in what _KiTA_ says. In fact, it's quite insightful. The "low use casual customers" are the ones who are subsidizing broadband for the rest of us. And that includes you, me, and the "college assclowns".
BTW, I specifically call out college students as assclowns as they tend to have that oh so magical combination of:
1. Ignorance
2. Entitlement Syndrome (You "owe" me a huge unlimited connection)
3. EXTREMELY high usage patterns (Napster, BRO!)
4. Arrogance.
We had SOME assclowns that were just retired people who were bored, or alpha users, but by and large it was college aged students who somehow saw nothing wrong with stealing thousands of dollars worth of music and somehow felt we owed them a 5 megabit connection (used 100% 24/7) when they were paying for a 128k connection.
Perhaps calling them "college assclowns" was a bit harsh, but you have to understand, I've been on both sides of the fence, as an ISP technician, and as a user that was overusing our service so much that the owner of the company had to come up to me and tell me to knock it off.
The myth of unlimited bandwidth is just that, a myth. I donno if my ISP was unique as it was somewhat smaller than, say, Comcast (although, we weren't going billions in debt as a business plan in hopes of being bought out later like the big boys like Comcast do, either), but our set up, well, as such:
We had a series of very large antennas with Motorola Canopy Wifi equipment and large antennas on them. At a client side, we had a Wireless bridge hooked up to a 12" antenna pointing at our tower. This setup allowed us to get about a 10 mile range out of them, give or take, which is how we solved the "last mile" problem -- we could get 128k connections out to people who won't have Cable or DSL in the next 10 years.
The problem was, we didn't actually have any way to cap people at 128k. Which means, you paid for 128k, but you got whatever the tower gave you. I usually clocked around 2 megabit myself, and I was pretty far from the tower.
The downside to this is if you were an assclown, like I myself was, you could fire up eMule, Gnutella, or Bittorrent, all of which are designed to break through bandwidth throttles by simply DDOSing the network into submission, and get 2-3megabit, guaranteed. The problem is, anyone else on that tower would be getting jack and squat.
Given that Cable works on a similar system -- a set amount of bandwidth is sent to a neighborhood, you pay for a certain minimum level of service but get whatever you actually can get from the neighborhood's pipe, etc -- I imagine that Comcast has the same problem with assclowns that we did.
Now, you have to understand, for the most part, it's not the assclowns we were upset with. Most of the initial assclowns were happy to dial it in -- for example, eMule, Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc, they're all set up out of box to open up hundreds (and in some Gnutella clients, thousands) of concurrent connections in order to break past individual connection throttles. If we contacted these guys and walked them through setting their Bittorrent to say, 1 file at a time, 30 max connections, their impact on the tower was much less than if they refused to do anything and were just going to queue up 7 or 8 thousand copies of P-diddle's latest until they got a real one off eMule.
The real problem wasn't these assclowns. Remember, I was an assclown myself. The problem was when their assclowning around caused the grandmas to notice that their internet was slow or outright offline, and when we went out to fix it, realized that they were connecting to the tower just fine, it's just that the tower's full. "Sorry, we can't do anything, just live with it... oh wait, you