If MS distributed just a kernel, a process scheduler, IO and Memory managers, You could have a 'usuable' Windows distro made entirely of freeware or Open Source software.
To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a.xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the.xxx TDL.
And you're an idiot.
Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.
First of all, you fail to make a distinction between real porn sites-- individuals and companies interested in selling explicit material to consenting adults-- and scam sites who are interested in trying to get as many eyeballs as they can, frequently with pornographic material.
Real pornographers know that they are running location-independant businesses. That's why in the real world the best strip clubs and adult bookstores and novelty shops will always be outside whatever city limits you happen to live inside. They have less to worry about in the way of police interference, angry neighbors, and intolerant church groups.
The intelligent ones *want* to be segregated. Because it is considered a 'vice', Porn is a unique business in that its customers will come to it rather than the other way around. Pornographers are interested in making money, not corrupting your children or your neighborhood's youth, regardless of what your religious leaders. They don't make money unless they sell to consenting adults. They make money off people who know what they want and know where to find it, and not people who 'browse' like you would in a department store.
By creating an.XXX or.adult TLD, Pornographers get all the benifits of opening a store five miles outside the city limits while at the same time giving those who are intolerant to porn every opportunity to shut them out of the 'communities'. Parasitic scammers who try to lure people to illigitamate sites would quickly find themselves without the stronger, legitimate pornographers to shield their activity, and fade away.
Now, I'm not saying that Porno is not a dirty, manipulative business without a lot of problems. Most of that, however, is due to the same kind of neglect and intolerance that ICANN showed during the TLD fiasco. Look at the state of Nevada, which has legalized sex work to a great deal. Adult actors, models, and prostitutes in that state not only make more money than sex workers anywhere else in the world, but are also better protected from rape, STD's, harrassment, and abuse. If ICANN had approved the XXX tld, I can't help but think that would have had a little of the same effect on internet porn.
Hmmm... The 'This is my ball and I'll take it away' defense worked really well... when I was 5 years old.
It's especially too good to be true if you consider that the only way for people to use Microsoft products after such an act would be to pirate them.
Just think, Microsoft would be in the wonderful position of having to actively persuade people to switch to other operating systems so that they wouldn't be using Windows.
Heheheh... Don't see that happening any time soon. It's a tactic. Nothing more.
The more star systems will slip through its fingers.
(+1 Bad Starwars Reference)
The RIAA is 'investigating' this company? Regardless of Brilliant Digital Entertainment's ethics or motives, the RIAA is not a governmental body and is acting like it has the power of subpeona.
All this is going to do is create new Morpheuses. Sure, they went to Gnutella rather than FT, but ended up contributing source back to the Gnutella project. It may be mostly GUI source, but User Interface is something that most open source projects are usually a little lacking in. I haven't looked at the source yet, but maybe they added one or two improvements into the way Gnutella files are transmitted that will now make it into other open source filesharing projects.
By forcing their 'enemies' underground, the RIAA is cutting off its own fingers.
Three cheers for Nullsoft for creating an unstoppable monster! Three cheers for all the people who've built and expanded upon Gnutella ever since, including Morpheus.
Microsoft employees paid huge amounts of income tax, the sale of their products generated huge amounts of sales tax and their business operations are huge tax base (property, licenses, etc.) The revenue generated for the government from MS far exceeds that coming from VA Linux/Software, corporate tax or no.
This is just a function of the size of Microsoft's employee base.
Take another huge company like... say... Sony. While they do a lot of closed-source development... usually through subsidaries (Verant/Everquest for example)... they've flirted with using Linux on various pieces of hardware they produce. Say they started making a push to make all Sony software internal or external Linux/GPL compatible. They have that same huge employee base paying taxes both in the U.S. and overseas despite the fact they're making Open Source software.
In 2001, MS payed *no* income tax because they were able to deduct the value of employee stock options and 401k plans.
Re:Larry Combest is a Jerkoff
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
A Texas politician? He probably doesn't even know what Copyright is. Shouldn't he be busy drafting beef laws that make it OK to sell cow testicle as "Grade A Serloin?"
You kidding? Texans like this consider 'Calf Fries' to be a step up from Sirloin.
IIRC, Combest supported the Texas Cattleman's association when they sued Oprah Winfrey for slander after she expressed negative sentiments about beef production on national TV.
Larry Combest is a Jerkoff
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
Anyone live in the Texas Panhandle?
I sent my representative a angry letter about the SSSCA and got told how important it was to protect the nation's intellectual property against evil theives like Napster and P2P
Translation: Hollywood has been very good to me, so I'm going to continue bending you over to get play from them.
a quick search for 'Case Mods' down at the bottom of the screen turns up dozens of subjects that have more to do with court cases than PC cases.
That said, 99% of the casemods, radical overclockings, unique PC hacks I read come from slashdot. Why not make a 'Hardware Hacks' (Suggestion: Hacksaw Icon) area that deals with things like this and then keep the Hardware area pure for people who are interested in reading about new kinds of hardware, or the recent 'Intel likes DDR Ram' stories we've been seeing.
Google rocks. Go to images.google.com. Turn the adult content filter off. Type in thongs. You very quickly get to see this image, which frankly, made my day.
It is a sticky subject... and one not many of the posters here seem to gather.
Most human traits are defined by a combination of the two. This is evident in the 'athletic build but lazy' scenario I laid out. My father is a guard at a government facility. He works out ever day in order to stay in terrorist-proof shape for his job. He is lean, mean, and at nearly 50, could beat most comers in a street brawl.
I have the exact same build as my father, but I've always been significantly more sedentary, preferring to write, make art... other sit-down stuff. I try to watch my diet but probably eat more fat and cholesterol than I should. I could still use to lose a few pounds.
We have very similiar builds, my father and I, but he has done strenuous work since he was a child whereas I have not. If I were to work damn hard for the next two and a half decades, I *might* be able to approach the kind of shape he is in at 50, but never quite make the same levels he does.
The argument for mental tasks is a little more clear cut. It's been evidenced by data collected in a few of the more famous child abuse cases that children who are isolate, not exposed to language at all (spoken or sign), slowly lose the ability to use language until about age 14 when they will probably never speak (or sign) coherently. They lose the ability to develop many higher reasoning skills at the same time. Even if a person has an affinity for language, if their brain is put in a vacuum like this, nature determines the outcome.
The most famous case of this kind of depravtion is the 'Genie' story. In 1970 young girl of about 13 was found chained to a toilet in her grandparent's back room. She had had little or no experience with anything other than that room her entire life. (Outraged? If I remember correctly, the grandparents were sent away for a very long time) Despite the fact that her family had *no* history of mental illness or retardation, Genie displayed all the symptoms of either severe mental retardation, autism, or brain damage simply because her brain had nothing to develop against like any kid who hadn't suffered that kind of abuse.
Amoung her other problems, Genie couldn't... and still can't... speak coherently despite intensive tutoring and help. She lost that ability due to the poor environment.
Nature does have a siginificant role to play in determining our traits. The world around us affects us in so many myriad ways that it should not be discounted as so many of the posters replying to this have stated.
Not only the diseases, but when (and if) we can pre-screen for intelligence, strenght, certain characteristics, won't we be creating a 'super human-race'?
Very simply, you can't screen for most human traits. Period. Sorry, go to the back of the line.
Besides the fact that most traits are caused not by one gene, but by the interaction of dozens of genes and the proteins they create, you have to consider that almost all human traits develop in accordance to someone's environment.
Thusly, if Albert Einstein had been raised in an environment where he wasn't exposed to mathematics or the written word until he was 30 years old, he probably wouldn't come across quite as bright as he was. If he had been raised in an environment where he was not exposed to speech-- The so called 'Forbidden Expirement'-- he probably would come across as being pretty retarded.
If Michael Jordan had not had the opportunity to work hard in his youth and become athletic, he probably wouldn't be the sports superstar he is today. He couldn't just 'develop' those traits and skills later in life.
Say you're an intelligent but pudgy software engineer/couch potato type and you actually manage to get the doctors to screen embryos and sperm most likely to create an athletic individual. If the child created may have a better chance of becoming atheltic, but if he follows his parents example, he will probably be just as pudgy.
Now the one trait that you *can* screen for is gender, mostly because the relationship between X and Y chromosomes has been fairly well observed even if the science behind all the related protein interactions has not been fully plumbed yet.
This raises some scary possibilities, especially in parts of the world where reproduction is controlled by government (China) or families are encouraged to have male children. (Quite a bit of the world, actually.) Having a gender imbalance will do a number on women's rights.
All doctors did was select an unaltered embryo that had a better chance of developing into a healthy adult. They didn't change the embryo in any way, nor did they give any advantage to the mother or embryo.
Some doctors encourage people who are at risk of genetically transmitted diseases to have their unborn fetuses screened for those same diseases so that they have the option of aborting early in the pregnancy.
This merely takes that practice a step further, while eliminating the controversy of abortion.
I am an artist and an amature writer. I own a domain and pay for hosting service. I host my artwork, which I have made available for free download, on my website. I also host both my fiction and my non-fiction on the same website. I pay a certain amount every year for domain and hosting.
I also pay a certain amount per year for cable modem service. If I wasn't afraid of the privacy implications of running a file-trading service such as Morpheus, Kazaa, etc... I could host those files on my own cable modem connection rather than pay through the ass for domain and hosting.
Hmm... An intelligent statement coming from Redmond?
While I'm certain a lot of this is about leveraging Microsoft to control the 'next' major form of web transport, the engineer in question is right about one thing... HTTP is overused.
A lot of P2P stuff could be a lot more efficiently and resource-considerate if it were to use UDP-style transmission like email and some online games rather than 'Virtual Circuit' style TCP connections. Another sweetener to add in the pot is to use Parchive (PAR) style error correction on your datagram packects in order to be more tolerant to faults, etc...
sender transmits udp0-6, upd7 is lost by receiver, receiver requests par(0,6), sender transmits, receiver self-generates upd7, sender transmits upd8-999 with no further par requests without ever trying to figure out if receiver got all those packets.
It's async. It's resource considerate, and it could do a great deal to ease download over p2p architecture.
If this worked the way it was supposed to in the US, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Pay probably 5$ more than you normally would when buying any kind of PCB product.
Not every piece of hardware is reusable and needs to be disposed. For Example: A long, long time ago, I bought a logitech hand scanner. It came with a IO card. Not a SCSI card, mind, but a proprietary logitech IO card. Now that the scanner's dead, there's no reason to not throw the card in the trash except for environmental concerns. If I could have that card recycled, I would.
Examine this behavior in your selves....
on
Pilot of My Soul
·
· Score: 2
The example they give is the motorist who drives his car to work, paying attention to the drive only when something unusual happens.
Open your browser window, be it IE, Moz, Konq, Opera, etc...
What's your first reaction?
Depending on how you browse, you quickly start looking for the button that says 'Slashdot' or 'Google'. You get a quick hit of dopamine for finding what you want, even if you just closed your browser window a few seconds ago.
What happens if the site you want doesn't work? Rather than not worrying about it, you reload a few times, don't you? Like the angry monkey wondering why the dispenser isn't giving him his juice, you suddenly get a shock by getting your dopamine level reduced.
You can browse on autopilot, just like you drive. If I'm sleepy in the morning, I'll open CNN, Washington post, Acid Reflux, Exploitation Now, Penny-Arcade, and Sluggy freelance without ever reading what's there. Takes me a few minutes to realize I'm on autopilot, but once I do I go back and reload those pages to read their daily dose of goodness.
I recently changed the order of my 'hotlink' buttons in Moz. Now, if I'm not paying attention, I'll visit Wired News a few dozen times before I realize it's not the personal chat board I set up for me and a few friends.
I recently spent several weeks doing my best to convince the people in my company's marketing department that they could not start sending unsolicited commercial email to potential customers.
My arguments were the familiar reasons why USCE is so evil. Their arguments amounted to "Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
To this day, I have to tell my father-in-law about once a week that the "money-making business idea" he's found out about through a 'helpful email' is in actuality a get-rick-quick scheme, a pyramid scam or something similiar.
Scarily enough, Spam *does* work. The people in my marketing deparment all have degrees! True, that doesn't say anything about their intelligence, but they had enough common sense to pass enough tests, (or kiss enough ass) to get through college sucessfully. To the more stupid, or those unprepared to deal with blatant profiteerism-- quite a few Spams prey on the eldery, trying to get them to 'invest' their social security checks-- Spam is a deadly trap.
What's the saying? It was in an article on evolution a few weeks ago. Went something like:
"Natural selection favors those who are too stupid to use birth control."
Sailor Moon (which my wife shows to her kindergartners) is indeed toned down signifcantly for U.S. audiences. Viewers of the original via fansubs or the recently released Pioneer DVD's will note that
a. Zoicite was really a guy and Kunzite's (Malachite) gay lover.
b. All four of the inner planet senshi and Tuxedo Mask died on screen in the first season.
c. Usagi (Serena) and Mamoru (Darien) are frequently shown at his apartment early in the morning. While it's not explicit that Mamaoru is getting some underage nookie, it's not explained away either.
d. Makoto (Lita) is quite proud of her breast size and says so loudly on any number of occasions.
e. Haruka (Amara) and Michiru (Michelle) ain't cousins. Again, while there's no hot Senshi-on-Senshi action, series creator Naoko Takeuchi has confirmed that Sailors Uranus and Neptune are lesbian lovers.
f. In the fifth and final season of Sailor Moon which has yet to make it to NA shores, Sailor Moon fights along side the Sailor Starlights, three transsexual Sailor Senshi from a solar system far away. They're male pop singers by day and leather- S&M-gear-clad fighters for justice by night.
Explain that one away. I dare you... Sadly, that's probably the reason we'll never see Sailor Stars on U.S. TV.
The list of cuts is too numerous to mention. Even the most casual violence to humans, like all the scenes where Rei rather justly slaps the shit out of Usagi, are cut.
Say you're running a 1.5 ghz machine and browsing the web. Chances are, even if you're playing MP3's in the background, you're using less than 5% of your processor cycles. If you could trade another 50% of those cycles you're not otherwise using for the ability to kill ads or for access to a restricted site, Would you?
(I can see it now. 50 to 100 years from now, the Porn Website Coalition has won a Nobel prize for creating a vast distributed network for math intensive problems....)
The problem with this model is that the implimentation of Javascript is slow and horrendously messy. It's brutally inefficient for anything other than the most minor effects carried out in a browser window. I shudder to think of what most browsers would do, given a math-intensive task. FFT's in Javascript anyone?
Unlike the author, I think that Java and/or ActiveX applets will probably see this sort of exploitation first, since they're easier to tune speed out of.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously wonder what people (the nine states included) would do if MS stripped Windows down until it was just the OS itself. Bye-bye, calc,
Google search lists dozens of freeware calculators, many of them promoted as 'Windows Calculator Replacements'.
notepad,
http://www.textpad.com Not freeware, but damn close to being worth the money. There are dozens of freeware 'Notetab Replacements' out there.
wordpad,
http://www.openoffice.org/
solitaire,
http://www.fdepot.com/sol.asp
ftp, telnet,
Both blatantly ripped BSD code. The original BSD code is in active use and can be ported to Win32 or compiled for use with Cygwin
minesweeper,
http://freewarejava.com/applets/games.shtml
icons, windows, menus...
It's arguable that these are part of the operating system, just like the windowing systems on Linux are part of a 'usuable' Linux Distro. That said...
There are many Windows UI and File Manager interface replacement projects, many of which are open source.
If MS distributed just a kernel, a process scheduler, IO and Memory managers, You could have a 'usuable' Windows distro made entirely of freeware or Open Source software.
To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a .xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the .xxx TDL.
.XXX or .adult TLD, Pornographers get all the benifits of opening a store five miles outside the city limits while at the same time giving those who are intolerant to porn every opportunity to shut them out of the 'communities'. Parasitic scammers who try to lure people to illigitamate sites would quickly find themselves without the stronger, legitimate pornographers to shield their activity, and fade away.
And you're an idiot.
Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.
First of all, you fail to make a distinction between real porn sites-- individuals and companies interested in selling explicit material to consenting adults-- and scam sites who are interested in trying to get as many eyeballs as they can, frequently with pornographic material.
Real pornographers know that they are running location-independant businesses. That's why in the real world the best strip clubs and adult bookstores and novelty shops will always be outside whatever city limits you happen to live inside. They have less to worry about in the way of police interference, angry neighbors, and intolerant church groups.
The intelligent ones *want* to be segregated. Because it is considered a 'vice', Porn is a unique business in that its customers will come to it rather than the other way around. Pornographers are interested in making money, not corrupting your children or your neighborhood's youth, regardless of what your religious leaders. They don't make money unless they sell to consenting adults. They make money off people who know what they want and know where to find it, and not people who 'browse' like you would in a department store.
By creating an
Now, I'm not saying that Porno is not a dirty, manipulative business without a lot of problems. Most of that, however, is due to the same kind of neglect and intolerance that ICANN showed during the TLD fiasco. Look at the state of Nevada, which has legalized sex work to a great deal. Adult actors, models, and prostitutes in that state not only make more money than sex workers anywhere else in the world, but are also better protected from rape, STD's, harrassment, and abuse. If ICANN had approved the XXX tld, I can't help but think that would have had a little of the same effect on internet porn.
Nah, that sounds just too good to be true
Hmmm... The 'This is my ball and I'll take it away' defense worked really well... when I was 5 years old.
It's especially too good to be true if you consider that the only way for people to use Microsoft products after such an act would be to pirate them.
Just think, Microsoft would be in the wonderful position of having to actively persuade people to switch to other operating systems so that they wouldn't be using Windows.
Heheheh... Don't see that happening any time soon. It's a tactic. Nothing more.
The more star systems will slip through its fingers.
(+1 Bad Starwars Reference)
The RIAA is 'investigating' this company? Regardless of Brilliant Digital Entertainment's ethics or motives, the RIAA is not a governmental body and is acting like it has the power of subpeona.
All this is going to do is create new Morpheuses. Sure, they went to Gnutella rather than FT, but ended up contributing source back to the Gnutella project. It may be mostly GUI source, but User Interface is something that most open source projects are usually a little lacking in. I haven't looked at the source yet, but maybe they added one or two improvements into the way Gnutella files are transmitted that will now make it into other open source filesharing projects.
By forcing their 'enemies' underground, the RIAA is cutting off its own fingers.
Three cheers for Nullsoft for creating an unstoppable monster! Three cheers for all the people who've built and expanded upon Gnutella ever since, including Morpheus.
Microsoft employees paid huge amounts of income tax, the sale of their products generated huge amounts of sales tax and their business operations are huge tax base (property, licenses, etc.) The revenue generated for the government from MS far exceeds that coming from VA Linux/Software, corporate tax or no.
This is just a function of the size of Microsoft's employee base.
Take another huge company like... say... Sony. While they do a lot of closed-source development... usually through subsidaries (Verant/Everquest for example)... they've flirted with using Linux on various pieces of hardware they produce. Say they started making a push to make all Sony software internal or external Linux/GPL compatible. They have that same huge employee base paying taxes both in the U.S. and overseas despite the fact they're making Open Source software.
And this is how they did it.
In 2001, MS payed *no* income tax because they were able to deduct the value of employee stock options and 401k plans.
A Texas politician? He probably doesn't even know what Copyright is. Shouldn't he be busy drafting beef laws that make it OK to sell cow testicle as "Grade A Serloin?"
You kidding? Texans like this consider 'Calf Fries' to be a step up from Sirloin.
IIRC, Combest supported the Texas Cattleman's association when they sued Oprah Winfrey for slander after she expressed negative sentiments about beef production on national TV.
Anyone live in the Texas Panhandle?
I sent my representative a angry letter about the SSSCA and got told how important it was to protect the nation's intellectual property against evil theives like Napster and P2P
Translation: Hollywood has been very good to me, so I'm going to continue bending you over to get play from them.
a quick search for 'Case Mods' down at the bottom of the screen turns up dozens of subjects that have more to do with court cases than PC cases.
That said, 99% of the casemods, radical overclockings, unique PC hacks I read come from slashdot. Why not make a 'Hardware Hacks' (Suggestion: Hacksaw Icon) area that deals with things like this and then keep the Hardware area pure for people who are interested in reading about new kinds of hardware, or the recent 'Intel likes DDR Ram' stories we've been seeing.
Google rocks. Go to images.google.com. Turn the adult content filter off. Type in thongs. You very quickly get to see this image, which frankly, made my day.
It is a sticky subject... and one not many of the posters here seem to gather.
Most human traits are defined by a combination of the two. This is evident in the 'athletic build but lazy' scenario I laid out. My father is a guard at a government facility. He works out ever day in order to stay in terrorist-proof shape for his job. He is lean, mean, and at nearly 50, could beat most comers in a street brawl.
I have the exact same build as my father, but I've always been significantly more sedentary, preferring to write, make art... other sit-down stuff. I try to watch my diet but probably eat more fat and cholesterol than I should. I could still use to lose a few pounds.
We have very similiar builds, my father and I, but he has done strenuous work since he was a child whereas I have not. If I were to work damn hard for the next two and a half decades, I *might* be able to approach the kind of shape he is in at 50, but never quite make the same levels he does.
The argument for mental tasks is a little more clear cut. It's been evidenced by data collected in a few of the more famous child abuse cases that children who are isolate, not exposed to language at all (spoken or sign), slowly lose the ability to use language until about age 14 when they will probably never speak (or sign) coherently. They lose the ability to develop many higher reasoning skills at the same time. Even if a person has an affinity for language, if their brain is put in a vacuum like this, nature determines the outcome.
The most famous case of this kind of depravtion is the 'Genie' story. In 1970 young girl of about 13 was found chained to a toilet in her grandparent's back room. She had had little or no experience with anything other than that room her entire life. (Outraged? If I remember correctly, the grandparents were sent away for a very long time) Despite the fact that her family had *no* history of mental illness or retardation, Genie displayed all the symptoms of either severe mental retardation, autism, or brain damage simply because her brain had nothing to develop against like any kid who hadn't suffered that kind of abuse.
Amoung her other problems, Genie couldn't... and still can't... speak coherently despite intensive tutoring and help. She lost that ability due to the poor environment.
Nature does have a siginificant role to play in determining our traits. The world around us affects us in so many myriad ways that it should not be discounted as so many of the posters replying to this have stated.
Not only the diseases, but when (and if) we can pre-screen for intelligence, strenght, certain characteristics, won't we be creating a 'super human-race'?
Very simply, you can't screen for most human traits. Period. Sorry, go to the back of the line.
Besides the fact that most traits are caused not by one gene, but by the interaction of dozens of genes and the proteins they create, you have to consider that almost all human traits develop in accordance to someone's environment.
Thusly, if Albert Einstein had been raised in an environment where he wasn't exposed to mathematics or the written word until he was 30 years old, he probably wouldn't come across quite as bright as he was. If he had been raised in an environment where he was not exposed to speech-- The so called 'Forbidden Expirement'-- he probably would come across as being pretty retarded.
If Michael Jordan had not had the opportunity to work hard in his youth and become athletic, he probably wouldn't be the sports superstar he is today. He couldn't just 'develop' those traits and skills later in life.
Say you're an intelligent but pudgy software engineer/couch potato type and you actually manage to get the doctors to screen embryos and sperm most likely to create an athletic individual. If the child created may have a better chance of becoming atheltic, but if he follows his parents example, he will probably be just as pudgy.
Now the one trait that you *can* screen for is gender, mostly because the relationship between X and Y chromosomes has been fairly well observed even if the science behind all the related protein interactions has not been fully plumbed yet.
This raises some scary possibilities, especially in parts of the world where reproduction is controlled by government (China) or families are encouraged to have male children. (Quite a bit of the world, actually.) Having a gender imbalance will do a number on women's rights.
All doctors did was select an unaltered embryo that had a better chance of developing into a healthy adult. They didn't change the embryo in any way, nor did they give any advantage to the mother or embryo.
Some doctors encourage people who are at risk of genetically transmitted diseases to have their unborn fetuses screened for those same diseases so that they have the option of aborting early in the pregnancy.
This merely takes that practice a step further, while eliminating the controversy of abortion.
Of course, one could say we should sue all the record labels because the move to digital format itself is what's making piracy so easy. :)
*cough*.... While this may have started *quick* piracy, there are multitudinous volumes of vinyl to mp3 out there. Play, capture, encode.
I am an artist and an amature writer. I own a domain and pay for hosting service. I host my artwork, which I have made available for free download, on my website. I also host both my fiction and my non-fiction on the same website. I pay a certain amount every year for domain and hosting.
I also pay a certain amount per year for cable modem service. If I wasn't afraid of the privacy implications of running a file-trading service such as Morpheus, Kazaa, etc... I could host those files on my own cable modem connection rather than pay through the ass for domain and hosting.
My bad. Email does *not* use UDP.
Hmm... An intelligent statement coming from Redmond?
While I'm certain a lot of this is about leveraging Microsoft to control the 'next' major form of web transport, the engineer in question is right about one thing... HTTP is overused.
A lot of P2P stuff could be a lot more efficiently and resource-considerate if it were to use UDP-style transmission like email and some online games rather than 'Virtual Circuit' style TCP connections. Another sweetener to add in the pot is to use Parchive (PAR) style error correction on your datagram packects in order to be more tolerant to faults, etc...
sender transmits udp0-6, upd7 is lost by receiver, receiver requests par(0,6), sender transmits, receiver self-generates upd7, sender transmits upd8-999 with no further par requests without ever trying to figure out if receiver got all those packets.
It's async. It's resource considerate, and it could do a great deal to ease download over p2p architecture.
.nl - Netherlands, right?
If this worked the way it was supposed to in the US, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Pay probably 5$ more than you normally would when buying any kind of PCB product.
Not every piece of hardware is reusable and needs to be disposed. For Example: A long, long time ago, I bought a logitech hand scanner. It came with a IO card. Not a SCSI card, mind, but a proprietary logitech IO card. Now that the scanner's dead, there's no reason to not throw the card in the trash except for environmental concerns. If I could have that card recycled, I would.
The example they give is the motorist who drives his car to work, paying attention to the drive only when something unusual happens.
Open your browser window, be it IE, Moz, Konq, Opera, etc...
What's your first reaction?
Depending on how you browse, you quickly start looking for the button that says 'Slashdot' or 'Google'. You get a quick hit of dopamine for finding what you want, even if you just closed your browser window a few seconds ago.
What happens if the site you want doesn't work? Rather than not worrying about it, you reload a few times, don't you? Like the angry monkey wondering why the dispenser isn't giving him his juice, you suddenly get a shock by getting your dopamine level reduced.
You can browse on autopilot, just like you drive. If I'm sleepy in the morning, I'll open CNN, Washington post, Acid Reflux, Exploitation Now, Penny-Arcade, and Sluggy freelance without ever reading what's there. Takes me a few minutes to realize I'm on autopilot, but once I do I go back and reload those pages to read their daily dose of goodness.
I recently changed the order of my 'hotlink' buttons in Moz. Now, if I'm not paying attention, I'll visit Wired News a few dozen times before I realize it's not the personal chat board I set up for me and a few friends.
Who the heck buys anything off of spam.
You'd be surprised.
I recently spent several weeks doing my best to convince the people in my company's marketing department that they could not start sending unsolicited commercial email to potential customers.
My arguments were the familiar reasons why USCE is so evil. Their arguments amounted to "Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
To this day, I have to tell my father-in-law about once a week that the "money-making business idea" he's found out about through a 'helpful email' is in actuality a get-rick-quick scheme, a pyramid scam or something similiar.
Scarily enough, Spam *does* work. The people in my marketing deparment all have degrees! True, that doesn't say anything about their intelligence, but they had enough common sense to pass enough tests, (or kiss enough ass) to get through college sucessfully. To the more stupid, or those unprepared to deal with blatant profiteerism-- quite a few Spams prey on the eldery, trying to get them to 'invest' their social security checks-- Spam is a deadly trap.
What's the saying? It was in an article on evolution a few weeks ago. Went something like:
"Natural selection favors those who are too stupid to use birth control."
Sailor Moon (which my wife shows to her kindergartners) is indeed toned down signifcantly for U.S. audiences. Viewers of the original via fansubs or the recently released Pioneer DVD's will note that
a. Zoicite was really a guy and Kunzite's (Malachite) gay lover.
b. All four of the inner planet senshi and Tuxedo Mask died on screen in the first season.
c. Usagi (Serena) and Mamoru (Darien) are frequently shown at his apartment early in the morning. While it's not explicit that Mamaoru is getting some underage nookie, it's not explained away either.
d. Makoto (Lita) is quite proud of her breast size and says so loudly on any number of occasions.
e. Haruka (Amara) and Michiru (Michelle) ain't cousins. Again, while there's no hot Senshi-on-Senshi action, series creator Naoko Takeuchi has confirmed that Sailors Uranus and Neptune are lesbian lovers.
f. In the fifth and final season of Sailor Moon which has yet to make it to NA shores, Sailor Moon fights along side the Sailor Starlights, three transsexual Sailor Senshi from a solar system far away. They're male pop singers by day and leather- S&M-gear-clad fighters for justice by night.
Explain that one away. I dare you... Sadly, that's probably the reason we'll never see Sailor Stars on U.S. TV.
The list of cuts is too numerous to mention. Even the most casual violence to humans, like all the scenes where Rei rather justly slaps the shit out of Usagi, are cut.
Should TI have called it EVANGELION or something?
Man, I'd buy a handheld with an EVA or NERV branded processor so fast, it would make most geekboys' heads spin.
I can see it now, "When you need a handheld as powerful as the Magi..." or "When you need data protection strong as an AT field..."
Say you're running a 1.5 ghz machine and browsing the web. Chances are, even if you're playing MP3's in the background, you're using less than 5% of your processor cycles. If you could trade another 50% of those cycles you're not otherwise using for the ability to kill ads or for access to a restricted site, Would you?
(I can see it now. 50 to 100 years from now, the Porn Website Coalition has won a Nobel prize for creating a vast distributed network for math intensive problems....)
The problem with this model is that the implimentation of Javascript is slow and horrendously messy. It's brutally inefficient for anything other than the most minor effects carried out in a browser window. I shudder to think of what most browsers would do, given a math-intensive task. FFT's in Javascript anyone?
Unlike the author, I think that Java and/or ActiveX applets will probably see this sort of exploitation first, since they're easier to tune speed out of.
Doesn't TI know they're supposed to rename any chip for portable/handheld use so that it's an Anime reference?
*cough* Dragonball *cough*