I just took out the old ATA to try to upgrade the software on it and get it to work with Asterisk [asteriskpbx.com]. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to reset it to defaults as it won't let you do anything at all until it finds the Gatekeeper that is programmed into it.
Check the Cisco site - I was able to find the reset procedure there a few weeks ago.
"The lawsuit also demands that buyers and sellers, who use aliases in eBay transactions, register their screen names with the state of California as fictitious business names, and that eBay be forced to collect state sales tax."
Is this an underhanded way of getting ebay to pay tax? And the rest of it a smoke screen?
Nope, exactly the opposite.
The sales tax thing is a way of putting pressure on eBay to settle; this is a classic crooked lawyer blackmail tactic (go ahead and sue me, Grace; you're a disgrace to the profession and this is the sort of barratry that would see its perpetrator disbarred in more genteel times). It's potentially far more costly to eBay than any judgment they could reasonably expect to pay for the bogus libel claim. eBay throws him a bone, he stops making noise about the sales tax, everyone signs the papers and goes home.
When will the ISPs start getting off their respecitve behinds and start doing something about this?
Never, I hope. When nimda was going around, my DSL provider blocked port 80 and never unblocked it - and it's what, a year later now? That's resulted in my being unable to access my home computer from a variety of kiosks, etc., that don't allow selecting alternate ports.
If the ISPs do anything, they should be setting up rules that catch probes from live worms and then disconnect the specific lines from which they originated.
If Israel ceases to exist, will the common people suddenly decide to overthrow the Saudi monarchy that prevents the people from deciding if they should live under strict islamic law?
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but just to make it clear:
The monarchy in Saudi Arabia - for which I otherwise have very little sympathy - is the only thing seriously standing in the way between the medium-strict version of sharia in place now, and a full-on hardcore cleritocracy of a sort that would send those lightweight weekend jihadis from the Taliban and revolutionary Iran whimpering to their mommies.
How would I know I _really_ downloaded a cert from your site? How would I know my HTTP connection wasn't hijacked?
In the same way you know that the Verisign cert installed on a Windows machine by Dell wasn't compromised.
Not the same at all.
If the certificate in my Dell machine had been compromised, either it was a random one-off, in which case the likelihood of it affecting me is infinitessimal (how would the attacker guess who the machine would be delivered to and which https:// site they would visit first?) . . . or it happened on a whole run of machines, in which case it would have very quickly become obvious (because all my fellow consumers' attempts to visit https:// sites would have brought up certificate-invalid dialogs, and someone would have called Dell, and there would have been media reports and a product recall).
By contrast, a man-in-the-middle attack against your little web site need not attract anyone's attention, and, with a little knowledge about your movements and the visit patterns of your existing users, could easily go on unnoticed indefinitely.
I'm wondering if the NYT reporter is mistaken or the telcos are intentionally telling people incorrectly to dial 1+... so it's a long distance call -- different rules, different pricing structure, etc.
If your intimation is that dialing 1+ would result in being billed for what's otherwise a local call, that's incorrect. That would be a tariff violation anywhere in the USA.
In any case, it's been a long time since the presence or absence (or requirement) of a leading 1 has had any predictable correspondence to a call's chargeability. Some cities/states it does, others it doesn't. For at least 10 years there have been plenty of places with non-local 7-digit calls as well as with local 11-digit calls.
It's just this tedious micro-centricity that all you earthlings have. Fact is, universes are where the action is. Distinctive individual humans and their houses and telephones are comparatively few. A given telephone number is repeated in endless parallel universes.
This of course is why the transition to infinite-digit dialing is inevitable, and you might as well start getting used to it. I believe the FCC has a working group devoted to the issue, but they've spent the past 9 years typing all the digits of example phone number into their PowerPoint presentation and show no signs of finishing anytime soon.
I was actually wondering why they didn't just start new area codes in states just for pagers and cell phones. That would've saved everyone a LOT of headaches
They did. It's called 917. Wasn't enough; New York City is a crowded place.
When I ride my bike in a downtown area where there are lots of cars parked on the side of the street, I get on the sidewalk and ride slowly.
The reason is that I can't rely on the drivers watching before they slam open a car door.
You're right about car doors being a hazard but the way to deal with that is to ride a safe distance from the parked cars. If you find cars are passing you too close in the lane, then ride just to the left of the center of the lane - that gives you lots of space and people will use the other lane to pass (or wait, if it's the only lane).
Sidewalks are very dangerous places to ride unless you're at a granny pace.
Technically, in a lot of cities, bicycles are not allowed on the sidewalks either, but most of the time it is not enforced because those who tend to ride bikes on the sidewalks are kids, and its safer for them to be off the road.
No it's not, unless they're just learning how to ride and staying in residential areas with no pedestrians, buildings well set back, and no shrubs or bushes near the street. The sidewalk is a minefield of blind spots, cars emerging from parking structures, people emerging from buildings, uneven surfaces, hard-to-see low obstacles, and erratic pedestrian behavior.
Riding on the sidewalk is one of the most dangerous things to do - not only for yourself, but for others as well.
The reason police don't go after sidewalk cyclists is because they're mainly endangering only themselves (except in crowded downtown areas, where they often do go after them) and because it isn't worth the grief.
It's hardly a conflict of interest. This challenge wasn't to the notion of copyright, it was to an extention that occurs after the original author is dead.
Unless Clarence Thomas is dead, and is coming close to being dead for 70 years, I don't see how he has any personal interest in the outcome.
The value of the book to the publishers depends on how long they'll be able to extract revenue from it. The longer copyright lasts, the more potential for reprint, serial, motion picture, musical, comic book, and other revenues (some of these, I suspect, are more likely than others)
Prolonging the copyright term makes his contract more valuable to the publisher, and hence makes them willing to pay him more money up front.
That's one angle. The other is the possibility that the book deal was just a payoff - that they have no expectation to make their money back on sales of that title, but that the industry funneled money through HarperCollins to help ensure a favorable outcome to this Court decision, thus helping them maximize revenue over the long term. This one is more far-fetched, but worse things have happened, and let's face it, Thomas is smart, but no paragon of virtue. Of all the people sitting on the Court, he's the one I wouldn't put either one of these past.
ALLLL ABOOARD! NEXT STOP AMERIKA! "Paper's Please." "Have your Paper's ready please!"
I fear this terrible future, where our cherished letter 'C' has been replaced with the barbaric 'K', and where the iron fist of oppression scatters spurious apostrophes throughout the land.
So, an Author does not have the right to own the novel they spent years writing because they based it in something, or on som amalgomation of things they have taken in over their lives and spun them into a story?
Sure he does. But his family isn't him.
J.R.R. Tolkien's family doesn't have the right to own copyright on the Lord of the Ring's. Why? Why should his work become public domain? What gives you the right to it?
What gives his family the right to it? They didn't write it. He earned money with the books, and passed that on to them, and they have every right to it. That's where "right" stops. After that they're just guileless beneficiaries of a system designed to enrich corporations, not families of authors. They can write their own books if they want.
If I own a store, I can pass the physical assets on to my family, but when I die, they have to come up with the intangibles (goodwill, friendly chat with customers, ongoing interaction with the broader public) on their own.
If I'm on a basketball team, and I die, my family doesn't get "rights" to my starting center position. They just inherit my money.
Having lived in Maine, Pennsylvania, Ecuador, and Washington, DC I can say with confidence that a $3 burrito can be had easily in any of those places (except Ecuador where no food item costs that much except in upscale establishments).
Okay, where do I go in DC to find a burrito? Anything edible would be fine, let alone for $3. Burrito Brothers? I could make a more flavorful burrito out of old newspapers(*), and they're $5.50. Chipotle aka McDonalds? Slightly more taste, but same price. That stand on K St & 15th? It's open for 15 minutes a day, the $3 burrito is the size of a 'D' battery, and it's just an old tortilla full of rice and cinnamon.
I've been prowling the streets of DC for years in search of decent tex-mex, so I am going to be very excited to see what you've got to share.
(*) Not only do Burrito Brothers' burritos taste like Wonder Bread soaked in tepid water, but you can use a half gallon of their "hot" sauce and it'll still have less kick than a grape soda.
The fact that we ever spent money researching weapons which provided marginal (if any) strategic advantage at the cost of the potential for vast horror beyond compare in human history, has consequences we'll have to live with forever.
Whether we say we were doing it in order to maintain parity with a potential aggressor or anything else, it's unjustifiable. The Soviet Union has never - to my knowledge - developed a biological agent which provided a reasonable long term value proposition in any conceivable battle scenario, so it's really not worth worrying about except in the context of a madman at the controls, in which case nuclear weapons were trouble enough.
So yes, in my opinion, our bad. Once these things are created, they can't be un-created. And if two people on either side of a line are creating them, each new one you create leads the other person to go back the lab and create a worse one. Be man enough to stand fast at 1000% horrible while the other guy moves ahead to 1001% horrible and you can stop it where it is.
It's not published in Popular Mechanics, it's published in internal documents which - over the space of 40 years - make it out one way or another.
Additionally, people involved in the process share bits and pieces with others who re-assemble the chain of enquiry and publish their own summaries. This is how so much documentation on constructing nuclear weapons has become public.
I've lived in Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and anyone who mentions them both in one breath is insane. Saudi Arabia is a society where religious police patrol the streets looking for and beating people who don't go to prayers, who keep their stores open or use pay phones during the 5 daily prayer periods, or who are women and show their ankles or noses. It's a country where government agents hang around in the mosques listening for rabblerousers, who are summarily dragged off for interrogation.
Singapore, on the other hand, is basically what you get if you combine the social conservatism and corporate-centricity of the USA with the ridiculous libel laws of the UK. It's far closer to the USA than it is to Saudi Arabia.
And the big difference is, in Singapore, people want it that way. They have one of the world's highest income levels, they have safety, they have long life and good health, and they have enough freedom not to feel stifled. One of the greatest achievements is that there's basically no sectarian trouble despite significant Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu populations all sharing a small and dense space. Any number of polls has turned up time and time again that the vast majority wouldn't change a thing.
Singapore is effectively a one-party state. In part that's because only a minority have wanted change. It's also because the PAP is aggressive in its use of libel action to silence non-member candidates who make too much noise.
Personally, coming from a tradition where freedom of expression is a cherished core social value, I find that uncomfortable. But it doesn't change the fact that it works for Singapore. And it's not the sort of country where people would feel like they couldn't complain to me because they'd get taken away by the secret police.
Anyway, by conflating these - though the material online was too thin to really be able to get to the bottom of their evidence - they seem to elide over the likely fact that the internet's open expression is a far greater threat to a regime like Saudi Arabia, which is unpopular anyway - than to one like Singapore's. Without relatively complacent countries like Singapore and UAE to soften the mix, I doubt their thesis would stand. Additionally, the inclusion of countries like Burma and to some extent Vietnam, where internet is a non-factor in general society, clouds their point further.
Well, when you're all getting killed by muslim extremeists using Ricin and Anthrax.. tell me how evil the USA is ok?
Why not think back to who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to weaponize ricin and anthrax in the first place, resulting in published data on how to effectively deliver them and on which strains had the highest effectiveness (i.e., fatality)? Without that US taxpayer-funded work, the threat wouldn't be there in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Check the Cisco site - I was able to find the reset procedure there a few weeks ago.
That would help against the attacks that can be pulled off using spoofed source addresses, but I'd guess that's a minority.
In any case, why would someone conducting a DDOS care if the source addresses were spoofed? It's not their address being used, it's their patsies'.
Nope, exactly the opposite.
The sales tax thing is a way of putting pressure on eBay to settle; this is a classic crooked lawyer blackmail tactic (go ahead and sue me, Grace; you're a disgrace to the profession and this is the sort of barratry that would see its perpetrator disbarred in more genteel times). It's potentially far more costly to eBay than any judgment they could reasonably expect to pay for the bogus libel claim. eBay throws him a bone, he stops making noise about the sales tax, everyone signs the papers and goes home.
Never, I hope. When nimda was going around, my DSL provider blocked port 80 and never unblocked it - and it's what, a year later now? That's resulted in my being unable to access my home computer from a variety of kiosks, etc., that don't allow selecting alternate ports.
If the ISPs do anything, they should be setting up rules that catch probes from live worms and then disconnect the specific lines from which they originated.
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, but just to make it clear:
The monarchy in Saudi Arabia - for which I otherwise have very little sympathy - is the only thing seriously standing in the way between the medium-strict version of sharia in place now, and a full-on hardcore cleritocracy of a sort that would send those lightweight weekend jihadis from the Taliban and revolutionary Iran whimpering to their mommies.
Not the same at all.
If the certificate in my Dell machine had been compromised, either it was a random one-off, in which case the likelihood of it affecting me is infinitessimal (how would the attacker guess who the machine would be delivered to and which https:// site they would visit first?) . . . or it happened on a whole run of machines, in which case it would have very quickly become obvious (because all my fellow consumers' attempts to visit https:// sites would have brought up certificate-invalid dialogs, and someone would have called Dell, and there would have been media reports and a product recall).
By contrast, a man-in-the-middle attack against your little web site need not attract anyone's attention, and, with a little knowledge about your movements and the visit patterns of your existing users, could easily go on unnoticed indefinitely.
In the suburbs, yeah, but in 202 (the only area that counts) it's still 7-digit (and 10-, not 11-, digit for free suburban calls to 301/703/240/etc).
If your intimation is that dialing 1+ would result in being billed for what's otherwise a local call, that's incorrect. That would be a tariff violation anywhere in the USA.
In any case, it's been a long time since the presence or absence (or requirement) of a leading 1 has had any predictable correspondence to a call's chargeability. Some cities/states it does, others it doesn't. For at least 10 years there have been plenty of places with non-local 7-digit calls as well as with local 11-digit calls.
It's just this tedious micro-centricity that all you earthlings have. Fact is, universes are where the action is. Distinctive individual humans and their houses and telephones are comparatively few. A given telephone number is repeated in endless parallel universes.
This of course is why the transition to infinite-digit dialing is inevitable, and you might as well start getting used to it. I believe the FCC has a working group devoted to the issue, but they've spent the past 9 years typing all the digits of example phone number into their PowerPoint presentation and show no signs of finishing anytime soon.
They did. It's called 917. Wasn't enough; New York City is a crowded place.
Pay attention. Telephony-DNS is a way of uniquely identifying a particular universe by identifying one of its Canadian residents.
That may well be true. I freely admit that I would sooner grind my hands off with a belt sander than spend time in a non-urban environment.
You're right about car doors being a hazard but the way to deal with that is to ride a safe distance from the parked cars. If you find cars are passing you too close in the lane, then ride just to the left of the center of the lane - that gives you lots of space and people will use the other lane to pass (or wait, if it's the only lane).
Sidewalks are very dangerous places to ride unless you're at a granny pace.
No it's not, unless they're just learning how to ride and staying in residential areas with no pedestrians, buildings well set back, and no shrubs or bushes near the street. The sidewalk is a minefield of blind spots, cars emerging from parking structures, people emerging from buildings, uneven surfaces, hard-to-see low obstacles, and erratic pedestrian behavior.
Riding on the sidewalk is one of the most dangerous things to do - not only for yourself, but for others as well.
The reason police don't go after sidewalk cyclists is because they're mainly endangering only themselves (except in crowded downtown areas, where they often do go after them) and because it isn't worth the grief.
And I bet there are still people in Papua New Guinea who don't know that there's a such thing as electricity.
I've had ADSL at home for over 4 years.
Because I'm 100% sure there ain't no Texas mariachi band called "The Brooklyn Funk Experience".
The value of the book to the publishers depends on how long they'll be able to extract revenue from it. The longer copyright lasts, the more potential for reprint, serial, motion picture, musical, comic book, and other revenues (some of these, I suspect, are more likely than others)
Prolonging the copyright term makes his contract more valuable to the publisher, and hence makes them willing to pay him more money up front.
That's one angle. The other is the possibility that the book deal was just a payoff - that they have no expectation to make their money back on sales of that title, but that the industry funneled money through HarperCollins to help ensure a favorable outcome to this Court decision, thus helping them maximize revenue over the long term. This one is more far-fetched, but worse things have happened, and let's face it, Thomas is smart, but no paragon of virtue. Of all the people sitting on the Court, he's the one I wouldn't put either one of these past.
I fear this terrible future, where our cherished letter 'C' has been replaced with the barbaric 'K', and where the iron fist of oppression scatters spurious apostrophes throughout the land.
Sure he does. But his family isn't him.
What gives his family the right to it? They didn't write it. He earned money with the books, and passed that on to them, and they have every right to it. That's where "right" stops. After that they're just guileless beneficiaries of a system designed to enrich corporations, not families of authors. They can write their own books if they want.
If I own a store, I can pass the physical assets on to my family, but when I die, they have to come up with the intangibles (goodwill, friendly chat with customers, ongoing interaction with the broader public) on their own.
If I'm on a basketball team, and I die, my family doesn't get "rights" to my starting center position. They just inherit my money.
Okay, where do I go in DC to find a burrito? Anything edible would be fine, let alone for $3. Burrito Brothers? I could make a more flavorful burrito out of old newspapers(*), and they're $5.50. Chipotle aka McDonalds? Slightly more taste, but same price. That stand on K St & 15th? It's open for 15 minutes a day, the $3 burrito is the size of a 'D' battery, and it's just an old tortilla full of rice and cinnamon.
I've been prowling the streets of DC for years in search of decent tex-mex, so I am going to be very excited to see what you've got to share.
(*) Not only do Burrito Brothers' burritos taste like Wonder Bread soaked in tepid water, but you can use a half gallon of their "hot" sauce and it'll still have less kick than a grape soda.
Well, that's going a little far. There are other 4-color models as well as hexachrome, etc.
The fact that we ever spent money researching weapons which provided marginal (if any) strategic advantage at the cost of the potential for vast horror beyond compare in human history, has consequences we'll have to live with forever.
Whether we say we were doing it in order to maintain parity with a potential aggressor or anything else, it's unjustifiable. The Soviet Union has never - to my knowledge - developed a biological agent which provided a reasonable long term value proposition in any conceivable battle scenario, so it's really not worth worrying about except in the context of a madman at the controls, in which case nuclear weapons were trouble enough.
So yes, in my opinion, our bad. Once these things are created, they can't be un-created. And if two people on either side of a line are creating them, each new one you create leads the other person to go back the lab and create a worse one. Be man enough to stand fast at 1000% horrible while the other guy moves ahead to 1001% horrible and you can stop it where it is.
It's not published in Popular Mechanics, it's published in internal documents which - over the space of 40 years - make it out one way or another.
Additionally, people involved in the process share bits and pieces with others who re-assemble the chain of enquiry and publish their own summaries. This is how so much documentation on constructing nuclear weapons has become public.
I've lived in Saudi Arabia and Singapore, and anyone who mentions them both in one breath is insane. Saudi Arabia is a society where religious police patrol the streets looking for and beating people who don't go to prayers, who keep their stores open or use pay phones during the 5 daily prayer periods, or who are women and show their ankles or noses. It's a country where government agents hang around in the mosques listening for rabblerousers, who are summarily dragged off for interrogation.
Singapore, on the other hand, is basically what you get if you combine the social conservatism and corporate-centricity of the USA with the ridiculous libel laws of the UK. It's far closer to the USA than it is to Saudi Arabia.
And the big difference is, in Singapore, people want it that way. They have one of the world's highest income levels, they have safety, they have long life and good health, and they have enough freedom not to feel stifled. One of the greatest achievements is that there's basically no sectarian trouble despite significant Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu populations all sharing a small and dense space. Any number of polls has turned up time and time again that the vast majority wouldn't change a thing.
Singapore is effectively a one-party state. In part that's because only a minority have wanted change. It's also because the PAP is aggressive in its use of libel action to silence non-member candidates who make too much noise.
Personally, coming from a tradition where freedom of expression is a cherished core social value, I find that uncomfortable. But it doesn't change the fact that it works for Singapore. And it's not the sort of country where people would feel like they couldn't complain to me because they'd get taken away by the secret police.
Anyway, by conflating these - though the material online was too thin to really be able to get to the bottom of their evidence - they seem to elide over the likely fact that the internet's open expression is a far greater threat to a regime like Saudi Arabia, which is unpopular anyway - than to one like Singapore's. Without relatively complacent countries like Singapore and UAE to soften the mix, I doubt their thesis would stand. Additionally, the inclusion of countries like Burma and to some extent Vietnam, where internet is a non-factor in general society, clouds their point further.
Why not think back to who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to weaponize ricin and anthrax in the first place, resulting in published data on how to effectively deliver them and on which strains had the highest effectiveness (i.e., fatality)? Without that US taxpayer-funded work, the threat wouldn't be there in the first place.