What is interesting is that this same type dial-up access is also used in Singapore. There is free dial-up but you have to pay for phone usage. I am not sure if it is profitable, but it is still being offered. All incoming and outgoing phone calls are charged in Singapore depending on the time of day.
It's not particularly interesting that this is done in Singapore (nor was it interesting that it's done in Egypt). It's done this way in many places all over the world.
SingTel customers do not pay for incoming calls, unless you're talking about mobile phones.
Gee... now, I'm an American, so my geography ain't near as bad as my grammar; but I don't think Syria is in Egypt. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here...
From 1958 to 1961 the two countries came together under one flag as the United Arab Republic, if that makes you feel any better.
Not exactly a refuting argument, because you knew each other in real life. I get together with friends I knew ahead of time and play computer games. I spend a lot of time playing Warcraft 3 and Starcraft, but 99% of the games I play are with friends. Sounds like you have a similar experience.
I guess this would be the point: The people I talked about were indeed participating in a MUD that had worldwide reach (mainly Australia and Finland, for some reason), and they were therefore available for everyone in the game to meet and interact with. There were plenty of folks that nobody knew in Real Life who figured prominently in their virtual lives.
I have never met someone who talks about EQ or Muds who is a well-rounded individual. Fit, eats right, talks right, and has any degree of charisma about them. They all seem to be either shy, ugly (sorry, but it's true), can't speak well, or has about as much charisma as a lepar.
I recall an early LPmud on our college campus back in 1989. There were players from all over the world, but it was most popular with local students.
Several of my good friends, almost none of them computer types, got very involved in it for a while. At the bar on Friday night everyone would be chattering about their characters or the new castle that just got added or whatever.
Today, these people include editors at major metropolitan newspapers, sports agents, on-air TV personalities, elected politicians, and successful musicians. They're all friendly, outgoing, popular, attractive, and "winners" by almost anyone's measure. None is overweight or a shut-in, and to the best of my knowledge their level of computer mastery (and interest) still hovers somewhere around email and MS Office.
Once in a while, when we get together, we still joke about the mud. It was a strange and interesting thing that intrigued intelligent people, no more, no less.
The way that works is you file against a John Doe in some court having jurisdiction over the registrar, then subpoena the domain holder's info. That involves submitting some forms to the court and paying a small filing fee. It's not like starting a DoJ vs. Microsoft case with thousands of lawyers.
To file in a remote jurisdiction takes either time (to research the procedure) or money (to hire a law firm to do it for you). Thousands of lawyers? Probably not. But that's what we in the bickering business call a straw man.
One important aspect of this is the domain holder now knows who YOU are and that you're trying to obtain their info. That's different from WHOIS, where you can get people's info without their being informed. But there's no reason to support that kind of stalking feature. If you want someone else's info, you should be willing to supply your own info to them. You got a problem with that?
That is already arbitrated by existing systems. Someone sends you an envelope, they can put a return address on it, or not. If it's a bogus or unsupplied address, you can throw the envelope away. Likewise with phone calls. No need to get the courts involved.
There are hundreds of ways to get people's addresses, from calling the DMV to following them home. All legal. Your accessibility to the outside world is a byproduct of your choice to live in society. If you don't like it, there are still plenty of openings in the hermit industry.
Why do you need any more "accountability" than that? If you want to take legal action against someone, you have to go to court. If you don't want to go to court, what you want the address for is extralegal action, such as spamming or stalking. There's no reason any registrar should assist in anything like that.
There's a whole wide world between sitting on your thumbs and filing suit.
Perhaps you just want to contact them to discuss something (a settlement, strange packets coming out of their network, what have you - and yes I know, Verisign has nothing to do with IP assignment but I'm discussing the principle here). That's what the judge is going to tell you to do anyway.
Perhaps you'd like to know where they're located so you can assess the feasibility of legal action before going to the expense.
If the only resort is the last resort, then every disagreement has to be settled with nuclear weapons. That's one hell of a way to run a circus.
What's wrong? You don't want every slashdotter knowing your address? Maybe you see why I feel the same way? Somehow I doubt it.
You're quite correct; I do not follow your logic (or rather, I do, but I think it might be a bit simplistic).
The potential for mischief is very well controlled within the Slashdot milieux, and the site's purpose is limited to discussion. Both of these make anonymity appropriate and useful, with no significant drawbacks.
The same cannot be said for participation in the world at large. Sometimes anonymity is good, other times it is not. When it comes to interconnection with a shared resource, accountability is essential. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't have the means to send anonymous emails, or to use anonymizing proxies to surf the web. However, there is - as always - a need for balance.
If anything I do using my domain names annoys or intrigues you, I cheerfully encourage you to use whois to find out. Call before coming to my house and I'll even bake cookies.
That was a quote from a Verisign Exec. There's at least tens of thousands with bad data.
I'd guess far more than that. Pretty much every time I go to look up a domain, it's got bad info. Of course, the only reason I look up domains is when I'm annoyed at the spam they've left in my inbox or the attack attempts they've left in my logs.
So I dunno about the converse, but bad internet citizenship seems to be an excellent predictor of bad contact info.
He doesn't want to list his home address for obvious reasons.
What are those obvious reasons? I've listed my home address for all my domains for many years, and the only consequence of note is that I get about 1 ad for hosting services per month.
Use your office, your school, your parents' house, find a sympathetic non-profit to take your mail... take some responsibility or stay home and leave the internet alone.
I'm wondering if a public networking system is really worth the risk. By offering a public service, you simple open so many problems caused by unadept users, malicous users, and abuse. Broadband is an excellent tool to be used, however the nightmare of getting everyone hooked up correctly, not to mention managing to keep those users connected must be a nightmare.
By offering it as a wide user base, it allows a malicous user to have a network of people to choose from. Due to the general publics disregard of security, updates and firewalls, this make them sitting ducks to becoming pawns for a Denial of service attack. How long would it be before hackers have a huge network of computers to do their bidding, by simply making a few stokes of the pen on his PDA?
Nobody better tell this guy about the existing network of dial-up nodes that pervades almost every corner of every country on the planet...
That shares with this one the need for client authentication, the prevalence of users with little knowledge of security, and the tendency of machines to come on and off the network.
The only particularly significant difference, which will hopefully be mitigated by development and adoption of effective encryption, and which in the meantime has little relevance to the substance of the comment, is the relative ease of snooping.
You probably want at least the email and calendaring closely coupled if not the same app. If I arrange a meeting an email is sent to all those invited.
Hey, almost every spreadsheet I make eventually gets mailed to someone, but that doesn't mean I need my email app and spreadsheet app to be the same program...
Aside from IDE, pretty much every technology found in both Macs and Wintels was first implemented in Macs.
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these, but I believe the PCI bus was first used in PC's, SDRAM, DDR RAM, you mentioned IDE, AGP, Nvidia and ATI cards used in said buses, etc. (Not saying these were all invented on x86, just that they came to the x86 platform before they came to mac).
Off the top of my head, you're right on those. Fortunately, I said "pretty much" and those are a tiny minority of the significant technologies involved in the machine.
Yes, yes, we all know about the Megahertz myth, and yes I've taken several architecture classes so I think I have an inkling of what I'm talking about. Show me ANY benchmark ANYWHERE that shows a 1GHz G4 beating a say, 2.5GHz P4. I'm afraid even your altivec benchmarks don't even give that great an edge any more since the addition of SSE2. Please do back up your statements.
I didn't say the 1GHz G4 was faster than the 2.5GHz P4 (though, depending on the real-world task, some benchmarks run on some implementations may show that).
My issue was with the statement that implied direct comparability between clock speeds on different processor models. Such is charlatanry.
> Quartz anti-aliasing for Carbon apps About time. Anti-aliased fonts have only been in Windows and X for several years.
Quartz anti-aliasing, not just anti-aliasing in general. The Mac's had it before Windows. Quartz anti-aliasing is just better (than the Mac's old anti-aliasing system, as well as any others out there that I've seen).
And don't get me started on anti-aliasing in X. Sucks like Dick Cheney on an oxygen tank after a walk around the block.
> Sherlock 3
Is nothing more than a glorified search engine front-end. Try Google [google.com] or Teoma [teoma.com] instead
Actually, no, the major change from Sherlock 2 to Sherlock 3 was the integration of functionality from the shareware program Watson, which everyone who's used it agrees is an amazing time-saver (and it's unlike anything I've seen anywhere else, for whatever that's worth).
> IPv6
And this is usable... how? Unless you have an internet2 connection, but you're probably enlightened and running a genuine *BSD at that point.
A) Any student who pays tuition at a major university has an internet2 connection. And you can bet that 99% of them are not running *BSD (except those running OSX).
B) Anyone who wants to can tunnel to IPv6; there are plenty of public gateways.
Why is this insightful? "x86 components have proven that they don't 'just work'" . WTF, this has NO validity behind it. Look inside your mac, almost all the components you'll see were brought from x86 or other systems with the CPU being the obvious exception.
Aside from IDE, pretty much every technology found in both Macs and Wintels was first implemented in Macs.
And hell, with the massive speed gap you have between the highend G4's (what, 1GHz top?) and high-end P4's (what, 2.8GHz now?) the x86 platform is clearly superior in terms of speed.
I'm not generally in favor of the government regulating speech, but moronic statements like that have become so commonplace that I'm actually in support of the FTC's recent hints at forcing computer vendors to use comparable numbers when reporting speed.
Which is faster, a 5-speed Honda Accord or a 4-speed Testarossa?
(I'm not interested in car-nerd rebuttals about whether or not Hondas actually come in 5-speeds - I have no idea whether or not they do; you get my point)
Of course, if they tried to track everybody via MAC addresses, you'd have to do a little creative kung-fu... But spoofing a MAC address can't be that hard: My $100 linksys router does it just fine, so I imagine the equipment available at this ISP can easily handle the task.
Um, a $10 56K modem "blocks" MAC addresses (and any computer with an ethernet card made in the past decade or so can spoof them).
MACs are only exchanged on the local ethernet. Nobody can block or track based on MAC addresses unless they have equipment physically located on your network (such as a cable modem).
Sounds damn close to contributory and/or vicarious copyright infringment to me.
Say it's established that some percentage of the people are shoplifters.
Further say that I run a hotel.
There's a store next door, and sometimes people shoplift things from the store.
The store is sick of it, so they hire some thugs to tackle to the ground anyone they see carrying a purse, and then rifle through the purse.
My guests do not enjoy this - they're walking through the lobby of the hotel, and next thing they know, they're being tacked by random thugs.
So I hire a bouncer who doesn't let that store's thugs into my hotel anymore.
This strikes me as perfectly within my rights. There's no proof that my hotel guests in particular are notorious shoplifters. And there are plenty of reasons not to want to be tackled that have nothing to do with being guilty of shoplifting.
that the defendant derived a direct financial benefit from the direct infringement.
If I don't have usage-sensitive charges (and, specifically, a markup over my costs on those charges), then I don't derive a direct financial benefit from the infringement. And in any case, the financial benefit I would derive if I did have usage-sensitive charges, has nothing to do with the particular content being trafficked.
That sounds awesome, do you have a page detailing the software that you use for that?
It's cobbled together from shell scripts on top of vgetty.
I have a USRobotics Sportster Voice 33.6 modem which was a giveaway because nobody wants 33.6 modems anymore, but they work great for voice. I'm sure you can find them at those suburban computer flea market show things.
The two phone lines (one real and one from the Vonage box) are bridged using a little relay and some resistors from Radio Shack and this X-10 box, in conjunction with the Firecracker set they gave away for $5 a couple years ago (and which I learned about from Slashdot).
The whole thing is an unsightly mess, both physically and software-wise, but it hangs together. I haven't made any changes in a while and I'm a little afraid to mess with it, though... The vgetty stuff was tricky to get right.
What's the point of getting this if you already have a cell phone? You can already get unlimited minutes for $40 a month. Why pay a total of $80 for a $40 service?
Ditch the cell phone and you're only paying $40.
And I'd love to hear about a cell plan that provides "unlimited minutes" for $40 a month. There are about 41,000 minutes in a month, and the sun is shining during most of the ones I want to use.
If you happen to have friends or family in an area served by Vonage, you can pick that area code, and they can all call you for free, which means that you can give them something without having to change their behavior.
Also -- Around here, payphones claim that they won't accept incoming calls, but it's a lie; they do. Using xringd, I call my house twice for two rings each, then it calls me back, then I enter a code and it bridges me a dialtone on the Vonage line (through the miracle of X-10's low-voltage connector wired to a little DP relay). That gives me free nationwide calling from pay phones as long as I have a couple quarters in my pocket to loan to the phone for a few secs.
As I find cell phones to be hatefully annoying, this is a much better deal. I can use the same mechanism to check my messages or have my email read to me (still ironing out the kinks on that one; at the moment I can't interrupt a long boring message).
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Do you pay your friends to talk to you on the phone?
Here the phone company has created a friend for you to talk to, so that you'll spend more money on phone calls.
From 1958 to 1961 the two countries came together under one flag as the United Arab Republic, if that makes you feel any better.
I guess this would be the point: The people I talked about were indeed participating in a MUD that had worldwide reach (mainly Australia and Finland, for some reason), and they were therefore available for everyone in the game to meet and interact with. There were plenty of folks that nobody knew in Real Life who figured prominently in their virtual lives.
I recall an early LPmud on our college campus back in 1989. There were players from all over the world, but it was most popular with local students.
Several of my good friends, almost none of them computer types, got very involved in it for a while. At the bar on Friday night everyone would be chattering about their characters or the new castle that just got added or whatever.
Today, these people include editors at major metropolitan newspapers, sports agents, on-air TV personalities, elected politicians, and successful musicians. They're all friendly, outgoing, popular, attractive, and "winners" by almost anyone's measure. None is overweight or a shut-in, and to the best of my knowledge their level of computer mastery (and interest) still hovers somewhere around email and MS Office.
Once in a while, when we get together, we still joke about the mud. It was a strange and interesting thing that intrigued intelligent people, no more, no less.
To file in a remote jurisdiction takes either time (to research the procedure) or money (to hire a law firm to do it for you). Thousands of lawyers? Probably not. But that's what we in the bickering business call a straw man.
That is already arbitrated by existing systems. Someone sends you an envelope, they can put a return address on it, or not. If it's a bogus or unsupplied address, you can throw the envelope away. Likewise with phone calls. No need to get the courts involved.
There are hundreds of ways to get people's addresses, from calling the DMV to following them home. All legal. Your accessibility to the outside world is a byproduct of your choice to live in society. If you don't like it, there are still plenty of openings in the hermit industry.
There's a whole wide world between sitting on your thumbs and filing suit.
Perhaps you just want to contact them to discuss something (a settlement, strange packets coming out of their network, what have you - and yes I know, Verisign has nothing to do with IP assignment but I'm discussing the principle here). That's what the judge is going to tell you to do anyway.
Perhaps you'd like to know where they're located so you can assess the feasibility of legal action before going to the expense.
If the only resort is the last resort, then every disagreement has to be settled with nuclear weapons. That's one hell of a way to run a circus.
You're quite correct; I do not follow your logic (or rather, I do, but I think it might be a bit simplistic).
The potential for mischief is very well controlled within the Slashdot milieux, and the site's purpose is limited to discussion. Both of these make anonymity appropriate and useful, with no significant drawbacks.
The same cannot be said for participation in the world at large. Sometimes anonymity is good, other times it is not. When it comes to interconnection with a shared resource, accountability is essential. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't have the means to send anonymous emails, or to use anonymizing proxies to surf the web. However, there is - as always - a need for balance.
If anything I do using my domain names annoys or intrigues you, I cheerfully encourage you to use whois to find out. Call before coming to my house and I'll even bake cookies.
I'd guess far more than that. Pretty much every time I go to look up a domain, it's got bad info. Of course, the only reason I look up domains is when I'm annoyed at the spam they've left in my inbox or the attack attempts they've left in my logs.
So I dunno about the converse, but bad internet citizenship seems to be an excellent predictor of bad contact info.
What are those obvious reasons? I've listed my home address for all my domains for many years, and the only consequence of note is that I get about 1 ad for hosting services per month.
Use your office, your school, your parents' house, find a sympathetic non-profit to take your mail... take some responsibility or stay home and leave the internet alone.
Insightful? Gaggme with a spoon.
Nobody better tell this guy about the existing network of dial-up nodes that pervades almost every corner of every country on the planet...
That shares with this one the need for client authentication, the prevalence of users with little knowledge of security, and the tendency of machines to come on and off the network.
The only particularly significant difference, which will hopefully be mitigated by development and adoption of effective encryption, and which in the meantime has little relevance to the substance of the comment, is the relative ease of snooping.
When the heck has anyone sued (or credibly threatened to sue) Microsoft because their software didn't work?
Hey, almost every spreadsheet I make eventually gets mailed to someone, but that doesn't mean I need my email app and spreadsheet app to be the same program...
Off the top of my head, you're right on those. Fortunately, I said "pretty much" and those are a tiny minority of the significant technologies involved in the machine.
I didn't say the 1GHz G4 was faster than the 2.5GHz P4 (though, depending on the real-world task, some benchmarks run on some implementations may show that).
My issue was with the statement that implied direct comparability between clock speeds on different processor models. Such is charlatanry.
Quartz anti-aliasing, not just anti-aliasing in general. The Mac's had it before Windows. Quartz anti-aliasing is just better (than the Mac's old anti-aliasing system, as well as any others out there that I've seen).
And don't get me started on anti-aliasing in X. Sucks like Dick Cheney on an oxygen tank after a walk around the block.
Actually, no, the major change from Sherlock 2 to Sherlock 3 was the integration of functionality from the shareware program Watson, which everyone who's used it agrees is an amazing time-saver (and it's unlike anything I've seen anywhere else, for whatever that's worth).
A) Any student who pays tuition at a major university has an internet2 connection. And you can bet that 99% of them are not running *BSD (except those running OSX).
B) Anyone who wants to can tunnel to IPv6; there are plenty of public gateways.
Aside from IDE, pretty much every technology found in both Macs and Wintels was first implemented in Macs.
I'm not generally in favor of the government regulating speech, but moronic statements like that have become so commonplace that I'm actually in support of the FTC's recent hints at forcing computer vendors to use comparable numbers when reporting speed.
Which is faster, a 5-speed Honda Accord or a 4-speed Testarossa?
(I'm not interested in car-nerd rebuttals about whether or not Hondas actually come in 5-speeds - I have no idea whether or not they do; you get my point)
Have a look at this, where the Supreme Court recently addressed a similar question.
Um, a $10 56K modem "blocks" MAC addresses (and any computer with an ethernet card made in the past decade or so can spoof them).
MACs are only exchanged on the local ethernet. Nobody can block or track based on MAC addresses unless they have equipment physically located on your network (such as a cable modem).
Say it's established that some percentage of the people are shoplifters.
Further say that I run a hotel.
There's a store next door, and sometimes people shoplift things from the store.
The store is sick of it, so they hire some thugs to tackle to the ground anyone they see carrying a purse, and then rifle through the purse.
My guests do not enjoy this - they're walking through the lobby of the hotel, and next thing they know, they're being tacked by random thugs.
So I hire a bouncer who doesn't let that store's thugs into my hotel anymore.
This strikes me as perfectly within my rights. There's no proof that my hotel guests in particular are notorious shoplifters. And there are plenty of reasons not to want to be tackled that have nothing to do with being guilty of shoplifting.
If I don't have usage-sensitive charges (and, specifically, a markup over my costs on those charges), then I don't derive a direct financial benefit from the infringement. And in any case, the financial benefit I would derive if I did have usage-sensitive charges, has nothing to do with the particular content being trafficked.
Score -2, non-sequitur. ISPs don't have common carrier status to begin with.
Yes, I do. It came for free with a 1-year Vonage contract, though. And I see one on eBay for $40 at the moment.
It's cobbled together from shell scripts on top of vgetty.
I have a USRobotics Sportster Voice 33.6 modem which was a giveaway because nobody wants 33.6 modems anymore, but they work great for voice. I'm sure you can find them at those suburban computer flea market show things.
The two phone lines (one real and one from the Vonage box) are bridged using a little relay and some resistors from Radio Shack and this X-10 box, in conjunction with the Firecracker set they gave away for $5 a couple years ago (and which I learned about from Slashdot).
The whole thing is an unsightly mess, both physically and software-wise, but it hangs together. I haven't made any changes in a while and I'm a little afraid to mess with it, though... The vgetty stuff was tricky to get right.
Look into the Cisco ATA-186. You can plug an old-fashioned $5 POTS phone (or anything else that acts like one) into it. No computer required.
Ditch the cell phone and you're only paying $40.
And I'd love to hear about a cell plan that provides "unlimited minutes" for $40 a month. There are about 41,000 minutes in a month, and the sun is shining during most of the ones I want to use.
If you happen to have friends or family in an area served by Vonage, you can pick that area code, and they can all call you for free, which means that you can give them something without having to change their behavior.
Also -- Around here, payphones claim that they won't accept incoming calls, but it's a lie; they do. Using xringd, I call my house twice for two rings each, then it calls me back, then I enter a code and it bridges me a dialtone on the Vonage line (through the miracle of X-10's low-voltage connector wired to a little DP relay). That gives me free nationwide calling from pay phones as long as I have a couple quarters in my pocket to loan to the phone for a few secs.
As I find cell phones to be hatefully annoying, this is a much better deal. I can use the same mechanism to check my messages or have my email read to me (still ironing out the kinks on that one; at the moment I can't interrupt a long boring message).