Saudi Arabia beleive it or not banned 'Baywatch' because it was thought it would corrupt their youth.
I believe Batwatch would corrupt almost anyone.
But nevermind. Some Saudi censorship fun:
The "Beetle Bailey" comic strip has a character - the General's secretary - who characteristically wears short dresses. In the Riyadh English-language newspaper, she shows up with a long-sleeve, full-length black muu-muu (crudely hand-drawn onto the strip prior to printing)
If a crossword puzzle answer is something shocking like "wine" or "beer", the clue is deleted from the puzzle. Of course, this leaves an obvious gap which prompts everyone to rush to solve the clues around it so they can figure out what the offensive word was.
(My personal favorite) On a dopey British kids' game show which was shown daily, the prize one day was a trip to Finland; specifically, Lapland. The announcer said, "And you might even meet --BLEEP--!". The name bleeped out, of course, was Santa Claus.
So count your lucky stars, Adelaideans: It could be a lot worse.
As for the Baywatch story, I suspect that's apocryphal or at best misleading. Nothing even close to Baywatch makes it on TV. They wouldn't even show My Three Sons (the early ones, before Mrs. Pfeiffer got all trampy). It's highly unlikely that anyone would have wasted time trying to get that particular show on.
>Most were posted by the same crackpots who add X-No-Archive headers to their posts Why does putting that on my posts make me a crackpot, exactly?:-)
Because it's so much like pissing up a rope.
If your post was of any interest, it got quoted by all sorts of people, 80% of whom couldn't be bothered to add the header to their posts, and the other 20% of whom do want their posts archived and available.
Also, just because deja.com supported it doesn't mean that other archives did, so at best all it did was break threads when viewed through one particular site.
All of which is fine, except that so many people were so darn dogmatic about it, screaming at other folks who neglected to add the header to quoting posts... which is just plain silly. If you don't want your words saved, use the phone. If you don't want them attached to you, post anonymously. But don't yell at other people just because they're less weird than you are (not you personally).
Every few years it actually becomes a political issue here that the U of M attracts too many top out-of-state students, taking up slots that rightfully belong to home-grown Michigan kids. Then Engler and the legislature start rattling their sabres, threatening to cut funding unless the Big U drops its admissions standards and stops importing so much talent from other states.
Pretty sad stuff. The school brings the state jobs (Ann Arbor is crawling with high-tech companies; Main street has turned into Rodeo Drive), prestige, internet access for all the other colleges way back when nobody had heard of it in the early 90s, and a way for its brightest students to get a top-notch education for pennies on the dollar.
They want to turn their world-class institution into another East Lansing?
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
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Finally, if you think technology will not reach these levels in the next hundred years, think again. I remember buying a computer in 1993, and Pentium 90's were just coming out. We have gone from trying to break the 100Mhz barrier to making 1.5Ghz processors in 8 years. Now tell me technology is moving slowly.
Okay.
Technology is moving slowly.
There is nothing particularly world-changing about replacing 90Mhz processors with 1.5GHz processors. What did we get? Active Desktop, and Solitaire was upgraded to FreeCell. Power structures are still the same, the reasons people live and die are still the same, the organization of societies follows the same principles as before 512K processor caches became de rigeur.
I think computer technology stands a decent chance of having a noticeable impact on the way the world works, but it hasn't happened yet.
Manufacturing for no cost will actually be possible, at least in the not extremely distant future. Think about it. Once fusion power becomes safe and possible, a generator fueled by hydrogen, which it can easily obtain from two of our most abundant resources, air and water, can be practically turned on and left alone and will power cities or even continents ad infinitum. Your energy problems are solved.
Uh huh. I forget - which was coming first? Practical home fusion generators or personal jetcars? Or was it household robots to do the vacuuming and walk the dogs? These things have been "coming" since 1955. So far we have AIBO to show for it.
In true communism, it is eventually possible for the government to actually become a figure head, only keeping crime at bay and not really interfering with economy
No argument here. But this, just like the libertarian paradise that certain idiot savants are always harping about, is untenable. There is a fundamental naïveté at work here.
Some of the people in the world are extremely predisposed to greed. This in itself is not a problem; shun them Amish-style, or lock them away, or check their pockets on the way out, or whatever you need to do. The problem, however, is that greed is contagious. Once you have a smart greedy person setting an example by getting more than other people have, a share of onlookers will want to do the same. That in turn will lure still more away from the communitarian acivity du jour. At some point, the pie-in-the-sky system will break down.
It's interesting that the extreme left (communism) and left (libertarianism) fantasies suffer from the identical problem: They're constructs championed by fairly smart people who are for some reason utterly unable to comprehend the ramifications of the apparently obscure fact that not everyone will share the same motivations.
The only system that seems to be able to cope is market capitalism, which - surprise! - evolved on its own as a gradual response to how humans are inclined to behave.
USENET postings have expiration dates, which state to recipients how long the authors intends for them to be retained on public servers.
A tiny minority do. I just grepped through several thousand sitting in the spool here, and 47 articles had expiration dates. Most were posted by the same crackpots who add X-No-Archive headers to their posts. Expires: headers are basically irrelevant to the discussion.
That's nonsense. There is no "work" involved in archiving USENET postings. DejaNews didn't manually classify or edit articles. What you need for USENET archiving is storage and a simple script.
Storing a few weeks of Usenet isn't that complicated (but it's more than "a simple script"). Storing and being able to retrieve several years' worth is something else entirely. Come back to us once you've actually dealt with terabytes of data being randomly accessed by millions of people.
Using this system, couldn't companies just have their IS department handle the phones?
Our Nortel PBX came into service in 1994. It has been moved, dropped (raju1kabir takes a bow), had its power cut, and suffered who-knows-what other indignities.
Nothing has ever gone wrong.
It is indestructible and unflappable. That's how I want business phone service to be. The only time we ever interact with it is when we need to add/subtract/move lines or stations, or install a software upgrade (easy as removing one Atari-style cartridge and sticking in another).
Contrast that to general-purpose computers. They crash. They're finicky about environment and power drops. They require security patches and constant software upgrades.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favor of exciting new ways of doing things, and I think you have some interesting ideas (many already realized in CTI products on the market) about how to converge phones with other communications. But I don't think it's really ready for prime time yet.
I think he might be thinking of Andrew Tridgell (Australian author of samba and rsync) and Linus Torvalds (Finnish author of Linux).
Sure there are a handful of high-profile projects spearheaded from these countries, but my point was that this stands in contrast to a country like Germany where open source develoment is a way of life.
My (perhaps erroneous) way of assessing this is to look at where patches come from when I release something onto Freshmeat.
I'll get stacks from Germany, lesser numbers from Poland, Russia, UK, Switzerland or Austria (never both... hmmm...), the Skandies and the USA, two each from Japan and Korea, dribbles from Australia and NZ, one from South Africa three months later, and that's usually it.
Another responder made the very legitimate point that Australia does not exactly enjoy India's population density, so perhaps each individual Australian may well be pulling more than their weight without showing up on the radar.
If it was possible to measure value to the Open Source community as contributed by country, I'm sure Australia and Finland would be at or very near the top.
I assume by "Australia and Finland" you mean "Germany", since that's where all the active developers (aside from those who came from UK or France or Austria or Mexico or wherever and then moved to California) seem to be.
Australia is definitely near the top of the list if you're comparing to Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Kyrgyzstan, and Surinam. Otherwise I think you're suffering from a wee bit of myopia.
Whether or not Microsoft gets one penny of yours is entirely your decision.
Sort of, but it's often a difficult decision to be informed about, and an even harder thing to avoid, since the Microsoft tax is levied on hardware purchases from almost all major PC manufacturers.
A tax is an involuntary monetary obligation to a ruler.
I think you're still trapped in the 1500s (which would explain how you've managed to avoid the Microsoft tax). We don't have "rulers" anymore (at least in democratic societies). We have governments which carry out tasks on our behalf. And we pay taxes to plenty of entities that have no authority over us. I pay taxes on goods exported from many countries, to the governments of those countries. I pay taxes to UNESCO when I visit certain historic sites. I pay taxes to governments of states I would never visit (e.g., Texas) when ordering goods from there by mail in certain circumstances.
What right is that? Where other than the lips of Richard Stallman do find it? You have the right to distribute your own original software any way you please, but you have absolutely no right to tell anyone else how they can distribute theirs.
Eh? I must have missed the meeting where it was decided that you would be forced to release all of your original code under the GPL. Were there donuts?
There's a package called vgetty that will let you do exactly what you're after.
Assuming you have a caller-ID-capable voice modem and a beat-up old unixish computer lying around, you can do pretty much anything you can think up.
The key to most of the call filtering stuff is to turn off the ringers on your phones and instead hook a speaker to the box you have running vgetty. Someone calls in, your box answers it, and if it likes the caller it plays ringback into the modem and generates an audible signal through the external speaker (this signal, of course, can vary based on caller ID or on a PIN the caller entered). If it doesn't like them, it can tell them why or just hang up.
Coupled with caller ID, you can do things like having different messages for different callers (for instance, people you know can always get a recording with your pager and cellphone numbers, while strangers just get the standard). You can have it never wake you up prior to 10am, unless someone touch-tones in a special code you've given them. If you have two phone lines and a little extra hardware, you can do discretionary follow-me forwarding so certain people can always find you. If you live in an area where pay phones accept incoming calls, you can use your two phone lines to make unlimited-length, unlimited-number calls for a quarter (plus your home landline call cost, which shouldn't be much) from any pay phone. You can make the phone of your choice into your personal private office. The sky's the limit.
My next project is to make it so I can call in to my 800 number and have it read my email to me using Festival.
After that, I've got to do something about my apartment building entry system - the landlord charges $50 for extra Mul-T-Lock keys (anyone know where I can get them copied on the sly?), so when I have visitors stay over, we have to play the key trading game. I'd like to be able to give my computer a heads up with my cell phone, and then if I call it from the box downstairs within the next couple minutes, it will just send the tone to pop open the door for me.
The point is, that deep down, the RIAA is smart. They know that the great percentage of the music traded on Napster wouldn't be purchased anyways. Its not money they're losing, they're just afraid that their loyal purchasing crowd might SOMEDAY drift into that environment and they'll start losing real sales.
I think you have a good point, but I also think the RIAA may be overplaying their hand. No matter what happens to this particular company, the rise of Napster was a watershed event for the music distribution industry: Millions of people have learned that it is feasible and easy for them to use the internet to move music around.
No matter what happens now, people will still know that. And just as importantly, Napster's size and user volume provided a lab for exploration of how to do it - software, legal issues, pitfalls, hype, arguments pro and con, incentive for copycat technologies, etc.
So whoever starts something new is standing on Napster's shoulders. They don't have to deal with the huge hurdle of explaining to the public what it is and how it works and why it might be fun to use. They don't have to do a lot of the development. They only have to deal with the legal issues.
And there are two ways that can go down. One, someone with a lot of money can make an offer the RIAA can't refuse, and it happens above board. If that happens, okay, well, fair enough. Everybody probably wins, or at least nobody loses too much.
Possibility number two, however, is that it goes underground. Someone comes up with a FreeNet or a Gnutella or an OpenNap that works, that scales, and that doesn't have an address where papers can be served. No other industry has ever faced anything like this before: A ready-made, prepackaged illicit adversary with infrastructure already in place, where millions of educated, well-to-do people have demonstrated that they have no moral problem with lending their participation and support.
If the distributors are smart they'll hedge their bets and sign. If I worked for Napster this would sound like blackmail. As it is, it's just some friendly advice.
Everywhere I've seen (granted that comes to about 10 universities total) students are required to fill out a form acknowledging not to do anything particularly bad before they can plug in. This could be handled when they're picking their login ID (and if your school doesn't let people pick their own login IDs either, well, I guess we have nothing further to talk about. Hmph.).
In any case, it could be done online with - get this - electronic forms. Cost pretty much approaches zero. The list of who goes where can be fed by a web app into the DHCP server. Likewise they get automatically dumped onto the mailing list. A machine runs nessus against the machines in the no-filter pool, dumps the results to a $9/hr work study student, who sifts through and picks out the ones with lots of red, which are handed to a $12/hr student consultant. This is a dirt-cheap project.
Likewise, if we had the ability to use a 3rd axis on all system, we would probably thnk of new (and possibly better) ways to organize our thoughts.
I don't see this as being very difficult. We can easily adapt to ways of manipulating imagined spaces that correspond to our sense of real space. If you're anything like me, you twitch for the mouse wheel when you get to the bottom of the page in a real-world newspaper.
Yes, we have two eyes which are unavoidably on the same 2-D plane and can only focus on a 2-D space at any one time.
But our visual memory (the very short-term peripheral-vision-assisting memory that remembers what your middle finger looks like while you're staring at your index finger) works in 3-D. For that matter, our eyes are healthier when they're working in 3-D space with shifting focus. Our brains and bodies are clearly ready for it. (As if the fundamental fact that everything we do all day away from the computer screen is in 3-D weren't enough)
Right now I can only see one directory at a time - either the forwardmost window if I'm using a graphical file manager, or the most recent output of 'ls' if I'm being productive. (I'm ignoring those little triangley/pane things because I find them counterintuitive in the way they represent the relationship between spaces, not to mention space-wasting)
People talk about the file hierarchy being 2-D. But we already use two dimensions for any useful expression of a single point in that hierarchy. Why not use the extra dimension to represent the relationships with other points? If I could navigate forward and backward through parent/child directories, with my inborn visual memory assisted by scaling, transparency, and motion, I suspect I'd work a whole lot faster. It would be one less level of abstraction my brain would have to worry about; it'd be like offloading the job to a hardware accelerator that came free with my head.
Likewise, if we had the ability to use a 3rd axis on all system, we would probably thnk of new (and possibly better) ways to organize our thoughts.
Hell yeah! Everything from address books to network maps would make more sense if we organized it the way our brain wants things organized.
This is not to say that I think we need simulated woodgrain checkboxes and radio buttons just because there is a fair amount of wood in the real world. However we should simulate the aspects of the real world that our brain has labored hard lo these many aeons to get itself around: How multiple entities relate to each other in space; how we can identify and select entites to interact with; how we get feedback from these entities that they are responding or want our attention; and so on.
3-D is only the beginning. Files and directories should smell. Mice (or their successors) should have physical force feedback. Interfaces should make use of intuited concepts like gravity, reflection angles, inertia, and so on. We don't need to spend anywhere near as much mental energy figuring out what our computers are trying to tell us as we do now.
But that's just it, i't implied and very misleading. Do you think the average joe is reading the fine print?
I dunno, but the fine print is available to him and was available to him before he plunked down his money, so there's nobody to blame but himself if he didn't.
That's the nature of advertising. Push the truth to its limits, talk up the possibilities, get the mark's imagination going. Otherwise you'd have ads like:
Car.
Four wheels. Two doors. Actually, hood, hatchback, and gas tank access would count as doors. Oh, and the glove compartment. Moves forward and reverse. And turns. May or may not be available for sale now or in the future at a location near or far from you at a price at, above, or below $10000.
Instead, they're saying blustery crud like "we build excitement" which is arguably true at best. I wish I could come up with better examples but my brain's anti-car-ad filter is remarkably effective.
When I bought a second static IP address, it seems that some squatter was already using it. Bastard!
Quite so. For a couple days I had a squatter on my home IP address, who parked an HP JetDirect box on it, of all things. Now that just ain't smart. I don't like wasting paper, so I made sure my PostScript art was concise, persuasive, to-the-point, while containing graphic visual aids to overcome any potential literacy gap. The printer disappeared quickly after that.
Some NAT implementations (notoriously, Linux) use telltale port number ranges by default
Different, overlapping HTTP-User-Agent headers (i.e., web browsers with different OSes running at the same time)
Multiple simultaneous highly interactive services. One person on one computer can only play one game of Quake at a time.
TCP OS fingerprint doesn't match HTTP-User-Agent, or protocol with limited client availability. Windows Media Player streams heading to a FreeBSD box? Hmmm...
None of these is failsafe - and in particular many of the techniques are liable to confusion by emulators like VMWare - but automatic detection can very usefully help build a case for further human investigation.
The side that benefits from exposure of information always wins.
Your analogy is flawed. The supermarket (according to your analogy) promised no specific amount of oranges. So, indeed, he would have no right to throw a fit about the oranges. On the other hand, DSL providers promise nkbps of bandwidth.
My analogy rocks. It is the sort of analogy people will be naming their children after.
You don't understand what the ISP is selling.
The supermarket is selling oranges at, say, 10 cents per orange.
The ISP is selling burst connection speed at, say, $25 per 256kb/s.
The ISP is not selling data volume. I have never heard of a flat rate ISP advertising raw data volume. They can't deliver, they don't want to deliver, and most of their target clientele don't care or want it.
The fundamental problem is that people are reading things into the advertising - things which are perhaps implied but certainly not stated - and making connections in their heads that don't exist, driven by wishful thinking.
The ISP says that you can get up to 256kb/s. They say that the service is always on. They do not say that you can get exactly 256kb/s 24/7. Some people would like to get 256kb/s 24/7, but all the wanting in the world isn't going to make it economically viable to provide that at consumer rates with today's technology.
And that's what the service contract is for. Read it. Learn. Buy wisely.
You must not disclose your password or user ID to anyone else. Your account can only be used for a single internet session at any one time and for no more than 24 hours in any one day
I bet Cable Modem Jail is packed to bursting on Daylight Savings Day.
What is really happening is that the DSL provider really doesn't expect to be providing the true bandwidth. Their business model and infrastructure would fall apart if they actually had to provide what they are selling you. In protest, all DSL users should mak out their lines with NON-'server' traffic. Make the providers hold up their end of the deal.
Not to be rude, but are you totally retarded? In one breath you say that their business model would fall apart if they could provide max bandwidth to every user simultaneously. Then in the next you propose that a solution to all this is to force them to provide it.
You have three choices here.
Pay dedicated-bandwidth prices for dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth costs what it costs because of the expenses involved.
Pay shared-bandwidth prices for shared bandwidth (like consumer DSL). Shared bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper because it is shared. Needs are projected and averaged based on typical consumer internet usage patterns
Pay shared-bandwidth prices for dedicated bandwidth, while driving your magic jetcar off to the time-travel shop in Tijuana, capital of the United Republic of North America.
I am continually impressed by deep and pervasive immaturity of people who are actually MAD that the fundamental rules of economics must apply to their MP3 downloading.
Your ISP never promised you that you would have full-on max bandwidth to anywhere and everywhere at all times. You just can't read.
Companies which gratuitously advertise exaggerated bandwidth they can provide, are the reason that people use the bandwidth to the max.
No, low IQs are the reason that people waste bandwidth (I'm particularly thinking of the jerk who leaves his audio streams on 24/7 to "punish" his ISP).
If a company oversells its bandwidth, then sucking up what little there is won't solve the problem. That's just plain idiotic. If the supermarket were having a sale on oranges, and they only had 20 left, and you wanted 40, would you throw a fit and stomp the 20 to the ground? What on earth would that accomplish, other than giving the store a good reason not to let you in again?
If you don't like what they provide, move elsewhere (or wait for others to do so). It frees up bandwidth for other customers, and the ISP will get the message. One stone. Two birds.
Well, first I would like to applaud the university for doing something, anything to help protect their students and departments. They might not be going about it exactly the right way, but they're trying.
If they were trying to protect students, there would be a space on the dorm ethernet sign-up form that said:
Would you like your system to be protected by our campus firewall? This will help prevent outsiders from breaking into your computer, but may also prevent you from running certain types of servers in your room. Students who answer "no" will be required to provide an email address that will be subscribed to our mailing list of vulnerabilities, and to repair these promptly. There will be spot checks of your computer systems using remote security analysis software, and if it is found that you have failed to address vulnerabilities or apply fixes as required, you will forfeit your connection for the remainder of the school year.
Student machines would be tossed into one of two address pools depending on their answer.
All they're trying to protect are their own behinds and budgets, at the expense of the students' learning environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Batwatch would corrupt almost anyone.
But nevermind. Some Saudi censorship fun:
So count your lucky stars, Adelaideans: It could be a lot worse.
As for the Baywatch story, I suspect that's apocryphal or at best misleading. Nothing even close to Baywatch makes it on TV. They wouldn't even show My Three Sons (the early ones, before Mrs. Pfeiffer got all trampy). It's highly unlikely that anyone would have wasted time trying to get that particular show on.
Can anyone give me the definitive origin of the "All your bases are belong to us" thing? I would like to use it in a presentation next week.
Because it's so much like pissing up a rope.
If your post was of any interest, it got quoted by all sorts of people, 80% of whom couldn't be bothered to add the header to their posts, and the other 20% of whom do want their posts archived and available.
Also, just because deja.com supported it doesn't mean that other archives did, so at best all it did was break threads when viewed through one particular site.
All of which is fine, except that so many people were so darn dogmatic about it, screaming at other folks who neglected to add the header to quoting posts... which is just plain silly. If you don't want your words saved, use the phone. If you don't want them attached to you, post anonymously. But don't yell at other people just because they're less weird than you are (not you personally).
Pretty sad stuff. The school brings the state jobs (Ann Arbor is crawling with high-tech companies; Main street has turned into Rodeo Drive), prestige, internet access for all the other colleges way back when nobody had heard of it in the early 90s, and a way for its brightest students to get a top-notch education for pennies on the dollar.
They want to turn their world-class institution into another East Lansing?
Okay.
Technology is moving slowly.
There is nothing particularly world-changing about replacing 90Mhz processors with 1.5GHz processors. What did we get? Active Desktop, and Solitaire was upgraded to FreeCell. Power structures are still the same, the reasons people live and die are still the same, the organization of societies follows the same principles as before 512K processor caches became de rigeur.
I think computer technology stands a decent chance of having a noticeable impact on the way the world works, but it hasn't happened yet.
Uh huh. I forget - which was coming first? Practical home fusion generators or personal jetcars? Or was it household robots to do the vacuuming and walk the dogs? These things have been "coming" since 1955. So far we have AIBO to show for it.
No argument here. But this, just like the libertarian paradise that certain idiot savants are always harping about, is untenable. There is a fundamental naïveté at work here.
Some of the people in the world are extremely predisposed to greed. This in itself is not a problem; shun them Amish-style, or lock them away, or check their pockets on the way out, or whatever you need to do. The problem, however, is that greed is contagious. Once you have a smart greedy person setting an example by getting more than other people have, a share of onlookers will want to do the same. That in turn will lure still more away from the communitarian acivity du jour. At some point, the pie-in-the-sky system will break down.
It's interesting that the extreme left (communism) and left (libertarianism) fantasies suffer from the identical problem: They're constructs championed by fairly smart people who are for some reason utterly unable to comprehend the ramifications of the apparently obscure fact that not everyone will share the same motivations.
The only system that seems to be able to cope is market capitalism, which - surprise! - evolved on its own as a gradual response to how humans are inclined to behave.
A tiny minority do. I just grepped through several thousand sitting in the spool here, and 47 articles had expiration dates. Most were posted by the same crackpots who add X-No-Archive headers to their posts. Expires: headers are basically irrelevant to the discussion.
Storing a few weeks of Usenet isn't that complicated (but it's more than "a simple script"). Storing and being able to retrieve several years' worth is something else entirely. Come back to us once you've actually dealt with terabytes of data being randomly accessed by millions of people.
With recent versions of ghostscript, you can use a line like this to convert myfile.pdf to myfile.ps:
Our Nortel PBX came into service in 1994. It has been moved, dropped (raju1kabir takes a bow), had its power cut, and suffered who-knows-what other indignities.
Nothing has ever gone wrong.
It is indestructible and unflappable. That's how I want business phone service to be. The only time we ever interact with it is when we need to add/subtract/move lines or stations, or install a software upgrade (easy as removing one Atari-style cartridge and sticking in another).
Contrast that to general-purpose computers. They crash. They're finicky about environment and power drops. They require security patches and constant software upgrades.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favor of exciting new ways of doing things, and I think you have some interesting ideas (many already realized in CTI products on the market) about how to converge phones with other communications. But I don't think it's really ready for prime time yet.
Sure there are a handful of high-profile projects spearheaded from these countries, but my point was that this stands in contrast to a country like Germany where open source develoment is a way of life.
My (perhaps erroneous) way of assessing this is to look at where patches come from when I release something onto Freshmeat.
I'll get stacks from Germany, lesser numbers from Poland, Russia, UK, Switzerland or Austria (never both... hmmm...), the Skandies and the USA, two each from Japan and Korea, dribbles from Australia and NZ, one from South Africa three months later, and that's usually it.
Another responder made the very legitimate point that Australia does not exactly enjoy India's population density, so perhaps each individual Australian may well be pulling more than their weight without showing up on the radar.
I assume by "Australia and Finland" you mean "Germany", since that's where all the active developers (aside from those who came from UK or France or Austria or Mexico or wherever and then moved to California) seem to be.
Australia is definitely near the top of the list if you're comparing to Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Kyrgyzstan, and Surinam. Otherwise I think you're suffering from a wee bit of myopia.
Sort of, but it's often a difficult decision to be informed about, and an even harder thing to avoid, since the Microsoft tax is levied on hardware purchases from almost all major PC manufacturers.
I think you're still trapped in the 1500s (which would explain how you've managed to avoid the Microsoft tax). We don't have "rulers" anymore (at least in democratic societies). We have governments which carry out tasks on our behalf. And we pay taxes to plenty of entities that have no authority over us. I pay taxes on goods exported from many countries, to the governments of those countries. I pay taxes to UNESCO when I visit certain historic sites. I pay taxes to governments of states I would never visit (e.g., Texas) when ordering goods from there by mail in certain circumstances.
My OSX Public Beta CD came with one.
Eh? I must have missed the meeting where it was decided that you would be forced to release all of your original code under the GPL. Were there donuts?
There's a package called vgetty that will let you do exactly what you're after.
Assuming you have a caller-ID-capable voice modem and a beat-up old unixish computer lying around, you can do pretty much anything you can think up.
The key to most of the call filtering stuff is to turn off the ringers on your phones and instead hook a speaker to the box you have running vgetty. Someone calls in, your box answers it, and if it likes the caller it plays ringback into the modem and generates an audible signal through the external speaker (this signal, of course, can vary based on caller ID or on a PIN the caller entered). If it doesn't like them, it can tell them why or just hang up.
Coupled with caller ID, you can do things like having different messages for different callers (for instance, people you know can always get a recording with your pager and cellphone numbers, while strangers just get the standard). You can have it never wake you up prior to 10am, unless someone touch-tones in a special code you've given them. If you have two phone lines and a little extra hardware, you can do discretionary follow-me forwarding so certain people can always find you. If you live in an area where pay phones accept incoming calls, you can use your two phone lines to make unlimited-length, unlimited-number calls for a quarter (plus your home landline call cost, which shouldn't be much) from any pay phone. You can make the phone of your choice into your personal private office. The sky's the limit.
My next project is to make it so I can call in to my 800 number and have it read my email to me using Festival.
After that, I've got to do something about my apartment building entry system - the landlord charges $50 for extra Mul-T-Lock keys (anyone know where I can get them copied on the sly?), so when I have visitors stay over, we have to play the key trading game. I'd like to be able to give my computer a heads up with my cell phone, and then if I call it from the box downstairs within the next couple minutes, it will just send the tone to pop open the door for me.
I think you have a good point, but I also think the RIAA may be overplaying their hand. No matter what happens to this particular company, the rise of Napster was a watershed event for the music distribution industry: Millions of people have learned that it is feasible and easy for them to use the internet to move music around.
No matter what happens now, people will still know that. And just as importantly, Napster's size and user volume provided a lab for exploration of how to do it - software, legal issues, pitfalls, hype, arguments pro and con, incentive for copycat technologies, etc.
So whoever starts something new is standing on Napster's shoulders. They don't have to deal with the huge hurdle of explaining to the public what it is and how it works and why it might be fun to use. They don't have to do a lot of the development. They only have to deal with the legal issues.
And there are two ways that can go down. One, someone with a lot of money can make an offer the RIAA can't refuse, and it happens above board. If that happens, okay, well, fair enough. Everybody probably wins, or at least nobody loses too much.
Possibility number two, however, is that it goes underground. Someone comes up with a FreeNet or a Gnutella or an OpenNap that works, that scales, and that doesn't have an address where papers can be served. No other industry has ever faced anything like this before: A ready-made, prepackaged illicit adversary with infrastructure already in place, where millions of educated, well-to-do people have demonstrated that they have no moral problem with lending their participation and support.
If the distributors are smart they'll hedge their bets and sign. If I worked for Napster this would sound like blackmail. As it is, it's just some friendly advice.
Everywhere I've seen (granted that comes to about 10 universities total) students are required to fill out a form acknowledging not to do anything particularly bad before they can plug in. This could be handled when they're picking their login ID (and if your school doesn't let people pick their own login IDs either, well, I guess we have nothing further to talk about. Hmph.).
In any case, it could be done online with - get this - electronic forms. Cost pretty much approaches zero. The list of who goes where can be fed by a web app into the DHCP server. Likewise they get automatically dumped onto the mailing list. A machine runs nessus against the machines in the no-filter pool, dumps the results to a $9/hr work study student, who sifts through and picks out the ones with lots of red, which are handed to a $12/hr student consultant. This is a dirt-cheap project.
I don't see this as being very difficult. We can easily adapt to ways of manipulating imagined spaces that correspond to our sense of real space. If you're anything like me, you twitch for the mouse wheel when you get to the bottom of the page in a real-world newspaper.
Yes, we have two eyes which are unavoidably on the same 2-D plane and can only focus on a 2-D space at any one time.
But our visual memory (the very short-term peripheral-vision-assisting memory that remembers what your middle finger looks like while you're staring at your index finger) works in 3-D. For that matter, our eyes are healthier when they're working in 3-D space with shifting focus. Our brains and bodies are clearly ready for it. (As if the fundamental fact that everything we do all day away from the computer screen is in 3-D weren't enough)
Right now I can only see one directory at a time - either the forwardmost window if I'm using a graphical file manager, or the most recent output of 'ls' if I'm being productive. (I'm ignoring those little triangley/pane things because I find them counterintuitive in the way they represent the relationship between spaces, not to mention space-wasting)
People talk about the file hierarchy being 2-D. But we already use two dimensions for any useful expression of a single point in that hierarchy. Why not use the extra dimension to represent the relationships with other points? If I could navigate forward and backward through parent/child directories, with my inborn visual memory assisted by scaling, transparency, and motion, I suspect I'd work a whole lot faster. It would be one less level of abstraction my brain would have to worry about; it'd be like offloading the job to a hardware accelerator that came free with my head.
Hell yeah! Everything from address books to network maps would make more sense if we organized it the way our brain wants things organized.
This is not to say that I think we need simulated woodgrain checkboxes and radio buttons just because there is a fair amount of wood in the real world. However we should simulate the aspects of the real world that our brain has labored hard lo these many aeons to get itself around: How multiple entities relate to each other in space; how we can identify and select entites to interact with; how we get feedback from these entities that they are responding or want our attention; and so on.
3-D is only the beginning. Files and directories should smell. Mice (or their successors) should have physical force feedback. Interfaces should make use of intuited concepts like gravity, reflection angles, inertia, and so on. We don't need to spend anywhere near as much mental energy figuring out what our computers are trying to tell us as we do now.
I dunno, but the fine print is available to him and was available to him before he plunked down his money, so there's nobody to blame but himself if he didn't.
That's the nature of advertising. Push the truth to its limits, talk up the possibilities, get the mark's imagination going. Otherwise you'd have ads like:
Instead, they're saying blustery crud like "we build excitement" which is arguably true at best. I wish I could come up with better examples but my brain's anti-car-ad filter is remarkably effective.
Quite so. For a couple days I had a squatter on my home IP address, who parked an HP JetDirect box on it, of all things. Now that just ain't smart. I don't like wasting paper, so I made sure my PostScript art was concise, persuasive, to-the-point, while containing graphic visual aids to overcome any potential literacy gap. The printer disappeared quickly after that.
None of these is failsafe - and in particular many of the techniques are liable to confusion by emulators like VMWare - but automatic detection can very usefully help build a case for further human investigation.
The side that benefits from exposure of information always wins.
My analogy rocks. It is the sort of analogy people will be naming their children after.
You don't understand what the ISP is selling.
The supermarket is selling oranges at, say, 10 cents per orange.
The ISP is selling burst connection speed at, say, $25 per 256kb/s.
The ISP is not selling data volume. I have never heard of a flat rate ISP advertising raw data volume. They can't deliver, they don't want to deliver, and most of their target clientele don't care or want it.
The fundamental problem is that people are reading things into the advertising - things which are perhaps implied but certainly not stated - and making connections in their heads that don't exist, driven by wishful thinking.
The ISP says that you can get up to 256kb/s. They say that the service is always on. They do not say that you can get exactly 256kb/s 24/7. Some people would like to get 256kb/s 24/7, but all the wanting in the world isn't going to make it economically viable to provide that at consumer rates with today's technology.
And that's what the service contract is for. Read it. Learn. Buy wisely.
I bet Cable Modem Jail is packed to bursting on Daylight Savings Day.
Not to be rude, but are you totally retarded? In one breath you say that their business model would fall apart if they could provide max bandwidth to every user simultaneously. Then in the next you propose that a solution to all this is to force them to provide it.
You have three choices here.
I am continually impressed by deep and pervasive immaturity of people who are actually MAD that the fundamental rules of economics must apply to their MP3 downloading.
Your ISP never promised you that you would have full-on max bandwidth to anywhere and everywhere at all times. You just can't read.
No, low IQs are the reason that people waste bandwidth (I'm particularly thinking of the jerk who leaves his audio streams on 24/7 to "punish" his ISP).
If a company oversells its bandwidth, then sucking up what little there is won't solve the problem. That's just plain idiotic. If the supermarket were having a sale on oranges, and they only had 20 left, and you wanted 40, would you throw a fit and stomp the 20 to the ground? What on earth would that accomplish, other than giving the store a good reason not to let you in again?
If you don't like what they provide, move elsewhere (or wait for others to do so). It frees up bandwidth for other customers, and the ISP will get the message. One stone. Two birds.
If they were trying to protect students, there would be a space on the dorm ethernet sign-up form that said:
Student machines would be tossed into one of two address pools depending on their answer.
All they're trying to protect are their own behinds and budgets, at the expense of the students' learning environment.