The big thing is that the bandwidth providing companies are generally trying to segregate the mostly-downloading occasional-access consumers and the server folks. This way, they can fit more people into the same amount of bandwidth.
I get 1.5/786 from Speakeasy.net for $69/mo, with no crap. Nice folks, can't say anything wrong about them. It's a consumer grade connection with consumer grade quality of service, but I can do whatever the heck I want (excepting being a script kiddie, of course) and not have to deal with it. They will even split the bill if you share a net connection.
The reason why a T1 is so expensive is because there's no other way to do it. Just running the line is troublesome in ways that DSL isn't.
The DSL providers, at least partially because of the world of CLECs, have been much more comfortable with the idea of offering multiple grades of service. That's where you get reasonable connections, not through your cable provider, who has always done nothing but consumer-grade products.
See, Columbine has nothing to do with geekdom. The Columbine folks were messed up kids in general.
My point is not that geekdom is a bunch of sociopaths. Far from it, as geeks are usually content to put up with mistreatment and try to argue things out instead of going radical with guns. We haven't even unionized. My point is, if the revolution comes and geeks are stretched too far, we'll make things real interesting.
There's a marked difference between a guy with a sniper rifle a quarter mile away and a guy who launches a pumpkin from a quarter mile away and then welds a penguin to the hood of your limo. The second one is far more menacing, far more creative, and shows that we aren't going to stoop that low.
Currently, the geeks of the world are interested in fighting the good fight. I did not propose a vision of the future, merely a potential vision of the future that might happen if there is no good fight left for us to take.
No, it was written by a teenage anarchist based on some light research and it's filled with unstable recipes that anarchist wanabes will blow themselves up with because he didn't know better.;)
See, 2k was an enhancement simply because you can keep a machine running Win 2k up for weeks on end without having the kernel crash. Win2k is a "real" OS in ways that 98 wasn't.
Otherwise, there really hasn't been much in terms of improvement since 95.
The problem is, your average teacher may not be prepared to deal with that sort of thing.
Especially if they are trying to view the web as a sort of high speed collision between pen-pals, a literature search engine, half of the library, and an encyclopedia. Before the Internet came along, they were carefully scrutinizing all of the available information sources for kids, figuring that they could be taught later on how to scrutinize the source. Now, you need to teach kids to be skeptical from the beginning.
Actually, the intangible value of an encyclopedia is not really related to it being print. There have always been bizare books published that are most certainly disconnected from reality. Mein Kampf is a good example there.
The value that the encyclopedias had was the name. You trusted that Encyclopedia Brittanica (or the World Book or any other one, for that matter) would be generally accurate because nobody had any major complaints.
Russia always maintained a death grip on their encyclopedias before Communism kicked the bucket.
The problem was, I'd almost think that the world of encyclopedias was getting chipped away when MS Encarta and the other "multimedia" encyclopedias, which were entertainment disguized as reference, came out.
With Wikipedia, there's the assumptions that there is at least a few people who might know something about a topic who happen upon it. Just because there's no "formal" criticism of the content doesn't mean that it doesn't get critiqued and fact-checked.
Google, on the other hand, has no fact checking ability. And, making things worse, for Google to fact check itself would ruin all of the reasons why people would want to use it in the first place.
So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
The way I see it, the last thing you want is to destroy the livelyhood and creative output of a bunch of nerds.
First, we take it personally in ways that other industries who have had attempts to destroy them haven't. Taking the pickaxe away from a coal miner or the torch away from a welder at an auto plant is one thing. Taking the paints away from an artist or the code away from the programmers is another thing.
Second, there are enough geeks who have varried interests in firepower. There's ESR and his "Geeks with guns". There's all of the crazy flamethrowers, flame cannons, high voltage tesla coils, etc. from the burner contingent.
Third, we won't be stopped if you take away our weapons. A gas grill and some machine tools can be turned into a variety of interesting weapons.
Fourth, we have been accumulating this knowlege ever since we found the Anarchist's Cookbook on the local BBS, so restricting further flows of information won't stop us. We have brother geeks in the other engineering fields to draw on as sympathizers. In fact, DeCSS has shown that the more you try to restrict the flow of information, the more folks who may not have cared otherwise now want to help share it.
Fifth, we understand the system better than some of the other displaced groups. The Detroit auto-workers would take out their agression by buying a Honda and publically smashing it. We do not have political ability, but I have no doubts that the angry nerds of the world will be able to pick the right targets.
What's preventing this from happening? Well, right now, there's still a promise on the horizon. People remember the last boom-bust cycles, the last time stuff was outsourced and we were still able to find jobs. Our hacker projects have kept us from blowing up at OS/360 and Microsoft and VMS because there *was* something that we could work on. Take that away, and we'll show all of the other groups that have used terror how things are really done.
Having said that, I think that everybody is currently more interested in Darl being a failed businessman (And indicental picker-up-of-the-soap) than dead. Because, overall, that's just more fun.
The problem is that paying for mail only works to reduce spam when it's widespread.;)
Re:Make spamming just a bit harder...
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
True.
The problem is, there's nothing preventing them from setting themselves up with another ISP. And, given that most hosting ISPs took a beating in the dotcom crash, they aren't too discriminating.
You could charge a $500 "cleanup fee", but it's awfully hard when they are using stolen credit cards, fake addresses, and if they are using a legit card, will generally do a chargeback. And it's not worth suing them because you aren't going to get anything out of them if you can track them down.
Back in "the day" when you made an ass out of yourself online on the Internet, your sysadmin would boot you and it would be hard to find another way on because it was hard to get on the Internet to begin with. Make an ass out of yourself on a local BBS, and the sysops would start passing your name around and you wouldn't be able to get on any of the systems. (That, and you'd generally need to provide contact info so that they could call you up)
Of course, here we get to the problem with no good solution because there's no good way to do that sort of thing today, thereon drawing to the inevitable conclusion that life sucks and if would be really nice to have a vigalante army under my command to hurt people who piss me off.
Re:Postage due.... Postage declined
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Picture somebody sending you a message in a good natured way and inviting you to respond in kind (A "I found your website interesting. Wana chat?" message)
You send back a response and attach your 1 penny stamp token.
Said person sending you an email is really a scamster. They keep the penny. Repeat a bunch of times, you've just made some money.
Of course you know...
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That charging for email means that *nobody* will be able to run a free mailing list service anymore. Or, alternatively, be just as easy to get around as the current system. Or, even better, have a new set of quirks and possibilities for abuse that would further ruin our email systems.
The problem is, the main reason why the Internet has worked and CIS, GEnie, ISDN, Teletex, etc. have all fallen by the wayside is because you pay for bandwidth, not services.
No, the problem is, there's no good way to kick somebody off of the Internet.
The problem, I think, is that they didn't think up where the line of demarcation is supposed to be and this was all written before high speed Internet access was a popular product.
I've been a champion of the idea (not mine, but I forget where I read it) of seperating the part of the system that goes between the house and the central office. Which removes alot of the stupidity and weird legal areas from the equation. The CLEC and ILECs will then lease space in the CO and pay some amount of money per pair. This network provider will then have a clear incentive to upgrade their network wiring (fiber and DSL-capable wiring is priced higher) and you aren't forcing a company to let their competitors into their CO at a questionable percentage of normal rates.
The thing that gets to me is that the RBOCs agreed to open up their networks to local competition and, in return, would be able to go into the long distance business.
Now that this comprimise has been made, they want to not be required to open up their networks. But do they have to get out of the long distance business? Of course not.
Cake and eat it, anyone?
The real solution would be to have the phone companies divest the part of them that manages the wiring between your house and the CO.
And, to preach to the choir, once you've made a machine that's verifiable and produces a proper audit log, is it actually any less expensive and troublesome than the paper ballots?
Liquid water on Mars required the atmospheric pressures to be higher than they are right now. There was no proof, only speculation, that this was the case. Now there's something closer to proof.
No, comets contain water-ice. In a vaccum, ice subliminates into water vapor without an intervining liquid step. Neither water vapor nor ice can support "life as we know it".
The big thing here is that there was a body of water for some geologically continuous amount of time, which implies that there still is the potential for "life as we know it" on Mars.
The problem is that people do not commonly identify what a machine "should" look like, which ruins a lot of the possible techniques.
Diversity helps with some of it, however. Each reader needs to match the molding and coloring exactly.
You also have to remember that any sort of deterrent will need to be cheaper than the expected losses from not having the deterrent at all.
It's pretty simple to foil. Either be an ATM-facing camera that makes sure that the machine has no extra reader attached or just having the guy who fills it with cash take an extra hard look at it should bring the losses down to a reasonable level.
The trick, as far as I can tell, is to assume that people will be looking from any sort of angle. So you hover the palm of your hand over the PIN keypad and use your pinky and thumb to hit the lower row and the middle row, and then the other three fingers to hit the upper row.
If you are obscessed with somebody watching from your left, they'll see about watching from the right.
Slashdot Mirror
The big thing is that the bandwidth providing companies are generally trying to segregate the mostly-downloading occasional-access consumers and the server folks. This way, they can fit more people into the same amount of bandwidth.
I get 1.5/786 from Speakeasy.net for $69/mo, with no crap. Nice folks, can't say anything wrong about them. It's a consumer grade connection with consumer grade quality of service, but I can do whatever the heck I want (excepting being a script kiddie, of course) and not have to deal with it. They will even split the bill if you share a net connection.
The reason why a T1 is so expensive is because there's no other way to do it. Just running the line is troublesome in ways that DSL isn't.
The DSL providers, at least partially because of the world of CLECs, have been much more comfortable with the idea of offering multiple grades of service. That's where you get reasonable connections, not through your cable provider, who has always done nothing but consumer-grade products.
See, Columbine has nothing to do with geekdom. The Columbine folks were messed up kids in general.
My point is not that geekdom is a bunch of sociopaths. Far from it, as geeks are usually content to put up with mistreatment and try to argue things out instead of going radical with guns. We haven't even unionized. My point is, if the revolution comes and geeks are stretched too far, we'll make things real interesting.
Thank you from getting my point. ;)
There's a marked difference between a guy with a sniper rifle a quarter mile away and a guy who launches a pumpkin from a quarter mile away and then welds a penguin to the hood of your limo. The second one is far more menacing, far more creative, and shows that we aren't going to stoop that low.
I'm very sory for misspeaking. Please spare me from the rain of spuds. ;)
This is very true.
Currently, the geeks of the world are interested in fighting the good fight. I did not propose a vision of the future, merely a potential vision of the future that might happen if there is no good fight left for us to take.
No, it was written by a teenage anarchist based on some light research and it's filled with unstable recipes that anarchist wanabes will blow themselves up with because he didn't know better. ;)
See, 2k was an enhancement simply because you can keep a machine running Win 2k up for weeks on end without having the kernel crash. Win2k is a "real" OS in ways that 98 wasn't.
Otherwise, there really hasn't been much in terms of improvement since 95.
The problem is, your average teacher may not be prepared to deal with that sort of thing.
Especially if they are trying to view the web as a sort of high speed collision between pen-pals, a literature search engine, half of the library, and an encyclopedia. Before the Internet came along, they were carefully scrutinizing all of the available information sources for kids, figuring that they could be taught later on how to scrutinize the source. Now, you need to teach kids to be skeptical from the beginning.
Actually, the intangible value of an encyclopedia is not really related to it being print. There have always been bizare books published that are most certainly disconnected from reality. Mein Kampf is a good example there.
The value that the encyclopedias had was the name. You trusted that Encyclopedia Brittanica (or the World Book or any other one, for that matter) would be generally accurate because nobody had any major complaints.
Russia always maintained a death grip on their encyclopedias before Communism kicked the bucket.
The problem was, I'd almost think that the world of encyclopedias was getting chipped away when MS Encarta and the other "multimedia" encyclopedias, which were entertainment disguized as reference, came out.
Wikipedia worries me less than Google.
With Wikipedia, there's the assumptions that there is at least a few people who might know something about a topic who happen upon it. Just because there's no "formal" criticism of the content doesn't mean that it doesn't get critiqued and fact-checked.
Google, on the other hand, has no fact checking ability. And, making things worse, for Google to fact check itself would ruin all of the reasons why people would want to use it in the first place.
So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
The way I see it, the last thing you want is to destroy the livelyhood and creative output of a bunch of nerds.
First, we take it personally in ways that other industries who have had attempts to destroy them haven't. Taking the pickaxe away from a coal miner or the torch away from a welder at an auto plant is one thing. Taking the paints away from an artist or the code away from the programmers is another thing.
Second, there are enough geeks who have varried interests in firepower. There's ESR and his "Geeks with guns". There's all of the crazy flamethrowers, flame cannons, high voltage tesla coils, etc. from the burner contingent.
Third, we won't be stopped if you take away our weapons. A gas grill and some machine tools can be turned into a variety of interesting weapons.
Fourth, we have been accumulating this knowlege ever since we found the Anarchist's Cookbook on the local BBS, so restricting further flows of information won't stop us. We have brother geeks in the other engineering fields to draw on as sympathizers. In fact, DeCSS has shown that the more you try to restrict the flow of information, the more folks who may not have cared otherwise now want to help share it.
Fifth, we understand the system better than some of the other displaced groups. The Detroit auto-workers would take out their agression by buying a Honda and publically smashing it. We do not have political ability, but I have no doubts that the angry nerds of the world will be able to pick the right targets.
What's preventing this from happening? Well, right now, there's still a promise on the horizon. People remember the last boom-bust cycles, the last time stuff was outsourced and we were still able to find jobs. Our hacker projects have kept us from blowing up at OS/360 and Microsoft and VMS because there *was* something that we could work on. Take that away, and we'll show all of the other groups that have used terror how things are really done.
Having said that, I think that everybody is currently more interested in Darl being a failed businessman (And indicental picker-up-of-the-soap) than dead. Because, overall, that's just more fun.
The problem is that paying for mail only works to reduce spam when it's widespread. ;)
True.
The problem is, there's nothing preventing them from setting themselves up with another ISP. And, given that most hosting ISPs took a beating in the dotcom crash, they aren't too discriminating.
You could charge a $500 "cleanup fee", but it's awfully hard when they are using stolen credit cards, fake addresses, and if they are using a legit card, will generally do a chargeback. And it's not worth suing them because you aren't going to get anything out of them if you can track them down.
Back in "the day" when you made an ass out of yourself online on the Internet, your sysadmin would boot you and it would be hard to find another way on because it was hard to get on the Internet to begin with. Make an ass out of yourself on a local BBS, and the sysops would start passing your name around and you wouldn't be able to get on any of the systems. (That, and you'd generally need to provide contact info so that they could call you up)
Of course, here we get to the problem with no good solution because there's no good way to do that sort of thing today, thereon drawing to the inevitable conclusion that life sucks and if would be really nice to have a vigalante army under my command to hurt people who piss me off.
Picture somebody sending you a message in a good natured way and inviting you to respond in kind (A "I found your website interesting. Wana chat?" message)
You send back a response and attach your 1 penny stamp token.
Said person sending you an email is really a scamster. They keep the penny. Repeat a bunch of times, you've just made some money.
That charging for email means that *nobody* will be able to run a free mailing list service anymore. Or, alternatively, be just as easy to get around as the current system. Or, even better, have a new set of quirks and possibilities for abuse that would further ruin our email systems.
The problem is, the main reason why the Internet has worked and CIS, GEnie, ISDN, Teletex, etc. have all fallen by the wayside is because you pay for bandwidth, not services.
No, the problem is, there's no good way to kick somebody off of the Internet.
I make a point of still calling SBC by their pre-merger name of "Pacific Bell". ;)
The problem, I think, is that they didn't think up where the line of demarcation is supposed to be and this was all written before high speed Internet access was a popular product.
I've been a champion of the idea (not mine, but I forget where I read it) of seperating the part of the system that goes between the house and the central office. Which removes alot of the stupidity and weird legal areas from the equation. The CLEC and ILECs will then lease space in the CO and pay some amount of money per pair. This network provider will then have a clear incentive to upgrade their network wiring (fiber and DSL-capable wiring is priced higher) and you aren't forcing a company to let their competitors into their CO at a questionable percentage of normal rates.
The thing that gets to me is that the RBOCs agreed to open up their networks to local competition and, in return, would be able to go into the long distance business.
Now that this comprimise has been made, they want to not be required to open up their networks. But do they have to get out of the long distance business? Of course not.
Cake and eat it, anyone?
The real solution would be to have the phone companies divest the part of them that manages the wiring between your house and the CO.
And, to preach to the choir, once you've made a machine that's verifiable and produces a proper audit log, is it actually any less expensive and troublesome than the paper ballots?
Long John Silvers picked out an insurance plan. They pay the same amount of money either way.
So it's NASA and the insurance company, silly.
No, the way they are posing it, there would have to be enough water to actually form the minerals.
Liquid water on Mars required the atmospheric pressures to be higher than they are right now. There was no proof, only speculation, that this was the case. Now there's something closer to proof.
No, comets contain water-ice. In a vaccum, ice subliminates into water vapor without an intervining liquid step. Neither water vapor nor ice can support "life as we know it".
The big thing here is that there was a body of water for some geologically continuous amount of time, which implies that there still is the potential for "life as we know it" on Mars.
The problem is that people do not commonly identify what a machine "should" look like, which ruins a lot of the possible techniques.
Diversity helps with some of it, however. Each reader needs to match the molding and coloring exactly.
You also have to remember that any sort of deterrent will need to be cheaper than the expected losses from not having the deterrent at all.
It's pretty simple to foil. Either be an ATM-facing camera that makes sure that the machine has no extra reader attached or just having the guy who fills it with cash take an extra hard look at it should bring the losses down to a reasonable level.
The trick, as far as I can tell, is to assume that people will be looking from any sort of angle. So you hover the palm of your hand over the PIN keypad and use your pinky and thumb to hit the lower row and the middle row, and then the other three fingers to hit the upper row.
If you are obscessed with somebody watching from your left, they'll see about watching from the right.