If you're going to go to the trouble of paying for your music, you should at least get: Something tangible that won't disappear if your hard drive crashes
There already exists shops which will allow you to pay for music while you're getting something tangible, in case your hard drive crashes. They are called record shops. They're even available online, with names such as amazon.com or cdnow.com
Besides, if your hard drive crashes, you should have backup. You really should.
High-quality sound (don't get me wrong... MP3s sound great, but they're not CD quality)
Actually, those record shops I just mentioned, they sell cd-quality music.
And, what the heck, it may as well be shiny, aerodynamic and mountable on your cubicle wall as functional artwork
Living inside a cubicle. That just sounds so sad...
Am I wrong in the understanding that when I instant message (IM) with someone, that our IM clients have knowledge of each other's IP addresses once they are resolved for the first time? What's so bad about sending files broken out as packets to another IP address?
Well, a huge proportion of users would be behind a firewall or NAT or something, and wouldn't be able to have a port open for incoming connections. If that applies to both sender and receiver, neither of them are able to accept a direct connection from the other party. Then the connection from A to B would have to go through some IM-server middleman, and the packets would most probably go on a less than optimum path.
NAT users have an inferior internet connection. And yet, to try to please all these people, protocols do a lot of costly and unneccessary workarounds.
Let's hope some people see this as a business opportunity, and start a business or organization to sue on behalf of all of us who don't bother now, and collect a percentage. So that more of us can use our lawful right to make the spammers pay for their nuisance.
We could donate proceedings of successful spam litigation to open source projects or to the EFF.
You still need to relearn millions of lusers how to do just that. And they won't.
Microsoft might own the desktop marketshare, but free software does own the server market. Let's give free software mailservers an option to convert Word documents into RTF-files.
(And optimze those converters for speed. If some features of Word won't gets mangled in the translation process, that will only reflect badly on Word.)
And in Switzerland, a large bulk of the weapons are military ones, for use in case of a war only, not guns purchased individually by gun-crazed loonies...
This little snippet is also interesting: "Reuters reports the head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, said on Monday that UN police and KFOR had improved security in Kosovo to the point where the murder rate was lower than that in Washington and the South African capital Pretoria. Kouchner showed reporters charts which plotted Kosovo's rapidly declining murder rate and showed that Moscow and Kosovo now had roughly the same murder count, the dispatch adds, quoting him saying: "The rate of criminality is down--look at where we are and where we were just two months ago."
(We should really be sending peace-keeping forces to the US to calm their near civil-war like tendencies down.)
A quick translation of the law in question: "To break a protection mechanism or otherwise getting unauthorized access to data which is stored or transmitted electronically or by other technical means, and cause damage by gaining or using such unwarranted knowledge." (Copied from story in Aftenposten in Norwegian.)
This is the exact same paragraph which is used to convict hackers in Norway.
He might very well get convicted, I'm sad to say. He did break a protection mechanism, or distribute a means to break a protection mechanism. Although that mechanism was severely flawed.
So it's one people, one nation, one (group of) leader(s)?
We aren't one people, we are many peoples. But we all happen to live in this little part of world together, and we might just try to make the best out of it. It's the opposite of going to war.
Sorry if this seems flamish, but as an American I'm nervous about anything that could bring together all of Europe under one flag.
I think you have it backwards. European cooperation leads to less wars and conflicts, not more.
Besides, why shouldn't I be just as nervous about the US under one flag?
Otherwise, the world would be facing a unified Europe, ruled by faceless bureaucrats headquartered in a continental European country, and America would be the only country that could go toe to toe with them.
The nazis tried to invade and konquer Europe. Big difference.
All countries who has joined the EU the last three decades at least has done so after democratic referendums.
Bureaucrats and standardization isn't very sexy, but it's necessary. Having different standards for phone plugs and electricity for each European country plugs doesn't make much sense. And those bureacrats aren't foreign, they're European, they come from all of our countries. We do this unification thing together, all of us.
I just don't get it. What does lukewarm reception from content-owners have to do with slow rollout of broadband?
Is it so much different i Canada or Europe in those departments?
I don't live in the US, but I'd rather guess at some alternate reasons:
- Poor availability of broadband service, confusing potential buyers
- Poor customer service when ordering
- Long waits to get service
- Poor marketing of service availability
- Word of initial failures spreads, and delays the entire market until public perceives the technology is ready for market
- Stories of changing contracts and fee structures (like bandwith limitations) confuse potential customers
I've had DSL for a year here in Oslo, Norway. I ordered from one of three major, near nationwide broadband competitors. I had service installed within 10-14 days, just as the provider had informed me. The DSL-provider I use is profitable, and seems unlikely to go bankrupt, just like its two-three main competitiors. It's very easy to check for service availability. Companies charge realistic, sustainable prices which aren't likely to force any of the largest providers into bankruptcy. People who get broadband here are generally positive, don't feel screwed by their provider, and tell friends and family about the great new service they've gotten installed, which entices more people to get connected properly.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Either way, whoever is running the Euro, giving control of your currency to another nation is suicide.
The euro is our money. It's not a foreign currency. It is our currency. Eurozone countries control it together, through the European Central Bank.
Can you imagine the US Treasury accepting the control of the Dollar and the US economy from Canada or Mexico?
Going from 1.25 to.90/$ is not exactly a big success, is it ?
Most of EU countries' trade is with other EU countries. With the euro, companies in the eurozone has zero currency risk trading within the eurozone. This has been a great success for three years already, and will only become more and more important now.
Eurozone businesses will increasingly demand to pay for imports from other European countries in euros, putting the currency risk on imports squarely on companies in non-Eurozone countries.
Re:The Euro was introduced two years ago!
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Watching all the continental Europeans scramble to abandon their democratically-elected governments in favor of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels is a wonder to behold. This Euro currency is just another brick in the new European bureaucratic state.
The European Central Bank is in Frankfurt, not Brussels.
The officials/board members of the ECB are appointed by the various national central banks.
National bank officials are not elected by the people, not in the UK, not in the US and not the ECB. They are appointed by their governments, but are independent of government policies. So democratically it doesn't matter wether the central bank is national or European.
Many European countries has had their currencies pegged to the D-Mark for years, if not decades. This was beneficial to these countries' export businesses, but these countries didn't get much say in the German central bank. With the Euro, these countries actually get more say and much less risk. The Euro is basically a European-wide D-Mark.
The problem here is that people in GSM-land compare the quality of GSM mobile to the landline quality they had before the mobile explosion. Try comparing landline quality in Europe in 1980 to landline quality in North America in 1980, and both against any current mobile technology. Compared to pre-breakup NA voice quality, mobile (including GSM) is a sick joke.
Bull. GSM audio is just fine, even compared to uncompressed digital 64kbps ISDN audio.
Unless your provider is clueless or there's A LOT of background noise (club, pub, wind, etc).
I'd say having a standardised system helped in many ways. We got down the prices of handsets very quickly. We had instant competition. And people could switch from one operator to another just by switching SIM-card. They nedn't throw away the whole phone, and change to another system.
Having a standardised system across the patchwork of countries which Europe is is also beneficial. Roaming works across the continent worked out of the box. If every country had gone for their own system, that wouldn't have happened.
Europe chose to select the mobile standard proposal out of technical merit, rather than political or national reasons. Which is a triumph for techies over politicians, I guess.
In the Nordic countries, stock broker fashions had very little to do with the very high mobile penetration we have here. Rather, ordinary people saw that the stuff worked, that coverage was good, it was easy to use, not that expensive, and it was easy to figure out what your calls would cost. You can get nearly 100% of the population to want a mobile phone if you only sell it as a yuppie (or drug dealer) toy.
Now is the time to go to Mars.
Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Send a bunch of equipment first,
then a large party of humans, one way.
Let them explore the planet,
and then figure out how to change the planet, plants, animals and humans to be able to live there, selvsufficiently...
Everone who would like to become the first martians, raise their hands...
The prefixes kilo, mega, giga are SI prefixes and are always powers of 10, and should never, I repeat never, be used when talking about powers of 2. Use the terms "large gigabits/gigabytes" or "kibis, mebis and gibis" instead, to avoid confusion.
In telecommiunication measurements like bps, the SI prefixes have traditionally always been used properly.
But I'm just sick of hearing maybe 1 pro-US comment out of every 100 anti-US comments. Wheres your national pride? We will prevail.
Anti-invasion isn't automatically anti-US. Geez, wake up of your anger and come back to reality. A massive US & NATO invasion will only mean lots of our best soldiers in bodybags. And lots more local civilians dead. And we would make the entire mid-east turn against the west. We would loose.
What do you think these terrorists wanted by attacking the WTC? They wanted the US to attack back in a way that would enrage all arabs, and turn them all against us. If we do that, they win.
* Not use all possible bits in the algorithm (ie, only use 40 of 56 bits in DES, and always leave the last 16 bits zeroed out.)
* Flawed random number generators (flawed in a way they think only NSA would know about)
* All crypto keys must be generated by some authority, and of course, kept there.
* Algorithm is designed to have an internal weakness, or is implemented in such a way
* Symmetric key used to encrypt plaintext is encrypted with assymetric algorithm for both recipients and some agency
* etc... It's easy to weaken crypto. It's good security that is hard.
All in all, strong crypto is much more important for us in western democracies, because we are much more reliant on technology and communication. Outlawing strong crypto would only shoot our own security in the foot, and leave our own doors wide open, while terrorists still would have perfectly good crypto and steganography tools which they of course still would use.
Shouldn't we all log on to infected machines, start up MSIE and point it to a web page explaining that the machine is infected and that it should be patched, and then remove root.exe?
It could be done automatically by a few lines of perl code listening to a tail -f of the weblog.
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If you're going to go to the trouble of paying for your music, you should at least get: Something tangible that won't disappear if your hard drive crashes
There already exists shops which will allow you to pay for music while you're getting something tangible, in case your hard drive crashes. They are called record shops. They're even available online, with names such as amazon.com or cdnow.com
Besides, if your hard drive crashes, you should have backup. You really should.
High-quality sound (don't get me wrong... MP3s sound great, but they're not CD quality)
Actually, those record shops I just mentioned, they sell cd-quality music.
And, what the heck, it may as well be shiny, aerodynamic and mountable on your cubicle wall as functional artwork
Living inside a cubicle. That just sounds so sad...
Am I wrong in the understanding that when I instant message (IM) with someone, that our IM clients have knowledge of each other's IP addresses once they are resolved for the first time? What's so bad about sending files broken out as packets to another IP address?
Well, a huge proportion of users would be behind a firewall or NAT or something, and wouldn't be able to have a port open for incoming connections. If that applies to both sender and receiver, neither of them are able to accept a direct connection from the other party. Then the connection from A to B would have to go through some IM-server middleman, and the packets would most probably go on a less than optimum path.
NAT users have an inferior internet connection. And yet, to try to please all these people, protocols do a lot of costly and unneccessary workarounds.
Yup. And Apple's LCD-displays are really good. I'm fortunate enough to have one at my OS X workstation, and it really is a blessing for my eyes.
The digital input (ADC on newer displays, DVI on older) are just great. It makes the pixels much crisper than other analog LCD that I've tried.
The built in USB hub is practical.
Even the power-button on the display can be configured to turn off either just the display or the whole machine if you want that.
I'll never go back to a CRT.
Well, me thinks Nokia mobiles has a kind of Apple-like user-friendlyness to them...
When the storage capacity of these things increase beyond gigabytes, USB is just too slow.
The iPod sells a lot because of good design and user interface. The Riot looks black and ugly to me.
The iPod can be used as a firewire harddrive.
It doesn't seem to me that the Riot "kills" the iPod in any way at all.
Let's hope some people see this as a business opportunity, and start a business or organization to sue on behalf of all of us who don't bother now, and collect a percentage. So that more of us can use our lawful right to make the spammers pay for their nuisance.
We could donate proceedings of successful spam litigation to open source projects or to the EFF.
You still need to relearn millions of lusers how to do just that. And they won't.
Microsoft might own the desktop marketshare, but free software does own the server market. Let's give free software mailservers an option to convert Word documents into RTF-files.
(And optimze those converters for speed. If some features of Word won't gets mangled in the translation process, that will only reflect badly on Word.)
That explains why England, with its Draconian laws against gun ownership is a peaceful, crime-free haven
Standard NRA propaganda...
Uhem...
And in Switzerland, a large bulk of the weapons are military ones, for use in case of a war only, not guns purchased individually by gun-crazed loonies...
This little snippet is also interesting: "Reuters reports the head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, said on Monday that UN police and KFOR had improved security in Kosovo to the point where the murder rate was lower than that in Washington and the South African capital Pretoria. Kouchner showed reporters charts which plotted Kosovo's rapidly declining murder rate and showed that Moscow and Kosovo now had roughly the same murder count, the dispatch adds, quoting him saying: "The rate of criminality is down--look at where we are and where we were just two months ago."
(We should really be sending peace-keeping forces to the US to calm their near civil-war like tendencies down.)
The prosecution will probably emphasize the following:
1. He did break (or assist in breaking) a protection mechanism.
2. He did cause economical damage to movie industry.
And the law might be broad enough convict him for that.
Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people
People without guns don't kill that many people by far, which leads to a much lower crime and murder rate in society as a whole.
A quick translation of the law in question: "To break a protection mechanism or otherwise getting unauthorized access to data which is stored or transmitted electronically or by other technical means, and cause damage by gaining or using such unwarranted knowledge." (Copied from story in Aftenposten in Norwegian.)
Aftenposten also has a story in English.
This is the exact same paragraph which is used to convict hackers in Norway.
He might very well get convicted, I'm sad to say. He did break a protection mechanism, or distribute a means to break a protection mechanism. Although that mechanism was severely flawed.
So it's one people, one nation, one (group of) leader(s)?
We aren't one people, we are many peoples. But we all happen to live in this little part of world together, and we might just try to make the best out of it. It's the opposite of going to war.
Sorry if this seems flamish, but as an American I'm nervous about anything that could bring together all of Europe under one flag.
I think you have it backwards. European cooperation leads to less wars and conflicts, not more.
Besides, why shouldn't I be just as nervous about the US under one flag?
Otherwise, the world would be facing a unified Europe, ruled by faceless bureaucrats headquartered in a continental European country, and America would be the only country that could go toe to toe with them.
The nazis tried to invade and konquer Europe. Big difference.
All countries who has joined the EU the last three decades at least has done so after democratic referendums.
Bureaucrats and standardization isn't very sexy, but it's necessary. Having different standards for phone plugs and electricity for each European country plugs doesn't make much sense. And those bureacrats aren't foreign, they're European, they come from all of our countries. We do this unification thing together, all of us.
I just don't get it. What does lukewarm reception from content-owners have to do with slow rollout of broadband?
Is it so much different i Canada or Europe in those departments?
I don't live in the US, but I'd rather guess at some alternate reasons:
- Poor availability of broadband service, confusing potential buyers
- Poor customer service when ordering
- Long waits to get service
- Poor marketing of service availability
- Word of initial failures spreads, and delays the entire market until public perceives the technology is ready for market
- Stories of changing contracts and fee structures (like bandwith limitations) confuse potential customers
I've had DSL for a year here in Oslo, Norway. I ordered from one of three major, near nationwide broadband competitors. I had service installed within 10-14 days, just as the provider had informed me. The DSL-provider I use is profitable, and seems unlikely to go bankrupt, just like its two-three main competitiors. It's very easy to check for service availability. Companies charge realistic, sustainable prices which aren't likely to force any of the largest providers into bankruptcy. People who get broadband here are generally positive, don't feel screwed by their provider, and tell friends and family about the great new service they've gotten installed, which entices more people to get connected properly.
Either way, whoever is running the Euro, giving control of your currency to another nation is suicide.
The euro is our money. It's not a foreign currency. It is our currency. Eurozone countries control it together, through the European Central Bank.
Can you imagine the US Treasury accepting the control of the Dollar and the US economy from Canada or Mexico?
Can you imagine the US without a common currency?
Going from 1.25 to .90/$ is not exactly a big success, is it ?
Most of EU countries' trade is with other EU countries. With the euro, companies in the eurozone has zero currency risk trading within the eurozone. This has been a great success for three years already, and will only become more and more important now.
Eurozone businesses will increasingly demand to pay for imports from other European countries in euros, putting the currency risk on imports squarely on companies in non-Eurozone countries.
Watching all the continental Europeans scramble to abandon their democratically-elected governments in favor of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels is a wonder to behold. This Euro currency is just another brick in the new European bureaucratic state.
The European Central Bank is in Frankfurt, not Brussels.
The officials/board members of the ECB are appointed by the various national central banks.
National bank officials are not elected by the people, not in the UK, not in the US and not the ECB. They are appointed by their governments, but are independent of government policies. So democratically it doesn't matter wether the central bank is national or European.
Many European countries has had their currencies pegged to the D-Mark for years, if not decades. This was beneficial to these countries' export businesses, but these countries didn't get much say in the German central bank. With the Euro, these countries actually get more say and much less risk. The Euro is basically a European-wide D-Mark.
SMS is a different medium from email, and do different things.
Besides, 99% of teenagers and billions in annual revenue can't be wrong, SMS is one of the most important mobile services.
To write "hello" on my Nokia 8210 with a built in dictionary, I only write 43556. Get a proper phone to get the experience right.
Or get a keyboard. Ericsson has had them for years. Or take a look at the Nokia 5510, a teenie-mobile with a QWERTY-keyboard.
To read mail or news, use WAP.
Bull. GSM audio is just fine, even compared to uncompressed digital 64kbps ISDN audio.
Unless your provider is clueless or there's A LOT of background noise (club, pub, wind, etc).
I'd say having a standardised system helped in many ways. We got down the prices of handsets very quickly. We had instant competition. And people could switch from one operator to another just by switching SIM-card. They nedn't throw away the whole phone, and change to another system.
Having a standardised system across the patchwork of countries which Europe is is also beneficial. Roaming works across the continent worked out of the box. If every country had gone for their own system, that wouldn't have happened.
Europe chose to select the mobile standard proposal out of technical merit, rather than political or national reasons. Which is a triumph for techies over politicians, I guess.
In the Nordic countries, stock broker fashions had very little to do with the very high mobile penetration we have here. Rather, ordinary people saw that the stuff worked, that coverage was good, it was easy to use, not that expensive, and it was easy to figure out what your calls would cost. You can get nearly 100% of the population to want a mobile phone if you only sell it as a yuppie (or drug dealer) toy.
Now is the time to go to Mars.
Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Send a bunch of equipment first,
then a large party of humans, one way.
Let them explore the planet,
and then figure out how to change the planet, plants, animals and humans to be able to live there, selvsufficiently...
Everone who would like to become the first martians, raise their hands...
80 Gbit/s != 85 899 345 920 bps
The prefixes kilo, mega, giga are SI prefixes and are always powers of 10, and should never, I repeat never, be used when talking about powers of 2. Use the terms "large gigabits/gigabytes" or "kibis, mebis and gibis" instead, to avoid confusion.
In telecommiunication measurements like bps, the SI prefixes have traditionally always been used properly.
But I'm just sick of hearing maybe 1 pro-US comment out of every 100 anti-US comments. Wheres your national pride? We will prevail.
Anti-invasion isn't automatically anti-US. Geez, wake up of your anger and come back to reality. A massive US & NATO invasion will only mean lots of our best soldiers in bodybags. And lots more local civilians dead. And we would make the entire mid-east turn against the west. We would loose.
What do you think these terrorists wanted by attacking the WTC? They wanted the US to attack back in a way that would enrage all arabs, and turn them all against us. If we do that, they win.
We need to win this war on many different levels.
* Not use all possible bits in the algorithm (ie, only use 40 of 56 bits in DES, and always leave the last 16 bits zeroed out.)
* Flawed random number generators (flawed in a way they think only NSA would know about)
* All crypto keys must be generated by some authority, and of course, kept there.
* Algorithm is designed to have an internal weakness, or is implemented in such a way
* Symmetric key used to encrypt plaintext is encrypted with assymetric algorithm for both recipients and some agency
* etc... It's easy to weaken crypto. It's good security that is hard.
All in all, strong crypto is much more important for us in western democracies, because we are much more reliant on technology and communication. Outlawing strong crypto would only shoot our own security in the foot, and leave our own doors wide open, while terrorists still would have perfectly good crypto and steganography tools which they of course still would use.
Shouldn't we all log on to infected machines, start up MSIE and point it to a web page explaining that the machine is infected and that it should be patched, and then remove root.exe?
It could be done automatically by a few lines of perl code listening to a tail -f of the weblog.