Sorry, but that's plainly ignorant. There's no "static routes" on Level3 that send traffic to Cogent. The way peering works is that Cogent announces their routes to Level3 (and UUNet, and Sprint etc.) using the BGP routing protocol at interconnections in their network. UUNet does the same for their routes, Sprint for theirs, and so on. The big boys do NOT announce each others' routes to each others peers, only those routes that they originate or that their downstream customers own. If all of those connections to Cogent are somehow severed (manually, or in a backhoe-derived outage scenario), Level3 cannot route to Cogent, and vice-versa. The same would go for any other provider.
Back to the concept of peering. The idea is that Cogent will only send traffic to Level3 that Level3 announces routes for. They will also agree to only peer if there's a relative balance of traffic across their interconnections (say, within a few percentage points up or down of a 50/50 split), or a split of costs (e.g. if Cogent is going to send more bits to Level3, they pay for the interconnection costs, and the router ports, and perhaps the colocation costs for the gear to make up the difference). In this case, Cogent was dumping on Level3 at a 10-to-1 ratio of bits sent to Level3 to bits received from Level3. In those cases, the relationship is no longer that of peers (equals in utilization), but of provider (Level3) and customer (Cogent). Like any other legitimate enterprise that uses Internet bandwidth to sell a product, Cogent needs to buy their bandwidth from large providers. If they choose to use Level3 as one of those providers, that's their preogative. They could choose UUNet, Sprint, AT&T and many others to provide transit. However, that would cost them money. Instead, they cajole providers like Level3 into setting up peering, promising relatively equal traffic exchange, and then dump as much traffic to Level3 as they can get away with (in some cases, even routing to other tier 1 providers through Level3). This breaks the agreement, so Level3 had every right to depeer Cogent, no matter how sucky it turns out for the rest of us.
Disclaimer: I used to (5+ years ago) work for Genuity, the bankrupt ISP bought by Level3. I know how this stuff works, and have no axe to grind or promotion to give either provider.
It's only absurd as soon as Louisiana has direct jurisdiction over the levee system itself. It doesn't - it's a federal project. If the feds transferred ownership to the state or local officials, you'd be absolutely right. That hasn't happened, so while it would be feasible to generate funds locally and have them spent federally, it would be a nightmare of red tape, likely eating into the funds raised for the project beyond any meaningful scope.
Further, and this is a pretty meaningful point, we all were already taxed for this very project. The feds take taxes for a myriad of public works projects, and I'd expect most folks put shoring up public infrastructure higher on their list of priorities than tax cuts. Why should LA specifically tax their citizens a second time for the projects already funded by the feds? Sadly, in the guise of sensible budget cutting, the GOP has cut where they should not, spent foolishly, and left us in risky positions nationally. They decided to do things this way; let them suffer the political fallout.
Even worse, Congress didn't just approve the cuts, they increased them. Referring to the Louisiana Army Corps of Engineers budget:
The House of Representatives wants to cut the New Orleans district budget 21 percent to $272.4 million in 2006, down from $343.5 million in 2005. The House figure is about $20 million lower than the president's suggested $290.7 million budget.
Source: New Orleans City Business, 6/5/2005. Quoted rather presciently is Democratic senator Mary Landrieu:
"I think it's extremely shortsighted," Landrieu said. "When the Corps of Engineers' budget is cut, Louisiana bleeds. These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are (of) vital economic interest to the entire nation."
So...we blow the budget on a war that has no return on investment (unless you consider bloody civil war and likely splintering of Iraq into Shiite and Kurdish states a ROI). We also deepen the deficit with tax cuts that make the rich richer without targeting their dollars for reinvestment in the US. Our return? The poor drown like rats or get shot at like fish in a barrel when they can't escape the flooding in NOLA nor the shooting in Baghdad. Nice folks, the GOP.
Every server also went down for maintenance this morning
It's Tuesday. Every server goes down for maintenance from 9 AM ET to 3 PM ET every Tuesday. Your other question (about how long it'll take to fix) is valid, but the downtime here is planned, expected downtime. If it's not up by 6 PM ET tonight, then I'll start to worry.
Spoken like somebody who got a few K gold dropped in his pocketbook by a duper:)
IMHO, a rollback, plus refunds for double the time rolled back, is reasonable. For those that didn't break the rules in any way (like me), it definitely sucks. It's also something we should be willing to deal with to keep things reasonably healthy economy-wise (at least, as healthy as it can be with farmers and Ebay'd gold).
Broadcast TV Cares Not For Quality
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So long as there are broadcast television networks and channels that don't make a dime off cable subscription fees, the subject is accurate. Execs don't particularly care about cool, fun or quality. They care that the programs they run bring eyeballs to the screen that will allow them to maintain (and raise) advertising rates. It's how they make virtually all of their revenue.
Now, what's changed in recent years is the number of cable networks and channels getting in on the act. Ad revenue matters to them too, but they throw on much riskier programming that can be resold through retail channels. Their smaller quantities of free eyeballs ("expanded basic" cable or satellite subscribers, not over-the-air or nearly-free basic cable) demands that they provide niche value to the channel lineups, and demands they produce programming that can be sold. Comedy Central is a perfect example of this - South Park, Chappelle's Show and Reno 911 would not have gotten a chance elsewhere. On CC, they made money for the channel through ad revenue, and sold tons of DVDs.
The production houses are the wildcard in all this (Warner Bros, Paramount, NewsCorp). They're now directly affiliated with broadcast media conglomerates themselves, but for years, they sold to ABC, NBC and CBS. Now they can pitch to those 3, along with their "vanity" broadcast network, as well as to their vanity cable station (FX, TNT, USA and the like). With so many broadcast outlets, the big dollars don't come with being picked up. They come from syndication and retail resale. As such, those production house (like the one from this article) owe it to themselves to get quality shows in front of viewers, no matter what it takes to get it there.
I wonder which lobby would have more influence -- corporate or Christian? Right now, I'd say Christian cause the funding is not there.
You'd very likely be wrong. Bush's tax cuts have plainly delivered tens of billions to rich individuals and corporations already (with the deficit climbing precipitously largely due to these changes). His various regulatory policymakers have made it easier for polluters to pollute and tax cheaters to cheat.
As for policies that would suit the Falwell/Dobson wing of the Christian Right...hmm, the fed. money stem cell research is one small step. Partial birth abortion ban would be another small one. But he couldn't even begin to get "marriage is between 1 man and 1 woman" enacted as a Constitutional amendment (died on both chamber floors), and recently declared the federal DOMA ("Defense of Marriage Act") law would be sufficient to stop gay marriage, while it obviously isn't (states' rights, people, states' rights). And what's he starting with this term? An abortion ban? Nope, Social Security privitization, a boondoggle for brokerage houses, not the Christian Right. He may serve two masters (the moral conservatives and the fiscal conservatives), but he knows who's gonna cut the check.
Nope, they're not morons, but they do get old. Justice John Paul Stevens leans liberal, and is 84 years old. I'm tremendously hopeful that the moderates and liberals on the court can make it four more years, but I'm not optimistic.
I'm not a slashbot, troll. The point is that other presidents whose party also controlled both houses had the balls to veto bad legislation. GWB doesn't, and won't. He's a Party Man through and through. This may be an example some of us can get behind, although any geek who also can deal with the proposed ban on commercial fast-forwarding doesn't deserve his/her geek stripes.
President Bush is expected to sign the legislation when it is passed.
Of course he will. He has yet to veto a single bill as President. It's easy to not have to, when your party controls both houses of Congress and is on the edge of a long-term conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
You're absolutely right that "spawn camping doesn't scale". However, I think the answer is not instancing. He's right that it's a decent short-term solution. The real solution will be significantly more dynamic and unique content. For example, there's a billion spoiler sites for the major MMORPGs out there today. Quest walkthroughs, mob locations, gear comparisons and search engines - it's all out there for review. I want to make those obsolete by having a world with ever-changing content around central areas. The genius who develops a world engine bright enough to create and manage AI'd content around one-time quests or events - that's the game I'm gonna play for good. It'll be hard, and it'll be massively different from today's MMORPGs, but it'll be worth it in sheer replayability alone.
Assuming (yeah, I know, big assumption) the whois info is relatively accurate, we may have an idea as to at least next step in the chain of figuring out the culprit, output of whois addlebrain.com:
Registration Service Provided By: StoreIQ, Inc. Contact: technical@storeiq.com Visit:
Domain name: addlebrain.com
Registrant Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Administrative Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Technical Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Billing Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Status: Locked
Name Servers:
dns1.name-services.com
dns2.name-services.com
dns3.name-services.com
dns4.name-services.com
dns5.name-services.com
The same address is used for two associated domains, buywirelessdirect.com (the email addy for this domain's tech contact) and storeiq.com (the email addy for buywirelessdirect.com's tech contact). The area code is accurate for that neck of the woods too, though I haven't tried the phone number (yet):
StoreIQ, Inc.
John Thompson (technical@storeiq.com)
+1.7323331145
Fax:
3587 US Highway 9 #213
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Every cable company is (or has been) rolling out digital cable packages to subscribers, touting the enormous number of extra channels, insta-PPV ordering, "digital quality sound" etc. The big catch is that you're shackled to their box - all the years of cable-ready TV sets go out the window. As such, since I'm not aware of any cable companies that will let you bring your own box, cool set tops are useless to us.
...is that the guys who run several web hosting places are overworked, besieged by takedown notices, or dumb (or most likely, a combination of all three). Hell, I could've told you that, and I didn't try to do a study.
The hosting sweet spot is selling power/pipe/ping, not managed services. Managed services always cost more than expected when paired with a reasonable SLA. As such, most hosters just take in whoever seems capable of paying, content be damned. When they get a takedown notice, they shut the port or server instance (whichever is easier i.e. whichever they know how to do quickly) and deal with the consequences later.
Balmer, "iPod" can easily be replaced with "Windows" in your preceding statement. MP3 has been the de facto standard for music files for 7-8 years now, maybe longer. Were iPods around 7-8 years ago? No. What were they played on? Windows, under Winamp. The masses have understood how to rip their own (un-DRM'd) CDs since the turn of the millenium. Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey and many more of flourished (til legal proceedings crush each) with trading of these files. I don't recall using my iPod to access any of these services. Oh yes, that's right. I used my Windows-running PC.
I know it's FUD, but this is just plain lousy FUD. Anyone with half a brain can see right through his attempt to link Windows with anti-piracy.
Yup, they not make this move to challenge the military absentee ballots, mainly because they didn't want to look like assholes to the military and folks support the troops above all. However, they probably should have at least challenged some of those ballots - those that were postmarked later (by days and sometimes weeks), those that had both major candidates marked, those that had questionable markings etc. The NY Times did some actual investigative work and found Bush's tiny margin of victory would've been eliminated, and Gore the winner, had those absentee ballots been counted as the law decreed prior to the election.
I'm all for the military having full, enfranchised rights to vote. I'm not for them (or anyone else) having the right to vote after Election Day is completed for the rest of us.
At the ripe young age of 9, I remember being highly interested in the birth of the new rating, and began keeping track (purposes - yes, I'm a trivia geek, why do you ask?) of those first few PG-13 movies. Red Dawn was indeed the first released PG-13 film, but among the other first movies were Dreamscape (for violence) and Oxford Blues (for language and brief nudity) and The Woman In Red, all within a week of Red Dawn's release.
Ah Darl. Silly, silly Darl. SCO Unix had its day 7-8 years ago, when Linux was still a hobby. The key market they owned was the x86 commodity hardware Unix. Linux absolutely owns x86 hardware-based *nix now, official Unix name or not. No ounce of marketing muscle you could possibly muster will change that fact. You're dead. Go away. And no, "Linux" didn't steal your IP, which you're quietly admitting now. Thanks for the 2+ year roadblock. Now fuck off.
The familiar joke about Democrats being stupid but passionate and Republicans being cold but smart seems to fit this situation rather well, unfortunately.
I prefer Dave Barry's take on said joke:
The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. ~Dave Barry
FWIW, I'm registered Unenrolled, but vote Democratic. Thanks to QuoteGarden.
Not only is it his real name, but I recall signing him up for his first Boston-area dialup account in December '95. He was a TIAC subscriber back in the day. I even took a couple of late-night support calls from him. You don't forget a guy named Hiawatha.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, does this refrain ever sound familiar.
Well duh, Hemos. Advise the man on the way to deal with "new article" monotony: repost previous game recaps. Dupes 4tw.
Sorry, but that's plainly ignorant. There's no "static routes" on Level3 that send traffic to Cogent. The way peering works is that Cogent announces their routes to Level3 (and UUNet, and Sprint etc.) using the BGP routing protocol at interconnections in their network. UUNet does the same for their routes, Sprint for theirs, and so on. The big boys do NOT announce each others' routes to each others peers, only those routes that they originate or that their downstream customers own. If all of those connections to Cogent are somehow severed (manually, or in a backhoe-derived outage scenario), Level3 cannot route to Cogent, and vice-versa. The same would go for any other provider.
Back to the concept of peering. The idea is that Cogent will only send traffic to Level3 that Level3 announces routes for. They will also agree to only peer if there's a relative balance of traffic across their interconnections (say, within a few percentage points up or down of a 50/50 split), or a split of costs (e.g. if Cogent is going to send more bits to Level3, they pay for the interconnection costs, and the router ports, and perhaps the colocation costs for the gear to make up the difference). In this case, Cogent was dumping on Level3 at a 10-to-1 ratio of bits sent to Level3 to bits received from Level3. In those cases, the relationship is no longer that of peers (equals in utilization), but of provider (Level3) and customer (Cogent). Like any other legitimate enterprise that uses Internet bandwidth to sell a product, Cogent needs to buy their bandwidth from large providers. If they choose to use Level3 as one of those providers, that's their preogative. They could choose UUNet, Sprint, AT&T and many others to provide transit. However, that would cost them money. Instead, they cajole providers like Level3 into setting up peering, promising relatively equal traffic exchange, and then dump as much traffic to Level3 as they can get away with (in some cases, even routing to other tier 1 providers through Level3). This breaks the agreement, so Level3 had every right to depeer Cogent, no matter how sucky it turns out for the rest of us.
Disclaimer: I used to (5+ years ago) work for Genuity, the bankrupt ISP bought by Level3. I know how this stuff works, and have no axe to grind or promotion to give either provider.
It's only absurd as soon as Louisiana has direct jurisdiction over the levee system itself. It doesn't - it's a federal project. If the feds transferred ownership to the state or local officials, you'd be absolutely right. That hasn't happened, so while it would be feasible to generate funds locally and have them spent federally, it would be a nightmare of red tape, likely eating into the funds raised for the project beyond any meaningful scope.
Further, and this is a pretty meaningful point, we all were already taxed for this very project. The feds take taxes for a myriad of public works projects, and I'd expect most folks put shoring up public infrastructure higher on their list of priorities than tax cuts. Why should LA specifically tax their citizens a second time for the projects already funded by the feds? Sadly, in the guise of sensible budget cutting, the GOP has cut where they should not, spent foolishly, and left us in risky positions nationally. They decided to do things this way; let them suffer the political fallout.
Even worse, Congress didn't just approve the cuts, they increased them. Referring to the Louisiana Army Corps of Engineers budget:
The House of Representatives wants to cut the New Orleans district budget 21 percent to $272.4 million in 2006, down from $343.5 million in 2005. The House figure is about $20 million lower than the president's suggested $290.7 million budget.
Source: New Orleans City Business, 6/5/2005. Quoted rather presciently is Democratic senator Mary Landrieu:
"I think it's extremely shortsighted," Landrieu said. "When the Corps of Engineers' budget is cut, Louisiana bleeds. These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are (of) vital economic interest to the entire nation."
So...we blow the budget on a war that has no return on investment (unless you consider bloody civil war and likely splintering of Iraq into Shiite and Kurdish states a ROI). We also deepen the deficit with tax cuts that make the rich richer without targeting their dollars for reinvestment in the US. Our return? The poor drown like rats or get shot at like fish in a barrel when they can't escape the flooding in NOLA nor the shooting in Baghdad. Nice folks, the GOP.
Every server also went down for maintenance this morning
It's Tuesday. Every server goes down for maintenance from 9 AM ET to 3 PM ET every Tuesday. Your other question (about how long it'll take to fix) is valid, but the downtime here is planned, expected downtime. If it's not up by 6 PM ET tonight, then I'll start to worry.
Does it even need to be removed?
:)
Spoken like somebody who got a few K gold dropped in his pocketbook by a duper
IMHO, a rollback, plus refunds for double the time rolled back, is reasonable. For those that didn't break the rules in any way (like me), it definitely sucks. It's also something we should be willing to deal with to keep things reasonably healthy economy-wise (at least, as healthy as it can be with farmers and Ebay'd gold).
So long as there are broadcast television networks and channels that don't make a dime off cable subscription fees, the subject is accurate. Execs don't particularly care about cool, fun or quality. They care that the programs they run bring eyeballs to the screen that will allow them to maintain (and raise) advertising rates. It's how they make virtually all of their revenue.
Now, what's changed in recent years is the number of cable networks and channels getting in on the act. Ad revenue matters to them too, but they throw on much riskier programming that can be resold through retail channels. Their smaller quantities of free eyeballs ("expanded basic" cable or satellite subscribers, not over-the-air or nearly-free basic cable) demands that they provide niche value to the channel lineups, and demands they produce programming that can be sold. Comedy Central is a perfect example of this - South Park, Chappelle's Show and Reno 911 would not have gotten a chance elsewhere. On CC, they made money for the channel through ad revenue, and sold tons of DVDs.
The production houses are the wildcard in all this (Warner Bros, Paramount, NewsCorp). They're now directly affiliated with broadcast media conglomerates themselves, but for years, they sold to ABC, NBC and CBS. Now they can pitch to those 3, along with their "vanity" broadcast network, as well as to their vanity cable station (FX, TNT, USA and the like). With so many broadcast outlets, the big dollars don't come with being picked up. They come from syndication and retail resale. As such, those production house (like the one from this article) owe it to themselves to get quality shows in front of viewers, no matter what it takes to get it there.
I wonder which lobby would have more influence -- corporate or Christian? Right now, I'd say Christian cause the funding is not there.
You'd very likely be wrong. Bush's tax cuts have plainly delivered tens of billions to rich individuals and corporations already (with the deficit climbing precipitously largely due to these changes). His various regulatory policymakers have made it easier for polluters to pollute and tax cheaters to cheat.
As for policies that would suit the Falwell/Dobson wing of the Christian Right...hmm, the fed. money stem cell research is one small step. Partial birth abortion ban would be another small one. But he couldn't even begin to get "marriage is between 1 man and 1 woman" enacted as a Constitutional amendment (died on both chamber floors), and recently declared the federal DOMA ("Defense of Marriage Act") law would be sufficient to stop gay marriage, while it obviously isn't (states' rights, people, states' rights). And what's he starting with this term? An abortion ban? Nope, Social Security privitization, a boondoggle for brokerage houses, not the Christian Right. He may serve two masters (the moral conservatives and the fiscal conservatives), but he knows who's gonna cut the check.
Nope, they're not morons, but they do get old. Justice John Paul Stevens leans liberal, and is 84 years old. I'm tremendously hopeful that the moderates and liberals on the court can make it four more years, but I'm not optimistic.
I'm not a slashbot, troll. The point is that other presidents whose party also controlled both houses had the balls to veto bad legislation. GWB doesn't, and won't. He's a Party Man through and through. This may be an example some of us can get behind, although any geek who also can deal with the proposed ban on commercial fast-forwarding doesn't deserve his/her geek stripes.
President Bush is expected to sign the legislation when it is passed.
Of course he will. He has yet to veto a single bill as President. It's easy to not have to, when your party controls both houses of Congress and is on the edge of a long-term conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
You're absolutely right that "spawn camping doesn't scale". However, I think the answer is not instancing. He's right that it's a decent short-term solution. The real solution will be significantly more dynamic and unique content. For example, there's a billion spoiler sites for the major MMORPGs out there today. Quest walkthroughs, mob locations, gear comparisons and search engines - it's all out there for review. I want to make those obsolete by having a world with ever-changing content around central areas. The genius who develops a world engine bright enough to create and manage AI'd content around one-time quests or events - that's the game I'm gonna play for good. It'll be hard, and it'll be massively different from today's MMORPGs, but it'll be worth it in sheer replayability alone.
Yup, all that typing == strong wrists
Assuming (yeah, I know, big assumption) the whois info is relatively accurate, we may have an idea as to at least next step in the chain of figuring out the culprit, output of whois addlebrain.com:
Registration Service Provided By: StoreIQ, Inc.
Contact: technical@storeiq.com
Visit:
Domain name: addlebrain.com
Registrant Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Administrative Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Technical Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Billing Contact:
ABM Wireless
Domain Administrator (administrator@buywirelessdirect.com)
+1.7323331100
Fax: +1.NA
3587 US Highway 9 #132
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Status: Locked
Name Servers:
dns1.name-services.com
dns2.name-services.com
dns3.name-services.com
dns4.name-services.com
dns5.name-services.com
The same address is used for two associated domains, buywirelessdirect.com (the email addy for this domain's tech contact) and storeiq.com (the email addy for buywirelessdirect.com's tech contact). The area code is accurate for that neck of the woods too, though I haven't tried the phone number (yet):
StoreIQ, Inc.
John Thompson (technical@storeiq.com)
+1.7323331145
Fax:
3587 US Highway 9 #213
Freehold, NJ 07728
US
Cees are nice, but really, I love dees. Double Ds, in particular. Hoofah.
Every cable company is (or has been) rolling out digital cable packages to subscribers, touting the enormous number of extra channels, insta-PPV ordering, "digital quality sound" etc. The big catch is that you're shackled to their box - all the years of cable-ready TV sets go out the window. As such, since I'm not aware of any cable companies that will let you bring your own box, cool set tops are useless to us.
...is that the guys who run several web hosting places are overworked, besieged by takedown notices, or dumb (or most likely, a combination of all three). Hell, I could've told you that, and I didn't try to do a study.
The hosting sweet spot is selling power/pipe/ping, not managed services. Managed services always cost more than expected when paired with a reasonable SLA. As such, most hosters just take in whoever seems capable of paying, content be damned. When they get a takedown notice, they shut the port or server instance (whichever is easier i.e. whichever they know how to do quickly) and deal with the consequences later.
...on an iPod is 'stolen'.
Balmer, "iPod" can easily be replaced with "Windows" in your preceding statement. MP3 has been the de facto standard for music files for 7-8 years now, maybe longer. Were iPods around 7-8 years ago? No. What were they played on? Windows, under Winamp. The masses have understood how to rip their own (un-DRM'd) CDs since the turn of the millenium. Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey and many more of flourished (til legal proceedings crush each) with trading of these files. I don't recall using my iPod to access any of these services. Oh yes, that's right. I used my Windows-running PC.
I know it's FUD, but this is just plain lousy FUD. Anyone with half a brain can see right through his attempt to link Windows with anti-piracy.
Nope. They'll come out with new equipment, which we will buy. Sigh.
Yup, they not make this move to challenge the military absentee ballots, mainly because they didn't want to look like assholes to the military and folks support the troops above all. However, they probably should have at least challenged some of those ballots - those that were postmarked later (by days and sometimes weeks), those that had both major candidates marked, those that had questionable markings etc. The NY Times did some actual investigative work and found Bush's tiny margin of victory would've been eliminated, and Gore the winner, had those absentee ballots been counted as the law decreed prior to the election.
I'm all for the military having full, enfranchised rights to vote. I'm not for them (or anyone else) having the right to vote after Election Day is completed for the rest of us.
At the ripe young age of 9, I remember being highly interested in the birth of the new rating, and began keeping track (purposes - yes, I'm a trivia geek, why do you ask?) of those first few PG-13 movies. Red Dawn was indeed the first released PG-13 film, but among the other first movies were Dreamscape (for violence) and Oxford Blues (for language and brief nudity) and The Woman In Red, all within a week of Red Dawn's release.
...rubbing up against some fat guy in a squirrel suit he had shipped over from Japan.
You can get a fat guy in a squirrel suit shipped from Japan? Wow, what will J-List think of next?
Ah Darl. Silly, silly Darl. SCO Unix had its day 7-8 years ago, when Linux was still a hobby. The key market they owned was the x86 commodity hardware Unix. Linux absolutely owns x86 hardware-based *nix now, official Unix name or not. No ounce of marketing muscle you could possibly muster will change that fact. You're dead. Go away. And no, "Linux" didn't steal your IP, which you're quietly admitting now. Thanks for the 2+ year roadblock. Now fuck off.
The familiar joke about Democrats being stupid but passionate and Republicans being cold but smart seems to fit this situation rather well, unfortunately.
I prefer Dave Barry's take on said joke:
The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. ~Dave Barry
FWIW, I'm registered Unenrolled, but vote Democratic. Thanks to QuoteGarden.
Not only is it his real name, but I recall signing him up for his first Boston-area dialup account in December '95. He was a TIAC subscriber back in the day. I even took a couple of late-night support calls from him. You don't forget a guy named Hiawatha.