I disagree. Protocols which don't work well over NAT are poorly engineered, so IPSEC is one of them. You can't assume every PC is on the internet with its door open any more than you can assume people use the default port or the same implementation of an IP stack. There are plenty of great reasons to have NAT'd machines, even with IPv6. My personal favorite is load balancing. If you want to control load balancing, and not rely on the requesting client to do it for you, a NAT-based routing device is an elegant solution. It optimizes queue speed by minimizing the lag effect of long requests and provides an extra layer of security. I'm thinking of F5's BigIP, which I absolutely love. All requests come in on the same IP, they all leave on the same IP -- but there's a bank of machines on the internal network serving the request. It's transparent to the end user...no www-16 prepended to the URL, unless you want it there.
Alright, so I'll have 100 devices that require an IP. I could see that, although I fully intend to become a luddite sometime after OS 10.5 comes out. My question is this: does each device that has internet connectivity NEED its own IP?
And of course, the NAT community says NYET.
The end user's desire for privacy and security combined with the world's ISPs' need to cut down on the number of machines running active web/ftp/samba/gopher/finger servers over their lines (and essentially bypassing their commercial services, which is where the real money is), will eventually mean that all consumers will be given a single IP, or less, from their provider. And you'll have to make do or pay a huge fee.
(What, you think just because IP banks are massive with IPv6 that your ISP is just going to give you a shitload of them? No dice, kid. They'll make you pay just like everything else, and try to tell you it's a deal.)
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most connection sharing devices -- routers, gateways, access points, etc -- also act as a pretty good form of security. They close devices off from the rest of the internet, unless you explicitly allow internet users in. I'm pretty much unworried about the threat of hackers getting into my printer; all i have to worry about is hackers getting into the router. And a single path of entry makes it easier to cut them off as well.
Sure, you can get a personal router with IPv6. But you don't HAVE to, and a lot of people won't. So the current scheme is forcing people to use slightly better security. And while roughly 4 billion addresses isn't enough for every widget on the planet, it's far more than the number of conceptual groups on the planet. One IP per organization or per household...should be enough for a LONNNNNG while.
And I can't imagine it'll easy for someone in, say, Afghanistan, to retreive cash from this service if it's based in the US. It'll be heavily regulated. So as far as that goes, it'd be better than paypal.
Yeah, but MasterCard is already doing this -- selling debit mastercards that work like gift certificates. He wouldn't get the patent if that was it. No, I bet it depenses some sort of cryptographic string which is impossible to generate meaningfully, but which will unlock the cash purchase.
Oh, and anybody who uses my line Just because you make a fuss about some obscure nuisance doesn't make you a patriot. to try and prove me a hypocrite is a total dick and not at all funny.
Whoa. If the guy is interested in his privacy, maybe he shouldn't be entering into high profile lawsuits. If he's interested in privacy maybe he shouldn't be going out of his way to establish an active communicative connection with somebody who obviously doesn't care about privacy. Definitely, if he doesn't want to be publicly mocked for his stupidity, he shouldn't post his private legal matters where everybody can see them.
A sleazeball spams a newsgroup, and this clown acts like it's the end of an age. Is this news? There's been spam in MY newsgroup since 1994. I don't read it. I sure as hell don't respond to it.
What's even worse is WHY he took offense to the spam. If it were porn in a science or kids group (which happens all the time, and is the major reason I don't suggest my little brother read 'groups), I could understand being upset. But this guy was upset because the spam was ADVERTISING SOFTWARE FOR AN OS HE DIDN'T EVEN USE. Again, I wouldn't mind if he was in some alt.linux.nutjob.advocacy group. BUT HE WAS IN A CRYPTO GROUP, where usage of linux is neither a requirement nor is it implied. So he's complaining, basically, that he didn't like the message he received on an unmoderated public board, not because it was offtopic, not because it was advertising, but because he didn't like the OS the software was for and the website was hard to use.
Oh look, I'm shedding real tears for this jackoff.
Nobody owns newgroups. They're essentially an anarchistic entity. So nobody has the right to complain about what's in them. And I think we can all guess that this spammer douche isn't have to give a shit about a random anti-Windows nutjob's spitemail. This spammer does exactly what he does with everything else -- he ruins the internet. And the loser acts SURPRISED??? SANCTIMONIOUS even...like the spammer was supposed to take his hate mail to heart and give up shitting on newsgroups and selling an inferior product with lies. Yeah. And Rumsfeld would step down if I called him to in a real nice voice.
Get over yourself, guy. Just because you make a fuss about some obscure nuisance doesn't make you a patriot. This is just like all the assholes who feel they have to make a scene at the DMV every time the line slows down. Like causing undue stress on the hapless teller is going to help the other people in line at all. Complaining about falsehood in advertising is like complaining about the holes in a screen door.
WTF is this, "uninterested in Windows" bullshit? Software is what computer users are most interested in, or should be. And an OS is just a platform to run it on. So how can a person become "uninterested" in software, just because it's right now only working on a different platform?
Take this out a level. An internet service provider is just a platform for going online. But we aren't "uninterested" in other providers. Hell no -- we all get super excited every time a new option comes to our area. Hell, I'm on a waiting list with three DSL providers that will NEVER come to my area. Because I'm interested, even if I can't or don't use the provider. It represents an option and as a guy striving to be Informed, I wanna know.
If new software comes out, and it's windows only, Linux geeks EVERYWHERE ask "when is it coming to Linux?" Because they are INTERESTED. They may not install a new OS, but they're definitely intrigued. And if it never comes out, you can guarantee somebody will try and clone the functionality of it. Linux people are SO interested in some pieces of Windows software that they will spend THOUSANDS of man hours making Linux work similarly.
And this guy most certainly is not "uninterested" in the product in question. He emailed the president, put up a web page, and fought them tooth and nail. That's not ennui. That's PASSION. Perhaps this should have read "Eric Green is so PASSIONATELY AGAINST Windows software that he considers the mere mention of it to be an affront to his personal philosophy, and will take every action possible to prevent its discussion in his presence."
I mean, geez. I'm uninterested in the stock market, but I don't feel the need to berate penny stock spammers. I just delete their messages.
Those car talk guys don't know wtf they're talking about.
For one thing, the Geo Tracker isn't even on the list. Here's a car that was WHITE with PINK AND PURPLE lettering down one side.
For another, the Jeep Wrangler is the ULTIMATE car of blondes out for a good time, and with the proper tire aspect, of frat guys looking for trouble. It is by no means gay.
(FYI, I drive the only volkswagen not on the list. SCORE 1 FOR DAS' SEXUALITY!)
Re:two overpriced underperforming technologies
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Pods Unite
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If the world's safest compact, and the world's highest capacity sub 6 oz mp3 player, are underperforming technologies, I wonder what you consider the par to be.
You see, there are many different directions engineering goes in. Making faster engines or bigger SUVs is one direction. Making efficient engines and safer small cars is another. Making a high capacity hard drive is one. Making a regular capacity hard drive light enough to carry around is another.
But maybe you're right. Maybe there are some things we just shouldn't bother engineering. So, you know, all of these "feed the world" biotech kooks and "reduce the depletion of our natural resources" solar energy kooks should just give up.
Oh, and as for the "50% too high" comment: fuck you. You don't know what the margin is, know less about business than you do about engineering and Apple shouldn't drop the prices that are keeping them alive just to appease people who don't want an iPod anyway. My 30 gb iPod was the easiest $538.92 I ever spent (after selling four shitty mp3 players that were too big, bulky, poorly designer or low capacity, I found myself with over $600...enough to buy a couple CDs, too).
Re:Is it really an incentive?
on
Pods Unite
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, a new 15 GB iPod is $400. If you can, instead of spending this money directly on the iPod, spend it as part of a downpayment on a new car, and STILL get the iPod, you might be likely to do that.
It's a tie in deal. VW has done this in the past with Trek cycles (you buy a Jetta, you get a $200 Trek 800), K2 Snowboards (you buy a Jetta, you get this snowboard and no damn boots or bindings), and if i'm not mistaken they had an e-edition golf with a MS PocketPC.
A tie-in doesn't really save anybody any money, but it does associate your vehicle in a very unique way with an activity. Any car can transport a bike, but VW's got a car "built" for it. Any car can have a little handheld pc holder glued in it, but VW's got one "designed" for it. It's little things like this that get people curious enough to go and check it out at their local lot. And then chances are more likely that they'll buy something.
They're not the only ones to do this -- i'm thinking of Orvis, Eddie Bauer and LL Bean edition SUVs, which are the same with slightly altered upholstery or a slightly altered storage compartment.
I've always hoped VW would team up with Apple. They're marketted to the same people with pretty much the same tactics -- us pretentious liberal arts assholes with our buddy holly glasses and square toed shoes YEARNING to think different and be a wanted driver.
Well, one of the problems with aftermarket stereos is they're all too fucking fancy. Big bright displays trying to lure my into purchase with dolphins swimming on a shitty LCD. Whoa guys, I've been using winamp since 1997. Color me a bright shade of unimpressed.
Or with faces that slide down, pop out, and all sorts of other worthless servo controlled motions which will no doubt break within the next two years.
I bought a volkswagen in part because of the large buttons, easy access to information and the stylish (and non blinding) indigo and red dash lights. The stereo is no exception. My model year, the unit is manufactured by blau but keeps the same bevel as the other dash buttons, and basically blends into the dash, instead thrusting itself outward saying "HEY! I'M A CAR STEREO! LOOK AT THIS STUPID DOLPHIN! AND THIS GIRL DANCING!"
It is impossible to find all of these things in an aftermarket stereo. Stereos with the right colors have the wrong ergonomics, and stereos with decent ergonomics have the wrong colors. So, I use a stupid tape adapter with a lead that I spliced down to 9 inches -- just long enough to reach the ipod "stow spot" where the ashtray used to be.
Oh! And don't forget this nonsense -- VW car stereos have a cool "music sensor" that detects when a tape needs to be flipped. And they detect this at the end of any song on the ipod that fades out. So it flips the tape, which takes about 3 seconds...and you miss the start of the next song! Oh, and what's worse is that when the ipod stops playing, your tape ejects after about 30 seconds and the radio comes on. Meaning if I don't have time to switch albums in traffic, i have to shut the stereo off entirely to prevent this.
Ugh.
Re:My iPod is super!
on
Pods Unite
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It is a male fallacy that girls are impressed by long, sleek rocket cars.
The girls I know like clean cars with luxurious acoutrements. Past a certain point, they don't care about how fast or loud or covered with chrome and decals it is. These are people who like SUBTLETY, who obsess over details, safey and cuteness. That's the beetle for you.
Besides, the volkswagen beetle is a nice car. It's comfortable inside, surprisingly roomy despite its apparent size, and there are lots of really nice editions out there. My personal favorite is the 1.8 turbo with the two tone leather interior, sunroof, sport suspension, rims painted to match the paint job...I've got a friend who drives one of these in jet black, and he gets more bumper than a body shop (to quote the film Airheads). In fact, of all the members of his rockabilly band (with their requisite 1960s chevrolets), his car gets the most attention. Could also be the drumming. Chicks dig a drummer.
"Brown nosing corporate fuckwit?" Look buddy, I don't know what things are like in your neck of the woods, but around here map making is one of the last great profitable jobs for the small businessman. These fake streets are one of the ways they keep corporate panzers like InfoUSA from buying all the information and hording it over people for subscription fees and tourist maps that only show what THEY want.
Maybe it would be better if you HAD died in that accident. One less dumbass who can't check facts or even think before he posts.
God, it's assholes admins like this that give IT a bad name...and are probably the reason why so many jobs are getting outsourced. I mean, why keep around people who think it's their job to be a beligerent elitist and in the process stop everybody else from getting their job done? I didn't think Nick Burns was a funny character at all...I thought he was a sick composite.
Listen. Management doesn't mean discouragement. It does not mean banning a person from doing what they need to do because you're too fucking lazy to make it safe. There's a huge difference between indescriminately giving somebody root and letting them run select statements in a database or on a particular set of tables. It's the difference between giving the inventory guy the keys to your warehouse, or letting him run around INSIDE without hassling him every five minutes. I used to work for the records center for the NY Department of Criminal Justice, and they didn't run as tight a ship as some of the UN*X admins I've known. That's because if they denied access to everything like some sysadmins, the "runners" wouldn't be able to pull what they needed, and law enforcement would suffer as a consequence.
Besides, as much as you like to think of it as such, this isn't your system. You may be in charge of it, but chances are you don't use the thing. The customers do -- the customers and the staff who serve them. You may be in charge of it, but you have no ownership over it. You're in charge like the custodial staff is in charge of the toilet.
You can keep the bad guys out of the building with your firewalls and your routers and your proxies. You can keep the idiots in house out of the sensitive shit, back up the data every 17 seconds and dust everybody's keyboards at night for unknown fingerprints. Hell, you can even come up with some cockamamie password policy, like i have to have at least one korean symbol in my password that changes bihourly. Do whatever makes you feel like you actually know dick about security -- just don't keep me from doing my job. If I can't run a query for a troubled customer, we've lost business. If you have to monitor one extra user account for suspicious activity, we haven't lost anything. Not only is creating potholes like this counterproductive, it also doesn't improve security in the least. I've never known an "exploratory hacker" who cared a whit about getting access to a person's read only accounts when it's often just as easy to get root. Why eat hamburger when you can eat steak?
Ok -- I think this isn't necessarily a bad idea, so long as you don't expect it to be the end-all, be-all of security. I often perform wierd ad-hoc queries on tables for data mining purposes, or to help our support team do things that their program just won't do (like cross index reports for a list of ids).
Some DBAs LOVE to think that their precious data is only access the way they want it to be accessed. I once had a guy tell me, flat out, "You guys should never be doing ad hoc queries. Write and submit a stored procedure for everything you do." I have never heard a more ivory tower asshole statement in my life, and you better believe I didn't listen for a second. Nor should I have, nor would he really want me to...when the CEO comes over and asks for usage statistics for a potential customer, he doesn't want to be told "Wait until the DBA shmuck reviews this query first." It becomes harder to justify your excessive salary when all you do is prevent us programming peons from doing our job and call it "security."
If I pull up a honeyrecord, and you're my dba, you should ask me about it, but not assume my account has been hacked and lock it down. Which means this is nothing more than yet another check measure. You'll still have to eye your logs and know your system.
You know, this is actually a great way to prove somebody from outside has been data mining, and prosecute them for it. Put bullshit data in your db. If it shows up on somebody's website as fact, you'll know they were grabbing your shit. Producers of maps do similar things...invent dead end streets and place them where nobody will ever try to go. If you look at somebody else's map, and you find your BS street, you know they plagarized. Just make sure you never buy a house on that street. Heh.
My domain, unlogged.org, is registered using false information. It's a privacy website. It would be a shame if I had to tell everybody who I was before advocating privacy.
19 ``(b) As used in this section, the term `enabling soft- 20 ware' means software that, when installed on the user's 21 computer, enables 3rd parties to store data on that com- 22 puter, or use that computer to search other computers' 23 contents over the Internet.''.
Doesn't this mean that Internet Explorer is ALSO illegal? It allows third parties to save cookies and the user to search other people's webservers.
No way in hell is this shit passing -- not on Microsoft's watch.
Well yes. Freenet could be used to set up a kiddie porn ring. Which is why it's so important not to expect the internet to solve every investigation on the planet.
You know, there are insanely illegal things going on right now all around the world. Some are conducted over regular phone lines with code. Some are conducted right out in the open, and the people involved either don't care or they're relying on normal citizens not caring enough to act.
DUTY is important to freedom. I'm not talking about the sort of duty that reports the arab neighbour next door getting a package in the mail. I'm talking about calling the police when there's a drug deal going down outside your window, or stepping forward when somebody's being attacked. That's what catches criminals. You know, there have been many instances of people using open forums like Yahoogroups to trade child pornography. We've caught the ones stupid enough to do that. But nobody's policing each of the millions of web servers on the planet. Pornographers are hiding RIGHT NOW. Freenet isn't activating them to do anything that the smart ones aren't already doing, and it isn't going to make the dumb ones any harder to catch.
Freenet doesn't touch kids. It doesn't fly planes into buildings. It might supply nuclear secrets to third world nations, but it doesn't build bombs and it doesn't set them off. People did this shit WAY before the internet. Ever hear of Guy Fawkes? Charles Manson? Caligula? Goddamn Hitler?
All Freenet does is equalize things. Makes it possible for everybody to anonymously access and supply information. Maybe some of the pedophiles out there will post their journals online, and somebody will care enough to help them instead of forcing them into hiding.
At the end of the day, it's just information, and people still have the free will to do with it what they will. Some of them might beat their swords into ploughshares. Some of them might bear them into more dangerous weapons. Some people might just put on a Charlotte Church MP3 and masturbate furiously. People are strange. Freenet lets them tell us all about it.
Re:RIAA and 30 years of permission to copy
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Freenet 0.5.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They don't have to show you anything. All they have to do is prove to the jury that your file sharing harmed their industry.
Legislation is against human nature. If we weren't all naturally inclined to steal candy bars, shoplifting wouldn't be illegal. The RIAA is trying to tell the world that what you are doing is just as wrong, morally speaking, and as long as the people signing the papyrus and reading the verdicts believe what the RIAA is telling them, it's going to be illegal.
You know, a lot of murderers don't understand why what they did is wrong. This doesn't get them free.
Your recourse in this battle over the freedom of music is twofold: one, you can stop trading and fight tooth and nail in the courts and on the streets to legalize it. Or two, you can just make sure you don't get caught.
Ask the millions of Americans who smoke marijuana, drive over the speed limit and don't pay their fair share of taxes which of these two courses of action is most effective.
Exactly wrong. If something you do contradicts a "freedom" of somebody else, neither of you were free to do that in the first place. Instead, you were imposing some control over something which infringed on somebody else's ability to control it. If I am able to own property, then somebody else is not free to own it. That's not freedom -- in the strictest sense of the word, that's robbing someone of their freedom to enjoy the bounty of the natural world. Hence the oft quoted line "property is theft."
Yeah, this is anarchy. No, it won't work in the real world because of what I like to call the "asshole factor." Greed stops it. But in the "computer" world, greed doesn't have to be a factor because there's no scarcity. No greed means no need to delegate your freedoms to a third party to insure "equity." No greed means no need for controls at all.
Freenet is an attempt at structured anarchy with the belief that only complete freedom can protect every freedom. There's no need for tension between conflicting freedoms because there's no conflict. Conflict is external to the system -- it's out here, in the world of pundits and attorneys. In there, it's just zeroes and ones.
It has been done. It was pretty worthless. It may still be in process, but it is not a part of Freenet. It's a hacked client and you're welcome to use it.
But you should know that the reason it was worthless is that keys in freenet are so easy to create that the second one got blocked, and published to a block list, you could resubmit the same file with a new key. Which would also have a different file size and CRC.
So, no way to identify offensive files until they download and decrypt. So, no useful mechanism to censor them. But a very useful mechanism for filling your hard drive with a useless black list.
It doesn't help, besides. If your computer refuses to serve a file, clients will just request around you. And thanks to the ease of changing keys, you're still not protected from having offensive material on your PC.
Lots of work with no benefit always seems suspicious to me...
Slashdot Mirror
Really, 6.65x10^23?
That's eerily similar to Avagadro's Number (6.022x10^23), the amount of "stuff" in one Mole of anything.
Does this mean we have more than a Mole of IPs?
I disagree. Protocols which don't work well over NAT are poorly engineered, so IPSEC is one of them. You can't assume every PC is on the internet with its door open any more than you can assume people use the default port or the same implementation of an IP stack. There are plenty of great reasons to have NAT'd machines, even with IPv6. My personal favorite is load balancing. If you want to control load balancing, and not rely on the requesting client to do it for you, a NAT-based routing device is an elegant solution. It optimizes queue speed by minimizing the lag effect of long requests and provides an extra layer of security. I'm thinking of F5's BigIP, which I absolutely love. All requests come in on the same IP, they all leave on the same IP -- but there's a bank of machines on the internal network serving the request. It's transparent to the end user...no www-16 prepended to the URL, unless you want it there.
Alright, so I'll have 100 devices that require an IP. I could see that, although I fully intend to become a luddite sometime after OS 10.5 comes out. My question is this: does each device that has internet connectivity NEED its own IP?
And of course, the NAT community says NYET.
The end user's desire for privacy and security combined with the world's ISPs' need to cut down on the number of machines running active web/ftp/samba/gopher/finger servers over their lines (and essentially bypassing their commercial services, which is where the real money is), will eventually mean that all consumers will be given a single IP, or less, from their provider. And you'll have to make do or pay a huge fee.
(What, you think just because IP banks are massive with IPv6 that your ISP is just going to give you a shitload of them? No dice, kid. They'll make you pay just like everything else, and try to tell you it's a deal.)
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most connection sharing devices -- routers, gateways, access points, etc -- also act as a pretty good form of security. They close devices off from the rest of the internet, unless you explicitly allow internet users in. I'm pretty much unworried about the threat of hackers getting into my printer; all i have to worry about is hackers getting into the router. And a single path of entry makes it easier to cut them off as well.
Sure, you can get a personal router with IPv6. But you don't HAVE to, and a lot of people won't. So the current scheme is forcing people to use slightly better security. And while roughly 4 billion addresses isn't enough for every widget on the planet, it's far more than the number of conceptual groups on the planet. One IP per organization or per household...should be enough for a LONNNNNG while.
And I can't imagine it'll easy for someone in, say, Afghanistan, to retreive cash from this service if it's based in the US. It'll be heavily regulated. So as far as that goes, it'd be better than paypal.
Yeah, but MasterCard is already doing this -- selling debit mastercards that work like gift certificates. He wouldn't get the patent if that was it. No, I bet it depenses some sort of cryptographic string which is impossible to generate meaningfully, but which will unlock the cash purchase.
MMM
Oh, and anybody who uses my line Just because you make a fuss about some obscure nuisance doesn't make you a patriot. to try and prove me a hypocrite is a total dick and not at all funny.
Whoa. If the guy is interested in his privacy, maybe he shouldn't be entering into high profile lawsuits. If he's interested in privacy maybe he shouldn't be going out of his way to establish an active communicative connection with somebody who obviously doesn't care about privacy. Definitely, if he doesn't want to be publicly mocked for his stupidity, he shouldn't post his private legal matters where everybody can see them.
A sleazeball spams a newsgroup, and this clown acts like it's the end of an age. Is this news? There's been spam in MY newsgroup since 1994. I don't read it. I sure as hell don't respond to it.
What's even worse is WHY he took offense to the spam. If it were porn in a science or kids group (which happens all the time, and is the major reason I don't suggest my little brother read 'groups), I could understand being upset. But this guy was upset because the spam was ADVERTISING SOFTWARE FOR AN OS HE DIDN'T EVEN USE. Again, I wouldn't mind if he was in some alt.linux.nutjob.advocacy group. BUT HE WAS IN A CRYPTO GROUP, where usage of linux is neither a requirement nor is it implied. So he's complaining, basically, that he didn't like the message he received on an unmoderated public board, not because it was offtopic, not because it was advertising, but because he didn't like the OS the software was for and the website was hard to use.
Oh look, I'm shedding real tears for this jackoff.
Nobody owns newgroups. They're essentially an anarchistic entity. So nobody has the right to complain about what's in them. And I think we can all guess that this spammer douche isn't have to give a shit about a random anti-Windows nutjob's spitemail. This spammer does exactly what he does with everything else -- he ruins the internet. And the loser acts SURPRISED??? SANCTIMONIOUS even...like the spammer was supposed to take his hate mail to heart and give up shitting on newsgroups and selling an inferior product with lies. Yeah. And Rumsfeld would step down if I called him to in a real nice voice.
Get over yourself, guy. Just because you make a fuss about some obscure nuisance doesn't make you a patriot. This is just like all the assholes who feel they have to make a scene at the DMV every time the line slows down. Like causing undue stress on the hapless teller is going to help the other people in line at all. Complaining about falsehood in advertising is like complaining about the holes in a screen door.
WTF is this, "uninterested in Windows" bullshit? Software is what computer users are most interested in, or should be. And an OS is just a platform to run it on. So how can a person become "uninterested" in software, just because it's right now only working on a different platform?
Take this out a level. An internet service provider is just a platform for going online. But we aren't "uninterested" in other providers. Hell no -- we all get super excited every time a new option comes to our area. Hell, I'm on a waiting list with three DSL providers that will NEVER come to my area. Because I'm interested, even if I can't or don't use the provider. It represents an option and as a guy striving to be Informed, I wanna know.
If new software comes out, and it's windows only, Linux geeks EVERYWHERE ask "when is it coming to Linux?" Because they are INTERESTED. They may not install a new OS, but they're definitely intrigued. And if it never comes out, you can guarantee somebody will try and clone the functionality of it. Linux people are SO interested in some pieces of Windows software that they will spend THOUSANDS of man hours making Linux work similarly.
And this guy most certainly is not "uninterested" in the product in question. He emailed the president, put up a web page, and fought them tooth and nail. That's not ennui. That's PASSION. Perhaps this should have read "Eric Green is so PASSIONATELY AGAINST Windows software that he considers the mere mention of it to be an affront to his personal philosophy, and will take every action possible to prevent its discussion in his presence."
I mean, geez. I'm uninterested in the stock market, but I don't feel the need to berate penny stock spammers. I just delete their messages.
That'll be the Passat. A car whose name my dad says sounds like "a wet fart."
Anonymous cowards saying shit that isn't insightful, interesting, informative or funny.
If your words were worth posting, you'd get a fucking login.
Those car talk guys don't know wtf they're talking about.
For one thing, the Geo Tracker isn't even on the list. Here's a car that was WHITE with PINK AND PURPLE lettering down one side.
For another, the Jeep Wrangler is the ULTIMATE car of blondes out for a good time, and with the proper tire aspect, of frat guys looking for trouble. It is by no means gay.
(FYI, I drive the only volkswagen not on the list. SCORE 1 FOR DAS' SEXUALITY!)
If the world's safest compact, and the world's highest capacity sub 6 oz mp3 player, are underperforming technologies, I wonder what you consider the par to be.
You see, there are many different directions engineering goes in. Making faster engines or bigger SUVs is one direction. Making efficient engines and safer small cars is another. Making a high capacity hard drive is one. Making a regular capacity hard drive light enough to carry around is another.
But maybe you're right. Maybe there are some things we just shouldn't bother engineering. So, you know, all of these "feed the world" biotech kooks and "reduce the depletion of our natural resources" solar energy kooks should just give up.
Oh, and as for the "50% too high" comment: fuck you. You don't know what the margin is, know less about business than you do about engineering and Apple shouldn't drop the prices that are keeping them alive just to appease people who don't want an iPod anyway. My 30 gb iPod was the easiest $538.92 I ever spent (after selling four shitty mp3 players that were too big, bulky, poorly designer or low capacity, I found myself with over $600...enough to buy a couple CDs, too).
Well, a new 15 GB iPod is $400. If you can, instead of spending this money directly on the iPod, spend it as part of a downpayment on a new car, and STILL get the iPod, you might be likely to do that.
It's a tie in deal. VW has done this in the past with Trek cycles (you buy a Jetta, you get a $200 Trek 800), K2 Snowboards (you buy a Jetta, you get this snowboard and no damn boots or bindings), and if i'm not mistaken they had an e-edition golf with a MS PocketPC.
A tie-in doesn't really save anybody any money, but it does associate your vehicle in a very unique way with an activity. Any car can transport a bike, but VW's got a car "built" for it. Any car can have a little handheld pc holder glued in it, but VW's got one "designed" for it. It's little things like this that get people curious enough to go and check it out at their local lot. And then chances are more likely that they'll buy something.
They're not the only ones to do this -- i'm thinking of Orvis, Eddie Bauer and LL Bean edition SUVs, which are the same with slightly altered upholstery or a slightly altered storage compartment.
I've always hoped VW would team up with Apple. They're marketted to the same people with pretty much the same tactics -- us pretentious liberal arts assholes with our buddy holly glasses and square toed shoes YEARNING to think different and be a wanted driver.
Well, one of the problems with aftermarket stereos is they're all too fucking fancy. Big bright displays trying to lure my into purchase with dolphins swimming on a shitty LCD. Whoa guys, I've been using winamp since 1997. Color me a bright shade of unimpressed.
Or with faces that slide down, pop out, and all sorts of other worthless servo controlled motions which will no doubt break within the next two years.
I bought a volkswagen in part because of the large buttons, easy access to information and the stylish (and non blinding) indigo and red dash lights. The stereo is no exception. My model year, the unit is manufactured by blau but keeps the same bevel as the other dash buttons, and basically blends into the dash, instead thrusting itself outward saying "HEY! I'M A CAR STEREO! LOOK AT THIS STUPID DOLPHIN! AND THIS GIRL DANCING!"
It is impossible to find all of these things in an aftermarket stereo. Stereos with the right colors have the wrong ergonomics, and stereos with decent ergonomics have the wrong colors. So, I use a stupid tape adapter with a lead that I spliced down to 9 inches -- just long enough to reach the ipod "stow spot" where the ashtray used to be.
Oh! And don't forget this nonsense -- VW car stereos have a cool "music sensor" that detects when a tape needs to be flipped. And they detect this at the end of any song on the ipod that fades out. So it flips the tape, which takes about 3 seconds...and you miss the start of the next song! Oh, and what's worse is that when the ipod stops playing, your tape ejects after about 30 seconds and the radio comes on. Meaning if I don't have time to switch albums in traffic, i have to shut the stereo off entirely to prevent this.
Ugh.
It is a male fallacy that girls are impressed by long, sleek rocket cars.
The girls I know like clean cars with luxurious acoutrements. Past a certain point, they don't care about how fast or loud or covered with chrome and decals it is. These are people who like SUBTLETY, who obsess over details, safey and cuteness. That's the beetle for you.
Besides, the volkswagen beetle is a nice car. It's comfortable inside, surprisingly roomy despite its apparent size, and there are lots of really nice editions out there. My personal favorite is the 1.8 turbo with the two tone leather interior, sunroof, sport suspension, rims painted to match the paint job...I've got a friend who drives one of these in jet black, and he gets more bumper than a body shop (to quote the film Airheads). In fact, of all the members of his rockabilly band (with their requisite 1960s chevrolets), his car gets the most attention. Could also be the drumming. Chicks dig a drummer.
Hmm. Maybe i'm too literal minded. I got jtjtjtjtjtjtjtjtjtjt: ...
Just an inkblot
Just an inkblot
Just an inkblot
"Brown nosing corporate fuckwit?" Look buddy, I don't know what things are like in your neck of the woods, but around here map making is one of the last great profitable jobs for the small businessman. These fake streets are one of the ways they keep corporate panzers like InfoUSA from buying all the information and hording it over people for subscription fees and tourist maps that only show what THEY want.
Maybe it would be better if you HAD died in that accident. One less dumbass who can't check facts or even think before he posts.
God, it's assholes admins like this that give IT a bad name...and are probably the reason why so many jobs are getting outsourced. I mean, why keep around people who think it's their job to be a beligerent elitist and in the process stop everybody else from getting their job done? I didn't think Nick Burns was a funny character at all...I thought he was a sick composite.
Listen. Management doesn't mean discouragement. It does not mean banning a person from doing what they need to do because you're too fucking lazy to make it safe. There's a huge difference between indescriminately giving somebody root and letting them run select statements in a database or on a particular set of tables. It's the difference between giving the inventory guy the keys to your warehouse, or letting him run around INSIDE without hassling him every five minutes. I used to work for the records center for the NY Department of Criminal Justice, and they didn't run as tight a ship as some of the UN*X admins I've known. That's because if they denied access to everything like some sysadmins, the "runners" wouldn't be able to pull what they needed, and law enforcement would suffer as a consequence.
Besides, as much as you like to think of it as such, this isn't your system. You may be in charge of it, but chances are you don't use the thing. The customers do -- the customers and the staff who serve them. You may be in charge of it, but you have no ownership over it. You're in charge like the custodial staff is in charge of the toilet.
You can keep the bad guys out of the building with your firewalls and your routers and your proxies. You can keep the idiots in house out of the sensitive shit, back up the data every 17 seconds and dust everybody's keyboards at night for unknown fingerprints. Hell, you can even come up with some cockamamie password policy, like i have to have at least one korean symbol in my password that changes bihourly. Do whatever makes you feel like you actually know dick about security -- just don't keep me from doing my job. If I can't run a query for a troubled customer, we've lost business. If you have to monitor one extra user account for suspicious activity, we haven't lost anything. Not only is creating potholes like this counterproductive, it also doesn't improve security in the least. I've never known an "exploratory hacker" who cared a whit about getting access to a person's read only accounts when it's often just as easy to get root. Why eat hamburger when you can eat steak?
Ok -- I think this isn't necessarily a bad idea, so long as you don't expect it to be the end-all, be-all of security. I often perform wierd ad-hoc queries on tables for data mining purposes, or to help our support team do things that their program just won't do (like cross index reports for a list of ids).
Some DBAs LOVE to think that their precious data is only access the way they want it to be accessed. I once had a guy tell me, flat out, "You guys should never be doing ad hoc queries. Write and submit a stored procedure for everything you do." I have never heard a more ivory tower asshole statement in my life, and you better believe I didn't listen for a second. Nor should I have, nor would he really want me to...when the CEO comes over and asks for usage statistics for a potential customer, he doesn't want to be told "Wait until the DBA shmuck reviews this query first." It becomes harder to justify your excessive salary when all you do is prevent us programming peons from doing our job and call it "security."
If I pull up a honeyrecord, and you're my dba, you should ask me about it, but not assume my account has been hacked and lock it down. Which means this is nothing more than yet another check measure. You'll still have to eye your logs and know your system.
You know, this is actually a great way to prove somebody from outside has been data mining, and prosecute them for it. Put bullshit data in your db. If it shows up on somebody's website as fact, you'll know they were grabbing your shit. Producers of maps do similar things...invent dead end streets and place them where nobody will ever try to go. If you look at somebody else's map, and you find your BS street, you know they plagarized. Just make sure you never buy a house on that street. Heh.
My domain, unlogged.org, is registered using false information. It's a privacy website. It would be a shame if I had to tell everybody who I was before advocating privacy.
No way in hell is this shit passing -- not on Microsoft's watch.
Well yes. Freenet could be used to set up a kiddie porn ring. Which is why it's so important not to expect the internet to solve every investigation on the planet.
You know, there are insanely illegal things going on right now all around the world. Some are conducted over regular phone lines with code. Some are conducted right out in the open, and the people involved either don't care or they're relying on normal citizens not caring enough to act.
DUTY is important to freedom. I'm not talking about the sort of duty that reports the arab neighbour next door getting a package in the mail. I'm talking about calling the police when there's a drug deal going down outside your window, or stepping forward when somebody's being attacked. That's what catches criminals. You know, there have been many instances of people using open forums like Yahoogroups to trade child pornography. We've caught the ones stupid enough to do that. But nobody's policing each of the millions of web servers on the planet. Pornographers are hiding RIGHT NOW. Freenet isn't activating them to do anything that the smart ones aren't already doing, and it isn't going to make the dumb ones any harder to catch.
Freenet doesn't touch kids. It doesn't fly planes into buildings. It might supply nuclear secrets to third world nations, but it doesn't build bombs and it doesn't set them off. People did this shit WAY before the internet. Ever hear of Guy Fawkes? Charles Manson? Caligula? Goddamn Hitler?
All Freenet does is equalize things. Makes it possible for everybody to anonymously access and supply information. Maybe some of the pedophiles out there will post their journals online, and somebody will care enough to help them instead of forcing them into hiding.
At the end of the day, it's just information, and people still have the free will to do with it what they will. Some of them might beat their swords into ploughshares. Some of them might bear them into more dangerous weapons. Some people might just put on a Charlotte Church MP3 and masturbate furiously. People are strange. Freenet lets them tell us all about it.
They don't have to show you anything. All they have to do is prove to the jury that your file sharing harmed their industry.
Legislation is against human nature. If we weren't all naturally inclined to steal candy bars, shoplifting wouldn't be illegal. The RIAA is trying to tell the world that what you are doing is just as wrong, morally speaking, and as long as the people signing the papyrus and reading the verdicts believe what the RIAA is telling them, it's going to be illegal.
You know, a lot of murderers don't understand why what they did is wrong. This doesn't get them free.
Your recourse in this battle over the freedom of music is twofold: one, you can stop trading and fight tooth and nail in the courts and on the streets to legalize it. Or two, you can just make sure you don't get caught.
Ask the millions of Americans who smoke marijuana, drive over the speed limit and don't pay their fair share of taxes which of these two courses of action is most effective.
Exactly wrong. If something you do contradicts a "freedom" of somebody else, neither of you were free to do that in the first place. Instead, you were imposing some control over something which infringed on somebody else's ability to control it. If I am able to own property, then somebody else is not free to own it. That's not freedom -- in the strictest sense of the word, that's robbing someone of their freedom to enjoy the bounty of the natural world. Hence the oft quoted line "property is theft."
Yeah, this is anarchy. No, it won't work in the real world because of what I like to call the "asshole factor." Greed stops it. But in the "computer" world, greed doesn't have to be a factor because there's no scarcity. No greed means no need to delegate your freedoms to a third party to insure "equity." No greed means no need for controls at all.
Freenet is an attempt at structured anarchy with the belief that only complete freedom can protect every freedom. There's no need for tension between conflicting freedoms because there's no conflict. Conflict is external to the system -- it's out here, in the world of pundits and attorneys. In there, it's just zeroes and ones.
It has been done. It was pretty worthless. It may still be in process, but it is not a part of Freenet. It's a hacked client and you're welcome to use it.
But you should know that the reason it was worthless is that keys in freenet are so easy to create that the second one got blocked, and published to a block list, you could resubmit the same file with a new key. Which would also have a different file size and CRC.
So, no way to identify offensive files until they download and decrypt. So, no useful mechanism to censor them. But a very useful mechanism for filling your hard drive with a useless black list.
It doesn't help, besides. If your computer refuses to serve a file, clients will just request around you. And thanks to the ease of changing keys, you're still not protected from having offensive material on your PC.
Lots of work with no benefit always seems suspicious to me...