...because it'll be the best years of your life. College is for slacking off, getting drunk and scoring hot chicks, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Guys who work hard at college will make more than you, and guys who skip it might as well (without loans to pay off) but they cannot buy the memories you will have.
We have achieved a society that is rich enough to allow a fair proportion of our young people to slack off and enjoy college. That's a precious gift. Don't waste the opportunity, and don't ever let anyone tell you that you should work hard now and reap the rewards later, because you'll never be as well equipped, physically and emotionally, to live life to the utmost as you are right now.
So go out there and slack like you've never slacked before. Just remember to panic cram your way through the exams, but don't get all confused by thinking you're actually learning anything that you'll use in your working life.;-)
OK, so this was a film that Rob decided that he absolutely had to see on the first minute. He went in hyped and ready to love it, probably with a bunch of Star Wars loving friends. And here's how I read his review:
"The plot, dialogue and acting really sucked for most of the film. Some of the scenes were almost unwatchable. The CGI characters were merely bad characters, not bad CGI as well. It got better towards the end, which (somehow) redeems the money that I wasted on Phantom Menace and on the crappy bits of this film."
This is the best we can do? You'll forgive me if I don't go rushing out to show the MPAA exactly how easily influenced I am by trailers and advertising. This review reads like a rationalization for wasting a bunch of time and money.
Rob, if you'd waited a week, would the film have somehow got worse? Would the crappy reviews from your friends have made you feel bad about going to see it? Would they have made it so much harder for you to pretend that you really liked a film that you actually seem to criticize more than praise?
I know that we all want everything that is Star Wars to be good and pure and holy, but it just isn't so any more. The magic has left Lucas. At best, he can give us an oh-so-brief glimpse of how great it used to be. But in twenty years time, who is going to be quoting lines from Menace or Clones? Not me, and not you either. Just walk away. Close the book, and don't sully your memories.
Bertelsmann poured in excess of $85 million into Napster (that they've declared), and they're getting none of it back, because the fucked up control freak DRM-infected new-Napster technology that it paid for is utterly without a market. That money is gone, burned, buried.
Now... where are they going to recoup that $85 million from? Pay cuts for their executives? Hmmm, I think not.
That $85 million is coming from two places. From their artists, and from us.
You have a think about that the next time the RIAA tells you that you're stealing from artists, and that you'll suffer in the long run. Bertelsmann paid $85 million to come up with a worse system than one 19 year old college dropout knocked up in his spare time. And we're going to pay for it. No doubt they will spin that so that their incompetence becomes our fault for using Napster in the first place.
think it's appalling that the same editors who decry the practices of the MPAA at every turn go out and spend their money and give publicity to the most crass and over-marketed of MPAA-sanctioned output
And on the first day, too. What clearer way to send the message that you don't care about the content, that you don't give a damn about reviews (professional or peer), but that you've been bought by the trailers and the advertising, that your money is already in the bank. It sends the signal that the MPAA should be able to expect and demand our money.
Not that Cmdr Taco cares. Hey, man, he's just one guy going to watch a movie, right? I mean, what can one guy do? If he didn't buy those tickets, someone else would, right? And the movie would suck if he waited two weeks to see it, right? Right?
I have tickets for a 12:01 showing in Ann Arbor and I'll be getting in line in just a few short hours...
...with the other sheep.
What, will it become a worse film if you wait a week? Everybody that goes to see this film on the opening day is sending this message, clear and load: "We don't give a damn how good this is, because we decided that we had to see it years ago. You've had our money in the bank since 1977. You could show 2 hours of Jar Jar breakdancing, and we'd queue up to see it and then temporise about ways in which it could have sucked more. Don't bother yourself actually making more than a trailer's worth of decent footage, and the rest of you Hollywood studios, take note. We're sheep. Baa. Baaaaaaaa."
But don't mind me. You go and see it, and demonstrate that it doesn't matter if you're flogging a dead horse, so long as it's a horse that people loved a lot when it was alive. Demonstrate that Hollywood (like the RIAA) is right to expect and demand a guaranteed revenue stream, regardless of whether they're making anything worth while. Demonstrate that if you lower our expectations enough, cognitive dissonance will kick in and a feeling that "Hey, that movie didn't suck as much as I feared!" will somehow morph into "Hey, that movie was OK! I guess I'll decide here and now to see the next one, no matter how drab awful it appears."
Bah, enough. You're a sheep, Taco. Enjoy being fleeced.
"Direct to the artists", right. How would that work, exactly, when the vast majority of artists don't own any rights to "their" music?
And how exactly would the money be split up? Based on the tracks downloaded? No, they can't monitor that reliably (given that 90% of the music that I download is mislabelled, truncated, badly encoded or fucked up radio edits). They'll use the same model as for radio play: it'll be based on the number of albums sold, it will go via the labels, and it will be given (grudingly) only to those artists who have the financial clout to demand what they're owed.
Foreign artists will get nothing, regardless of how many US citizens download their music. Independent artists will get nothing. Artists who distribute their own music online will be in the worst position of all! I don't listen to Angry Young White Guy rawk, nor do I listen to la Spears. But any tax on my internet connection will go mostly to them, simply because a lot of teenagers do what they're told to by the marketing $$$ and purchase their albums.
And now let's talk about the free market economy. If the music industry becomes supported by a tax, then what exactly is their incentive to even pretend to give a damn about producing actual music?
The situation is bad enough as it is, what with them controlling the means of production and distribution, but they still have to persuade us to buy the stuff. And they already assert that they have a right to receive an ever increasing revenue stream (viz their hissy fits every time sales slump), and Congress and the courts seems to agree (the DMCA talks about "promoting commerce" more than "protecting rights holders", and the Elcomsoft judge agrees that it's all about the money). How much more government mandated guaranteed revenue do they need?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Anyone outside the industry would say "none", anyone inside it would say "we deserve to have all the money in the world, while the rest of you die cold and hungry in the gutter, wishing you were us". I guess it'll come down to which of us our elected (ha ha) representatives (ah hahaha) choose to actually represent.
Actually, research has shown that most people won't register/remember a brand or product until they've been exposed to it at least three times
Mmm, sounds reasonable, but we're back to the problem of persuading us to watch it three times. There are very few shows that are good enough that I'll stick with that channel through the commercial break; usually I'll go channel hopping, or mute the set and go and tinker with the iptables on my firewall (again) and not really care if I miss 30 seconds of content after the break, as long as I can avoid watching the same dreary old adverts for the Nth time.
the unfortunate fact is that it's cheaper for them to produce a single commercial and saturate it.
We've been assuming that, but is it really true? Over a long run, isn't the cost of showing it going to dwarf the cost of making it? I'm not suggesting that they make multiple high quality versions, but rather that they make a load of cheap, raw slots. Sure, half of them might be unwatchable, but I find 90% of commercials unwatchable on the 2nd and subsequent viewing anyway, so what's the loss? I might even stick with them to see how bad they get.
Regarding whether it's more effective to run one high quality or six low quality commercials, are we going to believe whatever advertisers have to say about that? I think that this is one area where we (the viewers) really do know better.;-)
I had assumed that the solution is for advertisers to make high quality and entertaining commercials that actually border on content, which necessitates making fewer of them and running them for longer.
And then I remembered that last night I was watching a Captain Scarlet rerun, and thinking "Hey, these little wooden guys are better actors than half of the ones in mainstream drama and comedy shows."
So given that we've shown a propensity for accepting any old crap as original content, perhaps the solution is for advertisers to go that way and produce more content, and damn the quality. If you're watching two hour of TV, you can easily see the same advert six or more times. If it didn't work as a sales pitch the first time, it won't work the second or the sixth time. If you switch over to avoid it, it doesn't even gain brand recognition. If you make it too good as content, the message is lost (there's a lovely commercial on UK TV just now featuring cat herding as a metaphor for some service, but I'm damned if I know what service, or who it's for). And no matter how good it is, you simply can't actively watch the same advert six times a night.
However, if they ran six different commercials, even cheesy ones, you get some novelty value. Twist endings, different tunes, even the same scene but with different actors, anything to make you go "Hey! That's not the same as the last one!" Or even (gasp) live commercials. What, we don't have the technology to do that any more? Bollocks, we just don't want to do it, because it cuts out the dickweeds in Armani suits who have to run it past focus groups and debate endlessly on whether it's "on message" or not, all the time missing (or avoiding, rather) the point that we just don't want to watch the same advert more than once.
I'm not saying that I'd actually want to watch commercials, just that I believe there are far too many commercial directors who are frustrated feature directors, and want to produce a single wonderful masterpiece, that looks great - to a bunch of suits in a boardroom who watch it once. Just because I'll buy Buffy on DVD even after seeing in on cable doesn't mean I'll watch even the best quality commercial more than once. You just can't make me care enough during your 30 second slot to make me want to watch it even one more time. But make a dozen 30 second slots, and I might - might - watch them all.
There never has been a country, state or city run as a democracy. Athens came close - if you were a free man of property (the premise that both US and UK systems were also based on) - but they got sick of governing themselves and executing advocates of free speech and more or less acquiesed in their own transformation to a dictatorship. The US system is heavily influenced by Athens, and even more so by Rome and it's wacky dagger-in-the-back machinations. Hurrah!
Given your.sig, I'll infer that your primary argument is that in the US, you're allowed to own guns. I'm using that wording advisedly. You are allowed to own guns. As long as you haven't been convicted of a crime, and you don't want a concealed weapon, or a fully automatic weapon, or a handgun with a clip in excess of ten rounds, or live in New York and aren't (de facto) employed in government or the legal system, or in any way want arms (not guns specifically) that could actually be used for the explicitely intended purpose, which is "A well regulated Militia". You've already lost the gun argument, they're just being taken away (from honest men and women) one shell at a time by men and women with heavily armed bodyguards, until only criminals will have guns.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that the UK is much better than the US. The UK is a nasty, mean little country, but in practical terms, i.e. in practicing what we preach - we are still a little better, although I freely concede that we get worse every day under the auspices of Mr President-Elect Tony Blair.
New Zealand knocks us both into a cocked hat, of course. But let's not go there, it's always embarrasing when you think you're on the high ground only to find someone dropping moral rocks on your swollen head.
Don't assume that because you wouldn't do it, it isn't done. Bookshops (and libraries) are full of small, portable items that are so easy to just slip into your jacket. The value is low enough that a significant minority of people might not even view it as "real" theft. Before you gasp in outraged horror, ask any office worker how they feel about liberating office supplies.
Unrelated to this story, I heard an anecdote from a friend last week about casual bookstore theft: the mother of an errant child brought it back in to the bookstore to hand over a book that it had just slipped into its jacket. The child was about eight, and seemed utterly unrepentant, and the mother slammed the book down with a curt "Here's your book," then stormed off, as though it was the bookshop's fault that her offspring had taken it.
The part that surprised my friend was that the mother had even brought it back. He says that most of the people they get browsing their books are the sort who have to follow the words with their fingers, and they lose a lot of stock to casual - sometimes very casual - theft. People often don't even bother hiding the books, they just calmly walk out of the shop with them.
Now, tagging won't help to catch the most casual thieves, but if they do it once too often, it will help to convict them. Perhaps you think that this is a bad thing? Or perhaps you're confused about whether the purchases that you make on a credit/debit card are already logged and tagged to you. They are, and that information is already available to law enforcement.
Tagging of books (or any retail object) doesn't breach any privacy that you already have (which is almost none). It is targetted exactly and only at actual thieves.
Regarding your argument buying Karl Marx, it's very clever and sinister sounding, but considering that the USA already ban books it's overly hypothetical. How about finding out how few rights you have now rather than imagining lesser evils in the future?
Blah, blah, blah -- I've got nothing to hide, so why should I worry? Please stop with this tired anti-privacy and anti-freedom argument
You're creating a straw man to push your own agenda. That's not what I said, and it's not what I meant. This isn't just lack-of-evil, it's actively good, for you and for me.
Instead of a (tired) knee jerk reaction of looking at this as "them" tagging "you", think of it as you being able to identify your stuff. Seeing as how that's exactly and only what it is.
And don't quote me out of context. The important adjunct is: nobody will care about your purchases because it's small potatoes. If you believe for one second that law enforcement or government in the US don't already have the technology and the leglislation to track every single purchase, deposit and withdrawal that you make then you're living in a happy dream world. Your life is already transparent. You have no privacy. The only issue is whether "they" care enough to peel you like a grape, and whether they will use any of your activities as evidence against you. Chances are that they won't, but either way product tagging won't make a blind bit of difference to the information that the MiB can obtain about you.
I'm not so sure that relying on moral repugnance is a good idea, based on current trends. I would have been tempted to patent a non-human on the basis that "being non-human, it would be unprotected as a human under law and thus able to be exploited as a beast of burden or slave".
Not bad, but a lot of people might like a little mouse-man to use as a servant (think Kevin in South Park). There's no downside for them. We really need to play to people's fears and prejudices.
I'm thinking that we come up with a picture of a mouse-man and run an ad campaign with the theme: "Do you want your daughter dating this guy?"
Yes, good old racist paranoia: it worked for banning opiates, it worked for banning cocaine, it works for self-perpetuating stop-and-search racial profiling, it could work for this too.
modifying the monkey genome to increase their intelligence a bit, then addict them to a drug for their survival, would make excellent workers
Yeah, right, until the ACLU has them declared human and they all go on welfare and take over the trailer parks. Still, at least they'll provide a higher standard of guest for Gerry Springer, being capable of doing more than screaming, thumping their chests, and flinging their faeces at each other.
Nobody is going to care - ever - that you bought the latest Pratchett, then sold it to your friend, who donated it to a charity shop, who then sold it to a guy who gets drug conviction.
Then why record which book I have bought and who has bought it later
Sigh. So that when it's stolen, it can be uniquely identified so that the thief can be prosecuted, and so that it can be returned to you. It's quite clear from the article that this is the intent, and really, it's the only practical use. It can't be used to track goods moving from one retail purchaser to the next. It's not invasive, or sinister, it's for your protection.
Perhaps somebody might care that I have a copy of the Koran and the Los Alamos Primer?
Are you aware of the definition of clinical paranoia? It's not specifically "they're out to get me!", it's generally seeing patterns that aren't there, attributing significance to insignificant things, particularly with regard to yourself. That's a pretty solipsistic attitude you've got there, buddy. Nobody cares about you. Nobody will ever care.
That aside, how exactly does this identify you any more than it already does? If you buy a book with a card, the purchase (against the book code) is already recorded (gasps of horror!). If you buy with cash, you're anonymous in either case. You think that we're going to ban anonymous cash purchases? OK, then say that, and we'll debate that.
A word and a number, Farenheit 451.
Yes, that's a very nice work of fiction. Rather than worrying about speculative censorship and information control, why not worry about the books that are banned in the USA right now?
You can get 800X600 lcd projectors on ebay for less than $500.00
OK, but when the next one comes up, then you can get it, or I can get it, but we can't both get it.
I always have a bit of a chuckle at these "Build X for only $Y!", when Y is based on some completely arbitrary cost for a strictly limited supply of used hardware. And of course, every person who reads this (the original article or your suggestion) and thinks "I'll do that!" will hit eBay and drive the price up.
Sorry guys, but if you're not quoting a retail source, you're just blueskying. We can't all buy/build for bargain prices.
Information is not an object. Tagging it is an attempt to turn it into an object. Tagging of data adds a false layer of psuedo-reality with the clear intent to turn information into property, to restrict it and to create an artificial market. Tagging of data is inherently bad.
A physical object like a book is a unique entitry. It can be bought, sold, owned, given, lent... and stolen. Tagging it just helps to identify that it's a particular object (which it is). It's neutral information, with no inherent evil purpose.
Tagging a physical book is not sinister, it's not anti-privacy, it's not 1984. Nobody is going to care - ever - that you bought the latest Pratchett, then sold it to your friend, who donated it to a charity shop, who then sold it to a guy who gets drug conviction. There is no nightmare "Enemy of the State" scenario, because it's small potatoes. What this tagging is for is exactly what it say it's for: to identify specific objects to help convict habitual or large scale thieves. That's all it will do, and that's good, because it means those of us who do pay for books won't have to pay for the stolen ones too.
I guess if we don't have at least one anti-privacy conspiracy story on a weekend, we have to find one, huh?
Re:Overview of Netrek
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Netrek
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Problems with abuse are typically over-reported.
Way to miss the point. Your suggestion is to ignore the abuse and stick with it. Bzzzt, wrong. That attitude will kill Netrek stone dead. The learning curve is steep enough as it is; when nobody is willing to teach you, only to heap abuse on you, what exactly is your incentive to stay? In case you'd missed it, there are a lot of network games out there these days.
One big problem with Netrek is that new players can see that they're clueless. It's not like many FPSers or pickup map-based RTS's, where you can find twinks to play against, or you can convince yourself that you got unlucky or your opponent is cheating. With netrek, you feel overwhelmed. At that point, if someone heaps abuse on you, why on earth would you stay and discover what a great game it really is? Especially with the rest of your team just telling you to shut up and either play better or get lost.
If you don't believe me, try starting an Ensign (and playing like one) and asking questions in pickup. When I played back in the early-mid 90's, people would happily mentor ensigns in pickup. Now as soon as it hits T, everyone seems to go red mist, and either shouts at or just plain ignores newbies in favour of desparately scumming every last previous planet. Rest in peace, Netrek.
Re:Overview of Netrek
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Netrek
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· Score: 4, Informative
It could be easy to learn, but the casual newcomer will inevitably hit a learning roadblock. Consequently, everyone who plays now was introduced by a mentor.
There's a whole pile of things wrong with Netrek now:
Non-intuitive default keymap.
Horribly complex.rc file (which turns Windoze users right off)
No basic tutorial: there are plenty of FAQ's and strategy guides, but they're aimed at veterans and developes. There's no ten-point howtos for your first session.
Abusive players.
This last one is what will kill Netrek. Cooperation and communication is core to the game, and one idiotic abusive player (no matter how good) is a liability. For example, I jumped into a pickup game a few months back. As Ensign Rogerborg, I made a point of reading the message board, watching the galactic, and detting like a bastard. One guy on my team picked armies, then flew around for close to ten minutes, screaming for help for most of it. He received escort after escort, but never made a drop. Eventually he went too far, screamed again, and cloaked. I came in (alone) at warp 9, saw an enemy ship firing torps near his cloaked position, and smacked it with a torp volley. The explosion took him out.
Can you guess the response? "fucking twink, he was out of fuel fuck off and get a clue"
It gets worse. When I questioned what I'd done wrong, he got more abusive and the rest of the team backed him up and told me to shut up and get a clue. None of them told me what "get a clue" meant, or what I'd done wrong.
Thing is, I hadn't done anything wrong. The ship was torping when I came on screen, so it wasn't out of fuel. The carrier was cloaked and moving at warp 1 or 2, so the situation was critical. I took out the enemy with a single torp load, which wasn't (granted) my intention, which had simply been to get his attention.
The reason that I knew all this was because I played Netrek for 5+ years, captained an ENL team for two, and wrote a fully featured RSA-busting borg. I know Netrek, and I know that when an Ensign receives abuse for reading the message board and being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing (with an unlucky result) then we can basically give it up and go and wait for Doom3. The good coop players are all playing FPS team games now; all Netrek has left are a (very few) old men and a bunch of arrogant children.
It's sad to acknowledge that a much loved game has died through neglect, but Netrek should really get its tombstone carved.
Incidentally, for those putting their faith in the RSA check, it's easy (not trivial, but easy) to get around. Compile a client, add the server socket.c code to it so that it opens a listening socket, forward all packets from the client and "server" sockets, and connect a blessed client to the "server" socket to perform the cluecheck for you. The trick is that the RSA response has the result of a "getpeername" encoded into it. There are plenty of ways to trick this. Hack your kernel, write a wsock32.dll that passes through everything except getpeername to the real dll, -assert your own.so under Solaris, or (d'oh) just change the FQDN name of your machine to match the server.
The RSA scheme was a good attempt. but the real strength of the netrek network architecture is information hiding. Even a near-robot client gives you very few benefits. Vector torps are practically a liability against clue players, and you need low lag to be able to use perfectly aimed phasers. The biggest benefits of a borg are info features (like watching army pickups and tracking carriers) and that's just replacing the clue that comes with experience. The netrek model of information hiding should be required reading for anyone writing a network game.
I can't even remember the last time I saw a BSOD on a Windows box
main() { for(;;) printf("\t\b\b"); }// disclaimer: save any important work
Or install an AGP and a PCI card, set the PCI as primary display in the BIOS, but the AGP as the primary Windows display, and watch it die the first time it opens a DirectX app.
Don't get me wrong, I like XP (corporate, with everything turned off), but it's still not as stable as even a badly set up X/GNU/Linux system, because an application - any application, even a trivial console app like the \t\b\b printf - can crash the whole OS. But now that OpenOffice 1.0 is out, the only thing I need my XP partition for is games, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Back OT, I've just received the dispatch note for my SuSE 8.0 Pro ($60), with KDE 3.0 and 7 CD's full of goodies. Why exactly would I want to pay more to "upgrade" to Red Hat? This is a very strange offer.
[The people who download films] are obsessed people, my friends. Nobody is doing this to avoid paying $8 at the box office.
Hmm. Sounds reasonable, until you consider the guy sitting right behind me. He's currently downloading four films to his home machine over his cable modem (using VNC to drive it from work) and has just started looking for AOTC (based on me telling him that it's out there). He basically downloads everything, just because it's free, and it's there. He's getting megabits per second that he's not paying for, he's got a 120GB hard drive, and CD's are dirt cheap. Downloading a film involves half a dozen keypresses, two mouse clicks, and bingo, it's waiting for him when he gets home.
Would he have spent money at theatres to see all of those films? Probably not, but he's damn sure not going to now. The main point is that he's not a hard core Star Wars fan (he's too young), so it's not just the obsessives who are doing this. Remember, original Star Wars fans are all 30+ now, there's a whole new generation coming up who are seeing films not so much as something you go and watch as something you download to see if it sucks.
I can quite honestly see why the movie industry is worried. However, I think that the solution is to make fewer and better quality films, and (personal gripe) to show them in theatres with a strict "Shut the hell up and don't bring your damn chattering hyperactive kids, you morons" policy, rather than doing what they're doing, which is dumbing down, going for quantity over quality, and shrieking for legislation to protect their profits.
"Damn this digital copying technology!" cries the MPAA. "It makes it really easy for a single copy to be rapidly distributed to many sites!"
Which is true, but these early copies are all taken from pre-release showings of celluloid. Given that the studios clearly can't keep control of the celluloid, it's no longer giving them any benefit. In fact, they're a bloody liability, as it takes time to make many celluloid copies and to distribute them, worldwide in this case. Consider the problems of trying to make and ship thousands of celluloid copies all around the world, weeks before the first screenings, while trying to keep an eye on them and stop reviewers filming the showings (or people in the distribution chain just pocketing copies).
Hey, here's a solution that I can think of. Give up on it. Keep a single digital master, say "FUCK the reviewers" ('cause half of them don't watch the damn film anyway before writing their review, and some of those who do are filming it!), transmit digital copies the day before showing start, and only start your celluloid printing there and then. Digital copying technology makes it really easy for a single copy to be rapidly distributed to many sites, remember? Hey, we can figure that out.
George wants to encourage more digital screens, right? Great, do something about it. (Assuming Episode 2 doesn't suck), then consider if Episode 3 screen times were:
16th May 2005 (Digital screens only)
23rd May 2005 (other screens)
Get the point? The digital genie is out of the bottle, and it can't be put back. Celluloid is a security liability. Distributors might as well get with the 21st century and start using digital technology rather than weeping over how much it's costing them.
And in the absense of any references, I'll just flatly assert that my Surfboard 3100 doesn't even bring up the ethernet side interface until it's brought up the cable side, been told what docsis to get and where to get it from, and pulled it in on the cable side. Exception, if the cable side fails, the ethernet side is then brought up purely for the purposes of serving DHCP to a LAN, but in this case, the cable side is down and it won't forward packets.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a network engineer, and I fully accept that engineers do make idiotic mistakes like bringing up and checking both interfaces. But I'm saying that in this case, I've never seen it happen, nor have I seen any credible documentation (other than hacker optimism and unfounded assertions) that there are any DOCSIS modems out there that actually do this.
motorola cable-modems are looking on both sides (cable and ethernet) for a TFTP server. Yes it's stupid... but they do
Yes, that's right, because they bring up the ethernet interface before they've brought up the cable side, negotiated the frequencies, been told where to get the docsis file, and received it on the cable interface.
No, wait... actually they don't, as can easily be veried by pinging one as it comes up and noting that it doesn't go live on the ethernet side until after negotiating on the cable side.
Also, providers don't "switch to DOCSIS". DOCSIS modems will do squat unless there's a DOCSIS compliant cable network for them to get their info from. That's another reason why this is just hackers mouthing off (or getting very, very confused): until a DOCSIS modem has been told what file to get and from where (from the cable side, after negotiating frequencies), it won't try and get it, nor will it forward packets.
Incidentally, it's true that Surfboards will bring up the ethernet interface eventually, but only for the limited purposes of acting as a DHCP server on a LAN, and only after cable side negotiation has failed.
Unless you want to see how easy it is to produce convicing and very elaborate documentation of a fundamentally flawed exploit.
For those who won't bother reading the link (most of you), the exploit is this:
DOCSIS Cable modems TFTP a file from the ISP to tell them what speed they are capped at (true)
You can produce a docsis file (using the docsis project at sourceforge) that tells your cable modem to run at whatever speed you like (true).
You can set the NIC IP on your PC to match the ISP's TFTP server, and set up your own TFTP server to serve your own docsis file (true).
If you reset the cable modem, it will look on the PC side for the TFTP server, and user your docsis file (bzzzzt, false).
It looks really pretty until this last point, where it enters the realms of fantasy. The people who wrote the docsis spec aren't idiots. Cable modems will not look on the ethernet side for a TFTP server. TFTP'ing is done just after the cable side network discovery (so you have to have the cable side plugged in when you reset) and the modem knows which side is cable and which is ethernet. No, pinging the modem's ethernet IP from the PC doesn't help. It's just not that stupid; it knows that it has two interfaces, and it knows which one is which.
So go ahead and try this. You won't damage your modem, because it will simply ignore your TFTP server. What will happen is that you'll spend a couple of hours following the steps, getting all excited, then getting increasingly frustrated as you just can't get that last step to work. Rest assured, you're not doing anything wrong, other than following the instructions of a delusional wannabe hacker with a tiny amount of network knowledge and a real problem dealing with reality.
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...because it'll be the best years of your life. College is for slacking off, getting drunk and scoring hot chicks, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Guys who work hard at college will make more than you, and guys who skip it might as well (without loans to pay off) but they cannot buy the memories you will have.
We have achieved a society that is rich enough to allow a fair proportion of our young people to slack off and enjoy college. That's a precious gift. Don't waste the opportunity, and don't ever let anyone tell you that you should work hard now and reap the rewards later, because you'll never be as well equipped, physically and emotionally, to live life to the utmost as you are right now.
So go out there and slack like you've never slacked before. Just remember to panic cram your way through the exams, but don't get all confused by thinking you're actually learning anything that you'll use in your working life. ;-)
OK, so this was a film that Rob decided that he absolutely had to see on the first minute. He went in hyped and ready to love it, probably with a bunch of Star Wars loving friends. And here's how I read his review:
"The plot, dialogue and acting really sucked for most of the film. Some of the scenes were almost unwatchable. The CGI characters were merely bad characters, not bad CGI as well. It got better towards the end, which (somehow) redeems the money that I wasted on Phantom Menace and on the crappy bits of this film."
This is the best we can do? You'll forgive me if I don't go rushing out to show the MPAA exactly how easily influenced I am by trailers and advertising. This review reads like a rationalization for wasting a bunch of time and money.
Rob, if you'd waited a week, would the film have somehow got worse? Would the crappy reviews from your friends have made you feel bad about going to see it? Would they have made it so much harder for you to pretend that you really liked a film that you actually seem to criticize more than praise?
I know that we all want everything that is Star Wars to be good and pure and holy, but it just isn't so any more. The magic has left Lucas. At best, he can give us an oh-so-brief glimpse of how great it used to be. But in twenty years time, who is going to be quoting lines from Menace or Clones? Not me, and not you either. Just walk away. Close the book, and don't sully your memories.
Bertelsmann poured in excess of $85 million into Napster (that they've declared), and they're getting none of it back, because the fucked up control freak DRM-infected new-Napster technology that it paid for is utterly without a market. That money is gone, burned, buried.
Now... where are they going to recoup that $85 million from? Pay cuts for their executives? Hmmm, I think not.
That $85 million is coming from two places. From their artists, and from us.
You have a think about that the next time the RIAA tells you that you're stealing from artists, and that you'll suffer in the long run. Bertelsmann paid $85 million to come up with a worse system than one 19 year old college dropout knocked up in his spare time. And we're going to pay for it. No doubt they will spin that so that their incompetence becomes our fault for using Napster in the first place.
And on the first day, too. What clearer way to send the message that you don't care about the content, that you don't give a damn about reviews (professional or peer), but that you've been bought by the trailers and the advertising, that your money is already in the bank. It sends the signal that the MPAA should be able to expect and demand our money.
Not that Cmdr Taco cares. Hey, man, he's just one guy going to watch a movie, right? I mean, what can one guy do? If he didn't buy those tickets, someone else would, right? And the movie would suck if he waited two weeks to see it, right? Right?
...with the other sheep.
What, will it become a worse film if you wait a week? Everybody that goes to see this film on the opening day is sending this message, clear and load: "We don't give a damn how good this is, because we decided that we had to see it years ago. You've had our money in the bank since 1977. You could show 2 hours of Jar Jar breakdancing, and we'd queue up to see it and then temporise about ways in which it could have sucked more. Don't bother yourself actually making more than a trailer's worth of decent footage, and the rest of you Hollywood studios, take note. We're sheep. Baa. Baaaaaaaa."
But don't mind me. You go and see it, and demonstrate that it doesn't matter if you're flogging a dead horse, so long as it's a horse that people loved a lot when it was alive. Demonstrate that Hollywood (like the RIAA) is right to expect and demand a guaranteed revenue stream, regardless of whether they're making anything worth while. Demonstrate that if you lower our expectations enough, cognitive dissonance will kick in and a feeling that "Hey, that movie didn't suck as much as I feared!" will somehow morph into "Hey, that movie was OK! I guess I'll decide here and now to see the next one, no matter how drab awful it appears."
Bah, enough. You're a sheep, Taco. Enjoy being fleeced.
"Direct to the artists", right. How would that work, exactly, when the vast majority of artists don't own any rights to "their" music?
And how exactly would the money be split up? Based on the tracks downloaded? No, they can't monitor that reliably (given that 90% of the music that I download is mislabelled, truncated, badly encoded or fucked up radio edits). They'll use the same model as for radio play: it'll be based on the number of albums sold, it will go via the labels, and it will be given (grudingly) only to those artists who have the financial clout to demand what they're owed.
Foreign artists will get nothing, regardless of how many US citizens download their music. Independent artists will get nothing. Artists who distribute their own music online will be in the worst position of all! I don't listen to Angry Young White Guy rawk, nor do I listen to la Spears. But any tax on my internet connection will go mostly to them, simply because a lot of teenagers do what they're told to by the marketing $$$ and purchase their albums.
And now let's talk about the free market economy. If the music industry becomes supported by a tax, then what exactly is their incentive to even pretend to give a damn about producing actual music?
The situation is bad enough as it is, what with them controlling the means of production and distribution, but they still have to persuade us to buy the stuff. And they already assert that they have a right to receive an ever increasing revenue stream (viz their hissy fits every time sales slump), and Congress and the courts seems to agree (the DMCA talks about "promoting commerce" more than "protecting rights holders", and the Elcomsoft judge agrees that it's all about the money). How much more government mandated guaranteed revenue do they need?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Anyone outside the industry would say "none", anyone inside it would say "we deserve to have all the money in the world, while the rest of you die cold and hungry in the gutter, wishing you were us". I guess it'll come down to which of us our elected (ha ha) representatives (ah hahaha) choose to actually represent.
Mmm, sounds reasonable, but we're back to the problem of persuading us to watch it three times. There are very few shows that are good enough that I'll stick with that channel through the commercial break; usually I'll go channel hopping, or mute the set and go and tinker with the iptables on my firewall (again) and not really care if I miss 30 seconds of content after the break, as long as I can avoid watching the same dreary old adverts for the Nth time.
We've been assuming that, but is it really true? Over a long run, isn't the cost of showing it going to dwarf the cost of making it? I'm not suggesting that they make multiple high quality versions, but rather that they make a load of cheap, raw slots. Sure, half of them might be unwatchable, but I find 90% of commercials unwatchable on the 2nd and subsequent viewing anyway, so what's the loss? I might even stick with them to see how bad they get.
Regarding whether it's more effective to run one high quality or six low quality commercials, are we going to believe whatever advertisers have to say about that? I think that this is one area where we (the viewers) really do know better. ;-)
I had assumed that the solution is for advertisers to make high quality and entertaining commercials that actually border on content, which necessitates making fewer of them and running them for longer.
And then I remembered that last night I was watching a Captain Scarlet rerun, and thinking "Hey, these little wooden guys are better actors than half of the ones in mainstream drama and comedy shows."
So given that we've shown a propensity for accepting any old crap as original content, perhaps the solution is for advertisers to go that way and produce more content, and damn the quality. If you're watching two hour of TV, you can easily see the same advert six or more times. If it didn't work as a sales pitch the first time, it won't work the second or the sixth time. If you switch over to avoid it, it doesn't even gain brand recognition. If you make it too good as content, the message is lost (there's a lovely commercial on UK TV just now featuring cat herding as a metaphor for some service, but I'm damned if I know what service, or who it's for). And no matter how good it is, you simply can't actively watch the same advert six times a night.
However, if they ran six different commercials, even cheesy ones, you get some novelty value. Twist endings, different tunes, even the same scene but with different actors, anything to make you go "Hey! That's not the same as the last one!" Or even (gasp) live commercials. What, we don't have the technology to do that any more? Bollocks, we just don't want to do it, because it cuts out the dickweeds in Armani suits who have to run it past focus groups and debate endlessly on whether it's "on message" or not, all the time missing (or avoiding, rather) the point that we just don't want to watch the same advert more than once.
I'm not saying that I'd actually want to watch commercials, just that I believe there are far too many commercial directors who are frustrated feature directors, and want to produce a single wonderful masterpiece, that looks great - to a bunch of suits in a boardroom who watch it once. Just because I'll buy Buffy on DVD even after seeing in on cable doesn't mean I'll watch even the best quality commercial more than once. You just can't make me care enough during your 30 second slot to make me want to watch it even one more time. But make a dozen 30 second slots, and I might - might - watch them all.
I'll bite. I (the poster you're responding to) am a UK citizen. Now, let's see. We can be sued for contributory copyright infringement for bypassing DRM, but we didn't make it criminal offence. We don't already habitually hand over book purchase records to law enforcement. We don't have banned book lists. We have exactly the same fucked up first-past-the post electoral system as the US, but we have five parties that regularly win seats in parliament, and we don't return 90% of incumbents, nor did we choose to re-invent the idea of a near-absolute head of state appointed not by democratic process, but by a council of picked power brokers (if you know your history, the 2000 Presidential election was fascinatingly similar to the Anglo Saxon selection of a monarch by the witan, a council of aethelings and eoldermen appointed, influenced by and loyal to various factions in contention for the throne).
There never has been a country, state or city run as a democracy. Athens came close - if you were a free man of property (the premise that both US and UK systems were also based on) - but they got sick of governing themselves and executing advocates of free speech and more or less acquiesed in their own transformation to a dictatorship. The US system is heavily influenced by Athens, and even more so by Rome and it's wacky dagger-in-the-back machinations. Hurrah!
Given your .sig, I'll infer that your primary argument is that in the US, you're allowed to own guns. I'm using that wording advisedly. You are allowed to own guns. As long as you haven't been convicted of a crime, and you don't want a concealed weapon, or a fully automatic weapon, or a handgun with a clip in excess of ten rounds, or live in New York and aren't (de facto) employed in government or the legal system, or in any way want arms (not guns specifically) that could actually be used for the explicitely intended purpose, which is "A well regulated Militia". You've already lost the gun argument, they're just being taken away (from honest men and women) one shell at a time by men and women with heavily armed bodyguards, until only criminals will have guns.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that the UK is much better than the US. The UK is a nasty, mean little country, but in practical terms, i.e. in practicing what we preach - we are still a little better, although I freely concede that we get worse every day under the auspices of Mr President-Elect Tony Blair.
New Zealand knocks us both into a cocked hat, of course. But let's not go there, it's always embarrasing when you think you're on the high ground only to find someone dropping moral rocks on your swollen head.
People who cant punctuate or spel?
Don't assume that because you wouldn't do it, it isn't done. Bookshops (and libraries) are full of small, portable items that are so easy to just slip into your jacket. The value is low enough that a significant minority of people might not even view it as "real" theft. Before you gasp in outraged horror, ask any office worker how they feel about liberating office supplies.
Unrelated to this story, I heard an anecdote from a friend last week about casual bookstore theft: the mother of an errant child brought it back in to the bookstore to hand over a book that it had just slipped into its jacket. The child was about eight, and seemed utterly unrepentant, and the mother slammed the book down with a curt "Here's your book," then stormed off, as though it was the bookshop's fault that her offspring had taken it.
The part that surprised my friend was that the mother had even brought it back. He says that most of the people they get browsing their books are the sort who have to follow the words with their fingers, and they lose a lot of stock to casual - sometimes very casual - theft. People often don't even bother hiding the books, they just calmly walk out of the shop with them.
Now, tagging won't help to catch the most casual thieves, but if they do it once too often, it will help to convict them. Perhaps you think that this is a bad thing? Or perhaps you're confused about whether the purchases that you make on a credit/debit card are already logged and tagged to you. They are, and that information is already available to law enforcement.
Tagging of books (or any retail object) doesn't breach any privacy that you already have (which is almost none). It is targetted exactly and only at actual thieves.
Regarding your argument buying Karl Marx, it's very clever and sinister sounding, but considering that the USA already ban books it's overly hypothetical. How about finding out how few rights you have now rather than imagining lesser evils in the future?
You're creating a straw man to push your own agenda. That's not what I said, and it's not what I meant. This isn't just lack-of-evil, it's actively good, for you and for me.
Instead of a (tired) knee jerk reaction of looking at this as "them" tagging "you", think of it as you being able to identify your stuff. Seeing as how that's exactly and only what it is.
And don't quote me out of context. The important adjunct is: nobody will care about your purchases because it's small potatoes. If you believe for one second that law enforcement or government in the US don't already have the technology and the leglislation to track every single purchase, deposit and withdrawal that you make then you're living in a happy dream world. Your life is already transparent. You have no privacy. The only issue is whether "they" care enough to peel you like a grape, and whether they will use any of your activities as evidence against you. Chances are that they won't, but either way product tagging won't make a blind bit of difference to the information that the MiB can obtain about you.
Not bad, but a lot of people might like a little mouse-man to use as a servant (think Kevin in South Park). There's no downside for them. We really need to play to people's fears and prejudices.
I'm thinking that we come up with a picture of a mouse-man and run an ad campaign with the theme: "Do you want your daughter dating this guy?"
Yes, good old racist paranoia: it worked for banning opiates, it worked for banning cocaine, it works for self-perpetuating stop-and-search racial profiling, it could work for this too.
Yeah, right, until the ACLU has them declared human and they all go on welfare and take over the trailer parks. Still, at least they'll provide a higher standard of guest for Gerry Springer, being capable of doing more than screaming, thumping their chests, and flinging their faeces at each other.
- Nobody is going to care - ever - that you bought the latest Pratchett, then sold it to your friend, who donated it to a charity shop, who then sold it to a guy who gets drug conviction.
Then why record which book I have bought and who has bought it laterSigh. So that when it's stolen, it can be uniquely identified so that the thief can be prosecuted, and so that it can be returned to you. It's quite clear from the article that this is the intent, and really, it's the only practical use. It can't be used to track goods moving from one retail purchaser to the next. It's not invasive, or sinister, it's for your protection.
Are you aware of the definition of clinical paranoia? It's not specifically "they're out to get me!", it's generally seeing patterns that aren't there, attributing significance to insignificant things, particularly with regard to yourself. That's a pretty solipsistic attitude you've got there, buddy. Nobody cares about you. Nobody will ever care.
That aside, how exactly does this identify you any more than it already does? If you buy a book with a card, the purchase (against the book code) is already recorded (gasps of horror!). If you buy with cash, you're anonymous in either case. You think that we're going to ban anonymous cash purchases? OK, then say that, and we'll debate that.
Yes, that's a very nice work of fiction. Rather than worrying about speculative censorship and information control, why not worry about the books that are banned in the USA right now?
OK, but when the next one comes up, then you can get it, or I can get it, but we can't both get it.
I always have a bit of a chuckle at these "Build X for only $Y!", when Y is based on some completely arbitrary cost for a strictly limited supply of used hardware. And of course, every person who reads this (the original article or your suggestion) and thinks "I'll do that!" will hit eBay and drive the price up.
Sorry guys, but if you're not quoting a retail source, you're just blueskying. We can't all buy/build for bargain prices.
How can you be sued for providing information to someone?
If this does come to pass, it'll mark the last time I distribute a binary, that's for damn sure.
Tagging a physical book is not sinister, it's not anti-privacy, it's not 1984. Nobody is going to care - ever - that you bought the latest Pratchett, then sold it to your friend, who donated it to a charity shop, who then sold it to a guy who gets drug conviction. There is no nightmare "Enemy of the State" scenario, because it's small potatoes. What this tagging is for is exactly what it say it's for: to identify specific objects to help convict habitual or large scale thieves. That's all it will do, and that's good, because it means those of us who do pay for books won't have to pay for the stolen ones too.
I guess if we don't have at least one anti-privacy conspiracy story on a weekend, we have to find one, huh?
Way to miss the point. Your suggestion is to ignore the abuse and stick with it. Bzzzt, wrong. That attitude will kill Netrek stone dead. The learning curve is steep enough as it is; when nobody is willing to teach you, only to heap abuse on you, what exactly is your incentive to stay? In case you'd missed it, there are a lot of network games out there these days.
One big problem with Netrek is that new players can see that they're clueless. It's not like many FPSers or pickup map-based RTS's, where you can find twinks to play against, or you can convince yourself that you got unlucky or your opponent is cheating. With netrek, you feel overwhelmed. At that point, if someone heaps abuse on you, why on earth would you stay and discover what a great game it really is? Especially with the rest of your team just telling you to shut up and either play better or get lost.
If you don't believe me, try starting an Ensign (and playing like one) and asking questions in pickup. When I played back in the early-mid 90's, people would happily mentor ensigns in pickup. Now as soon as it hits T, everyone seems to go red mist, and either shouts at or just plain ignores newbies in favour of desparately scumming every last previous planet. Rest in peace, Netrek.
There's a whole pile of things wrong with Netrek now:
This last one is what will kill Netrek. Cooperation and communication is core to the game, and one idiotic abusive player (no matter how good) is a liability. For example, I jumped into a pickup game a few months back. As Ensign Rogerborg, I made a point of reading the message board, watching the galactic, and detting like a bastard. One guy on my team picked armies, then flew around for close to ten minutes, screaming for help for most of it. He received escort after escort, but never made a drop. Eventually he went too far, screamed again, and cloaked. I came in (alone) at warp 9, saw an enemy ship firing torps near his cloaked position, and smacked it with a torp volley. The explosion took him out.
Can you guess the response? "fucking twink, he was out of fuel fuck off and get a clue"
It gets worse. When I questioned what I'd done wrong, he got more abusive and the rest of the team backed him up and told me to shut up and get a clue. None of them told me what "get a clue" meant, or what I'd done wrong.
Thing is, I hadn't done anything wrong. The ship was torping when I came on screen, so it wasn't out of fuel. The carrier was cloaked and moving at warp 1 or 2, so the situation was critical. I took out the enemy with a single torp load, which wasn't (granted) my intention, which had simply been to get his attention.
The reason that I knew all this was because I played Netrek for 5+ years, captained an ENL team for two, and wrote a fully featured RSA-busting borg. I know Netrek, and I know that when an Ensign receives abuse for reading the message board and being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing (with an unlucky result) then we can basically give it up and go and wait for Doom3. The good coop players are all playing FPS team games now; all Netrek has left are a (very few) old men and a bunch of arrogant children.
It's sad to acknowledge that a much loved game has died through neglect, but Netrek should really get its tombstone carved.
Incidentally, for those putting their faith in the RSA check, it's easy (not trivial, but easy) to get around. Compile a client, add the server socket.c code to it so that it opens a listening socket, forward all packets from the client and "server" sockets, and connect a blessed client to the "server" socket to perform the cluecheck for you. The trick is that the RSA response has the result of a "getpeername" encoded into it. There are plenty of ways to trick this. Hack your kernel, write a wsock32.dll that passes through everything except getpeername to the real dll, -assert your own .so under Solaris, or (d'oh) just change the FQDN name of your machine to match the server.
The RSA scheme was a good attempt. but the real strength of the netrek network architecture is information hiding. Even a near-robot client gives you very few benefits. Vector torps are practically a liability against clue players, and you need low lag to be able to use perfectly aimed phasers. The biggest benefits of a borg are info features (like watching army pickups and tracking carriers) and that's just replacing the clue that comes with experience. The netrek model of information hiding should be required reading for anyone writing a network game.
main() { for(;;) printf("\t\b\b"); } // disclaimer: save any important work
Or install an AGP and a PCI card, set the PCI as primary display in the BIOS, but the AGP as the primary Windows display, and watch it die the first time it opens a DirectX app.
Don't get me wrong, I like XP (corporate, with everything turned off), but it's still not as stable as even a badly set up X/GNU/Linux system, because an application - any application, even a trivial console app like the \t\b\b printf - can crash the whole OS. But now that OpenOffice 1.0 is out, the only thing I need my XP partition for is games, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Back OT, I've just received the dispatch note for my SuSE 8.0 Pro ($60), with KDE 3.0 and 7 CD's full of goodies. Why exactly would I want to pay more to "upgrade" to Red Hat? This is a very strange offer.
Hmm. Sounds reasonable, until you consider the guy sitting right behind me. He's currently downloading four films to his home machine over his cable modem (using VNC to drive it from work) and has just started looking for AOTC (based on me telling him that it's out there). He basically downloads everything, just because it's free, and it's there. He's getting megabits per second that he's not paying for, he's got a 120GB hard drive, and CD's are dirt cheap. Downloading a film involves half a dozen keypresses, two mouse clicks, and bingo, it's waiting for him when he gets home.
Would he have spent money at theatres to see all of those films? Probably not, but he's damn sure not going to now. The main point is that he's not a hard core Star Wars fan (he's too young), so it's not just the obsessives who are doing this. Remember, original Star Wars fans are all 30+ now, there's a whole new generation coming up who are seeing films not so much as something you go and watch as something you download to see if it sucks.
I can quite honestly see why the movie industry is worried. However, I think that the solution is to make fewer and better quality films, and (personal gripe) to show them in theatres with a strict "Shut the hell up and don't bring your damn chattering hyperactive kids, you morons" policy, rather than doing what they're doing, which is dumbing down, going for quantity over quality, and shrieking for legislation to protect their profits.
"Damn this digital copying technology!" cries the MPAA. "It makes it really easy for a single copy to be rapidly distributed to many sites!"
Which is true, but these early copies are all taken from pre-release showings of celluloid. Given that the studios clearly can't keep control of the celluloid, it's no longer giving them any benefit. In fact, they're a bloody liability, as it takes time to make many celluloid copies and to distribute them, worldwide in this case. Consider the problems of trying to make and ship thousands of celluloid copies all around the world, weeks before the first screenings, while trying to keep an eye on them and stop reviewers filming the showings (or people in the distribution chain just pocketing copies).
Hey, here's a solution that I can think of. Give up on it. Keep a single digital master, say "FUCK the reviewers" ('cause half of them don't watch the damn film anyway before writing their review, and some of those who do are filming it!), transmit digital copies the day before showing start, and only start your celluloid printing there and then. Digital copying technology makes it really easy for a single copy to be rapidly distributed to many sites, remember? Hey, we can figure that out.
George wants to encourage more digital screens, right? Great, do something about it. (Assuming Episode 2 doesn't suck), then consider if Episode 3 screen times were:
Get the point? The digital genie is out of the bottle, and it can't be put back. Celluloid is a security liability. Distributors might as well get with the 21st century and start using digital technology rather than weeping over how much it's costing them.
And in the absense of any references, I'll just flatly assert that my Surfboard 3100 doesn't even bring up the ethernet side interface until it's brought up the cable side, been told what docsis to get and where to get it from, and pulled it in on the cable side. Exception, if the cable side fails, the ethernet side is then brought up purely for the purposes of serving DHCP to a LAN, but in this case, the cable side is down and it won't forward packets.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a network engineer, and I fully accept that engineers do make idiotic mistakes like bringing up and checking both interfaces. But I'm saying that in this case, I've never seen it happen, nor have I seen any credible documentation (other than hacker optimism and unfounded assertions) that there are any DOCSIS modems out there that actually do this.
Got references?
Yes, that's right, because they bring up the ethernet interface before they've brought up the cable side, negotiated the frequencies, been told where to get the docsis file, and received it on the cable interface.
No, wait... actually they don't, as can easily be veried by pinging one as it comes up and noting that it doesn't go live on the ethernet side until after negotiating on the cable side.
Also, providers don't "switch to DOCSIS". DOCSIS modems will do squat unless there's a DOCSIS compliant cable network for them to get their info from. That's another reason why this is just hackers mouthing off (or getting very, very confused): until a DOCSIS modem has been told what file to get and from where (from the cable side, after negotiating frequencies), it won't try and get it, nor will it forward packets.
Incidentally, it's true that Surfboards will bring up the ethernet interface eventually, but only for the limited purposes of acting as a DHCP server on a LAN, and only after cable side negotiation has failed.
Unless you want to see how easy it is to produce convicing and very elaborate documentation of a fundamentally flawed exploit.
For those who won't bother reading the link (most of you), the exploit is this:
It looks really pretty until this last point, where it enters the realms of fantasy. The people who wrote the docsis spec aren't idiots. Cable modems will not look on the ethernet side for a TFTP server. TFTP'ing is done just after the cable side network discovery (so you have to have the cable side plugged in when you reset) and the modem knows which side is cable and which is ethernet. No, pinging the modem's ethernet IP from the PC doesn't help. It's just not that stupid; it knows that it has two interfaces, and it knows which one is which.
So go ahead and try this. You won't damage your modem, because it will simply ignore your TFTP server. What will happen is that you'll spend a couple of hours following the steps, getting all excited, then getting increasingly frustrated as you just can't get that last step to work. Rest assured, you're not doing anything wrong, other than following the instructions of a delusional wannabe hacker with a tiny amount of network knowledge and a real problem dealing with reality.