"What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?"
well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.
proprietary software has been reinventing the wheel since people figured out you could build machines to count instead of people having to use math skills.
the rich get very rich off this planned obsolescence and reinvention process. those people rarely have morals or ethics.
case in point VR goggles. the idea of them is old, there are several ways to design and deploy these devices and yet the 'occulus rift' is just now coming out? i realize multi thousand dollar devices have been around, but most of them don't do what the rift will do, and none of them were able to use a ultra high def display device such as some cell phones are able to do.
secondly graphic processors which are on almost always 1-2 generations ahead of desktop processors. there is a gpu sitting in my desktop with 32 render output units. that is like a 32 core desktop chip and it has the speed and with gddr5 memory speeds to do what it needs to. it's not even the 64 ROPs of the top card. to even push my card to its limits requires 3 or more screens.
i realize graphics cards and desktop cpus are different markets, but the desktop chips always have some reason for scaling back performance while the gpus push a little. soon there may be an open hardware ASIC processor which at hash processing is way ahead of anything else on the market, and the little game the desktop and gpu makers are playing will all collapse as the chinese flood the market with open source asics the way they did with android tablets.
"Of course I would like to see what wind loading a 40 m dish would take, in terms of thunderstorms and the like."
since the device is made from concrete i would imagine it is nice and stable if properly installed. that is instead of glass in the mirrors which are just aluminum with a silvered surface... and yes that was from the fine article.
and virtually every city has 'clubs' where people do various things, and find inside connections to get jobs. kiwanis, the lions club and a zillion more on wikipedia if you look for them there.
servers aren't all unique, some need to provide the internet archive with 50 petabytes of storage(on 7 TB/disc spinning rust if they are using raid 1+0), some need to be secure against outside hacks and obvious indoor hacks, some need to host the 'cloud', some need to be able to route 3000 petabytes of data a day(route not store)....
the real reason republicans hate obama care is simple. it eliminates two very important metrics for keeping people poor.
first off it means buisnesses can't 'manipulate' cash strapped people to make artificial job growth or contraction simply by hiring more or less people for the same total work hours. this no longer works when you are required to provide heathcare then they have no choice but to give people the hours wages needed to live a good life, instead of making them work to boost or contract the economy.
prior to obama care the working poor had only quacks peddling fake insurance houses constantly shifting locations and doing many unscrupulus methods to keep the poor from being able to pay for care via insurance. if you were poor enough you could hit the jackpot of qualifying for medicare, for the rest it means payday loans to buy meds and such, and the unscrupulis con artists insurance is slowly beginning to fade away, because of the new law.
once released under public domain some hacker somewhere builds a website shows tons of content under public domain, links to youtube then claims ownership and DMCA takedowns original content and runs with as much cash as they can turn over from people who paid for access to what content they provided.
it's happened before... to http://theoatmeal.com/ and he didn't even release as public domain.
the best way to do this is to make a basic user account for normal mode, and an administrator account for accessing everything. all the settings for WM can be made so that admin can see everything wile basic user sees only a custom menubar and desktop and can't actually do anything. if their desktop icons are made immutable they won't be able to remove them, and if you find cheap hardware to run it all on they won't be a target anymore except to spammers/con artists.
is a $100 device you could work with and just tell them it's their new pc. since it has a serial port many hardware modems will work, and need no drivers, usb modems may or may not work i don't know...
i don't know where to go with Linux recommendations but pppd on freebsd will allow dialup on demand, but if you don't want that a manual link can be put on the desktop. chflags run as root (chattr if you don't like bsd and insist on linux) can make files immutable then not even root can delete, or move without running the chflags program first. if you want parts of the os to be protected feel free to make immutable files anywhere you feel like it to 'harden' the system the freebsd handbook has a walkthrough on compiling the kernel which is highly recommended for removing features and making the system harder to hack. disable or remove everything you or they don't need to further harden the system, and use a customizable WM and edit it so that only the functions you or they need are present i don't know what the people use these days, though. freebsd is easily configured to run on slow computers. keep in mind software modems may be a real pain to configure and there are usb modems that might work good, further research is required. i don't know what hardware you're running for them, but if you've got them on an arm board there are way more people working on linux based ARM support while FreeBSD warns they aren't end user ready... however a basic browser and email virtually anything x86 is usable for a modern browser which may not work right on dialup requires at least 256MB of ram with 1GB or better recommended by me.
the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies. in an open ecosystem where everything is free as in libre, any person designing medical devices could interoperate with everyone else designing medical devices. ever call to every piece of hardware would be workable by anyone who wanted to. every program even one privately funded, would then be opened to the community so their competitors could learn what you did and how and be able to build on what you did.
and if that smells like lost profit to you, maybe it is, but it's better for everyone. there is no vendor lock in forcing you to use inferior or vulnerable platforms. there is no 'upgrade cycle' that hardware vendors crave, the free market is always releasing inferior hardware to generate new upgrade cycles.
the government is supposed to be fixing things which corporations do wrong and they just don't care it seems. planned obsolescence.... do i need to rant more here?
if you think of sick people only in dollars and cents then you are in need of some morality. if you think we need to reinvent every medical tool every 20-30 years to 'fund' the proprietary developers of hardware and software then think of all the things that could have been done with those people not doing BS work, in a civilization where people are more than the dollars they have in their wallets.
and yet a $100 wifi dual band router is capable of transferring files wirelessly 8 bands of 40mhz that carries 1300Mbit/s of data and there is enough bands for a whole apartment building to each have a wifi router in every apartment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11 802.11ac Main article: IEEE 802.11ac
IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n.[18] Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). As of October 2013, high-end implementations support 80 MHz channels, three spatial streams, and 256-QAM, yielding a data rate of up to 433.3 Mbit/s per spatial stream, 1300 Mbit/s total, in 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band.[19] Vendors have announced plans to release so-called "Wave 2" devices with support for 160 MHz channels, four spatial streams, and MU-MIMO in 2014 and 2015.[20][21][22]
that worked great for openssl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed their solution? a fork to libssl without all the messy kludges for various vendors/platforms.
there is a thing called a bluetooth keyboard+touchpad/mouse url:https://www.google.com/search?q=bluetooth+keyboard as only one pairing is possible though that one pairing can be cloned to four or eight devices.
so government a key portion of civilization is no longer needed once our corporate overlords take their place? and these $800 com devices that have $160 worth of parts every 18 months is better than taxes how? oh and hey the phone company will drop the price $200 if only you agree to pay $15 a month more cause a $600 phone is more affordable than if you pay $280 over time. sure there are pay as you go wireless... but they are carried in some markets they don't have towers in. same for contract based phones they will sign you up happily even if their computer says they have no towers where you live. because once the ink is there its final you have to pay.
the point of the government is to protect the people from companies and it has sadly failed many times many ways. lung black from coal miners goes untreated despite federal laws where are the government acting about that? obama care has the potential of killing a $3 billion dollar a year of fraudulent medical payments but no those are 'easy' jobs for the wealthy to profit off the suffering of the poor, so we can't let the program actually work now can we?
bleh
technology doesn't kill the need for government especially when it comes from corporations. the free market you say? then clearly they buy low sell high. even if granny freezes to death because propane went up in price when her social security payment went down. and IT IS REAL http://kstp.com/article/stories/s3313632.shtml
the problem isn't that the government is too big, it is that it has not been doing it's job and is now more worried about how to keep the rich rich while allowing as many companies to be free of pesky regulations like preserving the quality of our water and air.
What really kills open source is that it doesn't have a functional GUI or a dearth of useful apps. It is because it doesn't have what marketing is looking for, vendor lock in for not giving competitors access to the same tools/data sets. It doesn't guarantee high profits, on low margins. It doesn't offer a user base of clueless clickers, who will pay because everyone else is charging for software, and think software means paying money...
remind me how many dollars sony was sued for over the walkman.
remind me how much has apple had to pay for illegal downloaded music playing on ipods.
the internet is a service, and with net neutrality it is not up to the isp to issue a court order to stop the infringement. they are not a court. neither is these stupid companies who harass people for using bittorrent or jigdo or ftp for crying out loud. the DMCA has clauses for takedown notices which the isp is allowed to essentially ignore unless the burden of proof is achieved. which these companies don't care about. this is shakedown money. and without net neutrality it is a forgone conclusion that to use the internet will require shakedown money for all future generations.
"I've learned the hard way over the years. Never let Windows Update install a driver of any kind. Ever.
I've had them blow out network cards, video cards, sound cards, and low level on-board devices. I've had them completely bork systems to the point where they were unbootable. "
thats not a bug, thats a feature... you've heard of vendor lockin and planned obsolescence...
thing is, i've seen $100 a fix computer security professionals unable to remove a virus.
i removed the administrator privileges from said user and the malware couldn't reinstall itself. funny thing about windows is that making a new user account prevents many reinfection scenarios, yet a $100 a fix professional tries to fix it with tools that wont install properly because a malware is reinstalling every boot up.
they infected the keyboard controller on the laptop somehow too, so i used a new $10 usb keyboard to fix that because i didn't want to replace the whole keyboard, and made it so that the id ten t user would have to enter a password to install a program, and would have to use a password to remove the anti virus which i wrote down and didn't give to them. they also though youtube movie links were 'purchasing' movies so i did what i could and washed my hands of the situation.
here, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ download, put to usb media... use BIOS to set usb and/or dvd to boot before the hdd. then boot and fix MBR then roll back updates. you can ever use the boot cd to replace the bad files using the copy on your boot dvd (just google the guides i'm lazy)
not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified.
right now only governments and corporations are really able to build their own fabs and thus be 100% certain no backdoors are installed. 3d printing breakthroughs will take that fab and make it a expensive prototype box which can create copies of itself for material prices, as well as make devices such as routers/firewalls etc. leading to cheap devices that can make secure open hardware for defending the walled gardens of less secure devices. within 10 years of the processor printing 3-d printers and there will be a world changing event where the hobbyist can secure a network anywhere in the world and thus be totally immune to government watchdogs. they will then resort to ipv6 built in tech to find the secured routers by location and go in and try to bust their hardware for not having government required mandatory backdoors. or maybe i need to see my doc and get some of the meds back that i asked to be taken off of.
if it has all the information needed to rebuild civilization and can easily fit on a new $220 laptop which an old virused windows machine isn't going to have the hdd space to store it on except in the microdownloads section i linked to.
and yes wikipidia for school (the name for the hdd distributable edition) is already there now.
good comment but i have a bit more detail. if you use wifi on your smartphone then it uses about 200mb a month for light in car use (not as driver though) verizon and walmart have a 20 year contract for pay as you go, unlimited data for their straighttalk wireless users. the 'average' smartphone user uses 1 gb per month based on verizons numbers. verizon is crying crocodile tears here, cause 'poor folk' can afford unlimited wireless and can and will stream music and videos if they don't cost them money and the buffering isn't too bad, especially if they are paying $45 a month for unlimited everything from walmart, without a contract (if you use a used phone, or buy a pay as you go phone) verizon rampantly spies on users and when making a slow lane for torrenters they realized legal streaming customers were using their expensive hardware for old contracts of unlimited data that are no longer offered to new customers. despite the fact there is dark fiber and dark spectrum. why can one apartment building have wifi from every user and has only a small spectrum of broadcast yet cell carriers are supposedly restrained by their data networks capabilities? hah, this plan to only throttle when a tower is over-saturated is a bait and switch scam, they will take down towers and claim their networks are over-saturated and throttle the networks so no one can use it so they can put cheaper gear in their towers. i just spent $100 on a wireless router and it's radio is almost double the signal of the old $40 walmart router. fwiw it's a 1750ac router. and fwiw the same router sells for $180 at walmart, but i bought it online. anyways better gear costs more and thus this is just verizon lying about why they want permission to throttle wireless signals they want to use cheaper hardware and take down towers. the sad part though is that a modern communication satellite can transmit over 1,000 channels of 1080i sized channels of broadcast, as long as it doesn't have to process the signals onboard. i've heard as high as 5000 channels and that is from a hundred some odd miles above the sky... wireless signals have way more bandwidth it is just that terrestrial based com signals are all processed so it can be spied on, and processing that is not as cheap as unprocessed (in the sky) data.
"You don't think it is noteworthy or interesting that a free, open source library is able to play Blu-Ray?"
is able to execute bluray java, not play discs. the bluray libs will play Standard compliant, non encryted discs. eg: home movies. you still need a proprietary decrypter to get around bluray limitations. and if it has cinvia that is a second program to detect and erase cinvia with little loss to audio.
ip holders are rarely ip creators. and copyleft benefits from copyright law, which is where it gets messy. but that is another thing entirely.
this sounds great on paper, but in the real world youtube content creators are subject to trolls, prudes, angry bigots, spam, false DMCA notices, people with a lack of humor, and market saturation. youtube starts as profitable but over time the benefits stop rolling in and some people completely go to a less public venue when ironically trying to reach out to new fans, simply because a less public venue will have fewer of these problems at first. online life is not that different from real life, but was often promoted as being different.
market saturation is like this, someone collects fans who watch their content, perhaps multiple times. this nets them money, but then people learn people are making money making youtube channels and then there are millions of channels then billions because of this the consumer of this content doesn't grow as fast as the channel production supply grows. so eventually everyone has a youtube channel and all the viewers wind up spending so long trying to see the best videos that they get sick of the time sink that it is and thus revenues drop.
drm is trivial because the fundamental concept of what a computer is is a device that reads memory processes that memory through an script or program and then dump the useful data to a memory device.
this means that any device dumps useful data somewhere. no encryption scheme is unbreakable and with digital is totally dependent on the end user not intentionally adding a mod chip to the device to read and capture the data in an unencrypted form from the own devices memory as it passes along the chain.
as a side note passwords are only as secure as the hosting computers own memory scheme, since at some point passwords themselves are in an unencrypted state, even if while transmitting across wires is not possible to decrypt in human lifetimes worth of brute force decryption. all it takes is one computer with legit access to memory to be modded to store that data elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
"What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?"
well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.
http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation
proprietary software has been reinventing the wheel since people figured out you could build machines to count instead of people having to use math skills.
the rich get very rich off this planned obsolescence and reinvention process. those people rarely have morals or ethics.
case in point VR goggles. the idea of them is old, there are several ways to design and deploy these devices and yet the 'occulus rift' is just now coming out? i realize multi thousand dollar devices have been around, but most of them don't do what the rift will do, and none of them were able to use a ultra high def display device such as some cell phones are able to do.
secondly graphic processors which are on almost always 1-2 generations ahead of desktop processors. there is a gpu sitting in my desktop with 32 render output units. that is like a 32 core desktop chip and it has the speed and with gddr5 memory speeds to do what it needs to. it's not even the 64 ROPs of the top card. to even push my card to its limits requires 3 or more screens.
i realize graphics cards and desktop cpus are different markets, but the desktop chips always have some reason for scaling back performance while the gpus push a little. soon there may be an open hardware ASIC processor which at hash processing is way ahead of anything else on the market, and the little game the desktop and gpu makers are playing will all collapse as the chinese flood the market with open source asics the way they did with android tablets.
"Of course I would like to see what wind loading a 40 m dish would take, in terms of thunderstorms and the like."
since the device is made from concrete i would imagine it is nice and stable if properly installed. that is instead of glass in the mirrors which are just aluminum with a silvered surface... and yes that was from the fine article.
and virtually every city has 'clubs' where people do various things, and find inside connections to get jobs. kiwanis, the lions club and a zillion more on wikipedia if you look for them there.
servers aren't all unique, some need to provide the internet archive with 50 petabytes of storage(on 7 TB/disc spinning rust if they are using raid 1+0), some need to be secure against outside hacks and obvious indoor hacks, some need to host the 'cloud', some need to be able to route 3000 petabytes of data a day(route not store)....
the real reason republicans hate obama care is simple. it eliminates two very important metrics for keeping people poor.
first off it means buisnesses can't 'manipulate' cash strapped people to make artificial job growth or contraction simply by hiring more or less people for the same total work hours. this no longer works when you are required to provide heathcare then they have no choice but to give people the hours wages needed to live a good life, instead of making them work to boost or contract the economy.
prior to obama care the working poor had only quacks peddling fake insurance houses constantly shifting locations and doing many unscrupulus methods to keep the poor from being able to pay for care via insurance. if you were poor enough you could hit the jackpot of qualifying for medicare, for the rest it means payday loans to buy meds and such, and the unscrupulis con artists insurance is slowly beginning to fade away, because of the new law.
once released under public domain some hacker somewhere builds a website shows tons of content under public domain, links to youtube then claims ownership and DMCA takedowns original content and runs with as much cash as they can turn over from people who paid for access to what content they provided.
it's happened before... to http://theoatmeal.com/ and he didn't even release as public domain.
the best way to do this is to make a basic user account for normal mode, and an administrator account for accessing everything. all the settings for WM can be made so that admin can see everything wile basic user sees only a custom menubar and desktop and can't actually do anything. if their desktop icons are made immutable they won't be able to remove them, and if you find cheap hardware to run it all on they won't be a target anymore except to spammers/con artists.
http://linuxgizmos.com/fanless-x86-mini-pc-runs-debian-on-2-3-watts/
is a $100 device you could work with and just tell them it's their new pc. since it has a serial port many hardware modems will work, and need no drivers, usb modems may or may not work i don't know...
i don't know where to go with Linux recommendations but pppd on freebsd will allow dialup on demand, but if you don't want that a manual link can be put on the desktop. chflags run as root (chattr if you don't like bsd and insist on linux) can make files immutable then not even root can delete, or move without running the chflags program first. if you want parts of the os to be protected feel free to make immutable files anywhere you feel like it to 'harden' the system the freebsd handbook has a walkthrough on compiling the kernel which is highly recommended for removing features and making the system harder to hack. disable or remove everything you or they don't need to further harden the system, and use a customizable WM and edit it so that only the functions you or they need are present i don't know what the people use these days, though.
freebsd is easily configured to run on slow computers. keep in mind software modems may be a real pain to configure and there are usb modems that might work good, further research is required. i don't know what hardware you're running for them, but if you've got them on an arm board there are way more people working on linux based ARM support while FreeBSD warns they aren't end user ready... however a basic browser and email virtually anything x86 is usable for a modern browser which may not work right on dialup requires at least 256MB of ram with 1GB or better recommended by me.
the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies. in an open ecosystem where everything is free as in libre, any person designing medical devices could interoperate with everyone else designing medical devices. ever call to every piece of hardware would be workable by anyone who wanted to. every program even one privately funded, would then be opened to the community so their competitors could learn what you did and how and be able to build on what you did.
and if that smells like lost profit to you, maybe it is, but it's better for everyone. there is no vendor lock in forcing you to use inferior or vulnerable platforms. there is no 'upgrade cycle' that hardware vendors crave, the free market is always releasing inferior hardware to generate new upgrade cycles.
the government is supposed to be fixing things which corporations do wrong and they just don't care it seems. planned obsolescence.... do i need to rant more here?
if you think of sick people only in dollars and cents then you are in need of some morality. if you think we need to reinvent every medical tool every 20-30 years to 'fund' the proprietary developers of hardware and software then think of all the things that could have been done with those people not doing BS work, in a civilization where people are more than the dollars they have in their wallets.
and yet a $100 wifi dual band router is capable of transferring files wirelessly 8 bands of 40mhz that carries 1300Mbit/s of data and there is enough bands for a whole apartment building to each have a wifi router in every apartment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
802.11ac
Main article: IEEE 802.11ac
IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n.[18] Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). As of October 2013, high-end implementations support 80 MHz channels, three spatial streams, and 256-QAM, yielding a data rate of up to 433.3 Mbit/s per spatial stream, 1300 Mbit/s total, in 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band.[19] Vendors have announced plans to release so-called "Wave 2" devices with support for 160 MHz channels, four spatial streams, and MU-MIMO in 2014 and 2015.[20][21][22]
that worked great for openssl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
their solution? a fork to libssl without all the messy kludges for various vendors/platforms.
there is a thing called a bluetooth keyboard+touchpad/mouse url:https://www.google.com/search?q=bluetooth+keyboard
as only one pairing is possible though that one pairing can be cloned to four or eight devices.
so government a key portion of civilization is no longer needed once our corporate overlords take their place? and these $800 com devices that have $160 worth of parts every 18 months is better than taxes how? oh and hey the phone company will drop the price $200 if only you agree to pay $15 a month more cause a $600 phone is more affordable than if you pay $280 over time. sure there are pay as you go wireless... but they are carried in some markets they don't have towers in. same for contract based phones they will sign you up happily even if their computer says they have no towers where you live. because once the ink is there its final you have to pay.
the point of the government is to protect the people from companies and it has sadly failed many times many ways. lung black from coal miners goes untreated despite federal laws where are the government acting about that? obama care has the potential of killing a $3 billion dollar a year of fraudulent medical payments but no those are 'easy' jobs for the wealthy to profit off the suffering of the poor, so we can't let the program actually work now can we?
bleh
technology doesn't kill the need for government especially when it comes from corporations. the free market you say? then clearly they buy low sell high. even if granny freezes to death because propane went up in price when her social security payment went down. and IT IS REAL http://kstp.com/article/stories/s3313632.shtml
the problem isn't that the government is too big, it is that it has not been doing it's job and is now more worried about how to keep the rich rich while allowing as many companies to be free of pesky regulations like preserving the quality of our water and air.
What really kills open source is that it doesn't have a functional GUI or a dearth of useful apps. It is because it doesn't have what marketing is looking for, vendor lock in for not giving competitors access to the same tools/data sets. It doesn't guarantee high profits, on low margins. It doesn't offer a user base of clueless clickers, who will pay because everyone else is charging for software, and think software means paying money...
remind me how many dollars sony was sued for over the walkman.
remind me how much has apple had to pay for illegal downloaded music playing on ipods.
the internet is a service, and with net neutrality it is not up to the isp to issue a court order to stop the infringement. they are not a court. neither is these stupid companies who harass people for using bittorrent or jigdo or ftp for crying out loud. the DMCA has clauses for takedown notices which the isp is allowed to essentially ignore unless the burden of proof is achieved. which these companies don't care about. this is shakedown money. and without net neutrality it is a forgone conclusion that to use the internet will require shakedown money for all future generations.
"I've learned the hard way over the years. Never let Windows Update install a driver of any kind. Ever.
I've had them blow out network cards, video cards, sound cards, and low level on-board devices. I've had them completely bork systems to the point where they were unbootable. "
thats not a bug, thats a feature... you've heard of vendor lockin and planned obsolescence...
sounds like we've got an Id ten T error.
thing is, i've seen $100 a fix computer security professionals unable to remove a virus.
i removed the administrator privileges from said user and the malware couldn't reinstall itself. funny thing about windows is that making a new user account prevents many reinfection scenarios, yet a $100 a fix professional tries to fix it with tools that wont install properly because a malware is reinstalling every boot up.
they infected the keyboard controller on the laptop somehow too, so i used a new $10 usb keyboard to fix that because i didn't want to replace the whole keyboard, and made it so that the id ten t user would have to enter a password to install a program, and would have to use a password to remove the anti virus which i wrote down and didn't give to them. they also though youtube movie links were 'purchasing' movies so i did what i could and washed my hands of the situation.
here, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ download, put to usb media... use BIOS to set usb and/or dvd to boot before the hdd. then boot and fix MBR then roll back updates. you can ever use the boot cd to replace the bad files using the copy on your boot dvd (just google the guides i'm lazy)
not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified.
right now only governments and corporations are really able to build their own fabs and thus be 100% certain no backdoors are installed. 3d printing breakthroughs will take that fab and make it a expensive prototype box which can create copies of itself for material prices, as well as make devices such as routers/firewalls etc. leading to cheap devices that can make secure open hardware for defending the walled gardens of less secure devices. within 10 years of the processor printing 3-d printers and there will be a world changing event where the hobbyist can secure a network anywhere in the world and thus be totally immune to government watchdogs. they will then resort to ipv6 built in tech to find the secured routers by location and go in and try to bust their hardware for not having government required mandatory backdoors. or maybe i need to see my doc and get some of the meds back that i asked to be taken off of.
http://www.cd3wd.com/mdownloads/index.htm
if it has all the information needed to rebuild civilization and can easily fit on a new $220 laptop which an old virused windows machine isn't going to have the hdd space to store it on except in the microdownloads section i linked to.
and yes wikipidia for school (the name for the hdd distributable edition) is already there now.
good comment but i have a bit more detail. if you use wifi on your smartphone then it uses about 200mb a month for light in car use (not as driver though)
verizon and walmart have a 20 year contract for pay as you go, unlimited data for their straighttalk wireless users.
the 'average' smartphone user uses 1 gb per month based on verizons numbers.
verizon is crying crocodile tears here, cause 'poor folk' can afford unlimited wireless and can and will stream music and videos if they don't cost them money and the buffering isn't too bad, especially if they are paying $45 a month for unlimited everything from walmart, without a contract (if you use a used phone, or buy a pay as you go phone)
verizon rampantly spies on users and when making a slow lane for torrenters they realized legal streaming customers were using their expensive hardware for old contracts of unlimited data that are no longer offered to new customers.
despite the fact there is dark fiber and dark spectrum. why can one apartment building have wifi from every user and has only a small spectrum of broadcast yet cell carriers are supposedly restrained by their data networks capabilities? hah, this plan to only throttle when a tower is over-saturated is a bait and switch scam, they will take down towers and claim their networks are over-saturated and throttle the networks so no one can use it so they can put cheaper gear in their towers. i just spent $100 on a wireless router and it's radio is almost double the signal of the old $40 walmart router. fwiw it's a 1750ac router. and fwiw the same router sells for $180 at walmart, but i bought it online. anyways better gear costs more and thus this is just verizon lying about why they want permission to throttle wireless signals they want to use cheaper hardware and take down towers. the sad part though is that a modern communication satellite can transmit over 1,000 channels of 1080i sized channels of broadcast, as long as it doesn't have to process the signals onboard. i've heard as high as 5000 channels and that is from a hundred some odd miles above the sky... wireless signals have way more bandwidth it is just that terrestrial based com signals are all processed so it can be spied on, and processing that is not as cheap as unprocessed (in the sky) data.
"You don't think it is noteworthy or interesting that a free, open source library is able to play Blu-Ray?"
is able to execute bluray java, not play discs. the bluray libs will play Standard compliant, non encryted discs. eg: home movies. you still need a proprietary decrypter to get around bluray limitations. and if it has cinvia that is a second program to detect and erase cinvia with little loss to audio.
ip holders are rarely ip creators. and copyleft benefits from copyright law, which is where it gets messy. but that is another thing entirely.
this sounds great on paper, but in the real world youtube content creators are subject to trolls, prudes, angry bigots, spam, false DMCA notices, people with a lack of humor, and market saturation. youtube starts as profitable but over time the benefits stop rolling in and some people completely go to a less public venue when ironically trying to reach out to new fans, simply because a less public venue will have fewer of these problems at first. online life is not that different from real life, but was often promoted as being different.
market saturation is like this, someone collects fans who watch their content, perhaps multiple times. this nets them money, but then people learn people are making money making youtube channels and then there are millions of channels then billions because of this the consumer of this content doesn't grow as fast as the channel production supply grows. so eventually everyone has a youtube channel and all the viewers wind up spending so long trying to see the best videos that they get sick of the time sink that it is and thus revenues drop.
drm is trivial because the fundamental concept of what a computer is is a device that reads memory processes that memory through an script or program and then dump the useful data to a memory device.
this means that any device dumps useful data somewhere. no encryption scheme is unbreakable and with digital is totally dependent on the end user not intentionally adding a mod chip to the device to read and capture the data in an unencrypted form from the own devices memory as it passes along the chain.
as a side note passwords are only as secure as the hosting computers own memory scheme, since at some point passwords themselves are in an unencrypted state, even if while transmitting across wires is not possible to decrypt in human lifetimes worth of brute force decryption. all it takes is one computer with legit access to memory to be modded to store that data elsewhere.