I have to agree with you here, in some respects. While in college, I hung out in a frat house a lot for a few months. One of the more disturbing things I witnessed was the gleeful enjoyment many of the members got out of watching "Faces of Death" and the horribly drawn out, disturbing rape scene in "I Spit On Your Grave". The experience gave me a new low opinion of the human race.
So how goes the evaluation? I've been patiently waiting for the 7.0 release (it's killing me) so I can get my hands on ZFS. Kind of ironic that you're worried about BSD moving towards Solaris, as Solaris was preceded by SunOS which was based on BSD.
If I recall correctly, that was mostly the reason given to the public, crap like "marijuana makes black men look you in the eye and desire white women". The real reason, or so the anti-prohibition school claims, is that a print media mogul realized that hemp would severely cut into the market for wood pulp, in which he was heavily invested. So, this guy uses the power of his own presses to demonize all forms of cannabis, influencing public policy for years to come and ensuring that old-school rich white men in power today still can't see the truth because they're looking eye-to-eye with their own colons.
What? Firstly, it wasn't documented initially, so they lost trust there. If a company introduces *any* circumvention into a product, they lose trust. I don't care if corporate execs or IT head honchos aren't comfortable with the inconvenience of using good crypto, but any back door is bad. Period. This is just another notch against PGP's reputation. When they introduced a master password to decrypt PGP-encrypted email a few years back (for corporate interests, of course), that was a bad thing. This is just as bad, and, from a true security standpoint, is unacceptable.
One of the trade-offs of using encryption is not having access to data which is encrypted (unless you have the password/key of course), as well as losing some functionality of the system it is installed on (as illustrated by this hack of a "feature" introduced to facilitate remote administration). If you're willing to punch holes into a a crypto system, then your data isn't worthy of that much protection. If you mis-trust your users to the point forcing a master password to unlock their data w/o their presence or consent, then you have no business trusting them with the data to being with.
When Phil sold out and went commercial with PGP. He may have saved face by leaving shortly thereafter, but it was too late. With monied interests involved, everyone knew the product's integrity was in question from the first day of the announcement. This just proves that you cannot trust a proprietary product for something as important as encryption.
As a Fab Four fan myself, a I agree. However, I think the Stones put out better rock than the Beatles, when each group's entire career is taken into account. The Beatles, after their initial teeny-pop-rock phase (say, Rubber Soul and beyond), they were more like today's "alternative" than the true rock of the time.
I think he meant that the history behind the demonization of weed has been solely to the benefit of big business, the prison industrial complex, and big government, while at the expense of taxpayers and the freedom of many individuals. All with a host of evidence supporting that, in terms of substance with abuse potential, pot should be *way* down on the priority list, if on the list at all.
I like the hosting philosophy of NearlyFreeSpeech.net. So far as I'm aware, they rank pretty well in the "not evil" department. I am a customer of theirs -- a happy one, at that (especially cool pricing model) -- but I'm always on the look-out for cheap, ethical hosting services to recommend to friends/family/clients. Thanks for the link.
I'm too busy to track down a good link, but google "salt lake city winter olympics propane teddy bear". I don't know if the guy was ever found to have a nefarious purpose for the purchase, but the government can and does correlate innocuous things together to form suspicions about people. Still, it's pretty scary that stuff like this happens (the correlation of people's behavior, not the purchase of teddy bears, that is).
I don't think lasers, piranhas, or white cats are included in the $1,000,000 asking price, but a nice underground bunker can be had here, if you desire such prime real estate.:) Jump on it, folks! When they outlaw the ownership of underground bunkers, only outlaws will own one!
I guess when you rely on something so specialized, you take what the vendor offers or you don't. So you can't get support under a less sucky MS product? Like Windows 2000? Machine automation is a domain I'm very unfamiliar with. Not saying it's feasible to switch, but are there competitors?
A specialty store sometimes you can find things made in maybe Europe somewhere, but US made things are hard to find and anything non-chinese is pretty hard as well.
Check out Lehman's. They're smack in the middle of the Ohio Amish/Mennonite community, and cater to their need for simple and non-electric tools. Some of their stuff is hand-made by the locals, including some toys. Sure, they're not the snazzy plastic baubles you can get everywhere else, but are more simple things, often made of wood. I see that the "Toys" link off the main page boasts "Made in the USA".
Even if the phone call gets redirected to deepest India, they will still help you out - as I found out when I had to revalidate my Windows install for the fourth time, due to hardware issues.
Don't you see something inherently wrong with that? Not to be snide, but why would you continue to put up with such problems?
Must be something else. I run Firefox 2.0.0.7 under Windows 2000 on a ~500MHz laptop w/ 160MB of memory, and it doesn't ever lock up on me. No, it's not fast, but it's quite stable and usable (in spite of the 800x600 max resolution). Something else is likely the cause of your instability, like a plug-in or using a later version of Windows.
To name a few other options to pursue w/ your local telco. Not cheap, but possible if copper is accessible to your area. If you go with something like a T1, and if there's a market in your neighborhood, you could offer local wireless service to cover some of your costs.
I once lived in a good-sized city, worked at a large university as a sysadmin, and had my pick of broadband options. Then, I moved to a very rural town 150 miles away and telecommuted via 56k dial-up for 2 years until DSL became available.
Aside from missing out on the fun stuff that a fast 'net connection provides, my work access was pretty acceptable. To help with the web browsing, I used squid/privoxy with firefox/adblock as well as a local caching DNS server. I set up a similar system on my work desktop, and then used an SSH tunnel w/ the fastest crypto protocol and maximum compression and used that to tunnel my pre-screened web traffic.
Of course, most of my work was text console based, so SSH and screen were my best tools.
I know you're running at half of what I was, and I don't know what you admin. So there may be not much room for improvement for your dial-up system.
When some rich kid tries to make a point and challenge a needlessly adversarial system, it's bad. But when some rich geek like John Gilmore tries to make a point and challenge a needlessly adversarial system, we all cheer him on?
What's the difference between these 2 cases? Just because Gilmore has the stones and cash to take his case to the top, whereas the kid didn't, does that invalidate the point the kid was trying to make?
Do you feel Gilmore's case was equally as frivolous as you appear to regard this kid's case? While obviously different and scope and weight, both cases address what many people feel to be a problem in the core of our day-to-day living.
In spite of the "justice is blind" theory in which our legal system operates, it obviously isn't that cut and dry.
Take, for instance, an incident in the rural little town of Hinckley, UT. Several years ago, a town employee was caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, having spent town funds on (among other things) diet pills and kitchen decorations. She defrauded a small community and broke the public trust. Pretty bad, if you ask me.
The asshat of a judge over the case, Judge Donald Eyre of Millard County, gave her a slap on the wrist. Yet, reading the local weekly police blotter (I used to live near this shit stain of a town), this judge routinely punished the Hispanic and white trash population far harsher for far lesser offenses. I wish I could find the case transcripts for this dude's court somewhere online, as I bet it would be very entertaining (this case in particular, but just in general). This county/town is relatively obscure, and the only page I could find with any reference to the case at all is an ex-employee's brief account here.
So, while it not be right for personal standing or circumstance to affect court judgements, it does happen, so I see no reason why those caught in a corrupt industry's dragnet cannot exploit this and play the sympathy card.
Programming on DVD is (mostly) devoid of adverts, as well giving you the ability to watch the shows *when* and *where* you want to. That gives you, the viewer, the ability to optimize the use of your time. If you want to make the argument that entertainment, by definition, is a waste of time, it would be difficult to refute that. However, I don't think the person you responded to was making that particular claim.
These days I suppose you could consider lawsuits a market force, but it feels dirty. I can *somewhat* understand suits against telephone companies, as most pretty much regard having a telephone as a necessity.
But TV?!? Come on, my fellow Americans -- get your asses off the couch and turn off fucking television set. You think there's too much crap, and the few quality shows you do get aren't worth your money? Ditch the TV. It's not like you can't live without it.
Sometimes our populace is so pathetic is saddens me. "Boo-hoo. I can't pay $2/month for each of the 3 channels that I actually like so I'm *forced* to pay $50 for the minimum package required to get them. I'm gonna sue the cable companies and content producers for collusion. Waaaa!"
Look, the cable/sat companies will do anything to keep subscribers. When I cut off my cable subscription for the final time (ever) over 5 years ago, they all but begged and pleaded to keep me on. I told them something like, "Any package you have doesn't offer enough value for the money I spend. It's not worth it." They seemed to think I couldn't afford it. They first tried to rope me into the cheapest package they advertise. When that didn't work, they suddenly had these 2 other cheaper plans that really don't exist, unless you threaten to leave. Finally, they tried to get me to accept the cheapest of those plans with *vouchers* to cover then entire cost sans the taxes. They were essentially willing to provide me free cable so long as I stayed on. (Given the ads so rampant on cable, they'd have to essentiall *pay* me for me to watch, as I consider ads negative value.) So don't tell me that they don't get some money from *somewhere* per head of viewership.
Fuck 'em. Swear off broadcast programming of any kind. If people weren't such dumb-asses and thought about it for a minute, they'd know that they have the power over these companies, but they chose to accept their fate of the industry's door mat. Cable TV isn't like food or gasoline, where collusion can actually, you know, *hurt* your ability to live. Sound off your opinion of the situation as loudly as you can. Tell your friends and family, your neighbors, etc.
Look, I'm not one of those anti-TV snobs. There are a handful of shows that I like, and everyone deserves a little down-time in the form of entertainment. I get mine on DVD, sometimes via rental, sometimes with a purchase. I like LOST and Good Eats, so it's not like I'm so high-brow as to snub popular shows. But I recognize that I was getting screwed by the broadcasters, and would continue to do so until the system changed, so I opted out. The systems still sucks, so I remain out.
Over the years, I've seen several folks here recount how they've dicted TV. Cool. What puzzles me is that there are *far* more here that bitch about the price/quality of TV options, yet don't give it up. Tell me what's up with that?
One of my good friends at college had a HP 48SX calculator. At the time, they were still new and expensive. To reduce theft potential and make it easy as hell to ID the thing, he spray-painted it safety orange. If you never sell your laptops when you upgrade, a similar defacing might help.
Wow. I am constantly amazed at the crap US mobile phone users seem to have to put up with.
Indeed. There is so little value added to US wireless service that I finally, after 10 years of cell phone ownership, kicked my Verizon account to the curb and liberated myself from wireless hell. Of course, I'm in my mid-30s (married, w/ kids) and no longer hip and socially affluent, so it was quite easy to do.:)
Some day, when I can get unlimited air time w/o roaming charges throughout the entire continental US for the monthly price of a typical land line, I *may* get another cell phone. In the mean time, I'm going to investigate ditching my DSL account in favor of satellite, so I can get rid of my land line, as well. Phones suck.
My family has had a Big Berkey filter for several years. It's in the $300 price range. At 2 gallons, it's not something you'd toss into a day pack, but we've used it to filter water pooled on the ground after a rain, as well as some nasty water from an old shallow well settling tank. Still using the original 4 filters.
Not sure how it stacks up to the competition now, but when I bought it, it looked like it was one of the better models available. Ceramic (or diatomacious earth -- forget which, exactly) gravity-fed filter with activated charcoal core. When the filters are in good shape (new, or recently cleaned and boiled), some of the best water I've ever tasted. Being all stainless steel, it imparts no plastic flavors into the water.
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I have to agree with you here, in some respects. While in college, I hung out in a frat house a lot for a few months. One of the more disturbing things I witnessed was the gleeful enjoyment many of the members got out of watching "Faces of Death" and the horribly drawn out, disturbing rape scene in "I Spit On Your Grave". The experience gave me a new low opinion of the human race.
So how goes the evaluation? I've been patiently waiting for the 7.0 release (it's killing me) so I can get my hands on ZFS. Kind of ironic that you're worried about BSD moving towards Solaris, as Solaris was preceded by SunOS which was based on BSD.
If I recall correctly, that was mostly the reason given to the public, crap like "marijuana makes black men look you in the eye and desire white women". The real reason, or so the anti-prohibition school claims, is that a print media mogul realized that hemp would severely cut into the market for wood pulp, in which he was heavily invested. So, this guy uses the power of his own presses to demonize all forms of cannabis, influencing public policy for years to come and ensuring that old-school rich white men in power today still can't see the truth because they're looking eye-to-eye with their own colons.
One of the trade-offs of using encryption is not having access to data which is encrypted (unless you have the password/key of course), as well as losing some functionality of the system it is installed on (as illustrated by this hack of a "feature" introduced to facilitate remote administration). If you're willing to punch holes into a a crypto system, then your data isn't worthy of that much protection. If you mis-trust your users to the point forcing a master password to unlock their data w/o their presence or consent, then you have no business trusting them with the data to being with.
When Phil sold out and went commercial with PGP. He may have saved face by leaving shortly thereafter, but it was too late. With monied interests involved, everyone knew the product's integrity was in question from the first day of the announcement. This just proves that you cannot trust a proprietary product for something as important as encryption.
As a Fab Four fan myself, a I agree. However, I think the Stones put out better rock than the Beatles, when each group's entire career is taken into account. The Beatles, after their initial teeny-pop-rock phase (say, Rubber Soul and beyond), they were more like today's "alternative" than the true rock of the time.
I think he meant that the history behind the demonization of weed has been solely to the benefit of big business, the prison industrial complex, and big government, while at the expense of taxpayers and the freedom of many individuals. All with a host of evidence supporting that, in terms of substance with abuse potential, pot should be *way* down on the priority list, if on the list at all.
Not necessarily. But you have to be an informed consumer. I hear that Chinese made cables have a lot of lead in them, which degrades signal quality.
I like the hosting philosophy of NearlyFreeSpeech.net. So far as I'm aware, they rank pretty well in the "not evil" department. I am a customer of theirs -- a happy one, at that (especially cool pricing model) -- but I'm always on the look-out for cheap, ethical hosting services to recommend to friends/family/clients. Thanks for the link.
Very cool. Do you know if Divx hardware players will play back xvid-encoded files, too?
I'm too busy to track down a good link, but google "salt lake city winter olympics propane teddy bear". I don't know if the guy was ever found to have a nefarious purpose for the purchase, but the government can and does correlate innocuous things together to form suspicions about people. Still, it's pretty scary that stuff like this happens (the correlation of people's behavior, not the purchase of teddy bears, that is).
I don't think lasers, piranhas, or white cats are included in the $1,000,000 asking price, but a nice underground bunker can be had here, if you desire such prime real estate. :) Jump on it, folks! When they outlaw the ownership of underground bunkers, only outlaws will own one!
I guess when you rely on something so specialized, you take what the vendor offers or you don't. So you can't get support under a less sucky MS product? Like Windows 2000? Machine automation is a domain I'm very unfamiliar with. Not saying it's feasible to switch, but are there competitors?
Check out Lehman's. They're smack in the middle of the Ohio Amish/Mennonite community, and cater to their need for simple and non-electric tools. Some of their stuff is hand-made by the locals, including some toys. Sure, they're not the snazzy plastic baubles you can get everywhere else, but are more simple things, often made of wood. I see that the "Toys" link off the main page boasts "Made in the USA".
Don't you see something inherently wrong with that? Not to be snide, but why would you continue to put up with such problems?
Must be something else. I run Firefox 2.0.0.7 under Windows 2000 on a ~500MHz laptop w/ 160MB of memory, and it doesn't ever lock up on me. No, it's not fast, but it's quite stable and usable (in spite of the 800x600 max resolution). Something else is likely the cause of your instability, like a plug-in or using a later version of Windows.
I once lived in a good-sized city, worked at a large university as a sysadmin, and had my pick of broadband options. Then, I moved to a very rural town 150 miles away and telecommuted via 56k dial-up for 2 years until DSL became available.
Aside from missing out on the fun stuff that a fast 'net connection provides, my work access was pretty acceptable. To help with the web browsing, I used squid/privoxy with firefox/adblock as well as a local caching DNS server. I set up a similar system on my work desktop, and then used an SSH tunnel w/ the fastest crypto protocol and maximum compression and used that to tunnel my pre-screened web traffic.
Of course, most of my work was text console based, so SSH and screen were my best tools.
I know you're running at half of what I was, and I don't know what you admin. So there may be not much room for improvement for your dial-up system.
When some rich kid tries to make a point and challenge a needlessly adversarial system, it's bad. But when some rich geek like John Gilmore tries to make a point and challenge a needlessly adversarial system, we all cheer him on?
What's the difference between these 2 cases? Just because Gilmore has the stones and cash to take his case to the top, whereas the kid didn't, does that invalidate the point the kid was trying to make?
Do you feel Gilmore's case was equally as frivolous as you appear to regard this kid's case? While obviously different and scope and weight, both cases address what many people feel to be a problem in the core of our day-to-day living.
Take, for instance, an incident in the rural little town of Hinckley, UT. Several years ago, a town employee was caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, having spent town funds on (among other things) diet pills and kitchen decorations. She defrauded a small community and broke the public trust. Pretty bad, if you ask me.
The asshat of a judge over the case, Judge Donald Eyre of Millard County, gave her a slap on the wrist. Yet, reading the local weekly police blotter (I used to live near this shit stain of a town), this judge routinely punished the Hispanic and white trash population far harsher for far lesser offenses. I wish I could find the case transcripts for this dude's court somewhere online, as I bet it would be very entertaining (this case in particular, but just in general). This county/town is relatively obscure, and the only page I could find with any reference to the case at all is an ex-employee's brief account here.
So, while it not be right for personal standing or circumstance to affect court judgements, it does happen, so I see no reason why those caught in a corrupt industry's dragnet cannot exploit this and play the sympathy card.
Programming on DVD is (mostly) devoid of adverts, as well giving you the ability to watch the shows *when* and *where* you want to. That gives you, the viewer, the ability to optimize the use of your time. If you want to make the argument that entertainment, by definition, is a waste of time, it would be difficult to refute that. However, I don't think the person you responded to was making that particular claim.
But TV?!? Come on, my fellow Americans -- get your asses off the couch and turn off fucking television set. You think there's too much crap, and the few quality shows you do get aren't worth your money? Ditch the TV. It's not like you can't live without it.
Sometimes our populace is so pathetic is saddens me. "Boo-hoo. I can't pay $2/month for each of the 3 channels that I actually like so I'm *forced* to pay $50 for the minimum package required to get them. I'm gonna sue the cable companies and content producers for collusion. Waaaa!"
Look, the cable/sat companies will do anything to keep subscribers. When I cut off my cable subscription for the final time (ever) over 5 years ago, they all but begged and pleaded to keep me on. I told them something like, "Any package you have doesn't offer enough value for the money I spend. It's not worth it." They seemed to think I couldn't afford it. They first tried to rope me into the cheapest package they advertise. When that didn't work, they suddenly had these 2 other cheaper plans that really don't exist, unless you threaten to leave. Finally, they tried to get me to accept the cheapest of those plans with *vouchers* to cover then entire cost sans the taxes. They were essentially willing to provide me free cable so long as I stayed on. (Given the ads so rampant on cable, they'd have to essentiall *pay* me for me to watch, as I consider ads negative value.) So don't tell me that they don't get some money from *somewhere* per head of viewership.
Fuck 'em. Swear off broadcast programming of any kind. If people weren't such dumb-asses and thought about it for a minute, they'd know that they have the power over these companies, but they chose to accept their fate of the industry's door mat. Cable TV isn't like food or gasoline, where collusion can actually, you know, *hurt* your ability to live. Sound off your opinion of the situation as loudly as you can. Tell your friends and family, your neighbors, etc.
Look, I'm not one of those anti-TV snobs. There are a handful of shows that I like, and everyone deserves a little down-time in the form of entertainment. I get mine on DVD, sometimes via rental, sometimes with a purchase. I like LOST and Good Eats, so it's not like I'm so high-brow as to snub popular shows. But I recognize that I was getting screwed by the broadcasters, and would continue to do so until the system changed, so I opted out. The systems still sucks, so I remain out.
Over the years, I've seen several folks here recount how they've dicted TV. Cool. What puzzles me is that there are *far* more here that bitch about the price/quality of TV options, yet don't give it up. Tell me what's up with that?
(long pause)
Bony.
One of my good friends at college had a HP 48SX calculator. At the time, they were still new and expensive. To reduce theft potential and make it easy as hell to ID the thing, he spray-painted it safety orange. If you never sell your laptops when you upgrade, a similar defacing might help.
Indeed. There is so little value added to US wireless service that I finally, after 10 years of cell phone ownership, kicked my Verizon account to the curb and liberated myself from wireless hell. Of course, I'm in my mid-30s (married, w/ kids) and no longer hip and socially affluent, so it was quite easy to do. :)
Some day, when I can get unlimited air time w/o roaming charges throughout the entire continental US for the monthly price of a typical land line, I *may* get another cell phone. In the mean time, I'm going to investigate ditching my DSL account in favor of satellite, so I can get rid of my land line, as well. Phones suck.
Not sure how it stacks up to the competition now, but when I bought it, it looked like it was one of the better models available. Ceramic (or diatomacious earth -- forget which, exactly) gravity-fed filter with activated charcoal core. When the filters are in good shape (new, or recently cleaned and boiled), some of the best water I've ever tasted. Being all stainless steel, it imparts no plastic flavors into the water.