In the case of software patents, Amazon isn't distributing, selling, or otherwise offering for license "OneClick". It is using this patent to keep others from using it, even if the others are building it (or something similar) themselves. That's not quite correct; Apple licensed OneClick from Amazon to use on the iTunes Store. Amazon was using the patent to keep Barnes & Noble from building something similar, but B&N did anyway and Amazon sued them; the result was a settlement that included B&N licensing the patent from Amazon.
Wikipedia doesn't mention any other licensing, though.
It appears this isn't your traditional botnet. One of these, 208.29.62.83, doesn't have reverse DNS, but the HELO line was exportventures.com which checks out. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by reverse MX lookup - do you mean checking the MX records for the domain to see whether one of them points to the sending host? Surely not, since MX records aren't supposed to indicate which hosts may send mail from a particular domain. Please elaborate.
Out of all of this you neglected to refute the fact that my wife would be adding 30% or more time to her already 8-10 hour trip to her parents every weekend by traveling to town to get the car, or are you saying that there will be day car rental shops within 5 minutes of everyone's house? I was assuming that the public transportation would have a stop right at our house. But then a 15km travel into the city (You did say upto 20km away) to get the car rental, then 15km back to the apt to get the laundry, etc. not counting the time it takes to return the car that night. Are you sure you don't have a car rental place closer than 15km? There are several near me, including a new one that just opened a few blocks from my house (I'm in a suburb of Portland Oregon). In any case, yes, renting a car does take longer than getting in the car that's already parked in your driveway, and if you need to make those kinds of trips, I wouldn't recommend giving up the car. I can't give up my car either, but good public transportation would work for far more people than realize it.
Now a sophisticated attacker may come at your email server from multiple hosts (IPs) with a coordinated attack but they're going to need a LOT of hosts to get anywhere when they only get 10 shots before the server starts actively taking measures against any single host. Well, lucky for them that they have a LOT of hosts, and have no particular need to send more than 10 attempts from any one IP.
Glancing over the "User unknown" messages in my logs, I see a very slow dictionary attack (or.. well, not dictionary, but something) against my friend's domain, all coming from unique IPs. Target usernames are things like: ClaudestuffyNguyen@ ChristianshineHansen@ ErikepidermicWelch@ KarlbrendaLittle@ +._-JavierbrendaBurton@ JavierjackanapesGilbert@ ClintontailgateRomero@ FernandocatalogueLittle@
Those were spread out over a ten minute period, which works out to about 35,000 per month at that rate. Far slower than your tarpitting idea would account for, even if they do reuse IPs from time to time. The probability of hitting a valid address is low, and it at this rate it will take a very long time, but there's nothing to prevent them from keeping it up for YEARS. Obviously the same bots are attacking other domains at the same time; they're bound to stumble upon something somewhere.
You've got a good idea there, but spammers have moved on.
My current phone doesn't have 3G either. I'm no longer under contract, but I have service through AT&T anyway, and I have no particular desire to switch. I haven't heard of Apple "just shutting them off" - this particular incident seems to involve a beta version of the new firmware that is only available to registered developers, comes with lots of warnings about how unstable it might be, and can't even be installed on an iPhone unless you hack it first.
There are several things that I need my phone to do, that the iPhone doesn't do. But the things the iPhone does do, DAMN. The user interface on my current phone is horribly counter-intuitive (for example, if I want to view the calendar, it's under Settings). Some features, like e-mail, work so poorly that I usually don't bother. The iPhone is actually usable - everything it claims to do actually works, and works well enough that you can use it.
It's only bricked if... the device can serve no other purpose than to be a brick without highly technical intervention. In that case, even a brick isn't officially "bricked" because I can use it as a window-opener or skull-crusher. A bricked iPhone would do those things poorly, but it would do them better than making phone calls.
I don't think so considering how the majority of sexual child abuse cases are perpetrated by someone the child knows closely. Hell, most are done by someone in the same family. The sensational stories you hear about like the DateLine stings are the exception. Most of the pedo busts they do involve those trading media around which is also illegal to possess. Kidnappers handing out candy at the park is a pretty rare occurrence too, but we still teach children not to fall for that trick. Why shouldn't we teach them not to fall for this one?
But is the school the best place for that? I agree that the school has all the kids under one roof, but parents need to step up too. It cuts both ways. If school is an appropriate place to teach 3rd-graders not to take candy from strangers (because instead of a nice man giving out free candy, the stranger could really be a kidnapper), it's also an appropriate place to teach teens not to trade nude pics with strangers (because instead of a nice girl who likes showing off her body, the stranger could really be a pedophile).
Yes, parents need to step up and teach their kids not to take candy from strangers, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also repeat the lesson at school, just in case the parents don't do an adequate job, or just in case the child doesn't feel like listening to their parents and needs additional reinforcement.
Generalize. Why is a finger like a can of soup? I can't immediately think of a good answer to that question. Certainly there isn't a single "correct" answer coming to mind. That doesn't mean I'm not human.
Socialize. Tommy hit Billy. Will that make Tommy love Billy? Think about the future. Would it be good to give everyone in the world their own nuclear power plant? Dream. Tommy wears a cowboy hat. What does Tommy want to be when he grows up? You've definitely got the right idea. Unfortunately, while computers are terrible at answering these kinds of questions, computers are also terrible at asking these kinds of questions. Let's take the dream example - you'd have to give the computer a list of behaviors (wearing a cowboy hat) and the corresponding dreams (wanting to be a cowboy, or perhaps wanting to be a country music singer). The computer picks something from the list, forms it into a sentence, and checks to see if the answer matches what's on the list. Simple enough.
However, your list is of a finite size. You had to come up with the whole list by yourself, because computers are terrible at these kinds of questions. That means, it won't take a spammer long to reverse-engineer your list, and program a computer to be able to respond to your questions. Sure it will take awhile, but eventually you'll run out of questions that the spammer's computer hasn't been taught the answers to.
A much better idea is to combine multiple elements in infinite possible combinations, and ask questions about the way these elements are combined. Here's an example:
Tommy wears a cowboy hat, Suzy is tall, ants crawl around the picnic basket, the sun is shining brightly, Billy likes pastrami, and Jane loves bugs. 1) What does the vegetarian boy want to be when he grows up? 2) What is the short girl looking at?
This sort of thing shouldn't be difficult for a computer to generate. We still have to build lists of data (e.g. vegetarians don't like pastrami), interests (ants crawling around a picnic basket would attract the interest of someone who loves bugs), dreams (someone who wants to be a cowboy would wear a cowboy hat), etc., but now we have a ton of possible combinations, irrelevant data thrown in (the sun is shining), and no direct link between the question and the pieces of data needed to answer the question (it's not obvious why pastrami is important).
The problem will eventually resolve itself. With the switch to IPv6, dirt cheap appliance servers and free open source software, everyone will be running their own email server. The net result of that is, the default will be to block all free web mail messages and only allow known ones in.
Until then ISP's are going to have real problems with free web mail services, for the end user of course the solution is simply block them, and wait for an alternate form of communication to let you know an address to allow in.
You're just talking about whitelisting, which makes e-mail nearly useless because people can't get on your whitelist until they've gotten on your whitelist so they can let you know they want to send you mail. IPv6 is completely irrelevant to this discussion; most people don't want to run their own mail server and I sure as hell don't want them to try. It takes a lot of work for me to maintain my own mail server, and I know what I'm doing; normal users shouldn't have to deal with that responsibility.
No, the solution to the problem of free web mail services is not to make everyone run their own mail server. If you follow the problem back to its logical source, it's not even free web mail services that are the problem here - they're only a problem because it's easy for spammers to create thousands of accounts, so shutting down a single account has no measurable effect. The only reason they're able to sign up for multiple accounts without the web mail service figuring out that they're all for one spammer is that the spammer is using a botnet to distribute the requests, so they're all coming from unique IPs and look like individual people instead of a single spammer. Get rid of the botnets, and the web mail problem will sort itself out.
So how do we get rid of the botnets? Well, I thought enabling the software firewall by default in Windows XP Service Pack 2 would help; obviously it didn't. Users can be tricked into running just about anything, and once that happens, any security software on their PC can be assumed to have been compromised.
I think ISPs are going to have to step up to the plate here and become a little less customer-friendly, for the sake of the rest of the Internet. That means ISPs are going to have to start shutting off accounts when they find out their customers are part of a botnet. Block all outgoing traffic, and redirect port 80 to a site that explains what's going on and offers download links for free software to clean up the problem (it can be commercial software that the ISP pays for, but it has to be "free" to the customer).
That's going to piss people off, and cause cancellations. People don't like being accused of being spammers. People don't like being accused of being dumb enough to let their PC become compromised. Tough. It's the only way to clean up the Internet.
I would need to increase my storage capacity immensely if I allowed every spam message to get to the users Junk folder. Not to mention the extra bandwidth of allowing all those mail delivery connections to complete OR to send NDRs to forged senders that are going to bounce back at my system and cause even more load. On top of that, if you send all spam to the Junk folder, it completely negates the usefulness of the Junk folder. I send spam with a SpamAssassin score between 5 and 10 to a Quarantine folder, but anything above 10, users never see. I look through my own Quarantine folder every few days, checking for false positives, and every now and then, I find one. This is useful. If everything scored above 10 were in there too, there's no way I'd have time to look at it.
The system-wide quarantine (with all messages scored above 10) exists only so that if a user complains of a specific message they didn't get, I can verify whether it was incorrectly filtered, but that almost never happens. On my tiny little server with not very many users, the system-wide quarantine only gets about 200 messages a day, but that's definitely more than I'm willing to look at.
Damnit! I have gone for YEARS without using the term or anything similar simply because I thought it was stupid. Now look who's doing it? Don't worry... you weren't wrong!
don't fool yourself, apple made it popular. apple did not invent the concept. Yes, that's what I meant when I said Apple "helped bring Podcasting to the masses".
Although they still charge $0.30 per track to upgrade existing DRM-encumbered tracks to non-DRM tracks, they no longer charge a higher price to buy non-DRM (iTunes Plus) tracks.
Oh, you mean that thing where they distribute an MP3 file? Where's the success or failure of that? I think it's funny that Apple fanbois are running with it like Apple actually did something that no one else ever had. It's a fucking audio file with an Applized name. Get over it! It's not just distributing an MP3 file. It's an RSS feed you can subscribe to, where newly released MP3s are downloaded automatically (and, optionally, sync'd to your portable MP3 player, which is where the name came from).
The concept is simple: you leave your iPod connected to your computer overnight (which charges the battery). While you sleep, new editions of radio shows you've subscribed to are automatically downloaded from the Internet and transferred to your iPod. When you get up in the morning, you do nothing but unplug the iPod and bring it with you. You now have fresh content to listen to on your way to work or while working out at the gym or whatever. It's like radio, but no issues with fuzzy reception (I was trying to listed to something on a portable FM radio at the supermarket last night, and when I got to the checkout counters there was so much interference I couldn't hear it at all), you get only the content you want rather than whatever happens to be on right now, and you can pause/rewind/fast forward/etc.
Here's the really great thing about Podcasts: because the technology has become trendy and popular, content producers have switched over from offering proprietary RealAudio streams (that you can't save, can't bring with you, can't play offline, can't listen to with the software you prefer, and pause for rebuffering every time there's a network hiccup) to offering plain old MP3 files that anybody can download and play using any software they like. This switch would never have happened if Apple hadn't helped bring Podcasting to the masses, so content producers could see a reason to make the change.
Somehow, Apple got people to think it is somehow related to one of their products, the iPod, and worked the word "pod" into a brief, catchy term that merely means "a hyperlink to an audio file." I haven't kept up with the latest iPod models (can they play Vorbis yet?) but all the ones I've seen, don't have networking capability, so the machines aren't (weren't?) even able to downloading a podcast -- and yet a hyperlink to an audio file is named after their product.
That's pretty fucking spectacular.
It should be noted that Apple didn't do this. The name had been first proposed by The Guardian in February 2004 and again by Dannie Gregoire in September of that year, at which point the term began to be widely adopted. Apple jumped on the bandwagon, of course, by adding Podcast support to iTunes 4.9 in June 2005, but it definitely wasn't their idea.
All glory to the Hypnotoad.. err, I mean, Wikipedia.
By the way, a Podcast isn't just a hyperlink to an audio file, it's an RSS feed that automatically links to new audio files as they are released. And, while iPods still don't play Vorbis, the iPod touch (essentially an iPhone without the phone part) does have wifi. I'm not sure if it has Podcast support or not; obviously it should.
I'm a bit confused. Maybe I missed the hype that Podcasting has failed to live up to, but I use it every day and I think it's fantastic. Finally, the days of streaming-only RealAudio are gone!
iTunes is used by bajillions of people worldwide, and the Podcast button is right there, prominently displayed. There's all kinds of content, from public radio shows that I can now enjoy whenever is convenient for me instead of whenever they're broadcast on the air, commercial stuff like NBC Nightly News, tons of independent stuff running the gamut from utter crap to sheer genius, great comedy like The Onion Radio News and the Weekly Radio Address, and probably more I haven't bothered to look for yet.
Of course I understand that many people aren't interested in any of this, and that's fine, but Podcasting is certainly not a failure.
Don't pin this on McCain unless you have evidence of his involvement. I don't think there was an implication that McCain is involved. The Bush administration wants McCain to get elected, even if McCain has no knowledge of Bush's tactics, because McCain will keep a lot of Bush people employed, and won't try to make Bush look bad. If Obama or Hillary is elected, they might spend their entire presidency reminding people how awful the Bush administration was.
We should be spending all the money used to keep our troops deployed over seas on incentives going towards high tech weapons and defenses. Unfortunately, no amount of money spent on high-tech weapons and defenses will keep our country safe from terrorist attack.
Trying not to piss people off, while investing in reliable and redundant infrastructure, and remaining alert and prepared to handle the aftermath of any disaster, is a much better strategy. That includes natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as well as terrorist attacks like the destruction of the WTC towers.
Now, if immediately withdrawing our troops from Iraq would further the goal of not pissing people off, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, thanks to Bush and Rumsfeld's bungling incompetence, the situation over there is a mess, and I'm not convinced that withdrawal is the right answer. Obviously some people are pissed off that we're there, but other people would be pissed off if we abandoned the Iraqi people and left them to be slaughtered in sectarian violence that would quickly spread to neighboring countries.
I think the controversy around his pastor will help Obama's chances a great deal. If his pastor is involved in a race scandal, Obama can't possibly be Muslim. It's just too bad this didn't come out earlier in the campaign.
I just checked. The tech specs page for Apple Cinema Displays says "Display colors (maximum): 16.7 million". The tech specs pages for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and indeed the iMac all mention "millions of colors" (which is what Apple has traditionally called 24-bit color, as opposed to "thousands of colors" which is 16-bit mode and "256 colors" which is obviously 8-bit mode).
Somebody suggested that bandwidth should be billed by the number of gigabytes transferred per month, just like electricity is billed by kWh. That made me think of another idea: charge two different rates for peak vs. off-peak usage. Encouraging people to run their BitTorrent downloads at 8am instead of 8pm should reduce the amount of capacity needed at peak usage times.
My electric company offers something like this. I'm not doing it, because most of my electricity usage is relatively constant throughout the day and things like the oven or vacuum cleaner I can't shift to the middle of the night anyway. However, my dishwasher has a timer on it, so running a load of dishes at 3am is easy to do.
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Wikipedia doesn't mention any other licensing, though.
I wasn't aware of the term "Rumpelstiltskin attack"; that is precisely what I'm describing.
So let's take a look at where these messages were coming from. Here are the hostnames and IP addresses logged for those same eight messages:
mail.cybernetcom.com [63.146.122.32]
mailout02.dsvr.x-isp.net [213.253.179.6]
mail.oslofrakt.no [64.28.24.2]
mail.trusite.com [64.94.39.5]
mail.goldendesigngroup.com [69.15.142.28]
[208.29.62.83]
baer49.de [82.135.105.22]
mailout01.dsvr.x-isp.net [213.253.179.5]
It appears this isn't your traditional botnet. One of these, 208.29.62.83, doesn't have reverse DNS, but the HELO line was exportventures.com which checks out. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by reverse MX lookup - do you mean checking the MX records for the domain to see whether one of them points to the sending host? Surely not, since MX records aren't supposed to indicate which hosts may send mail from a particular domain. Please elaborate.
He never said it would be web-based. Although, I think you can run this in Internet Explorer...
Glancing over the "User unknown" messages in my logs, I see a very slow dictionary attack (or.. well, not dictionary, but something) against my friend's domain, all coming from unique IPs. Target usernames are things like:
ClaudestuffyNguyen@
ChristianshineHansen@
ErikepidermicWelch@
KarlbrendaLittle@
+._-JavierbrendaBurton@
JavierjackanapesGilbert@
ClintontailgateRomero@
FernandocatalogueLittle@
Those were spread out over a ten minute period, which works out to about 35,000 per month at that rate. Far slower than your tarpitting idea would account for, even if they do reuse IPs from time to time. The probability of hitting a valid address is low, and it at this rate it will take a very long time, but there's nothing to prevent them from keeping it up for YEARS. Obviously the same bots are attacking other domains at the same time; they're bound to stumble upon something somewhere.
You've got a good idea there, but spammers have moved on.
My current phone doesn't have 3G either. I'm no longer under contract, but I have service through AT&T anyway, and I have no particular desire to switch. I haven't heard of Apple "just shutting them off" - this particular incident seems to involve a beta version of the new firmware that is only available to registered developers, comes with lots of warnings about how unstable it might be, and can't even be installed on an iPhone unless you hack it first.
There are several things that I need my phone to do, that the iPhone doesn't do. But the things the iPhone does do, DAMN. The user interface on my current phone is horribly counter-intuitive (for example, if I want to view the calendar, it's under Settings). Some features, like e-mail, work so poorly that I usually don't bother. The iPhone is actually usable - everything it claims to do actually works, and works well enough that you can use it.
No worries about some sudden "phone call" either.Consider the open source alternative, OpenMoko No worries about some sudden "change in corporate direction" screwing you over.
Yes, parents need to step up and teach their kids not to take candy from strangers, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also repeat the lesson at school, just in case the parents don't do an adequate job, or just in case the child doesn't feel like listening to their parents and needs additional reinforcement.
Think about the future. Would it be good to give everyone in the world their own nuclear power plant?
Dream. Tommy wears a cowboy hat. What does Tommy want to be when he grows up? You've definitely got the right idea. Unfortunately, while computers are terrible at answering these kinds of questions, computers are also terrible at asking these kinds of questions. Let's take the dream example - you'd have to give the computer a list of behaviors (wearing a cowboy hat) and the corresponding dreams (wanting to be a cowboy, or perhaps wanting to be a country music singer). The computer picks something from the list, forms it into a sentence, and checks to see if the answer matches what's on the list. Simple enough.
However, your list is of a finite size. You had to come up with the whole list by yourself, because computers are terrible at these kinds of questions. That means, it won't take a spammer long to reverse-engineer your list, and program a computer to be able to respond to your questions. Sure it will take awhile, but eventually you'll run out of questions that the spammer's computer hasn't been taught the answers to.
A much better idea is to combine multiple elements in infinite possible combinations, and ask questions about the way these elements are combined. Here's an example:
Tommy wears a cowboy hat, Suzy is tall, ants crawl around the picnic basket, the sun is shining brightly, Billy likes pastrami, and Jane loves bugs.
1) What does the vegetarian boy want to be when he grows up?
2) What is the short girl looking at?
This sort of thing shouldn't be difficult for a computer to generate. We still have to build lists of data (e.g. vegetarians don't like pastrami), interests (ants crawling around a picnic basket would attract the interest of someone who loves bugs), dreams (someone who wants to be a cowboy would wear a cowboy hat), etc., but now we have a ton of possible combinations, irrelevant data thrown in (the sun is shining), and no direct link between the question and the pieces of data needed to answer the question (it's not obvious why pastrami is important).
Until then ISP's are going to have real problems with free web mail services, for the end user of course the solution is simply block them, and wait for an alternate form of communication to let you know an address to allow in.
You're just talking about whitelisting, which makes e-mail nearly useless because people can't get on your whitelist until they've gotten on your whitelist so they can let you know they want to send you mail. IPv6 is completely irrelevant to this discussion; most people don't want to run their own mail server and I sure as hell don't want them to try. It takes a lot of work for me to maintain my own mail server, and I know what I'm doing; normal users shouldn't have to deal with that responsibility.No, the solution to the problem of free web mail services is not to make everyone run their own mail server. If you follow the problem back to its logical source, it's not even free web mail services that are the problem here - they're only a problem because it's easy for spammers to create thousands of accounts, so shutting down a single account has no measurable effect. The only reason they're able to sign up for multiple accounts without the web mail service figuring out that they're all for one spammer is that the spammer is using a botnet to distribute the requests, so they're all coming from unique IPs and look like individual people instead of a single spammer. Get rid of the botnets, and the web mail problem will sort itself out.
So how do we get rid of the botnets? Well, I thought enabling the software firewall by default in Windows XP Service Pack 2 would help; obviously it didn't. Users can be tricked into running just about anything, and once that happens, any security software on their PC can be assumed to have been compromised.
I think ISPs are going to have to step up to the plate here and become a little less customer-friendly, for the sake of the rest of the Internet. That means ISPs are going to have to start shutting off accounts when they find out their customers are part of a botnet. Block all outgoing traffic, and redirect port 80 to a site that explains what's going on and offers download links for free software to clean up the problem (it can be commercial software that the ISP pays for, but it has to be "free" to the customer).
That's going to piss people off, and cause cancellations. People don't like being accused of being spammers. People don't like being accused of being dumb enough to let their PC become compromised. Tough. It's the only way to clean up the Internet.
The system-wide quarantine (with all messages scored above 10) exists only so that if a user complains of a specific message they didn't get, I can verify whether it was incorrectly filtered, but that almost never happens. On my tiny little server with not very many users, the system-wide quarantine only gets about 200 messages a day, but that's definitely more than I'm willing to look at.
Damnit! I have gone for YEARS without using the term or anything similar simply because I thought it was stupid. Now look who's doing it? Don't worry... you weren't wrong!
Although they still charge $0.30 per track to upgrade existing DRM-encumbered tracks to non-DRM tracks, they no longer charge a higher price to buy non-DRM (iTunes Plus) tracks.
The concept is simple: you leave your iPod connected to your computer overnight (which charges the battery). While you sleep, new editions of radio shows you've subscribed to are automatically downloaded from the Internet and transferred to your iPod. When you get up in the morning, you do nothing but unplug the iPod and bring it with you. You now have fresh content to listen to on your way to work or while working out at the gym or whatever. It's like radio, but no issues with fuzzy reception (I was trying to listed to something on a portable FM radio at the supermarket last night, and when I got to the checkout counters there was so much interference I couldn't hear it at all), you get only the content you want rather than whatever happens to be on right now, and you can pause/rewind/fast forward/etc.
Here's the really great thing about Podcasts: because the technology has become trendy and popular, content producers have switched over from offering proprietary RealAudio streams (that you can't save, can't bring with you, can't play offline, can't listen to with the software you prefer, and pause for rebuffering every time there's a network hiccup) to offering plain old MP3 files that anybody can download and play using any software they like. This switch would never have happened if Apple hadn't helped bring Podcasting to the masses, so content producers could see a reason to make the change.
..at least in terms of brainwashing and branding.
Somehow, Apple got people to think it is somehow related to one of their products, the iPod, and worked the word "pod" into a brief, catchy term that merely means "a hyperlink to an audio file." I haven't kept up with the latest iPod models (can they play Vorbis yet?) but all the ones I've seen, don't have networking capability, so the machines aren't (weren't?) even able to downloading a podcast -- and yet a hyperlink to an audio file is named after their product.
That's pretty fucking spectacular.
It should be noted that Apple didn't do this. The name had been first proposed by The Guardian in February 2004 and again by Dannie Gregoire in September of that year, at which point the term began to be widely adopted. Apple jumped on the bandwagon, of course, by adding Podcast support to iTunes 4.9 in June 2005, but it definitely wasn't their idea.All glory to the Hypnotoad.. err, I mean, Wikipedia.
By the way, a Podcast isn't just a hyperlink to an audio file, it's an RSS feed that automatically links to new audio files as they are released. And, while iPods still don't play Vorbis, the iPod touch (essentially an iPhone without the phone part) does have wifi. I'm not sure if it has Podcast support or not; obviously it should.
I'm a bit confused. Maybe I missed the hype that Podcasting has failed to live up to, but I use it every day and I think it's fantastic. Finally, the days of streaming-only RealAudio are gone!
iTunes is used by bajillions of people worldwide, and the Podcast button is right there, prominently displayed. There's all kinds of content, from public radio shows that I can now enjoy whenever is convenient for me instead of whenever they're broadcast on the air, commercial stuff like NBC Nightly News, tons of independent stuff running the gamut from utter crap to sheer genius, great comedy like The Onion Radio News and the Weekly Radio Address, and probably more I haven't bothered to look for yet.
Of course I understand that many people aren't interested in any of this, and that's fine, but Podcasting is certainly not a failure.
Trying not to piss people off, while investing in reliable and redundant infrastructure, and remaining alert and prepared to handle the aftermath of any disaster, is a much better strategy. That includes natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as well as terrorist attacks like the destruction of the WTC towers.
Now, if immediately withdrawing our troops from Iraq would further the goal of not pissing people off, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, thanks to Bush and Rumsfeld's bungling incompetence, the situation over there is a mess, and I'm not convinced that withdrawal is the right answer. Obviously some people are pissed off that we're there, but other people would be pissed off if we abandoned the Iraqi people and left them to be slaughtered in sectarian violence that would quickly spread to neighboring countries.
I think the controversy around his pastor will help Obama's chances a great deal. If his pastor is involved in a race scandal, Obama can't possibly be Muslim. It's just too bad this didn't come out earlier in the campaign.
512x342 pixels, baby!
I just checked. The tech specs page for Apple Cinema Displays says "Display colors (maximum): 16.7 million". The tech specs pages for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and indeed the iMac all mention "millions of colors" (which is what Apple has traditionally called 24-bit color, as opposed to "thousands of colors" which is 16-bit mode and "256 colors" which is obviously 8-bit mode).
Somebody suggested that bandwidth should be billed by the number of gigabytes transferred per month, just like electricity is billed by kWh. That made me think of another idea: charge two different rates for peak vs. off-peak usage. Encouraging people to run their BitTorrent downloads at 8am instead of 8pm should reduce the amount of capacity needed at peak usage times.
My electric company offers something like this. I'm not doing it, because most of my electricity usage is relatively constant throughout the day and things like the oven or vacuum cleaner I can't shift to the middle of the night anyway. However, my dishwasher has a timer on it, so running a load of dishes at 3am is easy to do.