Cool, maybe now I'll get to climb walls like Spiderman. Afterall, what's a better use for new technology than for recreation.
Truthfully though, this could be useful in a lot of applications. I would expect to see NASA interested, as it might be a good replacement for velcro, which is kinda limited in what it can stick to.
Its nice to see that the opponents of these bills have some sort of group of large compaines on their side. Though I wouldn't exactly say that Verizon is sticking up for the rights of the people. What they are fighting for is the protection of their networks and revenue streams. Looking at the responses to the questions, I don't doubt that Verizon et al. would exit the arena if they were given some sort of comfy loophole to sit in. Such as, they have to monitor and report on users, but they have no liability, and get some sort of content broadcast concessions from the media companies. Consider the following:
So you tried to fix Biden's bill?
We sat down with the content community, with (Capitol) Hill staffers, and offered up several different alternatives to get the service provider out of the bill. We proposed, for instance, that it apply only to the party initiating the transmission. That was rejected. We tried definitional approaches that made it clear the bill did not apply to an intermediary. That was rejected.
Did you try to work with the bill's sponsors directly? How about with Sen. Biden?
We've had a difficult time obtaining a carve-out. We think it's a very simple issue. The bill is intended to target the bad guys. There shouldn't be a controversy over exempting an intermediary.
When you lobby people on Capitol Hill, what do you tell politicians?
On the Hollings bill, we've discussed our concerns and talked about how the bill undermines our longstanding compromise (in the DMCA).
The ISPs would be happy to get a comprimise that would get the out of harms way. Sure they are currently against these bills, but as soon as they come up with some sort of DMCAesq comprimise, they'll shift sides.
For now they are just playing it up for PR, that's what the last response is, pure PR spin.
Though if Verizon and other telecommunications firms get what you want, you'd bow out of the debate. Since your interests are not exactly the same as consumers, wouldn't you be parting ways if that happens?
Not necessarily. We also want to see a law that's balanced and that the user community will also accept. The copyright community has to understand the reality that if consumers are not happy with the compromise...many of these illegal activities are going to continue.
If you do make one of these, please, please, post it on/. so people like me can find it. I'm not a programmer, and as such, probably couldn't put something like this together. However, I would love to be able to start dumping junk into the databases of these companies. The more tools we have to generate a low signal to noise ratio for these marketing drones, the better off we'll all be.
Assuming that you are not under some sort of NDA that would forbid it. Who are these people and what movie title should we be looking for? I've seen some really cool independent stuff and am always looking for more.
One worrying question - are they getting all the power for the smartcard from that laser pulse? Really? Probably means a battery, so your CD or DVD now has an even more limited lifetime. Tinker with the battery size and Hollywood now has a way to program in obsolescence into that new DVD, forcing you to buy a new copy!
Nope, smartcards, like most ID cards have no battery on board. They get thier electricity from the reader they are presented to. They probably just convert some of the light energy to electricity.
Do you think it is "stealing" if I go and photocopy a book and start distributing it to everyone I know? While the original author may not be "deprived" of their original product, it doesn't mean that they haven't been deprived of a potential sale. I would recommend you look into copyright law and why it exists.
Of course, the follow up question to this line of reasoning is: If I buy a copy of the book, and let people read it for free, and even set up a copy machine for them to use, am I breaking copyright laws? What if I do it with a lot of books in one place?
If no one else does... Then I will develop a little box to sit between your PS and the server and report everything as 0.
Don't send 0's, sure, it protects your privacy, but in the end it just means that Sony will just looks at the data from all the other people out there that are sending good data. If you're going to make a box to send junk data, have it send out data that looks real every few minutes. Just keep throwing out random games, bury all the useful data that they might get in junk that is too close to the real thing to filter out.
Honestly, every time one of thse new types of spyware some out the initial/. reaction is either block or flood. These are 2 utterly stupid reactions, all this does is get the compay behind the spyware laughing at you. If its blocked by you and every/.er here, it just means that they are missing out on data on a small demographic. If they get a flood of data (sending out 50 million packets about the same game) they are just going to filter that out as either a hack or an outlier. What we need are some good tools to send data that looks as much like the real thing as possible, but is really just random noise. Unfortunatly, I'm not a programmer, (I'm trying to learn, but don't have much spare time.) and as such can't do this sort of thing myself. However, I know there are a lot of good programmers on/. and if just a few of them would make this sort of noise generator and post it on/., we could really screw with some of these companies.
No, the real question is, how do I hack this thing so that is sends 50,000 packets with the same information. Or, better yet, send 5 million random pieces of information. Really, the only thing you do when you send them such obvious junk data is get it filtered out. The better thing to do is create a nice distributed type program (ala SETI@Home) that sends a continuious stream of junk data that looks genuine. It would be better to just increse the amount of data sent to them, rather than decrese it. If you decrese it, it helps keep the data they are getting pure, but if you artificially increse it, you can generate such a low signal to noise ratio that the data is useless.
I usually cannot stand the ACLU. IMHO I feel like they usually get involved in issues that they really don't belong in because of the publicity they recieve. I hope this isn't the case here. I see their power and finances being a great benefit to the fight against the DMCA. I hope they can help fight for rights that I feel like we should have here in the US.
Agreed, I usually get suspicious whenever I hear the ACLU has gotten involved in a case. As most of the cases they tend to get involved in are the highly controversial and highly visable cases. And I rarely find myself agreeing with thier point of view. However, there is the old axiom, "The enemy of my enemy is my ally". So, in this case, I'm happy to have them onboard. Maybe there will finally be enough money to throw at this law to get it killed.
PS: Anyone have a neat trick for recovering a Win2k box with SNAFU'd permissions? Bootdisk, and... ?... meh, I'm just the programmer
Do a Google search on NTFSDos. One of the best programs for recovering lost data on an NTFS partition. It lets you access the NTFS partitions through with a DOS boot disk. Great for recovery, and for cracking a system, when it becomes necessary.
Personally I have long held the belief that we should try and capture a Near Earth Asteroid. Nudge it a bit here and there and dump it in a high Earth orbit. Between the resources to be had, and the enormous amount of scientific study that could be done, it'd be worth the trouble.
As a extra note to this, keep in mind that MS's much touted Windows Authetication Protocol was cracked the same day Bill Gates made the unveiling speech for XP. If it exists, it will be cracked, though I still would rather not have to try in the first place. As a side note, I like the idea of voting with dollars, and trying to kill Palladium by not buying products that have it, but sadly, this type of thing will only hold up until the GForce/ATI (insert large number here) comes out and has this sort of thing built in. Ya, that Ti4600 is cool now, but will you really want to still be using it in 5 years? People will cave, Palladium will become a standard as soon as the hardware manufacturers get on the bandwagon with Bill. Most of us here on/. may scream, bitch and moan about this sort of thing, and rightfully so, but in the end there is nothing we can do about it. So, I say, start now, get what specs you can on Palladium and start working on breaking it now. The sooner its broken, the sooner hardware companies will give up on paying licensing costs on a worthless technology.
Besides, imagine how much it would help the enviroment (aka hurt the extremist enviro-nuts) if instead of burning fossil fuels, we grew plants.
No, they would just scream about farmland run-off, and we how are are destroying (insert land type here) to make room for crop-land. Its a no win situation with those types, if its not one thing we humans are doing to destroy the environment, its another. They won't be happy till we are back in the trees, eating berries; and for some of them, the trees will be considered a bad move.
Keep in mind that everyone either does things, or has characteristics that others might consider "deviant", and you probably don't know what those things are because they seem normal to you because you take your privacy for granted. Also keep in mind that things that are "normal" now might be "deviant" in the future.
This is certainly a valid point, with history to back it up. I doubt that many people would have viewed German Jews as "deviant" in 1920's Germany. And later, when they were all told to wear the Star of David in a visable location, what did they have to worry? No one would single out people and do harmful things to them, just because they are Jewish. Certainly, they had nothing to hide, so they had nothing to worry about. That is the argument put forth these days to assuage people's fears of all of the new security measures. Look where it led the Jews, and then tell me, do you really think its a valid argument?
(note: the use of the word 'you' is meant as the reader, not the above poster, with whom I am agreeing.)
The real question is how far behind the curve are these intelligence types when dealing with Internet enabled terrorists? All I'm saying is that I think this sucks, but it isn't necessarily a power grab to create a society based on "1984".
I for one don't fear that this is an Orwellian power grab either. I tend to feel that, for the most part, this is a well intentioned attempt by the governments to protect citizens. However, the problem is, once you have laws like this in place they are almost impossible to remove and/or stop. And, even if today's government is not out to force their citizens into surfdom, it may become an issue later. Take, as an example, the former USSR. I doubt that Lenin was really out to crush the peasents under his heel, but that didn't stop Stalin from using what Lenin setup, in order to maintain ruthless control. I don't fight these sorts on laws because I fear the people enacting them, I don't fight these laws because I have something to hide, I fight these laws because they may be used, in the future, to stitch a marker on me or my childeren. And that mark will be used by the Gestapo to single me out and put me in a prison camp. That is what I fear the most, I look at the laws that congress and the president are enacting now and ask myself, how will this be used in the future? I see some of these laws as the road to the creation of the American Stazi. I see a future where the Constitution is nothing more than an antiquated piece of paper that has had all real meaning taken out of it, or is ignored completely. No, don't fear that the current government will use these laws to create an Orwellian society. Instead, fear what the government,in the future, will do with these laws. This is why we have to fight them now, kill them before they are given life, for surely it will cost the lives of many of our childeren to kill the beast once it is full grown.
how can we stop global warming... Assume for a moment that global warming is like any force, just beacuse the change is still relatively small doesn't mean that the accelleration isn't huge. Once you want to "change" it's like stopping a car... it will take a while. A long while. If it took us 200 years to start serious warming, it may very well take us 300 years to do the cooling. And by then it may be just too late.
There are four types of people: those who are ignorant and know it; those who are knowlegable and don't; those that are knowlegable and know it; and those who are ignorant but think that they are knowlegable. You my fellow biped are in the latter category; and what a dangerous person you are beacuse of this. Why a moderator would mark you as insightful is beyond me. Spreading ignorance under the guise of wisdom is the worst of all sins.
Then you might want to put yourself in that last category, and as one of those horrible people that spread mis-information. You might find a good look at the NASA satellite data, for temperature, enlightening. And before you complain about the fact that this only goes back to the late '70s, and that the "real" picture only shows up when we look at the average temperature since the late 1800's, I would suggest looking up the Pacific Decadal Occilation, which is really where the "warming" in the past century has come from, though most envirometalist extremists conviently smooth the data over and forget to mention that this is the only real source of warming over the past 100 years. And, as a last note, the PDO has been determined to be a natural phenomena, though I am sure the next argument will be that humans are somehow changing it as well. My advice, accept it, we are not that important and don't have that large of an impact on the Earth, its just arrogance to assume that we are the cause of every little fluctuation.
Re:Days of denial are over.
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 1
All we have are some brilliant people constructing climate models that predict that the global average temperature will rise by some non-negligible amount and that according to mathematics in these models greenhouse gases cause this rise.
Then why, might I ask, does the global satallite data, taken after the Pacific Decadial Occilation, show a slight decrese in the global average temperature? Moreover, why is it that most of the computer models seem to be incapable of reproducing the current conditions, reliably, when run against the past century?
Personally, I think that at this point there is nothing but a bit of antecdotal evidence and a lot of screaming, to support the radical changes that are often proposed in order to "save the planet". Sure, I like the idea of making cars emit less CO and NOx, afterall where I live has seen its days of high smog levels. But I don't see the need to abandon our current way of doing things, until we have a really good alternitive.
The company I work for had a translated manual come in from Germany, with one of its new product lines. In the manual were instructed to: Insert Stiffy Disk
Just a couple of ideas, though some are perhaps repeats of the ones already given, by other peole.
1. Block all ports that are not necessary.
A simple but effective way of getting rid of the leeches, though perhaps a bit draconian.
2. Use QoS, or other throttleing techniques.
This lets them do it, but keeps them from hogging bandwidth.
3. Install Linux on all of the machines in the school.
This provides a number of positive effects. It gets rid of licensing cost. It teaches the students about OS's other than Windows. And it makes adding other, unacceptable, programs a bit tougher.
Personally, I would use all three of these ideas in a multi-layered secutity setup. First, I'd start blocking ports that I didn't want open. Second, I'd throttle all traffic that relates to P2P software, drop it to 3kb/s per user. That way, its better for them to go home and do it. Third, I would have the school running on Linux. This would stop a lot of the users from doing anything outside the basics.
And, of course, I would audit stuff like mad. So that, if someone manages to get outside the box I have set up for them, I could go congratulate them, and ask them to keep thier mouth shut on how to do it, and to keep their activities to an acceptable level, or I would lock them in tighter.
While I agree it's a good thing to not be dependant, don't we traditionally think of food as more essential than plastic. Sure most people around here get enough to eat, but what about Africa and whatnot? Oh well. I personally don't care but I know plenty of people do.
True enough, though in the article they mentioned switching from corn to the byproducts of agricultre. Corn stalks, wheat chaff, and the like. This would be great, not only are we moving towards the day where we can tell the middle east to blow itself back into the stone age, but we are also finding a good way to get rid of what we currently view as trash.
Ok, write one, I'll forward it to all my american friends... (no kidding)
If you do, please post a copy on/. And everyone here, please copy and paste it in an email to everyone you know. Just make sure that it is readable, has good spelling/grammar. And would be intelligable to the average person.
I really wouldn't mind paying $2/month per channel I watch provided the channel is ad-free.
I've been of this belief for years. Let me choose the channels I want, and only the channels I want. Problem is, then they wouldn't get the $50 per house that they are used to. So they load all of the crap on us, and say, "look its a great package 150 channels!" The fact is, its 25 sports channels, 90 "special intrest" channels, that don't interest me, plus the usual gambit of junk, so that I can get my wanted 3 channels. Of course, this package mentality is a defensive reaction for the cable companies. They know that, if they let people pick and choose channels, that they would only sell 10 or so channels per household. And most of the oddball ones would die from lack of revenue. In the end I just decided that I would dump cable/satellite TV and use my DVD player for my viewing recreation. In actuallity, I've been without TV for over a year now, and find that there are only 2 shows I miss. But then again, isn't that what CD burners and the internet are for, can we say VCD? But, of course, I would never do that, that would be stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, maybe now I'll get to climb walls like Spiderman. Afterall, what's a better use for new technology than for recreation.
Truthfully though, this could be useful in a lot of applications. I would expect to see NASA interested, as it might be a good replacement for velcro, which is kinda limited in what it can stick to.
Its nice to see that the opponents of these bills have some sort of group of large compaines on their side. Though I wouldn't exactly say that Verizon is sticking up for the rights of the people. What they are fighting for is the protection of their networks and revenue streams. Looking at the responses to the questions, I don't doubt that Verizon et al. would exit the arena if they were given some sort of comfy loophole to sit in. Such as, they have to monitor and report on users, but they have no liability, and get some sort of content broadcast concessions from the media companies. Consider the following:
So you tried to fix Biden's bill?
We sat down with the content community, with (Capitol) Hill staffers, and offered up several different alternatives to get the service provider out of the bill. We proposed, for instance, that it apply only to the party initiating the transmission. That was rejected. We tried definitional approaches that made it clear the bill did not apply to an intermediary. That was rejected.
Did you try to work with the bill's sponsors directly? How about with Sen. Biden?
We've had a difficult time obtaining a carve-out. We think it's a very simple issue. The bill is intended to target the bad guys. There shouldn't be a controversy over exempting an intermediary.
When you lobby people on Capitol Hill, what do you tell politicians?
On the Hollings bill, we've discussed our concerns and talked about how the bill undermines our longstanding compromise (in the DMCA).
The ISPs would be happy to get a comprimise that would get the out of harms way. Sure they are currently against these bills, but as soon as they come up with some sort of DMCAesq comprimise, they'll shift sides.
For now they are just playing it up for PR, that's what the last response is, pure PR spin.
Though if Verizon and other telecommunications firms get what you want, you'd bow out of the debate. Since your interests are not exactly the same as consumers, wouldn't you be parting ways if that happens?
Not necessarily. We also want to see a law that's balanced and that the user community will also accept. The copyright community has to understand the reality that if consumers are not happy with the compromise...many of these illegal activities are going to continue.
If you do make one of these, please, please, post it on /. so people like me can find it. I'm not a programmer, and as such, probably couldn't put something like this together. However, I would love to be able to start dumping junk into the databases of these companies. The more tools we have to generate a low signal to noise ratio for these marketing drones, the better off we'll all be.
Yes citizen, The Computer is your friend.
Trust The Computer.
Thank you...
Assuming that you are not under some sort of NDA that would forbid it. Who are these people and what movie title should we be looking for? I've seen some really cool independent stuff and am always looking for more.
One worrying question - are they getting all the power for the smartcard from that laser pulse? Really? Probably means a battery, so your CD or DVD now has an even more limited lifetime. Tinker with the battery size and Hollywood now has a way to program in obsolescence into that new DVD, forcing you to buy a new copy!
Nope, smartcards, like most ID cards have no battery on board. They get thier electricity from the reader they are presented to. They probably just convert some of the light energy to electricity.
Do you think it is "stealing" if I go and photocopy a book and start distributing it to everyone I know? While the original author may not be "deprived" of their original product, it doesn't mean that they haven't been deprived of a potential sale. I would recommend you look into copyright law and why it exists.
Of course, the follow up question to this line of reasoning is: If I buy a copy of the book, and let people read it for free, and even set up a copy machine for them to use, am I breaking copyright laws? What if I do it with a lot of books in one place?
If no one else does... Then I will develop a little box to sit between your PS and the server and report everything as 0.
/. reaction is either block or flood. These are 2 utterly stupid reactions, all this does is get the compay behind the spyware laughing at you. If its blocked by you and every /.er here, it just means that they are missing out on data on a small demographic. If they get a flood of data (sending out 50 million packets about the same game) they are just going to filter that out as either a hack or an outlier. What we need are some good tools to send data that looks as much like the real thing as possible, but is really just random noise. Unfortunatly, I'm not a programmer, (I'm trying to learn, but don't have much spare time.) and as such can't do this sort of thing myself. However, I know there are a lot of good programmers on /. and if just a few of them would make this sort of noise generator and post it on /., we could really screw with some of these companies.
Don't send 0's, sure, it protects your privacy, but in the end it just means that Sony will just looks at the data from all the other people out there that are sending good data. If you're going to make a box to send junk data, have it send out data that looks real every few minutes. Just keep throwing out random games, bury all the useful data that they might get in junk that is too close to the real thing to filter out.
Honestly, every time one of thse new types of spyware some out the initial
No, the real question is, how do I hack this thing so that is sends 50,000 packets with the same information. Or, better yet, send 5 million random pieces of information. Really, the only thing you do when you send them such obvious junk data is get it filtered out. The better thing to do is create a nice distributed type program (ala SETI@Home) that sends a continuious stream of junk data that looks genuine. It would be better to just increse the amount of data sent to them, rather than decrese it. If you decrese it, it helps keep the data they are getting pure, but if you artificially increse it, you can generate such a low signal to noise ratio that the data is useless.
I usually cannot stand the ACLU. IMHO I feel like they usually get involved in issues that they really don't belong in because of the publicity they recieve. I hope this isn't the case here. I see their power and finances being a great benefit to the fight against the DMCA. I hope they can help fight for rights that I feel like we should have here in the US.
Agreed, I usually get suspicious whenever I hear the ACLU has gotten involved in a case. As most of the cases they tend to get involved in are the highly controversial and highly visable cases. And I rarely find myself agreeing with thier point of view.
However, there is the old axiom, "The enemy of my enemy is my ally". So, in this case, I'm happy to have them onboard.
Maybe there will finally be enough money to throw at this law to get it killed.
PS: Anyone have a neat trick for recovering a Win2k box with SNAFU'd permissions? Bootdisk, and ... ? ... meh, I'm just the programmer
Do a Google search on NTFSDos. One of the best programs for recovering lost data on an NTFS partition. It lets you access the NTFS partitions through with a DOS boot disk. Great for recovery, and for cracking a system, when it becomes necessary.
Personally I have long held the belief that we should try and capture a Near Earth Asteroid. Nudge it a bit here and there and dump it in a high Earth orbit. Between the resources to be had, and the enormous amount of scientific study that could be done, it'd be worth the trouble.
As a extra note to this, keep in mind that MS's much touted Windows Authetication Protocol was cracked the same day Bill Gates made the unveiling speech for XP. If it exists, it will be cracked, though I still would rather not have to try in the first place. /. may scream, bitch and moan about this sort of thing, and rightfully so, but in the end there is nothing we can do about it. So, I say, start now, get what specs you can on Palladium and start working on breaking it now. The sooner its broken, the sooner hardware companies will give up on paying licensing costs on a worthless technology.
As a side note, I like the idea of voting with dollars, and trying to kill Palladium by not buying products that have it, but sadly, this type of thing will only hold up until the GForce/ATI (insert large number here) comes out and has this sort of thing built in. Ya, that Ti4600 is cool now, but will you really want to still be using it in 5 years? People will cave, Palladium will become a standard as soon as the hardware manufacturers get on the bandwagon with Bill. Most of us here on
Besides, imagine how much it would help the enviroment (aka hurt the extremist enviro-nuts) if instead of burning fossil fuels, we grew plants.
No, they would just scream about farmland run-off, and we how are are destroying (insert land type here) to make room for crop-land. Its a no win situation with those types, if its not one thing we humans are doing to destroy the environment, its another. They won't be happy till we are back in the trees, eating berries; and for some of them, the trees will be considered a bad move.
Keep in mind that everyone either does things, or has characteristics that others might consider "deviant", and you probably don't know what those things are because they seem normal to you because you take your privacy for granted. Also keep in mind that things that are "normal" now might be "deviant" in the future.
This is certainly a valid point, with history to back it up. I doubt that many people would have viewed German Jews as "deviant" in 1920's Germany. And later, when they were all told to wear the Star of David in a visable location, what did they have to worry? No one would single out people and do harmful things to them, just because they are Jewish. Certainly, they had nothing to hide, so they had nothing to worry about. That is the argument put forth these days to assuage people's fears of all of the new security measures. Look where it led the Jews, and then tell me, do you really think its a valid argument?
(note: the use of the word 'you' is meant as the reader, not the above poster, with whom I am agreeing.)
The real question is how far behind the curve are these intelligence types when dealing with Internet enabled terrorists? All I'm saying is that I think this sucks, but it isn't necessarily a power grab to create a society based on "1984".
I for one don't fear that this is an Orwellian power grab either. I tend to feel that, for the most part, this is a well intentioned attempt by the governments to protect citizens. However, the problem is, once you have laws like this in place they are almost impossible to remove and/or stop. And, even if today's government is not out to force their citizens into surfdom, it may become an issue later. Take, as an example, the former USSR. I doubt that Lenin was really out to crush the peasents under his heel, but that didn't stop Stalin from using what Lenin setup, in order to maintain ruthless control.
I don't fight these sorts on laws because I fear the people enacting them, I don't fight these laws because I have something to hide, I fight these laws because they may be used, in the future, to stitch a marker on me or my childeren. And that mark will be used by the Gestapo to single me out and put me in a prison camp. That is what I fear the most, I look at the laws that congress and the president are enacting now and ask myself, how will this be used in the future? I see some of these laws as the road to the creation of the American Stazi. I see a future where the Constitution is nothing more than an antiquated piece of paper that has had all real meaning taken out of it, or is ignored completely.
No, don't fear that the current government will use these laws to create an Orwellian society. Instead, fear what the government,in the future, will do with these laws. This is why we have to fight them now, kill them before they are given life, for surely it will cost the lives of many of our childeren to kill the beast once it is full grown.
how can we stop global warming... Assume for a moment that global warming is like any force, just beacuse the change is still relatively small doesn't mean that the accelleration isn't huge. Once you want to "change" it's like stopping a car... it will take a while. A long while. If it took us 200 years to start serious warming, it may very well take us 300 years to do the cooling. And by then it may be just too late.
There are four types of people: those who are ignorant and know it; those who are knowlegable and don't; those that are knowlegable and know it; and those who are ignorant but think that they are knowlegable. You my fellow biped are in the latter category; and what a dangerous person you are beacuse of this. Why a moderator would mark you as insightful is beyond me. Spreading ignorance under the guise of wisdom is the worst of all sins.
Then you might want to put yourself in that last category, and as one of those horrible people that spread mis-information. You might find a good look at the NASA satellite data, for temperature, enlightening. And before you complain about the fact that this only goes back to the late '70s, and that the "real" picture only shows up when we look at the average temperature since the late 1800's, I would suggest looking up the Pacific Decadal Occilation, which is really where the "warming" in the past century has come from, though most envirometalist extremists conviently smooth the data over and forget to mention that this is the only real source of warming over the past 100 years. And, as a last note, the PDO has been determined to be a natural phenomena, though I am sure the next argument will be that humans are somehow changing it as well. My advice, accept it, we are not that important and don't have that large of an impact on the Earth, its just arrogance to assume that we are the cause of every little fluctuation.
All we have are some brilliant people constructing climate models that predict that the global average temperature will rise by some non-negligible amount and that according to mathematics in these models greenhouse gases cause this rise.
Then why, might I ask, does the global satallite data, taken after the Pacific Decadial Occilation, show a slight decrese in the global average temperature? Moreover, why is it that most of the computer models seem to be incapable of reproducing the current conditions, reliably, when run against the past century?
Personally, I think that at this point there is nothing but a bit of antecdotal evidence and a lot of screaming, to support the radical changes that are often proposed in order to "save the planet". Sure, I like the idea of making cars emit less CO and NOx, afterall where I live has seen its days of high smog levels. But I don't see the need to abandon our current way of doing things, until we have a really good alternitive.
The company I work for had a translated manual come in from Germany, with one of its new product lines. In the manual were instructed to:
Insert Stiffy Disk
Its a good thing I don't sleep much, thoughts of this scenario are going to give me nightmares.
Just a couple of ideas, though some are perhaps repeats of the ones already given, by other peole.
1. Block all ports that are not necessary.
A simple but effective way of getting rid of the leeches, though perhaps a bit draconian.
2. Use QoS, or other throttleing techniques.
This lets them do it, but keeps them from hogging bandwidth.
3. Install Linux on all of the machines in the school.
This provides a number of positive effects. It gets rid of licensing cost. It teaches the students about OS's other than Windows. And it makes adding other, unacceptable, programs a bit tougher.
Personally, I would use all three of these ideas in a multi-layered secutity setup. First, I'd start blocking ports that I didn't want open. Second, I'd throttle all traffic that relates to P2P software, drop it to 3kb/s per user. That way, its better for them to go home and do it. Third, I would have the school running on Linux. This would stop a lot of the users from doing anything outside the basics.
And, of course, I would audit stuff like mad. So that, if someone manages to get outside the box I have set up for them, I could go congratulate them, and ask them to keep thier mouth shut on how to do it, and to keep their activities to an acceptable level, or I would lock them in tighter.
While I agree it's a good thing to not be dependant, don't we traditionally think of food as more essential than plastic. Sure most people around here get enough to eat, but what about Africa and whatnot? Oh well. I personally don't care but I know plenty of people do.
True enough, though in the article they mentioned switching from corn to the byproducts of agricultre. Corn stalks, wheat chaff, and the like. This would be great, not only are we moving towards the day where we can tell the middle east to blow itself back into the stone age, but we are also finding a good way to get rid of what we currently view as trash.
Ok, write one, I'll forward it to all my american friends... (no kidding)
/. And everyone here, please copy and paste it in an email to everyone you know. Just make sure that it is readable, has good spelling/grammar. And would be intelligable to the average person.
If you do, please post a copy on
I really wouldn't mind paying $2/month per channel I watch provided the channel is ad-free.
I've been of this belief for years. Let me choose the channels I want, and only the channels I want. Problem is, then they wouldn't get the $50 per house that they are used to. So they load all of the crap on us, and say, "look its a great package 150 channels!" The fact is, its 25 sports channels, 90 "special intrest" channels, that don't interest me, plus the usual gambit of junk, so that I can get my wanted 3 channels. Of course, this package mentality is a defensive reaction for the cable companies. They know that, if they let people pick and choose channels, that they would only sell 10 or so channels per household. And most of the oddball ones would die from lack of revenue. In the end I just decided that I would dump cable/satellite TV and use my DVD player for my viewing recreation. In actuallity, I've been without TV for over a year now, and find that there are only 2 shows I miss. But then again, isn't that what CD burners and the internet are for, can we say VCD? But, of course, I would never do that, that would be stealing.