There was a new comedian trying to get into the business. A long time comedian took him aside and told him, "We have a convention every year, that I'd like to take you to. It will help you understand the business."
Great, thought the young comedian.
The convention was at an old abandon theater. Thousands of old comedians were there. Each one would get on stage and simple say a number. Some people in the audience would laugh, others would groan.
"I don't understand, what are they doing?" asked the young comedian.
"Well see," said the old comedian, "every joke that anyone can ever come up with has already been told. We accepted this fact between ourselves years ago, so we've simply numbered them. We each take our turn getting up on stage and simply reciting the number to save time."
Well, in theory you're right. They're sending the data to you, regardless if you requested it or not.
That was the old logic behind stealing cable. They happened to run a cable line right past your house (on your property maybe), so putting in a splitter and taking the signal was fine.. Then people found out they were wrong.
Cable companies started putting filters in to block particular channels. People would 'accidently' climb the poll and replace them with dummy filters. They were wrong.
So, I receive every satellite feed in North America at my house (just like everyone else in North America). Does it make it right for me to decode whatever it may be? Nope. What's the difference between a regular satellite feed, and an encrypted one? Just a bit more decoding so it makes it acceptable to my TV.
FTA picks up every feed that isn't encrypted/encoded, so by itself it's fine. They're broadcast in the clear, so it should be ok, theoretically. Try asking the provider if it's ok for you to watch their feed that's in the clear, without paying them. I'm sure they'll tell you that they want to get paid.
It costs a fortune to have a satellite feed. Try leasing just one channel on a satellite, and maintaining a ground station for it.
I found out DirecTV doesn't maintain a whole bunch of ground stations, for every city that they offer local broadcasting for. They receive the local broadcast signal, and transmit it over the Internet to their uplink station(s). I'm sure the others are the same way.
Think of it this way. Would you consider it ok to decode/decrypt every feed coming down? There's lots of communication stuff up there, and lots of private data coming back down. Should you listen in on NSA/CIA/DIA communications just because they are being broadcast into your back yard? Luckly for the determined folks, it only becomes a problem when someone finds out.
The first time, the boss wanted to convert from BSDi to WinNT. Bad choice, I said, but I was a lowly tech then.. I ended up leaving after the migration was done. Not too long afterwards, they started migrating back. The company, on the verge of failure, sold.
The second time, we had a decent size network running Linux. I was happy with my happy network. It did it's thing very well.. One of the boss-type people wanted Windows. He likes Windows. We should have a Win2k AS network.. I refused. I refused. I refused some more. Luckly, I was in more of a position to refuse now.. It was a battle of wills. I gave all the reasons not to. I gave the few reasons to switch. In the end, I grew tired of the battle. "Fine, we'll switch over to Windows. Licensing will cost $xxx. We'll need x extra techs, and y more boxes, and z more space."
You know, all those damed x's y's and z's add up. He was reconsidering.
"We can have everything migrated over in a month, and stable sometime after that. I strongly recommend against it, but we can start the migration as soon as you get the licenses, and hire staff to do the migration and support the whole mess."
It never migrated.
Sometimes you just have to give them exactly what they want, and let them realize the mistake all on their own. If the company fails because of it, but you had given strong reservations against it, it's not your fault. When the company dumps, buy the machines from them for pennies, and start your own hosting company.:)
Just kidding about the hosting company. Get on board with the next company, and see if they're any smarter. At very least, you can use your experience as a warning to them.
"Oh, you want to migrate to Windows? That's why the last company I was at failed. Here's all the reasons....."
I see the biggest reason for people wanting to use Photoshop instead of GIMP is that people are comfortable with Photoshop.
I used Photoshop for a long time. When I started switching over to Linux as my primary OS (two machines on my desk, one Windows, one Linux), I had problems figuring out GIMP. It took me a while.
Now, I'm great with GIMP. I do things with it, that most Photoshop users can't figure out. As far as I'm concerned, and for what most people do, they're interchangable. BUT, for a user who is only familiar with Photoshop, and uses it daily for work, it's impractical to tell them "Ok, learn GIMP now."
I no longer use Photoshop for my own work, but I do help people with Photoshop on theirs.
Some people are "stuck" with their choice in software. I don't consider Photoshop a real problem, it's a great piece of software. I'd love to see it available for Linux, then I'd have another great choice in what to use on my Linux workstations.
They have a terms of service which is to be followed...
But...
If I'm a provider passing lots of mail for a variety of reason, and I mix in a bunch of spam, I can always say "Oh, bad user, they've been terminated..." blah, blah..
They're just looking to make an extra buck, they're not looking to solve the problem.
Check http://www.goodmailsystems.com/. It's a $199.00 application fee, until July 2006, when it goes up to $399.00. There's no mention on the per-message costs, or at least I didn't manage to find them.
It's pretty much for anyone who runs a mail server. It's more for us administrators, not the end users.
For me, I need to do the application, and pay the per-message rate. Since our mail servers are used for our staff, the per-message rate will need to be absorbed by the company. We can't pass the cost on to the users.
I have a friend, who sends a good bit of mail. It's all 100% legitimate.
One of the messages worked it's way through SpamCop, and ended up in my lap. I looked. It was an email saying that their online purchase hadn't gone through, and was requesting that they call with a different form of payment. I called the developer for fun, and she looked up the transaction. Yes, it had been placed online, and no the charge hadn't gone through (invalid card number)
We actually got an apology from the user. They simply flag everything in their box, and report it as spam. They didn't realize that a real message may come through.
At least at SpamCop, they're good about handling them. AOL, you're blacklisted until.... well.... you already know.
I can't. There's roughly an 80% chance that I've been blacklisted. There's no reason for it though. When we moved our mailserver to a new network, we found ourselves already blacklisted. It comes and goes, even though we've jumped through all of their hoops accordingly.
As a large bandwidth customer, while nowhere near the levels of Verizon, I am constantly playing the game of deciding what is needed where. I have multiple GigE connections and many servers. I float things around to (hopefully) ensure that I don't run out of bandwidth in any particular spot.
I have places, where I have "essential" services, which I want to leave extra bandwidth available. Those are for my own purposes.
Just on my own scale, I put mail, DNS, and some other internal use machines on a higher priority than say a free hosting server.
Why can't Verizon allocate X for Internet, Y for phone calls, and Z for 'internal' use? Who's freakin' business is it on how they allocate their services. If X suffers because Y and Z get prefered treatment, it's their own business which will be hurt. Customers will get frustrated at slow speeds and high latency, and go somewhere else. Likewise, if they were forced to make X use all available bandwidth, obviously Y and Z will be hurt. Verizon without the ability to pass phone traffic would be interesting. How do you explain to a whole bunch of residential phone customers that they can't make phone calls (frequent all circuits busy tone), because the Internet traffic sucked it all up.
The article references Verizon's new fiber that they've spent a freaking fortune installing. Now that they've put it in, are they under some sort of obligation to allow that to be used for whatever they are told? That really screws with any sort of plans they may have. Ok, so they're going to offer television over IP. Great. Why should they be required to sublet that to me for my latest/greatest ISP venture, or dedicate it to Internet bandwidth. It's their lines. They installed them for a reason.
I know Tier 1 providers frequently sublet fiber as they have it available. It's not like Verizon will hold onto a bunch of dark fiber just for the sake of telling another provider to go screw themselves. Well, it may happen, but they're in the business of making money.
The whole "who gets priority" thing is kind of silly. Providers have been doing it for years anyways. It may not be obvious, but it happens. Here's an example. Like I said, we use lots of bandwidth, and we're frequently checking on how things look. If we aren't, one of our roughly 2 million daily viewers is. People like to complain, and I guarantee at least a few of those 2 million viewers can run a traceroute. If things are slow through a city, either we'll already know about it, or a viewer will complain. A few times, a provider has made the mistake of lowering our quality of service. Someone else was given the prefered routes, and we were left with the crap. A few phone calls to high places in the company, and we can see things start working better and we suddenly get calls from high ranking people in the company apologizing that the mistake ever happened. Sometimes they'll play it off as a simple mistake, but in the end, it's all the same. They changed something (QOS), we complained, they changed it back.
I guarantee, we'll get the prefered routes, over someone with a T1 or even a 10Mb cross connect. It's all in who pays more. Obviously, if we have equipment on the provider in question, we'll always appear faster than someone on another provider, especially across a bad peering. Are we "paying" for this service? Sure. We pay out the ass to have equipment in a facility and bandwidth to support them. Are you as a home DSL/cablemodem customer going to have the same influence with a provider that we have? No freakin' way. On the other hand, we only deal with Tier 1 providers, so you won't be dealing with them directly. Even as a Verizon DSL/cablemodem customer, you aren't talking to the Tier 1 part of the company.
With all that said, we're not Verizon customers. We have been on occasion for lesser services (backup DSL for offices, and the like), but not for our main services. They don't offer the killer deals that others do.
I've been trying out various beta version of Microsoft Vista (Longhorn/2007, whatever).
Pretty.. Pretty crap.
With the newest version I have now, I'm lucky if it behaves anything like the way it's suppose to.
On one desk, a machine that was perfectly happy and stable until a few days ago when I started screwing with Vista. On the other desk, a perfectly happy stable machine running Slamd64 (x86_64 version of Slackware).
I can remain confident that my Slamd64 box won't go down. That's what I'm doing all my real work on. I have about a 25% chance when I move the mouse to make the screen saver go away (already set not to sleep, standby or require login after the screen saver), that it won't be available.
MSIE 7.0 is less stable than MSIE 6. And... well, they seem to have done a lot with the security. So much so, that many applications can't install, and I'm constantly asked for permission to do things.
The security aspect is fun. My compact flash card reader is plugged into this machine. I wanted to move some files over to the Linux machine. It doesn't want to play with the Samba, nor my girlfriend's WinXP machine, so I had to go with FTP. From the command line, I did 'mput *jpg'. It sent two of the three files in my current directory, before popping up the friendly warning that something unfriendly may be happening, and it has been stopped. Well, I got two of my files transfered. You're not so quick at stopping unsavory tasks.
I mention the CF reader, but don't think that works right either. It doesn't see it after boot. I have to physically unplug it, and plug it back in. It then gives me two prompts. One for the 'missing' drivers, and another asking how I want to open the device. Well, if the drivers don't work, how the hell are you offering to open the CF card? Aborting both lets it work.
I fought with the first install for two days, before I gave up on the sound drivers.. After upgrading to the current version, it took another day, and an odd combination of Vista and WinXP drivers. Some from nVidia, some from Microsoft. The PCI->AGP has to be Microsoft, but all the rest have to be nVidia's. Vista claims to have the right drivers, but they don't work worth shit.
Yet another abortion from Microsoft. Good work guys. Keep putting the crap out, and you'll push everyone over to either Linux or Mac OS/X. Either way, it's an improvement.
Don't say good bye quite yet. Just because they're saying it's being worked on doesn't mean that it'll ever be released. It's been "in production" for 10 years now.
Or more like...
it's been in production for so long that...... I vaugely remember that it was to be released.... I vaugely remember seeing a preview of some sort, that may have been cool.... a few years of recreational drug use may have blurred those memories with bad action movie on late night TV.... most kids, seeing Duke Nukem in the store, won't have ever played the original.
You don't have to launch with 2,900 tons of stuff. You have to launch with a crew and oxygen to get them to the ISS.
There are Soyuz and Progress launches almost every month, carrying stuff up each time. They could make the launches more frequent, and assemble the ISS to Moon vehicle there. They could even bump an unmanned vehicle from the ISS to a moon orbit, and wait for the crew to get there to land it. They'd just need a nice comfortable vehicle big enough for the crew to travel in, with supplies for the trip.
Won't happen though. Ya, I'm very optimistic about our real push for space travel.
Don't forget, almost everything with the Apollo missions was new technology. We've played quite a bit with space travel and long durations in space.
It wouldn't take 9 years to park someone's happy ass on the moon. I'd be willing to bet we *COULD* do it in a year, if the government(s) wanted to do it.
Now, the "could" part of that, is if we were doing it right. If a *good* leader were to control the whole thing, keeping all parties happy and active. We *could* have everything done in a year. I say that as a could. Maybe it'd go over the allocated time, and take 16 months.:)
It will never happen right now. The US Government is spending too much in stupid areas, like wars (war on drugs, war on immigration, war on the middle east, war on this, war on that). We also don't have the cooperation of the countries that could help us most. If we had China, Russia, Japan, and the European countries, that would be really helpful.
Of course, it would also require opening up the "secrets" of the space programs from everyone involved. Since the world is in the "trust no one, hate everyone" stance, we'll never get it done.
Hell, we could have probably put humans beyond Pluto by now, if we would simply cooperate.
Yup. SRB's are metal tubes full of solid fuel, that burn at a steady rate. They burn until they're empty. No choice on that. Once they start going, that's it. When they're done, they're hollow tubes that come crashing back down into the ocean.
There is nothing technical to them. Joe technician goes out there with his zippo, and lights the fuses, and off she goes.:)
OMS = Orbital Manuvering System
RCS = Reaction Control System
RCS are almost always automatically firing to keep the attitude of the orbiter correct. OMS are used for manuvering, such as to roll over for re-entry or to manuver for satellite deployment or docking.
Unless we're talking about a shuttle engine that I'm not familiar with, the three main shuttle engines do burn in the air. They provide the balance and thrust from initial ignition until SRB seperation.
The also continue burning into orbit. They don't stop burning until just before the external fuel tank is dropped.
For easy proof, watch most launch videos. They usually show the engines fire up. You can usually see the entire launch vehicle tilt as soon as they're fired, before it leaves the ground.
The three main engines have directed thrust, which gives the shuttle manuverability during liftoff. I don't believe the SRB's have any sort of directional control.
While in orbit, the orbiter uses OMS thrusters, but I doubt that's what we're talking about here. Those have almost no thrust in compairson to the main engines or SRB's.
Stopping an individual to talk to them, either with verbal commands or with indicators such as lights and siren, are ordering an individual to stop. It is implied that they are not to leave until directed otherwise.
Next time you're pulled over, try it. Just tell them, "sorry, no time right now", and leave. You can star in the next police beating video.
You know, it's funny. Iw as talking to someone on the phone this evening. I didn't mention this story to him.
He was a passenger in a car this evening. They rolled through a just turned red light (just before the opposing traffic had a green light). Of course, as fate would have it, there was a cop sitting at the intersection waiting for the green light.:)
The driver was of course identified, but my friend, the passenger, was also identified. He argued a little, but they're in the North, and it was too cold out to keep the window open to argue very long.
They were detained about 1/2 hour, before being allowed to continue. No citation was issued.
Why was the passenger required to show identification? Just because. They were suspect for running a red light. It was two older gentlemen, not your usual troublemakers (geez, two retirees in a car, there's real trouble).
I would suspect though, that's been entered into NCIC, where they were identified being in the same car, in that particular place, on that date.
I can't imagine that it hasn't happened to anyone else on here. It has happened to me.
Minding your own business, causing no trouble, cops come up, and demand your papers. They detail you, question you about your intentions in a particular location and use your identification to establish if you have any wants, warrants, or are a known criminal type who may be in the area to cause trouble.
Unamerican, huh?
Two years ago, exactly this happened to me.
One night, my girlfriend, some friends, and I wanted to go play pool and have a couple drinks. We walked down to Charles Billards, at 222 N. Brand Blvd, Glendale, CA. It's a nice area, with no real crime to speak of. The house we lived in at the time was less than a mile from here, so we frequently walked the area. Charles has a bouncer at the front and back door to keep kids out, being that they do serve alcohol also.
I stepped outside to smoke, and talk to a kid with a motorcycle. It was a nice bike, and a good excuse for a cigarette break. The others stayed inside and kept playing.
We had a nice conversation, and after a few minutes the guy with the bike left. I stayed outside smoking my cigarette. I was in plain view of the bouncer, standing where I was obviously causing no trouble.
Two police officers pulled up dramatically, and demanded my identification. "It's inside, the bartender has it.", I explained. Policy at Charles is that you give them your ID, and they'll give you the pool balls. I told them either they could check with the bartender for it. They refused. They continued for about 30 minutes, where I was searched, threatened with arrest, bullied, and otherwise harassed me.
I made the mistake of asking "What did I do?"
I did nothing. According to the police, I "fit the discription of someone they were looking for." No futher reason was given. I told them that I had been playing pool for a couple hours. The bartender knew it. The bouncers knew it. My friends knew it.
I intentionally didn't reference my friends. They did come out at one point to smoke also. Later, they told me, they came out looking for me, because I had been gone for so long. As soon as they saw I was with the cops, they knew there was trouble. No one trusts the police.
After about 30 minutes, they finally left me alone, so I could go play pool again. Why did they waste my time? Why was I interrogated like a criminal? To flex their "we control you" muscles. People are not to have the impression that they have any freedoms in this country, without wondering, "Will I get arrested today?"
An "arrest" by definition is being detained and not being free to leave. When a law enforcement officer stops you anywhere, and you are not free to walk away, you are technically under arrest. If you don't believe it, try walking or driving away next time a law enforcement officer asks you to stop. You'll then be charged with any of a variety of charges, which will land you in jail for months to years.
Most people feel good in that they were stopped and interrogated by the police, but not taken to jail. That's wrong. You should feel good in knowing that the police are there to protect you. Seeing a law enforcement officer drive by shouldn't bring on feelings of fear.
I fear law enforcement. I've never had a law enforcement officer do anything "good" for me. I've had cars and houses broken into. I've had property damaged and destroyed. I've had friends arrested on false charges. Not once have I had the experience of a law enforcement officer doing something good for me. "Hey, we caught they guy who broke into your house", or "hey, here's your lost cat." Nope. Never happened.
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I heard this joke once..
There was a new comedian trying to get into the business. A long time comedian took him aside and told him, "We have a convention every year, that I'd like to take you to. It will help you understand the business."
Great, thought the young comedian.
The convention was at an old abandon theater. Thousands of old comedians were there. Each one would get on stage and simple say a number. Some people in the audience would laugh, others would groan.
"I don't understand, what are they doing?" asked the young comedian.
"Well see," said the old comedian, "every joke that anyone can ever come up with has already been told. We accepted this fact between ourselves years ago, so we've simply numbered them. We each take our turn getting up on stage and simply reciting the number to save time."
Suddenly, the old comedian busted out laughing..
"What's so funny?" asked the young comedian.
"629,876! I love that one!"
Well, in theory you're right. They're sending the data to you, regardless if you requested it or not.
That was the old logic behind stealing cable. They happened to run a cable line right past your house (on your property maybe), so putting in a splitter and taking the signal was fine.. Then people found out they were wrong.
Cable companies started putting filters in to block particular channels. People would 'accidently' climb the poll and replace them with dummy filters. They were wrong.
So, I receive every satellite feed in North America at my house (just like everyone else in North America). Does it make it right for me to decode whatever it may be? Nope. What's the difference between a regular satellite feed, and an encrypted one? Just a bit more decoding so it makes it acceptable to my TV.
FTA picks up every feed that isn't encrypted/encoded, so by itself it's fine. They're broadcast in the clear, so it should be ok, theoretically. Try asking the provider if it's ok for you to watch their feed that's in the clear, without paying them. I'm sure they'll tell you that they want to get paid.
It costs a fortune to have a satellite feed. Try leasing just one channel on a satellite, and maintaining a ground station for it.
I found out DirecTV doesn't maintain a whole bunch of ground stations, for every city that they offer local broadcasting for. They receive the local broadcast signal, and transmit it over the Internet to their uplink station(s). I'm sure the others are the same way.
Think of it this way. Would you consider it ok to decode/decrypt every feed coming down? There's lots of communication stuff up there, and lots of private data coming back down. Should you listen in on NSA/CIA/DIA communications just because they are being broadcast into your back yard? Luckly for the determined folks, it only becomes a problem when someone finds out.
Well...
I've played this game before. Twice actually.
The first time, the boss wanted to convert from BSDi to WinNT. Bad choice, I said, but I was a lowly tech then.. I ended up leaving after the migration was done. Not too long afterwards, they started migrating back. The company, on the verge of failure, sold.
The second time, we had a decent size network running Linux. I was happy with my happy network. It did it's thing very well.. One of the boss-type people wanted Windows. He likes Windows. We should have a Win2k AS network.. I refused. I refused. I refused some more. Luckly, I was in more of a position to refuse now.. It was a battle of wills. I gave all the reasons not to. I gave the few reasons to switch. In the end, I grew tired of the battle. "Fine, we'll switch over to Windows. Licensing will cost $xxx. We'll need x extra techs, and y more boxes, and z more space."
You know, all those damed x's y's and z's add up. He was reconsidering.
"We can have everything migrated over in a month, and stable sometime after that. I strongly recommend against it, but we can start the migration as soon as you get the licenses, and hire staff to do the migration and support the whole mess."
It never migrated.
Sometimes you just have to give them exactly what they want, and let them realize the mistake all on their own. If the company fails because of it, but you had given strong reservations against it, it's not your fault. When the company dumps, buy the machines from them for pennies, and start your own hosting company.
Just kidding about the hosting company. Get on board with the next company, and see if they're any smarter. At very least, you can use your experience as a warning to them.
"Oh, you want to migrate to Windows? That's why the last company I was at failed. Here's all the reasons....."
I see the biggest reason for people wanting to use Photoshop instead of GIMP is that people are comfortable with Photoshop.
I used Photoshop for a long time. When I started switching over to Linux as my primary OS (two machines on my desk, one Windows, one Linux), I had problems figuring out GIMP. It took me a while.
Now, I'm great with GIMP. I do things with it, that most Photoshop users can't figure out. As far as I'm concerned, and for what most people do, they're interchangable. BUT, for a user who is only familiar with Photoshop, and uses it daily for work, it's impractical to tell them "Ok, learn GIMP now."
I no longer use Photoshop for my own work, but I do help people with Photoshop on theirs.
Some people are "stuck" with their choice in software. I don't consider Photoshop a real problem, it's a great piece of software. I'd love to see it available for Linux, then I'd have another great choice in what to use on my Linux workstations.
Actually, bulk mail just gets tossed, it doesn't get returned to sender no matter how you mark it.
They have a terms of service which is to be followed...
But...
If I'm a provider passing lots of mail for a variety of reason, and I mix in a bunch of spam, I can always say "Oh, bad user, they've been terminated..." blah, blah..
They're just looking to make an extra buck, they're not looking to solve the problem.
Check http://www.goodmailsystems.com/. It's a $199.00 application fee, until July 2006, when it goes up to $399.00. There's no mention on the per-message costs, or at least I didn't manage to find them.
It's pretty much for anyone who runs a mail server. It's more for us administrators, not the end users.
For me, I need to do the application, and pay the per-message rate. Since our mail servers are used for our staff, the per-message rate will need to be absorbed by the company. We can't pass the cost on to the users.
I have a friend, who sends a good bit of mail. It's all 100% legitimate.
One of the messages worked it's way through SpamCop, and ended up in my lap. I looked. It was an email saying that their online purchase hadn't gone through, and was requesting that they call with a different form of payment. I called the developer for fun, and she looked up the transaction. Yes, it had been placed online, and no the charge hadn't gone through (invalid card number)
We actually got an apology from the user. They simply flag everything in their box, and report it as spam. They didn't realize that a real message may come through.
At least at SpamCop, they're good about handling them. AOL, you're blacklisted until
I forward a copy of all my mail to GMail. Their spam filtering works pretty well.
On the other hand, the mail that lands in my local box is filtered just as well, using MailScanner with SpamAssassin.
I can't. There's roughly an 80% chance that I've been blacklisted. There's no reason for it though. When we moved our mailserver to a new network, we found ourselves already blacklisted. It comes and goes, even though we've jumped through all of their hoops accordingly.
Actually, they're already paying for that, to the USPS.
I agree.
As a large bandwidth customer, while nowhere near the levels of Verizon, I am constantly playing the game of deciding what is needed where. I have multiple GigE connections and many servers. I float things around to (hopefully) ensure that I don't run out of bandwidth in any particular spot.
I have places, where I have "essential" services, which I want to leave extra bandwidth available. Those are for my own purposes.
Just on my own scale, I put mail, DNS, and some other internal use machines on a higher priority than say a free hosting server.
Why can't Verizon allocate X for Internet, Y for phone calls, and Z for 'internal' use? Who's freakin' business is it on how they allocate their services. If X suffers because Y and Z get prefered treatment, it's their own business which will be hurt. Customers will get frustrated at slow speeds and high latency, and go somewhere else. Likewise, if they were forced to make X use all available bandwidth, obviously Y and Z will be hurt. Verizon without the ability to pass phone traffic would be interesting. How do you explain to a whole bunch of residential phone customers that they can't make phone calls (frequent all circuits busy tone), because the Internet traffic sucked it all up.
The article references Verizon's new fiber that they've spent a freaking fortune installing. Now that they've put it in, are they under some sort of obligation to allow that to be used for whatever they are told? That really screws with any sort of plans they may have. Ok, so they're going to offer television over IP. Great. Why should they be required to sublet that to me for my latest/greatest ISP venture, or dedicate it to Internet bandwidth. It's their lines. They installed them for a reason.
I know Tier 1 providers frequently sublet fiber as they have it available. It's not like Verizon will hold onto a bunch of dark fiber just for the sake of telling another provider to go screw themselves. Well, it may happen, but they're in the business of making money.
The whole "who gets priority" thing is kind of silly. Providers have been doing it for years anyways. It may not be obvious, but it happens. Here's an example. Like I said, we use lots of bandwidth, and we're frequently checking on how things look. If we aren't, one of our roughly 2 million daily viewers is. People like to complain, and I guarantee at least a few of those 2 million viewers can run a traceroute. If things are slow through a city, either we'll already know about it, or a viewer will complain. A few times, a provider has made the mistake of lowering our quality of service. Someone else was given the prefered routes, and we were left with the crap. A few phone calls to high places in the company, and we can see things start working better and we suddenly get calls from high ranking people in the company apologizing that the mistake ever happened. Sometimes they'll play it off as a simple mistake, but in the end, it's all the same. They changed something (QOS), we complained, they changed it back.
I guarantee, we'll get the prefered routes, over someone with a T1 or even a 10Mb cross connect. It's all in who pays more. Obviously, if we have equipment on the provider in question, we'll always appear faster than someone on another provider, especially across a bad peering. Are we "paying" for this service? Sure. We pay out the ass to have equipment in a facility and bandwidth to support them. Are you as a home DSL/cablemodem customer going to have the same influence with a provider that we have? No freakin' way. On the other hand, we only deal with Tier 1 providers, so you won't be dealing with them directly. Even as a Verizon DSL/cablemodem customer, you aren't talking to the Tier 1 part of the company.
With all that said, we're not Verizon customers. We have been on occasion for lesser services (backup DSL for offices, and the like), but not for our main services. They don't offer the killer deals that others do.
That would be too funny if it got banned just as it hit the market.
Ideally, they should be showing off how great their new version is. Not showing off how many bugs it still has.
I've been trying out various beta version of Microsoft Vista (Longhorn/2007, whatever).
Pretty.. Pretty crap.
With the newest version I have now, I'm lucky if it behaves anything like the way it's suppose to.
On one desk, a machine that was perfectly happy and stable until a few days ago when I started screwing with Vista. On the other desk, a perfectly happy stable machine running Slamd64 (x86_64 version of Slackware).
I can remain confident that my Slamd64 box won't go down. That's what I'm doing all my real work on. I have about a 25% chance when I move the mouse to make the screen saver go away (already set not to sleep, standby or require login after the screen saver), that it won't be available.
MSIE 7.0 is less stable than MSIE 6. And
The security aspect is fun. My compact flash card reader is plugged into this machine. I wanted to move some files over to the Linux machine. It doesn't want to play with the Samba, nor my girlfriend's WinXP machine, so I had to go with FTP. From the command line, I did 'mput *jpg'. It sent two of the three files in my current directory, before popping up the friendly warning that something unfriendly may be happening, and it has been stopped. Well, I got two of my files transfered. You're not so quick at stopping unsavory tasks.
I mention the CF reader, but don't think that works right either. It doesn't see it after boot. I have to physically unplug it, and plug it back in. It then gives me two prompts. One for the 'missing' drivers, and another asking how I want to open the device. Well, if the drivers don't work, how the hell are you offering to open the CF card? Aborting both lets it work.
I fought with the first install for two days, before I gave up on the sound drivers.. After upgrading to the current version, it took another day, and an odd combination of Vista and WinXP drivers. Some from nVidia, some from Microsoft. The PCI->AGP has to be Microsoft, but all the rest have to be nVidia's. Vista claims to have the right drivers, but they don't work worth shit.
Yet another abortion from Microsoft. Good work guys. Keep putting the crap out, and you'll push everyone over to either Linux or Mac OS/X. Either way, it's an improvement.
Don't say good bye quite yet. Just because they're saying it's being worked on doesn't mean that it'll ever be released. It's been "in production" for 10 years now.
Or more like...
it's been in production for so long that...
You don't have to launch with 2,900 tons of stuff. You have to launch with a crew and oxygen to get them to the ISS.
There are Soyuz and Progress launches almost every month, carrying stuff up each time. They could make the launches more frequent, and assemble the ISS to Moon vehicle there. They could even bump an unmanned vehicle from the ISS to a moon orbit, and wait for the crew to get there to land it. They'd just need a nice comfortable vehicle big enough for the crew to travel in, with supplies for the trip.
Won't happen though. Ya, I'm very optimistic about our real push for space travel.
Don't forget, almost everything with the Apollo missions was new technology. We've played quite a bit with space travel and long durations in space.
It wouldn't take 9 years to park someone's happy ass on the moon. I'd be willing to bet we *COULD* do it in a year, if the government(s) wanted to do it.
Now, the "could" part of that, is if we were doing it right. If a *good* leader were to control the whole thing, keeping all parties happy and active. We *could* have everything done in a year. I say that as a could. Maybe it'd go over the allocated time, and take 16 months.
It will never happen right now. The US Government is spending too much in stupid areas, like wars (war on drugs, war on immigration, war on the middle east, war on this, war on that). We also don't have the cooperation of the countries that could help us most. If we had China, Russia, Japan, and the European countries, that would be really helpful.
Of course, it would also require opening up the "secrets" of the space programs from everyone involved. Since the world is in the "trust no one, hate everyone" stance, we'll never get it done.
Hell, we could have probably put humans beyond Pluto by now, if we would simply cooperate.
Yup. SRB's are metal tubes full of solid fuel, that burn at a steady rate. They burn until they're empty. No choice on that. Once they start going, that's it. When they're done, they're hollow tubes that come crashing back down into the ocean.
There is nothing technical to them. Joe technician goes out there with his zippo, and lights the fuses, and off she goes.
(just kidding on the Zippo thing)
If I remember right:
OMS = Orbital Manuvering System
RCS = Reaction Control System
RCS are almost always automatically firing to keep the attitude of the orbiter correct. OMS are used for manuvering, such as to roll over for re-entry or to manuver for satellite deployment or docking.
Unless we're talking about a shuttle engine that I'm not familiar with, the three main shuttle engines do burn in the air. They provide the balance and thrust from initial ignition until SRB seperation.
The also continue burning into orbit. They don't stop burning until just before the external fuel tank is dropped.
For easy proof, watch most launch videos. They usually show the engines fire up. You can usually see the entire launch vehicle tilt as soon as they're fired, before it leaves the ground.
The three main engines have directed thrust, which gives the shuttle manuverability during liftoff. I don't believe the SRB's have any sort of directional control.
While in orbit, the orbiter uses OMS thrusters, but I doubt that's what we're talking about here. Those have almost no thrust in compairson to the main engines or SRB's.
"MuSecurity. We hack you first, so the hackers don't have to."
"Pre-root your box for only $19.95"
"Want a bot net? Have you own today!"
Oh, testing for exploits, not actually exploiting the box.. hehe.
Stopping an individual to talk to them, either with verbal commands or with indicators such as lights and siren, are ordering an individual to stop. It is implied that they are not to leave until directed otherwise.
Next time you're pulled over, try it. Just tell them, "sorry, no time right now", and leave. You can star in the next police beating video.
You know, it's funny. Iw as talking to someone on the phone this evening. I didn't mention this story to him.
He was a passenger in a car this evening. They rolled through a just turned red light (just before the opposing traffic had a green light). Of course, as fate would have it, there was a cop sitting at the intersection waiting for the green light.
The driver was of course identified, but my friend, the passenger, was also identified. He argued a little, but they're in the North, and it was too cold out to keep the window open to argue very long.
They were detained about 1/2 hour, before being allowed to continue. No citation was issued.
Why was the passenger required to show identification? Just because. They were suspect for running a red light. It was two older gentlemen, not your usual troublemakers (geez, two retirees in a car, there's real trouble).
I would suspect though, that's been entered into NCIC, where they were identified being in the same car, in that particular place, on that date.
It's not just if you're a derelict.
I can't imagine that it hasn't happened to anyone else on here. It has happened to me.
Minding your own business, causing no trouble, cops come up, and demand your papers. They detail you, question you about your intentions in a particular location and use your identification to establish if you have any wants, warrants, or are a known criminal type who may be in the area to cause trouble.
Unamerican, huh?
Two years ago, exactly this happened to me.
One night, my girlfriend, some friends, and I wanted to go play pool and have a couple drinks. We walked down to Charles Billards, at 222 N. Brand Blvd, Glendale, CA. It's a nice area, with no real crime to speak of. The house we lived in at the time was less than a mile from here, so we frequently walked the area. Charles has a bouncer at the front and back door to keep kids out, being that they do serve alcohol also.
I stepped outside to smoke, and talk to a kid with a motorcycle. It was a nice bike, and a good excuse for a cigarette break. The others stayed inside and kept playing.
We had a nice conversation, and after a few minutes the guy with the bike left. I stayed outside smoking my cigarette. I was in plain view of the bouncer, standing where I was obviously causing no trouble.
Two police officers pulled up dramatically, and demanded my identification. "It's inside, the bartender has it.", I explained. Policy at Charles is that you give them your ID, and they'll give you the pool balls. I told them either they could check with the bartender for it. They refused. They continued for about 30 minutes, where I was searched, threatened with arrest, bullied, and otherwise harassed me.
I made the mistake of asking "What did I do?"
I did nothing. According to the police, I "fit the discription of someone they were looking for." No futher reason was given. I told them that I had been playing pool for a couple hours. The bartender knew it. The bouncers knew it. My friends knew it.
I intentionally didn't reference my friends. They did come out at one point to smoke also. Later, they told me, they came out looking for me, because I had been gone for so long. As soon as they saw I was with the cops, they knew there was trouble. No one trusts the police.
After about 30 minutes, they finally left me alone, so I could go play pool again. Why did they waste my time? Why was I interrogated like a criminal? To flex their "we control you" muscles. People are not to have the impression that they have any freedoms in this country, without wondering, "Will I get arrested today?"
An "arrest" by definition is being detained and not being free to leave. When a law
enforcement officer stops you anywhere, and you are not free to walk away, you are technically under arrest. If you don't believe it, try walking or driving away next time a law enforcement officer asks you to stop. You'll then be charged with any of a variety of charges, which will land you in jail for months to years.
Most people feel good in that they were stopped and interrogated by the police, but not taken to jail. That's wrong. You should feel good in knowing that the police are there to protect you. Seeing a law enforcement officer drive by shouldn't bring on feelings of fear.
I fear law enforcement. I've never had a law enforcement officer do anything "good" for me. I've had cars and houses broken into. I've had property damaged and destroyed. I've had friends arrested on false charges. Not once have I had the experience of a law enforcement officer doing something good for me. "Hey, we caught they guy who broke into your house", or "hey, here's your lost cat." Nope. Never happened.