If you got it for cheap, used, its batteries are probably shot. Like most laptops, replacing the batteries on an older UPS would often be more expensive than simply replacing the UPS.
UPS batteries tend not to be as expensive as notebook batteries...there aren't as many different varieties, so they tend to be somewhat standardized. I recently replaced the two 12V 7Ah batteries in a UPS at home. That UPS cost about $170 when I bought it. New batteries were about $40 for two. Given that the UPS is a 900VA unit that can keep a dual-P!!! server running for about half an hour, $40 isn't a bad deal to keep it running.
most students take classes over and over again until they pass, making failure meaningless, and therefore cheating meaningless
To some extent, this is true...but your GPA gets dragged down every time you get a crappy grade. (I ended up taking Discrete Math I three times...got Ds the first two times (mainly on account of slacking off too much) and an A the third time. That's nine hours of an average 2.67 instead of three hours of 4.0.)
undergraduate degrees are not useful even for the purpose of getting a job. The fact that most people work in fields that are not related to their degrees proved that.
Maybe if your degree is in underwater basket weaving...or in English, but I repeat myself. (OK, so my father and my sister are both aircraft maintenance officers in the Air Force with geography and psychology degrees, respectively. Maybe you have a small point here as well, though I suspect that the average Slashdotter (those of us who've finished college, anyway) would refute it. As for me, I got a job writing image- and video-compression software while I was finishing my computer-science degree.)
they're not cracking your system and scanning your hard drive. However, if you're running Morpheus or something and sharing an mp3 or a copyrighted work, they'll see it just by doing a search for that title, downloading a little piece of it from you, comparing it to the digital signature, and then busting you.
If you blackhole their traffic, they can't get the "evidence" they'd need to rat you out.
iptables -A INPUT -s 209.95.126.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 204.92.244.208/28 -j DROP
This blocks Ranger Online, an "IP rent-a-cop" outfit mentioned here some time ago. Repeat with the appropriate netblocks for any other similar companies you know about. If they try to access your machine in any way, it'll be as if your machine doesn't even exist. Traceroute won't even show the hosts between them and you. Since search results on Gnutella are returned by peers (who will have access to your system) but files are transferred directly between hosts, the most they can get is a list of filenames. Without being able to download the file, how will they know that "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3" isn't really a picture of your dog?
What you are postulating as a universal principle is actually a specific feature of the American judicial system.
I doubt that it's just the American judicial system, given that we "inherited" English common law and (probably to some extent) legal practices.
For example, in France, once charges are brought against you, you will be assumed guilty until you can prove your innocence.
Further proof that it sucks to be French.:-) (Hey, you predicted this kind of response...)
"Fairness" is served when the outcome of legal proceedings reflects justice tempered by an appropriate smidgen of mercy. The starting presupposition does not necessarily predicate the outcome
How do you prove that you're not guilty? Isn't that an attempt at proving a negative? I could make some ridiculous accusation against you, based entirely on circumstantial evidence. How do you defend yourself against such an accusation in a situation that puts you behind the 8-ball from the beginning? A system that presumes guilt sounds to me like it'd give the authorities carte blanche to lock up anybody who pisses them off, since they don't first have to make the case that they should lock somebody up.
So you're sure that the program your client receives is the same as the program your server sends, not a trojaned version which turns off encryption, for example.
...and how does that trojaned version get onto the server? If salfter.dyndns.org is 0wn3d, I have bigger problems to deal with than a corrupt SSH client. I suppose someone could clone my website, hack dyndns.org to get the DNS entry for salfter.dyndns.org to point to the cloned site, and put a trojaned PuTTY on the cloned site that would know the IP address of the real salfter.dyndns.org...but who the hell's going to go to that kind of bother? Mine is just a personal website of maybe average quality (depending on whose opinion of it you seek). There are plentyofothertargets that would be much more attractive for someone to take over.
(Now that I've thought about it a bit, though, I suppose an end-run around such an attack would be to use the IP address instead of the name. It's easy enough to remember. Someone who's determined could crack these guys and reassign my IP address to another system...but then that basically knocks my machine off the net (so no harm will come to it), and (again) who would care enough to want to bother doing that?)
FWIW, the PuTTY download page isn't running on a secure server. It supplies various checksums for the files which you can use for verification, but (as Simon Tatham points out) the programs that do that verification aren't themselves verifiable. There is a point beyond which an eye for security turns into paranoia...nothing is ever 100% secure. At some point, you need to weigh the odds of something bad happening against the measures needed to protect against that something.
One final note: Keeping a copy of PuTTY on a secure site would entail getting a certificate from someone like Verisign, and they don't exactly have the best reputation in the world.
Using grain alcohol for fuel raises some ethical questions.
It amounts to burning food.
Um...we aren't exactly having any food shortages in this country. If we were, why would we be paying farmers to not grow crops? We grow enough food crops to keep everybody here pretty well-fed, export substantial amounts of food to all other parts of the world...and still have leftovers that we don't know what to do with. If anybody is starving, it's not on account of any food shortage. (More often than not, it's lack of motivation on the part of some people to get and keep a job...and even for those people, Uncle Sam steps in with food stamps to make sure they're kept in ice cream and Ding-Dongs. (Yes, people use food stamps to buy stuff like that. I see it all the time.))
They can be manufactured using current methods. Redbook on one side, SACD on the other. No need for fancy layers.
You could only do that if you're willing to bend some of the rules WRT the construction of a CD. The CDDA layer is on one side of the disc, while the SACD layer would be placed somewhere in the middle. If you tried making a "flippy" disc with both CDDA and SACD layers in the middle, either (1) the disc would be too thick to be handled by some CD players (1.2+x mm) or (2) some CD players might be unable to focus on the CDDA layer since it would be too close to the pickup. ("Flippy" discs work for DVD because that standard was developed with double-sided discs in mind...the data layer(s) in a DVD is/are in the middle.)
Why? All my webserver is doing is sending a file, which is the same thing that it does if you visit my website. PuTTY doesn't exactly run too well under Linux, so the worst that can happen is that a bunch of people access it at once and use up all my outbound bandwidth. That could happen with anything else on the server (as happened with this slashdotting). The systems that ought to be secured are other people's publically-accessible Windows boxen on which I run PuTTY to access my Linux server at home. Someone else could easily come along and download & run some particularly nasty malware that could do substantial damage. That those systems aren't secured is a common occurence that works to my advantage.
(Actually, since most of my website is made up of server-parsed HTML, there's a bit more processing going on to send out this than is involved in sending out this.)
A group of people so bereft of conscience that they would strap explosives to their kids and send them onto buses, into restaurants and schools, etc. to kill as many innocent people as possible is not deserving of sympathy by any civilized people. They're too chickensh*t to organize an armed force and attack military targets. If they had a legitimate gripe with Israel, that's what they would do. However, that's not how terrorists tend to operate. Get back under your bridge.
X connections over ssh are braindead easy, secure and quite simply kick ass.
VNC works pretty well over SSH as well. I can log into my home server, power up my home workstation from the server, wait a couple of minutes for it to start up, and use VNC-over-SSH to access my Win2K box at home from anything that can run a VNC client. I have VNCviewer and the Cygwin port of OpenSSH on an 8MB DiskOnKey with room to spare. (You don't need the complete Cygwin environment...put ssh.exe and cygwin1.dll in the same directory (maybe some more files that I don't recall offhand), open a command window, and then run SSH in the usual manner.)
What I like about it most is I can put it in my network drive at school and use it from all the computer labs without installing anything.
I threw it up on my webserver. I can punch the URL into IE on a random public system, tell it to run instead of save, and it'll fire right up. It's never failed to run on any public system I've run across. (You'd think they'd set up some sort of security to keep people from running downloaded EXEs, but I haven't seen it happen yet.)
Even that statement isn't true anymore. College radio is no longer a free-spirited playground of diverse music that it once was. Now, college radio is a proving grounds.
Pretty much nobody at UNLV listens to KUNV, the supposed college-radio station. A few years back, they switched from college-radio fare to jazz and similar crap, basically becoming kind of an NPR clone. They thought that was what their audience wanted, or there was more money in it, or something. They even moved out of the student union to an off-campus location.
Hell, I've just about given up on FM radio. KXTE (107.5) used to be OK, but their "x-treme radio" is sounding more and more like rap (the "style" of music where the "c" is silent). There's an 80s station (KSTJ, 102.7), but as someone else noted lately, many 80s stations tend to play from the same small group of 80s songs—and this one's no exception. (I appreciate that they avoid drek such as NKOTB, but (for instance) the only Depeche Mode they seem to have heard of is "Enjoy the Silence," "Personal Jesus," and "Blasphemous Rumours.") KEDG (103.5) used to be good, but they changed formats--first to R&B, then Spanish-language stuff, and now the latest Britney/Backdoor Boys/N'Suck tripe.
I stick mostly with talk radio nowadays. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the local talk-show hosts are nowhere near as repetitive as what gets spun on most FM stations.
Since the article at VIAHardware mentioned that a version with of the SS40G with an AGP slot might be in the works, I thought I'd try hitting Shuttle's website to see if they might have any info on when such a beast would be available.
THE SHUTTLE WEBSITE don't support Netscape browser or another browser.
Please use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above to view our website!
Thanks your cooperation.
I'm running Mozilla 1.0RC3 on Win2K. Damn clueless webmaster...especially since changing the URL to http://www.shuttle.com/english/default.asp takes you right to their website, and it renders almost the same as it does in IE 6. (I had to try viewing their site with Lynx to figure that out...it got stuck on the JavaScript redirect page.) If they can screw up such a simple thing as a website so badly, it raises questions about the other stuff they make.
I was giving a half-serious thought to snagging one of these boxen, if they make one with an AGP slot sometime in the future. The other specs are nearly perfect—it works with AMD processors, it includes built-in FireWire ports, it uses PCI audio instead of AC97 audio, etc. Now, I'm not so sure...maybe I'll just track down a desktop ATX case, move my current workstation hardware into it when Hammer comes out, and throw that into the A/V stack. It's not like I haven't used a beige box as a DVD/MP3 player before. (Unless someone knows of an ATX case of similar proportions and styling to home stereo equipment...something's probably out there already.)
I personally like the sound of my hardware revving up. It gives me this really Tim the Tool Man Taylor masculine feeling.
My home server runs on a pair of old 4.3GB Seagate Barracudas, striped with LVM. They're jumpered to spin up only when the SCSI controller first "pings" them at power-up, so one starts up a few seconds after the other. The effect is almost like the engines on an airplane spinning up...and that's the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it...:-)
For that matter, so does Win2K. I have a hard drive and a couple of webcams that use FireWire. (I had FireWire devices before I had any USB devices, for what that's worth...my printer is parallel and my scanner is SCSI (though the scanner's been acting flaky...might need to replace it).) Adding FireWire was as simple as adding the controller card...the driver for it was already part of Win2K.
I think Win98 SE had some level of FireWire support as well, but I had moved on to Win2K by the time I started doing anything with FireWire.
I was under the impression that EVD will have higher resolution compare to SVCD?
True...if it'll deliver DVD quality, EVD would be a nice upgrade from SVCD as well as VCD. (SVCD was developed as an alternative to DVD that sacrificed some quality for lower cost and fewer encumbrances.)
The trick will be burning your own. DVD burners have only recently gotten even somewhat affordable, and determining what burner will produce discs that work with your players is a bit of a crapshoot. If EVD uses (or can use) the same physical media as DVD, burning your own becomes subject to these limitations. If it's a completely new medium (and the article makes it sound like it will be), you can forget about making your own EVDs for a while.
(As an aside, some DVD players can play video formatted to the DVD-Video spec that's burned on CD-R or CD-RW. You get only a few minutes' storage, but it's in full DVD quality. It's known informally as "mini-DVD.")
They won't let you bring in alcohol without signing it in for the record. Make your own!!! Nobody is the wiser...
Given that you need to boil the wort (for those of you who don't brew, that's the barley-malt-and-hops solution that, along with yeast, is what beer is made of) for about an hour, that presents two problems: (1) finding a burner to do the job (a hotplate won't cut it and you probably don't want to use whatever common kitchen facilities your dorm might have) and (2) hiding the smell (and it is strong) from someone who might rat you out. There are kits where supposedly all you do is just stir some ingredients together and let it sit for a while, but you'll likely get something that resembles pisswater more than beer.
It's just like the razor blade industry. Except that you can't sell a half empty razor blade.
In one of those kits of free stuff you get when you buy your textbooks, there was a disposable razor with a single blade. I'd call that "half empty," given that most razors use two or three blades. (Took it on a trip...damn thing was the biggest POS. It nearly chewed up my face the first time I used it. It went in the garbage after one use and I picked up a Mach 3 at a store to put with all of my travel stuff.)
Cost of new black ink cartridge for my printer: $40
Cost of laser printer with toner on eBay: $50
Maybe they should just sell disposable printers instead.
They just about are...check out this AnandTech forum thread on a $10 (after rebate) inkjet printer. You can't get replacement cartridges at that price.
I don't think this will replace DVD format, however I hope this become the replacement for VCD format.
SVCD is already a decent replacement for VCD. The quality is much better (2/3 D1 VBR MPEG-2 vs. CIF CBR MPEG-1), and you can make 'em yourself with any CD burner. I rip video from my TiVo and convert it to SVCD all the time (info here). Player support isn't widespread, but many of the less-expensive DVD players support it (it's the expensive players from bigger companies that are least likely to support SVCD...hell, there are still DVD players on the market that won't even play CDDA burned to CD-R or CD-RW).
SuSE makes their distribution available to be installed via FTP, but their download site it so slow that it usually doesn't work.
That's why they have mirrors...you can install from those, and they're usually fairly quick. (That said, I usually build Linux From Scratch. You need an existing Linux system to kickstart the LFS build, though, and SuSE is what I used before LFS.)
Now I finally have a good reason/motivation to open up those huge rubbermaid tubs of Legos sitting my closet at home.
...and if you need an RCX brick to control them, it appears that Target is blowing out the Robotics Invention System 2.0 kits for $100 (their normal price was $200). I snagged one last Friday and am wondering if I should get another (they had two on the shelf).
I just checked the website, and the only mention of DVD availability is this page where you can tell them you're interested. A Google search turned up this page on why it's not on DVD already.
As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.
(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)
Slashdot Mirror
UPS batteries tend not to be as expensive as notebook batteries...there aren't as many different varieties, so they tend to be somewhat standardized. I recently replaced the two 12V 7Ah batteries in a UPS at home. That UPS cost about $170 when I bought it. New batteries were about $40 for two. Given that the UPS is a 900VA unit that can keep a dual-P!!! server running for about half an hour, $40 isn't a bad deal to keep it running.
To some extent, this is true...but your GPA gets dragged down every time you get a crappy grade. (I ended up taking Discrete Math I three times...got Ds the first two times (mainly on account of slacking off too much) and an A the third time. That's nine hours of an average 2.67 instead of three hours of 4.0.)
Maybe if your degree is in underwater basket weaving...or in English, but I repeat myself. (OK, so my father and my sister are both aircraft maintenance officers in the Air Force with geography and psychology degrees, respectively. Maybe you have a small point here as well, though I suspect that the average Slashdotter (those of us who've finished college, anyway) would refute it. As for me, I got a job writing image- and video-compression software while I was finishing my computer-science degree.)
If you blackhole their traffic, they can't get the "evidence" they'd need to rat you out.
iptables -A INPUT -s 209.95.126.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -s 204.92.244.208/28 -j DROP
This blocks Ranger Online, an "IP rent-a-cop" outfit mentioned here some time ago. Repeat with the appropriate netblocks for any other similar companies you know about. If they try to access your machine in any way, it'll be as if your machine doesn't even exist. Traceroute won't even show the hosts between them and you. Since search results on Gnutella are returned by peers (who will have access to your system) but files are transferred directly between hosts, the most they can get is a list of filenames. Without being able to download the file, how will they know that "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3" isn't really a picture of your dog?
I doubt that it's just the American judicial system, given that we "inherited" English common law and (probably to some extent) legal practices.
Further proof that it sucks to be French. :-) (Hey, you predicted this kind of response...)
How do you prove that you're not guilty? Isn't that an attempt at proving a negative? I could make some ridiculous accusation against you, based entirely on circumstantial evidence. How do you defend yourself against such an accusation in a situation that puts you behind the 8-ball from the beginning? A system that presumes guilt sounds to me like it'd give the authorities carte blanche to lock up anybody who pisses them off, since they don't first have to make the case that they should lock somebody up.
So you're sure that the program your client receives is the same as the program your server sends, not a trojaned version which turns off encryption, for example.
(Now that I've thought about it a bit, though, I suppose an end-run around such an attack would be to use the IP address instead of the name. It's easy enough to remember. Someone who's determined could crack these guys and reassign my IP address to another system...but then that basically knocks my machine off the net (so no harm will come to it), and (again) who would care enough to want to bother doing that?)
FWIW, the PuTTY download page isn't running on a secure server. It supplies various checksums for the files which you can use for verification, but (as Simon Tatham points out) the programs that do that verification aren't themselves verifiable. There is a point beyond which an eye for security turns into paranoia...nothing is ever 100% secure. At some point, you need to weigh the odds of something bad happening against the measures needed to protect against that something.
One final note: Keeping a copy of PuTTY on a secure site would entail getting a certificate from someone like Verisign, and they don't exactly have the best reputation in the world.
Um...we aren't exactly having any food shortages in this country. If we were, why would we be paying farmers to not grow crops? We grow enough food crops to keep everybody here pretty well-fed, export substantial amounts of food to all other parts of the world...and still have leftovers that we don't know what to do with. If anybody is starving, it's not on account of any food shortage. (More often than not, it's lack of motivation on the part of some people to get and keep a job...and even for those people, Uncle Sam steps in with food stamps to make sure they're kept in ice cream and Ding-Dongs. (Yes, people use food stamps to buy stuff like that. I see it all the time.))
You could only do that if you're willing to bend some of the rules WRT the construction of a CD. The CDDA layer is on one side of the disc, while the SACD layer would be placed somewhere in the middle. If you tried making a "flippy" disc with both CDDA and SACD layers in the middle, either (1) the disc would be too thick to be handled by some CD players (1.2+x mm) or (2) some CD players might be unable to focus on the CDDA layer since it would be too close to the pickup. ("Flippy" discs work for DVD because that standard was developed with double-sided discs in mind...the data layer(s) in a DVD is/are in the middle.)
Why? All my webserver is doing is sending a file, which is the same thing that it does if you visit my website. PuTTY doesn't exactly run too well under Linux, so the worst that can happen is that a bunch of people access it at once and use up all my outbound bandwidth. That could happen with anything else on the server (as happened with this slashdotting). The systems that ought to be secured are other people's publically-accessible Windows boxen on which I run PuTTY to access my Linux server at home. Someone else could easily come along and download & run some particularly nasty malware that could do substantial damage. That those systems aren't secured is a common occurence that works to my advantage.
(Actually, since most of my website is made up of server-parsed HTML, there's a bit more processing going on to send out this than is involved in sending out this.)
A group of people so bereft of conscience that they would strap explosives to their kids and send them onto buses, into restaurants and schools, etc. to kill as many innocent people as possible is not deserving of sympathy by any civilized people. They're too chickensh*t to organize an armed force and attack military targets. If they had a legitimate gripe with Israel, that's what they would do. However, that's not how terrorists tend to operate. Get back under your bridge.
VNC works pretty well over SSH as well. I can log into my home server, power up my home workstation from the server, wait a couple of minutes for it to start up, and use VNC-over-SSH to access my Win2K box at home from anything that can run a VNC client. I have VNCviewer and the Cygwin port of OpenSSH on an 8MB DiskOnKey with room to spare. (You don't need the complete Cygwin environment...put ssh.exe and cygwin1.dll in the same directory (maybe some more files that I don't recall offhand), open a command window, and then run SSH in the usual manner.)
I threw it up on my webserver. I can punch the URL into IE on a random public system, tell it to run instead of save, and it'll fire right up. It's never failed to run on any public system I've run across. (You'd think they'd set up some sort of security to keep people from running downloaded EXEs, but I haven't seen it happen yet.)
That, IIRC, would be KDKA.
Pretty much nobody at UNLV listens to KUNV, the supposed college-radio station. A few years back, they switched from college-radio fare to jazz and similar crap, basically becoming kind of an NPR clone. They thought that was what their audience wanted, or there was more money in it, or something. They even moved out of the student union to an off-campus location.
Hell, I've just about given up on FM radio. KXTE (107.5) used to be OK, but their "x-treme radio" is sounding more and more like rap (the "style" of music where the "c" is silent). There's an 80s station (KSTJ, 102.7), but as someone else noted lately, many 80s stations tend to play from the same small group of 80s songs—and this one's no exception. (I appreciate that they avoid drek such as NKOTB, but (for instance) the only Depeche Mode they seem to have heard of is "Enjoy the Silence," "Personal Jesus," and "Blasphemous Rumours.") KEDG (103.5) used to be good, but they changed formats--first to R&B, then Spanish-language stuff, and now the latest Britney/Backdoor Boys/N'Suck tripe.
I stick mostly with talk radio nowadays. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the local talk-show hosts are nowhere near as repetitive as what gets spun on most FM stations.
This is what came up in the browser window after a JavaScript-controlled redirect to http://www.shuttle.com/english/default_n.html:
I'm running Mozilla 1.0RC3 on Win2K. Damn clueless webmaster...especially since changing the URL to http://www.shuttle.com/english/default.asp takes you right to their website, and it renders almost the same as it does in IE 6. (I had to try viewing their site with Lynx to figure that out...it got stuck on the JavaScript redirect page.) If they can screw up such a simple thing as a website so badly, it raises questions about the other stuff they make.
I was giving a half-serious thought to snagging one of these boxen, if they make one with an AGP slot sometime in the future. The other specs are nearly perfect—it works with AMD processors, it includes built-in FireWire ports, it uses PCI audio instead of AC97 audio, etc. Now, I'm not so sure...maybe I'll just track down a desktop ATX case, move my current workstation hardware into it when Hammer comes out, and throw that into the A/V stack. It's not like I haven't used a beige box as a DVD/MP3 player before. (Unless someone knows of an ATX case of similar proportions and styling to home stereo equipment...something's probably out there already.)
My home server runs on a pair of old 4.3GB Seagate Barracudas, striped with LVM. They're jumpered to spin up only when the SCSI controller first "pings" them at power-up, so one starts up a few seconds after the other. The effect is almost like the engines on an airplane spinning up...and that's the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it...:-)
For that matter, so does Win2K. I have a hard drive and a couple of webcams that use FireWire. (I had FireWire devices before I had any USB devices, for what that's worth...my printer is parallel and my scanner is SCSI (though the scanner's been acting flaky...might need to replace it).) Adding FireWire was as simple as adding the controller card...the driver for it was already part of Win2K.
I think Win98 SE had some level of FireWire support as well, but I had moved on to Win2K by the time I started doing anything with FireWire.
True...if it'll deliver DVD quality, EVD would be a nice upgrade from SVCD as well as VCD. (SVCD was developed as an alternative to DVD that sacrificed some quality for lower cost and fewer encumbrances.)
The trick will be burning your own. DVD burners have only recently gotten even somewhat affordable, and determining what burner will produce discs that work with your players is a bit of a crapshoot. If EVD uses (or can use) the same physical media as DVD, burning your own becomes subject to these limitations. If it's a completely new medium (and the article makes it sound like it will be), you can forget about making your own EVDs for a while.
(As an aside, some DVD players can play video formatted to the DVD-Video spec that's burned on CD-R or CD-RW. You get only a few minutes' storage, but it's in full DVD quality. It's known informally as "mini-DVD.")
Given that you need to boil the wort (for those of you who don't brew, that's the barley-malt-and-hops solution that, along with yeast, is what beer is made of) for about an hour, that presents two problems: (1) finding a burner to do the job (a hotplate won't cut it and you probably don't want to use whatever common kitchen facilities your dorm might have) and (2) hiding the smell (and it is strong) from someone who might rat you out. There are kits where supposedly all you do is just stir some ingredients together and let it sit for a while, but you'll likely get something that resembles pisswater more than b e e r.
In one of those kits of free stuff you get when you buy your textbooks, there was a disposable razor with a single blade. I'd call that "half empty," given that most razors use two or three blades. (Took it on a trip...damn thing was the biggest POS. It nearly chewed up my face the first time I used it. It went in the garbage after one use and I picked up a Mach 3 at a store to put with all of my travel stuff.)
They just about are...check out this AnandTech forum thread on a $10 (after rebate) inkjet printer. You can't get replacement cartridges at that price.
SVCD is already a decent replacement for VCD. The quality is much better (2/3 D1 VBR MPEG-2 vs. CIF CBR MPEG-1), and you can make 'em yourself with any CD burner. I rip video from my TiVo and convert it to SVCD all the time (info here). Player support isn't widespread, but many of the less-expensive DVD players support it (it's the expensive players from bigger companies that are least likely to support SVCD...hell, there are still DVD players on the market that won't even play CDDA burned to CD-R or CD-RW).
That's why they have mirrors...you can install from those, and they're usually fairly quick. (That said, I usually build Linux From Scratch. You need an existing Linux system to kickstart the LFS build, though, and SuSE is what I used before LFS.)
As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.
(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)
It's not everything, but at least it's stuff that's known to work since the original poster was claiming problems with whatever stuff he has...