The founding principles of the United States of America are that the people, not the government (notice the small 'g' -- that's the intent they had) would be in charge of the people. The government would be in charge of defending the people from outside threats and from those doing them harm. Government in the U.S. was never meant to keep itself safe from the people, or to keep a person safe from himself.
Many of the founders of the U.S. believed that freedom is only possible if the government is more afraid of the people than the people are of the government. Regardless of how popular Kennedy was or his speech about what you can do for your country, it's never a good idea to lose sight of one thing: the country is the people, not the government. When you ask what you can do for your country, ask what you can do for the citizens -- to make them safer, better educated, more secure, and overall in a better place. Big, powerful governments and big, powerful corporations that care about themselves first and about people only as fodder for their own growth are not the answer to that.
Any government that tells you you cannot own the same technology the government owns because you MIGHT use it to a violent purpose is interested in only one thing. That is not the end of violence, but as Jared Diamond and others have said, the monopolization of it. The U.S. government for many years now has been trying to monopolize not only the act of violence, but the means and the opportunity. Now people should ponder the last factor in determining suspects of a crime -- the motive. Why be so prepared to do violence against a relatively unarmed populace the government has been chartered to protect unless there is some reason to use that advantage? And why does the government keep trying to unarm us further -- not just of guns and explosives, but of private communication, free expression, and even the ability to vote the corrupt parties out of office. After all, the government officially supports the two majority parties, which of course strengthens their position and weakens any nonviolent power play by outsiders.
When a government takes away your arms, your privacy, your ability to vote out the current ruling class, and starts ACTIVELY trying to link the communications of "unsuspected" people to those of an ill-defined and nebulous enemy, there is a reason. That reason cannot REALLY be to keep you, personally, safer and more secure. After all, you don't make someone safer and more secure by taking away the very tools of ensuring safety and security.
I advocate a drastic reduction in the power of the government to prevent the people from defending themselves against any threat -- be that Al Qaeda, the meth pusher down the street, the millions of invaders from the south (most of whom are harmless, but some of whom are not), the school bully that grew older but never grew up, or the very government that today is trying very hard to make sure we can't defend ourselves if it decides to take advantage of the situation it has created.
If you've ever waited for two hours for a publicly-funded first responder after a car accident in which you were injured as I have you know the great promise that the government will take care of everything for you is a joke. If you've ever had someone threaten your life on a public street in front of witnesses only to see the police write it all down and walk away because the witnesses are too afraid to give a true statement as I have you know the government can only do what it can do, and the rest is up to the people.
I once had a motorcylce stolen -- it was older and needed some paint, which I was about to take care of, but it ran well -- and the thief admitted he took it. The police said they could do nothing because the thief said he thought it was abandoned and he wanted it for parts. Never mind that the locks were broken with prybars, the bike had 45 miles put on it without any parts being replaced, and it was taken off private property without the owner's permission. Wh
It's SBC refusing to carry Vonage's traffic, because they don't want to subsidize their competition.
It's AOL (which is Time Warner, Warner Brothers, Time Magazine, Turner, etc.) deciding that Bugs Bunny downloads at a streamable speed but Ranma 1/2 must have bandwidth on their network paid for at both ends.
It's not the small guys. SBC's already threatened to kill Vonage and Skype traffic on their networks altogether.
If I'm 99% of desktop users, why am I updating hardware drivers in the first place?
For that matter, why am I using Linux? Especially SUSE, which is in my experience much more server-centric than desktop-centric. Knoppix, Ubuntu, or hell even Linspire should be the ones worried about updating things for desktop users.
The main reason someone who understands code would want to sue a package manager is the same reason anyone else would -- it gets the right version of something from the right place. I could very much appreciate downloading the latest version of a kernel module for my specific kernel automatically and notifying me that it's there, waiting for me to look it over. Just because I can make some sense of C doesn't mean I want to take the time to hunt down every driver for every bit of hardware in my system every day to see if there's been an update.
So enabling YasT to handle kernel modules... is now a breakthrough.
I mean, all this appears to be is distribution of precompiled kernel modules being handled by the package manager. This is not a good thing, let alone a huge advance.
How about a package manager that downloads the code, lets you inspect, customize, or debug it, then compiles it and adds it to your modules list once you approve it?
Every time my father's contract was up, the union would strike for weeks. Unemployment in Missouri wasn't very good, and I think it still probably stinks. They'd get a little pay raise, maybe a bit more paid time off. This was an every-year thing, because the union would never negotiate a multi-year contract -- no matter how much the local membership wanted one.
Then the union, seeing how it caused a strike around Christmas with January heating bills coming up and got us that little more money once they guys went back to work, would up the dues. Most of the raise went to the dues most times.
Then, one day the company couldn't turn a profit. They sold the plant, and the new company just wanted the name. They closed the plant and opened another in another state a few months later. Nearly 300 families had a breadwinner out of work -- mostly primary bread winners. My parents cancelled my plans to enroll in a private boarding school. My sister was worried how she'd afford to go to college. My father went back to work making one third what he had been making. That's because the union insisted he made three times as much as the non-union plant down the street before the closing instead of a mere twice as much.
Yes, the union did help someone financially -- the union bosses were well compensated, and probably went on to close bigger and better funded plants through other locals later.
Customers of AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth (and Cingular, which is AT&T/Bellsouth) need to sue the companies. They have violated regulations meant to protect the customers. If the companies willing to do this get hit heavily, they will be less willing to do it. The companies not fined and judged to the brink of collapse can then take market share from them, and we'll have more phones covered by companies unwilling to do this.
I'm sick of this EPA mileage chatter about the car companies scamming people. Yes, the numbers sometimes fail to be precise. They sometimes even fail to be accurate. They are not what the car company got by test-driving under perfect conditions on the open road.
They are required, by EPA regulation, to report what the car got on a dynamometer under certain cycles meant to simulate actually driving. The EPA regulates that this is the way. The EPA is therefore responsible for the validity of the results.
Some car companies love the inflated numbers they get because of these tests. Some would prefer to give accurate number and stop the customer complaints about actual real-world results being so far off the number. Some are torn internally along marketing vs. production vs. customer service desires, just as in any industry.
I am not currently nor have I ever been a car company or EPA employee. Edmunds.com or any other serious car info site in the U.S. can tell you these things.
I must say I'm offended at your double standard of racism, statism, and overall bigotry. It's okay for you to say I'm bigoted because I'm white and American, but you don't consider yourself a bigot for saying so?
Bigotry is a form of ignorance. And boy, Coward, you sure display that in spades if you can't even tell when you're practicing what it is that you have denounced.
Right. It's not the ones calling the case a "tower" you have to worry about.
I've dealt with people who think the monitor is the computer, who think the keyboard is the computer, or people who think the external CD-ROM their son installed when he was home from college is the computer. Now, we should be patient with these people and remember that from time to time there have been computers built into keyboards (Atari XL/Commodore 64/Amiga 500/ZeroPC/PC Junior/laptops/notepads), monitors (early Macs/iMacs/eMacs/one Gateway model I remember/ZeroPC/tablets/PDAs), and what look like external CD-ROM drives (Mac Mini/MiniPC/BookPC).
It's the ones who call the whole case and everything in it the "hard drive" or the "CPU" you must really watch.
Exactly my thoughts on the matter. If anyone wants to exclude the participation of people from an important part of their own lives through elitism and jargon, it's the ambulance chasers, the career politicians, and the contract lawyers for the huge coproations like Microsoft.
Besides, if MS really wanted an easier, more powerful, more secure Windows on the market, they never would have broken the law through strong-arm exclusive MS-only OS reseller contracts to kill OS/2. They had just as much right to sell it as IBM did, anyway. They just screwed IBM over on the cross-licensing deal then told the white-box PC dealers they had to pay for a license of a Microsoft OS for every box they sold if they wanted a single one to go out preloaded with an MS OS. All this was done so they could usher Windows 95 into a noncompetitive market and break the compatibility IBM had spent good money to promote.
Let's not forget history, folks. Microsoft has killed more products than they have ever released. Comparing what you can get for free which is always improving to what costs $300 and still serves Microsoft more than the end users even after it's installed is just silly.
An obvious example is on-demand delivery of high-definition video streams. Residential broadband connections are just not fast enough to enable those kinds of services. If I could buy hosting from the major ISPs, I would at least be able to target their customers without worrying about dropped packets and poor connections. It would require some minor changes to internet file access, only granting access to the stream if it's hosted on the requestor's ISP, but it's not really difficult to implement with current protocols.
This can be done with DNS, routing, and server access settings. No minor changes are really needed.
Many ISPs already route internal traffic internally.
Some local and regional ISPs offer game servers offer internal private mirrors of popular sites. Some offer game servers for games like Half-Life and others that have openly available dedicated server software. The first ISP I worked for actually had a customers-only bulletin board system.
When I was the technical operations manager for a small ISP, I made sure we had authentication servers in every major branch of our network so that the RADIUS authentication and logging traffic didn't need to even travel to the central office across our own bandwidth. It resulted in a number of benefits. We had outside links in several towns and tied them together with point-to-point links inside the network. Certain small towns we serviced had no direct Internet links at all, always being routed a hop or two through our network to get to the outside world. This cut down on our cost, since getting bandwidth in a town of 5,000 people is much more expensive than in a town of 50,000 or 100,000 people. It also allowed customers in certain (most) towns to be routed through multiple outside links in case of line failure.
At another ISP where I worked as an administrator, we had every city routed directly to the public Internet and all the mail, authentication, and whatever other traffic between the customers and our central network operations center (NOC) crossed other companies' routers. Some of our customers even dialed into equipment owned by companies that resold port time to us instead of into our own access concentrators. Using L2TP, destination NAT, RADIUS attributes, and a couple of other tools, we set up all deliquent accounts to see a website saying so no matter what address they put in their browser. Once they paid up, they could disconnect and redial then surf away.
So no, it wouldn't take much to do these things compared to current technology. Things like what you mention are pretty much already being done.
I'd guess many more than 50% of computers in operation have a CD drive. Probably more like 80%. This article about technology in schools says about 50% of computers in U.S. schools had CD-ROM drives as of 1998. I'm sure things are different in some other countries. The stat is from seven years ago and schools tend to be behind home use in technology in the U.S.
I'd guess a bit more than 10% have DVD drives.
Zip isn't dead just yet, but what hurts it the most is the price, not the technology. Sure, I can get a working used Zip250 drive for $5 (and did recently), but the disks are more than that apiece.
I'd say a lot less than 95% of today's computers have USB installed. CD-ROM drives have been around much longer than USB. Sure, you can add a PCI USB card to most PCs but many people haven't. Some "bargain" PCs from a few years ago have no expansion slots at all.
Portable HDs require SCSI, USB, or Firewire. There are lots of systems out there that have none of these.
Removable mass media as a whole is obviously not dead. The RIAA and MPAA are fighting for every penny they can get from a huge removable mass media distribution system. The electronics department at most discount stores has more space devoted to prerecorded removable mass media than to the devices to read them, the screens on which the video is displayed, and the audio systems on which the sound is played combined.
The 3.5" floppy will die when there's an alternative that costs less than $5 per unit for media and is re-recordable in a decent amount of time. None of the flash-based media (CF, xD, SD, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) are at that price point yet. Zip isn't there. CD-RW and DVD-RW need someone to figure out how to record new data over the old without a separate blanking process.
32 meg SD cards are on Froogle today at $8.31 per unit. Once that's down a few dollars and nearly all the PCs shipped in a 5-year period have card slots the we'll see CF1/CF2/SD/MMC/SM/SMC/xD/MemoryStick1/MemoryStick2/MemoryStickPro/MemoryStick Duo/MemoryStickROM/whatever take off.
The card readers make more sense than individually packaged USB drives. Even a 7-in-1 and sometimes a 9-in-1 reader is cheaper than one unit of the media anyway. There's no reason not to package a new system with a multi-format card reader and save the user the expense of buying the reader over and over with each unit of the memory.
Make PCs and Macs bootable from USB (or internal with some other interface) card readers, make card readers ubiquitous, make the media cheaper, and kiss the floppy goodbye in a few years.
The only thing left to see is that several levels of government also have some control over just how private the line provided by the corporations will be. They want more control over that. The regulated telecom companies have little choice when the FCC or some other entity that can fine them into oblivion tells them to do something.
Privacy is really only possible through technical or logistical means. For something really private, discuss it only with people you absoloutely trust in a physically secured location. For everything else, use strong encryption.
And if you liked it, check out -- no, sorry, no direct link, too many sites to choose from -- Tales for the Leet, classic stories from people like Shakespeare interpreted into 133t5p33k.
It seems though that it's increasingly the business model of companies to let someone into their networks without so much as a password then sue them for using that access.
Are web servers not being written with password access any longer? Is it illegal or impossible to keep people and search bots out of a site if they don't use a password? No! So why the hell would this guy's ineptitude make him worthy of Google's money?
Hell, he should pay Google for tipping him off that anyone who accesses his web site from beyond the main page doesn't need a password.
An agreement is something you sign to show you agree. It's not policy from on high.
MS's EULA isn't something you sign to say you agree. It's something tossed in the box Gateway or Dell ships you after you've bought a PC from them. Their websites say nothing about software copyright before you buy the PC. They say nothing about terms of use. It's a racket.
Stop using false metaphors to play devil's advocate. There's no signature on an EULA from either side. It's not a contract. Say it with me, "It's not a contract." There, don't you feel better?
Now, if they want to put a sticker over the mouse and keyboard ports that say, "Don't use the computer with Windows until you've read the Rights of Use agreement. If you disagree with your rights of use, don't install Windows and ship the CD containing it back to the vendor still sealed along with all documentation for a full refund of the software price," then I'd consider that an agreement.
Better yet, make the vendors get a signature for each Windows user showing they agree to the terms.
Chess has different pieces moving differently because that's part of the game. It's not silly at all. The game approximates learning to identify your resources and use them effectively. The resoruces available to you in real life are often different in nature and come in different numbers. They can often be combined in many different ways to acheive a goal. Training someone to identify the value of a resource and when its use is appropriate is a great tool for that person's future. There are advantages and disadvantages of using any particular piece at any particular time. There's also risk management built into the game. Sure, the queen is a powerful piece, but if used carelessly, it's no good due to capture.
Go may still be a better game, but chess is not silly.
I don't think you can legally parody something which is unknown. There's no public work here of which to make fun. These were private photos, and as far as we know they were never meant to become public.
Your perl might choke on it because it's not Perl. The vi editor would have little problem understanding that, so long as it's in command mode and you typed a colon first.
Yes, Perl is good with regular expressions and has a highly extended regex syntax compared to some other tools. I love Perl and do almost all my coding in it. It is not, however, the only place regexes are used.
The heart of successfull capitolist system is compitition, and this compitition breeds the best products at the cheapest prices.
Close, but not quite. It breeds a combination of price and quality as close to optimal as possible. Sometimes the best product dies because there's something cheaper. Sometimes the best product survives despite a higher price, because it brings that much extra value to the market. The best product at the cheapest price is a great thing to hope and wish for, but is not usually a realistic goal and is an oversimplification of the market tendencies.
The best realisitc goal one can usually hope for as a producer or consumer is to find a price point which makes a product the best value in the market, whether that means the best product available at a reasonably low premium in price or an acceptable but inferior product with a much lower price. This is where the idea of product classes comes in.
Few people would rather drive a Buick than a Cadillac. They're aimed at people with similar tastes and of a similar age and point of life, so if one was clearly better for everyone, the other would have no reason to exist (both being built by the same parent company and all). One, however, has most of the features of the other and is much less expensive. Even people who can afford the Cadillac may rather spend that extra money somewhere else. This in itself is of coruse an oversimplification, since there are many more than one car manufacturer building cars in these classes. However, I think it makes the point that for the right savings, a product in some ways inferior is quite acceptable to many people. For others, the better product duly earns the higher price. If a small manufacturer couldn't target both and couldn't decided which one to target, it'd have to try to match most of the features of the Caddy with a price closer to that of the Buick. In that case, someone somewhere would find that car to be their sweet spot.
From an article that says Cisco "controls" most of the routers on the Internet?
"Manufactures", sure. "provides the software used to operate", sure. But "controls"? Yeah, like Ford controls most of the pickups on the streets of North America, all at once, by remote control, without even looking at the roads.
All those drunken speeders who get busted on the show Cops on TV? Yep, just helpless passengers in vehicles controlled by the auto manufacturers. Because whatever you build and sell, you control after the sale. There's no selling something and turning over control to the buyer. That just never happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The founding principles of the United States of America are that the people, not the government (notice the small 'g' -- that's the intent they had) would be in charge of the people. The government would be in charge of defending the people from outside threats and from those doing them harm. Government in the U.S. was never meant to keep itself safe from the people, or to keep a person safe from himself.
Many of the founders of the U.S. believed that freedom is only possible if the government is more afraid of the people than the people are of the government. Regardless of how popular Kennedy was or his speech about what you can do for your country, it's never a good idea to lose sight of one thing: the country is the people, not the government. When you ask what you can do for your country, ask what you can do for the citizens -- to make them safer, better educated, more secure, and overall in a better place. Big, powerful governments and big, powerful corporations that care about themselves first and about people only as fodder for their own growth are not the answer to that.
Any government that tells you you cannot own the same technology the government owns because you MIGHT use it to a violent purpose is interested in only one thing. That is not the end of violence, but as Jared Diamond and others have said, the monopolization of it. The U.S. government for many years now has been trying to monopolize not only the act of violence, but the means and the opportunity. Now people should ponder the last factor in determining suspects of a crime -- the motive. Why be so prepared to do violence against a relatively unarmed populace the government has been chartered to protect unless there is some reason to use that advantage? And why does the government keep trying to unarm us further -- not just of guns and explosives, but of private communication, free expression, and even the ability to vote the corrupt parties out of office. After all, the government officially supports the two majority parties, which of course strengthens their position and weakens any nonviolent power play by outsiders.
When a government takes away your arms, your privacy, your ability to vote out the current ruling class, and starts ACTIVELY trying to link the communications of "unsuspected" people to those of an ill-defined and nebulous enemy, there is a reason. That reason cannot REALLY be to keep you, personally, safer and more secure. After all, you don't make someone safer and more secure by taking away the very tools of ensuring safety and security.
I advocate a drastic reduction in the power of the government to prevent the people from defending themselves against any threat -- be that Al Qaeda, the meth pusher down the street, the millions of invaders from the south (most of whom are harmless, but some of whom are not), the school bully that grew older but never grew up, or the very government that today is trying very hard to make sure we can't defend ourselves if it decides to take advantage of the situation it has created.
If you've ever waited for two hours for a publicly-funded first responder after a car accident in which you were injured as I have you know the great promise that the government will take care of everything for you is a joke. If you've ever had someone threaten your life on a public street in front of witnesses only to see the police write it all down and walk away because the witnesses are too afraid to give a true statement as I have you know the government can only do what it can do, and the rest is up to the people.
I once had a motorcylce stolen -- it was older and needed some paint, which I was about to take care of, but it ran well -- and the thief admitted he took it. The police said they could do nothing because the thief said he thought it was abandoned and he wanted it for parts. Never mind that the locks were broken with prybars, the bike had 45 miles put on it without any parts being replaced, and it was taken off private property without the owner's permission. Wh
No.
It's SBC refusing to carry Vonage's traffic, because they don't want to subsidize their competition.
It's AOL (which is Time Warner, Warner Brothers, Time Magazine, Turner, etc.) deciding that Bugs Bunny downloads at a streamable speed but Ranma 1/2 must have bandwidth on their network paid for at both ends.
It's not the small guys. SBC's already threatened to kill Vonage and Skype traffic on their networks altogether.
If I'm 99% of desktop users, why am I updating hardware drivers in the first place?
For that matter, why am I using Linux? Especially SUSE, which is in my experience much more server-centric than desktop-centric. Knoppix, Ubuntu, or hell even Linspire should be the ones worried about updating things for desktop users.
The main reason someone who understands code would want to sue a package manager is the same reason anyone else would -- it gets the right version of something from the right place. I could very much appreciate downloading the latest version of a kernel module for my specific kernel automatically and notifying me that it's there, waiting for me to look it over. Just because I can make some sense of C doesn't mean I want to take the time to hunt down every driver for every bit of hardware in my system every day to see if there's been an update.
So enabling YasT to handle kernel modules... is now a breakthrough.
I mean, all this appears to be is distribution of precompiled kernel modules being handled by the package manager. This is not a good thing, let alone a huge advance.
How about a package manager that downloads the code, lets you inspect, customize, or debug it, then compiles it and adds it to your modules list once you approve it?
Every time my father's contract was up, the union would strike for weeks. Unemployment in Missouri wasn't very good, and I think it still probably stinks. They'd get a little pay raise, maybe a bit more paid time off. This was an every-year thing, because the union would never negotiate a multi-year contract -- no matter how much the local membership wanted one.
Then the union, seeing how it caused a strike around Christmas with January heating bills coming up and got us that little more money once they guys went back to work, would up the dues. Most of the raise went to the dues most times.
Then, one day the company couldn't turn a profit. They sold the plant, and the new company just wanted the name. They closed the plant and opened another in another state a few months later. Nearly 300 families had a breadwinner out of work -- mostly primary bread winners. My parents cancelled my plans to enroll in a private boarding school. My sister was worried how she'd afford to go to college. My father went back to work making one third what he had been making. That's because the union insisted he made three times as much as the non-union plant down the street before the closing instead of a mere twice as much.
Yes, the union did help someone financially -- the union bosses were well compensated, and probably went on to close bigger and better funded plants through other locals later.
Customers of AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth (and Cingular, which is AT&T/Bellsouth) need to sue the companies. They have violated regulations meant to protect the customers. If the companies willing to do this get hit heavily, they will be less willing to do it. The companies not fined and judged to the brink of collapse can then take market share from them, and we'll have more phones covered by companies unwilling to do this.
I'm sick of this EPA mileage chatter about the car companies scamming people. Yes, the numbers sometimes fail to be precise. They sometimes even fail to be accurate. They are not what the car company got by test-driving under perfect conditions on the open road.
They are required, by EPA regulation, to report what the car got on a dynamometer under certain cycles meant to simulate actually driving. The EPA regulates that this is the way. The EPA is therefore responsible for the validity of the results.
Some car companies love the inflated numbers they get because of these tests. Some would prefer to give accurate number and stop the customer complaints about actual real-world results being so far off the number. Some are torn internally along marketing vs. production vs. customer service desires, just as in any industry.
I am not currently nor have I ever been a car company or EPA employee. Edmunds.com or any other serious car info site in the U.S. can tell you these things.
I'm a white American.
I must say I'm offended at your double standard of racism, statism, and overall bigotry. It's okay for you to say I'm bigoted because I'm white and American, but you don't consider yourself a bigot for saying so?
Bigotry is a form of ignorance. And boy, Coward, you sure display that in spades if you can't even tell when you're practicing what it is that you have denounced.
Right. It's not the ones calling the case a "tower" you have to worry about.
I've dealt with people who think the monitor is the computer, who think the keyboard is the computer, or people who think the external CD-ROM their son installed when he was home from college is the computer. Now, we should be patient with these people and remember that from time to time there have been computers built into keyboards (Atari XL/Commodore 64/Amiga 500/ZeroPC/PC Junior/laptops/notepads), monitors (early Macs/iMacs/eMacs/one Gateway model I remember/ZeroPC/tablets/PDAs), and what look like external CD-ROM drives (Mac Mini/MiniPC/BookPC).
It's the ones who call the whole case and everything in it the "hard drive" or the "CPU" you must really watch.
Exactly my thoughts on the matter. If anyone wants to exclude the participation of people from an important part of their own lives through elitism and jargon, it's the ambulance chasers, the career politicians, and the contract lawyers for the huge coproations like Microsoft.
Besides, if MS really wanted an easier, more powerful, more secure Windows on the market, they never would have broken the law through strong-arm exclusive MS-only OS reseller contracts to kill OS/2. They had just as much right to sell it as IBM did, anyway. They just screwed IBM over on the cross-licensing deal then told the white-box PC dealers they had to pay for a license of a Microsoft OS for every box they sold if they wanted a single one to go out preloaded with an MS OS. All this was done so they could usher Windows 95 into a noncompetitive market and break the compatibility IBM had spent good money to promote.
Let's not forget history, folks. Microsoft has killed more products than they have ever released. Comparing what you can get for free which is always improving to what costs $300 and still serves Microsoft more than the end users even after it's installed is just silly.
An obvious example is on-demand delivery of high-definition video streams. Residential broadband connections are just not fast enough to enable those kinds of services. If I could buy hosting from the major ISPs, I would at least be able to target their customers without worrying about dropped packets and poor connections. It would require some minor changes to internet file access, only granting access to the stream if it's hosted on the requestor's ISP, but it's not really difficult to implement with current protocols.
This can be done with DNS, routing, and server access settings. No minor changes are really needed.
Many ISPs already route internal traffic internally.
Some local and regional ISPs offer game servers offer internal private mirrors of popular sites. Some offer game servers for games like Half-Life and others that have openly available dedicated server software. The first ISP I worked for actually had a customers-only bulletin board system.
When I was the technical operations manager for a small ISP, I made sure we had authentication servers in every major branch of our network so that the RADIUS authentication and logging traffic didn't need to even travel to the central office across our own bandwidth. It resulted in a number of benefits. We had outside links in several towns and tied them together with point-to-point links inside the network. Certain small towns we serviced had no direct Internet links at all, always being routed a hop or two through our network to get to the outside world. This cut down on our cost, since getting bandwidth in a town of 5,000 people is much more expensive than in a town of 50,000 or 100,000 people. It also allowed customers in certain (most) towns to be routed through multiple outside links in case of line failure.
At another ISP where I worked as an administrator, we had every city routed directly to the public Internet and all the mail, authentication, and whatever other traffic between the customers and our central network operations center (NOC) crossed other companies' routers. Some of our customers even dialed into equipment owned by companies that resold port time to us instead of into our own access concentrators. Using L2TP, destination NAT, RADIUS attributes, and a couple of other tools, we set up all deliquent accounts to see a website saying so no matter what address they put in their browser. Once they paid up, they could disconnect and redial then surf away.
So no, it wouldn't take much to do these things compared to current technology. Things like what you mention are pretty much already being done.
I'd guess many more than 50% of computers in operation have a CD drive. Probably more like 80%. This article about technology in schools says about 50% of computers in U.S. schools had CD-ROM drives as of 1998. I'm sure things are different in some other countries. The stat is from seven years ago and schools tend to be behind home use in technology in the U.S.
2 /MemoryStickPro/MemoryStick Duo/MemoryStickROM/whatever take off.
I'd guess a bit more than 10% have DVD drives.
Zip isn't dead just yet, but what hurts it the most is the price, not the technology. Sure, I can get a working used Zip250 drive for $5 (and did recently), but the disks are more than that apiece.
I'd say a lot less than 95% of today's computers have USB installed. CD-ROM drives have been around much longer than USB. Sure, you can add a PCI USB card to most PCs but many people haven't. Some "bargain" PCs from a few years ago have no expansion slots at all.
Portable HDs require SCSI, USB, or Firewire. There are lots of systems out there that have none of these.
Removable mass media as a whole is obviously not dead. The RIAA and MPAA are fighting for every penny they can get from a huge removable mass media distribution system. The electronics department at most discount stores has more space devoted to prerecorded removable mass media than to the devices to read them, the screens on which the video is displayed, and the audio systems on which the sound is played combined.
The 3.5" floppy will die when there's an alternative that costs less than $5 per unit for media and is re-recordable in a decent amount of time. None of the flash-based media (CF, xD, SD, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) are at that price point yet. Zip isn't there. CD-RW and DVD-RW need someone to figure out how to record new data over the old without a separate blanking process.
32 meg SD cards are on Froogle today at $8.31 per unit. Once that's down a few dollars and nearly all the PCs shipped in a 5-year period have card slots the we'll see CF1/CF2/SD/MMC/SM/SMC/xD/MemoryStick1/MemoryStick
The card readers make more sense than individually packaged USB drives. Even a 7-in-1 and sometimes a 9-in-1 reader is cheaper than one unit of the media anyway. There's no reason not to package a new system with a multi-format card reader and save the user the expense of buying the reader over and over with each unit of the memory.
Make PCs and Macs bootable from USB (or internal with some other interface) card readers, make card readers ubiquitous, make the media cheaper, and kiss the floppy goodbye in a few years.
The only thing left to see is that several levels of government also have some control over just how private the line provided by the corporations will be. They want more control over that. The regulated telecom companies have little choice when the FCC or some other entity that can fine them into oblivion tells them to do something.
Privacy is really only possible through technical or logistical means. For something really private, discuss it only with people you absoloutely trust in a physically secured location. For everything else, use strong encryption.
It's pretty funny too.
It seems though that it's increasingly the business model of companies to let someone into their networks without so much as a password then sue them for using that access.
Are web servers not being written with password access any longer? Is it illegal or impossible to keep people and search bots out of a site if they don't use a password? No! So why the hell would this guy's ineptitude make him worthy of Google's money?
Hell, he should pay Google for tipping him off that anyone who accesses his web site from beyond the main page doesn't need a password.
Are you sure you don't mean "just deserts"?
Lock nit cup if your nut assure.
Interestingly enough, it did crash my other instance of the oh-so-secure IE. Infinite loop variety, actually. IE 6 SP1 with 5 updates since then.
An agreement is something you sign to show you agree. It's not policy from on high.
MS's EULA isn't something you sign to say you agree. It's something tossed in the box Gateway or Dell ships you after you've bought a PC from them. Their websites say nothing about software copyright before you buy the PC. They say nothing about terms of use. It's a racket.
Stop using false metaphors to play devil's advocate. There's no signature on an EULA from either side. It's not a contract. Say it with me, "It's not a contract." There, don't you feel better?
Now, if they want to put a sticker over the mouse and keyboard ports that say, "Don't use the computer with Windows until you've read the Rights of Use agreement. If you disagree with your rights of use, don't install Windows and ship the CD containing it back to the vendor still sealed along with all documentation for a full refund of the software price," then I'd consider that an agreement.
Better yet, make the vendors get a signature for each Windows user showing they agree to the terms.
Chess has different pieces moving differently because that's part of the game. It's not silly at all. The game approximates learning to identify your resources and use them effectively. The resoruces available to you in real life are often different in nature and come in different numbers. They can often be combined in many different ways to acheive a goal. Training someone to identify the value of a resource and when its use is appropriate is a great tool for that person's future. There are advantages and disadvantages of using any particular piece at any particular time. There's also risk management built into the game. Sure, the queen is a powerful piece, but if used carelessly, it's no good due to capture.
Go may still be a better game, but chess is not silly.
Too bad the question isn't "How would you like to get there?" or "Would you like to go somewhere without rebooting?"!
I don't think you can legally parody something which is unknown. There's no public work here of which to make fun. These were private photos, and as far as we know they were never meant to become public.
She looks a lot like my friend's 15-year-old daughter. Including the part about looking 15 years old.
Your perl might choke on it because it's not Perl. The vi editor would have little problem understanding that, so long as it's in command mode and you typed a colon first.
Yes, Perl is good with regular expressions and has a highly extended regex syntax compared to some other tools. I love Perl and do almost all my coding in it. It is not, however, the only place regexes are used.
Close, but not quite. It breeds a combination of price and quality as close to optimal as possible. Sometimes the best product dies because there's something cheaper. Sometimes the best product survives despite a higher price, because it brings that much extra value to the market. The best product at the cheapest price is a great thing to hope and wish for, but is not usually a realistic goal and is an oversimplification of the market tendencies.
The best realisitc goal one can usually hope for as a producer or consumer is to find a price point which makes a product the best value in the market, whether that means the best product available at a reasonably low premium in price or an acceptable but inferior product with a much lower price. This is where the idea of product classes comes in.
Few people would rather drive a Buick than a Cadillac. They're aimed at people with similar tastes and of a similar age and point of life, so if one was clearly better for everyone, the other would have no reason to exist (both being built by the same parent company and all). One, however, has most of the features of the other and is much less expensive. Even people who can afford the Cadillac may rather spend that extra money somewhere else. This in itself is of coruse an oversimplification, since there are many more than one car manufacturer building cars in these classes. However, I think it makes the point that for the right savings, a product in some ways inferior is quite acceptable to many people. For others, the better product duly earns the higher price. If a small manufacturer couldn't target both and couldn't decided which one to target, it'd have to try to match most of the features of the Caddy with a price closer to that of the Buick. In that case, someone somewhere would find that car to be their sweet spot.
From an article that says Cisco "controls" most of the routers on the Internet?
"Manufactures", sure. "provides the software used to operate", sure. But "controls"? Yeah, like Ford controls most of the pickups on the streets of North America, all at once, by remote control, without even looking at the roads.
All those drunken speeders who get busted on the show Cops on TV? Yep, just helpless passengers in vehicles controlled by the auto manufacturers. Because whatever you build and sell, you control after the sale. There's no selling something and turning over control to the buyer. That just never happens.