Actually never -- if they did, they would be neglectful of their responsibilities as leaders to do the best thing for their country. However, sometimes it's best to forgo a short-term gain in favor of long term stability. In other words, by submitting to international law (or a body like the WTO), you preserve a system which you believe benefits you in the long run.
Being law abiding, whether on the individual or national level, is not self-sacrificial behavior. There are good and rational reasons for doing so. It only looks disadvantageous when you're using a very short or narrow perspective. I would argue that the main problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it sacrifices long-term goals for short-term advantages or gains. We probably have more to gain from a strong World Trade Organization than anyone; if we make it irrelevant, we hurt ourselves in the long run.
Just for reference, in the linked article they estimate that drinking an ice-cold (0 deg C), 16-oz glass of water "burns" about 17 Calories due to the energy required to heat it up to body temperature.
So as long as you wash down that 200 Calorie can of Coke with twelve glasses of ice water (and it really has to be borderline freezing -- no cheating!), you'll be running a net energy deficit.
I'm waiting for someone to recommend just turning the temperature in your house down and walking around naked as a form of exercise. What, shivering isn't aerobic?
Huh... I guess that must be only on the CDMA phone models; I don't think that any of the Razr GSM models have 3G capability. At least I'm pretty sure mine doesn't; perhaps there are newer models of ones that do.
Frankly the thought of switching back to CDMA just makes me want to vomit; I crawled out of the Verizon dungeon into the light which is GSM ("wait...you mean I can switch providers and not buy a new phone? Hallelujah!"), and I am never going back there.
If there's a GSM Razr that does high-speed data, I might have to start saving my pennies for an upgrade.
As anyone who's used PayPal can probably attest to, they're extremely aggressive about closing accounts down over the slightest thing.
I doubt AllOfMp3's accounts there lasted ten minutes.
I think XROST is their way of getting around the financing problems of directly accepting credit cards or PayPal. You can (apparently?) buy XROST "cards" using either a credit card or PayPal, and then turn around and use that card at AllOfMp3 to load your account.
I'm not sure whether this is a totally safe tactic; it seems like in time, governments will just pressure the banks to stop allowing payments to XROST, either, and PayPal will similarly close down and seize their accounts. Plus, there's always the change that if XROST is a U.S. corporation, they could be gone after more directly for their billing records.
I did a WHOIS lookup against xrost.biz, and although the registrant is out of Belize, it's a suspiciously Russian-sounding name. Their registrar, however, is GoDaddy, so I wonder if the RIAA could go after them in the same way that the spammers went after SpamHaus -- ordering their domain closed down.
Registrant Name: Pavel Korchagin Registrant Organization: OCENA RESOURCES CORPORATION Registrant Address1: JASMINE COURT Registrant Address2: 35A REGENT STREET Registrant City: BELIZE CITY Registrant State/Province: BELIZE CITY Registrant Postal Code: 177 Registrant Country: Belize Registrant Country Code: BZ Registrant Phone Number: +501.37369147357 Registrant Email: support@intercardservice.com
Intercardservice.com is registered by a "DomainsByProxy.com" of Scottsdale, Arizona -- another U.S. based avenue of attack -- and I notice that their "Legal Issues" page contains the paragraph:
Prohibitions: Domains By Proxy will not do business with you, nor protect your identity, if you:
Transmit spam, viruses or harmful computer programs;
Violate the law or infringe a third party's trademark or copyright;
Engage in morally objectionable activities, including but not limited to those which are child pornographic, defamatory, abusive, harassing, obscene, racist, or otherwise objectionable.
All in all, probably safe enough to use right now, but I'm not sure how long it's going to stand up to the combined efforts of the RIAA and their pet politicos.
I saw the XROST option on there a while ago, but I don't know anything about it or how it works.
Also, I recall at one point there was an option to use some type of "online currency" that was sold in the U.K. at gas stations and retail stores, meaning that you could buy them with cash, and then you went to a web site and typed in the number on the card you bought, and could transfer the money to AllOfMp3.com -- that seems like a pretty good way of doing cash-transations on the web. Pity it's not available in the states. Is this the same thing as XROST?
I was thinking next time I went over to England, if they still existed, I'd buy some cards just to have around for stuff like that.
As more and more things get on the web, I think there's going to be a greater and greater demand for a way to accomplish anonymous financial transactions, to replace what's done in the real-world with cash. As of right now, I don't know of any way to do that, and I'm sure the governments of the world like it that way...but if there's a will, there's a way, and pirated music and gambling are a big "will."
Yes, but unless there's some darknet-capable BT protocol that I'm not aware of, when you start downloading a file, you expose your IP address to everyone that you're grabbing parts of the file from. Any one of them could be a government/MPAA/RIAA spy.
So if I want to find a bunch of would-be copyright infringers, or opposition journalists, or whatever, all I need to do is create a file with an enticing name (say, "tiananmen_square.mpg" or "TheLionKing.avi"), fill it with garbage data, and toss it out in a likely place where people will see it and start downloading. As soon as they connect, you've got their IP. Ask/subpoena/rubber-hose their ISP for the billing records, and cue the men with guns.
With a Usenet or Usenet-like system, an individual user is only ever connecting to one server. It's centralized, but there's also more trust. You're never exposing your IP address -- and thus your identity, because the two are effectively one and the same when the government or another entity can force your ISP to reveal it -- to any unknown or untrusted people.
In a really paranoid environment, Usenet can be compartmentalized; you would pull the feed from the person directly above you in your hierarchy, and they would pass traffic to someone else above them, without you knowing who the upstream provider is. If the network gets compromised at the bottom, it's a rather painstaking process to follow the traffic up in order to get the rest of the network. Rather than being able to grab a lot of users at once, you can only get one "cell" at a time, if it's being run as a darknet.
Usenet seems more centralized on the surface, but in some ways it's far less so. Perhaps its security is mostly accidental rather than by design, but it can survive in situations that are highly adverse to the free flow of information, while BitTorrent basically assumes that a high percentage (all?) of the people you're exchanging traffic with are friendly, and that your IP address is OK to give out.
Usenet is definitely big, but the problem (or maybe the reason it's still around) is that many people find it a lot harder to use than BT.
Generally -- at least in the good 'ol days -- Usenet was a service that you got from your ISP. Along with x many email addresses and everything else, ISPs would advertise their Usenet breadth and retention. A good ISP would have its own servers that would mirror the popular newsgroups and retain articles for a set length of time, usually 90 days.
As the size of the newsgroups grew and grew (a 90-day cache must be up in the petabyte range now), and its popularity with average readers waned, fewer ISPs kept good feeds. Now, if you want a really good newsfeed, you may have to pay for it, or you're going to have to do some research on your ISP's web page to figure out how to access theirs, and what groups they have and what their retention rate is. Some ISPs don't carry the binary groups, or have short retention spans.
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
But see, that's sort of the problem. You can say that, but where's the evidence for it?
Saying "First they came for the terrorists... then they came for me" doesn't have a whole lot of connections to reality. Far from it being a slippery slope, the more powers that the Executive branch has taken, the more scrutiny they've been subject to. And as happened in the case of Jose Padilla, when they overstepped their authority, the courts correctly slapped them down.
The main problem with the whole discussion right now, is that there's very little rational conversation. What could be a fairly interesting argument over the power of the executive branch has been in many cases hijacked by people who hate Bush and just want any excuse to compare him to Hitler, and that's not productive. It doesn't produce a convincing argument to the average person, and there's really no evidence for it. Basically it comes down to "Bush ordered people arrested; Hitler ordered people arrested; therefore, Bush is Hitler. QED."
Everything about the United States discourages long-term deviation from the median. Isn't that what people are always complaining about? That both of our political parties are basically the same, because they're both pandering to the same group of "moderates?" You can push in either direction -- right or left -- but the further you go away from the center, the greater the resistance becomes.
Bush isn't pushing the country down a slippery slope, he's pushing it up a greased hill; the further away from the historical mean it becomes, the greater becomes the scrutiny of and resistance to further changes.
I'm not saying that people should just put their fingers in their ears and stop paying attention (because that could lead to an actual slippery slope), but just that the ridiculous, overwrought, intellectually dishonest historical parallels aren't productive and aren't helping the discussion any.
In retrospect, I think we're going to see the Jose Padilla case as the high-water mark of the Bush administration's testing of Executive powers. They pushed as far as the other branches of government would allow, they were stopped when it came to actually imprisoning U.S. citizens, and now they're basically consolidating the power over foreign nationals that the courts implicitly granted them.
Actually there is software -- or was software, anyway -- for place-shifting using an EyeTV.
It's called CyTV. I haven't used it in a few versions, but basically it is/was a remote-viewer application, that would let you view the incoming stream from your EyeTV over a network, and also view the saved recordings and change channels and whatnot. So basically it was like a Slingbox, but also worked as a TV tuner on your computer, and also recorded. http://www.lucid-cake.net/cytv/index_en.html
It used to have two parts, a server and a player (the server going on the machine with the EyeTV), but now it seems like they're using the VideoLan Client as the client instead, so any machine than can run VLC can be a client. So it's totally cross-platform: your Mac can serve video to Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS... whatever. And IIRC, VLC uses standard formats and protocols, and is well documented, so you could probably even get embedded device support if you knew what you were doing.
The only advantage of the Slingbox is that it doesn't require a computer to be near a cable connection -- it's much more appliance-ish. You set it in your home A/V stack and it does its thing. Personally although I find the concept intriguing, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Any company that touts how it "leverages the latest WMV technology!" is not one I want anything to do with. That video stream is probably either encrypted all to hell, or so nonstandard that it might as well be. Given that their Mac support has come more from their marketing department than from engineering, I'm not interested.
Really, the Slingbox is just a horribly crippled example of what you could easily do with MythTV on Linux, or EyeTV on the Mac. (I wonder if it could be re-flashed with better software? The price is pretty reasonable -- under $150 -- so it would be hard to build a DIY micro system for the same price unless you have an impressive junk bin. Might be worth it just for the parts.) The fact that it transmits in WMV and requires a proprietary player application, as it comes from the factory, just kills it for me. Total waste.
Assuming you can drag a cable line over to where your Mac is, there is no excuse for purchasing a Slingbox. Do yourself a favor and support an actual Mac company, and get an EyeTV. It's by far the better product and actually has Mac users as a priority, and not a distant afterthought.
I've used Google Maps on my phone (Motorola Razr, with TMobile service) and think it's pretty decent. It's about the only third-party application I've ever used on a phone, so I guess I don't have much of a basis for comparison, but it's useful.
The phone's directional buttons work fine to scroll the map or pointer around, and although entering addresses to get directions is a pain, it's not intolerably bad. Overall it was handy enough that I'm definitely going to keep it on my phone.
My main complaint with it has to do with the connection speed -- my phone's internet connection is slow enough (the Razr doesn't do 3G or EVOO or whatever it is that the broadband-over-GSM is called) and that means that zooming the map, which necessatiates a complete reload of the map images, is painful. On a phone with high-speed, it would probably be great.
In the case of a mapping system, the handiness of having it on a phone greatly outweighs the inherent limitations of the medium. I hope that on a phone with GPS capability, that it would do automatic follow-me navigation...that would really be slick, for a free service.
There's a break-even point where it becomes easier to just haul out one's laptop and hook it up to the phone and use the internet that way, which I think is about five minutes. As long as doing it through the phone doesn't take more than five minutes extra, it's fine -- because that's how long it would take me to haul out my laptop and set everything up, and then break it down and put it away when I was finished.
Actually, "those imbeciles" didn't build the $35 Billion industry, their predecessors did. For all intents and purposes, they inherited it. I'd wager that very few of the people who were around during the rise of the large commercial record business are still there. No, I think most of them -- if they have any brains -- have cashed in their stock options and are laughing into their martinis, headed for Bali.
The imbeciles currently in charge of Sony/Warner/BMG were busily driving one of the biggest corporate empires ever created into the ground; it's only quite recently that they seem to have caught up to what a lot of people have been saying all along: there's a whole lot of money to be made in digital content if you play along and don't fight it every step of the way.
The only variable that ultimately affects any business is money. People will put up with a lot of unnecessary shit for the right price.
I won't speak for the GP, but this was my original point -- people will put up with anything if you pay them enough. I'm sure somewhere, you could find people who would be willing to let you beat them with a rubber hose on a daily basis; they'd just be very expensive. (If they had any other skills besides 'will allow self to be beaten regularly.')
The question then is, if you are a rational employer, is it cheaper to have the restriction and pay your employees to put up with it, or just not have it?
Look at it from the perspective of a free soda or coffee machine, since that's a little more straightforward than internet access. Having a soda machine that's always stocked costs money. However, you might determine that it's a worthwhile expense, because it makes your company a more pleasant place to work, and thus people are willing to work there for less cash compensation than they might otherwise.
Un-censored internet is the same way. There's arguably a cost (productivity loss), and there's arguably a gain (less cash compensation required to recruit the same person) if you believe, as I do, that many employees view it as a perk. This is the employer's tradeoff.
The employee's tradeoff is, in choosing between two potenial employers, one who pays more but is an ogre, and the other who pays less but has more relaxed policies, how much is it worth? "It" here could be free coffee/soda, or a casual dress code, or internet access, or an on-site gym.
I'm just saying that people should attempt to quantify that tradeoff, because it's being made every day, without a whole lot of thought.
'Every country in the world is moving towards modernization and a major element of this is high-speed internet access'
Yeah, and every country is running at breakneck speed towards the edge of the cliff that leads to the deep abyss too. Think we should all follow them? Didn't think so.
So... the rest of the world is going to run off of this cliff, leaving glorious countries like Iran, that have opted out of Life In The 21st Century, to claim the world and put it back together?
Have you been smoking hash with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again?
Looking at their total GDP isn't a good measure of poverty, because it doesn't say anything about the distribution of the resulting wealth that's being created. In the case of Iran, I have a feeling it's mostly concentrated in a small number of individuals.
That said, based on some articles that I've read, life there for the average person isn't too bad in the physical sense; it's not poverty-stricken in the same way that parts of Africa or even South-east Asia are. The government uses oil revenues to heavily subsidize some consumer goods in order to keep the people happy (the price of gas there is ridiculous, I want to say around $0.30 a gallon), but there's very little investment in anything that's going to help them once the oil runs out, like education or scientific research (no, building a bomb-factory nuclear reactor that would have been obsolete in 1975 doesn't count) or communications infrastructure.
The government's plan seems to be "hold on to as much as we can, for as long as we can, by any means necessary."
If your employees/team are being productive, and your project is successful and you're meeting deadlines, I question why a manager really ought to care whether people are reading Slashdot or Google News or playing the occasional Flash game.
If work's getting done, don't micromanage -- let your people do their work; the damage you'll do by creating an adversarial work culture probably greatly outweighs the very small gain in efficiency you'll get by prohibiting web browsing (and for some people, prohibiting them from doing that may result in a negative productivity change). If work isn't getting done, then maybe you need to take a look at either your recruiting, motivation, or compensation practices. You can't "beat them until morale improves," and employees who are all disinterested in work is probably a symptom of a greater problem than the browsing itself.
I was reading an article a while back about how more and more employees are coming to either expect, or desire as a perk, unfettered internet access.
I wonder if anyone has done a study or survey of how much employees value their internet access, and what kind of pay cut they'd be willing to take for it, or what kind of pay bump they would require to move to a company that didn't offer it.
Right now it might seem like a minor issue -- in many tech fields, there are enough candidates that employers can dictate terms to their employees, and employees are sufficiently discouraged by the thought of finding a new job, that they won't tell them to suck eggs and walk away. However, in a tighter market this might not be the case. I could easily see a situation where a company might decide that it's cheaper to offer unfettered internet access (and swallow the cost of the productivity hit) rather than pay extra in order to recruit and retain people who are willing to work under more limited conditions.
I've thought about what it's worth to me, and I think I would probably accept working in a secure area (where there's no public net access) for about a 5% pay increase; any less than that, and I'd probably say no. If they just started blocking web traffic tomorrow in my current position, I probably wouldn't quit immediately, but it would certainly factor into my list of things that I don't particularly like. At some point when that list got long enough, I'd find another job.
Everything's a trade-off, both from the employer's perspective and the employee's.
In most states those release forms are meaningless, because you can't sign away the rights of a minor child, and neither can they.
They exist more as a discouragement against people bringing suits, than any real defense in court if they did. If your child is injured while in someone else's care, and you can demonstrate that they were negligent and convince a jury of this, a release form isn't going to stop you from collecting. And of course, ususally you can just threaten to create enough of a hassle in court to force a cheaper out-of-court settlement with the insurance company. Avoids the trial but still means higher insurance premiums for everybody.
How are kids supposed to learn a damn thing when the schools are run by idiots?
It's not a question of if the kids are learning or not, because kids always learn. Every child (except for those with true mental defects) is learning, all the time. The real question is "what are we teaching them?"
Because they're going to learn; if not in the classroom than from example. If they learn that all risk is bad, then they're going to become adults willing to throw everything away, just because of the possibility of harm.
If we live constantly in fear, then they are going to learn that living in fear is normal, and our responses to it are the correct ones.
The question is never just "are we teaching," it's "what are we teaching."
Jose Padilla was the Administration's experiment in applying their legal reasoning to U.S. citizens.
It failed. The courts correctly shot them down, and right before the USSC was going to rule against them, the Executive branch basically gave up and remanded him to Federal prison for conventional (civilian) charges.
I don't think that case supports your argument very well; it seems to me that it is an example of the court system functioning correctly. The Executive branch overstepped, the Judicial branch stepped in and said (or was about to say) 'no way,' and as a result he got sent to Federal prison. Since then, the Bush administration has basically given up on that strategy and has been dealing with U.S. citizens through the conventional court system -- for example, there's Adam Yahiye Gadahn (who was recently indicted for treason in civilian court, by a Grand Jury). One branch of government attempted something that would have been illegal, they were stopped by another branch, and now they're doing it (more) legally.
Seems like the system worked the way it's supposed to: the courts have allowed the Executive branch to assert some authority over foreign detainees (implicit allowance; by declining to hear certain cases -- although they did reverse the Administration in certain respects), but stopped them when they began to do the same over citizens. You may disagree with this interpretation, but then your beef is really with the Federal and Supreme Court judiciary, not really with the Executive branch alone.
I pretty much agree with you, but don't expect an up-mod for that sentiment around here.
To date, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of how, exactly, anything the Bush administration has done could really affect a U.S. Citizen. Yes, they tried at one point to go there, and the courts (rightly) came down on them for it. Since then they've concentrated on non-citizens, and there doesn't seem to be any clear path for transitioning their legal maneuvering with regards to non-citizens, in order to make it applicable to citizens. The courts have pretty much drawn the line: the Executive branch has been allowed to assert wide powers over the treatment of foreign enemies of the State, but was stopped when it tried to assert those same powers on citizens.
If you're a Citizen and you get involved with terrorism, you'll in all likelihood end up getting charged with treason, or any of the various other Federal crimes that have been created with regards to terrorism, many of which carry the death penalty. Not exactly an outcome you'd want, but the whole Orwellian "OMG they're going to torture you to death in Gitmo" is ridiculous. (Notwithstanding the fact that Guantanamo Bay is actually a lot nicer than most Federal prisons; I'd much rather go there than some overcrowded PMITA State or Federal pen. Want to talk about the torture of U.S. citizens? How come nobody talks about prison rape? I'd rather be 'waterboarded' by some CIA interrogator than sodomized by some AIDS-infested cellmate.)
Lots of people seem mystified why there isn't more public concern in the U.S. over the habeas corpus thing. (And there really hasn't been, outside of circles where people already didn't like the President anyway.) It's because nobody has presented a clear argument as to why U.S. citizens should care, that doesn't involve non sequitur historical parallels (reality check, please -- as much as you dislike him, Pres. Bush is not Hitler and is not getting himself appointed Dictator for Life), or emotional appeals. First, the courts have done exactly as they should and stopped the Executive branch when they tried to assert powers over citizens. The framework that they have created for detaining foreigners would not translate easily to the theoretical oppression of a domestic minority, at least not without the complicance of the entire court system -- and at that point, it's hardly an Executive-branch coup.
Second, there's scant evidence for a 'slippery slope,' because we have multiple historical examples of instances when the Executive branch has taken much wider powers, and the country hasn't descended into a tyrannical police state. In fact, some of the Presidents that have done so are well-regarded by history. (E.g. Lincoln, FDR.) There is a certain obsessive fascination with the "decline and fall" concept of irreversibility in this country, which has historically been false far more often than it has been true.
If other countries are unimpressed by U.S. treatment of their citizens -- if, for example, the government of Afghanistan feels that the detention of the individuals in Guantanamo Bay is unjust or unwarranted -- then there are existing channels for the lodging of protests and the resolution of grievances between nations. The treatment of foreign citizens has long been governed by relationships between countries; many places have differing laws for the treatment of citizens, residents, and foreigners. In the extreme case, a nation that disagrees with U.S. treatment of its citizens could treat U.S. citizens similarly; although I question if it would be in their best interests, I cannot dispute the fairness of that.
That's like saying "eh, that DMCA bill is just a bunch of Congresscritters doing some research into ways to make a buck. Until it's on the House floor for a vote, it should just be considered interesting thoughts."
By the time Hollywood is trying to push something down your throat, it's probably already too late. This sort of stupidity needs to be nipped in the bud; the idiot executives who spend millions on these systems and millions more buying laws to force them on us, need to learn that no DRM scheme will last against the concerted effort of thousands of people. It's fundamentally flawed, irretrievably broken, and it doesn't matter if they put the decryption key on a USB dongle, or a special sector of the disc, or over the Internet.
All DRM is broken, it's just a question of how obnoxious it is to legitimate users. Systems that just reek of stupidity, like this one does, should be killed quickly before they can gain any traction.
That seems to me, to be an argument about which skills are in demand, not about immigration per se.
If the H1B visas were really being given out for fields that we needed in the U.S., I can't imagine that most of the people that have a problem with them now, would have a problem. If they do, then I would put forward that their argument is not really rational.
The main problem with H1Bs that I've ever heard, is the number of them that's given out, and the fields that they're given out for -- basically, that the government isn't in touch with the job market and isn't matching the needs of America to the visas that it gives out.
So still, I'd say that there's very little disagreement that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand... the question (and it's a valid one) is "what's in demand right now?" and "what's not being filled by the domestic labor market?"
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Actually never -- if they did, they would be neglectful of their responsibilities as leaders to do the best thing for their country. However, sometimes it's best to forgo a short-term gain in favor of long term stability. In other words, by submitting to international law (or a body like the WTO), you preserve a system which you believe benefits you in the long run.
Being law abiding, whether on the individual or national level, is not self-sacrificial behavior. There are good and rational reasons for doing so. It only looks disadvantageous when you're using a very short or narrow perspective. I would argue that the main problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it sacrifices long-term goals for short-term advantages or gains. We probably have more to gain from a strong World Trade Organization than anyone; if we make it irrelevant, we hurt ourselves in the long run.
Just for reference, in the linked article they estimate that drinking an ice-cold (0 deg C), 16-oz glass of water "burns" about 17 Calories due to the energy required to heat it up to body temperature.
So as long as you wash down that 200 Calorie can of Coke with twelve glasses of ice water (and it really has to be borderline freezing -- no cheating!), you'll be running a net energy deficit.
I'm waiting for someone to recommend just turning the temperature in your house down and walking around naked as a form of exercise. What, shivering isn't aerobic?
It looks to be a spoonerism away from "vagina".
Well, yeah -- and who wouldn't want to buy one of those?
Huh ... I guess that must be only on the CDMA phone models; I don't think that any of the Razr GSM models have 3G capability. At least I'm pretty sure mine doesn't; perhaps there are newer models of ones that do.
Frankly the thought of switching back to CDMA just makes me want to vomit; I crawled out of the Verizon dungeon into the light which is GSM ("wait...you mean I can switch providers and not buy a new phone? Hallelujah!"), and I am never going back there.
If there's a GSM Razr that does high-speed data, I might have to start saving my pennies for an upgrade.
I doubt AllOfMp3's accounts there lasted ten minutes.
I think XROST is their way of getting around the financing problems of directly accepting credit cards or PayPal. You can (apparently?) buy XROST "cards" using either a credit card or PayPal, and then turn around and use that card at AllOfMp3 to load your account.
I'm not sure whether this is a totally safe tactic; it seems like in time, governments will just pressure the banks to stop allowing payments to XROST, either, and PayPal will similarly close down and seize their accounts. Plus, there's always the change that if XROST is a U.S. corporation, they could be gone after more directly for their billing records.
I did a WHOIS lookup against xrost.biz, and although the registrant is out of Belize, it's a suspiciously Russian-sounding name. Their registrar, however, is GoDaddy, so I wonder if the RIAA could go after them in the same way that the spammers went after SpamHaus -- ordering their domain closed down.Intercardservice.co
Can you elaborate?
I saw the XROST option on there a while ago, but I don't know anything about it or how it works.
Also, I recall at one point there was an option to use some type of "online currency" that was sold in the U.K. at gas stations and retail stores, meaning that you could buy them with cash, and then you went to a web site and typed in the number on the card you bought, and could transfer the money to AllOfMp3.com -- that seems like a pretty good way of doing cash-transations on the web. Pity it's not available in the states. Is this the same thing as XROST?
I was thinking next time I went over to England, if they still existed, I'd buy some cards just to have around for stuff like that.
As more and more things get on the web, I think there's going to be a greater and greater demand for a way to accomplish anonymous financial transactions, to replace what's done in the real-world with cash. As of right now, I don't know of any way to do that, and I'm sure the governments of the world like it that way...but if there's a will, there's a way, and pirated music and gambling are a big "will."
Yes, but unless there's some darknet-capable BT protocol that I'm not aware of, when you start downloading a file, you expose your IP address to everyone that you're grabbing parts of the file from. Any one of them could be a government/MPAA/RIAA spy.
So if I want to find a bunch of would-be copyright infringers, or opposition journalists, or whatever, all I need to do is create a file with an enticing name (say, "tiananmen_square.mpg" or "TheLionKing.avi"), fill it with garbage data, and toss it out in a likely place where people will see it and start downloading. As soon as they connect, you've got their IP. Ask/subpoena/rubber-hose their ISP for the billing records, and cue the men with guns.
With a Usenet or Usenet-like system, an individual user is only ever connecting to one server. It's centralized, but there's also more trust. You're never exposing your IP address -- and thus your identity, because the two are effectively one and the same when the government or another entity can force your ISP to reveal it -- to any unknown or untrusted people.
In a really paranoid environment, Usenet can be compartmentalized; you would pull the feed from the person directly above you in your hierarchy, and they would pass traffic to someone else above them, without you knowing who the upstream provider is. If the network gets compromised at the bottom, it's a rather painstaking process to follow the traffic up in order to get the rest of the network. Rather than being able to grab a lot of users at once, you can only get one "cell" at a time, if it's being run as a darknet.
Usenet seems more centralized on the surface, but in some ways it's far less so. Perhaps its security is mostly accidental rather than by design, but it can survive in situations that are highly adverse to the free flow of information, while BitTorrent basically assumes that a high percentage (all?) of the people you're exchanging traffic with are friendly, and that your IP address is OK to give out.
Usenet is definitely big, but the problem (or maybe the reason it's still around) is that many people find it a lot harder to use than BT.
Generally -- at least in the good 'ol days -- Usenet was a service that you got from your ISP. Along with x many email addresses and everything else, ISPs would advertise their Usenet breadth and retention. A good ISP would have its own servers that would mirror the popular newsgroups and retain articles for a set length of time, usually 90 days.
As the size of the newsgroups grew and grew (a 90-day cache must be up in the petabyte range now), and its popularity with average readers waned, fewer ISPs kept good feeds. Now, if you want a really good newsfeed, you may have to pay for it, or you're going to have to do some research on your ISP's web page to figure out how to access theirs, and what groups they have and what their retention rate is. Some ISPs don't carry the binary groups, or have short retention spans.
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
The WP article on Usenet is fairly good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
But see, that's sort of the problem. You can say that, but where's the evidence for it?
... then they came for me" doesn't have a whole lot of connections to reality. Far from it being a slippery slope, the more powers that the Executive branch has taken, the more scrutiny they've been subject to. And as happened in the case of Jose Padilla, when they overstepped their authority, the courts correctly slapped them down.
Saying "First they came for the terrorists
The main problem with the whole discussion right now, is that there's very little rational conversation. What could be a fairly interesting argument over the power of the executive branch has been in many cases hijacked by people who hate Bush and just want any excuse to compare him to Hitler, and that's not productive. It doesn't produce a convincing argument to the average person, and there's really no evidence for it. Basically it comes down to "Bush ordered people arrested; Hitler ordered people arrested; therefore, Bush is Hitler. QED."
Everything about the United States discourages long-term deviation from the median. Isn't that what people are always complaining about? That both of our political parties are basically the same, because they're both pandering to the same group of "moderates?" You can push in either direction -- right or left -- but the further you go away from the center, the greater the resistance becomes.
Bush isn't pushing the country down a slippery slope, he's pushing it up a greased hill; the further away from the historical mean it becomes, the greater becomes the scrutiny of and resistance to further changes.
I'm not saying that people should just put their fingers in their ears and stop paying attention (because that could lead to an actual slippery slope), but just that the ridiculous, overwrought, intellectually dishonest historical parallels aren't productive and aren't helping the discussion any.
In retrospect, I think we're going to see the Jose Padilla case as the high-water mark of the Bush administration's testing of Executive powers. They pushed as far as the other branches of government would allow, they were stopped when it came to actually imprisoning U.S. citizens, and now they're basically consolidating the power over foreign nationals that the courts implicitly granted them.
Actually there is software -- or was software, anyway -- for place-shifting using an EyeTV.
... whatever. And IIRC, VLC uses standard formats and protocols, and is well documented, so you could probably even get embedded device support if you knew what you were doing.
It's called CyTV. I haven't used it in a few versions, but basically it is/was a remote-viewer application, that would let you view the incoming stream from your EyeTV over a network, and also view the saved recordings and change channels and whatnot. So basically it was like a Slingbox, but also worked as a TV tuner on your computer, and also recorded.
http://www.lucid-cake.net/cytv/index_en.html
It used to have two parts, a server and a player (the server going on the machine with the EyeTV), but now it seems like they're using the VideoLan Client as the client instead, so any machine than can run VLC can be a client. So it's totally cross-platform: your Mac can serve video to Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS
The only advantage of the Slingbox is that it doesn't require a computer to be near a cable connection -- it's much more appliance-ish. You set it in your home A/V stack and it does its thing. Personally although I find the concept intriguing, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Any company that touts how it "leverages the latest WMV technology!" is not one I want anything to do with. That video stream is probably either encrypted all to hell, or so nonstandard that it might as well be. Given that their Mac support has come more from their marketing department than from engineering, I'm not interested.
Really, the Slingbox is just a horribly crippled example of what you could easily do with MythTV on Linux, or EyeTV on the Mac. (I wonder if it could be re-flashed with better software? The price is pretty reasonable -- under $150 -- so it would be hard to build a DIY micro system for the same price unless you have an impressive junk bin. Might be worth it just for the parts.) The fact that it transmits in WMV and requires a proprietary player application, as it comes from the factory, just kills it for me. Total waste.
Assuming you can drag a cable line over to where your Mac is, there is no excuse for purchasing a Slingbox. Do yourself a favor and support an actual Mac company, and get an EyeTV. It's by far the better product and actually has Mac users as a priority, and not a distant afterthought.
I've used Google Maps on my phone (Motorola Razr, with TMobile service) and think it's pretty decent. It's about the only third-party application I've ever used on a phone, so I guess I don't have much of a basis for comparison, but it's useful.
The phone's directional buttons work fine to scroll the map or pointer around, and although entering addresses to get directions is a pain, it's not intolerably bad. Overall it was handy enough that I'm definitely going to keep it on my phone.
My main complaint with it has to do with the connection speed -- my phone's internet connection is slow enough (the Razr doesn't do 3G or EVOO or whatever it is that the broadband-over-GSM is called) and that means that zooming the map, which necessatiates a complete reload of the map images, is painful. On a phone with high-speed, it would probably be great.
In the case of a mapping system, the handiness of having it on a phone greatly outweighs the inherent limitations of the medium. I hope that on a phone with GPS capability, that it would do automatic follow-me navigation...that would really be slick, for a free service.
There's a break-even point where it becomes easier to just haul out one's laptop and hook it up to the phone and use the internet that way, which I think is about five minutes. As long as doing it through the phone doesn't take more than five minutes extra, it's fine -- because that's how long it would take me to haul out my laptop and set everything up, and then break it down and put it away when I was finished.
Actually, "those imbeciles" didn't build the $35 Billion industry, their predecessors did. For all intents and purposes, they inherited it. I'd wager that very few of the people who were around during the rise of the large commercial record business are still there. No, I think most of them -- if they have any brains -- have cashed in their stock options and are laughing into their martinis, headed for Bali.
The imbeciles currently in charge of Sony/Warner/BMG were busily driving one of the biggest corporate empires ever created into the ground; it's only quite recently that they seem to have caught up to what a lot of people have been saying all along: there's a whole lot of money to be made in digital content if you play along and don't fight it every step of the way.
The only variable that ultimately affects any business is money. People will put up with a lot of unnecessary shit for the right price.
I won't speak for the GP, but this was my original point -- people will put up with anything if you pay them enough. I'm sure somewhere, you could find people who would be willing to let you beat them with a rubber hose on a daily basis; they'd just be very expensive. (If they had any other skills besides 'will allow self to be beaten regularly.')
The question then is, if you are a rational employer, is it cheaper to have the restriction and pay your employees to put up with it, or just not have it?
Look at it from the perspective of a free soda or coffee machine, since that's a little more straightforward than internet access. Having a soda machine that's always stocked costs money. However, you might determine that it's a worthwhile expense, because it makes your company a more pleasant place to work, and thus people are willing to work there for less cash compensation than they might otherwise.
Un-censored internet is the same way. There's arguably a cost (productivity loss), and there's arguably a gain (less cash compensation required to recruit the same person) if you believe, as I do, that many employees view it as a perk. This is the employer's tradeoff.
The employee's tradeoff is, in choosing between two potenial employers, one who pays more but is an ogre, and the other who pays less but has more relaxed policies, how much is it worth? "It" here could be free coffee/soda, or a casual dress code, or internet access, or an on-site gym.
I'm just saying that people should attempt to quantify that tradeoff, because it's being made every day, without a whole lot of thought.
So
Have you been smoking hash with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again?
Looking at their total GDP isn't a good measure of poverty, because it doesn't say anything about the distribution of the resulting wealth that's being created. In the case of Iran, I have a feeling it's mostly concentrated in a small number of individuals.
That said, based on some articles that I've read, life there for the average person isn't too bad in the physical sense; it's not poverty-stricken in the same way that parts of Africa or even South-east Asia are. The government uses oil revenues to heavily subsidize some consumer goods in order to keep the people happy (the price of gas there is ridiculous, I want to say around $0.30 a gallon), but there's very little investment in anything that's going to help them once the oil runs out, like education or scientific research (no, building a bomb-factory nuclear reactor that would have been obsolete in 1975 doesn't count) or communications infrastructure.
The government's plan seems to be "hold on to as much as we can, for as long as we can, by any means necessary."
Well put.
If your employees/team are being productive, and your project is successful and you're meeting deadlines, I question why a manager really ought to care whether people are reading Slashdot or Google News or playing the occasional Flash game.
If work's getting done, don't micromanage -- let your people do their work; the damage you'll do by creating an adversarial work culture probably greatly outweighs the very small gain in efficiency you'll get by prohibiting web browsing (and for some people, prohibiting them from doing that may result in a negative productivity change). If work isn't getting done, then maybe you need to take a look at either your recruiting, motivation, or compensation practices. You can't "beat them until morale improves," and employees who are all disinterested in work is probably a symptom of a greater problem than the browsing itself.
I'm waiting for a batch process in the background; what's your excuse going to be?
I was reading an article a while back about how more and more employees are coming to either expect, or desire as a perk, unfettered internet access.
I wonder if anyone has done a study or survey of how much employees value their internet access, and what kind of pay cut they'd be willing to take for it, or what kind of pay bump they would require to move to a company that didn't offer it.
Right now it might seem like a minor issue -- in many tech fields, there are enough candidates that employers can dictate terms to their employees, and employees are sufficiently discouraged by the thought of finding a new job, that they won't tell them to suck eggs and walk away. However, in a tighter market this might not be the case. I could easily see a situation where a company might decide that it's cheaper to offer unfettered internet access (and swallow the cost of the productivity hit) rather than pay extra in order to recruit and retain people who are willing to work under more limited conditions.
I've thought about what it's worth to me, and I think I would probably accept working in a secure area (where there's no public net access) for about a 5% pay increase; any less than that, and I'd probably say no. If they just started blocking web traffic tomorrow in my current position, I probably wouldn't quit immediately, but it would certainly factor into my list of things that I don't particularly like. At some point when that list got long enough, I'd find another job.
Everything's a trade-off, both from the employer's perspective and the employee's.
In most states those release forms are meaningless, because you can't sign away the rights of a minor child, and neither can they.
They exist more as a discouragement against people bringing suits, than any real defense in court if they did. If your child is injured while in someone else's care, and you can demonstrate that they were negligent and convince a jury of this, a release form isn't going to stop you from collecting. And of course, ususally you can just threaten to create enough of a hassle in court to force a cheaper out-of-court settlement with the insurance company. Avoids the trial but still means higher insurance premiums for everybody.
Varies state by state, I'm sure.
Because they're going to learn; if not in the classroom than from example. If they learn that all risk is bad, then they're going to become adults willing to throw everything away, just because of the possibility of harm.
If we live constantly in fear, then they are going to learn that living in fear is normal, and our responses to it are the correct ones.
The question is never just "are we teaching," it's "what are we teaching."
if you are a Sheepdog, what are YOU going to do about it?
... that's not it.
Eat the Sheep, invite the Wolves over, have a party?
Oh, wait
Jose Padilla was the Administration's experiment in applying their legal reasoning to U.S. citizens.
It failed. The courts correctly shot them down, and right before the USSC was going to rule against them, the Executive branch basically gave up and remanded him to Federal prison for conventional (civilian) charges.
I don't think that case supports your argument very well; it seems to me that it is an example of the court system functioning correctly. The Executive branch overstepped, the Judicial branch stepped in and said (or was about to say) 'no way,' and as a result he got sent to Federal prison. Since then, the Bush administration has basically given up on that strategy and has been dealing with U.S. citizens through the conventional court system -- for example, there's Adam Yahiye Gadahn (who was recently indicted for treason in civilian court, by a Grand Jury). One branch of government attempted something that would have been illegal, they were stopped by another branch, and now they're doing it (more) legally.
Seems like the system worked the way it's supposed to: the courts have allowed the Executive branch to assert some authority over foreign detainees (implicit allowance; by declining to hear certain cases -- although they did reverse the Administration in certain respects), but stopped them when they began to do the same over citizens. You may disagree with this interpretation, but then your beef is really with the Federal and Supreme Court judiciary, not really with the Executive branch alone.
I pretty much agree with you, but don't expect an up-mod for that sentiment around here.
To date, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of how, exactly, anything the Bush administration has done could really affect a U.S. Citizen. Yes, they tried at one point to go there, and the courts (rightly) came down on them for it. Since then they've concentrated on non-citizens, and there doesn't seem to be any clear path for transitioning their legal maneuvering with regards to non-citizens, in order to make it applicable to citizens. The courts have pretty much drawn the line: the Executive branch has been allowed to assert wide powers over the treatment of foreign enemies of the State, but was stopped when it tried to assert those same powers on citizens.
If you're a Citizen and you get involved with terrorism, you'll in all likelihood end up getting charged with treason, or any of the various other Federal crimes that have been created with regards to terrorism, many of which carry the death penalty. Not exactly an outcome you'd want, but the whole Orwellian "OMG they're going to torture you to death in Gitmo" is ridiculous. (Notwithstanding the fact that Guantanamo Bay is actually a lot nicer than most Federal prisons; I'd much rather go there than some overcrowded PMITA State or Federal pen. Want to talk about the torture of U.S. citizens? How come nobody talks about prison rape? I'd rather be 'waterboarded' by some CIA interrogator than sodomized by some AIDS-infested cellmate.)
Lots of people seem mystified why there isn't more public concern in the U.S. over the habeas corpus thing. (And there really hasn't been, outside of circles where people already didn't like the President anyway.) It's because nobody has presented a clear argument as to why U.S. citizens should care, that doesn't involve non sequitur historical parallels (reality check, please -- as much as you dislike him, Pres. Bush is not Hitler and is not getting himself appointed Dictator for Life), or emotional appeals. First, the courts have done exactly as they should and stopped the Executive branch when they tried to assert powers over citizens. The framework that they have created for detaining foreigners would not translate easily to the theoretical oppression of a domestic minority, at least not without the complicance of the entire court system -- and at that point, it's hardly an Executive-branch coup.
Second, there's scant evidence for a 'slippery slope,' because we have multiple historical examples of instances when the Executive branch has taken much wider powers, and the country hasn't descended into a tyrannical police state. In fact, some of the Presidents that have done so are well-regarded by history. (E.g. Lincoln, FDR.) There is a certain obsessive fascination with the "decline and fall" concept of irreversibility in this country, which has historically been false far more often than it has been true.
If other countries are unimpressed by U.S. treatment of their citizens -- if, for example, the government of Afghanistan feels that the detention of the individuals in Guantanamo Bay is unjust or unwarranted -- then there are existing channels for the lodging of protests and the resolution of grievances between nations. The treatment of foreign citizens has long been governed by relationships between countries; many places have differing laws for the treatment of citizens, residents, and foreigners. In the extreme case, a nation that disagrees with U.S. treatment of its citizens could treat U.S. citizens similarly; although I question if it would be in their best interests, I cannot dispute the fairness of that.
Er, no.
That's like saying "eh, that DMCA bill is just a bunch of Congresscritters doing some research into ways to make a buck. Until it's on the House floor for a vote, it should just be considered interesting thoughts."
By the time Hollywood is trying to push something down your throat, it's probably already too late. This sort of stupidity needs to be nipped in the bud; the idiot executives who spend millions on these systems and millions more buying laws to force them on us, need to learn that no DRM scheme will last against the concerted effort of thousands of people. It's fundamentally flawed, irretrievably broken, and it doesn't matter if they put the decryption key on a USB dongle, or a special sector of the disc, or over the Internet.
All DRM is broken, it's just a question of how obnoxious it is to legitimate users. Systems that just reek of stupidity, like this one does, should be killed quickly before they can gain any traction.
That seems to me, to be an argument about which skills are in demand, not about immigration per se.
... the question (and it's a valid one) is "what's in demand right now?" and "what's not being filled by the domestic labor market?"
If the H1B visas were really being given out for fields that we needed in the U.S., I can't imagine that most of the people that have a problem with them now, would have a problem. If they do, then I would put forward that their argument is not really rational.
The main problem with H1Bs that I've ever heard, is the number of them that's given out, and the fields that they're given out for -- basically, that the government isn't in touch with the job market and isn't matching the needs of America to the visas that it gives out.
So still, I'd say that there's very little disagreement that we should stop legitimate immigration of people with skills that are in-demand