*grumbles something about failure to improve nuclear generators for destroyer use*
There's nothing wrong with the nuclear reactors we have now; you could easily fit one of them into a destroyer without any problems. I'm sure Westinghouse Nuclear would be happy to draw you (assuming 'you' have a few billion bucks to spend) some plans of how it could be done. Much of the space optimization has already been done, for submarines. There are several basically standardized designs that you could build the ship around, and then plop one in when you got everything else ready. It's totally doable.
The Russians have several nuclear powered ice breakers that aren't much larger than destroyers, and they used to have several nuclear-powered cruisers as well (although I think they've all been decommissioned).
The reason that surface ships haven't been built with nuclear reactors has more to do with the perceived economics of fossil fuels, rather than any real technical limitations. And for that matter, I've seen analyses that show that bulk supertankers could be economically driven by nuclear reactors -- if the NS Savannah was around today, and upgraded to use containerized cargo instead of manually loaded stuff, it would probably make money due to the high cost of bunker and diesel.
If it's really electricity that's the problem with the rail gun, putting a nuclear reactor on a smaller ship wouldn't be more work than breaking out some old plans, or making a long-distance phone call to a retired-engineer's home in Russia.
I think "works when SFTP won't" is the only other big advantage.
I did some quick Googling on the subject of Fish versus SFTP, and apparently: "The fish kio...relies [only] on the ssh [server] providing a unix shell, then it uploads a simple server program written in perl. A beautiful hack and handy if sftp is not available on your ssh server, but nowhere near the performance or reliability of sftp." From here.
So if the server you're connecting to supports SFTP, and you're only going to be doing file transfers, you might as well use it. But FISH will work even in situation were SFTP isn't supported, and your only way in is via SSH.
Re:Bow to the upstream, for he is your master.
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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That's where competition comes in. No one is locked into any one ISP, unless they are on AOL.
Tell that to Comcast, my only choice for broadband.
Unless you're talking about dialup, which is rapidly becoming practically unrelated to broadband in terms of what you can do with it (can't do VOIP, can't do video, can't do much audio streaming), most people have only one, sometimes two, choices of providers.
There's a natural limit to how many entities can feasibly provide the "last mile" connection to people's homes. There just are a limited number of connections going into people's houses that can carry a substantial amount of bandwidth. The cable TV company's coax is the obvious choice; the phone company's TWP is second. Even if you put in BPL, which doesn't even work all that well, and God smiles on you enough to have somebody drag fiber, that's a pretty limited playing field. I don't really think that the gas and water company are going to start transmitting data on their pipes, although who knows. The point is, there's a natural bottleneck there, unless you force (as the FCC used to force the phone company with DSL) to permit customer traffic to transit their lines to the head-end at some fixed rate, allowing a choice of ISP.
The market is not going to 'fix' it, because it's a natural monopoly.
They already have such systems for conventional artillery. I'm not sure of the G forces involved on a railgun projectile versus a conventional one, but we've managed to put fairly sensitive electronics in the noses of conventional artillery projectiles since World War II, so I think we can probably figure it out.
The GPS-guided artillery shells that I've seen actually don't use "fins" in the same way that a missile does, but little pop-up retarders that change the shape and aerodynamic characteristics of the projectile just enough to produce a change in direction. Allegedly they can be quite accurate.
I think the technology where I heard about the GPS-guided artillery was something to do with the Crusader mobile artillery system. Basically, it was the Army's way of competing with the Air Force as a "surgical strike" capability. Unfortunately then Iraq really happened, and people's interest in surgical air-strikes went out the window with "shock and awe," or at least it seems like it.
I think the intended application is blade servers. Some blade designs put a disk on the blade itself, so they use 2.5" drives. They're usually designed with good cooling systems and power supplies, so the fact that you can probably cook eggs on it isn't so much of a concern.
It ought to be fairly simple for Seagate to produce the same drive in an IDE or SATA model, by replacing the controller, using the same physical structure and technology, if there's a demand for this in high end "desktop replacement" notebooks...but I don't see it happening.
Bow to the upstream, for he is your master.
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
All well and good until your ISP throttles all bandwidth for unapproved services, where "approved" services are ones sanctioned by the RIAA/MPAA, and which also pay a tithe to your ISP.
With the end of network neutrality, it could easily happen.
Sure, no writing, but that's why you convert all your drives to HFS+
That's kind of a huge limitation. There are lots of times when you might want to share a drive back and forth between a Windows and Mac machine, and it's not possible or desirable to run MacDrive on the Windows side (and having for format the drive with FAT32 sucks mightily).
Letting the Mac understand NTFS is a good thing, because it provides for more interoperability. The only downside to it, is that it might cause people to think of NTFS as a good inter-operable standard, rather than the disgusting, proprietary, Redmond Albatross that it is.
Plus, being able to use SSH as a filesystem is pretty slick, and will probably get more use than the NTFS part. KDE's implementation of SSH-as-filesystem (called fish://) is darned slick, and I've always thought that Apple was missing out by not having something like it.
Since you seem to know something about the subject, would it be possible to enable the feature without waiting for another BIOS upgrade? Would it be possible to write an x86 assembly program that would just bit-twiddle the registers and switch it back on, at least until the system was rebooted and the BIOS set it back to disabled (presumably it does that each time) again?
Seems like once the BIOS has done its job and gotten out of the way at boot, that you ought to be able to go in, provided that you're careful enough, and set things back to however you like. But then again, I've never seen this done, so perhaps there's a good reason why... it's not like there's a shortage of x86 assembly-language programmers around (well, probably less of them now than 15 years ago, but still more than any other low-level language).
I think they realize that very few people are probably interested in 802.11n, because few have equipment to work with it. In any case, this functionality will almost certainly be included in the next major OS upgrade, so the market for this patch is a very small minority of Mac users, who aren't that huge a market to start off with. I think that's why it's not cheaper (like $1 or $0.01, as others have suggested). It's probably only going to be a few thousand copies that they move anyway, before the next big OS upgrade.
This whole thing looks more to me like Apple being "once bitten, twice shy" with regards to things that might possibly interest the FTC, rather than any big conspiracy.
And we know why they're there.
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Inside MySpace.com
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As far as personal profiles go, I'd suspect most people are pretty young, like 20s. But I know of many people in their 30s with MySpace sites also.
So, in other words, MySpace's chief demographics are "20-somethings" and "people trying to sleep with 20-somethings."
It seems like Linux would be a pretty rough platform to try and implement DRM (of any sort, media or software) on. Unless they have mandatory BLOBs in the kernel, it seems like their license-checking and enforcement codes would be pretty trivial to bypass, by intercepting the software's communications with other parts of the OS and the outside world. And if they depend on kernel-space stuff, I think they'll hurt adoption tremendously (I wouldn't compile anything into my kernel that was there just to provide copy-protection or DRM to some piece of software -- if I wanted that, I'd run Windows!).
I think at the end of the day, they'll basically have to be relying on the good-will of the community, or on their relationships with OEM installers. The more I think about it, the more I think this latter group will really have to be their bread and butter. It's where Linux fails hard, right now: if you want to sell Linux machines in the U.S., you basically have no choice but to sell them crippled, or face patent lawsuits. These guys could sell the rights to the codecs to Dell, etc., who would build that cost into the price of a Linux-preinstalled system, and in return users would get a machine that was ready to go out of the carton.
That doesn't require any draconian license enforcement, because would-be pirates of their software, are probably the people who are just going to download ffmpeg and Xvid from the Penguin Liberation Front (who I am no way slandering -- they rock) anyway. If the people at Fluendo have any brains at all, they'll realize they can't compete with FOSS for the Linux users who are out there right now. But what they can do, is go after the users that FOSS hasn't managed to pick up so far, and are still using Windows.
Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.
That's not really that bad. I remember back in the bad old days of dialup, I used to sometimes leave my modem off-hook for 48 hours at a time, if I was grabbing something big. (And at the time, I thought I had it made, because I had a dedicated line...)
Particularly given today's connections, where you can have your router throttle P2P traffic so it's just using the "surplus" bandwidth not taken up by more lag-sensitive applications, 30+ hour downloads are really not a dealbreaker. Sure, it means that the USPS may in fact be a faster way to deliver the data, but I don't doubt people will be queuing up to download it.
It's not, except that what gets people in trouble, is when they try to take credit for a vulnerability they've found in a production website.
I doubt that you'd get in trouble -- and how could you? -- if you submitted the vulnerability, or even publicized it, anonymously. There are lots of ways to do this; Mixmaster comes to mind, and is practically invulnerable to tracing, particularly when your potential adversary isn't expecting an anonymous communication to come in.
If you found a problem, realize that no good is ever going to come to you because of it, and don't expect to ever be rewarded or thanked. Once you've acknowledged those things, there's no reason to attach your name to it, when you let them know.
It's when you try to have your cake and eat it too -- point out someone else's problem while getting rewarded for it -- that the problems really begin.
Lifting of the Fairness Doctrine is directly responsibile for Rush Limbaugh's fame. With a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh can't have a show.
A lot of people that want to listen to Rush Limbaugh is responsible for Rush Limbaugh's fame. If nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, he wouldn't have a show.
That you want to take him off the air, when there are apparently a lot of people who enjoy his mindless rants, is frankly censorious, and represents the worst kind of elitism. You might as well say that the people who listen to him shouldn't be able to vote, and enlightened folks like yourself should just run everything, because you're so obviously superior.
Now, I have no love for the guy; I think he's an obnoxious blowhard, who creates a bad name for true political conservatives (there being a difference between right-wing Republicans and conservatives). But that doesn't mean I have any justification for ordering him off the air, particularly since there are quite a few people who enjoy listening to him. I find rap music offensive, too, but that doesn't mean that I have any cause to be arguing that we mandate an all-classical, all-the-time, nationwide format for music. (And to be honest, the freedom of political speech ranks far higher in my mind than freedom to play a particular type of music.)
The last thing we need is for the FCC to become the arbiter of our political speech. If there's a viewpoint that you don't like, you're free to try and convince it's supporters otherwise, or otherwise argue it down; if you have to silence them by force (which is what involving the government means), then it's pretty clear that you're attempting to push your opinions and agenda down the throats of others, and I find that even more offensive than Rush's drivel.
You're in a very small minority of viewers who want "substantive analysis," therefore, your viewing options are naturally going to be the most limited.
News outlets exist basically in proportion to the number of people who desire their particular flavor at any given time. That there are apparently so few "good" news outlets (whatever your personal definition of 'good' is), suggests that your tastes probably lie outside the cultural mean.
I find it amusing how many people I've met dislike mainstream music and mainstream, lowbrow TV entertainment, but get offended by mainstream news. It's just another entertainment medium, essentially -- why should you like it, when you don't like the rest of the products that are being produced for basically the same audience?
If you don't like the TV programs that are on right before and right after the news, there's probably very little chance that you're going to like the news itself; you're going to have to look elsewhere.
I think his point was that if you say you're "against (state-sanctioned) gay marriage," there is an unspoken assumption on most people's part that you are opposed to the "gay" part, rather than the "marriage" part, of a state-sanctioned marriage. This is because they plot the 'controversy' as one having purely one dimension, with conservatives at one end, and liberals and homosexual advocates at the other.
In reality, the issue is more complex. There are many issues and positions which may be nearly orthogonal to the single axis of 'gay marriage, for/against,' and unless you recognize that, you're going to oversimplify people's positions and pigeonhole them inappropriately.
"Equal time" laws create a false dichotomy where there may not be one. In a room of six people, you may be able to force three into "supporting" and three into "opposing" an issue, but within each three, they may be approaching the issue for completely different reasons, which may be incompatible for fundamental reasons even if they seem to be in agreement on the surface. (E.g., "I'm against gay marriage because homosexuality is a sin," and "I'm against gay marriage because all marriage is wrong and unnatural, regardless of who it's between.") To gloss over these differences and present it as being two-sided is false, and it does a disservice to the viewers of that program, by implying that there are only two opinions.
I, too, winced the first time I read the dust-jacket and saw the names there (Enoch Root and Qwghlm are there, too), but I'm about halfway through The Confusion and enjoying it immensely. There is certainly some self-referential stuff in there, but it's not much. It's just enough, IMO, so that fans of the other books have a common thread to tease out, but it doesn't significantly impact the Baroque Cycle as a standalone work.
Just to make a comparison to another geek favorite, I'd liken the relationship between Marathon canon and Halo. Fans can, if they wish, view the plot as continuous (via a certain amount of suspended disbelief of certain things), while others can enjoy them just as much while treating them completely separate, and many may not even be aware of the few self-referential links tossed in for the benefit of fans.
They will, probably, keep whatever DSL they may have, or dial-up, but no FIOS for them.
And there was never going to be any FIOS for them with Verizon. At least with a regional company, customer service will probably be better (I mean, unless they come to your house and actually beat you with a stick, it can't possibly be worse), and they'll have a better chance of getting new technologies as soon as it's technically and economically feasible in the area.
I used to live up in Maine, and while the big-name telco and cablecos wouldn't even dream about rolling out FIOS to most markets there, some local companies were. In particular, there was a local operation in Lewiston that was out, running fiber all over the place. I have no idea where they got their capital, but it was a local business with a huge office downtown, and a pretty rapid deployment plan.
I'm almost positive it was these guys: http://www.oxfordnetworks.com/
Let's face it; if you're not in a major market, then you aren't worth two squirts to a major national carrier. At least with a regional company, they're going to have some reason to pay attention.
It's both: it makes legitimate activities difficult to do, but rarely makes actually illegal ones impossible. So it doesn't accomplish its stated purpose, and fails to accomplish it at the cost of inhibiting legitimate activities. As an example, it will probably never be impossible for a skilled person to copy a movie, or move their audio from one device to the next; however it may not be within the reach of most people. They'll be left repurchasing their media, without regard to traditional fair use. And in their pursuit of locking users into pay-per-view business models, DRM systems will also drive more tightly controlled, black-box hardware.
DRM is flawed and will always be broken, but not easily; it will probably always be obnoxious and intrusive, and the continuing arms race between DRM-builders and DRM-breakers is destructive, and may have a lot of "collateral damage" (not to mention a waste of time and skill that could be profitably spent elsewhere).
But to be honest, the problem of DRM is really only a symptom of a far greater problem, which is the influence that industries (in particular, the entertainment industry) have on government. I would be ready to just let the DRM/anti-DRM war play itself out on the technological front, except that there's no way that it's going to stay there: as new DRM systems fail, the media lobby is going to look to the government to shore up the failed technology with draconian legislation. Those laws will have effects far beyond any single DRM system, or virtually anything that either the content industry or the anti-DRM programmers could do by themselves.
That we have entities other than natural (in the "natural persons" sense) U.S. citizens contributing money to politicians and their campaigns is absolutely ridiculous. So if you want to look for hypocrisy, just find a politician railing against 'corruption' in one moment, while begging for cash from lobbyists in the next.
I believe the intent of the fairness doctrine is more to get the facts underlying an arguement out to the general public. Let the "man on the street" think for himself. If you want to include an opinion, then you should probably provided equal time to more than one of the most prevalent sides of the arguement.
The intent of the doctrine is irrelevant. The implementation of any such doctrine would almost certainly mean that media outlets would make every issue, even if it's not really widely controversial, into a one-side-versus-the-other, "equal time" argument.
It's silly.
News outlets exist today for every possible political and social affiliation you could want. If you're liberal, listen to NPR. If you're conservative, Fox News. This is what people want. They want news sources that represent their views of the world, and this is what the news outlets are going to deliver, regardless of what requirements you try to drive down on them from on high.
What do you use to control the computer from that far away? I've looked into solutions like that, but it seemed like RF remotes or IR-RF-IR converters would be a real PITA and add a lot of complexity.
I'm in the process of putting together an HTPC system right now, and the remote control issue is the last one that I have to tackle. I'm really not looking forward to it; everything I've read suggests that LIRC is a huge pain.
Doesn't really matter. The real battle of DRM is going to happen in Congress; if the content industry gets what it wants, people won't have any option as to whether they buy DRM or not, any more than you have a choice of whether or not to buy a MacroVision-enabled VCR. They're just going to get Congress to mandate it, and that will be the end of the discussion.
The technology of DRM is hardly even worth discussing, because it's inherently flawed. There cannot ever be a 'perfect DRM' system, because of the model's fundamental problems. So whatever gets implemented, will be broken -- the discussion is whether the people who break it, and others who subsequently take advantage of the break, will be criminals.
If you have read Christian (Fluendo most visible VP) blog post, they plan to provide upgrades via distribution upgrade/installation system (apt-get, yum, etc.)
How would this work? Does APT or YUM work via authenticated HTTP connections? They'd obviously need some way to keep just anyone from sticking "apt http://fluendo.com/updates nonfree" into their sources.list and grabbing their software -- and I don't think their business model is going to fly if they attempt to do shareware.
Maybe they could sell people digital certificates which were used in the authentication process, allowing them to access the repositories; that seems like it might be viable. Not perfect (because you'd need to keep people from sharing the certificates, but at the same time you wouldn't want to tie them to IP addresses, because that would impact traveling people or those on dynamic IPs), but I could at least see it being possible.
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*grumbles something about failure to improve nuclear generators for destroyer use*
There's nothing wrong with the nuclear reactors we have now; you could easily fit one of them into a destroyer without any problems. I'm sure Westinghouse Nuclear would be happy to draw you (assuming 'you' have a few billion bucks to spend) some plans of how it could be done. Much of the space optimization has already been done, for submarines. There are several basically standardized designs that you could build the ship around, and then plop one in when you got everything else ready. It's totally doable.
The Russians have several nuclear powered ice breakers that aren't much larger than destroyers, and they used to have several nuclear-powered cruisers as well (although I think they've all been decommissioned).
The reason that surface ships haven't been built with nuclear reactors has more to do with the perceived economics of fossil fuels, rather than any real technical limitations. And for that matter, I've seen analyses that show that bulk supertankers could be economically driven by nuclear reactors -- if the NS Savannah was around today, and upgraded to use containerized cargo instead of manually loaded stuff, it would probably make money due to the high cost of bunker and diesel.
If it's really electricity that's the problem with the rail gun, putting a nuclear reactor on a smaller ship wouldn't be more work than breaking out some old plans, or making a long-distance phone call to a retired-engineer's home in Russia.
I think "works when SFTP won't" is the only other big advantage.
I did some quick Googling on the subject of Fish versus SFTP, and apparently: "The fish kio...relies [only] on the ssh [server] providing a unix shell, then it uploads a simple server program written in perl. A beautiful hack and handy if sftp is not available on your ssh server, but nowhere near the performance or reliability of sftp." From here.
So if the server you're connecting to supports SFTP, and you're only going to be doing file transfers, you might as well use it. But FISH will work even in situation were SFTP isn't supported, and your only way in is via SSH.
That's where competition comes in. No one is locked into any one ISP, unless they are on AOL.
Tell that to Comcast, my only choice for broadband.
Unless you're talking about dialup, which is rapidly becoming practically unrelated to broadband in terms of what you can do with it (can't do VOIP, can't do video, can't do much audio streaming), most people have only one, sometimes two, choices of providers.
There's a natural limit to how many entities can feasibly provide the "last mile" connection to people's homes. There just are a limited number of connections going into people's houses that can carry a substantial amount of bandwidth. The cable TV company's coax is the obvious choice; the phone company's TWP is second. Even if you put in BPL, which doesn't even work all that well, and God smiles on you enough to have somebody drag fiber, that's a pretty limited playing field. I don't really think that the gas and water company are going to start transmitting data on their pipes, although who knows. The point is, there's a natural bottleneck there, unless you force (as the FCC used to force the phone company with DSL) to permit customer traffic to transit their lines to the head-end at some fixed rate, allowing a choice of ISP.
The market is not going to 'fix' it, because it's a natural monopoly.
They already have such systems for conventional artillery. I'm not sure of the G forces involved on a railgun projectile versus a conventional one, but we've managed to put fairly sensitive electronics in the noses of conventional artillery projectiles since World War II, so I think we can probably figure it out.
The GPS-guided artillery shells that I've seen actually don't use "fins" in the same way that a missile does, but little pop-up retarders that change the shape and aerodynamic characteristics of the projectile just enough to produce a change in direction. Allegedly they can be quite accurate.
I think the technology where I heard about the GPS-guided artillery was something to do with the Crusader mobile artillery system. Basically, it was the Army's way of competing with the Air Force as a "surgical strike" capability. Unfortunately then Iraq really happened, and people's interest in surgical air-strikes went out the window with "shock and awe," or at least it seems like it.
I think the intended application is blade servers. Some blade designs put a disk on the blade itself, so they use 2.5" drives. They're usually designed with good cooling systems and power supplies, so the fact that you can probably cook eggs on it isn't so much of a concern.
It ought to be fairly simple for Seagate to produce the same drive in an IDE or SATA model, by replacing the controller, using the same physical structure and technology, if there's a demand for this in high end "desktop replacement" notebooks...but I don't see it happening.
All well and good until your ISP throttles all bandwidth for unapproved services, where "approved" services are ones sanctioned by the RIAA/MPAA, and which also pay a tithe to your ISP.
With the end of network neutrality, it could easily happen.
Sure, no writing, but that's why you convert all your drives to HFS+
That's kind of a huge limitation. There are lots of times when you might want to share a drive back and forth between a Windows and Mac machine, and it's not possible or desirable to run MacDrive on the Windows side (and having for format the drive with FAT32 sucks mightily).
Letting the Mac understand NTFS is a good thing, because it provides for more interoperability. The only downside to it, is that it might cause people to think of NTFS as a good inter-operable standard, rather than the disgusting, proprietary, Redmond Albatross that it is.
Plus, being able to use SSH as a filesystem is pretty slick, and will probably get more use than the NTFS part. KDE's implementation of SSH-as-filesystem (called fish://) is darned slick, and I've always thought that Apple was missing out by not having something like it.
Since you seem to know something about the subject, would it be possible to enable the feature without waiting for another BIOS upgrade? Would it be possible to write an x86 assembly program that would just bit-twiddle the registers and switch it back on, at least until the system was rebooted and the BIOS set it back to disabled (presumably it does that each time) again?
... it's not like there's a shortage of x86 assembly-language programmers around (well, probably less of them now than 15 years ago, but still more than any other low-level language).
Seems like once the BIOS has done its job and gotten out of the way at boot, that you ought to be able to go in, provided that you're careful enough, and set things back to however you like. But then again, I've never seen this done, so perhaps there's a good reason why
I think they realize that very few people are probably interested in 802.11n, because few have equipment to work with it. In any case, this functionality will almost certainly be included in the next major OS upgrade, so the market for this patch is a very small minority of Mac users, who aren't that huge a market to start off with. I think that's why it's not cheaper (like $1 or $0.01, as others have suggested). It's probably only going to be a few thousand copies that they move anyway, before the next big OS upgrade.
This whole thing looks more to me like Apple being "once bitten, twice shy" with regards to things that might possibly interest the FTC, rather than any big conspiracy.
As far as personal profiles go, I'd suspect most people are pretty young, like 20s. But I know of many people in their 30s with MySpace sites also.
So, in other words, MySpace's chief demographics are "20-somethings" and "people trying to sleep with 20-somethings."
It seems like Linux would be a pretty rough platform to try and implement DRM (of any sort, media or software) on. Unless they have mandatory BLOBs in the kernel, it seems like their license-checking and enforcement codes would be pretty trivial to bypass, by intercepting the software's communications with other parts of the OS and the outside world. And if they depend on kernel-space stuff, I think they'll hurt adoption tremendously (I wouldn't compile anything into my kernel that was there just to provide copy-protection or DRM to some piece of software -- if I wanted that, I'd run Windows!).
I think at the end of the day, they'll basically have to be relying on the good-will of the community, or on their relationships with OEM installers. The more I think about it, the more I think this latter group will really have to be their bread and butter. It's where Linux fails hard, right now: if you want to sell Linux machines in the U.S., you basically have no choice but to sell them crippled, or face patent lawsuits. These guys could sell the rights to the codecs to Dell, etc., who would build that cost into the price of a Linux-preinstalled system, and in return users would get a machine that was ready to go out of the carton.
That doesn't require any draconian license enforcement, because would-be pirates of their software, are probably the people who are just going to download ffmpeg and Xvid from the Penguin Liberation Front (who I am no way slandering -- they rock) anyway. If the people at Fluendo have any brains at all, they'll realize they can't compete with FOSS for the Linux users who are out there right now. But what they can do, is go after the users that FOSS hasn't managed to pick up so far, and are still using Windows.
Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.
That's not really that bad. I remember back in the bad old days of dialup, I used to sometimes leave my modem off-hook for 48 hours at a time, if I was grabbing something big. (And at the time, I thought I had it made, because I had a dedicated line...)
Particularly given today's connections, where you can have your router throttle P2P traffic so it's just using the "surplus" bandwidth not taken up by more lag-sensitive applications, 30+ hour downloads are really not a dealbreaker. Sure, it means that the USPS may in fact be a faster way to deliver the data, but I don't doubt people will be queuing up to download it.
It's not, except that what gets people in trouble, is when they try to take credit for a vulnerability they've found in a production website.
I doubt that you'd get in trouble -- and how could you? -- if you submitted the vulnerability, or even publicized it, anonymously. There are lots of ways to do this; Mixmaster comes to mind, and is practically invulnerable to tracing, particularly when your potential adversary isn't expecting an anonymous communication to come in.
If you found a problem, realize that no good is ever going to come to you because of it, and don't expect to ever be rewarded or thanked. Once you've acknowledged those things, there's no reason to attach your name to it, when you let them know.
It's when you try to have your cake and eat it too -- point out someone else's problem while getting rewarded for it -- that the problems really begin.
Lifting of the Fairness Doctrine is directly responsibile for Rush Limbaugh's fame. With a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh can't have a show.
A lot of people that want to listen to Rush Limbaugh is responsible for Rush Limbaugh's fame. If nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, he wouldn't have a show.
That you want to take him off the air, when there are apparently a lot of people who enjoy his mindless rants, is frankly censorious, and represents the worst kind of elitism. You might as well say that the people who listen to him shouldn't be able to vote, and enlightened folks like yourself should just run everything, because you're so obviously superior.
Now, I have no love for the guy; I think he's an obnoxious blowhard, who creates a bad name for true political conservatives (there being a difference between right-wing Republicans and conservatives). But that doesn't mean I have any justification for ordering him off the air, particularly since there are quite a few people who enjoy listening to him. I find rap music offensive, too, but that doesn't mean that I have any cause to be arguing that we mandate an all-classical, all-the-time, nationwide format for music. (And to be honest, the freedom of political speech ranks far higher in my mind than freedom to play a particular type of music.)
The last thing we need is for the FCC to become the arbiter of our political speech. If there's a viewpoint that you don't like, you're free to try and convince it's supporters otherwise, or otherwise argue it down; if you have to silence them by force (which is what involving the government means), then it's pretty clear that you're attempting to push your opinions and agenda down the throats of others, and I find that even more offensive than Rush's drivel.
You're in a very small minority of viewers who want "substantive analysis," therefore, your viewing options are naturally going to be the most limited.
News outlets exist basically in proportion to the number of people who desire their particular flavor at any given time. That there are apparently so few "good" news outlets (whatever your personal definition of 'good' is), suggests that your tastes probably lie outside the cultural mean.
I find it amusing how many people I've met dislike mainstream music and mainstream, lowbrow TV entertainment, but get offended by mainstream news. It's just another entertainment medium, essentially -- why should you like it, when you don't like the rest of the products that are being produced for basically the same audience?
If you don't like the TV programs that are on right before and right after the news, there's probably very little chance that you're going to like the news itself; you're going to have to look elsewhere.
I think his point was that if you say you're "against (state-sanctioned) gay marriage," there is an unspoken assumption on most people's part that you are opposed to the "gay" part, rather than the "marriage" part, of a state-sanctioned marriage. This is because they plot the 'controversy' as one having purely one dimension, with conservatives at one end, and liberals and homosexual advocates at the other.
In reality, the issue is more complex. There are many issues and positions which may be nearly orthogonal to the single axis of 'gay marriage, for/against,' and unless you recognize that, you're going to oversimplify people's positions and pigeonhole them inappropriately.
"Equal time" laws create a false dichotomy where there may not be one. In a room of six people, you may be able to force three into "supporting" and three into "opposing" an issue, but within each three, they may be approaching the issue for completely different reasons, which may be incompatible for fundamental reasons even if they seem to be in agreement on the surface. (E.g., "I'm against gay marriage because homosexuality is a sin," and "I'm against gay marriage because all marriage is wrong and unnatural, regardless of who it's between.") To gloss over these differences and present it as being two-sided is false, and it does a disservice to the viewers of that program, by implying that there are only two opinions.
I, too, winced the first time I read the dust-jacket and saw the names there (Enoch Root and Qwghlm are there, too), but I'm about halfway through The Confusion and enjoying it immensely. There is certainly some self-referential stuff in there, but it's not much. It's just enough, IMO, so that fans of the other books have a common thread to tease out, but it doesn't significantly impact the Baroque Cycle as a standalone work.
Just to make a comparison to another geek favorite, I'd liken the relationship between Marathon canon and Halo. Fans can, if they wish, view the plot as continuous (via a certain amount of suspended disbelief of certain things), while others can enjoy them just as much while treating them completely separate, and many may not even be aware of the few self-referential links tossed in for the benefit of fans.
Anyone else just say to themselves "there certainly are a lot of Amish in those areas..."
No, because most people know that the Amish mainly live in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, not northern New England...
That said, Maine still has a few Shakers left. But everyone else would really like to get DSL.
They will, probably, keep whatever DSL they may have, or dial-up, but no FIOS for them.
And there was never going to be any FIOS for them with Verizon. At least with a regional company, customer service will probably be better (I mean, unless they come to your house and actually beat you with a stick, it can't possibly be worse), and they'll have a better chance of getting new technologies as soon as it's technically and economically feasible in the area.
Not necessarily.
I used to live up in Maine, and while the big-name telco and cablecos wouldn't even dream about rolling out FIOS to most markets there, some local companies were. In particular, there was a local operation in Lewiston that was out, running fiber all over the place. I have no idea where they got their capital, but it was a local business with a huge office downtown, and a pretty rapid deployment plan.
I'm almost positive it was these guys: http://www.oxfordnetworks.com/
Let's face it; if you're not in a major market, then you aren't worth two squirts to a major national carrier. At least with a regional company, they're going to have some reason to pay attention.
It's both: it makes legitimate activities difficult to do, but rarely makes actually illegal ones impossible. So it doesn't accomplish its stated purpose, and fails to accomplish it at the cost of inhibiting legitimate activities. As an example, it will probably never be impossible for a skilled person to copy a movie, or move their audio from one device to the next; however it may not be within the reach of most people. They'll be left repurchasing their media, without regard to traditional fair use. And in their pursuit of locking users into pay-per-view business models, DRM systems will also drive more tightly controlled, black-box hardware.
DRM is flawed and will always be broken, but not easily; it will probably always be obnoxious and intrusive, and the continuing arms race between DRM-builders and DRM-breakers is destructive, and may have a lot of "collateral damage" (not to mention a waste of time and skill that could be profitably spent elsewhere).
But to be honest, the problem of DRM is really only a symptom of a far greater problem, which is the influence that industries (in particular, the entertainment industry) have on government. I would be ready to just let the DRM/anti-DRM war play itself out on the technological front, except that there's no way that it's going to stay there: as new DRM systems fail, the media lobby is going to look to the government to shore up the failed technology with draconian legislation. Those laws will have effects far beyond any single DRM system, or virtually anything that either the content industry or the anti-DRM programmers could do by themselves.
That we have entities other than natural (in the "natural persons" sense) U.S. citizens contributing money to politicians and their campaigns is absolutely ridiculous. So if you want to look for hypocrisy, just find a politician railing against 'corruption' in one moment, while begging for cash from lobbyists in the next.
I believe the intent of the fairness doctrine is more to get the facts underlying an arguement out to the general public. Let the "man on the street" think for himself. If you want to include an opinion, then you should probably provided equal time to more than one of the most prevalent sides of the arguement.
The intent of the doctrine is irrelevant. The implementation of any such doctrine would almost certainly mean that media outlets would make every issue, even if it's not really widely controversial, into a one-side-versus-the-other, "equal time" argument.
It's silly.
News outlets exist today for every possible political and social affiliation you could want. If you're liberal, listen to NPR. If you're conservative, Fox News. This is what people want. They want news sources that represent their views of the world, and this is what the news outlets are going to deliver, regardless of what requirements you try to drive down on them from on high.
What do you use to control the computer from that far away? I've looked into solutions like that, but it seemed like RF remotes or IR-RF-IR converters would be a real PITA and add a lot of complexity.
I'm in the process of putting together an HTPC system right now, and the remote control issue is the last one that I have to tackle. I'm really not looking forward to it; everything I've read suggests that LIRC is a huge pain.
Doesn't really matter. The real battle of DRM is going to happen in Congress; if the content industry gets what it wants, people won't have any option as to whether they buy DRM or not, any more than you have a choice of whether or not to buy a MacroVision-enabled VCR. They're just going to get Congress to mandate it, and that will be the end of the discussion.
The technology of DRM is hardly even worth discussing, because it's inherently flawed. There cannot ever be a 'perfect DRM' system, because of the model's fundamental problems. So whatever gets implemented, will be broken -- the discussion is whether the people who break it, and others who subsequently take advantage of the break, will be criminals.
If you have read Christian (Fluendo most visible VP) blog post, they plan to provide upgrades via distribution upgrade/installation system (apt-get, yum, etc.)
How would this work? Does APT or YUM work via authenticated HTTP connections? They'd obviously need some way to keep just anyone from sticking "apt http://fluendo.com/updates nonfree" into their sources.list and grabbing their software -- and I don't think their business model is going to fly if they attempt to do shareware.
Maybe they could sell people digital certificates which were used in the authentication process, allowing them to access the repositories; that seems like it might be viable. Not perfect (because you'd need to keep people from sharing the certificates, but at the same time you wouldn't want to tie them to IP addresses, because that would impact traveling people or those on dynamic IPs), but I could at least see it being possible.