Firefox 3.6.19 forever! I am now treating Firefox like an abandoned application. Google developers have now taken over. It may still be the best current browser due to its useful extensions, but it is like a bad copy of Chrome and imho inferior to Firefox 3.6.19 in most ways.
If I had to choose between Chrome and Firefox 4+, I really don't know what I would choose. Despite the horrible interface and all the badly implemented Chrome-ness Firefox 4+ still has unique functionality in the form of extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, and Scrapbook. They contain functionality that I just cannot live without and I haven't seen 100% replicated in any other browser. So I would probably be forced to stick with Firefox 4+ even though I prefer Chrome, Opera, and even MSIE in terms of the interface and usability etc.
Sure Chrome has NotScript, but it just doesn't work very well compared to NoScript. It's not a viable replacement. I ended up using the built in javascript whitelisting functionality which was a huge PITA. It was like going back to IE4 when I had to manually add sites to security zones by actually typing in the URLs.
If it some point a critical security flaw is found in Firefox 3.6.19 complete with exploits in the wild I may reluctantly migrate to Opera. Or maybe by that time someone will have forked Firefox 3.6.19 to at least apply security fixes as needed.
As of today Firefox 3.6.19 is still downloadable for Windows and Mac OS X and is available as a binary in the repositories of both of the Linux distros I use: ArchLinux and TinyCore.
Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser.
If Google jumps off a cliff should Firefox jump too?
This is what the current crop of Firefox devs believe:
1. Google Chrome is the best browser in the world. It is much better than Firefox has ever been or probably ever will be. If we are really, really lucky and work very, very hard maybe someday we could make Firefox just as good as Chrome. To improve Firefox all we have to do is copy everything Google does.
2. Even MSIE is better than Firefox. Let's copy that browser too insofar as it doesn't interfere with copying Google.
You may already be aware of this but the US bill of rights, an explicit enumeration of our rights, was quite hotly debated here as well. It was felt by many at the time that any explicit enumeration of rights would seem to imply that those are the only rights we had and that as long as the government did not infringe on those it could do absolutely anything else it wished.
Predictably enough that is precisely what has happened. The US government most definitely does not recognize any rights that are not in the bill of rights. For instance, airline travel is considered a privilege, not a right. Only walking and possibly travel by horse or bicycle are considered rights. If a certain technology was not around at the time the first 10 constitutional amendments were written it is automatically a privilege that can be revoked at any time and not a right.
The 9th amendment states: The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.. AFAIK, it has never been successfully used to protect a single human right that was not mentioned in the bill of rights. Effectively it has always been ignored completely. Maybe we would have been better off with a bill of rights for the government instead of for the people. Oh wait...that is what the constitution was supposed to be, a limitation on their power. What a joke.
The only way to limit the power of a government is through large scale organized violence. That is the only real power. In the end, words scribbled on a piece of paper mean very little. And the English language is much too vague anyway. It can always be interpreted by those in power to mean whatever they want it to mean. Or when that fails, just it can just be ignored like the 9th amendment.
What Microsoft needs is someone who understands what an Operating System is and what it is not. A genuine geek who understands that a 40 GB operating system is wasteful and unnecessary and a sign of incompetence and stupidity. Someone who understands that when your software grows to 10 times the size of your competitors (Linux and OSX) something is badly wrong and needs to be fixed. When you don't know the first thing about coding you have no business managing coders. It will all just turn into one giant predictable mess. As we have seen with post-Gates Microsoft.
Is the javascript whitelisting comparable to NoScript yet in terms of effectiveness and ease of use? Is there an equivalent to AdBlock Plus and Scrapbook? If a non-firefox browser would incorporate those features as standard and do it well, I would be happy to give them a try. Especially with Firefox's idiotic rapid release numbering scheme I am ready to try some alternatives.
The very first programming class I ever took was in Fortran and I actually ended up dropping the class. I hated it. A single whitespace at the end of a line would throw an error. Something that was almost impossible to debug with the tools I had at the time. Only later, when I tried languages like assembly, Turbo Pascal, C, and Hewlett Packard RPL did I truly start to love programming.
Those who download copyrighted content use a greater amount of bandwidth compared to the average user.
Citation needed. This is complete bollocks. Most people use minimal bandwidth whether they download copyrighted material or not. How much bandwidth does a few songs use up? Not a lot. If they were concerned about bandwidth issues they could just start bandwidth capping or reduce the cap if they already have one. This agreement is definitely not in the financial interest of the ISPs themselves. And, frankly, if I were a shareholder I would consider suing. This agreement has no potential for profit and a huge potential for loss, which is why it took so many years to even reach this stage. These companies will be screwing over their own shareholders in the name of some political (fascist) ideal. Just brilliant.
Fourth, it seems to be some kind of bizarre psychological trait that you'll commonly find in people. For example, an overclocking enthusiast will spend an extra $50 on CPU cooling, so they can overclock their CPU by 100 MHz, instead of just buying a CPU that's 100 MHz faster, for $25. People like feeling that they got something extra, for free, even if the reality of the situation is that they only cost themselves more money. Some people are more ideological than pragmatic.
You do realize this is 2011, right? What you are describing is Pentium overclocking. As in Pentium 1. Ah yes. I remember my Pentium 166. I spent so much effort trying to get to 200 Mhz. Also some people would prefer to use proper cooling even if they were not overclocking. It makes even more sense now that clock speeds are no longer increasing. So it makes sense to keep your CPU for many years. Also, even then it cost more than $25 to buy that extra speed. Probably $300 would be more like it. And nowadays you can't buy the extra speed at any price.
if you are spending an extra $20 a month just to let you secretly pirate stuff so that your ISP can't detect you, why not just buy the stuff legitimately?
Let me answer your question with a question. Why pay more than $20 a month for internet service if all you use it for is browsing/email/facebook? I remember paying $10 a month for reliable, always connected, dialup service and it worked okay for browsing. It just wasn't fast enough to download content. Face it. Piracy is what drove the internet to broadband speeds.
Besides, I think you are missing the point. This is about freedom. If someone puts shackles on your legs, you would be willing to either pay someone to remove them or buy a hack saw and do it yourself. Freedom isn't free. And in this case it also means 'as in beer'.
Also, charge something like $0.30/GB overage - people wouldn't mind that
Are you serious? At that price you won't get any customers at all unless you are the only choice. No one in the US is going to pay those prices unless they live in the middle of nowhere and have no choice. In which case, congrats because they are only going to use a few GB per month and you will get all of $1.00 from them.
There's a difference between using the internet for just browsing web sites and actually downloading content. The only point of having "broadband" speeds at all is for the content. If the ISPs find a way to cut that off I won't be paying $100 a month anymore just to browse websites. Maybe I'll pay $20 a month for slow DSL or even $10 - $15 a month for dialup.
It will also become quite tempting for many techies to steal internet service from unprotected or WEP wireless routers. My friend has already been doing this for years. He downloads content all the time without paying a dime. The point is the ISPs will be really screwing themselves. If they are smart they will start seriously encouraging everyone to migrate to WPA2 protection for their routers and paying the price in offering the tech support for it because this would *seriously* encourage service theft for those living in densely populated areas.
The biggest likely outcome of this sort of thing is an explosion in anonymous VPN use. A significant percentage of the US and Australian internet will just hide behind an anon VPN and access TPB from there.
The ISPs will really be shooting themselves in the foot if they do this. That is the difference between something like this which only benefits the rights holders (although that is debatable) and something like bandwidth capping which clearly benefits the ISPs by either getting rid of or neutering their high use customers. Of course they are trying to avoid giving customers a choice by all agreeing to it (unlike the bandwidth caps and torrent throttling). But they are neglecting the basic fact that ISPs benefit more financially from piracy than almost anyone. If I were an ISP shareholder I would be seriously pissed off right now. There is no profit in this and a huge potential for loss.
Einstein's solution was that space and time are warped by gravity
The idea of space per say being warped by gravity is a vague and probably inaccurate analogy rather than an observation. The warping is of a purely mathematical nature. That is, the analogy makes us believe that we understand the math even though we don't. The mathematics is able to make accurate predictions with or without the pseudo-idea of curved space, the idea of which was actually introduced by Minkowski, not Einstein. Minkowski was more a mathemetician than a traditional scientist-as-experimentalist and the idea was never originally intended to reflect the nature of reality per se.
Also the actual mathematics implies a curving of space-time which is *not* the same thing as curved space. Space-time is not even really a thing, at least not a thing that we are capable of picturing in our minds. The pseudo-concept is just a convenient shorthand for the elegant (but extremely complex) math which itself is the great achievement of relativity theory with its superb predictive value. Our various explanations of the math are highly suspect and the idea of space itself being curved into a 4th physical dimension (not time) is itself both utterly unproven and not even implied by the math.
1. We know that objects travel faster than light in at least one place in the universe â" in a black hole objects are accelerated to speeds at which light reflecting off of their surfaces or emitted by the objects cannot reach escape velocity. Thus, things falling into a black hole must be traveling faster than the speed of light.
The speed at which an object enters the event horizon of a black hole has nothing to do with light not being able to escape its gravity well and certainly does not imply faster-than-light speed. The way I imagine it is this: A black hole is black because the speed at which photons (reflected or emitted) travel is not sufficient to reach escape velocity. Picture a photon being slowed down until it just falls back down toward the surface of the superdense matter of the black hole. Of course this only makes sense if you believe in photons with mass and photons which can be slowed or reversed in direction through a spooky-action-at-a-distance (aka gravity). I tend to find the idea of light-as-a-stream-of-particles easier to imagine than the massless wave alternative or some spooky combination of the two, but the truth can only be determined by experiment.
I believe the usual analogy would involve first pretending that our naive idea of space and space-time are equivalent and then imagining that 3d space is somehow a thin flexible fabric which can be deformed by objects with mass like bowling balls, lead shot, ball bearings, and marbles. Of course photons are often considered to be without mass, but it is really just another way of imaging the photons sort of falling back down. Into the bowl like depression in the space-time fabric too steep for it to escape. But by focusing only on the path of a massless photon and not on what is causing it to actually move you can try to escape the problem that Newtonian ideas of gravity would have with a massless object.
As long as Comcast makes the cap clear in their advertisements, I don't care what the cap is, even if it's 1GB/month.
But they don't. You have to specifically ask them about it if you want to discuss the issue with them.
If you want unlimited data, you can get it elsewhere, but you've gotta pay. In many cities, you can get metro ethernet for around $3500/month for 100Mbit - and this is with true unlimited bandwidth, you can stream 100Mbit downstream *and* upstream all day long and they don't care.
Wouldn't Verizon FiOS be a more realistic example? Where I live an uncapped 35/35 Gbit connection costs just under $100 including telephone service with a 2 year contract. A 50/20 connection is about $140 with phone, and I think there is some absurdly fast connection they offer for around $200. All such connections are worth considering because there is no cap and you can actually make use of your bandwidth. That is not the case with Comcap's plans. Buying anything above their lowest tier service is an idiotic waste of money because they do not raise the cap for the higher service tiers. You are paying more money for the same amount of data.
As far as dedicated lines go, this service is meant to compete with FIOS and bring the USA up to speed with China, Japan and Europe.
If that's true then they have failed miserably. FIOS is uncapped. With my FIOS connection I can download and upload at around 4.3 megabytes per second all day every day for as long as I want.
250Gigabyte cap does result in 5 hours. On the other hand, it also results in a 250Gigabyte cap.
That's not 8 BD movie tips. That's 62 BD movie rips.
Now I really don't understand what the fuss is about and I stand by my earlier statement... if you want that 24/7, no cap, get a dedicated line.
You have you ever actually ripped a bluray? The resulting mkv file is typically between 25 and 35 GB in size. If you have some way of just downloading them via the internet (like say via usenet) that would mean less than 10 movies before you hit the cap. Not 62. In the real world you would probably download the movies via p2p which typically means a commitment to 1:1 UL:DL ratios. So your 10 bluray rips become only 5. Checking back with reality again it can be seen that most movies available for download have been recompressed to half to one third size. Most 1080p rips are 8-12 GB. Assume an average of 10. If you combine that with your 125 gig effective cap (1:1 p2p) and you can download about 12 bluray movies per month or one movie every 2.5 days with comcap. That is easy to do even on the slowest tier of service. So this new offering is useless.
Hey, that's only $21 an hour. That still compares pretty favorably to even the cheapest of hookers, it's a bargain for how hard they'll screw you.
In some countries you can get hookers for $20 a night. $20 for 8 hours. A really pretty one would probably cost you more like $35/night nowadays though. Inflation is bitch. The weekly rate might drop down to $25 a night though if you negotiate and are not too fat or ugly.
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I have exceeded Comcap's cap on a number of occasions. It's really quite easy. I can do it in less than a week even on their slowest tier of service. Think bitorrent. The average recompressed 1080p movie from TPB is 8-12 gigs. The average computer game is also between 8 and 12 gigs. If you assume a fair 1:1 upload:download ratio that means your real download cap is about 125 gigs which is about 10 movies/games per month. But often my UL:DL ratios are higher than 1:1. More like 2:1 which means I might just barely be able to download 7 games/moves with bittorrent. Oh wait, were you thinking in terms of just checking email and web browsing? Yeah. Paying a huge premium for higher download speeds makes a lot of sense for that. Page loads aren't even necessarily faster with higher tier service.
after a report recorded his young child freaking out because of a patdown the TSA Rep stated that their rules clearly state they are not to give patdowns to children under the age of 10.
Citation? AFAIK that is simply not true. The TSA rules are secret, but they are most definitely allowed to pat down children. And, yes I have heard this directly from a number of TSOs. They even pat down newborns.
In the rest of the world, were air travel is likely to cross borders, checks have always been more strict. And with good reason. Hijacks were once common. Aircraft made good targets. It was tried with both ships and trains but they lack a sense of urgency, are to big, to open. So, something had to be done.
As an expat who is lived in quite a few different countries from South America and Latin America to Asia and has traveled to 50-60 different countries you are flat out simply dead wrong. Whether you are trying to be intentionally deceptive or not I don't know. Please provide citations to back up your comments. There isn't a single country in the whole world that has airport security even close to what the US has. Period. Even Cubans and citizens of other communist countries have more freedom to travel than we do. Also, hijackings were never common. Not ever.
If the current genital searches and naked imaging, even of small children, are so necessary then what about cavity searches? All of your arguments would apply just as well there. Ministry of Truth leader Pistole has said that currently cavity searches are not on the agenda, but he refused to specifically rule them out either. Clearly the time isn't right for them yet, but it will come. When it does what will your position be?
Does it work? Lots of people claim that ZERO attacks have been stopped. But you can turn that bit right around. ZERO successful attacks SINCE the TSA. Shoe-bomber? Detroit flight? NOT successful. Because the attackers used stupid primitive tech that didn't stand a chance in hell?
So the TSA gets the credit because a couple of wanna be terrorists were dumb? The attackers you are referring to were just stupid. It is quite possible to smuggle genuine explosives through TSA checkpoints. The nude scanners cannot detect them if you flatten the explosives into a pancake shape without sharp edges and tape it to your abdomen. If you get caught you just press the button and destroy the entire busy checkpoint. And there are other methods of smuggling explosives onboard the plane. For instance a body bomb. You could surgically plant a large amount of plastic explosives into your abdomen.
Airport security doesn't fix everything but I don't think it would be smart to go back to the early days of commercial flight and just open the whole place up. That was tried. It didn't work.
When was this tried?
People break the law, in general most normal people (A lot of slashdot does not apply) want the law to be enforced and so airports are now enforcing the laws.
Even if it means living in a police state? Also I don't support laws against drug or cash smuggling. The whole idea of cash smuggling being a crime is absurd. Money should not be illegal.
Nice catch. Gary Numan did a new wave punkish synthpop song called "cars" that I liked back in 1980 when it made the top 40 charts in the US. Apparently it had hit #1 in the pop charts in the UK the year before. A true one hit wonder. So maybe he switched from writing music to writing code.
Coal burning power generation accounts for an estimated 200,000 deaths EVERY YEAR.
Yes. But what you haven't mentioned is every one of those 200,000 deaths was only indirectly related to coal. The coal created electricity and the electricity created lightning and it was the lightning that killed those 200,000 people. Also there were some sharks involved. Are you people for real? I don't like to be too paranoid but there are some discussions here where I really wonder if people are getting paid for their posts.
Ah. I see what you are saying. He really had two points which he tightly wove together. 1) Piracy is very naughty and 2) Complaining about the difficulty in getting blurays to just work on linux is rather pathetic. Now that I have disassembled his actual points (but without the benefit of IDA Pro or OllyDbg) I can say that I disagree with 1) and mostly agree with 2).
With the added caveat that he could probably multi-boot with a small windows partition and a stripped down version of windows XP. Surely every app can't be expected to run in Linux. Then he could use the plethora of windows apps that can get you from a bluray disc to an mkv file and with exactly the size and quality that you want, unlike the downloadable versions. As others have pointed out there is also the super easy to use MakeMKV which has a fully supported Linux version, but which seems to result in an MKV that requires either a proprietary DTS-MA codec or lossy audio compression to play back properly on most software players. I assume most people are getting around the lack of DTS-MA decoders by using lossy audio, which is a shame.
MakeMKV is easy to use, but it doesn't give you the same freedom that eac3to does. For instance it won't output flac audio and thus the mkv audio will often not play in apps like vlc that don't have DTS-MA decoders. I had a similar problem with trying to use DVDfab which has a feature for automagically ripping a bluray to an mkv file. Very slick but the resulting file doesn't play properly on my PC. Also eac3to gives me the control to alter the audio track in Soundforge which I find is almost always necessary. I also like to change 5.1 or 7.1 audio to 2 channel stereo to reduce file size quite a bit. Automatic systems are nice, but only if they give you enough control to do what you want. To be fair the MakeMKV author is working on the flac output. When he gets around to it I will try the software again.
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Firefox 3.6.19 forever! I am now treating Firefox like an abandoned application. Google developers have now taken over. It may still be the best current browser due to its useful extensions, but it is like a bad copy of Chrome and imho inferior to Firefox 3.6.19 in most ways.
If I had to choose between Chrome and Firefox 4+, I really don't know what I would choose. Despite the horrible interface and all the badly implemented Chrome-ness Firefox 4+ still has unique functionality in the form of extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, and Scrapbook. They contain functionality that I just cannot live without and I haven't seen 100% replicated in any other browser. So I would probably be forced to stick with Firefox 4+ even though I prefer Chrome, Opera, and even MSIE in terms of the interface and usability etc.
Sure Chrome has NotScript, but it just doesn't work very well compared to NoScript. It's not a viable replacement. I ended up using the built in javascript whitelisting functionality which was a huge PITA. It was like going back to IE4 when I had to manually add sites to security zones by actually typing in the URLs.
If it some point a critical security flaw is found in Firefox 3.6.19 complete with exploits in the wild I may reluctantly migrate to Opera. Or maybe by that time someone will have forked Firefox 3.6.19 to at least apply security fixes as needed.
As of today Firefox 3.6.19 is still downloadable for Windows and Mac OS X and is available as a binary in the repositories of both of the Linux distros I use: ArchLinux and TinyCore.
Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser.
If Google jumps off a cliff should Firefox jump too?
This is what the current crop of Firefox devs believe:
1. Google Chrome is the best browser in the world. It is much better than Firefox has ever been or probably ever will be. If we are really, really lucky and work very, very hard maybe someday we could make Firefox just as good as Chrome. To improve Firefox all we have to do is copy everything Google does.
2. Even MSIE is better than Firefox. Let's copy that browser too insofar as it doesn't interfere with copying Google.
You may already be aware of this but the US bill of rights, an explicit enumeration of our rights, was quite hotly debated here as well. It was felt by many at the time that any explicit enumeration of rights would seem to imply that those are the only rights we had and that as long as the government did not infringe on those it could do absolutely anything else it wished.
Predictably enough that is precisely what has happened. The US government most definitely does not recognize any rights that are not in the bill of rights. For instance, airline travel is considered a privilege, not a right. Only walking and possibly travel by horse or bicycle are considered rights. If a certain technology was not around at the time the first 10 constitutional amendments were written it is automatically a privilege that can be revoked at any time and not a right.
The 9th amendment states: The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.. AFAIK, it has never been successfully used to protect a single human right that was not mentioned in the bill of rights. Effectively it has always been ignored completely. Maybe we would have been better off with a bill of rights for the government instead of for the people. Oh wait...that is what the constitution was supposed to be, a limitation on their power. What a joke.
The only way to limit the power of a government is through large scale organized violence. That is the only real power. In the end, words scribbled on a piece of paper mean very little. And the English language is much too vague anyway. It can always be interpreted by those in power to mean whatever they want it to mean. Or when that fails, just it can just be ignored like the 9th amendment.
What Microsoft needs is someone who understands what an Operating System is and what it is not. A genuine geek who understands that a 40 GB operating system is wasteful and unnecessary and a sign of incompetence and stupidity. Someone who understands that when your software grows to 10 times the size of your competitors (Linux and OSX) something is badly wrong and needs to be fixed. When you don't know the first thing about coding you have no business managing coders. It will all just turn into one giant predictable mess. As we have seen with post-Gates Microsoft.
If the Supremes rule against this does that mean my routine GPS tracking of my estranged ex-GF will become illegal?
Is the javascript whitelisting comparable to NoScript yet in terms of effectiveness and ease of use? Is there an equivalent to AdBlock Plus and Scrapbook? If a non-firefox browser would incorporate those features as standard and do it well, I would be happy to give them a try. Especially with Firefox's idiotic rapid release numbering scheme I am ready to try some alternatives.
The very first programming class I ever took was in Fortran and I actually ended up dropping the class. I hated it. A single whitespace at the end of a line would throw an error. Something that was almost impossible to debug with the tools I had at the time. Only later, when I tried languages like assembly, Turbo Pascal, C, and Hewlett Packard RPL did I truly start to love programming.
Those who download copyrighted content use a greater amount of bandwidth compared to the average user.
Citation needed. This is complete bollocks. Most people use minimal bandwidth whether they download copyrighted material or not. How much bandwidth does a few songs use up? Not a lot. If they were concerned about bandwidth issues they could just start bandwidth capping or reduce the cap if they already have one. This agreement is definitely not in the financial interest of the ISPs themselves. And, frankly, if I were a shareholder I would consider suing. This agreement has no potential for profit and a huge potential for loss, which is why it took so many years to even reach this stage. These companies will be screwing over their own shareholders in the name of some political (fascist) ideal. Just brilliant.
Fourth, it seems to be some kind of bizarre psychological trait that you'll commonly find in people. For example, an overclocking enthusiast will spend an extra $50 on CPU cooling, so they can overclock their CPU by 100 MHz, instead of just buying a CPU that's 100 MHz faster, for $25. People like feeling that they got something extra, for free, even if the reality of the situation is that they only cost themselves more money. Some people are more ideological than pragmatic.
You do realize this is 2011, right? What you are describing is Pentium overclocking. As in Pentium 1. Ah yes. I remember my Pentium 166. I spent so much effort trying to get to 200 Mhz. Also some people would prefer to use proper cooling even if they were not overclocking. It makes even more sense now that clock speeds are no longer increasing. So it makes sense to keep your CPU for many years. Also, even then it cost more than $25 to buy that extra speed. Probably $300 would be more like it. And nowadays you can't buy the extra speed at any price.
if you are spending an extra $20 a month just to let you secretly pirate stuff so that your ISP can't detect you, why not just buy the stuff legitimately?
Let me answer your question with a question. Why pay more than $20 a month for internet service if all you use it for is browsing/email/facebook? I remember paying $10 a month for reliable, always connected, dialup service and it worked okay for browsing. It just wasn't fast enough to download content. Face it. Piracy is what drove the internet to broadband speeds.
Besides, I think you are missing the point. This is about freedom. If someone puts shackles on your legs, you would be willing to either pay someone to remove them or buy a hack saw and do it yourself. Freedom isn't free. And in this case it also means 'as in beer'.
Also, charge something like $0.30/GB overage - people wouldn't mind that
Are you serious? At that price you won't get any customers at all unless you are the only choice. No one in the US is going to pay those prices unless they live in the middle of nowhere and have no choice. In which case, congrats because they are only going to use a few GB per month and you will get all of $1.00 from them.
There's a difference between using the internet for just browsing web sites and actually downloading content. The only point of having "broadband" speeds at all is for the content. If the ISPs find a way to cut that off I won't be paying $100 a month anymore just to browse websites. Maybe I'll pay $20 a month for slow DSL or even $10 - $15 a month for dialup.
It will also become quite tempting for many techies to steal internet service from unprotected or WEP wireless routers. My friend has already been doing this for years. He downloads content all the time without paying a dime. The point is the ISPs will be really screwing themselves. If they are smart they will start seriously encouraging everyone to migrate to WPA2 protection for their routers and paying the price in offering the tech support for it because this would *seriously* encourage service theft for those living in densely populated areas.
The biggest likely outcome of this sort of thing is an explosion in anonymous VPN use. A significant percentage of the US and Australian internet will just hide behind an anon VPN and access TPB from there.
The ISPs will really be shooting themselves in the foot if they do this. That is the difference between something like this which only benefits the rights holders (although that is debatable) and something like bandwidth capping which clearly benefits the ISPs by either getting rid of or neutering their high use customers. Of course they are trying to avoid giving customers a choice by all agreeing to it (unlike the bandwidth caps and torrent throttling). But they are neglecting the basic fact that ISPs benefit more financially from piracy than almost anyone. If I were an ISP shareholder I would be seriously pissed off right now. There is no profit in this and a huge potential for loss.
Einstein's solution was that space and time are warped by gravity
The idea of space per say being warped by gravity is a vague and probably inaccurate analogy rather than an observation. The warping is of a purely mathematical nature. That is, the analogy makes us believe that we understand the math even though we don't. The mathematics is able to make accurate predictions with or without the pseudo-idea of curved space, the idea of which was actually introduced by Minkowski, not Einstein. Minkowski was more a mathemetician than a traditional scientist-as-experimentalist and the idea was never originally intended to reflect the nature of reality per se.
Also the actual mathematics implies a curving of space-time which is *not* the same thing as curved space. Space-time is not even really a thing, at least not a thing that we are capable of picturing in our minds. The pseudo-concept is just a convenient shorthand for the elegant (but extremely complex) math which itself is the great achievement of relativity theory with its superb predictive value. Our various explanations of the math are highly suspect and the idea of space itself being curved into a 4th physical dimension (not time) is itself both utterly unproven and not even implied by the math.
1. We know that objects travel faster than light in at least one place in the universe â" in a black hole objects are accelerated to speeds at which light reflecting off of their surfaces or emitted by the objects cannot reach escape velocity. Thus, things falling into a black hole must be traveling faster than the speed of light.
The speed at which an object enters the event horizon of a black hole has nothing to do with light not being able to escape its gravity well and certainly does not imply faster-than-light speed. The way I imagine it is this: A black hole is black because the speed at which photons (reflected or emitted) travel is not sufficient to reach escape velocity. Picture a photon being slowed down until it just falls back down toward the surface of the superdense matter of the black hole. Of course this only makes sense if you believe in photons with mass and photons which can be slowed or reversed in direction through a spooky-action-at-a-distance (aka gravity). I tend to find the idea of light-as-a-stream-of-particles easier to imagine than the massless wave alternative or some spooky combination of the two, but the truth can only be determined by experiment.
I believe the usual analogy would involve first pretending that our naive idea of space and space-time are equivalent and then imagining that 3d space is somehow a thin flexible fabric which can be deformed by objects with mass like bowling balls, lead shot, ball bearings, and marbles. Of course photons are often considered to be without mass, but it is really just another way of imaging the photons sort of falling back down. Into the bowl like depression in the space-time fabric too steep for it to escape. But by focusing only on the path of a massless photon and not on what is causing it to actually move you can try to escape the problem that Newtonian ideas of gravity would have with a massless object.
As long as Comcast makes the cap clear in their advertisements, I don't care what the cap is, even if it's 1GB/month.
But they don't. You have to specifically ask them about it if you want to discuss the issue with them.
If you want unlimited data, you can get it elsewhere, but you've gotta pay. In many cities, you can get metro ethernet for around $3500/month for 100Mbit - and this is with true unlimited bandwidth, you can stream 100Mbit downstream *and* upstream all day long and they don't care.
Wouldn't Verizon FiOS be a more realistic example? Where I live an uncapped 35/35 Gbit connection costs just under $100 including telephone service with a 2 year contract. A 50/20 connection is about $140 with phone, and I think there is some absurdly fast connection they offer for around $200. All such connections are worth considering because there is no cap and you can actually make use of your bandwidth. That is not the case with Comcap's plans. Buying anything above their lowest tier service is an idiotic waste of money because they do not raise the cap for the higher service tiers. You are paying more money for the same amount of data.
As far as dedicated lines go, this service is meant to compete with FIOS and bring the USA up to speed with China, Japan and Europe.
If that's true then they have failed miserably. FIOS is uncapped. With my FIOS connection I can download and upload at around 4.3 megabytes per second all day every day for as long as I want.
250Gigabyte cap does result in 5 hours. On the other hand, it also results in a 250Gigabyte cap.
That's not 8 BD movie tips. That's 62 BD movie rips.
Now I really don't understand what the fuss is about and I stand by my earlier statement... if you want that 24/7, no cap, get a dedicated line.
You have you ever actually ripped a bluray? The resulting mkv file is typically between 25 and 35 GB in size. If you have some way of just downloading them via the internet (like say via usenet) that would mean less than 10 movies before you hit the cap. Not 62. In the real world you would probably download the movies via p2p which typically means a commitment to 1:1 UL:DL ratios. So your 10 bluray rips become only 5. Checking back with reality again it can be seen that most movies available for download have been recompressed to half to one third size. Most 1080p rips are 8-12 GB. Assume an average of 10. If you combine that with your 125 gig effective cap (1:1 p2p) and you can download about 12 bluray movies per month or one movie every 2.5 days with comcap. That is easy to do even on the slowest tier of service. So this new offering is useless.
Hey, that's only $21 an hour. That still compares pretty favorably to even the cheapest of hookers, it's a bargain for how hard they'll screw you.
In some countries you can get hookers for $20 a night. $20 for 8 hours. A really pretty one would probably cost you more like $35/night nowadays though. Inflation is bitch. The weekly rate might drop down to $25 a night though if you negotiate and are not too fat or ugly.
But it isn't that bad.I haven't come close to maxing it out and I tried. I don't know, how exactly do you use more than 250GB in a month?
I have exceeded Comcap's cap on a number of occasions. It's really quite easy. I can do it in less than a week even on their slowest tier of service. Think bitorrent. The average recompressed 1080p movie from TPB is 8-12 gigs. The average computer game is also between 8 and 12 gigs. If you assume a fair 1:1 upload:download ratio that means your real download cap is about 125 gigs which is about 10 movies/games per month. But often my UL:DL ratios are higher than 1:1. More like 2:1 which means I might just barely be able to download 7 games/moves with bittorrent. Oh wait, were you thinking in terms of just checking email and web browsing? Yeah. Paying a huge premium for higher download speeds makes a lot of sense for that. Page loads aren't even necessarily faster with higher tier service.
after a report recorded his young child freaking out because of a patdown the TSA Rep stated that their rules clearly state they are not to give patdowns to children under the age of 10.
Citation? AFAIK that is simply not true. The TSA rules are secret, but they are most definitely allowed to pat down children. And, yes I have heard this directly from a number of TSOs. They even pat down newborns.
In the rest of the world, were air travel is likely to cross borders, checks have always been more strict. And with good reason. Hijacks were once common. Aircraft made good targets. It was tried with both ships and trains but they lack a sense of urgency, are to big, to open. So, something had to be done.
As an expat who is lived in quite a few different countries from South America and Latin America to Asia and has traveled to 50-60 different countries you are flat out simply dead wrong. Whether you are trying to be intentionally deceptive or not I don't know. Please provide citations to back up your comments. There isn't a single country in the whole world that has airport security even close to what the US has. Period. Even Cubans and citizens of other communist countries have more freedom to travel than we do. Also, hijackings were never common. Not ever.
If the current genital searches and naked imaging, even of small children, are so necessary then what about cavity searches? All of your arguments would apply just as well there. Ministry of Truth leader Pistole has said that currently cavity searches are not on the agenda, but he refused to specifically rule them out either. Clearly the time isn't right for them yet, but it will come. When it does what will your position be?
Does it work? Lots of people claim that ZERO attacks have been stopped. But you can turn that bit right around. ZERO successful attacks SINCE the TSA. Shoe-bomber? Detroit flight? NOT successful. Because the attackers used stupid primitive tech that didn't stand a chance in hell?
So the TSA gets the credit because a couple of wanna be terrorists were dumb? The attackers you are referring to were just stupid. It is quite possible to smuggle genuine explosives through TSA checkpoints. The nude scanners cannot detect them if you flatten the explosives into a pancake shape without sharp edges and tape it to your abdomen. If you get caught you just press the button and destroy the entire busy checkpoint. And there are other methods of smuggling explosives onboard the plane. For instance a body bomb. You could surgically plant a large amount of plastic explosives into your abdomen.
Airport security doesn't fix everything but I don't think it would be smart to go back to the early days of commercial flight and just open the whole place up. That was tried. It didn't work.
When was this tried?
People break the law, in general most normal people (A lot of slashdot does not apply) want the law to be enforced and so airports are now enforcing the laws.
Even if it means living in a police state? Also I don't support laws against drug or cash smuggling. The whole idea of cash smuggling being a crime is absurd. Money should not be illegal.
Nice catch. Gary Numan did a new wave punkish synthpop song called "cars" that I liked back in 1980 when it made the top 40 charts in the US. Apparently it had hit #1 in the pop charts in the UK the year before. A true one hit wonder. So maybe he switched from writing music to writing code.
What if you don't have an internet connection or want a game that you can still install when steam goes out of business in 5-10 years.
Coal burning power generation accounts for an estimated 200,000 deaths EVERY YEAR.
Yes. But what you haven't mentioned is every one of those 200,000 deaths was only indirectly related to coal. The coal created electricity and the electricity created lightning and it was the lightning that killed those 200,000 people. Also there were some sharks involved. Are you people for real? I don't like to be too paranoid but there are some discussions here where I really wonder if people are getting paid for their posts.
Ah. I see what you are saying. He really had two points which he tightly wove together. 1) Piracy is very naughty and 2) Complaining about the difficulty in getting blurays to just work on linux is rather pathetic. Now that I have disassembled his actual points (but without the benefit of IDA Pro or OllyDbg) I can say that I disagree with 1) and mostly agree with 2).
With the added caveat that he could probably multi-boot with a small windows partition and a stripped down version of windows XP. Surely every app can't be expected to run in Linux. Then he could use the plethora of windows apps that can get you from a bluray disc to an mkv file and with exactly the size and quality that you want, unlike the downloadable versions. As others have pointed out there is also the super easy to use MakeMKV which has a fully supported Linux version, but which seems to result in an MKV that requires either a proprietary DTS-MA codec or lossy audio compression to play back properly on most software players. I assume most people are getting around the lack of DTS-MA decoders by using lossy audio, which is a shame.
MakeMKV is easy to use, but it doesn't give you the same freedom that eac3to does. For instance it won't output flac audio and thus the mkv audio will often not play in apps like vlc that don't have DTS-MA decoders. I had a similar problem with trying to use DVDfab which has a feature for automagically ripping a bluray to an mkv file. Very slick but the resulting file doesn't play properly on my PC. Also eac3to gives me the control to alter the audio track in Soundforge which I find is almost always necessary. I also like to change 5.1 or 7.1 audio to 2 channel stereo to reduce file size quite a bit. Automatic systems are nice, but only if they give you enough control to do what you want. To be fair the MakeMKV author is working on the flac output. When he gets around to it I will try the software again.