Cheaper than a Playstation: If the "free" in "free time" equates to "free (as in beer)," I'd like some more of that. That is to
say, End the Culture of ultraproductivity in
the US.
Cheaper than a PlayStation2 on Ebay:
A maid, or at least a helper to come once a week and help me get my house in order, so I can do all the things that a homeowner is supposed to get done in the course of normal life that I don't have time to do (see above).
Unlimited:My own lobbyist. Or a patrol of them. Not to badger pols into legislation that only benefits me, but to nudge the government into a lane of common sense (Patents on hyperlinks? *Bzzzt* Oil prospecting in National Parks? *Are you nuts?* Solving social problem with unenforcable laws and empty talk on TV? *C'mon guys. This is the real world.* And what happened to the 40-hour work week? huh? HUH? I *like* life outside of work.
I am on so many mailing lists that I can actually track the passage of one to the next. The most humorous one I have had so far goes a little like this:
I had a friend with a cool wool trenchcoat. I told him I liked his coat, and he said that he got it from U.S. Cavalry for $7. Wow! So I went online and bought one. Two, actually.
Of course, I started getting U.S. Cav catalogs. But then a few months later, I started getting literature and membership offers from the N.R.A.
Then, just last month, I got an offer to join a hunt club -- when I have never hunted anything in my life! Now I have someone called "Buckmasters" calling me on the phone.
All because I bought a trenchcoat.
I think corporate mailing list sharing has become the evil meme of our times.
Yet another blow to the star-filled hopes of my generation; a generation that grew up on the tail end of the Space Race, who still have their copies of TIME magazine from when Viking landed on Mars. At age 10 I fully expected to get to ride on a Space Shuttle one day. At age 26 I am sad that the US seems more interested in immediacy and BS politics than expanding the role of humanity in a universe which happens to be larger than the Republican convention, no matter how it looks on TV.
"Dammit, I can't ping the microwave. How in the hell am I supposed to make a sandwitch if I can't ping the microwave?!? Wilma!! Get me the packet sniffer! Ah, gods, someone's ping flooded the refridgerator! Get me my PDA! QUICK!"
So? One of the old OPERs on the VAX at school did this to us, too. He would generate lists of people using the TINT client to access MU*s during the daytime hours (during which games were forbidden). He even saw through our ruse of renaming TINT as WP500.COM.;)
Oh yeah, it pissed us off, too. But hey, we were breaking the rules. It was just embarrassing to have one's name up on a public list like that, as if we'd cashed a bad check at El Charro or something (JDC, I know you're out there. ..).
Folks who are sharing Metallica songs are more than likely breaking the rules, too. Their ruse is up, too. So, if you wanna break the rules, you'd better find a better way to hide your tracks.
You're thinking about it in the wrong way (on your first question). The time elapsed is not negative. Imagine it as a race car traveling at 200 MPH into a tunnel 100 miles long. The race car emerges from the tunnel travelling at the same speed, but it only takes 15 minutes for the car to traverse the tunnel. If the driver insists she* travelled at a constant speed (200mph) the whole time, you have an effect much like the microwaves. The time is only "negative" if you imagine that the constant rate of speed of the car is absolute, and use the time the car should take to traverse the tunnel as zero.
As far as your second question, the claim they make is logical (regarding sending info faster than C). My lay guess is that the "tail" of the microwaves that arrives first is some kind of quantum equivilent to a RAID stripe-- the cesium atoms at the far side of the chamber use some form of SpAAD (Spooky Action At a Distance) to reconstruct the information contained in the whole beam based on the information in the tail, and they do the reconstruction faster than the rest of the beam actually enters the chamber.
Sorry I am sans PhD, but HTH anyway.
-Omar *The car is driven by, of course, Natalie Portman.
I wish they were a little more specific about the mechanism here. It sounds like it may have something to do with SpAAD, but I don't remember enough of my rudimentary quantum mechanics to speculate. Anyone know something about how this actually works?
I've not taken the RHCE course, but I have taken a class from Global Knowledge. I took Nortel's Accelar configuration class, and I was very impressed with the knowledgability of my instructor. The tech training business must be booming, because I've never taken any training classes where there weren't two or three young people taking the class to prepare for teaching the class. I enjoyed my class w/ Global and would recommend it to anyone--assuming their other classes are of a similar caliber.
However, I must say I agree with those folks who speak out against vendor-specific certification. I would jump in a minute at the chance to take a general Linux certification exam. I hold two of CompTIA's general specifications (A+ and Network+), and feel that the skills reviewed in those exams are good samplings of the kind of knowledge computer professionals need to have. Not knowing where the default install location for a specific package on a specific distro is a momentary problem for anyone with a basic knowledge of UNIX/Linux. With a strong elementary knowledge base and a good skill set, learning a new distro would be a snap for someone with some experience.
I champion vendor neutral certifications for the same time I advocate Liberal Arts universities and colleges: Specific skills become obsolete quickly. General knowledge and widely applicable skills enable students and professionals to adapt, learn, and grow with changing situations and technologies (and distros!:)
Do you remember how cool it was when email attachments became widely supported? How wonderfully convenient it was? No more cut/paste/uudecoding? No need to mourn the loss of Bitnet and send file/binary?
Well, too bad! Because we're back there again, and nobody is ever going to be able to send an attachment without first calling the recipient.
So call your old university and get your VAX account back. It's the the tightest send in the file sending business.
I think that history has pretty well documented that every extremely powerful state in history has tried to take over the world -- or at the very least, dreamed of it.
The difference is that the US is neither in a position to march troops across the Earth or bind other states by trade dominance. ..our main assets are military strength and, well, wealth.
To paraphrase one of my favorite video game intros, "He who controls the Laws controls the Net -- and he who controlls the Net controlls the world!
I can't help but shake my head at the whole deal. The whole spectre of endless appeals makes me feel pretty let down about this enterprise.
It makes one wonder at the power of the federal government that it can easily whisk in and steal a child that has one lawyer, but can't punish a corporation that has seventy (or 100 or more).
I got these emails this morning. Personally, I found it rather amusing.
Other than that, I don't much feel like there's very much about this incident that's interesting other than the fact that everyone's making such a big deal out of it.
This really isn't as bad as it sounds. It's no different than if you had a service that, say, only allowed people from certain IPs to connect. For example, many Universities pay big bucks to connect to databases such as WolrdCat. To protect their subscription interests, they limit usage to those inside the University's IP range.
Or, look at it another way. This vaporware network would be a pseudo intranet within the Internet, just as my firewalled company network is.
I'm not saying that these powers couldn't be used for evil instead of good; nor am I defending the MPAA. But until we have some sort of cultural upheval and the capitalist system is replaced by something else (!!!), we're gonna always have fish like this to fry. I just think there are probably bigger ones at the present time.:)
1) Yes, they are the same AT&T product that you've known and loved.:)
2) WaveLan uses public bandwidth to broadcast - 10.4, I think. I should know this, since I'm the tech guy for a WaveLan reseller. (Read: should lay off the beer).
I've had similar problems with my website. I wrote a BB program in perl, and users were having a wee bit too much fun with tags. So, I simply modified the code to escape out all >'s with >'s and all -Omar
Why not? Try looking at it this way: People who send 'spam snailmail' (i.e., junk mail) have to pay the United States Postal Service directly to compensate its workers and postal carriers and finance the infrastructure which facilitatesthe delivery of that mail. If they want to send junk mail to 100,000,000 people, it's within their right.
However, Internet spammers are paying an ISP on the edge of the Big Ole Net for two pipes -- one into the ISP, and one out onto the rest of the Internet. If they send out spam to 100,000,000 people, that mail
Traverses lines and takes up bandwidth provided by companies who receive no compensation for allowing the spam to pass
Is parsed by mail servers that are administered by folks whose companies do not get compensated for simply parsing other peoples' email
Takes up tremendous amount of expensive disk space on servers that are run by companies who receive no additional fundage for delivering that email.
So, it's like paying 1 post office a penny a piece to deliver mail all over the US, instead of paying the whole postal service.
It's theft. It's why we used to yell at folks in UseNet just 'cause their.sigs were too long. Now people send spam mail with HTML and graphics and code... I'll bet the amount was pretty well justified by the expense AOL had to go through to deal with the Spam.
I'm no fan of AOL, but I'll defend their right to not be stolen from any day.
Slashdot Mirror
- Cheaper than a Playstation: If the "free" in "free time" equates to "free (as in beer)," I'd like some more of that. That is to
say, End the Culture of ultraproductivity in
the US.
- Cheaper than a PlayStation2 on Ebay:
A maid, or at least a helper to come once a week and help me get my house in order, so I can do all the things that a homeowner is supposed to get done in the course of normal life that I don't have time to do (see above).
- Unlimited:My own lobbyist. Or a patrol of them. Not to badger pols into legislation that only benefits me, but to nudge the government into a lane of common sense (Patents on hyperlinks? *Bzzzt* Oil prospecting in National Parks? *Are you nuts?* Solving social problem with unenforcable laws and empty talk on TV? *C'mon guys. This is the real world.* And what happened to the 40-hour work week? huh? HUH? I *like* life outside of work.
Or something like that.-O
They should be happy to get the fsking publicity.
-Omar
I had a friend with a cool wool trenchcoat. I told him I liked his coat, and he said that he got it from U.S. Cavalry for $7. Wow! So I went online and bought one. Two, actually.
Of course, I started getting U.S. Cav catalogs. But then a few months later, I started getting literature and membership offers from the N.R.A.
Then, just last month, I got an offer to join a hunt club -- when I have never hunted anything in my life! Now I have someone called "Buckmasters" calling me on the phone.
All because I bought a trenchcoat.
I think corporate mailing list sharing has become the evil meme of our times.
-Omar
-Omar
-Omar
-Omar
-Omar
joe_user-961-acorn-drive-anytown-va-22802@usa.com?
Yeah. My aunt Matilda will remember that.
-Omar
[To the tune of "My Sharona"]
So you want to share some songs
Share some songs
When your Napster's gone you'll use my Gnutella
RIAA Copyright qualms
Copyright qualms
They will never find you with my Gnutella
Screw Metallica, and the rest, never gonna stop
I won't give it up. I'm gonna rock. You'll never
catch me with my... my... my... my WOO!
m-m-m-my Gnutella!
m-m-m-my Gnutella!
Oh yeah, it pissed us off, too. But hey, we were breaking the rules. It was just embarrassing to have one's name up on a public list like that, as if we'd cashed a bad check at El Charro or something (JDC, I know you're out there. . .).
Folks who are sharing Metallica songs are more than likely breaking the rules, too. Their ruse is up, too. So, if you wanna break the rules, you'd better find a better way to hide your tracks.
-Omar
As far as your second question, the claim they make is logical (regarding sending info faster than C). My lay guess is that the "tail" of the microwaves that arrives first is some kind of quantum equivilent to a RAID stripe-- the cesium atoms at the far side of the chamber use some form of SpAAD (Spooky Action At a Distance) to reconstruct the information contained in the whole beam based on the information in the tail, and they do the reconstruction faster than the rest of the beam actually enters the chamber.
Sorry I am sans PhD, but HTH anyway.
-Omar
*The car is driven by, of course, Natalie Portman.
-Omar
These are some of the best, most technically advanced and immersive computer games of all time.
Let's all have a moment of silence, and then continue to agitate against the dominant software business model.
-Omar
-Omar
However, I must say I agree with those folks who speak out against vendor-specific certification. I would jump in a minute at the chance to take a general Linux certification exam. I hold two of CompTIA's general specifications (A+ and Network+), and feel that the skills reviewed in those exams are good samplings of the kind of knowledge computer professionals need to have. Not knowing where the default install location for a specific package on a specific distro is a momentary problem for anyone with a basic knowledge of UNIX/Linux. With a strong elementary knowledge base and a good skill set, learning a new distro would be a snap for someone with some experience.
I champion vendor neutral certifications for the same time I advocate Liberal Arts universities and colleges: Specific skills become obsolete quickly. General knowledge and widely applicable skills enable students and professionals to adapt, learn, and grow with changing situations and technologies (and distros! :)
-Omar
Well, too bad! Because we're back there again, and nobody is ever going to be able to send an attachment without first calling the recipient.
So call your old university and get your VAX account back. It's the the tightest send in the file sending business.
-Omar
The difference is that the US is neither in a position to march troops across the Earth or bind other states by trade dominance. . .our main assets are military strength and, well, wealth.
To paraphrase one of my favorite video game intros, "He who controls the Laws controls the Net -- and he who controlls the Net controlls the world!
Bah.
-Omar
It makes one wonder at the power of the federal government that it can easily whisk in and steal a child that has one lawyer, but can't punish a corporation that has seventy (or 100 or more).
-Omar
It probably boots more systems on this planet than the old DOS MBR did though its useful lifetime, and it sure seems stable enough. . .
-Omar
Argh,
-Omar
Other than that, I don't much feel like there's very much about this incident that's interesting other than the fact that everyone's making such a big deal out of it.
Chill out, folks.
-Omar
Or, look at it another way. This vaporware network would be a pseudo intranet within the Internet, just as my firewalled company network is.
I'm not saying that these powers couldn't be used for evil instead of good; nor am I defending the MPAA. But until we have some sort of cultural upheval and the capitalist system is replaced by something else (!!!), we're gonna always have fish like this to fry. I just think there are probably bigger ones at the present time. :)
-Omar
2) WaveLan uses public bandwidth to broadcast - 10.4, I think. I should know this, since I'm the tech guy for a WaveLan reseller. (Read: should lay off the beer).
-JD
I've had similar problems with my website. I wrote a BB program in perl, and users were having a wee bit too much fun with tags. So, I simply modified the code to escape out all >'s with >'s and all -Omar
Why not? Try looking at it this way:
People who send 'spam snailmail' (i.e., junk mail) have to pay the United States Postal Service directly to compensate its workers and postal carriers and finance the infrastructure which facilitatesthe delivery of that mail. If they want to send junk mail to 100,000,000 people, it's within their right.
However, Internet spammers are paying an ISP on the edge of the Big Ole Net for two pipes -- one into the ISP, and one out onto the rest of the Internet. If they send out spam to 100,000,000 people, that mail
- Traverses lines and takes up bandwidth provided by companies who receive no compensation for allowing the spam to pass
- Is parsed by mail servers that are administered by folks whose companies do not get compensated for simply parsing other peoples' email
- Takes up tremendous amount of expensive disk space on servers that are run by companies who receive no additional fundage for delivering that email.
So, it's like paying 1 post office a penny a piece to deliver mail all over the US, instead of paying the whole postal service.It's theft. It's why we used to yell at folks in UseNet just 'cause their .sigs were too long. Now people send spam mail with HTML and graphics and code... I'll bet the amount was pretty well justified by the expense AOL had to go through to deal with the Spam.
I'm no fan of AOL, but I'll defend their right to not be stolen from any day.
-Omar@my.two.sense