I have a hard time sympathizing with management who would willingly use Windows 98, especially in the year 2003. Windows 98 was nothing but pain for me (I ran it on the kids' computer for a couple years). I switched it to XP Home and all my problems went away.
Speaking as someone who's dealt with a very wide variety of hardware and software combinations (it being the nature of my job), I can tell you that this is not a unified solution. Newer does not equal better by any means. We have several customers who've insisted on taking the plunge and upgrading to (formatting and re-installing; not upgrading the installed components) Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (home or pro) and hav actually CAUSED themselves problems, rather than solve them. Many of them have reverted to Windows 98 to solve their problems because it 'worked' moreso than the "professional" operating systems (ME notwithstanding).
To make this post doubly effective, I'll also respond to your parent poster; the article submitter stated specifically that he was interested in a solution that would avail him automated updates for Windows 98 systems - something I, myself, have also been looking for. SMS does NOT support anything but Windows 2000 or Windows XP - period. SMS is NOT an option. Were this not explicitly stated in the article I'd agree with the Insightful mods, but sadly I'm afraid it's more aptly classified as redundant.
For the record, I'm also interested in an automated solution to upgrading client computers ranging from Windows'98 through to Windows XP Professional (we don't support anything older than Windows'98) without having to significantly alter the users' computer. The notion of using our own in-house Windows Update server is potentially viable, except I understand that Windows would then look to that server for future updates. Moreover, I haven't found a decent method by which to automate this process even a little bit; including the ability to download, in raw form, all updates to all Windows versions.
The setup I'm interested in is analagous to the article submitter, except I'm not dealing with a single geographically diverse network, I'm dealing with a geographically diverse cross-section of business and residential customers. Many of whom do not have access to broadband Internet access, so a solution that is portable by means of CD-R would be preferable.
Presently our solution is to (transparently) proxy the machines while on our work benches in order to decrease the time required to download all updates. Some updates (IE6, some criticals) are proxy-friendly, but many simply will not cache, and therefore must be repeatedly re-downloaded from Microsoft. As I pointed out earlier, Microsoft's "Automatic Update" feature, while an apt solution to the apathetic mass customer base, causes problems for a setup like ours. For approximately three full business days after Microsoft's release of their recent VM security update, we simply could not access the Windows Update site with any degree of reliability. It took upwards of an hour to two hours just to download the ActiveX controls and scan for updates; applying them was another story entirely (timeouts, re-tries galore). When I was on location at customer premeses, this made updating their computers all but completely impossible. (If I'd attemped to bill them for an additional four hours to sit and stare blankly at their monitors in turn, I'd never see payment of that invoice!)
I look forward to reading the remainder of the responses and see if anybody else has come up with anything viable. Microsoft, of course, reccomends either direct use of windowsupdate.microsoft.com or SMS. No help there.
While your summary is pretty decent (as far as layman terms go), the one thing I haven't seen mentioned thus far is peering and transit costs.
We all know that the Internet is a great mesh of providers of bandwidth, to whom providers of content connect (and oft-times these providers will be one and the same, but I digress). End-users then connect to this mesh and utilize the content provided via the bandwidth links.
To break it down, let's say we have five companies in a mesh. Ideally, all five companies would maintain a link with all four other companies but rarely does the world ever work out in the most idyllic sense, so we have a partial mesh instead.
Company A connects to B and E.
Company B connects to A, C, and D.
Company C connects to B, D, and E.
Company D connects to B and C.
Company E connects to A and C.
Now we have a problem. Company B wants to transmit data from company E - but they have no direct route. They must transmit portions of their data through A and/or C in order to reach the destination, and vice versa for the return trip. So now a request that involves only two companies has now involved a third party company who really has no interest in this request. To go a step further, we could introduce company F, who maintains a connection with only company D. Now companies A and E must send their transit via no less than two companies to reach their destination. Run a traceroute to some of your favourite websites, large and small, and count the companies your data path crosses along the way. For spice; try probing sites across an ocean or two.
To accomplish the harmony that is our global Internet, companies (vis; corporations, transit providers) utilize peering agreements. These agreements make statements of amounts of data and/or ratios. The relationship between A and B could involve something along the lines of a 2:1 ratio, where the smaller company is permitted to 'generate' 2 times the amount of traffic for every 1 amount that the larger company 'generates'. In the case of a slashdotting, this could throw that ratio, as well as that of many other interim providers, out of balance.
Since this extra bandwidth, although provisions have been made for it, is unexpected and can cause other customers of these providers to experience increased lag until it ends. It can also cause technicians to be called in to adjust routing metrics to mitigate the damage caused by the newly opened floodgates.
Since these top level ("tier 1") providers have to bear these additional expenses, as well as the second level ("tier 2") providers, the cost is translated onto the customer who caused the increase in traffic.
Now this might seem horrifically unfair, many might think - what about when I'm being (D)DoS'ed? Many (most?) providers have provisions in place for such contingencies, including 24x7x365 staffed NOCs with people trained to, again, mitigate the damage and attempt to trace the problem back to its origin and stop it from causing further harm to the network. Again, this service costs money and is an invaluable service to the function and utility of the Internet. If techs had to be roused at 5AM and drive into work in all sorts of weather, consume copious quantities of coffee, then appraise the situation before getting around to solving it DoS attacks would extraordinarily harmful, to the point of "taking down the Internet" for very, very large segments of its userbase.
There are other nominal costs that are incurred and have to be accounted for, such as medium (fibre, copper, microwave, satellite, etc.) to transport bandwidth, equipment to switch, route, shape, filter the data, NOCs to manage the equipment, support centres to handle customer enqueries, sales staff to sell the bandwidth, (management to talk about all of this {nyuk}), real estate in which to house these facilities and their respective staff, etc. When bandwidth usage increases, more medium is required, which comes down to more equipment to connect the medium, more staff to manage it, etc. etc.
In the simplistic sense of 'bandwidth'; once the line is installed and equipment placed at both ends (and paid for), and the recurring costs of the facilities are paid for - you could load that line to wire capacity 24 hours a day for as long as it pleased you. ICMP, NFS, HTTP, whatever traffic suited your fancy. However - as soon as you put a third entity in the middle of that traffic path, the story changes. Most source <---> destinations on the 'net involve two or more interim companies, if not substantially more.
Bandwidth has just as many tangible costs associated with it as fruit after all.:)
My files all already have attributes. For example, my todo list has the following:...
That's all well and good, except when you get into document storage that's more complicated than last week's todo list. I myself have a growing collection of textual documents that I'd love to properly categorize. Take a document, for example, relating to religious influence in the ${BIG_WAR} of ${TIME_PERIOD} in ${LOCALIZATION}. I've also got documentation on race relations in same ${LOCALIZATION}, as well as a history of fashion for ${TIME_PERIOD} over a sparse geographical area, and I've got a chronicle of wars that have affected ${LOCALIZATION} in the last century, etc..
Now; five years later, I'm doing some digging on either religious influence on war, or on a particular war, or on a particular location, or a cross-reference of ${LOCATION} and {$TIME_PERIOD}, or any number of other subjects. Now I have to look in my religion folder, sub folders of various localizations - but wait - do I sort by time period? So now I have to symlink time periods with other time periods for the same location; then I have to link different locations with their various time periods, and I have to cross reference the links involving black religion, or the insurgence of muslim influence on the jewish population, or...
Document management systems are pretty meaningless when you consider your personal tax returns, todo lists, shopping lists, etc. but when you consider large volumes of historical data, or even a collection of jokes, or music (genre, cross-overs, artists, re-mixes, albums, songs,...) such systems are absolutely invaluable; short of indexing everything into a database that has cross-referencing abilities.
A former history professor of mine was recently lamenting on the fact that he needed a better electronic chronicling system for his many tens of thousands of documents relating to holocaust (and era) literature. For individual lessons, he'd like to be able to plug in a set number of parameters and pull up a wide range of documents (and literary works) to choose from, rather than having to sift through every category that comes to mind.
For the record; the "My Documents" folder heirarchy falls flat on its face as soon as you start getting involved in projects with multiple participants. Consider a Venn diagram with, say, six circles; each representing groups of five or six people and you'll get the idea.
The grant isn't paying for the admission (tuition) but the facilities and curriculum. Both are needed to educate someone; as such this grant would fund the education of non-citizens. I don't have a problem with denying government help to non-citizens.
That's probably the most flawed logic I've ever heard. By that logic, each and every resident American's tuition is also paying for facilities and curriculum and faculty and therefore is contributing to foreign students' education. Moreover, every penny put into the colleges / universities in America can be traced directly or indirectly to supporting the education of foreign students.
So why not just get it over with and close your borders already? After all, these foreigners will obviously just be coming to America seeking welfare, right?
Was the class advertised as post-secondary level (and did the "slacker" students just sign up for something that was over their heads), or were the teacher's expectations beyond the level of the class? If the former, then that must have been dissapointing for the teacher and the students who were actually capable of the higher level work, but, on some level, I want to say that if the class really was too hard for the majority of the students then the curve probably really did need adjusting.
The class was required for the program, and it being a post-secondary (college) program, it should have been expected to be at a post-secondary level. The course was actually extremely easy; mostly simple take-home assignments and some simple in-class excersizes. The exams were open-book (anything you could bring on paper was permissable) yet atleast half the class failed. Yes, that's right, failed.
The majority of students in this program were fresh out of high school, and I'd have to say that the vast majority of them had absolutely no discipline where studies were concerned. Students didn't pay attention in class and didn't complete their take home assignments. Students were buying and trading (bartering) for one-another's assignments and cheating on, but still failing (or barely passing) open book exams (atleast three of the first years' finals were open book).
In short; the problems of students not paying attention isn't related to the technology at their disposal, that's just the latest of a long string of distractions students have had at the post secondary level to not pay attention in [lecture|class]. Whether you're in the blame the parents camp, or in the blame the teachers camp, or in the blame the liberals camp, or... the students are completely unprepared for an actual learning environment, and by extension are not adequately prepared for the real world. When in a class out of 115 students, where about 5% or so have been out of high school for a number of years, only 10% really show any signs of excelling or even performing up to expected standards.
Teachers face the burden of having to win popularity contests in order to keep their positions and pay levels. The idea of student review is a good one; only if the students are mature enough to review the teachers with some level of responsibility. Otherwise, the teachers who demand any sort of high standards from their students are rated very poorly; coupled with complaints of unfairness to the program facilitator and/or chairperson and the teacher gets reprimnded. After all; ten students wouldn't complain for frivolous reasons, right?
The typical reaction I got from many of the students I spoke to about the course was flippant; they didn't believe they needed it. These being people who haven't worked a single hour in the field of computer networking, and they're telling me with great authority that they don't need to know anything about data encoding, signal attenuation, cross-talk, electronic versus optical signalling, etc.. (if you work in data communications, I'm sure by now you're shaking your head. Let me tell you; I was, and still am).
High school has taught students that some courses are required and others are optional - they only understand that credits lead to a diploma; the knowledge gleaned from the course is inconsequential. This being a rather unfortunate side-effect of most high school courses that can be literally faked through by any cunning student.
It looks like Slashdot has discovered a new source of income: turning press releases into headlines. It's far from original, but it works -- for a while, anyway.
Newsflash for you, and for every other maroon who parrots the "Slashdot is selling out" / "Slashdot should charge advertising fees" lines; This is a site dedicated to news for nerds. Nerds like gadgets. They like cool toys, fast processors, high speed RAM, water cooling to make the best out of their new high speed toys, mods to make their toys look good, caffeinated products, sugary foods - how else is a news site supposed to tell people about these products without, oh, mentioning them by name? Are you going to clamour that they should charge AMD for announcing the Athlon 64 release to the market? Or they they should invoice Intel for announcing the Pentium 4 4.0GHz?
It's news. Get over it. If you don't like it, go somewhere else and be uninformed. Stick to your Celeron 400MHz and thinnet LAN and quit bitching. It's old, and nobody cares.
And at the risk of turning this into a spelling flame, perhaps you should have paid more attention to your English professor while you were busy learning to multi-task in grade 8.
The lecture on cultural sensitivity on an international medium is thattaway -->
I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that Monseur SerpentMage is, how you say, French?
And if the student is not paying enough attention to the professor to actually give an honest, fair evaluation, what then?
One of the professors at the college I attended was probably the best lecturer I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. (And yes, he had a fairly distinct Italian accent. If you paid attention, however, you could understand what he was saying - he was kind enough to enunciate industry terminology) However, he had post-secondary expectations of the students who had secondary school expectations of the course. Therefore he wound up with dozens of complaints and really poor reviews. Throughout the course he gave lectures including many things that weren't in the assigned textbook or in the handout materials - kind of extra digressions of the course material. Much of it helped to learn the materikal better, some of it was simply an extra interesting fact or two that we could take away with us. Much of it, however, was to be on the final exam. See, he'd already noticed a rather distinct pattern of students who were away from most every class.
Early in the course, he handed out a 30-50 page report, due in about three months, and from then on the students decided, en masse, to unilaterally hate and ignore said teacher. As a result, he was forced to lower the bar to ridiculous levels when marking these assignments; to the point where I, who had handed in a large, well researched, well complied paper covering all the outlined materials, nicely presented in a folder, felt slighted. Granted, I got an A+ on the paper - but the guy who handed in a four page, double spaced, stapled, wide margin paper with (of all things) pictures got an A.
The unfortunate aspect of colleges and universities is the fact that they are, by and large, a business. Their clients are their students; without whom they could not keep their doors open. I entered college with the rather naive impression that college would be somehow better than high school because, hey, people are paying thousands of dollars to be here so they have to care, right? As it turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. College students seemed to be some of the most spoiled, apathetic brats I've had the displeasure of being associated with. What made matters worse was the fact that so many of them had cars, not to mention that the majority were 'of age' to drink and could skip class in favour of the campus bar.
I'm of the opinion that college should have a pre-requisite that students do sometghing on their own for a period of one-two years such as work a full-time job, rent their own appartment and manage bills; something to aquaint themselves with the real world before they get to sit in padded, swivellling chairs and ignore the poor schmuch trying to instill knowledge in them.
To get topical; wireless or no wireless, students will likely always ignore the teacher to some extent. The "Back Row" students will always find distractions; even if they have to bring a switch/hub and some ethernet cables and play games against one-another, they'll do it. Our primary lab was wired with a 2:1 ratio of ethernet ports to computers, therefore allowing every student to also bring a laptop with them (which was, for various reasons, against policy, but I digress). To get around the problem of students playing games, chatting on ${MESSENGER}, surfing the web - many teachers would instruct the students to close all laptops and turn off all monitors. There were few rare exceptions for the students who actually took lecture notes on their computers, but those were typically sitting at or near the front and were few and far between.
Perhaps these instructors could simply ask the disruptive students who obviously aren't paying attention why they're there? After all, if they just want to use the network and play games / horse around - couldn't they do that in the school's lounge, student centre, cafeteria, etc..? If they continue to not pay attention, they could be asked to leave, lest they disrupt the remainder of the class. Sure, they have a right to be there based on the money they've paid - but they don't have the right to disrupt the class for the dozens of others who've also paid thue same amount.
Get up off your ass and RUN FOR PUBLIC FREE ELECTIONS.
Ok, so I can possibly get elected to a municipal council. I'll get to affect changes to the size and number of speed bumps around certain school zones. I'll be able to vote on such poignant issues as the number of trees that should be planted around the water front.
Oh, wait, did you mean run for political positions that mean something? Ok, so I run for [Provincial|State] office. I run, with a limited budget with minor campaign contributions from my non-conglomerate backers against people with hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of corporate backers in their pocket. I air one television spot; they air a hundred. I air a short radio stint, they air a week-long blitz. I appear on local, free, or otherwise small-scale radio stations - they interview on national shows in prime time.
Welcome to your capitalist dream society. The little moralistic guy can't win - it's just not built that way. The only way to win an election is to have the financial support and backers to get your message out to the public, and even then it has to be a message that people will want to put their vote behind.
So let's assume I do get financial support via some magical windfall. My opponent (who, let's not forget, is the amoral type we're trying to remove from office in the first place) does a little digging and comes up with some not so tasteful elements of my past, or the past of any of the major contributors / members of my campaign party. So now they're slinging mud, and hey, how can I throw back what with my moralistic campaign and all?
Welcome to your modern representitive democracy; where the media wins and loses elections based on popular opinion.
So now I get into office. I've had to struggle like a madman for probably a little over a decade with likely upwards of half a million dollars invested in my campaign. Now I have a seat in Parliament where I can make a difference, right? Wait - no, I can't. I'm voting my voice against the majority [Liberal| Conservative| Republican| Democratic| Progressive Conservative| etc] government, and the minority opposition. So my vote is heard among the hundreds of other voices. Well gee whiz - what a load of good I've just accomplished for one riding who, oh, wait, can decide that they don't like the progress I'm (not) making and subsequently elect my ass out of office.
Welcome to reality. It's all well and good to stand on your patriotic soapbox and tell people that they can make a difference, but some of us know that this is a crock. We've been living in a capitalist corrupted system for more than a century that's only getting worse by the year as the separation of church and state becomes less pertinent as the separation of corporation and state; a margin that grows ever smaller as each and every day goes by.
So if you think a small individual can make a difference in a world whose apathy exceeds all bounds, by all means, show me a solid plan. Show me where you plan on finding the hundreds of thousands of dedicated individuals who won't just get behind the cause of the moment but who'll stand behind your everlasting cause of change of the system through thick and thin.
When you're done mulling, maybe you can wake up and join me in the knowledge that you can't use a corrupt system to change its roots. The next major change to our way of life will come at the end of a large payload that makes my two story house the tallest building for hundreds of miles. Or, perhaps, it'll come in a more subtle form.
Since this is a response to an obvious troll, I'll not +1 myself.
Is there a PDF plugin for a linux based browser? I dont mean sticking a seperate viewer inside the browser, I mean using the browser to render the page I have never seen a good PDF viewer, okay?
Why would the browser render something that the plugin is more than capable of handling? I've got Acrobat Reader 5 installed, including the Netscape plugin being used with both Mozilla 1.2.1 and Phoenix 0.5 and it works fine for me. I can still use my browser controls for back / forward, and I've got all the functionality of the Acrobat reader software (what more do you need? Zoom, scroll, search, print, text selection, copy'n'paste,...). The same is true for any non-HTML data format sent to web browsers (spreadsheet, document, etc.) in that the browsers can not, and should not render these formats.
If you'd like, you could write a simple plugin that converts the PDF data to another format more to your liking and that the browser can display. Google does it with (almost?) all PDF files referenced in their search results.
The technology exists; all you have to do is use it.
BECAUSE PDF IS FOR PRINTING, YOU JACKHOLES.
My, such strong words for such a mis-understanding. The above referenced 'article' is a book - get it? It's not a web page, it's an online BOOK, Herr Jackhole. The author / publisher most likely wish it to remain in the same format / style as they so laboriously laid out for printing, therefore they use a stylistic medium that affords them this luxury. Comprende?
And if you're of a differing opinion, any comment you post in responce is wrong. This is because I have here stated my opinion, and personal experience. So trying to combat this with your opinion or personal experience is.. see above for comment about you being a moron.
Wow. It's so nice to see that offering a difference of opinion is "moronic" in a debate that centres around the freedoms and virtues of America.
My, but it's nice to be able to state an opinion and be labelled a moron; all this before my second cup of coffee, no less.
Here's a little lesson in how things work for Americans, because obviously some of you just don't get it. American Government is ran by AMERICANS. "they" are "us" and no different except the titles beside their names
Please, oh please tell me that you're not this naive. Do you really think the oil-baron, conglomerate corporate executives who become elected officials in North America are no different from John Q. Public who elect them? Come on. I've heard more plausible conclusions come out of children's fairy tales.
Re:I still haven't filled my 60GB HDD...
on
1.5 TB DVD by 2010
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· Score: 2
i never even filled my 20gb drive. and i had 3 operating systems and an impressive collection of pr0n and mp3s on it. unless you do digital video editing, you probably won't ever need anything larger than 40gb. at least until the next version of windows and office comes out.
I've come pretty close to filling my 80GB Western Digital that resides in my server, and the 20GB and 40GB that make up my workstation are getting pretty close to filled based on;
Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault
MechWarrior 4: Vengeance
Max Payne
Need For Speed III
Oni
Soldier Of Fortune Platinum
Soldier Of Fortune II: Double Helix
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
WarCraft III
WarCraft II
Star Trek: Armada 2
With more coming (Comanche 4, Silent Hill 2, Hitman 2: Silent Assault, etc) as soon as I upgrade my video card. That's not to mention the fact that I've got;
Windows XP
Microsoft Office 2000
Corel Office 2002
Windows 2000
Gentoo 1.2
KDE 3.0.5a
OpenOffice 1.0.1
VMWare
Windows 98SE
Windows 2000
SuSE 8.0
Gentoo 1.4
FreeBSD 4.7
installed presently. Video editing does eat up a lot of space, but there are probably dozens of reasons why a person would require large amounts of storage capacity. A friend of mine with 30GB worth of MP3s, another friend with several game CD images stored on his drive (he hates hunting for the CDs), a colleague who runs a recording studio and deals with raw, uncompressed digital audio, etc. etc.
The 15GB drive in my laptop is getting a bit brimming right now, since I have to have three operating systems and a lot of data (network maps/plans, company information, images, price lists, development tools, etc.).
7 years ago a friend of mine had an 11 Gig hard drive (I remember his exact quote "I can copy *ENTIRE CD's* to my drive"). Now 11 Gigs was impressive as all hell, but it's a far cry from the 200 meg drive the parent poster was claiming.
7 years ago? As in 1995-1996? Your friend must have had a pretty decent source of income to purchase such an astronomically large drive.
Ok you're right, after I submitted and did more remembering, I remember my friends having 1GB hard drives in '95. But in '92 when we purchased a 486DX/33 it had a 120MB hard drive that was big for its time. Still, 7 years ago we had 1.6GB hard drives. Do you think 1.5TB will be such a big deal in 7 years? I don't think so. We'll have 1TB hard drives in 4-5 years from now.
Based on the proportionality the computer industry seems to maintain, hard drive capacity will, in all likelyhood, outstripe removeable media capacity by atleast ten-fold.
Right now I can burn 4.7 (or, I believe, 9.4) GB onto a single disc. I can also purchase a single hard disk drive that will hold 200GB. That's more than twenty times the storage capacity.
Following that (grossly over-simplified) logic, by the time I can store 1.5TB on a single disc, my hard drive will hold a modest 30-60TB.
While the notion of RAID'ing a group of 5 30TB hard disk drives sounds way more than phoenominal today, it'll most likely be fairly common-place in a decade.
I'm not sure if the content and magnitude of growth of knowledge/information we have will grow at the rate of technology, so it's difficult to say whether we'd need "Data Centres" in the not-so-distant future, or if the network server will be a standard ATX (or equivalent at the time) case sitting under somebody's desk.
Then again, if full-motion 3D imaging comes to pass as a commonplace technology (hard to envision, what with regular video conferencing being so niche (ie; not mainstream), we could see requirements for fields upon fields of 100PB storage arrays.
Then I converted the weight into grains and fed that into the calculator here [firearmexpertwitness.com]. I got a result of 314102.56 Ft-Lbs. Convert that to joules and you get 425,865.873284 joules. Sigvigantly more than the 500 joules at the muzzle quoted for a 9mm hand gun shell.
Going back to the 'hole' theory, however, tells me that this shell will create a rather significant hole in whatever area it hits. Supposing it hits the chest area (the broadest area of an animal, also the one with the most vital organs) it would potentialy create a hole large enough to put your arm clean through. The chance of such a shell NOT hitting a vital organ along its way is very, very slim.
I have to say, though, that this is the first time I've ever heard mention of this "Hydrostatic Shock" theory, and I can easily see why; it's about as baseless as so many other pseudo-science ('wives tale') claims.
Anybody who's taken even a basic biology course will understand that if an artery is clipped/severed/ruptured, the animal's heart is then literally pumping blood outside of thebody. When enough blood has escaped so as to decrease the blood pressure, and thus deprive vitaul organs of blood/oxygen, they will cease to function as expected. (Very non-medical description from a person who is not a doctor; consider it a nutshell;) )
What's next; a claim that bullets offset the balance of the four humours?
Because these anti-science crackpots are trying to make it look as if NASA spent billions with nothing to show for it. They're trying to undermine the faith that society has in science.
You're painting with a pretty wide brush there, I must say. Some (many, I'd wager) people who doubt things like the moon landing are merely skeptical; it doesn't mean they're somehow opposed to science as a whole. Problem is, generally the only ones who get substantial airtime are the extremists. {sigh}
The world is a much bigger, more diverse place than Fox portrays.;)
You're probably not going to change the mind of someone who is CONVINCED the moon landing was a hoax. I don't see a need to spend money that could go toward research on trying to change people's minds.
I for one wish more people would start to doubt things they saw on television / the big screen. Things like the "Blair Witch Project", for example, show just how easy it is to convince people that fantasy is reality.
n.b. I'm not saying the moon landing didn't happen, I'm just saying it's entirely possible that it was faked. Personally, I remain skeptical, but I don't fret about it. Did we land on the moon? Does it matter? Who cares! Of course the billions of dollars the American citizens are spending on NASA funding quite probably sticks in their craw some, but hey, it's their choice whether they want to spend money for the research NASA provides. Is the moon landing the only tangible thing for which they can plead for funding? If they have other reasons to request funding, so be it.
As for people who are "CONVINCED" that it was a hoax, well, they're just as closed-minded as the people who are "CONVINCED" that it did happen. It's like anything else you haven't personally experienced; you have to take someone elses word for it. I'm sure we could spend weeks coming up with counter-arguments for every existing argument, and even counter-arguments for the counter-arguments. The problem is, however, all of this relies on the words of people who are making the original claims. That amounts to a lot of circular logic being employed by both sides. As for the people who were there, well, they have a vested interest in maintaining a unified front.
Meanwhile, there are more important things down on Earth to concern ourselves with, so I'll now attend to them and forget the whole thing. {smile}
It doesn't seem appropriate that these ISPs turn around and deactivate you for something they can simply block- disallowing TCP protocols 50 and 51 (mind you, not TCP ports 50 and 51, there is a sharp difference) would block VPN access. I surmise that non-commercial grade VPN software resolves merely to ssh tunnel/ppp/routing hacks- unreliable and costly, overhead wise.
"Commercial-Grade" VPN, by their wording, means any VPN software that offers encryption. Or, really, anything they want to call it. That's the design of their TOS - deliberate ambiguity.
Resource taxing or no, SSL tunnelling VPN software via UDP / TCP is perfectly capable of delivering what users want; the ability to sneak packets out the door, so to speak.
By the same ambiguous wording, they've enabled themselves to block P2P clients based on the fact that each one of them is, technically, a 'server'.
Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable both have (or had, at one point in time) wording in their AUPs that forbid "commercial grade virtual private network" software from being used on their connection.
30-50? That's pretty good. Between work and home, I get around 175 spams a day. It's nice taking a vacation, and checking my email for the first time in a week. There's about 800 messages at home, plus another hundred at work.
Ouch. Rather than quoting, I'll try to address each of your points individually;
Purchasing things via the Internet / web page form submissions; That's why I have a generic @yahoo.com e-mail account. Periodically I log in, select probably 9 of 10 messages, delete them, browse the other few messages then delete them too. When I'm expecting something I'll log in, read it, then select the whole mailbox for deletion. Problem solved.
Mailing lists; I have an account that I use solely for mailing lists. Anything that doesn't fit into one of my (very stringent) procmail recipes destined for that address is bit-bucketed. If I didn't sign up for it, I don't want it.
I don't give out any of my personal e-mail addresses in electronic form, except to individuals whom I trust (which generally precludes people who run Outlook* e-mail clients).
Running my own domain; I don't get e-mail as a result of running a domain, for a number of reasons. I host my own websites, and everything involving my domain on my own computer. I don't publish any @snerk.org e-mail addresses; instead opting to use a small, little-known CGI e-mail contact form (that has a clearly visible "[FROM EMAIL CGI]" string in the subject line. Hell-o procmail!;)
As a result, I haven't yet had any need for a SPAM catching utility.
As to your addendum about telemarketers; as many people said in the previous telemarketting thread (I forget which story); requesting to be removed from their call lists has worked absolute wonders for me. I'm to the point where I don't recall the last telemarketer phone call I've had. Kind of upsetting, too, since I've always enjoyed playing with them. Asking carpet cleaning companies if they can get human blood out.. No, no; it's fresh... Beaming with excitement and thanking chimney cleaning companies because, hey, if they're going to install a fireplace for me (you know, so they can then clean my chimney)...
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who's dealt with a very wide variety of hardware and software combinations (it being the nature of my job), I can tell you that this is not a unified solution. Newer does not equal better by any means. We have several customers who've insisted on taking the plunge and upgrading to (formatting and re-installing; not upgrading the installed components) Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP (home or pro) and hav actually CAUSED themselves problems, rather than solve them. Many of them have reverted to Windows 98 to solve their problems because it 'worked' moreso than the "professional" operating systems (ME notwithstanding).
To make this post doubly effective, I'll also respond to your parent poster; the article submitter stated specifically that he was interested in a solution that would avail him automated updates for Windows 98 systems - something I, myself, have also been looking for. SMS does NOT support anything but Windows 2000 or Windows XP - period. SMS is NOT an option. Were this not explicitly stated in the article I'd agree with the Insightful mods, but sadly I'm afraid it's more aptly classified as redundant.
For the record, I'm also interested in an automated solution to upgrading client computers ranging from Windows'98 through to Windows XP Professional (we don't support anything older than Windows'98) without having to significantly alter the users' computer. The notion of using our own in-house Windows Update server is potentially viable, except I understand that Windows would then look to that server for future updates. Moreover, I haven't found a decent method by which to automate this process even a little bit; including the ability to download, in raw form, all updates to all Windows versions.
The setup I'm interested in is analagous to the article submitter, except I'm not dealing with a single geographically diverse network, I'm dealing with a geographically diverse cross-section of business and residential customers. Many of whom do not have access to broadband Internet access, so a solution that is portable by means of CD-R would be preferable.
Presently our solution is to (transparently) proxy the machines while on our work benches in order to decrease the time required to download all updates. Some updates (IE6, some criticals) are proxy-friendly, but many simply will not cache, and therefore must be repeatedly re-downloaded from Microsoft. As I pointed out earlier, Microsoft's "Automatic Update" feature, while an apt solution to the apathetic mass customer base, causes problems for a setup like ours. For approximately three full business days after Microsoft's release of their recent VM security update, we simply could not access the Windows Update site with any degree of reliability. It took upwards of an hour to two hours just to download the ActiveX controls and scan for updates; applying them was another story entirely (timeouts, re-tries galore). When I was on location at customer premeses, this made updating their computers all but completely impossible. (If I'd attemped to bill them for an additional four hours to sit and stare blankly at their monitors in turn, I'd never see payment of that invoice!)
I look forward to reading the remainder of the responses and see if anybody else has come up with anything viable. Microsoft, of course, reccomends either direct use of windowsupdate.microsoft.com or SMS. No help there.
While your summary is pretty decent (as far as layman terms go), the one thing I haven't seen mentioned thus far is peering and transit costs.
We all know that the Internet is a great mesh of providers of bandwidth, to whom providers of content connect (and oft-times these providers will be one and the same, but I digress). End-users then connect to this mesh and utilize the content provided via the bandwidth links.
To break it down, let's say we have five companies in a mesh. Ideally, all five companies would maintain a link with all four other companies but rarely does the world ever work out in the most idyllic sense, so we have a partial mesh instead.
Company A connects to B and E.
Company B connects to A, C, and D.
Company C connects to B, D, and E.
Company D connects to B and C.
Company E connects to A and C.
Now we have a problem. Company B wants to transmit data from company E - but they have no direct route. They must transmit portions of their data through A and/or C in order to reach the destination, and vice versa for the return trip. So now a request that involves only two companies has now involved a third party company who really has no interest in this request. To go a step further, we could introduce company F, who maintains a connection with only company D. Now companies A and E must send their transit via no less than two companies to reach their destination. Run a traceroute to some of your favourite websites, large and small, and count the companies your data path crosses along the way. For spice; try probing sites across an ocean or two.
To accomplish the harmony that is our global Internet, companies (vis; corporations, transit providers) utilize peering agreements. These agreements make statements of amounts of data and/or ratios. The relationship between A and B could involve something along the lines of a 2:1 ratio, where the smaller company is permitted to 'generate' 2 times the amount of traffic for every 1 amount that the larger company 'generates'. In the case of a slashdotting, this could throw that ratio, as well as that of many other interim providers, out of balance.
Since this extra bandwidth, although provisions have been made for it, is unexpected and can cause other customers of these providers to experience increased lag until it ends. It can also cause technicians to be called in to adjust routing metrics to mitigate the damage caused by the newly opened floodgates.
Since these top level ("tier 1") providers have to bear these additional expenses, as well as the second level ("tier 2") providers, the cost is translated onto the customer who caused the increase in traffic.
Now this might seem horrifically unfair, many might think - what about when I'm being (D)DoS'ed? Many (most?) providers have provisions in place for such contingencies, including 24x7x365 staffed NOCs with people trained to, again, mitigate the damage and attempt to trace the problem back to its origin and stop it from causing further harm to the network. Again, this service costs money and is an invaluable service to the function and utility of the Internet. If techs had to be roused at 5AM and drive into work in all sorts of weather, consume copious quantities of coffee, then appraise the situation before getting around to solving it DoS attacks would extraordinarily harmful, to the point of "taking down the Internet" for very, very large segments of its userbase.
There are other nominal costs that are incurred and have to be accounted for, such as medium (fibre, copper, microwave, satellite, etc.) to transport bandwidth, equipment to switch, route, shape, filter the data, NOCs to manage the equipment, support centres to handle customer enqueries, sales staff to sell the bandwidth, (management to talk about all of this {nyuk}), real estate in which to house these facilities and their respective staff, etc. When bandwidth usage increases, more medium is required, which comes down to more equipment to connect the medium, more staff to manage it, etc. etc.
In the simplistic sense of 'bandwidth'; once the line is installed and equipment placed at both ends (and paid for), and the recurring costs of the facilities are paid for - you could load that line to wire capacity 24 hours a day for as long as it pleased you. ICMP, NFS, HTTP, whatever traffic suited your fancy. However - as soon as you put a third entity in the middle of that traffic path, the story changes. Most source <---> destinations on the 'net involve two or more interim companies, if not substantially more.
Bandwidth has just as many tangible costs associated with it as fruit after all. :)
Pssst - Just because a news site mentions a company name doesn't make it advertising. Perhaps you should heed your own signature.
That's nice. Do they buy them 10 thousand at a hit?
Think "Big Picture"
That's all well and good, except when you get into document storage that's more complicated than last week's todo list. I myself have a growing collection of textual documents that I'd love to properly categorize. Take a document, for example, relating to religious influence in the ${BIG_WAR} of ${TIME_PERIOD} in ${LOCALIZATION}. I've also got documentation on race relations in same ${LOCALIZATION}, as well as a history of fashion for ${TIME_PERIOD} over a sparse geographical area, and I've got a chronicle of wars that have affected ${LOCALIZATION} in the last century, etc..
Now; five years later, I'm doing some digging on either religious influence on war, or on a particular war, or on a particular location, or a cross-reference of ${LOCATION} and {$TIME_PERIOD}, or any number of other subjects. Now I have to look in my religion folder, sub folders of various localizations - but wait - do I sort by time period? So now I have to symlink time periods with other time periods for the same location; then I have to link different locations with their various time periods, and I have to cross reference the links involving black religion, or the insurgence of muslim influence on the jewish population, or ...
Document management systems are pretty meaningless when you consider your personal tax returns, todo lists, shopping lists, etc. but when you consider large volumes of historical data, or even a collection of jokes, or music (genre, cross-overs, artists, re-mixes, albums, songs, ...) such systems are absolutely invaluable; short of indexing everything into a database that has cross-referencing abilities.
A former history professor of mine was recently lamenting on the fact that he needed a better electronic chronicling system for his many tens of thousands of documents relating to holocaust (and era) literature. For individual lessons, he'd like to be able to plug in a set number of parameters and pull up a wide range of documents (and literary works) to choose from, rather than having to sift through every category that comes to mind.
For the record; the "My Documents" folder heirarchy falls flat on its face as soon as you start getting involved in projects with multiple participants. Consider a Venn diagram with, say, six circles; each representing groups of five or six people and you'll get the idea.
That's probably the most flawed logic I've ever heard. By that logic, each and every resident American's tuition is also paying for facilities and curriculum and faculty and therefore is contributing to foreign students' education. Moreover, every penny put into the colleges / universities in America can be traced directly or indirectly to supporting the education of foreign students.
So why not just get it over with and close your borders already? After all, these foreigners will obviously just be coming to America seeking welfare, right?
This is a research grant, not tuition. Foreign students generally pay far more than residents due to ineligibility for federal/state grants.
Now then - what's that they say about knowing when to open one's mouth?
The class was required for the program, and it being a post-secondary (college) program, it should have been expected to be at a post-secondary level. The course was actually extremely easy; mostly simple take-home assignments and some simple in-class excersizes. The exams were open-book (anything you could bring on paper was permissable) yet atleast half the class failed. Yes, that's right, failed.
The majority of students in this program were fresh out of high school, and I'd have to say that the vast majority of them had absolutely no discipline where studies were concerned. Students didn't pay attention in class and didn't complete their take home assignments. Students were buying and trading (bartering) for one-another's assignments and cheating on, but still failing (or barely passing) open book exams (atleast three of the first years' finals were open book).
In short; the problems of students not paying attention isn't related to the technology at their disposal, that's just the latest of a long string of distractions students have had at the post secondary level to not pay attention in [lecture|class]. Whether you're in the blame the parents camp, or in the blame the teachers camp, or in the blame the liberals camp, or ... the students are completely unprepared for an actual learning environment, and by extension are not adequately prepared for the real world. When in a class out of 115 students, where about 5% or so have been out of high school for a number of years, only 10% really show any signs of excelling or even performing up to expected standards.
Teachers face the burden of having to win popularity contests in order to keep their positions and pay levels. The idea of student review is a good one; only if the students are mature enough to review the teachers with some level of responsibility. Otherwise, the teachers who demand any sort of high standards from their students are rated very poorly; coupled with complaints of unfairness to the program facilitator and/or chairperson and the teacher gets reprimnded. After all; ten students wouldn't complain for frivolous reasons, right?
The typical reaction I got from many of the students I spoke to about the course was flippant; they didn't believe they needed it. These being people who haven't worked a single hour in the field of computer networking, and they're telling me with great authority that they don't need to know anything about data encoding, signal attenuation, cross-talk, electronic versus optical signalling, etc.. (if you work in data communications, I'm sure by now you're shaking your head. Let me tell you; I was, and still am).
High school has taught students that some courses are required and others are optional - they only understand that credits lead to a diploma; the knowledge gleaned from the course is inconsequential. This being a rather unfortunate side-effect of most high school courses that can be literally faked through by any cunning student.
Newsflash for you, and for every other maroon who parrots the "Slashdot is selling out" / "Slashdot should charge advertising fees" lines; This is a site dedicated to news for nerds. Nerds like gadgets. They like cool toys, fast processors, high speed RAM, water cooling to make the best out of their new high speed toys, mods to make their toys look good, caffeinated products, sugary foods - how else is a news site supposed to tell people about these products without, oh, mentioning them by name? Are you going to clamour that they should charge AMD for announcing the Athlon 64 release to the market? Or they they should invoice Intel for announcing the Pentium 4 4.0GHz?
It's news. Get over it. If you don't like it, go somewhere else and be uninformed. Stick to your Celeron 400MHz and thinnet LAN and quit bitching. It's old, and nobody cares.
The lecture on cultural sensitivity on an international medium is thattaway -->
I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that Monseur SerpentMage is, how you say, French?
One of the professors at the college I attended was probably the best lecturer I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. (And yes, he had a fairly distinct Italian accent. If you paid attention, however, you could understand what he was saying - he was kind enough to enunciate industry terminology) However, he had post-secondary expectations of the students who had secondary school expectations of the course. Therefore he wound up with dozens of complaints and really poor reviews. Throughout the course he gave lectures including many things that weren't in the assigned textbook or in the handout materials - kind of extra digressions of the course material. Much of it helped to learn the materikal better, some of it was simply an extra interesting fact or two that we could take away with us. Much of it, however, was to be on the final exam. See, he'd already noticed a rather distinct pattern of students who were away from most every class.
Early in the course, he handed out a 30-50 page report, due in about three months, and from then on the students decided, en masse, to unilaterally hate and ignore said teacher. As a result, he was forced to lower the bar to ridiculous levels when marking these assignments; to the point where I, who had handed in a large, well researched, well complied paper covering all the outlined materials, nicely presented in a folder, felt slighted. Granted, I got an A+ on the paper - but the guy who handed in a four page, double spaced, stapled, wide margin paper with (of all things) pictures got an A.
The unfortunate aspect of colleges and universities is the fact that they are, by and large, a business. Their clients are their students; without whom they could not keep their doors open. I entered college with the rather naive impression that college would be somehow better than high school because, hey, people are paying thousands of dollars to be here so they have to care, right? As it turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. College students seemed to be some of the most spoiled, apathetic brats I've had the displeasure of being associated with. What made matters worse was the fact that so many of them had cars, not to mention that the majority were 'of age' to drink and could skip class in favour of the campus bar.
I'm of the opinion that college should have a pre-requisite that students do sometghing on their own for a period of one-two years such as work a full-time job, rent their own appartment and manage bills; something to aquaint themselves with the real world before they get to sit in padded, swivellling chairs and ignore the poor schmuch trying to instill knowledge in them.
To get topical; wireless or no wireless, students will likely always ignore the teacher to some extent. The "Back Row" students will always find distractions; even if they have to bring a switch/hub and some ethernet cables and play games against one-another, they'll do it. Our primary lab was wired with a 2:1 ratio of ethernet ports to computers, therefore allowing every student to also bring a laptop with them (which was, for various reasons, against policy, but I digress). To get around the problem of students playing games, chatting on ${MESSENGER}, surfing the web - many teachers would instruct the students to close all laptops and turn off all monitors. There were few rare exceptions for the students who actually took lecture notes on their computers, but those were typically sitting at or near the front and were few and far between.
Perhaps these instructors could simply ask the disruptive students who obviously aren't paying attention why they're there? After all, if they just want to use the network and play games / horse around - couldn't they do that in the school's lounge, student centre, cafeteria, etc..? If they continue to not pay attention, they could be asked to leave, lest they disrupt the remainder of the class. Sure, they have a right to be there based on the money they've paid - but they don't have the right to disrupt the class for the dozens of others who've also paid thue same amount.
Ok, so I can possibly get elected to a municipal council. I'll get to affect changes to the size and number of speed bumps around certain school zones. I'll be able to vote on such poignant issues as the number of trees that should be planted around the water front.
Oh, wait, did you mean run for political positions that mean something? Ok, so I run for [Provincial|State] office. I run, with a limited budget with minor campaign contributions from my non-conglomerate backers against people with hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of corporate backers in their pocket. I air one television spot; they air a hundred. I air a short radio stint, they air a week-long blitz. I appear on local, free, or otherwise small-scale radio stations - they interview on national shows in prime time.
Welcome to your capitalist dream society. The little moralistic guy can't win - it's just not built that way. The only way to win an election is to have the financial support and backers to get your message out to the public, and even then it has to be a message that people will want to put their vote behind.
So let's assume I do get financial support via some magical windfall. My opponent (who, let's not forget, is the amoral type we're trying to remove from office in the first place) does a little digging and comes up with some not so tasteful elements of my past, or the past of any of the major contributors / members of my campaign party. So now they're slinging mud, and hey, how can I throw back what with my moralistic campaign and all?
Welcome to your modern representitive democracy; where the media wins and loses elections based on popular opinion.
So now I get into office. I've had to struggle like a madman for probably a little over a decade with likely upwards of half a million dollars invested in my campaign. Now I have a seat in Parliament where I can make a difference, right? Wait - no, I can't. I'm voting my voice against the majority [Liberal| Conservative| Republican| Democratic| Progressive Conservative| etc] government, and the minority opposition. So my vote is heard among the hundreds of other voices. Well gee whiz - what a load of good I've just accomplished for one riding who, oh, wait, can decide that they don't like the progress I'm (not) making and subsequently elect my ass out of office.
Welcome to reality. It's all well and good to stand on your patriotic soapbox and tell people that they can make a difference, but some of us know that this is a crock. We've been living in a capitalist corrupted system for more than a century that's only getting worse by the year as the separation of church and state becomes less pertinent as the separation of corporation and state; a margin that grows ever smaller as each and every day goes by.
So if you think a small individual can make a difference in a world whose apathy exceeds all bounds, by all means, show me a solid plan. Show me where you plan on finding the hundreds of thousands of dedicated individuals who won't just get behind the cause of the moment but who'll stand behind your everlasting cause of change of the system through thick and thin.
When you're done mulling, maybe you can wake up and join me in the knowledge that you can't use a corrupt system to change its roots. The next major change to our way of life will come at the end of a large payload that makes my two story house the tallest building for hundreds of miles. Or, perhaps, it'll come in a more subtle form.
Since this is a response to an obvious troll, I'll not +1 myself.
Why would the browser render something that the plugin is more than capable of handling? I've got Acrobat Reader 5 installed, including the Netscape plugin being used with both Mozilla 1.2.1 and Phoenix 0.5 and it works fine for me. I can still use my browser controls for back / forward, and I've got all the functionality of the Acrobat reader software (what more do you need? Zoom, scroll, search, print, text selection, copy'n'paste, ...). The same is true for any non-HTML data format sent to web browsers (spreadsheet, document, etc.) in that the browsers can not, and should not render these formats.
If you'd like, you could write a simple plugin that converts the PDF data to another format more to your liking and that the browser can display. Google does it with (almost?) all PDF files referenced in their search results.
The technology exists; all you have to do is use it.
My, such strong words for such a mis-understanding. The above referenced 'article' is a book - get it? It's not a web page, it's an online BOOK, Herr Jackhole. The author / publisher most likely wish it to remain in the same format / style as they so laboriously laid out for printing, therefore they use a stylistic medium that affords them this luxury. Comprende?
Wow. It's so nice to see that offering a difference of opinion is "moronic" in a debate that centres around the freedoms and virtues of America.
My, but it's nice to be able to state an opinion and be labelled a moron; all this before my second cup of coffee, no less.
Please, oh please tell me that you're not this naive. Do you really think the oil-baron, conglomerate corporate executives who become elected officials in North America are no different from John Q. Public who elect them? Come on. I've heard more plausible conclusions come out of children's fairy tales.
I've come pretty close to filling my 80GB Western Digital that resides in my server, and the 20GB and 40GB that make up my workstation are getting pretty close to filled based on;
With more coming (Comanche 4, Silent Hill 2, Hitman 2: Silent Assault, etc) as soon as I upgrade my video card. That's not to mention the fact that I've got;
Gentoo 1.4
FreeBSD 4.7
installed presently. Video editing does eat up a lot of space, but there are probably dozens of reasons why a person would require large amounts of storage capacity. A friend of mine with 30GB worth of MP3s, another friend with several game CD images stored on his drive (he hates hunting for the CDs), a colleague who runs a recording studio and deals with raw, uncompressed digital audio, etc. etc.
The 15GB drive in my laptop is getting a bit brimming right now, since I have to have three operating systems and a lot of data (network maps/plans, company information, images, price lists, development tools, etc.).
7 years ago? As in 1995-1996? Your friend must have had a pretty decent source of income to purchase such an astronomically large drive.
Based on the proportionality the computer industry seems to maintain, hard drive capacity will, in all likelyhood, outstripe removeable media capacity by atleast ten-fold.
Right now I can burn 4.7 (or, I believe, 9.4) GB onto a single disc. I can also purchase a single hard disk drive that will hold 200GB. That's more than twenty times the storage capacity.
Following that (grossly over-simplified) logic, by the time I can store 1.5TB on a single disc, my hard drive will hold a modest 30-60TB.
While the notion of RAID'ing a group of 5 30TB hard disk drives sounds way more than phoenominal today, it'll most likely be fairly common-place in a decade.
I'm not sure if the content and magnitude of growth of knowledge/information we have will grow at the rate of technology, so it's difficult to say whether we'd need "Data Centres" in the not-so-distant future, or if the network server will be a standard ATX (or equivalent at the time) case sitting under somebody's desk.
Then again, if full-motion 3D imaging comes to pass as a commonplace technology (hard to envision, what with regular video conferencing being so niche (ie; not mainstream), we could see requirements for fields upon fields of 100PB storage arrays.
Going back to the 'hole' theory, however, tells me that this shell will create a rather significant hole in whatever area it hits. Supposing it hits the chest area (the broadest area of an animal, also the one with the most vital organs) it would potentialy create a hole large enough to put your arm clean through. The chance of such a shell NOT hitting a vital organ along its way is very, very slim.
I have to say, though, that this is the first time I've ever heard mention of this "Hydrostatic Shock" theory, and I can easily see why; it's about as baseless as so many other pseudo-science ('wives tale') claims.
Anybody who's taken even a basic biology course will understand that if an artery is clipped/severed/ruptured, the animal's heart is then literally pumping blood outside of thebody. When enough blood has escaped so as to decrease the blood pressure, and thus deprive vitaul organs of blood/oxygen, they will cease to function as expected. (Very non-medical description from a person who is not a doctor; consider it a nutshell ;) )
What's next; a claim that bullets offset the balance of the four humours?
This has been another episode of "Slashdotter Without A Clue!"
Brought to you by the letters "D", "U", "H", and by the number 6!
I'll take vested interest for $400, Alex!
n.b. You should probably read posts before you respond to them.
You're painting with a pretty wide brush there, I must say. Some (many, I'd wager) people who doubt things like the moon landing are merely skeptical; it doesn't mean they're somehow opposed to science as a whole. Problem is, generally the only ones who get substantial airtime are the extremists. {sigh}
The world is a much bigger, more diverse place than Fox portrays. ;)
I for one wish more people would start to doubt things they saw on television / the big screen. Things like the "Blair Witch Project", for example, show just how easy it is to convince people that fantasy is reality.
n.b. I'm not saying the moon landing didn't happen, I'm just saying it's entirely possible that it was faked. Personally, I remain skeptical, but I don't fret about it. Did we land on the moon? Does it matter? Who cares! Of course the billions of dollars the American citizens are spending on NASA funding quite probably sticks in their craw some, but hey, it's their choice whether they want to spend money for the research NASA provides. Is the moon landing the only tangible thing for which they can plead for funding? If they have other reasons to request funding, so be it.
As for people who are "CONVINCED" that it was a hoax, well, they're just as closed-minded as the people who are "CONVINCED" that it did happen. It's like anything else you haven't personally experienced; you have to take someone elses word for it. I'm sure we could spend weeks coming up with counter-arguments for every existing argument, and even counter-arguments for the counter-arguments. The problem is, however, all of this relies on the words of people who are making the original claims. That amounts to a lot of circular logic being employed by both sides. As for the people who were there, well, they have a vested interest in maintaining a unified front.
Meanwhile, there are more important things down on Earth to concern ourselves with, so I'll now attend to them and forget the whole thing. {smile}
"Commercial-Grade" VPN, by their wording, means any VPN software that offers encryption. Or, really, anything they want to call it. That's the design of their TOS - deliberate ambiguity.
Resource taxing or no, SSL tunnelling VPN software via UDP / TCP is perfectly capable of delivering what users want; the ability to sneak packets out the door, so to speak.
By the same ambiguous wording, they've enabled themselves to block P2P clients based on the fact that each one of them is, technically, a 'server'.
Sure thing there, peppy! You'll find yourself quickly disconnected, though. ;)
Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable both have (or had, at one point in time) wording in their AUPs that forbid "commercial grade virtual private network" software from being used on their connection.
"Hey! That's encrypted traffic!" *plonk!*
Ouch. Rather than quoting, I'll try to address each of your points individually;
Purchasing things via the Internet / web page form submissions; That's why I have a generic @yahoo.com e-mail account. Periodically I log in, select probably 9 of 10 messages, delete them, browse the other few messages then delete them too. When I'm expecting something I'll log in, read it, then select the whole mailbox for deletion. Problem solved.
Mailing lists; I have an account that I use solely for mailing lists. Anything that doesn't fit into one of my (very stringent) procmail recipes destined for that address is bit-bucketed. If I didn't sign up for it, I don't want it.
I don't give out any of my personal e-mail addresses in electronic form, except to individuals whom I trust (which generally precludes people who run Outlook* e-mail clients).
Running my own domain; I don't get e-mail as a result of running a domain, for a number of reasons. I host my own websites, and everything involving my domain on my own computer. I don't publish any @snerk.org e-mail addresses; instead opting to use a small, little-known CGI e-mail contact form (that has a clearly visible "[FROM EMAIL CGI]" string in the subject line. Hell-o procmail! ;)
As a result, I haven't yet had any need for a SPAM catching utility.
As to your addendum about telemarketers; as many people said in the previous telemarketting thread (I forget which story); requesting to be removed from their call lists has worked absolute wonders for me. I'm to the point where I don't recall the last telemarketer phone call I've had. Kind of upsetting, too, since I've always enjoyed playing with them. Asking carpet cleaning companies if they can get human blood out.. No, no; it's fresh... Beaming with excitement and thanking chimney cleaning companies because, hey, if they're going to install a fireplace for me (you know, so they can then clean my chimney) ...