It was the ultra-conservative Republican, Orin Hatch (representing ultra-conservative Utah) that wrote the DMCA.
Hatch is a moderate. He's one of the few Republicans who is in favor of the antitrust prosecution of Microsoft (the fact that Novell is in his state is only a coincidence I'm sure), and he's as clueless about techonology as you would expect.
Besides, the DMCA was a bipartisan bill, cowritten by Democrat Senator Leahy, who Senator Hatch praises here:
"Finally, I would like to particularly pay tribute to the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy. I don't know of anyone who has more interest in the Internet, more interest in computers, more interest in copyright matters than Senator Leahy, unless it is myself, and I don't think I have more. He has done a great job on this committee. It is a pleasure to work with him."
The bill passed 99-0, the nonvoting senator being absent. Can't get any more bipartisan than that.
Yes, laying new cable is expensive, that's why the cable companies get cranky when they're forced to share their cable plant with rivals that aren't $billions in debt.
However, a credible threat of a competitor laying new cable may prove to be enough to convince the existing cable company to open up their network. It's hard to say, since so far competitors have been more interested in suing than engineering.
Eventually, though, the existing cable plant will need replacement anyhow. 1.5Mbits over fiber/coax hybrid is nice now, but we'll choke it soon enough. The company that does the new build doesn't have to be the incumbent. And as other posters have noted, there's always wireless.
And a big,,!,, to the twits who keep modding down my posts!
Competitors should build their own networks, such as 100Mbit or 1Gbit Ethernet-to-the-home, and leapfrog the cable monopolies. If there are any government regs preventing them from building the plant, which governments often grant in exchange for a cut of the take--er, "franchise fees", attack those!
Maybe internet access should be entirely funded by the government just like public roads and highways.
Given the moon-crater-like surface of the highways around here, I'd say NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Now, if local governments would kindly get out of the way and let folks string up neighborhoods with new fiber someone could build decent Internet access. Unfortunately, they granted these things called LEGAL MONOPOLIES to the cable company in exchange for taxes--er, "franchise fees"...
The bad guy from the movie "The Usual Suspects". Very good movie. I'm too lazy to look it up on imdb.com and see if that's really how you spell his name.
This story was in today's newspaper. Rural govenments here in Michigan have been getting fed up waiting for the usual suspects to provide high-speed service. I can see this working in such small towns. Hopefully they'll get it right.
The high end Suns might be quiet, but the Blade 100 on my desk ($995, plus 4 cheap 256meg PC133 CL2 ECC DIMMs from Crucial) is far noisier than the Dell Dimension and Optiplex machines sitting next to it. The Seagate IDE HD Sun used is the biggest culprit, replacing that with an IBM 60GXP-series is reported to do wonders.
I'd very much like to read a second source of this story, some organization other than CNN. Why? Read this story. Then read this overview of Jorge Mas Canosa, who founded MasTech which bought Sintel, and remember this line from the CNN story: "Next to his shack hung a poster of Che Guevara, the symbol of Marxist insurgency and early ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro." CNN's nickname "Castro News Network" is well earned.
For this particular story, I'd prefer a source that isn't biased as hell in favor of leftist slavemasters and against the man who fought their favorite one.
In other words, the official announcement of dual Athlon availability is imminent, and Intel is making a pathetic attempt to steal some of AMDs thunder. Amusingly, today the price-per-share gap between Intel and AMD grew to 4-1/2 points.
You're forgetting about the government's monopoly on the USE OF FORCE, which in this context is used to extract $BILLIONS in spectrum fees and hike the hell out of airtime costs. Those extortions... er, "fees" also help suppress competition, since not many companies can pull off raising that much capital and still fund a network buildout.
We'd be in cheap, high-bandwidth nirvana in short order if Big Brother wasn't so damn greedy.
But if we fly an unmanned spy plane, why not just take random potshots at it?
Because first they have to find the thing. You can make the planes smaller, reducing their radar signature (could use stealth materials, but then you have to worry about the enemy getting ahold of them if the plane is shot down). You could fly higher and longer because of the reduced size and weight too. And if the plane is discovered... well, you can self-destruct it.
AMD has been running banner ads on news.com for weeks now (at least), and they've run two page ads in Forbes ASAP. Best Buy, CompUSA, and all the other big-box retailers advertise AMD machines in their newspaper ads. Beyond that, AMD hasn't had any need for *expensive* TV ads that would whack their profit margins.
Besides, while most people don't know squat about computers, they know that they don't know, and ask someone who does know (like me) for advice. Everyone who does know buys Athlons. I even got my employer to let me custom build the last PC we bought for our project team because Dell still hasn't undone their rectal-cranium inversion and started selling Athlons. AMD's going to be alright.
Xinhua News Service has the official ChiCom party line on this incident and assorted other things. The site reads like an American parody of Communist "journalism". Funny as hell, in a pathetic sort of way, particularly their descriptions of the acrobatic moves our big, slow, prop-driven aircraft can do. Of course, they don't *mention* that they're big, slow, prop-driven aircraft...
Netcraft says they're running Netscape-Enterprise 4.1 on Solaris, alternating with Apache/1.3.6 on Solaris. So much for Red Flag Linux.
Anyhow, if you want to know what the Chinese people are being fed, there y'go.
I'm sorry that a Chinese fighter pilot was outmaneuvered by an American autopilot.
I'm sorry that Taiwan feels so threatened by SEVERAL HUNDRED CHINESE BALLISTIC MISSILES POINTED AT THEM that they want to buy a few Aegis cruisers so they'll have half a prayer of defending themselves. (Time for a variant of the "zero option" that Reagan proposed to the former Soviet Union?)
I'm sorry that China took a wrong left turn last century after America helped bail them out of Imperial Japanese occupation (Flying Tigers volunteers, etc).
I'm sorry that the ICBM technology the Chinese Communist Party bought/stole from America will be rendered largely irrelevant by the antiballistic missile systems we're going to build now that there's a Republican in the White House.
I'm sorry that the Chinese Communist Party lost their investment in the American Democratic Party.
I'm sorry that most of the smart Chinese have hauled ass out of mainland China, or there might be someone left to tell the Chinese government and military how F------ STUPID they look to the rest of the world. "Don't shoot the messenger" really is good advice. And don't send them to labor camps, either.
The desktop Palamino has been delayed so AMD can redirect those Palamino chips to notebooks. AMD can't overhaul all their production lines at once y'know, and the Thunderbird is holding its own against the P4 just fine.
Translation: there's big-time demand for Athlon notebooks, and I'm really, really glad I dumped my Intel stock several months ago;-).
I walked up to Best Buy the other day and purchased Aerosmith's "Just Push Play" CD, for several reasons:
1) Aerosmith rocks, as does their new CD.
2) I needed the excercise from the walk.
3) I wanted to encode the disc at the highest possible quality setting, which to me means using MusicMatch Jukebox in Very High quality mode with error correcting (when it reads the CD) turned on. On my 900MHz Athlon, the CD rips and encodes at 0.7x speed. The CD now sits on my shelf, awaiting the next great digital recording standard.
Now, while I would grant you that I need all the excercise I can get, I would rather be able to conveniently purchase a licence to the CD online, download high-quality unrestricted files from high-bandwidth servers in the format of my choice, be able to redownload them later in newer formats or to replace my existing copies, and save a few bucks by cutting out the meatspace overhead. I'd certainly buy a lot more music. (Come to think of it, MusicMatch licenses their software in this manner...) Unfortunately, by fighting a lost cause in the most obnoxious manner possible, the record companies are merely making life more difficult than necessary for honest customers and giving priceless publicity to Napster, Gnutella, etc.
The record companies need to learn what the software industry figured out years ago: copy protection on mass-marketed products just aggravates your best customers.
And if you're wrong once we lose a city. How much would it cost to rebuild LA? You have noticed that piss-poor countries like North Korea are expending considerable resources to build ICBMs, yes? (NK lobbed a three stage ICBM over northern Japan two years ago.) Or perhaps you missed the comment from the Chinese general who asked if "saving Tawain is worth losing Los Angeles?"
Then there's the small matter of all the ballistic missile batteries China has built and aimed at Taiwan...
1) Repeal all laws granting legal monopolies to cable and telephone companies. The ex-monopolies will either have to resell access to ISPs or risk a competitor building new (and state-of-the-art) infrastructure in their territory. Works for me either way.
2) The Federal government is being greedy as hell with their auctioning of spectrum licenses. A "land rush" model would be more appropriate, with the first company to occupy spectrum (deploy service) registering their claim with the government (and meeting certain qualifications, ie, real service and not a white noise generator). Yes, this was Ayn Rand's idea. Cheaper for the companies than paying hundreds of $billions to Big Brother (guess how they'll have to pay that back?), and it makes it far more likely that we'll get 3G (and whatever succeeds it) soon and cheap. If companies can share spectrum, this model works even better.
I ordered my Blade 100 this morning, before the Left Coast woke up (see, there *is* an advantage to living in Michigan!). Anyhow, they say it has four industry standard 168-pin DIMM slots, using PC133 ECC SDRAM memory... I assume unregistered memory? So I can remove the stock 128meg DIMM and drop in four of these things?
Also, can I use standard Adaptec PCI SCSI cards? Does anyone have a link to info on how to set those up? Or at the very least, can the Blades handle large (ie, 60gig) IDE drives? Tho I think putting 10K RPM Ultrastars in would be the most fun...
Any way to dual boot Solaris and SPARC Linux?
Are there any sites dedicated to upgrading Sun workstations?
Actually, I was thinking conservative as in a conservative approach to testing, etc. not conservative politics.
Ah.
Their testing isn't political, but they do have a separate lobbying agenda that is left-wing in nature, advocating for nationalized health care in particular and greater government regulation in general. (I read the mag when I visit my parents, my dad's been subscribing since before CU stepped up its lobbying.) CU isn't anywhere near as bad about this as, say, the AARP, but it's worth noting. The irony is that their unbiased product testing is the best replacement for ham-handed government regulation. Go figure.
Granting +20 points on admission scores does not even come close to compensate for the disadvantages that minorities face. Is this what you call racist?
Yes it is, because a) it presumes that all blacks/Hispanics/NA's are disadvantaged, and b) it treats minorities who aren't (yet) academically qualified for university enrollment differently than their white and Asian peers. Excuses, true or not, don't change the fact that students being accepted into universities under AA are less qualified, and should have started at second-tier and community colleges and attempted to reapply to the top-tier universities in 2-4 years (like their white and Asian peers).
We need to fix the underlying problem, which is the government education monopoly. Everything else is just political posturing.
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It was the ultra-conservative Republican, Orin Hatch (representing ultra-conservative Utah) that wrote the DMCA.
Hatch is a moderate. He's one of the few Republicans who is in favor of the antitrust prosecution of Microsoft (the fact that Novell is in his state is only a coincidence I'm sure), and he's as clueless about techonology as you would expect.
Besides, the DMCA was a bipartisan bill, cowritten by Democrat Senator Leahy, who Senator Hatch praises here:
"Finally, I would like to particularly pay tribute to the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy. I don't know of anyone who has more interest in the Internet, more interest in computers, more interest in copyright matters than Senator Leahy, unless it is myself, and I don't think I have more. He has done a great job on this committee. It is a pleasure to work with him."
The bill passed 99-0, the nonvoting senator being absent. Can't get any more bipartisan than that.
Yes, laying new cable is expensive, that's why the cable companies get cranky when they're forced to share their cable plant with rivals that aren't $billions in debt.
,,!,, to the twits who keep modding down my posts!
However, a credible threat of a competitor laying new cable may prove to be enough to convince the existing cable company to open up their network. It's hard to say, since so far competitors have been more interested in suing than engineering.
Eventually, though, the existing cable plant will need replacement anyhow. 1.5Mbits over fiber/coax hybrid is nice now, but we'll choke it soon enough. The company that does the new build doesn't have to be the incumbent. And as other posters have noted, there's always wireless.
And a big
Competitors should build their own networks, such as 100Mbit or 1Gbit Ethernet-to-the-home, and leapfrog the cable monopolies. If there are any government regs preventing them from building the plant, which governments often grant in exchange for a cut of the take--er, "franchise fees", attack those!
They're already working on it.
;-)
No idea when/if they'll finish the project, tho. Spill it, Linus!
Maybe internet access should be entirely funded by the government just like public roads and highways.
Given the moon-crater-like surface of the highways around here, I'd say NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Now, if local governments would kindly get out of the way and let folks string up neighborhoods with new fiber someone could build decent Internet access. Unfortunately, they granted these things called LEGAL MONOPOLIES to the cable company in exchange for taxes--er, "franchise fees"...
Who is Keyser Soze?
The bad guy from the movie "The Usual Suspects". Very good movie. I'm too lazy to look it up on imdb.com and see if that's really how you spell his name.
This story was in today's newspaper. Rural govenments here in Michigan have been getting fed up waiting for the usual suspects to provide high-speed service. I can see this working in such small towns. Hopefully they'll get it right.
The high end Suns might be quiet, but the Blade 100 on my desk ($995, plus 4 cheap 256meg PC133 CL2 ECC DIMMs from Crucial) is far noisier than the Dell Dimension and Optiplex machines sitting next to it. The Seagate IDE HD Sun used is the biggest culprit, replacing that with an IBM 60GXP-series is reported to do wonders.
ARGH! I belatedly noticed the "AP" attribution...
Well, the links are still relevant, just not as much. The first and last two are still must-reads.
I'd very much like to read a second source of this story, some organization other than CNN. Why? Read this story. Then read this overview of Jorge Mas Canosa, who founded MasTech which bought Sintel, and remember this line from the CNN story: "Next to his shack hung a poster of Che Guevara, the symbol of Marxist insurgency and early ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro." CNN's nickname "Castro News Network" is well earned.
For this particular story, I'd prefer a source that isn't biased as hell in favor of leftist slavemasters and against the man who fought their favorite one.
More on Cuban persecution: here and here.
Think about what happens with spillover in a zero-gravity environment.
"Honey, the regs say you have to swallow..."
In other words, the official announcement of dual Athlon availability is imminent, and Intel is making a pathetic attempt to steal some of AMDs thunder. Amusingly, today the price-per-share gap between Intel and AMD grew to 4-1/2 points.
You're forgetting about the government's monopoly on the USE OF FORCE, which in this context is used to extract $BILLIONS in spectrum fees and hike the hell out of airtime costs. Those extortions... er, "fees" also help suppress competition, since not many companies can pull off raising that much capital and still fund a network buildout.
We'd be in cheap, high-bandwidth nirvana in short order if Big Brother wasn't so damn greedy.
But if we fly an unmanned spy plane, why not just take random potshots at it?
Because first they have to find the thing. You can make the planes smaller, reducing their radar signature (could use stealth materials, but then you have to worry about the enemy getting ahold of them if the plane is shot down). You could fly higher and longer because of the reduced size and weight too. And if the plane is discovered... well, you can self-destruct it.
AMD has been running banner ads on news.com for weeks now (at least), and they've run two page ads in Forbes ASAP. Best Buy, CompUSA, and all the other big-box retailers advertise AMD machines in their newspaper ads. Beyond that, AMD hasn't had any need for *expensive* TV ads that would whack their profit margins.
Besides, while most people don't know squat about computers, they know that they don't know, and ask someone who does know (like me) for advice. Everyone who does know buys Athlons. I even got my employer to let me custom build the last PC we bought for our project team because Dell still hasn't undone their rectal-cranium inversion and started selling Athlons. AMD's going to be alright.
Xinhua News Service has the official ChiCom party line on this incident and assorted other things. The site reads like an American parody of Communist "journalism". Funny as hell, in a pathetic sort of way, particularly their descriptions of the acrobatic moves our big, slow, prop-driven aircraft can do. Of course, they don't *mention* that they're big, slow, prop-driven aircraft...
Netcraft says they're running Netscape-Enterprise 4.1 on Solaris, alternating with Apache/1.3.6 on Solaris. So much for Red Flag Linux.
Anyhow, if you want to know what the Chinese people are being fed, there y'go.
I'm sorry that a Chinese fighter pilot was outmaneuvered by an American autopilot.
I'm sorry that Taiwan feels so threatened by SEVERAL HUNDRED CHINESE BALLISTIC MISSILES POINTED AT THEM that they want to buy a few Aegis cruisers so they'll have half a prayer of defending themselves. (Time for a variant of the "zero option" that Reagan proposed to the former Soviet Union?)
I'm sorry that China took a wrong left turn last century after America helped bail them out of Imperial Japanese occupation (Flying Tigers volunteers, etc).
I'm sorry that the ICBM technology the Chinese Communist Party bought/stole from America will be rendered largely irrelevant by the antiballistic missile systems we're going to build now that there's a Republican in the White House.
I'm sorry that the Chinese Communist Party lost their investment in the American Democratic Party.
I'm sorry that most of the smart Chinese have hauled ass out of mainland China, or there might be someone left to tell the Chinese government and military how F------ STUPID they look to the rest of the world. "Don't shoot the messenger" really is good advice. And don't send them to labor camps, either.
(Append "NOT!" as appropriate.)
The desktop Palamino has been delayed so AMD can redirect those Palamino chips to notebooks. AMD can't overhaul all their production lines at once y'know, and the Thunderbird is holding its own against the P4 just fine.
;-).
Translation: there's big-time demand for Athlon notebooks, and I'm really, really glad I dumped my Intel stock several months ago
I walked up to Best Buy the other day and purchased Aerosmith's "Just Push Play" CD, for several reasons:
1) Aerosmith rocks, as does their new CD.
2) I needed the excercise from the walk.
3) I wanted to encode the disc at the highest possible quality setting, which to me means using MusicMatch Jukebox in Very High quality mode with error correcting (when it reads the CD) turned on. On my 900MHz Athlon, the CD rips and encodes at 0.7x speed. The CD now sits on my shelf, awaiting the next great digital recording standard.
Now, while I would grant you that I need all the excercise I can get, I would rather be able to conveniently purchase a licence to the CD online, download high-quality unrestricted files from high-bandwidth servers in the format of my choice, be able to redownload them later in newer formats or to replace my existing copies, and save a few bucks by cutting out the meatspace overhead. I'd certainly buy a lot more music. (Come to think of it, MusicMatch licenses their software in this manner...) Unfortunately, by fighting a lost cause in the most obnoxious manner possible, the record companies are merely making life more difficult than necessary for honest customers and giving priceless publicity to Napster, Gnutella, etc.
The record companies need to learn what the software industry figured out years ago: copy protection on mass-marketed products just aggravates your best customers.
And if you're wrong once we lose a city. How much would it cost to rebuild LA? You have noticed that piss-poor countries like North Korea are expending considerable resources to build ICBMs, yes? (NK lobbed a three stage ICBM over northern Japan two years ago.) Or perhaps you missed the comment from the Chinese general who asked if "saving Tawain is worth losing Los Angeles?"
Then there's the small matter of all the ballistic missile batteries China has built and aimed at Taiwan...
1) Repeal all laws granting legal monopolies to cable and telephone companies. The ex-monopolies will either have to resell access to ISPs or risk a competitor building new (and state-of-the-art) infrastructure in their territory. Works for me either way.
2) The Federal government is being greedy as hell with their auctioning of spectrum licenses. A "land rush" model would be more appropriate, with the first company to occupy spectrum (deploy service) registering their claim with the government (and meeting certain qualifications, ie, real service and not a white noise generator). Yes, this was Ayn Rand's idea. Cheaper for the companies than paying hundreds of $billions to Big Brother (guess how they'll have to pay that back?), and it makes it far more likely that we'll get 3G (and whatever succeeds it) soon and cheap. If companies can share spectrum, this model works even better.
Which Symbios SCSI card? These are different than the PC ones? Where's a good place to get one? Do any of them support Ultra160 drives?
:-). I'll probably skip it.
Yeah, running SPARC Linux is a low priority for me, especially since my Athlon probably whomps the Blade 100
I'll check out http://www.sunfreeware.com, thanks!
Also, can I use standard Adaptec PCI SCSI cards? Does anyone have a link to info on how to set those up? Or at the very least, can the Blades handle large (ie, 60gig) IDE drives? Tho I think putting 10K RPM Ultrastars in would be the most fun...
Any way to dual boot Solaris and SPARC Linux?
Are there any sites dedicated to upgrading Sun workstations?
Actually, I was thinking conservative as in a conservative approach to testing, etc. not conservative politics.
Ah.
Their testing isn't political, but they do have a separate lobbying agenda that is left-wing in nature, advocating for nationalized health care in particular and greater government regulation in general. (I read the mag when I visit my parents, my dad's been subscribing since before CU stepped up its lobbying.) CU isn't anywhere near as bad about this as, say, the AARP, but it's worth noting. The irony is that their unbiased product testing is the best replacement for ham-handed government regulation. Go figure.
Granting +20 points on admission scores does not even come close to compensate for the disadvantages that minorities face. Is this what you call racist?
Yes it is, because a) it presumes that all blacks/Hispanics/NA's are disadvantaged, and b) it treats minorities who aren't (yet) academically qualified for university enrollment differently than their white and Asian peers. Excuses, true or not, don't change the fact that students being accepted into universities under AA are less qualified, and should have started at second-tier and community colleges and attempted to reapply to the top-tier universities in 2-4 years (like their white and Asian peers).
We need to fix the underlying problem, which is the government education monopoly. Everything else is just political posturing.