Here in Moscow I pay $40/month for 10mpbs connection, that includes pathetic 500 _Mega_bytes of traffic, everything else is $ 80/gig. I do not, I repeat, do NOT feel owned by my ISP, although I do hate these greedy bastards. This is just simple economics at work, get over it.
I am so happy I chose to stay here, in Moscow, where you can pay $2 at a newsstand for a CD full of MP3s or warez!!! Really, f#ck the corporations - I do not feel guilty for countless GBs of music on my harddisk or all the warez I knowingly choose to use. Not at all. I refuse to accept the set of values that evil american corps try to instill upon me, I refuse to recognise so called "intellectual property" - this is not within my set of beliefs and I will not change them to protect somebody's profits. From now on, I will be actively participating in any anti-globalist event I am able to. Before you start bashing me please note that I am a fully grown up person, I earn my living by managing software projects and play guitar in a real band in the evenings.
indeed it will be too hard
I live in Moscow. You dont even have to go to the flea market to get warez as in downtown CD kiosks and newsstands are placed every 200 feet or so. Usually there is a choice from about 50 to more than 300 warez disks, and/or few dozen to a couple of hundred DivX cds (finally! excellent quality movies that cost $3 and take 10 minutes to copy perfectly!) and/or about the same number of MP3 cds. MP3 collections are especially nice, they are obviously compiled by collectors. It's a marvel if you love music - you can buy _complete_ Coltrane on 5 cds ($15), rarities, bootlegs and imports included.
Now you can understand why I prefer to live in Moscow despite all the job offers from US;)
BTW, the situation in Kiev (I grew up there and visit my parents quite often) is almost exactly the same, only the prices are slightly lower.
Actually, it looks like we have a perfect cd distribution system. The pirates respond to market demand very quickly; there's big competition between them. What's really surprising is that they print quite a lot of non-pop, e.g. I bought a number of John McLaughlin cds (that are _NOT_ in stock in local licensed cd stores) from a newsstand pile next to usual Enrique Iglesias crap. I do feel mildly guilty as he probably gets something like $1 for every cd sold, so I owe this brilliant musician about $30 and have to find a way to send these monies to him.
I am a Business Applications Manager at a very large beer business, and one of our biggest plants uses Syteline as their MRP/ERP. Some of the servers are running on Linux, so far we're quite satisfied with performance, reliability and cost (especially compared to Sun-based servers). The system is in production with approx. 250 users and performs all the functions you normaly expect from ERP/MRP/manufacturing/shop floor control app.
The problem as I see it: many people hate spam (especially sysadmin types like myself), but lack the time to hunt down and kill those idiots one-by-one.
The proposal: make a central database of 800 numbers,e-mail addresses and websites advertised through spam (rather big I figure). Then, anytime you get annoyed (about 10 times per day probably) by a spammer, first report the contact details and then run a script that randomly grabs say 100 email addresses from the database and sends loads of crap to them. Do the same with 800 numbers and website forms. If we get 10000 angry sysadmins sending loads of random crap or just angry letters to poor souls who decided to advertise through spam we may quickly make them get some clue and stop annoying us.
Of course, reasonable filters are mandatory - e.g. an 800 number gets added to the database only after 10 people from different subnets report it.
I'm really surprised to read Graeme say "no known cd-key generators for Q3A exist" while I personally have used at least one, successfully. Please dont flame me to death for pirating Q3A, I've tried it for a couple of days and then went back to good ol' TF2.8 - much more fun for me in coop multiclass than just fragging around:)
Serious, here in Russia (and probably in many other places as well) the broadcaster is legally required to somehow distinguish between ads and regular content. The logical way is to _hide_ the logo during ads and to keep it on all other content, thus also shoveling the brand image down consumers' throats. Well, we can fight back - build a device that checks for logo presence and switches the channel or mutes the sound if it's not here. Rumors are, the device is already on the black market at about $30 (at least here in Moscow).
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Here in Moscow I pay $40/month for 10mpbs connection, that includes pathetic 500 _Mega_bytes of traffic, everything else is $ 80/gig. I do not, I repeat, do NOT feel owned by my ISP, although I do hate these greedy bastards. This is just simple economics at work, get over it.
That is, even in China you certainly can make all the cracks about Mr.G. "Clever" Bush - no one's gonna hurt you for that!
I am so happy I chose to stay here, in Moscow, where you can pay $2 at a newsstand for a CD full of MP3s or warez!!! Really, f#ck the corporations - I do not feel guilty for countless GBs of music on my harddisk or all the warez I knowingly choose to use. Not at all. I refuse to accept the set of values that evil american corps try to instill upon me, I refuse to recognise so called "intellectual property" - this is not within my set of beliefs and I will not change them to protect somebody's profits. From now on, I will be actively participating in any anti-globalist event I am able to. Before you start bashing me please note that I am a fully grown up person, I earn my living by managing software projects and play guitar in a real band in the evenings.
indeed it will be too hard
;)
I live in Moscow. You dont even have to go to the flea market to get warez as in downtown CD kiosks and newsstands are placed every 200 feet or so. Usually there is a choice from about 50 to more than 300 warez disks, and/or few dozen to a couple of hundred DivX cds (finally! excellent quality movies that cost $3 and take 10 minutes to copy perfectly!) and/or about the same number of MP3 cds. MP3 collections are especially nice, they are obviously compiled by collectors. It's a marvel if you love music - you can buy _complete_ Coltrane on 5 cds ($15), rarities, bootlegs and imports included.
Now you can understand why I prefer to live in Moscow despite all the job offers from US
BTW, the situation in Kiev (I grew up there and visit my parents quite often) is almost exactly the same, only the prices are slightly lower.
Actually, it looks like we have a perfect cd distribution system. The pirates respond to market demand very quickly; there's big competition between them. What's really surprising is that they print quite a lot of non-pop, e.g. I bought a number of John McLaughlin cds (that are _NOT_ in stock in local licensed cd stores) from a newsstand pile next to usual Enrique Iglesias crap. I do feel mildly guilty as he probably gets something like $1 for every cd sold, so I owe this brilliant musician about $30 and have to find a way to send these monies to him.
The proposal: make a central database of 800 numbers,e-mail addresses and websites advertised through spam (rather big I figure). Then, anytime you get annoyed (about 10 times per day probably) by a spammer, first report the contact details and then run a script that randomly grabs say 100 email addresses from the database and sends loads of crap to them. Do the same with 800 numbers and website forms. If we get 10000 angry sysadmins sending loads of random crap or just angry letters to poor souls who decided to advertise through spam we may quickly make them get some clue and stop annoying us.
Of course, reasonable filters are mandatory - e.g. an 800 number gets added to the database only after 10 people from different subnets report it.
I'm really surprised to read Graeme say "no known cd-key generators for Q3A exist" while I personally have used at least one, successfully. Please dont flame me to death for pirating Q3A, I've tried it for a couple of days and then went back to good ol' TF2.8 - much more fun for me in coop multiclass than just fragging around :)
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