...but, what Werner Von Braun did was not considered unlawful.
And Josef Mengele was also considered a patriotic hero of the Reich and his work was lawful too. I just argue that America chose to ignore any factors (be they crimes, moral turpitude, whatever) to obtain the knowledge that von Braun had. The Mitnick case is identical. People will be happy to ignore his past crimes, moral turpitude, whatever, if his knowledge is worth obtaining.
He more than developed the technology, he developed the weapon itself. If he didn't design the V2, those people killed by V2s wouldn't have been killed by V2s. (simple enough?) There really isnt any break in the chain of causation.
To expand your argument, its the person who pushed the button that launched each individual V2 who was the person responsible for the deaths. I argue that its the person who made it possible for a rocket to kill people who is responsible and Robert Oppenheimer certainly seemed to agree with me.
I made the comparison with von Braun because America in that case chose to ignore any possible crimes to obtain the benefit of his knowledge (and von Braun was only one of many many German scientists with shady pasts, and otherwise, who were happily welcomed in America for their knowledge post WW2), and this directly compares with Mitnick in that any person who choses to employ Mitnick, regardless of his crimes, to obtain his knowledge, has acted in exactly the same way. Its really nothing more than a simple cost benefit analysis. The benefit outweighs the cost, moral or otherwise, in both cases.
I agree 100% and make a comparison with Werner Von Braun, who undoubtedly caused the death of many hundreds of people as a result of his development of the V2 rocket in WW2, but also undoubtedly knew more about rockets than just about anyone anywhere. His past history certainly didn't stop the US Government from leveraging his skills to get to the moon (well, maybe;)
Moreover, Mitnick (and any felon who is now out of jail) has served his time and if the system does what its supposed to do, he is now reformed. (Unless you argue that jail is purely a punitive thing, in which case why let anyone out ever, if they are just going to be the same as they went in?) Certainly, I would think twice about handing him the proverbial keys to the NSA's servers, but equally, if I wanted to protect those same servers, who better to ask than someone who potentially has the skills to compromise them?
As I said though, there wasnt any valid reason that it couldn't be run on an AD DC. I imagine that enough people complained and MS was forced to remove whatever restrictions were in place, rather than added the functionality. (But then I'm always quick to abuse MS. I have had to support their crap software across 20 odd client sites, hundreds of servers and destops in their thousands over the past 8 years, so I reserve this right.:) As of the 31st of February though, I quit my job and i'm back at uni finishing my Law degree, so I dont care anymore and its Linux all the way! I havent seen a Windows startup screen since my last day at work. You have no idea how good it feels:)
The poor sod was actually OCR (or Optical Character Recognition for those acronymically challenged). The book, PGP Internals (which interestingly enough was published by MIT along with Phil Zimmerman) contained the source code in an OCR friendly font.
Unfortunately with the DMCA, you can be arrested wherever it is that you disseminated the breach as long as you set foot on American soil. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov. He published his work while living in Russia and only got arrested when visiting the States.
I'd imagine that Andrew Huang would rather not leave the US never to return. He seems to have a pretty sweet deal with MIT atm, which I'm sure he doesnt want to give up and he also seems to be a pretty clued in guy. I can't see him pushing it if MS come down heavy.
My experience is that if you download a single update, such as the Media Player, IE, service packs etc, which can only be downloaded individually, then squid will cache it. If you select a few updates, such as grouping your critical updates, it wont do it.
Looking at my squid logs, it appeared that there was a problem with WindowsUpdate issuing a 0 byte sized reply to the GET request (must be somthing to do with the activex control I guess, but never really bothered to look further into it). Squid seemed to choke on the 0 byte reply and obviously didnt cache the rest of the download.
Interestingly enough, MS's caching offering ISA appears to deal with it, but I suppose that they specifally coded it with a knowledge of how their activex control works and hence it knows whats following that 0 byte reply.
Disclaimer - I checked this all out when the new WindowsUpdate first came out and havent been arsed to look at it since then. I ended up just setting up a shitty old box as a SUS server and going that route. (The only benefit to being an MSDN partner being $0 cost for licensing as I justify it as being for testing purposes;)
The problem is that you cant run SUS on any kind of AD master server. The server has to effectively be nothing more than a member server and not take part in any kind of AD master rolls.
This means that for smallish organisations, you need your AD master, a backup master (at least 1) for redundancy and then your additional SUS server, which means minimum 3 server licenses, plus all your cals. It also means you have to run IIS (http and ftp) which noone in their right minds wants to run. I havent been able to find any particular reason why it shouldn't be able to run on a backup AD server than MS wanting to force you to get another server license and obviously another server.
I used to run SUS at a largish predominantly Windows site I worked at, and when setup properly can be pretty useful, but obviously its an added expense that a lot of people just cant bear.
Unfortunately thats the nature of the capitalist system. It goes something like this;
Organisations are driven to make profits (because they have to assume that max profits are what shareholders want). As profit margins start to decline in a given industry (like MS's will when Linux on the desktop starts to get going) an organisation is forced to look elsewhere for profit margins which meet their required return on investment. For a company like MS, with such vast liquid assets, this is almost an inevitability, as they are likely to get higher returns in other industries than pumping the billions into a declining market share.
Interestingly, a labour law professor of mine believes that the logical development of capitalism is that the big firms like MS will start buying all the smaller firms as they find smaller and smaller returns in their industry until we end up with just a few Uber-Corporations which ultimately end up owning everything. These Uber-Corps then start merging until there is one organisation that owns everything.
My spin on it is that as your domestic market declines, you go out and create a new market in the same industry. For instance, the big corporations might spend up big on humanitarian aid in poor nations so that the nation can eventually afford to buy the corporations product. Either that or you bribe the politicians to go bomb the crap out of a country so that they no longer have any infrastructure and bingo, you got a whole lot of business in rebuilding the nation. But be sure that only the people who bribed the pollies have a chance to get the tenders to rebuild. I think thats how it works isnt it Misters Bush and Cheney?
...as someone who recently had an email server relay raped
Hmmm. Not to come across too harsh or anything, but you _really_ should test these things. Rather than just assuming that it wasnt "accesible to the open", you should telnet to your mail server and test the possible relay methods, or at the very least, register with abuse.net and let their online tester do the work for you.
As you have no doubt seen, getting a server off ORBS and the like is really a LOT more hassle than testing in the first place. Additionally; as you say "[i]t's about time people realise that stuff like this has very real consequences..." This works both ways. If you don't secure your systems, they _will_ be taken advantage of, and next time it will be Company X suing you for permitting your mail server to be used in spamming them and not just Company X suing the spammer.
It won't, however, keep you up to date on "suspicious" activity - it's mostly for just making sure that your server and any services that run on it are going.
Well actually it _can_ keep you up to date on 'suspicious activity' if you are willing to write a plugin to say, monitor your IDS output.
Nagios itself is nothing more than a web-based system of notification. The plugins provide whatever functionality you code into them, from monitoring a network service, to parsing a logfile, to monitoring temperature. Pretty much anything that provides you with feedback can be used as the input to a plugin.
I actually wrote a little plugin that parses the output from my Win2k Terminal Server logs (via BackLogNT) on my central syslog server to email me everytime my boss logs on and logs off from Windows so I can figure out when he is leaving home and on his way into the office.....and he has yet to catch me playing games when I should be working.:)
The long and the short is that Nagios handles the notifications, the plugins handle what is being measured/monitored.
I would have prefered to see the alternate add with the pictures of a unicorn, a mermaid, a pixie and a hacker with the caption; "Just like the unicorn, the mermaid and the pixie, a hacker who cant compromise our operating systems just doesnt exist."
For me, if they can guarantee me that the CD I buy wont scratch, crack or split for my lifetime, then I would be happy to pay the money.
As it is, I do buy a few CDs, but only if I consider the package as a whole is worth owning. If record companies want people to buy CDs they should try making the product 'value-added' enough that its better than just having the MP3. Good artwork, lyric sheets, stylised packaging. Do anything to make it worth the money, but don't expect people to pay for a CD when its as easy as ripping it, or P2Ping it.
What I would have really liked is something on the lines of "Here is patent number 1" and here is how linux is different/same.....It is not as if SCO patent reads like "WE patent UNIX and everything that looks like it. And that is that
Quoting from the SCO complaint; 18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing rights to System V Technology.
If you can show me how to do a base (kernel with very basic tools *ONLY*) install of any of those distros I would like to see it.
Its actually pretty damn easy with RedHat at least. All you need to do is to edit the flat text comps file (xml in RH8) to no longer include the things you don't want installed in the 'Base' section, run genhdlist and you're away. Make up a quickstart floppy for network installs or burn up a new CD for CD installs.
I personally use an ftp/apt-rpm server to do all my installs from kickstart floppies. 10-15 minutes from a blank system to a fully patched up system, containing _only_ the packages I want and nothing I dont, plus apt allows me to add in my own custom rpms of things that RH is reluctant or slow to release. I have different floppy images setup to build base systems for different purposes. Apt then means all I need is to throw a cron job in place to keep them patched up every day.
People seem to be so quick to dis a distro without actually trying it out properly or learning what it offers. Kickstart installs give you control over pretty much everything you could want in an installer.
Part of the reason i have the account is to get these test servers 'up to speed' to keep from getting hacked while i am testing.
Hi,
Really late come to the party so to speak, but you sound like you could use apt-rpm. I do a lot of building test servers and there is nothing that makes it easier than running your own local ftp/apt server.
I mirror the RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0 distros and update folders from my local redhat mirror. Keep it up to date with rsync and all you need to do to get an 'up to speed' server is throw in a floppy with the build requirements which includes a post install command to update via apt.
I can get a server from nothing to fully installed and patched up in the space of 10-15 minutes without any intervention whatsoever. I've got kickstart floppies with comp files setup to install each of the basic type of servers that I test on and do ftp installs across the network.
You get the advantage of speed, plus you only end up downloading the update packages once, instead of each time you update a new test box. Add to this that you can have cron jobs running on any of your permanent boxes to update themselves via apt instead of the RedHat network stuff. I personally package up anything I _would_ have installed as a tarball to an rpm and plonk it in my apt tree and can roll it out fromt there. It really does make life easier.
Well just a few thoughts for you that you probably won't even read, but it needs to be said.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again? Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
No they aren't, so the point is that with it being so easy for an acceptable pirate to be created, we should look at ways of making the initial music making process cheaper. This way the loss over investment is much less.
Congruent with technology making it easier to pirate music, we have also obtained the ability to make music of an acceptable quality cheaply. (Hell that fact that people are happy to have all their music as MP3s indicates that you dont need to record to 2" in an awesome room with Neumann U87s)
What is needed now is for new industries to develop that are based around distributing the music that's been made cheaply, rather than making music that costs a lot, then promoting the fuck out of it by paying radio stations to play it.
The only reason this doesn't happen is that the record companies have a vested interest in preventing it. ie They make money (and a lot of it) out of having the industry as is. They certainly wouldn't make as much money by being in distribution.
The only reason that we pay the amount we do for CDs is so that the record industry bohemoths can carry on as they do. You and I pay extra for every CD so that the company can pay a few million dollars to radio stations so they'll play Avril bloody Levigne.
Now if on the other hand, musicians made their music on the relative cheap, signed distribution deals only, they could then sell their work at a fraction of the cost; more people would buy CDs and the music industry is saved.
Sure its a simple analysis, but why should we be protecting industries that are clearly being oustripped by technological change. If the ice carriers and sanitation men had bought politicians like the record industry have today, we might still be without refrigerators and shitting in a bucket. Technology changes things, and until recently, we were happy to let business change with it. Nowadays its sufficient to buy a few pollies and legislate for your own existence.
Well as a Bigpond customer, I can tell you that there really won't be many people inconvenienced by Bigpond being UDP'ed as the service provided is SO dismally poor that anyone who uses Usenet already has a pay account somewhere else.
Not that I ever go there (and when I do its for that articles) but the alt.binaries.* groups have about 50% completion and retention rates that ensure that anything that's larger than 1 part is guaranteed to be ungetable, PAR or otherwise.
IMHO its a deliberate plan on the part of Telstra to ensure that people don't use the service. Quite simply you make the service so bad as to be useless; people stop using it and hey presto you can justify dropping an expensive, revenue losing, part of internet service providing. If anything, they permit the level of spam they do to guarantee that the bulk of it isn't filtered before it hits their servers.
I say this as a Usenet user of many years and a Bigpond user for 4 of them. Their's is quite simply the worst feed I have ever used.
On the other hand, they have the most incompetent bunch of techos I've ever had the displeasure to work with, so it could just be they have no clue how to run a newsfeed.
I rotated the XBOX decal on the top so it now says XOBX. I tell people its the cheap knock-off of the Xbox made in the Soviet Union (where apparently Xbox pays you...or some such crap.)
What I cant understand is why it has to be Wi-fi in a plane? I mean aren't you supposed to sit down all the time?
If the airline is handing out the laptops to people without them, wifi is just an added cost and for those with them, when did you last see a laptop with wireless but without ethernet? (handhelds aside) Seriously, where is the benefit to having it, over and above ethernet via your chair?
Its pretty obvious why the American airlines (which one isn't going broke atm?) aren't too interested.
Slashdot Mirror
...but, what Werner Von Braun did was not considered unlawful.
And Josef Mengele was also considered a patriotic hero of the Reich and his work was lawful too. I just argue that America chose to ignore any factors (be they crimes, moral turpitude, whatever) to obtain the knowledge that von Braun had. The Mitnick case is identical. People will be happy to ignore his past crimes, moral turpitude, whatever, if his knowledge is worth obtaining.
He more than developed the technology, he developed the weapon itself. If he didn't design the V2, those people killed by V2s wouldn't have been killed by V2s. (simple enough?) There really isnt any break in the chain of causation.
To expand your argument, its the person who pushed the button that launched each individual V2 who was the person responsible for the deaths. I argue that its the person who made it possible for a rocket to kill people who is responsible and Robert Oppenheimer certainly seemed to agree with me.
I made the comparison with von Braun because America in that case chose to ignore any possible crimes to obtain the benefit of his knowledge (and von Braun was only one of many many German scientists with shady pasts, and otherwise, who were happily welcomed in America for their knowledge post WW2), and this directly compares with Mitnick in that any person who choses to employ Mitnick, regardless of his crimes, to obtain his knowledge, has acted in exactly the same way. Its really nothing more than a simple cost benefit analysis. The benefit outweighs the cost, moral or otherwise, in both cases.
I agree 100% and make a comparison with Werner Von Braun, who undoubtedly caused the death of many hundreds of people as a result of his development of the V2 rocket in WW2, but also undoubtedly knew more about rockets than just about anyone anywhere. His past history certainly didn't stop the US Government from leveraging his skills to get to the moon (well, maybe ;)
Moreover, Mitnick (and any felon who is now out of jail) has served his time and if the system does what its supposed to do, he is now reformed. (Unless you argue that jail is purely a punitive thing, in which case why let anyone out ever, if they are just going to be the same as they went in?) Certainly, I would think twice about handing him the proverbial keys to the NSA's servers, but equally, if I wanted to protect those same servers, who better to ask than someone who potentially has the skills to compromise them?
I stand corrected.
:) As of the 31st of February though, I quit my job and i'm back at uni finishing my Law degree, so I dont care anymore and its Linux all the way! I havent seen a Windows startup screen since my last day at work. You have no idea how good it feels :)
As I said though, there wasnt any valid reason that it couldn't be run on an AD DC. I imagine that enough people complained and MS was forced to remove whatever restrictions were in place, rather than added the functionality. (But then I'm always quick to abuse MS. I have had to support their crap software across 20 odd client sites, hundreds of servers and destops in their thousands over the past 8 years, so I reserve this right.
The poor sod was actually OCR (or Optical Character Recognition for those acronymically challenged). The book, PGP Internals (which interestingly enough was published by MIT along with Phil Zimmerman) contained the source code in an OCR friendly font.
Unfortunately with the DMCA, you can be arrested wherever it is that you disseminated the breach as long as you set foot on American soil. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov. He published his work while living in Russia and only got arrested when visiting the States.
I'd imagine that Andrew Huang would rather not leave the US never to return. He seems to have a pretty sweet deal with MIT atm, which I'm sure he doesnt want to give up and he also seems to be a pretty clued in guy. I can't see him pushing it if MS come down heavy.
My experience is that if you download a single update, such as the Media Player, IE, service packs etc, which can only be downloaded individually, then squid will cache it. If you select a few updates, such as grouping your critical updates, it wont do it.
;)
Looking at my squid logs, it appeared that there was a problem with WindowsUpdate issuing a 0 byte sized reply to the GET request (must be somthing to do with the activex control I guess, but never really bothered to look further into it). Squid seemed to choke on the 0 byte reply and obviously didnt cache the rest of the download.
Interestingly enough, MS's caching offering ISA appears to deal with it, but I suppose that they specifally coded it with a knowledge of how their activex control works and hence it knows whats following that 0 byte reply.
Disclaimer - I checked this all out when the new WindowsUpdate first came out and havent been arsed to look at it since then. I ended up just setting up a shitty old box as a SUS server and going that route. (The only benefit to being an MSDN partner being $0 cost for licensing as I justify it as being for testing purposes
The problem is that you cant run SUS on any kind of AD master server. The server has to effectively be nothing more than a member server and not take part in any kind of AD master rolls.
This means that for smallish organisations, you need your AD master, a backup master (at least 1) for redundancy and then your additional SUS server, which means minimum 3 server licenses, plus all your cals. It also means you have to run IIS (http and ftp) which noone in their right minds wants to run. I havent been able to find any particular reason why it shouldn't be able to run on a backup AD server than MS wanting to force you to get another server license and obviously another server.
I used to run SUS at a largish predominantly Windows site I worked at, and when setup properly can be pretty useful, but obviously its an added expense that a lot of people just cant bear.
Unfortunately thats the nature of the capitalist system. It goes something like this;
Organisations are driven to make profits (because they have to assume that max profits are what shareholders want). As profit margins start to decline in a given industry (like MS's will when Linux on the desktop starts to get going) an organisation is forced to look elsewhere for profit margins which meet their required return on investment. For a company like MS, with such vast liquid assets, this is almost an inevitability, as they are likely to get higher returns in other industries than pumping the billions into a declining market share.
Interestingly, a labour law professor of mine believes that the logical development of capitalism is that the big firms like MS will start buying all the smaller firms as they find smaller and smaller returns in their industry until we end up with just a few Uber-Corporations which ultimately end up owning everything. These Uber-Corps then start merging until there is one organisation that owns everything.
My spin on it is that as your domestic market declines, you go out and create a new market in the same industry. For instance, the big corporations might spend up big on humanitarian aid in poor nations so that the nation can eventually afford to buy the corporations product. Either that or you bribe the politicians to go bomb the crap out of a country so that they no longer have any infrastructure and bingo, you got a whole lot of business in rebuilding the nation. But be sure that only the people who bribed the pollies have a chance to get the tenders to rebuild. I think thats how it works isnt it Misters Bush and Cheney?
...as someone who recently had an email server relay raped
Hmmm. Not to come across too harsh or anything, but you _really_ should test these things. Rather than just assuming that it wasnt "accesible to the open", you should telnet to your mail server and test the possible relay methods, or at the very least, register with abuse.net and let their online tester do the work for you.
As you have no doubt seen, getting a server off ORBS and the like is really a LOT more hassle than testing in the first place. Additionally; as you say "[i]t's about time people realise that stuff like this has very real consequences..." This works both ways. If you don't secure your systems, they _will_ be taken advantage of, and next time it will be Company X suing you for permitting your mail server to be used in spamming them and not just Company X suing the spammer.
It won't, however, keep you up to date on "suspicious" activity - it's mostly for just making sure that your server and any services that run on it are going.
:)
Well actually it _can_ keep you up to date on 'suspicious activity' if you are willing to write a plugin to say, monitor your IDS output.
Nagios itself is nothing more than a web-based system of notification. The plugins provide whatever functionality you code into them, from monitoring a network service, to parsing a logfile, to monitoring temperature. Pretty much anything that provides you with feedback can be used as the input to a plugin.
I actually wrote a little plugin that parses the output from my Win2k Terminal Server logs (via BackLogNT) on my central syslog server to email me everytime my boss logs on and logs off from Windows so I can figure out when he is leaving home and on his way into the office.....and he has yet to catch me playing games when I should be working.
The long and the short is that Nagios handles the notifications, the plugins handle what is being measured/monitored.
I would have prefered to see the alternate add with the pictures of a unicorn, a mermaid, a pixie and a hacker with the caption;
"Just like the unicorn, the mermaid and the pixie, a hacker who cant compromise our operating systems just doesnt exist."
It just seems more appropriate to me...
That being said, forks are dangerous...
Agreed. Perhaps they should look at a spork of some kind?
For me, if they can guarantee me that the CD I buy wont scratch, crack or split for my lifetime, then I would be happy to pay the money.
As it is, I do buy a few CDs, but only if I consider the package as a whole is worth owning. If record companies want people to buy CDs they should try making the product 'value-added' enough that its better than just having the MP3. Good artwork, lyric sheets, stylised packaging. Do anything to make it worth the money, but don't expect people to pay for a CD when its as easy as ripping it, or P2Ping it.
Thats my opinion anyway.
What I would have really liked is something on the lines of "Here is patent number 1" and here is how linux is different/same.....It is not as if SCO patent reads like "WE patent UNIX and everything that looks like it. And that is that
Quoting from the SCO complaint;
18. SCO is the present owner of all software code and licensing rights to System V Technology.
Pretty much summarises what they are saying.
If you can show me how to do a base (kernel with very basic tools *ONLY*) install of any of those distros I would like to see it.
Its actually pretty damn easy with RedHat at least. All you need to do is to edit the flat text comps file (xml in RH8) to no longer include the things you don't want installed in the 'Base' section, run genhdlist and you're away. Make up a quickstart floppy for network installs or burn up a new CD for CD installs.
I personally use an ftp/apt-rpm server to do all my installs from kickstart floppies. 10-15 minutes from a blank system to a fully patched up system, containing _only_ the packages I want and nothing I dont, plus apt allows me to add in my own custom rpms of things that RH is reluctant or slow to release. I have different floppy images setup to build base systems for different purposes. Apt then means all I need is to throw a cron job in place to keep them patched up every day.
People seem to be so quick to dis a distro without actually trying it out properly or learning what it offers. Kickstart installs give you control over pretty much everything you could want in an installer.
Part of the reason i have the account is to get these test servers 'up to speed' to keep from getting hacked while i am testing.
Hi,
Really late come to the party so to speak, but you sound like you could use apt-rpm. I do a lot of building test servers and there is nothing that makes it easier than running your own local ftp/apt server.
I mirror the RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0 distros and update folders from my local redhat mirror. Keep it up to date with rsync and all you need to do to get an 'up to speed' server is throw in a floppy with the build requirements which includes a post install command to update via apt.
I can get a server from nothing to fully installed and patched up in the space of 10-15 minutes without any intervention whatsoever. I've got kickstart floppies with comp files setup to install each of the basic type of servers that I test on and do ftp installs across the network.
You get the advantage of speed, plus you only end up downloading the update packages once, instead of each time you update a new test box. Add to this that you can have cron jobs running on any of your permanent boxes to update themselves via apt instead of the RedHat network stuff. I personally package up anything I _would_ have installed as a tarball to an rpm and plonk it in my apt tree and can roll it out fromt there. It really does make life easier.
Well just a few thoughts for you that you probably won't even read, but it needs to be said.
Hell. My only fear is that someone will figure out how to hack the wireless protocol and beam the goatse guy direct to my eyeballs.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again? Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
No they aren't, so the point is that with it being so easy for an acceptable pirate to be created, we should look at ways of making the initial music making process cheaper. This way the loss over investment is much less.
Congruent with technology making it easier to pirate music, we have also obtained the ability to make music of an acceptable quality cheaply. (Hell that fact that people are happy to have all their music as MP3s indicates that you dont need to record to 2" in an awesome room with Neumann U87s)
What is needed now is for new industries to develop that are based around distributing the music that's been made cheaply, rather than making music that costs a lot, then promoting the fuck out of it by paying radio stations to play it.
The only reason this doesn't happen is that the record companies have a vested interest in preventing it. ie They make money (and a lot of it) out of having the industry as is. They certainly wouldn't make as much money by being in distribution.
The only reason that we pay the amount we do for CDs is so that the record industry bohemoths can carry on as they do. You and I pay extra for every CD so that the company can pay a few million dollars to radio stations so they'll play Avril bloody Levigne.
Now if on the other hand, musicians made their music on the relative cheap, signed distribution deals only, they could then sell their work at a fraction of the cost; more people would buy CDs and the music industry is saved.
Sure its a simple analysis, but why should we be protecting industries that are clearly being oustripped by technological change. If the ice carriers and sanitation men had bought politicians like the record industry have today, we might still be without refrigerators and shitting in a bucket. Technology changes things, and until recently, we were happy to let business change with it. Nowadays its sufficient to buy a few pollies and legislate for your own existence.
Well as a Bigpond customer, I can tell you that there really won't be many people inconvenienced by Bigpond being UDP'ed as the service provided is SO dismally poor that anyone who uses Usenet already has a pay account somewhere else.
Not that I ever go there (and when I do its for that articles) but the alt.binaries.* groups have about 50% completion and retention rates that ensure that anything that's larger than 1 part is guaranteed to be ungetable, PAR or otherwise.
IMHO its a deliberate plan on the part of Telstra to ensure that people don't use the service. Quite simply you make the service so bad as to be useless; people stop using it and hey presto you can justify dropping an expensive, revenue losing, part of internet service providing. If anything, they permit the level of spam they do to guarantee that the bulk of it isn't filtered before it hits their servers.
I say this as a Usenet user of many years and a Bigpond user for 4 of them. Their's is quite simply the worst feed I have ever used.
On the other hand, they have the most incompetent bunch of techos I've ever had the displeasure to work with, so it could just be they have no clue how to run a newsfeed.
Yeah, and you'd hope they'd turn off the pr0n filter software too.
I mean there isnt much that's pinker than someone's insides. That shit is sure to get blocked.
I cant actually remember how much it cost, but I picked up my geology license when I got a license for my pet fish.....
.....Eric the 'alibut.
Maybe you wouldn't like my mod then....
I rotated the XBOX decal on the top so it now says XOBX. I tell people its the cheap knock-off of the Xbox made in the Soviet Union (where apparently Xbox pays you...or some such crap.)
Hell, I'd go back and do the chick myself. Those slutty girls always liked older guys anyways.
...and you think you're shallow. ;)
What I cant understand is why it has to be Wi-fi in a plane? I mean aren't you supposed to sit down all the time?
If the airline is handing out the laptops to people without them, wifi is just an added cost and for those with them, when did you last see a laptop with wireless but without ethernet? (handhelds aside) Seriously, where is the benefit to having it, over and above ethernet via your chair?
Its pretty obvious why the American airlines (which one isn't going broke atm?) aren't too interested.