Get a Tivo. Enjoy it. In the meantime, get parts and software so you can build your own when the guys in the black helicopters shut down the company (and thus, your source for show guide information) for "violating the law*".
*The law of revised economics, which dictates that it's no longer enough to serve a market need, but you must do so at the pleasure of the ruling monopoly.
Re:Beat him over the head with a VOTING BOOTH.
on
Hatch Pushes INDUCE Act
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know, there are a lot of Slashdot readers. I'm sure most of us have at least $5 to spare toward killing the INDUCE act, and kicking Orrin Hatch out of office. We should pool our money, take out some Google Adwords ads, targeting keywords such as "Orrin Hatch, VCR, MP3 Player, freedom, etc.", and have them point to a site detailing how Hatch plans on stealing rights from the citizens of the country, in order to give them to corporate interests. This is nothing more than corporate welfare, cloaked in lies.
Next step is to start taking out newspaper ads, and sending in letters to the editor (we've targeted the geeks and the net-savvy with the Google Adwords and the website, now to take it to the rest of the voting populace.) Drop by your local Good Guys, Best Buy, etc. where the salespeople make their commissions by selling you the latest electronic doodads. Let them know that their livelihoods are being imperiled by Hatch, and that they should tell people to buy their DVD recorders, etc. NOW. Nothing like panic buying to help drive up sales, and increase media awareness of an impending deadline to get coverage.
Only now, that you've sounded the alarm among the voting public, gotten money involved (ie, commerce is threatened), and managed to get media attention focused on scaremongering INDUCE for what it is, ONLY THEN do you start putting the heat on the senators and elected representatives. That's how the game is played - if we approach them now, they'll just spin it about how INDUCE is needed to prevent piracy, blah, blah, blah. If we establish that INDUCE will rob Americans of their rights, and condemn our industries to second-class status, and throw thousands out of work, all to provide corporate welfare to Orrin Hatch's campaign contributors, well, and that's what the media is telling the general public, that puts the politicians mightly on the defensive, doesn't it?
Assuming that the user isn't saddled with some crappy PPPOE connection that automatically cuts out after a few hours, some bright soul with a backbone presence could sell a SSH tunneling service and a box, to turn your high-bandwith, but feature-poor consumer connection, into a business-class connection.
Here's what I mean: you set up a VPN over SSH, which redirects a select group of ports associated with a static but virtual IP on the provider's box, which sits on the backbone somewhere. This effectively gives you a high bandwidth static IP (at the cost of latency, and a potential bottleneck at the provider's box). As far as your consumer provider knows, you're running a VPN connection. As far as your clients know, you're running a static IP, server, etc.
Of course, this assumes that your consumer provider will let you run a VPN connection, even over SSH, AND it assumes that the static IP provider has mucho bandwidth to handle the traffic coming from you, and then the traffic to the rest of the internet.
The constitution only really says that we have the right to form a private militia in order to defend the country.
And this is based on? From my grasp of history, it seems evident to me that having an armed populace is beneficial in both discouraging foreign incursions on your territory, and in discouraging elites within the country from grabbing power and setting up a system to benefit themselves at the cost of the ordinary citizens (ie, a centralized dictatorship.)
It doesn't say anything about Joe Blow owning a handgun for fun and I wish people would revisit that clause.
What's wrong with shooting for fun? Pistol and rifle competition are both events in the Olympics, and have been for a number of years. There are junior teams at the Middle and High School level, in addition to teams at the collegiate level. As long as Joe Blow isn't a certifiable moron, and a menace to society, or a felon or other restricted person, he (or she in the case of a Jane Blow), can probably pass the DOJ background check (with $20 fee), subject to restrictions on handgun ownership in the local city/county/state.
Now if you're talking about the strict libertarians, they'd probably insist that every citizen has the right to own heavy weapons...
The idea of having more laws on the books infuriates me, wether it be banning violent games or guns. We just need to stop blaming other people when our ignored child turns out rotten.
I think that this is the key problem in the US today. Nobody on the street actually has taken a look at what the laws are, how many there are, and what they actually outlaw. If they did, I'm absolutely sure that they'd be less inclined to press for more laws, when the existing ones already cover the "evil" that people want to regulate, are currently enforced on a selective basis, and nothing would change for the better to have a NEW law regulating the same thing.
Laws get added, and rarely get removed. Regulations and restrictions get added, and rarely get removed. In the meantime, to document, administer, and enforce all of these laws, regulations, and restrictions, takes money - taxpayer money. When people talk about the bloat in government, they should start with the civil and criminal codes to see WHY such a massive legislative and adminstrative bureaucracy is needed, and why the court systems are clogged. You might also want to think about this issue the next time you get called up to jury duty, especially in California, where you get paid $15 a day, and they're so desperate for jurors, they'll make you serve even if your job pays $0 for jury duty, and the trial stretches several weeks (I served 4 weeks on a civil trial - on $5 a day.)
- Allowing the government to take down cell service around any incident that the government would rather not news spread quickly about. By ensuring that the people within the secured zone can't call or send pictures out, and reporters can't get in, they can assure a delay in the release of any account of what's going on in that zone... such jamming would be glaringly clear if all of the cell companies filed reports about the simultainous downtime without any equipment failures.
I think this is the main reason. Anybody remember Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six? (the book, not the game.) If you were about to hit a bunch of suspected terrorist cells, and wanted to make sure they were completely isolated (communications-wise), you want to jam the cellular frequencies, or isolate the local towers to make sure that they couldn't warn their buddies when the men in black start kicking in the doors. Suddenly realizing that service in your area is out might be a good tip-off that the hammer is about to fall, and being able to visualize that on a global map would be a great way to figuring out what areas to avoid during an extended operation.
Actually, it's not an mpeg encoder. The previous versions for analog TV were encoders. This version takes the mpeg2 stream straight from the digital broadcast and pipes it onto your hard drive. As a result, it's good for broadcast digital only - it cannot encode analog sources (because it isn't an mpeg encoder.)
Think of it as a tuner that is willing to talk to your Mac via firewire, and a software suite that allows you to record that stream to your HD and play it back at will. Assuming that El Gato doesn't cripple this functionality in compliance with the proposed broadcast copying flag, $300+ may very well be cheap if it's the only way you can record digital TV off the air, without having to reencode the signal.
Even worse, once "everyone" has it, people will start linking things to it (like they currently do with social security numbers). Imagine not being able to order food at a restaurant because you're not tagged, and hence are not "verifiable", or being able to enter a movie theatre or concert, because you could "be one of those subversives."
Of course, the criminals will have a field day - once they can wand you to verify your ID, people might just stop looking at photo IDs (which are easy enough to fake anyways), making false transmitters a great way of ripping people off (cloning car key transmitters, or cellphones, anyone?)
The key argument, of course, will be - "Well, if you have nothing to hide, then this shouldn't be a problem, right?" That one and the other argument, "Only criminals fear more government. We citizens have nothing to be afraid of..."
Or better, they are trying to monopolize the said market.
The goal of every capitalist is to dominate the market. The lesson here is that our laws and court system are so incredibly broken to allow trivial monopolies to occur without some sort of corresponding public good to outweigh the inefficiencies that come with monopolies. Patents and copyrights are monopolies. That they can be handed out like candy, and retained almost indefinitely (in the case of copyrights), or for obvious or pre-existing inventions, clearly undermines any possible public benefit to granting such a monopoly.
The real tragedy is that YOUR money (in the form of tax dollars) will inevitably go toward enforcing such monopolies under the current law, in the form of court time, paperwork, and legal actions (both civil and criminal if certain lawmakers have their way). Yes, you got that right - you're paying money so that the government can sue you on behalf of monopolists who are ripping you off (in most cases.) That you've already paid for your congresscritters to pass such stupid legislation, and will eventually pay again for the court time and challenges required to overturn such legislation should also be factored into the equation.
Copyrights and patents were meant to reward sharing material and ideas reduced to practice with the public, by protecting your ability to profit from that information even after making the info public. In many cases, I'd argue copyrights really don't apply because there are so many restrictions (ie, copy protection in the form of DRM, shrinkwrap agreements, etc), you're really dealing with something more akin to trade secrets rather than copyright. In the same vein, the companies aren't really sharing the information with the public in exchange for monopoly protection. For example, a publisher issues a DVD which degrades in 5 years, but forbids anyone from making any copies, which means that 20 years down the line, there are no readable copies left. Sounds crazy? Many old films fall into this sort of trap - the only surviving copies exist because somebody violated the "law" by hanging onto something they weren't supposed to, or by making a bootleg duplicate. The irony? Studios doing restorations of films to release onto DVD have relied on such copies (because they didn't take care of their own masters), which have surfaced from time to time, from certain "private" collections.
Theoretically it is supposed to be that every copyrighted work is filed with the Library of Congress, but since they're not getting enough money to store, cateogorize, and preserve such materials, they've long since dropped that requirement. So much for preserving creative works until such time that they lapse into the public domain...
Be very careful that you're not passing any of the user-input information without checking it. For example, one spammer tactic is to override your subject header by putting in a into the input, and then substituting their own set of headers (for example, a BCC: containing their targets, and a new set of body data which contains their spam message).
Filter out any CR/LFs and semi-colons in your input, hard-code your destination address, and I think that should lock your form down against that type of attack.
Spammers have already made strides in bypassing any such limits on their spamming. Accepting e-mails from untrusted senders only after they've done computation, only means that spammers will go after faster computers (to spam more serially), and deliver from multiple IP addresses (as they do already, to increase throughput by spamming in parallel.) To avoid instant blacklisting via honeypot addresses, spammers routinely make spamming runs from dozens of machines at the same time, in order to use the shotgun effect to their advantage.
Besides, the spammers don't care how much work the machines do - they're not their machines. The price could be storing data on the local hard drive, or having a bounty taken out on the IP, and the spammer could care less what happens to the zombie.
Word of warning. Don't cheap out on Firewire hardware - it's touted as being bulletproof, but in practice I've found SCSI-voodoo-like interactions between cheap cards/cases, and questionable power supplies. I've pretty much given up using Firewire for applications where I need to swap drives a lot, as weird crap happens, just at the worst possible moment.
In those applications, I've gone with dedicated ATA/133 cards with a nice roomy case with a bunch of removable drive bays. It's a pain to have to shutdown to swap drives, but less of a pain than Windows bluescreening, rebooting, and "fixing" your attached Firewire drive, scrambling all of the data on it, and making it impossible to run a recovery (no, I didn't have a backup of that data...)
I've also had weird crap happen with my Macs as well - some hardware doesn't show up unless you have it plugged in on startup. In theory it was a great idea (mix Firewire cases with removable drive bays), in practice, you're asking for trouble if you're using cheap parts (ie, bottom-basement cases, with cheap cables.)
EVERY Taiwanese person that I have ever met thinks that the island should be completely and formally a seperate nation. Oddly enough, every mainland chinese person that I've met disagrees and belives as you have stated. Most of them also believe that Tibet rightfully belongs to China too.
Here's why -- that's what they teach them in the schools. Both sides get a full load of propaganda growing up and it takes a serious amount of critical thinking for any of them to get beyond it.
Actually, it's even more convoluted than that. Taiwan (aka Formosa, around the WWII era), which was formerly a colonial posession of Japan, who had taken it from China, was essentially invaded by the mainland remnants of Chian-kai-shek's army, who took over the island, imposed their power structure on the local populace, and continually declared that they were the one true government of all of China.
If you will, think of it as General Lee and what was left of the Confederate army, complete with families and other hangers-on, retreating to the island of Cuba, and declaring themselves the one true government of the USA. And, of course, declaring it illegal on the island of Cuba to speak any language than Standard English, and making it the sole goal of every citizen on the island to press for reunification with the mainland - with the Confederacy as the government.
For the longest time, the mention of independence was intolerable not only to the mainland communists, but also the mainland losers who controlled Taiwan - being a "political dissident" or an "intellectual" (ie, potential troublemaker) could literally get you shot. Mandarin was the only legal language you could speak in school, which is one of the reasons why many young Taiwanese speak Mandarin, while their parents speak both Mandarin and one of several other dialects, and their grandparents (as a legacy of the Japanese occupation) speak Japanese and their home dialect, but usually not Mandarin.
The "colonials" have essentially been separated from mainland China for the better part of a century now, and recently became freed of the restrictions of the Chiang-kai-shek era (ie, speaking languages other than Mandarin in school is allowed now, or so I hear.) The Kuomingtang (the mainlander political party in Taiwan) is no longer in control, which makes it permissible to talk about independence, rather than reunification, even if the President of Taiwan must tread a fine line.
However, despite my American-propaganda filled youth, I can independently say that it is absolutely true that while Taiwan and the mainland obivously share a strong cultural bond, their current-day societies are different enough that any such integration would be extremely difficult and very destructive to smaller of the two.
Actually, the cultural bond goes deeper than you might suspect. Chiang, on his way to fleeing the mainland, looted a lot of cultural treasures (sculptures, paintings, scrolls, etc.) A lot of those items are still in Taiwan, as far as I know, and the mainlanders, despite now having a different written language (they simplified their writing system), would dearly like to have all that back...
Thus, a hijacked PC on the Comcast network will not be able to contact any SMTP server of interest to the spammer.
Unless they do it via a trojaned proxy that is accepting SMTP connections from a non-standard port, or unless they are using their zombies to attack web-side mailing scripts in order to take over and use the webserver's local mail system to send out spam. Having been on the receiving side of multiple attempts to take over my mail forms (unsuccessful so far), I have to say, they're damned annoying.
I think it's fewer people reporting spam. My spam count has increased (400+ a day), but I gave up reporting to SpamCop a number of months ago because I couldn't keep up. I emptied my held mail a few weeks ago, and had 6000+ messages on the system. I know SpamCop has been throwing away the older ones that I haven't gotten around to reporting/cleaning out, because I store a local copy of the mail going to SpamCop and I've archived WAY more than that...
And if you do ship UPS, package your stuff so that it could at least withstand being drop kicked 20 feet into a metal wall...
In my experience, I've only gotten two type of packages that have survived the trip through UPS with the article inside intact:
1. Ultra-light packages with about 4 inches of padding between the box and the object, so when the box gets inevitably crushed, impaled, and dented, the object inside miraculously survives, because it wasn't heavy enough to suffer serious shock damage.
2. Super-well packed packages - reinforced triple-layer heavy duty cardboard boxes, with an underlayer of foamed insulation (peanuts are bad news - crushed boxes allow the peanuts to migrate away from the bottom of the package, leading to your heavy object making almost direct contact with the concrete when the package makes the 10-20ft drop), a inner core of foam peanuts as a cushion, and a stop-gap last-ditch double layer of tightly wrapped bubble wrap around the article itself.
Anything that weighs more than a couple of pounds, and shipped without enough protection via UPS will end up looking like it was used as part of a crash barrier at NASCAR. I have an old MacOS clone (all metal construction with rivets) that took such a pounding when the box it was in was crushed (repeatedly, it looks like) and then dropped, when I took it out of the box, the entire case was completely bent out of true, steel panels had popped loose, and the power supply was cracked internally. I ended up using a mallet and a piece of scrap wood to pound the case back into shape, and had to use screws to secure the panels together, since the rivets had all popped loose from the abuse of transit. This was not a cheap case either (any of you who remember the old Radius 81/100 clones can attest to this - the steel on these things is thick!)
Excellent link - the article does a great job of voicing some of the deeply held suspicions I've had about micropayments, namely marginal costs of transactions for the user vs. the utility of the material being purchased. Believers think that I'm willing to throw away a quarter on something to see if it's good or not. If it was cash, I *might* agree, but there's a big cost in terms of mental processing to pitch a few pennies in on the net for a one-time peek at something that might stink.
That's what really annoys me about certain organizations. You send them $40, and they spend probably $15 of it sending you mail, and calling you, in order to convince you to give them more money. Why the hell don't they keep the $15 and do what they promised to do with it?
Personally, I would never see nor care any sum of money > 1 million dollars.
I would. 1 million dollars doesn't last long, not if you intend to do anything big. SpaceShipOne development has cost Paul Allen 20 million so far. The budget for your local concert orchestra probably exceeds 1 mil a year. And these are one-time commitments. Trying to find a cure for cancer? Diabetes? Need to protect woodlands against overdevelopment? Pay the tax man?
It all costs money. Not surprisingly, if you want to donate more money, you have to have more money to start off with...
I help people, but I make sure I walk them through what I'm doing, so that they learn what the process is, and how not to end up in the same situation (ie, backup your drive on a regular basis, so when your system gets hosed/drive fails, you won't need to spend 6 days running drive recovery programs...)
The worst thing is to give services away for free (without forcing the user to get involved), because then there's an expectation of the level of service you're going to provide, without any knowledge of how much work you're putting in, or how messed up their system is. Also, the key reason I want to help these people for free, is:
#1. To diagnose and fix a problem I haven't seen before. (If it isn't interesting, then I'm less inclined to take the job on myself.)
#2. For them to help themselves. Many times, I'm giving away advice or walking them through on the phone (ie, install Firefox, Spybot Search and Destroy, Kerio, and an antivirus program, backup regularly, etc.) in lieu of actually doing the work myself.
Although, I have to say, you save the woman several hundred dollars on her brakes out of the kindness of your heart, and all she can do is blame you for her engine problems???
I would go the PBS way, and insert stuff at the beginning, a short segment during an intermission (gotta go to the bathroom sometime) and trailers at the end. As long as the commercials are interesting enouch (consider the geeky nature of an audience that uses RSS, Bittorrent, and computers to watch TV - you can tailor the ad time very nicely), it will be easier to leave them in, than having to cut them out and re-seed a now illegal stram.
As far as skipping, well, I could cut out a piece of cardboard and tape it to my monitor to block out your annoying banner. At least ads at the beginning, middle and end can get some eyeball time, especially if you lead off with a good one.
The salary numbers being tossed around have caught my eye (120k+ - tax free?!?) but how hard is it to procure a sidearm, and carry it legally where you will be working? I'd hate to be armed well enough to take on abductors, only to get hauled off by the local gendarmes for packing heat. Do you get waivers if you want to order body armor from a company that usually sells only to military and law enforcement (ie, US Cavalry). Who do you talk to to get job leads?
Once this prize is won, we need another, specifying that the same vehicle reaches orbit, returns to Earth and then does it again within a limited time frame.
Actually, the X-Prize specifies that you have to put 3 people (or a pilot and equivalent weight for 2 other passengers) into sub-orbital spaceflight, and be able to turn your craft around and repeat the flight within 2 weeks to claim the prize.
Monday's flight will not be X-Prize qualified, but if it goes well, you will probably see Rutan & Co. schedule the real deal in the near future with much more fanfare.
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Get a Tivo. Enjoy it. In the meantime, get parts and software so you can build your own when the guys in the black helicopters shut down the company (and thus, your source for show guide information) for "violating the law*".
*The law of revised economics, which dictates that it's no longer enough to serve a market need, but you must do so at the pleasure of the ruling monopoly.
You know, there are a lot of Slashdot readers. I'm sure most of us have at least $5 to spare toward killing the INDUCE act, and kicking Orrin Hatch out of office. We should pool our money, take out some Google Adwords ads, targeting keywords such as "Orrin Hatch, VCR, MP3 Player, freedom, etc.", and have them point to a site detailing how Hatch plans on stealing rights from the citizens of the country, in order to give them to corporate interests. This is nothing more than corporate welfare, cloaked in lies.
Next step is to start taking out newspaper ads, and sending in letters to the editor (we've targeted the geeks and the net-savvy with the Google Adwords and the website, now to take it to the rest of the voting populace.) Drop by your local Good Guys, Best Buy, etc. where the salespeople make their commissions by selling you the latest electronic doodads. Let them know that their livelihoods are being imperiled by Hatch, and that they should tell people to buy their DVD recorders, etc. NOW. Nothing like panic buying to help drive up sales, and increase media awareness of an impending deadline to get coverage.
Only now, that you've sounded the alarm among the voting public, gotten money involved (ie, commerce is threatened), and managed to get media attention focused on scaremongering INDUCE for what it is, ONLY THEN do you start putting the heat on the senators and elected representatives. That's how the game is played - if we approach them now, they'll just spin it about how INDUCE is needed to prevent piracy, blah, blah, blah. If we establish that INDUCE will rob Americans of their rights, and condemn our industries to second-class status, and throw thousands out of work, all to provide corporate welfare to Orrin Hatch's campaign contributors, well, and that's what the media is telling the general public, that puts the politicians mightly on the defensive, doesn't it?
Assuming that the user isn't saddled with some crappy PPPOE connection that automatically cuts out after a few hours, some bright soul with a backbone presence could sell a SSH tunneling service and a box, to turn your high-bandwith, but feature-poor consumer connection, into a business-class connection.
Here's what I mean: you set up a VPN over SSH, which redirects a select group of ports associated with a static but virtual IP on the provider's box, which sits on the backbone somewhere. This effectively gives you a high bandwidth static IP (at the cost of latency, and a potential bottleneck at the provider's box). As far as your consumer provider knows, you're running a VPN connection. As far as your clients know, you're running a static IP, server, etc.
Of course, this assumes that your consumer provider will let you run a VPN connection, even over SSH, AND it assumes that the static IP provider has mucho bandwidth to handle the traffic coming from you, and then the traffic to the rest of the internet.
The constitution only really says that we have the right to form a private militia in order to defend the country.
And this is based on? From my grasp of history, it seems evident to me that having an armed populace is beneficial in both discouraging foreign incursions on your territory, and in discouraging elites within the country from grabbing power and setting up a system to benefit themselves at the cost of the ordinary citizens (ie, a centralized dictatorship.)
It doesn't say anything about Joe Blow owning a handgun for fun and I wish people would revisit that clause.
What's wrong with shooting for fun? Pistol and rifle competition are both events in the Olympics, and have been for a number of years. There are junior teams at the Middle and High School level, in addition to teams at the collegiate level. As long as Joe Blow isn't a certifiable moron, and a menace to society, or a felon or other restricted person, he (or she in the case of a Jane Blow), can probably pass the DOJ background check (with $20 fee), subject to restrictions on handgun ownership in the local city/county/state.
Now if you're talking about the strict libertarians, they'd probably insist that every citizen has the right to own heavy weapons...
The idea of having more laws on the books infuriates me, wether it be banning violent games or guns. We just need to stop blaming other people when our ignored child turns out rotten.
I think that this is the key problem in the US today. Nobody on the street actually has taken a look at what the laws are, how many there are, and what they actually outlaw. If they did, I'm absolutely sure that they'd be less inclined to press for more laws, when the existing ones already cover the "evil" that people want to regulate, are currently enforced on a selective basis, and nothing would change for the better to have a NEW law regulating the same thing.
Laws get added, and rarely get removed. Regulations and restrictions get added, and rarely get removed. In the meantime, to document, administer, and enforce all of these laws, regulations, and restrictions, takes money - taxpayer money. When people talk about the bloat in government, they should start with the civil and criminal codes to see WHY such a massive legislative and adminstrative bureaucracy is needed, and why the court systems are clogged. You might also want to think about this issue the next time you get called up to jury duty, especially in California, where you get paid $15 a day, and they're so desperate for jurors, they'll make you serve even if your job pays $0 for jury duty, and the trial stretches several weeks (I served 4 weeks on a civil trial - on $5 a day.)
- Allowing the government to take down cell service around any incident that the government would rather not news spread quickly about. By ensuring that the people within the secured zone can't call or send pictures out, and reporters can't get in, they can assure a delay in the release of any account of what's going on in that zone... such jamming would be glaringly clear if all of the cell companies filed reports about the simultainous downtime without any equipment failures.
I think this is the main reason. Anybody remember Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six? (the book, not the game.) If you were about to hit a bunch of suspected terrorist cells, and wanted to make sure they were completely isolated (communications-wise), you want to jam the cellular frequencies, or isolate the local towers to make sure that they couldn't warn their buddies when the men in black start kicking in the doors. Suddenly realizing that service in your area is out might be a good tip-off that the hammer is about to fall, and being able to visualize that on a global map would be a great way to figuring out what areas to avoid during an extended operation.
Actually, it's not an mpeg encoder. The previous versions for analog TV were encoders. This version takes the mpeg2 stream straight from the digital broadcast and pipes it onto your hard drive. As a result, it's good for broadcast digital only - it cannot encode analog sources (because it isn't an mpeg encoder.)
Think of it as a tuner that is willing to talk to your Mac via firewire, and a software suite that allows you to record that stream to your HD and play it back at will. Assuming that El Gato doesn't cripple this functionality in compliance with the proposed broadcast copying flag, $300+ may very well be cheap if it's the only way you can record digital TV off the air, without having to reencode the signal.
Even worse, once "everyone" has it, people will start linking things to it (like they currently do with social security numbers). Imagine not being able to order food at a restaurant because you're not tagged, and hence are not "verifiable", or being able to enter a movie theatre or concert, because you could "be one of those subversives."
Of course, the criminals will have a field day - once they can wand you to verify your ID, people might just stop looking at photo IDs (which are easy enough to fake anyways), making false transmitters a great way of ripping people off (cloning car key transmitters, or cellphones, anyone?)
The key argument, of course, will be - "Well, if you have nothing to hide, then this shouldn't be a problem, right?" That one and the other argument, "Only criminals fear more government. We citizens have nothing to be afraid of..."
Or better, they are trying to monopolize the said market.
The goal of every capitalist is to dominate the market. The lesson here is that our laws and court system are so incredibly broken to allow trivial monopolies to occur without some sort of corresponding public good to outweigh the inefficiencies that come with monopolies. Patents and copyrights are monopolies. That they can be handed out like candy, and retained almost indefinitely (in the case of copyrights), or for obvious or pre-existing inventions, clearly undermines any possible public benefit to granting such a monopoly.
The real tragedy is that YOUR money (in the form of tax dollars) will inevitably go toward enforcing such monopolies under the current law, in the form of court time, paperwork, and legal actions (both civil and criminal if certain lawmakers have their way). Yes, you got that right - you're paying money so that the government can sue you on behalf of monopolists who are ripping you off (in most cases.) That you've already paid for your congresscritters to pass such stupid legislation, and will eventually pay again for the court time and challenges required to overturn such legislation should also be factored into the equation.
Copyrights and patents were meant to reward sharing material and ideas reduced to practice with the public, by protecting your ability to profit from that information even after making the info public. In many cases, I'd argue copyrights really don't apply because there are so many restrictions (ie, copy protection in the form of DRM, shrinkwrap agreements, etc), you're really dealing with something more akin to trade secrets rather than copyright. In the same vein, the companies aren't really sharing the information with the public in exchange for monopoly protection. For example, a publisher issues a DVD which degrades in 5 years, but forbids anyone from making any copies, which means that 20 years down the line, there are no readable copies left. Sounds crazy? Many old films fall into this sort of trap - the only surviving copies exist because somebody violated the "law" by hanging onto something they weren't supposed to, or by making a bootleg duplicate. The irony? Studios doing restorations of films to release onto DVD have relied on such copies (because they didn't take care of their own masters), which have surfaced from time to time, from certain "private" collections.
Theoretically it is supposed to be that every copyrighted work is filed with the Library of Congress, but since they're not getting enough money to store, cateogorize, and preserve such materials, they've long since dropped that requirement. So much for preserving creative works until such time that they lapse into the public domain...
Be very careful that you're not passing any of the user-input information without checking it. For example, one spammer tactic is to override your subject header by putting in a into the input, and then substituting their own set of headers (for example, a BCC: containing their targets, and a new set of body data which contains their spam message).
Filter out any CR/LFs and semi-colons in your input, hard-code your destination address, and I think that should lock your form down against that type of attack.
Can the government claim eminent domain over patents or other IP?
They did it with the airplane in order to make use of it during WWI. Must have pissed off the Wright brothers something fierce when their patents were rendered useless during that time, but it contributed to the birth of the commercial aircraft industry.
Spammers have already made strides in bypassing any such limits on their spamming. Accepting e-mails from untrusted senders only after they've done computation, only means that spammers will go after faster computers (to spam more serially), and deliver from multiple IP addresses (as they do already, to increase throughput by spamming in parallel.) To avoid instant blacklisting via honeypot addresses, spammers routinely make spamming runs from dozens of machines at the same time, in order to use the shotgun effect to their advantage.
Besides, the spammers don't care how much work the machines do - they're not their machines. The price could be storing data on the local hard drive, or having a bounty taken out on the IP, and the spammer could care less what happens to the zombie.
Word of warning. Don't cheap out on Firewire hardware - it's touted as being bulletproof, but in practice I've found SCSI-voodoo-like interactions between cheap cards/cases, and questionable power supplies. I've pretty much given up using Firewire for applications where I need to swap drives a lot, as weird crap happens, just at the worst possible moment.
In those applications, I've gone with dedicated ATA/133 cards with a nice roomy case with a bunch of removable drive bays. It's a pain to have to shutdown to swap drives, but less of a pain than Windows bluescreening, rebooting, and "fixing" your attached Firewire drive, scrambling all of the data on it, and making it impossible to run a recovery (no, I didn't have a backup of that data...)
I've also had weird crap happen with my Macs as well - some hardware doesn't show up unless you have it plugged in on startup. In theory it was a great idea (mix Firewire cases with removable drive bays), in practice, you're asking for trouble if you're using cheap parts (ie, bottom-basement cases, with cheap cables.)
EVERY Taiwanese person that I have ever met thinks that the island should be completely and formally a seperate nation. Oddly enough, every mainland chinese person that I've met disagrees and belives as you have stated. Most of them also believe that Tibet rightfully belongs to China too.
Here's why -- that's what they teach them in the schools. Both sides get a full load of propaganda growing up and it takes a serious amount of critical thinking for any of them to get beyond it.
Actually, it's even more convoluted than that. Taiwan (aka Formosa, around the WWII era), which was formerly a colonial posession of Japan, who had taken it from China, was essentially invaded by the mainland remnants of Chian-kai-shek's army, who took over the island, imposed their power structure on the local populace, and continually declared that they were the one true government of all of China.
If you will, think of it as General Lee and what was left of the Confederate army, complete with families and other hangers-on, retreating to the island of Cuba, and declaring themselves the one true government of the USA. And, of course, declaring it illegal on the island of Cuba to speak any language than Standard English, and making it the sole goal of every citizen on the island to press for reunification with the mainland - with the Confederacy as the government.
For the longest time, the mention of independence was intolerable not only to the mainland communists, but also the mainland losers who controlled Taiwan - being a "political dissident" or an "intellectual" (ie, potential troublemaker) could literally get you shot. Mandarin was the only legal language you could speak in school, which is one of the reasons why many young Taiwanese speak Mandarin, while their parents speak both Mandarin and one of several other dialects, and their grandparents (as a legacy of the Japanese occupation) speak Japanese and their home dialect, but usually not Mandarin.
The "colonials" have essentially been separated from mainland China for the better part of a century now, and recently became freed of the restrictions of the Chiang-kai-shek era (ie, speaking languages other than Mandarin in school is allowed now, or so I hear.) The Kuomingtang (the mainlander political party in Taiwan) is no longer in control, which makes it permissible to talk about independence, rather than reunification, even if the President of Taiwan must tread a fine line.
However, despite my American-propaganda filled youth, I can independently say that it is absolutely true that while Taiwan and the mainland obivously share a strong cultural bond, their current-day societies are different enough that any such integration would be extremely difficult and very destructive to smaller of the two.
Actually, the cultural bond goes deeper than you might suspect. Chiang, on his way to fleeing the mainland, looted a lot of cultural treasures (sculptures, paintings, scrolls, etc.) A lot of those items are still in Taiwan, as far as I know, and the mainlanders, despite now having a different written language (they simplified their writing system), would dearly like to have all that back...
Thus, a hijacked PC on the Comcast network will not be able to contact any SMTP server of interest to the spammer.
Unless they do it via a trojaned proxy that is accepting SMTP connections from a non-standard port, or unless they are using their zombies to attack web-side mailing scripts in order to take over and use the webserver's local mail system to send out spam. Having been on the receiving side of multiple attempts to take over my mail forms (unsuccessful so far), I have to say, they're damned annoying.
I think it's fewer people reporting spam. My spam count has increased (400+ a day), but I gave up reporting to SpamCop a number of months ago because I couldn't keep up. I emptied my held mail a few weeks ago, and had 6000+ messages on the system. I know SpamCop has been throwing away the older ones that I haven't gotten around to reporting/cleaning out, because I store a local copy of the mail going to SpamCop and I've archived WAY more than that...
And if you do ship UPS, package your stuff so that it could at least withstand being drop kicked 20 feet into a metal wall...
In my experience, I've only gotten two type of packages that have survived the trip through UPS with the article inside intact:
1. Ultra-light packages with about 4 inches of padding between the box and the object, so when the box gets inevitably crushed, impaled, and dented, the object inside miraculously survives, because it wasn't heavy enough to suffer serious shock damage.
2. Super-well packed packages - reinforced triple-layer heavy duty cardboard boxes, with an underlayer of foamed insulation (peanuts are bad news - crushed boxes allow the peanuts to migrate away from the bottom of the package, leading to your heavy object making almost direct contact with the concrete when the package makes the 10-20ft drop), a inner core of foam peanuts as a cushion, and a stop-gap last-ditch double layer of tightly wrapped bubble wrap around the article itself.
Anything that weighs more than a couple of pounds, and shipped without enough protection via UPS will end up looking like it was used as part of a crash barrier at NASCAR. I have an old MacOS clone (all metal construction with rivets) that took such a pounding when the box it was in was crushed (repeatedly, it looks like) and then dropped, when I took it out of the box, the entire case was completely bent out of true, steel panels had popped loose, and the power supply was cracked internally. I ended up using a mallet and a piece of scrap wood to pound the case back into shape, and had to use screws to secure the panels together, since the rivets had all popped loose from the abuse of transit. This was not a cheap case either (any of you who remember the old Radius 81/100 clones can attest to this - the steel on these things is thick!)
Excellent link - the article does a great job of voicing some of the deeply held suspicions I've had about micropayments, namely marginal costs of transactions for the user vs. the utility of the material being purchased. Believers think that I'm willing to throw away a quarter on something to see if it's good or not. If it was cash, I *might* agree, but there's a big cost in terms of mental processing to pitch a few pennies in on the net for a one-time peek at something that might stink.
That's what really annoys me about certain organizations. You send them $40, and they spend probably $15 of it sending you mail, and calling you, in order to convince you to give them more money. Why the hell don't they keep the $15 and do what they promised to do with it?
Personally, I would never see nor care any sum of money > 1 million dollars.
I would. 1 million dollars doesn't last long, not if you intend to do anything big. SpaceShipOne development has cost Paul Allen 20 million so far. The budget for your local concert orchestra probably exceeds 1 mil a year. And these are one-time commitments. Trying to find a cure for cancer? Diabetes? Need to protect woodlands against overdevelopment? Pay the tax man?
It all costs money. Not surprisingly, if you want to donate more money, you have to have more money to start off with...
I help people, but I make sure I walk them through what I'm doing, so that they learn what the process is, and how not to end up in the same situation (ie, backup your drive on a regular basis, so when your system gets hosed/drive fails, you won't need to spend 6 days running drive recovery programs...)
The worst thing is to give services away for free (without forcing the user to get involved), because then there's an expectation of the level of service you're going to provide, without any knowledge of how much work you're putting in, or how messed up their system is. Also, the key reason I want to help these people for free, is:
#1. To diagnose and fix a problem I haven't seen before. (If it isn't interesting, then I'm less inclined to take the job on myself.)
#2. For them to help themselves. Many times, I'm giving away advice or walking them through on the phone (ie, install Firefox, Spybot Search and Destroy, Kerio, and an antivirus program, backup regularly, etc.) in lieu of actually doing the work myself.
Although, I have to say, you save the woman several hundred dollars on her brakes out of the kindness of your heart, and all she can do is blame you for her engine problems???
Good lord, a post rife with spelling errors. I need to go to sleep. Apologies to everybody...
I would go the PBS way, and insert stuff at the beginning, a short segment during an intermission (gotta go to the bathroom sometime) and trailers at the end. As long as the commercials are interesting enouch (consider the geeky nature of an audience that uses RSS, Bittorrent, and computers to watch TV - you can tailor the ad time very nicely), it will be easier to leave them in, than having to cut them out and re-seed a now illegal stram.
As far as skipping, well, I could cut out a piece of cardboard and tape it to my monitor to block out your annoying banner. At least ads at the beginning, middle and end can get some eyeball time, especially if you lead off with a good one.
The salary numbers being tossed around have caught my eye (120k+ - tax free?!?) but how hard is it to procure a sidearm, and carry it legally where you will be working? I'd hate to be armed well enough to take on abductors, only to get hauled off by the local gendarmes for packing heat. Do you get waivers if you want to order body armor from a company that usually sells only to military and law enforcement (ie, US Cavalry). Who do you talk to to get job leads?
Once this prize is won, we need another, specifying that the same vehicle reaches orbit, returns to Earth and then does it again within a limited time frame.
Actually, the X-Prize specifies that you have to put 3 people (or a pilot and equivalent weight for 2 other passengers) into sub-orbital spaceflight, and be able to turn your craft around and repeat the flight within 2 weeks to claim the prize.
Monday's flight will not be X-Prize qualified, but if it goes well, you will probably see Rutan & Co. schedule the real deal in the near future with much more fanfare.