> Can't you find something better to do with your money? People like this make me sick, although if I had the money, I must admit I'd be tempted to do the same. It's easy to be frugal with other people's money.
You find it easy to be frugal with other people's money? It's a shame that disqualifies you for elected office, 'cuz we need people like you.
> While his house is indeed "cool", I don't see this really "benefiting" humankind any more than, say, Theater Surround systems or MP3 players. They're neat, they're fun, and they're great for people who can afford them.
OK, I'll put on my "hippie hat" for a minute and say that "at least it's more environmentally-sound than driving your SUV to the movie theater".
But the real reason is, as you guessed, convenience.
> But the truth is automated (or at least the best equivalent at the time) houses have been around forever, and always among the wealthiest of the population.
So ask your grandmother how her parents did the laundry when she was a kid. If your great-grandmother was lucky, she had a wringer she turned with a crank to speed up the drying process, and she didn't have to boil the water herself, because the coal-burning stove had a heat exchanger in the back of it to keep some water hot for bathing.
Flush toilets, basic refrigerators, frost-free refrigerators, self-cleaning ovens, hot water on tap, and laundry machines all started out as things that were "great for people who can afford them" too.
> Why does Jones need a home that includes a movie theater that seats 20 and wine cellar accessible only by fingerprint scan?
> > > > According to Jones, "I like to build things and change the world." > > Sure, I like to build things and wouldn't mind changing the world, where is my 27,000 sq ft mansion? But really, how does this mansion change the world? I'm sure a lot of progress is being made to help the world out while he lounges around, having shades opened and lights turned on for him automatically, while he listens to some classical music on his hidden speakers as he heads to the wine cellar to get something tasty to drink. Yep, lots of progress going on there, I can see the world's problems just dissolving away.
I'm willing to compromise on some things. For instance, rather than having a wine cellar (that could be full of Thunderbird and Wild Turkey for all we know) that had biometric access control, I'd settle for a wine cellar so well-stocked that it needed a biometric access control, even if it never got one.
But will some of you "that money could be spent on other people" folks kindly put your money where your mouth is, so we can settle this question once and for all? I'm willing to bet a million bucks of your money that owning a house like that would certainly dissolve the world's problems away for me!
And for the record - I'd even bet a million bucks of my money. I'm just short by about a million bucks at the moment.
(Why yes, it is my goal in life to have a personal answer to the question of whether or not money can buy happiness. I don't trust poor people or government officials when they insist that it can't.:-)
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
> Raise The Fist [raisethefist.com] webmaster Sherman Austin is being indicted [raisethefist.com] by the feds for circulating bomb-making literature and carrying an unregistered handgun. These charges came down six months after federal prosecutors told him there would probably be no charges filed.
I don't know about the other two d00dz, but I remember the Slashdot articles about this luzer.
I believe the moral of the "Raise the Fist" threads was that if you cr4x0r and DD0S 4rmy and f3d w3bs1t3z, j00 get 0wn3d, and deservedly so.
If prosecuting DDOSers and website vandals is political persecution in your books, well, I'm all for it.
(More to the point - check your sources. If the diffs between your stories about the other two "innocent protestors" and reality are even half wide as they are for the raisethefist d00d, I'm all for their prosecutions too. The government may be run by morons for morons, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)
> What it does show is that it is feasible to do more work in this area - despite its size, people lose interest (although I would imagine this is more to do with wedding-associated alcohol than anything else...) and let it click away without ogling at it - all it is is fairly simple technology appliying simple rules (e.g. face should be in centre or photo or wherever) and then takes a few pictures.
It's a good thing so many of us geeks are so stereotypically asexual.
I mean, this would be the perfect thing to have at a/.er's wedding. Except that you'd just get roll after roll of close-ups of geeks' noses as they examine the wedcambot for 3 hours while the reception goes on in the background.
Groom included. ("Huh? Oh yeah, yeah, I do, I do, whatever. Just gimme a few minutes, I think I can get a Quake server running on this thing! Tell the best d00d to bring his laptop, we're gonna have wireless LAN gaming at the reception!")
> > Lewis is able to determine that it's seeing a human by recognizing that it's looking at a pair of legs. Once this realization is made, Lewis gazes up to look at the individual's face. > > That pretty much describes the way most guys recognize chicks (especially in sunny climates)
The poster of that comment must be female.
A male poster would say "Face? Never seen one of those..." *rimshot*
> Napster and AudioGalaxy have shown me that there are PLENTY of people out there who share my fondness for, say, [... ] Johnny Standley's "Grandma's Lye Soap."
Thanks. You just brought back 20-year-old memories of 10 minutes of side-splitting laughter when I was a kid. Another track I now have to find and download. You bastard. I hate you.
(...but I guess that's OK, because, well... no reason really... umm, it's in the book.)
Re:Well, I guess that's how Fascism takes root....
on
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· Score: 2
> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a socialist. >Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist. > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew. >Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me. >- Martin Niemöller
Dude, you left out the part where they came for the trite:-)
>Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
I say this as one of Slashdot's resident cynics, and one who is highly cynical about government even more so than the private sector - so let me say this clearly:
Your free speech rights have clearly not been abridged, nor are they in danger - or you wouldn't have been able to write what you just wrote, because you'd face imprisonment and execution within days.
There are many countries where saying such things about their leaders would indeed lead to just such a fate. The United States is not one of those countries.
The fact that 49% (or even, hypothetically, 51%) of its citizens "think the First Amendment goes too far" does not mean that there is sufficient political will to repeal it. The Constitution has safeguards such as a supermajority requirement for precisely such a reason. They work. Deal with it.
Re:Revoking people's right to complain?
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> Here's an example: When there's a structure set up, such as that of the US Military, and the command officers make all the decisions...they may not be making the right ones, and a private or a lieutenant might see a solution to the problem. Now, say for example, the 4-Star General in charge doesn't want to look bad to his superiors, [... and court-martials everyone who questions his decision to send his troops into a meat grinder ]
Once upon a time, that's how militaries were run. Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade is a particularly poignant reminder.
In a modern professional military, such as that of the US, troops are trained to think for themselves and given relatively wide latitude. Your hypothetical 4-star General might order an attack from one, two, or more fronts - but he'd leave it up to lower ranking officers to accomplish the various subtasks of taking airstrips, villages, and maintaining lines of supply and communications.
> Private Jon Doe, realizes where the ambushes keep happening, and tries to speak up, to prevent more losses. But, the General doesn't want to look bad, so therefore Private Jon Doe is court-marshalled.
In the real world - Pvt. Doe tells his squad leader - and his squad leader says "OK, guys, we're gonna take out that nest of snipers on the top of the hill. Other squads will be the main assault. We have to take out the snipers first or it'll be like yesterday, which sucked ass. Remember - the Colonel said he wanted the town taken, but not how, and the General doesn't even know this town exists. So it's up to us - let's get to work!"
And last but not least - even a 4-star General is answerable to the Commander-in-Chief. High-ranking Generals have been sacked from their positions both for failing to meet their objectives, and for overstepping their bounds.
With apologies to Jello Biafra...
on
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· Score: 5, Insightful
(With apologies to Jello Biafra's 1990 spoken word piece)
We interupt your surfing session with a special bulletin:
The Internet is now under martial law.
All constitutional rights have been suspended.
Stay in your homes! Do not attempt to contact loved ones, science fiction authors, or software developers.
SHUT UP!
Do not attempt to think, or depresion may occur.
Stay in your homes. Curfew is at 7 pm sharp after work. Anyone transferring content on ports other than those allowed by their subdivision router - will - be - shot.
(Remain calm.)
Do not panic.
Your neighborhood Digital Rights Inspector will be around to collect access logs in the morning. Anyone caught interfering with the collection of access logs - will - be - shot.
Stay in your homes! Remain calm!
The number one enemy of progress is questions!
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Re:intersting, but one bigass plot hole
on
0wnz0red
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· Score: 1
> Ok so he takes the shit to somalia. did he forget that when you are "infected" you have to eat 5 cheeseburgers and a box of krispykremes every fucking day? part of the reason life sucks in somalia is the lack of food and malnutrition.
So you're saying the real reason the Feds developed this nano/biotech was to make sure that their b0rgz had to remain in the US or starve to death, and that it was all a plot to enslave us to the will of the donut makers and hamburger shops?
Y'know, that'd make a great story too. (Scary thing is, if there was a genetic mod that made me require a box of krispy kremes every day and not gain weight, I'd be first in line. Skip the rest of the superhuman powers... Mmmmmm. Doooonuts!:-)
Re:Poor writing.
on
0wnz0red
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· Score: 4, Insightful
> Consider the paragraph on the first page where he mentions that the protagonist loses commit privileges on CVS.
So to a nontechnical audience, it sounds like "modulate the shield harmonics" on Star Trek. Big deal, that's par for the course in SF.
What was important about the story, IMHO, was the way he made it very clear (to a technical or a nontechnical audience alike) what DRM, Palladium, the "Fritz chip" and "Trustworthy" computing were all about. In that vein, it's on a par with "The Right To Read".
I've recommended this story to nontechnical folks who want both a good cyber-yarn, and a good explanation of what kinds of laws Hollywood's buying from Congress.
> "The Diamond Age", one of my favorite NS books. It had a terrible ending. NS spent nearly the entire book everything up in intricate detail, then he threw it away with an ending that was something like 15 pages long. It was as if he had completely run out of energy/money/will/etc. and had to stop writing that instant. It was such a diservice to the rest of the book, which was pretty cool and rather interesting.
For Neal Stephenson, that's a long ending.
Try Snow Crash, which (while also a wonderful read) ends as if he was thinking "Holy shit! I've got one page of paper left! Gotta wrap this up now!"
> The keylogger probably detects that hotmail is open and then monitors keystrokes to the web browser.
Umm... to what web browser?
Netscape? Mozilla? Opera? Lynx? I didn't know anyone wrote plugins for all of those products:)
If you get to Hotmail from work by using your home machine as a web proxy and encrypt that connection, it's not even gonna see the DNS lookups to Hotmail's site.
Yeah, Joe Sixpack who only uses IE with Javashit and ActiveX turned on is fux0r3d, but anyone sending stuff to internalmemos.com without covering their ass deserves what they get.
(And if Joe Sixpack can't install another browser because his work box prevents it, whatever happened to "Cut, paste, save to floppy, and send it through hotmail from home?")
> I can't take it anymore! When's someone gonna prove all this "enough for the entire Library of Congress" crap, and just give me the friggin' Library of Congress on some kind of rediculously itty-bitty medium?
You'll never have the Library of Congress on a portable storage medium because every work added to the Library of Congress after 1928 will crumble to dust (or be incinerated when the Sun goes red giant) before it enters the public domain.
The copyright laws that ensure this come from, of course, Congress.
> Sega probably used a handful of their Sonic Team people on the Moonwalker arcade... both features bad guys in big machines taking on quick-footed heroes.
I dunno. Look at the screenshots. Fucking creepy. Moonwalker has to be a product of Michael Jackson's deranged imagination.
I mean, c'mon. Your weapons are magic sprinkles and crotch-grabs? And you run around looking for little kids tied up? And there's giant robots with five-foot metal cocks?
Under "God, I love MAME" - 10 Dec 2000", and I quote...
No, I'm not, repeat, not, kidding. Not even about the "children in bondage" part - the entire point of the game is that you go touch these little urchins, who are hogtied and struggling and calling your (well, Michael's) name.
I know those of you that never saw this game in real life probably think I'm making this shit up. You'd definitely think I was making it all up if I told you that I had undoctored game footage of Michael in an alleyway, first deftly avoiding getting assaulted with a five-foot metal cock, then immediately returning the favor to a little boy huddled up against a streetlight...
Sonic, my ass. That game has Michael Jackson written all over it, man.
> DDR introduced me to social situations. I mean, before DDR, I never really mingled with people at large social gatherings. But DDR has made me a much more social person, forcing you to either deal with people or play at home.
Me too. Before there was DDR, there was SDRAM. People laughed at me at LAN parties as they fragged my bog-slow-framerate azz. I couldn't deal with people with such a lame system.
So I bought an RDRAM system, and the people at LAN parties poured Bawlz into my power supply and shorted it out. Said I deserved it for supporting the lawyers at Rambus. So I got a new power supply, but I had to play from home. (and despite decent frame rates, with the lag on a 56k connection, everyone still fragged my azz.)
Then I got a DDR system in a kickass aluminum case! Wow! My framerates are up, and I'm no longer embarassed to show up at the LAN party! I can deal with people, and I don't have to play at home anymore! w00t! I 0wn!
(Not to mention the health benefits of being able to haul my watercooled rig with fishtank reservoir to the party. I did that once up ten flights of stairs, it hurt.)
> > a paper cup containing spongy jelly that you had intercourse with > >*I* most certainly did not have intercouse with a spongy thingy. And by the way, what kind of freak
would it take to sell some spongy stuff *I* had intercourse with? Or even worse, what kind of ueber freak would buy the spongy stuff that I had intercourse with. Aaaah. The horror (** sound of hair being torn out of head**)
I can't speak for what you had intercourse with, but the spongy jelly Ihad sex with last night was no inanimate jelly-in-a-cup from Japan!
My jellied pleasure trove was a shoggoth, and I swear, she said she was 18! (Oh, sure, it wasn't until after we were necking in the back of her 1657 Ford Thunderpseudopod overlooking a fungus garden on Yuggoth that I discovered she'd meant 18 aeons, but by then my brain had been eaten, and I didn't mind as much.
(Never trust a chick you meet through Shub-Internet:-)
> If DMCA service provider liability is found to apply to people running their own servers through an ISP- Verizon and other ISPs will lose a lot of customers as they shift around. Users won't necessarily *want* to shift around, but they will have to move ISPs as they get their accounts terminated under the DMCA for distributing the latest music or movies through their p2p app of choice.
Idea for a subscription-based music service: "Buy a $20 account, l33ch Kazaa for a month, get DMCA'd. Call the sales department the next morning and buy another $20 account for next month!"
(Hey, spammers have used throwaway accounts for years... oh, the irony:-)
> I think the biggest hurdle the telecoms and cable are going to have revolves around the above
question. Telcos are used to smart networks and want them so they can charge for quality of service, premium content, etc.
Thought for the day: What's "premium content"?
If MPAA and RIAA won't release movies and music for online distribution, where will "premium content" (meaning "stuff that people will pay Verizon money to get access to") come from?
It will have to come from other users of the network.
Now, it may be transmitted in violation of copyrights, but as long as Verizon acts as a common carrier, and conforms to the DMCA takedown requirements, Verizon can allow its users to do whatever they want.
So - suppose you have a "smart network" - fine.
You could say that "live streaming video from mpaa.com gets priority" - but mpaa.com doesn't offer live streaming video.
So instead, you say "P2P file-sharing packets get higher QOS when they travel from a Verizon user to another Verizon user that's 'close' on Verizon's internal network". (Lower load on the internal network, and because it's internal, there are no per-gigabit transit charges or peering issues to work out with other backbones.)
Voila - if you're Verizon, you've just created a real incentive for your existing customer to get his buddy down the street to sign up with you instead of AOL/TW ("D00d! No bandwidth quota charges if the guy you share filez with is also a customer!").
Finally - unlike AOL's "The Internet Is Like TV!" business model, the "content" that your customers sign up to access costs you nothing to create. Yes, it comes with legal risks if that content's infringing, but those risks land entirely on your customers, not you.
If that view can stand up in court (and there are two reasons it should - first, because Napster died because it ran the P2P network but here, the ISP isn't involved -- and second, because that telco lawyers are paid more than Napster lawyers and RIAA lawyers combined, and will therefore win the case regardless of the merits:-), it's a huge win/win for broadband development and Internet users.
> > Kinda sexy, rich smart geek-wannabe chick. >
>
So which one of us is gonna paste her face onto a pornstar's body and digitially add a PDA in one hand and a laptop in her other?
Didn't
Palm already get in trouble with this with their "Simply pr0n^H^H^H^HPalm" campaign? (Obligatory parodies here:)
> When did Verizon become the "good guy"? > > Did something happen in Hell?
Yeah, but look at the competition - RIAA, MPAA, Hollings (D-Disney). The plans they have for the 'net make Bernie Ebbers of WCOM look ethical by comparison:)
> Sure, you have a small minority that likes to download linux iso images for fun, but he majority of people have broadband for online gaming, mp3s, divx, p0rn, etc. The ISPs have to fight to make sure they don't lose the very reason for the existance of broadband. These ISPs are not the good guys, they just know that if they don't fight this, that they'll lose money.
Which is why I'm very glad they're fighting this.
Fundamentally, what the Hollings bill, the bill authorizing RIAA/MPAA to DDOS your box, and all the rest of Hollywood's laws are about is killing the $600B technology industry to preserve the $10-20B entertainment industry.
You and I can't convince Hollings that the CBDTPA doesn't "promote" broadband, it kills it, because Hollings won't listen to us. We, after all, don't own broadband providers, we're merely customers.
Verizon can, and will, make that case.
If Hollywood kills broadband by buying Congress, we're inconvenienced, but our lives aren't over. Like the story about a ham and egg breakfast, wherein the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed -- when it comes to saving the 'net from Hollywood, we're involved, but the few remaining telcos are most definitely committed.
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You find it easy to be frugal with other people's money? It's a shame that disqualifies you for elected office, 'cuz we need people like you.
OK, I'll put on my "hippie hat" for a minute and say that "at least it's more environmentally-sound than driving your SUV to the movie theater".
But the real reason is, as you guessed, convenience.
> But the truth is automated (or at least the best equivalent at the time) houses have been around forever, and always among the wealthiest of the population.
So ask your grandmother how her parents did the laundry when she was a kid. If your great-grandmother was lucky, she had a wringer she turned with a crank to speed up the drying process, and she didn't have to boil the water herself, because the coal-burning stove had a heat exchanger in the back of it to keep some water hot for bathing.
Flush toilets, basic refrigerators, frost-free refrigerators, self-cleaning ovens, hot water on tap, and laundry machines all started out as things that were "great for people who can afford them" too.
> >
> > According to Jones, "I like to build things and change the world."
>
> Sure, I like to build things and wouldn't mind changing the world, where is my 27,000 sq ft mansion? But really, how does this mansion change the world? I'm sure a lot of progress is being made to help the world out while he lounges around, having shades opened and lights turned on for him automatically, while he listens to some classical music on his hidden speakers as he heads to the wine cellar to get something tasty to drink. Yep, lots of progress going on there, I can see the world's problems just dissolving away.
I'm willing to compromise on some things. For instance, rather than having a wine cellar (that could be full of Thunderbird and Wild Turkey for all we know) that had biometric access control, I'd settle for a wine cellar so well-stocked that it needed a biometric access control, even if it never got one.
But will some of you "that money could be spent on other people" folks kindly put your money where your mouth is, so we can settle this question once and for all? I'm willing to bet a million bucks of your money that owning a house like that would certainly dissolve the world's problems away for me!
And for the record - I'd even bet a million bucks of my money. I'm just short by about a million bucks at the moment.
(Why yes, it is my goal in life to have a personal answer to the question of whether or not money can buy happiness. I don't trust poor people or government officials when they insist that it can't. :-)
I don't know about the other two d00dz, but I remember the Slashdot articles about this luzer.
I believe the moral of the "Raise the Fist" threads was that if you cr4x0r and DD0S 4rmy and f3d w3bs1t3z, j00 get 0wn3d, and deservedly so.
If prosecuting DDOSers and website vandals is political persecution in your books, well, I'm all for it.
(More to the point - check your sources. If the diffs between your stories about the other two "innocent protestors" and reality are even half wide as they are for the raisethefist d00d, I'm all for their prosecutions too. The government may be run by morons for morons, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)
It's a good thing so many of us geeks are so stereotypically asexual.
I mean, this would be the perfect thing to have at a /.er's wedding. Except that you'd just get roll after roll of close-ups of geeks' noses as they examine the wedcambot for 3 hours while the reception goes on in the background.
Groom included. ("Huh? Oh yeah, yeah, I do, I do, whatever. Just gimme a few minutes, I think I can get a Quake server running on this thing! Tell the best d00d to bring his laptop, we're gonna have wireless LAN gaming at the reception!")
>
> That pretty much describes the way most guys recognize chicks (especially in sunny climates)
The poster of that comment must be female.
A male poster would say "Face? Never seen one of those..." *rimshot*
Hey, I was a Prodigy in electronics class too :)
Thanks. You just brought back 20-year-old memories of 10 minutes of side-splitting laughter when I was a kid. Another track I now have to find and download. You bastard. I hate you.
(...but I guess that's OK, because, well... no reason really... umm, it's in the book.)
>Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist.
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew.
>Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
>- Martin Niemöller
Dude, you left out the part where they came for the trite :-)
>Let me say this clearly: Bush sucks. He's a dangerous, arrogant man who's brother stole the election for him, and who's flushing our democracy down the toilet as fast as we will let him.
I say this as one of Slashdot's resident cynics, and one who is highly cynical about government even more so than the private sector - so let me say this clearly:
Your free speech rights have clearly not been abridged, nor are they in danger - or you wouldn't have been able to write what you just wrote, because you'd face imprisonment and execution within days.
There are many countries where saying such things about their leaders would indeed lead to just such a fate. The United States is not one of those countries.
The fact that 49% (or even, hypothetically, 51%) of its citizens "think the First Amendment goes too far" does not mean that there is sufficient political will to repeal it. The Constitution has safeguards such as a supermajority requirement for precisely such a reason. They work. Deal with it.
Once upon a time, that's how militaries were run. Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade is a particularly poignant reminder.
In a modern professional military, such as that of the US, troops are trained to think for themselves and given relatively wide latitude. Your hypothetical 4-star General might order an attack from one, two, or more fronts - but he'd leave it up to lower ranking officers to accomplish the various subtasks of taking airstrips, villages, and maintaining lines of supply and communications.
> Private Jon Doe, realizes where the ambushes keep happening, and tries to speak up, to prevent more losses. But, the General doesn't want to look bad, so therefore Private Jon Doe is court-marshalled.
In the real world - Pvt. Doe tells his squad leader - and his squad leader says "OK, guys, we're gonna take out that nest of snipers on the top of the hill. Other squads will be the main assault. We have to take out the snipers first or it'll be like yesterday, which sucked ass. Remember - the Colonel said he wanted the town taken, but not how, and the General doesn't even know this town exists. So it's up to us - let's get to work!"
And last but not least - even a 4-star General is answerable to the Commander-in-Chief. High-ranking Generals have been sacked from their positions both for failing to meet their objectives, and for overstepping their bounds.
We interupt your surfing session with a special bulletin:
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SHUT UP!
Do not attempt to think, or depresion may occur. Stay in your homes. Curfew is at 7 pm sharp after work. Anyone transferring content on ports other than those allowed by their subdivision router - will - be - shot.
(Remain calm.)
Do not panic. Your neighborhood Digital Rights Inspector will be around to collect access logs in the morning. Anyone caught interfering with the collection of access logs - will - be - shot.
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So you're saying the real reason the Feds developed this nano/biotech was to make sure that their b0rgz had to remain in the US or starve to death, and that it was all a plot to enslave us to the will of the donut makers and hamburger shops?
Y'know, that'd make a great story too. (Scary thing is, if there was a genetic mod that made me require a box of krispy kremes every day and not gain weight, I'd be first in line. Skip the rest of the superhuman powers... Mmmmmm. Doooonuts! :-)
So to a nontechnical audience, it sounds like "modulate the shield harmonics" on Star Trek. Big deal, that's par for the course in SF.
What was important about the story, IMHO, was the way he made it very clear (to a technical or a nontechnical audience alike) what DRM, Palladium, the "Fritz chip" and "Trustworthy" computing were all about. In that vein, it's on a par with "The Right To Read".
I've recommended this story to nontechnical folks who want both a good cyber-yarn, and a good explanation of what kinds of laws Hollywood's buying from Congress.
For Neal Stephenson, that's a long ending.
Try Snow Crash, which (while also a wonderful read) ends as if he was thinking "Holy shit! I've got one page of paper left! Gotta wrap this up now!"
Umm... to what web browser? Netscape? Mozilla? Opera? Lynx? I didn't know anyone wrote plugins for all of those products :)
If you get to Hotmail from work by using your home machine as a web proxy and encrypt that connection, it's not even gonna see the DNS lookups to Hotmail's site.
Yeah, Joe Sixpack who only uses IE with Javashit and ActiveX turned on is fux0r3d, but anyone sending stuff to internalmemos.com without covering their ass deserves what they get.
(And if Joe Sixpack can't install another browser because his work box prevents it, whatever happened to "Cut, paste, save to floppy, and send it through hotmail from home?")
You'll never have the Library of Congress on a portable storage medium because every work added to the Library of Congress after 1928 will crumble to dust (or be incinerated when the Sun goes red giant) before it enters the public domain.
The copyright laws that ensure this come from, of course, Congress.
You know, I have one simple request, and that is hard drives with frickin' laser beams attached to their read-write heads. Is that too much to ask?
I dunno. Look at the screenshots. Fucking creepy. Moonwalker has to be a product of Michael Jackson's deranged imagination.
I mean, c'mon. Your weapons are magic sprinkles and crotch-grabs? And you run around looking for little kids tied up? And there's giant robots with five-foot metal cocks?
Under "God, I love MAME" - 10 Dec 2000", and I quote...
Sonic, my ass. That game has Michael Jackson written all over it, man.
Me too. Before there was DDR, there was SDRAM. People laughed at me at LAN parties as they fragged my bog-slow-framerate azz. I couldn't deal with people with such a lame system.
So I bought an RDRAM system, and the people at LAN parties poured Bawlz into my power supply and shorted it out. Said I deserved it for supporting the lawyers at Rambus. So I got a new power supply, but I had to play from home. (and despite decent frame rates, with the lag on a 56k connection, everyone still fragged my azz.)
Then I got a DDR system in a kickass aluminum case! Wow! My framerates are up, and I'm no longer embarassed to show up at the LAN party! I can deal with people, and I don't have to play at home anymore! w00t! I 0wn!
(Not to mention the health benefits of being able to haul my watercooled rig with fishtank reservoir to the party. I did that once up ten flights of stairs, it hurt.)
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>*I* most certainly did not have intercouse with a spongy thingy. And by the way, what kind of freak would it take to sell some spongy stuff *I* had intercourse with? Or even worse, what kind of ueber freak would buy the spongy stuff that I had intercourse with. Aaaah. The horror (** sound of hair being torn out of head**)
I can't speak for what you had intercourse with, but the spongy jelly I had sex with last night was no inanimate jelly-in-a-cup from Japan!
My jellied pleasure trove was a shoggoth, and I swear, she said she was 18! (Oh, sure, it wasn't until after we were necking in the back of her 1657 Ford Thunderpseudopod overlooking a fungus garden on Yuggoth that I discovered she'd meant 18 aeons, but by then my brain had been eaten, and I didn't mind as much.
(Never trust a chick you meet through Shub-Internet :-)
Idea for a subscription-based music service: "Buy a $20 account, l33ch Kazaa for a month, get DMCA'd. Call the sales department the next morning and buy another $20 account for next month!"
(Hey, spammers have used throwaway accounts for years... oh, the irony :-)
Thought for the day: What's "premium content"?
If MPAA and RIAA won't release movies and music for online distribution, where will "premium content" (meaning "stuff that people will pay Verizon money to get access to") come from?
It will have to come from other users of the network.
Now, it may be transmitted in violation of copyrights, but as long as Verizon acts as a common carrier, and conforms to the DMCA takedown requirements, Verizon can allow its users to do whatever they want.
So - suppose you have a "smart network" - fine.
You could say that "live streaming video from mpaa.com gets priority" - but mpaa.com doesn't offer live streaming video.
So instead, you say "P2P file-sharing packets get higher QOS when they travel from a Verizon user to another Verizon user that's 'close' on Verizon's internal network". (Lower load on the internal network, and because it's internal, there are no per-gigabit transit charges or peering issues to work out with other backbones.)
Voila - if you're Verizon, you've just created a real incentive for your existing customer to get his buddy down the street to sign up with you instead of AOL/TW ("D00d! No bandwidth quota charges if the guy you share filez with is also a customer!").
Finally - unlike AOL's "The Internet Is Like TV!" business model, the "content" that your customers sign up to access costs you nothing to create. Yes, it comes with legal risks if that content's infringing, but those risks land entirely on your customers, not you.
If that view can stand up in court (and there are two reasons it should - first, because Napster died because it ran the P2P network but here, the ISP isn't involved -- and second, because that telco lawyers are paid more than Napster lawyers and RIAA lawyers combined, and will therefore win the case regardless of the merits :-), it's a huge win/win for broadband development and Internet users.
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> So which one of us is gonna paste her face onto a pornstar's body and digitially add a PDA in one hand and a laptop in her other?
Didn't Palm already get in trouble with this with their "Simply pr0n^H^H^H^HPalm" campaign? (Obligatory parodies here :)
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> Did something happen in Hell?
Yeah, but look at the competition - RIAA, MPAA, Hollings (D-Disney). The plans they have for the 'net make Bernie Ebbers of WCOM look ethical by comparison :)
Which is why I'm very glad they're fighting this.
Fundamentally, what the Hollings bill, the bill authorizing RIAA/MPAA to DDOS your box, and all the rest of Hollywood's laws are about is killing the $600B technology industry to preserve the $10-20B entertainment industry.
You and I can't convince Hollings that the CBDTPA doesn't "promote" broadband, it kills it, because Hollings won't listen to us. We, after all, don't own broadband providers, we're merely customers.
Verizon can, and will, make that case.
If Hollywood kills broadband by buying Congress, we're inconvenienced, but our lives aren't over. Like the story about a ham and egg breakfast, wherein the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed -- when it comes to saving the 'net from Hollywood, we're involved, but the few remaining telcos are most definitely committed.