> use the Net Installer! [mozilla.org] It is a 200KB download that lets you choose the options you want, and then download them. If you don't want/need Chatzilla or Mail & News, you can install a smaller package.
Call me an old fart, but "net installers" (aka stubs) annoy me. (This isn't a Mozilla criticism - IE is just as bad.)
If I don't want the email/news/chat cruft (and I don't), but I do want the basic browser on 3 systems, why should I download a 200K.exe three times, click on the same options three times, and download the same few-megabytes browser, three times?
Just gimme a damn URL where I can get the installer that contains everything needed for the basic browser. (That is, tell me where to find the thing the stub's downloading). Then let me download it ONCE. I can then FTP or copy it on my LAN, or even burn it to CD and use SneakerNet to get it to other machines.
General question: I'm seeing stubs more often, and I just don't get the idea. Apart from marketing ("Look! Upgrade your Netscape! Only 200K download!" - conveniently ignoring that it's only the stub, and thereby obfuscating the size of the real download) purposes, what value is added by these "network installer" stubs?
In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?
> Looks like NIC cards are going to basically have full packet filtering & application level firewalls built in. "Hmmm, does this stream of packets have a broadcast flag when I attempt to assemble them thusly? Yes? Hmmm, what's the destination IP? 204.*? Yikes, start dropping packets on this connection!"
$ whois -h whois.arin.net 204.0.0.0
Verio, Inc. (NET-VRIO-204-000)
8005 South Chester Street
Englewood,, CO 80112
US
Hmph. My mail server already does that. Mebbe it's time I did it in the router, too:-)
> Actually, Verisign recently acquired Illuminet, which is the largest independant carrier switching network. So they do have a pretty big investment in telecom that plays into this pretty well.
I knew it was an Illumineti plot to take over the world!
> I'm in no way doubting that there are way too many people in the US that are below the poverty line, but how accurate is that data about taiwan? 1%. I wish people would stop embracing cutthroat capitalism here. I doesn't always work, and it isn't always efficient.
Funny, I wish people would start embracing cutthroat capitalism here:)
Hong Kong and Taiwan didn't build their economies up from nothing via redistributionism.
> Today we outsource wire tapping.Tommorrow we will outsource the analysis of the wiretaps.Then outsource "crime detection and response systems" and mebbe do away with judiciary. Bah!
Given the quality of work from our current law enforcement personnel, maybe that's not a bad thing.
The problem isn't the personnel per se - most of 'em are hard-working SOBs trying to do their best, but they're are overworked, underpaid, and fettered by layer upon layer of bureaucracy.
We don't have the money (as a society) to hire enough agents or to pay 'em what they're worth. Gubmint jobs have therefore often tended to attract a lower-skilled (or they'd find work elsewhere) and more easily-corrupted (because they need the money) worker.
And it's the Gubmint, after all. These are the folks who raised bureaucracy to an art form. Doesn't matter who's in charge, nothing's gonna get done. Witness the INS fuckups that have been going on for years, but are only now receiving media attention.
Next issue - why won't this (as you fear) spread to outsourcing of the law enforcement task? Well, "what's a cop?" Any citizen can make an arrest - a cop is a guy who happens to do it for a living, and who's been trained in how to do it without (a) getting killed, and (b) getting sued for taking down the wrong guy. He's paid from tax dollars because there's a lot of work involved, and there ain't much money in it, on account of criminals not necessarily having lots of money to sieze. I suppose you could go to a bounty system, but I can't see enforcement being profitable. Who wants to risk getting blown away for the $100 bounty on graffiti taggers?
Back to the issue at hand - by outsourcing data collection to people who actually know something about technology, you increase the probability of getting the data you need. This frees up money to hire better analysts.
Finally, and critically, unlike Gubmint drones, if a Verislime drone fscks up and wiretaps the wrong guy, or (let's outsource everything:) if issues visas to dead hijackers, you can fire his monkey ass and replace him with someone competent.
While I understand your concerns, I think this new approach could ultimately be a win-win for both law enforcement and the public.
> Jesus - Religious Freedom, Equality of Man
> Boston Tea Party - Taxation without Representation
> American Revolution - Same thing, freedom from tyranny
> Freeing Slaves - Equality of Man
> Napster - You getting music (a luxury item) for free.
The history of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the
How, Why and Where phases.
"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have
lunch?'"
- Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Clearly, the notion that MP3 file sharing constitutes a fundamental civil right is an indication that we've advanced to the third stage;-)
> > "Turn on, JACK IN, drop out!" > > -- ghost of Timothy Lear
>
> Spoken like someone who's never done LSD. [... ] Until there are some major advances in graphics technology, no PC can produce the impression of a five-dimensional alien entity simultaneous receding into the past and accelerating into the future while interpenetrating all possible points in the universe at the speed of light accompanied by a soundtrack based on the contents of my subconscious mind.
Spoken like someone who's never played DOOM III:-)
> Just when I thought there was nothing else the BSA could do to surprise me...
~ wavy lines as I shift into a new timeline ~
9/11/2022: 19 terrorists, operating with the support of Osama Bin Valenti and Yasser Rosen (well, at least the Israelis and Palestinians sorted out their differences;-), defeated security checkpoints, boarded, and took control of, four 747-class unmanned-aerial-freighters (UAFs) containing full loads of Celine Dion CDs and Pauly Shore DVDs, and flew the aircraft directly into the chip fabs of Intel, AMD, the main offices of the Free Software Foundation.
The fourth aircraft, its target unknown, was downed harmlessly over water when a skilled hacker on the ground figured out what was going on, and managed to succesfully reverse-engineer, decrypt, and override the terrorists' jamming signal, regaining partial control of the aircraft using nothing but a CB radio, a Pringles can, a laptop, and an old 802.11b card. "Yeah, it was scary, but thanks to the fact that I was able to pick up on the basics of programming by kindergarten, and I had to reverse-engineer some arbitrary code samples for my high school entrance exams, it wasn't too hard to figure out how to take the plane back. Thank God they repealed the DMCA, or I'd have never had the chance to develop these skills. I only had a couple of watts of transmitter power, and I didn't have enough time to set up a distributed computing network to crack the entire protocol, so all I could do was point it over water and send it down before my batteries ran down. They can't win. All their base are belong to us!"
The 20th hijacker, Zaccarias Eisner, is still at large. Authorities in the previous administration had, in fact, detained him in 2013, but had been forced to released him under direct order of Attorney General Hollings.
The final transmission from one of the doomed freighter aircraft was recorded as "I say to you that the universal Turing machine is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Taliban Stranglers are to women home alone without their burkhas! Free Software has made our industry bleed and bleed and hemorrage! We shall not stop our jihad against the Great Satan of fair use!"
Noam Chomsky, commenting on CNN from the Shady Hippy Retirement Home, said "[...]we have to look past the destruction of our information technology industry and find the root cause of the cycle of violence - the Supreme Court's 2004 declaration of the DMCA as unconstitutional, and Congress' failure to pass the CBDTPA or any of its variants by 2005 - followed by the rapid rollout of broadband wireless P2P meshes networks, all led to the collapse of the Hollywood's business model, the consequent radicalization of members of the Hollywood media elite, ultimately leading to the tragic events of 2022. It's all still America's fault."
President Stallman and Vice President Raymond, along with Senate Majority Leader Torvalds, (they settled their differences in 2009, as Mozilla 1.0 finally shipped as part of the "Really Really Unified Distro":-) broadcasting from an undisclosed location, issued a joint statement: "You are either with us or you are with the Hollywood Cartel."
House Minority Leader Gates, and Senate Minority Leader Ballmer issued a joint statement: "Although we differ from the administration on the point of free software, we agree with them on the fundamental issue - the trillion-dollar technology industry cannot allow itself to bow down to the $60B entertainment industry. Sure, we'd prefer you be using.WMA instead of.MP3 or.OGG, but today is no day for partisan games. The bottom line is that if you don't download your indie music for free -- if you're still paying $29.99 for copy-protected Britney Spears and Celine Dion WAV files -- then the terrorists have won."
~ wavylines ~
...as I return with apologies to the real victims from the real fanatics in the crappy time-line we got stuck with.
> As a relatively conervative Christian, I can't believe that these "Christians" don't think for themselves. WWJD is replaced with WWMPD (What would my priest do?), at least with most of the Catholics I know.
Considering that the most popular answer to "What would my priest do?" these days is "an altar boy, with a crucifix if he can't find Viagra!", may I suggest you find some Catholic friends who aren't part of NAMBLA?
OK, there are some Cathaholics who are dumber than a bag of rocks when it comes to thinking for themselves, but most of 'em aren't sick:)
> "Television is never going to be successful."--Valenti talking to himself in front of a bathroom mirror in 1919 > >
I haven't had an erection in 12 years."--Valenti talking to his wife in 2001.
> Send your congressman/woman a copy of 1984 along with a letter explaining your point of view. The book itself will only run you $7 from bn, and will probably at least get your represenative thinking (if that's at all possible).
~ imaginary scenario, AD 2048 ~
Congressman: "Huh? Wazziz ting with foldy bits and black squigglez? Smells funny. Oh no! Duz it got ant tracks?" Staffer: "A book, sir, and no, sir, you know everything's been screened for biohazards. The foldy bits are pages, (no, Sir, not the kind you fuck after-hours, the other kind, the kind you write on!), and the squiggles are letters, that make words, like the ones they put in the Congressional Record when they write down your speeches." Congressman: "OK, it's a book. Whaddya do with it? Wazzit for?" Staffer: "The words contain ideas. It's a communications medium. You read it to extract the ideas." Congressman: "Hmph. No time for that. I've gotta get to the floor for a vote. You read it and tell me the ideas when I get back." Staffer: "Okay, sir."
...a few days later...
Congressman: "Hey, did you ever get around to reading that 'book' thing? Any interesting ideas there?" Staffer: "Yes sir! Lots of them! This Orwell guy was some kind of genius! He anticipated technologies 100 years ahead of his time. Call up Jack Valenti Jr. and Hilary Rosen II, and tell 'em their prayers are answered!"
> My favorite example of this phenomena is food profiling. I am not making this up.
Uh-oh. Even though I'm the kind of guy who eats red meat from cows that eat red meat, I don't like marketroids, and consequently, don't have a supermarket tracking card.
Worse, I purchase most of my food at a local grocer/butcher who does good work with quality cuts of meat and pretty fresh veggies. As I see no value in burdening him with credit card processing fees, I pay cash.
Based on that, they're gonna conclude that I either eat nothing at all, or that I must have something to hide because I pay for stuff with cash and am therefore almost absent in the grocery marketing databases. (And other databases, for that matter, as I also block doubleclick.net and as many of the other web bug scumbagz as I can.)
In short, I think it's a good thing they're reading and archiving my Slashdot postings and email, or I'd be worried:-)
(Actually, that comment is only half in jest. The problem with database marketing is that incomplete and inaccurate data is worse than no data at all. By having access to my complete datastream, their automated systems can profile me as "cynical and geeky, but harmless". If they only had access to the fact that I take a few steps to avoid being tracked by mass marketers, the systems might come to an inaccurate conclusion and mark me for higher levels of surveillance than I warrant.)
> > illegal to buy, or illegal to posses? so If I went and made such equipment, or if it was given to me as a gift?
>
> [conflicting information on usage] But it has been made illegal to buy/sell the equipment in Canada.
The original question was probably along the lines of: "Is it legal to download plans, PIC code, purchase discrete components, burn your own PICs, mount the components on a PCB, and hook it up to a TV?", and "Is it legal for a builder to give away such devices?"
Personally, I'd like to see the answer to those questions be "yes", with a ban on commercial manufacture/sales.
I think one of the coolest things that could happen would be for a complete design to "leak" its way onto the 'net. I've got no ethical problems with a guy building his own gear to l33ch TV. I do have an ethical problem with a guy who has the plans, refuses to share, and charges $500 for a p1r4t3 box.
Paying a satellite company for service is giving a media company money for s scarcity that's only somewhat artificial. (On one hand, the signal's landing in everyone's backyard. On the other hand, someone spent $MEGABUX to launch the sats that provide the datastreams, so there's a high barrier to entry. Launch your own damn satellite if you don't like his;-)
But paying a DBS pirate reseller for devices based on plans and code developed through reverse engineering is merely buying into another artificial scarcity -- except that the reseller of h4x0r3d cards has a very low investment, and is thus price-gouging.
The guy cracking DBS may be a genius, but the guy in the back room selling cards has no such mad sk1llz. He's just taking advantage of the fact that the code for the cards isn't widely-available on the 'net. In that sense, he's very much like the RIAA or MPAA exec; his business model is all about a device that costs him next to nothing to reproduce, and charging you for code he didn't write. His existence depends on making sure nobody else can get the code to burn their own PICs. It's not just an artificial scarcity, it's the definition of an artificial scarcity.
If you continued to aggressively pursue the illegal sale of these boxes, but passed a law that explicitly permitted both the reverse-engineering of such datastreams and the free-as-in-beer downloading of plans and code, you could eliminate the commercial DBS piracy market in a month.
The market would then come down to two people: (1) People who choose to pay money to a DBS provider for service, or (2) people with a few less scruples who choose to pay in time/effort keeping up with the engineering arms race for service.
Is that as good for the DBS providers as a market where everyone who views, pays their share of the freight for the expenses involved in putting the sats aloft? No.
Is it better than the current situation, where we still have slightly-unscrupulous people who choose to pirate, but who, in doing so, support a line of highly unscrupulous people (i.e. whose livelihoods are based on hoarding the reverse-engineered secrets?) IMNSHO, yes.
> What if the alien already had your random number sequence? They could subtract the numbers
from every byte. You had better make sure it's a secure random number generator! Presumably though, if you're only sending spam to/dev/null you'll be alright.
That's what the FPGA-accelerated/dev/null is for.
It's a cover story for a faster random number generator.
Any mathematician will tell you that if the alien has a sufficiently large string of random numbers, or even enough digits of pi, he does have your random number sequence.
You just have to make sure you can build your strings of random numbers faster than he can.
> To take your point a little further. Why can I not bill for time spent disposing of junk mail?
In the US, your mailbox doesn't actually belong to you - it belongs to the US Post Office. They allow you to take mail out of it.
I don't like junk mail, but someone's paying the US Post Office to deliver the snail junkmail to mailboxes which are the US Post Office's property. (To be absolutely technical - I think it's something like "you may purchase and own the physical container on the fencepost near the driveway, but the USPS still owns the space within it.")
> (in addition, materials garbage bags, etc.) What about electricity used to power the doorbell when a solicitor comes?
OK, fair enough:)
The (non-property-rights) issue with spam is the one of scale -- junk mail costs money for the sender to deliver. Door-to-door solicitors are throttled by the time/effort that it takes to walk from door to door. Even telemarketers are rate-limited by the number of drones they can have behind the predictive dialers. (Which is we've passed laws to try and combat the use of prerecorded telephone messages. But even these are rate-limited by the time it takes the recording to play back into the victim's voicemail.)
Spam, regrettably, has no such bottleneck. Even if you don't agree that it's theft of the recipient's mailbox, most of it comes through open proxies and open relays -- which clearly qualifies as stealing service from the victimized hosts.
Whether they're stealing very small amounts from millions of victims (the recipients) or larger amounts from a few victims (the bandwidth stolen from unauthorized abuse of intermediate open relays and open proxies) - spammers are thieves.
> My point was that every time I've upgraded my CPU or RAM, I've had to buy a new motherboard as well. Hence the OS re-install.
Depends on the upgrade.
As a lark, when I moved from a Pentium I (430TX chipset) to the 440BX-based system (new mobo, Celeron CPU, new chipset, new video card, new sound card, new RAM), I tried transferring (after Ghosting:) a Win9x system to it. After several reboots and requests for the install CD, it actually ran.
(Then, of course, I wiped it and reinstalled from scratch to be sure I had a decent config and drivers, but it's theoretically possible. I was amazed it worked at all.)
That said, I chose the 440BX because it had headroom for growth. That lowly Celeron-366 (66 FSB oc'ed to 100 for 550 MHz) is now running a Celeron 800 at over 1 GHz (FSB at 124.) It could probably run at an FSB of 133, except that I've got mismatched sticks of PC133.
Am I getting as much out of that PIII-1G on a 440BX chipset as I could? Of course not. My 5400 RPM drives are still running ATA-66. It's still SDRAM. It's still the same PCI frequency.
But the upgrade was $50 for the CPU, gave me another two years out of the system, and (most importantly) required no time-consuming OS or driver changes, be it Win9x, 2000, or Linux.
I think we might be at a similar point with the P4 Northwoods. Buy a cheap Northwood 1.6A now, and a mobo with a chipset (SiS 645DX or Via P4X333) with some FSB headroom. Throw some fast DDR-I into it.
Two years down the road, I think you'll probably be able to plunk in another "$50 CPU and $20 stick of RAM" behind the OS's back, giving you decent performance for another year.
There are no guarantees, of course, but by paying a $50 premium for quality parts today, you can often get better than 50/50 odds of saving $500+ two years from now. That's a good risk, IMNSHO.
> > I'm still waiting for P4 motherboards to support 333Mhz DDR.
> >There are plenty of them, based on the SIS645DX chipset. I've got a ASUS P4S533 that supports it just fine, and can use DDR400 (though there is no ratified spec for it) as well.
Wow, great timing... I'm looking at building a few boxen based on this mobo with a 1.6A, and for my own box, playing with FSB overclocks (133=533 sounds easy) versus running the RAM asynchronously.
(If I need USB2.0 I can just use a card - I think Via's P4X333 chipset will be strong, but why wait another couple of months just to get USB 2.0 onboard. SiS645DX rocks.)
So anyways - on to my question - when you say DDR400 on the P4S533, do you have a stick of DDR333 / CAS2.5 running as DDR400 / CAS3.0, and how does your bandwidth compare? (Or are you able to run it at CAS2.0 at 333, 2.5 at 400?)
> Hey, Coward, this is not a speech issue. It's a property rights issue
Amen.
I'll see your Fifth Amendment response, and, I'll raise you a Supreme Court ruling.
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any
unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically
reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the
Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the
home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow
of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to
press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted
right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of
every person's domain."
- Chief Justice Berger, U.S. Supreme Court, Rowan vs. U.S. Post Office Dep't, 397 U.S. 728, May 4, 1970.
A man's home - and his email box - is his castle. Any spammer invoking the First Amendment is full of it.
>Send the Telemarketers, telephone repair-people, door-to-door knife/luggage/vaccuum cleaner salesfolk, Sally Struthers, George Lucas, Jehovas Witnesses, Best Buy computer department employees, boy bands, send them all up. That way, all of our most (ahem) precious occupations will have a go there on the Red Planet. (Oh, yes, send the producers of that movie up, too.) > >The trick would be getting them all into one ship without them killing each other.
I'm not sure I follow you.
You're talking about getting all the telemarketers, door-to-door salesdrones, boy bands, RIAA and MPAA execs, Sally, George, and what-not on the B Ark.
But there's a "trick", namely how to load 'em onto the ship without them killing each other.
"Trick?" Either way, I fail to see this as a problem.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't seem to stop 19 jerkwads from pulling off 9/11, did it?
Java and Flash can be installed? Oops, I guess 1.0 still has some bugs left. Hope they fix these bugs by 1.1 ;-)
Call me an old fart, but "net installers" (aka stubs) annoy me. (This isn't a Mozilla criticism - IE is just as bad.)
If I don't want the email/news/chat cruft (and I don't), but I do want the basic browser on 3 systems, why should I download a 200K .exe three times, click on the same options three times, and download the same few-megabytes browser, three times?
Just gimme a damn URL where I can get the installer that contains everything needed for the basic browser. (That is, tell me where to find the thing the stub's downloading). Then let me download it ONCE. I can then FTP or copy it on my LAN, or even burn it to CD and use SneakerNet to get it to other machines.
General question: I'm seeing stubs more often, and I just don't get the idea. Apart from marketing ("Look! Upgrade your Netscape! Only 200K download!" - conveniently ignoring that it's only the stub, and thereby obfuscating the size of the real download) purposes, what value is added by these "network installer" stubs?
In principle, can't it be replaced by a web page with radio buttons that say "do you want your download to include/exclude $FOO, $BAR, $BAZ", and upon clicking "submit", give you a page with the corresponding packages/zips/tarballs/whatevers?
$ whois -h whois.arin.net 204.0.0.0
Verio, Inc. (NET-VRIO-204-000)
8005 South Chester Street
Englewood,, CO 80112
US
Hmph. My mail server already does that. Mebbe it's time I did it in the router, too :-)
Should be a short hearing.
How long does it take to traverse a list of length zero?
I knew it was an Illumineti plot to take over the world!
Funny, I wish people would start embracing cutthroat capitalism here :)
Hong Kong and Taiwan didn't build their economies up from nothing via redistributionism.
Given the quality of work from our current law enforcement personnel, maybe that's not a bad thing.
The problem isn't the personnel per se - most of 'em are hard-working SOBs trying to do their best, but they're are overworked, underpaid, and fettered by layer upon layer of bureaucracy.
We don't have the money (as a society) to hire enough agents or to pay 'em what they're worth. Gubmint jobs have therefore often tended to attract a lower-skilled (or they'd find work elsewhere) and more easily-corrupted (because they need the money) worker.
And it's the Gubmint, after all. These are the folks who raised bureaucracy to an art form. Doesn't matter who's in charge, nothing's gonna get done. Witness the INS fuckups that have been going on for years, but are only now receiving media attention.
Next issue - why won't this (as you fear) spread to outsourcing of the law enforcement task? Well, "what's a cop?" Any citizen can make an arrest - a cop is a guy who happens to do it for a living, and who's been trained in how to do it without (a) getting killed, and (b) getting sued for taking down the wrong guy. He's paid from tax dollars because there's a lot of work involved, and there ain't much money in it, on account of criminals not necessarily having lots of money to sieze. I suppose you could go to a bounty system, but I can't see enforcement being profitable. Who wants to risk getting blown away for the $100 bounty on graffiti taggers?
Back to the issue at hand - by outsourcing data collection to people who actually know something about technology, you increase the probability of getting the data you need. This frees up money to hire better analysts.
Finally, and critically, unlike Gubmint drones, if a Verislime drone fscks up and wiretaps the wrong guy, or (let's outsource everything :) if issues visas to dead hijackers, you can fire his monkey ass and replace him with someone competent.
While I understand your concerns, I think this new approach could ultimately be a win-win for both law enforcement and the public.
> Boston Tea Party - Taxation without Representation
> American Revolution - Same thing, freedom from tyranny
> Freeing Slaves - Equality of Man
> Napster - You getting music (a luxury item) for free.
Clearly, the notion that MP3 file sharing constitutes a fundamental civil right is an indication that we've advanced to the third stage ;-)
> > -- ghost of Timothy Lear
>
> Spoken like someone who's never done LSD. [
Spoken like someone who's never played DOOM III :-)
~ wavy lines as I shift into a new timeline ~
9/11/2022: 19 terrorists, operating with the support of Osama Bin Valenti and Yasser Rosen (well, at least the Israelis and Palestinians sorted out their differences ;-), defeated security checkpoints, boarded, and took control of, four 747-class unmanned-aerial-freighters (UAFs) containing full loads of Celine Dion CDs and Pauly Shore DVDs, and flew the aircraft directly into the chip fabs of Intel, AMD, the main offices of the Free Software Foundation.
The fourth aircraft, its target unknown, was downed harmlessly over water when a skilled hacker on the ground figured out what was going on, and managed to succesfully reverse-engineer, decrypt, and override the terrorists' jamming signal, regaining partial control of the aircraft using nothing but a CB radio, a Pringles can, a laptop, and an old 802.11b card. "Yeah, it was scary, but thanks to the fact that I was able to pick up on the basics of programming by kindergarten, and I had to reverse-engineer some arbitrary code samples for my high school entrance exams, it wasn't too hard to figure out how to take the plane back. Thank God they repealed the DMCA, or I'd have never had the chance to develop these skills. I only had a couple of watts of transmitter power, and I didn't have enough time to set up a distributed computing network to crack the entire protocol, so all I could do was point it over water and send it down before my batteries ran down. They can't win. All their base are belong to us!"
The 20th hijacker, Zaccarias Eisner, is still at large. Authorities in the previous administration had, in fact, detained him in 2013, but had been forced to released him under direct order of Attorney General Hollings.
The final transmission from one of the doomed freighter aircraft was recorded as "I say to you that the universal Turing machine is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Taliban Stranglers are to women home alone without their burkhas! Free Software has made our industry bleed and bleed and hemorrage! We shall not stop our jihad against the Great Satan of fair use!"
Noam Chomsky, commenting on CNN from the Shady Hippy Retirement Home, said "[...]we have to look past the destruction of our information technology industry and find the root cause of the cycle of violence - the Supreme Court's 2004 declaration of the DMCA as unconstitutional, and Congress' failure to pass the CBDTPA or any of its variants by 2005 - followed by the rapid rollout of broadband wireless P2P meshes networks, all led to the collapse of the Hollywood's business model, the consequent radicalization of members of the Hollywood media elite, ultimately leading to the tragic events of 2022. It's all still America's fault."
President Stallman and Vice President Raymond, along with Senate Majority Leader Torvalds, (they settled their differences in 2009, as Mozilla 1.0 finally shipped as part of the "Really Really Unified Distro" :-) broadcasting from an undisclosed location, issued a joint statement: "You are either with us or you are with the Hollywood Cartel."
House Minority Leader Gates, and Senate Minority Leader Ballmer issued a joint statement: "Although we differ from the administration on the point of free software, we agree with them on the fundamental issue - the trillion-dollar technology industry cannot allow itself to bow down to the $60B entertainment industry. Sure, we'd prefer you be using .WMA instead of .MP3 or .OGG, but today is no day for partisan games. The bottom line is that if you don't download your indie music for free -- if you're still paying $29.99 for copy-protected Britney Spears and Celine Dion WAV files -- then the terrorists have won."
~ wavylines ~
Considering that the most popular answer to "What would my priest do?" these days is "an altar boy, with a crucifix if he can't find Viagra!", may I suggest you find some Catholic friends who aren't part of NAMBLA?
OK, there are some Cathaholics who are dumber than a bag of rocks when it comes to thinking for themselves, but most of 'em aren't sick :)
>
> I haven't had an erection in 12 years."--Valenti talking to his wife in 2001.
You sure that last quote wasn't also from 1919?
~ imaginary scenario, AD 2048 ~
Congressman: "Huh? Wazziz ting with foldy bits and black squigglez? Smells funny. Oh no! Duz it got ant tracks?"
Staffer: "A book, sir, and no, sir, you know everything's been screened for biohazards. The foldy bits are pages, (no, Sir, not the kind you fuck after-hours, the other kind, the kind you write on!), and the squiggles are letters, that make words, like the ones they put in the Congressional Record when they write down your speeches."
Congressman: "OK, it's a book. Whaddya do with it? Wazzit for?"
Staffer: "The words contain ideas. It's a communications medium. You read it to extract the ideas."
Congressman: "Hmph. No time for that. I've gotta get to the floor for a vote. You read it and tell me the ideas when I get back."
Staffer: "Okay, sir."
Congressman: "Hey, did you ever get around to reading that 'book' thing? Any interesting ideas there?"
Staffer: "Yes sir! Lots of them! This Orwell guy was some kind of genius! He anticipated technologies 100 years ahead of his time. Call up Jack Valenti Jr. and Hilary Rosen II, and tell 'em their prayers are answered!"
Careful what you ask for, kids :)
Uh-oh. Even though I'm the kind of guy who eats red meat from cows that eat red meat, I don't like marketroids, and consequently, don't have a supermarket tracking card.
Worse, I purchase most of my food at a local grocer/butcher who does good work with quality cuts of meat and pretty fresh veggies. As I see no value in burdening him with credit card processing fees, I pay cash.
Based on that, they're gonna conclude that I either eat nothing at all, or that I must have something to hide because I pay for stuff with cash and am therefore almost absent in the grocery marketing databases. (And other databases, for that matter, as I also block doubleclick.net and as many of the other web bug scumbagz as I can.)
In short, I think it's a good thing they're reading and archiving my Slashdot postings and email, or I'd be worried :-)
(Actually, that comment is only half in jest. The problem with database marketing is that incomplete and inaccurate data is worse than no data at all. By having access to my complete datastream, their automated systems can profile me as "cynical and geeky, but harmless". If they only had access to the fact that I take a few steps to avoid being tracked by mass marketers, the systems might come to an inaccurate conclusion and mark me for higher levels of surveillance than I warrant.)
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> [conflicting information on usage] But it has been made illegal to buy/sell the equipment in Canada.
The original question was probably along the lines of: "Is it legal to download plans, PIC code, purchase discrete components, burn your own PICs, mount the components on a PCB, and hook it up to a TV?", and "Is it legal for a builder to give away such devices?"
Personally, I'd like to see the answer to those questions be "yes", with a ban on commercial manufacture/sales.
I think one of the coolest things that could happen would be for a complete design to "leak" its way onto the 'net. I've got no ethical problems with a guy building his own gear to l33ch TV. I do have an ethical problem with a guy who has the plans, refuses to share, and charges $500 for a p1r4t3 box.
Paying a satellite company for service is giving a media company money for s scarcity that's only somewhat artificial. (On one hand, the signal's landing in everyone's backyard. On the other hand, someone spent $MEGABUX to launch the sats that provide the datastreams, so there's a high barrier to entry. Launch your own damn satellite if you don't like his ;-)
But paying a DBS pirate reseller for devices based on plans and code developed through reverse engineering is merely buying into another artificial scarcity -- except that the reseller of h4x0r3d cards has a very low investment, and is thus price-gouging.
The guy cracking DBS may be a genius, but the guy in the back room selling cards has no such mad sk1llz. He's just taking advantage of the fact that the code for the cards isn't widely-available on the 'net. In that sense, he's very much like the RIAA or MPAA exec; his business model is all about a device that costs him next to nothing to reproduce, and charging you for code he didn't write. His existence depends on making sure nobody else can get the code to burn their own PICs. It's not just an artificial scarcity, it's the definition of an artificial scarcity.
If you continued to aggressively pursue the illegal sale of these boxes, but passed a law that explicitly permitted both the reverse-engineering of such datastreams and the free-as-in-beer downloading of plans and code, you could eliminate the commercial DBS piracy market in a month.
The market would then come down to two people: (1) People who choose to pay money to a DBS provider for service, or (2) people with a few less scruples who choose to pay in time/effort keeping up with the engineering arms race for service.
Is that as good for the DBS providers as a market where everyone who views, pays their share of the freight for the expenses involved in putting the sats aloft? No.
Is it better than the current situation, where we still have slightly-unscrupulous people who choose to pirate, but who, in doing so, support a line of highly unscrupulous people (i.e. whose livelihoods are based on hoarding the reverse-engineered secrets?) IMNSHO, yes.
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> Crap goes in, but doesn't seem to go out until you have to reinstall a month later
Or the abuse department at any Chinese ISP, the difference being that crap comes out.
That's what the FPGA-accelerated /dev/null is for.
It's a cover story for a faster random number generator.
Any mathematician will tell you that if the alien has a sufficiently large string of random numbers, or even enough digits of pi, he does have your random number sequence.
You just have to make sure you can build your strings of random numbers faster than he can.
Random-numbers-arms-race, anyone? :)
"No, man, I was just hostin' it for a friend, man!"
Thanks, dude!
In the US, your mailbox doesn't actually belong to you - it belongs to the US Post Office. They allow you to take mail out of it.
I don't like junk mail, but someone's paying the US Post Office to deliver the snail junkmail to mailboxes which are the US Post Office's property. (To be absolutely technical - I think it's something like "you may purchase and own the physical container on the fencepost near the driveway, but the USPS still owns the space within it.")
> (in addition, materials garbage bags, etc.) What about electricity used to power the doorbell when a solicitor comes?
OK, fair enough :)
The (non-property-rights) issue with spam is the one of scale -- junk mail costs money for the sender to deliver. Door-to-door solicitors are throttled by the time/effort that it takes to walk from door to door. Even telemarketers are rate-limited by the number of drones they can have behind the predictive dialers. (Which is we've passed laws to try and combat the use of prerecorded telephone messages. But even these are rate-limited by the time it takes the recording to play back into the victim's voicemail.)
Spam, regrettably, has no such bottleneck. Even if you don't agree that it's theft of the recipient's mailbox, most of it comes through open proxies and open relays -- which clearly qualifies as stealing service from the victimized hosts.
Whether they're stealing very small amounts from millions of victims (the recipients) or larger amounts from a few victims (the bandwidth stolen from unauthorized abuse of intermediate open relays and open proxies) - spammers are thieves.
Depends on the upgrade.
As a lark, when I moved from a Pentium I (430TX chipset) to the 440BX-based system (new mobo, Celeron CPU, new chipset, new video card, new sound card, new RAM), I tried transferring (after Ghosting :) a Win9x system to it. After several reboots and requests for the install CD, it actually ran.
(Then, of course, I wiped it and reinstalled from scratch to be sure I had a decent config and drivers, but it's theoretically possible. I was amazed it worked at all.)
That said, I chose the 440BX because it had headroom for growth. That lowly Celeron-366 (66 FSB oc'ed to 100 for 550 MHz) is now running a Celeron 800 at over 1 GHz (FSB at 124.) It could probably run at an FSB of 133, except that I've got mismatched sticks of PC133.
Am I getting as much out of that PIII-1G on a 440BX chipset as I could? Of course not. My 5400 RPM drives are still running ATA-66. It's still SDRAM. It's still the same PCI frequency.
But the upgrade was $50 for the CPU, gave me another two years out of the system, and (most importantly) required no time-consuming OS or driver changes, be it Win9x, 2000, or Linux.
I think we might be at a similar point with the P4 Northwoods. Buy a cheap Northwood 1.6A now, and a mobo with a chipset (SiS 645DX or Via P4X333) with some FSB headroom. Throw some fast DDR-I into it.
Two years down the road, I think you'll probably be able to plunk in another "$50 CPU and $20 stick of RAM" behind the OS's back, giving you decent performance for another year.
There are no guarantees, of course, but by paying a $50 premium for quality parts today, you can often get better than 50/50 odds of saving $500+ two years from now. That's a good risk, IMNSHO.
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>There are plenty of them, based on the SIS645DX chipset. I've got a ASUS P4S533 that supports it just fine, and can use DDR400 (though there is no ratified spec for it) as well.
Wow, great timing... I'm looking at building a few boxen based on this mobo with a 1.6A, and for my own box, playing with FSB overclocks (133=533 sounds easy) versus running the RAM asynchronously.
(If I need USB2.0 I can just use a card - I think Via's P4X333 chipset will be strong, but why wait another couple of months just to get USB 2.0 onboard. SiS645DX rocks.)
So anyways - on to my question - when you say DDR400 on the P4S533, do you have a stick of DDR333 / CAS2.5 running as DDR400 / CAS3.0, and how does your bandwidth compare? (Or are you able to run it at CAS2.0 at 333, 2.5 at 400?)
Any hints/tips appreciated. Thanx.
Amen.
I'll see your Fifth Amendment response, and, I'll raise you a Supreme Court ruling.
A man's home - and his email box - is his castle. Any spammer invoking the First Amendment is full of it.
Attorney General Spitzer, YOU ROCK.
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>The trick would be getting them all into one ship without them killing each other.
I'm not sure I follow you.
You're talking about getting all the telemarketers, door-to-door salesdrones, boy bands, RIAA and MPAA execs, Sally, George, and what-not on the B Ark.
But there's a "trick", namely how to load 'em onto the ship without them killing each other.
"Trick?" Either way, I fail to see this as a problem. ;-)