I hope these guys don't win anything in court. I really hate getting calls to equip my apartment with vinyl siding.
One of the downsides to having an apartment with an actual street adress. The home-stuff telemarketers never leave you alone.
On that note, I think of the people who sell things over the phone as being a member of the same pecking order sequence as alcoholic bums downtown.
It's been a few years. I am forever 2 years off with my shopping information.:)
Re:More Sustainable than Aluminum ??
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Bamboo Bike A Reality
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think it's that big of a deal when it comes to bikes. The only bikes made from aluminum are the mid to high end bikes in the $500-$1500 range. The amount of aluminum used in these bikes is less than 6 pounds, typically. Most of the bike's weight is due to the gearing system, tires, strut system, crank and chain. These guys seem to be focusing on the low-end, buy your bike at Kmart crowd.
If you look closely at the design of an aluminum bike, you can tell not many resources are used as they use the least for weight purposes. I know the frame on my Cannondale is a couple of millimeters thick. The rigidness comes from thin walls on a fat tube.
Aluminum bikes aren't going to be around for much longer anyway, the price range for a good aluminum bike gets you right up there with titanium and magnesium alloy frames, which are superior in my opinion. Most of the trim parts consist of carbon fiber (wheels and forks on the better bikes use this).
I am not sure what the point in this article is. There are far greater wastes of resources in new car design as well as the actual bottling process of cans. If the media, or anyone else cared enough to be earth friendly, we'd do it in ways that were actually beneficial. Not by purchasing organic bikes.
A note on steel bikes. They aren't taking into consideration the actual alloys used when doing the comparison. No bikes are made with 100% steel. They use various alloies in the process.
I'm picky on this subject after commuting soley by bike for a few years. I would not trust my riding on busy city streets to an organic material, I'd much prefer the comfort of knowing the materials are consistent due to the manufacture process involved with metals. I highly doubt the bamboo is nearly as consistent if measured across the bike's whole frame.
The logging industry is probably the best example of an industry that once raped land, but now plants more than it tears down.
I have no problem with them. They are even making strides to get those walking machines in production to avoid damage to forrest floors. That doesn't sound like much to your average person from the city, but to someone who is familiar with forrest area, it's a big deal. Erosion damage doesn't go away in many cases, leaving an area that could have been woods or a grass land a bare bed of orange georgia clay that nothing grows on since the top soil washed away. Eventually much land like this results in flooding and the need for more government maintained duct systems to handle the water run-off when it affects populated areas. More money pissed away..
I am pretty certain 3/4 of our solid 'trash' could be ground up and used as construction materials.
Thrown away materials with poisonous chemicals that do not break down in the enviroment after long periods of time should at least be extracted and recycled or sealed before just being tossed into a landfill. Take PC's.. All the nasty stuff they are made from, yet they just end up in with normal garbage. Dealing with this should be a cost of making the thing in the first place.
Bowling for Columbine is an excellent work. I find Moore irritating to look at, but his mission to educate the public is a good one. Of course, it's difficult for someone like him to stay popular or even be taken seriously when nobody on the nightly news or government can find anything nice to say about him.
Another great work concerning media corruption and hype is a documentary called 'Spin'. It does a good job of documenting the process of 'creating news'. Very very dirty stuff. This one is available for download somewhere on archive.org.
I agree with the last part of your statement. But, don't count on much changing here in the states.
The media does not focus on enviromental issues when there is more 'exciting' news to watch. It's one of the saddest things about being an american in recent years. The media is completely filled with high calory hype with no nutritional content.
In the great scheme of things, do you think the murder that happened on the bad side of town where two crack dealers killed each other is bigger news than reporting on the smog conditions that affect the whole city? This is why I can't stand more than 5-10 minutes of any nightly news program.
Also, feel safe about the reliabiltiy of your news once you find out that almost all the political shorts you get come directly from a government media office in DC. They could use these feeds for something more useful than career planning for the white house, such as enviromental problems, informational shorts on why it's bad to suck money from government entitlement programs, etc.
Yes, a bit offtopic as a whole, but the media is at fault for not making the truley big issues big. The government is right up there with them for encouraging them to report on other stories.
It has little to do with 'wide open space' and more to do with greed and irrisponsibility. I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for the continued contamination of natural habitat. It's okay to build and occupy areas, but it's not okay to destroy land that was otherwise being used by nature just because you were too cheap and the government was too irrisponsible to at least try and find alternative solutions (recycling?!)..
Personally, I think the government should mandate that every citizen, corporation, or entity in the US to recycle ALL items that are possible.
Call me a tree hugger and I'll disagree. I'm a realist who would like to see my grandkids prosper and be happy knowing my generation did what it could to not crap on their day (unlike previous american generations). If you think that slinging insulting remarks at people who care about the state of the planet is okay, then it's time to sit down and rationalize your thoughts about the matter.
"Will mailbombing the FTC with the same basic complaint achieve anything?"
Actually, yes it will. It's much like having everyone send the same type of letter to a local politician. Eventually, they get scared of being embarrassed after so many in the public have started to contact them. Pestering a corporate or legal entity can have great results too.
It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Bill Clinton appeared and said something to the order of "Do your best and succeed, or complain until your all your dreams come true".
It makes no difference whether they are behind NAT or not. The ISP would still be likely to use PPPoE for authenticating users. The issued private IP and the account will still be linked in the ISP's radius logs.
Since you would have the gateway IP, you would have all you would need. Even if the client was connected through a public IP, the ISP still would have to check the same logs to see what account it was associated with.
There aren't many "fans of NATting", as you put it. I am giving the realistic approach many ISPs may take into consideration when dealing with the lack of IP space and the costs associated with changes to infrastructure.
I like the smarty response where you say "if you actually read the article (gasp, idiotic idea, I know) you'd have read about the fact that people are connecting more and more stuff to the net". Man, that screams of trolling. Of course people are connecting more things to the net. That's why we are discussing the issue. Pardon me for pointing out the obvious.
NAT is not a good solution, just a cheap fix for those companies who are looking for 3Q and 4Q numbers to show their investors. Investors don't care, as of yet, about the technical details. All they want to see is a profit posted (or the least amount lost per share) when the results come out. If the Net was governed by which technology was the best and there were unlimited resources to pump into making sure everything was as good as it could be, then yes, we would already be using ipv6 without a doubt. But when there's 800,000k worth of work involved with upgrading (man hours, hardware, planning, testing, etc, etc), and your company is already in the hole for the year due to a sluggish economy, then it's not going to get done until it absolutely has to. In the meantime alternatives must be found to delay such changes until they are absolutely needed.
I hope the above can seep into that inflamitory brain of yours. I don't see why I am responding to such a silly post by an Anon Coward though.:)
Good for you that your ISP allows you to run servers. My current ISP allows such activities, as well. Yet, the last 3 I had did not allow such activites and there were no alternatives for broadband connectivity. Even though your ISP does allow such things, it's not something that someone with a basic account can demand as part of their $39.99/mo. TOS agreements can, and are often, rewritten without notice or warning. There is no legal right to do anything on your ISPs hardware that they don't specifically grant. That's not to say that they will do anything if you mildly violate a TOS, typically they will want your $$$ unless you are generating enough traffic that their NOC will notice or complaints from other users.
"Is it really upto ISPs to tell me if I can do that or not?"
Now that's the dumbest question I've heard in a while. YES. Does your ISP's hardware belong to you? Does US law specifically state that you have some kind of rights associated with your access to the Internet via your ISP? No. You pay them a monthly fee to access the Internet, through THEIR hardware, on their terms. They will offer service that will please the grand majority of people so that they may attract more customers, but no, you have no right to say you can carry on whatever type of communication you wish because "you have a say" in the matter. Your "say" is when you cancel an account and find an ISP who's TOS allows you to do what you want.
I grow weary of people who think they own the Internet. It reminds me of doing Tech Support years ago and people demanding that I fix their phone line because I sold them Internet service. This would often be due to no dialtone on their data line, or a similar non-ISP related issue. I would often sit there and daydream about how this person acts when in various other situations.. "I bought a cat from your store last week, and well, it doesn't help me with the laundry. I want my money back! NO, I HAVE A RIGHT TO DEMAND THIS!! I PAID YOU $9 AND WANT IT TO WIPE MY BOTTOM, TOO". I digress.
I don't see this as being much of a crisis. I've worked for several companies that employ ~10,000 people, most of which have systems connected to the network.
I remember in 1995, every Windows box had it's own public facing IP. Then over the years, everyone who could use NAT was moved over to private IP space.
The 'crisis' is really another example of media fear-inducing hype. Worst case senario, your ISP will begin issuing private IPs for for customers with basic accounts.
Yes, some things will break. But there's not much out there that doesn't function in a NAT enviroment from a client standpoint.
It'd also save ISPs a lot of headache with customers running unauthorized services.
I can already see the call to tech support..
customer "My web server/P2P/Warez FTP/etc doesn't work now that you changed my account to use a private IP."
ISP "Well, sir. You can upgrade to a business class account and get a static, public IP address."
customer "DOH."
I don't know about restricting the usage of IPs in countries that the US has a political agenda against. That would seem to defeat the whole idea behind the Internet. At least, that idea that was lost when Ebay and Amazon started suing everyone under the sun. It would keeps us going for a while longer, but I can see the NAT thing happen before that.
Personally, I would like to see one of the educational networks grow to a decent size and allow commoners onto their network with the restriction of no commercial activity. How I miss visiting Usenet and content outnumbering SPAM.
Also, doesn't Mercedes and a bunch of other companies that don't need an excessive number of IPs still have their own Class A? I know when I worked at an ISP that gobbled up a bunch of other companies in the late 90's, they were forced to hand over tons and tons of IP addresses because they could not prove they were actually being used for anything useful. That's what I was told, mind you I could see something underhanded going on since public IPs are quite a commodity these days.
Go straight for their badboy machine.
What part of 'most' does your brain not handle?
Let's compare the power cube, imac, and any assortment of their laptops. Okay, so we are 1 for 4. Next please...
I did not call anyone gay. If you sit with your legs crossed and drink lattes, I'll call you feminine. That is not the same thing as gay. Most of the gay people I've known were more the roughneck biker types, not feminine types at all.
I wasn't being sarcastic as much as I was being realistic. Most Apple products appear feminine.
Take the colors you can get: cherry, grape, that funny bright orange, etc. Those are colors of feminisity.
Most products are rounded and bubbly looking, too. Not the more masculine black and silver you see with other products on the market.
Forgive me for voicing an opinion. I thought that's what forums were all about.
I get moderated down as a troll for bringing up facts? I seriously don't see how it's trolling or flaming.
Please visit compusa.com for the latest prices on the G5 and other series systems, then visit pricewatch.com and assemble a PC from parts.
Show me where I am wrong.
I detect overly zealous mac users here. You can't compare intel products to macs in the damn article and not have people voice facts on the issue in a forum.
Yes. Everyone plays catchup with Mac all the time.
That's why Mac dominates the desktop market. Not. They are too expensive and proprietary.
Just because they have a few innovative products doesn't mean they are the benchmark. I cite the G5 as a neat system, but not innovative in the current market. I do consider the iPod innovative, as well as most of their laptop's designs.
Look at processor speeds on desktop systems over the past few years. It's already a rather foggy memory the last time I looked at a Mac's specs and thought 'wow, the PC market really needs to play some catchup!'. The last one I was impressed with were the PowerPC clones, actually. They moved pretty quick compared to PC's of the same price. But that was like '94 or '95..
In the case of laptops, I agree in this particular case, but as for other configurations forget it.
For the price of a new G5 I could have a monster of a PC that would make the G5 look like last year's PC except for the pretty case that matches a cinema display. Is that worth the extra money? Nah, I'll stick with Lian Li cases for now.
Yeah, you can get a G5 with dual CPU's.. Whoopee. For that price I can get a quad CPU PC. Not that 99.9999999% of users will get a dramatic performance gain out of multiple processors. It's just a way to spin people with advertising by making them think 1.4+1.4 cpu = 2.8. Not that it doesn't do well in the server department, but there's not a lot of serving to be done with 'em.
If I was a latte sipping, feminine male, I'd probably show more loyalty. But for now, I think Linux or Windows on PC hardware is better when it comes to options, software, and cost.
Anyway, when I get a Mac it'll look cool. But it'll also look like every other box like it on the market. At least with a PC, I can dress it up with nice parts and have something at bit more unique.
This might be a little off topic, but I had to get it off my chest. I don't mean to sound like a flame tard either. Just have to pour some water on this before it gets started.:)
So why is SCO causing trouble now? They have had years to bring up this dispute. Doesn't the court system recognize that by waiting out a technology or device you've patented to see how well it does before trying to take control of it is wrong?
So you are saying it hurts your professional art career when someone simply has a copy of your photo on their computer's desktop?
I would be honored, as I have in the past, when my works get spread around. It gives me free advertising since the signature and website they can obtain more is always at the bottom-right of the image.
Now if a company used my artwork for advertising purposes, or enhanced the resolution and started selling framed copies, then we'd have a lawsuit.
It's not like grandma was really going to buy a JPG of your latest creation anyway. She'll just go to phong.com and grab something better for free.
I guess what I am saying is that your point isn't thought through. Either that, or you'd prefer to have no exposure.
I recall when MP3 first started to boom, CD sales skyrocketed. Then the RIAA started being assholes about the whole thing and CD sales plumeted. You do the math.
Anyway, you being Mr. Artist should know about fair use when it comes to artwork. Your entire trade is about 'borrowing' styles and imagery.
I remember reading that when I was a youngster living out in a rural part of america. I thought it was all a bunch of crap until I got out and saw more of the world. It's even more true in practice nowadays than ever.
I'd like to see America become a better place to live. But when you've got 20K gun murders a year and basically 3rd world countries sprouting up in urban areas, there's little hope for a brighter tomorrow.
One of the thoughts that rings in my head every day is the fact that our inner-city slums and Section 8 housing have little chance of recovery. At least if you live in a slum in south america, the USA will ship food and medicine in for you. In our cities, you have no option but to accumulate debt and continue the cycle of poverty, God help you if you need medical treatment. Also, our slums don't have fertile soil, so even if you want to you can't give these people the ability to be self sustaining in a basic way like other nations. In a time when education is so expensive and the doorway into higher education is closed to all but a select few and the lack of available jobs for these people, even if they broke free, things will continue to get worse.
Watch as our poor population explodes and more laws hit the books. Drugs will continue to sooth the pain of poverty and abuse while the government rakes in their savings due to activities these people partake in that affect nobody besides themselves. Meanwhile, the media will do selective reporting to make the minority areas look more dangerous than they actually are so what's left of middle white america will maintain it's fear justify exceedingly harsh laws and punishment.
While all this continues, politicians continue to blabber incoherently about issues that don't matter since spin is the name of the game.
For anyone interested in seeing a different viewpoint beyond the Republican rhetoric and *-wing conspiracy crap, go download a copy of "Spin" off movies.archive.org. If you missed it in theatres, I'd suggest renting a copy of "Bowling for Columbine" by Micheal Moore. Yes, Moore is an obnoxious self-centered piggy, but what he has to say is usually dead on when it comes to the problems we are facing today.
Anyway, I'll hush now. I tend to get that vien popping up on my head and ramble for hours if not kept in check.:)
Your friends are not criminals. If in that position, you are likely an enabler of an overly intrusive justice system.
In this era, crime is less about punishment and rehabilitation than fines associated with crimes being a revenue source for government entities.
For instance, in most cities, one of the greatest source of revenue is parking and speeding tickets. This is how police pay for new cruisers, new guns, and more officers. Then the media, in return, gets people hyped about crimes that could happen; thus we had better spend more in taxes to fight off these evils! That type of thinking has seemed to scale all the way up to the federal government after 9/11. Which is really sad for the freedoms and so-called rights of individuals.
Here are some thoughts. Do you think a $800 fine for minor drug possesion is going to make someone quit smoking pot? How about a $300 speeding ticket causing people to never speed again? How about a $15 parking ticket preventing illegal parking? None of this is about reform. Every bit of it is about local government seeking some cash.
Now if the legal system was geared for reform, things would be different. Say if you get any sort of speeding ticket and had to take a 30 day course on safe driving but paid no fines, I would bet that the number of speeding tickets would decrease. How about the teenager caught with mary jane? Send him off to a drug rehabilitation center for 30 days. I'll bet he will think twice about getting caught doing drugs again.
I think the biggest failure of our legal system is the prison system. The US has this idea that 'Texas Justice' is the way to deal with felony offenses. We have a higher percentage of people locked away in prison than Iraq or China ever had. While in prison, they get no real treatment or counseling. They get out a few years later with a hatred for our laws and could be considered worse than when they went in.
Take my uncle, for instance. He spent two years in prison. Work details, fights, possible anal probes from other jailmates. He got out and hasn't been the same. It appears he managed to come down with post-traumatic stress syndrome due to harsh experiences while locked up. By the way, he was locked away without 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' since court appointed attorneys do little to actually defend an individual.
I would not report him. Friends and family are the two things that are supposed to be more important to individuals than the law of the land.
If you go turning in all of your friends for anything illegal that you happen to witness, it's likely you won't have friends anymore.. because, well, you'd be a bad friend to have. Plus, it's impossible never do anything that infracts on the law. Especially here in the US where mere words are considered crimes.
I'm not saying if a friend goes out and commits homocide that you should protect them, just to rationalize a situation before blowing a whistle on someone.
Personally, I wouldn't turn anyone in on anything to do with theft from a corporation. This is a capitalist society. Anyone on the top has gotten there by breaking a few rules, so why should the rest of us (the poor people that funded and helped monopolies be what they are today) be the ones who always must play by the rules? It's a double standard in my eyes.
Btw, police officers are some of the biggest criminals we have. I recall in highschool, the kids that turned out to be cops were some of the worst people to associate with. Considering being a police officer requires little more than no felonies on your record and an 8th grade reading level. My assesment is that most officers would rather get paid $24k a year to be in control of other's fates than to make $45k a year in an office somewhere.
Pardon my disrespect for the legal system. It's a mess. How do I go about becoming a Canadian citizen again?
You have to look at this from the RIAA's standpoint. For instance, you've got an artist you are marketing ten ways to sunday, such as Eminem. You mass produce 1,000,000 CDs of his new album to save a penny or two ahead of time. You can do this since you know your marketing efforts will result in massive sales.
Now if people download the mp3's of this new album and find that it's not as great as all the hype lead everyone to think, then it's not going to sell quite as well. You are stuck with all these CDs in your warehouses.
Then you've got Band B. They aren't very popular. You've done little to market them. There might be one or two copies of their CDs in each major record store and no extras in the warehouse. They weren't intended to be a big seller. Their mp3's end up on P2P networks and people download and listen. WOW. They are great! People rush to the store and buy their CDs, but none are to be had. The radio stations don't play these guys either. The record company then has to pay a higher cost per CD to press them since they aren't dealing with the same huge quantity they pressed for the mega-star. The poor record company makes less money, though they sell more CDs overall. Plus the extra effort involved in understanding what people really want to hear is obviously too high a price to pay these days for such self-serving entities.
I know that example has some holes, but it goes with my belief that the record industry is more interested in control over the music in all aspects than just raw sales. They won't make as much immediate cash from a diluted market of sales of thousands of artists as they will for an all-attention focused marketing campaign on a lucky few.
That's where the consumer gets to apply Astroglide to their rectum. We don't get the choices we could have or the cheap education in various types of music that hasn't hit 'mainstream'.
People's musical tastes don't change every years, so much as the music industry pumps the ears of teenagers full of particular bands because it's the most profitable short-term thing to do.
Look at the complete and utter lack of new hip-hop during the past year or two. Artists have not quit writing hip-hop music. It's still being written just as it was in it's peak 4 years ago. It's just not being invested in by the record companies as they are still squeezing every penny of profit out of what's already out there, knowing if they release one or two new tracks for radio play every month they will continue to manufacture sales.
I hope what I just typed makes sense. It's a bad represenation of what I think their reasons are for this type of BS.
Now if they were just to accept the digital age and offer us music online where we purchase individual tracks or collections (a CD in mp3 isn't a CD or album anymore, really) and download it to a personal media device; I'm sure they'd profit more than ever, but it would take time to catch on -- time is money and money is needed to impress investors NOW, ASAP, or we are all going to die poor and lonely!! Damned be this greedy capitalist society. If I could only get a job in Canada, I'd blow this joint in a heart beat.:)
They saw the RIAA cost manufacturers of MP3 players a lot of money in litigation a few years ago. They'd rather play it smart and not get the media giants after them.
There doesn't have to be a law in place for them to get sued. That's the wonder of civil court.
In a few years, everyone will calm down and you'll see all the features you could ever imagine on these things. That is, unless one of these PVR companies gets an example made of them by the MPAA or RIAA.
It would be cooler if the NAT thing would actually work. (un?)Fortunately, cable video uses a lot more bandwidth than you are going to fit over that cat5 cable.
And since you don't get to own the box, you get a bill for $1000 when they detect your tamperings with it's hard drive.
Don't be a fool and think the cable companies don't have counter-measures for having their devices hacked.
If you tinker with a box that communicates bi-directionally with the cable company, you are probably going to get nailed.
If you tinker with this box by using a published exploit from newsgroups, go ahead and get your checkbook ready. They will already be watching for this type of activity far before you get your hands on the How-to.
Freevo is just a software solution. It does not have a hardware component with dual tuners and complete control over them.
These commercial PVR solutions are the only way to go if you want it to be functional by the whole family.
Freevo is a good toy for a geek, but not a complete PVR solution.
Mind you, only the people without PVRs seem to be talking up the homebrew solutions. Once you go with the proprietary box, you see that it's much easier and more functional in regards to it's intended use than any current homebrew due to the limitations in control over the tuners and program schedules. Plus, I don't think the homebrews can encode the video real-time, so there's no pausing tv programs or commercial skipping unless you record the whole thing, encode it, then watch it. I tend to play a broadcast about 10 minutes after it starts on my PVR so I have enough time shift to be able to skip the commercials.
Don't get me wrong, I've got both a media PC and a PVR. They both serve their intended purposes. The media PC does divx and high resolution playback of movies/mp3/etc and the PVR does scheduled recordings of programs I like to watch.
I really don't understand why folks would want to trade tv shows or have access to the files TV programs are stored in to begin with. Do you really want to encode those Farscape reruns overnight, then spend forever uploading them to a friend? I'd tell his cheap ass to just buy his own PVR and schedule the recordings himself. We are talking a waste of hard drive space and time here.
I've also found that once a program is on my PVR, I don't really care to watch it more than once, maybe twice if I wasn't sober the first time. I'll typically save it long enough for others in the house to watch, then it gets erased to make room for other programs.
Mind you, if your goal is backing up and archiving, you should just consider getting a netflix account and rip dvds. Yes, it's illegal, but so is sending Farscape reruns to your friend.
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I hope these guys don't win anything in court. I really hate getting calls to equip my apartment with vinyl siding. One of the downsides to having an apartment with an actual street adress. The home-stuff telemarketers never leave you alone. On that note, I think of the people who sell things over the phone as being a member of the same pecking order sequence as alcoholic bums downtown.
It's been a few years. I am forever 2 years off with my shopping information. :)
I don't think it's that big of a deal when it comes to bikes. The only bikes made from aluminum are the mid to high end bikes in the $500-$1500 range. The amount of aluminum used in these bikes is less than 6 pounds, typically. Most of the bike's weight is due to the gearing system, tires, strut system, crank and chain. These guys seem to be focusing on the low-end, buy your bike at Kmart crowd.
If you look closely at the design of an aluminum bike, you can tell not many resources are used as they use the least for weight purposes. I know the frame on my Cannondale is a couple of millimeters thick. The rigidness comes from thin walls on a fat tube.
Aluminum bikes aren't going to be around for much longer anyway, the price range for a good aluminum bike gets you right up there with titanium and magnesium alloy frames, which are superior in my opinion. Most of the trim parts consist of carbon fiber (wheels and forks on the better bikes use this).
I am not sure what the point in this article is. There are far greater wastes of resources in new car design as well as the actual bottling process of cans. If the media, or anyone else cared enough to be earth friendly, we'd do it in ways that were actually beneficial. Not by purchasing organic bikes.
A note on steel bikes. They aren't taking into consideration the actual alloys used when doing the comparison. No bikes are made with 100% steel. They use various alloies in the process.
I'm picky on this subject after commuting soley by bike for a few years. I would not trust my riding on busy city streets to an organic material, I'd much prefer the comfort of knowing the materials are consistent due to the manufacture process involved with metals. I highly doubt the bamboo is nearly as consistent if measured across the bike's whole frame.
The logging industry is probably the best example of an industry that once raped land, but now plants more than it tears down.
I have no problem with them. They are even making strides to get those walking machines in production to avoid damage to forrest floors. That doesn't sound like much to your average person from the city, but to someone who is familiar with forrest area, it's a big deal. Erosion damage doesn't go away in many cases, leaving an area that could have been woods or a grass land a bare bed of orange georgia clay that nothing grows on since the top soil washed away. Eventually much land like this results in flooding and the need for more government maintained duct systems to handle the water run-off when it affects populated areas. More money pissed away..
I am pretty certain 3/4 of our solid 'trash' could be ground up and used as construction materials.
Thrown away materials with poisonous chemicals that do not break down in the enviroment after long periods of time should at least be extracted and recycled or sealed before just being tossed into a landfill. Take PC's.. All the nasty stuff they are made from, yet they just end up in with normal garbage. Dealing with this should be a cost of making the thing in the first place.
Bowling for Columbine is an excellent work. I find Moore irritating to look at, but his mission to educate the public is a good one. Of course, it's difficult for someone like him to stay popular or even be taken seriously when nobody on the nightly news or government can find anything nice to say about him.
Another great work concerning media corruption and hype is a documentary called 'Spin'. It does a good job of documenting the process of 'creating news'. Very very dirty stuff. This one is available for download somewhere on archive.org.
I agree with the last part of your statement. But, don't count on much changing here in the states.
The media does not focus on enviromental issues when there is more 'exciting' news to watch. It's one of the saddest things about being an american in recent years. The media is completely filled with high calory hype with no nutritional content.
In the great scheme of things, do you think the murder that happened on the bad side of town where two crack dealers killed each other is bigger news than reporting on the smog conditions that affect the whole city? This is why I can't stand more than 5-10 minutes of any nightly news program.
Also, feel safe about the reliabiltiy of your news once you find out that almost all the political shorts you get come directly from a government media office in DC. They could use these feeds for something more useful than career planning for the white house, such as enviromental problems, informational shorts on why it's bad to suck money from government entitlement programs, etc.
Yes, a bit offtopic as a whole, but the media is at fault for not making the truley big issues big. The government is right up there with them for encouraging them to report on other stories.
It has little to do with 'wide open space' and more to do with greed and irrisponsibility. I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for the continued contamination of natural habitat. It's okay to build and occupy areas, but it's not okay to destroy land that was otherwise being used by nature just because you were too cheap and the government was too irrisponsible to at least try and find alternative solutions (recycling?!)..
Personally, I think the government should mandate that every citizen, corporation, or entity in the US to recycle ALL items that are possible.
Call me a tree hugger and I'll disagree. I'm a realist who would like to see my grandkids prosper and be happy knowing my generation did what it could to not crap on their day (unlike previous american generations). If you think that slinging insulting remarks at people who care about the state of the planet is okay, then it's time to sit down and rationalize your thoughts about the matter.
"Will mailbombing the FTC with the same basic complaint achieve anything?"
Actually, yes it will. It's much like having everyone send the same type of letter to a local politician. Eventually, they get scared of being embarrassed after so many in the public have started to contact them. Pestering a corporate or legal entity can have great results too.
It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Bill Clinton appeared and said something to the order of "Do your best and succeed, or complain until your all your dreams come true".
It makes no difference whether they are behind NAT or not. The ISP would still be likely to use PPPoE for authenticating users. The issued private IP and the account will still be linked in the ISP's radius logs.
Since you would have the gateway IP, you would have all you would need. Even if the client was connected through a public IP, the ISP still would have to check the same logs to see what account it was associated with.
Your point is pointless.
There aren't many "fans of NATting", as you put it. I am giving the realistic approach many ISPs may take into consideration when dealing with the lack of IP space and the costs associated with changes to infrastructure.
:)
I like the smarty response where you say "if you actually read the article (gasp, idiotic idea, I know) you'd have read about the fact that people are connecting more and more stuff to the net". Man, that screams of trolling. Of course people are connecting more things to the net. That's why we are discussing the issue. Pardon me for pointing out the obvious.
NAT is not a good solution, just a cheap fix for those companies who are looking for 3Q and 4Q numbers to show their investors. Investors don't care, as of yet, about the technical details. All they want to see is a profit posted (or the least amount lost per share) when the results come out. If the Net was governed by which technology was the best and there were unlimited resources to pump into making sure everything was as good as it could be, then yes, we would already be using ipv6 without a doubt. But when there's 800,000k worth of work involved with upgrading (man hours, hardware, planning, testing, etc, etc), and your company is already in the hole for the year due to a sluggish economy, then it's not going to get done until it absolutely has to. In the meantime alternatives must be found to delay such changes until they are absolutely needed.
I hope the above can seep into that inflamitory brain of yours. I don't see why I am responding to such a silly post by an Anon Coward though.
Good for you that your ISP allows you to run servers. My current ISP allows such activities, as well. Yet, the last 3 I had did not allow such activites and there were no alternatives for broadband connectivity. Even though your ISP does allow such things, it's not something that someone with a basic account can demand as part of their $39.99/mo. TOS agreements can, and are often, rewritten without notice or warning. There is no legal right to do anything on your ISPs hardware that they don't specifically grant. That's not to say that they will do anything if you mildly violate a TOS, typically they will want your $$$ unless you are generating enough traffic that their NOC will notice or complaints from other users.
"Is it really upto ISPs to tell me if I can do that or not?"
Now that's the dumbest question I've heard in a while. YES. Does your ISP's hardware belong to you? Does US law specifically state that you have some kind of rights associated with your access to the Internet via your ISP? No. You pay them a monthly fee to access the Internet, through THEIR hardware, on their terms. They will offer service that will please the grand majority of people so that they may attract more customers, but no, you have no right to say you can carry on whatever type of communication you wish because "you have a say" in the matter. Your "say" is when you cancel an account and find an ISP who's TOS allows you to do what you want.
I grow weary of people who think they own the Internet. It reminds me of doing Tech Support years ago and people demanding that I fix their phone line because I sold them Internet service. This would often be due to no dialtone on their data line, or a similar non-ISP related issue. I would often sit there and daydream about how this person acts when in various other situations.. "I bought a cat from your store last week, and well, it doesn't help me with the laundry. I want my money back! NO, I HAVE A RIGHT TO DEMAND THIS!! I PAID YOU $9 AND WANT IT TO WIPE MY BOTTOM, TOO". I digress.
I don't see this as being much of a crisis. I've worked for several companies that employ ~10,000 people, most of which have systems connected to the network.
I remember in 1995, every Windows box had it's own public facing IP. Then over the years, everyone who could use NAT was moved over to private IP space.
The 'crisis' is really another example of media fear-inducing hype. Worst case senario, your ISP will begin issuing private IPs for for customers with basic accounts.
Yes, some things will break. But there's not much out there that doesn't function in a NAT enviroment from a client standpoint.
It'd also save ISPs a lot of headache with customers running unauthorized services.
I can already see the call to tech support..
customer "My web server/P2P/Warez FTP/etc doesn't work now that you changed my account to use a private IP."
ISP "Well, sir. You can upgrade to a business class account and get a static, public IP address."
customer "DOH."
I don't know about restricting the usage of IPs in countries that the US has a political agenda against. That would seem to defeat the whole idea behind the Internet. At least, that idea that was lost when Ebay and Amazon started suing everyone under the sun. It would keeps us going for a while longer, but I can see the NAT thing happen before that.
Personally, I would like to see one of the educational networks grow to a decent size and allow commoners onto their network with the restriction of no commercial activity. How I miss visiting Usenet and content outnumbering SPAM.
Also, doesn't Mercedes and a bunch of other companies that don't need an excessive number of IPs still have their own Class A? I know when I worked at an ISP that gobbled up a bunch of other companies in the late 90's, they were forced to hand over tons and tons of IP addresses because they could not prove they were actually being used for anything useful. That's what I was told, mind you I could see something underhanded going on since public IPs are quite a commodity these days.
Go straight for their badboy machine. What part of 'most' does your brain not handle? Let's compare the power cube, imac, and any assortment of their laptops. Okay, so we are 1 for 4. Next please...
I did not call anyone gay. If you sit with your legs crossed and drink lattes, I'll call you feminine. That is not the same thing as gay. Most of the gay people I've known were more the roughneck biker types, not feminine types at all.
I wasn't being sarcastic as much as I was being realistic. Most Apple products appear feminine.
Take the colors you can get: cherry, grape, that funny bright orange, etc. Those are colors of feminisity.
Most products are rounded and bubbly looking, too. Not the more masculine black and silver you see with other products on the market.
Forgive me for voicing an opinion. I thought that's what forums were all about.
I get moderated down as a troll for bringing up facts? I seriously don't see how it's trolling or flaming.
Please visit compusa.com for the latest prices on the G5 and other series systems, then visit pricewatch.com and assemble a PC from parts.
Show me where I am wrong.
I detect overly zealous mac users here. You can't compare intel products to macs in the damn article and not have people voice facts on the issue in a forum.
Thank you,
Victor
Yes. Everyone plays catchup with Mac all the time.
:)
That's why Mac dominates the desktop market. Not. They are too expensive and proprietary.
Just because they have a few innovative products doesn't mean they are the benchmark. I cite the G5 as a neat system, but not innovative in the current market. I do consider the iPod innovative, as well as most of their laptop's designs.
Look at processor speeds on desktop systems over the past few years. It's already a rather foggy memory the last time I looked at a Mac's specs and thought 'wow, the PC market really needs to play some catchup!'. The last one I was impressed with were the PowerPC clones, actually. They moved pretty quick compared to PC's of the same price. But that was like '94 or '95..
In the case of laptops, I agree in this particular case, but as for other configurations forget it.
For the price of a new G5 I could have a monster of a PC that would make the G5 look like last year's PC except for the pretty case that matches a cinema display. Is that worth the extra money? Nah, I'll stick with Lian Li cases for now.
Yeah, you can get a G5 with dual CPU's.. Whoopee. For that price I can get a quad CPU PC. Not that 99.9999999% of users will get a dramatic performance gain out of multiple processors. It's just a way to spin people with advertising by making them think 1.4+1.4 cpu = 2.8. Not that it doesn't do well in the server department, but there's not a lot of serving to be done with 'em.
If I was a latte sipping, feminine male, I'd probably show more loyalty. But for now, I think Linux or Windows on PC hardware is better when it comes to options, software, and cost.
Anyway, when I get a Mac it'll look cool. But it'll also look like every other box like it on the market. At least with a PC, I can dress it up with nice parts and have something at bit more unique.
This might be a little off topic, but I had to get it off my chest. I don't mean to sound like a flame tard either. Just have to pour some water on this before it gets started.
So why is SCO causing trouble now? They have had years to bring up this dispute. Doesn't the court system recognize that by waiting out a technology or device you've patented to see how well it does before trying to take control of it is wrong?
I hope so.. !
So you are saying it hurts your professional art career when someone simply has a copy of your photo on their computer's desktop?
I would be honored, as I have in the past, when my works get spread around. It gives me free advertising since the signature and website they can obtain more is always at the bottom-right of the image.
Now if a company used my artwork for advertising purposes, or enhanced the resolution and started selling framed copies, then we'd have a lawsuit.
It's not like grandma was really going to buy a JPG of your latest creation anyway. She'll just go to phong.com and grab something better for free.
I guess what I am saying is that your point isn't thought through. Either that, or you'd prefer to have no exposure.
I recall when MP3 first started to boom, CD sales skyrocketed. Then the RIAA started being assholes about the whole thing and CD sales plumeted. You do the math.
Anyway, you being Mr. Artist should know about fair use when it comes to artwork. Your entire trade is about 'borrowing' styles and imagery.
No troll intended.
Thing,
:)
I remember reading that when I was a youngster living out in a rural part of america. I thought it was all a bunch of crap until I got out and saw more of the world. It's even more true in practice nowadays than ever.
I'd like to see America become a better place to live. But when you've got 20K gun murders a year and basically 3rd world countries sprouting up in urban areas, there's little hope for a brighter tomorrow.
One of the thoughts that rings in my head every day is the fact that our inner-city slums and Section 8 housing have little chance of recovery. At least if you live in a slum in south america, the USA will ship food and medicine in for you. In our cities, you have no option but to accumulate debt and continue the cycle of poverty, God help you if you need medical treatment. Also, our slums don't have fertile soil, so even if you want to you can't give these people the ability to be self sustaining in a basic way like other nations. In a time when education is so expensive and the doorway into higher education is closed to all but a select few and the lack of available jobs for these people, even if they broke free, things will continue to get worse.
Watch as our poor population explodes and more laws hit the books. Drugs will continue to sooth the pain of poverty and abuse while the government rakes in their savings due to activities these people partake in that affect nobody besides themselves. Meanwhile, the media will do selective reporting to make the minority areas look more dangerous than they actually are so what's left of middle white america will maintain it's fear justify exceedingly harsh laws and punishment.
While all this continues, politicians continue to blabber incoherently about issues that don't matter since spin is the name of the game.
For anyone interested in seeing a different viewpoint beyond the Republican rhetoric and *-wing conspiracy crap, go download a copy of "Spin" off movies.archive.org. If you missed it in theatres, I'd suggest renting a copy of "Bowling for Columbine" by Micheal Moore. Yes, Moore is an obnoxious self-centered piggy, but what he has to say is usually dead on when it comes to the problems we are facing today.
Anyway, I'll hush now. I tend to get that vien popping up on my head and ramble for hours if not kept in check.
Your friends are not criminals. If in that position, you are likely an enabler of an overly intrusive justice system.
:)
In this era, crime is less about punishment and rehabilitation than fines associated with crimes being a revenue source for government entities.
For instance, in most cities, one of the greatest source of revenue is parking and speeding tickets. This is how police pay for new cruisers, new guns, and more officers. Then the media, in return, gets people hyped about crimes that could happen; thus we had better spend more in taxes to fight off these evils! That type of thinking has seemed to scale all the way up to the federal government after 9/11. Which is really sad for the freedoms and so-called rights of individuals.
Here are some thoughts. Do you think a $800 fine for minor drug possesion is going to make someone quit smoking pot? How about a $300 speeding ticket causing people to never speed again? How about a $15 parking ticket preventing illegal parking? None of this is about reform. Every bit of it is about local government seeking some cash.
Now if the legal system was geared for reform, things would be different. Say if you get any sort of speeding ticket and had to take a 30 day course on safe driving but paid no fines, I would bet that the number of speeding tickets would decrease. How about the teenager caught with mary jane? Send him off to a drug rehabilitation center for 30 days. I'll bet he will think twice about getting caught doing drugs again.
I think the biggest failure of our legal system is the prison system. The US has this idea that 'Texas Justice' is the way to deal with felony offenses. We have a higher percentage of people locked away in prison than Iraq or China ever had. While in prison, they get no real treatment or counseling. They get out a few years later with a hatred for our laws and could be considered worse than when they went in.
Take my uncle, for instance. He spent two years in prison. Work details, fights, possible anal probes from other jailmates. He got out and hasn't been the same. It appears he managed to come down with post-traumatic stress syndrome due to harsh experiences while locked up. By the way, he was locked away without 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' since court appointed attorneys do little to actually defend an individual.
Pffft.. I'm rambling again..
Tom,
I would not report him. Friends and family are the two things that are supposed to be more important to individuals than the law of the land.
If you go turning in all of your friends for anything illegal that you happen to witness, it's likely you won't have friends anymore.. because, well, you'd be a bad friend to have. Plus, it's impossible never do anything that infracts on the law. Especially here in the US where mere words are considered crimes.
I'm not saying if a friend goes out and commits homocide that you should protect them, just to rationalize a situation before blowing a whistle on someone.
Personally, I wouldn't turn anyone in on anything to do with theft from a corporation. This is a capitalist society. Anyone on the top has gotten there by breaking a few rules, so why should the rest of us (the poor people that funded and helped monopolies be what they are today) be the ones who always must play by the rules? It's a double standard in my eyes.
Btw, police officers are some of the biggest criminals we have. I recall in highschool, the kids that turned out to be cops were some of the worst people to associate with. Considering being a police officer requires little more than no felonies on your record and an 8th grade reading level. My assesment is that most officers would rather get paid $24k a year to be in control of other's fates than to make $45k a year in an office somewhere.
Pardon my disrespect for the legal system. It's a mess. How do I go about becoming a Canadian citizen again?
I'm so out of date :)
Thanks for the information.
You have to look at this from the RIAA's standpoint. For instance, you've got an artist you are marketing ten ways to sunday, such as Eminem. You mass produce 1,000,000 CDs of his new album to save a penny or two ahead of time. You can do this since you know your marketing efforts will result in massive sales.
:)
Now if people download the mp3's of this new album and find that it's not as great as all the hype lead everyone to think, then it's not going to sell quite as well. You are stuck with all these CDs in your warehouses.
Then you've got Band B. They aren't very popular. You've done little to market them. There might be one or two copies of their CDs in each major record store and no extras in the warehouse. They weren't intended to be a big seller. Their mp3's end up on P2P networks and people download and listen. WOW. They are great! People rush to the store and buy their CDs, but none are to be had. The radio stations don't play these guys either. The record company then has to pay a higher cost per CD to press them since they aren't dealing with the same huge quantity they pressed for the mega-star. The poor record company makes less money, though they sell more CDs overall. Plus the extra effort involved in understanding what people really want to hear is obviously too high a price to pay these days for such self-serving entities.
I know that example has some holes, but it goes with my belief that the record industry is more interested in control over the music in all aspects than just raw sales. They won't make as much immediate cash from a diluted market of sales of thousands of artists as they will for an all-attention focused marketing campaign on a lucky few.
That's where the consumer gets to apply Astroglide to their rectum. We don't get the choices we could have or the cheap education in various types of music that hasn't hit 'mainstream'.
People's musical tastes don't change every years, so much as the music industry pumps the ears of teenagers full of particular bands because it's the most profitable short-term thing to do.
Look at the complete and utter lack of new hip-hop during the past year or two. Artists have not quit writing hip-hop music. It's still being written just as it was in it's peak 4 years ago. It's just not being invested in by the record companies as they are still squeezing every penny of profit out of what's already out there, knowing if they release one or two new tracks for radio play every month they will continue to manufacture sales.
I hope what I just typed makes sense. It's a bad represenation of what I think their reasons are for this type of BS.
Now if they were just to accept the digital age and offer us music online where we purchase individual tracks or collections (a CD in mp3 isn't a CD or album anymore, really) and download it to a personal media device; I'm sure they'd profit more than ever, but it would take time to catch on -- time is money and money is needed to impress investors NOW, ASAP, or we are all going to die poor and lonely!! Damned be this greedy capitalist society. If I could only get a job in Canada, I'd blow this joint in a heart beat.
They saw the RIAA cost manufacturers of MP3 players a lot of money in litigation a few years ago. They'd rather play it smart and not get the media giants after them.
There doesn't have to be a law in place for them to get sued. That's the wonder of civil court.
In a few years, everyone will calm down and you'll see all the features you could ever imagine on these things. That is, unless one of these PVR companies gets an example made of them by the MPAA or RIAA.
It would be cooler if the NAT thing would actually work. (un?)Fortunately, cable video uses a lot more bandwidth than you are going to fit over that cat5 cable.
And since you don't get to own the box, you get a bill for $1000 when they detect your tamperings with it's hard drive.
Don't be a fool and think the cable companies don't have counter-measures for having their devices hacked.
If you tinker with a box that communicates bi-directionally with the cable company, you are probably going to get nailed.
If you tinker with this box by using a published exploit from newsgroups, go ahead and get your checkbook ready. They will already be watching for this type of activity far before you get your hands on the How-to.
It will not be a seamless as the cable box.
Freevo is just a software solution. It does not have a hardware component with dual tuners and complete control over them.
These commercial PVR solutions are the only way to go if you want it to be functional by the whole family.
Freevo is a good toy for a geek, but not a complete PVR solution.
Mind you, only the people without PVRs seem to be talking up the homebrew solutions. Once you go with the proprietary box, you see that it's much easier and more functional in regards to it's intended use than any current homebrew due to the limitations in control over the tuners and program schedules. Plus, I don't think the homebrews can encode the video real-time, so there's no pausing tv programs or commercial skipping unless you record the whole thing, encode it, then watch it. I tend to play a broadcast about 10 minutes after it starts on my PVR so I have enough time shift to be able to skip the commercials.
Don't get me wrong, I've got both a media PC and a PVR. They both serve their intended purposes. The media PC does divx and high resolution playback of movies/mp3/etc and the PVR does scheduled recordings of programs I like to watch.
I really don't understand why folks would want to trade tv shows or have access to the files TV programs are stored in to begin with. Do you really want to encode those Farscape reruns overnight, then spend forever uploading them to a friend? I'd tell his cheap ass to just buy his own PVR and schedule the recordings himself. We are talking a waste of hard drive space and time here.
I've also found that once a program is on my PVR, I don't really care to watch it more than once, maybe twice if I wasn't sober the first time. I'll typically save it long enough for others in the house to watch, then it gets erased to make room for other programs.
Mind you, if your goal is backing up and archiving, you should just consider getting a netflix account and rip dvds. Yes, it's illegal, but so is sending Farscape reruns to your friend.
Vic