I don't think this is quite such a clear-cut case, as it's my understanding that Zecco's "buying power" number is actually a *credit* balance, not a cash balance, and is often substantially different than the actual amount of money deposited with them. My bank has raised my allowable credit on my cards several times without notifying me - should I then go to jail for charging against that newly available credit?
Certainly Zecco made an industrial-strength error, but given the flaky nature of their "buying power" calculations, I don't really think that the opportunistic folks that performed trades on the credit Zecco extended to them should be penalized beyond repaying the credit they were inadvertently granted, and perhaps a finance charge equal to a percentage of the profits realized. If you lost money and are in the hole to Zecco for half a million dollars, well, that's your problem.
On the other hand, if you trust Google/Amazon/whoever to be your cloud provider for the next 10-15 years, you don't really have to worry about the machine.
You do have to worry quite a bit more about connectivity though. It sucks to have your business shut down for a couple of days because some idiot with a backhoe down the street wasn't paying attention.
Even before the Intel switch, some of the PowerMac parts were ridiculously priced. I've mentioned it before, but I have a dual-proc G4-450 that sits uselessly in a corner because the proprietary power supply died a couple of years ago, and for what that power supply would cost to replace, I could build a PC that would run a hacked OS X image in a VM at least as well as the old G4 did.
For the most part that's true, but those costs are also spread across a *much* smaller number of customers for the colos, and ISPs also have their costs sharply reduced by the generous rights-of-way, franchise guarantees, and other subsidies they receive from the local government.
ISPs have it within their means to offer vastly better service at the prices they currently charge while still making a substantial profit. They simply choose not to do so.
It's not at all difficult to convince a provider to run a T1 wherever you want, or bigger pipes if you so desire. All it takes is the correct amount on the check, but that amount will likely be quite a bit more than $350/month.
Bandwidth is just not that expensive, nor is it anywhere near as scarce as the cable companies are suggesting.
This is exactly right. How is it that it's prohibitively expensive for the average Joe to get decent connectivity, yet I can maintain a colocated server in a very nice data center at a constant 70 degrees F, with a UPS system that will keep my server up for two weeks after the mains goes away, with a terabyte of data transfer each month on a dedicated 100 megabit switch port (and I've yet to see my transfer rate drop below 10Mb/sec), and a/27 netblock, *and* a SLA, all for $100/month? Also, when I submit a service ticket, they respond in less than two minutes and can discuss the issue intelligently without stepping through an inane script. And, in the unlikely event I overrun my bandwidth allocation for the month, they'll just charge me a reasonable fee for the overage and never utter a word about cancelling my account.
the right to express one's opinion -on any subject- should not be subject to persecution by any person. That is why it is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
No, that only applies to the *government* persecuting you for your speech. The Constitution doesn't bind citizens and businesses as it does the government, and it certainly is not a "get out of jail, free" card to avoid the consequences of one's speech. If I have an employee that continually badmouths me anonymously, and I find out who it is, I have every right in the world to can him, and to pursue legal action if the speech is defamatory.
I agree that if he did the work himself and found out that is one thing, but how many here actually believe he did that? Nope, me neither.
I don't either, but that doesn't mean it's valid to just assume he used government resources to find out. Who's to say he didn't ask a IT-knowledgeable family member/friend/business associate? Or maybe just engaged a PI? Just because you doubt he'd use his own money doesn't mean he didn't - lots of powerful people exercise that power through the use of their own resources.
You'd be investigating on your own behalf, not for profit for someone else, so I'd think you'd probably be okay. IANAL, and it's late, and I'm just pulling that out of the air.:-)
I hate over-long copyright terms with the subsequent wholesale theft (real, according to the legal definition) from society and hate all of the bullshit excuses that they come up with to keep doing it.
A large part of the problem a lot of these folks seem to be having is that it's TPB offering the service, and they're assuming guilt by association. It looks to me like TPB will be offering a reasonably priced service that offers at least as much as competing VPN services, so it doesn't make business sense not to consider them.
Once it's on the VPN, it's no longer a torrent, and it's not a ToS issue.
What's your major problem with people wanting privacy? For several posts you've been stridently whining about there not being legitimate uses for a VPN, even in the face of reasoned arguments to the contrary. Do you seriously believe that people should not be allowed to anonymize their traffic, and that they're committing some grievous wrong by trying to maintain their privacy online?
What is the legitimate use of a VPN connection to the Pirate Bay?
One legitimate use is simply preventing one's browsing habits to be logged and/or analyzed. Someone that's into geriatric amputee midget porn probably doesn't want that fetish to be widely known, even though it's perfectly legal. Another might to be able to establish a truly anonymous mail account with a webmail provider such as Yahoo. And then of course there is the old standby of maintaining anonymity when making material available that your local government or large corporation might find offensive and over which might attempt to wage a legal war of attrition.
Going through TPB, to me at least, makes me more confident that network security will be taken seriously, and I trust them a bit more that other providers when they make the statement, "we don't keep logs". Given their history I don't imagine they'll just roll over for anyone like AT&T and Verizon did, and if they are forced to I'm quite sure they'll find a way to let people know. They'll also be price-competitive with other services, so why *not* consider them?
He very well could merely be gullible or wrong, but to me this article reeked of astroturfing, which is an inherently deceitful practice IMO. I could be wrong, but I stand behind my choice of words.
Doesn't change the fact that none of that costs anything substantial to implement (certainly not a $275 premium over the cost of the drive itself), and you're an idiot if you really believe you need custom grommets for mounting drives. There are plenty of cheap off-the-shelf rubber parts that will isolate the drives just as well.
Not to mention that all of the supposedly special sauce that goes into Apple's drive modules apparently didn't keep this one from dying after only six months of use. I'm sorry, I was thinking "reliability" was part of what I was paying extra for.
And it also doesn't do a good job of explaining why the drive modules are so expensive. "Server-class" SATA drives? Big deal, if you want that, pay $30 more for a Seagate NS drive instead of the consumer-level AS model. Custom firmware? Again, big deal - every server mfr does that (my Seagate NS drives have HP firmware on them), and the article offer no numbers to indicate a qualitative improvement. Extra hardware in the carrier? Again, show me a net benefit for the extra money. Custom rubber grommets? Puh-lease. The quote I found most amusing was this: "A final fact to realize about the custom firmware in ADM drives is that the Xserve's Server Monitor software is designed to monitor about a dozen variables reported by the drive's firmware and report pre-failure warnings if those variables stray outside acceptable limits." Has this person never heard of SMART, and is he not aware that practically every drive made today implements it? It's hardly rocket science to write a SMART monitor.
The reason Apple (and every other server vendor) charges that much for drives is because that's what they want to do, and it's disingenuous for this guy to be spinning it as if Apple has something special in that regard.
Also...at least in LA, these camera fines are treated differently. They are not your normal traffic court proceedings, but, a weird type of civil court, and you don't have the same rights as you do in a criminal court.
Because they know they'd get shot to pieces in a real courtroom.
When vehicular traffic is stopped on the opposite side of an intersection, no person shall drive a vehicle into such intersection
And that totally does not account for the common situation we see in Orlando, where you're the fifth car back and you get stuck in the intersection because the bus four cars ahead of you (that proceeded right through the intersection with nothing but clear road ahead of him) unexpectedly stops at the microscopic bus stop sign that the traffic engineers thoughtfully placed 40 feet past the intersection on the far side, leaving you stranded in the last 40-50 feet of the intersection for God-knows-how-long. The damn busses are so slow you generally don't know they're making a stop until they're right on top of it.
Florida's law on the matter is a bit more succinct:
(1) Except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic, or in compliance with law or the directions of a police officer or official traffic control device, no person shall:
Slashdot Mirror
Google, Yahoo, and the vast majority of the aggregators they're whining about do in fact respect the robots.txt file.
I don't think this is quite such a clear-cut case, as it's my understanding that Zecco's "buying power" number is actually a *credit* balance, not a cash balance, and is often substantially different than the actual amount of money deposited with them. My bank has raised my allowable credit on my cards several times without notifying me - should I then go to jail for charging against that newly available credit?
Certainly Zecco made an industrial-strength error, but given the flaky nature of their "buying power" calculations, I don't really think that the opportunistic folks that performed trades on the credit Zecco extended to them should be penalized beyond repaying the credit they were inadvertently granted, and perhaps a finance charge equal to a percentage of the profits realized. If you lost money and are in the hole to Zecco for half a million dollars, well, that's your problem.
On the other hand, if you trust Google/Amazon/whoever to be your cloud provider for the next 10-15 years, you don't really have to worry about the machine.
You do have to worry quite a bit more about connectivity though. It sucks to have your business shut down for a couple of days because some idiot with a backhoe down the street wasn't paying attention.
Even before the Intel switch, some of the PowerMac parts were ridiculously priced. I've mentioned it before, but I have a dual-proc G4-450 that sits uselessly in a corner because the proprietary power supply died a couple of years ago, and for what that power supply would cost to replace, I could build a PC that would run a hacked OS X image in a VM at least as well as the old G4 did.
For the most part that's true, but those costs are also spread across a *much* smaller number of customers for the colos, and ISPs also have their costs sharply reduced by the generous rights-of-way, franchise guarantees, and other subsidies they receive from the local government.
ISPs have it within their means to offer vastly better service at the prices they currently charge while still making a substantial profit. They simply choose not to do so.
It's not at all difficult to convince a provider to run a T1 wherever you want, or bigger pipes if you so desire. All it takes is the correct amount on the check, but that amount will likely be quite a bit more than $350/month.
On those same routers you can also install Tomato, which I've found to be a *much* better package than DD-WRT, and without the questionable history.
It's per-user until it gets to the DSLAM/RT, but from there it's a single pipe back to the CO.
Bandwidth is just not that expensive, nor is it anywhere near as scarce as the cable companies are suggesting.
/27 netblock, *and* a SLA, all for $100/month? Also, when I submit a service ticket, they respond in less than two minutes and can discuss the issue intelligently without stepping through an inane script. And, in the unlikely event I overrun my bandwidth allocation for the month, they'll just charge me a reasonable fee for the overage and never utter a word about cancelling my account.
This is exactly right. How is it that it's prohibitively expensive for the average Joe to get decent connectivity, yet I can maintain a colocated server in a very nice data center at a constant 70 degrees F, with a UPS system that will keep my server up for two weeks after the mains goes away, with a terabyte of data transfer each month on a dedicated 100 megabit switch port (and I've yet to see my transfer rate drop below 10Mb/sec), and a
the right to express one's opinion -on any subject- should not be subject to persecution by any person. That is why it is the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
No, that only applies to the *government* persecuting you for your speech. The Constitution doesn't bind citizens and businesses as it does the government, and it certainly is not a "get out of jail, free" card to avoid the consequences of one's speech. If I have an employee that continually badmouths me anonymously, and I find out who it is, I have every right in the world to can him, and to pursue legal action if the speech is defamatory.
I agree that if he did the work himself and found out that is one thing, but how many here actually believe he did that? Nope, me neither.
I don't either, but that doesn't mean it's valid to just assume he used government resources to find out. Who's to say he didn't ask a IT-knowledgeable family member/friend/business associate? Or maybe just engaged a PI? Just because you doubt he'd use his own money doesn't mean he didn't - lots of powerful people exercise that power through the use of their own resources.
You'd be investigating on your own behalf, not for profit for someone else, so I'd think you'd probably be okay. IANAL, and it's late, and I'm just pulling that out of the air. :-)
I hate over-long copyright terms with the subsequent wholesale theft (real, according to the legal definition) from society and hate all of the bullshit excuses that they come up with to keep doing it.
4.) Even if forced to cooperate, I'd bet they would find a way to make it public knowledge that their network was compromised and wasn't safe.
A large part of the problem a lot of these folks seem to be having is that it's TPB offering the service, and they're assuming guilt by association. It looks to me like TPB will be offering a reasonably priced service that offers at least as much as competing VPN services, so it doesn't make business sense not to consider them.
Once it's on the VPN, it's no longer a torrent, and it's not a ToS issue.
What's your major problem with people wanting privacy? For several posts you've been stridently whining about there not being legitimate uses for a VPN, even in the face of reasoned arguments to the contrary. Do you seriously believe that people should not be allowed to anonymize their traffic, and that they're committing some grievous wrong by trying to maintain their privacy online?
As stated by Ars Technica, NOT Pirate Bay.
What is the legitimate use of a VPN connection to the Pirate Bay?
One legitimate use is simply preventing one's browsing habits to be logged and/or analyzed. Someone that's into geriatric amputee midget porn probably doesn't want that fetish to be widely known, even though it's perfectly legal. Another might to be able to establish a truly anonymous mail account with a webmail provider such as Yahoo. And then of course there is the old standby of maintaining anonymity when making material available that your local government or large corporation might find offensive and over which might attempt to wage a legal war of attrition.
Going through TPB, to me at least, makes me more confident that network security will be taken seriously, and I trust them a bit more that other providers when they make the statement, "we don't keep logs". Given their history I don't imagine they'll just roll over for anyone like AT&T and Verizon did, and if they are forced to I'm quite sure they'll find a way to let people know. They'll also be price-competitive with other services, so why *not* consider them?
No, it's been my experience that all server drives are ridiculously priced. This article just happened to be about Apple. :-)
He very well could merely be gullible or wrong, but to me this article reeked of astroturfing, which is an inherently deceitful practice IMO. I could be wrong, but I stand behind my choice of words.
Doesn't change the fact that none of that costs anything substantial to implement (certainly not a $275 premium over the cost of the drive itself), and you're an idiot if you really believe you need custom grommets for mounting drives. There are plenty of cheap off-the-shelf rubber parts that will isolate the drives just as well.
Not to mention that all of the supposedly special sauce that goes into Apple's drive modules apparently didn't keep this one from dying after only six months of use. I'm sorry, I was thinking "reliability" was part of what I was paying extra for.
And it also doesn't do a good job of explaining why the drive modules are so expensive. "Server-class" SATA drives? Big deal, if you want that, pay $30 more for a Seagate NS drive instead of the consumer-level AS model. Custom firmware? Again, big deal - every server mfr does that (my Seagate NS drives have HP firmware on them), and the article offer no numbers to indicate a qualitative improvement. Extra hardware in the carrier? Again, show me a net benefit for the extra money. Custom rubber grommets? Puh-lease. The quote I found most amusing was this: "A final fact to realize about the custom firmware in ADM drives is that the Xserve's Server Monitor software is designed to monitor about a dozen variables reported by the drive's firmware and report pre-failure warnings if those variables stray outside acceptable limits." Has this person never heard of SMART, and is he not aware that practically every drive made today implements it? It's hardly rocket science to write a SMART monitor.
The reason Apple (and every other server vendor) charges that much for drives is because that's what they want to do, and it's disingenuous for this guy to be spinning it as if Apple has something special in that regard.
Also...at least in LA, these camera fines are treated differently. They are not your normal traffic court proceedings, but, a weird type of civil court, and you don't have the same rights as you do in a criminal court.
Because they know they'd get shot to pieces in a real courtroom.
When vehicular traffic is stopped on the opposite side of an intersection, no person shall drive a vehicle into such intersection
...
And that totally does not account for the common situation we see in Orlando, where you're the fifth car back and you get stuck in the intersection because the bus four cars ahead of you (that proceeded right through the intersection with nothing but clear road ahead of him) unexpectedly stops at the microscopic bus stop sign that the traffic engineers thoughtfully placed 40 feet past the intersection on the far side, leaving you stranded in the last 40-50 feet of the intersection for God-knows-how-long. The damn busses are so slow you generally don't know they're making a stop until they're right on top of it.
Florida's law on the matter is a bit more succinct:
(1) Except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic, or in compliance with law or the directions of a police officer or official traffic control device, no person shall:
(a) Stop, stand, or park a vehicle:
3. Within an intersection.