Unlicensed is not the same as unregulated.
The license-free-services are controlled by the FCC as outlined in Part 15.
SCOTUS has upheld time and time again that in matters of RF spectrum usage, FCC trumps local and state legislative intent, except in certain very specific cases (public safety, eg).
There is a broad gap between "orgaic tissue will be affected" and "provable causality of detrimental side effects."
Everything one choses to do in life has risks associated with it -- and if "bathing myself in nanovolt/m fields of 5 GHz energy" raises a risk factor from 1 in a billion to one in 250 million Extra Extra! Radio Waves Cause 400% increase in cancer!, I think I would be willing to live with that.
In the mean time, there are some simple proven ways to improve your risk factors.
Put out that cigarette.
Wear a condom.
Put down the Burrito Supreme.
Walk to the liquor store instead of drive.
Computer software consists of only two components -- ones and zeros -- in roughly equal proportions. All that is required is to sort them into the correct order.
and even better -- it does not count as a moving violation. No points.
There was a well-circuilated rumour that Sun Microsystems had a standing policy that their CE staff was to use the carpool lanes - and that the company would 100% reimburse your tickets.
The rumour continues to say that they stopped, because traffic fines are not reimbursable expenses according to IRS rules, and thus it had to be counted as additional income to the employee.
When I was doing hardware development in Mountain View, CA - I did almost exactly this. I hired a young computer-nerd for the primary purpose of "going with me in the car if I needed to go down to Halted" during car-pool hours. He got $5 an hour off-the-books from 2:45ish PM until 6ish every day.
He also was a neat-freak, and cleaned the lab - which was nice because I'm a terminal slob, and the lab was a disaster before he came.
If, perchance, it is a company that makes its bread and butter collecting and selling e-mail addresses to the gullible, they probably already KNOW what they are doing, and you reminding them does nothing but give you a warm feeling.
Another option is some retail user - there probably is no postmaster@CPE0080c6ef6343-CM0143000000054.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com just to pull a random IP address out of my log file.
And finally the last case -- you hit the 'jackpot' -- you find the email address of some overworked sysadmin at medium-nsp.net who COULD do something if she could.
An anecdote to illustrate:
I was working as head network/system administration guy for a very successful NSP in the S.F. bay area in the mid 90s, when spam REALLY began to take off. We had a customer who had the domain name PASTA.COM (not really -- to preserve his anonymity I have substituted an equally common word for his).
A very vigorous spam organization was sending out tens of thousands of emails advertising their spaghetti-sauce and accessory business, directing people to call 1-800-PASTA.CO (M)
They had no relationship to our (domain-squatter) client, who did not even sell pasta products. He was just hoping that some pasta-manufacturer would give him ten large for the name.
Every day, my postmaster@... inbox would be filled with vitriolic e-mail demanding that I terminate his connectivity for violating our AUP. (Sadly, our AUP had been drafted before anyone had imagined that spam would be a problem. The closest we had was a paragraph "protection of network")
Sometimes, if I was feeling argumentative, I would correspond with these sub-people asking exactly how is this customer violating any AUP? By having a domainname that is a common five-letter english word that someone else happened to use in a piece of spam?
I had my own real job to do -- helping our customers track down and eliminate open mail relays, sending out bills for rack space, taking my turn standing in front of the idiot with the backhoe so he couldn't dig up our OC3, keeping usenet working.
Eventually, I developed a tecnique that satisfied everybody. I would send out a polite form-letter saying, "Thank you internet user for your vigilance. Please be assured that the most appropriate action is being taken immediately."
Then I moved their original message into/dev/null.
As someone who hires programmers, I disagree strongly with you.
This is not America pre-1975, when people were hired, and expected life-long employment. If *ONE* of the programmers I have working for me here is still here in ten years, I'd be amazed. If I am still here in ten years, shoot me.
--L
Pay attention -- this is important. Where is it stated in capitalist doctrine that the sale-price of a product must be determined by it's cost of production?
Market forces dictate that the sale price of a product will be determined by it's VALUE to consumers. Obviously, having multiple computer attached to a DSL/Cablemodem/Whatever connection has value, or/.ers wouldn't bitch about this topic so much.
Now, market pressures being what they are - the price naturally tends to drift TOWARD the cost of production for a commodity item, and as the market for internet service matures - it becomes more of a commodity.
But, as long as having two computers share an internet connection is important to you, someone will be glad to charge you more to do that. And as long as your ISP has a mechanism to offer "one computer, one price" "two computers, different price" products they are going to do it.
And herein lies the beauty of the system: You don't like it? Start Smilin' Bizitch's NAT-Friendly ISP!
You need to have a password policy that encourages better passwords without requiring a specific password makeup.
If I encounter a system where my password must include mixed case and digits and punctuation, I'm going to make up a random string, and then have to write it down.
Some Unices I've encountered had a passwd(1) that would NOT allow you to enter a "bad" password, while others would nag you gently depending on how "bad" it was, but would eventually relent and let you set your password to "flower" if that's what you REALLLY wanted.
The REAL answer is not "password" but "pass phrase" where the text can be lengthy and meaningful to none but the user.
Furthermore Opie is a neat project to avoid keyboard snooping.
Some parts of the third world I've been to, most poor fucks don't have a TV, because there aren't any TV stations to look at, and isn't any electricity to run it.
Even in Mexico, where I live now, 40% of the population lives on less than the minimum wage -- US$4 per day (+/- 10%). 40% of households make between USD4 and USD8 per day, and the rest make - well more.
In a major city, a 21-year-old geek might have a good job making USD 60 per week. Half of that goes to housing (rent, light, gas), two thirds of what remains goes to food, and the other ten dollars goes to clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc.
Similar problem here -- when I was living in Tijuana, my (Mexican) Postal Code was 22145 - virtually all of my mail from the US had a stamp on the back that shows it had gone through the MSC at Falls Church, Virginia.
I don't know where 441xx is in the US, yet. I get very little mail from there now.
Some years ago, in Fremont, California, Tymnet (not CALLED Tymnet at the time) scrapped their last four KL10s. One went to the Computer Museum History Center at Moffet Field, and the front end cabinet from one went to one of their employees. This left two complete CPUs and one PDP10-only.
Bruce Kennard was called, as one of the last remaining dealers in legacy DEC systems in the bay area, and given an opportunity to save the machines from the smelter who wanted them. The catch was: All the PDP10s and a boatload of SA10s (PDP10 IOBus to IBM Channel Adapaters) and an even LARGER boatload of Memorex Washing-machine disks had to go too (If I recall correctly, there were 145 of these, some of which were side-by-side double-spindle units). And we had 48 hours to do it. Bruce could beat the smetlers price, but couldn't assemble a crew to move the equipment before the deadline. I had a crew, but couldn't raise the money. A deal was struck: I'd move all the equipment out of BT's space down to Bruce's warehouse a couple of miles away, in exchange Eric Smith & I would get to keep one of the complete KL10s.
On the day of the move, I show up with a 17-foot box van, and four guys, and we begin filling the truck with 200ish pound each disk drives, fifteen at a time. At BT, we were loading from a dock-height ramp, but at Bruce's warehouse, we had to unload with a forklift, so each round trip took close to 45 minutes.
Now these disks were being knocked apart for breakage - nobody wanted Channel-attached 300ish megabyte washing machines any more, so we weren't being particularly careful with them, i.e. no tie-downs or anything in the truck.
We had made seven or eight trips, and things were moving pretty smoothly.I was passenging, and a friend was driving. Then, a car passes us blowing his horn and flashing his lights. I get this horrible sick sensation -- I immediately know what has happend. We pull over, and where there HAD been fifteen disks, were now 6. So, we double back, and in an otherwise busy intersection were 9 of these beasts in various levels of decomposition. I thank deity that none of them fell onto another motorist.
With just the two of us, and a team of Fremont City Cops heckling (but not helping) we get the drives wrestled back into the truck, and down to Bruce's warehouse.
The LAST load of the night is taking the PDP10 to my house. For those who have never seen a KL10, it is an enormous beast. Two 23-inch racks and one 19-inch rack, all bolted together, with dozens of cables running back and forth (i.e. the PDP11s unibus runs from the front-end processor in the right-most rack, all the way to the IO cabinet in the left-most rack, and all the way back to the right-most rack to pick up the TU56es). So, seperating the cabinets is a MAJOR chore that I was unwilling to take so late in the day.
In the bottom of the center rack is the 13 kilowatt power supply for the ECL cage. The whole thing is VERY heavy - at least 1000 pounds.
It is also wider than the lift-gate on the truck.
With great difficulty, using shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, causing one non-life threatening injury, we get the computer out onto the lift gate, with the IO and FE cabinets hanging off the ends, but the center of gravity (thanks to DEC's decision to use an enormous FR transformer) well centered.
But once we get it on the ground, it won't budge. The 3-inch casters were designed to roll over smooth machine-room floors, not asphalt suburban driveways.
My intrepid friend Charles suggests we have a 300 horespower diesel-powered computer-tug right here. So, with the judicious application of ablative books (one on Songwriting, and a copy of the UCSD P-System Report) we carefullyback the truck up, so the edge of the lift-gate is bearing on the steel of the FE cabinet.
Charles gets into the truck, shifts into low-Reverse, and eases out on the clutch. Slowly everything begins to move, but when the computer jumps the bump from the driveway into the garage, the terrain became MUCH smoother, and it began accelerating. I rush from my vantage point at the FRONT of the mission, to the back, and LITERALLY throw myself between the advancing computer and the AMPEX memory box. I have the wind knocked out of me, but no broken bones, and the computer seemed to survive.
Ask me some other time about how I nearly killed my friend Josh by trying to drop a fully loaded SparcCenter 2000 on him.
Actually, if you read some of the comments in the poll, you would find that chris said, "This poll was inspired by an article in the pipeline, these polls are just kinda fun, yadda yadda.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlicensed is not the same as unregulated. The license-free-services are controlled by the FCC as outlined in Part 15. SCOTUS has upheld time and time again that in matters of RF spectrum usage, FCC trumps local and state legislative intent, except in certain very specific cases (public safety, eg).
Everything one choses to do in life has risks associated with it -- and if "bathing myself in nanovolt/m fields of 5 GHz energy" raises a risk factor from 1 in a billion to one in 250 million Extra Extra! Radio Waves Cause 400% increase in cancer!, I think I would be willing to live with that.
In the mean time, there are some simple proven ways to improve your risk factors.
- Put out that cigarette.
- Wear a condom.
- Put down the Burrito Supreme.
- Walk to the liquor store instead of drive.
Computer software consists of only two components -- ones and zeros -- in roughly equal proportions. All that is required is to sort them into the correct order.There was a well-circuilated rumour that Sun Microsystems had a standing policy that their CE staff was to use the carpool lanes - and that the company would 100% reimburse your tickets.
The rumour continues to say that they stopped, because traffic fines are not reimbursable expenses according to IRS rules, and thus it had to be counted as additional income to the employee.
He also was a neat-freak, and cleaned the lab - which was nice because I'm a terminal slob, and the lab was a disaster before he came.
postmaster@j3rk.ugh.com doesn't really care.
If, perchance, it is a company that makes its bread and butter collecting and selling e-mail addresses to the gullible, they probably already KNOW what they are doing, and you reminding them does nothing but give you a warm feeling.
Another option is some retail user - there probably is no postmaster@CPE0080c6ef6343-CM0143000000054.cpe.net .cable.rogers.com just to pull a random IP address out of my log file.
And finally the last case -- you hit the 'jackpot' -- you find the email address of some overworked sysadmin at medium-nsp.net who COULD do something if she could.
An anecdote to illustrate:
I was working as head network/system administration guy for a very successful NSP in the S.F. bay area in the mid 90s, when spam REALLY began to take off. We had a customer who had the domain name PASTA.COM (not really -- to preserve his anonymity I have substituted an equally common word for his).
A very vigorous spam organization was sending out tens of thousands of emails advertising their spaghetti-sauce and accessory business, directing people to call 1-800-PASTA.CO (M)
They had no relationship to our (domain-squatter) client, who did not even sell pasta products. He was just hoping that some pasta-manufacturer would give him ten large for the name.
Every day, my postmaster@... inbox would be filled with vitriolic e-mail demanding that I terminate his connectivity for violating our AUP. (Sadly, our AUP had been drafted before anyone had imagined that spam would be a problem. The closest we had was a paragraph "protection of network")
Sometimes, if I was feeling argumentative, I would correspond with these sub-people asking exactly how is this customer violating any AUP? By having a domainname that is a common five-letter english word that someone else happened to use in a piece of spam?
I had my own real job to do -- helping our customers track down and eliminate open mail relays, sending out bills for rack space, taking my turn standing in front of the idiot with the backhoe so he couldn't dig up our OC3, keeping usenet working.
Eventually, I developed a tecnique that satisfied everybody. I would send out a polite form-letter saying, "Thank you internet user for your vigilance. Please be assured that the most appropriate action is being taken immediately."
Then I moved their original message into /dev/null.
As someone who hires programmers, I disagree strongly with you. This is not America pre-1975, when people were hired, and expected life-long employment. If *ONE* of the programmers I have working for me here is still here in ten years, I'd be amazed. If I am still here in ten years, shoot me. --L
Pay attention -- this is important. Where is it stated in capitalist doctrine that the sale-price of a product must be determined by it's cost of production?
Market forces dictate that the sale price of a product will be determined by it's VALUE to consumers. Obviously, having multiple computer attached to a DSL/Cablemodem/Whatever connection has value, or /.ers wouldn't bitch about this topic so much.
Now, market pressures being what they are - the price naturally tends to drift TOWARD the cost of production for a commodity item, and as the market for internet service matures - it becomes more of a commodity.
But, as long as having two computers share an internet connection is important to you, someone will be glad to charge you more to do that. And as long as your ISP has a mechanism to offer "one computer, one price" "two computers, different price" products they are going to do it.
And herein lies the beauty of the system: You don't like it? Start Smilin' Bizitch's NAT-Friendly ISP!
You need to have a password policy that encourages better passwords without requiring a specific password makeup.
If I encounter a system where my password must include mixed case and digits and punctuation, I'm going to make up a random string, and then have to write it down.
Some Unices I've encountered had a passwd(1) that would NOT allow you to enter a "bad" password, while others would nag you gently depending on how "bad" it was, but would eventually relent and let you set your password to "flower" if that's what you REALLLY wanted.
The REAL answer is not "password" but "pass phrase" where the text can be lengthy and meaningful to none but the user.
Furthermore Opie is a neat project to avoid keyboard snooping.
Some parts of the third world I've been to, most poor fucks don't have a TV, because there aren't any TV stations to look at, and isn't any electricity to run it. Even in Mexico, where I live now, 40% of the population lives on less than the minimum wage -- US$4 per day (+/- 10%). 40% of households make between USD4 and USD8 per day, and the rest make - well more. In a major city, a 21-year-old geek might have a good job making USD 60 per week. Half of that goes to housing (rent, light, gas), two thirds of what remains goes to food, and the other ten dollars goes to clothing, entertainment, transportation, etc.
Similar problem here -- when I was living in Tijuana, my (Mexican) Postal Code was 22145 - virtually all of my mail from the US had a stamp on the back that shows it had gone through the MSC at Falls Church, Virginia. I don't know where 441xx is in the US, yet. I get very little mail from there now.
Bruce Kennard was called, as one of the last remaining dealers in legacy DEC systems in the bay area, and given an opportunity to save the machines from the smelter who wanted them. The catch was: All the PDP10s and a boatload of SA10s (PDP10 IOBus to IBM Channel Adapaters) and an even LARGER boatload of Memorex Washing-machine disks had to go too (If I recall correctly, there were 145 of these, some of which were side-by-side double-spindle units). And we had 48 hours to do it. Bruce could beat the smetlers price, but couldn't assemble a crew to move the equipment before the deadline. I had a crew, but couldn't raise the money. A deal was struck: I'd move all the equipment out of BT's space down to Bruce's warehouse a couple of miles away, in exchange Eric Smith & I would get to keep one of the complete KL10s.
On the day of the move, I show up with a 17-foot box van, and four guys, and we begin filling the truck with 200ish pound each disk drives, fifteen at a time. At BT, we were loading from a dock-height ramp, but at Bruce's warehouse, we had to unload with a forklift, so each round trip took close to 45 minutes.
Now these disks were being knocked apart for breakage - nobody wanted Channel-attached 300ish megabyte washing machines any more, so we weren't being particularly careful with them, i.e. no tie-downs or anything in the truck.
We had made seven or eight trips, and things were moving pretty smoothly.I was passenging, and a friend was driving. Then, a car passes us blowing his horn and flashing his lights. I get this horrible sick sensation -- I immediately know what has happend. We pull over, and where there HAD been fifteen disks, were now 6. So, we double back, and in an otherwise busy intersection were 9 of these beasts in various levels of decomposition. I thank deity that none of them fell onto another motorist. With just the two of us, and a team of Fremont City Cops heckling (but not helping) we get the drives wrestled back into the truck, and down to Bruce's warehouse.
The LAST load of the night is taking the PDP10 to my house. For those who have never seen a KL10, it is an enormous beast. Two 23-inch racks and one 19-inch rack, all bolted together, with dozens of cables running back and forth (i.e. the PDP11s unibus runs from the front-end processor in the right-most rack, all the way to the IO cabinet in the left-most rack, and all the way back to the right-most rack to pick up the TU56es). So, seperating the cabinets is a MAJOR chore that I was unwilling to take so late in the day.
In the bottom of the center rack is the 13 kilowatt power supply for the ECL cage. The whole thing is VERY heavy - at least 1000 pounds.
It is also wider than the lift-gate on the truck.
With great difficulty, using shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, causing one non-life threatening injury, we get the computer out onto the lift gate, with the IO and FE cabinets hanging off the ends, but the center of gravity (thanks to DEC's decision to use an enormous FR transformer) well centered.
But once we get it on the ground, it won't budge. The 3-inch casters were designed to roll over smooth machine-room floors, not asphalt suburban driveways.
My intrepid friend Charles suggests we have a 300 horespower diesel-powered computer-tug right here. So, with the judicious application of ablative books (one on Songwriting, and a copy of the UCSD P-System Report) we carefullyback the truck up, so the edge of the lift-gate is bearing on the steel of the FE cabinet.
Charles gets into the truck, shifts into low-Reverse, and eases out on the clutch. Slowly everything begins to move, but when the computer jumps the bump from the driveway into the garage, the terrain became MUCH smoother, and it began accelerating. I rush from my vantage point at the FRONT of the mission, to the back, and LITERALLY throw myself between the advancing computer and the AMPEX memory box. I have the wind knocked out of me, but no broken bones, and the computer seemed to survive.
Ask me some other time about how I nearly killed my friend Josh by trying to drop a fully loaded SparcCenter 2000 on him.
Actually, if you read some of the comments in the poll, you would find that chris said, "This poll was inspired by an article in the pipeline, these polls are just kinda fun, yadda yadda.
Remember, nobody wrote "incentivates", Jodrell -- that was the malapropism produced by an automated translation tool.