Well, Comcast may be blocking Vonage but so far they've left AT&T's CallVantage alone so far as I can tell. Which is probably smart: AT&T has deeper pockets, more lawyers and more Congressmen.
I agree. I was running Smoothwall for a while, but then I got hold of a WRT54GL V4 and started playing around with alternate firmware. I eventually settled on Tomato. I use AT&T's CallVantage VoIP service, and it works great with Tomato. I can have my line maxed out running a bunch of torrents, or playing live video from Netflix, and the phone never stutters.
Frankly, I think Linksys ought to hire the guy that wrote Tomato. His stuff is light years ahead of the stock firmware.
A well regulated Militia... In other words, I don't think they had the idea of people owning guns to protect their home and overthrow the government, but more for the idea of protecting the country against attack.
The standard misinterpretation used by gun-control proponents nationwide.
Unfortunately for that perspective, in Revolutionary times, We the People were the Militia! You also fail to understand that the Founders believed very strongly that a well-armed general population was a tremendous deterrent to government arrogating too much power to itself. In fact, the whole point of the Second Amendment was to keep government in line, afraid of the people. In that they were correct: they had a keen awareness of history and knew well what happens when civilian populations have no means of defense against a malicious government. By assuring us of a means of self-defense, they were attempting to stave off the very necessity of open rebellion for as long as possible. These people were not stupid, and it would be a mistake to think that the world is so very different today that their accumulated wisdom somehow doesn't apply. It still does, now more than ever.
You are correct, revolution was a matter of last resort even to the Founders. Regardless, a well-armed populace was intended to keep government officials afraid our wrath if they ever got too far out of line. And that principle is still valid to this very day: when one side of a conflict has all the guns the outcome is perfectly predictable, and if we allow ourselves to be disarmed we have no right to complain when matters go from bad to worse. The Second Amendment was intended to maintain a balance of power, a balance which has been severely shifted in the government's favor in the past few decades.
I personally don't own any firearm more powerful than a BB pistol. That's irrelevant though: deliberately misinterpreting the Constitution in order to take away my right to own one, if I so choose, is not acceptable. I may need one someday.
It's disgraceful what American's have allowed themselves to become.
This make come as quite a shock to you, but very few Americans condone such behavior. Period. There's a reason George Bush has such an abysmal approval rating: it's because we don't like this crap any more than you do. So please don't cast some three hundred million otherwise decent, law-abiding citizens into the same mold as some underpaid government thug. I can just imagine how you must feel about Russians or the Chinese or any other nation whose government does truly horrible things... why, you must really hate those people since they're obviously all evil. Or are we Americans somehow an exception, to be vilified regardless of the facts?
except globalization is the sole reason for our comfortable living status and swelled middle class. be careful what you wish for.
No, not at all. Economic dominance and a thriving manufacturing sector maintained our standard of living. The global economy did little to help that, and in fact has been much of why that vaunted standard of living has been dropping in the past few decades.
The number of people who qualify as "middle class" is also not so swelled anymore.
But will every pirated copy magically transforms into a sale
Nope.
... or will this scheme just annoy legitimate users and be cracked anyway?
Duh.
This approach invariably torques off paying customers, especially if they aren't made aware of the protection before they plunk down their money. Worse yet, if the game is any good (or even if it's not... the dude issued a challenge to the world's crackers just by announcing this) it'll be cracked forthwith. I buy all the games I play, but only if the vendor respects me as a customer. Doesn't matter how good your product is, if you treat me badly you won't get my money. You still might get my money if a solid crack is available though. Either way, I insist upon maintaining control over my property.
Now, having said that I don't have a problem with a game company wanting to keep non-paying users off their gaming network, but don't go overboard with security. Also, if I want to run the software single-player I absolutely should not have to jump through hoops, need to keep the damn CD in the drive, or maintain an active Internet connection for Chrissakes.
Hear hear! I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things.
Thank you! Finally someone wrote "Hear hear!" instead of "Here here!".
Not at all. You're reading way too much into my one-liner.
What I object to is individuals who promote one party (pick one) claiming that the other party is the only one with serious and fundamental failures of principle. The reality is that both sides play dirty, always have and always will, and for either to claim moral superiority is hypocritical at best. People who are steeped in party politics often simply refuse to acknowledge when their side does awful things, and rationalize such reprehensible behavior to a degree that I find truly appalling. Frequently it's excused as being necessary ("you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs", etc.) with a complete loss of moral and ethical functioning, and concomitant social and economic consequences, dismissed as mere collateral damage. We have to win at all costs, don't you understand?!!!
This is why neither side can ever get any traction in the direction of improvement, why matters are going steadily from bad to worse... if you cannot admit and accept your own flaws and work to correct them, you have no business criticizing anyone else, especially if you're doing the same things you're accusing them of doing!
Hypocrisy is rife in modern politics. It makes me ill.
RIAA, be careful what you ask for. Maybe someday there will be a revolution and the RIAA lawyers will be lined up against the wall.
Problem is, when mobs and "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" start meting out justice like that, they're not usually very selective. We'd end up with all of our lawyers lined up against the wall and shot.
Sure... but this discussion is about people who install this stuff and don't know what they're doing. My point is that working with a low-voltage system doesn't necessarily make you safer.
Low voltage power wiring can be more dangerous than regular 115/220 VAC. If a circuit is shorted the I2R losses will much greater. For example, I have a Hawker 6FV11 12V 105 AH battery that runs my sump pumps. It's capable of dumping tens of thousands of amperes across a dead short: if that ever happened the results would be Biblical. I took a number of precautions when building that system, one of which was to have 200 amp fuses mounted directly to the battery terminals and covered in heat-shrink tubing. Big battery arrays are dangerous, make no mistake. A neophyte is better off getting a book on home wiring and learning how to handle conduit and junction boxes rather than fooling around with a battery bank that's more dangerous than a tank full of gasoline.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Many women in the U.S. claim to want "equality" when what they really want is to offload any responsibility for their own existence onto their partners of the moment. Oh sure, that's a generalization of Biblical proportions, I know. But there is more than a little truth to it, I think.
For my part, I finally found someone that truly understands what "for better or worse" means and is in it for the long haul. More to the point, she is totally focused on making life better for both of us, not just herself. In turn, that frees me to give without reservation. I've been trying for a couple of decades to find someone like her, and it's a remarkable experience and I don't want it to ever end. Honestly, it took some time for me to realize just how different she is from all her predecessors, but once I did I realized I had to do whatever it took to keep her. That meant making some big changes, but they were all worth it.
Unlike yours truly, she wasn't born here, but you know what? I couldn't be happier... and I'm not looking back.
I presume you meant a "Do Yourself In" project, which is what usually happens when people who don't know what they're doing attempt to rewire their homes.
The telcos are given a pass to monitor and interfer with traffic as long as the intended purpose is to detect and/or prevent illegal activities.
Pure incrementalism. The telcos have always been required to co-operate with law enforcement when it comes to monitoring illegal or suspected illegal activities, it's just that it was only supposed to happen with judicial oversight. The lack of such oversight is what this is all about. The other issue is this: who gets to decide their priorities? Who gets to decide what activities are sufficiently illegal to demand more warrantless monitoring? If that involves some new Copyright Enforcement arm of the Justice Department driven by the needs of big media, I foresee some big problems.
This pretty much equates to outlawing the symptoms of a problem such as the tremors of an alcoholic in need of smooth refreshing goodness.
I once heard that described as "trying to cure diarrhea by tinkering with the plumbing in your house."
When something is no good for anyone I think it's safe to say that it should be illegal. If someone comes along that can prove it does some good then the issue needs to be readdressed and evaluated for legitimacy.
That, ultimately, isn't the issue. The problem here is that the mere accusation of child pornography is punitive to such a degree that, even if you're not ultimately convicted, you'll suffer severe consequences. That's not what the Founders had in mind for our legal system (as corrupted as their vision has become.) Somebody who gets nailed for drug possession or dealing (which, given how much the government spends to stop it must be a crime worse than murder) doesn't go through what a person merely accused of possessing child pornography does. It's one thing to punish those who break the law, those who hurt other people... but we're at the point where law enforcement is doing as much if not more damage. Time to restore a little balance, time to make sure that we're actually putting the right people away. Most of us complain vociferously about the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign because whether you did the crime or not, whether you go to court or settle, you've been punished by the legal system. A person who has been accused of a crime shouldn't have their life destroyed over the accusation. But that is exactly what's happening here.
Better to let a guilty man go free than imprison an innocent one. There are those who disagree with that, who believe that a few thousand wrongly imprisoned souls are a small price to pay "for the children" but they're wrong. If child pornography is truly as big a problem as everyone says (I'm not saying that it isn't, I just haven't looked up any numbers on it) then give law enforcement the funds they need to go after the real criminals, the ones who exploit the innocent is such a horrible way. To do otherwise is no justice at all.
Amendment 8 - Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Frankly, zero-tolerance doesn't seem like what the Founders had in mind, nor does torturing people you don't like for the rest of their natural (and now probably shortened) lives. Granted, I suppose this depends upon your interpretation of "cruel and unusual", but if this can be applied to sex offenders it can be applied to any group of people if you can manage to vilify them sufficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Comcast may be blocking Vonage but so far they've left AT&T's CallVantage alone so far as I can tell. Which is probably smart: AT&T has deeper pockets, more lawyers and more Congressmen.
I agree. I was running Smoothwall for a while, but then I got hold of a WRT54GL V4 and started playing around with alternate firmware. I eventually settled on Tomato. I use AT&T's CallVantage VoIP service, and it works great with Tomato. I can have my line maxed out running a bunch of torrents, or playing live video from Netflix, and the phone never stutters.
Frankly, I think Linksys ought to hire the guy that wrote Tomato. His stuff is light years ahead of the stock firmware.
A well regulated Militia ... In other words, I don't think they had the idea of people owning guns to protect their home and overthrow the government, but more for the idea of protecting the country against attack.
The standard misinterpretation used by gun-control proponents nationwide.
Unfortunately for that perspective, in Revolutionary times, We the People were the Militia! You also fail to understand that the Founders believed very strongly that a well-armed general population was a tremendous deterrent to government arrogating too much power to itself. In fact, the whole point of the Second Amendment was to keep government in line, afraid of the people. In that they were correct: they had a keen awareness of history and knew well what happens when civilian populations have no means of defense against a malicious government. By assuring us of a means of self-defense, they were attempting to stave off the very necessity of open rebellion for as long as possible. These people were not stupid, and it would be a mistake to think that the world is so very different today that their accumulated wisdom somehow doesn't apply. It still does, now more than ever.
You are correct, revolution was a matter of last resort even to the Founders. Regardless, a well-armed populace was intended to keep government officials afraid our wrath if they ever got too far out of line. And that principle is still valid to this very day: when one side of a conflict has all the guns the outcome is perfectly predictable, and if we allow ourselves to be disarmed we have no right to complain when matters go from bad to worse. The Second Amendment was intended to maintain a balance of power, a balance which has been severely shifted in the government's favor in the past few decades.
I personally don't own any firearm more powerful than a BB pistol. That's irrelevant though: deliberately misinterpreting the Constitution in order to take away my right to own one, if I so choose, is not acceptable. I may need one someday.
It's disgraceful what American's have allowed themselves to become.
... why, you must really hate those people since they're obviously all evil. Or are we Americans somehow an exception, to be vilified regardless of the facts?
This make come as quite a shock to you, but very few Americans condone such behavior. Period. There's a reason George Bush has such an abysmal approval rating: it's because we don't like this crap any more than you do. So please don't cast some three hundred million otherwise decent, law-abiding citizens into the same mold as some underpaid government thug. I can just imagine how you must feel about Russians or the Chinese or any other nation whose government does truly horrible things
Regardless, you're way out of line.
since none of you are layers
Interesting that you got modded "Troll" for that comment since, as everyone knows, Trolls have layers.
except globalization is the sole reason for our comfortable living status and swelled middle class. be careful what you wish for.
No, not at all. Economic dominance and a thriving manufacturing sector maintained our standard of living. The global economy did little to help that, and in fact has been much of why that vaunted standard of living has been dropping in the past few decades.
The number of people who qualify as "middle class" is also not so swelled anymore.
But will every pirated copy magically transforms into a sale
... or will this scheme just annoy legitimate users and be cracked anyway?
... the dude issued a challenge to the world's crackers just by announcing this) it'll be cracked forthwith. I buy all the games I play, but only if the vendor respects me as a customer. Doesn't matter how good your product is, if you treat me badly you won't get my money. You still might get my money if a solid crack is available though. Either way, I insist upon maintaining control over my property.
Nope.
Duh.
This approach invariably torques off paying customers, especially if they aren't made aware of the protection before they plunk down their money. Worse yet, if the game is any good (or even if it's not
Now, having said that I don't have a problem with a game company wanting to keep non-paying users off their gaming network, but don't go overboard with security. Also, if I want to run the software single-player I absolutely should not have to jump through hoops, need to keep the damn CD in the drive, or maintain an active Internet connection for Chrissakes.
Get over yourselves.
Let's face it, this is symbolic at best.
seeing as how taking oaths has worked so well for doctors, lawyers and Presidents.
I'm having an epiphany! I've been fooled all these years! DAMN YOU!! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!! (I mean Bell)
Get your paws of my checkbook, you damn dirty ape!
and this has been your Pedantic Slashdot Rant from a Expert(TM) for today.
I can play the pedant game as well. You meant "an Expert(TM)".
Seriously, if I had a choice I'd go for the working transporter. Better yet, a Holodeck.
Hear hear! I think snapshots, mirrors, stripes, encryption, compression and resizing are all very useful things.
Thank you! Finally someone wrote "Hear hear!" instead of "Here here!".
Not at all. You're reading way too much into my one-liner.
... if you cannot admit and accept your own flaws and work to correct them, you have no business criticizing anyone else, especially if you're doing the same things you're accusing them of doing!
What I object to is individuals who promote one party (pick one) claiming that the other party is the only one with serious and fundamental failures of principle. The reality is that both sides play dirty, always have and always will, and for either to claim moral superiority is hypocritical at best. People who are steeped in party politics often simply refuse to acknowledge when their side does awful things, and rationalize such reprehensible behavior to a degree that I find truly appalling. Frequently it's excused as being necessary ("you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs", etc.) with a complete loss of moral and ethical functioning, and concomitant social and economic consequences, dismissed as mere collateral damage. We have to win at all costs, don't you understand?!!!
This is why neither side can ever get any traction in the direction of improvement, why matters are going steadily from bad to worse
Hypocrisy is rife in modern politics. It makes me ill.
Republicans aren't able to run on facts and policy so they run on identity and process.
And that differs from the Democrats how?
and the majority of searchers will not know to put their guard up.
... once should always have one's guard up. Period.
On the other hand, in politics as with science
So you're saying there are lots of sluts in NYC?
Nah. They just have a lot of nighttime power failures in their office buildings.
RIAA, be careful what you ask for. Maybe someday there will be a revolution and the RIAA lawyers will be lined up against the wall.
Problem is, when mobs and "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" start meting out justice like that, they're not usually very selective. We'd end up with all of our lawyers lined up against the wall and shot.
Sure ... but this discussion is about people who install this stuff and don't know what they're doing. My point is that working with a low-voltage system doesn't necessarily make you safer.
Low voltage power wiring can be more dangerous than regular 115/220 VAC. If a circuit is shorted the I2R losses will much greater. For example, I have a Hawker 6FV11 12V 105 AH battery that runs my sump pumps. It's capable of dumping tens of thousands of amperes across a dead short: if that ever happened the results would be Biblical. I took a number of precautions when building that system, one of which was to have 200 amp fuses mounted directly to the battery terminals and covered in heat-shrink tubing. Big battery arrays are dangerous, make no mistake. A neophyte is better off getting a book on home wiring and learning how to handle conduit and junction boxes rather than fooling around with a battery bank that's more dangerous than a tank full of gasoline.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Many women in the U.S. claim to want "equality" when what they really want is to offload any responsibility for their own existence onto their partners of the moment. Oh sure, that's a generalization of Biblical proportions, I know. But there is more than a little truth to it, I think.
... and I'm not looking back.
For my part, I finally found someone that truly understands what "for better or worse" means and is in it for the long haul. More to the point, she is totally focused on making life better for both of us, not just herself. In turn, that frees me to give without reservation. I've been trying for a couple of decades to find someone like her, and it's a remarkable experience and I don't want it to ever end. Honestly, it took some time for me to realize just how different she is from all her predecessors, but once I did I realized I had to do whatever it took to keep her. That meant making some big changes, but they were all worth it.
Unlike yours truly, she wasn't born here, but you know what? I couldn't be happier
Want a DYI project?
I presume you meant a "Do Yourself In" project, which is what usually happens when people who don't know what they're doing attempt to rewire their homes.
On the other hand, if a sufficiently large population of Torrent users made the change, that particular attack vector would pretty much go away.
The telcos are given a pass to monitor and interfer with traffic as long as the intended purpose is to detect and/or prevent illegal activities.
Pure incrementalism. The telcos have always been required to co-operate with law enforcement when it comes to monitoring illegal or suspected illegal activities, it's just that it was only supposed to happen with judicial oversight. The lack of such oversight is what this is all about. The other issue is this: who gets to decide their priorities? Who gets to decide what activities are sufficiently illegal to demand more warrantless monitoring? If that involves some new Copyright Enforcement arm of the Justice Department driven by the needs of big media, I foresee some big problems.
This pretty much equates to outlawing the symptoms of a problem such as the tremors of an alcoholic in need of smooth refreshing goodness.
... but we're at the point where law enforcement is doing as much if not more damage. Time to restore a little balance, time to make sure that we're actually putting the right people away. Most of us complain vociferously about the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign because whether you did the crime or not, whether you go to court or settle, you've been punished by the legal system. A person who has been accused of a crime shouldn't have their life destroyed over the accusation. But that is exactly what's happening here.
I once heard that described as "trying to cure diarrhea by tinkering with the plumbing in your house."
When something is no good for anyone I think it's safe to say that it should be illegal. If someone comes along that can prove it does some good then the issue needs to be readdressed and evaluated for legitimacy.
That, ultimately, isn't the issue. The problem here is that the mere accusation of child pornography is punitive to such a degree that, even if you're not ultimately convicted, you'll suffer severe consequences. That's not what the Founders had in mind for our legal system (as corrupted as their vision has become.) Somebody who gets nailed for drug possession or dealing (which, given how much the government spends to stop it must be a crime worse than murder) doesn't go through what a person merely accused of possessing child pornography does. It's one thing to punish those who break the law, those who hurt other people
Better to let a guilty man go free than imprison an innocent one. There are those who disagree with that, who believe that a few thousand wrongly imprisoned souls are a small price to pay "for the children" but they're wrong. If child pornography is truly as big a problem as everyone says (I'm not saying that it isn't, I just haven't looked up any numbers on it) then give law enforcement the funds they need to go after the real criminals, the ones who exploit the innocent is such a horrible way. To do otherwise is no justice at all.
Amendment 8 - Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Frankly, zero-tolerance doesn't seem like what the Founders had in mind, nor does torturing people you don't like for the rest of their natural (and now probably shortened) lives. Granted, I suppose this depends upon your interpretation of "cruel and unusual", but if this can be applied to sex offenders it can be applied to any group of people if you can manage to vilify them sufficiently.