The program that modifies plasma's bar at the bottom
Indeed. To paraphrase that shape-shifter from ST6: "Not everybody keeps his panel in the same place." Mine sits at the top, is 90% of the display width, 38 pixels deep and has been that way for five years. Before anybody starts, it's nothing like the MacOS X look'n'feel. It just feels more natural up there to me. It was this ability to personalise the desktop, along with sensible defaults and no assumptions made that couldn't be altered, that made me settle with KDE. That, and Kioslaves.
That said, as Sebastian points out, expecting feature parity in a point zero release is hardly justified. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we'll know our way around immediately, either. For example, dragging and dropping widgets onto the panel after removing one too many was non-obvious to me at first, but the elegance of it becomes one of those all-too-familiar epiphanies that makes you wonder how you managed to get confused at all. I'm still undecided on the new Kickoff menu, though. I can see me removing that and putting the traditional K menu launcher in its place. Fortunately, that functionality is there in the initial release. Oxygen is stunning, Dolphin looks promising (but I'll be keeping Konq, simply because it's what I'm used to) and even little things like the default wallpapers seem well thought out.
All in all, not a bad point zero at all. Certainly, given the complexity of KDE, a success in anyone's book.
3.5.7 most certainly did pass. I have a few tweaks in my Web Browser profile, which I thought may be causing the problem (javascript settings, adblock filters, etc) but my results with 3.5.8 are exactly the same as yours.
FYI: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5) KHTML/3.5.8 (like Gecko) on FreeBSD-6.2-p9
Strangley enough, you don't legally require a TV licence in the UK to view conent on the BBC's iPlayer
Yet. You'll recall, of course, Tessa Jowell's unimpressive speech to the commons in 2005? If not, here's a link to the Register's report. Do you think the Beeb's little ears didn't prick up at the sound of "PC Tax"? The post below yours by AC has a lot of information in it for those curious about this little scam. To quote the article "either a compulsory levy on all households or even on ownership of PCs as well as TVs."
Since this lovely little address, the Beeb has been launching all sorts of things on the web. One could almost believe they're trying to make the ability to exploit the mentioned loophole even more obvious. Of course, they would never do that and then go to whoever is "culture" minister now and say "Look! Freeloaders who could be worth millions in revenue! Do something!" would they?
Nice troll. The fact that you claim to have a) never missed Eastenders [snip]
I think you misunderstand the use of the word "missed" when put into context of having never missed the lack of Eastenders by dint of not watching the rubbish. And that goes for Corrie, Emmerdale Farm and the other bilge people seem so addicted to that the networks must repeat the whole week's episodes at the weekend, too. I just picked that one because I know for a fact it's a Beeb creation.
I read your comment. What the devil are you drivelling about? MPAA? Clue: That last "A" stands for "America," which, last I looked, was several thousand miles West of here and getting further away all the time thanks to the mid-Atlantic ridge. Torrents? Honestly, do you even know what the iPlayer (with its associated Kontiki P2P back-end) and the associated Flash site are for? It's a catch-up service with a hidden agenda. Missed Eastenders? I've never missed it in my life. They could cancel it and I'd be blissfully ignorant of the loss of my ability to peer into the lives of fictional characters whose vocabulary seems to consist of the words "bloody," "fancy a shag?" "pint" and "caaa!" (cockney for cow, I'm led to believe) but should you be of that bent, you can watch it online.
The BBC have done this for one reason and ONLY one reason: To back up their ridiculous stance that anyone with a 'net connection in the UK needs a TV licence. Wouldn't want the OSS hippies to find a loophole in that, now, would we? That's it. Nothing to see here besides another money grab on the back of new media and shared resources. The reason you're not getting iPlayer if you're a "Johnny Foreigner" is because you don't pay the Beeb tax. Congratulations. I wish I didn't either.
This is off-topic, I know. Geekoid, would you please be so good as to elucidate that particular distinction? I know the difference between science fiction, space opera, cyberpunk et al, but I have never seen a distinction between science fiction and what appears to be a contraction of the same thing, sci-fi. This is a genuine "I do not understand" as opposed to the usual contradiction. I've probably misinterpreted what you wrote and you meant the misapplication of science fiction/sci-fi to other genres. OK, this may damage my credibility a bit but not quite as much as having what appears to be a huge and fundamental gap in my knowledge.
As for the rest, it simply had to be said - once. In future, I'll just sigh along with you.
Once and for all, a software issue is NOT a bloody bricking, as pointed out over and over by many people in the last few weeks, predominantly due to the same mistake made by the Jesus phone fans. A brick is a device that has lost its firmware with no hope of recovery through known methods. For example, those Conexant ADSL routers when their firmware disappears? Not bricked as there's a jumper inside that starts the factory firmware load procedure, the presence of which is well known. An old-school Icom 2m rig that the backup battery has failed in may quite accurately be called a brick, I suppose, even though Icom can revive them (for a price). This, however, is about as far away from a brick as one can get. It's just one more Wintel box rendered temporarily confused by another load of crap software, something we should all be used to.
Christ on a sodding bike, get a clue. Boot.ini is a flat text file. A bootable CD/pen drive and a decent editor will fix this in seconds.
It isn't capitalised. An articulated lorry is exactly the same thing you would call a semi-trailer rig. A big-arsed steel thing with a stopping time of a fortnight and 18 wheels which really doesn't care whether you call it a truck or a lorry when some bastard pushes you in front of it. Funny thing is, most drivers call the tractor a truck when it's without its trailer. The mad sods even race the things. (WARNING: Flash video embedded right there in the front page)
The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
This has all the hallmarks of being a supportive suggestion rather than a definitive statement. However, in true Slashdot style, let's rip into it anyway.
The Internet You know how people like to make jokes about "teh Internets?" Well, joke's on you folks, because that's exactly what Inter-Network routes really are. Screw with any particular route and new ones grow. So, "The Internet" used to describe world+wife+dog's WAN link is superfluous at best and misinformed at worst. This isn't a single entity that you can attack with laws, regulations and red-tape. Perhaps that's why they're so afraid? has aided Now this is a downright stupid assertion. To paraphrase the NRA, "The Internets don't subvert people. People subvert people." facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence I'm yet to receive a real-time smack in the mouth over the 'net. There have been moments when people have dearly wanted to deliver one, but I digress. homegrown terrorism process in the United States There's a process? Funny, it doesn't show up in top(1) and there's no pidfile. providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens and to everyone else on the planet. It happens. Count yourselves lucky that it has also facilitated the ability of you LEAs and security people to possess the same information those allegedly being subverted by the terrorists have, by exactly the same means. If they were still relying solely on word-of-mouth and secret couriers you'd be far less well informed. If anyone thinks we'll ever stop governments, anywhere, from monitoring network traffic on public links, you're seriously deluded, especially when ISPs are performing deep-packet inspection for traffic shaping purposes with impunity. I hate to break the chain here, folks, but stopping people trying to blow other people up, regardless of how bad they are at it, has to be more important than throttling Kazaa traffic in the evening so Mark Cuban can surf his [porn|sports|whatever] at full speed.
This article and the quote above (including a lot of my somewhat tongue-in-cheek rebuttal) are just examples typical of the knee-jerk reaction of someone who doesn't understand the threat they think they perceive. In the late 70s, CB radio was being campaigned for in the UK. One peer remarked that he found the notion of "millions of people in direct contact with each other" frightening. He must have headed for the hills in shock when he heard a 'phone ring because I can't recall his name or anything else noteworthy he might have said. This is more of the same. No control over something = threat, whereas the benefits to society far outweigh the drawbacks. Indeed, one may now make an informed decision, armed with the power of billions of computers serving billions of pages of information, on issues just like this one with just a little careful thought, an open mind and a large razor originally used by William of Ockham. Those without such skills really need to get back to school on information technology before issuing edicts that affect it. That same razor suggests to me that, far from being afraid of subversive terrorist doctrines or draconian laws, what really frightens some such misinformed people is large bodies of other people far better informed than themselves.
On our side, I think it may be time to call truce with the LEAs. They have some valid points, regardless of how hard it is to admit it. What we need to do is find a balance that both protects liberties and privacy on the one hand, yet makes it more difficult for terrorism to manifest itself in the real world on the other and there's no way of escaping the fact that we're going to have to
Indeed, not to mention Cirkit, who stocked Toko coils and other such useful goodies. In fact, ISTR Cirkit's catalogues were more than a bit spacey. Of course, all this nostalgia is a bit like the feeling of being on the cutting edge when pulling down Telesoftware from Ceefax...
Well I'm with Eclipse and I'm not aware of any major changes to my ADSL service, but perhaps that's the point as there have definitely been changes - eg it went from 512Kbps fixed to user-variable up to 2Mbps to 8Mbps, all without any issues that affected me.
Yes, Eclipse here as well. I only stated I know categorically that Zen follow procedure because I know someone who works in the NOC. With Eclipse I've had three periods of downtime in the last three years, two of which were BT issues with the local MUX. The other was a RADIUS server failure. Migration from the old 512 to Flex to ADSLMax went smoothly, too.
Near the start of the year my ex moved out, and so one of the many things that had to be changed was the BT phone line - it was in her name, so I needed to change it to mine. BT couldn't just change the name on the account; oh no, they had to close the old account and open a new one for me. Ok, fine - what they didn't tell me was that that would involve cancelling my ADSL provision. Luckily Eclipse were notified by BT and emailed me to check. One quick reply to say no I most certainly did not want to cancel and everything was sorted.
Here is where we get into Tiscali territory. A friend of mine was on Tiscali 'phone service which, of course, meant when the time to drag himself into C21 came he got his broadband from them as well. Now, last year his BT 'phone cable developed a fault and they had to re-jumper at the exchange and the DP to a new pair. Yes, you guessed it, they didn't re-jumper the DSLAM.
We had, I kid you not, three weeks of being bounced between the Adastral Park runaround and Tiscali's tech "support" to try to get this fixed. Neither would admit there was a problem, even though I'd deduced exactly what the fault was before we even touched the dial. Eventually, we got a MAC from Tiscali (after threatening OfCom intervention) and migrated him to Eclipse.
The jumpers still hadn't been moved come activation day, so I rang the lads in Exeter and went through the whole story again, stating that I knew the engineer at the exchange hadn't re-jumpered the DSLAM to the replacement pair. The helldesk guy (probably relieved to hear that the OS was FreeBSD, the microfilters were in and we had three different brands of known working order routers and an Alcatel Frog to try) agreed it was the most likely scenario and got on to BT. Two days later BT had moved the jumpers and he had subcarrier and ATM frames, along with a follow up courtesy call from Exeter to ensure that things were working. Quick reconfig of the router and he's been online ever since.
I know of one or two people (one in my own family, embarrassingly, was successful, although only a ~£400 judgment and it probably cost more in time pissing about than it was worth) who have used one of the companies in question (AG) since they started hanging around busy shopping areas in town accosting people with the "Have you.." line. For my part, the reply was "No, I haven't, but you're about to if you don't [expletive] off." I'm not too sure whether the local A&E have the facilities to remove clipboards from body cavities, having never had to avail myself of such, so it's just as well he did as he was told.
I also try not to watch the idiot lantern too much. It tends to affect your ability to think for yourself.
Fortunatly we don't have to put up with stupid court cases
Oh really?
"Have you had an accident in the last three years? Too stupid to know a wet floor is slippery? Can't see where you're going? Lift boxes with your back? Too stupid to pour piss from a boot without instructions on the heel? Cut yourself on a bread-knife left out in the kitchen of the house you were burgling? NO WIN NO FEE! It's not your fault you're a half-wit, so get the compensation everyone else with only a couple of defective neurons to their name gets."
Now, granted, that's an imported idea but we're getting to the stage where even breathing near someone else can set them talking about "compo."
Yes, most of us have, especially those of us in IT. The problem is we have Murdoch's crap (Sky) with their don't give a shit attitude, Beardy Branson's Virgin Media (the name says it all) and Tiscali (Italian for crap) to choose from, along with the monopoly telco BT's offerings which, although they were haemorrhaging customers right, left and centre a few years ago, seem to have come out as the best of a bad bunch. The UK is very cost conscious (we're tight bastards) so we'll quite happily trade reliability for getting broadband for a tenner and what most people fail to realise is that the broadband packages are simply loss leaders for other products such as Virgin's cable TV or Sky's satellite.
The real ISPs, such as Eclipse, Zen, Bogons et al probably do follow accepted procedure. I know for sure that Zen do.
What is ironic here is just which law they're breaking: They're committing copyright infringement (distributing GPL software without source which, in turn, means they have no right or licence to distribute, making that action a breach of copyright) to tackle copyright infringement.
Of course, it's alright for them to rip off "some damn pinko commie's" code to save themselves from the spectre of "new media," free thinkers and falling revenue, isn't it? After all, given the content they produce is such good quality, one can hardly expect them to create a new, fairer, sustainable business model. It's easier to simply blame piracy for their dwindling customer base and invent some method of proving it like suing college kids, already in debt for a substantial portion of their lives for getting an education in the first place. We owe these people their revenue, dammit, and the college kids and the GPL are just acceptable collateral damage.
Think twice before you download that KDE-Four-Live image over BitTorrent, undergrads. With no "content of traffic examined" you'll probably end up regretting it.
First off, I'm having a really hard time understanding just how the US controls a network of mutual consent. That said, and I know I'm going to be modded to oblivion for not participating in the groupthink du jour (America hating), so far the US control of the gTLDs has been exemplary, impartial and efficient (Verisign's idiotic DNS pollution aside).
I'm British and yes, I can hate Bush and [Blair|Brown]'s little crusade with the best of them but I fail to see why we should fix something that isn't broken. If you really are worried about US control, use ORSN roots as I do. So far, the only reason I have had to use them is IPv6 accessible root servers, but they also go into independent mode if anyone screws with the roots with malevolence. So far, touch wood, nobody has.
Would it also be so terrible to say "thanks, USA and ICANN" for the stability they've given the gTLDs over the years? I shudder to think what would happen if the UN ever got control of the roots. Can you say "bureaucracy" and not think inefficiency and inaccessibility?
Rant ahead and I'm not in the best of moods. Please have NaCl on standby.
BBC Model B, 2MHz 6502A processor, DFS and BASIC in ROM, 5.25" floppy, circa 1984 (and still working): [CTRL][Break] Brrr-beep. Ready. >_
AMD Athlon 64 *mumble* GHz (given up caring), 1GB RAM, Super-mega graphics card GTi (with sunroof and DVI connectors), hard disk the size of a small planet, etc: [CTRL][ALT][Delete] Faff about for ten minutes (alright, you lot, I know. It SEEMS like ten minutes) while the disk syncs, wait until the screen goes blank, hit [CTRL][Break] on the Beeb and by the time the Beeb has booted, the PC is still sat there loading the video BIOS with its high-performance electronic finger up its arse. By the time the PC has got to the point of actually being ready for instructions (from the disk), the Beeb has already loaded ViewSheet from an EPROM and is doing useful stuff. I'm assuming this latest huge breakthrough in user-friendliness and convenience also has to wait for the POST procedure. Yep, two steps forward, three back.
So tell me again, how exactly is this concept new? All I really need to make my day complete is to hear that Phoenix (I could have sworn they had been Borged by Award, BICBW) are trying to patent it.
Oh, and "Invalid partition type detected (0xa5). Please wait while I load a web browser so you can buy a copy of Windows. You don't seem to have one and I'd really like you to consider getting one. No, really, I must insist, since you didn't even pay your $699 SCOsource licence, you cock-smoking teabagger."
All joking aside, you're not on your own, my friend. Here in the UK, the slightest movement near anything sensitive makes the.gov pull guns and start shouting incoherently, at which point anyone nearby who doesn't conform to the standard norm shits bricks. Why we must suffer for the cowardice of our "ruling elite" I really don't know. We've had 30+ years of the IRA (and believe me, those boys KNEW what they were doing, unlike this latest bunch of jokers) and not a single thought was given to curtailing our freedoms because, devastating as every single incident was, the vast majority of the public knew that freedom was more important than a false sense of security. I don't for one second believe that the US public is any less brave in the face of such cowardice. It's just our respective governments who have no balls.
Or perhaps they have; it's not every day you get an excuse to extend your powers in varied and unconstitutional ways and get away with it...
Slashdot Mirror
That said, as Sebastian points out, expecting feature parity in a point zero release is hardly justified. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we'll know our way around immediately, either. For example, dragging and dropping widgets onto the panel after removing one too many was non-obvious to me at first, but the elegance of it becomes one of those all-too-familiar epiphanies that makes you wonder how you managed to get confused at all. I'm still undecided on the new Kickoff menu, though. I can see me removing that and putting the traditional K menu launcher in its place. Fortunately, that functionality is there in the initial release. Oxygen is stunning, Dolphin looks promising (but I'll be keeping Konq, simply because it's what I'm used to) and even little things like the default wallpapers seem well thought out.
All in all, not a bad point zero at all. Certainly, given the complexity of KDE, a success in anyone's book.
Surely you mean iMissiles, iTanks, iFighters and iWarships, all available as a generously discounted bundle package, iConquer?
You're right, though. I sincerely hope they know about Leopard's "firewall" issues and can read man pages.
3.5.7 most certainly did pass. I have a few tweaks in my Web Browser profile, which I thought may be causing the problem (javascript settings, adblock filters, etc) but my results with 3.5.8 are exactly the same as yours.
FYI: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5) KHTML/3.5.8 (like Gecko) on FreeBSD-6.2-p9
Only one thing to add to your already insightful post: This.
Since this lovely little address, the Beeb has been launching all sorts of things on the web. One could almost believe they're trying to make the ability to exploit the mentioned loophole even more obvious. Of course, they would never do that and then go to whoever is "culture" minister now and say "Look! Freeloaders who could be worth millions in revenue! Do something!" would they?
I read your comment. What the devil are you drivelling about? MPAA? Clue: That last "A" stands for "America," which, last I looked, was several thousand miles West of here and getting further away all the time thanks to the mid-Atlantic ridge. Torrents? Honestly, do you even know what the iPlayer (with its associated Kontiki P2P back-end) and the associated Flash site are for? It's a catch-up service with a hidden agenda. Missed Eastenders? I've never missed it in my life. They could cancel it and I'd be blissfully ignorant of the loss of my ability to peer into the lives of fictional characters whose vocabulary seems to consist of the words "bloody," "fancy a shag?" "pint" and "caaa!" (cockney for cow, I'm led to believe) but should you be of that bent, you can watch it online.
The BBC have done this for one reason and ONLY one reason: To back up their ridiculous stance that anyone with a 'net connection in the UK needs a TV licence. Wouldn't want the OSS hippies to find a loophole in that, now, would we? That's it. Nothing to see here besides another money grab on the back of new media and shared resources. The reason you're not getting iPlayer if you're a "Johnny Foreigner" is because you don't pay the Beeb tax. Congratulations. I wish I didn't either.
That all depends on whether you're a n00b or not.
As for the rest, it simply had to be said - once. In future, I'll just sigh along with you.
Once and for all, a software issue is NOT a bloody bricking, as pointed out over and over by many people in the last few weeks, predominantly due to the same mistake made by the Jesus phone fans. A brick is a device that has lost its firmware with no hope of recovery through known methods. For example, those Conexant ADSL routers when their firmware disappears? Not bricked as there's a jumper inside that starts the factory firmware load procedure, the presence of which is well known. An old-school Icom 2m rig that the backup battery has failed in may quite accurately be called a brick, I suppose, even though Icom can revive them (for a price). This, however, is about as far away from a brick as one can get. It's just one more Wintel box rendered temporarily confused by another load of crap software, something we should all be used to.
Christ on a sodding bike, get a clue. Boot.ini is a flat text file. A bootable CD/pen drive and a decent editor will fix this in seconds.
It isn't capitalised. An articulated lorry is exactly the same thing you would call a semi-trailer rig. A big-arsed steel thing with a stopping time of a fortnight and 18 wheels which really doesn't care whether you call it a truck or a lorry when some bastard pushes you in front of it. Funny thing is, most drivers call the tractor a truck when it's without its trailer. The mad sods even race the things. (WARNING: Flash video embedded right there in the front page)
This has all the hallmarks of being a supportive suggestion rather than a definitive statement. However, in true Slashdot style, let's rip into it anyway.
The Internet You know how people like to make jokes about "teh Internets?" Well, joke's on you folks, because that's exactly what Inter-Network routes really are. Screw with any particular route and new ones grow. So, "The Internet" used to describe world+wife+dog's WAN link is superfluous at best and misinformed at worst. This isn't a single entity that you can attack with laws, regulations and red-tape. Perhaps that's why they're so afraid? has aided Now this is a downright stupid assertion. To paraphrase the NRA, "The Internets don't subvert people. People subvert people." facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence I'm yet to receive a real-time smack in the mouth over the 'net. There have been moments when people have dearly wanted to deliver one, but I digress. homegrown terrorism process in the United States There's a process? Funny, it doesn't show up in top(1) and there's no pidfile. providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens and to everyone else on the planet. It happens. Count yourselves lucky that it has also facilitated the ability of you LEAs and security people to possess the same information those allegedly being subverted by the terrorists have, by exactly the same means. If they were still relying solely on word-of-mouth and secret couriers you'd be far less well informed. If anyone thinks we'll ever stop governments, anywhere, from monitoring network traffic on public links, you're seriously deluded, especially when ISPs are performing deep-packet inspection for traffic shaping purposes with impunity. I hate to break the chain here, folks, but stopping people trying to blow other people up, regardless of how bad they are at it, has to be more important than throttling Kazaa traffic in the evening so Mark Cuban can surf his [porn|sports|whatever] at full speed.
This article and the quote above (including a lot of my somewhat tongue-in-cheek rebuttal) are just examples typical of the knee-jerk reaction of someone who doesn't understand the threat they think they perceive. In the late 70s, CB radio was being campaigned for in the UK. One peer remarked that he found the notion of "millions of people in direct contact with each other" frightening. He must have headed for the hills in shock when he heard a 'phone ring because I can't recall his name or anything else noteworthy he might have said. This is more of the same. No control over something = threat, whereas the benefits to society far outweigh the drawbacks. Indeed, one may now make an informed decision, armed with the power of billions of computers serving billions of pages of information, on issues just like this one with just a little careful thought, an open mind and a large razor originally used by William of Ockham. Those without such skills really need to get back to school on information technology before issuing edicts that affect it. That same razor suggests to me that, far from being afraid of subversive terrorist doctrines or draconian laws, what really frightens some such misinformed people is large bodies of other people far better informed than themselves.
On our side, I think it may be time to call truce with the LEAs. They have some valid points, regardless of how hard it is to admit it. What we need to do is find a balance that both protects liberties and privacy on the one hand, yet makes it more difficult for terrorism to manifest itself in the real world on the other and there's no way of escaping the fact that we're going to have to
Indeed, not to mention Cirkit, who stocked Toko coils and other such useful goodies. In fact, ISTR Cirkit's catalogues were more than a bit spacey. Of course, all this nostalgia is a bit like the feeling of being on the cutting edge when pulling down Telesoftware from Ceefax...
But there's a hole in my e-mail, dear Murdoch, dear Murdoch...
We had, I kid you not, three weeks of being bounced between the Adastral Park runaround and Tiscali's tech "support" to try to get this fixed. Neither would admit there was a problem, even though I'd deduced exactly what the fault was before we even touched the dial. Eventually, we got a MAC from Tiscali (after threatening OfCom intervention) and migrated him to Eclipse.
The jumpers still hadn't been moved come activation day, so I rang the lads in Exeter and went through the whole story again, stating that I knew the engineer at the exchange hadn't re-jumpered the DSLAM to the replacement pair. The helldesk guy (probably relieved to hear that the OS was FreeBSD, the microfilters were in and we had three different brands of known working order routers and an Alcatel Frog to try) agreed it was the most likely scenario and got on to BT. Two days later BT had moved the jumpers and he had subcarrier and ATM frames, along with a follow up courtesy call from Exeter to ensure that things were working. Quick reconfig of the router and he's been online ever since.
Try getting service like that for a tenner.
I know of one or two people (one in my own family, embarrassingly, was successful, although only a ~£400 judgment and it probably cost more in time pissing about than it was worth) who have used one of the companies in question (AG) since they started hanging around busy shopping areas in town accosting people with the "Have you.." line. For my part, the reply was "No, I haven't, but you're about to if you don't [expletive] off." I'm not too sure whether the local A&E have the facilities to remove clipboards from body cavities, having never had to avail myself of such, so it's just as well he did as he was told.
I also try not to watch the idiot lantern too much. It tends to affect your ability to think for yourself.
"Have you had an accident in the last three years? Too stupid to know a wet floor is slippery? Can't see where you're going? Lift boxes with your back? Too stupid to pour piss from a boot without instructions on the heel? Cut yourself on a bread-knife left out in the kitchen of the house you were burgling? NO WIN NO FEE! It's not your fault you're a half-wit, so get the compensation everyone else with only a couple of defective neurons to their name gets."
Now, granted, that's an imported idea but we're getting to the stage where even breathing near someone else can set them talking about "compo."
The real ISPs, such as Eclipse, Zen, Bogons et al probably do follow accepted procedure. I know for sure that Zen do.
What is ironic here is just which law they're breaking: They're committing copyright infringement (distributing GPL software without source which, in turn, means they have no right or licence to distribute, making that action a breach of copyright) to tackle copyright infringement.
Of course, it's alright for them to rip off "some damn pinko commie's" code to save themselves from the spectre of "new media," free thinkers and falling revenue, isn't it? After all, given the content they produce is such good quality, one can hardly expect them to create a new, fairer, sustainable business model. It's easier to simply blame piracy for their dwindling customer base and invent some method of proving it like suing college kids, already in debt for a substantial portion of their lives for getting an education in the first place. We owe these people their revenue, dammit, and the college kids and the GPL are just acceptable collateral damage.
Think twice before you download that KDE-Four-Live image over BitTorrent, undergrads. With no "content of traffic examined" you'll probably end up regretting it.
First off, I'm having a really hard time understanding just how the US controls a network of mutual consent. That said, and I know I'm going to be modded to oblivion for not participating in the groupthink du jour (America hating), so far the US control of the gTLDs has been exemplary, impartial and efficient (Verisign's idiotic DNS pollution aside).
I'm British and yes, I can hate Bush and [Blair|Brown]'s little crusade with the best of them but I fail to see why we should fix something that isn't broken. If you really are worried about US control, use ORSN roots as I do. So far, the only reason I have had to use them is IPv6 accessible root servers, but they also go into independent mode if anyone screws with the roots with malevolence. So far, touch wood, nobody has.
Would it also be so terrible to say "thanks, USA and ICANN" for the stability they've given the gTLDs over the years? I shudder to think what would happen if the UN ever got control of the roots. Can you say "bureaucracy" and not think inefficiency and inaccessibility?
Rant ahead and I'm not in the best of moods. Please have NaCl on standby.
BBC Model B, 2MHz 6502A processor, DFS and BASIC in ROM, 5.25" floppy, circa 1984 (and still working):
[CTRL][Break]
Brrr-beep.
Ready.
>_
AMD Athlon 64 *mumble* GHz (given up caring), 1GB RAM, Super-mega graphics card GTi (with sunroof and DVI connectors), hard disk the size of a small planet, etc:
[CTRL][ALT][Delete]
Faff about for ten minutes (alright, you lot, I know. It SEEMS like ten minutes) while the disk syncs, wait until the screen goes blank, hit [CTRL][Break] on the Beeb and by the time the Beeb has booted, the PC is still sat there loading the video BIOS with its high-performance electronic finger up its arse. By the time the PC has got to the point of actually being ready for instructions (from the disk), the Beeb has already loaded ViewSheet from an EPROM and is doing useful stuff. I'm assuming this latest huge breakthrough in user-friendliness and convenience also has to wait for the POST procedure. Yep, two steps forward, three back.
So tell me again, how exactly is this concept new? All I really need to make my day complete is to hear that Phoenix (I could have sworn they had been Borged by Award, BICBW) are trying to patent it.
Oh, and "Invalid partition type detected (0xa5). Please wait while I load a web browser so you can buy a copy of Windows. You don't seem to have one and I'd really like you to consider getting one. No, really, I must insist, since you didn't even pay your $699 SCOsource licence, you cock-smoking teabagger."
Just check your hair. All OK? Good.
Next time a joke flies that high above someone's head, AC, try attaching a solar panel or two to it. The guys on the ISS could do with a spare.
All joking aside, you're not on your own, my friend. Here in the UK, the slightest movement near anything sensitive makes the .gov pull guns and start shouting incoherently, at which point anyone nearby who doesn't conform to the standard norm shits bricks. Why we must suffer for the cowardice of our "ruling elite" I really don't know. We've had 30+ years of the IRA (and believe me, those boys KNEW what they were doing, unlike this latest bunch of jokers) and not a single thought was given to curtailing our freedoms because, devastating as every single incident was, the vast majority of the public knew that freedom was more important than a false sense of security. I don't for one second believe that the US public is any less brave in the face of such cowardice. It's just our respective governments who have no balls.
Or perhaps they have; it's not every day you get an excuse to extend your powers in varied and unconstitutional ways and get away with it...