At the time, it was a choice between Sarkozy, a pro-business right-winger who said all the right things about doing the hard work in fixing the French social security systems and getting people back to work by getting rid of brain-dead government employment policies.
His main opponent, the socialist Segolene Royal, mainly appealed to emotion, and dodged any tricky questions on how she planned to magically fix France's problems. She even called on women to vote for her just because she was a woman, which I know pissed off at least two french women.
So they voted Sarkozy in. Who promptly ignored pretty much all the stuff he'd promised to do, spent a good while seducing a 'pop star' in the full glare of the media, then started concentrating on a bunch of copyright bullshit laws which he made no mention of during the election.
The French got fooled by Sarkozy, but the alternative wasn't exactly a great choice either. And frankly, Sarkozy has a LONG way to go before he's as bad as Bush. At least he's not got them into any illegal wars, or started torturing people in internment camps yet who've never been tried - yet.
(yes, I know I've missed off the accents. WTF is slashdot going to support unicode?)
Well, I'm English, and I thought I'd better stand up for our much maligned workforce, including myself, getting shown up by the French like that.
Well, I would have. But I was delayed a bit getting into work today. I was going to drive, but it's in the garage, and they're waiting for parts. Since last week. The bus turned up half-hour late, but that's OK as we were got stuck in the roadworks that mysteriously popped up yesterday, but didn't have any workmen on.
I could have worked from home, but my landline was broken by BT last week, and the engineer is a bit behind, so my internet is out of order. But then again, they've just started throttling VPNs, so it wouldn't have been great anyway.
I tried calling in on the mobile, but was out of coverage - I'm sure they'll put up some more towers round here some day.
Well, I did finally get to work, but they'd all gone down the pub for lunch, so they didn't need me anyway. Then I remembered I need to pop down into town to run some errands.
I went to the bank first, but forgot they've just closed the branch - had to make some savings after making dodgy investments apparently. I did get to the post office ok, but they only had one counter open, so I was a bit delayed in the queue.
Finally got down to the council office, but found they'd all gone on strike, some furore over pensions I think.
I would have gone back to work, but since they all knock of at 4.30, there didn't seem much point...
It's a matter of scale. Lets say I'm your neighbour, taking a photo of my kids in front of both our houses. No problem, right, even if I can see in your windows. I even put it on the internet.
so what's the difference between that, and me putting a video camera up in my car pointed at your house, taking video of you every time you leave the house, who comes over to visit, whenever you go into the garden, what we can see through the windows? How about I post this realtime feed on the internet? How about I have one mounted in my car, and follow you everywhere you drive, recording and broadcasting everywhere you go and who you meet there?
I'm sure you wouldn't feel the slightest bit uncomfortable - after all, it's all in public view, right?
Take when a whole load of usenet archives were put up on google and made searchable. Angst ridden teenage questions, that at the time were public to a small group of people and only easily available for a fairly short time, suddenly became public and easily findable years after the event, from the power of tech that didn't even exist at the time the posts were made.
There's a difference between public to people who happen to be there at the time, and really really public for everyone to see at no effort and easily findable for all time.
In one way streetview is a good thing. It really brings home to people how current technology has revolutionised the surveillance society, and how much our daily lives are indeed recorded, catalogued and trivially easily available at will to those who choose to look.
Note, the European Convention applied in the UK since 1950 - but to take advantage of it, you had to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights directly. With the Human Rights Act, UK courts have to take into account ECHR judgements, and it makes it illegal for any UK public body to act contrary to the Convention, which can then be judged in the UK courts. There's still the option of taking a case to the ECHR though, if UK courts don't give satisfaction, and the ECHR is a higher jurisdiction than any UK court, so its judgements must be followed, or you're in breach of european and UK law.
Ultimately Brits are STILL Subjects and not citizens. They are only allowed to speak in public at the pleasure of the crown
I don't know where this meme keeps coming from, as it's flat out wrong. Magna Carta in 1215 explicitly limited the power of the Crown, and showed that landowners at least had rights; that the rule of law, and the courts, superceded that of the Crown.
While we may not have had a written constitution until recently, there were various acts combined that gave UK citizens human rights by law that parliament could not take away.
Amongst other things, this prevents torture and slavery, guarantees freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, liberty, privacy, and the right to a fair trial. Yes, that law could be overturned by leaving the EU, and passing a new anti-human rights act; but the rights in your constitution can be removed by an amendment; witness prohibition, or the attempts to remove the rights of gay's to marry by an amendment.
the Crown reserves the right to keep all the others. Nor does this make any sense. The Crown hasn't had the power to create law for British citizens since Charles II, that power is delegated to Parliament - she signs the laws, but has no power of veto. She is nominal head of the armed forces, but again it's purely a symbolic power. That which is not illegal we are free to do, as in the US.
While we're on the subject, how's that US constitution holding up with say, stopping the government wiretapping without a warrant, preventing torture of prisoners and ensuring Habeas Corpus?
I've been using a VPN service that's based outside my country (the UK) for years. VPNs have the advantage that absolutely everything is encrypted, except the tunnel itself. I even send DNS queries via it. Tor is slow (and not trusted, given you don't know who runs the endpoints), anonymous proxies are no cheaper, and they only work for browsing.
This way, I can bypass all the logging my ISP does as a matter of course on behalf of the government. They want to find out where I go and what I read and post, they can damn well go to court, get a warrant and inform me first.
As far as anyone else is concerned, my IP ends at a VPN provider that doesn't have any logs linking subscriptions to traffic.
You're thinking of the Council of Ministers. They're unelected representatives of the national governments, and are generally secretive, underhand and otherwise responsible for behind-closed-doors things like ACTA. They're one of the least democratic parts of the EU.
The parliament on the other hand, is directly elected, and while not perfect, is generally pretty transparent. We can also thank the parliament for things such as striking down software patents in europe, in opposition to the Council of Ministers.
If you've a gripe to pick with the EP, pick up the phone and give your MEPs a call - they at least listen to their constituents. Good luck trying to get through to the Council of Ministers - they represent the governments' agendas, not the general public.
And if all our kids were as smart as Einstein, I'd agree with you.
It's impossible to learn new things if you don't have a certain base level to work from. It'd be like say, learning how to speak french by studying the rules of grammar without learning any actual vocabulary or speech patterns - just relying on a an english/french dictionary for both every time you needed to construct a sentence.
Or in physics, trying to learn without memorizing any equations.
Learning methods of learning and research is important along with critical thinking, yes - but a base of knowledge to build on, and a general ballpark 'feel' whether something is in the right area so you spot obvious mistakes or wrong avenues are just as important.
OK, you're not anonymous to the election officials for the obvious reason to prevent double voting and ensure you do have the right to vote there.
However, neither the government nor anybody else know who you voted for or even if you voted once you walk out that door. Those registration lists checked off at the door are destroyed, like the ballots, after the election is completed in my country.
It's even worse that that. In our brave new world where everything you've ever said online is indexed and recorded by google et al; and corporate judgements of our personality - and employability - can be made based upon some 10 year old blog posting, it's crucial that anonymous speech be defended.
Voting is anonymous for a reason; people can be pressured into voting a certain way by businesses, threatened to be fired if they don't vote as instructed and hand over their ballot receipt as proof. With no voter receipt, and privacy in the voting booth, this protects voters from unfair co-oercion by the powerful.
These days, instead of that private conversation by the watercooler or in the pub where people express their opinions - and gripes - beyond the ears of their manager, instead, it's on the likes of twitter, facebook and slashdot.
How can we have freedom of speech in our names, on our own time, when we fear for our very livelihoods because every word we ever utter will be pored over by some bored manager or HR guy, regardless of whether it's any way related to or the business of the company?
Anonymous and pseudonymous speech allows us to carve out a little bit of our lives and keep them for ourselves and our friends, and not be constantly looking over our shoulders in fear at government or company in case we're perceived to be less than an ideal citizen.
I've just migrated off adsl24 because after 3 months solid of my offpeak speeds dropping to 1-2Mb at the best of times, and sub 0.5Mb at the worst. On an 8Mb line, and no promise that it'd improve - the service is now designed for peak business hours, and offpeak is you get what you're given.
Since I only actually use my home connection when I'm not at work, that's not much help.
If you were on a low-load node, I'm sure your service is fine now. If you're on a node like Edinburgh (99% load right now), Manchester (95.3%), or Slough (92%) like myself, the service went from great to utter crap. I've been having problems since December, and they've been getting worse, not better, so I finally bit the bullet and used my MAC code.
The 360 GPU heatsink is tiny compared to the CPU heatsink, because they had to squeeze it directly under the DVD drive because of their layout. I have heard that originally that had more room - and a bigger heatsink - but it was shrunk when the case was redesigned to be smaller. The board is also under curve stress because of the case, so when the GPU gets so hot it starts to melt its own solder slightly, you get bad joints, and bing, it dies.
Many people have fixed their own RROD problem, at least temporarily, by disassembling the unit and heating the GPU heatsink with a hairdryer, while using something like the X-clamp replacement clamps to keep the heatsink clamped down tight, and effectively reheat and reflow the solder joints. Some people have used flux to fix more problematic consoles, and some repair specialists have even got their own reflow ovens.
Several of the console revisions have basically been an extra heatsink with a heatpipe to try and stop the GPU literally cooking itself off the board. The newest consoles, with the process shrink, have smaller power supplies and generate less heat in the first place, so should be more reliable.
The biggest problem with the 360 is overheating, even in normal use, and that's down to too small a case with consequential undersized heatsinks.
However, I'll grant you that the DVD scratching problem is simply down to them being cheap - they skipped putting bumpers in to stop it digging into the disc, because it saved them a couple of cents per console. The problem comes about because they're spinning the disc too fast, with insufficient magnetic grip. They could have redesigned the drive, but it would have made it too slow reading, or take longer to spinup/eject discs. Microsoft knew about the design problem, but went ahead anyway, because they were too cheap to fix it.
discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.
Discrimination is taking action based upon a prejudice; you're looking at someone's skin colour or hair, things they have no control over, and making assumptions about their character based upon that. Religion is not strictly something you have no choice over, but many arabs and jews share common genetics which make them identifiable to the prejudiced (even if they're actually of another faith, or no faith at all)
Being a member of the NRA is not something you're born into. Carrying a rifle to shoot deer is an active decision you've carried out as an adult. While it's certainly possible to be prejudiced against hunters, it's not discrimination merely to have a dislike of an activity that someone voluntarily partakes in as an adult and express that opinion, whereas it is discrimination to have a dislike of say, black people as a whole, then act upon it.
I'm with entanet. They only do IPv6 as part of a trial, which is currently shut due to the 21CN upgrade, and they only support a tiny handful of cisco routers. After previous dealings with claranet, I wouldn't trust them to give internet connectivity to my toilet, let alone my work network.
Thanks for the heads up on the others though, I'll look into them.
Linksys is the cheapo arm of cisco, and cisco charge for IPv6 addons to IOS on their expensive routers. Draw your own conclusions as to why linksys default firmware is so limited, while DD-WRT and friends romp away and add things like voip, vpn endpoints and IPv6 for free.
I'm in a similar boat. I did try setting up a ipv6 tunnel a couple of years ago on one machine; it worked but was was so slow, I canned the idea of extending it immediately.
Currently, I'm looking at using 6to4 with either an airport extreme or switching out my dd-wrt router firmware with one with radvd (which is the equivalent of DHCP in IPv6 space). With 6to4, every global IPv4 address has a/48 IPv6 range assigned to it. (that's 65K subnets of 2^64 addresses!)
Theoretically that should be it; my IPv6 internal boxes will automagically generate IPv6 addresses from the prefix on the radvd server on the gateway, which will then route them out to IPv6 space automagically, encapsulating then routing via the IPv4 address to the anycast 192.88.99.1 address, which should take me to the nearest box willing to route me to the rest of the IPv6 only world (or sends me direct to the IPv4 address of another service using 6to4)
Reverse DNS for inbound connections can be be a bit tricky by the sounds of it, but I've no need to publish static servers at home on IPv6 just yet.
I'll be interested to see if it works as easily as it sounds - the odds of getting natively routed IPv6 addresses for my router via my ISP anytime in the next decade are pretty remote.
You'll still have a firewall/router at your network edges, deciding what connections are allowed to come in and out of your network as currently.
The difference is, instead of your routers pretending to the rest of the world that they're the one that wants to say, connect to a video conference or a website, and then munges the packet headers in and out so they end up at the right box internally, while fooling everybody else, your pcs will send packets out and get them back using a real address, and your firewall just has to decide whether to allow that or not. It can force the pcs to go through a proxy, just like currently, if that's what you want.
The network admin, and his managers, has exactly the same amount of control as they do using NAT, but reliability and simply using the internet will get a lot simpler. Multicast will get a lot, lot simpler.
NAT is the only reason we still have ipv4 - if we hadn't had that nasty hack, we'd have had to move to ipv6 out of necessity some time ago. I'm really looking forward to going back to having every PC with a globally routable IP address, it will make application communication work so much easier, and firewalls can stick to being allow/deny/drop firewalls instead of all this stateful masquerade hack-job stuff on top.
The main sticking point for me is all UK ISPs are IPv4 only. There's not much point running IPv6 internally if you're only going to have to tunnel it or 6to4 it once it leaves your network, though I'm thinking of converting a VLAN or two internally to IPv6 for a systems and applications trial.
I have a policy of never clicking on big intrusive, flashing or blinking ads - not least because compromised ad-servers are a prime target for drive-by malware.
I'm doing everybody a favour by not wasting the bandwidth downloading that crap, especially since they're always for US crap or Windows crap, neither of which are relevent to me.
You want to make money from your website? Sell a associated service I'm interested in, or stick to to simple text ads. Hell, put up a donations box.
If your site is SO important and expensive to run you can't possibly put it on the web without charging every single person that visits it, then make it a subscription site - I've subscribed to several that are worth it.
You can't have it both ways - you can't make your site freely available to all, with a spec that allows for people to pick and choose which bits they want to go to and reap the google traffic, then bitch when people don't spam-click your intrusive adverts that make the site take 3 times as long to load.
Loads of us. It even makes the front-pages of the newspapers sometimes. It's just the Labour government doesn't give a shit what the citizens actually want, and never has. Mind you, neither does the Conservative party, when they're in power.
2 million people, 1 in 30 of the entire population marched through London in protest against starting the latest Iraq war, with hundreds of thousands more at other major cities. And we all know how effective that level of protest was, given Labour still won a narrow victory at their next election.
Politics in the UK is largely based on tribalism. You vote for a party because that's who people of your region and class vote for, who they're traditionally aligned with. Then you get the odd election where the government was the last one in before a major recession, and hey, the other guys get a go. Guess which party isn't going to win their 4th election next year?
If you're up to date on your patches and AV on all the pcs on your lan, along with a decent firewall, you should be safe enough.
The biggest pools of infection are 1) unpatched home users with no firewall, especially in areas where pirated versions of windows are rife (faked activation, people don't risk getting updates) 2) office LANs - it gets in via thumbdrive or infected laptop, then starts infecting unpatched pcs directly, or guessing network share passwords and infecting even patched machines on the lan that way, or via infected thumbdrive.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time, it was a choice between Sarkozy, a pro-business right-winger who said all the right things about doing the hard work in fixing the French social security systems and getting people back to work by getting rid of brain-dead government employment policies.
His main opponent, the socialist Segolene Royal, mainly appealed to emotion, and dodged any tricky questions on how she planned to magically fix France's problems. She even called on women to vote for her just because she was a woman, which I know pissed off at least two french women.
So they voted Sarkozy in. Who promptly ignored pretty much all the stuff he'd promised to do, spent a good while seducing a 'pop star' in the full glare of the media, then started concentrating on a bunch of copyright bullshit laws which he made no mention of during the election.
The French got fooled by Sarkozy, but the alternative wasn't exactly a great choice either.
And frankly, Sarkozy has a LONG way to go before he's as bad as Bush. At least he's not got them into any illegal wars, or started torturing people in internment camps yet who've never been tried - yet.
(yes, I know I've missed off the accents. WTF is slashdot going to support unicode?)
Well, I'm English, and I thought I'd better stand up for our much maligned workforce, including myself, getting shown up by the French like that.
Well, I would have. But I was delayed a bit getting into work today. I was going to drive, but it's in the garage, and they're waiting for parts. Since last week. The bus turned up half-hour late, but that's OK as we were got stuck in the roadworks that mysteriously popped up yesterday, but didn't have any workmen on.
I could have worked from home, but my landline was broken by BT last week, and the engineer is a bit behind, so my internet is out of order. But then again, they've just started throttling VPNs, so it wouldn't have been great anyway.
I tried calling in on the mobile, but was out of coverage - I'm sure they'll put up some more towers round here some day.
Well, I did finally get to work, but they'd all gone down the pub for lunch, so they didn't need me anyway. Then I remembered I need to pop down into town to run some errands.
I went to the bank first, but forgot they've just closed the branch - had to make some savings after making dodgy investments apparently. I did get to the post office ok, but they only had one counter open, so I was a bit delayed in the queue.
Finally got down to the council office, but found they'd all gone on strike, some furore over pensions I think.
I would have gone back to work, but since they all knock of at 4.30, there didn't seem much point...
It's a matter of scale. Lets say I'm your neighbour, taking a photo of my kids in front of both our houses. No problem, right, even if I can see in your windows. I even put it on the internet.
so what's the difference between that, and me putting a video camera up in my car pointed at your house, taking video of you every time you leave the house, who comes over to visit, whenever you go into the garden, what we can see through the windows? How about I post this realtime feed on the internet? How about I have one mounted in my car, and follow you everywhere you drive, recording and broadcasting everywhere you go and who you meet there?
I'm sure you wouldn't feel the slightest bit uncomfortable - after all, it's all in public view, right?
Take when a whole load of usenet archives were put up on google and made searchable. Angst ridden teenage questions, that at the time were public to a small group of people and only easily available for a fairly short time, suddenly became public and easily findable years after the event, from the power of tech that didn't even exist at the time the posts were made.
There's a difference between public to people who happen to be there at the time, and really really public for everyone to see at no effort and easily findable for all time.
In one way streetview is a good thing. It really brings home to people how current technology has revolutionised the surveillance society, and how much our daily lives are indeed recorded, catalogued and trivially easily available at will to those who choose to look.
The best bit was the crosslink with cuteoverload.com and their reciprocal 'cute/scary IBM nerds' story.
Note, the European Convention applied in the UK since 1950 - but to take advantage of it, you had to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights directly. With the Human Rights Act, UK courts have to take into account ECHR judgements, and it makes it illegal for any UK public body to act contrary to the Convention, which can then be judged in the UK courts. There's still the option of taking a case to the ECHR though, if UK courts don't give satisfaction, and the ECHR is a higher jurisdiction than any UK court, so its judgements must be followed, or you're in breach of european and UK law.
Ultimately Brits are STILL Subjects and not citizens. They are only allowed to speak in public at the pleasure of the crown
I don't know where this meme keeps coming from, as it's flat out wrong. Magna Carta in 1215 explicitly limited the power of the Crown, and showed that landowners at least had rights; that the rule of law, and the courts, superceded that of the Crown.
While we may not have had a written constitution until recently, there were various acts combined that gave UK citizens human rights by law that parliament could not take away.
Even ignoring all of that, there's the UK Human Rights act of 1998, which enacts the lastest version of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which has been around since 1950.
Amongst other things, this prevents torture and slavery, guarantees freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, liberty, privacy, and the right to a fair trial. Yes, that law could be overturned by leaving the EU, and passing a new anti-human rights act; but the rights in your constitution can be removed by an amendment; witness prohibition, or the attempts to remove the rights of gay's to marry by an amendment.
the Crown reserves the right to keep all the others.
Nor does this make any sense. The Crown hasn't had the power to create law for British citizens since Charles II, that power is delegated to Parliament - she signs the laws, but has no power of veto. She is nominal head of the armed forces, but again it's purely a symbolic power. That which is not illegal we are free to do, as in the US.
While we're on the subject, how's that US constitution holding up with say, stopping the government wiretapping without a warrant, preventing torture of prisoners and ensuring Habeas Corpus?
I've been using a VPN service that's based outside my country (the UK) for years. VPNs have the advantage that absolutely everything is encrypted, except the tunnel itself. I even send DNS queries via it. Tor is slow (and not trusted, given you don't know who runs the endpoints), anonymous proxies are no cheaper, and they only work for browsing.
This way, I can bypass all the logging my ISP does as a matter of course on behalf of the government. They want to find out where I go and what I read and post, they can damn well go to court, get a warrant and inform me first.
As far as anyone else is concerned, my IP ends at a VPN provider that doesn't have any logs linking subscriptions to traffic.
You're thinking of the Council of Ministers. They're unelected representatives of the national governments, and are generally secretive, underhand and otherwise responsible for behind-closed-doors things like ACTA. They're one of the least democratic parts of the EU.
The parliament on the other hand, is directly elected, and while not perfect, is generally pretty transparent. We can also thank the parliament for things such as striking down software patents in europe, in opposition to the Council of Ministers.
If you've a gripe to pick with the EP, pick up the phone and give your MEPs a call - they at least listen to their constituents. Good luck trying to get through to the Council of Ministers - they represent the governments' agendas, not the general public.
And if all our kids were as smart as Einstein, I'd agree with you.
It's impossible to learn new things if you don't have a certain base level to work from. It'd be like say, learning how to speak french by studying the rules of grammar without learning any actual vocabulary or speech patterns - just relying on a an english/french dictionary for both every time you needed to construct a sentence.
Or in physics, trying to learn without memorizing any equations.
Learning methods of learning and research is important along with critical thinking, yes - but a base of knowledge to build on, and a general ballpark 'feel' whether something is in the right area so you spot obvious mistakes or wrong avenues are just as important.
Fortunately, we can teach both.
Here's a link to what a Polish driving licence looks like. I presume line 2 is the full name, but my Polish is a little rusty.
OK, you're not anonymous to the election officials for the obvious reason to prevent double voting and ensure you do have the right to vote there.
However, neither the government nor anybody else know who you voted for or even if you voted once you walk out that door. Those registration lists checked off at the door are destroyed, like the ballots, after the election is completed in my country.
Yeah, there's a name for speaking up in the face of inevitable judgment by your peers. It's called "having the courage of your convictions."
Out of interest, is Baron Hethor Samedi your real nameor a pseudonym?
It's even worse that that. In our brave new world where everything you've ever said online is indexed and recorded by google et al; and corporate judgements of our personality - and employability - can be made based upon some 10 year old blog posting, it's crucial that anonymous speech be defended.
Voting is anonymous for a reason; people can be pressured into voting a certain way by businesses, threatened to be fired if they don't vote as instructed and hand over their ballot receipt as proof. With no voter receipt, and privacy in the voting booth, this protects voters from unfair co-oercion by the powerful.
These days, instead of that private conversation by the watercooler or in the pub where people express their opinions - and gripes - beyond the ears of their manager, instead, it's on the likes of twitter, facebook and slashdot.
How can we have freedom of speech in our names, on our own time, when we fear for our very livelihoods because every word we ever utter will be pored over by some bored manager or HR guy, regardless of whether it's any way related to or the business of the company?
Anonymous and pseudonymous speech allows us to carve out a little bit of our lives and keep them for ourselves and our friends, and not be constantly looking over our shoulders in fear at government or company in case we're perceived to be less than an ideal citizen.
I've just migrated off adsl24 because after 3 months solid of my offpeak speeds dropping to 1-2Mb at the best of times, and sub 0.5Mb at the worst. On an 8Mb line, and no promise that it'd improve - the service is now designed for peak business hours, and offpeak is you get what you're given.
Since I only actually use my home connection when I'm not at work, that's not much help.
If you were on a low-load node, I'm sure your service is fine now. If you're on a node like Edinburgh (99% load right now), Manchester (95.3%), or Slough (92%) like myself, the service went from great to utter crap. I've been having problems since December, and they've been getting worse, not better, so I finally bit the bullet and used my MAC code.
I hadn't heard of them, but their ADSL services look interesting. Cheers for the heads up.
No, it is definitely bad design.
The 360 GPU heatsink is tiny compared to the CPU heatsink, because they had to squeeze it directly under the DVD drive because of their layout. I have heard that originally that had more room - and a bigger heatsink - but it was shrunk when the case was redesigned to be smaller. The board is also under curve stress because of the case, so when the GPU gets so hot it starts to melt its own solder slightly, you get bad joints, and bing, it dies.
Many people have fixed their own RROD problem, at least temporarily, by disassembling the unit and heating the GPU heatsink with a hairdryer, while using something like the X-clamp replacement clamps to keep the heatsink clamped down tight, and effectively reheat and reflow the solder joints. Some people have used flux to fix more problematic consoles, and some repair specialists have even got their own reflow ovens.
Several of the console revisions have basically been an extra heatsink with a heatpipe to try and stop the GPU literally cooking itself off the board. The newest consoles, with the process shrink, have smaller power supplies and generate less heat in the first place, so should be more reliable.
The biggest problem with the 360 is overheating, even in normal use, and that's down to too small a case with consequential undersized heatsinks.
However, I'll grant you that the DVD scratching problem is simply down to them being cheap - they skipped putting bumpers in to stop it digging into the disc, because it saved them a couple of cents per console. The problem comes about because they're spinning the disc too fast, with insufficient magnetic grip. They could have redesigned the drive, but it would have made it too slow reading, or take longer to spinup/eject discs. Microsoft knew about the design problem, but went ahead anyway, because they were too cheap to fix it.
discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.
Discrimination is taking action based upon a prejudice; you're looking at someone's skin colour or hair, things they have no control over, and making assumptions about their character based upon that. Religion is not strictly something you have no choice over, but many arabs and jews share common genetics which make them identifiable to the prejudiced (even if they're actually of another faith, or no faith at all)
Being a member of the NRA is not something you're born into. Carrying a rifle to shoot deer is an active decision you've carried out as an adult. While it's certainly possible to be prejudiced against hunters, it's not discrimination merely to have a dislike of an activity that someone voluntarily partakes in as an adult and express that opinion, whereas it is discrimination to have a dislike of say, black people as a whole, then act upon it.
I'm with entanet. They only do IPv6 as part of a trial, which is currently shut due to the 21CN upgrade, and they only support a tiny handful of cisco routers. After previous dealings with claranet, I wouldn't trust them to give internet connectivity to my toilet, let alone my work network.
Thanks for the heads up on the others though, I'll look into them.
Linksys is the cheapo arm of cisco, and cisco charge for IPv6 addons to IOS on their expensive routers. Draw your own conclusions as to why linksys default firmware is so limited, while DD-WRT and friends romp away and add things like voip, vpn endpoints and IPv6 for free.
I'm in a similar boat. I did try setting up a ipv6 tunnel a couple of years ago on one machine; it worked but was was so slow, I canned the idea of extending it immediately.
Currently, I'm looking at using 6to4 with either an airport extreme or switching out my dd-wrt router firmware with one with radvd (which is the equivalent of DHCP in IPv6 space). With 6to4, every global IPv4 address has a /48 IPv6 range assigned to it. (that's 65K subnets of 2^64 addresses!)
Theoretically that should be it; my IPv6 internal boxes will automagically generate IPv6 addresses from the prefix on the radvd server on the gateway, which will then route them out to IPv6 space automagically, encapsulating then routing via the IPv4 address to the anycast 192.88.99.1 address, which should take me to the nearest box willing to route me to the rest of the IPv6 only world (or sends me direct to the IPv4 address of another service using 6to4)
Reverse DNS for inbound connections can be be a bit tricky by the sounds of it, but I've no need to publish static servers at home on IPv6 just yet.
I'll be interested to see if it works as easily as it sounds - the odds of getting natively routed IPv6 addresses for my router via my ISP anytime in the next decade are pretty remote.
NAT != firewall.
You'll still have a firewall/router at your network edges, deciding what connections are allowed to come in and out of your network as currently.
The difference is, instead of your routers pretending to the rest of the world that they're the one that wants to say, connect to a video conference or a website, and then munges the packet headers in and out so they end up at the right box internally, while fooling everybody else, your pcs will send packets out and get them back using a real address, and your firewall just has to decide whether to allow that or not. It can force the pcs to go through a proxy, just like currently, if that's what you want.
The network admin, and his managers, has exactly the same amount of control as they do using NAT, but reliability and simply using the internet will get a lot simpler. Multicast will get a lot, lot simpler.
NAT is the only reason we still have ipv4 - if we hadn't had that nasty hack, we'd have had to move to ipv6 out of necessity some time ago. I'm really looking forward to going back to having every PC with a globally routable IP address, it will make application communication work so much easier, and firewalls can stick to being allow/deny/drop firewalls instead of all this stateful masquerade hack-job stuff on top.
The main sticking point for me is all UK ISPs are IPv4 only. There's not much point running IPv6 internally if you're only going to have to tunnel it or 6to4 it once it leaves your network, though I'm thinking of converting a VLAN or two internally to IPv6 for a systems and applications trial.
I have a policy of never clicking on big intrusive, flashing or blinking ads - not least because compromised ad-servers are a prime target for drive-by malware.
I'm doing everybody a favour by not wasting the bandwidth downloading that crap, especially since they're always for US crap or Windows crap, neither of which are relevent to me.
You want to make money from your website? Sell a associated service I'm interested in, or stick to to simple text ads. Hell, put up a donations box.
If your site is SO important and expensive to run you can't possibly put it on the web without charging every single person that visits it, then make it a subscription site - I've subscribed to several that are worth it.
You can't have it both ways - you can't make your site freely available to all, with a spec that allows for people to pick and choose which bits they want to go to and reap the google traffic, then bitch when people don't spam-click your intrusive adverts that make the site take 3 times as long to load.
Aren't any of the UK citizens concerned?
Loads of us. It even makes the front-pages of the newspapers sometimes. It's just the Labour government doesn't give a shit what the citizens actually want, and never has. Mind you, neither does the Conservative party, when they're in power.
2 million people, 1 in 30 of the entire population marched through London in protest against starting the latest Iraq war, with hundreds of thousands more at other major cities. And we all know how effective that level of protest was, given Labour still won a narrow victory at their next election.
Politics in the UK is largely based on tribalism. You vote for a party because that's who people of your region and class vote for, who they're traditionally aligned with. Then you get the odd election where the government was the last one in before a major recession, and hey, the other guys get a go. Guess which party isn't going to win their 4th election next year?
If you're up to date on your patches and AV on all the pcs on your lan, along with a decent firewall, you should be safe enough.
The biggest pools of infection are
1) unpatched home users with no firewall, especially in areas where pirated versions of windows are rife (faked activation, people don't risk getting updates)
2) office LANs - it gets in via thumbdrive or infected laptop, then starts infecting unpatched pcs directly, or guessing network share passwords and infecting even patched machines on the lan that way, or via infected thumbdrive.