You're also not bound to a contract if you were drunk when you agreed to it. So maybe if you got drunk, agreed to it, then mumbled instructions to someone across the room to reverse engineer the protocol, which is a legal means of making a compatible system, then they wrote a spec and gave it to someone to write the code for it, it would be okay. Right?
I believe that's actually on a state-by-state basis (or is there maybe something in the UCC? I can't remember, I think I was drunk during most of those classes:). But for something like this, would you be brought to bear under the state of the plaintiff's incorporation, or in the state where the act was committed?
Just have some minors (the younger the better) agree to the license, and redistribute unencoded info.
IANAL (but I did take a business law class, part of which dealt with contract law, and making contracts with minors). I'm pretty sure if a bunch of minors did that, they could not be held legally accountable for that transgression, but the people who end up with it might be. This obviously doesn't make a boatload of sense in the digital era, but I think that's probably the way it would go.
Does anyone else know for certain? I'd be sort of interested to know how that would work.
Uh....PalmPilots run on the dragonball processor, not a 680x0 series. Perhaps you are thinking of the TI-89 and TI-92 calculators?
Palm Pilots (I know this for a fact about the IIIx's, I don't know about the others, I'd assume they're similar though) emulate a straight M68k. There's an assembly language course at stanford taught in m68k assembler using palm pilots as the target platform.
And m68k assembler just kicks the crud out of x86... have you ever looked at that stuff? I mean assembler aside, I'm surprised intel can get their chips to power up, let alone run at the speeds they seem to make them run at. x86 assembler is sorta fubar'd, goes well with windows.
they're felons. they have less rights than those of us who obey the laws, which is at it should be. i'm sorry, just because some criminal shares some stupid, geek ethos with you idiots doesn't make him a special person. he deserves the scorn and ignominy of being a felon.
No, and this is the typical narrow-minded and vengeful view of criminal justice that seems to permeate American society. Quite frankly, it sickens me.
Why do people seem to think that if you commit a crime, your entire life is worthless, and that you should not be allowed to continue it in even a small amount of comfort? The guy needs to eat, and condemning him to work at a McDonald's for the rest of his life seems unduly harsh. Prohibiting him from using computers is certainly unreasonable.
The entire paradigm that the American criminal "Justice" system is run on it so twisted and foul, and there are certainly millions of people in various countries who find it completely disgusting and inhumane, but we don't hear about any of this in our little protected shell inside the U.S., where the government has so learned to expertly control the media that there is no need for socialist-style state-controlled media outlets.
Think about the word, "Justice". And think about all the things you hear about "reform" and such. Is locking a man up for several years, denying him his constitutional rights, and then taking away his source of income "Justice", or "Reform"? The goal of the prison/justice system is (well, should) be to prevent crimes from happening again. It doesn't work for reasons like we see in the Mitnick case. The same thing happens with murderers, theives, and rapists. Now, certainly some of those may be harder to reform (or perhaps impossible, but it's no reason to stop trying) than others, but locking them up in prisons with horrible conditions where they are abused and mistreated both by the officials and the other prisoners is not the answer. And to make it worse, they're basically stripped of any chance they have of making a life for themselves on the outside, and revert back to whatever landed them in jail in the first place, because they really don't have that many alternatives from their standpoint.
The entire system is based upon some misguided and twisted notion that the populous at large needs revenge for what these people have done, and this is wrong.
Ok, that's my rant... but I really think the american public is really twisted and evil when it comes down to criminal justice stuff.
Why not use it all for research of some sort? I'm sure there's tons of people out there who could think of tons of legitimate uses for the equipment that could actually HELP people.
They could adopt some sort of system similar to the one that gets used to decide who gets to do what with the Hubble Space Telescope, where the best proposals submitted get to use the equipment as they see fit for a pre-arranged block of time. Now that of course leaves open the debate of who exactly is deciding what use of the equipment would be in the public interests, but the Hubble people seem to be doing a decent job.
I'd put my vote on the Human Genome project going first, they're so close (comparitively speaking) to sequencing the entire human genome, which just has some incredible applications for the future, and that sort of horsepower could certainly help them.
Or,if any of you have seen the little video clip that ships with BeOS of all the Be guys tossing the old macs off the roof of the office, something like that would be pretty cool too:)
This really depends on what you're talking about, back in my SysAdmin days, I'd NEVER use software RAID if I had a choice (and given, there were a few times when I didn't), but if you're just going to run this on a home/play machine, go nuts. I've never spent much time using the linux software RAID setup, but I never had a problem with vinum under FreeBSD, it's not really all that difficult to setup either.
But if you're thinking about a RAID solution for a "real" system, I'd really recommend against using software RAID (and I'd never use IDE disks in something like that anyway). Preformance issues aside, it's nice to be able to just unplug the card and move it to a different machine, instead of having to re set-up the software RAID or copying configurations over, etc. Especially if it's something at a remote location and the best you can do is talk somebody through it over the phone to get a system up. It's also a lot easier for some random junior sysadmin to screw up your software RAID configuration than it is for him to jump into the hardware config without knowing he's doing something wrong.
I agree, that is an _EXCELLENT_ idea, I'm sure there are tons of legal-savvy geeks out there who could contribute sometihng, not to mention all the regular geeks who could provide insight into the technical details and history to provide supporting evidence.
In the same respect, the dumpsters of large companies can be gold mines as well, I won't attest as to the legality of this practice, but I've scored a whole bunch of random equipment, including a $2,000 _PLOTTER_ once. They throw all the stuff away because it's easier to do the taxes than if they sell it, I know from experience that if you're around Northern Virginia, there's tons of good places to go (EDS in herndon as I recall never let me down:)
A lot of the responses I've seen about this topic seem to be along the lines of "This isn't the same as VHS/Beta, Audio Cassettes, etc. because you can make perfect digital copies and distribute them extremely easily"
While I don't think anybody would deny this, at the same time I think it's important to realize that this is just the next step for how music is distributed. You didn't expect everything to be distributed on bulky analog (or digital for that matter) physical media forever, did you? Should we all just stick with CDs and Audio Tapes because we're afraid of the music industry losing money?
I'll be the first one to say that I think that the RIAA are basically a bunch of big jerks and need to get a life, but you really can't blame them for trying to protect their interests, I just think (as I'm sure tons of other people do) that they're going about it in absolutely the wrong way.
What it really boils down to is this, the growing trend is that consumers/WANT/ freely distributeable, digital media for their music. Now obviously, this sort of screws up the record industry's business plan. But why should the record industry be spared from ever having to evolve? They certainly did quite well even after vinyl disappeared (well, not altogether, but in the mainstream anyway), and who out there beleives that the vast majority of the world's population is going to stop buying CDs overnight and that the record companies are going to go belly up? Granted, this new medium has to potential to take hold much quicker than say, CDs ever did, but it won't happen overnight. I'm don't have an MBA or anything, but I think it makes pretty good sense that if you make it easier for consumers to get what they want, you can make money. That's where the people with MBA's come in.
It may sound ridiculous, but free web pages, e-mail, and news sounded ridiculous at first too, didn't it? The modern american economy has a tremendous ability to adapt to new situations and somehow (don't ask me how) end up making a lot of people rich.
That article was very unclear. Several other people have pointed this out as well, but I've got some insight on a personal level.
ASFAIK it's still fairly common practice for ISPs to include in their usage agreements something along the lines of "You can be monitored, and there really isn't much you can do about it". Not that I'm saying that's the way things should be, but I'd expect to see some lawsuits challenging the validity of those agreements. Have there been any that any one has heard of? What were the outcomes, if any?
What I mainly am worried about is the criminal implications this may have. I don't know a lot about criminal law, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't it a current legal precedent for ISPs and other people in similar situations to basically be held legally responsible for what's on their servers? I think that's at least the case for web pages, I don't know if maybe there's an exception to the rule for email, since it's supposedly "private". I'm just scared that if sometime in the near future (god forbid, but for argument's sake) if Joe Terrorist blows up a building somewhere in the U.S. and it's determined that he planned the whole thing using email.
Now, if the ISP who handled the email can be found criminally negligent for letting such material go across their network, yet can also be sued for invading someone's privacy if they monitor it, where does that leave us?
Also, what about mail admins? I used to work for a pretty big ISP and I got hundreds of bounced messages (that get bounced to postmaster) sent to me every day. Most of them I just deleted, but I did have to look through them to attempt to diagnose certain problems. And it's pretty hard to look through a message and not notice the body, sure it can be done, but you don't really think about it at the time. Especially if the contents of said message are "Please transfer $1.5 Million into account XXX-XXX-XXX from account XXX-XXX-XXX" (that was actually in a bounced message I saw once). I mean that just opens up a whole world of hurt if you're in that position. Hopefully just seeing it wouldn't violate any laws, but this whole area of law is so murky...
I used to run a large mail server at a fairly big ISP who will remain nameless, and I'd like to suggest you consider a RAID-10 solution, we were experiencing disk bottleneck problems, and this really helped. Basically, RAID-10 splits the disk i/o half and half over multiple drives with the standard mirroring/striping. This is a simplified explination, but that's the basic idea.
I'm in the same position as well, and I don't know about the general age of the other people in this prediciament, but I'm only 20 years old (which seems old to me, but not to the rest of the world:) I've dropped out of college (twice:) to go work, and now I'm certainly in way to deep to leave to go to school again, and personally I don't think I'd want to anyway, distance learning would REALLY be a godsend for me, but the degree itself really doesn't concern me as much as actually learning what there is to be learned... and I don't know if $5,000+ one-week training/certification courses in highly specialized fields are the way to go, useful in some situations, perhaps, but I'd prefer the more general education associated with a BS.
Anyway, my point is, the U of Phoenix online page says you need to be 23 to apply! Ahh! I guess it wouldn't kill me to wait 3 more years, but still... And I don't think I could get into RIT, skilled I may be, but school and I have typically not gotten along too well (although I did to considerably better in college than HS, and I had good SATs). Anybody have any personal experieince with any of these? I'm very interested in this, and would love to see some real-life testimony from someone.
I think it's both incredibly funny and awesome that as soon as the lawyers decided that you can't have the source code, interest in it must have jumped by like 6,000%. Open CSS development probably just kicked into high gear because of this decision. Had this not happened, it probably would have stayed in the public eye (of the linux community anyway), but I doubt as many people would have wanted to become involved with the project as they do now... hehe... smooth move film industry.:)
All versions of RealPlayer G2 Send it, and I beleive all versions of 5.0 did as well. They look like this:
22a7cc46-7962-11d2-8612-006097a1ae04
It gets logged by RealServer G2, which is sort of funny, since it doesn't really do RealServer admins a whole lot of good, I guess you could get accurate numbers of how many REALLY unique hits you got, on a per-player basis, but I usually just do it by IPs and nobody seems to care. So one would assume that RBN is tracking this in some fashion for their own use.
Development time in Perl is considerably less than it usually would be in C/C++, and it's also a lot easier to gauruntee portability. Basically any operating system your a web server runs on will be able to run your perl script, given the fact that it has a perl interpreter. This is especially important if you're doing CGI scripting on a web server that you don't necissarily administer or have a whole lot of access to other than to upload your files. You don't have to compile perl, and there are very few cross-platform portability issues. Not to mention it's awesome string handling stuff that's built right into it, which is of course extremely handy for most CGI applications.
Well, please don't beat me up, but but turning up enya really loud usually seems to get the code out pretty quickly. But if I'm out of enya, a band with really long techno-ish songs without many vocals is an ideal choice... Orbital for instance.
About the pi==3 thing, you just reminded me of some senator from another bible-belt state (I have no idea who, what state, it happened before I was born I think, but it could be the same one), who was asked to comment on making English the national language of the United States. And his reply was "If English Was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me". If only the truly intelligent people ran the country...
A G4 probably is a bit of overkill, if you're streaming pre-compressed mp3's (which I assume you are), RAM is a lot more important than CPU. a PII -400 is enough to handle at least 600 simultaneous connections, as long as you have enough RAM (which would probably be 512MB to be safe). But if you want my advice, buy a nice layer-4 switch and have it do load balancing for you, and then have a series of celerons with 128-256MB RAM each, and if you ever need more power, you just plug another machine into the switch.
Where the heck are 4th graders getting thousands of dollars to spent on trading cards? I know this is the same firm that is basically exclusively involved in frivilous lawsuites, but putting that aside, it really disgusts me that people make their living (and probably not a bad one) off of doing this. Basically what they're proposing is that Nintendo and friends change their product from one that gives people a motivation to buy it, to one that maybe somebody will buy, but there's no real reason too, since they're just worthless peices of cardboard (of course we all know about pogs... ick). But hey, I guess it's the price you have to pay to live in a capitalistic society, where has the government been all these years while these bastards of companys have been polluting our minds and turning us into antisocial trenchcoat-wearing murderous gambling monsters? Ha! Some democracy.:)
Well, specialized License Plates in Virginia are comparitively cheap too I beleive (that's what I was always told when I lived there, they're like $50/year I think). Which I'm sure doesn't help any. BUT - when I was living in Virginia I actually did pay for a specialized one, and I NEVER GOT IT! They sent me the plain old boring blue-on-white one. And they never gave me my money back or responded to any of the voice mails or letters I sent them. So down with Virginia and it's stupid personalized license plates!
Well, having been born in Michigan, lived in Northern Virginia for 12 years, and now I live in Silicon Valley, and I like California a lot better, so I'm gonna have to go with California:)
I beleive the best way to go would be to send out a message to everyone saying that they are going to be watched. If that doesn't scare people into not doing whatever it is that they were doing, I guess it's too bad if they get caught. Now if they're asking you to monitor and report people WITHOUT them knowing about it, that's bad, and if I was in that position I'd like to think I'd refuse to comply on moral grounds, but losing my job would be pretty strong motivation not to.
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You're also not bound to a contract if you were drunk when you agreed to it. So maybe if you got drunk, agreed to it, then mumbled instructions to someone across the room to reverse engineer the protocol, which is a legal means of making a compatible system, then they wrote a spec and gave it to someone to write the code for it, it would be okay. Right?
I believe that's actually on a state-by-state basis (or is there maybe something in the UCC? I can't remember, I think I was drunk during most of those classes :). But for something like this, would you be brought to bear under the state of the plaintiff's incorporation, or in the state where the act was committed?
Just have some minors (the younger the better) agree to the license, and redistribute unencoded info.
IANAL (but I did take a business law class, part of which dealt with contract law, and making contracts with minors). I'm pretty sure if a bunch of minors did that, they could not be held legally accountable for that transgression, but the people who end up with it might be. This obviously doesn't make a boatload of sense in the digital era, but I think that's probably the way it would go.
Does anyone else know for certain? I'd be sort of interested to know how that would work.
Uh....PalmPilots run on the dragonball processor, not a 680x0 series. Perhaps you are thinking of the TI-89 and TI-92 calculators?
Palm Pilots (I know this for a fact about the IIIx's, I don't know about the others, I'd assume they're similar though) emulate a straight M68k. There's an assembly language course at stanford taught in m68k assembler using palm pilots as the target platform.
And m68k assembler just kicks the crud out of x86... have you ever looked at that stuff? I mean assembler aside, I'm surprised intel can get their chips to power up, let alone run at the speeds they seem to make them run at. x86 assembler is sorta fubar'd, goes well with windows.
they're felons. they have less rights than those of us who obey the laws, which is at it should be. i'm sorry, just because some criminal shares some stupid, geek ethos with you idiots doesn't make him a special person. he deserves the scorn and ignominy of being a felon.
No, and this is the typical narrow-minded and vengeful view of criminal justice that seems to permeate American society. Quite frankly, it sickens me.
Why do people seem to think that if you commit a crime, your entire life is worthless, and that you should not be allowed to continue it in even a small amount of comfort? The guy needs to eat, and condemning him to work at a McDonald's for the rest of his life seems unduly harsh. Prohibiting him from using computers is certainly unreasonable.
The entire paradigm that the American criminal "Justice" system is run on it so twisted and foul, and there are certainly millions of people in various countries who find it completely disgusting and inhumane, but we don't hear about any of this in our little protected shell inside the U.S., where the government has so learned to expertly control the media that there is no need for socialist-style state-controlled media outlets.
Think about the word, "Justice". And think about all the things you hear about "reform" and such. Is locking a man up for several years, denying him his constitutional rights, and then taking away his source of income "Justice", or "Reform"? The goal of the prison/justice system is (well, should) be to prevent crimes from happening again. It doesn't work for reasons like we see in the Mitnick case. The same thing happens with murderers, theives, and rapists. Now, certainly some of those may be harder to reform (or perhaps impossible, but it's no reason to stop trying) than others, but locking them up in prisons with horrible conditions where they are abused and mistreated both by the officials and the other prisoners is not the answer. And to make it worse, they're basically stripped of any chance they have of making a life for themselves on the outside, and revert back to whatever landed them in jail in the first place, because they really don't have that many alternatives from their standpoint.
The entire system is based upon some misguided and twisted notion that the populous at large needs revenge for what these people have done, and this is wrong.
Ok, that's my rant... but I really think the american public is really twisted and evil when it comes down to criminal justice stuff.
Why not use it all for research of some sort? I'm sure there's tons of people out there who could think of tons of legitimate uses for the equipment that could actually HELP people.
They could adopt some sort of system similar to the one that gets used to decide who gets to do what with the Hubble Space Telescope, where the best proposals submitted get to use the equipment as they see fit for a pre-arranged block of time. Now that of course leaves open the debate of who exactly is deciding what use of the equipment would be in the public interests, but the Hubble people seem to be doing a decent job.
I'd put my vote on the Human Genome project going first, they're so close (comparitively speaking) to sequencing the entire human genome, which just has some incredible applications for the future, and that sort of horsepower could certainly help them.
Or,if any of you have seen the little video clip that ships with BeOS of all the Be guys tossing the old macs off the roof of the office, something like that would be pretty cool too :)
This really depends on what you're talking about, back in my SysAdmin days, I'd NEVER use software RAID if I had a choice (and given, there were a few times when I didn't), but if you're just going to run this on a home/play machine, go nuts. I've never spent much time using the linux software RAID setup, but I never had a problem with vinum under FreeBSD, it's not really all that difficult to setup either.
But if you're thinking about a RAID solution for a "real" system, I'd really recommend against using software RAID (and I'd never use IDE disks in something like that anyway). Preformance issues aside, it's nice to be able to just unplug the card and move it to a different machine, instead of having to re set-up the software RAID or copying configurations over, etc. Especially if it's something at a remote location and the best you can do is talk somebody through it over the phone to get a system up. It's also a lot easier for some random junior sysadmin to screw up your software RAID configuration than it is for him to jump into the hardware config without knowing he's doing something wrong.
Just my $0.02 worth.
I agree, that is an _EXCELLENT_ idea, I'm sure there are tons of legal-savvy geeks out there who could contribute sometihng, not to mention all the regular geeks who could provide insight into the technical details and history to provide supporting evidence.
In the same respect, the dumpsters of large companies can be gold mines as well, I won't attest as to the legality of this practice, but I've scored a whole bunch of random equipment, including a $2,000 _PLOTTER_ once. They throw all the stuff away because it's easier to do the taxes than if they sell it, I know from experience that if you're around Northern Virginia, there's tons of good places to go (EDS in herndon as I recall never let me down :)
>He helped out >MS, even though we all hate them. (joke, geez!) No, we really do all hate them, no need to be modest :)
A lot of the responses I've seen about this topic seem to be along the lines of "This isn't the same as VHS/Beta, Audio Cassettes, etc. because you can make perfect digital copies and distribute them extremely easily"
While I don't think anybody would deny this, at the same time I think it's important to realize that this is just the next step for how music is distributed. You didn't expect everything to be distributed on bulky analog (or digital for that matter) physical media forever, did you? Should we all just stick with CDs and Audio Tapes because we're afraid of the music industry losing money?
I'll be the first one to say that I think that the RIAA are basically a bunch of big jerks and need to get a life, but you really can't blame them for trying to protect their interests, I just think (as I'm sure tons of other people do) that they're going about it in absolutely the wrong way.
What it really boils down to is this, the growing trend is that consumers /WANT/ freely distributeable, digital media for their music. Now obviously, this sort of screws up the record industry's business plan. But why should the record industry be spared from ever having to evolve? They certainly did quite well even after vinyl disappeared (well, not altogether, but in the mainstream anyway), and who out there beleives that the vast majority of the world's population is going to stop buying CDs overnight and that the record companies are going to go belly up? Granted, this new medium has to potential to take hold much quicker than say, CDs ever did, but it won't happen overnight. I'm don't have an MBA or anything, but I think it makes pretty good sense that if you make it easier for consumers to get what they want, you can make money. That's where the people with MBA's come in.
It may sound ridiculous, but free web pages, e-mail, and news sounded ridiculous at first too, didn't it? The modern american economy has a tremendous ability to adapt to new situations and somehow (don't ask me how) end up making a lot of people rich.
That's my $0.02 worth, anyway.
But what difference does it make, the coming of the Great White Handkercheif is due to happen any day now, just make the most of it.
Well, just hope nobody takes out a patent on naming planets. :)
That article was very unclear. Several other people have pointed this out as well, but I've got some insight on a personal level.
ASFAIK it's still fairly common practice for ISPs to include in their usage agreements something along the lines of "You can be monitored, and there really isn't much you can do about it". Not that I'm saying that's the way things should be, but I'd expect to see some lawsuits challenging the validity of those agreements. Have there been any that any one has heard of? What were the outcomes, if any?
What I mainly am worried about is the criminal implications this may have. I don't know a lot about criminal law, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't it a current legal precedent for ISPs and other people in similar situations to basically be held legally responsible for what's on their servers? I think that's at least the case for web pages, I don't know if maybe there's an exception to the rule for email, since it's supposedly "private". I'm just scared that if sometime in the near future (god forbid, but for argument's sake) if Joe Terrorist blows up a building somewhere in the U.S. and it's determined that he planned the whole thing using email.
Now, if the ISP who handled the email can be found criminally negligent for letting such material go across their network, yet can also be sued for invading someone's privacy if they monitor it, where does that leave us?
Also, what about mail admins? I used to work for a pretty big ISP and I got hundreds of bounced messages (that get bounced to postmaster) sent to me every day. Most of them I just deleted, but I did have to look through them to attempt to diagnose certain problems. And it's pretty hard to look through a message and not notice the body, sure it can be done, but you don't really think about it at the time. Especially if the contents of said message are "Please transfer $1.5 Million into account XXX-XXX-XXX from account XXX-XXX-XXX" (that was actually in a bounced message I saw once). I mean that just opens up a whole world of hurt if you're in that position. Hopefully just seeing it wouldn't violate any laws, but this whole area of law is so murky...
Something to think about I guess.
I used to run a large mail server at a fairly big ISP who will remain nameless, and I'd like to suggest you consider a RAID-10 solution, we were experiencing disk bottleneck problems, and this really helped. Basically, RAID-10 splits the disk i/o half and half over multiple drives with the standard mirroring/striping. This is a simplified explination, but that's the basic idea.
I'm in the same position as well, and I don't know about the general age of the other people in this prediciament, but I'm only 20 years old (which seems old to me, but not to the rest of the world :) I've dropped out of college (twice :) to go work, and now I'm certainly in way to deep to leave to go to school again, and personally I don't think I'd want to anyway, distance learning would REALLY be a godsend for me, but the degree itself really doesn't concern me as much as actually learning what there is to be learned... and I don't know if $5,000+ one-week training/certification courses in highly specialized fields are the way to go, useful in some situations, perhaps, but I'd prefer the more general education associated with a BS.
Anyway, my point is, the U of Phoenix online page says you need to be 23 to apply! Ahh! I guess it wouldn't kill me to wait 3 more years, but still... And I don't think I could get into RIT, skilled I may be, but school and I have typically not gotten along too well (although I did to considerably better in college than HS, and I had good SATs). Anybody have any personal experieince with any of these? I'm very interested in this, and would love to see some real-life testimony from someone.
Thanks!
I think it's both incredibly funny and awesome that as soon as the lawyers decided that you can't have the source code, interest in it must have jumped by like 6,000%. Open CSS development probably just kicked into high gear because of this decision. Had this not happened, it probably would have stayed in the public eye (of the linux community anyway), but I doubt as many people would have wanted to become involved with the project as they do now... hehe... smooth move film industry. :)
All versions of RealPlayer G2 Send it, and I beleive all versions of 5.0 did as well. They look like this:
22a7cc46-7962-11d2-8612-006097a1ae04
It gets logged by RealServer G2, which is sort of funny, since it doesn't really do RealServer admins a whole lot of good, I guess you could get accurate numbers of how many REALLY unique hits you got, on a per-player basis, but I usually just do it by IPs and nobody seems to care. So one would assume that RBN is tracking this in some fashion for their own use.
Development time in Perl is considerably less than it usually would be in C/C++, and it's also a lot easier to gauruntee portability. Basically any operating system your a web server runs on will be able to run your perl script, given the fact that it has a perl interpreter. This is especially important if you're doing CGI scripting on a web server that you don't necissarily administer or have a whole lot of access to other than to upload your files. You don't have to compile perl, and there are very few cross-platform portability issues. Not to mention it's awesome string handling stuff that's built right into it, which is of course extremely handy for most CGI applications.
Well, please don't beat me up, but but turning up enya really loud usually seems to get the code out pretty quickly. But if I'm out of enya, a band with really long techno-ish songs without many vocals is an ideal choice... Orbital for instance.
About the pi==3 thing, you just reminded me of some senator from another bible-belt state (I have no idea who, what state, it happened before I was born I think, but it could be the same one), who was asked to comment on making English the national language of the United States. And his reply was "If English Was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me". If only the truly intelligent people ran the country...
A G4 probably is a bit of overkill, if you're streaming pre-compressed mp3's (which I assume you are), RAM is a lot more important than CPU. a PII -400 is enough to handle at least 600 simultaneous connections, as long as you have enough RAM (which would probably be 512MB to be safe). But if you want my advice, buy a nice layer-4 switch and have it do load balancing for you, and then have a series of celerons with 128-256MB RAM each, and if you ever need more power, you just plug another machine into the switch.
Where the heck are 4th graders getting thousands of dollars to spent on trading cards? I know this is the same firm that is basically exclusively involved in frivilous lawsuites, but putting that aside, it really disgusts me that people make their living (and probably not a bad one) off of doing this. Basically what they're proposing is that Nintendo and friends change their product from one that gives people a motivation to buy it, to one that maybe somebody will buy, but there's no real reason too, since they're just worthless peices of cardboard (of course we all know about pogs... ick). But hey, I guess it's the price you have to pay to live in a capitalistic society, where has the government been all these years while these bastards of companys have been polluting our minds and turning us into antisocial trenchcoat-wearing murderous gambling monsters? Ha! Some democracy. :)
Well, specialized License Plates in Virginia are comparitively cheap too I beleive (that's what I was always told when I lived there, they're like $50/year I think). Which I'm sure doesn't help any. BUT - when I was living in Virginia I actually did pay for a specialized one, and I NEVER GOT IT! They sent me the plain old boring blue-on-white one. And they never gave me my money back or responded to any of the voice mails or letters I sent them. So down with Virginia and it's stupid personalized license plates!
Well, having been born in Michigan, lived in Northern Virginia for 12 years, and now I live in Silicon Valley, and I like California a lot better, so I'm gonna have to go with California :)
I beleive the best way to go would be to send out a message to everyone saying that they are going to be watched. If that doesn't scare people into not doing whatever it is that they were doing, I guess it's too bad if they get caught. Now if they're asking you to monitor and report people WITHOUT them knowing about it, that's bad, and if I was in that position I'd like to think I'd refuse to comply on moral grounds, but losing my job would be pretty strong motivation not to.