That's because it's the best "Windows" browser out there,...uh, as long as you don't count Opera. HAHAHAHAHA
It is not a Macintosh browser/app. Period
I use it as my default browser on a Powerbook, and it can be unloaded, and I can select an URL in a link in email, or a note, or whatever, and Firefox launches, and opens the URL. Just the way it should.. BUT, if Firefox is already launched, and is the "Foreground" app (is 'focused', in other words) BUT doesn't have it's own window open, it will NOT even open a window, never mind hit an URL, from its own Bookmarks menu!!!
You have to hit Com-N to get a 'new' window, and THEN its menu bar bookmarks work again.
I'd love to see one of their programmers explain that. It couldn't have been easy to pull that off. It cracks me up.
Man, you guys on windows have it rough. In Thoth (out of development for 2 years now) on a mac, you can over-ride any default number of articles to download, a simple Alt-click on the group and type in your number. I like 80,000 for some reason. anyway, that, and yeah, the kill filters. I use messae IDs for kills, not the entire string, usually just the server... tiatn.news. is a nice, prime candidate for the k-file. Thoth, it's the kller news reader. And, yeah, i've used forte agent, and other even shittier Mac news readers... ha ha, what a waste.
Thank you Jesus...
heheh, haven't said that in a while... and there was the add... menu item, right at the top of the right-click drop down. man, i'm slowin' down, no doubt. I used the right-click to download the script, the first time, and didn't even see the menu item... uh, yeah...
regards,
~flipper
Hey jesus, thanks for the links. pretty clued-out on recent firefox and moz-dev development over here, so it's really appreciated. The 'add cache links' web site looks extremely interesting... now to figure out how to add the.js script to f-fox, and we're done, for now.... thanks
There are numerous ways to look at it all, I agree
But, honestly, I use Windows at work, because that's what the company supplies. I didn't 'choose' the platform, any more than most office workers do. That probably puts me right in the middle of the largest group of corporate desktop users, in terms of choice, or whatever.
Ironically, I don't mind the system all that much, outside of the the 1 app-1 window bit, and a few other minor gripes. But, my company wrote a couple of small apps that are necessary in our workflow, that are in a windows-only release, and meanwhile, I use JEdit and other open, or easily-swapped for open, apps to do the bulk of my work there. I could do the work more efficiently, on either a newer Wintel box, or a newer Mac...but I'd give the nod to the Mac, precisely because of the app/window situation (a real 'negative' in cross-doc editing, which i do), better thread management and RAM management (app goes down/system stays up)...
Windows has a couple things that the Mac could use, badly: For one, the cut/paste deal. Moving files is easy on a Mac, and even easier, for bulk moves, using the command line, but the Windows 'Cut' and 'Paste' to any directory on the 'tree', without opening further windows or directories, seems to be a no-brainer. Alt-key menu/command navigation/execution, is the other thing.
I'm a Macintosh 'fan', in the sense of that's where my money has gone, but i use the tools I have access to, to do a pro job, period, and that's what it's all about, in the end. Do i need to color correct rolling mattes for a Star Wars TV pilot, on a Compaq Pro? Of course not. But I don't need a dual-proc G5 to roar through SGML coding in TextPad, or JEdit, either. Different strokes...etc
I'm getting tired of people assuming that if you run windows, you spend most of your time protecting against or fixing viruses etc.
I couldn't agree more. As a full-time workplace Windows user who uses the Macintosh at home, even I know the virus/trojan/adware problem is just an overblown 'sideline' issue.
Where Windows really shines, in the time-wasting deartment, is in the one app/one window paradigm that is almost exactly 20 years behind the times
What a crappy, so-called 'the serious work platform' reality
Watching Word re-paginate a huge doc, because I batch-removed 15 'leading' white spaces from ONE column in a lousy 2-page table, and then, after the one-page per second re-paging slows, opening Task Manager to see that this "Process" is consuming 99% of the CPU, is disgusting and laughable
Give me a Performa or an old 86 -9600 beige box Mac, anyday, for real work, and as for my Aluminum Powerbook...running OS X...compared to garden variety 'workplace' PCs? You have got to be fucking kidding.
After a laborious translation of the writings of Nostradamus (with the aid of Rosetta Stone, an OCR thingy, and some oddball 'voices' from ViaVoice) I see that (again, according to the writings) all these things shall, too, come to pass...
I agree. My m130 has gone belly-up recently. Don't know if it's the cradle or what. But 'free' isn't worth the pain in the arse, if you ask me. I'm hoping the Apple-Intel rumors are partly about an ARM-based Apple PDA.:) I'm 'in', if that's what's up over there. (Doesn't look like it though).
If you use the Time Warner digital phone service, we can block internet access AND leave the phone working. That's because the modem has two IP addresses. One for internet access, and the other for MTA (phone).
If your using vonage or some other 3rd party VOIP access and need 911, your fucked.
I use TimeWarner, with Vonage. No 911 enabled. Big deal. I would never use TM's phone over IP, it's a shitty deal compared to Vonage. So, there...oh, and "fucked"? I don't think so. Fuck you too, pal, have a nice day.
Me too... to hell with the lawsuits, i'm much more interested in who manufactured (not to mention fired) that little guided missile that went through the window 18" off the ground at the Pentagon. Pretty good logistics for a guy living in a cave on the Afghani-Pakistan border, no?
I found the best jazz station I've ever heard there, and listen to it when working.
Mind if I ask which of the stations is your 'best jazz station' choice? I have a friend (a lady in BC) who has a really good jazz station on there. Just curious.
It's similar to the "way too loud music" thing, out in the burbs,, so, like the boys in LA, the first time Junior's PC starts infecting the neightbors, you have a nice friendly chat... and the next time it happens (usually right away, --laughs--) you just walk in, polite as hell, and put nightsticks through the shit. Works great on speakers... just remember not to 'blow it up' LA movie style... you know, blasting the shit out of the monitors instead of the towers.
sure... you got it right, very smart. It's also why McDonald's has the best food in the world, and Wal-Mart is the favorite place for people to work...
If you give up, and time is short, don't forget the other military edict regarding the disposal of 'sensitive' electronics: "Heat sufficient to melt steel, or a hastily dug hole and the use of explosives."
A Gutmann scenario might work very well, but personally, lacking the sort of kiln required in the event of failure, I lean towards the foxhole/grenades idea.
Scan the docs, convert from OCR/rtf to plain text. Format in XML, using a one-time exectuted, well-thought out DTD. After that, migrating the material to text, print, web, pdf, or anything else, is trivial. One source - any output. The way to go. That's what our little company does. We do military manuals. Heavy DTD, though. Most folks won't need the detail.
TextPad, on a PC, or any java-based editor, will do all the grunt work. Companies in India have the outsourced market for this kind of work pretty well sewn up, but the military and others who aren't fond of sending their data abroad, use 'local' people, like us. This would be different for those abroad, obviously, but the same principles apply.
We use a couple of our own, proprietary apps, but all the 'pieces' are out there, open-sourced, and free. (Our in-house stuff includes an organizer, a DTD insight tool, and a 'variant' we wrote for the Electronics Communication Command guys.)
Here's a little tech note: The paper-based manuals on an aircraft carrier are responsible for 3 1/2 inches of water displacement, at sea. That's some serious weight factor. Similar situations arise with commercial and military aircraft. All that stuff can be traded for a handful of CDs.
...probably explains why the article failed to pick up on something that anyone working in a hospital already knows: Most of the keyboards (especially the ones in corridors near burse's stations, being used a lot) have thin plastic film covering the entire flat surface. They're almost all laptops, protected by plastic, easily cleaned, etc. Another non-story.
play 300 shows a year...take a powerbook loaded with Digital Performer, everywhere you play...use a good contact manager... give away high quality versions of tunes... get on CDBaby... and when you're playing the South, make friends with people who run cotton mills... T-Shirts will be the cash you actually retire on.
Bullshit, spoken like the truly clueless. Guess what dumbie? The firewallis enabled by default. If you want to share a web site from yer Mac, the firewall opens up one port, or port forwards, if you wish... Vulnerable straight out of the box? What a dumbshit
~flipper
I would add to the other good advice re: take the year and see some world, etc: Do some volunteer work in the community. You don't need to travel for a whole year. (I did that, and didn't come back for 20 years).
Take three months, and in those three months take three long days a week to volunteer. One day at a VA Hospital, another day with elderly folks, and maybe a day a week at a Food Bank.
It'll give you more character, might change your outlook on what's needed in society and what you can do about it. You'll give a lot, and end up being a real beneficiary of the whole process. Consider it.
Opera is a suite and it has a 'footprint' one third the size of Firefox. I don't know how it all works out for you guys on Windows, but on a mac over here Firefox's java script thing is whacky. I have a roomamte who uses an online veterinarian school site that is heavily-laden with chatapplets (a PeopleSoft nightmare). Only OmniWeb and IE 5.2 will get right through the entire site.
Firefox bails out early.
I noticed on the Firefox page, as i was downloading 1.0.2, they trumpet the 'fast downloads', and the automatic d-load to the desktop. Oh really? Not on a Mac. Every download gets the same fucking window..."Save to disk?" Which is exactly what it's set for in Preferences... and then, to top it off, a blurb appears that says, "Ya know..you can set this in Prefs instead"... Yeah? And when does that kick in?
Bottom line: I'll spell it out: Not BAD compared to the un-upgraded (for 5 years) Internet Explorer (on a winblows box), but who gives a shit? Jesus, talk about a lowest common denominator, aim-low culture. If it wasn't for the Extensions it would be useless.
I use it a lot, for that reason alone, but when shit gets critical, it's Omni, Opera, Safari, IE, and lynx (from the command line) when time is really tight. Don't get me totally wrong, I sent cash to mozilla, on ethical, political grounds.
But this 'better than IE on Windows" shit, gimme a fucking break. I run a little better than this old guy across the street who lost a leg in Vietnam, too, but I'm no closer to the Olympics than Firefox is to primetime on the Macintosh...
The big problem is dumping the traffic onto the recipient's egress line. If the recipient is trying to run BitTorrent and VOIP at the same time, without any QoS markings, their quality will suffer - but most people have fatter pipes downstream than upstream, and they'll just have to pause BitTorrent/ftp/etc. while talking unless their CPE is smart enough to throttle outbound requests.
A year ago, running through Time Warner Cable, (25Kb up/220Kb down), I allocated 50Kbs to my Vonage box, and throttled Azureus (BitTorrent client) at 15Kbs up. The system worked great.
This year I'm on Verizon dsl (17Kb up/92Kb down) and with 30Kbs allocated to my Vonage box the service is choppy, with *no* BitTorrent traffic at all.
Why the disparity? I have no idea (I'm not an engineer). But in my simplistic world view, it makes a return to Cable the only option.
I used great Motorola cellular gear in the early-mid 90s and made calls up and down the East Coast with amazing clarity, no drop-outs, etc, better than landline on the whole. But that was usually a call from a Florida beach to my office in Montreal, so most of the transmission was occurring over water, up the seaboard. With even 50 Kbs allocated on a Vonage box, the results leave any cell or landline technology in the dust. Intercontinental calls had that 'in the next room' quality, and transcontinental calls were 'in your ear, breathy'.
These guys who blame problems on 'regulators' have never seen real regulation, not in the US. Here, in the US, regulation is about 2 things: Mandating hegemony to large corporations, in whatever industry the so-called regulation 'regulates', and applying toothless laws and fines (that amount to trivially-priced licenses) to the most egregious violators of actual law.
It has been American foreign and domestic policy, always, that whenever any entity, (be it a domestic company, individual, foreign country, etc) decides to put the well-being of its clients/users/citizens first, they are obviously not putting American corporate 'interests' 'first' and are therefore communists, or terrorists (or, in the case of Native Americans: 'savages', etc), and are de facto enemies of the State. At which point the corporate mercenary (police, Military, 'friendly' foreign right-wing terrorists, etc) is ordered to apply some real 'regulation'... American style.
This isn't about Capitalism. America isn't in a capitalist business mode, at all. Oligarchial feudalism is much closer to the reality of the American enterprise system. This 'issue' regarding VoIP is just another trivial example of the ho-hum business as usual state of things. Next.
Perhaps you would like to present some points to convince the rest of us that it is ludicrous so we can address those points. Or would you prefer that we take your word for it?
The fact you're paranoid is your biz. But being rude sucks, pal. Jobs was on worldwide QT multicast talking about Tiger coming for Summer, three fucking months ago.
"Your Honour, I used this website to knowingly violate copyright law, and then gave the owner of said site some money in the belief it was in order to defend a case against him, and therefore keep the site up. I want my money back, because no such case existed".
Response:
"So, you gave money in exchange for the possibility of continued use of an illegal service"
It would be very, very hard to argue that you gave money without previously using the site to download illegal material, or that when you parted with your money you had no hope at all it would result in the continued usage of the illegal service LokiTorrent provided.
And guess what? The wire fraud and RICO are both Federal raps, and committing fraud in the course of an illegal transaction buffers nobody from the Law, pal, not in America. And no judge would toss speculation (on the Court's behalf) into the fray. There is nothing illegal about contributing to someone's legal defense. The presumption of innocence, and the commonly-held belief that big companies can 'outlast' anyone 'small' in a protracted Civil suit, would leave the 'witness' or plaintiff in the free and clear.
IANAL, either, but I can read well enough, and I've read plenty of stories of guys burning fed undercovers with procaine, mannita (and a little 'faked' hydrolization, heheh), and ending up doing 2-6 in Leavenworth. har, har.
So, I joe brainless d-loader, rat homeboy for the fake 'appeal'...who takes the bigger 'fall'? Me? Getting a nasty little note from an ISP (maybe, not even likely) and havin' to promise not to do it again? Or homeboy on his way to being some lifer's girlfriend?
As the other genius quoted, "There's no honor amongst thieves." And, that's not debatable in terms of the likelihood of it all, but it is indicative of someone who just never ran into the 'right' thief.
I also heard that to live outside the law you must be honest....Not law-abiding per se, but honest. There's still plenty of room for good old-fashioned fraud, i.e., the 'con', wherein you cannot cheat an honest man. Why? Because for the 'con' to work, there must be larceny in the heart of the so-called 'victim'.
If the guy behind Loki got help with designing any part of the scam..it's conspiracy to commit. If his server was offshore, he's looking at another echelon of interstate wire fraud. He ran the appeal for at least a month or two, no? Then RICO (which rarely gets applied to the guys it was enacted for, originally, could come into play. Convicted on all those counts,...maybe....5-6 in Leavenworth.
It's a ridiculous situation to contemplate, no doubt about it. Do I see the absurdity of downloaders getting a guy 'bagged' on some 'born again' sense of principles? Hell yes. But that's what happens when a society cranks out laws, that are selectively enforced, and that try to legislate morality, etc...It gets crazy. Here's another quote for ya:
The more laws and order are made prominent,
The more thieves and robbers there will be.
-- Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)
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That's because it's the best "Windows" browser out there, ...uh, as long as you don't count Opera. HAHAHAHAHA
It is not a Macintosh browser/app. Period
I use it as my default browser on a Powerbook, and it can be unloaded, and I can select an URL in a link in email, or a note, or whatever, and Firefox launches, and opens the URL. Just the way it should.. BUT, if Firefox is already launched, and is the "Foreground" app (is 'focused', in other words) BUT doesn't have it's own window open, it will NOT even open a window, never mind hit an URL, from its own Bookmarks menu!!!
You have to hit Com-N to get a 'new' window, and THEN its menu bar bookmarks work again.
I'd love to see one of their programmers explain that. It couldn't have been easy to pull that off. It cracks me up.
Man, you guys on windows have it rough. In Thoth (out of development for 2 years now) on a mac, you can over-ride any default number of articles to download, a simple Alt-click on the group and type in your number. I like 80,000 for some reason. anyway, that, and yeah, the kill filters. I use messae IDs for kills, not the entire string, usually just the server... tiatn.news. is a nice, prime candidate for the k-file. Thoth, it's the kller news reader. And, yeah, i've used forte agent, and other even shittier Mac news readers... ha ha, what a waste.
Thank you Jesus... heheh, haven't said that in a while... and there was the add... menu item, right at the top of the right-click drop down. man, i'm slowin' down, no doubt. I used the right-click to download the script, the first time, and didn't even see the menu item... uh, yeah... regards, ~flipper
Hey jesus, thanks for the links. pretty clued-out on recent firefox and moz-dev development over here, so it's really appreciated. The 'add cache links' web site looks extremely interesting... now to figure out how to add the .js script to f-fox, and we're done, for now.... thanks
"rain on the parade" all you wish, but the fact is: the first step in making anything better is to stop making it worse.
There are numerous ways to look at it all, I agree
But, honestly, I use Windows at work, because that's what the company supplies. I didn't 'choose' the platform, any more than most office workers do. That probably puts me right in the middle of the largest group of corporate desktop users, in terms of choice, or whatever.
Ironically, I don't mind the system all that much, outside of the the 1 app-1 window bit, and a few other minor gripes. But, my company wrote a couple of small apps that are necessary in our workflow, that are in a windows-only release, and meanwhile, I use JEdit and other open, or easily-swapped for open, apps to do the bulk of my work there. I could do the work more efficiently, on either a newer Wintel box, or a newer Mac...but I'd give the nod to the Mac, precisely because of the app/window situation (a real 'negative' in cross-doc editing, which i do), better thread management and RAM management (app goes down/system stays up)...
Windows has a couple things that the Mac could use, badly: For one, the cut/paste deal. Moving files is easy on a Mac, and even easier, for bulk moves, using the command line, but the Windows 'Cut' and 'Paste' to any directory on the 'tree', without opening further windows or directories, seems to be a no-brainer. Alt-key menu/command navigation/execution, is the other thing.
I'm a Macintosh 'fan', in the sense of that's where my money has gone, but i use the tools I have access to, to do a pro job, period, and that's what it's all about, in the end. Do i need to color correct rolling mattes for a Star Wars TV pilot, on a Compaq Pro? Of course not. But I don't need a dual-proc G5 to roar through SGML coding in TextPad, or JEdit, either. Different strokes...etc
I couldn't agree more. As a full-time workplace Windows user who uses the Macintosh at home, even I know the virus/trojan/adware problem is just an overblown 'sideline' issue.
Where Windows really shines, in the time-wasting deartment, is in the one app/one window paradigm that is almost exactly 20 years behind the times
What a crappy, so-called 'the serious work platform' reality
Watching Word re-paginate a huge doc, because I batch-removed 15 'leading' white spaces from ONE column in a lousy 2-page table, and then, after the one-page per second re-paging slows, opening Task Manager to see that this "Process" is consuming 99% of the CPU, is disgusting and laughable
Give me a Performa or an old 86 -9600 beige box Mac, anyday, for real work, and as for my Aluminum Powerbook...running OS X...compared to garden variety 'workplace' PCs? You have got to be fucking kidding.
After a laborious translation of the writings of Nostradamus (with the aid of Rosetta Stone, an OCR thingy, and some oddball 'voices' from ViaVoice) I see that (again, according to the writings) all these things shall, too, come to pass...
...when the Leafs win the Cup.
el flipper/p
I agree. My m130 has gone belly-up recently. Don't know if it's the cradle or what. But 'free' isn't worth the pain in the arse, if you ask me. I'm hoping the Apple-Intel rumors are partly about an ARM-based Apple PDA. :) I'm 'in', if that's what's up over there. (Doesn't look like it though).
~flipper
I use TimeWarner, with Vonage. No 911 enabled. Big deal. I would never use TM's phone over IP, it's a shitty deal compared to Vonage. So, there...oh, and "fucked"? I don't think so. Fuck you too, pal, have a nice day.
Me too... to hell with the lawsuits, i'm much more interested in who manufactured (not to mention fired) that little guided missile that went through the window 18" off the ground at the Pentagon. Pretty good logistics for a guy living in a cave on the Afghani-Pakistan border, no?
Mind if I ask which of the stations is your 'best jazz station' choice? I have a friend (a lady in BC) who has a really good jazz station on there. Just curious.
...ummm, anyone who has ever been a member of the Musician's Union in North America?
It's similar to the "way too loud music" thing, out in the burbs,, so, like the boys in LA, the first time Junior's PC starts infecting the neightbors, you have a nice friendly chat... and the next time it happens (usually right away, --laughs--) you just walk in, polite as hell, and put nightsticks through the shit. Works great on speakers... just remember not to 'blow it up' LA movie style... you know, blasting the shit out of the monitors instead of the towers.
sure... you got it right, very smart. It's also why McDonald's has the best food in the world, and Wal-Mart is the favorite place for people to work...
"people are sheep" != "shepherds are superior"
If you give up, and time is short, don't forget the other military edict regarding the disposal of 'sensitive' electronics: "Heat sufficient to melt steel, or a hastily dug hole and the use of explosives."
A Gutmann scenario might work very well, but personally, lacking the sort of kiln required in the event of failure, I lean towards the foxhole/grenades idea.
Scan the docs, convert from OCR/rtf to plain text. Format in XML, using a one-time exectuted, well-thought out DTD. After that, migrating the material to text, print, web, pdf, or anything else, is trivial. One source - any output. The way to go. That's what our little company does. We do military manuals. Heavy DTD, though. Most folks won't need the detail.
TextPad, on a PC, or any java-based editor, will do all the grunt work. Companies in India have the outsourced market for this kind of work pretty well sewn up, but the military and others who aren't fond of sending their data abroad, use 'local' people, like us. This would be different for those abroad, obviously, but the same principles apply.
We use a couple of our own, proprietary apps, but all the 'pieces' are out there, open-sourced, and free. (Our in-house stuff includes an organizer, a DTD insight tool, and a 'variant' we wrote for the Electronics Communication Command guys.)Here's a little tech note: The paper-based manuals on an aircraft carrier are responsible for 3 1/2 inches of water displacement, at sea. That's some serious weight factor. Similar situations arise with commercial and military aircraft. All that stuff can be traded for a handful of CDs.
...probably explains why the article failed to pick up on something that anyone working in a hospital already knows: Most of the keyboards (especially the ones in corridors near burse's stations, being used a lot) have thin plastic film covering the entire flat surface. They're almost all laptops, protected by plastic, easily cleaned, etc. Another non-story.
play 300 shows a year...take a powerbook loaded with Digital Performer, everywhere you play...use a good contact manager... give away high quality versions of tunes... get on CDBaby... and when you're playing the South, make friends with people who run cotton mills... T-Shirts will be the cash you actually retire on.
Bullshit, spoken like the truly clueless. Guess what dumbie? The firewallis enabled by default. If you want to share a web site from yer Mac, the firewall opens up one port, or port forwards, if you wish... Vulnerable straight out of the box? What a dumbshit ~flipper
I would add to the other good advice re: take the year and see some world, etc: Do some volunteer work in the community. You don't need to travel for a whole year. (I did that, and didn't come back for 20 years).
Take three months, and in those three months take three long days a week to volunteer. One day at a VA Hospital, another day with elderly folks, and maybe a day a week at a Food Bank.
It'll give you more character, might change your outlook on what's needed in society and what you can do about it. You'll give a lot, and end up being a real beneficiary of the whole process. Consider it.
Opera is a suite and it has a 'footprint' one third the size of Firefox. I don't know how it all works out for you guys on Windows, but on a mac over here Firefox's java script thing is whacky. I have a roomamte who uses an online veterinarian school site that is heavily-laden with chatapplets (a PeopleSoft nightmare). Only OmniWeb and IE 5.2 will get right through the entire site.
Firefox bails out early.
I noticed on the Firefox page, as i was downloading 1.0.2, they trumpet the 'fast downloads', and the automatic d-load to the desktop. Oh really? Not on a Mac. Every download gets the same fucking window..."Save to disk?" Which is exactly what it's set for in Preferences... and then, to top it off, a blurb appears that says, "Ya know..you can set this in Prefs instead"... Yeah? And when does that kick in?Bottom line: I'll spell it out: Not BAD compared to the un-upgraded (for 5 years) Internet Explorer (on a winblows box), but who gives a shit? Jesus, talk about a lowest common denominator, aim-low culture. If it wasn't for the Extensions it would be useless.
I use it a lot, for that reason alone, but when shit gets critical, it's Omni, Opera, Safari, IE, and lynx (from the command line) when time is really tight. Don't get me totally wrong, I sent cash to mozilla, on ethical, political grounds.
But this 'better than IE on Windows" shit, gimme a fucking break. I run a little better than this old guy across the street who lost a leg in Vietnam, too, but I'm no closer to the Olympics than Firefox is to primetime on the Macintosh...
A year ago, running through Time Warner Cable, (25Kb up/220Kb down), I allocated 50Kbs to my Vonage box, and throttled Azureus (BitTorrent client) at 15Kbs up. The system worked great.
This year I'm on Verizon dsl (17Kb up/92Kb down) and with 30Kbs allocated to my Vonage box the service is choppy, with *no* BitTorrent traffic at all.
Why the disparity? I have no idea (I'm not an engineer). But in my simplistic world view, it makes a return to Cable the only option.
I used great Motorola cellular gear in the early-mid 90s and made calls up and down the East Coast with amazing clarity, no drop-outs, etc, better than landline on the whole. But that was usually a call from a Florida beach to my office in Montreal, so most of the transmission was occurring over water, up the seaboard. With even 50 Kbs allocated on a Vonage box, the results leave any cell or landline technology in the dust. Intercontinental calls had that 'in the next room' quality, and transcontinental calls were 'in your ear, breathy'.
These guys who blame problems on 'regulators' have never seen real regulation, not in the US. Here, in the US, regulation is about 2 things: Mandating hegemony to large corporations, in whatever industry the so-called regulation 'regulates', and applying toothless laws and fines (that amount to trivially-priced licenses) to the most egregious violators of actual law.
It has been American foreign and domestic policy, always, that whenever any entity, (be it a domestic company, individual, foreign country, etc) decides to put the well-being of its clients/users/citizens first, they are obviously not putting American corporate 'interests' 'first' and are therefore communists, or terrorists (or, in the case of Native Americans: 'savages', etc), and are de facto enemies of the State. At which point the corporate mercenary (police, Military, 'friendly' foreign right-wing terrorists, etc) is ordered to apply some real 'regulation'... American style.
This isn't about Capitalism. America isn't in a capitalist business mode, at all. Oligarchial feudalism is much closer to the reality of the American enterprise system. This 'issue' regarding VoIP is just another trivial example of the ho-hum business as usual state of things. Next.
The fact you're paranoid is your biz. But being rude sucks, pal. Jobs was on worldwide QT multicast talking about Tiger coming for Summer, three fucking months ago.
And guess what? The wire fraud and RICO are both Federal raps, and committing fraud in the course of an illegal transaction buffers nobody from the Law, pal, not in America. And no judge would toss speculation (on the Court's behalf) into the fray. There is nothing illegal about contributing to someone's legal defense. The presumption of innocence, and the commonly-held belief that big companies can 'outlast' anyone 'small' in a protracted Civil suit, would leave the 'witness' or plaintiff in the free and clear.
IANAL, either, but I can read well enough, and I've read plenty of stories of guys burning fed undercovers with procaine, mannita (and a little 'faked' hydrolization, heheh), and ending up doing 2-6 in Leavenworth. har, har.
So, I joe brainless d-loader, rat homeboy for the fake 'appeal'...who takes the bigger 'fall'? Me? Getting a nasty little note from an ISP (maybe, not even likely) and havin' to promise not to do it again? Or homeboy on his way to being some lifer's girlfriend?
As the other genius quoted, "There's no honor amongst thieves." And, that's not debatable in terms of the likelihood of it all, but it is indicative of someone who just never ran into the 'right' thief.
I also heard that to live outside the law you must be honest....Not law-abiding per se, but honest. There's still plenty of room for good old-fashioned fraud, i.e., the 'con', wherein you cannot cheat an honest man. Why? Because for the 'con' to work, there must be larceny in the heart of the so-called 'victim'.
If the guy behind Loki got help with designing any part of the scam..it's conspiracy to commit. If his server was offshore, he's looking at another echelon of interstate wire fraud. He ran the appeal for at least a month or two, no? Then RICO (which rarely gets applied to the guys it was enacted for, originally, could come into play. Convicted on all those counts, ...maybe....5-6 in Leavenworth.
It's a ridiculous situation to contemplate, no doubt about it. Do I see the absurdity of downloaders getting a guy 'bagged' on some 'born again' sense of principles? Hell yes. But that's what happens when a society cranks out laws, that are selectively enforced, and that try to legislate morality, etc...It gets crazy. Here's another quote for ya: