It's also about stopping the pirates who don't have all day to spend finding and downloading stuff through bittorrent, which, by the way, is the vast majority of them.
Finding stuff is trivial. There are many torrent search engines, Usenet has the famous Newzbin, and of course the various P2P apps have search functionality which is generally reliable.
Downloading certainly does take time, but consumer-grade connectivity is getting better every day. Many ISPs offer 8-15mbit service and some are offering more than that, up to FiOS's peak of 50mbit. I myself have one 8mbit line, 1-6 10mbit lines depending on the day, and occasionally another 8mbit line via WiFi, all strapped together through a FreeBSD router. Anyone who is experienced with Usenet binary services knows that they've got incredible bandwidth and can flood almost any connection. This means that at any given time I have the capability to download at between 18 and 76 mbit/sec. If you do the math that means a full quality DVD rip (full-res XviD + AC3, 1.5GB) in somewhere between 2.5 and 11 minutes. A worst-case scenario of a full bit-for-bit BRD-DL or triple-layer HD-DVD (50/51GB, respectively) would be between 1.5 and 6.3 hours. Now obviously my situation is unique and most households don't have that kind of bandwidth, but even assuming a single 8mbit cable line (not very hard to find in many metro areas) the numbers are 26 minutes and 14 hours, respectively.
26 minutes is certainly no real investment. It can take longer than that to go to the video store on a busy night PLUS there are no such things as late fees or limited stock on the internet. Even the 14 hour number is completely reasonable if you plan ahead. Look for whatever you want on Tuesday or Wednesday, queue it up in the client of your choice and set a bandwidth limit so it won't affect your daily use. When the weekend comes, your movie is ready to be watched. Again, there's no lines, no late fees, and no shipping delays.
If you make a few assumptions, high definition content becomes even more accessible. I believe these are completely reasonable and will apply in most cases. 1. Most high definition discs will not push the boundaries of their respective format's capacity. 2. Those that do will likely be packed with "special bonus content" filling much of the space, as well as extra audio tracks, angles, etc. 3. The vast majority of viewers only care about the feature film, and within such only the main video track, one single audio track, and possibly one subtitle track.
Based on these assumptions, we could easily strip quite a few gigabytes off of a raw HD-DVD or Blu-Ray rip without affecting the quality or feature content at all in the eyes of most viewers. A 25GB HD-DVD could become 15GB. Supporting this theory, the recently released rip of the Serenity HD-DVD totals 19.6GB, of which 16.5GB is the feature with all extra audio tracks, extra angles, etc. remaining intact. I don't believe it to be too far off that another 3-4GB could be cut from this once HD-DVD EVO processing software is as readily available as the DVD VOB equivalents. Assuming an average of 15GB, this is only a little over 4 hours 15 minutes on an ordinary 8mbit connection. Set it to download when you get home from work and it's ready to watch by sunset (well, unless it's winter and sunset comes before you even leave work). The more you trim it down to what people really want, the more download-friendly it gets. You could even scale the video down to 720p instead of 1080p and dramatically cut the file size. One only has to look at the Xbox 360 HD movie download service to see how well that works. Connections will only keep getting faster and compression techniques will only keep getting better.
You'll note also that when discussing the advantages of these systems I do not mention the lack of cost, because these same concepts can be applied to a legal download service. The problem with current services has been a combination of
I haven't seen any HDTVs in stores for SEVERAL YEARS that didn't have HDMI inputs. My own HDTV is a couple years old now, and absolutely everything had at least one HDMI input. Several years is still long enough to hurt a lot of people. I bought my HDTV in the spring of 2002. At that point HDMI did not yet exist and even VGA or DVI inputs were things you had to hunt for. DVI-HDCP support was next to impossible to find. Even so, the majority of large screen TVs in retail stores were HDTVs, and thus most if not all of those will be affected if the Image Constraint Token is ever enabled.
My particular TV is a 61" CRT rear projection set made by RCA with an internal DirecTV HD + ATSC tuner along with the expected NTSC tuner. The only high definition input it offers is a single set of RCA jacks for component video. This was about average at the time, with some having two sets of component inputs, a few having VGA, and the expensive high end models sometimes having DVI. This example was not long ago, and while HD penetration certainly wasn't as great as it is today, we were by no means early adopters. We just happened to be looking for a large-screen TV and it wasn't worth it to spend thousands of dollars on a standard definition set with the digital switch supposedly looming (I'm still waiting...).
The November Xbox360 update unlocked the video playback so that it can now play videos (still limited to WMV and I think MPEG) from any UPnP server. This includes XP machines with Windows Media Connect, Macs with Connect360, a number of standalone media servers, and of course Linux boxes.
But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use". I would argue that the majority of users breaking DRM are doing so exactly for fair use. More often than not, there's no reason for a pirate to break the DRM on a retail DVD because that work has already been done. Within mere hours of the discs arriving at stores (generally a few days before the official launch) and occasionally weeks or months earlier (see Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story) one person has ripped the DVD and released it in to the wild. That's all it takes. Once there is a raw DVD copy floating around, the DRM never has to be broken for piracy again. Because of this, DRM can't even stop casual piracy. The only people a broken DRM scheme has left to get in the way of are those who are trying to legitimately make fair use copies.
Like others in this discussion, I have a homebrew VoD system set up in my apartment. A media server with a few terabytes of hard drive space and a trio of TV tuners (two analog for cable and one OTA HD) stores all of my movies and every episode of my favorite TV shows. Thanks to this, my roommates and I have point-and-click access to all of those videos from every computer, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the apartment. It's very convenient and I never have to worry about a scratched disc or missing a single episode. Thanks to DRM + the DMCA, every single movie on the server is technically illegal even though I can point at the shelf where the DVDs sit gathering dust.
There are commercial hard drive based DVD library devices, but they're overpriced (in to the thousands of dollars for a mere terabyte last time I checked) and nowhere near as compatible as my solution. The one I looked at would only stream to proprietary set-top boxes and even now I'd wager only possibly the Xbox 360 out of my current line up would be compatible with any similar products on the market now (due to its support for streaming DRM). None would support streaming to my modified Xbox and certainly not to any of my computers.
I would say the home media server is a substantial example of fair use which is legally blocked by DRM+DMCA issues. One like I have is trivial to set up (Myth + Linux + Samba or XP/Vista MCE) and works with a number of clients (I intend to test using my DS as a client once I get the adapter card which enables homebrew and I've already used a PSP as a client in the past). Everyone I know who's seen my setup wants to clone it and if it weren't for the legal issues I'm sure the market would be flooded with such devices.
im guessing because Brazil already has a bad reputation for pornography. A media starlet whos supposed to be representative of it only encourages brazilian women to continue their slutty ways which also gives off a bad perception to the outside world. Wait....slutty women cause a BAD perception? I don't follow...
I should also say that I about as close to anarchist as one can get while still believing there is a purpose for government, so the idea of government intervention is not ideal for me. The fact is though that there is no better option.
Back in the dialup days, I would have laughed at the idea of regulating net neutrality. It was then actually possible to start an ISP literally in one's basement and choice was abundant, so the free market took care of things. In the broadband world, things are different. Choice is minimal (satellite does not count because of latency and ToS issues which make it undesirable and only a last resort) and there's no real way to start an ISP without significant investment. Here at home, I have one choice (Verizon). At my college apartment, I could have three in theory (Buckeye Cable, University of Toledo ethernet, and Ameritech DSL), but due to the way the phone system is wired DSL is out of the picture (it wasn't price-competitive with cable by a long shot anyways). The University connection is fast as hell for straight downloads, but they use a packet shaping solution which makes all realtime applications next to useless and gives a glimpse of what a non-neutral Internet could mean. This means that once again for gaming, VoIP, streaming, etc. there is only one choice.
For the most part, residents of urban and suburban areas will have two choices, cable or telco-provided DSL. Both the big cable companies and the big telcos have come out saying they will use QoS against the Googles, eBays, and Youtubes of the world if they can, so you can't "vote with your wallet" away from them.
The telcos claim the reason they don't want net neutrality is so they can charge the Googles of the world for the traffic they pass over their network.
The problem is that both Google and I have already indirectly paid all the ISPs in between us for the data we transfer. We pay our ISPs, who then have peering agreements with the other ISPs in the path. If I had a smaller ISP, some of my internet access fees would be paying for their pipe(s) to a bigger ISP. Typically the larger ISPs don't pay for traffic amongst themselves, because they figure a roughly equal amount of traffic will go each direction, so it's an even trade.
A particular example would be the connection from my home to Google.
traceroute to google.com (64.233.167.99), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 wrt54g (192.168.254.1) 1.309 ms 0.785 ms 0.753 ms
2 10.34.1.1 (10.34.1.1) 88.684 ms 89.800 ms 57.469 ms
3 so-0-1-0-0.core-rtr1.chi01.verizon-gni.net (130.81.16.84) 57.756 ms 58.238 ms 57.747 ms
4 so-7-2-0-0.bb-rtr1.chi01.verizon-gni.net (130.81.20.56) 60.333 ms 58.891 ms 61.207 ms
5 so-6-0-0-0.peer-rtr1.chi80.verizon-gni.net (130.81.16.11) 58.656 ms 58.021 ms 57.863 ms
6 pos1-0.gw2.chi13.alter.net (152.63.65.9) 58.089 ms 58.184 ms 58.104 ms
7 0.so-1-1-0.xl1.chi13.alter.net (152.63.71.206) 58.024 ms 58.533 ms 57.517 ms
8 0.so-6-0-0.br2.chi13.alter.net (152.63.73.25) 57.688 ms 60.928 ms 57.497 ms
9 204.255.168.58 (204.255.168.58) 57.786 ms 57.238 ms 57.866 ms 10 cer-core-02.inet.qwest.net (205.171.139.149) 58.981 ms 56.884 ms 57.767 ms 11 chx-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.139.166) 58.283 ms 57.761 ms 58.090 ms 12 65.112.69.202 (65.112.69.202) 59.902 ms 59.649 ms 57.701 ms 13 216.239.46.5 (216.239.46.5) 79.953 ms 78.397 ms 80.202 ms 14 66.249.94.135 (66.249.94.135) 103.476 ms 82.409 ms 72.14.232.57 (72.14.232.57) 80.062 ms 15 72.14.232.74 (72.14.232.74) 82.327 ms 64.233.175.42 (64.233.175.42) 86.972 ms 72.14.232.74 (72.14.232.74) 80.368 ms 16 py-in-f99.google.com (64.233.167.99) 80.690 ms 81.534 ms 81.840 ms
I pay for Verizon DSL access, thus the first hop out is to the Verizon Global Network. From there, it hops over to Verizon's Business network (still labeled as alter.net and UUNET). Obviously this exchange is free to both of those networks, being under the same parent company. From there it goes to Qwest, and with both Verizon Business and Qwest being Tier 1 providers this is again a no cost exchange. Three Qwest hops and my traffic is now on Google's network, where presumably Google has paid for that connection.
As you can see, all the networks my traffic passed through either got paid or had agreements in place which allowed traffic to pass without payment. None of the ISPs are getting screwed here. They're all getting exactly what they want, either in the form of payment or a free interconnect to one of the other Tier 1 networks. Any attempts to charge Google by Verizon (or the flip side, if Qwest wanted to charge me) would be purely greed and basically theft. I pay for access to Verizon's network, which by way of peering agreements also includes all of Qwest's network and thus Google.
I can understand the tunnel being geeky, but the easier solution of just leaving the proxied network is simple even for the most technophobic individuals. Obviously this doesn't work for those unfortunate people in countries like Qatar, but this thread was about a school district in Canada. Canada being a first-world country with multiple competitive ISPs, it won't be hard to leave that particular network.
So create an account from another computer outside of the proxy force field, or tunnel out to another proxy. It's not that hard to dodge these autoblocks.
Spending $20-30 for a different wireless card is doable. If I'm looking at the lower end of the laptop market, it could be a few hundred dollar bump to go up to a model available with something other than a Broadcom card. That's a lot of money to spend to "vote with my wallet"
I'm a bit of a Seagate fanboy, so take my word with a fair sized chunk of salt, but I think you just had a run of bad luck. It happens. The odds are slim, but then again people have won the lottery twice in a row so anything's possible.
My desktop runs all Seagate 7200.x 250GB drives. One 7200.8 and two 7200.9s. The two.9s (6 months old) have 9 ECC errors between them and the.8 (15 months old) has 60. Most of those errors were recorded about a year ago when I had this computer temporarily in a cheap steel case which apparently had inadequate ventilation and the drive managed to reach 63 C according to SMART. It was that hot for many hours before I began to notice instability, checked my temps, and immediately powered down to go and get a decent case. It hasn't acted up since, but out of caution I check the SMART numbers regularly and only use that drive for OS/App installs, keeping my important data on the newer drives.
Other than that one time, all three of my desktop drives, the two Momentus drives my laptop lives off of, and the Barracuda in my Xbox have all been extremely reliable. Neither I nor any of my roommates buy any HDs other than Seagates unless we have no choice (laptops) or the deal is great (WD Caviars from Woot run our media center).
The problem, especially with wireless cards, is that most of us don't have a choice in the matter. They come built in to most if not all laptops now and the retail selection is thus shrinking. If you buy a HPaq or Dell, you get a Broadcom card by default. If you chose an Intel CPU, you might be offered the Intel wireless card (which is the better choice even under Windows) but most people don't know this and choose to save the $25. Very few notebooks come with Atheros cards, and the Windows drivers are horrid (though they're at or near the top of the list for every other OS). Even worse, it's become common to find that you can't even swap out the miniPCI card, since there's a BIOS lock. IBM and HPaq do this, I haven't heard one way or another about Dell.
Try that after buying some crack. Tell the judge "He invited me into the back alley and sold me the crack. It's not my responsibility to make sure what I'm buying is legal. Bad analogy. You are expected to know the crack is illegal, where when file sharing is involved it's hard to tell. The content is available legally, some artists do release one or two tracks for free on their web sites, so you are presented with a confusing scenario.
Anyways, downloading is basically impossible to get sued over. If you're downloading off some random guy on the Internet, how's the **AA going to know, and if you're downloading off one of their bot machines it was completely legal because they own the copyright and put it up for free download. (as an aside, I came to this conclusion once before when they were polluting KaZaA and the like with damaged files and I decided to download 5-6 damaged versions and put them together in to one good version. It only worked with certain songs and was more work than it's worth, but technically it would have been legal.)
Sharing is the only way you'll face legal trouble now and in the foreseeable future.
That's why they make gas leak detectors. Every residence with gas appliances should have at least one between the appliances and the living area and preferably a few more near the appliances themselves. CO detectors on the ceiling for natural gas houses and LPG detectors near the floor elsewhere. Just like a smoke detector, a well placed functional gas detector will alert you and/or your family long before the situation gets dangerous.
The hardware is ready. As others have mentioned, it's basically impossible now to buy a 32 bit desktop (the only one I know of still for sale is the Mac Mini) and the laptops will follow as soon as Intel phases out the original Core line.
Personally I've been 100% 64 bit on the hardware side for a while now. Athlon 64 X2 in my desktop, Core 2 Duo in my laptop, and even a triple-core 64 bit "Xenon" PowerPC derivative in my game console (though I recently sold that for a Wii, I'm not sure whether "Broadway" is 64 bit or not).
Software, it's a different story. I'd have no problem running a 64 bit OS on a server or workstation where I can be certain it'll be doing a set group of tasks, but on the desktop no way.
On both Windows and Linux, drivers are the biggest issue. Linux obviously less than Windows, because all but my video drivers are open source and many were 64 bit ready before AMD ever shipped a single Opteron, but the user-level 64 bit support is less. On Windows, it was mainly driver issues and a few games that balked at the NT 5.2 (Win2003) kernel under XP64. On Linux, the biggest problem was related to plugins and codecs. I didn't have Flash or Java in my web browser and a lot of codecs either weren't there or required building from source which I prefer not to do if I have a choice. I know I could have installed 32 bit Firefox and the 32 bit plugins would have worked, but just like with the codecs it was more work than I was willing to put in to it.
In both cases 64 bit gained me nothing other than being able to say I'm running in 64 bit mode while causing quite a bit of extra work. The tradeoff wasn't worth it, so I went back.
Depending on how things develop, I might try 64 bit Vista a few months after the official release, and of course Leopard will bring my Macbook a fully 64 bit OS, but for now I'm happy with 32 bit Vista on the desktop, 32 bit Tiger on the laptop, and 32 bit Ubuntu on both.
Your first linked article makes the claim that the Earth can't be more than 20 million years old. This is in obvious conflict with little details like almost the entire Mesozoic era. Just about 230 million years of the existence of life that the "Institute of Creation Science" [as I restrain laughter at the concept of calling something that can never be tested a science] chooses to ignore.
The second one is even more laughable, again mixing overly simplified pseudoscience with diversions to insult "evolutionary science". The paragraph about the moon dust is especially amusing, as they claim that "evolutionary scientists" were wrong and "creationist scientists" were right while using their own book as a reference for the claim.
As many others have said, evolution does not cover the beginning. You silly creationists always whine about it, but if you think for a second you can still believe that your god created life in the first place and from there it evolved to what we see now. Of course you like to believe that man was created directly by your god, which is provably false.
Evolution and creation aren't mutually exclusive, but the Genesis version of creation is clearly wrong at all levels. We can easily prove that the earth is much older and formed over a much longer time than specified in the Christian bible, as well as the FACT that humans are descendants of older primate species.
Not that this matters, as there are already many ways to develop for the original Xbox. If you have one of a few specific games, a memory card, and a USB cable you don't mind hacking you can do it for free.
There's a difference? What distro are you using? I've just put Ubuntu on everything except my servers (Debian goes there) for the last 2 years and it's installed the same on both laptops and desktops. Hibernation worked on all of them.
This happened to my Macbook twice and the only thing I can figure is that Adium had infinite looped like it's been known to do in older versions before I closed the lid. It happened twice over a period of weeks and then hasn't happened since, so obviously something changed.
It still does suck to open a bag and find my nice white machine hot enough that it becomes hard to handle because it's been in an insulated backpack with the Core Duo running at full capacity for 2 hours. CoreDuoTemp reported it was at 79C after I rebooted.
It's been there out of the box on every Linux install I've done in the last 3 years. Also, it's not a Microsoft "innovation", I've been using laptops with hibernation support for years. I distinctly remember a work notebook my dad had long ago having hibernation at the BIOS level with Windows 3.1 installed.
You'll need a pc that has some kind of TV out. Fortunately, that's not really a problem. Every standalone video card I've seen for years and now quite a few integrated graphics solutions have TV outputs. I can even get component HD out from all of the GeForce 6 and 7 series hardware I have. Pretty much the only way you can buy a computer now without TV out is if you buy the cheapest POS they offer.
People who take my money in an effort to make things fair for the poor/retired/whatever. I have a job and am saving money for retirement. Why should I pay for those who fucked up?
After all, all Social Security does is ensures that even those of us who don't have children or rich friends won't starve when we become too old or sick to work.
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It's also about stopping the pirates who don't have all day to spend finding and downloading stuff through bittorrent, which, by the way, is the vast majority of them.
Finding stuff is trivial. There are many torrent search engines, Usenet has the famous Newzbin, and of course the various P2P apps have search functionality which is generally reliable.
Downloading certainly does take time, but consumer-grade connectivity is getting better every day. Many ISPs offer 8-15mbit service and some are offering more than that, up to FiOS's peak of 50mbit. I myself have one 8mbit line, 1-6 10mbit lines depending on the day, and occasionally another 8mbit line via WiFi, all strapped together through a FreeBSD router. Anyone who is experienced with Usenet binary services knows that they've got incredible bandwidth and can flood almost any connection. This means that at any given time I have the capability to download at between 18 and 76 mbit/sec. If you do the math that means a full quality DVD rip (full-res XviD + AC3, 1.5GB) in somewhere between 2.5 and 11 minutes. A worst-case scenario of a full bit-for-bit BRD-DL or triple-layer HD-DVD (50/51GB, respectively) would be between 1.5 and 6.3 hours. Now obviously my situation is unique and most households don't have that kind of bandwidth, but even assuming a single 8mbit cable line (not very hard to find in many metro areas) the numbers are 26 minutes and 14 hours, respectively.
26 minutes is certainly no real investment. It can take longer than that to go to the video store on a busy night PLUS there are no such things as late fees or limited stock on the internet. Even the 14 hour number is completely reasonable if you plan ahead. Look for whatever you want on Tuesday or Wednesday, queue it up in the client of your choice and set a bandwidth limit so it won't affect your daily use. When the weekend comes, your movie is ready to be watched. Again, there's no lines, no late fees, and no shipping delays.
If you make a few assumptions, high definition content becomes even more accessible. I believe these are completely reasonable and will apply in most cases.
1. Most high definition discs will not push the boundaries of their respective format's capacity.
2. Those that do will likely be packed with "special bonus content" filling much of the space, as well as extra audio tracks, angles, etc.
3. The vast majority of viewers only care about the feature film, and within such only the main video track, one single audio track, and possibly one subtitle track.
Based on these assumptions, we could easily strip quite a few gigabytes off of a raw HD-DVD or Blu-Ray rip without affecting the quality or feature content at all in the eyes of most viewers. A 25GB HD-DVD could become 15GB. Supporting this theory, the recently released rip of the Serenity HD-DVD totals 19.6GB, of which 16.5GB is the feature with all extra audio tracks, extra angles, etc. remaining intact. I don't believe it to be too far off that another 3-4GB could be cut from this once HD-DVD EVO processing software is as readily available as the DVD VOB equivalents. Assuming an average of 15GB, this is only a little over 4 hours 15 minutes on an ordinary 8mbit connection. Set it to download when you get home from work and it's ready to watch by sunset (well, unless it's winter and sunset comes before you even leave work). The more you trim it down to what people really want, the more download-friendly it gets. You could even scale the video down to 720p instead of 1080p and dramatically cut the file size. One only has to look at the Xbox 360 HD movie download service to see how well that works. Connections will only keep getting faster and compression techniques will only keep getting better.
You'll note also that when discussing the advantages of these systems I do not mention the lack of cost, because these same concepts can be applied to a legal download service. The problem with current services has been a combination of
My particular TV is a 61" CRT rear projection set made by RCA with an internal DirecTV HD + ATSC tuner along with the expected NTSC tuner. The only high definition input it offers is a single set of RCA jacks for component video. This was about average at the time, with some having two sets of component inputs, a few having VGA, and the expensive high end models sometimes having DVI. This example was not long ago, and while HD penetration certainly wasn't as great as it is today, we were by no means early adopters. We just happened to be looking for a large-screen TV and it wasn't worth it to spend thousands of dollars on a standard definition set with the digital switch supposedly looming (I'm still waiting...).
The November Xbox360 update unlocked the video playback so that it can now play videos (still limited to WMV and I think MPEG) from any UPnP server. This includes XP machines with Windows Media Connect, Macs with Connect360, a number of standalone media servers, and of course Linux boxes.
Like others in this discussion, I have a homebrew VoD system set up in my apartment. A media server with a few terabytes of hard drive space and a trio of TV tuners (two analog for cable and one OTA HD) stores all of my movies and every episode of my favorite TV shows. Thanks to this, my roommates and I have point-and-click access to all of those videos from every computer, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the apartment. It's very convenient and I never have to worry about a scratched disc or missing a single episode. Thanks to DRM + the DMCA, every single movie on the server is technically illegal even though I can point at the shelf where the DVDs sit gathering dust.
There are commercial hard drive based DVD library devices, but they're overpriced (in to the thousands of dollars for a mere terabyte last time I checked) and nowhere near as compatible as my solution. The one I looked at would only stream to proprietary set-top boxes and even now I'd wager only possibly the Xbox 360 out of my current line up would be compatible with any similar products on the market now (due to its support for streaming DRM). None would support streaming to my modified Xbox and certainly not to any of my computers.
I would say the home media server is a substantial example of fair use which is legally blocked by DRM+DMCA issues. One like I have is trivial to set up (Myth + Linux + Samba or XP/Vista MCE) and works with a number of clients (I intend to test using my DS as a client once I get the adapter card which enables homebrew and I've already used a PSP as a client in the past). Everyone I know who's seen my setup wants to clone it and if it weren't for the legal issues I'm sure the market would be flooded with such devices.
I should also say that I about as close to anarchist as one can get while still believing there is a purpose for government, so the idea of government intervention is not ideal for me. The fact is though that there is no better option.
Back in the dialup days, I would have laughed at the idea of regulating net neutrality. It was then actually possible to start an ISP literally in one's basement and choice was abundant, so the free market took care of things. In the broadband world, things are different. Choice is minimal (satellite does not count because of latency and ToS issues which make it undesirable and only a last resort) and there's no real way to start an ISP without significant investment. Here at home, I have one choice (Verizon). At my college apartment, I could have three in theory (Buckeye Cable, University of Toledo ethernet, and Ameritech DSL), but due to the way the phone system is wired DSL is out of the picture (it wasn't price-competitive with cable by a long shot anyways). The University connection is fast as hell for straight downloads, but they use a packet shaping solution which makes all realtime applications next to useless and gives a glimpse of what a non-neutral Internet could mean. This means that once again for gaming, VoIP, streaming, etc. there is only one choice.
For the most part, residents of urban and suburban areas will have two choices, cable or telco-provided DSL. Both the big cable companies and the big telcos have come out saying they will use QoS against the Googles, eBays, and Youtubes of the world if they can, so you can't "vote with your wallet" away from them.
The problem is that both Google and I have already indirectly paid all the ISPs in between us for the data we transfer. We pay our ISPs, who then have peering agreements with the other ISPs in the path. If I had a smaller ISP, some of my internet access fees would be paying for their pipe(s) to a bigger ISP. Typically the larger ISPs don't pay for traffic amongst themselves, because they figure a roughly equal amount of traffic will go each direction, so it's an even trade.
A particular example would be the connection from my home to Google. I pay for Verizon DSL access, thus the first hop out is to the Verizon Global Network. From there, it hops over to Verizon's Business network (still labeled as alter.net and UUNET). Obviously this exchange is free to both of those networks, being under the same parent company. From there it goes to Qwest, and with both Verizon Business and Qwest being Tier 1 providers this is again a no cost exchange. Three Qwest hops and my traffic is now on Google's network, where presumably Google has paid for that connection.
As you can see, all the networks my traffic passed through either got paid or had agreements in place which allowed traffic to pass without payment. None of the ISPs are getting screwed here. They're all getting exactly what they want, either in the form of payment or a free interconnect to one of the other Tier 1 networks. Any attempts to charge Google by Verizon (or the flip side, if Qwest wanted to charge me) would be purely greed and basically theft. I pay for access to Verizon's network, which by way of peering agreements also includes all of Qwest's network and thus Google.
I can understand the tunnel being geeky, but the easier solution of just leaving the proxied network is simple even for the most technophobic individuals. Obviously this doesn't work for those unfortunate people in countries like Qatar, but this thread was about a school district in Canada. Canada being a first-world country with multiple competitive ISPs, it won't be hard to leave that particular network.
So create an account from another computer outside of the proxy force field, or tunnel out to another proxy. It's not that hard to dodge these autoblocks.
Spending $20-30 for a different wireless card is doable. If I'm looking at the lower end of the laptop market, it could be a few hundred dollar bump to go up to a model available with something other than a Broadcom card. That's a lot of money to spend to "vote with my wallet"
I'm a bit of a Seagate fanboy, so take my word with a fair sized chunk of salt, but I think you just had a run of bad luck. It happens. The odds are slim, but then again people have won the lottery twice in a row so anything's possible.
.9s (6 months old) have 9 ECC errors between them and the .8 (15 months old) has 60. Most of those errors were recorded about a year ago when I had this computer temporarily in a cheap steel case which apparently had inadequate ventilation and the drive managed to reach 63 C according to SMART. It was that hot for many hours before I began to notice instability, checked my temps, and immediately powered down to go and get a decent case. It hasn't acted up since, but out of caution I check the SMART numbers regularly and only use that drive for OS/App installs, keeping my important data on the newer drives.
My desktop runs all Seagate 7200.x 250GB drives. One 7200.8 and two 7200.9s. The two
Other than that one time, all three of my desktop drives, the two Momentus drives my laptop lives off of, and the Barracuda in my Xbox have all been extremely reliable. Neither I nor any of my roommates buy any HDs other than Seagates unless we have no choice (laptops) or the deal is great (WD Caviars from Woot run our media center).
The problem, especially with wireless cards, is that most of us don't have a choice in the matter. They come built in to most if not all laptops now and the retail selection is thus shrinking. If you buy a HPaq or Dell, you get a Broadcom card by default. If you chose an Intel CPU, you might be offered the Intel wireless card (which is the better choice even under Windows) but most people don't know this and choose to save the $25. Very few notebooks come with Atheros cards, and the Windows drivers are horrid (though they're at or near the top of the list for every other OS). Even worse, it's become common to find that you can't even swap out the miniPCI card, since there's a BIOS lock. IBM and HPaq do this, I haven't heard one way or another about Dell.
start>run>services.msc
stop "Automatic Updates"
I'm sure there's a way to do this from the command line too.
I always forget to disable the stupid automatic updates every time I format, so this saves me until I feel like rebooting.
There needs to be a "go the hell away until I say so" checkbox on that thing.
Anyways, downloading is basically impossible to get sued over. If you're downloading off some random guy on the Internet, how's the **AA going to know, and if you're downloading off one of their bot machines it was completely legal because they own the copyright and put it up for free download. (as an aside, I came to this conclusion once before when they were polluting KaZaA and the like with damaged files and I decided to download 5-6 damaged versions and put them together in to one good version. It only worked with certain songs and was more work than it's worth, but technically it would have been legal.)
Sharing is the only way you'll face legal trouble now and in the foreseeable future.
That's why they make gas leak detectors. Every residence with gas appliances should have at least one between the appliances and the living area and preferably a few more near the appliances themselves. CO detectors on the ceiling for natural gas houses and LPG detectors near the floor elsewhere. Just like a smoke detector, a well placed functional gas detector will alert you and/or your family long before the situation gets dangerous.
The hardware is ready. As others have mentioned, it's basically impossible now to buy a 32 bit desktop (the only one I know of still for sale is the Mac Mini) and the laptops will follow as soon as Intel phases out the original Core line.
Personally I've been 100% 64 bit on the hardware side for a while now. Athlon 64 X2 in my desktop, Core 2 Duo in my laptop, and even a triple-core 64 bit "Xenon" PowerPC derivative in my game console (though I recently sold that for a Wii, I'm not sure whether "Broadway" is 64 bit or not).
Software, it's a different story. I'd have no problem running a 64 bit OS on a server or workstation where I can be certain it'll be doing a set group of tasks, but on the desktop no way.
On both Windows and Linux, drivers are the biggest issue. Linux obviously less than Windows, because all but my video drivers are open source and many were 64 bit ready before AMD ever shipped a single Opteron, but the user-level 64 bit support is less. On Windows, it was mainly driver issues and a few games that balked at the NT 5.2 (Win2003) kernel under XP64. On Linux, the biggest problem was related to plugins and codecs. I didn't have Flash or Java in my web browser and a lot of codecs either weren't there or required building from source which I prefer not to do if I have a choice. I know I could have installed 32 bit Firefox and the 32 bit plugins would have worked, but just like with the codecs it was more work than I was willing to put in to it.
In both cases 64 bit gained me nothing other than being able to say I'm running in 64 bit mode while causing quite a bit of extra work. The tradeoff wasn't worth it, so I went back.
Depending on how things develop, I might try 64 bit Vista a few months after the official release, and of course Leopard will bring my Macbook a fully 64 bit OS, but for now I'm happy with 32 bit Vista on the desktop, 32 bit Tiger on the laptop, and 32 bit Ubuntu on both.
Your first linked article makes the claim that the Earth can't be more than 20 million years old. This is in obvious conflict with little details like almost the entire Mesozoic era. Just about 230 million years of the existence of life that the "Institute of Creation Science" [as I restrain laughter at the concept of calling something that can never be tested a science] chooses to ignore.
The second one is even more laughable, again mixing overly simplified pseudoscience with diversions to insult "evolutionary science". The paragraph about the moon dust is especially amusing, as they claim that "evolutionary scientists" were wrong and "creationist scientists" were right while using their own book as a reference for the claim.
As many others have said, evolution does not cover the beginning. You silly creationists always whine about it, but if you think for a second you can still believe that your god created life in the first place and from there it evolved to what we see now. Of course you like to believe that man was created directly by your god, which is provably false.
Evolution and creation aren't mutually exclusive, but the Genesis version of creation is clearly wrong at all levels. We can easily prove that the earth is much older and formed over a much longer time than specified in the Christian bible, as well as the FACT that humans are descendants of older primate species.
Not that this matters, as there are already many ways to develop for the original Xbox. If you have one of a few specific games, a memory card, and a USB cable you don't mind hacking you can do it for free.
There's a difference? What distro are you using? I've just put Ubuntu on everything except my servers (Debian goes there) for the last 2 years and it's installed the same on both laptops and desktops. Hibernation worked on all of them.
This happened to my Macbook twice and the only thing I can figure is that Adium had infinite looped like it's been known to do in older versions before I closed the lid. It happened twice over a period of weeks and then hasn't happened since, so obviously something changed.
It still does suck to open a bag and find my nice white machine hot enough that it becomes hard to handle because it's been in an insulated backpack with the Core Duo running at full capacity for 2 hours. CoreDuoTemp reported it was at 79C after I rebooted.
It's been there out of the box on every Linux install I've done in the last 3 years. Also, it's not a Microsoft "innovation", I've been using laptops with hibernation support for years. I distinctly remember a work notebook my dad had long ago having hibernation at the BIOS level with Windows 3.1 installed.
Then what are you complaining about ?
People who take my money in an effort to make things fair for the poor/retired/whatever. I have a job and am saving money for retirement. Why should I pay for those who fucked up?That's what a retirement fund is for.
What's that? You didn't think to start one?
Sucks to be you, the world's not fair.