What's the point? If you can only connect to people who's key you have, and if only people who have your key can connect to you, this is going to be a pretty private thing.
Exactly, privacy is what it's all about. People tend to forget (or not realize to begin with) that every bit of chatter they send to one another on AIM goes through AOL's servers, every message they send to their buddy on MSN Messenger passes through Microsoft's servers, etc. Waste gives you the ability to conduct reasonably secure conversations and chat. Sure, it's not as geeky as running your own private IRC server wrapped in stunnel, but hey, the easier crypto becomes, the better.
The next time you want to have a chat with a friend, but you don't exactly want the contents bouncing all over the internet in plaintext, this looks like the perfect application. Reminds me somewhat of a program called SIMP, which is a minimalistic Blowfish-ized IM program.
I'm writing a web application and since I can't create good graphics, I'll be ripping them from other places on the web. The decent thing to do would be to ask permission, and at least specify where you got the graphic
...But the easy thing to do would be to seek out some clip-art or graphic sites who are intentionally making their work available for free use. Google for "free clip art," "free icons," etc. and you'll come up with a treasure trove of usable art.
exactly, they are more focused on defending child molesters like NAMBLA than defending the rights of every man woman and child in the country in copyright law chalenges.
This is pure bullshit. The ACLU is also busy challenging the USA PATRIOT act, mandatory school drug testing, internetcensorship, and a variety of other issues which affect every man, woman, and child in the country. And, believe it or not, the members of NAMBLA have every right to believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say, so long as no one is harmed in the process. If any child is harmed we have laws to deal with that already.
When you say "child molesters [sic] like NAMBLA," you might as well be saying "illegal hackers like Linux users." Using Linux does not make one an illegal hacker, nor does being a member of NAMBLA make one a child molestor. You can't have free speech unless everyone's speech is equally free, I wish there was a way to make this stand out more than by using the bold tag.
Want the ACLU to broaden their horizons and tackle other issues? Become a member and tell them what you'd like them to pursue. Filing lawsuits against the federal government isn't free, you know!
In Intuit's case, they actually saw a loss on the books, and realized it was a Bad Thing. Hollywood hasn't seen any such loss, and so doesn't understand.
I'm not sure about the MPAA, but the RIAA is claiming millions and millions of dollars in "losses." And they still don't understand. I know several people (myself included) who flat-out refuse to accept any crippled, copy-protected, DRM'd imitation of a real CD, even as the record labels continue pumping them out. Their losses are only going to grow.
then again it's MS and they prolly have some evil plan with this all...
My guess is that this is a strategic move by MS to try and seriously impact Linux.
We're always talking here at Slashdot about patent abuse, and how patent houses go after "infringing" small fish first to set precedent for the bigger fish. By agreeing to pay off SCO, Microsoft may have just saved SCO the trouble of going after the small fish. The argument for smalltime Linux distros against paying royalties for the supposedly infringing code gets a bit tougher when SCO comes to you and says "look, even Microsoft ponied up and were too afraid to risk a legal battle."
It is unknown who runs SPEWS, and the Web site -- spews.org -- offers few answers. The site's registration information at various Internet WHOIS databases is deliberately false, with the e-mail contact listed as not@available.org.
Someone hasn't figured out the -h flag to whois, apparently. Depending upon the flavor of whois being used, any queries for.org domains will now list "not@available.org" as the contact email addresses unless the sponsoring registrar's server is queried.
SPEWS' WHOIS record isn't really hiding anything when you ask the right server:
Whether or not that address really exists, I don't know - but I doubt SPEWS is about to put obviously bogus information (e.g. not@available.org) in their WHOIS record. The spammers would just file a complaint with ICANN.
One potentially poignant note is the date restriction on that stat,
For example, an SAT combined score of 1250 (
1974-1994 SAT editions) correlates with a Stanford-Binet IQ of 132, the top 2% of humanity, and thus qualifies a person for Mensa.
I took an IQ test in '93 (though I don't know whether or not it was of the Stanford-Binet variety) and scored 140. I took the SAT in '96 and scored 1360. Wonder what a 1360 at that point in time boils down to, percentile-of-humanity wise...
Though I'll agree with you about the disturbing factor - I consider myself to be intelligent, but if I'm in the top 2% of all humanity, then God help us!
Want to talk about games which have really, really "affected me?" There's only one, and that's Ultima Online.
I spent three years of my life in a state of amazing addiction to that game. For two of those three years, I was playing UO 12+ hours a day. Weekdays, I'd wake up at 10AM, go to class, come home at 2PM and spend an hour or two on homework. Then I'd login to UO, and I wouldn't stop playing until the servers went down at 5AM. If something happened to my main server before it was supposed to go down, I'd usually go to bed early. I was literally scheduling my sleep every day around Ultima Online.
Weekends I occasionally made my "off days" from the game, where I actually had some semblance of a social life, because on weekends there were more people logged in (adding to the lag/crowding problem). I thought of weekends that way, too - as "off days" - like one might think of having a day off from work. The game itself was a lot of work, though I enjoyed every bit of it. And, towards the end, it paid like work too. I was selling various in-game items on eBay here and there. Not enough for a living, but at the time, I had enough income and savings that I could afford to take 2 classes then sit around playing an MMORPG all day long.
If I still had the comfortable income (back then I was running some websites which were doing wonderfully until the economy went into the shitter) I'd probably still be playing 12+ hours a day. As it turns out, I sold my UO accounts almost a year ago. I created another one when the latest expansion, Age of Shadows, was released... But I haven't played in a month or more due to lack of time. I still pay to keep the account active, though; once every now and then I'm able to login for an hour and have a bit of fun.
When it comes to games affecting me, UO was it. Not just affected but totally consumed - it doesn't get any [better|worse] than that.
I miss the old days. Gaming all day was cool, working all day sucks!
Re:weeds aren't the problem, weed killer is.
on
Hi-Tech Weed-Killer
·
· Score: 1
Even better plant flowers and other
hebs that attract colonies of beneficial insects
In terms of going after the users, they've got court backing on that one - they simply go to the ISP. Heck, they don't even need a warrant, judge's order, or even probable cause.
Even if the information is so readily available (sigh), RIAA still has to do something with it. I think the point the grandparent post was trying to make is that even the RIAA isn't about to send snailmail C&Ds to - much less file lawsuits against - hundreds of thousands of people. Using the messaging systems of the filesharing apps, they can try to get their message out on the cheap. It beats paying for, what, half a million registered letters going out.
They've already tried the tactic of "making a few examples" and they see that it's not really scaring anyone. Of course, they fucked themselves on that angle; if they'd sued for $10,000 instead of $97 Billion, that case might actually have a chance of succeeding. A $10K ruling against some college kids would, I think, get out the message that "hey, they really are serious, and I don't have $10K to take the chance." But nobody is intimidated by nonsensical lawsuits seeking $97B.
So, why does filtering work for me when it is supposedly futile?
As others have pointed out, filtering works for you because you're the one implementing your own mail filters. You know what you consider to be wanted and unwanted messages, and you've set up SA with some particular ruleset(s) to match. Unfortunately, this just doesn't work well at the ISP level. There are two reasons, really:
1. Who decides what does and doesn't get filtered? If you put the ISP in charge of this, invariably you're going to wind up with users missing legitimate email (remember, it's up to the user to determine which messages he or she thinks are legitimate). When Jane User loses an email from Mom talking about how things are going - which happens to mention how Dad got a prescription for Viagra - she's going to be ticked.
2. How much computing power is needed? You get 1,000 emails a day. AOL gets billions. And while AOL probably has the cash to invest in a few Gibsons to scan billions of inbound email messages looking for keywords, your average ISP is unlikely to make such an investment. (Interesting now that I think about it; if they're filtering for spam, what else might the world's largest ISP - conveniently situated in the middle of Spookville - be looking for?)
Point 2 becomes an extension of point 1 when you think about the "obvious solution" to the question of who decides what's filtered. That obvious solution, naturally, would be to implement a system where each user gets to set up his or her own filters; similar to what Yahoo mail has done on a rather limited scale. The problem there is yet more processing time. Instead of blindly applying the same filter to all inbound messages, with each message the recipient must be determined and their unique filter rules loaded.
It's not that filtering doesn't work. It does work, but it loses both effectiveness and accuracy when control moves away from the individual recipient. I don't want my ISP filtering my email based upon their idea of what looks spammish, or their idea of which hosts should or shouldn't be sending me email. But my ISP doesn't want to invest in the resources to let each of its users control their own spam filtering. As long as that catch-22 exists, ISPs are either going to filter everything equally or they aren't going to filter at all.
Even if there were a real solution available (aside from shifting the burden of filtering to the end-users), you'd still see the major ISPs suggesting legislation instead of filtration. The reason is that even bit-bucketed spam costs money to receive. AOL filters something on the order of a billion emails a day; assuming an average of 1KB per message, if my calculations are right that comes out to approximately a terabyte of bandwidth per day comprised completely of inbound trash. You can bet they'd rather see spam outlawed than have to sit around and pay for it.
You bring up a good point in latency. I think latency and throughput are - at least in the current state of residential broadband in the US - mutually exclusive; the DSL providers tend to give you awesome pings but low caps, the cable companies give you less conservative caps but the pings aren't as hot. You choose your connection for one or the other. I chose throughput.
From RoadRunner (Time Warner) Midsouth, to one of the Ultima Online game servers I play:
$ ping -c5 greatlakes.owo.com PING central-ae6.owo.com (159.153.226.29): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=39.161 ms 64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=36.583 ms 64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=35.448 ms 64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=38.382 ms 64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=40.056 ms
--- central-ae6.owo.com ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 35.448/37.926/40.056/1.686 ms
Having read the UO message boards for a long time, it seems like DSL users tend to get slightly better pings (averaging 15-20ms, I've seen some on speakeasy who claim pings of 5ms). However, I'm perfectly able to compete with my latency. I'd rather have a 40ms ping average to game, and also be able to download at 250KB/sec.
It really depends on what you use your connection for the most, and how you prioritize those uses. Someone who is generally a casual uploader/downloader but does a ton of gaming might be better off with DSL, for the apparent latency boost. Someone like me, who enjoys gaming but spends a lot of time uploading and downloading as a coder/sysadmin is better off with cable and its apparent throughput boost.
For me, it boils down to the work side of things. I have (among others) one mysqldump that's over 900 megs, which I download 3 times a week to maintain as an offsite backup[1]. There are a number of other dumps I download for backup purposes as well, probably totalling 500+ megs in their own right. When it comes to downloading 900 megs - or especially a gig and a half - there's a noticeable difference between a 150KB/s download cap and a 250KB/s download cap. I can give up a few lag-deaths in Ultima Online now and then as a tradeoff to getting my "important" file transfers faster.
At the risk of sounding like a Time Warner apologist (I have a rather botched history with AOL, so believe me I'm no fan) I have to say that cable has always been more appealing to me than DSL. Then again, I've always been more concerned with how fast I can download;)
Just my two cents.
[1] Yeah, I'm probably one of those hated "power users" from the cableco's standpoint. `ipfw show` claims ~32 gigs in 24 days uptime, but until I hear any complaints, I figure I'll use the broadband I pay for.
I might be way off here, but didn't he just recently ACCEPT this position and he's already resigning?
Yep. His predecessor resigned, too, just three months ago, citing the Slammer worm as his reason for leaving. It seemed like a bad excuse at the time, and it seems even worse now, after two people have resigned that position this year.
My hunch is that either:
a) Whoever's in the office of Cybersecurity Adviser is basically the designated fall guy. We'll see this person pushed out (e.g. fake resignation) whenever there's a "cyber attack" that he "should have seen coming."
b) Both men accepted this position, realized that the plans they're supposed to implement are just feel-good actions which aren't going to really accomplish anything security wise, and decided to get out.
c) Both men accepted this position, were asked to do something they couldn't morally/personally agree to do (perhaps some sort of TIA-style project, or overzealous "figure out how to route the entire internet through the NSA" plan) and decided to get out.
d) The government doesn't pay me enough to put up with all this shit.
e) Some combination of the above.
Granted, all of these are speculation, but I imagine the true answer is probably e). It'll be interesting to see how long the next one lasts.
if you think this is a transparent attempt to get IETF to appear to endorse a heinous activity
The IETF basically told the FBI to bugger off with regards to working CALEA into standards a long time ago. One lawyer who handles CALEA related cases doesn't seem to think this was a good idea, though;
"The IETF's long-ago refusal to consider this issue was hailed as a civil liberties victory at the time. In fact, it has had the ironic effect of making it more likely that wiretap solutions will be proprietary and designed in quiet consultation with the FBI. Bottom line: the notion that the Net inherently resists government control is in for a bad decade."
This comes from a letter to Politech last week. That letter, and a few more references re: IETF/CALEA, can be found here.
God forbid a child read a book about a kid who can make things float.
Ironic, too, when you consider that most of the parents causing a stir about Harry Potter are making their kids read a book about a guy who can walk on water. Sometimes I wonder who's really corrupting the minds of our children.
the problem with censoring data is that - if you aim to remove access to offending data - there is no end to it. there will always be people who get offended at anything.
Your first sentence is also true in another way; namely, there is no end to the censored information even after the act of censoring.
Case in point, the Muzzle awarded to the high school for censoring a story out of the school paper. The local newspaper ran the content instead, and it probably picked up a considerably larger audience there. The distribution of most high school newspapers is limited to the students of that school who bother to grab a copy, and perhaps their parents. But by trying to censor the story, the principal wound up achieving the opposite: the "censored" material was seen by more people than would have seen it had it remained uncensored in the first place.
We truly have reached a point in the history of human communications where once something is written down or typed in, it's nearly impossible for anyone - even its author - to "unpublish" it. Once the cat's out of the bag, there's no putting it back. The internet makes permanence of speech a guarantee, so long as there are people interested in that speech. DeCSS is perhaps the best example, but there are thousands more.
This is a powerful thing, folks. Remember to use it whenever you can.
But... You complain that your parents find out what happens to you at school? That your legal guardians can find out if you try to deceive them and not do schoolwork?
I'm torn between the two sides here, but I really have to sympathize with the student. How many of us can really claim to have completed every homework assignment ever given? How many of us can really claim to have fulfilled every request of every teacher?
I'm a recent college graduate. I remember my high school years quite well. There were plenty of teachers throughout my high school "career" who assigned homework meant as nothing more than busy-work. They didn't collect it, and it wasn't graded, it was simply assigned. Guess what? In most of those cases, I didn't do that homework. I turned out just fine, I passed all the tests (and not just with a barely-passing grade), and I made it to college where I succeeded as well.
My point is that just because a teacher assigns homework doesn't mean that the homework is either necessary or essential. In my Algebra II class in high school, the typical daily homework assignment was something along the lines of 30 problems out of the textbook. If you grasped the concepts and could do 3 of the problems, you could do all 30. Why bother actually doing all 30 if you can do 3 and come up with the correct answers? Clearly you can prove that you understand the concepts, anything beyond that is just busy-work.
I understand the desire - and perhaps the right - of parents to "check up on" their kids and see whether or not they're doing what's supposed to be done. However, I have a problem with the idea that homework is an all-or-nothing proposition, and I fear that systems like this will lead to parents thinking their kids aren't learning. I remember getting $20 per A on my report card when I was in elementary school. As time wore on, and my parents realized that I was going to get mostly A's whether they rewarded me or not, they stopped paying for good grades. I kept getting good grades anyway.
A determined student will make the grade no matter what, and it doesn't necessarily take 100% completion of homework to do so. I think that parents should stick to report cards as a judgement of their kids' aptitude and performance. Daily checkups on whether or not homework was completed border on invasion of privacy IMO - if the kid can make the grade without doing all of his assigned homework, let it go and congratulate him anyway.
Thank you, mom and dad, for being good parents and focusing on the positives instead of the negatives:)) I hope other parents out there do the same.
Actually, the Gillette strategy is even better. When they sell you the razor, it's something that's actually going to last awhile, and keep you buying their blades for a long time.
When I was 14, Gillette sent me a free Sensor razor in the mail (I assume they must buy lists of incoming high school male freshmen). I was using disposable Bic razors at the time, tried the one they sent me, and haven't touched another razor since. I'm 23 now, and guess what: I'm still using that free razor handle that I got in the mail 9 years ago. I don't even want to think about the number of blades I've bought for it, at something like $7 for 5 of them, over those years.
Point being, the "Gillette strategy" only works if the initial product holds up. HP could send everyone in the country a free printer, but if the printer died a month later, they wouldn't have much of a return in terms of recurring supply sales.
As an interesting aside, it's worth pointing out that the Sensor blades Gillette sells today still fit the handle they mailed me 9 years ago. How many printer manufacturers still sell ink cartridges, fusers, toner, etc. for printers they made 9 years ago?
Here's another "good computing practice" tip that I can add to the list of great suggestions in the parent post: keep your desktop small.
I've found that with nearly any version of Windows, the bulkier your desktop, the slower your performance. I'm not just talking about the icons that appear on your desktop, I'm talking about all of the files contained within your "desktop" directory (e.g. c:\%windir%\desktop, c:\documents and settings\%profile%\desktop, etc).
Keep the contents of your desktop to an absolute minimum. Again, this doesn't mean create a folder on the desktop and move all your crud in there; that won't help, as those files are still in your Windows desktop directory. It's not about what shows on your desktop, it's about what's inside your desktop directory.
Move non-essentials out of the desktop completely. I've "treated" complete dog systems whose only real problem, aside from an adware app or two, was the fact that the owner had no concept of drive structure, and placed every file he owned somewhere within his desktop. I've seen machines with literally 20 gigs worth of files in the desktop directory. The solution is as simple as creating c:\My Stuff, moving the gigs worth of cruft from the desktop there, rebooting, and - as Emeril would say - BAM! Kick it up a notch, it's like booting a brand new computer.
My Windows desktops typically have five items: My Computer, My Documents*, My Network Places, Recycle Bin, and a shortcut to PuTTy (if I didn't run PuTTy so damned often, even that wouldn't be there). Period. Sure, it's more convenient to have your 20 gig MP3 collection and shortcuts to all your apps right there on the desktop, but this will slow you down like crazy. I don't know why, but it does, and it always has.
Trim down your desktop and you'll speed yourself up:)
*Remember that stuff in My Documents winds up within your desktop. Keep that clean as well. I strongly recommend a c:\My Stuff directory as a repository for your saved documents, pictures, and miscellaneous junk; just pretend that My Documents doesn't exist.
Now on top of this people do use open proxies and these are harder to find
Not necessarily. We use that proxy list to deny transactions at many of our sites, and with reasonable success. We've coded our signup and purchase pages in such a way that if your REMOTE_ADDR is in that proxy database, you can't sign up.
Of course the OpenProxies.com list isn't all-encompassing, occasionally someone uses a proxy not in the list, but it catches plenty of carding attempts automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
The next time you want to have a chat with a friend, but you don't exactly want the contents bouncing all over the internet in plaintext, this looks like the perfect application. Reminds me somewhat of a program called SIMP, which is a minimalistic Blowfish-ized IM program.
When you say "child molesters [sic] like NAMBLA," you might as well be saying "illegal hackers like Linux users." Using Linux does not make one an illegal hacker, nor does being a member of NAMBLA make one a child molestor. You can't have free speech unless everyone's speech is equally free, I wish there was a way to make this stand out more than by using the bold tag.
Want the ACLU to broaden their horizons and tackle other issues? Become a member and tell them what you'd like them to pursue. Filing lawsuits against the federal government isn't free, you know!
We're always talking here at Slashdot about patent abuse, and how patent houses go after "infringing" small fish first to set precedent for the bigger fish. By agreeing to pay off SCO, Microsoft may have just saved SCO the trouble of going after the small fish. The argument for smalltime Linux distros against paying royalties for the supposedly infringing code gets a bit tougher when SCO comes to you and says "look, even Microsoft ponied up and were too afraid to risk a legal battle."
SPEWS' WHOIS record isn't really hiding anything when you ask the right server:Whether or not that address really exists, I don't know - but I doubt SPEWS is about to put obviously bogus information (e.g. not@available.org) in their WHOIS record. The spammers would just file a complaint with ICANN.
Though I'll agree with you about the disturbing factor - I consider myself to be intelligent, but if I'm in the top 2% of all humanity, then God help us!
Want to talk about games which have really, really "affected me?" There's only one, and that's Ultima Online.
I spent three years of my life in a state of amazing addiction to that game. For two of those three years, I was playing UO 12+ hours a day. Weekdays, I'd wake up at 10AM, go to class, come home at 2PM and spend an hour or two on homework. Then I'd login to UO, and I wouldn't stop playing until the servers went down at 5AM. If something happened to my main server before it was supposed to go down, I'd usually go to bed early. I was literally scheduling my sleep every day around Ultima Online.
Weekends I occasionally made my "off days" from the game, where I actually had some semblance of a social life, because on weekends there were more people logged in (adding to the lag/crowding problem). I thought of weekends that way, too - as "off days" - like one might think of having a day off from work. The game itself was a lot of work, though I enjoyed every bit of it. And, towards the end, it paid like work too. I was selling various in-game items on eBay here and there. Not enough for a living, but at the time, I had enough income and savings that I could afford to take 2 classes then sit around playing an MMORPG all day long.
If I still had the comfortable income (back then I was running some websites which were doing wonderfully until the economy went into the shitter) I'd probably still be playing 12+ hours a day. As it turns out, I sold my UO accounts almost a year ago. I created another one when the latest expansion, Age of Shadows, was released... But I haven't played in a month or more due to lack of time. I still pay to keep the account active, though; once every now and then I'm able to login for an hour and have a bit of fun.
When it comes to games affecting me, UO was it. Not just affected but totally consumed - it doesn't get any [better|worse] than that.
I miss the old days. Gaming all day was cool, working all day sucks!
They've already tried the tactic of "making a few examples" and they see that it's not really scaring anyone. Of course, they fucked themselves on that angle; if they'd sued for $10,000 instead of $97 Billion, that case might actually have a chance of succeeding. A $10K ruling against some college kids would, I think, get out the message that "hey, they really are serious, and I don't have $10K to take the chance." But nobody is intimidated by nonsensical lawsuits seeking $97B.
1. Who decides what does and doesn't get filtered? If you put the ISP in charge of this, invariably you're going to wind up with users missing legitimate email (remember, it's up to the user to determine which messages he or she thinks are legitimate). When Jane User loses an email from Mom talking about how things are going - which happens to mention how Dad got a prescription for Viagra - she's going to be ticked.
2. How much computing power is needed? You get 1,000 emails a day. AOL gets billions. And while AOL probably has the cash to invest in a few Gibsons to scan billions of inbound email messages looking for keywords, your average ISP is unlikely to make such an investment. (Interesting now that I think about it; if they're filtering for spam, what else might the world's largest ISP - conveniently situated in the middle of Spookville - be looking for?)
Point 2 becomes an extension of point 1 when you think about the "obvious solution" to the question of who decides what's filtered. That obvious solution, naturally, would be to implement a system where each user gets to set up his or her own filters; similar to what Yahoo mail has done on a rather limited scale. The problem there is yet more processing time. Instead of blindly applying the same filter to all inbound messages, with each message the recipient must be determined and their unique filter rules loaded.
It's not that filtering doesn't work. It does work, but it loses both effectiveness and accuracy when control moves away from the individual recipient. I don't want my ISP filtering my email based upon their idea of what looks spammish, or their idea of which hosts should or shouldn't be sending me email. But my ISP doesn't want to invest in the resources to let each of its users control their own spam filtering. As long as that catch-22 exists, ISPs are either going to filter everything equally or they aren't going to filter at all.
Even if there were a real solution available (aside from shifting the burden of filtering to the end-users), you'd still see the major ISPs suggesting legislation instead of filtration. The reason is that even bit-bucketed spam costs money to receive. AOL filters something on the order of a billion emails a day; assuming an average of 1KB per message, if my calculations are right that comes out to approximately a terabyte of bandwidth per day comprised completely of inbound trash. You can bet they'd rather see spam outlawed than have to sit around and pay for it.
Today's PA comic
From RoadRunner (Time Warner) Midsouth, to one of the Ultima Online game servers I play:Having read the UO message boards for a long time, it seems like DSL users tend to get slightly better pings (averaging 15-20ms, I've seen some on speakeasy who claim pings of 5ms). However, I'm perfectly able to compete with my latency. I'd rather have a 40ms ping average to game, and also be able to download at 250KB/sec.
It really depends on what you use your connection for the most, and how you prioritize those uses. Someone who is generally a casual uploader/downloader but does a ton of gaming might be better off with DSL, for the apparent latency boost. Someone like me, who enjoys gaming but spends a lot of time uploading and downloading as a coder/sysadmin is better off with cable and its apparent throughput boost.
For me, it boils down to the work side of things. I have (among others) one mysqldump that's over 900 megs, which I download 3 times a week to maintain as an offsite backup[1]. There are a number of other dumps I download for backup purposes as well, probably totalling 500+ megs in their own right. When it comes to downloading 900 megs - or especially a gig and a half - there's a noticeable difference between a 150KB/s download cap and a 250KB/s download cap. I can give up a few lag-deaths in Ultima Online now and then as a tradeoff to getting my "important" file transfers faster.
At the risk of sounding like a Time Warner apologist (I have a rather botched history with AOL, so believe me I'm no fan) I have to say that cable has always been more appealing to me than DSL. Then again, I've always been more concerned with how fast I can download
Just my two cents.
[1] Yeah, I'm probably one of those hated "power users" from the cableco's standpoint. `ipfw show` claims ~32 gigs in 24 days uptime, but until I hear any complaints, I figure I'll use the broadband I pay for.
My hunch is that either:
a) Whoever's in the office of Cybersecurity Adviser is basically the designated fall guy. We'll see this person pushed out (e.g. fake resignation) whenever there's a "cyber attack" that he "should have seen coming."
b) Both men accepted this position, realized that the plans they're supposed to implement are just feel-good actions which aren't going to really accomplish anything security wise, and decided to get out.
c) Both men accepted this position, were asked to do something they couldn't morally/personally agree to do (perhaps some sort of TIA-style project, or overzealous "figure out how to route the entire internet through the NSA" plan) and decided to get out.
d) The government doesn't pay me enough to put up with all this shit.
e) Some combination of the above.
Granted, all of these are speculation, but I imagine the true answer is probably e). It'll be interesting to see how long the next one lasts.
Case in point, the Muzzle awarded to the high school for censoring a story out of the school paper. The local newspaper ran the content instead, and it probably picked up a considerably larger audience there. The distribution of most high school newspapers is limited to the students of that school who bother to grab a copy, and perhaps their parents. But by trying to censor the story, the principal wound up achieving the opposite: the "censored" material was seen by more people than would have seen it had it remained uncensored in the first place.
We truly have reached a point in the history of human communications where once something is written down or typed in, it's nearly impossible for anyone - even its author - to "unpublish" it. Once the cat's out of the bag, there's no putting it back. The internet makes permanence of speech a guarantee, so long as there are people interested in that speech. DeCSS is perhaps the best example, but there are thousands more.
This is a powerful thing, folks. Remember to use it whenever you can.
I'm a recent college graduate. I remember my high school years quite well. There were plenty of teachers throughout my high school "career" who assigned homework meant as nothing more than busy-work. They didn't collect it, and it wasn't graded, it was simply assigned. Guess what? In most of those cases, I didn't do that homework. I turned out just fine, I passed all the tests (and not just with a barely-passing grade), and I made it to college where I succeeded as well.
My point is that just because a teacher assigns homework doesn't mean that the homework is either necessary or essential. In my Algebra II class in high school, the typical daily homework assignment was something along the lines of 30 problems out of the textbook. If you grasped the concepts and could do 3 of the problems, you could do all 30. Why bother actually doing all 30 if you can do 3 and come up with the correct answers? Clearly you can prove that you understand the concepts, anything beyond that is just busy-work.
I understand the desire - and perhaps the right - of parents to "check up on" their kids and see whether or not they're doing what's supposed to be done. However, I have a problem with the idea that homework is an all-or-nothing proposition, and I fear that systems like this will lead to parents thinking their kids aren't learning. I remember getting $20 per A on my report card when I was in elementary school. As time wore on, and my parents realized that I was going to get mostly A's whether they rewarded me or not, they stopped paying for good grades. I kept getting good grades anyway.
A determined student will make the grade no matter what, and it doesn't necessarily take 100% completion of homework to do so. I think that parents should stick to report cards as a judgement of their kids' aptitude and performance. Daily checkups on whether or not homework was completed border on invasion of privacy IMO - if the kid can make the grade without doing all of his assigned homework, let it go and congratulate him anyway.
Thank you, mom and dad, for being good parents and focusing on the positives instead of the negatives
Actually, the Gillette strategy is even better. When they sell you the razor, it's something that's actually going to last awhile, and keep you buying their blades for a long time.
When I was 14, Gillette sent me a free Sensor razor in the mail (I assume they must buy lists of incoming high school male freshmen). I was using disposable Bic razors at the time, tried the one they sent me, and haven't touched another razor since. I'm 23 now, and guess what: I'm still using that free razor handle that I got in the mail 9 years ago. I don't even want to think about the number of blades I've bought for it, at something like $7 for 5 of them, over those years.
Point being, the "Gillette strategy" only works if the initial product holds up. HP could send everyone in the country a free printer, but if the printer died a month later, they wouldn't have much of a return in terms of recurring supply sales.
As an interesting aside, it's worth pointing out that the Sensor blades Gillette sells today still fit the handle they mailed me 9 years ago. How many printer manufacturers still sell ink cartridges, fusers, toner, etc. for printers they made 9 years ago?
Here's another "good computing practice" tip that I can add to the list of great suggestions in the parent post: keep your desktop small.
:)
I've found that with nearly any version of Windows, the bulkier your desktop, the slower your performance. I'm not just talking about the icons that appear on your desktop, I'm talking about all of the files contained within your "desktop" directory (e.g. c:\%windir%\desktop, c:\documents and settings\%profile%\desktop, etc).
Keep the contents of your desktop to an absolute minimum. Again, this doesn't mean create a folder on the desktop and move all your crud in there; that won't help, as those files are still in your Windows desktop directory. It's not about what shows on your desktop, it's about what's inside your desktop directory.
Move non-essentials out of the desktop completely. I've "treated" complete dog systems whose only real problem, aside from an adware app or two, was the fact that the owner had no concept of drive structure, and placed every file he owned somewhere within his desktop. I've seen machines with literally 20 gigs worth of files in the desktop directory. The solution is as simple as creating c:\My Stuff, moving the gigs worth of cruft from the desktop there, rebooting, and - as Emeril would say - BAM! Kick it up a notch, it's like booting a brand new computer.
My Windows desktops typically have five items: My Computer, My Documents*, My Network Places, Recycle Bin, and a shortcut to PuTTy (if I didn't run PuTTy so damned often, even that wouldn't be there). Period. Sure, it's more convenient to have your 20 gig MP3 collection and shortcuts to all your apps right there on the desktop, but this will slow you down like crazy. I don't know why, but it does, and it always has.
Trim down your desktop and you'll speed yourself up
*Remember that stuff in My Documents winds up within your desktop. Keep that clean as well. I strongly recommend a c:\My Stuff directory as a repository for your saved documents, pictures, and miscellaneous junk; just pretend that My Documents doesn't exist.
Mirror 1
Mirror 2
To lighten the load.
Finally, the scriptkiddie bit! Now we'll be able to drop all that pesky DDoS traffic with ease!
Of course the OpenProxies.com list isn't all-encompassing, occasionally someone uses a proxy not in the list, but it catches plenty of carding attempts automatically.