But, for better or for worse, everyone has the right to a fair vote.
Along with that right comes the responsibility to exercize it properly, carefully, and responsibly.
If they found the ballot confusing, the time to resolve the matter was at the polls. They should have read it more carefully, asked for assistance if necessary, and, above all, refused to knowingly submit a ballot that did not reflect their intended votes.
Anyone who is unwilling to accepte the responsibilities that come along with their right to vote, shouldn't have that right.
If anybody tries to give the Presidency to someone that didn't get a majority vote, I'm going to throw a fit.
So did you throw a fit in 1996? Or 1992?
In neither of Mr. Clinton's presidential campaigns did he win a majority of the popular vote. It's happened many other times as well.
For that matter, it doesn't appear that it is even going to be POSSIBLE to give the presidency to the winner of a majority vote in this election. The most recent numbers I've seen have 49% as the largest portion of the popular vote garnered by any one candidate, which is, of course, not a majority.
So, regardless of the outcome of the next few days, you had better get prepared to throw your fit, because the presidence most certainly IS going to a man who did not win a majority of the popular vote.
(Unless, of course, you meant to say "plurality", in which case you really ought to invest in a dictionary. Even one of the small pocket-sized versions would do.)
Compared to "Real work", which is normally mind-numming repetitive physical work, the life in a cubicle is not that bad.
Just out of curiosity, how old are you?
Most people that I've run into with that opinion are just a couple years out of college, not quite enough time to hit the burn-out point.
Back when I did manual labor, at the end of the day I'd be physically tired, but still itching to get out of the house and go have a good time.
After 10 years of working in IT, now at the end of the day about all I want to do is find a couch and a remote control and shut off my brain.
The type of exhaustion you experience from mental work is different that the physical sort, but it's still quite real. It's also trickier to recover from. If you're physically tired, the solution is simple: sit down, lie down, get some rest.
With mental exhaustion, the solution isn't quite so cut and dried. Just resting isn't always enough, you need to force your mind to stop thinking about the job, not always an easy task. And many times, there simply isn't enough time in the evening to totally refresh yourself from the day's work (especially when that day didn't end until midnight). So each day you go back to work just slightly more drained than the day before. After 10 or so years, the cumalitive effect of this can be rather severe.
Make no mistake about it, mental work is "real work." Often times having worse effects on the quality of your "off-time" than the physical variety.
I saw nothing in that post that warrants the "racist" label. He was simply making the point that if people want to enjoy the benefits of living in this country, then they should be expected to accept the downside as well. Take the good with the bad.
You don't have to agree with it, but it's certainly a point of view worthy of discussion.
And not at all racist.
Re:The killer "app" for Mayo-at least for me
on
DivX ;-) Deux Update
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· Score: 1
The only problem is the real-time MPEG compression of the video-in stream.
I've seen mention of an upcoming card from Hauppaugee called the WinTV/PVR (or something like that) that should resolve this issue. Apparently, it's supposed to support realtime MPEG-2 encoding in hardware.
Then all you need is a fast enough processor to decode the stream in real time and you're set.
You DO have an absolute, complete, and irrevocable right to the free exchange of ideas. As long as they're your ideas.
By the same token, if we're talking about my ideas, then I have a right to control the manner in which they are distributed and, if they're particularly good ideas, even make some money off of them.
As far as the rights of the poor to "participate in human's culture", bite me. If money is the only thing holding them back, then let them get educated and go make more money. I feel no obligation to hand over the fruits of my labor just because someone else didn't feel like working quite as hard.
I watch a little Star Trek, some Babylon 5, the occasional Hogan's Heroes, and a movie every now and then.
There, it's out. All my dirty little TV viewing secrets. Boy, that's a load off my mind.
I always thought that was zealous about my privacy, but some of you people are nuts.
If you really want to make a difference in preserving the privacy of the average citizen, then it's important to sound reasonable and intelligent. Overzealous and radical comments do more harm than good.
There are many people, like me, who take their privacy very seriously. When you make the claim that somebody knowing that I watch Babylon 5 gives them some form of control over me, you accomplish nothing other than making privacy advocates, as a group, sound like radical lunatics who can be safely and prudently ignored.
If you really want to protect privacy, then do it in a reasonable and intelligent manner. Whether you know it or not, by making statements like the last sentence in your post, you're playing for the other side.
The $600 initial setup cost is going to be a tough hurdle to jump. That's a pretty hefty setup fee even in a city. And remember, $600 is a lot more money out in the sticks than it is in a city.
She lives in Chariton, which is quite a small community south of Des Moines. All of her friends have Net access and they're as busy as anybody I know anywhere sharing email back and forth.
In Iowa terms, I wouldn't call Chariton "quite small." It's more along the lines of average size. At a population of ~4,600, it's virtually a metropolis compared to the town I grew up in. (I, of course, packed up my things and got the hell out of there the day after high school graduation.) And there were plenty of other towns around that were even smaller.
As of a year or so ago (last time I checked), there were still plenty of Midwestern towns that not only couldn't get broadband access, but couldn't even get dialup access without paying long distance charges.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't make financial sense to provide access to a community of a couple hundred people.
Well, there's no guarantees that it will remain this way in the future, but...
The version of AOL for linux linked to in the article contains itself 100% within/usr/local/lib/aol. (with the harmless exception of a few fonts that go into/usr/share/fonts/truetype)
I regularly download files at an average indicated speed of 35k
OK, this is gonna sound like I'm being a smartass, but I'm really not.
If I start to see speeds like that from servers that I know to be fast, I call @Home and report a network problem. I routinely see "indicated" speeds of 150K. Just this morning, I had one download reach 230K.
And this is for 2/3 the price that I was paying for DSL.
Of course, the YMMV and other standard disclaimers still apply.
Wow, that sucks. Even in your case though, they didn't suspend your service until you handed them the evidence of your server. They didn't actually go looking for it. Still a shitty thing for them to do, though.
Also, the fact that you haven't had your service suspended again even though you left the server operational seems to indicate that they aren't actively looking for violations. (assuming your current lack of telnet access doesn't indicate a service suspension.)
On a side note: You got cracked and you're STILL using telnet? Over a cable modem? Might as well post your passwords on a web page. Both cable-connected machines that I take care of get portscanned at least four times a day, and I'm sure there's a ton of sniffing going on on the cable network. I've had at least one incident where I got careless and telnetted to a cable-connected box and had another person log in to the same account within a minute.
Do yourself a favor and install OpenSSH first chance you get, and shut down that telnet port.
The problem is that in areas where they designed their network to use load coils, then they sometimes have to play little "tricks" to remove them. Frequently, while they are able to get a DSL connection working once they remove the coils, the compromises they make in order to remove them prevent it from being a *good* DSL connection.
If you're going to extend this argument this far up the stream, then it should be noted that ALL network connections share bandwidth with other users at some point
I almost did note that. Not sure why I decided against it.
I think the point I was trying to make was that while the architecture of an ADSL based ISP looks better than that of a cable modem provider on paper, that technical advantage doesn't necessarily translate to a higher quality of service in the real world. There seem to be two debates going on regarding cable vs. DSL.
#1. Which solution technologically superior. (clearly DSL)
#2. Which solution provides a better connection. (in many cases, cable)
I've personally used cable modems in about 12 separate locations, and shared bandwidth or not, they ALL provided better throughput than similarly priced DSL options.
Of course, my personal experience is not a statistically valid sample, YMMV, all that jazz...
Anyway, my typical bandwidth was around 30 Kbps, not 30KBps (i.e. slower than dialup).
I think a big part of the issue is that the part of town you live in has an older infrastructure, which means heavier copper, fewer loading coils, etc... The ISP issue may also have something to do with it.
As far as AT&T@Home goes, I know they have problems in some parts of town. At the last house I lived in, I'd lose my connection every night at midnight for a duration of one hour. They never did figure out why.
I think what it boils down to is that consumer-grade high-speed access is still in the early stages, and all you can do is experiment with the available options until you find the one that works best for your location.
sounds like you were too far from the CO, didn't they test that before-hand?
Yep, they sure did. I was less than half the maximum distance from the CO. I also ran new phone wire in my house in an attempt to improve things, with no result.
On paper, I should have had a good connection. But something with their infrastructure in my part of town was turning the DSL connection to crap. I stopped trying to figure out what the problem was once @home rolled out in my neighborhood since it gives me a faster, more reliable connection for less money anyway.
ip-masq: They would restrict this if they wanted to sell you more IP numbers.
VPN: They would restrict this if they wanted to charge you BUSINESS rates for telecommuting.
I can't speak about comcast, but I've been using AT&T@Home (formerly TCI) for a couple years now, and have been running pretty much all of the "forbidden" services on my box. Granted, the daemons don't account for a great deal of traffic, but certainly enough to be detectable if they were looking.
My gut feeling is that running these services is "forbidden" simply to relieve their tech support staff from having to answer questions, and from complaints like "my users are getting horrible download speeds from my ftp site." Other than that, they really have no reason to care what you run on your machines, especially with the upstream bandwidth caps they've recently put in place.
As much hype as there has been about these restrictions, I don't think I've heard of even one case of somebody getting their service terminated for running an ftp or http server.
Um, just to put things into perspective, why not go shopping for a T1, which would be the closest alternative on the market in terms of the bandwidth you're buying.
A dedicated T1 certainly has advantages over a cable modem, but for home use, cable modems are EXTREMELY reasonably priced.
I'm currently using AT&T@Home (Des Moines, IA) for one reasons, and one reason only: ADSL from US West blows. I was paying for a 256Kbps link, and was seeing roughly 30Kbps throughput. I won't even talk about the latency.
With AT&T@Home, I'm getting between 1.5 & 2Mbps and very low latency (compared to all other previous ISP's I've used). So, in general, I'm happy with them.
The only complaint I have is that their DNS servers are about as unreliable as can be. Really, how often should you not be able to resolve URLs like yahoo.com, netscape.com, slashdot.org, etc... This was happening to me at least once a week. I've now eliminated the problem by setting up my own caching DNS server which doesn't rely on @Home's servers for anything.
(Oh, one other complaint. My upstream bandwidth appears to be capped at about 16Kbps.)
No it's not. I can think of a couple dozen uses for a computer that size, especially with an RF communications link. I'll admit, though, that none of them involve strapping the thing to my wrist. (But I'm sure those straps would come off easy enough...)
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No, being elderly and having bad vision doesn't make anyone dumb.
Stubbornly refusing to get assistance with a ballot that you can't figure out yourself, now THAT makes a person dumb.
But, for better or for worse, everyone has the right to a fair vote.
Along with that right comes the responsibility to exercize it properly, carefully, and responsibly.
If they found the ballot confusing, the time to resolve the matter was at the polls. They should have read it more carefully, asked for assistance if necessary, and, above all, refused to knowingly submit a ballot that did not reflect their intended votes.
Anyone who is unwilling to accepte the responsibilities that come along with their right to vote, shouldn't have that right.
If anybody tries to give the Presidency to someone that didn't get a majority vote, I'm going to throw a fit.
So did you throw a fit in 1996? Or 1992?
In neither of Mr. Clinton's presidential campaigns did he win a majority of the popular vote. It's happened many other times as well.
For that matter, it doesn't appear that it is even going to be POSSIBLE to give the presidency to the winner of a majority vote in this election. The most recent numbers I've seen have 49% as the largest portion of the popular vote garnered by any one candidate, which is, of course, not a majority.
So, regardless of the outcome of the next few days, you had better get prepared to throw your fit, because the presidence most certainly IS going to a man who did not win a majority of the popular vote.
(Unless, of course, you meant to say "plurality", in which case you really ought to invest in a dictionary. Even one of the small pocket-sized versions would do.)
Compared to "Real work", which is normally mind-numming repetitive physical work, the life in a cubicle is not that bad.
Just out of curiosity, how old are you?
Most people that I've run into with that opinion are just a couple years out of college, not quite enough time to hit the burn-out point.
Back when I did manual labor, at the end of the day I'd be physically tired, but still itching to get out of the house and go have a good time.
After 10 years of working in IT, now at the end of the day about all I want to do is find a couch and a remote control and shut off my brain.
The type of exhaustion you experience from mental work is different that the physical sort, but it's still quite real. It's also trickier to recover from. If you're physically tired, the solution is simple: sit down, lie down, get some rest.
With mental exhaustion, the solution isn't quite so cut and dried. Just resting isn't always enough, you need to force your mind to stop thinking about the job, not always an easy task. And many times, there simply isn't enough time in the evening to totally refresh yourself from the day's work (especially when that day didn't end until midnight). So each day you go back to work just slightly more drained than the day before. After 10 or so years, the cumalitive effect of this can be rather severe.
Make no mistake about it, mental work is "real work." Often times having worse effects on the quality of your "off-time" than the physical variety.
use it sort of a lava lamp kinda deal. But instead of it having gobbs of gup like lava lamp, have real time rendering of new-clear explosions.
That would be cool as hell as an xmms plugin.
:-)
polls show that 75 percent of Americans want *less* immigration. Maybe the polictal elite are out of touch.
Maybe?
I saw nothing in that post that warrants the "racist" label. He was simply making the point that if people want to enjoy the benefits of living in this country, then they should be expected to accept the downside as well. Take the good with the bad.
You don't have to agree with it, but it's certainly a point of view worthy of discussion.
And not at all racist.
The only problem is the real-time MPEG compression of the video-in stream.
I've seen mention of an upcoming card from Hauppaugee called the WinTV/PVR (or something like that) that should resolve this issue. Apparently, it's supposed to support realtime MPEG-2 encoding in hardware.
Then all you need is a fast enough processor to decode the stream in real time and you're set.
What about a right to the free exchange of ideas,
You DO have an absolute, complete, and irrevocable right to the free exchange of ideas. As long as they're your ideas.
By the same token, if we're talking about my ideas, then I have a right to control the manner in which they are distributed and, if they're particularly good ideas, even make some money off of them.
As far as the rights of the poor to "participate in human's culture", bite me. If money is the only thing holding them back, then let them get educated and go make more money. I feel no obligation to hand over the fruits of my labor just because someone else didn't feel like working quite as hard.
I watch a little Star Trek, some Babylon 5, the occasional Hogan's Heroes, and a movie every now and then.
There, it's out. All my dirty little TV viewing secrets. Boy, that's a load off my mind.
I always thought that was zealous about my privacy, but some of you people are nuts.
If you really want to make a difference in preserving the privacy of the average citizen, then it's important to sound reasonable and intelligent. Overzealous and radical comments do more harm than good.
There are many people, like me, who take their privacy very seriously. When you make the claim that somebody knowing that I watch Babylon 5 gives them some form of control over me, you accomplish nothing other than making privacy advocates, as a group, sound like radical lunatics who can be safely and prudently ignored.
If you really want to protect privacy, then do it in a reasonable and intelligent manner. Whether you know it or not, by making statements like the last sentence in your post, you're playing for the other side.
But I can't see anything that would doom it.
The $600 initial setup cost is going to be a tough hurdle to jump. That's a pretty hefty setup fee even in a city. And remember, $600 is a lot more money out in the sticks than it is in a city.
She lives in Chariton, which is quite a small community south of Des Moines. All of her friends have Net access and they're as busy as anybody I know anywhere sharing email back and forth.
In Iowa terms, I wouldn't call Chariton "quite small." It's more along the lines of average size. At a population of ~4,600, it's virtually a metropolis compared to the town I grew up in. (I, of course, packed up my things and got the hell out of there the day after high school graduation.) And there were plenty of other towns around that were even smaller.
As of a year or so ago (last time I checked), there were still plenty of Midwestern towns that not only couldn't get broadband access, but couldn't even get dialup access without paying long distance charges.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't make financial sense to provide access to a community of a couple hundred people.
Well, there's no guarantees that it will remain this way in the future, but...
/usr/local/lib/aol. (with the harmless exception of a few fonts that go into /usr/share/fonts/truetype)
The version of AOL for linux linked to in the article contains itself 100% within
Screenshot of my KDE desktop with the AOL client running is here.
Only shows the login screen since I don't actually have an AOL account.
I regularly download files at an average indicated speed of 35k
OK, this is gonna sound like I'm being a smartass, but I'm really not.
If I start to see speeds like that from servers that I know to be fast, I call @Home and report a network problem. I routinely see "indicated" speeds of 150K. Just this morning, I had one download reach 230K.
And this is for 2/3 the price that I was paying for DSL.
Of course, the YMMV and other standard disclaimers still apply.
Wow, that sucks. Even in your case though, they didn't suspend your service until you handed them the evidence of your server. They didn't actually go looking for it. Still a shitty thing for them to do, though.
Also, the fact that you haven't had your service suspended again even though you left the server operational seems to indicate that they aren't actively looking for violations. (assuming your current lack of telnet access doesn't indicate a service suspension.)
On a side note: You got cracked and you're STILL using telnet? Over a cable modem? Might as well post your passwords on a web page. Both cable-connected machines that I take care of get portscanned at least four times a day, and I'm sure there's a ton of sniffing going on on the cable network. I've had at least one incident where I got careless and telnetted to a cable-connected box and had another person log in to the same account within a minute.
Do yourself a favor and install OpenSSH first chance you get, and shut down that telnet port.
Exactly right.
The problem is that in areas where they designed their network to use load coils, then they sometimes have to play little "tricks" to remove them. Frequently, while they are able to get a DSL connection working once they remove the coils, the compromises they make in order to remove them prevent it from being a *good* DSL connection.
If you're going to extend this argument this far up the stream, then it should be noted that ALL network connections share bandwidth with other users at some point
I almost did note that. Not sure why I decided against it.
I think the point I was trying to make was that while the architecture of an ADSL based ISP looks better than that of a cable modem provider on paper, that technical advantage doesn't necessarily translate to a higher quality of service in the real world. There seem to be two debates going on regarding cable vs. DSL.
#1. Which solution technologically superior. (clearly DSL)
#2. Which solution provides a better connection. (in many cases, cable)
I've personally used cable modems in about 12 separate locations, and shared bandwidth or not, they ALL provided better throughput than similarly priced DSL options.
Of course, my personal experience is not a statistically valid sample, YMMV, all that jazz...
First, with the upstream bandwidth caps they now have, your ability to impact your neighbors quality of service is minimal.
Contrary to popular opinion, ADSL also has the "shared-bandwidth" problem, it's just that the bottleneck lies in a different place.
Hey! Haven't talked to you for awhile!
Anyway, my typical bandwidth was around 30 Kbps, not 30KBps (i.e. slower than dialup).
I think a big part of the issue is that the part of town you live in has an older infrastructure, which means heavier copper, fewer loading coils, etc... The ISP issue may also have something to do with it.
As far as AT&T@Home goes, I know they have problems in some parts of town. At the last house I lived in, I'd lose my connection every night at midnight for a duration of one hour. They never did figure out why.
I think what it boils down to is that consumer-grade high-speed access is still in the early stages, and all you can do is experiment with the available options until you find the one that works best for your location.
sounds like you were too far from the CO, didn't they test that before-hand?
Yep, they sure did. I was less than half the maximum distance from the CO. I also ran new phone wire in my house in an attempt to improve things, with no result.
On paper, I should have had a good connection. But something with their infrastructure in my part of town was turning the DSL connection to crap. I stopped trying to figure out what the problem was once @home rolled out in my neighborhood since it gives me a faster, more reliable connection for less money anyway.
ip-masq: They would restrict this if they wanted to sell you more IP numbers.
VPN: They would restrict this if they wanted to charge you BUSINESS rates for telecommuting.
I can't speak about comcast, but I've been using AT&T@Home (formerly TCI) for a couple years now, and have been running pretty much all of the "forbidden" services on my box. Granted, the daemons don't account for a great deal of traffic, but certainly enough to be detectable if they were looking.
My gut feeling is that running these services is "forbidden" simply to relieve their tech support staff from having to answer questions, and from complaints like "my users are getting horrible download speeds from my ftp site." Other than that, they really have no reason to care what you run on your machines, especially with the upstream bandwidth caps they've recently put in place.
As much hype as there has been about these restrictions, I don't think I've heard of even one case of somebody getting their service terminated for running an ftp or http server.
Um, just to put things into perspective, why not go shopping for a T1, which would be the closest alternative on the market in terms of the bandwidth you're buying.
A dedicated T1 certainly has advantages over a cable modem, but for home use, cable modems are EXTREMELY reasonably priced.
And, @Home sucks. Is ADSL any better?
In my experience, no.
I'm currently using AT&T@Home (Des Moines, IA) for one reasons, and one reason only: ADSL from US West blows. I was paying for a 256Kbps link, and was seeing roughly 30Kbps throughput. I won't even talk about the latency.
With AT&T@Home, I'm getting between 1.5 & 2Mbps and very low latency (compared to all other previous ISP's I've used). So, in general, I'm happy with them.
The only complaint I have is that their DNS servers are about as unreliable as can be. Really, how often should you not be able to resolve URLs like yahoo.com, netscape.com, slashdot.org, etc... This was happening to me at least once a week. I've now eliminated the problem by setting up my own caching DNS server which doesn't rely on @Home's servers for anything.
(Oh, one other complaint. My upstream bandwidth appears to be capped at about 16Kbps.)
Sure it's useless.
No it's not. I can think of a couple dozen uses for a computer that size, especially with an RF communications link. I'll admit, though, that none of them involve strapping the thing to my wrist. (But I'm sure those straps would come off easy enough...)