Most of us cannot go to work and surf porn because we know it is possible to watch what we are doing and most of us would probably like to keep our job.
Remind your kid of this. There are rules. No way would I make a 15 yr old leave the bedroom door open all the time, but if they end up spending ALL their time in there I would make sure they were provided more "opportunities" to interact with real life people. And if they were hitting porn I still wouldn't make it a problem unless it became clear that was ALL they were doing.
A router will keep logs, and those logs will reveal pretty much everywhere the people in the house have been. So leave the router logs open and accessible by everyone in the house - that keeps the playing field level (thus not saying "I am spying on you because I do not trust you") and gives them an opportunity to police each other but also to come down on dad if it looks like he's the one who's been frequenting fuckmedaddy.com. This will give them a taste of real life and still provide an air of respecting one another's immediate privacy.
Porn and warez galleries are not healthy places for anyone, no matter their age. I do not allow that sort of traffic on my own home lan and never would, and it has nothing to do with whether or not I like porn (which I don't, but only because I find most of it so incredibly boring). If you use ecommerce or banking sites (or even personal accounting software) all it takes is for Joey's computer to get rooted to make mom and dad's financial records vulnerable to inopportune disclosure. Businesses have firewalls for a reason, and most homes should probably have them, too. I would not do any realtime monitoring or net nannying, but I would have no qualms about reminding them of the priviledges of administrator access to machines on a network. Remind them of why these rules exist (especially about the rootkits and backdoors that are so popular on those "free" thumbnail galleries and warez sites).
Sermon
The local TV station ran a week of "special reports" about how plain clothes officers acting as "predators" were able to entice kids into their vehicles even while in public spaces before the (now shocked and terrified) parents knew what happened. Lots of fearmongering, and you almost NEVER see the truth reported - that stranger abductions are extremely rare (even Polly Klass and Elizabeth Smart were NOT stranger abductions, but were by people known in the neighborhood and even in their homes). They conveniently ignore the fact most children are molested in their own homes by a parent or guardian, afraid of even hinting at how commonplace the problem might really be, and who the real devils are in this world.
In short: fearing the internet is like fearing TV in 1960. Lots of people do it now, as they did then - but ignorance, then as now, is the far greater enemy. If your children trust you then you have nothing to fear, and if they don't then you have no one to blame but yourself when they live up to your worse expectations.
If just one person on the L.I.R.R had been carrying a gun a few years ago when a certain nutcase decided to cut loose, several people on that train that day might still be alive today.
If just one person (any "individual" of "the People") on a certain two planes had been carrying a gun a couple of years ago, several hundred children would not have lost their parents in a heap of concrete and steel - and we very well would never have gone to war with Iraq.
Any given individual carrying a gun can defend liberty for us all. That's why the Constitution was written like that.
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
There's those "People" again. Who are they talking about? A force chosen by election? Appointment? No, they are talking about the people who choose to live their lives in a respectful manner. They're not talking about felons, traitors, and those "fleeing from justice." So making the argument "the People" means one thing in this part of the document where you agree but something else in this other part you don't like, is not going to win any arguments amongst those who actually do have the capacity for critical thought.
I think it's cool enough to be the first PDA I'd actually plunk down cash on. but it's still lacking in two areas: it's not quite small enough (the front should just be ALL screen, or at most just a narrow frame around it) and it's not in color. I suspect it also would not have the horsepower to play 320x240 xvid movies, which it really needs along with a teeny camera.
That system, with one of those 1GB microdrives for storage, would make a killer pocket computer. Use it to record notes, video, and watch and listen. Type? Who needs to type? Just record everything and let the sync software on the home PC do the rest.
This is a really old story. I don't recall if I read it here or on ars, but I first read about this thing a really, really long time ago (like maybe July, 2002?)
Anyway, it's worth the trip to follow the links to the website of the people who make this thing. There are some fantastic MPEG clips of flights of this model that (were, maybe not are) available for download.
Why is it so cool to watch a model fly? Check it out and see. The thing is so big nad heavy it "lifts off" just like a "real" rocket. None of this 3-2-1 disappear in a puff of smoke. You actually get several frames of liftoff before it really picks up speed... very cool.
Are we still in that set-top-box era, where a select few families determine the entire reality of programming?
Maybe the demographic is changing because there are fewer 18-24 year olds being made. We don't get ABC here or the WB or UPN, but CBS and NBC are almost 100% pure crap. This mornijng Les Moonves was bragging about how shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "CSI" (chicken shit idiocy) are destined to become the next classics on the order of "MASH" and "All In the Family." And maybe he's right 0 hell, Lawrence Welk still gets rerun on PBS like it was once some piece of great highbrow entertainment, and so far as I can see that was just pure shit, too. So in twenty years maybe the current crop will reflect how shit things were now, but people will be nostalgic for it just because they're idiots just like their grandparents were.
Oops. Anyway, I know I watch much less TV than I did just last year. And I skip many of the shows I used to think I like - ER, Frasier, etc. The only shows I KNOW I like are the reality shows everyone seems to find fashionable to trash. Given the choice between fear mongering crap like CSI or the jingoist cheeleading of Jag, those "reality shows" are pure gold.
It seems to me he's "sorta" right. It's online communities that's leading people away, but not just gaming. I've never been much of a gamer, but I sure find bitching about life on/. more entertaining than vegging over yet another moronic murder "action mystery." Even the news isn't worth watching - why the fuck should I give give 30 minutes a day of my life to assimilating the corporate propoganda? This morning I checked out "Today" just for the hell of it - I turned it off in disgust after about three minutes of Katy Couric's ultraliberal feminazi claptrap.
Ratings are down because TV sucks ass and people are, thanks to online alternative viewpoints, beginning to realize just why it sucks. The chickens have come home to the corporate roost, so to speak... their reign is as doomed as the dodo.
you're not gonna like this, but I use openwiki. It's not only ASP based, it uses gawd awful vbscript for everything. But I'd still rather edit vbscript (I have it fairly customized) than perl, which is what most of the apache solutions I've seen use.
Because it's just me I use the access database version, which makes it a breeze to backup. In fact, after several migrations I've yet to lose ANYTHING, and that includes the ass-large flat directory where all my misc. downloads are stored.
It should also be fairly trivial to migrate. I'm still hoping to find something I can run without having a dedicated box to host it (I use an old recycled 200MHz vectra) and when I do, "migration" should be little more than migrating the database fields to the new system.
OpenWiki is pretty powerful. It uses css and xml and is very modular, which makes it way easy to modify. Unfortunately it seems to be abandonware, and I don't like it enough to learn how EVERY little detail works so a couple of features I really, really want I cannot add. And, frankly, I've never found another wiki engine that has all the features I have already, so moving to another platform means I not only have to start from scratch, I have to learn new code as well.
I'm hoping the project that was mentioned here a while back as part of the gnome desktop will mature enough that I can jump in with both feet. When I read the description at the site it looked like he already had much of the stuff I want to add to mine (automatic logging of every URL and cataloging the pages in a searchable database - like a personal history google, for one) so I've been giving some serious thought to jumping in there.
The problem with that so far has been my main machine, a 1.6GHz AMD, has some serious issues with every linux distro I've tried to install on it! I'm sure it's a motherboard issue, and it runs every version of windows just fine. But you gotta hold your mouth just so to even get it where it will reboot after the first step of a redhat install, so I ain't screwing with it until I decide on a new motherboard. And that ain't happening until I save the pennies for one of those cool new 6MP SLR Digital Rebels.
Then I bet I can really start filling up that database...
I've had a blogging engine - no, actually a wiki engine but I'm the only one using it - as part of my desktop for more than a year now. And I have a friend who picked up on the idea himself after seeing how handy it was. I'm surprised there aren't more who have discovered this.
Just think about making notes on a project, recording all that misc data that you tell yourself to remember but never do - and right there, in the browser and one click away, is a full featured web server. All my downloaded files go into one repository along with HTML-ized notes on when and why and even a copy of the website if I want it. It's trivial to do because the wiki does all the work according to my configs.
The best part is the wiki markup. This is something that ALL WEBSITES (hint hint) should make part of their text entry fields. Why use <b> when I can just type **bold text**? Or <i> when//italicized text// is so much quicker and easier? The mozilla people realized this ages ago as well, but apparently these lessons are lost on SOTA websites like/.;)
But I guess the crew at/. have more to worry about than text entry features, what with all those ERROR 500 server errors...
This should be modded up. And this SHOULD be done as well, by as many documented contributors as is possible. The corporations lobbied for the DMCA, they damn sure should be forced to live with it.
Once a company goes public, it is bound by different rules. And if a hostile takeover bid is sufficiently lucrative and if the FTC does ntor have objection on the basis of antitrust concerns, then the company HAS to accept the offer. This has happened more than once in the past, where a publicly held "family" company was taken over by hostile forces.
If google is public and MS wants it, the only hope it would have of remaining "free" is that the FTC would decide MS doesn't need to expand its "monopoly" into search engines.
This is not a new concept. And I don't just mean in the "love it or leave it" sense. The US has huge sums of disposable cash, which leads to markets being available for this sort of thing. But do you really think some poor nation that can barely feed its own people is going to see widespread adoption of this sort of tech?
I live in the south. There are people here wouldn't live anywhere else no matter how rich the opportunity, simply because it's a decade behind down here and they LIKE it that way. So, if you're sick of the nonsense move to a rural area and avoid the local wallyworld. Of course, in a small town you have to worry about the neighbors snooping and gossiping... so which is worse?
To those who say "tchnology will redefine privacy" I say get over your jingoistic self. No matter which side of the fence you ride on this issue, the fact is there's a lot more to the world (and to the notions of privacy) than lies within North America. Don't you think the people of N. Korea or Singapore already have a very different notion of "privacy" than we in the US?
Did anyone say fifty years ago that "communism will redefine privacy as we know it?" And, even with all the handwaving and the witch hunts, did any of it really make a difference in the end? Communism crashed to the ground under its own immense weight... just as corporatism eventually will... just as any tyranical system eventually does.
I guess I'm not saying "love it or leave it" but I am saying if you don't like the game, you can still find another field to play in. There's a whole world of them out there.
The "stack of CDs" is the stack of MP3 Cds one has downloaded from the net.
Like I said: how is "dialup" a limitation? I download all I want and still have bytes every month to spare on movies other porn crap. And I have discovered dozens of new artists the last couple years. It takes what - two minutes to download enough of a track to decide if you want to hear more?
Where did people get this stupid notion you cannot download music on dialup? There were a LOT fewer people on fat pipes at the peak of napsterdom - they didn't seem to have a hard time with it then. It's not like you have to shovel the bits by hand, or babysit the telephone.
I've stuffed three spindles of CDs - more than 100GB - downloading over one of those slow dialup connections. And I haven't listened to the radio in years. Tried a few times... couldn't stand it.
What's the point? No stations around here are going to play bjork, or blue man group, or linda, or combustible edison - or pretty much anything that isn't fecal matter sucked from the corporate ass.
I actually thought I was getting old because there was no "new music" I liked.. then I started shopping the dance and world groups on usenet. I've discovered more great new artists the last two years using usenet than I did the entire ten years before sucking on the MTV ruled corporate teat.
I can download 3-4 CDs a night. It's not like you have to sit there and watch it all download! I get 12GB (actually more like 15-16 since yenc became popular) for ten bucks a month from sleasynews, and I have no problem using it all up... even over a "slow" modem connection.
I get a whopping three tv stations (and neither ABC nor the WB are amongst them). I have to suffer a 56k modem link that maxes out at 49k. And I drive about 90 miles a day round trip.
I cannot stand the radio. The first time in a very long time I tried listening to the radio a couple of weeks ago. There wasn't a damn thing on I wanted to hear. About the closest any staiton came was the "classic rock" station and that even sucked - Kansas sucked in 1979, Kansas still sucks today. And Boston and Foreigner and Journey. No Pink Floyd, no Yes, no Aerosmith nor Stones nor Led Zepp. It seems even the "classic" rock is not so classic any more, it's just slightly older corporate drivel.
Long story short: radio can be completely replaced by a personal MP3 player. You don't even need the fancy-schmancy hard drive models; a stack of CDs, a $5 carrying case, a home CD burner, and a $30 MP3 player from wal-mart is all it takes.
And before you say that sounds like a lot, remember that the only "extra" for most folks is the damn MP3 player.
You didn't read what I said. I realize you think you're replying to what I said, but it's obvious you forgot to turn off your geek filters before actually hitting that reply button...
I love Linux, but when it comes to reliable, easy-to-install, works every time, doesn't require a degree in programming, there's something to be said about paying money for a prepackaged working solution with support and a warranty.
That's why the guy doing the installation (ie the unemployed geek who decides to take on this business model) has a job. Where did I say "plop a bunch of geeky components in someone's living room and dash?" I'm pretty sure I made it clear that this is part of the service provided by the business. Or do you think we should all just be given money for doing nothing at all?
Nobody has yet to show me a MythTV solution that is half as clean and reliable as a Tivo...
If there is ANY market for this type of thing, unemployed geeks across the nation need to head down to the local hifi hut and make their presence known. For $2800 I would come to someone's home, setup a mini PC that could do all of this (more efficiently, too, using shns or apes), and even throw in an extra mini system for the bedroom.
$2800 is a LOT of money for something so limited in functionality. And Yamaha can't compete with 1:1 personalized service. $1000 for hardware and $1500 profit on an afternoon of work seems like a decent business opportunity to me.
As an ISP, I am not 'censoring' anything - I am protecting my bandwidth from people who are stealing from me.
Do you not have any customers? An ISP with no customers surely cannot stay in business very long.
If you have customers, it is your customers who are paying for that bandwidth. Now, perhaps your customers are asking you to decide for them what they see an what they do not - and that's fine. But whether your customers demand it or you just take that responsibility upon yourself without question, you are still putting yourself in the role of gatekeeper. Ergo, when you fail in that role - when someone's 8 year old opens up her email and finds an animation of some turgid member spewing jism all over some generic porn starlet - that means you have failed in your elected role as gatekeeper of all that is blessed. And that opens you up to liability.
The reason ISPs fight against this in courts is because they DO NOT want that liability. And by taking upon themselves this liability in the name of "spam" they are playing right into the hands of those who wish to break every foundation of the internet - that is, the corporations - to whom unlimited personal communications represents a great threat.
I live in the sticks. I get three tv stations, and those just barely. The quality here is absolute shit, but I love West Wing so I watch anyway. Then, two days later, I go to campus and download a DVD quality recording of the HD broadcast, so i can actually enjoy watching it. Lately I've even been tempted to not watch it at all on Wed night so I can enjoy the HD recording "as new" - and no commercials.
Do you REALLY think this "broadcast flag" is going to stop that? Or the NX01 project that makes available all the Enterprise episodes?
I'm sure they'll come up with something even more invasive just down the road - after all, once they have forced encryption into the public airwaves (and the technology needed to decipher it) then they can do just about anything else they like. But that's years away - in the meantime, this "flag" will be about as effective as "a very stern warning."
Spam is not free speech. Spam is advertising. Advertising is not covered under the first amendment, there are rules for commercial speech that are separate from private speech.
And, as I already pointed out (and as we all knew anyway) there are already LAWS regarding the matter. It is not the responsibility of the ISP to determine for me what mail I should receive and what I should not. And, if they should decide to take upon themselves that responsibility without my behest, they still must be held accountable when they fail it.
That was kinda my point as well. I have a subdomain and I use a different email address for each service - ie slashdot has "slashdot@" etc. About the only company that sends me spam is LA Times, and I tolerate that only because they have good hollywood coverage abd their spam policy is "if you read ourt site we are gonna send you spam." Of course, since the address they send to is "latimes@" they're right easy to killfile.
I think of spam the way I think of pornography or any other offensive speech: if you don't like it, don't fucking listen. But don't infringe on other's rights to expression. Yes, much of what spammers do is illegal - but every single spam is sent representing someone who wants money. No spammers are going to send out 100,000 emails hyping penis enlargment pills out of the goodness of their hearts. So hold the people making the money responsible for the actions of the people they contract to represent them, and you got it nailed. Meanwhle, any ISP gateway that decides to take on responsibilities that should be left to its customers should well be prosecuted when they fail in those responsibilities - ie when my eight year old gets porn spam in her mailbox, someone's heads should hit the basket at my ISP. It's a precedent that hasn't yet been set, but damn well should be; ISPs have no business taking upon themselves the role of censor.
That's how many "spams" I've received in the last three months. And three of them came just today because two days ago I stupidly obliterated my mozilla profile and the (few) mail rules I had set up were lost.
I wonder how the people on AT&T's ISP networks are going to feel about not being able to communicate with mom and dad in Singapore? And all those folks (or those few folks, I suppose, depending on who you hang with) running personal SMTP services from their homes for the added privacy it buys them.
Yes, there's a lot of trash spam out there. It's NOT impossible to stop, but solutions like this one are not going to substantially help. If AT&T closes off its mail network to the world outside, those broadband customers running open proxies just become that much more valuable - then ATs own customers become the conduit of the spam they are trying to squash. There are thousands of "questionable" usenet posts that originate from roadrunner and AT&T and pacbell and earthlink usenet servers that are proxied there through their own broadband customers. Even locking those customers down to port 80 access won't stop trojans and backdoors, so logically I guess this is just the first step to AT&T closing off its network from the internet entirely?
Maybe they'll just firewall all their customers in and dish out the DMCA approved web pages through proxy farms... that'll teach those evil spammers!
Slashdot Mirror
Remind your kid of this. There are rules. No way would I make a 15 yr old leave the bedroom door open all the time, but if they end up spending ALL their time in there I would make sure they were provided more "opportunities" to interact with real life people. And if they were hitting porn I still wouldn't make it a problem unless it became clear that was ALL they were doing.
A router will keep logs, and those logs will reveal pretty much everywhere the people in the house have been. So leave the router logs open and accessible by everyone in the house - that keeps the playing field level (thus not saying "I am spying on you because I do not trust you") and gives them an opportunity to police each other but also to come down on dad if it looks like he's the one who's been frequenting fuckmedaddy.com. This will give them a taste of real life and still provide an air of respecting one another's immediate privacy.
Porn and warez galleries are not healthy places for anyone, no matter their age. I do not allow that sort of traffic on my own home lan and never would, and it has nothing to do with whether or not I like porn (which I don't, but only because I find most of it so incredibly boring). If you use ecommerce or banking sites (or even personal accounting software) all it takes is for Joey's computer to get rooted to make mom and dad's financial records vulnerable to inopportune disclosure. Businesses have firewalls for a reason, and most homes should probably have them, too. I would not do any realtime monitoring or net nannying, but I would have no qualms about reminding them of the priviledges of administrator access to machines on a network. Remind them of why these rules exist (especially about the rootkits and backdoors that are so popular on those "free" thumbnail galleries and warez sites).
Sermon
The local TV station ran a week of "special reports" about how plain clothes officers acting as "predators" were able to entice kids into their vehicles even while in public spaces before the (now shocked and terrified) parents knew what happened. Lots of fearmongering, and you almost NEVER see the truth reported - that stranger abductions are extremely rare (even Polly Klass and Elizabeth Smart were NOT stranger abductions, but were by people known in the neighborhood and even in their homes). They conveniently ignore the fact most children are molested in their own homes by a parent or guardian, afraid of even hinting at how commonplace the problem might really be, and who the real devils are in this world.
In short: fearing the internet is like fearing TV in 1960. Lots of people do it now, as they did then - but ignorance, then as now, is the far greater enemy. If your children trust you then you have nothing to fear, and if they don't then you have no one to blame but yourself when they live up to your worse expectations.
If just one person (any "individual" of "the People") on a certain two planes had been carrying a gun a couple of years ago, several hundred children would not have lost their parents in a heap of concrete and steel - and we very well would never have gone to war with Iraq.
Any given individual carrying a gun can defend liberty for us all. That's why the Constitution was written like that.
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
There's those "People" again. Who are they talking about? A force chosen by election? Appointment? No, they are talking about the people who choose to live their lives in a respectful manner. They're not talking about felons, traitors, and those "fleeing from justice." So making the argument "the People" means one thing in this part of the document where you agree but something else in this other part you don't like, is not going to win any arguments amongst those who actually do have the capacity for critical thought.
I think it's cool enough to be the first PDA I'd actually plunk down cash on. but it's still lacking in two areas: it's not quite small enough (the front should just be ALL screen, or at most just a narrow frame around it) and it's not in color. I suspect it also would not have the horsepower to play 320x240 xvid movies, which it really needs along with a teeny camera.
That system, with one of those 1GB microdrives for storage, would make a killer pocket computer. Use it to record notes, video, and watch and listen. Type? Who needs to type? Just record everything and let the sync software on the home PC do the rest.
Anyway, it's worth the trip to follow the links to the website of the people who make this thing. There are some fantastic MPEG clips of flights of this model that (were, maybe not are) available for download.
Why is it so cool to watch a model fly? Check it out and see. The thing is so big nad heavy it "lifts off" just like a "real" rocket. None of this 3-2-1 disappear in a puff of smoke. You actually get several frames of liftoff before it really picks up speed... very cool.
Maybe the demographic is changing because there are fewer 18-24 year olds being made. We don't get ABC here or the WB or UPN, but CBS and NBC are almost 100% pure crap. This mornijng Les Moonves was bragging about how shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "CSI" (chicken shit idiocy) are destined to become the next classics on the order of "MASH" and "All In the Family." And maybe he's right 0 hell, Lawrence Welk still gets rerun on PBS like it was once some piece of great highbrow entertainment, and so far as I can see that was just pure shit, too. So in twenty years maybe the current crop will reflect how shit things were now, but people will be nostalgic for it just because they're idiots just like their grandparents were.
Oops. Anyway, I know I watch much less TV than I did just last year. And I skip many of the shows I used to think I like - ER, Frasier, etc. The only shows I KNOW I like are the reality shows everyone seems to find fashionable to trash. Given the choice between fear mongering crap like CSI or the jingoist cheeleading of Jag, those "reality shows" are pure gold.
It seems to me he's "sorta" right. It's online communities that's leading people away, but not just gaming. I've never been much of a gamer, but I sure find bitching about life on /. more entertaining than vegging over yet another moronic murder "action mystery." Even the news isn't worth watching - why the fuck should I give give 30 minutes a day of my life to assimilating the corporate propoganda? This morning I checked out "Today" just for the hell of it - I turned it off in disgust after about three minutes of Katy Couric's ultraliberal feminazi claptrap.
Ratings are down because TV sucks ass and people are, thanks to online alternative viewpoints, beginning to realize just why it sucks. The chickens have come home to the corporate roost, so to speak... their reign is as doomed as the dodo.
Because it's just me I use the access database version, which makes it a breeze to backup. In fact, after several migrations I've yet to lose ANYTHING, and that includes the ass-large flat directory where all my misc. downloads are stored.
It should also be fairly trivial to migrate. I'm still hoping to find something I can run without having a dedicated box to host it (I use an old recycled 200MHz vectra) and when I do, "migration" should be little more than migrating the database fields to the new system.
OpenWiki is pretty powerful. It uses css and xml and is very modular, which makes it way easy to modify. Unfortunately it seems to be abandonware, and I don't like it enough to learn how EVERY little detail works so a couple of features I really, really want I cannot add. And, frankly, I've never found another wiki engine that has all the features I have already, so moving to another platform means I not only have to start from scratch, I have to learn new code as well.
I'm hoping the project that was mentioned here a while back as part of the gnome desktop will mature enough that I can jump in with both feet. When I read the description at the site it looked like he already had much of the stuff I want to add to mine (automatic logging of every URL and cataloging the pages in a searchable database - like a personal history google, for one) so I've been giving some serious thought to jumping in there.
The problem with that so far has been my main machine, a 1.6GHz AMD, has some serious issues with every linux distro I've tried to install on it! I'm sure it's a motherboard issue, and it runs every version of windows just fine. But you gotta hold your mouth just so to even get it where it will reboot after the first step of a redhat install, so I ain't screwing with it until I decide on a new motherboard. And that ain't happening until I save the pennies for one of those cool new 6MP SLR Digital Rebels.
Then I bet I can really start filling up that database...
Just think about making notes on a project, recording all that misc data that you tell yourself to remember but never do - and right there, in the browser and one click away, is a full featured web server. All my downloaded files go into one repository along with HTML-ized notes on when and why and even a copy of the website if I want it. It's trivial to do because the wiki does all the work according to my configs.
The best part is the wiki markup. This is something that ALL WEBSITES (hint hint) should make part of their text entry fields. Why use <b> when I can just type **bold text**? Or <i> when //italicized text// is so much quicker and easier? The mozilla people realized this ages ago as well, but apparently these lessons are lost on SOTA websites like /. ;)
But I guess the crew at /. have more to worry about than text entry features, what with all those ERROR 500 server errors...
Just watch any day of the week and see for yourself.
It's true!
Really...
it would appear "the community" has already taken care of the take-down part.
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.sco.com/support/linux_info.html
The following error was encountered:
* Read Timeout
The system returned:
[No Error]
A Timeout occurred while waiting to read data from the network. The network or server may be down or congested. Please retry your request.
This should be modded up. And this SHOULD be done as well, by as many documented contributors as is possible. The corporations lobbied for the DMCA, they damn sure should be forced to live with it.
If google is public and MS wants it, the only hope it would have of remaining "free" is that the FTC would decide MS doesn't need to expand its "monopoly" into search engines.
I live in the south. There are people here wouldn't live anywhere else no matter how rich the opportunity, simply because it's a decade behind down here and they LIKE it that way. So, if you're sick of the nonsense move to a rural area and avoid the local wallyworld. Of course, in a small town you have to worry about the neighbors snooping and gossiping... so which is worse?
To those who say "tchnology will redefine privacy" I say get over your jingoistic self. No matter which side of the fence you ride on this issue, the fact is there's a lot more to the world (and to the notions of privacy) than lies within North America. Don't you think the people of N. Korea or Singapore already have a very different notion of "privacy" than we in the US?
Did anyone say fifty years ago that "communism will redefine privacy as we know it?" And, even with all the handwaving and the witch hunts, did any of it really make a difference in the end? Communism crashed to the ground under its own immense weight... just as corporatism eventually will... just as any tyranical system eventually does.
I guess I'm not saying "love it or leave it" but I am saying if you don't like the game, you can still find another field to play in. There's a whole world of them out there.
Talk radio is irrelevant to this conversation. Did you read the article?
Like I said: how is "dialup" a limitation? I download all I want and still have bytes every month to spare on movies other porn crap. And I have discovered dozens of new artists the last couple years. It takes what - two minutes to download enough of a track to decide if you want to hear more?
Where did people get this stupid notion you cannot download music on dialup? There were a LOT fewer people on fat pipes at the peak of napsterdom - they didn't seem to have a hard time with it then. It's not like you have to shovel the bits by hand, or babysit the telephone.
What's the point? No stations around here are going to play bjork, or blue man group, or linda, or combustible edison - or pretty much anything that isn't fecal matter sucked from the corporate ass.
I actually thought I was getting old because there was no "new music" I liked.. then I started shopping the dance and world groups on usenet. I've discovered more great new artists the last two years using usenet than I did the entire ten years before sucking on the MTV ruled corporate teat.
I can download 3-4 CDs a night. It's not like you have to sit there and watch it all download! I get 12GB (actually more like 15-16 since yenc became popular) for ten bucks a month from sleasynews, and I have no problem using it all up... even over a "slow" modem connection.
Don't say that stuff too loud. There's plenty of industry brainwashed people here who will swear artists can never make a living being "regional."
I cannot stand the radio. The first time in a very long time I tried listening to the radio a couple of weeks ago. There wasn't a damn thing on I wanted to hear. About the closest any staiton came was the "classic rock" station and that even sucked - Kansas sucked in 1979, Kansas still sucks today. And Boston and Foreigner and Journey. No Pink Floyd, no Yes, no Aerosmith nor Stones nor Led Zepp. It seems even the "classic" rock is not so classic any more, it's just slightly older corporate drivel.
Long story short: radio can be completely replaced by a personal MP3 player. You don't even need the fancy-schmancy hard drive models; a stack of CDs, a $5 carrying case, a home CD burner, and a $30 MP3 player from wal-mart is all it takes.
And before you say that sounds like a lot, remember that the only "extra" for most folks is the damn MP3 player.
I love Linux, but when it comes to reliable, easy-to-install, works every time, doesn't require a degree in programming, there's something to be said about paying money for a prepackaged working solution with support and a warranty.
That's why the guy doing the installation (ie the unemployed geek who decides to take on this business model) has a job. Where did I say "plop a bunch of geeky components in someone's living room and dash?" I'm pretty sure I made it clear that this is part of the service provided by the business. Or do you think we should all just be given money for doing nothing at all?
Nobody has yet to show me a MythTV solution that is half as clean and reliable as a Tivo...
Ah... you mean that linux system?But.. but.. you just said...
And, with an 80GB hard drive in the server, most audiophiles will be looking for a way to hide it in a closet or another room. Did you RTFA?
$2800 is a LOT of money for something so limited in functionality. And Yamaha can't compete with 1:1 personalized service. $1000 for hardware and $1500 profit on an afternoon of work seems like a decent business opportunity to me.
Do you not have any customers? An ISP with no customers surely cannot stay in business very long.
If you have customers, it is your customers who are paying for that bandwidth. Now, perhaps your customers are asking you to decide for them what they see an what they do not - and that's fine. But whether your customers demand it or you just take that responsibility upon yourself without question, you are still putting yourself in the role of gatekeeper. Ergo, when you fail in that role - when someone's 8 year old opens up her email and finds an animation of some turgid member spewing jism all over some generic porn starlet - that means you have failed in your elected role as gatekeeper of all that is blessed. And that opens you up to liability.
The reason ISPs fight against this in courts is because they DO NOT want that liability. And by taking upon themselves this liability in the name of "spam" they are playing right into the hands of those who wish to break every foundation of the internet - that is, the corporations - to whom unlimited personal communications represents a great threat.
Do you REALLY think this "broadcast flag" is going to stop that? Or the NX01 project that makes available all the Enterprise episodes?
I'm sure they'll come up with something even more invasive just down the road - after all, once they have forced encryption into the public airwaves (and the technology needed to decipher it) then they can do just about anything else they like. But that's years away - in the meantime, this "flag" will be about as effective as "a very stern warning."
And, as I already pointed out (and as we all knew anyway) there are already LAWS regarding the matter. It is not the responsibility of the ISP to determine for me what mail I should receive and what I should not. And, if they should decide to take upon themselves that responsibility without my behest, they still must be held accountable when they fail it.
I think of spam the way I think of pornography or any other offensive speech: if you don't like it, don't fucking listen. But don't infringe on other's rights to expression. Yes, much of what spammers do is illegal - but every single spam is sent representing someone who wants money. No spammers are going to send out 100,000 emails hyping penis enlargment pills out of the goodness of their hearts. So hold the people making the money responsible for the actions of the people they contract to represent them, and you got it nailed. Meanwhle, any ISP gateway that decides to take on responsibilities that should be left to its customers should well be prosecuted when they fail in those responsibilities - ie when my eight year old gets porn spam in her mailbox, someone's heads should hit the basket at my ISP. It's a precedent that hasn't yet been set, but damn well should be; ISPs have no business taking upon themselves the role of censor.
I wonder how the people on AT&T's ISP networks are going to feel about not being able to communicate with mom and dad in Singapore? And all those folks (or those few folks, I suppose, depending on who you hang with) running personal SMTP services from their homes for the added privacy it buys them.
Yes, there's a lot of trash spam out there. It's NOT impossible to stop, but solutions like this one are not going to substantially help. If AT&T closes off its mail network to the world outside, those broadband customers running open proxies just become that much more valuable - then ATs own customers become the conduit of the spam they are trying to squash. There are thousands of "questionable" usenet posts that originate from roadrunner and AT&T and pacbell and earthlink usenet servers that are proxied there through their own broadband customers. Even locking those customers down to port 80 access won't stop trojans and backdoors, so logically I guess this is just the first step to AT&T closing off its network from the internet entirely?
Maybe they'll just firewall all their customers in and dish out the DMCA approved web pages through proxy farms... that'll teach those evil spammers!