How can you possibly assume there will be no protection of the stream? I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that Tivo is going to try its best to encrypt the movie stream and you will probably have to hack your Tivo to be able to offload the movie off your Tivo and decrypt it.
And I would say that it is much harder to hack a Series 2 Tivo than it is to decrypt a stream on a DVD. DeCSS has been around for years, printed on t-shirts, and implemented in perl in a few lines of code. Series 2 Tivo's employ digital private/public key technology to make sure that the signed kernel isn't changed and that you can't install your own software. Also, they have announced plans for the new TivoToGo feature to allow you to export shows to your PC only by using a USB flash memory device with a private key on it. You know they are going to be at least as paranoid about not pissing off the MPAA with this feature.
About storage size, most Tivos these days have 60 or 80 GB of storage. That is plenty of room to store several movies. I'm sure you could fit a handful of movies even on a 40GB Tivo. Plus, this is Netflix, the DVD *rental* store. You are only expected to have 3 or 4 movies at one given time. This isn't about archiving movies forever. If you want to keep a movie, you buy the DVD for $20.
The time it takes to download a movie and the bandwidth it will take for Tivo and/or Netflix to provide movies to millions of people over the internet is a valid one. But these are real companies with real money to purchase large amounts of bandwidth. As long as you aren't on dialup, they will probably be able to deliver you a movie faster than the USPS can do it. And even if does take longer, at least you are still guaranteed to get the movie you want because there isn't a limit on the number of copies of a given movie.
Also something not mentioned in the article that could potentially change the meaning of the numbers drastically: what is the definition of a server to them?
They said they studied hacks on servers. Is that just a term to describe any computer running any software considered to be a server (web server, ftp server, etc.) or what most of us would consider a server: a computer that isn't used as a desktop, one that serves out much more data than it ever takes in, and one that is probably in a rack mount case sitting in some colo rather than on someone's desktop?
Because if they use the latter definition, then you have to consider the fact that more servers in the that sense of the word are running some form of UNIX/BSD/Linux, followed by Windows, and followed very far behind by Macs. It has been only very recently that Apple has tried to sell Macs as "servers".
So combine the fact that probably 5% of true servers out there are Macs and the fact that you point out, that they are listing raw numbers of successful attacks instead of as a proportion, and I could claim that Commodore 64's are the most secure servers because 0 out of the 0 Commodore 64 servers in the world have been hacked.
Now perhaps the brevity of the article is to blame and if we were to see the actual study, these things would be more clearly defined, who knows? Needless to say, the article is practially useless.
You can purchase a DirecTV/Tivo combo (now known as the DirecTV DVR powered by Tivo) for $99. I think that requires a year commitment to DirecTV, which means you need to have a view of the southern sky and the ability to install a dish where you live (assuming you don't already have DirecTV), but it is $99 well spent. It would be worth it at 5 times the cost. You will even get use out of it as well.
You can buy directly from DirecTV online or you can probably pick one up at your local Circuit City/Best Buy, etc.
Bruce and the director did a Q&A at the end of the Bubba Hotep showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, too. Two of the most memorable moments where when:
1) Someone asked him if he was going to do Evil Dead 4, and he replied, "Well, let's see, Sam Raimi can either do Evil Dead 4 or Spiderman 2....Hmmmm.. which one do you think he'll do?"
2) Some jackass asked Bruce if he could call his friend who declined to come to the screening and tell him how he missed out. Said jackass handed his cell phone to Bruce who galdly agreed to the stunt. When jackass' friend answered Bruce said "Hi, would you be interested in more life insurance?" and then turned to jackass and said, "Oh, he hung up, sorry!" and handed the phone back.
He is definitely a funny guy in person and his humor comes across in his roles.
I have to agree that I think the price is a little high, especially when compared to a laptop computer. Let's hope that you can buy this thing for quite a bit less than retail when it's in stores. But if you compare it to an IPod which retails for $399 for 15GB, $499 for 30 GB, it's not that much more for a device that superceeds the IPod with the ability to view videos and pictures (on its tiny screen AND on an external TV).
As far as ripping to DivX, it has an add-on that will do the ripping for you basically. You just plug your DVD player, Tivo, etc. S-Video and audio out into this add-on, hit play and record straight onto the device. That's a pretty cool feature for the non-techie folks. In fact, it's cool for techie folks, too, since ripping to DivX even on a fast computer probably is going to be slower than real-time. Of course this add-on probably costs even more money.
Anyway, it seems like a cool device, but it probably won't catch on until the Apple IPod w/ video is released which looks slicker and comes with better support and still costs an arm and a leg.:-)
Actually the caller-id pins from the modem aren't connected in the Series 1 standalone Tivos (the Tivo most people have). It would actually take some soldering to get it to work for those models. It does work most of the time in most of the Series 1 DirecTivo models.
Also, the "slot" that is avaliable on Series 1's isn't really a slot. It's this male PCI-looking ISA connector on the corner of the motherboard used for testing. The fact that Tivo hackers got ethernet cards to work with that thing that actually fit inside the Tivos was truly a major hack and I have a feeling the people at Tivo were pretty surprised when that was unveiled.
Tivo did, however, encourage the ethernet hacks. In the case of the Turbonet card, they even invited the hacker who created it (Jafa) to Tivo HQ to make sure that a proper driver for the Turbonet card made it into the next Tivo software release.
Your point about Tivo supporting certain hacks while discouraging others is still valid, then. Personally, though, I would rather a company allow some hacking and not allow other hacking rather than trying to sue everyone who opened their boxes and tried to fiddle with them.
I don't know why Tivo is concerned with video extraction on the Standalone (normal) Tivos since the signal is being endoded digitally from an analog signal inside the Tivo. So it isn't a perfect digital copy and is exactly what you can do with a PC with a TV tuner/Video In/MPEG encoder card.
However, the DirecTivos (DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes) store the digital signal straight off the satellite. Therefore you are getting a high quality pure digital signal encoded for you by DirecTV and therefore I can see why DirecTV is concerned about it with respect to the DMCA.
The steps to extract video is almost exactly the same for both Tivos and DirecTivos, so you can't talk about doing it for one without pretty much telling you how to do it for the other. Therefore it is a forboden topic on the most popular Tivo hacking site www.tivocommunity.com and often someone asks why it is forbidden to talk about extraction there quite often. Bottom line is that the owners of that forum (AVS Forum) don't want to get in trouble so they don't allow it.
He might have been referring to the fact that the Series 1 DirecTivos started scrambling the video stream on disk starting with software version 2.5. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), the Series 1 Standalone's have never done any video scrambling. Therefore hacking a S1 DirecTivo is slightly more complicated than hacking a S1 Standalone by adding one step to the process.
Of course this scrambling is easy to turn off once the box is hacked, but it can leave you in a "bad" state where you have saved video that is scrambled and new video that isn't and you can only play one type at a time without leading/unloading a kernel module. So it can be a bit of a pain.
BTW, I love that DirecTivo onscreen caller-id, too.;-)
Actually you are wrong. There isn't an MPEG encoder in the box at all and there never was. So unless the 50MHz Power PC chip inside is doing 2-stream real-time MPEG-2 encoding, the DirecTivo is and always was just storing the MPEG-2 data straight off the satellite.
The only problem with your plan is the fact that your step #6 takes forever, even on fast, modern hardware. Takes way longer than realtime and frankly, realtime isn't fast enough. The "Tivo format" is basically MPEG-2 which can (after slight processing that takes ~5 minutes) be burned to DVD and played in most any modern DVD player.
Actually I quite enjoyed Jake's performances in both "Lovely and Amazing" and "The Good Girl" as eerily similar as the roles were. These were both very good independent movies. I also hear he did a great job in "Moonlight Mile" which I have yet to see. I would say that these were all "serious" roles, although maybe not in as widely popular and accepted movies as the Tobey movies you list. I don't think you can fault him for appearing in more independent films than major releases. You can fault him for "Bubble Boy", though.
New idea for industrious slashdotters
on
Prince of Pop-ups
·
· Score: 1
This gives me a good idea. We should all sit around and brainstorm the most annoying advertising schemes we can think of, then patent them, and then when people try to use them, we tell them they are violating our patent and make them stop. This we can shut down the next-generation annoying advertising scheme before they get popular. Brilliant.
If you read carefully you see that the source is the "Weekly World News." You know that trashy tabloid newspaper at the grocery store right next to the National Enquirer? If you saw this story on the front cover of the tabloid while picking up some Doritos, you would chuckle and move on. But in the world of the Internet, it's posted on Yahoo and looks just like every other Yahoo news article, except for the fact that it's on tv.yahoo.com instead of news.yahoo.com. Even Slashdot picks it up (in jest, right guys?) and it looks even more legit.
So it just goes to show you that on the Internet, you need to check the source of news a little more carefully since tabloid news can have the same exact "look" as the real news.
They are AOL and they own Time Warner Cable. This means that they could just build this technology into the next generation digital cable boxes. So if you subscribe to Time Warner Cable, you own (or rent) this box once it is released. If they can cut sweet deals with the networks and advertisers, it is possible that the cost for the end-user is $0.00. So the end user gets some Tivo-like features, such as the ability to rewind/pause live-tv, record programming that they are allowed to record, etc. all for free.
Then average Joe wonders why he would spend money out of his pocket buying another Tivo box. Chances are he wouldn't unless he really wants to skip commercials and program/keep any programs he wishes. AOL is probably betting that average Joe who thinks AOL is the Internet will take the TV-network-driven free PVR over paying for Tivo. If this strategy works, then Tivo is driven out of business.
Well yes, it is possible to use a credit card number that isn't yours to purchase items. The risk, though, is built into the cost of using the credit cards. And any decent credit card company will not make you pay for false charges. This is much of the reason it costs so much to use a credit card. This cost is usually eaten by the merchant, though, and the consumer rarely sees it.
There are new ways in place to make it a little more difficult for theives to make fradulaent purchases. Most places now make you give them the expiration date of the card and that is checked to be valid in real-time. Also, they can do real-time checks of the name of the card holder as well as the zip code. It's really up to the merchant as to how much risk they want to take. In fact, the merchant will usually get better rates if they implement these anti-fraud measures force the customer to give them their zip code or whatever.
The credit card system is vastly better than the check system as far as fraud goes. There exists a system called ACH (Automated Clearing House, I think) in which you only need the person's name, bank routing number, and bank account number, all of which are always printed right on the front of a personal check. And unlike a credit card that you only hand over temporarily to a merchant, you send checks to people all the time. There are a number of things you can buy online or mailorder using ACH (lots of bill-pay places, etc). Makes you think twice the next time you want to pay some stranger with a personal check.
Of course the irony being that Open Source is often described as "communist" because it's by the people based on mutual cooperation, for the good of the people, often not for profit, etc. But here you aren't tracking down communists, as McCarthy was, you would be tracking down people violating this "communist" way of doing things.
I have to disagree with one thing you said. I think "Homer's Phobia" is in my Simpson's top-5 all-time list. It's funny from start to finish (ok, the reindeer part sort of drags), has some classic lines, and was one of the first Simpson's episodes that handled a somewhat controversial real-world subject so frankly (homophobia). That episode is worth it just for the gay steel mill.
"Hot stuff coming through!" "We work hard, and we play hard." [cue C&C Music Factory as the steel mill turns into a gay dance club]
and of course Homer's classic line to Bart:
"He didn't give you gay did he?"
I regret that they didn't mention one of my other all-time favorites, "In Marge We Trust". It's the one where Homer finds the box of Mr. Sparkle dishwashing detergent:
Mr. Sparkle: I'm disrespectful to dirt. Can you see that I am serious? Out of my way, all of you. This is no place for loafers! Join me or die! Can you do any less?
I think worst episode ever goes to the one with Mel Gibson. That episode is just painful to watch. The same goes for most Simpsons episodes with celebrities who play themselves.
At a minimum laptops should forgo the legacy ports. They're just not necessary.
I can't count the number of times I've used the serial port on my laptop. If you have machines with serial console, that's the best/easiest way to connect to them. Bring your laptop over to dead machine, plug in serial cable from laptop to dead machine, poke around to see what the problem is. I don't think I could buy a laptop without a serial cable. I could live without a parallel port, though.
Re:I don't know what's scarier...
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually I find it interesting that in this case that they went to some trouble to air this song that they didn't expect to be on the Top 10. All of their stations use pre-defined playlists anyway, so you would just expect the Top 10 to come straight from that. If some listeners actually attempt to call-in to get some song not on the playlist onto the Top 10, I would have just expected them to silently ignore their request, given their track record and motives.
Are the listeners really going to find out what happened? Especially if they are already swallowing the crap that Clear Channel is sending down their throats. If those listeners actually tried to make a stink about it, they could just claim that it was obvious that someone was "stuffing the ballot boxes" or something like that.
It's obvious that Clear Channel is not in the business of pleasing the masses, just focusing on making money.
Ok, calm down Mr. Huffy. Do you have a link to said article? I have yet to find one that didn't say anything more than "BofA's ATM network was affected, people were unable to withdraw money, now it's fixed."
I didn't imply that it was hitting the terminals or not, front end or back end. I am theorizing that they are using a private network (like frame relay or ATM (the other kind of ATM) ) that's not connected to the Internet in any way, but shares bandwidth with other Internet-connected machines that were over-utilizing the network with Slammer. This theory seems to go with what you are saying was stated in some article. I would like to read this article if you have a URL. Thanks.
I agree that I would like to know how/why it shut down Bank of America's ATMs. I really _hope_ that it doesn't mean that the ATMs are connected to the public Internet. My guess is that they are on some private frame relay network (which shares bandwidth with Internet frame relay connections) and that the frame relay network was hosed for a while while Slammer propogated.
As a Bank of America customer, I would sure like to read an offical response by the company.
An album would be around 80MB as a 128kbps MP3. If you follow the NAS-2.3 link, you will find that it also plays uncompressed PCM format music. That's going to be more like 500-600MB per album. So if you redo your math:
80 gigs @ 600MB/album = 133 albums * $20 = $2666.
I would say that a lot of people I know own over 100 albums easily. Not to mention people with roomates combining their collection, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you possibly assume there will be no protection of the stream? I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that Tivo is going to try its best to encrypt the movie stream and you will probably have to hack your Tivo to be able to offload the movie off your Tivo and decrypt it.
And I would say that it is much harder to hack a Series 2 Tivo than it is to decrypt a stream on a DVD. DeCSS has been around for years, printed on t-shirts, and implemented in perl in a few lines of code. Series 2 Tivo's employ digital private/public key technology to make sure that the signed kernel isn't changed and that you can't install your own software. Also, they have announced plans for the new TivoToGo feature to allow you to export shows to your PC only by using a USB flash memory device with a private key on it. You know they are going to be at least as paranoid about not pissing off the MPAA with this feature.
About storage size, most Tivos these days have 60 or 80 GB of storage. That is plenty of room to store several movies. I'm sure you could fit a handful of movies even on a 40GB Tivo. Plus, this is Netflix, the DVD *rental* store. You are only expected to have 3 or 4 movies at one given time. This isn't about archiving movies forever. If you want to keep a movie, you buy the DVD for $20.
The time it takes to download a movie and the bandwidth it will take for Tivo and/or Netflix to provide movies to millions of people over the internet is a valid one. But these are real companies with real money to purchase large amounts of bandwidth. As long as you aren't on dialup, they will probably be able to deliver you a movie faster than the USPS can do it. And even if does take longer, at least you are still guaranteed to get the movie you want because there isn't a limit on the number of copies of a given movie.
Oops that's supposed to say <5%, not 5%. Darn HTML.
Also something not mentioned in the article that could potentially change the meaning of the numbers drastically: what is the definition of a server to them?
They said they studied hacks on servers. Is that just a term to describe any computer running any software considered to be a server (web server, ftp server, etc.) or what most of us would consider a server: a computer that isn't used as a desktop, one that serves out much more data than it ever takes in, and one that is probably in a rack mount case sitting in some colo rather than on someone's desktop?
Because if they use the latter definition, then you have to consider the fact that more servers in the that sense of the word are running some form of UNIX/BSD/Linux, followed by Windows, and followed very far behind by Macs. It has been only very recently that Apple has tried to sell Macs as "servers".
So combine the fact that probably 5% of true servers out there are Macs and the fact that you point out, that they are listing raw numbers of successful attacks instead of as a proportion, and I could claim that Commodore 64's are the most secure servers because 0 out of the 0 Commodore 64 servers in the world have been hacked.
Now perhaps the brevity of the article is to blame and if we were to see the actual study, these things would be more clearly defined, who knows? Needless to say, the article is practially useless.
You can purchase a DirecTV/Tivo combo (now known as the DirecTV DVR powered by Tivo) for $99. I think that requires a year commitment to DirecTV, which means you need to have a view of the southern sky and the ability to install a dish where you live (assuming you don't already have DirecTV), but it is $99 well spent. It would be worth it at 5 times the cost. You will even get use out of it as well.
You can buy directly from DirecTV online or you can probably pick one up at your local Circuit City/Best Buy, etc.
Bruce and the director did a Q&A at the end of the Bubba Hotep showing at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, too. Two of the most memorable moments where when:
1) Someone asked him if he was going to do Evil Dead 4, and he replied, "Well, let's see, Sam Raimi can either do Evil Dead 4 or Spiderman 2....Hmmmm.. which one do you think he'll do?"
2) Some jackass asked Bruce if he could call his friend who declined to come to the screening and tell him how he missed out. Said jackass handed his cell phone to Bruce who galdly agreed to the stunt. When jackass' friend answered Bruce said "Hi, would you be interested in more life insurance?" and then turned to jackass and said, "Oh, he hung up, sorry!" and handed the phone back.
He is definitely a funny guy in person and his humor comes across in his roles.
What can MS do to usenet? What about:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this usenet posting in order to have your advice.
See you later. Thanks.
I have to agree that I think the price is a little high, especially when compared to a laptop computer. Let's hope that you can buy this thing for quite a bit less than retail when it's in stores. But if you compare it to an IPod which retails for $399 for 15GB, $499 for 30 GB, it's not that much more for a device that superceeds the IPod with the ability to view videos and pictures (on its tiny screen AND on an external TV).
:-)
As far as ripping to DivX, it has an add-on that will do the ripping for you basically. You just plug your DVD player, Tivo, etc. S-Video and audio out into this add-on, hit play and record straight onto the device. That's a pretty cool feature for the non-techie folks. In fact, it's cool for techie folks, too, since ripping to DivX even on a fast computer probably is going to be slower than real-time. Of course this add-on probably costs even more money.
Anyway, it seems like a cool device, but it probably won't catch on until the Apple IPod w/ video is released which looks slicker and comes with better support and still costs an arm and a leg.
Actually the caller-id pins from the modem aren't connected in the Series 1 standalone Tivos (the Tivo most people have). It would actually take some soldering to get it to work for those models. It does work most of the time in most of the Series 1 DirecTivo models.
Also, the "slot" that is avaliable on Series 1's isn't really a slot. It's this male PCI-looking ISA connector on the corner of the motherboard used for testing. The fact that Tivo hackers got ethernet cards to work with that thing that actually fit inside the Tivos was truly a major hack and I have a feeling the people at Tivo were pretty surprised when that was unveiled.
Tivo did, however, encourage the ethernet hacks. In the case of the Turbonet card, they even invited the hacker who created it (Jafa) to Tivo HQ to make sure that a proper driver for the Turbonet card made it into the next Tivo software release.
Your point about Tivo supporting certain hacks while discouraging others is still valid, then. Personally, though, I would rather a company allow some hacking and not allow other hacking rather than trying to sue everyone who opened their boxes and tried to fiddle with them.
I don't know why Tivo is concerned with video extraction on the Standalone (normal) Tivos since the signal is being endoded digitally from an analog signal inside the Tivo. So it isn't a perfect digital copy and is exactly what you can do with a PC with a TV tuner/Video In/MPEG encoder card.
However, the DirecTivos (DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes) store the digital signal straight off the satellite. Therefore you are getting a high quality pure digital signal encoded for you by DirecTV and therefore I can see why DirecTV is concerned about it with respect to the DMCA.
The steps to extract video is almost exactly the same for both Tivos and DirecTivos, so you can't talk about doing it for one without pretty much telling you how to do it for the other. Therefore it is a forboden topic on the most popular Tivo hacking site www.tivocommunity.com and often someone asks why it is forbidden to talk about extraction there quite often. Bottom line is that the owners of that forum (AVS Forum) don't want to get in trouble so they don't allow it.
He might have been referring to the fact that the Series 1 DirecTivos started scrambling the video stream on disk starting with software version 2.5. As far as I know (and I could be wrong), the Series 1 Standalone's have never done any video scrambling. Therefore hacking a S1 DirecTivo is slightly more complicated than hacking a S1 Standalone by adding one step to the process.
;-)
Of course this scrambling is easy to turn off once the box is hacked, but it can leave you in a "bad" state where you have saved video that is scrambled and new video that isn't and you can only play one type at a time without leading/unloading a kernel module. So it can be a bit of a pain.
BTW, I love that DirecTivo onscreen caller-id, too.
Actually you are wrong. There isn't an MPEG encoder in the box at all and there never was. So unless the 50MHz Power PC chip inside is doing 2-stream real-time MPEG-2 encoding, the DirecTivo is and always was just storing the MPEG-2 data straight off the satellite.
The only problem with your plan is the fact that your step #6 takes forever, even on fast, modern hardware. Takes way longer than realtime and frankly, realtime isn't fast enough. The "Tivo format" is basically MPEG-2 which can (after slight processing that takes ~5 minutes) be burned to DVD and played in most any modern DVD player.
Actually I quite enjoyed Jake's performances in both "Lovely and Amazing" and "The Good Girl" as eerily similar as the roles were. These were both very good independent movies. I also hear he did a great job in "Moonlight Mile" which I have yet to see. I would say that these were all "serious" roles, although maybe not in as widely popular and accepted movies as the Tobey movies you list. I don't think you can fault him for appearing in more independent films than major releases. You can fault him for "Bubble Boy", though.
This gives me a good idea. We should all sit around and brainstorm the most annoying advertising schemes we can think of, then patent them, and then when people try to use them, we tell them they are violating our patent and make them stop. This we can shut down the next-generation annoying advertising scheme before they get popular. Brilliant.
If you read carefully you see that the source is the "Weekly World News." You know that trashy tabloid newspaper at the grocery store right next to the National Enquirer? If you saw this story on the front cover of the tabloid while picking up some Doritos, you would chuckle and move on. But in the world of the Internet, it's posted on Yahoo and looks just like every other Yahoo news article, except for the fact that it's on tv.yahoo.com instead of news.yahoo.com. Even Slashdot picks it up (in jest, right guys?) and it looks even more legit.
So it just goes to show you that on the Internet, you need to check the source of news a little more carefully since tabloid news can have the same exact "look" as the real news.
Don't waste your time TCP dumping. Todd Larason already documented pretty much every protocol the ReplayTV 4xxx series uses in great detail here
They are AOL and they own Time Warner Cable. This means that they could just build this technology into the next generation digital cable boxes. So if you subscribe to Time Warner Cable, you own (or rent) this box once it is released. If they can cut sweet deals with the networks and advertisers, it is possible that the cost for the end-user is $0.00. So the end user gets some Tivo-like features, such as the ability to rewind/pause live-tv, record programming that they are allowed to record, etc. all for free.
Then average Joe wonders why he would spend money out of his pocket buying another Tivo box. Chances are he wouldn't unless he really wants to skip commercials and program/keep any programs he wishes. AOL is probably betting that average Joe who thinks AOL is the Internet will take the TV-network-driven free PVR over paying for Tivo.
If this strategy works, then Tivo is driven out of business.
Well yes, it is possible to use a credit card number that isn't yours to purchase items. The risk, though, is built into the cost of using the credit cards. And any decent credit card company will not make you pay for false charges. This is much of the reason it costs so much to use a credit card. This cost is usually eaten by the merchant, though, and the consumer rarely sees it.
There are new ways in place to make it a little more difficult for theives to make fradulaent purchases. Most places now make you give them the expiration date of the card and that is checked to be valid in real-time. Also, they can do real-time checks of the name of the card holder as well as the zip code. It's really up to the merchant as to how much risk they want to take. In fact, the merchant will usually get better rates if they implement these anti-fraud measures force the customer to give them their zip code or whatever.
The credit card system is vastly better than the check system as far as fraud goes. There exists a system called ACH (Automated Clearing House, I think) in which you only need the person's name, bank routing number, and bank account number, all of which are always printed right on the front of a personal check. And unlike a credit card that you only hand over temporarily to a merchant, you send checks to people all the time. There are a number of things you can buy online or mailorder using ACH (lots of bill-pay places, etc). Makes you think twice the next time you want to pay some stranger with a personal check.
Of course the irony being that Open Source is often described as "communist" because it's by the people based on mutual cooperation, for the good of the people, often not for profit, etc. But here you aren't tracking down communists, as McCarthy was, you would be tracking down people violating this "communist" way of doing things.
I have to disagree with one thing you said. I think "Homer's Phobia" is in my Simpson's top-5 all-time list. It's funny from start to finish (ok, the reindeer part sort of drags), has some classic lines, and was one of the first Simpson's episodes that handled a somewhat controversial real-world subject so frankly (homophobia). That episode is worth it just for the gay steel mill.
"Hot stuff coming through!"
"We work hard, and we play hard." [cue C&C Music Factory as the steel mill turns into a gay dance club]
and of course Homer's classic line to Bart:
"He didn't give you gay did he?"
I regret that they didn't mention one of my other all-time favorites, "In Marge We Trust". It's the one where Homer finds the box of Mr. Sparkle dishwashing detergent:
Mr. Sparkle: I'm disrespectful to dirt. Can you see that I am serious? Out of my way, all of you. This is no place for loafers! Join me or die! Can you do any less?
I think worst episode ever goes to the one with Mel Gibson. That episode is just painful to watch. The same goes for most Simpsons episodes with celebrities who play themselves.
At a minimum laptops should forgo the legacy ports. They're just not necessary.
I can't count the number of times I've used the serial port on my laptop. If you have machines with serial console, that's the best/easiest way to connect to them. Bring your laptop over to dead machine, plug in serial cable from laptop to dead machine, poke around to see what the problem is. I don't think I could buy a laptop without a serial cable. I could live without a parallel port, though.
Actually I find it interesting that in this case that they went to some trouble to air this song that they didn't expect to be on the Top 10. All of their stations use pre-defined playlists anyway, so you would just expect the Top 10 to come straight from that. If some listeners actually attempt to call-in to get some song not on the playlist onto the Top 10, I would have just expected them to silently ignore their request, given their track record and motives.
Are the listeners really going to find out what happened? Especially if they are already swallowing the crap that Clear Channel is sending down their throats. If those listeners actually tried to make a stink about it, they could just claim that it was obvious that someone was "stuffing the ballot boxes" or something like that.
It's obvious that Clear Channel is not in the business of pleasing the masses, just focusing on making money.
Ok, calm down Mr. Huffy. Do you have a link to said article? I have yet to find one that didn't say anything more than "BofA's ATM network was affected, people were unable to withdraw money, now it's fixed."
I didn't imply that it was hitting the terminals or not, front end or back end. I am theorizing that they are using a private network (like frame relay or ATM (the other kind of ATM) ) that's not connected to the Internet in any way, but shares bandwidth with other Internet-connected machines that were over-utilizing the network with Slammer. This theory seems to go with what you are saying was stated in some article. I would like to read this article if you have a URL. Thanks.
I agree that I would like to know how/why it shut down Bank of America's ATMs. I really _hope_ that it doesn't mean that the ATMs are connected to the public Internet. My guess is that they are on some private frame relay network (which shares bandwidth with Internet frame relay connections) and that the frame relay network was hosed for a while while Slammer propogated.
As a Bank of America customer, I would sure like to read an offical response by the company.
An album would be around 80MB as a 128kbps MP3. If you follow the NAS-2.3 link, you will find that it also plays uncompressed PCM format music. That's going to be more like 500-600MB per album. So if you redo your math:
80 gigs @ 600MB/album = 133 albums * $20 = $2666.
I would say that a lot of people I know own over 100 albums easily. Not to mention people with roomates combining their collection, etc.