...if you have the moral latitude to embrace them. During the early 90's I acquired, thru no fault of my own, a bad credit history. I wasn't in debt and never had been, but despite seeing my wages increase more than six fold over the next decade I couldn't even get a standard credit card, let alone anything more ambitious. So when I was forced to move I closed all my accounts and "forgot" to leave a forwarding address. Now I'm unemployed and living in a small rented flat my credit history has been left behind. Accounts and plastic once denied me are now mine for the asking. Then there's the black economy, a little buying and selling turns a nice profit. A card in the supermarket bulletin board gets me casual work repairing PCs, tuition, Internet advice and even some web design. My DSL connection along with my provider's free web space is enough to run a website that also generates income. Every penny earned is a penny in my pocket. I don't feel guilty about not paying tax, if The Man doesn't want me at his party then I'm not gonna pay to try and get in. I've paid enough over the years. The best bit though is that I've fallen off the radar as far as Big Brother is concerned. I still get unemployment even though I've conveniently forgotten my National Insurance number. I feel like I've been reborn sometimes. I'm 36 with little formal education so my days in the mainstream IT industry are almost certainly over. But I'm not a wage slave anymore. No more crushing onto packed and overheated Tube trains, no more games of pedestrian roulette with London's drivers and couriers. No more rushed lunches (my ulcer hasn't kicked in for over a year!), no more general crap of inner-city life. No more stress. I used to say "I work to live, not the other way around" an attitude that didn't sit well with most managers, but since being unemployed I've found I've actually acquired a life. It's much simpler than the old one, not as fancy, but much more enjoyable.
In the UK, government and industry watchdogs have actually issued a warning that large parts of the UK could face sustained power shortages this winter. As the various regional grids and producers were privatised they downsized, to a hideous extent. The old-style (and much missed) nationalised electricity boards had to keep a certain amount of spare capacity online as well as having mechanisms in place for neighbouring regions to help each other out. Those extra stations have been closed down to keep the shareholders happy and now they're all in competition with each other there's rock all cooperation between them. The UK is running within a fraction of it's total capacity now. When it was nationalised we had a robust and fault tolerant system (unions notwithstanding), now we have a house of cards. It's the same across most of the western world. How's your retirement fund doing ??
Here in the UK an increasing number of broadband ISPs are doing this already. They started a couple of years ago blocking inbound SMTP. I run my own mailserver and virtually had to promise the life of my unborn child to get it unblocked.
But here's the kicker. Looking for a new ISP I found several that block inbound SMTP to all their DHCP customers, if you want it unblocked you have to get a static IP account for which they charge an extra 5 per month (+tax).
The funny thing is we'll probably get some ISPs charging extra for their "Premium Protected" rate service while others will charge more for "Unrestricted Access" accounts.
There's a shedload of reasons mostly to do with resources and military advantage. Raw materials can be extracted and processed on a scale we can't imagine yet, imagine an area the size of Manhatten Island as one huge mining / refining plant chugging away 24/7 with no impact on Earth's environment. Electricity could be generated on an unimaginable scale, again little or no impact to our biosphere.
The military advantages are truly scary though. Whoever holds the high ground, especially in the Earth-Moon system effectively rules the world. All they have to do is throw a rock in your direction. A very big rock from a very high place. By the time it hit the Earth's surface it would've picked up a huge kinetic energy payload. Depending on the size of the rock we could be talking hundreds of megatonnes explosive yield. With no ABC fallout or legacy except for a bloody big smoking hole in the ground. If Bush had a weapon like that do you think he'd hesitate to use it ? The only delay would be while he decided which small country to splat first, a few seconds might be added if he tried to pronounce it's name.
No pilot in his right mind will fly with a system like this unless it has an OFF switch.
In-flight emergencies, landing in adverse conditions, aborting a takeoff. These are all things pilots have to contend with that this system could very well prevent them from doing so. If the pilot can find the OFF switch then so can the hijackers. Even if it was protected with biometrics they can be fooled and a kamikaze hijacker prolly won't have many qualms about severing a finger or plucking out an eyeball.
Pilots will insist, rightly so, on manual override. To coin a phrase, this idea just won't fly.
If mine own foggy memory serves... OS/2 was a collaboration between IBM and M$, I'm pretty sure I remember His Borgness talking it up big time at a convention in 1989, "OS/2 is THE future." Then Big Blue hit financial troubles, M$ pulled out of the project and nicked most of the code to form the basis of NT. Does this guy have no shame ?? Ahhh, I'm kidding myself, it was surgically removed shortly after they germinated him.
I've worked in the UK IT sector for 14 years and I can tell you it's about the management running scared. Not scared of OpenSource but fear of their peers and colleagues. The whole business world has very cut throat since the days of Thatcher, it's very dog eat dog, so lower management and above spend most of their time covering their arses. It's inevitable something will go bang at some point their main concern is to make sure they're not in the firing line. So from this culture of fear in the business community everyone needs SLAs, guarantees etc, basically someone lower on the food chain they can point to when the crapola hits the fan. To think that pundits wonder why British industry has been in decline for decades....ah well.
...the case that the labels will start to realise most artists can only put three or four decent tracks on an album and the rest is filler material ? I know I know, there's exceptions to this, but let's face it, 90% of the stuff churned out by today's manufactured bands is crap. I think it's more a case of the artists running scared that instead of signing a mega-bucks 3 album deal, which is gonna be mostly them treading water in the studio, it might set a precendent where they get paid purely by commission on how popular individual songs are. Hey who knows, the Top 40 might have relevance again!
The only way we'll stop spam, and kiddie pr0n and all the other crap that pollutes the net is if we start imposing national laws on our own locales of the net.
This might be easier than you'd imagine. Most nations have only a very few choke points that connects them to the rest of the world. China's already gone a long way towards this (hey I don't like their politics but you gotta admit they've been pretty effective). ISTR Hong Kong was completely isolated from the 'net for a while, around about the time of the Chinese takeover, all 'net connections were severed on a New Years Eve while the authorities cracked down on warez and virus merchants.
Obviously the US and (to an extent) Canada are different cases. It'd be next to impossible for these countries to cut themselves off from the rest of the world, but then I don't think they'd want to. The 'net is a great asset to merkin commercialism and most spam these days can trace its origins back to North America. So I think we'll see nation states controlling what crosses their borders.
Under EU law you're not allowed to use your handset while driving anyway, so follow the law and switch it off and you'll find your problems, this one at least, have magically gone away.
I can't see much wrong with this "offensive" patent blocking at least when it's being done by individuals or small companies.
We all get great ideas sometimes, but how many of us have the resources to follow them through ?
Most of the article was heavily biased against the lone inventor it did all but call them anti-american anarchists. Their analogy is arse over tit, it's more comparable to the land rush in the American west. Anyone can in theory can stake a claim and if you're very lucky you've pitched your tent over an oilfield. No inventor in their right mind would sit on a patent forever without allowing it to be developed, that's just plain perverse but it seems to be okay for big business to do exactly that.
There's nothing wrong with this practice it's one of the few areas where Joe Public still has some leverage over faceless mega-corporations. Right and wrong rarely matter in the courts these days, it's simply who's got more money to throw at the lawyers, it's nice to see the little guy with a chance for a change.
I noticed this renaming to "Freedom" fries when I was in the states a couple of months ago.
Nobody seemed to mind they were still using the word "menu" though...
We're in that situation now in the UK. Our govt. is committed to switching off the analogue TV transmissions ASAP.
They have a provisional date of 2010, last time I checked, they keep moving the goalposts on this one.
Instead we have Digital Terrestrial TV. More channels (mostly trying to sell you something) as well as the existing ones. But it's crap:(
Most of the signals are too compressed, these are MPEG streams we receive, and artifacts are all over the shop especially when watching sports.
The sound quality is worse than the previous standard of Nicam Stereo too. But we're told this is good for us and the UK electorate doesn't have any influence over our current administration.
AFAIR they want 95%+ of the population to be able to receive DTT before they switch off the analogue signals. Apart from glib statements along the lines of "freeing up a large chunk of the spectrum" there's been no concrete plans as to what they intend to do with it.
Prolly auction it off and make a bundle like they did with 3G. How we laughed at that one!
Slashdot Mirror
...if you have the moral latitude to embrace them.
During the early 90's I acquired, thru no fault of my own, a bad credit history. I wasn't in debt and never had been, but despite seeing my wages increase more than six fold over the next decade I couldn't even get a standard credit card, let alone anything more ambitious.
So when I was forced to move I closed all my accounts and "forgot" to leave a forwarding address.
Now I'm unemployed and living in a small rented flat my credit history has been left behind. Accounts and plastic once denied me are now mine for the asking.
Then there's the black economy, a little buying and selling turns a nice profit. A card in the supermarket bulletin board gets me casual work repairing PCs, tuition, Internet advice and even some web design.
My DSL connection along with my provider's free web space is enough to run a website that also generates income.
Every penny earned is a penny in my pocket. I don't feel guilty about not paying tax, if The Man doesn't want me at his party then I'm not gonna pay to try and get in. I've paid enough over the years.
The best bit though is that I've fallen off the radar as far as Big Brother is concerned. I still get unemployment even though I've conveniently forgotten my National Insurance number. I feel like I've been reborn sometimes.
I'm 36 with little formal education so my days in the mainstream IT industry are almost certainly over. But I'm not a wage slave anymore. No more crushing onto packed and overheated Tube trains, no more games of pedestrian roulette with London's drivers and couriers. No more rushed lunches (my ulcer hasn't kicked in for over a year!), no more general crap of inner-city life. No more stress. I used to say "I work to live, not the other way around" an attitude that didn't sit well with most managers, but since being unemployed I've found I've actually acquired a life. It's much simpler than the old one, not as fancy, but much more enjoyable.
In the UK, government and industry watchdogs have actually issued a warning that large parts of the UK could face sustained power shortages this winter.
As the various regional grids and producers were privatised they downsized, to a hideous extent. The old-style (and much missed) nationalised electricity boards had to keep a certain amount of spare capacity online as well as having mechanisms in place for neighbouring regions to help each other out.
Those extra stations have been closed down to keep the shareholders happy and now they're all in competition with each other there's rock all cooperation between them.
The UK is running within a fraction of it's total capacity now. When it was nationalised we had a robust and fault tolerant system (unions notwithstanding), now we have a house of cards.
It's the same across most of the western world. How's your retirement fund doing ??
Here in the UK an increasing number of broadband ISPs are doing this already. They started a couple of years ago blocking inbound SMTP.
I run my own mailserver and virtually had to promise the life of my unborn child to get it unblocked.
But here's the kicker. Looking for a new ISP I found several that block inbound SMTP to all their DHCP customers, if you want it unblocked you have to get a static IP account for which they charge an extra 5 per month (+tax).
The funny thing is we'll probably get some ISPs charging extra for their "Premium Protected" rate service while others will charge more for "Unrestricted Access" accounts.
Lemme see now....
The SW Kid is French Canadian, and in EpIII the Jedi lose horribly...
There's a shedload of reasons mostly to do with resources and military advantage.
Raw materials can be extracted and processed on a scale we can't imagine yet, imagine an area the size of Manhatten Island as one huge mining / refining plant chugging away 24/7 with no impact on Earth's environment.
Electricity could be generated on an unimaginable scale, again little or no impact to our biosphere.
The military advantages are truly scary though. Whoever holds the high ground, especially in the Earth-Moon system effectively rules the world. All they have to do is throw a rock in your direction. A very big rock from a very high place. By the time it hit the Earth's surface it would've picked up a huge kinetic energy payload. Depending on the size of the rock we could be talking hundreds of megatonnes explosive yield. With no ABC fallout or legacy except for a bloody big smoking hole in the ground.
If Bush had a weapon like that do you think he'd hesitate to use it ? The only delay would be while he decided which small country to splat first, a few seconds might be added if he tried to pronounce it's name.
The first rounds have been fired in the often talked about cyber wars methinks.
Can someone upload these to Kazaa pls ? TIA
No pilot in his right mind will fly with a system like this unless it has an OFF switch.
In-flight emergencies, landing in adverse conditions, aborting a takeoff. These are all things pilots have to contend with that this system could very well prevent them from doing so.
If the pilot can find the OFF switch then so can the hijackers. Even if it was protected with biometrics they can be fooled and a kamikaze hijacker prolly won't have many qualms about severing a finger or plucking out an eyeball.
Pilots will insist, rightly so, on manual override. To coin a phrase, this idea just won't fly.
If mine own foggy memory serves... OS/2 was a collaboration between IBM and M$, I'm pretty sure I remember His Borgness talking it up big time at a convention in 1989, "OS/2 is THE future." Then Big Blue hit financial troubles, M$ pulled out of the project and nicked most of the code to form the basis of NT. Does this guy have no shame ?? Ahhh, I'm kidding myself, it was surgically removed shortly after they germinated him.
You guys invented it, welcome to the real world
I've worked in the UK IT sector for 14 years and I can tell you it's about the management running scared. Not scared of OpenSource but fear of their peers and colleagues. The whole business world has very cut throat since the days of Thatcher, it's very dog eat dog, so lower management and above spend most of their time covering their arses. It's inevitable something will go bang at some point their main concern is to make sure they're not in the firing line. So from this culture of fear in the business community everyone needs SLAs, guarantees etc, basically someone lower on the food chain they can point to when the crapola hits the fan. To think that pundits wonder why British industry has been in decline for decades....ah well.
I just have this vision of an arrest suspect who's AOL branded phone browser starts to chirrup; "You've got bail! You've got bail!"
...the case that the labels will start to realise most artists can only put three or four decent tracks on an album and the rest is filler material ? I know I know, there's exceptions to this, but let's face it, 90% of the stuff churned out by today's manufactured bands is crap. I think it's more a case of the artists running scared that instead of signing a mega-bucks 3 album deal, which is gonna be mostly them treading water in the studio, it might set a precendent where they get paid purely by commission on how popular individual songs are. Hey who knows, the Top 40 might have relevance again!
The only way we'll stop spam, and kiddie pr0n and all the other crap that pollutes the net is if we start imposing national laws on our own locales of the net. This might be easier than you'd imagine. Most nations have only a very few choke points that connects them to the rest of the world. China's already gone a long way towards this (hey I don't like their politics but you gotta admit they've been pretty effective). ISTR Hong Kong was completely isolated from the 'net for a while, around about the time of the Chinese takeover, all 'net connections were severed on a New Years Eve while the authorities cracked down on warez and virus merchants. Obviously the US and (to an extent) Canada are different cases. It'd be next to impossible for these countries to cut themselves off from the rest of the world, but then I don't think they'd want to. The 'net is a great asset to merkin commercialism and most spam these days can trace its origins back to North America. So I think we'll see nation states controlling what crosses their borders.
Under EU law you're not allowed to use your handset while driving anyway, so follow the law and switch it off and you'll find your problems, this one at least, have magically gone away.
I can't see much wrong with this "offensive" patent blocking at least when it's being done by individuals or small companies. We all get great ideas sometimes, but how many of us have the resources to follow them through ? Most of the article was heavily biased against the lone inventor it did all but call them anti-american anarchists. Their analogy is arse over tit, it's more comparable to the land rush in the American west. Anyone can in theory can stake a claim and if you're very lucky you've pitched your tent over an oilfield. No inventor in their right mind would sit on a patent forever without allowing it to be developed, that's just plain perverse but it seems to be okay for big business to do exactly that. There's nothing wrong with this practice it's one of the few areas where Joe Public still has some leverage over faceless mega-corporations. Right and wrong rarely matter in the courts these days, it's simply who's got more money to throw at the lawyers, it's nice to see the little guy with a chance for a change.
I noticed this renaming to "Freedom" fries when I was in the states a couple of months ago. Nobody seemed to mind they were still using the word "menu" though...
We're in that situation now in the UK. Our govt. is committed to switching off the analogue TV transmissions ASAP. They have a provisional date of 2010, last time I checked, they keep moving the goalposts on this one. Instead we have Digital Terrestrial TV. More channels (mostly trying to sell you something) as well as the existing ones. But it's crap :(
Most of the signals are too compressed, these are MPEG streams we receive, and artifacts are all over the shop especially when watching sports.
The sound quality is worse than the previous standard of Nicam Stereo too. But we're told this is good for us and the UK electorate doesn't have any influence over our current administration.
AFAIR they want 95%+ of the population to be able to receive DTT before they switch off the analogue signals. Apart from glib statements along the lines of "freeing up a large chunk of the spectrum" there's been no concrete plans as to what they intend to do with it.
Prolly auction it off and make a bundle like they did with 3G. How we laughed at that one!