Take a gander at how audio CDs store their data (google on "Reed-Solomon" and "CD"). With enough recovery bits, you'll be able to pull the data back off the audio tape even with a moderate amount of noise.
As an alternative, you could write the data to tape with recovery blocks inter-spersed.
e.g. chop the data file into smaller files, use PAR/PAR2 to create recovery files and dump the whole lot onto the audio tape. On the other end, pull the audio data back off, ignoring errors, and run the PAR/PAR2 tools on the data set to discover/fix errors.
I would have to say that there is already an effect from the number of people with Caller ID or who screen their calls with answering machines. I know I don't bother picking up if there's no caller info or it says "GALLUP POLL".
The question for the market research is:
Does the universe of people who have cell phones correlate to the universe of respondents that I'm trying to reach or does it introduce bias? (I know just enough to get myself in trouble here...)
e.g. if 55% of your population is A, and 45% is B, and the cellphone population is also 55% A / 45% B, then it will have no impact on the results. OTOH, if the cellphone population is 75% A / 25% B, then there is going to be bias that will have to be corrected for in order to extrapolate back to the main population. (Guaranteed there is some wrong terminology there...)
Back in the spring I probably got 20 per day, I'm now up to around 100 and the pace seems to be picking up. It all gets filed in a central folder, so here are the counts:
A neighbor that shines bright lights into all of your windows to display ads on your interior walls. Obnoxious, no?
So you buy blinds and opaque curtains and all your friends now wonder if you're living in a cave.
So your neighbor steps up the assault and switches to speakers so that you have to hear the ads.
Now you spend $$$ on soundproofing your house.
Next, he starts to transmit signals via radio/TV bands so that all of your radio/TV channels display the ads.
Annoyed yet? Some of this stuff is illegal, yet the authorities don't do anything to stop it.
So now you've blocked all the windows, soundproofed your house, can't watch TV or listen to radio.
So now he starts dialing your phone, 24x7x365, every minute on the minute. (Oh, and your cell phone, and your second secret line because he got lucky on a random dial attack.)
Next, he starts stuffing flyers through the mail slot, hundreds at a time. Your town only lets you put out 2 bags of trash per week, so you have to pay for a special trash pickup now to cart away the dozens of bags per week.
Still don't think that he deserves jail time?
After all, if you don't want to deal with the ads, all you had to do was put up blinds, soundproofing, stop watching radio/TV, throw away all the flyers he shoved through the mailslot. Basically, you're not able to live a normal life or use your communication mediums due to the sheer amount of garbage involved.
Agreed, between online bill payment and auto-deduction (and yes, I have multiple checking accounts thank-you-very-much in case I get drained), I use about 1 stamp per month on average. (Have to mail those quarterly estimated tax payments.)
Only 2 bills require any monthly action on my part, soon to be down to none again. Takes me longer to fill out my expense account each month then to download transactions weekly and take a quick gander to make sure everything balances (and that I have enough funds for the next 60 days). My previous employer even had direct-deposit, which made things even easier.
I guess I've been using online payments since mid-90s, maybe a bit earlier (used to be through CheckFree). Not sure what I'll do if I ever decide to move away from Quicken (between Home & Business and the tax software every year... it's a bit pricey). Still, I can't imagine going back to writing out all my checks by hand and mailing them in every month.
(who used to keep things meticulously in folders, until he realized that no-one cared, including himself)
Gods yes... if it's not tax-related or warranty-related or expense-account, it gets paid, shredded then tossed. Tax-related, etc., stuff gets scanned and filed by year (which is easy enough to dig through a single year).
Tax receipts go in a 9 1/2" x 11 1/2" envelope (1 for each year), tax forms go in a 2nd and both envelopes go into the firesafe.
I agree, but I'm pessimistic about the chances of a cartridge format taking off. Backwards compatiblity is probably what would kill it, unless the new format offered *big* advantages over traditional DVD/CD media format.
Possible advantages that might sell it would be equivalent to those which moved us from LP/tape to CD:
- storage density (would have to be a 10x improvement over the previous technology)
- can't compete on audio quality because CD-ROM is "good enough"
- might compete on video quality, but by then you'll be going up against HD-DVD (which probably won't be cartridge format)
- open standards, ease-of-use (unlikely given the knee-jerk reactions that content companies have against new media)
I'd *love* to see something around 4" (8-9 cm), in a thin case like a 3.5" FD or MD that holds 20-25Gb. Unfortunately, unless the HD-DVD format does it, I don't see it happening before holographic cubes or something else comes along that isn't disc-style.
The first time I watched it, I had difficulties with the way that the lady who's in charge of the fort is portrayed. Western style would be that she would be complete evil, exploiting the land, her workers, soley for personal gain/power. We should be cheering for her destruction, no?
Well not quite, because things are not black-n-white like western audiences expect. Villans are not necessarily beyond redemption or entirely evil and heros can make some horrible decisions.
That's one of the attractive things compared to most western fare, it doesn't assume that the viewer is an idiot who has to have a black-n-white outcome.
Trigun is a 26 episode story arc about the personal journey of Vash as he seeks to heal the rift between him and his brother. The setting is sci-fi with a western twist (similar to steampunk?), which does not make it like Unforgiven or other Hollywood Westerns. The comedy is there to lighten up some serious under-pinnings to the story (Vash acts over the top to throw people off of thinking that he is actually Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon).
including having his face turn into a cat for no apparent reason
Which is a stylized way of showing a michevious character (I forget if it's supposed to be a fox or a japanese racoon, but the roots lie in japanese myths). Some anime artists prefer to express emotion through stylized methods like that, others choose more realistic art styles.
The juxtaposition from slapstick hilarity to gut wrenching action was not handled at all well by whoever wrote this piece of trash. I don't think they felt the need at the time.
More likely (since I won't watch a engrishized version of Anime on CN), it was butchered by either the english dubbing or things were cut by CN. Watch the original in Japanese and you'll have a better basis to judge it on.
god damn water droplets appearing over people's heads for some reason
You do realize that's a stylized way of depicting unease (beads of sweat)? A lot of the other stuff is a rose-tinted look back at the Meiji era (when dating/etc was different, much like the Victorian era compared to today).
RK is not an action story arc, it's more of a comedy/drama (the manga explains a lot of this better). They spend a lot of time introducing characters, developing them, showing inter-play between them so that later cliff-hangers bring the audience in better. I only watch the DVDs with Japanese audio, so I don't know what the CN version is like. (As a rule, I avoid english dubs of popular anime, only a few are ever acted properly. And if CN is selling RK as an action series, they've missed how to sell it.)
For the action side, I'd say check out the Trust/Betrayal Samurai X set. You probably won't like the 2nd DVD in the set as it's more character development / back plot then action.
For something different, go pickup a DVD of Perfect Blue, which is a nice classical horror flick.
Having read the article, I was impressed by how clever their proposed solution was, though since I don't have a CS background, I don't understand how a mathematical computation can be essentially bottlenecked by memory latency -- I'd love it if someone could give an explanation of how that works.I'm guessing that some cryptographic hash needs to be held in memory, such that the nature of the data structure and physical access to it proves a bottleneck. This is probably way off.
Close... all they're doing is requiring the CPU to work on more data then any existing CPU has L1/L2 cache memory to hold. Cache memory is fast, say that it can read/write data from cache memory 10x faster then the system can read/write data from main memory.
If a CPU has 2Mb of cache memory, then forcing it to work on a 32Mb data set will involve a lot of cache misses. Each "miss" means that the CPU has to sit and wait for the system to retrieve the missing data from main memory. So instead of the algorithm processing data as fast as the CPU is capable of, we've bogged it down to as fast as the main memory bus can pull information from main memory.
The equivalent real-world analogy would be working with paper on your desktop... you can only hold so much paper on your desktop within easy arms-reach. Your desktop is like cache memory, fast access to the data that is "on hand". However, if you need to access data that won't fit on your desktop, you have to put a file away and pull another from the file-cabinet across the room. This is going to be slower then reaching out and grabbing a file that is already on your desk. And if the file isn't on your desk or in the file cabinet across the room, then you have to pull the data from central storage (which is like paging information in from the hard drive).
This has been covered multiple times before, but I'll give it another go:
The spamming machine is not simply talking to your inbound server, it's also sending e-mail to hundreds of other servers at the same time. Putting a sleep(10) into your server's configuration merely slows the rate at which a single spammer machine can inject e-mail into *your* system. While they're waiting for your slow-punk machine to get back from it's mid-winter nap, they're busy pumping e-mails out on other threads to other servers at other domains.
That, or if they have 1000 e-mails to drop into your domain, they merely spread the work out across multiple (zombied) spamming machines. Which means that they can then pump e-mail into your machine as fast as they used to.
In order for the whitelist to be used in conjunction with Hash Cash or Penny Black, the whitelist has to be on the inbound mail server (where the HC/PB challenge is issued).
HC/PB is only useful in keeping unwanted e-mail out of your systems. Once it's inside your organization, it doesn't make sense to expend CPU cycles on PB/HC as you propogate it to other systems/clients within your organization.
Have you traced the IP address on the message back to the MSN network?
Odds are, the e-mail FROM: is *forged*, and the e-mail is being sent from outside of the MSN network. MSN can't do anything to stop e-mail that doesn't outbound through any of their servers. (If they could, the hue & cry from the conspiracy theorists would be quite loud.)
Which is also why challenge/response systems are such a bad idea in today's environment. They send challenges to forged FROM: addresses, which can be used to perform a DoS on the forged domain.
Which then turns the issue into who maintains the whitelist? (Has to be done on the inbound mailserver to be used in combination with Penny Black or HashCash.)
Some issues:
- Reliably identifying senders when SMTP is easily forged
- How do senders get added to the whitelist?
- Rogue user X is secretly on the payroll of a spammer and adds the spammer to the whitelist
- User A says that sender S is okay, user B says that sender S is a spammer
There are some underlying problems (mostly related to forgery) that would need to be corrected first.
SSH and SSL are very attractive targets... breaking them is like breaking through a building's wall (the inside elements of the system are probably not as well protected). As a result of the high reward of breaking SSH or SSL, a lot of effort is going into attacking / checking the code.
Also, any exploits that are found/patched are pretty serious, if for no other reason then that they are part of SSH or SSL. (The same exploit in Solitare would not rate near the same level of attention.) When the bad guys break into Chuck's Chicken Shack, it's not front page news. When they break into the local bank vault, it is.
NTFS is not useful for small volumes (less then 1Gb, I don't remember what the minimum NTFS volume size is off-hand). It also can't be used on read-only media (unlike FAT32).
FAT32 handles niches that NTFS simply won't fit into. There's no way that this will bring about 'complete' adoption of NTFS/WinFS. (If anything, it would push another open format such as one of the Linux filesystems or UDF.)
We'll eventually reach the end of our dirty industrial phase (without killing ourselves), and begin a green nanotech phase where we're not forced to rape resources in the conventional top-down way, because we've got complete control over 100% recyclable matter, and where we can actually reverse all the environmental damage we've done at the molecular level.
The majority of corporations/people will always take the option/path that produces the most profit with the least amount of effort. (Profit can be defined as personal pleasure/gratification and expenses can be defined as personal sacrifice.) In addition, a corporation's sole guiding principle is to maximize profit on behalf of it's shareholders. (e.g. if they can get away with it, they will)
Until the costs of not being a good environmental citizen are greater then the costs of being a good environmental citizen - corporations and people will not change their patterns. These costs can be raised through regulation or the exhaustion of resources, but as long as it is cheaper to make widget X through raw materials / dirty pollution / moving to a less regulated country, a company will make widget X in that manner or else they will be put out of business by another company willing to do so.
Green nanotech phase is a nice wishview, but unless the economics are cheaper then traditional pollution-heavy methods, it's a non-starter. Even then, it's a stretch to believe that corporations will sink costs into repairing past damage of their own free will.
Actually, I found Snow Crash to be a bit of a dissapointment (having just read it this week for the first time). I'm not sure I'll read anything else by Stephenson (even allowing that it's probably one of his earlier works?).
It lacked polish and pacing. The plot had problems with maintaining tension or building to a climax. It was a lot of really neat scenes cobbled together. The ending was anti-climatic... when I got to the last page I wondered where the last chapter was. Not sure if the book needed to be twice as long (to flesh it out more), or if some parts shouldn't have been chopped to allow other sections to be fleshed out properly.
I could go into details, but it would be spoilerish (but I will if asked).
(And of course, the other options like quieter CPU fans, quieter exhaust fans, quieter power supplies. For my home office, 2004 is the year of "quiet", my goal is to make a serious dent in the amount of PC noise going on in here.)
1) Memorize the kana symbols (both hiragana and katakana, there are roughly 100 of each but they're paired, hiragana is used for Japenese words, katakana used for borrowed words). Look around the bookstores for elementary level books (Jimi's book of Japanese, etc.). If you know your kana and their pronunciations, you've got a shot at getting started.
2) After that you're going to have to start learning grammer and memorizing kanji. This is where the hobby starts to get expensive... dictionaries can be $50+, learning software and audio tapes are typically pricey, college courses are never cheap. I probably have $300 worth of materials on my shelf and I'm only a beginner.
For simple word lookups, I currently use my Basic Japenese-English Dictionary $19 (ISBN: 0-19-864328-4). All the entries are indexed in romanized style which makes it possible to find words you've only heard.
Because your there and because it's an easy way for someone to launder their internet usage (and guess who's door the MIBs are gonna come knocking on?). Breaking into an AP is typically not about the data on your network, but being able to crack other network's without getting caught.
Sure, MAC filtering isn't the end-all of security, but if it makes your AP harder to crack then the one next door... well, guess which system the cracker is going to go after first? (A lot of security practices are simply meant to make your systems a less appealing target.)
Well, I looked into adding the TXT records to my domains, but register.com doesn't provide a method for adding the TXT records if you use the domain manager tool.
Soo... looks like they'll need to be prodded into adding that functionality to their DNS tool.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a gander at how audio CDs store their data (google on "Reed-Solomon" and "CD"). With enough recovery bits, you'll be able to pull the data back off the audio tape even with a moderate amount of noise.
As an alternative, you could write the data to tape with recovery blocks inter-spersed.
e.g. chop the data file into smaller files, use PAR/PAR2 to create recovery files and dump the whole lot onto the audio tape. On the other end, pull the audio data back off, ignoring errors, and run the PAR/PAR2 tools on the data set to discover/fix errors.
I would have to say that there is already an effect from the number of people with Caller ID or who screen their calls with answering machines. I know I don't bother picking up if there's no caller info or it says "GALLUP POLL".
The question for the market research is:
Does the universe of people who have cell phones correlate to the universe of respondents that I'm trying to reach or does it introduce bias? (I know just enough to get myself in trouble here...)
e.g. if 55% of your population is A, and 45% is B, and the cellphone population is also 55% A / 45% B, then it will have no impact on the results. OTOH, if the cellphone population is 75% A / 25% B, then there is going to be bias that will have to be corrected for in order to extrapolate back to the main population. (Guaranteed there is some wrong terminology there...)
Back in the spring I probably got 20 per day, I'm now up to around 100 and the pace seems to be picking up. It all gets filed in a central folder, so here are the counts:
Oct - 2895
Nov - 3089
Dec - 3488
Picture this in another way...
A neighbor that shines bright lights into all of your windows to display ads on your interior walls. Obnoxious, no?
So you buy blinds and opaque curtains and all your friends now wonder if you're living in a cave.
So your neighbor steps up the assault and switches to speakers so that you have to hear the ads.
Now you spend $$$ on soundproofing your house.
Next, he starts to transmit signals via radio/TV bands so that all of your radio/TV channels display the ads.
Annoyed yet? Some of this stuff is illegal, yet the authorities don't do anything to stop it.
So now you've blocked all the windows, soundproofed your house, can't watch TV or listen to radio.
So now he starts dialing your phone, 24x7x365, every minute on the minute. (Oh, and your cell phone, and your second secret line because he got lucky on a random dial attack.)
Next, he starts stuffing flyers through the mail slot, hundreds at a time. Your town only lets you put out 2 bags of trash per week, so you have to pay for a special trash pickup now to cart away the dozens of bags per week.
Still don't think that he deserves jail time?
After all, if you don't want to deal with the ads, all you had to do was put up blinds, soundproofing, stop watching radio/TV, throw away all the flyers he shoved through the mailslot. Basically, you're not able to live a normal life or use your communication mediums due to the sheer amount of garbage involved.
Agreed, between online bill payment and auto-deduction (and yes, I have multiple checking accounts thank-you-very-much in case I get drained), I use about 1 stamp per month on average. (Have to mail those quarterly estimated tax payments.)
Only 2 bills require any monthly action on my part, soon to be down to none again. Takes me longer to fill out my expense account each month then to download transactions weekly and take a quick gander to make sure everything balances (and that I have enough funds for the next 60 days). My previous employer even had direct-deposit, which made things even easier.
I guess I've been using online payments since mid-90s, maybe a bit earlier (used to be through CheckFree). Not sure what I'll do if I ever decide to move away from Quicken (between Home & Business and the tax software every year... it's a bit pricey). Still, I can't imagine going back to writing out all my checks by hand and mailing them in every month.
(who used to keep things meticulously in folders, until he realized that no-one cared, including himself)
Gods yes... if it's not tax-related or warranty-related or expense-account, it gets paid, shredded then tossed. Tax-related, etc., stuff gets scanned and filed by year (which is easy enough to dig through a single year).
Tax receipts go in a 9 1/2" x 11 1/2" envelope (1 for each year), tax forms go in a 2nd and both envelopes go into the firesafe.
Um, they tried that... it was called DIVX and it flopped.
2 4
OTOH, they're trying to come out with a DVD that "goes bad" 48 hours after you open it.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/16/18322
Question would be whether the media costs would be low enough to support the concept. (Not to mention stock and waste disposal issues.)
I agree, but I'm pessimistic about the chances of a cartridge format taking off. Backwards compatiblity is probably what would kill it, unless the new format offered *big* advantages over traditional DVD/CD media format.
Possible advantages that might sell it would be equivalent to those which moved us from LP/tape to CD:
- storage density (would have to be a 10x improvement over the previous technology)
- can't compete on audio quality because CD-ROM is "good enough"
- might compete on video quality, but by then you'll be going up against HD-DVD (which probably won't be cartridge format)
- open standards, ease-of-use (unlikely given the knee-jerk reactions that content companies have against new media)
I'd *love* to see something around 4" (8-9 cm), in a thin case like a 3.5" FD or MD that holds 20-25Gb. Unfortunately, unless the HD-DVD format does it, I don't see it happening before holographic cubes or something else comes along that isn't disc-style.
Princess Mononoke is indeed a good example...
The first time I watched it, I had difficulties with the way that the lady who's in charge of the fort is portrayed. Western style would be that she would be complete evil, exploiting the land, her workers, soley for personal gain/power. We should be cheering for her destruction, no?
Well not quite, because things are not black-n-white like western audiences expect. Villans are not necessarily beyond redemption or entirely evil and heros can make some horrible decisions.
That's one of the attractive things compared to most western fare, it doesn't assume that the viewer is an idiot who has to have a black-n-white outcome.
Trigun is a 26 episode story arc about the personal journey of Vash as he seeks to heal the rift between him and his brother. The setting is sci-fi with a western twist (similar to steampunk?), which does not make it like Unforgiven or other Hollywood Westerns. The comedy is there to lighten up some serious under-pinnings to the story (Vash acts over the top to throw people off of thinking that he is actually Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon).
including having his face turn into a cat for no apparent reason
Which is a stylized way of showing a michevious character (I forget if it's supposed to be a fox or a japanese racoon, but the roots lie in japanese myths). Some anime artists prefer to express emotion through stylized methods like that, others choose more realistic art styles.
The juxtaposition from slapstick hilarity to gut wrenching action was not handled at all well by whoever wrote this piece of trash. I don't think they felt the need at the time.
More likely (since I won't watch a engrishized version of Anime on CN), it was butchered by either the english dubbing or things were cut by CN. Watch the original in Japanese and you'll have a better basis to judge it on.
god damn water droplets appearing over people's heads for some reason
You do realize that's a stylized way of depicting unease (beads of sweat)? A lot of the other stuff is a rose-tinted look back at the Meiji era (when dating/etc was different, much like the Victorian era compared to today).
RK is not an action story arc, it's more of a comedy/drama (the manga explains a lot of this better). They spend a lot of time introducing characters, developing them, showing inter-play between them so that later cliff-hangers bring the audience in better. I only watch the DVDs with Japanese audio, so I don't know what the CN version is like. (As a rule, I avoid english dubs of popular anime, only a few are ever acted properly. And if CN is selling RK as an action series, they've missed how to sell it.)
For the action side, I'd say check out the Trust/Betrayal Samurai X set. You probably won't like the 2nd DVD in the set as it's more character development / back plot then action.
For something different, go pickup a DVD of Perfect Blue, which is a nice classical horror flick.
Having read the article, I was impressed by how clever their proposed solution was, though since I don't have a CS background, I don't understand how a mathematical computation can be essentially bottlenecked by memory latency -- I'd love it if someone could give an explanation of how that works.I'm guessing that some cryptographic hash needs to be held in memory, such that the nature of the data structure and physical access to it proves a bottleneck. This is probably way off.
Close... all they're doing is requiring the CPU to work on more data then any existing CPU has L1/L2 cache memory to hold. Cache memory is fast, say that it can read/write data from cache memory 10x faster then the system can read/write data from main memory.
If a CPU has 2Mb of cache memory, then forcing it to work on a 32Mb data set will involve a lot of cache misses. Each "miss" means that the CPU has to sit and wait for the system to retrieve the missing data from main memory. So instead of the algorithm processing data as fast as the CPU is capable of, we've bogged it down to as fast as the main memory bus can pull information from main memory.
The equivalent real-world analogy would be working with paper on your desktop... you can only hold so much paper on your desktop within easy arms-reach. Your desktop is like cache memory, fast access to the data that is "on hand". However, if you need to access data that won't fit on your desktop, you have to put a file away and pull another from the file-cabinet across the room. This is going to be slower then reaching out and grabbing a file that is already on your desk. And if the file isn't on your desk or in the file cabinet across the room, then you have to pull the data from central storage (which is like paging information in from the hard drive).
This has been covered multiple times before, but I'll give it another go:
The spamming machine is not simply talking to your inbound server, it's also sending e-mail to hundreds of other servers at the same time. Putting a sleep(10) into your server's configuration merely slows the rate at which a single spammer machine can inject e-mail into *your* system. While they're waiting for your slow-punk machine to get back from it's mid-winter nap, they're busy pumping e-mails out on other threads to other servers at other domains.
That, or if they have 1000 e-mails to drop into your domain, they merely spread the work out across multiple (zombied) spamming machines. Which means that they can then pump e-mail into your machine as fast as they used to.
In order for the whitelist to be used in conjunction with Hash Cash or Penny Black, the whitelist has to be on the inbound mail server (where the HC/PB challenge is issued).
HC/PB is only useful in keeping unwanted e-mail out of your systems. Once it's inside your organization, it doesn't make sense to expend CPU cycles on PB/HC as you propogate it to other systems/clients within your organization.
Have you traced the IP address on the message back to the MSN network?
Odds are, the e-mail FROM: is *forged*, and the e-mail is being sent from outside of the MSN network. MSN can't do anything to stop e-mail that doesn't outbound through any of their servers. (If they could, the hue & cry from the conspiracy theorists would be quite loud.)
Which is also why challenge/response systems are such a bad idea in today's environment. They send challenges to forged FROM: addresses, which can be used to perform a DoS on the forged domain.
Which then turns the issue into who maintains the whitelist? (Has to be done on the inbound mailserver to be used in combination with Penny Black or HashCash.)
Some issues:
- Reliably identifying senders when SMTP is easily forged
- How do senders get added to the whitelist?
- Rogue user X is secretly on the payroll of a spammer and adds the spammer to the whitelist
- User A says that sender S is okay, user B says that sender S is a spammer
There are some underlying problems (mostly related to forgery) that would need to be corrected first.
SSH and SSL are very attractive targets... breaking them is like breaking through a building's wall (the inside elements of the system are probably not as well protected). As a result of the high reward of breaking SSH or SSL, a lot of effort is going into attacking / checking the code.
Also, any exploits that are found/patched are pretty serious, if for no other reason then that they are part of SSH or SSL. (The same exploit in Solitare would not rate near the same level of attention.) When the bad guys break into Chuck's Chicken Shack, it's not front page news. When they break into the local bank vault, it is.
Why then would they go about it in this manner?
NTFS is not useful for small volumes (less then 1Gb, I don't remember what the minimum NTFS volume size is off-hand). It also can't be used on read-only media (unlike FAT32).
FAT32 handles niches that NTFS simply won't fit into. There's no way that this will bring about 'complete' adoption of NTFS/WinFS. (If anything, it would push another open format such as one of the Linux filesystems or UDF.)
We'll eventually reach the end of our dirty industrial phase (without killing ourselves), and begin a green nanotech phase where we're not forced to rape resources in the conventional top-down way, because we've got complete control over 100% recyclable matter, and where we can actually reverse all the environmental damage we've done at the molecular level.
The majority of corporations/people will always take the option/path that produces the most profit with the least amount of effort. (Profit can be defined as personal pleasure/gratification and expenses can be defined as personal sacrifice.) In addition, a corporation's sole guiding principle is to maximize profit on behalf of it's shareholders. (e.g. if they can get away with it, they will)
Until the costs of not being a good environmental citizen are greater then the costs of being a good environmental citizen - corporations and people will not change their patterns. These costs can be raised through regulation or the exhaustion of resources, but as long as it is cheaper to make widget X through raw materials / dirty pollution / moving to a less regulated country, a company will make widget X in that manner or else they will be put out of business by another company willing to do so.
Green nanotech phase is a nice wishview, but unless the economics are cheaper then traditional pollution-heavy methods, it's a non-starter. Even then, it's a stretch to believe that corporations will sink costs into repairing past damage of their own free will.
Actually, I found Snow Crash to be a bit of a dissapointment (having just read it this week for the first time). I'm not sure I'll read anything else by Stephenson (even allowing that it's probably one of his earlier works?).
It lacked polish and pacing. The plot had problems with maintaining tension or building to a climax. It was a lot of really neat scenes cobbled together. The ending was anti-climatic... when I got to the last page I wondered where the last chapter was. Not sure if the book needed to be twice as long (to flesh it out more), or if some parts shouldn't have been chopped to allow other sections to be fleshed out properly.
I could go into details, but it would be spoilerish (but I will if asked).
Have you considered the Antec Sonata case?
(And of course, the other options like quieter CPU fans, quieter exhaust fans, quieter power supplies. For my home office, 2004 is the year of "quiet", my goal is to make a serious dent in the amount of PC noise going on in here.)
1) Memorize the kana symbols (both hiragana and katakana, there are roughly 100 of each but they're paired, hiragana is used for Japenese words, katakana used for borrowed words). Look around the bookstores for elementary level books (Jimi's book of Japanese, etc.). If you know your kana and their pronunciations, you've got a shot at getting started.
2) After that you're going to have to start learning grammer and memorizing kanji. This is where the hobby starts to get expensive... dictionaries can be $50+, learning software and audio tapes are typically pricey, college courses are never cheap. I probably have $300 worth of materials on my shelf and I'm only a beginner.
For simple word lookups, I currently use my Basic Japenese-English Dictionary $19 (ISBN: 0-19-864328-4). All the entries are indexed in romanized style which makes it possible to find words you've only heard.
Toshiba 57HLX82 - (press release, May 2002), 57", (3) 1080p LCoS chips, msrp: $8,999.99, depth is only 18"
Mitsubishi WL-82913A - $18,000 (list was around $21,000), can't find a listing on Mitsubishi's site
Because your there and because it's an easy way for someone to launder their internet usage (and guess who's door the MIBs are gonna come knocking on?). Breaking into an AP is typically not about the data on your network, but being able to crack other network's without getting caught.
Sure, MAC filtering isn't the end-all of security, but if it makes your AP harder to crack then the one next door... well, guess which system the cracker is going to go after first? (A lot of security practices are simply meant to make your systems a less appealing target.)
Well, I looked into adding the TXT records to my domains, but register.com doesn't provide a method for adding the TXT records if you use the domain manager tool.
Soo... looks like they'll need to be prodded into adding that functionality to their DNS tool.