This might not be such a stupid idea as you might think.
1) Report any and every website you can find, Labour.org.uk, conservatives.com, bbc.co.uk, itv.com, amazon.co.uk, ebay.co.uk, etc etc 2) Repeat, but using tinyurl and other link squashers, proxies, caches, and any other form of URL mangling 3) ??? 4) Collapse!
There's a recaptcha on the submission page, which is a shame, otherwise I'd have had a script running already. Perhaps I should set up a "recaptcha for pr0n" or more appropriate perhaps, "recaptcha for terrorist information";-)
Mind you, given this is our government, there's probably a way to submit without the recaptcha, and probably a way to download the IPs of every submitter, but that's another story.
I clearly don't understand this well enough, as I'm sure will be self-evident in a moment...
How would the private sector end up being 'space tourism' if Nasa contracts private companies to get it's people to the ISS, and to put satellites into LEO?
I'm not saying privatisation is the Best Thing to do, but won't it foster a handful of LEO-capable mini-Nasas? The real Nasa could then concentrate on wider orbit deployment work, moon/mars missions and science (maybe not right now, but in the next 5-10 years). Apart from wider-orbit stuff, all the non-LEO stuff isn't all that interesting to private companies right now, and only the very rich/established can do it, so why not specialise?
The other angle here is obviously money. Knowing the deficit is a bit big, slimming Nasa down a bit makes a bit of sense (I know other things dwarf what it costs, but maybe they're not as easy to cut). If what comes out of Nasa is truly unique and beyond the reach of any other space-going organisation in the world, wouldn't that be better than a sort of "do it all" Nasa that does what others could (in theory at least) do?
If like a lot of people you're about to say "yes, I but don't even want my country to be in the EU", well, again, we all got to vote for our respective governments, and we voted for parties who wanted to join up. For those of us that didn't vote for our government, and even though they didn't get 50%+ of the votes, well, you still voted for your version of democracy. What's wrong in the EU/your country today got set that way 10+ years ago.
I'm not saying this is good, and I'm not saying I feel any more 'in control' than you do, but we are all to blame here. Democracy sucks like that.
* yes, I know my citations aren't brilliant, but I couldn't immediately lay my hands on better ones;-)
Phenomenally stupid indeed. In fact, an example of exactly the sort of content users aren't clicking on.
The findings give further ammunition to publishers who insist that Google and other news aggregators are linking to their stories without paying any advertising revenue.
Had there been any semblance of journalism here, it might have said:
The findings indicate that Google generates fewer, but more highly qualified leads to publishers. These highly engaged users are 78% more likely to be interested in the tightly targeted ads those publishers are now able to include on their content. All this has lead to a 50% decrease in traffic (with a corresponding decrease in publisher's operating costs of about 22%), yet a 38% increase in profit.
(obviously I'm making up the numbers)
The kind of people spouting this rubbish just want to wallow in the problem rather than being any tiny part of the solution. If they haven't figured out that their lower traffic is actually more valuable than the swathes of dross they used to get, then they deserve to whither and die. The ads industry has long since worked out that "conversions" are far more useful than "page impressions", so I have no idea how so-called publishers still think page views are important to them. As I say, they don't want to succeed.
Perhaps these people would celebrate and order their Porsches if every bot net on the planet starting downloading and discarding content from them? Maybe once they can't pay for the champagne and hookers they might they realise that traffic alone doesn't generate revenue, and actually does the opposite because it increases costs.
Keys-by-DNS (or similar) is pretty much where I think things need to go.
I've always wondered why we needed SSL-for-http, SSL-for-smtp and SSL-for-other_protocol. Why don't we just have a generic "ssh to someone" protocol which can forward the packets to the right service on the remote server (perhaps a sort of TCP-S protocol or something?). Of course, key management is really the problem.
Back to costs: Who's gonna spend the time (and money) trying to convince the world it needs keys-by-DNS when no one uses keys-by-DNS yet? It's probably worse than you might think because SSL's already been done, and the vast majority of normal people in the world don't need much more than that.
I see where you're going on this, but I think you're missing a proportion of possible uses for such a gadget.
I'm personally looking for one or two (touchscreen) tablet machines - definitely one in the kitchen, and maybe one in the bathroom or else just on the coffee table. I'm not looking to do all that much with it, except (in the kitchen) to be a place to play music, maybe watch something like BBC iPlayer for a cookery show, or just display a recipe on a web page (or fiddle with the home automation or what not). I'm not saying this specific device is going to be perfect for that (even when it gets touchscreen), but having hands covered in butter isn't going to be useful on any sort of keyboard or mouse. At least I can wipe the touchscreen clean, and I don't have to give up any horizontal space to use it.
Am I going to throw away my laptop for this? No way, but if it's a matter of "honey, just check if the trains are running on time", then a super-slimmed down tablet on the coffee table or stuck to the side of the fridge is definitely easier than any machine I've seen (other than some smart phones, maybe).
The problem the tablet producers will have include convincing the masses that they need a coffee table computer, and proving to people such as yourself that $200 for a bit of a toy is actually worth it.
(Just another thought: I once bought a Phillips Pronto touch screen universal remote control for more than $200 - so obviously there are some of us saps out there ready to spend money on an apparently over-engineered solution to a problem;-)
I've wondered about the "remote controlled wheelie luggage" bomb. Same idea as yours, except the guy shows up, puts his bag down, it then mysteriously starts driving toward the secure area, and detonates when someone stops it, picks up up, or when the controller decides to do so. No need for a suicide bomber. There's actually no need for much of a bomb either - just enough of an explosion to cause a bit of damage - it'll still close the airport, and it'll still stop people flying.
This all reminds me of a number of years ago when the IRA were doing a UK mainland bombing campaign. They let off a small explosion on a barely-used branch line at Clapham Junction (the UK's busiest station). No one was injured, there was actually a very small amount of actual damage to anything, yet CJ closed for a day, and tens of thousands of people didn't get to work that day.
Thankfully it seems terrorists don't read history (or/.):-)
From the summary, one might draw the conclusion that "be a BT customer, and you're more of a target", but I seem to remember BT being the biggest ISP in the UK by quite a big margin*. Virgin Media (aka. NTL / Telewest) are the second largest*, and so it goes on. So I suppose it's reasonable that BT would account for the majority of the infractions. Conversely, BT have amongst the shittiest networks of all, so you'd imagine that the file sharers weren't actually sharing that much after all. But I suppose that would mean BT won't mind 25,000 people getting cut off, because it'll save them having to upgrade their network (like they say they're doing on the TV ads they're running at the moment).
So the real take-away here is that if you're at a small ISP, you're less likely to be targeted (at least until the big ones tumble). Meanwhile, the utter incompetence of the BPI and their friends should keep this from being anything more than an annoyance for 30,000 people. If even 5000 of them follow up and challenge their accusers, it'll tie the whole system up for months, if not years.
The BPI, Mandleson, and their ilk have an idealised view that file sharing should be super-illegal and so almost entirely eradicated. The problem is, best estimates suggest 7 million people in the UK share files*, so even if half give up from fear of prosecution, that's still 3.5 million people they've got to prosecute. I don't imagine there's a lawyer in the UK who's capable of executing that many cases in a decade, let alone simultaneously.
(* No, I can't substantiate this with a link right now - you know how to use a search engine though, right?)
I agree with everything you're saying - clearly, our legislators are the problem here. Being, as we are, British, there's an extremely good chance this whole thing will eventually tie itself in knots (legally, publicly, legislatively, or just technically).
However, for all Virgin Media customers, now's the time to fire up your bittorrent client. I'm not a NTL/Telewaste/Virgin Media customer, but maybe I'll just fire up the bittorrent client on my NAS anyway. Now's the time for us to all start sharing Linux distros, random bits in files, and as much Creative Commons music as you can squeeze onto your hard disk.
If they won't listen to reason, perhaps a slew of false positives in a veritable barrage of extra traffic which makes vast chunks of their customer base eligible for disconnection will make them think differently?
Of course, since this is/., I'd hope any readers who were Virgin Media customers would just move elsewhere. Think Broadband is your friend;-)
As the world has got more crowded and busier, it's becoming harder to be a good parent when dealing with your kids. I mean, we can't be expected to actually be interested in our own kids can we? How can we possibly do that and answer the all important phone calls we get from our friends, let alone talk to our friends as we walk about. How can I possibly keep track of my five children when I'm having a party? I mean, not only do I have lots of guests around, but I can barely see straight enough to go back to the shop to buy more booze. There's no way I'm going to know every last detail about the little tikes that just seem to get into every little hole, or out of every open door way in the half a second my back is turned!
The problem really is that kids just don't understand that mummy and daddy are busy people. We don't always have enough time in our days to watch their every move ourselves, so if we need some emotionless, compassionless computer to do it for us, for a relatively small up-front charge, then we think that's perfectly fine - at least until they've grown up a bit and shown that they're trustworthy. Of course, my 15 year old still hasn't reached that point, but then he always was a bit uncontrollable, and never really listened to anything we said. I blame schools for that - they don't instil any discipline these days. The police don't help, all they seem to do is harass my kids. They're good kids really, but of course they don't understand that.
I can't comment about true HD capability, and relative speeds, and respond to "does it do better than " type questions, but that machine looks like a regular PC in a shiny case to me. If you want something a bit more revolutionary, then a Fit PC might be more up your street: http://fit-pc.co.uk/ (and yes, it can run Linux).
The Pirate bay people have devised a way that makes it financially unattractive to represent the *AA when going against a popular service such as TPB. This arguably also makes it unattractive to represent TPB (or others) in case they do the same thing to you for some reason. It does not directly cause any discomfort to the *AA, except to (possibly) make it harder for them to prosecute further cases. There is some concern that this plan attracts legal action because it's a deliberate attempt to cause financial discomfort. However, it could be argued that the plan's only transgression was to publish the lawyers bank account details, and some instructions. The bank account details are non-confidential, and the general concepts of the plan are not a new idea. It remains to be seen how this is handled by the courts, if indeed they become involved in it.
TPB has asked the community to send 1SEK (or, I presume less) to the lawyers who prosecuted them. These lawyers are of course the designated recipients of the fine that TPB have to pay to the *AA, so have given TPB their bank account details.
Under Swedish law, if you accidentally electronically pay someone, you can write to them to ask them to refund the money. They are legally obliged to do this.
The intention of TPB's plan is to have the community pay the lawyers 1SEK each, but to then claim they did this accidentally, and to demand a refund. The refund will cost the lawyers time and money to process. If the lawyers chose to electronically return the money, they will quickly exceed their account's 1000 free transfers limit, and will have to pay 2SEK to perform subsequent transactions.
It's not entirely clear if the 1000 transfer limit includes receiving money as well as sending it. If it does include receiving, then it's probable that the lawyers will simply instruct their bank not to accept payments unless greater than (say) 1 million SEK. It's unlikely the bank will charge more than a one-off fee to set up this facility. If this occurs, then the plan will quickly fail. Likewise, if receiving money does not impact the 1000 transfer limit, then community members failing to ask for a refund essentially help the lawyers by making them richer.
Please note: If the community does indeed send these micro-payments, this does not, in any way contribute towards the fine that TPB have to pay (even if you do not ask for your money to be refunded). If you wish to help TPB pay the fine, then please arrange to send money directly to TPB, as the fine will only be considered paid if TPB pay the lawyers directly.
Authors note: I suspect this plan will quickly fail, however even if it does so, it appears to me that it sends a strong message to lawyers representing anyone TPB dislikes. I'll leave it to the reader to decide what they think of that 'message'. Lastly, I hope I got all the details right, but since this is/., I'm sure I'll quickly be corrected if not.
I know it's not 'the done thing', but I RTFA. Lord knows, the BBC aren't famed for their excellent technology journalism, but even they managed to show how incredibly stupid and "woe is me" the PRS are.
In the article, the PRS say that they've been pleading with Google to re-instate the videos in the UK. Google of course basically say the PRS made it too expensive for them. The PRS carry on acting like they're the ones who've been kicked in the teeth, and say that Google doesn't want to pay more, "despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing". Of course, as we know, video-views only cost Google money - and only ad-clicks actually make them anything.
So just because a video gets viewed lots of times means nothing - it's how many ad-clicks you get that counts.
However, where a music video is concerned, those views may, in a small number of cases, lead to the viewer deciding to buy that music or video. Of course, Google make nothing out of that sale, but the PRS does.
So the PRS is saying they want Google to pay them for advertising their product, regardless of how much money Google makes or loses from doing so.
So in this story, Google is the closest thing to a representative of the music buying public that we have. The PRS really serves itself, and to a lesser extent the music producers. As a consumer, I'm quite happy with Google's choice - if people don't want to sell me music, then I won't buy it. If someone else on the Internet wants to show me those videos instead, then maybe I'll go there, maybe I won't.
However, if I was a producer, I'd probably be rather upset by the PRS's actions (although given the spin the PRS is putting on this, the producers are probably blaming Google).
Didn't one of the courier companies actually state they were interested in this sort of thing?
The quote I remember was "give us the parcel by 10am and and we'll deliver it by 5pm the day before" (although I might have got the times wrong, completely misquoted or indeed be talking complete rubbish).
Acorn is a long-forgotten, but actually tremendously influential company. Had Acorn not made the Acorn Electron, and subsequently the BBC Micro, I'm sure British IT would not be what it is today.
Oh wait... this article is about a nut. Silly me, I thought I was on Slashdot.
Margaret Thatcher slowly went mad on her 4 hours a night. Suggesting the Poll Tax was a "fair" system ought to be evidence enough. Just go and read some of the ramblings she's come out with since if you fancy a laugh. Once insanity arrived, then even the notion of needing sleep probably took a back seat.
She's my favourite example when telling people I'd love to be able to get 10 hours every weeknight, and perhaps 12 on weekends. All these people walking around with 6-8 hours per night are risking their mental health! I of course, am perfectly sane.
One could go on to cite America as further example of lack-of-sleep related insanity. However, one notes that the president of that country seemed to do little else but sleep or play golf early in his tenure, and still went on to start dubious wars.
(I feel some troll-related anti-karma coming my way - quick! hide under the covers!)
If a stupid filter works like a coffee filter, does that mean that they'll end up with a super-dense blob of stupidity in the strainer? If they keep filtering, maybe it will collapse making a stupid star or some such. A shining beacon of our stupidity for future generations. Of course, I can imagine some careful handling would be required, in case anyone becomes "infected" with stupid.
The mind boggles... well, it would if I had one;-)
I know this is contraversial, but for a good number of them, I say "balls to you". As a Brit, I see many US based Internet stations acting as parochially and as US-centric as your terrestrial stations do. I understand that most of their listeners are in the US, but they're not going to get many international listeners unless they open up a bit. I'll give you an example:
To highlight the royalties problem, a series of stations are putting ads in the stream which say something along the lines of, "the Copyright Royalty board just raised rates for this station. If this new rate increase holds, most Internet radio stations will close - they won't be able to make their royalty payments. Visit savenetradio.org, today, voice your opinion..."
For all you Americans, I'll translate that into English (which is far more compatible with people that live outside the US and are either British, or speak English as a second language).
"The US Copyright Royalty board has just raised rates for this station. If these new rates continue, most US based Internet radio stations will close - they won't be able to afford the royalty payments. Visit savenetradio.org and voice your opinion...".
There's another ad that's even worse, asking me to talk to my senators. Well, guess what, I don't have any. There's nothing wrong with promoting US culture or style, but this isn't even that - it's just plain ignorant.
When these people start even vaguely acknowledging the existence of the world outside the US borders, then I'll start feeling some sympathy towards them. Right now, this is effectively a US-only problem, confined to the US. The billions of people, and thousands of 'net radio stations in other nations needn't worry about it. Besides, you can bet that a whole load of these stations will start basing themselves out of non-US locations pretty soon (which with a bit of luck will make them realise there's a world out there).
You might have a point here... If I post the offending Flikr material, then eventually I'll get blocked too (although I'm a lot lower profile than Flikr;-). Would that potentially lead to a drop in my comment spam too? Whilst the botnets are all over the place, at least some of them could be controlled from within China. If the controller can't easily see what anti-spam protections I put in place, maybe they'd leave me alone.
Absolutely. The thing is, I don't necessarily want a house (maybe I want a huge hotel/casino looking thing instead?).
I'm sure everyone has ideas of how this could be done. My favoured approach is like Elite. My server becomes a planet. The basics mean I have to provide a space station, but if I'm up to it, I can provide the entire planet surface too. The space station offers standard things, like a chat room, informational space, basic trading etc. If I run a planet surface, then it's all as I want it. Maybe one area is a first-person shooter type game (paintball?), another has a formula-1 race track, and another has loads of commerical entities on it. Somehow I provide ways for you to bring your special paintball gun, car or money along and go crazy in my made-up world. Of course, if my server goes down, then my planet disappears from the map (or becomes impossible to travel to).
Of course, if you don't like what I'm doing, then you can do it your own way on your own planet. A bit like if you don't like my website, you can run your own, in your own way. In fact, making this whole thing an "extension" to your website could also lead to some interesting possibilities - start by visiting a map provider (Google), then take their directions to (whoever), which causes your client to connect to their server and start the experience.
Right - and the poor admin who sits at your computer to get your printer working.
Having spent many a happy hour trying to find where an "oh so clever" user has put all the standard bits of his computer, all this sounds like a support nightmare. If MS do it, you can be sure the computer's behaviour will change so significantly that one user won't be able to tell another how to do simple tasks - they'll all have different knowledge about how to do the same thing. The poor admin will have to have a super-brain to have all those variants in memory at once.
That said, done right, it could be really good. I'd wait for Apple to do it before getting too excited though.
Agreed, but it'll work on your blog or other "don't care about the money" sites you may control. Between suitably militant/. users alone, that's got to be a fairly large number of sites. Working on the theory that it takes five goes to get a message across, an IE user's probably going to get it eventually.
Just my 2 pence, and I'm sure not about to change the world:-(
Right - and herin lies the fundamental problem with ASBOs. Many people (some of whom seem to have commented here) think asbos are good because they get rid of scumbags who otherwise evade prosecution by the law. Indeed, asbos were introduced to combat such problems. However, the current UK government has shown time and time again that it responds to problems in the wrong way.
This as an example: There are already ample laws regarding the misuse of computer systems, unauthorised use of systems etc etc. These laws could be clarified, adjusted or ammended to combat the problem of so called cybercriminals. Indeed, these laws are already used in many ways to do just that.
Instead, the government wants to use it's 'great idea', the asbo, to do this. Asbos are the wrong response to the problem, because they discriminate totally, and allow no space for correct behaviour. As you point out, all that would be left for a 'hacker' would be a McJob, because they won't be allowed near a computer. Conviction under existing computer misuse laws would sure make it difficult to convince BigBank that they were safe, but if they got a job, they could use a computer quite happily. Clearly getting some bright, but misguided kid, into a situation where they are forced to have a McJob isn't going to make them realise the error of their ways - it's far more likely to breed resentment and lack of respect for authority/the government. If that kid gets near a computer in the future, they're not likely to just sit there and read the BBC news.
Whilst asbos are currently very carefully administered, there is so much room for abuse it's just not funny. The Home Office is procedurally and culturally totally broken, so I wouldn't be suprised if asbos were already being abused. Certainly, they seem to be getting dished out for the most bizarre things. Either way, asbos create more discrimination against people (scumbags or otherwise) and alienate such people from society. Everyone agrees something has to be done about such people, but this is not the answer.
</rant>
Re:Gotta wonder how IBM feels about this...
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
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· Score: 1
Didn't IBM have a plan to move whole-sale to Linux? I heard they'd mostly got the servers sorted and were moving into desktops. I'd imagine they have vast rafts of IBM Thinkpads in-house, and quite probably a good number of Lenovo machines too.
Assuming they don't have any special arrangements with Lenovo with respect to Linux, would this imply IBM would end up buying another vendors laptops in the future? Or would it mean that IBM would take over Linux support for Thinkpads, leaving Lenovo to do the Windows side of things?
The mind boggles, but no immediately obvious solution springs to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
This might not be such a stupid idea as you might think.
1) Report any and every website you can find, Labour.org.uk, conservatives.com, bbc.co.uk, itv.com, amazon.co.uk, ebay.co.uk, etc etc
2) Repeat, but using tinyurl and other link squashers, proxies, caches, and any other form of URL mangling
3) ???
4) Collapse!
There's a recaptcha on the submission page, which is a shame, otherwise I'd have had a script running already. Perhaps I should set up a "recaptcha for pr0n" or more appropriate perhaps, "recaptcha for terrorist information" ;-)
Mind you, given this is our government, there's probably a way to submit without the recaptcha, and probably a way to download the IPs of every submitter, but that's another story.
I clearly don't understand this well enough, as I'm sure will be self-evident in a moment...
How would the private sector end up being 'space tourism' if Nasa contracts private companies to get it's people to the ISS, and to put satellites into LEO?
I'm not saying privatisation is the Best Thing to do, but won't it foster a handful of LEO-capable mini-Nasas? The real Nasa could then concentrate on wider orbit deployment work, moon/mars missions and science (maybe not right now, but in the next 5-10 years). Apart from wider-orbit stuff, all the non-LEO stuff isn't all that interesting to private companies right now, and only the very rich/established can do it, so why not specialise?
The other angle here is obviously money. Knowing the deficit is a bit big, slimming Nasa down a bit makes a bit of sense (I know other things dwarf what it costs, but maybe they're not as easy to cut). If what comes out of Nasa is truly unique and beyond the reach of any other space-going organisation in the world, wouldn't that be better than a sort of "do it all" Nasa that does what others could (in theory at least) do?
What am I missing?
Statistically, you didn't vote in the last European elections. That's where the democracy you speak of has gone.
The EU Parliament is a gravy-train. Your MEP most likely doesn't even turn up most days of the week, least of all on the days when stuff you care about is being debated.
If like a lot of people you're about to say "yes, I but don't even want my country to be in the EU", well, again, we all got to vote for our respective governments, and we voted for parties who wanted to join up. For those of us that didn't vote for our government, and even though they didn't get 50%+ of the votes, well, you still voted for your version of democracy. What's wrong in the EU/your country today got set that way 10+ years ago.
I'm not saying this is good, and I'm not saying I feel any more 'in control' than you do, but we are all to blame here. Democracy sucks like that.
* yes, I know my citations aren't brilliant, but I couldn't immediately lay my hands on better ones ;-)
Phenomenally stupid indeed. In fact, an example of exactly the sort of content users aren't clicking on.
The findings give further ammunition to publishers who insist that Google and other news aggregators are linking to their stories without paying any advertising revenue.
Had there been any semblance of journalism here, it might have said:
The findings indicate that Google generates fewer, but more highly qualified leads to publishers. These highly engaged users are 78% more likely to be interested in the tightly targeted ads those publishers are now able to include on their content. All this has lead to a 50% decrease in traffic (with a corresponding decrease in publisher's operating costs of about 22%), yet a 38% increase in profit.
(obviously I'm making up the numbers)
The kind of people spouting this rubbish just want to wallow in the problem rather than being any tiny part of the solution. If they haven't figured out that their lower traffic is actually more valuable than the swathes of dross they used to get, then they deserve to whither and die. The ads industry has long since worked out that "conversions" are far more useful than "page impressions", so I have no idea how so-called publishers still think page views are important to them. As I say, they don't want to succeed.
Perhaps these people would celebrate and order their Porsches if every bot net on the planet starting downloading and discarding content from them? Maybe once they can't pay for the champagne and hookers they might they realise that traffic alone doesn't generate revenue, and actually does the opposite because it increases costs.
Keys-by-DNS (or similar) is pretty much where I think things need to go.
I've always wondered why we needed SSL-for-http, SSL-for-smtp and SSL-for-other_protocol. Why don't we just have a generic "ssh to someone" protocol which can forward the packets to the right service on the remote server (perhaps a sort of TCP-S protocol or something?). Of course, key management is really the problem.
Back to costs: Who's gonna spend the time (and money) trying to convince the world it needs keys-by-DNS when no one uses keys-by-DNS yet? It's probably worse than you might think because SSL's already been done, and the vast majority of normal people in the world don't need much more than that.
I see where you're going on this, but I think you're missing a proportion of possible uses for such a gadget.
I'm personally looking for one or two (touchscreen) tablet machines - definitely one in the kitchen, and maybe one in the bathroom or else just on the coffee table. I'm not looking to do all that much with it, except (in the kitchen) to be a place to play music, maybe watch something like BBC iPlayer for a cookery show, or just display a recipe on a web page (or fiddle with the home automation or what not). I'm not saying this specific device is going to be perfect for that (even when it gets touchscreen), but having hands covered in butter isn't going to be useful on any sort of keyboard or mouse. At least I can wipe the touchscreen clean, and I don't have to give up any horizontal space to use it.
Am I going to throw away my laptop for this? No way, but if it's a matter of "honey, just check if the trains are running on time", then a super-slimmed down tablet on the coffee table or stuck to the side of the fridge is definitely easier than any machine I've seen (other than some smart phones, maybe).
The problem the tablet producers will have include convincing the masses that they need a coffee table computer, and proving to people such as yourself that $200 for a bit of a toy is actually worth it.
(Just another thought: I once bought a Phillips Pronto touch screen universal remote control for more than $200 - so obviously there are some of us saps out there ready to spend money on an apparently over-engineered solution to a problem ;-)
I've wondered about the "remote controlled wheelie luggage" bomb. Same idea as yours, except the guy shows up, puts his bag down, it then mysteriously starts driving toward the secure area, and detonates when someone stops it, picks up up, or when the controller decides to do so. No need for a suicide bomber. There's actually no need for much of a bomb either - just enough of an explosion to cause a bit of damage - it'll still close the airport, and it'll still stop people flying.
This all reminds me of a number of years ago when the IRA were doing a UK mainland bombing campaign. They let off a small explosion on a barely-used branch line at Clapham Junction (the UK's busiest station). No one was injured, there was actually a very small amount of actual damage to anything, yet CJ closed for a day, and tens of thousands of people didn't get to work that day.
Thankfully it seems terrorists don't read history (or /.) :-)
From the summary, one might draw the conclusion that "be a BT customer, and you're more of a target", but I seem to remember BT being the biggest ISP in the UK by quite a big margin*. Virgin Media (aka. NTL / Telewest) are the second largest*, and so it goes on. So I suppose it's reasonable that BT would account for the majority of the infractions. Conversely, BT have amongst the shittiest networks of all, so you'd imagine that the file sharers weren't actually sharing that much after all. But I suppose that would mean BT won't mind 25,000 people getting cut off, because it'll save them having to upgrade their network (like they say they're doing on the TV ads they're running at the moment).
So the real take-away here is that if you're at a small ISP, you're less likely to be targeted (at least until the big ones tumble). Meanwhile, the utter incompetence of the BPI and their friends should keep this from being anything more than an annoyance for 30,000 people. If even 5000 of them follow up and challenge their accusers, it'll tie the whole system up for months, if not years.
The BPI, Mandleson, and their ilk have an idealised view that file sharing should be super-illegal and so almost entirely eradicated. The problem is, best estimates suggest 7 million people in the UK share files*, so even if half give up from fear of prosecution, that's still 3.5 million people they've got to prosecute. I don't imagine there's a lawyer in the UK who's capable of executing that many cases in a decade, let alone simultaneously.
(* No, I can't substantiate this with a link right now - you know how to use a search engine though, right?)
I agree with everything you're saying - clearly, our legislators are the problem here. Being, as we are, British, there's an extremely good chance this whole thing will eventually tie itself in knots (legally, publicly, legislatively, or just technically).
However, for all Virgin Media customers, now's the time to fire up your bittorrent client. I'm not a NTL/Telewaste/Virgin Media customer, but maybe I'll just fire up the bittorrent client on my NAS anyway. Now's the time for us to all start sharing Linux distros, random bits in files, and as much Creative Commons music as you can squeeze onto your hard disk.
If they won't listen to reason, perhaps a slew of false positives in a veritable barrage of extra traffic which makes vast chunks of their customer base eligible for disconnection will make them think differently?
Of course, since this is /., I'd hope any readers who were Virgin Media customers would just move elsewhere. Think Broadband is your friend ;-)
As the world has got more crowded and busier, it's becoming harder to be a good parent when dealing with your kids. I mean, we can't be expected to actually be interested in our own kids can we? How can we possibly do that and answer the all important phone calls we get from our friends, let alone talk to our friends as we walk about. How can I possibly keep track of my five children when I'm having a party? I mean, not only do I have lots of guests around, but I can barely see straight enough to go back to the shop to buy more booze. There's no way I'm going to know every last detail about the little tikes that just seem to get into every little hole, or out of every open door way in the half a second my back is turned!
The problem really is that kids just don't understand that mummy and daddy are busy people. We don't always have enough time in our days to watch their every move ourselves, so if we need some emotionless, compassionless computer to do it for us, for a relatively small up-front charge, then we think that's perfectly fine - at least until they've grown up a bit and shown that they're trustworthy. Of course, my 15 year old still hasn't reached that point, but then he always was a bit uncontrollable, and never really listened to anything we said. I blame schools for that - they don't instil any discipline these days. The police don't help, all they seem to do is harass my kids. They're good kids really, but of course they don't understand that.
I can't comment about true HD capability, and relative speeds, and respond to "does it do better than " type questions, but that machine looks like a regular PC in a shiny case to me. If you want something a bit more revolutionary, then a Fit PC might be more up your street: http://fit-pc.co.uk/ (and yes, it can run Linux).
The Pirate bay people have devised a way that makes it financially unattractive to represent the *AA when going against a popular service such as TPB. This arguably also makes it unattractive to represent TPB (or others) in case they do the same thing to you for some reason. It does not directly cause any discomfort to the *AA, except to (possibly) make it harder for them to prosecute further cases. There is some concern that this plan attracts legal action because it's a deliberate attempt to cause financial discomfort. However, it could be argued that the plan's only transgression was to publish the lawyers bank account details, and some instructions. The bank account details are non-confidential, and the general concepts of the plan are not a new idea. It remains to be seen how this is handled by the courts, if indeed they become involved in it.
TPB has asked the community to send 1SEK (or, I presume less) to the lawyers who prosecuted them. These lawyers are of course the designated recipients of the fine that TPB have to pay to the *AA, so have given TPB their bank account details.
Under Swedish law, if you accidentally electronically pay someone, you can write to them to ask them to refund the money. They are legally obliged to do this.
The intention of TPB's plan is to have the community pay the lawyers 1SEK each, but to then claim they did this accidentally, and to demand a refund. The refund will cost the lawyers time and money to process. If the lawyers chose to electronically return the money, they will quickly exceed their account's 1000 free transfers limit, and will have to pay 2SEK to perform subsequent transactions.
It's not entirely clear if the 1000 transfer limit includes receiving money as well as sending it. If it does include receiving, then it's probable that the lawyers will simply instruct their bank not to accept payments unless greater than (say) 1 million SEK. It's unlikely the bank will charge more than a one-off fee to set up this facility. If this occurs, then the plan will quickly fail. Likewise, if receiving money does not impact the 1000 transfer limit, then community members failing to ask for a refund essentially help the lawyers by making them richer.
Please note: If the community does indeed send these micro-payments, this does not, in any way contribute towards the fine that TPB have to pay (even if you do not ask for your money to be refunded). If you wish to help TPB pay the fine, then please arrange to send money directly to TPB, as the fine will only be considered paid if TPB pay the lawyers directly.
Authors note: I suspect this plan will quickly fail, however even if it does so, it appears to me that it sends a strong message to lawyers representing anyone TPB dislikes. I'll leave it to the reader to decide what they think of that 'message'. Lastly, I hope I got all the details right, but since this is /., I'm sure I'll quickly be corrected if not.
I know it's not 'the done thing', but I RTFA. Lord knows, the BBC aren't famed for their excellent technology journalism, but even they managed to show how incredibly stupid and "woe is me" the PRS are.
In the article, the PRS say that they've been pleading with Google to re-instate the videos in the UK. Google of course basically say the PRS made it too expensive for them. The PRS carry on acting like they're the ones who've been kicked in the teeth, and say that Google doesn't want to pay more, "despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing". Of course, as we know, video-views only cost Google money - and only ad-clicks actually make them anything.
So just because a video gets viewed lots of times means nothing - it's how many ad-clicks you get that counts.
However, where a music video is concerned, those views may, in a small number of cases, lead to the viewer deciding to buy that music or video. Of course, Google make nothing out of that sale, but the PRS does.
So the PRS is saying they want Google to pay them for advertising their product, regardless of how much money Google makes or loses from doing so.
So in this story, Google is the closest thing to a representative of the music buying public that we have. The PRS really serves itself, and to a lesser extent the music producers. As a consumer, I'm quite happy with Google's choice - if people don't want to sell me music, then I won't buy it. If someone else on the Internet wants to show me those videos instead, then maybe I'll go there, maybe I won't.
However, if I was a producer, I'd probably be rather upset by the PRS's actions (although given the spin the PRS is putting on this, the producers are probably blaming Google).
Didn't one of the courier companies actually state they were interested in this sort of thing? The quote I remember was "give us the parcel by 10am and and we'll deliver it by 5pm the day before" (although I might have got the times wrong, completely misquoted or indeed be talking complete rubbish).
Acorn is a long-forgotten, but actually tremendously influential company. Had Acorn not made the Acorn Electron, and subsequently the BBC Micro, I'm sure British IT would not be what it is today. Oh wait... this article is about a nut. Silly me, I thought I was on Slashdot.
Margaret Thatcher slowly went mad on her 4 hours a night. Suggesting the Poll Tax was a "fair" system ought to be evidence enough. Just go and read some of the ramblings she's come out with since if you fancy a laugh. Once insanity arrived, then even the notion of needing sleep probably took a back seat.
She's my favourite example when telling people I'd love to be able to get 10 hours every weeknight, and perhaps 12 on weekends. All these people walking around with 6-8 hours per night are risking their mental health! I of course, am perfectly sane.
One could go on to cite America as further example of lack-of-sleep related insanity. However, one notes that the president of that country seemed to do little else but sleep or play golf early in his tenure, and still went on to start dubious wars.
(I feel some troll-related anti-karma coming my way - quick! hide under the covers!)
If a stupid filter works like a coffee filter, does that mean that they'll end up with a super-dense blob of stupidity in the strainer? If they keep filtering, maybe it will collapse making a stupid star or some such. A shining beacon of our stupidity for future generations. Of course, I can imagine some careful handling would be required, in case anyone becomes "infected" with stupid.
;-)
The mind boggles... well, it would if I had one
I know this is contraversial, but for a good number of them, I say "balls to you". As a Brit, I see many US based Internet stations acting as parochially and as US-centric as your terrestrial stations do. I understand that most of their listeners are in the US, but they're not going to get many international listeners unless they open up a bit. I'll give you an example:
To highlight the royalties problem, a series of stations are putting ads in the stream which say something along the lines of, "the Copyright Royalty board just raised rates for this station. If this new rate increase holds, most Internet radio stations will close - they won't be able to make their royalty payments. Visit savenetradio.org, today, voice your opinion..."
For all you Americans, I'll translate that into English (which is far more compatible with people that live outside the US and are either British, or speak English as a second language).
"The US Copyright Royalty board has just raised rates for this station. If these new rates continue, most US based Internet radio stations will close - they won't be able to afford the royalty payments. Visit savenetradio.org and voice your opinion...".
There's another ad that's even worse, asking me to talk to my senators. Well, guess what, I don't have any. There's nothing wrong with promoting US culture or style, but this isn't even that - it's just plain ignorant.
When these people start even vaguely acknowledging the existence of the world outside the US borders, then I'll start feeling some sympathy towards them. Right now, this is effectively a US-only problem, confined to the US. The billions of people, and thousands of 'net radio stations in other nations needn't worry about it. Besides, you can bet that a whole load of these stations will start basing themselves out of non-US locations pretty soon (which with a bit of luck will make them realise there's a world out there).
You might have a point here... If I post the offending Flikr material, then eventually I'll get blocked too (although I'm a lot lower profile than Flikr ;-). Would that potentially lead to a drop in my comment spam too? Whilst the botnets are all over the place, at least some of them could be controlled from within China. If the controller can't easily see what anti-spam protections I put in place, maybe they'd leave me alone.
Absolutely. The thing is, I don't necessarily want a house (maybe I want a huge hotel/casino looking thing instead?).
I'm sure everyone has ideas of how this could be done. My favoured approach is like Elite. My server becomes a planet. The basics mean I have to provide a space station, but if I'm up to it, I can provide the entire planet surface too. The space station offers standard things, like a chat room, informational space, basic trading etc. If I run a planet surface, then it's all as I want it. Maybe one area is a first-person shooter type game (paintball?), another has a formula-1 race track, and another has loads of commerical entities on it. Somehow I provide ways for you to bring your special paintball gun, car or money along and go crazy in my made-up world. Of course, if my server goes down, then my planet disappears from the map (or becomes impossible to travel to).
Of course, if you don't like what I'm doing, then you can do it your own way on your own planet. A bit like if you don't like my website, you can run your own, in your own way. In fact, making this whole thing an "extension" to your website could also lead to some interesting possibilities - start by visiting a map provider (Google), then take their directions to (whoever), which causes your client to connect to their server and start the experience.
I built an invisible flyer years ago, look, here it is:
I even filed a patent for it... Now where did I put that? Never mind, the company I set up for this is doing really well too. It is, really.
Right - and the poor admin who sits at your computer to get your printer working.
Having spent many a happy hour trying to find where an "oh so clever" user has put all the standard bits of his computer, all this sounds like a support nightmare. If MS do it, you can be sure the computer's behaviour will change so significantly that one user won't be able to tell another how to do simple tasks - they'll all have different knowledge about how to do the same thing. The poor admin will have to have a super-brain to have all those variants in memory at once.
That said, done right, it could be really good. I'd wait for Apple to do it before getting too excited though.
Agreed, but it'll work on your blog or other "don't care about the money" sites you may control. Between suitably militant /. users alone, that's got to be a fairly large number of sites. Working on the theory that it takes five goes to get a message across, an IE user's probably going to get it eventually.
:-(
Just my 2 pence, and I'm sure not about to change the world
Right - and herin lies the fundamental problem with ASBOs. Many people (some of whom seem to have commented here) think asbos are good because they get rid of scumbags who otherwise evade prosecution by the law. Indeed, asbos were introduced to combat such problems. However, the current UK government has shown time and time again that it responds to problems in the wrong way.
This as an example: There are already ample laws regarding the misuse of computer systems, unauthorised use of systems etc etc. These laws could be clarified, adjusted or ammended to combat the problem of so called cybercriminals. Indeed, these laws are already used in many ways to do just that.
Instead, the government wants to use it's 'great idea', the asbo, to do this. Asbos are the wrong response to the problem, because they discriminate totally, and allow no space for correct behaviour. As you point out, all that would be left for a 'hacker' would be a McJob, because they won't be allowed near a computer. Conviction under existing computer misuse laws would sure make it difficult to convince BigBank that they were safe, but if they got a job, they could use a computer quite happily. Clearly getting some bright, but misguided kid, into a situation where they are forced to have a McJob isn't going to make them realise the error of their ways - it's far more likely to breed resentment and lack of respect for authority/the government. If that kid gets near a computer in the future, they're not likely to just sit there and read the BBC news.
Whilst asbos are currently very carefully administered, there is so much room for abuse it's just not funny. The Home Office is procedurally and culturally totally broken, so I wouldn't be suprised if asbos were already being abused. Certainly, they seem to be getting dished out for the most bizarre things. Either way, asbos create more discrimination against people (scumbags or otherwise) and alienate such people from society. Everyone agrees something has to be done about such people, but this is not the answer.
</rant>
Didn't IBM have a plan to move whole-sale to Linux? I heard they'd mostly got the servers sorted and were moving into desktops. I'd imagine they have vast rafts of IBM Thinkpads in-house, and quite probably a good number of Lenovo machines too.
Assuming they don't have any special arrangements with Lenovo with respect to Linux, would this imply IBM would end up buying another vendors laptops in the future? Or would it mean that IBM would take over Linux support for Thinkpads, leaving Lenovo to do the Windows side of things?
The mind boggles, but no immediately obvious solution springs to mind.