this is something id like to know myself... really the only thing i use bittorrent for other than game demos is TV shows... just yesterday i grabbed this week's episode of veronica mars because the election coverage caused my tivo to only get about 20 minutes of it... and i dont keep them after i watch them, because theres really not much of a point, and they take up a lot of space...
im not sure i see how this is illegal any more than me recording a show on tivo and watching it later is, or me recording a show on a vcr, watching it, and possibly giving a copy of the tape to a friend that wanted to see it...?
i can understand how it might be an issue if i were grabbing something that was available for purchase on dvd, but if im just grabbing broadcast shows i dont see what the issue would be... granted, the shows usually have their commercials removed, but i never see the commercials at anything less than a blur anyway thanks to tivo...
A better solution would be to force the tobacco companies to sell Nicotine free cigarettes. Not that they ever will.
well, until that day comes (and monkeys fly out my ass) i highly recommend smokers who want to quit give zyban a try... im sure it doesnt work for everyone, biochemistry being what it is, but it seems to be working for me where nothing else did... i dont really understand how it works, but it does... i just dont ENJOY cigarettes like i used to, and i enjoy them less every day (only been on the stuff for about a week and half, and i understand it takes two weeks to really kick in)...
definitely a better option than replacing one addiction with another (slightly more healthy) addiction...
Fiber to the home... why not?
on
Broadband Bits
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· Score: 0
Whilst FTTH is by far the most impressive and feature-filled technology on display here, the likeliness of it ever reaching a wide audience isn't very high, at least not in the near future.
i cant for the life of me understand how the challenges faced by widespread fiber to the home/curb is any different than those faced by the cable industry in the late 70s... i mean, it was a crazy idea... i can just see someone trying to convince investors that it was going to be worthwhile to run miles and miles and miles of coax all over the place, right to a customer's home, FOR FREE to anyone and everyone who wanted it... im sure everyone said it was nuts, it would be too expensive, too difficult, too time consuming, too much red tape on right of ways etc, too complicated to build the infrastructure, yadda yadda yadda...
im also sure the same folks are feeling kinda stupid today, because it DID work, in a big way... and the best part was, the entire infrastructure was PRIVATELY OWNED, it wasnt a utility, and the owners could pretty much do whatever the damn well pleased with it...
i have to believe that there would be similar advantages to a company ballsey enough to take it upon themselves to do the same thing with fiber... just eat the initial cost of building the physical infrastructure in return for controlling it in the future once it has become ubiquitous...
i dunno, its entirely possible i dont understand all the issues involved, it just seems like there would be a strong parallel between the infacy of cable tv services and fiber to the home...
do you feel that this kind of technology will tend to bring people together more, or apart?
further apart, definitely... its already happening... a fine example of this can be seen in how the console gaming market has changed with the advent of online capabilities... the number of console games that feature non-network (splitscreen, whatever) multiplay has declined dramatically... and the ones that do are mostly limited to sports games... and it seems games that offer some form of network multiplay but no same-station multiplay are becoming increasingly common...
evidently, people just dont gather around the tv with real people for some gaming goodness anymore...
i dunno, maybe it just seems that way to me, it isnt like ive been doing any kind of real tracking on it... but i cant help thinking that instantly finding an illiterate jackass opponent at any time day or night (and just as easily ditching them when youre done) must feel so much more convenient than the hassle of maintaining real relationships with quality people to most gamers... and the market is shifting in accordance with this preference for "tele-gaming"...
hell, now we even have online fighting games, which is just sad... half the fun of a fighting game is humiliating your opponent (or being humiliated as the case may be), and i really doubt anonymous "tele-humiliation" is very satisfying...
ill second that... im on my third ps2 and second xbox... compare that to every other disk-based system i own, like my gamecube, dreamcast, or saturn, all of which still read disks just fine, and play just fine, even after many years of use...
i hate buying those "extended replacement plans" but at this point, i wouldnt consider buying a console from either sony or microsoft without one, just because its almost guaranteed it will fail after around 10-14 months...
Battery life estimates are always complete fabrications.
"always" and "never" never happen:) while i agree that this is generally the case (apple and the ipod being the posterchild for this kind of fudging) not every "estimate" quoted by a manufacturer is so far off base...
two examples in particular come to mind where i actually got MORE battery life than quoted... my first HDD-based mp3 player, the PJB-100, had a rated battery life of 10-12 hours, but i regularly got 14-16 hours out of it... and the most dramatic example of battery life underestimation is from my nintendo GBA SP... i think its rated at 10-12 hours, but ive managed to run it 2-3 hours a day for days on end without the "charge me please" light coming on, and ive never actually managed to run it all the way down...
I doubt that the DS will live up to its battery life estimate either
im hoping it turns out to be like my GBA SP, and actually be a very conservative estimate...
tsk... i never said money was a bad thing... only the ravenous accumulation of it...
the problem is the distribution of wealth (and influence) is screwed up, and getting more screwed up as time passes, thanks to the vanishing middle class... the bell curve is becoming more and more inverted, with more people at the extreme ends of the economic spectrum...
and as for the voting thing, the object is to distribute the political power across the middle class... by restricting it to landowners, you only eliminate the extremely lazy or otherwise screwed up folks, because it really ISNT that tough to own a house (and the dirt it sits on), hell, *i* own a house, and believe me, if i could get one, *anyone* could with an ounce of dedication...
on the other end of the spectrum, thanks to one person/one vote, the extremely rich also dont have too much political power... this is, of course, NOT at all the case currently... but thats because the elected officials in question are bought and sold by the rich instead of actually representing the majority of their constituents... that is another problem entirely, but i do have some ideas that might help increase fair representation from our politicians, as im sure you can imagine...
so i guess bottom line, im on the side of the people who actually DO the work that drives the economy... im not anti-money, or some kind of communist... i believe people should earn their way in life, work hard for their piece of the pie... its when people DONT want to work for it and expect you to give them a piece anyway, or at the other end try to take the whole goddamn pie for themselves, and are willing to stomp the life out of you to get it, that i have a problem...
It's all about saving a buck or two so some CEO can give himself a nice bonus for cutting costs.
this is the root cause of the problem... hell, MOST problems, currently... outsourcing, the collapsing economy, the vanishing middle class, etc... the goddamn crap-wrapped-in-skin C*Os of the world and their absolutely insatiable greed... their willingness to lie, cheat, steal, ANYTHING that will feed that sucking black hole...
these people are like a cancer or something... constantly accumulating, well past what they "need" to live even the most extravagant lifestyle. its never enough...
now, if these folks actually SPENT some of that accumulation it wouldnt be so bad, but for the most part, they DONT... every dollar that gets sucked in to the "corporate officer's club" never comes out again, resulting in an ever-decreasing supply of cash for the rest of us... oh, sure, sometimes they will blow a huge wad of dough on buying yet another company, but really thats just shuffling cash from one set of officers to another, the money moved around but it never actually got back into circulation...
anyhow, got slightly off course, my point is that this outsourcing thing is nothing more than another way to feed the sucking black hole of corporate accumulation... to fix the problem, youve got to stop it at the source... and its obviously going to be left to us to do that, since the governments of the world have demonstrated that they have no interest in stopping it...
ill leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what the best way to stop it might be... personally, im thinking of something along the lines of hot lead, and a lot fewer C*Os... who knows, maybe their heirs would get some of that cash back into circulation, and if not, maybe THEIR heirs will, etc... but thats just me...
Voting from a PC at home is a bad idea because it unfairly gives people with money a chance to vote easier than without.
personally, i think its a great idea for just that reason... in fact, id like to go old-school and say only landowners can vote... i find the idea that just anybody (non-felon, citizen, over 18) can walk up and influence the direction of the country to be absolutely horrific...
want to vote? no problem: buy a house. cant afford one? no problem: work harder, SAVE your damn money, get a better job. dont have the education to get a better job? no problem: get your ass educated. something in the way of your education (a brood of grubby kids, too damn lazy, too damn stupid, not enough time, too high, too drunk, too much time in jail, too fat to get out of the house, manic-depressive, ADHD, whatever)? tough titty said the kitty. no voting for you, so sorry so sad... just go back to whatever it is youre doing to waste your life and leave running the country to the people who actually have some skin in the game...
people like that are exactly the kind of people i DONT want deciding the direction of the country.
on the upside, people like that dont usually vote anyway... but the idea that they COULD just gives me nightmares...
i felt the same way for a long time about my primary email address... after 9 years of using the same address, i think i was on pretty much every list around, and was getting somewhere around 300-500 spams a day, up to 800+ on particularly bad days...
i tried filters... i tried stuff like spamassassin... i tried dns black holes... nothing worked...
then one day i decided to try a challenge / response package called TMDA (tmda.net)... it took quite a bit of fiddling with to get things just like i wanted, and a lot of testing with other email addresses before i felt comfortable with it, but it turned out to be well worth the effort... since implementing this for my main email account, i have received ZERO (yes, really) spams in my box... its been about 3-4 months now, and i dont know how i ever lived without it...
i suppose its possible that i may have missed one or two legitimate emails from people to offended by the challenge message or too stupid to understand the challenge message, but odds are i missed or accidentally deleted at least that many legitimate emails while wading through the daily spam...
because in real life i cant run down a bunch bunch of people with my car, or torch a house, or beat the living hell out of some snot-nosed punkass teenager, no matter how badly i WANT to do so...
well, actually i guess thats not true, i COULD, i just dont want to deal with the real-life reprecussions...
so, instead i do it in a game. this is a good thing, really, because i have absolutely zero doubt that if i didnt have a virtual outlet for my aggression, at some point it would bubble up to the surface in the real world, consequences be damned... in my case, games dont cause violent behavior, they *prevent* it:)
Does this mean that I will end up having to recode all my web pages to not use cookies, in order to avoid a fine?
i, for one, hope so... ive been 99% cookie-free for years and years, and watched more and more of the web become broken or inaccessable to me because of it...
So what, you came across some rude people. They exist everywhere, including open source land.
the problem is, open source land has a MUCH higher than average population of socially stunted emotionally retarded assholes just waiting to lash out at any "inferior" that shows up on their radar (and if youre using distro-X or software-Y or, god forbid, are so clueless as to need to ask for help, you are clearly an inferior)... and i believe this high dumbass population contributes DIRECTLY to the sorry state of usability in open source software...
"i mean, who cares about those lusers anyway, right? whiny babies, always wanting things to WORK, always wanting them to be in-tu-it-ive! wah wah, let them figure it out by digging through source code and learning to use 6-button hotkeys, just like i did! yeah, go back to windoze you pathetic worms, thats more your speed anyway!"
well i say, fuck'em... ive given up on open source entirely until such a time as the developers start writing software for USERS and not just for themselves.
personally i just use two bank accounts to mitigate my risk... one account has all my money in it, and the other is my spending account... the debit card for my storage account stays locked up at home, and i just keep a few hundred bucks transfered over into my spending account at any given time, then just use the visa debit card on that account for purchases online and off...
this limits how much i could lose if someone stole my card or card info... and on the rare occasions im shelling out more than a few hundred bucks at a pop, i generally know exactly how much ill need and just transfer that much over before paying a payment... it also has the side effect of making it easier to do my accounting, and more obvious when i am spending more than i ought to be:)
and for those occasions where a debit card just wont do... i have exactly ONE credit card, and that card has a $300 limit... so im not going to get too terribly screwed on that either. its pretty funny, every now and then they will raise the limit on the card and i have to call to tell them to put it back...
i guess this wouldnt work for everyone, but if you can reasonably manage to operate debt-free, with enough assets liquid to deal with those occasional big-ticket unexpected expenses (like your car blows up or something), then it can certainly mitigate the risks of using plastic instead of cash, with only the minor added inconvenience of the periodic transfers... but maybe there are other flaws with this that i just havent noticed or thought of yet...
Slashdot Mirror
an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
;)
nah, it just makes it really hard for the whole world to hit a baseball
this is something id like to know myself... really the only thing i use bittorrent for other than game demos is TV shows... just yesterday i grabbed this week's episode of veronica mars because the election coverage caused my tivo to only get about 20 minutes of it... and i dont keep them after i watch them, because theres really not much of a point, and they take up a lot of space...
im not sure i see how this is illegal any more than me recording a show on tivo and watching it later is, or me recording a show on a vcr, watching it, and possibly giving a copy of the tape to a friend that wanted to see it...?
i can understand how it might be an issue if i were grabbing something that was available for purchase on dvd, but if im just grabbing broadcast shows i dont see what the issue would be... granted, the shows usually have their commercials removed, but i never see the commercials at anything less than a blur anyway thanks to tivo...
A better solution would be to force the tobacco companies to sell Nicotine free cigarettes. Not that they ever will.
well, until that day comes (and monkeys fly out my ass) i highly recommend smokers who want to quit give zyban a try... im sure it doesnt work for everyone, biochemistry being what it is, but it seems to be working for me where nothing else did... i dont really understand how it works, but it does... i just dont ENJOY cigarettes like i used to, and i enjoy them less every day (only been on the stuff for about a week and half, and i understand it takes two weeks to really kick in)...
definitely a better option than replacing one addiction with another (slightly more healthy) addiction...
Whilst FTTH is by far the most impressive and feature-filled technology on display here, the likeliness of it ever reaching a wide audience isn't very high, at least not in the near future.
i cant for the life of me understand how the challenges faced by widespread fiber to the home/curb is any different than those faced by the cable industry in the late 70s... i mean, it was a crazy idea... i can just see someone trying to convince investors that it was going to be worthwhile to run miles and miles and miles of coax all over the place, right to a customer's home, FOR FREE to anyone and everyone who wanted it... im sure everyone said it was nuts, it would be too expensive, too difficult, too time consuming, too much red tape on right of ways etc, too complicated to build the infrastructure, yadda yadda yadda...
im also sure the same folks are feeling kinda stupid today, because it DID work, in a big way... and the best part was, the entire infrastructure was PRIVATELY OWNED, it wasnt a utility, and the owners could pretty much do whatever the damn well pleased with it...
i have to believe that there would be similar advantages to a company ballsey enough to take it upon themselves to do the same thing with fiber... just eat the initial cost of building the physical infrastructure in return for controlling it in the future once it has become ubiquitous...
i dunno, its entirely possible i dont understand all the issues involved, it just seems like there would be a strong parallel between the infacy of cable tv services and fiber to the home...
do you feel that this kind of technology will tend to bring people together more, or apart?
further apart, definitely... its already happening... a fine example of this can be seen in how the console gaming market has changed with the advent of online capabilities... the number of console games that feature non-network (splitscreen, whatever) multiplay has declined dramatically... and the ones that do are mostly limited to sports games... and it seems games that offer some form of network multiplay but no same-station multiplay are becoming increasingly common...
evidently, people just dont gather around the tv with real people for some gaming goodness anymore...
i dunno, maybe it just seems that way to me, it isnt like ive been doing any kind of real tracking on it... but i cant help thinking that instantly finding an illiterate jackass opponent at any time day or night (and just as easily ditching them when youre done) must feel so much more convenient than the hassle of maintaining real relationships with quality people to most gamers... and the market is shifting in accordance with this preference for "tele-gaming"...
hell, now we even have online fighting games, which is just sad... half the fun of a fighting game is humiliating your opponent (or being humiliated as the case may be), and i really doubt anonymous "tele-humiliation" is very satisfying...
ill second that... im on my third ps2 and second xbox... compare that to every other disk-based system i own, like my gamecube, dreamcast, or saturn, all of which still read disks just fine, and play just fine, even after many years of use...
i hate buying those "extended replacement plans" but at this point, i wouldnt consider buying a console from either sony or microsoft without one, just because its almost guaranteed it will fail after around 10-14 months...
Battery life estimates are always complete fabrications.
:) while i agree that this is generally the case (apple and the ipod being the posterchild for this kind of fudging) not every "estimate" quoted by a manufacturer is so far off base...
"always" and "never" never happen
two examples in particular come to mind where i actually got MORE battery life than quoted... my first HDD-based mp3 player, the PJB-100, had a rated battery life of 10-12 hours, but i regularly got 14-16 hours out of it... and the most dramatic example of battery life underestimation is from my nintendo GBA SP... i think its rated at 10-12 hours, but ive managed to run it 2-3 hours a day for days on end without the "charge me please" light coming on, and ive never actually managed to run it all the way down...
I doubt that the DS will live up to its battery life estimate either
im hoping it turns out to be like my GBA SP, and actually be a very conservative estimate...
tsk... i never said money was a bad thing... only the ravenous accumulation of it...
the problem is the distribution of wealth (and influence) is screwed up, and getting more screwed up as time passes, thanks to the vanishing middle class... the bell curve is becoming more and more inverted, with more people at the extreme ends of the economic spectrum...
and as for the voting thing, the object is to distribute the political power across the middle class... by restricting it to landowners, you only eliminate the extremely lazy or otherwise screwed up folks, because it really ISNT that tough to own a house (and the dirt it sits on), hell, *i* own a house, and believe me, if i could get one, *anyone* could with an ounce of dedication...
on the other end of the spectrum, thanks to one person/one vote, the extremely rich also dont have too much political power... this is, of course, NOT at all the case currently... but thats because the elected officials in question are bought and sold by the rich instead of actually representing the majority of their constituents... that is another problem entirely, but i do have some ideas that might help increase fair representation from our politicians, as im sure you can imagine...
so i guess bottom line, im on the side of the people who actually DO the work that drives the economy... im not anti-money, or some kind of communist... i believe people should earn their way in life, work hard for their piece of the pie... its when people DONT want to work for it and expect you to give them a piece anyway, or at the other end try to take the whole goddamn pie for themselves, and are willing to stomp the life out of you to get it, that i have a problem...
It's all about saving a buck or two so some CEO can give himself a nice bonus for cutting costs.
this is the root cause of the problem... hell, MOST problems, currently... outsourcing, the collapsing economy, the vanishing middle class, etc... the goddamn crap-wrapped-in-skin C*Os of the world and their absolutely insatiable greed... their willingness to lie, cheat, steal, ANYTHING that will feed that sucking black hole...
these people are like a cancer or something... constantly accumulating, well past what they "need" to live even the most extravagant lifestyle. its never enough...
now, if these folks actually SPENT some of that accumulation it wouldnt be so bad, but for the most part, they DONT... every dollar that gets sucked in to the "corporate officer's club" never comes out again, resulting in an ever-decreasing supply of cash for the rest of us... oh, sure, sometimes they will blow a huge wad of dough on buying yet another company, but really thats just shuffling cash from one set of officers to another, the money moved around but it never actually got back into circulation...
anyhow, got slightly off course, my point is that this outsourcing thing is nothing more than another way to feed the sucking black hole of corporate accumulation... to fix the problem, youve got to stop it at the source... and its obviously going to be left to us to do that, since the governments of the world have demonstrated that they have no interest in stopping it...
ill leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what the best way to stop it might be... personally, im thinking of something along the lines of hot lead, and a lot fewer C*Os... who knows, maybe their heirs would get some of that cash back into circulation, and if not, maybe THEIR heirs will, etc... but thats just me...
Voting from a PC at home is a bad idea because it unfairly gives people with money a chance to vote easier than without.
personally, i think its a great idea for just that reason... in fact, id like to go old-school and say only landowners can vote... i find the idea that just anybody (non-felon, citizen, over 18) can walk up and influence the direction of the country to be absolutely horrific...
want to vote? no problem: buy a house. cant afford one? no problem: work harder, SAVE your damn money, get a better job. dont have the education to get a better job? no problem: get your ass educated. something in the way of your education (a brood of grubby kids, too damn lazy, too damn stupid, not enough time, too high, too drunk, too much time in jail, too fat to get out of the house, manic-depressive, ADHD, whatever)? tough titty said the kitty. no voting for you, so sorry so sad... just go back to whatever it is youre doing to waste your life and leave running the country to the people who actually have some skin in the game...
people like that are exactly the kind of people i DONT want deciding the direction of the country.
on the upside, people like that dont usually vote anyway... but the idea that they COULD just gives me nightmares...
i felt the same way for a long time about my primary email address... after 9 years of using the same address, i think i was on pretty much every list around, and was getting somewhere around 300-500 spams a day, up to 800+ on particularly bad days...
i tried filters... i tried stuff like spamassassin... i tried dns black holes... nothing worked...
then one day i decided to try a challenge / response package called TMDA (tmda.net)... it took quite a bit of fiddling with to get things just like i wanted, and a lot of testing with other email addresses before i felt comfortable with it, but it turned out to be well worth the effort... since implementing this for my main email account, i have received ZERO (yes, really) spams in my box... its been about 3-4 months now, and i dont know how i ever lived without it...
i suppose its possible that i may have missed one or two legitimate emails from people to offended by the challenge message or too stupid to understand the challenge message, but odds are i missed or accidentally deleted at least that many legitimate emails while wading through the daily spam...
why a game and not real life?
:)
because in real life i cant run down a bunch bunch of people with my car, or torch a house, or beat the living hell out of some snot-nosed punkass teenager, no matter how badly i WANT to do so...
well, actually i guess thats not true, i COULD, i just dont want to deal with the real-life reprecussions...
so, instead i do it in a game. this is a good thing, really, because i have absolutely zero doubt that if i didnt have a virtual outlet for my aggression, at some point it would bubble up to the surface in the real world, consequences be damned... in my case, games dont cause violent behavior, they *prevent* it
Does this mean that I will end up having to recode all my web pages to not use cookies, in order to avoid a fine?
i, for one, hope so... ive been 99% cookie-free for years and years, and watched more and more of the web become broken or inaccessable to me because of it...So what, you came across some rude people. They exist everywhere, including open source land.
the problem is, open source land has a MUCH higher than average population of socially stunted emotionally retarded assholes just waiting to lash out at any "inferior" that shows up on their radar (and if youre using distro-X or software-Y or, god forbid, are so clueless as to need to ask for help, you are clearly an inferior)... and i believe this high dumbass population contributes DIRECTLY to the sorry state of usability in open source software...
"i mean, who cares about those lusers anyway, right? whiny babies, always wanting things to WORK, always wanting them to be in-tu-it-ive! wah wah, let them figure it out by digging through source code and learning to use 6-button hotkeys, just like i did! yeah, go back to windoze you pathetic worms, thats more your speed anyway!"
well i say, fuck'em... ive given up on open source entirely until such a time as the developers start writing software for USERS and not just for themselves.
personally i just use two bank accounts to mitigate my risk... one account has all my money in it, and the other is my spending account... the debit card for my storage account stays locked up at home, and i just keep a few hundred bucks transfered over into my spending account at any given time, then just use the visa debit card on that account for purchases online and off...
this limits how much i could lose if someone stole my card or card info... and on the rare occasions im shelling out more than a few hundred bucks at a pop, i generally know exactly how much ill need and just transfer that much over before paying a payment... it also has the side effect of making it easier to do my accounting, and more obvious when i am spending more than i ought to be :)
and for those occasions where a debit card just wont do... i have exactly ONE credit card, and that card has a $300 limit... so im not going to get too terribly screwed on that either. its pretty funny, every now and then they will raise the limit on the card and i have to call to tell them to put it back...
i guess this wouldnt work for everyone, but if you can reasonably manage to operate debt-free, with enough assets liquid to deal with those occasional big-ticket unexpected expenses (like your car blows up or something), then it can certainly mitigate the risks of using plastic instead of cash, with only the minor added inconvenience of the periodic transfers... but maybe there are other flaws with this that i just havent noticed or thought of yet...