We can clone some meat animals occasionally, but that doesn't mean they appear out of nowhere; you still need to feed them till they grow up to eating size.
There has been some work done on growing meat muscle directly in artificial environments, but it's only small experimental quantities and it's basically grown in a meat-based broth, so there's no efficiency gain there either. (It's too bad - I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, so if they could grow cultured mystery meat without having to use dead animal juices to feed it, I'd be interested in eating some.) Of course, since it's lab research only, it's not something available at a finite price.
If you're going to host a controversial site, you shouldn't use your DNS registrar to host the site itself; otherwise they can be pressured into pulling the whole thing. Wikileaks was able to reconstitute itself by getting another domain name, wikileaks.be, since the site itself was still there.
It's also a good idea not to get your domain service from a US registrar if you're going to be annoying to US-based interests. Gandi's based in France, or at least find some Canadians, and maybe get yourself an additional domain name that's not in.com or.net. (It's harder to mess with the registry than with individual registrars, but the.com/.net registry is US-based.)
I has a summer job in college doing programming on an IBM System/34, mostly in RPG2. It had 48KB of Semiconductor RAM (as opposed to real core), and a 13MB Winchester drive, and came with two IBM employees who were around every couple of weeks to keep it happy (usually by updating the accounting software, and then re-patching the updates to deal with the customizations our system had because the construction industry does accounting differently.) Unfortunately, we only had the slow printer, not the fast printer, so compile time was largely constrained by how long it took to print out the 10-page program listing, which was 20-30 minutes, and the printout was not optional; you always got one when you compiled. And of course when the Apple II came out, except for the disk drive it could totally kick the/34's ass, not that you'd want to run corporate accounting packages on the Apple.
The thing that was cool about the/34 was the Operations Control Language, which was a shell-like interface that you could actually do simple programming in. It was obviously cooler than JCL, but it was also even cooler than the PDP-11's RSTS-11 user interfaces that we used to run BASIC programs.
One thing that wasn't cool about the/34 was its mainframish approach to file system management - the OS wrote new file system headers when you saved or closed a file, but if it got interrupted before you'd done that, you basically lost everything. We were a steel fabricating company, and one day the clerk had spent about 6 hours typing in the list of parts we were going to need for a project, and some guy in the shop was trying to shut off the circuit breaker for his welder and powered us down instead. Fortunately she'd entered an hour or so worth of data the day before, so there were pointers to the beginning of the file and where it had ended after the first hour's work, and it was an extent-based file system. So I spent about 5 hours on the phone with IBM wandering through hex dumps of the file system to find the remaining pieces; it ended up being slightly faster than just retyping the whole thing would have been, but that could have easily gone either way. If you remember fsdb, it was kind of like using that on the raw disk.
It's definitely commerce, and at least some of it's definitely interstate, and it doesn't appear that the prosecution attempted to prove that some of it was transmitted in-state (though it's possible that the spammer used Virginia-based zombies, in which case the VA jurisdiction would have been appropriate, but they'd have to be non-lazy about it.)
I'm not bothered by the free-speech aspects here, in spite of being fairly radical about the issue, but the case should have been tossed out of state courts prima facie because it _is_ interstate, and therefore Federal jurisdiction. The spammer can appeal to Federal court, but shouldn't have had to - AOL should have sued him there to start with, though state laws are often much more aggressive about spammers. The Federal You-Can-Spam law is pretty easy for spammers to avoid, but most of them don't seem to bother (except the ones sending spam internationally).
As you say, the electrolysis-in-the-car approach is basically a fancy battery, which makes the system basically a plug-in electric car. Either charge it up at night (cracking water into hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen in a fuel-cell when you drive), or possibly get refills at hydrogen stations if you're trying to go farther than your overnight charge lets you go.
Of course, the plug-in-in-your-garage model is kind of annoying if you're like me, and keep the car in the driveway and the other can on the street while you use the garage for storage:-)
Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited is the former government telecom monopoly. Just about any ISP is going to get themselves a BGP Autonomous System Number and use BGP to communicate with other ISPs.
A long long time ago, when the Internet was smaller and more trusting, long enough ago that I've forgotten the names of the guilty parties, some company in Virginia made a mistake in configuring their router, and announced that their T1 was a really really good route to MAE-East, and about 1/3 of the packets on the Internet decided to go use their T1, for a couple of seconds before it melted... Since then, it's become a Best Current Practice for ISPs to filter out routing announcements from their customers, and most ISPs also filter their peering links with other ISPs, though some are more aggressive about it than others (plus they tend to have limits on how specific a route can be announced, just to keep router table sizes from exploding.)
But even with that, occasional glitches can happen. A couple of years ago, an ISP in South America did a bad job of route summarization (probably using RIP internally, which uses the old Class A/B/C system instead of CIDR), and announced a route for the/8 network that belonged to a major US Tier 1 ISP. Their upstream provider didn't filter it, and it was a couple of hops before you got to the US ISP, so much of Latin America lost connectivity to that US ISP because they were using that upstream. Once the US ISP saw bad route announcements about their space, they announced a pair of/9 routes to cover their/8, which was more specific than the South American route and therefore fixed everything. Many other large ISPs have done the same sorts of things as a defensive measure.
It's highly unlikely that PCTL was trying to block YouTube access for the whole world, as opposed to just for their country. That doesn't mean what they did was competent, of course, but it's not too surprising that somebody exported a route to their peers that they really only intended for their customers. Their upstream provider probably should have filtered out the announcements as well. But things like this do happen, and if you're likely to be a major target, either of malice or of incompetence, you need to do the extra work to monitor route announcements that include your address space.
Pakistan isn't a theocracy. Pakistan is an occasional-democracy heavily-tribal state ruled by a military dictator who's in serious trouble trying to retain power when lots of people want to get rid of him. Musharraff is a Muslim, but his religiousity goes about deep enough to get him a Muslim funeral when he dies, if his body doesn't get blown up into too many little pieces to bother burying.
So if an Islamic court has any authority to order the PTT to block YouTube because of "blasphemy", it's because YouTube is carrying political news about the situation in Pakistan that Musharraff doesn't want people in Pakistan watching. If Iran had tried that kind of thing, that really would be a theocratic problem, but that's not the issue here. If they implemented it in a way that blocks YouTube from the rest of the world, it's because of incompetence, not malice. (That kind of thing happens a lot, usually because somebody does a bad job of router configuration, but usually ISPs filter out incorrect advertisements; their upstream provider didn't do a good enough job here.)
So in some sense it is similar to Bush in the US - pandering to the religious right wingers as a way to get radical right-wing politics done.
Dude, being able to spend my money publishing my opinions or buying TV commercials isn't the same thing as putting people into a Clockwork Orange movie viewer. You don't have to listen, and you can use Tivo to blip over commercials you don't like.
When you talk about free speech on the Internet, people tell you "oh, no, the First Amendment isn't about protecting pornography and bad art, it's about protecting political speech", but when you talk about the First Amendment protecting political speech, they say "oh, no, elections are *far* too important to let just anybody spend their own money expressing political opinions, especially on Television where people might see it!" Bullshit. The First Amendment means that if you've got something you want to say, you should be able to use any resources you've got trying to say it.
You're asserting that limiting my spending doesn't limit my ability to speak freely, ignoring that it limits my ability to publish freely. If I can't contribute to spending money on political advertising that reflects what I want and the candidates I like, then only the Official Sources of opinions are allowed to be on television, and we're stuck with Fixed Noise, the Capitalist Broadcasting System, and Nationalized Public Radio. (And no, I didn't contribute to Ron Paul this election, though I did back in 1988.)
A tax system that can't be tweaked? Inherently not possible - if the government can write tax laws, they can change them. Of course, most of the purpose of the tax laws is to implement social controls or grant favors to people rather than just to raise money; otherwise the tax laws would be much simpler. And one of the big purposes of doing that is so that lobbyists will fork over money to politicians. But also if the government is trying to tax complex things, the taxes are going to be complex, and they're going to need to tweak the laws because it's hard to do that correctly the first time.
The Allegedly Fair Sales Tax And Double-Whammy On Retired People would have no impact on the power of politicians and very little on lobbyists for business. It doesn't eliminate business taxes; it just pretends to replace the income tax (though in practice it would be introduced as a transitional thing and the income side would never get transitioned out.) Lobbyists who currently want the personal income taxes tweaked in ways that affect their customers' spending would have to switch to lobbying to get things exempted from the National Sales Tax instead - and if you don't think so, imagine how the Realtors would react once they understand the implications of a 30% tax on sales of houses.
In theory, if you have an income tax, taxes on businesses are a bad idea economically; better to let the businesses make all the money they want, pay their stockholders and/or employees more, and get the money as income tax from the stockholders and employees. That way you're not artificially interfering with the business decisions, forcing them to operate less efficiently to reduce their taxes, and you still get the money. You lose a little on dividends paid to foreign stockholders, but because they've invested their money in businesses in your country, you're getting more of your people working. But that wouldn't let you write lots of tax laws to mess around with businesses, forcing them to lobby you and give you campaign funds.
I agree with most of what Larry's said about copyright periods being way way too long. However, there are multiple reasons that a copyright should be able to last for a reasonably long time, including beyond the death of the author, and for corporations to be able to hold them.
One is that authors sometimes make money by selling their creative works. If you can't sell to corporations, you can't easily make that money.
The longer a copyright lasts, the more money you can sell it for. It's still a gamble for both the artist and the publisher, but time value of money means it's still worth somewhat more (though Larry argues that it's not much more.)
Copyright lasting beyond death means that older authors can sell their work; otherwise it's very difficult. It's fine if you write the Great American Novel at age 25 and aren't a heroin addict or motorcycle rider, but if you're an old person who's writing either from life experience or from having spare time in your retirement, or a younger person who engages in dangerous activities, a publisher wouldn't be willing to risk paying you much if copyright ended at death.
That doesn't mean that "death plus N years" is appropriate - "N years" should be fine.
Corporations often hire writers, artists, etc. to produce work for them, and especially movies aren't a single-author-copyright kind of work. There may be one screenwriter, and maybe one lead artist for an animated picture, but lots of people contribute to the product, and in many cases they're just paid upfront. You can argue that the work shouldn't be owned by a corporation, but more of an autonomous collective, and that soggy corporations lobbing money is no way to run an artistic activity, but that's kind of where it goes.
Planespotting seems to be more of a European obsession than an American one; perhaps it's a leftover from WWII and the Cold War. But recently it's been a problem for the US government - planespotters tracked a bunch of those CIA "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping flights that the US pretended weren't happening.
It's there to take our minds off the war with Islam?
It's also there because high-tech secrecy is something that only matters if you've got a high-tech enemy, and Russia's really not that relevant a threat these days. So if you're in the business of high-tech paranoia, the Chinese are the only other superpower around.
Look, if you're going to do knee-jerk anti-religious trolling, at least do it when it's vaguely on-topic, like stem-cell research, bootstrapping the Eschaton, or building AIs with off-switches. Otherwise it's in as bad taste as saying that we can't do it because too many of our scientists are Jews, or that they can't do it because not enough of their scientists are gay.
I've seen two areas in which people's ethical or religious beliefs or aesthetics may affect nanotech research - one is what to do about an actually super-human intelligence, and one is fear about the risks of gray goo (and lower-level contamination.) You're at least as likely to have environmentalists panicking about the gray goo problem, and militarists panicking about the need to be able to destroy any super-human intelligences, and theologians wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a nanobot, and while anything you do is going to get *somebody* ranting about it, the religious arguments that are really going to happen when we start assembling nanotech tools to build enough horsepower to run AI are going to be which flavor of open source license will the new brains be running?, and some of our new nanotech overlords are going to be really annoyed if you insist on upgrading their brains. Also, once some of them start asking for citizenship, it'll get entertaining.
Meanwhile, nanotech's more at the level of self-assembling paint and similar materials science types of problems. China's research investment may advance the state of the art, or it may amount to as little as the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing great leap forward in artificial intelligence did.
Sites written in the Chinese language are, of course, mostly written for viewers who read Chinese, including in China and the widespread overseas Chinese populations.
But there's a huge business of websites in China that are used by spammers, phishers, and other parasites, because the Internet means that you can connect to anywhere in the world for the cost of a few hundred milliseconds, and China not only as a large technically skilled population, a lot of infrastructure, and an imbalance in bandwidth usage, and it also has a regulatory attitude that doesn't care too much what you do to make money selling foreigners what they want. (And DNS doesn't care what language your sysadmins speak - you can be a.com or.biz anywhere.) So if foreigners want somewhere to host a website selling Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra, the Chinese regulators don't mind all that much, and if the hosting customers want to advertise their products by sending spam with URLs that have obfuscated names in them and end up in China, the Chinese regulators don't mind all that much either. They get really grumpy if you're selling information about Falun Gong or overthrowing Communism, and kind of grumpy if there's pornography, at least if the text and filenames are in Chinese, and once in a while they'll react to trade pressure about pirated music or software, but basically if you want to host a website with malware, the best places in the world to do it are usually either China or Russia.
Sure, Moore expressed his observations in terms of transistor density, and the speed factor of 1-2 years has varied a bit over the last few decades, but what it's really about is price-performance of technology in a positive-reinforcement market. If you want to sell more chips, you either have to make them faster or cheaper or both, unless you're the only player in an underserved market.
So the expensive fast chips get faster to sell to customers with the need for speed, and the production technology gets refined to make more chips cheaper at a given speed, so the currently-fast speeds get cheaper, and the currently-cheap chips get faster, but on the other hand you do spend more capital on each new generation of fab plant.
And as the chips get faster, the software makers use up the available speed, and as the software makes machines slower (but more useful, or more friendly, or more popular), the customers want faster chips or bigger memories or bigger disks or all of the above.
The big threats to Moore's Law right now aren't so much that we're running into the edge of silicon technology, but that Microsoft Vista is sufficiently unsatisfactory that people aren't buying it unless it ships on their new laptops, so there's less demand for faster machines, and also that gamers are playing more MMORPGs, where faster CPUs and graphics chips don't make as much difference in game capability as they do with standalone games (but even so, a cutting-edge graphics card costs more than a business-class desktop computer.)
On the other hand, virtualization (which is pretty much the reinvention of time-sharing) is pushing the business sector toward doing new and exciting technology for clustering storage, and at least creating some demand for RAM, and using up some of those multi-core CPUs even though they're buying fewer of them. And we're starting to hit environments where the cost of electricity for cooling and power exceeds the cost of the CPU itself, so price-performance is starting to get measured in watts/bogomips, rather than just dollars/bogomips.
Not only is it possible for an Open Wifi system to be running a rogue DNS or other untrustworthy configuration, it's in fact nearly universal at commercial establishments that want to hand you a login page before letting you have access. It may be a non-free page that wants you to give them a credit card number, or it may be a free wireless system that wants you to check a box saying "Yes, I agree you're connecting me to the Real Internet, and anything unpleasant I see their is Not Your Fault." And there have been a number of proposals for "free" municipal wireless that want to hijack every web page you access to put banner ads on them, as well as the ones that just give you the ad banners when you first connect.
That doesn't mean, of course, that logging onto a random "linksys" SSID in a residential neighborhood won't actually get you a rogue DNS installed on a virus-infected computer, or a kid's wireless system trolling for passwords from nearby gamerz. But those are at least not *guaranteed* to be hijacking you.
If the problem really is just domain-taster scum kiting every name they can generate that gets them ad-banners, then stopping tasters from doing that will cut way back on the problem. On the other hand, if it really is front-running, charging for formerly-free tasting will reduce it a bit (because the front-runner will need to spend actual money, not just kited money), so you'll only get ripped off by people who think it's worth gambling the proposed 20-cent ICANN fee or maybe the whole $6 on selling you the domain name.
It's easy to work around that, though - if you think of a name you might want to use, and want to check if it's available, just buy it from your favorite registrar rather than checking; if it's already in use you'll get rejected. That's less helpful if you want to buy the.com,.net,.org,.info,.biz.,.etc., but worst case is *you're* stuck having tasted a name you don't want to keep and paying the 20-cent ICANN restocking fee to return it. The.com name is the most likely to get ripped off, so if you can't find a registrar who'll do an atomic transaction, you could try just the.com or the.com and.net, and then check the others if you succeeded on the first two.
Also, of course, if front-running sticks around after there's a fee for tasting, it's much more effective to run an automated check-lots-of-names bot that costs front-runners money on gambles that always lose than if it's only costing them free kiting. (There are ways to fight back - captchas on name queries, for instance - but there are also name-grabbers who use DNS/Whois queries, and you can keep querying those without captchas, and not only do those people deserve to lose even more than registrar name-grabbers, but the DNS operator for the.com domain has proposed selling information on queries to (ahem) interested customers, and this'll discourage that.
A friend of mine kept analog service for a few years after everybody else had switched to digital. He liked driving around the hills, where coverage was still spotty, and while digital is better when the signal's good, if the signal's bad, analog is noisy but digital won't connect at all. It's not a universal problem, but it worked for him. These days he's got some little digital set with data functions and a camera, of course...
How do you back up your data after the power button breaks? Ideally you don't; you back it up when it's still working.
Yeah, ok, I've been slacking off on that too. The other way you do it is you pop the disk out of the laptop and into a disk-to-USB adapter which the store keeps on its DVD-burning machine. Unlike doing my backups regularly, I *have* bought one of those:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Now a stance that would upset penguins a bit more would be pro-orca or pro-leopard-seal...
There has been some work done on growing meat muscle directly in artificial environments, but it's only small experimental quantities and it's basically grown in a meat-based broth, so there's no efficiency gain there either. (It's too bad - I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, so if they could grow cultured mystery meat without having to use dead animal juices to feed it, I'd be interested in eating some.) Of course, since it's lab research only, it's not something available at a finite price.
No, it's Rabbit Season!
It's also a good idea not to get your domain service from a US registrar if you're going to be annoying to US-based interests. Gandi's based in France, or at least find some Canadians, and maybe get yourself an additional domain name that's not in
The thing that was cool about the
One thing that wasn't cool about the
I'm not bothered by the free-speech aspects here, in spite of being fairly radical about the issue, but the case should have been tossed out of state courts prima facie because it _is_ interstate, and therefore Federal jurisdiction. The spammer can appeal to Federal court, but shouldn't have had to - AOL should have sued him there to start with, though state laws are often much more aggressive about spammers. The Federal You-Can-Spam law is pretty easy for spammers to avoid, but most of them don't seem to bother (except the ones sending spam internationally).
Of course, the plug-in-in-your-garage model is kind of annoying if you're like me, and keep the car in the driveway and the other can on the street while you use the garage for storage
Just about any ISP is going to get themselves a BGP Autonomous System Number and use BGP to communicate with other ISPs.
A long long time ago, when the Internet was smaller and more trusting, long enough ago that I've forgotten the names of the guilty parties, some company in Virginia made a mistake in configuring their router, and announced that their T1 was a really really good route to MAE-East, and about 1/3 of the packets on the Internet decided to go use their T1, for a couple of seconds before it melted... Since then, it's become a Best Current Practice for ISPs to filter out routing announcements from their customers, and most ISPs also filter their peering links with other ISPs, though some are more aggressive about it than others (plus they tend to have limits on how specific a route can be announced, just to keep router table sizes from exploding.)
But even with that, occasional glitches can happen. A couple of years ago, an ISP in South America did a bad job of route summarization (probably using RIP internally, which uses the old Class A/B/C system instead of CIDR), and announced a route for the
It's highly unlikely that PCTL was trying to block YouTube access for the whole world, as opposed to just for their country. That doesn't mean what they did was competent, of course, but it's not too surprising that somebody exported a route to their peers that they really only intended for their customers. Their upstream provider probably should have filtered out the announcements as well. But things like this do happen, and if you're likely to be a major target, either of malice or of incompetence, you need to do the extra work to monitor route announcements that include your address space.
So if an Islamic court has any authority to order the PTT to block YouTube because of "blasphemy", it's because YouTube is carrying political news about the situation in Pakistan that Musharraff doesn't want people in Pakistan watching. If Iran had tried that kind of thing, that really would be a theocratic problem, but that's not the issue here. If they implemented it in a way that blocks YouTube from the rest of the world, it's because of incompetence, not malice. (That kind of thing happens a lot, usually because somebody does a bad job of router configuration, but usually ISPs filter out incorrect advertisements; their upstream provider didn't do a good enough job here.)
So in some sense it is similar to Bush in the US - pandering to the religious right wingers as a way to get radical right-wing politics done.
BBC said the outage was only for two hours.
When you talk about free speech on the Internet, people tell you "oh, no, the First Amendment isn't about protecting pornography and bad art, it's about protecting political speech", but when you talk about the First Amendment protecting political speech, they say "oh, no, elections are *far* too important to let just anybody spend their own money expressing political opinions, especially on Television where people might see it!" Bullshit. The First Amendment means that if you've got something you want to say, you should be able to use any resources you've got trying to say it.
You're asserting that limiting my spending doesn't limit my ability to speak freely, ignoring that it limits my ability to publish freely. If I can't contribute to spending money on political advertising that reflects what I want and the candidates I like, then only the Official Sources of opinions are allowed to be on television, and we're stuck with Fixed Noise, the Capitalist Broadcasting System, and Nationalized Public Radio. (And no, I didn't contribute to Ron Paul this election, though I did back in 1988.)
The Allegedly Fair Sales Tax And Double-Whammy On Retired People would have no impact on the power of politicians and very little on lobbyists for business. It doesn't eliminate business taxes; it just pretends to replace the income tax (though in practice it would be introduced as a transitional thing and the income side would never get transitioned out.) Lobbyists who currently want the personal income taxes tweaked in ways that affect their customers' spending would have to switch to lobbying to get things exempted from the National Sales Tax instead - and if you don't think so, imagine how the Realtors would react once they understand the implications of a 30% tax on sales of houses.
In theory, if you have an income tax, taxes on businesses are a bad idea economically; better to let the businesses make all the money they want, pay their stockholders and/or employees more, and get the money as income tax from the stockholders and employees. That way you're not artificially interfering with the business decisions, forcing them to operate less efficiently to reduce their taxes, and you still get the money. You lose a little on dividends paid to foreign stockholders, but because they've invested their money in businesses in your country, you're getting more of your people working.
But that wouldn't let you write lots of tax laws to mess around with businesses, forcing them to lobby you and give you campaign funds.
I didn't have enough sleep, or something, to deal with this article. Is it mushroom season in the Pacific Northwest, or what?
But it still got posted before he thought of anything to write...
Planespotting seems to be more of a European obsession than an American one; perhaps it's a leftover from WWII and the Cold War. But recently it's been a problem for the US government - planespotters tracked a bunch of those CIA "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping flights that the US pretended weren't happening.
It's also there because high-tech secrecy is something that only matters if you've got a high-tech enemy, and Russia's really not that relevant a threat these days. So if you're in the business of high-tech paranoia, the Chinese are the only other superpower around.
I've seen two areas in which people's ethical or religious beliefs or aesthetics may affect nanotech research - one is what to do about an actually super-human intelligence, and one is fear about the risks of gray goo (and lower-level contamination.) You're at least as likely to have environmentalists panicking about the gray goo problem, and militarists panicking about the need to be able to destroy any super-human intelligences, and theologians wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a nanobot, and while anything you do is going to get *somebody* ranting about it, the religious arguments that are really going to happen when we start assembling nanotech tools to build enough horsepower to run AI are going to be which flavor of open source license will the new brains be running?, and some of our new nanotech overlords are going to be really annoyed if you insist on upgrading their brains. Also, once some of them start asking for citizenship, it'll get entertaining.
Meanwhile, nanotech's more at the level of self-assembling paint and similar materials science types of problems. China's research investment may advance the state of the art, or it may amount to as little as the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing great leap forward in artificial intelligence did.
But there's a huge business of websites in China that are used by spammers, phishers, and other parasites, because the Internet means that you can connect to anywhere in the world for the cost of a few hundred milliseconds, and China not only as a large technically skilled population, a lot of infrastructure, and an imbalance in bandwidth usage, and it also has a regulatory attitude that doesn't care too much what you do to make money selling foreigners what they want. (And DNS doesn't care what language your sysadmins speak - you can be a
So the expensive fast chips get faster to sell to customers with the need for speed, and the production technology gets refined to make more chips cheaper at a given speed, so the currently-fast speeds get cheaper, and the currently-cheap chips get faster, but on the other hand you do spend more capital on each new generation of fab plant.
And as the chips get faster, the software makers use up the available speed, and as the software makes machines slower (but more useful, or more friendly, or more popular), the customers want faster chips or bigger memories or bigger disks or all of the above.
The big threats to Moore's Law right now aren't so much that we're running into the edge of silicon technology, but that Microsoft Vista is sufficiently unsatisfactory that people aren't buying it unless it ships on their new laptops, so there's less demand for faster machines, and also that gamers are playing more MMORPGs, where faster CPUs and graphics chips don't make as much difference in game capability as they do with standalone games (but even so, a cutting-edge graphics card costs more than a business-class desktop computer.)
On the other hand, virtualization (which is pretty much the reinvention of time-sharing) is pushing the business sector toward doing new and exciting technology for clustering storage, and at least creating some demand for RAM, and using up some of those multi-core CPUs even though they're buying fewer of them. And we're starting to hit environments where the cost of electricity for cooling and power exceeds the cost of the CPU itself, so price-performance is starting to get measured in watts/bogomips, rather than just dollars/bogomips.
That doesn't mean, of course, that logging onto a random "linksys" SSID in a residential neighborhood won't actually get you a rogue DNS installed on a virus-infected computer, or a kid's wireless system trolling for passwords from nearby gamerz. But those are at least not *guaranteed* to be hijacking you.
On the other hand, if it really is front-running, charging for formerly-free tasting will reduce it a bit (because the front-runner will need to spend actual money, not just kited money), so you'll only get ripped off by people who think it's worth gambling the proposed 20-cent ICANN fee or maybe the whole $6 on selling you the domain name.
It's easy to work around that, though - if you think of a name you might want to use, and want to check if it's available, just buy it from your favorite registrar rather than checking; if it's already in use you'll get rejected. That's less helpful if you want to buy the
Also, of course, if front-running sticks around after there's a fee for tasting, it's much more effective to run an automated check-lots-of-names bot that costs front-runners money on gambles that always lose than if it's only costing them free kiting. (There are ways to fight back - captchas on name queries, for instance - but there are also name-grabbers who use DNS/Whois queries, and you can keep querying those without captchas, and not only do those people deserve to lose even more than registrar name-grabbers, but the DNS operator for the
A friend of mine kept analog service for a few years after everybody else had switched to digital. He liked driving around the hills, where coverage was still spotty, and while digital is better when the signal's good, if the signal's bad, analog is noisy but digital won't connect at all. It's not a universal problem, but it worked for him. These days he's got some little digital set with data functions and a camera, of course...
Yeah, ok, I've been slacking off on that too. The other way you do it is you pop the disk out of the laptop and into a disk-to-USB adapter which the store keeps on its DVD-burning machine. Unlike doing my backups regularly, I *have* bought one of those
It's time to polish up that tinfoil hat so all the satellite can see is its shiny metal reflection. Better get your polish while it's still legal....