When the phisher sends you email saying "Get a Great Credit Card / Mortgate Today - Send me all your information!" it's not fraud unless you actually give them your info and they use it to rip off you (or some bank, etc.) It is spam, and you'd like it to go away. And it's easier to prove that somebody broke a phishing law than to get your money back.
"This is EBay/PayPal/SomeRealBank/eGold/etc. - Give me all your info", that's lightweight no-money-stolen fraud, unless you give them your info and they use it, in which case it's bigger fraud. The smaller fraud isn't typically worth the effort of the police to track down. EBay/SomeRealBank/EGold could go after them for trademark infringement or something, but you've probably noticed that eBay/PayPal and most banks haven't even bothered to use SPF on their domain names to make it easy for your mail server to discard mail, so that tells you how much *they* care. (SPF's not perfect, but it's a start.) If they steal small amounts of money from you, depending on your state's thresholds, it's still petty enough that the police are not likely to bother with it, and they'll probably find that it's interstate commerce, so it's the Feds' problem to deal with it, and it's almost certainly too small for them to bother with either.
Adding Phishing as a separate crime raises the potential penalties enough that the state police might find it worthwhile to go after a phisher just for sending out the email, if there's a $100K fine or a $100/message fine times a million messages or whatever. In reality, of course, it's almost certainly an interstate crime or an international crime, but at least Washington State gets to spank Washington-based phishers even if they can't extradict someone from Florida or Russia, and they're more likely to be able to extradict them if there's a felony with a $100m potential fine than if there's a misdemeanor with 30 days in jail.
And like it or not, police do prioritize crime-fighting effort based on dead bodies and violence, big amounts of money, political-correctness crimes like drugs, or things that bring revenue to their departments (like traffic tickets). That's not all bad - unless the legislature tells them something is a real priority by attaching lots of money to it, they're going to ignore that spam you're receiving and spend their time worrying about any recent murders and rapes, responding to complaints about street-fights and maybe domestic violence, give out $200 tickets to people with burned-out taillights, and *maybe* deal with stolen cars and laptops, though the probability of success of those two is low enough it doesn't get much effort unless they're busting a suspected fence anyway. If you lost $1000 to a phisher, and you're a grandmother, they'll feel sorry for you, and if you're a yuppie they'll laugh at you after you leave the room. If you're a *bank*, and 500 of your customers have lost $1000, then that's enough that they'll be interested, and anti-phishing laws make it easier to get evidence to catch the successful phishers and stomp on some of the riff-raff along the way.
3 - Illegal to transmit software that takes control of computer or changes security-critical settings,
4 - Illegal to deceptively induce owner/operator to install software for security/privacy/viewing, or to execute software that installs software.
5 - Covers the ass of ISPs, carriers, hardware and software vendors, service providers, etc. installing, monitoring, managing, or upgrading things or detecting illegal use of networks, services, or software.
6 - Penalties
7,8,9,10 - Legal technicalities and boilerplate.
Section 5 is directly intended to protect people like anti-virus companies updating their products, Microsoft doing operating system updates, Digital-Rights-Management software companies running licensing spyware, ISPs doing security stuff, etc. Real Networks appears to be pretty thoroughly protected here. But just about anybody selling software is protected, even if it's ueber-blatant spyware, as long as they don't falsely claim that they're the *only* way to view some kind of material when they're not. And the bill makes the classic passive-voice mistake of referring to "authorized" updates and "authorized" remote system management without saying *who's* authorizing it to do *what* to whom.So my software company, Evil-Ware Incorporated, authorizes anybody to install our product on their computers and use it to update their browsers, and we'll be monitoring your machine to make sure you're not using it in ways that violate the 347 pages of fine-print licensing terms that you agreed to when you clicked the "Yes!" button, including Page 157 where you agree that you've read the whole thing and understand it.
It's probably impossible to write a good anti-spyware bill. Not only are legislators and their staffs not skilled enough to recognize the subtleties, but they're under pressure from major manufacturers not to interfere with various software or content licensing products, which are essentially legitimate spyware. Furthermore, it's extremely difficult to draw subtle legal distinctions between edge cases (with a $100K penalty for the loser) when the legislators aren't smart enough to apply the equivalent of the "I know it when I see it" obscenity test. Think about the differences between an email message or web page containing
a 1x1 transparent GIF HTML tag (obviously a web bug) sent by someone evil,
same web bug sent by the listbot for a mailing list you intentionally subscribe to,
an HTML IMG URL that also displays an ad for the usual canned-spiced-meat products,
an HTML IMG URL that displays the logo of some advertiser or author but isn't tracked and doesn't have the recipient's address or other identifier,
the same IMG with a URL that does have a query identifying the addressee,
the same IMG with a URL that is tracked but doesn't identify the addressee,
the same IMG with a URL that doesn't directly identify the addressess but could be indirectly used to do so if somebody queried the web server logs and correlated them with other databases,
any of the above, where the image says "Click Here for More Info"
any of the above, where the image says "Click Here To Be Removed",
animated singing-dancing humorous video image from some streaming-video provider that tracks recipients by IP/cookies/etc. that you requested
same video that your Mom forwarded because she thought it was funny when one of her AOL buddies sent it to her,
same video, sent by spammer who gets paid by the number of people who watch it
etc. etc. etc. - You can think of dozens more subtly different cases, but you're reading Slashdot, so you're almost certainly more technical than 99% of your legislators and 95% of their staff people.
The bill is very explicit about the name of the Chief Clerk of the House of Reptilians who's in charge of the bill, but for the Governor's signature line, it only has the Gov's title and not his/her name:-)
So if you don't like being prosecuted as an uploader, then don't upload, assuming you can find a P2P network that lets you use it as leech-only.
There are two obvious ways to charge for uploads - charging the first uploader for all the subsequent downloads (because if that person hadn't uploaded the file, it wouldn't be there), and charging _each_ uploader for the number of copies they've uploaded. So if the basic cost is $1/song, and a song gets downloaded by 1000 people, it's "fair" to nail the first uploader for $1000 and maybe triple-for-damages, and/or it's fair to nail the person who uploaded 15 copies for $15 and triple-for-damages. In practice, of course, it's really hard to identify the *first* person to upload a file, and most P2P clients and file-sharing networks probably don't track uploads in a format that's usable as evidence in court. There are techniques that can help nail people - continually watch the trackers for changes, and identify the people who are offering uploads when they first appear. And if you're the RIAA, you find the first person you can prove uploaded something and nail them for the whole lot, especially if they are fairly active, easy to find, and have enough money to nail them but not enough for a really aggressive defense lawyer.
BitTorrent is much fuzzier, because except for the first seeder, individual clients aren't uploading and downloading entire files - they're uploading and downloading small chunks, so rather than uploading 5 copies of a 1GB movie, one to each of 5 people, you might have uploaded 5GB of total stuff spread out over 25 people. Clients and trackers do have more information about what they've done, though again it's not necessarily reliable enough to use in court.
Sure, you can get blazingly fast 7200rpm 2.5" drives, and Google will happily find you 10000rpm drives if you don't mind being limited to 36 GB and put a big hole in your wallet and possibly exceed the heat budget for a Mac Mini. But if you're concerned about price, you're almost always going to win by using an external enclosure supporting 3.5" drives with either USB2.0 or Firewire. Firewire shoeboxes are usually a bit more expensive than USB2, but I don't know if Apple's USB2 drivers are as fast as their firewire drivers, so check it out if it matters to you. Certainly if you're going to be downloading lots of lossless-compression music from etree.org or recording videos, you're going to want a bigger drive anyway.
Apple's web page says they're "inexpansive but never cheap", even though they've used a 4200rpm wimp-sized drive - oh, well:-) If the cheap 40GB version isn't big enough for you, you're probably better off getting an external drive than upgrading to the cheap 80GB version, and if it doesn't perform well enough, add RAM, because 256MB isn't enough for everybody.
Yeah, it's definitely picking up too much or too little of something. The catch is that it's too much or too little compared to what the original engine would have done under those conditions - the replacement engine's behaviour is a bit different, so sometimes it'll just look wrong to the computer.
My 2001 PT Cruiser had a "recall" a couple of years ago - they gave it a firmware upgrade, and the acceleration got better.
Back in the 80s, I had an old beater 1971 Chevy Van with the usual Weird Chevy Electrical Problems. Every once in a while the engine would stop running while I was driving down the road (which is a problem for power steering...), so I'd put it in neutral and reboot, which would usually work. My current van is a 1987 Chevy, with a new engine installed about 5 years ago. The engine's not quite identical to the original, and every once in a while the monitoring system decides something's wrong and turns on the "Service Engine Soon" light, typically when I accelerate to pass somebody while going uphill on a freeway. There's no harm done, as long as that's the cause (as opposed to something actually being wrong with it), but to turn the light off you also have to reboot the car.
Yes, New Family/Genus/Species, total odd-ball
on
New Rodent Species Found
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One of the articles quoted the guy saying, "we knew we had a really odd-ball rodent." Wikipedia has already been updated to identify it as Family Laonastidae, Genus/Species "Laonastes aenigmamus". The Wikipedia author identifies the suborder as "Hystricognathi"; one of the news articles suggested that Timmons thinks that Laonstes may be an early ancestor of that suborder, but that's filtered through reporter-speak.
An article predating this discovery lists 29 Families of Rodentia. The Old-World Hystricognathi include old-world porcupines, mole rats, cane rats, and Dassie rats; the New World families are a lot broader.
"Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist!
The ESP-without-Authentication issues have been known for a while. ICMP leakage of the otherwise-secure packets are an interesting new wrinkle on it, though.
I heard the story on public radio, and they threw in a comment about "You're not going to see one of these in WalMart any time soon." Well, you probably won't see *this* PC there, but Walmart has carried $199 standard PCs running Linux. This device does look nice, and the low power and built-in battery support are especially useful in India, but it's not like there's no competition. They also didn't mention the ~$100 PC project that somebody's working on (Negroponte, I think?) which was in the news recently.
So he immersed everything but the hard disks. Makes sense for many of the parts, though I'd be a bit concerned about oil interfering with cable connectors, but immersing the speakers just sounds likely to fail:-)
Yup. I've had no problems playing MP3s that I downloaded from the net, including from musicians' own websites and from CD-selling websites that have sample tracks. I've got no desire to have music in multiple DRM formats, though I've put up with Apple's format to use iTunes on my Shuffle.
CDs hadn't come out yet when I was in college, so audiophiles were into perfectly geared vinyl turntables, expensive speakers, and arguing about whether vacuum tubes really were or were not better. One of my housemates had a moderately expensive stereo, but had come to the conclusion that for classical music, it wasn't worth spending his money on upgrading it, because it was good enough to hear what the orchestra was playing with decent fidelity. The real place to put his money was into better recordings by better orchestras with better conductors, because if you're listening to the Obsequious Commercial Strings conducted by Joe Tuneless and recorded by the Random American Record Company, it doesn't matter *how* well your stereo reproduces the sound; you're better off getting Deutsche Grammophon recording Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and playing it on something from the clearance bin at Radio Shack.
If midrange listening equipment isn't enough to let you compare MP3s vs. raw WAVs, then MP3s are good enough for you. And if you need to have a well-insulated listening environment with no ambient noise, then MP3s are good enough for your car stereo or the portable player you use on the subway or the background music at a party. Perceptual coding's designed so that it still sounds pretty good even if you're losing big chunks of the waveform. It ain't perfect, but most of us aren't in environments where it matters, and most of us don't have your finely-tuned listening skills.
Also, the really big advantage of MP3 isn't just how much you can fit on a big storage device like a CD - it's what you can fit on a flash-based player, and how long it takes to download things (more important for dialup, as you point out, but also for broadband - it often takes me 10-20 hours to download CD-sized files on BitTorrent, depending on how popular they are, and the music I've downloaded has mostly been in lossless formats (FLAC or SHN) which are a bit smaller than life-sized but still a lot bigger than MP3 or AAC.
I've got an iPod Shuffle rather than a diskful iPod, so I suppose it could be different, but I've had no problems downloading songs from a number of sources and playing them on my iPod. As far as I can tell, none of them have significant DRM in them, but they've all been legal downloads, mostly either directly from the musicians' own web sites or from online stores that are selling CDs and provide sample tracks.
By contrast, I haven't been *able* to rip my own CDs using iTunes (:-) I think it's either a problem with my CD drive or the drivers or some XP setting I'm not aware of. And iTunes on XP is the first piece of Apple software I've used that didn't Just Work - I've got XP Home, with separate user IDs for root, me (as non-administrator), and my wife, and I had to become root to install iTunes, so it insists on keeping root's music separate from mine in various annoying ways. And there's some flakiness about accessing the iPod as a USB drive - sometimes it's there and sometimes it disappears.
The North American Network Operators Group mailing list, which is mainly for discussions between ISP people, had a good bit of discussion about this. Unfortunately, I get my NANOG subscriptions at my Gmail account, so I couldn't read about it there until it was over:-)
They're doing something like $3B in bond issues up front, and after they've borrowed all the money and gotten it locked in to their non-profit corporation, *then* they'll start doling it out over many years. That means that there's no way for the state government to control it, or to cut back the amount of money if they get into budget trouble or if they're not satisfied with the results. It's a great deal for the scammers who end up running it, but it's also going to cut down on the state's willingness to invest in other science projects.
While much of the opposition to the bond issue was from those of us with ethical objections to the research, as well as objections to using bonds to fund things that should be funded from general-fund tax revenues instead, some of the strongest arguments against the proposition in the official debates were made by people who support government-funded stem cell research and thought that the whole project was an overpriced scam.
The Berkeley-Iowa Naked People Finder project by Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth in ~1996 was fairly good at deciding whether pictures had naked people in them or not. (They also did a G-rated version that looked for horses.)
The ENUM folks have a technology that has no particular need to be centralized, but they keep insisting that there can be only one! and that they're in charge of the One True ENUM tree, and that everybody therefore must follow their sets of policies for number assignment, naming, legal contact information, permission to use numbers, etc. There's some convenience to having it centralized, but it also leads to new versions of the ICANN-vs-Verisign-vs-sane-people fights, and it's better to have policy and practice experimentation before carving the whole system in stone.
I haven't checked out DUNDi, but good for Asterisk/Digium for including it.
First of all, way too much VOIP equipment uses G.711 codecs, which are the raw 64kbps telephony interface that most of the world's wireline telephones use. Once you add all the headers, it tends to bloat to 80kbps or sometimes more.
But even 8kbps G.729a codecs, which are the most common compression, are really just fine for most people most of the time. They're better than cellphone codecs, and most desktop VOIP equipment doesn't have tinny little microphones with background road noise drowning them out. (BEEEP!!! $&$%&^%@@$!!)(sorry, what was I saying? Oh, right) Some PCs have inadequate mikes built in, and may locate them next to fans or disk drives, so you may want a headset if you're using a softphone rather than a desk phone. You're still not going to use a modem over them, of course, and many VOIP systems detect fax-modem tones and use an appropriate fax codec instead of a voice codec.
Some people also worry excessively about latency, because some article they read says that 150ms is a hard maximum and everything sounds terrible at worse than that. But the main cause of latency in wide-area networks is distance, and it's about the same whether you're on the internet or the old-fashioned phone network, because they're taking the same sets of cables across the oceans. VOIP adds a bit of latency in the codecs, but it's not that much different.
Security is a different can of worms, or more precisely a caseload of cans of worms. Eavesdropping is preventable if you use proper technology, which almost none of the commercial providers does - and even though Skype uses some good algorithms, they've got proprietary code so you can't check whether their key management is botched like so many other proprietary crypto products.
I started working before the Post-It notes came out. We mainly used similar-sized pieces of paper held on with paper-clips. (This was before the paper-clip had become a universal symbol of evil and obsequiousness:-)
At Bell Labs, the standard "routing slip" was green, so they were referred to as "greenies".
If you're running Linux, try to find out if the drivers are available for the built-in parts. They probably are - builtins tend to be pretty vanilla standard Southbridge parts, so enough other people often have them, and Knoppix can probably find them. But otherwise you may need to use your own boards.
If you're running Windows, the integrated on-board stuff will work fine, and as another poster says, you could use the built-in graphics to run a second monitor, which you'll find very addictive. If you're a gamer, you'll probably want to use your own video card, but otherwise it's nice to have your system be cooler and quieter with the built-in video.
"When you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend."
On the other hand, many idiots know not to pull the pin on a hand grenade, while they don't have the same reticence to do stupid things with rope.
Like the couple at Disclave 97 who thought a hotel room fire sprinkler would be an appropriate tie-down for their bondage activities. ("Why would you even *think* of doing something so stupid?" "It worked ok the night before....")
I've used Outlook and its predecessors at work for about a decade. While it's not as evil as earlier versions, especially the early Microsoft Mail, and it has some features that are fairly useful, it's fundamentally a broken system designed to keep people locked into the whole Microsoft package rather than to provide them with good email. The worst part is that your email is stored in One Big Bloated Undocumented Binary File, rather than separate mailboxes or separate messages, and if anything breaks, you don't have any tools to fix it other than its built-in ones. It's less fragile than it used to be, and its repair tools are more successful, but you can always get hit with a bad block on disk, and if the mailbox hits 2GB, Very Bad Things can happen (yes, I mean 2GB - I said it was bloatware, and it encourages you to mail around bloatware files like Powerpoint and Word instead of simply writing text, so 2GB is really not uncommon.)
I've used Eudora for about the same amount of time, and I like it. The user interface is friendlier than pre-Thunderbird Mozilla Mail (I haven't used Thunderbird enough to comment on it), and the mailbox storage format is the original ASCII (or whatever format the mail is in), so if something bad happens, you can still recover your messages.) There are index files that are binary, but they're separate, and if they get trashed, Eudora can rebuild them.
Really, they've got to schedule it sometime in advance so they could arrange for hotel room space. A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend. And the waiting line at Mary Chung's will just be outrageous...
Slashdot Mirror
"This is EBay/PayPal/SomeRealBank/eGold/etc. - Give me all your info", that's lightweight no-money-stolen fraud, unless you give them your info and they use it, in which case it's bigger fraud. The smaller fraud isn't typically worth the effort of the police to track down. EBay/SomeRealBank/EGold could go after them for trademark infringement or something, but you've probably noticed that eBay/PayPal and most banks haven't even bothered to use SPF on their domain names to make it easy for your mail server to discard mail, so that tells you how much *they* care. (SPF's not perfect, but it's a start.) If they steal small amounts of money from you, depending on your state's thresholds, it's still petty enough that the police are not likely to bother with it, and they'll probably find that it's interstate commerce, so it's the Feds' problem to deal with it, and it's almost certainly too small for them to bother with either.
Adding Phishing as a separate crime raises the potential penalties enough that the state police might find it worthwhile to go after a phisher just for sending out the email, if there's a $100K fine or a $100/message fine times a million messages or whatever. In reality, of course, it's almost certainly an interstate crime or an international crime, but at least Washington State gets to spank Washington-based phishers even if they can't extradict someone from Florida or Russia, and they're more likely to be able to extradict them if there's a felony with a $100m potential fine than if there's a misdemeanor with 30 days in jail.
And like it or not, police do prioritize crime-fighting effort based on dead bodies and violence, big amounts of money, political-correctness crimes like drugs, or things that bring revenue to their departments (like traffic tickets). That's not all bad - unless the legislature tells them something is a real priority by attaching lots of money to it, they're going to ignore that spam you're receiving and spend their time worrying about any recent murders and rapes, responding to complaints about street-fights and maybe domestic violence, give out $200 tickets to people with burned-out taillights, and *maybe* deal with stolen cars and laptops, though the probability of success of those two is low enough it doesn't get much effort unless they're busting a suspected fence anyway. If you lost $1000 to a phisher, and you're a grandmother, they'll feel sorry for you, and if you're a yuppie they'll laugh at you after you leave the room. If you're a *bank*, and 500 of your customers have lost $1000, then that's enough that they'll be interested, and anti-phishing laws make it easier to get evidence to catch the successful phishers and stomp on some of the riff-raff along the way.
- 1 - Definitions
- 2 - Intentionally deceptive evil things banned,
- 3 - Illegal to transmit software that takes control of computer or changes security-critical settings,
- 4 - Illegal to deceptively induce owner/operator to install software for security/privacy/viewing, or to execute software that installs software.
- 5 - Covers the ass of ISPs, carriers, hardware and software vendors, service providers, etc. installing, monitoring, managing, or upgrading things or detecting illegal use of networks, services, or software.
- 6 - Penalties
- 7,8,9,10 - Legal technicalities and boilerplate.
Section 5 is directly intended to protect people like anti-virus companies updating their products, Microsoft doing operating system updates, Digital-Rights-Management software companies running licensing spyware, ISPs doing security stuff, etc. Real Networks appears to be pretty thoroughly protected here. But just about anybody selling software is protected, even if it's ueber-blatant spyware, as long as they don't falsely claim that they're the *only* way to view some kind of material when they're not. And the bill makes the classic passive-voice mistake of referring to "authorized" updates and "authorized" remote system management without saying *who's* authorizing it to do *what* to whom. So my software company, Evil-Ware Incorporated, authorizes anybody to install our product on their computers and use it to update their browsers, and we'll be monitoring your machine to make sure you're not using it in ways that violate the 347 pages of fine-print licensing terms that you agreed to when you clicked the "Yes!" button, including Page 157 where you agree that you've read the whole thing and understand it.It's probably impossible to write a good anti-spyware bill. Not only are legislators and their staffs not skilled enough to recognize the subtleties, but they're under pressure from major manufacturers not to interfere with various software or content licensing products, which are essentially legitimate spyware. Furthermore, it's extremely difficult to draw subtle legal distinctions between edge cases (with a $100K penalty for the loser) when the legislators aren't smart enough to apply the equivalent of the "I know it when I see it" obscenity test. Think about the differences between an email message or web page containing
The bill is very explicit about the name of the Chief Clerk of the House of Reptilians who's in charge of the bill, but for the Governor's signature line, it only has the Gov's title and not his/her name :-)
There are two obvious ways to charge for uploads - charging the first uploader for all the subsequent downloads (because if that person hadn't uploaded the file, it wouldn't be there), and charging _each_ uploader for the number of copies they've uploaded. So if the basic cost is $1/song, and a song gets downloaded by 1000 people, it's "fair" to nail the first uploader for $1000 and maybe triple-for-damages, and/or it's fair to nail the person who uploaded 15 copies for $15 and triple-for-damages. In practice, of course, it's really hard to identify the *first* person to upload a file, and most P2P clients and file-sharing networks probably don't track uploads in a format that's usable as evidence in court. There are techniques that can help nail people - continually watch the trackers for changes, and identify the people who are offering uploads when they first appear. And if you're the RIAA, you find the first person you can prove uploaded something and nail them for the whole lot, especially if they are fairly active, easy to find, and have enough money to nail them but not enough for a really aggressive defense lawyer.
BitTorrent is much fuzzier, because except for the first seeder, individual clients aren't uploading and downloading entire files - they're uploading and downloading small chunks, so rather than uploading 5 copies of a 1GB movie, one to each of 5 people, you might have uploaded 5GB of total stuff spread out over 25 people. Clients and trackers do have more information about what they've done, though again it's not necessarily reliable enough to use in court.
Apple's web page says they're "inexpansive but never cheap", even though they've used a 4200rpm wimp-sized drive - oh, well :-) If the cheap 40GB version isn't big enough for you, you're probably better off getting an external drive than upgrading to the cheap 80GB version, and if it doesn't perform well enough, add RAM, because 256MB isn't enough for everybody.
Yeah, it's definitely picking up too much or too little of something. The catch is that it's too much or too little compared to what the original engine would have done under those conditions - the replacement engine's behaviour is a bit different, so sometimes it'll just look wrong to the computer.
Back in the 80s, I had an old beater 1971 Chevy Van with the usual Weird Chevy Electrical Problems. Every once in a while the engine would stop running while I was driving down the road (which is a problem for power steering...), so I'd put it in neutral and reboot, which would usually work. My current van is a 1987 Chevy, with a new engine installed about 5 years ago. The engine's not quite identical to the original, and every once in a while the monitoring system decides something's wrong and turns on the "Service Engine Soon" light, typically when I accelerate to pass somebody while going uphill on a freeway. There's no harm done, as long as that's the cause (as opposed to something actually being wrong with it), but to turn the light off you also have to reboot the car.
An article predating this discovery lists 29 Families of Rodentia. The Old-World Hystricognathi include old-world porcupines, mole rats, cane rats, and Dassie rats; the New World families are a lot broader.
"Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist!
The ESP-without-Authentication issues have been known for a while. ICMP leakage of the otherwise-secure packets are an interesting new wrinkle on it, though.
I heard the story on public radio, and they threw in a comment about "You're not going to see one of these in WalMart any time soon." Well, you probably won't see *this* PC there, but Walmart has carried $199 standard PCs running Linux. This device does look nice, and the low power and built-in battery support are especially useful in India, but it's not like there's no competition. They also didn't mention the ~$100 PC project that somebody's working on (Negroponte, I think?) which was in the news recently.
Flammable liquid coolants - just what a gamer needs. You thought using the flamethrower inside was only a way to die in Doom?
So he immersed everything but the hard disks. Makes sense for many of the parts, though I'd be a bit concerned about oil interfering with cable connectors, but immersing the speakers just sounds likely to fail :-)
Yup. I've had no problems playing MP3s that I downloaded from the net, including from musicians' own websites and from CD-selling websites that have sample tracks. I've got no desire to have music in multiple DRM formats, though I've put up with Apple's format to use iTunes on my Shuffle.
If midrange listening equipment isn't enough to let you compare MP3s vs. raw WAVs, then MP3s are good enough for you. And if you need to have a well-insulated listening environment with no ambient noise, then MP3s are good enough for your car stereo or the portable player you use on the subway or the background music at a party. Perceptual coding's designed so that it still sounds pretty good even if you're losing big chunks of the waveform. It ain't perfect, but most of us aren't in environments where it matters, and most of us don't have your finely-tuned listening skills.
Also, the really big advantage of MP3 isn't just how much you can fit on a big storage device like a CD - it's what you can fit on a flash-based player, and how long it takes to download things (more important for dialup, as you point out, but also for broadband - it often takes me 10-20 hours to download CD-sized files on BitTorrent, depending on how popular they are, and the music I've downloaded has mostly been in lossless formats (FLAC or SHN) which are a bit smaller than life-sized but still a lot bigger than MP3 or AAC.
By contrast, I haven't been *able* to rip my own CDs using iTunes (:-) I think it's either a problem with my CD drive or the drivers or some XP setting I'm not aware of. And iTunes on XP is the first piece of Apple software I've used that didn't Just Work - I've got XP Home, with separate user IDs for root, me (as non-administrator), and my wife, and I had to become root to install iTunes, so it insists on keeping root's music separate from mine in various annoying ways. And there's some flakiness about accessing the iPod as a USB drive - sometimes it's there and sometimes it disappears.
The North American Network Operators Group mailing list, which is mainly for discussions between ISP people, had a good bit of discussion about this. Unfortunately, I get my NANOG subscriptions at my Gmail account, so I couldn't read about it there until it was over :-)
While much of the opposition to the bond issue was from those of us with ethical objections to the research, as well as objections to using bonds to fund things that should be funded from general-fund tax revenues instead, some of the strongest arguments against the proposition in the official debates were made by people who support government-funded stem cell research and thought that the whole project was an overpriced scam.
The Berkeley-Iowa Naked People Finder project by Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth in ~1996 was fairly good at deciding whether pictures had naked people in them or not. (They also did a G-rated version that looked for horses.)
I haven't checked out DUNDi, but good for Asterisk/Digium for including it.
But even 8kbps G.729a codecs, which are the most common compression, are really just fine for most people most of the time. They're better than cellphone codecs, and most desktop VOIP equipment doesn't have tinny little microphones with background road noise drowning them out. (BEEEP!!! $&$%&^%@@$!!) (sorry, what was I saying? Oh, right) Some PCs have inadequate mikes built in, and may locate them next to fans or disk drives, so you may want a headset if you're using a softphone rather than a desk phone. You're still not going to use a modem over them, of course, and many VOIP systems detect fax-modem tones and use an appropriate fax codec instead of a voice codec.
Some people also worry excessively about latency, because some article they read says that 150ms is a hard maximum and everything sounds terrible at worse than that. But the main cause of latency in wide-area networks is distance, and it's about the same whether you're on the internet or the old-fashioned phone network, because they're taking the same sets of cables across the oceans. VOIP adds a bit of latency in the codecs, but it's not that much different.
Security is a different can of worms, or more precisely a caseload of cans of worms. Eavesdropping is preventable if you use proper technology, which almost none of the commercial providers does - and even though Skype uses some good algorithms, they've got proprietary code so you can't check whether their key management is botched like so many other proprietary crypto products.
At Bell Labs, the standard "routing slip" was green, so they were referred to as "greenies".
If you're running Windows, the integrated on-board stuff will work fine, and as another poster says, you could use the built-in graphics to run a second monitor, which you'll find very addictive. If you're a gamer, you'll probably want to use your own video card, but otherwise it's nice to have your system be cooler and quieter with the built-in video.
On the other hand, many idiots know not to pull the pin on a hand grenade, while they don't have the same reticence to do stupid things with rope.
Like the couple at Disclave 97 who thought a hotel room fire sprinkler would be an appropriate tie-down for their bondage activities. ("Why would you even *think* of doing something so stupid?" "It worked ok the night before....")
I've used Eudora for about the same amount of time, and I like it. The user interface is friendlier than pre-Thunderbird Mozilla Mail (I haven't used Thunderbird enough to comment on it), and the mailbox storage format is the original ASCII (or whatever format the mail is in), so if something bad happens, you can still recover your messages.) There are index files that are binary, but they're separate, and if they get trashed, Eudora can rebuild them.
Really, they've got to schedule it sometime in advance so they could arrange for hotel room space. A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend. And the waiting line at Mary Chung's will just be outrageous...