Anywhere I've worked in Silicon Valley had lots of choices within 5 minutes drive if there wasn't something in walking distance, and many office complexes have some basic sandwich shop if you're not in an office big enough to have a cafeteria. (That doesn't mean that there isn't a 90 minute wait in line at the deli at noon, of course:-) There may be only one choice nearby, which is boring, but there *is* usually one choice.
My previous office was a block away from a group of half a dozen lunch-oriented restaurants; my current location has a Korean company's cafeteria (which is great, because they've usually got something Korean in addition to the sandwiches/salad/grill.) My location before that had a deli in the office park (good falafel, ok greasy Chinese.) Our downtown San Jose location is downtown, so lots of choices within three block walk. Our downtown San Francisco office has dozens of places within three blocks.
Anarchy actually worked quite well until the FCC nationalized access to the airwaves. Broadcasters had to work things out with each other, but that was ok. The FCC was largely intended to allow big companies to get control of the airwaves and keep all the small operators from interfering with them. Because they were also giving the Bell System and other regional players a monopoly on telephone systems, there was no real way to develop effective mass-market radio telephony to compete with wireline until about the 1980s, when the combination of deregulation and newer computer technology made it inevitable. It was easier to build it using 1980s technology than it would have using 1950s technology, but things evolved much differently and probably much more slowly because of the monopoly control.
Italy's radio broadcasting worked on an anarchy-based system for some decades until around the time Berlusconi took over - not for official policy reasons, but simply because the civil service was too incompetent to control it successfully for many years, so the broadcasters had to work things out for themselves, and they did just fine. Berlusconi was a major media mogul, so he finally made them straighten out and take control again. (I don't remember if this was after he became Prime Minister or only once he became sufficiently influential in parliament - it's been a while.) For about 50 years after World War II, the US government was quietly but actively involved in destablizing Italian politics, basically because various Socialist and Communist political parties were fairly popular, and they wanted to prevent them from being successful (though there were a number of Communist mayors and other local government officials.) With most of the government coalitions staying in charge less than a year, it was really tough for the civil service to stay very organized, especially since each new coalition has a bunch of people wanting political favors - so it was a tough job. Eventually the Cold War ended and the US backed off and left them alone.
Radio channels are spaced something like 20KHz apart for AM and 200 KHz for FM, so unless you've got really amazing control over signal/noise ratio, you're not going to get much data bit rate on an analog channel designed to run audio. Taking back TV channels starts to look interesting, but it's really the higher frequency bands that are fun.
Taking back the airwaves for pirate radio is more realistic, especially on the FM channels where distances are somewhat limited.
If they're paying license fees to the ASCAP and BMI folks, who know how to deal with radio stations, they avoid pretty much all the copyright problems, unlike freelance Internet broadcasters who are outside the standard recording industry business model. That kind of lawsuit is easy to prevent, assuming they're making enough on advertising to stay in business.
There's still the politically-incorrect language problem, though, which means they probably will have to pre-screen to avoid having the Republicans fine them gazillions of dollars for using naughty words. I suppose they can outsource that to India or something, as well as doing speech-to-text and pattern matching things. (They also need to keep their advertisers happy - some random soap vendor might not want their advertisements coming right after the "Goatse Hour" show...)
We're talking about *television* here
on
Build Your Own DVR
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· Score: 1
Sure, if everybody just buys things and doesn't make things, we'll be couch potatoes who spend all our time in front of the TV. I suppose that making a DVR is good because it makes you spend some number of hours hassling with stupid device drivers from cretinous closed-source manufacturers instead of spending those hours watching television, but you'll probably get finished with that in a few days and be back in front of your TV again:-)
Software for removing Republicans? Cool!
on
Build Your Own DVR
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· Score: 1
Sounds like GOPchop is just like what we need around here:-)
OK, you spent $6 on a card. Cool. What kind of card is it, and what features does it have? (Especially, is it analog or digital, and is it HDTV or regular resolution?) How's the picture quality? Some people have commented that the fancier cards have MPEG-2 encoding/decoding hardware, which makes a big difference if you're using a fanless 800 MHz machine, but 2+GHz Celerons are pretty much free these days, which helps make up for it.
Are you able to do vaguely TiVo-like recording (I haven't used mplayer, and only briefly looked at the docs, so I don't know how much it can do besides "start recording/playing now".) Are there data feeds that let you do things like "Record every show of Boston Legal", or only "Record channel 7 every Sunday night at 10pm"?
Remember just a couple of years ago when possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, especially fictitious ones, was justification for starting a war? Now we're back to the Good Old Days, when Weapons of Mass Destruction are a *good* thing, protecting our country from the *bad* people, making us *safer*....
USB-based Knoppix FAQ. If you can run Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, etc. from a CDROM, you should be able to run them fine from a USB Flash stick as long as your PC and USB stick let you boot it (some USB sticks aren't bootable, some look like CDROMs, some don't.) You need to do slightly different setup so it'll find everything, handle partitions appropriately, etc., and it'll use more RAM than necessary if you don't tune it a bit. (If you're a Windows user, the official answer about whether you can do this with BartPE is "maybe" and they expect it'll get better in the future. I don't know if Macintoshes can do anything similar.)
For software that's grumpy about where things are loaded, the easier solution is to run it from disk rather than flash - it'll still cache in RAM, which is mostly just a startup-speed issue, and you'll have most of the OS and applications in flash so you'll get most of the speedup you want. There are fancier solutions like translucent file systems of various sorts that let you mount dynamic stuff on top of the read-only stuff, or you can play with partitions some more (e.g. use the flash as native storage rather than compressed cloop stuff.)
I'm not sure if you're saying flash is slower than disk, RAM, or what. Reading from flash may be slower than reading from DRAM, but it's reasonably fast. Write speeds are also much better than they used to be (don't get distracted by the slow USB1.1 bus your older flash-RAM stick has. A quick Google search found flash sticks with write speeds of 5-13 MB/sec.) and people have been playing interesting games with RAID which could easily be built into an on-board customized controller like this.
But the big difference is that disk drives are rotating hardware, so they consume power keeping them rotating, take time to stop and start rotating, and take time to rotate to the right location when you want to read or write something. Flash memory doesn't have as fast a megabytes/second writing throughput as a rotating disk drive, but there's no latency, and the amount of time it takes to write to flash is fairly reasonable compared to the time it takes to start up a spun-down disk, wait for it to stabilize, wait for it to rotate to the right location, and then blast data onto it. And it lets you leave the drive spun down unless you've accumulated 128MB-1GB of stuff to write, or unless you need to read something you don't have cached in memory somewhere, so you save a lot of battery.
No need for it to be close to the processor as opposed to close to the disk drive or somewhere in between - that's an architectural question driven mainly by software capabilities, and flash is slow enough that it can live out on a disk bus if that's the right choice, unlike video RAM or something. The prices *would* be higher, as you suggest (which I'm sure the disk drive companies don't mind), but it looks like this is being driven by Microsoft rather than the disk companies.
While there's a lot of material you're occasionally using, for the most part most people's usage doesn't behave like that unless they're watching movies or something. A few megabytes of real text wrapped up in some bloated Office format, plus some programs that get cached in RAM (MS may not be the world's experts at caching, but they're good enough to do that much), plus occasional bursts of swapping which may be annoying but aren't randomly spread out on disk.
Also, if you're using Microsoft Outlook for your email, you might be writing out large amounts of changes, depending on how they manage space within the.pst file (assuming you're using one, which is a good assumption for laptop users.) Unfortunately, the format doesn't appear to be documented in a way that anybody but Microsoft employees typically has access to.
It's definitely an Insightful article, but I've posted several comments on this thread so I can't also moderate it.
On the other hand, laptops usually *don't* really know how much power they have left - battery behaviour is much less linear than you'd expect, and my experience with the battery gauges and automatic-save systems on the last half dozen laptops I've used is that they're pretty accurate when the battery is new, and increasingly unreliable as the battery gets older, so it fails to do the friendly gentle save mode while it still can, as opposed to the "flush a bit of cache and then shutdown" mode, which loses all those open windows you had.
Windows NT 3.51 was the probably the worst experience I've had with this, since MS was pretending that NT was a "Server Operating System" and not intended for desktops, so it didn't have power management support. I was commuting by train, with a laptop battery life approximately equal to the train trip if I caught the express. The hardware was smart enough to detect a low battery and send an interrupt to the operating system to tell it to save everything, but the OS wsn't smart enough to respond properly so it would blue-screen. Sometimes I'd get ten seconds of about-to-shutdown beeps which I could use to save my files, and sometimes I wouldn't.
ok, ok, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I recently had my laptop disk die from heat death and the loaner PC get stolen while it was in the shop:-)
If you really have a good backup system, with everything updated to a server or desktop at least daily and preferably constantly when you're online, and some way to restore a machine image rapidly, then you *might* not lose several days of work reinstalling everything when your disk gets trashed *after* the corporate IT droids back in New Jersey have mailed your ostensibly repaired machine back to you.
Alas, typical support isn't that good, so you're going to lose more than just the morning's new typing. And just because you're getting your salary, that doesn't mean that the people you're supporting aren't handing you work to do while you're wasting your time with the bloody broken PC.
The press release wasn't very deep or very long - did the trade show folks provide more information about how it worked? 40 years is obviously not the working time for something that caches every disk write, so they're doing something to decide what to cache and what not to cache, which seems to be driving much of the Slashdot discussion.
Laptops and desktops/servers are really much different problems. A laptop has limits to power, weight, size, and heat load, so you wouldn't do a battery-backed-RAM disk cache system for use in unplugged mode - you'd want to do something with flash, and your goal is minimizing power and disk usage, not maximizing speed.
Desktops and servers are a much different game - your goal is maximizing speed, size&weight aren't a problem, and you have lots of electricity available to power everything except when Something Bad happens. So you can use standard RAM (which can use a lot of power) and build in batteries or use a UPS, and while you could integrate it into your disk array appliance, you could also just use it as a separate drive and tell your application or your OS to use it. ($50K probably does get you a really cool system, but a $200 PC, $250 worth of RAM, and a $50 UPS can get you a 2GB system with Firewire/USB/GigE interface for ~$500 if nobody wants to make something better and integrated.)
The old Legato Prestoserve from ~1990 had about 1MB of battery-backed RAM, and was designed as an accelerator card for Sun's NFS Networked File System and also for database applications - it was big enough to make an enormous performance difference, because it eliminated disk seek and rotational delays when storing journals and committing writes, and only needed to handle ~100 milliseconds worth of data. On modern disk arrays, obviously the transfer speeds are much higher, but the seek and rotational times are shorter, and the price of RAM is much lower, so might as well pack in a couple of GB.
I didn't get from the article that this was for permanent storage - how is the disk controller going to know what to store in flash and what to store on disk? If it's a cache thing, then the controller can just cache each write and the OS doesn't need to know when it actually got written to the disk - it just gets the "write succeeded" ack back faster and reads to cached material are really speedy. But if it's a permanent-storage thing, that implies that what it really looks like is that the first 128MB or whatever of/dev/hda is really in flash, so the OS needs to know to store the interesting stuff in that section of the disk. That's already a problem, and once you start using applications, it's much harder to define what the "interesting" stuff is that ought to be in that fast-storage space so that you can avoid having to hit the disk for the application that's currently running.
If you build the flash cache into the disk controller, it has a very limited functionality and can therefore mostly hide it from the operating system except for maybe providing some energy-star hooks. It's nowhere near as useful for some applications as a general-purpose flash cache would be (e.g. database journaling), but it's easy to add, and it gives the disk drive manufacturer something to sell that might have a bit of profit margin hidden in it.
On the other hand, if you put the flash somewhere that the operating system can use it directly (whether that's on a disk bus or a memory bus or somewhere else), you get a lot more flexibility - at the cost of needing to do operating system development and/or application development to support it. Application development may be easier, e.g. tell the database that/dev/hdc1 is flash and it'll know how to use it, or write a file system driver that does something reasonable with it, as opposed to messing with the entire Virtual Memory, caching, and memory allocation strategies.
OS support is a big problem for Microsoft - they're huge and slow, Longhorn is late, and when I last kept track (a decade or so ago) they really weren't very good at managing caching (and given how XP and Win2003 behave when Mozilla-with-50-tabs gets too big, it still feels like they're not very good at it.) Linux or *BSD or MacOS could integrate it much better, because Unix platforms have a head start on them, but it would still need to be a major change.
Just think how much movies would change if they could develop 3-D projection! oh... wait...
For many years, the worst movie I'd ever seen was Treasure of the Four Crowns, a 3-D movie that has a Robert Blake clone and a few other adventurers wandering through a castle with 3-D booby traps jumping out at them. There's almost no dialog in the first half of the movie, which seems bad, until you get to the second half, which does have dialog, and it's even worse:-)
Of *course* they didn't think it through. Legislators are seldom technologically clueful, and they had lots of pressure from the copyright special interests and not enough (presumably none?) from the music-listening community, and the special interests have long since demonstrated their cluelessness.
ANY general-purpose computer can be used to store pirated material. Laptops are portable music players, and desktops are non-portable music players (I use my desktop to download most of the music I download, though I download legitimately downloadable music.) And taxing per gigabyte is silly - users of small players don't keep all their music on them - they keep it on the much bigger disk drives of their regular PC, and download the player with what they plan to listen to real soon. I've got a 1GB iPod shuffle, but probably 40GB of FLAC/Shorten files on my PC, and that's only because iTunes doesn't like my CD-ROM so I haven't ripped my CD collection into iPod formats yet...
If the Netherlands has some kind of "equal protection" laws, somebody who's getting hit with this tax should sue to make sure it covers all computers, especially including those used by businesses, because that'll make the absurdity more obvious. (Or some non-Netherlands disk drive maker should sue them under the various world trade treaties.) As it is, the tax of EU3.28/GB is about four times the cost of disk drives themselves for the desktop market - laptop drives are more expensive, but most of them are still less than the tax (the newest cutting-edge drives seem to be about twice the price per GB as the smaller slower laptop drives.)
I've tended to use 127.0.0.2 in/etc/hosts for sites I really don't want to see (e.g. banner ad sites.) The various Spam Blocking Lists that use DNS have a set of values in the 127.0.0.x space for sites that they dislike for various reasons, so you can differentiate between Open Proxy, Open Relay, Known Spam Senders, Collateral Damage, etc. There doesn't seem to be a consistent policy between the different blockers, but just about anything besides 127.0.0.1 is some kind of negative response.
Google gives money to the Democratic Party, but that doesn't mean they discriminate against their employees based on political views. That would not only be Evil (which is against their corporate policy) but it would be really stupid, because they're trying to make money by developing Really Cool Stuff and selling it, so they need the best people they can get. (If they were employing economists instead of technologists, it might not be totally stupid - most Democrats and the Borrow&Spend Militarist side of the Republican party are pretty clueless economically - but even many of them are perfectly capable of handling a single company's finances responsibly.)
The Bush League somehow thinks that our representatives at a Telecom policy-makers meeting are there to represent the Bush Administration, rather than representing US telecom and economic needs. It's not 100% orthogonal, but probably 90%. And many large businesses give donations to both of the Incumbent Parties, because the game is that that's supposed to grant you Access. If the winners are going to redefine the game after the election, they'd better realize that the people they're trying to extort may change their parts of the game as well.
Oh, also, the Bush Administration are a bunch of Yahoos, so if they don't like Google giving money to the Democrats, they can stop using Google...
and sad to say, I'd take Richard Nixon back over Dubya any day, just as I'd take Dubya's father back (taking Reagan back really means taking G.H.W.Bush back, since he was effectively in charge of everything except public speeches after Reagan got shot.) GHWB was evil, but at least he was doing his *own* evil, and he was relatively competent at it most of the time. He wasn't quite as fiscally irresponsible as Dubya (or as Neil:-), but he also had a Congress run by the Democrats spending money even faster than he was.
OK, I *hated* Nixon. But it was *OK* to hate Nixon - you were *allowed* to do it, and it wasn't politically or religiously incorrect the way disagreeing with Dubya is. And Watergate was an appalling violation of democracy, but it's nothing that Karl Rove wouldn't have done more competently, and Nixon didn't have his brother to count the votes in the swing states to make sure the result came out right (unlike Kennedy, who might very well have stolen the 1960 election.)
Slashdot Mirror
My previous office was a block away from a group of half a dozen lunch-oriented restaurants; my current location has a Korean company's cafeteria (which is great, because they've usually got something Korean in addition to the sandwiches/salad/grill.) My location before that had a deli in the office park (good falafel, ok greasy Chinese.) Our downtown San Jose location is downtown, so lots of choices within three block walk. Our downtown San Francisco office has dozens of places within three blocks.
Italy's radio broadcasting worked on an anarchy-based system for some decades until around the time Berlusconi took over - not for official policy reasons, but simply because the civil service was too incompetent to control it successfully for many years, so the broadcasters had to work things out for themselves, and they did just fine. Berlusconi was a major media mogul, so he finally made them straighten out and take control again. (I don't remember if this was after he became Prime Minister or only once he became sufficiently influential in parliament - it's been a while.) For about 50 years after World War II, the US government was quietly but actively involved in destablizing Italian politics, basically because various Socialist and Communist political parties were fairly popular, and they wanted to prevent them from being successful (though there were a number of Communist mayors and other local government officials.) With most of the government coalitions staying in charge less than a year, it was really tough for the civil service to stay very organized, especially since each new coalition has a bunch of people wanting political favors - so it was a tough job. Eventually the Cold War ended and the US backed off and left them alone.
Taking back the airwaves for pirate radio is more realistic, especially on the FM channels where distances are somewhat limited.
There's still the politically-incorrect language problem, though, which means they probably will have to pre-screen to avoid having the Republicans fine them gazillions of dollars for using naughty words. I suppose they can outsource that to India or something, as well as doing speech-to-text and pattern matching things. (They also need to keep their advertisers happy - some random soap vendor might not want their advertisements coming right after the "Goatse Hour" show...)
Sure, if everybody just buys things and doesn't make things, we'll be couch potatoes who spend all our time in front of the TV. I suppose that making a DVR is good because it makes you spend some number of hours hassling with stupid device drivers from cretinous closed-source manufacturers instead of spending those hours watching television, but you'll probably get finished with that in a few days and be back in front of your TV again :-)
Sounds like GOPchop is just like what we need around here :-)
Are you able to do vaguely TiVo-like recording (I haven't used mplayer, and only briefly looked at the docs, so I don't know how much it can do besides "start recording/playing now".) Are there data feeds that let you do things like "Record every show of Boston Legal", or only "Record channel 7 every Sunday night at 10pm"?
Remember just a couple of years ago when possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction, especially fictitious ones, was justification for starting a war? Now we're back to the Good Old Days, when Weapons of Mass Destruction are a *good* thing, protecting our country from the *bad* people, making us *safer*....
For software that's grumpy about where things are loaded, the easier solution is to run it from disk rather than flash - it'll still cache in RAM, which is mostly just a startup-speed issue, and you'll have most of the OS and applications in flash so you'll get most of the speedup you want. There are fancier solutions like translucent file systems of various sorts that let you mount dynamic stuff on top of the read-only stuff, or you can play with partitions some more (e.g. use the flash as native storage rather than compressed cloop stuff.)
But the big difference is that disk drives are rotating hardware, so they consume power keeping them rotating, take time to stop and start rotating, and take time to rotate to the right location when you want to read or write something. Flash memory doesn't have as fast a megabytes/second writing throughput as a rotating disk drive, but there's no latency, and the amount of time it takes to write to flash is fairly reasonable compared to the time it takes to start up a spun-down disk, wait for it to stabilize, wait for it to rotate to the right location, and then blast data onto it. And it lets you leave the drive spun down unless you've accumulated 128MB-1GB of stuff to write, or unless you need to read something you don't have cached in memory somewhere, so you save a lot of battery.
No need for it to be close to the processor as opposed to close to the disk drive or somewhere in between - that's an architectural question driven mainly by software capabilities, and flash is slow enough that it can live out on a disk bus if that's the right choice, unlike video RAM or something. The prices *would* be higher, as you suggest (which I'm sure the disk drive companies don't mind), but it looks like this is being driven by Microsoft rather than the disk companies.
Also, if you're using Microsoft Outlook for your email, you might be writing out large amounts of changes, depending on how they manage space within the .pst file (assuming you're using one, which is a good assumption for laptop users.) Unfortunately, the format doesn't appear to be documented in a way that anybody but Microsoft employees typically has access to.
On the other hand, laptops usually *don't* really know how much power they have left - battery behaviour is much less linear than you'd expect, and my experience with the battery gauges and automatic-save systems on the last half dozen laptops I've used is that they're pretty accurate when the battery is new, and increasingly unreliable as the battery gets older, so it fails to do the friendly gentle save mode while it still can, as opposed to the "flush a bit of cache and then shutdown" mode, which loses all those open windows you had.
Windows NT 3.51 was the probably the worst experience I've had with this, since MS was pretending that NT was a "Server Operating System" and not intended for desktops, so it didn't have power management support. I was commuting by train, with a laptop battery life approximately equal to the train trip if I caught the express. The hardware was smart enough to detect a low battery and send an interrupt to the operating system to tell it to save everything, but the OS wsn't smart enough to respond properly so it would blue-screen. Sometimes I'd get ten seconds of about-to-shutdown beeps which I could use to save my files, and sometimes I wouldn't.
If you really have a good backup system, with everything updated to a server or desktop at least daily and preferably constantly when you're online, and some way to restore a machine image rapidly, then you *might* not lose several days of work reinstalling everything when your disk gets trashed *after* the corporate IT droids back in New Jersey have mailed your ostensibly repaired machine back to you.
Alas, typical support isn't that good, so you're going to lose more than just the morning's new typing. And just because you're getting your salary, that doesn't mean that the people you're supporting aren't handing you work to do while you're wasting your time with the bloody broken PC.
The press release wasn't very deep or very long - did the trade show folks provide more information about how it worked? 40 years is obviously not the working time for something that caches every disk write, so they're doing something to decide what to cache and what not to cache, which seems to be driving much of the Slashdot discussion.
Desktops and servers are a much different game - your goal is maximizing speed, size&weight aren't a problem, and you have lots of electricity available to power everything except when Something Bad happens. So you can use standard RAM (which can use a lot of power) and build in batteries or use a UPS, and while you could integrate it into your disk array appliance, you could also just use it as a separate drive and tell your application or your OS to use it. ($50K probably does get you a really cool system, but a $200 PC, $250 worth of RAM, and a $50 UPS can get you a 2GB system with Firewire/USB/GigE interface for ~$500 if nobody wants to make something better and integrated.)
The old Legato Prestoserve from ~1990 had about 1MB of battery-backed RAM, and was designed as an accelerator card for Sun's NFS Networked File System and also for database applications - it was big enough to make an enormous performance difference, because it eliminated disk seek and rotational delays when storing journals and committing writes, and only needed to handle ~100 milliseconds worth of data. On modern disk arrays, obviously the transfer speeds are much higher, but the seek and rotational times are shorter, and the price of RAM is much lower, so might as well pack in a couple of GB.
I didn't get from the article that this was for permanent storage - how is the disk controller going to know what to store in flash and what to store on disk? If it's a cache thing, then the controller can just cache each write and the OS doesn't need to know when it actually got written to the disk - it just gets the "write succeeded" ack back faster and reads to cached material are really speedy. But if it's a permanent-storage thing, that implies that what it really looks like is that the first 128MB or whatever of /dev/hda is really in flash, so the OS needs to know to store the interesting stuff in that section of the disk. That's already a problem, and once you start using applications, it's much harder to define what the "interesting" stuff is that ought to be in that fast-storage space so that you can avoid having to hit the disk for the application that's currently running.
On the other hand, if you put the flash somewhere that the operating system can use it directly (whether that's on a disk bus or a memory bus or somewhere else), you get a lot more flexibility - at the cost of needing to do operating system development and/or application development to support it. Application development may be easier, e.g. tell the database that /dev/hdc1 is flash and it'll know how to use it, or write a file system driver that does something reasonable with it, as opposed to messing with the entire Virtual Memory, caching, and memory allocation strategies.
OS support is a big problem for Microsoft - they're huge and slow, Longhorn is late, and when I last kept track (a decade or so ago) they really weren't very good at managing caching (and given how XP and Win2003 behave when Mozilla-with-50-tabs gets too big, it still feels like they're not very good at it.) Linux or *BSD or MacOS could integrate it much better, because Unix platforms have a head start on them, but it would still need to be a major change.
I'm going to post about some other parts of this article, so I can't moderate the parent post up, but it's really good.
For many years, the worst movie I'd ever seen was Treasure of the Four Crowns, a 3-D movie that has a Robert Blake clone and a few other adventurers wandering through a castle with 3-D booby traps jumping out at them. There's almost no dialog in the first half of the movie, which seems bad, until you get to the second half, which does have dialog, and it's even worse :-)
ANY general-purpose computer can be used to store pirated material. Laptops are portable music players, and desktops are non-portable music players (I use my desktop to download most of the music I download, though I download legitimately downloadable music.) And taxing per gigabyte is silly - users of small players don't keep all their music on them - they keep it on the much bigger disk drives of their regular PC, and download the player with what they plan to listen to real soon. I've got a 1GB iPod shuffle, but probably 40GB of FLAC/Shorten files on my PC, and that's only because iTunes doesn't like my CD-ROM so I haven't ripped my CD collection into iPod formats yet...
If the Netherlands has some kind of "equal protection" laws, somebody who's getting hit with this tax should sue to make sure it covers all computers, especially including those used by businesses, because that'll make the absurdity more obvious. (Or some non-Netherlands disk drive maker should sue them under the various world trade treaties.) As it is, the tax of EU3.28/GB is about four times the cost of disk drives themselves for the desktop market - laptop drives are more expensive, but most of them are still less than the tax (the newest cutting-edge drives seem to be about twice the price per GB as the smaller slower laptop drives.)
If hte script kiddie is dumb enough not to know that 127.0.0.1 is a loopback address, he should be *encouraged* to run it
I've tended to use 127.0.0.2 in /etc/hosts for sites I really don't want to see (e.g. banner ad sites.) The various Spam Blocking Lists that use DNS have a set of values in the 127.0.0.x space for sites that they dislike for various reasons, so you can differentiate between Open Proxy, Open Relay, Known Spam Senders, Collateral Damage, etc. There doesn't seem to be a consistent policy between the different blockers, but just about anything besides 127.0.0.1 is some kind of negative response.
then what the [expletive deleted] is his motivation?
The Bush League somehow thinks that our representatives at a Telecom policy-makers meeting are there to represent the Bush Administration, rather than representing US telecom and economic needs. It's not 100% orthogonal, but probably 90%. And many large businesses give donations to both of the Incumbent Parties, because the game is that that's supposed to grant you Access. If the winners are going to redefine the game after the election, they'd better realize that the people they're trying to extort may change their parts of the game as well.
Oh, also, the Bush Administration are a bunch of Yahoos, so if they don't like Google giving money to the Democrats, they can stop using Google...
OK, I *hated* Nixon. But it was *OK* to hate Nixon - you were *allowed* to do it, and it wasn't politically or religiously incorrect the way disagreeing with Dubya is. And Watergate was an appalling violation of democracy, but it's nothing that Karl Rove wouldn't have done more competently, and Nixon didn't have his brother to count the votes in the swing states to make sure the result came out right (unlike Kennedy, who might very well have stolen the 1960 election.)