If this were Immigration, they'd have given him an official printed form to fill out, which would ask well-defined questions. Then a government bureaucrat would have arbitrarily treated him rudely, but there are well-defined limits to that unless you're Extra Suspicious.
If this were the Customs Service, he wouldn't encounter them until he arrived at his destination airport or international gateway airport with his luggage, and then they might treat his luggage rudely and get dog slobber on it, but they're interested in the stuff in the luggage. If the stuff appeared to be business goods, they might question him in ways determining if he were planning to sell it or take it back with him, but unless it was especially valuable and fungible, it'd be unlikely that they'd treat him worse than Canadian customs treats business travellers with merchandise.
This wasn't even the TSA Security Mafia. They don't have rules that are printed that citizens or non-citizens can see, because then citizens would be able to argue with them. If they feel like always strip-searching large-breasted women in public, they'll do it. But still, if they want documents, they either want documents that somebody else already prepared, or they'll use forms.
This is the "make the airlines handle security" process, which the US has used for a decade or so. There's no well-defined rules for what security checking they provide - it just has to be "good enough" for the FAA to accept it, and the agreements between the airlines and the Feds are proprietary and individual. That means that the airlines can require more than any actual laws require, and some airport and some bureaucrat at some airport can require whatever the airline or bureaucrat feels like. The one consistent property is that the airlines will always tell you that it's because of FAA rules, and they'll always tell you that "it's always been that way", and if you challenge them about how they don't require the same things at other airports, they'll give you some bogus line, either about "well they're certainly *supposed* to follow that policy there", but fundamentally, it's the *airline* deciding what to require, not the Feds, so they're not limited to Constitutionally supported requirements - they can do anything they want. The Feds sometimes give them extra instructions, but it's still the airline's policy.
What's especially annoying is that when the ID rules were introduced, which was after the hijacking-to-Cuba days but before terrorism, the real motivation was to prevent people from buying cheap tickets in advance or getting frequent flywe tickets and selling them to other people cheaper than last-minute airline business-travel fares. Big businesses buying tickets for their employees and big travel agents selling to vacationers and small businesses were threatening to trash the entire pricing model of the industry, and it was much easier to get the Feds to help them out by requiring ID for named-passenger tickets than to fight it out in the market.
The Supreme Court has never nailed down a specific number, but 48 hours is definitely in the approved category - and they can grab you on a Thursday, keep you in jail until Saturday morning, and oh, darn, there's no judge on duty until Monday who can authorize releasing you, so you're stuck there until Monday.
When I'm on vacation by myself in much of Europe, I routinely don't have hotel reservations in most cities. The train or plane arrives, you go to the tourist office by the train station, and there's a list of penziones and small hotels and some clerk there who handles reservations and can tell you which bus or streetcar line goes to wherever the room is. My wife doesn't like that level of randomness and uncertainty and luggage-dragging, so we tend to have reservations if she's along, and this doesn't work as well in local high season crowds, but if I'm just adding a week or so of walkabout before or after a conference, it's much more relaxing to go wherever I'm in the mood for.
If the country has leftover fascist passport-control laws, wherever I stay may want to see a passport, but even so, I've never had anywhere that the immigration bureauthugs were bothered by not knowing where I was staying.
Sure, Xanadu is the oldest and best hypertext, if you like intertwingled enfilades, but it's one thing to talk about Xanadu creating prior art for the technology and another quite thing to accuse the Xanadudes of having anything resembling *business methods*:-) How much is a Golden Vaporware award worth, anyway?
This isn't a machine that's designed for battery power, though it's probably not bad, since it's pretty similar to some of their laptops. It's designed to be inexpensive and small for minimal impact on your desktop, with an AC power supply plugged into the wall. If you don't mind having robots plugged into the wall, you can go for bigger boxes with more CPU if you need them; if you don't need the fast CPU, the embedded systems market offers a lot more choices, many of which don't waste power on things like a high-end DVI video system, and which offer much more flexible choices of data I/O for controlling peripherals.
NAT's a really lame approach to firewalling. But it's usually good enough to let you plug in a newly installed Windows machine behind your NAT box on your DSL/cablemodem so you can download all the necessary Windows updates to make the machine slightly less vulnerable, as opposed to having it 0wned before SP2 is even downloads:-)
A few years ago I got a DSL line for my lab (back when that was still new and cool:-) and some of the boxes we were using were doorstop Pentium-60 and Pentium-133 machines that had become surplus when their users got newer machines. The P133 was running Win98 or maybe Win95, with all the MSOffice apps that a secretary had used (initially set up by our IT department), plus some Netscape and a shareware web server and such that I'd added. The P60 was running RedHat 6, installed right out of the box with minimal configuration effort, and one of the P60s spent most of its time running tcpdump to monitor what was on the LAN.
Nobody ever bothered the Windows box, not that there was much you could do with it.
On the other hand, the Linux box got cracked pretty rapidly, sometimes with Staecheldraht DDOS clients, sometimes with an attacker who appeared to have logged in by hand and installed things once he'd cracked it. After 3-4 rounds of the machine being brutally and senselessly attacked every week, I renamed the box "Kenny"... Sometimes I discovered the crack by looking at the tcpdump ("why is my box pinging a university in Sweden???") and sometimes by running commands like "find" in root's home directory which found files that looked suspicious ("ls" had been replaced with a version that didn't show the cracker's files, and "ps" didn't show his processes, but "ls/proc" showed his processes just fine:-)
As an old Unix hacker, this annoyed me. One major target for the crackers was the WU-FTPD ftp server, so it was somewhat ironic that my machine once attacked or was attacked by machines at Washington University (I forget which - I think my machine was cracking them.) It looked for a while like I was getting attacked by somebody at MIT, but it turns out that the culprit was really in Japan, and had the byte order backwards for the response packets...
Some kinds of cracking methods are timeless and relatively system-independent. The DEC standard logins to the VMS administrative accounts used login name "System" and password "manager", or "Field" and "Service" so that field circus could get access to a machine, and too many sysadmins didn't bother changing either or both of these passwords. I'm posting this separately from the Worms Against Nuclear Killers comment to make the point that VMS _does_ have administrative accounts, and that they were at least at the time an obvious cracking method. (Of course, so was popping off the removable disk pack with the VMS operating system installed and popping on your own copy, so you could go look at the data on the other disk, but you needed physical access to do that one:-)
Their dislike of upload bandwidth isn't the money - cable modem technology is inherently asymmetric. Cable modem companies had serious performance problems in the early years - cable TV distribution equipment was pretty shoddy, and the cable modem equipment was relatively experimental, so the native performance wasn't very good, and they didn't have any effective way to limit user's upstream bandwidth. They were absolutely terrified that somebody would trash their neighborhood's cable modem performance by using too much upstream, and especially terrified that the bandwidth would be hogged by somebody running a Pr0n website, back when pr0n on the internet was still a somewhat scandalous concept. Their performance really wasn't all that good, and Pac Bell's "Web Hog" TV ads, while dishonest, were extremely effective.
So they made inflexible hard-core policies against running anything server-like, and it became a religion for them. The fact that they didn't understand what a "server" really was wasn't relevant - an Instant Messaging client is a server, and interactive game programs are servers, and they like both of those, and "email servers" don't consume scarce upstream bandwidth, they use plentiful downstream bandwidth.
Napster was another big issue - not only was it a bandwidth hog, but it was Pirating Content, and TV stations are really in the content business so that was obviously Bad Bad Bad. Not everybody at Comcast was clueless - when I talked with some of their engineers privately, their opinion was "Like, duh, why do you *think* people buy broadband? It's so they can download music faster, and Napster's the best marketing tool out there for us, even if we officially pretend to hate it."
Bookies have to maintain a reputation. And paying taxes just goes to governments, who typically do bad things with their money.
Here in the US we have this fiction that there's some moral difference between government-run gambling and privately-run gambling, so whenever a state wants to start a lottery and bilk the innumerate, they claim that the money will be used for schools and/or old people, though in reality it usually goes into the general fund. In New Jersey, the state lottery agency puts up posters with where the money is going, and last time I looked, more than 1/3 of it went to prisons, a bunch more to other activities that I don't like either, and very little to either schools or old people, and that's not even counting the money that goes to lottery bureaucrats or annoying dishonest TV ads.
They're not going after the online casinos because they're opposed to vice - many of the extortionists appear to be Russian mafias, who are perfectly happy to have vice around as long as they get a piece of the action. They're going after the online casinos because they're cranking a lot of money, and they depend on the internet, and their internet connections are easily attacked, and the attacks are relatively untraceable.
You're thinking about this as a US couch potato that believes that what your government tells you applies to the rest of the world, or even to your part of the world. Stop that silliness.... In most of the world, gambling is a legal activity, though many governments require licenses for gambling houses. Tax revenue from gambling is simply tax revenue, like any other business tax revenue. The connection to schools is popularly used in the US when state lotteries are trying to convince the public that there's some moral difference between gambling with the state vs. gambling with your local bookie, which lets them continue the hypocrisy of banning the local bookie's operations.
If you don't like small groups of people telling society what they can and can't do, work on changing your government. The US Feds have tried to stop Internet gambling, and any interstate gambling activities, and are relatively successful at it within the US, and many states are pretty aggressive about it as well. Senator John Kyl is one of the worst offenders. Then there's this drug prohibition thing, which is designed to fund gangs and terrorism and cause government corruption around the world, and the US has bullied a lot of other countries and even the UN into treaties agreeing to let the US politicians' idea of good vs. bad drugs be enforced on everybody else. And then there was that sting a few years ago where the US Feds got some California pornographer to mail videotapes to Tennessee so they could bust them for obscenity, because "community standards" in Tennessee are different than in California.
Disclaimer: This is my personal commentary, not the official position of the Tier 1 ISP I work for
It's definitely an attack that benefits from upstream support at a big ISP, where you can handle gigabits per second of traffic through your filters instead of whatever size access line you use. Sometimes the attacks are simple, and you can block them by filtering out protocols other than HTTP/HTTPS, but often that's not good enough - DDOS attacks can fake those too, and there are all the usual SYN flood attacks.
Cisco's Riverhead equipment is designed to use a wide variety of filtering techniques, including passive filters, active replies, rate limitation, dynamic lists of traffic sources, etc. They may have renamed it Cisco Guard after buying Riverhead. We've got a pool of cleaner boxes hanging off the big peering points, and DDOS detection equipment in the network as well as optionally on customer premises (or the customer can just call us.) When we detect an attack on a customer who's set up for this kind of protection, we use BGP to point the customer's traffic to the Riverhead pool, and then build a GRE tunnel to the customer's port to deliver the traffic that's been cleaned up.
The other important thing we do is basic hygiene on our own networks, such as Source Address Assurance prevent forged traffic from our own customers. Customer internet ports are provisioned with specific IP address ranges, and they can only send out packets with a source address that's in their range. (Cisco routers implement this efficiently with uRPF.) This means they can't do things like DNS or SYN flood attacks that use forged source addresses, except addresses within their own address blocks, so any attacks are limited and can be traced or blocked. Customers that are dual-homed with another ISP can arrange to advertise both address ranges, so they can do whatever load-balancing tricks and redundancy they want, but that's still limited.
Some people use Windows machines at work and have faster internet connections there, or CD-burners, or more spare time (:-). Why not allow downloads from there?
If you're able to run in a Macintosh environment, carry around a Mac Mini and just plug into their monitor, keyboard, mouse, and LAN connection, rather than rebooting their computer.
Or run some kind of terminal server environment on your main development machine, and then run X windows or a VNC client on the roaming platform.
It's using the host PC as a thin client, and running the storage and CPU on the portable box, using the USB instead of an Ethernet.
I haven't figured out what actual functions the central server provides - probably a VPN tunnel server and some authentication, and maybe also file serving for people who need more than the remote device provides, but to me it looks basically like a license server to extract cash from the customer in return for cheap remote boxes.
Anon.Coward has it just about right, though it would be better taken with a gram of hash than all that salt.... "Legality" is an interesting concept if you're a lawyer, or a judge, or evaluating actions that may be beneficial to you if you don't get caught by a government, but it's fundamentally an attempt to divert the respect that people traditionally have for moral principles and social cohesion and use it to support rules thought up by politicians, who typically aren't all that skillful or farsighted about the topics they write rules about and are often trying to help special interests rather than the general public.
Some laws are important moral principles regarding aggression against other people (don't kill, don't steal),
some are reasonable but not about moral issues (drive on the right-hand side of the road unless it's marked otherwise),
some are about moral issues but none of the government's business (you can't say the following list of Nasty Words on TV or sell the following items on Sunday),
some are attempts to redefine moral concepts to cover other situations (we'll redefine "plagiarism" as "theft" and define "property" to include "ideas"),
some are attempts to use government power take control of actions of social cooperation (you can only rent to white people, or we're redefining "marriage" to be "something the government grants you permission to do" instead of "a personal relationship that society recognizes" or "a personal relationship that the Church blesses or condemns depending on who's doing it"),
some are attempts to favor one group over another (you can only drive a taxi if you own a medallion.)
The list just keeps going on.
Spamming is rude, and there's too much of it out there, and the Internet makes it hard to treat rude people appropriately so lots of people think that laws might be a useful tool, especially since the law forbids the public to use other potentially useful tools such as wirecutters, 2x4s, and small nuclear weapons. The drug prohibition laws are evil and have immensely bad effects on society. The DMCA is greedy, and it's so totally overblown that it's obvious that it's authors were not only clueless about the effects of the power they were throwing around but also simply don't care, but unlike the drug wars, it still interferes with people's productivity, creativity, and access to shiny toys but doesn't lead to dead bodies on the streets.
Patents aren't a problem in this space - digital cameras the kind of market they're made for and work well in. They're are an obvious application for improved compression, and they're self-contained embedded devices so you don't need to worry about your compression code leaking out and getting ripped off, so they work well with a model of "license the patent and some source code or binary implementations for compression, give away free-under-license viewers." I don't like patents, especially algorithm and business-method patents, but they're much less annoying here than, say, in general software applications. The patent-owners have an incentive to find a market, the camera makers have an incentive to get better compression, and there's competition from good existing technology, so everybody's motivated to find a reasonable price.
The problem is that wavelets are a CPU hog, and digital cameras don't have any to spare. One estimate I saw was that JPEG2000 needs about 5 times as much CPU as JPEG. It didn't say how much CPU it takes to decompress JPEG2000, but the decompression direction is usually much faster than compression and usually runs on devices with enough horsepower. A 20% savings in memory capacity probably doesn't justify the costs of the faster CPU, bigger battery, larger case, etc.
I've got one cheapo $29 camera that seems to make JPEGs that are twice as big for the same number of pixels as other digital cameras I've used - that probably let them use a cheaper CPU, and it's still a battery-burner (and they probably decided that a $29 camera could get away with only storing 24 pictures instead of 48. If only they hadn't done such a blazingly bad design in other ways - you can't change the battery without it resetting back to Picture#1, so it'll overwrite earlier pictures you haven't downloaded, and it uses a leftover Twain driver instead of using its USB as a disk drive like everybody else, so you can really only use the thing if you upload it to your laptop frequently.)
Dude - read the comments more carefully - people *have* given you reasonable explanations, and you're just not understanding them.
The reason that he's assuming that "it's not written to flash immediately" is that writing to flash is slow, and uncompressed image files are big, and it takes time to write them. If you're trying to do back-to-back shots, 1 second apart, you might not be able to do write the first 18-meg image from RAM into flash before you want to take the next shot. So your choices are "sell a camera that's too slow to take back-to-back pictures" or "include more RAM". Most cameras include enough RAM for one or maybe two uncompressed pictures plus the amount they need for compression calculations. Also, using up flash limits the number of pictures you can take. These days, an extra 72MB of flash is only ~$20 or so, but that's still non-trivial on a cheap camera, and it reduces the number of pictures you can store significantly, as well as requiring the storage space management algorithms to be more complex (e.g. if you ever store an uncompressed picture, you need to also reserve enough storage to hold the compressed version, and you don't know how tightly it will compress so you need to be conservative.)
Battery life has been a major issue for any camera I've used that had enough flash memory to not run out of storage first. The way you design for maximum battery life is to find out what components use the most power and keep them small or run them for short periods of time or put them in standby mode when you can. RAM is power-hungry, and quadrupling the amount of RAM is going to increase the amount of power you need even when you're not using it, unless you get really fancy and make some of the RAM power down when it's not active, which is probably very difficult.
43% of all statistics are made up
on
Newsy Numbers
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And most of the rest get misinterpreted - sometimes deliberately, sometimes just ignorantly.
My company's been public for ~125 years, so there should have been enough information out there to value options using all the standard Black-Scholes models (except for that nasty telecomm industry crash that reduced them to wallpaper;-)
But most Silicon Valley stock options weren't that way - they were for pre-IPO companies developing The Next Cool Product, and valuing them for expense purposes was nearly impossible and certainly wildly inaccurate. If the product did in fact ship and turned out to be The Next Cool Product, they were worth a huge amount of money (unless it was the Next Uber-Cool Dotcom Product with No Business Model, in which case they were worthless); if the company folded or the product didn't sell, options were worthless, and if you were lucky, they were somewhere in between. My wife's last startup company valued their options at $3.00 the week she was allowed to exercise them, because that was the fictitious-VC-pricing number that week, so that's what we had to pay Alternative Minimum Tax on; they never did go public, and when they eventually sold off the intellectual property and a dozen people to another company, things got arranged so option-holders got 5 cents per share.
I can't imagine why schools hand out MBA degrees to people who don't have work experience. Sure, classrooms can teach you some things, like finance, but mastery of business administration does require having actually spent some time at a business and at least watching it be administered if not necessarily doing it yourself. Technical degrees are different. I found that having a year or so of work experience (co-op plus summer jobs) when I got my MS and later took some classes, gave me some useful perspective, and broadened my experience a bit, but it was possible to learn things anyway while still in student-mode.
I agree that the concentration skills are probably harder to pick back up. There's also the issue of having a life - if you're married (which I was in grad school) that takes time away from your studies but also forces you to be more disciplined when you are studying, and cuts back on the number of caffeine-fueled all-nighters you're willing to pull in a week:-) Having kids presumably makes an even bigger difference. If you're single, dating is probably a good bit different spending five years working (I wouldn't know), but grad school is probably a good place for it. On the other hand, the grad students who are closer to your age and maturity level are likely to be leaving school soon.
oh, come on now, do I really need a message body after you hand me a straight line like that?
Anyway, no, spammers don't have anyone in charge, though there seem to be about 200 big bad actors who contribute most of it, plus a large number of anklebiters.
Slashdot Mirror
If this were the Customs Service, he wouldn't encounter them until he arrived at his destination airport or international gateway airport with his luggage, and then they might treat his luggage rudely and get dog slobber on it, but they're interested in the stuff in the luggage. If the stuff appeared to be business goods, they might question him in ways determining if he were planning to sell it or take it back with him, but unless it was especially valuable and fungible, it'd be unlikely that they'd treat him worse than Canadian customs treats business travellers with merchandise.
This wasn't even the TSA Security Mafia. They don't have rules that are printed that citizens or non-citizens can see, because then citizens would be able to argue with them. If they feel like always strip-searching large-breasted women in public, they'll do it. But still, if they want documents, they either want documents that somebody else already prepared, or they'll use forms.
This is the "make the airlines handle security" process, which the US has used for a decade or so. There's no well-defined rules for what security checking they provide - it just has to be "good enough" for the FAA to accept it, and the agreements between the airlines and the Feds are proprietary and individual. That means that the airlines can require more than any actual laws require, and some airport and some bureaucrat at some airport can require whatever the airline or bureaucrat feels like. The one consistent property is that the airlines will always tell you that it's because of FAA rules, and they'll always tell you that "it's always been that way", and if you challenge them about how they don't require the same things at other airports, they'll give you some bogus line, either about "well they're certainly *supposed* to follow that policy there", but fundamentally, it's the *airline* deciding what to require, not the Feds, so they're not limited to Constitutionally supported requirements - they can do anything they want. The Feds sometimes give them extra instructions, but it's still the airline's policy.
What's especially annoying is that when the ID rules were introduced, which was after the hijacking-to-Cuba days but before terrorism, the real motivation was to prevent people from buying cheap tickets in advance or getting frequent flywe tickets and selling them to other people cheaper than last-minute airline business-travel fares. Big businesses buying tickets for their employees and big travel agents selling to vacationers and small businesses were threatening to trash the entire pricing model of the industry, and it was much easier to get the Feds to help them out by requiring ID for named-passenger tickets than to fight it out in the market.
The Supreme Court has never nailed down a specific number, but 48 hours is definitely in the approved category - and they can grab you on a Thursday, keep you in jail until Saturday morning, and oh, darn, there's no judge on duty until Monday who can authorize releasing you, so you're stuck there until Monday.
If the country has leftover fascist passport-control laws, wherever I stay may want to see a passport, but even so, I've never had anywhere that the immigration bureauthugs were bothered by not knowing where I was staying.
Vegetarians eat vegetables; I'm a humanitarian myself....
Sure, Xanadu is the oldest and best hypertext, if you like intertwingled enfilades, but it's one thing to talk about Xanadu creating prior art for the technology and another quite thing to accuse the Xanadudes of having anything resembling *business methods* :-) How much is a Golden Vaporware award worth, anyway?
This isn't a machine that's designed for battery power, though it's probably not bad, since it's pretty similar to some of their laptops. It's designed to be inexpensive and small for minimal impact on your desktop, with an AC power supply plugged into the wall. If you don't mind having robots plugged into the wall, you can go for bigger boxes with more CPU if you need them; if you don't need the fast CPU, the embedded systems market offers a lot more choices, many of which don't waste power on things like a high-end DVI video system, and which offer much more flexible choices of data I/O for controlling peripherals.
NAT's a really lame approach to firewalling. But it's usually good enough to let you plug in a newly installed Windows machine behind your NAT box on your DSL/cablemodem so you can download all the necessary Windows updates to make the machine slightly less vulnerable, as opposed to having it 0wned before SP2 is even downloads :-)
Nobody ever bothered the Windows box, not that there was much you could do with it.
On the other hand, the Linux box got cracked pretty rapidly, sometimes with Staecheldraht DDOS clients, sometimes with an attacker who appeared to have logged in by hand and installed things once he'd cracked it. After 3-4 rounds of the machine being brutally and senselessly attacked every week, I renamed the box "Kenny"... Sometimes I discovered the crack by looking at the tcpdump ("why is my box pinging a university in Sweden???") and sometimes by running commands like "find" in root's home directory which found files that looked suspicious ("ls" had been replaced with a version that didn't show the cracker's files, and "ps" didn't show his processes, but "ls /proc" showed his processes just fine :-)
As an old Unix hacker, this annoyed me. One major target for the crackers was the WU-FTPD ftp server, so it was somewhat ironic that my machine once attacked or was attacked by machines at Washington University (I forget which - I think my machine was cracking them.) It looked for a while like I was getting attacked by somebody at MIT, but it turns out that the culprit was really in Japan, and had the byte order backwards for the response packets...
Some kinds of cracking methods are timeless and relatively system-independent. The DEC standard logins to the VMS administrative accounts used login name "System" and password "manager", or "Field" and "Service" so that field circus could get access to a machine, and too many sysadmins didn't bother changing either or both of these passwords. I'm posting this separately from the Worms Against Nuclear Killers comment to make the point that VMS _does_ have administrative accounts, and that they were at least at the time an obvious cracking method. (Of course, so was popping off the removable disk pack with the VMS operating system installed and popping on your own copy, so you could go look at the data on the other disk, but you needed physical access to do that one :-)
Phrack article on the WANK worm that cracked lots of NASA VMS machines. Yes, it was 1989 or so, but this is VMS, so that's a reasonable timeframe :-)
Cable modem companies had serious performance problems in the early years - cable TV distribution equipment was pretty shoddy, and the cable modem equipment was relatively experimental, so the native performance wasn't very good, and they didn't have any effective way to limit user's upstream bandwidth. They were absolutely terrified that somebody would trash their neighborhood's cable modem performance by using too much upstream, and especially terrified that the bandwidth would be hogged by somebody running a Pr0n website, back when pr0n on the internet was still a somewhat scandalous concept. Their performance really wasn't all that good, and Pac Bell's "Web Hog" TV ads, while dishonest, were extremely effective.
So they made inflexible hard-core policies against running anything server-like, and it became a religion for them. The fact that they didn't understand what a "server" really was wasn't relevant - an Instant Messaging client is a server, and interactive game programs are servers, and they like both of those, and "email servers" don't consume scarce upstream bandwidth, they use plentiful downstream bandwidth.
Napster was another big issue - not only was it a bandwidth hog, but it was Pirating Content, and TV stations are really in the content business so that was obviously Bad Bad Bad. Not everybody at Comcast was clueless - when I talked with some of their engineers privately, their opinion was "Like, duh, why do you *think* people buy broadband? It's so they can download music faster, and Napster's the best marketing tool out there for us, even if we officially pretend to hate it."
Here in the US we have this fiction that there's some moral difference between government-run gambling and privately-run gambling, so whenever a state wants to start a lottery and bilk the innumerate, they claim that the money will be used for schools and/or old people, though in reality it usually goes into the general fund. In New Jersey, the state lottery agency puts up posters with where the money is going, and last time I looked, more than 1/3 of it went to prisons, a bunch more to other activities that I don't like either, and very little to either schools or old people, and that's not even counting the money that goes to lottery bureaucrats or annoying dishonest TV ads.
You're thinking about this as a US couch potato that believes that what your government tells you applies to the rest of the world, or even to your part of the world. Stop that silliness.... In most of the world, gambling is a legal activity, though many governments require licenses for gambling houses. Tax revenue from gambling is simply tax revenue, like any other business tax revenue. The connection to schools is popularly used in the US when state lotteries are trying to convince the public that there's some moral difference between gambling with the state vs. gambling with your local bookie, which lets them continue the hypocrisy of banning the local bookie's operations.
If you don't like small groups of people telling society what they can and can't do, work on changing your government. The US Feds have tried to stop Internet gambling, and any interstate gambling activities, and are relatively successful at it within the US, and many states are pretty aggressive about it as well. Senator John Kyl is one of the worst offenders. Then there's this drug prohibition thing, which is designed to fund gangs and terrorism and cause government corruption around the world, and the US has bullied a lot of other countries and even the UN into treaties agreeing to let the US politicians' idea of good vs. bad drugs be enforced on everybody else. And then there was that sting a few years ago where the US Feds got some California pornographer to mail videotapes to Tennessee so they could bust them for obscenity, because "community standards" in Tennessee are different than in California.
It's definitely an attack that benefits from upstream support at a big ISP, where you can handle gigabits per second of traffic through your filters instead of whatever size access line you use. Sometimes the attacks are simple, and you can block them by filtering out protocols other than HTTP/HTTPS, but often that's not good enough - DDOS attacks can fake those too, and there are all the usual SYN flood attacks.
Cisco's Riverhead equipment is designed to use a wide variety of filtering techniques, including passive filters, active replies, rate limitation, dynamic lists of traffic sources, etc. They may have renamed it Cisco Guard after buying Riverhead. We've got a pool of cleaner boxes hanging off the big peering points, and DDOS detection equipment in the network as well as optionally on customer premises (or the customer can just call us.) When we detect an attack on a customer who's set up for this kind of protection, we use BGP to point the customer's traffic to the Riverhead pool, and then build a GRE tunnel to the customer's port to deliver the traffic that's been cleaned up.
The other important thing we do is basic hygiene on our own networks, such as Source Address Assurance prevent forged traffic from our own customers. Customer internet ports are provisioned with specific IP address ranges, and they can only send out packets with a source address that's in their range. (Cisco routers implement this efficiently with uRPF.) This means they can't do things like DNS or SYN flood attacks that use forged source addresses, except addresses within their own address blocks, so any attacks are limited and can be traced or blocked. Customers that are dual-homed with another ISP can arrange to advertise both address ranges, so they can do whatever load-balancing tricks and redundancy they want, but that's still limited.
Some people use Windows machines at work and have faster internet connections there, or CD-burners, or more spare time (:-). Why not allow downloads from there?
Or run some kind of terminal server environment on your main development machine, and then run X windows or a VNC client on the roaming platform.
I haven't figured out what actual functions the central server provides - probably a VPN tunnel server and some authentication, and maybe also file serving for people who need more than the remote device provides, but to me it looks basically like a license server to extract cash from the customer in return for cheap remote boxes.
Spamming is rude, and there's too much of it out there, and the Internet makes it hard to treat rude people appropriately so lots of people think that laws might be a useful tool, especially since the law forbids the public to use other potentially useful tools such as wirecutters, 2x4s, and small nuclear weapons. The drug prohibition laws are evil and have immensely bad effects on society. The DMCA is greedy, and it's so totally overblown that it's obvious that it's authors were not only clueless about the effects of the power they were throwing around but also simply don't care, but unlike the drug wars, it still interferes with people's productivity, creativity, and access to shiny toys but doesn't lead to dead bodies on the streets.
The problem is that wavelets are a CPU hog, and digital cameras don't have any to spare. One estimate I saw was that JPEG2000 needs about 5 times as much CPU as JPEG. It didn't say how much CPU it takes to decompress JPEG2000, but the decompression direction is usually much faster than compression and usually runs on devices with enough horsepower. A 20% savings in memory capacity probably doesn't justify the costs of the faster CPU, bigger battery, larger case, etc.
I've got one cheapo $29 camera that seems to make JPEGs that are twice as big for the same number of pixels as other digital cameras I've used - that probably let them use a cheaper CPU, and it's still a battery-burner (and they probably decided that a $29 camera could get away with only storing 24 pictures instead of 48. If only they hadn't done such a blazingly bad design in other ways - you can't change the battery without it resetting back to Picture#1, so it'll overwrite earlier pictures you haven't downloaded, and it uses a leftover Twain driver instead of using its USB as a disk drive like everybody else, so you can really only use the thing if you upload it to your laptop frequently.)
The reason that he's assuming that "it's not written to flash immediately" is that writing to flash is slow, and uncompressed image files are big, and it takes time to write them. If you're trying to do back-to-back shots, 1 second apart, you might not be able to do write the first 18-meg image from RAM into flash before you want to take the next shot. So your choices are "sell a camera that's too slow to take back-to-back pictures" or "include more RAM". Most cameras include enough RAM for one or maybe two uncompressed pictures plus the amount they need for compression calculations. Also, using up flash limits the number of pictures you can take. These days, an extra 72MB of flash is only ~$20 or so, but that's still non-trivial on a cheap camera, and it reduces the number of pictures you can store significantly, as well as requiring the storage space management algorithms to be more complex (e.g. if you ever store an uncompressed picture, you need to also reserve enough storage to hold the compressed version, and you don't know how tightly it will compress so you need to be conservative.)
Battery life has been a major issue for any camera I've used that had enough flash memory to not run out of storage first. The way you design for maximum battery life is to find out what components use the most power and keep them small or run them for short periods of time or put them in standby mode when you can. RAM is power-hungry, and quadrupling the amount of RAM is going to increase the amount of power you need even when you're not using it, unless you get really fancy and make some of the RAM power down when it's not active, which is probably very difficult.
And most of the rest get misinterpreted - sometimes deliberately, sometimes just ignorantly.
But most Silicon Valley stock options weren't that way - they were for pre-IPO companies developing The Next Cool Product, and valuing them for expense purposes was nearly impossible and certainly wildly inaccurate. If the product did in fact ship and turned out to be The Next Cool Product, they were worth a huge amount of money (unless it was the Next Uber-Cool Dotcom Product with No Business Model, in which case they were worthless); if the company folded or the product didn't sell, options were worthless, and if you were lucky, they were somewhere in between. My wife's last startup company valued their options at $3.00 the week she was allowed to exercise them, because that was the fictitious-VC-pricing number that week, so that's what we had to pay Alternative Minimum Tax on; they never did go public, and when they eventually sold off the intellectual property and a dozen people to another company, things got arranged so option-holders got 5 cents per share.
I agree that the concentration skills are probably harder to pick back up. There's also the issue of having a life - if you're married (which I was in grad school) that takes time away from your studies but also forces you to be more disciplined when you are studying, and cuts back on the number of caffeine-fueled all-nighters you're willing to pull in a week :-) Having kids presumably makes an even bigger difference. If you're single, dating is probably a good bit different spending five years working (I wouldn't know), but grad school is probably a good place for it. On the other hand, the grad students who are closer to your age and maturity level are likely to be leaving school soon.
Great. So NASA's turning into a place for Robots to play Segway Polo?
Anyway, no, spammers don't have anyone in charge, though there seem to be about 200 big bad actors who contribute most of it, plus a large number of anklebiters.