These products have been around for a while for journaling space for DBMSs, and the Legato Prestoserve board which was an NFS accelerator. NFS had the similar problem that the protocol requires you to write stuff to stable storage before ACKing a request, and a meg or so of battery-backed RAM was enough to cache a couple of disk tracks, making the whole system much faster.
For most people, the real threat model isn't the FBI breaking their door down - it's their laptop getting stolen. Be sure to keep good backups somewhere.
There are several different versions of encrypted disk partitions and encrypted file systems that need you to enter the password to mount them, and which read/write all data to/from the disk in encrypted form. That way, if you power the system down, they're not readable until somebody types in the password. I'm not aware of any that have duress passwords built in (which scribbles the partition if you use it instead of the correct password) or cover-material passwords (which give the Feds some innocent cover material if they use it, e.g. the "backup" copy of/usr/ or something.) So if you live in a country that has thugs who will beat you up until you give them the correct password, only keep your dangerous material in RAM, and if you live in a country with an NSA-quality bunch of people who actually want to recover *your* material, keep it on an encrypted RAM disk, but otherwise, a regular encrypted file system will work fine.
You don't use multiple RocketDrives in parallel to make them transfer data faster - you use them to keep more stuff on Rocketdrive instead of disk. It already goes fast enough, or if it doesn't go fast enough, you really need system main memory.
Sure, the US honors the 1st Amendment far too often by violating it rather than supporting it, but if you think that the law they're proposing won't be used to ban other things, you're a very trusting soul. It's unlikely you'll have an adequate possibility of public review of material that's been banned - the interesting question is whether the authors of banned material will be informed about it. (Admittedly, the cure for that is to always do periodic independent checks to see if your material is accessible.)
The PCI interface is faster than IDE and most flavors of SCSI - the only reason SCSI could be helpful is that it lets you locate the RAM disk box externally, which makes it easier to do power supplies, battery backup, etc., as well as making it a bit easier to stack multiples of these on your machine if that's what you want. But except for power, it's probably more reliable to put it inside the case with your CPU. Drivers aren't a big deal - either they can provide them (they should be dirt simple), or more likely they make the device look like an IDE drive so it doesn't need separate drivers.
I agree that the pricing structure is silly. It should be one price for the board, and either add your own RAM or let them sell you RAM with a small markup.
Censorship laws are almost always used deceptively - first, they use some wildly offensive example of speech to get themselves a mechanism to use for censorship, then they go censor anything they don't like, and whenever possible they censor the information about what they're censoring, so there can be no independent review by the public or the press. Surely you don't seriously imagine that if they get the power to censor calls for violent anti-WTO protests that they won't use it to silence indymedia any time they dislike it, do you? Furthermore, a censorship law that acts, as most do, on the request of a government bureaucrat is much worse than one that requires a trial and a court order to begin the censorship process - there's no excuse for doing it without public review, and since a state is just a bunch of people pretending to act on behalf of all the other people, the state has no excuse not to permit it.
The Roman author Juvenal is highly unlikely to have been the first person to think about the concept Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? He probably wasn't even the first one to say it in Latin.
There are some exceptions, and I gather they actually apply in Australia - some loudmouth politician wants a censorship law, so they pass one to shut him up, assign implementation to some bureaucrat sitting in a corner who doesn't get any funding, and tell him to go out for a beer and not bother anybody, and in those cases they also censor the actual activities of the censor, so nobody gets on their case for putting up a sham, but that's not the usual case.
Got a new engine for my van - that'd work.
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 1
My van probably no longer has the same magnetic signature as a stock 87 Chevy van. As with my previous Chevy van, it did the classic American Car trick of having the engine go foom at 110K miles, and the replacement is a similar but different hunk of big iron. It's also slightly different in other ways - occasionally the computer system decides it's not behaving in the expected manner and lights the "service engine soon" light, which stays on until I reboot it. (Usually this happens when I'm accelerating uphill for a while.)
Most non-US cars don't encourage this kind of modification - Volvos advertise getting multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers, though if you've got a significantly old Volkswagen beetle, they got more like 25-50,000 miles (40-80Mm) per engine, unless you did one of those external oil coolers.
Another group that's doing research in this space is Aether Wire & Location. They're building localizer frobs with the objective of getting down to coin size, and doing lots of work on Ultrawideband networking technology, which is good at very-low-power connectivity.
License plate reading technology will keep getting better - the main limits are camera deployment, image quality, and CPU, all of which keep growing. Image quality grows partly because of cheap camera resolution increases, though partly because of careful deployment at good reading angles. But if you don't already have a transponder on your car for one of those automated toll-collector systems, they can always add one to your license plate - no need to have the auto manufacturer involved.
If you're only collecting occasional data, rather than full scans of everybody, technology's been there for a while. A couple years ago, when San Francisco was going to close the Central Freeway, they spent a week videotaping license plates of cars that took it, had a bunch of convicts at the local prison read the plate numbers, and sent everybody a postcard saying that they were planning to close the freeway and please find an alternate route to work. Did the job just fine.
That's definitely insightful, and the situation is even worse than it appears. If Microsoft wins, they can do so either broadly or narrowly. The broad win is to invalidate the patent and toss it out entirely. The narrow win is to show that the patent doesn't specifically apply to what Microsoft's doing with its browser, because the patent's novelty is the combination of Thing1+Thing2+Thing3, and Microsoft's really only doing Thing1+Thing2 and doing Thing3 separately. That gets Microsoft off the hook and leaves Eolas with a mostly intact patent they can use to beat up AOL or whoever owns the remains of Netscape these days, trashing Mozilla as a side effect, or else beat up Mozilla.org as a warmup to beating up AOL.
Microsoft may have adopted IE as a way to do huge numbers of things in Windows, just as Unix developers adopted the shell as a way to do huge numbers of things, and ripping it out entirely is probably impractical by now, though they could replace it with hooks that call your favorite browser.
But it wouldn't be very difficult for them to create a subset of IE that didn't use plug-ins, and there are unlikely to be many Windows-critical operations that use plugins instead of core IE browser functions, especially since the patent is unlikely to cover builtins like ActiveX and Javascript. Splitting IE into a core version and a plugin-supporting web browser means you can still watch those dancing Schlockwave animations if you're using an EOLAS-approved browser, but IE can use cleaner and slightly safer code when it's called by the OS.
Sell Microsoft a license, but keep ownership. That's the usual case in a patent settlement - for a good patent, it means they make money licensing to other people, and for a truly bogus patent, they also make money harassing other people.
Sell Microsoft the whole package, including ownership. They might do this, but Microsoft will have to pay them a lot more money.
RMS might not like being on the same side as Microsoft here, but opposing this patent is clearly consistent with his usual comments about software patents being Bad, and about how software patents potentially force programmers to do a complete patent search before every line of code they write, which is clearly impossible. How many of you knew about this patent when you last wrote a plugin for something?
Democracy doesn't mean free markets - it means the people picking the politicians who run their governments, and ideally means that the people can tell the politicians what laws to make. That doesn't mean that you won't get bad laws - protectionism is really popular in much of the world, especially in countries with farmers or big industries. India's a democracy, but it's got heavily non-free markets. Australia's Telstra is no longer a total monopoly, and they don't have endemic corruption problems, but they're still technically clueless.
India's telecom monopoly, VSNL, has traditionally been one of the world's biggest and most clueless, and until telecom liberalization started a couple of years ago, you had to deal with them for all services to India, which meant that those services were severely limited, for high-priced voice as well as for very limited Internet except in a few parts of Bangalore. Meanwhile, India's got 200 million highly educate people and a huge unrealized economic potential.
One of the best things somebody could have done for the world economy was to go to VSNL and ask them how much money it would take to get them to go away and leave everybody alone. It doesn't matter how big a number they say - a billion dollars? Pay them.
There was a report on US National Public Radio yesterday about the call center business in Bangalore, which started essentially from scratch two years ago, and is expected to make about $25 Billion over the next five years. Nobody actually offered to pay VSNL a billion-dollar bribe (as far as I know:-), but if they'd done that, it looks like payback would have taken less than two years. Instead, we waited for telecom liberalization to be the politically correct thing to do, and VSNL's been rather slow about letting go of power, but they've gradually been letting go.
They're not the only place with telecom monopolies maintaining the digital divide. Most countries have monopolies on radio broadcasting as well, and the combination of radio and telephone monopolies delayed the development of effective radio-based voice calling technology in the US by 40-50 years, and there are large parts of the world that have limited or expensive telephony because they're limited to wires. (Remember that the digital divide is partly about computing, but it's partly a voice communications divide as well.) Technologies like unlicensed 802.11 are just gradually leaking around it, and most practical VOIP was initially a better replacement for ham-radio phone-patch that was good enough for calling your cousin in Israel even if it wasn't good enough for business calls.
If they advertise it as a CD, and use the Phillips CD logo, but it isn't actually a CD, isn't that fraud? And also, isn't it a violation of Phillips's Intellectual Property in their trademark?
It's probably not a DMCA violation, because they're only using technical means to violate the trademark, not the copyright, unless of course the CD logo is copyrighted as well as trademarked....
VNS has Content Problems Too
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Maybe they've gotten better, but in the past, they not only counted only the votes for Democrats and Republicans, but made the totals add up to 100%. On tonight's election results, I saw one channel reporting the California governor's race results as 53%-47%, but another channel reporting 47-43-5-2-2-1. The Greens particularly took votes that Davis would have otherwise gotten many of, and the American Independent took votes that would otherwise have been Republican, and the Libertarians and Natural Law probably would have split.
To get back to software issues, some of the stations had a fixed display format that could only handle two candidates (whether the numbers were correct or not), while others were more flexible (which they also needed for things like city council races, which here in California are usually Vote-for-N-of-M non-partisan.)
The spirit of the telephone racket, on the other hand, thinks forbidding competition is the routine way of doing business, and "natural monopoly" theories were developed to justify and encourage that sort of misbehaviour.
[ObLiteraryReference:] Everybody hates The Phone Company.
Unfortunately, that's correct. Some capitalists really *are* the pure-hearted self-reliant free marketers of Randian fiction, but many other capitalists out there figure it's cheaper to buy politicians than new hardware.
In the telephony business, we invented the concepts of "natural monopolies" and "universal service" as the hook to let TPC get monopolies over local telecom service, and instead of buying politicians with cold cash, we bought them with the concept that they were "doing good", and "encouraging development", and giving them the ability to hire their friends as telecom regulators. Well, that was a fun game for almost a hundred years, but technological change has made it easier for other people to get in the game, and as the computer industry and telecom industry have gotten closer together, the costs of doing business have come way down.
Most of the voice-over-cable-modem deployment isn't VOIP - it's analog 4kHz connections pulled off the analog side of the signal space, before anything digital gets done. These get connected to a traditional 5ESS or Nortel DMS phone switch, which was much easier organizationally for the telcos to implement quickly and scalably, without having to reinvent things like billing. It's theoretically possible to use the digital signalling on digital cable, but that's really the Mos Eisley of the telecom standards world - you'll never see a more wretched hive of scum, villainy, and creeping featurism. VOIP over the cable modem space will probably win out eventually - we'll see if the competitive impact of the AT&T Broadband sale to Comcast breaks some of the organizational barriers (plus a couple extra years of VOIP technology development and Moore's Law.)
Two of the problems of VOIP over cable are service reliability and reliability during power failures. The easiest way to fix the latter is to integrate some cheap cellphones into the equipment. Service reliability's a bit harder - the economics of the cable TV business assume that you need enough technicians and trucks to take care of most failures, so customers are happy and you don't need to rebate their bills for downtime very often, but that fundamentally it's just television, and if it goes down for the weekend in bad weather, your customers can read a book or go watch videotapes until you can get it fixed.
Two decades ago, our 1 MIPS Vax11/780 cost about $400K. Right now, the cost of a BogoMIPS is about a quarter, if you're buying PC-flavored motherboards. If you're buying DSPs, it's a lot cheaper than that. In the PC world, the market adapted somewhat by using MSBloatware and Gamez so that people need machines that are twice as fast every year or two, but you Evil Linux Weenies Attempting To Gain Total World Domination are busting the curve by letting people use their old machines for several years longer, and by encouraging people to use GNU/Emacs or at most HTML editors instead of Word2004. The business model for buggy whips looks pretty bad too.
A decade or so ago, when Joe Nacchio was working for AT&T before he started Qwest, he gave us a talk at Bell Labs where he drew a curve on the screen that showed the market price of long-distance voice telephone minutes. It took a steep dive, settling down asymptotically toward zero; given the prices of the time, he was showing it going from a quarter to a dime to a nickel to a penny. What could we do about it? Well, the choices were adapt or die. Use technology to cut costs, and use lower prices (plus advertising) to get people to make more phone calls.
Many countries' PTTs were abusing their monopoly positions by charging excessively non-cost-based prices for their service, ripping off their customers and damaging their overall economies by interfering with international communications and therefore international trade. In the past couple of years, they've been taken down not only by callback companies, but by wholesalers using VOIP technology to keep their costs much lower than the PTTs costs. Everybody wins from that, except the greedier PTTs, and most of them were using excess international prices to cross-subsidize local calling.
What's the next step? What happens if VOIP drops costs to the equivalent of $0.001 per minute? The most likely big impact turns out not to be the costs, but the fact that you no longer need a gigantic expensive #4ESS telephone switch to route large numbers of calls - internet routing technology works quite well for that, with something DNS-like to help with end-user location. Unlike those of you who aren't in the telephony business, yes, we do care that our last several business models have gotten the chairs kicked out from under them, but the problem of proposing new business models for telcos is ours, not that of the people who are trying to make us obsolete.
There are *lots* of things wrong with H.323, including its relationship to a bunch of baroque badly designed ISDN signalling protocols which don't look much like Internet approaches to problem-solving. (SIP is rather better-behaved.) One of the most critical problems is the lack of encryption, leaving the whole system open to eavesdroppers, with or without warrants. In this case, the obvious right choice is to use ipsec to tunnel the VOIP traffic, which takes care of C&W's anti-competitiveness as well as taking care of most wiretappers. (You can't stop all the wiretappers, because the telco side of the interface is still tappable, but it reduces many of the opportunities.)
It's not perfect - Compressed RTP does a CSLIP-like elimination of most of the IP, UDP, and rTP overhead, but doesn't work over IPSEC or most other tunneling protocols.) That means bandwidth is pretty tight over 28.8-upstream dialup modems (especially if you don't always get full speed), but I'm not aware of any better tunneling solutions. It'd be nice to have some tradeoffs like putting more than one voice sample per IP packet, which is not so hot for quality but cuts the packet overhead in half, and the protocols *ought* to have encryption as a standard feature, so you don't need tunneling for the general case, but it's a good start.
Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail describes one of the early conflicts between cable modem users and Law Enforcement Authorities. The author had not in fact stolen service - she'd bought cable modem service without buying cable television service, and the incompetent combination of the cable tv company, cable modem company, inadequate communication processes between the two, and Maryland's highly aggressive laws against theft of cable modem service led to her being charged with 4 counts of cable fraud, based on accusations by Comcast which the state wouldn't let them withdraw once they understood they'd made a mistake.
According to Seti@Home, Canada has 213307 machines working on SETI problems, which have contributed 71519 machine-years. The academic project has about 1% this many machines. Some of them may be faster than the average SETI machine. My article also commented about Canada's place on top500.org.
I've just installed Mandrake, and I need to decide which of the El-Cheapo Pretends-To-Be-Soundblaster-Compatible audio cards I've got I should install, so the timing is really convenient for me. The ALSA folks rock, compared to the quality of driver support for soundcards on Linux in the past.
I'm also evaluating getting a better audio card, but I've had trouble finding decent documentation, even on the boxes - sure, everything does eight-dimensional 12-in-1 audio output, but what's I'm more interested in is the quality of the A/D converter, so when I input sound from analog media (my old vinyl disks and analog tapes) it doesn't lose more than necessary. Are there chipsets to avoid, or to hunt around for?
Slashdot Mirror
These products have been around for a while for journaling space for DBMSs, and the Legato Prestoserve board which was an NFS accelerator. NFS had the similar problem that the protocol requires you to write stuff to stable storage before ACKing a request, and a meg or so of battery-backed RAM was enough to cache a couple of disk tracks, making the whole system much faster.
There are several different versions of encrypted disk partitions and encrypted file systems that need you to enter the password to mount them, and which read/write all data to/from the disk in encrypted form. That way, if you power the system down, they're not readable until somebody types in the password. I'm not aware of any that have duress passwords built in (which scribbles the partition if you use it instead of the correct password) or cover-material passwords (which give the Feds some innocent cover material if they use it, e.g. the "backup" copy of
You don't use multiple RocketDrives in parallel to make them transfer data faster - you use them to keep more stuff on Rocketdrive instead of disk. It already goes fast enough, or if it doesn't go fast enough, you really need system main memory.
Sure, the US honors the 1st Amendment far too often by violating it rather than supporting it, but if you think that the law they're proposing won't be used to ban other things, you're a very trusting soul. It's unlikely you'll have an adequate possibility of public review of material that's been banned - the interesting question is whether the authors of banned material will be informed about it. (Admittedly, the cure for that is to always do periodic independent checks to see if your material is accessible.)
I agree that the pricing structure is silly. It should be one price for the board, and either add your own RAM or let them sell you RAM with a small markup.
The Roman author Juvenal is highly unlikely to have been the first person to think about the concept Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? He probably wasn't even the first one to say it in Latin.
There are some exceptions, and I gather they actually apply in Australia - some loudmouth politician wants a censorship law, so they pass one to shut him up, assign implementation to some bureaucrat sitting in a corner who doesn't get any funding, and tell him to go out for a beer and not bother anybody, and in those cases they also censor the actual activities of the censor, so nobody gets on their case for putting up a sham, but that's not the usual case.
Most non-US cars don't encourage this kind of modification - Volvos advertise getting multiple hundreds of thousands of kilometers, though if you've got a significantly old Volkswagen beetle, they got more like 25-50,000 miles (40-80Mm) per engine, unless you did one of those external oil coolers.
Another group that's doing research in this space is Aether Wire & Location. They're building localizer frobs with the objective of getting down to coin size, and doing lots of work on Ultrawideband networking technology, which is good at very-low-power connectivity.
If you're only collecting occasional data, rather than full scans of everybody, technology's been there for a while. A couple years ago, when San Francisco was going to close the Central Freeway, they spent a week videotaping license plates of cars that took it, had a bunch of convicts at the local prison read the plate numbers, and sent everybody a postcard saying that they were planning to close the freeway and please find an alternate route to work. Did the job just fine.
That's definitely insightful, and the situation is even worse than it appears. If Microsoft wins, they can do so either broadly or narrowly. The broad win is to invalidate the patent and toss it out entirely. The narrow win is to show that the patent doesn't specifically apply to what Microsoft's doing with its browser, because the patent's novelty is the combination of Thing1+Thing2+Thing3, and Microsoft's really only doing Thing1+Thing2 and doing Thing3 separately. That gets Microsoft off the hook and leaves Eolas with a mostly intact patent they can use to beat up AOL or whoever owns the remains of Netscape these days, trashing Mozilla as a side effect, or else beat up Mozilla.org as a warmup to beating up AOL.
But it wouldn't be very difficult for them to create a subset of IE that didn't use plug-ins, and there are unlikely to be many Windows-critical operations that use plugins instead of core IE browser functions, especially since the patent is unlikely to cover builtins like ActiveX and Javascript. Splitting IE into a core version and a plugin-supporting web browser means you can still watch those dancing Schlockwave animations if you're using an EOLAS-approved browser, but IE can use cleaner and slightly safer code when it's called by the OS.
Sell Microsoft a license, but keep ownership. That's the usual case in a patent settlement - for a good patent, it means they make money licensing to other people, and for a truly bogus patent, they also make money harassing other people.
Sell Microsoft the whole package, including ownership. They might do this, but Microsoft will have to pay them a lot more money.
RMS might not like being on the same side as Microsoft here, but opposing this patent is clearly consistent with his usual comments about software patents being Bad, and about how software patents potentially force programmers to do a complete patent search before every line of code they write, which is clearly impossible. How many of you knew about this patent when you last wrote a plugin for something?
Democracy doesn't mean free markets - it means the people picking the politicians who run their governments, and ideally means that the people can tell the politicians what laws to make. That doesn't mean that you won't get bad laws - protectionism is really popular in much of the world, especially in countries with farmers or big industries. India's a democracy, but it's got heavily non-free markets. Australia's Telstra is no longer a total monopoly, and they don't have endemic corruption problems, but they're still technically clueless.
One of the best things somebody could have done for the world economy was to go to VSNL and ask them how much money it would take to get them to go away and leave everybody alone. It doesn't matter how big a number they say - a billion dollars? Pay them.
There was a report on US National Public Radio yesterday about the call center business in Bangalore, which started essentially from scratch two years ago, and is expected to make about $25 Billion over the next five years. Nobody actually offered to pay VSNL a billion-dollar bribe (as far as I know
They're not the only place with telecom monopolies maintaining the digital divide. Most countries have monopolies on radio broadcasting as well, and the combination of radio and telephone monopolies delayed the development of effective radio-based voice calling technology in the US by 40-50 years, and there are large parts of the world that have limited or expensive telephony because they're limited to wires. (Remember that the digital divide is partly about computing, but it's partly a voice communications divide as well.) Technologies like unlicensed 802.11 are just gradually leaking around it, and most practical VOIP was initially a better replacement for ham-radio phone-patch that was good enough for calling your cousin in Israel even if it wasn't good enough for business calls.
It's probably not a DMCA violation, because they're only using technical means to violate the trademark, not the copyright, unless of course the CD logo is copyrighted as well as trademarked....
To get back to software issues, some of the stations had a fixed display format that could only handle two candidates (whether the numbers were correct or not), while others were more flexible (which they also needed for things like city council races, which here in California are usually Vote-for-N-of-M non-partisan.)
[ObLiteraryReference:] Everybody hates The Phone Company.
In the telephony business, we invented the concepts of "natural monopolies" and "universal service" as the hook to let TPC get monopolies over local telecom service, and instead of buying politicians with cold cash, we bought them with the concept that they were "doing good", and "encouraging development", and giving them the ability to hire their friends as telecom regulators. Well, that was a fun game for almost a hundred years, but technological change has made it easier for other people to get in the game, and as the computer industry and telecom industry have gotten closer together, the costs of doing business have come way down.
Two of the problems of VOIP over cable are service reliability and reliability during power failures. The easiest way to fix the latter is to integrate some cheap cellphones into the equipment. Service reliability's a bit harder - the economics of the cable TV business assume that you need enough technicians and trucks to take care of most failures, so customers are happy and you don't need to rebate their bills for downtime very often, but that fundamentally it's just television, and if it goes down for the weekend in bad weather, your customers can read a book or go watch videotapes until you can get it fixed.
A decade or so ago, when Joe Nacchio was working for AT&T before he started Qwest, he gave us a talk at Bell Labs where he drew a curve on the screen that showed the market price of long-distance voice telephone minutes. It took a steep dive, settling down asymptotically toward zero; given the prices of the time, he was showing it going from a quarter to a dime to a nickel to a penny. What could we do about it? Well, the choices were adapt or die. Use technology to cut costs, and use lower prices (plus advertising) to get people to make more phone calls.
Many countries' PTTs were abusing their monopoly positions by charging excessively non-cost-based prices for their service, ripping off their customers and damaging their overall economies by interfering with international communications and therefore international trade. In the past couple of years, they've been taken down not only by callback companies, but by wholesalers using VOIP technology to keep their costs much lower than the PTTs costs. Everybody wins from that, except the greedier PTTs, and most of them were using excess international prices to cross-subsidize local calling.
What's the next step? What happens if VOIP drops costs to the equivalent of $0.001 per minute? The most likely big impact turns out not to be the costs, but the fact that you no longer need a gigantic expensive #4ESS telephone switch to route large numbers of calls - internet routing technology works quite well for that, with something DNS-like to help with end-user location. Unlike those of you who aren't in the telephony business, yes, we do care that our last several business models have gotten the chairs kicked out from under them, but the problem of proposing new business models for telcos is ours, not that of the people who are trying to make us obsolete.
It's not perfect - Compressed RTP does a CSLIP-like elimination of most of the IP, UDP, and rTP overhead, but doesn't work over IPSEC or most other tunneling protocols.) That means bandwidth is pretty tight over 28.8-upstream dialup modems (especially if you don't always get full speed), but I'm not aware of any better tunneling solutions.
It'd be nice to have some tradeoffs like putting more than one voice sample per IP packet, which is not so hot for quality but cuts the packet overhead in half, and the protocols *ought* to have encryption as a standard feature, so you don't need tunneling for the general case, but it's a good start.
Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail describes one of the early conflicts between cable modem users and Law Enforcement Authorities. The author had not in fact stolen service - she'd bought cable modem service without buying cable television service, and the incompetent combination of the cable tv company, cable modem company, inadequate communication processes between the two, and Maryland's highly aggressive laws against theft of cable modem service led to her being charged with 4 counts of cable fraud, based on accusations by Comcast which the state wouldn't let them withdraw once they understood they'd made a mistake.
According to Seti@Home, Canada has 213307 machines working on SETI problems, which have contributed 71519 machine-years. The academic project has about 1% this many machines. Some of them may be faster than the average SETI machine. My article also commented about Canada's place on top500.org.
I'm also evaluating getting a better audio card, but I've had trouble finding decent documentation, even on the boxes - sure, everything does eight-dimensional 12-in-1 audio output, but what's I'm more interested in is the quality of the A/D converter, so when I input sound from analog media (my old vinyl disks and analog tapes) it doesn't lose more than necessary. Are there chipsets to avoid, or to hunt around for?