I'm using both NoScript and Ghostery
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Window Pain
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There are sites that I want to read that need Javascript, so I've got NoScript set to allow them - but Ghostery lets me block many of the third-party privacy-violators that many of those sites seem to have, such as advertising-statistic counters of various sorts. Doesn't seem to slow things down, and doesn't interfere much visually (there's an occasional floating stuff-we-blocked box in the browser tabs.)
If you're going to gripe about the low Internet speeds we've got in the US, tell me what cool stuff you want to do with it, or what cool stuff the Japanese, Koreans, and Swedes are doing with theirs!
Other than running P2P file sharing faster, the big applications I keep hearing about for faster-than-3Mbs internet are Television and downloading movies from Internet TV competitors. ZZZZZ unless you like that sort of passive entertainment; you're basically just displacing the transport vendor selling you the same old material. It may let you negotiate lower prices for your TV, but it's still 500+ channels and nothing's on, except that it looks a bit better in 1080p.
Gaming? That's a job for low-latency sub-megabit bandwidth. At least the canonical Old People in Korea can see the specials at the local grocery store on video. Video Skype? Still doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, though it's better than video over 14.4kbps modems was.
Back in the Dark Ages, the @Home cable modem folks had two different opinions about Napster - the PR Droids would rant about Evil Content Thieves, but the engineers (and even most of the managers, if you asked them unofficially) would say "Duh, the reason people are buying broadband is to run Napster! Go Piracy!" But these day I can download most content far faster than I can watch it all. Go build something interesting so we need more bandwidth!
What you need to really look at to compare technology growth is the backplane density, how many cabinets you need, how many interfaces of what kinds of speeds, prices, energy consumption, etc. The big marketing number isn't where you see Moore's Law sorts of effects, and the prices of optics don't behave the same way the prices of chips do.
The CRS-1 and CRS-3 are both really big honking routers - you don't get to 100Tbs speeds without ganging together a large number of chassis in multiple racks. And you don't typically use anywhere near that much routing in one place. Wikipedia reports that Google and AT&T were each carrying traffic in the 20 PByte/day range - that would be about 2Terabits/sec if it were spread out evenly over 24 hours. (It's not, of course, but it's also not all on the same fiber or same switch. A typical big US carrier has big switches in 20-40 cities, often in pairs for diversity, and some level of fiber meshing that reflects geography as well as traffic patterns and interface cost optimization.)
I'm surprised to hear that you're stuck with 768kbps DSL, unless you're either way out behind Stanford or in one of the politically-weird boundary neighborhoods like Whiskey Gulch. Check on www.att.com to see what they've got. Also, I'd think you could get cable modem service (again, unless you're in weird parts of PA or there's some regulatory annoyance because of PA's city-owned fiber network.) Neither one's going to be friendly about static IPs without gouging you. If you don't mind an annoyingly low 5GB cap, there's also 3G wireless.
I'm in Mountain View, debatably 11000 or 16000 wire-feet from the CO, and I've got 3Mbps DSL; I could probably get 6Mbps but haven't tried, and they've recently started offering U-verse so I can get much faster connections if I want them bundled with television, which I don't.
When I first got DSL, it was 384kbps SDSL because the lines weren't quite good enough for 768kbps SDSL, but that was the mid-90s, and whatever ADSL variant they're using this decade is a lot more flexible.
One reason for systems this heavy is to support 100Gbps Ethernet trunking; most carrier routers are limited to 40Gbps or 10Gbps. Another reason is to support lots of cables at high speeds. All of those speeds are per-wavelength; you can multiplex large numbers of wavelengths on a single cable depending on what kind of optical switching gear you're using, but that's usually a Layer 1 question.
If you can run Crysis on a VT-100 terminal, then yes, otherwise see if you can compile Nethack to run on IOS-XR:-)
Several decades ago, I had a CRT as the console for my VAX, instead of the more traditional Decwriter. One day I ran rogue from the console, and at some point needed to repeat a message, so I typed control-P. But instead of getting a response from rogue, I got the prompt from the LSI-11 console processor (D'oh!) Fortunately, since this was an 11/780, that didn't actually stop the VAX (like it would have with an 11/750), so I was able to connect back to the VAX CPU, save my game, and go restart it from a normal terminal.
Based on a brief look at Cisco.com, it looks like the CRS-3 scales from a single 4-slot chassis up to an 1192-slot multiple-rack array, so the amount of backplane capacity you get depends on what size chassis and how many chassis you want to chain together, as well as what flavors of interface cards you put in them. (A lot of the processing capacity is on the cards, which is how you get things to scale to carrier-class.) The small box is going to have supervisor CPUs and probably control-plane, and you'll presumably want redundant power supplies of some sort (though that may be DC if you're in a carrier environment), and probably a couple of GigE interfaces on the supervisor card, but it's not the kind of platform you buy without buying some hefty interface cards, which is where most of your money'd be going.
Yup. It's much easier for the Police State if there's already a policeman inside everybody's head, but having one next door will do - and the Internet means everybody's next door.
Also use "Ghostery" to block stuff
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Ghostery is more of a privacy protection than an annoying-display protection, but a surprising fraction of the sites that I do allow to use Javascript have 2-6 widgets from sites I'd rather not trust. Typically they're ad-trackers of various sorts, or Facebook/Digg/etc.-submission widgets, but in general I block most of them. (I haven't figured out whether killing AddThis or Google Custom Search Engine will lose me useful features or not, but just about everything else gets blocked.)
Browser should still protect you
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The more content-controlled features in your browser, the easier it is for malicious web pages to abuse them. But that's no excuse for the browser to allow them to do so untraceably - it should still show you where the window came from, and give you tools to block that, regardless of what else it's doing. (Of course, that doesn't stop the whack-a-mole moving target problem, but it should at least tell you what mole to whack, and let you limit popup-like things to known good actors anyway.)
MS wants to suppress one file, JY refuses, MS sends DMCA letter to Netsol requesting taking down the one file. That's mildly newsworthy because it's cryptome and MS, but that's not the big event. Netsol took down the whole site, not just the one file, which is especially newsworthy because of the importance of cryptome and because it exceeds their requirements, and then Netsol the Registrar locked the domain name, which isn't at all required, and is newsworthy because they're locking domain names for non-domain-related reasons.
And MS is saying "sorry" not only because JY asserted his rights to dispute the DMCA takedown and thousands of people yelled at MS, but because MS is getting blamed for Netsol's overkill overreaction.
The DMCA requires that if an alleged copyright owner alleges that specific material on a site infringes their copyright, the web hosting provider needs to disable access to that specific material, unless notified by the user that he disputes the allegations of the alleged copyright owner, and there are some detailed timelines for the actions. It doesn't require that the web hosting provider disable the whole website, or that the domain name registrar prevent the domain owner from changing the IP addresses for the website, or that either the web hosting provider or domain name registrar erase all backups, destroy the hardware with thermite, shoot the user's dog, or nuke the city from orbit.
Unless I'm misreading the correspondence that was posted on Cryptome's backup site, Microsoft asked Young's web hosting provider, Network Solutions, to disable access to one specific file under the DMCA, and Network Solutions, as the hosting provider, decided on their own to disable the entire cryptome website, and their evil twin, Network Solutions the DNS Registrar, decided on their own to place a lock on the domain name. I don't know if Netsol-the-registrar's contract with ICANN lets them do that, but I'd be surprised -this isn't a trademark dispute about the name cryptome, it's a copyright dispute about material on the site.
The DMCA deadlines haven't expired yet, so Network Solution's Other Evil Twin, Cthulhu Inc, have not yet completed the aforementioned other activities and slunk back in to the ocean, but it's possible they'll do it anyway just for fun.
Back in the mumblety-80s, standard Bell Labs* Unix licenses came in binary and source versions. Binaries were cheap, source more expensive, universities got discounts so it was nearly free to them. At one point the US Government wanted a license that would give them unlimited rights to the code, because that was what they got for software that they'd paid to have develop, and their contracting bureaucrats insisted strenuously that they wanted that option for Unix as well. The Bell Labs Obnoxious Licensing Lawyers thought about it for a while, decided ok, and gave them a price - One Billion Dollars. The government bureaucrats said "ok, thanks", checked the box on their forms saying it was available, didn't actually order it:-)
...
* Actually, depending on the year, it might have been Bell Labs, or Western Electric, or various parts of AT the bureaucracy you ordered Unix from changed over the years.
The one case I can see where they might hypothetically have a case for accusing him of inappropriate behaviour is that if the laptop were being used for cracking the school's computer system, posting inappropriate material in the school's discussion sites, etc.then they might have had an excuse to turn on the camera to verify who was using it, and then they might have been able to accuse him of inappropriate behaviour. None of their business if he's smoking dope naked or eating high-fructose-corn-syrup candies that are banned from the school's vending machines, but the candy picture could be legitimate evidence if they're busting him for cracking.
On the other hand, if their policy is really that the system is only used to locate stolen laptops, then they've either got a record that somebody said the laptop was stolen, or they don't, and if there's a record that that laptop was stolen, and if the laptop was registered to that kid, and the camera shows that kid using it, legitimate case closed, delete the picture, and anything else they do with the picture is invasion of privacy.
Most people's metabolisms change with age. I seldom drink enough to get drunk anyway, but when I was young I could do it without hangovers; these days I have to be more careful or the next morning will be painful. And caffeine can be really nasty if you start using too much of it.
I suppose it's no worse than showing people a demo on a laptop screen, but that's also suboptimal for more than two people.
Basically, if you want brightness, you're going to need to plug the projector into a reasonable power source; I don't know if USB's enough (probably not) or if that means the wall socket.
Windows Vista or 7 can use a variety of kinds of flash memory as disk cache. It's the kind of thing you might as well do - fast flash is pretty cheap, and cheap flash is really really cheap, and while the transfer rate isn't as fast as rotating disks, avoiding rotational latency is a huge win these days, plus (unless you're running a your systems with lots of disk drives) you get to use it in parallel with your disk drives, so your applications and data don't have to compete with each other for disk rotations or bandwidth.
Did the Republican and Democratic Parties ever register? If not, should we help them out by submitting forms for them? The filing fee's only $5; that was real money back in 1951, but these days it's less than the price of a movie ticket.
And no, those guys had no interest in overthrowing the US government; if they did that then who'd be around to pay them billions and billions of taxpayer dollars? The ones they need to bust are anybody from the Bush Administration, though many of those folks are still around because Obama didn't clean house when he took over.
Slashdot Mirror
There are sites that I want to read that need Javascript, so I've got NoScript set to allow them - but Ghostery lets me block many of the third-party privacy-violators that many of those sites seem to have, such as advertising-statistic counters of various sorts. Doesn't seem to slow things down, and doesn't interfere much visually (there's an occasional floating stuff-we-blocked box in the browser tabs.)
Wikipedia's article on Petabytes says that archive.org has about three of them, though obviously that's a moving target...
If you're going to gripe about the low Internet speeds we've got in the US, tell me what cool stuff you want to do with it, or what cool stuff the Japanese, Koreans, and Swedes are doing with theirs!
Other than running P2P file sharing faster, the big applications I keep hearing about for faster-than-3Mbs internet are Television and downloading movies from Internet TV competitors. ZZZZZ unless you like that sort of passive entertainment; you're basically just displacing the transport vendor selling you the same old material. It may let you negotiate lower prices for your TV, but it's still 500+ channels and nothing's on, except that it looks a bit better in 1080p.
Gaming? That's a job for low-latency sub-megabit bandwidth. At least the canonical Old People in Korea can see the specials at the local grocery store on video. Video Skype? Still doesn't need a lot of bandwidth, though it's better than video over 14.4kbps modems was.
Back in the Dark Ages, the @Home cable modem folks had two different opinions about Napster - the PR Droids would rant about Evil Content Thieves, but the engineers (and even most of the managers, if you asked them unofficially) would say "Duh, the reason people are buying broadband is to run Napster! Go Piracy!" But these day I can download most content far faster than I can watch it all. Go build something interesting so we need more bandwidth!
What you need to really look at to compare technology growth is the backplane density, how many cabinets you need, how many interfaces of what kinds of speeds, prices, energy consumption, etc. The big marketing number isn't where you see Moore's Law sorts of effects, and the prices of optics don't behave the same way the prices of chips do.
The CRS-1 and CRS-3 are both really big honking routers - you don't get to 100Tbs speeds without ganging together a large number of chassis in multiple racks. And you don't typically use anywhere near that much routing in one place. Wikipedia reports that Google and AT&T were each carrying traffic in the 20 PByte/day range - that would be about 2Terabits/sec if it were spread out evenly over 24 hours. (It's not, of course, but it's also not all on the same fiber or same switch. A typical big US carrier has big switches in 20-40 cities, often in pairs for diversity, and some level of fiber meshing that reflects geography as well as traffic patterns and interface cost optimization.)
I'm surprised to hear that you're stuck with 768kbps DSL, unless you're either way out behind Stanford or in one of the politically-weird boundary neighborhoods like Whiskey Gulch. Check on www.att.com to see what they've got. Also, I'd think you could get cable modem service (again, unless you're in weird parts of PA or there's some regulatory annoyance because of PA's city-owned fiber network.) Neither one's going to be friendly about static IPs without gouging you. If you don't mind an annoyingly low 5GB cap, there's also 3G wireless.
I'm in Mountain View, debatably 11000 or 16000 wire-feet from the CO, and I've got 3Mbps DSL; I could probably get 6Mbps but haven't tried, and they've recently started offering U-verse so I can get much faster connections if I want them bundled with television, which I don't.
When I first got DSL, it was 384kbps SDSL because the lines weren't quite good enough for 768kbps SDSL, but that was the mid-90s, and whatever ADSL variant they're using this decade is a lot more flexible.
One reason for systems this heavy is to support 100Gbps Ethernet trunking; most carrier routers are limited to 40Gbps or 10Gbps. Another reason is to support lots of cables at high speeds. All of those speeds are per-wavelength; you can multiplex large numbers of wavelengths on a single cable depending on what kind of optical switching gear you're using, but that's usually a Layer 1 question.
If you can run Crysis on a VT-100 terminal, then yes, otherwise see if you can compile Nethack to run on IOS-XR :-)
Several decades ago, I had a CRT as the console for my VAX, instead of the more traditional Decwriter. One day I ran rogue from the console, and at some point needed to repeat a message, so I typed control-P. But instead of getting a response from rogue, I got the prompt from the LSI-11 console processor (D'oh!) Fortunately, since this was an 11/780, that didn't actually stop the VAX (like it would have with an 11/750), so I was able to connect back to the VAX CPU, save my game, and go restart it from a normal terminal.
Based on a brief look at Cisco.com, it looks like the CRS-3 scales from a single 4-slot chassis up to an 1192-slot multiple-rack array, so the amount of backplane capacity you get depends on what size chassis and how many chassis you want to chain together, as well as what flavors of interface cards you put in them. (A lot of the processing capacity is on the cards, which is how you get things to scale to carrier-class.) The small box is going to have supervisor CPUs and probably control-plane, and you'll presumably want redundant power supplies of some sort (though that may be DC if you're in a carrier environment), and probably a couple of GigE interfaces on the supervisor card, but it's not the kind of platform you buy without buying some hefty interface cards, which is where most of your money'd be going.
Ob. XKCD reference
Yup. It's much easier for the Police State if there's already a policeman inside everybody's head, but having one next door will do - and the Internet means everybody's next door.
Ghostery is more of a privacy protection than an annoying-display protection, but a surprising fraction of the sites that I do allow to use Javascript have 2-6 widgets from sites I'd rather not trust. Typically they're ad-trackers of various sorts, or Facebook/Digg/etc.-submission widgets, but in general I block most of them. (I haven't figured out whether killing AddThis or Google Custom Search Engine will lose me useful features or not, but just about everything else gets blocked.)
The more content-controlled features in your browser, the easier it is for malicious web pages to abuse them. But that's no excuse for the browser to allow them to do so untraceably - it should still show you where the window came from, and give you tools to block that, regardless of what else it's doing. (Of course, that doesn't stop the whack-a-mole moving target problem, but it should at least tell you what mole to whack, and let you limit popup-like things to known good actors anyway.)
MS wants to suppress one file, JY refuses, MS sends DMCA letter to Netsol requesting taking down the one file. That's mildly newsworthy because it's cryptome and MS, but that's not the big event. Netsol took down the whole site, not just the one file, which is especially newsworthy because of the importance of cryptome and because it exceeds their requirements, and then Netsol the Registrar locked the domain name, which isn't at all required, and is newsworthy because they're locking domain names for non-domain-related reasons.
And MS is saying "sorry" not only because JY asserted his rights to dispute the DMCA takedown and thousands of people yelled at MS, but because MS is getting blamed for Netsol's overkill overreaction.
MS only asserted copyright over one file, and didn't request taking down the whole site. Netsol-the-hoster overreacted.
And as you say, Netsol-the-registrar way overstepped their boundaries.
The DMCA requires that if an alleged copyright owner alleges that specific material on a site infringes their copyright, the web hosting provider needs to disable access to that specific material, unless notified by the user that he disputes the allegations of the alleged copyright owner, and there are some detailed timelines for the actions. It doesn't require that the web hosting provider disable the whole website, or that the domain name registrar prevent the domain owner from changing the IP addresses for the website, or that either the web hosting provider or domain name registrar erase all backups, destroy the hardware with thermite, shoot the user's dog, or nuke the city from orbit.
Unless I'm misreading the correspondence that was posted on Cryptome's backup site, Microsoft asked Young's web hosting provider, Network Solutions, to disable access to one specific file under the DMCA, and Network Solutions, as the hosting provider, decided on their own to disable the entire cryptome website, and their evil twin, Network Solutions the DNS Registrar, decided on their own to place a lock on the domain name. I don't know if Netsol-the-registrar's contract with ICANN lets them do that, but I'd be surprised -this isn't a trademark dispute about the name cryptome, it's a copyright dispute about material on the site.
The DMCA deadlines haven't expired yet, so Network Solution's Other Evil Twin, Cthulhu Inc, have not yet completed the aforementioned other activities and slunk back in to the ocean, but it's possible they'll do it anyway just for fun.
Back in the mumblety-80s, standard Bell Labs* Unix licenses came in binary and source versions. Binaries were cheap, source more expensive, universities got discounts so it was nearly free to them. At one point the US Government wanted a license that would give them unlimited rights to the code, because that was what they got for software that they'd paid to have develop, and their contracting bureaucrats insisted strenuously that they wanted that option for Unix as well. The Bell Labs Obnoxious Licensing Lawyers thought about it for a while, decided ok, and gave them a price - One Billion Dollars. The government bureaucrats said "ok, thanks", checked the box on their forms saying it was available, didn't actually order it :-)
* Actually, depending on the year, it might have been Bell Labs, or Western Electric, or various parts of AT the bureaucracy you ordered Unix from changed over the years.
It did start out as a student's project, after all.
Yes, it grew out of Bell Labs v7 Unix, but the Berkeley Unix work was done at a public university.
The one case I can see where they might hypothetically have a case for accusing him of inappropriate behaviour is that if the laptop were being used for cracking the school's computer system, posting inappropriate material in the school's discussion sites, etc. then they might have had an excuse to turn on the camera to verify who was using it, and then they might have been able to accuse him of inappropriate behaviour. None of their business if he's smoking dope naked or eating high-fructose-corn-syrup candies that are banned from the school's vending machines, but the candy picture could be legitimate evidence if they're busting him for cracking.
On the other hand, if their policy is really that the system is only used to locate stolen laptops, then they've either got a record that somebody said the laptop was stolen, or they don't, and if there's a record that that laptop was stolen, and if the laptop was registered to that kid, and the camera shows that kid using it, legitimate case closed, delete the picture, and anything else they do with the picture is invasion of privacy.
Black tape if you want to be professional about it, chewing gum if you want to be appropriate for a misbehaving schoolkid...
Most people's metabolisms change with age. I seldom drink enough to get drunk anyway, but when I was young I could do it without hangovers; these days I have to be more careful or the next morning will be painful. And caffeine can be really nasty if you start using too much of it.
He was still the President of a number of the American states.
I suppose it's no worse than showing people a demo on a laptop screen, but that's also suboptimal for more than two people.
Basically, if you want brightness, you're going to need to plug the projector into a reasonable power source; I don't know if USB's enough (probably not) or if that means the wall socket.
Windows Vista or 7 can use a variety of kinds of flash memory as disk cache. It's the kind of thing you might as well do - fast flash is pretty cheap, and cheap flash is really really cheap, and while the transfer rate isn't as fast as rotating disks, avoiding rotational latency is a huge win these days, plus (unless you're running a your systems with lots of disk drives) you get to use it in parallel with your disk drives, so your applications and data don't have to compete with each other for disk rotations or bandwidth.
Did the Republican and Democratic Parties ever register? If not, should we help them out by submitting forms for them? The filing fee's only $5; that was real money back in 1951, but these days it's less than the price of a movie ticket.
And no, those guys had no interest in overthrowing the US government; if they did that then who'd be around to pay them billions and billions of taxpayer dollars? The ones they need to bust are anybody from the Bush Administration, though many of those folks are still around because Obama didn't clean house when he took over.