I was doing this for a while (actually it was an OpenBSD box because pf is much more sane to use compared to tc/iptables) but found a better way. Rather than having a general purpose machine running 24/7 sucking down electricity (and having a big ugly grey box sitting on my desk) I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router and installed the open source DD-WRT firmware on it. It does easy traffic shaping, port forwarding/NAT and firewalling including full layer 7 filtering.
It does everything my old dedicated router did with less power usage, much smaller form factor, no fan noise and it has a decent web admin interface out of the box. Essentially it's like buying a tiny dedicated Linux router box that actually designed to be a wired/wireless router.
OP has a valid point. Monthlies will kill your finances if not looked at wisely. What if you took $100/month and invested it in your retirement or even just a normal stock portfolio? THAT is how the smart build wealth.
But if you spend $100/month on your 'essential' unlimited trendy cellphone (never the $29.99 or free basic phone, right?), another $80-100/month for cable television, $299 + $150 insurance/month for your leased car, $50/weekend to hit the bars and see a movie to unwind....do you really wonder why despite the good job you can never really get ahead?
Not only a backup of my GPG private key, but the only copy of the secure keyring. I have a symlink in my home directory (~/.gnupg/secring.gpg) to the thumbdrive mount point.
I carry around the thumbdrive so it's never out of my sight. Assuming my home PC is compromised, the only way to sign or decrypt data using my key is to physically plug the keydrive in.
Agonist/antagonist drugs are fairly widely used, the ones I'm aware of (buprenorphine primarily, but butorphanol and nalbuphine may also apply here) retain a certain quantity of abuse potential. These drugs are still opioid agonists and show dependency traits accordingly, the main reason to use something like buprenorphine is that users (due to their mixed antagonist effect) may experience reduced effects when using pure mu agonists concurrently. Especially with the buprenorphine formulations that contain naloxone (a heroin addict is being treated with Subutex, he/she relapses and injects heroin but experiences no euphoric effect). When used alone in non-dependent patients the effects mirror the classic opioids pretty closely.
No. The exact mechanism of action of acetaminophen (APAP, paracetamol) is not totally understood, however recent research has shown that it is an indirect inhibitor of COX (which is similar to aspirin and the classic NSAIDs) and may act on a previously unknown variant of COX called COX-3. (see the wikipedia paracetamol article for futhur details)
Painkillers (opioid painkillers, specifically) are addictive precisely because of their analgesic effects. Addiction and analgesia are not separate traits, but rather two aspects of the same action. Anything that provides strong central pain relief (as opposed to peripheral analgesia as in NSAIDs) has at least some risk of causing psychological or physical dependence.
Beagle is one of the coolest tools available for Linux desktops and it requires xattrs on indexed filesystems, so yes, my/home and / have xattrs enabled.
Stimulants are not miracle drugs and they don't improve your mental state for very long. When you use them you're basically borrowing against your future sleep or mental energy. After the drug wears off you experience a crash that's at least as intense (in the opposite direction) as the original positive effects. It's also debatable whether the improvement is entirely psychosomatic (the drug makes you 'feel' smarter but empirically there is no improvement) or if it is something positive and measurable.
Think of amphetamines and other stimulants as sort of an energy credit card. They might come in handy every once in a while but you'll always have to pay it back (usually with interest) and if you use them too much you'll get into serious trouble.
Brian Peppers is a paraplegic man who has had his disfigured photograph sent around the internet as a meme of sorts. He lives in a nursing home and one day allegedly groped one of his nurses (he claims he was trying to get her attention and ripped her skirt). Consequently he was given 5 years probation and is forced to register as a sex offender (the photo in question is his booking/registration mug shot).
Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia, and screaming 'censorship' when that worthless Wikipedia entry was deleted is shameful.
I can do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange which adds zero complexity to the user experience: no key management hassles at all.
You're proposing using a system with known design vulnerabilities. See my comment above re: false security vs no security at all.
As soon as you add key management into the mix (which is absolutely crucial and, due to the strength of modern ciphers, becomes the keystone of security) things get very complicated very quickly (as you allude to wrt SSH).
That is not to say that it is an insurmountable problem: an example is web browser SSL. The mechanics of key authentication and distribution are actually quite complex, however this is hidden almost entirely from the user. This is done through a large and relatively robust crypto infrastructure which was created because commerce makes SSL necessary. The public's right to privacy does have the same corporate backing.
Because encryption is very difficult to do correctly. And we should all know by now that a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
There's also the not insignificant fact that encryption is complex to use and administer. Adding in robust encryption is not free from a user-friendliness perspective. Much thought has to be put into reducing the user-visible complexity as much as possible so that the user base will actually use the encryption, and use it in such a way that security is preserved. Not trivial.
One of Harris' most compelling points is that submission to irrational belief is simply not necessary to live an ethical, fulfilling life. It is entirely possible to build a science of ethics, a body of knowledge that is entirely empirical, testable, falsifiable and logical. Certain traditions of Eastern thought (parts of the Buddhist canon in particular) have already carried this idea for thousands of years; they are not based on irrational dogma or infallible books of fantasy but instead on testable, verifiable human experience.
I would encourage you to read his book yourself, even if you disagree it has the potential to open up an interesting discussion at the very least.
This claim by religious moderates that so-called "faith" and rational biological science are compatible is total nonsense. As neuroscientist and author Sam Harris argues in his excellent book The End of Faith, this kind of claim can only be made when you selectively disregard large portions of biblical text while arbitrarily interpreting others in a "metaphorical" sense.
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.
(Long Now has a great talk given by Harris available for free download in Ogg Vorbis or MP3)
I think the poster was referring to psychiatric drugs in general, not epilepsy per se (which isn't really a psychiatric condition anyway).
Drugs used to treat schizoprenia are dangerous with severe, often irreversible, side effects. Tardive dyskinesia is a symptom of permanent neurological damage caused by long term use of neuroleptics. The benzodiazepines (used to treat anxiety disorders, among other things) are addictive with a pronounced, physically dangerous withdrawl syndrome (it can actually precipitate delerium tremens). Even the relatively benign SSRI/SNRIs are starting to show unanticipated side effects that are somewhat limiting their use.
As the previous poster said, these drugs are far better than psychosurgery, but they are far from perfect. In any event, they treat the symptoms rather than the (unknown) causes of mental illness. Hopefully that will change someday.
There's a very good reason they're testing this tech on Arabic speech primarily. Although they won't say it, I'd be very surprised if the DOD isn't sponsoring this. NSA would absolutely love to be able to translate and transcribe monitored Arabic speech (ie, phone calls) in real time. No backlog of untranslated intercepts, no staff shortages.
Too bad the so-called audio download is only available as WMP/Realplayer embedded content. Where's the direct download link? Isn't BBC one of the few media giants to have embraced open formats, etc?
All NASA communications are encrypted. One of the highest priorities during recovery of the Columbia wreckage was to find and secure the NSA "black box" that encrypted radio traffic between the shuttle and ground control.
Can you imagine the damage some antisocial radio vandal could do to the Mars Rovers, for instance, if the command traffic was sent in the clear?
Private torrent communities are the lifeblood of the BitTorrent scene. They are the only thing standing between BT and the sort of vast, content-less wasteland of Kazaa/Edonkey type systems. Yes, that means individual users need to be held accountable and poor quality clients that enable cheaters and leechers will unfortunately have to be banned. Such is life.
You have to get a daily build (or cross-compile it yourself from CVS) to use it on iRiver. Despite very active development it is quite stable (occasionally a daily build will break, but not often). Either way, you always retain the ability to boot into the factory firmware if something goes wrong. The functionality can't be beaten; Rockbox on iRiver is an audio geek's dream gadget.
Maybe the only downside is that the UI is a little spartan so far (the Archos devices that Rockbox was originally designed for had smaller screens that didn't support grayscale, just black and white). You can customize it pretty extensively, though, so with a little work you can make it look much better.
I jumped on the AAC bandwagon when the Ogg one was just getting ready to leave, and seem to have stayed on it.
AAC in many ways is Apple's version of WMA; although technically it is MPEG4 standards-based in practice it is nearly as proprietary as WMA (perhaps intentionally so; I believe patent law is involved). It also doesn't live up to the quality hype; a 128kbps iTunes track *does not* sound equivalent to a 192kbps LAME-encoded MP3 track. It is, perhaps, somewhat better than generic CBR MP3 at 128k but then so is WMA; Ogg Vorbis (according to nearly all listening tests) is markedly superior at 128k. At 160kbps Ogg is transparent to most listeners, at 192kbps virtually everyone.
The next generation lossy audio codec winner might be AAC (or it may not), but technical superiority won't be the reason why. It will have far more to do with market penetration and entrenchment.
Not true. iRiver H120 (aka iHP-120) is a HDD player and was the (arguably superior) predecessor to the H320/H340. The stock firmware supported Ogg Vorbis out of the box (along with MP3 and WMA), it also has features like near DAT-quality recording in WAV or MP3, analog line in/line out and digital optical line in/out that no current player matches.
Today it runs the open source Rockbox firmware and supports virtually every major audio format in use today: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, A/52, AAC (experimental), FLAC, Shorten, Apple Lossless and WavPack. It even has a 33 shade greyscale JPEG viewer.
ID propagandists must be attacked in the same way that, for instance, white-supremacist/neo-nazi/neo-fascist ideologues are attacked. In many ways, who cares if they scream about persecution? They are nutjobs hell-bent (no pun intended) on dismantling the basis of rational, secular civilization and all the advances of modern science. I don't care what your religion is or what you choose to believe, but when you try to force your worldview on me or society as a whole, I will attack you with whatever tactics I have at my disposal.
This is basically just a fancy measurement of your local Internet connection (latency, packet loss, etc), and it extrapolates that to try and speculate what effect that would have on VoIP. The effects of the hardware and your VoIP provider's network is not included in this test, which could significantly affect the outcome.
My point is that it's only possible to cheat undetected if you limit your cheating to insignificant amounts, or wait until after you've already established a decent ratio and/or reputation. Significant cheating (like what you describe, 2x the upload) will be caught 90% of the time. The torrentbits code has a lot of behind the scenes tools to track user behavior and catch cheaters.
By the way, I'm talking about smallish torrent sites (<50,000 users or so) where the account turnover is low enough that new users can be noticed by mod staff. Huge sites with six figure userbases and hundreds of signups a day would obviously be much easier to cheat on.
Slashdot Mirror
It does everything my old dedicated router did with less power usage, much smaller form factor, no fan noise and it has a decent web admin interface out of the box. Essentially it's like buying a tiny dedicated Linux router box that actually designed to be a wired/wireless router.
OP has a valid point. Monthlies will kill your finances if not looked at wisely. What if you took $100/month and invested it in your retirement or even just a normal stock portfolio? THAT is how the smart build wealth.
But if you spend $100/month on your 'essential' unlimited trendy cellphone (never the $29.99 or free basic phone, right?), another $80-100/month for cable television, $299 + $150 insurance/month for your leased car, $50/weekend to hit the bars and see a movie to unwind....do you really wonder why despite the good job you can never really get ahead?
I carry around the thumbdrive so it's never out of my sight. Assuming my home PC is compromised, the only way to sign or decrypt data using my key is to physically plug the keydrive in.
Agonist/antagonist drugs are fairly widely used, the ones I'm aware of (buprenorphine primarily, but butorphanol and nalbuphine may also apply here) retain a certain quantity of abuse potential. These drugs are still opioid agonists and show dependency traits accordingly, the main reason to use something like buprenorphine is that users (due to their mixed antagonist effect) may experience reduced effects when using pure mu agonists concurrently. Especially with the buprenorphine formulations that contain naloxone (a heroin addict is being treated with Subutex, he/she relapses and injects heroin but experiences no euphoric effect). When used alone in non-dependent patients the effects mirror the classic opioids pretty closely.
No. The exact mechanism of action of acetaminophen (APAP, paracetamol) is not totally understood, however recent research has shown that it is an indirect inhibitor of COX (which is similar to aspirin and the classic NSAIDs) and may act on a previously unknown variant of COX called COX-3. (see the wikipedia paracetamol article for futhur details)
Painkillers (opioid painkillers, specifically) are addictive precisely because of their analgesic effects. Addiction and analgesia are not separate traits, but rather two aspects of the same action. Anything that provides strong central pain relief (as opposed to peripheral analgesia as in NSAIDs) has at least some risk of causing psychological or physical dependence.
Beagle is one of the coolest tools available for Linux desktops and it requires xattrs on indexed filesystems, so yes, my /home and / have xattrs enabled.
Stimulants are not miracle drugs and they don't improve your mental state for very long. When you use them you're basically borrowing against your future sleep or mental energy. After the drug wears off you experience a crash that's at least as intense (in the opposite direction) as the original positive effects. It's also debatable whether the improvement is entirely psychosomatic (the drug makes you 'feel' smarter but empirically there is no improvement) or if it is something positive and measurable.
Think of amphetamines and other stimulants as sort of an energy credit card. They might come in handy every once in a while but you'll always have to pay it back (usually with interest) and if you use them too much you'll get into serious trouble.
Making fun of the handicapped is not the role of an encyclopedia, and screaming 'censorship' when that worthless Wikipedia entry was deleted is shameful.
http://allenpeppers.ytmnd.com/? title=Uncensored:Brian_Peppers
http://www.wikitruth.info.nyud.net:8090/index.php
You're proposing using a system with known design vulnerabilities. See my comment above re: false security vs no security at all.
As soon as you add key management into the mix (which is absolutely crucial and, due to the strength of modern ciphers, becomes the keystone of security) things get very complicated very quickly (as you allude to wrt SSH).
That is not to say that it is an insurmountable problem: an example is web browser SSL. The mechanics of key authentication and distribution are actually quite complex, however this is hidden almost entirely from the user. This is done through a large and relatively robust crypto infrastructure which was created because commerce makes SSL necessary. The public's right to privacy does have the same corporate backing.
Because encryption is very difficult to do correctly. And we should all know by now that a false sense of security is worse than no security at all.
There's also the not insignificant fact that encryption is complex to use and administer. Adding in robust encryption is not free from a user-friendliness perspective. Much thought has to be put into reducing the user-visible complexity as much as possible so that the user base will actually use the encryption, and use it in such a way that security is preserved. Not trivial.
One of Harris' most compelling points is that submission to irrational belief is simply not necessary to live an ethical, fulfilling life. It is entirely possible to build a science of ethics, a body of knowledge that is entirely empirical, testable, falsifiable and logical. Certain traditions of Eastern thought (parts of the Buddhist canon in particular) have already carried this idea for thousands of years; they are not based on irrational dogma or infallible books of fantasy but instead on testable, verifiable human experience.
I would encourage you to read his book yourself, even if you disagree it has the potential to open up an interesting discussion at the very least.
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.
(Long Now has a great talk given by Harris available for free download in Ogg Vorbis or MP3)
Drugs used to treat schizoprenia are dangerous with severe, often irreversible, side effects. Tardive dyskinesia is a symptom of permanent neurological damage caused by long term use of neuroleptics. The benzodiazepines (used to treat anxiety disorders, among other things) are addictive with a pronounced, physically dangerous withdrawl syndrome (it can actually precipitate delerium tremens). Even the relatively benign SSRI/SNRIs are starting to show unanticipated side effects that are somewhat limiting their use.
As the previous poster said, these drugs are far better than psychosurgery, but they are far from perfect. In any event, they treat the symptoms rather than the (unknown) causes of mental illness. Hopefully that will change someday.
There's a very good reason they're testing this tech on Arabic speech primarily. Although they won't say it, I'd be very surprised if the DOD isn't sponsoring this. NSA would absolutely love to be able to translate and transcribe monitored Arabic speech (ie, phone calls) in real time. No backlog of untranslated intercepts, no staff shortages.
Too bad the so-called audio download is only available as WMP/Realplayer embedded content. Where's the direct download link? Isn't BBC one of the few media giants to have embraced open formats, etc?
Can you imagine the damage some antisocial radio vandal could do to the Mars Rovers, for instance, if the command traffic was sent in the clear?
Private torrent communities are the lifeblood of the BitTorrent scene. They are the only thing standing between BT and the sort of vast, content-less wasteland of Kazaa/Edonkey type systems. Yes, that means individual users need to be held accountable and poor quality clients that enable cheaters and leechers will unfortunately have to be banned. Such is life.
Maybe the only downside is that the UI is a little spartan so far (the Archos devices that Rockbox was originally designed for had smaller screens that didn't support grayscale, just black and white). You can customize it pretty extensively, though, so with a little work you can make it look much better.
AAC in many ways is Apple's version of WMA; although technically it is MPEG4 standards-based in practice it is nearly as proprietary as WMA (perhaps intentionally so; I believe patent law is involved). It also doesn't live up to the quality hype; a 128kbps iTunes track *does not* sound equivalent to a 192kbps LAME-encoded MP3 track. It is, perhaps, somewhat better than generic CBR MP3 at 128k but then so is WMA; Ogg Vorbis (according to nearly all listening tests) is markedly superior at 128k. At 160kbps Ogg is transparent to most listeners, at 192kbps virtually everyone.
The next generation lossy audio codec winner might be AAC (or it may not), but technical superiority won't be the reason why. It will have far more to do with market penetration and entrenchment.
Today it runs the open source Rockbox firmware and supports virtually every major audio format in use today: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, A/52, AAC (experimental), FLAC, Shorten, Apple Lossless and WavPack. It even has a 33 shade greyscale JPEG viewer.
This is not a game, in other words.
Riiight. 'Nuff said.
This is basically just a fancy measurement of your local Internet connection (latency, packet loss, etc), and it extrapolates that to try and speculate what effect that would have on VoIP. The effects of the hardware and your VoIP provider's network is not included in this test, which could significantly affect the outcome.
By the way, I'm talking about smallish torrent sites (<50,000 users or so) where the account turnover is low enough that new users can be noticed by mod staff. Huge sites with six figure userbases and hundreds of signups a day would obviously be much easier to cheat on.