Interestingly I haven't bought a new CD since the RIAA started this crap a couple of years ago.
Quite frankly, the new music being put on the market by the record companies is nothing by recycled pablum for the most part.
But here comes the interesting part. They can only nail you if you share files OUT. Download like a fiend - most of the P2P programs out there are UDP now anyhow and UDP is connectionless. That's why they rushed to shut down the Bit Torrent sites, once a stream was started it could be going to one or ten thousand people.
So the solution is to host share outs in a country that doesn't subscribe to the RIAA dominated copyright theory. China would be a good start.
The efforts to get people to legally download are ridiculous. At a dollar a track there really isn't any cost saving to the consumer, yet the industry can cut a large part of their overhead costs. At $0.25 a track it might be more attractive and they'd still be making money hand over fist.
WRT tapping wire line phones it is indeed trivial and requires nothing more technically complex than a court warrant or order.
I've actually been in a #5ESS CO and had this feature demonstrated to me. They could pipe a subscribers conversation to overhead speakers, or silently to another telephone.
WRT wireless, under NAMPS you could buy scanners capable of getting into the cell bands, couple some of them with a certain controller that hooked to a PC. You could then follow calls by subscriber, cell site, and even follow from cell site to cell site had you a good enough antenna for it.
Now the taps are done at the MTSO - and it works very much like wire line tapping. Matter of fact, most MTSO's are just parts of wire line switches provisioned to provide cell services.
The guy was definitely a script kiddie or a wannabe. I love to taunt idiots like that, and it seems the crew on that server was doing a very good job of it.
He got what he deserved for not knowing that 127.0.0.1 is local loopback.
Indeed - the whole cutover is just a money grab. TV set manufacturers make out like a bandit while broadcasters feel the pinch to convert to digital. Oh, and congress gets to auction off all sorts of valuable spectrum.
That spectrum is valuable because of its propagation characteristics. The mobile services we have now start around 800MHz and go up, with the majority being in the 1-2GHz range. Those bands are short range propagation with all sorts of nasty side effects including bouncing off glass/steel/aluminum to become multi-path interference, etc.
Will some good come of the new spectrum? I highly doubt it. The FCC has managed to screw up every auction thus far.
The problems I have with medicine in general is that it takes the shotgun approach to everything.
If we really understood the human body we could tailor treatments. I think we're just on the cusp of being able to do so.
Part of that I blame on religion supressing scientific research that could have possibly opened up new benefits. The other part I blame on greed, pure and simple.
One other thing about school budgets. I don't know if this is a universal situation but here in Rhode Island more than one third of the tax revenue provided to run the schools goes to satisfying retirement obligations.
The problem with most retirements systems on the state level is that the actuaries, if any were ever brought in, failed to see that life spans were becoming longer. This means that the retirement system then turns into a Ponzi Scheme.
What really upsets me is the attitude ot the US PTO. They'll just roll over and patent anything so long as you bury them in enough bullshit.
What's the betting that the one that reads "'The Bible' copyright 134AD, Any resemblance to people past or present is purely coincidental" is quickly covered up?
I stronlgy doubt any of them ever wrote a disclaimer. Law hadn't yet come up with that particular vehicle in those days. You either took it on faith or not.
It will be interesting though if they dig up more evidence of the Gospels of Mary, and if they find clear evidence that Christ was married to Mary Magdelene.
Were those to pieces of evidence ever to be found and brought to the light of day would cast doubt on the foundations of the Christian religions. For example, if Christ had children which was entirely a Jewish custom if you will, it would mean that every pope including Peter was an impostor. It would also mean that there is a presence of Christ still in existence on this earth. How very interestng that would be.
Of all of it though, this is a worthy discovery. Yet another benefit of the militiary paranoia delivered to mankind.
and it's entirely likely that he did, he was Jewish after all and Jewish law encouraged men to breed like rabbits.
FACT: Housing prices have surged more than 30% in many markets in the United States.
FACT: Because of the higher prices without an attendant rise in income, many people are financing just the interest right now. Once they hit that bubble payment all bets are off. And they will hit it.
FACT: Once that bubble bursts, there'll be a surplus of housing. Banks holding notes for say, $400K on a property now worth $65K are going to take a bath.
Welcome to the Georgenium! The one where people believe everything they see on TV and do no self-research into finding out what might be true and what might not be. Why should they form their own opinions? There are two sides to every story but the news media is fair and balanced right?
Realize that we have not only corporations funding false research and presenting it as true we have our own government doing the same thing. Sadly people fall for it and even want more of it!
You have hit the nail on the proverbial head. We are too comfortable in the United States but that is gradually changing.
It's old saw in the I.T. community that you can give something to people, but you cannot take it away without suffering major consequences. The same is true of government.
The U.S. is heading for a huge fall, sooner than most people think. I'll leave it to those who read this to do their own research and draw their own conclusions. But I predict we'll see at least one major bank failure in the next five years along with a major crash of the real estate market.
Why? Because the real estate market now is speculative, as is fuel and food. Once you put those necessities in a speculative position all hell breaks loose.
Do you think for a moment that the cops won't have their own robots that are just as deadly?
They already have the tethered variety. What makes one think they wouldn't go for an autonomous bipedal. After all, it has benefits no human police officer could have, like pinpoint accuracy with weaponry, endurance, and best of all is a low fixed cost.
Obedience to the Rule of Law is breaking down all around us, from the White House on down.
For example, in todays Providence Journal was the story of a woman who nudged a crossing guard with her car. To make matters worse, the woman was going the wrong way on a one way street.
I would hope they throw the book at the woman, but there is a high probability she'll get off with a slap on the hand. This sets very bad precedent.
It occurs to me that we actually do something right in my shop. All user folers are on a server, be it NT, 2K, or Linux SMB type. We map their My Documents folder to it and then restrict where they can write on the local machine.
Works like a charm - and when HD's break or people move they just log in and everything should be there.
The giant tetris board has been done already. Some enterprising engineering geeks at Brown converted the Sciences Library windows into elements for the blocks in tetris.
I spent $110 on my Netgear router/firewall, and the Linksys router/firewall was free with sign up for VoIP.
My experience with D-Link gear has always been less than satisfying. And the price isn't right on this unit when other 802.11g gear with the same feature set is selling for
Too little, too late once again.
When you consider that circuit switched phone carriers have been doing this for years you then understand that the fire codes are baloney.
Phone switching and networking gear use -48VDC. If you've ever gotten to tour a switching facility the battery area is a treat.
Many of those fire codes were developed during the intial roll out of electrical power. More than likely much of the resistance to it being widespread is because with DC, the current is constant, there isn't even a fraction of a break. AC at least gives you a very short period of time to 'break' from the connection.
Good design and practices would elminate the perceived dangers but I still think you'd catch a lot of static for it from authorities.
It's because there isn't project management in place, or the project management is weak.
I work in a place that just recently started implementing Project Management. The biggest problem I see is that if you don't have buy-in by upper management you'll be fighting a battle of critical change requests on a constant basis.
We just had one project take place that was mandated but never went through PM at all. Not even a requirements document was produced. It was a nightmare that touched 75% of the I.T. staff.
Had PM actually been followed the process would have started back in November of 2004 and then the blame would have been off the plate of I.T. But for fear of stepping on toes I.T. management decided not to follow its own procedures.
We just upgraded to MySQL 4.1.1 - suits our needs. Fast, cheap and reliable.
I would love to ditch our one critical MS-SQL server and convert it to MySQL but that one is heavily dependent upon triggers and stored procedures for two databases. Until MySQL 5 is up to snuff we won't even entertain transitioning those two.
That being said, I note that the MySQL Migration Toolkit is very nice. Too bad you can't suck the data from an MS-SQL server yet. But give it time - someone will figure out how to do it.
If I buy a music track I realize I'm purchasing a license of use. But if that use includes copying a CD to my computer and my MP3 player then so be it. The moment I distriute that track to someone other than myself would be a violation of the DRM in my view.
On the flip side of that, the industry needs to do something about the outrageous pricing for digital music. At $1.00 a track you're not really saving anything but the time and fuel necessary to go out and buy the whole disc, along with songs you may not necessarily like.
But I'd be willing to pay say, $5.00 a month to download all I want. A subscription service if prefer. Actually I like the fee applied to all broadband accounts. That way I could download a track, share it with a friend, etc. and the artists still get paid.
We won't ever see anything that makes that much sense though.
We amateurs are allowed to run up to 1500W PEP on bands from 160M up to the 10GHz band. Of course depending on band the power levels allowed varies but on all the HF bands 160M-10M you can run 1500W PEP and so long as your installation is kosher with the FCC there isn't anything the neighbors can do.
What people don't realize is that most consumer electronic devices including computers have bare minimum or no shielding. These are all Part 15 devices and that parts states that they cannot create interference to other regulated services and that they must accept any interference from other regulated services.
Complain to the manufacturers of your cheap consumer gear and work with your ham neighbors to solve this.
I recall an incident where my friend lived next door to a Keebler route salesman. The Keebler guy used to transmit his orders around 7-8PM which coincided with my friend going on 20M and 40M bands.
The space between the two houses was
But remember this, the amateur radio operator is in the right. It's your equipment that is faulty.
Whenever it's self-swipe a cashier never asks to see the card. They just slide the slip over, you sign it and that is the end.
And these self-swipe stations are popping up in lots of places.
But when you have to hand the card over I very rarely run into a signature verification process. Most of them just swipe it and give the card back to you immediately.
But when I do run across a scrutinizer I pointedly ask them how many classes they took to become a handwriting analysis expert. That gets the point across in a hurry.
What ever happened to good old fashioned ANI? You can't spoof that.
Caller-ID is a hack, plain and simple. There are two phone numbers that really matter - the one reported as Caller-ID data and the billing telephone number.
For most consumers - the BTN and the Caller-ID number are the same. It only becomes a problem for business but even they can set both ANI delivery and CLID delivery to be the same for all their outbound trunks but few businesses have people in their I.T. and telecom units that would know how to bully providers into setting things up correctly.
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Umm... if it's in a ritzy community the chances of those utilities being strung on poles is slim to none.
Everything in the ritzy communities is buried. At least that is the way it works around here.
Interestingly I haven't bought a new CD since the RIAA started this crap a couple of years ago.
Quite frankly, the new music being put on the market by the record companies is nothing by recycled pablum for the most part.
But here comes the interesting part. They can only nail you if you share files OUT. Download like a fiend - most of the P2P programs out there are UDP now anyhow and UDP is connectionless. That's why they rushed to shut down the Bit Torrent sites, once a stream was started it could be going to one or ten thousand people.
So the solution is to host share outs in a country that doesn't subscribe to the RIAA dominated copyright theory. China would be a good start.
The efforts to get people to legally download are ridiculous. At a dollar a track there really isn't any cost saving to the consumer, yet the industry can cut a large part of their overhead costs. At $0.25 a track it might be more attractive and they'd still be making money hand over fist.
Star Trek? How about Star Wars, The Emperors March would be quite interesting.
WRT tapping wire line phones it is indeed trivial and requires nothing more technically complex than a court warrant or order.
I've actually been in a #5ESS CO and had this feature demonstrated to me. They could pipe a subscribers conversation to overhead speakers, or silently to another telephone.
WRT wireless, under NAMPS you could buy scanners capable of getting into the cell bands, couple some of them with a certain controller that hooked to a PC. You could then follow calls by subscriber, cell site, and even follow from cell site to cell site had you a good enough antenna for it.
Now the taps are done at the MTSO - and it works very much like wire line tapping. Matter of fact, most MTSO's are just parts of wire line switches provisioned to provide cell services.
It is entirely feasible.
The guy was definitely a script kiddie or a wannabe. I love to taunt idiots like that, and it seems the crew on that server was doing a very good job of it.
He got what he deserved for not knowing that 127.0.0.1 is local loopback.
Indeed - the whole cutover is just a money grab. TV set manufacturers make out like a bandit while broadcasters feel the pinch to convert to digital. Oh, and congress gets to auction off all sorts of valuable spectrum.
That spectrum is valuable because of its propagation characteristics. The mobile services we have now start around 800MHz and go up, with the majority being in the 1-2GHz range. Those bands are short range propagation with all sorts of nasty side effects including bouncing off glass/steel/aluminum to become multi-path interference, etc.
Will some good come of the new spectrum? I highly doubt it. The FCC has managed to screw up every auction thus far.
The problems I have with medicine in general is that it takes the shotgun approach to everything.
If we really understood the human body we could tailor treatments. I think we're just on the cusp of being able to do so.
Part of that I blame on religion supressing scientific research that could have possibly opened up new benefits. The other part I blame on greed, pure and simple.
One other thing about school budgets. I don't know if this is a universal situation but here in Rhode Island more than one third of the tax revenue provided to run the schools goes to satisfying retirement obligations.
The problem with most retirements systems on the state level is that the actuaries, if any were ever brought in, failed to see that life spans were becoming longer. This means that the retirement system then turns into a Ponzi Scheme.
What really upsets me is the attitude ot the US PTO. They'll just roll over and patent anything so long as you bury them in enough bullshit.
What's the betting that the one that reads "'The Bible' copyright 134AD, Any resemblance to people past or present is purely coincidental" is quickly covered up?
I stronlgy doubt any of them ever wrote a disclaimer. Law hadn't yet come up with that particular vehicle in those days. You either took it on faith or not.
It will be interesting though if they dig up more evidence of the Gospels of Mary, and if they find clear evidence that Christ was married to Mary Magdelene.
Were those to pieces of evidence ever to be found and brought to the light of day would cast doubt on the foundations of the Christian religions. For example, if Christ had children which was entirely a Jewish custom if you will, it would mean that every pope including Peter was an impostor. It would also mean that there is a presence of Christ still in existence on this earth. How very interestng that would be.
Of all of it though, this is a worthy discovery. Yet another benefit of the militiary paranoia delivered to mankind.
and it's entirely likely that he did, he was Jewish after all and Jewish law encouraged men to breed like rabbits.
FACT: Housing prices have surged more than 30% in many markets in the United States.
FACT: Because of the higher prices without an attendant rise in income, many people are financing just the interest right now. Once they hit that bubble payment all bets are off. And they will hit it.
FACT: Once that bubble bursts, there'll be a surplus of housing. Banks holding notes for say, $400K on a property now worth $65K are going to take a bath.
Welcome to the Georgenium! The one where people believe everything they see on TV and do no self-research into finding out what might be true and what might not be. Why should they form their own opinions? There are two sides to every story but the news media is fair and balanced right?
Realize that we have not only corporations funding false research and presenting it as true we have our own government doing the same thing. Sadly people fall for it and even want more of it!
You have hit the nail on the proverbial head. We are too comfortable in the United States but that is gradually changing.
It's old saw in the I.T. community that you can give something to people, but you cannot take it away without suffering major consequences. The same is true of government.
The U.S. is heading for a huge fall, sooner than most people think. I'll leave it to those who read this to do their own research and draw their own conclusions. But I predict we'll see at least one major bank failure in the next five years along with a major crash of the real estate market.
Why? Because the real estate market now is speculative, as is fuel and food. Once you put those necessities in a speculative position all hell breaks loose.
This explains why Superman's Fortress was in a cold, desolate place.
He needed the cold temps to get his optical computer running.
If they're bipedal it means they'll be able to navigate stairs too.
We don't stand a chance. The only thing that will save us is an EMP generator.
Do you think for a moment that the cops won't have their own robots that are just as deadly?
They already have the tethered variety. What makes one think they wouldn't go for an autonomous bipedal. After all, it has benefits no human police officer could have, like pinpoint accuracy with weaponry, endurance, and best of all is a low fixed cost.
Obedience to the Rule of Law is breaking down all around us, from the White House on down.
For example, in todays Providence Journal was the story of a woman who nudged a crossing guard with her car. To make matters worse, the woman was going the wrong way on a one way street.
I would hope they throw the book at the woman, but there is a high probability she'll get off with a slap on the hand. This sets very bad precedent.
It occurs to me that we actually do something right in my shop. All user folers are on a server, be it NT, 2K, or Linux SMB type. We map their My Documents folder to it and then restrict where they can write on the local machine.
Works like a charm - and when HD's break or people move they just log in and everything should be there.
The giant tetris board has been done already. Some enterprising engineering geeks at Brown converted the Sciences Library windows into elements for the blocks in tetris.
It was up and running for a few weeks.
I spent $110 on my Netgear router/firewall, and the Linksys router/firewall was free with sign up for VoIP.
My experience with D-Link gear has always been less than satisfying. And the price isn't right on this unit when other 802.11g gear with the same feature set is selling for
Too little, too late once again.
When you consider that circuit switched phone carriers have been doing this for years you then understand that the fire codes are baloney.
Phone switching and networking gear use -48VDC. If you've ever gotten to tour a switching facility the battery area is a treat.
Many of those fire codes were developed during the intial roll out of electrical power. More than likely much of the resistance to it being widespread is because with DC, the current is constant, there isn't even a fraction of a break. AC at least gives you a very short period of time to 'break' from the connection.
Good design and practices would elminate the perceived dangers but I still think you'd catch a lot of static for it from authorities.
It's because there isn't project management in place, or the project management is weak.
I work in a place that just recently started implementing Project Management. The biggest problem I see is that if you don't have buy-in by upper management you'll be fighting a battle of critical change requests on a constant basis.
We just had one project take place that was mandated but never went through PM at all. Not even a requirements document was produced. It was a nightmare that touched 75% of the I.T. staff.
Had PM actually been followed the process would have started back in November of 2004 and then the blame would have been off the plate of I.T. But for fear of stepping on toes I.T. management decided not to follow its own procedures.
We just upgraded to MySQL 4.1.1 - suits our needs. Fast, cheap and reliable.
I would love to ditch our one critical MS-SQL server and convert it to MySQL but that one is heavily dependent upon triggers and stored procedures for two databases. Until MySQL 5 is up to snuff we won't even entertain transitioning those two.
That being said, I note that the MySQL Migration Toolkit is very nice. Too bad you can't suck the data from an MS-SQL server yet. But give it time - someone will figure out how to do it.
If I buy a music track I realize I'm purchasing a license of use. But if that use includes copying a CD to my computer and my MP3 player then so be it. The moment I distriute that track to someone other than myself would be a violation of the DRM in my view.
On the flip side of that, the industry needs to do something about the outrageous pricing for digital music. At $1.00 a track you're not really saving anything but the time and fuel necessary to go out and buy the whole disc, along with songs you may not necessarily like.
But I'd be willing to pay say, $5.00 a month to download all I want. A subscription service if prefer. Actually I like the fee applied to all broadband accounts. That way I could download a track, share it with a friend, etc. and the artists still get paid.
We won't ever see anything that makes that much sense though.
I know the Retro Computing Society of Rhode Island has a Mac Portable and a Lisa in its collection. Both are actually functional.
The collection can be seen at http://www.osfn.org/rcs
We amateurs are allowed to run up to 1500W PEP on bands from 160M up to the 10GHz band. Of course depending on band the power levels allowed varies but on all the HF bands 160M-10M you can run 1500W PEP and so long as your installation is kosher with the FCC there isn't anything the neighbors can do.
What people don't realize is that most consumer electronic devices including computers have bare minimum or no shielding. These are all Part 15 devices and that parts states that they cannot create interference to other regulated services and that they must accept any interference from other regulated services.
Complain to the manufacturers of your cheap consumer gear and work with your ham neighbors to solve this.
I recall an incident where my friend lived next door to a Keebler route salesman. The Keebler guy used to transmit his orders around 7-8PM which coincided with my friend going on 20M and 40M bands.
The space between the two houses was
But remember this, the amateur radio operator is in the right. It's your equipment that is faulty.
Whenever it's self-swipe a cashier never asks to see the card. They just slide the slip over, you sign it and that is the end.
And these self-swipe stations are popping up in lots of places.
But when you have to hand the card over I very rarely run into a signature verification process. Most of them just swipe it and give the card back to you immediately.
But when I do run across a scrutinizer I pointedly ask them how many classes they took to become a handwriting analysis expert. That gets the point across in a hurry.
What ever happened to good old fashioned ANI? You can't spoof that.
Caller-ID is a hack, plain and simple. There are two phone numbers that really matter - the one reported as Caller-ID data and the billing telephone number.
For most consumers - the BTN and the Caller-ID number are the same. It only becomes a problem for business but even they can set both ANI delivery and CLID delivery to be the same for all their outbound trunks but few businesses have people in their I.T. and telecom units that would know how to bully providers into setting things up correctly.