At least over here the major difference was that before that you could demand that you had a phone line pretty much no matter where you lived and it cost about £50 to get it installed, now it costs £1000 and that is if you already live near an existing line. There was an old lady on the news yesterday, her safety alarm would not work any more because the telephone station in their are were being dismantled.
Yay privatization!
£1000? That's just plain wrong. According to their website it's £30 if you don't need an engineer visit, £130 if you do or free if you take broadband as well.
If you're being quoted £1000 you must live in the middle of nowhere and have never had a phone line before. Let me guess the milkman also doesn't deliver to your doorstep? Either suck it up or move to civilization.
Also prices have fallen 40% since priviatization so you're wrong on that count as well. (http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/CPS_assets/174_ProductPreviewFile.pdf)
>> Because allowing the Skype PtP client on to office computers makes them insecure, and probably uncontrollably violates the Congress firewalls in the process.
Can you provide a link that discusses this in detail? I'd like to know what about Skype is inherently insecure.
As much as people complain about some government/company having the ability to do 'something', completely decentralized systems are also subject to wide spread abuse that is nearly impossible to stop. Think about the proposed "mesh" networking - you traffic goes through who knows whom's device, your IP address comes from where? Your DNS queries come from who knows where? If I can feed you your IP address and DNS results and your data passes through my network - then I own you. Witness what has happened with even fairly simply systems such as SMTP. The world is inundated with SPAM because the system in inherently decentralized and it is impossible to verify where email is coming from. Put all your network traffic through a decentralized system and no one is going to be happy with the results. You think SPAM is bad? You've not seen anything compared to what would happen if you could not say where your IP/DNS/Traffic is from.
Luckily with things like 6LoWPAN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6LoWPAN/
and the other work that the IPSO alliance is doing many of these issues are being addressed.
I'd agree with you that the current stack that most of use isn't up to the task, but that doesn't mean that it can't be made to work.
...and how do you know that the OS you're running doesn't have an undocumented back door or a security hole or the like??
It all comes down to trust. I don't study the source code to all the open source apps I install. I just read the prevailing opinions out there on the interweb and make a judgement.
That's how I got one of the excellent eXPerience editions of XP. SP3 slipstreamed, unatended installation, no serial to enter, just pop the cd in press go and leave it for half an hour.
These 'shady' homebrew OSs are the only way your going to get a 99mb version of XP as well.
Hydrogen when used in cars is no where near as dangerous as you're making out.
- Once any storage tank is ruptured the gas would boil off very quickly.
- It is much less volitile and less likely to ignite than gasoline/petrol vapor/vapour is.
- Much of the negative publicity about hydrogen is down to the Hindenburg disaster where the airship skin being doped with a rocket fuel like substance caused it to burn so quickly.
So there! One valid point though hydrogen storage isn't easy and needs to be kept at high pressures and/or low temperatures leading to added weight compared to a fuel that's liquid at room temperaure being kept in a little tin csan fuel tank.
Slashdot Mirror
At least over here the major difference was that before that you could demand that you had a phone line pretty much no matter where you lived and it cost about £50 to get it installed, now it costs £1000 and that is if you already live near an existing line. There was an old lady on the news yesterday, her safety alarm would not work any more because the telephone station in their are were being dismantled.
Yay privatization!
£1000? That's just plain wrong. According to their website it's £30 if you don't need an engineer visit, £130 if you do or free if you take broadband as well.
If you're being quoted £1000 you must live in the middle of nowhere and have never had a phone line before. Let me guess the milkman also doesn't deliver to your doorstep? Either suck it up or move to civilization.
Also prices have fallen 40% since priviatization so you're wrong on that count as well. (http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/CPS_assets/174_ProductPreviewFile.pdf)
>> Because allowing the Skype PtP client on to office computers makes them insecure, and probably uncontrollably violates the Congress firewalls in the process.
Can you provide a link that discusses this in detail? I'd like to know what about Skype is inherently insecure.
Assuming he meant insecure in the workplace, not insecure in general, then the link is here: http://www.bluecoat.com/doc/644/
As much as people complain about some government/company having the ability to do 'something', completely decentralized systems are also subject to wide spread abuse that is nearly impossible to stop. Think about the proposed "mesh" networking - you traffic goes through who knows whom's device, your IP address comes from where? Your DNS queries come from who knows where? If I can feed you your IP address and DNS results and your data passes through my network - then I own you. Witness what has happened with even fairly simply systems such as SMTP. The world is inundated with SPAM because the system in inherently decentralized and it is impossible to verify where email is coming from. Put all your network traffic through a decentralized system and no one is going to be happy with the results. You think SPAM is bad? You've not seen anything compared to what would happen if you could not say where your IP/DNS/Traffic is from.
Luckily with things like 6LoWPAN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6LoWPAN/ and the other work that the IPSO alliance is doing many of these issues are being addressed.
I'd agree with you that the current stack that most of use isn't up to the task, but that doesn't mean that it can't be made to work.
It all comes down to trust. I don't study the source code to all the open source apps I install. I just read the prevailing opinions out there on the interweb and make a judgement.
That's how I got one of the excellent eXPerience editions of XP. SP3 slipstreamed, unatended installation, no serial to enter, just pop the cd in press go and leave it for half an hour.
These 'shady' homebrew OSs are the only way your going to get a 99mb version of XP as well.
Hydrogen when used in cars is no where near as dangerous as you're making out.
- Once any storage tank is ruptured the gas would boil off very quickly.
- It is much less volitile and less likely to ignite than gasoline/petrol vapor/vapour is.
- Much of the negative publicity about hydrogen is down to the Hindenburg disaster where the airship skin being doped with a rocket fuel like substance caused it to burn so quickly.
So there! One valid point though hydrogen storage isn't easy and needs to be kept at high pressures and/or low temperatures leading to added weight compared to a fuel that's liquid at room temperaure being kept in a little tin csan fuel tank.