Okay, maybe there's something we could do in the way of cryptography and applying one-time pad techniques to SSNs or public cryptography. They give you their public #, you generate a # complimentary to your private #, so on. Not a solution by itself, but adding a layer of difficulty.
We need stronger punishments upon conviction but imprisonment isn't the only answer. They need to be b*tch-slapped in perpetuity any time they operate computers, engage in anything shady and get caught, with escalating punishments each time in terms of fines and so forth.
A certain cryptography writer notwithstanding, two-factor id for transactions needs to come into being ASAP.
We need roadblocks that make socializing the target dupes a lot less useful. Instead, we build a fortress facade in front and leave the back end protected by a broken horse corral gate and a drunken ranchhand with questionable morality.
I concur. Google is becoming more like Xerox and Bell Labs with much more advertisement power and a large group of fans.
(sarcasm on)Considering what spawned from those hellish places like the horrors of Unix and Apple and so on, maybe we should all be frightened what might come from the ruins of the dark land of Google.(sarcasm off)
Seriously, the small is beautiful and better than correct or workable mindset belongs in the past with things like Xenix. We're living in better times now. We can deal with Google no matter how big they get. Tinfoil hats are no help.
BTW, I can't get even their mobile pages to work reasonably swift on my Sprint service so I guess I'll wait to make use of them for when I have a more powerful phone.
#7 A willingness to make the superhuman attempt at ignoring the carping from the direction of/. that is otherwise loud enough to make disco seem like a public library activity.
Based on what I've seen so far, and having been cut by the bleeding edge of various things before, I'll take Debian's slowness and give them some patience. I'll wait and see what this brings before even thinking about carping.
As much as I dislike digging things up later on, just noted this and...
The cable companies definitely do not have a government granted monopoly and in West Hartford, Connecticut for instance, there are three cable systems one on top of the other. One is the local incumbent which is now Comcast. The next is the SNET Americast system gone to seed and dead. The third is the Gemini cable data system which has not a whole lot of subs.
SBC, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, decided to be whiny primma-donnas and drop their cable service and all their customers in the state, which was over fifty towns. "We're phone people, not cable goons," was the essence of their decision when it came down to it.
There has been cable competition. What there is lacking is successful competition and there's no possible law to guarantee success. Basic incompetence will always find a way to steal defeat from the jaws of victory and the overbuilders have basic human incompetence down to a science.
First, the rule that one should never engage in vast undertakings with half-vast ideas is violated right from the get-go. Like the Linux zealots who predicted years ago that free software would kill Microsoft and turn Bill Gates into a homeless psychitzophrenic inside of a year, people let emotions get in the way of reality. As bad as the cable prices can be, those attempting to be operators soon find out the genuine reasons for those costs and how hard it really is to be a cable operator and just like the existing franchise, they tend to safeguard their salaries at the expense of workers' salaries, raise their rates, and cut service levels every chance they get to economize. No different from Comcast, Cablevision, Charter, Cox, etc.
Witness the similar issues of DBS where zealots still insist despite all evidence to the contrary that satellite service will kill cable any day now.
What is lacking is any model for success and intelligence to follow said model properly and courage to stick by said model through the hard times. No laws will fix that. Not running scared doesn't come naturally, it takes work, and people who build based on FUD of the other guy instead of how great their stuff is and back it up with a solid answer to "Why?" aren't candidates.
Municipal WiFi is being provided based on a combination of private sector donations and tax-payers' taxes,. The actual costs of broadband are actually very very high. I suggest you do some research on the costs of T1, DS3, and OC3 services. Monthly costs are in the five figures starting with the DS3 and rise from there. Bandwidth is not inexpensive.
I remember Carter and he was one of the most ridiculously horrifically bad presidents I've ever seen. In school the teachers during mock elections campaigned for him and against Reagan fanatically and openly, threatening bad grades and other retaliation on students who they found voted for Reagan. We weren't stupid though, we voted over 80% for Reagan on the spot.
I don't know who's remembering things so much differently, but I obviously wasn't smoking what they were. Not surprising since I was standing in a gas line with my family during a phony energy crisis that wasn't.
...we buy cruddy unsupported hardware from China, we run horrendously unsupported software from India, and we have it fall prey to Russian hackers.
Am I the only one finding this to be a problem?
You know, there was once an old joke on a comparison of Heaven and Hell based on which nationality did your food, car, laws, lovers, etc. I think we're headed towards the same in IT.
I wonder what the South American FOSS contingent will have to say as time goes by or what influence the hacker high thing will have.
Probably just nationalistic chest beating but it is weird news.
I would really like to see this working reliably, I'll have to download, burn, and test. Oh boy.
All in all though, it is the live CD that works the most solidly across multiple hardware configs so if the *nix community can keep this up, they might eventually really have something to challenge Windows on desktops for clueless newbies.
.. and besides, doesnt biometrics suck? It's all about onetime identifiers. You cant easily change your eye, breath or thumbprint if they happened to fall into the wrong hands.
I'm not sure how your breath can fall into the wrong hands. I have trouble smelling my own breath by cupping my hands over my face. As to your eyes and thumbs, are you one of those people who has detachable parts? Like, when your S.O.(yes, some Slashdot readers have actual real life involvements with women) says "get your butt out of bed" you can hand it to her and say, "sure, take it, let me sleep."
Joking aside, bioelectricity, thermal output, and a bunch of other things are easily checked for to prevent use of amputated body parts.
Optimally, there would be stress identification methods and more than one password such that if someone tried the gun-to-your-head coercion method, you could silently tip off the system to call the authorities to the location. Be nice if every important system had personal 911 sort of passwords right now. "Send two units to the ATM at Stepford Avenue, we have a possible kidnap."
Biometrics is wonderful stuff in my book to keep people out of stuff where they don't belong. I just don't want a national ID card where I have to keep a record of my dna on file and so forth. But biometrics to secure my stuff? Better than leaving it wide open.
In a factory, it is possible to automate a tremendous amount of things because the factory is always in the same place and the functions are all the same. One piece is machined and another one parallel to it and their pallets borught over to another area and then welded and then that assembly attached to another and so on. Parts are supplied just as needed to each device or the device goes nowhere. A lathe cell is programmed to expect stock of a given size, not random sizes. Etc.
The way to do it with houses would be to create a giant multi-bot factory with gantry assemblies and so on and one by one, load stock, machine the stock, fasten in place. Then transport the finished house (by whatever means someone can) to its site and connect it to the utilities.
Onsite robotics will eventually fail before the problem that all robots for production would fail before: inconsistant environment. The technological advancements needed to make it work would almost obviate their reason for being in the first place. It makes more sense economically to have all the automation in a controlled environment.
I'm waiting for nanotech and genetic engineering and understanding of molecular biology to come together where we grow biomechanical houses that process our sewage output, absorb ambient energy and store it, and are self-healing. Some day, we might have cities that take in more pollution than average cities of today put out.
...distributed file sharing, cryptography, proxies, and parity will collide and instead of any one person hosting a complete file, the file will be containerized, split, parity containers built, and the pieces uploaded to peers at random based only on their availible space and relative activity and pipe size and so on and the original copy deleted.
Enough copies of pieces and parity files would propagate out based on statistics to ensure reasonable chance to get at anything, not any less easy than eMule of today. If you download all pieces and construct successfully, the solid file isn't seen and listed by IP because only the parts are shared at large. Your whole copy is totally outside the system once gotten.
Once no one person has a complete copy of anything, and each piece is named in gibberish that only the system understands and knows, what are they going to do then? Sue a teen girl because one twentieth of a Metallica song might be on their hard drive and she's got no way of knowing for sure because her storage is managed by the collective peer network?
The technical capabilities exist right now to do it and eventually it will be reasonably perfected. They will be brought to their knees by it, sputtering and whining all the way. It will illustrate very clearly that as long as information is in the hands of individuals, as long as they can read, write, and think for themselves, effective subjugation of the unwilling by any private organization or government will be difficult short of violence or threat thereof.
I don't see a RIAA-SWAT team becoming reality in the future nor do I see work-a-day policemen putting up with the notion of being their tools. So unless it could possibly go that direction, they've lost this fight the instant they picked it. They need to cut to the chase, admit defeat, and bargain for a new understanding between producer and consumer that's acceptable to both parties.
Re:Zoom sucked to start with
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Voom No More
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Professional? So you're part of that 1/10 of 1% who are. Cool. I always thought of myself more as Pro-Am really given the ever changing nature and lack of guidelines to it. (Writer is SBCA certified and has almost 1,000 installs to his credit, so this is a joke, okay?)
East coast people have similar problems with SuperDish where they get set up for birds just barely over the trees, and when you're in an area that hasn't been clear-cut to a moonscape, that means no line of sight for you.
I wouldn't re-enter the business unless they finally got going with that constellation of LEO birds with phased array flat panel antennas so you always had one to three birds reachable at all times. I keep hearing about someone doing this, but where is it? In the meantime, every cable operator in my state will lay hardline and even fiber into the boonie woods to reach a single customer, including Cablevision. So why should they have bothered with something that had less reliable reachability and less bandwidth than their wired service did? Yet another grandiose adventure with the Dolans...
You ex-Voomers who are stuck with NLoS to Dish and Direct and live in a Cablevision served area have my sympathies but at least you can get OIO.
It is the becoming the only way to send a message.
Imagine if on a given day every last person who has a net connection started up hosting torrents of everything that was being threatened by this absurdity. Source, binaries, the works.
Same thing with music and video.
It's headed in the direction of Open Source being killed off and fair use being beheaded. And still we sit and twiddle our thumbs. Time for massive non-co-operation. Sooner or later, they'll be brought to their knees.
Or we can not do anything but sign each others' web petitions and post here on/. and watch as sending a simple twelve sentence e-mail will require seven layers of encryption and six chained proxies before hitting the Nym and Mixmaster systems and the replies going encrypted to random groups on Usenet just to avoid some corporate or government dipstick from checking our prose to make sure we didn't accidentally use a sentence identical to one someone else copyrighted twelve years ago as part of a book no one found interesting enough to read in the first place.
I mean, I love sci-fi movies, but I do not need to live in a Blader Runner meets Johnny Mnemonic meets Ghost in the Shell future.
...whether a monarchy where the mob is unleashed by a king or a democracy where the mob unleashes itself. No matter what, you're at the mercy of everyone around you.
Sad to say, our open and freestyle way of life has a lot of huge cracks in it you could drive a passenger jet through (and they did on 9/11/1) and these terrorist scumbags are as close to a perfect marriage of willful evil and compulsory insane as you get. There is no arguing with them, their POV is about as rational as any bunch of Neo Nazis, UFO conspiracy buffs, or the crackpots who go on about the Tri Lateral Commission, and they stick to it.
Should we tighten things? Yes. Should we give up freedoms altogether? No. But should we be surprised when the same government that tries to kill flies with shotguns goes after larger game with everything in the arsenal? Government runs on maximum overkill precisely because it is a function of human mob dynamics.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't think we're headed for anything like 1984. I do think we're just going to be doing a lot of things to ourselves that we're going to find we should roll back later on. Might as well calmly talk about it and cut to the chase and avoid the problems in the first place.
...as their live DVD is a memory hogging behemoth the likes of which Redmond could not devise. 256MB are like a morsel to it. It crashes on my machine. Not a really good first impression when every other live CD/DVD I've tried hasn't come close to failing over memory size.
MP3 support is almost a non-issue if I'm doing something serious like serving files, doing a network border gateway, etc. If I was using it for my desktop then I'd be ticked. If it would run on my desktop without another $500 worth of RAM. Which it doesn't. So it doesn't really matter.
I can understand why the low star rating entirely though. I expect better of Novell than this.
Opt out altogether. I don't listen to the radio, I barely ever listen to my old CDs, I certainly never buy any, I never go to concerts. If the artists are going to be the wussies they are and let the record companies schtup them for as big a percentage as they do, and keep putting out crap, and the record companies engage in abuse of intellectual property laws as they do, attempting to expunge the very concept of fair use, I say, screw giving them one more penny.
What are they going to do? Insist on a new law to tax me to get a sort of cover charge out of me just in case I overhear music on someone else's stereo some place? I ain't paying them anything. Nada. Not the artists, not the industry, not the phony poseurs who pretend to being alternative, not the people endlessly brainstorming more online music models, no one.
If we all went on a music spending free strike indefinitely, they might get the hint.
Why does this have to be so far away when I am stacked with so many bills?!
Please, those of you who do go, blog away. I want to hear how this went. Many people will be very appreciative since we're stuck as desks half a nation or more away.
Internet access is NOT a basic service in any way, shape, or form. It is a method for conveying information, a tool for research, a conduit of free speech and press, a way of entertaining yourself, and a hundred other things but it is NOT on par with organized society having laws, public education, and so on. It's in another category altogether.
Anyone here for trusting the government with running the television broadcast facilities? I don't mean regulating the airwaves so we don't trample each other using a common finite resource. I mean they operate the television facilities and the only thing ending up on tv is what they allow you to put on. Anyone for Los Angeles running the cable operations? Anyone for the federal government running DirecTV and Dish Network?
Anyone for putting the FCC in charge of running radio stations and graciously letting people use the facilities until such time as they decide they don't feel like it?
Anyone for returning to the USPS having a total monopoly on printed message transport? Anyone remember the hair-brained ideas some years back to put the USPS in charge of all electronic mail?
Yeah, let's let the government run the conduit and trust them that they won't change their mind or take advantage of their control of the conduit to snoop and hold it against you. I can't even say the words "trust" and "government" in the same sentence without laughing.
I'll ask it. Who here is willing to let the IRS become their bank and accountant? Who here is willing to let the FCC actually RUN the broadcast facilities? Why then would you trust the government (insert pause in typing for laughing here) to convey your speech when it is precisely the government which ends up having a multi-branch fight over the government itself committing censorship, and then only if enough noise is made over it? If they were trustworthy with your speech, would there ever be any censorship on their part in the first place?
...letting the government provide your electronic information access is like letting the tax authorities be your bank and accountant. What was that phrase I was looking for..? Oh yes, It's the fox guarding the henhouse.
AFAIC, it's for nothing unless you use secure tunnels and proxies to keep them from snooping on you. No, this isn't tinfoil hate time. This is plain old reality. I love my country, but I fear my government as I should. I can't see the same dingbats who can't get water fountains in the parks fixed within five years as being trustworthy with a cordless phone never mind my Internet access. No thanks.
They demonstrate you've put up with the bullshit long enough to accomplish something.
I don't want to hire anyone who would put up with bullshit.
So you're saying you don't want competent support technicians? Putting up with bullshit is ALL we do.
Sure this is more tp for the bunghole cert whores. And sure this is more boob bait for suited bubbas. However, this is the way things are all over in multiple sectors and you just do it. I pay as little attention to RHCE as MCSE these days and SBCA in satellite is a joke too as are so many other efficiency standard gymnastics awards from the ISO in manufacturing.
But the people who make decisions in industry need quick eye-catching summations and people need things to put on their walls so...
Why do people keep mutating new strains of Linux kernels and full OS distros constantly? Why do Windows flash and bang kids change skins more than most people change their mind or underwear? Why do ricers keep changing the annoying decals taking up half their windshields?
As G'Kar said, because they thought it was a good idea at the time.
More than that, and directly on topic of pi, would be the question, "is there over the long view some periodicity to pi, some regularity, some strange nature to it?". Who knows? Doing the calculations is an excellent exercise in basic mathematics.
Business should be free to offer whatever the heck it wants. Consumers should be free to buy whatever the heck they want. Telephone companies have a monopoly over a particular area? In a particular area, if the cable company delivers something better, faster, and cheaper than the telephone company, then the telephone company will ultimately lose revenue, which will stimulate an improvement in the telephone company. Or get broadband through your cellphone carrier. It's not quite as fast as DSL, and not quite as cheap, but it's an alternative choice, if that's what you want.
It doesn't work that way with phone. The copper lines are regulated because at one time nearly every single phone system in the nation was owned by a single company which engaged in whatever practices it felt like such as telling you that you couldn't install or even buy your own phone much less do your own wiring. Imagine a mobo company telling you what peripherals and memory you were allowed to use or even requiring that you have it done by them and forbidding you from doing anything with it that they didn't like.
For this and many other reasons, Ma Bell was broken up into smaller companies, and they were regulated to the hilt. As it was fairly impossible given modern growth and other infrastructures accompanying the same to build out a parallel infrastructure by any given competitor who wanted to. IOW, running tens of hundreds of thousands of copper pairs per city on top of those already there was just not doable.
Therefore, the Regional Bell Operating Companies still held an essential monopoly for copper pair phone service.
Prior to this FCC mega-mistake of a decision, it was conceivable that you could get ILEC DSL and get phone from a CLEC just as easily as the other way around. Or do without it if you chose.
The point of the regulations was the copper was not easily overbuildable without burdensome effects on local infrastructure, quality of life, etc., and therefore a necessary national resource of sorts held by a company with a virtual monopoly on it. So they opened the lines to usage by competitors as long as certain fair fees were paid to the telcos for access and maintenance and co-locations and power and so forth.
This new rule basically encroaches on that competition regulation by saying that if one service on the pair is ordered then they can require other services with it or not give any service at all, thus essentially preventing their customers from choosing a competitor for one of those other services.
Should Video over DSL ever take off, will they get away with denying a VoDSL CLEC's services to their own telco DSL customers?
...this could be a win for cable. Since forever, every cable operator I've worked for has been only too happy to provide cable modem only and let the customer pick DBS if they want. I can pick and choose or bundle however I like and they've always been of the mind to have this. For the phone companies to fight so hard for something that is only going to bite them in the arse with the public is grossly stupid, but I am not surprised since this is the telcos we're talking about.
Meanwhile I freely choose a service bundle from my cable company for voice, video, and data and save tons over the comparable packages that I would be forced to take or leave with the phone company. It's this sort of thing that caused me to kiss off SBC years ago and never look back.
...which would be well known to anyone in the custom high-end AV biz. It's also probably a bad idea as sooner or later an argument in the family room erupts over which channel to watch and the system has a nervous breakdown as it hears "Nickolodeon!" "MTV!" "Golf!" and so on until you go back to the good old fashioned button remote.
Not flamebait to me, personally. I'd like to know which included apps might now be broke and which they are actually working on patches for pending SP2. This is old standard MS proceedure and we should all know by now that it is a valid question.
Of course, custom and 3rd party apps being broke goes w/out saying. I used to say that if people stuck to the MFCs and the rest of the MS standards and didn't custom code and mod dlls, then they'd be much better off, but even doing the cleanest MS standard job you can, one little thing is done on the OS side by MS and everything goes to fark. One minute fine, the next not a single desktop or server will work and all report exactly the same fault.
Slashdot Mirror
but I don't see what exactly as IANAL. : P
Okay, maybe there's something we could do in the way of cryptography and applying one-time pad techniques to SSNs or public cryptography. They give you their public #, you generate a # complimentary to your private #, so on. Not a solution by itself, but adding a layer of difficulty.
We need stronger punishments upon conviction but imprisonment isn't the only answer. They need to be b*tch-slapped in perpetuity any time they operate computers, engage in anything shady and get caught, with escalating punishments each time in terms of fines and so forth.
A certain cryptography writer notwithstanding, two-factor id for transactions needs to come into being ASAP.
We need roadblocks that make socializing the target dupes a lot less useful. Instead, we build a fortress facade in front and leave the back end protected by a broken horse corral gate and a drunken ranchhand with questionable morality.
I concur. Google is becoming more like Xerox and Bell Labs with much more advertisement power and a large group of fans.
(sarcasm on)Considering what spawned from those hellish places like the horrors of Unix and Apple and so on, maybe we should all be frightened what might come from the ruins of the dark land of Google.(sarcasm off)
Seriously, the small is beautiful and better than correct or workable mindset belongs in the past with things like Xenix. We're living in better times now. We can deal with Google no matter how big they get. Tinfoil hats are no help.
BTW, I can't get even their mobile pages to work reasonably swift on my Sprint service so I guess I'll wait to make use of them for when I have a more powerful phone.
#7 A willingness to make the superhuman attempt at ignoring the carping from the direction of /. that is otherwise loud enough to make disco seem like a public library activity.
Based on what I've seen so far, and having been cut by the bleeding edge of various things before, I'll take Debian's slowness and give them some patience. I'll wait and see what this brings before even thinking about carping.
Does anyone really need to say it? "In Soviet Russia, the new overlord welcomes you."
/. inanity out of my system. Back to serious reflection. : P
There. I've worked that growing desire to join in the
As much as I dislike digging things up later on, just noted this and...
The cable companies definitely do not have a government granted monopoly and in West Hartford, Connecticut for instance, there are three cable systems one on top of the other. One is the local incumbent which is now Comcast. The next is the SNET Americast system gone to seed and dead. The third is the Gemini cable data system which has not a whole lot of subs.
SBC, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, decided to be whiny primma-donnas and drop their cable service and all their customers in the state, which was over fifty towns. "We're phone people, not cable goons," was the essence of their decision when it came down to it.
There has been cable competition. What there is lacking is successful competition and there's no possible law to guarantee success. Basic incompetence will always find a way to steal defeat from the jaws of victory and the overbuilders have basic human incompetence down to a science.
First, the rule that one should never engage in vast undertakings with half-vast ideas is violated right from the get-go. Like the Linux zealots who predicted years ago that free software would kill Microsoft and turn Bill Gates into a homeless psychitzophrenic inside of a year, people let emotions get in the way of reality. As bad as the cable prices can be, those attempting to be operators soon find out the genuine reasons for those costs and how hard it really is to be a cable operator and just like the existing franchise, they tend to safeguard their salaries at the expense of workers' salaries, raise their rates, and cut service levels every chance they get to economize. No different from Comcast, Cablevision, Charter, Cox, etc.
Witness the similar issues of DBS where zealots still insist despite all evidence to the contrary that satellite service will kill cable any day now.
What is lacking is any model for success and intelligence to follow said model properly and courage to stick by said model through the hard times. No laws will fix that. Not running scared doesn't come naturally, it takes work, and people who build based on FUD of the other guy instead of how great their stuff is and back it up with a solid answer to "Why?" aren't candidates.
Municipal WiFi is being provided based on a combination of private sector donations and tax-payers' taxes,. The actual costs of broadband are actually very very high. I suggest you do some research on the costs of T1, DS3, and OC3 services. Monthly costs are in the five figures starting with the DS3 and rise from there. Bandwidth is not inexpensive.
I remember Carter and he was one of the most ridiculously horrifically bad presidents I've ever seen. In school the teachers during mock elections campaigned for him and against Reagan fanatically and openly, threatening bad grades and other retaliation on students who they found voted for Reagan. We weren't stupid though, we voted over 80% for Reagan on the spot.
I don't know who's remembering things so much differently, but I obviously wasn't smoking what they were. Not surprising since I was standing in a gas line with my family during a phony energy crisis that wasn't.
...we buy cruddy unsupported hardware from China, we run horrendously unsupported software from India, and we have it fall prey to Russian hackers.
Am I the only one finding this to be a problem?
You know, there was once an old joke on a comparison of Heaven and Hell based on which nationality did your food, car, laws, lovers, etc. I think we're headed towards the same in IT.
I wonder what the South American FOSS contingent will have to say as time goes by or what influence the hacker high thing will have.
Probably just nationalistic chest beating but it is weird news.
I would really like to see this working reliably, I'll have to download, burn, and test. Oh boy.
All in all though, it is the live CD that works the most solidly across multiple hardware configs so if the *nix community can keep this up, they might eventually really have something to challenge Windows on desktops for clueless newbies.
.. and besides, doesnt biometrics suck? It's all about onetime identifiers. You cant easily change your eye, breath or thumbprint if they happened to fall into the wrong hands.
I'm not sure how your breath can fall into the wrong hands. I have trouble smelling my own breath by cupping my hands over my face. As to your eyes and thumbs, are you one of those people who has detachable parts? Like, when your S.O.(yes, some Slashdot readers have actual real life involvements with women) says "get your butt out of bed" you can hand it to her and say, "sure, take it, let me sleep."
Joking aside, bioelectricity, thermal output, and a bunch of other things are easily checked for to prevent use of amputated body parts.
Optimally, there would be stress identification methods and more than one password such that if someone tried the gun-to-your-head coercion method, you could silently tip off the system to call the authorities to the location. Be nice if every important system had personal 911 sort of passwords right now. "Send two units to the ATM at Stepford Avenue, we have a possible kidnap."
Biometrics is wonderful stuff in my book to keep people out of stuff where they don't belong. I just don't want a national ID card where I have to keep a record of my dna on file and so forth. But biometrics to secure my stuff? Better than leaving it wide open.
In a factory, it is possible to automate a tremendous amount of things because the factory is always in the same place and the functions are all the same. One piece is machined and another one parallel to it and their pallets borught over to another area and then welded and then that assembly attached to another and so on. Parts are supplied just as needed to each device or the device goes nowhere. A lathe cell is programmed to expect stock of a given size, not random sizes. Etc.
The way to do it with houses would be to create a giant multi-bot factory with gantry assemblies and so on and one by one, load stock, machine the stock, fasten in place. Then transport the finished house (by whatever means someone can) to its site and connect it to the utilities.
Onsite robotics will eventually fail before the problem that all robots for production would fail before: inconsistant environment. The technological advancements needed to make it work would almost obviate their reason for being in the first place. It makes more sense economically to have all the automation in a controlled environment.
I'm waiting for nanotech and genetic engineering and understanding of molecular biology to come together where we grow biomechanical houses that process our sewage output, absorb ambient energy and store it, and are self-healing. Some day, we might have cities that take in more pollution than average cities of today put out.
...distributed file sharing, cryptography, proxies, and parity will collide and instead of any one person hosting a complete file, the file will be containerized, split, parity containers built, and the pieces uploaded to peers at random based only on their availible space and relative activity and pipe size and so on and the original copy deleted.
Enough copies of pieces and parity files would propagate out based on statistics to ensure reasonable chance to get at anything, not any less easy than eMule of today. If you download all pieces and construct successfully, the solid file isn't seen and listed by IP because only the parts are shared at large. Your whole copy is totally outside the system once gotten.
Once no one person has a complete copy of anything, and each piece is named in gibberish that only the system understands and knows, what are they going to do then? Sue a teen girl because one twentieth of a Metallica song might be on their hard drive and she's got no way of knowing for sure because her storage is managed by the collective peer network?
The technical capabilities exist right now to do it and eventually it will be reasonably perfected. They will be brought to their knees by it, sputtering and whining all the way. It will illustrate very clearly that as long as information is in the hands of individuals, as long as they can read, write, and think for themselves, effective subjugation of the unwilling by any private organization or government will be difficult short of violence or threat thereof.
I don't see a RIAA-SWAT team becoming reality in the future nor do I see work-a-day policemen putting up with the notion of being their tools. So unless it could possibly go that direction, they've lost this fight the instant they picked it. They need to cut to the chase, admit defeat, and bargain for a new understanding between producer and consumer that's acceptable to both parties.
Professional? So you're part of that 1/10 of 1% who are. Cool. I always thought of myself more as Pro-Am really given the ever changing nature and lack of guidelines to it. (Writer is SBCA certified and has almost 1,000 installs to his credit, so this is a joke, okay?)
East coast people have similar problems with SuperDish where they get set up for birds just barely over the trees, and when you're in an area that hasn't been clear-cut to a moonscape, that means no line of sight for you.
I wouldn't re-enter the business unless they finally got going with that constellation of LEO birds with phased array flat panel antennas so you always had one to three birds reachable at all times. I keep hearing about someone doing this, but where is it? In the meantime, every cable operator in my state will lay hardline and even fiber into the boonie woods to reach a single customer, including Cablevision. So why should they have bothered with something that had less reliable reachability and less bandwidth than their wired service did? Yet another grandiose adventure with the Dolans...
You ex-Voomers who are stuck with NLoS to Dish and Direct and live in a Cablevision served area have my sympathies but at least you can get OIO.
It is the becoming the only way to send a message.
/. and watch as sending a simple twelve sentence e-mail will require seven layers of encryption and six chained proxies before hitting the Nym and Mixmaster systems and the replies going encrypted to random groups on Usenet just to avoid some corporate or government dipstick from checking our prose to make sure we didn't accidentally use a sentence identical to one someone else copyrighted twelve years ago as part of a book no one found interesting enough to read in the first place.
Imagine if on a given day every last person who has a net connection started up hosting torrents of everything that was being threatened by this absurdity. Source, binaries, the works.
Same thing with music and video.
It's headed in the direction of Open Source being killed off and fair use being beheaded. And still we sit and twiddle our thumbs. Time for massive non-co-operation. Sooner or later, they'll be brought to their knees.
Or we can not do anything but sign each others' web petitions and post here on
I mean, I love sci-fi movies, but I do not need to live in a Blader Runner meets Johnny Mnemonic meets Ghost in the Shell future.
...whether a monarchy where the mob is unleashed by a king or a democracy where the mob unleashes itself. No matter what, you're at the mercy of everyone around you.
Sad to say, our open and freestyle way of life has a lot of huge cracks in it you could drive a passenger jet through (and they did on 9/11/1) and these terrorist scumbags are as close to a perfect marriage of willful evil and compulsory insane as you get. There is no arguing with them, their POV is about as rational as any bunch of Neo Nazis, UFO conspiracy buffs, or the crackpots who go on about the Tri Lateral Commission, and they stick to it.
Should we tighten things? Yes. Should we give up freedoms altogether? No. But should we be surprised when the same government that tries to kill flies with shotguns goes after larger game with everything in the arsenal? Government runs on maximum overkill precisely because it is a function of human mob dynamics.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't think we're headed for anything like 1984. I do think we're just going to be doing a lot of things to ourselves that we're going to find we should roll back later on. Might as well calmly talk about it and cut to the chase and avoid the problems in the first place.
Being only human, you know we won't.
...as their live DVD is a memory hogging behemoth the likes of which Redmond could not devise. 256MB are like a morsel to it. It crashes on my machine. Not a really good first impression when every other live CD/DVD I've tried hasn't come close to failing over memory size.
MP3 support is almost a non-issue if I'm doing something serious like serving files, doing a network border gateway, etc. If I was using it for my desktop then I'd be ticked. If it would run on my desktop without another $500 worth of RAM. Which it doesn't. So it doesn't really matter.
I can understand why the low star rating entirely though. I expect better of Novell than this.
Opt out altogether. I don't listen to the radio, I barely ever listen to my old CDs, I certainly never buy any, I never go to concerts. If the artists are going to be the wussies they are and let the record companies schtup them for as big a percentage as they do, and keep putting out crap, and the record companies engage in abuse of intellectual property laws as they do, attempting to expunge the very concept of fair use, I say, screw giving them one more penny.
What are they going to do? Insist on a new law to tax me to get a sort of cover charge out of me just in case I overhear music on someone else's stereo some place? I ain't paying them anything. Nada. Not the artists, not the industry, not the phony poseurs who pretend to being alternative, not the people endlessly brainstorming more online music models, no one.
If we all went on a music spending free strike indefinitely, they might get the hint.
Why does this have to be so far away when I am stacked with so many bills?!
Please, those of you who do go, blog away. I want to hear how this went. Many people will be very appreciative since we're stuck as desks half a nation or more away.
Internet access is NOT a basic service in any way, shape, or form. It is a method for conveying information, a tool for research, a conduit of free speech and press, a way of entertaining yourself, and a hundred other things but it is NOT on par with organized society having laws, public education, and so on. It's in another category altogether.
Anyone here for trusting the government with running the television broadcast facilities? I don't mean regulating the airwaves so we don't trample each other using a common finite resource. I mean they operate the television facilities and the only thing ending up on tv is what they allow you to put on. Anyone for Los Angeles running the cable operations? Anyone for the federal government running DirecTV and Dish Network?
Anyone for putting the FCC in charge of running radio stations and graciously letting people use the facilities until such time as they decide they don't feel like it?
Anyone for returning to the USPS having a total monopoly on printed message transport? Anyone remember the hair-brained ideas some years back to put the USPS in charge of all electronic mail?
Yeah, let's let the government run the conduit and trust them that they won't change their mind or take advantage of their control of the conduit to snoop and hold it against you. I can't even say the words "trust" and "government" in the same sentence without laughing.
I'll ask it. Who here is willing to let the IRS become their bank and accountant? Who here is willing to let the FCC actually RUN the broadcast facilities? Why then would you trust the government (insert pause in typing for laughing here) to convey your speech when it is precisely the government which ends up having a multi-branch fight over the government itself committing censorship, and then only if enough noise is made over it? If they were trustworthy with your speech, would there ever be any censorship on their part in the first place?
...letting the government provide your electronic information access is like letting the tax authorities be your bank and accountant. What was that phrase I was looking for..? Oh yes, It's the fox guarding the henhouse.
AFAIC, it's for nothing unless you use secure tunnels and proxies to keep them from snooping on you. No, this isn't tinfoil hate time. This is plain old reality. I love my country, but I fear my government as I should. I can't see the same dingbats who can't get water fountains in the parks fixed within five years as being trustworthy with a cordless phone never mind my Internet access. No thanks.
They demonstrate you've put up with the bullshit long enough to accomplish something.
I don't want to hire anyone who would put up with bullshit.
So you're saying you don't want competent support technicians? Putting up with bullshit is ALL we do.
Sure this is more tp for the bunghole cert whores. And sure this is more boob bait for suited bubbas. However, this is the way things are all over in multiple sectors and you just do it. I pay as little attention to RHCE as MCSE these days and SBCA in satellite is a joke too as are so many other efficiency standard gymnastics awards from the ISO in manufacturing.
But the people who make decisions in industry need quick eye-catching summations and people need things to put on their walls so...
Why do people keep mutating new strains of Linux kernels and full OS distros constantly? Why do Windows flash and bang kids change skins more than most people change their mind or underwear? Why do ricers keep changing the annoying decals taking up half their windshields?
As G'Kar said, because they thought it was a good idea at the time.
More than that, and directly on topic of pi, would be the question, "is there over the long view some periodicity to pi, some regularity, some strange nature to it?". Who knows? Doing the calculations is an excellent exercise in basic mathematics.
Business should be free to offer whatever the heck it wants. Consumers should be free to buy whatever the heck they want. Telephone companies have a monopoly over a particular area? In a particular area, if the cable company delivers something better, faster, and cheaper than the telephone company, then the telephone company will ultimately lose revenue, which will stimulate an improvement in the telephone company. Or get broadband through your cellphone carrier. It's not quite as fast as DSL, and not quite as cheap, but it's an alternative choice, if that's what you want.
It doesn't work that way with phone. The copper lines are regulated because at one time nearly every single phone system in the nation was owned by a single company which engaged in whatever practices it felt like such as telling you that you couldn't install or even buy your own phone much less do your own wiring. Imagine a mobo company telling you what peripherals and memory you were allowed to use or even requiring that you have it done by them and forbidding you from doing anything with it that they didn't like.
For this and many other reasons, Ma Bell was broken up into smaller companies, and they were regulated to the hilt. As it was fairly impossible given modern growth and other infrastructures accompanying the same to build out a parallel infrastructure by any given competitor who wanted to. IOW, running tens of hundreds of thousands of copper pairs per city on top of those already there was just not doable.
Therefore, the Regional Bell Operating Companies still held an essential monopoly for copper pair phone service.
Prior to this FCC mega-mistake of a decision, it was conceivable that you could get ILEC DSL and get phone from a CLEC just as easily as the other way around. Or do without it if you chose.
The point of the regulations was the copper was not easily overbuildable without burdensome effects on local infrastructure, quality of life, etc., and therefore a necessary national resource of sorts held by a company with a virtual monopoly on it. So they opened the lines to usage by competitors as long as certain fair fees were paid to the telcos for access and maintenance and co-locations and power and so forth.
This new rule basically encroaches on that competition regulation by saying that if one service on the pair is ordered then they can require other services with it or not give any service at all, thus essentially preventing their customers from choosing a competitor for one of those other services.
Should Video over DSL ever take off, will they get away with denying a VoDSL CLEC's services to their own telco DSL customers?
...this could be a win for cable. Since forever, every cable operator I've worked for has been only too happy to provide cable modem only and let the customer pick DBS if they want. I can pick and choose or bundle however I like and they've always been of the mind to have this. For the phone companies to fight so hard for something that is only going to bite them in the arse with the public is grossly stupid, but I am not surprised since this is the telcos we're talking about.
Meanwhile I freely choose a service bundle from my cable company for voice, video, and data and save tons over the comparable packages that I would be forced to take or leave with the phone company. It's this sort of thing that caused me to kiss off SBC years ago and never look back.
...which would be well known to anyone in the custom high-end AV biz. It's also probably a bad idea as sooner or later an argument in the family room erupts over which channel to watch and the system has a nervous breakdown as it hears "Nickolodeon!" "MTV!" "Golf!" and so on until you go back to the good old fashioned button remote.
Not flamebait to me, personally. I'd like to know which included apps might now be broke and which they are actually working on patches for pending SP2. This is old standard MS proceedure and we should all know by now that it is a valid question.
Of course, custom and 3rd party apps being broke goes w/out saying. I used to say that if people stuck to the MFCs and the rest of the MS standards and didn't custom code and mod dlls, then they'd be much better off, but even doing the cleanest MS standard job you can, one little thing is done on the OS side by MS and everything goes to fark. One minute fine, the next not a single desktop or server will work and all report exactly the same fault.