The problem with a united geek front is that some of the tech companies are just as bad as the MPAA, RIAA, and legislators.
Gun companies don't alienate their users by pushing end user license agreements or suing their customers when they take their guns apart. They just sell you a product and contribute to an organization that helps make sure that you can legally own your product. Firearms manufacturers contribute quite a bit to the NRA and though gun nuts have varying opinions on WHICH gun manufacturers they prefer, they can all see a common goal in the 2nd amendment that benefits everyone.
I don't see fractionalization of the geeks in the sense of vi vs. emacs, Gnome vs. KDE kind of stuff being a problem....those people can all agree on the main central issues...that being "don't legislate how we use our fucking computers." It's the tech companies like Microsoft that want complete control over the market and end users that make unifying a difficult proposition. Let's face it, corporations are heard by legislators a lot more than individuals, and without corporate sponsorship and cooperation, no sort of unified tech organization is going to get anywhere.
because they know that their farce is metaphysically unenforceable and must use muscle and intimidation to keep good Catholics in line lest they realize one day the wool that is over their eyes.
A fast internet connection has more long term value. Your typical 18 year old girl is good for about 1 night....then either she gets bored and moves on or you want to strangle her after hearing "Like, you know, and stuff" in EVERY goddam sentence.
Now Gigabit Ethernet....that's the gift that keeps on giving.
Re:Is it again the case of game specific drivers?
on
ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 2
They did benchmarks with like 4 different games in this review. (UT, Q3, Serious Sam, JK2) In places where CPU was not the bottleneck, the R300 was way ahead of the TI4600.
I'd like to see non-game tests, too, which disappointed me. Something to test raw video horsepower without invoking memory or CPU limitations because of non-video processes. (sound, ai, etc)
Re:Some Piers Anthony novels adults would enjoy.
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
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· Score: 2
You said it man....had he ended that series around book 6, the interminable lengths would have been somewhat tolerable.
I was VERY into that series until it got to the point where I couldn't remember names and places he was talking about because he had gone through FAR too many, and in addition, made all of the main characters I knew and loved in the first few books turn into total jerkoffs.
If you're actually talking about file system scanning you should probably avoid the cute geek term for "fuck." Remember, fsck IS basically a filesystem scan, making your post, as written, a bit redundant.
Maybe that's because there are MORE Linux boxes out in production than there were a last year and people are starting to drop IIS because of the security nightmare it is?
Think about what happened last year....Code Red abused IIS servers to death and sysadmins started realizing that Linux/Apache was a viable alternative, what with the kernel networking code improvements it got in 2.4.x, (or was that 2 year ago?) not to mention the publicity Linux has been getting increases every year.
Not exactly a profound leap of logic to make this deduction.
What a piece of reactionary fluff
on
Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I mean, not to flame this guy, but his mom loses some email and suddenly there's going to be a time where all digital information stored on hard drives is lost?
Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?
It would just be a matter of figuring out how much 12g is in Planck mass. The definition of the mole is the number of atoms contained in precisely 12g of the most commonly occuring isotope of Carbon. (That number being about 6.022x10^23 atoms) As you can see, it wasn't picked arbitrarily, there really is a basis for that number.
It would be easier said than done trying to find another element that had an integer for the atomic mass of it's most common isotope as well as containing 6.022x10^23 atoms, hence the definition of the mole would change.
Not that there ever WILL be a change to this system of measurement, but if in some alternate dimension there was, I'm betting that they'd just use the Planck-mass that is the equivalent of 12g of carbon.
Unfortunately, with all the different networks and network splits, IRC is even more factionalized that IM clients are.
I miss the golden days of IRC, I really do, but I think it's about time for a standardized real-time messaging protocol...something like SMTP where it has user@domain but the message is delivered to a live client rather than stored on a server, that way whichever service and client you're using (MSN, Yahoo, whatever) is irrelevant, you can still communicate with people on other networks.
Hehehe, yeah, the teenage chick with the horse on the cover....I took some serious shit for that one too, being in 10th grade when it came out. (I had a nice big hardcover version from the library, too)
Not for nothing, but were we reading the same books? The only writings of his I've remember seeing that have anything to do with non-standard sexuality are Firefly and some of his short stories.
Am I just not remembering his Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality books well? (I read them probably 10-15 years ago) I also don't remember much along those lines in the Adept or Mode books...also read those quite a while ago.
Please detail which novels/stories you mean, if nothing else for recollection's sake.
I'd love to ride my bike to the convenience store every time I go...I'd love to ride to work and to school too. There are a few problems with that though:
-Most places I'd go there are no bike racks, hence nowhere to lock my bike up. People steal bikes that aren't locked up.
-No bike paths in many areas...and drivers are NOT considerate of people on bikes.
-Weather. I can drive anywhere when it's -10 degrees Celsius and a foot of snow outside...I'd be insane trying to ride my bike in that. In some parts of the country, it's too cold or too rainy to bicycle more than a few months out of the year.
I think the ultimate solution is not to bike everywhere, but to develop smaller and more economic vehicles. We had our fun, but time's up...time to start driving vehicles that don't use fossil fuels and don't emit any element or compound that's not naturally occuring in our atmoshpere in large quantities. Hydrogen fuel cells that have water as a byproduct come to mind as a possible solution.
Bikes are a good hobby and great exercise, but like the Segway, they're not the world's solution to transportation problems.
If you don't like their terms don't do business with them!
Ah the cry of capitalism. I think the reason for the lawsuit here is not that they are tracking rentals with satellites, but that they were not notifying their customers beforehand. Hence the violation of privacy. If not you're told ahead of time, obviously you cannot choose to do business with a more ethical car rental agency.
As far as your car insurance covering you while you're in Mexico or Canada, just tell them you're going there ahead of time and they charge you like $10 that month for "out of country travel" coverage. I used to live near Niagara Falls and did this quite often....a good idea considering how horrible traffic was in that area during the summer. Man, I tell ya....you get American tourists in a vehicle in a country where the speed limits and distances are posted in metric and they completely lose their higher thought processes.
That's the problem with running a service that's (for the most part) black market...when someone starts fucking it all up with counter-attacks, there's really not a lot of recourse.
I was thinking that a moderation system would work, if it's implemented correctly. For instance, once a person has been sharing X GB of files for, say, 2 weeks, they start getting moderation points....they can use these points to flag a file as being a dummy. (or just a shitty rip) If a user gets too many files modded down, he becomes unable to gain moderation points for a certain period. The sharing requirements will make it undesirable for RIAA droids to pollute the moderation system, since they'll have to be sharing material of their own. (and any dummy files they have will hopefully be moderated down...and if they ARE sharing valid material, well, cool, they're contributing to their own demise)
Please, nitpick at this suggestion, I'd like to see if it's feasible or not.
I'd mod you up but I posted in this topic already, obviously. At least I'm not the first person to make this mistake...too many damn acronyms now to keep em all straight.
3 Mbps * 1 MBps / 8 Mbps * 1024 KBps / 1 MBps = 384KBps (the highest number you will theoretically see on a transfer)
The highest I've ever gotten on AT'd network is about 175KBps, a little less than 1.5 MBps, so I'm getting reasonably close to my advetised limits. I highly doubt I'll see AT upgrade maximum bandwidth unless I pay an assload for it. Too bad a decent DSL line is so expensive in Denver.
At an old job of mine, they were trying to get me to evaluate GPS-based NNTP servers. Being a security admin, I wasn't terribly interested in the prospect.
They wanted their own root level time server that synced off of satellite-delivered time, and the server would be unavailable to anyone outside the corporate LAN.
It occured to me that unless you're running some sort of application that requires time accuracy to the millisecond or greater at all times, you're perfectly fine syncing your enterprise from a tier-3 time server that syncs off of a public NNTP server from the internet. Should you lose internet connectivity, the thing to keep in mind is that time does not mysteriously stop until the network is restored. The time-sync decay for your typical NNTP server is a couple milliseconds a day if it's unable to refresh...you're still getting VERY freakin accurate time during this period off of your own server. This concept is amazingly hard to convey to a middle manager with a budget he thinks he needs to waste.
I finally convinced them this was a waste of money and they should send me to SANS instead.
You're not supposed to use an attorney in small claims court...in fact, most of them won't allow it.
The point of this being that most attorney's fees are more than you can ever win in small claims court and most people will feel it's pointless to use it if it will cost them money in the end.
So either the phone company that printed your phonebook is ignorant or you're making it up.;)
The no-call list law in Colorado just started and so far, no telemarketers have spoken on the phone, but we're still getting calls from numbers that don't show up on caller ID...there's just no answer at the end that called us. So, from what it looks like, is the telespammers' computers are disconnecting the call after dialing instead of deleting us from the database. Quite annoying.
In many government court cases where goods used in or during the commission of a crime (or if the goods ARE the commission of the crime) they list the acse of the seizure as being against the property. Any criminal case against the person is considered separate. This is because seizures are considered civil cases. [IANAL...but I just took a couple basic law classes)
My understanding has always been that there is a freedom of religion, meaning the state will not force anyone to follow a particular religion
Freedom of religion also implies not HAVING a religion. You're missing the big issue is that people who are atheists are seeing their children being forced (by law) to recite an affirmation to a god whom the children are being taught does NOT exist. Imagine the ruckus that would arise from religious groups if the pledge were changed to "One nation, there is no God, indivisible, with liberty blah blah blah)
They'd shit a pigeon over it. And with good reason. No governmental organzition should dictate dogma (or lack there of) to it's citizens, let alone children. That's the reason the Taliban fucked up Afghanistan so badly. (as an extreme example)
Right on, brother! I've been saying for a long time that it's about time that corporate raiders who through knowing actions damage the well-being or security of others are much bigger criminals than some hippie who's all hopped up on goof-balls.
Let's stop punishing the victimless crimes (don't give me that Broken Windows Theory crap either, James Wilson and George Kelling are ignorant) and start punishing the victimizers.
There just needs to be a large enough public outcry against this sort of behavior before there is change. If it comes down a matter of getting re-elected or not, I bet you dollars to dildos that the congress-critters will drop dime on their CEO golfing buddies so fast it'll make their kids ugly.
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The problem with a united geek front is that some of the tech companies are just as bad as the MPAA, RIAA, and legislators.
Gun companies don't alienate their users by pushing end user license agreements or suing their customers when they take their guns apart. They just sell you a product and contribute to an organization that helps make sure that you can legally own your product. Firearms manufacturers contribute quite a bit to the NRA and though gun nuts have varying opinions on WHICH gun manufacturers they prefer, they can all see a common goal in the 2nd amendment that benefits everyone.
I don't see fractionalization of the geeks in the sense of vi vs. emacs, Gnome vs. KDE kind of stuff being a problem....those people can all agree on the main central issues...that being "don't legislate how we use our fucking computers." It's the tech companies like Microsoft that want complete control over the market and end users that make unifying a difficult proposition. Let's face it, corporations are heard by legislators a lot more than individuals, and without corporate sponsorship and cooperation, no sort of unified tech organization is going to get anywhere.
I say we talk the spammers into combining all their ads into one giant spam that we can get once a week.
Get your hot gay teen bestiality penis-enlarging viagra diploma life insurance here! We accept Pay-pal and immortal souls!
because they know that their farce is metaphysically unenforceable and must use muscle and intimidation to keep good Catholics in line lest they realize one day the wool that is over their eyes.
A fast internet connection has more long term value. Your typical 18 year old girl is good for about 1 night....then either she gets bored and moves on or you want to strangle her after hearing "Like, you know, and stuff" in EVERY goddam sentence.
Now Gigabit Ethernet....that's the gift that keeps on giving.
They did benchmarks with like 4 different games in this review. (UT, Q3, Serious Sam, JK2) In places where CPU was not the bottleneck, the R300 was way ahead of the TI4600.
I'd like to see non-game tests, too, which disappointed me. Something to test raw video horsepower without invoking memory or CPU limitations because of non-video processes. (sound, ai, etc)
You said it man....had he ended that series around book 6, the interminable lengths would have been somewhat tolerable.
I was VERY into that series until it got to the point where I couldn't remember names and places he was talking about because he had gone through FAR too many, and in addition, made all of the main characters I knew and loved in the first few books turn into total jerkoffs.
If you're actually talking about file system scanning you should probably avoid the cute geek term for "fuck." Remember, fsck IS basically a filesystem scan, making your post, as written, a bit redundant.
Maybe that's because there are MORE Linux boxes out in production than there were a last year and people are starting to drop IIS because of the security nightmare it is?
Think about what happened last year....Code Red abused IIS servers to death and sysadmins started realizing that Linux/Apache was a viable alternative, what with the kernel networking code improvements it got in 2.4.x, (or was that 2 year ago?) not to mention the publicity Linux has been getting increases every year.
Not exactly a profound leap of logic to make this deduction.
I mean, not to flame this guy, but his mom loses some email and suddenly there's going to be a time where all digital information stored on hard drives is lost?
Jesus, it's not like every hard drive on the planet is going to die simultaneously at an unknown future date....and in the meantime, new hard drives are manufactured and new storage media ara invented, did it ever occur to him that people might migrate their data along the way?
Horrible, horrible article.
It's because they charge fat people for 2 seats...all that extra loot is keeping their profit margin nice and high.
It would just be a matter of figuring out how much 12g is in Planck mass. The definition of the mole is the number of atoms contained in precisely 12g of the most commonly occuring isotope of Carbon. (That number being about 6.022x10^23 atoms) As you can see, it wasn't picked arbitrarily, there really is a basis for that number.
It would be easier said than done trying to find another element that had an integer for the atomic mass of it's most common isotope as well as containing 6.022x10^23 atoms, hence the definition of the mole would change.
Not that there ever WILL be a change to this system of measurement, but if in some alternate dimension there was, I'm betting that they'd just use the Planck-mass that is the equivalent of 12g of carbon.
5 words for YOU:
You only had four words.
Unfortunately, with all the different networks and network splits, IRC is even more factionalized that IM clients are.
I miss the golden days of IRC, I really do, but I think it's about time for a standardized real-time messaging protocol...something like SMTP where it has user@domain but the message is delivered to a live client rather than stored on a server, that way whichever service and client you're using (MSN, Yahoo, whatever) is irrelevant, you can still communicate with people on other networks.
Hehehe, yeah, the teenage chick with the horse on the cover....I took some serious shit for that one too, being in 10th grade when it came out. (I had a nice big hardcover version from the library, too)
Not for nothing, but were we reading the same books? The only writings of his I've remember seeing that have anything to do with non-standard sexuality are Firefly and some of his short stories.
Am I just not remembering his Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality books well? (I read them probably 10-15 years ago) I also don't remember much along those lines in the Adept or Mode books...also read those quite a while ago.
Please detail which novels/stories you mean, if nothing else for recollection's sake.
I'd love to ride my bike to the convenience store every time I go...I'd love to ride to work and to school too. There are a few problems with that though:
-Most places I'd go there are no bike racks, hence nowhere to lock my bike up. People steal bikes that aren't locked up.
-No bike paths in many areas...and drivers are NOT considerate of people on bikes.
-Weather. I can drive anywhere when it's -10 degrees Celsius and a foot of snow outside...I'd be insane trying to ride my bike in that. In some parts of the country, it's too cold or too rainy to bicycle more than a few months out of the year.
I think the ultimate solution is not to bike everywhere, but to develop smaller and more economic vehicles. We had our fun, but time's up...time to start driving vehicles that don't use fossil fuels and don't emit any element or compound that's not naturally occuring in our atmoshpere in large quantities. Hydrogen fuel cells that have water as a byproduct come to mind as a possible solution.
Bikes are a good hobby and great exercise, but like the Segway, they're not the world's solution to transportation problems.
If you don't like their terms don't do business with them!
Ah the cry of capitalism. I think the reason for the lawsuit here is not that they are tracking rentals with satellites, but that they were not notifying their customers beforehand. Hence the violation of privacy. If not you're told ahead of time, obviously you cannot choose to do business with a more ethical car rental agency.
As far as your car insurance covering you while you're in Mexico or Canada, just tell them you're going there ahead of time and they charge you like $10 that month for "out of country travel" coverage. I used to live near Niagara Falls and did this quite often....a good idea considering how horrible traffic was in that area during the summer. Man, I tell ya....you get American tourists in a vehicle in a country where the speed limits and distances are posted in metric and they completely lose their higher thought processes.
That's the problem with running a service that's (for the most part) black market...when someone starts fucking it all up with counter-attacks, there's really not a lot of recourse.
I was thinking that a moderation system would work, if it's implemented correctly. For instance, once a person has been sharing X GB of files for, say, 2 weeks, they start getting moderation points....they can use these points to flag a file as being a dummy. (or just a shitty rip) If a user gets too many files modded down, he becomes unable to gain moderation points for a certain period. The sharing requirements will make it undesirable for RIAA droids to pollute the moderation system, since they'll have to be sharing material of their own. (and any dummy files they have will hopefully be moderated down...and if they ARE sharing valid material, well, cool, they're contributing to their own demise)
Please, nitpick at this suggestion, I'd like to see if it's feasible or not.
Hahah! You got me there. =)
I'd mod you up but I posted in this topic already, obviously. At least I'm not the first person to make this mistake...too many damn acronyms now to keep em all straight.
3 Mbps * 1 MBps / 8 Mbps * 1024 KBps / 1 MBps = 384KBps (the highest number you will theoretically see on a transfer)
The highest I've ever gotten on AT'd network is about 175KBps, a little less than 1.5 MBps, so I'm getting reasonably close to my advetised limits. I highly doubt I'll see AT upgrade maximum bandwidth unless I pay an assload for it. Too bad a decent DSL line is so expensive in Denver.
At an old job of mine, they were trying to get me to evaluate GPS-based NNTP servers. Being a security admin, I wasn't terribly interested in the prospect.
They wanted their own root level time server that synced off of satellite-delivered time, and the server would be unavailable to anyone outside the corporate LAN.
It occured to me that unless you're running some sort of application that requires time accuracy to the millisecond or greater at all times, you're perfectly fine syncing your enterprise from a tier-3 time server that syncs off of a public NNTP server from the internet. Should you lose internet connectivity, the thing to keep in mind is that time does not mysteriously stop until the network is restored. The time-sync decay for your typical NNTP server is a couple milliseconds a day if it's unable to refresh...you're still getting VERY freakin accurate time during this period off of your own server. This concept is amazingly hard to convey to a middle manager with a budget he thinks he needs to waste.
I finally convinced them this was a waste of money and they should send me to SANS instead.
You're not supposed to use an attorney in small claims court...in fact, most of them won't allow it.
;)
The point of this being that most attorney's fees are more than you can ever win in small claims court and most people will feel it's pointless to use it if it will cost them money in the end.
So either the phone company that printed your phonebook is ignorant or you're making it up.
The no-call list law in Colorado just started and so far, no telemarketers have spoken on the phone, but we're still getting calls from numbers that don't show up on caller ID...there's just no answer at the end that called us. So, from what it looks like, is the telespammers' computers are disconnecting the call after dialing instead of deleting us from the database. Quite annoying.
In many government court cases where goods used in or during the commission of a crime (or if the goods ARE the commission of the crime) they list the acse of the seizure as being against the property. Any criminal case against the person is considered separate. This is because seizures are considered civil cases. [IANAL...but I just took a couple basic law classes)
My understanding has always been that there is a freedom of religion, meaning the state will not force anyone to follow a particular religion
Freedom of religion also implies not HAVING a religion. You're missing the big issue is that people who are atheists are seeing their children being forced (by law) to recite an affirmation to a god whom the children are being taught does NOT exist. Imagine the ruckus that would arise from religious groups if the pledge were changed to "One nation, there is no God, indivisible, with liberty blah blah blah)
They'd shit a pigeon over it. And with good reason. No governmental organzition should dictate dogma (or lack there of) to it's citizens, let alone children. That's the reason the Taliban fucked up Afghanistan so badly. (as an extreme example)
Right on, brother! I've been saying for a long time that it's about time that corporate raiders who through knowing actions damage the well-being or security of others are much bigger criminals than some hippie who's all hopped up on goof-balls.
Let's stop punishing the victimless crimes (don't give me that Broken Windows Theory crap either, James Wilson and George Kelling are ignorant) and start punishing the victimizers.
There just needs to be a large enough public outcry against this sort of behavior before there is change. If it comes down a matter of getting re-elected or not, I bet you dollars to dildos that the congress-critters will drop dime on their CEO golfing buddies so fast it'll make their kids ugly.