Funny thing about Boost is that they are owned by Sprint. I'm left scratching my head wondering why Sprint offers a $99 dollar unlimited plan while another part of the same company is offering virtually the same plan for $50? I guess there might be one important difference - the Boost plan offers unlimited 'web', but not ulimited 'data' which probably means you can't use something like a Blackberry or other smartphone with apps. So, no AIM or Skype unless you want to cough up another $49/mo.
I also have to wonder how long before the corporate overlords at Sprint kill this deal? Might just be a somewhat short term offer to grow the brand.
What I'm going to say here, I do not say specifically in context to the Jammie Thomas case - I do think this seems rather unreasonable for what she did. But, there is a larger question - is it ever reasonable to have punative damages that are much larger than the actual damage? I think that yes, in some cases there are.
Consider hypothetically any sort of business that profits from any sort of illegal activity - whether that's theft, or building unsafe cars knowing that only 3 out of a 100000 of your customers will actually be injured by the car. If you, as this company, only have to pay actual damages (or only small punitive damages) to those three out of 100000 customers, you might decide it's more profitable to break the laws regarding safety (because you have 99,997 customers who you won't have to pay damages to) and pay the damages, than to build the car the right way and save those three customers from death or injury.
Or, for theft. Let's say instead of sending thieves to jail (I'm not including copyright violators as thieves here, but people who really bust into people's businesses, houses or cars and take stuff, or pickpockets) we just made the thieves give back what they took, and maybe made them pay an additional $100. If you did that, you'd have a heck of a lot of thieves, because the chances are you'd only get caught thieving maybe 1 in 10. So, 90% of the time you get to keep what you stole (that is, you profit from it), and maybe 10 percent of the time you have to give it back and pay $100. If that were the case, theft would be highly profitable. So, you put very high punitive damages (in this case, years in jail) on the bad behavior, to make it so that even getting caught once makes it not worth it ever to steal (or at least, that's the theory).
The RIAA faces a somewhat analogous situation. In reality, they can only catch and sue a vanishingly small number of copyright violators - they can't catch and sue everyone who does it (I have no idea what the real numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least 1-in-a-million). So, they want to make it hella scary to face their lawsuits, so it's not worth it to risk even getting caught once. The question we have to decide as a society is, do we think copyright infringement is serious enough of a problem, like theft, or selling unsafe products, that it is just to severely punish that.
I'm not sure that 2 Million dollars is reasonable, but I can't help but thinking that it's gotta be much larger than the actual cost of the tracks that were illegally copied. Maybe something like $200 per song - so that would be damages of like $4,800 in this case. That seems steep enough, seems like, to be a somewhat effective deterrent, while being low enough that someone could reasonably be expected to be able to pay it without totally bankrupting them - you could setup monthly payments - $100/mo for 48 months or something like that. That would be enough damages to make me think twice about sharing out songs. Sure, it's still not super likely I'd be found and sued, but if I was, I'd know that I'd be facing manageable but very unpleasant consequences.
It occurs to me that throughout earth's entire life, there's been a process of the ocean absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. Some living thing in the ocean must extract that carbon and fixate it somehow? Is there any reason that whatever is responsible for that process won't continue to do so?
From my high school and college freshman biology classes, I seem to recall a principle of equilibrium - that whenever something, like a particular nutrient or food source becomes more abundant, it will cause whatever 'feeds' off that nutrient or food source to thrive, which will then cause a reduction in the nutrient or food source, and so equilibrium will be maintained.
Is there some reason that won't happen here, where as the carbon in the ocean becomes more abundant, whatever 'feeds' off of it won't become more abundant too?
Mac addresses aren't part of IPv4 or IPv6 - they are a different layer of networking - the physical/ethernet layer. Now, it's true that for autoconfiguration, because the Mac address is a globally unique (unless you've changed it) 48-bit value, IPv6 implementations will often use the Mac address as the 'host' portion of your IPv6 address, but far as I know, IPv6 doesn't really care what your mac address is. In both IPv4 and IPv6, a IP address gets mapped by the local router (I think, I'm not a network engineer, but this is my understanding) to a Mac address for final delivery, but that mapping is only maintained on your local network.
It's like this, I think: Someone sends a packet to an IP address across the Internet. The sending party has no idea what your Mac address is. In the transfer across the Internet, that IP packet might cross a dozen different type of physical links, each with their own addressing schemes (ATM, Frame Relay, PPP, Ethernet, etc). All that's really important at that point is the IP address. When that IP packet finally reaches your home router, your home router just has to know that IP address 123A::1 resolves to the ethernet network device with Mac address 01:23:45:67:89:ab. I think that's just maintained in a table in RAM in your home broadband routers (higher-end routers like Cisco gear might do something that is faster than a table in RAM, I dunno, but for home-use gear, where you have a very small number of devices on the network, storing those mappings in RAM should be fast enough I think).
1) Privacy: IPv4 addresses can already, largely, be traced back to at least your ISP account, if not the specific device on your local network. You have no IP address privacy. Go read about the Jammie Thomas / RIAA case if you doubt it.
2) Security: NAT provides, basically, a type of a firewall. Firewalls existed before NAT. There's no reason your 'home router' which currently does NAT couldn't firewall your connections in a very similar way to how NAT protects you currrently (e.g., only outbound connections are allowed by default, and in-bound connections when you purposefully open a port). NAT does not give you any better security than a firewall.
What it does do is make it a pain when you *want* to allow people to connect directly to your computer for things like games, Voice- or Video-chat, direct file transfers, bittorrent, etc. This is particularly if you have more than one computer you want to allow people to connect to (yes, with NAT you can do a port forward, but that only works for a single computer; if you have 2 or 3 computers, your pretty much screwed).
But, you say, the Internet works fine right now and I have NAT, but I have no problem using Skype, games, bittorrent, etc. That is because, in order to deal with everyone using NAT, pretty much everyone has come up with proxy schemes. What do I mean by that? Instead of two computers connecting directly to each other, when a NAT is 'in the way', typically the two computers will connect to a third computer. This works, BUT, it's inefficient - it means that your packets have to route through a longer chain of Internet connections (usually), and if the proxy server does not have sufficient bandwidth, your throughput is limited by that proxy server.
So, in the bittorrent example, I believe that if you join a torrent, and you are behind a NAT, then in order for you (A) to upload a chunk of data to another user (B), you both have to connect to a third user (C) who is NOT behind a NAT (or at least, who has properly setup port-forwarding, and I suspect a great many bittorrent users don't really know how to setup port forwarding correctly). If that NAT wasn't there, the torrent would be faster for you and everyone else who is part of that torrent.
The Internet works with NAT, but it would work BETTER without NAT.
DNS isn't a single centralized database. It's many, many databases, organized hierarchically. Granted, if the Internet keeps growing, I suppose there could still be some scalability issues.
See this article for an explanation of how the DNS 'database' is broken up into pieces which are handled by different servers.
Chicken-and-Egg: There is very little home networking equipment available in the US that currently supports IPv6 because there are no ISPs in the US who have deployed IPv6, so there is no market for such equipment.
However, that said, I learned awhile back (I think it may have been from another/. poster) that Apple's Airport line of home routers (at least, the current generation) support IPv6. The Airport express (WiFi-only) is $99. The Airport-extreme, which adds a few local ethernet ports on the back of the device (like a Linksys or Netgear router) in addition to wifi, is $179. Seems a little expensive, but it's cheaper than the $1k+ you were talking about earlier.
Another option is to get a router which is supported by one of the Linux-based 'alternative firmwares', and 'upgrade' one of the non-IPv6 compatible home routers to add support for IPv6. You'll probably void your warranty, but you'll get an inexpensive router (as I'm posting this, Newegg is advertising Linksys WRT54GL routers for $50), which has IPv6 support.
To me, that's the most interesting aspect in watching to see how this goes for Comcast - I imagine that, at least at first, they will run *both* IPv4 and IPv6 on their network. I imagine for existing customers who aren't interested in upgrading, it'll still be IPv4 for quite a while.
But, Comcast has an opportunity, with new customers, to start deploying IPv6. The trick here is, from the customers' perspective, their local network could still support IPv4, I suspect. If you check my journal, I had posted an article I wrote up some months back, describing how I think someone could create a router device which allows IPv4 devices on the local network to use IPv4 locally, but have an IPv6 address which the outside world sees. Basically, the router would do mapping and translation between the (global) IPv6 and (local) IPv4 address.
All of the necessary 'logic' to get this to work could most likely be bundled into a firmware on a device like a Linksys WRT54GL router. Any computers or devices which understand IPv6 could use IPv6 locally, while any devices which don't understand IPv6 could continue to use IPv4 on the local network.
It'll be interesting to see if Comcast gives customers who trial the IPv6 connections, such a router device to take care of all this stuff.
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use::1,::2,::3,::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?
Mono is a Novell/Ximian product, not a Microsoft product. Unless I'm mistaken, Mono being part of OIN doesn't put ANY legal restrictions on what Microsoft can do. So, I don't see how Mono being part of OIN really has anything to do with whether or not Mono is 'safe' for use by developers and end-users?
I've been trying to read more about this the last couple days, and from what I can find, the 'core' Mono/.Net technologies are apparently considered pretty 'safe' because Microsoft published it as part of an ECMA standard. I guess that provides some protection against lawsuits about that (I'm not really sure, though - I'm not a lawyer, and all that).
Still, there is some question surrounding the ASP.net, ADO.net, and Windows.Forms parts of Mono.
In my opinion, a far bigger problem than handset exlcusivity deals, is the practice of charging customers the same price for cell phone service whether or not they are or are not getting a contract for a phone. Most of the carriers will let you buy phones outright, and even pay month-to-month for service. The problem is, I'm paying the same monthly-fee as if I were on the contract. So, it ends up being financially stupid to buy a phone outright, because you're just paying an extra $200-$300 (in most cases), but not paying less for service than the people whose phones are subsidized by the contracts.
If I'm not getting my phone subsidized, I should be seeing about a $10/mo discount on my service. But, no.
Get rid of that nonsense, and also give people the legal right to modify their phones to unlock them from the original network, and you've solved the 'exclusivity' problem in the simplest possible fashion.
The problem with your statement is. . . how do you buy an iPhone without getting into a 2 year contract with AT&T? Ok, I suppose AT&T probably offers a (much more expensive) non-contract price to buy the phone, so you can probably do that (I'm not sure in this case - maybe they only offer the phone if you sign the contract?).
But more importantly, the phone is software-locked to the AT&T network.
Generally speaking, though, I too am of a libertarian mindset here - I agree that that government should be limited in how much it interfers in business relationships and contracts. If Apple freely chooses to sell iPhones only to AT&T, then it should have the freedom to do that. . .
My problem comes in the fact that Apple can lock the phone to AT&T's network, and then the DMCA can potentially be used to prevent me from hacking the phone to unlock it (or at least, prevent someone who has figure out how to hack it from distributing patches/software to unlock it). Yes, I know that the copyright office issued a DMCA exemption for unlocking cell phones, but that isn't a permanent change of law - that's just a (currently) temporary exemption.
So, on the one hand, the government has no business trying to force companies to not do exclusive hardware deals. . . but on the other hand, IMO, the government has no business 'protecting' businesses by making it illegal for people to modify the software in their cellphones to work with other networks, or even for third parties to assist (heck, other cell-networks and their vendors should be able to assist me in hacking my phone to work on their network).
The legitimate function of government is protecting our rights, not making wireless corporations' (or any other copyright holders') wishes come true.
I'm thinking the experiment would work better when the moon is, err, at 1/2 (can't remember the name) - that is, when the light side of the moon is sort of perpendicular to your line of view from the earth. That way, you get a 'sideways' view of the debris cloud, instead of straight on (which might be a bit hard to see). Also, I bet having dark space as the background will make the cloud show up better than having the lit surface of the moon - better contrast.
The simple solution to that is to slow down and you won't get gravel damage. Cars moving 10-15 mph don't usually kick up that much gravel, but once you get going faster than that, or if you accelerate suddenly, that's when you get the problems.
That's really a great point - not all roads necessarily *have* to be paved. Maybe in very rural areas with few residents or businesses along such roads, there's simply not the money there to pay for paving. Maybe we shouldn't be spending money on paving every inch of road in the country. People can't seem to get their heads around the idea that governments (whether federal, state, or local) don't have unlimited access to funds. Sometimes, you have to find places to cut funding.
Would it be better to cut funding to emergency services like police, fire, ems? Maybe the schools? Personally, I'd rather grind up a few rural roads into gravel, than to cut funding for education or emergency services (although, that's probably happening too, unfortunately).
Proven? Really? What's the proof? That Microsoft hasn't sued yet? That doesn't stop them from suing in the future. I'm not aware of any 'proof' that the Mono fear is stupid. If anything, I used to not be too worried about Mono, until Microsoft sued TomTom for their use of Linux. That was NOT a lawsuit over Mono, but rather over VFAT and some other stuff. But, it proved that Microsoft is willing to use stupid patents to sue Linux users. So, now I'm worried that in the future, they will decide to sue over Mono. What would stop them if they should decide to sue?
Some things might not have a purpose, that's true, but there is nothing wrong with trying to find out if there might be a purpose. If every scientist took the attitude you expressed, science would never get anywhere, because anything which didn't have an *obvious* purpose would never be further investigated. Sometimes in science, you have to come up with lots of wrong hypotheses, test them, then throw them out, before someone comes up with the right one. Sometimes there could be more than one 'right' answer. I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprints serve multiple purposes. Some people have mentioned that it increases the sense of touch - I'm not familiar with that scientific research, but it sounds plausible. Others have mentioned that, like channels on a tire, it allows better grip when the skin is wet. That sounds plausible too - maybe *both* ideas are right?
All sorts of questions which might seem stupid to most people, will come up with surprising answers/results when someone does bother to pursue the answer. Some of those answers help us learn how to create/engineer things better - we can often find inspiration for 'new' ways of doing things based upon observations of the adaptations that different life forms have.
It never said she sampled her own intestinal tissue. From the article, it sounds like she got the slides from her doctor, after the pathologist had already 'examined' and missed the inflammation in the tissue. Honestly, she should probably be suing the pathologist for malpractice for declaring the slide to be 'completely normal', when it was not. This is also why second opinions are probably a good idea. One doc finds nothing wrong with a tissue sample? Ask to have a second doctor, not affiliated with the original hospital/practice, examine and give a second opinion.
I blame the parents. Adoption is a wonderful thing (or at least can be - of course, if adoptive parents abuse the kid, then it's not wonderful), but you should probably sit down with a kid sometime *before* they are old enough to be in a high-school biology class, and explain something like that to them. If a kid finds out from you, I imagine they are likely to be much less upset than if they find out about it on their own, later.
At least the answer was adoption. I thought your story was leading up to a "Your father was the postman" sort of ending. Better adoption than cheating, although testing one's own blood could lead to discoveries like that.
At least, that's the ruling by the appeals court, according to that article. The article makes it sound like, since the tech had been given permission to access the computer as part of the course of doing service for the guy, that the subsequent finding of the materials on the hard drive was not an illegal search. The techs found the evidence *legally*, and once found, they are allowed to voluntarily turn over evidence of a crime to law enforcement.
I believe (though I'm not sure - IANAL), that if private individuals illegally obtain evidence, it would still not be admissible in court, even though it wasn't the police doing the illegal evidence gathering.
Well, the fact that they say the bundle is targeted at the retail industry would lead me to suspect that there might be Email, Web, plus some sort of Point of Sale/Inventory Management/Accounting/Customer Relationship Management system (hopefully all integrated together seemlessly, so that the CRM is tightly integrated with the Point of Sale portion, and the Point of Sale portion is tightly integrated with both the inventory control and the accounting). I might be giving Dell too much credit here, but if I were starting a retail business, and I were looking for a single-server Small Business in a Box solution for my small Retail business, I would expect at least those things.
I find it very. . . interesting, that on the McAfee website, you can turn ON the auto-renew yourself through the account management, but to get it turned OFF, you have to contact their customer service reps. What kind of BS is that? I'm getting my parents away from McAfee, and I myself left McAfee a couple years back. They used to be a good company to deal with. Now, I just don't trust them anymore. Setting up your website like that just screams out to me that they are trying to make it as hard as possible for people to get out of the auto-renew.
Those "Free" versions (AVG, Avast, maybe others) are often restricted in the fine print so that you can do no commercial activity whatsoever on your computer. It's ambiguously enough stated that even just using a remote access program to access your computer at your job to do work from home might be violating the EULA. Granted, it's not likely that they'll actually catch you, but the point still remains that if you do anything that might be construed as generating income now or in the future, you might be a fly in their web.
Not an issue as much with ClamWin, but ClamWin has no real-time scanner, which despite the parent post's assertion, do sometimes stop infections before they happen (not always, it's true, but enough of the time that it's definitely worth having anti-virus software of some sort). The On-access scanner isn't *required*, but most users will not remember to manually scan stuff 100 percent of the time. The On-access scanners, will provide much more consistent protection against infection than a manual scanner, for most users.
Personally, I've been using the AVG Free edition, and if I need to upgrade to a 'commercial use' license in the future, AVG seems to have slightly better prices than most of the others out there.
"Additionally many cheats can be caught out, and subsequently banned by using secure servers, with dumb clients (speedhack,aimbot,etc are easy to see server side)"
On that note - I've wondered before - this wouldn't work for all types of possible cheats, but it seems to me like it should be possible to do some sort of server-side automatic analysis of client behavior, to see if people are using something like a speedhack, or certain other types of cheats, and auto-ban those types of accounts? Or, for gold-farming bots, do something like checking to see if a client has been connected and actively playing for more than like 24 or 36 hours at a time or something like that. Is anyone doing anything like that? Maybe this wouldn't even be done real-time (maybe real-time checks might slow down the servers too much), but maybe detailed logs of player activity could be kept, and analyzed on a seperate server, or during server downtime.
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Funny thing about Boost is that they are owned by Sprint. I'm left scratching my head wondering why Sprint offers a $99 dollar unlimited plan while another part of the same company is offering virtually the same plan for $50? I guess there might be one important difference - the Boost plan offers unlimited 'web', but not ulimited 'data' which probably means you can't use something like a Blackberry or other smartphone with apps. So, no AIM or Skype unless you want to cough up another $49/mo.
I also have to wonder how long before the corporate overlords at Sprint kill this deal? Might just be a somewhat short term offer to grow the brand.
What I'm going to say here, I do not say specifically in context to the Jammie Thomas case - I do think this seems rather unreasonable for what she did. But, there is a larger question - is it ever reasonable to have punative damages that are much larger than the actual damage? I think that yes, in some cases there are.
Consider hypothetically any sort of business that profits from any sort of illegal activity - whether that's theft, or building unsafe cars knowing that only 3 out of a 100000 of your customers will actually be injured by the car. If you, as this company, only have to pay actual damages (or only small punitive damages) to those three out of 100000 customers, you might decide it's more profitable to break the laws regarding safety (because you have 99,997 customers who you won't have to pay damages to) and pay the damages, than to build the car the right way and save those three customers from death or injury.
Or, for theft. Let's say instead of sending thieves to jail (I'm not including copyright violators as thieves here, but people who really bust into people's businesses, houses or cars and take stuff, or pickpockets) we just made the thieves give back what they took, and maybe made them pay an additional $100. If you did that, you'd have a heck of a lot of thieves, because the chances are you'd only get caught thieving maybe 1 in 10. So, 90% of the time you get to keep what you stole (that is, you profit from it), and maybe 10 percent of the time you have to give it back and pay $100. If that were the case, theft would be highly profitable. So, you put very high punitive damages (in this case, years in jail) on the bad behavior, to make it so that even getting caught once makes it not worth it ever to steal (or at least, that's the theory).
The RIAA faces a somewhat analogous situation. In reality, they can only catch and sue a vanishingly small number of copyright violators - they can't catch and sue everyone who does it (I have no idea what the real numbers are, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least 1-in-a-million). So, they want to make it hella scary to face their lawsuits, so it's not worth it to risk even getting caught once. The question we have to decide as a society is, do we think copyright infringement is serious enough of a problem, like theft, or selling unsafe products, that it is just to severely punish that.
I'm not sure that 2 Million dollars is reasonable, but I can't help but thinking that it's gotta be much larger than the actual cost of the tracks that were illegally copied. Maybe something like $200 per song - so that would be damages of like $4,800 in this case. That seems steep enough, seems like, to be a somewhat effective deterrent, while being low enough that someone could reasonably be expected to be able to pay it without totally bankrupting them - you could setup monthly payments - $100/mo for 48 months or something like that. That would be enough damages to make me think twice about sharing out songs. Sure, it's still not super likely I'd be found and sued, but if I was, I'd know that I'd be facing manageable but very unpleasant consequences.
It occurs to me that throughout earth's entire life, there's been a process of the ocean absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. Some living thing in the ocean must extract that carbon and fixate it somehow? Is there any reason that whatever is responsible for that process won't continue to do so?
From my high school and college freshman biology classes, I seem to recall a principle of equilibrium - that whenever something, like a particular nutrient or food source becomes more abundant, it will cause whatever 'feeds' off that nutrient or food source to thrive, which will then cause a reduction in the nutrient or food source, and so equilibrium will be maintained.
Is there some reason that won't happen here, where as the carbon in the ocean becomes more abundant, whatever 'feeds' off of it won't become more abundant too?
Mac addresses aren't part of IPv4 or IPv6 - they are a different layer of networking - the physical/ethernet layer. Now, it's true that for autoconfiguration, because the Mac address is a globally unique (unless you've changed it) 48-bit value, IPv6 implementations will often use the Mac address as the 'host' portion of your IPv6 address, but far as I know, IPv6 doesn't really care what your mac address is. In both IPv4 and IPv6, a IP address gets mapped by the local router (I think, I'm not a network engineer, but this is my understanding) to a Mac address for final delivery, but that mapping is only maintained on your local network.
It's like this, I think: Someone sends a packet to an IP address across the Internet. The sending party has no idea what your Mac address is. In the transfer across the Internet, that IP packet might cross a dozen different type of physical links, each with their own addressing schemes (ATM, Frame Relay, PPP, Ethernet, etc). All that's really important at that point is the IP address. When that IP packet finally reaches your home router, your home router just has to know that IP address 123A::1 resolves to the ethernet network device with Mac address 01:23:45:67:89:ab. I think that's just maintained in a table in RAM in your home broadband routers (higher-end routers like Cisco gear might do something that is faster than a table in RAM, I dunno, but for home-use gear, where you have a very small number of devices on the network, storing those mappings in RAM should be fast enough I think).
1) Privacy: IPv4 addresses can already, largely, be traced back to at least your ISP account, if not the specific device on your local network. You have no IP address privacy. Go read about the Jammie Thomas / RIAA case if you doubt it.
2) Security: NAT provides, basically, a type of a firewall. Firewalls existed before NAT. There's no reason your 'home router' which currently does NAT couldn't firewall your connections in a very similar way to how NAT protects you currrently (e.g., only outbound connections are allowed by default, and in-bound connections when you purposefully open a port). NAT does not give you any better security than a firewall.
What it does do is make it a pain when you *want* to allow people to connect directly to your computer for things like games, Voice- or Video-chat, direct file transfers, bittorrent, etc. This is particularly if you have more than one computer you want to allow people to connect to (yes, with NAT you can do a port forward, but that only works for a single computer; if you have 2 or 3 computers, your pretty much screwed).
But, you say, the Internet works fine right now and I have NAT, but I have no problem using Skype, games, bittorrent, etc. That is because, in order to deal with everyone using NAT, pretty much everyone has come up with proxy schemes. What do I mean by that? Instead of two computers connecting directly to each other, when a NAT is 'in the way', typically the two computers will connect to a third computer. This works, BUT, it's inefficient - it means that your packets have to route through a longer chain of Internet connections (usually), and if the proxy server does not have sufficient bandwidth, your throughput is limited by that proxy server.
So, in the bittorrent example, I believe that if you join a torrent, and you are behind a NAT, then in order for you (A) to upload a chunk of data to another user (B), you both have to connect to a third user (C) who is NOT behind a NAT (or at least, who has properly setup port-forwarding, and I suspect a great many bittorrent users don't really know how to setup port forwarding correctly). If that NAT wasn't there, the torrent would be faster for you and everyone else who is part of that torrent.
The Internet works with NAT, but it would work BETTER without NAT.
DNS isn't a single centralized database. It's many, many databases, organized hierarchically. Granted, if the Internet keeps growing, I suppose there could still be some scalability issues.
See this article for an explanation of how the DNS 'database' is broken up into pieces which are handled by different servers.
Chicken-and-Egg: There is very little home networking equipment available in the US that currently supports IPv6 because there are no ISPs in the US who have deployed IPv6, so there is no market for such equipment.
However, that said, I learned awhile back (I think it may have been from another /. poster) that Apple's Airport line of home routers (at least, the current generation) support IPv6. The Airport express (WiFi-only) is $99. The Airport-extreme, which adds a few local ethernet ports on the back of the device (like a Linksys or Netgear router) in addition to wifi, is $179. Seems a little expensive, but it's cheaper than the $1k+ you were talking about earlier.
Another option is to get a router which is supported by one of the Linux-based 'alternative firmwares', and 'upgrade' one of the non-IPv6 compatible home routers to add support for IPv6. You'll probably void your warranty, but you'll get an inexpensive router (as I'm posting this, Newegg is advertising Linksys WRT54GL routers for $50), which has IPv6 support.
To me, that's the most interesting aspect in watching to see how this goes for Comcast - I imagine that, at least at first, they will run *both* IPv4 and IPv6 on their network. I imagine for existing customers who aren't interested in upgrading, it'll still be IPv4 for quite a while.
But, Comcast has an opportunity, with new customers, to start deploying IPv6. The trick here is, from the customers' perspective, their local network could still support IPv4, I suspect. If you check my journal, I had posted an article I wrote up some months back, describing how I think someone could create a router device which allows IPv4 devices on the local network to use IPv4 locally, but have an IPv6 address which the outside world sees. Basically, the router would do mapping and translation between the (global) IPv6 and (local) IPv4 address.
All of the necessary 'logic' to get this to work could most likely be bundled into a firmware on a device like a Linksys WRT54GL router. Any computers or devices which understand IPv6 could use IPv6 locally, while any devices which don't understand IPv6 could continue to use IPv4 on the local network.
It'll be interesting to see if Comcast gives customers who trial the IPv6 connections, such a router device to take care of all this stuff.
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use ::1, ::2, ::3, ::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?
"Mono is part of OIN."
Mono is a Novell/Ximian product, not a Microsoft product. Unless I'm mistaken, Mono being part of OIN doesn't put ANY legal restrictions on what Microsoft can do. So, I don't see how Mono being part of OIN really has anything to do with whether or not Mono is 'safe' for use by developers and end-users?
I've been trying to read more about this the last couple days, and from what I can find, the 'core' Mono/.Net technologies are apparently considered pretty 'safe' because Microsoft published it as part of an ECMA standard. I guess that provides some protection against lawsuits about that (I'm not really sure, though - I'm not a lawyer, and all that).
Still, there is some question surrounding the ASP.net, ADO.net, and Windows.Forms parts of Mono.
In my opinion, a far bigger problem than handset exlcusivity deals, is the practice of charging customers the same price for cell phone service whether or not they are or are not getting a contract for a phone. Most of the carriers will let you buy phones outright, and even pay month-to-month for service. The problem is, I'm paying the same monthly-fee as if I were on the contract. So, it ends up being financially stupid to buy a phone outright, because you're just paying an extra $200-$300 (in most cases), but not paying less for service than the people whose phones are subsidized by the contracts.
If I'm not getting my phone subsidized, I should be seeing about a $10/mo discount on my service. But, no.
Get rid of that nonsense, and also give people the legal right to modify their phones to unlock them from the original network, and you've solved the 'exclusivity' problem in the simplest possible fashion.
The problem with your statement is. . . how do you buy an iPhone without getting into a 2 year contract with AT&T? Ok, I suppose AT&T probably offers a (much more expensive) non-contract price to buy the phone, so you can probably do that (I'm not sure in this case - maybe they only offer the phone if you sign the contract?).
But more importantly, the phone is software-locked to the AT&T network.
Generally speaking, though, I too am of a libertarian mindset here - I agree that that government should be limited in how much it interfers in business relationships and contracts. If Apple freely chooses to sell iPhones only to AT&T, then it should have the freedom to do that. . .
My problem comes in the fact that Apple can lock the phone to AT&T's network, and then the DMCA can potentially be used to prevent me from hacking the phone to unlock it (or at least, prevent someone who has figure out how to hack it from distributing patches/software to unlock it). Yes, I know that the copyright office issued a DMCA exemption for unlocking cell phones, but that isn't a permanent change of law - that's just a (currently) temporary exemption.
So, on the one hand, the government has no business trying to force companies to not do exclusive hardware deals. . . but on the other hand, IMO, the government has no business 'protecting' businesses by making it illegal for people to modify the software in their cellphones to work with other networks, or even for third parties to assist (heck, other cell-networks and their vendors should be able to assist me in hacking my phone to work on their network).
The legitimate function of government is protecting our rights, not making wireless corporations' (or any other copyright holders') wishes come true.
I'm thinking the experiment would work better when the moon is, err, at 1/2 (can't remember the name) - that is, when the light side of the moon is sort of perpendicular to your line of view from the earth. That way, you get a 'sideways' view of the debris cloud, instead of straight on (which might be a bit hard to see). Also, I bet having dark space as the background will make the cloud show up better than having the lit surface of the moon - better contrast.
The simple solution to that is to slow down and you won't get gravel damage. Cars moving 10-15 mph don't usually kick up that much gravel, but once you get going faster than that, or if you accelerate suddenly, that's when you get the problems.
That's really a great point - not all roads necessarily *have* to be paved. Maybe in very rural areas with few residents or businesses along such roads, there's simply not the money there to pay for paving. Maybe we shouldn't be spending money on paving every inch of road in the country. People can't seem to get their heads around the idea that governments (whether federal, state, or local) don't have unlimited access to funds. Sometimes, you have to find places to cut funding.
Would it be better to cut funding to emergency services like police, fire, ems? Maybe the schools? Personally, I'd rather grind up a few rural roads into gravel, than to cut funding for education or emergency services (although, that's probably happening too, unfortunately).
Proven? Really? What's the proof? That Microsoft hasn't sued yet? That doesn't stop them from suing in the future. I'm not aware of any 'proof' that the Mono fear is stupid. If anything, I used to not be too worried about Mono, until Microsoft sued TomTom for their use of Linux. That was NOT a lawsuit over Mono, but rather over VFAT and some other stuff. But, it proved that Microsoft is willing to use stupid patents to sue Linux users. So, now I'm worried that in the future, they will decide to sue over Mono. What would stop them if they should decide to sue?
Some things might not have a purpose, that's true, but there is nothing wrong with trying to find out if there might be a purpose. If every scientist took the attitude you expressed, science would never get anywhere, because anything which didn't have an *obvious* purpose would never be further investigated. Sometimes in science, you have to come up with lots of wrong hypotheses, test them, then throw them out, before someone comes up with the right one. Sometimes there could be more than one 'right' answer. I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprints serve multiple purposes. Some people have mentioned that it increases the sense of touch - I'm not familiar with that scientific research, but it sounds plausible. Others have mentioned that, like channels on a tire, it allows better grip when the skin is wet. That sounds plausible too - maybe *both* ideas are right?
All sorts of questions which might seem stupid to most people, will come up with surprising answers/results when someone does bother to pursue the answer. Some of those answers help us learn how to create/engineer things better - we can often find inspiration for 'new' ways of doing things based upon observations of the adaptations that different life forms have.
It never said she sampled her own intestinal tissue. From the article, it sounds like she got the slides from her doctor, after the pathologist had already 'examined' and missed the inflammation in the tissue. Honestly, she should probably be suing the pathologist for malpractice for declaring the slide to be 'completely normal', when it was not. This is also why second opinions are probably a good idea. One doc finds nothing wrong with a tissue sample? Ask to have a second doctor, not affiliated with the original hospital/practice, examine and give a second opinion.
I blame the parents. Adoption is a wonderful thing (or at least can be - of course, if adoptive parents abuse the kid, then it's not wonderful), but you should probably sit down with a kid sometime *before* they are old enough to be in a high-school biology class, and explain something like that to them. If a kid finds out from you, I imagine they are likely to be much less upset than if they find out about it on their own, later.
At least the answer was adoption. I thought your story was leading up to a "Your father was the postman" sort of ending. Better adoption than cheating, although testing one's own blood could lead to discoveries like that.
At least, that's the ruling by the appeals court, according to that article. The article makes it sound like, since the tech had been given permission to access the computer as part of the course of doing service for the guy, that the subsequent finding of the materials on the hard drive was not an illegal search. The techs found the evidence *legally*, and once found, they are allowed to voluntarily turn over evidence of a crime to law enforcement.
I believe (though I'm not sure - IANAL), that if private individuals illegally obtain evidence, it would still not be admissible in court, even though it wasn't the police doing the illegal evidence gathering.
It strikes me that, considering how unstable and impossible to observe this stuff is, maybe we should just call it Unobtainium.
Well, the fact that they say the bundle is targeted at the retail industry would lead me to suspect that there might be Email, Web, plus some sort of Point of Sale/Inventory Management/Accounting/Customer Relationship Management system (hopefully all integrated together seemlessly, so that the CRM is tightly integrated with the Point of Sale portion, and the Point of Sale portion is tightly integrated with both the inventory control and the accounting). I might be giving Dell too much credit here, but if I were starting a retail business, and I were looking for a single-server Small Business in a Box solution for my small Retail business, I would expect at least those things.
I find it very. . . interesting, that on the McAfee website, you can turn ON the auto-renew yourself through the account management, but to get it turned OFF, you have to contact their customer service reps. What kind of BS is that? I'm getting my parents away from McAfee, and I myself left McAfee a couple years back. They used to be a good company to deal with. Now, I just don't trust them anymore. Setting up your website like that just screams out to me that they are trying to make it as hard as possible for people to get out of the auto-renew.
Those "Free" versions (AVG, Avast, maybe others) are often restricted in the fine print so that you can do no commercial activity whatsoever on your computer. It's ambiguously enough stated that even just using a remote access program to access your computer at your job to do work from home might be violating the EULA. Granted, it's not likely that they'll actually catch you, but the point still remains that if you do anything that might be construed as generating income now or in the future, you might be a fly in their web.
Not an issue as much with ClamWin, but ClamWin has no real-time scanner, which despite the parent post's assertion, do sometimes stop infections before they happen (not always, it's true, but enough of the time that it's definitely worth having anti-virus software of some sort). The On-access scanner isn't *required*, but most users will not remember to manually scan stuff 100 percent of the time. The On-access scanners, will provide much more consistent protection against infection than a manual scanner, for most users.
Personally, I've been using the AVG Free edition, and if I need to upgrade to a 'commercial use' license in the future, AVG seems to have slightly better prices than most of the others out there.
"Additionally many cheats can be caught out, and subsequently banned by using secure servers, with dumb clients (speedhack,aimbot,etc are easy to see server side)"
On that note - I've wondered before - this wouldn't work for all types of possible cheats, but it seems to me like it should be possible to do some sort of server-side automatic analysis of client behavior, to see if people are using something like a speedhack, or certain other types of cheats, and auto-ban those types of accounts? Or, for gold-farming bots, do something like checking to see if a client has been connected and actively playing for more than like 24 or 36 hours at a time or something like that. Is anyone doing anything like that? Maybe this wouldn't even be done real-time (maybe real-time checks might slow down the servers too much), but maybe detailed logs of player activity could be kept, and analyzed on a seperate server, or during server downtime.