99% of the referenced document refers to CALEA, not FISA. These are ordinary, run-of-the-mill, catch-a-criminal wiretaps. The sort that are ordered VIA WARRANT for drug lords, mob figures and anyone else using the telephone in the furtherance of a criminal operation.
Gosh, do you think there might actually be some CRIME going on in US cities? Of course not, since Bush took office all crime is now centralized in the White House, right? Do you actually believe that there is so little crime going on that these wiretaps must be for political reasons rather than criminal?
And on the usual happy think-of-the-children note, wiretaps in relation to child exploitation are free. So all you need is a naked nine-year-old in the picture and wiretaps are free.
Paranoid bullshit. 99% of the document referenced refers to court-ordered wiretaps, like the sort that are obtained - VIA WARRANT - for drug lords, mob figures, etc.
Simple. Some online vendor takes a credit card and doesn't deliver, I have 60 days to report it and get my money back. Some online vendor takes a credit card and passes it to all their friends in Romania, I get a new card and a bunch of voided charges. Too bad for the merchants that got ripped off, but I lose nothing.
I play online poker (or any other online game) and am cheated. Where do I get my money back? I don't. I'm just poorer and perhaps somewhat more experienced.
Today, if you want to go to a popular concert or sports event you cannot buy a ticket. You have to deal with a ticket broker or scalper. Period. All the tickets were gone in 10 minutes by agents of the ticket brokers and scalpers.
What this does is vastly inflate ticket prices. Because the ticket brokers can sell Super Bowl tickets for $2000 does this mean there is a market at that price? No, what it means is that by outright theft the brokers were able to snatch all the tickets up so nobody could buy them at the original price. Then they get to charge whatever they want.
This is patently unfair and most places have rules about ticket resale. There are laws in some states and municipalities governing this sort of thing. What this is all about is introducing artificial scarcity into the market so the brokers and scalpers get to make money.
This is about as fair as stealing someone's mail and selling it back to them.
Apparently what a lot of people do not realize is the common, off-the-shelf freeware stego tools insert signatures of the program used into the file itself. Thus, by examining a JPEG image with a suitable steganography detection tool it will reveal that such a program was used.
This utterly removes the utility of steganography in one pass. If the program leaves a signature, there is no longer a reason for using it.
And pictures are not the only thing. There is a tool that will embed data into a Windows.EXE file. Of course, it leaves a signature so it can determine if there is anything included in any given.EXE file.
Pointless. Sure you can encrypt the data you are hiding, but the point of hiding is to remain hidden. With a signature it is obvious there is something hidden there. Do you not believe there are people checking USENET posts and picture exchange sites for this sort of thing? OK, I can post a picture of a dog with some child porn hidden in it. I would then publically offer the password/location/etc for $10 via e-Gold. Of course I'm not going to get caught but the picture will get taken down. Probably before I get paid. This stopped being a good way to exchange pictures of abused children several years ago.
Sorry, but every Internet merchant is a "retailer".
Subscriptions aren't the point. This would have required eliminating the model where you trick someone into paying for shipping for something that is otherwise free just so you can continue to bill then month after month for the rest of the collection. Video Professor is one example of this. Not that this would have been all that bad a deal, but it doesn't sound like an intended consequence.
There are also plenty of other service-related "retailers" that do reoccurring billings to credit cards. This would have ended this practice as well.
There are many businesses that accept credit cards via third parties. The real "merchant" is this third party but all of the personal information (except for credit card number) is transmitted to the vendor/author/publisher/etc.
Amazon has a service for this, for example. Your personal information is being sold (in a manner of speaking) or at least transferred from the merchant to this vendor that is really selling you the goods. Wouldn't this violate many of the recent laws? I would certainly think it would.
I would imagine that such services are now possibly illegal to use in Canada. Maybe other places as well. Who knows?
If you are not familiar with this game, you aren't going to understand. And probably not understand the true depth to which gaming can descend.
Custer's Revenge was released one morning in 1983 I believe. It was pulled from every store by noon. If you haven't heard of it, that is probably why. It very nearly sold out of the modest number of units produced. If it had been left on the market it almost certainly would have been the best-selling video game of the time. Well over a million copies.
It was a vile, disgusting game. The objective of the game was very simple. You moved a figure wearing a cavalry shirt and no pants across the playfield to reach the squaw tied to a post. Then, by manipulating the controls, you would have the cavalry soldier repeatedly rape the squaw, accumulating points.
Do you understand why some control might be useful?
Your mistake is thinking that reselling the same services is competition. DSL is utterly dependent on the ILEC physical plant. Same with just about all wireless - what are the ground stations connected to, satellite? No, it all comes down to the same thing. Even the cable providers are connected to the telephone network using ILEC-leased infrastructure. Same thing with satellite ground stations.
Sorry, there is but one network. There are no competitors, really.
What the telecom infrastructure owners are currently faced with is delivering services to competitors at rates which allow their competitors to underbid them for identical retail services. This grew out of the 1984 breakup and was seen as a way to introduce competition into telecommunications.
It has been somewhat successful in that goal, but it isn't any sort of solution. What it has forced has been the continual degradation of customer service from the ILECs because the only way they can compete price-wise is by cutting non-essentials. Customer service was the first to go. Installation and physical plant maintenance was next.
It as if you had a car dealer that was required to sell cars in bulk at a substantial discount to other car dealers who could then turn around and sell these cars to the public for less than the original dealer could afford to. The original dealer would be forced to cut prices to match and cut services to continue to be able to afford to keep up. Mandating the bulk sales to introduce this artifical competition is absurd and just creates a race to the bottom where everyone is competing on price and everything else is sacrificed. This is exactly where we are today.
Yes, I have the option of choosing telephone service from a variety of different retailers. All of these retailers are using the same infrastructure owned by the ILEC, in my case Qwest. Qwest has awful customer service and is doing a lousy job of maintaining their physical plant. But the structure of this deal ensures that no competing physical plant will ever be built. Why would it when you can lease access at a discounted rate that is far, far less than what it would cost to build it? Or, as Qwest is discovering, even maintain it?
I used to be under Ameritech/SBC. Same problems. I could get a T1+phone+data from a "competitor" for for less than I could get the same number of phone lines from SBC. Why? Because SBC was required to lease out the infrastructure at below-cost levels.
Where does this artifical nonsense of "competition" end up? Well, nobody is building, improving or replacing physical plant except in unusual circumstances. Verizon has apparently discovered that if you run fiber all the way that you no longer have to lease out the infrastructure. That apparent loophole is all the reason needed to replace the copper with fiber. I do not believe there are solid figures for maintenance cost but I would suspect that buried fiber is substantially more expensive to maintain than buried copper in the long run. So if Verizon has to lease out the fiber at less-than-cost levels as they have to do with the copper you can expect fiber to go unmaintained and to stop running fiber. I can't imagine the loophole lasting very long and I would not want to be orphaned with fiber that nobody wants to maintain.
There is the usual sorts of comments about how the infrastructure should be publiclly owned. Sure, look at some other countries where this has been the case. The difference is that the original infrastructure was built by the government, not nationalized by the government. The US has never nationalized anything that I know of and it is highly doubtful they would start with the telephone network. I don't see that happening. Nor do I believe it would be in anyone's best interest.
So where could competition come from? It is difficult to say. The current artificial competition is very destructive and has created no real competitors but a bunch of leeches. Just as with a leech, if the host (the ILEC) the parasite dies. The real solution to this would be to have competing infrastructure - the ILEC has the copper and someone new runs fiber. Unfortunately, anyone owning physical plant today has to be prepared to support the army of leeches that would come forth. So why would anyone build physical plant today if they have to share it and probably share it below cost?
This isn't competition. It is a suicide pact. If an ILEC folds, everyone loses and we all get to discover there isn't any "competition" at all.
Email is useless. It cannot be relied upon. Mail servers will silently drop your mail after acknowledging receipt. Mail servers will reject your mail for no logical reason. All of this is in the name of fighting spam.
Because of spam, you can assume only that if you send an email and do not get a response that it never got through. If the only contact you have with a customer is an email address, you aren't going to get anywhere. Mail can be blocked at any point between the sender and the recipient without the knowledge or consent of the recipient - telling the recipient that they need to unblock your email is pointless as they may have nothing to do with the blocking.
Face it, email is suitable for sending threatening letters to georgebush@whitehouse.gov, love notes to your girlfriend and jokes to others in the office. And that's about it.
Sadly, I think you are misinformed. Greatly. None of the code that you are waiting around for is in the BIOS. It is all in BIOS extensions that are called blindly by the BIOS because of address slot assignments dated from the IBM PC.
So, if you want your RAID to work it's BIOS extension needs to be called. The fact that you replace the BIOS with something else isn't going to change that requirement one little bit. Now you might be able to work around this if you didn't boot from the RAID and did not access it until an OS had taken over completely. In that case you could move the initialization from BIOS-time to OS startup.
The PXE problem is also outside the BIOS and running code on the network adapter, not part the BIOS.
Could you have a BIOS that didn't call extensions? Sure. But then lots of hardware simply would not work.
Do you have any suggestions as to how evidence of distribution might be obtained?
I didn't think so. The Internet is a consequences-free zone. You can't convict people of crimes on the Internet because it is impossible for anyone to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt. In most cases, there isn't any evidence at all - only the bragging of idiots.
This case, if it would have required evidence of distribution would have been decided immediately in the defendant's favor.
There can't be an effective law against redistributing other people's work. It is going to continue to be like speeding - 1 out of 1,000 or even 10,000 people gets a ticket. If you are unlucky, you get a ticket. This has no real effect on speeding because the other 9,999 people that got away with it continue to speed.
There is no respect for laws that cannot be enforced today. So, we might as well get used to it.
Comments here seem to somehow imply that manufacturers should want to include a copy of Windows in some fashion with a PC that the customer can choose to pay the OEM price for. They would - seemingly - pay Microsoft for this.
Well, that isn't how it works. The reason the OEM price is less than the retail price is because the computer manufacturer put Windows on the machine and tailored it specifically for that environment and what not. They also get to absorb the tech support load. You do not get to call Microsoft and run up their support expenses with an OEM license. Instead, you call the computer manufacturer because part of the OEM deal is they handle support calls.
So, without the ability to control how Windows is installed on the computer it is unlikely the manufacturer is going to give you OEM tech support or an OEM price. Microsoft isn't going to give you the OEM price and take the support call load. So this would require people to pay retail price for Windows and go to Microsoft for support.
Microsoft would love to do this. The OEM deal is in the consumers and manufacturers best interest and not all that great for Microsoft. Except for perhaps reinforcing the dominance of Windows which is unlikely to be dimenshed any time soon. Microsoft would experience 2x or 3x their current revenue should this happen.
They are a reseller of an existing service - access to the telephone network. They do not provide anything on their own. No service, no infrastructure, no protocol on an existing infrastructure. Instead they are using the infrastructure that exists because of the telephone carriers as a club to beat them to death. Interestingly enough, if Vonage ever really succeeds and Sprint or Verizon shuts their doors, Vonage loses.
An exact parallel to this would be delivering IP video to cable customers through their cable modem. You buy a little box which takes the video data stream and outputs a video signal. Then the cable customer could drop television service in favor of this new service. Except in order to get the video programming the provider is a cable subscriber. So the cable company would get to be both the network and the wholesaler of the programming. Since the programming would be almost free (1 cable subscriber bill) it should make tons of money, right?
If the above seems like a clever idea to you, I've got another one. Have a little cart from which you sell hamburgers. You can take the cart around to people on the street so they don't have to drive or walk as far. In order to get these hamburgers you just work out a bulk purchase plan from McDonalds and resell them from your little cart. The idea would be to get McDonalds to agree to a such a low price that you could make money on this.
How long do you think such buy-bulk-services-for-resale schemes can go on? Sooner or later if you treat your supplier as a competitor your supplier is either (a) going to shut down or (b) shut your service off. Either is death to the buy-in-bulk reseller.
Sure, you can say that the infrastructure (or the hamburgers) should be public and any retailer should be able to use this infrastructure to compete with each other. That's fine now that it exists. But in order to get that first hamburger (or telephone switch) it was necessary to make a risky investment. Governments are not in the business of making risky investments. They either invest in sure things or they line up someone else to get the privilege of making the investment. We wouldn't have the phone system we have today if it was up to the government in 1900 to build it. They would have waited until 1950 to do it and then where do you think the US would be?
We have been engaged in an interesting experiment for the past 15 years or so. It is called the Internet. Under the terms of this experiment, everyone is immune to prosecution because, well, it's the Internet. It isn't "Real Life".
Not knowing this, the folks at DirectBuy do not realize that they have utterly no recourse to anything stated about them, no matter how unsubstantiated, defamatory or libelous. Their lawyer seems to be under the impression that there is some other sort of universal shield law for everone (publishers, web service providers and posters alike) on the Internet. I suspect once one gets their head around the idea that it is the Internet it will become obvious that they can't sue an IP address and defending an IP address is pointless.
Unsubstantiated, anonymous reviews on the Internet are the norm. You can find scathing reviews of high school dates intended to utterly destroy people. You can find scathing reviews of nearly any business that some customer has had a problem with with the clear intent to force the company out of business. Normally such sites do not post anything positive, mostly because positive reviews are hard to come by. People are far more motivated when they perceive they have been wronged.
Of course, if you find such a review of your personality, your business or anything else you might as well just declare bankruptcy, move to a deserted island and kill yourself because it is highly unlikely you are going to get any sympathy on the Internet. And getting the information removed is impossible. After all, it is the Internet and nobody is responsible for anything.
The Internet is a different sort of writing. What works on the Internet are short pieces. There are no novels on the Internet because nobody has the attention span or time to read a novel there.
For a professional writer that is any good, it is almost impossible to work within the bounds of the Internet. It is damn confining. We're not talking about having to polish something to get it expressed in absolutely the fewest words possible. That doesn't work either. What is required are both speed and terseness.
Also, the Internet is free. You might find some people getting shown ads in exchange for their reading, but nobody is going to pay enough to keep a writer from starving. All of the tip-jar and subscription services have pretty much proven that you can't get people to pay directly on the Internet. Ads are an indirect form of payment, but that only goes so far. The thing you need to make ads pay is massive numbers of lookers and immediate, topical content. Again we're back to speed and terseness.
I don't see it being good for people trying to break into writing as a career unless they are looking to write press releases and advertising copy. The misspelled bad grammer that is taken as a given on the Internet is no way to polish your craft. There are no "editors" just harsh critics, most of whom are not interested in grooming an author for success but just complaining about crap. Sure, the Internet also enables some collaborative work and that can be good. But a bunch of beginning writers trying to find their way without any guidance is like a little league team without the coach.
I'd say if you are good at "Internet writing" you are unlikely to be good in other published works. If you are a professional author you probably have nothing to fear from the Internet either.
In the US you cannot use a radio station for "music on hold". You can find lots of stuff about this all over. You either need to pay ASCAP fees or find something else to put on your phone system.
Every once in a while ASCAP goes and calls folks using radio stations to tell them to stop or get sued. I've not been called but I have briefly used a radio for this purpose until hearing about this.
If you set up a stand selling heroin on a busy street corner you will have a line of customers around the block - until you get busted. And you will, eventually, get busted.
Contrast this with a lemonade stand with no customers.
The difference in the US is that people will go out of their way to do something they believe (a) is illegal and (b) has a low risk of consequences. Movie and music pirating fall in this category. This company, doing business from a foreign country with several different names will eventually be shut down. But they will likely have made millions of dollars before that happens. They will lose whatever cash is lying around though. So stashing it all in the bank for retirement isn't really an option.
NetFlix is a temporary abberation. It is because Internet distribution of quality video is impractical today. If it was practical, you would be downloading movies for free just like you are downloading music for free today.
Today nobody wants to wait 36+ hours for their movie selection to download through clogged P2P nodes. NetFlix is far more practical. It also is helping a significant percentage of their customer base to build up huge video libraries just waiting for the Internet speeds to make redistribution practical.
NetFlix has at most five years left to run. Maybe just 2-3 if broadband penetration of higher speeds gets going in the US.
The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.
This means any commercial enterprise which revolves around selling music is doomed. People will redistribute it and remove any possible value from your product.
This means the end of recorded music as a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't see a choice. I understand this is now how it is in China today - they gave up against piracy. I is going to be that way elsewhere shortly.
How is a credit card number "sensitive" information in any way whatsoever? You follow the average credit-using American and you will find a trail of credit card number spread far and wide.
For the period 1950-1990 this wasn't really a problem. Now suddenly it is a problem? How? I reguarly have fraudulent charges put on a credit card. At least once a year. Want to know how much this "identity theft" costs me?
Nothing. Ever. Never has. Never will.
Last time around Blizzard got stuck for some chargebacks. Someone decided to try to use my credit card number to pay for three WoW subscriptions. They failed. Blizzard evidently didn't check the cards out too well and didn't question why a US-address card was being used from Australia. Too bad for them, they had to pay the chargeback fee to their credit card processor. This was because they did not invest in enough fraud detection and are not manually checking out these charges that have a high potential of fraud. I suppose the tradeoff is worth it if the volume of non-fraud is high enough.
I hear constantly how much of a problem this is for card holders and I simply do not understand. I have never heard of a card holder being held responsible for a fraudulent charge, ever. I have never heard of anyone other than the merchant getting penalized in any way. The person committing the fraud is never pursued and never has any consequences.
Now, in my opinion it would be very simple to stop 90% of credit card fraud - have the card issuing companies (Visa, MC, etc.) prosecute the people committing fraud. Currently because nobody wants to press charges law enforcement does nothing. Fix this, get some enforcement and the problem will go away. Unlike copyright infringement, most countries will gladly prosecute credit card fraud, if they are given the information and tools to do so. When both the person committing the crime and the crime itself are in the same country there is no excuse for not pursuing it.
No prosecution simply means that the risk vs. reward balance is all screwed up. There is no risk today, just reward. Which is why there is so much credit card fraud.
This has been the way of things when the Romans were looking for some new chariot designs. The concept that there are lots of "new" things with computers has led to this being more rigorously enforced.
The biggest problem with this are things like file systems, memory management and such where experienced people are passed over for "new innovation" from younger people with no experience. Then we get to see the same problems that were fixed in 1970 being recreated and needing to be fixed again.
I don't see it having much to do with salary. It is the idea that older people do not have anything to contribute because somehow we have moved past all of the things that the old people know about. The thinking goes that now we have new problems and need younger people uncorrupted by old problems and old solutions to solve these new problems. Then they find out that these "new" problems aren't so new after all and they only reason they are cropping up now is that some inexperienced person didn't research things well enough to know about existing solutions.
But still we have managers that want "younger, energetic people" to work for them. Yup, older people are a rarity in the IT world. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I create artwork using cat litter and the various objects naturally found in it. I believe this is the highest expression of modern artwork and the world is suffering from not being able to behold in large public forums the beauty of my creations.
I believe any reasonable government would support me in the lifestyle that I require in order to achieve the relaxed, stress-free state that is required to create my artwork. The beauty of these creations would certainly justify several million a year in support in order to ensure that these creations continue to flow from my creative hands.
Please write your local government officials about this so that I can be releived of my tedious day job so that these magnificent creations can flow from my talented hands
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99% of the referenced document refers to CALEA, not FISA. These are ordinary, run-of-the-mill, catch-a-criminal wiretaps. The sort that are ordered VIA WARRANT for drug lords, mob figures and anyone else using the telephone in the furtherance of a criminal operation.
Gosh, do you think there might actually be some CRIME going on in US cities? Of course not, since Bush took office all crime is now centralized in the White House, right? Do you actually believe that there is so little crime going on that these wiretaps must be for political reasons rather than criminal?
And on the usual happy think-of-the-children note, wiretaps in relation to child exploitation are free. So all you need is a naked nine-year-old in the picture and wiretaps are free.
Paranoid bullshit. 99% of the document referenced refers to court-ordered wiretaps, like the sort that are obtained - VIA WARRANT - for drug lords, mob figures, etc.
Simple. Some online vendor takes a credit card and doesn't deliver, I have 60 days to report it and get my money back. Some online vendor takes a credit card and passes it to all their friends in Romania, I get a new card and a bunch of voided charges. Too bad for the merchants that got ripped off, but I lose nothing.
I play online poker (or any other online game) and am cheated. Where do I get my money back? I don't. I'm just poorer and perhaps somewhat more experienced.
Today, if you want to go to a popular concert or sports event you cannot buy a ticket. You have to deal with a ticket broker or scalper. Period. All the tickets were gone in 10 minutes by agents of the ticket brokers and scalpers.
What this does is vastly inflate ticket prices. Because the ticket brokers can sell Super Bowl tickets for $2000 does this mean there is a market at that price? No, what it means is that by outright theft the brokers were able to snatch all the tickets up so nobody could buy them at the original price. Then they get to charge whatever they want.
This is patently unfair and most places have rules about ticket resale. There are laws in some states and municipalities governing this sort of thing. What this is all about is introducing artificial scarcity into the market so the brokers and scalpers get to make money.
This is about as fair as stealing someone's mail and selling it back to them.
Apparently what a lot of people do not realize is the common, off-the-shelf freeware stego tools insert signatures of the program used into the file itself. Thus, by examining a JPEG image with a suitable steganography detection tool it will reveal that such a program was used.
.EXE file. Of course, it leaves a signature so it can determine if there is anything included in any given .EXE file.
This utterly removes the utility of steganography in one pass. If the program leaves a signature, there is no longer a reason for using it.
And pictures are not the only thing. There is a tool that will embed data into a Windows
Pointless. Sure you can encrypt the data you are hiding, but the point of hiding is to remain hidden. With a signature it is obvious there is something hidden there. Do you not believe there are people checking USENET posts and picture exchange sites for this sort of thing? OK, I can post a picture of a dog with some child porn hidden in it. I would then publically offer the password/location/etc for $10 via e-Gold. Of course I'm not going to get caught but the picture will get taken down. Probably before I get paid. This stopped being a good way to exchange pictures of abused children several years ago.
Sorry, but every Internet merchant is a "retailer".
Subscriptions aren't the point. This would have required eliminating the model where you trick someone into paying for shipping for something that is otherwise free just so you can continue to bill then month after month for the rest of the collection. Video Professor is one example of this. Not that this would have been all that bad a deal, but it doesn't sound like an intended consequence.
There are also plenty of other service-related "retailers" that do reoccurring billings to credit cards. This would have ended this practice as well.
There are many businesses that accept credit cards via third parties. The real "merchant" is this third party but all of the personal information (except for credit card number) is transmitted to the vendor/author/publisher/etc.
Amazon has a service for this, for example. Your personal information is being sold (in a manner of speaking) or at least transferred from the merchant to this vendor that is really selling you the goods. Wouldn't this violate many of the recent laws? I would certainly think it would.
I would imagine that such services are now possibly illegal to use in Canada. Maybe other places as well. Who knows?
If you are not familiar with this game, you aren't going to understand. And probably not understand the true depth to which gaming can descend.
Custer's Revenge was released one morning in 1983 I believe. It was pulled from every store by noon. If you haven't heard of it, that is probably why. It very nearly sold out of the modest number of units produced. If it had been left on the market it almost certainly would have been the best-selling video game of the time. Well over a million copies.
It was a vile, disgusting game. The objective of the game was very simple. You moved a figure wearing a cavalry shirt and no pants across the playfield to reach the squaw tied to a post. Then, by manipulating the controls, you would have the cavalry soldier repeatedly rape the squaw, accumulating points.
Do you understand why some control might be useful?
Your mistake is thinking that reselling the same services is competition. DSL is utterly dependent on the ILEC physical plant. Same with just about all wireless - what are the ground stations connected to, satellite? No, it all comes down to the same thing. Even the cable providers are connected to the telephone network using ILEC-leased infrastructure. Same thing with satellite ground stations.
Sorry, there is but one network. There are no competitors, really.
What the telecom infrastructure owners are currently faced with is delivering services to competitors at rates which allow their competitors to underbid them for identical retail services. This grew out of the 1984 breakup and was seen as a way to introduce competition into telecommunications.
It has been somewhat successful in that goal, but it isn't any sort of solution. What it has forced has been the continual degradation of customer service from the ILECs because the only way they can compete price-wise is by cutting non-essentials. Customer service was the first to go. Installation and physical plant maintenance was next.
It as if you had a car dealer that was required to sell cars in bulk at a substantial discount to other car dealers who could then turn around and sell these cars to the public for less than the original dealer could afford to. The original dealer would be forced to cut prices to match and cut services to continue to be able to afford to keep up. Mandating the bulk sales to introduce this artifical competition is absurd and just creates a race to the bottom where everyone is competing on price and everything else is sacrificed. This is exactly where we are today.
Yes, I have the option of choosing telephone service from a variety of different retailers. All of these retailers are using the same infrastructure owned by the ILEC, in my case Qwest. Qwest has awful customer service and is doing a lousy job of maintaining their physical plant. But the structure of this deal ensures that no competing physical plant will ever be built. Why would it when you can lease access at a discounted rate that is far, far less than what it would cost to build it? Or, as Qwest is discovering, even maintain it?
I used to be under Ameritech/SBC. Same problems. I could get a T1+phone+data from a "competitor" for for less than I could get the same number of phone lines from SBC. Why? Because SBC was required to lease out the infrastructure at below-cost levels.
Where does this artifical nonsense of "competition" end up? Well, nobody is building, improving or replacing physical plant except in unusual circumstances. Verizon has apparently discovered that if you run fiber all the way that you no longer have to lease out the infrastructure. That apparent loophole is all the reason needed to replace the copper with fiber. I do not believe there are solid figures for maintenance cost but I would suspect that buried fiber is substantially more expensive to maintain than buried copper in the long run. So if Verizon has to lease out the fiber at less-than-cost levels as they have to do with the copper you can expect fiber to go unmaintained and to stop running fiber. I can't imagine the loophole lasting very long and I would not want to be orphaned with fiber that nobody wants to maintain.
There is the usual sorts of comments about how the infrastructure should be publiclly owned. Sure, look at some other countries where this has been the case. The difference is that the original infrastructure was built by the government, not nationalized by the government. The US has never nationalized anything that I know of and it is highly doubtful they would start with the telephone network. I don't see that happening. Nor do I believe it would be in anyone's best interest.
So where could competition come from? It is difficult to say. The current artificial competition is very destructive and has created no real competitors but a bunch of leeches. Just as with a leech, if the host (the ILEC) the parasite dies. The real solution to this would be to have competing infrastructure - the ILEC has the copper and someone new runs fiber. Unfortunately, anyone owning physical plant today has to be prepared to support the army of leeches that would come forth. So why would anyone build physical plant today if they have to share it and probably share it below cost?
This isn't competition. It is a suicide pact. If an ILEC folds, everyone loses and we all get to discover there isn't any "competition" at all.
Email is useless. It cannot be relied upon. Mail servers will silently drop your mail after acknowledging receipt. Mail servers will reject your mail for no logical reason. All of this is in the name of fighting spam.
Because of spam, you can assume only that if you send an email and do not get a response that it never got through. If the only contact you have with a customer is an email address, you aren't going to get anywhere. Mail can be blocked at any point between the sender and the recipient without the knowledge or consent of the recipient - telling the recipient that they need to unblock your email is pointless as they may have nothing to do with the blocking.
Face it, email is suitable for sending threatening letters to georgebush@whitehouse.gov, love notes to your girlfriend and jokes to others in the office. And that's about it.
Sadly, I think you are misinformed. Greatly. None of the code that you are waiting around for is in the BIOS. It is all in BIOS extensions that are called blindly by the BIOS because of address slot assignments dated from the IBM PC.
So, if you want your RAID to work it's BIOS extension needs to be called. The fact that you replace the BIOS with something else isn't going to change that requirement one little bit. Now you might be able to work around this if you didn't boot from the RAID and did not access it until an OS had taken over completely. In that case you could move the initialization from BIOS-time to OS startup.
The PXE problem is also outside the BIOS and running code on the network adapter, not part the BIOS.
Could you have a BIOS that didn't call extensions? Sure. But then lots of hardware simply would not work.
Do you have any suggestions as to how evidence of distribution might be obtained?
I didn't think so. The Internet is a consequences-free zone. You can't convict people of crimes on the Internet because it is impossible for anyone to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt. In most cases, there isn't any evidence at all - only the bragging of idiots.
This case, if it would have required evidence of distribution would have been decided immediately in the defendant's favor.
There can't be an effective law against redistributing other people's work. It is going to continue to be like speeding - 1 out of 1,000 or even 10,000 people gets a ticket. If you are unlucky, you get a ticket. This has no real effect on speeding because the other 9,999 people that got away with it continue to speed.
There is no respect for laws that cannot be enforced today. So, we might as well get used to it.
Comments here seem to somehow imply that manufacturers should want to include a copy of Windows in some fashion with a PC that the customer can choose to pay the OEM price for. They would - seemingly - pay Microsoft for this.
Well, that isn't how it works. The reason the OEM price is less than the retail price is because the computer manufacturer put Windows on the machine and tailored it specifically for that environment and what not. They also get to absorb the tech support load. You do not get to call Microsoft and run up their support expenses with an OEM license. Instead, you call the computer manufacturer because part of the OEM deal is they handle support calls.
So, without the ability to control how Windows is installed on the computer it is unlikely the manufacturer is going to give you OEM tech support or an OEM price. Microsoft isn't going to give you the OEM price and take the support call load. So this would require people to pay retail price for Windows and go to Microsoft for support.
Microsoft would love to do this. The OEM deal is in the consumers and manufacturers best interest and not all that great for Microsoft. Except for perhaps reinforcing the dominance of Windows which is unlikely to be dimenshed any time soon. Microsoft would experience 2x or 3x their current revenue should this happen.
They are a reseller of an existing service - access to the telephone network. They do not provide anything on their own. No service, no infrastructure, no protocol on an existing infrastructure. Instead they are using the infrastructure that exists because of the telephone carriers as a club to beat them to death. Interestingly enough, if Vonage ever really succeeds and Sprint or Verizon shuts their doors, Vonage loses.
An exact parallel to this would be delivering IP video to cable customers through their cable modem. You buy a little box which takes the video data stream and outputs a video signal. Then the cable customer could drop television service in favor of this new service. Except in order to get the video programming the provider is a cable subscriber. So the cable company would get to be both the network and the wholesaler of the programming. Since the programming would be almost free (1 cable subscriber bill) it should make tons of money, right?
If the above seems like a clever idea to you, I've got another one. Have a little cart from which you sell hamburgers. You can take the cart around to people on the street so they don't have to drive or walk as far. In order to get these hamburgers you just work out a bulk purchase plan from McDonalds and resell them from your little cart. The idea would be to get McDonalds to agree to a such a low price that you could make money on this.
How long do you think such buy-bulk-services-for-resale schemes can go on? Sooner or later if you treat your supplier as a competitor your supplier is either (a) going to shut down or (b) shut your service off. Either is death to the buy-in-bulk reseller.
Sure, you can say that the infrastructure (or the hamburgers) should be public and any retailer should be able to use this infrastructure to compete with each other. That's fine now that it exists. But in order to get that first hamburger (or telephone switch) it was necessary to make a risky investment. Governments are not in the business of making risky investments. They either invest in sure things or they line up someone else to get the privilege of making the investment. We wouldn't have the phone system we have today if it was up to the government in 1900 to build it. They would have waited until 1950 to do it and then where do you think the US would be?
We have been engaged in an interesting experiment for the past 15 years or so. It is called the Internet. Under the terms of this experiment, everyone is immune to prosecution because, well, it's the Internet. It isn't "Real Life".
Not knowing this, the folks at DirectBuy do not realize that they have utterly no recourse to anything stated about them, no matter how unsubstantiated, defamatory or libelous. Their lawyer seems to be under the impression that there is some other sort of universal shield law for everone (publishers, web service providers and posters alike) on the Internet. I suspect once one gets their head around the idea that it is the Internet it will become obvious that they can't sue an IP address and defending an IP address is pointless.
Unsubstantiated, anonymous reviews on the Internet are the norm. You can find scathing reviews of high school dates intended to utterly destroy people. You can find scathing reviews of nearly any business that some customer has had a problem with with the clear intent to force the company out of business. Normally such sites do not post anything positive, mostly because positive reviews are hard to come by. People are far more motivated when they perceive they have been wronged.
Of course, if you find such a review of your personality, your business or anything else you might as well just declare bankruptcy, move to a deserted island and kill yourself because it is highly unlikely you are going to get any sympathy on the Internet. And getting the information removed is impossible. After all, it is the Internet and nobody is responsible for anything.
The Internet is a different sort of writing. What works on the Internet are short pieces. There are no novels on the Internet because nobody has the attention span or time to read a novel there.
For a professional writer that is any good, it is almost impossible to work within the bounds of the Internet. It is damn confining. We're not talking about having to polish something to get it expressed in absolutely the fewest words possible. That doesn't work either. What is required are both speed and terseness.
Also, the Internet is free. You might find some people getting shown ads in exchange for their reading, but nobody is going to pay enough to keep a writer from starving. All of the tip-jar and subscription services have pretty much proven that you can't get people to pay directly on the Internet. Ads are an indirect form of payment, but that only goes so far. The thing you need to make ads pay is massive numbers of lookers and immediate, topical content. Again we're back to speed and terseness.
I don't see it being good for people trying to break into writing as a career unless they are looking to write press releases and advertising copy. The misspelled bad grammer that is taken as a given on the Internet is no way to polish your craft. There are no "editors" just harsh critics, most of whom are not interested in grooming an author for success but just complaining about crap. Sure, the Internet also enables some collaborative work and that can be good. But a bunch of beginning writers trying to find their way without any guidance is like a little league team without the coach.
I'd say if you are good at "Internet writing" you are unlikely to be good in other published works. If you are a professional author you probably have nothing to fear from the Internet either.
In the US you cannot use a radio station for "music on hold". You can find lots of stuff about this all over. You either need to pay ASCAP fees or find something else to put on your phone system.
Every once in a while ASCAP goes and calls folks using radio stations to tell them to stop or get sued. I've not been called but I have briefly used a radio for this purpose until hearing about this.
If you set up a stand selling heroin on a busy street corner you will have a line of customers around the block - until you get busted. And you will, eventually, get busted.
Contrast this with a lemonade stand with no customers.
The difference in the US is that people will go out of their way to do something they believe (a) is illegal and (b) has a low risk of consequences. Movie and music pirating fall in this category. This company, doing business from a foreign country with several different names will eventually be shut down. But they will likely have made millions of dollars before that happens. They will lose whatever cash is lying around though. So stashing it all in the bank for retirement isn't really an option.
NetFlix is a temporary abberation. It is because Internet distribution of quality video is impractical today. If it was practical, you would be downloading movies for free just like you are downloading music for free today.
Today nobody wants to wait 36+ hours for their movie selection to download through clogged P2P nodes. NetFlix is far more practical. It also is helping a significant percentage of their customer base to build up huge video libraries just waiting for the Internet speeds to make redistribution practical.
NetFlix has at most five years left to run. Maybe just 2-3 if broadband penetration of higher speeds gets going in the US.
The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.
This means any commercial enterprise which revolves around selling music is doomed. People will redistribute it and remove any possible value from your product.
This means the end of recorded music as a commercial enterprise. Period. I don't see a choice. I understand this is now how it is in China today - they gave up against piracy. I is going to be that way elsewhere shortly.
Movies are probably next.
How is a credit card number "sensitive" information in any way whatsoever? You follow the average credit-using American and you will find a trail of credit card number spread far and wide.
For the period 1950-1990 this wasn't really a problem. Now suddenly it is a problem? How? I reguarly have fraudulent charges put on a credit card. At least once a year. Want to know how much this "identity theft" costs me?
Nothing. Ever. Never has. Never will.
Last time around Blizzard got stuck for some chargebacks. Someone decided to try to use my credit card number to pay for three WoW subscriptions. They failed. Blizzard evidently didn't check the cards out too well and didn't question why a US-address card was being used from Australia. Too bad for them, they had to pay the chargeback fee to their credit card processor. This was because they did not invest in enough fraud detection and are not manually checking out these charges that have a high potential of fraud. I suppose the tradeoff is worth it if the volume of non-fraud is high enough.
I hear constantly how much of a problem this is for card holders and I simply do not understand. I have never heard of a card holder being held responsible for a fraudulent charge, ever. I have never heard of anyone other than the merchant getting penalized in any way. The person committing the fraud is never pursued and never has any consequences.
Now, in my opinion it would be very simple to stop 90% of credit card fraud - have the card issuing companies (Visa, MC, etc.) prosecute the people committing fraud. Currently because nobody wants to press charges law enforcement does nothing. Fix this, get some enforcement and the problem will go away. Unlike copyright infringement, most countries will gladly prosecute credit card fraud, if they are given the information and tools to do so. When both the person committing the crime and the crime itself are in the same country there is no excuse for not pursuing it.
No prosecution simply means that the risk vs. reward balance is all screwed up. There is no risk today, just reward. Which is why there is so much credit card fraud.
Old people = old ideas.
Old people = no innovation.
Old people = old ways.
This has been the way of things when the Romans were looking for some new chariot designs. The concept that there are lots of "new" things with computers has led to this being more rigorously enforced.
The biggest problem with this are things like file systems, memory management and such where experienced people are passed over for "new innovation" from younger people with no experience. Then we get to see the same problems that were fixed in 1970 being recreated and needing to be fixed again.
I don't see it having much to do with salary. It is the idea that older people do not have anything to contribute because somehow we have moved past all of the things that the old people know about. The thinking goes that now we have new problems and need younger people uncorrupted by old problems and old solutions to solve these new problems. Then they find out that these "new" problems aren't so new after all and they only reason they are cropping up now is that some inexperienced person didn't research things well enough to know about existing solutions.
But still we have managers that want "younger, energetic people" to work for them. Yup, older people are a rarity in the IT world. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I create artwork using cat litter and the various objects naturally found in it. I believe this is the highest expression of modern artwork and the world is suffering from not being able to behold in large public forums the beauty of my creations.
I believe any reasonable government would support me in the lifestyle that I require in order to achieve the relaxed, stress-free state that is required to create my artwork. The beauty of these creations would certainly justify several million a year in support in order to ensure that these creations continue to flow from my creative hands.
Please write your local government officials about this so that I can be releived of my tedious day job so that these magnificent creations can flow from my talented hands
Point made?