I can't imagine many people actually listen to any of these addresses; they just provide fodder for later press coverage. This sounds like Bush preaching to the Republican choir about the evils of trial lawyering. Many Republicans see organizations like the EFF as "trial lawyers" even if those organizations have very different goals and rewards.
Some of you may recall the piece here the other day about AL senator Sessions attempts to overturn a patent decision concerning electronic check clearing. He also saw this issue as another attempt by wicked trial lawyers to extract unfair settlements from the poor banking industry.
The depth of animosity between the parties over "trial lawyers" and plaintiffs' actions is profound. Democrats see the attorneys as defending the little guy against the malfeasance of large corporations and governments. Republicans see plaintiffs' attorneys as a bunch of greedy ambulance chasers out to make a quick buck off apparent fat-cat targets.
Personally I wish John Edwards could become an AL citizen in time to run against Sessions. The debates in that campaign would have been great theater.
During the holiday season of 2007, I put a Cowon audio player that plays Vorbis on my wish list. But it turned out that nobody found any brick-and-mortar chain in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that carries Cowon or iRiver products. How should I avoid this situation in the future?
So, what's wrong with buying online? Amazon sells COWONs at a decent price; we bought our A2 there.
BTW, the A3 is a pretty remarkable piece of hardware with support for H.264 and Matroska and automatic rescaling of 720p videos to fit the small screen.
I fail to see what relevance this has to the discussion of hardware support for Linux, though, not to mention its relevance to the question of Samsung's Blu-Ray player.
I found this figure rather implausible as well. I suppose it's possible that only 8% of routers connected to the Internet deny inbound traffic by default, but I thought that was a fundamental aspect of firewall design as well. Even consumer routers are designed this way.
But if the base for the 8% figure is all routers in, say, the top 2000 companies, then I might believe it. It's not uncommon to trust all internal traffic, even though a stricter security model might be more appropriate there as well. Converting internal routers from accept to deny raises the possibility that applications will suddenly stop working. For overworked network administrators this alone probably provides a sufficient disincentive to implementing internal security. The miscreant Tippett describes in TFA who spreads out across a network after breaking a single password will have a harder time if the internal routers block his path.
I'm also not surprised to hear that "techie" stuff like vulnerability testing gets a disproportionate share of security spending while employee training gets short shrift. Code vulnerabilities have an empirical reality about them that training doesn't offer. You can fix a hole in code or install anti-virus software on all your workstations. Your chances of "fixing" employees by making them adopt better security practices is a lot more hit or miss.
I don't usually reply to my own posts, but I just wanted to add that I think way too much sensitive information is carried around on laptops already. I'm especially appalled whenever I hear of laptop thefts from accountants, insurers, health professionals, and the like, who are carrying around hundreds or even thousands of personal records oftentimes indexed by SSN. Get rid of the SSN's, put the data on secure storage, and access it over encrypted channels. Don't carry around my tax or medical records on your laptop.
I had the same reaction as you when I heard this story on NPR a week or two ago. Why would anyone in this day and age carry sensitive information on a laptop across an international border? I'd make sure I had nothing important on my laptop at the border, then download the sensitive information when I've reached my destination, and upload anything I needed before departure. I know that heavy-duty forensic analysis could probably resuscitate anything I put on the hard drive, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Isn't this one of the ways we've always thought that the Internet would destroy geographic borders in the long run?
Moreover, you could always pull the hard drive, ship it by FedEx or some other carrier, and replace it with a clean "dummy" drive before crossing the border. Seems to me that whatever efforts the Customs and Immigration people adopt could easily be foiled by someone with malicious intent while annoying the hell out of ordinary businesspeople and tourists.
Just what information are they expecting to find on random laptops anyway? Plans to build a nuclear device that I can get from the Internet like this?
"The Teens Market in the U.S., a new Packaged Facts report, provides a comprehensive analysis of the consumer behavior of the 26 million 12- to 17-year-olds who comprise the teens market. With an aggregate income of $80 billion, teens represent an important consumer segment in their own right. Moreover, parents spend another $110 billion on teens in key consumer categories such as apparel, food, personal care items, and entertainment."
$80 billion / 26 million = $3,076 annual income plus another $4,231 spent by parents. Still think teens (in the US at least) have no money?
Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.
You need to read the decisions more closely. In the Grokster case, for instance, a lot of the argument revolved around whether the Sony Betamax decision applied. In particular, since Grokster distributed its own client software, could an argument be made that that sofware enabled other non-infringing uses (an important test in the Betamax decision). The Court decided that Grokster was distributing its software solely for the purpose of infringement and, worse, gaining commercially from such infringement by selling ads on its site.
Bittorrent, per se, is clearly a content-neutral technology that enables downloads of all types of materials, both infringing and non-infringing. In practice the infringing content far outweighs the legitimate content, but that's not the fault of the technlogy itself, but rather the purpose for which it's being used.
I agree entirely with this comment. I keep looking into TiVo recorders, but having to pay $13 a month for the program guide is truly outrageous. In comparison, I pay Verizon the equivalent amount for their movie package consisting of all the Starz, Encore, Showtime, and Sundance programming including video-on-demand options. Asking me to pay the same amount of money for a program guide shows a real lack of perspective.
I wish I had bought in during the lifetime membership period, but alas, that's not available any more as far as I can tell.
I have an LG DVDR/VCR combo unit, and like it quite a bit as well. I bought it primarily to dub old VHS recordings onto DVD, but I use it for off-air recordings as well. It even supports the S-VHS format, which a few of my tapes were in. Using the DVD recorder produces quite acceptable quality even at the 6-hour speed, especially for live programs like sporting events. Unless I want to archive something, I use DVD+RW disks and just write over them. As fewer amd fewer people have VCRs, it's nice to be able to share a program with a friend using standard-format DVDs.
Being able to play DivX/XviD files was another big plus for me since I watch fansubbed anime. I would write the files to a DVD on my computer, then play them on my TV using the LG. Even in the current generation of upscaling DVD players, there are manufacturers who still don't support DivX playback, notably Sony. I bought a Sony upscaling player and immediately exchanged it for a Panasonic S53 when I discovered the Sony wouldn't play DivX. However, the value of DivX playback has faded somewhat since I bought an HDTV and connected a computer to it directly. This method has the additional advantage over the DVD player of letting me play shows in the Matroska or standard (non-DivX) MPEG4 containers.
My positive experiences with this device made me wonder about the initial topic.
In the US, working on a project for an employer constitutes a "work-for-hire" under the terms of the Copyright Act, specifically 17 USC 201(b). The employer owns the rights in these cases, not the coders. You'd have to have negotiated a specific contract with the employer in advance granting you copyright, which I doubt rarely happens in practice.
BitTorrent users often use uPNP to punch a hole through the router for torrents. Many torrenting "how-tos" specify using uPNP for this purpose, and it's commonly enabled in many BT clients like Azureus and uTorrent. For most of these people, uPNP is a godsend since it eliminates the need to mess around with portforwarding in the router configuration.
There is no viable open source alternative (http://oemr.org/ doesn't look quite ready for prime time) - though I think there's an opportunity here for some enterprising Linux loving propellerheads.
I wish I had your optimism. I spent some time discussing open-source options with IT people in US community health centers, organizations with small budgets and difficult patient loads. You would think that, of all people in the medical community, CHC's would be among those looking for low-cost solutions like open-sourced software. In reality, they were just as tied to proprietary solutions as any large medical organization, perhaps even more so.
In many cases providers like these are tied to large hospital networks, so whatever their hospitals implement becomes what they implement. Next, there's the usual, "if it's free, it can't be good," syndrome at work. Because medical practitioners have become so used to dealing with large IT providers like GE Healthcare, they simply can't imagine alternatives that don't come with a lot of corporate backing and corporate support. Remember that most medical professionals are looking over their shoulders at potential lawsuits. Regardless of whether in reality it makes little difference whether those records were stored in OpenEHR or in some large provider's proprietary system, it probably does make a difference when you're testifying on the witness stand.
Finally if you're short on funds, you might actually prefer the proprietary solution with a support contract over an open-source solution that requires a level of IT competence, particulary competence with Unix/Linux, that still doesn't exist in most IT departments where Windows rules the day.
What happens when Fedora 9 comes out? Will I just be able to push a button and seamlessly upgrade the whole thing in place?
Short answer, yes. Install the repo files for version 9 and run 'yum update'. In fact, you can always upgrade in place to the current development version if you choose to activate the development repos.
Long answer, I almost never do this. I just reinstall. Since I keep/home and/usr/local on separate servers or partitions, reinstallation doesn't destroy anything that matters.
I've found regex queries can run faster than string matching using LIKE. I don't know whether regex queries make better use of indexes, though. I recall reading something about LIKE not being able to take advantage of indexes, but that was some time (and a few versions) ago.
Anyways, try SELECT * FROM table WHERE title ~* '.*string.*' instead.
I thought this paragraph from TFA was especially interesting:
But the growth in file sizes is made worse by a concurrent increase in the use of P2P as a delivery mechanism. Distribution gets pushed from the center of the network to the edges as users increasingly become both the consumers and providers of content, so the tubes could be clogged in both directions.... The [US Internet Industry Association] describes this transition as a traffic shift "from the Internet backbone to a peered system in which content is streamed directly to consumers," and the group notes that it will require ISPs to upgrade the most expensive part of their networks to keep pace: the last mile.
Wasn't the Internet designed from the ground up to be "peer-to-peer?" Yes, I know we started with client/server technologies and "the Internet backbone," but fundamentally every machine with a public IP address is, and has always been, the peer of all the other millions of machines with public addresses. That's what makes the Internet so profoundly democratic and so profoundly threatening to established interests.
I suppose cable operators weren't used to seeing the world in those terms, but telcos certainly were. Voice/data services were always interactive, not unidirectional broadcasting. Why should anyone be surprised that the Internet is being used for the purposes its designers envisioned?
Oh, and why is a system where "content is streamed directly to consumers" described as "peered?"
It must be my mood today, but when I saw those two lines are juxtaposed on a page of text, rather than being sung as a jingle, I realized they contained a sexual innuendo I'd never thought of before. I'm guessing their ad agency saw this, though.
What about all those Office-related libraries that Windows loads at boot time even if you don't need them? There's a reason why Word seems to start so quickly, and it's because it's using a lot of code that was already put into memory at boot. This strategy was the result of focus group work with end-users who complained that programs took too long to start. Since most people never really think much about how long it takes to boot the computer, MS realized the best solution was to move a lot of libraries into the boot process.
I'm not trying to defend OpenOffice here; I find it rather slow and bloaty as well. I'm just saying that to compare the two on the Windows platform is rather unfair since only Microsoft has control over what happens when Windows boots up.
Many ISPs "hijack" outbound port 80 connections and transparently proxy them. I'm not sure how you think you'd avoid this proxy unless you yourself are using a proxy that listens on some port other than 80 and is located on a network outside your ISP's.
I routinely configure office networks to do this with iptables+squid. It gives their administrators a log of requests in case they need to check up on what sites their employees have visited. It also enables us to add some security features to the network that apply automatically to all users, for instance, blocking downloads of.exe files.
This was my immediate reaction to reading this story. I don't what the law is in Canada, but in the US this seems a clear infringement based on the creation of an unauthorized derived work.
IANAL, but I think the argument that the copies are technically infringing because they are unauthorized is a plausible one. The real question is fair use: should the exemption apply in this case? That depends on how personal copying fits with the tests in 17 USC 107.
All the other replies seem to be about outbound SMTP. I think you're asking about inbound SMTP.
I've used my Linux firewall on my residential Comcast connection as a backup MX server for many years now. I knew full well this was in violation of the "no-servers" clause in the Terms of Service, but Comcast didn't seem to care much about it. (My total SMTP traffic was probably a lot less than my bittorrent traffic as well.) About a month ago inbound SMTP was blocked. I doubt they singled me out particularly; my guess is they just started filtering traffic for port 25 across the network.
I'm probably going to buy a Verizon business FiOS connection and dump Comcast. I think it will add another $30-40/month to the cost of an Internet service, but I'll get to have a fixed IP and run servers. If I had the money, I'd buy Verizon's 5/5 MB symmetric business FioS which is something like $225/month. We pay more for the commercial T1 my servers share now and get a third the bandwidth.
Zucker's point is that, in the online music distribution marketplace, Apple is something of a "monopsonist." NBC/Universal picked up its ball and went home when Apple refused to alter its "one-price-fits-all" policy. In the long run, I don't think Apple can maintain this position, since companies like Amazon could compete on the industry's terms if they so choose. I don't know whether online distribution by the program owners themselves will succeed, though. People don't want to visit a number of different "islands" of content to buy what they want (NBC/Uni sells their shows, Viacom sells theirs, etc.). They want a reputable broker to make all the content available in a single place at competitive prices. That model conflicts so fundamentally with the traditional structures of the audiovisual content industries that I expect it to take at least a decade or more to materialize.
"Chief Executive Officer of NBC On December 15, 2005, Zucker was again promoted by NBC, to Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal Television Group behind Robert Charles Wright, vice chairman of General Electric and chairman & CEO of NBC Universal. Zucker was responsible for all programming across the company's television properties, including network, news, cable, and Sports and Olympics. His responsibilities also include the company's studio operations and global distribution efforts [emphasis mine]. Zucker reports to Bob Wright."
I bet you drink a lot of Maalox in a job like that.
In the "old days" the FCC's "financial interest and syndication rules" (quick history) made it unprofitable for the big-three networks to own the content-production side of the business as well. The rules prohibited the networks from selling "reruns" of programs they produced (e.g, The Johnny Carson Show) to local television stations, a practice called "program syndication." Since all the risk capital in program development is upfront, a program's profits are not made on its initial showing but in "reruns" to cable networks, local television stations, and overseas distributors. By prohibiting the networks from profiting in this aftermarket, the "fin-syn" rules made owning the production studios uneconomical.
Nowadays, anything goes. CBS created Viacom and sold it off to comply with the FCC. Now Viacom owns CBS. NBC has merged with Universal Studios, and Disney bought ABC/ESPN by first buying a multi-market TV station owner. Australian-owned Fox has interests in newspapers, movies, satellite TV, US local television stations in the US, and many more outlets I'm sure. What were once strict divisions between media production and distribution have long since fallen by the wayside. In large part these pro-business changes reflected the opinions of new FCC commissioners appointed by Republican administrations. They also represented a change in the structure of television from a world where three networks commanded 90% or more of the viewers to one where they fewer than half that number. (http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/10/16/cbs_network_scores_another_ratings_win/)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine many people actually listen to any of these addresses; they just provide fodder for later press coverage. This sounds like Bush preaching to the Republican choir about the evils of trial lawyering. Many Republicans see organizations like the EFF as "trial lawyers" even if those organizations have very different goals and rewards.
Some of you may recall the piece here the other day about AL senator Sessions attempts to overturn a patent decision concerning electronic check clearing. He also saw this issue as another attempt by wicked trial lawyers to extract unfair settlements from the poor banking industry.
The depth of animosity between the parties over "trial lawyers" and plaintiffs' actions is profound. Democrats see the attorneys as defending the little guy against the malfeasance of large corporations and governments. Republicans see plaintiffs' attorneys as a bunch of greedy ambulance chasers out to make a quick buck off apparent fat-cat targets.
Personally I wish John Edwards could become an AL citizen in time to run against Sessions. The debates in that campaign would have been great theater.
During the holiday season of 2007, I put a Cowon audio player that plays Vorbis on my wish list. But it turned out that nobody found any brick-and-mortar chain in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that carries Cowon or iRiver products. How should I avoid this situation in the future?
So, what's wrong with buying online? Amazon sells COWONs at a decent price; we bought our A2 there.
BTW, the A3 is a pretty remarkable piece of hardware with support for H.264 and Matroska and automatic rescaling of 720p videos to fit the small screen.
I fail to see what relevance this has to the discussion of hardware support for Linux, though, not to mention its relevance to the question of Samsung's Blu-Ray player.
I found this figure rather implausible as well. I suppose it's possible that only 8% of routers connected to the Internet deny inbound traffic by default, but I thought that was a fundamental aspect of firewall design as well. Even consumer routers are designed this way.
But if the base for the 8% figure is all routers in, say, the top 2000 companies, then I might believe it. It's not uncommon to trust all internal traffic, even though a stricter security model might be more appropriate there as well. Converting internal routers from accept to deny raises the possibility that applications will suddenly stop working. For overworked network administrators this alone probably provides a sufficient disincentive to implementing internal security. The miscreant Tippett describes in TFA who spreads out across a network after breaking a single password will have a harder time if the internal routers block his path.
I'm also not surprised to hear that "techie" stuff like vulnerability testing gets a disproportionate share of security spending while employee training gets short shrift. Code vulnerabilities have an empirical reality about them that training doesn't offer. You can fix a hole in code or install anti-virus software on all your workstations. Your chances of "fixing" employees by making them adopt better security practices is a lot more hit or miss.
I don't usually reply to my own posts, but I just wanted to add that I think way too much sensitive information is carried around on laptops already. I'm especially appalled whenever I hear of laptop thefts from accountants, insurers, health professionals, and the like, who are carrying around hundreds or even thousands of personal records oftentimes indexed by SSN. Get rid of the SSN's, put the data on secure storage, and access it over encrypted channels. Don't carry around my tax or medical records on your laptop.
MOD PARENT UP
I had the same reaction as you when I heard this story on NPR a week or two ago. Why would anyone in this day and age carry sensitive information on a laptop across an international border? I'd make sure I had nothing important on my laptop at the border, then download the sensitive information when I've reached my destination, and upload anything I needed before departure. I know that heavy-duty forensic analysis could probably resuscitate anything I put on the hard drive, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Isn't this one of the ways we've always thought that the Internet would destroy geographic borders in the long run?
Moreover, you could always pull the hard drive, ship it by FedEx or some other carrier, and replace it with a clean "dummy" drive before crossing the border. Seems to me that whatever efforts the Customs and Immigration people adopt could easily be foiled by someone with malicious intent while annoying the hell out of ordinary businesspeople and tourists.
Just what information are they expecting to find on random laptops anyway? Plans to build a nuclear device that I can get from the Internet like this?
But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!?
From http://www.mindbranch.com/Teens-R567-647/
"The Teens Market in the U.S., a new Packaged Facts report, provides a comprehensive analysis of the consumer behavior of the 26 million 12- to 17-year-olds who comprise the teens market. With an aggregate income of $80 billion, teens represent an important consumer segment in their own right. Moreover, parents spend another $110 billion on teens in key consumer categories such as apparel, food, personal care items, and entertainment."
$80 billion / 26 million = $3,076 annual income plus another $4,231 spent by parents. Still think teens (in the US at least) have no money?
Napster and Grokster were basically search engines that could be used for both legal or illegal purposes, but the courts didn't buy it.
You need to read the decisions more closely. In the Grokster case, for instance, a lot of the argument revolved around whether the Sony Betamax decision applied. In particular, since Grokster distributed its own client software, could an argument be made that that sofware enabled other non-infringing uses (an important test in the Betamax decision). The Court decided that Grokster was distributing its software solely for the purpose of infringement and, worse, gaining commercially from such infringement by selling ads on its site.
Bittorrent, per se, is clearly a content-neutral technology that enables downloads of all types of materials, both infringing and non-infringing. In practice the infringing content far outweighs the legitimate content, but that's not the fault of the technlogy itself, but rather the purpose for which it's being used.
LG RC199H
I agree entirely with this comment. I keep looking into TiVo recorders, but having to pay $13 a month for the program guide is truly outrageous. In comparison, I pay Verizon the equivalent amount for their movie package consisting of all the Starz, Encore, Showtime, and Sundance programming including video-on-demand options. Asking me to pay the same amount of money for a program guide shows a real lack of perspective.
I wish I had bought in during the lifetime membership period, but alas, that's not available any more as far as I can tell.
I have an LG DVDR/VCR combo unit, and like it quite a bit as well. I bought it primarily to dub old VHS recordings onto DVD, but I use it for off-air recordings as well. It even supports the S-VHS format, which a few of my tapes were in. Using the DVD recorder produces quite acceptable quality even at the 6-hour speed, especially for live programs like sporting events. Unless I want to archive something, I use DVD+RW disks and just write over them. As fewer amd fewer people have VCRs, it's nice to be able to share a program with a friend using standard-format DVDs.
Being able to play DivX/XviD files was another big plus for me since I watch fansubbed anime. I would write the files to a DVD on my computer, then play them on my TV using the LG. Even in the current generation of upscaling DVD players, there are manufacturers who still don't support DivX playback, notably Sony. I bought a Sony upscaling player and immediately exchanged it for a Panasonic S53 when I discovered the Sony wouldn't play DivX. However, the value of DivX playback has faded somewhat since I bought an HDTV and connected a computer to it directly. This method has the additional advantage over the DVD player of letting me play shows in the Matroska or standard (non-DivX) MPEG4 containers.
My positive experiences with this device made me wonder about the initial topic.
In the US, working on a project for an employer constitutes a "work-for-hire" under the terms of the Copyright Act, specifically 17 USC 201(b). The employer owns the rights in these cases, not the coders. You'd have to have negotiated a specific contract with the employer in advance granting you copyright, which I doubt rarely happens in practice.
BitTorrent users often use uPNP to punch a hole through the router for torrents. Many torrenting "how-tos" specify using uPNP for this purpose, and it's commonly enabled in many BT clients like Azureus and uTorrent. For most of these people, uPNP is a godsend since it eliminates the need to mess around with portforwarding in the router configuration.
There is no viable open source alternative (http://oemr.org/ doesn't look quite ready for prime time) - though I think there's an opportunity here for some enterprising Linux loving propellerheads.
I wish I had your optimism. I spent some time discussing open-source options with IT people in US community health centers, organizations with small budgets and difficult patient loads. You would think that, of all people in the medical community, CHC's would be among those looking for low-cost solutions like open-sourced software. In reality, they were just as tied to proprietary solutions as any large medical organization, perhaps even more so.
In many cases providers like these are tied to large hospital networks, so whatever their hospitals implement becomes what they implement. Next, there's the usual, "if it's free, it can't be good," syndrome at work. Because medical practitioners have become so used to dealing with large IT providers like GE Healthcare, they simply can't imagine alternatives that don't come with a lot of corporate backing and corporate support. Remember that most medical professionals are looking over their shoulders at potential lawsuits. Regardless of whether in reality it makes little difference whether those records were stored in OpenEHR or in some large provider's proprietary system, it probably does make a difference when you're testifying on the witness stand.
Finally if you're short on funds, you might actually prefer the proprietary solution with a support contract over an open-source solution that requires a level of IT competence, particulary competence with Unix/Linux, that still doesn't exist in most IT departments where Windows rules the day.
What happens when Fedora 9 comes out? Will I just be able to push a button and seamlessly upgrade the whole thing in place?
/home and /usr/local on separate servers or partitions, reinstallation doesn't destroy anything that matters.
Short answer, yes. Install the repo files for version 9 and run 'yum update'. In fact, you can always upgrade in place to the current development version if you choose to activate the development repos.
Long answer, I almost never do this. I just reinstall. Since I keep
I've found regex queries can run faster than string matching using LIKE. I don't know whether regex queries make better use of indexes, though. I recall reading something about LIKE not being able to take advantage of indexes, but that was some time (and a few versions) ago.
Anyways, try SELECT * FROM table WHERE title ~* '.*string.*' instead.
Take a look at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/functions-matching.html for more details on pattern matching.
I thought this paragraph from TFA was especially interesting:
But the growth in file sizes is made worse by a concurrent increase in the use of P2P as a delivery mechanism. Distribution gets pushed from the center of the network to the edges as users increasingly become both the consumers and providers of content, so the tubes could be clogged in both directions.... The [US Internet Industry Association] describes this transition as a traffic shift "from the Internet backbone to a peered system in which content is streamed directly to consumers," and the group notes that it will require ISPs to upgrade the most expensive part of their networks to keep pace: the last mile.
Wasn't the Internet designed from the ground up to be "peer-to-peer?" Yes, I know we started with client/server technologies and "the Internet backbone," but fundamentally every machine with a public IP address is, and has always been, the peer of all the other millions of machines with public addresses. That's what makes the Internet so profoundly democratic and so profoundly threatening to established interests.
I suppose cable operators weren't used to seeing the world in those terms, but telcos certainly were. Voice/data services were always interactive, not unidirectional broadcasting. Why should anyone be surprised that the Internet is being used for the purposes its designers envisioned?
Oh, and why is a system where "content is streamed directly to consumers" described as "peered?"
It must be my mood today, but when I saw those two lines are juxtaposed on a page of text, rather than being sung as a jingle, I realized they contained a sexual innuendo I'd never thought of before. I'm guessing their ad agency saw this, though.
What about all those Office-related libraries that Windows loads at boot time even if you don't need them? There's a reason why Word seems to start so quickly, and it's because it's using a lot of code that was already put into memory at boot. This strategy was the result of focus group work with end-users who complained that programs took too long to start. Since most people never really think much about how long it takes to boot the computer, MS realized the best solution was to move a lot of libraries into the boot process.
I'm not trying to defend OpenOffice here; I find it rather slow and bloaty as well. I'm just saying that to compare the two on the Windows platform is rather unfair since only Microsoft has control over what happens when Windows boots up.
Many ISPs "hijack" outbound port 80 connections and transparently proxy them. I'm not sure how you think you'd avoid this proxy unless you yourself are using a proxy that listens on some port other than 80 and is located on a network outside your ISP's.
.exe files.
I routinely configure office networks to do this with iptables+squid. It gives their administrators a log of requests in case they need to check up on what sites their employees have visited. It also enables us to add some security features to the network that apply automatically to all users, for instance, blocking downloads of
I wish I had mod points for you today.
This was my immediate reaction to reading this story. I don't what the law is in Canada, but in the US this seems a clear infringement based on the creation of an unauthorized derived work.
IANAL, but I think the argument that the copies are technically infringing because they are unauthorized is a plausible one. The real question is fair use: should the exemption apply in this case? That depends on how personal copying fits with the tests in 17 USC 107.
All the other replies seem to be about outbound SMTP. I think you're asking about inbound SMTP.
I've used my Linux firewall on my residential Comcast connection as a backup MX server for many years now. I knew full well this was in violation of the "no-servers" clause in the Terms of Service, but Comcast didn't seem to care much about it. (My total SMTP traffic was probably a lot less than my bittorrent traffic as well.) About a month ago inbound SMTP was blocked. I doubt they singled me out particularly; my guess is they just started filtering traffic for port 25 across the network.
I'm probably going to buy a Verizon business FiOS connection and dump Comcast. I think it will add another $30-40/month to the cost of an Internet service, but I'll get to have a fixed IP and run servers. If I had the money, I'd buy Verizon's 5/5 MB symmetric business FioS which is something like $225/month. We pay more for the commercial T1 my servers share now and get a third the bandwidth.
Zucker's point is that, in the online music distribution marketplace, Apple is something of a "monopsonist." NBC/Universal picked up its ball and went home when Apple refused to alter its "one-price-fits-all" policy. In the long run, I don't think Apple can maintain this position, since companies like Amazon could compete on the industry's terms if they so choose. I don't know whether online distribution by the program owners themselves will succeed, though. People don't want to visit a number of different "islands" of content to buy what they want (NBC/Uni sells their shows, Viacom sells theirs, etc.). They want a reputable broker to make all the content available in a single place at competitive prices. That model conflicts so fundamentally with the traditional structures of the audiovisual content industries that I expect it to take at least a decade or more to materialize.
You do know that the "Universal" in NBC/Universal is Universal Studios, don't you?
From Jeff Zucker's bio at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Zucker):
"Chief Executive Officer of NBC
On December 15, 2005, Zucker was again promoted by NBC, to Chief Executive Officer of NBC Universal Television Group behind Robert Charles Wright, vice chairman of General Electric and chairman & CEO of NBC Universal. Zucker was responsible for all programming across the company's television properties, including network, news, cable, and Sports and Olympics. His responsibilities also include the company's studio operations and global distribution efforts [emphasis mine]. Zucker reports to Bob Wright."
I bet you drink a lot of Maalox in a job like that.
In the "old days" the FCC's "financial interest and syndication rules" (quick history) made it unprofitable for the big-three networks to own the content-production side of the business as well. The rules prohibited the networks from selling "reruns" of programs they produced (e.g, The Johnny Carson Show) to local television stations, a practice called "program syndication." Since all the risk capital in program development is upfront, a program's profits are not made on its initial showing but in "reruns" to cable networks, local television stations, and overseas distributors. By prohibiting the networks from profiting in this aftermarket, the "fin-syn" rules made owning the production studios uneconomical.
Nowadays, anything goes. CBS created Viacom and sold it off to comply with the FCC. Now Viacom owns CBS. NBC has merged with Universal Studios, and Disney bought ABC/ESPN by first buying a multi-market TV station owner. Australian-owned Fox has interests in newspapers, movies, satellite TV, US local television stations in the US, and many more outlets I'm sure. What were once strict divisions between media production and distribution have long since fallen by the wayside. In large part these pro-business changes reflected the opinions of new FCC commissioners appointed by Republican administrations. They also represented a change in the structure of television from a world where three networks commanded 90% or more of the viewers to one where they fewer than half that number. (http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2007/10/16/cbs_network_scores_another_ratings_win/)
Are you using the "Image Zoom" plugin on Firefox? This is known to conflict with Google maps.