You make a good point, but here is why this article should be important for U.S. citizens: citizens of this country are responsible for ensuring that our own government doesn't overstep its boundaries, too...as seems to be happening very often of late.
This kind of crap pisses me off. How can I contribute to this guy's legal defense fund?
For Linux, there's a utility called regionset (Google it) to reset the region codes on a DVD drive. I would imagine there's one for Macs as well, but be warned: I've read that some DVD drives only allow you to change the region code a fixed number of times. So, you might be better off acquiring an external DVD drive to play DVDs from this region and use the built in drive to play DVDs from whatever region you normally use.
If it becomes too expensive to play mainstream/signed artists, then perhaps we'll see a boatload of Internet radio stations spring up that exclusively play indie music.
Hmmmm...I'd better go research streaming audio feeds -- I think I see a potential opportunity here =D
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
This culture of fear of everything, as you so aptly described it in the post above, wasn't exactly what FDR had in mind when he spoke these words, but I can't help but think how incredibly prescient his words were.
Korea also blocks whois lookups for Korean-owned domains. As a mail server administrator, this made my life easy: whenever I would do a whois lookup that would return a domain under kornet.net's sphere of influence (the registrar for Korea), I would blacklist it out of hand.
If I don't know who you are or how to contact you, I don't accept e-mail from your netblocks. It's a rather ham-fisted policy, but it made a huge dent in the amount of spam my users received. And you know what? I didn't get very many complaints from my users >:]
Does it cover some of the...ahem...advantages...that zero gravity might bring, as well?
Back on topic...Did you ever see "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Somehow, I suspect that NASA won't be sending a tiny capsule to Mars like they did to the moon. That would cause a lot of other practical problems on a year-or-more mission besides how to handle a healthy sex drive among the crewmembers. You think two kids under ten years old in the back seats of a car fight a lot? I suspect a Mars mission would be in something more like Discovery was -- a large ship that is either rotating itself or has a ring-shaped crew quarters that rotates to provide at least be some degree of gravity, which neatly solves the problems you bring to light.
IANAL, but I have worked the abuse desk at an ISP, and therefore, I have fielded my share of RIAA/BSA/MPAA complaints and I have researched subscriber information for several subpoena requests. As I understand the process, you don't have to file suit to get subscriber information; all you have to do is get a court order requesting subscriber information. Consequently, I don't believe that this is a tactic to avoid getting burned by the backlash from the "John Doe" lawsuits -- they already had a method by which they could get subscriber information without exposing themselves to barristry charges, etc.
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that DSL and T1's provide a greater likelihood of meeting your sold service than cable. You've got a point-to-point circuit to the telco with DSL and T1, but you share the cable circuit with everyone on your local loop. I don't know a lot about T1's, so I'm not going to address them further, but I do work with DSL frequently at my job.
Where I work, we use 24 port DSLAMs that are cable of providing service up to two or three Mb, as I recall. 24 ports X 3Mb per port = 72Mb if I'm doing the math correctly. The DSLAMs have 100Mb ports to our Internet network, so I don't see that being a bottleneck. However, whether you are using T1, DSL or cable, I can guarantee you that your ISP is overselling their backbone network (unless you are shelling out the really big bucks for a dedicated T1 between branch offices, and therefore completely bypassing the telco's core -- is this service even available anywhere???)
You are partially correct (at least in my experience, and yes, I work for a telco that provides DSL service so I have some qualifications here).
DSL does, in fact, use frequencies unused by voice and is indeed pulled off the phone circuit by hardware at the telco's Central Office (CO) for your area. However, it is not correct to say "...that had nothing to do with a phone circuit." The DSL signal rides over a standard telephone copper pair, but the line card in the DSLAM (DSL Aggregation Multiplexor -- the hardware that pulls the DSL signal off the phone line) is inserted between your phone line and the telephone switch in the CO. When you sign up for DSL service, the phone company reroutes your phone line in the CO to hit the DSLAM first, then to the telephone switch. Consequently, I don't know how you could get DSL from a service provider if you aren't using their phone lines. At both the company where I used to work and the company for whom I now work, you had to be using their copper to get a DSL account.
However there are FCC regulations that require the incumbent telco to resell their copper to competitors, so where I live, it is possible to buy a company A's telephone line while using company B's telephone lines (IIRC) because company B resells telephone lines to company A.
Yeah, but there's got to be something on the other side of that tunnel. IOW, you aren't just tunneling from the students' PCs to the Bit Torrent/KaZaA/gnutella/whatever host -- you have to have an intermediate endpoint outside the university network to be the other side of your tunnel, which then connects to your torrent. At that point, the RIAA complaints are no longer the University's problem (although bandwidth still is).
Add to that the fact that most people don't even know how to update their computers, and the fact remains that while all the CS majors might still be able to download their mp3s^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs, they make up a relatively small portion of the population, and therefore both the bandwidth usage and RIAA complaints are reduced.
While finishing up my CS degree, I worked for three years as a parts guy at a Cessna dealer and (small) airplane repair shop. While most of the time, the mechanics there were able to arrive at eight and leave at four, that wasn't always the case. There were projects where they needed to put in O/T to get a customer back in the air on time. There were a lot of times when they were working outside in the rain, snow, wind, etc. And as the parent post insinuated, there's a lot more opportunity for seriously screwing your body up when working 40+ hours a week with power tools, nasty solvents (ever use Turko or MEK? No, thanks!), etc.
On the other hand, there has been exactly ONE time in my 6 year Sys Admin career when I've had to work out in the weather. Granted, it was really friggin' cold that day (about -15F IIRC and the wind chill brought it down to about -35F), but I was only outside for an hour and a half, and we set up a tent with a propane heater which brought the temp where I was working up to 65-70F. And let's see...how many life threatening industrial accidents involving ethernet cables have I seen? Oh, that's right -- none.
The network I manage is pretty stable, so I don't get called in after hours very often, and when I do, I take comp time to make up for it. I'm paid reasonably well, I work with a great group of people, and I like my job. There's no way on God's green earth I'd give up my CS degree to become a wrench.
Maybe you guys in the lower 48 states have nasty beer, but Alaskan Amber is still my favorite beer. And there's a bunch of guys here in Anchorage who started a place called Moose's Tooth (and a spin-off called Bear Tooth) that brews some really, really good beer as well:) Oh, yeah...you can get truly awesome pizzas at the Tooth (well, both, errr, Teeth...whatever) as well.
American wine, American cheese, American Chocolate...yeah, you're probably right about that.
...it's better to have innocent people jailed than having a guilty one run free
There's an old, dead Greek guy who I suspect would really take offense at that sentiment: "It is better that a hundred guilty men should go free than that a single righteous man should be persecuted unjustly." -- Plato
While I agree with your sentiment, this is, unfortunately, the way things work.
A few years ago, I was involved in a wreck that totaled my Toyota Celica (which I absolutely loved). The other party in the accident blew through a red light, and due to the number of SUV's in the turn lane of the street she was on, I couldn't see her coming. My light turned green, I pulled into the intersection, and T-boned her car. The police officer responding to the call issued her a citation for running the red light. A little later, I received a summons because this person wanted to contest the citation in court. I took unpaid time off from work to go to court, as did one of the witnesses to the accident. The other driver? She didn't show. I too was mightily pissed off.
Considering that I support about 100 or so users, some 500 miles away from my desk and reachable only by airplane (remote Alaska), and many of whom are using Core/Core2 Duo based laptops with Realtek hardware, I'd say that for me at least, yes it's a real fricking issue >:( It may be easy enough to download the Realtek driver on one or two home computers, but it's a real PITA when you're trying to push that update out to a number of corporate desk/lap-tops.
I really wish I could just migrate everyone to Linux, but we've got some proprietary Windows-only desktop applications (which blows chunks itself, btw) that are core to our business...sigh.
True...but you could always sacrifice a common port such as 80, 25, 110 or 443 for your tunnel while you were travelling;) Just make sure you make the change before you leave the house.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. As has already been noted above, the brain is highly adaptable. Remember when you were learning how to drive? It took all of your concentration just to keep the car moving straight down the road. Later, you learned to keep your speed within 5mph (kph, if you prefer) while keeping the car going straight down the road. Then, you started playing music in the car, talking to passengers, using the cell phone, etc. I suspect the reason is because your brain rewired itself to process the additional data, little by little. This happens all the time, to a number of people. When my wife learned to play drums, she could only play simple rhythms because trying to manage three different beats (kick drum, snare, cymbals) was all she could do. Now, she can manage all of the drums in the kit while singing along with the song she's playing. Her brain rewired itself to cope with more complexity. I've played guitar for years, but it's only been in the last two years that I've been able to sing while playing--my brain rewired itself to handle one rhythm on the guitar and another vocally.
It seems to me that while attention might be a limited resource, most people aren't anywhere near their limits. It just takes a little practice to become proficient at handling additional loads.
In terms of the PC - well, x86 is in charge and always will be.
Meh. "Always" is a really long time. The x86 may well be in charge for a while to come (for all the reasons everyone else has posted already), but sooner or later, something better will emerge, and people will switch. It's just a matter of time.
'Scuse the possibly stupid question, since IANA(M)BOD (biologist/microbiologist or doctor), but what about the potential for damage to your own body as a result of a temporarily ramped up immune system?
As I understand, this peptide temporarily boosts the immune system, which then is better able to fight off the invading organism. However, there are a number of medical conditions caused by an immune system that's a little too heightened--allergies for example, or a number of other, more serious conditions. When I was 21, I contracted "Rapidly Progressive Glomerulonephritis" which is a condition where the immune system attacks the nodules in your kidneys that filter your blood. I now have a kidney transplant as a result. Lupus, I believe, is another serious condition resulting from an overactive immune system.
If we start prescribing this peptide the way we currently prescribe antibiotics, what are the chances that more than the patient's immune system will attack more than just the intended target? Also, what if, like me, you have an intentionally weakened immune system (to prevent transplant rejection), when you take this peptide? Will you be at greater risk to reject the transplant, since the transplanted organ is a foreign body?
I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back.
Hmmmm...what kind of airplanes do you fly? Unless I am forgetting some obscure model, every single-engine Cessna built since the 1960's has had rear windows. Having flown 150's, 152's, 172's, 182's and 206's, I can attest that you can, in fact, see out the back of these airplanes. When I was working on my private pilot certificate, my flight instructor used to have me look out the rear window once we had climbed to about 500 feet to make sure that I was still aligned with the runway centerline, and that's something I taught to my students when I became a CFI.
In fact, the only airplanes I've flown that didn't have rear windows were two Cherokees, an early model 150 and a Citabria.
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You make a good point, but here is why this article should be important for U.S. citizens: citizens of this country are responsible for ensuring that our own government doesn't overstep its boundaries, too...as seems to be happening very often of late.
This kind of crap pisses me off. How can I contribute to this guy's legal defense fund?
For Linux, there's a utility called regionset (Google it) to reset the region codes on a DVD drive. I would imagine there's one for Macs as well, but be warned: I've read that some DVD drives only allow you to change the region code a fixed number of times. So, you might be better off acquiring an external DVD drive to play DVDs from this region and use the built in drive to play DVDs from whatever region you normally use.
Maybe not.
If it becomes too expensive to play mainstream/signed artists, then perhaps we'll see a boatload of Internet radio stations spring up that exclusively play indie music.
Hmmmm...I'd better go research streaming audio feeds -- I think I see a potential opportunity here =D
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
This culture of fear of everything, as you so aptly described it in the post above, wasn't exactly what FDR had in mind when he spoke these words, but I can't help but think how incredibly prescient his words were.
Sigh....
Korea also blocks whois lookups for Korean-owned domains. As a mail server administrator, this made my life easy: whenever I would do a whois lookup that would return a domain under kornet.net's sphere of influence (the registrar for Korea), I would blacklist it out of hand. If I don't know who you are or how to contact you, I don't accept e-mail from your netblocks. It's a rather ham-fisted policy, but it made a huge dent in the amount of spam my users received. And you know what? I didn't get very many complaints from my users >:]
Does it cover some of the...ahem...advantages...that zero gravity might bring, as well?
Back on topic...Did you ever see "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Somehow, I suspect that NASA won't be sending a tiny capsule to Mars like they did to the moon. That would cause a lot of other practical problems on a year-or-more mission besides how to handle a healthy sex drive among the crewmembers. You think two kids under ten years old in the back seats of a car fight a lot? I suspect a Mars mission would be in something more like Discovery was -- a large ship that is either rotating itself or has a ring-shaped crew quarters that rotates to provide at least be some degree of gravity, which neatly solves the problems you bring to light.
...and Skynet was born
You're geek enough to read and post on /. but not geek enough to be able to Google a mysterious hex code? :)
Actually, wouldn't that be descrambling to find it?
IANAL, but I have worked the abuse desk at an ISP, and therefore, I have fielded my share of RIAA/BSA/MPAA complaints and I have researched subscriber information for several subpoena requests. As I understand the process, you don't have to file suit to get subscriber information; all you have to do is get a court order requesting subscriber information. Consequently, I don't believe that this is a tactic to avoid getting burned by the backlash from the "John Doe" lawsuits -- they already had a method by which they could get subscriber information without exposing themselves to barristry charges, etc.
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that DSL and T1's provide a greater likelihood of meeting your sold service than cable. You've got a point-to-point circuit to the telco with DSL and T1, but you share the cable circuit with everyone on your local loop. I don't know a lot about T1's, so I'm not going to address them further, but I do work with DSL frequently at my job.
Where I work, we use 24 port DSLAMs that are cable of providing service up to two or three Mb, as I recall. 24 ports X 3Mb per port = 72Mb if I'm doing the math correctly. The DSLAMs have 100Mb ports to our Internet network, so I don't see that being a bottleneck. However, whether you are using T1, DSL or cable, I can guarantee you that your ISP is overselling their backbone network (unless you are shelling out the really big bucks for a dedicated T1 between branch offices, and therefore completely bypassing the telco's core -- is this service even available anywhere???)
You are partially correct (at least in my experience, and yes, I work for a telco that provides DSL service so I have some qualifications here).
DSL does, in fact, use frequencies unused by voice and is indeed pulled off the phone circuit by hardware at the telco's Central Office (CO) for your area. However, it is not correct to say "...that had nothing to do with a phone circuit." The DSL signal rides over a standard telephone copper pair, but the line card in the DSLAM (DSL Aggregation Multiplexor -- the hardware that pulls the DSL signal off the phone line) is inserted between your phone line and the telephone switch in the CO. When you sign up for DSL service, the phone company reroutes your phone line in the CO to hit the DSLAM first, then to the telephone switch. Consequently, I don't know how you could get DSL from a service provider if you aren't using their phone lines. At both the company where I used to work and the company for whom I now work, you had to be using their copper to get a DSL account.
However there are FCC regulations that require the incumbent telco to resell their copper to competitors, so where I live, it is possible to buy a company A's telephone line while using company B's telephone lines (IIRC) because company B resells telephone lines to company A.
Yeah, but there's got to be something on the other side of that tunnel. IOW, you aren't just tunneling from the students' PCs to the Bit Torrent/KaZaA/gnutella/whatever host -- you have to have an intermediate endpoint outside the university network to be the other side of your tunnel, which then connects to your torrent. At that point, the RIAA complaints are no longer the University's problem (although bandwidth still is).
Add to that the fact that most people don't even know how to update their computers, and the fact remains that while all the CS majors might still be able to download their mp3s^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs, they make up a relatively small portion of the population, and therefore both the bandwidth usage and RIAA complaints are reduced.
I'm not so sure that a mechanic's job is so rosy.
While finishing up my CS degree, I worked for three years as a parts guy at a Cessna dealer and (small) airplane repair shop. While most of the time, the mechanics there were able to arrive at eight and leave at four, that wasn't always the case. There were projects where they needed to put in O/T to get a customer back in the air on time. There were a lot of times when they were working outside in the rain, snow, wind, etc. And as the parent post insinuated, there's a lot more opportunity for seriously screwing your body up when working 40+ hours a week with power tools, nasty solvents (ever use Turko or MEK? No, thanks!), etc.
On the other hand, there has been exactly ONE time in my 6 year Sys Admin career when I've had to work out in the weather. Granted, it was really friggin' cold that day (about -15F IIRC and the wind chill brought it down to about -35F), but I was only outside for an hour and a half, and we set up a tent with a propane heater which brought the temp where I was working up to 65-70F. And let's see...how many life threatening industrial accidents involving ethernet cables have I seen? Oh, that's right -- none.
The network I manage is pretty stable, so I don't get called in after hours very often, and when I do, I take comp time to make up for it. I'm paid reasonably well, I work with a great group of people, and I like my job. There's no way on God's green earth I'd give up my CS degree to become a wrench.
I stand corrected :)
Thanks for the enlightenment.
Maybe you guys in the lower 48 states have nasty beer, but Alaskan Amber is still my favorite beer. And there's a bunch of guys here in Anchorage who started a place called Moose's Tooth (and a spin-off called Bear Tooth) that brews some really, really good beer as well :) Oh, yeah...you can get truly awesome pizzas at the Tooth (well, both, errr, Teeth...whatever) as well.
American wine, American cheese, American Chocolate...yeah, you're probably right about that.
There's an old, dead Greek guy who I suspect would really take offense at that sentiment: "It is better that a hundred guilty men should go free than that a single righteous man should be persecuted unjustly." -- Plato
Personally, I think Plato's got a point.
While I agree with your sentiment, this is, unfortunately, the way things work.
A few years ago, I was involved in a wreck that totaled my Toyota Celica (which I absolutely loved). The other party in the accident blew through a red light, and due to the number of SUV's in the turn lane of the street she was on, I couldn't see her coming. My light turned green, I pulled into the intersection, and T-boned her car. The police officer responding to the call issued her a citation for running the red light. A little later, I received a summons because this person wanted to contest the citation in court. I took unpaid time off from work to go to court, as did one of the witnesses to the accident. The other driver? She didn't show. I too was mightily pissed off.
Considering that I support about 100 or so users, some 500 miles away from my desk and reachable only by airplane (remote Alaska), and many of whom are using Core/Core2 Duo based laptops with Realtek hardware, I'd say that for me at least, yes it's a real fricking issue >:( It may be easy enough to download the Realtek driver on one or two home computers, but it's a real PITA when you're trying to push that update out to a number of corporate desk/lap-tops.
I really wish I could just migrate everyone to Linux, but we've got some proprietary Windows-only desktop applications (which blows chunks itself, btw) that are core to our business...sigh.
True...but you could always sacrifice a common port such as 80, 25, 110 or 443 for your tunnel while you were travelling ;) Just make sure you make the change before you leave the house.
Nah. Any geek worth his salt will just establish an SSH tunnel to his home network and run his VoIP call through the tunnel :)
But at least then you would only have interesting calls (for geeks, anyway).
I'm not sure I entirely agree. As has already been noted above, the brain is highly adaptable. Remember when you were learning how to drive? It took all of your concentration just to keep the car moving straight down the road. Later, you learned to keep your speed within 5mph (kph, if you prefer) while keeping the car going straight down the road. Then, you started playing music in the car, talking to passengers, using the cell phone, etc. I suspect the reason is because your brain rewired itself to process the additional data, little by little. This happens all the time, to a number of people. When my wife learned to play drums, she could only play simple rhythms because trying to manage three different beats (kick drum, snare, cymbals) was all she could do. Now, she can manage all of the drums in the kit while singing along with the song she's playing. Her brain rewired itself to cope with more complexity. I've played guitar for years, but it's only been in the last two years that I've been able to sing while playing--my brain rewired itself to handle one rhythm on the guitar and another vocally.
It seems to me that while attention might be a limited resource, most people aren't anywhere near their limits. It just takes a little practice to become proficient at handling additional loads.
Meh. "Always" is a really long time. The x86 may well be in charge for a while to come (for all the reasons everyone else has posted already), but sooner or later, something better will emerge, and people will switch. It's just a matter of time.
'Scuse the possibly stupid question, since IANA(M)BOD (biologist/microbiologist or doctor), but what about the potential for damage to your own body as a result of a temporarily ramped up immune system?
As I understand, this peptide temporarily boosts the immune system, which then is better able to fight off the invading organism. However, there are a number of medical conditions caused by an immune system that's a little too heightened--allergies for example, or a number of other, more serious conditions. When I was 21, I contracted "Rapidly Progressive Glomerulonephritis" which is a condition where the immune system attacks the nodules in your kidneys that filter your blood. I now have a kidney transplant as a result. Lupus, I believe, is another serious condition resulting from an overactive immune system.
If we start prescribing this peptide the way we currently prescribe antibiotics, what are the chances that more than the patient's immune system will attack more than just the intended target? Also, what if, like me, you have an intentionally weakened immune system (to prevent transplant rejection), when you take this peptide? Will you be at greater risk to reject the transplant, since the transplanted organ is a foreign body?
Hmmmm...what kind of airplanes do you fly? Unless I am forgetting some obscure model, every single-engine Cessna built since the 1960's has had rear windows. Having flown 150's, 152's, 172's, 182's and 206's, I can attest that you can, in fact, see out the back of these airplanes. When I was working on my private pilot certificate, my flight instructor used to have me look out the rear window once we had climbed to about 500 feet to make sure that I was still aligned with the runway centerline, and that's something I taught to my students when I became a CFI.
In fact, the only airplanes I've flown that didn't have rear windows were two Cherokees, an early model 150 and a Citabria.