Naw, I re-read the question, and I was wrong to flame the guy. I really don't know why I read flaming into his question, or why I felt compelled to feed those flames I had perceived. I was wrong in either instance, and wrong-squared for following through with a response.
To The Great Pretender: I apologize for my completely uncalled-for response. You certainly didn't deserve being treated that way.
I recall one of my first questions about networking (on FidoNet): "What's a Node?" Actually took a while before I really got a straight answer, most people thought I was baiting them with dumb questions (I think "trolling" hadn't come into common usage yet). I guess I've become the same sort of cynic, and I hope I didn't contribute to creating another one.
Oh my yes. It's not only that they stonewall and outright shelter any abusive customers, it's not even the first time they waved around legal threats. Lying is just SOP for them.
Halon only "sucks out the oxygen" when it's heated by fire. Its displacement effect won't evacuate much of the oxygen already in the room. You'd have to have them stand in the room for several minutes until they got lightheaded and eventually passed out. You'd do better with carbon monoxide. But by then hey, if you're gassing your victims, you may as well go for something really lethal. Now in a really enclosed space like a tape silo, halon will evict the breathable air pretty quickly, and that will certainly kill you, but unless you're fire or the ozone layer, halon is pretty harmless.
The rest of the suggestions... you may as well surround it with a moat filled with sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads.
> So can anyone here be bothered to explain to the ignorant what a datacenter is?
Not really, no. Not anymore than we can explain what a router or a switch or a 1U rack box is. Seriously, I take slashdot to task for not expanding acronyms or insider terms sometimes, but if you don't know what a datacenter is, you're probably nowhere near interested in this entire field.
> Netflix lowered monthly subscriptions a month or so ago
Blockbuster followed up and did exactly the same. Blockbuster's queue is far better than Netflix's too -- you get the movies in the order you queued them, almost no exceptions.
Their system for series dvds is kind of buggy though -- I got disc 2 of The Prisoner full series before disc 1, returned it, and I've never seen another one from it since, it shows as unavailable in my queue. Another couple series items had similar problems -- once it gave me an out-of-order item, it became unavailable forever. Maybe they're just losing all their series dvds?
It should also have a clause that says that from the time it is patented, it must be refreshed annually with proof of substantial progress towards making the invention publicly available.
So basically, a lot like a grant. I'm not really sure that's a complete win, though it should certainly be an affirmative defense in litigation if it can be shown that there was no intention to bring it to market. Thing is, these guys actually could be shown to have been working on bringing their technology to market, but if their patent was vague, or more likely as is the case with patents, obfuscated and vague, it doesn't really help.
I even think there's a place for software patents -- I've seen some techniques developed that were mind-blowingly innovative, and the inventor does deserve a chance at protecting their investment in exchange for making the implementation public. But one big caveat applies: the patent must include full source code of a reference implementation. The whole point of patents is to make designs public after all.
> Maybe if enough scumbag IP holding companies extort enough money out of big corporations, those corporations will lobby congress to get the patent laws changed.
No, they'll just become scumbag IP holding companies themselves. And lobby congress to get the patent laws changed. To favor them.
No kidding -- watching that video, it actually doesn't look like they're obscuring much at all. This is CLEARLY an AO title, and I really wish that they'd take the fight to get the console makers to allow AO titles rather than further muddle the M rating. I mean shit, The Longest Journey has an M rating, and it's a game I'd let any kid play, since the worst thing in it is the occasional language.
> It is also available on PACER, which may be more complete, but there is a per-page access fee involved.
PACER is free if you don't rack up more than $10 a year with it. Of course it's VERY easy to do that -- even searches incur a per-"page" charge for the results. It's also a public record, so anyone's perfectly free to grab documents off PACER and republish them publicly.
If you don't like Oblivion's Leveling system, there are lots of mods that let you change it. One of them lets you temporarily turn off your own leveling entirely so you can build up neglected skills without having it throw everything out of balance. Others like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul get rid of the leveled list monsters and loot (for the most part -- they still leave some of it in).
I don't think I could stand the game without OOO. With it, it still gets.. a 9/10 (points off for a much shallower plot than Morrowind, poor voice acting, and overuse of bloom in outdoor areas)
I burn the occasional disk from Netflix. Not all of them like some people do, since I question the ethics of that, but some of them.
And what effort? I start up dvd decryptor, and press one single button. I burn by hitting a key, then pressing the same big button. My bandwidth doesn't get used, I get all the extra features, audio tracks, subtitles, I can carry the disk anywhere and play it on anyone's player, and there's no secret MPAA police monitoring my activities to send the gendarmes to kick down my door.
> Let me know when they've got a copy-protection method that doesn't get cracked in a few weeks or months of its debut.
Anyone cracked MagicGate yet?
Heck, even AACS is just weakened, not really permanently broken. Though I suspect as long as they're giving keys to software players, it's going to keep getting cracked.
Even if ICANN kills whois (which is itself doubtful) IP whois isn't likely to go away. The annoying personal info requirement is only a "feature" of domain name whois.
BGP4 data is pretty good when you want to find ip ranges to block. RouteViews, Team Cymru, and The CIDR Report are all pretty good resources there. It's usually a bit more coarse-grained than IP whois, but it doesn't rely on the ISPs updating SWIPS records that may go out of date or never get added in the first place.
You don't need whois to check for the existence of a domain. Just look up its NS glue record.
What WHOIS is really good for is getting the registration date of a domain, which is a nice indicator of whether a domain is actually a throwaway spam domain or an established site. It'd be nice if the dates actually came back in a consistent format, but at least it's usually human-readable. IP whois is also nice when you're looking at an ISP that actually bothers to fill out SWIPS records for allocations. I've been going more to BGP4 ASNs to determine ownership of IPs instead, but those only come into play for larger allocations.
RIPE is the only RIR that has its shit together when it comes to WHOIS, everywhere else is a complete mess. I say ICANN drops the requirement for WHOIS to return personal data in public queries, and also mandates a migration to the RIPE formats, which are actually consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
Naw, I re-read the question, and I was wrong to flame the guy. I really don't know why I read flaming into his question, or why I felt compelled to feed those flames I had perceived. I was wrong in either instance, and wrong-squared for following through with a response.
To The Great Pretender: I apologize for my completely uncalled-for response. You certainly didn't deserve being treated that way.
I recall one of my first questions about networking (on FidoNet): "What's a Node?" Actually took a while before I really got a straight answer, most people thought I was baiting them with dumb questions (I think "trolling" hadn't come into common usage yet). I guess I've become the same sort of cynic, and I hope I didn't contribute to creating another one.
> And you think CI is the scumbag here?
Oh my yes. It's not only that they stonewall and outright shelter any abusive customers, it's not even the first time they waved around legal threats. Lying is just SOP for them.
> Go ahead and kill some hookers on your toy; the grown-ups will be over here.
It's so cute when the children argue over who's more grown-up.
Toyota produces a large number of cars in the USA. These are UAW shops like the rest.
In Japan, the pay and benefits in the manufacturing sector are a matter of law.
Whoosh indeed.
Halon only "sucks out the oxygen" when it's heated by fire. Its displacement effect won't evacuate much of the oxygen already in the room. You'd have to have them stand in the room for several minutes until they got lightheaded and eventually passed out. You'd do better with carbon monoxide. But by then hey, if you're gassing your victims, you may as well go for something really lethal. Now in a really enclosed space like a tape silo, halon will evict the breathable air pretty quickly, and that will certainly kill you, but unless you're fire or the ozone layer, halon is pretty harmless.
... you may as well surround it with a moat filled with sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads.
The rest of the suggestions
> So can anyone here be bothered to explain to the ignorant what a datacenter is?
Not really, no. Not anymore than we can explain what a router or a switch or a 1U rack box is. Seriously, I take slashdot to task for not expanding acronyms or insider terms sometimes, but if you don't know what a datacenter is, you're probably nowhere near interested in this entire field.
It couldn't have happened to a better bunch of scumbags. In fact I wouldn't be surprised at all if they robbed the datacenter themselves to destroy evidence or just for insurance fraud.
> Because, last I checked, the other guys had policies about family values and whatnot.
Maybe 10 years ago. Sure as hell isn't the case now. Got the unrated Requiem for a Dream there years ago. I almost wish I got the edited version.
The bad guy you're looking for now is Wal-mart.
> Netflix lowered monthly subscriptions a month or so ago
Blockbuster followed up and did exactly the same. Blockbuster's queue is far better than Netflix's too -- you get the movies in the order you queued them, almost no exceptions.
Their system for series dvds is kind of buggy though -- I got disc 2 of The Prisoner full series before disc 1, returned it, and I've never seen another one from it since, it shows as unavailable in my queue. Another couple series items had similar problems -- once it gave me an out-of-order item, it became unavailable forever. Maybe they're just losing all their series dvds?
> Im printing me a new liver :)
We recommend having it professionally installed.
It should also have a clause that says that from the time it is patented, it must be refreshed annually with proof of substantial progress towards making the invention publicly available.
So basically, a lot like a grant. I'm not really sure that's a complete win, though it should certainly be an affirmative defense in litigation if it can be shown that there was no intention to bring it to market. Thing is, these guys actually could be shown to have been working on bringing their technology to market, but if their patent was vague, or more likely as is the case with patents, obfuscated and vague, it doesn't really help.
I even think there's a place for software patents -- I've seen some techniques developed that were mind-blowingly innovative, and the inventor does deserve a chance at protecting their investment in exchange for making the implementation public. But one big caveat applies: the patent must include full source code of a reference implementation. The whole point of patents is to make designs public after all.
> This seems like a great MythTV machine.
With a VIA CPU?!?!?!\N{INTERROBANG}
I think you're wildly optimistic. I don't think it could handle the front or back end.
> Maybe if enough scumbag IP holding companies extort enough money out of big corporations, those corporations will lobby congress to get the patent laws changed.
No, they'll just become scumbag IP holding companies themselves. And lobby congress to get the patent laws changed. To favor them.
The cake is a... aw forget it.
No kidding -- watching that video, it actually doesn't look like they're obscuring much at all. This is CLEARLY an AO title, and I really wish that they'd take the fight to get the console makers to allow AO titles rather than further muddle the M rating. I mean shit, The Longest Journey has an M rating, and it's a game I'd let any kid play, since the worst thing in it is the occasional language.
Oh, very nice troll (I mean in the classic AFU sense).
Now to the goofus that moderated this informative, go look up the latin word for "beard".
> It is also available on PACER, which may be more complete, but there is a per-page access fee involved.
PACER is free if you don't rack up more than $10 a year with it. Of course it's VERY easy to do that -- even searches incur a per-"page" charge for the results. It's also a public record, so anyone's perfectly free to grab documents off PACER and republish them publicly.
If you don't like Oblivion's Leveling system, there are lots of mods that let you change it. One of them lets you temporarily turn off your own leveling entirely so you can build up neglected skills without having it throw everything out of balance. Others like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul get rid of the leveled list monsters and loot (for the most part -- they still leave some of it in).
.. a 9/10 (points off for a much shallower plot than Morrowind, poor voice acting, and overuse of bloom in outdoor areas)
I don't think I could stand the game without OOO. With it, it still gets
There's really no point in arguing with the Drug Warriors. They see only two modes in which things can operate:
A) Pervasive drug testing, anonymous informants, civil forfeiture, and general kicking down of doors anywhere and anytime.
OR
B) 7-11 puts black tar heroin in slurpees and puppy chow.
I burn the occasional disk from Netflix. Not all of them like some people do, since I question the ethics of that, but some of them.
And what effort? I start up dvd decryptor, and press one single button. I burn by hitting a key, then pressing the same big button. My bandwidth doesn't get used, I get all the extra features, audio tracks, subtitles, I can carry the disk anywhere and play it on anyone's player, and there's no secret MPAA police monitoring my activities to send the gendarmes to kick down my door.
> Let me know when they've got a copy-protection method that doesn't get cracked in a few weeks or months of its debut.
Anyone cracked MagicGate yet?
Heck, even AACS is just weakened, not really permanently broken. Though I suspect as long as they're giving keys to software players, it's going to keep getting cracked.
Even if ICANN kills whois (which is itself doubtful) IP whois isn't likely to go away. The annoying personal info requirement is only a "feature" of domain name whois.
BGP4 data is pretty good when you want to find ip ranges to block. RouteViews, Team Cymru, and The CIDR Report are all pretty good resources there. It's usually a bit more coarse-grained than IP whois, but it doesn't rely on the ISPs updating SWIPS records that may go out of date or never get added in the first place.
Information that isn't there AT ALL isn't "obscure". It's INACCESSABLE.
Here's how you tell the difference:
My real name is "puneyrf h. sneyrl", but that's encrypted in a really secret way that I won't tell you (and no it's not REALLY my name).
My home address is out there on the net somewhere. Go tell me what it is.
You don't need whois to check for the existence of a domain. Just look up its NS glue record.
What WHOIS is really good for is getting the registration date of a domain, which is a nice indicator of whether a domain is actually a throwaway spam domain or an established site. It'd be nice if the dates actually came back in a consistent format, but at least it's usually human-readable. IP whois is also nice when you're looking at an ISP that actually bothers to fill out SWIPS records for allocations. I've been going more to BGP4 ASNs to determine ownership of IPs instead, but those only come into play for larger allocations.
RIPE is the only RIR that has its shit together when it comes to WHOIS, everywhere else is a complete mess. I say ICANN drops the requirement for WHOIS to return personal data in public queries, and also mandates a migration to the RIPE formats, which are actually consistent.
> Absolutely. "Only Congress should have the power or authority to rewrite scientific reports made by agencies."
I'm perfectly fine with that alternative. At least there's some possibility of oversight there.