"There are rumors of a massive cold front moving towards Hell"
Actually, as I type this, the weather in Hell is a mild 10 degrees Celsius (50F), projected to rise to 16 degrees Celsius (61F) by Friday. About normal for this time of year.
Oh, and Hell (altitude: 58 metres above sea level) is a small village/town in Norway, not far from Trondheim.
"I guess we'll see if/. can manage to be "fair and balanced", considering the rather significant slant in its readership.
Yeah, but slant in which direction? I've seen people stating, as if it were a self-evident fact, that the majority of the/. readership is heavily left leaning, while other people are equally convinced that it's right/libertarian leaning.
You obviously think the perceived slant is so pronounced that you don't even have to specify which way it leans (or falls over, as the case may be).
In my eyes, I have to say the slant appears to be to the right, with a heavy influence of libertarian thinking. Offhand, I can't remember having read a truly leftist view on/., ever.
YWVMV (Your World View May Vary), this one was brought to you from Norway.
I know some people (yes you, with the moderator points) are going to view this post as flamebait, but let me assure you that it's not intended as such.
I also realize that this is not a case of the federal government banning books nationwide, but still. Banning books is a very serious matter, perhaps the most serious matter in any society.
The dangerous thing is not that local governments and pressure groups manage to ban books in public libraries and schools, but that the federal goverment is not immediately challenging this in the courts. Government's role in any civilized society is to protect its citizens, against threats to both their physical safety as well as their civil rights, something the current US administration doesn't seem to grasp.
The list doesn't look good:
Restrictions on travel (secret no-fly lists)
People incarcerated without court oversight
Scientific research influenced by the government to fit their political agenda
Funding for scientific research steadily reduced
Unchallenged banning of books in public libraries and schools
Talk about your slippery slope. America has a good system of checks and balances but they seem to not be working properly at the moment.
"The United States is the origin of choice for spammers, said Alperovitch, because of the plentiful supply of cheap high-speed bandwidth."
I'm sorry, but this is just plain wrong. As others have already said, other countries have a higher penetration of broadband, as well as a much higher penetration of very fast broadband (10-100 Mbit/sec).
No, the main reason why 86% of spam originates from the US is cultural. In the US, greed is perceived as good, while in much of the rest of the world greed is perceived as bad, even in capitalist societies.
(Whether greed is in fact good or bad, seen from a rational perspective in a capitalist society, is beside the point. The point is how we are all conditioned to evaluate it, which will influence our behavior, including how we conduct business.)
I would imagine that the idea of the American dream also plays a part. Again, no judgement on the merits of the dream is intended, but the fact remains that it is a powerful narcotic for those affected. Living in the US, you are surrounded by reminders of it all the time, it's not hard to imagine how one might come to the conclusion that it is in fact one's right.
What all this does is create an environment where the end justifies the means when it comes to making money.
I found this part of the article most interesting:
"According to Cunningham's figures on mortgage leads, he can get a click-through rate for his messages from anywhere between 1:60 to 1:240, which means that one person will respond for every 60 to 240 e-mails; for AOL e-mail addresses the click-through rate is as favorable as 1:19."
Perhaps AOL should spend the same amount of money educating their customers as they do fighting spam?
Kind of makes you wonder why the spammers don't just spend all their energy on getting past AOL's spam filters and leave the rest of us the fsck alone.
the unbeliever wrote: > SP1a for XP was SP1 without the Microsoft JVM
And your point is?
It's not like there's ever been "a" releases of service packs before, that were bug fixes and were released not long after the service pack itself, right?
Yowza. dave420, in his "thinking for himself" mode, postulated thusly:
> SP2 is fine
Surely.
Lessee: 200 incompatible applications, some of them Microsoft's own, a hotfix released before the SP has even reached the masses (through Windows Update and localization to non-US locales), a much-hyped firewall that doesn't check outgoing connections (but pops up misleading dialogs that confuse the user into thinking it does) and quite a few people complaining about much strangeness after installing it.
This is your definition of fine, is it? After, as you say, having taken a look at it while clearly not being at all biased by "alterior"(sic) motives?
Well, I give in. Your eloquent arguments and unbiased outlook won me over. SP2 is fine. And the emperor's clothes are magnificent in their splendor.
Now go away and exercise that brain you imply having through allusions to thinking for yourself, before I have to get sarcastic on your ass.
Armed with this information, use OpenBSD to set up firewalls with ALTQ packet prioritizing, PF stateful filtering and IPsec secure VPNs between all endpoints.
Setup Asterisk PBX' behind the firewalls and network them over the VPNs.
Now let them try to monitor your calls.
(No, this doesn't help with calls you terminate with an insecure 3rd party, like a VoIP provider gatewaying your calls out to the PSTN. The "P" in PSTN is for "Public", so you need to treat it as completely insecure and act accordingly.)
> 0. It doesn't matter to you if someone else's computer is faster because
> you know your system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it.
Which reminds me: I'll always regret not saving a Cyber 180 at a former employer before it (the Cyber) went into a landfill back in '89 or '90. It had a MAP and all.
Now that thing would easily crush a VAX 11/750 if it fell over on it. And a PC? Pfft! Roadkill!
Let me give you an example of irony. Take this sentence:
"ticklemeozmo certainly has grasped the concept of irony"
That was dripping with irony, get it? Your rescue helicopter example isn't irony, it's a twist of fate. In fact, your misunderstanding of the term irony probably stems from the usage:
"Fate must have a keen sense of irony to allow that helicopter to crash on the person it was rescuing"
The above is not the same as your use of the term. Allowing the helicopter to crash on the rescuee might be seen as an ironic statement by Fate, if you believe Fate was in control of the helicopter in the first place. As a disinterested observer the crash holds no irony for us, and certainly not for the person being crashed upon, in and of itself.
OTOH, your use of the helicopter example in a post lambasting another poster for his misunderstanding of irony, is, in a word, ironic.
Google for more references, here's a couple to start you off:
Thanks for the reply. At least you took my question seriously and attempted give a serious answer.
I notice some idiot with modpoints decided to mod me down as a troll. I guess he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that I was not trying to provoke, I really want to know.
> perhaps you've never even played one
I can understand why you'd make that assumption, but in fact I have. My first exposure to FPS was the original Wolfenstein 3D for Mac back when it came out ('94). Everyone was talking about it, so I had to try. Didn't get it then, didn't get Doom, didn't get Quake and quickly lost patience with Half Life.
> many players seem to use Q3A as their form of irc or im
Heh, OK. Never tried that. While I'll be the first to agree that man wants to (and needs to!) play, I still find it strange that we as a group tend to gravitate towards games depicting mindless violence (your remarks about non-violent versions notwithstanding). We're supposed to be a cerebral bunch, aren't we? Everybody needs to blow off some steam once in a while, sure, but with this?
I guess I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm the only geek in the world who feels this way. Or am I? Anyone else out there? Hellooo?
Am I the only geek who just doesn't get it with FPS games?
Bo-ring.
Now give me a good arcade game any day of the week and I'm interested. If it's a good flight sim I'll be lost to this world for the next 48 hours. But pretending you're Rambo and shooting up the place? Yawn...
> Side thought: when does American democracy get a bugzilla page?
Excellent idea, but why limit it to just American democracy? With globalization and all, it seems to me we need to address some larger issues and deal with the fundamental bugs as well.
Bug #1: The people not really in charge as their elected politicians are just puppets of the big international mega-corporations
Assigned to: none
Status: pending
> Man can kill man, but until they do, there is nothing to be sad about.
- "Hey, we managed to coexist for 40 years without incinerating 500 million people, this calls for a celebration and a congratulatory pat on the back. Attaboy!"
Disclaimer: I'm a partner in a Linux and Asterisk based VoIP startup in Norway.
Thanks to efforts like E164.org, one day phone calls will be just another service running on the Internet. There will be no fees for doing simple peer-to-peer connections (me calling you to say hi), however special content and services will still have fees. Gateways to POTS* will be one such service for the foreseeable future.
What this means is that we're in for a revolution. We're rapidly moving from a model where the Internet is run over phone lines to where the phones are run over the Internet. IOW, basic communications go from a metered service produced by a relatively small group of very lucrative companies, some of which are still state-owned monopolies, to the Internet model which we all know: A basically cooperative network where people purchase the bandwidth they need and agree to connect to their neighbours in order to join the big network. As I'm sure you've already figured, selling that bandwidth will still be big business, but nowhere near as lucrative as selling metered service.
The big thing to get here is that the production of value, i.e. stuff that people are willing to pay for, will move from the center of the network to the edges. That is, from the big (sometimes monopolistic) phone companies to you and me. Welcome to the Internet revolution, you thought it was mostly over but in reality it's just starting. Oh, and if you thought the RIAA was running scared, they have nothing to fear compared to the big ol' phone companies.
So what do I mean by "one down, one to go"? Two things, actually. First, e164 directory services are the first step, the second involves VoIP providers creating an environment where they can exchange traffic and get paid for services they provide to other providers. Say a user on your VoIP provider in the US calls a POTS number in Norway via a VoIP provider in that country with a POTS gateway. Peering the actual voice traffic is just one part of the exchange, peering the business end of things is the other. But this too will fall into place, sooner rather than later.
The other thing I'm thinking of as "one to go" is TV. Today most countries are building separate infrastructures running parallell carrying different services: Voice over phone lines, TV over cable or OTA** and Internet over whatever's available. I'll give you an example:
In Norway the Storting (Parliament) has decided to spend $0.5 billion to build an OTA infrastructure to transmit digital TV signals. Once the new network is in place, the old analog network will be switched off. And you thought the US digital TV mandate was bad...
My prediction is that before the new digital TV network is in place it will already by severly outdated, completely overrun by the Internet revolution.
The world is rapidly becoming digital and the Internet is the enabler. There is no future in building any kind of infrastructure unless it is dedicated to carrying Internet traffic. Wired, wireless, optical, satellite, it just doesn't matter as long as it moves the bits.
Welcome to the revolution, we're just starting.
* POTS: Plain Old Telephone System
** OTA: Over The Air, traditional broadcasting
Slashdot Mirror
Voop offers PSTN termination over IAX and SIP for Asterisk users in Norway. Both business users and private individuals welcome.
Disclosure: I work for Voop.
Actually, as I type this, the weather in Hell is a mild 10 degrees Celsius (50F), projected to rise to 16 degrees Celsius (61F) by Friday. About normal for this time of year.
Oh, and Hell (altitude: 58 metres above sea level) is a small village/town in Norway, not far from Trondheim.
Yeah, but slant in which direction? I've seen people stating, as if it were a self-evident fact, that the majority of the /. readership is heavily left leaning, while other people are equally convinced that it's right/libertarian leaning.
You obviously think the perceived slant is so pronounced that you don't even have to specify which way it leans (or falls over, as the case may be).
In my eyes, I have to say the slant appears to be to the right, with a heavy influence of libertarian thinking. Offhand, I can't remember having read a truly leftist view on /., ever.
YWVMV (Your World View May Vary), this one was brought to you from Norway.
I also realize that this is not a case of the federal government banning books nationwide, but still. Banning books is a very serious matter, perhaps the most serious matter in any society.
The dangerous thing is not that local governments and pressure groups manage to ban books in public libraries and schools, but that the federal goverment is not immediately challenging this in the courts. Government's role in any civilized society is to protect its citizens, against threats to both their physical safety as well as their civil rights, something the current US administration doesn't seem to grasp.
The list doesn't look good:
- Restrictions on travel (secret no-fly lists)
- People incarcerated without court oversight
- Scientific research influenced by the government to fit their political agenda
- Funding for scientific research steadily reduced
- Unchallenged banning of books in public libraries and schools
Talk about your slippery slope. America has a good system of checks and balances but they seem to not be working properly at the moment.This is a common misconception. The truth of the matter is pigs fly just fine, given enough thrust.
Ouch. Sounds painful, considering the size of some of those IBM mainframes.
Actually, it's per station wagon full of tapes.
I'm sorry, but this is just plain wrong. As others have already said, other countries have a higher penetration of broadband, as well as a much higher penetration of very fast broadband (10-100 Mbit/sec).
No, the main reason why 86% of spam originates from the US is cultural. In the US, greed is perceived as good, while in much of the rest of the world greed is perceived as bad, even in capitalist societies.
(Whether greed is in fact good or bad, seen from a rational perspective in a capitalist society, is beside the point. The point is how we are all conditioned to evaluate it, which will influence our behavior, including how we conduct business.)
I would imagine that the idea of the American dream also plays a part. Again, no judgement on the merits of the dream is intended, but the fact remains that it is a powerful narcotic for those affected. Living in the US, you are surrounded by reminders of it all the time, it's not hard to imagine how one might come to the conclusion that it is in fact one's right.
What all this does is create an environment where the end justifies the means when it comes to making money.
"According to Cunningham's figures on mortgage leads, he can get a click-through rate for his messages from anywhere between 1:60 to 1:240, which means that one person will respond for every 60 to 240 e-mails; for AOL e-mail addresses the click-through rate is as favorable as 1:19."
Perhaps AOL should spend the same amount of money educating their customers as they do fighting spam?
Kind of makes you wonder why the spammers don't just spend all their energy on getting past AOL's spam filters and leave the rest of us the fsck alone.
> SP1a for XP was SP1 without the Microsoft JVM
And your point is?
It's not like there's ever been "a" releases of service packs before, that were bug fixes and were released not long after the service pack itself, right?
> SP2 is fine
Surely.
Lessee: 200 incompatible applications, some of them Microsoft's own, a hotfix released before the SP has even reached the masses (through Windows Update and localization to non-US locales), a much-hyped firewall that doesn't check outgoing connections (but pops up misleading dialogs that confuse the user into thinking it does) and quite a few people complaining about much strangeness after installing it.
This is your definition of fine, is it? After, as you say, having taken a look at it while clearly not being at all biased by "alterior"(sic) motives?
Well, I give in. Your eloquent arguments and unbiased outlook won me over. SP2 is fine. And the emperor's clothes are magnificent in their splendor.
Now go away and exercise that brain you imply having through allusions to thinking for yourself, before I have to get sarcastic on your ass.
Is it there or isn't it? What is it? It's the Heisenberg Patch!
I think I'll wait for SP2a, thanks all the same.
Armed with this information, use OpenBSD to set up firewalls with ALTQ packet prioritizing, PF stateful filtering and IPsec secure VPNs between all endpoints.
Setup Asterisk PBX' behind the firewalls and network them over the VPNs.
Now let them try to monitor your calls.
(No, this doesn't help with calls you terminate with an insecure 3rd party, like a VoIP provider gatewaying your calls out to the PSTN. The "P" in PSTN is for "Public", so you need to treat it as completely insecure and act accordingly.)
No.
And make that "perceived security".
> you know your system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it.
Which reminds me: I'll always regret not saving a Cyber 180 at a former employer before it (the Cyber) went into a landfill back in '89 or '90. It had a MAP and all.
Now that thing would easily crush a VAX 11/750 if it fell over on it. And a PC? Pfft! Roadkill!
*sniffle*
Not, that would not be irony. Unless you define "irony" to mean what Alanis Morissette evidently thinks it does. She's wrong and you're wrong.
Let me give you an example of irony. Take this sentence:
"ticklemeozmo certainly has grasped the concept of irony"
That was dripping with irony, get it? Your rescue helicopter example isn't irony, it's a twist of fate. In fact, your misunderstanding of the term irony probably stems from the usage:
"Fate must have a keen sense of irony to allow that helicopter to crash on the person it was rescuing"
The above is not the same as your use of the term. Allowing the helicopter to crash on the rescuee might be seen as an ironic statement by Fate, if you believe Fate was in control of the helicopter in the first place. As a disinterested observer the crash holds no irony for us, and certainly not for the person being crashed upon, in and of itself.
OTOH, your use of the helicopter example in a post lambasting another poster for his misunderstanding of irony, is, in a word, ironic.
Google for more references, here's a couple to start you off:
http://www.politicaljuice.com/2004/05/defining_iro ny.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ironic (check the usage note)
Thanks for the reply. At least you took my question seriously and attempted give a serious answer.
I notice some idiot with modpoints decided to mod me down as a troll. I guess he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that I was not trying to provoke, I really want to know.
> perhaps you've never even played one
I can understand why you'd make that assumption, but in fact I have. My first exposure to FPS was the original Wolfenstein 3D for Mac back when it came out ('94). Everyone was talking about it, so I had to try. Didn't get it then, didn't get Doom, didn't get Quake and quickly lost patience with Half Life.
> many players seem to use Q3A as their form of irc or im
Heh, OK. Never tried that. While I'll be the first to agree that man wants to (and needs to!) play, I still find it strange that we as a group tend to gravitate towards games depicting mindless violence (your remarks about non-violent versions notwithstanding). We're supposed to be a cerebral bunch, aren't we? Everybody needs to blow off some steam once in a while, sure, but with this?
I guess I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm the only geek in the world who feels this way. Or am I? Anyone else out there? Hellooo?
Bo-ring.
Now give me a good arcade game any day of the week and I'm interested. If it's a good flight sim I'll be lost to this world for the next 48 hours. But pretending you're Rambo and shooting up the place? Yawn...
You must be new here.
It's Sir Arthur, not Sir Clarke. Get it right, will ya?
Excellent idea, but why limit it to just American democracy? With globalization and all, it seems to me we need to address some larger issues and deal with the fundamental bugs as well.
Bug #1: The people not really in charge as their elected politicians are just puppets of the big international mega-corporations
Assigned to: none
Status: pending
Now say "Aargh!"
- "Hey, we managed to coexist for 40 years without incinerating 500 million people, this calls for a celebration and a congratulatory pat on the back. Attaboy!"
??
Thanks to efforts like E164.org, one day phone calls will be just another service running on the Internet. There will be no fees for doing simple peer-to-peer connections (me calling you to say hi), however special content and services will still have fees. Gateways to POTS* will be one such service for the foreseeable future.
What this means is that we're in for a revolution. We're rapidly moving from a model where the Internet is run over phone lines to where the phones are run over the Internet. IOW, basic communications go from a metered service produced by a relatively small group of very lucrative companies, some of which are still state-owned monopolies, to the Internet model which we all know: A basically cooperative network where people purchase the bandwidth they need and agree to connect to their neighbours in order to join the big network. As I'm sure you've already figured, selling that bandwidth will still be big business, but nowhere near as lucrative as selling metered service.
The big thing to get here is that the production of value, i.e. stuff that people are willing to pay for, will move from the center of the network to the edges. That is, from the big (sometimes monopolistic) phone companies to you and me. Welcome to the Internet revolution, you thought it was mostly over but in reality it's just starting. Oh, and if you thought the RIAA was running scared, they have nothing to fear compared to the big ol' phone companies.
So what do I mean by "one down, one to go"? Two things, actually. First, e164 directory services are the first step, the second involves VoIP providers creating an environment where they can exchange traffic and get paid for services they provide to other providers. Say a user on your VoIP provider in the US calls a POTS number in Norway via a VoIP provider in that country with a POTS gateway. Peering the actual voice traffic is just one part of the exchange, peering the business end of things is the other. But this too will fall into place, sooner rather than later.
The other thing I'm thinking of as "one to go" is TV. Today most countries are building separate infrastructures running parallell carrying different services: Voice over phone lines, TV over cable or OTA** and Internet over whatever's available. I'll give you an example:
In Norway the Storting (Parliament) has decided to spend $0.5 billion to build an OTA infrastructure to transmit digital TV signals. Once the new network is in place, the old analog network will be switched off. And you thought the US digital TV mandate was bad...
My prediction is that before the new digital TV network is in place it will already by severly outdated, completely overrun by the Internet revolution.
The world is rapidly becoming digital and the Internet is the enabler. There is no future in building any kind of infrastructure unless it is dedicated to carrying Internet traffic. Wired, wireless, optical, satellite, it just doesn't matter as long as it moves the bits.
Welcome to the revolution, we're just starting.
* POTS: Plain Old Telephone System
** OTA: Over The Air, traditional broadcasting