The trouble with claiming to have the lowest user ID in a thread is that someone with one lower will inevitably show up just to post and annoy you. N00b.
Now, as for the topic at hand, MythTV does allow automated commercial skipping, but you have to remember that most DVRs consumers use do not support anything more than a glorified fast-forward like a VCR. My Scientific Atlanta PVR from the cable company is like that and doesn't even offer skip feature. I believe TiVos are the same way unless you use the code to unlock the 30-second skip feature.
What we need is an Authentication System [si20.com] in the email protocol itself, and that is what my company - SolidBlue is working on over the next year or so. Interested researchers can email us and we'll see if we can get an RFC group started.
And rest assurred, your authentication information will be safe with my company who promises not to sell it to anyone else until we change our privacy policy which we don't have to notify you about. Oh yes, and we will also be giving the FBI full access to our databases for terrorist information gathering cooperative efforts.:-)
If your server is not listening to 443 (HTTPS by nature) then there is obviously no point of configuring your firewall to block this.
Or rather, if you're server isn't listening on port 443 there's no point in opening this port up in your firewall. Default deny people. Default deny. Portmap may not be vulnerable today but someone may discover a bug in it at 3am tomorrow while you're happily sleeping in bed and use it to exploit your box. Just block everything and open up only the services you need. And of those servers, think about if you really need them open or not and if you could be using a more secure program to do the same thing.. perhaps DJB's tools like publicfile and djbdns for example to replace these huge monolithic apps for a simple home box with a couple dozen web pages.
At my workplace, we're trying out Yahoo! IM at the moment (with a view toward moving to something more secure behind our firewall). I've found it helpful for things it's appropriate for. It's saved me several long-distance phone calls already, and helped out in situations where I needed an answer quickly to give to someone on the phone.
How is this instant messaging any different than IRC? If I want to talk to people I hop on our private server and join the channel and talk away. As for people that aren't on IRC e-mail works just fine. If they're sitting in front of their desks chances are I will get a reply within a few minutes. I'd rather read my e-mail and reply when I have time than be a slave to IM popups all the time. Plus, do you really trust AOL, Yahoo, and MSN to see what you're chatting about, especially at work? I would think an IM system where you can setup your own private server and link it to external servers and ONLY route messages to external servers if they can't be reached on the private one would be a much more preferred solution for a standardized instant messaging protocol. But wait, how would they deliver ads then?;-)
Sun is a bad example you can run Solaris 8 on a sparc 5 if you need to, thats some really old equipment. Not sure if Solaris 9 will run on one but I wouldn't be suprised if it did.
That's a bad analogy since they make it a point for Solaris to be very backward compatible with older versions of software and hardware. However, you can't run Solaris 7 or earlier on a Netra X1 or a Sun Blade 100 for instance simply because the hardware wasn't supported in that version. It's similar to the new Macs in 2003 situation. They probably plan on adding things that they'd rather not backport support for into OS 9 since it is dead. As far as hardware, in the Mac world, you can run MacOS X 10.2 on an Apple B&W PowerMac G3 tower. Other than being slow as hell it works fine. You just won't be able to boot into older OS 9 if you have a brand new Mac next year. There is NOTHING new with this. Windows 2000 for instance boots fine on my old machine, it just doesn't support some of the peripherals like my parallel port scanner. Maybe MacOS 9 won't support the video card in the newer Macs?
What difference does it make whether you're getting snail mail spam in your PO Box or your home address? You're still getting advertising. You do have the option of not watching TV but we don't seem to have the option of not receiving US Postal Mail.. at least Kramer didn't.
"The Internet" being knocked virtually out of commision is actually a possiblity, if a few major backbones are taken out. The worst part? We, in all honesty, have no clue how to "reboot" the Internet if enough of it went down.
Easy, you just send out this message, wait for the traffic to die down, and the Internet Administration Authority calls up all the guys with backbone routers and they reboot them at the same time. Simple.
Internet Cleaning DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM MARCH 31st 23:59 pm (GMT) UNTIL 12:01am (GMT) APRIL 1st.
*** Attention ***
It's that time again! As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 23:59 pm (GMT) on March 31st until 00:01 am (GMT) on April 2nd. During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet-crawling robots situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Interconnected Network Maintenance Staff Main Branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it.
Please pass this message on to other sysops and Internet users as well.
Or the real question would be, is it worth the trouble? Alternatively I could wipe the windows from there and install tiny linux. Is it a good good idea? I have some time to burn
If you were going to do this with a PC why even bother with Linux? That's overkill. Just install DOS on it and use one of the JPEG/GIF slideshow programs running out of autoexec.bat. If it "crashes" or locks up, just cycle the power and it'll reboot. DOS would take less than 1MB of memory to do this and be quite a bit faster at booting than the Linux version on that machine. www.freedos.org
Step 2 is "Get popular enough to be signed by a major record label and then no longer give away your music." This is also known as the "Metallica Factor".
Wow, what a difference a few years makes. Personally I found the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 much more fun than the NES. Hell, for one thing I didn't need to blow on all my Atari game carts to get them to work. I seem to remember having that be a huge issue whenever playing an NES game. Pull out cart, blow on connector, put it in slot. If you didn't it had a good chance of not working at all or the colors would be screwed up, etc.
Also, before the Atari I had tons of fun on my Commodore Vic 20 writing stupid Basic Goto loops and playing games in the early 1980's when I was a kid. The Vic-20 had some cool games too.
No, but I just registered a domain with godaddy.com last week, and got a post card from Versign today saying I can transfer domains to them for $15, and get a 1 year extension.
Funny I've been considering transfering my 3 domains from Verisign to Go Daddy for half that. That postcard sold me, I will now.
Everyone using Verisign should take this opportunity to switch! The only reason anyone would use Verisign as their registrar anymore is laziness. We've all been bitching and moaning about how much Network Solutions sucked since before they even started charging for domains but we have a choice now. I would recommend GoDaddy as well. $8.95/year for a domain name and they have a decent web interface for administration. I can register a domain for 4 years for what Network Solutions was charging for 1 year!:-) Talk about rape.
I for one like to see the DMCA used against companies that could possibly aid in its downfall.
Quick, someone come up with a P2P sharing client that would require the RIAA to violate the DMCA in order to serve up invalid and spoofed files using custom broken clients. There would be something so evil about doing that that the universe might implode.
Certainly there is a level of incompetence in network security where the person gaining unauthorised access can simply claim(when acused of accessing a secured network illegally) "The network was not secured". There has to be some remedial security standard below which (assumin it would otherwise be a crime to access a particular secured network) no crime would have been committed.
Crimes are determined on intent though. By your logic if I don't leave my doors locked 24 hours a day with an guard dog at my door then I deserve to be robbed? Unauthorised access of any network is akin to walking into someone's house. At the very least you are trespassing, at the very most I am going to shoot you. This is the kind of logic many pirates use to steal music. Just because you can do something doesn't give you the right to and certainly doesn't make it any less illegal.
Go watch some of the old Metallica documentries where Lars himself was advocating how great it was in the old days when Metallica fans were ILLEGALLY swapping Metallica tapes amongst themselves. My, how we've changed our tune. (No pun intended.) It was OK then because no one knew who Metallica was and they were spreading the music, thus creating a larger fan base.
I think I remember hearing one of them comment on that even recently. They said swapping tapes with friends is OK because it takes more effort to dub it and mail it (if out of state) than swapping it digitally. That justification seems kind of shallow to me. The medium shouldn't make any difference.
How did they measure those 60 million users? The number of usernames in their database? If that was a valid way to measure users then Slashdot has over 600,000 users? More likely 30,000 and 570,000 troll accounts. I myself had 5 or 6 Napster accounts. I was always forgetting the damn password when I reinstalled it.
From the EULA before you can download the images on CCO:
License. License. Subject to the terms and conditions of and except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, Cisco Systems, Inc. or the Cisco Systems, Inc. subsidiary licensing the Software, if sale is not directly by Cisco Systems, Inc. ("Cisco"), and its suppliers grant to Customer ("Customer") a nonexclusive and nontransferable license to use the specific Cisco program modules, feature set(s) or feature(s) for which Customer has paid the required license fees (the "Software"), in object code form only. In addition, the foregoing license shall also be subject to the following limitations, as applicable:
* Unless otherwise expressly provided in the documentation, Customer shall use the Software solely as embedded in, for execution on, or (where the applicable documentation permits installation on non-Cisco equipment) for communication with Cisco equipment owned or leased by Customer;
*snip* And this:
General Limitations. Except as otherwise expressly provided under this Agreement, Customer shall have no right, and Customer specifically agrees not to:
(i) transfer, assign or sublicense its license rights to any other person, or use the Software on unauthorized or secondhand Cisco equipment, and any such attempted transfer, assignment or sublicense shall be void;
I understand you may think you are exempt from EULAs because you don't want to pay for something, but the company's lawyers might see it a different way. Using any of those images on non-Cisco hardware is prohibited. Period.
You need good hardware to run it. It's a good port, but they didn't enhance it a lot for the PC. I don't think it'll run well with anything less than a GeForce 4 Ti.
Works perfectly fine on a 1.4GHz Athlon system with a GeForce 2 (32meg) and Windows2000.
Well, first yesterday they provided a direct link to a tool to DOS a Windows NT/2000/XP box, and today they're linking to an article on how to build a Cisco PIX and steal their software to run on it?? WTF is Slashdot becoming? If you are just downloading the PIX software you *are* stealing it. It's several thousand dollars.
But when that happens, your backup becomes the new original, and you now have a right to make a new backup of it for when it gets scratched. So no matter how many backups they give you to start with, in the long run you still need to be able to make your own.
I agree. I prefer to make an ISO image of my CDs and store the backup on a convenient distributed file sharing network. That way, if my house burns down, chances are someone will have replicated the image onto their system and I can restore the image! It's called a distributed offsite backup system.
Re:Oh that's very responsible of you, SlashDot
on
Microsoft News Update
·
· Score: 1
OK, so if there was a bug in Mozilla's HTTP pipelining which caused your OS to crash, who would you blame - the Mozilla team, or those 'morons' who switched on HTTP pipelining ?
I would file a bug report with the Linux networking kernel developers. There's a bug in there somewhere if something in a user-space application can crash the kernel. DOS'ing a server and bringing the machine to a crawl is one thing, but sending malformed packets or deliberately crafted traffic at a server and causing it to crash the entire OS is a different story.
I think that was the point. The RIAA is a 300lb gorilla that thinks it is an 800lb gorilla. If it doesn't be careful it is going to get squished by a REAL 800lb gorilla. I have this vision in my head of one of those little rat dogs barking at your heels trying to intimidate you when I think of the RIAA trying to influence one of these huge telecommunications providers. They're practically invincible! Nothing can ever bring down AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC, Worldcom... err.. hmm.. on second thought, forget it. Maybe the RIAA just needs to sick auditors on them.
call me a conspiracy theorist but i wouldn't be suprised if the RIAA is behind this somehow -- "we can't kill the servers, we can't kill the users.. hmm.. AH HAH!! we'll kill the format"
Isn't that a bit like prohibiting criminals from carrying guns? I mean, no shit, but they're criminals already! What's it matter if they rack up another weapons charge on top of that robbery or assault? Most of these people using mp3's are already violating copyright laws, do you really think they're going to feel inclined to go pay to "legally" use a decoder?;-)
In fact, multiplayer games are often played in one large room, so someone will make sure everyone has the same client and that they are not modified by you. In other cases, you play with your friend, so you trust each other anyway.
Maybe in your case, but most people play online and have never met any of the people they play against, much less play against them in the same room. Getting a pickup game of Quake going is impossible unless you go online or if your friends are complete losers and do nothing but sit around waiting for you to call up a LAN party.
If real tylenol was mixed with codine, they sure as hell wouldn't need to advertize the stuff:P
What do you classify as "real" Tylenol? Tylenol #3 or higher DO have codine in them. If you just mean that "Extra Strength" Tylenol crap then I agree. You might as well take sugar pills.
I can download movies from the net, why isn't that hurting the studios?
15 songs in MP3 format downloaded from P2P network would be about 60-80 megs at around 160Kbps. 2 hour movie downloaded in DivX format in any decent quality would be about 1500 megs. Even at 1.5 Mbps DSL speeds that takes quite awhile to download. In fact, I'd be more willing to just pop over to the store and plunk down the $20 to get the DVD than sit and wait hours for a low-quality rip to download. It all comes down to how convenient it is to get the information into a quality usable state. Ripping a CD and converting it to MP3 takes hardly any time at all. Ripping a DVD and converting it to DivX could take up to 6-8 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with claiming to have the lowest user ID in a thread is that someone with one lower will inevitably show up just to post and annoy you. N00b.
Now, as for the topic at hand, MythTV does allow automated commercial skipping, but you have to remember that most DVRs consumers use do not support anything more than a glorified fast-forward like a VCR. My Scientific Atlanta PVR from the cable company is like that and doesn't even offer skip feature. I believe TiVos are the same way unless you use the code to unlock the 30-second skip feature.
What we need is an Authentication System [si20.com] in the email protocol itself, and that is what my company - SolidBlue is working on over the next year or so. Interested researchers can email us and we'll see if we can get an RFC group started.
:-)
And rest assurred, your authentication information will be safe with my company who promises not to sell it to anyone else until we change our privacy policy which we don't have to notify you about. Oh yes, and we will also be giving the FBI full access to our databases for terrorist information gathering cooperative efforts.
If your server is not listening to 443 (HTTPS by nature) then there is obviously no point of configuring your firewall to block this.
Or rather, if you're server isn't listening on port 443 there's no point in opening this port up in your firewall. Default deny people. Default deny. Portmap may not be vulnerable today but someone may discover a bug in it at 3am tomorrow while you're happily sleeping in bed and use it to exploit your box. Just block everything and open up only the services you need. And of those servers, think about if you really need them open or not and if you could be using a more secure program to do the same thing.. perhaps DJB's tools like publicfile and djbdns for example to replace these huge monolithic apps for a simple home box with a couple dozen web pages.
At my workplace, we're trying out Yahoo! IM at the moment (with a view toward moving to something more secure behind our firewall). I've found it helpful for things it's appropriate for. It's saved me several long-distance phone calls already, and helped out in situations where I needed an answer quickly to give to someone on the phone.
;-)
How is this instant messaging any different than IRC? If I want to talk to people I hop on our private server and join the channel and talk away. As for people that aren't on IRC e-mail works just fine. If they're sitting in front of their desks chances are I will get a reply within a few minutes. I'd rather read my e-mail and reply when I have time than be a slave to IM popups all the time. Plus, do you really trust AOL, Yahoo, and MSN to see what you're chatting about, especially at work? I would think an IM system where you can setup your own private server and link it to external servers and ONLY route messages to external servers if they can't be reached on the private one would be a much more preferred solution for a standardized instant messaging protocol. But wait, how would they deliver ads then?
Sun is a bad example you can run Solaris 8 on a sparc 5 if you need to, thats some really old equipment. Not sure if Solaris 9 will run on one but I wouldn't be suprised if it did.
That's a bad analogy since they make it a point for Solaris to be very backward compatible with older versions of software and hardware. However, you can't run Solaris 7 or earlier on a Netra X1 or a Sun Blade 100 for instance simply because the hardware wasn't supported in that version. It's similar to the new Macs in 2003 situation. They probably plan on adding things that they'd rather not backport support for into OS 9 since it is dead. As far as hardware, in the Mac world, you can run MacOS X 10.2 on an Apple B&W PowerMac G3 tower. Other than being slow as hell it works fine. You just won't be able to boot into older OS 9 if you have a brand new Mac next year. There is NOTHING new with this. Windows 2000 for instance boots fine on my old machine, it just doesn't support some of the peripherals like my parallel port scanner. Maybe MacOS 9 won't support the video card in the newer Macs?
What difference does it make whether you're getting snail mail spam in your PO Box or your home address? You're still getting advertising. You do have the option of not watching TV but we don't seem to have the option of not receiving US Postal Mail.. at least Kramer didn't.
"The Internet" being knocked virtually out of commision is actually a possiblity, if a few major backbones are taken out. The worst part? We, in all honesty, have no clue how to "reboot" the Internet if enough of it went down.
Easy, you just send out this message, wait for the traffic to die down, and the Internet Administration Authority calls up all the guys with backbone routers and they reboot them at the same time. Simple.
Internet Cleaning
DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM MARCH 31st 23:59 pm (GMT) UNTIL 12:01am (GMT) APRIL 1st.
*** Attention ***
It's that time again! As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 23:59 pm (GMT) on March 31st until 00:01 am (GMT) on April 2nd. During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet-crawling robots situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Interconnected Network Maintenance Staff
Main Branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it.
Please pass this message on to other sysops and Internet users as well.
Or the real question would be, is it worth the trouble? Alternatively I could wipe the windows from there and install tiny linux. Is it a good good idea? I have some time to burn
If you were going to do this with a PC why even bother with Linux? That's overkill. Just install DOS on it and use one of the JPEG/GIF slideshow programs running out of autoexec.bat. If it "crashes" or locks up, just cycle the power and it'll reboot. DOS would take less than 1MB of memory to do this and be quite a bit faster at booting than the Linux version on that machine. www.freedos.org
Step 2 is "Get popular enough to be signed by a major record label and then no longer give away your music." This is also known as the "Metallica Factor".
Wow, what a difference a few years makes. Personally I found the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 much more fun than the NES. Hell, for one thing I didn't need to blow on all my Atari game carts to get them to work. I seem to remember having that be a huge issue whenever playing an NES game. Pull out cart, blow on connector, put it in slot. If you didn't it had a good chance of not working at all or the colors would be screwed up, etc.
Also, before the Atari I had tons of fun on my Commodore Vic 20 writing stupid Basic Goto loops and playing games in the early 1980's when I was a kid. The Vic-20 had some cool games too.
No, but I just registered a domain with godaddy.com last week, and got a post card from Versign today saying I can transfer domains to them for $15, and get a 1 year extension.
:-) Talk about rape.
Funny I've been considering transfering my 3 domains from Verisign to Go Daddy for half that. That postcard sold me, I will now.
Everyone using Verisign should take this opportunity to switch! The only reason anyone would use Verisign as their registrar anymore is laziness. We've all been bitching and moaning about how much Network Solutions sucked since before they even started charging for domains but we have a choice now. I would recommend GoDaddy as well. $8.95/year for a domain name and they have a decent web interface for administration. I can register a domain for 4 years for what Network Solutions was charging for 1 year!
I for one like to see the DMCA used against companies that could possibly aid in its downfall.
Quick, someone come up with a P2P sharing client that would require the RIAA to violate the DMCA in order to serve up invalid and spoofed files using custom broken clients. There would be something so evil about doing that that the universe might implode.
Certainly there is a level of incompetence in network security where the person gaining unauthorised access can simply claim(when acused of accessing a secured network illegally) "The network was not secured". There has to be some remedial security standard below which (assumin it would otherwise be a crime to access a particular secured network) no crime would have been committed.
Crimes are determined on intent though. By your logic if I don't leave my doors locked 24 hours a day with an guard dog at my door then I deserve to be robbed? Unauthorised access of any network is akin to walking into someone's house. At the very least you are trespassing, at the very most I am going to shoot you. This is the kind of logic many pirates use to steal music. Just because you can do something doesn't give you the right to and certainly doesn't make it any less illegal.
Go watch some of the old Metallica documentries where Lars himself was advocating how great it was in the old days when Metallica fans were ILLEGALLY swapping Metallica tapes amongst themselves. My, how we've changed our tune. (No pun intended.) It was OK then because no one knew who Metallica was and they were spreading the music, thus creating a larger fan base.
I think I remember hearing one of them comment on that even recently. They said swapping tapes with friends is OK because it takes more effort to dub it and mail it (if out of state) than swapping it digitally. That justification seems kind of shallow to me. The medium shouldn't make any difference.
How did they measure those 60 million users? The number of usernames in their database? If that was a valid way to measure users then Slashdot has over 600,000 users? More likely 30,000 and 570,000 troll accounts. I myself had 5 or 6 Napster accounts. I was always forgetting the damn password when I reinstalled it.
From the EULA before you can download the images on CCO:
License. License. Subject to the terms and conditions of and except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, Cisco Systems, Inc. or the Cisco Systems, Inc. subsidiary licensing the Software, if sale is not directly by Cisco Systems, Inc. ("Cisco"), and its suppliers grant to Customer ("Customer") a nonexclusive and nontransferable license to use the specific Cisco program modules, feature set(s) or feature(s) for which Customer has paid the required license fees (the "Software"), in object code form only. In addition, the foregoing license shall also be subject to the following limitations, as applicable:
* Unless otherwise expressly provided in the documentation, Customer shall use the Software solely as embedded in, for execution on, or (where the applicable documentation permits installation on non-Cisco equipment) for communication with Cisco equipment owned or leased by Customer;
*snip* And this:
General Limitations. Except as otherwise expressly provided under this Agreement, Customer shall have no right, and Customer specifically agrees not to:
(i) transfer, assign or sublicense its license rights to any other person, or use the Software on unauthorized or secondhand Cisco equipment, and any such attempted transfer, assignment or sublicense shall be void;
I understand you may think you are exempt from EULAs because you don't want to pay for something, but the company's lawyers might see it a different way. Using any of those images on non-Cisco hardware is prohibited. Period.
You need good hardware to run it. It's a good port, but they didn't enhance it a lot for the PC. I don't think it'll run well with anything less than a GeForce 4 Ti.
Works perfectly fine on a 1.4GHz Athlon system with a GeForce 2 (32meg) and Windows2000.
Well, first yesterday they provided a direct link to a tool to DOS a Windows NT/2000/XP box, and today they're linking to an article on how to build a Cisco PIX and steal their software to run on it?? WTF is Slashdot becoming? If you are just downloading the PIX software you *are* stealing it. It's several thousand dollars.
But when that happens, your backup becomes the new original, and you now have a right to make a new backup of it for when it gets scratched. So no matter how many backups they give you to start with, in the long run you still need to be able to make your own.
I agree. I prefer to make an ISO image of my CDs and store the backup on a convenient distributed file sharing network. That way, if my house burns down, chances are someone will have replicated the image onto their system and I can restore the image! It's called a distributed offsite backup system.
OK, so if there was a bug in Mozilla's HTTP pipelining which caused your OS to crash, who would you blame - the Mozilla team, or those 'morons' who switched on HTTP pipelining ?
I would file a bug report with the Linux networking kernel developers. There's a bug in there somewhere if something in a user-space application can crash the kernel. DOS'ing a server and bringing the machine to a crawl is one thing, but sending malformed packets or deliberately crafted traffic at a server and causing it to crash the entire OS is a different story.
What a lightweight!
I think that was the point. The RIAA is a 300lb gorilla that thinks it is an 800lb gorilla. If it doesn't be careful it is going to get squished by a REAL 800lb gorilla. I have this vision in my head of one of those little rat dogs barking at your heels trying to intimidate you when I think of the RIAA trying to influence one of these huge telecommunications providers. They're practically invincible! Nothing can ever bring down AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC, Worldcom... err.. hmm.. on second thought, forget it. Maybe the RIAA just needs to sick auditors on them.
call me a conspiracy theorist but i wouldn't be suprised if the RIAA is behind this somehow -- "we can't kill the servers, we can't kill the users.. hmm.. AH HAH!! we'll kill the format"
;-)
Isn't that a bit like prohibiting criminals from carrying guns? I mean, no shit, but they're criminals already! What's it matter if they rack up another weapons charge on top of that robbery or assault? Most of these people using mp3's are already violating copyright laws, do you really think they're going to feel inclined to go pay to "legally" use a decoder?
In fact, multiplayer games are often played in one large room, so someone will make sure everyone has the same client and that they are not modified by you. In other cases, you play with your friend, so you trust each other anyway.
Maybe in your case, but most people play online and have never met any of the people they play against, much less play against them in the same room. Getting a pickup game of Quake going is impossible unless you go online or if your friends are complete losers and do nothing but sit around waiting for you to call up a LAN party.
If real tylenol was mixed with codine, they sure as hell wouldn't need to advertize the stuff :P
What do you classify as "real" Tylenol? Tylenol #3 or higher DO have codine in them. If you just mean that "Extra Strength" Tylenol crap then I agree. You might as well take sugar pills.
I can download movies from the net, why isn't that hurting the studios?
15 songs in MP3 format downloaded from P2P network would be about 60-80 megs at around 160Kbps. 2 hour movie downloaded in DivX format in any decent quality would be about 1500 megs. Even at 1.5 Mbps DSL speeds that takes quite awhile to download. In fact, I'd be more willing to just pop over to the store and plunk down the $20 to get the DVD than sit and wait hours for a low-quality rip to download. It all comes down to how convenient it is to get the information into a quality usable state. Ripping a CD and converting it to MP3 takes hardly any time at all. Ripping a DVD and converting it to DivX could take up to 6-8 hours.