According to this CNET article they're not taking over the customer base:
Ma Bell agreed to buy "substantially all" of NorthPoint's assets for $135 million, the companies said. The phone company will use NorthPoint's networks to offer both high-speed Net service and voice telephone service, a spokeswoman said. AT&T is not taking over NorthPoint's customers along with the network, the companies said.
I REALLY hope this is wrong information. I can't take going back to dialup. I think I'm probably going to have to pick up a gun and go on a shooting spree if that happens.
That's nice. Of course, most of us don't have that option. The only option I have for broadband was Northpoint. Now that is going away so I'm either back to ISDN or going to have to buy a new analog modem for the first time in 6 years. If only this was happening next year.. at least then I could plan on moving into an area with cable modem access.
Well, when it comes down to it, why shouldn't the US government act as a certificate authority and key registry for the people of the United States? Is it any worse than trusting Verisign?? People seem to think just because they're a corporation and you pay money for a key they're suddenly more trustworthy. Pffft. I'd rather have the Post Office or something oversee signing keys and validating "webs of trust" for PKI. Unlike many of the paranoid people here I trust the government more than I trust Verisign or Entrust or any of the other nameless faceless corporations out there that have detailed information about my personal life gathered throughout the decades.
That's why that would never work. It sounds like you have other issues with your computer if it crashes that much. Ever think it might be bad memory or a faulty CPU? Windows2000 for example has only crashed on me once in a year. Maybe your system is faulty?
That's a good point. In fact, why don't all the clocks set their own time? I received a clock just like this for Christmas from Radio Shack. Nice LCD clock with the date, time, temperature, etc. It sets the clock automatically from the radio signals it picks up. I've checked it against my NTP time sources and it runs perfectly. I suppose the short answer is that it isn't cheap enough to add in this radio circuitry to make it worth it to manufacturers looking to make a profit. Still, most VCR's probably get hooked up to the cable anyway. My cable box seems to always know what time it is based on what the cable company throws over the line.. why not have something in the VCR that picks that up and sets the time based on that? At least when you set your VCR to record it'd be based on the time the cable company is using.:-)
Nice troll, but how did socialists suddenly corner the market on organized planning? Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now. Go into any midwestern suburb and take a shot of it from the air and you will see blocks and blocks and blocks of perfectly laid out grids. Now, look at a theme park. Obviously you don't just plant a roller coaster haphazardly in the middle of a concourse without any planning. Theme parks are planned to the most minute detail. As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there. What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.
Correction: *pop* songs don't make it because they are good, they make it because of promotion. A good song will still swirl its way up on underground fandom alone. Hell, you don't see anyone but a bunch of geeks saying "All your base are belong to us" but suddenly it's on the damned news. Now.. oooh.. it's not popular anymore, gotta move on to something nerdishly cool again.;-)
It's just a damned rig in the North Sea not an "island". The British Navy built it, the British Navy can destroy it. I say just bomb the hell out of the thing for target practice and send King Whatshisname on his way back to luserdom.
Sounds more like the broadcasters were the ones being the pirates in this case. I'm sure the laws governing piracy are probably over 200 years old so I have no idea, but I would think they would let a country sink a pirate ship in international waters if they were a threat to shipping or in this case, US commerce .:-)
Yea, but the problem is a lot of these are SO preventable. There are people that are still being exploited via the IIS RDS exploit!! The funniest thing is, I think one of the service packs actually reintroduced the bug.:-)
Heh, download the IE patch, reboot, download the critical patches, reboot, download the DirectX upgrade, reboot, download the next set of upgrades, reboot. ROFL. I love Windows Update.
You know, that's a good point. I've never really seen anything in Solaris or Linux that you couldn't break down into a problem and then just solve it logically. Maybe boot into single user mode and edit some text config files, etc. On the other hand, everytime my Windows box seems to flake out and bluescreen you just get this incomprehensible gibberish message with a god damned hex dump on the screen. Then you go to look up what the error message means on MS's knowledge base and get that it could possibly be one of 500 things. Woops.. maybe bad video driver, or keyboard driver, or maybe your memory is bad, or your CPU could be flaking out. Everytime I see a Windows problem I feel like I need to put on a voodoo outfit, light a room full of candles, and start killing chickens. I mean, Windows absolutely choked on one of my machines when I tried to put a new IDE card in. OK, so I took it out. Still choked even though it ran fine before. Took out one of the network cards. Now booted up fine. *sigh* I'm sure it's probably some insane resource allocation thing with PnP but still. Windows is by NO means an easy OS to administer when things go wrong.
Alternatively several companies (for example, Discover) have come out with one-time disposable card numbers specifically for online purchasing. It gets billed back to your master account but the retailer can only use it once. Good idea in light of all the idiotic online companies that apparently take absolutely no security precautions.
Nice non-explanation. Napster is a corporation. Their purpose is to make money and generate profit for their owners. Running mp3 directory servers is not cheap and they need to generate cash somehow so what is their business plan? Apparently it is to get people hooked on a free service then switch over to a pay service and hope at least 10% of them stay with the pay service. It's the drug dealer marketing scheme and it is very effective. People are not going to want to give up the easy access to mp3's that Napster provides so they will pay a small monthly fee just for the convenience they now enjoy. Napster and the rest of the non-profit generating.com's need to just die and go away before they tank the stock market even further and cause a depression for IT.
Moderators: Please moderate the above Anonymous Coward to troll or "stupid commie bastard" if available.
Not if the end result you're looking for is to stop rude people from making phone calls in restaurants and movie theaters. I say more power to them. I'm sick of people picking up their phones and holding conversations in front of you while you're trying to watch a movie or talking loudly on their phone in the middle of dinner as if they're too damned important to go out into the lobby. I want to kick them in the head, strangle them with piano wire, and throw their damned cell phone against the wall. Thankfully I'm not a violent person and just sit back and grumble.
What I want to know is, why would someone do this? How the hell does Napster or any of the other piracy sites make money? It's not advertising for Napster. How do they generate revenue!? What kind of idiot rich guy would mount a legal challenge in defense of media piracy? He'd be throwing his money away. The only ones I could see doing this are the liberal leftist pot smoking Hollywood types who never grew out of the 60's but that would be kind of hypocritical wouldn't it?
Eventually the RIAA and MPAA will demand that the Internet as we know it be dismantled in favour of a networking protocol that is better at supporting censorship. Eventually they'll demand an Internet that has "providers", who are big companies that can afford legal fees and scrupulously provide only legal content, and "users" who can send email and read content provided by "providers" but who can't afford the legal fees needed to publish anything, and whose communication with each other is heavily mediated by the "providers" taking legal responsibility. They'll want changes to the law, backed by new international conventions, that make even Slashdot illegal, because Slashdot can't guarantee someone won't put DeCSS here.
I'm sorry, but did I just sleep through something here? Since when is providing "illegal" content now legal on the Internet? How is giving away a corporations intellectual property for free without reimbursing them legal? Personally I think mp3 sharing is wonderful, but if we want it to truly be legal we should for our governments to enact legislation to do away with intellectual property rights altogether including copyrights, trademarks, and patents, etc. Let the free market really decide what products live or die instead of having artificial government monopolies supporting these companies in their quest to rape the public out of its money. Oh wait, I forgot... that would be communism. Government supported monopolies are part of capitalism. Silly me.
Yes, we have become that wired. It's part of many of our jobs. I would love to turn the pager off and toss it in the drawer after work but that isn't going to happen as long as somebody wants to get streaming wireless porn in their car. *sigh*
Did you ever think that maybe this is because you're not supposed to play them? You're probably the same nitwits that try to play Japanese regioned DVD's in your American players. Stop trying to circumvent the copyright owner's intent. It is no better than common piracy.
Well it's quite clear isn't it? Being a corporation you need to buy all the domain names whether you use them or not. Nice little profit generating thing built into the domain system. It's like some collectable. GOTTA HAVE EM ALL!!!
Damnit this is intolerable! How dare the Australian government try to outdo our RIAA and MPAA as to who is more braindead! We suggest we all lobby Congress and suggest they add a $1 tax to each CD-R disc sold in the USA to try to jump back ahead.
Why play your backups when you can just play your originals? If you don't have the originals then your "backups" aren't backups at all, they're pirated copies.
There's nothing to "hack" into bind to get it to do this. It supports it natively just fine. Network Solutions just found it more convenient to maintain their monopoly over the DNS system and getting tens of millions of DNS servers to add additional "open" root servers into their root cache files is a monumental task. Not impossible though. You just need to offer something.com/.net/.org doesn't and voila. You'll start to see people pointing to your.sex zone servers.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this CNET article they're not taking over the customer base:
Ma Bell agreed to buy "substantially all" of NorthPoint's assets for $135 million, the companies said. The phone company will use NorthPoint's networks to offer both high-speed Net service and voice telephone service, a spokeswoman said. AT&T is not taking over NorthPoint's customers along with the network, the companies said.
I REALLY hope this is wrong information. I can't take going back to dialup. I think I'm probably going to have to pick up a gun and go on a shooting spree if that happens.
That's nice. Of course, most of us don't have that option. The only option I have for broadband was Northpoint. Now that is going away so I'm either back to ISDN or going to have to buy a new analog modem for the first time in 6 years. If only this was happening next year.. at least then I could plan on moving into an area with cable modem access.
Well, when it comes down to it, why shouldn't the US government act as a certificate authority and key registry for the people of the United States? Is it any worse than trusting Verisign?? People seem to think just because they're a corporation and you pay money for a key they're suddenly more trustworthy. Pffft. I'd rather have the Post Office or something oversee signing keys and validating "webs of trust" for PKI. Unlike many of the paranoid people here I trust the government more than I trust Verisign or Entrust or any of the other nameless faceless corporations out there that have detailed information about my personal life gathered throughout the decades.
Just out of curiosity, can I see your masters degree from Yale?
That's why that would never work. It sounds like you have other issues with your computer if it crashes that much. Ever think it might be bad memory or a faulty CPU? Windows2000 for example has only crashed on me once in a year. Maybe your system is faulty?
That's a good point. In fact, why don't all the clocks set their own time? I received a clock just like this for Christmas from Radio Shack. Nice LCD clock with the date, time, temperature, etc. It sets the clock automatically from the radio signals it picks up. I've checked it against my NTP time sources and it runs perfectly. I suppose the short answer is that it isn't cheap enough to add in this radio circuitry to make it worth it to manufacturers looking to make a profit. Still, most VCR's probably get hooked up to the cable anyway. My cable box seems to always know what time it is based on what the cable company throws over the line.. why not have something in the VCR that picks that up and sets the time based on that? At least when you set your VCR to record it'd be based on the time the cable company is using. :-)
Nice troll, but how did socialists suddenly corner the market on organized planning? Rigid city planning has been a mainstay of many communities for decades now. Go into any midwestern suburb and take a shot of it from the air and you will see blocks and blocks and blocks of perfectly laid out grids. Now, look at a theme park. Obviously you don't just plant a roller coaster haphazardly in the middle of a concourse without any planning. Theme parks are planned to the most minute detail. As for France, of COURSE it's a socialist state. They even admit they're socialists over there. What's your point? Oh yea, to troll. Forget it.
Correction: *pop* songs don't make it because they are good, they make it because of promotion. A good song will still swirl its way up on underground fandom alone. Hell, you don't see anyone but a bunch of geeks saying "All your base are belong to us" but suddenly it's on the damned news. Now.. oooh.. it's not popular anymore, gotta move on to something nerdishly cool again. ;-)
Yea, like THAT'S not going to look suspicious in an airport. People will think you're setting up us the bomb or something.
It's just a damned rig in the North Sea not an "island". The British Navy built it, the British Navy can destroy it. I say just bomb the hell out of the thing for target practice and send King Whatshisname on his way back to luserdom.
Sounds more like the broadcasters were the ones being the pirates in this case. I'm sure the laws governing piracy are probably over 200 years old so I have no idea, but I would think they would let a country sink a pirate ship in international waters if they were a threat to shipping or in this case, US commerce . :-)
Yea, but the problem is a lot of these are SO preventable. There are people that are still being exploited via the IIS RDS exploit!! The funniest thing is, I think one of the service packs actually reintroduced the bug. :-)
Heh, download the IE patch, reboot, download the critical patches, reboot, download the DirectX upgrade, reboot, download the next set of upgrades, reboot. ROFL. I love Windows Update.
You know, that's a good point. I've never really seen anything in Solaris or Linux that you couldn't break down into a problem and then just solve it logically. Maybe boot into single user mode and edit some text config files, etc. On the other hand, everytime my Windows box seems to flake out and bluescreen you just get this incomprehensible gibberish message with a god damned hex dump on the screen. Then you go to look up what the error message means on MS's knowledge base and get that it could possibly be one of 500 things. Woops.. maybe bad video driver, or keyboard driver, or maybe your memory is bad, or your CPU could be flaking out. Everytime I see a Windows problem I feel like I need to put on a voodoo outfit, light a room full of candles, and start killing chickens. I mean, Windows absolutely choked on one of my machines when I tried to put a new IDE card in. OK, so I took it out. Still choked even though it ran fine before. Took out one of the network cards. Now booted up fine. *sigh* I'm sure it's probably some insane resource allocation thing with PnP but still. Windows is by NO means an easy OS to administer when things go wrong.
Alternatively several companies (for example, Discover) have come out with one-time disposable card numbers specifically for online purchasing. It gets billed back to your master account but the retailer can only use it once. Good idea in light of all the idiotic online companies that apparently take absolutely no security precautions.
Nice non-explanation. Napster is a corporation. Their purpose is to make money and generate profit for their owners. Running mp3 directory servers is not cheap and they need to generate cash somehow so what is their business plan? Apparently it is to get people hooked on a free service then switch over to a pay service and hope at least 10% of them stay with the pay service. It's the drug dealer marketing scheme and it is very effective. People are not going to want to give up the easy access to mp3's that Napster provides so they will pay a small monthly fee just for the convenience they now enjoy. Napster and the rest of the non-profit generating .com's need to just die and go away before they tank the stock market even further and cause a depression for IT.
Moderators: Please moderate the above Anonymous Coward to troll or "stupid commie bastard" if available.
Not if the end result you're looking for is to stop rude people from making phone calls in restaurants and movie theaters. I say more power to them. I'm sick of people picking up their phones and holding conversations in front of you while you're trying to watch a movie or talking loudly on their phone in the middle of dinner as if they're too damned important to go out into the lobby. I want to kick them in the head, strangle them with piano wire, and throw their damned cell phone against the wall. Thankfully I'm not a violent person and just sit back and grumble.
What I want to know is, why would someone do this? How the hell does Napster or any of the other piracy sites make money? It's not advertising for Napster. How do they generate revenue!? What kind of idiot rich guy would mount a legal challenge in defense of media piracy? He'd be throwing his money away. The only ones I could see doing this are the liberal leftist pot smoking Hollywood types who never grew out of the 60's but that would be kind of hypocritical wouldn't it?
Eventually the RIAA and MPAA will demand that the Internet as we know it be dismantled in favour of a networking protocol that is better at supporting censorship. Eventually they'll demand an Internet that has "providers", who are big companies that can afford legal fees and scrupulously provide only legal content, and "users" who can send email and read content provided by "providers" but who can't afford the legal fees needed to publish anything, and whose communication with each other is heavily mediated by the "providers" taking legal responsibility. They'll want changes to the law, backed by new international conventions, that make even Slashdot illegal, because Slashdot can't guarantee someone won't put DeCSS here.
I'm sorry, but did I just sleep through something here? Since when is providing "illegal" content now legal on the Internet? How is giving away a corporations intellectual property for free without reimbursing them legal? Personally I think mp3 sharing is wonderful, but if we want it to truly be legal we should for our governments to enact legislation to do away with intellectual property rights altogether including copyrights, trademarks, and patents, etc. Let the free market really decide what products live or die instead of having artificial government monopolies supporting these companies in their quest to rape the public out of its money. Oh wait, I forgot... that would be communism. Government supported monopolies are part of capitalism. Silly me.
Yes, we have become that wired. It's part of many of our jobs. I would love to turn the pager off and toss it in the drawer after work but that isn't going to happen as long as somebody wants to get streaming wireless porn in their car. *sigh*
Did you ever think that maybe this is because you're not supposed to play them? You're probably the same nitwits that try to play Japanese regioned DVD's in your American players. Stop trying to circumvent the copyright owner's intent. It is no better than common piracy.
Well it's quite clear isn't it? Being a corporation you need to buy all the domain names whether you use them or not. Nice little profit generating thing built into the domain system. It's like some collectable. GOTTA HAVE EM ALL!!!
Damnit this is intolerable! How dare the Australian government try to outdo our RIAA and MPAA as to who is more braindead! We suggest we all lobby Congress and suggest they add a $1 tax to each CD-R disc sold in the USA to try to jump back ahead.
Why play your backups when you can just play your originals? If you don't have the originals then your "backups" aren't backups at all, they're pirated copies.
There's nothing to "hack" into bind to get it to do this. It supports it natively just fine. Network Solutions just found it more convenient to maintain their monopoly over the DNS system and getting tens of millions of DNS servers to add additional "open" root servers into their root cache files is a monumental task. Not impossible though. You just need to offer something .com/.net/.org doesn't and voila. You'll start to see people pointing to your .sex zone servers.