It's also time to start charging DSL and Cable modem users the real cost of the bandwidth they're using. Those rates should be at least $400/month for 1 Megabit/sec services. Unfortunately they're being kept artificially low which will eventually spell the end of high speed consumer access entirely until there is another quantum leap in technology available for the home user like fiber to the house or wireless.
Well, they'll have to make a decision. Is Osama bin Laden and his henchmen worth the deaths of 24 million people to them? Somehow in their insane religious fundamentalist minds I think it does. So be it. I have no problems watching 24 million, or even 2 billion Muslim, starve to death at this point. They have shown they want nothing but to kill me and my family and would not think twice if they were in my position. I say fuck them. Let God sort out the atrocities in the end.
Well, we're just feeding the good wholesome Muslims our tained Infidel food. They'll probably all go to hell for eating it. Why doesn't some nice Arab neighbor like Iran and Saudia Arabia contribute $100 million in aid?
If Afghanistan were turned into a smoking crater in the Earth do you really think anyone would miss them? The only thing that country exports is terrorists and refugees.
Hahaha. That sounds a little impractical doesn't it? And how will these internet providers stop us from sending encrypted messages? Will they also forbid the use of SSL? Will we need to send all of our passwords and credit card information in cleartext now for all to see? Sorry, this incident was a terrible tragedy but encryption is about as responsible for this as Doom was for the Columbine killings. You can take my encryption away when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers. I'll be sure to just keep my firearms extra close to me while I'm breaking the law by encrypting my online orders and administering my systems via SSH.;-)
Our leaders have declared that we will be going to war, but it's a bit difficult to say we're actually at war when it's still not clear who we'll be at war *with*.
The Taliban leadership of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, and his Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Just remember those names because you'll be hearing them a lot when we start the invasion. Afghanistan's Northern Alliance is virtually wetting their pants with glee that the Allies are coming to destroy the Taliban for them. It also makes me more than a little suspicious and paranoid about them though.
I still think bin Laden and people like him should be treated not as states that declare war, but as international criminals that should be hunted down and removed. Calling it a war actually dignifies his actions more than they should be, it may actually give his people defenses that they would otherwise have, and even threatens to make some people who'd otherwise stay out decided to take sides against us. He should be treated as a mad dog, not as a warring state.
We would not, for obvious reasons, declare war on bin Laden or any other individuals. We can only declare war on other nation-states. We may however declare war on the Taliban government ruling Afghanistan who are harboring and helping bin Laden. He is already on the FBI's ten most wanted list and is an international criminal being hunted like a dog but he has not, up until now, been the target of a concerted effort to eliminate him once and for all. It's been more of a "Hey, if you happen to be dropping by Afghanistan and capture bin Laden, drop us a call and there's a $5 million reward in it for you". This time the gloves are coming off and we're going after him, his Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and the host countries that harbor it.
There are a lot of hotheaded people going around right now spouting off what they'd like to see done to the people who committed these acts. That's going to be natural in a situation like this. Remember though that the people in the Pentagon are going to be a bit more level-headed. They know the impoverished innocent civilians living in tents in Kabul are NOT our enemies. Our enemies are the Taliban government of Afghanistan, Osama bin Ladin and his Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and the other governments throughout the middle east and Africa that harbor terrorist networks.
I have very good friends who are Muslim (though they're Indian) and I know for a fact that they, nor their religion, would EVER condone these atrocities anymore than Christianity would condone them. None of these religions teach hatred of anyone, only the radical fanatics who have taken their scriptures and perverted them to fit their political goals are the ones who see it like this. We have some pretty fucked up radical Christians in this country bombing abortion clinics and killing homosexuals and the Muslims have some pretty fucked up Muslims bombing non-Muslims and their supporters.
Anyway, like I was saying, don't judge what is going to occur by the actions of what emotional people are saying right now on CNN. Our military is the best in the entire world and they will plan an offensive that will kill as many of our enemy (the Taliban, not the civilians) as possible with as few civilian casualties as possible. We are not monsters, unlike the terrorists who kill innocent people in buildings.
You know, many people complained before these events about the United States being a more violent country with far more crime per capita than its European cousins. When you start to look at how their governments and secret police and intelligence services operate though, is it any wonder why they have less crime? Europeans have long ago sacrificed some of their privacy and freedoms for safety and I would bet if you asked any of them today they would gladly accept the loss again. Maybe it is the Americans who need to get over this concept of complete and total freedom at any cost. Simple things like increased monitoring of our infrastructure and our citizens would virtually eliminate most of the crimes that occur today from murders to robberies to skyjackings.
When Benjamin Franklin said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" he was living in a world where the most heinous thing to worry about was the organized British army. We don't have the luxury of knowing where our enemy is anymore and they certainly don't walk the streets wearing bright red jackets. Our enemies are sleeping among us on our own shores. They blend in among our own citizens and they use our schools to gain knowledge to spread their reign of terror. In light of that situation, I don't think Franklin would've been able to say that line in good faith today. To find the enemy hiding among you you MUST be willing to give up some essential liberties, if only for long enough to rid your shores of them. This is a time of war and we do not have the luxury of due process of law while terrorists are crashing jumbo jets into our crowded buildings.
If you're still using telnet and FTP (other than maybe anonymous FTP) you've got bigger problems than the GOVERNMENT doing wiretaps.;-) SSH should be the first thing installed on a new box if your OS doesn't come with it. Then disable all that other garbage like telnet, rlogin, ftp, rsh, etc.
Benjamin Franklin didn't have terrorists walking onto airplanes and crashing them into buildings full of tens of thousands of people. I think you can safely say this situation is quite a bit different than anything anyone could have predicted 200 years ago.
As for "mandatory crypto backdoors", I think it's become a common saying that when encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption. This is a ridiculous time to be making any hot-headed decisions on something like this. Even if the US did make some inane law mandating backdoors in encryption there are plenty of free and completely open strong algorithms out there to use. What stops terrorists from using these other programs NOT made in the US or writing their own code?
This is the kind of thing that happens after every tragedy unfortunately. Emotional people start making emotional cries for immediate changes. After a school shooting people call for a ban on guns. People, shooting another person is already illegal! Banning guns are not going to stop a *criminal* from shooting people. Banning strong encryption is not going to stop criminals or terrorists from using strong encryption! Hijacking airplanes is also a crime but that didn't stop a bunch of whacked fundamentalist motherfuckers from doing it now did it?
I'll bet there are HAMs out there with RACES/ARES experience helping to provide emergency communications. At a time like this is when the amateur radio service really has a chance to show its worth during a disaster situation.
Why bother with a Crusoe? They were overhyped and haven't delivered on any of the promises. My Dell Inspiron laptop gets 4+ hours per battery using a PIII w/speedstep in it. This Crusoe based laptop only claims 5 hours of battery life and costs more for less hardware than I have in my Dell. You can get the same life out of an iBook or TiBook. So where are the huge power advantages that we were supposed to be seeing? We probably won't see them until more efficient drives and LCD panels come out which are probably bigger power-draining culprits than the mobile CPUs in laptops these days.
If judges are going to sit around looking at porn all day instead of working then I, as a taxpayer and citizen, demand action be taken. Judges are NOT above the law, if anything they are held to a higher scrutiny than anyone else. Not only should detailed logs of their activity be kept, they should be posted to a public web site for any citizen to see. Internet monitoring is a good thing and I strongly support it to prevent abuse of public and corporate resources. You don't have any privacy in a public place and shouldn't expect any on the Internet.
I guess, but tell that to the person who gets assigned an ID number of 2935E9BA882C3F51562D17. Just give me a damned ID card or tatoo it to my forehead and be done with it cause I'm not going to remember that.
Microsoft? Think what the spammers could do with this. Just start spamming at 00000000001@everybody.us and end at 99999999999@everybody.us. Maybe the government could just make it easier for them and setup a mailing list like citizens@everybody.us since spam isn't illegal.:-)
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
on
Itanium Update
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· Score: 1
Sun Blade 100, Netra X1, etc. The motherboards in those are probably about $100 but Sun isn't in the business of selling seperate components anymore than Intel is in the business of selling workstations and complete PCs.
OK so add the cost of your labor rate to $0 and then add it to $199, $99, $299, and $199 respectively. Linux is still cheaper! In an hour (75% of which is spent watching the installation bar go across the screen as packages are installed) you'll have a machine more ready to do work than 5-10 hours of installing patches and software packages on a Windows box. When I reinstall my Windows machine at home I know to schedule an entire day on the weekend because it is far more involved than installing the OS. After that comes the service packs and patches, reinstalling all my software, etc. With Linux all the software I use came with the distribution and was installed automatically.
Well, you of course know why. If Win2k came out of the box with all the types of applications Mandrake 8 does people would be screaming bloody murder and yelling "Monopoly! Monopoly!" Look what happened when they did something like bundle a browser (a VERY good one at that) with the OS! I'm actually on Microsoft's side on this one... most people today are buying computers to browse the web. If they didn't include IE how would people browse the web? Would they get instructions on how to open a DOS window and use ftp to download Netscape? That's just ridiculous.
Not it hasn't been. I've been saying this all along to people I know. The recent trends of anti-virus software vendors starting to charge a subscription fee to get signature updates has done nothing but solidify my argument. A few years ago companies that charged money for the antivirus software itself were really the exception... now we are seeing the reverse. Does anyone know of any virus scanning software that is free?
How is that censorship? They're just not subscribing to certain groups. They have a right to do that in the same way my cable company has a right not to offer Playboy, Spice, and other adult-oriented channels. Sure, it sucks big time but there are alternatives (DirecTV) and in your case, the web.
Don't blame SBC, blame the losers who spend all day flooding their DSL line downloading porn and warez from alt.binaries groups. Usenet is for discussion groups, the web is for porn and warez.
You're right. Usenet has degenerated into spam and worthless content. Sure, there are groups that still have decent content in them but they are few and far between the groups like alt.fan.suck-your-moms-dick and alt.john.sucks.deep.ass.rammer. Once that stuff started to appear I think it was the beginning of the end. Besides, the pornographers have really moved onto the web. They don't need to spend their days trawling newsgroups to download the 600 individual posts to recreate that image of goatsex. I say filter the entire alt.binaries heirarchy and be done with it. That would leave more content and longer retention times for the rest of us still reading the few newsgroups out there that are worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also time to start charging DSL and Cable modem users the real cost of the bandwidth they're using. Those rates should be at least $400/month for 1 Megabit/sec services. Unfortunately they're being kept artificially low which will eventually spell the end of high speed consumer access entirely until there is another quantum leap in technology available for the home user like fiber to the house or wireless.
Mac OS X version 11 might be the place to work that shit out.
MacOS X version 11? What happened to MacOS X version 2? Are they pulling a Microsoft on us? Will MacOS version 11 be called MacOS X+?
Well, they'll have to make a decision. Is Osama bin Laden and his henchmen worth the deaths of 24 million people to them? Somehow in their insane religious fundamentalist minds I think it does. So be it. I have no problems watching 24 million, or even 2 billion Muslim, starve to death at this point. They have shown they want nothing but to kill me and my family and would not think twice if they were in my position. I say fuck them. Let God sort out the atrocities in the end.
Well, we're just feeding the good wholesome Muslims our tained Infidel food. They'll probably all go to hell for eating it. Why doesn't some nice Arab neighbor like Iran and Saudia Arabia contribute $100 million in aid?
$60/month land line bill? Where do you live Canada? My phone bill is $20/month and I live in SBC-Ameritech monopoly land.
If Afghanistan were turned into a smoking crater in the Earth do you really think anyone would miss them? The only thing that country exports is terrorists and refugees.
Hahaha. That sounds a little impractical doesn't it? And how will these internet providers stop us from sending encrypted messages? Will they also forbid the use of SSL? Will we need to send all of our passwords and credit card information in cleartext now for all to see? Sorry, this incident was a terrible tragedy but encryption is about as responsible for this as Doom was for the Columbine killings. You can take my encryption away when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers. I'll be sure to just keep my firearms extra close to me while I'm breaking the law by encrypting my online orders and administering my systems via SSH. ;-)
Our leaders have declared that we will be going to war, but it's a bit difficult to say we're actually at war when it's still not clear who we'll be at war *with*.
The Taliban leadership of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, and his Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Just remember those names because you'll be hearing them a lot when we start the invasion. Afghanistan's Northern Alliance is virtually wetting their pants with glee that the Allies are coming to destroy the Taliban for them. It also makes me more than a little suspicious and paranoid about them though.
I still think bin Laden and people like him should be treated not as states that declare war, but as international criminals that should be hunted down and removed. Calling it a war actually dignifies his actions more than they should be, it may actually give his people defenses that they would otherwise have, and even threatens to make some people who'd otherwise stay out decided to take sides against us. He should be treated as a mad dog, not as a warring state.
We would not, for obvious reasons, declare war on bin Laden or any other individuals. We can only declare war on other nation-states. We may however declare war on the Taliban government ruling Afghanistan who are harboring and helping bin Laden. He is already on the FBI's ten most wanted list and is an international criminal being hunted like a dog but he has not, up until now, been the target of a concerted effort to eliminate him once and for all. It's been more of a "Hey, if you happen to be dropping by Afghanistan and capture bin Laden, drop us a call and there's a $5 million reward in it for you". This time the gloves are coming off and we're going after him, his Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and the host countries that harbor it.
There are a lot of hotheaded people going around right now spouting off what they'd like to see done to the people who committed these acts. That's going to be natural in a situation like this. Remember though that the people in the Pentagon are going to be a bit more level-headed. They know the impoverished innocent civilians living in tents in Kabul are NOT our enemies. Our enemies are the Taliban government of Afghanistan, Osama bin Ladin and his Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and the other governments throughout the middle east and Africa that harbor terrorist networks.
I have very good friends who are Muslim (though they're Indian) and I know for a fact that they, nor their religion, would EVER condone these atrocities anymore than Christianity would condone them. None of these religions teach hatred of anyone, only the radical fanatics who have taken their scriptures and perverted them to fit their political goals are the ones who see it like this. We have some pretty fucked up radical Christians in this country bombing abortion clinics and killing homosexuals and the Muslims have some pretty fucked up Muslims bombing non-Muslims and their supporters.
Anyway, like I was saying, don't judge what is going to occur by the actions of what emotional people are saying right now on CNN. Our military is the best in the entire world and they will plan an offensive that will kill as many of our enemy (the Taliban, not the civilians) as possible with as few civilian casualties as possible. We are not monsters, unlike the terrorists who kill innocent people in buildings.
You know, many people complained before these events about the United States being a more violent country with far more crime per capita than its European cousins. When you start to look at how their governments and secret police and intelligence services operate though, is it any wonder why they have less crime? Europeans have long ago sacrificed some of their privacy and freedoms for safety and I would bet if you asked any of them today they would gladly accept the loss again. Maybe it is the Americans who need to get over this concept of complete and total freedom at any cost. Simple things like increased monitoring of our infrastructure and our citizens would virtually eliminate most of the crimes that occur today from murders to robberies to skyjackings.
When Benjamin Franklin said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" he was living in a world where the most heinous thing to worry about was the organized British army. We don't have the luxury of knowing where our enemy is anymore and they certainly don't walk the streets wearing bright red jackets. Our enemies are sleeping among us on our own shores. They blend in among our own citizens and they use our schools to gain knowledge to spread their reign of terror. In light of that situation, I don't think Franklin would've been able to say that line in good faith today. To find the enemy hiding among you you MUST be willing to give up some essential liberties, if only for long enough to rid your shores of them. This is a time of war and we do not have the luxury of due process of law while terrorists are crashing jumbo jets into our crowded buildings.
Ah well, just my $0.02. Flame on.
If you're still using telnet and FTP (other than maybe anonymous FTP) you've got bigger problems than the GOVERNMENT doing wiretaps. ;-) SSH should be the first thing installed on a new box if your OS doesn't come with it. Then disable all that other garbage like telnet, rlogin, ftp, rsh, etc.
Benjamin Franklin didn't have terrorists walking onto airplanes and crashing them into buildings full of tens of thousands of people. I think you can safely say this situation is quite a bit different than anything anyone could have predicted 200 years ago.
As for "mandatory crypto backdoors", I think it's become a common saying that when encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption. This is a ridiculous time to be making any hot-headed decisions on something like this. Even if the US did make some inane law mandating backdoors in encryption there are plenty of free and completely open strong algorithms out there to use. What stops terrorists from using these other programs NOT made in the US or writing their own code?
This is the kind of thing that happens after every tragedy unfortunately. Emotional people start making emotional cries for immediate changes. After a school shooting people call for a ban on guns. People, shooting another person is already illegal! Banning guns are not going to stop a *criminal* from shooting people. Banning strong encryption is not going to stop criminals or terrorists from using strong encryption! Hijacking airplanes is also a crime but that didn't stop a bunch of whacked fundamentalist motherfuckers from doing it now did it?
I'll bet there are HAMs out there with RACES/ARES experience helping to provide emergency communications. At a time like this is when the amateur radio service really has a chance to show its worth during a disaster situation.
Why bother with a Crusoe? They were overhyped and haven't delivered on any of the promises. My Dell Inspiron laptop gets 4+ hours per battery using a PIII w/speedstep in it. This Crusoe based laptop only claims 5 hours of battery life and costs more for less hardware than I have in my Dell. You can get the same life out of an iBook or TiBook. So where are the huge power advantages that we were supposed to be seeing? We probably won't see them until more efficient drives and LCD panels come out which are probably bigger power-draining culprits than the mobile CPUs in laptops these days.
If judges are going to sit around looking at porn all day instead of working then I, as a taxpayer and citizen, demand action be taken. Judges are NOT above the law, if anything they are held to a higher scrutiny than anyone else. Not only should detailed logs of their activity be kept, they should be posted to a public web site for any citizen to see. Internet monitoring is a good thing and I strongly support it to prevent abuse of public and corporate resources. You don't have any privacy in a public place and shouldn't expect any on the Internet.
I guess, but tell that to the person who gets assigned an ID number of 2935E9BA882C3F51562D17. Just give me a damned ID card or tatoo it to my forehead and be done with it cause I'm not going to remember that.
Microsoft? Think what the spammers could do with this. Just start spamming at 00000000001@everybody.us and end at 99999999999@everybody.us. Maybe the government could just make it easier for them and setup a mailing list like citizens@everybody.us since spam isn't illegal. :-)
Sun Blade 100, Netra X1, etc. The motherboards in those are probably about $100 but Sun isn't in the business of selling seperate components anymore than Intel is in the business of selling workstations and complete PCs.
OK so add the cost of your labor rate to $0 and then add it to $199, $99, $299, and $199 respectively. Linux is still cheaper! In an hour (75% of which is spent watching the installation bar go across the screen as packages are installed) you'll have a machine more ready to do work than 5-10 hours of installing patches and software packages on a Windows box. When I reinstall my Windows machine at home I know to schedule an entire day on the weekend because it is far more involved than installing the OS. After that comes the service packs and patches, reinstalling all my software, etc. With Linux all the software I use came with the distribution and was installed automatically.
Well, you of course know why. If Win2k came out of the box with all the types of applications Mandrake 8 does people would be screaming bloody murder and yelling "Monopoly! Monopoly!" Look what happened when they did something like bundle a browser (a VERY good one at that) with the OS! I'm actually on Microsoft's side on this one... most people today are buying computers to browse the web. If they didn't include IE how would people browse the web? Would they get instructions on how to open a DOS window and use ftp to download Netscape? That's just ridiculous.
Not it hasn't been. I've been saying this all along to people I know. The recent trends of anti-virus software vendors starting to charge a subscription fee to get signature updates has done nothing but solidify my argument. A few years ago companies that charged money for the antivirus software itself were really the exception... now we are seeing the reverse. Does anyone know of any virus scanning software that is free?
How is that censorship? They're just not subscribing to certain groups. They have a right to do that in the same way my cable company has a right not to offer Playboy, Spice, and other adult-oriented channels. Sure, it sucks big time but there are alternatives (DirecTV) and in your case, the web.
Don't blame SBC, blame the losers who spend all day flooding their DSL line downloading porn and warez from alt.binaries groups. Usenet is for discussion groups, the web is for porn and warez.
You're right. Usenet has degenerated into spam and worthless content. Sure, there are groups that still have decent content in them but they are few and far between the groups like alt.fan.suck-your-moms-dick and alt.john.sucks.deep.ass.rammer. Once that stuff started to appear I think it was the beginning of the end. Besides, the pornographers have really moved onto the web. They don't need to spend their days trawling newsgroups to download the 600 individual posts to recreate that image of goatsex. I say filter the entire alt.binaries heirarchy and be done with it. That would leave more content and longer retention times for the rest of us still reading the few newsgroups out there that are worth reading.