Posts by Mark McGuire 40 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2007
You still get the issue of packet hot potato where customers' packets go careening off into random places so ISPs can pass off the packet to someone with a peering agreement or play hot potato until someone bites the data bullet. There's a reason they affectionately call Philadelphia "Comcast Country".
Youtube is synonymous with crappy webcam videos, overused memes and, for the most part, unintelligent uploads. I'd much rather have any rentals be separate from youtube, so that after I rent a movie I'm not recommended a video featuring cats. It's a nice move, but... keep it separate from the entirety of youtube.
that was you in school, that you were playing a prank on one of your buddies, he took it the wrong way and told the teacher. Normally the situation would be resolved (attack of guilt trip teacher) and you return item and apologize. But with CCTV, you hate that student, you're afraid of the teacher watching you everyday, you don't know where the camera's are, they could be anywhere, you're worried that something they see is taken the wrong way.
What is with the world that children must be watched 24/7? I thought the constant EVERYONE'S A PEDO was bad, but really???
Glad I'm in the US and not the UK, though our countries both seem to be on equal slippery slopes.
If it was an english exam, they are testing their usage of language not their knowledge of MLK.
As long as such gadgets are used on math, science, or any tests where there is an exact answer (that can be copied/duplicated easily) then there shouldn't be any problem. Actually this is a very good idea because many younger (and older) people do not know how, or that it's required (in some cases) to cite sources formally and informally.
The article is not clear whether the plan was advertised as an "unlimited plan". The phone companies, and internet providers (Comcast!!!) really like twisting words to grill consumers. Of course in advertising it is legal to say "Virtually (adj.)" because it's not actually (adj.), but it's "really close". The hidden crap like the hidden line Comcast has or the only use port 80 traffic is only out there to get the consumer. The average consumer has no idea what port 80 is. If they're downloading a file from the internet, it could be through FTP; how would they know that the ports differ or that there's even a switch?
There's a big stink in the telecommunications industry and somebody's gotta clear out the rot.
Dear God, if only I believed that laws like that could be passed. Governments in these times only get out of their lethargic monotony only if people die or big business gives them a bit to grease the wheels. I am almost certian that such laws will never be passed in the US, as the companies (seem to me) be the greediest bastards, thinking they're still innovating, when they don't do anything, and claiming a buck for it. Most of the big companies were innovators at one time, but now, in their monopolies they are complacent with doing nothing and suffocating competition with mountians of cash.
Just like most of everyone here (I hope), I build my own computer and shop between 4 stores to get the best price on each part. There is one store near me though that I wish there was more of. It's a small shop in one of those buisness office complexes where each section gets x amount of space. The guy who owns it has two and has random parts and computers for "fallen off the truck" prices. A 2.2 GHz computer with 512 ram is only $220, IBM thinkpads for only $300, and really really old machines lying around with their 5 and a half inch floppys. You have to use concious effort not to drool. I got a 24 port Cisco switch for $32 bucks, and it was in great condition. I just wish there were more tiny stores like that, than the huge warehouses of overpriced sh!t.
The problem here is the police think, like all uninformed/stupid (classify 'em how you like) people, that new technology are magic bullets and foolproof. When electronic keys for cars came out (most of them are rfid, I think, but I'm not sure), insurance companies thought that now cars couldn't be stolen since they needed the original key. Some people, however, were able to obtain master keys and copiers, and stole expensive cars. When the owner tried to get their money, the insurance companies refused because they saw the keys as unstoppable.
The cops believe the crap the taser companies are feeding them, and think that they are not lethal, and should be used at every opportunity when facing a violent individual, as opposed to guns and batons. Little do they realize the implications and effects such a weapon has (I'm sure there are training programs, but when have training budgets ever been good?) and so they use them, believing that they are doing the right thing.
High voltage electricity does not exist naturally in humans. I'm assuming it's not a good thing for us; please stop believing in your magic bullet.
I took a Java class last year and made a semi functioning String encryption program. It took a users string, converted it into Baudot binary (used in encryption and one time pads), generated a key (of any length), threw the key into Baudot and added the binary together. Then it converted it back into a string, which was all garbled. Then a user could send the message and key to the recipient, and they could decrypt using a backwards method.
The program had problems with symbols, so I scrapped the code after the class, but I did start working on it again recently. So now once I finish, I'll use that to keep my email private. I'll email the garbled text and text a prepaid phone the key. Brilliant!
I am so tired of those that go shouting this because they feel the media isn't being nice enough to their side. It's the media's job to provide information, but the only information the common man/woman wants is juicy stories of corruption and wrong duing. Basically the media gets paid for making well know figures (Presidents, leaders, movie stars, etc) look bad. If we had a President who was a Democrat the media would be all over him and all the liberals would complain about the media being too conservative.
@lglethal
Sorry, but you don't "have" to read our comments. Also you don't have to read the Reg's story on the US Gov. You wanted to come to this story and shout how Americans < Brits. And just because YOU don't care doesn't mean other people don't care. The Register reports for US, England, and technical people around the world. I tired of the f*ing elitism on both sides. WE ALL SUCK!!!!
I'll get off my soapbox now...
Never thought I'd see a war bout this, but I guess Americans and the British have to fight over the "top dog" spot all the time. We're both the top countries in arrogence with our "our (country, culture, military, people, political system [insert one]) is better than yours" speaches every day of the week.
How one draws a conclusion about national curiosity from two statistics is beyond me. What about the old ways of searching encyclopedia's or asking people that are knowledgable in the field of intrest. What about unique searches, ones that don't have similar keywords? If Europeans each had 30 searches about a topic, but couldn't find what they were looking for until the 30th search then the research on "curiosity is skewed". How was the data collected? Was it by ip? What if millions of students and employees are searching behind a proxy? Wouldn't that make it seem as if they were all one person?
Honestly this debate is one of the stupider wars I've seen on The Register yet.
My friend will be pleased. His Earthlink "broadband" runs at roughly 40-50k. So with the work force cuts, I expect a speed of around 25-35k for him. Maybe he should switch back to dialup since his modem keeps disconnecting him every 30 minutes.
Dear God, why does the internet in the US need to be at the speed of a third world country? I'm paying AT&T for 1.5MBps and all I get is 160k. What are you foreign bastards getting?
Thank you Steve for your brilliant and uninformed opinion. I regularly use torrent files when getting Linux software (a lot faster than the HTTP downloads) and a lot of live CDs have torrents now.
God I love people who stereotype gamers. You're like Hillary Clinton, "I don't understand it so it must be bad!" approach. I agree that playing WoW isn't the best way to spend your time, but many would say the same thing about me and DnD.
Now all we need to do is to some how bribe/get the number 1 BOFH to work in central government. Sure some tax dollars would be spent on computer parts for him, but you wouldn't get bad tech laws passed (He would block them by killing relevant emails and such...).
Even though I don't live in the UK I feel aghast at seeing this law. Even though we have one of the stupidest leaders of all time (see No Child Left Behind), I don't think we have that many overly outrageous tech laws (if I am wrong let me know, I might be breaking a few). I always make sure I encrypt my network with WPA though I don't hide the SSID (any script kitty with a brain can see hidden SSIDs).
Oh yes and I've seen so many unsecured routers with factory-default passwords and logins. I so should "help" them encrypt their network, don't you agree?
When I am absolutely forced to get Vista for some utterly necessary piece of software or feature I'll get it until then XP is my main boot and I have a Linux drive I use somewhat, but not enough because lack of wireless driver support (ndiswrapper likes crashing when installed). I am planning that Vista would be a secondary install to be used only when necessary since it would slow my computer down so much. For everything else it'll be on the Linux drive, but that won't happen until I get 50ft of cat 5e cable or a wireless card that works with Linux, until then XP is my choice.
I wish M$ would add a deletion of Internet Explorer, though they never will. It seems to be the biggest hole for viruses and spyware and will never be secured and while it's there on my drive it's a liability. Sigh... can't wait until the M$ monopoly is destroyed with the main weapons of our fight: piracy, viruses, and Microsoft constantly screwing the consumer.
I was talking it over with a friend and we came up with the idea for a great movie if this came to the public eye (no one pays attention in America unless they're spoonfed news). It'd be hilarious if there was a LotR spoof and the towers were the eyes of Sauron and we'd have a fellowship. Now what would we do for the ring...
I find the extremest comments partly humorous and partly enlightening. It's good to know what both sides think. I'm stuck in the middle. WoW is a horribly thought out game that tries to appeal to the masses that have been brainwashed into thinking WoW is cool. You cannot disprove that to me, I know people who have been sucked into that game, and few come back. However, the arguments against hacking or using hacks are very true. The act degrades the experience, however little of it there is in WoW, and frustrates the other players. I have experienced this and no words can express the amount of frustration, disgust, and anger I felt towards those that hacked.
In the end it is a grey area that this whole thing is in. The free servers are a good idea and no amount of blustering by Blizzard will get the sourcecode taken away. Script kitties are bothersome and terrible, but legitimate hackers who see if things are broke and try to get them fixed. Even if getting Blizzards attention means to give out the info on the bug and code to exploit it; companies don't like outside help for some reason.
In the meantime I'm sticking more to freeware games rather than pay to play games, as I have no reason to whine about what service I get, and usually the experience is better since there aren't as many people who cheat on those games.
Man don't you love flame wars? People bashing eachother on opinions neither can change with their "facts", very entertaining.
I find that older M$ products are better than the newer ones because they don't have BS features that require huge amounts of system resources. I tried Vista Beta RC2 and the full Vista release. Both caused my computer to run an idle speed with 512 MB out of 1GB of memory. I ran Office 2007 for a bit on my slower and crappier Dell (I did not buy it). It slowed the computer down so much I could not get Office and a simple browser window to run at the same time.
For me I run Office 2003 and Open Office. The only thing that frustrates me is that OpenOffice does not have good Power Point support and when my annoying teachers demand Power Point presentations I have to work on them at school.
Have fun screwing with my post ye fan boys.
Yeah same here. I'd just get my friend to drive it, he has no common sense. Which is why I shouldn't cause he'd probably get himself killed.
And on the intake thing, yeah I noticed that myself. It'd be pretty ugly if someone built an imitation without intakes at all. Wouldn't the driver be sucked in? I'm no aerospace genius, but I think that's what would happen.
Thanks for the jokes, I got a few chuckles out of this one. When people go spouting uninformative opinions I want to get up and smack them like the good American I am. This "study" was done in the same fashion as is used in a diet fad, using words to convince the consumer to their opinion. And in their enitre study they downplayed all consumer products like TVs and Radios. Something tells me that these companies don't really want free TV to spread to the interntet (Joost, and others).
MS is already technically a virus using one of the definitions:
"A computer program with the ability to modify other programs usually to the determent of the computer system."
They edit themselves to hurt themselves, Vista takes up more system resources at idle than any one spyware or adware. Now they are also a virus and adware, just another reason to start a mob to storm Redmond. Now I need to go find where I put that pitchfork...
Why don't you leave a bunch of Ubuntu CDs in the store yourself? I don't see how you could get arrested for such a thing (though there could be some BS thing the cops could come up with). If we coordinated a movement of putting Ubuntu next to Vista on shelves it might put the pressure on M$ or the store to change. Just a thought...
Yes every single company is out for themselves, however, M$ is the most monopolistic of them all. With Dell, even if it is in desperation, striking a blow to the evil that is M$. If linux can get mainstream, then M$ will have to compete more and competition is good for consumers, which will either make M$ have their products at a better value (why pay $150 for a $75 product) or actually put time in to making their software.
This is the first big step to taking M$ down a notch. In my opinion M$ shouldn't die, it should just learn to compete. Some of the brightest work at M$ and if the company actually had to fight for business then all their products and services would get much better. All that infastructure and captital is too much to waste.
Here's to hoping other companies follow Dell in this. As long as the ordinary consumer has the option we'll have a chance.
"ANY site, and I really do mean ANY site, that does 'filtering' is going to have either false positive or false negatives or most likely both."
Well I'm betting M$ will start blocking all emails and claim it is better because it has no spam whatsoever. I use Gmail and have no problem with sites (though I do get college recrution email a lot) spamming me. I'd rather have false positives sent to my inbox than false negitives deleted for all eternity. If I have to email or recieve email for an important assignment like a midterm paper, I'm not going to want hotmail deleting willy nilly. If that did happen and I was unable to get into a job after college or recieved a low score I would so sue M$.
If Bush notices this he is going to take this as an example of terrorist supporters in the US and try to increase surveillance on suspected "terrorists". At least he's out in '08.
In response to your question, you probably guessed that this would happen sooner or later.
Yes people have always found ways around DRM or other copyright protections, however, the masses aren't always the geekiest and audacity is fairly easy to learn, highlight and cut. With the ad cutoff being obvious it's no problem to snip it out in under 30 seconds. I have never done a DRM removal, but I'm guessing it takes a lot longer than 30 seconds.
"I imagine that each time you stream the mp3, they tack an ad on the front. If you stream it several times in a session, they stop tacking the ad on the front. Don't think that should require any kind of DRM system."
Just signed up and downloaded a song and I had the "audacity" to edit the ad ridden .mp3. If this is what they're going to be (they're still in beta so I don't know if they'll change) then they won't be around for long at all. People will get the songs make them advert free and make torrents of them. Business excecs will never learn, I give this guy credit for trying though.
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