Posts by Chris C

Am I being dense?

Maybe I'm just being dense here, but I always thought the purpose of encryption was to make sure people viewing the data couldn't decipher it. If you use something as useless as a person's name or geographic location as a key (or even their social security number at this point, since that's not even close to secret/private anymore), then a brute-force attack to decrypt the data will take relatively little time. In other words, the encryption will be virtually useless.

Isn't this why we tell people to use complex passwords? Isn't this why we tell them not to use personal info in their passwords (own/spouse/child's name, birthdays, etc)?

And yet now we're telling people this is a good way to encrypt sensitive information?

Same codebase

If Server 2008 really is the same codebase as Vista, then we should expect The Long Goodbye to occur on Server 2008. Wouldn't that be something -- a server choking on a simple file copy. But hey, it's not like it was designed for that at all...

They all suck at some point

No matter which drive manufacturer you name, they have or will suck at some point in their existence. The only manufacturers that I have not been burned by are Conner and Hitachi, and that's because I haven't used enough of their drives. I've been burned personally or professionally by every other manufacturer I know of -- Fujitsu, Samsung, IBM, Seagate (IDE and SCSI), Quantum, Maxtor, and WD.

Around 1997, Fujitsu and Samsung IDE drives had a 100% failure rate where I worked. All of those drives had bad sectors during format. WD drives were perfect.

1997 to 2000, every Quantum IDE drive I saw was crap, though their SCSI drives were known to be top of the line.

2000 to 2004, every time we built a server, the Seagate SCSI drives had a 33-50% DOA rate. The drives either wouldn't spin up, or would spin up but would not be detected.

IBM had the "Deathstar" issue.

WD started to have QA issues around 2000 (I'm sure I'm not the only one with a container full of LOUD 20GB drives).

Maxtor started having QA problems from around 2002.

So please, let's not pretend that any drive manufacturer is perfect, or even that one is better than another. They all have had, or will have, problems during their existence.

re: Hasta la vista

"I thought Terminator was a film, not a documentary"

And I thought 1984 was a work of fiction. Looks like we were both wrong.

Scary

So it's back to guilty unless proven innocent, then? And since you can't really prove innocence (it's impossible to prove a negative, after all)...

"DNA techniques offer the police service an invaluable tool in identifying and eliminating suspects in crime investigations"

Am I the only one scared by the word "eliminating" in that statement? Especially as you brits are now just about as good as us yanks in eliminating/terminating people who just don't quite look, act, or think the "right" way.

Cyber-sex is bad, mkay

"Young people may also engage in behaviour that is risky to themselves including cyber-flirting and cyber-sex. These situations can quickly escalate to a point where they may lose control."

First they'll start cyber-flirting... Then they'll engage in cyber-sex... Soon it will escalate to a point where they may lose control... at which point they'll have to clean the keyboard.

3 BILLION?!?

Dell is going to save $3 BILLION over three years by closing down this plant and laying off 800-900 workers?

First of all, 800-900? What, they don't even know how many workers they employ there? I guess when you're that removed, it's easy not to care about the poor sods who will now need to find other sources of income in this pathetic economy.

But $3bil over three years means they're saving one billion dollars per year. Let's assume the average factory worker earned $25 per hour (probably much less than that). 900 employees at $25/hr equals $46.8 million per year. Even taking into consideration various taxes, insurance, etc, they're likely paying far less than $100 million per year. So they're paying less than $100 Million in pay, but they'll save $1 Billion? What the hell kind of overhead do they have?!?

Jury of your peers

The problem with the US justice system is that it doesn't provide what it promises. A jury is said to be made up of "a jury of your peers". The problem with that is that is simply isn't true. A jury is made up of people who were civil-minded enough to appear for jury duty, people who mostly don't care about the case and just want to get home as soon as possible (or, for longer cases, unemployed people who want the case to continue as long as possible so they can keep collecting the $50/day the court pays them).

If the jury in this case were truly made up of Rambus' peers, then every jury member would be in the IT industry, preferably in the memory industry. If it's just the average Joe off the street (which it is), then it's not a jury of your peers. A jury of your community, perhaps, but not a jury of your peers. Imagine if we applied the same rules and terminology to other industries. Imagine if a medical peer review simply meant "reviewed by another person living in the community".

Women and minorities

Call me sexist, racist, or whatever else you'd like. But when we start treating *ANYBODY* as special, be it women, blacks, Mexicans, or Puerto Ricans (no, the government still doesn't consider gays to be a minority because it still doesn't want to acknowledge them), then it is no longer equality. When affirmative action forces a company to hire a "minority" instead of a "white" person, how do you call that equality? The ideology behind the laws and thoughts are well-intentioned, as there most definitely still are negative attitudes towards entire groups of people for no good reason, but giving them special additional rights means there is no longer equality. Why should a woman or a "minority" person be considered the winner of an auction when somebody else placed a higher bid? Should the same be applied to other markets as well? If somebody is selling a house, can a woman buy it for $100,000 even if a man bids $150,000 for it? Equality means just that -- equal. Equality does not mean one group of people is treated worse or another group of people is treated better. Of course, the worst and most insulting part of affirmative action is that an employer cannot refuse to hire somebody simply because they don't speak English. Yes, you read that correctly. It doesn't matter if you can communicate with your employees or not. It doesn't matter if they can perform the job or not (since performing the job necessitates speaking English with colleagues, customers, suppliers, etc).

And where does it end? As mentioned above, the only legally-acknowledged "minorities" are blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. "Minority" simply means less than the majority. I'm 5'6". For a male, that's short. So height-wise, I am in the minority. Should I get special treatment? I'm in IT; most of this country's citizens are not. Therefore, I'm a minority based on that as well. Women outnumber men in this country, so I'm a minority there, too. Using the word "minority" is a stupid idea, and is a very slippery slope. I would venture a guess that every person in the world is a minority in some way or another.

Then again, we supposedly have separation of church and state, and yet the Presidential inauguration and court oaths still end with "so help you god" or some such nonsense, and we still have "In God We Trust" on our currency. So I have no reason to believe that governmental hypocrisy will end in my lifetime.

If I was a resident of NJ

If I lived in NJ, and I voted on one of those machines, I would start a class-action lawsuit against the state. Then the state could decide who it was rather be sued by -- the citizens it fucked over by using faulty machines, or the manufacturer of the machines. If the state continues to use these machines, it is clearly willful and malicious negligence. Knowing that the machines were faulty, using the votes produced by the machines is willful and malicious negligence. The only fair and legal way around this is a re-vote without those machines. Anything less is yet more proof that the voting commissions don't care about the people's votes, which is illegal as one of the basic rights given to every adult citizen is the right to vote. Or are they going to try saying that the citizens were given that right, and there is nothing saying those votes must count towards something?

Illegal and stupidity

First of all, this is entrapment. Last I checked, entrapment was illegal (at least on the local level).

Second of all, I would guess that most of here have been to various porn sites. You know the type -- they have a lot of thumbnail images and you click on the one you like and hope you're not redirected a thousand times. My point is that these pages sometimes contain things you're not looking for. They may have 98 images of two (or more) consenting adults. But a small percentage of those images may be of two gay males (illegal in some places, not everywhere, but certainly not what you visited the site for), and a small percentage of those images may be of what appear to be underage women. And yet, when you're raided by the FBI like in this article, you'll be arrested, tried, and jailed for child porn because of those images that you did not actively seek and did not wish to see.

That's the problem with the internet. You don't know what you're going to see until you actually see it. I know it comes as a shock, but people lie. They can put one thing in the link text when the link is something completely different. I know friends who have done this as an innocent joke. One I saw recently was an email sent to a friend that said "Greatest peepshow", and it was a picture of those marshmallow Peeps decorated and situated as if they were dancers and visitors in a strip club. That was an innocent swap. We all know the opposite happens -- you're sent a link to a seemingly-innocent site, but the site is anything but. I imagine many of us have been led to goatse at one time or another. Yet, in this Era of Morality, you could be jailed for visiting that site, even though you didn't know what it was before you visited it. It doesn't matter if you closed it within a tenth of a second, as soon as you saw it wasn't what you intended to visit.

Now, having said that, this article mentions a suspect who was found guilty by a jury because he had *A* (let's be specific -- *A* means *ONE*) thumbnail image of two naked minors. Unless the image was explicitly sexual, there is nothing illegal about that image. Nudity is not illegal. If it were, there would be no such things as nudists and nudist camps. Nudity does not equal pornography (no matter how much the "right" tells you it does). But I bet the prosecutor never made that clear to the jury.

People actively taking part in child pornography, whether they are producing it, publishing it, viewing it, or simply encouraging it, should be wiped off the face of the earth. But we should be going after and prosecuting the real criminals, not those based on speculation at most. We used to require proof before we put somebody behind bars. I fear the saying "innocent until proven guilty" is taken too literally nowadays -- taken to mean that everybody is guilty and it just has not been proven yet.

Comcast sucks

As a Comcast customer for more than ten years (starting back when they were MediaOne using the Excite@Home high-speed internet, through AT&T Broadband, and finally ending with Comcast), I can categorically say that Comcast sucks. Back i 2001, I moved into an apartment and my internet connection would drop every few minutes. I called up support dozens of times. They all said the same thing -- unplug the modem, wait a minute, and plug it back in. It works? Then you're all set. Yeah, for another few minutes. I had over six service calls. One tech measured the signal coming directly from the tap (before it even hit my wall outlet), and he said it was a bad signal. Then, in the very next sentence, he blamed my internal wiring (yes, right after saying it was bad at the tap). Finally, one of the techs used his own equipment to test the equipment on the poles, and he found it was a faulty piece of equipment further down the line. This was ongoing for close to a year. What kind of credit did I get? A whole one month. Comcast refuses to give credits of more than one month no matter how much downtime you have.

So yeah, Comcast sucks. The only problem is the Verizon blows. As much as I hate Comcast, I'm forced to choose the lesser of two evils.

Which community

“violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community”

OK, *WHICH* adult community? The community of 65-year-olds, or the community of 18-year-olds? Which region? Which income level? People of different ages, localities, and income levels have different standards. That's the problem with laws like these -- they only reflect the opinions of the few lawmakers, not the opinions of the many citizens. And since most politicians are career politicians, they lost touch with the citizens years ago.

I'm 30, and I grew up playing violent video games, first on NES, then on the PC. I spent my teenage years playing Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, DOOM, DOOM II, etc. It could be argued that in their day, those games were very violent. And yet I've never so much as hit anyone. I find it hard to believe that I'm abnormal in that regard.

I'm still, and probably always will be, troubled with the hypocrisy of it all. Why is violence in video games so bad, but violence in movies is considered good? And don't try to give me the line of "it's a murder simulation". No, it isn't. Manipulating a fictional, pixelated character to stab another fictional, pixelated character on a display device using a keyboard, mouse, or game controller is not nearly the same as picking up a knife and physically stabbing another person. In Max Payne, I love throwing molotov cocktails on the enemies and watching them burn, but there's no way I could do that in real life. Then why can I do it in a video game? Because my brain understands that it's not real. Anybody who cannot differentiate between reality and fiction/fantasy is mentally ill, and enacting random laws regarding video games (or movies, for that matter) won't help that individual. These laws are like DRM -- the only people they'll affect are the law-abiding people who don't have a problem to begin with

And do I even need to bring up the story (a few years ago, I believe) of the grandmother who bought a rated-M game for her grandson? She knew it was rated M, and she still bought it for him. Then, shock, she found him playing it and it was violent, so she sued the game publisher. No laws would have prevented such stupidity.

re: head smack

"The rest of the world must think we Americans, by and large, are idiots. I can't wait for the Republican party to die next election."

Sadly, by and large, we Americans *ARE* idiots. Yes, there are many of us who are intelligent, but there are many more who are idiots.

"if it was a minority, how come Bush is President and not AlGore or Kerry?"

That's an easy question -- because Bush illegally stole the election. And no, I'm not making some bleeding-heart liberal conspiracy-theory comment here. It's documented that at least one or two states in both the 2000 and 2004 elections simply threw out many of their citizens' votes (remember Florida and the "hanging chads" issue?). When you selectively throw out votes from certain left-leaning districts, it's easy to manipulate the vote to go the way you want. It's also the perfect way to show people that their vote doesn't count, and convince them to not bother voting (to condition them for the future when we no longer have voting).

As for it being "crazy" to attach retroactive immunity to telecoms carriers as part of a mental health bill... I'd say it's no more crazy than attaching the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) to a port security bill. What *IS* crazy, and I'm very shocked over, is that enough reps actually read this bill to know that it had been hijacked.

Stupid, dangerous, and slippery slope

How can you possibly place fault with the vendor over unpatched software? it is the USER (the computer's OWNER) who determines when and if he/she wants to patch the software. It is NOT anybody else's decision. You cannot blame the software vendor for the actions or inactions of the software user.

Even if you only want to hold vendors responsible for vulnerabilities for which they have not yet released a patch (regardless of whether users have installed released patches or not), that's a bad idea as well. As stated above, it will almost completely kill freeware, shareware, and FOSS. And if you think software is expensive now, just wait until the vendors have to buy risk insurance to cover the possibility of vulnerabilities.

As for ISPs, how can you possibly blame the ISP for something their customer does? Do we blame Verizon when bad people communicate through the telephone? Do we blame Verizon Wireless, Sprint/Nextel, or AT&T when a cell phone is used to remotely detonate explosives? Did we blame the Postal Service when anthrax was sent through the mail? No, no, and no. So why would we blame ISPs if their customers purposely or unknowingly do something bad?

re: AC

You're right, I've never had a physical deformity that requires surgery. I feel fortunate for that. I sympathize with those who do. However, when you're allowing someone to take a scalpel to any part of your body, you must have complete trust in them. Any reputable surgeon will go over everything with you in as much detail as you need, and give you ample time to contemplate your decision and read all the necessary paperwork. Any surgeon who tries to rush you through it simply cannot be trusted. And if you can't trust them, why are you putting your life in their hands?

Moore's law?

Can somebody please explain how Moore's law is related to DNA sequencing? I'm not a geneticist here, but last I checked, DNA did not have transistors. And since Moore's law states that the number of transistors used to create a processor roughly doubles every 18 months, I fail to see how that is even remotely related to DNA sequencing. Even the alternately-accepted meaning (processor speed roughly doubles every 18 months) isn't even remotely related to DNA sequencing.

Ineptitude to the inifinite power

I've always known (since before birth, in fact) that the U.S. government was a bunch of incompetent, inept fools. But the DoD created ARPAnet which, in time, became the internet we now know and love/hate. So it seems somewhat ironic that the military can't even figure out the difference between .com and .mil, or figure out that sending classified information in unencrypted email isn't a good idea. Everyone found doing so should be severely sanctioned.

What we have to fear

"Once again, it seems that the main thing we have to fear is fear itself."

I respectfully disagree. The *MAIN* things we have to fear, in my opinion, are our governments (US for me, UK for you). Our governments use the "Think of the terrorists, they're coming for you!" line to strip away our freedoms quicker than you can say "what terrorists?". Pesonally, I find it sadly humorous that the US government is taking away freedoms under the illusion of "protection", while claiming they are actively stopping terrorists threats, yet say they are unable to describe said threats. It's the old "you'll have to trust us" line. This from a government with a proven track record of lies, deception, corruption, and cover-ups (not to mention the willingness to rig elections and then cover it up, making meaningless what is possibly the most basic freedom in a supposed democracy).

No. I don't fear fear. I don't (much) fear the terrorists. I do, however, fear our governments. And, given the current path we're on, I fear our 1984-style future.

re: UGH!

I'm with you. When I commented on it in another article a while ago, another commenter stated that getting the "information" was more important that the ability to successfully read said information. Repeated words/phrases make it very difficult and confusing to parse the sentences. That, together with the misspellings and other grammar problems (actual problems, not US/UK differences) make it painful to read many of the articles now.

Am I the only one?

Am I really the only one thinks that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft did *NOT* "steal" his idea? They had already developed Excel, a spreadsheet application. They (and everybody with a brain) knew very well that a lot of information is kept in databases. Therefore, allowing your spreadsheet application to pull data from a database is a natural progression. Just because this guy pitched his idea to them doesn't mean they weren't already planning it.

Also, why did it take him 8 years to sue them? Could it possibly be because he *WANTED* them to sell many copies in the hopes of a large payout? After all, if he sued them immediately, the payout (if any) would be a lot smaller, and they may have found a workaround. This way he gets rich. I hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but this guy doesn't look to be much better.

Unanswered question

There is still the unanswered question of why Network Solutions thinks this is necessary. The only way this could possibly be necessary to "protect" their customers is if third parties were actively registering domains queried through Network Solutions' servers. And the only way third parties could get those queries is if there was a pretty big security hole in Network Solutions' servers.

So which is it? Are they front-running in an attempt at price-fixing, or are they "protecting" their customers (which proves they have a security hole they refuse to fix)?

re: The quality of management

So you think what this guy did was justified? You think the management firing him was too harsh? Let's not forget that if he lost control or if the engines shut down, the plane would have crashed in one second (the downward pull of gravity is 9.8m/s/s). In other words, he needlessly and senselessly exposed the airlines to millions or billions of dollars/pounds in liability if anything went wrong (not to mention the millions on a lost plane). Let's not also forget that even though the plane didn't crash, those passengers can still file multi-million dollar/pound lawsuits for various reasons such as emotional distress. So no, I don't think the management overreacted at all. They did exactly what they should have. This guy was just an idiot trying to inflate his ego and show the world how big his dick is.

Sounds fishy

This sounds just a bit too fishy to me. I can understand Pakistan blocking YouTube (not that I agree with it). But then to declare that Pakistan's ISPs blocking YouTube somehow resulted in all ISPs worldwide to block it as well? I smell BS. Which is more likely -- that ISPs worldwide all decided to block access to YouTube, or simply that YouTube's host decided to block incoming requests?

re: Technical Clarification

ISPs typically keep logs of when their DHCP servers assign addresses, and to whom those addresses are assigned. The RIAA can they say "Who was IP address 1.2.3.4 assigned to on 2/23/2008 at 03:57:24 GMT?". Their query likely would not be as lucid, but you get the point. If the address was changed very close to that time, the true lessee may not be accurately known because of time differences. Unless the DHCP server and the system making the query are synchronized (to an NTP time server, for example), it may not be possible to tell who the lessee was. But I suspect it's unlikely that many queries will match this time-too-close-to-assignment scenario.

As for why ISPs charge more for static IPs, it's because when they assign a static IP address to you, they cannot use it for anyone else. And just like you, your ISP has to pay for their block of IP addresses. If everyone is using dynamic addresses, it's not such a big deal because everyone will not be online at the same time, so the ISP can oversell the address space (much like high-speed internet [broadband] providers oversell their bandwidth by claiming "up to" excessively high speeds and then cutting off people who use those speeds consistently).

re: Consumer Market?

Are you actually saying that you consider a 4GB Sandisk/PNY/whatever USB flash-based memory stick to be a "high-end flash drive"? If so, then please cover yourself in foil so we can identify you. By "high-end flash drive", he's talking about actual SSDs, not flash-based memory sticks. I would assume he means something with 128GB+ capacity, and something with an actual drive interface (FC, SAS, SCSI, SATA, etc), which currently cost $3000+.

re: About time

Are you actually saying that 3Com provides the "basic internet infrastructure"? By any chance, have you ever heard of a little company called Cisco?

The problem with public companies

This is the problem with being a publicly-traded company -- you're obligated to do what's best for the shareholders, not what's best for the company. The best thing for Yahoo!, the company, is to decline the takeover. But the best thing for the shareholders most likely is to accept it. The shareholders will get boatloads of money, but the company will be sunk; it'll be stripped for parts and most of the employees will most likely be sent packing. But hey, who cares about the competitive and economic impact as long as we get a couple more m/billionaires out of the deal?

Who needs terrorists

It's good to see that over here in the US, we decided to poison our own water. Who needs terrorists when we're willing, able to, and actively poisoning ourselves. All in order to "protect" ourselves, of course. Wait, that sounds familiar, doesn't it...

Give us money

So Network Solutions admits that *IT* has a problem. It admits that it does not effectively monitor its own servers and that third parties are (illegally?) accessing and monitoring its servers, and that this monitoring is responsible for this "front running". So instead of fixing their network, they're preventing people from registering domains at other registrars, and doing exactly the thing they say they are protecting people from? So they profit from it *AND* they don't have to fix their network. Yeah, that'll convince me to use their services. How does this make them any different than the miscreants they're supposedly "protecting" people from?

2.4 million hours? Really?

Being from the US, I'm ignorant of this bridge, so please forgive me. But I still think I can reasonably question the accuracy of those numbers. 2.4 million hours over six years? A typical full-time job is considered eight hours per day, five days per week. Giving two weeks vacation, that's 2,000 hours per year per person.

2,400,000 man-hours / 6 years = 400,000 man-hours per year

400,000 man-hours per year / 2,000 hours per year per person = 200 people

Are they actually saying that for the past six years, they've had 200 people working on this full-time (40 hours per week)? Call me ignorant or call me crazy, but I can't imagine that for a bridge of any size. And if they really did have 200 people working on it full-time, I would hope it would have been finished within those six years (which it obviously wasn't).

Protect the children?

One question I always ask people, and have never received a valid response to, is "how does nudity, erotica, or pornography harm or damage a child?" In the US, we spend a lot of time and resources trying (and usually succeeding) to convince ourselves and others that nudity and sex (and everything having to do with nudity and sex) is somehow "wrong", "immoral", and "dangerous". We go so far as throwing people in jail for having consensual sex in private if one of them happens to be 17 years old or if a 16- or 17-year-old decides to post nude pictures of themselves voluntarily.

Simply put, nudity is natural. There is really nothing more natural than nudity. It's how every single one of us came into this world. You may not like to look at everyone's nude body (especially in the US), but it's not "wrong" or "immoral". And yet many people equate "nude" with "pornography", saying that any picture of a nude woman is porn, somehow granting exceptions for pictures and statues of centuries past (any recent picture or statue is considered pornography).

Similarly, sex is natural. None of us would be here without it. Sex is necessary to the survival of the human species (whether or not you think that's a good thing), and yet we treat it as something dirty that can't be mentioned. We hide sex whenever possible in reality, while displaying it as much as possible in works of fiction (movies, TV, etc). We demean women who wear "revealing" clothing while cheering models who wear the same (or even less). We drool over the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, calling the models "gorgeous" and "perfect", while at the same time calling women on the streets "sluts" for displaying too much skin.

Hell, the readers of this journal are just as bad. These readers are quick to badmouth Britney Spears because she was photographed in public without wearing panties. And yet these same readers who badmouth her were (before those photos became public) likely scouring the internet to find pictures of her nude. Once word of those pictures came out, these same readers likely raced against the clock to find said pictures (after calling her a slut, of course). Hypocrisy, anyone?

Perhaps the point of this comment can best be summed up as: the more you "protect", the more you vilify; the more you "protect", the more you harm. Would we have such a problem with verbal and physical assault (including rape) against women who dare to wear revealing clothing if we were taught about sex and taught to respect sex (and women) instead of being taught that sex is something to be ashamed of and treating women as sexual objects?

Maybe we don't need better protection for children. Maybe, just maybe, it's education we need.

As for puritanical parents who do vilify sex and want to "protect" their children from it (these are usually the Christian people with 27 kids), there are already numerous solutions out there to do just that, on a per-computer basis. Or, if you have multiple computers connected through one internet connection, you can get a web-filtering application such as DansGuardian to protect all of the computers (that way, you don't have to worry about smart little Johnny disabling it on his system). Either way, the solution is already available for parents who want to do something about it. Why spend countless hours and resources reinventing the wheel and making things more inconvenient for everyone else?

Checks and what?

The President (the executive branch) disregards the courts (the judicial branch) by using the "State Secrets" pledge to avoid embarrassing and inconvenient information from leaking out.

The President (the executive branch) disregards the Congress (the legislative branch) by ignoring the laws of the country when enabling the NSA wiretaps against US citizens on US soil.

So can someone please explain how the "checks and balances" work, exactly? If I didn't know better, I'd describe the above behavior as that of a present-day communist (such as China), dictator, fascist, or totalitarian. But certainly not the country that our forefathers gave their lives for. I often wonder what the founding fathers would think of the country (and government) if they saw it today.

So naive

"My prosecution was a test case under the 2000 Terrorism Act. Today's decision means no first year student can ever be prosecuted again under this Act for possessing extremist literature."

This decision doesn't mean any such thing. At the very most, this decision means that hopefully, if a future judge feels like following precedent, he will not allow a conviction based on this premise. It does not mean the government will not try to prosecute someone under this premise.

And for the love of $deity, people, can we PLEASE get the phrase right? It's "Innocent UNLESS proven guilty". When you say "until", you're playing into the governments' hands -- that we're all guilty and they just haven't found the proof yet, but if they try real hard and are given enough time, they just know they'll find it (so we need to keep all suspects in jail until we find it). Christians might prefer that thought though, because it goes right along with original sin.

re: Save the Internet, Just Move

There seems to be a misconception is much of the world that U.S. residents actually have a choice concerning high-speed internet. In reality, we don't. We have only three choices:

1) Cable (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter, etc). Since the FCC has deemed cable to be an information service, the cable companies are not required to provide access to their lines to competitors. In other words, they have a monopoly in cable internet access. You cannot get cable internet from a third party.

2) DSL. The problem is that most people can't get good speeds (typical DSL speeds are 768kbps to 3Mbps), and many people can't get DSL at all (too far away from the DSLAM). Until now, telecoms carriers were required to allow third parties access to their lines. In other words, I could get DSL straight from Verizon or I could get it from Choice One (who leases the access from Verizon). However, the FCC recently ruled that DSL is an information service (like cable), so this may change in the very near future.

3) Business-class DS-1 or DS-3 lines (T1/T3). These are prohibitively expensive and are not an option for individuals.

So really, we're limited to two choces: cable or DSL. Yes, I could boycot Comcast (cable), but then I would have to go to DSL (Verizon) which (in my area, at least) is more expensive, much slower (Comcast in Mass. is up to 8Mbps, while Verizon DSL tops out at 3Mbps), and less reliable.

Unlimited

I *REALLY* wish some government or law agency would do something about all of these companies offering "unlimited" anything. Whenever I hear that word now I'm reminded of the Netflix exec who said something to the effect "Unlimited doesn't mean as many as you want". Terms of use should not be able to change the definition of "unlimited". If Yahoo's servers are unable to cope with the bandwidth and disk space required, then they are not unlimited, and it is false advertising. Period.

Cry me a river

Look, I know we live in the world of sue-n-screw, but can we please get a little perspective? First, Google and Yahoo Chinese entities *HAVE* to follow Chinese law. Just as their US entities have to follow US law, their UK entities have to follow UK law, etc. I don't agree with their past practices involving their Chinese operations, but that's irrelevant.

What really gets to me is this notion people have that Google and other search engines just *HAVE* to list their sites. They don't. There is nothing that says Google will return search results for every website. They are a business. They are not obligated to you, me, or anyone else other than their owners and shareholders. They could decide to stop returning search results entirely if they wanted to.

Simply put, no search engine is legally, morally, or ethically bound to ensure any website is in its search results. And no website owner can legally, morally, or ethically expect to be listed in a search engine's database. Search engines are there to make money. To that end, they make it easy for people to find a lot of things online. But they are not required to do so.

There is no right that says your website will be listed in a search engine database. Deal with it.

Stupid quote

""It would have been a phrase that sporting fans would definitely have associated with the New England Patriots," he said."

I'm sure there are many (probably the majority) of sporting fans, even in the U.S., who would never equate "19-0" with the New England Patriots. Hell, 19-0 isn't even impressive in sports. It might be in American football. But 19-0 is quite possible, and not such a grand feat, in other sports such as hockey and baseball.

To even suggest that sporting fans would definitely have associated "19-0" with the New England Patriots is so ridiculous that this guy should be forced to wear the dunce cap in public so we know to avoid him.

Accuracy?

"During the last three months of 2007 the company had 109m average monthly domestic unique visitors and 49bn domestic page views, according to comScore Media Metrix."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say those figures are grossly overstated. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population estimate for July 2007 was 301,621,157. In other words, comScore Media Metrix is claiming that during the last three months of 2007, 36.138 percent of the U.S. populace visited AOL each month, with each of those people viewing 426 pages each month.

re: McID

Actually, it could be even easier. Just have all retail stories (especially supermarkets) tie into the database used by a single card. That way you'd just have to carry one card. Damn sick of having to have a store card for every store just to have the privilege of not being over-charged. Every supermarket, each has its own card. Every pharmacy, each has its own card. Every retail store, each has its own card.

Besides, with all the stupid VISA commercials trying to condition people to not use cash, its only a matter of time before you need to use a card for all commerce transactions. Paper currency will be meaningless. It will all be electronic. And then the fun starts.

Disturbing trend

While my thinking may seem ironic since I'm in the IT industry, I find the current trend of e-everything very disturbing. Some may even claim that this scheme is discrimination against those who do not have mobile phones (yes, there are some people without, if you can imagine). Not everyone wants to be "connected" 24/7. Should we really punish them for it?

re: Free Vista

Maybe they decided it's better to "free" Vista, as you put it, than lose customers. I imagine not too many of the corporate users were happy when WGA decided their copies of Vista were "pirated" (even though they weren't) and shut itself down. People don't really like it when something they paid for stops working, and they usually tend to avoid it in the future.

While I don't run Vista, I'm curious to know if SP1 fixes The Long Goodbye.

re: Well, it IS news

With all due respect, your Playstation and Dreamcast didn't have such problems with their optical drives because they had CD-ROM drives. The Wii has a DVD drive. The lens and laser beam on a DVD drive is much smaller than the lens/laser on a CD drive. If a CD's lens becomes partially obstructed, it may be able to compensate because it still has a large area of non-obstructed lens. Because a DVD's lens is much smaller, any obstruction will be much more disabling.

Also, a CD is only one layer. DVDs can have two layers. That means the DVD laser has to be able to read through the first layer in order to read and decode the second layer. To do this, it absolutely must have a clean lens.

While I understand your thinking, asking why a DVD lens can't deal with things a CD lens can is a bit like asking why you can't erase pen marks when you can erase pencil marks. Sure, both pens and pencils perform similar tasks, but they're still not the same.

Great, just great

So not only do we have to deal with spam from these and people like these, but now I need to stump up my hard-earned tax dollars to keep them locked away in prison, too? That's just a slap in the face. I have a feeling that's not what the tax system was originally started for.

And I agree about personal responsibility. If you're stupid enough to send money to these people, I have little or no sympathy for you. There's a saying -- if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. You do not get unsolicited (legitimate) offers for millions of dollars/pounds, period. End of story. If you really did have a long-lost relative who died and you're in the will, an attorney will contact you by phone or letter, not by email. I would suggest that people be trained to read full emails (including headers), but since people can't even avoid "bad" websites, it wouldn't do any good. Then again, clients like Outlook make it difficult to impossible to see the full email anyway.

re: Cherished franchise (David)

If all you see when you watch the Nightmare series is a bunch of slasher flicks, you missed a lot. Nightmare does have a plot, a rather intricate and interesting plot, but perhaps you didn't pay enough attention to notice it. The plot twists its way through all of the movies, adding more back-story the further the series progressed. And that doesn't even get into Freddy's trademark humor. Saying Nightmare was "just a slasher flick" is like saying Pump Up The Volume was just about a foul-mouthed teen.

Sexually provocative behavior?

Mr. Sherrard's comments are spot-on. In a country where you print topless women in your freely-available (non-age-restricted) newspapers and websites, a fully-clothed women is considered offensive? Why? It is because she *IS* wearing clothes and you have to *IMAGINE* what she looks like naked?

Simply put, people can (and will) be offended by anything. If you're specifically looking to be offended, you will be. Many fat people are "offended" by skinny people (such as this model). Does that mean we should ban all pictures of skinny people, too?

I would question what exactly the ASA considers "sexually provocative behavior". If the word "HOTTEST" is considered "sexually provocative", they they really have a problem. Are the words "attractive", "cute", or "adorable" equally "provocative"? 'Tis a slippery slope, indeed.

You guys are getting to be as prudish (and ridiculous) as us over here in the US.

3 easy steps

1. Choose a generic name for your "social networking" website (example: "My Space", what a radically innovative name).

2. Force all owners of similar generic-name sites to hand their domains over to you.

3. Profit!

This ruling sets a very dangerous precedent when a domain, registered long before the "popular" domain is even thought of, can be forcibly handed over to the "popular" site's owner. Even if there was advertising for myspace.com on the website, nobody could possibly confuse the two of them. What was Rupert worried about -- that people might get to the "wrong" site and think MySpace is more intelligent than it really is?