However, there's a surprising amount of content on TPB that is definitely legal, Linux ISOs of various vintages, books and video in the public domain, as well as content uploaded by it's author.

I'm not sure if this has any legal bearing, but I think one thing that differentiates the legal content, is that it is *easily* and *reliably* found elsewhere. I want to bittorrent an Ubuntu distro, I can find a tracker on ubuntu.com, guaranteed, 100%. I think the same would apply for most other categories of free content. If an author John Doe makes his books available for free, then johndoe.com is probably a better place to download them, or find a tracker.

For illegal movies/software, there is no obvious official source; in some ways, the Pirate Bay has become the defacto source for a lot of this stuff.

Personally, I find rapidshare (esp. with a premium account) lets me download stuff much faster, more reliably, and without freaking out my routers with so many connections. (For legal content, of course. :)

(On that note, and a bit off-topic, why is it that torrents seem to kill my internet connecdtion (ADSL) for pretty much any other internet browsing, even when I throttle to a handful of connections, and a reasonable kbps rate?)

This will (well, could) be great for geek hikers like myself; I find the topographical maps available okay, but don't really give one an accurate feel for the lay of the land. Incorporating this map into GPS (or, in the shorter term, some open source mapping software on a PDA-sized device) will be very cool...

Sigh, one of these days I hope to look at the beautiful surroundings nature provides, more than I look at my gadgets I bring with me :) Oh well, navigating/mapping is half the fun of exploring, to me (whether in a car, boat, or on foot).

Ruminants are a relatively development on the evolutionary tree.

And even more unbelievable, is the fact that they the whole thing.

I'm sure it varies state by state (and province by province), but last time I checked, the power companies don't pay you penny-for-penny for the kwh you sell back to them. If memory serves, they pay you something like 10% of the going rates, which doesn't really amount to much. However, every bit of power you *reduce* your power company usage by, is pure gain. Counting on selling excess just doesn't factor in practically at this time.

A bit OT, but I'm curious as to why the best deal for half decent motherboards around here seem to be NVidia chipsets and onboard graphics, and AMD processors... Should AMD/ATI be cranking out chipsets that allow board makers to do better/faster/cheaper boards with combos from the same manufacturer?? Just seems odd. All the PC's in my house (one Linux, one Hackintosh, a couple of Windows ones for the kids, are all NVidia/AMD setups, bought over the past few years.)

Is there any chance that this is done to thwart 'IP-over-DNS' attempts?

Many ISP's will forward port 53 traffic happily, even before a cable modem is provisioned. If you attempt to go to any site (port 80, etc.) it will redirect you to their provisioning page. But DNS requests work.

So there are tools to funnel *all* of your traffic through a tunnel on port 53, as fake DNS requests.

You need a DNS server on the other end as an exit for the gateway, and control over your domain to redirect the requests appropriately, but I've used it on unprovisioned modems in a pinch, and it does work. I wouldn't want to download Redhat ISO's over it, but for casual browsing when nothing else is available, it does work. (Not recommending the practice of course.)

I could see grabbing control of port 53 to avoid this tunneling (although it's doubtful it's widespread enough to warrant such work).

In general, I'm a bit mixed on the topic; I'm all for net neutrality, but to provide a good, consistent user experience, an ISP taking control of DNS requests (and cacheing) isn't too far out there. If they are redirecting things inappropriately, however, then that's an absolute no-no, and should be slapped down immediately...

You are absolutely right man. Could you imagine if the Internet has been provided to them ? Every other dude would be on ICQ or similar client and we all would have lots of traces to follow.

1996 called, and they want their instant messaging client back...

Here's why I'm excited about/anxious for Chrome on OS/X:

I used Firefox for awhile, a couple of years back. It bogged down the CPU, especially after running for awhile.

So I switched to Opera (and shortly thereafter went from Windows to OS X). It was a peppier experience. But with newer releases, and the increasing use of Flash (I think) on the Net, it started getting slower and slower. I don't like having my fan run while I'm simply sitting and reading a static page. Turning off all plugins seems to avoid that, so I point the finger at Flash. But not having Flash, or only having it on demand, is fairly annoying. Also, there's some sites Opera just won't render properly. Not many, but some.

So I switched back to Firefox, with the advent of 3.0. Even doing nothing, sitting with a few static pages open (and Adblock, Flashblock) it seems to still hover at 10% CPU usage. Bleh. Enough to keep my fan humming all the time.

When I tried Chrome on Windows, I was quite excited, with the process-per-page approach. I can see *what* page is slowing things down, and kill it if I chose. That's my biggest beef with Opera/Firefox (I won't even let IE into the discussion :P): you can't tell *what* page is slowing down your browser. I've tried JavaScript debuggers, other dev tools to try and found out, but have had no success.

I'm praying that Chrome on OS/X will be my salvation (although I've become dependent upon some Firefox extensions, particularly vimperator :P). Upon first glance, it looks pretty good (and I'm using it to post this article). It seems to suck up 30% CPU for 20 seconds or so *after* finishing loading a page, but then does settle down.

Right now I have about 5 tabs open, and each is using 2-3%, which is slightly concerning. That could add up to be just as bad as Firefox/Opera. But for now, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of being an early release, and keep my fingers crossed that the "Browser That Finally Doesn't Suck [CPU]" is on the horizon...

For retro shits-n-giggles, I have two rotary phones (one wall mount, one desk) that ring with bells, etc.. I have an Asterisk system in the house, separate extensions in each room. But for my office, I like the funky old classic. It works fine with a Linksys ATA (pulse dialing, ringing). On some devices (iAXY), pulse dialing and sufficient ring current isn't provided, so they don't work; but on devices that still support pulse dialing, they do work nicely.

I also have a hand-crank phone (turn the crank to ring the operator, to connect you, kinda thing). Obviously the cranking wouldn't do much (but maybe fry some equipment), but answering and holding a conversation works just fine. The electrical standards for telephony haven't changed since pretty much their inception (or at least they've kept an amazing amount of backwards compatibility).

Given that it's hooked to a modern Asterisk system (which in turn is hooked to the internet), this is older than that 1962 modem (circa 1940, I believe). Having a 1940's phone connected to VOIP is quite a kick...

What do I win?

Can they do that? Add to my list of mental illnesses after the fact???

Wasn't there a story recently about how mission control managed to upload the whole freakin' Spiderman movie lately for the astronauts? How would uploading a codec or VLC be harder than that?

I'm also surprised they would bring DVD's. Why bring several clunky physical media, when the movies could have been pre-copied to the hard drives (ripped, that is). I rip movies from legal DVD's to the hard drive when I go on a mere business trip; one would think when you're going on the damn shuttle you pack even lighter...

Just seems very strange.

Most people's light switches are further than the TV, and they'd be outraged to have to turn the tv on/off without a remote... I think remote control of lights and other home functions is a natural evolution that we will see become more and more commonplace. Possibly managed by a computer, but more likely interfaced through a dedicated remote-control device. (These already exist of course, just will probably become more of a standard thing.)

Isn't this type of study best suited for a properly designed and executed "focus group." It's surely the more appropriate way to do user testing.

Experimenting with web site delays on live users is akin to inappropriately releasing an operating system before it's ready for prime time, and letting the users suffer by finding and reporting the bugs. Oh, wait...

(Also, I'm sure MS has enough sections to their web properties, and enough traffic, and enough existing delays, that they could analyze their existing data to determine where delays are distracting or frustrating users.)

Hmmm, as another posted pointed out, there is an add-on for that...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Must try it out.

I tend to browse, finding interesting links, always opening them in the background, and getting to them when I finish the current article.

I'm known as a bit of a tab hog, in general.

Now and then, I'll split things into two windows, to organize my browsing. This is effectively trying to put a bit of "hierarchy" the browsing experience.

I believe a "power browser user" basically does do a bit of a hierarchical thing when browsing, expanding topics of interest as they see fit. To have a single tab bar be able to handle a bit more structure to my browsing experience would really be killer, to me.

Opera (I think) does have the option of opening new tabs *next* to the current tab, rather than at the end, which kind of groups things together a bit better, but not well enough for my tastes.

To have the browser be able to open new tabs, but optionally in "sub-trees" where I choose, and maybe expand/collapse those subtrees might be pretty compelling (although possibly too confusing for the casual user?)

In any case, I think we need *some* tree-like tab behaviour.