I have to agree. One of my favorite parts of the movie is in the beginning when the teens are playing D&D and order a pizza, as the dialogue and interactions are much more realistic than anything I'd expect to see in a movie from that time or even in the present. It wasn't even a crucial scene, so they could have easily just wrote some standard obviously-scripted dialog and left it at that, but instead they aimed higher and decided to film something that resembled reality.

I wish more films were as bad as E.T.

It's not just the news, it's television in general. The most disgusting are the shows that detail real-life murders, complete with actual crime scene photographs, as if when someone is murdered, their unfortunate death should become some corporation's profits and everyone else's entertainment.

I feel the same way about it. I can understand wanting to license people who want to build their own transceivers, and maybe even those who want to develop their own modulation schemes and data protocols, but the fact that a HAM can't design and build some nice little ARPS transceivers for his friends and neighbors and allow them to use the devices without having their own license doesn't make any sense to me. Especially if the device were to transmit his call sign when in use so that people know who to talk to if the device or its user misbehaves. The radio spectrum is a natural resource, so I don't understand why less than 1% of it belongs to the public. There's no reason why we should all be paying monthly fees to cell phone companies when ARPS shows us that volunteers are more than capable of running a public text messaging system for free.

When I looked into HAM radio, I just couldn't see anything that appealed to me. I'm not the kind of person who cares to try to see how far away I can communicate with the least amount of power just for shits and giggles. I'd want to build digital devices, using my own data protocols, and maybe experiment with new modulation schemes, but the FCC dictates what you're allowed to transmit and what modulation schemes you're allowed to use. I don't even know how they ended up with ARPS since, from what I saw when I looked into HAM radio, no one would have been allowed to start the project because, by virtue of being new, it wouldn't have been on the list of things that people are permitted to do.

Anyway, I eventually lost interest, but if I still cared I'd probably either use CB or FRS and just ignore the fact that what I was doing with those frequencies was illegal since it's unlikely anyone who heard the transmissions would give a shit anyway. Around here, both bands are rather vacant, so it's unlikely anyone would even notice what I was doing, never mind anyone caring about it.

Actually, the speed was controlled. You could feed those little motors whatever voltage you wanted and they'd continue to spin at the same speed. The problem was that the path between the motor and the tape movement contained a lot of variables, in particular a smooth rubber belt on pulleys doesn't guarantee a fixed rotational ratio like you get with gears, though I imagine that design was necessary to allow the flywheel to actually do its job and ensure a constant speed.

The big issue was that the things often just weren't calibrated well. As a kid, I liked to play my keyboard along with the music, but every time I got a new cassette player I had to take the thing apart and adjust the potentiometer in the motor until the music was in tune. After that, most store-bought tapes would be in tune, and I imagine those that weren't were more due to artists recording their music without bothering to tune their guitars properly than to the recording speed being incorrect.

I never had any of the sound quality issues people love to complain about. I had one tape that I had listened to for years, even breaking my own rules about where my tapes go by putting it into "untrusted" players, like the one in my car. So one day I thought I had probably degraded the sound quality by now, and so I bought a new copy, but I found it to be indistinguishable from the old copy. When I switched to CDs, it wasn't even because of better sound quality, because they simply weren't better in that regard. ...and why should they be? Tape can be as good as you want it to be simply by increasing the tape speed.

Wow... Suggest that everyone's happy delusion might actually be false and not only do you get no evidence to the contrary of your suggestion, but you get modded down as a troll as well. So much for discussion and the search for truth. I guess I'll have to find another web site if I want that.

I know that "hacker" originally meaning "talented programmer" is common knowledge on Slashdot, but is this story actually true?

The idea just seems like a popular meme. Slashdot is full of nerds. Nerds like to call themselves "hackers" because it sounds cool. Then someone introduces them to the idea that they're not calling themselves criminals because that's not what the word "hacker" originally meant, and they absorb that supposed fact without question because they so deeply want it to be true.

Is it actually true? Are there any references that support this history of the word's meaning that are of higher quality than "everyone on the internet says it's true?"

Even the Wikipedia article about the definition controversy lacks any citations relevant to the supposed original meaning, even as it makes statements like "the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized" which just scream for a "citation needed" tag.

If everyone stopped working 40 hours and instead worked only 32, we'd need 25% more employees to make up the difference. That would eliminate unemployment overnight. With unemployment eliminated, employers would have to compete for employees, which would drive up wages and result in more benefits like health insurance.

We already did it once during the great depression, when the standard 40 hour work week was invented. Before that, everyone worked 80 hour weeks, and they had no choice due to a mountain of people desperate for a job. If you didn't like it, you were immediately replaced by someone in the line of people literally sitting outside your employer's front door.

With automation continuing to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, we're slowly returning to that situation. Obviously we need to reduce the standard work week yet again to get things back to where we want them.

Labor prices don't respond to the free market. If you pay people less, all that happens is that their spouses enter the work force as well, and now there are even more people competing for the job you're offering, and so you can reduce wages yet again.

...or just not break it in the first place.

The problem stems from the URL being a machine address necessary to acquire content, but one that is also human-readable which inspires people to treat it as if it were the page's title or something and so they edit it as freely as they edit the page's content.

Just name all of your web pages by UUID. Then, since one random number is just as good as any other, you'll never again have the urge to change your URLs.

Similarly, just use random UUIDs as domain names, and you'll never again be bothered by having your first choice be unavailable. An added advantage of this is that you can name your site whatever you want regardless of what domain names are available since you've decided that your domain name doesn't have to match your web site's name. Suddenly the fact that virtually every domain name is being squatted upon no longer matters.

I bought my own cable modem after TWC increased the monthly charge for the modem lease and I realized that if I bought my own it would pay for itself in only a year.

The configuration page for the modem has two buttons. One resets the modem. The other disables a DHCP feature which is only in effect when the modem isn't connected to the cable company's network, as the only reason for the feature is to allow you to view the modem's status pages. (Normally the device behind the modem gets its address via DHCP, and so without a cable connection, you wouldn't get an address and so you'd be unable to access the status pages.) There's literally nothing else the modem does that is under my control. I can't even update the firmware -- any firmware updates have to come over the cable network.

Apparently this is what the DOCSIS standards require. I may own the device, but the cable company determines how it operates, since they own the network.

The only good side of this is that it really doesn't matter as long as your modem isn't also your firewall. Even if your ISP couldn't spy on you by hacking your modem, they could still spy on you from the next hop towards the internet which is also under their control. It only becomes interesting if they can hack a device with access to your LAN, which is the case if your modem is also your router, which is a strong argument for why it shouldn't be.

The really shocking thing about this story is that the backdoor was (and still is) so unprotected. You expect that your ISP can snoop on your internet traffic, but when anyone anywhere on the internet can, that's a serious vulnerability. From the sound of it, the fix apparently closes the backdoor only until it is explicitly opened by the ISP, at which point it is once again available to anyone anywhere on the internet. How can people be this incompetent?

I like to pretend it always was shit, and that I and many others have simply become more intelligent over the years and so we're now able to see through it. It makes me feel better as it implies that people are becoming smarter and so there's still some hope for the world.

Actually you can. An AC in another story figured it out, and was promptly modded all the way up to +1.

You simply tell everyone that there is a vulnerability, but you do not tell them any details about what the vulnerability is. Instead, you simply announce a release date & time for a patch. People can either shut down their servers until the patch is released, or, if they're feeling lucky, they can keep running the old code until the patch is released since no one actually knows what the vulnerability is and so, in theory, they're in no more danger than they were the day before. Then, at the announced time, you release the patch, and because of the pre-release announcement, everyone with vulnerable servers has already taken them off-line, and so no one gets fucked by the patch essentially telling the hackers about the exploit.

The computer isn't $30, that's just the cost of the components you need to use the computer as a router. As for whether it can handle it, my router (a WRT54GL) has a 200 MHz single-core CPUs. Anything it can do, my PC can do with 2% CPU utilization.

Anyway, my point is that most people who desire to load a custom firmware onto their router probably already have several computers anyway, and at least one that is always on for one reason or another. I personally just don't ever turn my computers off. I also use MythTV and so, even if I did regularly turn them off, I'd keep one running 24/7 for MythTV. A lot of other people have always-on computers that function as file or print servers. As long as this is the case, why buy a $150 router and fudge around with custom firmware when, with only $30 of parts, you can use that computer to do your routing, NAT, firewall, bandwidth management, and anything else Linux can do? Why spend hundreds on a device which isn't even going to do what you want until you void the warranty?

As for prices, here's what I found on microcenter.com:

gigabit switch: 5 port for $20, 8 port for $25
gigabit wired PCI card: $10
wireless b/g/n PCI card: $15

So that's $50 for gigabit. If you don't want gigabit it's even less. Plus you've got $100 left over. If you want to spend another $50 you can get a 16-port switch. Maybe blow your last $50 on a more expensive wireless card with a special antenna you can put wherever you want. For the same money you'll end up with something far better than a simple router.

Obviously there are cheaper routers, but the routers people are buying to load custom firmware onto aren't the cheapest ones. Not only do they need routers that are Linux-compatible, but they also require larger flash memories, and they want features like USB ports so they can use them as file and print servers, and attach external storage so that they can keep log files. At some point you have to realize it makes more sense to just use a spare computer for the task.

...and let's not forget that every time you flash a new firmware onto your router you risk bricking the device. Then you'll really wish you'd spent your money on something more useful.

Everyone else is splitting hairs over which permutation of all possible methods is the overall best compromise, neglecting the fact that they all rather suck, but this idea actually has an advantage over the others.

As for the suggested issue with regard to everyone being too annoyed by having to take services offline for 24 hours, I'm not so sure they'd have to. If you know that the patch won't come out for another 12 hours, then the only people who will know about the bug before 12 hours from now will be any hackers who found it last year and so they've already had plenty of time to exploit you if they'd wanted to. So leaving your server online for the 12 hour period until the patches are released wouldn't be the worst idea. They either exploited you already, or they likely don't care to.

While some might argue that that's a bad idea since you now know there's an exploit, the truth is that you always knew there were exploits because there are always exploits. The only thing that's changed is that you now know that, in 12 hours, one is about to become much more well-known. So just set your alarm clock and, when the time comes, shut down your server and apply the patch.

Hopefully some people with mod points will see your comments.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, as I had to look up "dual-homed" as I've never heard the term before, and it sounds like a contradiction as the descriptions I'm seeing say that dual-homed hosts specifically don't route between their two network connections, which would rule out NAT.

Are you not aware of iptables? The kernel itself supports routing, or if you want a "dual-homed" host it also supports not routing, and it certainly does the stateful packet inspection necessary for NAT. There's no need for any additional software, you just have to be willing to spend a week learning to use iptables. ...and apparently next month you get to toss that knowledge and learn its replacement, nftables, since they can't seem to stop replacing their routing configuration tool.

In any event, all of these custom firmwares are Linux-based, so I can't imagine how they accomplish anything you can't do in Linux on a PC.

I do wish Slashdot would tell me when ACs reply to my posts so that I don't have to manually check them all. This war on ACs is retarded.

Why do people spend $150 on a shitty little computer for which they then spend a week of their time trying to find an ideal firmware that manages to squeeze all of the features they want into a measly 4 MB of flash memory? ...and, fuck, last I checked I still couldn't find one with IPv6 support.

You know that PC you have in the closet that's always on, doing whatever the fuck important task you have it performing 24/7? For a mere $30 you can add a wireless network card, a second ethernet card, and a five port switch. Holy shit, you just turned your spare CPU cycles in a router! What's more, due to being a full installation of Linux, it has all of those features you can't seem to find anywhere else, like full IPv4 support, and the ability to install any software you want. You can use it as a file server, a print server, even install MythTV on it and make it record television shows. The possibilities are endless!

Routers just suck. They're great for your average user who doesn't know what a switch is and couldn't configure Windows to do NAT if their life depended upon it, but if you know enough to install a custom firmware on a router, there's no reason you can't meet your routing goals with $30 plus a computer you already have.