richwmn - Slashdot User

Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough 157

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 15, 2008 @12:08AM from the fight-fight-fight dept.

Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica: "Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."

Submission + - Dell Linux Conspiracy Theory

Submitted by

Spacey Spade

on Friday May 04, 2007 @08:14PM

Spacey Spade writes: "I've heard that Microsoft pretty much owns Apple these days, and it occured to me that:

1) Microsoft knows Vista is unpopular
2) Microsoft wants Apple to get a larger user base
a) because of the resistance from Europe (good goin guys)
b) If an operating system becomes an appliance they cannot make money off of it, so they make it complex on purpose. Hey! Let's have two OS's that are hard to support!

Here's the shield they have in place to keep Linux from making headway: DELL !!!!!
Dell is in it too. Dell is taking their sweet time offering Linux. It promises but will not deliver. The threat of Dell offering Linux would keep other enterprises from taking steps to offer Linux, because they would be crushed by Dell.

I dunno... just an idea, but people in touch should check this out for the sake of Linux, or the BSD's.

Spacey"

Submission + - European GPS rival transmits first navigation data

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04, 2007 @06:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: Galileo, a European project that aims to create a civilian global navigation infrastructure, has reached a major milestone as the European Space Agency (ESA) today reported that the Giove-A satellite has transmitted the first navigation message. According to the ESA, the message was uplinked to Giove-A on May 2 from the Guildford ground station and contained was similar to those that will be sent by the operational Galileo system.

Submission + - ABC news and What happened to the 10th candidate?

Submitted by isotope23 on Friday May 04, 2007 @06:00PM

isotope23 writes: Regardless of your political stripe, this country is supposed to be about freedom of speech and ideas. There were 10 candidates in the Republican debates last night, so why did ABC only list 9 in their "who won the debate last night" poll? It's kind of hard IMO to "overlook" the Only Republican candidate who voted AGAINST the Iraq war from the start. Is it any wonder people are looking to the internet for alternate news sources as opposed to the "Mainstream Media"??? Perhaps a quick comment to ABC is in order?

Submission + - Wrong Phone Number = No DNS = No Income

Submitted by FishinDave on Sunday February 11, 2007 @01:29PM

FishinDave writes: The customer service staff at domain registrar Enom.com seems a bit standoffish, to put it charitably. They didn't email pioneering Web publisher Randy "This Is True" Cassingham to warn him that someone had changed the phone number on several of his income-producing Web sites' registry records to "0000000000".

They just shut off DNS to those sites and others registered to Cassingham, and even to a site that listed him only at the technical contact. They didn't bother to email any concerned parties about that, either.

It took several hair-tearing hours for Cassingham to figure out why no one could reach his sites and all his email addresses were down — why his livelihood had suddenly vanished, in other words. After he learned that Enom had cut him off, it took nearly 24 hours more to get his DNS restored.

Enom never responded to Cassingham's desperate communications with a single word of acknowledgement, explanation, apology, or advice.

The phone number was changed by Cassingham himself as he updated obsolete registry information. Like most sane people, he was loathe to put his office phone number in the registry for every con artist and crank to harvest, so he entered a placeholder number until he could get a voicemail flak-catcher. All of his DNS records contain a valid email address that auto-responds to incoming messages with Cassingham's full contact info, including a valid voice phone number.

OK, so Cassingham made a hasty mistake by not waiting until he had a valid voicemail number. More likely, his real mistake was using such an obviously bogus placeholder as "0000000000". Whois records are rife with plausible-looking contact info that doesn't work. Indeed, Cassingham's income would not have been interrupted and his heart slammed into fibrillation had he simply left in place the contact info that was obsolete since he moved in 2003.

But Enom made a bigger mistake by biting the hand that feeds it, without so much as a warning snarl.

Any domain registrar can do likewise to anyone at any time. I wonder how many have.

How do Slashdot readers manage their DNS records for privacy and security? If you manage a registry, what do you do when you discover possibly bogus contact info? What would you do if your registrar pulled a stunt like Enom's?

Journal Journal: The math behind "beer goggles" 2

Journal by tomhudson on Sunday February 11, 2007 @12:03PM

Researchers at Manchester University, among others, have discovered a mathematical formula for calculating the "beer goggles effect" (where people look more attractive after a few beers).

The factors are: how drunk you are, how dark the room is, your eye-sight, the amount of smoke in the air, and how far you are from your "target" (which also explains all those "good from far but far from good" sightings).

Submission + - VPN Issues with new Airport Extreme 802.11n

Submitted by on Sunday February 11, 2007 @11:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: The new Airport Extreme's are shipping and some users are reporting problems with certain types of VPN connectivity. There is a work-around posted in Apple's support forums, but the solution is less than ideal. These issues were not experienced in Apple's earlier Airport Extreme, and users are calling for Apple to fix the issue. Some have even taken their unit back to Apple until a fix is created.

Comment Bad Ballot Design (Score 2, Informative) 310

by richwmn on Saturday December 30, 2006 @10:47AM (#17408612) Attached to: Source Code Access Denied in Disputed Race

From the article
Buchanan backers and the company say that if there was an unusually large undervote it was likely because of bad ballot design.
It seems to me that admitting "bad ballot design" is worse than blaming the machines. Anyone who has taken statistics or marketing knows how easy it is to sway polls and sales by such methods as order in the phone book or on the ballot. IMHO bad design could just be effective design for the eventual winner.

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