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Comment Re:My argument against the Net Neutrality (Score 5, Insightful) 604

I normally don't reply to trolls, but in case anybody takes your comment seriously, consider this.

How about this, I'm trying to have a skype video call with aunt Betty, but keep getting video and audio packet loss cause people like you keep hogging up all the neighborhood bandwidth by watching your netflix, youtube, and other media streaming services when you all could just go out and get DirecTV or something. And little Johnny down the street says you're killing him in online gaming cause his ping is so high he's unable to snipe the enemy sniper in the battles on 2fort in Team Fortress 2. That's not all. Dave next door says you're causing him to get up very early in the morning, say 3 AM-ish so he can get decent VPN connection speeds to the work VPN server in order to get work files uploaded and synced on time.

It's so easy to blame everybody else for your connection issues, when in fact what you and countless others have been doing is causing grief with everybody else. And who's at fault? Not you, Betty, me, Dave, or little Johnny. The people at fault are the ones managing our connections, the ISP. They're the ones that are suppose to be managing this shit correctly by keeping their networks maintained, upgraded when necessary, using something like a round-ribbon load balancer to keep neighborhood bandwidth usage per peer fair (basically evenly distributed), and not deliberately cripple services in order to justify their yearly price increases.

And look at it this way. The ISP sold me a up to 1.5mbps / 256kps DSL connection. So, who are you to say what I can and cannot use it for, and when and when not I can use it? I paid $53/month for this connection and I'm going to use it how I please. Just as you want to use it how you please. You want to watch your netflix and I want to watch a web cam of a christmas light setup from somebody in Boulder, Colorado.

Net Neutrality is an idea to prevent ISPs from deciding that netflix and youtube traffic to their customers isn't cost effective, so they either throttle it way down, basically giving them the lowest QoS priority, unless they get paid extra by charging you additional fees to be able to use said services, and also billing netflix and youtube for the traffic going to their customers. Doesn't make sense since we the ISP customers pay the ISP already for said internet service, and netflix and youtube, etc... pay their ISPs for internet service. So, everything is already paid for. But its the greed of the ISPs that want to change the rules.

Technology

Submission + - Homebrew Cray-1 (chrisfenton.com)

egil writes: Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software.

Comment Oops -- Please Stand By (Score 1) 228

Either we slashdotted the stream server or this is typical error message for those outside of Canada:
Title: Please Stand By
32 kbps 16 KHz

Automated message that keeps looping every 30 seconds:

Oops, looks like this live stream is experiencing some technical difficulties.
Our apologies for the delay.
We are working on a solution, so please stay tuned.

While some ethnic or dream music is playing in the background, almost sounds like Enya.
I'm located in Tennessee, US.

Comment VAC enabled? (Score 3, Funny) 230

I find it funny that it says the game is "Valve Anti-Cheat enabled" on the Steam product page. So, what exactly are people doing to cheat in this moon base simulator game?

Cause I just hate it when I'm bunny hopping along on the moon's surface and suddenly get head-shotted by some kid using an aimbot. ;)
Privacy

Italian MEP Wants To Eliminate Anonymity On the Internet 223

m94mni writes "The European Parliament wants to monitor your Internet searches for child porn offenders, as previously reported. The declaration was adopted yesterday, and in an interview with the Swedish news outlet Europaportalen.se, the Italian MEP behind the declaration, Tiziano Motti, shares his views on the Internet and anonymity. In essence, Motti wants to completely eliminate anonymity on the Internet. 'Each upload of text, images, or video clips must be traceable by the authorities', says Motti. This is in line with the secretive UN initiative Q6/17, revealed two years ago." The doublespeak here seems to go beyond the imprecision of automated translation.

Comment Re:I have a big problem with everything (Score 3, Interesting) 952

... Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of separating the CONTENT (read.. the fucking text) from the rest of the bullshit on the webpage. Let me, the viewer, decide what color I want for the background and text.. and figure out how to make it look halfway decent!

That's funny I can right now go to View -> Page Style -> No Style, and Firefox will display slashdot as linear context using my font and color settings in Tools -> Options -> Content tab. Of course this only works if the site only decorates the page using CSS. I think there's a Firefox add-on that allows you to override the site's CSS and replace it with your own in a user friendly manner.

Comment Re:This could be awesome! (Score 1) 256

Unreal tech has been running natively on Mac and Linux as this was done years ago. You don't remember or haven't played Unreal Tournament 2004? Although that was the last Epic games title to run on Linux. UT3 was promised and still hasn't been ported to Linux and released publicly.

Even the original Unreal Tournament was ported to Linux, but by Loki Games and not Epic: http://www.lokigames.com/products/ut/

Comment Debian Debs Outdated (Score 4, Informative) 299

I just tried to update:

# cat /etc/debian_version
5.0.4

aptitude output during update:

Setting up clamav-daemon (0.94.dfsg.2-1lenny2) ...
Starting ClamAV daemon: clamd LibClamAV Warning:
LibClamAV Warning: *** This version of the ClamAV engine is outdated. ***
LibClamAV Warning: *** DON'T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faq ***
LibClamAV Warning:
LibClamAV Error: cli_hex2str(): Malformed hexstring: This ClamAV version has reached End of Life! Please upgrade to version 0.95 or later. For more information see www.clamav.net/eol-clamav-094 and www.clamav.net/download (length: 169)
LibClamAV Error: Problem parsing database at line 742
LibClamAV Error: Can't load daily.ndb: Malformed database
LibClamAV Error: cli_tgzload: Can't load daily.ndb
LibClamAV Error: Can't load /var/lib/clamav/daily.cld: Malformed database
ERROR: Malformed database

It appears debian repositories also need to be updated. :(

NOTE: I removed the * (star) chars from the warnings due to junk filter.

Comment Re:The purpose of government research (Score 1) 455

The moon missions were a long time ago - but its not clear that we have progressed much with technology needed for aerospace. The basic technology hasn't changed, launch costs aren't that different. It was hard then, and its still hard now. Mars is a lot harder. We could do it if we wanted to, but we aren't willing to put in the require effort, or take the required risks. Its not that I think Obama's plan is fundamentally flawed, but when he talks about a mars mission in the 2030s, it sounds like another of the every 10 years "lets go to mars" talk, never followed by any action. I think I will likely live to see the day when no living man has been beyond 1000 miles from earth.

Maybe China will do it - they have the will and are willing to take the risks. Not the flag I'd most like to see flying over a mars base though. Not what I imagined when I watched the first moon landing 2 generations ago.

Exploring and colonizing space doesn't have a point - it IS the point.

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