Category Archives: thoughts

musings and ideas

internet rant.

As is the seperation of church and state, so should it be with the service from the pipe.  Evil things happen when those who control everything attempt to limit and filter what we should be able to perform.
All cities/towns/municipalities should push for a buy out plan of the cable companies, and telco operations within their limits so that they may own their own network medium,( copper, fiber, HFC, etc.) and lease to own the network to the residents/businesses, and allow for up keep costs within a taxable situation not based at all on the usage of this unmetered network.  We can own our own homes.  Why shouldn’t we be able to own our own pipe, and choose where it gets physically and logically connected to?  Yeah, what a pipe dream, eh?
Once we all own the network, then we have a form of free communication, or atleast we’ll be able to do whatever we please over the network within it’s interconnections.  We should be able to host securely using our own servers, and services from our home connections.
Of course the current situation shows, our network providers don’t want us to be able to freely and easily provide this from our expensive home connections, where all we’re able to do is stuff our faces at 8-10mbps, while attempts to speak are limited to a measley 768kbps.
Now in attempts to stranglehold their ancient business models, they want to tell us who we can speak to and where we’re allowed to go, and maybe our traffic might not get to the destination we chose to send it!  WTF?  If we make a phone call is the bandwidth we get not synchronous and with prompt arrival at it’s destination, and not filtered?
Cable while originally seeming to be a broadcast method to those connected is now a two way street, and their currently business models are ancient and outdated for a civiliation craving to speakout at speeds only a few years ago completely unheard of.  The Telco’s figured they can get something out of the already exisiting copper running in mass to our homes, but of course the “super fast” speeds advertised are for those living close to the Central Office, or those willing to shell out some serious cheese, to bring in a T circuit or dig their own fiber.  Ideally we should all have fiber optics built into our homes and business like water, and sewage.  I beilve it to be a form of network technology that will rarely become outdated, in that changing the light bulb so it can blink faster and in different spectrums should be considerbly cheaper than developing new and interesting ways to send signals through copper cores.  It’s interesting to see that the majority of infighting between the two competing topolgies have quieted down some.  Cable being a pipe shared to a neighborhood, while DSL and other telco services limited to their only their upstream connection.  Both would rather not admit that the access is always going to be limited to an upstream connection.  So why not just make this upstream limitless compared to the actual number of users on either end?   I think something like that could be obtained with a mesh like structure of connections between sites.  Hmm, I forgot to bash a little on wireless.  Well, mobile phone/wireless companies have their own turf really, considering how is it possible for a cable company  to compete with someone who is “connected” without being connected.  Ok, well I suppose satellite services compete with terrestial based wireless services, but as each have a considerably smaller amount of shared bandwith availible in their medium of choice (air), than fiber/copper, the customers will generally be left with slower links than those directly connected.

While I’m busy ranting, another thing  a big problem with is transparent proxying.  While understandably it does allow for bandwidth saving, I do not appreciate the lack of communication that this is infact happening when if not before you use their network.  Proxy should be an alternative that a user is allowed to select for a possibly quicker experience.

Ok, i’m done for now.  I’m hungry.
[tags]ranting, thoughts, internet, savethenet[/tags]

Ok, so if federal dollars paid for even the smallest percentage of something and it’s destroyed, does that instantly make it a federal crime? If that’s the case then I think that any student who writes on their desk, or breaks a pencil purchased by the school should goto jail.

This thing with the video blogger Josh Wolf, and footage he shot is totally in the wierd.

No “unpaid journalist” wants to be an “unpaid investigator for law enforcement,” Wolf told a pack of reporters who had come to the prison for a press conference and to see him walk through the prison doors.” [cnet]

I feel the rights of a journalist, should be extended to anyone who provides information to the public, whether via the internet, or other broadcast method. The way things are going soon we will have little to no privacy.

You Boob!

After reading Cringley’s article this week, I finally decided to remove my videos from YouTube. Sure I’ll watch videos on there, but no more content will be submitted by me.

“Here are the exact words of the new YouTube license:

“…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business…in any media formats and through any media channels.”

The internet is huge why do big companies need to horde our content that we create. If you have a connection to the internet you should be able to share with the internet, via bittorrent and or an HTTP server. Publishing a feed of your content to the internet is pretty easy for anyone to do. Once out there, with the aid of search engines we find things to entertain us. Just because it makes it “easy” and has a semi universal flash player to share a video with a friend, are you ready to have your image abused later?

update: I just read blip.tv’s tos. You keep your rights unless you mark a license for that upload. The language used in the “Grant of License” section, is pretty similiar to YouTube, as in losing some rights to content you made, but only for blip.tv and non commercial uses. Of course these terms can change at any time.

[tags]cringley, licensing, content, youtube, sharing, rights, internet, thoughts, rants, blip.tv[/tags]

earthlink reader update.

Well, I don’t think that Earthlink should say it will take 10-15 minutes when it has been several days now since I last uploaded my opml export from bloglines. I would like all my feeds to be there please. Here’s what I got when I uploaded it again.

“We already know about 42 sources, so we’ve added them to Your Sources. There were 39 sources that were new to us, so we’ve sent our little robots out over the internet to go fetch articles for you. Give them about 10-15 minutes to retrieve everything, and you’ll have all 81 sources from your OPML file available.”

Also I noticed that my blog, managed to now have two ID’s in their system. 2007, and 4039. They aren’t checking for unique sites in their feeds database I guess? Could this be why I have been getting hit twice each time the earthlink robots come to my site?

[tags]freedbacking, earthlink, reader, aggregator, feeds, opml_import[/tags]

software needed for linux laptops

Auto-shutdown/suspend at given battery percentage.
Audio and or visual notifications of immenent shutdown.

50 years late.

Retire the penny use your bank card, checkbook, or credit card. Thanks to inflation, if the cost of producing a monetary item, it should be discontinued, all in circulation should be returned and quarters distributed. Does anyone even have a half-penny? How bout we each save a roll of pennies for two hundred years, so future generations will see the wasteful financial burden which was created when our economy wasn’t as over inflated. How bout we deflate the bubble, and do a devaluation/consolidation, by restructuring our dollars back to 1822.

EFF protects phone-in prescriptions from illegal wiretap

Ok, well that’s really only half of it. I think most of us like the government doing it’s best to fight crime and the likes, but not at the destruction of US citizens Fourth Amendment rights. Find a better way to do it. The government currently uses a device called a pen/trap to collect numbers dialed from a telephone, suppose this device captures your voicemail passcode, or SS# with other information when filling a prescription, or even information you have entered into a telephone chat service. Does the government really need to know that their intelligence mark, refills his erectile disfunction medication frequently and is also looking to chat with an 18 F from 90210? Sure if they were trying to entrap him/her.

The EFF filed a brief recently, which argued that in order for the government to collect any content of a telephone call, including the numbers dialed on a phone keypad, it must first have a warrant. I honestly cannot imagine the vast array of information big brother has gathered illegally, from telephone and internet pen/traps.

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More on pen/traps here.

anthropological

so someone on myspace, msg’d me randomly, and an interesting conversation came about from their reading of this really old article by Horace Miner,  “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”

at first while reading it, things seem almost tounge in cheek humor, like WTF is he talking about?  but in the end, it makes more sense.

the painful truth.

“Doctor, it hurts when I do that.” Doctors and patients agree - doctors are lousy when it comes to recognizing, diagnosing and treating pain. The AMA developed this free Continuing Medical Education tool (requires Flash) to help docs learn and understand how to deal with pain - but other folks, folks who are now in pain or might someday be in pain, might find it quite interesting as well. All docs in California have to complete this seminar or a similar one by the end of 2006 to get relicensed; the hope is that this will help the docs and the patients who have to deal with pain on a daily basis.

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I’ve only met a few doctors who seem to understand pain. Will this likely help me? Doubtfully, only time will tell I suppose.

ROWR!die

well i just biffed up my yahoo! calendar pretty good.
i was changing the date of an appointment, and by default it changes all of the dates for a reoccurring appointments. this change ended up killing all of the previous appointments listed in the calendar, and there is no undo for this. luckily i have a backup CSV export of my calendar from ~4 months ago, but importing this information just doubled everything in my schedule for the last 5 years, minus of course the reoccurring appointment all the way back till December. I’m pissed off right now at the bullshit task i have created for myself in order for me to effectively use my calendar without deleting the whole thing. manually deleting duplicate events.

*sigh* i think I’ll just stop using yahoo! calendar. then find another good solution for myself.

Bad Behavior has blocked 1062 access attempts in the last 7 days.