Or at well off layabouts, which was the point being made.
Sure, the poor can get through college with a lot of work.
Thus rendering them almost equal to the rich who can coast through college on the family dime.
I say 'almost' because the poor still won't have connections, and can't wait around months looking for a job. They'll get a job working for someone who just graduated from a 'good school' by doing half the work.
Assuming, of course, they don't get killed or maimed during their military service, fighting whatever war the rich want Or there's stop loss and they can't leave.
Just because things are 'possible' for the poor doesn't mean we don't have a class system.
For the mode they claim to be demoing and intending to ship as the first model, there's enough heat at a high enough temperature that you could use considerably less than all of it to drive a heat engine and generator to get the excitation.
I didn't say to call me when they calculate they could do that.
Call me when there's actually a box somewhere, unconnected to a power supply, where you can feed in water or metal or whatever, and get out power.
Judaism waited to return to Jerusalem for just over 1900 years after the ROMANS kicked them out the first time.
The Romans didn't 'kick anyone out'. They just destroyed the Temple. Almost all the Jews stayed there. Some, very few, Jews wandered off.
Those wandering Jews talk about the 'ten lost tribes', like we don't know where they got to. Uh, we do know. They just stayed in the area after the Temple fell, and outlasted the Roman Empire.
After Rome fell, they needed a strong leader...and Muhammad showed up, and everyone eventually converted to Islam. What happened is not rocket science, it's not some secret. Jews, in Israel, converted to Islam.
From the Muslim point of view, the land was promised to them thousands of years ago, they got the land, stayed, various prophets like Jesus and Muhammad showed up and gave them more info about God, and they still live there.
I don't really believe God 'gave them land' but, looking at it objectively, I'd argue that if God gives you something and you keep it and use it for thousands of years, vs just wandering away, the first group deserves it. The group that wandered away doesn't get to come back two thousand years later and argue it's really 'theirs' or attempt to divide it up without the people who stayed behind's permission.
So even if we accept the premise that God gave 'the Jewish people' that land...they're still on that land. They've been there all along. They just identify different, and have evolved their religion, which might make them 'bad Jews', but God didn't give the land to Jews 'as long as they worshiped him correctly', he just gave it to them. Jews have repeatedly
'failed' God, and not once has he threatened to take their land away. Even within the context of Judaism, the 'Jews who stayed behind', aka, Muslims, have just as much right to the land.
Technically, we probably wouldn't still be ruled by England, considering what happened with Canada and Australia. Although I guess they're still ruled 'by the Queen of England', so so would we...but we'd be an independent nation, probably part of Canada. (Or, rather, Canada would be part of us.)
Of course, a huge section of the US wouldn't be part of the US at all. France never would have sold Louisiana to the English, and without that, it's unlikely we'd have even been in Texas to 'revolt' and have it join the US.
Without us being that far south, it's unlikely we'd get California either. 'Canada' would be the east coast of the US plus the current location of Canada, Mexico would be California, with the great Plains going either way, or possibly with a French country in the middle.
I think there was actually an episode of Sliders with this premise, where the Revolutionary war failed and all the fertile land (Or at least California) was part of Mexico, and illegal immigrants from Canada kept sneaking south.
A couple of well known facts to historians that the media refuses to report are that Jerusalem and the West Bank are legally undisputed Israeli land that Israel can choose to give away or not at its pleasure
Are you a moron?
The Palestinians may be willing to drop the demand that Israel give away its capitol city of Jerusalem
Yup, a moron. Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel, you idiot.
The West Bank is undisputed Palestine territory. Jerusalem is also undisputed Palestine territory, although one that is supposed to be under the special protection of the UN.
Neither Palestine or Israel dispute those facts. (Israel seems to think it can build settlements in land it admits is Palestine, but it really does still agree it's Palestine land.)
When was the last time a newspaper reported that the Palestinians were founded in 1964 with help from the USSR
Wow, you are stupid. Palestine was not founded in '1964'. It was created by the UN in 1948, the PLO declared independence in 1988, and it, or at least the Gaza strip, became a 'nation' in 2005. (Although something more akin to a US state than a sovereign country.)
What you are talking about is the creation of the PLO, and, no, the USSR did not help found it. They supported the PLO between 1968 and the USSR's dissolution, which, you will note, does not include the start of the PLO. (I have no idea what you mean by 'the Palestinians were founded'. The Palestinians are people, and not 'founded' like countries or organizations.)
So, in short, to answer your question, the reason newspapers aren't reporting your facts is because they are wrong.
Indeed, and encrypted filesystems also allow you to avoid the 'bad sector remapping' issue, which could let you get data from wiped drives, although in extremely unlikely circumstances.
If I were in charge of classified information, I'd have every single computer come with a lockable USB port. When the computer is set up, I'd have a random key put on a flash drive, and that flash drive locked in.
Then I'd use full disk encryption based on that key. (Along with whatever other security already exists.) In fact, I'd probably have it boot off the USB key. I'd have no password on the encryption, it wouldn't prompt on startup, it would just transparently encrypt and decrypt all HDD reads and writes.
Then, when I needed to wipe a computer, I'd just take the damn USB drive out and destroy it. Hey, look, the data is completely unrecoverable, and it cost us a 30 cent 1meg USB flash drive instead of a hard drive. We don't have to take the computer apart, we don't even have to run any software at all. Unlock USB bay, take out key, put in new key, computer is good to go, no data is recoverable. Go melt old key.
As an added bonus, we've just made it much more complicated to get the data off if the computer is stolen. Now they need to steal, at minimum, two things, or the entire box.
You could even mandate things like if classified information ever needs to travel physically somewhere, the USB key and the computer travel separately.
It's sorta like the one time pad concept, except not technically 'impossible'. But AES-256 is functionally impossible to break.
I'd look at their setup and to me I just saw pain. CRT's set on 60Hz, mice with no pads or those paper thin pads (no wrist pad), mice that you have to almost fully extend your arm to use, keyboard right in front of a high sharp edge, screens angled upward and spring back chairs so soft you might as well be sitting on a stool.
No shit. People's physical computer layout often blows me away.
The screen goes at the level of your eyes. The keyboard and mouse go at the level of your elbows, preferably with an armrest that you can lay them one. Also, it's not a good idea to rub your wrist on a sharp corner like an idiot.
It's not damn rocket science, people.
People see my layout and they're like 'Why do you have your monitor on a piece of wood set on two bricks?'. (So it's at eye height, obviously.) I look at theirs and go 'My god, how do you not ruin your neck looking at this things? And your wrists, while we're at it?'
It's funny how many people actually have nice keyboard and mouse cushions...and have their mouse and keyboard as such absurd positions they can't even use them.
Speaking CRTs set at 60Hrz...they might not do that now, but they do happily set incorrect resolutions on their monitors instead of just scaling the fonts and icons, which Windows can do easily.
I have had over the last 5 years, I've had the discussion on why the ISPs "give" away free email address' and that is to lock them in, as we all know it is as much of a pain in the ass to change your email address as to change your phone number.
I've managed successfully to keep my family from using their ISP addresses by simply not telling people their address when I set up email.
I'm like 'Oh, I don't know what your ISP account is, but why don't you just use gmail or hotmail?'
The joke is, if people are really determined to pay for their email, they can buy a domain name for about $3 a month at somewhere like godaddy and other registrars, and then you also have a domain name, which is what I recommend to people who are even slightly internet savey. The idea of someone paying $9 a month just for email is insane.
The easiest way to mess with it...well, the easiest way to use that thing is to plug it into a power strip, right? Which lets it work without having to redo any wiring at all.
So you get a metal power strip, and modify it a little. Run a live naked wire from the switch down the back of the plug outlets, and loosen everything up, so that when someone pushes on a plug, it pushes the wire in contact with the metal outside, shorting the entire thing and instantly throwing the circuit breaker.
You can still use it like normal, you just have to turn the strip off before plugging stuff in. And make sure it's somewhere you won't kick.;)
I don't know how easy it is to find metal circuit breakers anymore, though. You might have to get a plastic one, install a grounded metal plate on the inside of the bottom, and then run a wire.
Of course, all this is moot, because, frankly, if people are leaving their secure computers on and worried about the police, they really need to install a booby trap. Not just to stop taking the computer, but for something like installing password sniffers and stuff.
A webcam motion sensor for the room that prompts for a password and hibernates if it's not given is simple enough. Or, even better, doesn't 'prompt' for the password...it could simply throw up a window on the screen saying 'click to abort shutdown', and you have to get past the screen saver to see/use it. And the police won't even know they have to do that and have a time limit.
Of course, the best option is to simply not leave secure computers running unattended. Um, duh.
OTOH, some of this automated stuff might be a good idea so you don't get charged with destroying evidence by turning off a computer. If whenever your webcam detects movement by the door, it locks the screen and starts a shutdown count, then if the police do that on their way in, tough shit for them. They can charge you only if you actually do something, they can't make you type a password in for them without a court order. (In fact, if they've said it's evidence, you have good legal grounds for refusing to touch it, period.)
You can 'don't care' all you want, but you're a minority.
But, as I pointed out, it's entirely stupid to DRM content with commercials. Studios want people to watch that!
The television industry is in a much position as they face the total disintegration of copyright than the music or the movie industry is. Because they already give their stuff away for free, and pay for it with ads.
If they'd just remember that, and actually do that over the internet, everyone would be happy.
I like many of these ideas, but they are impossible because they require a competitive experimental market.
No they don't. They just require a TV studio that makes some deal with TiVo and write a PC client.
While it would be nice if there was some actual clearinghouse of all this, there's certainly no need to start that way.
What's stopping them now is that half the advertising agencies are idiots who have no idea how to deal with any changes in their industry at all.
Of course, as they don't know how to deal with the internet either, they're in the process of dying or actually learning.
And the rest of the problem is that half the studios are in the same company as TV networks, and thus have pressure to not make those networks entirely obsolete. But it just take a few production companies to realize what's going on there and threaten to set off on their own before the studios will start acting sanely.
Easier for someone to quickly get access to a nice, clean version of the broadcast in a convenient format, strip the commercials and stick it on a file-sharing website. This still counts as "making it easier for the pirates"
Yes, in much the same way that balloons full of air make it easier to breathe in some hypothetical way. Except, um, everyone's breathing fine without those.
You cannot make things 'easier' that are, at this point, almost entirely automated. See here. Bones episode 6x10 aired 9-10 EST Thursday. While that doesn't tell you the exact time it was posted, my news client does...the SD copy says 22:00 EST. Yes, the SD was posted while the final commercials aired.
There's no such thing as 'easier' pirating of TV. It is utter nonsense to make any decision based on that concept. It cannot become easier. It's like easier breathing, or easier gravity.
There's easier downloading of those things, because where copies can be harder or easier to find, but actually producing copies is just happening, in damn real time, magically. It cannot become 'easier'.
- but either way, the regional aspect of commercials still applies - very few companies will be in a position to push the same commercials in more than a couple of countries.
Well, yes. And?
There's not really any point to share the version with commercials via P2P when anyone can just download it anyway.
Wikipedia suggests the Nirvana or Perfect Solution fallacy, or at least, that seems similar. And yes, much of the anti-pirate lobby seem to argue along these lines; forgetting that they are doing better financially now than they ever have. A common mistake is to look at the "number of downloads" rather than the "number of sales that didn't occur due to piracy - the number that occurred because of piracy". The first number is meaningless, but sounds scary and justifies the anti-pirates' salaries.
That's not the fact I was arguing about, although the fallacy seems right.
I was talking about the fact that the TV industry seems to make decisions based on things like 'not making piracy easier', which is, as I said, utter nonsense. Or 'We can stop people from having copies of our show'.
TV studios cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, in any manner, no matter what they do, keep TV shows out of the hands of people who wish to watch said TV shows. This is a fact. It doesn't matter how much they want it not to be true, it doesn't matter how much they scream, it doesn't matter what they get the law to say or how much they sue people. It doesn't matter if it actually will destroy the TV industry, or even destroy the entire Earth. The fact is still true.
It's an actual paradigm shift, not one of those pretend paradigm shifts that businesses talk about, but an actual one. The reason copyright worked is that it required work to break it. So the only people that broken it were for their use (And they sure as hell weren't doing that work for charity.) or companies that attempted to profit and subsequently got sued out of existence.
Copyright has, as hidden a fundamental premise, that copies are non-trivial to make, so that people don't make a bajillion copies and hand them out to everyone for fun.(1)
We never noticed this fact before, but it was one of the implicit assumptions behind making copyright work. And it's no longer true.
TV studios can either have copies in people's hands with ads possibly in them (Which requires them actually giving out those copies.) or they can have copies in people's hands without the ads. That is the actual choice. There are no other options.
I disagree - I think that copyright law can function perfectly well in our society - it is merely enforcing it that is problematic. The same can be said for speeding (and there are many parallels between t
Yes, yes,I know that people keep inventing dozens of hypothetical ways that data might be recovered from a hard drive. It's sorta like intelligence design at this point...people start with a premise, and keep trying to figure out how it could work.
...and, still, no one has ever demonstrated it to be possible ever.
Hard drives store data as dense as possible. If they could actually consistently work like everyone seems to think they worked for data recovery, they would already use that for storing data.
But they can't, because magnetism varies based on the heat of the material, or the speed of the drive, or the previous bits, or how much the damn video card is pulling power. So it's not going to be.02% vs.04%, it's going to be.00% to.40%, mostly randomly.
And at some point in the future they'll get that down to.30%, and then make the drive denser so that it's back up to.40%. See how that works?
Even if you could guess half the bits that way, the other half will be wrong, with no way to tell them apart. (And thanks to the encoding, if you get half the bits wrong, you've functionally gotten all the bits wrong.)
Well, firstly, there is data that can be recovered from wiped drives. Specifically, reallocated sectors can be recovered. If the drive was using one location, and it was flaky, it will reallocate that location to somewhere else, and leave crap behind.
Those, and the fact it's a hell of a lot faster and can be done in an assembly line without plugging them into computers, make degaussers a quite logical thing to use, or destroying a logical thing.
Although what they should actually do is encryption of the hard drive. If they're using whole-disk encryption with the key stored off the drive, like on a built-in flash drive, all they have to is destroy the flash drive and the drive is utter unreadable, even remapped sectors. But such a system might cost more than simply destroying new hard drives.
But that has nothing to do with what I said, which is talking about the urban myth that multiple wipes are required to erase data. No one denies that hard drives can still have data on them after a wipe because of remapping...I just deny that they have more data on them after one wipe of 0 than after 35 patterned wipes.
Except, again, you can't actually get any data from that. In fact, that's even worse.
So you read a bit with a strength of 9. And that tells you...what, exactly? It was a 1 at least two times in a row at some point in history. (I'm not sure exactly why it would be a 9, as we're talking about overwritten drives, but I'll assume we decided to overwrite with 1s instead of 0s.)
So that means...the original bit was a 4, it got low-level formatted to a 1, and then wiped to a 9? Or maybe it it got written with a 1 several times, making it a 10, and then erased to a 2, and then wiped back to a 9.
Like I said, knowing 'the state of this bit at some random point' is not actually helpful for recovering data. It's like trying to decode a messaged encoded with a one time pad...sure, you can invent unusable data. Any data you want. It's not the original data, but whatever.
Especially because, as you and I know but I bet most people don't, that hard drives do not actually store a byte of 10010110 as the pattern 10010110.
And the 'variable stength' thing is even worse because maybe the platter was running slightly hotter one day so that the magnetic change was more effective.
Anyone who thinks you can't recover a disk after one rewrite is wrong.
Yes, anyone who thinks that something that was once hypothesized to be possible under entirely different circumstances with no scientific proof, and has never been demonstrated to ever be possible, despite it being a multi-million dollar business if you could do it, is not actually possible...
...is wrong.
Everyone, please continue to believe this without any facts at all.
Distributing with commercials won't be enough, as commercials tend to be region-specific and can be stripped from the files quite easily.
Really? Easier than searching newsgroups or torrents right after the show and downloading without commercials at all?
The TV networks are operating under a logical fallacy, although sadly I'm not sure of the name. It's where you compare options against the way the world 'should be' in your head, and not the actual way the world is.
With the actual way the world is, copyright is unenforceable. Copyright always required some 'friction' to work, so that normally the only copyright violators were personal use, or commercial use, and copyright holders could ignore the personal use and sue the companies doing the commercial use.
That is over. Copyright law cannot function in a society with digital copies. This isn't a moral judgment, I'm not asserting that 'information wants to be free', it's not any sort of 'stance'...it's a fact. It's like trying to operate automobiles in a world without friction.
Television need to understand this. Luckily, their business model is selling ads, and can function within a universe where everyone freely copies stuff...if, and only if, they manage to get their ads in it.
They can either put those ads in there, and hope the convenience of watching the official stream at the moment of release beats running some 'ad stripping' software, and maybe live, or they can die. Those are the choices. It doesn't matter what anyone wishes were true.
My other thought concerning TV shows is that the production companies should stop bothering with the whole "getting networks to bid" thing, and instead just sell licences for a flat rate to anyone who wants it (i.e. "for $n you can show each episode once", "for $m you can show them as many times as you like", "for $p you can distribute them" and so on).
Like I said, I think it would be clever if this happened on an individual basis...someone wants to download an episode, advertisers can 'bid' as to how much they'd pay to have commercials in it.
Not literally at that moment, obviously, but someone would say 'I will pay 50 cents each to stick commercials in an 1000 episodes of BtVS' and someone else will say 'I will pay 40 cents for 10,000', and the 50 cents go first, and then the 40 cents. Sorta like how Google Ads work, in fact.
And what would be really interesting is if you let viewers also bid. If I'm willing to pay 60 cents for no ads, I win.
Instead of having networks handle all this, they might instead simply sell the entire ad space to another company, which could then parcel it out. Some companies might do what I suggested above, some companies might decide on targeted ads, so they know who you are and can give you 5 minutes of really specific ads, some companies might have people who pay subscription fees and a small extra fee and get episodes without commercials, etc, etc.
But then, I'm all for reworking licensing laws - something like the original copyright law, whereby if someone was charging too high a price you could take them to the authorities who could force them to charge less...
I think a saner way to do that is to require a mandatory level of sales to renew copyright. You get it for seven years. At the end of seven years, you must demonstrate that X people have purchased a copy, and/or Y people have viewed a copy, to keep your copyright. (The exact number should probably be based on the number of copyrighted works you currently have...the more you have, the more popular it has to be to hold on to. A TV network has to show a lot of viewers, whereas with someone with a single indy film that they can sometimes get a local theater to show doesn't have to show very many viewers.) And you must do this every 7 years.
Or you can enter the work in a mandatory licensing scheme, which means you will continue to get a percentage of the money people make off it, but that percentage can be as low as a dollar a copy or something.
I VERY STRONGLY urge everyone to read that article, (The first I randomly clicked) to actually see what sort of utter nonsense this poster is sprouting.
In short, apparently you can dismiss Randi because the article hypothesizes that Randi randomly turns away people just because he calls classes of claims 'absurd' (With absolutely no evidence at all he won't test those claims.), and that you can't be an asshat by repeatedly screaming obscenities or delaying the test you scheduled with them.
Wow, it's almost a microcosmic of the goddamn loons, right there in the article, written by the loons and they somehow missed it. Claims that he turns away applicants without proof, absurd behaviors and conditions on their 'powers'. It is truly an epic read.
Another article claims the reason he won't take the test is you have to sign a personal liability waiver. No shit, really? You mean they're worried about frauds claiming injury during the test and suing? I wonder why he'd worry about that.
Yes, and if you can do it 100% of the time, you win.
What Randi doesn't take is people who claim to be able to slightly manipulate probability, who want to do a 50/50 test a hundred times and win 60 or 70 of those times and call it victory.
Because statically, eventually, one of them would succeed just because of probability.
Eventually, someone could succeed with 100% probability via bland chance, too, which why Randi demands the 'undisputable show of magic' the GP was whining about, with enough tests that's extremely unlikely. (But unlike what the GP appears to think, he explains what they are and how many they are in advance.)
Slashdot Mirror
I want employees that can do hard things.
Or at well off layabouts, which was the point being made.
Sure, the poor can get through college with a lot of work.
Thus rendering them almost equal to the rich who can coast through college on the family dime.
I say 'almost' because the poor still won't have connections, and can't wait around months looking for a job. They'll get a job working for someone who just graduated from a 'good school' by doing half the work.
Assuming, of course, they don't get killed or maimed during their military service, fighting whatever war the rich want Or there's stop loss and they can't leave.
Just because things are 'possible' for the poor doesn't mean we don't have a class system.
For the mode they claim to be demoing and intending to ship as the first model, there's enough heat at a high enough temperature that you could use considerably less than all of it to drive a heat engine and generator to get the excitation.
I didn't say to call me when they calculate they could do that.
Call me when there's actually a box somewhere, unconnected to a power supply, where you can feed in water or metal or whatever, and get out power.
I was just paraphrasing the 'start my own casino' line from the second episode.
That sounds like a line from Futurama, it just needs finishing.
<bender>I'm nuking Jerusalem. With Vatican City and Mecca. And Gold Base. In fact, forget Jerusalem and Vatican City and Mecca.</bender>
Judaism waited to return to Jerusalem for just over 1900 years after the ROMANS kicked them out the first time.
The Romans didn't 'kick anyone out'. They just destroyed the Temple. Almost all the Jews stayed there. Some, very few, Jews wandered off.
Those wandering Jews talk about the 'ten lost tribes', like we don't know where they got to. Uh, we do know. They just stayed in the area after the Temple fell, and outlasted the Roman Empire.
After Rome fell, they needed a strong leader...and Muhammad showed up, and everyone eventually converted to Islam. What happened is not rocket science, it's not some secret. Jews, in Israel, converted to Islam.
From the Muslim point of view, the land was promised to them thousands of years ago, they got the land, stayed, various prophets like Jesus and Muhammad showed up and gave them more info about God, and they still live there.
I don't really believe God 'gave them land' but, looking at it objectively, I'd argue that if God gives you something and you keep it and use it for thousands of years, vs just wandering away, the first group deserves it. The group that wandered away doesn't get to come back two thousand years later and argue it's really 'theirs' or attempt to divide it up without the people who stayed behind's permission.
So even if we accept the premise that God gave 'the Jewish people' that land...they're still on that land. They've been there all along. They just identify different, and have evolved their religion, which might make them 'bad Jews', but God didn't give the land to Jews 'as long as they worshiped him correctly', he just gave it to them. Jews have repeatedly 'failed' God, and not once has he threatened to take their land away. Even within the context of Judaism, the 'Jews who stayed behind', aka, Muslims, have just as much right to the land.
Stopping US corporations from failing is always a good reason to send men to their deaths.
According to US corporations, that is.
Technically, we probably wouldn't still be ruled by England, considering what happened with Canada and Australia. Although I guess they're still ruled 'by the Queen of England', so so would we...but we'd be an independent nation, probably part of Canada. (Or, rather, Canada would be part of us.)
Of course, a huge section of the US wouldn't be part of the US at all. France never would have sold Louisiana to the English, and without that, it's unlikely we'd have even been in Texas to 'revolt' and have it join the US.
Without us being that far south, it's unlikely we'd get California either. 'Canada' would be the east coast of the US plus the current location of Canada, Mexico would be California, with the great Plains going either way, or possibly with a French country in the middle.
I think there was actually an episode of Sliders with this premise, where the Revolutionary war failed and all the fertile land (Or at least California) was part of Mexico, and illegal immigrants from Canada kept sneaking south.
A couple of well known facts to historians that the media refuses to report are that Jerusalem and the West Bank are legally undisputed Israeli land that Israel can choose to give away or not at its pleasure
Are you a moron?
The Palestinians may be willing to drop the demand that Israel give away its capitol city of Jerusalem
Yup, a moron. Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel, you idiot.
The West Bank is undisputed Palestine territory. Jerusalem is also undisputed Palestine territory, although one that is supposed to be under the special protection of the UN.
Neither Palestine or Israel dispute those facts. (Israel seems to think it can build settlements in land it admits is Palestine, but it really does still agree it's Palestine land.)
When was the last time a newspaper reported that the Palestinians were founded in 1964 with help from the USSR
Wow, you are stupid. Palestine was not founded in '1964'. It was created by the UN in 1948, the PLO declared independence in 1988, and it, or at least the Gaza strip, became a 'nation' in 2005. (Although something more akin to a US state than a sovereign country.)
What you are talking about is the creation of the PLO, and, no, the USSR did not help found it. They supported the PLO between 1968 and the USSR's dissolution, which, you will note, does not include the start of the PLO. (I have no idea what you mean by 'the Palestinians were founded'. The Palestinians are people, and not 'founded' like countries or organizations.)
So, in short, to answer your question, the reason newspapers aren't reporting your facts is because they are wrong.
Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.
Indeed, and encrypted filesystems also allow you to avoid the 'bad sector remapping' issue, which could let you get data from wiped drives, although in extremely unlikely circumstances.
If I were in charge of classified information, I'd have every single computer come with a lockable USB port. When the computer is set up, I'd have a random key put on a flash drive, and that flash drive locked in.
Then I'd use full disk encryption based on that key. (Along with whatever other security already exists.) In fact, I'd probably have it boot off the USB key. I'd have no password on the encryption, it wouldn't prompt on startup, it would just transparently encrypt and decrypt all HDD reads and writes.
Then, when I needed to wipe a computer, I'd just take the damn USB drive out and destroy it. Hey, look, the data is completely unrecoverable, and it cost us a 30 cent 1meg USB flash drive instead of a hard drive. We don't have to take the computer apart, we don't even have to run any software at all. Unlock USB bay, take out key, put in new key, computer is good to go, no data is recoverable. Go melt old key.
As an added bonus, we've just made it much more complicated to get the data off if the computer is stolen. Now they need to steal, at minimum, two things, or the entire box.
You could even mandate things like if classified information ever needs to travel physically somewhere, the USB key and the computer travel separately.
It's sorta like the one time pad concept, except not technically 'impossible'. But AES-256 is functionally impossible to break.
I'd look at their setup and to me I just saw pain. CRT's set on 60Hz, mice with no pads or those paper thin pads (no wrist pad), mice that you have to almost fully extend your arm to use, keyboard right in front of a high sharp edge, screens angled upward and spring back chairs so soft you might as well be sitting on a stool.
No shit. People's physical computer layout often blows me away.
The screen goes at the level of your eyes. The keyboard and mouse go at the level of your elbows, preferably with an armrest that you can lay them one. Also, it's not a good idea to rub your wrist on a sharp corner like an idiot.
It's not damn rocket science, people.
People see my layout and they're like 'Why do you have your monitor on a piece of wood set on two bricks?'. (So it's at eye height, obviously.) I look at theirs and go 'My god, how do you not ruin your neck looking at this things? And your wrists, while we're at it?'
It's funny how many people actually have nice keyboard and mouse cushions...and have their mouse and keyboard as such absurd positions they can't even use them.
Speaking CRTs set at 60Hrz...they might not do that now, but they do happily set incorrect resolutions on their monitors instead of just scaling the fonts and icons, which Windows can do easily.
So everything is just slightly blurry.
Comcast blocks port 25 outgoing because the rest of the internet has asked them to, you whiner.
You can't run an outgoing mail server from dynamic residential addresses anyway, as everyone blocks those.
How hard is it to get a damn gmail account and use it relay mail? If you can't figure that out, you're not competent enough to run a mail server.
I have had over the last 5 years, I've had the discussion on why the ISPs "give" away free email address' and that is to lock them in, as we all know it is as much of a pain in the ass to change your email address as to change your phone number.
I've managed successfully to keep my family from using their ISP addresses by simply not telling people their address when I set up email.
I'm like 'Oh, I don't know what your ISP account is, but why don't you just use gmail or hotmail?'
The joke is, if people are really determined to pay for their email, they can buy a domain name for about $3 a month at somewhere like godaddy and other registrars, and then you also have a domain name, which is what I recommend to people who are even slightly internet savey. The idea of someone paying $9 a month just for email is insane.
My DSL account actually comes with a dialup account.
Of course, it'd be long distance from anywhere I needed to use it.
The easiest way to mess with it...well, the easiest way to use that thing is to plug it into a power strip, right? Which lets it work without having to redo any wiring at all.
So you get a metal power strip, and modify it a little. Run a live naked wire from the switch down the back of the plug outlets, and loosen everything up, so that when someone pushes on a plug, it pushes the wire in contact with the metal outside, shorting the entire thing and instantly throwing the circuit breaker.
You can still use it like normal, you just have to turn the strip off before plugging stuff in. And make sure it's somewhere you won't kick. ;)
I don't know how easy it is to find metal circuit breakers anymore, though. You might have to get a plastic one, install a grounded metal plate on the inside of the bottom, and then run a wire.
Of course, all this is moot, because, frankly, if people are leaving their secure computers on and worried about the police, they really need to install a booby trap. Not just to stop taking the computer, but for something like installing password sniffers and stuff.
A webcam motion sensor for the room that prompts for a password and hibernates if it's not given is simple enough. Or, even better, doesn't 'prompt' for the password...it could simply throw up a window on the screen saying 'click to abort shutdown', and you have to get past the screen saver to see/use it. And the police won't even know they have to do that and have a time limit.
Of course, the best option is to simply not leave secure computers running unattended. Um, duh.
OTOH, some of this automated stuff might be a good idea so you don't get charged with destroying evidence by turning off a computer. If whenever your webcam detects movement by the door, it locks the screen and starts a shutdown count, then if the police do that on their way in, tough shit for them. They can charge you only if you actually do something, they can't make you type a password in for them without a court order. (In fact, if they've said it's evidence, you have good legal grounds for refusing to touch it, period.)
You can 'don't care' all you want, but you're a minority.
But, as I pointed out, it's entirely stupid to DRM content with commercials. Studios want people to watch that!
The television industry is in a much position as they face the total disintegration of copyright than the music or the movie industry is. Because they already give their stuff away for free, and pay for it with ads.
If they'd just remember that, and actually do that over the internet, everyone would be happy.
I like many of these ideas, but they are impossible because they require a competitive experimental market.
No they don't. They just require a TV studio that makes some deal with TiVo and write a PC client.
While it would be nice if there was some actual clearinghouse of all this, there's certainly no need to start that way.
What's stopping them now is that half the advertising agencies are idiots who have no idea how to deal with any changes in their industry at all.
Of course, as they don't know how to deal with the internet either, they're in the process of dying or actually learning.
And the rest of the problem is that half the studios are in the same company as TV networks, and thus have pressure to not make those networks entirely obsolete. But it just take a few production companies to realize what's going on there and threaten to set off on their own before the studios will start acting sanely.
Easier for someone to quickly get access to a nice, clean version of the broadcast in a convenient format, strip the commercials and stick it on a file-sharing website. This still counts as "making it easier for the pirates"
Yes, in much the same way that balloons full of air make it easier to breathe in some hypothetical way. Except, um, everyone's breathing fine without those.
You cannot make things 'easier' that are, at this point, almost entirely automated. See here. Bones episode 6x10 aired 9-10 EST Thursday. While that doesn't tell you the exact time it was posted, my news client does...the SD copy says 22:00 EST. Yes, the SD was posted while the final commercials aired.
There's no such thing as 'easier' pirating of TV. It is utter nonsense to make any decision based on that concept. It cannot become easier. It's like easier breathing, or easier gravity.
There's easier downloading of those things, because where copies can be harder or easier to find, but actually producing copies is just happening, in damn real time, magically. It cannot become 'easier'.
- but either way, the regional aspect of commercials still applies - very few companies will be in a position to push the same commercials in more than a couple of countries.
Well, yes. And?
There's not really any point to share the version with commercials via P2P when anyone can just download it anyway.
Wikipedia suggests the Nirvana or Perfect Solution fallacy, or at least, that seems similar. And yes, much of the anti-pirate lobby seem to argue along these lines; forgetting that they are doing better financially now than they ever have. A common mistake is to look at the "number of downloads" rather than the "number of sales that didn't occur due to piracy - the number that occurred because of piracy". The first number is meaningless, but sounds scary and justifies the anti-pirates' salaries.
That's not the fact I was arguing about, although the fallacy seems right.
I was talking about the fact that the TV industry seems to make decisions based on things like 'not making piracy easier', which is, as I said, utter nonsense. Or 'We can stop people from having copies of our show'.
TV studios cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, in any manner, no matter what they do, keep TV shows out of the hands of people who wish to watch said TV shows. This is a fact. It doesn't matter how much they want it not to be true, it doesn't matter how much they scream, it doesn't matter what they get the law to say or how much they sue people. It doesn't matter if it actually will destroy the TV industry, or even destroy the entire Earth. The fact is still true.
It's an actual paradigm shift, not one of those pretend paradigm shifts that businesses talk about, but an actual one. The reason copyright worked is that it required work to break it. So the only people that broken it were for their use (And they sure as hell weren't doing that work for charity.) or companies that attempted to profit and subsequently got sued out of existence.
Copyright has, as hidden a fundamental premise, that copies are non-trivial to make, so that people don't make a bajillion copies and hand them out to everyone for fun.(1)
We never noticed this fact before, but it was one of the implicit assumptions behind making copyright work. And it's no longer true.
TV studios can either have copies in people's hands with ads possibly in them (Which requires them actually giving out those copies.) or they can have copies in people's hands without the ads. That is the actual choice. There are no other options.
I disagree - I think that copyright law can function perfectly well in our society - it is merely enforcing it that is problematic. The same can be said for speeding (and there are many parallels between t
Yes, yes,I know that people keep inventing dozens of hypothetical ways that data might be recovered from a hard drive. It's sorta like intelligence design at this point...people start with a premise, and keep trying to figure out how it could work.
Hard drives store data as dense as possible. If they could actually consistently work like everyone seems to think they worked for data recovery, they would already use that for storing data.
But they can't, because magnetism varies based on the heat of the material, or the speed of the drive, or the previous bits, or how much the damn video card is pulling power. So it's not going to be .02% vs .04%, it's going to be .00% to .40%, mostly randomly.
And at some point in the future they'll get that down to .30%, and then make the drive denser so that it's back up to .40%. See how that works?
Even if you could guess half the bits that way, the other half will be wrong, with no way to tell them apart. (And thanks to the encoding, if you get half the bits wrong, you've functionally gotten all the bits wrong.)
Well, firstly, there is data that can be recovered from wiped drives. Specifically, reallocated sectors can be recovered. If the drive was using one location, and it was flaky, it will reallocate that location to somewhere else, and leave crap behind.
Those, and the fact it's a hell of a lot faster and can be done in an assembly line without plugging them into computers, make degaussers a quite logical thing to use, or destroying a logical thing.
Although what they should actually do is encryption of the hard drive. If they're using whole-disk encryption with the key stored off the drive, like on a built-in flash drive, all they have to is destroy the flash drive and the drive is utter unreadable, even remapped sectors. But such a system might cost more than simply destroying new hard drives.
But that has nothing to do with what I said, which is talking about the urban myth that multiple wipes are required to erase data. No one denies that hard drives can still have data on them after a wipe because of remapping...I just deny that they have more data on them after one wipe of 0 than after 35 patterned wipes.
Except, again, you can't actually get any data from that. In fact, that's even worse.
So you read a bit with a strength of 9. And that tells you...what, exactly? It was a 1 at least two times in a row at some point in history. (I'm not sure exactly why it would be a 9, as we're talking about overwritten drives, but I'll assume we decided to overwrite with 1s instead of 0s.)
So that means...the original bit was a 4, it got low-level formatted to a 1, and then wiped to a 9? Or maybe it it got written with a 1 several times, making it a 10, and then erased to a 2, and then wiped back to a 9.
Like I said, knowing 'the state of this bit at some random point' is not actually helpful for recovering data. It's like trying to decode a messaged encoded with a one time pad...sure, you can invent unusable data. Any data you want. It's not the original data, but whatever.
Especially because, as you and I know but I bet most people don't, that hard drives do not actually store a byte of 10010110 as the pattern 10010110.
And the 'variable stength' thing is even worse because maybe the platter was running slightly hotter one day so that the magnetic change was more effective.
Anyone who thinks you can't recover a disk after one rewrite is wrong.
Yes, anyone who thinks that something that was once hypothesized to be possible under entirely different circumstances with no scientific proof, and has never been demonstrated to ever be possible, despite it being a multi-million dollar business if you could do it, is not actually possible...
Everyone, please continue to believe this without any facts at all.
Distributing with commercials won't be enough, as commercials tend to be region-specific and can be stripped from the files quite easily.
Really? Easier than searching newsgroups or torrents right after the show and downloading without commercials at all?
The TV networks are operating under a logical fallacy, although sadly I'm not sure of the name. It's where you compare options against the way the world 'should be' in your head, and not the actual way the world is.
With the actual way the world is, copyright is unenforceable. Copyright always required some 'friction' to work, so that normally the only copyright violators were personal use, or commercial use, and copyright holders could ignore the personal use and sue the companies doing the commercial use.
That is over. Copyright law cannot function in a society with digital copies. This isn't a moral judgment, I'm not asserting that 'information wants to be free', it's not any sort of 'stance'...it's a fact. It's like trying to operate automobiles in a world without friction.
Television need to understand this. Luckily, their business model is selling ads, and can function within a universe where everyone freely copies stuff...if, and only if, they manage to get their ads in it.
They can either put those ads in there, and hope the convenience of watching the official stream at the moment of release beats running some 'ad stripping' software, and maybe live, or they can die. Those are the choices. It doesn't matter what anyone wishes were true.
My other thought concerning TV shows is that the production companies should stop bothering with the whole "getting networks to bid" thing, and instead just sell licences for a flat rate to anyone who wants it (i.e. "for $n you can show each episode once", "for $m you can show them as many times as you like", "for $p you can distribute them" and so on).
Like I said, I think it would be clever if this happened on an individual basis...someone wants to download an episode, advertisers can 'bid' as to how much they'd pay to have commercials in it.
Not literally at that moment, obviously, but someone would say 'I will pay 50 cents each to stick commercials in an 1000 episodes of BtVS' and someone else will say 'I will pay 40 cents for 10,000', and the 50 cents go first, and then the 40 cents. Sorta like how Google Ads work, in fact.
And what would be really interesting is if you let viewers also bid. If I'm willing to pay 60 cents for no ads, I win.
Instead of having networks handle all this, they might instead simply sell the entire ad space to another company, which could then parcel it out. Some companies might do what I suggested above, some companies might decide on targeted ads, so they know who you are and can give you 5 minutes of really specific ads, some companies might have people who pay subscription fees and a small extra fee and get episodes without commercials, etc, etc.
But then, I'm all for reworking licensing laws - something like the original copyright law, whereby if someone was charging too high a price you could take them to the authorities who could force them to charge less...
I think a saner way to do that is to require a mandatory level of sales to renew copyright. You get it for seven years. At the end of seven years, you must demonstrate that X people have purchased a copy, and/or Y people have viewed a copy, to keep your copyright. (The exact number should probably be based on the number of copyrighted works you currently have...the more you have, the more popular it has to be to hold on to. A TV network has to show a lot of viewers, whereas with someone with a single indy film that they can sometimes get a local theater to show doesn't have to show very many viewers.) And you must do this every 7 years.
Or you can enter the work in a mandatory licensing scheme, which means you will continue to get a percentage of the money people make off it, but that percentage can be as low as a dollar a copy or something.
Professor Michael Prescott found that James Randi’s million dollar challenge is very much an illusion that have fooled people for decades: http://torbjornsassersson.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/james-randi-and-his-one-million-dollar-challenge-fraud/
I VERY STRONGLY urge everyone to read that article, (The first I randomly clicked) to actually see what sort of utter nonsense this poster is sprouting.
In short, apparently you can dismiss Randi because the article hypothesizes that Randi randomly turns away people just because he calls classes of claims 'absurd' (With absolutely no evidence at all he won't test those claims.), and that you can't be an asshat by repeatedly screaming obscenities or delaying the test you scheduled with them.
Wow, it's almost a microcosmic of the goddamn loons, right there in the article, written by the loons and they somehow missed it. Claims that he turns away applicants without proof, absurd behaviors and conditions on their 'powers'. It is truly an epic read.
Another article claims the reason he won't take the test is you have to sign a personal liability waiver. No shit, really? You mean they're worried about frauds claiming injury during the test and suing? I wonder why he'd worry about that.
Yes, and if you can do it 100% of the time, you win.
What Randi doesn't take is people who claim to be able to slightly manipulate probability, who want to do a 50/50 test a hundred times and win 60 or 70 of those times and call it victory.
Because statically, eventually, one of them would succeed just because of probability.
Eventually, someone could succeed with 100% probability via bland chance, too, which why Randi demands the 'undisputable show of magic' the GP was whining about, with enough tests that's extremely unlikely. (But unlike what the GP appears to think, he explains what they are and how many they are in advance.)