It is absolutely ludicrous that an American citizen can become a billionaire running a gambling company that gets 70% of its revenues from Americans in America where this online gambling is illegal, and that this service is openly advertised all over the US media. The Partypoker founders should be extradited, charged, and their assets forfeited.
Do you think I would get away with it if I moved to Thailand and set up a website partypot.com, selling baggies of marijuana to Americans? This is no different.
The RIAA is using the legal system against people. A better word might be "misusing." However it is not going off into vigilante mode (actually, there is evidence that they have been hacking into people's computers, so maybe they go both ways).
The solution is to use litigation, lobbying, PR, consumer education and maybe boycotting and other measures. The worst thing that could happen is what you advocate, which is vigilante justice. Most of the people targetted by these lawsuits are basically law-abiding people. They are not going to rise up and start torching offices. If one does, as you say, snap and burn down a building, this would be a huge boon for the RIAA. They are insured anyway, they would lose very little. Suddenly there is proof that filesharers are literally "terrorists," and the fight against them will escalate, and I guarantee you Congress will start passing more draconian laws. That's how the game works. Think about what you're saying for a little bit before you go running your mouth off.
A guardian ad litem does not have custody of the child. Britanny is incompetent to appear in court because of her age. The court has already established that her mother cannot be sued. So the RIAA is asking the court to appoint a lawyer to appear on Britanny's behalf to allow proceedings against her to continue--this is all. The key word is "ad litem"--which means "for the suit." If you had spent 1 minute googling you would have known this yourself.
Well, it has actually been done, so it's not impossible, if there are some very competent and motivated leaders. But you make good points. This is why municipal/governmental-run wifi is a good thing.
They could. But then they would have to get people to invest a lot of money to buy equipment and get started, which is difficult. And they would have to charge monthly fees, which in the long-term could be highly competetive with commercial providers. But they could not operate at a loss, or provide free service. Governments can. And subsidizing utilities makes sense in some situations.
Maybe in your libertarianism-addled mind, public smoking bans are dystopian, but in fact they are the wave of the future. Not only entire countries like Italy but New York state have benefited from these bans, and everyone can breathe easier as a result. Even smokers enjoy going to bars more. I've smoked, and I know that even when you're smoking you prefer to be in a room with clean air rather than breathing clouds of everyone elses shit. This is a public health issue. I suppose you think thought that banning leaded gasoline was ushering in a new era of Stalinism as well. Sheesh.
Not the police force. The crime in this city border on out of control. Despite the "safe streets" program we still have a murder rate higher than 3x New York's, higher than Baltimore's, probably higher than DC's. And despite the "safe streets" program last time I walked through North Philly I got lots of people pushing crack at me.
As a Philly student, I am not so concerned about the wage tax--other than it being horribly regressive--as I am about the lack of decent employment opportunities around the city. Taxes are a part of life and if you have a decent job and decent wages you should be proud to pay them to support social services. And even infrastructure like wifi. But we need jobs. And social services for the poor, seeing how screwed up economically the city is.
...broadband services (speeds exceeding 200 kbps in both directions)...
Hm, I get 1.5Mbps down, 128kbps up from Verizon DSL. Does this mean I don't have broadband?
It sure would be nice to have a fatter uplink, even if it wasn't a symmetric connection. Of course even though this is slow compared to connections in some countries I'm not complaining too loudly. A few years ago a dual-bonded ISDN 128kbps connection seemed would have been a dream come true.
Grandparent suit is completely wrong. Copyright infringement can be a crime in the USA at least. Otherwise you wouldn't hear about the FBI raiding people's houses and people getting slapped in jail for pirating software, DVDs etc.
Yes, in both cases. Songs are copyrighted works, and covers are considered derivatory works. However I do know that in the USA you can always purchase a compulsory (statutory) license, which costs something like pennies per copy per song. Not sure exactly what a "copy" is when it's posted on a website for download, perhaps just downloads. Sucks but that's how it is. It may be a different situation if you're streaming the songs on internet "radio," not sure what applies there, but you'd still most likely need some kind of license. Or if you're just offering to stream the songs rather than offering them for download.
An optimizing compiler can in many cases figure out the static cases where bound-checking is unnecessary and omit them. If a programmer is intelligent enough to write secure code in C, s/he should be intelligent enough to write fast code in Java. I'm not saying that Java is a perfect hacker language, but I am saying that C is not a modern language and not the best choice for most large applications. There's no reason in this day and age that an applications programmer should have to be constantly piddling over things like memory management in their code when garbage collection can be done by the compiler.
Am I the only person here that finds it scarier that they were relying on PCs running DOS than that they are moving to web applications on the internet?
As some have observed, with these kinds of transactions, denial of service is probably a bigger threat than fraud. These are huge transactions between banks that you couldn't exactly route into you Citibank personal checking account and withdraw at the nearest ATM, and they can be reversed if something goes wrong.
So the question is, is the risk of some sort of DoS attack on the internet, despite their precautions, greater than the cost of using an ancient, legacy DOS-based system? Probably in the long run, no.
Keep in mind that this thing is probably going to be pretty much invisible to anyone on the internet. Most likely they have a sort of VPN and their firewalls will block even pings from computers that are not part of their Fed network. As someone who works in IT I know that this is obviously far from a foolproof situation, but there's no reason they can't do it right. If there were some sort of catastrophic disruption, I should hope that they have fallback plans to a off-internet means of clearing transactions, which would no doubt be costly and inefficient, but the idea that the entire Fed banking system would implode because of a computer crash is somewhat ludicrous. I hope.
Hate to break it to you, but bad as Microsoft has been in terms of business practices, Walmart has a far worse social impact. Just about all of their cheap crap comes from China where you know it was made in sweatshops, they pay jackshite for wages and force workers to work extra for nothing, and drive local shops out of business. That's really just the tip of the Walmart iceberg. You're not saving money when you shop at Walmart--don't buy their PCs.
Of course, if you're running Linux, *BSD, or even cygwin on your home machine, then you can run links (or lynx) on your home machine and it'll be even faster.
[for those who modded the parent "Interesting": IUDs are "contained" in vaginas, or, more generally, sexually active women, so this is a slam at the stereotypical Slashdot geek]
IUDs are placed inside the uterus, not the vagina, dumbass. That's why they're called "intrauterine devices." Sheesh, you're proving your own case about the sexual ignorance of slashdotters.
Although I imagine placing an IUD in a woman's vagina would be very effective birth control, sex with a plastic contraction stuck in your vagina would be very discouraging for both parties involved.
And remember that most common desktop use is multi-process. I got 37 processes running on this Windows machine, now if one of them starts pulling 100%, the machine will slow to a crawl.
For power users this is definitely true. However it is definitely true for that low-end users like Grandma can't really benefit much from SMP. While Grandma might leave a dozen applications running, she rarely has even one CPU-bound task running, much less more than two CPU-bound tasks. Most of the apps open will be sleeping or waiting for I/O, and it doesn't matter how many cores she has on the motherboard, the desktop is not going to respond one lick faster.
So for Grandma and many of these low-end users, secretaries, administrative staff and the like, desktop performance can't really be improved by faster CPU's or more cores. If anything they need more and faster RAM, faster drives, and a faster front-side bus.
Yeah, so what? Once the engineering and coding is done, it's done.
Excuse me for a second while I burst into uncontrollable laughter. Designs do not stay static. Any time you add code to an SMP-capable operating system you have to continue to ensure that it is SMP-safe. Likewise with hardware. It's not a one-time cost, moving to multi-core or SMP architecture increases the complexity of maintenance and upgrades.
Obviously what the end-users do with their system doesn't affect the developer's cost, but the developers have to somehow recoup their investment by amortizing it into their unit costs. Under the status quo for proprietary software developers, it makes sense for them to charge more for SMP-capable operating systems and multi-threaded software, presumably because end-users are willing to pay extra for the performance boost.
I'm willing to bet they will still be perfectly able to run the single-processor version of XP, they'll just be using one core. That's how SMP/hyperthreaded systems are now. Of course if everyone has dual-core processors then everyone will be using dual-core operating systems unless they want to take a big performance hit.
Writing multithreaded applications (or SMP-capable operating systems) that work well is hard work. It's always going to make sense for proprietary software vendors to charge extra for software that takes advantage of additional processors. Unless SMP and/or dual-core becomes ubiquitous, I something like per-processor licensing sticking around, unless the mythical day when free software eclipses proprietary software does in fact come about.
And I think single-core, single-CPU systems will stick around for a long time, if not for the indefinitely foreseeable future. CPUs get faster all the time, and since it's much easier to engineer single-core, single-CPU systems, so single-processor systems will remain the preferred solution for the low end. Look at something as basic as pipelining, that is an ancient technology in terms of processor design, yet there is still a place for non-pipelined processors at the very bottom of the chain, where microcontrollers are concerned.
from SpamAssassin? It takes a bunch of rules, applies them, and uses a neural net to classify the message. Seems to me SpamAssassin does the same thing, only is more mature and extensible and uses a genetic algorithm rather than a back-propagation neural net.
Slashdot Mirror
It is absolutely ludicrous that an American citizen can become a billionaire running a gambling company that gets 70% of its revenues from Americans in America where this online gambling is illegal, and that this service is openly advertised all over the US media. The Partypoker founders should be extradited, charged, and their assets forfeited.
Do you think I would get away with it if I moved to Thailand and set up a website partypot.com, selling baggies of marijuana to Americans? This is no different.
The RIAA is using the legal system against people. A better word might be "misusing." However it is not going off into vigilante mode (actually, there is evidence that they have been hacking into people's computers, so maybe they go both ways).
The solution is to use litigation, lobbying, PR, consumer education and maybe boycotting and other measures. The worst thing that could happen is what you advocate, which is vigilante justice. Most of the people targetted by these lawsuits are basically law-abiding people. They are not going to rise up and start torching offices. If one does, as you say, snap and burn down a building, this would be a huge boon for the RIAA. They are insured anyway, they would lose very little. Suddenly there is proof that filesharers are literally "terrorists," and the fight against them will escalate, and I guarantee you Congress will start passing more draconian laws. That's how the game works. Think about what you're saying for a little bit before you go running your mouth off.
Intended to reply to this post.
A guardian ad litem does not have custody of the child. Britanny is incompetent to appear in court because of her age. The court has already established that her mother cannot be sued. So the RIAA is asking the court to appoint a lawyer to appear on Britanny's behalf to allow proceedings against her to continue--this is all. The key word is "ad litem"--which means "for the suit." If you had spent 1 minute googling you would have known this yourself.
-1L law student
Well, it has actually been done, so it's not impossible, if there are some very competent and motivated leaders. But you make good points. This is why municipal/governmental-run wifi is a good thing.
They could. But then they would have to get people to invest a lot of money to buy equipment and get started, which is difficult. And they would have to charge monthly fees, which in the long-term could be highly competetive with commercial providers. But they could not operate at a loss, or provide free service. Governments can. And subsidizing utilities makes sense in some situations.
Maybe in your libertarianism-addled mind, public smoking bans are dystopian, but in fact they are the wave of the future. Not only entire countries like Italy but New York state have benefited from these bans, and everyone can breathe easier as a result. Even smokers enjoy going to bars more. I've smoked, and I know that even when you're smoking you prefer to be in a room with clean air rather than breathing clouds of everyone elses shit. This is a public health issue. I suppose you think thought that banning leaded gasoline was ushering in a new era of Stalinism as well. Sheesh.
Not the police force. The crime in this city border on out of control. Despite the "safe streets" program we still have a murder rate higher than 3x New York's, higher than Baltimore's, probably higher than DC's. And despite the "safe streets" program last time I walked through North Philly I got lots of people pushing crack at me.
As a Philly student, I am not so concerned about the wage tax--other than it being horribly regressive--as I am about the lack of decent employment opportunities around the city. Taxes are a part of life and if you have a decent job and decent wages you should be proud to pay them to support social services. And even infrastructure like wifi. But we need jobs. And social services for the poor, seeing how screwed up economically the city is.
Hm, I get 1.5Mbps down, 128kbps up from Verizon DSL. Does this mean I don't have broadband?
It sure would be nice to have a fatter uplink, even if it wasn't a symmetric connection. Of course even though this is slow compared to connections in some countries I'm not complaining too loudly. A few years ago a dual-bonded ISDN 128kbps connection seemed would have been a dream come true.
Grandparent suit is completely wrong. Copyright infringement can be a crime in the USA at least. Otherwise you wouldn't hear about the FBI raiding people's houses and people getting slapped in jail for pirating software, DVDs etc.
Yes, in both cases. Songs are copyrighted works, and covers are considered derivatory works. However I do know that in the USA you can always purchase a compulsory (statutory) license, which costs something like pennies per copy per song. Not sure exactly what a "copy" is when it's posted on a website for download, perhaps just downloads. Sucks but that's how it is. It may be a different situation if you're streaming the songs on internet "radio," not sure what applies there, but you'd still most likely need some kind of license. Or if you're just offering to stream the songs rather than offering them for download.
That's nice. Except nobody got sued here, this is merely a notification of infringement. And the notification was to the ISP, not the infringer.
There's a ways to go yet before there is automated filing of lawsuits, and the lawyer lobby probably doesn't want to see that happen.
An optimizing compiler can in many cases figure out the static cases where bound-checking is unnecessary and omit them. If a programmer is intelligent enough to write secure code in C, s/he should be intelligent enough to write fast code in Java. I'm not saying that Java is a perfect hacker language, but I am saying that C is not a modern language and not the best choice for most large applications. There's no reason in this day and age that an applications programmer should have to be constantly piddling over things like memory management in their code when garbage collection can be done by the compiler.
As some have observed, with these kinds of transactions, denial of service is probably a bigger threat than fraud. These are huge transactions between banks that you couldn't exactly route into you Citibank personal checking account and withdraw at the nearest ATM, and they can be reversed if something goes wrong.
So the question is, is the risk of some sort of DoS attack on the internet, despite their precautions, greater than the cost of using an ancient, legacy DOS-based system? Probably in the long run, no.
Keep in mind that this thing is probably going to be pretty much invisible to anyone on the internet. Most likely they have a sort of VPN and their firewalls will block even pings from computers that are not part of their Fed network. As someone who works in IT I know that this is obviously far from a foolproof situation, but there's no reason they can't do it right. If there were some sort of catastrophic disruption, I should hope that they have fallback plans to a off-internet means of clearing transactions, which would no doubt be costly and inefficient, but the idea that the entire Fed banking system would implode because of a computer crash is somewhat ludicrous. I hope.
Hate to break it to you, but bad as Microsoft has been in terms of business practices, Walmart has a far worse social impact. Just about all of their cheap crap comes from China where you know it was made in sweatshops, they pay jackshite for wages and force workers to work extra for nothing, and drive local shops out of business. That's really just the tip of the Walmart iceberg. You're not saving money when you shop at Walmart--don't buy their PCs.
Of course, if you're running Linux, *BSD, or even cygwin on your home machine, then you can run links (or lynx) on your home machine and it'll be even faster.
IUDs are placed inside the uterus, not the vagina, dumbass. That's why they're called "intrauterine devices." Sheesh, you're proving your own case about the sexual ignorance of slashdotters.
Although I imagine placing an IUD in a woman's vagina would be very effective birth control, sex with a plastic contraction stuck in your vagina would be very discouraging for both parties involved.
is for AOL-Time Warner to buy them out. Oh wait, Warner Brothers music is already one of the big four...
For power users this is definitely true. However it is definitely true for that low-end users like Grandma can't really benefit much from SMP. While Grandma might leave a dozen applications running, she rarely has even one CPU-bound task running, much less more than two CPU-bound tasks. Most of the apps open will be sleeping or waiting for I/O, and it doesn't matter how many cores she has on the motherboard, the desktop is not going to respond one lick faster.
So for Grandma and many of these low-end users, secretaries, administrative staff and the like, desktop performance can't really be improved by faster CPU's or more cores. If anything they need more and faster RAM, faster drives, and a faster front-side bus.
Excuse me for a second while I burst into uncontrollable laughter. Designs do not stay static. Any time you add code to an SMP-capable operating system you have to continue to ensure that it is SMP-safe. Likewise with hardware. It's not a one-time cost, moving to multi-core or SMP architecture increases the complexity of maintenance and upgrades.
Obviously what the end-users do with their system doesn't affect the developer's cost, but the developers have to somehow recoup their investment by amortizing it into their unit costs. Under the status quo for proprietary software developers, it makes sense for them to charge more for SMP-capable operating systems and multi-threaded software, presumably because end-users are willing to pay extra for the performance boost.
I'm willing to bet they will still be perfectly able to run the single-processor version of XP, they'll just be using one core. That's how SMP/hyperthreaded systems are now. Of course if everyone has dual-core processors then everyone will be using dual-core operating systems unless they want to take a big performance hit.
And I think single-core, single-CPU systems will stick around for a long time, if not for the indefinitely foreseeable future. CPUs get faster all the time, and since it's much easier to engineer single-core, single-CPU systems, so single-processor systems will remain the preferred solution for the low end. Look at something as basic as pipelining, that is an ancient technology in terms of processor design, yet there is still a place for non-pipelined processors at the very bottom of the chain, where microcontrollers are concerned.
from SpamAssassin? It takes a bunch of rules, applies them, and uses a neural net to classify the message. Seems to me SpamAssassin does the same thing, only is more mature and extensible and uses a genetic algorithm rather than a back-propagation neural net.
I am shocked, shocked!