It makes sense to produce a web-cam with a lid. A piece of paper and scotch tape could be used on older web-cams.
A lid on the webcam would defeat theoriginal stated excuse for having this setup (figuring out who has a stolen web-cam). That having been said, there was a long-time-ago article about Flash apps being able to turn on a web cam without user intervention (a 'feature' which then, apparently, had fail-safes added to it).... but any (pre)installed binary will be able to do this without such failsafes.
so the long answer is that lids on web-cams are a good failsafe to have on any such device even though they would have defeated the stated intent of this (clearly illegal) spying program. Hardware disables on built-in microphones would also be a good privacy guard.
Consider (again) the following, completely predictable, scenarios for pictures
captured of students who think that they're in the privacy of their own
bedrooms.
A student walking around their room Naked (straight out of the shower,
changing, and/or just not worried about being seen by anybody else)
A student making out with their boy/girlfriend.
A student masturbating.
etc., etc., etc.
Now, consider that you're talking about high-school students -- almost
all of whom are going to be under the age of 18.
All of a sudden, you're out of the realm of a simple class action
lawsuit, and looking at a charges of 'Creation, Possession, and
possibly even distribution, of Kiddie Porn'. . . .
Now, that may not do much more than garner some more interesting headlines, but
if you throw in counseling charges against the high-level managers who
concieved of, OKed or mandated this stupid idea, I expect that anyplace
where a similar plan is in place, the programs will be suddenly stopped. -- and to be honest, I'm more interested in getting this stupidity shut down now than I am in starting a witch-hunt against stupid school administrators.
No. Kiddy porn laws make the recipient of the pictures the criminal, not the kids in the pictures. This isn't like prostitution laws where the hooker is usually jailed, and the John may get a bye.
We're squeamish about oral sex (i.e. talking publicly about it). This leaves kids participating in sexual activity blindly (OK. Adults too). Lack of knowledge doesn't mean lack of action, just lack of intelligent action.
Unfortunately, some people seem to think that lack of training about the issues around sex will discourage kids from participation in sex that has been the norm since long before we understood enough to talk about (or, for that matter, even had language to talk about it). It's a process that only works for people who confuse belief and hope with reality.
I think that this explains why some of these same people confuse things like fantasy gaming with real devil worship...... and it explains why states that have the most restrictions about sex education also tend to have the most STDs and teen pregnancies.
I have a friend who does destructive testing of Lithium Ion batteries --- apparently the engineers get freaked out when a pierced battery doesn't explode. The thought of a fragile battery like that, big enough to provide decent range, that close to my body gives me the willies.
I just played with a friend's netbook, while fixing it (turned out to be the PS cable).
It's small, and simple. It netboots, has 1GB of ram and drove my 19"monitor just fine without any special work. For the price, you can just ignore the 9" screen.
Don't bother buying the latest and greatest. Get machines that are near the end of their sales life. It's cheaper and they'll probably last just as long.
Don't bother trying to censor the internet. It's not going to happen. Your better bet is to just get a higher profile for yourself in the present. Just be more judicious about what you release about yourself this time. Be prolific and useful, and bury the one bad reference.
uhm, No. You have to use less than 50% of your rated bandwidth to avoid being blocked. the 70% rule is only one of a number of triggers, any one of which can trigger rate limiting. by the rules that they document, about the only thing that can keep you up to full bandwidth capability is to be under 50% of your rated bandwidth for the last 15 minutes.
No, it is paranoid. How are you finding out about the vulnerability? Because Microsoft patched it last Tuesday.
Microsoft patched it because the Firefox people informed them that they were going to (out of frustration) explicitly disable it for having an 8 month old unpatched critical security bug.
With Microsoft now suddenly deciding to patch this bug, Firefox is only disabling a potentially unpatched security hole that Microsoft hoisted on their users.
You want to tout MS Hardware independence over Linux???? You must be somewhere between delusional and psychotic!
Yeah, I think it was a broadcom wireless that a friend of mine (Sunni) had on her laptop. For some reason it wouldn't work on Vista, no matter what she did.
I mentioned, out of frustration, the idea of installing Linux on the laptop, and she said "Is that the system you installed for father?" (I gave her 80 year old dad a Linux box earlier this year). I told her it was, and she said "Yeah, go for it". (Half his family has been playing with his Linux box since I installed it... It's been solid as a rock).
The broadcom wireless that Windows could't get working runs fine, and I now have 3 generations running Linux. (Sunni's daughter also got Ubuntu Ultimate on her desktop, but her grandson is autistic, so I'm not willing to upset him by replacing Windows -- even though it's got black-screen, and Dell want's $50 for a disk that will wipe his box clean and reinstall the OS with a 'proper' key).
But you want to know how I did the Linux install on their machines??? I did the install on a portable drive on my home machine, and then I took the newly installed disk and copied the partitions onto Sunni's laptop, and her daughter's desktop..... Install a new swap partition on the two machines, and boom, job done!
-------
If you don't think that that's enough proof of Linux's hardware independence, you should see how we do installations at Free Geek Vancouver. We start with completely wiped disks. We've got 4 machines that we do OEM installs on. Each install takes about 1/2 hour on a 2.4Gz celeron, and runs with almost NO user interaction (other than choosing 'automatic OEM install' from the network boot menu)..... then we take the installed drives, and plop them into random machines (truly random configurations ranging from a 800Mz Pentium 3s to higher end AMD multicores.... then we test for hardware problems and send the machines out.
Compare that to Windows, where simply swapping out your hard drive can send the system into apoplexy and eat half your day's productivity by forcing you to beg Microsoft for permission to upgrade your machine.
I still remember my first Linux install. It was a dual-boot system. (Redhat 5.2 and Windows 98). I decided to upgrade the motherboard from a P2 to a P3 (OK: needed a new case, too). Linux was easy It asked to verify that I'd changed my mouse, and then it finished booting happy.
Windows was an entirely different matter.
It took a few days of tweaking and downloading drivers (Using the Linux side, of course), before Windows was anywhere near stable.
---
The laptop I'm typing on also had WIndows XP hork on a simple hard drive upgrade. The Windows partition was copied from one drive to another. Linux on the other hand went from being installed on a file inside of NTFS, to a native Linux partition... No problems with Linux, but Windows was never the same again, even though the change was more trivial for WIndows.
So....
Windows hardware independent???? Give . Me . A . Break.
You should probably send an email to I4I's lawyers. I fully agree with what you said. It's pretty easy to 're-image' without word, or -- more likely -- to re-image with a 'patched' version of Word.
I'd expect that Dell creates images that incorporate new patches from MS all the time... The only difference in this case would be that the 'patch' would be mandated by a court rather than MS's business plan.
I expect that the FSF, and/or other like-minded associations would be willing to buck up and support the first few stations to get sued that way...
Thankfully, Copyright law has a 'loser pays' rule which means that, once you show that
you there's a CC licensed version of your song, it's up to the RIAA lawyers to prove (on the balance of the probabilites, with a tie being in your favor) that you were playing a non-CC version of that song.
If they fail to do so (and they're likely to fail if they're suing on false pretenses), then they're the ones who end up paying your court costs.
So say goodbye to all of the small Internet radio stations that you have been listening to, as they will no longer afford to operate legally."
Perhaps -- On the other hand, people who make music available without royalty (thus staying outside of the CARB system) -- such as Creative Commons licenses, or even non-CC licenses which simply explicitly allow On-Air radio stations that aren't part of CARB to play them -- might find themselves with a boon as they will then be the only music that small radio stations will be able to play.
If I was a small (or even not-so-small) musician that wanted my music to get play, I'd probably release my music on a license that allowed people who haven't signed up for CARB to play my music royalty free, but had standard fees for stations that had paid the CARB $25K minimum (I mean, why give up royalties that have already been allocated to me?).
That way, smaller stations can play my music, and the larger stations (that really make money) can give me my fair share of CARB royalties if/when I get big enough to attract the attention of the larger stations.
My guess is that earth started out as a (not -so-giant?) gas giant and bled of most of it's original hydrogen. If that's even vaguely true, then there's little likelihood that the isotope mix would be anywhere near what's in comets.
I'm guessing that the deuterium mix is much higher than in comets (because deuterium, being heavier than hydrogen, is less likely to bleed off).
We wouldn't accept such an incomplete standard from Microsoft. In fact, the rallying cry against OOXML was that it was "too complete" because it was X pages long.
The problem with OOXML is that it is incompleteand it was X pages long.
One example is that
Despite being a massive document, the OOXML 'standard' contained critical sections that essentially consisted of "Oh, just reverse-engineer Word-97 for this part"
That so-called reference is highly problematic for a number of reasons:
It means that implementers can't just depend on the standards document to figure out how things work. They now have to reverse engineer an entirely different document format and implement that too.
Microsoft's EULA for office claims that reverse-engineering is illegal. This means that the research that the OOXML requires you to do to implement it can open the researcher to legal liability.
Microsoft's patent pact only includes aspects of OOXML that are explicitly documented. This means that an implementer who implements these legacy formats (touted by Microsoft as being a critical advantage of OOXML over ODF) now opens themselves to patent liabilities.
If you were to include the referenced legacy formats in the OOXML definition it could, concievably double the size of the already behemoth standard.
The 'legacy' formats include all sorts of microsoft bugs and traps that should never be included in any sane international standard
And that's just one issue with the OOXML standard document.
In summary: the OOXML standard is massive, broken and incomplete.
Microsoft seems to design their protocols to be as hostile as possible to 'other' OSs (without being openly anti-competitive). This is good for their business plan but bad for users. A side effect of this is (like another comment in this thread noted), that it's really difficult to expand the system beyond what Microsoft wants you to be able to do.
Given that you're using mostly 'other' operating systems, I think it would be a big mistake to make the bulk of your systems beholden to a hostile mistress.
OK: so the proper title would be: "...may destroy life signs it was sent to find."
On the bright side, though, if we can show that Martian soil contains a big enough volume of perchlorates, it might be possible to use that knowledge to lower the payload of a manned mission (in-situ oxygen generation).
Did they mention to the hearing that they're doing their damndest to close the analog hole? Did they give a plan for what teachers could do when they manage to do that?
3-10 foot lengths of cable are worth buying in bulk. They tend to be worth the money, and the extra couple of feet isn't a big deal. When you get over 20 feet, though, there tends not to be the kind of granularity of length and you can end up with 10-30 feet of unwanted cable after a run.
If you multiply that by 20 (not to mention 2000) long cables in a building, you can quickly end up with an unruly mass of unwanted copper that makes maintenance an absolute horror.
As for the quality of the link -- not a big issue. With a good crimper and reasonable training (I was taught how to crimp ethernet cables by an EE who ran a networking equipment company), I've had about as many (few) problems with commercial cables as handmade ones. With factory-made cables, however, are you really gonna pull a 60' length of cable out of the wall just to return it to the manufacturer? If that's the case, then you're probably financially strapped enough that you should be using a hand crimper.
I'm more inclined to just lop the head off of the offending cable and put a new end on.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
(emphasis mine>
DRM, on the other hand, gives 'Authors' control of their 'writings' for an unlimited time. As such, DRM is not protected by article 1 Section 8 of the constitution. This means that DRM provisions are now far more susceptible to (for example) a first-amendment challenge than most other copyright provisions.
I just tried randomly about 20 picks at Amazon (in Europe), including current movies and movies older than 40 year, US movies, European movies, and mangas: All have region code 2. Where do you get your DVDs without region codes?
I can see 2 possibilities:
The GP has been (accidentally?) purchasing bootleg products, and/or
Slashdot Mirror
It makes sense to produce a web-cam with a lid. A piece of paper and scotch tape could be used on older web-cams.
A lid on the webcam would defeat theoriginal stated excuse for having this setup (figuring out who has a stolen web-cam). That having been said, there was a long-time-ago article about Flash apps being able to turn on a web cam without user intervention (a 'feature' which then, apparently, had fail-safes added to it). ... but any (pre)installed binary will be able to do this without such failsafes.
so the long answer is that lids on web-cams are a good failsafe to have on any such device even though they would have defeated the stated intent of this (clearly illegal) spying program. Hardware disables on built-in microphones would also be a good privacy guard.
Now, consider that you're talking about high-school students -- almost all of whom are going to be under the age of 18. All of a sudden, you're out of the realm of a simple class action lawsuit, and looking at a charges of 'Creation, Possession, and possibly even distribution, of Kiddie Porn'. . . .
Now, that may not do much more than garner some more interesting headlines, but if you throw in counseling charges against the high-level managers who concieved of, OKed or mandated this stupid idea, I expect that anyplace where a similar plan is in place, the programs will be suddenly stopped. -- and to be honest, I'm more interested in getting this stupidity shut down now than I am in starting a witch-hunt against stupid school administrators.
No. Kiddy porn laws make the recipient of the pictures the criminal, not the kids in the pictures. This isn't like prostitution laws where the hooker is usually jailed, and the John may get a bye.
Unfortunately, some people seem to think that lack of training about the issues around sex will discourage kids from participation in sex that has been the norm since long before we understood enough to talk about (or, for that matter, even had language to talk about it). It's a process that only works for people who confuse belief and hope with reality.
I think that this explains why some of these same people confuse things like fantasy gaming with real devil worship. ..... and it explains why states that have the most restrictions about sex education also tend to have the most STDs and teen pregnancies.
..... Might also be useful for someone exploring a remote area where a gas pump might not be readily available
Remote areas without gas pumps probably won't have roads that a vehicle like this can use, either.
I have a friend who does destructive testing of Lithium Ion batteries --- apparently the engineers get freaked out when a pierced battery doesn't explode. The thought of a fragile battery like that, big enough to provide decent range, that close to my body gives me the willies.
It's small, and simple. It netboots, has 1GB of ram and drove my 19"monitor just fine without any special work. For the price, you can just ignore the 9" screen.
Don't bother buying the latest and greatest. Get machines that are near the end of their sales life. It's cheaper and they'll probably last just as long.
Don't bother trying to censor the internet. It's not going to happen. Your better bet is to just get a higher profile for yourself in the present. Just be more judicious about what you release about yourself this time. Be prolific and useful, and bury the one bad reference.
The only problem I can foresee with bongs in space: no gravity!
All that does is make the problem as difficult for the astronauts, now, as it was when they were in high school,
Not so bad if you're in a house, but God help the guy on a penthouse balcony.
uhm, No. You have to use less than 50% of your rated bandwidth to avoid being blocked. the 70% rule is only one of a number of triggers, any one of which can trigger rate limiting. by the rules that they document, about the only thing that can keep you up to full bandwidth capability is to be under 50% of your rated bandwidth for the last 15 minutes.
No, it is paranoid. How are you finding out about the vulnerability? Because Microsoft patched it last Tuesday.
Microsoft patched it because the Firefox people informed them that they were going to (out of frustration) explicitly disable it for having an 8 month old unpatched critical security bug.
With Microsoft now suddenly deciding to patch this bug, Firefox is only disabling a potentially unpatched security hole that Microsoft hoisted on their users.
Yeah, I think it was a broadcom wireless that a friend of mine (Sunni) had on her laptop. For some reason it wouldn't work on Vista, no matter what she did.
I mentioned, out of frustration, the idea of installing Linux on the laptop, and she said "Is that the system you installed for father?" (I gave her 80 year old dad a Linux box earlier this year). I told her it was, and she said "Yeah, go for it". (Half his family has been playing with his Linux box since I installed it... It's been solid as a rock).
The broadcom wireless that Windows could't get working runs fine, and I now have 3 generations running Linux. (Sunni's daughter also got Ubuntu Ultimate on her desktop, but her grandson is autistic, so I'm not willing to upset him by replacing Windows -- even though it's got black-screen, and Dell want's $50 for a disk that will wipe his box clean and reinstall the OS with a 'proper' key).
But you want to know how I did the Linux install on their machines??? I did the install on a portable drive on my home machine, and then I took the newly installed disk and copied the partitions onto Sunni's laptop, and her daughter's desktop..... Install a new swap partition on the two machines, and boom, job done!
-------
If you don't think that that's enough proof of Linux's hardware independence, you should see how we do installations at Free Geek Vancouver. We start with completely wiped disks. We've got 4 machines that we do OEM installs on. Each install takes about 1/2 hour on a 2.4Gz celeron, and runs with almost NO user interaction (other than choosing 'automatic OEM install' from the network boot menu). .... then we take the installed drives, and plop them into random machines (truly random configurations ranging from a 800Mz Pentium 3s to higher end AMD multicores. ... then we test for hardware problems and send the machines out.
Compare that to Windows, where simply swapping out your hard drive can send the system into apoplexy and eat half your day's productivity by forcing you to beg Microsoft for permission to upgrade your machine.
I still remember my first Linux install. It was a dual-boot system. (Redhat 5.2 and Windows 98). I decided to upgrade the motherboard from a P2 to a P3 (OK: needed a new case, too). Linux was easy It asked to verify that I'd changed my mouse, and then it finished booting happy.
Windows was an entirely different matter. It took a few days of tweaking and downloading drivers (Using the Linux side, of course), before Windows was anywhere near stable.
---
The laptop I'm typing on also had WIndows XP hork on a simple hard drive upgrade. The Windows partition was copied from one drive to another. Linux on the other hand went from being installed on a file inside of NTFS, to a native Linux partition... No problems with Linux, but Windows was never the same again, even though the change was more trivial for WIndows.
So.... Windows hardware independent???? Give . Me . A . Break.
I'd expect that Dell creates images that incorporate new patches from MS all the time... The only difference in this case would be that the 'patch' would be mandated by a court rather than MS's business plan.
Thankfully, Copyright law has a 'loser pays' rule which means that, once you show that you there's a CC licensed version of your song, it's up to the RIAA lawyers to prove (on the balance of the probabilites, with a tie being in your favor) that you were playing a non-CC version of that song.
If they fail to do so (and they're likely to fail if they're suing on false pretenses), then they're the ones who end up paying your court costs.
So say goodbye to all of the small Internet radio stations that you have been listening to, as they will no longer afford to operate legally."
Perhaps -- On the other hand, people who make music available without royalty (thus staying outside of the CARB system) -- such as Creative Commons licenses, or even non-CC licenses which simply explicitly allow On-Air radio stations that aren't part of CARB to play them -- might find themselves with a boon as they will then be the only music that small radio stations will be able to play.
If I was a small (or even not-so-small) musician that wanted my music to get play, I'd probably release my music on a license that allowed people who haven't signed up for CARB to play my music royalty free, but had standard fees for stations that had paid the CARB $25K minimum (I mean, why give up royalties that have already been allocated to me?).
That way, smaller stations can play my music, and the larger stations (that really make money) can give me my fair share of CARB royalties if/when I get big enough to attract the attention of the larger stations.
My guess is that earth started out as a (not -so-giant?) gas giant and bled of most of it's original hydrogen. If that's even vaguely true, then there's little likelihood that the isotope mix would be anywhere near what's in comets.
I'm guessing that the deuterium mix is much higher than in comets (because deuterium, being heavier than hydrogen, is less likely to bleed off).
We wouldn't accept such an incomplete standard from Microsoft. In fact, the rallying cry against OOXML was that it was "too complete" because it was X pages long.
The problem with OOXML is that it is incomplete and it was X pages long.
One example is that Despite being a massive document, the OOXML 'standard' contained critical sections that essentially consisted of "Oh, just reverse-engineer Word-97 for this part"
That so-called reference is highly problematic for a number of reasons:
And that's just one issue with the OOXML standard document.
In summary: the OOXML standard is massive, broken and incomplete.
Uh huh. So what's wrong with AD?
Microsoft seems to design their protocols to be as hostile as possible to 'other' OSs (without being openly anti-competitive). This is good for their business plan but bad for users. A side effect of this is (like another comment in this thread noted), that it's really difficult to expand the system beyond what Microsoft wants you to be able to do.
Given that you're using mostly 'other' operating systems, I think it would be a big mistake to make the bulk of your systems beholden to a hostile mistress.
On the bright side, though, if we can show that Martian soil contains a big enough volume of perchlorates, it might be possible to use that knowledge to lower the payload of a manned mission (in-situ oxygen generation).
Did they mention to the hearing that they're doing their damndest to close the analog hole? Did they give a plan for what teachers could do when they manage to do that?
It may still take you years to understand the backups, but at least you'll have the full data for posterity.
If you multiply that by 20 (not to mention 2000) long cables in a building, you can quickly end up with an unruly mass of unwanted copper that makes maintenance an absolute horror.
As for the quality of the link -- not a big issue. With a good crimper and reasonable training (I was taught how to crimp ethernet cables by an EE who ran a networking equipment company), I've had about as many (few) problems with commercial cables as handmade ones. With factory-made cables, however, are you really gonna pull a 60' length of cable out of the wall just to return it to the manufacturer? If that's the case, then you're probably financially strapped enough that you should be using a hand crimper.
I'm more inclined to just lop the head off of the offending cable and put a new end on.
The constitution gives congress the right to
(emphasis mine>
DRM, on the other hand, gives 'Authors' control of their 'writings' for an unlimited time. As such, DRM is not protected by article 1 Section 8 of the constitution. This means that DRM provisions are now far more susceptible to (for example) a first-amendment challenge than most other copyright provisions.
I just tried randomly about 20 picks at Amazon (in Europe), including current movies and movies older than 40 year, US movies, European movies, and mangas: All have region code 2. Where do you get your DVDs without region codes?
I can see 2 possibilities: