May be so, but I don't really believe this. The main objection against your theory is that there will be a huge list of potential links (I think a safe assumption is that the site listed tens of thousands of individual downloads), making the page very large. And such an attack would be quite easily detectable, particularly as it's a known issue.
I see you're not a politician, so you see it totally wrong.
For starters, it's crime. It's murderous even: it kills music, it kills artists, it kills the studios and labels. And it is theft too, of course.
It's also serious, see above. Murder is a serious crime. So is theft - that's what I see on stickers pasted in shops against shoplifting. "Theft is a serious crime". I'm not going to argue with that, theft is a crime. So is murder. And it's serious.
And organised those web sites are. A large organisation, with its tentacles all over the place. They have hackers gaining access to unreleased music for them, other hackers that post complete albums or illegal recordings of concerts and whatnot. Well organised they must be, how else could they serve those thousands upon thousands of customers every day.
So of course it's a task for the SOCA. Drug dealers be damned, that're minor guys, not worth bothering with. But those music thieves must be stopped!
This JS history snooping sounds plausible, technically, but maybe not so practically. Besides the question of whether running such a script is legal: how did they manage to run those scrips?
To run such a history snooping script, a user has to visit a web site that runs said script. It's not likely the torrent site will do this for the authorities. It is also not likely that users will regularly visit anti-piracy web sites. They may visit it once, to get some information or out of curiousity, but well not much to repeat visits for.
Or is it done by the ISP? Who then would basically inject a js part into web pages the user downloads? Doesn't sound like a nice thing to do, to say the least.
Besides, such scripts afaik can only do something like "did you visit slashdot.org?": asking for specific URLs. I have not heard of a way to ask a browser "please tell me all sites this user has visited, and all urls which include slashdot.org". The first example shows whether or not the user visited the home page, the second example would give a list of all stories the user has opened, comments they opened, etc. You'd need the second method to be able to query a user's history for specific downloads.
Information from the browser cache determines whether to redownload a file, but the cache should be site-specific. Even if one site asks to download parts from another site, the browser should just reply "done" when the request is processed, regardless of whether that bit is locally available already or that it had to be downloaded.
The only legal way to obtain download histories would be if the user has a public profile on a web site that lists that user's download history (not likely) or that they would indeed come with a search warrant, confiscate the user's computer, and analyse its contents (even less likely).
So all in all this sounds like an illegal hacking action by the UK police.
Right. That's pretty horrible indeed, tasteless mainly. And besides, I've always been advised to give little children whole milk, as they need the fat at least as much as the protein and other goodies that come with it!
Vegetable I understand. Though my 5-year-old is eating most vegetables big time by now; sometimes even preferring them over meat. At 3-4 years old this was different though.
Milk? Not so. How come little American children don't like milk?
Of course there are spell checkers for those languages too. But not for Chinese et.al. (as there is no spelling to check).
The problem is: you will have to install spell checkers for every single language that you may possibly get; and can't be sure.
Then spell checkers don't generally handle multi-lingual texts well - if at all. E.g. running an English spell checker on an English/German message it will fail most of the German words and as such report many spelling errors. Using a German spell checker on the same message will have the same result.
And this is all assuming you have an easy way to determine the language the message is written in, to feed it to the correct spell checker. And you may run into problems related to character encoding.
THIS IS BASIC SPAM FILTER 101, if there is no address, or Unsubscribe in the newsletter, or a poor text to image ratio, IT IS SPAM! What the hell is their spam team researching?
Quite often I receive legitimate e-mails with a very poor text-to-image ratio... Text being limited to something like "loading pics", and then 10-20 images attached to it. Usually attachment, occasionally embedded even in the html message body.
I agree it's something that should score spam points, it's definitely not always spam.
That's going to be troublesome for people like me who are routinely receiving mails in various languages (for me: English, Dutch, German, Chinese). Or mails that are multi-lingual, including the above but sometimes also random other languages such as parts in Russian, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, just to name a few.
No, plastics only. And I'm a trader, not doing actual recycling.
And I have yet to see any automation in recycling plants in China. One of the problems of course is that your feed stock will be so inhomgeneous. Robots don't like that, they're only good when every product they handle is exactly the same. Lots of manual labour involved; it's the main reason so much recycling is done in countries like China and India, and also in Africa. People are cheap there. The lax environmental laws are an added bonus for recyclers.
Agreed. Being in the recycling business I can give you some additional comments.
Currently computer cases are made of ABS or PC/ABS (a blend of PC and ABS). Usually light grey or beige colour, occasionally black, and sometimes laden with flame retardants. Under the European RoHS this has to be a bromine-free FR for new products, but of course in the recycling you get lots of pre-RoHS materials as well. The main problem here is that the recycled material has limited applications, it can not be used for products to be sold within Europe for example.
Computer cases are being recycled big time, this is quite valuable material in the recycling world. The computer recyclers will collect and bale those cases for sale to plastic recyclers, China is a major market for this material. Here the material is sorted by type, washed, and repelletised for use in new products.
Regarding colouring: you can not remove pigments from a plastic, if it's in, it's in forever. Same accounts for other additives and fillers. You can only dye the plastic to a darker colour; in practice most coloured plastic is dyed black when it's reprocessed. This as the end user will always want a very specific colour (there are thousands of shades of red, for example), all colours can be dyed to black, and black is one of the most commonly used colours.
The PCBs is another matter: they contain many precious metals such as gold, and are also recycled. Working ICs are often reused (no idea what for but I know they're doing it), the precious metals are recovered. The latter in particular is a very nasty process, as it requires all kinds of poisonous chemicals. And it's often causing a lot of pollution, because these chemicals are often allowed to leak in the soil.
Back to the proposed material. It may or may not be recycled, I don't know. New technologies may have to be developed. It sounds a bit similar to the more common wood-plastic-composite, which is a blend of wood flour with plastics such as HDPE, PP or PVC. This is often used as replacement for wood.
PP does degrade in sunlight: I live in a subtropical area, near the tropic, so especially in summer we have very strong sunlight. Leave a PP product out in the sun and in a year it's become brittle and loses all strength. But it must be exposed to sunlight (specifically the UV part of course), as otherwise nothing happens. So any material covered by other material is well protected. And the flip side is also that the PP is really degraded, and has become useless. No recycling can regain any strength in the material, it's lost and has become total waste. Degenerating until something that can not be seen anymore takes a lot longer, and again requires exposure to direct sunlight.
I said bottle. Not bottle with water in it. Just bottle. I've routinely taken empty bottles with me - the restrictions are on liquids, and I didn't try to bring liquids.
There are exceptions for families with small children. They may bring milk and other drinks for the child (and yes that's of course a major security leak but who cares, it's theater anyway and the show must go on). Exact quantities I don't know but something like "a reasonable quantity for the trip".
Most airports provide drinking water fountains (if the tap water isn't drinkable straight away, like in many countries in Europe).
You're also allowed to bring bottles.
Cross checkpoint, fill bottle with water to drink later. Approach checkpoint? Empty bottle. Dump it in a toilet, or just in a garbage bin or so (they usually have plastic bag so shouldn't leak - and if it would, that's not your problem for having to conform to stupid rules).
You never know what may offend someone. It's unpredictable. Like Arthur Dent who accidentally caused an intergalactic war with the words "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel".
Maybe the most important part of knowledge is knowing where you can look up stuff.
And indeed without properly understanding the matter and as such having no idea what exact formula to look for and where to find it and then to apply it you're still at a total loss.
During an open-book exam, when taken in class, you normally can not call up your elder brother with a Ph.D. in the subject for help. Even though you might do that occasionally when you're having to solve a problem for your employer, later in life.
And maybe accessibility? (this one is particularly of concern for web sites)
All I see in this discussion is how to find sofware bugs and issues that crash the software - important sure, but that doesn't mean the software is easy to work with. Having a design team that designs the UI beforehand also doesn't mean there are no bottlenecks there.
Good software for me means that the software not only does what you expect it to do, but that it's also easy to use.
Except for the enormous transaction costs they will have on lots of very small payments.
It's an unsolved problem of the Internet: easily making small payments. I really don't like the idea (and the effort) of having to pull out my credit card and give my credit card details to all those different web sites just to make a US$1 payment. Sure they may opt for PayPal but then they still lose a very large chunk of their income in transaction fees. Try making it cheaper, like $0.25 for the song, and PayPal takes pretty much all in fees.
iTunes can consolidate these charges to make single larger transactions, and their sheer size will give them a lot of bargaining power towards payment processors.
And then I wonder: why wouldn't one be allowed to resell a license? Isn't there an existing market for used computer software, where the licenses are traded - with or without physical media?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Happy the mods did get it :-)
May be so, but I don't really believe this. The main objection against your theory is that there will be a huge list of potential links (I think a safe assumption is that the site listed tens of thousands of individual downloads), making the page very large. And such an attack would be quite easily detectable, particularly as it's a known issue.
LOL
Children's eating habits can be really interesting!
I see you're not a politician, so you see it totally wrong.
For starters, it's crime. It's murderous even: it kills music, it kills artists, it kills the studios and labels. And it is theft too, of course.
It's also serious, see above. Murder is a serious crime. So is theft - that's what I see on stickers pasted in shops against shoplifting. "Theft is a serious crime". I'm not going to argue with that, theft is a crime. So is murder. And it's serious.
And organised those web sites are. A large organisation, with its tentacles all over the place. They have hackers gaining access to unreleased music for them, other hackers that post complete albums or illegal recordings of concerts and whatnot. Well organised they must be, how else could they serve those thousands upon thousands of customers every day.
So of course it's a task for the SOCA. Drug dealers be damned, that're minor guys, not worth bothering with. But those music thieves must be stopped!
OK politician mode off. Have a nice day :-)
This JS history snooping sounds plausible, technically, but maybe not so practically. Besides the question of whether running such a script is legal: how did they manage to run those scrips?
To run such a history snooping script, a user has to visit a web site that runs said script. It's not likely the torrent site will do this for the authorities. It is also not likely that users will regularly visit anti-piracy web sites. They may visit it once, to get some information or out of curiousity, but well not much to repeat visits for.
Or is it done by the ISP? Who then would basically inject a js part into web pages the user downloads? Doesn't sound like a nice thing to do, to say the least.
Besides, such scripts afaik can only do something like "did you visit slashdot.org?": asking for specific URLs. I have not heard of a way to ask a browser "please tell me all sites this user has visited, and all urls which include slashdot.org". The first example shows whether or not the user visited the home page, the second example would give a list of all stories the user has opened, comments they opened, etc. You'd need the second method to be able to query a user's history for specific downloads.
Information from the browser cache determines whether to redownload a file, but the cache should be site-specific. Even if one site asks to download parts from another site, the browser should just reply "done" when the request is processed, regardless of whether that bit is locally available already or that it had to be downloaded.
The only legal way to obtain download histories would be if the user has a public profile on a web site that lists that user's download history (not likely) or that they would indeed come with a search warrant, confiscate the user's computer, and analyse its contents (even less likely).
So all in all this sounds like an illegal hacking action by the UK police.
Right. That's pretty horrible indeed, tasteless mainly. And besides, I've always been advised to give little children whole milk, as they need the fat at least as much as the protein and other goodies that come with it!
Vegetable I understand. Though my 5-year-old is eating most vegetables big time by now; sometimes even preferring them over meat. At 3-4 years old this was different though.
Milk? Not so. How come little American children don't like milk?
Of course there are spell checkers for those languages too. But not for Chinese et.al. (as there is no spelling to check).
The problem is: you will have to install spell checkers for every single language that you may possibly get; and can't be sure.
Then spell checkers don't generally handle multi-lingual texts well - if at all. E.g. running an English spell checker on an English/German message it will fail most of the German words and as such report many spelling errors. Using a German spell checker on the same message will have the same result.
And this is all assuming you have an easy way to determine the language the message is written in, to feed it to the correct spell checker. And you may run into problems related to character encoding.
THIS IS BASIC SPAM FILTER 101, if there is no address, or Unsubscribe in the newsletter, or a poor text to image ratio, IT IS SPAM! What the hell is their spam team researching?
Quite often I receive legitimate e-mails with a very poor text-to-image ratio... Text being limited to something like "loading pics", and then 10-20 images attached to it. Usually attachment, occasionally embedded even in the html message body.
I agree it's something that should score spam points, it's definitely not always spam.
That's going to be troublesome for people like me who are routinely receiving mails in various languages (for me: English, Dutch, German, Chinese). Or mails that are multi-lingual, including the above but sometimes also random other languages such as parts in Russian, Polish, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, just to name a few.
No, plastics only. And I'm a trader, not doing actual recycling.
And I have yet to see any automation in recycling plants in China. One of the problems of course is that your feed stock will be so inhomgeneous. Robots don't like that, they're only good when every product they handle is exactly the same. Lots of manual labour involved; it's the main reason so much recycling is done in countries like China and India, and also in Africa. People are cheap there. The lax environmental laws are an added bonus for recyclers.
Agreed. Being in the recycling business I can give you some additional comments.
Currently computer cases are made of ABS or PC/ABS (a blend of PC and ABS). Usually light grey or beige colour, occasionally black, and sometimes laden with flame retardants. Under the European RoHS this has to be a bromine-free FR for new products, but of course in the recycling you get lots of pre-RoHS materials as well. The main problem here is that the recycled material has limited applications, it can not be used for products to be sold within Europe for example.
Computer cases are being recycled big time, this is quite valuable material in the recycling world. The computer recyclers will collect and bale those cases for sale to plastic recyclers, China is a major market for this material. Here the material is sorted by type, washed, and repelletised for use in new products.
Regarding colouring: you can not remove pigments from a plastic, if it's in, it's in forever. Same accounts for other additives and fillers. You can only dye the plastic to a darker colour; in practice most coloured plastic is dyed black when it's reprocessed. This as the end user will always want a very specific colour (there are thousands of shades of red, for example), all colours can be dyed to black, and black is one of the most commonly used colours.
The PCBs is another matter: they contain many precious metals such as gold, and are also recycled. Working ICs are often reused (no idea what for but I know they're doing it), the precious metals are recovered. The latter in particular is a very nasty process, as it requires all kinds of poisonous chemicals. And it's often causing a lot of pollution, because these chemicals are often allowed to leak in the soil.
Back to the proposed material. It may or may not be recycled, I don't know. New technologies may have to be developed. It sounds a bit similar to the more common wood-plastic-composite, which is a blend of wood flour with plastics such as HDPE, PP or PVC. This is often used as replacement for wood.
PP does degrade in sunlight: I live in a subtropical area, near the tropic, so especially in summer we have very strong sunlight. Leave a PP product out in the sun and in a year it's become brittle and loses all strength. But it must be exposed to sunlight (specifically the UV part of course), as otherwise nothing happens. So any material covered by other material is well protected. And the flip side is also that the PP is really degraded, and has become useless. No recycling can regain any strength in the material, it's lost and has become total waste. Degenerating until something that can not be seen anymore takes a lot longer, and again requires exposure to direct sunlight.
If they complain, open it, hold it upside down, commenting "look, it's empty!". Any residue will be taken care of in the process.
Mostly empty != empty.
I said bottle. Not bottle with water in it. Just bottle. I've routinely taken empty bottles with me - the restrictions are on liquids, and I didn't try to bring liquids.
There are exceptions for families with small children. They may bring milk and other drinks for the child (and yes that's of course a major security leak but who cares, it's theater anyway and the show must go on). Exact quantities I don't know but something like "a reasonable quantity for the trip".
Most airports provide drinking water fountains (if the tap water isn't drinkable straight away, like in many countries in Europe).
You're also allowed to bring bottles.
Cross checkpoint, fill bottle with water to drink later. Approach checkpoint? Empty bottle. Dump it in a toilet, or just in a garbage bin or so (they usually have plastic bag so shouldn't leak - and if it would, that's not your problem for having to conform to stupid rules).
It seems the hilarious and unusual part of this is that Microsoft apparently until now didn't even have one.
You never know what may offend someone. It's unpredictable. Like Arthur Dent who accidentally caused an intergalactic war with the words "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel".
Maybe the most important part of knowledge is knowing where you can look up stuff.
And indeed without properly understanding the matter and as such having no idea what exact formula to look for and where to find it and then to apply it you're still at a total loss.
During an open-book exam, when taken in class, you normally can not call up your elder brother with a Ph.D. in the subject for help. Even though you might do that occasionally when you're having to solve a problem for your employer, later in life.
How about usability testing?
And maybe accessibility? (this one is particularly of concern for web sites)
All I see in this discussion is how to find sofware bugs and issues that crash the software - important sure, but that doesn't mean the software is easy to work with. Having a design team that designs the UI beforehand also doesn't mean there are no bottlenecks there.
Good software for me means that the software not only does what you expect it to do, but that it's also easy to use.
Except for the enormous transaction costs they will have on lots of very small payments.
It's an unsolved problem of the Internet: easily making small payments. I really don't like the idea (and the effort) of having to pull out my credit card and give my credit card details to all those different web sites just to make a US$1 payment. Sure they may opt for PayPal but then they still lose a very large chunk of their income in transaction fees. Try making it cheaper, like $0.25 for the song, and PayPal takes pretty much all in fees.
iTunes can consolidate these charges to make single larger transactions, and their sheer size will give them a lot of bargaining power towards payment processors.
And then I wonder: why wouldn't one be allowed to resell a license? Isn't there an existing market for used computer software, where the licenses are traded - with or without physical media?
Trying to claim that something else is the case would require a judge with a very pliable sense of reality.
This is iTunes. And Apple.
Ever heard of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field?
That the man is dead doesn't matter. That's probably just a distorted reality in and by itself.