The news articles do not indicate that he copied the files - only the police's charges indicate that, and they could very well be misunderstanding Windows' cache (the one Windows makes when you open a remote file) as an intentional copy.
This quote from the news article is especially telling:
All that was needed to access the information was a district password. School officials have admitted that thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks.
"A district password" in this quote sounds a lot like "a student or faculty account" to me. Doesn't sound like any hacking occurred at all.
If you read the original article you learn that he wasn't using his personal computer - he was in a school lab using a school computer from his school account (i.e. he had permission to use the network).
Furthermore, the article does not claim he copied the files anywhere, simply that he looked at them - and although looking at them requires making a local copy, that does not prove he copied them somewhere else.
It's like a store owner leaving an unlocked filing cabinet full of credit card info next to the front door of the store. It's not illegal to open the filing cabinet and see what's inside.
Best I could do for my Sony Ericsson W580i was a 4GB MicroSD card for $30 (including shipping). I have no idea where people claim to get 16GB cards for $20.
I don't think that just one sale is enough to justify including intrusive copy protection (from EA's standpoint). It costs a lot more than $60 to include copy protection (just in developer time, let alone licensing costs). It would have to be many lost sales - dozens, if not hundreds - to justify copy protection, and even more than that to justify the cost of running online activation servers and such.
No sane business does things like this for just one sale.
I agree with you on the rest of what you said, though, especially regarding Steam - I have had nothing but good experiences with Steam.
If you're going to harp on piracy, at least check your "facts". Not doing fact-checking makes you sound like a moron.
I especially find this sentence:
That was an awesome game, and apparently also massively pirated, being a first person game with no multiplayer.
to be quite illogical, aside from being factually incorrect. You seem to be asserting that any game with no multiplayer is, as a consequence, massively pirated. I'm guessing you think your own games are massively pirated, because they're single-player?
I completely agree. Although I have historically spent most flights reading books instead of using my computer, I would prefer to have the planes fixed rather than banning wireless devices.
Of course, I don't really believe a wireless mouse could actually cause this type of thing to happen, so perhaps the real issue is that we need some sort of legal precedent to prevent companies from blaming customers for things like this.
If there were a "Funny, and Sad but True" moderation, I'd totally be using it right now.
I was 21 when I got my first cell phone (ok, so it was only two years ago); each of my siblings got a cell phone at a younger age than the previous. My first sister got hers in 12th grade, the next got hers in 11th, the next got hers in 10th, and I expect my little brother will get one in 9th grade, if not sooner.
My parents are probably more permissive than most when it comes to technology, largely because my dad almost went in to programming but chose accounting instead. That, combined with the usual "each successive kid gets more freedom than the last" thing that parents seem to do, leads to this 8-year-old-with-a-cell-phone phenomena we're seeing nowadays.
I'm curious why you say IMAP is fundamentally broken. As a side note, Gmail's POP is quirky; I find that IMAP works much better with Gmail.
I need to store my mail on my mail server (so I can get to my mail from multiple computers), and I like using a local mail client. I need to consolidate mail from six e-mail addresses into one mailbox, so setting POP to "leave mail on the server" isn't a solution. How would you suggest I do this?
The only way I know of would be to set all my other addresses to be forwards instead of full-fledged mailboxes, but that has the undesirable side effect of not allowing me to log in to a particular account's web interface to be able to send mail with the proper return address (I occasionally need to do this). I could also set those accounts to be both mailboxes *and* forwards, but then I've got extra copies of my mail lying around all over the place, and spam would never get deleted, and then my mailboxes would overflow and I'd have to clean up giant piles of paper... you get the idea.
I got modded flamebait, but I'll post the results of the story anyway - one friend never responded, and the other flipped out saying things like "OMG dude I'm so sick of you ripping on Apple" and "Apple's commercials don't lie at all" and so on and so forth.
So mod me flamebait if you want, but I was right. (Doesn't that make me Insightful at least?)
Who modded me Troll? Come on, I wasn't trolling, and I think it's obvious - I can seriously imagine without difficulty a vendor accidentally distributing some random employee's files on their Linux CDs.
My only point was that the conclusion "Use a Mac because Windows sucks" is far less logical than "Don't buy from Asus".
I've never had an Asus machine. I have a few Asus motherboards (in fact I have three arriving in the mail today), and they seem to work alright. I didn't say *my* conclusion would be "Don't buy Asus", I said I thought *his* conclusion would have been "Don't buy Asus". I guess I made the mistake of thinking he was logical about his assertion.
7-zip doesn't handle what zip formats? For your convenience, here is a list of the file extensions it recognizes (you can guess the associated compression algorithms):
I would venture to guess that there are 7-zip plugins to handle other formats. What else do you want from 7-zip (besides a decent GUI)?
In my personal, anecdotal experience, I have never had 7-zip choke on a file or be unable to figure out what format it's in. Of course, I don't spend a lot of time downloading files on BitTorrent (read: none), so I may not come across some of the more obscure formats...
If all you ever use it for is through the right-click explorer-integrated menu, then it's a breeze to use. Especially if you bother to customize it to show the things you actually use and nothing else.
It's actually not about people lying to Nielsen - it's that their information gathering methods are likely to ignore the demographic that enjoys shows like Star Trek and Firefly. I don't have a landline, so I never get involved in their phone surveys. Their set-top boxes don't take into account DVR (something the denizens of Slashdot are likely to have and use regularly).
So, we end up with marketing statistics that show "EVERYONE LOVES SURVIVOR" even though a significant portion of the TV-viewing population is ignored by the marketing data.
My brother-in-law insists that the $600 price disparity I have documented on two separate occasions (a year apart) between Dell laptop prices and Apple laptop prices for essentially equivalent hardware is more than made up for by the [supposed] higher quality of Apple's hardware. I guess he never met a friend of mine who spent his days repairing MacBooks at a shop downtown...
The $600 difference is, of course, pure profit for Apple. I don't think their hardware is particularly more reliable than Dell's - just treat your Dell laptop like a computer instead of a textbook and it will work perfectly fine for a long time.
So I guess writing an NES emulator for the iPhone would be unacceptable - since the NES rom images are machine code for the NES platform, and the emulator would "interpret" that language...
Slashdot Mirror
The news articles do not indicate that he copied the files - only the police's charges indicate that, and they could very well be misunderstanding Windows' cache (the one Windows makes when you open a remote file) as an intentional copy.
This quote from the news article is especially telling:
All that was needed to access the information was a district password. School officials have admitted that thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks.
"A district password" in this quote sounds a lot like "a student or faculty account" to me. Doesn't sound like any hacking occurred at all.
If you read the original article you learn that he wasn't using his personal computer - he was in a school lab using a school computer from his school account (i.e. he had permission to use the network).
Furthermore, the article does not claim he copied the files anywhere, simply that he looked at them - and although looking at them requires making a local copy, that does not prove he copied them somewhere else.
It's like a store owner leaving an unlocked filing cabinet full of credit card info next to the front door of the store. It's not illegal to open the filing cabinet and see what's inside.
My bad! Thanks for correcting me.
I always get confused about all these memory stick formats :(
Best I could do for my Sony Ericsson W580i was a 4GB MicroSD card for $30 (including shipping). I have no idea where people claim to get 16GB cards for $20.
+1 Insightful in spirit.
Diablo II was practically free for me, in that light...
Oh, except the one time when Steam was broken and tech support told me to reinstall Windows.
I don't think that just one sale is enough to justify including intrusive copy protection (from EA's standpoint). It costs a lot more than $60 to include copy protection (just in developer time, let alone licensing costs). It would have to be many lost sales - dozens, if not hundreds - to justify copy protection, and even more than that to justify the cost of running online activation servers and such.
No sane business does things like this for just one sale.
I agree with you on the rest of what you said, though, especially regarding Steam - I have had nothing but good experiences with Steam.
If you're going to harp on piracy, at least check your "facts". Not doing fact-checking makes you sound like a moron.
I especially find this sentence:
That was an awesome game, and apparently also massively pirated, being a first person game with no multiplayer.
to be quite illogical, aside from being factually incorrect. You seem to be asserting that any game with no multiplayer is, as a consequence, massively pirated. I'm guessing you think your own games are massively pirated, because they're single-player?
I suddenly regret buying Starship Tycoon.
I completely agree. Although I have historically spent most flights reading books instead of using my computer, I would prefer to have the planes fixed rather than banning wireless devices.
Of course, I don't really believe a wireless mouse could actually cause this type of thing to happen, so perhaps the real issue is that we need some sort of legal precedent to prevent companies from blaming customers for things like this.
Duly noted.
If there were a "Funny, and Sad but True" moderation, I'd totally be using it right now.
I was 21 when I got my first cell phone (ok, so it was only two years ago); each of my siblings got a cell phone at a younger age than the previous. My first sister got hers in 12th grade, the next got hers in 11th, the next got hers in 10th, and I expect my little brother will get one in 9th grade, if not sooner.
My parents are probably more permissive than most when it comes to technology, largely because my dad almost went in to programming but chose accounting instead. That, combined with the usual "each successive kid gets more freedom than the last" thing that parents seem to do, leads to this 8-year-old-with-a-cell-phone phenomena we're seeing nowadays.
That, I don't know. Sorry. We're a Windows software company, so we don't run Linux machines...
I've been buying GeForce 9500 GT 512s at work for ~$70 each, before rebates. Those things pack a great punch for the price...
I'm curious why you say IMAP is fundamentally broken. As a side note, Gmail's POP is quirky; I find that IMAP works much better with Gmail.
I need to store my mail on my mail server (so I can get to my mail from multiple computers), and I like using a local mail client. I need to consolidate mail from six e-mail addresses into one mailbox, so setting POP to "leave mail on the server" isn't a solution. How would you suggest I do this?
The only way I know of would be to set all my other addresses to be forwards instead of full-fledged mailboxes, but that has the undesirable side effect of not allowing me to log in to a particular account's web interface to be able to send mail with the proper return address (I occasionally need to do this). I could also set those accounts to be both mailboxes *and* forwards, but then I've got extra copies of my mail lying around all over the place, and spam would never get deleted, and then my mailboxes would overflow and I'd have to clean up giant piles of paper... you get the idea.
I got modded flamebait, but I'll post the results of the story anyway - one friend never responded, and the other flipped out saying things like "OMG dude I'm so sick of you ripping on Apple" and "Apple's commercials don't lie at all" and so on and so forth.
So mod me flamebait if you want, but I was right. (Doesn't that make me Insightful at least?)
Who modded me Troll? Come on, I wasn't trolling, and I think it's obvious - I can seriously imagine without difficulty a vendor accidentally distributing some random employee's files on their Linux CDs.
My only point was that the conclusion "Use a Mac because Windows sucks" is far less logical than "Don't buy from Asus".
I've never had an Asus machine. I have a few Asus motherboards (in fact I have three arriving in the mail today), and they seem to work alright. I didn't say *my* conclusion would be "Don't buy Asus", I said I thought *his* conclusion would have been "Don't buy Asus". I guess I made the mistake of thinking he was logical about his assertion.
7-zip doesn't handle what zip formats? For your convenience, here is a list of the file extensions it recognizes (you can guess the associated compression algorithms):
7z, arj, bz2, bzip2, cab, cpio, deb, dmg, gz, gzip, hfs, iso, lha, lzh, lzma, rar, rpm, split, swm, tar, taz, tbz, tbz2, tgz, tpz, wim, xar, z, zip
I would venture to guess that there are 7-zip plugins to handle other formats. What else do you want from 7-zip (besides a decent GUI)?
In my personal, anecdotal experience, I have never had 7-zip choke on a file or be unable to figure out what format it's in. Of course, I don't spend a lot of time downloading files on BitTorrent (read: none), so I may not come across some of the more obscure formats...
If all you ever use it for is through the right-click explorer-integrated menu, then it's a breeze to use. Especially if you bother to customize it to show the things you actually use and nothing else.
I thought it would be "Don't buy Asus machines." It isn't hard to imagine a vendor doing something similar to this for Linux installations.
It's actually not about people lying to Nielsen - it's that their information gathering methods are likely to ignore the demographic that enjoys shows like Star Trek and Firefly. I don't have a landline, so I never get involved in their phone surveys. Their set-top boxes don't take into account DVR (something the denizens of Slashdot are likely to have and use regularly).
So, we end up with marketing statistics that show "EVERYONE LOVES SURVIVOR" even though a significant portion of the TV-viewing population is ignored by the marketing data.
My brother-in-law insists that the $600 price disparity I have documented on two separate occasions (a year apart) between Dell laptop prices and Apple laptop prices for essentially equivalent hardware is more than made up for by the [supposed] higher quality of Apple's hardware. I guess he never met a friend of mine who spent his days repairing MacBooks at a shop downtown...
The $600 difference is, of course, pure profit for Apple. I don't think their hardware is particularly more reliable than Dell's - just treat your Dell laptop like a computer instead of a textbook and it will work perfectly fine for a long time.
I just e-mailed two of my apple-loving friends regarding this news, and I expect that both of them will try to rationalize Apple's move.
On the bright side, one of these friends doesn't argue too much when I point out lies in Apple's "Mac vs PC" commercials... so who knows.
So I guess writing an NES emulator for the iPhone would be unacceptable - since the NES rom images are machine code for the NES platform, and the emulator would "interpret" that language...
Now I want to work on the iPhone even less.