So far the issues of DRM have mostly been raised by privacy advocates and geeks, with most of the rest simply not caring. DRM, as with copyright in general, is confined to the digital world, and the common attitude is "unless you are a pirate, you shouldn't care, right?".
If Apple does pursue this through the courts, it can change public opinion. A lot of people would think, "Getting sued for fixing up your own shoes? WTF", and perceive the lawsuit as frivolous, or, best of all, finally seeing that the grave shackle effects of DRM spread far beyond the digital world. People will seriously question DRM laws if they realize that they are breaking them day after day with routine, normal, and perfectly acceptable life activities.
You overlook something critical. Apple does not have a monopoly. Rules are different for monopolies, pure and simple.
This used to be the case, but not anymore. In the world of (legal) digital music distribution, Apple has nowadays at least as much marketshare and influence, as MS ever had for desktop OSs. And whereas MS steadily loses its market share every day, Apple keeps gaining more and more, with hardly any end in sight.
I can install Firefox and VNC on OSX any time I want.
Your statement reminds me of the old Soviet joke "I too can go to the Red Square and say that Reagan is an idiot, and nothing will happen to me". VLC (thats what I meant to say, was a typo) and FF are not competitors to Apple's business model, just like iTunes isn't a competitor to Windows. The bottom line is that Apple blocks what it percieves to hurt its business in an uncompetitive way. Music competitors to Apple is as Firefox/VLC is to MS. If we wouldn't tolerate MS blocking Firefox on Windows, we shouldn't tolerate Apple blocking a competitor to iTunes on iPhone/Pod.
Microsoft got almost split up (in addition to paying huge fines here and especially in the EU) for doing the much more harmless thing of preferential bundling of several of their products (notably the various combos of Win, IE, and WMP). Here we have a company which, forget BUNDLING their products together and giving it preferential treatment, but actually ACTIVELY BLOCKING competitors from using their platform.
Hello? WTF? Can you imagine what would happen if MS decided to block Firefox or VNC from any Windows platform, and allow only 1 web browser and only 1 media player? But Apple is doing exactly that, yet they are getting away with it and everyone turns a blind eye.
Apple is long due for the chopping procedure. Split Apple hardware (including MAC/Iphone platforms) and Apple software (OSX, iTunes) into different companies, and prohibit them from merging again. Because what they are doing is anticompetitive in pretty much every legal meaning of the term.
Nitrates don't need to be harmless, nor there needs to be zero side effects. All that's needed is that the combined damage produced by any side effects must be less than the damage produced by the excess carbon dioxide in lieu of said concrete.
Funny how any time there is a proposed innovation to solve a problem, there are always nitpickers who point out side effects without considering their proportion compared to the original problem being solved. A solution either offers a net benefit, or it doesn't.
>They have it run hot because it can run hot without ill effects.
My computer, maybe, but not me. I'd much rather live in a room that doesn't feel like a sauna.
How do we know that the app we use indeed came from the source they say it did?
With desktop app, one could compile and take an MD5, or just compile and compare to the binaries distributed, or just not use the binaries at all and compile from source for their own use.
With a web app, even if we had the source, we'd still be connecting to a 3-rd party HTTP server, and there is really no way to verify how the "real" program is run.
For a system like Hawkeye to be useful, it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to consistently be more accurate and impartial than a referee can be.
Nor is it required for the system to be fully automatic and autonomic. Referees can sit in front of their monitors, observe the cameras from all angles, with any time slowdown, and ultimately come to a better decision than a single person could make while the ball buzzes past them at Warp 9.
But from the social aspect, one has to decide on what is the referee's role, and what kind of influence, if any, do we want to delegate to a computer. And that depends on the type of sport.
For non-interactive sports such as sprinting, an automatic system works very efficiently, and most people readily accept it as better than a human time tracker.
But for many GAME sports (soccer and boxing come to mind) many people consider that a referee is PART of the game rather than just an observer. As long as a referee is comparatively competent, and acts in good faith, he has the authority to judge events in the game, and while mistakes are unavoidable, they are considered part of the game as well.
I'm not sure why this position is popular in these kinds of sports. Maybe it's the whole "humans should be judged by humans and not machines" aspect. Or maybe it's because having a Review Comission in front of CCTV monitors be judging every little move just feels too 1984-rish for spectators and players alike. Or maybe its something else. But this is a rather popular feeling.
Depending on the features and benchmarks of the electronic system, it may or may not be more accurate than a human observer. In the long term, a joint human-computer analysis system would be certainly more accurate than a human referee alone, especially in team or high-speed sports. But one has to ultimately question, whether, by gaining mathematical precision, we lost some human touch of sport that makes it enjoyable to play and watch. Fun can't be generated with a mathematical formula. And sometimes sitting on the couch and thinking "OMG that referee is such a dumbass" is part of the fun as well.
A defect, by definition, is an unintended behavior of a program. Something was designed to work, but for whatever reason, doesn't. Compare this to a lack of a feature, which means that something doesn't work because there was never the intention for it to work in the first place.
A buffer overflow or SQL injection related issue is almost definitely a defect, since there is a dedicated, designed parsing mechanism to process input, and if some types of inputs are not processed as intended, it is a defect of the software.
On the other hand, for example, a security issue arising from plaintext transmission of sensitive data over the net, is not necessarily a defect. If the site in question was never designed to use SSL or another encryption mechanism, then it's a lack of a feature. If the site in question is an online banking site, then it is a blatantly poor and inexcusable design shortcoming, but nontheless, not a defect. (Of course, if the site DID intend SSL to work properly, but for whatever reason there is a hole allowing to crack or circumvent the encryption, then it IS a defect).
Besides, assigning a "defect" status to a security issue is not necessarily useful for it's own sake. The understanding is that a responsible company should treat a security issue with much higher priority than a non-security related one, defect or not (compare "we released an emergency hotfix to download" to a "we'll ship the patch in the next release cycle"). Saying a security issue is a defect, is like saying that a cardiac arrest is "organ numbness" - true, but not very useful.
The 9800GX2 card is made up of two 9600GT cards in quasi-SLI (as in dual everything but don't require 2 slots). Individually, each of those is inferior to a single 9800GTX, but the 9800GX2, which puts 2 of those together,(usually) beats a single 9800GTX.
If the GTX280 card outperforms two 9800GTXs, it'll be vastly superior to the GX2.
And about time, may I say. The last major increase in performance was the 8800 series. The 9800s were just marginally better, and while they support DX10, who needs that when games under the wonderful OS Vista run twice as slow than they do on XP?
If it becomes illegal to charge a penalty for early termination, I imagine they'll change the scheme to something like this:
- The "free" phone that is given to you in exchange for signing a 3-year contract, instead becomes a "lease" - You must give a "deposit" in exchange for the lease. The deposit is equal to the cost of the phone that they would sell it for, should you choose to buy it without a contract - They'll conveniently offer you an instant loan to cover the cost of the lease. So you don't have to shell out those $300 bucks, you just "owe" them to the company. - Each time you pay your plan, part of the money is used to cover that deposit loan. If you finish your 3-year contract, the owed amount becomes 0, and you get to keep the phone. - If you leave early, they charge you the remainder of the loan.
They'll just wrap it all in the same kind of contract you sign without reading anyways, and for most customers it won't be any different in how or how much they pay, compared to the current system. But from the legal perspective, it suddenly becomes a whole new ball game.
Yes your child could have been saved with just a few pills but we didn't want to contaminate you.
Yes, as opposed to million of African children who die of malaria every year despite the fact that the aforementioned few pills could have easily saved them?
Yes you could see what some of the lights in the sky really do look like.
Yes, as opposed to the 95% percent of world population that will never see anything except the dirt they are digging or the nike shoes going past them in the assembly line? Forget about luxuries like university education, even things like books and the fucking internet is out of reach for most of the world's people.
You could meet people from far across the sea and you two could fly through the air.
Yes, as opposed to the millions of refugees who can't leave their war-striken country because nobody will give them a visa? Forget the plane or ship, they can't even leave on foot!
But we don't want to contaminate you.
I see your point, but by suggesting that we have some enlightened duty to help those "stone age" people, you are in fact using the same preferential treatment you are accusing others to have against them. There are hundreds of millions of poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in the world, who would GLADLY accept our help. Hell, there are many poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in our own fucking country. Help THEM out before you boldly take your morals to where no man has gone before.
True, you can put together a lot of composite pictures to achieve an arbitrary size and resolution. You can legitimately call the result a gigapixel picture (if it reaches the resolution requirement, of course). But that shouldn't be confused with a gigapixel camera, and in and by itself is not actually that impressive.
For example, if you take the entire photoset of Google Earth, you'd probably get a few peta-pixels worth of data. Ultimately, it all boils down to how much of that data is needed at any given time. You might need a low-detail, large-area image (e.g. view of Earth as a whole), or a high-detail, small-area image of your backyard. In either case, you wouldn't need more than at most a few dozen megapixels at any given time. It's unlikely anyone ever needs more than that size, whether they are studying galaxies or atoms, because the more detail you need, the less physical area you need covered, and vice versa.
I agree with those that said that in order to "hack" the pacemaker you have to be at a very close range to the victim. At this range, you could just as easily stab or shoot them. As a more general rule, apart from a select few VIP figures, there is nothing we can do to prevent someone from carrying out a murder if they want to, the only thing we can do is punish them after the fact and hope it serves as deterrent for others.
What IS a problem is that unlike other means to kill a person at close range, this method is rather subvert, and unless you are an expert at recognizing behavior and/or expect the victim to be targeted, you will probably not even notice the attack took place. Picture this: a man walks by another man, with a wireless device in his pocket and already pre-configured to carry out the attack. They each go their own ways, and seconds later the other man has a heart attack. The pacemaker is likely not to keep any logs that can reveal the nature of the "hack". So unless you find the equipment used for "hacking" and can tie it to the attacker, you have very little evidence to charge them with.
At this point the technique is so unknown that it is unlikely to be used as an attack option by anyone other than professional assassins. But this can change. If someone writes software that can work on a device like a PDA or cellphone, we may well have "script kiddies" who know nothing about hacking but just download and use the software for any reason they have.
We have a much milder precedent of this kind of abuse - some new traffic lights have wireless detectors to detect a special signal used by emergency vehicles and turn the lights green. Some people abuse this technology to just get a green light whereever they drive. Few get caught, and those who do get really laughable sentences, like a small fine with no jail time, perhaps a license suspension, but that's about it.
So in the long run, yes, I think we should have some kind of encryption or other security on the pacemakers. Of course, this has to be balanced with cost and speed issues for doctors to be able to treat patients.
As for punishment for this kind of offense, a "hacking" charge is just the icing on the cake. Tampering with life support equipment, whether via hacking or not, can result in charges from aggravated assault to attempted murder/manslaughter. I wouldn't envy someone who gets caught doing this, whatever their intentions are, as chances are they'll spend a lot of years behind bars for this.
Operator : "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut . May I have your order?" Customer: "Hello, can I order.." Operator : "Can I have your multi purpose card number first, Sir?" Customer: "It's eh..., hold on....6102049998-45-54610" Operator : "OK... you're... Mr. Sheehan and you're calling from 17 Meadow Drive. Your home number is 494 2366, your office 745 2302 and your mobile is 014 266 2566. Would you like to have the delivery made to 17 Meadow Drive? Customer: "Yes, how did you get all my phone numbers?" Operator : "We are connected to the system Sir" Customer: "May I order your Seafood Pizza..." Operator : "That's not a good idea Sir" Customer: "How come?" Operator : "According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir" Customer: "What?... What do you recommend then?" Operator : "Try our Low Fat Soybean Yogurt Pizza.You'll like it" Customer: "How do you know for sure?" Operator : "You borrowed a book entitled "Popular Soybean Yogurt Dishes" from the National Library last week Sir" Customer: "OK I give up... Give me three family sized ones then, how much will that cost? Operator : "That should be enough for your family of 10, Sir. The total is $ 49.99 Customer: "Can I pay by credit card?" Operator : "I'm afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you're owing your bank $3720.55 since October last year" Operator : "That's not including the late payment charges on your housing loan Sir. Customer: "I guess I have to run to the neighborhood ATM and withdraw Some cash before your guy arrives" Operator : "You can't do that Sir. Based on the records, you've reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today" Customer: "Never mind just send the pizzas, I'll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?" Operator : "About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can't wait you can always come and collect it on your motorcycle..." Customer: " What the..?" Operator : "According to the details in system, you own a Harley,...registration number E1123..." Customer: "@#%/$@&?#" Operator : "Better watch your language Sir. Remember on 15th July 1987 You were convicted of using abusive language to a policeman... Customer:( Speechless) Operator : "Is there anything else Sir?" Customer: "Nothing... by the way... aren't you giving me that 3 free bottles of Pepsi as advertised?" Operator : "We normally would Sir, but based on your records you're also diabetic....... "
What is it about run-of-the-mill brick-and-mortar libraries, in their current form, that offer a substantial benefit to society over online sources? I can think of dozens of drawbacks, but it's much harder for me to see the advantages.
Just because some neo-luddite English teachers freak out at the mere sound of the word "Internet" and consider it an abomination that destroys "proper education" doesn't mean the rest of society should care. A certain amount of significant libraries (such as the Library of Congress) do serve useful purposes (historic, legal, cultural, etc.), but they aren't the one that suffer the threat of extinction anyways - it's the everyday district branch libraries which are at stake here. And they wouldn't be on their way to extinction if they actually offered some advantages over their electronic counterpart.
I CAN see ways that libraries become "social hubs" where people physically meet to share and learn ideas, something that can't be done as well over the Internet. Maybe we'll see some of these new-generation brick-and-mortar libraries, which would be renamed to "educational centers" (akin to cultural centers). But the old concept of the "quiet library" with the disciplinarian librarian saying "shhh" every time someone opens their mouth, is on the way out, and, may I say, good riddance.
According to Russian copyright law, "purely informational reports on events and facts are not copyrightable". The copyright on the code itself belongs to RP (and copyright to all other flaws discovered by this Russian company belong to their respective owners), and the simple informational fact of knowledge about flaw is not subject to copyright.
RP can legally subscribe to be a "customer" of this security firm, and then just take all information they deliver, and pass it on to all parties involved (in other words, send flaws to all companies whose code has a vulnerability the relevant information). Several companies can team up and split the "subscription fee".
Consider this to be the security (and legal) version of ripping a pay porn site and dumping the contents on eMule. The Russian company won't go far with a single paying subscriber.
For y'all bashers saying that "a geek will never be an artist", here's an example of a man who was both a genius artist and a genius engineer.
Of course, not all of us can get even close to the ability that guy had (in terms of universal talent, I don't think he's ever been topped by anyone in history, before or after him). But Leonardo's biggest advantage is that he did not divide the world into "art" and "science". Nothing was irrelevant for him, or outside of his range of capability. He never said "it's not my job" to anything, and therefore did not shackle himself with prejudice that would restrain his talent.
To the original poster: don't succumb to the "it's not my job" mentality. If you are a one man show, EVERYTHING is your job. And yes, a coder who wants to learn the basics of design will never be as profound as a professional designer, and at first his design WILL look like it came from a 3-year-olds drawing album, but that does NOT mean he shouldn't keep learning. And I'll also say the same thing in the vice versa scenario (a graphical artist who tries to grasp the fundamentals of coding), even if at first his results will look like they came from thedailywtf. Practice makes perfect.
Above all, don't succumb to trolls and haters who in their prejudice divide the whole world into "us" and "them", and vehemently oppose any "cultural interbreeding" between the realms of art and science.
So never say "it's not my job", and let Leonardo be an inspiration to you. The World is only limited by your imagination and willingness to learn, and the particular field of study is much less restrictive than certain people would want you to believe.
If you are stupid enough to walk in the alley at night, you deserve to be mugged or raped. The mugger or rapist is just doing public service by educating you about the dangers. Right?
A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc). The spamming sentence seems to be just the icing on the cake, powerless to have any real effect on its own. It may be adding insult to injury to the criminal, but it's not what nails them in the first place.
The obvious problem with that is that the current system can only deal with people who commit other crimes while spamming, and while a lot certainly do, there are many spammers that don't break these laws and thus get away with the spam itself. Not to mention that proving something like money laundering is MUCH harder for the prosecution than proving spamming.
Y'all Slashdotters complain that the the laws which do and shouldn't (or don't and should) get passed/enforced are because of evil greedy corporations pulling the politicians' strings. Well, here's a question for you. EVERYONE hates spammers (other than spammers themselves). End users like you and me who already got offered to enlarge their penises so often that you could make a space elevator out of one, large corporations whose trademarks get infringed on with fake v14gr4 and bring bad reputation, businesses who lose hundreds of manhours digging through spam in their inboxes, ISPs who's bandwidth gets clogged up (and thus the subscribers of those ISPs as well)... Just about everyone, rich or poor, peon or king, hates spam, and large corporations are as eager as end users to get their governments to do something about it. It's a rare case when nobody is trying to sabotage each other, and everyone has the same goal - stamp out spam.
YET SPAM KEEPS GROWING BIGGER EVERY DAY, AND NOTHING GETS DONE. As I previously described, the current anti-spam laws are a joke when it comes to enforcement, and are only applied to people who get convicted on so many other counts they won't even feel this final punch.
Slashdot Mirror
that "Stories in video games are like stories in porn movies -- just a pretext to get to the action"
So far the issues of DRM have mostly been raised by privacy advocates and geeks, with most of the rest simply not caring. DRM, as with copyright in general, is confined to the digital world, and the common attitude is "unless you are a pirate, you shouldn't care, right?".
If Apple does pursue this through the courts, it can change public opinion. A lot of people would think, "Getting sued for fixing up your own shoes? WTF", and perceive the lawsuit as frivolous, or, best of all, finally seeing that the grave shackle effects of DRM spread far beyond the digital world. People will seriously question DRM laws if they realize that they are breaking them day after day with routine, normal, and perfectly acceptable life activities.
You overlook something critical. Apple does not have a monopoly. Rules are different for monopolies, pure and simple.
This used to be the case, but not anymore. In the world of (legal) digital music distribution, Apple has nowadays at least as much marketshare and influence, as MS ever had for desktop OSs. And whereas MS steadily loses its market share every day, Apple keeps gaining more and more, with hardly any end in sight.
I can install Firefox and VNC on OSX any time I want.
Your statement reminds me of the old Soviet joke "I too can go to the Red Square and say that Reagan is an idiot, and nothing will happen to me". VLC (thats what I meant to say, was a typo) and FF are not competitors to Apple's business model, just like iTunes isn't a competitor to Windows. The bottom line is that Apple blocks what it percieves to hurt its business in an uncompetitive way. Music competitors to Apple is as Firefox/VLC is to MS. If we wouldn't tolerate MS blocking Firefox on Windows, we shouldn't tolerate Apple blocking a competitor to iTunes on iPhone/Pod.
Microsoft got almost split up (in addition to paying huge fines here and especially in the EU) for doing the much more harmless thing of preferential bundling of several of their products (notably the various combos of Win, IE, and WMP). Here we have a company which, forget BUNDLING their products together and giving it preferential treatment, but actually ACTIVELY BLOCKING competitors from using their platform.
Hello? WTF? Can you imagine what would happen if MS decided to block Firefox or VNC from any Windows platform, and allow only 1 web browser and only 1 media player? But Apple is doing exactly that, yet they are getting away with it and everyone turns a blind eye.
Apple is long due for the chopping procedure. Split Apple hardware (including MAC/Iphone platforms) and Apple software (OSX, iTunes) into different companies, and prohibit them from merging again. Because what they are doing is anticompetitive in pretty much every legal meaning of the term.
The government already worries about those things, which is why we have an efficient judiciary, low crime rates, and a military that's winning wars.
Oh wait...
Nitrates don't need to be harmless, nor there needs to be zero side effects. All that's needed is that the combined damage produced by any side effects must be less than the damage produced by the excess carbon dioxide in lieu of said concrete.
Funny how any time there is a proposed innovation to solve a problem, there are always nitpickers who point out side effects without considering their proportion compared to the original problem being solved. A solution either offers a net benefit, or it doesn't.
>They have it run hot because it can run hot without ill effects. My computer, maybe, but not me. I'd much rather live in a room that doesn't feel like a sauna.
How do we know that the app we use indeed came from the source they say it did?
With desktop app, one could compile and take an MD5, or just compile and compare to the binaries distributed, or just not use the binaries at all and compile from source for their own use.
With a web app, even if we had the source, we'd still be connecting to a 3-rd party HTTP server, and there is really no way to verify how the "real" program is run.
For a system like Hawkeye to be useful, it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to consistently be more accurate and impartial than a referee can be.
Nor is it required for the system to be fully automatic and autonomic. Referees can sit in front of their monitors, observe the cameras from all angles, with any time slowdown, and ultimately come to a better decision than a single person could make while the ball buzzes past them at Warp 9.
But from the social aspect, one has to decide on what is the referee's role, and what kind of influence, if any, do we want to delegate to a computer. And that depends on the type of sport.
For non-interactive sports such as sprinting, an automatic system works very efficiently, and most people readily accept it as better than a human time tracker.
But for many GAME sports (soccer and boxing come to mind) many people consider that a referee is PART of the game rather than just an observer. As long as a referee is comparatively competent, and acts in good faith, he has the authority to judge events in the game, and while mistakes are unavoidable, they are considered part of the game as well.
I'm not sure why this position is popular in these kinds of sports. Maybe it's the whole "humans should be judged by humans and not machines" aspect. Or maybe it's because having a Review Comission in front of CCTV monitors be judging every little move just feels too 1984-rish for spectators and players alike. Or maybe its something else. But this is a rather popular feeling.
Depending on the features and benchmarks of the electronic system, it may or may not be more accurate than a human observer. In the long term, a joint human-computer analysis system would be certainly more accurate than a human referee alone, especially in team or high-speed sports. But one has to ultimately question, whether, by gaining mathematical precision, we lost some human touch of sport that makes it enjoyable to play and watch. Fun can't be generated with a mathematical formula. And sometimes sitting on the couch and thinking "OMG that referee is such a dumbass" is part of the fun as well.
...the nature of the security issue.
A defect, by definition, is an unintended behavior of a program. Something was designed to work, but for whatever reason, doesn't. Compare this to a lack of a feature, which means that something doesn't work because there was never the intention for it to work in the first place.
A buffer overflow or SQL injection related issue is almost definitely a defect, since there is a dedicated, designed parsing mechanism to process input, and if some types of inputs are not processed as intended, it is a defect of the software.
On the other hand, for example, a security issue arising from plaintext transmission of sensitive data over the net, is not necessarily a defect. If the site in question was never designed to use SSL or another encryption mechanism, then it's a lack of a feature. If the site in question is an online banking site, then it is a blatantly poor and inexcusable design shortcoming, but nontheless, not a defect. (Of course, if the site DID intend SSL to work properly, but for whatever reason there is a hole allowing to crack or circumvent the encryption, then it IS a defect).
Besides, assigning a "defect" status to a security issue is not necessarily useful for it's own sake. The understanding is that a responsible company should treat a security issue with much higher priority than a non-security related one, defect or not (compare "we released an emergency hotfix to download" to a "we'll ship the patch in the next release cycle"). Saying a security issue is a defect, is like saying that a cardiac arrest is "organ numbness" - true, but not very useful.
The 9800GX2 card is made up of two 9600GT cards in quasi-SLI (as in dual everything but don't require 2 slots). Individually, each of those is inferior to a single 9800GTX, but the 9800GX2, which puts 2 of those together,(usually) beats a single 9800GTX.
If the GTX280 card outperforms two 9800GTXs, it'll be vastly superior to the GX2.
And about time, may I say. The last major increase in performance was the 8800 series. The 9800s were just marginally better, and while they support DX10, who needs that when games under the wonderful OS Vista run twice as slow than they do on XP?
"What do I need to remotely administer my server?"
"Wireless keyboard and mouse."
"But it's really far away!"
"Binoculars too, then."
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2239/1801128557_043a923ea2.jpg
If it becomes illegal to charge a penalty for early termination, I imagine they'll change the scheme to something like this:
- The "free" phone that is given to you in exchange for signing a 3-year contract, instead becomes a "lease"
- You must give a "deposit" in exchange for the lease. The deposit is equal to the cost of the phone that they would sell it for, should you choose to buy it without a contract
- They'll conveniently offer you an instant loan to cover the cost of the lease. So you don't have to shell out those $300 bucks, you just "owe" them to the company.
- Each time you pay your plan, part of the money is used to cover that deposit loan. If you finish your 3-year contract, the owed amount becomes 0, and you get to keep the phone.
- If you leave early, they charge you the remainder of the loan.
They'll just wrap it all in the same kind of contract you sign without reading anyways, and for most customers it won't be any different in how or how much they pay, compared to the current system. But from the legal perspective, it suddenly becomes a whole new ball game.
Yes your child could have been saved with just a few pills but we didn't want to contaminate you.
Yes, as opposed to million of African children who die of malaria every year despite the fact that the aforementioned few pills could have easily saved them?
Yes you could see what some of the lights in the sky really do look like.
Yes, as opposed to the 95% percent of world population that will never see anything except the dirt they are digging or the nike shoes going past them in the assembly line? Forget about luxuries like university education, even things like books and the fucking internet is out of reach for most of the world's people.
You could meet people from far across the sea and you two could fly through the air.
Yes, as opposed to the millions of refugees who can't leave their war-striken country because nobody will give them a visa? Forget the plane or ship, they can't even leave on foot!
But we don't want to contaminate you.
I see your point, but by suggesting that we have some enlightened duty to help those "stone age" people, you are in fact using the same preferential treatment you are accusing others to have against them. There are hundreds of millions of poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in the world, who would GLADLY accept our help. Hell, there are many poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in our own fucking country. Help THEM out before you boldly take your morals to where no man has gone before.
True, you can put together a lot of composite pictures to achieve an arbitrary size and resolution. You can legitimately call the result a gigapixel picture (if it reaches the resolution requirement, of course). But that shouldn't be confused with a gigapixel camera, and in and by itself is not actually that impressive.
For example, if you take the entire photoset of Google Earth, you'd probably get a few peta-pixels worth of data. Ultimately, it all boils down to how much of that data is needed at any given time. You might need a low-detail, large-area image (e.g. view of Earth as a whole), or a high-detail, small-area image of your backyard. In either case, you wouldn't need more than at most a few dozen megapixels at any given time. It's unlikely anyone ever needs more than that size, whether they are studying galaxies or atoms, because the more detail you need, the less physical area you need covered, and vice versa.
Is Mathematics Discovered Or Invented?
Neither. It is defined.
Time to break out all the 'robotic overlords' jokes.
I agree with those that said that in order to "hack" the pacemaker you have to be at a very close range to the victim. At this range, you could just as easily stab or shoot them. As a more general rule, apart from a select few VIP figures, there is nothing we can do to prevent someone from carrying out a murder if they want to, the only thing we can do is punish them after the fact and hope it serves as deterrent for others.
What IS a problem is that unlike other means to kill a person at close range, this method is rather subvert, and unless you are an expert at recognizing behavior and/or expect the victim to be targeted, you will probably not even notice the attack took place. Picture this: a man walks by another man, with a wireless device in his pocket and already pre-configured to carry out the attack. They each go their own ways, and seconds later the other man has a heart attack. The pacemaker is likely not to keep any logs that can reveal the nature of the "hack". So unless you find the equipment used for "hacking" and can tie it to the attacker, you have very little evidence to charge them with.
At this point the technique is so unknown that it is unlikely to be used as an attack option by anyone other than professional assassins. But this can change. If someone writes software that can work on a device like a PDA or cellphone, we may well have "script kiddies" who know nothing about hacking but just download and use the software for any reason they have.
We have a much milder precedent of this kind of abuse - some new traffic lights have wireless detectors to detect a special signal used by emergency vehicles and turn the lights green. Some people abuse this technology to just get a green light whereever they drive. Few get caught, and those who do get really laughable sentences, like a small fine with no jail time, perhaps a license suspension, but that's about it.
So in the long run, yes, I think we should have some kind of encryption or other security on the pacemakers. Of course, this has to be balanced with cost and speed issues for doctors to be able to treat patients.
As for punishment for this kind of offense, a "hacking" charge is just the icing on the cake. Tampering with life support equipment, whether via hacking or not, can result in charges from aggravated assault to attempted murder/manslaughter. I wouldn't envy someone who gets caught doing this, whatever their intentions are, as chances are they'll spend a lot of years behind bars for this.
Operator : "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut . May I have your order?"
Customer: "Hello, can I order.."
Operator : "Can I have your multi purpose card number first, Sir?"
Customer: "It's eh..., hold on....6102049998-45-54610"
Operator : "OK... you're... Mr. Sheehan and you're calling from 17 Meadow Drive. Your home number is 494 2366, your office 745 2302 and your mobile is 014 266 2566. Would you like to have the delivery made to 17 Meadow Drive?
Customer: "Yes, how did you get all my phone numbers?"
Operator : "We are connected to the system Sir"
Customer: "May I order your Seafood Pizza..."
Operator : "That's not a good idea Sir"
Customer: "How come?"
Operator : "According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir"
Customer: "What?... What do you recommend then?"
Operator : "Try our Low Fat Soybean Yogurt Pizza.You'll like it"
Customer: "How do you know for sure?" Operator : "You borrowed a book entitled "Popular Soybean Yogurt Dishes" from the National Library last week Sir"
Customer: "OK I give up... Give me three family sized ones then, how much will that cost?
Operator : "That should be enough for your family of 10, Sir. The total is $ 49.99
Customer: "Can I pay by credit card?"
Operator : "I'm afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you're owing your bank $3720.55 since October last year"
Operator : "That's not including the late payment charges on your housing loan Sir.
Customer: "I guess I have to run to the neighborhood ATM and withdraw Some cash before your guy arrives"
Operator : "You can't do that Sir. Based on the records, you've reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today"
Customer: "Never mind just send the pizzas, I'll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?"
Operator : "About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can't wait you can always come and collect it on your motorcycle..."
Customer: " What the..?"
Operator : "According to the details in system, you own a Harley,...registration number E1123..."
Customer: "@#%/$@&?#"
Operator : "Better watch your language Sir. Remember on 15th July 1987 You were convicted of using abusive language to a policeman...
Customer:( Speechless)
Operator : "Is there anything else Sir?"
Customer: "Nothing... by the way... aren't you giving me that 3 free bottles of Pepsi as advertised?"
Operator : "We normally would Sir, but based on your records you're also diabetic....... "
What is it about run-of-the-mill brick-and-mortar libraries, in their current form, that offer a substantial benefit to society over online sources? I can think of dozens of drawbacks, but it's much harder for me to see the advantages.
Just because some neo-luddite English teachers freak out at the mere sound of the word "Internet" and consider it an abomination that destroys "proper education" doesn't mean the rest of society should care. A certain amount of significant libraries (such as the Library of Congress) do serve useful purposes (historic, legal, cultural, etc.), but they aren't the one that suffer the threat of extinction anyways - it's the everyday district branch libraries which are at stake here. And they wouldn't be on their way to extinction if they actually offered some advantages over their electronic counterpart.
I CAN see ways that libraries become "social hubs" where people physically meet to share and learn ideas, something that can't be done as well over the Internet. Maybe we'll see some of these new-generation brick-and-mortar libraries, which would be renamed to "educational centers" (akin to cultural centers). But the old concept of the "quiet library" with the disciplinarian librarian saying "shhh" every time someone opens their mouth, is on the way out, and, may I say, good riddance.
According to Russian copyright law, "purely informational reports on events and facts are not copyrightable". The copyright on the code itself belongs to RP (and copyright to all other flaws discovered by this Russian company belong to their respective owners), and the simple informational fact of knowledge about flaw is not subject to copyright.
RP can legally subscribe to be a "customer" of this security firm, and then just take all information they deliver, and pass it on to all parties involved (in other words, send flaws to all companies whose code has a vulnerability the relevant information). Several companies can team up and split the "subscription fee".
Consider this to be the security (and legal) version of ripping a pay porn site and dumping the contents on eMule. The Russian company won't go far with a single paying subscriber.
For y'all bashers saying that "a geek will never be an artist", here's an example of a man who was both a genius artist and a genius engineer.
Of course, not all of us can get even close to the ability that guy had (in terms of universal talent, I don't think he's ever been topped by anyone in history, before or after him). But Leonardo's biggest advantage is that he did not divide the world into "art" and "science". Nothing was irrelevant for him, or outside of his range of capability. He never said "it's not my job" to anything, and therefore did not shackle himself with prejudice that would restrain his talent.
To the original poster: don't succumb to the "it's not my job" mentality. If you are a one man show, EVERYTHING is your job. And yes, a coder who wants to learn the basics of design will never be as profound as a professional designer, and at first his design WILL look like it came from a 3-year-olds drawing album, but that does NOT mean he shouldn't keep learning. And I'll also say the same thing in the vice versa scenario (a graphical artist who tries to grasp the fundamentals of coding), even if at first his results will look like they came from thedailywtf. Practice makes perfect.
Above all, don't succumb to trolls and haters who in their prejudice divide the whole world into "us" and "them", and vehemently oppose any "cultural interbreeding" between the realms of art and science.
So never say "it's not my job", and let Leonardo be an inspiration to you. The World is only limited by your imagination and willingness to learn, and the particular field of study is much less restrictive than certain people would want you to believe.
If you are stupid enough to walk in the alley at night, you deserve to be mugged or raped. The mugger or rapist is just doing public service by educating you about the dangers. Right?
A conviction where the majority of the sentence came from the spamming law rather than all the other ones (fraud, laundering, etc). The spamming sentence seems to be just the icing on the cake, powerless to have any real effect on its own. It may be adding insult to injury to the criminal, but it's not what nails them in the first place.
The obvious problem with that is that the current system can only deal with people who commit other crimes while spamming, and while a lot certainly do, there are many spammers that don't break these laws and thus get away with the spam itself. Not to mention that proving something like money laundering is MUCH harder for the prosecution than proving spamming.
Y'all Slashdotters complain that the the laws which do and shouldn't (or don't and should) get passed/enforced are because of evil greedy corporations pulling the politicians' strings. Well, here's a question for you. EVERYONE hates spammers (other than spammers themselves). End users like you and me who already got offered to enlarge their penises so often that you could make a space elevator out of one, large corporations whose trademarks get infringed on with fake v14gr4 and bring bad reputation, businesses who lose hundreds of manhours digging through spam in their inboxes, ISPs who's bandwidth gets clogged up (and thus the subscribers of those ISPs as well)... Just about everyone, rich or poor, peon or king, hates spam, and large corporations are as eager as end users to get their governments to do something about it. It's a rare case when nobody is trying to sabotage each other, and everyone has the same goal - stamp out spam.
YET SPAM KEEPS GROWING BIGGER EVERY DAY, AND NOTHING GETS DONE. As I previously described, the current anti-spam laws are a joke when it comes to enforcement, and are only applied to people who get convicted on so many other counts they won't even feel this final punch.
My question is... WHY?