My latest piracy - entirely legal here in Switzerland, by the way - was to download a very nicely formatted complete set of the Harry Potter ebooks. Our family owns the entire set of books as dead-tree editions, but we wanted the option to re-read them as ebooks.
Why piracy? I would have happily paid for ebooks (assuming a reasonable price), and I was looking forward to the promised release date of last fall (even though this was ten years after publication of the first book). However, the official ebooks are still not available, and the release date has been pushed a year into the future. So I gave up, and downloaded them from a link on TPB.
If publishers (and authors, and musicians, and labels) want to end piracy, it's really simple!. Clue bat: (a) make your material available, (b) DRM-free, (c) at reasonable prices. Start with step (a). The stuff I have pirated is all material that I cannot otherwise get. As long as these idiots continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot, piracy will thrive.
No - she went to jail for lying to an investigator, in a one-on-one session, with no recording or any evidence except for the FBI investigator's handwritten notes. She was not under oath. Martha Stewart is also not by any means the only person in the USA to go to jail for this.
This is pretty much what the 5th amendment prohibits. You cannot be forced to provide testimony against yourself. From an armchair lawyer's perspective providing evidence against yourself is much the same thing. "You are required to hand over the murder weapon" - if you do, you have essentially confessed to the crime.
Do any/. lawyers have legal references about this sort of thing?
Something I have always wondered: Suppose they do manage to decrypt her disk (or in another case, the disk isn't even encrypted). What prevents them from planting a couple of incriminating files? How could you ever prove it?
The entire point of the fifth amendment is that you cannot be compelled to provide evidence against yourself. The prosecutor may ask you "where's the body", but you do not have to answer; importantly: refusal to answer cannot be taken as proof of guilt. In the end, the prosecutor has to go find the evidence, to bring it at trial. Here, it is really much the same: The prosecutor may ask you "give us all your incriminating files", and you do not have to do so. If you don't, the prosecutor has the task of getting the files without your aid.
The prosecutor in the case whines that, if the defendant isn't required to decrypt her disk, any criminal could just encrypt anything. He is clearly (probably deliberately) missing the point. The entire intent of the fifth amendment is you do not have to help prosecute yourself.
This ruling will almost certainly be overturned on appeal, unless the defendant's lawyers are incompetent. They will probably be able to get support from the EFF.
Really, this was inevitable, and this first implementation is just a first step. Future versions will undoubtedly include more functionality.
Current processors are ridiculously complicated. If you can knock out the entire cache with all of its logic, give the processor direct access to memory, and stick to a RISC design, you can get a very nice processor in under a million transistors.
Actually, you don't. Some 95% of criminal cases in America end with a plea bargain. This is one of the reasons that prosecutors throw a million charges at someone - so they can offer to drop most of those charges if only you'll save them the trouble of a trial. If you want to defend yourself, they throw not only the book, but the whole #$%@# library at you.
No one else seems to have asked the question: Why is the Food and Drug Administration even involved? Keyboards are not food, and UV is not a drug. The company intends to use the FDA approval (of what, exactly?) to to leverage this this $900 idiocy into hospitals.
Did you know: many keyboards do just fine in the dishwasher, as long as you let them dry thoroughly afterwards. For those that don't? You can destroy a lot of normal keyboards before spending $900 for a gimmick.
You just know that these figures have been massively inflates, but let's take them at face value and do some some math:
In the USA people drive 3 trillion miles per year, 100,000 accidents, so there is one relevant accident per 30 million miles driven. One accident for every 10,000 times you drive across the entire country. Here, we clearly have a serious problem.
There are 135 million vehicles on the road, and these accidents supposedly cost $12.5 billion per year, so it would be worth spending as much as $92 per vehicle. If these systems prevent all such accidents and create no new ones.
As an earlier poster mentions, this system is likely to cause accidents all its own - for example, when you are deliberately making a gentle lane change, the system fights you for it, and you (or the system) overreact.
I clicked through TFA to the website about the calendar. Apparently the most important feature (at least, the only one mentioned on the homepage) is the fact that the calendar meets biblical requirements.
If that's the way they feel, their credibility is zero. No need to look any further...
Of course, over a long-term average, the glaciers have been melting since the end of the last ice age. Melting glaciers are much better than the alternative. In other news, the earth continues in its previous orbit.
Don't laugh - I read on a frequent flyer forum several months ago that ice is not a problem, because it is not a liquid. The person posting on the forum claimed to regularly take frozen bottles of water through security. Whether this is a general policy, or only at that person's particular airport, I have no idea.
"The IT dept's worst nightmare are employees who *think* they know better."
Yes, but then you have the reverse situation. Those of us who really do know better, and have technical jobs that need doing - fighting with the IT department's inflexible rules is one battle we just don't need. Yes, IT, I really do need another virtual server. Yes, I really do need to know if/when/how the IT-dept backs the thing up. If IT can't/won't answer the questions, that's an interesting and unique message all its own.
My personal, and most recent favorite: yes, I really need another network cable in my office. Oh, the local switch is full, well, how terrible, now: how are you going to solve that? You aren't going to solve it? I know I'm not allowed to hang a personal switch on the cable, but we're just going to agree that you won't see it, aren't we? Grrr...
Dear bank, sorry, I can't give you the login directly, privacy you know. But (wink, wink) you can find them - just Google for my nickname "Anonymous"...
Just amazing, what statements you can make about such clear data. Many, many studies to date have shown that male and female abilities in mathematics are roughly the same. Nearly as many have shown support for a higher variance amongst males, meaning there are more stupid and more brilliant men. This has been (and is) used as the explanation for the predominance of men at the very top levels of STEM fields.
So...this paper claims "greater male variability...[is] largely [an] artifact of a complex variety of sociocultural factors".
Look at Figure 1.B. in the paper and read their discussion of it. With three only three exceptions - two of which are outliers for other reasons, all of their data supports the variability hypothesis. The same can be seen in Figure 1.C - with the same three exceptions, all of the variance ratios are above 1, with an average around 1.16.
In the end, their data plainly supports the same conclusions drawn by all of the other studies. The sincere desire to reach a PC conclusion apparently blinds the authors to the plain meaning of their own data.
This will undoubtedly be marked troll, but I'll try anyway: No, we are not headed for a wall.
There is a great deal of evidence (if only the media would let you see it) that global temperatures have not risen for more than 10 years. Ice extent in Antarctica is near record levels. Yes, we should avoid trashing our planet. However, climate is complex, and CO2 levels have a vanishingly small impact - except on the funding of particular groups.
None of the climate models yet produced have successfully predicted anything. Tropical storms are not more intense. Sea levels are not rising any faster than they have been since the end of the last ice age. Etc, etc.
So: why should we invest billions and trillions of dollars based on models and predictions that do not work?
The parent isn't funny, it's fricking true. Just today I logged into Gmail and found they had changed my account to the new interface. What the heck, give it a try...
Want to archive a conversation? There's no longer a button labelled "archive" - no, there is now some abstruse icon that some designer thinks I will magically understand to mean "archive". I discover this by hovering the mouse over the various controls until I find it.
Sure, I could learn which icon means "archive", but what's wrong with the word? What is the fascination with icons? Why invent new symbols, when language offers us perfectly functional ones already?
This is an apparently intelligent, certainly successful person - who cannot do basic math. He asks a number of questions - thinking that the answers are rhetorical, but they aren't. BTW, for those who don't RFTA, the guy was lousy on the reading-comprehension as well.
For example: if people can be successful (he has three degrees) and yet unable to answer these math questions, it must obviously be the case that the math is unnecessary or unrealistic. But there are other possible explanations:
- He would be even more successful if he actually had these basic academic skills.
- His success is due to other factors. Maybe he has people skills (i.e., a salesman type). Maybe he knows the right people. Maybe he's just lucky.
- Maybe his academic degrees are actually worthless (he doesn't say what fields they are in).
The thing that is most striking about the sample math questions is that you are allowed to use a calculator, even though they are nothing especially complex. At worst, you have to multiply by numbers like 29. These are the kinds of skills someone needs to balance their checkbook, to plan their annual finances, to do their taxes.
It gets even stranger: more people have died from solar energy accidents (mostly, falling off roofs while installing panels), than have died from nuclear accidents. Of course, ordinary facts can never overcome irrational fears...
For those who don't want to click on the link, the most dangerous (by far) is coal (including deaths due to pollution). Nuclear is the safest. The stats are based on deaths/TWh, and the authors gives lots of references.
Do note that Swiss pay a hefty copying levy. In particular, we pay a fee on the amount of memory in smart phones, iPods, MP3 players, and the like. This fee is supposed to be compensation for the copying that goes on. Since we've paid for it, it is really only fair that we are allowed to copy.
Also note: while downloading is legal, uploading is not.
It depends on what kind of job you have. If your primary duty is dealing with people, real-time contact makes sense. If you are a developer, an engineer, an architect, or anyone else whose job requires concentration, real-time interruptions are a work-killer. Of course, the PHBs of the world generally do not understand this.
Personally, I have 2-3 work-related phone calls per month. Everything else goes by email or a non-interactive web-service.
That said, there is indeed far too much internal email. If someone really cares about the minutes of some departmental meeting, put them on an Intranet site - don't bombard every single employee with a copy. The same for the latest opinion piece of the CEO, the latest changes to company health insurance, etc. - have a central site for company news, which people can look at (or not) if and when they want to.
On a practical level, so what? The robots are all controlled centrally, by remote control. There's nothing hugely special about the technology.
The point of this is art. According to TFA, the flight paths will be programmed to produce arcs, circles, etc - i.e., to look pretty. Might be a nifty exhibit to watch.
Why is a warning necessary? Is it not common knowledge that coffee is hot?
This is the kind of thinking that leads to warning labels like "do not set ladder in mud", "do not use hairdryer while bathing" and similar nonsense. There should be a standard of reasonableness - this has gone lost. Now we have this wonderful feedback cycle going: The courts allow frankly frivolous lawsuits to proceed, people play courts like a lottery, so whenever something bad happens people look around for deep pockets to sue, lawyers find this a great way to make money, later become judges, and allow more frivolous lawsuits through the system...
Perhaps the McDonald's coffee case was justified - there has been so much hype that it's hard to tell. However, the presence of (unnecessary) warning labels would almost certainly not have helped them.
Slashdot Mirror
My latest piracy - entirely legal here in Switzerland, by the way - was to download a very nicely formatted complete set of the Harry Potter ebooks. Our family owns the entire set of books as dead-tree editions, but we wanted the option to re-read them as ebooks.
Why piracy? I would have happily paid for ebooks (assuming a reasonable price), and I was looking forward to the promised release date of last fall (even though this was ten years after publication of the first book). However, the official ebooks are still not available, and the release date has been pushed a year into the future. So I gave up, and downloaded them from a link on TPB.
If publishers (and authors, and musicians, and labels) want to end piracy, it's really simple!. Clue bat: (a) make your material available, (b) DRM-free, (c) at reasonable prices. Start with step (a). The stuff I have pirated is all material that I cannot otherwise get. As long as these idiots continue to shoot themselves in their collective foot, piracy will thrive.
No - she went to jail for lying to an investigator, in a one-on-one session, with no recording or any evidence except for the FBI investigator's handwritten notes. She was not under oath. Martha Stewart is also not by any means the only person in the USA to go to jail for this.
Never talk to the police.
...they are forcing you to deliver up evidence
This is pretty much what the 5th amendment prohibits. You cannot be forced to provide testimony against yourself. From an armchair lawyer's perspective providing evidence against yourself is much the same thing. "You are required to hand over the murder weapon" - if you do, you have essentially confessed to the crime.
Do any /. lawyers have legal references about this sort of thing?
Something I have always wondered: Suppose they do manage to decrypt her disk (or in another case, the disk isn't even encrypted). What prevents them from planting a couple of incriminating files? How could you ever prove it?
There have been too many cases where it seemed, um, convenient for CP to "unexpectedly" turn up on a defendant's computer. To pick a random example out of zillions: "deputies discovered pornographic images of children on Krohl’s personal computer and hard drive during a unrelated investigation". Somehow, this seems to happen a lot. If they are after your marijuana plant, how logical is it to search your computer? "Look what we found! Perhaps you want to plea bargain?"
Want to see how often it happens? Browse through the results of this Google query...
The entire point of the fifth amendment is that you cannot be compelled to provide evidence against yourself. The prosecutor may ask you "where's the body", but you do not have to answer; importantly: refusal to answer cannot be taken as proof of guilt. In the end, the prosecutor has to go find the evidence, to bring it at trial. Here, it is really much the same: The prosecutor may ask you "give us all your incriminating files", and you do not have to do so. If you don't, the prosecutor has the task of getting the files without your aid.
The prosecutor in the case whines that, if the defendant isn't required to decrypt her disk, any criminal could just encrypt anything. He is clearly (probably deliberately) missing the point. The entire intent of the fifth amendment is you do not have to help prosecute yourself.
This ruling will almost certainly be overturned on appeal, unless the defendant's lawyers are incompetent. They will probably be able to get support from the EFF.
Really, this was inevitable, and this first implementation is just a first step. Future versions will undoubtedly include more functionality.
Current processors are ridiculously complicated. If you can knock out the entire cache with all of its logic, give the processor direct access to memory, and stick to a RISC design, you can get a very nice processor in under a million transistors.
Since in America we have trial by jury
Actually, you don't. Some 95% of criminal cases in America end with a plea bargain. This is one of the reasons that prosecutors throw a million charges at someone - so they can offer to drop most of those charges if only you'll save them the trouble of a trial. If you want to defend yourself, they throw not only the book, but the whole #$%@# library at you.
Many, many innocent people have gone to jail because of these tactics.
Numerous questions:
- Do you suppose the patient actually has someone who can do the audit?
- Is it realistic to audit the code without understanding the hardware interface? Probably not, so...
- Are they also going to demand hardware documentation? Free support?
Really, the source code along is not going to buy them much. I wonder what's really going on here?
No one else seems to have asked the question: Why is the Food and Drug Administration even involved? Keyboards are not food, and UV is not a drug. The company intends to use the FDA approval (of what, exactly?) to to leverage this this $900 idiocy into hospitals.
Did you know: many keyboards do just fine in the dishwasher, as long as you let them dry thoroughly afterwards. For those that don't? You can destroy a lot of normal keyboards before spending $900 for a gimmick.
You just know that these figures have been massively inflates, but let's take them at face value and do some some math:
In the USA people drive 3 trillion miles per year, 100,000 accidents, so there is one relevant accident per 30 million miles driven. One accident for every 10,000 times you drive across the entire country. Here, we clearly have a serious problem.
There are 135 million vehicles on the road, and these accidents supposedly cost $12.5 billion per year, so it would be worth spending as much as $92 per vehicle. If these systems prevent all such accidents and create no new ones.
As an earlier poster mentions, this system is likely to cause accidents all its own - for example, when you are deliberately making a gentle lane change, the system fights you for it, and you (or the system) overreact.
I clicked through TFA to the website about the calendar. Apparently the most important feature (at least, the only one mentioned on the homepage) is the fact that the calendar meets biblical requirements.
If that's the way they feel, their credibility is zero. No need to look any further...
Of course, over a long-term average, the glaciers have been melting since the end of the last ice age. Melting glaciers are much better than the alternative. In other news, the earth continues in its previous orbit.
"Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second"
This explains why we've never been able to nail him with anti-aircraft fire...
Don't laugh - I read on a frequent flyer forum several months ago that ice is not a problem, because it is not a liquid. The person posting on the forum claimed to regularly take frozen bottles of water through security. Whether this is a general policy, or only at that person's particular airport, I have no idea.
"The IT dept's worst nightmare are employees who *think* they know better."
Yes, but then you have the reverse situation. Those of us who really do know better, and have technical jobs that need doing - fighting with the IT department's inflexible rules is one battle we just don't need. Yes, IT, I really do need another virtual server. Yes, I really do need to know if/when/how the IT-dept backs the thing up. If IT can't/won't answer the questions, that's an interesting and unique message all its own.
My personal, and most recent favorite: yes, I really need another network cable in my office. Oh, the local switch is full, well, how terrible, now: how are you going to solve that? You aren't going to solve it? I know I'm not allowed to hang a personal switch on the cable, but we're just going to agree that you won't see it, aren't we? Grrr...
Dear bank, sorry, I can't give you the login directly, privacy you know. But (wink, wink) you can find them - just Google for my nickname "Anonymous"...
Just amazing, what statements you can make about such clear data. Many, many studies to date have shown that male and female abilities in mathematics are roughly the same. Nearly as many have shown support for a higher variance amongst males, meaning there are more stupid and more brilliant men. This has been (and is) used as the explanation for the predominance of men at the very top levels of STEM fields.
So...this paper claims "greater male variability...[is] largely [an] artifact of a complex variety of sociocultural factors".
Look at Figure 1.B. in the paper and read their discussion of it. With three only three exceptions - two of which are outliers for other reasons, all of their data supports the variability hypothesis. The same can be seen in Figure 1.C - with the same three exceptions, all of the variance ratios are above 1, with an average around 1.16.
In the end, their data plainly supports the same conclusions drawn by all of the other studies. The sincere desire to reach a PC conclusion apparently blinds the authors to the plain meaning of their own data.
This will undoubtedly be marked troll, but I'll try anyway: No, we are not headed for a wall.
There is a great deal of evidence (if only the media would let you see it) that global temperatures have not risen for more than 10 years. Ice extent in Antarctica is near record levels. Yes, we should avoid trashing our planet. However, climate is complex, and CO2 levels have a vanishingly small impact - except on the funding of particular groups.
None of the climate models yet produced have successfully predicted anything. Tropical storms are not more intense. Sea levels are not rising any faster than they have been since the end of the last ice age. Etc, etc.
So: why should we invest billions and trillions of dollars based on models and predictions that do not work?
Kudos to Canada.
The parent isn't funny, it's fricking true. Just today I logged into Gmail and found they had changed my account to the new interface. What the heck, give it a try...
Want to archive a conversation? There's no longer a button labelled "archive" - no, there is now some abstruse icon that some designer thinks I will magically understand to mean "archive". I discover this by hovering the mouse over the various controls until I find it.
Sure, I could learn which icon means "archive", but what's wrong with the word? What is the fascination with icons? Why invent new symbols, when language offers us perfectly functional ones already?
This is an apparently intelligent, certainly successful person - who cannot do basic math. He asks a number of questions - thinking that the answers are rhetorical, but they aren't. BTW, for those who don't RFTA, the guy was lousy on the reading-comprehension as well.
For example: if people can be successful (he has three degrees) and yet unable to answer these math questions, it must obviously be the case that the math is unnecessary or unrealistic. But there are other possible explanations:
- He would be even more successful if he actually had these basic academic skills.
- His success is due to other factors. Maybe he has people skills (i.e., a salesman type). Maybe he knows the right people. Maybe he's just lucky.
- Maybe his academic degrees are actually worthless (he doesn't say what fields they are in).
The thing that is most striking about the sample math questions is that you are allowed to use a calculator, even though they are nothing especially complex. At worst, you have to multiply by numbers like 29. These are the kinds of skills someone needs to balance their checkbook, to plan their annual finances, to do their taxes.
So RTFA, and then: what conclusions do you draw?
It gets even stranger: more people have died from solar energy accidents (mostly, falling off roofs while installing panels), than have died from nuclear accidents. Of course, ordinary facts can never overcome irrational fears...
For those who don't want to click on the link, the most dangerous (by far) is coal (including deaths due to pollution). Nuclear is the safest. The stats are based on deaths/TWh, and the authors gives lots of references.
Do note that Swiss pay a hefty copying levy. In particular, we pay a fee on the amount of memory in smart phones, iPods, MP3 players, and the like. This fee is supposed to be compensation for the copying that goes on. Since we've paid for it, it is really only fair that we are allowed to copy.
Also note: while downloading is legal, uploading is not.
It depends on what kind of job you have. If your primary duty is dealing with people, real-time contact makes sense. If you are a developer, an engineer, an architect, or anyone else whose job requires concentration, real-time interruptions are a work-killer. Of course, the PHBs of the world generally do not understand this.
Personally, I have 2-3 work-related phone calls per month. Everything else goes by email or a non-interactive web-service.
That said, there is indeed far too much internal email. If someone really cares about the minutes of some departmental meeting, put them on an Intranet site - don't bombard every single employee with a copy. The same for the latest opinion piece of the CEO, the latest changes to company health insurance, etc. - have a central site for company news, which people can look at (or not) if and when they want to.
On a practical level, so what? The robots are all controlled centrally, by remote control. There's nothing hugely special about the technology.
The point of this is art. According to TFA, the flight paths will be programmed to produce arcs, circles, etc - i.e., to look pretty. Might be a nifty exhibit to watch.
Why is a warning necessary? Is it not common knowledge that coffee is hot?
This is the kind of thinking that leads to warning labels like "do not set ladder in mud", "do not use hairdryer while bathing" and similar nonsense. There should be a standard of reasonableness - this has gone lost. Now we have this wonderful feedback cycle going: The courts allow frankly frivolous lawsuits to proceed, people play courts like a lottery, so whenever something bad happens people look around for deep pockets to sue, lawyers find this a great way to make money, later become judges, and allow more frivolous lawsuits through the system...
Perhaps the McDonald's coffee case was justified - there has been so much hype that it's hard to tell. However, the presence of (unnecessary) warning labels would almost certainly not have helped them.