Exactly. The region codes had nothing to do with piracy. That's just revisionist history. The region codes were put in because different regions of the world operate at different financial scales. This allows the media giants to set a lower price in countries where the median wage is much lower without worrying about cannibalizing profits in countries where the median wage is higher. The theory was that without region codes, DVDs sold in countries with a low wage level would get bought and reimported into the U.S. and sold at a significant profit, and they would still undercut the price of DVDs sold in the U.S. Because of the huge difference in those economic tiers, it would not be practical to eliminate this in any other way. Raising the cost in impoverished countries would kill sales there, and lowering the cost in the U.S. to levels where reimporting isn't feasible would kill profits here.
Instead, in practice, DVDs sold in countries with a low median wage get copied, stripped of their region codes, and sold in the U.S. The result is that the studios make even less profit than they would if region codes weren't around, but at least they can get criminal prosecution in some cases. In short, region codes were pretty much a failed attempt at curbing reimporting, and as a result, there are far fewer regions in Blu-Ray, and most Blu-Ray discs aren't region coded at all. If they thought it would curb piracy in any significant way, every Blu-Ray disc would have region codes. It's pretty clear that few, if any, industry leaders actually believe that....:-)
The biggest problem is that 4 is almost never broken, and when it is, it usually ends up being a movie star, which isn't much better. The other big problem is that #3 has never been broken to date for any elected position at the federal level, AFAIK.
Unless it's an IBM mainframe, in which case a mainframe with a bullet hole is still a mainframe, just with one CPU showing a fault condition. Redundancy is a virtue whenever bullets are involved, whether you're the shooter or the owner of the target.
No, they don't. The original Intel Macs used the Core Solo and Core Duo. Those were Yonah; SSE4 wasn't added until Penryn, AFAIK. They do support SSE3, but not SSE4....
Thanks for pointing that out. When I saw that his specs were comparable to the bottom end, US$1200 iMac, I was starting to wonder how the AUD was less than half a USD. Good to know that those numbers were as inflated as they sounded.:-)
You're kidding, right? First, you left out the logic board in your PC. That's going to boot really well. Second, the iMac is an all-in-one computer, not a tower. You can't compare Apples and oranges, so to speak. That's like saying the Mini is expensive because you can build a full-size tower for a hundred bucks less. Yeah, maybe, but in the end, you have a full-size tower with loud fans, no DVI, no DisplayPort, no FireWire, no built-in Wi-Fi, etc.
So malware is Microsoft's fault for not patching pirated machines? Or did I miss something...
Yes and no. It is true that by limiting patches to "legitimate" copies, they are making the odds of malware infection worse, and in doing so, are contributing to the botnet problem that creates truckloads of spam, wasted bandwidth, DOS attacks, and other nightmares that hurt everyone including their legitimate users. So I think they're utter morons for acting the way they do.
That said, this is not the whole story. A large percentage of malware comes from people installing pirated software. People who pirate Windows are... wait for it... more likely to pirate other software, too. Therefore, you'd expect a strong correlation between malware rate and pirated copies of Windows even if Microsoft did everything they could to keep pirated copies of Windows patched. Their "Genuine Advantage" crap is merely compounding the problem.
That's just classic bad design. There's no reason for the decompressed files to exist on disk at all just to decompress them. The software should have decompressed to RAM on the fly instead of storing the decompressed files as temp files on the hard drive. It's all probably because they made a poor attempt at shoehorning compression into a VFS layer that was too block-centric. Classic bad design all around.
Exactly. If it is in the background, I don't generally bother, but then again, I'm not really watching it, either. If I'm paying attention to the show, the commercials are gone.
Either way, just last week, I ran across precedent that the police don't have to notify you if they search your safe deposit box---not even delayed notification. I can't remember the case right now, though. It may vary from one circuit to the next, of course.
Actually, that's not true. The bank does have access to your safe deposit box even without you present. Surely you don't think that they continue to keep your stuff in that box if you fail to pay the rent. How, then, if they don't have access to the box, do they do so?:-)
So the question is whether notification of the owner is required for a safe deposit box search. I think that the answer is probably "no", in which case it's not that shocking for email to be treated in the same way---not that this treatment is right, mind you, but that it is consistent. If the law should be changed, it should be changed for everything similar, not just for email.
I wasn't the original person who misunderstood. There was a misreading of the court opinion by the article's author. Yes, I should have gone to original sources, but going to the original article as originally written wouldn't have helped at the time I wrote my comment, AFAICT.
That said, Warshak v. United States covers the question of warrants, and 18 U.S.C. 2703(c)(3) covers the question of notice. Yes, a warrant is required. No, notice is not required. Not even delayed notice, disturbingly. Just another reminder that in the U.S., we have only the illusion of privacy except insofar as we take deliberate steps to guarantee it.
These people are a blight on society. They deliberately ignore or abuse the rules of society for their own personal gain, deliberately harm millions of people for their own personal gain, deliberately commit mass fraud, etc. They are hardened sociopaths---not significantly different from mass murderers, child molesters, etc. except in the way and extent to which they choose to harm others. They have no morality, no ethics, and no fear of punishment. Therefore, it is not realistically feasible to rehabilitate these people short of a brain transplant. They are animals---less than human---and should be treated as such.
Were it not for the chances of misidentification, I'd suggest declaring open season on spammers and allowing people to take home and mount as many as they can tag and bag. I even hold terrorists in higher regard. At least they usually honestly believe they are doing what they do to save others and not just for their own personal gain. Spammers are the lowest of the low, right up there with CEOs and members of Congress.
More to the point, it is clearly no different than a bank safety deposit box, and those cannot be searched without a warrant. The mere fact that we are talking about data instead of physical objects should have no legal bearing on the requirement of a warrant for search and seizure. This is a clear case of bailment, and in bailment cases with a corporate entity, one can generally assume a right to privacy.
This will definitely get overturned on appeal unless the lawyers involved are inept.
I'm a pianist, which means my finger muscles were quite strong Indeed, strong hand muscles are precisely why my hands cramped while writing; stronger hands tend to lend themselves to a tighter grip on the pencil, harder pressure on the paper, etc., all of which contribute to muscle fatigue and injury.
And then there was the time when I sprained by thumb and had to write with a pencil between my first three fingers. Boy, did that drive the teachers nuts trying to read it. That was when I switched to typing everything I could, because writing was extremely difficult (and somewhat painful). I haven't looked back. I found that I could type several times as quickly as I could write by hand, which meant I had more time for myself instead of wasting it on the B.S. busywork that the school wanted me to waste my time on. Even if you ignore the discomfort angle, writing stuff out longhand for all but the shortest messages is an incredible waste of time.
Maybe for you. As a pianist, I have excellent muscle memory when working with a keyboard, too. On a good day, I can type 60+ WPM with two fingers. Not that I type with two fingers, of course. Too many typos.
When I say I stopped writing things by hand, I was including homework, papers, etc. And I never found that writing things down aided my learning process at all. I took notes in a single-digit number of classes, to the best of my recollection. I find that writing things down on paper distracts me from paying attention to the lecture and actually absorbing the information. When I take notes, I'm paying attention to writing, not to listening and seeing. That actually reduces the amount of learning that occurs. Copying the notes could reinforce learning, but not because of muscle memory. Copying the notes reinforces learning because it forces you to read critically and actually pay attention to every word. That said, even still, it only reinforces rote memorization, and not true understanding. Reading the printed lecture notes several times would do the same thing. However, when you read over them several times, you're focusing on the material instead of focusing on what your hands are doing, and thus you will probably actually learn more.
I find that rereading works best shortly after the lecture, while the material is still fresh in your mind. That said, it is also helpful to reread it a few days later after your mind has cooled a bit. On this second reading, pay attention to what makes sense and what doesn't. That way, you can identify the areas that you didn't completely grasp and can ask questions the next week. After asking those questions, reread it a third time and see if the explanations clarified your understanding. For the same reason, I go back and reread everything I post on Slashdot several times before I click "submit". When I'm typing, I'm not able to focus on the words as much. Focusing on just the material without the distraction of typing or writing frees your mind to actually learn.
That said, everyone's learning styles are different, and different people pick up new material in different ways. If taking handwritten notes and typing them in later works for you, great. For me, I always found it to be a waste of time that could be better spent listening, watching, and asking questions. It just depends on the person, I guess.
Any camera you buy, you're pretty much guaranteed to use it for other stuff, too. The advantage of the DSLR cameras and large lenses is that they work well in poor lighting without a tripod---something that point-and-shoot cameras are notoriously bad at because of the smaller lenses. Cell phone cameras doubly so. When you have to shoot photos of text in available light with limited time to take the photo before the board gets erased and without the benefit of a tripod, yeah, you bet your you-know-what I'd recommend a DSLR. I mean you can certainly try a point-and-shoot camera, but if you want something that's guaranteed to be able to handle it with ease, the DSLRs are a good idea. And the thing is, once you buy a camera, you're stuck with it unless you sell it. It's not like you can upgrade a point-and-shoot with a bigger lens to get more light gathering.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of karma, I can't believe there are this many posts and nobody has made the obvious "Karma's a bitch" joke yet.
Just saying.
Exactly. The region codes had nothing to do with piracy. That's just revisionist history. The region codes were put in because different regions of the world operate at different financial scales. This allows the media giants to set a lower price in countries where the median wage is much lower without worrying about cannibalizing profits in countries where the median wage is higher. The theory was that without region codes, DVDs sold in countries with a low wage level would get bought and reimported into the U.S. and sold at a significant profit, and they would still undercut the price of DVDs sold in the U.S. Because of the huge difference in those economic tiers, it would not be practical to eliminate this in any other way. Raising the cost in impoverished countries would kill sales there, and lowering the cost in the U.S. to levels where reimporting isn't feasible would kill profits here.
Instead, in practice, DVDs sold in countries with a low median wage get copied, stripped of their region codes, and sold in the U.S. The result is that the studios make even less profit than they would if region codes weren't around, but at least they can get criminal prosecution in some cases. In short, region codes were pretty much a failed attempt at curbing reimporting, and as a result, there are far fewer regions in Blu-Ray, and most Blu-Ray discs aren't region coded at all. If they thought it would curb piracy in any significant way, every Blu-Ray disc would have region codes. It's pretty clear that few, if any, industry leaders actually believe that.... :-)
The biggest problem is that 4 is almost never broken, and when it is, it usually ends up being a movie star, which isn't much better. The other big problem is that #3 has never been broken to date for any elected position at the federal level, AFAIK.
Unless it's an IBM mainframe, in which case a mainframe with a bullet hole is still a mainframe, just with one CPU showing a fault condition. Redundancy is a virtue whenever bullets are involved, whether you're the shooter or the owner of the target.
No, no, the line is "may he rest in pees".
No, they don't. The original Intel Macs used the Core Solo and Core Duo. Those were Yonah; SSE4 wasn't added until Penryn, AFAIK. They do support SSE3, but not SSE4....
Thanks for pointing that out. When I saw that his specs were comparable to the bottom end, US$1200 iMac, I was starting to wonder how the AUD was less than half a USD. Good to know that those numbers were as inflated as they sounded. :-)
You're kidding, right? First, you left out the logic board in your PC. That's going to boot really well. Second, the iMac is an all-in-one computer, not a tower. You can't compare Apples and oranges, so to speak. That's like saying the Mini is expensive because you can build a full-size tower for a hundred bucks less. Yeah, maybe, but in the end, you have a full-size tower with loud fans, no DVI, no DisplayPort, no FireWire, no built-in Wi-Fi, etc.
True, but that's going to fail when you change the very first file, and one would hope that the process would go no further.
Have security patches installed in redistributed form, they are available from MS or even torrent sites
Am I the only one who sees the problem here? Why do you think all those machines are infected with malware in the first place? :-D
Yes and no. It is true that by limiting patches to "legitimate" copies, they are making the odds of malware infection worse, and in doing so, are contributing to the botnet problem that creates truckloads of spam, wasted bandwidth, DOS attacks, and other nightmares that hurt everyone including their legitimate users. So I think they're utter morons for acting the way they do.
That said, this is not the whole story. A large percentage of malware comes from people installing pirated software. People who pirate Windows are... wait for it... more likely to pirate other software, too. Therefore, you'd expect a strong correlation between malware rate and pirated copies of Windows even if Microsoft did everything they could to keep pirated copies of Windows patched. Their "Genuine Advantage" crap is merely compounding the problem.
That's just classic bad design. There's no reason for the decompressed files to exist on disk at all just to decompress them. The software should have decompressed to RAM on the fly instead of storing the decompressed files as temp files on the hard drive. It's all probably because they made a poor attempt at shoehorning compression into a VFS layer that was too block-centric. Classic bad design all around.
Exactly. If it is in the background, I don't generally bother, but then again, I'm not really watching it, either. If I'm paying attention to the show, the commercials are gone.
Either way, just last week, I ran across precedent that the police don't have to notify you if they search your safe deposit box---not even delayed notification. I can't remember the case right now, though. It may vary from one circuit to the next, of course.
Actually, that's not true. The bank does have access to your safe deposit box even without you present. Surely you don't think that they continue to keep your stuff in that box if you fail to pay the rent. How, then, if they don't have access to the box, do they do so? :-)
So the question is whether notification of the owner is required for a safe deposit box search. I think that the answer is probably "no", in which case it's not that shocking for email to be treated in the same way---not that this treatment is right, mind you, but that it is consistent. If the law should be changed, it should be changed for everything similar, not just for email.
You could always use a ferry to get to YB Island. When it comes to adding a second bridge, that's too small a population to worry about.
I wasn't the original person who misunderstood. There was a misreading of the court opinion by the article's author. Yes, I should have gone to original sources, but going to the original article as originally written wouldn't have helped at the time I wrote my comment, AFAICT.
That said, Warshak v. United States covers the question of warrants, and 18 U.S.C. 2703(c)(3) covers the question of notice. Yes, a warrant is required. No, notice is not required. Not even delayed notice, disturbingly. Just another reminder that in the U.S., we have only the illusion of privacy except insofar as we take deliberate steps to guarantee it.
These people are a blight on society. They deliberately ignore or abuse the rules of society for their own personal gain, deliberately harm millions of people for their own personal gain, deliberately commit mass fraud, etc. They are hardened sociopaths---not significantly different from mass murderers, child molesters, etc. except in the way and extent to which they choose to harm others. They have no morality, no ethics, and no fear of punishment. Therefore, it is not realistically feasible to rehabilitate these people short of a brain transplant. They are animals---less than human---and should be treated as such.
Were it not for the chances of misidentification, I'd suggest declaring open season on spammers and allowing people to take home and mount as many as they can tag and bag. I even hold terrorists in higher regard. At least they usually honestly believe they are doing what they do to save others and not just for their own personal gain. Spammers are the lowest of the low, right up there with CEOs and members of Congress.
Either start answering your phone or quit setting it to vibrate.
Indeed, if you'd like a citation that agrees with you, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets001954.shtml is a good place to start.
More to the point, it is clearly no different than a bank safety deposit box, and those cannot be searched without a warrant. The mere fact that we are talking about data instead of physical objects should have no legal bearing on the requirement of a warrant for search and seizure. This is a clear case of bailment, and in bailment cases with a corporate entity, one can generally assume a right to privacy.
This will definitely get overturned on appeal unless the lawyers involved are inept.
You forgot
0 REM Block Control-C
1 ONERR GOTO 10
5 REM Control-Reset reboots
6 POKE 1010,0
I'm a pianist, which means my finger muscles were quite strong Indeed, strong hand muscles are precisely why my hands cramped while writing; stronger hands tend to lend themselves to a tighter grip on the pencil, harder pressure on the paper, etc., all of which contribute to muscle fatigue and injury.
And then there was the time when I sprained by thumb and had to write with a pencil between my first three fingers. Boy, did that drive the teachers nuts trying to read it. That was when I switched to typing everything I could, because writing was extremely difficult (and somewhat painful). I haven't looked back. I found that I could type several times as quickly as I could write by hand, which meant I had more time for myself instead of wasting it on the B.S. busywork that the school wanted me to waste my time on. Even if you ignore the discomfort angle, writing stuff out longhand for all but the shortest messages is an incredible waste of time.
Maybe for you. As a pianist, I have excellent muscle memory when working with a keyboard, too. On a good day, I can type 60+ WPM with two fingers. Not that I type with two fingers, of course. Too many typos.
When I say I stopped writing things by hand, I was including homework, papers, etc. And I never found that writing things down aided my learning process at all. I took notes in a single-digit number of classes, to the best of my recollection. I find that writing things down on paper distracts me from paying attention to the lecture and actually absorbing the information. When I take notes, I'm paying attention to writing, not to listening and seeing. That actually reduces the amount of learning that occurs. Copying the notes could reinforce learning, but not because of muscle memory. Copying the notes reinforces learning because it forces you to read critically and actually pay attention to every word. That said, even still, it only reinforces rote memorization, and not true understanding. Reading the printed lecture notes several times would do the same thing. However, when you read over them several times, you're focusing on the material instead of focusing on what your hands are doing, and thus you will probably actually learn more.
I find that rereading works best shortly after the lecture, while the material is still fresh in your mind. That said, it is also helpful to reread it a few days later after your mind has cooled a bit. On this second reading, pay attention to what makes sense and what doesn't. That way, you can identify the areas that you didn't completely grasp and can ask questions the next week. After asking those questions, reread it a third time and see if the explanations clarified your understanding. For the same reason, I go back and reread everything I post on Slashdot several times before I click "submit". When I'm typing, I'm not able to focus on the words as much. Focusing on just the material without the distraction of typing or writing frees your mind to actually learn.
That said, everyone's learning styles are different, and different people pick up new material in different ways. If taking handwritten notes and typing them in later works for you, great. For me, I always found it to be a waste of time that could be better spent listening, watching, and asking questions. It just depends on the person, I guess.
Any camera you buy, you're pretty much guaranteed to use it for other stuff, too. The advantage of the DSLR cameras and large lenses is that they work well in poor lighting without a tripod---something that point-and-shoot cameras are notoriously bad at because of the smaller lenses. Cell phone cameras doubly so. When you have to shoot photos of text in available light with limited time to take the photo before the board gets erased and without the benefit of a tripod, yeah, you bet your you-know-what I'd recommend a DSLR. I mean you can certainly try a point-and-shoot camera, but if you want something that's guaranteed to be able to handle it with ease, the DSLRs are a good idea. And the thing is, once you buy a camera, you're stuck with it unless you sell it. It's not like you can upgrade a point-and-shoot with a bigger lens to get more light gathering.