Speaking of 'hell', I guess all the churches in the state are going to have to stop letting children read the Bible. I bet that will go over real well.
Come now. The links to malware are almost certainly coming from cybercrooks. Online mischief isn't mischief anymore, it's organized crime. I absolutely believe that someone (or some group) is using these posts to stoke botnet(s). I can think of no good reason why pwning people ought to be considered a 'free speech' issue, any more than barring deliberate transmission of meatspace diseases would be a 'free association' issue.
In the US, only if it can be proved that either a) you knew it was false, and said it anyway; or b) you had a reckless disregard for whether or not it was true. Here the OP seemed to honestly believe them to be guilty of fraud; even though that's unlikely, he has a pretty good defense against any possible libel suit. No court is likely to find that it is 'reckless disregard for truth' that this could have been fraud.
They don't even try to account for the Insightful same situation where the Halting Problem fails Insightful. I ask the scanner what I'm going to do Funny, then do something else Hot sex or flip a coin. Let alone anything where the truly interesting Troll aspects of free will. For example, Insightful doing this brain scan on someone who thinks he has discovered a way to embezzle a million dollars Flying chair without getting caught, but isn't sure. Do I do it? Will I get caught? Insightful Even if I will get away with it, should I? How badly do I need the money?
If they could predict THAT before the person makes the actual decision -- not in a simulation, in the actual situation -- then this scan might shed light on the idea of free will. Flamebait Otherwise it's a giant leap.
Amen to that. Fortunately, this guy's lawsuit is going nowhere (note he's not a legal professor). The entire point of the notes is to take down the ideas contained in the lecture -- indeed, the point of the lecture itself is to transmit ideas! Unfortunately for this professor, ideas are not -- and never were -- copyrightable. Indeed, nobody would ever be able to make a new book, or movie, or song, were this not so; everyone borrows ideas, because at a certain fundamental level all stories are fundamentally the same. But worse, if ideas were copyrightable, then copyright becomes a kind of thoughtcrime.
What you're not allowed to do is copy the way those ideas are expressed; selling transcripts of the professor's lectures would be a no-no. But assuming these notes are actual summaries of the concepts presented in class, this company is free and clear.
This is not a juvenile prank. This isn't anything close to a juvenile prank, the same way swatting isn't. A juvenile prank would have been subliminal flashing penises, not iterative deployment of effects specifically designed to be highly effective against many types of epilepsy. Thousands of people were affected, it was an ongoing attack that received several refinements to make it more effective, so it wasn't spur-of-the-moment either.
Someone not only came up with the idea of forcing people to have epileptic fits, but was evil enough to follow through with it. This is a serious disease, with serious detrimental effects, and it was perpetrated in a way designed to maximize exposure.
The perps need to be found, and need to be prosecuted. Bury them with one seperate count of (at the least) assault for every person who says they suffered epileptic attacks. If law enforcement can't nail these guys, then they may as well throw in the towel, because it means they lost. The bad guys win.
What typically happens is that the side with the sensitive information seeks a protective order: the information is disclosed, but only to certain particular individuals (basically the other side's legal team) who are sworn to secrecy. The info then becomes a sealed exhibit. IF this guy gets such an order, AND Blizzard's devs see the code anyway and block his app, then Blizzard will have a serious problem.
Blizzard will certainly fight any such attempt by this guy to protect his code, by claiming the only reasons he wants to keep it secret are improper reasons. What actually will happen is hard to say since IANAL.
People have been trying to make that convergence happen for years with limited-to-no success. But there are a host of reasons the console market is what it is today, and difficulty of piracy is only one aspect. Write-once-run-anywhere is really true for consoles: your game runs on any PS2, XBox 360, NES, whatever console it was originally designed for... it just works.
What I see as the most overriding factor is the hardware subsidy. The economics of a $300 device are wildly different from a $2500 multipurpose tool. Many people won't spend more; Supposing the average person buys 10 games over the life of the machine, and suppose Sony's cut is $25. Would you recommend Sony charge $700 for the console and $35 for the games, or $450/PS3 and $60/game?
This to me is the real advantage of a console. The marketplace is distorted by a subsidy that reduces a console to an impulse buy. (Comparing to a PC, mind.) The machines are more powerful (better game product) and sell much more than they would without this distortion. So game budgets can be higher, since you will have a huge customer base. These kind of hit-driven markets are subject to network effects, and so this kind of draw can have a profound impact.
I'm sorry. Perhaps I'm missing something, but no matter how many times I read that statement, it says "Garfield" immediately followed by "joke". Is this some new variant of the Chewbacca Defense?
You have to wonder at any company that picks the name "Rob-U-Cab". Most of the time the companies have the good sense and decency to at least pretend. After the Titanic, you didn't hear about any vessels named the USS Improved or the HMS Seaworthy, did you? Usually when companies are honest like this somebody gets fired...
How do you know those are his own login credentials, and not a red herring? That's the funny thing about trust... once it's gone, it's a whole other ballgame. Here we have a company providing a nigh-useless "service" with broken English in their FAQ (weak circumstantial evidence only, but still evidence) and that employs coding practices either underhanded or dubious.
Does it really matter which it is? There's no compelling reason to ever use their product, and they've just demonstrated that they can't be trusted. Is it really any better if it's due to ineptness rather than maliciousness?
Branch prediction on CPUs is 90+ percent accurate. Chimp DNA is 95-plus percent identical to that of humans.
If branch prediction is almost as good as actually implementing the conditional jump instructions, does that mean the difference is a "rounding error, almost"? No, the 3-5% difference is the key, the important part. If you try to replace branch instructions with branch predictors your CPU would be worthless. Likewise for the chimp-to-human comparison: the raw numbers tell a misleading story. The key differences may be in a very small number of genes, but that does not make them any less profound.
My own personal beliefs aside, you have a very good point, but to say "religion is almost a rounding error" is to beg the question. If a given monotheistic faith is actually correct (unlikely, since there are a great many and at most one can possibly be correct), then of course they're going to disbelieve in all other gods. The only way religion is a "rounding error" is if atheism is correct; but this is what you are arguing for.
This is the case where the attorneys asked the Groklaw (and later Slashdot) communities to assist in picking apart the declaration. I read the RIAA's "expert"'s papers. He maintains she downloaded the material using Kazaa, yet admits he found no evidence through forensic examining of Windows that Kazaa was or had ever been installed. He made no effort to explain this discrepancy -- indeed, he seemed oblivious to the discrepancy's existence.
Either she's pulled a very convincing job of doctoring the evidence (involving tools to clean the various installation footprints that were not found), or the expert testimony is worthless. Personally, I lean towards "boilerplate" as an explanation for how such deficient 'evidence' got filed -- they seem to have just filled in sections of the declaration with rote repetition of generic stuff they probably say about everybody.
Nobody should be surprised by password issues anymore. That's like being surprised that some people cheat on their taxes; it's just a fundamental part of human nature.
Anyone remember thesestories? Someone got an ATM manual off the web, learned the default password... and walks up to an ATM, switches it to debug mode, makes it think the $20's were actually fives -- oh, and dispense everything in fives. And promptly makes off with hundreds of dollars by cleaning out (untraceable) prepaid debit cards.
One of the most telling points is that there's a year's difference between these two stories. Another is that the default passcode to some models of ATM is 123456. And this is for ATMs, where there's a very obvious and immediate impact to lax security (many thousands of dollars lost per incident since the reprogramming can go undetected for days). Considering this, it's not surprising that SQL server passwords don't get changed, for exactly the same reason: "I cut meat and I sell groceries. That's my job. I don't know anything about [securing] an ATM." is not all that far from "I'm just an application developer, I use SQL to get stuff done for the business. What do I know about security?"
Both are regrettable (they both have the same end result; pwnage) and they both flow from human nature.
They will use this pricing scheme to "extract value" from their customer base in the form of quotas that are properly tiered so as to be just below the common usage tier. The result will be many customers need to go a step higher, and are charged more
Not that I have any faith in Comcast, but this is exactly what I would NOT do, were I them. People are going to get %X extra gigabytes for $B bucks, and if they use a very small amount of %X they've wasted money. So they won't do that. They'll find things to spend it on, they wouldn't have otherwise. Net result is that kind of scheme will easily backfire, and people will commonly inflate traffic to keep very close to the quota. This could make their problem worse.
(And yes, that is exactly what would happen. While in college, I worked at the school cafeteria. The contract was set up such that you could use your meals as you wanted thru the week. BUT at the end of the week, unused meals expired. So, of course, the night the meals expired people would go to late-nite pizza (where I worked) and be like "Yeah, OK, how many meals I got left? 12? Alright, gimme 12 pizzas... What kind? Don't really care, dude...")
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of 'hell', I guess all the churches in the state are going to have to stop letting children read the Bible. I bet that will go over real well.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Come now. The links to malware are almost certainly coming from cybercrooks. Online mischief isn't mischief anymore, it's organized crime. I absolutely believe that someone (or some group) is using these posts to stoke botnet(s). I can think of no good reason why pwning people ought to be considered a 'free speech' issue, any more than barring deliberate transmission of meatspace diseases would be a 'free association' issue.
In the US, only if it can be proved that either a) you knew it was false, and said it anyway; or b) you had a reckless disregard for whether or not it was true. Here the OP seemed to honestly believe them to be guilty of fraud; even though that's unlikely, he has a pretty good defense against any possible libel suit. No court is likely to find that it is 'reckless disregard for truth' that this could have been fraud.
I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to see "birthday suits" myself ...
They don't even try to account for the Insightful same situation where the Halting Problem fails Insightful. I ask the scanner what I'm going to do Funny, then do something else Hot sex or flip a coin. Let alone anything where the truly interesting Troll aspects of free will. For example, Insightful doing this brain scan on someone who thinks he has discovered a way to embezzle a million dollars Flying chair without getting caught, but isn't sure. Do I do it? Will I get caught? Insightful Even if I will get away with it, should I? How badly do I need the money?
If they could predict THAT before the person makes the actual decision -- not in a simulation, in the actual situation -- then this scan might shed light on the idea of free will. Flamebait Otherwise it's a giant leap.
I didn't really want to read the article anyway. It's for the best ...
Amen to that. Fortunately, this guy's lawsuit is going nowhere (note he's not a legal professor). The entire point of the notes is to take down the ideas contained in the lecture -- indeed, the point of the lecture itself is to transmit ideas! Unfortunately for this professor, ideas are not -- and never were -- copyrightable. Indeed, nobody would ever be able to make a new book, or movie, or song, were this not so; everyone borrows ideas, because at a certain fundamental level all stories are fundamentally the same. But worse, if ideas were copyrightable, then copyright becomes a kind of thoughtcrime.
What you're not allowed to do is copy the way those ideas are expressed; selling transcripts of the professor's lectures would be a no-no. But assuming these notes are actual summaries of the concepts presented in class, this company is free and clear.
Until someone looks at the hard drive access light.
Alright, enough of these qutrit jokes, they're awful.
If you wanted to go into business selling mod chips, you need to hire guys like this.
This is not a juvenile prank. This isn't anything close to a juvenile prank, the same way swatting isn't. A juvenile prank would have been subliminal flashing penises, not iterative deployment of effects specifically designed to be highly effective against many types of epilepsy. Thousands of people were affected, it was an ongoing attack that received several refinements to make it more effective, so it wasn't spur-of-the-moment either.
Someone not only came up with the idea of forcing people to have epileptic fits, but was evil enough to follow through with it. This is a serious disease, with serious detrimental effects, and it was perpetrated in a way designed to maximize exposure.
The perps need to be found, and need to be prosecuted. Bury them with one seperate count of (at the least) assault for every person who says they suffered epileptic attacks. If law enforcement can't nail these guys, then they may as well throw in the towel, because it means they lost. The bad guys win.
What typically happens is that the side with the sensitive information seeks a protective order: the information is disclosed, but only to certain particular individuals (basically the other side's legal team) who are sworn to secrecy. The info then becomes a sealed exhibit. IF this guy gets such an order, AND Blizzard's devs see the code anyway and block his app, then Blizzard will have a serious problem.
Blizzard will certainly fight any such attempt by this guy to protect his code, by claiming the only reasons he wants to keep it secret are improper reasons. What actually will happen is hard to say since IANAL.
I'll drink to that!
People have been trying to make that convergence happen for years with limited-to-no success. But there are a host of reasons the console market is what it is today, and difficulty of piracy is only one aspect. Write-once-run-anywhere is really true for consoles: your game runs on any PS2, XBox 360, NES, whatever console it was originally designed for ... it just works.
What I see as the most overriding factor is the hardware subsidy. The economics of a $300 device are wildly different from a $2500 multipurpose tool. Many people won't spend more; Supposing the average person buys 10 games over the life of the machine, and suppose Sony's cut is $25. Would you recommend Sony charge $700 for the console and $35 for the games, or $450/PS3 and $60/game?
This to me is the real advantage of a console. The marketplace is distorted by a subsidy that reduces a console to an impulse buy. (Comparing to a PC, mind.) The machines are more powerful (better game product) and sell much more than they would without this distortion. So game budgets can be higher, since you will have a huge customer base. These kind of hit-driven markets are subject to network effects, and so this kind of draw can have a profound impact.
I'm sorry. Perhaps I'm missing something, but no matter how many times I read that statement, it says "Garfield" immediately followed by "joke". Is this some new variant of the Chewbacca Defense?
We ARE talking about Japan, here ... Pray it does not involve a squid.
You have to wonder at any company that picks the name "Rob-U-Cab". Most of the time the companies have the good sense and decency to at least pretend. After the Titanic, you didn't hear about any vessels named the USS Improved or the HMS Seaworthy, did you? Usually when companies are honest like this somebody gets fired...
How do you know those are his own login credentials, and not a red herring? That's the funny thing about trust ... once it's gone, it's a whole other ballgame. Here we have a company providing a nigh-useless "service" with broken English in their FAQ (weak circumstantial evidence only, but still evidence) and that employs coding practices either underhanded or dubious.
Does it really matter which it is? There's no compelling reason to ever use their product, and they've just demonstrated that they can't be trusted. Is it really any better if it's due to ineptness rather than maliciousness?
Branch prediction on CPUs is 90+ percent accurate. Chimp DNA is 95-plus percent identical to that of humans.
If branch prediction is almost as good as actually implementing the conditional jump instructions, does that mean the difference is a "rounding error, almost"? No, the 3-5% difference is the key, the important part. If you try to replace branch instructions with branch predictors your CPU would be worthless. Likewise for the chimp-to-human comparison: the raw numbers tell a misleading story. The key differences may be in a very small number of genes, but that does not make them any less profound.
My own personal beliefs aside, you have a very good point, but to say "religion is almost a rounding error" is to beg the question. If a given monotheistic faith is actually correct (unlikely, since there are a great many and at most one can possibly be correct), then of course they're going to disbelieve in all other gods. The only way religion is a "rounding error" is if atheism is correct; but this is what you are arguing for.
If no one can ever be punished for ignoring a standard (which is the point of this proposal), then it isn't really a standard, is it?
This is the case where the attorneys asked the Groklaw (and later Slashdot) communities to assist in picking apart the declaration. I read the RIAA's "expert"'s papers. He maintains she downloaded the material using Kazaa, yet admits he found no evidence through forensic examining of Windows that Kazaa was or had ever been installed. He made no effort to explain this discrepancy -- indeed, he seemed oblivious to the discrepancy's existence.
Either she's pulled a very convincing job of doctoring the evidence (involving tools to clean the various installation footprints that were not found), or the expert testimony is worthless. Personally, I lean towards "boilerplate" as an explanation for how such deficient 'evidence' got filed -- they seem to have just filled in sections of the declaration with rote repetition of generic stuff they probably say about everybody.
Nobody should be surprised by password issues anymore. That's like being surprised that some people cheat on their taxes; it's just a fundamental part of human nature.
... and walks up to an ATM, switches it to debug mode, makes it think the $20's were actually fives -- oh, and dispense everything in fives. And promptly makes off with hundreds of dollars by cleaning out (untraceable) prepaid debit cards.
Anyone remember these stories? Someone got an ATM manual off the web, learned the default password
One of the most telling points is that there's a year's difference between these two stories. Another is that the default passcode to some models of ATM is 123456. And this is for ATMs, where there's a very obvious and immediate impact to lax security (many thousands of dollars lost per incident since the reprogramming can go undetected for days). Considering this, it's not surprising that SQL server passwords don't get changed, for exactly the same reason: "I cut meat and I sell groceries. That's my job. I don't know anything about [securing] an ATM." is not all that far from "I'm just an application developer, I use SQL to get stuff done for the business. What do I know about security?"
Both are regrettable (they both have the same end result; pwnage) and they both flow from human nature.
It's not like a big kite!
Forty two.
(And yes, that is exactly what would happen. While in college, I worked at the school cafeteria. The contract was set up such that you could use your meals as you wanted thru the week. BUT at the end of the week, unused meals expired. So, of course, the night the meals expired people would go to late-nite pizza (where I worked) and be like "Yeah, OK, how many meals I got left? 12? Alright, gimme 12 pizzas