If the RIAA were forced to give all the money they collected BACK, the RIAA would simply close up shop permanently, probably filing some sort of bankruptcy or some such action to prevent their actually having to pay anything back.
The statement by the RIAA that they've lost money on this (see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/riaa-responds.ars ) means that most of the money has probably moved out of RIAA and into the hands of the lawyers and MediaSentry. One would hope that there would be some grounds to go after not just RIAA, but also their lawyers and MediaSentry, possibly under RICO-like recovery. But IANAL, and maybe a lawyer can comment on if it's possible to recover the $$ from the lawyers if RIAA goes bankrupt.
One of the great repositories of stuff that I hope can be read with this technique is the library of the "Villa of the Papyri" outside of ancient Herculaneum (Naples, buried by Vesuvius in AD79 along with Pompeii, et. al.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri
Somewhere I remember reading that the few scrolls that have been read were full of rather obscure philosophical texts (and this is discussed in the Wikipedia article.) (But wouldn't it be a hoot if it turns out that a substantial part of the holdings were schlocky romances or even porn... O Tempore! O Mores!)
In the mid '80s when I was in a heavy coding job, I used to run 'co-routines', the compiler and Rogue... One of my co-workers hacked the code to produce a party room on every level, the variant was known as 'twinkie - because you got a big delight with every bite.'
What bothered me after reading this paper is nowhere does this paper come out and say that the infected machines are all running Windows, although this is strongly implied by the description of how the virus works. The reader is left to wonder whether machines other than Microsoft Windows were infected.
Instead, the paper leaves the impression that all computing has the same architectural vulnerabilities. I thought that was a surprising defect, sufficient to make me wonder what else isn't captured/stated/analyzed in the paper.
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
That kind of comment generated a "WTF?" reaction from me. As did "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research"... I never heard of Nemertes Research, and if this is the quality of their work, they ain't getting no respect from me!
Of course, most contracts are written so that the big company preserves the right to do any damn thing they want at any point, but it still might be worthwhile looking at your contract, and then going to your state/county/city consumer affairs office and asking them to look at it. Cable companies are normally regulated utilities.
'unlimited bandwidth' would be basically infinite transfer -speed-. I think what is being offered is no cap on -contents-, which probably means unlimited -throughput-, but at some limited bandwidth (speed). At least my ISP has a sliding scale for real bandwidth, you pay more for more speed, and I'd be really surprised if TW doesn't have the same thing.
When I was in college (Norwich University, a military college) we tried to pay a "friendly visit" to the Coast Guard Academy (our big football rivals, "little Army/little Navy") for a prank. We were all camouflaged up, etc, etc, but despite that we all got caught by their campus security.
I was scared frankly shitless that I was going to be busted, fined, kicked out of school, lose my scholarship & Army career, etc. A couple of us are sitting in the security office in handcuffs, and the one 'rental cop' says on his walkie-talkie "Be advised, judging by their dress they may be hiding out in the bushes." That (intuitive grasp of the obvious) remark was the first hint that I just might survive the experience.
Same thing applies here: High quality tech fora are the kinds of places you'd expect hackers to at least monitor, if not hang out.
dave (who did make it to graduation and commissioning in the Army... All of our guys were caught but one, who spent 6 hours low-crawling from bush to bush to get off campus.)
Not that I'd buy tech there in any event (I'm one of those smarmy Mac guys), but this certainly means I'll minimize my purchases to only those staples (pun possibly intended) like paper and pencils.
There's the time I was pricing DVD drives, and got thrown out of the store because I dared to -write down- prices.
And the time we bought a 'open box return' DLT TV, and the bulb blew out a couple weeks later. The installer pointed out there was about 150 hours on the bulb, a lot more than you'd expect for an 'open box', but consistent with this as a demo/floor model.
My neighbor had a disastrous experience with their installation service, he ended up having to redo it all.
And of course, that's before their dumb-assed management failures. Unfortunately, I'm sure the -corporate officers- won't suffer (except in the loss of future rip-off income...)
In the immortal words of Al Gore: Do they have a "controlling legal authority" for that interpretation of copyright law, or is this just a legal posture, that is not supported by law or precedent?
My favorite naming convention?: Our rules for selecting the naming convention for a set of Sun workstations and server, back in the late '80s:
1. Must support at least 5 machines
2. Must have no name in the scheme already in the company (which had a lot of computers)
3. Extra credit for a good name for the server.
"James Bond Villains" was the winning scheme. Drax, Goldfinger, Dr_No (my machine!), etc. Server was called Spectre, of course! (And good ol' Spectre, a mid-size sun server lasted until it was shut down in 1999 because it was running SunOS rather than Solaris, and Sun didn't support Y2K updates for SunOS...) We were all excited because Spectre had a 'double eagle' huge disk drive, a full 600mb!
At home, we use mostly mythical names. My old PowerBook was named Pegasus (because it was a very fast machine when I got it.) Our first dual-CPU G5 Mac is called Janus (the Roman 2-headed god.) My wife's iMac, with the built-in Webcam on the top of the machine, is called Cyclops (of course!) My current MacBook is called Cerberus (3-headed dog of the underworld), since I intend to support all 3 of MacOS, Linux and Windows under virtualization (but I haven't gotten around to installing the Linux partition yet.) The Windows partition on that machine has its own name, Hecate a dark, evil bitch...:-)
If Microsoft wants me to "like them":
1. Ballmer has to go. This guy is just offensive. Between the combat metaphors and the chair tossing, I can't respect any company run by this guy. AND, he's doing a poor job of running Microsoft.
2. The 'kinder/gentler Microsoft' has to become more open. That means opening up APIs and stop trying to manipulate standardization processes.
3. They have to improve their product quality. That will be a huge challenge given their code base, and maybe Windows 7 will be a substantial quality improvement. The record for Microsoft seems to be "every other product is OK" (Win 98 was much better than Win 95, Win XP is much better than Win 2k, hopefully Win 7 will be much better than Vista."
4. They also need to pay attention to both Apple and to their own research arm, and start -innovating-rather than blindly copying what others are doing.
5. Until 1..4 are achieved, I'm not going to like Microsoft. More importantly, I'll not even consider a car (e.g. Ford) that has Microsoft products in it, and the idea of the current Microsoft trying to "fix health care records" scares the fertilizer out of me.
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If the RIAA were forced to give all the money they collected BACK, the RIAA would simply close up shop permanently, probably filing some sort of bankruptcy or some such action to prevent their actually having to pay anything back.
The statement by the RIAA that they've lost money on this (see http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/riaa-responds.ars ) means that most of the money has probably moved out of RIAA and into the hands of the lawyers and MediaSentry. One would hope that there would be some grounds to go after not just RIAA, but also their lawyers and MediaSentry, possibly under RICO-like recovery. But IANAL, and maybe a lawyer can comment on if it's possible to recover the $$ from the lawyers if RIAA goes bankrupt.
One of the great repositories of stuff that I hope can be read with this technique is the library of the "Villa of the Papyri" outside of ancient Herculaneum (Naples, buried by Vesuvius in AD79 along with Pompeii, et. al.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri
Somewhere I remember reading that the few scrolls that have been read were full of rather obscure philosophical texts (and this is discussed in the Wikipedia article.) (But wouldn't it be a hoot if it turns out that a substantial part of the holdings were schlocky romances or even porn... O Tempore! O Mores!)
OK by me...
> For 150 dollars an hour...
That's a really cheap lawyer these days! For a legal situation I was in recently in corporate law, we were paying more like $550/hr.
Can anyone think of a more hellish combination?
In the mid '80s when I was in a heavy coding job, I used to run 'co-routines', the compiler and Rogue... One of my co-workers hacked the code to produce a party room on every level, the variant was known as 'twinkie - because you got a big delight with every bite.'
What bothered me after reading this paper is nowhere does this paper come out and say that the infected machines are all running Windows, although this is strongly implied by the description of how the virus works. The reader is left to wonder whether machines other than Microsoft Windows were infected.
Instead, the paper leaves the impression that all computing has the same architectural vulnerabilities. I thought that was a surprising defect, sufficient to make me wonder what else isn't captured/stated/analyzed in the paper.
Ugh... You can tell I don't use Windows much...
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
That kind of comment generated a "WTF?" reaction from me. As did "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research"... I never heard of Nemertes Research, and if this is the quality of their work, they ain't getting no respect from me!
> Consumer ISPs aren't regulated in America, even if they are operated by a cable or telephone company.
May be formally/probably is true, but the appropriate consumer advocates still have substantial clout with cable companies, in particular.
Of course, most contracts are written so that the big company preserves the right to do any damn thing they want at any point, but it still might be worthwhile looking at your contract, and then going to your state/county/city consumer affairs office and asking them to look at it. Cable companies are normally regulated utilities.
dave
'unlimited bandwidth' would be basically infinite transfer -speed-. I think what is being offered is no cap on -contents-, which probably means unlimited -throughput-, but at some limited bandwidth (speed). At least my ISP has a sliding scale for real bandwidth, you pay more for more speed, and I'd be really surprised if TW doesn't have the same thing.
When I was in college (Norwich University, a military college) we tried to pay a "friendly visit" to the Coast Guard Academy (our big football rivals, "little Army/little Navy") for a prank. We were all camouflaged up, etc, etc, but despite that we all got caught by their campus security.
I was scared frankly shitless that I was going to be busted, fined, kicked out of school, lose my scholarship & Army career, etc. A couple of us are sitting in the security office in handcuffs, and the one 'rental cop' says on his walkie-talkie "Be advised, judging by their dress they may be hiding out in the bushes." That (intuitive grasp of the obvious) remark was the first hint that I just might survive the experience.
Same thing applies here: High quality tech fora are the kinds of places you'd expect hackers to at least monitor, if not hang out.
dave (who did make it to graduation and commissioning in the Army... All of our guys were caught but one, who spent 6 hours low-crawling from bush to bush to get off campus.)
That's as good as anything to get a 1-data-point comparison on camera sensors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range)
Real -quality- factors, such as low light performance, color accuracy, etc, are a lot harder to quantify.
dave
"Circuit City".
Not that I'd buy tech there in any event (I'm one of those smarmy Mac guys), but this certainly means I'll minimize my purchases to only those staples (pun possibly intended) like paper and pencils.
Mod parent up (very) funny!
When does Fry's start to move into the east? Microcenter is a lot better than Best Buy for computer stuff, but it ain't Fry's...
At 6 hours/night, that would be about 25 nights worth of viewing, or return within 30 days?
There's the time I was pricing DVD drives, and got thrown out of the store because I dared to -write down- prices.
And the time we bought a 'open box return' DLT TV, and the bulb blew out a couple weeks later. The installer pointed out there was about 150 hours on the bulb, a lot more than you'd expect for an 'open box', but consistent with this as a demo/floor model.
My neighbor had a disastrous experience with their installation service, he ended up having to redo it all.
And of course, that's before their dumb-assed management failures. Unfortunately, I'm sure the -corporate officers- won't suffer (except in the loss of future rip-off income...)
So Good Riddance, Circuit City! You sucked!
All that traffic directed to 127.0.0.1 would serve you right! :-)
dave
In the immortal words of Al Gore: Do they have a "controlling legal authority" for that interpretation of copyright law, or is this just a legal posture, that is not supported by law or precedent?
dave
But particularly his book on Phi... ("The Golden Ratio")
dave
p.s. has anyone read anything by John Allen Paulos, e.g. "A Mathematician Reads the Newspapers"?
I name all my Unix servers after famous eunuchs.
And what's your name, oh anonymous one?
My favorite naming convention?: Our rules for selecting the naming convention for a set of Sun workstations and server, back in the late '80s:
1. Must support at least 5 machines
2. Must have no name in the scheme already in the company (which had a lot of computers)
3. Extra credit for a good name for the server.
"James Bond Villains" was the winning scheme. Drax, Goldfinger, Dr_No (my machine!), etc. Server was called Spectre, of course! (And good ol' Spectre, a mid-size sun server lasted until it was shut down in 1999 because it was running SunOS rather than Solaris, and Sun didn't support Y2K updates for SunOS...) We were all excited because Spectre had a 'double eagle' huge disk drive, a full 600mb!
At home, we use mostly mythical names. My old PowerBook was named Pegasus (because it was a very fast machine when I got it.) Our first dual-CPU G5 Mac is called Janus (the Roman 2-headed god.) My wife's iMac, with the built-in Webcam on the top of the machine, is called Cyclops (of course!) My current MacBook is called Cerberus (3-headed dog of the underworld), since I intend to support all 3 of MacOS, Linux and Windows under virtualization (but I haven't gotten around to installing the Linux partition yet.) The Windows partition on that machine has its own name, Hecate a dark, evil bitch... :-)
dave
If Microsoft wants me to "like them":
1. Ballmer has to go. This guy is just offensive. Between the combat metaphors and the chair tossing, I can't respect any company run by this guy. AND, he's doing a poor job of running Microsoft.
2. The 'kinder/gentler Microsoft' has to become more open. That means opening up APIs and stop trying to manipulate standardization processes.
3. They have to improve their product quality. That will be a huge challenge given their code base, and maybe Windows 7 will be a substantial quality improvement. The record for Microsoft seems to be "every other product is OK" (Win 98 was much better than Win 95, Win XP is much better than Win 2k, hopefully Win 7 will be much better than Vista."
4. They also need to pay attention to both Apple and to their own research arm, and start -innovating-rather than blindly copying what others are doing.
5. Until 1..4 are achieved, I'm not going to like Microsoft. More importantly, I'll not even consider a car (e.g. Ford) that has Microsoft products in it, and the idea of the current Microsoft trying to "fix health care records" scares the fertilizer out of me.
Just my $.02...