Sorry to double post, but I also wanted to point out that you can simply choose to use a Pre-Shared Key... how hard is it to create a unique password that you can remember? You don't need a 16 digit HEX code... just a "strong" password that you enter on someone's machine when they first hit your network. Usually, you don't even have to enter it the next time they stop by.
I'm using Fx 3 currently. I refreshed the page, still looked horrible. Then, I closed the page, reopened it in IE... still looked horrible. Then I reopened it in Fx 3 again, and it suddenly had the white background like it should, and looked great. Don't know what that was, but good design? Nope.
It sounds to me that, in addition to blogging it or posting it on a website, that this would also allow a company the option to create an RSS feed that passes this inforamation to the various news organizations instead of having to send it (basically automatic push instead of manual push). The news organizations can subscribe and get updates automatically. Sounds good to me. As long as they still have to file with the SEC, this sounds like a good move forward... actual progress... it seems so strange to see it happen.
But the charging station can have batteries that charge throughout the day... then, plug in your car at night and drain the charging station into the car. Simple transfer of the day's solar power into the overnight transfer of energy. Now a full day's sunlight on the roof of your garage can charge your car overnight.
Plain and simple: No one wants to be liable for someone missing a call that causes someone's death. (doctor on call, friend calls to say she's committing suicide, I'm sure that the creative people here can come up with more). Basically no one wants to be responsible for a death due to trying to eliminate an annoyance.
Really? Untag himself? From hundreds of photos? And keep untagging himself as others add photos and tag them?
How is this a real solution?
All one has to do, if one hates another, is to post thousands of photos of the individual, post false and deceitful information on forums, implement a google bombing to destroy their name. And, if that is not enough, the instigator can get the 'mob' to do the rest for him/her. All the instigator has to do is post something to inflame the mob justice ("He's a pedophile and everyone needs to know it! Think of the children!" "She's got aids and sleeps with men she hates to infect them. She needs to be stopped!"). Get enough inflammatory falsehoods out there, and someone is bound to do the dirty work for them and destroy this person's life.
Privacy is dead (or at least is in the ICU).
The only true privacy left is privacy through obscurity (or perhaps absolute paranoia). Once someone wants to know something about you, they will find something, and much of it will be information you did not even know was out there on you. Good luck finding it all, and good luck actually getting it legally removed without drawing attention to the private data in the process.
It's a battle we chose to lose decades ago... it's just finally come to the point that we actually feel the loss. So again, I say, privacy is dead. All we have left is an attempt to sift through the falsehoods to try and find a sliver of real understanding about a person and be able to discern what is slander and what is actually the person's personality and life choices - and what hiring manager has that kind of time?
Problem with this statement "Don't put them on the internet" is this - many of these photos on the internet were not posted by the individual claiming a desire for privacy.
Facebook is a horrifying example of this. I have a friend who's facebook photos are nice and clean and show him as he (99% of the time) is. Shown right below that are the 300+ photos in which friends have tagged his face in so that people know they are of him. So... the 1% of his life in the last 3 years in which he made mistakes and did things that look ridiculous (wearing a bra on a dare, that type of stuff), are now plastered on the internet, and he cannot do anything about it.
So... yes, true privacy is dead. Long live the False Sense of Privacy.
How are they not compensating Apple? Every computer sold is a copy of OSX sold (still in shrink wrap, no EULA issues there, since First Sale doctrine applies), so they are effectively selling a product that increases demand for Apple's product. (Kinda like selling a video game that only works on a Windows PC running Vista with 4 GB of ram... practically forcing the end user to give money to Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers just to use the software.
In fact, this is almost exactly like that:
Selling the game causes an increased demand for the OS so that the user can use the product.
Selling the hardware causes an increased demand for the OS so that the user can use the product.
6106312300
Where is the theft in this transaction? How is this different exactly? If coupled as one product, why can I buy the OS separately? (I cannot buy the Wii's OS separately. I cannot buy the PS3's OS separately. I cannot buy the XBox's OS separately. I cannot buy the iPhone's OS separately.)
Selling the OS cheap is Apple's decision, so saying that it is stealing to buy the OS at the price they offer it to me is a bit of a strawman argument.
There is no theft, no damage to Apple (anymore than there is damage to Apple when someone buys an iTunes song and then rips it to CD to play on their Sony CD Player), and there is additional profit to Apple for new sales of the OS.
A lot of libraries are now trying to get their hands on any movie (high quality or not) following the same pattern for purchases as they follow for which books they buy (and yes, some bestseller paperbacks and even trashy romance novels end up in libraries). So do check it out... they likely have as good a selection of DVDs as they do books if they are anything like the library I have near me.
Oh, and to keep this on-topic, I have watched bootlegged videos, and I cannot see these replacing anything but DVD sales, and only in the case of poor people, or people who are simply going to rent the DVD to rip it, so no loss of income to the studios...
I really wish that lawmakers would realize the reality that making laws to restrict freedoms only restricts the freedoms of law abiding citizens. Laws are a balance between freedom and safety from those who would harm you. Once laws are created that do not protect you from harm (Patriot Act, DMCA, marijuana laws, drinking laws, etc.) you lose freedom and gain nothing in return. Laws that protect you from being harmed by another (DUI/DWI, unauthorized drug distribution, murder, rape, assault, etc.) restrict your freedoms, but the safety of yourself and others is, IMHO, worth the cost. I just wish our law makers would check with those that the laws apply to before trading our freedoms for nothing.
Anywho, that's my 2 pence (because my 2 cents isn't worth much nowadays)
So explain to me how when I bought a phone at best buy (that was an "AT&T only" phone) and it came with an AT&T sim card (I already had my own at home with all of my information on it), that I was not required to then return this piece of hardware? If I am renting it, why can I buy any old sim card and activate it with AT&T? Why can I go into a store and have them copy my sim to a new card, transferring all data? (Yes, they erase the old one, but I still keep the hardware.)
Basically, from my understanding, the closest to them "owning" the sim card would be them "owning" the IMSI keys and any data specific to allowing me to use their network (which I did not see anything in any contract anywhere which stated this, so from my point of view, they do not even own that!).
I plan to build this sim copier, backup my sim onto the new sim card, and feel secure that if my sim dies, I don't lose all of my data, and I don't have to even deal with my phone company at all.
I'm curious if I can, with two identical sims, listen in on the call in progress on one phone by using the other, or if both phones will ring, allowing my wife and I to have a "home phone" that either of us can answer. If this is possible, I wonder why carriers have not offered this service (multiple phones, one number, pay per phone charge, but keep it as "one" phone).
Anyways, no, my carrier does not in any way own my sim. If they did, wouldn't they sue me for selling one on eBay?
I also learned by writing a game. It was in basic. When I say I "wrote" a game, I mean that at 6 years old I copied a BASIC game, line by line, out of the BASIC programming book my dad made sure was on the bottom shelf and available to me.
My dad did not push me into it, but what he did that caught my interest was that he went to a garage sale, found a used AT&T 8086 in working order, and brought it home. He said "This is your computer. You can take it apart, but you have to put it back together yourself. You can install anything you can figure out how to install. I've installed DOS on there, and BASIC, a program that lets you make other programs. If you have questions, let me know, and I'll try to help."
I sat there for days reading the book, trying to understand it, and if I asked my dad a question, he said "what does the book say about it?" If I answered with at least some details, he would help fill in the rest - this forced me to find at least something before I asked for help.
When I finally understood enough to basically (pun intended) know how BASIC worked, I copied the program line by line. When I ran it, it broke (the book, I found out later, purposely had 4 errors which would be easy to find and correct), and my dad said at this point that he would not assist, but that he believed I was more than able to figure it out.
I did, and I really appreciate my dad's method of helping as little as was needed, as it pushed me to learn it on my own.
Don't force it, but do encourage it. The gift of a computer that would be my own (no matter how crappy the computer was) was enough to make my eyes like saucers (my dad's recollection of the events describe them as such), and made me feel responsible for understanding how all of the parts worked and how to make the software work. When I grew bored with the game, I wrote a digital clock application and left it running until the computer finally died.
Sorry for the rambling meander down memory lane, but those memories are really powerfully strong to me, and were the foundation of all my later computer skills, so I felt them worth mentioning.
Yes, sadly, I know that it is a "dream" set of options... But even so, I think that if just the forced licensing option were implemented (as described in my post) that it would be a great boon to innovation... I'd be able to implement a few projects that I found that appear to be simply patented by a company to stifle competition... since the item is not on the market anywhere, the market value for licensing would be $0, so I would pay whatever the minimum licensing fees are (which I think should be insanely low, perhaps even eliminate the minimum, so if the product is not on the market, the cost to license is $0 until the patent actually has market value). As my product grew in popularity, the original owner of the patent would get their increased cut (market value of said patent would increase), and both profit and innovation would be increased. Seems win-win to me?
I've always felt that four things were needed to make the patent system work, though they would be very difficult to implement:
Forced licensing at a predetermined rate after a short period of time, meaning that any competitor only needs wait X years and then can license this patent at X% of the current annual market value on the patent or $X, whichever is greater. (how long and how much is fair though?)
Shorter patent lives with only one renewal. Once the renewal is up, it should become public domain, and anyone anywhere can copy the patent verbatim to produce the product, driving prices down.
Limit the number of patents holdable by any one entity or it's agents, and place limitations which would significantly raise the required licensing fees should an agent/employee desire to license their own patent to their employer (to raise the costs significantly for companies attempting to circumvent the patent limit). - oh, and make patents non-transferable, except via inheritance, and even then, all time lines follow from the original patent date.
Once a product has been placed on the market, if a patent did not exist or was not in the process of being approved by the US Patent Office, then the product becomes public domain, and cannot be patented (ie it becomes a patent in and of itself, but with $0 unlimited licensing).
These options allow for the original intent and purpose of patents - namely to grant a limited monopoly on a certain tangible product or item and to spur development on otherwise unprofitable ventures. If the venture would be profitable without a patent, then because of the limited number of patents allowable, the company would likely go to market without a patent, unafraid of another attempting to patent the same idea. This would also cause more "useless" patents to be formally retired by corporations because they find a more valuable patent is needed, and they currently hold the maximum number of patents for their company. This would also lower the cost to the US Patent Office since less patents would come through the door, and some patent submissions could even be cancelled before they have been granted, due to a more important patent coming in. This would keep the active patents for each corporation relatively stable, and allow for a better allocation of workforce (patent officer X handles all patents for Corp X, Corp Y, and Corp Z, and handles 20% time on non-corporate patent request). I'm sure there's a dozen holes in this idea that will be found within seconds of my posting it, but the concept has always struck me as sound.
I have 3 very practical inventions that I would like to implement but fear that they are too similar to existing patents (which are not currently being implemented). Should I have to be forced to contact this person and pay them to use their patent because they came up with the idea first? What ever happened to being required to show a working prototype to get a patent? If they had a working prototype and were in preparations to go to market (or even showed interest in going to market), I'd simply wait and buy their product, or (if I still thought mine was better) work out a licensing agreement with them and move forward with my product based off their product. As the system currently stands, these inventions are not being created, and will likely sit on the drawing board until the existing patent lapses. It is very frustrating to be in that position.
Wow... talk about putting words in my mouth. I really hate when people do that.
I never once said a word about Microsoft and most certainly did not say anything positive about them. I use Microsoft only because it is required at my job. I'd switch to a flavor of *nix at home, but I have family to consider (my wife is not comfortable with it, and I want to maintain our network and servers for both our benefit, not just my hacking wishes).
Also, I have read the Mac forums, and have kept up on the comments that suddenly vanish because a person actually reported a serious bug. I've seen frustrated users repeatedly post bug reports due to their post suddenly vanishing without comment, and I've seen Apple remove those posts and then present nothing but denials that there are any issues being covered up.
No company is perfect, and these are obviously fringe cases, but the facts remain.
They look so clean because they work so hard to look clean. They white wash the issues to make that 5-10% of disgruntled customers disappear from their public image.
Microsoft simply sues people into oblivion to ensure that no matter how crappy their software is, they still make money.
Linux has many of its own issues, such as driver problems, so many versions as to make one's head spin, and a small number of rude but vocal people on forums telling people to shut up and stop posting their n00b questions to the forum (not a great welcome to my friends who are trying it out for the first time, even though I understand the forum users' frustration).
So to recap:
- Don't put words in others' mouths.
- All OS's and all companies have problems, just different problems, and anyone who is a fanboi for anything just because they like it has no ability to think critically.
So Mac does it better than the rest... so what. They still whitewash their image to try and look as squeaky clean as they can while still putting out stuff that may not be over priced, but sure isn't competitively priced either. Meh. It's life. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to double post, but I also wanted to point out that you can simply choose to use a Pre-Shared Key... how hard is it to create a unique password that you can remember? You don't need a 16 digit HEX code... just a "strong" password that you enter on someone's machine when they first hit your network. Usually, you don't even have to enter it the next time they stop by.
Posted Anonymously, Mr. drtsystems?
Exactly like the Predator... still helped him, right?
But it can be very effectively counterfeited :-) (See Balance of Power )
I'm using Fx 3 currently. I refreshed the page, still looked horrible. Then, I closed the page, reopened it in IE... still looked horrible. Then I reopened it in Fx 3 again, and it suddenly had the white background like it should, and looked great. Don't know what that was, but good design? Nope.
Simple - he's likely using no-script. Looks horrible to me without javascript turned on.
The really short answer: 0
It sounds to me that, in addition to blogging it or posting it on a website, that this would also allow a company the option to create an RSS feed that passes this inforamation to the various news organizations instead of having to send it (basically automatic push instead of manual push). The news organizations can subscribe and get updates automatically. Sounds good to me. As long as they still have to file with the SEC, this sounds like a good move forward... actual progress... it seems so strange to see it happen.
But the charging station can have batteries that charge throughout the day... then, plug in your car at night and drain the charging station into the car. Simple transfer of the day's solar power into the overnight transfer of energy. Now a full day's sunlight on the roof of your garage can charge your car overnight.
Plain and simple: No one wants to be liable for someone missing a call that causes someone's death. (doctor on call, friend calls to say she's committing suicide, I'm sure that the creative people here can come up with more). Basically no one wants to be responsible for a death due to trying to eliminate an annoyance.
Really? Untag himself? From hundreds of photos? And keep untagging himself as others add photos and tag them?
How is this a real solution?
All one has to do, if one hates another, is to post thousands of photos of the individual, post false and deceitful information on forums, implement a google bombing to destroy their name. And, if that is not enough, the instigator can get the 'mob' to do the rest for him/her. All the instigator has to do is post something to inflame the mob justice ("He's a pedophile and everyone needs to know it! Think of the children!" "She's got aids and sleeps with men she hates to infect them. She needs to be stopped!"). Get enough inflammatory falsehoods out there, and someone is bound to do the dirty work for them and destroy this person's life.
Privacy is dead (or at least is in the ICU).
The only true privacy left is privacy through obscurity (or perhaps absolute paranoia). Once someone wants to know something about you, they will find something, and much of it will be information you did not even know was out there on you. Good luck finding it all, and good luck actually getting it legally removed without drawing attention to the private data in the process.
It's a battle we chose to lose decades ago... it's just finally come to the point that we actually feel the loss. So again, I say, privacy is dead. All we have left is an attempt to sift through the falsehoods to try and find a sliver of real understanding about a person and be able to discern what is slander and what is actually the person's personality and life choices - and what hiring manager has that kind of time?
Problem with this statement "Don't put them on the internet" is this - many of these photos on the internet were not posted by the individual claiming a desire for privacy.
Facebook is a horrifying example of this. I have a friend who's facebook photos are nice and clean and show him as he (99% of the time) is. Shown right below that are the 300+ photos in which friends have tagged his face in so that people know they are of him. So... the 1% of his life in the last 3 years in which he made mistakes and did things that look ridiculous (wearing a bra on a dare, that type of stuff), are now plastered on the internet, and he cannot do anything about it.
So... yes, true privacy is dead. Long live the False Sense of Privacy.
Oblig. xkcd.com/398/
In fact, this is almost exactly like that:
6106312300 Where is the theft in this transaction? How is this different exactly? If coupled as one product, why can I buy the OS separately? (I cannot buy the Wii's OS separately. I cannot buy the PS3's OS separately. I cannot buy the XBox's OS separately. I cannot buy the iPhone's OS separately.)
Selling the OS cheap is Apple's decision, so saying that it is stealing to buy the OS at the price they offer it to me is a bit of a strawman argument.
There is no theft, no damage to Apple (anymore than there is damage to Apple when someone buys an iTunes song and then rips it to CD to play on their Sony CD Player), and there is additional profit to Apple for new sales of the OS.
I give up. No one will see reason.
Reinstall every 240 days.
A lot of libraries are now trying to get their hands on any movie (high quality or not) following the same pattern for purchases as they follow for which books they buy (and yes, some bestseller paperbacks and even trashy romance novels end up in libraries). So do check it out... they likely have as good a selection of DVDs as they do books if they are anything like the library I have near me.
Oh, and to keep this on-topic, I have watched bootlegged videos, and I cannot see these replacing anything but DVD sales, and only in the case of poor people, or people who are simply going to rent the DVD to rip it, so no loss of income to the studios...
I really wish that lawmakers would realize the reality that making laws to restrict freedoms only restricts the freedoms of law abiding citizens. Laws are a balance between freedom and safety from those who would harm you. Once laws are created that do not protect you from harm (Patriot Act, DMCA, marijuana laws, drinking laws, etc.) you lose freedom and gain nothing in return. Laws that protect you from being harmed by another (DUI/DWI, unauthorized drug distribution, murder, rape, assault, etc.) restrict your freedoms, but the safety of yourself and others is, IMHO, worth the cost. I just wish our law makers would check with those that the laws apply to before trading our freedoms for nothing.
Anywho, that's my 2 pence (because my 2 cents isn't worth much nowadays)
I wholeheartedly second this.
So explain to me how when I bought a phone at best buy (that was an "AT&T only" phone) and it came with an AT&T sim card (I already had my own at home with all of my information on it), that I was not required to then return this piece of hardware? If I am renting it, why can I buy any old sim card and activate it with AT&T? Why can I go into a store and have them copy my sim to a new card, transferring all data? (Yes, they erase the old one, but I still keep the hardware.)
Basically, from my understanding, the closest to them "owning" the sim card would be them "owning" the IMSI keys and any data specific to allowing me to use their network (which I did not see anything in any contract anywhere which stated this, so from my point of view, they do not even own that!).
I plan to build this sim copier, backup my sim onto the new sim card, and feel secure that if my sim dies, I don't lose all of my data, and I don't have to even deal with my phone company at all.
I'm curious if I can, with two identical sims, listen in on the call in progress on one phone by using the other, or if both phones will ring, allowing my wife and I to have a "home phone" that either of us can answer. If this is possible, I wonder why carriers have not offered this service (multiple phones, one number, pay per phone charge, but keep it as "one" phone).
Anyways, no, my carrier does not in any way own my sim. If they did, wouldn't they sue me for selling one on eBay?
I also learned by writing a game. It was in basic. When I say I "wrote" a game, I mean that at 6 years old I copied a BASIC game, line by line, out of the BASIC programming book my dad made sure was on the bottom shelf and available to me.
My dad did not push me into it, but what he did that caught my interest was that he went to a garage sale, found a used AT&T 8086 in working order, and brought it home. He said "This is your computer. You can take it apart, but you have to put it back together yourself. You can install anything you can figure out how to install. I've installed DOS on there, and BASIC, a program that lets you make other programs. If you have questions, let me know, and I'll try to help."
I sat there for days reading the book, trying to understand it, and if I asked my dad a question, he said "what does the book say about it?" If I answered with at least some details, he would help fill in the rest - this forced me to find at least something before I asked for help.
When I finally understood enough to basically (pun intended) know how BASIC worked, I copied the program line by line. When I ran it, it broke (the book, I found out later, purposely had 4 errors which would be easy to find and correct), and my dad said at this point that he would not assist, but that he believed I was more than able to figure it out.
I did, and I really appreciate my dad's method of helping as little as was needed, as it pushed me to learn it on my own.
Don't force it, but do encourage it. The gift of a computer that would be my own (no matter how crappy the computer was) was enough to make my eyes like saucers (my dad's recollection of the events describe them as such), and made me feel responsible for understanding how all of the parts worked and how to make the software work. When I grew bored with the game, I wrote a digital clock application and left it running until the computer finally died.
Sorry for the rambling meander down memory lane, but those memories are really powerfully strong to me, and were the foundation of all my later computer skills, so I felt them worth mentioning.
Yes, sadly, I know that it is a "dream" set of options... But even so, I think that if just the forced licensing option were implemented (as described in my post) that it would be a great boon to innovation... I'd be able to implement a few projects that I found that appear to be simply patented by a company to stifle competition... since the item is not on the market anywhere, the market value for licensing would be $0, so I would pay whatever the minimum licensing fees are (which I think should be insanely low, perhaps even eliminate the minimum, so if the product is not on the market, the cost to license is $0 until the patent actually has market value). As my product grew in popularity, the original owner of the patent would get their increased cut (market value of said patent would increase), and both profit and innovation would be increased. Seems win-win to me?
Wow... So NASA really is pissing it all away?
These options allow for the original intent and purpose of patents - namely to grant a limited monopoly on a certain tangible product or item and to spur development on otherwise unprofitable ventures. If the venture would be profitable without a patent, then because of the limited number of patents allowable, the company would likely go to market without a patent, unafraid of another attempting to patent the same idea. This would also cause more "useless" patents to be formally retired by corporations because they find a more valuable patent is needed, and they currently hold the maximum number of patents for their company.
This would also lower the cost to the US Patent Office since less patents would come through the door, and some patent submissions could even be cancelled before they have been granted, due to a more important patent coming in. This would keep the active patents for each corporation relatively stable, and allow for a better allocation of workforce (patent officer X handles all patents for Corp X, Corp Y, and Corp Z, and handles 20% time on non-corporate patent request). I'm sure there's a dozen holes in this idea that will be found within seconds of my posting it, but the concept has always struck me as sound.
I agree. The effects are very personal to me.
I have 3 very practical inventions that I would like to implement but fear that they are too similar to existing patents (which are not currently being implemented). Should I have to be forced to contact this person and pay them to use their patent because they came up with the idea first? What ever happened to being required to show a working prototype to get a patent? If they had a working prototype and were in preparations to go to market (or even showed interest in going to market), I'd simply wait and buy their product, or (if I still thought mine was better) work out a licensing agreement with them and move forward with my product based off their product. As the system currently stands, these inventions are not being created, and will likely sit on the drawing board until the existing patent lapses. It is very frustrating to be in that position.
30 pages of text for 10 years? I have books that do better than that! ;)
Um... not everyone uses a comma to separate numbers. For you, perhaps it helps to read that as:
30,000 pages of text for 10,000 years
Wow... talk about putting words in my mouth. I really hate when people do that.
I never once said a word about Microsoft and most certainly did not say anything positive about them. I use Microsoft only because it is required at my job. I'd switch to a flavor of *nix at home, but I have family to consider (my wife is not comfortable with it, and I want to maintain our network and servers for both our benefit, not just my hacking wishes).
Also, I have read the Mac forums, and have kept up on the comments that suddenly vanish because a person actually reported a serious bug. I've seen frustrated users repeatedly post bug reports due to their post suddenly vanishing without comment, and I've seen Apple remove those posts and then present nothing but denials that there are any issues being covered up.
No company is perfect, and these are obviously fringe cases, but the facts remain.
They look so clean because they work so hard to look clean. They white wash the issues to make that 5-10% of disgruntled customers disappear from their public image.
Microsoft simply sues people into oblivion to ensure that no matter how crappy their software is, they still make money.
Linux has many of its own issues, such as driver problems, so many versions as to make one's head spin, and a small number of rude but vocal people on forums telling people to shut up and stop posting their n00b questions to the forum (not a great welcome to my friends who are trying it out for the first time, even though I understand the forum users' frustration).
So to recap:
- Don't put words in others' mouths.
- All OS's and all companies have problems, just different problems, and anyone who is a fanboi for anything just because they like it has no ability to think critically.
So Mac does it better than the rest... so what. They still whitewash their image to try and look as squeaky clean as they can while still putting out stuff that may not be over priced, but sure isn't competitively priced either. Meh. It's life. Get over it.