Actually, I think there is a difference. The factory CD player in my car wont play CDR's. I've tried Maxell, Imation, and multiple brands of generics. I've varied the recording speeds, and tried various tricks with closed and open sessions. Heck, I even tried using CDRW's. Nada. The player can't read the disks and just spits them back out at me.
On a whim, I finally bought a 3-pack of Imation music CDR's and gave them a try. It worked perfectly, the first time and every time after that. Even more, my home theater system used to occasionally have problems while trying to seek through the music tracks on a burned CDR, and those problems have disappeared also. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but there's apparently more to the "music" CDR's than RIAA royalties.
Heh, since I was a lifeless dedicated DoomII player at the time, a bunch of friends and I gathered in our friendly neighborhood basement, broke out the Lantastic disks, and were ready and waiting on the release date. When the appointed hour came upon us, I logged into my CServe account (using my DOS client of course...Windows was for lusers) and pulled it down via my blazing 14.4 modem.
The next thing I remember, it was two days later...
Re:Not really important
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 2
Ah, but you (and many people) make a mistake when assuming that Martian outposts must have a sealed environment. The Martian atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, and with a suitable energy source it's not even difficult to extract oxygen from it. If this extracted O2 is catalyzed with hydrogen, they can even make their own water (the hydrogen would have to be imported though...it exists in only trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere.)
For every problem proposed, there is a solution. The truth of the matter is that we could have had men (and women) living on Mars over a decade ago, but governments apparently don't see the value in it. My only hope is that private industry will see the value in Mars and begin funding some private projects.
FYI, the system can be easily modded to run an ethernet interface for non-MS/non USB capable clients. SB themselves don't promote it, but there are a large number of sites on the Net that explain the mod in great detail.
Hmm, my small LAN is running a pre-MMX P166 as a firewall/proxy/webserver. Since a pre-MMX 166 doesn't requre a fan, and since the AT desktop case contains a fanless power supply, the only moving part in this computer is the hard disk. If not for the fact that we're stuck running NT4SP5 on the machine, it would be maintenance free...but as it is now, I just have to reboot it once every two or three months. There is NO single system solution currently on the market for a reasonable price that could take over the duties of this one computer, and still require as little maintenance.
Space a "preservative"? Have you ever seen any hardware after it's been in space a while? Thermal metal fatigue will eventually cause superstructure failure. Space debris (99% of which is naturally occuring) will contantly pepper it with tiny holes and slowly destroy its equipment. Solar radiation will eventually destroy its computers. Space, unfortunatly, is no preservative. Without maintenance and repair teams constantly refurbishing the craft, Mir would be destroyed in less than a decade.
Agreed. I work 80 miles from my home, and there is NO existing mass transit of ANY type running between the two. If there was, I'd use it. But there isn't, so I burn about five gallons of gas a day commuting back and forth. And no, I CAN'T do anything about it right away. I live in a city with 18%+ unemployment, no jobs in my field, and an insufficient client base to strike out on my own. Luckily, I'll be moving closer to where I work in about nine more months.
I did my time at an ISP, and your suggestions would never fly.
shell-only accounts This is a security risk and legal nightmare. While 90% of subscribers are legitimate UNIX/LINUX users, you've always got that 10% who think they can use you as a platform to launch their cracks. Since ISP's can be sued if they are repeatedly used as a cracking platform, it's not worth the effort or the legal fees (FYI, if I can prove that cracks are repeatedly coming from your ISP, I can legally establish negligence on your part for allowing it to happen. It sucks, but it's worked before.)
static IPs If he's running dialup, then ABSOLUTELY NOT. Static IP's encourage users to keep their connections alive all the time. If you've got a dialup with a 3:1 or 4:1 customer:line ratio, this will quickly swamp your service and cause busy signals. Busy signals are an ISP's worst enemy.
metered toll-free access ISP's only prifit $1-$2 a month per customer as it is. If you charge the connection costs back to the ISP, you quickly end up with negative cashflow followed by bankruptcy.
"free" email accounts For customers? Sure. Everyone else can bugger off.
maybe email virus scanning at the server Again, liability issues. If you claim to filter email viruses and then someone gets one anyway, you will quickly find yourself on the pointy end of a lawsuit. If you CLAIM to filter viruses, you'd damned well better be able to stop them ALL. Otherwise, don't even bother.
game servers, irc servers, news servers Cost permitting, sure. But with the tight margins modern ISP's have to deal with and the need to watch bandwidth usage to keep costs down, it's unlikely that a small rural ISP should be wasting precious capital on something that only a small minority of users will be interested in.
Distributing the programmable numbers for ringtones falls under the same category as copying sheet music...it's still legally considered to be copyrighted material and its distribution is prohibited by law. My feeling, though, is that many judges would laugh them out of court (keep in mind though that it only takes one hardass to set precedent).
FYI~ 'disinterested' and 'uninterested' can be used interchangeably in modern English, but they do have slightly different meanings. Disinterested can sometimes mean 'formerly interested' or 'lost interest in', while 'uninterested' always means the simpler 'has no interest in'.
I've heard this several times now, and only question it because we hadn't heard anything about it before. You have to remember that we had full radio communication with this plane until after it had landed, and I'm SURE that the pilot would have said something if he had been forced to land. The pilots own words, however, indicated that he chose that airfield because of its proximity, and nothing else.
Sure, that may be true among school-aged kids where active social scenes make that kind of information trading simple, but it's a mistake to believe that high school or college students made up the bulk of Napsters 65 million registered users. My company secretary used Napster to search for 80's music from her college days, and served up about 2GB of music herself. She's now offline for good. My own 50+ year old dad served up over 40GB of classic rock from the 50's and 60's that he'd collected on Napster, and he's now offline as well. My non-tech literate 23 year old kindergarten teaching little sister had many gigs of Techno shared on her hard drive (including some hard to find stuff), and she's now offline for good.
Many users, like my dad, think it's just too much trouble to continue on with it, and have tossed in the towel. Others, like my sister and secretary, have this mistaken impression that they'll get caught now that the RIAA has started filtering (the secretary actually told me that she heard a radio station talking about how the RIAA was gathering IP's off of Gnutella to start prosecuting end users).
The RIAA has won in the fact that trading MP3's will no longer be considered "mainstream". It'll continue on, much like the warez scene, but it'll be viewed as "underground" from now on. That alone will scare 90% of the population away from it.
Actually, I'd argue that even among the various *NIXes, Linux leaves a bit to be desired. My own experience: About a month ago I needed to set a personal webserver up for a friend. He needed to set up three sites with three domains on the same machine. Since he was short on money, we pieced together a P2-333 server, and I proceeded to load up RedHat for him. Total time to get the OS installed, configured, and talking to the network: 90 minutes. Then he decided that he actually wanted the machine to double as his development environment, so I had to get his sound, printer, and higher video modes working. Time? Another 40 minutes of patching, tweaking, manual file editing, and crawling through man pages. Then I reinstalled and configured Apache to run his sites. Web server and patch installs took another 60 minutes, start to stop. Finally, I installed Forte and his other dev tools on the machine, which required several more patches and manual file edits to get working...adding another 40 minutes of tweaking to the project. Total time? Ignoring the huge amount of time I spent searching for various documentation, it took nearly four hours to get the system running.
Of course, the system bombed the next day when he tried to update Java 1.2 to the 1.3 J2SE, so I got to repeat the whole thing again. And then it bombed again a week later when he tried to shut it down, and the whole damned filesystem corrupted (as far as I'm concerned, ext2 is just plain evil).
So, being a good friend, what did I do next? I grabbed my Solaris 8 Media Pack($70, unlimited license), drove back over to his home, and went to work. Solaris was installed, configured, and fully functional with his hardware and network in less than 30 minutes...and I NEVER ONCE had to edit a g*ddamned configuration file in vi to do it. iPlanet FasTrak Edition was installed and running all three of his sites 20 minutes after that, and his development tools were installed without a hitch or a patch. He figured out CDE in no time and is now happy as a clam.
The problem was not one of familiarity, I regularly use my Mandrake 6 box for development and built my own distro for my DNS server. I've used Linux since 1995 and am just about as familiar with it as one can get. But I'll be one of the fisrt to tell you that Linux has flaws. It's not that Linux isn't easy enough to use, it's that it often seems like some of the developers went out of their way to make it difficult. I like Linux, and I doubt that I'll be repartitioning my Mandrake box anytime soon, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a serious chiphead. Although we've come a long way, the major distros still need to do some more work on the ease of use issues.
Would you be willing or able to invest potentially tens of thousands of dollars in your legal defense should CCS somehow get the idea that you are violating copyrights? First off, it's a common misconception that defending yourself has to be expensive. Those sky-high lawyers fees you hear about are usually related to murder and other serious felony cases where lab work, expert witnesses, and other big $$ items are needed. But in these types of cases, that isn't needed (unless you want to hire a $500 an hour lawyer). Realistically, you can hire a GOOD defense attorney for anywhere from $1000 to $2500 (and crappy ones for less than that). Countersuits and harassment suits are often taken pro bono.
Even if you are (in your mind) unquestionably innocent, think about the expected cost of your lawsuit. First, don't count on recouping your legal fees just because you're found innocent -- they only need to show that they weren't being reckless (IANAL, BTW) Actually, it wouldn't even be that hard to win. What they would have to prove is that they had convincing evidence to indicate that you were the perpetrator of the theft. If they lost the court case based on their evidence, winning a countersuit is fairly simple.
Oh, and IANAL either (I'm a programmer), but my mother is a criminal defense attorney with nearly 30 years experience, who has been through scenarios very similar to this one several times since she started taking on computer fraud and theft cases (BTW, she has had several clients settle when guilt was obvious, but she's never had one found guilty). I just happened to grow up listening to legal discussions and reading law journals:-)
But to continue...
So figure legal fees + (probability of being wrongly found guilty) * (penalties if you're found guilty)...(ed)...I'm guessing that at around a 5% chance of being found wrongly guilty, you're going to win by just paying out. I guess that could be argued, since there's always a small chance of being found wrongly guilty (genuine statistics put it closer to 1-2% BTW). But even at 5%, look at the odds...that's a 95% chance of the truth prevailing. That's a 95% chance of you filing a countersuit and walking away with a few hundred thousand in your pocket. That's a 95% chance that you can give 'The Man' the high hard one. Perhaps I'm being a little cold, but I look at it this way; anybody who would bail and pay out on a 5% chance of failure deserves what he gets. To preserve your rights, you must be willing to stand up and fight for them. And with any fight, there's ALWAYS a small chance of failure. Besides, there's always appeals:-)
Further, their behavior can easily prevent people from freely exercising rights that they may have to use copyrighted materials. Consider the questionable process of downloading an MP3 of a song you own on CD in order to space-shift that song for play on your Rio. Maybe you want to help your less technically-minded friends do this by providing them with MP3s for songs you know they own on CD. Is this fair use? Straw man argument. If you are sending your friends MP3's of CD's they already own by email, nobody is going to bother you. If, by chance, someone from the RIAA does come knocking, their argument dies the second you show them the jewel case from the CD's in question. They can try to slap you with any penalty they want, but no court in the land would convict you for something like that, and almost ANY court would award YOU money to punish them for being so stupid.
the small guy can't help but be screwed in some situations. But being innocent is *not* necessarily enough in order not to have to worry about these guys. Sure, I got a speeding ticket when I was younger, when I was absolutely sure that I wasn't speeding. I'm sure that cops decision to pull me over had more to do with the fact that I was a purple haired teenager driving a beatup Camaro through the "nice" section of town than it had to do with my cars velocity. I ended up paying a $100 fine for something I didn't do, but I DON'T use that occasion to argue for the disbandment of our local police force. There will always be a small number of people who get unfairly burned, but that's a side effect of any society. If someone could figure out an efficient system that would eliminate this while still making sure that the guilty are punished, I would embrace it wholeheartedly. But as noone has invented such a system yet...
No, you're looking at it wrong. This is, for all intents and purposes, just an out of court settlement. It would be like you smashing my car up with a baseball bat, and me catching the whole thing on video. I could walk over to you the next day and hand you a bill with the stipulation "pay it now and I'll forget this happened, or fight it and I'll sue you and press charges". There's nothing wrong with that at all. You broke the law, and I'm giving you a way out that satisfies me and doesn't involve jailtime for you. You still have the option of your day in court if you want it, but you know that the evidence is irrefutable.
Besides, you're also overlooking the fact that you can sue someone for maliciously suing you. You're arguing that this could catch innocent people, so I'll use myself as an example: I am not a music pirate. I can honestly sit here and say that I have never stolen one piece of music in my life. So what would I do if this company came at me with the allegation that I was running a music swapping service? I'd fight them, and it would be on THEIR shoulders to prove that I actually did it. And after I won? I'd turn around and slap THEM with a HUGE punitive lawsuit for harrasment, character defamation, and all the other things my lawyer could think of. Innocents, if they have half a brain in their heads, could end up PROFITING from false allegations. And who could disagree with that?:-)
Evidence of this type is rarely accepted into a court trial, because it becomes the prosecutions responsibility to not only present the evidence, but to prove that it wasn't faked. Evidence collected during a warranted search is generally accepted to be "valid" for the purposes of trial (though it too can be challenged), but evidence that is "handed in" by someone else must be immediately treated as suspect. The odds are that any decent defense attorney could have the evidence supressed in a pre-trial hearing so that the judge or jury would never be permitted to see it during trial.
There is an easy way around this though: Let's say that I'm a cop and that you gave me a printout of illegally obtained info you'd pulled off a website. For all intents and purposes, that information is useless to me. But that doesn't mean that I can't use it. I could easily obtain a warrant and go get that information myself so that I WOULD have a valid copy. There are numerous legal yardsticks that have to be applied to this, and it tends to be a legal mess when it happens ("fruits of the poisoned tree" arguments), but 90% of the time evidence can be shoved through this way.
I think you're confusing missions. IIRC, the Clementine lunar mission ended a few years ago with the spacecraft slamming into the surface in order to kick up dust, so that we could do a water composition analysis from Earth. I seem to recall that, even with hundreds of telescopes looking for it, we couldn't spot the plume.
But a mission of this type would be highly improbable on Eros. Although it's a big asteroid, it's still just a small speck of light to Earth based telescopes. I don't think there's a telescope yet built that would have enough aperture to pick up a plume on its surface.
It's like this: You come up with a great idea and start selling it. I see your idea, copy it, and begin selling it myself. Legally, I now owe you royalties. The catch is that you CANNOT ask for so much that I'm priced out of the market, or that your price gains an unfair advantage. The goal of royalties is merely to make sure that you're compensated for the business I take away from you, not to put me out of business. A patent is like a purse to collect money from eveyone who uses your idea. It is NOT a hatchet to kill them with.
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 4
So you're telling me that you would have no problem with companies firing people because the employee isn't making the company any money? You'd agree with the management promoting and giving raises to some guy who's been with the company for six weeks, while passing over 100 other employees who've been with the company for years? You'd have no problem with an employee crossing a picket line if he honestly thought that the unions position was wrong?
You show me a union that agrees with those positions, and I'll think about changing mine. Until then...
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 5
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
No, it's YOU that doesn't get it. The fight is not against the corporation. It's not against the bosses or the big-money bigwigs. The fight is FOR individualism and AGAINST stagnation, so that we can all succeed and grow. The problem is that, in this regard, unions are just as bad as corporations. The collectivist push of union organizers is the complete opposite of the individualist attitudes that many Slashdotters share, because "promoting fairness" often means repressing those who truly ARE superior at their jobs. And stagnation? Nothing is worse than union bureaucracy. Union demands that force companies into adopting seniority based promotion and raise schedules, and make it difficult to drop deadwood and crappy workers from the system are the epitomy of what's WRONG with the old economy ways of doing business. I am not a sheep, and I don't need some damned union boss protecting me.
In Canada, the cost is the same, per capita, as in the USA. Yet, 100% of the population is COVERED. And yet the quality of that coverage is subpar. To me, a healthcare system that increases the number of people covered by decreasing the quality of that service is unacceptable. When you nationalize a system like medicine and subject it to needless government budget fights and cutbacks, the quality of service is BOUND to suffer.
t just had been revealed recently that those horror stories were totally false; they have been concocted by the myriad interests that want the universal health care wrecked. The guy in the story above is an old college buddy of my dads, is now 50 years old, and lives in Edmunten(sp?) Canada. I still remember how spooked my dad was that someone "so young" could come so close to dying from something so routine. I can't attest to whether or not most of them are true, but I can assure you that this one is.
The fact is that in the USA, plenty of lives have been wrecked by the private health-care system I actually agree with you there. I never said that the system couldn't use some work, only that socialisation isn't the answer. I'd point you to Californias public/private partnership used in the Medi-Cal program (public health insurance for low and zero income families). The system essentially works like this: you pick an insurance company from a short list of approved providers, and the state foots the bill. The only expense to the low-income family is the occasional $5 copay, and they are covered just like they would be under any other private health plan. My sister, a struggling college student with a three year old kid, has been using the system for several years now without a problem. Even though she has essentially zero income, she gets timely and immediate medical care and checkups for both herself and her son, Perhaps, instead of bantering on about knocking the foundations out of this system and building a new one, you should just look at fixing the problems. Californias system works well, so why not push YOUR state to adopt a similar system?
Oh, and LOL @ all the people wishing me death and dismemberment. I've always loved how many socialists would rather get personal than actually argue the merits of the system they're promoting.
The socialisation of medicine would suffer from the same fundamental problems that affect everything socialist. When you socialize a system, when you remove the competition from the market, all of the people who participate in that system become just another number, just another file to be processed from point X to point Y, nothing special. You have no recourse against the system, because for socialism to succeed, the free market options are usually removed.
This is what has happened to all of the socialized health care systems to date...they don't improve because they don't HAVE to improve. They have no competition, they don't have to worry about funding, and they know that the systems users have no other options, so there's no incentive to work harder. In the U.S, bad hospitals that don't advance go out of business. In Canada, the UK, Mexico, and all the other countries with socialized health care, the bad hospitals carry on because their funding can't be cut. THIS is why people come to the U.S. from all over the world to get their medical care, and it's why I don't understand the push towards socialized medicine here.
True story: A friend of my dads is a Canadian citizen, and he had made an appointment with his doctor because of some recurring light headedness. After waiting two months for an appointment to see his physician, the MD ordered a CT scan...but he was informed that he'd have to wait three more months because there weren't enough machines and the appointment list was rather long. A month later, while in Sacramento on business, he passed out at the wheel of his car and was rushed to the hospital. The CT scan that they immediately ran on him revealed a benign tumor at the base of his skull which was compressing one of the major arteries to the brain. They performed immediate surgery and he was fully healed in a matter of weeks. If not for free-market medicine that man would have been dead at 42, and there are THOUSANDS of others just like him. Socialised medicine just doesn't work.
The only problem I see with this is that they weren't upfront about it.
There is a widespread belief that insurance companies discriminating against someone because they have a genetic predisposition to a particular disease is somehow "wrong", and I don't get WHY. Insurance companies, like any other business, can only survive if their income exceeds their outlay. The natural response for ANY business must be to focus on reducing outlay. If you're an insurance company, you do that by refusing to cover sick people. This is why we take health exams when we want to buy large life insurance policies. This is why I pay more for my insurance because I'd smoked for a few years. Health insurance is like a big money pool, and the best way to make sure that there's enough money to go around is to limit the amount of money any one person can take out of it.
And if you have somebody who is likely to develop a MAJOR problem because of a genetic problem? Well, you just don't let them in. There are high-rate programs to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and they'll have to join them like anyone else would who had a pre-existing disease. While I'm sure that some people will shout about the "unfairness" of paying more because of a genetic disorder, it must be pointed out that they will also be USING more insurance than the average healthy person. Blame nature, not the insurance company.
In addition to it being illegal to climb on the underside of the bridge (which other people already pointed out), it is also illegal to throw anything over the side of the bridge. In the cases of both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, the police enforce these statutes VERY strictly. I was cuffed, arrested, and fined $250 about 10 years ago for throwing a SODA CAN over the side of the Golden Gate...so I can only imagine how bad these guys'll have it if they get caught.
You're missing an important difference on the trucks...they're optional. When a trucking company buys a new rig from Peterbilt, Freightliner, etc., they can specify whether or not they want an electronic speed limiter installed, and what speed they want it set for. Many trucking companies opt to buy the devices because it reduces the odds that some yahoo truck driver is going to destroy $200,000 worth of truck and trailer and it reduces their insurance premiums, but just as many do not install them. My uncle owns a fleet of 45 limiter-free Peterbilt Classics that his employees run on the 7-Western routes, and they regularly hit 90-100MPH on some of the more deserted stretches of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico highway. They run time-sensitive loads and the cost of paying the occasional ticket and liability claim is lower than his potential losses if he slowed the trucks down.
I could also get into the fact that it's really a different technology since the speed limiters on trucks are usully fixed at 55-60MPH (sometimes much lower on ag trucks) regardless of what the local speed is, whereas the tech mentioned here is dynamic depending on your location. But I'll ignore that and focus on the un-needed government intervention...a much more serious issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think there is a difference. The factory CD player in my car wont play CDR's. I've tried Maxell, Imation, and multiple brands of generics. I've varied the recording speeds, and tried various tricks with closed and open sessions. Heck, I even tried using CDRW's. Nada. The player can't read the disks and just spits them back out at me.
On a whim, I finally bought a 3-pack of Imation music CDR's and gave them a try. It worked perfectly, the first time and every time after that. Even more, my home theater system used to occasionally have problems while trying to seek through the music tracks on a burned CDR, and those problems have disappeared also. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but there's apparently more to the "music" CDR's than RIAA royalties.
Heh, since I was a lifeless dedicated DoomII player at the time, a bunch of friends and I gathered in our friendly neighborhood basement, broke out the Lantastic disks, and were ready and waiting on the release date. When the appointed hour came upon us, I logged into my CServe account (using my DOS client of course...Windows was for lusers) and pulled it down via my blazing 14.4 modem.
The next thing I remember, it was two days later...
Ah, but you (and many people) make a mistake when assuming that Martian outposts must have a sealed environment. The Martian atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, and with a suitable energy source it's not even difficult to extract oxygen from it. If this extracted O2 is catalyzed with hydrogen, they can even make their own water (the hydrogen would have to be imported though...it exists in only trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere.)
For every problem proposed, there is a solution. The truth of the matter is that we could have had men (and women) living on Mars over a decade ago, but governments apparently don't see the value in it. My only hope is that private industry will see the value in Mars and begin funding some private projects.
FYI, the system can be easily modded to run an ethernet interface for non-MS/non USB capable clients. SB themselves don't promote it, but there are a large number of sites on the Net that explain the mod in great detail.
Hmm, my small LAN is running a pre-MMX P166 as a firewall/proxy/webserver. Since a pre-MMX 166 doesn't requre a fan, and since the AT desktop case contains a fanless power supply, the only moving part in this computer is the hard disk. If not for the fact that we're stuck running NT4SP5 on the machine, it would be maintenance free...but as it is now, I just have to reboot it once every two or three months. There is NO single system solution currently on the market for a reasonable price that could take over the duties of this one computer, and still require as little maintenance.
Space a "preservative"? Have you ever seen any hardware after it's been in space a while? Thermal metal fatigue will eventually cause superstructure failure. Space debris (99% of which is naturally occuring) will contantly pepper it with tiny holes and slowly destroy its equipment. Solar radiation will eventually destroy its computers. Space, unfortunatly, is no preservative. Without maintenance and repair teams constantly refurbishing the craft, Mir would be destroyed in less than a decade.
Agreed. I work 80 miles from my home, and there is NO existing mass transit of ANY type running between the two. If there was, I'd use it. But there isn't, so I burn about five gallons of gas a day commuting back and forth. And no, I CAN'T do anything about it right away. I live in a city with 18%+ unemployment, no jobs in my field, and an insufficient client base to strike out on my own. Luckily, I'll be moving closer to where I work in about nine more months.
I did my time at an ISP, and your suggestions would never fly.
shell-only accounts
This is a security risk and legal nightmare. While 90% of subscribers are legitimate UNIX/LINUX users, you've always got that 10% who think they can use you as a platform to launch their cracks. Since ISP's can be sued if they are repeatedly used as a cracking platform, it's not worth the effort or the legal fees (FYI, if I can prove that cracks are repeatedly coming from your ISP, I can legally establish negligence on your part for allowing it to happen. It sucks, but it's worked before.)
static IPs
If he's running dialup, then ABSOLUTELY NOT. Static IP's encourage users to keep their connections alive all the time. If you've got a dialup with a 3:1 or 4:1 customer:line ratio, this will quickly swamp your service and cause busy signals. Busy signals are an ISP's worst enemy.
metered toll-free access
ISP's only prifit $1-$2 a month per customer as it is. If you charge the connection costs back to the ISP, you quickly end up with negative cashflow followed by bankruptcy.
"free" email accounts
For customers? Sure. Everyone else can bugger off.
maybe email virus scanning at the server
Again, liability issues. If you claim to filter email viruses and then someone gets one anyway, you will quickly find yourself on the pointy end of a lawsuit. If you CLAIM to filter viruses, you'd damned well better be able to stop them ALL. Otherwise, don't even bother.
game servers, irc servers, news servers
Cost permitting, sure. But with the tight margins modern ISP's have to deal with and the need to watch bandwidth usage to keep costs down, it's unlikely that a small rural ISP should be wasting precious capital on something that only a small minority of users will be interested in.
Distributing the programmable numbers for ringtones falls under the same category as copying sheet music...it's still legally considered to be copyrighted material and its distribution is prohibited by law. My feeling, though, is that many judges would laugh them out of court (keep in mind though that it only takes one hardass to set precedent).
FYI~ 'disinterested' and 'uninterested' can be used interchangeably in modern English, but they do have slightly different meanings. Disinterested can sometimes mean 'formerly interested' or 'lost interest in', while 'uninterested' always means the simpler 'has no interest in'.
I've heard this several times now, and only question it because we hadn't heard anything about it before. You have to remember that we had full radio communication with this plane until after it had landed, and I'm SURE that the pilot would have said something if he had been forced to land. The pilots own words, however, indicated that he chose that airfield because of its proximity, and nothing else.
Sure, that may be true among school-aged kids where active social scenes make that kind of information trading simple, but it's a mistake to believe that high school or college students made up the bulk of Napsters 65 million registered users. My company secretary used Napster to search for 80's music from her college days, and served up about 2GB of music herself. She's now offline for good. My own 50+ year old dad served up over 40GB of classic rock from the 50's and 60's that he'd collected on Napster, and he's now offline as well. My non-tech literate 23 year old kindergarten teaching little sister had many gigs of Techno shared on her hard drive (including some hard to find stuff), and she's now offline for good.
Many users, like my dad, think it's just too much trouble to continue on with it, and have tossed in the towel. Others, like my sister and secretary, have this mistaken impression that they'll get caught now that the RIAA has started filtering (the secretary actually told me that she heard a radio station talking about how the RIAA was gathering IP's off of Gnutella to start prosecuting end users).
The RIAA has won in the fact that trading MP3's will no longer be considered "mainstream". It'll continue on, much like the warez scene, but it'll be viewed as "underground" from now on. That alone will scare 90% of the population away from it.
Actually, I'd argue that even among the various *NIXes, Linux leaves a bit to be desired. My own experience: About a month ago I needed to set a personal webserver up for a friend. He needed to set up three sites with three domains on the same machine. Since he was short on money, we pieced together a P2-333 server, and I proceeded to load up RedHat for him. Total time to get the OS installed, configured, and talking to the network: 90 minutes. Then he decided that he actually wanted the machine to double as his development environment, so I had to get his sound, printer, and higher video modes working. Time? Another 40 minutes of patching, tweaking, manual file editing, and crawling through man pages. Then I reinstalled and configured Apache to run his sites. Web server and patch installs took another 60 minutes, start to stop. Finally, I installed Forte and his other dev tools on the machine, which required several more patches and manual file edits to get working...adding another 40 minutes of tweaking to the project. Total time? Ignoring the huge amount of time I spent searching for various documentation, it took nearly four hours to get the system running.
Of course, the system bombed the next day when he tried to update Java 1.2 to the 1.3 J2SE, so I got to repeat the whole thing again. And then it bombed again a week later when he tried to shut it down, and the whole damned filesystem corrupted (as far as I'm concerned, ext2 is just plain evil).
So, being a good friend, what did I do next? I grabbed my Solaris 8 Media Pack($70, unlimited license), drove back over to his home, and went to work. Solaris was installed, configured, and fully functional with his hardware and network in less than 30 minutes...and I NEVER ONCE had to edit a g*ddamned configuration file in vi to do it. iPlanet FasTrak Edition was installed and running all three of his sites 20 minutes after that, and his development tools were installed without a hitch or a patch. He figured out CDE in no time and is now happy as a clam.
The problem was not one of familiarity, I regularly use my Mandrake 6 box for development and built my own distro for my DNS server. I've used Linux since 1995 and am just about as familiar with it as one can get. But I'll be one of the fisrt to tell you that Linux has flaws. It's not that Linux isn't easy enough to use, it's that it often seems like some of the developers went out of their way to make it difficult. I like Linux, and I doubt that I'll be repartitioning my Mandrake box anytime soon, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a serious chiphead. Although we've come a long way, the major distros still need to do some more work on the ease of use issues.
A few rebuttals:
:-)
:-)
Would you be willing or able to invest potentially tens of thousands of dollars in your legal defense should CCS somehow get the idea that you are violating copyrights?
First off, it's a common misconception that defending yourself has to be expensive. Those sky-high lawyers fees you hear about are usually related to murder and other serious felony cases where lab work, expert witnesses, and other big $$ items are needed. But in these types of cases, that isn't needed (unless you want to hire a $500 an hour lawyer). Realistically, you can hire a GOOD defense attorney for anywhere from $1000 to $2500 (and crappy ones for less than that). Countersuits and harassment suits are often taken pro bono.
Even if you are (in your mind) unquestionably innocent, think about the expected cost of your lawsuit. First, don't count on recouping your legal fees just because you're found innocent -- they only need to show that they weren't being reckless (IANAL, BTW)
Actually, it wouldn't even be that hard to win. What they would have to prove is that they had convincing evidence to indicate that you were the perpetrator of the theft. If they lost the court case based on their evidence, winning a countersuit is fairly simple.
Oh, and IANAL either (I'm a programmer), but my mother is a criminal defense attorney with nearly 30 years experience, who has been through scenarios very similar to this one several times since she started taking on computer fraud and theft cases (BTW, she has had several clients settle when guilt was obvious, but she's never had one found guilty). I just happened to grow up listening to legal discussions and reading law journals
But to continue...
So figure legal fees + (probability of being wrongly found guilty) * (penalties if you're found guilty)...(ed)...I'm guessing that at around a 5% chance of being found wrongly guilty, you're going to win by just paying out.
I guess that could be argued, since there's always a small chance of being found wrongly guilty (genuine statistics put it closer to 1-2% BTW). But even at 5%, look at the odds...that's a 95% chance of the truth prevailing. That's a 95% chance of you filing a countersuit and walking away with a few hundred thousand in your pocket. That's a 95% chance that you can give 'The Man' the high hard one. Perhaps I'm being a little cold, but I look at it this way; anybody who would bail and pay out on a 5% chance of failure deserves what he gets. To preserve your rights, you must be willing to stand up and fight for them. And with any fight, there's ALWAYS a small chance of failure. Besides, there's always appeals
Further, their behavior can easily prevent people from freely exercising rights that they may have to use copyrighted materials. Consider the questionable process of downloading an MP3 of a song you own on CD in order to space-shift that song for play on your Rio. Maybe you want to help your less technically-minded friends do this by providing them with MP3s for songs you know they own on CD. Is this fair use?
Straw man argument. If you are sending your friends MP3's of CD's they already own by email, nobody is going to bother you. If, by chance, someone from the RIAA does come knocking, their argument dies the second you show them the jewel case from the CD's in question. They can try to slap you with any penalty they want, but no court in the land would convict you for something like that, and almost ANY court would award YOU money to punish them for being so stupid.
the small guy can't help but be screwed in some situations. But being innocent is *not* necessarily enough in order not to have to worry about these guys.
Sure, I got a speeding ticket when I was younger, when I was absolutely sure that I wasn't speeding. I'm sure that cops decision to pull me over had more to do with the fact that I was a purple haired teenager driving a beatup Camaro through the "nice" section of town than it had to do with my cars velocity. I ended up paying a $100 fine for something I didn't do, but I DON'T use that occasion to argue for the disbandment of our local police force. There will always be a small number of people who get unfairly burned, but that's a side effect of any society. If someone could figure out an efficient system that would eliminate this while still making sure that the guilty are punished, I would embrace it wholeheartedly. But as noone has invented such a system yet...
No, you're looking at it wrong. This is, for all intents and purposes, just an out of court settlement. It would be like you smashing my car up with a baseball bat, and me catching the whole thing on video. I could walk over to you the next day and hand you a bill with the stipulation "pay it now and I'll forget this happened, or fight it and I'll sue you and press charges". There's nothing wrong with that at all. You broke the law, and I'm giving you a way out that satisfies me and doesn't involve jailtime for you. You still have the option of your day in court if you want it, but you know that the evidence is irrefutable.
:-)
Besides, you're also overlooking the fact that you can sue someone for maliciously suing you. You're arguing that this could catch innocent people, so I'll use myself as an example: I am not a music pirate. I can honestly sit here and say that I have never stolen one piece of music in my life. So what would I do if this company came at me with the allegation that I was running a music swapping service? I'd fight them, and it would be on THEIR shoulders to prove that I actually did it. And after I won? I'd turn around and slap THEM with a HUGE punitive lawsuit for harrasment, character defamation, and all the other things my lawyer could think of. Innocents, if they have half a brain in their heads, could end up PROFITING from false allegations. And who could disagree with that?
Evidence of this type is rarely accepted into a court trial, because it becomes the prosecutions responsibility to not only present the evidence, but to prove that it wasn't faked. Evidence collected during a warranted search is generally accepted to be "valid" for the purposes of trial (though it too can be challenged), but evidence that is "handed in" by someone else must be immediately treated as suspect. The odds are that any decent defense attorney could have the evidence supressed in a pre-trial hearing so that the judge or jury would never be permitted to see it during trial.
There is an easy way around this though: Let's say that I'm a cop and that you gave me a printout of illegally obtained info you'd pulled off a website. For all intents and purposes, that information is useless to me. But that doesn't mean that I can't use it. I could easily obtain a warrant and go get that information myself so that I WOULD have a valid copy. There are numerous legal yardsticks that have to be applied to this, and it tends to be a legal mess when it happens ("fruits of the poisoned tree" arguments), but 90% of the time evidence can be shoved through this way.
I think you're confusing missions. IIRC, the Clementine lunar mission ended a few years ago with the spacecraft slamming into the surface in order to kick up dust, so that we could do a water composition analysis from Earth. I seem to recall that, even with hundreds of telescopes looking for it, we couldn't spot the plume.
But a mission of this type would be highly improbable on Eros. Although it's a big asteroid, it's still just a small speck of light to Earth based telescopes. I don't think there's a telescope yet built that would have enough aperture to pick up a plume on its surface.
It's like this: You come up with a great idea and start selling it. I see your idea, copy it, and begin selling it myself. Legally, I now owe you royalties. The catch is that you CANNOT ask for so much that I'm priced out of the market, or that your price gains an unfair advantage. The goal of royalties is merely to make sure that you're compensated for the business I take away from you, not to put me out of business. A patent is like a purse to collect money from eveyone who uses your idea. It is NOT a hatchet to kill them with.
So you're telling me that you would have no problem with companies firing people because the employee isn't making the company any money? You'd agree with the management promoting and giving raises to some guy who's been with the company for six weeks, while passing over 100 other employees who've been with the company for years? You'd have no problem with an employee crossing a picket line if he honestly thought that the unions position was wrong?
You show me a union that agrees with those positions, and I'll think about changing mine. Until then...
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
No, it's YOU that doesn't get it. The fight is not against the corporation. It's not against the bosses or the big-money bigwigs. The fight is FOR individualism and AGAINST stagnation, so that we can all succeed and grow. The problem is that, in this regard, unions are just as bad as corporations. The collectivist push of union organizers is the complete opposite of the individualist attitudes that many Slashdotters share, because "promoting fairness" often means repressing those who truly ARE superior at their jobs. And stagnation? Nothing is worse than union bureaucracy. Union demands that force companies into adopting seniority based promotion and raise schedules, and make it difficult to drop deadwood and crappy workers from the system are the epitomy of what's WRONG with the old economy ways of doing business. I am not a sheep, and I don't need some damned union boss protecting me.
In Canada, the cost is the same, per capita, as in the USA. Yet, 100% of the population is COVERED.
And yet the quality of that coverage is subpar. To me, a healthcare system that increases the number of people covered by decreasing the quality of that service is unacceptable. When you nationalize a system like medicine and subject it to needless government budget fights and cutbacks, the quality of service is BOUND to suffer.
t just had been revealed recently that those horror stories were totally false; they have been concocted by the myriad interests that want the universal health care wrecked.
The guy in the story above is an old college buddy of my dads, is now 50 years old, and lives in Edmunten(sp?) Canada. I still remember how spooked my dad was that someone "so young" could come so close to dying from something so routine. I can't attest to whether or not most of them are true, but I can assure you that this one is.
The fact is that in the USA, plenty of lives have been wrecked by the private health-care system
I actually agree with you there. I never said that the system couldn't use some work, only that socialisation isn't the answer. I'd point you to Californias public/private partnership used in the Medi-Cal program (public health insurance for low and zero income families). The system essentially works like this: you pick an insurance company from a short list of approved providers, and the state foots the bill. The only expense to the low-income family is the occasional $5 copay, and they are covered just like they would be under any other private health plan. My sister, a struggling college student with a three year old kid, has been using the system for several years now without a problem. Even though she has essentially zero income, she gets timely and immediate medical care and checkups for both herself and her son, Perhaps, instead of bantering on about knocking the foundations out of this system and building a new one, you should just look at fixing the problems. Californias system works well, so why not push YOUR state to adopt a similar system?
Oh, and LOL @ all the people wishing me death and dismemberment. I've always loved how many socialists would rather get personal than actually argue the merits of the system they're promoting.
The socialisation of medicine would suffer from the same fundamental problems that affect everything socialist. When you socialize a system, when you remove the competition from the market, all of the people who participate in that system become just another number, just another file to be processed from point X to point Y, nothing special. You have no recourse against the system, because for socialism to succeed, the free market options are usually removed.
This is what has happened to all of the socialized health care systems to date...they don't improve because they don't HAVE to improve. They have no competition, they don't have to worry about funding, and they know that the systems users have no other options, so there's no incentive to work harder. In the U.S, bad hospitals that don't advance go out of business. In Canada, the UK, Mexico, and all the other countries with socialized health care, the bad hospitals carry on because their funding can't be cut. THIS is why people come to the U.S. from all over the world to get their medical care, and it's why I don't understand the push towards socialized medicine here.
True story: A friend of my dads is a Canadian citizen, and he had made an appointment with his doctor because of some recurring light headedness. After waiting two months for an appointment to see his physician, the MD ordered a CT scan...but he was informed that he'd have to wait three more months because there weren't enough machines and the appointment list was rather long. A month later, while in Sacramento on business, he passed out at the wheel of his car and was rushed to the hospital. The CT scan that they immediately ran on him revealed a benign tumor at the base of his skull which was compressing one of the major arteries to the brain. They performed immediate surgery and he was fully healed in a matter of weeks. If not for free-market medicine that man would have been dead at 42, and there are THOUSANDS of others just like him. Socialised medicine just doesn't work.
The only problem I see with this is that they weren't upfront about it.
There is a widespread belief that insurance companies discriminating against someone because they have a genetic predisposition to a particular disease is somehow "wrong", and I don't get WHY. Insurance companies, like any other business, can only survive if their income exceeds their outlay. The natural response for ANY business must be to focus on reducing outlay. If you're an insurance company, you do that by refusing to cover sick people. This is why we take health exams when we want to buy large life insurance policies. This is why I pay more for my insurance because I'd smoked for a few years. Health insurance is like a big money pool, and the best way to make sure that there's enough money to go around is to limit the amount of money any one person can take out of it.
And if you have somebody who is likely to develop a MAJOR problem because of a genetic problem? Well, you just don't let them in. There are high-rate programs to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and they'll have to join them like anyone else would who had a pre-existing disease. While I'm sure that some people will shout about the "unfairness" of paying more because of a genetic disorder, it must be pointed out that they will also be USING more insurance than the average healthy person. Blame nature, not the insurance company.
In addition to it being illegal to climb on the underside of the bridge (which other people already pointed out), it is also illegal to throw anything over the side of the bridge. In the cases of both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, the police enforce these statutes VERY strictly. I was cuffed, arrested, and fined $250 about 10 years ago for throwing a SODA CAN over the side of the Golden Gate...so I can only imagine how bad these guys'll have it if they get caught.
You're missing an important difference on the trucks...they're optional. When a trucking company buys a new rig from Peterbilt, Freightliner, etc., they can specify whether or not they want an electronic speed limiter installed, and what speed they want it set for. Many trucking companies opt to buy the devices because it reduces the odds that some yahoo truck driver is going to destroy $200,000 worth of truck and trailer and it reduces their insurance premiums, but just as many do not install them. My uncle owns a fleet of 45 limiter-free Peterbilt Classics that his employees run on the 7-Western routes, and they regularly hit 90-100MPH on some of the more deserted stretches of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico highway. They run time-sensitive loads and the cost of paying the occasional ticket and liability claim is lower than his potential losses if he slowed the trucks down.
I could also get into the fact that it's really a different technology since the speed limiters on trucks are usully fixed at 55-60MPH (sometimes much lower on ag trucks) regardless of what the local speed is, whereas the tech mentioned here is dynamic depending on your location. But I'll ignore that and focus on the un-needed government intervention...a much more serious issue.