If you get caught with a radar detector in my state, and it has batteries in it or is plugged in, even if it is not on, you are guilty of a crime. I don't remember the severity off-hand, but it IS a crime.
As far as the theft-of-services goes, there is nothing wrong (or at least shouldn't be) with building your own receiver and decrypting the signal by brute force. If you subscribe to their service and then hack their system to receive channels that are not on your contract, then that is a theft of services. Even though is does not cost them a dime for you to decode that information, it costs them an awful lot that you're not paying to subscribe to those channels. You may think you can walk the line, but the courts will disagree. And then life will go on.
Sure, it takes a lot of effort to hack those cards, but my admiration goes to the Hughes programmers who did their job (protect the content from unauthorized access) and did it with flair.
Ok, I know this won't please everyone, but how about this for a test:
If a reasonable person could be easily convinced that it is in fact real, it should be banned. This would cover photoshopping minors' faces onto the bodies of young porn models, or otherwise displaying pictures that contain at least part of a real minor portrayed in such a situation. If it looks kinda young, but the model in the picture is of age, there is absolutely no justification for a ban, even if they have her wearing a bib and sucking on a bottle for the sake of the perverts. No reasonable person would confuse Anime for reality, either. In other words, if the distributor of the pornography can't show that no real human minors are depicted in a sexually explicit manner, that should be probable cause for a warrant. Obviously the ultimate burden of proof would remain on the government.
There you have it. Maybe on the edge of the slippery slope, but I would say within reach of the railing. Keeping in mind that there are many people who would have us go all the way down the slope, I think that a little bit of compromise, clearly limited, is in order. Obviously this is not the only way we could do it, so I welcome other ideas. And of course, IANAL, but I used to live with 2 of them.
Nothing came of the IBM case? Wrong! During the course of the case, IBM was forced to be very careful about abusing its monopoly power. Were it not for that the invisible hand may not have been able to force its will, or could have taken much longer to do so.
Even if Microsoft isn't broken up, this case has forced them to cool their heels for a few years, and in that time competition has started to gain at least a foothold in the market. It will still be difficult to topple this giant just as it was with IBM, but the power of the Justice Department to prosecute monopoly abuse will help keep that abuse in check. Microsoft was a bit more arrogant than IBM was, and they got bitchsmacked in court. Now they're taking it much more carefully. The warning has been made, and every market-controlling company out there knows that if they get too greedy and don't back down when the government comes after them, they could suffer an even worse fate.
Sorry, I was exaggerating a bit. I'm referring to the non-compete agreements they are enforcing rather vigorously. Granted, they expire after a while, but many people forced to wait that long will find another line of work.
From what we've been hearing lately, it would seem to be the ability to ever work in the tech industry again.
Besides, if you're knowledgeable enough to be understanding OS source, you shouldn't be stuck with windows anyway, unless you're one of those poor schmucks who is forced to develop with visual studio.
This is why we should all be using TI-89's to surf the web. Oh, and we should wear night-vision goggles instead of using overhead lights. It's more efficient in the long run. The poster had the right idea. Don't waste cycles on the grammer-checker. And no porn. Use your imagination. In fact, no masturbation. It's heat-innefficient. For about a 50% increase in energy expended on motion, and a drop in total frictional loss, due to lubrication, twice the orgasms can be achieved with greater overall satisfaction. Also, an orgasm has the same endorphin release as walking 10 miles, which uses up a hell of a lot of energy. So, we use calculators that don't have enough memory for a grammar checker to browse the web, and there's no loss as far as the poor graphics go because we don't need porn, because exercise will be banned in favor of sex. We're not just fighting global warming, this is the pending heat death of the universe we're talking about!
Put 16 of those in a rack, and you've got yourself a server farm. Granted, the G3 isn't really designed to be a server chip, but it's a whole lot better for the task than x86. They run nice and cool, too.
Maybe you could write something that would flash the BIOS and either
a) Kill the BIOS, requiring either a replacement unless they have one of the ones that has a dipswitch reset.
or
b) Overclock everything on their machine as high as it will go. With any luck, the kiddies will have already overclocked some by hardware means, so the BIOS method could have them running so hot that they burn out within the week.
Hmmm... other things that come to mind involve changing monitor settings so that their monitor burns out within the month, or reformatting the hard drive and labelling bunches of sectors as bad, or maybe just screwing with the boot sector or making invalid partition tables. Oh well, I'm sure you could have loads of fun dreaming such things...
I didn't find the nipple to be that bad after a month or so of using it. Your idea sounds really good, though. You could even have the "mouse key" be something that would activate when you press your thumb against the side of your finger, so it would really be a pointing action. Maybe some slight modification to avoid RSI, but I imagine it could work well. Of course, it's been far too long since I've touched a real erect nipple, so I'm kinda partial to the IBM approach at the moment.
This looks like a rather extreme version of the ergonomic keyboards that are split in the center and tilted off to the sides. I'm all for outside-the-box thinking, and I think this is a good exercise, but in the long run, we may be better off with something kinda between a modern ergonomic keyboard and this radical design. Hopefully with a trackball or something in the middle too, because having a mouse that requires taking hands off the keys is a terrible productivity killer. Despite the somewhat small keys, I have never been more productive than on an old thinkpad I once used with the little thing that resembles an erect nipple in the center of the keyboard. I could type and use the mouse without any delay between the two actions. As it stands I have one of those awful trackpads on my current laptop, but it still beats having a separate mouse for most purposes.
I said not a large explosion. Because liquid sodium is such a great conductor, so very little of it is needed. Since liquid sodium is much less corrosive to metal, you can have more complicated valve structures to automatically cut off flow under whatever conditions you like, and you can make them smaller so they can be closer to the reactor, allowing them to cut off flow very quickly. Sure, there would be a small sodium explosion, but just as an M-80 will not set off a nuclear bomb (though possibly destroy a toilet) the explosion will not have a significant effect on the ability to rapidly cool the reaction with water.
Say what you will about HP's printer drivers (come on, any business will have its quirks) but this man was an innovator. A legend has died. I'm extremely curious who will step up to fill the ranks. Rest in peace, Bill Hewlett. Long live innovation!
Recognizing a missile that is in the early stages of a launch is not that hard to do. Those things accelerate much faster than any manned aircraft (the pilot would pass out or die) and they have a huge rocket plume that is very easy to identify by infrared. Good luck thinking of something that would confuse the computer, because I can't think of anything. The big danger I see is in the sensor equipment, not the code. That's a whole different bag of monkeys, though.
Will they show us the freaking source? I think the point was exemplified by the battleship dead in the water, but I fear it may not have been taken to heart. Voting should be a completely transparent process with the sole exception of what goes on in the booth. I don't trust MicroSoft to even count right at this point. I want to make damn sure that nobody is going to work out a buffer overrun and move a few votes here and a few votes there and rig a close one. This needs to audited rigorously, and the source sounds like something that ought to be available at the least under the FOIA, and if the government can't get that right from MicroSoft, we shouldn't be using the software.
Or how about nuclear power, the French way? The plant costs a bit more to make because of all the stuff you need to contain the liquid sodium, but despite that, it's much easier to maintain than a water-cooled plant because the sodium doesn't corrode the pipes. I don't exactly know the full details, but apparently, despite the chemical reactivity, liquid sodium is a much safer coolant than water. Besides, you need very little of it, since it's a metal, so you can dump water on it in an emergency and not worry about a catastrophic hydrogen explosion. The French also use a particular kind of breeder reactor, which uses up almost all of its fuel, instead of 5% or so, nearly eliminating waste. Yeah, it costs a lot up front, but it's clean and safe and it lasts. Nuclear power has come a long way since the Chernobyl reactor was designed. Sure, fusion will be the paradise, but that's a long way off. Fission the French way is arguably cleaner than even hydroelectric, (missing from your list, though many may not know why) because of the effect the dam has on the ecosystem.
Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, the one who signed this into law, may well be the Attorney General by the end of Bush's term. There is a lot of well-credited speculation that Bush plans to put Ashcroft on the Supreme Court once a spot opens up, and by then, Gilmore's term in Virginia (we have a one-term limit) will be up. For those of you who are unaware, Gilmore is an ass. While I like Ashcroft's stance on crypto, there are a lot of other issues where he's simply draconian. As moderate as Bush seems, many of the people around him, the ones who will tell him what to do, are rather far right. If this election said anything, it's that America is fairly balanced in opinion. These folks won't represent the will of the people. They will represent their own interests.
Congressional elections are two years away. Let's get to work.
I think I have read at least 3 comments of yours, probably more in this thread, and I'm browsing at +1. How do you avoid the moderators?
By the way, I'm no Linux zealot, but this post is flamebait. Some of your others had merit, but think for a second. Just because you don't have much use for it doesn't mean that there aren't an awful lot of people out there who are a lot more productive with their free software product of choice than MS's comparable product, if it even exists.
Small mind? Like thinking that we'll be a thriving species without a naturally habitable planet? What the hell did you think I was talking about? At least you troll anonymously.
Mars is a much smaller planet than the Earth, it gets less than half the sunlight, and it's completely arid. Transporting the entire population of earth there would require a hell of a lot of Am-242. Then when we get there what would we do? We need to fix this planet, not move on.
NetZero is simply striking back against Juno for a similar lawsuit that Juno filed against them. In other words, they were tired of standing there letting Juno take potshots and they fired back. Hopefully a court will rule one of the patents unenforceable, thus having the same effect on the other. If not, NetZero wants some insurance to keep the playing field level. Sure, it's cheap, but Juno was the one that started playing dirty in the first place.
My old High School CS teacher is going to have a fit about this, for two reasons. For one thing, It means he has to learn another language to teach, and C++ was enough of a pain after all those years of Pascal (a wonderful teaching language), and also because this test is set up to work best with teaching languages. Granted, C++ isn't a teaching language, but it's a lot closer to Pascal than Java is. Don't get me wrong, Java is a great development language, but the APCS exam deals in very, VERY simplistic code fragments. The overhead that Java has for these simple things will make it an extreme headache for all involved. APCS only scratches the surface of object orientation, and then mostly only on the AB test. For most purposes, it might as well be in C, except for the safe vector, matrix, stack, queue, and string classes that could easily be done without.
Java is (or at least will be) wonderful for software development, but the code overhead for simple things like "Hello world." make it impractical for representing fragments of algorithms from toy programs.
That's why AMD had their DX/5 running at 133 and 160 MHz on 33 and 40 MHz busses respectively, to compete with pentiums while the K5 (and K6, and K7) was in development. AMD had to differentiate somehow, so they followed something like the Intel pattern, which everyone was familiar with. My 486-133 wasn't the fastest chip on the market, but the money my dad saved on it allowed him to buy more RAM than your average P-120 had, so it performed better.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get caught with a radar detector in my state, and it has batteries in it or is plugged in, even if it is not on, you are guilty of a crime. I don't remember the severity off-hand, but it IS a crime.
As far as the theft-of-services goes, there is nothing wrong (or at least shouldn't be) with building your own receiver and decrypting the signal by brute force. If you subscribe to their service and then hack their system to receive channels that are not on your contract, then that is a theft of services. Even though is does not cost them a dime for you to decode that information, it costs them an awful lot that you're not paying to subscribe to those channels. You may think you can walk the line, but the courts will disagree. And then life will go on.
Sure, it takes a lot of effort to hack those cards, but my admiration goes to the Hughes programmers who did their job (protect the content from unauthorized access) and did it with flair.
Ok, I know this won't please everyone, but how about this for a test:
If a reasonable person could be easily convinced that it is in fact real, it should be banned. This would cover photoshopping minors' faces onto the bodies of young porn models, or otherwise displaying pictures that contain at least part of a real minor portrayed in such a situation. If it looks kinda young, but the model in the picture is of age, there is absolutely no justification for a ban, even if they have her wearing a bib and sucking on a bottle for the sake of the perverts. No reasonable person would confuse Anime for reality, either. In other words, if the distributor of the pornography can't show that no real human minors are depicted in a sexually explicit manner, that should be probable cause for a warrant. Obviously the ultimate burden of proof would remain on the government.
There you have it. Maybe on the edge of the slippery slope, but I would say within reach of the railing. Keeping in mind that there are many people who would have us go all the way down the slope, I think that a little bit of compromise, clearly limited, is in order. Obviously this is not the only way we could do it, so I welcome other ideas. And of course, IANAL, but I used to live with 2 of them.
Nothing came of the IBM case? Wrong! During the course of the case, IBM was forced to be very careful about abusing its monopoly power. Were it not for that the invisible hand may not have been able to force its will, or could have taken much longer to do so.
Even if Microsoft isn't broken up, this case has forced them to cool their heels for a few years, and in that time competition has started to gain at least a foothold in the market. It will still be difficult to topple this giant just as it was with IBM, but the power of the Justice Department to prosecute monopoly abuse will help keep that abuse in check. Microsoft was a bit more arrogant than IBM was, and they got bitchsmacked in court. Now they're taking it much more carefully. The warning has been made, and every market-controlling company out there knows that if they get too greedy and don't back down when the government comes after them, they could suffer an even worse fate.
Sorry, I was exaggerating a bit. I'm referring to the non-compete agreements they are enforcing rather vigorously. Granted, they expire after a while, but many people forced to wait that long will find another line of work.
From what we've been hearing lately, it would seem to be the ability to ever work in the tech industry again.
Besides, if you're knowledgeable enough to be understanding OS source, you shouldn't be stuck with windows anyway, unless you're one of those poor schmucks who is forced to develop with visual studio.
This is why we should all be using TI-89's to surf the web. Oh, and we should wear night-vision goggles instead of using overhead lights. It's more efficient in the long run. The poster had the right idea. Don't waste cycles on the grammer-checker. And no porn. Use your imagination. In fact, no masturbation. It's heat-innefficient. For about a 50% increase in energy expended on motion, and a drop in total frictional loss, due to lubrication, twice the orgasms can be achieved with greater overall satisfaction. Also, an orgasm has the same endorphin release as walking 10 miles, which uses up a hell of a lot of energy. So, we use calculators that don't have enough memory for a grammar checker to browse the web, and there's no loss as far as the poor graphics go because we don't need porn, because exercise will be banned in favor of sex. We're not just fighting global warming, this is the pending heat death of the universe we're talking about!
Put 16 of those in a rack, and you've got yourself a server farm. Granted, the G3 isn't really designed to be a server chip, but it's a whole lot better for the task than x86. They run nice and cool, too.
Maybe you could write something that would flash the BIOS and either
a) Kill the BIOS, requiring either a replacement unless they have one of the ones that has a dipswitch reset.
or
b) Overclock everything on their machine as high as it will go. With any luck, the kiddies will have already overclocked some by hardware means, so the BIOS method could have them running so hot that they burn out within the week.
Hmmm... other things that come to mind involve changing monitor settings so that their monitor burns out within the month, or reformatting the hard drive and labelling bunches of sectors as bad, or maybe just screwing with the boot sector or making invalid partition tables. Oh well, I'm sure you could have loads of fun dreaming such things...
Hmmm... Very interesting idea...
I didn't find the nipple to be that bad after a month or so of using it. Your idea sounds really good, though. You could even have the "mouse key" be something that would activate when you press your thumb against the side of your finger, so it would really be a pointing action. Maybe some slight modification to avoid RSI, but I imagine it could work well. Of course, it's been far too long since I've touched a real erect nipple, so I'm kinda partial to the IBM approach at the moment.
This looks like a rather extreme version of the ergonomic keyboards that are split in the center and tilted off to the sides. I'm all for outside-the-box thinking, and I think this is a good exercise, but in the long run, we may be better off with something kinda between a modern ergonomic keyboard and this radical design. Hopefully with a trackball or something in the middle too, because having a mouse that requires taking hands off the keys is a terrible productivity killer. Despite the somewhat small keys, I have never been more productive than on an old thinkpad I once used with the little thing that resembles an erect nipple in the center of the keyboard. I could type and use the mouse without any delay between the two actions. As it stands I have one of those awful trackpads on my current laptop, but it still beats having a separate mouse for most purposes.
I said not a large explosion. Because liquid sodium is such a great conductor, so very little of it is needed. Since liquid sodium is much less corrosive to metal, you can have more complicated valve structures to automatically cut off flow under whatever conditions you like, and you can make them smaller so they can be closer to the reactor, allowing them to cut off flow very quickly. Sure, there would be a small sodium explosion, but just as an M-80 will not set off a nuclear bomb (though possibly destroy a toilet) the explosion will not have a significant effect on the ability to rapidly cool the reaction with water.
Say what you will about HP's printer drivers (come on, any business will have its quirks) but this man was an innovator. A legend has died. I'm extremely curious who will step up to fill the ranks. Rest in peace, Bill Hewlett. Long live innovation!
They're not unconstitutional, they're just not nice. They happen all the time though, so there's no reason that has to change now.
Recognizing a missile that is in the early stages of a launch is not that hard to do. Those things accelerate much faster than any manned aircraft (the pilot would pass out or die) and they have a huge rocket plume that is very easy to identify by infrared. Good luck thinking of something that would confuse the computer, because I can't think of anything. The big danger I see is in the sensor equipment, not the code. That's a whole different bag of monkeys, though.
Will they show us the freaking source? I think the point was exemplified by the battleship dead in the water, but I fear it may not have been taken to heart. Voting should be a completely transparent process with the sole exception of what goes on in the booth. I don't trust MicroSoft to even count right at this point. I want to make damn sure that nobody is going to work out a buffer overrun and move a few votes here and a few votes there and rig a close one. This needs to audited rigorously, and the source sounds like something that ought to be available at the least under the FOIA, and if the government can't get that right from MicroSoft, we shouldn't be using the software.
Or how about nuclear power, the French way? The plant costs a bit more to make because of all the stuff you need to contain the liquid sodium, but despite that, it's much easier to maintain than a water-cooled plant because the sodium doesn't corrode the pipes. I don't exactly know the full details, but apparently, despite the chemical reactivity, liquid sodium is a much safer coolant than water. Besides, you need very little of it, since it's a metal, so you can dump water on it in an emergency and not worry about a catastrophic hydrogen explosion. The French also use a particular kind of breeder reactor, which uses up almost all of its fuel, instead of 5% or so, nearly eliminating waste. Yeah, it costs a lot up front, but it's clean and safe and it lasts. Nuclear power has come a long way since the Chernobyl reactor was designed. Sure, fusion will be the paradise, but that's a long way off. Fission the French way is arguably cleaner than even hydroelectric, (missing from your list, though many may not know why) because of the effect the dam has on the ecosystem.
Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, the one who signed this into law, may well be the Attorney General by the end of Bush's term. There is a lot of well-credited speculation that Bush plans to put Ashcroft on the Supreme Court once a spot opens up, and by then, Gilmore's term in Virginia (we have a one-term limit) will be up. For those of you who are unaware, Gilmore is an ass. While I like Ashcroft's stance on crypto, there are a lot of other issues where he's simply draconian. As moderate as Bush seems, many of the people around him, the ones who will tell him what to do, are rather far right. If this election said anything, it's that America is fairly balanced in opinion. These folks won't represent the will of the people. They will represent their own interests.
Congressional elections are two years away. Let's get to work.
I think I have read at least 3 comments of yours, probably more in this thread, and I'm browsing at +1. How do you avoid the moderators?
By the way, I'm no Linux zealot, but this post is flamebait. Some of your others had merit, but think for a second. Just because you don't have much use for it doesn't mean that there aren't an awful lot of people out there who are a lot more productive with their free software product of choice than MS's comparable product, if it even exists.
Small mind? Like thinking that we'll be a thriving species without a naturally habitable planet? What the hell did you think I was talking about? At least you troll anonymously.
Mars is a much smaller planet than the Earth, it gets less than half the sunlight, and it's completely arid. Transporting the entire population of earth there would require a hell of a lot of Am-242. Then when we get there what would we do? We need to fix this planet, not move on.
That would be the Slashdot effect. This is not a frequently visited NASA server, from what I can tell. Lighten up.
NetZero is simply striking back against Juno for a similar lawsuit that Juno filed against them. In other words, they were tired of standing there letting Juno take potshots and they fired back. Hopefully a court will rule one of the patents unenforceable, thus having the same effect on the other. If not, NetZero wants some insurance to keep the playing field level. Sure, it's cheap, but Juno was the one that started playing dirty in the first place.
My old High School CS teacher is going to have a fit about this, for two reasons. For one thing, It means he has to learn another language to teach, and C++ was enough of a pain after all those years of Pascal (a wonderful teaching language), and also because this test is set up to work best with teaching languages. Granted, C++ isn't a teaching language, but it's a lot closer to Pascal than Java is. Don't get me wrong, Java is a great development language, but the APCS exam deals in very, VERY simplistic code fragments. The overhead that Java has for these simple things will make it an extreme headache for all involved. APCS only scratches the surface of object orientation, and then mostly only on the AB test. For most purposes, it might as well be in C, except for the safe vector, matrix, stack, queue, and string classes that could easily be done without.
Java is (or at least will be) wonderful for software development, but the code overhead for simple things like "Hello world." make it impractical for representing fragments of algorithms from toy programs.
If I get a beowulf cluster of wetware, do I get to determine the gender/clothing, and can I decide just how "wet" each unit should be?
/me waits for the Natalie Portman trolls to respond...
That's why AMD had their DX/5 running at 133 and 160 MHz on 33 and 40 MHz busses respectively, to compete with pentiums while the K5 (and K6, and K7) was in development. AMD had to differentiate somehow, so they followed something like the Intel pattern, which everyone was familiar with. My 486-133 wasn't the fastest chip on the market, but the money my dad saved on it allowed him to buy more RAM than your average P-120 had, so it performed better.