"We're here to defend Democracy, not to practice it"
Unfortunately, that's an all-too-common attitude among the higher ranks, who have a tendency to forget that their soldiers are citizens, not slaves.
So these guys tried to game the system with high-priced "search consultants" and now they're whining that Google caught them?!?!? Even more embarrassing is Forbes giving a voice to these lowlifes as if they're the victims.
While these guys may not be innocent victims, this does bring up an interesting counter-scenerio. Instead of putting links to your site in link farms, what if you put links to your competition's sites in link farms, forcing them in to Google Hell?
If I can create a throwaway site that negatively impacts your page ranking, that opens up a whole realm of dirty tricks and lets you game the system from the other end...
Automatically sifting for keywords in plaintext is trivial.
Fortunately, bypassing keyword filters is also trivial. Deliberate misspellings alone can defeat most filters without losing readibility. Once you start using slang and euphamisms, it becomes an impossible task to keep the filters up to date.
Have you any idea how much confidential information lives on university networks? Many university researchers sit on loads of proprietary and/or highly sensitive data with confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements up the yingyang
Confidential information should not be on a computer connected to an untrusted network, nor stored in an unencrypted format. If your data is that confidential, if you have any network at all it needs to be completely isolated from the outside world (no internet connection AT ALL, not even through a firewall, bridge, or proxy)
Allow me to introduce you to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.
This, like GPL and all other open-source licenses, derive their power from copyright law.
Copyright law is not a Bad Thing, at least not as it was originally intended. The original concept was that the State gives the author a limited monopoly on his or her work, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a REASONABLE period of time. Seven years, or even twenty, is reasonable. Eternity (on the installment plan, via retroactive extensions) is neither reasonable nor limited.
Professors will refuse term papers unless submitted through Turn-it-In which provides ample disclaimers
This almost make me wish I were back in college, just so I could confront an asshat professor over this. Oh, you're not going to accept my assignment, in hardcopy, with copyright notice attached? Let's see what the dean has to say about that. And the student newspaper. And the faculty ethics board. And the board of regents. Etc.
If done right, removing the watermark is really a decryption problem
I seriously doubt it.
Isolating the watermark should be trivial -- encode a known video source using two or more pieces of hardware. Diff the output, and you've identified the watermark.
Even if the watermark data is itself encrypted, you don't have to be able to read it in order to be able to remove it or corrupt it enough to render it untracable. Removing extraneous data (AKA noise) from an image or a signal is a well-defined problem space with lots of good solutions. Existing denoising and color-correction filters will probably suffice to render the watermark illegible if not remove it completely. They're counting on people not bothering to do any post-processing to the video before sharing it.
It's analogous to a physical object with a bar-coded serial number. You don't have to be able to read the bar code in order file it off -- you just need to know where it is.
Even if they're using steganographic techniques to hide the watermark, you can still detect it's presence, and in all liklihood derive the encoding algorithm, with a large enough sample size and a known source. I seriously doubt steganography is being used, because that would not survive the digital->analog->digital round trip like they claim.
Come back to me when an entire political party bases it's platform around hatred of the Muslims. Sounds pretty much like current Republican policy, at least what they pitch to their fundamentalist "Christian" core constituency.
A little reducto ad absurdum here... Suppose I release the following program under GPL:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
Does that now mean that any Perl script that "includes" mine is now subject to the GPL? How big does an "inclusion" have to be to trigger the GPL? One line of code? Ten? One hundred?
It may just me, but running VB on linux seems to be the digital equipment of buying a Ferrari and then putting a set of naked-girl mudflaps on it. Some things were just never ment to go together.
I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis.
The basis of modern (and medieval, and ancient) property ownership is based on three things:
I Got Here First
I Have Worked, Used, or Improved It
I Have Defended It
Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it.
Because they got there first, worked it, and defended their claim to it. They can keep their claim as long as they are willing and able to fight to defend it. In days gone by this was done with weapons. Nowadays, we use lawyers. It's debatable which one is more brutal.
It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death.
The longevity of a piece of property, whether it is a chattel or real estate, is immaterial to it's ability to be owned and transferred.
Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company.
So a person does not have the right to dispose of their property as they see fit? Why shouldn't a person be allowed to transfer his property to another under any terms that he feels are equitable -- regardless of whether those terms are "you can have it when I die, son" or "I'll sell it to you now for cash in hand"?
If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief
Yes, you are. Someone expended their money and labor to plow and fertilize the field, acquire and plant the seed, tend and weed the crop. What makes you think you have any right to take the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them?
but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.
You squat. Either the rightful owner chases you off, in which case you find another place to squat, or he doesn't and you have a place to live. Note that if you squat on a piece of unused and unworked land, and the owner does not assert his rights, it is possible (at least in some states) to take adverse possession of the land. This goes back to the whole "working the land" requirement property ownership. Do some research on squatter's rights and adverse possession.
Also note that you can legally camp in National Forests for (IIRC) up to 28 consecutive days. Find another nearby camp site (state park, perhaps) and shuttle between the two. In reality, the rangers generally won't kick you out after your time is up unless you're being a dick or someone complains that you're hogging a prime spot.
It's not a great life, but you can live off the land providing you know how to do it and are respectful of your environment and the powers that be.
Oh and while the land itself existed, it didn't plow itself. That corn didn't spring up in nice neat rows because a flock of crows flew over it in formation, shitting out seeds like a machine gun. Someone else worked to make that happen.
I believe it's easier to tell based on the contents of one's home lab how serious they are about their craft
Which is exactly why I asked that question on the interview.
A system administrator without a home network/lab/whatever is as inconceivable to me as a mechanic who doesn't have a car and a set of wrenches. While I wouldn't expect a surgeon to have a fully-equipped operating room in his basement, I would expect him to have an extensive library of medical journals, etc.
If you don't have the tools of your trade at home, I will lay long odds that you're not serious about your profession.
the PCs in the general hospital network are pretty open
The point being that it's not set up by a bunch of kids in somebody's basement....
Sounds like a bunch of kids in somebody's basement would do a better job. Basement-dwelling kids [AKA Geeks] probably understand the necessity for things like firewalls, spyware and virus protection, etc better than a lot of so-called "IT Professionals".
At one point I was doing phone screening for a network administrator position. One of the questions I asked was "Describe how your home network is configured". I was amazed that well over half the applicants said "I don't have a home network". Needless to say, those people didn't get called back.
Maybe so, but the people who work at Cheyenne are not 12.
Having served in the USAF and met a number of people who had been stationed there, I can say with some authority that NORAD troops are (as a rule) entirely devoid of a sense of humor. It is my firm opinion that they have it surgically removed when they report for duty there.
Geography also played a huge part in it.
Italy (particuarly Venice) had the closest ports to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time controlled trade with India and the Far East. If you were in Western Europe and wanted silk and spices, you had to trade with the Turks and/or Arabs to get it, and the Venetians were in the best location to conduct that trade.
All cars should have aerodynamically efficient shapes, light equipment most important of all be small.
Please explain to me how to pack 70+ cubic feet of inventory and a family of four into a small, areodynamic vehicle for a trip to a trade show.
Just because you don't need a large vehicle doesn't mean that everyone doesn't need one.
Sorry, but if you don't get a mild buzz from 3 beers of any sort, you are a mid-stage alcoholic
Bullshit. Your tolerance to alcohol can be influenced by how much you drink, but that is not the only factor. People have naturally different tolerances to alcohol. I've got a naturally high tolerance for alcohol -- 3 beers does nothing for me, unless it's something particuarly potent -- and I don't drink very frequentley (maybe 2x a month).
100 gallons/year of Beer + 100 gal/yr of wine if there is only one adult in the household, 200+200 if more than one adult in the household. Homebrewed beer and wine cannot be sold.
Is it really fair to compare an open-source project, designed to compete with for-pay commercial products, with crippled versions of said commercial products?
The "crippled" versions of which you speak are restricted only in the AMOUNT of data they can store and the amount of system resources (# of CPUs, RAM) they can utilize. They're not crippled in terms of features or reliability.
For instance, the free "crippled" version of Sybase ASE is limited to 5GB of data, 2GB of RAM, and 1 CPU. These are pretty non-trivial limits given modern hardware and is more than adequate for many serious business applications.
The part of the film I think will be most difficult, however, will be the Fantasy Game: the weird RPG they use as a psych test. How the devil do you do that and not look absurd
Slashdot Mirror
"We're here to defend Democracy, not to practice it" Unfortunately, that's an all-too-common attitude among the higher ranks, who have a tendency to forget that their soldiers are citizens, not slaves.
While these guys may not be innocent victims, this does bring up an interesting counter-scenerio. Instead of putting links to your site in link farms, what if you put links to your competition's sites in link farms, forcing them in to Google Hell?
If I can create a throwaway site that negatively impacts your page ranking, that opens up a whole realm of dirty tricks and lets you game the system from the other end...
I seriously doubt it.
Isolating the watermark should be trivial -- encode a known video source using two or more pieces of hardware. Diff the output, and you've identified the watermark.
Even if the watermark data is itself encrypted, you don't have to be able to read it in order to be able to remove it or corrupt it enough to render it untracable. Removing extraneous data (AKA noise) from an image or a signal is a well-defined problem space with lots of good solutions. Existing denoising and color-correction filters will probably suffice to render the watermark illegible if not remove it completely. They're counting on people not bothering to do any post-processing to the video before sharing it.
It's analogous to a physical object with a bar-coded serial number. You don't have to be able to read the bar code in order file it off -- you just need to know where it is.
Even if they're using steganographic techniques to hide the watermark, you can still detect it's presence, and in all liklihood derive the encoding algorithm, with a large enough sample size and a known source. I seriously doubt steganography is being used, because that would not survive the digital->analog->digital round trip like they claim.
It may just me, but running VB on linux seems to be the digital equipment of buying a Ferrari and then putting a set of naked-girl mudflaps on it. Some things were just never ment to go together.
- I Got Here First
- I Have Worked, Used, or Improved It
- I Have Defended It
Because they got there first, worked it, and defended their claim to it. They can keep their claim as long as they are willing and able to fight to defend it. In days gone by this was done with weapons. Nowadays, we use lawyers. It's debatable which one is more brutal. The longevity of a piece of property, whether it is a chattel or real estate, is immaterial to it's ability to be owned and transferred. So a person does not have the right to dispose of their property as they see fit? Why shouldn't a person be allowed to transfer his property to another under any terms that he feels are equitable -- regardless of whether those terms are "you can have it when I die, son" or "I'll sell it to you now for cash in hand"? Yes, you are. Someone expended their money and labor to plow and fertilize the field, acquire and plant the seed, tend and weed the crop. What makes you think you have any right to take the fruits of someone else's labor without compensating them? You squat. Either the rightful owner chases you off, in which case you find another place to squat, or he doesn't and you have a place to live. Note that if you squat on a piece of unused and unworked land, and the owner does not assert his rights, it is possible (at least in some states) to take adverse possession of the land. This goes back to the whole "working the land" requirement property ownership. Do some research on squatter's rights and adverse possession. Also note that you can legally camp in National Forests for (IIRC) up to 28 consecutive days. Find another nearby camp site (state park, perhaps) and shuttle between the two. In reality, the rangers generally won't kick you out after your time is up unless you're being a dick or someone complains that you're hogging a prime spot. It's not a great life, but you can live off the land providing you know how to do it and are respectful of your environment and the powers that be. Oh and while the land itself existed, it didn't plow itself. That corn didn't spring up in nice neat rows because a flock of crows flew over it in formation, shitting out seeds like a machine gun. Someone else worked to make that happen.Which is exactly why I asked that question on the interview.
A system administrator without a home network/lab/whatever is as inconceivable to me as a mechanic who doesn't have a car and a set of wrenches. While I wouldn't expect a surgeon to have a fully-equipped operating room in his basement, I would expect him to have an extensive library of medical journals, etc.
If you don't have the tools of your trade at home, I will lay long odds that you're not serious about your profession.
Geography also played a huge part in it. Italy (particuarly Venice) had the closest ports to the Ottoman Empire, which at the time controlled trade with India and the Far East. If you were in Western Europe and wanted silk and spices, you had to trade with the Turks and/or Arabs to get it, and the Venetians were in the best location to conduct that trade.
100 gallons/year of Beer + 100 gal/yr of wine if there is only one adult in the household, 200+200 if more than one adult in the household. Homebrewed beer and wine cannot be sold.
For instance, the free "crippled" version of Sybase ASE is limited to 5GB of data, 2GB of RAM, and 1 CPU. These are pretty non-trivial limits given modern hardware and is more than adequate for many serious business applications.