IIRC, she was driving while she had said coffee. And since I didn't hear about her having neurological problems involving the sense of touch, one would assume that she understood that said coffee was, in fact, burning hot.
That said, any idiot, no matter how old or senile, who decides to hold a scalding beverage with her legs, knowing fully well its proximity to her crotch, deserves to get burned. If this were a guy, and he were younger, I'd hope that he, er, got kicked out of the gene pool, and got a Darwin Award.
That said, I'm not arguing that MacDonalds is right in their coffee storage and preparation methods. I'm merely saying that the judge should have probably ordered them to pay damages, and instead of a punitive award, instead ordered MacDonalds to lower the temperature. And then sue them if they didn't/don't, as someone else said. What's wrong with that?
I own a Compaq PC which I recently repartitioned to dual-boot, without the benefit of Partion Magic, etc. Before I wiped and reinstalled Win98, I found out the AC97 sound codec, the video codec, and the modem.
A lot of the Winmodems used in Compaqs are Lucent, and there is a single unified driver on their site that you can download.
Similar things go for the video (most low end Compaqs seem to use SiS, which has OEM drivers available on their website tucked away in a corner), and the sound (most use ESS, which also have drives on their own website).
Granted, finding out what exact chip an "ESS Solo-1 PCI Audiodrive" is using is a royal pain in the ass, and I only found out because I happened to boot an OpenBSD floppy image first, which miraculously detected all my hardware down to a T.
That said, a slightly tech-saavy user shouldn't have major problems with recent Compaqs -- at least now that they don't store the bios in some weird track somewhere on the hard-drive anymore...
Good idea. Noone's adequately explained why the little old lady should get a chunk of MacDonald's pie beyond any medical and supposed emotional damages she suffered. As I see it, even given that MacDonald's fucked up, they paid her for the harm they did, they fixed it, and it wasn't intentional.
(Try convincing the judge and jury that the executives sit around scheming about how to make their fast food more dangerous so they can injure more Americans, since they're getting kickbacks from the HMOs... yeah right!)
So why should they be punished, especially when the customer is obviously partly at fault?
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws.
But see, the point is, they're _not_ getting more accurate. About the only way that they can accurately filter to their 'standards', would be to conquer and enslave the entire population of China and India, teach them all English and computers, acquire UUnet for the 'net's backbone bandwidth, and then have them new slaves browse websites by hand.
See what I mean? Not gonna happen.
AI, and similiar technologies with the level of sophistication necessary to filter accurately probably won't be here until all these companies have long gone out of business. In the meantime, showing that their technology is really shitty, and doing far more harm than good, seems a reasonable method of attack for now.
Well, it's true that they currently control a lot of the desktops in the world, and that programmers tend to target mainly Windows * as their platform of choice.
Were Microsoft to get split up, and sufficiently fragmented, the hope is that consumers would lose sufficient confidence that programmers would start targeting other platforms, like Linux and *BSD instead.
One might argue that MS product support is an issue, but the answer here is that there will still be plenty of Minesweeper Consultants an Solitare Experts around; not to mention the fact that MS phone support is worthless in any case.
As it were, neither of us are lying, although I admit that I may have been a bit vague:
The default install does not have the FTP daemon enabled, so the FTP root-bug doesn't apply for a default install. I believe the same goes for even an OpenSSH bug they fixed a while ago. The default install is sufficiently minimalist that it is indeed very difficult to attack successfully.
And when it comes to counting holes, I think they're just tallying up what Redhat publishes as 'security problems.' I mean, Redhat does contribute to the Open Source community, but by and large probably over 95% of RH Linux wasn't written by them; and yet I bet the holes they post about are in software they didn't write anyhow.
Well, the thing is, those who read Slashdot know quite well where to get RMS'es viewpoints on everything from toaster ovens to Microsoft Bob. They don't necessarily know, however, what kind of things might make a real-life encounter with RMS go more smoothly.
While this information might be of relatively little use to the greater number of us, it's still interesting to see RMS the human(tm), and not just RMS the advocate.
Yep. Figuring out how to divide work up, testing, debugging, and polishing probably takes up more time than actually coding in a lot of projects, IMHO.
Why not spend the time to teach something useful as far as metaprogramming is concerned, like Extreme Programming?
Part of it is that newbies think Redhat = Linux and that SuSE = Linux, etc, etc... because everyone keeps telling them that. So when they see Redhat 2.x and Suse 6.x, they automatically assume that SuSE is newer. In this case, you really can't blame marketing, IMO. I mean, even fairly noncommercial(?) Slackware is jumping version numbers to 'keep up'.
And when it comes to serious bugs: just an unfortunate fact of life. Heck, even OpenBSD 2.7 (which is excellent overall), had a few remote-root exploits in things like DNS and FTP when it was first released in June, I believe. These guys release a new version every half year, which isn't significantly slower than some Linux distros...
And as for Redhat bugs being more documented, that's likely just because, like it or not, a significant percentage of the Linux population uses Redhat these days. If you don't use it that much, you're not going to find out about the exploits for it. Security by obscurity in a sense, I guess.
He's trolling for ad revenue, although doubtlessly he's also a true idiot anyhow.
What these sites don't realize is that having their writers talk out of their asses for prolonged periods lowers the quality of the site, and then noone will want to go there, and noone will click on their ads.
. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
Impossible to prove this, on technical grounds. The server merely shows you who has what files available, or who has the latest Britney Spears trash or whateverthehell people listen to. It has no idea that they actually downloaded said songs, since one would contact another client, and not Napster servers, in order to download a song.
As it currently stands, the most they could show is that more copyrighted music vs free music is made available on Napster. Even then, they can't show that the party downloading does not own the CD.
(I download mp3s for cds I have all the time, because I'm too lazy to rip, and encoding on this piece of shit is far too slow).
As it were, I don't think it can be proven with the clients that are out right now that a single song has ever been downloaded from Napster!
A point could be made that new clients could come out, which notified the server whenever a file download successfully completed, together with username and filename.
Even in this case, Napster could simply put up the 'upgraded' client on their website, with large bold red flashing letters saying 'THIS CLIENT HAS NO OTHER NEW FUNCTIONALITY OTHER THAN TO RECORD YOUR MUSIC DOWNLOAD HABITS AND SEND THEM BACK TO US! OLDER VERSIONS OF OUR CLIENT SOFWARE DO NOT DO THIS. YOUR DOWNLOADED HABITS WOULD BE USED IN THE NAPSTER COURT CASE!'
... and see just how many people download; I'm sure 3000 out of 20 million is real convincing, statistically... and in court.
Since the RIAA are suing, they have the burden of proof. Let's see them prove that their copyrighted music is getting pirated then!
How does preventing the transfer of any files with an MP3 header stop illegally stolen music?
It would seem to prevent all transfer of mp3s, illegal or legal (say, Rage Against the Machine files).
Or are you saying to continue to let people transfer.mp3 files, but that they can't have the mp3 header? So should I just gzip each file before making it available?
I don't see what you're saying. First you say that it's trivial (but I've disproved that), and then you go back and say that Napster should pull the plug, if there is somehow no way to filter out the stolen music.
All said, there is obviously no way to distinguish a legal mp3 from an illegal one. You would have to listen to each song, and then find out what the artist's policy was. So I guess according to you, Napster should just shut down.
Okay, now let us take this premise a bit further: if a service cannot filter out illegal content, it should be stopped:
By your premise, my ISP should be stopped, because I sure as hell need a connection to pirate music. You should also get my phone company stopped, because they supply the line that my modem uses to connect me to my ISP.
Now, you might turn around and argue that Napster's primary purpose is to allow music piracy, whereas ISPs and phones have plenty of other good uses. But this is not so clear cut:
Irregardless of what its creators intended for the service to do, I can argue that the service is currently used to share music of underground artists, and that this is an important use.
The original intent is not important: Digitalis can be used to treat some heart problems. Used in large amounts, it can kill. Supposing that the original discoverer of the drug decided that he was going to use it to create a new poison? Does that mean that we ban a life-saving drug today because its discoverer created it for evil intents? I should hope NOT!
The same is here. Even if the original intent of Napster was to get rich off of banner ads while users were lured by pirating commercially-available music, as long as the service is used for other legitimate purposes today, it should not be shut down, anymore more than my ISP should be just because I have the ability to download w4r3z through the connection they give me.
Yep. Spammers try random hotmail addresses. A lot.
I know because I've set up accounts to flame certain people privately, and yet others that I've set up, but never used -- addresses not given out anywhere. All are spam targets.
I know that companies like Nintendo don't really enjoy the idea of people creating emulators and ripping roms, reasoning that after playing the older games, people will stop buying the new ones.
On the other hand, I don't know of any serious legal action going on against ROM sites or emulation sites, and the companies don't seem to pay too much attention to the issue.
So why do we need a Napster-like ROM trader? I've no problem finding any ROM I want on the web. I guess it's just for convenience's sake...
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
Indeed. Especially when you consider how MP3 is lossy enough to screw with any inaudible but present watermarks.
And as always, there's the old stand-by with an SBLive!
Until the RIAA makes sure that this stuff comes out of an end-to-end hardware-secure solution (like someone already said), we're still going to get perfect digital rips, thanks to things like the SBLive!
(One also wonders how difficult it would be to code up a driver for a soundcard that existed solely in software, and whose sole purpose was to dump the output stream to disk?)
This is just an extended version of the 'filename doesn't match contents' problem, in reality. And yes, any moron who downloads.vbs files and clicks on them DESERVES to have their Hard-Drives erased. Now if only there was some way that there could be a script that would cause their monitor to explode.
That said, it would be reasonably easy to insert either a warning of danger or a filter that simply blocks any files that end in.vbs,.bat, etc.
Oh, come on. In all seriousness, there's little reward for playing Myst/Riven type games. Which is why no serious gamer even thinks of them as games.
We've all heard the jokes about games that act like slideshows -- a la Myst/Riven. The fact is, glitzy graphics alone don't do it.
Neither do puzzles. Ohhh, setting the clock to 2:10 p.m. raises a bridge so I can get into a small room to solve more puzzles.
RPGs reward players with 'stuff'. Stuff that makes you badass, so you get the pleasure of beating them fearsome monsters into small piles of putrid debris.;p
3D shooters do much the same thing. Granted, there are classics like Tetris that don't use these methods, but puzzle games require lots of thinking, for what seems to be insufficient reward.
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IIRC, she was driving while she had said coffee. And since I didn't hear about her having neurological problems involving the sense of touch, one would assume that she understood that said coffee was, in fact, burning hot.
That said, any idiot, no matter how old or senile, who decides to hold a scalding beverage with her legs, knowing fully well its proximity to her crotch, deserves to get burned. If this were a guy, and he were younger, I'd hope that he, er, got kicked out of the gene pool, and got a Darwin Award.
That said, I'm not arguing that MacDonalds is right in their coffee storage and preparation methods. I'm merely saying that the judge should have probably ordered them to pay damages, and instead of a punitive award, instead ordered MacDonalds to lower the temperature. And then sue them if they didn't/don't, as someone else said. What's wrong with that?
I own a Compaq PC which I recently repartitioned to dual-boot, without the benefit of Partion Magic, etc. Before I wiped and reinstalled Win98, I found out the AC97 sound codec, the video codec, and the modem.
A lot of the Winmodems used in Compaqs are Lucent, and there is a single unified driver on their site that you can download.
Similar things go for the video (most low end Compaqs seem to use SiS, which has OEM drivers available on their website tucked away in a corner), and the sound (most use ESS, which also have drives on their own website).
Granted, finding out what exact chip an "ESS Solo-1 PCI Audiodrive" is using is a royal pain in the ass, and I only found out because I happened to boot an OpenBSD floppy image first, which miraculously detected all my hardware down to a T.
That said, a slightly tech-saavy user shouldn't have major problems with recent Compaqs -- at least now that they don't store the bios in some weird track somewhere on the hard-drive anymore...
Good idea. Noone's adequately explained why the little old lady should get a chunk of MacDonald's pie beyond any medical and supposed emotional damages she suffered. As I see it, even given that MacDonald's fucked up, they paid her for the harm they did, they fixed it, and it wasn't intentional.
... yeah right!)
(Try convincing the judge and jury that the executives sit around scheming about how to make their fast food more dangerous so they can injure more Americans, since they're getting kickbacks from the HMOs
So why should they be punished, especially when the customer is obviously partly at fault?
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws.
But see, the point is, they're _not_ getting more accurate. About the only way that they can accurately filter to their 'standards', would be to conquer and enslave the entire population of China and India, teach them all English and computers, acquire UUnet for the 'net's backbone bandwidth, and then have them new slaves browse websites by hand.
See what I mean? Not gonna happen.
AI, and similiar technologies with the level of sophistication necessary to filter accurately probably won't be here until all these companies have long gone out of business. In the meantime, showing that their technology is really shitty, and doing far more harm than good, seems a reasonable method of attack for now.
True. Linking to Microsoft mouthpieces really do us no good. Let's refrain from submitting links from these sites.
Well, it's true that they currently control a lot of the desktops in the world, and that programmers tend to target mainly Windows * as their platform of choice.
Were Microsoft to get split up, and sufficiently fragmented, the hope is that consumers would lose sufficient confidence that programmers would start targeting other platforms, like Linux and *BSD instead.
One might argue that MS product support is an issue, but the answer here is that there will still be plenty of Minesweeper Consultants an Solitare Experts around; not to mention the fact that MS phone support is worthless in any case.
As it were, neither of us are lying, although I admit that I may have been a bit vague:
The default install does not have the FTP daemon enabled, so the FTP root-bug doesn't apply for a default install. I believe the same goes for even an OpenSSH bug they fixed a while ago. The default install is sufficiently minimalist that it is indeed very difficult to attack successfully.
And when it comes to counting holes, I think they're just tallying up what Redhat publishes as 'security problems.' I mean, Redhat does contribute to the Open Source community, but by and large probably over 95% of RH Linux wasn't written by them; and yet I bet the holes they post about are in software they didn't write anyhow.
Well, the thing is, those who read Slashdot know quite well where to get RMS'es viewpoints on everything from toaster ovens to Microsoft Bob. They don't necessarily know, however, what kind of things might make a real-life encounter with RMS go more smoothly.
While this information might be of relatively little use to the greater number of us, it's still interesting to see RMS the human(tm), and not just RMS the advocate.
Yep. Figuring out how to divide work up, testing, debugging, and polishing probably takes up more time than actually coding in a lot of projects, IMHO.
Why not spend the time to teach something useful as far as metaprogramming is concerned, like Extreme Programming?
Correct. Especially if you're on a shoddy dialup like me, and become a part of the 'net only to disconnect, constantly, over and over again! :)
Part of it is that newbies think Redhat = Linux and that SuSE = Linux, etc, etc... because everyone keeps telling them that. So when they see Redhat 2.x and Suse 6.x, they automatically assume that SuSE is newer. In this case, you really can't blame marketing, IMO. I mean, even fairly noncommercial(?) Slackware is jumping version numbers to 'keep up'.
...
And when it comes to serious bugs: just an unfortunate fact of life. Heck, even OpenBSD 2.7 (which is excellent overall), had a few remote-root exploits in things like DNS and FTP when it was first released in June, I believe. These guys release a new version every half year, which isn't significantly slower than some Linux distros
And as for Redhat bugs being more documented, that's likely just because, like it or not, a significant percentage of the Linux population uses Redhat these days. If you don't use it that much, you're not going to find out about the exploits for it. Security by obscurity in a sense, I guess.
He's trolling for ad revenue, although doubtlessly he's also a true idiot anyhow.
What these sites don't realize is that having their writers talk out of their asses for prolonged periods lowers the quality of the site, and then noone will want to go there, and noone will click on their ads.
You know, reading about morons like this raises my self esteem. Thank you, Fred Moody!
P.S. Keep this shit flowing. Your stupidity and laziness make even me look good by comparison!
True. Recording at 48KHz might eliminiate the down-sampling, and one would then hope that the upsampling isn't screwing too much over?
. In the Napster case, the exact opposite is true. Napster is used almost exclusively to transfer copyrighted material.
... and see just how many people download; I'm sure 3000 out of 20 million is real convincing, statistically ... and in court.
Impossible to prove this, on technical grounds. The server merely shows you who has what files available, or who has the latest Britney Spears trash or whateverthehell people listen to. It has no idea that they actually downloaded said songs, since one would contact another client, and not Napster servers, in order to download a song.
As it currently stands, the most they could show is that more copyrighted music vs free music is made available on Napster. Even then, they can't show that the party downloading does not own the CD.
(I download mp3s for cds I have all the time, because I'm too lazy to rip, and encoding on this piece of shit is far too slow).
As it were, I don't think it can be proven with the clients that are out right now that a single song has ever been downloaded from Napster!
A point could be made that new clients could come out, which notified the server whenever a file download successfully completed, together with username and filename.
Even in this case, Napster could simply put up the 'upgraded' client on their website, with large bold red flashing letters saying 'THIS CLIENT HAS NO OTHER NEW FUNCTIONALITY OTHER THAN TO RECORD YOUR MUSIC DOWNLOAD HABITS AND SEND THEM BACK TO US! OLDER VERSIONS OF OUR CLIENT SOFWARE DO NOT DO THIS. YOUR DOWNLOADED HABITS WOULD BE USED IN THE NAPSTER COURT CASE!'
Since the RIAA are suing, they have the burden of proof. Let's see them prove that their copyrighted music is getting pirated then!
How does preventing the transfer of any files with an MP3 header stop illegally stolen music?
.mp3 files, but that they can't have the mp3 header? So should I just gzip each file before making it available?
It would seem to prevent all transfer of mp3s, illegal or legal (say, Rage Against the Machine files).
Or are you saying to continue to let people transfer
I don't see what you're saying. First you say that it's trivial (but I've disproved that), and then you go back and say that Napster should pull the plug, if there is somehow no way to filter out the stolen music.
All said, there is obviously no way to distinguish a legal mp3 from an illegal one. You would have to listen to each song, and then find out what the artist's policy was. So I guess according to you, Napster should just shut down.
Okay, now let us take this premise a bit further: if a service cannot filter out illegal content, it should be stopped:
By your premise, my ISP should be stopped, because I sure as hell need a connection to pirate music. You should also get my phone company stopped, because they supply the line that my modem uses to connect me to my ISP.
Now, you might turn around and argue that Napster's primary purpose is to allow music piracy, whereas ISPs and phones have plenty of other good uses. But this is not so clear cut:
Irregardless of what its creators intended for the service to do, I can argue that the service is currently used to share music of underground artists, and that this is an important use.
The original intent is not important: Digitalis can be used to treat some heart problems. Used in large amounts, it can kill. Supposing that the original discoverer of the drug decided that he was going to use it to create a new poison? Does that mean that we ban a life-saving drug today because its discoverer created it for evil intents? I should hope NOT!
The same is here. Even if the original intent of Napster was to get rich off of banner ads while users were lured by pirating commercially-available music, as long as the service is used for other legitimate purposes today, it should not be shut down, anymore more than my ISP should be just because I have the ability to download w4r3z through the connection they give me.
Yep. Spammers try random hotmail addresses. A lot.
I know because I've set up accounts to flame certain people privately, and yet others that I've set up, but never used -- addresses not given out anywhere. All are spam targets.
I know that companies like Nintendo don't really enjoy the idea of people creating emulators and ripping roms, reasoning that after playing the older games, people will stop buying the new ones.
...
On the other hand, I don't know of any serious legal action going on against ROM sites or emulation sites, and the companies don't seem to pay too much attention to the issue.
So why do we need a Napster-like ROM trader? I've no problem finding any ROM I want on the web. I guess it's just for convenience's sake
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
Indeed. Especially when you consider how MP3 is lossy enough to screw with any inaudible but present watermarks.
And as always, there's the old stand-by with an SBLive!
Until the RIAA makes sure that this stuff comes out of an end-to-end hardware-secure solution (like someone already said), we're still going to get perfect digital rips, thanks to things like the SBLive!
(One also wonders how difficult it would be to code up a driver for a soundcard that existed solely in software, and whose sole purpose was to dump the output stream to disk?)
This is just an extended version of the 'filename doesn't match contents' problem, in reality. And yes, any moron who downloads .vbs files and clicks on them DESERVES to have their Hard-Drives erased. Now if only there was some way that there could be a script that would cause their monitor to explode.
.vbs, .bat, etc.
That said, it would be reasonably easy to insert either a warning of danger or a filter that simply blocks any files that end in
An open-source OS to support a closed-source array of software. I don't see any benefits in this, other than easier bug-fixing.
/why/ someone'd want to copy Windows.
Even this may be a moot point, if MS does stupid things to fix their bugs like patching their API for some reason.
Other than the 'we have the source' view, I still don't see
Oh, come on. In all seriousness, there's little reward for playing Myst/Riven type games. Which is why no serious gamer even thinks of them as games.
;p
We've all heard the jokes about games that act like slideshows -- a la Myst/Riven. The fact is, glitzy graphics alone don't do it.
Neither do puzzles. Ohhh, setting the clock to 2:10 p.m. raises a bridge so I can get into a small room to solve more puzzles.
RPGs reward players with 'stuff'. Stuff that makes you badass, so you get the pleasure of beating them fearsome monsters into small piles of putrid debris.
3D shooters do much the same thing. Granted, there are classics like Tetris that don't use these methods, but puzzle games require lots of thinking, for what seems to be insufficient reward.
Well, yes. My comment was referring to the accidental severing of fiber lines by backhoes and similar equipment, not a deliberate attack.
One would assume that towers would be easier to avoid than buried fiber lines, but they would as you've pointed out, be more prone to attack.
Streaming 3D over the 'net -- maybe VRML that doesn't suck?