Here in the US, we have government issued IDs. And they're required for plenty of things, especially in person. We don't have the Post Office as part of the system you're referring to, but that's not the biggest problem.
The problem is that there's no possible way to even reasonably verify whether a moron is who they think they are online without having already laid some groundwork. (Like mailing something to prove address) Anything they can know, someone else can know. And as a parent mentioned, the skip-tracing people have AT LEAST as much information as a major credit card you just applied for - available for a couple $.
And the credit reporting agencies and credit companies here want you to be able to get drunk and call up and apply for a credit card and get instant gratification for it with no verification whatsoever...
They ought to have to at least mail you something at the address on your credit report and call you at the phone number on your credit report. If the credit reporting agency wants to do that and setup a secret PIN with you, you could share that secret with a credit card company...
They DO mail your PINs out, so you can't take too much direct cash from a fraudulent app - you can only buy an infinite quantity of goods. So that proves they know how to keep it safe - they just don't value ensuring that you're the right person to give credit to... because the incentives aren't in place.
Flash has issues, but there's no superior product it beat out. Java is CONCEPTUALLY superior, but it didn't pan out - partially Sun's and partially MSFT's fault. ActiveX is more powerful, but is even conceptually a total lack of security and has no crossplatform support.
Since I haven't used it, hypothetically Silverlight could possibly be better, but I personally, based on their long track record, just don't trust MSFT to be even reasonably secure or to play nicely with others.
Flash video does tend to take 100% of your CPU... no matter how fast your CPU is. But youtube plays on pretty modest CPUs, so it doesn't require an especially fast CPU... it just uses what CPU it can find to make your experience better. And it's better in each version of FP. I agree, that's an issue if you're playing video on the web in the background. For some reason. Although, there are plenty of players for FLV and MP4 that aren't Flash Player... like Quicktime.
As for overlays, there's no reason to do that. That is, while you might not believe it, Flash Player isn't a video plugin like Quicktime - it's a full fledged OO programming environment. So you can put whatever you want over your video whenever you want, with a little programming. If you want to create a standardized overlay spec in XML so it's shared by a lot of players, you could do that. So the only thing you're missing is the ability to create overlays IN your video editing software, instead of in Flash... which would have to be a much more limited functionality than the complete programming language that ActionScript is.
I'll take being able to program truly interactive video over supporting overlays, any day.
I think the previous poster is on target - it takes a long time to build a clientele where they keep coming back, so you're consistently busy instead of just occasionally busy.
But if you're good (or anyone else reading) we might be interested; we definitely mange independent part time remote developers, and I think we're going to be a bit shy in Java.
Let's say dev-slashjava@xig.net for this. Send what you can in terms of resume portfolio.
Movies are sold not licensed, like any other copyrighted material, and you ARE (via Betamax) within your legal rights to timeshift/formatshift. (but there's no requirement they make it easy)
What the DMCA makes illegal is circumventing an encryption scheme... So you ARE allowed to format shift (although the MPAA/RIAA would rather you didn't know that) but there's no legal way to do it losslessly.
I've actually started to think this should really be a 2nd amendment issue - that encryption is the current democratic arms.
CreepyCrawler did a better job of responding on the merits, so I'll just touch a few points:
I'm not a lawyer and, frankly, don't want to be a lawyer. I do HAVE a lawyer, and have entered a modest number of contracts...
If you think I need to be a lawyer to make my/. post, which, summarized, basically says to the OP "You're an idiot and you need a lawyer" - then I think you have a rather odd view of the world. You needn't be an attorney to handle that post.
I completely agree that the probability is low of any dispute rising to the actual expensive investigation and lengthy court hearings (because OP would have to make something of very significant value AND somehow have significant resources to continue fighting against this contract in court AND the contract would have to be weak enough that this didn't get immediately shut down.)
I also agree that this slight relevance depends on the contract actually being very badly written - because establishing his bad faith through crazy methods is only necessary if there's any doubt about whether he understood the contract in the first place. Which, if it's written reasonably, there probably isn't. I agree. And etc., I'm sure there's more.
However, if you don't think that an argument of bad faith in this context could EVER be relevant, especially to damages, or that IF it was worth enough money for them to do an intensive investigation and there is no circumstance where they would EVER use this if they knew about it (remembering that we haven't actually seen how good or bad the actual contract is) then I'm not sure I believe you're a lawyer. However, I suspect you're just saying that it's vanishingly, impractically unlikely - which I agree with.
But more importantly, you really missed my point there. First my meta-point, that the OP should take away from my post that not having an attorney is bad, and HIM not having an attorney is even worse. Do you disagree with either of these points?
To rehash that particular point of mine, it was:
- Whether/. is findable/admissible/worthwhile or not I can tell from your OP that you _believe_ this contract would restrict your rights, and you want to sign it then ignore it.
- That doing this to a random university makes you, in my opinion, a liar and a badly behaving person - whether or not the courts can thwack you for it.
- And that, in general, the courts may thwack you for acting in bad faith, if it can be demonstrated. (through obvious reading of the contract, or whatever)
- My mention of his/. post was really just illustrative - which I'd think you'd understand, considering the use of 'gasp' and 'Guilty' in your post.
P.S. ASKING on/. isn't what I meant as evidence of bad faith but (assuming you went through the possibly significant work to prove he really was the poster) his specific wording seemed in pretty bad faith to me.
I was just trying to pretend to be funny... which I admit is often sortof orthogonal to seeming rational. But rockets sounds like a better idea, around here.
While that's the explanation I'd LIKE, really I just added 0 later, and - as another poster suggested - I didn't think it was as meaningful.
But mostly I just don't value editing on/. enough to go renumber my points just to add a new one at the start. I'm sure around here somewhere I have a post that starts with -1.
Original complainer clearly doesn't understand that integers stretch in both directions.
Well, the INTENT was that I agreed with and was expanding on the, uh, 'concise' posting of the parent post -- that I wasn't trying to say this post armed you to negotiate your contract, but rather that the OP's obvious lack of legal understanding made it even MORE important they seek an attorney.
My execution might've been poor, though -- I don't exactly edit/. posts.:)
Something is seriously wrong w/ your OSX install. I've used several minor versions of each major version of OS X, and it shouldn't do this... Have you tried reinstalling? Tried running Rember? (free memtest for OS X)
I'm curious what menu pops up. Does the mouse jump to a new location when you click? The only thing I can imagine popping up at an arbitrary location is the context menu - this would be what's supposed to happen if you right-clicked instead of left clicking. Is it possible you're clicking on the wrong button, or your mouse is malfunctioning, or your keyboard is malfunctioning/dirty (you'll get the same behavior if the 'control' key is being intermittently depressed)
You could test the keyboard part pretty easily by just unplugging the kybd and clicking around with the mouse plugged directly into the machine, and seeing if you get the same behavior.
re: speed - I'd expect OS X to perhaps startup slower, esp 10.3 (4 and 5 have actually sped things up in certain scenarios.) , but I'd much rather watch a YouTube on the G4. The only other things that's very true is that however much OS X might be harder on your CPU/HD/etc., it's MUCH more RAM intensive. If you're running 10.3.9 and you can fix your crazy clicking issue, I'd recommend at least 512M of RAM. That machine takes at least 2 GB, and almost all the USB+ models are completely compatible with most standard PC RAM of the right speed. (My 400Mhz G4 tower is PC133, but I don't recall if the one you have is PC133, DDR, or the one model that used something weird.)
several posts say talk to an attorney, in detail, when they can READ your contract, and they're right. IANAL. However, since this is the Internet, I want to take this opportunity to point out several substantial flaws in your submission.
0. Posting here and not getting an attorney. Fail.
1. A purely ownership and non-personal right like this, it's very unlikely there's any prohibition against you signing it away. (Unlike, e.g. some noncompetes which are SOMETIMES unenforceable.) Fail.
2. If you sign this when you obviously (and demonstrably - you posted it here!) thought they intended it to mean you had no ownership, the courts will not look kindly on you turning around and saying you don't believe that. That's called 'bad faith'. Even if the contract WAS weak, if it's clear that both parties understood the same intent, usually that's what happens.
And there's a good reason for that. Knowingly signing that when you clearly believe they mean that if you don't intend to carry it through makes you a liar.
Fail.
3. That the faculty, who have a totally different contract, get to keep their work has no bearing on your contract. Fail.
4. The faculty don't even meet the standard you set out - which is 'if you're paid TO develop software' - which they aren't. They're paid to uphold the educational mission of the institution and do their research. The actual software is (at least contractually) secondary.
I'm not telling you not to take the job -
I only see two glimmers of hope here:
- If the UNIVERSITY's contract with NSERC specifies something different, you count point that out to them.
- I don't know if this is in your goalset, but depending on the U, if you WANTED to open source your project (whatever license) the U may allow that - and you MIGHT be able to get them to approve allowing that BEFORE hiring you. YOU will still own none of it. They'll own all the rights to sell a closed source version, etc., and they could un-open-source their future versions. (Which, if you were GPL, no one ELSE could legally do) But they can't exactly 'unlicense' the code they agreed to release.
I realize this is probably not an answer to the OP, because this kind of time (learn Actionscript) is a lot more than really free.
However, to answer the parent - to do applications these days Adobe Flex is preferred to Adobe Flash. And while Adobe Flex Builder isn't free (Eclipse based IDE with GUI Dreamweaver mode) the underlying vanilla SDK/compiler IS free (as in beer, at least)
Perfect for this discussion, the singular thing the free version doesn't come with is the advanced Charting package, but it's totally reasonable to draw arbitrary charts however you want (and indeed, with more customization), it's just slightly less automatic.
My degree was in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in CS, and now I manage a software firm (including hiring)
Mathematicians at a university are smarter, in my experience (dated by about a decade) I don't think this has to fundamentally mean there are no brilliant people in CS - I'd suspect the following mechanism:
CS is often really bad at evaluating students' ability. Possibly partially because they're a quite young educational discipline. Therefore, it's relatively hard to flunk out of CS due to lack of brilliance. (Flunking out from lack of DILIGENCE is different; a CS degree is still a lot of work.) I've seen VERY incompetent people with degrees from all sorts of places...
Math is often easier to flunk out of, and in some cases more likely to be very difficult to get program admission to. Perhaps this is partially because it's an extremely old educational discipline... And being less 'practical' I suspect there's a greater part brilliance and lesser part diligence to getting the degree. (That's not bad - some project management is important in CS!)
So if you take the same pool of candidates and randomize which field they go into, more people will stay in the program and graduate in CS than Math - at least in the admittedly limited subset of universities I've been exposed to. The best will do fine in either, the worst in neither, but a certain class of middle ones will pass in CS if they stick with it, and would fail out of Math.
I think it's also true that being a more practical, commercial discipline, there's simply demand for many more CS degrees, diluting the 'average' brilliance of someone graduating with that degree. I have made no attempt to verify this whatsoever, however.
Yes, I realize someone knows of a school where the math dept is easy and the CS dept is hard. I'm not trying to say this is a law of the universe, only a statistical truth.
I have a degree in engineering, but it's been a while.
Simply saying 'traction and friction' isn't a rebuttal. The AC's point is a bit counterintuitive, but in general, dynamic friction is pressure * patch size. But the pressure is weight DIVIDED BY patch size. So the patch size typically makes no difference to friction in conventional braking - it's weight of the car (plus any spoiler force) * the frictional coefficient of the tire to the road surface.
CHEAP tires make a huge difference, because their interaction with the road surface is inferior. Performance cars, as I understand it, have much GRIPPIER tires (the rubber is different) and those tires are much wider - partially because the WEAR IS directly related to patch size, and the larger tire lets them be grippier without disintegrating immediately. Tires are pretty complex technology, overall.
In my opinion, patch size CAN make a huge difference in nonconventional braking - that is, braking edge cases. On snow, I've seen massively better performance from a SMALL patch size (relative to vehicle weight) because the car will tend to sink farther into more solid material (until you bottom out!) I believe a large patch size similarly increases your chances of hydroplaning. On the other hand, a large patch size makes it much less likely that smaller transient factors will affect you - e.g. that if there's just a very small patch of ice or slick spot or loose road surface on part of the patch, the impact is lessened. And I'd say it definitely increases your chances of getting more EVEN acceleration/braking, by averaging out small scale road conditions.
I get the feeling large patch size might have additional advantages for advanced all weather technology (the ability of the tire to act like it's not in water by channeling water away, etc.)
I've done this too, but not as much as the parent, I'm sure!
I personally think mold is insidious and terrible, so I'd prioritize getting rid of mold over saving the electronics - but that doesn't mean I wouldn't try. (I rather imagine that most of the boater's stuff has to ALREADY be mold resistant, which does help stop the spread of mold.)
So I definitely recommend the mild bleach solution. This is increasing the death rate of the mold, but at the cost of reducing the life of your electronics. Since these things were submerged in water, ideally I'd recommend submerging them in a mild bleach solution for perhaps 20 min - ideally rotate/shake them a couple times during this bath.
If something has a ton of mold on it, you may want to actually WASH this - perhaps with mild soap or mild bleach, and scrubbing until there isn't a big pile of mold. Or it might be enough to let it soak longer (but with more corrosion) and shake it more.
Then to get RID of the bleach, I'd rinse them with two baths. (Because the first bath becomes bleachy just by the presence of the bleachy item you're rinsing.) In each case I'd give it some time to soak (~20 min) but esp in the first rinse, to make sure it gets all the bleach into solution.
Tap water is probably fine for the first one, but use distilled water for the second. After a couple items you should replace the second bath - and you might as well replace the first-bath with the water you just stopped using for the second bath.
Then I'd make sure they were quite dry as fast as possible, so any mold spores the bleach missed doesn't regrow on the damp you just created. The easiest way to do this is baking. 120 is pretty safe - most electronics can handle 140+ without a problem... the sensitive interior components get really hot while running, so the ones you're worried about damaging are usually the outside plastics.
40 min on one side (including getting it up to temp) and 20 min upside down is probably enough to stop further mold growth. I'd give them hours in the oven or days sitting before I turned them on, though.
Assuming you have a big pile of stuff to do this to, and 3 large buckets, and an oven as big as all 3 buckets combined, I've just described a 5 step assembly line process, where every 20 minutes you can move something ahead one step.
For smaller items, or ones you're not taking apart, the last bath could be rubbing alcohol, which would make it dry much faster. But in volume it's considerably more expensive; even distilled H20 is only a dollar a gallon.
You can do all the above things as a wash instead of a bath, IF you can effectively get to all the surfaces...
Spraying on a nonconductive corrosion resistor (like the above mentioned products seem to be) sounds like it would tend to extend the life of the device; it might also seal in any remaining mold spores, which I'd consider to be a good thing - but I'd still do a bleach-bath first to kill as much as you can.
LiveCDs in concept should work fine; Apple certainly hasn't disabled them to my knowledge - you can definitely boot from arbitrary media. The OS X install DVD is bootable and has disk tools, also.
However, there just aren't a plethora of available CDs for your average user to download and run. According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros#Mac_OS-based There's BootCD which doesn't support anything about 10.3 OSx86 (for Hackintosh's) supposedly has some LiveCDs, which I would presume also work on a real mac.
It's not exactly legal for someone to mangle OS X onto a liveDVD, so there's not the zillion options Linux users have.
I'm pretty sure if you had a Linux/BSD LiveCD that supported the hardware and supported the filesystem, it'd work fine.
But 'fine' still wouldn't include, for instance, being able to run OS X executables. All of that is still a ton of work.
***
And while it has its own advantages (not needing another machine) even a totally working liveCD is in some ways NOT as cool as Target Disk. In Target Disk you can run arbitrary applications etc from EITHER disk in most cases, and those applications can have access to writable space on the host machine. You can ALSO do things like install from DVD media to a machine that only has a CD - put the DVD in your newer machine, hook the older one up as a target disk, and install like any other external media.
With a liveDVD you didn't personally make, you ALSO have the problem that whatever other info you're trying to deal with isn't there. (Like the tool you just downloaded to fix today's problem.) So you have to deal with that stuff over the network, I suppose...
Of course Target Disk Mode is ALSO a solution to having a permanently broken ethernet adapter and backing up your info before you replace the MB - you can transfer all the files via TD. TD is just extremely convenient.
***** With all that said, though... I can get behind their decision to remove the hardware to trim costs. I think the MB SHOULD try to trim costs. I think the lack of TD sucks right now... and I hope they make up for it in software.
Specifically, I hope that they will make it so at the very least you can - with Mac like ease and using Apple-provided media that you are allowed to add tools to, boot without the disk, make a proper network connection, and have AFP sharing in any direction you want with complete access to the disk.
I agree with the earlier posts that say HOW MUCH money makes a big difference, but I'd add some other stipulations - you need to make damn sure that you don't end up with a short term payment for a long term screwed. You might even end up in a situation where they have the best intentions but go out of business and get bought by someone else.
barring you from "Ever" doing something is no good. The only saving grace is it might be so not-good it's not even legally for them to do, especially if they're actually hiring you (in which case it's almost certainly an invalid contract) But save everyone the discomfort and don't sign a terrible contract.
To just do this in perpetuity, this would have to be an AMAZING amount of money upfront, in my opinion. This could be an hourly rate, if it ALSO comes with a guarantee to give you X hours of work, and doesn't have a lot of broadly-worded ways to get out of it. Don't sign that agreement and have it 'turn out' that they only want you to do an hour worth of work.
Personally I think having an upfront payment (or reasonable contract to work for X) but also annual payments would make sense. Even if these annual payments are for a completely token amount (like $1), if the contract is worded properly and they FAIL to pay you, you get the right to contribute back... so you can contribute if they go bankrupt, etc. and that project just gets abandoned. A modest but not token amount - maybe even a couple hundred $ / yr - might be enough to make you feel like it was worth not working on that project.
Overall, this is a really misleading article and summary.
Adobe makes technology platforms. I assume this is using some derivative of Flash Media Server. FMS supports streaming media, and it also supports different kinds of optional and configurable encryption. Nothing is perfect and that goes double for software, but for the most part, Adobe's platforms are quite good.
Despite what you might think from the headlines, no part of this seems like a platform flaw.
I can only ASSUME that Adobe Consulting actually implemented the specific application for Amazon, and they screwed it up. Which I have to say I find much less concerning than if this is a platform problem.
The flaw seems to really be that whole movies are sent when just the beginning is supposed to be. This MIGHT be an FMS flaw, but it might also just be bad application design. I can't tell from here.
Then it says that the streams aren't encrypted. This might or might not have anything to do with the original problem, and in this kind of article it might or might not be true, since the first problem explains the issues. I would say that the streams for the preview plays SHOULDN'T be encrypted, if I correctly understand that anyone is allowed to watch those clips anyway.
I completely agree there are business case barriers to SWITCHING (e.g. you might be heavily dependent on a Windows only Jet-DB application, but that doesn't make it a stable solution.)
Absent that, though, you've just explained why everyone should buy a Mac!
I really don't buy your DVD-RW argument in the context that you've used it, because while a) it's much more likely to take longer to setup some pieces of hardware in Linux, b) It's MUCH more likely for a Windows box without a hardware problems to suddenly start behaving weirdly and take AT LEAST as long to massage back into shape - and you never know when it's going to happen.
I DO think there are legitimate barriers to switching. I do also think that a lot of those decisions are made via intellectual inertia: you hired MS people to work on your stuff, so they only consider MS solutions. But I do ALSO think that quite a bit of it is decisively based on short sighted decision making and/or bad or mis-information about the maintenance of those solutions. Linux is much more likely to have the work be at the beginning of the process, so whether Windows is 'easier' depends a lot on over what timescale you're talking.
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Not to say I support the sometimes attorney-heavy decisions they made about PDF, but "better protection" isn't possible in the context you're talking about - if you can see it you can save it.
RTMP has had an SSL option for a long time. RTMPE is supposed to be faster and work better through some firewalls. But either way it's real, legitimate job is to protect all that content from a middleman. If your computer is compromised, or YOU really want the data, and encrypted transport doesn't matter; you'll get it from RAM on your machine.
Letting people watch something and pretending you still have control over that is an INSOLUBLE problem - and it's also one where Adobe is too large a company to be TOTALLY forthright about the limitation, because they can't be saying "our product doesn't do that" when compared to a competitor's product.
I was originally thinking along the lines you were - but now I'm not so sure. I think under the right conditions they could get bitten by this, and hard.
It certainly depends on how the laws and regulations regarding these standards are written. In the best places they'll have reviewed the standard and found it lacking, but obviously that's not most places. However, depending on the language, failure of the standard to REALLY be open may be a legally binding requirement on them - and that their software is actually compliant with the standards will almost certainly be.
Now, I'd be amazed if any govt org that was duped by OOXML in the first place would then later sue MS for breach of contract. But where they really might get screwed is that, I THINK, they wouldn't have to. Because the government per se isn't the only hurt party. Potentially a class of all citizens who pay taxes there are, if you get a zealous class action attorney.
But there ALSO is definite and direct harm to any competitor who was trying to peddle e.g. ODF, if an MS product wins a contract with an openness clause and you can demonstrate - which you can - that they didn't actually implement OOXML. Going up against MS isn't a lawsuit for the faint of heart, but for someone with a big enough pocketbook, the payoff could potentially be huge... OOXML could have precedent-setting bans against such use, which would leave a significant void for... *drumroll* a company who was peddling e.g. ODF - especially a company that just beat MS and presumably got press about it.
I'm not saying the Qmail way is better - but your way has a significant flaw. It gives immediate notification of valid and invalid accounts, without any server ownership verification whatsoever (the qmail way at least verifies a valid return-mail-path)
Now, what WOULD be great would be if MTAs did SPF-checking and all (including systems using qmail as an MTA) did immediate failure on an SPF-failure (since that has nothing to do with the local accounts and everything to do with the sender.)
Then no one with a valid SPF record would ever get inappropriate bounces from such a server, and the qmail-security-delay would only be relevant to people without SPF records. (Heck, you could add text in the bounce that said 'if this bounce isn't from a message you sent, get SPF!')
Let's assume that it's legal to photograph in the mall because it's a fairly public space, which is probably true. (This is an assumption in the sense that you're in whatever jurisdiction)
That does NOT guarantee you that the mall or store will "allow" it. They can disallow and discriminate against anything they want, except for a few specific protected classes (e.g. race) Plenty of places of commerce have a no shirt, no shoes policy, even though it's legal to walk around without either (well, for a guy) Except for those protected classes, they can ask you to leave for any or no reason.
So it's completely legitimate and accurate for a security guard to tell you that taking pictures of their property is not "allowed" (Telling you it's illegal would generally be lying or inaccurate, but I have a hard time getting too upset with them over what is to most people a relatively small semantic difference, and most people aren't all OCD about what words they use.)
If what you did WAS illegal, they could call the police, get you ticketed/arrested, potentially get your camera impounded and/or an injunction for your photos, etc. - and in your situation they didn't suggest anything like that.
Now, what can they do to enforce THEIR rules and legal things that you aren't "allowed" to do? Not bloody much. They can ask you to leave, hypothetically ban/bar you from coming back (ask you to leave forever) - and that's it. If you DON'T leave when they ask, THAT'S illegal. But that's their only hook for pretty much all of their rules.
This lack of illegality is basically why renegade photography works out - because they can keep your from standing around taking pictures, but once you TAKE the picture you're basically home free - they can't do anything to do for having the picture, or probably even putting it on your blog (noncommercially... but commercial releases are a whole separate issue)
No smoking; fine as long as then you kill yourself
on
Let the Games Be Doped
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Your OBVIOUSLY wrong about smoking laws. Smoking does EXACTLY what you mention later - it kills other people.
These laws don't prevent YOU from smoking and killing yourself, they only prevent you from doing so IN (generally enclosed) public places and forcing (unfiltered!) carcinogens on everyone ELSE. Whether you think that's 'fair' or not, smoking in a public place isn't a 'private' matter unless you're so antiscience you don't believe in second hand smoke. You're not normally allowed to walk around spraying other known toxins into the air in great quantities. Most of these laws don't prohibit chew, because it's not about you killing you - it's about keeping you from killing me. And I've heard that modern US cigarettes are actually quite a bit worse than just rolling up a bunch of old natural tobacco was, including things like Polonium.
Everything ELSE you've just said is fine with me, honestly - as long as then you die. Because every single one of the above doesn't just improve statistics, it costs the government, and therefore us, the taxpayer, a bunch of money.
So I think you SHOULD be allowed to not wear a helmet - if you've signed a waiver saying that under no circumstances will my taxes pick up any part of the astronomical bill for your long term brain damaged life - or if you're going to off yourself if that happens. Since we're not presently at peace as a society with just letting you publicly rot in an acute way, the only way this currently works that I can see is if you pick up a sufficiently large long term insurance policy from a sufficiently well rated insurer. If you just die, that's not usually an excessive cost, relatively speaking.
Do you have even the slightest conception what kind of costs are involved in long term care for cancer or a debilitating brain injury? Sure, depending on where you are, on the thinly stretched public dime you might end up in some crazy terrible place with substandard care - but even THAT will be costing the taxpayers a very pretty penny, while being a fraction of the cost to give you top-flight care.
And I'm absolutely not making a point to be fanciful - I think motorcycle companies should sell helmet vs no helmet insurance, and I think if you have an appropriate long-term-care coverage you should be free to ride helmetless. I'm not even sure that would make motorcycle insurance that much MORE expensive. Maybe I'm wrong and the cost difference would be trivial, even.
Lest I come across wrong to the Slashdot masses - I decidedly think helmet laws are your strongest point... because the people who die without them have some balancing effect on the people who live with more debilitating injuries with them. Everything else is much more reliably costly.
And if you don't think obesity increases health costs, and that many of these health costs are in the poor, and that this dramatically increases the unreimbursed expenditures of emergency rooms, you're sorely misguided.
As an amusing note, last time I checked in Alaska you could legally ride without a helmet - but if you have a passenger without a helmet, YOU get a ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the US, we have government issued IDs. And they're required for plenty of things, especially in person. We don't have the Post Office as part of the system you're referring to, but that's not the biggest problem.
The problem is that there's no possible way to even reasonably verify whether a moron is who they think they are online without having already laid some groundwork. (Like mailing something to prove address) Anything they can know, someone else can know. And as a parent mentioned, the skip-tracing people have AT LEAST as much information as a major credit card you just applied for - available for a couple $.
And the credit reporting agencies and credit companies here want you to be able to get drunk and call up and apply for a credit card and get instant gratification for it with no verification whatsoever...
They ought to have to at least mail you something at the address on your credit report and call you at the phone number on your credit report. If the credit reporting agency wants to do that and setup a secret PIN with you, you could share that secret with a credit card company...
They DO mail your PINs out, so you can't take too much direct cash from a fraudulent app - you can only buy an infinite quantity of goods. So that proves they know how to keep it safe - they just don't value ensuring that you're the right person to give credit to... because the incentives aren't in place.
Flash has issues, but there's no superior product it beat out. Java is CONCEPTUALLY superior, but it didn't pan out - partially Sun's and partially MSFT's fault. ActiveX is more powerful, but is even conceptually a total lack of security and has no crossplatform support.
Since I haven't used it, hypothetically Silverlight could possibly be better, but I personally, based on their long track record, just don't trust MSFT to be even reasonably secure or to play nicely with others.
Flash video does tend to take 100% of your CPU... no matter how fast your CPU is. But youtube plays on pretty modest CPUs, so it doesn't require an especially fast CPU... it just uses what CPU it can find to make your experience better. And it's better in each version of FP. I agree, that's an issue if you're playing video on the web in the background. For some reason. Although, there are plenty of players for FLV and MP4 that aren't Flash Player... like Quicktime.
As for overlays, there's no reason to do that. That is, while you might not believe it, Flash Player isn't a video plugin like Quicktime - it's a full fledged OO programming environment. So you can put whatever you want over your video whenever you want, with a little programming. If you want to create a standardized overlay spec in XML so it's shared by a lot of players, you could do that. So the only thing you're missing is the ability to create overlays IN your video editing software, instead of in Flash... which would have to be a much more limited functionality than the complete programming language that ActionScript is.
I'll take being able to program truly interactive video over supporting overlays, any day.
I think the previous poster is on target - it takes a long time to build a clientele where they keep coming back, so you're consistently busy instead of just occasionally busy.
But if you're good (or anyone else reading) we might be interested; we definitely mange independent part time remote developers, and I think we're going to be a bit shy in Java.
Let's say dev-slashjava@xig.net for this. Send what you can in terms of resume portfolio.
arete
Movies are sold not licensed, like any other copyrighted material, and you ARE (via Betamax) within your legal rights to timeshift/formatshift. (but there's no requirement they make it easy)
What the DMCA makes illegal is circumventing an encryption scheme... So you ARE allowed to format shift (although the MPAA/RIAA would rather you didn't know that) but there's no legal way to do it losslessly.
I've actually started to think this should really be a 2nd amendment issue - that encryption is the
current democratic arms.
CreepyCrawler did a better job of responding on the merits, so I'll just touch a few points:
I'm not a lawyer and, frankly, don't want to be a lawyer. I do HAVE a lawyer, and have entered a modest number of contracts...
If you think I need to be a lawyer to make my /. post, which, summarized, basically says to the OP "You're an idiot and you need a lawyer" - then I think you have a rather odd view of the world. You needn't be an attorney to handle that post.
I completely agree that the probability is low of any dispute rising to the actual expensive investigation and lengthy court hearings (because OP would have to make something of very significant value AND somehow have significant resources to continue fighting against this contract in court AND the contract would have to be weak enough that this didn't get immediately shut down.)
I also agree that this slight relevance depends on the contract actually being very badly written - because establishing his bad faith through crazy methods is only necessary if there's any doubt about whether he understood the contract in the first place. Which, if it's written reasonably, there probably isn't. I agree. And etc., I'm sure there's more.
However, if you don't think that an argument of bad faith in this context could EVER be relevant, especially to damages, or that IF it was worth enough money for them to do an intensive investigation and there is no circumstance where they would EVER use this if they knew about it (remembering that we haven't actually seen how good or bad the actual contract is) then I'm not sure I believe you're a lawyer. However, I suspect you're just saying that it's vanishingly, impractically unlikely - which I agree with.
But more importantly, you really missed my point there. First my meta-point, that the OP should take away from my post that not having an attorney is bad, and HIM not having an attorney is even worse. Do you disagree with either of these points?
To rehash that particular point of mine, it was:
- Whether /. is findable/admissible/worthwhile or not I can tell from your OP that you _believe_ this contract would restrict your rights, and you want to sign it then ignore it.
- That doing this to a random university makes you, in my opinion, a liar and a badly behaving person - whether or not the courts can thwack you for it.
- And that, in general, the courts may thwack you for acting in bad faith, if it can be demonstrated. (through obvious reading of the contract, or whatever)
- My mention of his /. post was really just illustrative - which I'd think you'd understand, considering the use of 'gasp' and 'Guilty' in your post.
P.S. ASKING on /. isn't what I meant as evidence of bad faith but (assuming you went through the possibly significant work to prove he really was the poster) his specific wording seemed in pretty bad faith to me.
I was just trying to pretend to be funny... which I admit is often sortof orthogonal to seeming rational. But rockets sounds like a better idea, around here.
While that's the explanation I'd LIKE, really I just added 0 later, and - as another poster suggested - I didn't think it was as meaningful.
But mostly I just don't value editing on /. enough to go renumber my points just to add a new one at the start. I'm sure around here somewhere I have a post that starts with -1.
Original complainer clearly doesn't understand that integers stretch in both directions.
Well, the INTENT was that I agreed with and was expanding on the, uh, 'concise' posting of the parent post -- that I wasn't trying to say this post armed you to negotiate your contract, but rather that the OP's obvious lack of legal understanding made it even MORE important they seek an attorney.
My execution might've been poor, though -- I don't exactly edit /. posts. :)
Thanks for the other bit; corrected.
Something is seriously wrong w/ your OSX install. I've used several minor versions of each major version of OS X, and it shouldn't do this... Have you tried reinstalling? Tried running Rember? (free memtest for OS X)
I'm curious what menu pops up. Does the mouse jump to a new location when you click? The only thing I can imagine popping up at an arbitrary location is the context menu - this would be what's supposed to happen if you right-clicked instead of left clicking. Is it possible you're clicking on the wrong button, or your mouse is malfunctioning, or your keyboard is malfunctioning/dirty (you'll get the same behavior if the 'control' key is being intermittently depressed)
You could test the keyboard part pretty easily by just unplugging the kybd and clicking around with the mouse plugged directly into the machine, and seeing if you get the same behavior.
re: speed - I'd expect OS X to perhaps startup slower, esp 10.3 (4 and 5 have actually sped things up in certain scenarios.) , but I'd much rather watch a YouTube on the G4. The only other things that's very true is that however much OS X might be harder on your CPU/HD/etc., it's MUCH more RAM intensive. If you're running 10.3.9 and you can fix your crazy clicking issue, I'd recommend at least 512M of RAM. That machine takes at least 2 GB, and almost all the USB+ models are completely compatible with most standard PC RAM of the right speed. (My 400Mhz G4 tower is PC133, but I don't recall if the one you have is PC133, DDR, or the one model that used something weird.)
several posts say talk to an attorney, in detail, when they can READ your contract, and they're right. IANAL. However, since this is the Internet, I want to take this opportunity to point out several substantial flaws in your submission.
0. Posting here and not getting an attorney. Fail.
1. A purely ownership and non-personal right like this, it's very unlikely there's any prohibition against you signing it away. (Unlike, e.g. some noncompetes which are SOMETIMES unenforceable.) Fail.
2. If you sign this when you obviously (and demonstrably - you posted it here!) thought they intended it to mean you had no ownership, the courts will not look kindly on you turning around and saying you don't believe that. That's called 'bad faith'. Even if the contract WAS weak, if it's clear that both parties understood the same intent, usually that's what happens.
And there's a good reason for that. Knowingly signing that when you clearly believe they mean that if you don't intend to carry it through makes you a liar.
Fail.
3. That the faculty, who have a totally different contract, get to keep their work has no bearing on your contract. Fail.
4. The faculty don't even meet the standard you set out - which is 'if you're paid TO develop software' - which they aren't. They're paid to uphold the educational mission of the institution and do their research. The actual software is (at least contractually) secondary.
I'm not telling you not to take the job -
I only see two glimmers of hope here:
- If the UNIVERSITY's contract with NSERC specifies something different, you count point that out to them.
- I don't know if this is in your goalset, but depending on the U, if you WANTED to open source your project (whatever license) the U may allow that - and you MIGHT be able to get them to approve allowing that BEFORE hiring you. YOU will still own none of it. They'll own all the rights to sell a closed source version, etc., and they could un-open-source their future versions. (Which, if you were GPL, no one ELSE could legally do) But they can't exactly 'unlicense' the code they agreed to release.
I realize this is probably not an answer to the OP, because this kind of time (learn Actionscript) is a lot more than really free.
However, to answer the parent - to do applications these days Adobe Flex is preferred to Adobe Flash. And while Adobe Flex Builder isn't free (Eclipse based IDE with GUI Dreamweaver mode) the underlying vanilla SDK/compiler IS free (as in beer, at least)
Perfect for this discussion, the singular thing the free version doesn't come with is the advanced Charting package, but it's totally reasonable to draw arbitrary charts however you want (and indeed, with more customization), it's just slightly less automatic.
The Flex IDE also has a 100% student discount.
My degree was in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in CS, and now I manage a software firm (including hiring)
Mathematicians at a university are smarter, in my experience (dated by about a decade) I don't think this has to fundamentally mean there are no brilliant people in CS - I'd suspect the following mechanism:
CS is often really bad at evaluating students' ability. Possibly partially because they're a quite young educational discipline. Therefore, it's relatively hard to flunk out of CS due to lack of brilliance. (Flunking out from lack of DILIGENCE is different; a CS degree is still a lot of work.) I've seen VERY incompetent people with degrees from all sorts of places...
Math is often easier to flunk out of, and in some cases more likely to be very difficult to get program admission to. Perhaps this is partially because it's an extremely old educational discipline... And being less 'practical' I suspect there's a greater part brilliance and lesser part diligence to getting the degree. (That's not bad - some project management is important in CS!)
So if you take the same pool of candidates and randomize which field they go into, more people will stay in the program and graduate in CS than Math - at least in the admittedly limited subset of universities I've been exposed to. The best will do fine in either, the worst in neither, but a certain class of middle ones will pass in CS if they stick with it, and would fail out of Math.
I think it's also true that being a more practical, commercial discipline, there's simply demand for many more CS degrees, diluting the 'average' brilliance of someone graduating with that degree. I have made no attempt to verify this whatsoever, however.
Yes, I realize someone knows of a school where the math dept is easy and the CS dept is hard. I'm not trying to say this is a law of the universe, only a statistical truth.
I have a degree in engineering, but it's been a while.
Simply saying 'traction and friction' isn't a rebuttal. The AC's point is a bit counterintuitive, but in general, dynamic friction is pressure * patch size. But the pressure is weight DIVIDED BY patch size. So the patch size typically makes no difference to friction in conventional braking - it's weight of the car (plus any spoiler force) * the frictional coefficient of the tire to the road surface.
CHEAP tires make a huge difference, because their interaction with the road surface is inferior. Performance cars, as I understand it, have much GRIPPIER tires (the rubber is different) and those tires are much wider - partially because the WEAR IS directly related to patch size, and the larger tire lets them be grippier without disintegrating immediately. Tires are pretty complex technology, overall.
In my opinion, patch size CAN make a huge difference in nonconventional braking - that is, braking edge cases. On snow, I've seen massively better performance from a SMALL patch size (relative to vehicle weight) because the car will tend to sink farther into more solid material (until you bottom out!) I believe a large patch size similarly increases your chances of hydroplaning. On the other hand, a large patch size makes it much less likely that smaller transient factors will affect you - e.g. that if there's just a very small patch of ice or slick spot or loose road surface on part of the patch, the impact is lessened. And I'd say it definitely increases your chances of getting more EVEN acceleration/braking, by averaging out small scale road conditions.
I get the feeling large patch size might have additional advantages for advanced all weather technology (the ability of the tire to act like it's not in water by channeling water away, etc.)
I've done this too, but not as much as the parent, I'm sure!
I personally think mold is insidious and terrible, so I'd prioritize getting rid of mold over saving the electronics - but that doesn't mean I wouldn't try. (I rather imagine that most of the boater's stuff has to ALREADY be mold resistant, which does help stop the spread of mold.)
So I definitely recommend the mild bleach solution. This is increasing the death rate of the mold, but at the cost of reducing the life of your electronics. Since these things were submerged in water, ideally I'd recommend submerging them in a mild bleach solution for perhaps 20 min - ideally rotate/shake them a couple times during this bath.
If something has a ton of mold on it, you may want to actually WASH this - perhaps with mild soap or mild bleach, and scrubbing until there isn't a big pile of mold. Or it might be enough to let it soak longer (but with more corrosion) and shake it more.
Then to get RID of the bleach, I'd rinse them with two baths. (Because the first bath becomes bleachy just by the presence of the bleachy item you're rinsing.) In each case I'd give it some time to soak (~20 min) but esp in the first rinse, to make sure it gets all the bleach into solution.
Tap water is probably fine for the first one, but use distilled water for the second. After a couple items you should replace the second bath - and you might as well replace the first-bath with the water you just stopped using for the second bath.
Then I'd make sure they were quite dry as fast as possible, so any mold spores the bleach missed doesn't regrow on the damp you just created. The easiest way to do this is baking. 120 is pretty safe - most electronics can handle 140+ without a problem... the sensitive interior components get really hot while running, so the ones you're worried about damaging are usually the outside plastics.
40 min on one side (including getting it up to temp) and 20 min upside down is probably enough to stop further mold growth. I'd give them hours in the oven or days sitting before I turned them on, though.
Assuming you have a big pile of stuff to do this to, and 3 large buckets, and an oven as big as all 3 buckets combined, I've just described a 5 step assembly line process, where every 20 minutes you can move something ahead one step.
For smaller items, or ones you're not taking apart, the last bath could be rubbing alcohol, which would make it dry much faster. But in volume it's considerably more expensive; even distilled H20 is only a dollar a gallon.
You can do all the above things as a wash instead of a bath, IF you can effectively get to all the surfaces...
Spraying on a nonconductive corrosion resistor (like the above mentioned products seem to be) sounds like it would tend to extend the life of the device; it might also seal in any remaining mold spores, which I'd consider to be a good thing - but I'd still do a bleach-bath first to kill as much as you can.
It's a lot of work.
LiveCDs in concept should work fine; Apple certainly hasn't disabled them to my knowledge - you can definitely boot from arbitrary media. The OS X install DVD is bootable and has disk tools, also.
However, there just aren't a plethora of available CDs for your average user to download and run. According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros#Mac_OS-based
There's BootCD which doesn't support anything about 10.3
OSx86 (for Hackintosh's) supposedly has some LiveCDs, which I would presume also work on a real mac.
It's not exactly legal for someone to mangle OS X onto a liveDVD, so there's not the zillion options Linux users have.
I'm pretty sure if you had a Linux/BSD LiveCD that supported the hardware and supported the filesystem, it'd work fine.
But 'fine' still wouldn't include, for instance, being able to run OS X executables. All of that is still a ton of work.
***
And while it has its own advantages (not needing another machine) even a totally working liveCD is in some ways NOT as cool as Target Disk. In Target Disk you can run arbitrary applications etc from EITHER disk in most cases, and those applications can have access to writable space on the host machine. You can ALSO do things like install from DVD media to a machine that only has a CD - put the DVD in your newer machine, hook the older one up as a target disk, and install like any other external media.
With a liveDVD you didn't personally make, you ALSO have the problem that whatever other info you're trying to deal with isn't there. (Like the tool you just downloaded to fix today's problem.) So you have to deal with that stuff over the network, I suppose...
Of course Target Disk Mode is ALSO a solution to having a permanently broken ethernet adapter and backing up your info before you replace the MB - you can transfer all the files via TD. TD is just extremely convenient.
*****
With all that said, though... I can get behind their decision to remove the hardware to trim costs. I think the MB SHOULD try to trim costs. I think the lack of TD sucks right now... and I hope they make up for it in software.
Specifically, I hope that they will make it so at the very least you can - with Mac like ease and using Apple-provided media that you are allowed to add tools to, boot without the disk, make a proper network connection, and have AFP sharing in any direction you want with complete access to the disk.
How would I find out if a '91 Mazda 323 dose this?
The Mazda is manual; do automatic cars also do this?
I am not a lawyer, even on TV.
I agree with the earlier posts that say HOW MUCH money makes a big difference, but I'd add some other stipulations - you need to make damn sure that you don't end up with a short term payment for a long term screwed. You might even end up in a situation where they have the best intentions but go out of business and get bought by someone else.
barring you from "Ever" doing something is no good. The only saving grace is it might be so not-good it's not even legally for them to do, especially if they're actually hiring you (in which case it's almost certainly an invalid contract) But save everyone the discomfort and don't sign a terrible contract.
To just do this in perpetuity, this would have to be an AMAZING amount of money upfront, in my opinion. This could be an hourly rate, if it ALSO comes with a guarantee to give you X hours of work, and doesn't have a lot of broadly-worded ways to get out of it. Don't sign that agreement and have it 'turn out' that they only want you to do an hour worth of work.
Personally I think having an upfront payment (or reasonable contract to work for X) but also annual payments would make sense. Even if these annual payments are for a completely token amount (like $1), if the contract is worded properly and they FAIL to pay you, you get the right to contribute back... so you can contribute if they go bankrupt, etc. and that project just gets abandoned. A modest but not token amount - maybe even a couple hundred $ / yr - might be enough to make you feel like it was worth not working on that project.
Overall, this is a really misleading article and summary.
Adobe makes technology platforms. I assume this is using some derivative of Flash Media Server. FMS supports streaming media, and it also supports different kinds of optional and configurable encryption. Nothing is perfect and that goes double for software, but for the most part, Adobe's platforms are quite good.
Despite what you might think from the headlines, no part of this seems like a platform flaw.
I can only ASSUME that Adobe Consulting actually implemented the specific application for Amazon, and they screwed it up. Which I have to say I find much less concerning than if this is a platform problem.
The flaw seems to really be that whole movies are sent when just the beginning is supposed to be. This MIGHT be an FMS flaw, but it might also just be bad application design. I can't tell from here.
Then it says that the streams aren't encrypted. This might or might not have anything to do with the original problem, and in this kind of article it might or might not be true, since the first problem explains the issues. I would say that the streams for the preview plays SHOULDN'T be encrypted, if I correctly understand that anyone is allowed to watch those clips anyway.
I completely agree there are business case barriers to SWITCHING (e.g. you might be heavily dependent on a Windows only Jet-DB application, but that doesn't make it a stable solution.)
Absent that, though, you've just explained why everyone should buy a Mac!
I really don't buy your DVD-RW argument in the context that you've used it, because while a) it's much more likely to take longer to setup some pieces of hardware in Linux, b) It's MUCH more likely for a Windows box without a hardware problems to suddenly start behaving weirdly and take AT LEAST as long to massage back into shape - and you never know when it's going to happen.
I DO think there are legitimate barriers to switching. I do also think that a lot of those decisions are made via intellectual inertia: you hired MS people to work on your stuff, so they only consider MS solutions. But I do ALSO think that quite a bit of it is decisively based on short sighted decision making and/or bad or mis-information about the maintenance of those solutions. Linux is much more likely to have the work be at the beginning of the process, so whether Windows is 'easier' depends a lot on over what timescale you're talking.
Ben
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Not to say I support the sometimes attorney-heavy decisions they made about PDF, but "better protection" isn't possible in the context you're talking about - if you can see it you can save it.
RTMP has had an SSL option for a long time. RTMPE is supposed to be faster and work better through some firewalls. But either way it's real, legitimate job is to protect all that content from a middleman. If your computer is compromised, or YOU really want the data, and encrypted transport doesn't matter; you'll get it from RAM on your machine.
Letting people watch something and pretending you still have control over that is an INSOLUBLE problem - and it's also one where Adobe is too large a company to be TOTALLY forthright about the limitation, because they can't be saying "our product doesn't do that" when compared to a competitor's product.
I was originally thinking along the lines you were - but now I'm not so sure. I think under the right conditions they could get bitten by this, and hard.
It certainly depends on how the laws and regulations regarding these standards are written. In the best places they'll have reviewed the standard and found it lacking, but obviously that's not most places. However, depending on the language, failure of the standard to REALLY be open may be a legally binding requirement on them - and that their software is actually compliant with the standards will almost certainly be.
Now, I'd be amazed if any govt org that was duped by OOXML in the first place would then later sue MS for breach of contract. But where they really might get screwed is that, I THINK, they wouldn't have to. Because the government per se isn't the only hurt party. Potentially a class of all citizens who pay taxes there are, if you get a zealous class action attorney.
But there ALSO is definite and direct harm to any competitor who was trying to peddle e.g. ODF, if an MS product wins a contract with an openness clause and you can demonstrate - which you can - that they didn't actually implement OOXML. Going up against MS isn't a lawsuit for the faint of heart, but for someone with a big enough pocketbook, the payoff could potentially be huge... OOXML could have precedent-setting bans against such use, which would leave a significant void for... *drumroll* a company who was peddling e.g. ODF - especially a company that just beat MS and presumably got press about it.
I'm not saying the Qmail way is better - but your way has a significant flaw. It gives immediate notification of valid and invalid accounts, without any server ownership verification whatsoever (the qmail way at least verifies a valid return-mail-path)
Now, what WOULD be great would be if MTAs did SPF-checking and all (including systems using qmail as an MTA) did immediate failure on an SPF-failure (since that has nothing to do with the local accounts and everything to do with the sender.)
Then no one with a valid SPF record would ever get inappropriate bounces from such a server, and the qmail-security-delay would only be relevant to people without SPF records. (Heck, you could add text in the bounce that said 'if this bounce isn't from a message you sent, get SPF!')
"Not Allowed" is not the same as "illegal"
Let's assume that it's legal to photograph in the mall because it's a fairly public space, which is probably true. (This is an assumption in the sense that you're in whatever jurisdiction)
That does NOT guarantee you that the mall or store will "allow" it. They can disallow and discriminate against anything they want, except for a few specific protected classes (e.g. race) Plenty of places of commerce have a no shirt, no shoes policy, even though it's legal to walk around without either (well, for a guy) Except for those protected classes, they can ask you to leave for any or no reason.
So it's completely legitimate and accurate for a security guard to tell you that taking pictures of their property is not "allowed" (Telling you it's illegal would generally be lying or inaccurate, but I have a hard time getting too upset with them over what is to most people a relatively small semantic difference, and most people aren't all OCD about what words they use.)
If what you did WAS illegal, they could call the police, get you ticketed/arrested, potentially get your camera impounded and/or an injunction for your photos, etc. - and in your situation they didn't suggest anything like that.
Now, what can they do to enforce THEIR rules and legal things that you aren't "allowed" to do? Not bloody much. They can ask you to leave, hypothetically ban/bar you from coming back (ask you to leave forever) - and that's it. If you DON'T leave when they ask, THAT'S illegal. But that's their only hook for pretty much all of their rules.
This lack of illegality is basically why renegade photography works out - because they can keep your from standing around taking pictures, but once you TAKE the picture you're basically home free - they can't do anything to do for having the picture, or probably even putting it on your blog (noncommercially... but commercial releases are a whole separate issue)
Your OBVIOUSLY wrong about smoking laws. Smoking does EXACTLY what you mention later - it kills other people.
These laws don't prevent YOU from smoking and killing yourself, they only prevent you from doing so IN (generally enclosed) public places and forcing (unfiltered!) carcinogens on everyone ELSE. Whether you think that's 'fair' or not, smoking in a public place isn't a 'private' matter unless you're so antiscience you don't believe in second hand smoke. You're not normally allowed to walk around spraying other known toxins into the air in great quantities. Most of these laws don't prohibit chew, because it's not about you killing you - it's about keeping you from killing me. And I've heard that modern US cigarettes are actually quite a bit worse than just rolling up a bunch of old natural tobacco was, including things like Polonium.
Everything ELSE you've just said is fine with me, honestly - as long as then you die. Because every single one of the above doesn't just improve statistics, it costs the government, and therefore us, the taxpayer, a bunch of money.
So I think you SHOULD be allowed to not wear a helmet - if you've signed a waiver saying that under no circumstances will my taxes pick up any part of the astronomical bill for your long term brain damaged life - or if you're going to off yourself if that happens. Since we're not presently at peace as a society with just letting you publicly rot in an acute way, the only way this currently works that I can see is if you pick up a sufficiently large long term insurance policy from a sufficiently well rated insurer. If you just die, that's not usually an excessive cost, relatively speaking.
Do you have even the slightest conception what kind of costs are involved in long term care for cancer or a debilitating brain injury? Sure, depending on where you are, on the thinly stretched public dime you might end up in some crazy terrible place with substandard care - but even THAT will be costing the taxpayers a very pretty penny, while being a fraction of the cost to give you top-flight care.
And I'm absolutely not making a point to be fanciful - I think motorcycle companies should sell helmet vs no helmet insurance, and I think if you have an appropriate long-term-care coverage you should be free to ride helmetless. I'm not even sure that would make motorcycle insurance that much MORE expensive. Maybe I'm wrong and the cost difference would be trivial, even.
Lest I come across wrong to the Slashdot masses - I decidedly think helmet laws are your strongest point... because the people who die without them have some balancing effect on the people who live with more debilitating injuries with them. Everything else is much more reliably costly.
And if you don't think obesity increases health costs, and that many of these health costs are in the poor, and that this dramatically increases the unreimbursed expenditures of emergency rooms, you're sorely misguided.
As an amusing note, last time I checked in Alaska you could legally ride without a helmet - but if you have a passenger without a helmet, YOU get a ticket.