Since it is only the lawyers (and trolls) who make money off of this, why aren't those companies banding together to kill software patents?
I can understand copyrights on software.
If you can understand copyright on software for almost 200 years, then you can also understand the equally logical software patents just the same, which give the patent holder rights over some invention that does not and never will exist. Feel free to argue that fact when we get replicators, but until then the invention of 'software' was made in the early 1900's and very few people alive today were even involved with that invention, let alone should be able to patent it.
Both lock up human knowledge to keep our race from advancing, at the cost of human greed.
The natural reply is "But it is to compensate the creators!", despite that not being a true fact at all, so please don't bother making it. Repeating a lie does not make it true.
If companies can read their employee's Facebook posts, they're hardly private... besides, if someone is stupid enough to post something on Facebook that would get them fired if their employer saw it, they probably deserve to get fired!
Actually companies do not usually read their employees facebook posts. In fact, if you only post to facebook at home, and flag it as private, then your company reading your facebook posts is illegal and they will be fined and possibly go to jail over it.
If you are posting at work even, that doesn't automatically (or more importantly, legally make) your private posts public. The company using your private info, even if posted from work, is illegal too.
Typically when someone gets fired for posting to facebook from work, it is not any content that matters, thus they don't NEED to look. Just the act of connecting to facebook could be grounds for termination, so all they need to see is the TCP connection.
The only time your statement would be true is if you posted something to facebook and flagged it public. Only then is it legal (and expected these days) for your company to read your facebook info. Being public, just like everyone else.
That however is not at all what this story, article, or any parent posters have been talking about... So why even bring it up?
Reminds me of the time I tried to get an Antarctica domain (.aq), and the first email I got back stated "Sorry, to register you must live on the ice"
As for the history of the.us cctld, even back in the late 80s, one could register a subdomain out of it being an individual (and it was free too! Then again, so was.com)
However they did have and enforce a strict organizational structure. From what I recall, you had to get [something].county.state.us Later they opened it up more, but was still state/group sectioned at the second level, IE blah.k12.us for a school. These days for the right price anyone can get a blah.us
I also had a Canadian.ca domain, but the admin contact was my mailing address in Canada instead of my US one. So I think resident was the only requirement, not citizen. That or they just had poor checking of citizenship back then;}
OpenDNS breaks the DNS standard, as it returns a search page for non-existent domains, there was actually a/. article about sites doing this not too long ago.
That is an option that can be turned on and off to your own desire. Just uncheck the checkbox on your preferences page and it will not rewrite nxdomain.
FYI, most people like that feature. For the rest, who either don't like it, or do like it but for technical reasons can not have it, you can just not enable it.
Lastly, not to mention, you're letting a 3rd party track almost 100% of your net activity.
You say that like it is only true when using opendns and not true all other times.
All you are doing is changing 3rd party from your ISP into opendns, so in those cases that option is always there. And no, it does not matter if you run your own DNS server, since it needs to get records from some upstream service too...
I can understand not trusting your ISP (some ISPs simply have proven themselves untrustworthy), but I don't see why you would trust ICANN that much more than OpenDNS. ICANN has done some really rotten things too (Including rewritting NXDOMAIN but without any option to disable it!)
not something you want a for-profit entity to do, either directly or through front groups.
Has the DNS been a failure?
Yes, yes it has.
DNS the protocol is fine and dandy. DNS as in the root servers and domain policies, before they were given over to InterNIC (thus before ICANN) was fine.
DNS after a commercial for-profit company however is ass.
Do YOU know what the difference between.com.net and.org is? If not, don't feel bad. You had to be online in the late 80s early 90s to even have seen what the point was and how it worked.
These days they actually literally encourage you to purchase all three!! This is something that was forbidden, and for good reason, before.
Why bother having three filing cabinets to keep things sorted and separate, when you are then going to charge people to put files in it, and then encourage them to make copies as to keep one in each cabinet, not to make it easy to find but so you can charge multiple times. THAT is what commercialization of DNS has done, and yes, it is a failure now.
(Some may question the legality of torrenting TV shows, but I would argue that they're analogous to having a friend record a show to VHS and then pass it onto me.)
Sadly both of those are equally illegal in the USA:/
That is not to say I disagree with you on the rest of your post, and yes I too don't feel either of those things should be illegal, and do not blame you one bit.
But the thing is, that he *can* surely copy the disc without breaking the DRM?
Heh, you can't even watch a DVD without breaking the DRM.
Is "breaking DRM" the new term for using the key taped to the very lock you are trying to unlock? That is all he or anyone ripping DVDs is really doing.
What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of.conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format?
That would not be a replacement, since that is how it is done in Windows right now.
Tons of random folders within folders (That ironically all live in two files on disk), with no standard hierarchy, no standard method to store settings, no standard setting names, and tons of binary blob data.
This is why in Windows you have no choice but to reinstall your applications after you reinstall the OS. No other OS has this problem. You reinstall, and copy your binary apps back, and they all just work.
Just do it the Linux way, or even the MacOS way, where you only have to remember one location./etc/application-name/ ( Or library/preferences/ for OS X )
All global configs are in the same place, a config dir that contains subdirs named after the very app whos config files it contains.
Then per user config files also follow that same standard, except instead of/etc/ you keep them in your home directory, and the folder name there will tend to start with a dot so it is a hidden folder. But it will be named the same as the app and the same as the dir in etc.
In fact, to 'reset to defaults' all you have to do is copy the global config from etc into your home dir, and anything you broke is back to normal now. Windows doesn't even let you do that at all, as the initial configuration of the registry is not even IN most apps, only their installer/setup.exe files.
(I personally always found it funny that windows programmers put enough work into their apps so they can look for their settings missing, but not enough to just put defaults there when they aren't found instead of exiting with error codes)
However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed.
I don't think anyone has denied they have done some amazing things. If they have, they are simply wrong.
Those facts however do not at all change the fact that they enslaved an 8 year old child.
By that thinking, I too can enslave an 8 year old child legally, because prior to that I have done some pretty nice and amazing things.
How many old ladies do I need to help across the street before murder is OK?
My assumption is that this guy's malicious software is not necessarily something that can be patched, in that since it expects the user to run it manually, then no amount of "patching" can fix the problem at hand, which is ultimately the end user's hand.
Well yes. If the first two steps of 'becoming infected' are
1) user runs executable on purpose,
2) user enters root password then that is not a security issue. The computer is supposed to do as its owner asks.
However, he implied there are various injection methods it takes advantage of at the user level. Those can be fixed.
If the case happens to be it requires root access to do anything, then no, as you said nothing can be done about that.
Or heck, this is *Linux* we are talking about here.
Release it, and they will patch.
Give it to Theo Raadt of OpenBSD fame. In a week all of the attack vectors will be well defined, and source code fixes being pushed downstream. For BSD admittedly, but once the vectors are well defined, the Linux guys are more than able to 'translate' and make the same fixes.
That can only be a good thing.
It isn't like you need to worry about the company suing you for pointing out a security problem in their product when you tell them!
Besides, no matter how well behaved malware system you write, no matter what possible evils your imagination has come up with that it could be twisted into, the script kiddies out there already have much much better tools than that.
Just release it, sitting on it only gives the black hats more time to use the same exact security flaws for evil.
To be fair, it is not the GP's fault but the submitter and article authors fault.
Both use the word 'theft' and did so in the context of crimes. That fully brings the word into legal use, and legally theft is very specifically (nitpicky) defined. You can't avoid nitpicking when it comes to legal terms, since that is what they are by definition.
So no, taking someones credentials is not theft as defined by the law.
Using them without permission is, and the law is different between the US and UK, but in neither country does that crime fall under 'theft' or any of its related crimes.
In the US for sure, and from what I can tell in the UK too, you have to look at a totally separate unrelated set of laws to find the one that defines this action is illegal. They are all computer crime laws relating to unauthorized access and digital trespassing family of laws.
Saying taking someones credentials is theft is akin to saying calling someone 'tall' is armed robbery. Not even in the same field.
The only time theft laws come into play is when/if a person used your credentials without authorization to find where you live, and came to take your stuff located there. I'm sure it happens, but not in the linked article at least.
You have two things quantumly entangled. You tickle either one, they both laugh. But if can only observe one at a time, if one laughs without being tickled, you don't know whether it was because the other was tickled or if it laughed spontaneously until you observe the other being tickled. There's no way to confirm the laughter as FTL information from the future unless and until you observe the future.
Actually that is the easy part of the problem to solve. As far as proving things goes at least, not so much for being practical still.
If you separate the entangled particles by say one light minute, and have each particle isolated from each other (and all related observers) for at least that same minute, then you can observe one particle at one spot, which will cause the other particle state to be known, which can then be observed (not a full minute after, but it DOES need to be after. And it should be less than a minute later, just to rule out fast-as-light communications between particles, so that might be tricky) You can then simply wait one minute (assuming transmitting the results at the speed of light, ie radio) and compare results.
Do that with a few million entangled particles and in short time you can confirm what happened at both ends at slower than the speed of light, and only minutes into the future.
The hard part of the problem is the fact observing will then make those entangled particles useless as far as entanglement goes. You either need to make a whole lot of known-type entangled particles ahead of time, the amount of which limits the length of your total communications, or you need to figure out the flaws in our laws of nature.
I don't think the point of prison and/or the death penalty is to deter crime. Clearly neither one is effective at doing so. The point is to extract the debt that is owed to society for such behavior. The only method of payment for such debt is to require that you forfeit some of your limited time on this planet back to society.
What type of payment are you expecting out of a dead person? Fly bait?
(Note that past here, 'you' doesn't mean you personally, it means those whom believe in that sort of punishment. I'll try to use the generic 'they' instead.)
That sounds just like the governments logic however. For example, if you owe them some money, in order to get that money from you, they take away your right to drive (IE to get to the places that give you money for your time) and ban you from getting a job (IE the very places willing to give you money) So logically, if you are not allowed to make any money, then you could only possibly pay your debt back faster! Oh wait...
No, such thoughts come from the revenge obsessed animal part of the brain. There is no logic placed to it, other than the minimal needed to not look like the illogical thoughts they really are.
Oh, and unless you are already 60+ when you are convicted, then 'SOME of your limited time on this planet' has been far far exceeded by putting someone to death.
There is also the detail of murdering innocent people which you touched on. A fraction (sadly, a rather large fraction, as far as fractions go) of wrongful convictions aren't discovered until later. In the case of death sentences, way too late.
Fortunately in this country, unless you plan on leaving it soon, it is not a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN you will be wrongfully arrested, or someone you know or love, who truly did not commit any crimes. I suspect only then will people change their mind on how OK it is to put people to death, have them tortured and raped daily as a matter of course while laughing at it, on top of destroying the lives of everyone that knows that person.
I don't have an answer to the problem, but the issue is neither do they yet they are pushing for the wrong one just so they have an answer.
I regard the death penalty as somewhat childish and immature. "If X can't be alive, then... then... Neither Can Yoooooo! So nyah!" The idea that it gives closure to anything seemed to get a kick in the nuts with the Beltway Sniper's execution. If you don't get closure when the other person doesn't cry, then I'm not sure it's "closure" you're looking for. Try looking up "schoolyard bully".
Well at least you fully understand the American justice system.
It is one thing and one thing only: Revenge
If the powers that be, and those that put them in power, even cared in the slightest about justice, stopping crime, and helping people, then our legal system would be turned on its head and look totally different.
Unfortunately this is what most people in America want however. Not justice, just revenge. Not lack of crime, just to create more crime to dish out more suffering. It satisfies both the animal rage instincts as well as gives a false sense of superior morality.
so it would've made sense for them to do the following:
* Deliver a offer for the system requested. * Get the deal signed * Say: We notice you've not specified any backup, do you want that additionally ?
Who's to say they didn't?;)
My guess is the disconnect happened in between steps 1 and 2, more precisely when the bean counter saw the price in the offer and mentally could not attach that to any value.
There is no spinup of the DVD drive other than immediately after launching the game.
There is no other sounds from the DVD drive because it is not spinning. The games also load fast due to being on the HD and not reading from the DVD drive.
Just because YOU don't understand what that spinning noise from the DVD drive means, and what the LACK of that sound means, pretty much puts you into the stupid category.
You also don't explain the DLC games I can run off the HD which have no DVD at all to go with them let alone one in the drive.
Nice trick to tell me the game loads off DVD when no DVD is even in the drive. I think if your xbox is loading games from DVD with no DVD in the drive, you should return it as something major is broken or possessed.
Wow... Did you just seriously recommend he purchase 50 servers for each location???
I, personally, am TOTALLY in agreement with the ethos of whoever designed it, a single box for each service.
25 services is next to nothing. A single domain controller has that running on a single box.
And you want him to break out each service to its own machine... with a second box for redundancy.
I guess I am happy that you have $20k+ to spend on two low end boxes for eg. just DNS. But that is stupid as hell. Even worse that you are wasting a dual core 2ghz system for a NTP time sync server (Oh wait, two machines, like you said)
What waste. Waste of hardware, waste of electricity, waste of network port usage, and waste of time managing all of that.
Not to mention total lack of forethought in planning.
I mean, if your DHCP service server goes down, and has no fail over, then the 30 other machines you dedicated to 15 services that are also network related will not be used. Might as well put DNS on with DHCP since if one goes down the other will not help you one bit. See how that works? that was 5 seconds worth of thought and saved your company $20k!
Imagine what would happen if you put more than seconds of thought into the problem, like hours or days worth of thought! It _could_ save you hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to your current recommendations.
Hell, with 150 users, you probably just spent 10 years worth of their IT budget for your one suggestion alone!
Have you tried running the games installed on your harddrive? I am sure that when you do, it will fail and you will be required to run it from the disc, and be unable to install it to the hdd.
That is scary, xbox-scene is usually a very reputable and trustworthy source.
I have indeed run games installed and they work (The ones installed from a game disc) The only games on HD that did not run were downloaded from XBL. That type of game not working is more-or-less to be expected. However there are also exceptions to that rule. Games you download from XBL that are offline playable STILL WORK.
One xbox we were playing on two nights ago, which is banned from XBL, has a copy of Zombie Apocalypse downloaded to the hard drive. (Awesome game BTW!) The game still plays just fine. I can't upload top scores anymore to XBL, but that is because it is banned from XBL. I also can't upgrade it with new levels from XBL, but again due to being banned from XBL.
The game itself plays just fine from the HD, and was an XBL downloadable content game.
Also I think there is a miscommunication on the media center thing. I know you can still run media center, can still play local videos, as well as stream from a PC. However that article states as much. They say specifically 'media center extender' which I assumed meant the software you install in XP to stream (since vista and win7 come with it), which I know does work. If there is some other 'extender' product I am unaware of, they could be correct. But it is not related to streaming video and music from other network sources (Or if it does, then it is a pointless add-on and no loss.. just do it the normal library/network path way)
Other than those two things however, everything else they state is disabled is all totally xbox live related.
Of course you cant download from xbox live to get updates, you are banned from xbox live. Of course you can't download netflix from xbox live, you are banned from xbox live. Of course the achievements you get between last connecting and getting banned are lost. You can't connect to xbox live to upload them because you are banned.
Personal experience? Or something you just read online? Or worse, something you read on slashdot?
My own personal experience shows GP to be 100% correct. Only the couple games downloaded from XBL disappeared from the HD. All the games copied from real game discs are still there and work.
You seem extremely passionate about saying "MS bans other stuff!" but not one of your 8 posts on this thread have said anything else, no description of what else is banned, nor any personal experiences or other peoples stories being related from you.
I am very curious why you think it is not possible to do what hundreds of people are still doing right this very second, and what exactly you are getting out of saying that.
I realize my own personal experiences are worth jack and shit to you, and yours of course would be worth the same to me/us, but you don't even give one! Nor any other reason you would say what you have been saying...
After reloading the thread, I do see a couple people also stating that the HD is nonfunctional after a ban. Even one link (to a blog) that states the same thing.
So I do see where you got that idea from.
However unless something new happened last night I am unaware of, those stories are not at all true.
Of the 30-35 people I know with modded xboxes (some of which I helped do it), a little over 10 of them conencted to xbox live and were banned after I explicitly warned them not to.
Not a single one of them has this HD problem being talked about. They can even stream video from their PC to the xbox still, and just the night before last we had a 4 player Zombie Apocalypse marathon on one of the banned xboxes that has the XBL download of that game on the HD.
So, while I realize my personal accounts are equally worthless compared to these other peoples personal accounts, that at least is where I was coming from in my other post.
For a good 10-12 banned xboxes that I have personally laid hands on, they still function fine in every way but connecting to XBL.
When instructing the xbox to connect to XBL, it will first perform a network test. The result of that test is a message that you are banned.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it is only the lawyers (and trolls) who make money off of this, why aren't those companies banding together to kill software patents?
I can understand copyrights on software.
If you can understand copyright on software for almost 200 years, then you can also understand the equally logical software patents just the same, which give the patent holder rights over some invention that does not and never will exist.
Feel free to argue that fact when we get replicators, but until then the invention of 'software' was made in the early 1900's and very few people alive today were even involved with that invention, let alone should be able to patent it.
Both lock up human knowledge to keep our race from advancing, at the cost of human greed.
The natural reply is "But it is to compensate the creators!", despite that not being a true fact at all, so please don't bother making it. Repeating a lie does not make it true.
If companies can read their employee's Facebook posts, they're hardly private ... besides, if someone is stupid enough to post something on Facebook that would get them fired if their employer saw it, they probably deserve to get fired!
Actually companies do not usually read their employees facebook posts.
In fact, if you only post to facebook at home, and flag it as private, then your company reading your facebook posts is illegal and they will be fined and possibly go to jail over it.
If you are posting at work even, that doesn't automatically (or more importantly, legally make) your private posts public. The company using your private info, even if posted from work, is illegal too.
Typically when someone gets fired for posting to facebook from work, it is not any content that matters, thus they don't NEED to look. Just the act of connecting to facebook could be grounds for termination, so all they need to see is the TCP connection.
The only time your statement would be true is if you posted something to facebook and flagged it public. Only then is it legal (and expected these days) for your company to read your facebook info. Being public, just like everyone else.
That however is not at all what this story, article, or any parent posters have been talking about... So why even bring it up?
Reminds me of the time I tried to get an Antarctica domain (.aq), and the first email I got back stated "Sorry, to register you must live on the ice"
As for the history of the .us cctld, even back in the late 80s, one could register a subdomain out of it being an individual (and it was free too! Then again, so was .com)
However they did have and enforce a strict organizational structure.
From what I recall, you had to get [something].county.state.us
Later they opened it up more, but was still state/group sectioned at the second level, IE blah.k12.us for a school. These days for the right price anyone can get a blah.us
I also had a Canadian .ca domain, but the admin contact was my mailing address in Canada instead of my US one. So I think resident was the only requirement, not citizen. ;}
That or they just had poor checking of citizenship back then
OpenDNS breaks the DNS standard, as it returns a search page for non-existent domains, there was actually a /. article about sites doing this not too long ago.
That is an option that can be turned on and off to your own desire.
Just uncheck the checkbox on your preferences page and it will not rewrite nxdomain.
FYI, most people like that feature. For the rest, who either don't like it, or do like it but for technical reasons can not have it, you can just not enable it.
Lastly, not to mention, you're letting a 3rd party track almost 100% of your net activity.
You say that like it is only true when using opendns and not true all other times.
All you are doing is changing 3rd party from your ISP into opendns, so in those cases that option is always there.
And no, it does not matter if you run your own DNS server, since it needs to get records from some upstream service too...
I can understand not trusting your ISP (some ISPs simply have proven themselves untrustworthy), but I don't see why you would trust ICANN that much more than OpenDNS. ICANN has done some really rotten things too (Including rewritting NXDOMAIN but without any option to disable it!)
not something you want a for-profit entity to do, either directly or through front groups.
Has the DNS been a failure?
Yes, yes it has.
DNS the protocol is fine and dandy. DNS as in the root servers and domain policies, before they were given over to InterNIC (thus before ICANN) was fine.
DNS after a commercial for-profit company however is ass.
Do YOU know what the difference between .com .net and .org is? If not, don't feel bad. You had to be online in the late 80s early 90s to even have seen what the point was and how it worked.
These days they actually literally encourage you to purchase all three!!
This is something that was forbidden, and for good reason, before.
Why bother having three filing cabinets to keep things sorted and separate, when you are then going to charge people to put files in it, and then encourage them to make copies as to keep one in each cabinet, not to make it easy to find but so you can charge multiple times. THAT is what commercialization of DNS has done, and yes, it is a failure now.
(Some may question the legality of torrenting TV shows, but I would argue that they're analogous to having a friend record a show to VHS and then pass it onto me.)
Sadly both of those are equally illegal in the USA :/
That is not to say I disagree with you on the rest of your post, and yes I too don't feel either of those things should be illegal, and do not blame you one bit.
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
Just wait until they discover the 'job security insurance daemon' he installed a month after seti@home ;}
FUD ALERT
[citation needed] ;)
But the thing is, that he *can* surely copy the disc without breaking the DRM?
Heh, you can't even watch a DVD without breaking the DRM.
Is "breaking DRM" the new term for using the key taped to the very lock you are trying to unlock?
That is all he or anyone ripping DVDs is really doing.
What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of .conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format?
That would not be a replacement, since that is how it is done in Windows right now.
Tons of random folders within folders (That ironically all live in two files on disk), with no standard hierarchy, no standard method to store settings, no standard setting names, and tons of binary blob data.
This is why in Windows you have no choice but to reinstall your applications after you reinstall the OS.
No other OS has this problem. You reinstall, and copy your binary apps back, and they all just work.
Just do it the Linux way, or even the MacOS way, where you only have to remember one location. /etc/application-name/ ( Or library/preferences/ for OS X )
All global configs are in the same place, a config dir that contains subdirs named after the very app whos config files it contains.
Then per user config files also follow that same standard, except instead of /etc/ you keep them in your home directory, and the folder name there will tend to start with a dot so it is a hidden folder. But it will be named the same as the app and the same as the dir in etc.
In fact, to 'reset to defaults' all you have to do is copy the global config from etc into your home dir, and anything you broke is back to normal now. Windows doesn't even let you do that at all, as the initial configuration of the registry is not even IN most apps, only their installer/setup.exe files.
(I personally always found it funny that windows programmers put enough work into their apps so they can look for their settings missing, but not enough to just put defaults there when they aren't found instead of exiting with error codes)
However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed.
I don't think anyone has denied they have done some amazing things.
If they have, they are simply wrong.
Those facts however do not at all change the fact that they enslaved an 8 year old child.
By that thinking, I too can enslave an 8 year old child legally, because prior to that I have done some pretty nice and amazing things.
How many old ladies do I need to help across the street before murder is OK?
My assumption is that this guy's malicious software is not necessarily something that can be patched, in that since it expects the user to run it manually, then no amount of "patching" can fix the problem at hand, which is ultimately the end user's hand.
Well yes. If the first two steps of 'becoming infected' are
1) user runs executable on purpose,
2) user enters root password
then that is not a security issue. The computer is supposed to do as its owner asks.
However, he implied there are various injection methods it takes advantage of at the user level.
Those can be fixed.
If the case happens to be it requires root access to do anything, then no, as you said nothing can be done about that.
Or heck, this is *Linux* we are talking about here.
Release it, and they will patch.
Give it to Theo Raadt of OpenBSD fame. In a week all of the attack vectors will be well defined, and source code fixes being pushed downstream.
For BSD admittedly, but once the vectors are well defined, the Linux guys are more than able to 'translate' and make the same fixes.
That can only be a good thing.
It isn't like you need to worry about the company suing you for pointing out a security problem in their product when you tell them!
Besides, no matter how well behaved malware system you write, no matter what possible evils your imagination has come up with that it could be twisted into, the script kiddies out there already have much much better tools than that.
Just release it, sitting on it only gives the black hats more time to use the same exact security flaws for evil.
Oh, you want the 168 hour phone number? Well, that's gonna cost ya...
... Your job.
You mean the place demanding 23 out of every 24 hours of your time, yet paying you less than 1/3rd of their other employees?
I wouldn't say you lost your job, (Homer voice - Thats bad)
I'd say you lost your chains and shackles of enslavement. (Homer voice - Thats Good!)
So really, you are just nitpicking.
To be fair, it is not the GP's fault but the submitter and article authors fault.
Both use the word 'theft' and did so in the context of crimes. That fully brings the word into legal use, and legally theft is very specifically (nitpicky) defined. You can't avoid nitpicking when it comes to legal terms, since that is what they are by definition.
So no, taking someones credentials is not theft as defined by the law.
Using them without permission is, and the law is different between the US and UK, but in neither country does that crime fall under 'theft' or any of its related crimes.
In the US for sure, and from what I can tell in the UK too, you have to look at a totally separate unrelated set of laws to find the one that defines this action is illegal. They are all computer crime laws relating to unauthorized access and digital trespassing family of laws.
Saying taking someones credentials is theft is akin to saying calling someone 'tall' is armed robbery. Not even in the same field.
The only time theft laws come into play is when/if a person used your credentials without authorization to find where you live, and came to take your stuff located there.
I'm sure it happens, but not in the linked article at least.
You have two things quantumly entangled. You tickle either one, they both laugh. But if can only observe one at a time, if one laughs without being tickled, you don't know whether it was because the other was tickled or if it laughed spontaneously until you observe the other being tickled. There's no way to confirm the laughter as FTL information from the future unless and until you observe the future.
Actually that is the easy part of the problem to solve. As far as proving things goes at least, not so much for being practical still.
If you separate the entangled particles by say one light minute, and have each particle isolated from each other (and all related observers) for at least that same minute, then you can observe one particle at one spot, which will cause the other particle state to be known, which can then be observed (not a full minute after, but it DOES need to be after. And it should be less than a minute later, just to rule out fast-as-light communications between particles, so that might be tricky)
You can then simply wait one minute (assuming transmitting the results at the speed of light, ie radio) and compare results.
Do that with a few million entangled particles and in short time you can confirm what happened at both ends at slower than the speed of light, and only minutes into the future.
The hard part of the problem is the fact observing will then make those entangled particles useless as far as entanglement goes.
You either need to make a whole lot of known-type entangled particles ahead of time, the amount of which limits the length of your total communications,
or you need to figure out the flaws in our laws of nature.
I don't think the point of prison and/or the death penalty is to deter crime. Clearly neither one is effective at doing so. The point is to extract the debt that is owed to society for such behavior. The only method of payment for such debt is to require that you forfeit some of your limited time on this planet back to society.
What type of payment are you expecting out of a dead person? Fly bait?
(Note that past here, 'you' doesn't mean you personally, it means those whom believe in that sort of punishment. I'll try to use the generic 'they' instead.)
That sounds just like the governments logic however.
For example, if you owe them some money, in order to get that money from you, they take away your right to drive (IE to get to the places that give you money for your time) and ban you from getting a job (IE the very places willing to give you money)
So logically, if you are not allowed to make any money, then you could only possibly pay your debt back faster! Oh wait...
No, such thoughts come from the revenge obsessed animal part of the brain. There is no logic placed to it, other than the minimal needed to not look like the illogical thoughts they really are.
Oh, and unless you are already 60+ when you are convicted, then 'SOME of your limited time on this planet' has been far far exceeded by putting someone to death.
There is also the detail of murdering innocent people which you touched on. A fraction (sadly, a rather large fraction, as far as fractions go) of wrongful convictions aren't discovered until later. In the case of death sentences, way too late.
Fortunately in this country, unless you plan on leaving it soon, it is not a matter of IF but a matter of WHEN you will be wrongfully arrested, or someone you know or love, who truly did not commit any crimes.
I suspect only then will people change their mind on how OK it is to put people to death, have them tortured and raped daily as a matter of course while laughing at it, on top of destroying the lives of everyone that knows that person.
I don't have an answer to the problem, but the issue is neither do they yet they are pushing for the wrong one just so they have an answer.
I regard the death penalty as somewhat childish and immature. "If X can't be alive, then... then... Neither Can Yoooooo! So nyah!" The idea that it gives closure to anything seemed to get a kick in the nuts with the Beltway Sniper's execution. If you don't get closure when the other person doesn't cry, then I'm not sure it's "closure" you're looking for. Try looking up "schoolyard bully".
Well at least you fully understand the American justice system.
It is one thing and one thing only: Revenge
If the powers that be, and those that put them in power, even cared in the slightest about justice, stopping crime, and helping people, then our legal system would be turned on its head and look totally different.
Unfortunately this is what most people in America want however. Not justice, just revenge. Not lack of crime, just to create more crime to dish out more suffering. It satisfies both the animal rage instincts as well as gives a false sense of superior morality.
so it would've made sense for them to do the following:
* Deliver a offer for the system requested.
* Get the deal signed
* Say: We notice you've not specified any backup, do you want that additionally ?
Who's to say they didn't? ;)
My guess is the disconnect happened in between steps 1 and 2, more precisely when the bean counter saw the price in the offer and mentally could not attach that to any value.
There is no spinup of the DVD drive other than immediately after launching the game.
There is no other sounds from the DVD drive because it is not spinning. The games also load fast due to being on the HD and not reading from the DVD drive.
Just because YOU don't understand what that spinning noise from the DVD drive means, and what the LACK of that sound means, pretty much puts you into the stupid category.
You also don't explain the DLC games I can run off the HD which have no DVD at all to go with them let alone one in the drive.
Nice trick to tell me the game loads off DVD when no DVD is even in the drive. I think if your xbox is loading games from DVD with no DVD in the drive, you should return it as something major is broken or possessed.
Wow... Did you just seriously recommend he purchase 50 servers for each location???
I, personally, am TOTALLY in agreement with the ethos of whoever designed it, a single box for each service.
25 services is next to nothing. A single domain controller has that running on a single box.
And you want him to break out each service to its own machine... with a second box for redundancy.
I guess I am happy that you have $20k+ to spend on two low end boxes for eg. just DNS. But that is stupid as hell.
Even worse that you are wasting a dual core 2ghz system for a NTP time sync server (Oh wait, two machines, like you said)
What waste. Waste of hardware, waste of electricity, waste of network port usage, and waste of time managing all of that.
Not to mention total lack of forethought in planning.
I mean, if your DHCP service server goes down, and has no fail over, then the 30 other machines you dedicated to 15 services that are also network related will not be used. Might as well put DNS on with DHCP since if one goes down the other will not help you one bit.
See how that works? that was 5 seconds worth of thought and saved your company $20k!
Imagine what would happen if you put more than seconds of thought into the problem, like hours or days worth of thought! It _could_ save you hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to your current recommendations.
Hell, with 150 users, you probably just spent 10 years worth of their IT budget for your one suggestion alone!
What you really want is a James Bond wristwatch with 0.5T magnetic field generator whenever you turn the dial.
That I think is the first suggestion for a wrist watch that would get me to wear watches again!
Have you tried running the games installed on your harddrive? I am sure that when you do, it will fail and you will be required to run it from the disc, and be unable to install it to the hdd.
That is scary, xbox-scene is usually a very reputable and trustworthy source.
I have indeed run games installed and they work (The ones installed from a game disc)
The only games on HD that did not run were downloaded from XBL. That type of game not working is more-or-less to be expected.
However there are also exceptions to that rule. Games you download from XBL that are offline playable STILL WORK.
One xbox we were playing on two nights ago, which is banned from XBL, has a copy of Zombie Apocalypse downloaded to the hard drive. (Awesome game BTW!)
The game still plays just fine. I can't upload top scores anymore to XBL, but that is because it is banned from XBL. I also can't upgrade it with new levels from XBL, but again due to being banned from XBL.
The game itself plays just fine from the HD, and was an XBL downloadable content game.
Also I think there is a miscommunication on the media center thing.
I know you can still run media center, can still play local videos, as well as stream from a PC. However that article states as much.
They say specifically 'media center extender' which I assumed meant the software you install in XP to stream (since vista and win7 come with it), which I know does work.
If there is some other 'extender' product I am unaware of, they could be correct. But it is not related to streaming video and music from other network sources (Or if it does, then it is a pointless add-on and no loss.. just do it the normal library/network path way)
Other than those two things however, everything else they state is disabled is all totally xbox live related.
Of course you cant download from xbox live to get updates, you are banned from xbox live.
Of course you can't download netflix from xbox live, you are banned from xbox live.
Of course the achievements you get between last connecting and getting banned are lost. You can't connect to xbox live to upload them because you are banned.
Sorry, you're incorrect.
Why do you think that?
Personal experience? Or something you just read online? Or worse, something you read on slashdot?
My own personal experience shows GP to be 100% correct. Only the couple games downloaded from XBL disappeared from the HD. All the games copied from real game discs are still there and work.
You seem extremely passionate about saying "MS bans other stuff!" but not one of your 8 posts on this thread have said anything else, no description of what else is banned, nor any personal experiences or other peoples stories being related from you.
I am very curious why you think it is not possible to do what hundreds of people are still doing right this very second, and what exactly you are getting out of saying that.
I realize my own personal experiences are worth jack and shit to you, and yours of course would be worth the same to me/us, but you don't even give one! Nor any other reason you would say what you have been saying...
Ok, sorry for replying twice.
After reloading the thread, I do see a couple people also stating that the HD is nonfunctional after a ban.
Even one link (to a blog) that states the same thing.
So I do see where you got that idea from.
However unless something new happened last night I am unaware of, those stories are not at all true.
Of the 30-35 people I know with modded xboxes (some of which I helped do it), a little over 10 of them conencted to xbox live and were banned after I explicitly warned them not to.
Not a single one of them has this HD problem being talked about.
They can even stream video from their PC to the xbox still, and just the night before last we had a 4 player Zombie Apocalypse marathon on one of the banned xboxes that has the XBL download of that game on the HD.
So, while I realize my personal accounts are equally worthless compared to these other peoples personal accounts, that at least is where I was coming from in my other post.
For a good 10-12 banned xboxes that I have personally laid hands on, they still function fine in every way but connecting to XBL.
When instructing the xbox to connect to XBL, it will first perform a network test.
The result of that test is a message that you are banned.
http://www.dabbledoo.com/ee/images/uploads/gamertell/banned_message.jpg
That is the only difference I have seen.