4th party = XBL, 3rd party = Altus, or whoever you might have copied software from
Ahh, I see. No, XBL (which is the same party is MS) is 3rd. Altus does not come into play as far as that goes.
Now, I know that a TOU can let you restrict who has access to your network. But there aren't reasonable restrictions on that?
Not exactly.
The only restrictions in the USA by law are that you can not base your choice to provide service or not on one of the following: age, disability, national origin, race, religion, genetics or sex (gender)
Based off anything else is perfectly legal however. If you consider that reasonable or not is up to you (Personally I think a few other things should be on that list, but the list as-is is reasonable, just not complete IMHO)
You used slashdot as an example. What if slashdot said we're only allowing accounts that connect to slashdot with , and I logged in while using my own distro? Is that an acceptable TOU policy?
Acceptable? It wouldn't be to ME heh. Legal however, it 100% is. TO answer you directly, I would say it is not acceptable. Others I have no doubt would see things differently and to different levels of being pissed off at it.
Unless these modified consoles modify how the network is accessed or affects gameplay (ie, you hack your software so medics can one-shot everybody) in an unintended manner, are they allowed to write a TOU that band something that doesn't directly affect usage on their network?
Yes. Legally they can say you are not allowed to use their service if a butterfly landed in your yard today. Not very enforceable on that silly example, but the law would back them 100% and support them banning you as long as they could prove that a butterfly did indeed land in your yard that day.
Both are very silly and stupid examples, and no one with an IQ above 60 should think that is a good idea for a business model, but it would be 100% legal, and the courts would back that TOS up fully.
Legally speaking, the only things you CAN'T 'ban' someone for or put in a TOS are in that list above. Technically, you CAN put it in the TOS, but then that entire line item becomes void.
Morally and acceptably is a different matter. I'm no MS lover by any means, but if a hundred years of case law is turned on its head and thrown out just to punish MS for this, that would pretty much shut down most non-national businesses in this country.
Imagine a world where if someone commits credit card fraud on your online web store (or even in the real store), and could sue you and WIN because you chose not to accept their money. Or losing in court for asking someone to leave your shop because they are loud and drunk and upsetting everyone else there. Or losing in court because you were sick and stayed home from work, and someone felt you choose not to do business with them, thus sued.
Screw that world. Id rather have the right to do with my stuff as I please, even if that means giving everyone else that right.
Can you explain why a company can ban you from service because you modified your machine? It makes sense to ban if they were connecting to their live network using dubious means, or trying to use the network in illegal ways... But I don't understand why a fourth party can ban how you using a third party's product?
There is nothing preventing you from modifying hardware you own (the xbox itself), and that is both legal and MS can't really say squat about it (Specifically, they can say all the squat they want, but have less than no legal backing)
However, as xbox live is a subscription service, they can set forth rules to follow in order to be allowed to use it. Typically this is called Terms of Service, or ToS.
Being a service, they can dictate any rules they want and choose whom to do business with, at lease as long as that choice isn't based on one of the few things you can not legally discriminate against like age race etc. Legally modifying hardware you own is not in that list, so they CAN discriminate all they want.
Yes, they might be in some trouble for not refunding prorated payments back, but the only legal result of that is to be forced to pay them back (Which personally I think they should be doing anyway)
My setup used two xbox (xboxes?) one modded for homebrew that never connected to any MS service, and one unmodified for playing games online. (In the mean time, I stopped playing games online, and now that second xbox is sitting waiting to be modded too... Just haven't had the time to mess with it)
The 4th party you mentioned, I'm not sure where that came from so can't quite answer it. There are only two parties involved here. The people whom got banned from xbox live, and Microsoft.
Does it seem ethically gray to ban people from using your network based solely on something that isn't about how you're using the network?
Ethically, maybe. Probably not. If you ran a service, you would want the same right to choose whom you did business with or not.
Leagally, they are 100% in the right (With exception to not refunding unused prorated costs back, which I don't even know if they are really doing or not.)
Even slashdot has a TOS and they can ban your account for violating it. Nothing immoral there either.
* Test Drive of The i2Go eGo with IBM MicroDrive. by Richard Menta 9/01/00
*snip*
More Options
*snip*
Want more options? I2Go MP3Agent, the software that comes with the player, has text-to-speech capabilities designed to translate the morning email into MP3 files to listen to on the commute in. This culd be a lifesaver to busy dot-com employees who get backlogged with a hundred messages.
MyAudio2Go.com
One of the best options available from the folks at i2Go is a website they created called MyAudio2Go.com. On this site you can download daily news stories in MP3 format. You can select articles covering the top news stories, sports, business and finance, even recaps of a dozen or so television shows like ER. We loved this site and the best news is you don't need an i2Go to download and play these files. Check this site out!
And at least one example of how this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/ If nothing else, please Please read about this person!
Do further googles (or wiki searches) for Maher Arar Then just keep in mind there is NOTHING at all that happened nor will happen that would prevent you or anyone else you know from being in that persons shoes, by a random throw of the dice.
Sure that is an extreme case, but it is cases like that where I can honestly say I would support the usage. If anything, allowing these terrorists to come to a US Court sets a precedent where the usage of information gathered by torture becomes acceptable in a criminal investigation.
That is until they* come into your home at night, haul you and your wife/gf/S.O./whatever away to different prisons in another country and torture you for your terrorists connections for 9 months. You are doing exactly everything required to qualify as a terrorist suspect under our current methods of determining who is or could be a terrorist, so it is not at all as far fetched as your extreme example is.
[*] They being all of the sociopaths that work their way into positions of power and dominance due to their personality requiring it, whom you are willingly and gladly giving permission to torture anyone and everyone (since that is our current definition of terrorist suspect)
Are you aware what "declaration of war" and "captured" mean? How about swapping that out with "threat of control" and "purchased"? I mean, if it's a declaration of war then the populace should just capture their parliament as prisoners of war, right?
I know you were being sarcastic, but actually I like your idea!
Quick, someone photoshop up a declaration of war from the media cartels, and lets get to work. I'll go warm up the waterboards!
- Whatever your stance on waterboarding, they didn't do it to KSM to get him to confess. They did it to acquire intel to prevent further attacks and/or take the battle to Al Qaeda.
That might be what they claim, but it is a lie and not what they did.
There are only two things torture can even possibly get you.
A) revenge against someone
B) force someone to echo what you want them to say.
Revenge is revenge. I'm sure that was a large part of why we torture now. As for B, might as well just write out a confession and sign it for them. It means just as much and is a lot quicker to get. Doesn't get you as much revenge however with that option.
So, while I can use torture to force you to echo back something, like 'say you murdered that person!', no matter what you say (or don't say) that can not possibly indicate anything about you (other than you want the torture to stop), all it really proves is the torturer instructed the victim to say something, and the victim did.
So you are correct that they did not torture him to get him to confess, since that is not possible. But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible. You are also incorrect that they did it to prevent anything, like your example of future attacks, since that too is impossible.
I'm sure they have at some point CLAIMED it was for that, but there have been hundreds of different claims why they do it, but any that are not one of the two above are still lies.
While I see the point that you're trying to make - I really wouldn't mind that. If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested. Why would someone be AGAINST security cameras being pointed at their property, when other people pay hefty sums to set them up for security?
But you ARE doing something illegal. Most likely, many many somethings.
In one days time you most likely broke around 10 laws just by how you are dressed, what other people think of you, where you go and when, and what exactly you are seen doing.
If you are driving, add another 10+ laws broken per trip. 1mph over the limit? that is a crime. 21 mph below the limit and not within distance of an intersection? that too is a crime. Swerve to miss that dead animal in the road? that is a crime.
In my city, walking down the street with two ice cream cones is illegal. In fact it is still a law on the books to require a certain percentage of your customer parking to have a horse hitch. This makes practically all businesses break the law, since no one rides horses.
Even on slashdot alone, you probably made more than one comment today that someone can take as libel or slander, and if that person happens to be a different race than you (which unless they state it, you would never know online) you just committed a hate crime. That carries a jail sentence!
So your quaint thought that you are not breaking any laws is silly, you break tons of them a day.
Assuming a normal day of driving to and from work, and basic errands after work (pick up kids, grocery shopping, etc) that gives a good 30-40 opportunities for you to be arrested for the crimes you committed that day, that you are just 'lucky' for not being arrested on.
Right now such laws aren't enforced 'by the book' because there are not enough police to do so. If you consider taped evidence as taking an officers place, you now have a much larger police force. This lets more laws be enforced, and enforced retroactively.
So while now you break 30-40 laws a day and are arrested for zero of them due to no officers witnessing the crimes, with cameras you will be committing the same 30-40 crimes a day as you are right now, but most of those will be recorded permanently and in the hands of the very people who will be doing the arresting of you.
Hell, I have IE6 at work (pity me) and had the default search set to Google, but every time they apply patches the default goes back to bing.
As a network admin, this very thing pisses me off to no end!
Thankfully no IE6 here, only 7 and 8, but our active directory group policy is specifically set so the external search is google, and the internal search is our sharepoint server.
BOTH get reset to bing after every IE/Office/Outlook update so far (Excluding outlook junk filter updates, surprisingly.)
This is more annoying with the internal search, since it was just a couple months ago we deployed Microsoft search on the server side to integrate with intranet searching. Now, it attempts to go through bing and redirect, which doesn't quite work right.
So their search engine 'preference' will override group policy as well as user preference.
I ended up having to write two small batch scripts and call them from the IE GPO to run and change the default search, which is not the best solution at all. It does let us enforce group policy, but also removes user preference just like the bing updates do, so it is far from ideal.
My guess is that 10% figure is easily inflated 10x by people whom desire to use something other than bing, but find after each reboot bing is now the default and they only noticed after that first search, before setting it back.
It is quite sad that even with forcing bing on people who clearly do not want bing, on top of the few people who do want bing, they still can't get above 10%. Like the guy with a whole pack of aces up his sleeve that still loses the game.
The world "monopoly" here is being used to mean "market power". This is common usage.
I thought the common usage of the word monopoly was in the legal sense, which is a very different definition.
I assumed that because, at least here, the word is generally uttered in the same sentence demanding legal action and/or government involvement.
Granted, slashdot is not a legal site, nor is there a 'technical' definition for the word, so I guess I can see where that assumption would be confusing to many.
Perhaps that's a good question, too: why not open source it.
I can give one example.
Where I work, our ERP software is primarily coded in.NET, and needs 3.5.
It is the only reason to stick with Windows on each and every workstation there. Every so often I check up on the status of Wine and.NET, only to see 2.x is only partially supported with no plans on supporting 3.
If this lets me run our ERP client under Linux, be it Wine or Mono or whatever wrapper is needed, that will be a good number of workstation licenses that will fall out of the upgrade cycle.
It will also let us deploy more ERP dedicated terminals on slightly older hardware that XP doesn't treat too well, and 2k is too painful to run on (Plus we only have so many licenses for 2k that aren't OEM)
This could very well lead to a measured loss of sales. I am sure I am not the only one in that type of situation, even if it is not very common.
Apparently you couldn't release the internal workings of a system (Linux) and have someone make money from it (Redhat). I agree with you, that would be absurd.
I noticed out of four targets to apply to, not a single one was Intel.
What works for one company probably won't work for many others, and one could easily say it will Never work with All others.
One of the things I hated most about my computer arch class was that we had to learn about a completely made up system design which didn't translate to ANYTHING in the real world. Oh yeah, and it was RISC. *Snoooreeee*
That's only because you dropped out before getting to the FPGA classes!
Any functional CPU design (technically non-functional ones too, for whatever good that would do) can be flashed into an FPGA and become as real as any other silicon chip.
And identical to psudocode, psudo-chipfab can be translated into any real code/fab language by anyone that knows basic design and the target language. You were supposed to be learning the basic design part, so once you got to using a real language used in the real world, you would have some clue what to do with it.
Presumably... they also make a DVD player that lasts 1000 years?
You aren't much of a geek if you don't plan on upgrading beyond DVD technology once the next technology gets to the same price point and is an order of magnitude better. I know I will be!
However, I don't know when that will be. However I wouldn't mind my current DVD archives to last until that day.
Why bother making a DVD to last 10 years or 25 years or 50 years, when it is quite possible I might not want to migrate to the next best thing for 11 years, 26 years, or 51 years.
1000 will more than cover what I need.
Besides, you know better than anyone this is just their way to say it will last basically forever, based on the construction methods and materials.
Adobe's answer is just the greatest kind of cop out.
How exactly would you suggest Adobe modify the flash plugin so that it will run on your computer when I am the one to upload it to my website, but not run it when someone else who I have given permission (thus access) to upload it to my site in my name?
Either you run code from my website, or you don't. You can't base any decisions on if it was my SCP client that uploaded it to the web server, or someone else uploaded it, mainly because there is no possible way for the server nor you to tell the difference.
What change exactly can Adobe make to come into play here?
"You get a package in the mail. You don't recognize the return address. You open it, and inside is a device with a note that says 'want a good laugh? press this button'. Do you press it?"
That example is so not fair!
Which one of us could honestly resist pressing a big red shiny button? Come on now, be honest;)
Proper response: If you can't learn, I can't help. Sorry.
...but first, make sure that you are in good financial shape, own your own house, have your own car insurance and aren't planning to begat any offspring who might require Granny's Discount Daycare Services. Also check that your parents haven't been seen reading any articles about the total cost of raising a child.
Now I feel bad for the last generations 'backyard mechanics' in your family. I bet they were run out of thanksgiving dinner on a rail once they had to inform their parents that no a car does not Just Work, you must take it to the gas station and refill the tank every so often, and change oil and fluids every so often as well (or have it done.)
Personally I would refuse to go to a family members house with a can of gas once a week too.
Do these same people think that once you drive a car off the lot, it will run forever with zero effort or maintenance?
Computers are quite similar in the maintenance area (if not higher maintenance!)
If someone kept calling me to come pick them up off the side of the road every week due to not refilling the gas tank, I too would tell them I will not keep doing that when it is clearly their own doing.
And no, I'm not saying Everyone needs to be a computer expert to run their computer. No more than everyone needs to be a car expert to drive their own car. If you aren't an expert, that is fine, but there are people out there who are experts and charge accordingly for their time and knowledge. Use them. If you are taking advantage of 'free' (read: family) expert knowledge, then it is not unreasonable to be expected to listen.
There are C headers that will let you interface *directly* with the parallel port, and all you need on the hardware end are a couple opto-isolators for safety.
For $6ish, you can get a USB to TTL Serial chip, or a USB to LPT chip, and use those exact same C headers to program for, as the devices use the USB standard for serial and parallel interfaces and drivers.
Makes it really nice so your parallel port device only has a single 4 wire cable between it and the PC, with the 8-16 IO pins wired up in the same enclosure/protoboard the rest of your project is on!
Don't speed, you won't get a speeding ticket. What's so hard to understand about that?
I don't know, ask the cops.
I've been issued a speeding ticket for going 75 in a 65 zone, in a car that was not able to go above 60 (and barely that.)
So lets see...
Don't speed. check. Won't get a speeding ticket. Not so check. Nor was having to go to court for a day very check.
I still believe to this day that the ONLY reason my ticket was dismissed was because the stupid cop admitted in front of a courtroom full of people that they just pulled over all 10 nearest cars to the speed trap, they never checked anyones speed (It was a party of 10 cops doing this, literally all lined up off the side of the road in plain view, where everyone was slowing WAY below the limit they were already driving, specifically to avoid getting a ticket. Clearly others were willing to cause an accident to avoid appearing even going NEAR the posted limit.)
With no radar gun reports or any evidence of any kind outside of the very officer that illegally issued the ticket in the first place 'said so', others in that court room had tickets that were not dismissed, yet the few I saw after me were ALL dismissed.
This was my first speeding ticket, in my first $200 car (Thus the not able to go much over 55mph), within my first month of driving. So yes I remember it vividly.
So again, I ask you what you think speeding has to do with getting a speeding ticket? Because clearly you have no understanding of police officers or the law.
Slashdot Mirror
4th party = XBL, 3rd party = Altus, or whoever you might have copied software from
Ahh, I see. No, XBL (which is the same party is MS) is 3rd. Altus does not come into play as far as that goes.
Now, I know that a TOU can let you restrict who has access to your network. But there aren't reasonable restrictions on that?
Not exactly.
The only restrictions in the USA by law are that you can not base your choice to provide service or not on one of the following: age, disability, national origin, race, religion, genetics or sex (gender)
Based off anything else is perfectly legal however. If you consider that reasonable or not is up to you (Personally I think a few other things should be on that list, but the list as-is is reasonable, just not complete IMHO)
You used slashdot as an example. What if slashdot said we're only allowing accounts that connect to slashdot with , and I logged in while using my own distro? Is that an acceptable TOU policy?
Acceptable? It wouldn't be to ME heh. Legal however, it 100% is.
TO answer you directly, I would say it is not acceptable. Others I have no doubt would see things differently and to different levels of being pissed off at it.
Unless these modified consoles modify how the network is accessed or affects gameplay (ie, you hack your software so medics can one-shot everybody) in an unintended manner, are they allowed to write a TOU that band something that doesn't directly affect usage on their network?
Yes. Legally they can say you are not allowed to use their service if a butterfly landed in your yard today. Not very enforceable on that silly example, but the law would back them 100% and support them banning you as long as they could prove that a butterfly did indeed land in your yard that day.
Both are very silly and stupid examples, and no one with an IQ above 60 should think that is a good idea for a business model, but it would be 100% legal, and the courts would back that TOS up fully.
Legally speaking, the only things you CAN'T 'ban' someone for or put in a TOS are in that list above.
Technically, you CAN put it in the TOS, but then that entire line item becomes void.
Morally and acceptably is a different matter. I'm no MS lover by any means, but if a hundred years of case law is turned on its head and thrown out just to punish MS for this, that would pretty much shut down most non-national businesses in this country.
Imagine a world where if someone commits credit card fraud on your online web store (or even in the real store), and could sue you and WIN because you chose not to accept their money.
Or losing in court for asking someone to leave your shop because they are loud and drunk and upsetting everyone else there.
Or losing in court because you were sick and stayed home from work, and someone felt you choose not to do business with them, thus sued.
Screw that world. Id rather have the right to do with my stuff as I please, even if that means giving everyone else that right.
Your argument would only be valid if they could still use the xbox for everything else except connecting to the MS network, they can not.
Where did you get that idea?
It is not correct.
You can use your banned xbox for everything you used it for before, EXCEPT for connecting to xbox live.
Can you explain why a company can ban you from service because you modified your machine? It makes sense to ban if they were connecting to their live network using dubious means, or trying to use the network in illegal ways... But I don't understand why a fourth party can ban how you using a third party's product?
There is nothing preventing you from modifying hardware you own (the xbox itself), and that is both legal and MS can't really say squat about it (Specifically, they can say all the squat they want, but have less than no legal backing)
However, as xbox live is a subscription service, they can set forth rules to follow in order to be allowed to use it. Typically this is called Terms of Service, or ToS.
Being a service, they can dictate any rules they want and choose whom to do business with, at lease as long as that choice isn't based on one of the few things you can not legally discriminate against like age race etc.
Legally modifying hardware you own is not in that list, so they CAN discriminate all they want.
Yes, they might be in some trouble for not refunding prorated payments back, but the only legal result of that is to be forced to pay them back (Which personally I think they should be doing anyway)
My setup used two xbox (xboxes?) one modded for homebrew that never connected to any MS service, and one unmodified for playing games online.
(In the mean time, I stopped playing games online, and now that second xbox is sitting waiting to be modded too... Just haven't had the time to mess with it)
The 4th party you mentioned, I'm not sure where that came from so can't quite answer it.
There are only two parties involved here. The people whom got banned from xbox live, and Microsoft.
Does it seem ethically gray to ban people from using your network based solely on something that isn't about how you're using the network?
Ethically, maybe. Probably not.
If you ran a service, you would want the same right to choose whom you did business with or not.
Leagally, they are 100% in the right (With exception to not refunding unused prorated costs back, which I don't even know if they are really doing or not.)
Even slashdot has a TOS and they can ban your account for violating it. Nothing immoral there either.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/ego.html
* Test Drive of The i2Go eGo with IBM MicroDrive.
by Richard Menta 9/01/00
*snip*
More Options
*snip*
Want more options? I2Go MP3Agent, the software that comes with the player, has text-to-speech capabilities designed to translate the morning email into MP3 files to listen to on the commute in. This culd be a lifesaver to busy dot-com employees who get backlogged with a hundred messages.
MyAudio2Go.com
One of the best options available from the folks at i2Go is a website they created called MyAudio2Go.com. On this site you can download daily news stories in MP3 format. You can select articles covering the top news stories, sports, business and finance, even recaps of a dozen or so television shows like ER. We loved this site and the best news is you don't need an i2Go to download and play these files. Check this site out!
*snip*
Final Score A-
Copyright 2000 MP3 Newswire. All rights reserved.
But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.
Where's the study or even a valid argument supporting this claim.
Ok. Studies and reports on them:
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=20647
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/519416/
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/9/21/21847/9403
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/new-study-finds-torture-negatively-affects-memory
And further valid arguments supporting those claims:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30721458/print/1/displaymode/1098/
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/torture-is-more-than-just-harsh-tactics/
http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Dbq-Usefulness-Torture/132993
And at least one example of how this is a slippery slope that leads to nothing good:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/
If nothing else, please Please read about this person!
Do further googles (or wiki searches) for Maher Arar
Then just keep in mind there is NOTHING at all that happened nor will happen that would prevent you or anyone else you know from being in that persons shoes, by a random throw of the dice.
Sure that is an extreme case, but it is cases like that where I can honestly say I would support the usage. If anything, allowing these terrorists to come to a US Court sets a precedent where the usage of information gathered by torture becomes acceptable in a criminal investigation.
That is until they* come into your home at night, haul you and your wife/gf/S.O./whatever away to different prisons in another country and torture you for your terrorists connections for 9 months.
You are doing exactly everything required to qualify as a terrorist suspect under our current methods of determining who is or could be a terrorist, so it is not at all as far fetched as your extreme example is.
[*] They being all of the sociopaths that work their way into positions of power and dominance due to their personality requiring it, whom you are willingly and gladly giving permission to torture anyone and everyone (since that is our current definition of terrorist suspect)
Are you aware what "declaration of war" and "captured" mean? How about swapping that out with "threat of control" and "purchased"? I mean, if it's a declaration of war then the populace should just capture their parliament as prisoners of war, right?
I know you were being sarcastic, but actually I like your idea!
Quick, someone photoshop up a declaration of war from the media cartels, and lets get to work.
I'll go warm up the waterboards!
Yes you are wrong.
Web standards were created in 1992 with some design work back from 1991.
In case you did not know, web standards required TCP/IP standards to be there as well to even work.
Microsoft had no operating system in 1992 that supported either of those things.
- Whatever your stance on waterboarding, they didn't do it to KSM to get him to confess. They did it to acquire intel to prevent further attacks and/or take the battle to Al Qaeda.
That might be what they claim, but it is a lie and not what they did.
There are only two things torture can even possibly get you.
A) revenge against someone
B) force someone to echo what you want them to say.
Revenge is revenge. I'm sure that was a large part of why we torture now.
As for B, might as well just write out a confession and sign it for them. It means just as much and is a lot quicker to get. Doesn't get you as much revenge however with that option.
So, while I can use torture to force you to echo back something, like 'say you murdered that person!', no matter what you say (or don't say) that can not possibly indicate anything about you (other than you want the torture to stop), all it really proves is the torturer instructed the victim to say something, and the victim did.
So you are correct that they did not torture him to get him to confess, since that is not possible.
But you are incorrect that they did it for intel, since that is also not possible.
You are also incorrect that they did it to prevent anything, like your example of future attacks, since that too is impossible.
I'm sure they have at some point CLAIMED it was for that, but there have been hundreds of different claims why they do it, but any that are not one of the two above are still lies.
If these are public areas, and the cameras are paid for with public money, we should be able to watch them, or whatever we want, on *their* cameras.
I think you mean on *our* cameras.
While I see the point that you're trying to make - I really wouldn't mind that. If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I don't have to worry about being arrested. Why would someone be AGAINST security cameras being pointed at their property, when other people pay hefty sums to set them up for security?
But you ARE doing something illegal. Most likely, many many somethings.
In one days time you most likely broke around 10 laws just by how you are dressed, what other people think of you, where you go and when, and what exactly you are seen doing.
If you are driving, add another 10+ laws broken per trip.
1mph over the limit? that is a crime. 21 mph below the limit and not within distance of an intersection? that too is a crime. Swerve to miss that dead animal in the road? that is a crime.
In my city, walking down the street with two ice cream cones is illegal.
In fact it is still a law on the books to require a certain percentage of your customer parking to have a horse hitch. This makes practically all businesses break the law, since no one rides horses.
Even on slashdot alone, you probably made more than one comment today that someone can take as libel or slander, and if that person happens to be a different race than you (which unless they state it, you would never know online) you just committed a hate crime. That carries a jail sentence!
So your quaint thought that you are not breaking any laws is silly, you break tons of them a day.
Assuming a normal day of driving to and from work, and basic errands after work (pick up kids, grocery shopping, etc) that gives a good 30-40 opportunities for you to be arrested for the crimes you committed that day, that you are just 'lucky' for not being arrested on.
Right now such laws aren't enforced 'by the book' because there are not enough police to do so.
If you consider taped evidence as taking an officers place, you now have a much larger police force. This lets more laws be enforced, and enforced retroactively.
So while now you break 30-40 laws a day and are arrested for zero of them due to no officers witnessing the crimes, with cameras you will be committing the same 30-40 crimes a day as you are right now, but most of those will be recorded permanently and in the hands of the very people who will be doing the arresting of you.
Hell, I have IE6 at work (pity me) and had the default search set to Google, but every time they apply patches the default goes back to bing.
As a network admin, this very thing pisses me off to no end!
Thankfully no IE6 here, only 7 and 8, but our active directory group policy is specifically set so the external search is google, and the internal search is our sharepoint server.
BOTH get reset to bing after every IE/Office/Outlook update so far (Excluding outlook junk filter updates, surprisingly.)
This is more annoying with the internal search, since it was just a couple months ago we deployed Microsoft search on the server side to integrate with intranet searching.
Now, it attempts to go through bing and redirect, which doesn't quite work right.
So their search engine 'preference' will override group policy as well as user preference.
I ended up having to write two small batch scripts and call them from the IE GPO to run and change the default search, which is not the best solution at all. It does let us enforce group policy, but also removes user preference just like the bing updates do, so it is far from ideal.
My guess is that 10% figure is easily inflated 10x by people whom desire to use something other than bing, but find after each reboot bing is now the default and they only noticed after that first search, before setting it back.
It is quite sad that even with forcing bing on people who clearly do not want bing, on top of the few people who do want bing, they still can't get above 10%.
Like the guy with a whole pack of aces up his sleeve that still loses the game.
The world "monopoly" here is being used to mean "market power". This is common usage.
I thought the common usage of the word monopoly was in the legal sense, which is a very different definition.
I assumed that because, at least here, the word is generally uttered in the same sentence demanding legal action and/or government involvement.
Granted, slashdot is not a legal site, nor is there a 'technical' definition for the word, so I guess I can see where that assumption would be confusing to many.
Perhaps that's a good question, too: why not open source it.
I can give one example.
Where I work, our ERP software is primarily coded in .NET, and needs 3.5.
It is the only reason to stick with Windows on each and every workstation there. .NET, only to see 2.x is only partially supported with no plans on supporting 3.
Every so often I check up on the status of Wine and
If this lets me run our ERP client under Linux, be it Wine or Mono or whatever wrapper is needed, that will be a good number of workstation licenses that will fall out of the upgrade cycle.
It will also let us deploy more ERP dedicated terminals on slightly older hardware that XP doesn't treat too well, and 2k is too painful to run on (Plus we only have so many licenses for 2k that aren't OEM)
This could very well lead to a measured loss of sales. I am sure I am not the only one in that type of situation, even if it is not very common.
Still, I am not complaining!
Apparently you couldn't release the internal workings of a system (Linux) and have someone make money from it (Redhat). I agree with you, that would be absurd.
I noticed out of four targets to apply to, not a single one was Intel.
What works for one company probably won't work for many others, and one could easily say it will Never work with All others.
One of the things I hated most about my computer arch class was that we had to learn about a completely made up system design which didn't translate to ANYTHING in the real world. Oh yeah, and it was RISC. *Snoooreeee*
That's only because you dropped out before getting to the FPGA classes!
Any functional CPU design (technically non-functional ones too, for whatever good that would do) can be flashed into an FPGA and become as real as any other silicon chip.
And identical to psudocode, psudo-chipfab can be translated into any real code/fab language by anyone that knows basic design and the target language. You were supposed to be learning the basic design part, so once you got to using a real language used in the real world, you would have some clue what to do with it.
Yeah, I already did! I bought a MacBook Air and iPhone 3GS and now I buy and rent movies over Wi-Fi. Where the fuck do I put the stone DVD?
Well, you could build a small box out of these stone DVDs to store your MacBook and iPhone within..
I am uncertain as to how much extra protection this would give your data, but it would at least be a conversation starter!
Presumably... they also make a DVD player that lasts 1000 years?
You aren't much of a geek if you don't plan on upgrading beyond DVD technology once the next technology gets to the same price point and is an order of magnitude better. I know I will be!
However, I don't know when that will be. However I wouldn't mind my current DVD archives to last until that day.
Why bother making a DVD to last 10 years or 25 years or 50 years, when it is quite possible I might not want to migrate to the next best thing for 11 years, 26 years, or 51 years.
1000 will more than cover what I need.
Besides, you know better than anyone this is just their way to say it will last basically forever, based on the construction methods and materials.
mainly because there is no possible way for the server nor you to tell the difference.
I fail. I meant there is no way for the browser to tell the difference.
Obviously the server can tell the difference, and in fact is the only thing that can easily tell the difference, thus why it is a web server issue.
Adobe's answer is just the greatest kind of cop out.
How exactly would you suggest Adobe modify the flash plugin so that it will run on your computer when I am the one to upload it to my website, but not run it when someone else who I have given permission (thus access) to upload it to my site in my name?
Either you run code from my website, or you don't. You can't base any decisions on if it was my SCP client that uploaded it to the web server, or someone else uploaded it, mainly because there is no possible way for the server nor you to tell the difference.
What change exactly can Adobe make to come into play here?
"You get a package in the mail. You don't recognize the return address. You open it, and inside is a device with a note that says 'want a good laugh? press this button'. Do you press it?"
That example is so not fair!
Which one of us could honestly resist pressing a big red shiny button? ;)
Come on now, be honest
Proper response: If you can't learn, I can't help. Sorry.
...but first, make sure that you are in good financial shape, own your own house, have your own car insurance and aren't planning to begat any offspring who might require Granny's Discount Daycare Services. Also check that your parents haven't been seen reading any articles about the total cost of raising a child.
Now I feel bad for the last generations 'backyard mechanics' in your family.
I bet they were run out of thanksgiving dinner on a rail once they had to inform their parents that no a car does not Just Work, you must take it to the gas station and refill the tank every so often, and change oil and fluids every so often as well (or have it done.)
Personally I would refuse to go to a family members house with a can of gas once a week too.
Do these same people think that once you drive a car off the lot, it will run forever with zero effort or maintenance?
Computers are quite similar in the maintenance area (if not higher maintenance!)
If someone kept calling me to come pick them up off the side of the road every week due to not refilling the gas tank, I too would tell them I will not keep doing that when it is clearly their own doing.
And no, I'm not saying Everyone needs to be a computer expert to run their computer. No more than everyone needs to be a car expert to drive their own car.
If you aren't an expert, that is fine, but there are people out there who are experts and charge accordingly for their time and knowledge. Use them.
If you are taking advantage of 'free' (read: family) expert knowledge, then it is not unreasonable to be expected to listen.
Aren't there already totally free trackers for legal content (like Linux ISOs, etc)?
Yes there are, but as the summary states, the biggest ones of those are the trackers being shut down by lawsuits.
There are C headers that will let you interface *directly* with the parallel port, and all you need on the hardware end are a couple opto-isolators for safety.
For $6ish, you can get a USB to TTL Serial chip, or a USB to LPT chip, and use those exact same C headers to program for, as the devices use the USB standard for serial and parallel interfaces and drivers.
Makes it really nice so your parallel port device only has a single 4 wire cable between it and the PC, with the 8-16 IO pins wired up in the same enclosure/protoboard the rest of your project is on!
Don't speed, you won't get a speeding ticket. What's so hard to understand about that?
I don't know, ask the cops.
I've been issued a speeding ticket for going 75 in a 65 zone, in a car that was not able to go above 60 (and barely that.)
So lets see...
Don't speed. check.
Won't get a speeding ticket. Not so check.
Nor was having to go to court for a day very check.
I still believe to this day that the ONLY reason my ticket was dismissed was because the stupid cop admitted in front of a courtroom full of people that they just pulled over all 10 nearest cars to the speed trap, they never checked anyones speed (It was a party of 10 cops doing this, literally all lined up off the side of the road in plain view, where everyone was slowing WAY below the limit they were already driving, specifically to avoid getting a ticket. Clearly others were willing to cause an accident to avoid appearing even going NEAR the posted limit.)
With no radar gun reports or any evidence of any kind outside of the very officer that illegally issued the ticket in the first place 'said so', others in that court room had tickets that were not dismissed, yet the few I saw after me were ALL dismissed.
This was my first speeding ticket, in my first $200 car (Thus the not able to go much over 55mph), within my first month of driving. So yes I remember it vividly.
So again, I ask you what you think speeding has to do with getting a speeding ticket? Because clearly you have no understanding of police officers or the law.
Doesn't the Americans with Disabilities Act require books to be published in braille form, if a blind person requests it?
I have no idea. I do know, however, that as a US law, it's not binding on Canadians. :)
So, it's only legally required to be in English braille and French braille? ;}
(Please don't hurt me, I'm only joking!)