Also remember, All Hot chicks are insane, but not all insane chicks are hot.
No, but all single hot chicks who'll take an average flirt from an average to poor looking guy are probably bat shit insane, that's why they're single. Of course there's a match of personalities too, but a great looking body doesn't come any easier to them than it does to us, if they're willing to invest a lot in diet and exercise to look fit and you're not at all interested, that's a huge clash of interests already. Of course they say opposites attracts but that goes for interests that fill each other out rather than overlap, not being dead opposite to each other.
Long story short there's not that much soft demand in the market, those of us who'll move an old disk or have more disks in one machine are a small minority, assuming people have an old machine to pick from. By far most people, not only in the OEM market but also in the spot market want to buy complete PCs with an preinstalled OS and whatnot, which you can't do without a HDD. The price of the HDD almost doesn't matter because if they can't get HDDs, they're stuck with inventory of CPUs and GPUs and memory and everything else that loses value and they're not making any sales. So when supply is cut short and demand is very resistant to change the price goes up a lot, personally I got lucky but not so lucky that I'd want to sell anything back into the market, just keeping them for my own use until the prices are back to pre-crisis levels.
It's up there with being too healthy, or being too wealthy, or too alive, or too free.
More like there's far more water in the tap or far more electricity in the wires than I'm going to use. Going from 4 to 16 MB and 4 to 16 GB is the same mathematically, but the former was a huge upgrade and the latter a luxury. Before, how many applications/windows/tabs I'd have open was limited by the computer, too many and it'd slow down. Today it's practically only limited by how many I think is manageable to work with, today I could within "prosumer" prices get 8x8GB on a LGA2011 board and it's not that I couldn't afford it, it's that I haven't nearly tapped out the 16GB I have.
Same with CPU, 99.9% of the time the computer is waiting for me not the other way around, along with a SSD pretty much all response lag is gone. When there's a job that takes a few minutes, I'll go check the headlines or grab a refill or a snack or visit the facilities, in all honestly even with an infinitely fast computer I couldn't be that much more productive. Sure, there's always things that could use infinite power but not what most people do most of the time.
And while I like good graphics over poor, it's a diminishing return. It's not enough to simply make the textures, effects, shadows and reflections more detailed, you also have to get all the animations and physics right. Most realism fail in today's games have nothing to do with the graphics card, it's that you'd need an army of programmers to get all the details right. The hardware has outpaced even the hundred million dollar titles. And it's not just because of consoles, people won't pay 10x as much to get all the details right. The hardware can do it but the cost/benefit isn't there.
In short, if I had to justify my PC purchases I'm pretty much down to "because I can at a reasonable cost and because I spend so much time in front of it". Like if I spent a lot of time driving I wouldn't get just a usable car, like functional in the requirement to get me from A to B. I'd get a comfortable and enjoyable car, that I like to be in and to drive with maybe things of pure entertainment value like a good sound system.
P.S. Unless you're talking about a laptop, upgrading to a discrete GPU after three months isn't much of a WTF, I've found that buying things ahead of demand is usually just a giant waste of money. In three months time, the prices could have been slashed pretty good, a new generation of hardware could have arrived. Particularly now that it comes for "free" with every Intel processor anyway.
Among those was Nidec, which produces ~70% of the world's hard drive spindle motors.
Single supplier, but not single site. Their web site says they have plants for spindle motors in Thailand, China, Indonesia, The Philippines and Vietnam. True, the 6 plants listed are all in Thailand but the implication that 70% of the drive motors are made in Thailand is false.
Some friends, a case of beer, peanuts, large TV and a comfy couch all demand a console gaming experience. Just turn on the unit, pass out a few controllers and let the good times roll.
IMHO it's not so much that it's possible with a console as it is impossible with a PC. No games and no controllers. I do have my PC hooked up to my sound system and TV over HDMI, I can watch movies or play single player games that way using a wireless keyboard/mouse and I know I'm not alone. But there's absolutely no accessories I can buy that will turn it into a 4-player rig. The console controllers are just USB controllers with little to no modifications, a game and a USB hub and I should be ready to go. If there was anything like Buzz for PC and not just for the PS3, I'd buy it.
Since you have people that don't RTFA or even RTFS, why do you think moderators RTFC? He probably made it through the first sentence and went "Oooh, flamebait" then moved on to the next one.
I don't understand the legal ramifications of asking for the passkey versus asking for the (alleged) unencrypted data, but IANAL.
Because if your passkey is "I killed $person at $place on $date" compelling you to provide that would be factual and testimonial and thus clearly under the 5th amendment. So by granting you immunity from anything revealed in the passkey itself, they are hoping it will be treated like a safe analogy. Any documents produced from the decrypted hard disk would be like documents produced from an opened safe, they have not been compelled from your mind but from material objects the police have seized. They have only compelled from you the means to access them, like your safe key. I would argue that is not true because the decrypted data is an interpretation of the cipher data, not simply an access barrier but that is the dispute.
Having said that I think Ubuntu is mostly doomed anyway - even with this new tablet/TV angle Shuttleworth wants to get into, the fact he hasn't managed to expand Ubuntu's marketshare via OEMs preinstalling it on machines (with some rare exceptions) kinda tells me he is either really optimistic or really stupid. Red Hat gave up on the desktop and, but then again Red Hat never had Unity and disappearing global menus. Yeah, I'm sure that's what's gonna fix things to make Linux more appealing for mainstream users.:)
Well, creating Ubuntu wasn't such a bad idea when it came to building credibility for Ubuntu LTS and trying to compete with RHEL and SLES in the server market. And at face value, it didn't seem like a bad place to be for when there's a "paradigm shift" that would enable other solutions, but they haven't manage to catch it. Amazon EC2 and others beat them on the cloud, Apple and Google beat them to ARM mobile/tablets with iOS and Android, perhaps the smart TV market is still open but I doubt they're in a good enough position. When it comes right down to it, they're still trying to go head to head with Microsoft and Windows, which is a giant held down by other giants like Office. Outlook/Exchange and a ton of proprietary third party software that Canonical is far too lightweight to push away.
You can argue about self-incrimination, free-speech, etc. afterwards - when the judge KNOWS that you've been 100% co-operative. You can still have evidence stricken, ask for a mis-trial, appeal, etc. but you've been co-operative and had nothing to hide so when they *DO* find a USB stick that you've never seen before and are demanded to decrypt it, you are much more likely to make them think "Damn, he gave us all the others, even when it incriminated him - maybe he really *doesn't* know this one?".
As long as you've been read your rights, pretty much anything short of a confession at gunpoint is forever. You'll never manage to "undo" anything you've said to the police or in court and everything that tumbled out because you gave them access to everything you know and have will be fully legally admissible. Your whole argument revolves around your belief that they'll actually think you innocent, and not just "well we couldn't convict him on what we wanted, but we can slam him with everything we got".
If they for some fucked up reason think you're involved in terrorism or kiddie porn or organized crime or whatever, do you think that suspicion will go away because you "give" them petty software piracy and having a joint? No, you just handed them enough rope to hang yourself with. That said, yes being a smart ass and trying for a game of wits with the police is a very bad idea, as is getting rude and obnoxious. Politely decline any search without a warrant and that you would not like to answer questions without a lawyer present. Most people just make a bigger mess of everything trying to "prove their innocence" as you seem to suggest.
That depends how broad you think the 5th amendment is. To quote Justice Stevens:
A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe - by word or deed.
Note that this is from the dissenting opinion in Doe vs US, where the suspect was compelled to sign a form - that in itself contained no factual information - requesting information from foreign banks of any accounts he may be the holder of. The court found that they could, just like they could compel you to provide a handwriting sample.
As for a password, the best idea would be to STFU completely because:
The issue presented in those cases was whether the act of producing subpoenaed documents, not itself the making of a statement, might nonetheless have some protected testimonial aspects. The Court concluded that the act of production could constitute protected testimonial communication, because it might entail implicit statements of fact: by producing documents in compliance with a subpoena, the witness would admit that the papers existed, were in his possession or control, and were authentic. (...) Thus, the Court made clear that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination applies to acts that imply assertions of fact.
So unless you acknowledge that you're in (sole or not sole) possession of the password, as this woman apparently did, that in itself will have testimonial value. Even if the prosecution has ample evidence for that anyway, you should be able to invoke the 5th. In this case she may have seriously screwed herself there. If there's no testimonial value, there's not much precedent to say one way or the other. Oh yeah, and don't try to destroy any evidence with booby traps. In the search I found that the SOX act was used in a suspected child porn case:
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States (...)
Limited to the SOX act? Nope. Destroy evidence and you get up to 20 years in jail. Of course it helps that he stupid fuck admitted to destroying his HDD after the cops came by the first time, but just goes to prove laws will be cross-applied everywhere they can.
Religion telling people "You are accountable for your good and your bad actions, even those that people aren't around to see" makes an incalculably valuable contribution to society. Altruism will eventually be rewarded! Deceit and manipulation will be punished, even in the most convincing of cases! Yet, when someone has the ability to convince himself that no such accountability exists, saying things like "Huhhrrr 6000 year old earth, invisible sky man, Duhhrrr" then he's free to do anything he wants, as long as it does not come back to bite him, personally, in the end.
You know, you're not the first that has made that argument. It's why in some of the persecutions, inquisitions and witchhunts of heretics, kafirs, unbelievers and so on atheists have been high on their extermination lists. People that follow a false god, that is bad but people that don't follow any god that's worse, devoid of all ethical and moral compass. Trouble is, it doesn't reflect reality. The least religious countries on earth, Scandinavia, Japan, Western Europe are some of the most peaceful low-crime places there are, while most of the fucked up collapsed states and civil war areas are choking full of religion. Of course there's damn many countries that are religious and peaceful too, but the argument that taking away religion would lead to any kind of degenerate anarchy and chaos is laughable.
I don't think very many seriously intends to outlaw religion any more than you would outlaw superstition. The frustration usually comes when someone wants to make laws based on what the Bible, Quran or whatever says, because it defies any rational discussion. You can't argue if death by stoning is right if the logic goes "Stoning is in Sharia law, Sharia law is part of the Quran, the Quran is the exact words of Allah, Allah is perfect so his words can't be wrong. QED." I actually get annoyed the other way too, when you need to use religion to promote virtues. So Jesus was compassionate, does that mean it wasn't a good thing before Jesus? Without Jesus? Do you seriously need heaven and hell as carrot and stick? Can't you give me good enough reasons without invoking the invisible man in the sky? I'm more than happy to discuss ethics, society, law and almost everything else when it comes to how human beings should act towards each other. But when I hear of religious fundamentalists that want to replace evolution with God snapping his fingers 6000 years ago in the school curriculum, then yeah I'm almost ready to outlaw such stupidity.
Sad story, but it sounds like most of this is from dealing with the lawyers, law firms and the court system, with probably a far greater dose of contract law than copyright law. And "trumped up charges", "perpetraded a fraud on the courts" and a lawyer that wasn't actually filing a counter suit doesn't sound like a problem with the laws on the books. Here's the short, brutal facts of it:
The worst possible opponent you can have in a court of law is a law firm.
It doesn't have anything to do with what law you're dealing with. You are up against an opponent that has absolutely no incentive not to take it to courts, because they're experts at it and it'll cost you money but not them. I bet if you got experts to look at them, they'd find the charge were not ridiculous enough to make them illegal, the claims in court not so incorrect they'd amount to perjury, just distant enough from the truth to exhaust your resources. If you finally found a lawyer to counter sue, he'd be drowned in motions and depositions and counterclaims at every turn and they'd ride it to the very end of appeals.
A former employer of mine had one such dealing with a law firm. In the end, it came down to one sentence in the relatively huge contract that turned out to be a Pandora's box. They had shown us a component, the functionality they showed had been planned and estimated but instead of listing all the functional requirements of that component the contract said it would replace it. Guess what, it also had a lot of functionality they didn't show us, most likely because they didn't realize it was there but they did later, and rather than make an expensive change order they read the contract with a lawyer's eye and insisted we'd implement everything. And AFAIK we eventually did, even though it was a fixed price bid and we got exactly $0 for the job.
That lead to some new contract rules, we would specify the functionality you will get and the client will sign this will cover his needs but we would never promise to replace anything ever again. But it also has a lot to do with law firms, I don't think one company with a corporate lawyer would ride it that way against another company lawyer. But when you're dealing with a company full of them, I'd grow eyes in the back of my neck. They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You should apply that to lawyers...
You don't seem like a troll, so I'll just post a few definitions:
snap at someone to speak sharply or angrily to someone.
3 a : to retort to or interrupt curtly and irritably b : to utter curtly or abruptly
3 [transitive, intransitive] to speak or say something in an impatient, usually angry, voice "Don't just stand there," she snapped.
Yes, the figurative meaning is based on the literal meaning when animals try to bite someone, but unless you are talking about children raised by wolves it's not meant literally with people...
My experience with heavy torrent users, though, is that they legitimately purchase very little of the media they consume.
Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person
Just note that these positions are not mutually exclusive. If the average person will buy four albums and pirate one while the music buff will buy ten albums and pirate ninety then both are true. In fact, I would think the assumption that the more massive your consumption is, the less likely you will pay for everything seems likely. Imagine you have two people who spend all their time on music and WoW, the latter being a flat rate no matter how much you play. Now the first guy is playing WoW 90% of the time and will buy the few albums he listens to in the remaining 10% of the time. The other person is playing WoW 10% of the time and listening to music the other 90%, my bet would be that he's far more likely to supplement with torrents than the other guy.
This is of course assuming there's no Spotify or similar service available, that acts more or less as a cap these days. Talk to a music buff and he sounds like he's died and gone to heaven, all this music for only $X/month, compared to all the albums he used to buy and/or download. The average person on the other hand didn't spend so much on music to begin with, so it's not the same kind of killer offer to them. Still at least they have it better than with movies and TV series, give me an iTunes Plus for that - 1080p and no DRM, available where I live. That's what i'd wish for, but I'm not holding my breath....
Like this has to be an either-or, my hiring experience has been that there's a lot of interviews and relatively little practical testing of skills. I guess the closest I came was a company that tested me for logic, math and reading comprehension but there were no tests on the subjects and tools I claimed to know, just interview questions. Most the hiring WTFs I read about are people that smooth talked their way through the interviews, like coders that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. Most of the time you can find some way make good people with bad personalities productive, easier than the other way around. Of course in an ideal world we'd like just good people with good personalities, but reality is a compromise.
More like Hitler picked fights until he was up to 11. It wasn't enough to be at war with and/or occupying Poland, the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and several other territories, they had to go after the Soviet Union. Already France (42M) and the UK (48M) combined was bigger than Germany (69M in 1937 borders), the rest were just icing on the cake. Just to give you an idea of the scope, it's like if the US (300M) was already at war with Canada, Mexico and the whole of Central and South America (600M) and then decided "Hey, let's invade China too!". Okay so Germany had allies in Italy and Japan but they were fighting their own wars, so it's not far from the truth.
So instead of making the meeting a quarter longer so you'd get the meeting time you actually wanted, you went out of your way to headbutt with everyone else in the company. Many companies will plan meetings back-to-back, which means there's no time to move between locations, take a bathroom break or anything like that. Fifteen minutes seems excessive, but yes I've been to places where you can expect any larger meeting to start 5-10 minutes late because someone's always coming from another meeting, usually some of the most senior bosses that everyone wants a minute with them after the meeting too. Most people are now on their laptops/tablets/phones and doing something useful in that time until the meeting begins anyway. I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by insisting on everyone being there on the dot.
But they have more then enough lobbying power to make the consequences of being caught so severe and the internet so monitored that piracy is so underground that 99% cannot find it and would not take the risk if they did.
Honestly, this wasn't even true before the Internet, before even modems and BBS. There was rampant schoolyard piracy on floppies, kids would been from different schools, relatives etc. and it'd get around. The first teenager I knew to get a CD-burner co-financed that by burning lots of CDs for other people, same with early BBS/internet. One person would download at horrible per-minute charges, we'd buy copies to share the cost with our allowance. If they could really kill public P2P - which is far more complicated than you think - then I think F2F, friend to friend networks would become the new thing. Share with everyone you've had a few beers with and they would have a helluva time infiltrating social networks.
Particularly if friends would broker searches and files, like I'd be willing to relay files from my friend A to my friend B even though A and B don't know each other. They could remain totally anonymous to each other, all they'd know is that a friend of mine has it/wants it. That way you'd quickly have a large network of childhood friends, study friends, work friends, relatives etc. of your friends available to you. There'd be no central directory anywhere, first they'd have to get invited into the network and then try taking down one and one person. Good luck trying to take that down..
This should be a fairly straight forward way of encoding a pictogram, though it's unclear if they'll interpret 5 and 7 as the horizontal and vertical or opposite. Replace 5, 7 and 5*7 with arbitrary large primes to make detailed pictures. From there you can start sending maps of the galaxy, periodic table with illustration of the elements, everything we'd have in common. Show math with illustrations like you'd do to a preschooler, here's 2+3 = 5 with boxes of 2, 3 and 5 items. Once they understand our number system, show them distances they too probably know like size of galaxy, size of hydrogen atom etc.
Text and language, yes you'd get to that eventually. Send them them the alphabet then start over again, naming everything like the milky way, the sun, earth, all the elements and so on. For that matter, just teach them like you would a young child, the is s table and chair and book and flower and bird and whatnot. Illustration and text. Somehow I don't see this as a problem, put a US and Japanese kid in the same room and they'll find a way to communicate even though they got no words in common. Hell, we teach sign language to monkeys. How hard can it be to get a conversation going?
They might be surprised if they expect their costs to be significantly reduced. The top graph here shows the average contribution in taxes/expenses for people of a certain age. What can you say from that graph? Mostly that the very healthy and long-lived are very expensive to the government, in fact if you've worked a few decades and die at 50 you're not actually a net expense. Note that the graph doesn't add to zero since this is per person and obviously there's rather few 100 year olds, but if you multiply by population at that age it ought to be roughly balanced.
Here's the thing, everybody dies the only question is how. A long, protracted decline with failing health is far more expensive than the people that, sorry to be blunt, drop dead. Middle-aged people, even if they've attracted something serious like lung cancer from smoking or heart attacks from obesity tend to either die or recover, either way it's not that expensive. Meanwhile your 90 year old that's been in and out of hospital and made his slow recoveries has been a big expense, never mind the pensions, retirement homes, nursing homes and various other forms of aid. At least on average.
We've been able to have a retirement age because the cost of carrying people to the end of their lives haven't been all that big. But now more and more people are having sunset decades instead of sunset years and they don't want to work longer just because they live longer. And with longer education, work life is possibly even getting shorter. Study until you're 25, work until you're 65, live until you're 85 - that's more than half your life not working. Top that off with people that are unfit to work - or perhaps more relevant today, out of work - and society is struggling.
At the current predictions, I'd have to work until I'm 70. It's great that maybe we've added five years to the average lifespan so I'll be 90 instead of 85. But to make up for it you will have to take three year from 67 to 70 and turn retirement years into working years. Like so many countries in Europe are finding out now, the government can't make that money for nothing. The cost to keep me alive is coming out of my own hide, one way or the other. If I were to stuff myself full of things to I choke at 70 instead of 90, I should be rewarded not punished.
Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.
It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.
It's the good old "jack of all trades" vs "master of one" all over again, and I call bullshit. The largest companies I've seen have had business liaisons and IT liaisons and the business divisions were trying to align their demands and the IT divisions (central + specialized) trying to align their deliveries and the idea that one person could do everything was ridiculous. It's got nothing to do with being capable, it's that time is limited and one resource can only cover so much ground while staying updated on the technology, the business needs, the organization and plans and everything else that's constantly shifting. You need specialization and communication, the latter is obviously important so you don't get "islands" that act on their own but thinking everyone should be generalists is just as flawed.
There's somewhere between 5000 and 20000 contributors to the Linux kernel last I checked and as far as I know there's no minimum amount required to have a standing to sue. How hard would it be to send out an email saying "We know you're mostly too busy and don't want the hassle of enforcing GPL violations. We'd like to defend your rights if you give us the legal authority. If you're interested (...)" surely you could find some willing to hand it over. Either that or make a small effort writing some Linux code, until you're on the contributor list. Once you have standing you can usually generate more trouble than just complying with the GPL.
There's nothing honorable or applause worthy in that.
How often have you heard "If you don't like it, write it yourself" or something to that effect here on Slashdot? Assuming they do so without deriving from the Busybox code, what's not honorable about that? It is far more honorable than every company that has tried to weasel their way around the GPL, either in spirit or letter. Of course the OSS community would like them to continue contributing to open source so I wouldn't expect applause, but there's no dishonor in abstaining.
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Also remember, All Hot chicks are insane, but not all insane chicks are hot.
No, but all single hot chicks who'll take an average flirt from an average to poor looking guy are probably bat shit insane, that's why they're single. Of course there's a match of personalities too, but a great looking body doesn't come any easier to them than it does to us, if they're willing to invest a lot in diet and exercise to look fit and you're not at all interested, that's a huge clash of interests already. Of course they say opposites attracts but that goes for interests that fill each other out rather than overlap, not being dead opposite to each other.
Long story short there's not that much soft demand in the market, those of us who'll move an old disk or have more disks in one machine are a small minority, assuming people have an old machine to pick from. By far most people, not only in the OEM market but also in the spot market want to buy complete PCs with an preinstalled OS and whatnot, which you can't do without a HDD. The price of the HDD almost doesn't matter because if they can't get HDDs, they're stuck with inventory of CPUs and GPUs and memory and everything else that loses value and they're not making any sales. So when supply is cut short and demand is very resistant to change the price goes up a lot, personally I got lucky but not so lucky that I'd want to sell anything back into the market, just keeping them for my own use until the prices are back to pre-crisis levels.
It's up there with being too healthy, or being too wealthy, or too alive, or too free.
More like there's far more water in the tap or far more electricity in the wires than I'm going to use. Going from 4 to 16 MB and 4 to 16 GB is the same mathematically, but the former was a huge upgrade and the latter a luxury. Before, how many applications/windows/tabs I'd have open was limited by the computer, too many and it'd slow down. Today it's practically only limited by how many I think is manageable to work with, today I could within "prosumer" prices get 8x8GB on a LGA2011 board and it's not that I couldn't afford it, it's that I haven't nearly tapped out the 16GB I have.
Same with CPU, 99.9% of the time the computer is waiting for me not the other way around, along with a SSD pretty much all response lag is gone. When there's a job that takes a few minutes, I'll go check the headlines or grab a refill or a snack or visit the facilities, in all honestly even with an infinitely fast computer I couldn't be that much more productive. Sure, there's always things that could use infinite power but not what most people do most of the time.
And while I like good graphics over poor, it's a diminishing return. It's not enough to simply make the textures, effects, shadows and reflections more detailed, you also have to get all the animations and physics right. Most realism fail in today's games have nothing to do with the graphics card, it's that you'd need an army of programmers to get all the details right. The hardware has outpaced even the hundred million dollar titles. And it's not just because of consoles, people won't pay 10x as much to get all the details right. The hardware can do it but the cost/benefit isn't there.
In short, if I had to justify my PC purchases I'm pretty much down to "because I can at a reasonable cost and because I spend so much time in front of it". Like if I spent a lot of time driving I wouldn't get just a usable car, like functional in the requirement to get me from A to B. I'd get a comfortable and enjoyable car, that I like to be in and to drive with maybe things of pure entertainment value like a good sound system.
P.S. Unless you're talking about a laptop, upgrading to a discrete GPU after three months isn't much of a WTF, I've found that buying things ahead of demand is usually just a giant waste of money. In three months time, the prices could have been slashed pretty good, a new generation of hardware could have arrived. Particularly now that it comes for "free" with every Intel processor anyway.
Among those was Nidec, which produces ~70% of the world's hard drive spindle motors.
Single supplier, but not single site. Their web site says they have plants for spindle motors in Thailand, China, Indonesia, The Philippines and Vietnam. True, the 6 plants listed are all in Thailand but the implication that 70% of the drive motors are made in Thailand is false.
Some friends, a case of beer, peanuts, large TV and a comfy couch all demand a console gaming experience. Just turn on the unit, pass out a few controllers and let the good times roll.
IMHO it's not so much that it's possible with a console as it is impossible with a PC. No games and no controllers. I do have my PC hooked up to my sound system and TV over HDMI, I can watch movies or play single player games that way using a wireless keyboard/mouse and I know I'm not alone. But there's absolutely no accessories I can buy that will turn it into a 4-player rig. The console controllers are just USB controllers with little to no modifications, a game and a USB hub and I should be ready to go. If there was anything like Buzz for PC and not just for the PS3, I'd buy it.
Since you have people that don't RTFA or even RTFS, why do you think moderators RTFC? He probably made it through the first sentence and went "Oooh, flamebait" then moved on to the next one.
I don't understand the legal ramifications of asking for the passkey versus asking for the (alleged) unencrypted data, but IANAL.
Because if your passkey is "I killed $person at $place on $date" compelling you to provide that would be factual and testimonial and thus clearly under the 5th amendment. So by granting you immunity from anything revealed in the passkey itself, they are hoping it will be treated like a safe analogy. Any documents produced from the decrypted hard disk would be like documents produced from an opened safe, they have not been compelled from your mind but from material objects the police have seized. They have only compelled from you the means to access them, like your safe key. I would argue that is not true because the decrypted data is an interpretation of the cipher data, not simply an access barrier but that is the dispute.
Having said that I think Ubuntu is mostly doomed anyway - even with this new tablet/TV angle Shuttleworth wants to get into, the fact he hasn't managed to expand Ubuntu's marketshare via OEMs preinstalling it on machines (with some rare exceptions) kinda tells me he is either really optimistic or really stupid. Red Hat gave up on the desktop and, but then again Red Hat never had Unity and disappearing global menus. Yeah, I'm sure that's what's gonna fix things to make Linux more appealing for mainstream users. :)
Well, creating Ubuntu wasn't such a bad idea when it came to building credibility for Ubuntu LTS and trying to compete with RHEL and SLES in the server market. And at face value, it didn't seem like a bad place to be for when there's a "paradigm shift" that would enable other solutions, but they haven't manage to catch it. Amazon EC2 and others beat them on the cloud, Apple and Google beat them to ARM mobile/tablets with iOS and Android, perhaps the smart TV market is still open but I doubt they're in a good enough position. When it comes right down to it, they're still trying to go head to head with Microsoft and Windows, which is a giant held down by other giants like Office. Outlook/Exchange and a ton of proprietary third party software that Canonical is far too lightweight to push away.
You can argue about self-incrimination, free-speech, etc. afterwards - when the judge KNOWS that you've been 100% co-operative. You can still have evidence stricken, ask for a mis-trial, appeal, etc. but you've been co-operative and had nothing to hide so when they *DO* find a USB stick that you've never seen before and are demanded to decrypt it, you are much more likely to make them think "Damn, he gave us all the others, even when it incriminated him - maybe he really *doesn't* know this one?".
As long as you've been read your rights, pretty much anything short of a confession at gunpoint is forever. You'll never manage to "undo" anything you've said to the police or in court and everything that tumbled out because you gave them access to everything you know and have will be fully legally admissible. Your whole argument revolves around your belief that they'll actually think you innocent, and not just "well we couldn't convict him on what we wanted, but we can slam him with everything we got".
If they for some fucked up reason think you're involved in terrorism or kiddie porn or organized crime or whatever, do you think that suspicion will go away because you "give" them petty software piracy and having a joint? No, you just handed them enough rope to hang yourself with. That said, yes being a smart ass and trying for a game of wits with the police is a very bad idea, as is getting rude and obnoxious. Politely decline any search without a warrant and that you would not like to answer questions without a lawyer present. Most people just make a bigger mess of everything trying to "prove their innocence" as you seem to suggest.
That depends how broad you think the 5th amendment is. To quote Justice Stevens:
A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe - by word or deed.
Note that this is from the dissenting opinion in Doe vs US, where the suspect was compelled to sign a form - that in itself contained no factual information - requesting information from foreign banks of any accounts he may be the holder of. The court found that they could, just like they could compel you to provide a handwriting sample.
As for a password, the best idea would be to STFU completely because:
The issue presented in those cases was whether the act of producing subpoenaed documents, not itself the making of a statement, might nonetheless have some protected testimonial aspects. The Court concluded that the act of production could constitute protected testimonial communication, because it might entail implicit statements of fact: by producing documents in compliance with a subpoena, the witness would admit that the papers existed, were in his possession or control, and were authentic. (...) Thus, the Court made clear that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination applies to acts that imply assertions of fact.
So unless you acknowledge that you're in (sole or not sole) possession of the password, as this woman apparently did, that in itself will have testimonial value. Even if the prosecution has ample evidence for that anyway, you should be able to invoke the 5th. In this case she may have seriously screwed herself there. If there's no testimonial value, there's not much precedent to say one way or the other. Oh yeah, and don't try to destroy any evidence with booby traps. In the search I found that the SOX act was used in a suspected child porn case:
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States (...)
Limited to the SOX act? Nope. Destroy evidence and you get up to 20 years in jail. Of course it helps that he stupid fuck admitted to destroying his HDD after the cops came by the first time, but just goes to prove laws will be cross-applied everywhere they can.
Religion telling people "You are accountable for your good and your bad actions, even those that people aren't around to see" makes an incalculably valuable contribution to society. Altruism will eventually be rewarded! Deceit and manipulation will be punished, even in the most convincing of cases! Yet, when someone has the ability to convince himself that no such accountability exists, saying things like "Huhhrrr 6000 year old earth, invisible sky man, Duhhrrr" then he's free to do anything he wants, as long as it does not come back to bite him, personally, in the end.
You know, you're not the first that has made that argument. It's why in some of the persecutions, inquisitions and witchhunts of heretics, kafirs, unbelievers and so on atheists have been high on their extermination lists. People that follow a false god, that is bad but people that don't follow any god that's worse, devoid of all ethical and moral compass. Trouble is, it doesn't reflect reality. The least religious countries on earth, Scandinavia, Japan, Western Europe are some of the most peaceful low-crime places there are, while most of the fucked up collapsed states and civil war areas are choking full of religion. Of course there's damn many countries that are religious and peaceful too, but the argument that taking away religion would lead to any kind of degenerate anarchy and chaos is laughable.
I don't think very many seriously intends to outlaw religion any more than you would outlaw superstition. The frustration usually comes when someone wants to make laws based on what the Bible, Quran or whatever says, because it defies any rational discussion. You can't argue if death by stoning is right if the logic goes "Stoning is in Sharia law, Sharia law is part of the Quran, the Quran is the exact words of Allah, Allah is perfect so his words can't be wrong. QED." I actually get annoyed the other way too, when you need to use religion to promote virtues. So Jesus was compassionate, does that mean it wasn't a good thing before Jesus? Without Jesus? Do you seriously need heaven and hell as carrot and stick? Can't you give me good enough reasons without invoking the invisible man in the sky? I'm more than happy to discuss ethics, society, law and almost everything else when it comes to how human beings should act towards each other. But when I hear of religious fundamentalists that want to replace evolution with God snapping his fingers 6000 years ago in the school curriculum, then yeah I'm almost ready to outlaw such stupidity.
Sad story, but it sounds like most of this is from dealing with the lawyers, law firms and the court system, with probably a far greater dose of contract law than copyright law. And "trumped up charges", "perpetraded a fraud on the courts" and a lawyer that wasn't actually filing a counter suit doesn't sound like a problem with the laws on the books. Here's the short, brutal facts of it:
The worst possible opponent you can have in a court of law is a law firm.
It doesn't have anything to do with what law you're dealing with. You are up against an opponent that has absolutely no incentive not to take it to courts, because they're experts at it and it'll cost you money but not them. I bet if you got experts to look at them, they'd find the charge were not ridiculous enough to make them illegal, the claims in court not so incorrect they'd amount to perjury, just distant enough from the truth to exhaust your resources. If you finally found a lawyer to counter sue, he'd be drowned in motions and depositions and counterclaims at every turn and they'd ride it to the very end of appeals.
A former employer of mine had one such dealing with a law firm. In the end, it came down to one sentence in the relatively huge contract that turned out to be a Pandora's box. They had shown us a component, the functionality they showed had been planned and estimated but instead of listing all the functional requirements of that component the contract said it would replace it. Guess what, it also had a lot of functionality they didn't show us, most likely because they didn't realize it was there but they did later, and rather than make an expensive change order they read the contract with a lawyer's eye and insisted we'd implement everything. And AFAIK we eventually did, even though it was a fixed price bid and we got exactly $0 for the job.
That lead to some new contract rules, we would specify the functionality you will get and the client will sign this will cover his needs but we would never promise to replace anything ever again. But it also has a lot to do with law firms, I don't think one company with a corporate lawyer would ride it that way against another company lawyer. But when you're dealing with a company full of them, I'd grow eyes in the back of my neck. They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You should apply that to lawyers...
You don't seem like a troll, so I'll just post a few definitions:
snap at someone
to speak sharply or angrily to someone.
3
a : to retort to or interrupt curtly and irritably
b : to utter curtly or abruptly
3 [transitive, intransitive] to speak or say something in an impatient, usually angry, voice
"Don't just stand there," she snapped.
Yes, the figurative meaning is based on the literal meaning when animals try to bite someone, but unless you are talking about children raised by wolves it's not meant literally with people...
My experience with heavy torrent users, though, is that they legitimately purchase very little of the media they consume.
Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person
Just note that these positions are not mutually exclusive. If the average person will buy four albums and pirate one while the music buff will buy ten albums and pirate ninety then both are true. In fact, I would think the assumption that the more massive your consumption is, the less likely you will pay for everything seems likely. Imagine you have two people who spend all their time on music and WoW, the latter being a flat rate no matter how much you play. Now the first guy is playing WoW 90% of the time and will buy the few albums he listens to in the remaining 10% of the time. The other person is playing WoW 10% of the time and listening to music the other 90%, my bet would be that he's far more likely to supplement with torrents than the other guy.
This is of course assuming there's no Spotify or similar service available, that acts more or less as a cap these days. Talk to a music buff and he sounds like he's died and gone to heaven, all this music for only $X/month, compared to all the albums he used to buy and/or download. The average person on the other hand didn't spend so much on music to begin with, so it's not the same kind of killer offer to them. Still at least they have it better than with movies and TV series, give me an iTunes Plus for that - 1080p and no DRM, available where I live. That's what i'd wish for, but I'm not holding my breath....
Like this has to be an either-or, my hiring experience has been that there's a lot of interviews and relatively little practical testing of skills. I guess the closest I came was a company that tested me for logic, math and reading comprehension but there were no tests on the subjects and tools I claimed to know, just interview questions. Most the hiring WTFs I read about are people that smooth talked their way through the interviews, like coders that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. Most of the time you can find some way make good people with bad personalities productive, easier than the other way around. Of course in an ideal world we'd like just good people with good personalities, but reality is a compromise.
More like Hitler picked fights until he was up to 11. It wasn't enough to be at war with and/or occupying Poland, the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and several other territories, they had to go after the Soviet Union. Already France (42M) and the UK (48M) combined was bigger than Germany (69M in 1937 borders), the rest were just icing on the cake. Just to give you an idea of the scope, it's like if the US (300M) was already at war with Canada, Mexico and the whole of Central and South America (600M) and then decided "Hey, let's invade China too!". Okay so Germany had allies in Italy and Japan but they were fighting their own wars, so it's not far from the truth.
So instead of making the meeting a quarter longer so you'd get the meeting time you actually wanted, you went out of your way to headbutt with everyone else in the company. Many companies will plan meetings back-to-back, which means there's no time to move between locations, take a bathroom break or anything like that. Fifteen minutes seems excessive, but yes I've been to places where you can expect any larger meeting to start 5-10 minutes late because someone's always coming from another meeting, usually some of the most senior bosses that everyone wants a minute with them after the meeting too. Most people are now on their laptops/tablets/phones and doing something useful in that time until the meeting begins anyway. I don't think you're doing yourself any favors by insisting on everyone being there on the dot.
But they have more then enough lobbying power to make the consequences of being caught so severe and the internet so monitored that piracy is so underground that 99% cannot find it and would not take the risk if they did.
Honestly, this wasn't even true before the Internet, before even modems and BBS. There was rampant schoolyard piracy on floppies, kids would been from different schools, relatives etc. and it'd get around. The first teenager I knew to get a CD-burner co-financed that by burning lots of CDs for other people, same with early BBS/internet. One person would download at horrible per-minute charges, we'd buy copies to share the cost with our allowance. If they could really kill public P2P - which is far more complicated than you think - then I think F2F, friend to friend networks would become the new thing. Share with everyone you've had a few beers with and they would have a helluva time infiltrating social networks.
Particularly if friends would broker searches and files, like I'd be willing to relay files from my friend A to my friend B even though A and B don't know each other. They could remain totally anonymous to each other, all they'd know is that a friend of mine has it/wants it. That way you'd quickly have a large network of childhood friends, study friends, work friends, relatives etc. of your friends available to you. There'd be no central directory anywhere, first they'd have to get invited into the network and then try taking down one and one person. Good luck trying to take that down..
And setting up an antenna is the easy part. How are you going to decode the transmissions by an alien civilization?
2x beep ...and start over.
3x beep
5x beep
7x beep
11x beep
13x beep
17x beep
19x beep
*pause*
5x beep
*pause*
7x beep
*pause*
35x beep/no beep
*pause*
This should be a fairly straight forward way of encoding a pictogram, though it's unclear if they'll interpret 5 and 7 as the horizontal and vertical or opposite. Replace 5, 7 and 5*7 with arbitrary large primes to make detailed pictures. From there you can start sending maps of the galaxy, periodic table with illustration of the elements, everything we'd have in common. Show math with illustrations like you'd do to a preschooler, here's 2+3 = 5 with boxes of 2, 3 and 5 items. Once they understand our number system, show them distances they too probably know like size of galaxy, size of hydrogen atom etc.
Text and language, yes you'd get to that eventually. Send them them the alphabet then start over again, naming everything like the milky way, the sun, earth, all the elements and so on. For that matter, just teach them like you would a young child, the is s table and chair and book and flower and bird and whatnot. Illustration and text. Somehow I don't see this as a problem, put a US and Japanese kid in the same room and they'll find a way to communicate even though they got no words in common. Hell, we teach sign language to monkeys. How hard can it be to get a conversation going?
They might be surprised if they expect their costs to be significantly reduced. The top graph here shows the average contribution in taxes/expenses for people of a certain age. What can you say from that graph? Mostly that the very healthy and long-lived are very expensive to the government, in fact if you've worked a few decades and die at 50 you're not actually a net expense. Note that the graph doesn't add to zero since this is per person and obviously there's rather few 100 year olds, but if you multiply by population at that age it ought to be roughly balanced.
Here's the thing, everybody dies the only question is how. A long, protracted decline with failing health is far more expensive than the people that, sorry to be blunt, drop dead. Middle-aged people, even if they've attracted something serious like lung cancer from smoking or heart attacks from obesity tend to either die or recover, either way it's not that expensive. Meanwhile your 90 year old that's been in and out of hospital and made his slow recoveries has been a big expense, never mind the pensions, retirement homes, nursing homes and various other forms of aid. At least on average.
We've been able to have a retirement age because the cost of carrying people to the end of their lives haven't been all that big. But now more and more people are having sunset decades instead of sunset years and they don't want to work longer just because they live longer. And with longer education, work life is possibly even getting shorter. Study until you're 25, work until you're 65, live until you're 85 - that's more than half your life not working. Top that off with people that are unfit to work - or perhaps more relevant today, out of work - and society is struggling.
At the current predictions, I'd have to work until I'm 70. It's great that maybe we've added five years to the average lifespan so I'll be 90 instead of 85. But to make up for it you will have to take three year from 67 to 70 and turn retirement years into working years. Like so many countries in Europe are finding out now, the government can't make that money for nothing. The cost to keep me alive is coming out of my own hide, one way or the other. If I were to stuff myself full of things to I choke at 70 instead of 90, I should be rewarded not punished.
According to this:
Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.
It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.
It's the good old "jack of all trades" vs "master of one" all over again, and I call bullshit. The largest companies I've seen have had business liaisons and IT liaisons and the business divisions were trying to align their demands and the IT divisions (central + specialized) trying to align their deliveries and the idea that one person could do everything was ridiculous. It's got nothing to do with being capable, it's that time is limited and one resource can only cover so much ground while staying updated on the technology, the business needs, the organization and plans and everything else that's constantly shifting. You need specialization and communication, the latter is obviously important so you don't get "islands" that act on their own but thinking everyone should be generalists is just as flawed.
There's somewhere between 5000 and 20000 contributors to the Linux kernel last I checked and as far as I know there's no minimum amount required to have a standing to sue. How hard would it be to send out an email saying "We know you're mostly too busy and don't want the hassle of enforcing GPL violations. We'd like to defend your rights if you give us the legal authority. If you're interested (...)" surely you could find some willing to hand it over. Either that or make a small effort writing some Linux code, until you're on the contributor list. Once you have standing you can usually generate more trouble than just complying with the GPL.
There's nothing honorable or applause worthy in that.
How often have you heard "If you don't like it, write it yourself" or something to that effect here on Slashdot? Assuming they do so without deriving from the Busybox code, what's not honorable about that? It is far more honorable than every company that has tried to weasel their way around the GPL, either in spirit or letter. Of course the OSS community would like them to continue contributing to open source so I wouldn't expect applause, but there's no dishonor in abstaining.