This is a perfect example of eliminating the need to understand how something works in order to operate it. A pilot that understands how and why his/her plane works will be a better pilot because they will be able to interpret things about their flight that are not told by the gagues. Are we really better of if we make planes that you can fly without a great deal of knowledge, understanding, and experience?
It's like having an idiot lite for your car's oil pressure instead of an oil pressure gague. The light only gives you 30-40 seconds advanced warning that you're about to destroy your engine, while the gague can potentially warn you of an upcoming problem much sooner (even if the problem is probably a broken oil pressure gague:).
What exactly makes obtaining trade secrets through reverse engineering alright, but doing so by reading documents in a lawyer's office illegal?
The same thing that makes trade secrets a valid method of Intellectual Property protection only until the secret is disclosed. Once word about a trade secret is out you have no legal recourse. Presumably if the information were worthy of legal protection, the company that 'owned' it would get a patent on it. Since they did not, the information is only proprietary to them until somebody else figures it out. If somebody else discovers the secret through reverse engineering, the company the trade secret no longer has any legal protection. Even in this case, DirecTV can prosecute this guy, but afterward they are still without their trade secret. The prosecution will be for how he obtained and distributed it, not that he obtained and distributed it. It's not the knowledge or the distribution of the knowledge that makes this illegal, but solely the method through which the knowledge was obtained that makes it illegal.
What is illegal is that he obtained this information that is a trade secret of DirectTV.
This is where you were misguided. The only thing that protects a trade secret is that it's a secret. Once the secret is out there's no more protection. If the secret gets out because DirecTV implemented said secret and sold the product on the market than all that's protecting the secret is the obcurity of their implementation. It's perfectly legal to try and figure out how something you own works, and once you know how it works the trade secret isn't a secret anymore.
what's so amazing about this "P4" techonology that no one has been able to crack it yet? Has it only been on the market a week? Or is it just really that good?
The HU cards still work and the P4 cards are still relatively rare (they've been around for ~6 months, but only come with really new recievers or in the mail if your HU card gets fried), so there hasn't been much time spent on cracking them yet. If it seems like they're going to turn off the HU data stream, you can bet your ass that some hotshot DirecTV cracker out there would figure out how to crack the P4 stuff.
If the stupidity or laziness of a few makes the efforts of everyone else useless (they still have to pass them under a magnet), then the industrious and smart people should rebel and pretend they're stupid to send a message that thier time and efforts are being wasted.
I'm sure technology has advanced sufficiently from when the following happened to prevent it, since it was over 10 years ago, but this is why I bet they still have to pass all the cans under a magnet:
When I was in high school I worked in the kitchen periodically (we all had to rotate through cleanup duty). We had a recycling program run by our trash collection service. They provided statistics for us comparing what percentage (by weight and volume) of the things we threw away went to the landfill or were recycled. They were printed on greenbar and hung weekly on the board in the office. The recycling bins for cans were the extra large barrels with the hook and bar on them to be auto-loaded in the truck. After removing both ends of the can and stomping it flat, you could fit about 700 pounds of steel in the barrel. One week the recycling percentage dropped dramatically. The reason, they explained to us, was that someone had put an aerosol can in with the metal recyclables, and it made the whole load useless when they processed it. It's a great example of the stupidity of the few making everyone else's efforts useless when it comes to recycling.
with cans further devided between aluminum and non-aluminum
That's probably a waste. They'll still have to pass them under a magnet because of stupid people who don't know the difference, or lazy people who just don't seperate. It's not very hard to automatically seperate steel cans from aluminum cans.
And if you like your Terminial on your OS X you should give Command a try in Windows. Just run 'cmd' and you'll get a similar app with similar commands.
I have to call you on this one. The shell available in Windows 2000 and Windows XP is inferior to the shell that came with DOS 5. It can't even compare to tcsh or bash. It's so bad that even Microsoft realizes it's broken and have begun working on a replacement.
Quick, what's the command in the windows 'cmd' program to display a list of processes? How do you quickly include the second parameter to your last command in your next command without retyping it? How do you loop through a list of arbitrary items? How do you include the output from another program in your current command line?
There's lots of things you can't do with a GUI that you need a script or a textual shell to do. The problem is that the windows shell is so limited that you can't do many of those things either.
You get there with Option+Apple+ESC. It's similar to the Windows Task Manager but... less informative.
I don't know how you get to be less informative than a message like "Could not end task: Permission denied," which is what the windows task manager says quite frequently when you try to kill a process; even if you're 'Administrator.'
Really? Last I knew there wan't anything obvious about the ethics of genetic engineering. I know some extreme christians that would love to have a conversation with you.
In fact, I can't think of a better practical way to further my cause of preventing the slaughter of farm animals.
Lets say you succeed. Let's say we all become vegans and don't eat meat or dairy products. Is extinction of cows a preferable outcome? After all, most species don't exist in the wild, and we'd have no reason to breed them anymore.
Is it worse to become food then to never have existed?
Keep in mind that this article was written in 1982. It talks about prices dropping from $60,000 per carat to $30,000 a carat. The colapse it predicts happened in the early '90s, and prices of "perfect" diamonds are now quoted around $5,000 per carat, and can be had for slightly over $1,500 per carat without much trouble. The article also talks about resale values of diamonds being 40% of their retail value. Today, diamonds 1 carat and smaller are essentially worthless. Large retail jewlery chains are still maintaining a significant markup, but that is steadily decreasing now that the public has greater access to wholesale diamonds.
If she has to have a diamond (even after reading that article), do a little research and buy a loose stone from a wholesale vendor. It's not hard to find one, and you can get a local jewler to make you a very nice setting for $100-300. For two months salary these days, she can have a ring that will give her a workout. When I purchased my fiancee's ring (a 2.72 carat saphire with two.25 carat diamonds in a custom setting she designed. $900) I saw another guy buy a 2.9 carat diamond engagement ring for $3500. It wasn't flawless, but it was an excelent stone, and impractically large.
Has anybody considered a Class Action lawsuit for poor service?
It really pisses me off when people think this way. It's not like you can't get your money back if you don't like the game. Just buy it from a store that allows you to return it. If you like it in the beginning, and you stop liking it later on you can just cancel your subscription. It's not like they're forcing you to sign a contract for ongoing payment, so you don't have grounds for a lawsuit. Voting with your dollars is more likely to get the industry to move in the direction that you want than a lawsuit would anyway.
So, you provide two quotations from the article that say he's as free as any of us come January 20th, and you try to use them to show the opposite? I don't get it.
Read those quotes again. They say that he will no longer have to get permission because his probation will expire, and that they're not going to watch him any more then they're going to watch you.
Unless they didn't do any research, I'm sure that they're using a PIN along with the fingerprint. The fingerprint alone isn't sufficient. It's not any easier to copy your fingerprint and enter your PIN than to copy the magnetic strip of your ATM card and enter your PIN...
If it really is just fingerprints criminals shall rejoice.
I'd be glad to read your solution, 'cause i'm no terrorist and i'd like to find a peaceful way to fight
There is no peaceful solution that everybody will agree to. That's why it's silly to imply that "if only we acted differently they wouldn't attack us". Of course that's true, and if only they acted differently, we wouldn't fight either. It comes down to culture (and some of those political things play a small part). People don't want to change their way of life. The problem is amplified when there are people who already fight amongst themselves who then are exposed to an external (western) culture. People are willing to die to preserve what they consider the correct way to live, and because they have no control over how most other people live and if some new way of life starts moving closer to them, they are willing to strap a bomb to themselves. Obviously this a generalization that doesn't apply directly in some specific situations, but it's pretty close in most cases. In the long run, the most peaceful solution is likely to kill everybody from one side, but that's obviously not an acceptable solution, so we'll continue to fight. What I'm trying to say (and what I was trying to say in my previous post) is that I don't have a solution, but neither does anybody else (even if they think they do).
Tough luck, I get to read your sigs, you get to read mine.
First of all, I don't have a sig. Second of all, If I did you could go turn it off in your preferences because I'd put it in the sig field instead of pushing my off topic adgenda on people who have explicitly opted out.
Fight terrorism by addressing the reason *why* these people are driven a level of frustration that would cause them to commit such acts.
What do you do when one of the reasons these people are driven to frustration is that people of a certain gender are allowed freedoms that are offensive to said terrorists? Repeat that question to yourself and replace "gender" with "religion".
What do you think the reason is? What's your simple solution?
- My government supports terrorism. [objectivistcenter.org]
Please use the signature field of your user page for your signature, so that those of us who don't want to waste bandwidth with offtopic signatures can choose not to display it.
These guys are also looking for 5 10 and 20 year commitments thats great for businesees but horid for even a home owner.
That's no different from leasing a line from your local telco. Usually you pick a duration and you get the apropriate discount and if you cancel early you just pay the difference between what your discount was and what it should have been.
I would think a homeowner is more likely to stay put for five years than a business, but the business would be better able to pay the cancelation fee...
Am I the only one that looks at this like the list of things that will stop the telcos from making gobs of money
What does this boil down to getting rid of the metered bandwith middle man that the telcos are mostly because they have relied on time division muxing for so long. DWDM changes that once a single circut is provisioned you can pretty much keep adding channels as needed.
As long as the telco owns the fibre, you're screwed. Expect collusion between run owners to prevent you from attaching and configuring your own equipment at the termination points of the fibre. You want to add another channel? Sure, it'll only cost the telco tech labor for 5 minutes to change the line card configuration, but they're going to charge you per month. Don't think of this as disruptive to telco revenues, think of this as a massive increase to telco margins.
Worms Armageddon has to be the worst worms game ever made. If you're going to play worms, get Worms 2, or Worms World Party, but don't waste your money on the Armageddon shite.
Re:processor prices Re:gah!
on
Build Your Own Mac
·
· Score: 4, Informative
the rumors have long said IBM can outclock Moto's chips, but are not allowed to sell them because they are held back because of contractual agreements.
It really is just a rumor. Not only can IBM make chips that clock faster than motorola's chips, they do make them and they do sell them, so whatever contract you may have heard of wasn't or is no longer true.
Also, I believe that the current iBooks use IBM G3s. The 750CXe I think.
How could the presented statistic on alcoholic beverage commercials not lead you to a single conclusion?... I was making the point that alcoholic beverages are marketed at youth.
I fully understood what you were trying to imply. You cannot draw that conclusion from your statistic without other details. If you think you can, you're mistaken. Without other details, that statistic is just a number presented in a biased way to induce prejudice. Just because the media cartel pulls that crap doen't mean it's a vaild way to draw conclusions.
How does your statistic compare to other types of advertising? Is having 25% of your ads shown when your target isn't the majority of the audience better or worse than advertising for other products?
When children are the majority of the audience for a particular ad, how large is the majority? Is it 90% or only 51%? Perhaps they're marketing to the 49% of adults that are watching during that 25% of ads.
Are children who see alcohol ads compelled to drink it, or do the ads present adult situations that don't appeal to children hence making it irrelevant that one in four isn't viewed primarily by adults?
Where did your statistic come from? Is it even accurate?
When a family of four is driving in a car, 50% of the people looking out the windows are minors and can see alcohol billboards. Does this mean that the manufacturer is trying to push the alcohol on minors? Would you say the same about the local talk radio station's billboard? The investment bank? The retirement community that doesn't allow children?
Who do you consider children when you state that statistic? Are 18-20 year olds included in that, since they're not minors, but not of legal drinking age? How do you target 21-30 year olds without having 18-20 year old people see your ad?
Your entire point is moot anyway, because children imitate their parents when it comes to drinking behavior. Compared to that ads are practically irrelevant.
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easier to interpret for less experience pilots.
:).
This is a perfect example of eliminating the need to understand how something works in order to operate it. A pilot that understands how and why his/her plane works will be a better pilot because they will be able to interpret things about their flight that are not told by the gagues. Are we really better of if we make planes that you can fly without a great deal of knowledge, understanding, and experience?
It's like having an idiot lite for your car's oil pressure instead of an oil pressure gague. The light only gives you 30-40 seconds advanced warning that you're about to destroy your engine, while the gague can potentially warn you of an upcoming problem much sooner (even if the problem is probably a broken oil pressure gague
What exactly makes obtaining trade secrets through reverse engineering alright, but doing so by reading documents in a lawyer's office illegal?
The same thing that makes trade secrets a valid method of Intellectual Property protection only until the secret is disclosed. Once word about a trade secret is out you have no legal recourse. Presumably if the information were worthy of legal protection, the company that 'owned' it would get a patent on it. Since they did not, the information is only proprietary to them until somebody else figures it out. If somebody else discovers the secret through reverse engineering, the company the trade secret no longer has any legal protection. Even in this case, DirecTV can prosecute this guy, but afterward they are still without their trade secret. The prosecution will be for how he obtained and distributed it, not that he obtained and distributed it. It's not the knowledge or the distribution of the knowledge that makes this illegal, but solely the method through which the knowledge was obtained that makes it illegal.
What is illegal is that he obtained this information that is a trade secret of DirectTV.
This is where you were misguided. The only thing that protects a trade secret is that it's a secret. Once the secret is out there's no more protection. If the secret gets out because DirecTV implemented said secret and sold the product on the market than all that's protecting the secret is the obcurity of their implementation. It's perfectly legal to try and figure out how something you own works, and once you know how it works the trade secret isn't a secret anymore.
what's so amazing about this "P4" techonology that no one has been able to crack it yet? Has it only been on the market a week? Or is it just really that good?
The HU cards still work and the P4 cards are still relatively rare (they've been around for ~6 months, but only come with really new recievers or in the mail if your HU card gets fried), so there hasn't been much time spent on cracking them yet. If it seems like they're going to turn off the HU data stream, you can bet your ass that some hotshot DirecTV cracker out there would figure out how to crack the P4 stuff.
If the stupidity or laziness of a few makes the efforts of everyone else useless (they still have to pass them under a magnet), then the industrious and smart people should rebel and pretend they're stupid to send a message that thier time and efforts are being wasted.
I'm sure technology has advanced sufficiently from when the following happened to prevent it, since it was over 10 years ago, but this is why I bet they still have to pass all the cans under a magnet:
When I was in high school I worked in the kitchen periodically (we all had to rotate through cleanup duty). We had a recycling program run by our trash collection service. They provided statistics for us comparing what percentage (by weight and volume) of the things we threw away went to the landfill or were recycled. They were printed on greenbar and hung weekly on the board in the office. The recycling bins for cans were the extra large barrels with the hook and bar on them to be auto-loaded in the truck. After removing both ends of the can and stomping it flat, you could fit about 700 pounds of steel in the barrel. One week the recycling percentage dropped dramatically. The reason, they explained to us, was that someone had put an aerosol can in with the metal recyclables, and it made the whole load useless when they processed it. It's a great example of the stupidity of the few making everyone else's efforts useless when it comes to recycling.
with cans further devided between aluminum and non-aluminum
That's probably a waste. They'll still have to pass them under a magnet because of stupid people who don't know the difference, or lazy people who just don't seperate. It's not very hard to automatically seperate steel cans from aluminum cans.
And if you like your Terminial on your OS X you should give Command a try in Windows. Just run 'cmd' and you'll get a similar app with similar commands.
... less informative.
I have to call you on this one. The shell available in Windows 2000 and Windows XP is inferior to the shell that came with DOS 5. It can't even compare to tcsh or bash. It's so bad that even Microsoft realizes it's broken and have begun working on a replacement.
Quick, what's the command in the windows 'cmd' program to display a list of processes? How do you quickly include the second parameter to your last command in your next command without retyping it? How do you loop through a list of arbitrary items? How do you include the output from another program in your current command line?
There's lots of things you can't do with a GUI that you need a script or a textual shell to do. The problem is that the windows shell is so limited that you can't do many of those things either.
You get there with Option+Apple+ESC. It's similar to the Windows Task Manager but
I don't know how you get to be less informative than a message like "Could not end task: Permission denied," which is what the windows task manager says quite frequently when you try to kill a process; even if you're 'Administrator.'
Don't blame them. Blame the people who filed the arguably frivolous asbestos lawsuit.
and obviously more ethical to consume
Really? Last I knew there wan't anything obvious about the ethics of genetic engineering. I know some extreme christians that would love to have a conversation with you.
In fact, I can't think of a better practical way to further my cause of preventing the slaughter of farm animals.
Lets say you succeed. Let's say we all become vegans and don't eat meat or dairy products. Is extinction of cows a preferable outcome? After all, most species don't exist in the wild, and we'd have no reason to breed them anymore.
Is it worse to become food then to never have existed?
Keep in mind that this article was written in 1982. It talks about prices dropping from $60,000 per carat to $30,000 a carat. The colapse it predicts happened in the early '90s, and prices of "perfect" diamonds are now quoted around $5,000 per carat, and can be had for slightly over $1,500 per carat without much trouble. The article also talks about resale values of diamonds being 40% of their retail value. Today, diamonds 1 carat and smaller are essentially worthless. Large retail jewlery chains are still maintaining a significant markup, but that is steadily decreasing now that the public has greater access to wholesale diamonds.
.25 carat diamonds in a custom setting she designed. $900) I saw another guy buy a 2.9 carat diamond engagement ring for $3500. It wasn't flawless, but it was an excelent stone, and impractically large.
If she has to have a diamond (even after reading that article), do a little research and buy a loose stone from a wholesale vendor. It's not hard to find one, and you can get a local jewler to make you a very nice setting for $100-300. For two months salary these days, she can have a ring that will give her a workout. When I purchased my fiancee's ring (a 2.72 carat saphire with two
Has anybody considered a Class Action lawsuit for poor service?
It really pisses me off when people think this way. It's not like you can't get your money back if you don't like the game. Just buy it from a store that allows you to return it. If you like it in the beginning, and you stop liking it later on you can just cancel your subscription. It's not like they're forcing you to sign a contract for ongoing payment, so you don't have grounds for a lawsuit. Voting with your dollars is more likely to get the industry to move in the direction that you want than a lawsuit would anyway.
Lawsuits should be a last resort.
So, you provide two quotations from the article that say he's as free as any of us come January 20th, and you try to use them to show the opposite? I don't get it.
Read those quotes again. They say that he will no longer have to get permission because his probation will expire, and that they're not going to watch him any more then they're going to watch you.
Are the file-sizes smaller? Does it sound better?
If you pick one of those two questions, the answer is 'yes.'
If they're going to make them bigger they need to make the damn handles stronger. :)
How do you make cookies with a paper bag?
Unless they didn't do any research, I'm sure that they're using a PIN along with the fingerprint. The fingerprint alone isn't sufficient. It's not any easier to copy your fingerprint and enter your PIN than to copy the magnetic strip of your ATM card and enter your PIN...
If it really is just fingerprints criminals shall rejoice.
Now, if they'd just do away with those little plastic bags.
What's wrong with the plastic bags? What would you use instead?
After slogging 60+ hour work weeks for 10+ years and still not a millionaire, I've learned my lesson.
It doesn't matter how many hours you work or how many years you work them for, if you spend all the money you'll never be a millionaire.
I'd be glad to read your solution, 'cause i'm no terrorist and i'd like to find a peaceful way to fight
There is no peaceful solution that everybody will agree to. That's why it's silly to imply that "if only we acted differently they wouldn't attack us". Of course that's true, and if only they acted differently, we wouldn't fight either. It comes down to culture (and some of those political things play a small part). People don't want to change their way of life. The problem is amplified when there are people who already fight amongst themselves who then are exposed to an external (western) culture. People are willing to die to preserve what they consider the correct way to live, and because they have no control over how most other people live and if some new way of life starts moving closer to them, they are willing to strap a bomb to themselves. Obviously this a generalization that doesn't apply directly in some specific situations, but it's pretty close in most cases. In the long run, the most peaceful solution is likely to kill everybody from one side, but that's obviously not an acceptable solution, so we'll continue to fight. What I'm trying to say (and what I was trying to say in my previous post) is that I don't have a solution, but neither does anybody else (even if they think they do).
Tough luck, I get to read your sigs, you get to read mine.
First of all, I don't have a sig. Second of all, If I did you could go turn it off in your preferences because I'd put it in the sig field instead of pushing my off topic adgenda on people who have explicitly opted out.
Fight terrorism by addressing the reason *why* these people are driven a level of frustration that would cause them to commit such acts.
What do you do when one of the reasons these people are driven to frustration is that people of a certain gender are allowed freedoms that are offensive to said terrorists? Repeat that question to yourself and replace "gender" with "religion".
What do you think the reason is? What's your simple solution?
-
My government supports terrorism. [objectivistcenter.org]
Please use the signature field of your user page for your signature, so that those of us who don't want to waste bandwidth with offtopic signatures can choose not to display it.
These guys are also looking for 5 10 and 20 year commitments thats great for businesees but horid for even a home owner.
That's no different from leasing a line from your local telco. Usually you pick a duration and you get the apropriate discount and if you cancel early you just pay the difference between what your discount was and what it should have been.
I would think a homeowner is more likely to stay put for five years than a business, but the business would be better able to pay the cancelation fee...
Am I the only one that looks at this like the list of things that will stop the telcos from making gobs of money
What does this boil down to getting rid of the metered bandwith middle man that the telcos are mostly because they have relied on time division muxing for so long. DWDM changes that once a single circut is provisioned you can pretty much keep adding channels as needed.
As long as the telco owns the fibre, you're screwed. Expect collusion between run owners to prevent you from attaching and configuring your own equipment at the termination points of the fibre. You want to add another channel? Sure, it'll only cost the telco tech labor for 5 minutes to change the line card configuration, but they're going to charge you per month. Don't think of this as disruptive to telco revenues, think of this as a massive increase to telco margins.
Worms Armageddon has to be the worst worms game ever made. If you're going to play worms, get Worms 2, or Worms World Party, but don't waste your money on the Armageddon shite.
the rumors have long said IBM can outclock Moto's chips, but are not allowed to sell them because they are held back because of contractual agreements.
It really is just a rumor. Not only can IBM make chips that clock faster than motorola's chips, they do make them and they do sell them, so whatever contract you may have heard of wasn't or is no longer true.
Also, I believe that the current iBooks use IBM G3s. The 750CXe I think.
How could the presented statistic on alcoholic beverage commercials not lead you to a single conclusion? ... I was making the point that alcoholic beverages are marketed at youth.
I fully understood what you were trying to imply. You cannot draw that conclusion from your statistic without other details. If you think you can, you're mistaken. Without other details, that statistic is just a number presented in a biased way to induce prejudice. Just because the media cartel pulls that crap doen't mean it's a vaild way to draw conclusions.
How does your statistic compare to other types of advertising? Is having 25% of your ads shown when your target isn't the majority of the audience better or worse than advertising for other products?
When children are the majority of the audience for a particular ad, how large is the majority? Is it 90% or only 51%? Perhaps they're marketing to the 49% of adults that are watching during that 25% of ads.
Are children who see alcohol ads compelled to drink it, or do the ads present adult situations that don't appeal to children hence making it irrelevant that one in four isn't viewed primarily by adults?
Where did your statistic come from? Is it even accurate?
When a family of four is driving in a car, 50% of the people looking out the windows are minors and can see alcohol billboards. Does this mean that the manufacturer is trying to push the alcohol on minors? Would you say the same about the local talk radio station's billboard? The investment bank? The retirement community that doesn't allow children?
Who do you consider children when you state that statistic? Are 18-20 year olds included in that, since they're not minors, but not of legal drinking age? How do you target 21-30 year olds without having 18-20 year old people see your ad?
Your entire point is moot anyway, because children imitate their parents when it comes to drinking behavior. Compared to that ads are practically irrelevant.