Bear in mind that MediaSentry has accused a laser printer of sharing music files. Not just alleged, stated that they had proof positive of that laser printer serving up MP3s via a P2P network.
Not arguing against the likelihood that MediaSentry was utterly off base with that accusation, but most high-end and even some mid-level laser printers these days contain embedded general-purpose computers. Sometimes even running Linux.
If a device has a network connection, a CPU, and some storage, it's at least theoretically possible to make that device serve as a P2P filesharing node.
By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior
Yeah, that's not what 'legislating' means.
Web. Employers that exploit the Web to snoop into and judge people's personal lives infringe on everyone's privacy,
Yeah, that's not what 'infringe' means.
and their actions verge on discrimination.
Yeah, that's not what 'discrimination' means.
We can't debate the issue if we do not agree on the terminology, and there's no reason not to be using the generally-accepted legal meanings of these terms.
A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.
Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.
Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.
While we're at it, I think the clock in a CPU is just a useless crutch too.
You're joking, but this is actually more or less true. Computers could be much faster if each instruction could be executed immediately upon the necessary voltage levels arriving at the prerequisite points in the circuit, instead of having to wait a billionth of a second for the traffic lights installed every few microns to turn green.
In order to do all of this, you have to have all musicians performing to an absolutely constant tempo....OR have the ability to manipulate tempo via studio technology. Back in the days when time-stretching meant running the tape reel at a few inches per second below spec, then applying pitch correction, yes, it was not worth the effort.
But today, in the era of ProTools and audio manipulation entirely in the digital domain, it couldn't be easier to take a performance with bad tempo fluctuations and correct them. Heck, there's probably plugins to do it automatically for you.
I'll admit, there is a case where using a click track is important, and that's if you have a sampler synchronized to it to play pre-recorded material that has to line up.
Even then, it's possible (though not often done, for myriad reasons) to have the click track follow the drummer, instead of vice versa. It's not that complicated to put microphones or contact triggers on the drums and feed them into a computer to generate MIDI or SMPTE clock pulses.
Slow down, cowboy! If you engage me, and then decide to stiff me on a contract, I WILL SUE YOU. And I will win. It doesn't matter how long it takes, or even how much it costs me -- it's just business.
Ah, but the workers themselves don't have a direct contract with Microsoft. Microsoft has a contract with the staffing agency, and the agency has contracts with each worker individually.
As a contractor, you only get paid when you're on an assignment. It's common sense, and it's in your contract with Volt. Guess who gets to decide whether you're on an assignment or not?
Do you insure your house against the cost of mowing the lawn? Do you, as the grandparent suggests, split the cost of an oil change or a fill up with your auto insurance company as a "co-pay"?
Y'know, if my homeowner's insurance had a plan that subsidized lawn care, or may auto insurance offered "full-in" coverage that allowed me to pay for all my maintenance with a company-issued card... I just might. I'm sure the insurance company, with its hundreds of thousands of customers, could negotiate a better price with Jiffy Lube than I could by myself.
Simply put, health insurance companies offer this type of coverage because people are willing to buy it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning.
Most of us don't have workplaces where we're expected to stare at a bathroom wall for 8 hours straight, except for yo mama, and yet LCD screens seem to be good enough for the purpose.
Jeff Bozos' complaint about LCDs seems to be primarily with the backlighting. So why not use a transflective or even purely reflective LCD technology? The screen on my OLPC XO-1 is extremely comfortable to read with the backlight off.
Parking tickets should be backed up with photographs anyways, taken by the ticket-writer.
There's hundreds of years of jurisprudence based on the idea that an eyewitness account of an alleged act, delivered by a person bound by oath to be truthful, can be accepted by the court as evidence supporting the alleged act. Why would you want to reverse that?
Taken to a logical end, wouldn't this also mean that rapists, murderers, and kidnappers would walk free if none of the witnesses to their crimes happened to have a cameraphone handy at the right moment?
If you get ticketed, you're always free to take your own photographs of the scene and bring them to court with you when you contest the ticket.
That may be the accepted definition now, but [Operation Wolf is] unarguably a shooting game played in the 1st person.
It's also far, far from the first game of its type, its 1987 release date coming a full fifty years after electronic/mechanical hybrid shooting games like the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite.
iso format has real checksums. redbook audio does not. that's why 'ripping' is not accurate and can't be, by definition.
And it depends on how you define accuracy, doesn't it?
Yes, you can read the same block off a Red Book audio CD ten times and never get the same sequence of 1s and 0s twice -- but how much does it really matter if a given 1/44100th of a second of an audio signal is represented as 0xF2A6 vs. 0xF2A7? Or even 0x0000 vs. 0xF2A7?
they screwed up the original cd format. its not robust and its not reliable.
It was designed based on what was practical to achieve with the affordable consumer electronics technology of the late 1970s. In that context, it's pretty impressive that the fidelity ceiling that they were able to achieve is STILL considered "good enough" by most accounts today, 30 years later.
they patented such things like: "Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity" "Portable Computing Device-Integrated Appliance" [...] Most of this crap shouldn't have been patentable in the first place
Oh goody, another discussion of patent law on Slashdot by people who are not well informed about it...
The content of a patent is more than its title. Microsoft did not and can not patent the entire idea of a "Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity", only a specific implementation thereof. One actually has to read the entire patent document and study all the diagrams to actually understand what it is that Microsoft is claiming a patent on.
The court doesn't explore your expertise, and doesn't know if you're qualified. You might be a world-renowned bacteriologist, or you might be a guy who has a 20 year old doctorate in biology back when they only taught the "tail theory of classifying salmonella" or whatever.
Have you never served on a jury? The first thing the attorneys on both sides will do during jury selection is say to the prospective jurors, "this court case involves salmonella poisoning. If any of you have a background in biology studies, even if it was just high school coursework, please raise your hand now."
Neither side WANTS an expert juror to hear the case, because of the risk that he or she would discourage the other jurors from agreeing with the carefully orchestrated expert testimony that they will be incorporating into their argument.
Yours or not, it is not possible (generally) to legally immediately remove someone from a residence they have been in for some time (provided that person has not broken any other laws).
So Childs was the tenant, and the network was his primary residence? I guess since he had been paid to maintain it, that would make him a live-in superintendent?
I think this analogy is starting to veer off-topic. There's a reason why usually stick with car-based analogies, everybody.
Its not like its all that hard to do password recovery on most infrastructure equipment.
If I remember the story correctly, the city brought in consultants from Cisco to do password recovery analysis on the systems after Childs refused to relinquish the passwords.
Wanna ballpark the amount of the consultancy bill that the city was ultimately presented with?
what about a situation where the plaintiff [sic] claims to have forgotten the password?
Well, the courts would have to evaluate the veracity of such a claim. If the password was an essential part of the guy's job duties, and he had to make use of it on a daily basis during his employment there, it's pretty clear that if he says "I forgot" immediately afterward, he's lying. And that could result in perjury charges.
To think of this another way, you might not have a problem giving up your Social Security number and debit card PIN number to a bank employee while you're in their office conducting business, but if there were a half-dozen other people in the office too, listening to the conversation, you would certainly think differently.
Your SSN and PIN are data that authenticate YOUR identity, and if compromised could cause harm to come to YOU.
How would the ex-administrator have been harmed, personally, if some untrusted third party learned the passwords to a system for which he no longer had a bit of responsibility, and in fact was barred from?
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Indeed. I'd quote the relevant passage from the AP Stylebook regarding the use of abbreviations, but they seem to have locked it up behind a paid-content wall.
Take THAT, thriving black market for standard news industry reference materials!
... because wall warts with a tail plugged into the nearest network port wouldn't attract any kind of attention.
Was that intended to be sarcastic?
How much time do YOU spend analyzing at the rat's nest of cabling located under your desk, where the Linksys wireless router and the three daisy-chained power strips live? Less than an hour per year, if you're anything like me.
I would dare say that an espionage device that disguised itself as a wall wart would be more likely to be discovered based on network analysis ("hold up, what's this device with the unfamiliar MAC off of network port 73?") than based on a visual inspection of the site.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind that MediaSentry has accused a laser printer of sharing music files. Not just alleged, stated that they had proof positive of that laser printer serving up MP3s via a P2P network.
Not arguing against the likelihood that MediaSentry was utterly off base with that accusation, but most high-end and even some mid-level laser printers these days contain embedded general-purpose computers. Sometimes even running Linux.
If a device has a network connection, a CPU, and some storage, it's at least theoretically possible to make that device serve as a P2P filesharing node.
By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior
Yeah, that's not what 'legislating' means.
Web. Employers that exploit the Web to snoop into and judge people's personal lives infringe on everyone's privacy,
Yeah, that's not what 'infringe' means.
and their actions verge on discrimination.
Yeah, that's not what 'discrimination' means.
We can't debate the issue if we do not agree on the terminology, and there's no reason not to be using the generally-accepted legal meanings of these terms.
A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.
Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.
Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.
While we're at it, I think the clock in a CPU is just a useless crutch too.
You're joking, but this is actually more or less true. Computers could be much faster if each instruction could be executed immediately upon the necessary voltage levels arriving at the prerequisite points in the circuit, instead of having to wait a billionth of a second for the traffic lights installed every few microns to turn green.
even the best time stretch dsp tricks produce artefacts. Possibly tolerable in the +- 5% range, but annoying as hell in the +- 50% range.
If the rhythm section can't maintain a tempo within a +/- 50% tolerance, there are bigger problems than the lack of a click track.
In order to do all of this, you have to have all musicians performing to an absolutely constant tempo. ...OR have the ability to manipulate tempo via studio technology. Back in the days when time-stretching meant running the tape reel at a few inches per second below spec, then applying pitch correction, yes, it was not worth the effort.
But today, in the era of ProTools and audio manipulation entirely in the digital domain, it couldn't be easier to take a performance with bad tempo fluctuations and correct them. Heck, there's probably plugins to do it automatically for you.
I'll admit, there is a case where using a click track is important, and that's if you have a sampler synchronized to it to play pre-recorded material that has to line up.
Even then, it's possible (though not often done, for myriad reasons) to have the click track follow the drummer, instead of vice versa. It's not that complicated to put microphones or contact triggers on the drums and feed them into a computer to generate MIDI or SMPTE clock pulses.
You'd have to be careful with at least PET, because that degrades when exposed to H2O2 for more than a minute or so
No no, they're talking about restoring AMIGAS, not those angular early 8-bit Commodore computers.
Slow down, cowboy! If you engage me, and then decide to stiff me on a contract, I WILL SUE YOU. And I will win. It doesn't matter how long it takes, or even how much it costs me -- it's just business.
Ah, but the workers themselves don't have a direct contract with Microsoft. Microsoft has a contract with the staffing agency, and the agency has contracts with each worker individually.
As a contractor, you only get paid when you're on an assignment. It's common sense, and it's in your contract with Volt. Guess who gets to decide whether you're on an assignment or not?
Do you insure your house against the cost of mowing the lawn? Do you, as the grandparent suggests, split the cost of an oil change or a fill up with your auto insurance company as a "co-pay"?
Y'know, if my homeowner's insurance had a plan that subsidized lawn care, or may auto insurance offered "full-in" coverage that allowed me to pay for all my maintenance with a company-issued card... I just might. I'm sure the insurance company, with its hundreds of thousands of customers, could negotiate a better price with Jiffy Lube than I could by myself.
Simply put, health insurance companies offer this type of coverage because people are willing to buy it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning.
Most of us don't have workplaces where we're expected to stare at a bathroom wall for 8 hours straight, except for yo mama, and yet LCD screens seem to be good enough for the purpose.
Jeff Bozos' complaint about LCDs seems to be primarily with the backlighting. So why not use a transflective or even purely reflective LCD technology? The screen on my OLPC XO-1 is extremely comfortable to read with the backlight off.
Parking tickets should be backed up with photographs anyways, taken by the ticket-writer.
There's hundreds of years of jurisprudence based on the idea that an eyewitness account of an alleged act, delivered by a person bound by oath to be truthful, can be accepted by the court as evidence supporting the alleged act. Why would you want to reverse that?
Taken to a logical end, wouldn't this also mean that rapists, murderers, and kidnappers would walk free if none of the witnesses to their crimes happened to have a cameraphone handy at the right moment?
If you get ticketed, you're always free to take your own photographs of the scene and bring them to court with you when you contest the ticket.
That may be the accepted definition now, but [Operation Wolf is] unarguably a shooting game played in the 1st person.
It's also far, far from the first game of its type, its 1987 release date coming a full fifty years after electronic/mechanical hybrid shooting games like the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite.
iso format has real checksums. redbook audio does not. that's why 'ripping' is not accurate and can't be, by definition.
And it depends on how you define accuracy, doesn't it?
Yes, you can read the same block off a Red Book audio CD ten times and never get the same sequence of 1s and 0s twice -- but how much does it really matter if a given 1/44100th of a second of an audio signal is represented as 0xF2A6 vs. 0xF2A7? Or even 0x0000 vs. 0xF2A7?
they screwed up the original cd format. its not robust and its not reliable.
It was designed based on what was practical to achieve with the affordable consumer electronics technology of the late 1970s. In that context, it's pretty impressive that the fidelity ceiling that they were able to achieve is STILL considered "good enough" by most accounts today, 30 years later.
Does the 1's go into the 0's?
(You'll need an understanding of male-female activities to comprehend this question.)
How is binnary formed?
How do analog singal get digatized
Dude, this was a 12 year old *girl*.
Everyone knows girls can't masturbate.
they patented such things like:
"Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity"
"Portable Computing Device-Integrated Appliance"
[...] Most of this crap shouldn't have been patentable in the first place
Oh goody, another discussion of patent law on Slashdot by people who are not well informed about it...
The content of a patent is more than its title. Microsoft did not and can not patent the entire idea of a "Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity", only a specific implementation thereof. One actually has to read the entire patent document and study all the diagrams to actually understand what it is that Microsoft is claiming a patent on.
let your buffoonish boss you intend to speak to the FBI (assuming this is in the USA) about being blackmailed, and legal counsel.
Do you honestly believe the FBI gives a rat's ass if your manager threatens to leave a rude note in your personnel file?
The court doesn't explore your expertise, and doesn't know if you're qualified. You might be a world-renowned bacteriologist, or you might be a guy who has a 20 year old doctorate in biology back when they only taught the "tail theory of classifying salmonella" or whatever.
Have you never served on a jury? The first thing the attorneys on both sides will do during jury selection is say to the prospective jurors, "this court case involves salmonella poisoning. If any of you have a background in biology studies, even if it was just high school coursework, please raise your hand now."
Neither side WANTS an expert juror to hear the case, because of the risk that he or she would discourage the other jurors from agreeing with the carefully orchestrated expert testimony that they will be incorporating into their argument.
Yours or not, it is not possible (generally) to legally immediately remove someone from a residence they have been in for some time (provided that person has not broken any other laws).
So Childs was the tenant, and the network was his primary residence? I guess since he had been paid to maintain it, that would make him a live-in superintendent?
I think this analogy is starting to veer off-topic. There's a reason why usually stick with car-based analogies, everybody.
Its not like its all that hard to do password recovery on most infrastructure equipment.
If I remember the story correctly, the city brought in consultants from Cisco to do password recovery analysis on the systems after Childs refused to relinquish the passwords.
Wanna ballpark the amount of the consultancy bill that the city was ultimately presented with?
what about a situation where the plaintiff [sic] claims to have forgotten the password?
Well, the courts would have to evaluate the veracity of such a claim. If the password was an essential part of the guy's job duties, and he had to make use of it on a daily basis during his employment there, it's pretty clear that if he says "I forgot" immediately afterward, he's lying. And that could result in perjury charges.
To think of this another way, you might not have a problem giving up your Social Security number and debit card PIN number to a bank employee while you're in their office conducting business, but if there were a half-dozen other people in the office too, listening to the conversation, you would certainly think differently.
Your SSN and PIN are data that authenticate YOUR identity, and if compromised could cause harm to come to YOU.
How would the ex-administrator have been harmed, personally, if some untrusted third party learned the passwords to a system for which he no longer had a bit of responsibility, and in fact was barred from?
That being said, you're absolutely right. The full, unabbreviated name should have been in there at least once.
Indeed. I'd quote the relevant passage from the AP Stylebook regarding the use of abbreviations, but they seem to have locked it up behind a paid-content wall.
Take THAT, thriving black market for standard news industry reference materials!
... because wall warts with a tail plugged into the nearest network port wouldn't attract any kind of attention.
Was that intended to be sarcastic?
How much time do YOU spend analyzing at the rat's nest of cabling located under your desk, where the Linksys wireless router and the three daisy-chained power strips live? Less than an hour per year, if you're anything like me.
I would dare say that an espionage device that disguised itself as a wall wart would be more likely to be discovered based on network analysis ("hold up, what's this device with the unfamiliar MAC off of network port 73?") than based on a visual inspection of the site.