Long story short: A poorly-secured school computer started showing porn popups in class - with the aid of an inoperative content filter, which had been disabled due to an expired licence. The authories (I'm not sure exactly who made the decision) overreacted and charged the teacher with four counts of 'risk of injury to a minor' - which, this being Connecticut, the jury decided she was guilty of. She appealed, and all charges were overturned, but she'll never be able to work as a teacher again. Most internet-discussers of the case conclude the school had abandoned her to the parential mob and overzealous prosecution in order to place the blame for the incident upon one teacher rather than admit the incompetence of their own IT security department.
She very nearly got a few decades in jail for it, too - the school district decided to throw her to the mob as a scapegoat, rather than admit their own incompetent IT management.
Fixed links would be easy. Just use really directional antennas. Yagis and parapolics all round! You could expect to see more use of free-air laser links as well, with a radio fallback for poor weather. Mobile, though, not so easy. Expect to see much more sophisticated RF equipment in access points (dynamic phase-array antennas and such), which would likely work better than today but also cost much more - but a cell network? Much more difficult, when the devices are constantly moving and have such limited power.
Magnet links are extensible. They can contain any arbitary number of hashes or other pieces of identifying info of any type. You could put a whole file in if you wanted, uuencoded, but this would defeat the purpose of a link.
They were. A pulsar signal is a repeating pulse - a characteristic previously thought to be unique to artificially generated transmissions, perhaps a beacon of some purpose. It must have been quite a letdown when someone worked out a natural process that could generate such a signal.
There's a technical side too. Even if Megaupload had used hash blacklists, it'd be trivial for the pirates to adapt: Just stick an extra, unique file into their rar for every upload, or divide their split video files on different bytes. The end result is that the pirates are barely inconvenienced at all, while Megaupload has to pay for the extra storage.
Many people, including myself, have been subject to false positive results from their copyright-screener. It's an inprecise process, and youtube's policy is to pull anything suspicious. There is a nominal appeal process, but even after many attempts I never recieved a reply or even acknowledgement.
We have magnet links: A convenient, standard way of addressing a file by hash and size. If that were combined with some form of decentralised distribution-and-caching system, there'd be no need for lockers.
I'm not talking about piracy, but anything that needs to distribute lots of data without spending a fortune on a CDN. Linux package repos, patches, freely-distributable content, that sort of thing. Storage is cheap now. Something like freenet, but without the need for performance-hurting paranoia in every aspect. Ideally something so simple for clients that it could be built into browsers to get HTML5 video or downloads without the user needing to even be aware of what's going on.
I keep posting these half-formed ideas, hoping that if I get enough people thinking it over then someone with more skill than me will be able to work on the details and impliment it.
It's vague enough for lawyers to argue over. The problem is that DMCA takedowns are of limited effectiveness in such a dynamic environment: Take one down, someone will upload a new one in a few seconds. The legal case against Megaupload hinged on a technicality: They took the files down on request, but didn't also take down duplicates of the same file uploaded by someone else, even though they could (as they used file-level dedupe) have done so trivially. It isn't entirely clear what the responsibilities of a service provider are any more: The DMCA doesn't get into the technical implications of hashlists, de-duplication, fingerprinting, the countermeasures against them or the countermeasures against the countermeasures. It was written on the assumption that publishing content would be a difficult and expensive task, so if you can get it pulled down you've seriously inconvenienced pirates. The whole model breaks when publishing a file is just a matter of uploading, which it really always was.
The only way to actually stop piracy would be by passing new laws so draconian that I'd rather just see the entire copyright-driven industry destroyed than sacrifice that much freedom or hand so much power to those who can afford lawyers.
The problem is in making it useable to the masses. The untrained don't even know what a packet is. The best defence we have is a small army of geeks who do care enough to check, and are ready to report their observations all over the internet.
The SIM isn't just a memory card. It also has onboard processing. Not much, but just enough to perform a handshake: The network actually authenticates the SIM itsself, with the phone just acting as a network interface and power supply. That way it is practically impossible to clone a SIM (There are ways, but they are far beyond the abilities of even most specialists in the field). As for why they are used, it's a regulatory thing intended to decouple the network operators from control of the devices, which could be seen as a conflict of interest or as a way to prevent customers from moving to a new operator (If they couldn't just move the SIM, they'd have to buy a completly new device).
Millimeter waves are very hard to produce, espicially at high power. Microwaves are easy, infrared is easy, but that gap in between is just hard to work with.
Ultra-small and little propellant? I don't see a moon transport there. I see a sat manouvering/orbit-maintainance/deorbiting thruster. Even a very little thrust would be of a lot of use there, but weight matters.
Colonisation isn't going to solve any population issues. Sending a few thousand settlers is hard, but you'd have to send hundreds of millions to just make a dent in the population here. Think of the expense.
Long been commonplace. It's standard practice in computer crime to count the cost of securing the computers as damages - that's how a hacker (Or more often, script kiddie with luck) can break into a system, do nothing, leave, and still do enough 'damage' to make it a felony.
Make it in 16x16cm tiles, forming an electrical connection at each edge. That way if a section is damaged (Which it will be) you don't have to repaper the entire wall.
The surface area of this spheroid, however, remains finite. Once we have a few sustainable offworld colonies running, then you can start planning to take over the universe.
The definitions change constantly. The basic definition of conservative politically is to oppose change. Progressives look to the promise of a better future, conservatives try to preserve what they see as good in the present. Thus those who opposed voting for commoners, women's sufferage, divorce, abolition, etc *had* to be conservative by definition. That doesn't mean they are the same as the conservatives of today.
The standard conservative approach to that is retroactive support: They just say that those were conservative ideals all along, and that any claim conservatives once opposed them is just liberal propaganda. Except for that last one.
Slashdot Mirror
You said 'ass.' Best avoid Arizona for a while.
I can give you a name, too: "Julie Amero."
The original local paper doesn't keep it's stories going back so far, so here's a bit of tabloid reporting on it instead: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/11/spyware_teacher/
Long story short: A poorly-secured school computer started showing porn popups in class - with the aid of an inoperative content filter, which had been disabled due to an expired licence. The authories (I'm not sure exactly who made the decision) overreacted and charged the teacher with four counts of 'risk of injury to a minor' - which, this being Connecticut, the jury decided she was guilty of. She appealed, and all charges were overturned, but she'll never be able to work as a teacher again. Most internet-discussers of the case conclude the school had abandoned her to the parential mob and overzealous prosecution in order to place the blame for the incident upon one teacher rather than admit the incompetence of their own IT security department.
Might want to disable comments too, or sponsors will get annoyed at all the people insulting them.
She very nearly got a few decades in jail for it, too - the school district decided to throw her to the mob as a scapegoat, rather than admit their own incompetent IT management.
Plenty of schools, colleges and workplaces have a Nigel somewhere who will happily exchange data.
Fixed links would be easy. Just use really directional antennas. Yagis and parapolics all round! You could expect to see more use of free-air laser links as well, with a radio fallback for poor weather. Mobile, though, not so easy. Expect to see much more sophisticated RF equipment in access points (dynamic phase-array antennas and such), which would likely work better than today but also cost much more - but a cell network? Much more difficult, when the devices are constantly moving and have such limited power.
Magnet links are extensible. They can contain any arbitary number of hashes or other pieces of identifying info of any type. You could put a whole file in if you wanted, uuencoded, but this would defeat the purpose of a link.
They were. A pulsar signal is a repeating pulse - a characteristic previously thought to be unique to artificially generated transmissions, perhaps a beacon of some purpose. It must have been quite a letdown when someone worked out a natural process that could generate such a signal.
There's a technical side too. Even if Megaupload had used hash blacklists, it'd be trivial for the pirates to adapt: Just stick an extra, unique file into their rar for every upload, or divide their split video files on different bytes. The end result is that the pirates are barely inconvenienced at all, while Megaupload has to pay for the extra storage.
Many people, including myself, have been subject to false positive results from their copyright-screener. It's an inprecise process, and youtube's policy is to pull anything suspicious. There is a nominal appeal process, but even after many attempts I never recieved a reply or even acknowledgement.
We have magnet links: A convenient, standard way of addressing a file by hash and size. If that were combined with some form of decentralised distribution-and-caching system, there'd be no need for lockers.
I'm not talking about piracy, but anything that needs to distribute lots of data without spending a fortune on a CDN. Linux package repos, patches, freely-distributable content, that sort of thing. Storage is cheap now. Something like freenet, but without the need for performance-hurting paranoia in every aspect. Ideally something so simple for clients that it could be built into browsers to get HTML5 video or downloads without the user needing to even be aware of what's going on.
I keep posting these half-formed ideas, hoping that if I get enough people thinking it over then someone with more skill than me will be able to work on the details and impliment it.
It's vague enough for lawyers to argue over. The problem is that DMCA takedowns are of limited effectiveness in such a dynamic environment: Take one down, someone will upload a new one in a few seconds. The legal case against Megaupload hinged on a technicality: They took the files down on request, but didn't also take down duplicates of the same file uploaded by someone else, even though they could (as they used file-level dedupe) have done so trivially. It isn't entirely clear what the responsibilities of a service provider are any more: The DMCA doesn't get into the technical implications of hashlists, de-duplication, fingerprinting, the countermeasures against them or the countermeasures against the countermeasures. It was written on the assumption that publishing content would be a difficult and expensive task, so if you can get it pulled down you've seriously inconvenienced pirates. The whole model breaks when publishing a file is just a matter of uploading, which it really always was.
The only way to actually stop piracy would be by passing new laws so draconian that I'd rather just see the entire copyright-driven industry destroyed than sacrifice that much freedom or hand so much power to those who can afford lawyers.
The problem is in making it useable to the masses. The untrained don't even know what a packet is. The best defence we have is a small army of geeks who do care enough to check, and are ready to report their observations all over the internet.
The SIM isn't just a memory card. It also has onboard processing. Not much, but just enough to perform a handshake: The network actually authenticates the SIM itsself, with the phone just acting as a network interface and power supply. That way it is practically impossible to clone a SIM (There are ways, but they are far beyond the abilities of even most specialists in the field). As for why they are used, it's a regulatory thing intended to decouple the network operators from control of the devices, which could be seen as a conflict of interest or as a way to prevent customers from moving to a new operator (If they couldn't just move the SIM, they'd have to buy a completly new device).
Millimeter waves are very hard to produce, espicially at high power. Microwaves are easy, infrared is easy, but that gap in between is just hard to work with.
Ultra-small and little propellant? I don't see a moon transport there. I see a sat manouvering/orbit-maintainance/deorbiting thruster. Even a very little thrust would be of a lot of use there, but weight matters.
Colonisation isn't going to solve any population issues. Sending a few thousand settlers is hard, but you'd have to send hundreds of millions to just make a dent in the population here. Think of the expense.
Because powers of two make math easier for me.
Or, in plain english: "Climate is changing, we screwed it up, now we're going to get more flooding. Not sure about the cyclones though."
Long been commonplace. It's standard practice in computer crime to count the cost of securing the computers as damages - that's how a hacker (Or more often, script kiddie with luck) can break into a system, do nothing, leave, and still do enough 'damage' to make it a felony.
Make it in 16x16cm tiles, forming an electrical connection at each edge. That way if a section is damaged (Which it will be) you don't have to repaper the entire wall.
That built-in wi-fi is almost invariably in the form of a mini-PCIe card.
The surface area of this spheroid, however, remains finite. Once we have a few sustainable offworld colonies running, then you can start planning to take over the universe.
The definitions change constantly. The basic definition of conservative politically is to oppose change. Progressives look to the promise of a better future, conservatives try to preserve what they see as good in the present. Thus those who opposed voting for commoners, women's sufferage, divorce, abolition, etc *had* to be conservative by definition. That doesn't mean they are the same as the conservatives of today.
The standard conservative approach to that is retroactive support: They just say that those were conservative ideals all along, and that any claim conservatives once opposed them is just liberal propaganda. Except for that last one.