An argument could be made that when a company grows to a position of such power that it has a level of control close to that of government, then it should be subject to the same constitutional controls as the government. Yahoo, however, is not even close to that level of power. Even at their height, they wern't.
Facebook, perhaps. They do control a mass-surveillance system and data mining operation that would be the envy of most governments.
The wheel is already patented in Australia. A patent reform activist patented it years ago in order to demonstrate that the Australian patent office was ridiculously lax in enforcing even the most basic of originality standards.
Do either of those handle truncated ZIP files? Because I spent a lot of time writing one that does (shamelessly promoted elsewhere in this thread), and I will be rather annoyed if I only now uncover that there was already one around. And wonder why I didn't find those in googling first.
You are now welcome to point out the hundreds of other programs that do exactly the same thing. I'm sure there are some. All I know is that I tried everything I could google a few weeks ago on a truncated Office document with essential data in, and in the end had to resort to a copy of the zip spec and a hex editor. I did it, and wrote this in the process.
God used to do everything. God made the sun rise. God made the rain fall. God made the earthquakes come, and storms, and famine and plenty. God send health and disease. God made life. God made everything.
Then science came along. Science poked around, and determined that there was no God making the sun rise - mere an illusion created by a rotating planet. Science figured out the water cycle, and plate tectonics, and ecology. Science discovered that disease is caused by microorganisms, and found ways to fight them. Then science worked out how the diversity of life came about, all without any need for God.
Science is getting closer to working out how life could have originated and how the universe began, and without need of God. Every time science solves another great mystery, that is one less thing to attribute to God. As science fills in more and more gaps in knowledge, religion has less territory to occupy.
Schools are terrified of legal risks. If they have to line the entire building with wire mesh and put metal grills over the windows in order to keep the porn out, then they will. Or more realistically, they'll just ban the students from using any electronic device in school that isn't provided, maintained and and configured by the school.
Even secondary schools know never to buy a monitor without a hard glass panel in front of the delicate, pokeable LCD display. I've seen pupils bite through mouse cables before. We once had a local network outage due to defenestration of a switch - and I'm sure iPads could follow that route too.
Doable on any normal PC, but remember that an iPad is utterly useless without iTunes. There is no other way to get media onto it, no way to buy apps without an iTunes account. All the school need do is keep a record of the iPad's unique identifier, and inform Apple if one is stolen. Then as soon as the new user tries to install apps or media, Apple knows and can block it or inform the local police. One of the upsides of the manufacturer having what is effectively a remote killswitch - at least it can be used as an anti-theft measure.
Chemistry sets today are not what they used to be. Due to fear of getting sued, any chemical that may be remotely dangerous or harmful is avoided. You don't even get copper sulphate in a lot of them.
I work at a school, and a few months back we did an interesting school trip.... to an Apple store. Where the students all got told glowingly how wonderful Apple products are, and were given a chance to try them all out. School trips are not my department, but you don't need to be much of a conspiracy theorist to make the connection between that trip and the new iMacs that soon equipped the photography class.
It's no great secret that tech companies target schools intensively in their marketing. Microsoft has been doing it for years. So has Apple. So has just about everyone else. Sometimes they do it by offering equipment or software at a discount, even to almost or entirely free at times. Sometimes it's by lobbying, pressuring curriculum writers to mandate a particular vendor's technology or urging administrators to buy it.
Schools are just irresistable. Get the students familiar with something, and they will go buying it once they get out. Teach them Office, they buy Office at home. Teach them to use iPads, and they will want to buy iPads - or in this case, tell their parents how cool iPads are. Simple, highly effective marketing. Business sense says a vendor needs to get their product into schools, and so they will - even if it means intensive lobbying and selling at a loss.
1. There is a reason fossil fuels are so popular. It's because they are cheap. Really cheap. Super-incredibly-cheap. And with that cheapness comes a whole economy driven by cheap energy - where things can be made in China and sold in the US, because it costs next to nothing to have them shipped halfway around the world. Where workers can live out in the comfort of suburbia, and each day be transported in their own personal car to the city and back again. Where people can go where they want, when they want, without worrying too much about the cost of transport.
2. If country A is using cheap screw-the-planet oil and coal, and country B is using expensive renewables, guess which one is going to have all the businesses move there?
3. And sure enough, North America is the main source of climate change denial. The people want their cars. Cars are more than a means of transport - they are a symbol of freedom. The power to travel where one wants, unbound by the dictates of others. People want the comfort of air-conditioning, and the luxury of low-cost everything from that economy driven by cheap energy.
4. That too, of course. But right now, the popular support in the US has turned towards small government. While neither political party is actually doing very much to actually shrink the government, the republicans at least need to pretend they care.
Sometimes the truth is just so inconvenient, people choose subconsciously to reject it. Climate change is a very good example of this. If the claims of scientists are true, then something has to be done - and whatever the something is will be horribly expensive, economically disadvantagious, personally inconvenient for millions of people and politically difficult in a time when any form of regulation meets with popular resistance. Far easier simply to deny anything is wrong, and thus remove the need to do anything. It isn't even something people realise they are doing.
The problems come when the evidence is so complicated that it requires years of specialist education to become fully informed. In that situation, the scientist with a mountain of studies to back him will lose public debate to the charismatic speaker with a few catchy soundbytes. That's the problem here: The public is stupid, always has been, and always will be. Because each individual is highly knowledgeable only in their own small field, which means that the majority is ignorant of every field. This combines with the natural tendency of humans to vastly overestimate their own knowledge. I recall there was a survey that circulated in the news a few years ago for finding that somewhere more than ninety percent of drivers thought they were a better driver than most.
Some ISPs have to NAT now. There just aren't enough addresses to go around, and they put off the upgrade to IPv6 for a decade because they didn't want the hastle. Also, NAT screws up p2p completly, which is a nice incidential benefit for the ISPs - p2p users put a lot of load on the network.
Then I hope you can afford to pay the privately-funded police force the required protection money for your house before some free-enterprisers come to expand their breaking-and-entering business.
Minor correction: VMs are *almost* as fast as native now, so long as you don't want accelerated graphics. It's those virtualisation extensions on the processor that do it - the code essentially does run as native code, the VM side only kicking in to handle system calls. There is still some performance penalty from the extra layer of driver abstraction, but it's quite manageable.
That's how the IBM bios was first cloned. It would still work, legally - a perfect protection against copyright claims. Which is why, should ReactOS ever become a significent threat to Microsoft, they'll go after it with patent claims instead. With the amounts of patents MS has, I'm sure quite a lot of them are essential to windows compatibility.
Does 'knowingly' still apply if the process is automated? They probably just search on the titles of their movies and have a script takedown every hit.
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An argument could be made that when a company grows to a position of such power that it has a level of control close to that of government, then it should be subject to the same constitutional controls as the government. Yahoo, however, is not even close to that level of power. Even at their height, they wern't.
Facebook, perhaps. They do control a mass-surveillance system and data mining operation that would be the envy of most governments.
The wheel is already patented in Australia. A patent reform activist patented it years ago in order to demonstrate that the Australian patent office was ridiculously lax in enforcing even the most basic of originality standards.
As a furry, I approve of this idea.
I imagine there would be a 'naked patch' in circulation that just deletes all clothing from view too.
Ah, well... if anyone has a use for it, http://www.birds-are-nice.me/programming/zipfilerecover.shtml
It's not the most sophisticated of programs, but it gets the job done. Truncated/damaged zip in, lots of little zips out.
Not sure about doom10, but doom9 is a very famous forum for video processing and compression.
Do either of those handle truncated ZIP files? Because I spent a lot of time writing one that does (shamelessly promoted elsewhere in this thread), and I will be rather annoyed if I only now uncover that there was already one around. And wonder why I didn't find those in googling first.
You are now welcome to point out the hundreds of other programs that do exactly the same thing. I'm sure there are some. All I know is that I tried everything I could google a few weeks ago on a truncated Office document with essential data in, and in the end had to resort to a copy of the zip spec and a hex editor. I did it, and wrote this in the process.
The God of the Gaps argument.
God used to do everything. God made the sun rise. God made the rain fall. God made the earthquakes come, and storms, and famine and plenty. God send health and disease. God made life. God made everything.
Then science came along. Science poked around, and determined that there was no God making the sun rise - mere an illusion created by a rotating planet. Science figured out the water cycle, and plate tectonics, and ecology. Science discovered that disease is caused by microorganisms, and found ways to fight them. Then science worked out how the diversity of life came about, all without any need for God.
Science is getting closer to working out how life could have originated and how the universe began, and without need of God. Every time science solves another great mystery, that is one less thing to attribute to God. As science fills in more and more gaps in knowledge, religion has less territory to occupy.
And then they threw in religion too.
But what if they trip, land on their face and suffer a disfiguring injury to their nose? The parents could sue for millions in compensation.
Schools are terrified of legal risks. If they have to line the entire building with wire mesh and put metal grills over the windows in order to keep the porn out, then they will. Or more realistically, they'll just ban the students from using any electronic device in school that isn't provided, maintained and and configured by the school.
Even secondary schools know never to buy a monitor without a hard glass panel in front of the delicate, pokeable LCD display. I've seen pupils bite through mouse cables before. We once had a local network outage due to defenestration of a switch - and I'm sure iPads could follow that route too.
Doable on any normal PC, but remember that an iPad is utterly useless without iTunes. There is no other way to get media onto it, no way to buy apps without an iTunes account. All the school need do is keep a record of the iPad's unique identifier, and inform Apple if one is stolen. Then as soon as the new user tries to install apps or media, Apple knows and can block it or inform the local police. One of the upsides of the manufacturer having what is effectively a remote killswitch - at least it can be used as an anti-theft measure.
Chemistry sets today are not what they used to be. Due to fear of getting sued, any chemical that may be remotely dangerous or harmful is avoided. You don't even get copper sulphate in a lot of them.
Ports. Apple is port-phobic in it's ipads. Can't even plug in a USB storage device or SD card.
Every corporation wants the customers to be subservient. They call it 'brand loyalty.' Apple has it.
I work at a school, and a few months back we did an interesting school trip.... to an Apple store. Where the students all got told glowingly how wonderful Apple products are, and were given a chance to try them all out. School trips are not my department, but you don't need to be much of a conspiracy theorist to make the connection between that trip and the new iMacs that soon equipped the photography class.
It's no great secret that tech companies target schools intensively in their marketing. Microsoft has been doing it for years. So has Apple. So has just about everyone else. Sometimes they do it by offering equipment or software at a discount, even to almost or entirely free at times. Sometimes it's by lobbying, pressuring curriculum writers to mandate a particular vendor's technology or urging administrators to buy it.
Schools are just irresistable. Get the students familiar with something, and they will go buying it once they get out. Teach them Office, they buy Office at home. Teach them to use iPads, and they will want to buy iPads - or in this case, tell their parents how cool iPads are. Simple, highly effective marketing. Business sense says a vendor needs to get their product into schools, and so they will - even if it means intensive lobbying and selling at a loss.
1. There is a reason fossil fuels are so popular. It's because they are cheap. Really cheap. Super-incredibly-cheap. And with that cheapness comes a whole economy driven by cheap energy - where things can be made in China and sold in the US, because it costs next to nothing to have them shipped halfway around the world. Where workers can live out in the comfort of suburbia, and each day be transported in their own personal car to the city and back again. Where people can go where they want, when they want, without worrying too much about the cost of transport.
2. If country A is using cheap screw-the-planet oil and coal, and country B is using expensive renewables, guess which one is going to have all the businesses move there?
3. And sure enough, North America is the main source of climate change denial. The people want their cars. Cars are more than a means of transport - they are a symbol of freedom. The power to travel where one wants, unbound by the dictates of others. People want the comfort of air-conditioning, and the luxury of low-cost everything from that economy driven by cheap energy.
4. That too, of course. But right now, the popular support in the US has turned towards small government. While neither political party is actually doing very much to actually shrink the government, the republicans at least need to pretend they care.
Sometimes the truth is just so inconvenient, people choose subconsciously to reject it. Climate change is a very good example of this. If the claims of scientists are true, then something has to be done - and whatever the something is will be horribly expensive, economically disadvantagious, personally inconvenient for millions of people and politically difficult in a time when any form of regulation meets with popular resistance. Far easier simply to deny anything is wrong, and thus remove the need to do anything. It isn't even something people realise they are doing.
The problems come when the evidence is so complicated that it requires years of specialist education to become fully informed. In that situation, the scientist with a mountain of studies to back him will lose public debate to the charismatic speaker with a few catchy soundbytes. That's the problem here: The public is stupid, always has been, and always will be. Because each individual is highly knowledgeable only in their own small field, which means that the majority is ignorant of every field. This combines with the natural tendency of humans to vastly overestimate their own knowledge. I recall there was a survey that circulated in the news a few years ago for finding that somewhere more than ninety percent of drivers thought they were a better driver than most.
Some ISPs have to NAT now. There just aren't enough addresses to go around, and they put off the upgrade to IPv6 for a decade because they didn't want the hastle. Also, NAT screws up p2p completly, which is a nice incidential benefit for the ISPs - p2p users put a lot of load on the network.
Then I hope you can afford to pay the privately-funded police force the required protection money for your house before some free-enterprisers come to expand their breaking-and-entering business.
Minor correction: VMs are *almost* as fast as native now, so long as you don't want accelerated graphics. It's those virtualisation extensions on the processor that do it - the code essentially does run as native code, the VM side only kicking in to handle system calls. There is still some performance penalty from the extra layer of driver abstraction, but it's quite manageable.
That's how the IBM bios was first cloned. It would still work, legally - a perfect protection against copyright claims. Which is why, should ReactOS ever become a significent threat to Microsoft, they'll go after it with patent claims instead. With the amounts of patents MS has, I'm sure quite a lot of them are essential to windows compatibility.
Does 'knowingly' still apply if the process is automated? They probably just search on the titles of their movies and have a script takedown every hit.