This is what bothers me most. Free trade is only good when corporations can take advantage of emerging economies. But when it comes to selling their wares in emerging economies for 5% of what they charge in the US or Europe, well that is just people being unfair.
Perfect discrimination is the epitome of regulated trade. They can't have it both ways. Either free trade is good and we should embrace it, or it isn't and we should close the borders.
Personally, I think a company should have zero control of a product after it's been sold, other than to prevent said consumer from reproducing copyrighted portions of that product. This simple rule would render mod chips legal across board(at least for those designed to remove region coding, as opposed to those that allow you to use CDR media), as well as the used market for all games, even those with online content.
I also think we need a national law spelling out what software publishers may not put in a EULA. Too bad the legislators would name it something like "Consumer Rights Enforcement Act" and it would be 100% pro-corporations.
If the predominant business model here was that handset manufacturers sold directly to consumers, the carriers would no longer have service contracts and lock-in. They much much prefer the way it is, not just because they can charge more for the "service" of financing you a phone(which they conveniently continue to charge you for even after the subsidy is paid), but you're locked into a 2 year contract.
If you break it, even if it's the last month of the contract, you often owe hundreds of dollars(YMMV, judges in some states have tossed these out).
The real reason the carriers don't like the new model is because they lose control. Lock-in brings in a lot more money than just financing handsets.
The whole practice of tying phone subsidies to service contracts needs to end. It should be illegal across the board. It gives far too much control over the network and innovation to a few very large companies and really makes it a lot more difficult for new handset manufacturers to enter the market.
From a consumer fairness perspective, it's a win here also. Right now, carriers do not give you a discount if you provide the handset. They charge the same, whether they give you a branded phone for $30 or you provide your own $500 phone.
If carriers were required to offer discounts for providing your own phone at least, you'd see some quick changes in the way they sell them.
In my high school it was even easier than this. They had the environment almost entirely locked down with one exception. Defrag was launched on a schedule.
This of course ran with SYSTEM privileges. Once you've got any MMC panel open with privileges, you're just a few clicks away from local admin rights. Then you can do whatever you want.
During a deposition, you must either be responsive or invoke the 5th amendment. There's no middle ground. You're under oath and your responses are to be treated as if you're in a court room, in front of a judge.
You don't have to respond to reporters and you don't need any legal reason to do so, 5th or otherwise - they have no power to compel you to do anything.
The 5th amendment definitely can be invoked during a deposition.
Not really. There is no special phrase or magic combination of words you must say, but you must convey that you are not answering because the response may incriminate yourself.
That's it. And as I've pointed out in a few other posts today, there are times when you cannot invoke the 5th amendment.
Judges are aware too that suspects are often unknowing of their own rights. In many states, a judge can assign you an attorney to provide you counsel, even if you wish to represent yourself. This is important because people who aren't lawyers rarely understand all of their rights. Judges have also thrown out testimony and confessions made by people before, for the simple fact that they weren't Mirandized before or there is some evidence that the testimony or confession may have been coerced.
This is a civil case. They will pay a fine and/or could be ordered to stop certain tortuous conduct. If the plaintiff is seeking an order forcing the school district to immediately stop any and all surreptitious and furtive electronic observation of students and a jury finds them guilty, then it is so ordered that the school district must immediately comply. The judge is responsible for determining what remedies the plaintiff can legally ask for and guiding the jury through instructions under what circumstances each remedy applies to.
I have a picture of me naked in the bathtub when I was 2. Does that make me a criminal? Or just my mom, for taking the picture? Or maybe my dad for having it developed also...
While the line is always moving for what constitutes criminality regarding pictures of naked children, this indeed sounds like a pretty clear case this time. It isn't universal though.
You can also be forced to testify about crimes in which you did not participate.
For example, you know your boss is embezzling money but you don't want to testify because that may affect your job. Well, you can be compelled to testify anyway. If you participated in the embezzling, you can invoke the 5th amendment, even if you're not the defendant in that court case.
I'll undo about 10 points of moderation to comment here.
No. You're free to keep your mouth shut when being interrogated by police or in a courtroom if that information may incriminate you in any crime.
You can still be compelled to testify about another person, under threat of contempt and jail. A good example would be you being ordered by a judge to testify regarding a crime you're aware of, but did not participate in. If you did participate in it though, you could still invoke the 5th amendment and simply tell the judge you believe your testimony may be incriminating.
The right to not incriminate yourself is nearly universal, and for good reason. The original intent was not to allow guilty people to hide behind a legal shield, but to prevent innocent people from being forced to testify against themselves.
In a police state, without the 5th amendment, the police can very easily coerce confessions for crimes people didn't commit. This is one reason why even sometimes a confession isn't an open & shut case. Under some circumstances, the confession is tossed out due to 5th amendment rights. In some cases, something as simple as the interrogator sitting between the door and the suspect has been used, because such can be interpreted as coercion of someone who is otherwise free to leave at any time.
Probably not much skill required. Anecdotal I'm sure, but I've read online of other "hacking" done to Blackboard's software.
This kind of leads me to believe they just have really shitty security. Reminds me of the screen lock software they installed on the old Mac's we had when I was in middle school.
Move the mouse and it appears to ask you for a password, but click in the very far lower left corner and it let you in...
Any security device designed with an intentional circumvention probably has a security hole also.
I'm not aware of any scanners that use infrared. Not any type that are used in a retail setting anyway.
Almost all of them are monochromatic red lasers or LEDs.
The red lasers can only burn if you're shining it in your eyes. They're capped at 5mw of total laser output, and at that level you need to quite a period of time to cause damage.
Visible light at even extreme levels isn't likely to cause burns any time soon. It's UVA, UVB and infrared that burn.
The fact that fluorescent lights spit out more across the spectrum than a red LED(which fyi is monochromatic) kind of tells me this girl is just making shit up.
I'm not saying people don't deserve their day in court. I am saying though that judges should have free reign to use common sense when dismissing cases for lack of a scientific basis of any kind.
The whole discussion is moot in my opinion. Hear me out.
What do we need of online video?
Well, it should be ubiquitous. Everyone should have it available, or else web developers will be chasing their tales. FLV was a nice improvement over years gone by where a web developer couldn't predict with any accuracy what video playback facilities would be available to any particular user.
Sites like Youtube, break.com, theonion.com, are almost entirely based on online video and are only possible if most viewers can view the content with minimal fuss.
A codec doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be free as in beer, and everywhere. Flash did it, but it was proprietary and people didn't like it. Ogg Theora is free(in all the ways that matter, shut up Theo), but you'll never get native support for it from Microsoft.
To meet the needs of everyone, Google is giving us all VP8. It may not be the best, but if it's freely available to all browsers(native ideally, or by plugin), then it meets the needs of the web developer community to avoid recreating the wheel for every browser.
While off topic, this particular AC is keenly aware of the history and nuance of slashdot's past. It's actually very accurate, and since I've been here since not long after the beginning, I would know.
Politics can still be interesting. And compared to a plethora of drivel I've seen and learned to ignore on Slashdot over the last few years, a nerdy dude timing yellow light durations to beat traffic tickets is pretty damned good.
As far as yellow light durations go, I have it made in Minnesota. Big intersections have signs 150 yards or so before the intersection warning you that the light will be turning yellow soon, so that in the ice we drive in, you'll have the adequate half mile you need to slow down from 70 to zero without T-boning someone. That's not to say we don't have our own traffic subtleties. My favorite is the ninja-30mph-zone-on-a-highway.
There are numerous places where highways suddenly become city streets with 30mph limits. You remember them quick or suffer the fines.
I'm pretty sure the content owners, hardware designers and DVDCCA got together and said "we can make more money by forcing consumers to watch ads for movies, even years after the movies have come out. Get to work."
And with the wonders of patents, the DVDCCA forces all DVD format licensees to build players that honor the AUP table. It's pretty anti-consumer, but with patents they had a stranglehold on the format and consumers couldn't do much about it. Of course this is the same DVDCCA that forces manufacturers to produce DVD players that honor region coding.
This irks me even more than acceptable user operations tables. The movie producers are basically saying "globalization is only good if we can charge every penny each individual customer will pay". I know all companies seek perfect discrimination, but it shouldn't be that way. Content producers shouldn't decide WHERE you can view your legally purchased(not licensed) media.
Sigh, I need a hobby. Bitching about copyrights gets really tiring. Fuck the media companies. I should have just said that from the start and saved my finger strength for a more compelling topic.
There was a cultural barrier there. In the case of Germany, consumers did not like the warehouse type of store. Of course, this is the only way a Walmart store can be competitive - by being huge.
WalMart relies on razor thin margins and a huge number of customers to survive. It wouldn't take but a couple million people like me to make it unprofitable.
Of course, if they changed the way they hire, promote and pay people, that might change my mind. I just don't see that happening any time soon.
His point is valid nonetheless. $8.50 working 40 hours a week is only $1156 after tax per month, and before any deductions for retirement and savings plans.
WalMart touts itself as a perfectly kosher place to work if you're an adult that needs to live off the money, but that couldn't be further from the truth. A disproportionate number of WalMart employees rely on some sort of public social assistance program, whether that be food stamps, daycare assistance or insurance subsidies. WalMart uses razor thin margins, globalized distribution systems and cutthroat pricing to displace retailers that would otherwise pay better.
People buy WalMart's shit not realizing that they're cutting their own Achilles heel.
You could make an argument that some person in China has a job with WalMart where they otherwise would not, but consider this: WalMart directly operates factories in China(they're not just a distributor) and their employees face slave-labor conditions to produce the shit you wanted to save $1 on. If you're going to spout shit about globalization, go all the way and just say you don't give a shit about slave-laborers in China because you wanted to save money.
Cassettes didn't beat 8 track because it was better quality either. They were cheaper and smaller.
And while we're on the topic of media... I switched from VHS to DVD because the media lasted longer and fast forwarding and rewinding is faster. Why is it when I put a DVD in, I have to fuck with the remote for 30 seconds to get to the goddamned menu because of "Acceptable user operations"?
Who the fuck decided the media producers could decide when I can fast forward, rewind, pause or go to the next track?
The most ubiquitous DRM is in every household already and it's obnoxious. Bluray isn't any better either.
They weren't immune to foreign competition, but GM and Ford combined essentially dominated the market for many decades. It wasn't until a decade after the quality/price disparity between GM and foreign cars was so great that the company finally went belly up.
The market was just slow to correct itself because consumers are slow to change their perceptions.
If people were willing to abstain from businesses they think are acting outside societies best interests, we would have a very different corporate landscape. No more walmart. The big three wireless companies would have drastically different policies and pricing. Things would just look a lot different.
I'm not familiar really with this topic at all. As far as I understand it, Google is digitizing public domain books right? And the copyrighted ones it's digitizing previews of books(like table of contents, random pages, etc.)?
Correct? I'm just trying to get a handle on why everyone is pissed off. Sadly, googling this topic leads to information overload and I just don't have time to read 100 articles about it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what bothers me most. Free trade is only good when corporations can take advantage of emerging economies. But when it comes to selling their wares in emerging economies for 5% of what they charge in the US or Europe, well that is just people being unfair.
Perfect discrimination is the epitome of regulated trade. They can't have it both ways. Either free trade is good and we should embrace it, or it isn't and we should close the borders.
Personally, I think a company should have zero control of a product after it's been sold, other than to prevent said consumer from reproducing copyrighted portions of that product. This simple rule would render mod chips legal across board(at least for those designed to remove region coding, as opposed to those that allow you to use CDR media), as well as the used market for all games, even those with online content.
I also think we need a national law spelling out what software publishers may not put in a EULA. Too bad the legislators would name it something like "Consumer Rights Enforcement Act" and it would be 100% pro-corporations.
If the predominant business model here was that handset manufacturers sold directly to consumers, the carriers would no longer have service contracts and lock-in. They much much prefer the way it is, not just because they can charge more for the "service" of financing you a phone(which they conveniently continue to charge you for even after the subsidy is paid), but you're locked into a 2 year contract.
If you break it, even if it's the last month of the contract, you often owe hundreds of dollars(YMMV, judges in some states have tossed these out).
The real reason the carriers don't like the new model is because they lose control. Lock-in brings in a lot more money than just financing handsets.
The whole practice of tying phone subsidies to service contracts needs to end. It should be illegal across the board. It gives far too much control over the network and innovation to a few very large companies and really makes it a lot more difficult for new handset manufacturers to enter the market.
From a consumer fairness perspective, it's a win here also. Right now, carriers do not give you a discount if you provide the handset. They charge the same, whether they give you a branded phone for $30 or you provide your own $500 phone.
If carriers were required to offer discounts for providing your own phone at least, you'd see some quick changes in the way they sell them.
In my high school it was even easier than this. They had the environment almost entirely locked down with one exception. Defrag was launched on a schedule.
This of course ran with SYSTEM privileges. Once you've got any MMC panel open with privileges, you're just a few clicks away from local admin rights. Then you can do whatever you want.
During a deposition, you must either be responsive or invoke the 5th amendment. There's no middle ground. You're under oath and your responses are to be treated as if you're in a court room, in front of a judge.
You don't have to respond to reporters and you don't need any legal reason to do so, 5th or otherwise - they have no power to compel you to do anything.
The 5th amendment definitely can be invoked during a deposition.
Not really. There is no special phrase or magic combination of words you must say, but you must convey that you are not answering because the response may incriminate yourself.
That's it. And as I've pointed out in a few other posts today, there are times when you cannot invoke the 5th amendment.
Judges are aware too that suspects are often unknowing of their own rights. In many states, a judge can assign you an attorney to provide you counsel, even if you wish to represent yourself. This is important because people who aren't lawyers rarely understand all of their rights. Judges have also thrown out testimony and confessions made by people before, for the simple fact that they weren't Mirandized before or there is some evidence that the testimony or confession may have been coerced.
Not sure who modded you up, but you're dumb.
This is a civil case. They will pay a fine and/or could be ordered to stop certain tortuous conduct. If the plaintiff is seeking an order forcing the school district to immediately stop any and all surreptitious and furtive electronic observation of students and a jury finds them guilty, then it is so ordered that the school district must immediately comply. The judge is responsible for determining what remedies the plaintiff can legally ask for and guiding the jury through instructions under what circumstances each remedy applies to.
I have a picture of me naked in the bathtub when I was 2. Does that make me a criminal? Or just my mom, for taking the picture? Or maybe my dad for having it developed also...
While the line is always moving for what constitutes criminality regarding pictures of naked children, this indeed sounds like a pretty clear case this time. It isn't universal though.
You can also be forced to testify about crimes in which you did not participate.
For example, you know your boss is embezzling money but you don't want to testify because that may affect your job. Well, you can be compelled to testify anyway. If you participated in the embezzling, you can invoke the 5th amendment, even if you're not the defendant in that court case.
I'll undo about 10 points of moderation to comment here.
No. You're free to keep your mouth shut when being interrogated by police or in a courtroom if that information may incriminate you in any crime.
You can still be compelled to testify about another person, under threat of contempt and jail. A good example would be you being ordered by a judge to testify regarding a crime you're aware of, but did not participate in. If you did participate in it though, you could still invoke the 5th amendment and simply tell the judge you believe your testimony may be incriminating.
The right to not incriminate yourself is nearly universal, and for good reason. The original intent was not to allow guilty people to hide behind a legal shield, but to prevent innocent people from being forced to testify against themselves.
In a police state, without the 5th amendment, the police can very easily coerce confessions for crimes people didn't commit. This is one reason why even sometimes a confession isn't an open & shut case. Under some circumstances, the confession is tossed out due to 5th amendment rights. In some cases, something as simple as the interrogator sitting between the door and the suspect has been used, because such can be interpreted as coercion of someone who is otherwise free to leave at any time.
Probably not much skill required. Anecdotal I'm sure, but I've read online of other "hacking" done to Blackboard's software.
This kind of leads me to believe they just have really shitty security. Reminds me of the screen lock software they installed on the old Mac's we had when I was in middle school.
Move the mouse and it appears to ask you for a password, but click in the very far lower left corner and it let you in...
Any security device designed with an intentional circumvention probably has a security hole also.
I'm not aware of any scanners that use infrared. Not any type that are used in a retail setting anyway.
Almost all of them are monochromatic red lasers or LEDs.
The red lasers can only burn if you're shining it in your eyes. They're capped at 5mw of total laser output, and at that level you need to quite a period of time to cause damage.
Visible light at even extreme levels isn't likely to cause burns any time soon. It's UVA, UVB and infrared that burn.
The fact that fluorescent lights spit out more across the spectrum than a red LED(which fyi is monochromatic) kind of tells me this girl is just making shit up.
I'm not saying people don't deserve their day in court. I am saying though that judges should have free reign to use common sense when dismissing cases for lack of a scientific basis of any kind.
I have no problem with the pay rates itself. China and other foreign countries are perfectly free to enact their own minimum wage laws.
What bothers me is the unsafe working conditions and lack of workers rights.
The whole discussion is moot in my opinion. Hear me out.
What do we need of online video?
Well, it should be ubiquitous. Everyone should have it available, or else web developers will be chasing their tales. FLV was a nice improvement over years gone by where a web developer couldn't predict with any accuracy what video playback facilities would be available to any particular user.
Sites like Youtube, break.com, theonion.com, are almost entirely based on online video and are only possible if most viewers can view the content with minimal fuss.
A codec doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be free as in beer, and everywhere. Flash did it, but it was proprietary and people didn't like it. Ogg Theora is free(in all the ways that matter, shut up Theo), but you'll never get native support for it from Microsoft.
To meet the needs of everyone, Google is giving us all VP8. It may not be the best, but if it's freely available to all browsers(native ideally, or by plugin), then it meets the needs of the web developer community to avoid recreating the wheel for every browser.
While off topic, this particular AC is keenly aware of the history and nuance of slashdot's past. It's actually very accurate, and since I've been here since not long after the beginning, I would know.
Politics can still be interesting. And compared to a plethora of drivel I've seen and learned to ignore on Slashdot over the last few years, a nerdy dude timing yellow light durations to beat traffic tickets is pretty damned good.
As far as yellow light durations go, I have it made in Minnesota. Big intersections have signs 150 yards or so before the intersection warning you that the light will be turning yellow soon, so that in the ice we drive in, you'll have the adequate half mile you need to slow down from 70 to zero without T-boning someone. That's not to say we don't have our own traffic subtleties. My favorite is the ninja-30mph-zone-on-a-highway.
There are numerous places where highways suddenly become city streets with 30mph limits. You remember them quick or suffer the fines.
I'm pretty sure the content owners, hardware designers and DVDCCA got together and said "we can make more money by forcing consumers to watch ads for movies, even years after the movies have come out. Get to work."
And with the wonders of patents, the DVDCCA forces all DVD format licensees to build players that honor the AUP table. It's pretty anti-consumer, but with patents they had a stranglehold on the format and consumers couldn't do much about it. Of course this is the same DVDCCA that forces manufacturers to produce DVD players that honor region coding.
This irks me even more than acceptable user operations tables. The movie producers are basically saying "globalization is only good if we can charge every penny each individual customer will pay". I know all companies seek perfect discrimination, but it shouldn't be that way. Content producers shouldn't decide WHERE you can view your legally purchased(not licensed) media.
Sigh, I need a hobby. Bitching about copyrights gets really tiring. Fuck the media companies. I should have just said that from the start and saved my finger strength for a more compelling topic.
There was a cultural barrier there. In the case of Germany, consumers did not like the warehouse type of store. Of course, this is the only way a Walmart store can be competitive - by being huge.
I don't shop at WalMart.
WalMart relies on razor thin margins and a huge number of customers to survive. It wouldn't take but a couple million people like me to make it unprofitable.
Of course, if they changed the way they hire, promote and pay people, that might change my mind. I just don't see that happening any time soon.
His point is valid nonetheless. $8.50 working 40 hours a week is only $1156 after tax per month, and before any deductions for retirement and savings plans.
WalMart touts itself as a perfectly kosher place to work if you're an adult that needs to live off the money, but that couldn't be further from the truth. A disproportionate number of WalMart employees rely on some sort of public social assistance program, whether that be food stamps, daycare assistance or insurance subsidies. WalMart uses razor thin margins, globalized distribution systems and cutthroat pricing to displace retailers that would otherwise pay better.
People buy WalMart's shit not realizing that they're cutting their own Achilles heel.
You could make an argument that some person in China has a job with WalMart where they otherwise would not, but consider this: WalMart directly operates factories in China(they're not just a distributor) and their employees face slave-labor conditions to produce the shit you wanted to save $1 on. If you're going to spout shit about globalization, go all the way and just say you don't give a shit about slave-laborers in China because you wanted to save money.
You are correct.
Cassettes didn't beat 8 track because it was better quality either. They were cheaper and smaller.
And while we're on the topic of media... I switched from VHS to DVD because the media lasted longer and fast forwarding and rewinding is faster. Why is it when I put a DVD in, I have to fuck with the remote for 30 seconds to get to the goddamned menu because of "Acceptable user operations"?
Who the fuck decided the media producers could decide when I can fast forward, rewind, pause or go to the next track?
The most ubiquitous DRM is in every household already and it's obnoxious. Bluray isn't any better either.
Government is broken. It enacts regulation it will not enforce. It's regulatory bodies are toothless in the face of lobbying dollars.
The FCC is toothless to regulate dominating, price-fixing, anti-consumer telecom companies(AT&T, Verizon and Qwest, I'm talking about you.)
Comcast has no reason to treat customers fairly because nobody will make it do so. Being the asshole is more profitable.
He was on the right track though.
They weren't immune to foreign competition, but GM and Ford combined essentially dominated the market for many decades. It wasn't until a decade after the quality/price disparity between GM and foreign cars was so great that the company finally went belly up.
The market was just slow to correct itself because consumers are slow to change their perceptions.
If people were willing to abstain from businesses they think are acting outside societies best interests, we would have a very different corporate landscape. No more walmart. The big three wireless companies would have drastically different policies and pricing. Things would just look a lot different.
I'll be the village idiot for a minute.
I'm not familiar really with this topic at all. As far as I understand it, Google is digitizing public domain books right? And the copyrighted ones it's digitizing previews of books(like table of contents, random pages, etc.)?
Correct? I'm just trying to get a handle on why everyone is pissed off. Sadly, googling this topic leads to information overload and I just don't have time to read 100 articles about it.
Can you explain it to me in 1 paragraph or less?
UPS's do it using a MOSFET H bridge(or similar power drive configuration) and an output capacitor to smooth the waveform.
Scaling up something like that to the megawatt scale would be very expensive and probably fragile.