While I also think that it's silly that people think that giving MS money somehow causes them to lose money, I disagree that we can't have an effect.
Who do you think killed the adoption of RDRAM/MCA for the most part? In the end it was the geeks. We, collectively, are the people that order computers and parts for our companies. We are the people that work in or run thousands of smaller computer assembly shops. We are the people that get asked for advice when our less tech savvy friends are buying a computer. I wouldn't underestimate that effect.
While this effect is less so with game consoles, it's not negligible.
Of course, I think a lot of the people who say "buying an X-box is sticking it to MS" are really just rationalizing their own purchase, and I do agree with you for the most part.
Re:Evidence we've been damaging the environment
on
Starshine 3 is Toast
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you paid attention, you would realize he was making fun of the global warming people.
I remember when I heard about the Challenger accident vividly. With that in mind, exploding shuttles don't make good jokes.
Uh, why though? I never really understood why it was such a big deal other than the money. If your local news had reported on a 5 car pileup on the Interstate where 7 people were killed, would you remember that moment vividly for the rest of your life??
Sure, the shuttle cost a lot of money, but the government is in the business of building expensive things and then blowing them up, you know how much each cruise missle costs these days, right?
"Collapsing building leaves layer of dust and debris on surrounding area."
This is an amazing breakthrough. Just think of all the lives that will be saved when someone invents a "dust mask" that will prevent inhalation of dust while demolishing buildings. This is truely the pinnacle of scientific achievement.
Well, there would be less spam, but there would still be some.
See, spam doesn't have to actually sell anything. There is some level of spam that is just spam companies (they call themselves marketing consultants) convincing people that spam really works, even if it doesn't. The company may not sell anything, but that's OK, the spam/scammer can just move on to another company, or try to convince the company they need to "run their ad longer".
Your point is interesting, the spammers are changing their spam to get it past Spamassassin, that means that the authors of Spamassassin control the spam content!
Spamassassin should automatically let any message through that has AD: in the subject line by default.. Then all the spammers would use AD: to bypass the filter, and we could easily choose on the client side whether to read them or not. A sort of way to encourage ethical spamming I guess.
It would also seem to take some of the pressure off the "arms race" of spammers trying to outsmart filters.
This may not work, and I haven't really though it through very well, but it's just an idea I had after reading your message.
There is always going to be some level of single reflections. Get a magnifier and look at your own screen in a high contrast area. I guarantee you will be able to see what I mean.
Floppy disk data is many orders of magnitude less dense than a hard drive, let alone a modern one.
I mean, 200 GB in three platters these days. That's about 138,888 floppy disks, in about the surface area of 6 floppies. That's 23 thousand times more dense.
I've never found any accounts on the web of anyone doing magnetic analysis of platter surfaces with modern hard disk, with any amount of equipment, only seen some proposed methods in papers, and even then, they admit it would take weeks to get more than a few kilobytes.
and I'll do it at over 100Hz so it will be better for my eyes.
Or not. Higher refresh rates cause more signal reflections, which translate to a tiny wiggle in high contrast areas. Most of the time you won't notice it outright, but use a magnifying glass to look at a high contrast border when running at very high refresh.
I'm on an expensive Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 200, and even at 85 Hz I can see ripple in high contrast areas with a magnifier. It just gets worse the higher you go. Using coax with BNC instead of the D-sub signal cable should help with this though.
The best refresh is the lowest one that you can see no flicker at. For most people this is between 72 and 85 Hz.
if you vote from home, a politician could be standing right behind you while you enter in your 2048 bit pasword with a $50 bill and defeat the integrity of the electoral process.
I don't see that really as a problem in itself. After all, the person liked the candidate better because it got them $50. All voluntary.
It's no different from the current state of affairs, where some politician promises a tax cut, the net effect is the same, "Vote for me and I will give you $50". We saw that in Virginia with Gilmore and "No car tax!"... of course that translated into "Reduced car tax that is about to get put back to Full Car Tax!".
The root of the problem is not the potential to bribe voters, it's that voters are willing to sell out for such small amounts. I think there is little that can be done about that, it's an almost fundamental flaw in democracy.
The Supreme Court voted for Disney in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
I hate the ruling as much as anyone else, but this is going a little overboard. You obviously read Lessigs blog, so you should understand that the court was put into a difficult place. I'm sure that, given the choice to repeal the Bono act, they would. They mostly ruled that it wasn't the court's place to do so, not on the merits of the act itself.
isn't "a meeting of the minds" an essential aspect of a contract?
Yep, and I think it would be very easy to make a case against spyware on these grounds. Of all the spyware installations I have cleaned up for people, not one of them knew what they were getting into.
And as I said in another post, if the EULA is no longer protecting the spyware company, that means there is a good case for criminal charges under the computer crime laws for the things they do to people's computer without authorization. Right now they can claim authorization and skirt the laws, but if the EULA becomes invalid, they are on very thin ice criminally.
Save for the EULA, what spyware companies, including MS, do is criminal computer intrusion, clearly in violation of many computer crime laws. That makes it more than just a civil liability and gets into criminal territory.
I agree with you, hell will probably freeze over before we see Gates in handcuffs, but stranger things have happened.
In a way, this ruling creates a basis to say that an EULA is not a "contract" under contract law.
It's been firmly established that companies can enter into contracts with other companies and individuals that have the end result of censoring speech. Every nondisclosure agreement is of this nature.
This ruling is basically saying that the EULA is not a contract in the usual sense, and could provide basis for throwing out a whole lot of EULA clauses that are obnoxious.
While I think it would take another case to broaden this to the point of really making a difference, if this stands up to appeal, then it does make for interesting precedent. The end result could be reeling back in the EULA, and maybe getting some spyware people thrown in jail (including MS). A very good thing.
Except that Network Solutions is a completely different company. Network Associates makes anti-virus software.
On a related note, I guess this means MS will take the "You can't publish benchmarks about.NET" clause out of that EULA. It would be hilarious to see MS forced to pay 50 cents to everyone who installed a recent servicepack with.NET.
Well the problem with the African fruit fly is that they show an uncanny attraction to showtunes and Judy Garland, thus causing an overall drop in population.
Edonkey already based what "file" a file is on a hash value, not filename. As far as I know there is no trust metric yet. Kazaa seems to have the reverse, files defined by filename, with a simplistic "file rating" system.
I've come across some of this stuff, mostly I got mp3s that were the right length, but just silence rather than what the file was named.
They find their way into my playlist if I am not careful, and when I am using it for background music while intensively coding I usually don't notice when one comes up, but it scares the shit out of me if a really loud song comes on after it.:)
Well, it's come full circle then, I remember clearly shattering ceramic/glass like platters out of an old huge (full height drive bay sized) hard disk.
Slashdot Mirror
While I also think that it's silly that people think that giving MS money somehow causes them to lose money, I disagree that we can't have an effect.
Who do you think killed the adoption of RDRAM/MCA for the most part? In the end it was the geeks. We, collectively, are the people that order computers and parts for our companies. We are the people that work in or run thousands of smaller computer assembly shops. We are the people that get asked for advice when our less tech savvy friends are buying a computer. I wouldn't underestimate that effect.
While this effect is less so with game consoles, it's not negligible.
Of course, I think a lot of the people who say "buying an X-box is sticking it to MS" are really just rationalizing their own purchase, and I do agree with you for the most part.
If you paid attention, you would realize he was making fun of the global warming people.
I remember when I heard about the Challenger accident vividly. With that in mind, exploding shuttles don't make good jokes.
Uh, why though? I never really understood why it was such a big deal other than the money. If your local news had reported on a 5 car pileup on the Interstate where 7 people were killed, would you remember that moment vividly for the rest of your life??
Sure, the shuttle cost a lot of money, but the government is in the business of building expensive things and then blowing them up, you know how much each cruise missle costs these days, right?
So really, what's the big deal?
NASA Thaws Out Teacher in Space.... ....program.
:) Images of frozen teachers in stasis, part of a super secret Mars mission, etc etc.
Caught me offguard for a second.
"Collapsing building leaves layer of dust and debris on surrounding area."
This is an amazing breakthrough. Just think of all the lives that will be saved when someone invents a "dust mask" that will prevent inhalation of dust while demolishing buildings. This is truely the pinnacle of scientific achievement.
Well, there would be less spam, but there would still be some.
See, spam doesn't have to actually sell anything. There is some level of spam that is just spam companies (they call themselves marketing consultants) convincing people that spam really works, even if it doesn't. The company may not sell anything, but that's OK, the spam/scammer can just move on to another company, or try to convince the company they need to "run their ad longer".
Your point is interesting, the spammers are changing their spam to get it past Spamassassin, that means that the authors of Spamassassin control the spam content!
Spamassassin should automatically let any message through that has AD: in the subject line by default.. Then all the spammers would use AD: to bypass the filter, and we could easily choose on the client side whether to read them or not. A sort of way to encourage ethical spamming I guess.
It would also seem to take some of the pressure off the "arms race" of spammers trying to outsmart filters.
This may not work, and I haven't really though it through very well, but it's just an idea I had after reading your message.
There is always going to be some level of single reflections. Get a magnifier and look at your own screen in a high contrast area. I guarantee you will be able to see what I mean.
Floppy disk data is many orders of magnitude less dense than a hard drive, let alone a modern one.
I mean, 200 GB in three platters these days. That's about 138,888 floppy disks, in about the surface area of 6 floppies. That's 23 thousand times more dense.
I've never found any accounts on the web of anyone doing magnetic analysis of platter surfaces with modern hard disk, with any amount of equipment, only seen some proposed methods in papers, and even then, they admit it would take weeks to get more than a few kilobytes.
But did they take into account any eyestrain caused by prolonged reading with the signal ripple that is made worse at higher refresh?
as if he has been deaf, dumb, and blind for all this time.
But he sure plays a mean pinball.
and I'll do it at over 100Hz so it will be better for my eyes.
Or not. Higher refresh rates cause more signal reflections, which translate to a tiny wiggle in high contrast areas. Most of the time you won't notice it outright, but use a magnifying glass to look at a high contrast border when running at very high refresh.
I'm on an expensive Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 200, and even at 85 Hz I can see ripple in high contrast areas with a magnifier. It just gets worse the higher you go. Using coax with BNC instead of the D-sub signal cable should help with this though.
The best refresh is the lowest one that you can see no flicker at. For most people this is between 72 and 85 Hz.
if you vote from home, a politician could be standing right behind you while you enter in your 2048 bit pasword with a $50 bill and defeat the integrity of the electoral process.
I don't see that really as a problem in itself. After all, the person liked the candidate better because it got them $50. All voluntary.
It's no different from the current state of affairs, where some politician promises a tax cut, the net effect is the same, "Vote for me and I will give you $50". We saw that in Virginia with Gilmore and "No car tax!"... of course that translated into "Reduced car tax that is about to get put back to Full Car Tax!".
The root of the problem is not the potential to bribe voters, it's that voters are willing to sell out for such small amounts. I think there is little that can be done about that, it's an almost fundamental flaw in democracy.
The Supreme Court voted for Disney in Eldred vs. Ashcroft.
I hate the ruling as much as anyone else, but this is going a little overboard. You obviously read Lessigs blog, so you should understand that the court was put into a difficult place. I'm sure that, given the choice to repeal the Bono act, they would. They mostly ruled that it wasn't the court's place to do so, not on the merits of the act itself.
isn't "a meeting of the minds" an essential aspect of a contract?
Yep, and I think it would be very easy to make a case against spyware on these grounds. Of all the spyware installations I have cleaned up for people, not one of them knew what they were getting into.
And as I said in another post, if the EULA is no longer protecting the spyware company, that means there is a good case for criminal charges under the computer crime laws for the things they do to people's computer without authorization. Right now they can claim authorization and skirt the laws, but if the EULA becomes invalid, they are on very thin ice criminally.
Well, it's all in theory, but think about it.
Save for the EULA, what spyware companies, including MS, do is criminal computer intrusion, clearly in violation of many computer crime laws. That makes it more than just a civil liability and gets into criminal territory.
I agree with you, hell will probably freeze over before we see Gates in handcuffs, but stranger things have happened.
OJ Simpson would be the perfect person for the job
In a way, this ruling creates a basis to say that an EULA is not a "contract" under contract law.
It's been firmly established that companies can enter into contracts with other companies and individuals that have the end result of censoring speech. Every nondisclosure agreement is of this nature.
This ruling is basically saying that the EULA is not a contract in the usual sense, and could provide basis for throwing out a whole lot of EULA clauses that are obnoxious.
While I think it would take another case to broaden this to the point of really making a difference, if this stands up to appeal, then it does make for interesting precedent. The end result could be reeling back in the EULA, and maybe getting some spyware people thrown in jail (including MS). A very good thing.
As always, IANAL.
Except that Network Solutions is a completely different company. Network Associates makes anti-virus software.
.NET" clause out of that EULA. It would be hilarious to see MS forced to pay 50 cents to everyone who installed a recent servicepack with .NET.
On a related note, I guess this means MS will take the "You can't publish benchmarks about
Well the problem with the African fruit fly is that they show an uncanny attraction to showtunes and Judy Garland, thus causing an overall drop in population.
The world doesn't exist.... disprove it!
Edonkey already based what "file" a file is on a hash value, not filename. As far as I know there is no trust metric yet. Kazaa seems to have the reverse, files defined by filename, with a simplistic "file rating" system.
Shirley Manson is all that
Her sister Marilyn is really hot too.
I've come across some of this stuff, mostly I got mp3s that were the right length, but just silence rather than what the file was named.
:)
They find their way into my playlist if I am not careful, and when I am using it for background music while intensively coding I usually don't notice when one comes up, but it scares the shit out of me if a really loud song comes on after it.
Well, it's come full circle then, I remember clearly shattering ceramic/glass like platters out of an old huge (full height drive bay sized) hard disk.