No matter what safeguards are in place, ANY company like this is only one stupid intern away from a similar situation as AOL faces. Even if there's absolutely no malicious intent, information like this tends to have a very low vapor pressure. The information exists, and as the AOL incident points out, people want the information (as witnessed by the incredible number of articles, websites, and discussions about the content of the AOL database).
Someone will eventually screw up. It's inevitable. It's Murphy's Law... if it can happen, it will... especially given an ample number of opportunities. And there's lots of opportunities for someone to mis-handle this data.
I'm usually fairly on top of things like this, but to be honest, until this happened, I didn't know that Google Personal Search History existed. And apparently the default is to save the history and have it attached to my gmail account. I've now deleted the history and paused the data collection, but does that mean it's really gone? How do I know... maybe it's just hidden for now and not really gone. And it's a little bothersome that the default is to keep the data. The default should be to not save it attached to any sort of personally identifiable informaion unless I give explicit, and repeated, permission to do so.
When I can buy the music I want at a reasonable price with zero DRM (nada, none, zip... not Apple's kinda-friendly-with-the-masses DRM... none) and uncompressed formats, then I'm in... and I will buy a lot of music that way. There's a few places I buy from now, but the selections are limited.
But until then, it's physical CD's for me and all of the overhead that goes along with that. If stupid record companies want less profit because they're moving around physical media, then fine... that's their problem.
CORRECT! But don't stop there. Speak to Stevens' constituants by writing to the editors of The Anchorage Daily News, or any of these newspapers and magazines. Speak to other Americans by writing to the Washington Post. Maybe one of our "letters to the editor" will be published.
Write to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Vir., voted in favor of Network Neutrality in the Judiciary committee) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., introduced the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, S 2360, in March) to tell them about Sen. Stevens comments so that when they debate on the floor, they can speak to the utter incompetence of Sen. Stevens on this subject.
Make this your July 4th pledge. I'm sure most of you have the day off tomorrow. Spend an hour and write some letters. Talking amongst ourselves will accomplish nothing.
No, absolutely not. I know what you said did happen. But in this instance they were talking about reviewing cell phone conversation recordings. I would not have been at all surprised/shocked about them reviewing answering machine recordings. That isn't what they were talking about. Of that I'm certain.
Right after 9/11, I distinctly remember some lowly government official talking about them going through the recordings of cell phone conversations from flight 93. There was a lot of media and government confusion at the time and the media would talk to any government official they could and the feds hadn't quite gotten their lines of communication straight. I immediatly remember thinking "They've been recording cell phone conversations?!?!?!?" I was incredibly shocked to hear that, but I can't for the life of me remember what news show it was.
This happened within a few days after 9/11 and I wish I could remember the program, because at the time it seemed to be an incredible statement.
Does anyone know what program / source I'm talking about? Surely such a damning piece of evidence must have been noticed by someone other than me. I've always been mad at myself for not making note of the source when I heard it.
The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.
It was probably the early '80's or so when I think chemistry sets were at their peak of popularity. I used to get up on Saturday morning, grab my bike, and go yard-sale hunting looking for chemistry sets. In my mind, I figured no one set would give you enough stuff to do anything dangerous, but if I were clever enough to get multiple sets from multiple companies, then maybe I could actually find a good chemical combination that would be more interesting than turning blue looking water to green looking water. On a good day, I could come home with 2 or 3 nearly-complete sets.
Sadly, I was never able to find a combination that was truly worthy. About the worst I was able to do was to give the bathtub a purple stain that no amount of scrubbing was going to get rid of (and believe me... Mom had me try).
It is kind of sad to think that my son will probably never do anything similar (of course if he does, I'll smile and my wife will be making him scrub the tub).
Warner added that whether a TV show or feature film, it will only play on the initial computer used to make the download. The downloads will not therefore work on other PCs or standard DVD players.
A small step in the right direction, but no thanks. I'd gladly buy an un-DRM'd file that I can burn to DVD and shrink to put on my ipod.
I require AMP (that's Absolute Media Portability). Can I play it on my non-network connected TV in the bedroom? Can my kids watch it in the car? Can I loan it to my friend? If the answer to any of those is "No", then I'm really not interested. If "Yes", then I'll be VERY interested.
It seems incredibly stupid to me for media companies to waste money on physical distribution when they could be distributing bits. But I requite that I can do the same thing with those bits that I can do with physical media.
Come on. Let's not kid ourselves. As much as George likes to pretend he's taking the high ground and being true to his artistic vision (which annoyed me, but at least I could respect), we all knew this would come down to $$$$. In the grand scheme, it's a trivial amount of work to get these DVDs ready to go and the cost of production is trivial. This decision will bring in millions upon millions of dollars into Lucasfilm and there's no way they could turn that down.
It has nothing to do with the pressure we collectively put on them. It has nothing to do with George caving on his desire to keep tweaking his movies.
It has to do with bringing in more moolah. Just keep milking the cash cow.
Um... and I... um.... well... I'll probably be first in line to squeeze the teet.
-S
Is law enforcement ignoring this?
on
Phishers Get Phoney
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First off, the penalties for such intentional and deliberate fraud attempts should be very, very severe. This is an organized and well-planned attempt to commit fraud and it should be treated as such. I'm all for fairness in sentencing, but when someone goes through this much trouble to attempt to steal from others, they should be dealt with very harshly.
Secondly, why does law enforcement have such a hard time stopping things like this? It would seem fairly trivial to me to follow the phone and money trail to whomever is commiting these crimes. I understand that much of it may involve international crime, but come on.
Is it that there just so much of it that they can't keep up? Or is it that they're so incompetent that, even given the tools they have at their disposal, they can't actually track down the criminals? Or is this just such a low priority crime that they're not paying attention to it? Or is that they're so bogged down in the beauracracy, especially if they have to use international resources, that they don't have time to react?
No matter what, it's a sad state of affairs that such crimes are so common.
If talking on cell phones while driving is so dangerous, then why hasn't there been a very large and dramatic increase in accident rates to go along with the dramatic increase in cell phone usage?
Answer... there hasn't been. In fact, the number of deaths continues to fall in part due to safer cars, but also the number of accidents is falling too. Huh? I thought cell phones were such a serious problem that we have to pass laws to keep people from using them while driving? I'm sorry, but the data DOES NOT support such a conclusion. Incredible increase in cell phone usage. Small decrease in accident rates.
I just don't get it. Law makers need a boogey man to go after... to make it look like they're doing something.
It's not the phone... it's the driver. Some can handle a small level of multi-tasking... some can't. So the answer is to punish everyone and give the police something else to distract them from actually fighting crime and dealing with the truly dangerous people in our society.
I really can not believe that the rovers are still running at all.
NASA did a bang up job on these.
One might also argue that since they so grossly exceeded their life expectancy then they were overdesigned and cost too much.
But I agree. Great job.
Build more and recover the economies of scale!
Yes! Yes! Yes! I can't understand why they insist on going back to the drawing board every time. I've read about the next generation rovers. They're very different in many ways including the way they'll land on Mars.
I just don't understand why, with the success that Spirt and Opportunity have had, they don't build these as a platform. Surely if the research was put into new instruments that could be attached to the current design, rather than redesigning from scratch, that would be a better use of the money.
I'm sure (or hope) NASA has thought this through, right?
"I'm sorry Dave. Everything you were working on is know kaput and I've forgotten about everything that you were doing. By the way, where did that network connection go?"
ust what the world needs: another techno-crutch that will absolve parents of the annoyance of actual parenting. Let's not talk to kids about the effects of loud noises on their hearing - that's too difficult.
Ah, spoken like a true non-parent (I'll be shocked if you're the parent of anyone old enough to be effected by this). This doesn't absolve parents of anything. You can explain and reason with a teenager all you'd like and the second they're out of your sight, it's time to ignore everything the parents said. You can't hold their hand every minute of every day, but you're still responsible for them and that means not just talking to them, but being proactive in their lives and putting down certain boundaries.
Do I let my kid have free reign on the TV? No, I'm a parent and part of that is, as you said, parenting. Discussing with them what they're watching and why and putting down limits on what I think is appropriate for their age, not what THEY think is appropriate. Since I can't take the remote from them every minute of every day and be in the room with them every time it's time to watch TV, I lock out the channels I feel are inappropriate.
I see this as no different. My 6 year old wants and iPod. Younger and younger kids are getting them. And if he got one, I could explain to him and reason with him the dangers of loud music, but he doesn't have a sense of what's too loud, so I think this would be a great solution. If I explain to him not to touch the open bottle of sleeping pills on the counter, is that good parenting, or is leaving them there just plain irresponsible? Putting them in a locked cabinet doesn't absolve me of actual parenting. It's just being proactive and looking out for my child's best interests. Parenting is a continual series of teaching, learning, and guidance. Sometimes they do the right thing, other times you need to step in.
It's not a substitute for parenting. It's just another tool.
Great idea about burning and ripping! Now if I want to recompress it, I'll have a doubly sucky sounding song, not just the regular sucky that is 128 kbps.
Or I can just give a big 'ol F.U. to the big labels and Apple until they start releasing high quality un-DRM'd music.
On most every flight I've been on recently, I can recall at least one wayward cell phone ringing by someone who has forgotten to turn their phone off.
That most large commercial flights are probably carrying some number of cell phones that are turned on, and that there doesn't appear to be a change in the number of airline incidents as the number of cell phones has increased, indicates to me that the study is probably flawed.
I don't see anything new here. A bunch of enterprise CAD programs including NX (formerly Unigraphics) and Pro/E have similar design/FEA capabilities. There are typically many options for optimizing certain aspects of the design be it strength in a certain area, weight, etc. I haven't used them, but I'm sure higher-end versions of AutoCAD and the like have similar capabilities.
Maybe I missed something, but I didn't read anything in that article that isn't already done in industry every day.
I don't think that's a major exception. $1000 receivers are the norm for mid-range home theaters and $300-$400 per speaker isn't outrageous for something that actually sounds good. It's not like we're talking $10K electronics here. I think most all of my friends have home theater systems whose stereo sound component probably costs in the $1.5 to $2.5K range. We're not rich, just people who really love this stuff.
AAC at 128 kbps is at least equivalent in quality to MP3 at 192 kbps. Turning around and burning a 128-kbps AAC file to 192 kbps MP3 results in ABSOLUTELY NO audible degradation that I can hear... and you know what? I'll bet you can't hear it either. What is a good example of a track that I can purchase from iTunes, burn and re-rip as MP3, and observe a noticeable degree of loss?
I can't hear for you, so I can't comment. All I can tell you is what I hear and when I sit and listen to music (which literally means sitting... and listening... to music) on my home stereo system, it makes enough of a difference for it to matter to me. I don't have really high-end system either, though it's a good system. I did put a lot of time and listening into choosing the components (CD player, receiver, and speakers amount to about $2000).
And I'm not anti MP3. I have an ipod. I use it for music on-the-go (car, walking, etc). and I did rip most of my CD collection with either 196 or 256 kbps lame-encoded mp3. And I do listen to them on my home stereo (I stream them and the sound quality is absoutely OK if I just have background music on or if I have company over), but when I really want to listen to music at decent volume and actually pay attention to what I'm listening to, the difference is significant enough to me that I want to have access to the highest quality music available.
If I were (or if you are) listening with earbuds or computer speakers, or even any fairly mid-fi playback system, I agree that the difference would probably be indiscernable.
Slashdot Mirror
The person with username "wiggles" doesn't have kids. Go figure.
What do you mean "if" ?
-S
No matter what safeguards are in place, ANY company like this is only one stupid intern away from a similar situation as AOL faces. Even if there's absolutely no malicious intent, information like this tends to have a very low vapor pressure. The information exists, and as the AOL incident points out, people want the information (as witnessed by the incredible number of articles, websites, and discussions about the content of the AOL database).
Someone will eventually screw up. It's inevitable. It's Murphy's Law... if it can happen, it will... especially given an ample number of opportunities. And there's lots of opportunities for someone to mis-handle this data.
I'm usually fairly on top of things like this, but to be honest, until this happened, I didn't know that Google Personal Search History existed. And apparently the default is to save the history and have it attached to my gmail account. I've now deleted the history and paused the data collection, but does that mean it's really gone? How do I know... maybe it's just hidden for now and not really gone. And it's a little bothersome that the default is to keep the data. The default should be to not save it attached to any sort of personally identifiable informaion unless I give explicit, and repeated, permission to do so.
-S
Well, yea... that's pretty much what I meant.
When I can buy the music I want at a reasonable price with zero DRM (nada, none, zip... not Apple's kinda-friendly-with-the-masses DRM... none) and uncompressed formats, then I'm in... and I will buy a lot of music that way. There's a few places I buy from now, but the selections are limited.
But until then, it's physical CD's for me and all of the overhead that goes along with that. If stupid record companies want less profit because they're moving around physical media, then fine... that's their problem.
-S
Write to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Vir., voted in favor of Network Neutrality in the Judiciary committee) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., introduced the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, S 2360, in March) to tell them about Sen. Stevens comments so that when they debate on the floor, they can speak to the utter incompetence of Sen. Stevens on this subject.
Make this your July 4th pledge. I'm sure most of you have the day off tomorrow. Spend an hour and write some letters. Talking amongst ourselves will accomplish nothing.
-S
No, absolutely not. I know what you said did happen. But in this instance they were talking about reviewing cell phone conversation recordings. I would not have been at all surprised/shocked about them reviewing answering machine recordings. That isn't what they were talking about. Of that I'm certain.
-S
Right after 9/11, I distinctly remember some lowly government official talking about them going through the recordings of cell phone conversations from flight 93. There was a lot of media and government confusion at the time and the media would talk to any government official they could and the feds hadn't quite gotten their lines of communication straight. I immediatly remember thinking "They've been recording cell phone conversations?!?!?!?" I was incredibly shocked to hear that, but I can't for the life of me remember what news show it was.
This happened within a few days after 9/11 and I wish I could remember the program, because at the time it seemed to be an incredible statement.
Does anyone know what program / source I'm talking about? Surely such a damning piece of evidence must have been noticed by someone other than me. I've always been mad at myself for not making note of the source when I heard it.
-S
Sorry. I'm truly sorry. But it had to be said.
-S
It was probably the early '80's or so when I think chemistry sets were at their peak of popularity. I used to get up on Saturday morning, grab my bike, and go yard-sale hunting looking for chemistry sets. In my mind, I figured no one set would give you enough stuff to do anything dangerous, but if I were clever enough to get multiple sets from multiple companies, then maybe I could actually find a good chemical combination that would be more interesting than turning blue looking water to green looking water. On a good day, I could come home with 2 or 3 nearly-complete sets.
Sadly, I was never able to find a combination that was truly worthy. About the worst I was able to do was to give the bathtub a purple stain that no amount of scrubbing was going to get rid of (and believe me... Mom had me try).
It is kind of sad to think that my son will probably never do anything similar (of course if he does, I'll smile and my wife will be making him scrub the tub).
-S
A small step in the right direction, but no thanks. I'd gladly buy an un-DRM'd file that I can burn to DVD and shrink to put on my ipod.
I require AMP (that's Absolute Media Portability). Can I play it on my non-network connected TV in the bedroom? Can my kids watch it in the car? Can I loan it to my friend? If the answer to any of those is "No", then I'm really not interested. If "Yes", then I'll be VERY interested.
It seems incredibly stupid to me for media companies to waste money on physical distribution when they could be distributing bits. But I requite that I can do the same thing with those bits that I can do with physical media.
-S
Come on. Let's not kid ourselves. As much as George likes to pretend he's taking the high ground and being true to his artistic vision (which annoyed me, but at least I could respect), we all knew this would come down to $$$$. In the grand scheme, it's a trivial amount of work to get these DVDs ready to go and the cost of production is trivial. This decision will bring in millions upon millions of dollars into Lucasfilm and there's no way they could turn that down.
It has nothing to do with the pressure we collectively put on them. It has nothing to do with George caving on his desire to keep tweaking his movies.
It has to do with bringing in more moolah. Just keep milking the cash cow.
Um... and I... um.... well... I'll probably be first in line to squeeze the teet.
-S
First off, the penalties for such intentional and deliberate fraud attempts should be very, very severe. This is an organized and well-planned attempt to commit fraud and it should be treated as such. I'm all for fairness in sentencing, but when someone goes through this much trouble to attempt to steal from others, they should be dealt with very harshly.
Secondly, why does law enforcement have such a hard time stopping things like this? It would seem fairly trivial to me to follow the phone and money trail to whomever is commiting these crimes. I understand that much of it may involve international crime, but come on.
Is it that there just so much of it that they can't keep up? Or is it that they're so incompetent that, even given the tools they have at their disposal, they can't actually track down the criminals? Or is this just such a low priority crime that they're not paying attention to it? Or is that they're so bogged down in the beauracracy, especially if they have to use international resources, that they don't have time to react?
No matter what, it's a sad state of affairs that such crimes are so common.
-S
That's because he just wants to live like common people.
-S
Answer... there hasn't been. In fact, the number of deaths continues to fall in part due to safer cars, but also the number of accidents is falling too. Huh? I thought cell phones were such a serious problem that we have to pass laws to keep people from using them while driving? I'm sorry, but the data DOES NOT support such a conclusion. Incredible increase in cell phone usage. Small decrease in accident rates.
I just don't get it. Law makers need a boogey man to go after... to make it look like they're doing something.
It's not the phone... it's the driver. Some can handle a small level of multi-tasking... some can't. So the answer is to punish everyone and give the police something else to distract them from actually fighting crime and dealing with the truly dangerous people in our society.
-S
One might also argue that since they so grossly exceeded their life expectancy then they were overdesigned and cost too much.
But I agree. Great job.
Build more and recover the economies of scale!
Yes! Yes! Yes! I can't understand why they insist on going back to the drawing board every time. I've read about the next generation rovers. They're very different in many ways including the way they'll land on Mars.
I just don't understand why, with the success that Spirt and Opportunity have had, they don't build these as a platform. Surely if the research was put into new instruments that could be attached to the current design, rather than redesigning from scratch, that would be a better use of the money.
I'm sure (or hope) NASA has thought this through, right?
-S
... the windows "hibernate" feature.
"Ok... wake up"
"I'm sorry Dave. Everything you were working on is know kaput and I've forgotten about everything that you were doing. By the way, where did that network connection go?"
Ah, spoken like a true non-parent (I'll be shocked if you're the parent of anyone old enough to be effected by this). This doesn't absolve parents of anything. You can explain and reason with a teenager all you'd like and the second they're out of your sight, it's time to ignore everything the parents said. You can't hold their hand every minute of every day, but you're still responsible for them and that means not just talking to them, but being proactive in their lives and putting down certain boundaries.
Do I let my kid have free reign on the TV? No, I'm a parent and part of that is, as you said, parenting. Discussing with them what they're watching and why and putting down limits on what I think is appropriate for their age, not what THEY think is appropriate. Since I can't take the remote from them every minute of every day and be in the room with them every time it's time to watch TV, I lock out the channels I feel are inappropriate.
I see this as no different. My 6 year old wants and iPod. Younger and younger kids are getting them. And if he got one, I could explain to him and reason with him the dangers of loud music, but he doesn't have a sense of what's too loud, so I think this would be a great solution. If I explain to him not to touch the open bottle of sleeping pills on the counter, is that good parenting, or is leaving them there just plain irresponsible? Putting them in a locked cabinet doesn't absolve me of actual parenting. It's just being proactive and looking out for my child's best interests. Parenting is a continual series of teaching, learning, and guidance. Sometimes they do the right thing, other times you need to step in.
It's not a substitute for parenting. It's just another tool.
-S
Great idea about burning and ripping! Now if I want to recompress it, I'll have a doubly sucky sounding song, not just the regular sucky that is 128 kbps.
Or I can just give a big 'ol F.U. to the big labels and Apple until they start releasing high quality un-DRM'd music.
-S
On most every flight I've been on recently, I can recall at least one wayward cell phone ringing by someone who has forgotten to turn their phone off.
That most large commercial flights are probably carrying some number of cell phones that are turned on, and that there doesn't appear to be a change in the number of airline incidents as the number of cell phones has increased, indicates to me that the study is probably flawed.
-S
Maybe I missed something, but I didn't read anything in that article that isn't already done in industry every day.
-S
I don't think that's a major exception. $1000 receivers are the norm for mid-range home theaters and $300-$400 per speaker isn't outrageous for something that actually sounds good. It's not like we're talking $10K electronics here. I think most all of my friends have home theater systems whose stereo sound component probably costs in the $1.5 to $2.5K range. We're not rich, just people who really love this stuff.
-S
Oh, touchy touchy. Methinks one of the contributors to the billion doesn't like being called a sucker.
-S
I can't hear for you, so I can't comment. All I can tell you is what I hear and when I sit and listen to music (which literally means sitting... and listening... to music) on my home stereo system, it makes enough of a difference for it to matter to me. I don't have really high-end system either, though it's a good system. I did put a lot of time and listening into choosing the components (CD player, receiver, and speakers amount to about $2000).
And I'm not anti MP3. I have an ipod. I use it for music on-the-go (car, walking, etc). and I did rip most of my CD collection with either 196 or 256 kbps lame-encoded mp3. And I do listen to them on my home stereo (I stream them and the sound quality is absoutely OK if I just have background music on or if I have company over), but when I really want to listen to music at decent volume and actually pay attention to what I'm listening to, the difference is significant enough to me that I want to have access to the highest quality music available.
If I were (or if you are) listening with earbuds or computer speakers, or even any fairly mid-fi playback system, I agree that the difference would probably be indiscernable.
-S