It depends on who is doing the measuring. Companies who make storage media often use the system you describe, while software actually performing the reading and writing most often use 2^10 = kilobyte, 2^20 = megabyte, etc. since it reflects what is (more or less) actually happening on the media.
Insuficient control of execution by the continued use of filename extentions and insuficient privilidge seperation make continued explotation a reality.
I agree. Unfortunately, getting Microsoft to produce a reasonably secure product is not as simple a solution. The main point, however, still stands: The best way to prevent hijacked desktop computers is to secure the desktop computer.
I'm in more or less the same boat as far as my ISP restricting inbound and outbound SMTP connections. At least however, they do so in a reasonably sane manner. While you can't connect to external SMTP servers on port 25 anymore, their SMTP server is reasonably reliable and doesn't pull any dirty tricks such as filtering based on return address or rewriting mail headers, so it is useable as an outgoing mail server. They also don't block port 465 outgoing (SMTP over SSL).
When I decided I wanted to handle my own e-mail I signed up for one of the many UML host providers. (IMHO the $25/month or so is worth not having to worry about keeping a computer running and connected to the internet 24/7, YMMV). By using IMAP and SMTP over SSL, my ISP's typical restrictions really don't become a problem.
Can someone tell me the difference between an internet with open relays and one of peer machines where everyone is free to run mail transport agents.
Traceability. If you use your own host to send spam, the recipient of the spam is more likely to be able to trace the spam back to you and complain to your provider (assuming you care). If you use somebody else's misconfigured server, the recipient of your spam may only be able to see that it came from some open relay belonging to an unknown third party. (Note that by recipient I mean both the actual individual recipient and the organization hosting the recipient's e-mail)
If my open MTA records your IP address, don't I know who hijacked me to spam? Isn't that the same as being spammed in the first place?
Of course if you aren't knowledgeable enough to realize you're running an open relay, you're also probably not knowledable enough to check your logs and figure our who is abusing your server.
What's the practical benifit of cracking down on open relays when the world is full of hijacked Windoze boxes on cable modems that are serving kiddie porn while blasting us all with DDoS and spam attacks?
It raises the level of the "low-hanging fruit" just a little bit higher. Also, the open-relay mail server and the hijacked home computer are problems with two different (but very simple) solutions. The problem of hijacked home computers can be reasonably solved through the use of firewalls (hardware and/or software), virus scanners, mal-ware checkers, etc. The problem of open-relay mail servers (IMHO) is most appropriatly solved by convincing admins that proper configuaration of their mail servers is critical (or by not accepting mail from servers which allow inappropriate relaying).
I saw over at the windriver site that this thing
has a proprietary os
I'm not sure how this is a disadvantage. The people at NASA can't be experts at everything, and in this case, it looks like they decided to hire an outside company to write the rover software. Just becasue it is a proprietary OS doesn't meant that the code is any buggier, that NASA can't review the software, or that there is any less ability to debug the thing when problems occur.
and only on cpu and only one set of code
A second CPU (or an extra anything for that matter) would add to the weight and energy consumption of the device. I think one reliable system beats out two redundant (but necessarily more complex) systems in this case.
A car may have power-assisted brakes and steering, but the power systems are not required to be operational.
Although this is less-and-less the case as time goes on. Right now, you can buy vehicles where the accelerator pedal is connected to the engine by an entirely electrical link. Automatic transmissions will be going that way shortly (if there aren't any currenly availaible vehicles with that feature). Don't be too surprised if you see vehicles with all-electronic steering in the near future.
Just as an all-electronic system in a vehicle has certain advantages or disadvantages, an all-electronic voting system will be stronger than existing systems in some areas and weaker than existing systems in other area. It is simply a matter of whether the advantages outweigh the risks. (Of course, Diebold is doing a pretty good job of convincing me that the risks outweight the advantages.)
Umm, then why didn't they put this expensive circuitry on the iPod rather than the throw-away battery?
Because then there is nothing preventing the battery from misbehaving (which, from everything I've read is more likely and severe than is the case with NiCd or NiMH), once somebody removes the battery from the iPod.
With Li Ion, the protection circuits pretty much have to be part of the battery if the pack is removeable from the device.
A couple of people inquired about putting a railroad bridge under the Bering Straight.
Now that's a cool idea: An underwater bridge beneith the Bearing Straight. From a practical standpoint, however, I would prefer either a bridge over the bearing straight or a tunnel under the bearing straight.
I have nothing againt underwater bridges, mind you, however, high speed rail service would require much less fuel if the train passed through air rather than much-denser water.
Well, one problem is that under many conditions the frequencies used by BPL can propigate over-the-horizon. That implies that BPL operations in one location could interfear with emergency communications (Red Cross/CAP/ARES/RACES operations in another area.
In the event of an emergency affecting a large area, BPL operations might be taken out as well, as you said. However, since the frequencies might be unusable most of the time, the various agencies and organization which use those frequencies would not be able to use those frequencies for training purposes (which would greatly effect their usefullnes under emergency conditions).
specifically when it comes to pedophilia and statuatory rape
Let's make sure were using the right words here:
Pedophilia: sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object
Statuatory Rape: sexual intercourse with a person who is below the statutory age of consent
Neither of these definitions automatically imply that criminal did anything to cause anybody emotional trauma. An indiviual can find children sexually attractive and not rape them, just as most men don't rape every woman (or man) they find sexuall attractive. In the case of statutory rape, a person one day younger than the age of consent is no more likely to be hurt emotionally than a person one day older than the age of consent, especially given that there are many years difference between the age of consent in different localities.
Let me also add that in your case, you're talking about POP3 (inbound) services and not SMTP (outbound). The whole, "i can create my own temporary e-mail accounts to thwart spammers" is irrelevant. Sending and receiving mail are completely different systems. Anyone running an inbound, mail-receiving server would not be regulated. They would merely have the choice as to whether they wanted to accept only mail from whitelisted systems or not.
I think there is a bit of confusion here. To send mail, I connect to port 465 (smtp-over-ssl) on my sever. When others wish to send mail to me, they connect to port 25 (smtp). This is what I meant by outbound and inbound mail respectivly.
you probably are paying someone else for Internet connectivity, and therefore have the use of their outbound mail relays. It would be their responsibility to choose whether they wanted their server to be "registered" and if there was a centralized "whitelist", it would be of great benefit for them to participate.
You assume that the comany which can provide me with economical, reasonable-quality, decent-speed, consumer-class internet service is also capable of running a decent outbound mail server. In many cases, they are not. Mine, for example, occasionally rejects outbound email based on the From: header, occasionally silently drops messages, and has unusually long delays for sending e-mail. Other than their outbound e-mail, though, they seem to do a good job.
To answer the content of your other reply: Who decides who qualifies to be on the white-list? What are the requrements? How much will it cost? etc. I would happily register myself with any whitelist that has reasonable policies on all of the above.
I would happily register myself with any reasonable third-party white-list. However, if it is run by a government as a matter of law, or run/administered by the likes of versign et. al, I doubt reasonable would describe the system.
* Spread the word that the only realistic solution to spam is licensing outbound mail relays via a sanctioned body that is nowhere near as incompetent as ICANN. We need an opt-in, international SMTP mail relay whitelist with ethical rules for being included.
Sorry, I disagree. I (and by extension anybody) should be allowed to run whatever services they want so long as they do so in a responsible manner. For example I run my own incoming and outgoing mail server. I should not be prevented from running my own e-mail server simply because some individuals can not figure out (or care) how to set up their servers not to be an open relay.
* Encourage your ISP to employ relay blacklisting to thwart spammers so they can't even connect to remote systems.
One of the reasons I run my own e-mail server is so that I can employ whatever blacklists and filters I want on the server side. Also, since I control the server, I can set-up 'throw-away' and temporary addresses for specific purposes. If I need to give an e-mail address to an entity I do not trust, I simply set up an alias specifically for that purpose. If I start receiving spam via that alias a.) I know where it came from and b.) I can get rid of the alias and avoid any future spam. Of course, if all smtp server had to be on a whitelist, I couldn't do this because I probably couldn't afford/meet the requirements for inclusion.
Not to downplay the problem, but I've always been able to manage spam simply by setting up a decent set of client-side filters (yes, I know this still causes problems on the server side). At least in my experiance, spam is not a big enough problem to warrant crippling e-mail.
First of all, there's really no legitimate reason why you can't use the usual garage door remote.
Unless the original is broken, or lost, or you have several vehicles.
And second, I've had someone break into my garage by using one of these things.
That is a security issue, not a copyright issue. The code to my garage is encoded using a 10-bit switch. Since anybody could open my garage in a reasonable period of time by simply trying all possible codes, I don't don't keep valuable items in my garage unless they are secured through some other means (i.e: vehicle key). If I wanted by garage to be more secure, I would purchase a garage door opener that used a more secure security mechanism. It's bad that your garage was broken into, but that dosen't mean I shouldn't be able to buy a replacement opener for mine.
I, for one, would like to see these devices outlawed.
Garages would still be broken into. If somebody wanted to get into my garage, they could simply pry/cut/break the key-switch off the door-frame and touch the two wires together.
There's no legitimate uses for reverse engineering these devices.
IMHO, not having a legitimate use is not sufficient reason to outlaw something. There is no legitimate reason for me to stand on the beach in November, dressed in a chicken costume while holding a laser-pointer. That dosen't mean I shouldn't be allowed to do so.
This is a case when the DMCA is right on.
Where was copyright law broken? There might be a patent violation if they copied something patented , but I don't see how copyright applies. IIRC, the courts have ruled in the past that you can't use copyright protection to protect an invention. (Something about the Sega Genesis and a specific sequence of commands required to initialize the console which Sega tried to use to lock-out third party game manufacturers.)
Massive solar flares temprarily render the ionosphere incapable of reflecting HF radio waves back to earth. BPL would not be affected (at least not in the same manner) since BPL does not rely on bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
BTW, the EULA specifically prohibits NT and up from being used in "critical" situations where life and environmental damage are on the line. So it would be the utilities' fault, not Microsoft's.
Nothing, of course, stops utilities from negotiating their own licence agreement with Microsoft. I'd imagine, though, that such a licence would compleatly absolve Microsoft of any bad things which might result from some form of software error/bug/malfunction.
I've often wondered why companies don't offer a buffet style compensation plan. Lets say you and the employer can agree that your position is worth $90,000/year in pay and benifits. The employer could then have a schedule of benifits and costs. The employee could then choose the number of vacation days, number of sick days, health insurance, life insurance, etc. that they want. Whatever they don't "spend" on benifits becomes their salary. Want your own personal socialist utopia? Purchase the "company car", "premium health, dental, and optical insurance", and "primium life and disibility insurance" options.
Young and single? Purchase the "basic health insurance" option and no life insurance. Maybe even take fewer vacation days.
One place I interned for a while in college offered the option to purchase extra vacation days (As an intern I didn't get vacation days, though). It was introduced as a cost-cutting measure since one vacation day cost a bit more than one days worth of pay.
Another thing to look out for is to make sure that hardware marked Out-of-Order has been reported to the help-desk as such. My sophemore year of college, there was an incident in which a few students hid in a lab until security came an locked the door. They then went around and took all of the hardware out of three or four computer cases, leaving the case itself externally intact. Once they were finished, they printed official-looking out-of-order signs and placed them on the computers they had just stripped. The theft wasn't noticed until the faculty repsonsible for the lab called the help desk several days later to ask when the computers would be fixed.
The problem is that you would probably have to prove, in court, against Microsoft's legal gorillas, that you are reverse engineering. This is likely to have a chilling effect (at lease in the U.S.) which will prevent individuals or small firms from attempting to reverse engineer the format.
(I'm not an expert on the subject, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.)
That filiment inside the lightbulb gets really really hot (about 2500C [1]). If the glass were placed too close to the filiment, it would melt, crack, or otherwise be damaged by the heat. As a result, the glass has to be kept a certiain distance from the filiment in order to keep the glass relativly cool. This results in a roughly spherical shape (and a lot of "wasted" volume, as you put it.)
2. Polling machine adds voters choices to internal counters.
3. Polling machine prints paper slip with both a human readable and a machine readable record of voter's choices. This slip is placed in a sealed ballot box as in the current punched card system.
4. Once the polls close, the poll-workers, with the candidate's/party's representitives, record the tally from each machine. This becomes the official result unless a descrepancy is found in the following steps.
5. A random sample of n paper slips from each machine is machine counted based on the machine readable information. If this dosen't match the results from 4 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
6. A random sample of m paper slips (where m can be less than n) is counted based on the human readable information. If this dosent' match the results from 4 and 5 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
By printing the paper slips with human readable information, and machines mistalling votes will likely be noticed immediatly by the voters. Step 5 prevents tampering with the polling machine's internal results by ensuring that the printed slips match the internal tally. Step 6 prevents a more clever attacker from printing his or her desired vote on the machine-readable portion while recording the voter's choice on the human-readable portion.
It's about data, and it's none of the state's business what my data is or what protocol I wrap it in.
I agree with you on that point. However, in order for vonage to work, they have to interface to the public telephone network. At that point, IMHO, they become a phone company like all the others and subject to the same conditions (both in terms of privilages and in terms of regulations) faced by the traditional phone companies with whom they compete.
This case serves no purpose, but to have the RIAA, going forward, serve sopoenas correctly (i.e. through a court).
Forcing the RIAA to properly obtain their subpoenas is a positive effect in and of itself. Initially, their subpeonas are a lot like spam. Because the RIAA could have subpoenas issued from one court for the personal information of consumers nationwide, it was relativly inexpensive to obtain each subpoena. If the RIAA is forced to obtain the subpeona in the district court serving the consuemer concerned, it costs the RIAA more to send out subpoenas simple because there is not longer a one stop shop of all of their subpona needs.
I believe the GPL2 give the licencee the right to accept any future GPL licence in place of GPL2, so unless that particular part of the GPL2 were found to be invalid, the author has no say in GPL2 vs GPL3.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't VIM config files constitute prior art? They can be written in VIM script, perl, python, and ruby al lin one file.
No, not unless the differend langauges used are encapsulated in XML mark-up. (IANAL)
It depends on who is doing the measuring. Companies who make storage media often use the system you describe, while software actually performing the reading and writing most often use 2^10 = kilobyte, 2^20 = megabyte, etc. since it reflects what is (more or less) actually happening on the media.
Insuficient control of execution by the continued use of filename extentions and insuficient privilidge seperation make continued explotation a reality.
I agree. Unfortunately, getting Microsoft to produce a reasonably secure product is not as simple a solution. The main point, however, still stands: The best way to prevent hijacked desktop computers is to secure the desktop computer.
I'm in more or less the same boat as far as my ISP restricting inbound and outbound SMTP connections. At least however, they do so in a reasonably sane manner. While you can't connect to external SMTP servers on port 25 anymore, their SMTP server is reasonably reliable and doesn't pull any dirty tricks such as filtering based on return address or rewriting mail headers, so it is useable as an outgoing mail server. They also don't block port 465 outgoing (SMTP over SSL).
When I decided I wanted to handle my own e-mail I signed up for one of the many UML host providers. (IMHO the $25/month or so is worth not having to worry about keeping a computer running and connected to the internet 24/7, YMMV). By using IMAP and SMTP over SSL, my ISP's typical restrictions really don't become a problem.
Can someone tell me the difference between an internet with open relays and one of peer machines where everyone is free to run mail transport agents.
Traceability. If you use your own host to send spam, the recipient of the spam is more likely to be able to trace the spam back to you and complain to your provider (assuming you care). If you use somebody else's misconfigured server, the recipient of your spam may only be able to see that it came from some open relay belonging to an unknown third party. (Note that by recipient I mean both the actual individual recipient and the organization hosting the recipient's e-mail)
If my open MTA records your IP address, don't I know who hijacked me to spam? Isn't that the same as being spammed in the first place?
Of course if you aren't knowledgeable enough to realize you're running an open relay, you're also probably not knowledable enough to check your logs and figure our who is abusing your server.
What's the practical benifit of cracking down on open relays when the world is full of hijacked Windoze boxes on cable modems that are serving kiddie porn while blasting us all with DDoS and spam attacks?
It raises the level of the "low-hanging fruit" just a little bit higher. Also, the open-relay mail server and the hijacked home computer are problems with two different (but very simple) solutions. The problem of hijacked home computers can be reasonably solved through the use of firewalls (hardware and/or software), virus scanners, mal-ware checkers, etc. The problem of open-relay mail servers (IMHO) is most appropriatly solved by convincing admins that proper configuaration of their mail servers is critical (or by not accepting mail from servers which allow inappropriate relaying).
I saw over at the windriver site that this thing has a proprietary os
I'm not sure how this is a disadvantage. The people at NASA can't be experts at everything, and in this case, it looks like they decided to hire an outside company to write the rover software. Just becasue it is a proprietary OS doesn't meant that the code is any buggier, that NASA can't review the software, or that there is any less ability to debug the thing when problems occur.
and only on cpu and only one set of code
A second CPU (or an extra anything for that matter) would add to the weight and energy consumption of the device. I think one reliable system beats out two redundant (but necessarily more complex) systems in this case.
A car may have power-assisted brakes and steering, but the power systems are not required to be operational.
Although this is less-and-less the case as time goes on. Right now, you can buy vehicles where the accelerator pedal is connected to the engine by an entirely electrical link. Automatic transmissions will be going that way shortly (if there aren't any currenly availaible vehicles with that feature). Don't be too surprised if you see vehicles with all-electronic steering in the near future.
Just as an all-electronic system in a vehicle has certain advantages or disadvantages, an all-electronic voting system will be stronger than existing systems in some areas and weaker than existing systems in other area. It is simply a matter of whether the advantages outweigh the risks. (Of course, Diebold is doing a pretty good job of convincing me that the risks outweight the advantages.)
Umm, then why didn't they put this expensive circuitry on the iPod rather than the throw-away battery?
Because then there is nothing preventing the battery from misbehaving (which, from everything I've read is more likely and severe than is the case with NiCd or NiMH), once somebody removes the battery from the iPod.
With Li Ion, the protection circuits pretty much have to be part of the battery if the pack is removeable from the device.
A couple of people inquired about putting a railroad bridge under the Bering Straight.
Now that's a cool idea: An underwater bridge beneith the Bearing Straight. From a practical standpoint, however, I would prefer either a bridge over the bearing straight or a tunnel under the bearing straight.
I have nothing againt underwater bridges, mind you, however, high speed rail service would require much less fuel if the train passed through air rather than much-denser water.
Well, one problem is that under many conditions the frequencies used by BPL can propigate over-the-horizon. That implies that BPL operations in one location could interfear with emergency communications (Red Cross/CAP/ARES/RACES operations in another area.
In the event of an emergency affecting a large area, BPL operations might be taken out as well, as you said. However, since the frequencies might be unusable most of the time, the various agencies and organization which use those frequencies would not be able to use those frequencies for training purposes (which would greatly effect their usefullnes under emergency conditions).
specifically when it comes to pedophilia and statuatory rape
Let's make sure were using the right words here:
Pedophilia: sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object
Statuatory Rape: sexual intercourse with a person who is below the statutory age of consent
Neither of these definitions automatically imply that criminal did anything to cause anybody emotional trauma. An indiviual can find children sexually attractive and not rape them, just as most men don't rape every woman (or man) they find sexuall attractive. In the case of statutory rape, a person one day younger than the age of consent is no more likely to be hurt emotionally than a person one day older than the age of consent, especially given that there are many years difference between the age of consent in different localities.
Let me also add that in your case, you're talking about POP3 (inbound) services and not SMTP (outbound). The whole, "i can create my own temporary e-mail accounts to thwart spammers" is irrelevant. Sending and receiving mail are completely different systems. Anyone running an inbound, mail-receiving server would not be regulated. They would merely have the choice as to whether they wanted to accept only mail from whitelisted systems or not.
I think there is a bit of confusion here. To send mail, I connect to port 465 (smtp-over-ssl) on my sever. When others wish to send mail to me, they connect to port 25 (smtp). This is what I meant by outbound and inbound mail respectivly. you probably are paying someone else for Internet connectivity, and therefore have the use of their outbound mail relays. It would be their responsibility to choose whether they wanted their server to be "registered" and if there was a centralized "whitelist", it would be of great benefit for them to participate.
You assume that the comany which can provide me with economical, reasonable-quality, decent-speed, consumer-class internet service is also capable of running a decent outbound mail server. In many cases, they are not. Mine, for example, occasionally rejects outbound email based on the From: header, occasionally silently drops messages, and has unusually long delays for sending e-mail. Other than their outbound e-mail, though, they seem to do a good job.
To answer the content of your other reply: Who decides who qualifies to be on the white-list? What are the requrements? How much will it cost? etc. I would happily register myself with any whitelist that has reasonable policies on all of the above.
I would happily register myself with any reasonable third-party white-list. However, if it is run by a government as a matter of law, or run/administered by the likes of versign et. al, I doubt reasonable would describe the system.
* Spread the word that the only realistic solution to spam is licensing outbound mail relays via a sanctioned body that is nowhere near as incompetent as ICANN. We need an opt-in, international SMTP mail relay whitelist with ethical rules for being included.
Sorry, I disagree. I (and by extension anybody) should be allowed to run whatever services they want so long as they do so in a responsible manner. For example I run my own incoming and outgoing mail server. I should not be prevented from running my own e-mail server simply because some individuals can not figure out (or care) how to set up their servers not to be an open relay.
* Encourage your ISP to employ relay blacklisting to thwart spammers so they can't even connect to remote systems.
One of the reasons I run my own e-mail server is so that I can employ whatever blacklists and filters I want on the server side. Also, since I control the server, I can set-up 'throw-away' and temporary addresses for specific purposes. If I need to give an e-mail address to an entity I do not trust, I simply set up an alias specifically for that purpose. If I start receiving spam via that alias a.) I know where it came from and b.) I can get rid of the alias and avoid any future spam. Of course, if all smtp server had to be on a whitelist, I couldn't do this because I probably couldn't afford/meet the requirements for inclusion.
Not to downplay the problem, but I've always been able to manage spam simply by setting up a decent set of client-side filters (yes, I know this still causes problems on the server side). At least in my experiance, spam is not a big enough problem to warrant crippling e-mail.
First of all, there's really no legitimate reason why you can't use the usual garage door remote.
Unless the original is broken, or lost, or you have several vehicles.
And second, I've had someone break into my garage by using one of these things.
That is a security issue, not a copyright issue. The code to my garage is encoded using a 10-bit switch. Since anybody could open my garage in a reasonable period of time by simply trying all possible codes, I don't don't keep valuable items in my garage unless they are secured through some other means (i.e: vehicle key). If I wanted by garage to be more secure, I would purchase a garage door opener that used a more secure security mechanism. It's bad that your garage was broken into, but that dosen't mean I shouldn't be able to buy a replacement opener for mine.
I, for one, would like to see these devices outlawed.
Garages would still be broken into. If somebody wanted to get into my garage, they could simply pry/cut/break the key-switch off the door-frame and touch the two wires together.
There's no legitimate uses for reverse engineering these devices.
IMHO, not having a legitimate use is not sufficient reason to outlaw something. There is no legitimate reason for me to stand on the beach in November, dressed in a chicken costume while holding a laser-pointer. That dosen't mean I shouldn't be allowed to do so.
This is a case when the DMCA is right on.
Where was copyright law broken? There might be a patent violation if they copied something patented , but I don't see how copyright applies. IIRC, the courts have ruled in the past that you can't use copyright protection to protect an invention. (Something about the Sega Genesis and a specific sequence of commands required to initialize the console which Sega tried to use to lock-out third party game manufacturers.)
Massive solar flares temprarily render the ionosphere incapable of reflecting HF radio waves back to earth. BPL would not be affected (at least not in the same manner) since BPL does not rely on bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
Just so nobody is confused, DC current also produces a magnetic field.
BTW, the EULA specifically prohibits NT and up from being used in "critical" situations where life and environmental damage are on the line. So it would be the utilities' fault, not Microsoft's.
Nothing, of course, stops utilities from negotiating their own licence agreement with Microsoft. I'd imagine, though, that such a licence would compleatly absolve Microsoft of any bad things which might result from some form of software error/bug/malfunction.
I've often wondered why companies don't offer a buffet style compensation plan. Lets say you and the employer can agree that your position is worth $90,000/year in pay and benifits. The employer could then have a schedule of benifits and costs. The employee could then choose the number of vacation days, number of sick days, health insurance, life insurance, etc. that they want. Whatever they don't "spend" on benifits becomes their salary.
Want your own personal socialist utopia? Purchase the "company car", "premium health, dental, and optical insurance", and "primium life and disibility insurance" options.
Young and single? Purchase the "basic health insurance" option and no life insurance. Maybe even take fewer vacation days.
One place I interned for a while in college offered the option to purchase extra vacation days (As an intern I didn't get vacation days, though). It was introduced as a cost-cutting measure since one vacation day cost a bit more than one days worth of pay.
Another thing to look out for is to make sure that hardware marked Out-of-Order has been reported to the help-desk as such. My sophemore year of college, there was an incident in which a few students hid in a lab until security came an locked the door. They then went around and took all of the hardware out of three or four computer cases, leaving the case itself externally intact. Once they were finished, they printed official-looking out-of-order signs and placed them on the computers they had just stripped. The theft wasn't noticed until the faculty repsonsible for the lab called the help desk several days later to ask when the computers would be fixed.
The problem is that you would probably have to prove, in court, against Microsoft's legal gorillas, that you are reverse engineering. This is likely to have a chilling effect (at lease in the U.S.) which will prevent individuals or small firms from attempting to reverse engineer the format.
(I'm not an expert on the subject, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.)
That filiment inside the lightbulb gets really really hot (about 2500C [1]). If the glass were placed too close to the filiment, it would melt, crack, or otherwise be damaged by the heat. As a result, the glass has to be kept a certiain distance from the filiment in order to keep the glass relativly cool. This results in a roughly spherical shape (and a lot of "wasted" volume, as you put it.)
[1] Temperature of an Incandescent Light Bulb
Actually, I think its both:
Poor design allows automatic execution of code received as part of an email.
User error for not updating their systems to correct a known vaulerability.
1. Electonic polling machine accepts voter's choices.
2. Polling machine adds voters choices to internal counters.
3. Polling machine prints paper slip with both a human readable and a machine readable record of voter's choices. This slip is placed in a sealed ballot box as in the current punched card system.
4. Once the polls close, the poll-workers, with the candidate's/party's representitives, record the tally from each machine. This becomes the official result unless a descrepancy is found in the following steps.
5. A random sample of n paper slips from each machine is machine counted based on the machine readable information. If this dosen't match the results from 4 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
6. A random sample of m paper slips (where m can be less than n) is counted based on the human readable information. If this dosent' match the results from 4 and 5 pretty closely, a full hand count will be necessary.
By printing the paper slips with human readable information, and machines mistalling votes will likely be noticed immediatly by the voters. Step 5 prevents tampering with the polling machine's internal results by ensuring that the printed slips match the internal tally. Step 6 prevents a more clever attacker from printing his or her desired vote on the machine-readable portion while recording the voter's choice on the human-readable portion.
It's about data, and it's none of the state's business what my data is or what protocol I wrap it in.
I agree with you on that point. However, in order for vonage to work, they have to interface to the public telephone network. At that point, IMHO, they become a phone company like all the others and subject to the same conditions (both in terms of privilages and in terms of regulations) faced by the traditional phone companies with whom they compete.
This case serves no purpose, but to have the RIAA, going forward, serve sopoenas correctly (i.e. through a court).
Forcing the RIAA to properly obtain their subpoenas is a positive effect in and of itself. Initially, their subpeonas are a lot like spam. Because the RIAA could have subpoenas issued from one court for the personal information of consumers nationwide, it was relativly inexpensive to obtain each subpoena. If the RIAA is forced to obtain the subpeona in the district court serving the consuemer concerned, it costs the RIAA more to send out subpoenas simple because there is not longer a one stop shop of all of their subpona needs.
I believe the GPL2 give the licencee the right to accept any future GPL licence in place of GPL2, so unless that particular part of the GPL2 were found to be invalid, the author has no say in GPL2 vs GPL3.
As always, though, IANAL.