#1 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Your contact list is probably not copyrightable, and even then, isn't copyrighted. That law doesn't outlaw hacking, it outlaws hacking copyright protections.
The problem isn't lawyers, it's people. It's the old money/power corrupts etc etc. It makes more sense that we have people necessarily knowledgeable about the law interpreting laws and writing them than it does to put, say, farmers in Congress. The problem is flat out: people. Some people will always be corrupt, some will stay in line for fear of retribution, some don't care to see things change, ad infinitum. No matter WHO you bar from or appoint to legal positions, they're going to have an agenda. it's just coincidentally unfortunate that the people most qualified to be judges and legislators may have this particular agenda.
"Put 100 megawatts of power into a transmission grid and I doubt much more than 50 or 60 megawatts come out the other end."
False. Modern transmission systems can achieve under 2% loss in large-scale power transmission. And that's talking about a scale of Terawatts Hours, not Megawatts (keeping in mind that as the amount of energy lost in transmission is proportional to the amount of energy transmitted). Granted the site is for the UK power grid, but it shows you that any modern transmission system is ridiculously unlikely to be operating at 50% loss on a megawatt scale, even when dealing with distribution levels (transmission refers generally to connected substations, etc. on the power grid, distribution refers to how it gets to your house from there).
By comparison, my TiBook fell off of my desk (normal desk height, 2.5'-3' maybe), and busted out the IrDA , cracked the plastic interior, and bent a little of the frame around the IrDA port. The IrDA port I could care less about, but the case looks a little nasty, and not long after, it myseriously stopped working (it freezes even running the kernel on the OS install disc when reinstalling, and the hardware diagnostic tool reports that all hardware is nominal). I'm taking it to get fixed, even without AppleCare, which definitely shows love, but I'm pretty disappointed with its durability.
Best way to get around that when looking for driving directions is to not give it your street address, just your zip code (which, even in cities shouldn't be too bad). From there, hopefully you know your town/city well enough to figure out the fastest way to the route it prescribes, I don't generally waste my time listening to how it wants me to get to X highway.
That assumes you're going somewhere other than your town/city, though I'm not sure I'd trust MapQuest enough to ask it driving directions from one part of the city to another. Buy a map 7-11.
Actually, there is over a hundred years of legal precedent behind the notion that corporations ARE persons under the constitution. In 1886, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad was heard by the US Supreme Court. The Court reporter's case summary (note: the Court reporter being formerly a Railroad company president; the case summary holding no legal bearing whatsoever) had the added clause: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.", which not decided by the court. In fact, the judges themselves were quite relieved that they were able to settle the case without having to address the point of corporate personhood. However, as a hundred years pass, this informal summary becomes the legal basis for corporate personhood, and eventually becomes something of a common law, well...law.
In 1978, this was solidified by the Supreme Court, which expressly ruled that corporations were persons under the Constitution, ruling in their favor on the matter of free speech, and the ability to give money to political causes.
So, Corporations in some senses *are* persons in and of themselves, but the validity of the statement is questionable, at best.
What's your point? That just means the G5 is a versatile chip. The person who submitted the article stated that the Opteron beat the G5 to market by 4 months..well, so what? There have been servers running 64-bit processors for a long, long time. Opteron is nothing new in that respect (its hybrid design is admirable, but a necessity, now that most 64-bit CPUs carry them). The G5 however, was marketed as a desktop solution, and was sold as one. The Opteron just was not. Thus, the time scale is completely negligible.
Also, the 970 may be a server chip now, but again you're missing the point: Opteron was never meant for the desktop.
Because there's no marginal loss in terms of services. Paying by the minute is a vastly different concept, and they are undeniably wasting your resources. The only loss you incur picking up a plain old telephone and answering is the opportunity cost of having the phone line open when waiting for a call, or being on the phone yourself, which is arguably zero, as you can hang up at any time. With a cell phone, if I answer, hear it's a telemarketer, and immediately hang up, I'm officially losing 1 minute of airtime. In that model, the time lost is much more tangible financially.
"'Lonestar' consists of 300 Dell PowerEdge 1750 and PowerEdge 2650 servers running the Linux operating system from Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. [Nasdaq: RHAT]. Dell worked with Seattle.-based Cray Inc. [Nasdaq: CRAY] to design and install the cluster."
If Dell had to contract Cray to help them build the cluster, I'm sure that aspect wasn't cheap. I'd imagine that most of the actual costs associated with getting the Dells into an efficient cluster were more mundane things than buying the servers themselves. I can't imagine 600 Dell boxes costing 38 million, so I'm under the impression that planning, design, construction, maintenance, etc. add to the price of the servers significantly.
First, let me congratulate Daniel Lyons on an insightful concluding allusion, linking open source licenses to Russian Communism (with a big 'C'). Not only did it make me chuckle, but I'd imagine that you're the first in a long line of zany charicatures of open source portrayed in that light.
Moving on, may I ask: How is it so onerous to expect a company to make good on licensing terms they engaged in? One of the reasons that Linksys was able to make such a technological leap with their 802.11G router was that the software upon which they based its internals was already created for them by an outside source. To top that, they didn't even have to pay outsourcing fees to Bangalore, the software was available to them for free (open source advocates would make note that I mean "free as in beer", not "free as in freedom", regarding the price, not the ideal)!
Even further, the GPL mandates not that software written for the Linux operating system be released, but that software improvments to the operating system itself be released back to the community. Thus, the effort and expenditure put into the product (regarding software, not product design, etc.) on their pales visibly in comparison to the effort of so many bearded men on Saturday nights, toiling away at their computers, so that faceless companies could take advantage of their work by not complying with the one stipulation of their license.
I should have hoped that by now Forbes is well acquainted with the practices of business enough to know that, "there's no such thing as a free lunch". However, this is exactly what your point of view implies. In terms of Linux (which is distributed for free), there is only one cost: returning to the community your improvments on the intellectual property of someone else. Linksys should have recognized this cost at the outset of product development, or walked away from the game altogether.
What is exactly why it shouldn't be the ubiquitous browser?
That we depend on it? That logically follows from the definition of ubiquity. That there are crooks, social deviants, malcontents, and crackers? That's a part of life.
Either you pasted the wrong quote, or you (like most of us here on Slashdot) don't back up your anti-Microsoft rhetoric. It's not hard to make a logical case against IE, this post is just sans fact.
That doesn't make sense. Yes, the end result (now) is to make good little consumers happy. However, the poster was talking about DNS admins, y'know, the people who make sure we don't have to type in IP addresses anytime. The people who assure that the average user doesn't have to type in 216.239.37.99 or 66.218.71.198 everytime they they want to search for something. The people support the fundamental services that please the people you specify. I think they have a say.
If I were building a theme park, I'd care more about engineers giving me the thumbs up than the kids.
The campus owns the network, it is your prerogative to leave or find your own ISP if you don't like their bandwidth or their rules. They're not holding a gun to your head, you can just as easily plug in your phone line and use dialup. Sharing 100 gigs of anything on P2P is generally *NOT* an acceptable use for "average internet computing use", and is against some college TOS'es I've seen from the get-go. Also, think about it, if I use a couple gigabyte's worth of transfer a week, multiply me by 13 or 14 thousand. Pretty big, huh?
The point is hey, you may like sharing both illegal and legal media over P2P, but not everyone wants to pay for the upgrade so you can download your favorite WHAM! ditties. My freshman year of college, a kid across the hall from me had a family hand-me-down running Windows 3.11 (this was 2000, mind you), he could barely play *an* mp3 while having IE open. Me? I was running an httpd, ftpd, hotline server, downloading things from P2Ps, and hogging bandwidth like you wouldn't believe.
That kid paid the same amount of money for network utilities as I did. Would it be fair to ask him to kick in another $200 a semester so that I can run DirectConnect faster?
I didn't necessarily mean that an off-the-shelf *PC* would leave you lacking in quality, just that you get what you pay for. Most people will spend $1000 on the PC, hundreds on instruments, connectors, cables, etc. but then think they're ok with a piece of crap soundcard. If you're planning on getting anything more than a Pentium II and a Fender StratPak for $99 to record, go ahead and spend a little on the audio interface, if you've got a really sweet signal coming out of your vintage amp, and you've got a new computer running a new copy of Nuendo, but you're using a two year old SoundBlaster, that's a blatant misuse of funds.
That's really the point I was trying to make, not that you can't record good things on a mediocre PC, but that you can't expect to bring it home from the store and start rocking as soon as you download ProTools from KaZaA (which ProTools itself requires hardware). There certainly are other costs associated with a home studio.
Well, you can't just buy a PC from Walmart and start recording 'Tommy' in your basement, one of the caveats is that you still need a decent audio interface, and an Audigy, while possible, is just not how most people go about it. I mean technically, you could plug an amp straight into your stock sound card 1/8" mic input and load up CoolEdit, but you'll be *seriously* lacking in quality.
If you're serious about digital mixing, Mark of the Unicorn makes some pretty affordable interfaces, an amateur producer friend of mine bought a 16-track interface and was so happy with it that he just sold his digital mixer. If you were even more serious, I'd check out Digidesign, who also make ProTools, an industry standard in terms of recording software. That stuff doesn't run cheap, but they do offer a very high quality amateur/enthusiast grade interface called the MBox for ~$400 (it also comes with a lesser version of ProTools), which isn't bad at all.
In terms of recording software, check out ProTools, Steinberg Nuendo, or CoolEdit, which is now apparently being distributed as Adobe Audtion.
"How sad is it when people are encouraged to take other people's wealth instead of create their own?"
How do you suggest that we 'create' money? Hmm? Press our own? Make gold from lead? The invention of money and through it capitalism rests in the laws of scarcity, as someone said. There are inherent problems with any economic system, but in any one of them, it comes down to the idea of ownership (even the disallowing of ownership acknowledges the concept fo ownership). In the case of US capitalism, each dollar is owned by someone, the simple act of wealth creation dictates in and of itself that the source be from another individual or group capable of ownership.
Granted the original poster might have been zealous in his defamation of corporations, but when you have large groups capable of ownership, the capacity is there for them to hoard scarce resources (scarce as in limited), thus removing them from the total amount of recources available to the populace. That's bad enough, but if efficiency enables a corporation (or similarly large group) to simultaneously accumulate more resources and displace workers, you've just exacerbated the problem by increasing the pool of those in need, and decreased the pool of available resources. That can be reduced to simple algebra.
Cry all you might that corporations will not exploit that, but look back into history, it happens all the time. Company A might hold their moral ground, but if Company B does it, their pool of resources will grow beyond Company A's, and they will eventually surpass them, if not crushing them along the way. Note that I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I am quite fed up both with the opportunism of corporate policy and with those who defend it under flimsy or false pretenses.
Re:RFIDs hidden in new cars. US federal initiative
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
*cough* Your license plate is plainly visible to the people putting on your new tires because IT'S ON ONE OR BOTH ENDS OF THE CAR THEY'RE PUTTING TIRES ON. They don't need you to fill it out on complicated questionnaires, or to rummage through yoru garbage for old insurance forms, or break into your house. Unless you remove your plates after you arrive at the mechanic, and affix them again before you leave, good luck remaining anonymous.
Slashdot Mirror
since the volume approached 0.) I don't know how long it lasted
Very small fractions of a second.
#1 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Your contact list is probably not copyrightable, and even then, isn't copyrighted. That law doesn't outlaw hacking, it outlaws hacking copyright protections.
#2 "I was wrong about Plaxo's supposed ability to break your Outlook password. Company officials confirm that it doesn't do that. I was misinformed, and I apologize for passing along erroneous information."
The problem isn't lawyers, it's people. It's the old money/power corrupts etc etc. It makes more sense that we have people necessarily knowledgeable about the law interpreting laws and writing them than it does to put, say, farmers in Congress. The problem is flat out: people. Some people will always be corrupt, some will stay in line for fear of retribution, some don't care to see things change, ad infinitum. No matter WHO you bar from or appoint to legal positions, they're going to have an agenda. it's just coincidentally unfortunate that the people most qualified to be judges and legislators may have this particular agenda.
"Put 100 megawatts of power into a transmission grid and I doubt much more than 50 or 60 megawatts come out the other end."
False. Modern transmission systems can achieve under 2% loss in large-scale power transmission. And that's talking about a scale of Terawatts Hours, not Megawatts (keeping in mind that as the amount of energy lost in transmission is proportional to the amount of energy transmitted). Granted the site is for the UK power grid, but it shows you that any modern transmission system is ridiculously unlikely to be operating at 50% loss on a megawatt scale, even when dealing with distribution levels (transmission refers generally to connected substations, etc. on the power grid, distribution refers to how it gets to your house from there).
By comparison, my TiBook fell off of my desk (normal desk height, 2.5'-3' maybe), and busted out the IrDA , cracked the plastic interior, and bent a little of the frame around the IrDA port. The IrDA port I could care less about, but the case looks a little nasty, and not long after, it myseriously stopped working (it freezes even running the kernel on the OS install disc when reinstalling, and the hardware diagnostic tool reports that all hardware is nominal). I'm taking it to get fixed, even without AppleCare, which definitely shows love, but I'm pretty disappointed with its durability.
Best way to get around that when looking for driving directions is to not give it your street address, just your zip code (which, even in cities shouldn't be too bad). From there, hopefully you know your town/city well enough to figure out the fastest way to the route it prescribes, I don't generally waste my time listening to how it wants me to get to X highway.
That assumes you're going somewhere other than your town/city, though I'm not sure I'd trust MapQuest enough to ask it driving directions from one part of the city to another. Buy a map 7-11.
'Hell, it takes me 10 minutes to get anywhere in the town of 50,000 I live in.'
You mean Mexico?
Actually, there is over a hundred years of legal precedent behind the notion that corporations ARE persons under the constitution. In 1886, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad was heard by the US Supreme Court. The Court reporter's case summary (note: the Court reporter being formerly a Railroad company president; the case summary holding no legal bearing whatsoever) had the added clause: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.", which not decided by the court. In fact, the judges themselves were quite relieved that they were able to settle the case without having to address the point of corporate personhood. However, as a hundred years pass, this informal summary becomes the legal basis for corporate personhood, and eventually becomes something of a common law, well...law.
In 1978, this was solidified by the Supreme Court, which expressly ruled that corporations were persons under the Constitution, ruling in their favor on the matter of free speech, and the ability to give money to political causes.
So, Corporations in some senses *are* persons in and of themselves, but the validity of the statement is questionable, at best.
Source
What's your point? That just means the G5 is a versatile chip. The person who submitted the article stated that the Opteron beat the G5 to market by 4 months..well, so what? There have been servers running 64-bit processors for a long, long time. Opteron is nothing new in that respect (its hybrid design is admirable, but a necessity, now that most 64-bit CPUs carry them). The G5 however, was marketed as a desktop solution, and was sold as one. The Opteron just was not. Thus, the time scale is completely negligible.
Also, the 970 may be a server chip now, but again you're missing the point: Opteron was never meant for the desktop.
Because there's no marginal loss in terms of services. Paying by the minute is a vastly different concept, and they are undeniably wasting your resources. The only loss you incur picking up a plain old telephone and answering is the opportunity cost of having the phone line open when waiting for a call, or being on the phone yourself, which is arguably zero, as you can hang up at any time. With a cell phone, if I answer, hear it's a telemarketer, and immediately hang up, I'm officially losing 1 minute of airtime. In that model, the time lost is much more tangible financially.
"'Lonestar' consists of 300 Dell PowerEdge 1750 and PowerEdge 2650 servers running the Linux operating system from Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. [Nasdaq: RHAT]. Dell worked with Seattle.-based Cray Inc. [Nasdaq: CRAY] to design and install the cluster."
If Dell had to contract Cray to help them build the cluster, I'm sure that aspect wasn't cheap. I'd imagine that most of the actual costs associated with getting the Dells into an efficient cluster were more mundane things than buying the servers themselves. I can't imagine 600 Dell boxes costing 38 million, so I'm under the impression that planning, design, construction, maintenance, etc. add to the price of the servers significantly.
What is exactly why it shouldn't be the ubiquitous browser?
That we depend on it? That logically follows from the definition of ubiquity.
That there are crooks, social deviants, malcontents, and crackers? That's a part of life.
Either you pasted the wrong quote, or you (like most of us here on Slashdot) don't back up your anti-Microsoft rhetoric. It's not hard to make a logical case against IE, this post is just sans fact.
1. Unborn Fetus
2. Microwave
3. Pre-warmed stem cell monopoly
4. Profit!
You're right, it's someone else's private property. A mall is not a city-owned park, it's owned by corporations or individuals just like a house is.
Did you really believe that Eldred v. Ashcroft would fail?
Did you really think copyrights would be extended indefinitely for wealthy content-owners?
Did you ever think corporate giants could shrug off antitrust convictions?
Did you really think the star of Jingle All The Way would be Governor of California?
Wake up, not everyone with a contrarian point is a pot-smokin' patchouli-smellin' hippie, Donald.
Sweet Jesus tell me what the 'Props' key does on Sun keyboards, for me it just beeps.
That doesn't make sense. Yes, the end result (now) is to make good little consumers happy. However, the poster was talking about DNS admins, y'know, the people who make sure we don't have to type in IP addresses anytime. The people who assure that the average user doesn't have to type in 216.239.37.99 or 66.218.71.198 everytime they they want to search for something. The people support the fundamental services that please the people you specify. I think they have a say.
If I were building a theme park, I'd care more about engineers giving me the thumbs up than the kids.
"rationale"
The campus owns the network, it is your prerogative to leave or find your own ISP if you don't like their bandwidth or their rules. They're not holding a gun to your head, you can just as easily plug in your phone line and use dialup. Sharing 100 gigs of anything on P2P is generally *NOT* an acceptable use for "average internet computing use", and is against some college TOS'es I've seen from the get-go. Also, think about it, if I use a couple gigabyte's worth of transfer a week, multiply me by 13 or 14 thousand. Pretty big, huh?
The point is hey, you may like sharing both illegal and legal media over P2P, but not everyone wants to pay for the upgrade so you can download your favorite WHAM! ditties. My freshman year of college, a kid across the hall from me had a family hand-me-down running Windows 3.11 (this was 2000, mind you), he could barely play *an* mp3 while having IE open. Me? I was running an httpd, ftpd, hotline server, downloading things from P2Ps, and hogging bandwidth like you wouldn't believe.
That kid paid the same amount of money for network utilities as I did. Would it be fair to ask him to kick in another $200 a semester so that I can run DirectConnect faster?
He's a student first. He *IS* entry level.
I didn't necessarily mean that an off-the-shelf *PC* would leave you lacking in quality, just that you get what you pay for. Most people will spend $1000 on the PC, hundreds on instruments, connectors, cables, etc. but then think they're ok with a piece of crap soundcard. If you're planning on getting anything more than a Pentium II and a Fender StratPak for $99 to record, go ahead and spend a little on the audio interface, if you've got a really sweet signal coming out of your vintage amp, and you've got a new computer running a new copy of Nuendo, but you're using a two year old SoundBlaster, that's a blatant misuse of funds.
That's really the point I was trying to make, not that you can't record good things on a mediocre PC, but that you can't expect to bring it home from the store and start rocking as soon as you download ProTools from KaZaA (which ProTools itself requires hardware). There certainly are other costs associated with a home studio.
Well, you can't just buy a PC from Walmart and start recording 'Tommy' in your basement, one of the caveats is that you still need a decent audio interface, and an Audigy, while possible, is just not how most people go about it. I mean technically, you could plug an amp straight into your stock sound card 1/8" mic input and load up CoolEdit, but you'll be *seriously* lacking in quality.
If you're serious about digital mixing, Mark of the Unicorn makes some pretty affordable interfaces, an amateur producer friend of mine bought a 16-track interface and was so happy with it that he just sold his digital mixer. If you were even more serious, I'd check out Digidesign, who also make ProTools, an industry standard in terms of recording software. That stuff doesn't run cheap, but they do offer a very high quality amateur/enthusiast grade interface called the MBox for ~$400 (it also comes with a lesser version of ProTools), which isn't bad at all.
In terms of recording software, check out ProTools, Steinberg Nuendo, or CoolEdit, which is now apparently being distributed as Adobe Audtion.
"How sad is it when people are encouraged to take other people's wealth instead of create their own?"
How do you suggest that we 'create' money? Hmm? Press our own? Make gold from lead? The invention of money and through it capitalism rests in the laws of scarcity, as someone said. There are inherent problems with any economic system, but in any one of them, it comes down to the idea of ownership (even the disallowing of ownership acknowledges the concept fo ownership). In the case of US capitalism, each dollar is owned by someone, the simple act of wealth creation dictates in and of itself that the source be from another individual or group capable of ownership.
Granted the original poster might have been zealous in his defamation of corporations, but when you have large groups capable of ownership, the capacity is there for them to hoard scarce resources (scarce as in limited), thus removing them from the total amount of recources available to the populace. That's bad enough, but if efficiency enables a corporation (or similarly large group) to simultaneously accumulate more resources and displace workers, you've just exacerbated the problem by increasing the pool of those in need, and decreased the pool of available resources. That can be reduced to simple algebra.
Cry all you might that corporations will not exploit that, but look back into history, it happens all the time. Company A might hold their moral ground, but if Company B does it, their pool of resources will grow beyond Company A's, and they will eventually surpass them, if not crushing them along the way. Note that I'm not an advocate of socialism, but I am quite fed up both with the opportunism of corporate policy and with those who defend it under flimsy or false pretenses.
*cough* Your license plate is plainly visible to the people putting on your new tires because IT'S ON ONE OR BOTH ENDS OF THE CAR THEY'RE PUTTING TIRES ON. They don't need you to fill it out on complicated questionnaires, or to rummage through yoru garbage for old insurance forms, or break into your house. Unless you remove your plates after you arrive at the mechanic, and affix them again before you leave, good luck remaining anonymous.