I don't know where you are, but in the UK if you give false information in order to convince somebody to sell you an item or give you a service they would not otherwise give you under the same terms, this is a crime called "obtaining goods/services by deception".
I would imagine similar laws exist in other countries.
How hard is it for government forces to get hold of the footage shot by privately owned cameras?
Well, if they wanted footage from my camera, they'd have to either convince me there was a pressing need for it, or come up with a court order. I'm quite convinced that if there was massive abuse of this ability, getting the court order from the politically-independent judiciary would become fairly difficult.
It would have made the nightmare of opening a UK bank account disappear. As it is, I had to provide proof of a paid utility bill (in my name), which required getting an apartment which required references and (usually) proof of a bank account...
Opening a bank account in the UK is becoming ridiculous, I agree. The last account I opened, I had to provide one form of proof of identity, they accepted my passport. I recently attempted to open another. They required two forms of proof of identity and one (from a fairly limited list) of proof of address. They blame it on European anti-money-laundering regulations. Is this actually true, or is it just British banks being difficult?
You mean like if you borrowed money and were unable to repay it, you might not be able to borrow more money elsewhere? Oh, wait. They already keep that info, keyed to the SSN.
Not in the UK, they don't. Our data protection laws won't allow credit reference agencies to use your NI No (equivalent to the US's SSN). They have to identify you based on name, date of birth and address, and link together multiple addresses by asking you for previous ones. You can legally lose your credit reference file in the UK, if you know how to do it.
Under Blunkett's proposals, you'd need to show your ID card to claim benefits, for medical treatment, and probably lots of other places too. Later on, you will probably also be required to show it to open bank accounts or make large cash purchases (the UK is getting paranoid about money laundering these days). I bet they ask for it when you pay your motor vehicle tax, too. They ask for all sorts of other shite already.
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
On my 450MHz celeron speed is roughly comparable to the version of Mozilla (about 6 months old) that I was using previously. Also memory usage is down substantially, even if I count thunderbird as well (except, strangely, when I first started thunderbird it went immediately up to 75Mb usage, but a restart fixed this and it now hovers around 30Mb, plus 20Mb for firefox is much better than the 80 or so moz used to take, although I still don't see why either of them need so much).
3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Yeah, I'd hoped this had been fixed, but it seems not. For other posters who say they don't see a problem, it isn't page loads that cause it, the biggest problem is when it's doing stuff like reflowing very long documents, etc. At least having the mail client in a separate process helps, though. No more long web browser UI freezes while moving thousands of messages between folders.
I tried an Opera evaluation version about a year ago. When scrolling pages, any incompletely loaded images flickered badly, and sometimes just disappeared entirely, meaning you had to resize the browser window to cause a new layout before you could see them. I don't know whether it was just an incompatibility with my system, but everything else worked fine. Needless to say, I decided it wasn't worth paying for.
Is that legal? I know Microsoft software can't be resold.
It's called the doctrine of first sale. It is part of UK & US common law, I believe. Essentially, it means that EULA restrictions that try to prevent resale of the software are legally unenforceable.
OK, looking at that review, what I saw must have been a cut-down version of the same software. It had the same basic user interface, but lacked many of the options. Specifically, it did not have a "layers" palette or menu, which obviously means that 90% of the features of photoshop that are useful for graphic design, as opposed to photo editing, just weren't there.
To borrow the medical anology, pathology of a virus is important but this alone will not create a "cure". You may understand completely how a virus works but this alone does nothing to hamper it.
This breaks down trivially when applied to computer malware. By reverse engineering a computer virus (or other malware) you can tell how it spreads, and exactly what damage it does. By knowing how it spreads you can always avoid becoming infected. By knowing what damage it does you can always remove that damage.
I suspect the same would be true of biological viruses, if we understood the workings of the human body as well as we understand computer software.
So if a virus has built in copy-protection to prevent piracy, then it would be illegal to reverse engineer it. Am I missing something here?
No, it would be illegal to provide other people with a tool that enabled illegal copying of the virus, or instructions on how to make illegal copies of the virus.
Reverse engineering to determine how it works would still be perfectly legal. If describing how you did it would enable other people to make copies, then such descriptions would be illegal. But descriptions of how it works that exclude any such information would be fine.
Twisted, but it kind-of works. Of course, the idea of 'illegally copying' a piece of software that produces copies of itself as a matter of course is a little strange, and I doubt any court would hold it up.
Notice any difference? This is exactly why Usability and Security are NOT opposites. Any box that's running 99% cpu with malware and viruses is damn near unusable.
You're using a different definition of usability to the one intended. The point is, the computer is very usable when you first boot it, before it gets any of those infections. If an infected computer becomes less usable, that's a problem with the malware that is infecting it. The fact that the malware is able to be installed is a problem with security. But the link isn't a direct causation: the existence of the security problem did not make the computer less usable, because the security problem existed at first boot, and the computer was fine then.
Photoshopping is for editing, well, photos. It's fine also as a finishing tool for icons that are already made.
Photoshop is not only for photo editing. Many of its features are aimed primarily at graphic design content creation. It is, I believe, the most commonly used tool for doing pixel-level graphic design work in the industry.
He owns Photoshop, LightWave, and Maya. A cursory look at pricing reveals that buying those programs would cost about $3200 total (assuming he buys Maya Complete and not Maya Unlimited).
Assuming he has current versions, purchased recently. He may have these as left-over items from a previous job where an employer/client paid for him to acquire them (for instance, my copy of Flash was purchased via this route). Or he may have bought second hand out-of-date versions cheap on eBay. A quick search on ebay.co.uk shows a copy of Photoshop 7 for Mac for GBP 8 (about $12 US) going in 1 hour, with only one bid on it. You could probably get that for not much more than that figure.
I must admit I've never even seen Photoshop, it's much too expensive for me to even consider.
Second hand copies of out-of-date versions are much easier to get hold of. I find Photoshop 5 does pretty much everything I need. You can find copies on eBay for next to nothing.
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS: A. Photoshop B. Dreamweaver C. Flash D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
As an irregular user of products A, B and C above I have to say _bollocks_. Sure, these products take a little time to learn. For example, I spent two weeks learning to find my way around photoshop, getting good workflows for using its options to best effect, etc. But now, even if I don't use it for 6 months, I can sit down in front of it and just work on what I need. It's a tool, and if you understand what it does and how it does it, it's a pretty simple one, too.
PaintShopPro is OK, but many of the techniques you can use to achieve good results in Photoshop just don't work there (or at least didn't last time I used it, which was admittedly several version ago), meaning you end up wasting your time working around the program's limitations. And don't even consider Photoshop Elements for design work. If this is the program I think it is, it is intended for end-user digital photo manipulation (rotate, crop, add borders, colour adjustment, red-eye removal) and is horribly limited in terms of what you can actually achieve with it.
It looks very much like Microsoft is taking Google's results and passing it off as their own.
Or MS has spent a subtantial amount of time and effort reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm, and now they have it so accurately sussed that based on a similar selection of indexed sites you get similar results for the same query.
Not hard to believe. MS has many, many talented programmers. More than google, in fact.
I believe that under database right laws (covered on slashdot here, I don't know if it is actually a law yet) Google would have a right to prevent other people from using their index, if they want. Essentially, it would be a copyright-like right arising from the effort Google have put into building their index.
Looked at that way, the scientist's job is to secure another research grant. There are plenty of journalists who really do believe they are there to highlight the truth.
I've not heard the "coffee good for you" story, but wine being good for you was an independent university study, and is backed up by good, solid evidence.
The down side is that the amount that's good for you is about 2 glasses per week. Any more than that completely destroys the positive effects.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me who saw the title of this article and thought "Be vewy quiet. I'm hunting Internets."
And then wondered if Nukular weapons would be appropriate.
I don't know where you are, but in the UK if you give false information in order to convince somebody to sell you an item or give you a service they would not otherwise give you under the same terms, this is a crime called "obtaining goods/services by deception".
I would imagine similar laws exist in other countries.
IANAL, etc.
How hard is it for government forces to get hold of the footage shot by privately owned cameras?
Well, if they wanted footage from my camera, they'd have to either convince me there was a pressing need for it, or come up with a court order. I'm quite convinced that if there was massive abuse of this ability, getting the court order from the politically-independent judiciary would become fairly difficult.
It would have made the nightmare of opening a UK bank account disappear. As it is, I had to provide proof of a paid utility bill (in my name), which required getting an apartment which required references and (usually) proof of a bank account...
Opening a bank account in the UK is becoming ridiculous, I agree. The last account I opened, I had to provide one form of proof of identity, they accepted my passport. I recently attempted to open another. They required two forms of proof of identity and one (from a fairly limited list) of proof of address. They blame it on European anti-money-laundering regulations. Is this actually true, or is it just British banks being difficult?
You mean like if you borrowed money and were unable to repay it, you might not be able to borrow more money elsewhere? Oh, wait. They already keep that info, keyed to the SSN.
Not in the UK, they don't. Our data protection laws won't allow credit reference agencies to use your NI No (equivalent to the US's SSN). They have to identify you based on name, date of birth and address, and link together multiple addresses by asking you for previous ones. You can legally lose your credit reference file in the UK, if you know how to do it.
Under Blunkett's proposals, you'd need to show your ID card to claim benefits, for medical treatment, and probably lots of other places too. Later on, you will probably also be required to show it to open bank accounts or make large cash purchases (the UK is getting paranoid about money laundering these days). I bet they ask for it when you pay your motor vehicle tax, too. They ask for all sorts of other shite already.
That was godwaful. See why I'm going to major in math?
:)
Would it have anything to do with your spelling?
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
On my 450MHz celeron speed is roughly comparable to the version of Mozilla (about 6 months old) that I was using previously. Also memory usage is down substantially, even if I count thunderbird as well (except, strangely, when I first started thunderbird it went immediately up to 75Mb usage, but a restart fixed this and it now hovers around 30Mb, plus 20Mb for firefox is much better than the 80 or so moz used to take, although I still don't see why either of them need so much).
3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Yeah, I'd hoped this had been fixed, but it seems not. For other posters who say they don't see a problem, it isn't page loads that cause it, the biggest problem is when it's doing stuff like reflowing very long documents, etc. At least having the mail client in a separate process helps, though. No more long web browser UI freezes while moving thousands of messages between folders.
I tried an Opera evaluation version about a year ago. When scrolling pages, any incompletely loaded images flickered badly, and sometimes just disappeared entirely, meaning you had to resize the browser window to cause a new layout before you could see them. I don't know whether it was just an incompatibility with my system, but everything else worked fine. Needless to say, I decided it wasn't worth paying for.
Is that legal? I know Microsoft software can't be resold.
It's called the doctrine of first sale. It is part of UK & US common law, I believe. Essentially, it means that EULA restrictions that try to prevent resale of the software are legally unenforceable.
OK, looking at that review, what I saw must have been a cut-down version of the same software. It had the same basic user interface, but lacked many of the options. Specifically, it did not have a "layers" palette or menu, which obviously means that 90% of the features of photoshop that are useful for graphic design, as opposed to photo editing, just weren't there.
To borrow the medical anology, pathology of a virus is important but this alone will not create a "cure". You may understand completely how a virus works but this alone does nothing to hamper it.
This breaks down trivially when applied to computer malware. By reverse engineering a computer virus (or other malware) you can tell how it spreads, and exactly what damage it does. By knowing how it spreads you can always avoid becoming infected. By knowing what damage it does you can always remove that damage.
I suspect the same would be true of biological viruses, if we understood the workings of the human body as well as we understand computer software.
So if a virus has built in copy-protection to prevent piracy, then it would be illegal to reverse engineer it. Am I missing something here?
No, it would be illegal to provide other people with a tool that enabled illegal copying of the virus, or instructions on how to make illegal copies of the virus.
Reverse engineering to determine how it works would still be perfectly legal. If describing how you did it would enable other people to make copies, then such descriptions would be illegal. But descriptions of how it works that exclude any such information would be fine.
Twisted, but it kind-of works. Of course, the idea of 'illegally copying' a piece of software that produces copies of itself as a matter of course is a little strange, and I doubt any court would hold it up.
Notice any difference? This is exactly why Usability and Security are NOT opposites. Any box that's running 99% cpu with malware and viruses is damn near unusable.
You're using a different definition of usability to the one intended. The point is, the computer is very usable when you first boot it, before it gets any of those infections. If an infected computer becomes less usable, that's a problem with the malware that is infecting it. The fact that the malware is able to be installed is a problem with security. But the link isn't a direct causation: the existence of the security problem did not make the computer less usable, because the security problem existed at first boot, and the computer was fine then.
See?
Photoshopping is for editing, well, photos. It's fine also as a finishing tool for icons that are already made.
Photoshop is not only for photo editing. Many of its features are aimed primarily at graphic design content creation. It is, I believe, the most commonly used tool for doing pixel-level graphic design work in the industry.
He owns Photoshop, LightWave, and Maya. A cursory look at pricing reveals that buying those programs would cost about $3200 total (assuming he buys Maya Complete and not Maya Unlimited).
Assuming he has current versions, purchased recently. He may have these as left-over items from a previous job where an employer/client paid for him to acquire them (for instance, my copy of Flash was purchased via this route). Or he may have bought second hand out-of-date versions cheap on eBay. A quick search on ebay.co.uk shows a copy of Photoshop 7 for Mac for GBP 8 (about $12 US) going in 1 hour, with only one bid on it. You could probably get that for not much more than that figure.
I must admit I've never even seen Photoshop, it's much too expensive for me to even consider.
Second hand copies of out-of-date versions are much easier to get hold of. I find Photoshop 5 does pretty much everything I need. You can find copies on eBay for next to nothing.
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
As an irregular user of products A, B and C above I have to say _bollocks_. Sure, these products take a little time to learn. For example, I spent two weeks learning to find my way around photoshop, getting good workflows for using its options to best effect, etc. But now, even if I don't use it for 6 months, I can sit down in front of it and just work on what I need. It's a tool, and if you understand what it does and how it does it, it's a pretty simple one, too.
PaintShopPro is OK, but many of the techniques you can use to achieve good results in Photoshop just don't work there (or at least didn't last time I used it, which was admittedly several version ago), meaning you end up wasting your time working around the program's limitations. And don't even consider Photoshop Elements for design work. If this is the program I think it is, it is intended for end-user digital photo manipulation (rotate, crop, add borders, colour adjustment, red-eye removal) and is horribly limited in terms of what you can actually achieve with it.
Too bad that stupid person's post was more intelligent and insightful than your's will ever be.
If you want to insult the intelligence of the person you're replying to, learn how to use apostrophes correctly first.
Bad management.
It looks very much like Microsoft is taking Google's results and passing it off as their own.
Or MS has spent a subtantial amount of time and effort reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm, and now they have it so accurately sussed that based on a similar selection of indexed sites you get similar results for the same query.
Not hard to believe. MS has many, many talented programmers. More than google, in fact.
I believe that under database right laws (covered on slashdot here, I don't know if it is actually a law yet) Google would have a right to prevent other people from using their index, if they want. Essentially, it would be a copyright-like right arising from the effort Google have put into building their index.
Does anyone know if this happened?
Looked at that way, the scientist's job is to secure another research grant. There are plenty of journalists who really do believe they are there to highlight the truth.
I've not heard the "coffee good for you" story, but wine being good for you was an independent university study, and is backed up by good, solid evidence.
:(
The down side is that the amount that's good for you is about 2 glasses per week. Any more than that completely destroys the positive effects.
Tinfoil is no good for specs, it reflects too much light.
You need charcoal.