In general I do only receive personal letters (once I've dug them out from the spam). But they're still often to multiple people. My mom writes to her kids via email about once a week or so -- if I was to ditch email I'd lose that, and while I do talk to my mom often, it's a nice bonus.
Friend of mine emailed me about an address change yesterday too. Presumambly he also emailed all his other friends at the same time - he's smart enough to bcc everything. No email? No notice. Oh sure, I might've found out about it a month from now when I'm up there for his wedding, but that's rather silly.
Hope you don't have any mailing lists you like.
If you don't like people forwarding you stuff, ask them nicely to stop. It works, but you can't be an asshole about it if you want to keep them as a friend.
Sure... until you start realizing just how much spam there is out there now. If each message is stored individually (it isn't, I know, but it lends to my argument, and eventually spammers will stop using cc's and bcc's to get their job done) then a large ISP can have terabytes of spam on a daily basis. That's a boatload of disk space to have for junk. And that data has to go over the wire twice - once inbound to the ISP, once outbound to the user.
And that doesn't even count the time wasted on the ISP side dealing with spam -- I have friends who work at large ISPs and they spend a good bit of their time on spam management alone.
I don't expect a grass roots campaign to get spammers eliminated will do any good. I have very little faith in governments listening to the common person nowadays. I do expect for corporate entities such as AOL, Earthlink, MSN, etc. to eventually start screaming about the issue. Because it's costing them an amazing amount of money -- they just don't realize it because I doubt their bean counters have asked for a line item on disk, bandwidth, and support costs related to it.
Hope that works for you. But it certainly doesn't let you do what you can with email.
Sorry, when I want to let some friends know about something then I'm not going to go to their individual web boards and write a message. I'm going to email them once using cc's or bcc's. Oh, sure, I guess you can then start talking about community webboards (my wife uses one to keep up with her college friends), but just how many different boards do I get to go read for this kind of thing? No thanks.
And lets not even talk about the umpteen million different interfaces you'd have to deal with. Plus all the different "feature sets" -- any bets on how many people won't think to allow attachments? Or other things that will become standard for a large part of the net? Essentially you roll the email system back 30 years. There's a reason that it's a freaking 7-bit protocol with really, really wacky rules.
Email isn't going away. We need to work on technical and legal solutions to the issue - not ignore that it's there.
get maybe five spam messages a week, as opposed to the more than 100 per day!
No. You still get 100+ per day. You just don't see them in your mailbox. But the bandwidth and storage space have already been eaten, and that's really what's evil about spam.
I'm all for programs like Spamassassin, blackballing systems (run right), etc. But they put a thin veneer over the real problem - that boatloads of bandwidth and storage space is being sucked up by noise -- the vast majority of people don't want this stuff, and the cost of transporting it is being passed directly on to the consumer.
What, you think you don't pay for it? Has your internet service increased in price recently? Has the level of service on it remained the same for the past 3 years? Still able to download/upload stuff at the same rates you could 3 years ago?
I really, really hate to say it, but I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to stop spam is to do so through the legal system. The vast majority of spammers are within the US - either they source the mail from the US or they are US citizens using foreign resources. In either case prosecution under either current anti-fraud laws or (ick) new anti-spam laws could seriously reduce the flood of spam.
Yes, it would probably take some international cooperation on the legal front. But there's a helluva lot more of that then there is on the technical front. Sure, technical solutions (refusal of service, leaf node filtering, etc.) work in theory. In reality they've failed. Miserably.
Seeing the NY AG sue Monsterhut for fraud and violations of consumer rights statutes makes me happy. And I sincerely hope that it's just the tip of the iceberg on that kind of case.
The info on IBM using refurbished platters from Hungary was on/. awhile back... if you want to find the story, attempt to beat the search engine here into submission.
I favor OpenGL over DirectX because OpenGL is an open standard and available on multiple platforms. DX is an ad hoc standard pushed by MS, not by anyone else.
That said, if you think you can't make a "visually stunning" game in DX, you haven't played many DX games recently. Go take a look at DungeonSiege as one example. In fact, I'd bet that most of the more visually impressive games use DX, simply because the vast majority of games use DX. OpenGL doesn't give you some magical visual improvement over DX. Nor does DX give you the same over OpenGL. It's all about support (to the programmer, not to the end user) and knowledge bases.
The reason that EQ looks like crap is that their engine is shit and their graphic artists wouldn't know how to reduce poly count if their lives were at stake.
DX also doesn't give you any real advantage over OpenGL for end user support -- people have just as many (if not more) problems with DX as they do with OpenGL. Go talk to Verant about the joys they had upgrading the EQ engine to DX8.1 last year. And how they desupported every Win95 user in the process.
As a final note, it certainly seems that DX is what's driving graphics board features today (or graphic board features are driving DX... one of the two, I'm not in the industry). DX9 will have features that aren't in any currently available boards - but the new ATI and Nvidia chips will be fully DX9 compliant. I'm sure that OpenGL can support the same features through extensions, but the whole schema for OpenGL extentions is hokey and one of the reasons that most developers shy away from it to start with (of course, DX has fallen down much the same path...)
I love how people expand from "I won't enjoy it" to "no one will enjoy it".
Speak for yourself, frankly. There's a lot of people who enjoy playing FPS games, either single or multiplayer.
Yeah, I enjoy playing some old games too - Qbert, Qix, etc. are fun to play. But so is Quake3 CTF. It's a very different kind of game play. On the flipside, I don't enjoy RTS games... just not my cup of tea. But I'm not going to be so inane as to say "oh boy, Warcraft 3. Nobody's going to enjoy that."
As far as I'm concerned, CGI has its place. And it's not for recreating living creatures
The most recent attempts at CGI for living creatures has been fairly out of whack... I'm not an expert, I won't even begin to guess why.
But go back awhile. Hell, go back 10 years. Watch Jurassic Park again -- Spielburg mixed CGI and more traditional FX extremely well there. The first scene with a brontosaurus grazing on treetops is just amazing. Some of the later scenes with the smaller dinosaurs "moving like a flock of birds" and the T-Rex attacking them are also well done. In fact, a lot of the robotics just looks bad - like the sick triceratops.
It may be because we've never seen these creatures alive and the human interaction with them was nil (all interaction shots were done w/ robotics AFAIK). But it's an indication that it can be done right at least.
We'll eventually get CGI for living creatures down pat... but not yet.
Re:And because it happened to YOU
on
Mapping the Spam
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· Score: 1
Going from no spam one day to 40+ pieces a week after this loser got exposed isn't a coincidence. And, of course, it's grown since then.
Yup. I pissed off someone and they retaliated by adding my email address to every spam list on the face of the earth.
Eventually I'll setup my own domain and spamfilter, but until then I just deal with it. Hotmail's junkmail detection and filters cut out about 60% of it, but I still get 30-40 pieces daily. Used to cut out more, but then I hit the limit of 250 filters. And I do filter by domain.
There certainly isn't if you're fatalistic and don't look for solutions.
Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications
Ignoring the abundant misunderstanding of Shannon's research (hey, go read here and you'll already know more thant he poster), to call spam noise on the data network is an amazing stretch. Spam is not noise. Spam is data. If you took the spam off the network some other crap that nobody wanted wouldn't magically fill the spot.
I also deeply question your off-the-cuff nlogn value for spam. Let's just take my Hotmail account as an example. It receives roughly 200 spam emails a day. They average 8k each. So that's 1.6MB of spam per day per user. Now, there's 118 million Hotmail accounts. Assume that a mere 1% of them get this much spam. That's 1,888,000 MB of spam. Daily. To Hotmail alone. That's nearly 2 terabytes of capacity. Daily.
Now lets start throwing in Yahoo! mail, AltaVista mail, juno, excite, etc. etc. etc. and start counting numbers. It's scary. Very, very scary.
If anyone can actually provide real numbers for how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, please do. I did a Google search a couple weeks ago and came up empty. Lots of sites referring to it consuming "great amounts of bandwidth", but no hard numbers.
I'd guess that a lot of people browse at +3 - I do. It means that you have to be modded up at least once to get past the filter, which is a decent first-pass move.
If I'm interested in responses or the parent I'll click down, but that's about it.
Much like my belief in the Death Penelty was pretty much shreaded
I'm still a supporter of the death penalty, shrug... even though it doesn't make fiscal sense and there are clearly issues with the system. I'd rather see it applied only in cases where it's not questionable about who did it and there was extreme violence used (multiple homicide, rape). I'm pleased to see some recent Supreme Court rulings regarding DNA evidence and mentally challenged death row inmates.
The prison system is self-governing to some extent though... do shit to a kid and you're unlikely to make it out in one piece, if even alive. And while it may be vigilante justice, I don't cry tears at what happened to Jeffrey Dahlmer.
On the other side of the atlantic ocean, however, "region free" is a *major* sales feature found in many advertisements.
Wow... ok, I'm not at all surprised with the desire for hackable DVD players outside the US/Canada -- by and large everyone else gets the short end of the stick (particularly regions 5 and 6, and 4 to a large extent). I am surprised that it's openly advertised. I guess the MPAA is too busy trying to pass inane laws here to go look at Europe/Asia... or they just don't have the pull there that they do here (much more likely).
Every once in awhile I hear about a region 2 release that I'd be interested in. Usually a TV show -- syndication rights in the US make releasing stuff on DVD a nightmare -- some shows require agreements from up to 4 different studios. But it's not such a big deal to me to bother looking into modding one of my DVD players.
A major point of difference wrt. copy protection in general however, is that the Palladium thing isn't primarily targetted agains copyright violation
Well... if you look at the history of Longhorn the first things MS was saying were copyright oriented. In particular music and video oriented. They're just spinning it now.
Re:the real terrorists are governments and media
on
Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 2
fellow kayakers (most of whom, contrary to popular image, are healthy, intelligent, independant-minded folks
Gee... I always thought the image was of sickly, slightly dumb, and go-with-the-flow folks...
Exactly what is the "popular image" of kayakers? I never would've thought of them as anything but the above. You can't kayak if you're not healthy, it's certainly an independant sport, and while intelligence is in the eye of the beholder, I expect most sub-average intelligence folks wouldn't get the zen of kayaking. And would probably end up drowning themselves.
As far as the media/govt rhetoric on 9/11 - yes, it's rather insane. Some of it is well placed. Some is not. I'm not at all happy with a lot of the post-9/11 law enforcement bills that have been passed, nor am I pleased to see US citizens (and non-citizens) deprived of their rights with some rather vague handwaving. If they're guilty, prove it and either throw them out of the country, throw them in jail, or improve the gene pool.
Re:Smart Move...
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Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What's funny is that shortly after some of the first arm-chair quarterbacking by the networks the White House said "fine... we'll brief you more often". They then began to share more possible threats, particularly those with a lower probability than previously publicly discussed. What happened? The next night on the network news at least one anchor (either Sam Donaldson or Dan Rather I believe) groused that the White House was now sharing too much and causing undue panic.
Uh. Duh.
You can't have it both ways. You either have to let the intelligence community work at things and only inform you of the threats deemed likely to occur, or you have them warn you every time some crank caller picks up the phone. Yes, there's middle ground. But who draws it?
Were there screwups prior to 9/11? Possibly. It's likely that we'll look back on it and say "how could that have occurred?" similar to Pearl Harbor now. But it's being done in a post-mortem fashion -- when you KNOW what to look for it's a helluva lot easier to find it than it is when you have 5 million inputs and only one of them is valid.
How do you know? The government has refused to say who they have detained or even how many (although there have been leaks otherwise).
And US born doesn't mean jack -- if they are a citizen of the United States of America then they get the rights, privledges, and duties thereof. Whether born, naturalized, or otherwise (can't think of an otherwise offhand, but I'm not an immigration lawyer either). Point being, they're not.
Everyone seems to be ignoring this on the basis of "well, that's ok, because these are bad people and it's not me". What proof do we have that they are bad people? The government's? The same people that are locking them up and refusing them trial, right? Uh... and you don't think that vague evidence could be manufacturered or outright lied about?
I'm familiar with the law and Supreme Court decision that the AG is using here. But it does not apply to US citizens. It's questionable if it applies at all, since we do not have a formal declaration of war (but that gets into the War Powers Act, which everyone, especially the Supreme Court, has been dodging for nearly 50 years now). And there are US citizens being detained and stripped of their rights here. This is the same crap we yell at despots and communist countries about on a daily basis.
I'm all for locking them up and letting them rot... or even hanging them... but either we do it right, through the legal system we have established, or we start kissing freedom goodbye. And I'm not talking about the freedom people whine about with the RIAA/MPAA - I'm talking about actually being able to go outside your home without worrying that the government will put you away for pissing off some minor bureaucratic official.
I knew I'd read something where AMD disclaimed the linking (despite the unlikelihood of that). So I went and found the Athlon XP press release. Which contains this sentence:
The AMD Athlon "XP" modifier is designed to convey the extreme performance AMD Athlon XP processors deliver for the upcoming Microsoft Windows XP operating system.
Which pretty well does tie it directly to Windows XP.
So what happens if your trusty(trusted?) laptop is stolen and used by an unethical individual
You use secure passwords, right?
Yeah... I know. Scenarios like this tend to fall through the cracks -- either because they don't think about them or because they're "too hard".
Or what if a corporation sells off all it's old palladium systems after an upgrade
That's easier. Let's repeat the mantra - licenses are not transferable.
Go ahead and sell that hardware -- but you can't sell the software! Oh no! That's not yours, you didn't buy it, you just licensed it!
And, in actuality, that works fine for the corporate world where you usually have support contracts. But if the company sold the hardware (with software still installed) to an individual... well, that's another matter. Presumably the company would de-register the IDs prior to selling, but that's another assumption.
Clearly even a closed, proprietary system has holes big enough to drive a truck through. But to some extent it won't matter -- holes like these aren't going to show up immediately, and by the time they do the system may have already been adopted and in too widespread of use to remove.
It's like the regional protection with DVDs. If given a choice, many consumers will rather buy a crappy "region free" DVD player than a high-end player that doesn't allow japanes/european/us disks.
Apples to oranges here.
People buy "crappy DVD players" that happen to have region free hacks because they're cheap, not because they're region free. 99% of the US market couldn't care less about non-region 1 DVDs.
It is, however, unfortunate that there are few (if any) current high end DVD players that can be made region free. Putting a $99 DVD player on a $3000 HDTV is an injustice to the TV. And a fair number of the people in the $5000+ range for TVs are also in that 1% that does care about region-free capabilities. Of course, the high end DVD player manufacturers can't actually put in region free codes lest they be gutted by the DVD consortium -- and they're a lot easier to gut than a company like Apex.
I'm sure there are some region free high-end DVD players out there... anyone want to point some out?
In-house is irrelevant. That's not what this is marketed/designed toward. What MS is attempting to solve here is "how can I trust party X out there? How do I even know that party X is party X? And how can I trust party X not to share my private information with party Y?"
It is, at least on the surface, a noble goal. There's still a lot of people out there that aren't willing to do transactions over the net due to security concerns. And even those of us who do use the net to do transactions know that there's pretty much nothing we can do about step 3 above -- if someone decides to share my personal data (be it my name, my address, my credit card numbers, or my social security number), there's pretty much no way in hell for me to ever track it back to them.
The problem is, these are tough nuts to crack. That's why they haven't been fully completed yet. Microsoft is taking the stance that the only way to do it is to have a centralized authority, hardware encryption, and trusted systems. The problem with this is that it must be closed source. You cannot open the source up, nor can you allow people to "self-sign" -- doing so just means that Joe Cracker can say "yeah, I'm trusted - give me your info" and the system will. Because it's designed that way.
Of course, there are a plethora of other issues here... privacy advocates will immediately scream about a centralized database of ALL the private information. Think the credit bureaus are bad? You haven't seen anything yet. And, afterall, we're talking about Microsoft here -- they don't exactly have the greatest history when it comes to security. And this isn't the kind of thing you can release and patch up later. It must be virtually air tight from the very beginning, or else you won't be able to guarantee the system as a whole (good luck patching that security hole on the embedded card reader over there!).
I'd counter by saying that Mr. Love wasn't an appropriate selection for a Slashdot interview... he's a CEO and was chosen (by Caldera) to speak CEO-ese. Is the talk inappropriate for techies? Sure. But that's not his job. We're not the ones he needs to convince that Linux is good.
BTW, I'm a coder. I have absolutely zero aspirations to be a manager. I'd royally suck at being a manager. But I've had good managers (and CIO's) in the past and know their value. I've also worked in Dilbert-esque environments and know that not all managers are worth the air they breathe.
Slashdot Mirror
In general I do only receive personal letters (once I've dug them out from the spam). But they're still often to multiple people. My mom writes to her kids via email about once a week or so -- if I was to ditch email I'd lose that, and while I do talk to my mom often, it's a nice bonus.
Friend of mine emailed me about an address change yesterday too. Presumambly he also emailed all his other friends at the same time - he's smart enough to bcc everything. No email? No notice. Oh sure, I might've found out about it a month from now when I'm up there for his wedding, but that's rather silly.
Hope you don't have any mailing lists you like.
If you don't like people forwarding you stuff, ask them nicely to stop. It works, but you can't be an asshole about it if you want to keep them as a friend.
Storage space is cheap
Sure... until you start realizing just how much spam there is out there now. If each message is stored individually (it isn't, I know, but it lends to my argument, and eventually spammers will stop using cc's and bcc's to get their job done) then a large ISP can have terabytes of spam on a daily basis. That's a boatload of disk space to have for junk. And that data has to go over the wire twice - once inbound to the ISP, once outbound to the user.
And that doesn't even count the time wasted on the ISP side dealing with spam -- I have friends who work at large ISPs and they spend a good bit of their time on spam management alone.
I don't expect a grass roots campaign to get spammers eliminated will do any good. I have very little faith in governments listening to the common person nowadays. I do expect for corporate entities such as AOL, Earthlink, MSN, etc. to eventually start screaming about the issue. Because it's costing them an amazing amount of money -- they just don't realize it because I doubt their bean counters have asked for a line item on disk, bandwidth, and support costs related to it.
Hope that works for you. But it certainly doesn't let you do what you can with email.
Sorry, when I want to let some friends know about something then I'm not going to go to their individual web boards and write a message. I'm going to email them once using cc's or bcc's. Oh, sure, I guess you can then start talking about community webboards (my wife uses one to keep up with her college friends), but just how many different boards do I get to go read for this kind of thing? No thanks.
And lets not even talk about the umpteen million different interfaces you'd have to deal with. Plus all the different "feature sets" -- any bets on how many people won't think to allow attachments? Or other things that will become standard for a large part of the net? Essentially you roll the email system back 30 years. There's a reason that it's a freaking 7-bit protocol with really, really wacky rules.
Email isn't going away. We need to work on technical and legal solutions to the issue - not ignore that it's there.
get maybe five spam messages a week, as opposed to the more than 100 per day!
No. You still get 100+ per day. You just don't see them in your mailbox. But the bandwidth and storage space have already been eaten, and that's really what's evil about spam.
I'm all for programs like Spamassassin, blackballing systems (run right), etc. But they put a thin veneer over the real problem - that boatloads of bandwidth and storage space is being sucked up by noise -- the vast majority of people don't want this stuff, and the cost of transporting it is being passed directly on to the consumer.
What, you think you don't pay for it? Has your internet service increased in price recently? Has the level of service on it remained the same for the past 3 years? Still able to download/upload stuff at the same rates you could 3 years ago?
I really, really hate to say it, but I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to stop spam is to do so through the legal system. The vast majority of spammers are within the US - either they source the mail from the US or they are US citizens using foreign resources. In either case prosecution under either current anti-fraud laws or (ick) new anti-spam laws could seriously reduce the flood of spam.
Yes, it would probably take some international cooperation on the legal front. But there's a helluva lot more of that then there is on the technical front. Sure, technical solutions (refusal of service, leaf node filtering, etc.) work in theory. In reality they've failed. Miserably.
Seeing the NY AG sue Monsterhut for fraud and violations of consumer rights statutes makes me happy. And I sincerely hope that it's just the tip of the iceberg on that kind of case.
The info on IBM using refurbished platters from Hungary was on /. awhile back... if you want to find the story, attempt to beat the search engine here into submission.
What a load of hooey.
I favor OpenGL over DirectX because OpenGL is an open standard and available on multiple platforms. DX is an ad hoc standard pushed by MS, not by anyone else.
That said, if you think you can't make a "visually stunning" game in DX, you haven't played many DX games recently. Go take a look at DungeonSiege as one example. In fact, I'd bet that most of the more visually impressive games use DX, simply because the vast majority of games use DX. OpenGL doesn't give you some magical visual improvement over DX. Nor does DX give you the same over OpenGL. It's all about support (to the programmer, not to the end user) and knowledge bases.
The reason that EQ looks like crap is that their engine is shit and their graphic artists wouldn't know how to reduce poly count if their lives were at stake.
DX also doesn't give you any real advantage over OpenGL for end user support -- people have just as many (if not more) problems with DX as they do with OpenGL. Go talk to Verant about the joys they had upgrading the EQ engine to DX8.1 last year. And how they desupported every Win95 user in the process.
As a final note, it certainly seems that DX is what's driving graphics board features today (or graphic board features are driving DX... one of the two, I'm not in the industry). DX9 will have features that aren't in any currently available boards - but the new ATI and Nvidia chips will be fully DX9 compliant. I'm sure that OpenGL can support the same features through extensions, but the whole schema for OpenGL extentions is hokey and one of the reasons that most developers shy away from it to start with (of course, DX has fallen down much the same path...)
I love how people expand from "I won't enjoy it" to "no one will enjoy it".
Speak for yourself, frankly. There's a lot of people who enjoy playing FPS games, either single or multiplayer.
Yeah, I enjoy playing some old games too - Qbert, Qix, etc. are fun to play. But so is Quake3 CTF. It's a very different kind of game play. On the flipside, I don't enjoy RTS games... just not my cup of tea. But I'm not going to be so inane as to say "oh boy, Warcraft 3. Nobody's going to enjoy that."
As far as I'm concerned, CGI has its place. And it's not for recreating living creatures
The most recent attempts at CGI for living creatures has been fairly out of whack... I'm not an expert, I won't even begin to guess why.
But go back awhile. Hell, go back 10 years. Watch Jurassic Park again -- Spielburg mixed CGI and more traditional FX extremely well there. The first scene with a brontosaurus grazing on treetops is just amazing. Some of the later scenes with the smaller dinosaurs "moving like a flock of birds" and the T-Rex attacking them are also well done. In fact, a lot of the robotics just looks bad - like the sick triceratops.
It may be because we've never seen these creatures alive and the human interaction with them was nil (all interaction shots were done w/ robotics AFAIK). But it's an indication that it can be done right at least.
We'll eventually get CGI for living creatures down pat... but not yet.
Going from no spam one day to 40+ pieces a week after this loser got exposed isn't a coincidence.
And, of course, it's grown since then.
You get 200 a day?
Yup. I pissed off someone and they retaliated by adding my email address to every spam list on the face of the earth.
Eventually I'll setup my own domain and spamfilter, but until then I just deal with it. Hotmail's junkmail detection and filters cut out about 60% of it, but I still get 30-40 pieces daily. Used to cut out more, but then I hit the limit of 250 filters. And I do filter by domain.
There is no way to "fix the spam problem".
.
There certainly isn't if you're fatalistic and don't look for solutions.
Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications
Ignoring the abundant misunderstanding of Shannon's research (hey, go read here and you'll already know more thant he poster), to call spam noise on the data network is an amazing stretch. Spam is not noise. Spam is data. If you took the spam off the network some other crap that nobody wanted wouldn't magically fill the spot.
I also deeply question your off-the-cuff nlogn value for spam. Let's just take my Hotmail account as an example. It receives roughly 200 spam emails a day. They average 8k each. So that's 1.6MB of spam per day per user. Now, there's 118 million Hotmail accounts. Assume that a mere 1% of them get this much spam. That's 1,888,000 MB of spam. Daily. To Hotmail alone. That's nearly 2 terabytes of capacity. Daily
Now lets start throwing in Yahoo! mail, AltaVista mail, juno, excite, etc. etc. etc. and start counting numbers. It's scary. Very, very scary.
If anyone can actually provide real numbers for how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, please do. I did a Google search a couple weeks ago and came up empty. Lots of sites referring to it consuming "great amounts of bandwidth", but no hard numbers.
I'd guess that a lot of people browse at +3 - I do. It means that you have to be modded up at least once to get past the filter, which is a decent first-pass move.
If I'm interested in responses or the parent I'll click down, but that's about it.
Much like my belief in the Death Penelty was pretty much shreaded
I'm still a supporter of the death penalty, shrug... even though it doesn't make fiscal sense and there are clearly issues with the system. I'd rather see it applied only in cases where it's not questionable about who did it and there was extreme violence used (multiple homicide, rape). I'm pleased to see some recent Supreme Court rulings regarding DNA evidence and mentally challenged death row inmates.
The prison system is self-governing to some extent though... do shit to a kid and you're unlikely to make it out in one piece, if even alive. And while it may be vigilante justice, I don't cry tears at what happened to Jeffrey Dahlmer.
On the other side of the atlantic ocean, however, "region free" is a *major* sales feature found in many advertisements.
Wow... ok, I'm not at all surprised with the desire for hackable DVD players outside the US/Canada -- by and large everyone else gets the short end of the stick (particularly regions 5 and 6, and 4 to a large extent). I am surprised that it's openly advertised. I guess the MPAA is too busy trying to pass inane laws here to go look at Europe/Asia... or they just don't have the pull there that they do here (much more likely).
Every once in awhile I hear about a region 2 release that I'd be interested in. Usually a TV show -- syndication rights in the US make releasing stuff on DVD a nightmare -- some shows require agreements from up to 4 different studios. But it's not such a big deal to me to bother looking into modding one of my DVD players.
A major point of difference wrt. copy protection in general however, is that the Palladium thing isn't primarily targetted agains copyright violation
Well... if you look at the history of Longhorn the first things MS was saying were copyright oriented. In particular music and video oriented. They're just spinning it now.
fellow kayakers (most of whom, contrary to popular image, are healthy, intelligent, independant-minded folks
Gee... I always thought the image was of sickly, slightly dumb, and go-with-the-flow folks...
Exactly what is the "popular image" of kayakers? I never would've thought of them as anything but the above. You can't kayak if you're not healthy, it's certainly an independant sport, and while intelligence is in the eye of the beholder, I expect most sub-average intelligence folks wouldn't get the zen of kayaking. And would probably end up drowning themselves.
As far as the media/govt rhetoric on 9/11 - yes, it's rather insane. Some of it is well placed. Some is not. I'm not at all happy with a lot of the post-9/11 law enforcement bills that have been passed, nor am I pleased to see US citizens (and non-citizens) deprived of their rights with some rather vague handwaving. If they're guilty, prove it and either throw them out of the country, throw them in jail, or improve the gene pool.
What's funny is that shortly after some of the first arm-chair quarterbacking by the networks the White House said "fine... we'll brief you more often". They then began to share more possible threats, particularly those with a lower probability than previously publicly discussed. What happened? The next night on the network news at least one anchor (either Sam Donaldson or Dan Rather I believe) groused that the White House was now sharing too much and causing undue panic.
Uh. Duh.
You can't have it both ways. You either have to let the intelligence community work at things and only inform you of the threats deemed likely to occur, or you have them warn you every time some crank caller picks up the phone. Yes, there's middle ground. But who draws it?
Were there screwups prior to 9/11? Possibly. It's likely that we'll look back on it and say "how could that have occurred?" similar to Pearl Harbor now. But it's being done in a post-mortem fashion -- when you KNOW what to look for it's a helluva lot easier to find it than it is when you have 5 million inputs and only one of them is valid.
How do you know? The government has refused to say who they have detained or even how many (although there have been leaks otherwise).
And US born doesn't mean jack -- if they are a citizen of the United States of America then they get the rights, privledges, and duties thereof. Whether born, naturalized, or otherwise (can't think of an otherwise offhand, but I'm not an immigration lawyer either). Point being, they're not.
Everyone seems to be ignoring this on the basis of "well, that's ok, because these are bad people and it's not me". What proof do we have that they are bad people? The government's? The same people that are locking them up and refusing them trial, right? Uh... and you don't think that vague evidence could be manufacturered or outright lied about?
I'm familiar with the law and Supreme Court decision that the AG is using here. But it does not apply to US citizens. It's questionable if it applies at all, since we do not have a formal declaration of war (but that gets into the War Powers Act, which everyone, especially the Supreme Court, has been dodging for nearly 50 years now). And there are US citizens being detained and stripped of their rights here. This is the same crap we yell at despots and communist countries about on a daily basis.
I'm all for locking them up and letting them rot... or even hanging them... but either we do it right, through the legal system we have established, or we start kissing freedom goodbye. And I'm not talking about the freedom people whine about with the RIAA/MPAA - I'm talking about actually being able to go outside your home without worrying that the government will put you away for pissing off some minor bureaucratic official.
The rest of your assumptions are, well, assumptions!
Which is pretty much what I said in my post. There are holes.
I knew I'd read something where AMD disclaimed the linking (despite the unlikelihood of that). So I went and found the Athlon XP press release. Which contains this sentence:
Which pretty well does tie it directly to Windows XP.
So I retract my former statement.
So what happens if your trusty(trusted?) laptop is stolen and used by an unethical individual
You use secure passwords, right?
Yeah... I know. Scenarios like this tend to fall through the cracks -- either because they don't think about them or because they're "too hard".
Or what if a corporation sells off all it's old palladium systems after an upgrade
That's easier. Let's repeat the mantra - licenses are not transferable.
Go ahead and sell that hardware -- but you can't sell the software! Oh no! That's not yours, you didn't buy it, you just licensed it!
And, in actuality, that works fine for the corporate world where you usually have support contracts. But if the company sold the hardware (with software still installed) to an individual... well, that's another matter. Presumably the company would de-register the IDs prior to selling, but that's another assumption.
Clearly even a closed, proprietary system has holes big enough to drive a truck through. But to some extent it won't matter -- holes like these aren't going to show up immediately, and by the time they do the system may have already been adopted and in too widespread of use to remove.
Which had nothing to do with Windows XP. Move along.
It's like the regional protection with DVDs. If given a choice, many consumers will rather buy a crappy "region free" DVD player than a high-end player that doesn't allow japanes/european/us disks.
Apples to oranges here.
People buy "crappy DVD players" that happen to have region free hacks because they're cheap, not because they're region free. 99% of the US market couldn't care less about non-region 1 DVDs.
It is, however, unfortunate that there are few (if any) current high end DVD players that can be made region free. Putting a $99 DVD player on a $3000 HDTV is an injustice to the TV. And a fair number of the people in the $5000+ range for TVs are also in that 1% that does care about region-free capabilities. Of course, the high end DVD player manufacturers can't actually put in region free codes lest they be gutted by the DVD consortium -- and they're a lot easier to gut than a company like Apex.
I'm sure there are some region free high-end DVD players out there... anyone want to point some out?
In-house is irrelevant. That's not what this is marketed/designed toward. What MS is attempting to solve here is "how can I trust party X out there? How do I even know that party X is party X? And how can I trust party X not to share my private information with party Y?"
It is, at least on the surface, a noble goal. There's still a lot of people out there that aren't willing to do transactions over the net due to security concerns. And even those of us who do use the net to do transactions know that there's pretty much nothing we can do about step 3 above -- if someone decides to share my personal data (be it my name, my address, my credit card numbers, or my social security number), there's pretty much no way in hell for me to ever track it back to them.
The problem is, these are tough nuts to crack. That's why they haven't been fully completed yet. Microsoft is taking the stance that the only way to do it is to have a centralized authority, hardware encryption, and trusted systems. The problem with this is that it must be closed source. You cannot open the source up, nor can you allow people to "self-sign" -- doing so just means that Joe Cracker can say "yeah, I'm trusted - give me your info" and the system will. Because it's designed that way.
Of course, there are a plethora of other issues here... privacy advocates will immediately scream about a centralized database of ALL the private information. Think the credit bureaus are bad? You haven't seen anything yet. And, afterall, we're talking about Microsoft here -- they don't exactly have the greatest history when it comes to security. And this isn't the kind of thing you can release and patch up later. It must be virtually air tight from the very beginning, or else you won't be able to guarantee the system as a whole (good luck patching that security hole on the embedded card reader over there!).
No. The latter ruling supercedes the former law. This is how the justice system in the US works (and in all common law based judicial systems AFAIK).
I'd counter by saying that Mr. Love wasn't an appropriate selection for a Slashdot interview... he's a CEO and was chosen (by Caldera) to speak CEO-ese. Is the talk inappropriate for techies? Sure. But that's not his job. We're not the ones he needs to convince that Linux is good.
BTW, I'm a coder. I have absolutely zero aspirations to be a manager. I'd royally suck at being a manager. But I've had good managers (and CIO's) in the past and know their value. I've also worked in Dilbert-esque environments and know that not all managers are worth the air they breathe.