Yes, and merchants should be able to sell iPods for a price they want as well, not the price that Apple specifies. Odd that people are okay with that though.
I've seen quite a few crappy digital channels from time to time myself, blotchy, dropouts, sync issues, stutter and overall crappy quality. I'm sure the further away from your house the D->A is done would reduce the chance for those things to happen which may provide a more consistent experience if the cable system quality in your area is below average. This comparision has nothing to do with the old analog or digital music argument, unless of course you were trying to listen to a badly scratched and damaged CD.
How exactly is this post deemed "Insightful"? This is completely different.
1. Apple developed the iPod, iTunes and FairPlay to all work seemlessly together. Other companies want in, but Apple wants to provide the complete solution alone. Nothing wrong there
No, that is exactly what the parent stated, it is not completely different. Apple does not want to license the technology. You can sugar coat and try to justify why but that does not change a thing. They do not want to license their technology. That is their right to not license it but from what I've read here, Burst does not want to provide Apple with a license to their technology either.
As a side note, can you elaborate on your "Nothing wrong here" statement? You mean nothing wrong for Apple or nothing wrong for everyone as a whole? I think most people are fully supportive of choice and there are very few times when choice is not better for the public/consumers as a whole. You sound as if you are against having a choice. Even with a third party agreement with the Apple DRM, Apple can still have their tight integration of products and consumers that feel a benefit from that integration would still be able to chose an all Apple solution if they wanted.
Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy who designed it.
Pure FUD, You find someone that knows what they are doing and they can figure out the system in short time, we are not talking about debugging someones million lines of code here, it is simple hardware with off the shelf components.
Your entire section of the 11PM HD failure was nothing but FUD on many points as well. Anyone already on your staff that can pull out a failed drive and put in a new one.
I agree with some of your points but you are not being balanced at all or looking at this big picture. There are times when different levels of support are needed but full support is not needed all of the time. Where I work, we have a full contract with EMC that we assess annually but we have spare Cisco chassiss and cards laying around to support our network equipment that does not have premium 24/7 support. A cost analysis was done and someone determined that was the best way for us to go and buying spare equipment was much cheaper. You are dead set that everyone across the board needs premium support for everything and it will be cheaper which is not the case at all.
Security through obscurity in not a reliable form of security. You have to pay for that obscurity by having a one off system that is not supported and you pay through the nose to keep it running reliably in your enterprise. A standard LTO3 backup tape is almost $100, imagine what some specialized tape would cost when your company is the only one buying them. Basically, you pay a lot of money for some unknown amount of obscurity and reliability that has not been tested by more then a few people. Not cost effective at all when compared to standard equipment coupled with good security practices like accounting, tracking, and encryption. Is there even an enterprise backup system sold in the last few years that does not support some type of encryption?
IT is a cost center, not a revenue generator. Trying to squeeze security hardware, software, or better practices into IT budgets and manpower is a hard and normally plays out some combination of two ways.
Proactive and shot down - IT managers have a hard time getting others outside of IT to listen to potential issues. This changes rapidly after a breach and IT managers may be replaced.
Coast and milk - IT managers do not even want to bring up or even know about things like security because doing things the way they have always been has worked so far and makes the technical part of the manager job easier. Why rock the boat? That system was in place when I got here and we've been doing it this way for years and certainly "they" up there no about it so I'll go with the flow. That method of brown nosing and coasting with your other manager peers for a while typcially leads to the unemployment line with a knife in your back after a security breach! As it should IMHO.
999 out of 1000 times, if you cant get to the registy or look at the logs from the local PC, you are not going to be able to get to them remotely either. The benefit for you to be able to do this remotely on another users home machine is miniscule to the disadvantage of every windoes PC having these enabled. Really, how many have use your first step in troubleshooting someone elses PC as hooking up their own computer to the same network and connect in remotely to look at the registry and logs? That does not even make sense, considering the users typically have no idea what is really going on anyway and probably can't even describe the problem they are having. That was the whole point the parent poster was trying to make. It is almost never needed by a home user.
Remote Desktop. I'd never suggest enabling that for anyone attached directly to the internet, I know, it can be enabled at any time, firewall ports could be forwarded etc... Also considering the RD with WinXP logs off the local user, you will not be able to watch and see what they are having problems which is very valuable. Other solutions exist for free which are much better. Again, not needed by almost every home user.
Your points do help in a corporate environment but not for joe blow who has a problem with that E icon on the desktop.
Those restrictions do not seem based on anything really technical or related to bandwidth or large uploads or downloads. A Citrix session can use just as much bandwidth as a webcam. Based on what is common between the apps they list as restrictions are things that could function without you actively being in front of the computer. VOIP being the exception but probably listed as that would cut into their wireless cell business. I find it odd that internet providers have been getting away with a different definition of "unlimited" for so many years.
Today's agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content.'"
What exactly are "Google users"? That could be anyone that can type www.google.com into a browser. Its not like you aquired some type of paying customers or people under some type of contract or agreement and are now opening the doors to to this previously isolated group of people. Seems a little odd to say that as a bullet point for this agreement they made. Sounds like Eric Schmidt is talking out his ass. Where is my wealth of new content that I now qualify for because I am a Google user?
Also, I remember how easy it was to mod a scanner in '93 to make it pick up cellphone signals -- just remove a single SMT resistor. This was the work of minutes. And voila -- full band reception.
So easily modded consumer goods (whatever that is) will be banned too.
To add to your comment.. That is exactly what they did with scanners. They went back and edited the law to include that the scanner must not be able to be easily modified. Here is a paste from a scanner faq: In its simplest form, US Federal laws (Communications Act of 1934, Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Telecommunications Disclosure & Dispute Resolution Act of 1992, Digital Telephony Bill of 1994) make it illegal to:
1. Repeat what you hear to anyone but the transmitter or intended receiver of the transmission
2. Use what you hear to aid in the commission of a crime (e.g. evading police)
3. Use what you hear for personal gain (e.g. tow trucks listening for accidents to show up opportunistically at the scene)
4. Listen to transmissions relating to the following services:
* cellular phones
* cordless phones
* public land mobile systems
* voice paging services
* satellite/microwave/studio-to-transmitter links
* broadcast point-to-point relays.
5. Import a receiver which is capable of tuning cellular telephone frequencies
6. Import frequency converters which can be used to circumvent the blockage of cellular telephone frequency bands
Then took it a few steps further in 1997 and released directive DA 97-334 to make the modification you described above illegal: Scanning receivers are required by Section 15.101(a) of the FCC Rules to be certificated by the Commission. Section 15.121 states that scanning receivers, and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers, must be incapable of operating (tuning), or readily being altered by the user to operate, within the frequency bands allocated to the Domestic Public Cellular Radio Telecommunications Service. Scanners that are capable of "readily being altered by the user" include, but are not limited to: those for which the ability to receive cellular telephone frequencies can be added by clipping the leads of, or installing, a simple component, such as a diode, resistor and/or jumper wire; replacing a plug-in semiconductor chip; or programming a semiconductor chip using special access codes or an external device. Scanners and frequency converters for use with scanners, must also be incapable of converting digital cellular frequencies to analog voice audio. Under Section 15.37(f), the manufacture or importation of scanning receivers, and frequency converters used with scanning receivers, that do not comply with Section 15.121 shall cease on or before April 26, 1994.
I have been loosely following the changes over the years and have always been a scanner person. What stands out with these modifications to the communications act to prevent cellular listening is the speed the FCC acted and continued to act and modify the laws as people found ways around the initial wording. I never really fully understood the motivations. I assume it was the cellular providers trying to provide consumers a false sense of security in combination with not having to admit they went cheap and used plain old non encypted analog commun
A lot of people and companies make money off of others security problems. Those same people and companies also have detailed exploit/hole/workings for many unpatched problems and poor work practices.
I am going to go against the/. group think here but anyway.. Put down a script kiddie if it makes you feel better about yourself but an exploit is an expliot regardless of a persons hacking/cracking backgroud or reputation. Your company or the equipment your are responsible for maintaining will suffer equal damage from a script kiddie or an experienced hacker with malicious intentions, regardless of your opinion of the person. Try telling your boss, yes, I know our mail servers were owned but it was done by a teenage script kiddie with a 0-day. Do you think that will make a difference in the outcome or your work required to recover? Bottom line, the person may have information that would be valuable to someone.
I agree with your reaction time statement but not the overall assumption that the result would be the same.
In the example you site, all things are assumed to be equal up to the point that an immediate action has to be taken. Look at the two different situations a little deeper or back up in time about 15 seconds before the situation. If you are aware of your surroundings, you can make a more logical choice or possibly see a potential hazard and prepare for it. Assume a dog running down the side of the street or even a person on a bicycle. You should notice this well before reaching that hazard by the reaction of others ahead of you. Cars slowing down, people moving slightly to the left to go around something should set of a flag in your mind that something is not right up ahead. You can adjust your driving prior to getting to the dog and be preparded just in case it darts out in front of you. Have you even been in the slow lane and notice the driver ahead of you in the fast line suddenly hits the brakes? Chances are, something is not right ahead and you should proceed with caution. Another obviously one that I have seen many times is the obvious break in traffic near an intersection. You know, the ones where cars waiting in multilane traffic leave a gap so others can get waved across through them to get to a side street? How often does someone come flying up that third lane and suddenly a car pops out of "no where" in front of them and gets t-boned. All of these examples are things you should expect but talking on the cell phone might prevent you from thinking about it. Sure, given equal reaction time, cell phone or not, you would react the same. Without the cell phone, there is a chance you could have indenified the potential hazard BEFORE you got there.
I'm pulling a theory out of my ass here and there is no real way to test these numbers but I'd wager that a much larger percentage of drivers not talking on a cell phone can tell you at any given time if there is a car riding next to them, behind them, or at an intersection ahead of them waiting to pull out compared to someone not on a cell phone. Your surroundings play a role in what action you should take if an emergency situation comes up. Waiting until the emergency situation to survey your surroundings and then react accordingly can not be as safe.
I think I agree. I consider myself a "gamer", I am a little older then average but I've had every game console since pong in the mid 70's. Through gaming, I have developed great hand eye coordination, a decent ability to look for and predict how other people may react in certain situations, and I am expecting the unexpected. Those skills are great to have as a driver but I still suck at driving while on the cell phone, hands free or not. Maybe gamers are statistically better at driving overall beacause of these skills but they would still suffer from the multitasking part of talking and driving. I set a negative nice level to the phone conversation which leaves what ever mind scheduling is left over for driving. For me? It depends on the conversation. If I am discussing "how did your day go", I think I can still drive pretty decent, if I am trying to explain a recent change to our firewall to my boss, I think I'd be a road hazard.
New anti terrorist legislation may require all non crt monitors be equiped with an electromagnetic generator with equivelent power and signal of the crt equal. That way, the Tempest "experiment" can continue and protect the United States from evil forces. One government official stated "Only terrorists have a need for LCD monitors and this legislation will be a great benefit to consumers of non crt displays as they can now safely use LCD monitors as well." A bystander responded to that with "What the fu*k?", he was taken away for questioning.
Not only will you not see rebates at Wal-Mart but you also rarely see things on sale. "On sale" meaning some type of time limited temporary reduction in price. Their weekly flyers sales ads are typically just showing the normal prices they offer. They do have "special purchases" but these are not "on sale" priced either. Special purchases are typically a better value compared to normally stocked items. They are short term stocked items they are only offering once until they are gone. An example being some model of a lawn mower. At some point in the summer, Wal-Mart will offer 200 pieces of a specific model lawn mower that they have not sold in the past and will not offer again in the future. Once they are sold, it is gone. I assume special purchases could be used in combination of making up for shortages around a peak of a certain seasonal product or used after or before peak to spark interest in a similar product that may not be moving well.
Not to take away from your rebate scam story which was interesting but why would your bank charge you a fee for depositing a check that did not clear? I know banks have some absurd fees but I've never heard of that one before.
Getting off topic but I hate to buy stuff from BestBuy. I do not like the sales methods they use. Other stores use some of what I describe below but BB uses them all.
- They have very little stock on hand for on sale items. This is a ploy to get you in the store. I mean is it really worth the time and money to print and design for the weekly add and reprogram the registers when you only have 10 on hand to actually sell? They have no rain checks and no equivelent mark down on a similar product. If you get there 15 minutes after opening Sunday morning, the entire stock of that item is gone and they probably will not have any more the entire time of the sale. The comparable items still in stock are priced very high. Sorry, that $20 after giving first born 100GB hard drive is sold out, but look, we have another brand right here for $200. IMHO, this is nothing but a form of bait and switch. Even Sears will offer an equal markdown on a similar product and Wal-Mart and Sears and other stores typically have tons of the on sale items in stock. Many retailers anticipate the expected volume, BestBuy seems to go out of their way to ensure they have as little as possible. Is there studies to show that this method of retailing brings in more money overall? What about long term customers?
- Almost everything has a rebate. I do not like rebates. I thought more people did not but after reading many of the comments in this story, I guess I was wrong.
- BB takes the rebate concept one step further and also adds a gift card for a future purchase but advertises a current price minus the value of the future use only card in your current purchase. Something like "after 50 MIR and $50 gift card"
- Entended warranty is made unnecesarily complicated. I bought one ONCE. They refuse to acknowledge any extended warranty unless you have the physical reciept for the warranty in your hand. For some reason they can not look up your warranty information with your phone number, address, name, serial number of the device, the reciept of the actual product, date you bought the warranty. Nothing but the reciept showing you bought a warranty will work. Of course, once you show them the reciept, they magically can find you and your product! I ran into a really hard time with an extended warranty for my over the range microwave with them (and I had my reciept for the coverage). My reciept for the actual microwave was faded. They use thermal paper and it was three years old, taping the reciept to the back of the microwave so I would not lose it was obviously not a good idea. Since they could not fully make out the price on the receipt and the microwave was deemed unrepairable by a house visit technician, I had to get a replacement unit. They offered me the lowest price they ever sold the microwave for which was $175 less then I paid and was $50 less then what it was currently selling for. That lowest price quote came from a sale about 90 days prior they stated. I had bought it 3 years prior (date was still legible) but they seemed to have no record of the price on that date, only the lowest ever sold for. They wanted me to pay $50 to make up the difference between the lowest price ever and what it was currently selling for my on warranty replacement! What the fuck was the extended warranty for? To add salt to the injury, they tried to sell me another extended warranty and said my initial four year warranty was no longer valid (even though I had 1 year left) because it was "one use only". None of this could be backed up by any paperwork and depending on who you talked to, you got a completely different story. Not worth documenting the entire thing here but that overwhelming show of incompetence by everyone from the acting store manager down to the clerk behind the counter was comical. None of them rude but none of them knew much about anything related to the stores actual policies and could not even find any type of policies or guidelines in writing anywhere. I was not rude either, just asking basic
Don't you go rubbing those politicians wrong by implying they're clueless idiots.
They are elected to represent the people that elected them. It is THEIR job to understand what they are signing and putting into law. If they do not know what they are doing, they ask, seek help, or listen to obvious opposing views, they are not doing their job. I'm willing to bet, each senetor and representative got many responses/letters/faxes/personal visits/meetings/phone calls from people from all walks of live and organisations that were against the DMCA and why. Wether they read them or paid attention to them or not is another story. I knew what the DMCA was about and so did everyone here on slashdot as did many thousands of other people. How can you claim that a government representative is so blind and have absolutely no idea about the same thing? It would only take 10 minutes to give a representative an overview of the opinions of those that opposed the law and why. I do not agree with your overworked and unknowledgable story at all. IMHO, they were going about business as usual and the loudest persistent voice won. In the US, this almost always a lobby group that gives money to a campaign. How this concept is not considered bribery is beyond me. It has been happening so long it seems normal and has been accepted but if you look at the practice from outside the box, it is nothing but money changing hands for a favorable vote. $Big_Company with interest in the outcome of some legislation donates money to the people or the "party" voting on the outcome and helps write the legislation for them. WHAT THE FUCK? All the representative has to do is take 5 minutes out of his time and walk into his fucking office and ask the intern for some of the yea and na feedback he recieved on that pending legislation and sit down and thumb through it.
I know each model is different but there are many pieces of shit out there. Cheap or not. I got a AT&T 6800G wireless router for $20 and two AT&T 6500G PCI cards for $10 each on sale at CC one time. The PCI cards are fine for WinXP but the router is a huge POS. It drops connections and hard freezes wired or wireless under any type of load and some applications just do not work, like the headset in for the PS2 (yes I tried DMZ, forwarding ports blah blah, I have other routers that work fine including my current setup with a Smoothwall box with none of that set). Although I myself never attempted to contact AT&T support, others on DSLReports did and first level AT&T support basicially told them to eat shit and don't run network intensive applications like P2P, or game consoles and do not transfer large files with it. I am actually now just using it as a wireless access point and not routing anything with it and it seems to be doing okay. All in all I guess I now have a $20 access point and four port switch which is a good deal for the price but if I would have wanted to use it as an actual router, it would be useless.
It could work out for the ISP if there is no other ISP choice for the customers to get equivelent internet access from. Sadly, in many areas of the US, only one high speed provider exists and you are stuck with them no matter what. Given a choice? I don't think people would use an ISP that offered that type of "service".
It does with procmail if you can get it on the server you get your mail from.
A change in scope of what you desire but kind of related. I got sick of always reconfiguring mail clients/filters/accounts with different mail clients and having mail in different proprietary formats so I added imap server duties to my already running 24x7 Samba server. For years now, I've been using fetchmail and procmail via cron to collect and disperse all of my mail to one set of various mail folders. I can use any IMAP client on Windows/Linux (Pine, Thunderbird, Eudora, OE, Pegasys, Squirrelmail, Kmail and others) to connect to my own mail server and have already filtered mail with a familiar folder sturcture. You can configure fetchmail to leave mail on the remote servers if you'd like it to stay there so you check it directly as well and it supports variouus encrypted mail transfers as well (SSL/SSH etc). Changing the procmail filters takes more time then a GUI built into a mail client would have but you only have to configure each filter once. Again, I know this is not what you were asking for but it would work.
I think the study is unfairly grouping all internet activity into one big problem and calling that problem the internet. The problem is people have different things they may get hooked on. Some, gambling, some porn, some online games etc.. the internet is not the problem, only the method to get to the specific addiction. Wow, you can sit in your easy chair and gamble all night. People have addictions. I doubt someone addicted to crack gets what they need using the internet.
I bought a DV camera from Butterfly Photo in NYC. I did receive a call back and asked to buy a few accessories but I declined them. I was happy with the purchase but they may have changed sales practices since I ordered from them last year so YMMV.
Check out this site (probably will not survive a slashdot beating long), dude was doing undercover work for rec.photo.digital and tracking these shady places down. Some of these places are nothing but a garage or small office. Butterfly Photo was actually one of them but they let him come inside and take pictures. As odd as that seems, I actually found the linked page while researching BF prior to ordering from them, I considered that gesture a positive thing that maybe they really did not have anything to hide?
fucking brainless americans, don't you know the public education system was karl marx's idea? hitler said it himself 'let me control the textbooks, and i'll control the state.'
You lost all credibility in my mind with that statement and I stopped reading further. You tried to relate two things that are not even remotely the same. The US government does not control the textbooks. The US/state/local governments uses tax dollars to support an education system. Parents and teachers and representatives elected by the people (local government officials, school board members, Senators etc) and teachers all have input and control what is taught and how it is taught. What is taught, how it is taught, the standards to pass a certain level or grade and the rules and restrictions vary greatly from area to area depending on the budget and a collective majority thinking of those people in that area that make the decisions. Example being, some areas require a foreign language, some require a home economics class, some require 2,3, or 4 years of math and science and so on. It is not a perfect system but it is not ANYTHING like you are trying to describe with your completely unrelated Hitler reference.
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Yes, and merchants should be able to sell iPods for a price they want as well, not the price that Apple specifies. Odd that people are okay with that though.
I've seen quite a few crappy digital channels from time to time myself, blotchy, dropouts, sync issues, stutter and overall crappy quality. I'm sure the further away from your house the D->A is done would reduce the chance for those things to happen which may provide a more consistent experience if the cable system quality in your area is below average. This comparision has nothing to do with the old analog or digital music argument, unless of course you were trying to listen to a badly scratched and damaged CD.
How exactly is this post deemed "Insightful"? This is completely different.
1. Apple developed the iPod, iTunes and FairPlay to all work seemlessly together. Other companies want in, but Apple wants to provide the complete solution alone. Nothing wrong there
No, that is exactly what the parent stated, it is not completely different. Apple does not want to license the technology. You can sugar coat and try to justify why but that does not change a thing. They do not want to license their technology. That is their right to not license it but from what I've read here, Burst does not want to provide Apple with a license to their technology either.
As a side note, can you elaborate on your "Nothing wrong here" statement? You mean nothing wrong for Apple or nothing wrong for everyone as a whole? I think most people are fully supportive of choice and there are very few times when choice is not better for the public/consumers as a whole. You sound as if you are against having a choice. Even with a third party agreement with the Apple DRM, Apple can still have their tight integration of products and consumers that feel a benefit from that integration would still be able to chose an all Apple solution if they wanted.
Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy who designed it.
Pure FUD, You find someone that knows what they are doing and they can figure out the system in short time, we are not talking about debugging someones million lines of code here, it is simple hardware with off the shelf components.
Your entire section of the 11PM HD failure was nothing but FUD on many points as well. Anyone already on your staff that can pull out a failed drive and put in a new one.
I agree with some of your points but you are not being balanced at all or looking at this big picture. There are times when different levels of support are needed but full support is not needed all of the time. Where I work, we have a full contract with EMC that we assess annually but we have spare Cisco chassiss and cards laying around to support our network equipment that does not have premium 24/7 support. A cost analysis was done and someone determined that was the best way for us to go and buying spare equipment was much cheaper. You are dead set that everyone across the board needs premium support for everything and it will be cheaper which is not the case at all.
Security through obscurity in not a reliable form of security. You have to pay for that obscurity by having a one off system that is not supported and you pay through the nose to keep it running reliably in your enterprise. A standard LTO3 backup tape is almost $100, imagine what some specialized tape would cost when your company is the only one buying them.
Basically, you pay a lot of money for some unknown amount of obscurity and reliability that has not been tested by more then a few people. Not cost effective at all when compared to standard equipment coupled with good security practices like accounting, tracking, and encryption. Is there even an enterprise backup system sold in the last few years that does not support some type of encryption?
IT is a cost center, not a revenue generator. Trying to squeeze security hardware, software, or better practices into IT budgets and manpower is a hard and normally plays out some combination of two ways.
Proactive and shot down -
IT managers have a hard time getting others outside of IT to listen to potential issues. This changes rapidly after a breach and IT managers may be replaced.
Coast and milk -
IT managers do not even want to bring up or even know about things like security because doing things the way they have always been has worked so far and makes the technical part of the manager job easier. Why rock the boat? That system was in place when I got here and we've been doing it this way for years and certainly "they" up there no about it so I'll go with the flow. That method of brown nosing and coasting with your other manager peers for a while typcially leads to the unemployment line with a knife in your back after a security breach! As it should IMHO.
Remote Registry, RPC
999 out of 1000 times, if you cant get to the registy or look at the logs from the local PC, you are not going to be able to get to them remotely either.
The benefit for you to be able to do this remotely on another users home machine is miniscule to the disadvantage of every windoes PC having these enabled. Really, how many have use your first step in troubleshooting someone elses PC as hooking up their own computer to the same network and connect in remotely to look at the registry and logs? That does not even make sense, considering the users typically have no idea what is really going on anyway and probably can't even describe the problem they are having. That was the whole point the parent poster was trying to make. It is almost never needed by a home user.
Remote Desktop. I'd never suggest enabling that for anyone attached directly to the internet, I know, it can be enabled at any time, firewall ports could be forwarded etc... Also considering the RD with WinXP logs off the local user, you will not be able to watch and see what they are having problems which is very valuable. Other solutions exist for free which are much better. Again, not needed by almost every home user.
Your points do help in a corporate environment but not for joe blow who has a problem with that E icon on the desktop.
Those restrictions do not seem based on anything really technical or related to bandwidth or large uploads or downloads. A Citrix session can use just as much bandwidth as a webcam. Based on what is common between the apps they list as restrictions are things that could function without you actively being in front of the computer. VOIP being the exception but probably listed as that would cut into their wireless cell business. I find it odd that internet providers have been getting away with a different definition of "unlimited" for so many years.
Sandisk Extreme III, which has a quite higher performance than the Ultra II.
;)
How do you know? It was not tested.
Today's agreement leverages technologies from both companies to connect Google users worldwide to a wealth of new content.'"
What exactly are "Google users"? That could be anyone that can type www.google.com into a browser. Its not like you aquired some type of paying customers or people under some type of contract or agreement and are now opening the doors to to this previously isolated group of people. Seems a little odd to say that as a bullet point for this agreement they made. Sounds like Eric Schmidt is talking out his ass.
Where is my wealth of new content that I now qualify for because I am a Google user?
Also, I remember how easy it was to mod a scanner in '93 to make it pick up cellphone signals -- just remove a single SMT resistor. This was the work of minutes. And voila -- full band reception.
:
:
So easily modded consumer goods (whatever that is) will be banned too.
To add to your comment..
That is exactly what they did with scanners. They went back and edited the law to include that the scanner must not be able to be easily modified. Here is a paste from a scanner faq:
In its simplest form, US Federal laws (Communications Act of 1934, Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Telecommunications Disclosure & Dispute Resolution Act of 1992, Digital Telephony Bill of 1994) make it illegal to
1. Repeat what you hear to anyone but the transmitter or intended receiver of the transmission
2. Use what you hear to aid in the commission of a crime (e.g. evading police)
3. Use what you hear for personal gain (e.g. tow trucks listening for accidents to show up opportunistically at the scene)
4. Listen to transmissions relating to the following services
* cellular phones
* cordless phones
* public land mobile systems
* voice paging services
* satellite/microwave/studio-to-transmitter links
* broadcast point-to-point relays.
5. Import a receiver which is capable of tuning cellular telephone frequencies
6. Import frequency converters which can be used to circumvent the blockage of cellular telephone frequency bands
Then took it a few steps further in 1997 and released directive DA 97-334 to make the modification you described above illegal:
Scanning receivers are required by Section 15.101(a) of the FCC Rules to be certificated by the Commission. Section 15.121 states that scanning receivers, and frequency converters designed or marketed for use with scanning receivers, must be incapable of operating (tuning), or readily being altered by the user to operate, within the frequency bands allocated to the Domestic Public Cellular Radio Telecommunications Service. Scanners that are capable of "readily being altered by the user" include, but are not limited to: those for which the ability to receive cellular telephone frequencies can be added by clipping the leads of, or installing, a simple component, such as a diode, resistor and/or jumper wire; replacing a plug-in semiconductor chip; or programming a semiconductor chip using special access codes or an external device. Scanners and frequency converters for use with scanners, must also be incapable of converting digital cellular frequencies to analog voice audio. Under Section 15.37(f), the manufacture or importation of scanning receivers, and frequency converters used with scanning receivers, that do not comply with Section 15.121 shall cease on or before April 26, 1994.
I have been loosely following the changes over the years and have always been a scanner person. What stands out with these modifications to the communications act to prevent cellular listening is the speed the FCC acted and continued to act and modify the laws as people found ways around the initial wording. I never really fully understood the motivations. I assume it was the cellular providers trying to provide consumers a false sense of security in combination with not having to admit they went cheap and used plain old non encypted analog commun
Or pawn shops. They have tons of really old crap at completely unrealistic prices. Maybe the owners of these places knew this was coming.
A lot of people and companies make money off of others security problems. Those same people and companies also have detailed exploit/hole/workings for many unpatched problems and poor work practices.
/. group think here but anyway..
I am going to go against the
Put down a script kiddie if it makes you feel better about yourself but an exploit is an expliot regardless of a persons hacking/cracking backgroud or reputation. Your company or the equipment your are responsible for maintaining will suffer equal damage from a script kiddie or an experienced hacker with malicious intentions, regardless of your opinion of the person. Try telling your boss, yes, I know our mail servers were owned but it was done by a teenage script kiddie with a 0-day. Do you think that will make a difference in the outcome or your work required to recover? Bottom line, the person may have information that would be valuable to someone.
I agree with your reaction time statement but not the overall assumption that the result would be the same.
In the example you site, all things are assumed to be equal up to the point that an immediate action has to be taken. Look at the two different situations a little deeper or back up in time about 15 seconds before the situation.
If you are aware of your surroundings, you can make a more logical choice or possibly see a potential hazard and prepare for it. Assume a dog running down the side of the street or even a person on a bicycle. You should notice this well before reaching that hazard by the reaction of others ahead of you. Cars slowing down, people moving slightly to the left to go around something should set of a flag in your mind that something is not right up ahead. You can adjust your driving prior to getting to the dog and be preparded just in case it darts out in front of you. Have you even been in the slow lane and notice the driver ahead of you in the fast line suddenly hits the brakes? Chances are, something is not right ahead and you should proceed with caution. Another obviously one that I have seen many times is the obvious break in traffic near an intersection. You know, the ones where cars waiting in multilane traffic leave a gap so others can get waved across through them to get to a side street? How often does someone come flying up that third lane and suddenly a car pops out of "no where" in front of them and gets t-boned. All of these examples are things you should expect but talking on the cell phone might prevent you from thinking about it. Sure, given equal reaction time, cell phone or not, you would react the same. Without the cell phone, there is a chance you could have indenified the potential hazard BEFORE you got there.
I'm pulling a theory out of my ass here and there is no real way to test these numbers but I'd wager that a much larger percentage of drivers not talking on a cell phone can tell you at any given time if there is a car riding next to them, behind them, or at an intersection ahead of them waiting to pull out compared to someone not on a cell phone. Your surroundings play a role in what action you should take if an emergency situation comes up. Waiting until the emergency situation to survey your surroundings and then react accordingly can not be as safe.
I think I agree. I consider myself a "gamer", I am a little older then average but I've had every game console since pong in the mid 70's. Through gaming, I have developed great hand eye coordination, a decent ability to look for and predict how other people may react in certain situations, and I am expecting the unexpected. Those skills are great to have as a driver but I still suck at driving while on the cell phone, hands free or not. Maybe gamers are statistically better at driving overall beacause of these skills but they would still suffer from the multitasking part of talking and driving. I set a negative nice level to the phone conversation which leaves what ever mind scheduling is left over for driving. For me? It depends on the conversation. If I am discussing "how did your day go", I think I can still drive pretty decent, if I am trying to explain a recent change to our firewall to my boss, I think I'd be a road hazard.
New anti terrorist legislation may require all non crt monitors be equiped with an electromagnetic generator with equivelent power and signal of the crt equal. That way, the Tempest "experiment" can continue and protect the United States from evil forces. One government official stated "Only terrorists have a need for LCD monitors and this legislation will be a great benefit to consumers of non crt displays as they can now safely use LCD monitors as well." A bystander responded to that with "What the fu*k?", he was taken away for questioning.
Not only will you not see rebates at Wal-Mart but you also rarely see things on sale. "On sale" meaning some type of time limited temporary reduction in price. Their weekly flyers sales ads are typically just showing the normal prices they offer. They do have "special purchases" but these are not "on sale" priced either. Special purchases are typically a better value compared to normally stocked items. They are short term stocked items they are only offering once until they are gone. An example being some model of a lawn mower. At some point in the summer, Wal-Mart will offer 200 pieces of a specific model lawn mower that they have not sold in the past and will not offer again in the future. Once they are sold, it is gone. I assume special purchases could be used in combination of making up for shortages around a peak of a certain seasonal product or used after or before peak to spark interest in a similar product that may not be moving well.
Not to take away from your rebate scam story which was interesting but why would your bank charge you a fee for depositing a check that did not clear? I know banks have some absurd fees but I've never heard of that one before.
Getting off topic but I hate to buy stuff from BestBuy. I do not like the sales methods they use. Other stores use some of what I describe below but BB uses them all.
- They have very little stock on hand for on sale items. This is a ploy to get you in the store. I mean is it really worth the time and money to print and design for the weekly add and reprogram the registers when you only have 10 on hand to actually sell? They have no rain checks and no equivelent mark down on a similar product. If you get there 15 minutes after opening Sunday morning, the entire stock of that item is gone and they probably will not have any more the entire time of the sale. The comparable items still in stock are priced very high. Sorry, that $20 after giving first born 100GB hard drive is sold out, but look, we have another brand right here for $200. IMHO, this is nothing but a form of bait and switch. Even Sears will offer an equal markdown on a similar product and Wal-Mart and Sears and other stores typically have tons of the on sale items in stock. Many retailers anticipate the expected volume, BestBuy seems to go out of their way to ensure they have as little as possible. Is there studies to show that this method of retailing brings in more money overall? What about long term customers?
- Almost everything has a rebate. I do not like rebates. I thought more people did not but after reading many of the comments in this story, I guess I was wrong.
- BB takes the rebate concept one step further and also adds a gift card for a future purchase but advertises a current price minus the value of the future use only card in your current purchase. Something like "after 50 MIR and $50 gift card"
- Entended warranty is made unnecesarily complicated. I bought one ONCE. They refuse to acknowledge any extended warranty unless you have the physical reciept for the warranty in your hand. For some reason they can not look up your warranty information with your phone number, address, name, serial number of the device, the reciept of the actual product, date you bought the warranty. Nothing but the reciept showing you bought a warranty will work. Of course, once you show them the reciept, they magically can find you and your product! I ran into a really hard time with an extended warranty for my over the range microwave with them (and I had my reciept for the coverage). My reciept for the actual microwave was faded. They use thermal paper and it was three years old, taping the reciept to the back of the microwave so I would not lose it was obviously not a good idea. Since they could not fully make out the price on the receipt and the microwave was deemed unrepairable by a house visit technician, I had to get a replacement unit. They offered me the lowest price they ever sold the microwave for which was $175 less then I paid and was $50 less then what it was currently selling for. That lowest price quote came from a sale about 90 days prior they stated. I had bought it 3 years prior (date was still legible) but they seemed to have no record of the price on that date, only the lowest ever sold for. They wanted me to pay $50 to make up the difference between the lowest price ever and what it was currently selling for my on warranty replacement! What the fuck was the extended warranty for? To add salt to the injury, they tried to sell me another extended warranty and said my initial four year warranty was no longer valid (even though I had 1 year left) because it was "one use only". None of this could be backed up by any paperwork and depending on who you talked to, you got a completely different story. Not worth documenting the entire thing here but that overwhelming show of incompetence by everyone from the acting store manager down to the clerk behind the counter was comical. None of them rude but none of them knew much about anything related to the stores actual policies and could not even find any type of policies or guidelines in writing anywhere. I was not rude either, just asking basic
Don't you go rubbing those politicians wrong by implying they're clueless idiots.
They are elected to represent the people that elected them. It is THEIR job to understand what they are signing and putting into law. If they do not know what they are doing, they ask, seek help, or listen to obvious opposing views, they are not doing their job.
I'm willing to bet, each senetor and representative got many responses/letters/faxes/personal visits/meetings/phone calls from people from all walks of live and organisations that were against the DMCA and why. Wether they read them or paid attention to them or not is another story. I knew what the DMCA was about and so did everyone here on slashdot as did many thousands of other people. How can you claim that a government representative is so blind and have absolutely no idea about the same thing? It would only take 10 minutes to give a representative an overview of the opinions of those that opposed the law and why. I do not agree with your overworked and unknowledgable story at all. IMHO, they were going about business as usual and the loudest persistent voice won. In the US, this almost always a lobby group that gives money to a campaign. How this concept is not considered bribery is beyond me. It has been happening so long it seems normal and has been accepted but if you look at the practice from outside the box, it is nothing but money changing hands for a favorable vote. $Big_Company with interest in the outcome of some legislation donates money to the people or the "party" voting on the outcome and helps write the legislation for them. WHAT THE FUCK? All the representative has to do is take 5 minutes out of his time and walk into his fucking office and ask the intern for some of the yea and na feedback he recieved on that pending legislation and sit down and thumb through it.
I know each model is different but there are many pieces of shit out there. Cheap or not. I got a AT&T 6800G wireless router for $20 and two AT&T 6500G PCI cards for $10 each on sale at CC one time. The PCI cards are fine for WinXP but the router is a huge POS. It drops connections and hard freezes wired or wireless under any type of load and some applications just do not work, like the headset in for the PS2 (yes I tried DMZ, forwarding ports blah blah, I have other routers that work fine including my current setup with a Smoothwall box with none of that set). Although I myself never attempted to contact AT&T support, others on DSLReports did and first level AT&T support basicially told them to eat shit and don't run network intensive applications like P2P, or game consoles and do not transfer large files with it. I am actually now just using it as a wireless access point and not routing anything with it and it seems to be doing okay. All in all I guess I now have a $20 access point and four port switch which is a good deal for the price but if I would have wanted to use it as an actual router, it would be useless.
It could work out for the ISP if there is no other ISP choice for the customers to get equivelent internet access from. Sadly, in many areas of the US, only one high speed provider exists and you are stuck with them no matter what. Given a choice? I don't think people would use an ISP that offered that type of "service".
Imap filtering.
It does with procmail if you can get it on the server you get your mail from.
A change in scope of what you desire but kind of related.
I got sick of always reconfiguring mail clients/filters/accounts with different mail clients and having mail in different proprietary formats so I added imap server duties to my already running 24x7 Samba server.
For years now, I've been using fetchmail and procmail via cron to collect and disperse all of my mail to one set of various mail folders. I can use any IMAP client on Windows/Linux (Pine, Thunderbird, Eudora, OE, Pegasys, Squirrelmail, Kmail and others) to connect to my own mail server and have already filtered mail with a familiar folder sturcture.
You can configure fetchmail to leave mail on the remote servers if you'd like it to stay there so you check it directly as well and it supports variouus encrypted mail transfers as well (SSL/SSH etc). Changing the procmail filters takes more time then a GUI built into a mail client would have but you only have to configure each filter once.
Again, I know this is not what you were asking for but it would work.
I think the study is unfairly grouping all internet activity into one big problem and calling that problem the internet. The problem is people have different things they may get hooked on. Some, gambling, some porn, some online games etc.. the internet is not the problem, only the method to get to the specific addiction. Wow, you can sit in your easy chair and gamble all night. People have addictions. I doubt someone addicted to crack gets what they need using the internet.
I bought a DV camera from Butterfly Photo in NYC. I did receive a call back and asked to buy a few accessories but I declined them. I was happy with the purchase but they may have changed sales practices since I ordered from them last year so YMMV.
Check out this site (probably will not survive a slashdot beating long), dude was doing undercover work for rec.photo.digital and tracking these shady places down. Some of these places are nothing but a garage or small office. Butterfly Photo was actually one of them but they let him come inside and take pictures. As odd as that seems, I actually found the linked page while researching BF prior to ordering from them, I considered that gesture a positive thing that maybe they really did not have anything to hide?
fucking brainless americans, don't you know the public education system was karl marx's idea? hitler said it himself 'let me control the textbooks, and i'll control the state.'
You lost all credibility in my mind with that statement and I stopped reading further. You tried to relate two things that are not even remotely the same. The US government does not control the textbooks. The US/state/local governments uses tax dollars to support an education system. Parents and teachers and representatives elected by the people (local government officials, school board members, Senators etc) and teachers all have input and control what is taught and how it is taught. What is taught, how it is taught, the standards to pass a certain level or grade and the rules and restrictions vary greatly from area to area depending on the budget and a collective majority thinking of those people in that area that make the decisions. Example being, some areas require a foreign language, some require a home economics class, some require 2,3, or 4 years of math and science and so on. It is not a perfect system but it is not ANYTHING like you are trying to describe with your completely unrelated Hitler reference.