I thought the argument was to place ICANN under the authority of the UN, which is a completely different idea then making "ICANN a totally autonomous entity".
This is the meat of the argument, right? Should ICANN be under US authority or should it be under UN authority?
And of course, at this point, the thread turns to UN bashing, without stopping to think that, hey, the UN actually already runs a global adressing system - or rather, the international telecommunications union does. And it plods along just fine, with all those different countries assigning their own numbers, and things just keeping on working..
What most people fail to realise is that what ICANN actually does (that is of any consequence) is very, very little. They don't run any nameservers, they just say "those ones are the ones we recommend you use" and tell the people running them "these are our policies". At any point in time people can say "you know what, fuck you ICANN", and NOTHING would change. ICANN is there because people feel a need for there to be an "authority". In reality the show is run by the (cc)TLD registries, verisign, ISC, RIPE, etc.
In fact, the EU has legislation that reserves the right to EU governments subvert ICANN; it would legally obligate ISPs to point to government-approved nameservers rather than ICANN's. (Of course you could still use your own). This is the same legal mechanism through which telephonenumber registries are appointed, actually. This is a recourse the US doesn't even impose on their citizens, even though they contract out to ICANN.
That hasn't happened because ICANN has failed to really fuck up that much.
The day ICANN is deposed will be much like a bloodless coup in Thailand. ICANN folks will show up at work some day to find everyone's just kind of ignoring them.
Cpanel is so common because it's provided by the hosting places on a lot of dedicated servers and used for almost all web hosting packages that I have seen.
Also, Cpanel is popular because it is popular. Customers are accustomed to it and expect panels to be Cpanel, but there's more to it than that; many hosting providers will offer to restore your cpanel hosted site from your old hosting provider when you switch to them. That way you'll retain niceties like your userdatabase etc. This commonality is very useful in migrating new customers to your service (though obviously it also makes it easier for them to leave again).
Yes, I do know there have been occasions where the RIAA has come up with some possible false positives, and mislabelled files certainly exist, but it's more the exception than than the rule, so on the balance of probabilities, a person who shows up as having a Metallica album on a p2p program more likely than not does, it's as simple as that.
The problem lies with 1) RIAA agents areknown to put mislabeled files on p2p programs. Ouch! 2) they claim 27 files, and voluntarily introduce 11 they downloaded; they are holding themselves up to a level of evidence they can't fulfill for most of their claim.
They're already basically involved in a sting operation, and are known for having crappy evidence (sueing people that don't even own computers etc.). They're operating a scare campaign. A campaign of terror if you will. Given that so many of their cases are baseless, and the dollar amounts of damages they seek, I can see a judge holding them to a more stringent standard of evidence than, say, some schmoe sueing his neighbor in small claims court over overhanging tree branches.
If the copyright cartel enforcers are required to have downloaded copies from the alleged infringer in order to maintain a suit, then something like Peer Guardian becomes more effective: p2p'ers can be seen online, yet they're safe as long as they can succeed in blocking connections to or from all the enforcers' addresses.
Hardly. Peerguardian can only ever block IP addresses that are known to belong to *AA agents. Nothing prevents them from using cable, dialup, wifi, etc. to get online.
In fact, to the *AA it would be interesting to see that a certain peer can be contacted from an untainted IP address, but not from a tainted one. That way they know you're using PeerGuardian. If I were them, I'd go after those people just to scare PeerGuardian users. They can even use the fact that you used PeerGuardian to argue that you knew you were doing wrong.
Nothing new here. Slashdot as a whole seems that way. It wants some sort of vindication that the gpl is valid, and c+d letters go flying. However when other companies, such as members of the **AA are involved, the crowd screams bloody murder. How dare these corporations excersize their right ? There goes my karma
Some differences; - accusations of GPL breaches are usually well-researched and levied at the correct legal entity, where the *AAs have been known to send C+D letters based on similarity of filenames to people who don't even have computers. - the GPL is aimed at preventing the formation of monopolies; as such, enforcing it doesn't entail monopoly abuses, whereas the *AAs are regularly accused of price gouging, etc. - the *AAs tend to ask for huge dollar amounts of damages, in the hundreds of dollars per song or film copied. In this case no damages were sought at all, even though Germany does know statutory damages - it's often argued that people who download content illegaly usually end up buying the stuff they like, or at least that they would never in the first place have bought the content. D-Link on the other hand used GPL'ed software to profit from it, and then didn't abide by its licensing terms. - the burden for D-Link for 'staying honest' is much lower than the (monetary) burden for some teen who downloaded 1000 tracks. Even if you disagree with copyright fundamentally, you'd be less upset about D-Link having to do no more than include a written offer or a download URL with its kit than with some kid having to pay thousands of dollars of compensation. - the *AAs even sue you if the stuff you downloaded is NOT available from them anymore; by contrast, once a piece of code is GPL'ed, it stays GPL'ed; there's no orfan-ware problem.
People get proportionately more upset if piracy is carried out by professional gangs who profit from it (selling illegal copies of windows to your mom, for example); if it concerns software from small (non-monopoly) companies or music from independent labels; if people who can easily afford it still pirate stuff just because they're cheapskates (e.g. fortune-500 corporations using illegal copies of winzip, which is $6 per copy in volume) etc. etc. etc.
So there are philosophical, moral, legal and practical differences between the two -- whether you agree with those is another thing, but there is no need for someone that supports enforcing the GPL and pirating Windows to be a hypocrite. And that's not even taking into account anti-corporate or communist themes.
Maybe some people aren't hypocrites, but just don't see the world as exclusively black and white. Just maybe they agree with some (application of) laws, and not others. "You're a hypocrite, because you depend on the law" is not much of an argument against people who want the law changed so they can depend on it better.
Selfish, perhaps you could levy that accusation. But hypocrites? Hardly.
"It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet," says David Struck.
No it's not. It's completely different. It's more like handing out free samples, and to your horror finding that there are people who will just take any crap they get for free, even if they're not interested. It's like sending out mail order catalogues to people who just need something to put under a table leg to stabalize it. In fact, it's completely like, oh, let's say, paying a TV network based on pulled-out-of-ass Nielsen ratings, only to find out people go to the toilet during a commercial break! Who would've thought?
, MostChoice e-mailed Google to point out 316 clicks it received in June from ZapMeta.com, a little-known search site. MostChoice paid an average of $4.56 a click, or roughly $1,500 for the batch.
There's your problem right there. $4.56 per click?! What are ya, nuts?
1. The election officials don't believe that they can re-gear the process in time for the general election, which is only 6 weeks away. I certainly don't think they can pull it off, given their record so far.
So.. In the event that it turns out that all the voting machines are controlled by Red China, they have no backup? Even though the backup would be red pencils, some ballots and cardboard boxes with some security tape thrown in for good measure?
"The first thing we can talk about is the controller. When we last saw the controller for the PlayStation 3, it was a shoddily put together, almost third party-like unit with ugly red sensors on the top and a lack of weight. However, in the redesigned version that is much closer to the model that will reach consumers, the controller has been weighted down with a considerable amount of 18 carat gold. The fans are folded origami, made from 3-ply $100 bills, rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins. The model we tested had some problems maintaining sync at times, because of the impurities (elevated diamond content) in the Quartz crystal used, but we expect this problem to be solved in the budget bundle."
Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.
Well DUH! The whole point of the debate is to prevent bad things from happening, not to stop something bad that's already happening. Do these people really understand the issue?
The hardware manufacturers understand this as no other. The thing is, they themselves have been pushing for years their own solutions in search of a problem; MPLS and other Quality of Service schemes. The doomscenarios that the net-neutrality camp sketches are in fact exactly the kind of thing that would sell network companies on multi-tiered networks, which works out great for the hardware manufacturers, since now all their MPLS/QoS/ProtocolAware/StatefulInspection networking gear has a purpose!
Sure, to consumers they'll say "there's no problem", but to their actual customers they'll say "there's no problem... because you will benefit greatly from hurting other businesses and consumers!"
The harder the network neutrality camp shouts, the better the business case for the hardware manufacturers is perceived to be by network operators.
could the adblock utilities have any effect on this? i think we've all known that if everyone used adblockers, we'd have a big problem: free sites would no longer have any income. we havent really worried about it because it didnt seem like enough of us were using them to make a difference.
could this be the first sign?
No, this is about selling the ads. Getting people to see them is step 2. If too many people use adblockers, you will need to spend a lot more effort at getting non-adblockers to see them, increasing costs (rather than losing sales), preventing you from reaching step 3 (profit).
The fact that you have to press [ESC]:%s is what turns off people, even if they usually are pretty intelligent, they don't see the value of learning a few keystrokes to use a superior editor.
The really odd thing is that instead, they use Editpad, which does have regexps (which they don't use) but also fucks up keystrokes for find/replace (F3 does something completely different, Ctrl+F doesn't work, etc.. I think you need to press F5 or F8)
One thing that could sell some of my co-workers on vim would be if it had better XML features. Nothing too fancy but at least prettyprinting and a wellformedness check. Add a few GUI things to make life easier for people using search+replace and it could well become the preferred editor (people are now making do with editpad, notepad2, xmlspy home edition, etc.)
Fancy stuff I would like; smartly(!) adding closing tags (i.e. only if needed to make the document wellformed, skip adding a closing tag if there's one allready there), checking against DTD/schema, font size zooming using ctrl+/- and ctrl+scrollmousebutton, and of course, using XPATHs instead of/alongside regular expressions for search and replace..
The XPATH search is why I keep hold of an old version of xmlspy professional that the company doesn't get new licenses for (suck it, new guy!).
Now, I'm sure much, if not all of this, can be added through plugins (anyone got a list? my current xml plugin doesn't do too well at adding closing tags only when needed, and doesn't pretty print) but for my coworkers it has to be an out-of-the-box setup.exe experience..
The earlier/later thing would be a boon to a journalist friend of mine - then again, proper autosave in microsoft word would be, too. (He has a knack for shutting down and answering 'yes' to any 'are you really sure you want to throw away a day's work?' dialogues..)
When AOL partly funded mozilla, it was already in its downward spiral. AOL was never a great company, but it was at one time a fucking huge company worth bajillions on the stock market.
Up until the dotcom hype, AOLs businessmodel was pretty simple; you sell a subscription service that is slightly (but not vastly) expensive. Obviously, to maximize profits from subscriptions (and to make sure you don't suddenly lose 50% of your income from one month to the next) you have to make it hard for people to quit, and easy to signup (hence the AOL coasters that you got in the mail, magazines, etc.)
It's a fairly straightforward business; you provide a simple service and try not to annoy people so much that it seems worth their time to jump through the hoops to cancel their subscription. Much like bland, unadventurous magazines and newspapers - their contents is maybe 10% useful and the rest is filler, but they stay clear of printing too much gore or "incest - how to?" columns. And they flood you with those subscription inserts.
Then the dotcom hype happened, which meant that AOL was now worth bajillions based on basically it's name. "America" - can't go wrong there, you don't want to invest in Lithuania, and "Online", well, that has dotcom written all over it.
In this period they did the stuff like fund mozilla, and buy the guys behind winamp (whose media player hasn't improved vastly, but their shoutcast streaming audio site is just how streaming audio should be).
Then, after the dotcom crash (and Time Warners (reverse)takeover of/merger with AOL) came the stark reality of post-dotcomhype business. Being an ISP is no longer a simple affair - with technlogies like cable (docsis 1.0, 2.0), (V)(H)(A)DSL (1/2+) being upgraded every two years, the death of dialup at the time where dialup had just become so ubiquitous that it's built into telephone exchanges; there's not much value in being an ISP (too much competition) and doing it right is hard. AOL had always been doing the ISP bit a bit halfheartedly, and even with TimeWarner on board, they found they can't really be a persuasive content company!
So, cut to present time, and AOL is trying its damn hardest to get away from being an ISP, and to be as much as Google and Yahoo as they can.
There's no reason they shouldn't be good at the things Yahoo and Google do. Except that they've sullied their brandname by sucking at everything they've ever done. And being mismanaged.
Opening up AIM and trying to get their video search on other people's sites is just recognizing a simple fact; their brand sucks. They desperately need people to use their services first, find out they're worth using, and then worry about reeling them into 'the AOL experience' (with AOL's ads) later.
AOL's best bet would be to start doing stuff under different brand names, if possible to set up small companies with just a few people, with a start-up kind of atmosphere, where they don't have to bother much about tying into AOL's infrastructure (and management structure) beyond perhaps using AIM screennames as some sort of single sign on mechanism.
I assumed the qualifier was understood; I meant publicly disclosed, not just disclosed to the vendor. Also, I'm not sure if you're familiar with how disclosure works, but it's not in Moore's best interests reveal that he's sitting on vulnerabilities unless he intends to disclose them soon.
In this case, it seems like disclosure isn't working - particularly "responsible" disclosure. Otherwise no one would be reporting vulnerabilities that others *claim* are already known (by whom? not the guy claiming the 0day).
Undisclosed to whom? The second guy seemed to be sitting on the vulnerability. He might've disclosed to Microsoft, but has the public learned of this vulnerability before? If not, they can't be taking any precautions.
The 'genuine advantage' program isn't aimed at people who copy xp from a friend, or download it, or who know their copy isn't on the up and up.
It's a program to get people who buy windows, either with or without hardware, to grass up the sellers, if the copy was unlicensed.
These people do lose out due to the fact that the copy isn't properly licensed. They won't be able to get support from Microsoft, and non-security updates will stop working to name just two.
Now, the value of this 'support' to the people who're just installing their friend's copy is negligible. But, this is a pretty self-selecting group we're talking about. The kind of people who actually expect their $199 PC to come with a duly licensed copy of windows. The kind of people who take dialogue boxes warning them their copy of windows is 'not genuine' seriously. The kind of people who call microsoft support because they've managed to install 500 pieces of spyware.
Call them 'dumbasses', 'computer illiterates', or 'consumers'. These are people who see software as a product that comes in a box, rather than digitally perfect copies of x86 binary machine code.
The point is, they expect those few additional services from Microsoft to come with the product; for them, having paid money to some guy for 'genuine' windows, and to find out it's 'not genuine' DOES make a difference.
Especially if they bought a boxed version with the fake holograms and everything - genuine software, counterfeit box, fraudulent sale.
Those are the people targetted by the 'genuine advantage' program, and in that context it does make sense.
The reason it's not a 0day exploit is because some other dude already discovered the vulnerability, but didn't disclose it to the public? And that second guy is sitting on another 3 or 4 vulnerabilities?
I'm sorry, what's the definition of 0day exploit these days? If not exploit code for which there is no patch available, then what?
Can we now use "responsible disclosure" to argue away the fact that actual computer systems are at risk of being exploited right here and now, by saying "yeah, well, you got rooted and all, but we knew about that bug, so it doesn't count, even though we don't have a patch yet."?
Can we now take comments that the programmers left in the code ("// does this work?" "/* coded while druk */" "//BUGBUG") as an excuse to completely ignore actual vulnerabilities?
And hey, if TWO researches come up with this vulnerability seemingly independently, what are the chances of the exploit already circulating in the black hat community? Close to 100%?
By my definition you've got your negative-day and your zero-day exploits. Negative-day exploits; no patch yet. Zero-day; the patch has just been issued, so might as well give your exploit to scriptkiddies and botnet operators to use on the systems that don't patch early/often enough. Obviously, a negative-day exploit usually isn't going to be used on a large scale, because your average blackhatter wants to keep it in his toolkit to attack well-patched systems; after all, it's what gives him (and his leet skillz) an edge. Once patchday arrives, you might as well give it to some noobs, because they might be interested in unpatched targets, while a leet blackhatter is not.
So no, it's not a "stretch" to call it 0day. It's negative day, even.
* managing the spectrum. Not what goes over the airwaves, but who gets to use them for what purpose. (You don't want your local HAM interfering with TV or emergency services frequencies) * regulating the crap out of telcos, preventing much telco rapage (they're doing this less and less, regretably) * certifying electronic shit so it doesn't interfere with your other electronic shit
Those are pretty much the good things. The bad things are
* trying to be the thought police (nipplegate!) * being big and slow and bureaucratic (we want more free-for-all spectrum weeeeh ultrawideband weeeh) * failing to regulate industries despite huge whopping monopoly abuse (media ownership, ADSL/net neutrality, etc.)
A similar system has been in use in the Netherlands for some time. Not for judges, but for prosecutors. Most laws state e.g. that if you're guilty you "shalle be imprisoned for no longer than 10 years". Now, those maximum sentences are only applied if you've been a real asshole. If there are mitigating circumstances, you can expect some leniency. For example; you have no history of criminal behavior, you were provoked, etc. Those circumstances don't influence culpability, but they can influence sentencing.
To help prosecutors in demanding a punishment that fits the crime, and more importantly to have prosecutors demand the same punishment in similar cases, regardless of jurisdiction, there's a piece of software to help them out. Just enter the specifics of the case, and the software will work out the sentence you should ask for based on a) guidelines given out by the national government, and b) comparisons to similar cases from a historical database.
Now, the software just comes up with a suggestion, so the prosecutor can still say "well, in similar cases people have gotten 6 years in jail, but this guy's a real asshole based on characteristics I can't fill in on these forms, so he deserves to raise the average". Or the prosecutor can decide to stay on the lenient side. Whichever way though, if there's a discrepency from guidelines+case law, he'll have to explain it.
Now, ultimately, it's still in the judge's hands. The judge may attach greater weight to certain mitigating circumstances, and less to others, and come up with a different sentence. But the judge is also aware of the guidelines and statistics.
The reason for such a system is to increase the dependability of the judicial system. If two people commit the same crime, in the same manner, for the same reasons, and in the same circumstances, they should get the same punishment; justice, after all, should be blind.
I'll just point out the obvious ones 1) How would people know my URL? How would they know my "i-Name"? Hey! Same thing! FWIW there already are X.500/LDAP directories on the web (one was even pushed by microsoft and included in NetMeeting) and guess what, no one really thought it convenient enough so that it rose to any sort of popularity. 2) you can't invite all your friends to a party? Why, perhaps they're not all on "i-name".. Perhaps I don't want to receive mass mailings ("boon to marketing scumbags") unless I specifically hand you my e-mail address? 3) "if I'm away from the computer but right next to a phone/envelope and stamp/fax machine/semaphore flag/whatever" - great, so you've got working implementations of the directory for all those media, huh? Ohh, that's right, you don't.
But wait a minute. There's NO service on offer. But it's being sold for $5 a year!
What is convenient about that? A convenient way for me to pay $5 per year (a limited time offer, that goes up to $20) FOR NOTHING IN RETURN.
What's so hard about this to work out?
Taking $5 for nothing in return = scam. What's so hard about that to work out?
Friendster, myspace, orkut, facebook, etc. aren't about finding someone's contact information based on name, if you haven't figured that out yet. Besides of which a flat namespace like i-name's will only result in cutesy names like tggrgrrrl16, since Jane.Doe will have been taken already. Much like the usernames on hotmail, gmail, oh wait, myspace etc.
You seem to be a bit too enthusiastic about this. Are you one of the people launching this? I'm just telling you; prepare to be disappointed.
Models that are used most for dark scenes with/without flash.
While I agree with you - what would that metrics tell? Inquiring mind wants to know.
Maybe I'm simply not in the know -- I usually do dark scenes without flash with my Nikon F2, Ilford film, a stativ, and a good lens.:-)
it's just an example of a piece of statistics that would make a bit more sense. For the lower end of the market (i.e. your NON-Canon EOS/Nikon F models) the performance in low light is particularly horrendous, what with the tiny lenses and superslow CCDs. On many review sites they only show pictures taken with a camera outside at noon in summer, and then complain about saturation (or lack thereof). Most consumers are more concerned with taking shots of social gatherings, which usually take place in the evening or at night, indoors. So, the relative performance on that kind of scene should be more interesting than the aggregate number of uploaded pics.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the argument was to place ICANN under the authority of the UN, which is a completely different idea then making "ICANN a totally autonomous entity".
This is the meat of the argument, right? Should ICANN be under US authority or should it be under UN authority?
And of course, at this point, the thread turns to UN bashing, without stopping to think that, hey, the UN actually already runs a global adressing system - or rather, the international telecommunications union does. And it plods along just fine, with all those different countries assigning their own numbers, and things just keeping on working..
What most people fail to realise is that what ICANN actually does (that is of any consequence) is very, very little. They don't run any nameservers, they just say "those ones are the ones we recommend you use" and tell the people running them "these are our policies". At any point in time people can say "you know what, fuck you ICANN", and NOTHING would change. ICANN is there because people feel a need for there to be an "authority". In reality the show is run by the (cc)TLD registries, verisign, ISC, RIPE, etc.
In fact, the EU has legislation that reserves the right to EU governments subvert ICANN; it would legally obligate ISPs to point to government-approved nameservers rather than ICANN's. (Of course you could still use your own). This is the same legal mechanism through which telephonenumber registries are appointed, actually. This is a recourse the US doesn't even impose on their citizens, even though they contract out to ICANN.
That hasn't happened because ICANN has failed to really fuck up that much.
The day ICANN is deposed will be much like a bloodless coup in Thailand. ICANN folks will show up at work some day to find everyone's just kind of ignoring them.
Cpanel is so common because it's provided by the hosting places on a lot of dedicated servers and used for almost all web hosting packages that I have seen.
Also, Cpanel is popular because it is popular. Customers are accustomed to it and expect panels to be Cpanel, but there's more to it than that; many hosting providers will offer to restore your cpanel hosted site from your old hosting provider when you switch to them. That way you'll retain niceties like your userdatabase etc. This commonality is very useful in migrating new customers to your service (though obviously it also makes it easier for them to leave again).
Maybe it's loading an ad in an iframe, and the iframe is pointing to "myhostname.somewhere.com" which has 192.168.1.1 as the IP address by mistake?
Yes, I do know there have been occasions where the RIAA has come up with some possible false positives, and mislabelled files certainly exist, but it's more the exception than than the rule, so on the balance of probabilities, a person who shows up as having a Metallica album on a p2p program more likely than not does, it's as simple as that.
The problem lies with
1) RIAA agents areknown to put mislabeled files on p2p programs. Ouch!
2) they claim 27 files, and voluntarily introduce 11 they downloaded; they are holding themselves up to a level of evidence they can't fulfill for most of their claim.
They're already basically involved in a sting operation, and are known for having crappy evidence (sueing people that don't even own computers etc.). They're operating a scare campaign. A campaign of terror if you will. Given that so many of their cases are baseless, and the dollar amounts of damages they seek, I can see a judge holding them to a more stringent standard of evidence than, say, some schmoe sueing his neighbor in small claims court over overhanging tree branches.
If the copyright cartel enforcers are required to have downloaded copies from the alleged infringer in order to maintain a suit, then something like Peer Guardian becomes more effective: p2p'ers can be seen online, yet they're safe as long as they can succeed in blocking connections to or from all the enforcers' addresses.
Hardly. Peerguardian can only ever block IP addresses that are known to belong to *AA agents. Nothing prevents them from using cable, dialup, wifi, etc. to get online.
In fact, to the *AA it would be interesting to see that a certain peer can be contacted from an untainted IP address, but not from a tainted one. That way they know you're using PeerGuardian. If I were them, I'd go after those people just to scare PeerGuardian users. They can even use the fact that you used PeerGuardian to argue that you knew you were doing wrong.
Nothing new here. Slashdot as a whole seems that way. It wants some sort of vindication that the gpl is valid, and c+d letters go flying. However when other companies, such as members of the **AA are involved, the crowd screams bloody murder. How dare these corporations excersize their right ? There goes my karma
Some differences;
- accusations of GPL breaches are usually well-researched and levied at the correct legal entity, where the *AAs have been known to send C+D letters based on similarity of filenames to people who don't even have computers.
- the GPL is aimed at preventing the formation of monopolies; as such, enforcing it doesn't entail monopoly abuses, whereas the *AAs are regularly accused of price gouging, etc.
- the *AAs tend to ask for huge dollar amounts of damages, in the hundreds of dollars per song or film copied. In this case no damages were sought at all, even though Germany does know statutory damages
- it's often argued that people who download content illegaly usually end up buying the stuff they like, or at least that they would never in the first place have bought the content. D-Link on the other hand used GPL'ed software to profit from it, and then didn't abide by its licensing terms.
- the burden for D-Link for 'staying honest' is much lower than the (monetary) burden for some teen who downloaded 1000 tracks. Even if you disagree with copyright fundamentally, you'd be less upset about D-Link having to do no more than include a written offer or a download URL with its kit than with some kid having to pay thousands of dollars of compensation.
- the *AAs even sue you if the stuff you downloaded is NOT available from them anymore; by contrast, once a piece of code is GPL'ed, it stays GPL'ed; there's no orfan-ware problem.
People get proportionately more upset if piracy is carried out by professional gangs who profit from it (selling illegal copies of windows to your mom, for example); if it concerns software from small (non-monopoly) companies or music from independent labels; if people who can easily afford it still pirate stuff just because they're cheapskates (e.g. fortune-500 corporations using illegal copies of winzip, which is $6 per copy in volume) etc. etc. etc.
So there are philosophical, moral, legal and practical differences between the two -- whether you agree with those is another thing, but there is no need for someone that supports enforcing the GPL and pirating Windows to be a hypocrite. And that's not even taking into account anti-corporate or communist themes.
Maybe some people aren't hypocrites, but just don't see the world as exclusively black and white. Just maybe they agree with some (application of) laws, and not others. "You're a hypocrite, because you depend on the law" is not much of an argument against people who want the law changed so they can depend on it better.
Selfish, perhaps you could levy that accusation. But hypocrites? Hardly.
1. allow only discussion on events that happened atleast 120 years ago in rural Sweden
2. no Swedes
"It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet," says David Struck.
No it's not. It's completely different. It's more like handing out free samples, and to your horror finding that there are people who will just take any crap they get for free, even if they're not interested. It's like sending out mail order catalogues to people who just need something to put under a table leg to stabalize it. In fact, it's completely like, oh, let's say, paying a TV network based on pulled-out-of-ass Nielsen ratings, only to find out people go to the toilet during a commercial break! Who would've thought?
, MostChoice e-mailed Google to point out 316 clicks it received in June from ZapMeta.com, a little-known search site. MostChoice paid an average of $4.56 a click, or roughly $1,500 for the batch.
There's your problem right there. $4.56 per click?! What are ya, nuts?
1. The election officials don't believe that they can re-gear the process in time for the general election, which is only 6 weeks away. I certainly don't think they can pull it off, given their record so far.
So.. In the event that it turns out that all the voting machines are controlled by Red China, they have no backup? Even though the backup would be red pencils, some ballots and cardboard boxes with some security tape thrown in for good measure?
"The first thing we can talk about is the controller. When we last saw the controller for the PlayStation 3, it was a shoddily put together, almost third party-like unit with ugly red sensors on the top and a lack of weight. However, in the redesigned version that is much closer to the model that will reach consumers, the controller has been weighted down with a considerable amount of 18 carat gold. The fans are folded origami, made from 3-ply $100 bills, rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins. The model we tested had some problems maintaining sync at times, because of the impurities (elevated diamond content) in the Quartz crystal used, but we expect this problem to be solved in the budget bundle."
Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.
Well DUH! The whole point of the debate is to prevent bad things from happening, not to stop something bad that's already happening. Do these people really understand the issue?
The hardware manufacturers understand this as no other. The thing is, they themselves have been pushing for years their own solutions in search of a problem; MPLS and other Quality of Service schemes. The doomscenarios that the net-neutrality camp sketches are in fact exactly the kind of thing that would sell network companies on multi-tiered networks, which works out great for the hardware manufacturers, since now all their MPLS/QoS/ProtocolAware/StatefulInspection networking gear has a purpose!
Sure, to consumers they'll say "there's no problem", but to their actual customers they'll say "there's no problem... because you will benefit greatly from hurting other businesses and consumers!"
The harder the network neutrality camp shouts, the better the business case for the hardware manufacturers is perceived to be by network operators.
could the adblock utilities have any effect on this? i think we've all known that if everyone used adblockers, we'd have a big problem: free sites would no longer have any income. we havent really worried about it because it didnt seem like enough of us were using them to make a difference.
could this be the first sign?
No, this is about selling the ads. Getting people to see them is step 2. If too many people use adblockers, you will need to spend a lot more effort at getting non-adblockers to see them, increasing costs (rather than losing sales), preventing you from reaching step 3 (profit).
The fact that you have to press [ESC]:%s is what turns off people, even if they usually are pretty intelligent, they don't see the value of learning a few keystrokes to use a superior editor.
The really odd thing is that instead, they use Editpad, which does have regexps (which they don't use) but also fucks up keystrokes for find/replace (F3 does something completely different, Ctrl+F doesn't work, etc.. I think you need to press F5 or F8)
One thing that could sell some of my co-workers on vim would be if it had better XML features. Nothing too fancy but at least prettyprinting and a wellformedness check. Add a few GUI things to make life easier for people using search+replace and it could well become the preferred editor (people are now making do with editpad, notepad2, xmlspy home edition, etc.)
Fancy stuff I would like; smartly(!) adding closing tags (i.e. only if needed to make the document wellformed, skip adding a closing tag if there's one allready there), checking against DTD/schema, font size zooming using ctrl+/- and ctrl+scrollmousebutton, and of course, using XPATHs instead of/alongside regular expressions for search and replace..
The XPATH search is why I keep hold of an old version of xmlspy professional that the company doesn't get new licenses for (suck it, new guy!).
Now, I'm sure much, if not all of this, can be added through plugins (anyone got a list? my current xml plugin doesn't do too well at adding closing tags only when needed, and doesn't pretty print) but for my coworkers it has to be an out-of-the-box setup.exe experience..
The earlier/later thing would be a boon to a journalist friend of mine - then again, proper autosave in microsoft word would be, too. (He has a knack for shutting down and answering 'yes' to any 'are you really sure you want to throw away a day's work?' dialogues..)
When AOL partly funded mozilla, it was already in its downward spiral. AOL was never a great company, but it was at one time a fucking huge company worth bajillions on the stock market.
Up until the dotcom hype, AOLs businessmodel was pretty simple; you sell a subscription service that is slightly (but not vastly) expensive. Obviously, to maximize profits from subscriptions (and to make sure you don't suddenly lose 50% of your income from one month to the next) you have to make it hard for people to quit, and easy to signup (hence the AOL coasters that you got in the mail, magazines, etc.)
It's a fairly straightforward business; you provide a simple service and try not to annoy people so much that it seems worth their time to jump through the hoops to cancel their subscription. Much like bland, unadventurous magazines and newspapers - their contents is maybe 10% useful and the rest is filler, but they stay clear of printing too much gore or "incest - how to?" columns. And they flood you with those subscription inserts.
Then the dotcom hype happened, which meant that AOL was now worth bajillions based on basically it's name. "America" - can't go wrong there, you don't want to invest in Lithuania, and "Online", well, that has dotcom written all over it.
In this period they did the stuff like fund mozilla, and buy the guys behind winamp (whose media player hasn't improved vastly, but their shoutcast streaming audio site is just how streaming audio should be).
Then, after the dotcom crash (and Time Warners (reverse)takeover of/merger with AOL) came the stark reality of post-dotcomhype business. Being an ISP is no longer a simple affair - with technlogies like cable (docsis 1.0, 2.0), (V)(H)(A)DSL (1/2+) being upgraded every two years, the death of dialup at the time where dialup had just become so ubiquitous that it's built into telephone exchanges; there's not much value in being an ISP (too much competition) and doing it right is hard. AOL had always been doing the ISP bit a bit halfheartedly, and even with TimeWarner on board, they found they can't really be a persuasive content company!
So, cut to present time, and AOL is trying its damn hardest to get away from being an ISP, and to be as much as Google and Yahoo as they can.
There's no reason they shouldn't be good at the things Yahoo and Google do. Except that they've sullied their brandname by sucking at everything they've ever done. And being mismanaged.
Opening up AIM and trying to get their video search on other people's sites is just recognizing a simple fact; their brand sucks. They desperately need people to use their services first, find out they're worth using, and then worry about reeling them into 'the AOL experience' (with AOL's ads) later.
AOL's best bet would be to start doing stuff under different brand names, if possible to set up small companies with just a few people, with a start-up kind of atmosphere, where they don't have to bother much about tying into AOL's infrastructure (and management structure) beyond perhaps using AIM screennames as some sort of single sign on mechanism.
Real or not, lonelygirl15's whiny voice made me want to vomit so hard after 15 seconds I "like totally" didn't visit youtube for an entire week.
I assumed the qualifier was understood; I meant publicly disclosed, not just disclosed to the vendor. Also, I'm not sure if you're familiar with how disclosure works, but it's not in Moore's best interests reveal that he's sitting on vulnerabilities unless he intends to disclose them soon.
In this case, it seems like disclosure isn't working - particularly "responsible" disclosure. Otherwise no one would be reporting vulnerabilities that others *claim* are already known (by whom? not the guy claiming the 0day).
Undisclosed to whom? The second guy seemed to be sitting on the vulnerability. He might've disclosed to Microsoft, but has the public learned of this vulnerability before? If not, they can't be taking any precautions.
The 'genuine advantage' program isn't aimed at people who copy xp from a friend, or download it, or who know their copy isn't on the up and up.
It's a program to get people who buy windows, either with or without hardware, to grass up the sellers, if the copy was unlicensed.
These people do lose out due to the fact that the copy isn't properly licensed. They won't be able to get support from Microsoft, and non-security updates will stop working to name just two.
Now, the value of this 'support' to the people who're just installing their friend's copy is negligible. But, this is a pretty self-selecting group we're talking about. The kind of people who actually expect their $199 PC to come with a duly licensed copy of windows. The kind of people who take dialogue boxes warning them their copy of windows is 'not genuine' seriously. The kind of people who call microsoft support because they've managed to install 500 pieces of spyware.
Call them 'dumbasses', 'computer illiterates', or 'consumers'. These are people who see software as a product that comes in a box, rather than digitally perfect copies of x86 binary machine code.
The point is, they expect those few additional services from Microsoft to come with the product; for them, having paid money to some guy for 'genuine' windows, and to find out it's 'not genuine' DOES make a difference.
Especially if they bought a boxed version with the fake holograms and everything - genuine software, counterfeit box, fraudulent sale.
Those are the people targetted by the 'genuine advantage' program, and in that context it does make sense.
The reason it's not a 0day exploit is because some other dude already discovered the vulnerability, but didn't disclose it to the public? And that second guy is sitting on another 3 or 4 vulnerabilities?
I'm sorry, what's the definition of 0day exploit these days? If not exploit code for which there is no patch available, then what?
Can we now use "responsible disclosure" to argue away the fact that actual computer systems are at risk of being exploited right here and now, by saying "yeah, well, you got rooted and all, but we knew about that bug, so it doesn't count, even though we don't have a patch yet."?
Can we now take comments that the programmers left in the code ("// does this work?" "/* coded while druk */" "//BUGBUG") as an excuse to completely ignore actual vulnerabilities?
And hey, if TWO researches come up with this vulnerability seemingly independently, what are the chances of the exploit already circulating in the black hat community? Close to 100%?
By my definition you've got your negative-day and your zero-day exploits. Negative-day exploits; no patch yet. Zero-day; the patch has just been issued, so might as well give your exploit to scriptkiddies and botnet operators to use on the systems that don't patch early/often enough. Obviously, a negative-day exploit usually isn't going to be used on a large scale, because your average blackhatter wants to keep it in his toolkit to attack well-patched systems; after all, it's what gives him (and his leet skillz) an edge. Once patchday arrives, you might as well give it to some noobs, because they might be interested in unpatched targets, while a leet blackhatter is not.
So no, it's not a "stretch" to call it 0day. It's negative day, even.
I want to know what good you think the FCC does?
* managing the spectrum. Not what goes over the airwaves, but who gets to use them for what purpose. (You don't want your local HAM interfering with TV or emergency services frequencies)
* regulating the crap out of telcos, preventing much telco rapage (they're doing this less and less, regretably)
* certifying electronic shit so it doesn't interfere with your other electronic shit
Those are pretty much the good things. The bad things are
* trying to be the thought police (nipplegate!)
* being big and slow and bureaucratic (we want more free-for-all spectrum weeeeh ultrawideband weeeh)
* failing to regulate industries despite huge whopping monopoly abuse (media ownership, ADSL/net neutrality, etc.)
A similar system has been in use in the Netherlands for some time. Not for judges, but for prosecutors. Most laws state e.g. that if you're guilty you "shalle be imprisoned for no longer than 10 years". Now, those maximum sentences are only applied if you've been a real asshole. If there are mitigating circumstances, you can expect some leniency. For example; you have no history of criminal behavior, you were provoked, etc. Those circumstances don't influence culpability, but they can influence sentencing.
To help prosecutors in demanding a punishment that fits the crime, and more importantly to have prosecutors demand the same punishment in similar cases, regardless of jurisdiction, there's a piece of software to help them out. Just enter the specifics of the case, and the software will work out the sentence you should ask for based on a) guidelines given out by the national government, and b) comparisons to similar cases from a historical database.
Now, the software just comes up with a suggestion, so the prosecutor can still say "well, in similar cases people have gotten 6 years in jail, but this guy's a real asshole based on characteristics I can't fill in on these forms, so he deserves to raise the average". Or the prosecutor can decide to stay on the lenient side. Whichever way though, if there's a discrepency from guidelines+case law, he'll have to explain it.
Now, ultimately, it's still in the judge's hands. The judge may attach greater weight to certain mitigating circumstances, and less to others, and come up with a different sentence. But the judge is also aware of the guidelines and statistics.
The reason for such a system is to increase the dependability of the judicial system. If two people commit the same crime, in the same manner, for the same reasons, and in the same circumstances, they should get the same punishment; justice, after all, should be blind.
Wow. You're really crabby about this.
I'll just point out the obvious ones
1) How would people know my URL? How would they know my "i-Name"? Hey! Same thing! FWIW there already are X.500/LDAP directories on the web (one was even pushed by microsoft and included in NetMeeting) and guess what, no one really thought it convenient enough so that it rose to any sort of popularity.
2) you can't invite all your friends to a party? Why, perhaps they're not all on "i-name".. Perhaps I don't want to receive mass mailings ("boon to marketing scumbags") unless I specifically hand you my e-mail address?
3) "if I'm away from the computer but right next to a phone/envelope and stamp/fax machine/semaphore flag/whatever" - great, so you've got working implementations of the directory for all those media, huh? Ohh, that's right, you don't.
But wait a minute. There's NO service on offer. But it's being sold for $5 a year!
What is convenient about that? A convenient way for me to pay $5 per year (a limited time offer, that goes up to $20) FOR NOTHING IN RETURN.
What's so hard about this to work out?
Taking $5 for nothing in return = scam.
What's so hard about that to work out?
Friendster, myspace, orkut, facebook, etc. aren't about finding someone's contact information based on name, if you haven't figured that out yet. Besides of which a flat namespace like i-name's will only result in cutesy names like tggrgrrrl16, since Jane.Doe will have been taken already. Much like the usernames on hotmail, gmail, oh wait, myspace etc.
You seem to be a bit too enthusiastic about this. Are you one of the people launching this? I'm just telling you; prepare to be disappointed.
Models that are used most for dark scenes with/without flash.
:-)
While I agree with you - what would that metrics tell? Inquiring mind wants to know.
Maybe I'm simply not in the know -- I usually do dark scenes without flash with my Nikon F2, Ilford film, a stativ, and a good lens.
it's just an example of a piece of statistics that would make a bit more sense.
For the lower end of the market (i.e. your NON-Canon EOS/Nikon F models) the performance in low light is particularly horrendous, what with the tiny lenses and superslow CCDs. On many review sites they only show pictures taken with a camera outside at noon in summer, and then complain about saturation (or lack thereof). Most consumers are more concerned with taking shots of social gatherings, which usually take place in the evening or at night, indoors. So, the relative performance on that kind of scene should be more interesting than the aggregate number of uploaded pics.