If you don't like their customer service, don't buy their products. The market will decide whether good customer service is worth the extra cost.
So what you're saying is, contractual law isn't necessary to police breaches of contract? Interesting.
What Dell is doing is basically breaching EU laws on remote sales, as well as common laws. Customers are entitled to statutory protections and Dell isn't living up to those. This is a problem in a free market, because the playing field is level to everyone, except Dell. Meanwhile, people buy a Dell expecting it to be a merchantible piece of equipment, fit for its purpose (Dell isn't saying otherwise) and then the shit starts, anywhere from Dell not actually delivering the thing in time, delivering the wrong thing and denying it, not replacing parts that are bad (i.e. not agreed to) etc.
A free market presupposed actual fair trading, rather than taking money for stuff, and not living up to your end of the deal. That would be illegal.
His article is completely anecdotal and short on facts.
It's a news article, of course it's anecdotal, that's what news is - stuff that happens, not necessarily repeatable experimental observations that support a hypothesis.
Having said that, the article is full of facts. Facts that can be checked. Like quotes from sources, most of which are identified clearly.
Of course, it's easier to just disparage the writer (and with him, the Associated Press, not a source well known for being unreliable) than to check those facts. Or to entertain the possibility that they might be true.
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know. To be fair, the grandparent was referring to Jews and Muslims. There aren't many Jewish Christians (I think those Jews for Jesus folks are eligible), but I haven't heard of people who claim to be Muslim and Christian at the same time. Are there examples of this?
In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree. The Y and mitochrondial dna would be great, we could probably trace anybody right to their family. Similar things are being done between species where DNA tests are providing actual relationships between animals as such.
The entirety of the population of Iceland has been DNA-sampled and indexed according to their lineage. DNA studies are already used to determine how populations moved and intermixed in the past, on a population-wide scale (where a few people from a population are sampled, rather than everyone).
There even a (if somewhat shaky) DNA test to determine racial descent. I saw it on a TV show once, where they had some school kids find out they had DNA from basically another race. I.e. a black guy turned out to have some asian genes, a white girl with blonde hair turned out to have some black genes etc. Possibly a bullshit test, possibly not.
After, we had to also submit to the European idea that creators somehow had a "moral right" to their works, which is entirely opposite what the Constitution says copyright is supposed to be!
While it's not spelled out in european laws, copyright and patent law is, and always has been, a matter of social contract; the 'for the promotion of the arts' bit isn't made explicit, but it's always there in the background.
"moral rights" don't refer to some sort of God-given right to hold copyright (and note that moral rights don't apply to patents). In fact, moral rights are rights of the creator that cannot be signed away.
The best example goes like this; suppose you wrote a song "I'm so proud of you, Whitey", which refers to your bunnyrabbit who happens to be very good at maths. You find out that this song is being used by Neo Nazis in their ads, on radiostations, websites, etc. If they pay their licensing fees (and remember, radio licenses are mandatory) you have no way to stop them from doing this. Under the theory of moral rights, you have the right to stop your work from being used in a defamatory way (whatever that means).
Now, I'm not saying I agree 100% with these laws. One example of how bad they can get is when an architect objected to people repainting a pink high-rise building in a more sane color, since he had designed it to be pink, and painting it over would hurt the 'integrity' of his work. Of course, he could be swayed by a large sum of cash..
But the "moral" in "moral rights" doesn't mean creators have a right, morally, to copyright protection, but rather that they have some additional rights. To have their authorship recognized, for example (basically a plagiarism ban). To prevent people (even their publishers) from fudging up their work beyond recognition. Or from using it for political ends the author can't live with.
Russia was the main force (they had also been attacked by Germany like the US) that went, Britain was the second force
You've got to be kidding. The Brits were practically inconsequential by the time we invaded France. Churchill himself said that they would've surrendered had the Americans not entered the war when they did...and would've done so much earlier if the Americans hadn't been supplying them with weapons, munitions, food, tools, spare parts, and so on since the start of the war.
The allied forces suffered 17 million military dead. 10 million of which were Russian. 4 million were Chinese. That leaves only 3 million for the UK, the US, the Canadians, the European forces and sundry others (India, Australia, etc.) combined.
The Russians were the dominant force in Europe, albeit an inefficient one; their advancements had a high toll in human lifes, where the Western allies relied on mechanized war fare, air support etc.
There is a reason Germany was divided in a Western half and a Russian half post WOII. And a reason why the Western half was shared among the UK, USA and France.
The reason the US is remembered so well, is because of Hollywood movies. In The Netherlands for example, people remember the US as a very involved force in our country, where in actuality most of The Netherlands was liberated by Canadian forces.
Or you could use a bilinear filter which is faster, simpler and more common for image resizing. That they went ahead with a nearest-neighbor image resizer when a bilinear resizer would be trivially more code (and if it's vectorized, could be faster than nearest-neighbor too!) shows inexperience. No one who's ever done any kind of multimedia coding would have made the decision that mozilla/firefox did. It makes me wonder what other questionable or unlearned decisions were made in the code.
I think they didn't bother with it because they had other priorities. When firefox resizes images, it looks better than IE, which is their priority. (Really, IE makes a horrible mess of resizing images, especially when it does so to match your display's DPI settings..)
Ohhhh, what does that mean? well, look at the word reblended. re-blend-ed meaning re - again, blend - well, ya know, mix, blend, whatever, and ed - happened in the past.
A lot of languages don't let you do that, such as German
German is a perfectly cromulant language in this aspect actually. Take for example words like "wiedergutmachung" (re-good-making; making up for something/reparations), "hauptbanhof" (main train station), or even "Büromaschinenmechaniker" (office machinery mechanic).
In fact, German is probably just as (in)flexible as English when it comes to making compound words.
The most flexible language in this regard is actually Dutch, in which a word such as "paashaasschaamhaarverzamelaar", though whimsical, is a syntactically and orthographically correct word. (The meaning btw is 'collector of easter bunnies' pubic hair'). Such words can be generated pretty much at will. Take for example "waterverbruiksraminghereikdatum" (water-use estimate re-calibration date). You silly anglophones stick spaces in there between the words;-)
BTW, I used to work for Logica, in the telecoms division, and have a LOT of knowledge of GSM systems, and how they work.
That's not really a good advertisement for Logica then.
The IMEI has next to nothing to do with any sort of security function of GSM. It only identifies your handset, and some countries have a registry that they'll put your stolen phone's IMEI on so networks can prevent the handset's further use in that particular country among the operators that signed up to the registry, but IMEI is not checked against your subscription. In fact, that's one of the primary design tenets of GSM; subscription data is contained in the Subscriber Identity Module; the SIM.
is simply not possible to associate a number with two SIMs. You can associate a SIM with two or more numbers, but not the other way round. This is false. Many operators offer dual SIM cards; both cards contain the same subscription data, and usually the last one activated is logged on to the network succesfully to receive incoming calls. Both can make outbound calls.
If someone HAS cloned your SIM, and both phones are attached at the same time, the network would register a fault No, it works, though you will notice only one handset receiving calls. It's not registered as a fault (though it is registered).
A SIM can only be "effectively" cloned if the original was never used afterwards. If both the Original SIM and the Clone was used at the same time, the network will try and continuesly switch between the two cells its registered to, unless both are on the same cell. if both are on the same cell, further issues would happen. Again, not true.
In fact, if certain algorithms are used (IIRC, COMP-128) it's even possible to reconstruct the SIM's KI and clone it using information eavesdropped over-the-air (be afraid!).
- Maybe, if you visited another country (or performed roaming) there might be some residual temporary numbers assigned to your phone. Which numbers would those be? The connection between your MSISDN and most-likely (or actual) away-network is always looked up via the home registry; the away-registry doesn't associate any temporary MSISDNs to your SIM, it doesn't need to. And if it did, and someone misdialed such a random number, how would they be supposed to get through to you? Their home registry simply won't accept entries for SIMs from your network.
However, the way the records are kept, you shoudl find that its pretty easy for the phone company to determine what happend. Who made the phone call, what handset was in use, where the call was recieved. Spoken as some one who's never tried to get a phone company to look up something in their records. Good luck trying that. Yes, it's technically feasible, but that doesn't mean phone companies are organizationally capable of doing this.
Finally I do not know the laws of the US, but here in the UK, the first point of call if you think your phone has been cloned or if your believe that a crime has been committed regarding your phone is the POLICE. No, first call the phone company to report fraud, so they can put restrictions in place (e.g. no international calls, no premium toll numbers) to prevent ongoing abuse and rising phone bills, and report and investigate at leisure.
Why does this have to be a Firefox extension? Why can't I just use Skype (or at least make it standalone)?
There are a zillion stand alone SIP applications, which is beside the point. From the company's perspective this is great for 3 reasons; 1) one-click install; no setup.exe, no.zip files people can't open, no folders they shouldn't delete; it's all hidden away, much like it's pretty hard to fudge up your macromedia flash "install". 2) silly browser integration; it recognizes phonenumbers and makes them clickable, 3) guaranteed coverage on slashdot and other firefox-crazy websites.
If it's really that useful, Opera will have it integrated in 3 months time anyway;-)
Or even, pay some other kid for the one he broke, and present the broken phone to your parents, who will refuse to get you a new (non-spying one), while selling your working unit, and using the cash left over to buy a non-spying phone!
Suchs laws would severely impact the contracts broadband companies can enter into.
That's the entire point.
They've been handed full or near monopolies on data communications, and with monopoly comes restriction.
Because they already have, already are, and will continue to screw over the consumer.
Heck, even companies that do not have monopolies have huge restrictions on screwing over their customers when it comes to conflicts of interest. For example; some investment banker isn't allowed to tell you how great company X is, if a different unit of his bank happens to be seriving company X's IPO. That's really just plain common sense.
Net non-neutrality is very simple, basic, econ 101 vertical monopoly. Nothing at all suspect about wanting to curb it. Yes, it happens to benefit other companies. In fact, making sur the vertical playing ground is even benefits the entire economy, and not just broadband companies rights to enter into contracts.
I do disagree. Computer security is three things and only three things in concept: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. [..] Mind you, I know you didn't say availability is ALL a bank cares about, so I want to be clear about this. IMO, all three go hand-in-hand, the same emphasis, especially for a bank, or not at all....
What he said, and what your list misses, is that banks care most about Accountability. CIA is a nice short list to memorize, but nowadays, you have to worry about Accountability, Authenticity (different from Integrity as it involves data from the outside world) and Authorisation too.
Given a choice, a bank will always prefer the solution that maximizes accountability, even if it falls short in the other categories.
Supermarkets on the other hand, prioritize availability. If you shut down walmart's for a day, they lose millions of dollars in revenue. To a bank, closing down for a day just means interest accrues in account A instead of B.
Supermarkets have between 8-10% "churn". Goods that go missing, either because they're stolen or dropped and broken, misaccounted for, etc. Given the choice between even 0.5% of the money in accounts going missing and closing down for a day, banks will ALWAYS close down for a day. Because it's not their money.
They don't care as much about personell using each others passwords than the military does. As long as they can sniff out fraud and follow the money trail. They don't care as much about Confidentiality; clearly sending someone else your statement is not as bad as sending them your money.
Banks care most about Accountability and Integrity, followed by Availability, Authenticity, Authorisation, and Confidentiality. That's in the order of what it costs them if the principle fails. Sure, these principles are intertwined; o accountability if your data links are easily hijacked because you didn't encrypt them - but the principle of Accountability is the greater good that is served.
No complaints process might work out better for you than a crappy one. If they don't have a complaints process, you can take them to small claims court immediately, since you've exhausted all your options of dispute resolution within the service's framework.
So basically, you're paying for the privilege of having your computing/network resources sold to others, and getting nothing in return.. It's like paying to be a prostitute! That's a sweet deal. Well, not for the xbox consumer, obviously.
Not a bad sceheme but I don't think its fool proof. As with any public key encryption (I'm assuming this because of the words "console's key") if you could MitM the initial key exchange (not an unreasonable assumption given they're already using bridges) you can just have 2 sets of keys in play. One between the console and the proxy, and one between the proxy and the peers or server.
MITM would be beaten by using a certificate on the client, as would the second setup. Cheating would then require tampering with the certificate on the client, so the client is no longer clean. It's not impossible to tamper with of course (encryption is supposed to secure communications between two parties who wish it to be secure) but it will make it harder to do so whilst remaining undetected.
Statistics are showing that Linden Labs is dumping way more money into the economy than is getting taken out; as a result, the L$ is now trading at 340/US$ and going down from there. The primary way money gets poured in is through stipends; LL is trying to cut off the spigot by eliminating the weekly stipend on free accounts, and there are those that would like to see them eliminated for "premium" (paid) accounts as well.
You might just as well say that the US dollar is now worth more, at least relative to the L$. That doesn't sound very intuitive, with the current high levels of inflation, but consider that people will first be buying shelter, food, gas and crap from wallmart before spending money on pixels. With high inflation, people will spend an ever increasing portion of their income on basic expenditures, and less on luxuries.
So, given that the worth of a dollar itself isn't constant, it's hard to say what the USD/LSD exchange rates really mean.
I checked out their website, WTF, $5000 for a "big island"? A bunch of pixels? WTF!
Last I checked you paid for sending SMS text messages. And for internet service. And those are both taxed by a general sales tax (every EU memberstate is in fact required to have a general sales tax, though sales tax hits poor people the most, as it's unrelated to your income or whether you even make a living wage).
And apart from a very few exceptions (environmental 'levies' and 'fees' etc.) there is a ban on double taxation.
Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.
In many binary formats, there isn't just header information in the first bit of a big file, but also on subdivisions. Here's an example; PASCAL format strings - instead of C-style null-terminated strings (or XML's "/sometagname. Except, you have no way of knowing how many XML parsers may have fucked with the file, added or remove trailing whitespace, converted linefeeds to end-of-lines and vice-versa, whether it's UTF-8 or UTF-16 or iso-8859-1, if some characters got entity-referenced, etc. etc. And you'd lose extensibility; some application that is agnostic of your format can't just splice in some XML of its own (with its own namespace).
This sort of thing is why people are clamoring for 'binary XML', basically preparsed XML.
Also, consider that OOo also uses XML to store database records. This is, of course, a pretty bad idea as a native format to operate on, as this is an application where you DO expect mostly fixed or finite-length fields which can be relatively easily skipped and indexed (and non-finite length fields are treated as an exception, e.g. CLOBs/BLOBs).
XML is *really* great for document/data interchange. Not so much as a format you'd want to operate on in real time. That's why applications parse XML first.
A format that emphasizes both portability and performance is ASN.1 with its BER and PER encodings. As you can guess, it's binary -- and not necessarily extensible, unicode-friendly, etc.
Articles like these make me sad that slashdot doesn't allow the posting of images in replies. Had this been on fark.com, this thread would be full of Ric Romero images.
Luckily Ric's wikipedia article suggests a textual equivalent..
"Determining which bugs to fix should take into account some manner of cost-benefit analysis?! Thank you, Captain Obvious!"
I know what you're thinking. "If I squeeze it all into one big paragraph, even people who think copying multiple paragraphs is plagiarism will copy my post wholesale."
Enter-key? The big fat one with the arrow on it? Try it some time.
Although 40% of PSP owners claimed UMD media was a big reason why they plopped down a few hundred on Sony's pixel-spurting game brick
I think if you check with those people again, the REAL reason those 40% bought a PSP was PORTABLE media, not UMD specifically.
This is one of those results you get from interpreting polls. They probably asked people something like "did the ability to play movies on your PSP have a positive influence on your decision to buy one", or something like that with checkboxes. 40% of people said, sure, it seemed a pretty nice idea to also have that option. This then is translated to "40% claims it was a big reason". But 40% of PSP owners weren't looking for a media player. They were looking for a tiny assed playstation 1, which would get a zillion games (basically the PS 1 catalog) ported to it. If it plays movies, all the better. Sadly neither of these two scenarios really played out.
Most people say the Notes email client sucks because they're used to Outlook Express (go ask your users why they think it sucks and you'll get "because Outlook does it this other way" comments). No, they say it sucks because it does. And that's when I'm comparing it to the likes of squirrelmail and pegasusmail - both not paragons of userfriendlyness, or to forte agent, thunderbird, eudora, etc. etc.
I can think of very few mail apps that suck worse than notes. Perhaps mutt. (I like pine just fine, actually). Can you think of one? Really?
Notes has the lovely properties of; completely hiding the otherwise mangled mailheaders, having a proprietary adressing scheme, making it very hard to copy-paste a From: e-mail address, barely functioning in island mode (mundane stuff like Create mail to.. stops working, it doesn't send mail when you tell it to), irritating bugs galore, especially w.r.t. opening, adding, forwarding or removing attachments (or quoted messages), and calendaring basically doesn't work properly, especially when doing such 'advanced' things like rescheduling or interoperating with outlook. I think I even managed to delete a meeting from my calendar, and find that the original meeting invitation was gone from mail as well. Insane stuff like that. Double click an e-mail body and you're editing an e-mail you received. Not a copy, or a reply, no, the original. Not a day goes by that notes does NOT fuck something up for me.
The Notes email client lets you do interesting things like file a document in multiple folders, integrated IM, etc. WOW.. that's, like, SO advanced. Filing a document in multiple folders. Wow. Great diskspace saving feature. Which you'll need, because the notes folder occupies hundreds of megabytes.
I'm not even sure WHY you'd want to have integrated IM. Exchange also has it for some reason.
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If you don't like their customer service, don't buy their products. The market will decide whether good customer service is worth the extra cost.
So what you're saying is, contractual law isn't necessary to police breaches of contract? Interesting.
What Dell is doing is basically breaching EU laws on remote sales, as well as common laws. Customers are entitled to statutory protections and Dell isn't living up to those. This is a problem in a free market, because the playing field is level to everyone, except Dell. Meanwhile, people buy a Dell expecting it to be a merchantible piece of equipment, fit for its purpose (Dell isn't saying otherwise) and then the shit starts, anywhere from Dell not actually delivering the thing in time, delivering the wrong thing and denying it, not replacing parts that are bad (i.e. not agreed to) etc.
A free market presupposed actual fair trading, rather than taking money for stuff, and not living up to your end of the deal. That would be illegal.
His article is completely anecdotal and short on facts.
It's a news article, of course it's anecdotal, that's what news is - stuff that happens, not necessarily repeatable experimental observations that support a hypothesis.
Having said that, the article is full of facts. Facts that can be checked. Like quotes from sources, most of which are identified clearly.
Of course, it's easier to just disparage the writer (and with him, the Associated Press, not a source well known for being unreliable) than to check those facts. Or to entertain the possibility that they might be true.
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.
To be fair, the grandparent was referring to Jews and Muslims.
There aren't many Jewish Christians (I think those Jews for Jesus folks are eligible), but I haven't heard of people who claim to be Muslim and Christian at the same time. Are there examples of this?
In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree. The Y and mitochrondial dna would be great, we could probably trace anybody right to their family. Similar things are being done between species where DNA tests are providing actual relationships between animals as such.
The entirety of the population of Iceland has been DNA-sampled and indexed according to their lineage. DNA studies are already used to determine how populations moved and intermixed in the past, on a population-wide scale (where a few people from a population are sampled, rather than everyone).
There even a (if somewhat shaky) DNA test to determine racial descent. I saw it on a TV show once, where they had some school kids find out they had DNA from basically another race. I.e. a black guy turned out to have some asian genes, a white girl with blonde hair turned out to have some black genes etc. Possibly a bullshit test, possibly not.
After, we had to also submit to the European idea that creators somehow had a "moral right" to their works, which is entirely opposite what the Constitution says copyright is supposed to be!
While it's not spelled out in european laws, copyright and patent law is, and always has been, a matter of social contract; the 'for the promotion of the arts' bit isn't made explicit, but it's always there in the background.
"moral rights" don't refer to some sort of God-given right to hold copyright (and note that moral rights don't apply to patents). In fact, moral rights are rights of the creator that cannot be signed away.
The best example goes like this; suppose you wrote a song "I'm so proud of you, Whitey", which refers to your bunnyrabbit who happens to be very good at maths. You find out that this song is being used by Neo Nazis in their ads, on radiostations, websites, etc. If they pay their licensing fees (and remember, radio licenses are mandatory) you have no way to stop them from doing this. Under the theory of moral rights, you have the right to stop your work from being used in a defamatory way (whatever that means).
Now, I'm not saying I agree 100% with these laws. One example of how bad they can get is when an architect objected to people repainting a pink high-rise building in a more sane color, since he had designed it to be pink, and painting it over would hurt the 'integrity' of his work. Of course, he could be swayed by a large sum of cash..
But the "moral" in "moral rights" doesn't mean creators have a right, morally, to copyright protection, but rather that they have some additional rights. To have their authorship recognized, for example (basically a plagiarism ban). To prevent people (even their publishers) from fudging up their work beyond recognition. Or from using it for political ends the author can't live with.
Russia was the main force (they had also been attacked by Germany like the US) that went, Britain was the second force
You've got to be kidding. The Brits were practically inconsequential by the time we invaded France. Churchill himself said that they would've surrendered had the Americans not entered the war when they did...and would've done so much earlier if the Americans hadn't been supplying them with weapons, munitions, food, tools, spare parts, and so on since the start of the war.
The allied forces suffered 17 million military dead. 10 million of which were Russian. 4 million were Chinese. That leaves only 3 million for the UK, the US, the Canadians, the European forces and sundry others (India, Australia, etc.) combined.
The Russians were the dominant force in Europe, albeit an inefficient one; their advancements had a high toll in human lifes, where the Western allies relied on mechanized war fare, air support etc.
There is a reason Germany was divided in a Western half and a Russian half post WOII. And a reason why the Western half was shared among the UK, USA and France.
The reason the US is remembered so well, is because of Hollywood movies. In The Netherlands for example, people remember the US as a very involved force in our country, where in actuality most of The Netherlands was liberated by Canadian forces.
From what I've heard working conditions in China are vastly improving.
Or you could use a bilinear filter which is faster, simpler and more common for image resizing. That they went ahead with a nearest-neighbor image resizer when a bilinear resizer would be trivially more code (and if it's vectorized, could be faster than nearest-neighbor too!) shows inexperience. No one who's ever done any kind of multimedia coding would have made the decision that mozilla/firefox did. It makes me wonder what other questionable or unlearned decisions were made in the code.
I think they didn't bother with it because they had other priorities. When firefox resizes images, it looks better than IE, which is their priority. (Really, IE makes a horrible mess of resizing images, especially when it does so to match your display's DPI settings..)
Ohhhh, what does that mean? well, look at the word reblended. re-blend-ed meaning re - again, blend - well, ya know, mix, blend, whatever, and ed - happened in the past.
A lot of languages don't let you do that, such as German
German is a perfectly cromulant language in this aspect actually. Take for example words like "wiedergutmachung" (re-good-making; making up for something/reparations), "hauptbanhof" (main train station), or even "Büromaschinenmechaniker" (office machinery mechanic).
In fact, German is probably just as (in)flexible as English when it comes to making compound words.
The most flexible language in this regard is actually Dutch, in which a word such as "paashaasschaamhaarverzamelaar", though whimsical, is a syntactically and orthographically correct word. (The meaning btw is 'collector of easter bunnies' pubic hair'). Such words can be generated pretty much at will. Take for example "waterverbruiksraminghereikdatum" (water-use estimate re-calibration date). You silly anglophones stick spaces in there between the words
BTW, I used to work for Logica, in the telecoms division, and have a LOT of knowledge of GSM systems, and how they work.
That's not really a good advertisement for Logica then.
The IMEI has next to nothing to do with any sort of security function of GSM. It only identifies your handset, and some countries have a registry that they'll put your stolen phone's IMEI on so networks can prevent the handset's further use in that particular country among the operators that signed up to the registry, but IMEI is not checked against your subscription. In fact, that's one of the primary design tenets of GSM; subscription data is contained in the Subscriber Identity Module; the SIM.
is simply not possible to associate a number with two SIMs. You can associate a SIM with two or more numbers, but not the other way round.
This is false. Many operators offer dual SIM cards; both cards contain the same subscription data, and usually the last one activated is logged on to the network succesfully to receive incoming calls. Both can make outbound calls.
If someone HAS cloned your SIM, and both phones are attached at the same time, the network would register a fault
No, it works, though you will notice only one handset receiving calls. It's not registered as a fault (though it is registered).
A SIM can only be "effectively" cloned if the original was never used afterwards. If both the Original SIM and the Clone was used at the same time, the network will try and continuesly switch between the two cells its registered to, unless both are on the same cell. if both are on the same cell, further issues would happen.
Again, not true.
In fact, if certain algorithms are used (IIRC, COMP-128) it's even possible to reconstruct the SIM's KI and clone it using information eavesdropped over-the-air (be afraid!).
- Maybe, if you visited another country (or performed roaming) there might be some residual temporary numbers assigned to your phone.
Which numbers would those be? The connection between your MSISDN and most-likely (or actual) away-network is always looked up via the home registry; the away-registry doesn't associate any temporary MSISDNs to your SIM, it doesn't need to. And if it did, and someone misdialed such a random number, how would they be supposed to get through to you? Their home registry simply won't accept entries for SIMs from your network.
However, the way the records are kept, you shoudl find that its pretty easy for the phone company to determine what happend. Who made the phone call, what handset was in use, where the call was recieved.
Spoken as some one who's never tried to get a phone company to look up something in their records. Good luck trying that. Yes, it's technically feasible, but that doesn't mean phone companies are organizationally capable of doing this.
Finally I do not know the laws of the US, but here in the UK, the first point of call if you think your phone has been cloned or if your believe that a crime has been committed regarding your phone is the POLICE.
No, first call the phone company to report fraud, so they can put restrictions in place (e.g. no international calls, no premium toll numbers) to prevent ongoing abuse and rising phone bills, and report and investigate at leisure.
In UK, if we recieve am abusive call, calling the phone company will not be any help. They will rightly ask you to contact the police first, and they will work with the police to resolve the matter.
Again, no; "British Telecom has its own unit, which deals with nuisance calls. If you have not already reported it to BT then contact them on 150. They will investigate first and if they can trace the calls, you will then be advised to make a formal police report to your local police station. Cable & Wireless and mobile phone companies require that it be reported to police before they will deal with it. Attend your
Why does this have to be a Firefox extension? Why can't I just use Skype (or at least make it standalone)?
.zip files people can't open, no folders they shouldn't delete; it's all hidden away, much like it's pretty hard to fudge up your macromedia flash "install".
;-)
There are a zillion stand alone SIP applications, which is beside the point.
From the company's perspective this is great for 3 reasons;
1) one-click install; no setup.exe, no
2) silly browser integration; it recognizes phonenumbers and makes them clickable,
3) guaranteed coverage on slashdot and other firefox-crazy websites.
If it's really that useful, Opera will have it integrated in 3 months time anyway
You missed one; break it.
Or even, pay some other kid for the one he broke, and present the broken phone to your parents, who will refuse to get you a new (non-spying one), while selling your working unit, and using the cash left over to buy a non-spying phone!
Suchs laws would severely impact the contracts broadband companies can enter into.
That's the entire point.
They've been handed full or near monopolies on data communications, and with monopoly comes restriction.
Because they already have, already are, and will continue to screw over the consumer.
Heck, even companies that do not have monopolies have huge restrictions on screwing over their customers when it comes to conflicts of interest. For example; some investment banker isn't allowed to tell you how great company X is, if a different unit of his bank happens to be seriving company X's IPO. That's really just plain common sense.
Net non-neutrality is very simple, basic, econ 101 vertical monopoly. Nothing at all suspect about wanting to curb it. Yes, it happens to benefit other companies. In fact, making sur the vertical playing ground is even benefits the entire economy, and not just broadband companies rights to enter into contracts.
not feasible to make the extensive changes necessary.. easily prevented by basic fire-walling
What? Microsoft can't write a simple packetfilter for windows98? I'm quite sure others have.
Oh well, better upgrade, then.
I do disagree. Computer security is three things and only three things in concept: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.
[..]
Mind you, I know you didn't say availability is ALL a bank cares about, so I want to be clear about this. IMO, all three go hand-in-hand, the same emphasis, especially for a bank, or not at all....
What he said, and what your list misses, is that banks care most about Accountability. CIA is a nice short list to memorize, but nowadays, you have to worry about Accountability, Authenticity (different from Integrity as it involves data from the outside world) and Authorisation too.
Given a choice, a bank will always prefer the solution that maximizes accountability, even if it falls short in the other categories.
Supermarkets on the other hand, prioritize availability. If you shut down walmart's for a day, they lose millions of dollars in revenue. To a bank, closing down for a day just means interest accrues in account A instead of B.
Supermarkets have between 8-10% "churn". Goods that go missing, either because they're stolen or dropped and broken, misaccounted for, etc. Given the choice between even 0.5% of the money in accounts going missing and closing down for a day, banks will ALWAYS close down for a day. Because it's not their money.
They don't care as much about personell using each others passwords than the military does. As long as they can sniff out fraud and follow the money trail. They don't care as much about Confidentiality; clearly sending someone else your statement is not as bad as sending them your money.
Banks care most about Accountability and Integrity, followed by Availability, Authenticity, Authorisation, and Confidentiality. That's in the order of what it costs them if the principle fails. Sure, these principles are intertwined; o accountability if your data links are easily hijacked because you didn't encrypt them - but the principle of Accountability is the greater good that is served.
No complaints process might work out better for you than a crappy one. If they don't have a complaints process, you can take them to small claims court immediately, since you've exhausted all your options of dispute resolution within the service's framework.
So basically, you're paying for the privilege of having your computing/network resources sold to others, and getting nothing in return.. It's like paying to be a prostitute! That's a sweet deal. Well, not for the xbox consumer, obviously.
Not a bad sceheme but I don't think its fool proof. As with any public key encryption (I'm assuming this because of the words "console's key") if you could MitM the initial key exchange (not an unreasonable assumption given they're already using bridges) you can just have 2 sets of keys in play. One between the console and the proxy, and one between the proxy and the peers or server.
MITM would be beaten by using a certificate on the client, as would the second setup. Cheating would then require tampering with the certificate on the client, so the client is no longer clean. It's not impossible to tamper with of course (encryption is supposed to secure communications between two parties who wish it to be secure) but it will make it harder to do so whilst remaining undetected.
Statistics are showing that Linden Labs is dumping way more money into the economy than is getting taken out; as a result, the L$ is now trading at 340/US$ and going down from there. The primary way money gets poured in is through stipends; LL is trying to cut off the spigot by eliminating the weekly stipend on free accounts, and there are those that would like to see them eliminated for "premium" (paid) accounts as well.
You might just as well say that the US dollar is now worth more, at least relative to the L$. That doesn't sound very intuitive, with the current high levels of inflation, but consider that people will first be buying shelter, food, gas and crap from wallmart before spending money on pixels. With high inflation, people will spend an ever increasing portion of their income on basic expenditures, and less on luxuries.
So, given that the worth of a dollar itself isn't constant, it's hard to say what the USD/LSD exchange rates really mean.
I checked out their website, WTF, $5000 for a "big island"? A bunch of pixels? WTF!
Last I checked you paid for sending SMS text messages. And for internet service. And those are both taxed by a general sales tax (every EU memberstate is in fact required to have a general sales tax, though sales tax hits poor people the most, as it's unrelated to your income or whether you even make a living wage).
And apart from a very few exceptions (environmental 'levies' and 'fees' etc.) there is a ban on double taxation.
So, no. Next.
Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.
In many binary formats, there isn't just header information in the first bit of a big file, but also on subdivisions. Here's an example; PASCAL format strings - instead of C-style null-terminated strings (or XML's "/sometagname. Except, you have no way of knowing how many XML parsers may have fucked with the file, added or remove trailing whitespace, converted linefeeds to end-of-lines and vice-versa, whether it's UTF-8 or UTF-16 or iso-8859-1, if some characters got entity-referenced, etc. etc. And you'd lose extensibility; some application that is agnostic of your format can't just splice in some XML of its own (with its own namespace).
This sort of thing is why people are clamoring for 'binary XML', basically preparsed XML.
Also, consider that OOo also uses XML to store database records. This is, of course, a pretty bad idea as a native format to operate on, as this is an application where you DO expect mostly fixed or finite-length fields which can be relatively easily skipped and indexed (and non-finite length fields are treated as an exception, e.g. CLOBs/BLOBs).
XML is *really* great for document/data interchange. Not so much as a format you'd want to operate on in real time. That's why applications parse XML first.
A format that emphasizes both portability and performance is ASN.1 with its BER and PER encodings. As you can guess, it's binary -- and not necessarily extensible, unicode-friendly, etc.
Articles like these make me sad that slashdot doesn't allow the posting of images in replies. Had this been on fark.com, this thread would be full of Ric Romero images.
Luckily Ric's wikipedia article suggests a textual equivalent..
"Determining which bugs to fix should take into account some manner of cost-benefit analysis?! Thank you, Captain Obvious!"
I know what you're thinking. "If I squeeze it all into one big paragraph, even people who think copying multiple paragraphs is plagiarism will copy my post wholesale."
Enter-key? The big fat one with the arrow on it? Try it some time.
Although 40% of PSP owners claimed UMD media was a big reason why they plopped down a few hundred on Sony's pixel-spurting game brick
I think if you check with those people again, the REAL reason those 40% bought a PSP was PORTABLE media, not UMD specifically.
This is one of those results you get from interpreting polls. They probably asked people something like "did the ability to play movies on your PSP have a positive influence on your decision to buy one", or something like that with checkboxes. 40% of people said, sure, it seemed a pretty nice idea to also have that option. This then is translated to "40% claims it was a big reason". But 40% of PSP owners weren't looking for a media player. They were looking for a tiny assed playstation 1, which would get a zillion games (basically the PS 1 catalog) ported to it. If it plays movies, all the better. Sadly neither of these two scenarios really played out.
Most people say the Notes email client sucks because they're used to Outlook Express (go ask your users why they think it sucks and you'll get "because Outlook does it this other way" comments).
No, they say it sucks because it does. And that's when I'm comparing it to the likes of squirrelmail and pegasusmail - both not paragons of userfriendlyness, or to forte agent, thunderbird, eudora, etc. etc.
I can think of very few mail apps that suck worse than notes. Perhaps mutt. (I like pine just fine, actually). Can you think of one? Really?
Notes has the lovely properties of; completely hiding the otherwise mangled mailheaders, having a proprietary adressing scheme, making it very hard to copy-paste a From: e-mail address, barely functioning in island mode (mundane stuff like Create mail to.. stops working, it doesn't send mail when you tell it to), irritating bugs galore, especially w.r.t. opening, adding, forwarding or removing attachments (or quoted messages), and calendaring basically doesn't work properly, especially when doing such 'advanced' things like rescheduling or interoperating with outlook. I think I even managed to delete a meeting from my calendar, and find that the original meeting invitation was gone from mail as well. Insane stuff like that. Double click an e-mail body and you're editing an e-mail you received. Not a copy, or a reply, no, the original. Not a day goes by that notes does NOT fuck something up for me.
The Notes email client lets you do interesting things like file a document in multiple folders, integrated IM, etc.
WOW.. that's, like, SO advanced. Filing a document in multiple folders. Wow. Great diskspace saving feature. Which you'll need, because the notes folder occupies hundreds of megabytes.
I'm not even sure WHY you'd want to have integrated IM. Exchange also has it for some reason.