Keep in mind that in some foreign countries they ARE legal.
In Korea, in Japan, in China? Not legal, but many people there believe it is.
The rhetorical contortions the Obama camp are going through to avoid the "M" word just feed the perception that he has something to hide.
McCain is trying to portray Obama as a "secret Muslim", not as "Obama's father was a Muslim". The thinly-veiled racism inherent in the Republican party is on full display here. And with McCain personally for that matter. He hated MLK and campaigned against the civil rights movement. He was a huge supporter of apartheid. He STILL hates Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He opposed the bill to remove the ANC and Mandela from the terrorist watch list.
Google has absurd perks, far greater than anything I say during the tech boom. Citrix is also very well known for treating their employees well. I've worked for a number of companies with similar cultures.
The fact is, this model (which revolves about having the "best of the best" talent) works for many companies. These companies tend to have elaborate hiring processes because of the "best of the best" mentality.
In the case of military, CIA, NSA, &tc. there are fences, gates, guards, dogs and suchlike preventing your access to what they don't want pictures of.
Um, no. Remember when Cheney insisted that Google photos of his private home be taken down immediately and they were?
The problem is that Google is willing to grant "privacy" to the military, government, corporations, and politically connected individuals who can harm them in some way but show utter contempt for consumers in general. This is part of the corporate culture of Google, which sees itself as "elite".
Also, because Google is a company who's whole business model revolves around tracking the general public and gathering as much personal information about them as possible, they tend to have contempt for the concept of privacy in general.
As I've talked about before, I've had to work with these people and they're horrible. It really is pure stupidity. Their bean-counters had determined (circa 1999) that the record industry would make less money selling single track MP3s than the full album CDs they were currently selling (about 1-2 billion a year less). Their bean counters were absolutely right, at least in the short term. So they've been fighting digital music tooth and nail. Of course, CD revenues have plummeted since then, but they still believe (rightly) that digital music costs them money.
The big labels passionately hate iTunes for two reasons:
1) They're deathly afraid of getting locked into one vendor. This is what happened with music videos, where one vendor (MTV, who also owns VH1) had near-complete control of the market. Initially MTV ran the music videos (which were essentially advertisements) for free (without charging the labels). As long as they were a premium service without advertising this worked, and when they eventually switched to advertising this worked for a while, until the advertisers realized the videos themselves were ads and insisted that MTV start charging the labels, or give the advertisers very steep discounts. So they started charging the labels (no payola laws for music videos). This is basically why you don't see music videos on MTV anymore.
2) Steve Jobs tricked them. When he pitched iTunes to the labels he repeated over and over again that iTunes would work only on Macintosh computers using Mac-only MP3 players, EVER. This was important to the labels because it meant that iTunes COULDN'T dominate the market because Macs were unpopular, and possibly piracy was limited to the handful of people using Macs. So porting their platform to Windows is seen as a major betrayal by the record labels.
Of course, the market is shifting towards unprotected MP3s. They very thing the big labels were viciously fighting 10 years ago. This is also because unprotected MP3s (as a format) aren't locked to a single vendor, the way Protected AAC and WMA are. After the iTunes debacle, this has become extremely important to the labels.
They're still bastards who actively hate you, musicians, and music in general. Don't give them a dime no matter what. Get your music off P2P. You can almost always get something of superior quality off P2P anyway.
Otherwise, only white men with a freehold estate would be voting these days.
At no point in US history were the MAJORITY of Americans landed white men. The United States started with a SMALL MINORITY (landed white men over the age of 35) voting and then expanded it slowly over the years to white men in general, then white women, then everyone else.
Perhaps this will be an issue when there's one national airline in the US, but I can't see this going anywhere right now. The airlines make a lot of money selling in-flight phone and internet service in a vain attempt to stay solvent, I don't see them abandoning revenue streams.
Why did Activision/Blizzard, id, and Lucasarts (and others) quit the ESA?
The report doesn't address this at all and Activision etc. aren't talking. The only hints I've heard have been complaints that they didn't like the way ESA was spending their dues. Releasing the report is consistent with that, but that doesn't seem like enough to quit.
This issue perfectly illustrates why we need strong laws protecting freedom of speech. Just having the 1st Ammendment isn't enough. If there was a federal law saying you can't sue over video game content, NO MATTER WHAT, this game would have been released as intended. The fact that you can sue somebody because you're "offended" is nonsense.
The exact way that it is a free ride is that they agreed to pay X dollars to live in a house, then they didn't pay X dollars and continued living in the house.
Which is exactly WRONG.
First, they didn't "continue living". After payments stop, eviction soon follows. The only times this doesn't happen is when the bank sold a worthless home to begin with (i.e. FRAUD).
What happened to the US markets is that evil greedy banks thought they could make a ton of money by screwing poor people with deceptive loan practices. They would create zero-down loans (one attractive feature) with lots of hidden fees and hidden variable interest rates that they would skyrocket after a few months. They would often outright lie to buyers (saying it was fixed when it wasn't) because the sales agents knew that they could lie all they wanted and get away with it becasue all that "counts" is the text in the byzantine paperwork. And they knew their poor clients couldn't afford lawyers to go over the dense legalese in the contracts.
Shockingly, under these conditions many people defaulted. They defaulted because the banks sold them the house under FRAUDULENT terms.
The whole theory that you should charge poor people higher rates (the people least able to handle higher rates) because they represent a greater risk to the lender is bullshit. Microloan and other loan companies have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor people are NOT a serious credit risk and are MUCH MORE LIKELY to pay back loans than large corporations with AAA credit ratings as long as the terms of the loan are favorable to poor people (low interest, variable payments, etc).
As far as I'm concerned the banks should GIVE the houses to the people they defrauded and the government should nationalize the banks without compensating leinholders or shareholders that KNOWINGLY (unlike the poor homeowners) bought into this ponzi scheme.
The exact way that it is a free ride is that they agreed to pay X dollars to live in a house, then they didn't pay X dollars and continued living in the house.
Which is exactly WRONG.
First, they didn't "continue living". After payments stop, eviction soon follows. The only times this doesn't happen is when the bank sold a worthless home to begin with (i.e. FRAUD).
What happened to the US markets is that evil greedy banks thought they could make a ton of money by screwing poor people with deceptive loan practices. They would create zero-down loans (one attractive feature) with lots of hidden fees and hidden variable interest rates that they would skyrocket after a few months. They would often outright lie to buyers (saying it was fixed when it wasn't) because the sales agents knew that they could lie all they wanted and get away with it becasue all that "counts" is the text in the byzantine paperwork. And they knew their poor clients couldn't afford lawyers to go over the dense legalese in the contracts.
Shockingly, under these conditions many people defaulted. They defaulted because the banks sold them the house under FRAUDULENT terms.
The whole theory that you should charge poor people higher rates (the people least able to handle higher rates) because they represent a greater risk to the lender is bullshit. Microloan and other loan companies have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor people are NOT a serious credit risk and are MUCH MORE LIKELY to pay back loans than large corporations with AAA credit ratings as long as the terms of the loan are favorable to poor people (low interest, variable payments, etc).
As far as I'm concerned the banks should GIVE the houses to the people they defrauded and the government should nationalize the banks without compensating leinholders or shareholders that KNOWINGLY (unlike the poor homeowners) bought into this ponzi scheme.
This is exactly right. When the MAJORITY of traffic in the Big 5 became spam, Usenet was over. Spam was a problem even in the early days, but most of it was nuts and trolls, not commercial spammers. It's the commercial spammers that killed Usenet, are killing email, and are GOING TO kill web forums. Real law enforcement is the only solution. Have a 10 year mandatory minimum for spammers, and send agents to Russia and to kidnap them (Russia refuses to extradite criminals).
Theora pukes (fails silently) when transcoding just about any MPEG4 file and lots of MPEG2 files. In my testing, using 3 different encoders (ffmpeg, Super, and VLC), Theora puked on 9 out of 10 files. I last tested about a year ago.
It took me longer to encode an AVI file to Theora than it took to transcode a Quicktime file to H.264 (my previous slowest process). A lot longer. Theora is really slow.
There are no integer implementations of Theora. As far as I'm concerned, this falls into the realm of "batshit stupidity" on the part of Xiph.org. This is exactly what killed Vorbis. The notion that they would release Theora without an integer implementation, especially given the Vorbis experience, boggles the mind. This means you can forget playing Theora video on your phone.
Now some of this might be problems with the tools (ffmpeg, Super, etc.) rather than Theora itself, but that really doesn't matter. The best codec in the world is useless if it has no tools.
It's just not enough that Vorbis and Theora are "philosophically free" (MP3 and MPEG4 are PRACTICALLY free because of the low or non-existent licensing fees) to push adoption. Especially the absurd notion that such a buggy product should be the web standard for video. It is incumbent upon Xiph.org not just to release a product that is stable, but a product that is DRAMATICALLY superior to existing commercial products.
Most people don't use Apache and Firefox because they're "open source", they use them over IIS and IE because they're BETTER PRODUCTS. If Xiph.org wants people to use Theora they have to make it A LOT better than existing products like Quicktime, Real, Windows Media, Flash Video, etc.
Theora has pretty much the same weaknesses as Vorbis and is going to meet pretty much the same fate.
ffmpeg is not Linux only, there are Windows binaries WITH GUI front-ends available. The problem is that the ffmpeg people won't include Theora as a "standard feature" in ffmpeg because Theora is really, really, buggy and slow.
You cannot compile your own binary from the supposedly free open source code and distribute it. The goal here is to save money on QA by rolling patches made to the released open source code into their commecrcial non-distibutable binary product. This is the same crap that has me pissed off at Sugar (of SugarCRM). Sugar has done a very good job of FOOLING the open source community into thinking their product is open source. What Sugar does is that the release most of the product as open source, except for a few critical features, and they refuse to allow open source people to add those features. So they can have the benefits of open source (free QA, free development) without actually sharing freely with the public.
Essentially what Sun is trying to do here is STEAL the code of contributors.
As he said, Yahoo HAD to do this. Killing the license server violates their contract with the credit card company for "non-delivered goods". As far as Visa is concerned, breaking the tracks is the same as shipping an empty box. Most people don't grasp that chargebacks are a major money-maker for the credit card companies, and they'll typically bend over backwards to accommodate the customer because each one can net then between $50 and $500 for Visa/Mastercard/etc. Yes, some merchants really are billed $500 for each chargeback.
They would also face an inevitable class-action as pissed-off customers attempt to recover their losses.
Your solution is to migrate off Firewire. It's being discontinued. If you're using Firewire for storage, stop. It's not scalable and slower that other, cheaper, solutions.
I've been able to come up with exactly one good remaining reason to use Firewire: external sound cards/video processors. They tend to be much better at handling he I/O than USB. Such devices are only intended for LAPTOPS though, so I'm not sure how that would affect VMWare (unless you want to run VMWare on the laptops, which is almost certainly a bad idea).
The/. crowd is pretty savvy, but surveys have shown that over 50% of Internet users, especially overseas, believe P2P content is LEGAL. I knew the Napster people, and most Napster users also believed that Napster was 100% legal.
People sincerely believe all sorts of obviously wrong things all the time. 30% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. 60-70% of Americans believe in Creationism. etc.
Yeah. My fingers stick to those. It's very difficult to do any sort of "sliding" motion. I found scrolling near-impossible on iPhones for this reason. Putting rubbing alcohol on my fingers (to dry them out) helped quite a bit. And when I used a little stylus, everything worked perfectly. But the idea of a touchpad that requires a stylus seems... odd to me.
Interpol disagrees with you. They seem to think the majority of child pornography involving white children is made in former Soviet states like Russia, the Ukraine, former Yugoslavia, and the Czech Republic where the police are easily bribed.
A lot of porn models come from the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic is filled with poor desperate young blonde women, who are the staple of the porn industry. Take Denmark. No shortage of pretty blondes there, and Denmark is way more liberal than the Czech Republic, AND porn and prostitution is legal. But the vast majority of the pros and porn stars working in Denmark are Czech and Ukrainian because Danish women have FAR better financial prospects.
I don't personally have expert knowledge. The FBI and Interpol say that they vast majority of child porn distributed over the internet is not produced in the USA. I'm not sure what they base this on. I'm not going to look it up. Why don't you find some contradictory statistics?
If you're using the GNU compiler, you could theoretically tear that apart. HDD firmware is quite a bit tricker though, and HDD makers consider that information very senstive. But this is a good point. That code is probably really only well-known by a handful of engineers. If you can compromise them (or really, just ONE of them) you have a much more serious avenue of attack.
Telesync'd cams for Dark Knight were available on private trackers within 4 hours of the midnight screenings. At least one tracker had the East coast midnight screening up before the West coast screenings even started.
As long as there is money to be made off cams, people will keep using them. Expect to see theaters in the US start searching patrons in the name of "terrorist" threats.
Imagine if megacorps only paid damages whenever they harmed someone.
"Only"? I would be very, very, very happy if we could get large corporations to do this. As it is now, it's very tough to nail them for outright murder, let alone relatively petty crimes like fraud, theft, and illegal surveillance.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that in some foreign countries they ARE legal.
In Korea, in Japan, in China? Not legal, but many people there believe it is.
The rhetorical contortions the Obama camp are going through to avoid the "M" word just feed the perception that he has something to hide.
McCain is trying to portray Obama as a "secret Muslim", not as "Obama's father was a Muslim". The thinly-veiled racism inherent in the Republican party is on full display here. And with McCain personally for that matter. He hated MLK and campaigned against the civil rights movement. He was a huge supporter of apartheid. He STILL hates Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He opposed the bill to remove the ANC and Mandela from the terrorist watch list.
Google has absurd perks, far greater than anything I say during the tech boom. Citrix is also very well known for treating their employees well. I've worked for a number of companies with similar cultures.
The fact is, this model (which revolves about having the "best of the best" talent) works for many companies. These companies tend to have elaborate hiring processes because of the "best of the best" mentality.
In the case of military, CIA, NSA, &tc. there are fences, gates, guards, dogs and suchlike preventing your access to what they don't want pictures of.
Um, no. Remember when Cheney insisted that Google photos of his private home be taken down immediately and they were?
The problem is that Google is willing to grant "privacy" to the military, government, corporations, and politically connected individuals who can harm them in some way but show utter contempt for consumers in general. This is part of the corporate culture of Google, which sees itself as "elite".
Also, because Google is a company who's whole business model revolves around tracking the general public and gathering as much personal information about them as possible, they tend to have contempt for the concept of privacy in general.
Mod this guy up, he nailed it.
As I've talked about before, I've had to work with these people and they're horrible. It really is pure stupidity. Their bean-counters had determined (circa 1999) that the record industry would make less money selling single track MP3s than the full album CDs they were currently selling (about 1-2 billion a year less). Their bean counters were absolutely right, at least in the short term. So they've been fighting digital music tooth and nail. Of course, CD revenues have plummeted since then, but they still believe (rightly) that digital music costs them money.
The big labels passionately hate iTunes for two reasons:
1) They're deathly afraid of getting locked into one vendor. This is what happened with music videos, where one vendor (MTV, who also owns VH1) had near-complete control of the market. Initially MTV ran the music videos (which were essentially advertisements) for free (without charging the labels). As long as they were a premium service without advertising this worked, and when they eventually switched to advertising this worked for a while, until the advertisers realized the videos themselves were ads and insisted that MTV start charging the labels, or give the advertisers very steep discounts. So they started charging the labels (no payola laws for music videos). This is basically why you don't see music videos on MTV anymore.
2) Steve Jobs tricked them. When he pitched iTunes to the labels he repeated over and over again that iTunes would work only on Macintosh computers using Mac-only MP3 players, EVER. This was important to the labels because it meant that iTunes COULDN'T dominate the market because Macs were unpopular, and possibly piracy was limited to the handful of people using Macs. So porting their platform to Windows is seen as a major betrayal by the record labels.
Of course, the market is shifting towards unprotected MP3s. They very thing the big labels were viciously fighting 10 years ago. This is also because unprotected MP3s (as a format) aren't locked to a single vendor, the way Protected AAC and WMA are. After the iTunes debacle, this has become extremely important to the labels.
They're still bastards who actively hate you, musicians, and music in general. Don't give them a dime no matter what. Get your music off P2P. You can almost always get something of superior quality off P2P anyway.
Otherwise, only white men with a freehold estate would be voting these days.
At no point in US history were the MAJORITY of Americans landed white men. The United States started with a SMALL MINORITY (landed white men over the age of 35) voting and then expanded it slowly over the years to white men in general, then white women, then everyone else.
Perhaps this will be an issue when there's one national airline in the US, but I can't see this going anywhere right now. The airlines make a lot of money selling in-flight phone and internet service in a vain attempt to stay solvent, I don't see them abandoning revenue streams.
The big question is:
Why did Activision/Blizzard, id, and Lucasarts (and others) quit the ESA?
The report doesn't address this at all and Activision etc. aren't talking. The only hints I've heard have been complaints that they didn't like the way ESA was spending their dues. Releasing the report is consistent with that, but that doesn't seem like enough to quit.
This issue perfectly illustrates why we need strong laws protecting freedom of speech. Just having the 1st Ammendment isn't enough. If there was a federal law saying you can't sue over video game content, NO MATTER WHAT, this game would have been released as intended. The fact that you can sue somebody because you're "offended" is nonsense.
The exact way that it is a free ride is that they agreed to pay X dollars to live in a house, then they didn't pay X dollars and continued living in the house.
Which is exactly WRONG.
First, they didn't "continue living". After payments stop, eviction soon follows. The only times this doesn't happen is when the bank sold a worthless home to begin with (i.e. FRAUD).
What happened to the US markets is that evil greedy banks thought they could make a ton of money by screwing poor people with deceptive loan practices. They would create zero-down loans (one attractive feature) with lots of hidden fees and hidden variable interest rates that they would skyrocket after a few months. They would often outright lie to buyers (saying it was fixed when it wasn't) because the sales agents knew that they could lie all they wanted and get away with it becasue all that "counts" is the text in the byzantine paperwork. And they knew their poor clients couldn't afford lawyers to go over the dense legalese in the contracts.
Shockingly, under these conditions many people defaulted. They defaulted because the banks sold them the house under FRAUDULENT terms.
The whole theory that you should charge poor people higher rates (the people least able to handle higher rates) because they represent a greater risk to the lender is bullshit. Microloan and other loan companies have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor people are NOT a serious credit risk and are MUCH MORE LIKELY to pay back loans than large corporations with AAA credit ratings as long as the terms of the loan are favorable to poor people (low interest, variable payments, etc).
As far as I'm concerned the banks should GIVE the houses to the people they defrauded and the government should nationalize the banks without compensating leinholders or shareholders that KNOWINGLY (unlike the poor homeowners) bought into this ponzi scheme.
The exact way that it is a free ride is that they agreed to pay X dollars to live in a house, then they didn't pay X dollars and continued living in the house.
Which is exactly WRONG.
First, they didn't "continue living". After payments stop, eviction soon follows. The only times this doesn't happen is when the bank sold a worthless home to begin with (i.e. FRAUD).
What happened to the US markets is that evil greedy banks thought they could make a ton of money by screwing poor people with deceptive loan practices. They would create zero-down loans (one attractive feature) with lots of hidden fees and hidden variable interest rates that they would skyrocket after a few months. They would often outright lie to buyers (saying it was fixed when it wasn't) because the sales agents knew that they could lie all they wanted and get away with it becasue all that "counts" is the text in the byzantine paperwork. And they knew their poor clients couldn't afford lawyers to go over the dense legalese in the contracts.
Shockingly, under these conditions many people defaulted. They defaulted because the banks sold them the house under FRAUDULENT terms.
The whole theory that you should charge poor people higher rates (the people least able to handle higher rates) because they represent a greater risk to the lender is bullshit. Microloan and other loan companies have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that poor people are NOT a serious credit risk and are MUCH MORE LIKELY to pay back loans than large corporations with AAA credit ratings as long as the terms of the loan are favorable to poor people (low interest, variable payments, etc).
As far as I'm concerned the banks should GIVE the houses to the people they defrauded and the government should nationalize the banks without compensating leinholders or shareholders that KNOWINGLY (unlike the poor homeowners) bought into this ponzi scheme.
Why did it die? Spam.
Mod the parent up.
This is exactly right. When the MAJORITY of traffic in the Big 5 became spam, Usenet was over. Spam was a problem even in the early days, but most of it was nuts and trolls, not commercial spammers. It's the commercial spammers that killed Usenet, are killing email, and are GOING TO kill web forums. Real law enforcement is the only solution. Have a 10 year mandatory minimum for spammers, and send agents to Russia and to kidnap them (Russia refuses to extradite criminals).
Theora pukes (fails silently) when transcoding just about any MPEG4 file and lots of MPEG2 files. In my testing, using 3 different encoders (ffmpeg, Super, and VLC), Theora puked on 9 out of 10 files. I last tested about a year ago.
It took me longer to encode an AVI file to Theora than it took to transcode a Quicktime file to H.264 (my previous slowest process). A lot longer. Theora is really slow.
There are no integer implementations of Theora. As far as I'm concerned, this falls into the realm of "batshit stupidity" on the part of Xiph.org. This is exactly what killed Vorbis. The notion that they would release Theora without an integer implementation, especially given the Vorbis experience, boggles the mind. This means you can forget playing Theora video on your phone.
Now some of this might be problems with the tools (ffmpeg, Super, etc.) rather than Theora itself, but that really doesn't matter. The best codec in the world is useless if it has no tools.
It's just not enough that Vorbis and Theora are "philosophically free" (MP3 and MPEG4 are PRACTICALLY free because of the low or non-existent licensing fees) to push adoption. Especially the absurd notion that such a buggy product should be the web standard for video. It is incumbent upon Xiph.org not just to release a product that is stable, but a product that is DRAMATICALLY superior to existing commercial products.
Most people don't use Apache and Firefox because they're "open source", they use them over IIS and IE because they're BETTER PRODUCTS. If Xiph.org wants people to use Theora they have to make it A LOT better than existing products like Quicktime, Real, Windows Media, Flash Video, etc.
Theora has pretty much the same weaknesses as Vorbis and is going to meet pretty much the same fate.
ffmpeg is not Linux only, there are Windows binaries WITH GUI front-ends available. The problem is that the ffmpeg people won't include Theora as a "standard feature" in ffmpeg because Theora is really, really, buggy and slow.
Because it's bullshit.
You cannot compile your own binary from the supposedly free open source code and distribute it. The goal here is to save money on QA by rolling patches made to the released open source code into their commecrcial non-distibutable binary product. This is the same crap that has me pissed off at Sugar (of SugarCRM). Sugar has done a very good job of FOOLING the open source community into thinking their product is open source. What Sugar does is that the release most of the product as open source, except for a few critical features, and they refuse to allow open source people to add those features. So they can have the benefits of open source (free QA, free development) without actually sharing freely with the public.
Essentially what Sun is trying to do here is STEAL the code of contributors.
Mod the parent up please.
As he said, Yahoo HAD to do this. Killing the license server violates their contract with the credit card company for "non-delivered goods". As far as Visa is concerned, breaking the tracks is the same as shipping an empty box. Most people don't grasp that chargebacks are a major money-maker for the credit card companies, and they'll typically bend over backwards to accommodate the customer because each one can net then between $50 and $500 for Visa/Mastercard/etc. Yes, some merchants really are billed $500 for each chargeback.
They would also face an inevitable class-action as pissed-off customers attempt to recover their losses.
MS won't admit any issues
They just released a Service Pack.
Your solution is to migrate off Firewire. It's being discontinued. If you're using Firewire for storage, stop. It's not scalable and slower that other, cheaper, solutions.
I've been able to come up with exactly one good remaining reason to use Firewire: external sound cards/video processors. They tend to be much better at handling he I/O than USB. Such devices are only intended for LAPTOPS though, so I'm not sure how that would affect VMWare (unless you want to run VMWare on the laptops, which is almost certainly a bad idea).
The /. crowd is pretty savvy, but surveys have shown that over 50% of Internet users, especially overseas, believe P2P content is LEGAL. I knew the Napster people, and most Napster users also believed that Napster was 100% legal.
People sincerely believe all sorts of obviously wrong things all the time. 30% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. 60-70% of Americans believe in Creationism. etc.
Yeah. My fingers stick to those. It's very difficult to do any sort of "sliding" motion. I found scrolling near-impossible on iPhones for this reason. Putting rubbing alcohol on my fingers (to dry them out) helped quite a bit. And when I used a little stylus, everything worked perfectly. But the idea of a touchpad that requires a stylus seems... odd to me.
Interpol disagrees with you. They seem to think the majority of child pornography involving white children is made in former Soviet states like Russia, the Ukraine, former Yugoslavia, and the Czech Republic where the police are easily bribed.
A lot of porn models come from the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic is filled with poor desperate young blonde women, who are the staple of the porn industry. Take Denmark. No shortage of pretty blondes there, and Denmark is way more liberal than the Czech Republic, AND porn and prostitution is legal. But the vast majority of the pros and porn stars working in Denmark are Czech and Ukrainian because Danish women have FAR better financial prospects.
I don't personally have expert knowledge. The FBI and Interpol say that they vast majority of child porn distributed over the internet is not produced in the USA. I'm not sure what they base this on. I'm not going to look it up. Why don't you find some contradictory statistics?
If you're using the GNU compiler, you could theoretically tear that apart. HDD firmware is quite a bit tricker though, and HDD makers consider that information very senstive. But this is a good point. That code is probably really only well-known by a handful of engineers. If you can compromise them (or really, just ONE of them) you have a much more serious avenue of attack.
What are the advantages of a glass trackpad? Wouldn't your finger stick to it?
Telesync'd cams for Dark Knight were available on private trackers within 4 hours of the midnight screenings. At least one tracker had the East coast midnight screening up before the West coast screenings even started.
As long as there is money to be made off cams, people will keep using them. Expect to see theaters in the US start searching patrons in the name of "terrorist" threats.
Imagine if megacorps only paid damages whenever they harmed someone.
"Only"? I would be very, very, very happy if we could get large corporations to do this. As it is now, it's very tough to nail them for outright murder, let alone relatively petty crimes like fraud, theft, and illegal surveillance.