I have traveled around the world, and every nation is thinking how it can model [intellectual property governance] after the U.S.
Yeah, that's because as with most free trade agreement treaties put out by the West, countries are forced to "harmonize" their intellectual property laws with Western standards lest they not be allowed to participate. One large example of one of these treaties; there've been other bilateral ones the U.S. has all but forced on developing countries.
Because we know it'll result in tons of false positives, shoot-from-the-hip automated letters being sent out en masse, and people getting their websites pulled by over-eager ISPs?
Because people don't want some web spider wasting their server bandwidth just so it can spy on them on behalf of the *AA cartels?
Because of everything else they've done in the past -- from the lawsuits aimed at 80-year-old ladies to the already-mentioned automated letters and false positives to the automated flooding of p2p networks with garbage results to the all-around known reputation of the entities employing this spider -- No good can come from this is a perfectly reasonable initial assumption?
Considering that the RIAA/MPAA have been suing ordinary users using P2P software, going after regular users on MySpace/YouTube/&c., a claim like this most likely is, to put it lightly, a load of crap.
I would recommend against even trying to completely block it for employees. Having a policy to deal with major offenders is better than creating such a restrictive environment.
Firstly, the virus/adware problem the employer is worried about would be better solved by making sure the machines have up-to-date virus definitions, that the browser is configured properly: disabled Active-X, blocking popups, to not be Internet Explorer... the usual suggestions. Make sure their IT people are keeping the machines in order, and that the employees can't disable or otherwise futz up the antivirus software. And secondly:--
You can block the 19 or 20 Class C Address Blocks that MySpace has, but then you get into problems of sites like "MySpace Bypass" and other such sites that allow you to bypass most of the filtering that's done.
This makes me think of what happens when a government tries to outlaw something they know that people want: all it ends up doing is creating a new black market and more crime; beyond the tautology of new law = new lawbreakers, you end up with people doing all sorts of bad things they otherwise wouldn't have to do, just in order to get around a law that shouldn't've been passed in the first place. You start out by outlawing something you think people ought not have, and pretty soon you find yourself spending $40 billion a year with no end in sight, just to use one example.
So right now they've employees wasting a little time each day on MySpace. Do you want to create a situation where instead some of these employees waste an hour or two trying to come up with creative ways to evade proxies and firewalls? Or where an employee ends up infecting his computer with all sorts of malware because of some shady site he came across while trying to find, say, open proxy lists? Or he ends up accidentally divulging a whole bunch of private data by setting his browser to use an open proxy, not realizing all his HTTP traffic is now being routed through who-knows-what in Russia? And how much productivity will be lost when some employee gets fired over 15min of slacking off and it takes the company two weeks to find a replacement candidate?
And consider the morale impact -- and thus productivity impact -- when you start getting employees grumbling about being treated like prisoners at their workplace.
I'd recommend that the employer A) not worry about the employees who spend a few minutes a day browsing MySpace, and B) only come down on the people having major productivity issues because they're spending half their day slacking off, or the people who've caused severe security problems by getting their computers breached by malware.
They'll pass a new law requiring people to recycle them, and to pay a fee to do so. And then of course you'd need a law fining people for putting them in with their normal trash. And all of this will induce people to chuck them in ditches like old tires and batteries, so you'll have to fine people for that too. And all this enforcement doesn't come for free either, so if they're not collecting enough revenues from the fees and fines, the rest will come out of your taxes.
Copyright law as of the 1976 reforms grants automatic copyright to any creative works, whether or not someone registers them with the government. Not all creative works are done for profit (obviously), yet they can still be copyrighted. Therefore, this argument is ridiculous.
Looks like that Oxley-Manton amendment was eventually defeated. I'd never heard of it, although, similar laws pertaining to key escrow do exist in England (and I'd guess other countries). So whatever Seagate is selling -- and whatever Apple is selling -- could be compromised so that they don't get shut out of those markets.
Yeah, I'll use something I can be fairly confident isn't backdoored, thank you very much.
I'd be worried their encryption algorithm had some sort of back door / administrative override password to let, say, law enforcement decrypt people's drives if they wanted to. For example, Apple's FileVault encryption can be decrypted with at least two separate passwords -- your login password and the "master" password you can set as an emergency recovery option -- so who knows if these drives wouldn't have a master password safely kept by Seagate and available to your friendly neighborhood DHS spooks?
"...[T]he social network no one talks about anymore." Spend five minutes in an Indonesian/Malaysian/Filipino IRC channel and you'll see how very wrong this statement is.
Instead of the water meter, put the monitoring device closer to something you know wouldn't be automatically activated: a faucet, shower head, or something similar.
"There has to be an almost endless supply of vendors."
I think this is pretty much true. Ever notice how the spam you get nowadays isn't hawking the same products it was a few years or even months ago? For a while you see stuff like "Cialis soft tabs," then it goes away. Then fake Rolexes, or Louis Vouitton handbags. Then those go away. Penny stocks for a certain company you've never heard of, they come and then they're gone, and then there's another company's penny stocks being pumped.
This indicates to me that you got a few schmucks with a bright idea, they hire spammers to sell their junk, and it doesn't work: they go away, move on, or give up. Then up steps the next schmuck with his fake watches or penis pills. Rinse, repeat.
Yes, it has. Spam was originally used to sell pretty ordinary products and services: the same type of things you'd find in the Yellow Pages. The first spam was actually an advertisement for a law firm, IIRC. The businesses were contactable, had real phone numbers and street addresses, and so on; people thought of spam as just being a new advertising venue not unlike TV, newspapers, the Yellow Pages, &c.
After people started getting more and more upset about spam, legitimate businesses naturally moved away from it, leaving behind only the shadier businesses or outright scams like penis pills, diet drugs, debt-wiping services, and penny-stock investment advice. With spam being outlawed nowadays, the only people left spamming are going to be illegal or quasi-legal businesses, naturally.
Exactly what I was thinking. Your average supercluster is a few hundreds of millions of light years in size; is this considered a "single object"? It's mostly empty space, but then again so is a nebula, just on a smaller scale. So is any solid object, just on a nanoscopic scale.
This thing is 500 million light-years long, 300 million light-years wide and 15 million light-years thick.
Zend is an Israeli product. Zend is making money for an Israeli company. If a lead PHP developer quits, that could have a significant negative impact on PHP, which would then have a significant negative impact on Zend. Hence this is, albeit a rather convoluted one, a simple economic boycott.
"The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction, a feature commonly known as crashing."
You merely have to remember that objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Not only that, but logged-in users can, at their own discretion, mark an edit "minor" (the purpose of which is, for example, if you're just fixing a typo), and there's a preferences setting that allows users who watch the change logs to hide minor edits -- so this makes it easier for articles to slip past.
[You can indeed mark page creations as minor; I do it sometimes when just creating "common mispelling" and "alternate name" redirects.]
I don't think he's talking about ordinary individuals using a large chunk of their finances, but something along the lines of a fundraiser: many people donating, say, $5-100 -- a few generous people donating more, but most donating rather small amounts that simply add up. If pledge drives work for PBS, why can't something similar work here?
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Because we know it'll result in tons of false positives, shoot-from-the-hip automated letters being sent out en masse, and people getting their websites pulled by over-eager ISPs?
Because people don't want some web spider wasting their server bandwidth just so it can spy on them on behalf of the *AA cartels?
Because of everything else they've done in the past -- from the lawsuits aimed at 80-year-old ladies to the already-mentioned automated letters and false positives to the automated flooding of p2p networks with garbage results to the all-around known reputation of the entities employing this spider -- No good can come from this is a perfectly reasonable initial assumption?
Don't forget to set up a bandwidth-throttling module in your Apache server so it sends the file at a blazing 50 bytes per second.
Considering that the RIAA/MPAA have been suing ordinary users using P2P software, going after regular users on MySpace/YouTube/&c., a claim like this most likely is, to put it lightly, a load of crap.
I would recommend against even trying to completely block it for employees. Having a policy to deal with major offenders is better than creating such a restrictive environment.
Firstly, the virus/adware problem the employer is worried about would be better solved by making sure the machines have up-to-date virus definitions, that the browser is configured properly: disabled Active-X, blocking popups, to not be Internet Explorer... the usual suggestions. Make sure their IT people are keeping the machines in order, and that the employees can't disable or otherwise futz up the antivirus software. And secondly:--
This makes me think of what happens when a government tries to outlaw something they know that people want: all it ends up doing is creating a new black market and more crime; beyond the tautology of new law = new lawbreakers, you end up with people doing all sorts of bad things they otherwise wouldn't have to do, just in order to get around a law that shouldn't've been passed in the first place. You start out by outlawing something you think people ought not have, and pretty soon you find yourself spending $40 billion a year with no end in sight, just to use one example.
So right now they've employees wasting a little time each day on MySpace. Do you want to create a situation where instead some of these employees waste an hour or two trying to come up with creative ways to evade proxies and firewalls? Or where an employee ends up infecting his computer with all sorts of malware because of some shady site he came across while trying to find, say, open proxy lists? Or he ends up accidentally divulging a whole bunch of private data by setting his browser to use an open proxy, not realizing all his HTTP traffic is now being routed through who-knows-what in Russia? And how much productivity will be lost when some employee gets fired over 15min of slacking off and it takes the company two weeks to find a replacement candidate?
And consider the morale impact -- and thus productivity impact -- when you start getting employees grumbling about being treated like prisoners at their workplace.
I'd recommend that the employer A) not worry about the employees who spend a few minutes a day browsing MySpace, and B) only come down on the people having major productivity issues because they're spending half their day slacking off, or the people who've caused severe security problems by getting their computers breached by malware.
Campaign funding records for Levine. Anyone recognize any of the names of people or companies in there being in the CFL business?
...Are you suggesting someone would have to show ID just to buy a bloody lightbulb?
They'll pass a new law requiring people to recycle them, and to pay a fee to do so. And then of course you'd need a law fining people for putting them in with their normal trash. And all of this will induce people to chuck them in ditches like old tires and batteries, so you'll have to fine people for that too. And all this enforcement doesn't come for free either, so if they're not collecting enough revenues from the fees and fines, the rest will come out of your taxes.
When in doubt, throw a new law at it.
If such a technique is ever invented, expect the spammers to just start using real images as backgrounds, with the text superimposed.
The images are, ironically, using the same technique used in captchas.
Copyright law as of the 1976 reforms grants automatic copyright to any creative works, whether or not someone registers them with the government. Not all creative works are done for profit (obviously), yet they can still be copyrighted. Therefore, this argument is ridiculous.
Looks like that Oxley-Manton amendment was eventually defeated. I'd never heard of it, although, similar laws pertaining to key escrow do exist in England (and I'd guess other countries). So whatever Seagate is selling -- and whatever Apple is selling -- could be compromised so that they don't get shut out of those markets.
Yeah, I'll use something I can be fairly confident isn't backdoored, thank you very much.
I'd be worried their encryption algorithm had some sort of back door / administrative override password to let, say, law enforcement decrypt people's drives if they wanted to. For example, Apple's FileVault encryption can be decrypted with at least two separate passwords -- your login password and the "master" password you can set as an emergency recovery option -- so who knows if these drives wouldn't have a master password safely kept by Seagate and available to your friendly neighborhood DHS spooks?
"...[T]he social network no one talks about anymore." Spend five minutes in an Indonesian/Malaysian/Filipino IRC channel and you'll see how very wrong this statement is.
Instead of the water meter, put the monitoring device closer to something you know wouldn't be automatically activated: a faucet, shower head, or something similar.
"There has to be an almost endless supply of vendors."
I think this is pretty much true. Ever notice how the spam you get nowadays isn't hawking the same products it was a few years or even months ago? For a while you see stuff like "Cialis soft tabs," then it goes away. Then fake Rolexes, or Louis Vouitton handbags. Then those go away. Penny stocks for a certain company you've never heard of, they come and then they're gone, and then there's another company's penny stocks being pumped.
This indicates to me that you got a few schmucks with a bright idea, they hire spammers to sell their junk, and it doesn't work: they go away, move on, or give up. Then up steps the next schmuck with his fake watches or penis pills. Rinse, repeat.
Yes, it has. Spam was originally used to sell pretty ordinary products and services: the same type of things you'd find in the Yellow Pages. The first spam was actually an advertisement for a law firm, IIRC. The businesses were contactable, had real phone numbers and street addresses, and so on; people thought of spam as just being a new advertising venue not unlike TV, newspapers, the Yellow Pages, &c.
After people started getting more and more upset about spam, legitimate businesses naturally moved away from it, leaving behind only the shadier businesses or outright scams like penis pills, diet drugs, debt-wiping services, and penny-stock investment advice. With spam being outlawed nowadays, the only people left spamming are going to be illegal or quasi-legal businesses, naturally.
Couple months away from an election in the US, so here we go again. Guess this story didn't have enough of an impact so we need a bigger scare, mm?
/ Learned to stop asking "Are people really this stupid?" a long time ago...
This thing is 500 million light-years long, 300 million light-years wide and 15 million light-years thick.
Zend is an Israeli product. Zend is making money for an Israeli company. If a lead PHP developer quits, that could have a significant negative impact on PHP, which would then have a significant negative impact on Zend. Hence this is, albeit a rather convoluted one, a simple economic boycott.
"The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction, a feature commonly known as crashing."
You merely have to remember that objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This was right after they let their officers know they could now get your cell phone records without a warrant, right?
Not only that, but logged-in users can, at their own discretion, mark an edit "minor" (the purpose of which is, for example, if you're just fixing a typo), and there's a preferences setting that allows users who watch the change logs to hide minor edits -- so this makes it easier for articles to slip past.
[You can indeed mark page creations as minor; I do it sometimes when just creating "common mispelling" and "alternate name" redirects.]
I don't think he's talking about ordinary individuals using a large chunk of their finances, but something along the lines of a fundraiser: many people donating, say, $5-100 -- a few generous people donating more, but most donating rather small amounts that simply add up. If pledge drives work for PBS, why can't something similar work here?