So, to use your house analogy, you need to get an inspection when the foundation is poured, when it's framed, when the electricity is run, when the plumbing is run, when it's insulated, when it's sheetrocked, when the shingles go on, when the windows go in, every time you change the carpet or re-paint, every time you open or shut the garage door, every time you lock or unlock the front door, open a window, or flush the toilet. Then after it's been inspected 8 billion times, you go to sell it, and they want to inspect it again?
I live in a country where inspections of the sort you describe are cursory at best, more often than not rendered optional by a few ducats slid in the right direction. Fatal building collapses and other tragedies make the news far more often that they should, and general shoddiness is the order of the day. It basically doesn't matter how much you spend; people have just learned to accept an absence of standards.
Turns out this is one of those things where doing things properly requires sufficiently arcane knowledge, and the consequences of doing them wrong are sufficiently unpredictable, that the market fails to match price with quality.
A fence who receives stolen goods is engaged in theft even though someone else does the actual stealling.
No, a fence is "receiving and concealing stolen goods." This is a crime that depends on theft, and which helps to make theft profitable, but it is not in itself theft.
A person who sells spam tools to a spammer is engaged in spamming even if they never use the tool themselves.
Really? Am I speeding if I tell the driver of a car to put the petal to the metal? Am I committing assault if I sell someone a set of brass knuckles?
Sure you can rationalize a set of values where taking a movie off bittorrent is different from stealling a DVD off the shelf of a store. But the reason people have moderated my original comment down as troll even though it is nothing of the kind is because they know deep down that what I am saying here is correct and they don't like to hear it.
Rather the contrary, it is starting to sound like you don't get the point.
Stealing means a certain thing. There are other things that might also be bad, but just because they are bad doesn't mean they're stealing. As someone else posted above, murder is not "stealing someone's life". Likewise littering is not "stealing cleanliness", and libel is not "stealing a reputation".
Even if I really, really, really don't like piracy, I am not going to call it stealing, because that's not the correct word for it. As long as you continue to use words for other than their intended purposes, you come off as a dogmatist fishing to score emotional points rather than a rational participant in a mature discussion.
I think Sweden's view on not just protecting the rights of the minority, but also giving them some subsidy rights, is where they fail overall in having a much more powerful trade position as well as a more vibrant economy.
Calling this a failure is really dependent on the assumption that their primary goal is to have "a much more powerful trade position and a more vibrant economy." I would submit that the Swedish people have decided other things are more important.
I could easily be a lot richer than I am, but the tradeoffs are not worth it to me. That doesn't mean I'm a failure at wealth acquisition, any more than you're a failure at getting sex-change operations or being a circus clown.
ITIL-based Service Management practices bring a high degree of process management and process maturity
What?
I would strongly caution against denegrating a product or practice when in actuality the problems lie elsewhere.
Why? Gonna come over here and optimise my ass a new structural change management implementation process framework? You and what army? And how much do they bill?
This isn't universally true, and in some circumstances, it's probably the right model. But at a research facility or University, other than administration, it's probably not.
Exactly. This policy might be fine for clerical staff, but for researchers - especially those working in the computer field - it's a non-starter.
Giving a remote, central IT department control over the computer engineering faculty's computers is like putting the agricultural research tracts under the control of university groundkeeping staff. Or putting the automotive engineering department's facilities under control of motor pool.
When I did work at a University the only linux boxes that were on the network in my building were the IT admin machines, a couple servers and one that a researcher used for running MATLab simulations (the researcher had a deal with the IT team and they never touched his linux box).
Let's assume for the sake of argument that we are not talking about Southeastern Mississippi State College of Arithmetic and Hair Maintenance, and in fact a real university, where Linux and Mac are generally quite common - certainly more than in the corporate world.
Years ago we were flying from London to San Francisco on Virgin, Premium Economy class. In that class you got a SNES built-in to the back of the seat in front of you
Actually Zelda is the only video game I've played in the past 15 years or so, just because it happens to be installed on so many planes (I have another 8 hours of Zelda coming up tonight). In normal life I couldn't see myself playing a game, but with 16 hours in a long metal tube, suddenly it becomes very appealing to pretend I'm in a faraway kingdom.
Zelda is definitely a fixture on Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines, any others have it?
And the version of the game on the plane seems a bit different to any of the ones described in TFA and associated links. Is it a special portable edition or something?
It seems to me that the primary goal of watermarking system is simply to identify pirated content. Even if a pirate changes or removes a watermark, you can show that the mark was pirated or removed.
So, let's say you gave each legally sold copy of a song a unique randomly generated 64bit ID (that you record). The pirate could remove that ID. They might even put their own random ids in place of your id. The deal is, their IDs will not match those that you recorded, and you could make the the case that this is pirated music.
I suppose things work differently in different places, but when I see pirated music for sale it's pretty obvious. Go into a record store, pick out some stuff, and the bloke at the counter looks at you for a second and asks if you want "original or discount version". Don't need no steenkin watermarks to figure out what's going on there.
The rest of the time it's downloaded from www.cheepmusik.ru. Again, not much confusion.
What is your scenario in which people are mostly scratching their heads trying to suss out whether or not a given instance of a song is pirated?
Doesn't matter how smart they are. The 1ee7 trading group gets 10 copies of the CD, averages the values at each sampling interval, and the watermark is gone (or obscured beyond use).
Drives up the entry cost a tiny bit but not enough to make a difference. I live pretty close to piracy ground zero - probably 1000 people employed in the piracy business within 2km radius of my home (and the retailers are a whole lot friendlier and more knowledgeable than anyone at Best Buy, by the way) - they are too serious about it to care about some piddling obstacle like this. Either they ignore the watermarks entirely and let the identifiied party be the fall guy, or they take the trivial steps necessary to remove them. But once their distribution network kicks into gear, entry costs quickly fade off into the distance to the right of the decimal point.
Either way, I don't see them putting unique ID codes on mass-market CDs anytime soon. Imagine the size of the tracking database - and the distribution chain cooperation required. Instead they'll make one version for each distribution channel or region, and use that as part of the evidence in building a case ("we know the CD was sold in Nebraska - which is exactly where our suspect lives!").
Re:you seem to think that J.K. Rowling is an Ameri
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
·
· Score: 2, Funny
No, I'm well aware that J.K. Rowling lives in Great Britain (although I'm not sure which particular kingdom).
I have burned down all my Legos in protest against the blasphemous cartoons published by Danish newspapers last year. Also I have denounced the little Lego people, and will be stoning the larger ones (with the bendy arms) on Friday.
Sure, but I guess I'm still not seeing how this differs from just running an open-access point, from the POV of somebody running a hotspot.
I find this comment confusing. The reason I'm enticed to run one is so that I can get access to lots of other hotspots all over the place. To me that provides significant value.
The whole "Hotspot" thing is getting old. Really, how many people would use a system/service that:
1. Is not engineered to be accessable country-wide on a single bill and with possibilities of international roaming?
Did you RTFA? The system under discussion does indeed work internationally.
2. Is designed for SHORT distances from access points.
Wifi serves my needs well. I can get online from almost any restaurant or cafe in my neighborhood, which is about 90% of my usage. The rest is in airports and hotels, where it also works fine.
3. Cannot hand over between cells.
See above. I would never care about handing over between cells. When I am using my laptop, I am sitting down. If I am on the move, I am walking (all the time in the world, I can spend a few seconds to re-sync my PDA to a new hotspot), in a bus or subway (no room), piloting a vehicle (unsafe and irresponsible to use a device while moving), or on a train or plane (large enough to carry its own hotspot around with it).
4. Is unreliable, no guaranteed uptime and no centralised management of links. (If a link goes down, who is responsible to fix it?)
This is why it's cheap.
5. Has no "standard" protocol etc. configuration EVEN FROM THE SAME VENDOR, which makes configuration and management difficult.
So buy equipment with the same management interface if you care.
6. Is reputedly insecure, with WPA-2 just about impossible to set up for a layman, and WEP easily cracked?
You should be doing your own encryption (or using SSL) on anything that matters anyway. Do you trust the phone company?
So if I sign up for this, and somebody using my connections downloads all sorts of illegal files, who is the RIAA going to sue?
Some grandmother in North Dakota who's never touched a mouse. The RIAA prey on the same victims as all those other scam artists who call up senior citizens in Kansas and sell them $10,000 tsunami insurance policies. It has nothing to do with who is actually uploading pirated content.
Starbucks makes so much money selling drinks and other crap, they could easily give it away. Don't even give me that crap that people would sit all day and surf. Some would, but they would be in the vast minority.
In this country (Malaysia), wifi is free at Starbucks. I don't really see anyone with a laptop who doesn't also have a drink-in-progress. People (myself included) order something every hour or so, and at those prices, that's surely keeping them in business.
After hours it's a different story. Many of the Starbucks near me have primarily outdoor seating, and when they shut at 1 or 2am, strange characters show up with decal-coated laptops and do mysterious things late into the night. If this really bothered the management, presumably they would turn off the access point or bring in the chairs at closing time.
The conclusion I've come to is that wireless will probably make this somewhat feasible. Private citizens would have trouble coming up with the resources to create their own global wired network, but it's not that difficult for everyone to pop a wireless antenna on their roof for free, anonymous access. At first it might have to be connected to the internet and would probably resemble the old dial-up BBS's at first, but if a critical mass is reached, it could become its own sustainable network. The biggest problem might be connecting to other continents over large oceans.
No, the biggest problem is that it won't work.
A large-scale hobbyist mesh network really only works if people are primarily interested in local content. Otherwise you will find that certain popular nodes choke everyone near them as they draw traffic from all over the place. If it happens to be static content you can cache it, but otherwise you're out of luck - you're not going to get every popular site to distribute its application logic across the network.
For instance if I set up a private access network, can the government pass laws regarding what I can and can't do on that totally private network?
Yes, of course it can. Can the government pass laws regarding what you do in your own totally private house? How about if you want to run a dental surgery in the basement to get some use out of those old power tools?
Of course this would depend on a benevolent entity having a monopoly and not abusing it.
If Cory had actually found the problems he's claiming are in this software, he could have won $10,000 and a free trip to Moscow to demonstrate them.
Uh, no. Cory said that the Starforce driver caused performance degradation over time, eventually making it impossible to burn discs. He did not say that the drive was physically damaged.
Starforce is only paying out if you can show them a physically damaged drive. It's a classic straw man. They know that drives are not physically being damaged, but by focusing attention on that idea, they are misdirecting people away from the fact that their software leaves Windows unable to burn discs.
A restriction that hasnt affected any of the douzens of site that offer image and video hosting?
What, you think they just hate Germans, and denying access to these videos is Google's way of getting revenge? Maybe they're still bitter about the Lusitania.
There is a long list of terms and conditions on the web site, presumably written at the behest of highly-paid lawyers, and some of that might be incompatible with German law. Or maybe there is a significant amount of content there that's covered by pre-existing distribution agreements in Germany which preclude making it available online.
People from all over the world i spoke to had it working without problems, no matter if they are in australia, japan, uk or poland...
Has anyone worked out a way to download this for offline viewing? I have tried to watch it from here in Malaysia but my DSL just isn't up to the task. Within a minute or two it taps out the buffer and starts skipping like crazy. Or is there a way to configure the Macromedia player to use a much larger buffer?
Fuck you google.
Holster your weapon there, pardner. Almost certainly the restriction is a consequence of some German law.
Who cares? The CRT in my TV is turned off (to the point that it takes about 10 seconds to fully come back on), so the component that takes 99.9% of the power isn't drawing a thing. The only thing required for standby is the IR receiver circuit. How much current can that possibly draw (at low voltages to boot) when idle?
You've never even been in Europe.
Had you ever been there, you would've known TV's operate no differently in Europe than they do in the U.S.
US TV: "Power" button on the TV itself and the one on the remote do exactly the same thing: switch between "on" and "standby". The only way to get it off is to unplug the mains cord.
European TV: Power button on the TV requires some finger pressure and physically disconnects the power, leaving the remote impotent. The "power" button on the remote only puts it into standby.
Of course there are exceptions but this has typically been the situation with my and my family's relatively modern CRT TVs on both continents.
he can simply refuse to allow you to quote him and the story goes away.
No company employee can refuse to allow you to quote them, unless you have an explicit contractual arrangement. At least not in the USA. Their only recourse is to keep their mouth shut in the first place.
What the AC is talking about is situations where he says, "Our tests show our 20 ppm printer is actually faster than our competitor's 20 ppm printer," but the reporter prints "'FuBarCo has been fudging their benchmarks for years,' said Mr. Coward. 'They're obviously trying to deceive their customers.'" And the reporter's editor will damned well make sure it's straight before it gets printed.
umm just about any company that would think of having stock has a policy of DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA WITHOUT CLEARING WITH MEDIA RELATIONS and yes they will approve everything that is said (or corp legal will be "talking" to the media) im sure that there is several meters of regs that need to be followed.
Yes, of course, the point is that once it gets into the newspaper's hands the company has lost control and the paper is very unlikely to give any control back.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in a country where inspections of the sort you describe are cursory at best, more often than not rendered optional by a few ducats slid in the right direction. Fatal building collapses and other tragedies make the news far more often that they should, and general shoddiness is the order of the day. It basically doesn't matter how much you spend; people have just learned to accept an absence of standards.
Turns out this is one of those things where doing things properly requires sufficiently arcane knowledge, and the consequences of doing them wrong are sufficiently unpredictable, that the market fails to match price with quality.
Give me inspections anytime.
No, a fence is "receiving and concealing stolen goods." This is a crime that depends on theft, and which helps to make theft profitable, but it is not in itself theft.
Really? Am I speeding if I tell the driver of a car to put the petal to the metal? Am I committing assault if I sell someone a set of brass knuckles?
Rather the contrary, it is starting to sound like you don't get the point.
Stealing means a certain thing. There are other things that might also be bad, but just because they are bad doesn't mean they're stealing. As someone else posted above, murder is not "stealing someone's life". Likewise littering is not "stealing cleanliness", and libel is not "stealing a reputation".
Even if I really, really, really don't like piracy, I am not going to call it stealing, because that's not the correct word for it. As long as you continue to use words for other than their intended purposes, you come off as a dogmatist fishing to score emotional points rather than a rational participant in a mature discussion.
Calling this a failure is really dependent on the assumption that their primary goal is to have "a much more powerful trade position and a more vibrant economy." I would submit that the Swedish people have decided other things are more important.
I could easily be a lot richer than I am, but the tradeoffs are not worth it to me. That doesn't mean I'm a failure at wealth acquisition, any more than you're a failure at getting sex-change operations or being a circus clown.
What?
Why? Gonna come over here and optimise my ass a new structural change management implementation process framework? You and what army? And how much do they bill?
Exactly. This policy might be fine for clerical staff, but for researchers - especially those working in the computer field - it's a non-starter.
Giving a remote, central IT department control over the computer engineering faculty's computers is like putting the agricultural research tracts under the control of university groundkeeping staff. Or putting the automotive engineering department's facilities under control of motor pool.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that we are not talking about Southeastern Mississippi State College of Arithmetic and Hair Maintenance, and in fact a real university, where Linux and Mac are generally quite common - certainly more than in the corporate world.
Actually Zelda is the only video game I've played in the past 15 years or so, just because it happens to be installed on so many planes (I have another 8 hours of Zelda coming up tonight). In normal life I couldn't see myself playing a game, but with 16 hours in a long metal tube, suddenly it becomes very appealing to pretend I'm in a faraway kingdom.
Zelda is definitely a fixture on Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines, any others have it?
And the version of the game on the plane seems a bit different to any of the ones described in TFA and associated links. Is it a special portable edition or something?
I suppose things work differently in different places, but when I see pirated music for sale it's pretty obvious. Go into a record store, pick out some stuff, and the bloke at the counter looks at you for a second and asks if you want "original or discount version". Don't need no steenkin watermarks to figure out what's going on there.
The rest of the time it's downloaded from www.cheepmusik.ru. Again, not much confusion.
What is your scenario in which people are mostly scratching their heads trying to suss out whether or not a given instance of a song is pirated?
Doesn't matter how smart they are. The 1ee7 trading group gets 10 copies of the CD, averages the values at each sampling interval, and the watermark is gone (or obscured beyond use).
Drives up the entry cost a tiny bit but not enough to make a difference. I live pretty close to piracy ground zero - probably 1000 people employed in the piracy business within 2km radius of my home (and the retailers are a whole lot friendlier and more knowledgeable than anyone at Best Buy, by the way) - they are too serious about it to care about some piddling obstacle like this. Either they ignore the watermarks entirely and let the identifiied party be the fall guy, or they take the trivial steps necessary to remove them. But once their distribution network kicks into gear, entry costs quickly fade off into the distance to the right of the decimal point.
Either way, I don't see them putting unique ID codes on mass-market CDs anytime soon. Imagine the size of the tracking database - and the distribution chain cooperation required. Instead they'll make one version for each distribution channel or region, and use that as part of the evidence in building a case ("we know the CD was sold in Nebraska - which is exactly where our suspect lives!").
They have more than one king now?
I have burned down all my Legos in protest against the blasphemous cartoons published by Danish newspapers last year. Also I have denounced the little Lego people, and will be stoning the larger ones (with the bendy arms) on Friday.
I find this comment confusing. The reason I'm enticed to run one is so that I can get access to lots of other hotspots all over the place. To me that provides significant value.
Are you sure you read the site? The reason to run a Linus hotspot is so that you will get reciprocal access to all the other Linus hostpots out there.
[And how did parent get modded informative? All it said was that the author didn't have any information to add.]
Did you RTFA? The system under discussion does indeed work internationally.
Wifi serves my needs well. I can get online from almost any restaurant or cafe in my neighborhood, which is about 90% of my usage. The rest is in airports and hotels, where it also works fine.
See above. I would never care about handing over between cells. When I am using my laptop, I am sitting down. If I am on the move, I am walking (all the time in the world, I can spend a few seconds to re-sync my PDA to a new hotspot), in a bus or subway (no room), piloting a vehicle (unsafe and irresponsible to use a device while moving), or on a train or plane (large enough to carry its own hotspot around with it).
This is why it's cheap.
So buy equipment with the same management interface if you care.
You should be doing your own encryption (or using SSL) on anything that matters anyway. Do you trust the phone company?
Some grandmother in North Dakota who's never touched a mouse. The RIAA prey on the same victims as all those other scam artists who call up senior citizens in Kansas and sell them $10,000 tsunami insurance policies. It has nothing to do with who is actually uploading pirated content.
In this country (Malaysia), wifi is free at Starbucks. I don't really see anyone with a laptop who doesn't also have a drink-in-progress. People (myself included) order something every hour or so, and at those prices, that's surely keeping them in business.
After hours it's a different story. Many of the Starbucks near me have primarily outdoor seating, and when they shut at 1 or 2am, strange characters show up with decal-coated laptops and do mysterious things late into the night. If this really bothered the management, presumably they would turn off the access point or bring in the chairs at closing time.
No, the biggest problem is that it won't work.
A large-scale hobbyist mesh network really only works if people are primarily interested in local content. Otherwise you will find that certain popular nodes choke everyone near them as they draw traffic from all over the place. If it happens to be static content you can cache it, but otherwise you're out of luck - you're not going to get every popular site to distribute its application logic across the network.
Yes, of course it can. Can the government pass laws regarding what you do in your own totally private house? How about if you want to run a dental surgery in the basement to get some use out of those old power tools?
Ah yes, the lynchpin of every successful plan.
Uh, no. Cory said that the Starforce driver caused performance degradation over time, eventually making it impossible to burn discs. He did not say that the drive was physically damaged.
Starforce is only paying out if you can show them a physically damaged drive. It's a classic straw man. They know that drives are not physically being damaged, but by focusing attention on that idea, they are misdirecting people away from the fact that their software leaves Windows unable to burn discs.
What, you think they just hate Germans, and denying access to these videos is Google's way of getting revenge? Maybe they're still bitter about the Lusitania.
There is a long list of terms and conditions on the web site, presumably written at the behest of highly-paid lawyers, and some of that might be incompatible with German law. Or maybe there is a significant amount of content there that's covered by pre-existing distribution agreements in Germany which preclude making it available online.
Ah, never mind, looks like if I pause it for a while, it will keep buffering.
Has anyone worked out a way to download this for offline viewing? I have tried to watch it from here in Malaysia but my DSL just isn't up to the task. Within a minute or two it taps out the buffer and starts skipping like crazy. Or is there a way to configure the Macromedia player to use a much larger buffer?
Holster your weapon there, pardner. Almost certainly the restriction is a consequence of some German law.
Why bother posting if you didn't RTFA?
US TV: "Power" button on the TV itself and the one on the remote do exactly the same thing: switch between "on" and "standby". The only way to get it off is to unplug the mains cord.
European TV: Power button on the TV requires some finger pressure and physically disconnects the power, leaving the remote impotent. The "power" button on the remote only puts it into standby.
Of course there are exceptions but this has typically been the situation with my and my family's relatively modern CRT TVs on both continents.
No company employee can refuse to allow you to quote them, unless you have an explicit contractual arrangement. At least not in the USA. Their only recourse is to keep their mouth shut in the first place.
Yes, any good editor would.
Yes, of course, the point is that once it gets into the newspaper's hands the company has lost control and the paper is very unlikely to give any control back.