"So now when I put stump remover and sugar together on my list I gaurantee I'm gonna be put on some sort of terrorist list (cuz you can make a bomb out of that)."
It's too late, you already posted you know how to do this on a public forum - if you know that then you are probably smart enough to shop in two separate places. Add in that you didn't do this anonymously and on a well known anti-establishment website and, well, expect the jackbooted thugs to be knocking on your door in a few hours (at least expect if they are going to actually be data mining grocery lists and putting anyone who purchases both stump remover and sugar and their terrorist list).
This is one of the more fun ways and upon reading it I intended to post a similar topic (dang you, getting ahead of me!!!!) - though it is easier with rifles. Too many handgun cartridges are too weak to really do the damage. Just make sure you use a large enough caliber, while a 223 will penetrate all the way through it pretty much makes.223 inch hole in the thing - not so much what you are looking for. Pick a large rifle caliber, pick one of the modern bonded bullets (they retain weight which translates into penetration, expand well, and start off with a nice large diameter). This is an effective *and* fun way of doing it. I usually also try and stack the platters up - it is interesting to see how different bullets penetrate vs their damage. Other wise they mostly go into a vise and have a hammer have at them. Than usually a grinder or other tool that normally destroys metal.
I've never really understood why these questions come up. If you *really* have sensitive data then the price of reselling the device is irrelevant (especially given the market for used hard drives) - destroy the thing. There are MANY easy ways to ensure the platter is no longer in a single piece and the gaps are not recoverable, some fun some not so fun. In any case reducing a thin aluminum platter to scrap metal isn't very hard and doesn't really require a post to slashdot.
However, discussing "fun" methods is quite entertaining - I'm sure some amount of chemical reactions could also be entertaining though I have never tried them (mainly due to not having a good access to said chemicals). This is WELL worth the time spent even if it is just destroying a platters worth of crap - if it is fun destroying the platter the data stored is mostly irrelevant.
'There's a heightened potential for deception,'
on
FTC Offput by Offsets
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, no shit Sherlock.
Lets see, we allow people to pay lots of money in order to spew extra amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Yea, we should all be shocked this one didn't work out well in the end. If one truly believes that this is wrong then doing so is, well, wrong. Most realize this though many want to rationalize why they can continue to do so.
How many would support increasing the costs of a Hummer by enough to "offset" the carbon impact and then declare this just as "green" as an alternative fuel only small lightweight car? How many would talk about how great it is purchase a hummer if they included in the cost enough carbon offset to make the car a carbon sink (and given their cost it wouldn't be much a percentage increase)? My guess is VERY VERY few. However, that is *exactly* what is going on here - except that the rich are able to do so for their freaking entire lifestyle. The carbon offsets can't be attributed 100% to the hummer and are generally spun as going towards other things, however for those living so called "carbon neutral" lifestyles and still driving such things that is *exactly* what they are doing.
If one ever wants to know why the general public doesn't care much at all, all we have to do is look here. The vast majority of the highly public outspoken people are making *no* sacrifice while demanding it of us. They are simply trying to purchase their way by having us "less fortunate" people make up their slack. Especially true when certain Nobel Prize winners purchase them from their selves (not naming names here - after all that would be unfair). More often than not offsets are simply used for the True Believers to rationalize away their living gods.
No, no abuse of the system going on here. It is perfectly legitimate for those with more money to purchase a lower carbon impact of those without money so they can continue to do what they have always done. Nope, no problem there.
but since the main reason seemed to be to use the internet it seems to me a large portion of them was just using it as a free high speed connection anyway. I already have cable in my house and, being 33, I can do whatever I want with my computer so I see no reason to go to a library to do anything. Nor do I do anything that needs to be that anonymous.
As far as books go, I have a better technical reference than my local public library does and I have all the fiction I really want to read (also quite large). Anything new comes out I would rather own it than borrow it anyway as I generally read books multiple times. The local university has a better technical reference section than I do but I don't have time to sit there and read a large reference book and I can't take one home. If/when my work requires me to read one then I may go, but they usually find it cheaper just to purchase the books (or I prefer to purchase for my own library even though I didn't have too - I would rather have 100% control of something I need). Even in the cases I simply find something interesting time commitments mean I pretty much have to purchase it. Further, add that most reference material is now easily findable on the internet and I have even less reason to go to the library.
Ah well, some may find it sad that I almost never visit one but I'm shocked over 50% of the people feel the need too. Once out of college I see no reason to go to one unless you are someone, like my mother, who likes reading pop-culture once read books (and there is nothing wrong with that - MUCH better than watching TV which is what most do). Generally if it is worth reading for your education it is worth purchasing (true while in college also, but money is a larger issue and you should factor library time into your class schedule) and the majority of books I feel are worth my time to read are also worth my time to purchase and read more than once (technical or entertaining).
But then, the last time I went to the public library they seemed to think the same thing - mostly children's books and pop-fiction (lots and lots of romance novels) along with a large block of computers with high speed internet connections. They could get technical stuff on ILL's but they generally pointed me towards the universities library.
"a) publicly companies can't have anykind of idelogoue because it would distance them from potential customers"
I would say that they have just as much right to free speech as any other entity. If a company decided it would be a hot idea to support the KKK then that's their business. I don't have to purchase their goods if they happen to do that, just as I see no reason for Amazon to have to employee the national leader of the KKK if they don't want too. In both cases you still have freedom of speech, but that is VERY different from freedom of it's consequences - said consequence being my right to spend my money how I wish.
"b) but they can still demand it from their employees and even refuse to work with employees they disagree with their ideology"
Yep, I've been denied work because I "don't fit the corporate culture". Companies generally do not do this *too* strongly because, well, that whole "consequences" of your actions. I'm not going to purchase something from a company that is a front for the KKK and I see no reason why I should have to hire someone that is a member of that organization either.
Further, if we guarantee that anything you say will not have an economic impact on you are we going to force people to purchase from said companies? I see no other way to do ensure it - after all if the VP of Amazon turned out to be the leader of the Aryan Nation (and no, I'm not saying he is, I just picked a well known company and something people generally hate) there is absolutely no way to keep that economic impact "free". In fact, that one persons free speech is going to impact every single employees economic freedom as Amazon.com would tank.
"I'm not also convinced that having ideologically diffrent people is recipe for failure."
I highly agree, unless it is something extreme (again, use the KKK example) a company is making a huge mistake by not doing that. However, I can tell you for sure that many companies do this type of thing over MUCH less (both Amazon.com and Google have a "corporate culture" that they only hire people who fit in it, they are, however, successfully)
"First of all, average job shouldn't raise deep ideological diffrences. If employer spends his time preaching Adam Smith, Hitler or Jesus to employees, his not doing business but running a political or religous party."
Very much so, thus he looses employees and money - no reason why he should get especially screwed for exercising his freedom of speech but one of his employees can say and do anything. Both are people, both are exercising their first amendment right, however one has WAY more protections than the other for no real reason. We can, however, keep things quite equal by leaving it the way it is now.
"Secondly, average worker can't anyway choose people he/she works with and certainly not customers. If all companies and project would be just be run by mormons just because they share same values, it would be recipe for failure too(nothing against mormons btw.)."
There are many successful companies in Utah that would disagree that they are failures and see Amazon.com and Google for others that have fairly strict social requirements. There are many minority run only companies that say the same thing also. I don't particularly care for that (for one thing you can only have "pure" companies if it is one of the currently Govt Approved reasons)
"I think its easier to get 10 persons to do things because they have the skills, than finding 10 people who have the skill and also agree with you ideologically. I know employers in real who try latter one, and I can only feel sorry for them. They certainly don't have too many options."
For the most part, however some extreme reasons can cause that to break down. I shoot both archery and several competitive firearm competitions. In the last place I worked there were areas I could *not* operate in because one of the females thought that meant I was unstable and was moments from raping and then murdering everyone in the build
Unfortunately all we have from the auction house is what the person doing the complaining wishes to tell us.
"Translation: What does Brent Spiner know, trust me, you bought the real one from us. (As an aside, does anyone think they deliberately chose this spokesman for his surname?)"
At least according to several posters and people who watched the auction on TV (I thought I was crazy watching c-span live coverage of congressional hearings) the auctioneer explicitly stated that this was not the one worn by Brent Spiner and that there was an error in the catalog.
People are showing the catalog, and if they had bid from the catalog I would tend to agree. However, if one ignored the auctioneer then it is their own fault.
I very well could be Translation: "Brent Spiner told us it was not the one he wore but only a spare, it is misprinted in the catalog and we informed everyone who could cast a bid on the item."
And that translation is MUCH more damaging to the person writing the article than "We stand behind what we said" and all they are telling that they said is "The one seen in episode blah and blah".
Of course, that will come out in the court case. I find both fairly possible, in fact given the reputation of Christie's with their need to maintain it and that the people reporting that have nothing to loose I tend to side with TFA writer to be wrong. In the end assuming it goes to court we will see. I would also say that given that Christie's hasn't offered to settle and are vehemently denying they mislead people I would even guess that if they sold it as "worn by Data" that they have enough evidence past Brent Spiner's testimony behind them. They are 100% where they are by people being able to trust them fully with many-million dollar bids and even offering millions is to keep a mistake quite is *well* worth the money, let alone continuing to argue that they were 100% accurate.
Eh, I suppose it wouldn't be the first time someplace with their reputation did the absolute wrong thing either - though that is VERY rare.
Isn't this pretty much the point of the article? That due to customers mostly listening with bad equipment or compressed formats (mp3's) that the source has been degraded until one can not tell the difference? They are saying the same thing you are - users can't tell the difference, however their point is that the *should*. They are saying that you can not tell the effective difference because they *no longer sale the items where you can* (and they actually more blame the loudness war, of which they claim MP3's are the final end of that). Obviously under that situation one would expect to, well, not tell the difference.
Personally it wasn't until you got into equipment that was so expensive that mostly I couldn't hope to afford it that I told the difference even with recording that *were* good. I have a few pieces of equipment that are good (my headphones are) but that mostly just lets me hear all the imperfections.
Maybe once I can afford the price of my house in audio equipment I may care (and believe me, I would *love* too and am not complaining about anyone who has), but until then I don't so much. I do, however, agree with the idea that the "loudness war" (along with other problems) mostly destroyed most new music out there. Not because I can tell much difference in the quality of recordings but because the music in general is also created to take advantage of it instead of sounding good.
"In any case, you get the guarantee that programs written in this language terminate,"
If your friend has a Turing complete language that can take an arbitrary program and determine if it completes or not (and to ensure it does complete requires you to determine that) then your friend is about to shake up the comp sci world like no other person has. Not only that, but it would reach far into mathematics (even simple math), physics, and many many other fields. A VERY large portion of people out there would like to know how he overcame the paradox inherent the system, especially given all the non-comp sci problems that have been proven to be the equivalent of The Halting Problem.
If, however, he doesn't have a Turing complete language then I question it's usefulness to the general public (I can ensure any program terminates out there by killing it after 1000 steps, but that isn't terribly useful and few have any need of a language to enforce that). Maybe there will be some specific market for it, I would guess there are some embedded systems that may benefit from such a thing, but then I also bet they already do something more specific to their domain with existing well tested languages/environments.
I rather suspect that he/she has created a language few will use, hasn't tested it thoroughly, or will be "close" to releasing it until the end of time. My guess is also that if you think you have created a language that "can not" be broken (and is thus totally bug free) then you also fall into that very same category.
But who knows, maybe both of you will be the first computer scientist to ever win a Nobel prize in Mathematics, or heck your friend will most likely win them in several fields and require a new, more prestigious award to be created. I, for one, would like to see it solved simply because I would be back at square one of my education - I might find it interesting to go back and bother with getting a PhD and going back into research. Heck, if you guys just solved P=NP (a much less harder problem and one many think is true) it may even do the same for me. As is, much like the myriad perpetual motion machines people say they have built, I'm not going to make any life altering changes anticipating it.
To be fair a large portion of the complaints about Western countries (especially the US and Britain) operate under the same ideas. The "World is Going to End" ideas seem popular right now.
In those countries many times things are not decided until a high enough court hears it and lower courts tend to enforce laws passed by the governing body (said governing body doing things it knows will get shot down yet do it anyway, usually because of funding). Unfortunately we see that as every new technology comes out it has to wind its way through the courts even though it is pretty much obvious what the outcome will be. Some use this as a "OMG - You Sucks!!!" opportunity when we (and in this case Japan) really doesn't, and rarely are the systems from the criers any better and usually worse.
That's not to say writing your govt is a waste of time nor is public demonstrations - many times without them things will degrade to a really bad state. However, hyperbole doesn't helps one cause either. While it may help in the short term once it is shown to be horridly inaccurate in the long term you loose any credibility you gained in the interim. Best is to be as truthful as possible in every state transition even if you see greater gains in that transition.
"they don't have any business doing so except to the generally limited extent that it is necessary for their work."
From the article, this seems to be the crux of the case - did the tech have the right to go through the files. Given what the court documents say I would gather yes, it was a legitimate thing.
"If they want to test a DVD burner, they can perfectly well use a file that they keep for that purpose."
First off, it is reasonable to use a clients file to do this, I and many many many others regularly do so. And why not? They are there and they are *specifically* the problem. Many on slashdot are saying "why video files?" - well, why anything else you can think of? You have to choose something and with several hundred million people chances are anything you choose someone somewhere will be caught with an illegal file. While an in house file to check this sort of thing would also work, there is no reason to do it above and beyond simply picking one of the clients files - I've *never* had anyone complain about me doing that while they sit and watch me work on their equipment (and there have been times where clients were terribly embarrassed about what was simply noted while I was working on problems).
Secondly, we do not know what the problem was - did they say they had issues burning AVI's (or whatever video format)? If so then it totally makes sense to try them. Yea, data is data but if they happen to have trouble later and you come back with "Yea, I successfully burned a.dat file of random bytes" then you will loose customers. Does it make a technical sense? Not at all, however that is irrelevant - you will loose WAY more customers by doing that than you will by happening to catch a client with child porn. I always try and replicate the "error" as close as possible and that is fairly standard. Heck, I only do it for side money and find this to be true.
I do agree that random poking around my hard drive should be taboo - that should be part of what I expect and should be legally enforced. However, from everything I have read from the article it seems as if they simply chose movie files and got some "strange" results, that is perfectly legitimate. If the original complaint was with respect to movies then I would say it is even the *expected procedure*.
And, lastly, we do not know from the article how hidden this stuff was. We know they used the "search" function of windows which reduces the file system to basically flat - but did they scroll through several thousand videos? Was it their first options seen? Was it simply stored in My Documents? A lot of these questions would go a long ways into deciding how much they were prying. If the videos were on his desktop then there should be no legal standing, if they were buried somewhere in an encrypted directory then yea, that is real invasion of privacy. However, I suspect it was somewhere in between and without examining the people who found it I can not make an accurate conclusion.
Even then, while I may very well expect that I would never assume it - especially if I had something truly illegal. I may not care so much about some of the legal (yet taboo) stuff I have (and since the early 90's that has included things on how to make fireworks and such), but if I had something *really* illegal it wouldn't be passed to a second party. Especially assuming I am ignorant of how a computer works (and given that I would be using Circuit City's tech line for simple break and fix work that is a given) I am surely not going to send that over - especially since I have no idea how much they are going to have to pry to get it fixed.
Apparently not since this "secretive, shadowy, unaccountable" program has been around in various forms since - oh sometime in the 50's. In fact, stories from the height of the cold war in the 60's tend to be the most egregious use.
Not to say it's a *good* program, but it's a little late in the game to get this riled up about it. Nor will the next president (even if they have a D by their name) stop it, they will just try and convince you that it is now used for good - much as in the 90's it was supported because it was used in the War on Drugs and to catch those triksy militias everyone hated.
But don't let that get in the way of a good ole fashioned Bush Hating - it's all really his fault and this is all unprecedented.
There are large areas of the countries where this technology will be WAY to expensive to maintain and there is no real technological way to "fix" it as far as I can tell.
You see, people where I live own these things called "firearms" - in this case namely "rifles". Most of us that own them, while not top end marksmen by any stretch of the imagination, shoot well enough to destroy these things. Not only that, but being what we refer to as "rednecks" (however, in rural areas that has a different connotation than in cities, a more appropriate term for most Slashdotter's to understand is "hillbilly" or "country") we do not take to such measures easily and, well, shooting things to destroy them isn't exactly unheard of either - sometimes just for fun let alone when something really needs it.
Our county government recently installed those nice little red light camera's to catch people who run the light, already a number of them have turned up inoperable due to a large amount of swiftly moving projectiles entering the housing and destroying the contents. Interestingly enough, they actually caught one person doing it recently and they guy hadn't ever had a ticket, just thought the dang things were an invasion of privacy and ought to be destroyed. I can't imagine the number of the intrusive devices in this article that would be shot down.
In nearly all major surgeries you will have a fairly large amount (in the two digits) of specialists work on you. It is assumed by the other doctors that each specialist knows what they are doing and doctors generally do not interfere with others. Given that there are thousands of surgeries per year it is not surprising that something get left behind.
Now, I agree we can all point to cases where the surgeon closing should have known better (or at least asked), Large sponges, clamps, and many other large obvious objects shouldn't get closed up in you. However I know of several people who had stuff left in them on purpose for short periods of time, those items needed for the body to recover.
Then there are small items, my father had some of his heart monitor wires left in well after they should have been removed - it wasn't until all the doctors signed off on his release that the lest one in line went "Uh oh - this is going to painful". Each one in line thought one of the others had needed and could make up all sorts of reasons why it could be needed.
IMO anything that causes some type of flag to be raised at the end "This is listed as need to remove" is a good thing. Given the number of surgeons/specialists along with the number of surgeries they do even a.01% chance will result in some left over. I highly suspect that the vast majority of humans in the word would be ecstatic with that success rate (in fact, that success rate is considered impossible) let alone 5 zeroes. Yet doctors are expected to truly have a 0% failure rate.
Electronic devices are *simple* compared to surgeries and five nines are considered the holy grail, let alone *infinite nines* (and yes, some electronic devices are life critical - see medical devices). Five nines is GREAT even for simple devices. Of course negligence and incompetence are one thing and should be punished (especially in life critical applications), reasonable failure is another.
One is risk - like any non-locally human controlled craft we can send these into places we can not go due to us being fairly fragile. We simply do not have to worry that the pilots return alive.
Another factor is that these aren't really taking the place of full aircraft. These are used to loiter around someplace we think someone is at, look for them, and kill them if they find them (or direct others to kill them, usually from a distance). It is trivial to keep them up in air as long as they have power to do so, we simply switch some guys at a desk. Nor are these generally as large as a "real" aircraft - those humans take up room and have requirements other than simply the physical space they take up sitting still (though combat aircraft designers try and minimize this, it is still well above zero). This makes them much harder for those on the ground to find.
And finally, cost. As expensive as even something like our f-22 is it pales in comparison to the cost of the human flying it. See above for most of the reason as to why we remove the risk against this cost, not to mention many of us are used to controlling things nowadays from a keyboard and joystick. Add in other things like we no longer care what our bodies can sustain but only care what the airframe does (some of these can pull in the 20 and 30 g's) and you have a real case for UAV's.
In short, we have combat fighter pilots telecommuting.
They don't totally replace humans on the field (or in the air) and never will. At the very least war requires humans have their ability to wage war to be removed and that generally involves killing us or damaging us to the point where we can not function. In this case it is just a person behind the controller (or maybe someday the programmer writing the AI) to be the one causing the causalities or be the one taking them. At some point UAV's will make less sense as both sides will have equal access to them and we will back to human vs human.
And, no, latency has not really been an issue as of yet. We have combat air-to-air craft that function well, however at some point attacks against the signal are inevitable (I assume that has been though of in some way).
When we are in the current state where we can sit in a safe spot and inflict casualties on the enemy with little to no ability for them to inflict them back we are crazy to not use it. If we had the equivalent of this for infantry then on our side we would be seeing "body counts" of robots - no matter your opinion on if the Iraq war (or even war at all) is justified it should be obvious why any nation would want to be able to say only robots got blown up or damaged. One may argue that blowing things up is futile, but that id VERY different as to why one would want this.
"1. all things being equal, the sexier sounding name wins. And "empeethree" has a simplistic, yet technical sound to it. Whereas AAC and WMA can be thrown right out the window. Ogg has some appeal, but nowhere near the sexiness of mp3."
This is one of the bigger problems with a lot of Open Source stuff - few of us are good at marketing. Like me, most people who name projects have some inane reason that all us other geeks find highly amusing an like. However, how many people want to ask for all you oggs? Much easier to ask for even AAC's of WMA'S (though many hunters will wonder why are you asking for their wildlife management areas:) ).
"3. Now.. as to being "inferior" technically. You need only to look at things like DC and AC, VHS and Betamax or Amiga and PC (oh boy, am I gonna get it for that last one) to see that the technically superior solution is not always the one that ends up on top."
And here is one of the other main obstacles to true acceptance of most open source products. It's not nearly as bad today as it was back then, for one thing some commercial companies are now involved. Nor can I blame developers - it is mostly volunteer work I also do not find dealing with everyday consumers to be fun (thus I do not volunteer my time answering inane questions either). However, general acceptance needs that sort of thing. "Technically better" involves more than which is capable of producing better sound at a specific file size.
The fact that it took many years to have a decoder that was easy to install and easy to use (especially outside of Linux) is one of the main things that killed OGG. When the "format war" (such as it was) was going on you had to be highly computer literate to use the stuff (including the players, in the earlier days you even had to understand the math behind the compression). By the time someone finally made it so that it could be used by the general populace the war was over, and the MP3 format had fired one shot to finish it.
Once MP3 had won you are going to have to produce something obviously superior. At one time disk space would have been important - but now who cares? Ogg isn't it, about the only people who still talk about it much are the ones who were it's army at the time (I still have quite a few ogg files and anything I rip is of that format). All it takes is to look at how strong Microsoft pushes it's stuff, how much power they have, and how they have mostly failed to see that something like OGG isn't going to make it as the most popular format.
Again, such is the life of much of the open source world. Ones I have contributed too I'm no better. For it to win it needs a commercial company to try and do the non-fun stuff (after all, why am I going to donate most of my free time doing something not-fun). Then you have the give and take from those that agree with people like Stallman and those that agree with ESR and those that do not care. I find the whole thing interesting both as an observer and as an occasional participant (and I tend to fall into the "I do not care" crowd - either one is perfectly fine by me, it just needs to be decided per project and people need to accept the consequences of those choices).
A large portion of what you are describing is a type of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. While not exactly the same, it is derived from the same mindset and it covers WAY more than just child rearing.
For instance, I live in the mountains of East Tennessee. I can't tell you how many times I've been told to bike to work and my larger vehicle is Evil(TM), that is totally impractical to me. I've been told that if I get into shape it will be fine, that I'm simply a liar, all sorts of thing (though usually just ignored). The reason it is impractical? There is one particular hill - and a large one - that if/when I am driving my mothers four cylinder manual I have to turn the air conditioning off because the vehicle can barely make it up the hill let alone with more people in the vehicle (car pooling and all). It is either go that way or add another 5 or so miles to the trip - neither one is acceptable. Moving close to work doesn't help due to that fact that my job changes too often, we do not have dense urban style housing (and frankly can not due to the terrain). Heck, just to get out of my subdivision from my house requires you to drop over 60 feet, rise another 70, drop around 50, and finally go up another 50 feet (and these numbers are fairly accurate - we did the engineering for the subdivision and it required A LOT of earth to be moved to makes it down to that point). That's more hills than the vast majority of people will *ever* see just to get to the main highway let alone the rest of what we refer to as "rolling hills".
My area isn't going to get subways either - it is all rocks and caves. My parents are land surveyors and I worked with them through the 80'2 and 90's. It was just about as much work going back and routing around what they called "voids" (read caves). Some of those are LARGE, I recall one particularly large void where they had used a 300ft rope and had not found the bottom (VERY disconcerting to know you are standing over such a thing). Yea, we are going to get a subway through that type of thing. Even with public transportation such as buses it requires fairly strenuous walking, especially with groceries or all the items needed for work (laptops, books, etc) - see the above hill that is fairly common around here.
When I worked at a national lab we frequently had students, they normally had two shocks. First was going from a fairly urban area to a rural one (though there were quite a few that were just as rural and in a few cases more so than us) and the second was getting used to the topography. There are amusing stories about being kinda scared of how dark the city was, not realizing that street signs that show "sharp turn" mean 90 degrees or greater instead of just a small bend, and having trouble giving directions - my definition of "flat" was theirs of "really big hill" and I told how to get places by how many hills to pass and most wanted how many intersections to go through. To be fair, when I went other places I had my own share of "shocks" too:)
You see lots of people hawk sun power for everyone from places where they get enough sun, wind power from places that get a lot of wind, geothermal from places who can do it, all sorts of things being pushed to be forced on the whole country (and at the UN level the whole world) when it is impractical outside of local areas. The vast majority of these things are very good for those that are pushing them, just not so good for many others.
This is why I think most power should be local. No it doesn't solve everything - what you are describing is more a generational thing (the baby boomers have the population), but I think it would help. At the very least it is a more healthy view of the world and would hopefully bleed into the things you describe.
"Yellow press..... yes, I know,/. is not supposed to have any credibility like any other parasite news sites, but anyway...."
As far as I can tell they are no worse than "normal" news. Planted questions in townhall meetings, political convention members used as "undecided voters" (and you will note in both of those I did not name a political party as it is standard practice for *all* sides including so called "third" parties), individual reporters feelings presented as fact on technical issues, payed "stories" about products, so on and so on.
While the above is American centric it isn't hard to find it in French, British, German, or any of the "free world" let alone the "semi-free" (like Russia) or the "non-free". Some places are a little better, some places a little worse but over all if you had to live off the differences then you would starve to death. Yea, some may be conservative, liberal, "other", Microsoft centric, linux centric, or whichever way they lean (and from that point of view they are quite different) but that isn't what I'm talking about - I mean honesty and attempting to simply inform people in a fairly balanced manner. It's comical seeing them talk about how unbiased and fair they are (though I think some commentators say it more tongue in cheek and are somewhat making fun of the people they work for).
At the least everyone pretty much knows how Slashdot is biased and they don't try and hide it. I may very much disagree with that bias, but as bad as it can get it tends to be better than anything higher than local news (and that will vary by quite a bit), not to mention there will be enough readers jumping on them for gross mistakes.
I just don't understand those type of "standards" - they do not really make much sense.
If you are writing "Must Always Work" software (which is what you are saying) then there is no way you can adequately test to meet what *should* be compliance in 8 hours unless the software is trivial, let alone identify the bug and fix it. Heck, you would be lucky to have 48 hour turnaround if you put the whole team on it for the 48 hours solid though a 72 hour is normally doable.
Yea, 99/100 times you simply unit test and it works (what I normally do, but nothing I've written is mission critical in that sense - if my stuff breaks I just get another phone call and I would normally start the regression testing after sending patches out), the problem is that 1/100 time that you break something else that used to work, that break is usually MUCH more major than the bug you were trying to fix. For most software this is quite acceptable, it is pretty much the "best" in terms of the cost/benefit - but if you truly have highly critical software then "best" usually isn't at the most benefit for the cheapest cost:)
It just amazes me the number of software developers who seem to think this is somehow being "secure" - heck there are several posters in this thread that say that security fixes should be under 12 hours and all of theirs are usually under 6 - I *really* do not want a "security" person who think that unit testing is perfectly adequate and turns out a fix 3 or four hours after finding it. If your software is small enough that you can identify, isolate, fix, and regression test everything in under 6-12 hours then your software is small and not really what the OP is asking about.
Of course, the above is how your industry is regulated (I have no idea if you think it is peachy keen or actually understand why things like regression testing are important for software that truly must be robust and secure) - I've seen the same thing in other industries I've worked in and it boggles my mind how many do not - and can not - see why there is a problem with their software production model. I generally bet that even if your bosses understood why it is a bad idea they probably do not care (and I bet only a few understand why) - after all they are following industry standards and they always have us to blame when unit testing in an attempt to get high turnaround time introduces a major bug regardless of the fact that it is a problem with your development cycle.
I knew someone about 10-15 years ago that it happened too - they lost (in Tennessee).
Of course, not being a lawyer I can't say - however I rather suspect it is quite enforceable if you create something the company works on. That is - if you work for Microsoft and you invent some nifty software at home you have little to stand on (especially if you are a software engineer). I think it would be fairly easy for them to argue that you, at the very least, used company resources to learn and you are payed to write software (effectively the case of the person I mentioned above). The further away you go from there I simply do not know - I know that some places hire you as a "researcher" to make that as broad as possible. As to how enforceable that is I would guess it would depend on your state (and the one case I personally know of is old enough new laws may vary well have been passed).
I'm also under the impression that short term non-competes are pretty much enforceable. While I didn't personally know any people who fought them, there were quite a number of news stories about such contracts during the DotCom bubble. Many had *permanent* non-competes, that was obviously unenforceable, but the trade mags said that the limited, reasonable term stuff was. Reasonable being up to the judge and state legislature and of course a state may very well totally nullify such things too.
Of course, were I the OP I would get a lawyer to look at it - there should at least be some monetary compensation for those six months if the company was the one to decide to terminate the position. I rather suspect that the "all inventions" clause could be re-worded to where both sides are happy.
In both cases I can see the point of the employer - they do not want you to have advance internal knowledge of their product, quit, and go "sell" yourself to their main competitor (and that could very well happen given how much some software is worth, how much money several companies have, and that those companies aren't the most honest places on the planet). I can also see why a software company would feel they own your software if you are a software engineer, they are paying you to do that and there is no way you can totally separate yourself from the company.
Of course if they terminate your employment with them then they should not be able to detain you from earning an income for those six months nor should they own a lawnmower blade you made if you are a software engineer.
Normally such things *can* be negotiated without a big hassle.
You are not going to win this argument - the sides have been drawn and you bring no new information to the table. All of us have already made up our minds.
You have the two sides that care and then the rest of us that do not. It's not that I do no understand it - I've been an academic weenie for quite some time and find these things highly entertaining, yet I just don't care when it comes to my money. If I had to choose I prefer the base 2 definition as it makes the most sense, yet as long as I can compare two devices I do not care of they use "miblywinks" to rate their storage size - I just want something I know what they mean and standard across devices.
In the end what file table I decide to use has more impact as to the usable size of my hard drive than if they use base 2 or base 10. That is WAY more confusing and "dishonest" than the esoteric idea of which standard you use. I find that I spend more time explaining why their 105gb (converted to base 2) device shows much less than that (also in base 2) when they click on it to non technical people. But then, do we then standardize on NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, EXT3, REISERFS, or ExoMibFS? Again, as long as I can compare apples to apples I could care less, just lets standardize on one.
It's not a big deal to anyone who has half an idea what is being discussed, but most people do not know it. That isn't making fun of anyone - that is what those of us in IT are payed for. Lets face it, how many of us know what the building set backs for Residential One zones are - that is what Land Surveyors are for and there are going to be more of us worried if our house meets zoning laws than if our hard drives capacity is based on base 2 or base 10. Yet how many that feel that average people should know this know their local zoning laws (or land laws) to the extent we expect people to know computer technology (and there is WAY more money involved with land)? Unfortunately to many do no trust their IT professionals like they do the professionals they hire in other areas - but that is a different complaint.
I too noticed that, however I can't come to the conclusion that you did.
For it to be true they would have had to have a good recording of his voice while doing the crime - that in and of itself is going to be hard. But lets assume for a moment that he defeated the video camera and was singing loudly enough to be clear (surely if they are recording audio then they are video), then they need to have the ability to compare this voice to most of the people who call into any call center that he may call - not very likely if for no other reason than computation power let alone cost and him being a high priority enough of a target (they may very well do that for some global criminal - but this guy?).
More than likely something was misreported. I would rather think that the people that the parts were stolen from reported it, had a tech support call from someone, and the Secret Service simply matched the call to the person they arrested (along with the equipment). The *best* I could give is that they somehow recorded enough of his voice and sent it out to any place that co-operates with them which is quite acceptable and even then that is quite unlikely due to nothing more than computational cost.
Of course, as I have read in other places - if they are listening then Fuck the President and the horse he rode in on. Iraq is a quagmire and he is a retard for continuing support of it and should be deposed from his office along with all his Republican Shills, Cheney is the anti-christ and the Neo-cons deserve to assault an Iraqi insurgent stronghold unarmed and unarmored to prove their point - Long live our democrat overlords!!! (I'm still here and have posted similar things many times - oh well maybe one day the Jack booted Thugs will come here to take me to the secret gulag and I can make the news for killing them all).
I won't say the govt doesn't listen, in fact I am sure they do and have for a LONG time - we know of fairly pervasive electronic eavesdropping during Clinton's term (and it was sophisticated enough that it just didn't spring out of nowhere), but they aren't going to let that program slip for something this simple nor do would it be anywhere near this granular. If this is all you are worried over you have missed the boat long ago and has little to do with Democrat or Republican (though, to be fair, from your post I can't tell if you are like many that seem to think their side doesn't do it). One real problem is that *real* stuff doesn't get reported because of paranoid crap that should have immediately been ignored.
Other than a specific crowd that will purchase anything neat (and I am very much in that group) who cares about any of those issue?
To largely replace paper books we need a minimum of large size, lots of contrast, rugged construction, light weight, and generally usable anywhere for long periods of time. We are no where *near* that. Add in cost and being able to make marks on it being a requirement for many applications and we have some real issues.
Size, rugged, and battery life do not go together. I need something I can carry in my car, backpack, or just mostly leave lying around and not have it break or get scratched to the point of unusable. I need to be able to expect to take it to most places I go and have it work *and* be readable at the same time - having to have it plugged up every 10 hours is, in many cases, unacceptable.
That is only concerning replacing books, let alone paper. Can I fold it and stick it in my pocket? Will I care if I happen to destroy it? If I can't stick it in my pocket what good does it do me? If I can't carry it in any place other than carefully controlled environments due to its cost - again what good does it do me? Heck, if I can not make a note and give it to someone else that doesn't have one what good does it do me? Everyone on the planet isn't going to carry around their e-paper (which can not be folded, carried in their pocket, exposed to water, exposed to much shock, exposed to high/low temperatures, and all the other things any current or foreseeable future technology has to offer).
E-paper has not come close to its window - it hasn't even come close to the point that most people would seriously look at it. Heck, even the totally made up stuff we saw in Star Trek didn't really replace paper books, let alone paper. That's not to say it will not happen (I think it will), but anything I have remotely seen companies working on do not come close to meeting the requirements to replace paper. They are trying to force books/paper into existing technology and technological paradigms instead of trying to make electronics work like books/paper.
Among them is finding a business model that allows the hardware makers to subsidize the cost of the music
We have already seen that most of those that pirate music still purchase CD's - in fact we consistently see that those that pirate music are the *highest* purchasers of music. Why do they need to incorporate this - it is already subsidized in the outrageous cost for a CD?
Allow it to play anything and make your money off 15 dollar CD's like they always have. Put lyrics, art, higher quality recordings (that is, non-compressed just like they currently do), and other things most music enthusiast want for the music they really want and let everything else go. For quite a few years now those purchasing music do so because they want too and feel they get value from their money, not because they have too or lawsuits. In fact my bet is that there are more that refuse to purchase because of the lawsuits than they gain from people refusing to download.
Even though I used the term "outrageous cost" I purchased quite a number of CD's until I finally got fed up with what they were doing, I haven't purchased one in years (nor have I downloaded music - while they like to pretend otherwise they know that also supports them in their crusade). While I thought it was over priced having a decent copy with the CD jacket was worth the cost for the stuff I liked.
At some point that will *have* to be the business model as Pandora's Box has been opened on MP3's and other compressed music (the only impediment to non-compressed is hard drive space and that will most likely be "fixed" some day also). They can't close it and *must* come to terms with it somewhere down the road - it is just a matter of how much "collateral damage" there is in the interim.
Not to mention I am willing to bet that many would pay quite a bit extra for a player that offered you indemnity to lawsuits from the RIAA (that is - your downloads/uploads are legal) and they would still get the CD purchases they are currently getting, plus the ones they have turned away from their lawsuits. They really should look at this as tons and tons and tons of free bandwidth. Heck, I would even side with them on harsh punishments if they just required a copyright notice (complete with some advertisement) with every download - in a sense a BSD licensed music download. Still plenty of reasons to purchased a CD, lots of free advertisement, and lots of free bandwidth.
It was *supposed* to apply to commercial applications of the broadcast - that is, the broadcast is part of your business/what you are selling. For instance, lets say CBS broadcast a football game and you want to have "Football Night" - it makes some sense for you to pay CBS for it. Same thing goes for bands making a living copying others songs or playing their music at a dance or bar. That has always been the intent of Copyright and there needs to be some level of it.
In this case it is stupid, for one thing the restaurant patrons would probably rather not be bothered with the noise anyway. It is not part of the businesses but someone playing their music too loud. I doubt the original intent of the law was to deal with this and that includes the original intent of the recording industry when they lobbied for it.
This is just their current over zealous idiocy trying to "protect" their stuff. Before too long their "protection" is going to be equivalent to going to hide in a large cave and prattling on and on about their "precious" in fear that others will get a hold of it.
Slashdot Mirror
"So now when I put stump remover and sugar together on my list I gaurantee I'm gonna be put on some sort of terrorist list (cuz you can make a bomb out of that)."
It's too late, you already posted you know how to do this on a public forum - if you know that then you are probably smart enough to shop in two separate places. Add in that you didn't do this anonymously and on a well known anti-establishment website and, well, expect the jackbooted thugs to be knocking on your door in a few hours (at least expect if they are going to actually be data mining grocery lists and putting anyone who purchases both stump remover and sugar and their terrorist list).
This is one of the more fun ways and upon reading it I intended to post a similar topic (dang you, getting ahead of me!!!!) - though it is easier with rifles. Too many handgun cartridges are too weak to really do the damage. Just make sure you use a large enough caliber, while a 223 will penetrate all the way through it pretty much makes .223 inch hole in the thing - not so much what you are looking for. Pick a large rifle caliber, pick one of the modern bonded bullets (they retain weight which translates into penetration, expand well, and start off with a nice large diameter). This is an effective *and* fun way of doing it. I usually also try and stack the platters up - it is interesting to see how different bullets penetrate vs their damage. Other wise they mostly go into a vise and have a hammer have at them. Than usually a grinder or other tool that normally destroys metal.
I've never really understood why these questions come up. If you *really* have sensitive data then the price of reselling the device is irrelevant (especially given the market for used hard drives) - destroy the thing. There are MANY easy ways to ensure the platter is no longer in a single piece and the gaps are not recoverable, some fun some not so fun. In any case reducing a thin aluminum platter to scrap metal isn't very hard and doesn't really require a post to slashdot.
However, discussing "fun" methods is quite entertaining - I'm sure some amount of chemical reactions could also be entertaining though I have never tried them (mainly due to not having a good access to said chemicals). This is WELL worth the time spent even if it is just destroying a platters worth of crap - if it is fun destroying the platter the data stored is mostly irrelevant.
Well, no shit Sherlock.
Lets see, we allow people to pay lots of money in order to spew extra amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Yea, we should all be shocked this one didn't work out well in the end. If one truly believes that this is wrong then doing so is, well, wrong. Most realize this though many want to rationalize why they can continue to do so.
How many would support increasing the costs of a Hummer by enough to "offset" the carbon impact and then declare this just as "green" as an alternative fuel only small lightweight car? How many would talk about how great it is purchase a hummer if they included in the cost enough carbon offset to make the car a carbon sink (and given their cost it wouldn't be much a percentage increase)? My guess is VERY VERY few. However, that is *exactly* what is going on here - except that the rich are able to do so for their freaking entire lifestyle. The carbon offsets can't be attributed 100% to the hummer and are generally spun as going towards other things, however for those living so called "carbon neutral" lifestyles and still driving such things that is *exactly* what they are doing.
If one ever wants to know why the general public doesn't care much at all, all we have to do is look here. The vast majority of the highly public outspoken people are making *no* sacrifice while demanding it of us. They are simply trying to purchase their way by having us "less fortunate" people make up their slack. Especially true when certain Nobel Prize winners purchase them from their selves (not naming names here - after all that would be unfair). More often than not offsets are simply used for the True Believers to rationalize away their living gods.
No, no abuse of the system going on here. It is perfectly legitimate for those with more money to purchase a lower carbon impact of those without money so they can continue to do what they have always done. Nope, no problem there.
but since the main reason seemed to be to use the internet it seems to me a large portion of them was just using it as a free high speed connection anyway. I already have cable in my house and, being 33, I can do whatever I want with my computer so I see no reason to go to a library to do anything. Nor do I do anything that needs to be that anonymous.
As far as books go, I have a better technical reference than my local public library does and I have all the fiction I really want to read (also quite large). Anything new comes out I would rather own it than borrow it anyway as I generally read books multiple times. The local university has a better technical reference section than I do but I don't have time to sit there and read a large reference book and I can't take one home. If/when my work requires me to read one then I may go, but they usually find it cheaper just to purchase the books (or I prefer to purchase for my own library even though I didn't have too - I would rather have 100% control of something I need). Even in the cases I simply find something interesting time commitments mean I pretty much have to purchase it. Further, add that most reference material is now easily findable on the internet and I have even less reason to go to the library.
Ah well, some may find it sad that I almost never visit one but I'm shocked over 50% of the people feel the need too. Once out of college I see no reason to go to one unless you are someone, like my mother, who likes reading pop-culture once read books (and there is nothing wrong with that - MUCH better than watching TV which is what most do). Generally if it is worth reading for your education it is worth purchasing (true while in college also, but money is a larger issue and you should factor library time into your class schedule) and the majority of books I feel are worth my time to read are also worth my time to purchase and read more than once (technical or entertaining).
But then, the last time I went to the public library they seemed to think the same thing - mostly children's books and pop-fiction (lots and lots of romance novels) along with a large block of computers with high speed internet connections. They could get technical stuff on ILL's but they generally pointed me towards the universities library.
"a) publicly companies can't have anykind of idelogoue because it would distance them from potential customers"
I would say that they have just as much right to free speech as any other entity. If a company decided it would be a hot idea to support the KKK then that's their business. I don't have to purchase their goods if they happen to do that, just as I see no reason for Amazon to have to employee the national leader of the KKK if they don't want too. In both cases you still have freedom of speech, but that is VERY different from freedom of it's consequences - said consequence being my right to spend my money how I wish.
"b) but they can still demand it from their employees and even refuse to work with employees they disagree with their ideology"
Yep, I've been denied work because I "don't fit the corporate culture". Companies generally do not do this *too* strongly because, well, that whole "consequences" of your actions. I'm not going to purchase something from a company that is a front for the KKK and I see no reason why I should have to hire someone that is a member of that organization either.
Further, if we guarantee that anything you say will not have an economic impact on you are we going to force people to purchase from said companies? I see no other way to do ensure it - after all if the VP of Amazon turned out to be the leader of the Aryan Nation (and no, I'm not saying he is, I just picked a well known company and something people generally hate) there is absolutely no way to keep that economic impact "free". In fact, that one persons free speech is going to impact every single employees economic freedom as Amazon.com would tank.
"I'm not also convinced that having ideologically diffrent people is recipe for failure."
I highly agree, unless it is something extreme (again, use the KKK example) a company is making a huge mistake by not doing that. However, I can tell you for sure that many companies do this type of thing over MUCH less (both Amazon.com and Google have a "corporate culture" that they only hire people who fit in it, they are, however, successfully)
"First of all, average job shouldn't raise deep ideological diffrences. If employer spends his time preaching Adam Smith, Hitler or Jesus to employees, his not doing business but running a political or religous party."
Very much so, thus he looses employees and money - no reason why he should get especially screwed for exercising his freedom of speech but one of his employees can say and do anything. Both are people, both are exercising their first amendment right, however one has WAY more protections than the other for no real reason. We can, however, keep things quite equal by leaving it the way it is now.
"Secondly, average worker can't anyway choose people he/she works with and certainly not customers.
If all companies and project would be just be run by mormons just because they share same values, it would be recipe for failure too(nothing against mormons btw.)."
There are many successful companies in Utah that would disagree that they are failures and see Amazon.com and Google for others that have fairly strict social requirements. There are many minority run only companies that say the same thing also. I don't particularly care for that (for one thing you can only have "pure" companies if it is one of the currently Govt Approved reasons)
"I think its easier to get 10 persons to do things because they have the skills, than finding 10 people who have the skill and also agree with you ideologically. I know employers in real who try latter one, and I can only feel sorry for them. They certainly don't have too many options."
For the most part, however some extreme reasons can cause that to break down. I shoot both archery and several competitive firearm competitions. In the last place I worked there were areas I could *not* operate in because one of the females thought that meant I was unstable and was moments from raping and then murdering everyone in the build
Unfortunately all we have from the auction house is what the person doing the complaining wishes to tell us.
"Translation: What does Brent Spiner know, trust me, you bought the real one from us. (As an aside, does anyone think they deliberately chose this spokesman for his surname?)"
At least according to several posters and people who watched the auction on TV (I thought I was crazy watching c-span live coverage of congressional hearings) the auctioneer explicitly stated that this was not the one worn by Brent Spiner and that there was an error in the catalog.
People are showing the catalog, and if they had bid from the catalog I would tend to agree. However, if one ignored the auctioneer then it is their own fault.
I very well could be Translation: "Brent Spiner told us it was not the one he wore but only a spare, it is misprinted in the catalog and we informed everyone who could cast a bid on the item."
And that translation is MUCH more damaging to the person writing the article than "We stand behind what we said" and all they are telling that they said is "The one seen in episode blah and blah".
Of course, that will come out in the court case. I find both fairly possible, in fact given the reputation of Christie's with their need to maintain it and that the people reporting that have nothing to loose I tend to side with TFA writer to be wrong. In the end assuming it goes to court we will see. I would also say that given that Christie's hasn't offered to settle and are vehemently denying they mislead people I would even guess that if they sold it as "worn by Data" that they have enough evidence past Brent Spiner's testimony behind them. They are 100% where they are by people being able to trust them fully with many-million dollar bids and even offering millions is to keep a mistake quite is *well* worth the money, let alone continuing to argue that they were 100% accurate.
Eh, I suppose it wouldn't be the first time someplace with their reputation did the absolute wrong thing either - though that is VERY rare.
Isn't this pretty much the point of the article? That due to customers mostly listening with bad equipment or compressed formats (mp3's) that the source has been degraded until one can not tell the difference? They are saying the same thing you are - users can't tell the difference, however their point is that the *should*. They are saying that you can not tell the effective difference because they *no longer sale the items where you can* (and they actually more blame the loudness war, of which they claim MP3's are the final end of that). Obviously under that situation one would expect to, well, not tell the difference.
Personally it wasn't until you got into equipment that was so expensive that mostly I couldn't hope to afford it that I told the difference even with recording that *were* good. I have a few pieces of equipment that are good (my headphones are) but that mostly just lets me hear all the imperfections.
Maybe once I can afford the price of my house in audio equipment I may care (and believe me, I would *love* too and am not complaining about anyone who has), but until then I don't so much. I do, however, agree with the idea that the "loudness war" (along with other problems) mostly destroyed most new music out there. Not because I can tell much difference in the quality of recordings but because the music in general is also created to take advantage of it instead of sounding good.
"In any case, you get the guarantee that programs written in this language terminate,"
If your friend has a Turing complete language that can take an arbitrary program and determine if it completes or not (and to ensure it does complete requires you to determine that) then your friend is about to shake up the comp sci world like no other person has. Not only that, but it would reach far into mathematics (even simple math), physics, and many many other fields. A VERY large portion of people out there would like to know how he overcame the paradox inherent the system, especially given all the non-comp sci problems that have been proven to be the equivalent of The Halting Problem.
If, however, he doesn't have a Turing complete language then I question it's usefulness to the general public (I can ensure any program terminates out there by killing it after 1000 steps, but that isn't terribly useful and few have any need of a language to enforce that). Maybe there will be some specific market for it, I would guess there are some embedded systems that may benefit from such a thing, but then I also bet they already do something more specific to their domain with existing well tested languages/environments.
I rather suspect that he/she has created a language few will use, hasn't tested it thoroughly, or will be "close" to releasing it until the end of time. My guess is also that if you think you have created a language that "can not" be broken (and is thus totally bug free) then you also fall into that very same category.
But who knows, maybe both of you will be the first computer scientist to ever win a Nobel prize in Mathematics, or heck your friend will most likely win them in several fields and require a new, more prestigious award to be created. I, for one, would like to see it solved simply because I would be back at square one of my education - I might find it interesting to go back and bother with getting a PhD and going back into research. Heck, if you guys just solved P=NP (a much less harder problem and one many think is true) it may even do the same for me. As is, much like the myriad perpetual motion machines people say they have built, I'm not going to make any life altering changes anticipating it.
To be fair a large portion of the complaints about Western countries (especially the US and Britain) operate under the same ideas. The "World is Going to End" ideas seem popular right now.
In those countries many times things are not decided until a high enough court hears it and lower courts tend to enforce laws passed by the governing body (said governing body doing things it knows will get shot down yet do it anyway, usually because of funding). Unfortunately we see that as every new technology comes out it has to wind its way through the courts even though it is pretty much obvious what the outcome will be. Some use this as a "OMG - You Sucks!!!" opportunity when we (and in this case Japan) really doesn't, and rarely are the systems from the criers any better and usually worse.
That's not to say writing your govt is a waste of time nor is public demonstrations - many times without them things will degrade to a really bad state. However, hyperbole doesn't helps one cause either. While it may help in the short term once it is shown to be horridly inaccurate in the long term you loose any credibility you gained in the interim. Best is to be as truthful as possible in every state transition even if you see greater gains in that transition.
"they don't have any business doing so except to the generally limited extent that it is necessary for their work."
.dat file of random bytes" then you will loose customers. Does it make a technical sense? Not at all, however that is irrelevant - you will loose WAY more customers by doing that than you will by happening to catch a client with child porn. I always try and replicate the "error" as close as possible and that is fairly standard. Heck, I only do it for side money and find this to be true.
From the article, this seems to be the crux of the case - did the tech have the right to go through the files. Given what the court documents say I would gather yes, it was a legitimate thing.
"If they want to test a DVD burner, they can perfectly well use a file that they keep for that purpose."
First off, it is reasonable to use a clients file to do this, I and many many many others regularly do so. And why not? They are there and they are *specifically* the problem. Many on slashdot are saying "why video files?" - well, why anything else you can think of? You have to choose something and with several hundred million people chances are anything you choose someone somewhere will be caught with an illegal file. While an in house file to check this sort of thing would also work, there is no reason to do it above and beyond simply picking one of the clients files - I've *never* had anyone complain about me doing that while they sit and watch me work on their equipment (and there have been times where clients were terribly embarrassed about what was simply noted while I was working on problems).
Secondly, we do not know what the problem was - did they say they had issues burning AVI's (or whatever video format)? If so then it totally makes sense to try them. Yea, data is data but if they happen to have trouble later and you come back with "Yea, I successfully burned a
I do agree that random poking around my hard drive should be taboo - that should be part of what I expect and should be legally enforced. However, from everything I have read from the article it seems as if they simply chose movie files and got some "strange" results, that is perfectly legitimate. If the original complaint was with respect to movies then I would say it is even the *expected procedure*.
And, lastly, we do not know from the article how hidden this stuff was. We know they used the "search" function of windows which reduces the file system to basically flat - but did they scroll through several thousand videos? Was it their first options seen? Was it simply stored in My Documents? A lot of these questions would go a long ways into deciding how much they were prying. If the videos were on his desktop then there should be no legal standing, if they were buried somewhere in an encrypted directory then yea, that is real invasion of privacy. However, I suspect it was somewhere in between and without examining the people who found it I can not make an accurate conclusion.
Even then, while I may very well expect that I would never assume it - especially if I had something truly illegal. I may not care so much about some of the legal (yet taboo) stuff I have (and since the early 90's that has included things on how to make fireworks and such), but if I had something *really* illegal it wouldn't be passed to a second party. Especially assuming I am ignorant of how a computer works (and given that I would be using Circuit City's tech line for simple break and fix work that is a given) I am surely not going to send that over - especially since I have no idea how much they are going to have to pry to get it fixed.
"But I suspect it will be sat on, no doubt something to do with afraid something not under their control may be done with it."
There, I fixed the line for you. That is normally the way these types of things work, I can;t see them giving this site up for any reason whatsoever.
Ever hear of Echelon or Carnivore?
Apparently not since this "secretive, shadowy, unaccountable" program has been around in various forms since - oh sometime in the 50's. In fact, stories from the height of the cold war in the 60's tend to be the most egregious use.
Not to say it's a *good* program, but it's a little late in the game to get this riled up about it. Nor will the next president (even if they have a D by their name) stop it, they will just try and convince you that it is now used for good - much as in the 90's it was supported because it was used in the War on Drugs and to catch those triksy militias everyone hated.
But don't let that get in the way of a good ole fashioned Bush Hating - it's all really his fault and this is all unprecedented.
There are large areas of the countries where this technology will be WAY to expensive to maintain and there is no real technological way to "fix" it as far as I can tell.
You see, people where I live own these things called "firearms" - in this case namely "rifles". Most of us that own them, while not top end marksmen by any stretch of the imagination, shoot well enough to destroy these things. Not only that, but being what we refer to as "rednecks" (however, in rural areas that has a different connotation than in cities, a more appropriate term for most Slashdotter's to understand is "hillbilly" or "country") we do not take to such measures easily and, well, shooting things to destroy them isn't exactly unheard of either - sometimes just for fun let alone when something really needs it.
Our county government recently installed those nice little red light camera's to catch people who run the light, already a number of them have turned up inoperable due to a large amount of swiftly moving projectiles entering the housing and destroying the contents. Interestingly enough, they actually caught one person doing it recently and they guy hadn't ever had a ticket, just thought the dang things were an invasion of privacy and ought to be destroyed. I can't imagine the number of the intrusive devices in this article that would be shot down.
In nearly all major surgeries you will have a fairly large amount (in the two digits) of specialists work on you. It is assumed by the other doctors that each specialist knows what they are doing and doctors generally do not interfere with others. Given that there are thousands of surgeries per year it is not surprising that something get left behind.
.01% chance will result in some left over. I highly suspect that the vast majority of humans in the word would be ecstatic with that success rate (in fact, that success rate is considered impossible) let alone 5 zeroes. Yet doctors are expected to truly have a 0% failure rate.
Now, I agree we can all point to cases where the surgeon closing should have known better (or at least asked), Large sponges, clamps, and many other large obvious objects shouldn't get closed up in you. However I know of several people who had stuff left in them on purpose for short periods of time, those items needed for the body to recover.
Then there are small items, my father had some of his heart monitor wires left in well after they should have been removed - it wasn't until all the doctors signed off on his release that the lest one in line went "Uh oh - this is going to painful". Each one in line thought one of the others had needed and could make up all sorts of reasons why it could be needed.
IMO anything that causes some type of flag to be raised at the end "This is listed as need to remove" is a good thing. Given the number of surgeons/specialists along with the number of surgeries they do even a
Electronic devices are *simple* compared to surgeries and five nines are considered the holy grail, let alone *infinite nines* (and yes, some electronic devices are life critical - see medical devices). Five nines is GREAT even for simple devices. Of course negligence and incompetence are one thing and should be punished (especially in life critical applications), reasonable failure is another.
As of right now, many things.
One is risk - like any non-locally human controlled craft we can send these into places we can not go due to us being fairly fragile. We simply do not have to worry that the pilots return alive.
Another factor is that these aren't really taking the place of full aircraft. These are used to loiter around someplace we think someone is at, look for them, and kill them if they find them (or direct others to kill them, usually from a distance). It is trivial to keep them up in air as long as they have power to do so, we simply switch some guys at a desk. Nor are these generally as large as a "real" aircraft - those humans take up room and have requirements other than simply the physical space they take up sitting still (though combat aircraft designers try and minimize this, it is still well above zero). This makes them much harder for those on the ground to find.
And finally, cost. As expensive as even something like our f-22 is it pales in comparison to the cost of the human flying it. See above for most of the reason as to why we remove the risk against this cost, not to mention many of us are used to controlling things nowadays from a keyboard and joystick. Add in other things like we no longer care what our bodies can sustain but only care what the airframe does (some of these can pull in the 20 and 30 g's) and you have a real case for UAV's.
In short, we have combat fighter pilots telecommuting.
They don't totally replace humans on the field (or in the air) and never will. At the very least war requires humans have their ability to wage war to be removed and that generally involves killing us or damaging us to the point where we can not function. In this case it is just a person behind the controller (or maybe someday the programmer writing the AI) to be the one causing the causalities or be the one taking them. At some point UAV's will make less sense as both sides will have equal access to them and we will back to human vs human.
And, no, latency has not really been an issue as of yet. We have combat air-to-air craft that function well, however at some point attacks against the signal are inevitable (I assume that has been though of in some way).
When we are in the current state where we can sit in a safe spot and inflict casualties on the enemy with little to no ability for them to inflict them back we are crazy to not use it. If we had the equivalent of this for infantry then on our side we would be seeing "body counts" of robots - no matter your opinion on if the Iraq war (or even war at all) is justified it should be obvious why any nation would want to be able to say only robots got blown up or damaged. One may argue that blowing things up is futile, but that id VERY different as to why one would want this.
"1. all things being equal, the sexier sounding name wins. And "empeethree" has a simplistic, yet technical sound to it. Whereas AAC and WMA can be thrown right out the window. Ogg has some appeal, but nowhere near the sexiness of mp3."
:) ).
This is one of the bigger problems with a lot of Open Source stuff - few of us are good at marketing. Like me, most people who name projects have some inane reason that all us other geeks find highly amusing an like. However, how many people want to ask for all you oggs? Much easier to ask for even AAC's of WMA'S (though many hunters will wonder why are you asking for their wildlife management areas
"3. Now.. as to being "inferior" technically. You need only to look at things like DC and AC, VHS and Betamax or Amiga and PC (oh boy, am I gonna get it for that last one) to see that the technically superior solution is not always the one that ends up on top."
And here is one of the other main obstacles to true acceptance of most open source products. It's not nearly as bad today as it was back then, for one thing some commercial companies are now involved. Nor can I blame developers - it is mostly volunteer work I also do not find dealing with everyday consumers to be fun (thus I do not volunteer my time answering inane questions either). However, general acceptance needs that sort of thing. "Technically better" involves more than which is capable of producing better sound at a specific file size.
The fact that it took many years to have a decoder that was easy to install and easy to use (especially outside of Linux) is one of the main things that killed OGG. When the "format war" (such as it was) was going on you had to be highly computer literate to use the stuff (including the players, in the earlier days you even had to understand the math behind the compression). By the time someone finally made it so that it could be used by the general populace the war was over, and the MP3 format had fired one shot to finish it.
Once MP3 had won you are going to have to produce something obviously superior. At one time disk space would have been important - but now who cares? Ogg isn't it, about the only people who still talk about it much are the ones who were it's army at the time (I still have quite a few ogg files and anything I rip is of that format). All it takes is to look at how strong Microsoft pushes it's stuff, how much power they have, and how they have mostly failed to see that something like OGG isn't going to make it as the most popular format.
Again, such is the life of much of the open source world. Ones I have contributed too I'm no better. For it to win it needs a commercial company to try and do the non-fun stuff (after all, why am I going to donate most of my free time doing something not-fun). Then you have the give and take from those that agree with people like Stallman and those that agree with ESR and those that do not care. I find the whole thing interesting both as an observer and as an occasional participant (and I tend to fall into the "I do not care" crowd - either one is perfectly fine by me, it just needs to be decided per project and people need to accept the consequences of those choices).
A large portion of what you are describing is a type of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. While not exactly the same, it is derived from the same mindset and it covers WAY more than just child rearing.
:)
For instance, I live in the mountains of East Tennessee. I can't tell you how many times I've been told to bike to work and my larger vehicle is Evil(TM), that is totally impractical to me. I've been told that if I get into shape it will be fine, that I'm simply a liar, all sorts of thing (though usually just ignored). The reason it is impractical? There is one particular hill - and a large one - that if/when I am driving my mothers four cylinder manual I have to turn the air conditioning off because the vehicle can barely make it up the hill let alone with more people in the vehicle (car pooling and all). It is either go that way or add another 5 or so miles to the trip - neither one is acceptable. Moving close to work doesn't help due to that fact that my job changes too often, we do not have dense urban style housing (and frankly can not due to the terrain). Heck, just to get out of my subdivision from my house requires you to drop over 60 feet, rise another 70, drop around 50, and finally go up another 50 feet (and these numbers are fairly accurate - we did the engineering for the subdivision and it required A LOT of earth to be moved to makes it down to that point). That's more hills than the vast majority of people will *ever* see just to get to the main highway let alone the rest of what we refer to as "rolling hills".
My area isn't going to get subways either - it is all rocks and caves. My parents are land surveyors and I worked with them through the 80'2 and 90's. It was just about as much work going back and routing around what they called "voids" (read caves). Some of those are LARGE, I recall one particularly large void where they had used a 300ft rope and had not found the bottom (VERY disconcerting to know you are standing over such a thing). Yea, we are going to get a subway through that type of thing. Even with public transportation such as buses it requires fairly strenuous walking, especially with groceries or all the items needed for work (laptops, books, etc) - see the above hill that is fairly common around here.
When I worked at a national lab we frequently had students, they normally had two shocks. First was going from a fairly urban area to a rural one (though there were quite a few that were just as rural and in a few cases more so than us) and the second was getting used to the topography. There are amusing stories about being kinda scared of how dark the city was, not realizing that street signs that show "sharp turn" mean 90 degrees or greater instead of just a small bend, and having trouble giving directions - my definition of "flat" was theirs of "really big hill" and I told how to get places by how many hills to pass and most wanted how many intersections to go through. To be fair, when I went other places I had my own share of "shocks" too
You see lots of people hawk sun power for everyone from places where they get enough sun, wind power from places that get a lot of wind, geothermal from places who can do it, all sorts of things being pushed to be forced on the whole country (and at the UN level the whole world) when it is impractical outside of local areas. The vast majority of these things are very good for those that are pushing them, just not so good for many others.
This is why I think most power should be local. No it doesn't solve everything - what you are describing is more a generational thing (the baby boomers have the population), but I think it would help. At the very least it is a more healthy view of the world and would hopefully bleed into the things you describe.
"Yellow press..... yes, I know, /. is not supposed to have any credibility like any other parasite news sites, but anyway...."
As far as I can tell they are no worse than "normal" news. Planted questions in townhall meetings, political convention members used as "undecided voters" (and you will note in both of those I did not name a political party as it is standard practice for *all* sides including so called "third" parties), individual reporters feelings presented as fact on technical issues, payed "stories" about products, so on and so on.
While the above is American centric it isn't hard to find it in French, British, German, or any of the "free world" let alone the "semi-free" (like Russia) or the "non-free". Some places are a little better, some places a little worse but over all if you had to live off the differences then you would starve to death. Yea, some may be conservative, liberal, "other", Microsoft centric, linux centric, or whichever way they lean (and from that point of view they are quite different) but that isn't what I'm talking about - I mean honesty and attempting to simply inform people in a fairly balanced manner. It's comical seeing them talk about how unbiased and fair they are (though I think some commentators say it more tongue in cheek and are somewhat making fun of the people they work for).
At the least everyone pretty much knows how Slashdot is biased and they don't try and hide it. I may very much disagree with that bias, but as bad as it can get it tends to be better than anything higher than local news (and that will vary by quite a bit), not to mention there will be enough readers jumping on them for gross mistakes.
I just don't understand those type of "standards" - they do not really make much sense.
:)
If you are writing "Must Always Work" software (which is what you are saying) then there is no way you can adequately test to meet what *should* be compliance in 8 hours unless the software is trivial, let alone identify the bug and fix it. Heck, you would be lucky to have 48 hour turnaround if you put the whole team on it for the 48 hours solid though a 72 hour is normally doable.
Yea, 99/100 times you simply unit test and it works (what I normally do, but nothing I've written is mission critical in that sense - if my stuff breaks I just get another phone call and I would normally start the regression testing after sending patches out), the problem is that 1/100 time that you break something else that used to work, that break is usually MUCH more major than the bug you were trying to fix. For most software this is quite acceptable, it is pretty much the "best" in terms of the cost/benefit - but if you truly have highly critical software then "best" usually isn't at the most benefit for the cheapest cost
It just amazes me the number of software developers who seem to think this is somehow being "secure" - heck there are several posters in this thread that say that security fixes should be under 12 hours and all of theirs are usually under 6 - I *really* do not want a "security" person who think that unit testing is perfectly adequate and turns out a fix 3 or four hours after finding it. If your software is small enough that you can identify, isolate, fix, and regression test everything in under 6-12 hours then your software is small and not really what the OP is asking about.
Of course, the above is how your industry is regulated (I have no idea if you think it is peachy keen or actually understand why things like regression testing are important for software that truly must be robust and secure) - I've seen the same thing in other industries I've worked in and it boggles my mind how many do not - and can not - see why there is a problem with their software production model. I generally bet that even if your bosses understood why it is a bad idea they probably do not care (and I bet only a few understand why) - after all they are following industry standards and they always have us to blame when unit testing in an attempt to get high turnaround time introduces a major bug regardless of the fact that it is a problem with your development cycle.
I knew someone about 10-15 years ago that it happened too - they lost (in Tennessee).
Of course, not being a lawyer I can't say - however I rather suspect it is quite enforceable if you create something the company works on. That is - if you work for Microsoft and you invent some nifty software at home you have little to stand on (especially if you are a software engineer). I think it would be fairly easy for them to argue that you, at the very least, used company resources to learn and you are payed to write software (effectively the case of the person I mentioned above). The further away you go from there I simply do not know - I know that some places hire you as a "researcher" to make that as broad as possible. As to how enforceable that is I would guess it would depend on your state (and the one case I personally know of is old enough new laws may vary well have been passed).
I'm also under the impression that short term non-competes are pretty much enforceable. While I didn't personally know any people who fought them, there were quite a number of news stories about such contracts during the DotCom bubble. Many had *permanent* non-competes, that was obviously unenforceable, but the trade mags said that the limited, reasonable term stuff was. Reasonable being up to the judge and state legislature and of course a state may very well totally nullify such things too.
Of course, were I the OP I would get a lawyer to look at it - there should at least be some monetary compensation for those six months if the company was the one to decide to terminate the position. I rather suspect that the "all inventions" clause could be re-worded to where both sides are happy.
In both cases I can see the point of the employer - they do not want you to have advance internal knowledge of their product, quit, and go "sell" yourself to their main competitor (and that could very well happen given how much some software is worth, how much money several companies have, and that those companies aren't the most honest places on the planet). I can also see why a software company would feel they own your software if you are a software engineer, they are paying you to do that and there is no way you can totally separate yourself from the company.
Of course if they terminate your employment with them then they should not be able to detain you from earning an income for those six months nor should they own a lawnmower blade you made if you are a software engineer.
Normally such things *can* be negotiated without a big hassle.
You are not going to win this argument - the sides have been drawn and you bring no new information to the table. All of us have already made up our minds.
You have the two sides that care and then the rest of us that do not. It's not that I do no understand it - I've been an academic weenie for quite some time and find these things highly entertaining, yet I just don't care when it comes to my money. If I had to choose I prefer the base 2 definition as it makes the most sense, yet as long as I can compare two devices I do not care of they use "miblywinks" to rate their storage size - I just want something I know what they mean and standard across devices.
In the end what file table I decide to use has more impact as to the usable size of my hard drive than if they use base 2 or base 10. That is WAY more confusing and "dishonest" than the esoteric idea of which standard you use. I find that I spend more time explaining why their 105gb (converted to base 2) device shows much less than that (also in base 2) when they click on it to non technical people. But then, do we then standardize on NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, EXT3, REISERFS, or ExoMibFS? Again, as long as I can compare apples to apples I could care less, just lets standardize on one.
It's not a big deal to anyone who has half an idea what is being discussed, but most people do not know it. That isn't making fun of anyone - that is what those of us in IT are payed for. Lets face it, how many of us know what the building set backs for Residential One zones are - that is what Land Surveyors are for and there are going to be more of us worried if our house meets zoning laws than if our hard drives capacity is based on base 2 or base 10. Yet how many that feel that average people should know this know their local zoning laws (or land laws) to the extent we expect people to know computer technology (and there is WAY more money involved with land)? Unfortunately to many do no trust their IT professionals like they do the professionals they hire in other areas - but that is a different complaint.
I too noticed that, however I can't come to the conclusion that you did.
For it to be true they would have had to have a good recording of his voice while doing the crime - that in and of itself is going to be hard. But lets assume for a moment that he defeated the video camera and was singing loudly enough to be clear (surely if they are recording audio then they are video), then they need to have the ability to compare this voice to most of the people who call into any call center that he may call - not very likely if for no other reason than computation power let alone cost and him being a high priority enough of a target (they may very well do that for some global criminal - but this guy?).
More than likely something was misreported. I would rather think that the people that the parts were stolen from reported it, had a tech support call from someone, and the Secret Service simply matched the call to the person they arrested (along with the equipment). The *best* I could give is that they somehow recorded enough of his voice and sent it out to any place that co-operates with them which is quite acceptable and even then that is quite unlikely due to nothing more than computational cost.
Of course, as I have read in other places - if they are listening then Fuck the President and the horse he rode in on. Iraq is a quagmire and he is a retard for continuing support of it and should be deposed from his office along with all his Republican Shills, Cheney is the anti-christ and the Neo-cons deserve to assault an Iraqi insurgent stronghold unarmed and unarmored to prove their point - Long live our democrat overlords!!! (I'm still here and have posted similar things many times - oh well maybe one day the Jack booted Thugs will come here to take me to the secret gulag and I can make the news for killing them all).
I won't say the govt doesn't listen, in fact I am sure they do and have for a LONG time - we know of fairly pervasive electronic eavesdropping during Clinton's term (and it was sophisticated enough that it just didn't spring out of nowhere), but they aren't going to let that program slip for something this simple nor do would it be anywhere near this granular. If this is all you are worried over you have missed the boat long ago and has little to do with Democrat or Republican (though, to be fair, from your post I can't tell if you are like many that seem to think their side doesn't do it). One real problem is that *real* stuff doesn't get reported because of paranoid crap that should have immediately been ignored.
Other than a specific crowd that will purchase anything neat (and I am very much in that group) who cares about any of those issue?
To largely replace paper books we need a minimum of large size, lots of contrast, rugged construction, light weight, and generally usable anywhere for long periods of time. We are no where *near* that. Add in cost and being able to make marks on it being a requirement for many applications and we have some real issues.
Size, rugged, and battery life do not go together. I need something I can carry in my car, backpack, or just mostly leave lying around and not have it break or get scratched to the point of unusable. I need to be able to expect to take it to most places I go and have it work *and* be readable at the same time - having to have it plugged up every 10 hours is, in many cases, unacceptable.
That is only concerning replacing books, let alone paper. Can I fold it and stick it in my pocket? Will I care if I happen to destroy it? If I can't stick it in my pocket what good does it do me? If I can't carry it in any place other than carefully controlled environments due to its cost - again what good does it do me? Heck, if I can not make a note and give it to someone else that doesn't have one what good does it do me? Everyone on the planet isn't going to carry around their e-paper (which can not be folded, carried in their pocket, exposed to water, exposed to much shock, exposed to high/low temperatures, and all the other things any current or foreseeable future technology has to offer).
E-paper has not come close to its window - it hasn't even come close to the point that most people would seriously look at it. Heck, even the totally made up stuff we saw in Star Trek didn't really replace paper books, let alone paper. That's not to say it will not happen (I think it will), but anything I have remotely seen companies working on do not come close to meeting the requirements to replace paper. They are trying to force books/paper into existing technology and technological paradigms instead of trying to make electronics work like books/paper.
Among them is finding a business model that allows the hardware makers to subsidize the cost of the music
We have already seen that most of those that pirate music still purchase CD's - in fact we consistently see that those that pirate music are the *highest* purchasers of music. Why do they need to incorporate this - it is already subsidized in the outrageous cost for a CD?
Allow it to play anything and make your money off 15 dollar CD's like they always have. Put lyrics, art, higher quality recordings (that is, non-compressed just like they currently do), and other things most music enthusiast want for the music they really want and let everything else go. For quite a few years now those purchasing music do so because they want too and feel they get value from their money, not because they have too or lawsuits. In fact my bet is that there are more that refuse to purchase because of the lawsuits than they gain from people refusing to download.
Even though I used the term "outrageous cost" I purchased quite a number of CD's until I finally got fed up with what they were doing, I haven't purchased one in years (nor have I downloaded music - while they like to pretend otherwise they know that also supports them in their crusade). While I thought it was over priced having a decent copy with the CD jacket was worth the cost for the stuff I liked.
At some point that will *have* to be the business model as Pandora's Box has been opened on MP3's and other compressed music (the only impediment to non-compressed is hard drive space and that will most likely be "fixed" some day also). They can't close it and *must* come to terms with it somewhere down the road - it is just a matter of how much "collateral damage" there is in the interim.
Not to mention I am willing to bet that many would pay quite a bit extra for a player that offered you indemnity to lawsuits from the RIAA (that is - your downloads/uploads are legal) and they would still get the CD purchases they are currently getting, plus the ones they have turned away from their lawsuits. They really should look at this as tons and tons and tons of free bandwidth. Heck, I would even side with them on harsh punishments if they just required a copyright notice (complete with some advertisement) with every download - in a sense a BSD licensed music download. Still plenty of reasons to purchased a CD, lots of free advertisement, and lots of free bandwidth.
The law, as intended, makes some amount of sense.
It was *supposed* to apply to commercial applications of the broadcast - that is, the broadcast is part of your business/what you are selling. For instance, lets say CBS broadcast a football game and you want to have "Football Night" - it makes some sense for you to pay CBS for it. Same thing goes for bands making a living copying others songs or playing their music at a dance or bar. That has always been the intent of Copyright and there needs to be some level of it.
In this case it is stupid, for one thing the restaurant patrons would probably rather not be bothered with the noise anyway. It is not part of the businesses but someone playing their music too loud. I doubt the original intent of the law was to deal with this and that includes the original intent of the recording industry when they lobbied for it.
This is just their current over zealous idiocy trying to "protect" their stuff. Before too long their "protection" is going to be equivalent to going to hide in a large cave and prattling on and on about their "precious" in fear that others will get a hold of it.