I had a tech come by to fix a line issue. When his fix didn't work, he needed a computer to debug with. I let him use an extra laptop I had lying around. The jerk put some kind of Comcast toolbar on IE. I don't remember the details, but removing it was not trivial. Not insane, maybe, but definitely designed to be annoying for the average user to remove. I'm not sure if the tech was pressured to do that or if it was just something that the page he was told to access from users' machines did automatically. I just re-imaged the thing, but still. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
This was my favorite out of the Hitchiker's series. It has the normal quirkiness and whit of a Douglas Adams book, but is overall a great love story. This book can stand alone from the others in the series and still make sense. A lot of it happens on Earth to "normal" people and, in my opinion, really highlights Adams' versatility as a story teller.
What is Sci-Fi and Fantasy? I thought I knew until I started listening to Escape Pod and Pod Castle, both short-fiction pod casts.
I always considered myself "not all that into sci-fi or fantasy". Both of these shows exposed me to such a wide array of stories that I don't even know what Sci-Fi or Fantasy is anymore. The line between those are blurred. As sometimes is the line between those and "traditional" fiction as well.
Steve Eley (host of Escape Pod) referred to both genres as "Speculative Fiction". That's something I can get behind. The world can be flashy, and the gimmick can be amusing, but a good story is a good story. Short fiction is good because the reader can survey a large variety without investing too much in the duds.
Sci-Fi certainly has its duds. Lots of them for sure. But the Gems. Wow.
Often, these bot nets are designed to install software for commission. The company paying the commission should be held accountable. They can play dumb and claim that they didn't know it was being installed in this manner, sure. But it would be fairly simple to make it so the installed software makes itself known to the user. It would be fairly simple to make it easy to un-install as well.
I know there are ways around it. But, it'd be great to see the companies selling the products that are making revenue to be accountable. They are enabling it. And they know it.
yeah. I thought that was odd too. It's not a Google product. I'm glad to see that it's not Google, and I'm also glad that it uses Google. It goes to show that allowing others to use your platform can help innovation.
well, 31.. because I don't think "00000" would be a particularly useful "key press". But,point taken. But, I remember seeing a blind / deaf man using a braille typewriter when I was a kid. It was very similar to what you describe. The point there being.. with just a small amount of buttons (6 for braille, one for morse!), you can relay quite a bit of information.
With the knowledge of penmanship goes the ability to sign a pact with the Devil in one's own blood. I suppose a syringe and an empty ink cartridge would do the trick, but why bother? Whatever Life trouble you are trying to bypass with such a pact cannot seriously be as bad as the anxiety this will cause. Imagine the stress of not only owing your soul to Satan, but also to living your life in fear of litigation from Canon, Epson and the like for breaking the DMCA by refilling those cartridges.
No sir. I am glad to see the day of this cursed writing.
What I have to go by is the fact that I personally know 5 people who had the XBox issue. I've never met anyone who said their PS3 bombed out. Maybe more people own the XBox. But my impression is that the 360 is not very reliable. That's the major why I bought a PS3 recently instead of an XBox. I could be wrong, but I went with my gut on it.
I would welcome less noise on an eBook store, and if this honestly is quality control, that's a good thing.
A delay may also be necessary to ensure something actually is public domain.
I just don't see the conspiracy here that I would like to see. It's certainly in Amazon's interest to provide any literature that their competitors might.
For the last decade, I've been eking by on the "well, can a robot tie it's own tie?" Hey, at least there's still "sleeping one's way to the top". And once robots learn to do that... is anyone REALLY going to want to leave their house for a stupid JOB anyway?
I didn't bother reading the whole thing. As many people did, I glanced first at the annotations. They are composed primarily of editorial "neener neener" than anything insightful.
At least Cracked Magazine would have made an attempt at humor to make up for the lack of substance.
Near all fire alarms? That sets off its own alarm? I don't imagine kids will casually pull that thing just so they can make a call. Then again.. I guess I shouldn't underestimate these kids!
I suppose it would be hard to talk to a 911 operator with that alarm going off, but still... I'm sure their used to hearing alarms.
So.. suppose their output includes a repetition of your input. Suppose you input a copyrighted phrase or image? Would that not invalidate their copyright claim? They can claim design elements, sure. But this is a real stretch.
Patent Schmatent. Apple already has just invented something that IMPROVES upon that. It's called the podcast. It's also capable providing meta data to an online store and supports multiple channels. This version works on iPods too!
Criminal A: Hey.. let's crash that cell phone tower! Criminal B: YEA! I love evil plans. Let's DO IT! Criminal A: How can we do it? Criminal B: I Know... with this jail-broke phone! Criminal A: But that would be illegal. Criminal B: Rats. Foiled again.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that? Could they sue me for copying their scanned version? Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
We've been pushing to go from Paper to Digital. It's interesting that they're going in the opposite direction here. The article has no mention of the Kindle. I find it hard to believe that the Kindle doesn't play some big role in this. Perhaps they will offer these books for free on the Kindle to help push the device? Personally, I think they should be online and free.
Even if they attacks were proven to come from the UK... even if they came from North Korea, Nigeria, or Witchita KS..
Does that really tell us about the culprit? It just tells us from where the attacks were launched. This could be because the attacker is from that area, or because the attacker wants to appear to be from that area.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a tech come by to fix a line issue. When his fix didn't work, he needed a computer to debug with. I let him use an extra laptop I had lying around. The jerk put some kind of Comcast toolbar on IE. I don't remember the details, but removing it was not trivial. Not insane, maybe, but definitely designed to be annoying for the average user to remove. I'm not sure if the tech was pressured to do that or if it was just something that the page he was told to access from users' machines did automatically. I just re-imaged the thing, but still. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
This was my favorite out of the Hitchiker's series. It has the normal quirkiness and whit of a Douglas Adams book, but is overall a great love story. This book can stand alone from the others in the series and still make sense. A lot of it happens on Earth to "normal" people and, in my opinion, really highlights Adams' versatility as a story teller.
What is Sci-Fi and Fantasy? I thought I knew until I started listening to Escape Pod and Pod Castle, both short-fiction pod casts.
I always considered myself "not all that into sci-fi or fantasy". Both of these shows exposed me to such a wide array of stories that I don't even know what Sci-Fi or Fantasy is anymore. The line between those are blurred. As sometimes is the line between those and "traditional" fiction as well.
Steve Eley (host of Escape Pod) referred to both genres as "Speculative Fiction". That's something I can get behind. The world can be flashy, and the gimmick can be amusing, but a good story is a good story. Short fiction is good because the reader can survey a large variety without investing too much in the duds.
Sci-Fi certainly has its duds. Lots of them for sure. But the Gems. Wow.
Often, these bot nets are designed to install software for commission. The company paying the commission should be held accountable. They can play dumb and claim that they didn't know it was being installed in this manner, sure. But it would be fairly simple to make it so the installed software makes itself known to the user. It would be fairly simple to make it easy to un-install as well.
I know there are ways around it. But, it'd be great to see the companies selling the products that are making revenue to be accountable. They are enabling it. And they know it.
yeah. I thought that was odd too. It's not a Google product. I'm glad to see that it's not Google, and I'm also glad that it uses Google. It goes to show that allowing others to use your platform can help innovation.
There's a video here of a demo being performed for some VCs. http://www.micello.com/
Pretty "lively" CEO. It's a good sign when the person pushing a product comes off as genuinely enthusiastic.
well, 31.. because I don't think "00000" would be a particularly useful "key press". But,point taken. But, I remember seeing a blind / deaf man using a braille typewriter when I was a kid. It was very similar to what you describe. The point there being.. with just a small amount of buttons (6 for braille, one for morse!), you can relay quite a bit of information.
With the knowledge of penmanship goes the ability to sign a pact with the Devil in one's own blood. I suppose a syringe and an empty ink cartridge would do the trick, but why bother? Whatever Life trouble you are trying to bypass with such a pact cannot seriously be as bad as the anxiety this will cause. Imagine the stress of not only owing your soul to Satan, but also to living your life in fear of litigation from Canon, Epson and the like for breaking the DMCA by refilling those cartridges.
No sir. I am glad to see the day of this cursed writing.
What I have to go by is the fact that I personally know 5 people who had the XBox issue. I've never met anyone who said their PS3 bombed out. Maybe more people own the XBox. But my impression is that the 360 is not very reliable. That's the major why I bought a PS3 recently instead of an XBox. I could be wrong, but I went with my gut on it.
I cannot find it.
I would welcome less noise on an eBook store, and if this honestly is quality control, that's a good thing.
A delay may also be necessary to ensure something actually is public domain.
I just don't see the conspiracy here that I would like to see. It's certainly in Amazon's interest to provide any literature that their competitors might.
For the last decade, I've been eking by on the "well, can a robot tie it's own tie?" Hey, at least there's still "sleeping one's way to the top". And once robots learn to do that... is anyone REALLY going to want to leave their house for a stupid JOB anyway?
See! I told you that kid ain't my son.
I didn't bother reading the whole thing. As many people did, I glanced first at the annotations. They are composed primarily of editorial "neener neener" than anything insightful.
At least Cracked Magazine would have made an attempt at humor to make up for the lack of substance.
Well... that's just your opinion. I bet these pre-historic spiders are HUGE! Maybe even close to the size of spiders from the future.
Of COURSE they're GIANT spiders. If they weren't would it be News for Nerds? And would it matter? I think not.
Near all fire alarms? That sets off its own alarm? I don't imagine kids will casually pull that thing just so they can make a call. Then again.. I guess I shouldn't underestimate these kids!
I suppose it would be hard to talk to a 911 operator with that alarm going off, but still... I'm sure their used to hearing alarms.
So.. suppose their output includes a repetition of your input. Suppose you input a copyrighted phrase or image? Would that not invalidate their copyright claim? They can claim design elements, sure. But this is a real stretch.
Patent Schmatent. Apple already has just invented something that IMPROVES upon that. It's called the podcast. It's also capable providing meta data to an online store and supports multiple channels. This version works on iPods too!
Criminal A: Hey.. let's crash that cell phone tower!
Criminal B: YEA! I love evil plans. Let's DO IT!
Criminal A: How can we do it?
Criminal B: I Know... with this jail-broke phone!
Criminal A: But that would be illegal.
Criminal B: Rats. Foiled again.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that? Could they sue me for copying their scanned version? Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
We've been pushing to go from Paper to Digital. It's interesting that they're going in the opposite direction here. The article has no mention of the Kindle. I find it hard to believe that the Kindle doesn't play some big role in this. Perhaps they will offer these books for free on the Kindle to help push the device? Personally, I think they should be online and free.
You mean.. sometimes these broads really are blond?
In other news... "Internet addicts treated with electricity". The real story here is that this is there to be banned in the first place.
Even if they attacks were proven to come from the UK... even if they came from North Korea, Nigeria, or Witchita KS..
Does that really tell us about the culprit? It just tells us from where the attacks were launched. This could be because the attacker is from that area, or because the attacker wants to appear to be from that area.
It's a clue. Nothing more.
Your personal black box
Gore-Techs