The average security guard/police officer is not involved in electronics
Then perhaps they aught not hold jobs where they make life-and-death decisions about
whether a given device can blow up or not.
The guys actually carrying bombs will fashion them to look very much like a
laptop or novelty lamp or some other harmless electronic device. They'll make their
next improvised knife-like weapon out of the razor-sharp RF shielding inside their
cell phones or GBAs. They'll synchronize their attacks by a lunar eclipse or some
other natural phenomena.
She did something very, very stupid and is lucky to have walked away alive.
On that, we agree completely - Don't fuck with the guys with guns.
That doesn't make it "right".
The police acted with great restraint and should be commended for it.
By not shooting someone based on (as you yourself point out) their complete lack of
understanding of both electronics and explosives?
I don't think the greatest comedic geniuses of history could have written a more
scathing indictment of modern society than your exact words.
In addition we have only his side of the story, and the
comments to his story point out discrepancies.
In this case, no "other side of the story" exists. If he had
actually shoplifted, the city wouldn't have settled.
Not often, but sometimes, the world really does offer
us black-and-white situations. A guy stood up for his rights,
got a smack-down for it, and gets to pay $7500 for the
honor. And why? Not because the prosecutor considered
him in-the-wrong, but admittedly to protect the city
from a civil liability suit. you just don't get a more
clear-cut abuse of the legal system than that.
Go West (or East) until you hit a large body of salty water. Keep going.
Welcome to the rest of the world, not (yet) a wholly-owned and occupied
subsidiary of Haliburton.
Perhaps next time you rant against "the aristocracy" you might do a
bit of research first.
Good idea. And next time you tell someone the weather, look outside
before vehemently insisting your bedroom remains rain-free.
No one said anything about being free or public domain.
When someone describes the works of a dead author going online in
some archival form, "in an effort to preserve the contents digitally
while making the collection easily available to both academics and
the general public", the idea of "for free" implicitly tags along
for the ride.
If you want to "preserve" an intangible and/or make it
"easily available" to everyone, you don't charge for it.
You give it away to anyone who will take it.
Furthermore, while I have no problem with rewarding an artist
for their work, I do have a problem with continuing to
pay them after they've died. I will never understand how the
aristocracy managed to get the plebes to buy into the idea
of leaving one's heirs a "legacy". For most of us, that
means getting nothing, or worse than nothing - Thanks
to modern medicine keeping people alive long after they should
have died, more people today pass on massive debt than
any sort of estate.
You can skip the brief article and go straight to the archives.
...Where you can add any of Heinlin's works to your cart, for a low, low
price. They take Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, and Discover.
Hey, if I link to the "complete" works of another great author on
Amazon, can I make FP too? Or does it have to belong to some "special"
collection selling out?
and then go for whom the heck you think will do the best job
Not a single ballot will have an "Anyone but these megalomaniacal
inbred (m/b)illionaires" option. So our current system quite
effectively prevents me from taking your advice.
Most ballots don't even allow write-ins anymore, so you can't vote
for the classics such as Mickey Mouse, Norton II, or Adolph Hitler.
...you have a hardware problem. Check your power supply,
you may be suffering what we in the trade call a +5SB undervolt.
The same problem with a racked PowerEdge server (RHEL), a top-of-the-line
Latitude laptop (XP), and a hand-built greybox (XP, Slackware, Knoppix)
using some of the highest quality parts available (ABit KN8-SLI, Seasonic
power supply, OCZ memory)?
I would tend to agree with you for a one-off problem. But those three
have literally nothing in common.
Like I said, perhaps I just have bad luck with USB. But I can only
let it burn me so many times before I conclude the interface
itself (or at least, most implementations thereof) sucks rather than
merely my experiences with it.
Yes, it affected Apple, too, but It was a general "hack" that
affected WiFi chipsets on other platforms, including non-Apple
hardware, Windows, and Linux! That's the whole point of why
people took issue with this, and it's still being perpetuated here!
Linux folks readily admit when kernel modules have bugs in serious need
of repair. Windows users pretty much accept poor security as a fact
of daily life.
But Mac users... They would call a dead pixel a "feature intended to
relieve eye-strain from prolonged use - Not that the gorgeous appearance
of OS-X could ever cause eye strain, but Steve just loves us all that
much, always looking out for us".
So when an actual, undeniable vulnerability appears, well, you'll
have to forgive us for rubbing a bit of salt in the wound.
This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use.
Faster, yes. Easier?
Perhaps I count as an extremely unlucky outlier in my experiences with
USB in general, but I have found it one of the buggiest PC interfaces
ever. And I include VL graphics cards in that list.
XP and a modern machine finally seem capable of handling simple
things like USB1 keyboards and mice properly. Printers, still asking for
a reservation at the sanitarium. Cameras, not too bad, but they only need
to work for five minutes at a time.
But HDDs... I've dealt with four different models on three different
PCs running four different OSs (yes, four OSs on three PCs - I actually
reinstalled three different Linux distros, using 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6
kernels, just to recover data I had trusted to an external
USB HDD). And they all have exactly the same problem - They
randomly drop offline just when you start hitting them the hardest.
Under XP, they appear and dissapear on a whim. Some days you can't
even get them to stay connected long enough to format them, while others
(rarely) you might have it work all day long.
Under Linux, I've had what you could technically call a better
experience - As long as I limit it to UHCI (ie, slow old 12mbit
USB1.1), it works great, rock solid. Toss in the EHCI driver to allow
a decent transfer rate, and it zips along nicely - For about 45 seconds,
after which it decides to offline itself until a reboot (even removing
and reinserting the module doesn't let you bring it back up).
So... Forgive my skepticism, but the thought of a newer-faster-buggier-than-ever
version of USB just doesn't get me all that excited. I think I'd use
the phrase "fills me with dread".
People in the market for a 10~100 dollar (fake) Rolex are not the same people who are in the market for a 5,000~10,000 dollar Rolex
Bingo. I think only you, in this entire discussion so far, even read the FP, much less TFA.
Counterfeiting != Piracy, people.
The RIAA has a pretty good argument (even if they use massively inflated numbers) when they say
that the average person who pirated popular-song-X might have bought it instead. That
doesn't scale up to tens of thousands of songs, but as a one-off, they have a valid point.
When the IACC tries to make the same argument, it falls completely flat.
These jokers make the RIAA look reasonable by comparison. The average person simply will not ever
buy a $1500 handbag or a $5000 watch. This organization doesn't protect the average Joe (they even admit the
counterfeit goods usually have comparable quality to the real thing, making them harder to spot); They don't
protect the manufacturers (since counterfeiting results in no lost sales); They don't help anyone
but the mega-rich.
They make sure Paris Hilton doesn't need to run home and change because her cellmate wore the same
(if $10k cheaper) shoes to the press conference.
C.1 To control a dangerous or violent subject when deadly
force does not appear to be justified and/or necessary;
You forgot the precursor - "Have a suspect of some kind, relevant
to an actual crime".
The guy did nothing (legally) wrong in the first place. Every
human has both a right and an obligation to resist wrongful arrest
with as much force as it requires. This guy, while rude and boorish,
attended a PUBLIC event and tried to use it for precisely its
superficial purpose - To ask questions.
Illustrating hypocrisy has not, to the best of my knowledge, become
a crime yet.
And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100
GB Cap on downloads do the same.
You'll notice I didn't actually complain about that as a limit - I
consider it quite reasonable, for now. Even given all that
I said, my monthly usage usually comes out to only 25-35GB. I don't
think I've ever broken 50GB.
I do, however, have a problem with companies that first offer "unlimited"
yet kick off those who use too much; Then simply don't mention limits
anywhere; Then phrase their limits in terms not applicable to the
very people to whom they most apply.
Yeah, John Q probably thinks in terms of songs/pictures/emails per
month, and goes "ooh, big numbers!" when limited to 30,000 of them.
But to John Q, the idea of a monthly cap means nothing. He not
only has no chance of hitting it, he also has no idea how much he
actually uses every month.
But these caps don't exist for John Q. They exist for geeks who
know very well how much they use, and chose an "unlimited" service
for precisely that reason. And I for one find it highly insulting
that Comcast would phrase their limits in subjective terms not even
remotely applicable to the people most likely to get nailed by such
caps. You and I both know, as you pointed out, that Comcast means
30,000 3MB MP3 songs, not 20+MB FLAC or 50+MB raw WAV files. They
need to say as much, not play games solely for the purpose of making
it harder to comparate pricing between broadband providers.
The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that
Microsoft had abused its dominant market position.
Surprise surprise, a European court decided to rob an American
company of half a billion dollars, after said company complied
with order after absurd order to change its practices.
"The People" want a Media-Player-less version, comrade? Okay...
Gee, no one seems to have bought XP-N.
Open the file formats? Here, have some source code. Not good
enough? How about we just use XML? Still not good enough?
Here, let us lube up Balmer's derriere for you...
No one can compete with Microsoft because, put simply, Microsoft
has a "good enough" product; not "great", just "okay". They
understand, and have embraced, the principle of mediocrity at
the sweet price-point, and have thrived as a result. A free
web browser couldn't compete because MSIE works out of the box.
But people still had the choice to install a number of alternatives - And
most chose not to.
I also prefer losslessly stored images to JPEGs,
on the order of 10-20MB per picture. As for email,
I'll readily admit that those take up only a few KB
each.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously
deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
I chose "D - The listed metrics do not represent actual usage".
My downloading of music, pictures, and email accounts
for probably quite a bit less than 10% of my total.
Videos (legal) alone probably come in at 3x music+pics+email.
Game demos probably match that. And then I have the low level
of background traffic to monitor systems I remotely admin for
friends and relatives - Low at any given moment, but probably
20% of my total overall. And don't forget the ever-popular/.
exuse of Linux ISOs - Massively overstated on the whole, I'll
agree, but every few months, it easily adds another 3-5GB to
my total.
And don't forget the growing popularity of "real" movies-on-demand...
Netflix already offers quite a few in a very viable way; bandwidth
alone keeps that from exploding into the mainstream. You could easily
suck down half a terabyte every month watching a few movies every
night after work.
Whenever the "missing links" argument is put forward, the "God of the gaps" needs to be referenced.
I would have to disagree. "Missing links" do not count as "gaps", in the sense you mean. Gravity counts
as a gap. The origin (or meta-origin, if you accept "big bang" as the right answer) of the universe leaves
us a gap. The speed of light remaining constant in different frames of reference forms something of a gap.
"Missing links" form gaps in the fossil record, not in scientific understanding of the nature of reality.
More like pages missing from a book rather than entire books written in a language we can't (yet) read.
if the minimal complexity chain was a mere 142 bases, there would be only [4^142/(10^85)]=.3?
probability that this chain would form somewhere.
"Evolution" means more than speciation. It means that, as long as you have something, anything capable of self-replication-with-errors, you have a small chance of increasing complexity via those
errors. Given enough instances of such self-replication, a more "fit" molecule results. On the
early Earth,this meant nothing more than increasingly substituted C/N chains (originally from
ammonia and methane) - Not coincidentally, the core constituents of all life on Earth today.
Although your calculation holds true in isolation, recalculate it for the N-1 case, of
adding one "just one more base". Now for the N-2 case... Now for the N-141 case. See my point?
No, a fully-formed DNA molecule didn't appear out of nowhere one day from a random lightning strike.
It "appeared" from a slightly more simple molecule, formed of numerous simple-yet-statistically-likely
organic molecules. And when it got long enough, strange side-reactions started occuring, which we
now call "protein synthesis".
At some point it managed to get wrapped into one of those slime-bubbles the ocean makes trillions
of every second, which lent it a huge edge over all the other self-replicating molecules out there.
At a later point, it became complex enough to start swapping functional units with other "cells".
Then "life" really took off.
Just as we came from less-advanced primates, so too did early self-replicators come from more
primative molecules. Although I will readily concede that "greenness dissolves", we can
demonstrate the production of simple substituted ammonia molecules from the primordial
atmosphere in a lab environment. From there, just add time and a massively parallel
application of statistics.
if that is the case then your "definitively proven" fact could easily be wrong for there is
endless potential for finding examples of evolutions which goes against the Darwinian formula.
True - But in the complete lack of such evidence, despite people on both sides of the issue
doing their damnedest to find any, only a fool would doggedly insist on the counterfactual
stance. Evolution may well have a few holes that we find someday; perhaps even a complete parallel
mechanism of speciation has played out over the eons of Earth's history (or even off-planet,
"in a galaxy far, far away"). But the core mechanisms of evolution do not count as mere conjecture,
or even mere theory.
We have absolute proof-of-concept of every aspect of evolution, from
creation of increasingly complex organic molecules on a young Earth, to tidal and glacial generation of
lipid membranes, to endosymbiosis as a means of producing progressively more complex cells, to
progressively more cohesive "colonies" of multicellular life such as bacterial plaques to sponges
to jellyfish, all the way through to producing divergent species via artifical separation of populations.
The "missing links" so proudly flaunted
by creationists amount to nothing more than pages lost from the family album in a fire. Just because
you don't have photographic proof that your grandfather existed, you don't presume that Prometheus scooped
up some dust and breathed life into it to bridge the gap between the pictures of your great grandfather
and your father.
a theory is only good so long as the evidence is (following Popper) - and none of us know the future.
In the strictest sense, you have it absolutely correct - Thus we still call evolution a "theory".
In practice, as humans, we can only reserve judgement on the validity of a theory against so much
evidence before we informally accept it. Not knowing the future, we could also hold out judgement
that the Earth will continue to have gravity tomorrow. But we don't.
The article stating that he is in jail for tax evasion is a blatant red herring.
It has no bearing on the group's DMCA claims whatsoever.
When arguing with (or for the sake of) a group for whom "rational argument" and
"scientific method" have no meaning, you may as well make full shameless use of
the techniques so carefully documented by Aristotle. No sense in wasting all
his hard work.
Or better, if you can't find a way to use their ignorance to extract money from
them, just leave such fools alone. You'll come away from the experience with
far more sanity remaining (and lower blood-pressure to boot).
That said, when posting something on Slashdot - Probably best to presume that
someone will call you on a logical fallacy, even though in this case,
the overwhelming majority will side with the FP.
A few years ago, social networking Web sites were just some newfangled technology that college students loved
...Whereas now, the first round of those original college kids have graduated and some haven't yet moved on; additionally,
their younger siblings have started using these services to get a head start on the Cool New Thing(tm). Woo-woo.
But over time, they have metamorphosed into an unavoidable Internet phenomenon
I'd call this a sad commentary on the steadily advancing age-of-first-real-job, not an
"internet phenomenon". YMMV. In any case, I've managed to avoid them quite well,
thankyouverymuch.
changing the way people of all ages keep in touch with friends
No, not really. The afforementioned "college kids who haven't moved on yet"
use it to keep in touch. The rest of us still use the phone or email or,
wonder-of-wonders, physically meeting one another.
and even look for employment.
"Look". Not "find".
These folks have a rather rude awakening to look forward to... The rest of the
world really doesn't give two shakes of a rat's ass about their pathetic
little ego-pages. It doesn't care about their blogs, their favorite bands,
their pictures of their cat/dog/iguana/fish-named-bob.
Your future employer
doesn't care about Bob-the-fish. He cares that you have the ability to work,
in person, with others, and get the job done. The fact that you can't
differentiate between "friends" and "people you've never met but add
to a counter on your website" doesn't really help with that.
From the FP, it sounds like you have two separate situations here.
First, you had free hosting that
came with a domain name (and probably some form of basic administration in the setting up of the Wiki
and keeping it running smoothly - Though your community may have separated those four "services").
Second, you have user-provided CC-nc content that happens to live on the above-provided set of
services.
Your community (individually, keep in mind) "owns" the latter. You have no rights at all to the
former (though your could argue the domain name itself as a trademark, I highly doubt you registered
it as such, and the courts always favor the party who will actually use it for, y'know, "trade"
over any nonprofit use.
So as much as you may object to this change, no one has actually violated your copyrights, yet. Your
domain owner and admin sold their services, not your content ("the database" can have
multiple meanings; you should generally presume a legal one until proven otherwise). Thus,
you have two choices, as I see it:
1) Do nothing, and accept banner ads as the price of your hosting.
2) Inform the new owner of your intent, as a group, to disallow them the use
of your content. Begin removing it from the current servers and move it elsewhere
(a variation of what you called "mass vandalism").
In the case of #2, if Wikia starts doing massive rollbacks to "preserve"
content you have every right to remove, then you can cry copyright infringement,
and may want to hire a lawyer (this seems like a perfect class-action situation,
if you can get anyone to take the case for such small stakes, since you don't actually
want any cash for it, you just want an injunction against use of it by Wikia). They
may, however, play it perfectly fair. They might expect to lose 10-25% of the
community, and treat the rest well enough to stay and even recover over a few months.
But mostly, you should probably wait for an actual infringement before crying wolf.
Whether it's your wish or not, you agreed to it by clicking "I Accept"
Good thing I never clicked (or caused the same to happen) that button,
then.
Before I ever stuck an XP disk in the drive, I remastered it (a "right"
not banned anywhere in the packaging) with nlite to remove all the
crapware (including bypassing all those nag screens at installation
that I never saw).
Yeah, you and I both know I did no such thing (the first time, anyway - I
do actually have my current primary desktop machine running a
remastered XP install). But I could have. And that makes all
the difference in the world.
"...But not anything that might actually affect security,
only those features relating to disabling machines we consider
invalidly licensed. Because we never make mistakes
regarding licensing issues."
Yeah, I most certainly do take issue with them patching a
system against the owner's wishes. After the owner has explicitly
disabled autoupdating, I would go so far as to call that "criminal
trespass". And doing so in a way that neither fixes nor improves
the security of a machine... Not justifiable in any context.
I'd agree with that. So how do I run WPA2 over wires?
If you look in your Windows networking properties, you'll see an
option for 802.1X.
The fact that WPA happens to use the same ideas doesn't prevent you from
using the (preexisting!) underlying technology for just about any physically
connection you want. Most of this amounts to making an encrypted VPN
tunnel between the client machine and either the router or a dedicated server
on the target network. Not new, or unique to wireless in any way.
As do I - But I'd call them on the low side. And I say that as someone
having pretty strong feelings in support of personal privacy even at
work.
62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission
If I need a file, or just somewhere to run a remote process, I'll grab
it from the first machine I think of. Permission? From whom,
exactly? If I happen to occupy the same room as the target machine, I'll
usually let the user know, but I don't ask to access a company
resource that I administer. I inform.
50% read confidential or sensitive information without
a legitimate reason
People, even upper management, leave "confidential" crap scattered
everwhere, from unprotected shares to networked scanners. If I just
delete those when doing the occasional cleanup, it makes people quite
unhappy. Now, you may call that a "legitimate reason", but only in
the task itself, not as an excuse to look at a particular
document.
42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy,
security or IT policies.
IT generally needs an exception to most of those policies to do
the job. So again, I "know" I've violated policies, but policies that
don't particularly apply to me by nature of the job itself.
Any company that can't trust its IT department has a problem that goes
far beyond "policies". You don't second-guess your surgeon as
he frantically reaches for a clamp; you judge him by whether you
live or bleed to death.
Slashdot Mirror
The average security guard/police officer is not involved in electronics
Then perhaps they aught not hold jobs where they make life-and-death decisions about whether a given device can blow up or not.
The guys actually carrying bombs will fashion them to look very much like a laptop or novelty lamp or some other harmless electronic device. They'll make their next improvised knife-like weapon out of the razor-sharp RF shielding inside their cell phones or GBAs. They'll synchronize their attacks by a lunar eclipse or some other natural phenomena.
She did something very, very stupid and is lucky to have walked away alive.
On that, we agree completely - Don't fuck with the guys with guns.
That doesn't make it "right".
The police acted with great restraint and should be commended for it.
By not shooting someone based on (as you yourself point out) their complete lack of understanding of both electronics and explosives?
I don't think the greatest comedic geniuses of history could have written a more scathing indictment of modern society than your exact words.
In addition we have only his side of the story, and the comments to his story point out discrepancies.
In this case, no "other side of the story" exists. If he had actually shoplifted, the city wouldn't have settled.
Not often, but sometimes, the world really does offer us black-and-white situations. A guy stood up for his rights, got a smack-down for it, and gets to pay $7500 for the honor. And why? Not because the prosecutor considered him in-the-wrong, but admittedly to protect the city from a civil liability suit. you just don't get a more clear-cut abuse of the legal system than that.
At least in the US
Go West (or East) until you hit a large body of salty water. Keep going. Welcome to the rest of the world, not (yet) a wholly-owned and occupied subsidiary of Haliburton.
Perhaps next time you rant against "the aristocracy" you might do a bit of research first.
Good idea. And next time you tell someone the weather, look outside before vehemently insisting your bedroom remains rain-free.
No one said anything about being free or public domain.
When someone describes the works of a dead author going online in some archival form, "in an effort to preserve the contents digitally while making the collection easily available to both academics and the general public", the idea of "for free" implicitly tags along for the ride.
If you want to "preserve" an intangible and/or make it "easily available" to everyone, you don't charge for it. You give it away to anyone who will take it.
Furthermore, while I have no problem with rewarding an artist for their work, I do have a problem with continuing to pay them after they've died. I will never understand how the aristocracy managed to get the plebes to buy into the idea of leaving one's heirs a "legacy". For most of us, that means getting nothing, or worse than nothing - Thanks to modern medicine keeping people alive long after they should have died, more people today pass on massive debt than any sort of estate.
You can skip the brief article and go straight to the archives.
...Where you can add any of Heinlin's works to your cart, for a low, low
price. They take Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, and Discover.
Hey, if I link to the "complete" works of another great author on Amazon, can I make FP too? Or does it have to belong to some "special" collection selling out?
and then go for whom the heck you think will do the best job
Not a single ballot will have an "Anyone but these megalomaniacal inbred (m/b)illionaires" option. So our current system quite effectively prevents me from taking your advice.
Most ballots don't even allow write-ins anymore, so you can't vote for the classics such as Mickey Mouse, Norton II, or Adolph Hitler.
...you have a hardware problem. Check your power supply, you may be suffering what we in the trade call a +5SB undervolt.
The same problem with a racked PowerEdge server (RHEL), a top-of-the-line Latitude laptop (XP), and a hand-built greybox (XP, Slackware, Knoppix) using some of the highest quality parts available (ABit KN8-SLI, Seasonic power supply, OCZ memory)?
I would tend to agree with you for a one-off problem. But those three have literally nothing in common.
Like I said, perhaps I just have bad luck with USB. But I can only let it burn me so many times before I conclude the interface itself (or at least, most implementations thereof) sucks rather than merely my experiences with it.
Yes, it affected Apple, too, but It was a general "hack" that affected WiFi chipsets on other platforms, including non-Apple hardware, Windows, and Linux! That's the whole point of why people took issue with this, and it's still being perpetuated here!
Linux folks readily admit when kernel modules have bugs in serious need of repair. Windows users pretty much accept poor security as a fact of daily life.
But Mac users... They would call a dead pixel a "feature intended to relieve eye-strain from prolonged use - Not that the gorgeous appearance of OS-X could ever cause eye strain, but Steve just loves us all that much, always looking out for us".
So when an actual, undeniable vulnerability appears, well, you'll have to forgive us for rubbing a bit of salt in the wound.
This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use.
Faster, yes. Easier?
Perhaps I count as an extremely unlucky outlier in my experiences with USB in general, but I have found it one of the buggiest PC interfaces ever. And I include VL graphics cards in that list.
XP and a modern machine finally seem capable of handling simple things like USB1 keyboards and mice properly. Printers, still asking for a reservation at the sanitarium. Cameras, not too bad, but they only need to work for five minutes at a time.
But HDDs... I've dealt with four different models on three different PCs running four different OSs (yes, four OSs on three PCs - I actually reinstalled three different Linux distros, using 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6 kernels, just to recover data I had trusted to an external USB HDD). And they all have exactly the same problem - They randomly drop offline just when you start hitting them the hardest.
Under XP, they appear and dissapear on a whim. Some days you can't even get them to stay connected long enough to format them, while others (rarely) you might have it work all day long.
Under Linux, I've had what you could technically call a better experience - As long as I limit it to UHCI (ie, slow old 12mbit USB1.1), it works great, rock solid. Toss in the EHCI driver to allow a decent transfer rate, and it zips along nicely - For about 45 seconds, after which it decides to offline itself until a reboot (even removing and reinserting the module doesn't let you bring it back up).
So... Forgive my skepticism, but the thought of a newer-faster-buggier-than-ever version of USB just doesn't get me all that excited. I think I'd use the phrase "fills me with dread".
People in the market for a 10~100 dollar (fake) Rolex are not the same people who are in the market for a 5,000~10,000 dollar Rolex
Bingo. I think only you, in this entire discussion so far, even read the FP, much less TFA.
Counterfeiting != Piracy, people.
The RIAA has a pretty good argument (even if they use massively inflated numbers) when they say that the average person who pirated popular-song-X might have bought it instead. That doesn't scale up to tens of thousands of songs, but as a one-off, they have a valid point.
When the IACC tries to make the same argument, it falls completely flat. These jokers make the RIAA look reasonable by comparison. The average person simply will not ever buy a $1500 handbag or a $5000 watch. This organization doesn't protect the average Joe (they even admit the counterfeit goods usually have comparable quality to the real thing, making them harder to spot); They don't protect the manufacturers (since counterfeiting results in no lost sales); They don't help anyone but the mega-rich.
They make sure Paris Hilton doesn't need to run home and change because her cellmate wore the same (if $10k cheaper) shoes to the press conference.
Maybe this will help
Call me crazy, but does anyone else notice that that hole looks more like something dug with a backhoe than an impact crater?
C.1 To control a dangerous or violent subject when deadly force does not appear to be justified and/or necessary;
You forgot the precursor - "Have a suspect of some kind, relevant to an actual crime".
The guy did nothing (legally) wrong in the first place. Every human has both a right and an obligation to resist wrongful arrest with as much force as it requires. This guy, while rude and boorish, attended a PUBLIC event and tried to use it for precisely its superficial purpose - To ask questions.
Illustrating hypocrisy has not, to the best of my knowledge, become a crime yet.
And I suggest that all of you who are complaining about their 100 GB Cap on downloads do the same.
You'll notice I didn't actually complain about that as a limit - I consider it quite reasonable, for now. Even given all that I said, my monthly usage usually comes out to only 25-35GB. I don't think I've ever broken 50GB.
I do, however, have a problem with companies that first offer "unlimited" yet kick off those who use too much; Then simply don't mention limits anywhere; Then phrase their limits in terms not applicable to the very people to whom they most apply.
Yeah, John Q probably thinks in terms of songs/pictures/emails per month, and goes "ooh, big numbers!" when limited to 30,000 of them. But to John Q, the idea of a monthly cap means nothing. He not only has no chance of hitting it, he also has no idea how much he actually uses every month.
But these caps don't exist for John Q. They exist for geeks who know very well how much they use, and chose an "unlimited" service for precisely that reason. And I for one find it highly insulting that Comcast would phrase their limits in subjective terms not even remotely applicable to the people most likely to get nailed by such caps. You and I both know, as you pointed out, that Comcast means 30,000 3MB MP3 songs, not 20+MB FLAC or 50+MB raw WAV files. They need to say as much, not play games solely for the purpose of making it harder to comparate pricing between broadband providers.
The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position.
Surprise surprise, a European court decided to rob an American company of half a billion dollars, after said company complied with order after absurd order to change its practices.
"The People" want a Media-Player-less version, comrade? Okay... Gee, no one seems to have bought XP-N.
Open the file formats? Here, have some source code. Not good enough? How about we just use XML? Still not good enough? Here, let us lube up Balmer's derriere for you...
No one can compete with Microsoft because, put simply, Microsoft has a "good enough" product; not "great", just "okay". They understand, and have embraced, the principle of mediocrity at the sweet price-point, and have thrived as a result. A free web browser couldn't compete because MSIE works out of the box. But people still had the choice to install a number of alternatives - And most chose not to.
30.000 MP3's of 3 MB a piece.
/.
exuse of Linux ISOs - Massively overstated on the whole, I'll
agree, but every few months, it easily adds another 3-5GB to
my total.
I use FLAC. Try 4+MB/minute.
I also prefer losslessly stored images to JPEGs, on the order of 10-20MB per picture. As for email, I'll readily admit that those take up only a few KB each.
Anyone who complains about that download limit is seriously deranged, in posession of a Tardis or immortal. You choose.
I chose "D - The listed metrics do not represent actual usage".
My downloading of music, pictures, and email accounts for probably quite a bit less than 10% of my total. Videos (legal) alone probably come in at 3x music+pics+email. Game demos probably match that. And then I have the low level of background traffic to monitor systems I remotely admin for friends and relatives - Low at any given moment, but probably 20% of my total overall. And don't forget the ever-popular
And don't forget the growing popularity of "real" movies-on-demand... Netflix already offers quite a few in a very viable way; bandwidth alone keeps that from exploding into the mainstream. You could easily suck down half a terabyte every month watching a few movies every night after work.
Whenever the "missing links" argument is put forward, the "God of the gaps" needs to be referenced.
I would have to disagree. "Missing links" do not count as "gaps", in the sense you mean. Gravity counts as a gap. The origin (or meta-origin, if you accept "big bang" as the right answer) of the universe leaves us a gap. The speed of light remaining constant in different frames of reference forms something of a gap.
"Missing links" form gaps in the fossil record, not in scientific understanding of the nature of reality. More like pages missing from a book rather than entire books written in a language we can't (yet) read.
if the minimal complexity chain was a mere 142 bases, there would be only [4^142/(10^85)]=.3? probability that this chain would form somewhere.
"Evolution" means more than speciation. It means that, as long as you have something, anything capable of self-replication-with-errors, you have a small chance of increasing complexity via those errors. Given enough instances of such self-replication, a more "fit" molecule results. On the early Earth,this meant nothing more than increasingly substituted C/N chains (originally from ammonia and methane) - Not coincidentally, the core constituents of all life on Earth today.
Although your calculation holds true in isolation, recalculate it for the N-1 case, of adding one "just one more base". Now for the N-2 case... Now for the N-141 case. See my point? No, a fully-formed DNA molecule didn't appear out of nowhere one day from a random lightning strike. It "appeared" from a slightly more simple molecule, formed of numerous simple-yet-statistically-likely organic molecules. And when it got long enough, strange side-reactions started occuring, which we now call "protein synthesis".
At some point it managed to get wrapped into one of those slime-bubbles the ocean makes trillions of every second, which lent it a huge edge over all the other self-replicating molecules out there. At a later point, it became complex enough to start swapping functional units with other "cells". Then "life" really took off.
Just as we came from less-advanced primates, so too did early self-replicators come from more primative molecules. Although I will readily concede that "greenness dissolves", we can demonstrate the production of simple substituted ammonia molecules from the primordial atmosphere in a lab environment. From there, just add time and a massively parallel application of statistics.
if that is the case then your "definitively proven" fact could easily be wrong for there is endless potential for finding examples of evolutions which goes against the Darwinian formula.
True - But in the complete lack of such evidence, despite people on both sides of the issue doing their damnedest to find any, only a fool would doggedly insist on the counterfactual stance. Evolution may well have a few holes that we find someday; perhaps even a complete parallel mechanism of speciation has played out over the eons of Earth's history (or even off-planet, "in a galaxy far, far away"). But the core mechanisms of evolution do not count as mere conjecture, or even mere theory.
We have absolute proof-of-concept of every aspect of evolution, from creation of increasingly complex organic molecules on a young Earth, to tidal and glacial generation of lipid membranes, to endosymbiosis as a means of producing progressively more complex cells, to progressively more cohesive "colonies" of multicellular life such as bacterial plaques to sponges to jellyfish, all the way through to producing divergent species via artifical separation of populations.
The "missing links" so proudly flaunted by creationists amount to nothing more than pages lost from the family album in a fire. Just because you don't have photographic proof that your grandfather existed, you don't presume that Prometheus scooped up some dust and breathed life into it to bridge the gap between the pictures of your great grandfather and your father.
a theory is only good so long as the evidence is (following Popper) - and none of us know the future.
In the strictest sense, you have it absolutely correct - Thus we still call evolution a "theory".
In practice, as humans, we can only reserve judgement on the validity of a theory against so much evidence before we informally accept it. Not knowing the future, we could also hold out judgement that the Earth will continue to have gravity tomorrow. But we don't.
The article stating that he is in jail for tax evasion is a blatant red herring. It has no bearing on the group's DMCA claims whatsoever.
When arguing with (or for the sake of) a group for whom "rational argument" and "scientific method" have no meaning, you may as well make full shameless use of the techniques so carefully documented by Aristotle. No sense in wasting all his hard work.
Or better, if you can't find a way to use their ignorance to extract money from them, just leave such fools alone. You'll come away from the experience with far more sanity remaining (and lower blood-pressure to boot).
That said, when posting something on Slashdot - Probably best to presume that someone will call you on a logical fallacy, even though in this case, the overwhelming majority will side with the FP.
A few years ago, social networking Web sites were just some newfangled technology that college students loved
...Whereas now, the first round of those original college kids have graduated and some haven't yet moved on; additionally,
their younger siblings have started using these services to get a head start on the Cool New Thing(tm). Woo-woo.
But over time, they have metamorphosed into an unavoidable Internet phenomenon
I'd call this a sad commentary on the steadily advancing age-of-first-real-job, not an "internet phenomenon". YMMV. In any case, I've managed to avoid them quite well, thankyouverymuch.
changing the way people of all ages keep in touch with friends
No, not really. The afforementioned "college kids who haven't moved on yet" use it to keep in touch. The rest of us still use the phone or email or, wonder-of-wonders, physically meeting one another.
and even look for employment.
"Look". Not "find".
These folks have a rather rude awakening to look forward to... The rest of the world really doesn't give two shakes of a rat's ass about their pathetic little ego-pages. It doesn't care about their blogs, their favorite bands, their pictures of their cat/dog/iguana/fish-named-bob.
Your future employer doesn't care about Bob-the-fish. He cares that you have the ability to work, in person, with others, and get the job done. The fact that you can't differentiate between "friends" and "people you've never met but add to a counter on your website" doesn't really help with that.
Obviously, IANAL.
From the FP, it sounds like you have two separate situations here.
First, you had free hosting that came with a domain name (and probably some form of basic administration in the setting up of the Wiki and keeping it running smoothly - Though your community may have separated those four "services").
Second, you have user-provided CC-nc content that happens to live on the above-provided set of services.
Your community (individually, keep in mind) "owns" the latter. You have no rights at all to the former (though your could argue the domain name itself as a trademark, I highly doubt you registered it as such, and the courts always favor the party who will actually use it for, y'know, "trade" over any nonprofit use.
So as much as you may object to this change, no one has actually violated your copyrights, yet. Your domain owner and admin sold their services, not your content ("the database" can have multiple meanings; you should generally presume a legal one until proven otherwise). Thus, you have two choices, as I see it:
1) Do nothing, and accept banner ads as the price of your hosting.
2) Inform the new owner of your intent, as a group, to disallow them the use of your content. Begin removing it from the current servers and move it elsewhere (a variation of what you called "mass vandalism").
In the case of #2, if Wikia starts doing massive rollbacks to "preserve" content you have every right to remove, then you can cry copyright infringement, and may want to hire a lawyer (this seems like a perfect class-action situation, if you can get anyone to take the case for such small stakes, since you don't actually want any cash for it, you just want an injunction against use of it by Wikia). They may, however, play it perfectly fair. They might expect to lose 10-25% of the community, and treat the rest well enough to stay and even recover over a few months.
But mostly, you should probably wait for an actual infringement before crying wolf.
Whether it's your wish or not, you agreed to it by clicking "I Accept"
Good thing I never clicked (or caused the same to happen) that button, then.
Before I ever stuck an XP disk in the drive, I remastered it (a "right" not banned anywhere in the packaging) with nlite to remove all the crapware (including bypassing all those nag screens at installation that I never saw).
Yeah, you and I both know I did no such thing (the first time, anyway - I do actually have my current primary desktop machine running a remastered XP install). But I could have. And that makes all the difference in the world.
MS:O.k, we'll patch the system involuntarily.
"...But not anything that might actually affect security, only those features relating to disabling machines we consider invalidly licensed. Because we never make mistakes regarding licensing issues."
Yeah, I most certainly do take issue with them patching a system against the owner's wishes. After the owner has explicitly disabled autoupdating, I would go so far as to call that "criminal trespass". And doing so in a way that neither fixes nor improves the security of a machine... Not justifiable in any context.
I'd agree with that. So how do I run WPA2 over wires?
If you look in your Windows networking properties, you'll see an option for 802.1X.
The fact that WPA happens to use the same ideas doesn't prevent you from using the (preexisting!) underlying technology for just about any physically connection you want. Most of this amounts to making an encrypted VPN tunnel between the client machine and either the router or a dedicated server on the target network. Not new, or unique to wireless in any way.
I think these numbers are bogus.
As do I - But I'd call them on the low side. And I say that as someone having pretty strong feelings in support of personal privacy even at work.
62% said they had accessed another person's computer without permission
If I need a file, or just somewhere to run a remote process, I'll grab it from the first machine I think of. Permission? From whom, exactly? If I happen to occupy the same room as the target machine, I'll usually let the user know, but I don't ask to access a company resource that I administer. I inform.
50% read confidential or sensitive information without a legitimate reason
People, even upper management, leave "confidential" crap scattered everwhere, from unprotected shares to networked scanners. If I just delete those when doing the occasional cleanup, it makes people quite unhappy. Now, you may call that a "legitimate reason", but only in the task itself, not as an excuse to look at a particular document.
42% said they had knowingly violated their company's privacy, security or IT policies.
IT generally needs an exception to most of those policies to do the job. So again, I "know" I've violated policies, but policies that don't particularly apply to me by nature of the job itself.
Any company that can't trust its IT department has a problem that goes far beyond "policies". You don't second-guess your surgeon as he frantically reaches for a clamp; you judge him by whether you live or bleed to death.