They might have a 32 KHz CPU clock and draw
a fraction of a microampere most of the time.
Based on your concluding comment, I will take
it you meant your entire response as tongue-in-cheek.
If, however, you meant that seriously, and don't
refer to a uC that spends spends "most of the
time" not even turned on, I would love to hear
a part number for such a device...
So, did anyone else want to cry at seeing that
Nintendo has finally taken the most wonderful
game series ever created by Humankind (ie,
Metroid), and made it into a multiplayer
death-match-style FPS?
Sigh. Nintendo, You've just lost a customer,
not for the lack of games, but for the
non-lack of this particular one.
Really who is going to print out all 600 pages
of the newest Tom Clancey book, then goto the
effort of binding them together. It'd cost more
in paper, ink, time & energy than to just buy
the book.
"Print out?"
Have you gone daft, man!
I'd pay Google for the service of simply
providing me with high-quality scans of books
I already own (preferably including a proofread
OCR of the contents in the images' metadata).
I don't want printouts. I want versions
I can throw on my home fileserver and search
the content thereof within a few minutes for
"that neat idea I remember reading three years
ago but not which book it came from".
Not to say I don't want a hardcopy as well...
Physical books have a certain appeal that
no level of scanning quality can match. But
as a companion to the physical books, I would
very much like to have searchable digital
copies of every book in my library.
If Google ever managed to cripple my browser
without the use of CSS or Javascript, how about
I just tcpdump packets into files as they pass
by.
...Thus requiring you to build not only your
own browser, but your own network stack simulator
as well, just to decode some marginally-readable
page scans?
You make the assumption that Google only uses
such stupid-browser-tricks to keep you from
storing their content locally. It would make
far more sense to use such trick to make the
content even remotely intelligible.
If they just send an image and prevent printing
and right-clicks and the like, a far easier
circumvention would exist - Run a caching
web proxy on the local machine, then just fetch
the images from the cache. I'll give the guys
at Google at least enough credit to have thought
of that one (since in many cases,
particularly larger corporate networks, it
would happen without anyone deliberately
trying to use it for DRM circumvention).
In theory, true.
In practice... Well, I have yet to
see it.
Rocket fuel is really nasty stuff. I remember
the warnings after Columbia went bang sent out
to people informing them that getting near
peices of the reckage could be very hazerdous
for their health.
There ya go... Thank you for providing a nice
example. The "Hazardous fuel" line counts
as what we non-political-minded folk call a
"lie".
Yes, hydrazine can harm you... If you
manage to come into contact with it in the very
few seconds it will last in the presence of oxygen
and water vapor (such as you would have great
difficulty avoiding anywhere on Earth).
The reports of the danger of even touching bits
of shuttle debris served a purpose - It prevented
most people from trying to collect bits of shuttle
debris. Such lies had nothing to do with safety,
and everything to do with keeping people scared
and in line (the One True Goal(tm) of any real-world
government).
Did you know that only about 1% of the
housecats in the world are pure breed?
Did you know that the entire concept of a
"purebred" counts as total BS, a fictional
concept designed to allow a small number of
people to profit from an activity this particular
species engages in prolifically (and loudly)?
Not to mention that a "mixed" breed will
usually have fewer health problems (some
defensive cat-slaver will no doubt chime
in to dispute that - True, under optimal
conditions, you can breed genetic disease
out of a line. It simply does not
happen in practice, as the largest motivation
to breed involves profit, which you don't
maximize by "rendering nonviable" two out
of every three newborns).
In fact, for computational tasks, many
benchmarks have shown that a modern optimized
JVM with JIT compilation is roughly equivalent
with most implementations of C++, with some
benchmarks being better for Java and some
being better for C++.
Funny... Yeah, exact word I wanted.
Even funnier? Those benchmarks compare C++ (with
C/C++ libs), to Java (with C/C++ libs). Woo-woo,
color me simply shocked that such tests
show the two as performing comparably on tasks
that minimize the impact of the frontend code.
And something else "funny"? You always see
Java compared against compiler-optimized C++,
a strawman if ever I've seen one. I don't
claim C++ as all that much better than Java,
I claim C (no ++) with hand-tuned assembler
for a few tight loops as faster than Java.
Come back to me when Java can match that,
and I'll consider it merely redundant, rather
than outright wasteful. Until then, take the
"immune from buffer overflow exploits" with
a grain of "what language did they write the
JVM/JRE in?".
Secure products generally make money than
insecure products.
BS.
Microsoft has built an entire business model out
of releasing buggy software, patching it for a
few years, then abandoning it for the new
version which really contains nothing actually
"new" beyond a renewed patch cycle.
If not for SP6 counting as the last major fix
for NT4, I (and millions of others) would still
use it. Not to say that I don't like 2k, but
aside from functional PNP (which NT4 sorta had,
but broken so badly MS didn't make any serious
claims about it), not enough differences exist
to matter.
And let's not ignore XP - A new build of Win2k
with a Fisher-Price UI. Now why would I
ever upgrade to that? Oh, yeah, major
security flaws in 2k that MS has bluntly stated
they will never repair.
Looking at things from a corporate perspective,
companies have a disincentive to "do it
right" the first time (or ever). All the programs
I use that the development house did right the first
time, I still use (ie, no more money for them for
"upgrades"). Sad but true.
Regardless of your opinion of MS's involvement
in this idea, does AOL's take on it really matter
to anyone?
Right up there at the top of my blacklist you'll
find "*.aol.*". Whether or not the mail really
came from there doesn't matter, because almost
half of the spam I get reports itself as coming
from an AOL account.
Same goes for MSN, hotmail, and yahoo. I
couldn't care less whether or not they choose
to adopt anti-spam-technique-X, since I don't
read any mail coming from them anyway.
And for the one AOL-using person with
whom I actually exchange email, my whitelist
works just fine.
What's to prevent a criminal from breaking
the padlock off the box?
Because it takes an NSA-sized sledgehammer to
do so.
Now, if either the contents of the message,
or the value of replacing it with a different
message, might interest the NSA, well, you can't
make a thick enough tinfoil beanie to
keep them out.
The NSA, however, doesn't really care about
your choice of Fleshlight inserts.;-)
I challenge you to explain why it is safe to
send my credit card number to Amazon through
untrusted servers without using mathematics.
On one side you have Alice. On the other, you
have Bob.
Alice sends Bob a box containing an unlocked
padlock, for which she has the only key.
Bob puts a message for Alice in the box, and
uses the padlock to lock the box. He then
sends it back to Alice.
It dosn't matter how he sends the box back to
Alice, because she has the only key.
Now, we need to add one more layer to this,
since Charles might have intercepted the box
from Alice, replaced her lock with his own,
send the box on to Bob, intercepted it on
the return, and replaced his own lock with
Alice's. They call this the "Man in the Middle"
attack.
The solution? A fourth party, Diane,
sells pre-locked box-and-key pairs, and can
"certify" that a given key belongs to a given
lock which belongs to a given box. Thus, Bob
can make sure the lock and box both came from
Alice, and can Alice can know that she gets
back the same box (in case Charles smashed the
original box open and managed to use an entirely
new box with the same lock).
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on
a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it
ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy,
DON'T USE IT.
Overall, I agree with your point. However
(always a however, or I wouldn't have
responded)...
Many Slashdotters get to deal with not only the
consequences of their own software, but with
the choices of non-geek family and friends.
I have no problem saying, "I will never make the
mistake of installing another Real product on
my computer". I know better. I realize how
invasively their products behave, the poor
quality of their media formats (until they went
to basically pure MPEG-4 for everything), the
legendarily-pathetic streaming problems (what,
they never heard of "let me buffer the whole
damned thing while I get a snack, before
starting to play"?).
OTOH, every time I visit a friend or relative,
they want me to make Real go away. I ask why
they reinstalled it, and the answer inevitably
either involves "the kids did it" or "the
website told me I had to". So, not having
installed it myself, I still have to
deal with it. That irks me, just a tad.
Incidentally, sometimes even we geeks can make
mistakes. I (presume I) accidentally left a
checkbox ticked for RealOne as part of some
other program, and it took literally hours
to completely get rid of it (A tip, for
"removing" literally any self-protective
Windows program - Burn a Knoppix CD with an
NTFS-write enabled kernel, boot it, mount the
Windows partition in question, and rename the
directory of the offending program).
I will swallow my pride and admit I screwed up
in allowing it to install. But that
sort of irritation has lead to the anti-Real
zealotry you see in Slashdotters today... A
mere oversight during installing a seemingly
unrelated product, and I lost a few hours of
my all-too-rare free time.
If someone steals some CDs from you, you don't
have the right to burn their house down.
But you have a legal right to own CDs (not getting
into the topic of media-vs-content-license).
For a better analogy, in the US, you don't have the
right to own an ounce of weed.
Now, if someone mugs you for it, technically, they
have "stolen" it.
But would you go to the police to say "yeah,
I had just bought this huge bag of chronic when some
douche mugged me for it"?
Same idea here. Maliciously deleting files may count
as illegal, but in order to press charges, you have to
admit committing software piracy (and in this case,
also violating the DMCA, since a hacked reg code would
certainly count as "access control circumvention").
It may count as playing with fire, but he made sure to
wear asbestos gloves.
Bear in mind that FTL also means time
travel; the two are equivalent.
...Of a sort.
It doesn't mean "Gee, today I think
I'll visit 1642 and give Isaac Newton's
father a pack of Trojans".
Think of it in classical terms (since, if we
find a way to go faster than the speed of light,
it means either that light does not count as
the universal speed-limit, or we've found a
way around it such as a wormhole or other
means of folding space to make two points
effectively closer).
Now, imagine two people living on planets one
light-year apart. If they look through a
telescope, they each see the other's planet
as it existed a year ago.
Now, let's say person A's planet gets whacked
by a huge asteroid. Looking through the
telescope, it would person B a year to
notice.
If, however, person B could travel almost
instantly to planet A, person A wouldn't
magically watch their planet regress back
a year for the convenience of preserving
B's time-location.
At worst, if person B got to planet A by
moving faster than the speed of light rather
than by folding space, he would "see"
planet A sped up as they approached, then
return to normal when he arrived.
As an attorney, I have no problem not
getting overtime pay when I work over 40
hours per week.
Overtime pay? No, I don't care about overtime
pay. I'd gladly take straight pay for my hours
over 40.
I didn't spend 7+ years in school to spend
my work day looking at the clock.
Nor did I do the same to leave home and return
in the dark every day. Oh, how I miss lying on
the quad basking in the sun, rather than needing
to take a walk down the hall just to tell the
current weather.
But anyone doing drudge work should
certainly be paid overtime for more than
40 hours per week.
...Because, after all, we chose to go to college
and have a "real" career because of our strong
aversions to free time, right?
As an attorney
Had you not made that statement, I would consider
you a troll.
Everyone, regardless of what they do,
deserves to get paid for their labor.
As soon as my company tells me "Hey, y'know,
you do your job twice as fast as average, so
we'll let you only put in 20 hours for the same
salary", I'll consider it fair. As it stands
now, performing twice as well as most of my
coworkers means I get twice the workload (and
have twice as much motivation to read Slashdot
for four hours of my work-day)...
"Hey, Bob, when you booted up your computer
this morning, it reported that the chassis had
been opened...."
"Yeah, and when I tried to access the Exchange
server you supposedly admin, it told me it had
negative 472 files to synchronize, then crashed.
Your point?"
Never worked for a big corporation?
That's pretty much illegal.
Actually, I would argue that point ("Against
company policy" does not equal "illegal"), but
I consider it irrelevant anyway...
Why would you want to stop people from
having access to removeable media devices
in the first place? To stop them from
stealing sensitive corporate information...
...The theft of which would already
break relevant trade secret / IP / SEC
/ HIPAA / copyright / whatever laws.
Now, do you suppose that it would really bother
someone already determined to risk breaking big
bad federal laws, to point out that they have to
commit theft of a sub-$500 object as part of
their goal?
Thus, this goes back to my second-to-last sentence,
which you may or may not have made it to before
pouncing on the "Reply" button, so I'll repeat
it for you: "Yet another "great" idea that
annoys honest people and doesn't even slow
down those intent on doing damage".
Don't like it? Work somewhere else. It's their machine.
You just don't get it... I don't actually disagree with you.
Just pointing out the futility of such ideas.
When a "security measure" stops Grandma from syncing
her iPod but doesn't effectively thwart Mr. Evil Hacker,
I consider that both annoying and ineffective (or
worse than ineffective, since it provides the
illusion of security).
Face it, you're on their property, it's their building, tough
titties. You don't like it, move off campus or go to a different
school.
Not the university's property - A totally private apartment
complex nearby, that even has (a small minority of) non-students
living there.
Not the university's internet connection, privately
paid-for Comcast, the AUP of which explicitly allows WAPs.
So you have US citizens living on non-uni private property, with
non-uni WAPs and computers connecting to non-uni broadband. These
students may live near campus, but basically count as
commuters. Would you call it equally reasonable for the school
to ban WAPs at all their students' parents' houses? Because
this counts as basically the same situation, despite the rampant
misunderstanding flying around about this topic.
The university can't do jack beyond make vague threats in this
situation. They know this, and as nasty as they may talk, you
won't see them go after anyone for it. Even without
this stepping on FCC exclusivity, the university would have no
say in this matter.
This applies as a group policy... Circumvention?
As easy as:
Copy the data you want to the local HDD.
Unplug the network cable.
Reboot.
Log on to the local machine rather than the domain.
Make your copies.
Plug the network cable back in.
Reboot.
Resume work as normal.
Now, if your admins actually went around and
locked down each machine individually, you might
need to get a little more "personal" with the
machine (taking the HDD home for the night
works well - Let's call that Circumvention
Method #28).
Yet another "great" idea that annoys honest
people and doesn't even slow down those intent
on doing damage. Who comes up with this crap?
Use a computer to compose a song with all
possible 3 note combinations in the popular
note range
A better approach, that would not only not
infringe on every existing copyright, but
actually invalidate them (at least, in relation
to any given three notes)...
Search through pre-copyright-era works for an
instance of all possible three-note sequences.
Poof, you have just proven any song
not only has prior art, but has NON-COPYRIGHTED
(ie, in the public domain) prior art.
Since you can't just re-release a public
domain work as your own (well, by the
definition of public domain, you could,
but you'd get laughed out of court for trying
to asser copyright over your "new" work),
this would mean that anyone making use of
any of those three-note sequences has
"accidentally" created a piecewise
public domain work.
Actually, I would say "yes", the government
that supposedly exists for our benefit
should not have any secrets from us. But I
consider that a slightly different topic.
But that is another story...the issue here
is whether there is a LAW requiring it.)
Ah, okay. From that perspective, I agree with
you. It seems, though, this takes us from
discussing something tangible (what does the
law say) to mere semantics - if the law says
"obey the airline's rules" and the airline
has secret rules, do we have a secret law?
However, in case I didn't make the target of
my indignation clear, I didn't even want to
get onto the topic of the suit itself - I
feel indigation over the DoJ wanting to keep
its reasons a secret. In something like a
rape trial, I can accept that. I can very
rarely accept "national security" as a
reason. When the only apparent reason involves
"placebo effect requires the subject to think
the cure will work", well, that just doesn't
cut it, not by a long shot.
It's more fun to believe that there are
secret laws, though, isn't it?
You've taken my quote out of context. Again,
I did not claim we had secret laws,
only that the DoJ wanting to seal their
testimony bothers me greatly.
Those who want to travel with no ID can
submit to a more intensive search, to ensure
they are not bringing dangerous materials
onto the plane. ...
I see asking for a form of ID as perfectly
reasonable, not because it prevents incidents,
but because it gives investigators extremely
useful starting points after an incident.
Do you see how you've contradicted yourself
here?
If ID cards only provide a starting point in
an investigation, rather than any real safety,
then how does accepting a thorough search
count as a viable alternative? The latter
I will grant may truly improve security, but
using the former as the red herring to justify
the latter - Well, I'd call that the very
slippery slope so many of us paranoids have
pointed to all this time.
are you suggesting that we actually should have
no security checks at airports, at all?
Not no security. But certainly
not placebo security. If the TSA really
wanted to solve the problem, rather than
look busy, they'd have made the flight deck
entirely isolated from the passenger compartment
as their very first step. Yet, that still
has not happened, nor do I see it as likely.
Until they take that very basic, obvious step,
I'll consider the rest nothing more than a
ruse no more clever than "lookit the monkey!"
Slashdot Mirror
They might have a 32 KHz CPU clock and draw a fraction of a microampere most of the time.
Based on your concluding comment, I will take it you meant your entire response as tongue-in-cheek.
If, however, you meant that seriously, and don't refer to a uC that spends spends "most of the time" not even turned on, I would love to hear a part number for such a device...
So, did anyone else want to cry at seeing that Nintendo has finally taken the most wonderful game series ever created by Humankind (ie, Metroid), and made it into a multiplayer death-match-style FPS?
Sigh. Nintendo, You've just lost a customer, not for the lack of games, but for the non-lack of this particular one.
I apologize for picking nits (I largely agree with you)...
But...
Battery capacity is fairly close to being limited by physics (many estimate maybe a doubling in power density, and that'll be about it).
A "High capacity" NiMH AA Battery holds 2300mAh (which at 1.2V means 1.92 Watt-hours).
A Typical NiMH AA battery weighs roughly an ounce (the 27 currently in my "charged" pile weigh an average of 28.5g each).
Octane yields 44811.1 Joules per gram, and one Joule equals 0.0002778 Watt-hour.
So... 28.5 grams of octane, on complete combustion, yields a bit under 1.28MJ, or 354.8 Watt-hours.
Thus, a perfectly efficient fuel cell running on octane could store 185.1 times as much energy as an equivalent NiMH battery.
Really who is going to print out all 600 pages of the newest Tom Clancey book, then goto the effort of binding them together. It'd cost more in paper, ink, time & energy than to just buy the book.
"Print out?"
Have you gone daft, man!
I'd pay Google for the service of simply providing me with high-quality scans of books I already own (preferably including a proofread OCR of the contents in the images' metadata).
I don't want printouts. I want versions I can throw on my home fileserver and search the content thereof within a few minutes for "that neat idea I remember reading three years ago but not which book it came from".
Not to say I don't want a hardcopy as well... Physical books have a certain appeal that no level of scanning quality can match. But as a companion to the physical books, I would very much like to have searchable digital copies of every book in my library.
If Google ever managed to cripple my browser without the use of CSS or Javascript, how about I just tcpdump packets into files as they pass by.
...Thus requiring you to build not only your
own browser, but your own network stack simulator
as well, just to decode some marginally-readable
page scans?
You make the assumption that Google only uses such stupid-browser-tricks to keep you from storing their content locally. It would make far more sense to use such trick to make the content even remotely intelligible.
If they just send an image and prevent printing and right-clicks and the like, a far easier circumvention would exist - Run a caching web proxy on the local machine, then just fetch the images from the cache. I'll give the guys at Google at least enough credit to have thought of that one (since in many cases, particularly larger corporate networks, it would happen without anyone deliberately trying to use it for DRM circumvention).
Goverment is not always a bad thing
In theory, true.
In practice... Well, I have yet to see it.
Rocket fuel is really nasty stuff. I remember the warnings after Columbia went bang sent out to people informing them that getting near peices of the reckage could be very hazerdous for their health.
There ya go... Thank you for providing a nice example. The "Hazardous fuel" line counts as what we non-political-minded folk call a "lie".
Yes, hydrazine can harm you... If you manage to come into contact with it in the very few seconds it will last in the presence of oxygen and water vapor (such as you would have great difficulty avoiding anywhere on Earth).
The reports of the danger of even touching bits of shuttle debris served a purpose - It prevented most people from trying to collect bits of shuttle debris. Such lies had nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with keeping people scared and in line (the One True Goal(tm) of any real-world government).
Fnord.
Did you know that only about 1% of the housecats in the world are pure breed?
Did you know that the entire concept of a "purebred" counts as total BS, a fictional concept designed to allow a small number of people to profit from an activity this particular species engages in prolifically (and loudly)?
Not to mention that a "mixed" breed will usually have fewer health problems (some defensive cat-slaver will no doubt chime in to dispute that - True, under optimal conditions, you can breed genetic disease out of a line. It simply does not happen in practice, as the largest motivation to breed involves profit, which you don't maximize by "rendering nonviable" two out of every three newborns).
In fact, for computational tasks, many benchmarks have shown that a modern optimized JVM with JIT compilation is roughly equivalent with most implementations of C++, with some benchmarks being better for Java and some being better for C++.
Funny... Yeah, exact word I wanted.
Even funnier? Those benchmarks compare C++ (with C/C++ libs), to Java (with C/C++ libs). Woo-woo, color me simply shocked that such tests show the two as performing comparably on tasks that minimize the impact of the frontend code.
And something else "funny"? You always see Java compared against compiler-optimized C++, a strawman if ever I've seen one. I don't claim C++ as all that much better than Java, I claim C (no ++) with hand-tuned assembler for a few tight loops as faster than Java.
Come back to me when Java can match that, and I'll consider it merely redundant, rather than outright wasteful. Until then, take the "immune from buffer overflow exploits" with a grain of "what language did they write the JVM/JRE in?".
Secure products generally make money than insecure products.
BS.
Microsoft has built an entire business model out of releasing buggy software, patching it for a few years, then abandoning it for the new version which really contains nothing actually "new" beyond a renewed patch cycle.
If not for SP6 counting as the last major fix for NT4, I (and millions of others) would still use it. Not to say that I don't like 2k, but aside from functional PNP (which NT4 sorta had, but broken so badly MS didn't make any serious claims about it), not enough differences exist to matter.
And let's not ignore XP - A new build of Win2k with a Fisher-Price UI. Now why would I ever upgrade to that? Oh, yeah, major security flaws in 2k that MS has bluntly stated they will never repair.
Looking at things from a corporate perspective, companies have a disincentive to "do it right" the first time (or ever). All the programs I use that the development house did right the first time, I still use (ie, no more money for them for "upgrades"). Sad but true.
Regardless of your opinion of MS's involvement in this idea, does AOL's take on it really matter to anyone?
Right up there at the top of my blacklist you'll find "*.aol.*". Whether or not the mail really came from there doesn't matter, because almost half of the spam I get reports itself as coming from an AOL account.
Same goes for MSN, hotmail, and yahoo. I couldn't care less whether or not they choose to adopt anti-spam-technique-X, since I don't read any mail coming from them anyway.
And for the one AOL-using person with whom I actually exchange email, my whitelist works just fine.
Data integrity. Apparently it uses file checksums to error-correct files, so files will never be corrupted. About time someone did this.
So, I take it that back in the days of DOS, you never got a CRC error trying to copy an important file off a floppy?
What's to prevent a criminal from breaking the padlock off the box?
;-)
Because it takes an NSA-sized sledgehammer to do so.
Now, if either the contents of the message, or the value of replacing it with a different message, might interest the NSA, well, you can't make a thick enough tinfoil beanie to keep them out.
The NSA, however, doesn't really care about your choice of Fleshlight inserts.
If nothing else, go look at this just to see the panels installed and "lit up."
Whoah!
Simply Amazing!
34 posts, and a person's personal site hasn't gone up in flames yet?
The hell with the LCD panels, I want to know his ISP!
I challenge you to explain why it is safe to send my credit card number to Amazon through untrusted servers without using mathematics.
On one side you have Alice. On the other, you have Bob.
Alice sends Bob a box containing an unlocked padlock, for which she has the only key.
Bob puts a message for Alice in the box, and uses the padlock to lock the box. He then sends it back to Alice.
It dosn't matter how he sends the box back to Alice, because she has the only key.
Now, we need to add one more layer to this, since Charles might have intercepted the box from Alice, replaced her lock with his own, send the box on to Bob, intercepted it on the return, and replaced his own lock with Alice's. They call this the "Man in the Middle" attack.
The solution? A fourth party, Diane, sells pre-locked box-and-key pairs, and can "certify" that a given key belongs to a given lock which belongs to a given box. Thus, Bob can make sure the lock and box both came from Alice, and can Alice can know that she gets back the same box (in case Charles smashed the original box open and managed to use an entirely new box with the same lock).
Satisfied?
If you don't like a type of food, do you go on a personal crusade to ensure no one ever eats it ever again? Probably not.
If you don't like Real's business strategy, DON'T USE IT.
Overall, I agree with your point. However (always a however, or I wouldn't have responded)...
Many Slashdotters get to deal with not only the consequences of their own software, but with the choices of non-geek family and friends.
I have no problem saying, "I will never make the mistake of installing another Real product on my computer". I know better. I realize how invasively their products behave, the poor quality of their media formats (until they went to basically pure MPEG-4 for everything), the legendarily-pathetic streaming problems (what, they never heard of "let me buffer the whole damned thing while I get a snack, before starting to play"?).
OTOH, every time I visit a friend or relative, they want me to make Real go away. I ask why they reinstalled it, and the answer inevitably either involves "the kids did it" or "the website told me I had to". So, not having installed it myself, I still have to deal with it. That irks me, just a tad.
Incidentally, sometimes even we geeks can make mistakes. I (presume I) accidentally left a checkbox ticked for RealOne as part of some other program, and it took literally hours to completely get rid of it (A tip, for "removing" literally any self-protective Windows program - Burn a Knoppix CD with an NTFS-write enabled kernel, boot it, mount the Windows partition in question, and rename the directory of the offending program).
I will swallow my pride and admit I screwed up in allowing it to install. But that sort of irritation has lead to the anti-Real zealotry you see in Slashdotters today... A mere oversight during installing a seemingly unrelated product, and I lost a few hours of my all-too-rare free time.
If someone steals some CDs from you, you don't have the right to burn their house down.
But you have a legal right to own CDs (not getting into the topic of media-vs-content-license).
For a better analogy, in the US, you don't have the right to own an ounce of weed.
Now, if someone mugs you for it, technically, they have "stolen" it.
But would you go to the police to say "yeah, I had just bought this huge bag of chronic when some douche mugged me for it"?
Same idea here. Maliciously deleting files may count as illegal, but in order to press charges, you have to admit committing software piracy (and in this case, also violating the DMCA, since a hacked reg code would certainly count as "access control circumvention").
It may count as playing with fire, but he made sure to wear asbestos gloves.
Bear in mind that FTL also means time travel; the two are equivalent.
...Of a sort.
It doesn't mean "Gee, today I think I'll visit 1642 and give Isaac Newton's father a pack of Trojans".
Think of it in classical terms (since, if we find a way to go faster than the speed of light, it means either that light does not count as the universal speed-limit, or we've found a way around it such as a wormhole or other means of folding space to make two points effectively closer).
Now, imagine two people living on planets one light-year apart. If they look through a telescope, they each see the other's planet as it existed a year ago.
Now, let's say person A's planet gets whacked by a huge asteroid. Looking through the telescope, it would person B a year to notice.
If, however, person B could travel almost instantly to planet A, person A wouldn't magically watch their planet regress back a year for the convenience of preserving B's time-location.
At worst, if person B got to planet A by moving faster than the speed of light rather than by folding space, he would "see" planet A sped up as they approached, then return to normal when he arrived.
Looks like somebody's just discovered the terrible secret of space!
I hope you live in a one-story building...
As an attorney, I have no problem not getting overtime pay when I work over 40 hours per week.
...Because, after all, we chose to go to college
and have a "real" career because of our strong
aversions to free time, right?
Overtime pay? No, I don't care about overtime pay. I'd gladly take straight pay for my hours over 40.
I didn't spend 7+ years in school to spend my work day looking at the clock.
Nor did I do the same to leave home and return in the dark every day. Oh, how I miss lying on the quad basking in the sun, rather than needing to take a walk down the hall just to tell the current weather.
But anyone doing drudge work should certainly be paid overtime for more than 40 hours per week.
As an attorney
Had you not made that statement, I would consider you a troll.
Everyone, regardless of what they do, deserves to get paid for their labor.
As soon as my company tells me "Hey, y'know, you do your job twice as fast as average, so we'll let you only put in 20 hours for the same salary", I'll consider it fair. As it stands now, performing twice as well as most of my coworkers means I get twice the workload (and have twice as much motivation to read Slashdot for four hours of my work-day)...
"Hey, Bob, when you booted up your computer this morning, it reported that the chassis had been opened...."
"Yeah, and when I tried to access the Exchange server you supposedly admin, it told me it had negative 472 files to synchronize, then crashed. Your point?"
Never worked for a big corporation? That's pretty much illegal.
...The theft of which would already
break relevant trade secret / IP / SEC
/ HIPAA / copyright / whatever laws.
Actually, I would argue that point ("Against company policy" does not equal "illegal"), but I consider it irrelevant anyway...
Why would you want to stop people from having access to removeable media devices in the first place? To stop them from stealing sensitive corporate information...
Now, do you suppose that it would really bother someone already determined to risk breaking big bad federal laws, to point out that they have to commit theft of a sub-$500 object as part of their goal?
Thus, this goes back to my second-to-last sentence, which you may or may not have made it to before pouncing on the "Reply" button, so I'll repeat it for you: "Yet another "great" idea that annoys honest people and doesn't even slow down those intent on doing damage".
Don't like it? Work somewhere else. It's their machine.
You just don't get it... I don't actually disagree with you. Just pointing out the futility of such ideas.
When a "security measure" stops Grandma from syncing her iPod but doesn't effectively thwart Mr. Evil Hacker, I consider that both annoying and ineffective (or worse than ineffective, since it provides the illusion of security).
Face it, you're on their property, it's their building, tough titties. You don't like it, move off campus or go to a different school.
Not the university's property - A totally private apartment complex nearby, that even has (a small minority of) non-students living there.
Not the university's internet connection, privately paid-for Comcast, the AUP of which explicitly allows WAPs.
So you have US citizens living on non-uni private property, with non-uni WAPs and computers connecting to non-uni broadband. These students may live near campus, but basically count as commuters. Would you call it equally reasonable for the school to ban WAPs at all their students' parents' houses? Because this counts as basically the same situation, despite the rampant misunderstanding flying around about this topic.
The university can't do jack beyond make vague threats in this situation. They know this, and as nasty as they may talk, you won't see them go after anyone for it. Even without this stepping on FCC exclusivity, the university would have no say in this matter.
This applies as a group policy... Circumvention? As easy as:
Copy the data you want to the local HDD.
Unplug the network cable.
Reboot.
Log on to the local machine rather than the domain.
Make your copies.
Plug the network cable back in.
Reboot.
Resume work as normal.
Now, if your admins actually went around and locked down each machine individually, you might need to get a little more "personal" with the machine (taking the HDD home for the night works well - Let's call that Circumvention Method #28).
Yet another "great" idea that annoys honest people and doesn't even slow down those intent on doing damage. Who comes up with this crap?
Use a computer to compose a song with all possible 3 note combinations in the popular note range
A better approach, that would not only not infringe on every existing copyright, but actually invalidate them (at least, in relation to any given three notes)...
Search through pre-copyright-era works for an instance of all possible three-note sequences. Poof, you have just proven any song not only has prior art, but has NON-COPYRIGHTED (ie, in the public domain) prior art.
Since you can't just re-release a public domain work as your own (well, by the definition of public domain, you could, but you'd get laughed out of court for trying to asser copyright over your "new" work), this would mean that anyone making use of any of those three-note sequences has "accidentally" created a piecewise public domain work.
Should *nothing* be secret?
...
Actually, I would say "yes", the government that supposedly exists for our benefit should not have any secrets from us. But I consider that a slightly different topic.
But that is another story...the issue here is whether there is a LAW requiring it.)
Ah, okay. From that perspective, I agree with you. It seems, though, this takes us from discussing something tangible (what does the law say) to mere semantics - if the law says "obey the airline's rules" and the airline has secret rules, do we have a secret law?
However, in case I didn't make the target of my indignation clear, I didn't even want to get onto the topic of the suit itself - I feel indigation over the DoJ wanting to keep its reasons a secret. In something like a rape trial, I can accept that. I can very rarely accept "national security" as a reason. When the only apparent reason involves "placebo effect requires the subject to think the cure will work", well, that just doesn't cut it, not by a long shot.
It's more fun to believe that there are secret laws, though, isn't it?
You've taken my quote out of context. Again, I did not claim we had secret laws, only that the DoJ wanting to seal their testimony bothers me greatly.
Those who want to travel with no ID can submit to a more intensive search, to ensure they are not bringing dangerous materials onto the plane.
I see asking for a form of ID as perfectly reasonable, not because it prevents incidents, but because it gives investigators extremely useful starting points after an incident.
Do you see how you've contradicted yourself here?
If ID cards only provide a starting point in an investigation, rather than any real safety, then how does accepting a thorough search count as a viable alternative? The latter I will grant may truly improve security, but using the former as the red herring to justify the latter - Well, I'd call that the very slippery slope so many of us paranoids have pointed to all this time.
are you suggesting that we actually should have no security checks at airports, at all?
Not no security. But certainly not placebo security. If the TSA really wanted to solve the problem, rather than look busy, they'd have made the flight deck entirely isolated from the passenger compartment as their very first step. Yet, that still has not happened, nor do I see it as likely.
Until they take that very basic, obvious step, I'll consider the rest nothing more than a ruse no more clever than "lookit the monkey!"