No kidding, eh? I know this decision
has made *MY* respect for copyrights,
our entire judicial system, and the
government in general, go way up.
Golly. Better "plug that analog hole",
aka our eyes, by chipping our brains
right away, Fritz, 'cuz my opinion
of your "rights" just hit bottom.
Time to start violating copyrights to
material I don't even *want*, just for
the sake of civil disobedience.
As an independent artist I can tell you
that copyrights are the only thing that can
protect us from people taking advantage of
our work.
And as a recent article about the dojinshi
phenomena in Japan shows, that doesn't quite
hold true.
However, I *do* respect you, and thank you
for producing works that I (or others, if
not me) might enjoy. Seriously, no
sarcasm intended.
However...
Those copyrights don't *NEED* to protect you
after you die. Current copyright terms *will*
last longer than any of us will, unless
science "cures" death in the next few years.
The idea of "to the author's death plus 70
years" seems quite adequate to me.
As for your "legacy"... Face it - If your
work doesn't make you wealthy in this life,
it won't do so in the next. At most,
someday your kids might make a few bucks
selling the distillation of your life for
some company to use in a commercial. Yay,
the thought makes *me* want to go out and
create.
I think a lot of people have missed the
big *philosophical* issue involved here.
Corporate America has us so brainwashed
to believe in their "rights" that we don't
even realize the true nature of such rights.
Many of us think it MORALLY wrong to "steal"
80-year-old copyrighted material. Yet, the
US constitution *only* allows copyrights "to
promote the progress of science and useful
arts, by securing for limited times to
authors and inventors the exclusive right to
their respective writings and discoveries."
For THAT reason, all Americans should feel
outrage at this decision. The supreme
court has sold us out. Unlimited extensions
ala the Sunny Bono act do not equal "limited"
copyright terms as allowed in the
constitution.
I'll skip getting into the obvious rant
about erosion of fair-use rights as well.
Well, at least you Europeans don't need
to worry about your artistic heritage
vanishing into the past because something
ceased to exist (think nitrate film)
because it became unprofitable before
its copyright expired. Perhaps when
(if) the US gets some sanity back,
you'll lend us a copy so we can enjoy
the past as well?
Why shouldn't we be charged sales tax
on internet purchases?
For a better question, why *should* we
have tax on internet purchases? For
in-state purchases only, I can see it as
(somewhat) justified. Otherwise, this
gets into a large mess with that whole
"No taxation without representation"
thing. Tell me, how does my tax money
going to another state enhance my
representation in my own state's
government?
Of course, I agree with you that we should
not have any state-level sales tax in the
first place. A number of states get by
just fine without it, and those with the
highest sales taxes tend to get the most
tourists (such as NY). Explain to me how
heavily taxing tourism has ANYTHING to do
with representation in government? Yeah,
I harp on that point a bit, but we fought
our very first WAR over it. If we've
recanted our stance on taxation, perhaps
we should just beg the British to take
us back? Their economy seems a hell
of a lot better than our own, at the
moment...
Finally, this will kill on-line purchasing,
but not have any of the desired effects, for
one simple reason - I most certainly would
*NOT* pay taxes on an on-line purchase when
I can simply pick up the phone and order the
same thing, from the same company, as "mail
order", without the taxes.
Start the antivirus UI process as part of an
isolated job with limited UI privs. It'll be in
a separate windowing namespace, and the shatter
attack will no longer work.
Tell me, do you run *all* your programs in
a private UI context? The antivirus program
just makes the "classic" example. How about
your usually-hidden-but-always-instantiated
NVidia setup panel? Any services you run
that have a control panel for configuring
them (Tardis, for example)? A local web
server? One of those annoying (but often
necessary for proper functioning of the
related device) printer or scanner control
panels?
Aside from not trusting the so-called "privacy"
of running something on a private desktop,
you don't even need to bother breaking that
layer of security. Just look for something
else running as administrator... or backup...
or power user... or replicator... or even
"guest", which by default has an obscenely
high level of privelage (relative to a Unix
box, which doesn't even usually *have*
an account as conceptually insecure as
Window's guest account).
If you've managed to configure a Windows
box to have *everything* run as a specific,
seperate user, in its own UI context, I tip
my hat to you. I also do not envy the hell
of making even trivial config changes to
such systems, nor do I envy the frustration
your users must feel at trying to use such
a system productively. Put simply, Windows
lacks the *design level* security to make
it generally useable yet reasonably
safe against its own users.
Finally, even if you change the default
permissions on "ping" as the parent suggested,
under Windows that doesn't do a damned
thing to stop a trojan that *includes*
its own ping program from working just
fine. Remember that, in dealing with
a DDoS problem, it doesn't matter if
a security expert *can* lock down a given
box - It only matters that 99% of the people
out there won't bother to fix (or even *know
about*) a given exploit allowing raw network
access.
Also, I wonder if switching the default
permissions on ping so that only root (or
some other privileged user -- I don't know
how/if Windows implements this these days)
wouldn't be a good idea.
Windows has only the most vague concept of
a "root" user, and rooting a Windows box
takes about 40 lines of code (basically, the
problem comes from the GUI - any program
running with administrator privelage, such
as a virus scanner, can spawn additional
processes also running as the administrator. Making them do so requires nothing more than
getting a handle to a text edit control,
pasting in the desired malicious code, and
using the address of the edit's buffer as
a start-of-execution point. All of which
*any* user can do.
Or at least put a lid on it when someone
starts sending lots of pings for more than
a couple of seconds...
Doing so would require remembering who
pinged, and when, for the last few seconds.
Under normal conditions, that sounds trivial,
but pings don't cause any problems under
"normal" conditions. In a DDoS, you might
have a million machines all pinging. How do
you propose to store, look up, and update
the last ping time for 100 million pings per
second? A quick off-the-cuff calculation shows
that *just the storage* for 10 seconds of such recording would take around 8Gb (32b IP and 32b
timestamp). That doesn't include the CPU time
to find matches (not that bad, since you can
use the IP as an array index, but you can
almost guarantee a continually invalid CPU
cache) or update the list. And, that assumes
you *always* dedicate that 8Gb to each server
running on the machine, since otherwise the
search you propose requires adding new pings
to a dynamic list, making the lookup time
become very very non-trivial.
More importantly, even if you *do* manage
such a feat (or even get rid of ping
altogether), attackers can still use other
services (like, for example, DNS lookups,
which I'd like to see a DNS server try
to stop supporting).
Actually, it surprises me that no DDoS
clients use SSH yet... Although not every
machine (ie, Windows) runs an attackable
server, a well-planned attack could suck
up significant bandwidth, memory, *and*
CPU power, all in one tidy packet.
I really don't see what these guys want
to accomplish. How does "back" not really
go back? The article seems to imply
that "back" understands the idea of a
site hierarchy and will literally only
go "up" in that hierarchy (whatever that
means... Toward the root of a site?):
Cockburn and his colleagues reprogrammed
web browsers so that their back button was
based on the order of pages, not their
hierarchy
See? This just makes no sense. When I
click "back", it goes to the previous page
I visited. In chronological order. No
"hierarchy" involved. The linked article
seems to imply otherwise.
Now, if they mean that non-server content,
such as the state of a running JS/Java
program, or user entered data, will not
persist, I can understand their point, but
wouldn't *WANT* it to stay around for others
to find on my machine later.
Furthermore:
The order-based back button was good
at navigating between distant pages.
Now here, I've definitely missed something.
How does an order-based back button make it
*easier* to go between distant sites? A
hierarchical button (if such a thing existed)
would do that better.
Overall, either I missed something *REALLY*
fundamental in what these guys did, or they
did nothing and obscured that fact with lots
of talk about irrelevant relational concepts.
From the words they chose to use, a back
button *already* behaves like what they want
to change it to, and the supposed benefits
of their change fit better with the behavior
they claim the back button already has (which
it doesn't).
As the best credit I could give them from
the article, I could assume that the author
completely misunderstood the research and
reversed the two concepts. Thus, the research
would actually have the "new" button behavior
using a hierarchy of sites, rather than strict
chronological behavior.
Do we all think that products like RU-486
sprung from the ground unaided?
No, "we" think the two drugs involved,
mifepristone and misoprostol, both originated
for other uses. The former, an antiprogestin,
just happens to cause a very high incidence of
detachment of fertilized critters as a
predictable but not originally "deliberate" consequence of its action (methotrexate, a
drug used in chemotherapy and for rheumatoid
arthritis, has almost the same effectiveness,
though by a different mechanism of action...
Shall we attribute this coincidence to "liberal
science" as well?). The latter, a
prostoglandin analogue, simply causes
uterine contractions (as a side effect of
its "real" action), raising the efficacy
of the combination quite a bit.
Incindentally, just about any two pairs
of drugs from the same classes would have
similar effects.
I don't quite see where you mean to go
with the idea of "liberal" science,
however. Do you mean we only have drugs
like RU-486 because liberals "lied" about
something? I can only assume you mean
that, as the parent article involves
what amounts to us getting bad policies
due to conservatives "lying" about
controvertial scientific findings.
I will, however, agree with you in one
key aspect (lest you think I just want to
nitpick)... Political correctness *does*
pervade science, in the form of ethical
restrictions not just on what someone *can*
do, but on what others will acknowledge
ever happened. For example, the science
done at concentration camps during WWII...
Yeah, *REALLY* nasty, and much of it
totally unneccessary. But in addition to
what we might describe as "torture for
the fun of it", they also answered a
lot of questions for which no "ethical"
means of getting an answer exists.
most folks aren't really at the
brink of destruction
'Scuse me? I hate to tell you this, but after
over a year of unemployment, I, and hundreds of
thousands like me, exist REALLY uncomfortably
close to the "brink of destruction".
I've maxed my CC's, run out of savings
(including 401k), and would presently
starve to death if my SO decided to throw
me out.
And I've always managed my money rather well,
not buying too many frivolous things, avoiding
spending more than I have like the plague (my
one exception, buying a new car when my last
one died. But a "commuting" car, by no means
a luxury toy). But a total of around $10k to
last 14 months now, good luck. I suspect many
geeks (who have a stereotype/reputation for
buying *lots* of expensive toys and holding
pretty decent sized debts) have it a lot
worse than I do.
And it has nothing to do with "wanting" to
work, or only the "bad" geeks not having
jobs... I have qualifications and experience
that hiring managers used to *dream* of.
And yeah, for the first three months, I
only applied for "sweet" jobs. Then "anything
involving computers". Six months ago I
started getting sick of hearing the word
"overqualified". Lately I've taken to
simply "forgetting" the fact that I went
to college for applications, and get a
much better callback rate, but the
number of unemployed (in general, not
just tech) means anything I apply for,
even flipping burgers, I have to compete
with literally hundreds of others to get
noticed.
Not a pretty situation, for a lot of people.
I don't "whine" about it much, but *DON'T*
try to trivialize the problem.
And, think the US has economic problems now?
Wait another year. If the tech market
doesn't start picking up, a lot (more) of
us will end up declaring bankruptcy. What
effect do you suppose that would have,
half a million geeks, each owing as
much as a quarter million dollars (typical
house, or a really nice car and lots of
toys), all defaulting on their debts?
I love all these questions about "speed".
If you want speed, use VMWare. Bochs
EMULATES an 80x86, pure software, no
hardware involved.
So why would you want to use it?
Personally, I use it mostly to run old DOS
games. Games that won't run at all under
Windows (you could insert "Linux" there just
as well, or "OS X", or "HP-UX", or whatever
you run on reasonably modern equipment).
Games that run waaaaay too fast. Games
that "don'y play well with others" and you
wish you could have stuck in on its own
machine even when you really *did* run DOS
just to keep it from breaking other programs.
It makes a GREAT debugging tool, for those
who know how to write low-level code. As long
as your problem doesn't involve instruction
timing or asynchronous events, Bochs works
almost as well as a VERY expensive ICE.
Another nice use, I already mentioned partially,
you can put a program in it's own "clean room".
Ever wanted to see how some of the classic
virii worked but didn't have the balls to risk
your own machine? Put it in a Bochs and let
it do its thing.
Additionally, IMO, the speed (as of 1.4, and
they claim twice the performance for 2.0)
suffices for any CPU or graphics non-intensive
task under Windows 95 OSR2, with FAR better
compatibility than Wine (Not to disparage
Wine, a great and worthy poject, but you
just can't beat the real thing for accuracy
of emulation )
The one "bad" thing about Bochs, and I hope a
developer for it reads this, you need to
manually calibrate the IPS, and then
everything else *relative* to that value.
Although I understand why getting an *exact*
value counts as an almost impossible feat,
I don't see why a simple few-second internal
benchmark at startup couldn't come to within
10% of the "right" value. Admittedly, though,
I haven't played with 2.0 (away from home for
a few days), so if you've added that for this
release, my apologies (and thanks).
I just played a bit with the second two
photos you linked to. Believe it or not,
although the jpegs lack sufficient detail,
I would feel willing to bet that, given a
high-res scan (4k) of those two negatives,
I could get a license plate. For example,
even with the images posted, I can make out
some sort of "special" sticker on the right
side of the license plate, possible one of
those FOP stickers.
Unless, of course, Rich already heavily cropped
and enlarged the pictures he posted on the web.
Then I doubt I could do much more.;-)
These anti-spam nuts are beginning to act
a lot like the anti-abortion nuts. Posting
personal information about spammers online,
making threats against them. Very similar to
the so-called "wanted posters" that
anti-abortionists post on their sites.
Taking pictures of someone's house, from
the street, does not break the law (though
you could argue it borders on stalking).
Accessing public records to find things
like addresses and phone numbers does not
break the law. By Ralsky's own public
statements, signing people up against
their will for "exciting commercial
opportunities" does not break the law.
Making threatening phone calls to a random
person *does* break the law. Parking outside
their house with the deliberate intent of
scaring the hell out of them *does* break
the law. Sending spam to people after they
have opted out *does* break the law (in many
states).
See the pattern? As much as I usually don't
believe in such extremes, this really does
look look like a case of "good guys vs bad
guy".
How really strange. I found one
particular part of the call transcripts
rather interesting...
"You don't know who the hell you were
fucking with yesterday, man, you got the
wrong guy, you don't even have the guy
that you think you have"
Anyone else see a strong possibility of
Ralsky having a deep dark secret that
someone believed poor Rich had accidentally
caught on film? Like meeting with someone
to put a hit on Ralsky's detractors, or
using the supposedly lucrative spam biz
to launder mob money, or the like?
Yeah, slam me for baseless speculation,
but the guy doesn't exactly have the
cleanest legal record, and that quote
just strikes me as so *REALLY* bizarre.
Don't have the right guy? What does *that*
mean?
"Hi, Fred here, from Fred's Aluminum Siding
Non-Profit Shell Corporation and Charity.
I'd like to talk to you about how 0.0001% of
every purchase you make through us goes directly
to feed starving, aluminum-siding-less children
in South Africa..."
Why not? It works for companies that want to
buy their own personal politician... Does
anyone really suspect ANY sane politician
(I didn't say "ethical", just "sane") would
dare take a stand against a scheme that could
turn around and attack their major source of
campaign financing?
Disclaimer: The poster (me) expresses no
opinion as to the merits (if any) of this
class action settlement, and this post is
not legal advice nor is it an advertisement
or solicitation for legal services.
Screw "tact", the settlement absolutely SUCKS.
No question about it. No ambiguity, or
moderating factors. Suck, suck, suckity-suck.
Not so much the individual payouts, which if I
had only bought half a dozen CDs in that time,
I would consider reasonable (assuming, of course,
that they don't get so many claimants that it
drives the disbursement to below $5 each).
But two major problems exist - First, it doesn't
take into account how much music each person
bought (personally, I bought on the order of
200 CDs in the period under consideration - Which
has dropped to around 4 in the past two years
due to the RIAA's political and ethical
policies). And second, NEW CDS STILL COST
$15-$20 EACH!
This makes the SECOND time (that I know of) that
the RIAA has gotten a beat-down for price fixing,
yet they continue to do it.
Yet another complete BS class-action suit. Until
the FTC tells them "lower prices or don't sell
in the US", which I doubt they can (and certainly
wouldn't if they could), no improvement will
happen. Why? It costs the RIAA (members) *FAR*
less to pay a combined $140M once per decade
than to allow fair market competition to lower
prices by 50% or so. Start getting settlements
in the tens of billions, and they *might* pay attention (at once per decade, that would eat
into around 10% of their income... Noticeable,
at least). This paltry little mosquito
doesn't even make them reach down and
scratch.
Nope. "Final Frontier" may have lacked
a certain sort of continuity, and had
some *serious* cheese, but can't possibly
compare to how much "The Voyage Home"
sucked. The time-travel scene made
just about the worst I've ever seen
(even compared to how they portrayed it
in TOS), the over-the-top environmentalist
message just annoyed me beyond words, and
lacking any potential for "hard" sci-fi,
resorted to endless, and unforgiveable,
cuteness to keep the audience entertained.
And VI, "The Undiscovered Country"... Okay,
that one at least had its moments, but for
the most part, about as exciting as watching
paint peel.
I'd take V over either of its neighbors
*any* day.
Well, I can provide "prior art" right off
the top of my head - Every retail store in
the US has offered a "wedding registry"
for longer than I've drawn breath. Unless
Amazon (sorry, Bezos and Kaphan, the patent
doesn't actually mention Amazon) only wants
the *name* "Wish List", they have quite an
uphill battle in defending *this* one.
But the more general issue, of contacting
the buyer if they didn't provide enough
information - I thought the USPTO didn't
allow "trivial" patents. Can someone explain
how the idea of "you didn't tell me your credit
card's expiration date, so I called to get it"
doesn't count as trivial?
Absolutely absurd. The USPTO *really*
needs to start actually *reading* the
applications it approves. And issuing
some sort of fines to companies that
repeatedly try to push through complete
drivel.
Just temporarily (perhaps 1 day) block
ANY client's class C (not just that of Alexa's
crawler) that starts generating more than X
hits per second for longer than five minutes.
By doing so, you haven't taken steps to
specifically thwart *Amazon's* activity,
you have simply enacted a reasonably security
measure to block DOS attacks. If Amazon
actually dared to sue
for blocking them, you'd have a HELL of a
countersuit on the grounds that their 'bot
triggered your DOS alarm.
Personally, I'd just block their bot and
if they complain, tell them where they
can stick their partner agreement. No self
respecting online retailer needs their own
"partners" degrading their QOS. Anyway, When I
want to buy something, I use either Google,
or a product-specific price-search engine
(like PriceWatch). Amazon counts as my
LAST choice for finding something (actually
not quite true... If I need to use Google to
find a product for sale, I often check Amazon
first, just to get things like UPC or ISBN
numbers to narrow my search).
I really do not understand people's "need" to
always have the newest version of a program.
I upgrade *ONLY* when I encounter either a
major bug (meaning "uncircumventable") in
what I already have, or what I have simply
cannot do what I need it to.
For my web-surfing machine, I run W2K. I
will *not*, *ever*, upgrade to XP simply
because it doesn't do anything "new".
Perhaps I will need to upgrade to the
next version of Windows someday, but
considering Microsoft's (and most companys')
release habits, I doubt I'll need to for at
least a few more versions. Hell, I only
upgraded from NT4 because it had poor PNP
and high-end multimedia support (which I
don't really consider a "good" reason,
technologically speaking, but when I couldn't
run 90% of modern games or get any new
hardware, I didn't have much choice). Before
NT4, I used DOS (the entire Win95 line
quite simply sucked, and amazingly, seemed
to get progressively *worse*, not better).
For email, I use Calypso (well, mostly, I
use Elm, but for my junkmail account I
find it easier to get it via POP and just
let the nice filters strip out 99% of the
spam). Calypso, for those who don't know
it, still uses a text-only interface (basic
support for HTML/RTF, but the only email I
get in HTML consists of spam, so I don't
really care 'bout that).
For compiling under windows, I still use
Borland C++ 5. I suspect I'll have to
upgrade when 64-bit chips hit the mainstream
in a year or two, but at the moment, that
6-year-old compiler does the job just as
well as anything I could go out and buy
today.
The "solution" here seems obvious. "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it".
Don't get me wrong, I have no strong love
for "retro" computing (except classic console
video game emulation ). But of the
programs I regularly use, not a single
one has made any real improvement in half
a decade.
And now, we see companies moving toward
*decreased* functionality in their programs,
along with non-permanant licenses to use
them. Explain how that benefits me?
After years of following the news from
various "fringe" groups that claim
some pretty impressive (but "impossible"
things), it pleases me greatly to have
something finally get taken seriously.
*SO* many self-righteous so-called "scientists"
have this incredible fear of anything outside
their understanding. Meteorites? They don't
exist, said the French acadamy of sciences.
The ether? Pish, everyone knows that
Michaelson and Moreley (sp?) disproved that.
Lower-than-ground state Hydrogen? What
nonsense.;-)
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive
about their holy truths as any other two-bit
religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we
can make some real progress.
And, just for the record, no, I do not
either "fear" science, or have anything
against it. I have a fairly decent grounding
in the "hard" sciences, and see that the
methods and results (so far) of science have
a whole lot to offer mankind. So, it
*really* bothers me when so many "experts" categorically refuse to even *look* at claims
such as this, on the grounds that it violates
what they BELIEVE as the underlying basis
of reality.
Throw down with the priesthood, and get
back to the "real" work of investigating
the universe *as it exists*, not as you
believe it to exist.
Damn, people, can the collective computer
geeks of the world *please* pick some sort
of "standard" language (or at least a
very small set of languages, like perhaps
C++ for most things, Perl for scripts,
and Tcl/Tk for GUIs)?
I personally like C. I consider myself
fairly good at it. But honestly, I don't
care if we decide "Everyone must code in
Forth". Just *some* sort of standard.
I'll learn it, and feel happy to "waste"
a year mastering it, just to never have
to learn another "fad" language.
I see people asking why Eiffel doesn't have
more popularity - Why? I can answer that
*really* simply. Because we already have
too-damn-many languages to choose from!
Yes, a *FEW* choices make sense, because not
every language has the same strengths and
weaknesses. But really, how many people
research all 250+ "major" existing languages
to determine the best for each and every
program they write? No one. People pick a
language that has a lot of general-purpose
power and flexibility, and *ONLY* deviate
when their first choice literally cannot
accomplish the task at hand.
Put out efforts toward making a few projects
truly great, not having a huge number of
mediocre projects.
We as an industry (computers) are
*way* bigger then them.
Unfortunately, that doesn't hold true.
The entertainment industry has grown
*dependant* on computers, but absolutely
DWARFS the tech industry for overall
profitability.
People like computers. Take them away,
and they complain. People (believe they)
NEED "bread and circuses", however. Take
the circuses away, and expect all-out
rioting in the streets.
Not sending email to grandma and access to
endless free porn, vs actually having to
spend time with people in a (gasp!)
*interactive* manner? How barbaric.
I agree with what I perceive as your point,
though. Hollywood can't screw us (the general
"us") without our (the specific computer-related
"us") help. But it only takes a few traitors
to all of humanity to screw the rest of us.
And offer enough money, and *someone* will
do the job even against their morals.
Sad, but true. We just have to keep fighting
for sanity, and when things look bleak, take
some solace in the fact that anything they
come up with, we can get around.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
stealing' from those bastards is not a crime.
No kidding, eh? I know this decision has made *MY* respect for copyrights, our entire judicial system, and the government in general, go way up. Golly. Better "plug that analog hole", aka our eyes, by chipping our brains right away, Fritz, 'cuz my opinion of your "rights" just hit bottom. Time to start violating copyrights to material I don't even *want*, just for the sake of civil disobedience.
As an independent artist I can tell you that copyrights are the only thing that can protect us from people taking advantage of our work.
And as a recent article about the dojinshi phenomena in Japan shows, that doesn't quite hold true.
However, I *do* respect you, and thank you for producing works that I (or others, if not me) might enjoy. Seriously, no sarcasm intended.
However...
Those copyrights don't *NEED* to protect you after you die. Current copyright terms *will* last longer than any of us will, unless science "cures" death in the next few years. The idea of "to the author's death plus 70 years" seems quite adequate to me.
As for your "legacy"... Face it - If your work doesn't make you wealthy in this life, it won't do so in the next. At most, someday your kids might make a few bucks selling the distillation of your life for some company to use in a commercial. Yay, the thought makes *me* want to go out and create.
I think a lot of people have missed the big *philosophical* issue involved here. Corporate America has us so brainwashed to believe in their "rights" that we don't even realize the true nature of such rights. Many of us think it MORALLY wrong to "steal" 80-year-old copyrighted material. Yet, the US constitution *only* allows copyrights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
For THAT reason, all Americans should feel outrage at this decision. The supreme court has sold us out. Unlimited extensions ala the Sunny Bono act do not equal "limited" copyright terms as allowed in the constitution.
I'll skip getting into the obvious rant about erosion of fair-use rights as well.
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing into the past because something ceased to exist (think nitrate film) because it became unprofitable before its copyright expired. Perhaps when (if) the US gets some sanity back, you'll lend us a copy so we can enjoy the past as well?
Why shouldn't we be charged sales tax on internet purchases?
For a better question, why *should* we have tax on internet purchases? For in-state purchases only, I can see it as (somewhat) justified. Otherwise, this gets into a large mess with that whole "No taxation without representation" thing. Tell me, how does my tax money going to another state enhance my representation in my own state's government?
Of course, I agree with you that we should not have any state-level sales tax in the first place. A number of states get by just fine without it, and those with the highest sales taxes tend to get the most tourists (such as NY). Explain to me how heavily taxing tourism has ANYTHING to do with representation in government? Yeah, I harp on that point a bit, but we fought our very first WAR over it. If we've recanted our stance on taxation, perhaps we should just beg the British to take us back? Their economy seems a hell of a lot better than our own, at the moment...
Finally, this will kill on-line purchasing, but not have any of the desired effects, for one simple reason - I most certainly would *NOT* pay taxes on an on-line purchase when I can simply pick up the phone and order the same thing, from the same company, as "mail order", without the taxes.
Start the antivirus UI process as part of an isolated job with limited UI privs. It'll be in a separate windowing namespace, and the shatter attack will no longer work.
Tell me, do you run *all* your programs in a private UI context? The antivirus program just makes the "classic" example. How about your usually-hidden-but-always-instantiated NVidia setup panel? Any services you run that have a control panel for configuring them (Tardis, for example)? A local web server? One of those annoying (but often necessary for proper functioning of the related device) printer or scanner control panels?
Aside from not trusting the so-called "privacy" of running something on a private desktop, you don't even need to bother breaking that layer of security. Just look for something else running as administrator... or backup... or power user... or replicator... or even "guest", which by default has an obscenely high level of privelage (relative to a Unix box, which doesn't even usually *have* an account as conceptually insecure as Window's guest account). If you've managed to configure a Windows box to have *everything* run as a specific, seperate user, in its own UI context, I tip my hat to you. I also do not envy the hell of making even trivial config changes to such systems, nor do I envy the frustration your users must feel at trying to use such a system productively. Put simply, Windows lacks the *design level* security to make it generally useable yet reasonably safe against its own users.
Finally, even if you change the default permissions on "ping" as the parent suggested, under Windows that doesn't do a damned thing to stop a trojan that *includes* its own ping program from working just fine. Remember that, in dealing with a DDoS problem, it doesn't matter if a security expert *can* lock down a given box - It only matters that 99% of the people out there won't bother to fix (or even *know about*) a given exploit allowing raw network access.
Also, I wonder if switching the default permissions on ping so that only root (or some other privileged user -- I don't know how/if Windows implements this these days) wouldn't be a good idea.
Windows has only the most vague concept of a "root" user, and rooting a Windows box takes about 40 lines of code (basically, the problem comes from the GUI - any program running with administrator privelage, such as a virus scanner, can spawn additional processes also running as the administrator. Making them do so requires nothing more than getting a handle to a text edit control, pasting in the desired malicious code, and using the address of the edit's buffer as a start-of-execution point. All of which *any* user can do.
Get them to code into their OS some sort of rate limit for icmp-echo-reply packets
And it would take about 2 hours before someone compiled and distributed a "raw" ping client for windows.
Or at least put a lid on it when someone starts sending lots of pings for more than a couple of seconds...
Doing so would require remembering who pinged, and when, for the last few seconds. Under normal conditions, that sounds trivial, but pings don't cause any problems under "normal" conditions. In a DDoS, you might have a million machines all pinging. How do you propose to store, look up, and update the last ping time for 100 million pings per second? A quick off-the-cuff calculation shows that *just the storage* for 10 seconds of such recording would take around 8Gb (32b IP and 32b timestamp). That doesn't include the CPU time to find matches (not that bad, since you can use the IP as an array index, but you can almost guarantee a continually invalid CPU cache) or update the list. And, that assumes you *always* dedicate that 8Gb to each server running on the machine, since otherwise the search you propose requires adding new pings to a dynamic list, making the lookup time become very very non-trivial.
More importantly, even if you *do* manage such a feat (or even get rid of ping altogether), attackers can still use other services (like, for example, DNS lookups, which I'd like to see a DNS server try to stop supporting).
Actually, it surprises me that no DDoS clients use SSH yet... Although not every machine (ie, Windows) runs an attackable server, a well-planned attack could suck up significant bandwidth, memory, *and* CPU power, all in one tidy packet.
I really don't see what these guys want to accomplish. How does "back" not really go back? The article seems to imply that "back" understands the idea of a site hierarchy and will literally only go "up" in that hierarchy (whatever that means... Toward the root of a site?):
Cockburn and his colleagues reprogrammed web browsers so that their back button was based on the order of pages, not their hierarchy
See? This just makes no sense. When I click "back", it goes to the previous page I visited. In chronological order. No "hierarchy" involved. The linked article seems to imply otherwise.
Now, if they mean that non-server content, such as the state of a running JS/Java program, or user entered data, will not persist, I can understand their point, but wouldn't *WANT* it to stay around for others to find on my machine later.
Furthermore:
The order-based back button was good at navigating between distant pages.
Now here, I've definitely missed something. How does an order-based back button make it *easier* to go between distant sites? A hierarchical button (if such a thing existed) would do that better.
Overall, either I missed something *REALLY* fundamental in what these guys did, or they did nothing and obscured that fact with lots of talk about irrelevant relational concepts. From the words they chose to use, a back button *already* behaves like what they want to change it to, and the supposed benefits of their change fit better with the behavior they claim the back button already has (which it doesn't).
As the best credit I could give them from the article, I could assume that the author completely misunderstood the research and reversed the two concepts. Thus, the research would actually have the "new" button behavior using a hierarchy of sites, rather than strict chronological behavior.
In Netscape you can do this. Preferences -> Navigator -> "Last page Visited".
Do we all think that products like RU-486 sprung from the ground unaided?
No, "we" think the two drugs involved, mifepristone and misoprostol, both originated for other uses. The former, an antiprogestin, just happens to cause a very high incidence of detachment of fertilized critters as a predictable but not originally "deliberate" consequence of its action (methotrexate, a drug used in chemotherapy and for rheumatoid arthritis, has almost the same effectiveness, though by a different mechanism of action... Shall we attribute this coincidence to "liberal science" as well?). The latter, a prostoglandin analogue, simply causes uterine contractions (as a side effect of its "real" action), raising the efficacy of the combination quite a bit.
Incindentally, just about any two pairs of drugs from the same classes would have similar effects.
I don't quite see where you mean to go with the idea of "liberal" science, however. Do you mean we only have drugs like RU-486 because liberals "lied" about something? I can only assume you mean that, as the parent article involves what amounts to us getting bad policies due to conservatives "lying" about controvertial scientific findings.
I will, however, agree with you in one key aspect (lest you think I just want to nitpick)... Political correctness *does* pervade science, in the form of ethical restrictions not just on what someone *can* do, but on what others will acknowledge ever happened. For example, the science done at concentration camps during WWII... Yeah, *REALLY* nasty, and much of it totally unneccessary. But in addition to what we might describe as "torture for the fun of it", they also answered a lot of questions for which no "ethical" means of getting an answer exists.
most folks aren't really at the brink of destruction
'Scuse me? I hate to tell you this, but after over a year of unemployment, I, and hundreds of thousands like me, exist REALLY uncomfortably close to the "brink of destruction".
I've maxed my CC's, run out of savings (including 401k), and would presently starve to death if my SO decided to throw me out.
And I've always managed my money rather well, not buying too many frivolous things, avoiding spending more than I have like the plague (my one exception, buying a new car when my last one died. But a "commuting" car, by no means a luxury toy). But a total of around $10k to last 14 months now, good luck. I suspect many geeks (who have a stereotype/reputation for buying *lots* of expensive toys and holding pretty decent sized debts) have it a lot worse than I do.
And it has nothing to do with "wanting" to work, or only the "bad" geeks not having jobs... I have qualifications and experience that hiring managers used to *dream* of. And yeah, for the first three months, I only applied for "sweet" jobs. Then "anything involving computers". Six months ago I started getting sick of hearing the word "overqualified". Lately I've taken to simply "forgetting" the fact that I went to college for applications, and get a much better callback rate, but the number of unemployed (in general, not just tech) means anything I apply for, even flipping burgers, I have to compete with literally hundreds of others to get noticed.
Not a pretty situation, for a lot of people. I don't "whine" about it much, but *DON'T* try to trivialize the problem.
And, think the US has economic problems now? Wait another year. If the tech market doesn't start picking up, a lot (more) of us will end up declaring bankruptcy. What effect do you suppose that would have, half a million geeks, each owing as much as a quarter million dollars (typical house, or a really nice car and lots of toys), all defaulting on their debts?
I love all these questions about "speed". If you want speed, use VMWare. Bochs EMULATES an 80x86, pure software, no hardware involved.
So why would you want to use it?
Personally, I use it mostly to run old DOS games. Games that won't run at all under Windows (you could insert "Linux" there just as well, or "OS X", or "HP-UX", or whatever you run on reasonably modern equipment). Games that run waaaaay too fast. Games that "don'y play well with others" and you wish you could have stuck in on its own machine even when you really *did* run DOS just to keep it from breaking other programs.
It makes a GREAT debugging tool, for those who know how to write low-level code. As long as your problem doesn't involve instruction timing or asynchronous events, Bochs works almost as well as a VERY expensive ICE.
Another nice use, I already mentioned partially, you can put a program in it's own "clean room". Ever wanted to see how some of the classic virii worked but didn't have the balls to risk your own machine? Put it in a Bochs and let it do its thing.
Additionally, IMO, the speed (as of 1.4, and they claim twice the performance for 2.0) suffices for any CPU or graphics non-intensive task under Windows 95 OSR2, with FAR better compatibility than Wine (Not to disparage Wine, a great and worthy poject, but you just can't beat the real thing for accuracy of emulation )
The one "bad" thing about Bochs, and I hope a developer for it reads this, you need to manually calibrate the IPS, and then everything else *relative* to that value. Although I understand why getting an *exact* value counts as an almost impossible feat, I don't see why a simple few-second internal benchmark at startup couldn't come to within 10% of the "right" value. Admittedly, though, I haven't played with 2.0 (away from home for a few days), so if you've added that for this release, my apologies (and thanks).
Trust me, since it isn't actually that hard the "average user" will learn how to dd a disk if they want copies and have a computer.
;-)
Actually, it takes *very* slightly more work than "dd". For Windows users, either DVD Dec or SmartRipper, in "file" mode, will suffice.
I just played a bit with the second two photos you linked to. Believe it or not, although the jpegs lack sufficient detail, I would feel willing to bet that, given a high-res scan (4k) of those two negatives, I could get a license plate. For example, even with the images posted, I can make out some sort of "special" sticker on the right side of the license plate, possible one of those FOP stickers.
;-)
Unless, of course, Rich already heavily cropped and enlarged the pictures he posted on the web. Then I doubt I could do much more.
These anti-spam nuts are beginning to act a lot like the anti-abortion nuts. Posting personal information about spammers online, making threats against them. Very similar to the so-called "wanted posters" that anti-abortionists post on their sites.
Taking pictures of someone's house, from the street, does not break the law (though you could argue it borders on stalking). Accessing public records to find things like addresses and phone numbers does not break the law. By Ralsky's own public statements, signing people up against their will for "exciting commercial opportunities" does not break the law.
Making threatening phone calls to a random person *does* break the law. Parking outside their house with the deliberate intent of scaring the hell out of them *does* break the law. Sending spam to people after they have opted out *does* break the law (in many states).
See the pattern? As much as I usually don't believe in such extremes, this really does look look like a case of "good guys vs bad guy".
How really strange. I found one particular part of the call transcripts rather interesting...
"You don't know who the hell you were fucking with yesterday, man, you got the wrong guy, you don't even have the guy that you think you have"
Anyone else see a strong possibility of Ralsky having a deep dark secret that someone believed poor Rich had accidentally caught on film? Like meeting with someone to put a hit on Ralsky's detractors, or using the supposedly lucrative spam biz to launder mob money, or the like?
Yeah, slam me for baseless speculation, but the guy doesn't exactly have the cleanest legal record, and that quote just strikes me as so *REALLY* bizarre. Don't have the right guy? What does *that* mean?
The "charity" loophole will end up VERY abused...
"Hi, Fred here, from Fred's Aluminum Siding Non-Profit Shell Corporation and Charity. I'd like to talk to you about how 0.0001% of every purchase you make through us goes directly to feed starving, aluminum-siding-less children in South Africa..."
Why not? It works for companies that want to buy their own personal politician... Does anyone really suspect ANY sane politician (I didn't say "ethical", just "sane") would dare take a stand against a scheme that could turn around and attack their major source of campaign financing?
Disclaimer: The poster (me) expresses no opinion as to the merits (if any) of this class action settlement, and this post is not legal advice nor is it an advertisement or solicitation for legal services.
Screw "tact", the settlement absolutely SUCKS. No question about it. No ambiguity, or moderating factors. Suck, suck, suckity-suck.
Not so much the individual payouts, which if I had only bought half a dozen CDs in that time, I would consider reasonable (assuming, of course, that they don't get so many claimants that it drives the disbursement to below $5 each).
But two major problems exist - First, it doesn't take into account how much music each person bought (personally, I bought on the order of 200 CDs in the period under consideration - Which has dropped to around 4 in the past two years due to the RIAA's political and ethical policies). And second, NEW CDS STILL COST $15-$20 EACH!
This makes the SECOND time (that I know of) that the RIAA has gotten a beat-down for price fixing, yet they continue to do it.
Yet another complete BS class-action suit. Until the FTC tells them "lower prices or don't sell in the US", which I doubt they can (and certainly wouldn't if they could), no improvement will happen. Why? It costs the RIAA (members) *FAR* less to pay a combined $140M once per decade than to allow fair market competition to lower prices by 50% or so. Start getting settlements in the tens of billions, and they *might* pay attention (at once per decade, that would eat into around 10% of their income... Noticeable, at least). This paltry little mosquito doesn't even make them reach down and scratch.
Nope. "Final Frontier" may have lacked a certain sort of continuity, and had some *serious* cheese, but can't possibly compare to how much "The Voyage Home" sucked. The time-travel scene made just about the worst I've ever seen (even compared to how they portrayed it in TOS), the over-the-top environmentalist message just annoyed me beyond words, and lacking any potential for "hard" sci-fi, resorted to endless, and unforgiveable, cuteness to keep the audience entertained.
And VI, "The Undiscovered Country"... Okay, that one at least had its moments, but for the most part, about as exciting as watching paint peel.
I'd take V over either of its neighbors *any* day.
Well, I can provide "prior art" right off the top of my head - Every retail store in the US has offered a "wedding registry" for longer than I've drawn breath. Unless Amazon (sorry, Bezos and Kaphan, the patent doesn't actually mention Amazon) only wants the *name* "Wish List", they have quite an uphill battle in defending *this* one.
But the more general issue, of contacting the buyer if they didn't provide enough information - I thought the USPTO didn't allow "trivial" patents. Can someone explain how the idea of "you didn't tell me your credit card's expiration date, so I called to get it" doesn't count as trivial?
Absolutely absurd. The USPTO *really* needs to start actually *reading* the applications it approves. And issuing some sort of fines to companies that repeatedly try to push through complete drivel.
Simple 'nuff...
Just temporarily (perhaps 1 day) block ANY client's class C (not just that of Alexa's crawler) that starts generating more than X hits per second for longer than five minutes.
By doing so, you haven't taken steps to specifically thwart *Amazon's* activity, you have simply enacted a reasonably security measure to block DOS attacks. If Amazon actually dared to sue for blocking them, you'd have a HELL of a countersuit on the grounds that their 'bot triggered your DOS alarm.
Personally, I'd just block their bot and if they complain, tell them where they can stick their partner agreement. No self respecting online retailer needs their own "partners" degrading their QOS. Anyway, When I want to buy something, I use either Google, or a product-specific price-search engine (like PriceWatch). Amazon counts as my LAST choice for finding something (actually not quite true... If I need to use Google to find a product for sale, I often check Amazon first, just to get things like UPC or ISBN numbers to narrow my search).
I really do not understand people's "need" to always have the newest version of a program.
I upgrade *ONLY* when I encounter either a major bug (meaning "uncircumventable") in what I already have, or what I have simply cannot do what I need it to.
For my web-surfing machine, I run W2K. I will *not*, *ever*, upgrade to XP simply because it doesn't do anything "new". Perhaps I will need to upgrade to the next version of Windows someday, but considering Microsoft's (and most companys') release habits, I doubt I'll need to for at least a few more versions. Hell, I only upgraded from NT4 because it had poor PNP and high-end multimedia support (which I don't really consider a "good" reason, technologically speaking, but when I couldn't run 90% of modern games or get any new hardware, I didn't have much choice). Before NT4, I used DOS (the entire Win95 line quite simply sucked, and amazingly, seemed to get progressively *worse*, not better).
For email, I use Calypso (well, mostly, I use Elm, but for my junkmail account I find it easier to get it via POP and just let the nice filters strip out 99% of the spam). Calypso, for those who don't know it, still uses a text-only interface (basic support for HTML/RTF, but the only email I get in HTML consists of spam, so I don't really care 'bout that).
For compiling under windows, I still use Borland C++ 5. I suspect I'll have to upgrade when 64-bit chips hit the mainstream in a year or two, but at the moment, that 6-year-old compiler does the job just as well as anything I could go out and buy today.
The "solution" here seems obvious. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Don't get me wrong, I have no strong love for "retro" computing (except classic console video game emulation ). But of the programs I regularly use, not a single one has made any real improvement in half a decade.
And now, we see companies moving toward *decreased* functionality in their programs, along with non-permanant licenses to use them. Explain how that benefits me?
Wow, if I could mod in threads I posted in, you'd definitely get a "+1 insightful".
I think you have really nailed the key difference, here. Kudos.
After years of following the news from various "fringe" groups that claim some pretty impressive (but "impossible" things), it pleases me greatly to have something finally get taken seriously.
;-)
*SO* many self-righteous so-called "scientists" have this incredible fear of anything outside their understanding. Meteorites? They don't exist, said the French acadamy of sciences. The ether? Pish, everyone knows that Michaelson and Moreley (sp?) disproved that. Lower-than-ground state Hydrogen? What nonsense.
When "scientists" stop acting as defensive about their holy truths as any other two-bit religion with a tenuous basis, perhaps we can make some real progress.
And, just for the record, no, I do not either "fear" science, or have anything against it. I have a fairly decent grounding in the "hard" sciences, and see that the methods and results (so far) of science have a whole lot to offer mankind. So, it *really* bothers me when so many "experts" categorically refuse to even *look* at claims such as this, on the grounds that it violates what they BELIEVE as the underlying basis of reality.
Throw down with the priesthood, and get back to the "real" work of investigating the universe *as it exists*, not as you believe it to exist.
Damn, people, can the collective computer geeks of the world *please* pick some sort of "standard" language (or at least a very small set of languages, like perhaps C++ for most things, Perl for scripts, and Tcl/Tk for GUIs)?
I personally like C. I consider myself fairly good at it. But honestly, I don't care if we decide "Everyone must code in Forth". Just *some* sort of standard. I'll learn it, and feel happy to "waste" a year mastering it, just to never have to learn another "fad" language.
I see people asking why Eiffel doesn't have more popularity - Why? I can answer that *really* simply. Because we already have too-damn-many languages to choose from!
Yes, a *FEW* choices make sense, because not every language has the same strengths and weaknesses. But really, how many people research all 250+ "major" existing languages to determine the best for each and every program they write? No one. People pick a language that has a lot of general-purpose power and flexibility, and *ONLY* deviate when their first choice literally cannot accomplish the task at hand.
Put out efforts toward making a few projects truly great, not having a huge number of mediocre projects.
We as an industry (computers) are *way* bigger then them.
;-)
Unfortunately, that doesn't hold true. The entertainment industry has grown *dependant* on computers, but absolutely DWARFS the tech industry for overall profitability.
People like computers. Take them away, and they complain. People (believe they) NEED "bread and circuses", however. Take the circuses away, and expect all-out rioting in the streets.
Not sending email to grandma and access to endless free porn, vs actually having to spend time with people in a (gasp!) *interactive* manner? How barbaric.
I agree with what I perceive as your point, though. Hollywood can't screw us (the general "us") without our (the specific computer-related "us") help. But it only takes a few traitors to all of humanity to screw the rest of us. And offer enough money, and *someone* will do the job even against their morals.
Sad, but true. We just have to keep fighting for sanity, and when things look bleak, take some solace in the fact that anything they come up with, we can get around.