Sorry, not to put too fine a point on it, but you have a stupid argument. It's like arguing that by knocking on your door the last Jehova Witness that came around agreed to a punch in the groin. You might think that but the police will happily inform you as to the error of your ways.
Software is similar, I don't agree to anything by double clicking on it other than the fact that I might like to try out what that piece of software purports to be. Double clicking on it may install a virus, or a Trojan horse or format my hard drive. There are laws against deploying software that does this with corresponding penalties which are enforced if they can manage to figure out who the author was.
In this case the author is a company but the same rules don't seem to apply even though the authors and distributors are much easier to find. The people who propogate this software need to be fined and/or jailed.
But I've never agreed to install the product. In the one case I could track down, my RCA Lyra 2, the MusicMatch software installed it even after I said not to. I never purposely click on banner ads and definately never said "OK" when something is asked to be installed.
Is it possible to override the behaviour of the close button (as opposed to cancel) in a JavaScript popup? If it gets installed once can it screw with defaults such that it has an easy in next time around?
It's viral in nature in that it attaches itself to another application though it is rather selective about what applications it attaches itself to, namely web browsers. Maybe parasitic would be a better word I suppose, but it's also not entirely a Trojan horse.
Initially every virus is also a Trojan horse anyway. The virus writer has to start the inital propogation somehow and so attaches it to something they know will be downloaded. From there it propogates like a virus by attaching itself to programs that it's victim uploads or gives to others.
Yeah, virus isn't the right term but it doesn't exactly fit into any of the traditional descriptions. Trojan horse is less wrong than virus though.
I used Windows for about a year and found that occasionally something would install GatorWare (or however it is spelled). I narrowed down one instance to the software package that came with my RCA Lyra MP3 player but the source of others still eluded me. In the RCA case I had said "No, don't install GatorWare" but I still found myself the recipient of it.
There is some mechanism where this crap gets installed and it might not be via Internet Explorer but personally can't rule it out. When I moved to Mozilla I never had this problem any more.
When I first started using IBM compatibles there were forms of software which would install themselves on your system and were written to evade removal as well as modify your system in ways that you may or may not have approved of. Writing these packages was considered bad, and propogating them was even considered illegal. These small applications were called viruses.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's usually pretty safe to say that it's a duck. In this case all of these enhancements sound like viruses to me, or at least a derivitave of a virus. Where viruses had to be cleverly coded in order to be as small as possible and avoid detection by a skilled hacker these new pieces of code are large and increasingly rely on being able to remove software that would remove it.
If you modify my system without me requesting it then you've installed a virus on my system. I should be able to call the FBI computer crimes division and get proceedings underway that result in you getting some nice free government accomodations.
CmdrTaco is too busy to read this site, slashdot, which you speak of. He and his co-workers are too busy providing the excellent editorial content which we have all become accustomed to. Do you have any idea how much work goes into editing submissions for grammatical and spelling errors? Could you even imagine what this site would look like without Rob's hard work in this area?
We can expect a few spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in the commentary section, however heads would roll if any were to make the front page. Not only that, but inflammatory, sensationalized or factually incorrect articles would be the norm otherwise. Perhaps even duplicate stories would grace the front page.
Why, it's these services which make a paid subscription to this site so worthwhile, and why if any of these problems ever make the front page I will immediately cancel my subscription.
I don't think it's actually illegal since they don't try to represent it as a legal contract. It's definately unethical, but companies, especially Real, have never been too worried about ethics.
If this were an actual contract there would be certain legal requirements designed that both sides of the contract at least have the potential of being on equal footing.
This is a concept car where the designers were told to go wild, all of the actual fuel cell components could just as easily be applied with the traditional brake and gas pedal arrangement. The cost of the drive train is more of a concern than anything else.
Re:DRM adoption
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you had any faith in humanity you would feel offended that DRM was being foisted upon us. I'm not against DRM any more than I am against copy protection on software. I just think the concept itself has always been fundamentally flawed. Content producers spend millions on developing the next generation of software to stop people from accessing information they aren't entitled to while hundreds of hackers go to work on defeating the technology. Your millions of dollars in development buy you a few weeks or months of protection.
For software maybe this is adequate, after a few months most packages are relegated to the bargain shelves, but for audio or video it really accomplishes nothing. People routinely watch movies or listen to music that are decades old.
A better investment would be to spend some time determining how to get the most people to pay for their product. This might be reducing the costs and charging less per piece (good old economics: supply and demand) or just admitting that a certain number of people will not pay for it, but hey, we're still wildly profitable.
Hmm, when I read reviews it listed the SD9 as having 3.34 megapixels, however it really has over 10 million. What I think the reviewers are doing is assuming that only 1/3 of the 10 million pixels are one of red, green or blue. This is true for other digital cameras, but not for this particular camera.
It's only a 3.34 megapixel camera, yet the images I've seen are sharper than other prosumer digital cameras with higher pixel count. This makes some sense, since most digital cameras only dedicate a certain number of the available pixels to each colour, but I'm suprised that the quality is so high.
I'm still waiting to buy a digital camera to replace my Nikon N90s. I have a Canon S300 I use (mostly) for scuba diving but I've held back on buying a SLR. The ones I can afford don't offer full frame, so, like this Sigma SD9 your 18 mm wide angle lens becomes a 24 or 30 mm lens.
If I could find a camera with the Foveon technology, full frame and that would preferably preserve my investment in Nikon lenses I'd buy it in a minute if they could sell it to me for around $2000.00.
Probably not, the DMCA is an American law and this is a decision made in Norwegian courts. It might influence a judge, but it sets no precedence. Large donations speak louder than foreign court cases.
A communications network that was pervasively encrypted could be built on top of the existing network infrastructure, but there are still opportunities to become exposed. If you're just trying to remain anonymous as opposed to doing "bad things" as defined by the government this is probably good enough. An ICQ type client based around public key technology would be a simple example, or only using encrypted email would be another example.
Since your packets, encrypted or not, pass through potentially monitored infrastructure you could still be associated with a particular message, or sequence of messages, but the contents of the message could be protected. You could also be associated with other people as well, though what information passes between you may not be known.
If the persons you communicate with are considered suspicious then this could infect you as well according to the axiom "You're known by the company you keep".
It might be possible to build obsfucating points via a laser or microwave network that rides outside of the traditional infrastructure though. I'm thinking along the lines of having listening posts who's only job is to propogate signals from say microwave onto the internet to another point that propogates the signal out via microwave.
You'd only be able to tell that a message was transmitted within the detection range of the receiving network and sent to a transmitting network that was broadcasting over a certain range. If the message was encrypted with a public key then anybody in range would receive it, but only the intended recipient would be able to decrypt it.
Re:I was shocked that I couldn't find a Go board.
on
Low Tech Toys?
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· Score: 1
You can still find kaleidescopes, at least the pricey ones. I've seen cheap paper ones too at dollar stores, shiny wrapping paper around a cardboard tube with plastic mirrors inside.
No, Harry and the Henderson's was, at least loosely, based on real events. This is simply a ruse to give Harry some privacy which has sadly been denied since his smashing film debut. The public was eager to drink up news of the heady excesses of his marathon sexual excapades with Britney Spears, Shakira and Oprah. The fleeting hands of fame and fortune were just as quick to let him plummet painfully to earth when news of his addiction to Penguin Mints and predeliction for priest porn reached the light of day.
Let this charade go on, let him live out the rest of his days in happiness with his faithful lovers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson.
You don't need to maintain the archaic technologies at all, you just need to maintain a procedure. If I were going to archive something today (as a consumer), I'd choose a readily available prevalent technology. As something else becomes readily available and prevalent I'd transfer the data over to the up and coming readily available and prevalent technology. Make sure your data is stored in a format that's well and openly documented so that if need be you can create a viewing application. Think PostScript rather than Microsoft Word or MPEG rather than Windows Media Player for instance.
I even have some data that's been through a few iterations of this, early programming done on my TI99-4/A for instance and essays I've written for high school on my C-64. The first generation of information (program files on the TI's tape drive or essays on a slow C-64 disk drive) took many magnitudes of time longer than a present technology copy would.
Digital media is the easiest thing in the world to preserve. Digital data can be migrated to more modern media (casette v.s. hard drive v.s. digital video disc) with increasing efficiency with every passing generation. People have already copied data off of 5 1/4" floppies onto 3.5" floppies onto Syquest drives onto CD-ROMS. Nothing is lost in this process. A photograph of the Mona Lisa loses something over the original painting. A digital copy of a photograph of the Mona Lisa doesn't need to lose anything over the photograph.
The real problem is that people don't look any further than right here, right now. All that's required to preserve digital data for future generations to revere or vilify is an effort to keep migrating it onto future media and to publish the method of reading the data along with it. Software formats come and go, there are probably software packages that can't even reliably read data using older versions of that software package.
The specification for the format in which the data is stored is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Make this open and data can live in perpetuity.
then the right thing isn't necessarily to pay cash, or barter or start your own currency. Jam there databases with useless information. Buy paper towels and toilet paper with cash, subscribe to 2600 with your credit card. Leaving no trace isn't realistic for most people, even if you only use cash chances are you withdrew that cash from a bank, or a bank cashed your check. Instead concentrate on leaving a wide swath of purchases that indicate you're a "subversive" for them to discover when they mine their data.
I get maybe 5 pieces of spam per day on my real email account. Occasionaly it goes up but around 5 seems to be the norm. I don't see this as convincing me to give up email, or maintain a whitelist. On the whole email is a win for me, it's cheap, I can keep in touch with friends and its fast.
I think part of the reason why is because I'm careful about giving out my email address in the first place. I don't post it on slashdot.org (I did as my old retired account, and while I got a couple of compliments and some constructive critisism I also got deluged with hate mail - so I stopped doing that). I don't think people should need to do this, but unfortunately I think people have to.
Somehow my work account gets more spam, I think some people make a few extra bucks by selling the company roster. This would be supported by the fact that I'm pretty sure employee information is also sold, a few recruiters have known just a little too much about what I do for an educated guess.
Well, part of customer service is supporting the customer. Letting your webmonkeys dictate who can and can't access your site is piss poor customer service. I can't think of a valid reason that just about any browser shouldn't be able to access a bank. Flash and other special effects are just that, special effects. Design to the standards first, make sure that works, and provide an interface with all the extraneous (and that's really what they are) bells and whistles for people who want to use them.
A browser matters least only if it isn't preventing you from doing what matters most at a bank: banking.
My guess is that they're using a dedicated chip to do the MPEG1 encoding, and at the time of manufacture there were no dedicated DIVX/MPEG encoding chips, or none that were cost effective at least. Using dedicated chips like this cuts down on your time to market, and quite often the actual cost of the device. A microprocessor may be good for higher priced devices but not possible in lower cost devices.
Thanks! I've been after Transactor archives for some time. My trusty dog-eared copies were destroyed when my parents house had a fire. I'll probably never power up a C-64 again, but Transactor had such a great part in steering me towards engineering that I'd love to thumb through them again. Transactor came out in a golden era of computer magazines. There were actual technical articles in magazines like Transactor (C-64/C-128/Amiga biased) and Byte (no bias, except for possibly towards machines I couldn't afford). Compute and others were geared more towards introductory computer users. Most magazines I've thumbed through these days appear to be clones of PC-magazine.
I've just started teaching myself SQL a bit. Languages are easy, the problem is I don't have any formal training in databases, so while I can make a database do what I want I'm also probably doing it terribly inefficiently.
If I wanted to learn the theory behind designing databases what would be a good book to read? I'm thinking more along the lines of learning from a text book v.s. learning from The Blithering Idiot's Guide to Database Design.
Slashdot Mirror
Software is similar, I don't agree to anything by double clicking on it other than the fact that I might like to try out what that piece of software purports to be. Double clicking on it may install a virus, or a Trojan horse or format my hard drive. There are laws against deploying software that does this with corresponding penalties which are enforced if they can manage to figure out who the author was.
In this case the author is a company but the same rules don't seem to apply even though the authors and distributors are much easier to find. The people who propogate this software need to be fined and/or jailed.
Is it possible to override the behaviour of the close button (as opposed to cancel) in a JavaScript popup? If it gets installed once can it screw with defaults such that it has an easy in next time around?
Initially every virus is also a Trojan horse anyway. The virus writer has to start the inital propogation somehow and so attaches it to something they know will be downloaded. From there it propogates like a virus by attaching itself to programs that it's victim uploads or gives to others.
Yeah, virus isn't the right term but it doesn't exactly fit into any of the traditional descriptions. Trojan horse is less wrong than virus though.
There is some mechanism where this crap gets installed and it might not be via Internet Explorer but personally can't rule it out. When I moved to Mozilla I never had this problem any more.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's usually pretty safe to say that it's a duck. In this case all of these enhancements sound like viruses to me, or at least a derivitave of a virus. Where viruses had to be cleverly coded in order to be as small as possible and avoid detection by a skilled hacker these new pieces of code are large and increasingly rely on being able to remove software that would remove it.
If you modify my system without me requesting it then you've installed a virus on my system. I should be able to call the FBI computer crimes division and get proceedings underway that result in you getting some nice free government accomodations.
We can expect a few spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in the commentary section, however heads would roll if any were to make the front page. Not only that, but inflammatory, sensationalized or factually incorrect articles would be the norm otherwise. Perhaps even duplicate stories would grace the front page.
Why, it's these services which make a paid subscription to this site so worthwhile, and why if any of these problems ever make the front page I will immediately cancel my subscription.
If this were an actual contract there would be certain legal requirements designed that both sides of the contract at least have the potential of being on equal footing.
This is a concept car where the designers were told to go wild, all of the actual fuel cell components could just as easily be applied with the traditional brake and gas pedal arrangement. The cost of the drive train is more of a concern than anything else.
For software maybe this is adequate, after a few months most packages are relegated to the bargain shelves, but for audio or video it really accomplishes nothing. People routinely watch movies or listen to music that are decades old.
A better investment would be to spend some time determining how to get the most people to pay for their product. This might be reducing the costs and charging less per piece (good old economics: supply and demand) or just admitting that a certain number of people will not pay for it, but hey, we're still wildly profitable.
Hmm, when I read reviews it listed the SD9 as having 3.34 megapixels, however it really has over 10 million. What I think the reviewers are doing is assuming that only 1/3 of the 10 million pixels are one of red, green or blue. This is true for other digital cameras, but not for this particular camera.
I'm still waiting to buy a digital camera to replace my Nikon N90s. I have a Canon S300 I use (mostly) for scuba diving but I've held back on buying a SLR. The ones I can afford don't offer full frame, so, like this Sigma SD9 your 18 mm wide angle lens becomes a 24 or 30 mm lens.
If I could find a camera with the Foveon technology, full frame and that would preferably preserve my investment in Nikon lenses I'd buy it in a minute if they could sell it to me for around $2000.00.
Probably not, the DMCA is an American law and this is a decision made in Norwegian courts. It might influence a judge, but it sets no precedence. Large donations speak louder than foreign court cases.
Since your packets, encrypted or not, pass through potentially monitored infrastructure you could still be associated with a particular message, or sequence of messages, but the contents of the message could be protected. You could also be associated with other people as well, though what information passes between you may not be known.
If the persons you communicate with are considered suspicious then this could infect you as well according to the axiom "You're known by the company you keep".
It might be possible to build obsfucating points via a laser or microwave network that rides outside of the traditional infrastructure though. I'm thinking along the lines of having listening posts who's only job is to propogate signals from say microwave onto the internet to another point that propogates the signal out via microwave.
You'd only be able to tell that a message was transmitted within the detection range of the receiving network and sent to a transmitting network that was broadcasting over a certain range. If the message was encrypted with a public key then anybody in range would receive it, but only the intended recipient would be able to decrypt it.
You can still find kaleidescopes, at least the pricey ones. I've seen cheap paper ones too at dollar stores, shiny wrapping paper around a cardboard tube with plastic mirrors inside.
Let this charade go on, let him live out the rest of his days in happiness with his faithful lovers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson.
I even have some data that's been through a few iterations of this, early programming done on my TI99-4/A for instance and essays I've written for high school on my C-64. The first generation of information (program files on the TI's tape drive or essays on a slow C-64 disk drive) took many magnitudes of time longer than a present technology copy would.
The real problem is that people don't look any further than right here, right now. All that's required to preserve digital data for future generations to revere or vilify is an effort to keep migrating it onto future media and to publish the method of reading the data along with it. Software formats come and go, there are probably software packages that can't even reliably read data using older versions of that software package.
The specification for the format in which the data is stored is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Make this open and data can live in perpetuity.
then the right thing isn't necessarily to pay cash, or barter or start your own currency. Jam there databases with useless information. Buy paper towels and toilet paper with cash, subscribe to 2600 with your credit card. Leaving no trace isn't realistic for most people, even if you only use cash chances are you withdrew that cash from a bank, or a bank cashed your check. Instead concentrate on leaving a wide swath of purchases that indicate you're a "subversive" for them to discover when they mine their data.
I think part of the reason why is because I'm careful about giving out my email address in the first place. I don't post it on slashdot.org (I did as my old retired account, and while I got a couple of compliments and some constructive critisism I also got deluged with hate mail - so I stopped doing that). I don't think people should need to do this, but unfortunately I think people have to.
Somehow my work account gets more spam, I think some people make a few extra bucks by selling the company roster. This would be supported by the fact that I'm pretty sure employee information is also sold, a few recruiters have known just a little too much about what I do for an educated guess.
A browser matters least only if it isn't preventing you from doing what matters most at a bank: banking.
My guess is that they're using a dedicated chip to do the MPEG1 encoding, and at the time of manufacture there were no dedicated DIVX/MPEG encoding chips, or none that were cost effective at least. Using dedicated chips like this cuts down on your time to market, and quite often the actual cost of the device. A microprocessor may be good for higher priced devices but not possible in lower cost devices.
Thanks! I've been after Transactor archives for some time. My trusty dog-eared copies were destroyed when my parents house had a fire. I'll probably never power up a C-64 again, but Transactor had such a great part in steering me towards engineering that I'd love to thumb through them again. Transactor came out in a golden era of computer magazines. There were actual technical articles in magazines like Transactor (C-64/C-128/Amiga biased) and Byte (no bias, except for possibly towards machines I couldn't afford). Compute and others were geared more towards introductory computer users. Most magazines I've thumbed through these days appear to be clones of PC-magazine.
If I wanted to learn the theory behind designing databases what would be a good book to read? I'm thinking more along the lines of learning from a text book v.s. learning from The Blithering Idiot's Guide to Database Design.
There are occasional QuickSilver cases for sale on eBay. Not cheap though because they're not cheap cases.