Diebold doesn't want to, because it's too much trouble to recall all the (election-stealing) machines they already have in place and equip them for printing. <Conspiracy Theory>Or their CEO doesn't want to because he promised Ohio's votes to Bush this year, and he wants to keep that promise.</Conspiracy>
The people who keep suggesting an electronic voting machine work exactly as a fill-in-the-circle paper voting machine are EXACTLY on the right track. Without such human-readable PAPER ballots, electronic voting will never be safe. There absolutely has to be a paper backup to the electronic voting.
When someone comes out with flash-based storage that costs less than $10/GB (I'm being generous here) and has infinite read/write life (or at least on par with a hard disk), let me know.
Until then, flash-based players aren't ever going to compete with the iPod on price/capacity ratio, and that's obviously (look at the success of the iPod mini relative to the flash-based player market) what consumers want.
Isn't this primarily because the high performance engines of an airplane are generally running at or near 100% power all the time, under a LOT of stress?
No.
Aircraft piston engine technology dates to about the 1930s, with the major advances in the last 75 years being lighter, stronger materials. Additionally, virtually the only time a piston engine is running at 100% power is on the takeoff roll and departure; the rest of the time, it's more like 55-75% rated power.
Everything has to be monitored so minutely because any engine failure, whether in a single or light twin, is an emergency situation. And there are literally hundreds of things that could go wrong and cause an engine failure. You need extensive inspections to make sure none of those things is a reasonable possibility, and it still happens fairly often.
Two US skyscrapers have been hit with truck bombs in the last fifteen years. They make a mess, and people die. Making trucks airborne won't change that much.
After Oklahoma City, most major federal buildings started putting big concrete barriers out front so trucks couldn't drive right up and park 10 feet from the door. Making trucks airborne means you have to make those barriers airborne, too, and that's not an easy task at all. (Then again, neither is making a 20-foot Ryder truck fly.)
In fact, people have crashed small planes into buildings, both before and after September 11th, and it doesn't do that much damage.
Yeah, because those people didn't pack the plane full of fuel and try to use it as a weapon. If you pack a Cessna 172 full of fuel (including baggage areas and passenger areas) and load it to just over legal gross weight and maybe a slightly aft-of-legal CG, and then fly it into a building, you can do a helluva lot of damage. You probably won't knock it down, but then again, Al Qaeda wasn't planning on completely destroying the WTC, either.
If someone is intentionally using a flying vehicle (airplane, helicopter, 2008-model flying car, whatever) as a weapon, you can rest assured that much more damage will be done than if someone *accidentally* crashes a small plane into a building. People who accidentally crash into buildings are often trying to set up the aircraft for a landing, so they're slowing down, which will minimise the damage done on impact. Think about it.
Until M$ can fix their own fucking mail clients not to send viruses to every goddamn e-mail address in the address book (or even in any file on the entire hard drive), I'd rather people with Windoze machines NOT add my address to their address books, thankyouverymuch.
And I refuse to pay money to send e-mail to those people. Either I pay to send them e-mail, or I pay by spending my time deleting all their viruses. No fucking way.
And here I was thinking, "How the heck did Larry Wall come to be associated with The Onion? And does this mean that maybe they'll bring back their free archives?"
That's all well and good, but do you have any idea how many false positives that system has generated over the last year or two? I'm curious, because it sounds like it would reject a lot of list mail and "cold" contacts from people asking for help with stuff (which is something I'm happy to answer when I have the time).
Universities were originally mere facilities in which learned professors could teach. The professor was the drawing power, and could teach in a self-rented hall or in the College.
Uhm...top-flight universities in the United States still *are* facilities in which learned professors can teach, and where professors *are* the drawing power. At least at the graduate level, for people who do more than consult U.S. News and World Report once a year. Nobody cares where you went. They care who you did your Ph. D. with, and they care what your grades were if you're trying to get an academic job.
The other two points are pretty much right on, though.
And any American Olympian who got DQ'd for doing that ought to stand up and say, "Look here, this is a stupid-ass policy, and my lawyers will be contacting you. Take away my gold if you want, but I'll have my victory in the eyes of the public."
I say American only because the US probably has the strongest legal basis for fighting such a silly policy.
We need someone to stand up and take one for the team, with the idea that not only will the medal be reinstated later, but they'll be a hero for standing up to the IOC and NBC. I guarantee you that if Carly Patterson got stripped of her gold for something like this, the American public would have Jacques Rogge's head on a pike by the end of the week. In fact, she'd be perfect. All the fawning sycophants and talking heads absolutely fugging love these gymnasts. Can you imagine the PR disaster that would follow if she got stripped of her gold?
Explain to me how coming down on PlayFair is misuse of a bad law. Putting Skylarov in jail and telling SourceForge to pull PlayFair or get sued are two completely different things.
The position I see you taking here is that any use whatsoever of a "bad" law is immoral, and I'm not sure how the heck that's defensible. But I'd love to hear it, if that's indeed what you're saying.
(Side note: do you ever see the same/. UID posting GNAA comments more than once? They get banned to all hell too...but there are a lot more of them than there are of Hans, obviously. And if you can post again, the problem is fixed. It won't necessarily never happen again, but you can post now...)
I read your sig. Hans deserved everything he got, you didn't (and the moderation on the two comments reflects that, by the way), but obviously it's fixed now.
The DMCA can go to hell.
Until it does, however, I'm not going to blame any companies for the actions they take under the fucked-up "law" known as the DMCA.ANY companies. Not Apple, not M$, not Real, not anybody. They're working within the constraints of a severely broken system. Apple broke out the DMCA on the PlayFair folks because 1) PlayFair was illegal under the DMCA and 2) if no action was taken, the RIAA member labels with tracks on the iTMS would have pulled out because iTMS tracks would, at that point, have been no different from un-DRMed MP3s.
DRM is an unfortunate fact of life for online music distribution until someone can get an alternative accepted by the major labels. I don't like it, you may not like it, but it's a fact of life. If anyone is going to sell music legally on-line other than their own work, it's going to have to have DRM. If that DRM gets broken, it's curtains for the online music store.
It doesn't matter if someone writes an open source program or a closed source program that violates the DMCA -- if they violate the DMCA, they put themselves at risk for getting their distribution shut down, at least until we can fix that abominable piece of legislation. And I don't see how anyone could have thought that PlayFair would NOT violate the DMCA. It complies with the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, but unfortunately, the DMCA supercedes that.
In the meanwhile, even bad news is good news for Apple.
Yesterday it announced it's recalling close to 30,000 very dodgy batteries - an internal short can cause the cells to overheat "posing a fire hazard to consumers". It says "no injuries have been reported".
Any other manufacturer would have been hung, drawn and quartered and shock-horror headlines would have been everywhere.
But it's Apple. So that's OK.
Wow. Talk about demonising the wrong entity here. The DMCA isn't Apple's fault. Apple just did what they had to in order to keep the labels from shutting down the iTMS entirely. If you hate the DMCA, say so, but don't blame Apple for it. Apple != Congress.
This article has pretty much convinced me that the folks running p2pnet are only concerned about piracy -- as in committing it -- rather than having an intelligent discussion about the real issues here.
Well, the grounds for taking down PlayFair was that it removed the encryption.
AFAICT, ourTunes doesn't circumvent any copy-protection mechanisms, so as long as it isn't decrypting the DRMed AAC files and allowing people to play them who haven't actually purchased that music, it should be OK, especially in light of this recent court decision.
p
Re:Phishing is a big problem for hosting companies
on
Anti-Phishing Tools
·
· Score: 1
The biggest threat would be if any of these guys ever hires a native English speaker who can write, and thinks a bit about what a real e-mail from a big corporation might look like.
Or, even better, just copy-n-paste a legitimate e-mail from said corporation, and insert a "fishy" (I refuse to use the "ph" in this case, dammit, because this has NOTHING to do with the band and it just looks stupid) URL in place of the "click here" in the original e-mail.
On a related note, dontcha just love when you get these e-mails from companies you've never done business with? I keep getting them from Citi and US Bank. How dumb do they think I am?
even if Real Rhapsody or Jukebox or whatever was available for the Mac platform, most Mac users probably wouldn't use it.
Yeah, because knowing Real, their software would suck ass. You think Windoze users would still use RealPlayer if someone could write a free or low-cost alternative that worked better and didn't have spyware? Let me let you in on a little secret: Mac users use iTunes because virtually every other MP3 player on the Macintosh sucks in comparison. Not because it's the only MP3 player -- there are plenty of alternatives -- but because it's the best. And do we have ANY reason to believe that in a truly competitive market, Real could write the best piece of software? No.
Keeping a business like Apple alive simply by running a "music" store seems like a flawed way of operating a hardware/operating system business.
Which is why Apple makes money selling computers and iPods, and doesn't make (much) money selling music. How difficult is that to understand?
Slashdot Mirror
It *isn't* difficult to implement such a system.
Diebold doesn't want to, because it's too much trouble to recall all the (election-stealing) machines they already have in place and equip them for printing. <Conspiracy Theory>Or their CEO doesn't want to because he promised Ohio's votes to Bush this year, and he wants to keep that promise.</Conspiracy>
The people who keep suggesting an electronic voting machine work exactly as a fill-in-the-circle paper voting machine are EXACTLY on the right track. Without such human-readable PAPER ballots, electronic voting will never be safe. There absolutely has to be a paper backup to the electronic voting.
p
When someone comes out with flash-based storage that costs less than $10/GB (I'm being generous here) and has infinite read/write life (or at least on par with a hard disk), let me know.
Until then, flash-based players aren't ever going to compete with the iPod on price/capacity ratio, and that's obviously (look at the success of the iPod mini relative to the flash-based player market) what consumers want.
p
There already is a viable plan.
It's raising the several billion dollars when any revenue is 10-15 years off that's proving to be the problem.
p
There was an experiment where a scientist used LOX and charcoal to see how fast it would burn - it esentially flashed in less than a second.
;)
Experiment? More like "let's see how fast we can light a barbecue grill!"
p
Isn't this primarily because the high performance engines of an airplane are generally running at or near 100% power all the time, under a LOT of stress?
No.
Aircraft piston engine technology dates to about the 1930s, with the major advances in the last 75 years being lighter, stronger materials. Additionally, virtually the only time a piston engine is running at 100% power is on the takeoff roll and departure; the rest of the time, it's more like 55-75% rated power.
Everything has to be monitored so minutely because any engine failure, whether in a single or light twin, is an emergency situation. And there are literally hundreds of things that could go wrong and cause an engine failure. You need extensive inspections to make sure none of those things is a reasonable possibility, and it still happens fairly often.
p
A couple problems with your assertions...
Two US skyscrapers have been hit with truck bombs in the last fifteen years. They make a mess, and people die. Making trucks airborne won't change that much.
After Oklahoma City, most major federal buildings started putting big concrete barriers out front so trucks couldn't drive right up and park 10 feet from the door. Making trucks airborne means you have to make those barriers airborne, too, and that's not an easy task at all. (Then again, neither is making a 20-foot Ryder truck fly.)
In fact, people have crashed small planes into buildings, both before and after September 11th, and it doesn't do that much damage.
Yeah, because those people didn't pack the plane full of fuel and try to use it as a weapon. If you pack a Cessna 172 full of fuel (including baggage areas and passenger areas) and load it to just over legal gross weight and maybe a slightly aft-of-legal CG, and then fly it into a building, you can do a helluva lot of damage. You probably won't knock it down, but then again, Al Qaeda wasn't planning on completely destroying the WTC, either.
If someone is intentionally using a flying vehicle (airplane, helicopter, 2008-model flying car, whatever) as a weapon, you can rest assured that much more damage will be done than if someone *accidentally* crashes a small plane into a building. People who accidentally crash into buildings are often trying to set up the aircraft for a landing, so they're slowing down, which will minimise the damage done on impact. Think about it.
p
This is a near-total dupe of Big Brother in Your Front Seat, from 10 August.
I think Michael's RAM chips need a parity check. There's a failed chip in there somewhere...
p
Until M$ can fix their own fucking mail clients not to send viruses to every goddamn e-mail address in the address book (or even in any file on the entire hard drive), I'd rather people with Windoze machines NOT add my address to their address books, thankyouverymuch.
And I refuse to pay money to send e-mail to those people. Either I pay to send them e-mail, or I pay by spending my time deleting all their viruses. No fucking way.
Next proposal, please.
p
And here I was thinking, "How the heck did Larry Wall come to be associated with The Onion? And does this mean that maybe they'll bring back their free archives?"
p
That's all well and good, but do you have any idea how many false positives that system has generated over the last year or two? I'm curious, because it sounds like it would reject a lot of list mail and "cold" contacts from people asking for help with stuff (which is something I'm happy to answer when I have the time).
p
Anyone else have other pie-in-the-sky, impractical ideas for changing the US patent system? ;)
;)
Yes.
Patent the idea of a patent system/office, then sue the piss out of the USPTO for fucking it up so badly.
Hey, you asked for it...
p
Universities were originally mere facilities in which learned professors could teach. The professor was the drawing power, and could teach in a self-rented hall or in the College.
Uhm...top-flight universities in the United States still *are* facilities in which learned professors can teach, and where professors *are* the drawing power. At least at the graduate level, for people who do more than consult U.S. News and World Report once a year. Nobody cares where you went. They care who you did your Ph. D. with, and they care what your grades were if you're trying to get an academic job.
The other two points are pretty much right on, though.
p
And any American Olympian who got DQ'd for doing that ought to stand up and say, "Look here, this is a stupid-ass policy, and my lawyers will be contacting you. Take away my gold if you want, but I'll have my victory in the eyes of the public."
I say American only because the US probably has the strongest legal basis for fighting such a silly policy.
We need someone to stand up and take one for the team, with the idea that not only will the medal be reinstated later, but they'll be a hero for standing up to the IOC and NBC. I guarantee you that if Carly Patterson got stripped of her gold for something like this, the American public would have Jacques Rogge's head on a pike by the end of the week. In fact, she'd be perfect. All the fawning sycophants and talking heads absolutely fugging love these gymnasts. Can you imagine the PR disaster that would follow if she got stripped of her gold?
p
Explain to me how coming down on PlayFair is misuse of a bad law. Putting Skylarov in jail and telling SourceForge to pull PlayFair or get sued are two completely different things.
/. UID posting GNAA comments more than once? They get banned to all hell too...but there are a lot more of them than there are of Hans, obviously. And if you can post again, the problem is fixed. It won't necessarily never happen again, but you can post now...)
The position I see you taking here is that any use whatsoever of a "bad" law is immoral, and I'm not sure how the heck that's defensible. But I'd love to hear it, if that's indeed what you're saying.
(Side note: do you ever see the same
p
I must burn my Karma, in order to save it.
:-p
.sig like that and getting modded up. For both of us. :)
Yep, you pretty much got that right.
Such are the perils of having a
p
I read your sig. Hans deserved everything he got, you didn't (and the moderation on the two comments reflects that, by the way), but obviously it's fixed now.
The DMCA can go to hell.
Until it does, however, I'm not going to blame any companies for the actions they take under the fucked-up "law" known as the DMCA. ANY companies. Not Apple, not M$, not Real, not anybody. They're working within the constraints of a severely broken system. Apple broke out the DMCA on the PlayFair folks because 1) PlayFair was illegal under the DMCA and 2) if no action was taken, the RIAA member labels with tracks on the iTMS would have pulled out because iTMS tracks would, at that point, have been no different from un-DRMed MP3s.
DRM is an unfortunate fact of life for online music distribution until someone can get an alternative accepted by the major labels. I don't like it, you may not like it, but it's a fact of life. If anyone is going to sell music legally on-line other than their own work, it's going to have to have DRM. If that DRM gets broken, it's curtains for the online music store.
It doesn't matter if someone writes an open source program or a closed source program that violates the DMCA -- if they violate the DMCA, they put themselves at risk for getting their distribution shut down, at least until we can fix that abominable piece of legislation. And I don't see how anyone could have thought that PlayFair would NOT violate the DMCA. It complies with the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, but unfortunately, the DMCA supercedes that.
I hate the DMCA.
p
Wow. Talk about demonising the wrong entity here. The DMCA isn't Apple's fault. Apple just did what they had to in order to keep the labels from shutting down the iTMS entirely. If you hate the DMCA, say so, but don't blame Apple for it. Apple != Congress.
This article has pretty much convinced me that the folks running p2pnet are only concerned about piracy -- as in committing it -- rather than having an intelligent discussion about the real issues here.
p
Well, the grounds for taking down PlayFair was that it removed the encryption.
AFAICT, ourTunes doesn't circumvent any copy-protection mechanisms, so as long as it isn't decrypting the DRMed AAC files and allowing people to play them who haven't actually purchased that music, it should be OK, especially in light of this recent court decision.
p
The biggest threat would be if any of these guys ever hires a native English speaker who can write, and thinks a bit about what a real e-mail from a big corporation might look like.
Or, even better, just copy-n-paste a legitimate e-mail from said corporation, and insert a "fishy" (I refuse to use the "ph" in this case, dammit, because this has NOTHING to do with the band and it just looks stupid) URL in place of the "click here" in the original e-mail.
On a related note, dontcha just love when you get these e-mails from companies you've never done business with? I keep getting them from Citi and US Bank. How dumb do they think I am?
p
A better question is what grade you got on that paper...
And whether the mod who called this "interesting" actually read it.
p
You didn't really expect a major corporate site to follow Web standards, did you? :-p
p
even if Real Rhapsody or Jukebox or whatever was available for the Mac platform, most Mac users probably wouldn't use it.
Yeah, because knowing Real, their software would suck ass. You think Windoze users would still use RealPlayer if someone could write a free or low-cost alternative that worked better and didn't have spyware? Let me let you in on a little secret: Mac users use iTunes because virtually every other MP3 player on the Macintosh sucks in comparison. Not because it's the only MP3 player -- there are plenty of alternatives -- but because it's the best. And do we have ANY reason to believe that in a truly competitive market, Real could write the best piece of software? No.
Keeping a business like Apple alive simply by running a "music" store seems like a flawed way of operating a hardware/operating system business.
Which is why Apple makes money selling computers and iPods, and doesn't make (much) money selling music. How difficult is that to understand?
p
It sure looks like Apple hired a bunch of its own astroturfers to post anti-Real comments on Real's bulletin board.
...except unlike Real, Apple didn't need to hire those folks. Mac zealots work free of charge.
p
You mean like Apple is planning to do with Spotlight in Tiger?
p
That depends on how you define "media outlet."
News.com ranks slightly above my own "media outlet" for usefulness, if you get my drift...
p