What if someone doesn't want to use the retina scanner, wouldn't that look suspicious in itself?
That's part of the problem. It SHOULDN'T. There are many reasons a person might not to want to use one.
Some possible reasons? 1. The technology is inacurate and unreliable, and shouldn't be trusted. (Lot's of other posts have dealt with the inaccuracies.) 2. Unless this is radically different than older scanners, some people may find the scan uncomfortable. (Older scanners used visible light. If this one doesn't it may not be bothersome.) 3. Many people may find it as objectionable as being fingerprinted, for exactly the same reasons. Having done nothing wrong, they find it objectionable to be treated as if they were a criminal. 4. They would rather deal with a person than a machine. 5. They don't like the idea of living in a police state and view biometrics as a potentially dangerous tool if misused. 6. Perhaps they simply don't feel well.
Anyway, the point is that even if they have no reason than that simply don't want to, that it doesn't tell you even the first thing about their motivation.
And they already know which flights I take and can register that to their hearts content.
One of the freedoms we take for granted here, but that is still not universally shared, is the ability to travel where and when we choose, without restriction, and without having to get permission. It's not anyone's business, including the government's, where we travel, or when, or how. If they chose to begin tracking all of our movements, that would be a very bad thing because it would be 1) moderately expensive, 2) mostly valueless for any legitimate reason, 3) valuable for all sorts of the wrong reasons (a huge database with lots of information such as this would be a goldmine for targeted marketing, for identify theft, and for a variety of profiling techniques -- it's of no benefit to you, only to others).
So why would I want to refuse to use the easier way of a scan?
For any of the above reasons, or for many more. The question you should be asking is why anyone should want to submit to the scan, and even more importantly, if the scan actually accomplishes what it purports to be for.
It doesn't.
If someone who hasn't previously done anything chooses to harm someone, or hijack a plane, a retinal scan won't do a thing to help identify them.
And even if they are someone who's been identified as a potential threat, the scan may not identify them. They are inaccurate. They are unreliable.
In short, they don't provide a significant benefit to outweigh the obvious imposition and the danger they themselves represent.
I can't help it, but it gives me the fealing that only those who are dishonest for one reason or another would fear a system like that.
That very feeling is a huge part of the problem, not simply with with any such system, but in general. It's exactly the same thing as saying "but only people with something to hide would resist being searched by the police". Our personal freedoms are only real if we can exercise them, and exercise them without an attached stigma associated with them.
I hardly think that it would make us pawns or something like that.
Pawns? No. Not in and of itself. But have you ever seen Gattaca? It's about a world where your physical identity is everything, and where you can't do anything at all without constantly proving, moment by moment, who you are, and where people everything is divided up into where you can and cannot be and what you can and cannot do by the people controling it. Simple freedoms we take for granted don't exist anymore.
By conditioning people to accept such impositions, this is just one more step toward that kind of world, with that kind of pervasive control, whether intentionally or not.
Then go worry over the goverment instead.
Everyone should. Haven't you ever heard the saying "The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance. "?
It's not (just) referring to protecting your freedom by watching for threats from external sources. It's about watching everywhere, and especially about watching the watchers. If you don't protect your freedoms aggressively, they will be taken, bit by bit, with one poorly written and poorly reasoned bit of legislation after another. The greatest threat of all is complaceny, and what you've said above is exactly the sort of creeping loss of freedoms it was warning about.
Benjamin Franklin was right. "Those who give up their freedom for security deserve neither."
We should constantly challenge our authority figures to justify their decisions, and to make the best ones possible. We should never assume that if their intentions are good (something we shouldn't assume to begin with, simply because there just as human as the rest of us), that they will make good decisions that should simply be accepted without question.
If we give up our freedoms out of fear, then the terrorists win. They destroy our way of life without having to do anything. Unchecked, the fear of them doing something does far more damage than they themselves.
So this means that I can sell a copy of Ender's Game (Great book by Orson Scott Card, btw) on Ebay (Since I bought it) when I'm done. But since the shower scene was disturbing, I ripped those 5 pages out. So now I can't sell it?
I think you do get it. That may actually be an example where you would be violating copyright, yes. You own a copy of the book, which for your own use you may do what you like, but you can't alter the content, then sell it, no.
You might tell people you changed your copy, but what if whoever buys it doesn't tell people and then sells it. They are then representing that it is the original work, when it is not.
Hmm... you can't redistribute originals of the materials you buy? Did you check that out?
If you bought an actual original, such as for a painting, you could, yes, resell it. But with an original you could not alter the work without the authors permission if they retained the copyright for the original. If you purchased the copyright as well as the original, then you could do whatever you wanted with it, because you would be the copyright holder. But the copyright exists entirely independently of the physical object itself. (Incidently, if you bought an original painting, but not the copyright, not only couldn't you change the original, even though you could resell it, but the artist could sell as many reproductions of the original as he liked, since he'd still be the copyright holder.)
They go buy a tape. They edit that tape. They sell/rent that tape. Selling/Renting copies is not a factor here.
But it is. They don't hold the copyright, and they're redistributing a copy of the film. It doesn't matter if it's a copy manufactured by the studio or not. They're all copies.
Personally, I'm squarely on the side of the rental store.
But whether you agree with the concept or not, that's how copyright works, and has (with only minor variation) for hundreds of years. It's there to protect the intellectual property of the author/artist, which goes beyond the possesion of a copy of the work.
1) They bought the tapes, they can do with them what they like short of selling/renting copies of those tapes.
But only within the bounds of copyright law. Being in posession of a copy of a work does not give you unlimited rights in regard to that copy, merely control over a copy that may give you the opportunity to violate copyright. But the opportunity isn't the right.
2) They aren't pushing for censorship of the source material (unlike 5,000 other groups out there). They have their own 'acceptable copies' and quietly rent those out to people of like minds.
Be that as it may, even though they're not trying to prevent others from seeing an unaltered copy, it still doesn't give them the right to redistribute a copy that has had alterations made to it. Fair use doesn't extend that far, and they are infringing on the intelectual property of the creator of the work.
Fair use would let you show a brief clip (measured in seconds) of a film for purposes of commentary, or review, or as part of a film collage of your own creation. But it doesn't let you alter the film and redistribute it.
3) They aren't forcing their views on others, indeed customers have to seek them out.
Indeed they aren't. And it's good that they aren't. And it worth acknowledging that they aren't trying to get anyone else to alter their copies either.
But that still doesn't change that they're violating the copyright of the creator of the work to have it viewed unaaltered from it's original form. Unless they get the permission of the respective copyright holders, any alteration and redistribution violates the copyright.
After all, what are they doing that a fast-forward button in the hands of some evilly moralistic moviewatacher couldn't do?
But the fast-forward button doesn't alter the original work (note I didn't use the word 'copy') while editing the film does alter the original work.
What's important here is not whether a given print of the film is a master of the film, or a copy of the master, but that any given print reproduces the entire 'original' work, un unaltered form.
For intellectual works, such as books, film, and other things distributed in digital media (like software), the word 'original' is used in the sense of unaltered, not whether it's the first from which all others are copied, or the most recently copied. Content is everything.
You purchase a piece of distribution media, but you don't purchase the right to alter the content itself. That right, in addition to simply making more copies, is what copyright refers to.
From what I understand, it's not. Censorship is what happens when people *deny* other people the right to see the sex and violence.
An interesting distinction on one level, but it misidentifies the act of censorship itself. Even if it might be argued that the original version is available elsewhere, the measure of censorship isn't whether or not the original work can still be seen. The act of editing out of the film content that the director put there is, in and of itself, censorship.
It makes no difference whether it's Clean Flicks or BlockBuster, or any other redistributor who does the editing, because the availability of an unedited version somewhere else doesn't in any way change the act of editing (censoring) into something else.
Nor does an unedited version being available elsewhere change the fundamental basis of copyright, that the author of the work has the right to determine who, if anyone, may change it, and if the author does allow changes, what changes may be made.
Changing a copyrighted work in any way against the wishes of the copyright holder violates copyright. (For example, colorizing a black and white film against the wishes of the copyright holder would also be a violation of copyright.)
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
Step back and look at it carefully. These are TWO DIFFERENT ISSUES.
The first one is simple. It's censorship.
And while you're right that we need to support free speech, you've got exactly backwards who we need to support. Here, in order to protect free speech, we have to support the directors.
Editing the films against the express wishes of the directors and copyright holders is simultaneously a violation of copyright law AND censoring their creative works.
Censoring someone else is NOT an exercise of free speech, but an infringement of it. You have every right not to watch a film if you don't like it's content, but that does NOT mean you can chop out what you don't like and then redistribute it.
In order to protect the fundamental principle, which you are correct must be the priority, the only choice is to side with the creator, not with the censor.
The SECOND issue here is what constitutes fair use.
Under fair use, it might be argued that as long as you paid for a copy of the film for your use that you might be able to edit a copy of that copy and watch it yourself without what you didn't want to see, but that's still not at all clear.
But fair use doesn't ever permit you to redistribute any copy of the film to anyone else, regardless of whether there is any profit at all, because it's NOT YOUR FILM. It's only your COPY of the film. Possesion of the copy doesn't give you the right to edit the original work.
That's why copyright is called copyright to begin with. It spells out who has the right to control both the distribution AND THE CONTENT of a work.
The only reason TV stations are permitted to alter content without express consent of the director is because there are statues that dictate what content may be shown on broadcast television, and it is understood that when a network pays for the right to broadcast the film that a certain amount of editing may be required in order to meet the statutory guidelines. Within that context they are granted a certain amount of leaway that they sometimes take advantage of in ways that also leave directors unhappy, but that they usually tolerate.
This is an entirely different scenario than the one under debate related to rental distribution. Since there is no overriding legislation regarding content with rental distribution, there is no legal basis under which to alter content without express consent of the copyright holder.
This doesn't mean that we should by any means support the Directors' Guild uniformly in all of their arguments about fair use. Some of the restrictions they want preventing users from making any copies whatsoever for their own use DO violate fair use, but this particular issue is not one of those.
... but in China it's still a matter of "Try it. Really. The first hit's free".
M$ is willing to spend a little money now, and to overlook the rampant piracy, in order to get in the door and hope to make enough points with the government to gain a significant position.
In a nation without their monopoly, M$ can't simply bully everyone to do what they want. So instead, for now, M$ will bide its time and distribute product trying to gain a monopoly first...
If it does, though, you will soon see the usual draconican M$ tactics you've come to expect.
Once you realize it really IS all about eliminating the competition to protect the monopoly, it's perfectly consistent with all of their other business decisions. Competition is a greater danger to M$ profits than any amount of piracy, so they addess the greater concern first.
They'll be back for the pirates later.
And if they (horror of horrors) gain ground with Palladium, they'll use that to deal with both competition AND with piracy in one stroke. Palladium is a trojan horse of pretty bells, whistles, and features, but like everything else M$ proposes, it's all about M$ interests first.
Colleges don't have automotive programs, unless perhaps it's a 'technical college' -- i.e., a two-year technical program -- i.e. a trade school...
Or, even more accurately, specific training provided by the auto manufacturers themselves.
Ever notice those signs on the garage wall, "A.C.E.", "some-manufacturer-or-other certified" and such? They're automotive certifications, just like for we computer geeks.
I just ran the numbers, and if you're a non-commercial broadcaster (eg. most of us hobbiests) this works out to be $100.09 per listener-year (that is, one continuous listener for one year).
While it's a lot better than the proposed rate would have been ($184 per listener-year PLUS $1000 per year in ephemeral licenses [the recommendation was for $500 in E.L., but if you dig deeply you'll discover that an ephemeral license only permitted retaining a digital copy for a period of six months...]), it's still pretty terrible.
Thank you for your interesting and insightful treatise.
Clearly, with your keen grasp of the history of programming, and your understanding of VB and HTML, you will someday make a fine salesman or mid-level manager. You already exhibit the skill and insight used by management at most companies to plan their projects, procedures, timelines, and budgetary requirements.
Many programming issues would clearly benefit from simplification, and perhaps you are on to something. By reducing the number of tools a language attempts to implement, it clearly decreases the number of distractions for the programmer. If you wish to pursue this concept further, you may perhaps wish to research another foundational language called Logo.
Good luck in your next class!
Billbert, PhB, TFIC Redmond, WA
P.S. - A side note regarding the original article:
A firm understanding of your process for code development, and a clear design for your testing procedure are essential.
If you spend some time in advance on planning, your code will benefit. Also, a good test plan should include a measure of the relative impact of a 'bug' or 'defect' to help determine priority of response by your programmers.
By focusing on your programming objectives from the beginning, and maintaining that focus throughout your entire design lifecycle, you should be able to identify underlying problems in your current development model and use them to improve your entire process, with a goal of helping prevent errors in design, and catching errors in code before going to test.
Peer review at each stage prior to testing (planning, functional design, algorithm design, coding, and test design) will also help catch errors in advance, and lead to the development of much better code. It may sound like it will take longer and cost more, but it saves time and money in the end in terms of not having to rewrite and maintain poorly implemented code.
A modem simply translates digital signals to an analog medium. The modem you connect to when you use yours translates these back into digital signals again.
To capture all of your online communucations, they'd only have to pass your analog signal into an appropriate analog device (effectively like a null modem connection) to translate them back into their digital form, at which time they can simply disassemble the packets.
The only difference between this and a normal modem would be that it was passive, translating all information passed in either direction, rather than being an active component in transmitting information.
If your phone company is using digital switching (and nearly all of them are now) it's even easier. With a digital switch, they can simply mirror one switch port to another, process the digitally encoded analog information using an appropriate software filter for the analog signal and the protocol used by your modem (probably PPP, less likely SLIP), and they again have all of your packets.
I don't think, then, that you understand what a troll is. The post was informative, not inflammatory...
No - !(Re:Local Warming != Global Warming)
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 1
Good god. Global Warming, if observed, will be an average change of a few degrees across the globe.
Think about your own statement.
Global warming will be an average change of a few degrees across the globe.
That average will be affected by changes in local weather patterns. But that average is made up of sample readings from individual locales.
Weather is a complex system that is currently best modeled using mathematics. While current models are far from perfect, there are strong indicationss that this is an appropriate approach.
When you add energy to a chaotic system, rather than seeing an immediate uniform increase in overall energy, you instead first see an increase in randomness and relative volatilivity within the system that over a period of time eventually develops a new stable higher-energy-level pattern of realtive randomness.
In the case of weather, energy is in the form of thermal units. Increases in randomness could be expressed as localized abnormal effects [changes in temperature (ranges or extremes), rainfall patterns, ozone density, changes in animal migratory and reproductive patterns, et cetera]. Increased volatilivity may be expressed as changes in storm frequency and/or intensity, or in sea level, for example.
Such a pattern of effects has been observable for some years now, and at this point (contrary to what American industry and the current administration want people to believe) there is no real debate over whether global warming is occuring [only the vocal objections of a few industry funded individuals or special interests]. It is occuring.
The actual current debates are 1) whether or not the change in overall global warming we are seeing is primarily due to human influences, or if it is part of a longer-term pattern that we do not yet fully understand; 2) the relative proporation of human-induced versus natural change in average global temperature; and 3) the projected size of the overall increase before the system reaches another point of relative stability.
It will be impossible to pinpoint local effects until it really gets out of hand. (It will have local effects, we just won't be able to say which are and are not natural.)
I agree with the second part of your statement. Localized effects will occur. I also agree that it may be impossible to reach a concensus among the majority of parties debating specific local effects until things are as you say 'out of hand'. (I'd say until the evidence is overwhelming. But given that the overall evidence that global warming is occuring is currently overwhelming, parties trying to defend their own specific interests will still deny the effect until no one will listen, and probably beyond.)
Furthermore, I think you are correct that we will have a great difficulty determining which may be natural and which may be human-induced.
It does not follow from that however, that specific local events cannot be examples of a larger pattern, or that the specific example brought up by the article may not be a real instance of a specific local effect. Only that it can't be conclusively determined at this time whether or not it is such an effect.
Not every instance of local climate change is a symptom of global climate change. Local climate fluctuates wildly.
I think the first of these observations is only functionally accurate. I say 'functionally' because, being a chaotic system, all climatic changes are interlinked. In that way, all weather phenomena are actually symptomatic of global climate change. We just can't interpret all of them.
As for the second, I don't agree. While local weather does flucuate to varying extremes, it does not do so wildly, but in a pattern. We understand some of these patterns better than others (5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, 200-year flood patterns for different areas, and so on), but whether we fully understand them or not, the patterns are present. Part of climatological science is finding and studying these patterns and learning how to interpret them.
Ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Hint: it used to be a greener when they named it a few centuries back.
Actually, no. As several others have already pointed out, this may be one of the first documented instances of marketing spin. It was called Greenland to encourage settlers. Iceland, another example of spin, was called Iceland because the settlers wanted to discourage too many people from migrating to the beautiful island they wanted for their own.
This is just like El Nino. Because it was causing some unusual weather patterns, every little rainstorm was blamed on it.
Well. While global warming and El Nino are both weather patterns, and are both still only partly understood (not well at all yet), I think it's too easy an out to write off every unusual weather pattern just because it's convenient.
The dramatic changes in the Antarctic ice shelves, changes in seal level in the Pacific Islands, notable changes in local temperatures and weather patterns are indications of the overall global changes that are taking place. But it will be many years before an overall global temperature change results in a general rise in overall temperature.
You are entitled to your opinion, however unfounded, foolish, inflammatory, or indefensible it may be.
They say its uncrashable! THEY ARE LYING!
Who is this infamouus they?
Nothing is uncrashable. Perhaps this is merely a small hyperbole about the comparison to certain OS that crash so often that crashing is considered normal and acceptable.
They say its unhackable! THEY ARE LYING.
Again. Who's they?
Linux isn't unhackable, just much harder to hack when properly configured than any of the Micro$oft OSes, which are riddled with security problems.
Security patches are also available within a few hours or days for linux, instead of having to wait weeks or months for Windows...
(If you really want an 'unhackable' system, use any pre-OS X Macintosh OS. They don't natively support the IP port structure, so they simply don't have the associated vulnerabilities. OS X (based-on FreeBSD) is now succeptible to similar attacks as BSD itself, however.)
They say its FREE. They are lying. The Mandrake linux prostitute will set you back $179.99 the same as windows does!
Again, they? In this case, they are completely correct.
If you want to buy Mandrake off the shelf (which includes manuals, media, and actual human tech support) you can choose to spend money on it. Tech support for Windows, incidently, starts at $35 per incident for XP if you want to talk to a generic drone, or $245 if you want to talk to an actual professional who might be able to help you resolve something more complicated than adding paper for your printer...
BUT, alternatively, you can download the.iso images of the CDs for Mandrake or virtually any other flavour of Linux from the internet for free.
Get over yourself. It is free...
WELL NOW YOU can fuck it up with these techniques! Just type these commands into your terminal emulator. Commands with a * need root access.
Yes. It will allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. But you have to actively attempt to. Let's take a look at what your examples really do...
To crash it
yes >/dev/mem
This attempts to pipe 'yes' directly into core memory dump file.
If you're a normal user, nothing happens except that you generate a 'permission denied' error. If you are root, not surprisingly, this initiates a kernel panic because you've used/dev/mem incorrectly. If you deliberately write garbage to core memory on ANY system it will croak. Linux, like unix, presumes if you're root that you really WANT to shoot yourself.
To rape it*
chmod -R 000/
Chmod changes security permissions for files. 000 removes all access, which brings things pretty much to a halt. Again, you have to be root before you can chmod things you don't own. And again, if you really want to shoot yourself, if you're root you can. This is a feature, not a bug. Children shouldn't play with root, any more than they should with matches...
To delete*
yes|rm -R/
This pipes 'yes' as a reponse to the query confirming that you really want to erase files. Not a very elegant way to delete [remove eg. rm] everything, but is effective. Again, you have to have root privileges, and you have to be a moron.
A somewhat more elegant way to do it would be to use:
rm -fr/
Ironically, this is actually yet another diplay of superior efficiency for linux. Why? Because it is more efficient than Micro$oft's:
del c:\*.*/fsq
because rm will completely erase files on all connected mountpoints, whereas 'del' can only erase one logical disk at a time.
To hack it
su -c command
su is the superuser command. The -c switch passes a single command using different security credentials than those of the current user. (The default user for su is root, but it can be used for any account.) Since you must have the password of the user you want to issue the command as, this isn't really a hack at all. Again, it's a feature. In actuality, having the su command allows the system to be better secured because normal users are given only limited access so they can't easily cause problems.
Even MicroSoft has acknowledged it's a superior model and has now implemented a limited form of su on NT4 (as a supplemental utility), on Win2K, and on XP.
To use your system PROPERLY insert windows XP setup disk and reboot your system.
Let's look at what that accomplishes.
But first, learn to punctuate.
Without a comma after 'PROPERLY', I could ask how you think you properly insert a disk...
If you want your computer to have training wheels, by all means, spend a lot of money on XP. It just makes it all that much more useful to the script kiddies who want to take advantage of all of the available exploits.
Apologies in advance, all. No flamebait intended. Evidently I (a Mac-o-phile since '87) am having a curmudgeonly morning...
"...If you use an Apple computer, you can't even get the disc out of the tray. It requires the time and cost of taking the computer into a repair shop and having it removed that way..."
Complete silliness. Of course it can be removed.
Worst case, most Macs do have the manual ejection hole. (Even G4s. If you manually flip the outer case door up, there's a standard Sony tray behind it.) Perhaps somebody can give an actual example of a 'new' Mac without one, but every Mac I've ever worked with has one.
Even without, TIG is right...
... you could just hold the mouse button down whilst rebooting...
Quite so.
Apple really needs to provide an obvious external means of ejecting CDs.
For users who can't/won't RTM? I'm not sure it would it help...
**Sigh**
Maybe you're right.
They should label all of their cases with friendly yellow letters, too...
No flame intended, but license schemes are contractual agreements. And as with any contract, all parties have equal rights to opt _not_ to agree with a set of terms they find unreasonable. If they don't like them, they don't have to accept them.
That's how business works. If one party is foolish, and agrees to unfavorable terms, they hurt themself.
It's bad business practice for someone to effectively give a competitor (and M$ competes _directly_ against EA in that they also write games) a gun to hold to his/her head. If EA accepts being forced onto M$ server platform they will, like everyone else who's allowed M$ a critical advantage, set themselves up to be assimilated or eliminated.
If EA moves to M$ servers they will have to adopt M$ own coding standards and APIs for both client (on Xbox) AND for server-side code. They would become dependent upon code they have no control over (for the server itself) and would then give M$ a very significant advantage.
M$ could then bring to bear the anti-competive tactics that have landed them repeatedly in court and establish yet another area in which they have monopoly power because they would hold most of the cards. EA would become 'just another' (albeit a very large and somewhat influential) M$ development shop.
Progressivly, M$ would leverage this arrangement and continue to stipulate new, more restrictive 'license terms' for each (annual) license renewal, making it progressively harder for EA to write games that perform as well for Sony or SEGA except by spending more and more money to do so.
Over time, decreased ROI due to rising development costs (on both Xbox and non-Xbox platforms) would become significant enough to force EA to either reduce the number of platforms for which they develop (after having entered into an agreement to use M$ server-side), or to accept losses in order to continue parallel development for other systems. Cost to change to a non-M$ platform would be sufficiently expensive that it would become financially imfeasible to move away from M$, leaving EA at M$ mercy, and making it overwhelmingly likely that SEGA or Sony would be the platform dropped.
Alternatively, performance on non-Xbox systems would be sufficiently poorer (due to 'undocumented coding features' or 'non-optimization' for non-Xbox hardware) that consumer choice would shift to Xbox, allowing an alternate path for M$ to establish their domination of yet another market.
If you examine M$ business model, these tactics have been repeatedly demonstrated. Look at the progression to OS dominance, Office Suite dominance, or Client/Server dominance, and M$ tactics to subvert open standards to their own ends (HTML, JAVA, CHIRP, to name only a few). Or look at their current attacks on MPEG standards, trying to force everyone away from them to WMA and AVI formats and to M$ media streaming servers.
It's not superior products that give M$ dominance. (Even in areas where they may produce quality products.) It is aggresive and anti-competitive tactics.
Those are my observations (from the last 18 years or 20 years) anyway. You may interpret it differently...
Slashdot Mirror
What if someone doesn't want to use the retina scanner, wouldn't that look suspicious in itself?
That's part of the problem. It SHOULDN'T. There are many reasons a person might not to want to use one.
Some possible reasons?
1. The technology is inacurate and unreliable, and shouldn't be trusted. (Lot's of other posts have dealt with the inaccuracies.)
2. Unless this is radically different than older scanners, some people may find the scan uncomfortable. (Older scanners used visible light. If this one doesn't it may not be bothersome.)
3. Many people may find it as objectionable as being fingerprinted, for exactly the same reasons. Having done nothing wrong, they find it objectionable to be treated as if they were a criminal.
4. They would rather deal with a person than a machine.
5. They don't like the idea of living in a police state and view biometrics as a potentially dangerous tool if misused.
6. Perhaps they simply don't feel well.
Anyway, the point is that even if they have no reason than that simply don't want to, that it doesn't tell you even the first thing about their motivation.
And they already know which flights I take and can register that to their hearts content.
One of the freedoms we take for granted here, but that is still not universally shared, is the ability to travel where and when we choose, without restriction, and without having to get permission. It's not anyone's business, including the government's, where we travel, or when, or how. If they chose to begin tracking all of our movements, that would be a very bad thing because it would be 1) moderately expensive, 2) mostly valueless for any legitimate reason, 3) valuable for all sorts of the wrong reasons (a huge database with lots of information such as this would be a goldmine for targeted marketing, for identify theft, and for a variety of profiling techniques -- it's of no benefit to you, only to others).
So why would I want to refuse to use the easier way of a scan?
For any of the above reasons, or for many more. The question you should be asking is why anyone should want to submit to the scan, and even more importantly, if the scan actually accomplishes what it purports to be for.
It doesn't.
If someone who hasn't previously done anything chooses to harm someone, or hijack a plane, a retinal scan won't do a thing to help identify them.
And even if they are someone who's been identified as a potential threat, the scan may not identify them. They are inaccurate. They are unreliable.
In short, they don't provide a significant benefit to outweigh the obvious imposition and the danger they themselves represent.
I can't help it, but it gives me the fealing that only those who are dishonest for one reason or another would fear a system like that.
That very feeling is a huge part of the problem, not simply with with any such system, but in general. It's exactly the same thing as saying "but only people with something to hide would resist being searched by the police". Our personal freedoms are only real if we can exercise them, and exercise them without an attached stigma associated with them.
I hardly think that it would make us pawns or something like that.
Pawns? No. Not in and of itself. But have you ever seen Gattaca? It's about a world where your physical identity is everything, and where you can't do anything at all without constantly proving, moment by moment, who you are, and where people everything is divided up into where you can and cannot be and what you can and cannot do by the people controling it. Simple freedoms we take for granted don't exist anymore.
By conditioning people to accept such impositions, this is just one more step toward that kind of world, with that kind of pervasive control, whether intentionally or not.
Then go worry over the goverment instead.
Everyone should. Haven't you ever heard the saying "The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance. "?
It's not (just) referring to protecting your freedom by watching for threats from external sources. It's about watching everywhere, and especially about watching the watchers. If you don't protect your freedoms aggressively, they will be taken, bit by bit, with one poorly written and poorly reasoned bit of legislation after another. The greatest threat of all is complaceny, and what you've said above is exactly the sort of creeping loss of freedoms it was warning about.
Benjamin Franklin was right. "Those who give up their freedom for security deserve neither."
We should constantly challenge our authority figures to justify their decisions, and to make the best ones possible. We should never assume that if their intentions are good (something we shouldn't assume to begin with, simply because there just as human as the rest of us), that they will make good decisions that should simply be accepted without question.
If we give up our freedoms out of fear, then the terrorists win. They destroy our way of life without having to do anything. Unchecked, the fear of them doing something does far more damage than they themselves.
So this means that I can sell a copy of Ender's Game (Great book by Orson Scott Card, btw) on Ebay (Since I bought it) when I'm done. But since the shower scene was disturbing, I ripped those 5 pages out. So now I can't sell it?
I think you do get it. That may actually be an example where you would be violating copyright, yes. You own a copy of the book, which for your own use you may do what you like, but you can't alter the content, then sell it, no.
You might tell people you changed your copy, but what if whoever buys it doesn't tell people and then sells it. They are then representing that it is the original work, when it is not.
Hmm... you can't redistribute originals of the materials you buy? Did you check that out?
If you bought an actual original, such as for a painting, you could, yes, resell it. But with an original you could not alter the work without the authors permission if they retained the copyright for the original. If you purchased the copyright as well as the original, then you could do whatever you wanted with it, because you would be the copyright holder. But the copyright exists entirely independently of the physical object itself. (Incidently, if you bought an original painting, but not the copyright, not only couldn't you change the original, even though you could resell it, but the artist could sell as many reproductions of the original as he liked, since he'd still be the copyright holder.)
They go buy a tape. They edit that tape. They sell/rent that tape. Selling/Renting copies is not a factor here.
But it is. They don't hold the copyright, and they're redistributing a copy of the film. It doesn't matter if it's a copy manufactured by the studio or not. They're all copies.
Personally, I'm squarely on the side of the rental store.
But whether you agree with the concept or not, that's how copyright works, and has (with only minor variation) for hundreds of years. It's there to protect the intellectual property of the author/artist, which goes beyond the possesion of a copy of the work.
1) They bought the tapes, they can do with them what they like short of selling/renting copies of those tapes.
But only within the bounds of copyright law. Being in posession of a copy of a work does not give you unlimited rights in regard to that copy, merely control over a copy that may give you the opportunity to violate copyright. But the opportunity isn't the right.
2) They aren't pushing for censorship of the source material (unlike 5,000 other groups out there). They have their own 'acceptable copies' and quietly rent those out to people of like minds.
Be that as it may, even though they're not trying to prevent others from seeing an unaltered copy, it still doesn't give them the right to redistribute a copy that has had alterations made to it. Fair use doesn't extend that far, and they are infringing on the intelectual property of the creator of the work.
Fair use would let you show a brief clip (measured in seconds) of a film for purposes of commentary, or review, or as part of a film collage of your own creation. But it doesn't let you alter the film and redistribute it.
3) They aren't forcing their views on others, indeed customers have to seek them out.
Indeed they aren't. And it's good that they aren't. And it worth acknowledging that they aren't trying to get anyone else to alter their copies either.
But that still doesn't change that they're violating the copyright of the creator of the work to have it viewed unaaltered from it's original form. Unless they get the permission of the respective copyright holders, any alteration and redistribution violates the copyright.
After all, what are they doing that a fast-forward button in the hands of some evilly moralistic moviewatacher couldn't do?
But the fast-forward button doesn't alter the original work (note I didn't use the word 'copy') while editing the film does alter the original work.
What's important here is not whether a given print of the film is a master of the film, or a copy of the master, but that any given print reproduces the entire 'original' work, un unaltered form.
For intellectual works, such as books, film, and other things distributed in digital media (like software), the word 'original' is used in the sense of unaltered, not whether it's the first from which all others are copied, or the most recently copied. Content is everything.
You purchase a piece of distribution media, but you don't purchase the right to alter the content itself. That right, in addition to simply making more copies, is what copyright refers to.
Does that explain more clearly?
From what I understand, it's not. Censorship is what happens when people *deny* other people the right to see the sex and violence.
An interesting distinction on one level, but it misidentifies the act of censorship itself. Even if it might be argued that the original version is available elsewhere, the measure of censorship isn't whether or not the original work can still be seen. The act of editing out of the film content that the director put there is, in and of itself, censorship.
It makes no difference whether it's Clean Flicks or BlockBuster, or any other redistributor who does the editing, because the availability of an unedited version somewhere else doesn't in any way change the act of editing (censoring) into something else.
Nor does an unedited version being available elsewhere change the fundamental basis of copyright, that the author of the work has the right to determine who, if anyone, may change it, and if the author does allow changes, what changes may be made.
Changing a copyrighted work in any way against the wishes of the copyright holder violates copyright. (For example, colorizing a black and white film against the wishes of the copyright holder would also be a violation of copyright.)
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
Step back and look at it carefully. These are TWO DIFFERENT ISSUES.
The first one is simple. It's censorship.
And while you're right that we need to support free speech, you've got exactly backwards who we need to support. Here, in order to protect free speech, we have to support the directors.
Editing the films against the express wishes of the directors and copyright holders is simultaneously a violation of copyright law AND censoring their creative works.
Censoring someone else is NOT an exercise of free speech, but an infringement of it. You have every right not to watch a film if you don't like it's content, but that does NOT mean you can chop out what you don't like and then redistribute it.
In order to protect the fundamental principle, which you are correct must be the priority, the only choice is to side with the creator, not with the censor.
The SECOND issue here is what constitutes fair use.
Under fair use, it might be argued that as long as you paid for a copy of the film for your use that you might be able to edit a copy of that copy and watch it yourself without what you didn't want to see, but that's still not at all clear.
But fair use doesn't ever permit you to redistribute any copy of the film to anyone else, regardless of whether there is any profit at all, because it's NOT YOUR FILM. It's only your COPY of the film. Possesion of the copy doesn't give you the right to edit the original work.
That's why copyright is called copyright to begin with. It spells out who has the right to control both the distribution AND THE CONTENT of a work.
The only reason TV stations are permitted to alter content without express consent of the director is because there are statues that dictate what content may be shown on broadcast television, and it is understood that when a network pays for the right to broadcast the film that a certain amount of editing may be required in order to meet the statutory guidelines. Within that context they are granted a certain amount of leaway that they sometimes take advantage of in ways that also leave directors unhappy, but that they usually tolerate.
This is an entirely different scenario than the one under debate related to rental distribution. Since there is no overriding legislation regarding content with rental distribution, there is no legal basis under which to alter content without express consent of the copyright holder.
This doesn't mean that we should by any means support the Directors' Guild uniformly in all of their arguments about fair use. Some of the restrictions they want preventing users from making any copies whatsoever for their own use DO violate fair use, but this particular issue is not one of those.
I'll pass up the obvious opportunity for 'flat earth' comments.
If you think you've got a case, by all means lay it out. I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy.
Watcha got?
M$ is willing to spend a little money now, and to overlook the rampant piracy, in order to get in the door and hope to make enough points with the government to gain a significant position.
In a nation without their monopoly, M$ can't simply bully everyone to do what they want. So instead, for now, M$ will bide its time and distribute product trying to gain a monopoly first...
If it does, though, you will soon see the usual draconican M$ tactics you've come to expect. Once you realize it really IS all about eliminating the competition to protect the monopoly, it's perfectly consistent with all of their other business decisions. Competition is a greater danger to M$ profits than any amount of piracy, so they addess the greater concern first.
They'll be back for the pirates later.
And if they (horror of horrors) gain ground with Palladium, they'll use that to deal with both competition AND with piracy in one stroke. Palladium is a trojan horse of pretty bells, whistles, and features, but like everything else M$ proposes, it's all about M$ interests first.
Beware M$ G[r]eeks(tm) bearing gifts...
Colleges don't have automotive programs, unless perhaps it's a 'technical college' -- i.e., a two-year technical program -- i.e. a trade school...
Or, even more accurately, specific training provided by the auto manufacturers themselves.
Ever notice those signs on the garage wall, "A.C.E.", "some-manufacturer-or-other certified" and such? They're automotive certifications, just like for we computer geeks.
I just ran the numbers, and if you're a non-commercial broadcaster (eg. most of us hobbiests) this works out to be $100.09 per listener-year (that is, one continuous listener for one year).
While it's a lot better than the proposed rate would have been ($184 per listener-year PLUS $1000 per year in ephemeral licenses [the recommendation was for $500 in E.L., but if you dig deeply you'll discover that an ephemeral license only permitted retaining a digital copy for a period of six months...]), it's still pretty terrible.
Thank you for your interesting and insightful treatise.
Clearly, with your keen grasp of the history of programming, and your understanding of VB and HTML, you will someday make a fine salesman or mid-level manager. You already exhibit the skill and insight used by management at most companies to plan their projects, procedures, timelines, and budgetary requirements.
Many programming issues would clearly benefit from simplification, and perhaps you are on to something. By reducing the number of tools a language attempts to implement, it clearly decreases the number of distractions for the programmer. If you wish to pursue this concept further, you may perhaps wish to research another foundational language called Logo.
Good luck in your next class!
Billbert, PhB, TFIC
Redmond, WA
P.S. - A side note regarding the original article:
A firm understanding of your process for code development, and a clear design for your testing procedure are essential.
If you spend some time in advance on planning, your code will benefit. Also, a good test plan should include a measure of the relative impact of a 'bug' or 'defect' to help determine priority of response by your programmers.
By focusing on your programming objectives from the beginning, and maintaining that focus throughout your entire design lifecycle, you should be able to identify underlying problems in your current development model and use them to improve your entire process, with a goal of helping prevent errors in design, and catching errors in code before going to test.
Peer review at each stage prior to testing (planning, functional design, algorithm design, coding, and test design) will also help catch errors in advance, and lead to the development of much better code. It may sound like it will take longer and cost more, but it saves time and money in the end in terms of not having to rewrite and maintain poorly implemented code.
Cheers.
A modem simply translates digital signals to an analog medium. The modem you connect to when you use yours translates these back into digital signals again.
To capture all of your online communucations, they'd only have to pass your analog signal into an appropriate analog device (effectively like a null modem connection) to translate them back into their digital form, at which time they can simply disassemble the packets.
The only difference between this and a normal modem would be that it was passive, translating all information passed in either direction, rather than being an active component in transmitting information.
If your phone company is using digital switching (and nearly all of them are now) it's even easier. With a digital switch, they can simply mirror one switch port to another, process the digitally encoded analog information using an appropriate software filter for the analog signal and the protocol used by your modem (probably PPP, less likely SLIP), and they again have all of your packets.
Poof. You, too, have a Big Brother...
That's what I get for reading with my filter on...
I don't think, then, that you understand what a troll is. The post was informative, not inflammatory...
Think about your own statement.
Global warming will be an average change of a few degrees across the globe.
That average will be affected by changes in local weather patterns. But that average is made up of sample readings from individual locales.
Weather is a complex system that is currently best modeled using mathematics. While current models are far from perfect, there are strong indicationss that this is an appropriate approach.
When you add energy to a chaotic system, rather than seeing an immediate uniform increase in overall energy, you instead first see an increase in randomness and relative volatilivity within the system that over a period of time eventually develops a new stable higher-energy-level pattern of realtive randomness.
In the case of weather, energy is in the form of thermal units. Increases in randomness could be expressed as localized abnormal effects [changes in temperature (ranges or extremes), rainfall patterns, ozone density, changes in animal migratory and reproductive patterns, et cetera]. Increased volatilivity may be expressed as changes in storm frequency and/or intensity, or in sea level, for example.
Such a pattern of effects has been observable for some years now, and at this point (contrary to what American industry and the current administration want people to believe) there is no real debate over whether global warming is occuring [only the vocal objections of a few industry funded individuals or special interests]. It is occuring.
The actual current debates are 1) whether or not the change in overall global warming we are seeing is primarily due to human influences, or if it is part of a longer-term pattern that we do not yet fully understand; 2) the relative proporation of human-induced versus natural change in average global temperature; and 3) the projected size of the overall increase before the system reaches another point of relative stability.
It will be impossible to pinpoint local effects until it really gets out of hand. (It will have local effects, we just won't be able to say which are and are not natural.)
I agree with the second part of your statement. Localized effects will occur. I also agree that it may be impossible to reach a concensus among the majority of parties debating specific local effects until things are as you say 'out of hand'. (I'd say until the evidence is overwhelming. But given that the overall evidence that global warming is occuring is currently overwhelming, parties trying to defend their own specific interests will still deny the effect until no one will listen, and probably beyond.)
Furthermore, I think you are correct that we will have a great difficulty determining which may be natural and which may be human-induced.
It does not follow from that however, that specific local events cannot be examples of a larger pattern, or that the specific example brought up by the article may not be a real instance of a specific local effect. Only that it can't be conclusively determined at this time whether or not it is such an effect.
Not every instance of local climate change is a symptom of global climate change. Local climate fluctuates wildly.
I think the first of these observations is only functionally accurate. I say 'functionally' because, being a chaotic system, all climatic changes are interlinked. In that way, all weather phenomena are actually symptomatic of global climate change. We just can't interpret all of them.
As for the second, I don't agree. While local weather does flucuate to varying extremes, it does not do so wildly, but in a pattern. We understand some of these patterns better than others (5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, 200-year flood patterns for different areas, and so on), but whether we fully understand them or not, the patterns are present. Part of climatological science is finding and studying these patterns and learning how to interpret them.
Ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Hint: it used to be a greener when they named it a few centuries back.
Actually, no. As several others have already pointed out, this may be one of the first documented instances of marketing spin. It was called Greenland to encourage settlers. Iceland, another example of spin, was called Iceland because the settlers wanted to discourage too many people from migrating to the beautiful island they wanted for their own.
This is just like El Nino. Because it was causing some unusual weather patterns, every little rainstorm was blamed on it.
Well. While global warming and El Nino are both weather patterns, and are both still only partly understood (not well at all yet), I think it's too easy an out to write off every unusual weather pattern just because it's convenient.
The dramatic changes in the Antarctic ice shelves, changes in seal level in the Pacific Islands, notable changes in local temperatures and weather patterns are indications of the overall global changes that are taking place. But it will be many years before an overall global temperature change results in a general rise in overall temperature.
But to continue my curmudgeonly morning...
Linux sucks!
You are entitled to your opinion, however unfounded, foolish, inflammatory, or indefensible it may be.
They say its uncrashable! THEY ARE LYING!
Who is this infamouus they?
Nothing is uncrashable. Perhaps this is merely a small hyperbole about the comparison to certain OS that crash so often that crashing is considered normal and acceptable.
They say its unhackable! THEY ARE LYING.
Again. Who's they?
Linux isn't unhackable, just much harder to hack when properly configured than any of the Micro$oft OSes, which are riddled with security problems.
Security patches are also available within a few hours or days for linux, instead of having to wait weeks or months for Windows...
(If you really want an 'unhackable' system, use any pre-OS X Macintosh OS. They don't natively support the IP port structure, so they simply don't have the associated vulnerabilities. OS X (based-on FreeBSD) is now succeptible to similar attacks as BSD itself, however.)
They say its FREE. They are lying. The Mandrake linux prostitute will set you back $179.99 the same as windows does!
Again, they? In this case, they are completely correct.
If you want to buy Mandrake off the shelf (which includes manuals, media, and actual human tech support) you can choose to spend money on it. Tech support for Windows, incidently, starts at $35 per incident for XP if you want to talk to a generic drone, or $245 if you want to talk to an actual professional who might be able to help you resolve something more complicated than adding paper for your printer...
BUT, alternatively, you can download the .iso images of the CDs for Mandrake or virtually any other flavour of Linux from the internet for free.
Get over yourself. It is free...
WELL NOW YOU can fuck it up with these techniques! Just type these commands into your terminal emulator. Commands with a * need root access.
Yes. It will allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. But you have to actively attempt to. Let's take a look at what your examples really do...
To crash it /dev/mem
yes >
This attempts to pipe 'yes' directly into core memory dump file.
If you're a normal user, nothing happens except that you generate a 'permission denied' error. If you are root, not surprisingly, this initiates a kernel panic because you've used /dev/mem incorrectly. If you deliberately write garbage to core memory on ANY system it will croak. Linux, like unix, presumes if you're root that you really WANT to shoot yourself.
To rape it* /
chmod -R 000
Chmod changes security permissions for files. 000 removes all access, which brings things pretty much to a halt. Again, you have to be root before you can chmod things you don't own. And again, if you really want to shoot yourself, if you're root you can. This is a feature, not a bug. Children shouldn't play with root, any more than they should with matches...
To delete* /
yes|rm -R
This pipes 'yes' as a reponse to the query confirming that you really want to erase files. Not a very elegant way to delete [remove eg. rm] everything, but is effective. Again, you have to have root privileges, and you have to be a moron.
A somewhat more elegant way to do it would be to use:
Ironically, this is actually yet another diplay of superior efficiency for linux. Why? Because it is more efficient than Micro$oft's: because rm will completely erase files on all connected mountpoints, whereas 'del' can only erase one logical disk at a time.To hack it
su -c command
su is the superuser command. The -c switch passes a single command using different security credentials than those of the current user. (The default user for su is root, but it can be used for any account.) Since you must have the password of the user you want to issue the command as, this isn't really a hack at all. Again, it's a feature. In actuality, having the su command allows the system to be better secured because normal users are given only limited access so they can't easily cause problems.
Even MicroSoft has acknowledged it's a superior model and has now implemented a limited form of su on NT4 (as a supplemental utility), on Win2K, and on XP.
To use your system PROPERLY insert windows XP setup disk and reboot your system.
Let's look at what that accomplishes. But first, learn to punctuate.
Without a comma after 'PROPERLY', I could ask how you think you properly insert a disk...
If you want your computer to have training wheels, by all means, spend a lot of money on XP. It just makes it all that much more useful to the script kiddies who want to take advantage of all of the available exploits.
Ah. SkipNewarkDE just did.
The newest iMac. Bummer.
Kudos to him for really useful info, too. (see #3707420).
Those friendly yellow letters are looking better and better... :)
"...If you use an Apple computer, you can't even get the disc out of the tray. It requires the time and cost of taking the computer into a repair shop and having it removed that way..."
Complete silliness. Of course it can be removed.
Worst case, most Macs do have the manual ejection hole. (Even G4s. If you manually flip the outer case door up, there's a standard Sony tray behind it.) Perhaps somebody can give an actual example of a 'new' Mac without one, but every Mac I've ever worked with has one.
Even without, TIG is right...
Quite so.
Apple really needs to provide an obvious external means of ejecting CDs.
For users who can't/won't RTM? I'm not sure it would it help...
**Sigh**
Maybe you're right.
They should label all of their cases with friendly yellow letters, too...
Ah, well...
Perhaps you'd simply have better luck with different hardware.
Anybody have a spare toaster???
No flame intended, but license schemes are contractual agreements. And as with any contract, all parties have equal rights to opt _not_ to agree with a set of terms they find unreasonable. If they don't like them, they don't have to accept them.
That's how business works. If one party is foolish, and agrees to unfavorable terms, they hurt themself.
It's bad business practice for someone to effectively give a competitor (and M$ competes _directly_ against EA in that they also write games) a gun to hold to his/her head. If EA accepts being forced onto M$ server platform they will, like everyone else who's allowed M$ a critical advantage, set themselves up to be assimilated or eliminated.
If EA moves to M$ servers they will have to adopt M$ own coding standards and APIs for both client (on Xbox) AND for server-side code. They would become dependent upon code they have no control over (for the server itself) and would then give M$ a very significant advantage.
M$ could then bring to bear the anti-competive tactics that have landed them repeatedly in court and establish yet another area in which they have monopoly power because they would hold most of the cards. EA would become 'just another' (albeit a very large and somewhat influential) M$ development shop.
Progressivly, M$ would leverage this arrangement and continue to stipulate new, more restrictive 'license terms' for each (annual) license renewal, making it progressively harder for EA to write games that perform as well for Sony or SEGA except by spending more and more money to do so.
Over time, decreased ROI due to rising development costs (on both Xbox and non-Xbox platforms) would become significant enough to force EA to either reduce the number of platforms for which they develop (after having entered into an agreement to use M$ server-side), or to accept losses in order to continue parallel development for other systems. Cost to change to a non-M$ platform would be sufficiently expensive that it would become financially imfeasible to move away from M$, leaving EA at M$ mercy, and making it overwhelmingly likely that SEGA or Sony would be the platform dropped.
Alternatively, performance on non-Xbox systems would be sufficiently poorer (due to 'undocumented coding features' or 'non-optimization' for non-Xbox hardware) that consumer choice would shift to Xbox, allowing an alternate path for M$ to establish their domination of yet another market.
If you examine M$ business model, these tactics have been repeatedly demonstrated. Look at the progression to OS dominance, Office Suite dominance, or Client/Server dominance, and M$ tactics to subvert open standards to their own ends (HTML, JAVA, CHIRP, to name only a few). Or look at their current attacks on MPEG standards, trying to force everyone away from them to WMA and AVI formats and to M$ media streaming servers.
It's not superior products that give M$ dominance. (Even in areas where they may produce quality products.) It is aggresive and anti-competitive tactics.
Those are my observations (from the last 18 years or 20 years) anyway. You may interpret it differently...
(JMHO)