1. Depends on company policy. If the files in Jane's directory are owned by the company, and they probably are, and the manager that requested them has the authority to do so, then do it. If he doesn't have the authority to do so, then have him go through proper channels.
2. Once again company policy. If the company forbids the use of software that is not work related, then it is not directly their responsibility of an employee misuses the equipment. If the company actively permits the use of such software, or to a lesser degree chooses to ignore it, then they may share some responsibilty in the matter. Closing off ports is just an extension of company policy, and the ports should probably be closed off anyway for security reasons, regardless of legal reasons.
3. Unless you happen to be her husband or the person she's cheating with, it's none of your business. And regardless, it's none of your business what's on the computer at all. If a retail store had you repair a computer and you found a ton of credit card numbers on there, I don't think there are many people that would consider it legal OR ethical to use that information in any way.
4. Mandatory reporters are generally an exception to the rule that forbids them from disclosing any information without permission. Doctors, counselors, priests, and lawyers are not allowed to disclose to authorities or anyone else information they have about the criminal activities of their clients. Disclosed child abuse is one of the few exceptions to that rule. As a normal civilian, you are under no such confidentiality constraints, and although it gets legally fuzzy, in many cases you can be charged as an accessory if you have knowledge of a crime and don't report it. If you're a tech person and you find kiddy porn on a machine, there's nothing stopping you from reporting it, and in fact you probably better, otherwise you'll now be in possession of it, knowing you're in possession of it. Doesn't matter if it belongs to you or not. As for "just pot", you're under no real obligation to report it now. But let someone bring it into your car, you better hope you don't get pulled over.
5. None. If there are disposal laws related to computers, that's the responsibility of the owner. There's many things you can't legally throw in the garbage. For things like car batteries, part of the price of the battery is the disposal charge, which is picked up by the retailer, typically when you buy your new battery.
6. Although it's more complicated than that, intentionally breaking the law is pretty well considered immoral. And you used that magic word "probably". The second two people use it, you're both illegal AND immoral, assuming copyright law has any relation to morality. In this case, figure out alternatives. If the software NEEDS to be on 10 different machines, then you probably need 10 licenses, regardless of the number of people that use it at once. It's not just a convience measure, such as installing one copy at home and one at work, knowing you'll never use it at the same time. Some software, Access probably not being one of them, allow for concurrent licenses, where you can install it on as many machines as you want on a network, but the sofware will only run on a designated maximum number of machines at any one time. If that can't work, attempt a licensing negotiation for that specific situation. Probably won't happen with Microsoft, but it's a better option than breaking the rules, and you won't have any moral issues to deal with.
I'm certain that the outrage over this case is well justified. And based on my 5 minutes of exposure to this case, I'm sure that he's not intentionally guilty of anything. Things like this happen, sad though it might seem. Innocent people have been unfairly locked up before, and if he IS cleared and the reasons for doing this to him were found to be unreasonable, then he should be well compensated for the intrusion into his life.
But please stop comparing innocent people with Kevin Mitnick. Yes, I'll agree, there were issues regarding his 5+ years of confinement, but he really brough it upon himself. Here's a few hints for people trying to avoid the Kevin Mitnick treatment:
1. Obey the law. 2. If you neglect to follow rule #1, revisit it after you get caught. 3. If you again neglect to follow rule #1, and don't choose to pay attention to rule #2, REALLY pay attention to it the next time you get caught. 4. If you once again neglect to follow rule #1, and rules #2 and #3 didn't sink in, now would be a good time for a serious attitude change. 5. If you continue to break the law, despite many instances in your life that would imply that this is a bad idea, and a warrant is issued for your arrest, turn yourself in. 6. If you're being pursued by the police, STOP RUNNING. 7. If you continue to run and a place you're living at gets raided, that's a clue that they're on to you. 8. When the police knock on your door with a warrant, ANSWER IT.
Mitnick presented himself as a flight risk. He dug himself a deep hole by constantly attacking 3 letter corporations with deep pockets. They didn't accumulate 10's of thousands of pages of evidence on him because he was a habitual jaywalker. In the end he got a token restitution. Even if the assessed damages weren't accurate, he probably DID cause damage far in excess of what the court required him to pay, considering time spent by system administrators cleaning up after him.
Federal cases also take a long time to prepare. He waived his own right to a speedy trial. That was a mistake. The FBI was kinda busy at the time what with this little incident in OKC. Spare them years of effort and force them to come up with something quickly, they'd probably offer a plea deal that would have been much better than what he ended up with.
Please don't use Kevin Mitnick as a comparison, there IS no comparison. There are plenty of perfectly innocent posterboys you can pick up as a reference. Don't sully Mr. Hawash's name further by comparing him to a criminal.
Almost all commercial photography is touched up in some way. Almost any stripmall photography place will touch up photographs to remove skin blemishes and artifacts in the picture, for a price. However, there is a big difference between altering a model pose where you're buying the perfect look, and a news photo where you're buying (supposively) unbiased fact.
A local newspaper had a similar problem with this a few years back. They were doing a story on teenage drug use in schools and used as a picture, the photograph of a girl bent over into her locker, snorting something. The photograph was a posed one, and was identified as such in the fine print of the article, but enough people got outraged, thinking that it was so prevalant that a roving news crew was able to catch such an event, taking place so casually. This gave the impression of the problem seeming worse than it actually was.
However, for news organizations, if they're going to modify images, make it obvious. Nobody gets upset about a collage mix of multiple images to represent a theme. But if the resulting image is represented as a single snapshot in time, you start to cross ethical boundaries.
I get that all the time with my site. Someone will post in a random forum about it, then a ton of people who seem to believe that computer controlled home automation is little more than a futuristic pipe dream insist that it must be fake, but never spend the time to actually confirm it.
I do get a bit of an ego boost out of proving them wrong though.:)
I think people are just jaded. The troll who really IS faking it has nothing to lose, and people would rather be sceptical and proven wrong rather than being had by a hoax. And certainly, there ARE enough hoaxes out there to make being automatically sceptical a reasonable assertion. But if it's fake, it's easy to prove fake. There's no reason to make any wild jumps to a false conclusion. It only points out to the world who the idiots REALLY are.
said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name)
This means you know what you're doing is wrong, and you have a great deal of shame for doing so. Otherwise, why would you care? Oh, maybe your account would get canceled, but that's a small price to pay for being right, isn't it?
While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games,
Yes, sometimes you find insurmountable obstacles that cheating seems to be the only way around. But it's not true, you're just not trying hard enough. But by cheating, you rob yourself of the thrill of actually BEATING the damn thing. But once you start adding extra programs to "assist" you in playing the game, or exploit hidden bugs to give your character an unfair advantage, you've just admitted to yourself that you aren't good enough to play by the rules.
and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
No, when it gets boring, that means its TIME TO STOP PLAYING! That's your brain telling you that it's time to get a life.
They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
And ultimately this is true. However, all game companies aren't perfectly innocent in this regard. Cheaters may comprise a small percentage of the total player base, but it has appeared at times that reforming the cheaters seems to be of a higher priority than showing them where they can get off, and giving them a shove in that direction. Ultima Online went through this several times during the first few months. Kept giving amnesty to cheaters if they just gave back the stuff they obtained by cheating, or even warning them a few days before they would start checking. I say, day one, mention that all cheaters will be banned permanantly and immediately, no exceptions, no warnings, NOTHING. And in their defense, a lot of them say this, but there wouldn't be that many cheaters if they were serious about it.
In theory, this should give players many options and strategies to explore, but it could also lead to players' gaining monopolies.
And in the real world, monopolies are regulated.
Games also typically have a grey area, mentioned in the article. These are tricks you can do in the game that are within the rules and maybe even the spirit of the game, but have a result that was not planned for. FPS Speedrunners have long exploited these tricks without crossing the line into cheating. In Doom for instance, you had strafe running, wall grabs, wall running, rocketjumps, archie jumps, flipping switches that are "out of reach", clearing ledges that should have been too far, but aren't, etc. Of course, all of these tricks are generally more difficult than playing exactly as it was intended. Players have spent hours trying to perfect a trick that will save them a few seconds, just so they can shave a second or two off the record.
If a grey area is considered unfair, then it should be stated as such and fixed. In a perfect world, most such exploits and grey areas will be identified and removed during an extensive beta period, but beta periods have been traditionally too short, and game developers are caught with problems that they have to fix without upsetting a world that can't be reset. In games that end after 30-60 minutes, this isn't a problem, but for the games that go on forever, your options are limited.
What's the big deal? The modem already compresses data on the fly, and some webpages already come.gz compressed. Standard text data compression is pretty old science, and from what I can tell, this won't do a damn thing to speed up images, a single one of which typically is larger than the entire html file.
From reading the rumors, the borg episode will involve discovering part of the crashed remains from the borg sphere that was destroyed during First Contact. It wouldn't be TOO much of a stretch to have an episode where they are discovered, and then destroyed along with all evidence without any clear idea of what they were or what they represented. As long as they don't bring the borg into TOO many episodes.
The temperal cold war will probably involve several interactions with the events from other series. Voyager had several encounters with Time enformcent from the future, and there's the timeship from TNG that was stolen by the guy who used it during the episode. These are events that could be developed further.
But if they try to do ANOTHER hack on The Trouble with Tribbles, now with the characters from THREE series in it, that just might start to get silly.
All the main keywords come up with heavily text focussed sites because text is what Google can index properly. They need to be better at rating image sites and annimation sites.
http://images.google.com specifically for this. Granted, its not perfect, but it's not bad either.
Then there's the 'multi-domain' spamming - sites set up across multiple domains pretending to be different but all being basically the same, simply for the link bonus.
If Google detects that several domains are really the same site, then it should treat all links between the sites as internal links in a single site, and all the sites corresponding pages should get the same PR value, since they *are* the same page, just on different domains.
Known affectionately as link farms. Google is well aware of them and they spend a great deal of effort in defeating them, to the point that they get sued for their success. Do a search on some slashdot articles relating to Searchking for more information.
Indrema suffered from the same dotcom failures that many other companies at the time did. I can't find a timeline on the company at the moment, so I can't make specifics, but they advanced with thier project with the assumption that it was going to require a large sum of cash to just get it out the door, with the expectation that they would recover it later. This is great if you already have the product and just need the money to produce it, but it's another thing entirely when you're in uncharted territory with no idea of your market, no idea of your R&D costs, and no idea about how long it's going to take. And I'm not saying that the Indrema developers didn't have an idea about these things, but they clearly hadn't thought it out sufficiently.
Most successful businesses rely on the initial partners putting in lots of 8 hour nights working for nothing but sweat equity for upwards of years before they have a product that has a decent chance in the market. The dot com era got people spoiled to the idea that they could do all this initial R&D while getting paid $150,000 a year, because VC's were willing to live off the hype. The point is, its unrealistic, and it didn't last.
An open source gaming console isn't a stretch. It's just a matter of what dedicated people are willing to put into getting it out the door. At the minimum, it requires the following:
- A custom hardware platform. Even if it is based on x86 hardware, you'll need a design that gives a performance and cost advantage to a console system, otherwise people could just buy a PC, defeating the whole purpose of the console. Even the X-Box, mostly a standard PC stuffed in a tiny box, has shared memory pipelines and other features that give it an advantage over comperable computers at the same speed and cost. Sony develops their hardware from scratch, and gains a cost advantage as a result, but the R&D involved in doing that is out of the ballpark of any smaller companies.
- Games designed for the platform. Assuming it's not just a standard PC in a box, you'll need games. Some might get by with a recompile, but for the most part, you're going to need others to invest their time and effort with the hopes that you're going to have a successful platform. When Sony or Microsoft puts up their cash to make it happen, it's a safe investment. You know the system will be available, and you know people will be marketed into purchasing it, so the quality of your game is the only selling point you need to concern yourself with. When you don't even know if the console will sell, you're going to have a tough time getting others to invest in your dream. It's quite the chicken and the egg problem. Nobody buys the console without games, and nobody buys the games without the console. The best course of action would be to hope for a bunch of easy ports of already available games, so even if they don't take full advantage of the hardware, there will at least be a selection available to give some credibility to the system.
- A market. If people don't buy it, none of this matters. Linux people aren't the primary market here. We already have our linux boxes, and all things considered, would prefer more games available on that system before the effort is spent to put them on a vapor console. So you need to go after the console gaming market in general, which means you need to compete with the other consoles on the market. And you're not competing with the PS2 and Xbox, you're competing with whatever is available 3 years from now, because that's the minimum time its going to take to get a viable system out the door.
If enough individuals are willing to do the games on a small budget with the hopes of some future return, there's a possibility. But a company creating the console is going to rely on the sweat equity of others for the success of their own product. It's not out of line to think that way, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
And one of the quotes from the Indrema developers said it best. Wait until you actually have a product before you talk about it. Time spent talking is time not spent working. People love to drool at vaporware, but they can't buy vaporware, so your pre-marketing efforts are in vain. Even if you finish it years later, people will have gone on to drool at other things. To have any hopes of success, you have to sell your product while people are still drooling. That means, give them some pictures, give them some specs, give them a date, and STICK WITH IT. You can't predict hardware development, you can't predict software development. You can predict how long it will take to put it into boxes and fill said boxes with fuzzy foam peanuts. Market appropriately.
Well, about the only things in common between Starship Troopers the movie, and the book was the title and a few of the character's names. They didn't even get all the genders right. I personally liked the movie for what it was, but it wasn't the same story as the book. At best, it was an entirely different story using the same universe, and had they written it and sold it on that basis, it probably wouldn't be sacrilege.
I for one, will appreciate someone who mirrors the slower sites while there's still a chance to get in. This feature gives people the opportunity to do so while the site isn't suffering from the slashdot effect. It also gives the site owner a warning of the onslaught that is soon to come, giving them the opportunity to establish mirrors of their own, or to quickly set up a minimal format.
There are many jobs for which the net income for a company exceeds the salary paid for that work done. This applies to every company that ever made a profit. Many times, an individual employee might generate value for the company several times that for which he's compensated for. While at face value, that might not seem fair, the simple fact of the matter is, the employee doesn't risk anything. The employee doesn't put up a large sum of cash to get the job, and if for some reason the actions of an employee cause the company to lose a lot of money, in most cases the worst that will happen is they get fired.
So take a look at the musicians. What do they risk by making the album. Ignore the fact that they have to have talent, which usually requires many years of unpaid work to get good enough to compete, this is typical for many jobs. Think "college"... "internship"... etc. But at the point they sign a contract, what do they risk? If there is a good chance that they'll actually lose money by signing the contract, then they shouldn't sign it, unless the potential reward for success far outweighs the potential risk. If the odds are that they'll at least eek out a managable salary from it, and 40k a year is definitely managable, then it's probably a good deal. The problems arise with the conditions of the contract that go beyond the yearly salary on one album. If its a one shot deal, one album, get paid, and renegotiate on the next one, then this is a VERY fair deal. I realize that it probably doesn't work that way. The record industry fleeces the artists. They own your soul, AND your copyrights. And that sucks.
But the artists signed the contract. And look at all the fringe benefits. I mean... groupies! And what is the alternative? Be a sanitation engineer, play clubs at night, sell a few albums via the internet, and make more money, but only grade B groupies.
Of course, *I* have groupies... and while it can be fun, definitely not something I'd consider as a condition of a contract.
3% of customers buy less "because of the cost of the CD". However, no statistics are given for the remaining 97%. Does this imply that the remainder buy the same or more CDs, or is there an even bigger made up percentage attributed to online file trading? The world may never know, but I'm sure she'll tell us.
Another interesting point, Bon Jovi put out a $7 CD, and people actually buy it. Hmm... interesting.
Sound quality on CDs?? I can barely tell the difference between a CD and an mp3, and only when I play them through a relatively decent stereo system, and I attribute that more to the noise created by a long run of unshileded audio cables, since a CD burned from mp3's sounds better on the same stereo system than the mp3's played directly from the computer. The point is, am I really going to tell the difference between a CD and something better? Am I going to care? Will anyone? Sure, on a DVD you could cram every music video, the making of every music video, the making of the making of every music video, the 12 hour documentary on the life of a overnight, soon to be gone popstar. Yes, you COULD cram all of this onto a DVD, but I'll bet you that DVD will still have only one hour of music on it. And seeing how I never watch music videos, even for the music I like, I can't assume that EVERYONE is going to want it. Now, if they want to cram 7 hours of music on that DVD, maybe they'll have something there, but I'll bet you it will cost a ton more than the CDs do today. Oh, I'm SURE people will buy it then. No more 3% drop, that's for sure.
That it won't take proper advantage of a local network. There is no good reason that any song should be transferred 181 times over the main upstream router. I presume that implies downloads. Once it has been downloaded, it's now present on a computer on the local network, which should have at least an order of magnitude more bandwidth available. The advantage for the user is that the file will transfer a lot faster. The advantage for the owner of the network is that local resources will be utilized (cheap) instead of the internet resources (expensive). Certainly, it's possible that someone downloads, listens once, and deletes a file before anyone else grabs it, but as soon as it has any significant saturation, it will be very difficult to remove ALL local copies for quite some time. I would bet between 95-99% of files downloaded by someone in a large network environment, such as a school or a large corporation, are already in existance somewhere on the same network.
Yes, the school is searching for illegally transferred content. However, while they might want to promote only legal use of their network, curtailing the internet bandwidth is most likely a higher priority, and if 95% of the data that flows over your network is illegal, that's a nice target to aim for. However, if the hit on their bandwidth was negligible, they probably wouldn't even pay attention.
This might at first glance seem to only help the downstream, but if the same P2P software is used elsewhere, then the upstream requirements would diminish as well. Even for those on cable networks, it would be better to only grab from someone on the same network, rather than hit a backbone provider. The less an ISP has to spend on internet traffic, the more money they'll have, and the less it will cost you, or at least the ISP's won't all go backrupt.
But he never implied that he wanted to sue them. Only that he puts them in a position where they refuse to pay for damage caused by a function of their software that they were well aware of, but haven't bothered to inform the public of.
The point is, you make a media case out of the company and in light of a well informed marketplace, hope that people will see this software as dangerous and refuse to use it on that basis, especially when they clearly refuse to pay for damage that they clearly caused.
And EULA's aren't the impenetrable blanket they might appear to be. Yes, we can use them to avoid getting sued because some overlooked bug did something undesireable. But as far as I know, a contract that involves illegal activity is not a legal contract. And as long as initiating the spread of a dangerous virus is considered illegal (and judging by the arrests and convictions to that effect, I'm going to assume it is), the only thing a virus writer would have to do to exempt themselves from prosecution would be to include a EULA along with the virus that somehow the victim would agree to. Nobody reads them anyway, so the virus would still spread just as rapidly.
Writing to the boot sector is dangerous, and application software has NO reason to do so. As far as I'm concerned, make a public spectacle out of them. Let the public realize that in the name of DRM some software companies are doing inherently dangerous things, and let other software companies know that this type of activity will not be tolerated.
When a large enough asteroid hits, it will scorch a significant percentage of the planet's surface, and black out the sky for many years, throwing the planet into an ice age. As a result, most life on the planet will die. This has happened many times before.
Yet something survived. Something was able to withstand the ice age until it receeded, and it was enough to maintain the ecosystem, so both animal AND plant life persevered. Somehow. That means, despite how horrible it would be, there would be a CHANCE that humans could survive. Granted, life as we know it would be over, but we could find a way to hold out, hundreds of years if we had to.
The chances of any of this being possible relies upon the amount of time we've had to prepare. If we have minutes, then yes, there's little we could do. But if we have years, months, even days, there's plenty that could be done. The impact area would be known far enough in advance that it could be completely evacuated. Deep caves could be built to house the population of the world. Lord only knows, if we REALLY wanted to, we might find a way to push that asteroid out of the way in time.
And besides, how exactly would you keep it a secret? Half the space objects discovered are done so by people and equipment not under control by the government. Remember the 1 mile asteroid discovered a few years ago with a SLIGHT chance of hitting Earth? Even before they knew for sure that it wouldn't, it was on the front page of the newspapers. It was the effort to notify other scientists for peer review on the projected orbit that the press got wind of. There is no effort to keep these things secret, so how would you suddenly shut everyone up once several hundred people were aware of it?
The smaller asteroids can be just as dangerous. Something 50 to 100 meters wide, similar to what hit siberia in the early 1900's had a devastating effect locally, but today, if people didn't have advance warning, you better hope people figure out what it was before they start launching retalliation nuclear strikes.
I liked it, for what it was. A little hack&slash, a little coordinated movement. Nice graphics, and a clever music video at the end.
It lacks in several regards though. First, its just too damn short. Probably spent 3 hours getting through it the first time. Total. Playing it the second time only took me two hours. Of course, you could finish the original in 15 minutes, so I suppose its an improvement.:) However, while they included a good number of scenes from the first Dragon's Lair, they included nothing from the second game, although they did include some characters from it, providing a little more depth to the story, not that DL was ever known as a "deep". But they TRIED to tell a story, just wish they did a better job at it. The second game would probably have been harder to put into 3D due to the dramatically different environments, but it was a more entertaining game than the first one, in my not so humble opinion.
One big issue of contention, their in-game movies use the bink format, and downloading a free bink player, you can play them fine outside of the game, but for some reason I can't figure out, the in-game player simply can't handle it. Of course, I'm ONLY on a 1.7ghz machine, so I'm sure there's a really really really good reason that a video playback can't exceed 4fps, but I digress.
I WISH I could get some people to visit to try to sell me something. Especially those trying to sell religion. I would love nothing more than to invite them in and tell them to ignore the flashing lights and screaming and voices.... Just tell them the house is possessed... and what were you saying again?
As for telemarketers, almost all the calls I get now are just recorded things. I started having fun trying to sell things to telemarketers. You can be as ruthless as you like, since driving off the potential customer is the whole point. So telling them that. And flirt with the telemarketers of opposite gender. Ask detailed questions about their favorite sexual acts and when they'd be able to get together for some practice.
Of course, now I only get recorded calls. Can't have fun with those.:(
Get ahold of one of Tom Mabe's albums. He has several albums which are nothing but recorded conversations with telemarketers. My favorite is the one where someone calls offering carpet cleaning services and he acts all panicked asking if they can get blood out of carpets TODAY. fun stuff.
Compare your average internet connected server to a more real world scenario, and compare your "cracker" to your "thief".
Imagine a theif wants to steal my TV set and no law or threat of force is going to stop him. If I were to "store" my TV set out on the sidewalk in front of my house, it WILL disappear. It's only a matter of time. Likewise, if I keep an insecure server wide open on the internet, with known exploits, it WILL get cracked, it's only a matter of time.
Now consider that I store my TV set inside my house, like most people do, and keep the doors locked, like most people do. The cracker still knows where the TV is, but he'll first need to get inside to take it. However, if he is undeterred, he can break a window and get in. This compares to your average insecure system behind a firewall. Good protection, to be sure, but if there is a flaw in the system, and an insecure system behind a firewall is still a major flaw, someone can still get in. The options are just limited.
Now say I bolt down the TV set. Removing it will require an extensive amount of time. A dedicated thief can still get it if he wants to, but there's almost a 100% chance that he'll get caught in the process. A well patched, up to date system with no known vulnerabilities is safe. Certainly, some blackhat might have a way in that nobody has ever heard of before, but it's highly unlikely. And likewise, they can track down the physical location of the machine, and hit it manually, but by that time you have bigger problems.
How does this relate to insurance? Imagine an insurance company willing to insure a TV set you store on your sidewalk. It's not going to happen. So will an insurance company choose to cover a network that has any known vulnerabilities on it? Or are they going to do a risk assessment based on a company's ability to keep their machines secured? And do they plan to keep track of these things? Simple fact is, a well secured network probably won't need the insurance. And good administrators will know this.
This means, that anyone who really needs the insurance will have to pay a TON of money for it, otherwise the insurance companies will go broke handling all the claims, for if someone is well insured, they're likely to be more sloppy. This means the insurance company is going to have to take a somewhat proactive stance to insure (no pun intended) that the customer's network is secured.
Why is everyone instantly assuming all of this is a hoax? So 11 years ago he had an idea. He probably filled up a grand total of two pages of notes. From what it looks like, he didn't even get so far as researching prices, since all his commentary has to do with backtracking google newsgroup posts to find prices back then.
If anything, this was probably spawned from the impression that a 386 had a lot more power than the average console system at the time. So he figured why not make a console system out of it. Only problem is, when I got my 386 system in 1989 it was $3300. I dare say it was still rather expensive in 1991. Not THAT bad obviously, but still not necessarily competitive with the average console system, and his notes confirm that.
So he scribbles a few notes, digs it up 10 years later, and decides to write up a webpage on it. I don't think its a stretch to name it X-Box. The other couple thousand people who scribbled something similar and didn't name it X-box never bothered to post it. Don't get so worked up over "convienent" coincidences.
For that matter, back in 1990, 91 era I was planning on a web style interface. And I actually had several hundred hours worth of code to prove the concept, beyond about 100 pages of notes. No, I don't claim that I had the idea for the web before anyone else did. It had very little representation to what we see today. I wasn't even aiming it for the internet, but just as a complex BBS interface. I didn't even discover the internet until I went to college a couple years later. However, it's sometimes fun to think that if I had just kept working on it, maybe there really was a chance that something could have come of it. But we'll never know. And it doesn't really matter anyway. That's what hindsight is all about.
Lets say the ISP secretly wanted to capture the script kiddie demographic. It still wouldn't matter. Most packet kiddies use bots on comprimised computers, typically on different ISP's. It's this comprimised computer that's doing the damage. That customer couldn't care less about egress filtering, but the indended victim would definitely appreciate it. You can argue P2P has valid uses, even if 99% or more of the data going over it is in violation of copyright. The only people who have a legitimate need for sending packets who's source IP address didn't originate from that network are servers that have loadbalanced upstreams over several ISP's. However, it is easy enough for the ISP to allow those IP addresses through assuming they permit that type of activity.
The sun couldn't suddenly disappear, although that scenario works for the purpose of explaining the speed of gravity. Consider this alternative.
Take the sun and instantly accellerate it to almost the speed of light, toward a collision course with Earth. For most of the 8 minutes between acceleration and collision, nobody would notice anything, as light, all other energy, and gravity would all present the sun as occupying its original location.
However, brief moments before the collision, the sun's change of accelleration toward earth will be noticed. Of course, you're noticing the change that happened 93 million miles away, even though the sun is about to impact. However, one second later, the sun will appear to be almost 186000 miles closer, and it will FEEL like it's 186000 miles closer. Suddenly the gravitational accelleration has increased to reflect the new position of the sun. But within that second, you get all the accumulated influences of gravity over a much larger stretch of space than just the 186000 miles it travelled in that time. Since the sun is moving at almost the speed of light, let's say 99% of it, after 99 seconds, the influence of the sun's gravity will only be 1 second ahead of the sun. However, within that one second between the position of the sun and the gravitational influence of the sun is contained the gravitational influence of the sun over the last 99 seconds. You get the combined force in 1 second that you normally would have gotten in 99. So when the Sun's influence is finally felt by Earth, you will not get a force that implies a steady rise in gravitational force of a sun massed object until impact, you'll get a very quick rise in force of an object that is, generally, about 99 times as large as the sun.
And if you remember relativity, when an object is travelling near the speed of light, the mass increases. So the theory at least makes sense. Here's another thing to ponder. If an object the size of the sun suddenly acquired the 99x its mass, would it not either collapse upon itself, or expand rapidly, nova, and the core would collapse upon itself, causing the same result, a singularity, with a small event horizon. And it will be this singularity that will collide with Earth, ripping through it in a fraction of a second, and the sudden, combined gravitational effect on earth will cause it to very suddenly pull out of it's orbit toward the origninal center of gravity of the sun, with a nice city sized hole carved through it.
Ok, this had no purpose at all, but it was interesting to think about. Go on with your business... nothing to see here. Rant over.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Depends on company policy. If the files in Jane's directory are owned by the company, and they probably are, and the manager that requested them has the authority to do so, then do it. If he doesn't have the authority to do so, then have him go through proper channels.
2. Once again company policy. If the company forbids the use of software that is not work related, then it is not directly their responsibility of an employee misuses the equipment. If the company actively permits the use of such software, or to a lesser degree chooses to ignore it, then they may share some responsibilty in the matter. Closing off ports is just an extension of company policy, and the ports should probably be closed off anyway for security reasons, regardless of legal reasons.
3. Unless you happen to be her husband or the person she's cheating with, it's none of your business. And regardless, it's none of your business what's on the computer at all. If a retail store had you repair a computer and you found a ton of credit card numbers on there, I don't think there are many people that would consider it legal OR ethical to use that information in any way.
4. Mandatory reporters are generally an exception to the rule that forbids them from disclosing any information without permission. Doctors, counselors, priests, and lawyers are not allowed to disclose to authorities or anyone else information they have about the criminal activities of their clients. Disclosed child abuse is one of the few exceptions to that rule. As a normal civilian, you are under no such confidentiality constraints, and although it gets legally fuzzy, in many cases you can be charged as an accessory if you have knowledge of a crime and don't report it. If you're a tech person and you find kiddy porn on a machine, there's nothing stopping you from reporting it, and in fact you probably better, otherwise you'll now be in possession of it, knowing you're in possession of it. Doesn't matter if it belongs to you or not. As for "just pot", you're under no real obligation to report it now. But let someone bring it into your car, you better hope you don't get pulled over.
5. None. If there are disposal laws related to computers, that's the responsibility of the owner. There's many things you can't legally throw in the garbage. For things like car batteries, part of the price of the battery is the disposal charge, which is picked up by the retailer, typically when you buy your new battery.
6. Although it's more complicated than that, intentionally breaking the law is pretty well considered immoral. And you used that magic word "probably". The second two people use it, you're both illegal AND immoral, assuming copyright law has any relation to morality. In this case, figure out alternatives. If the software NEEDS to be on 10 different machines, then you probably need 10 licenses, regardless of the number of people that use it at once. It's not just a convience measure, such as installing one copy at home and one at work, knowing you'll never use it at the same time. Some software, Access probably not being one of them, allow for concurrent licenses, where you can install it on as many machines as you want on a network, but the sofware will only run on a designated maximum number of machines at any one time. If that can't work, attempt a licensing negotiation for that specific situation. Probably won't happen with Microsoft, but it's a better option than breaking the rules, and you won't have any moral issues to deal with.
-Restil
I'm certain that the outrage over this case is well justified. And based on my 5 minutes of exposure to this case, I'm sure that he's not intentionally guilty of anything. Things like this happen, sad though it might seem. Innocent people have been unfairly locked up before, and if he IS cleared and the reasons for doing this to him were found to be unreasonable, then he should be well compensated for the intrusion into his life.
But please stop comparing innocent people with Kevin Mitnick. Yes, I'll agree, there were issues regarding his 5+ years of confinement, but he really brough it upon himself. Here's a few hints for people trying to avoid the Kevin Mitnick treatment:
1. Obey the law.
2. If you neglect to follow rule #1, revisit it after you get caught.
3. If you again neglect to follow rule #1, and don't choose to pay attention to rule #2, REALLY pay attention to it the next time you get caught.
4. If you once again neglect to follow rule #1, and rules #2 and #3 didn't sink in, now would be a good time for a serious attitude change.
5. If you continue to break the law, despite many instances in your life that would imply that this is a bad idea, and a warrant is issued for your arrest, turn yourself in.
6. If you're being pursued by the police, STOP RUNNING.
7. If you continue to run and a place you're living at gets raided, that's a clue that they're on to you.
8. When the police knock on your door with a warrant, ANSWER IT.
Mitnick presented himself as a flight risk. He dug himself a deep hole by constantly attacking 3 letter corporations with deep pockets. They didn't accumulate 10's of thousands of pages of evidence on him because he was a habitual jaywalker. In the end he got a token restitution. Even if the assessed damages weren't accurate, he probably DID cause damage far in excess of what the court required him to pay, considering time spent by system administrators cleaning up after him.
Federal cases also take a long time to prepare. He waived his own right to a speedy trial. That was a mistake. The FBI was kinda busy at the time what with this little incident in OKC. Spare them years of effort and force them to come up with something quickly, they'd probably offer a plea deal that would have been much better than what he ended up with.
Please don't use Kevin Mitnick as a comparison, there IS no comparison. There are plenty of perfectly innocent posterboys you can pick up as a reference. Don't sully Mr. Hawash's name further by comparing him to a criminal.
-Restil
Almost all commercial photography is touched up in some way. Almost any stripmall photography place will touch up photographs to remove skin blemishes and artifacts in the picture, for a price. However, there is a big difference between altering a model pose where you're buying the perfect look, and a news photo where you're buying (supposively) unbiased fact.
A local newspaper had a similar problem with this a few years back. They were doing a story on teenage drug use in schools and used as a picture, the photograph of a girl bent over into her locker, snorting something. The photograph was a posed one, and was identified as such in the fine print of the article, but enough people got outraged, thinking that it was so prevalant that a roving news crew was able to catch such an event, taking place so casually. This gave the impression of the problem seeming worse than it actually was.
However, for news organizations, if they're going to modify images, make it obvious. Nobody gets upset about a collage mix of multiple images to represent a theme. But if the resulting image is represented as a single snapshot in time, you start to cross ethical boundaries.
-Restil
I get that all the time with my site. Someone will post in a random forum about it, then a ton of people who seem to believe that computer controlled home automation is little more than a futuristic pipe dream insist that it must be fake, but never spend the time to actually confirm it.
:)
I do get a bit of an ego boost out of proving them wrong though.
I think people are just jaded. The troll who really IS faking it has nothing to lose, and people would rather be sceptical and proven wrong rather than being had by a hoax. And certainly, there ARE enough hoaxes out there to make being automatically sceptical a reasonable assertion.
But if it's fake, it's easy to prove fake. There's no reason to make any wild jumps to a false conclusion. It only points out to the world who the idiots REALLY are.
-Restil
Some comments to comments made in the article.
said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name)
This means you know what you're doing is wrong, and you have a great deal of shame for doing so. Otherwise, why would you care? Oh, maybe your account would get canceled, but that's a small price to pay for being right, isn't it?
While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games,
Yes, sometimes you find insurmountable obstacles that cheating seems to be the only way around. But it's not true, you're just not trying hard enough. But by cheating, you rob yourself of the thrill of actually BEATING the damn thing. But once you start adding extra programs to "assist" you in playing the game, or exploit hidden bugs to give your character an unfair advantage, you've just admitted to yourself that you aren't good enough to play by the rules.
and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
No, when it gets boring, that means its TIME TO STOP PLAYING! That's your brain telling you that it's time to get a life.
They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
And ultimately this is true. However, all game companies aren't perfectly innocent in this regard. Cheaters may comprise a small percentage of the total player base, but it has appeared at times that reforming the cheaters seems to be of a higher priority than showing them where they can get off, and giving them a shove in that direction. Ultima Online went through this several times during the first few months. Kept giving amnesty to cheaters if they just gave back the stuff they obtained by cheating, or even warning them a few days before they would start checking. I say, day one, mention that all cheaters will be banned permanantly and immediately, no exceptions, no warnings, NOTHING. And in their defense, a lot of them say this, but there wouldn't be that many cheaters if they were serious about it.
In theory, this should give players many options and strategies to explore, but it could also lead to players' gaining monopolies.
And in the real world, monopolies are regulated.
Games also typically have a grey area, mentioned in the article. These are tricks you can do in the game that are within the rules and maybe even the spirit of the game, but have a result that was not planned for. FPS Speedrunners have long exploited these tricks without crossing the line into cheating. In Doom for instance, you had strafe running, wall grabs, wall running, rocketjumps, archie jumps, flipping switches that are "out of reach", clearing ledges that should have been too far, but aren't, etc. Of course, all of these tricks are generally more difficult than playing exactly as it was intended. Players have spent hours trying to perfect a trick that will save them a few seconds, just so they can shave a second or two off the record.
If a grey area is considered unfair, then it should be stated as such and fixed. In a perfect world, most such exploits and grey areas will be identified and removed during an extensive beta period, but beta periods have been traditionally too short, and game developers are caught with problems that they have to fix without upsetting a world that can't be reset. In games that end after 30-60 minutes, this isn't a problem, but for the games that go on forever, your options are limited.
-Restil
What's the big deal? The modem already compresses data on the fly, and some webpages already come .gz compressed. Standard text data compression is pretty old science, and from what I can tell, this won't do a damn thing to speed up images, a single one of which typically is larger than the entire html file.
-Restil
From reading the rumors, the borg episode will involve discovering part of the crashed remains from the borg sphere that was destroyed during First Contact. It wouldn't be TOO much of a stretch to have an episode where they are discovered, and then destroyed along with all evidence without any clear idea of what they were or what they represented. As long as they don't bring the borg into TOO many episodes.
The temperal cold war will probably involve several interactions with the events from other series. Voyager had several encounters with Time enformcent from the future, and there's the timeship from TNG that was stolen by the guy who used it during the episode. These are events that could be developed further.
But if they try to do ANOTHER hack on The Trouble with Tribbles, now with the characters from THREE series in it, that just might start to get silly.
-Restil
All the main keywords come up with heavily text focussed sites because text is what Google can index properly. They need to be better at rating image sites and annimation sites.
http://images.google.com specifically for this. Granted, its not perfect, but it's not bad either.
Then there's the 'multi-domain' spamming - sites set up across multiple domains pretending to be different but all being basically the same, simply for the link bonus.
If Google detects that several domains are really the same site, then it should treat all links between the sites as internal links in a single site, and all the sites corresponding pages should get the same PR value, since they *are* the same page, just on different domains.
Known affectionately as link farms. Google is well aware of them and they spend a great deal of effort in defeating them, to the point that they get sued for their success. Do a search on some slashdot articles relating to Searchking for more information.
-Restil
Indrema suffered from the same dotcom failures that many other companies at the time did. I can't find a timeline on the company at the moment, so I can't make specifics, but they advanced with thier project with the assumption that it was going to require a large sum of cash to just get it out the door, with the expectation that they would recover it later. This is great if you already have the product and just need the money to produce it, but it's another thing entirely when you're in uncharted territory with no idea of your market, no idea of your R&D costs, and no idea about how long it's going to take. And I'm not saying that the Indrema developers didn't have an idea about these things, but they clearly hadn't thought it out sufficiently.
Most successful businesses rely on the initial partners putting in lots of 8 hour nights working for nothing but sweat equity for upwards of years before they have a product that has a decent chance in the market. The dot com era got people spoiled to the idea that they could do all this initial R&D while getting paid $150,000 a year, because VC's were willing to live off the hype. The point is, its unrealistic, and it didn't last.
An open source gaming console isn't a stretch. It's just a matter of what dedicated people are willing to put into getting it out the door. At the minimum, it requires the following:
- A custom hardware platform. Even if it is based on x86 hardware, you'll need a design that gives a performance and cost advantage to a console system, otherwise people could just buy a PC, defeating the whole purpose of the console. Even the X-Box, mostly a standard PC stuffed in a tiny box, has shared memory pipelines and other features that give it an advantage over comperable computers at the same speed and cost. Sony develops their hardware from scratch, and gains a cost advantage as a result, but the R&D involved in doing that is out of the ballpark of any smaller companies.
- Games designed for the platform. Assuming it's not just a standard PC in a box, you'll need games. Some might get by with a recompile, but for the most part, you're going to need others to invest their time and effort with the hopes that you're going to have a successful platform. When Sony or Microsoft puts up their cash to make it happen, it's a safe investment. You know the system will be available, and you know people will be marketed into purchasing it, so the quality of your game is the only selling point you need to concern yourself with. When you don't even know if the console will sell, you're going to have a tough time getting others to invest in your dream. It's quite the chicken and the egg problem. Nobody buys the console without games, and nobody buys the games without the console. The best course of action would be to hope for a bunch of easy ports of already available games, so even if they don't take full advantage of the hardware, there will at least be a selection available to give some credibility to the system.
- A market. If people don't buy it, none of this matters. Linux people aren't the primary market here. We already have our linux boxes, and all things considered, would prefer more games available on that system before the effort is spent to put them on a vapor console. So you need to go after the console gaming market in general, which means you need to compete with the other consoles on the market. And you're not competing with the PS2 and Xbox, you're competing with whatever is available 3 years from now, because that's the minimum time its going to take to get a viable system out the door.
If enough individuals are willing to do the games on a small budget with the hopes of some future return, there's a possibility. But a company creating the console is going to rely on the sweat equity of others for the success of their own product. It's not out of line to think that way, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
And one of the quotes from the Indrema developers said it best. Wait until you actually have a product before you talk about it. Time spent talking is time not spent working. People love to drool at vaporware, but they can't buy vaporware, so your pre-marketing efforts are in vain. Even if you finish it years later, people will have gone on to drool at other things. To have any hopes of success, you have to sell your product while people are still drooling. That means, give them some pictures, give them some specs, give them a date, and STICK WITH IT. You can't predict hardware development, you can't predict software development. You can predict how long it will take to put it into boxes and fill said boxes with fuzzy foam peanuts. Market appropriately.
-Restil
Well, about the only things in common between Starship Troopers the movie, and the book was the title and a few of the character's names. They didn't even get all the genders right. I personally liked the movie for what it was, but it wasn't the same story as the book. At best, it was an entirely different story using the same universe, and had they written it and sold it on that basis, it probably wouldn't be sacrilege.
-Restil
I for one, will appreciate someone who mirrors the slower sites while there's still a chance to get in. This feature gives people the opportunity to do so while the site isn't suffering from the slashdot effect. It also gives the site owner a warning of the onslaught that is soon to come, giving them the opportunity to establish mirrors of their own, or to quickly set up a minimal format.
-Restil
Don't you mean O's???
Of course, I was more of a Rogue fan myself.
-Restil
There are many jobs for which the net income for a company exceeds the salary paid for that work done. This applies to every company that ever made a profit. Many times, an individual employee might generate value for the company several times that for which he's compensated for. While at face value, that might not seem fair, the simple fact of the matter is, the employee doesn't risk anything. The employee doesn't put up a large sum of cash to get the job, and if for some reason the actions of an employee cause the company to lose a lot of money, in most cases the worst that will happen is they get fired.
So take a look at the musicians. What do they risk by making the album. Ignore the fact that they have to have talent, which usually requires many years of unpaid work to get good enough to compete, this is typical for many jobs. Think "college"... "internship"... etc. But at the point they sign a contract, what do they risk? If there is a good chance that they'll actually lose money by signing the contract, then they shouldn't sign it, unless the potential reward for success far outweighs the potential risk. If the odds are that they'll at least eek out a managable salary from it, and 40k a year is definitely managable, then it's probably a good deal. The problems arise with the conditions of the contract that go beyond the yearly salary on one album. If its a one shot deal, one album, get paid, and renegotiate on the next one, then this is a VERY fair deal. I realize that it probably doesn't work that way. The record industry fleeces the artists. They own your soul, AND your copyrights. And that sucks.
But the artists signed the contract. And look at all the fringe benefits. I mean... groupies! And what is the alternative? Be a sanitation engineer, play clubs at night, sell a few albums via the internet, and make more money, but only grade B groupies.
Of course, *I* have groupies... and while it can be fun, definitely not something I'd consider as a condition of a contract.
-Restil
3% of customers buy less "because of the cost of the CD". However, no statistics are given for the remaining 97%. Does this imply that the remainder buy the same or more CDs, or is there an even bigger made up percentage attributed to online file trading? The world may never know, but I'm sure she'll tell us.
Another interesting point, Bon Jovi put out a $7 CD, and people actually buy it. Hmm... interesting.
Sound quality on CDs?? I can barely tell the difference between a CD and an mp3, and only when I play them through a relatively decent stereo system, and I attribute that more to the noise created by a long run of unshileded audio cables, since a CD burned from mp3's sounds better on the same stereo system than the mp3's played directly from the computer. The point is, am I really going to tell the difference between a CD and something better? Am I going to care? Will anyone? Sure, on a DVD you could cram every music video, the making of every music video, the making of the making of every music video, the 12 hour documentary on the life of a overnight, soon to be gone popstar. Yes, you COULD cram all of this onto a DVD, but I'll bet you that DVD will still have only one hour of music on it. And seeing how I never watch music videos, even for the music I like, I can't assume that EVERYONE is going to want it. Now, if they want to cram 7 hours of music on that DVD, maybe they'll have something there, but I'll bet you it will cost a ton more than the CDs do today. Oh, I'm SURE people will buy it then. No more 3% drop, that's for sure.
-Restil
That it won't take proper advantage of a local network. There is no good reason that any song should be transferred 181 times over the main upstream router. I presume that implies downloads. Once it has been downloaded, it's now present on a computer on the local network, which should have at least an order of magnitude more bandwidth available. The advantage for the user is that the file will transfer a lot faster. The advantage for the owner of the network is that local resources will be utilized (cheap) instead of the internet resources (expensive). Certainly, it's possible that someone downloads, listens once, and deletes a file before anyone else grabs it, but as soon as it has any significant saturation, it will be very difficult to remove ALL local copies for quite some time. I would bet between 95-99% of files downloaded by someone in a large network environment, such as a school or a large corporation, are already in existance somewhere on the same network.
Yes, the school is searching for illegally transferred content. However, while they might want to promote only legal use of their network, curtailing the internet bandwidth is most likely a higher priority, and if 95% of the data that flows over your network is illegal, that's a nice target to aim for. However, if the hit on their bandwidth was negligible, they probably wouldn't even pay attention.
This might at first glance seem to only help the downstream, but if the same P2P software is used elsewhere, then the upstream requirements would diminish as well. Even for those on cable networks, it would be better to only grab from someone on the same network, rather than hit a backbone provider. The less an ISP has to spend on internet traffic, the more money they'll have, and the less it will cost you, or at least the ISP's won't all go backrupt.
-Restil
But he never implied that he wanted to sue them. Only that he puts them in a position where they refuse to pay for damage caused by a function of their software that they were well aware of, but haven't bothered to inform the public of.
The point is, you make a media case out of the company and in light of a well informed marketplace, hope that people will see this software as dangerous and refuse to use it on that basis, especially when they clearly refuse to pay for damage that they clearly caused.
And EULA's aren't the impenetrable blanket they might appear to be. Yes, we can use them to avoid getting sued because some overlooked bug did something undesireable. But as far as I know, a contract that involves illegal activity is not a legal contract. And as long as initiating the spread of a dangerous virus is considered illegal (and judging by the arrests and convictions to that effect, I'm going to assume it is), the only thing a virus writer would have to do to exempt themselves from prosecution would be to include a EULA along with the virus that somehow the victim would agree to. Nobody reads them anyway, so the virus would still spread just as rapidly.
Writing to the boot sector is dangerous, and application software has NO reason to do so. As far as I'm concerned, make a public spectacle out of them. Let the public realize that in the name of DRM some software companies are doing inherently dangerous things, and let other software companies know that this type of activity will not be tolerated.
-Restil
When a large enough asteroid hits, it will scorch a significant percentage of the planet's surface, and black out the sky for many years, throwing the planet into an ice age. As a result, most life on the planet will die. This has happened many times before.
Yet something survived. Something was able to withstand the ice age until it receeded, and it was enough to maintain the ecosystem, so both animal AND plant life persevered. Somehow. That means, despite how horrible it would be, there would be a CHANCE that humans could survive. Granted, life as we know it would be over, but we could find a way to hold out, hundreds of years if we had to.
The chances of any of this being possible relies upon the amount of time we've had to prepare. If we have minutes, then yes, there's little we could do. But if we have years, months, even days, there's plenty that could be done. The impact area would be known far enough in advance that it could be completely evacuated. Deep caves could be built to house the population of the world. Lord only knows, if we REALLY wanted to, we might find a way to push that asteroid out of the way in time.
And besides, how exactly would you keep it a secret? Half the space objects discovered are done so by people and equipment not under control by the government. Remember the 1 mile asteroid discovered a few years ago with a SLIGHT chance of hitting Earth? Even before they knew for sure that it wouldn't, it was on the front page of the newspapers. It was the effort to notify other scientists for peer review on the projected orbit that the press got wind of. There is no effort to keep these things secret, so how would you suddenly shut everyone up once several hundred people were aware of it?
The smaller asteroids can be just as dangerous. Something 50 to 100 meters wide, similar to what hit siberia in the early 1900's had a devastating effect locally, but today, if people didn't have advance warning, you better hope people figure out what it was before they start launching retalliation nuclear strikes.
-Restil
I liked it, for what it was. A little hack&slash, a little coordinated movement. Nice graphics, and a clever music video at the end.
:) However, while they included a good number of scenes from the first Dragon's Lair, they included nothing from the second game, although they did include some characters from it, providing a little more depth to the story, not that DL was ever known as a "deep". But they TRIED to tell a story, just wish they did a better job at it. The second game would probably have been harder to put into 3D due to the dramatically different environments, but it was a more entertaining game than the first one, in my not so humble opinion.
It lacks in several regards though. First, its just too damn short. Probably spent 3 hours getting through it the first time. Total. Playing it the second time only took me two hours. Of course, you could finish the original in 15 minutes, so I suppose its an improvement.
One big issue of contention, their in-game movies use the bink format, and downloading a free bink player, you can play them fine outside of the game, but for some reason I can't figure out, the in-game player simply can't handle it. Of course, I'm ONLY on a 1.7ghz machine, so I'm sure there's a really really really good reason that a video playback can't exceed 4fps, but I digress.
-Restil
I WISH I could get some people to visit to try to sell me something. Especially those trying to sell religion. I would love nothing more than to invite them in and tell them to ignore the flashing lights and screaming and voices.... Just tell them the house is possessed... and what were you saying again?
:(
As for telemarketers, almost all the calls I get now are just recorded things. I started having fun trying to sell things to telemarketers. You can be as ruthless as you like, since driving off the potential customer is the whole point. So telling them that. And flirt with the telemarketers of opposite gender. Ask detailed questions about their favorite sexual acts and when they'd be able to get together for some practice.
Of course, now I only get recorded calls. Can't have fun with those.
-Restil
Get ahold of one of Tom Mabe's albums. He has several albums which are nothing but recorded conversations with telemarketers. My favorite is the one where someone calls offering carpet cleaning services and he acts all panicked asking if they can get blood out of carpets TODAY. fun stuff.
-Restil
Compare your average internet connected server to a more real world scenario, and compare your "cracker" to your "thief".
Imagine a theif wants to steal my TV set and no law or threat of force is going to stop him. If I were to "store" my TV set out on the sidewalk in front of my house, it WILL disappear. It's only a matter of time. Likewise, if I keep an insecure server wide open on the internet, with known exploits, it WILL get cracked, it's only a matter of time.
Now consider that I store my TV set inside my house, like most people do, and keep the doors locked, like most people do. The cracker still knows where the TV is, but he'll first need to get inside to take it. However, if he is undeterred, he can break a window and get in. This compares to your average insecure system behind a firewall. Good protection, to be sure, but if there is a flaw in the system, and an insecure system behind a firewall is still a major flaw, someone can still get in. The options are just limited.
Now say I bolt down the TV set. Removing it will require an extensive amount of time. A dedicated thief can still get it if he wants to, but there's almost a 100% chance that he'll get caught in the process. A well patched, up to date system with no known vulnerabilities is safe. Certainly, some blackhat might have a way in that nobody has ever heard of before, but it's highly unlikely. And likewise, they can track down the physical location of the machine, and hit it manually, but by that time you have bigger problems.
How does this relate to insurance? Imagine an insurance company willing to insure a TV set you store on your sidewalk. It's not going to happen.
So will an insurance company choose to cover a network that has any known vulnerabilities on it? Or are they going to do a risk assessment based on a company's ability to keep their machines secured? And do they plan to keep track of these things? Simple fact is, a well secured network probably won't need the insurance. And good administrators will know this.
This means, that anyone who really needs the insurance will have to pay a TON of money for it, otherwise the insurance companies will go broke handling all the claims, for if someone is well insured, they're likely to be more sloppy. This means the insurance company is going to have to take a somewhat proactive stance to insure (no pun intended) that the customer's network is secured.
And just think of the possibilities for fraud...
-Restil
Why is everyone instantly assuming all of this is a hoax? So 11 years ago he had an idea. He probably filled up a grand total of two pages of notes. From what it looks like, he didn't even get so far as researching prices, since all his commentary has to do with backtracking google newsgroup posts to find prices back then.
If anything, this was probably spawned from the impression that a 386 had a lot more power than the average console system at the time. So he figured why not make a console system out of it. Only problem is, when I got my 386 system in 1989 it was $3300. I dare say it was still rather expensive in 1991. Not THAT bad obviously, but still not necessarily competitive with the average console system, and his notes confirm that.
So he scribbles a few notes, digs it up 10 years later, and decides to write up a webpage on it. I don't think its a stretch to name it X-Box. The other couple thousand people who scribbled something similar and didn't name it X-box never bothered to post it. Don't get so worked up over "convienent" coincidences.
For that matter, back in 1990, 91 era I was planning on a web style interface. And I actually had several hundred hours worth of code to prove the concept, beyond about 100 pages of notes. No, I don't claim that I had the idea for the web before anyone else did. It had very little representation to what we see today. I wasn't even aiming it for the internet, but just as a complex BBS interface. I didn't even discover the internet until I went to college a couple years later. However, it's sometimes fun to think that if I had just kept working on it, maybe there really was a chance that something could have come of it. But we'll never know. And it doesn't really matter anyway. That's what hindsight is all about.
Ok. Rant over.
-Restil
You might be sarcastic, but lets say you aren't.
Lets say the ISP secretly wanted to capture the script kiddie demographic. It still wouldn't matter. Most packet kiddies use bots on comprimised computers, typically on different ISP's. It's this comprimised computer that's doing the damage. That customer couldn't care less about egress filtering, but the indended victim would definitely appreciate it. You can argue P2P has valid uses, even if 99% or more of the data going over it is in violation of copyright. The only people who have a legitimate need for sending packets who's source IP address didn't originate from that network are servers that have loadbalanced upstreams over several ISP's. However, it is easy enough for the ISP to allow those IP addresses through assuming they permit that type of activity.
-Restil
I've noticed two articles this morning that come with disclaimers. Been had by one hoax too many perhaps?
-Restil
The sun couldn't suddenly disappear, although that scenario works for the purpose of explaining the speed of gravity. Consider this alternative.
Take the sun and instantly accellerate it to almost the speed of light, toward a collision course with Earth. For most of the 8 minutes between acceleration and collision, nobody would notice anything, as light, all other energy, and gravity would all present the sun as occupying its original location.
However, brief moments before the collision, the sun's change of accelleration toward earth will be noticed. Of course, you're noticing the change that happened 93 million miles away, even though the sun is about to impact. However, one second later, the sun will appear to be almost 186000 miles closer, and it will FEEL like it's 186000 miles closer. Suddenly the gravitational accelleration has increased to reflect the new position of the sun. But within that second, you get all the accumulated influences of gravity over a much larger stretch of space than just the 186000 miles it travelled in that time. Since the sun is moving at almost the speed of light, let's say 99% of it, after 99 seconds, the influence of the sun's gravity will only be 1 second ahead of the sun. However, within that one second between the position of the sun and the gravitational influence of the sun is contained the gravitational influence of the sun over the last 99 seconds. You get the combined force in 1 second that you normally would have gotten in 99. So when the Sun's influence is finally felt by Earth, you will not get a force that implies a steady rise in gravitational force of a sun massed object until impact, you'll get a very quick rise in force of an object that is, generally, about 99 times as large as the sun.
And if you remember relativity, when an object is travelling near the speed of light, the mass increases. So the theory at least makes sense. Here's another thing to ponder. If an object the size of the sun suddenly acquired the 99x its mass, would it not either collapse upon itself, or expand rapidly, nova, and the core would collapse upon itself, causing the same result, a singularity, with a small event horizon. And it will be this singularity that will collide with Earth, ripping through it in a fraction of a second, and the sudden, combined gravitational effect on earth will cause it to very suddenly pull out of it's orbit toward the origninal center of gravity of the sun, with a nice city sized hole carved through it.
Ok, this had no purpose at all, but it was interesting to think about. Go on with your business... nothing to see here. Rant over.
-Restil