"Hi students! Here's a laptop for you, so you can do your homework. One caveat, though. NEVER COVER THE WEBCAM. Enjoy!"
I'm sorry, if any student gets that command and doesn't start sniffing network traffic, they got what they deserved. Even if they didn't know the technical side of things, it should have at least been an inducement to some very bad performance art.
It's not that it is not illegal. It is that the feds decided not to prosecute. There are any number of laws this violates. The most obvious ones are the ones that prevent people from photographing you within your home without your consent (which may be State, now that I say it), making photographs of minors in various states of undress, etc.
The software was part of a package to help recover stolen computers. IT people only turned it on at the request of school administrators, and had reasonable expectation that the administrators were using it in the intended fashion. The administrators probably started out using it in the intended fashion, and eventually came to rely upon it to understand and keep safe at-risk students. While I definitely disagree with that usage, I remember how hard high school was on the teachers. The school admins stumbled across a magic tool they didn't understand that gave them a window into the people they were trying to help. They didn't know any better, and they used it.
These guys have lost a lot of time, effort, and money fighting this thing. They're never going to do it again. And even if they win every case, they're still going to get reamed by legal fees in the civil cases. Considering that their intent wasn't just non-malicious, but was actually intending to do good for these students, I can see the feds deciding to prioritize other cases.
I'm reminded of how security researchers and general white-hats in this country live in constant fear of being arrested for doing the right thing. If it's not some overly broad DMCA interpretation, it's wiretapping or digital trespass. I can only hope the standard of "they didn't mean any harm" will be applied to everyone in the country who didn't mean any harm, and not just people who do this stuff en masse.
As you mention, there are ways of estimating the speed a user can expect to experience with DSL. At BARE MINIMUM DSL providers should state their numbers as a range, I.E. "speeds between 500kbps and 5mbps." By nature of the product, they know they cannot deliver speeds they are promising.
And while DSL has seen a surge of quality in recent years, traditionally DSL providers have been the smarmiest of the lot. Promised speeds that are just way outside the bounds of reality. Line noise that is blamed on the customer, but is really due to outdated switching equipment still on the line. Charging customers for leaving when the promised 5mbps was actually about the speed of dial-up. Blaming the underlying technology when really the ISP was really just criminally oversubscribed.
If I sold you a sports car that could do "Up To 300 km/h," but failed to mention that is only when being dropped out of an airplane, would that be lying?
It comes down to what the problem is. If it is congestion on other people's networks, then the ISP is fine. But let's be frank: that's not the problem. If the problem is with the ISP, then there is a problem. To cover some basic grounds, the main reason why a line is slower than the advertised speeds are:
1. Oversubscription. ISP's sell far more upstream capacity than they actually have. In a well balanced system some of this is fine, necessary even, but the degree of oversubscription is silly.
2. Lines that can't possibly live up to advertised speeds. DSL springs to mind. By nature of DSL technology, you're guaranteed to never hit the maximum line speed, which is frequently the number the advertisers plaster up there.
3. Outdated switching tech at the ISP. This should never be a problem, but happens more often than it should.
4. Shared lines. Comcast seems to be getting better about this. But if other local users effect whether or not you can reach your advertised speeds, you're almost guaranteed to be on the same loop as Mr. McFilesharer.
I don't know. I'm hard pressed to think of another area where "up to" can be used as the only number a consumer encounters, rather than an average. Can people sell "up to" 12 ounces of orange juice, and deliver 6? Can you be billed for "up to" an hour with a personal trainer, even though you only got 1/2 hour?
While I would love a flash alternative, at what point can we assume our web users will have HTML 5 and CSS3? It took nearly ten years for it to be safe to assume your users had PNG transparency compatibility. Considering the number of users still on XP, HTML5 might only be compatible to some people through a Firefox simulator plug-in in Internet Explorer.
The contest winner has 3 legs and 2 arms, +3 additional attachment points. I hate to sound this terrible, but this is Iceland we're talking about, not Southern California. They probably don't need wall-to-wall high-voltage wires.
There are computer systems that are self-modifying, both in software and hardware. In software, self-modifying code was a fad in the 80's, which was abandoned because it was ridiculously hard to understand or debug. Yet aspects of that persist in genetic and iterative tuning algorithms. In hardware, modern GPU's are oddly hardware self-modifying. This tends to be more like shifting gears in a car than an akira-like monster out to assimilate the world, but it's still hardware modifying itself.
There are also analog and imperfect computing circuits for specific tasks, where it is difficult or impossible to guess the exact output, but it does give you almost the right answer very, very quickly. And certain aspects of floating point calculations are generally imperfect in a way that programmers don't always take into account, but that's not the fault of the FLOP.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
It's just a million lines of self-modifying code, written in assembly, for an undocumented old system where the manufacturer won't return our calls. It can't be that difficult, right?
I'm not convinced that the patent system is broken. If we actually examined patents to begin with, the system might be fine.
But we don't. The guy here just patented a lightswitch. Others have patented swinging on tires. Forget legal wrangling, this is raw "Should Never Have Been Approved" territory.
Considering the rule of thumb is that it costs 5 grand to patent something, of which only 500 goes to the USPTO to check the patent, maybe we should up that number significantly. An additional 1,000 to the USPTO should give enough time for two examiners to spend a full day each investigating the patent. That extra %20 on the front end could save millions on the back.
Of course, everyone who works in upper management in the patent office should be fired immediately and sent to jail.
There are streaming radio versions of most of the local radio stations here in Boston.
Most of the radio stations here in Boston start cutting out by the time you get to the 495 ring.
If you're doing any traveling, it's easier to put on a streaming radio station on your phone than an actual radio station on your car. The coverage is better, and it doesn't start fuzzing out every five minutes.
I touch type without looking at the keys. Further, with my hands over the keyboard I can see maybe 1/4th of the available keys. Can you comment on how variable key labels might still be useful? Or is this the sort of thing that is useful primarily for new users?
IANAL, but AFAIK parody requires the work to be a commentary on the original work. God Squad would have to be about Geek Squad in a substantial way. Also, they would have to use a minimal amount of protected material, and certain other thresholds.
Satire does not require a work to be a commentary on the original work. God Squad could be about anything, and be re-appropriating Geek Squad material for humorous effect. But Satire is not protected in this country in the same way that Parody is.
Not a killer item of any sort, but I had a complete system that refused to work if a single screw in the middle of the motherboard was tightened down. It worked fine outside of the case. It worked fine when most of the parts were in the case. All together, it stopped working. Everything got taken out of the case, and worked fine again. Things were put back into the case. It stopped. This went on for about two days, until I finally got to the point of putting it back together one screw at a time.
Sometimes it's just easier to chuck complete systems and start over.
This is the first generation of consoles where this has been true. During all previous generations, PC graphics have outstripped console graphics by a pretty wide margin. PC sales remained healthy. I don't think you can blame Consoles for the demise of PC gaming, so much as the convergence of a few trends.
1: Laptops. Laptops have been greatly outselling desktops for this console generation. And the industry hasn't been able to agree upon a fixed laptop graphics card standard. This keeps Laptop graphics slow and bad, and devalues desktop graphics cards.
2: World of Warcrack. This continues to absorb approximately one billion dollars per year of the total PC gaming industry (no exaggeration), or about 1/5th of console game sales equivalent. WoW will run on almost anything, which means less incentive to upgrade graphics cards.
3: Flash, online games, etc. There is actually a pretty healthy ecosystem on the PC of flash games, smaller MMO's, Yahoo casual games, ad-supported titles, direct-downloadable games, etc. Because there are so many of them, it's harder for boxed titles to compete. And all of the online distribution space games aim for the widest market possible, which is to say low hardware requirements.
I do feel like the biggest factor is number 1, though. The PC graphics card market will probably not recover until you can pop open a panel in the bottom of your laptop and swap in a new bleeding-edge graphics card for your old one. Without that, the market is limited to towers, and the people who buy towers seem to be businesses, geeks who need servers, and people who are too broke to afford laptops.
What about a company whose products are already in the channel? If BFG has unsold cards on store shelves, is it obligated to get "No Warranty Included" stickers into the hands of the resellers?
I've always seen "not pirating the hell out of something" as a common courtesy to DRM suppliers. If Steam goes under, and Valve is no longer in a position to disable the DRM, you can always walk over and download an unencumbered version from online. Seeing as how most everything will be years old at that point, it will be easy. You'll lose saved games, but if you're picking up Doom again after twenty years, you probably want to play from the beginning anyway.
I bought a CD online from a smaller musician. After a few weeks with no shipping, I started sending mail in an attempt to track down what happened. The person handling CD's had disappeared, then re-appeared, then went away again, etc. I suspect someone had a death in the family, or some sort of drug binge, or something. Either way, after about 6 months of this, I just walked over to the local online supplier and downloaded a FLAC version of the album. Sure, I don't get the case or anything, but I now have the perfect digital copy of the album I wanted anyway, and the creator got paid.
They very well can be obligated to refund the purchase price of the product, but being in bankruptcy, what money are they going to refund it with? If they have suppliers, employees, landowners, manufacturing plant owners, and others they owe large chunks of money to, will a court prioritize a refund to consumers over paying owed wages?
Yes, it's courteous to send the item back, which is more than most dying companies would do.
Briggs & Riley does the same thing. A ten year old piece of luggage that an airplane has run over will be fixed or replaced, no receipt needed.
And while it's not a lifetime warranty, I do have to give a nod to poor old MoGo and ID-8. MoGo (who makes super thin headsets and mice) went out of business, then was acquired by ID-8. I had some problems with MoGo product. Not only did ID-8 honor MoGo's warranty, they sent parts out immediately without a receipt, no questions asked. And the parts they sent out had fixed the design flaws in MoGo's stuff.
If they were "reputable" would they be burning people with "lifetime" warranties?
Yes.
Know who you're buying from, people. A Lifetime warranty from the tech company could be A: Your lifetime, B: The lifetime of the tech company, or C: The lifetime of the technology. An MMO might sell a lifetime subscription early on for $150 to help create needed seed funding and start a playerbase. Are they obligated to keep servers going until all of their players die? More than likely, they'll be going out of business at some point. That's just how things go. No lifetime anything lasts forever. BFG says they're liquidating. Generally that means they're dead. It happens.
The bigger question is "should anyone sell lifetime anything?" I'm not convinced. Business plans change, people go out of business. Partners you're relying upon for key parts of technology go away. But on the flip side, anything with a lifetime warranty is probably going to be built better than things without, as they don't want to take them back.
Not to sound like a pessimist, but I suspect in Scenario 1 the parents will complain bitterly about the WiFi their students are still being subjected to. And they'll provide proof of it too. And in Scenario 3, the parents will say what a great difference it has been to how their students feel.
The real, legitimate test is Scenario 2 of course. But in Scenario 1 and 3 you at least discover how much information is getting to the parents, what those information channels might be, and how grounded complaints might be. Oh, and if you're right, Scenario 1 and 3 gives you get a ton of ammunition to tell the lot that they're bonkers and to go sod off. Scenario 2 would provide proof, but Scenario 1 and 3 makes Scenario 2 unassailable in public forums.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi students! Here's a laptop for you, so you can do your homework. One caveat, though. NEVER COVER THE WEBCAM. Enjoy!"
I'm sorry, if any student gets that command and doesn't start sniffing network traffic, they got what they deserved. Even if they didn't know the technical side of things, it should have at least been an inducement to some very bad performance art.
It's not that it is not illegal. It is that the feds decided not to prosecute. There are any number of laws this violates. The most obvious ones are the ones that prevent people from photographing you within your home without your consent (which may be State, now that I say it), making photographs of minors in various states of undress, etc.
The software was part of a package to help recover stolen computers. IT people only turned it on at the request of school administrators, and had reasonable expectation that the administrators were using it in the intended fashion. The administrators probably started out using it in the intended fashion, and eventually came to rely upon it to understand and keep safe at-risk students. While I definitely disagree with that usage, I remember how hard high school was on the teachers. The school admins stumbled across a magic tool they didn't understand that gave them a window into the people they were trying to help. They didn't know any better, and they used it.
These guys have lost a lot of time, effort, and money fighting this thing. They're never going to do it again. And even if they win every case, they're still going to get reamed by legal fees in the civil cases. Considering that their intent wasn't just non-malicious, but was actually intending to do good for these students, I can see the feds deciding to prioritize other cases.
I'm reminded of how security researchers and general white-hats in this country live in constant fear of being arrested for doing the right thing. If it's not some overly broad DMCA interpretation, it's wiretapping or digital trespass. I can only hope the standard of "they didn't mean any harm" will be applied to everyone in the country who didn't mean any harm, and not just people who do this stuff en masse.
As you mention, there are ways of estimating the speed a user can expect to experience with DSL. At BARE MINIMUM DSL providers should state their numbers as a range, I.E. "speeds between 500kbps and 5mbps." By nature of the product, they know they cannot deliver speeds they are promising.
And while DSL has seen a surge of quality in recent years, traditionally DSL providers have been the smarmiest of the lot. Promised speeds that are just way outside the bounds of reality. Line noise that is blamed on the customer, but is really due to outdated switching equipment still on the line. Charging customers for leaving when the promised 5mbps was actually about the speed of dial-up. Blaming the underlying technology when really the ISP was really just criminally oversubscribed.
If I sold you a sports car that could do "Up To 300 km/h," but failed to mention that is only when being dropped out of an airplane, would that be lying?
It comes down to what the problem is. If it is congestion on other people's networks, then the ISP is fine. But let's be frank: that's not the problem. If the problem is with the ISP, then there is a problem. To cover some basic grounds, the main reason why a line is slower than the advertised speeds are:
1. Oversubscription. ISP's sell far more upstream capacity than they actually have. In a well balanced system some of this is fine, necessary even, but the degree of oversubscription is silly.
2. Lines that can't possibly live up to advertised speeds. DSL springs to mind. By nature of DSL technology, you're guaranteed to never hit the maximum line speed, which is frequently the number the advertisers plaster up there.
3. Outdated switching tech at the ISP. This should never be a problem, but happens more often than it should.
4. Shared lines. Comcast seems to be getting better about this. But if other local users effect whether or not you can reach your advertised speeds, you're almost guaranteed to be on the same loop as Mr. McFilesharer.
I don't know. I'm hard pressed to think of another area where "up to" can be used as the only number a consumer encounters, rather than an average. Can people sell "up to" 12 ounces of orange juice, and deliver 6? Can you be billed for "up to" an hour with a personal trainer, even though you only got 1/2 hour?
While I would love a flash alternative, at what point can we assume our web users will have HTML 5 and CSS3? It took nearly ten years for it to be safe to assume your users had PNG transparency compatibility. Considering the number of users still on XP, HTML5 might only be compatible to some people through a Firefox simulator plug-in in Internet Explorer.
Have you ever gone to a high-priced resort island like Iceland because it looked good?
The contest winner has 3 legs and 2 arms, +3 additional attachment points. I hate to sound this terrible, but this is Iceland we're talking about, not Southern California. They probably don't need wall-to-wall high-voltage wires.
There are computer systems that are self-modifying, both in software and hardware. In software, self-modifying code was a fad in the 80's, which was abandoned because it was ridiculously hard to understand or debug. Yet aspects of that persist in genetic and iterative tuning algorithms. In hardware, modern GPU's are oddly hardware self-modifying. This tends to be more like shifting gears in a car than an akira-like monster out to assimilate the world, but it's still hardware modifying itself.
There are also analog and imperfect computing circuits for specific tasks, where it is difficult or impossible to guess the exact output, but it does give you almost the right answer very, very quickly. And certain aspects of floating point calculations are generally imperfect in a way that programmers don't always take into account, but that's not the fault of the FLOP.
Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
It's just a million lines of self-modifying code, written in assembly, for an undocumented old system where the manufacturer won't return our calls. It can't be that difficult, right?
I'm not convinced that the patent system is broken. If we actually examined patents to begin with, the system might be fine.
But we don't. The guy here just patented a lightswitch. Others have patented swinging on tires. Forget legal wrangling, this is raw "Should Never Have Been Approved" territory.
Considering the rule of thumb is that it costs 5 grand to patent something, of which only 500 goes to the USPTO to check the patent, maybe we should up that number significantly. An additional 1,000 to the USPTO should give enough time for two examiners to spend a full day each investigating the patent. That extra %20 on the front end could save millions on the back.
Of course, everyone who works in upper management in the patent office should be fired immediately and sent to jail.
Don't worry: Toshiba, Apple, Sony et al have enough money to squash this.
There are streaming radio versions of most of the local radio stations here in Boston.
Most of the radio stations here in Boston start cutting out by the time you get to the 495 ring.
If you're doing any traveling, it's easier to put on a streaming radio station on your phone than an actual radio station on your car. The coverage is better, and it doesn't start fuzzing out every five minutes.
Are you counting by fans or by hours watched?
Hours... and hours... and hours...
I touch type without looking at the keys. Further, with my hands over the keyboard I can see maybe 1/4th of the available keys. Can you comment on how variable key labels might still be useful? Or is this the sort of thing that is useful primarily for new users?
IANAL, but AFAIK parody requires the work to be a commentary on the original work. God Squad would have to be about Geek Squad in a substantial way. Also, they would have to use a minimal amount of protected material, and certain other thresholds.
Satire does not require a work to be a commentary on the original work. God Squad could be about anything, and be re-appropriating Geek Squad material for humorous effect. But Satire is not protected in this country in the same way that Parody is.
Was there every any doubt?
Not a killer item of any sort, but I had a complete system that refused to work if a single screw in the middle of the motherboard was tightened down. It worked fine outside of the case. It worked fine when most of the parts were in the case. All together, it stopped working. Everything got taken out of the case, and worked fine again. Things were put back into the case. It stopped. This went on for about two days, until I finally got to the point of putting it back together one screw at a time.
Sometimes it's just easier to chuck complete systems and start over.
This is the first generation of consoles where this has been true. During all previous generations, PC graphics have outstripped console graphics by a pretty wide margin. PC sales remained healthy. I don't think you can blame Consoles for the demise of PC gaming, so much as the convergence of a few trends.
1: Laptops. Laptops have been greatly outselling desktops for this console generation. And the industry hasn't been able to agree upon a fixed laptop graphics card standard. This keeps Laptop graphics slow and bad, and devalues desktop graphics cards.
2: World of Warcrack. This continues to absorb approximately one billion dollars per year of the total PC gaming industry (no exaggeration), or about 1/5th of console game sales equivalent. WoW will run on almost anything, which means less incentive to upgrade graphics cards.
3: Flash, online games, etc. There is actually a pretty healthy ecosystem on the PC of flash games, smaller MMO's, Yahoo casual games, ad-supported titles, direct-downloadable games, etc. Because there are so many of them, it's harder for boxed titles to compete. And all of the online distribution space games aim for the widest market possible, which is to say low hardware requirements.
I do feel like the biggest factor is number 1, though. The PC graphics card market will probably not recover until you can pop open a panel in the bottom of your laptop and swap in a new bleeding-edge graphics card for your old one. Without that, the market is limited to towers, and the people who buy towers seem to be businesses, geeks who need servers, and people who are too broke to afford laptops.
What about a company whose products are already in the channel? If BFG has unsold cards on store shelves, is it obligated to get "No Warranty Included" stickers into the hands of the resellers?
I've always seen "not pirating the hell out of something" as a common courtesy to DRM suppliers. If Steam goes under, and Valve is no longer in a position to disable the DRM, you can always walk over and download an unencumbered version from online. Seeing as how most everything will be years old at that point, it will be easy. You'll lose saved games, but if you're picking up Doom again after twenty years, you probably want to play from the beginning anyway.
I bought a CD online from a smaller musician. After a few weeks with no shipping, I started sending mail in an attempt to track down what happened. The person handling CD's had disappeared, then re-appeared, then went away again, etc. I suspect someone had a death in the family, or some sort of drug binge, or something. Either way, after about 6 months of this, I just walked over to the local online supplier and downloaded a FLAC version of the album. Sure, I don't get the case or anything, but I now have the perfect digital copy of the album I wanted anyway, and the creator got paid.
They very well can be obligated to refund the purchase price of the product, but being in bankruptcy, what money are they going to refund it with? If they have suppliers, employees, landowners, manufacturing plant owners, and others they owe large chunks of money to, will a court prioritize a refund to consumers over paying owed wages?
Yes, it's courteous to send the item back, which is more than most dying companies would do.
Briggs & Riley does the same thing. A ten year old piece of luggage that an airplane has run over will be fixed or replaced, no receipt needed.
And while it's not a lifetime warranty, I do have to give a nod to poor old MoGo and ID-8. MoGo (who makes super thin headsets and mice) went out of business, then was acquired by ID-8. I had some problems with MoGo product. Not only did ID-8 honor MoGo's warranty, they sent parts out immediately without a receipt, no questions asked. And the parts they sent out had fixed the design flaws in MoGo's stuff.
If they were "reputable" would they be burning people with "lifetime" warranties?
Yes.
Know who you're buying from, people. A Lifetime warranty from the tech company could be A: Your lifetime, B: The lifetime of the tech company, or C: The lifetime of the technology. An MMO might sell a lifetime subscription early on for $150 to help create needed seed funding and start a playerbase. Are they obligated to keep servers going until all of their players die? More than likely, they'll be going out of business at some point. That's just how things go. No lifetime anything lasts forever. BFG says they're liquidating. Generally that means they're dead. It happens.
The bigger question is "should anyone sell lifetime anything?" I'm not convinced. Business plans change, people go out of business. Partners you're relying upon for key parts of technology go away. But on the flip side, anything with a lifetime warranty is probably going to be built better than things without, as they don't want to take them back.
Not to sound like a pessimist, but I suspect in Scenario 1 the parents will complain bitterly about the WiFi their students are still being subjected to. And they'll provide proof of it too. And in Scenario 3, the parents will say what a great difference it has been to how their students feel.
The real, legitimate test is Scenario 2 of course. But in Scenario 1 and 3 you at least discover how much information is getting to the parents, what those information channels might be, and how grounded complaints might be. Oh, and if you're right, Scenario 1 and 3 gives you get a ton of ammunition to tell the lot that they're bonkers and to go sod off. Scenario 2 would provide proof, but Scenario 1 and 3 makes Scenario 2 unassailable in public forums.