I wrote to Senators Durbin, and Burris. They both responded in form letter that they are all for whatever is being negotiated to stop "piracy". Is there anything in this treaty about arming merchant ships? It would be kind of hard to board a ship capable of raining granades down on a pirate boat:)
>> According to the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has harassed and attacked them with '8,139 threatening phone calls, 3.6 million e-mails, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism against its property, 22 bomb threats, and eight death threats against Church leaders.'"
How many of these claims were actually substantiated by independent investigation? Especially considering that the CoS most likely would not be against creating "false flag" attacks against themselves...
Surely one of the main reasons for having web based applications in the first place is to get some independence from the clients' platform.
Not in the minds of certain web developers. It gets especially ironic where you have Apache running under Linux refusing to talk to anything other than IE running under Windows, by deliberate design.
I always thought scientific journals should judge submissions based upon the quality of the data and the research, not if they passed some popularity contest. If science is down to simply popularity or majority group-think, then science is dead.
By that definition science is "dead". Or at least certain sciences have been periodically "dead" throughout the history of scientific journals. Peer reviewers and editors are only human they can at times be very conservative in their behaviour, in some cases for decades.
But, one of the thoughts of the whole Global Warming thing is countries having to "pay" to some "World Fund" for their carbon emissions. The establishment of this fund and the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries via environmental guilt it the being of the One World Government.
Has anyone done a "follow the money" and established where the money is actually going? It would be far more likely that it's going from the tax payers in "rich countries" to some already rich corporations and individuals. Even if any of it did wind up in poor countries it dosn't mean that it would actually do any "good". It certainly wouldn't be the first time that "foreign aid" turned out to be a "minus" for the recipient.
The U.S. Government has funded over 90 billion dollars of studies since 1989. Collages and Universities in the U.S. receive over 4 billion a year. It's where the money is. If you want to run an experiment and it has a "bias" towards proving global warming...you are much more likely to get money for it.
Presumably "Anthropogenic Global Warming". Thus it would not be PC to conclude that the world was getting warmer, but humans had nothing to do with it or that things would be getting warmer quicker without humans around... This certainly isn't the only area where "research" is trumped by politics. At least it isn't (yet) illegal to research which comes to the "wrong" conclusion here.
I know most of us would like to pretend IE doesn't exist, but they haven't even heard of IE 8?
There are plenty of web apps (especially in the "Enterprise" environment) which depend of quirks of specific browsers. Most commonly IE6. Using a different browser means making major changes. At which point it probably dosn't matter if the change were to be to Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Indeed there are versions of Windows which won't run IE8, but will run modern non Microsoft browsers. Indeed if things are web based then without a requirement for IE something akin to "Google OS" might make rather more sense than Windows. Especially if the result is small enough to be reasonably started by PXE.
The problem is that people want science fiction to take place in a comfortable, "safe" future.
Any such future would be boring beyond tolerance.
This dosn't just apply to science fiction. Conflict is very much a part of drama. Just about any story about a "safe future" would be likely concerned about the "people" (be they human, alien, AI, cybernetic or whatever) responsible for making sure that things stay "safe".
It's also about politics as well, and how we perceive them as well. Take a look at the new V series. It's set after 9/11 when we've become suspicious of everything different, where we value security, and those that aren't with us, must be destroyed. This new series once again explores the unknown, (and yes it sucks majorly right now because they need a writing staff that's more qualified to do justice,) but at the same time it explores how our ideologies are.
There's also the idea that the aliens have been manipulating events on Earth on a global scale. The aliens's disguise appears be more "Terminator" than the original series in some ways.
Think about this as well, charismatic and "peaceful" beings who want to share with us their tech and heal us.
It's a bit suprising that nobody has queried that the aliens insist on mentioning "peace" so often.
It's also about religion. The old series didn't have a priest who was questioning everything that the V said. That's what makes this series so good, is that it has more depth to it then the original series. Plus the role of Anna, she has a hidden agenda
But it is as much hidden from her own people (except possibly her family) as it is from the human. Indeed several of the aliens appear to have hidden agendas.
In this new series, we have 9/11 and terrorists and sleeper cells.
As well as it being unclear who is on which "side" even exactly what sides there are. Maybe some of the blanks will be filled in by the Ryan Nichols character telling the priest and the FBI agent both about why he was sent to Earth and why he became a rebel.
This is one good thing that comes with economic hardship. Idiotic, wasteful, inefficient ideas like this get swept away in the tide while people start focusing on more important issues, like keeping a roof over their heads or feeding and clothing themselves and their children.
Pity other extremist political groups appear to have rather deeper pockets. No doubt some even thrive in times of economic hardship:(
Just to make things clear, my last statement was sarcastic. Perhaps it isn't as obvious to others as it is to me, but our customers *didn't have any money*.
Or rather that you don't have any customers. Since your business model appeared to have changed to one where you expected third parties to sell your product then pass the money onto you. But those third parties have nothing to lose by not selling your product.
This is why we failed. Not piracy. Piracy was helping. Some of those pirates had money and were willing to buy the app eventually.
If anything piracy was part of your, as then, sucessful business model. Though maybe an unintended and univited part of it.
Moronic sales people trying to sell software to fly-by-night service companies with no money was a less successful tactic.
Also at this point you stopped what you had been doing and tried to do something different. The true morons here are the management not doing something, including returning to the previous way of doing things when it became apparent that money was no longer coming in...
I once worked for a small company with a semi-popular application. Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website.
Remember that there are plenty of people who will have nothing to do with Pay Pal...
It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to pay one developer. But piracy was a huge problem. It was quite obvious that more than 90% of the copies running were pirated.
So what? Especially considering that the sales were bringing in a useful amount of money, which puts it in the minority to start with. All these people were doing was getting hold of your game without paying a small sum of money. It's not as if they were kidnapping people at gunpoint and requesting huge sums of money for their safe return.
The company changed directions and started bundling the application for free with online services. The service provider would pay for the application and the customers would get the software for use only with the service. But the company was worried about piracy, so they asked me to write DRM that tied the application to the service. They would continue to sell an untied version off the website, but with "call home" DRM (it's an internet app, so it's not quite as draconian as it sounds). I very reluctantly agreed (i.e., I had to decide whether it was worth quitting over -- if I had to do it again, I'd quit).
The end result was that all piracy stopped. In fact, all usage stopped. Instead of selling 2 or 3 copies a day off the website, not one copy of the DRM version was ever sold. And due to very poor choices of service provider partners, the company received no revenue at all. Within a year the company had folded.
This is known as "cutting one's nose off to spite one's face".
The thing is, the new version was head and shoulders better than then non-DRMed version. And the DRM was truly unobtrusive (think DRM in WoW). Paying customers wouldn't even know it existed.
How was it "better"? At best DRM is neutral at worst it causes issues such as making an application less reliable, more resource intensive or other ways which detract from whatever the primary purpose of the app is intended to be.
Whenever a developer claims to be "losing money" to piracy, one has to wonder... are the developers losing this money trying to combat piracy directly (lawsuits and DRM tactics), or is it simply a case of self-flattery, where the developer is grossly over-estimating the value of their software, thinking "If my software isn't great, then why would anyone pirate it?"
There may be some cases where a pirated copy is a "lost sale". This includes where you (or your vendor) won't actually sell it potential customers or where you are trying to sell it at too higher price. The latter including price differentiation based on a customer's physical location (or that of their credit card issuer). To the typical customer geographical price differentiation, especially of something which has no physical substance, equates to "they tried to rip me off". Thus "piracy" is a perfectly justified, even a morally required action. So best make sure that your 0.99 USD equates to 0.67 EUR, 0.60 GBP, 1.06 CAD, 1.08 AUD, 88.08 JPY, 46.08 INR, 3.76 ARS, 7.51 ZAR or whatever the applicable exchange rate at the time is. Which you don't even have to worry about, since the banks will take care of any necessary conversions.
Another argentinian here, developing for the iPhone, and I'm calling your bullshit on this. There isn't an iTunes Store here but there is an App Store. You cannot buy music here without an international credit card, but you can buy anything from the App Store with your regular national credit card.
Does Argentina have special credit cards which can only be used for transactions in ARS? (Which also don't carry either the Visa or Mastercard logo.) Which would imply that anyone handling credit cards in Argentina would have to accept both these and standard cards, which would be an issue in popular tourist. Does this also mean that Argentinians have to get a standard credit card if they wish to be able to use one abroad, including buying an airline ticket in the first place, (since the fuel is priced in USD). Or do you mean that certain suppliers are refusing to accept perfectly valid Visa or Mastercard cards for reasons which are questionable.
On the other hand, some companies, for whatever unfathomable reasons, only release on the USA and neglect to release on other App Stores - even unlocalized versions of their apps, which would be good enough for most of us.
The only South American country where there might be a language issue being Brazil, since Portugese is not a common language in the US. Whereas Spanish commonly used by many people in the US, even to the point where in several states just about every place name is Spanish.
They don't want to sell their product to you, so that gives you the right to take it anyway?
It's equally valid to ask if "they" have any right to complain in such a case.
Find something else that does the job where the owner has given you permission to use it and give them your money to support them. Write your own app to do the same thing and fill the gap in the market yourself.
Is that person's time free? Maybe the awkward supplier should compensate them for their additional time spent finding a supplier who isn't so daft or even for "reinventing the wheel". Assuming that the supplier in question isn't a monopoly...
On the other hand, some materials have odor thresholds above their toxic thresholds - that is, if you can smell them, they've already done their damage.
However some, such as H2S, can only be smelt at low concentrations
It's just that every time the Met comes up here, they bungle the case big time and those arrested have to be released, even in the midst of over-whelming evidence against them. Either that, or they blatantly get the wrong person but release all sorts of emotive "facts" about what they were arrested for which tries to convince everyone (or maybe just themselves) theyve got the right person.
That's in addition to Met Officers not being arrested and tried for killing members of the public. Something which has happened more than once.
A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music
Most people would think of this as "having more money than sense". No doubt the same applies to those who spend a small fortune on speaker cable and bits of ceramic to keep it a few cm above the floor:)
How exactly do you detect employees accessing data they are being paid to access?
The number of employees who actually have a legitimate need to access huge numbers of records/substantial portions of the database is very small. Appropriate access controls are implied by the relevent legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote to Senators Durbin, and Burris. They both responded in form letter that they are all for whatever is being negotiated to stop "piracy". :)
Is there anything in this treaty about arming merchant ships? It would be kind of hard to board a ship capable of raining granades down on a pirate boat
>> According to the Church of Scientology, Anonymous has harassed and attacked them with '8,139 threatening phone calls, 3.6 million e-mails, 141 million hits on its website, ten acts of vandalism against its property, 22 bomb threats, and eight death threats against Church leaders.'"
How many of these claims were actually substantiated by independent investigation? Especially considering that the CoS most likely would not be against creating "false flag" attacks against themselves...
Surely one of the main reasons for having web based applications in the first place is to get some independence from the clients' platform.
Not in the minds of certain web developers. It gets especially ironic where you have Apache running under Linux refusing to talk to anything other than IE running under Windows, by deliberate design.
I always thought scientific journals should judge submissions based upon the quality of the data and the research, not if they passed some popularity contest. If science is down to simply popularity or majority group-think, then science is dead.
By that definition science is "dead". Or at least certain sciences have been periodically "dead" throughout the history of scientific journals. Peer reviewers and editors are only human they can at times be very conservative in their behaviour, in some cases for decades.
But, one of the thoughts of the whole Global Warming thing is countries having to "pay" to some "World Fund" for their carbon emissions. The establishment of this fund and the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries via environmental guilt it the being of the One World Government.
Has anyone done a "follow the money" and established where the money is actually going?
It would be far more likely that it's going from the tax payers in "rich countries" to some already rich corporations and individuals. Even if any of it did wind up in poor countries it dosn't mean that it would actually do any "good". It certainly wouldn't be the first time that "foreign aid" turned out to be a "minus" for the recipient.
The U.S. Government has funded over 90 billion dollars of studies since 1989. Collages and Universities in the U.S. receive over 4 billion a year. It's where the money is. If you want to run an experiment and it has a "bias" towards proving global warming...you are much more likely to get money for it.
Presumably "Anthropogenic Global Warming". Thus it would not be PC to conclude that the world was getting warmer, but humans had nothing to do with it or that things would be getting warmer quicker without humans around...
This certainly isn't the only area where "research" is trumped by politics. At least it isn't (yet) illegal to research which comes to the "wrong" conclusion here.
I know most of us would like to pretend IE doesn't exist, but they haven't even heard of IE 8?
There are plenty of web apps (especially in the "Enterprise" environment) which depend of quirks of specific browsers. Most commonly IE6. Using a different browser means making major changes. At which point it probably dosn't matter if the change were to be to Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Indeed there are versions of Windows which won't run IE8, but will run modern non Microsoft browsers.
Indeed if things are web based then without a requirement for IE something akin to "Google OS" might make rather more sense than Windows. Especially if the result is small enough to be reasonably started by PXE.
The problem is that people want science fiction to take place in a comfortable, "safe" future.
Any such future would be boring beyond tolerance.
This dosn't just apply to science fiction. Conflict is very much a part of drama. Just about any story about a "safe future" would be likely concerned about the "people" (be they human, alien, AI, cybernetic or whatever) responsible for making sure that things stay "safe".
It's also about politics as well, and how we perceive them as well. Take a look at the new V series. It's set after 9/11 when we've become suspicious of everything different, where we value security, and those that aren't with us, must be destroyed. This new series once again explores the unknown, (and yes it sucks majorly right now because they need a writing staff that's more qualified to do justice,) but at the same time it explores how our ideologies are.
There's also the idea that the aliens have been manipulating events on Earth on a global scale. The aliens's disguise appears be more "Terminator" than the original series in some ways.
Think about this as well, charismatic and "peaceful" beings who want to share with us their tech and heal us.
It's a bit suprising that nobody has queried that the aliens insist on mentioning "peace" so often.
It's also about religion. The old series didn't have a priest who was questioning everything that the V said. That's what makes this series so good, is that it has more depth to it then the original series. Plus the role of Anna, she has a hidden agenda
But it is as much hidden from her own people (except possibly her family) as it is from the human. Indeed several of the aliens appear to have hidden agendas.
In this new series, we have 9/11 and terrorists and sleeper cells.
As well as it being unclear who is on which "side" even exactly what sides there are. Maybe some of the blanks will be filled in by the Ryan Nichols character telling the priest and the FBI agent both about why he was sent to Earth and why he became a rebel.
Either that, or the Video Game Bogeyman has been replaced by the Terrorism Bogeyman, and people are simply concentrating on that instead.
:)
Don't forget the "e-safety" bogart
This is one good thing that comes with economic hardship. Idiotic, wasteful, inefficient ideas like this get swept away in the tide while people start focusing on more important issues, like keeping a roof over their heads or feeding and clothing themselves and their children.
:(
Pity other extremist political groups appear to have rather deeper pockets. No doubt some even thrive in times of economic hardship
Just to make things clear, my last statement was sarcastic. Perhaps it isn't as obvious to others as it is to me, but our customers *didn't have any money*.
Or rather that you don't have any customers. Since your business model appeared to have changed to one where you expected third parties to sell your product then pass the money onto you. But those third parties have nothing to lose by not selling your product.
This is why we failed. Not piracy. Piracy was helping. Some of those pirates had money and were willing to buy the app eventually.
If anything piracy was part of your, as then, sucessful business model. Though maybe an unintended and univited part of it.
Moronic sales people trying to sell software to fly-by-night service companies with no money was a less successful tactic.
Also at this point you stopped what you had been doing and tried to do something different. The true morons here are the management not doing something, including returning to the previous way of doing things when it became apparent that money was no longer coming in...
I once worked for a small company with a semi-popular application. Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website.
Remember that there are plenty of people who will have nothing to do with Pay Pal...
It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough to pay one developer. But piracy was a huge problem. It was quite obvious that more than 90% of the copies running were pirated.
So what? Especially considering that the sales were bringing in a useful amount of money, which puts it in the minority to start with. All these people were doing was getting hold of your game without paying a small sum of money. It's not as if they were kidnapping people at gunpoint and requesting huge sums of money for their safe return.
The company changed directions and started bundling the application for free with online services. The service provider would pay for the application and the customers would get the software for use only with the service. But the company was worried about piracy, so they asked me to write DRM that tied the application to the service. They would continue to sell an untied version off the website, but with "call home" DRM (it's an internet app, so it's not quite as draconian as it sounds). I very reluctantly agreed (i.e., I had to decide whether it was worth quitting over -- if I had to do it again, I'd quit).
The end result was that all piracy stopped. In fact, all usage stopped. Instead of selling 2 or 3 copies a day off the website, not one copy of the DRM version was ever sold. And due to very poor choices of service provider partners, the company received no revenue at all. Within a year the company had folded.
This is known as "cutting one's nose off to spite one's face".
The thing is, the new version was head and shoulders better than then non-DRMed version. And the DRM was truly unobtrusive (think DRM in WoW). Paying customers wouldn't even know it existed.
How was it "better"? At best DRM is neutral at worst it causes issues such as making an application less reliable, more resource intensive or other ways which detract from whatever the primary purpose of the app is intended to be.
Whenever a developer claims to be "losing money" to piracy, one has to wonder... are the developers losing this money trying to combat piracy directly (lawsuits and DRM tactics), or is it simply a case of self-flattery, where the developer is grossly over-estimating the value of their software, thinking "If my software isn't great, then why would anyone pirate it?"
There may be some cases where a pirated copy is a "lost sale". This includes where you (or your vendor) won't actually sell it potential customers or where you are trying to sell it at too higher price. The latter including price differentiation based on a customer's physical location (or that of their credit card issuer).
To the typical customer geographical price differentiation, especially of something which has no physical substance, equates to "they tried to rip me off". Thus "piracy" is a perfectly justified, even a morally required action. So best make sure that your 0.99 USD equates to 0.67 EUR, 0.60 GBP, 1.06 CAD, 1.08 AUD, 88.08 JPY, 46.08 INR, 3.76 ARS, 7.51 ZAR or whatever the applicable exchange rate at the time is. Which you don't even have to worry about, since the banks will take care of any necessary conversions.
because with a kill switch, pirates will have to circumvent your system, and you end up with knowing nothing at all.
Having a "kill switch" means that it can malfunction and hurt your actual customers. It can also be abused maliciously.
with tracking, you at least can see how bad the piracy is
Expending your own resources to track people who arn't your customers dosn't make that much sense though.
Another argentinian here, developing for the iPhone, and I'm calling your bullshit on this. There isn't an iTunes Store here but there is an App Store. You cannot buy music here without an international credit card, but you can buy anything from the App Store with your regular national credit card.
Does Argentina have special credit cards which can only be used for transactions in ARS? (Which also don't carry either the Visa or Mastercard logo.) Which would imply that anyone handling credit cards in Argentina would have to accept both these and standard cards, which would be an issue in popular tourist. Does this also mean that Argentinians have to get a standard credit card if they wish to be able to use one abroad, including buying an airline ticket in the first place, (since the fuel is priced in USD). Or do you mean that certain suppliers are refusing to accept perfectly valid Visa or Mastercard cards for reasons which are questionable.
On the other hand, some companies, for whatever unfathomable reasons, only release on the USA and neglect to release on other App Stores - even unlocalized versions of their apps, which would be good enough for most of us.
The only South American country where there might be a language issue being Brazil, since Portugese is not a common language in the US. Whereas Spanish commonly used by many people in the US, even to the point where in several states just about every place name is Spanish.
They don't want to sell their product to you, so that gives you the right to take it anyway?
It's equally valid to ask if "they" have any right to complain in such a case.
Find something else that does the job where the owner has given you permission to use it and give them your money to support them. Write your own app to do the same thing and fill the gap in the market yourself.
Is that person's time free? Maybe the awkward supplier should compensate them for their additional time spent finding a supplier who isn't so daft or even for "reinventing the wheel". Assuming that the supplier in question isn't a monopoly...
On the other hand, some materials have odor thresholds above their toxic thresholds - that is, if you can smell them, they've already done their damage.
However some, such as H2S, can only be smelt at low concentrations
It's just that every time the Met comes up here, they bungle the case big time and those arrested have to be released, even in the midst of over-whelming evidence against them. Either that, or they blatantly get the wrong person but release all sorts of emotive "facts" about what they were arrested for which tries to convince everyone (or maybe just themselves) theyve got the right person.
That's in addition to Met Officers not being arrested and tried for killing members of the public. Something which has happened more than once.
2 down, a billion to go.
Probably thousands or millions to go.
Sorry, I just can't get excited about 2 people caught.
Especially when these two are the first to be arrested for this kind of crime in the whole of Europe.
A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music
:)
Most people would think of this as "having more money than sense". No doubt the same applies to those who spend a small fortune on speaker cable and bits of ceramic to keep it a few cm above the floor
How exactly do you detect employees accessing data they are being paid to access?
The number of employees who actually have a legitimate need to access huge numbers of records/substantial portions of the database is very small. Appropriate access controls are implied by the relevent legislation.
At what point do the competitors have to take responsibility for purchasing the data? It seems that they should have known the data wasn't kosher.
IMHO as soon as they used the data, rather than reporting the "brokers" to the appropriate authorities.
Scientology has gotten away with innumerable crimes
Including various acts of terrorism. Indeed what they call "fair game" is a euphemism for "terrorism".
The Mormon Church also requires large sums of money from it's members (a large percentage of your earnings) as well as mandated service.
Can you read the Book of Mormon and/or information about it without joining the church.? AFAIK you can.