Yes they are - but now they can more-or-less show 'good faith' to the judge.
Currently mininova - knowing full well the reason why people use their site - simply go by the strict laws.. if a copyright holder / representative tells them they're hosting particular copyrighted content, they'll take it down.
Of course it will be back up there 5 minutes later. This is pissing the Dutch interest groups off who are trying to slap the mininova people around a bit with other laws / more loose interpretations.
But now they can say "ahh, but look.. we installed a filter.. it's not our fault that them sneaky pirates find ways around those filters.. it would be *impossible* for us to manually go over each and every upload!".. then hope to exit the court grinning while their main page continues to display top 10 lists of every popular category with scarce 'legal' torrents (I think the Windows 7 Release Candidate was the only one when I checked yesterday and yes, I know there's nothing illegal about a torrent file itself.. splitting hairs over technical details is what they'll be doing in court).
full bit: "She said that the organization running ICANN needs be one free of control by one single nation but controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations."
That's quite a different story than implied by the summary's "hand over control [implied: to the EU]".
I still think it's a bad idea to let 'multiple nations' govern the thing - there's too many nations that would seriously curb what can and cannot be done. I don't think the U.S. having sole control is all that great either, but out of the various options - I'd sooner 'trust' the U.S. with it (given existing records, although I disagree with the whole.xxx domain getting nixed - especially since ICANN has/had plans to offer.anythingyouwant anyway) than, say, the U.N. or a grouping of e.g. U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China to pick a semi-random grouping there.
You already purchased Windows, one way or another (unless you're a pirate - ARRR!!!!!), so you can put whatever the heck you want on there.
The Windows Marketplace is a -store-. You don't own it. Why exactly should they have to -sell- (or offer) another company's software - especially if it's competing software?
Don't like it? Go to Handango.com or pocketgear.com or any of dozens of other stores.
Microsoft isn't stopping anybody from installing competing 'market place'-type software; they just don't want to offer/sell it through their own market place. Sounds normal to me.
That's been said before... I'm thinking MSN.. or MySpace and Facebook. They're all still around.
What I -do- think will happen is that Twitter is too specific in what it does. That makes it reasonably easy to duplicate its functionality and integrate that straight into e.g. MSN or Facebook. There's no reason why you couldn't just 'tweet' what you're doing as your Facebook status. In fact, you already can, but only from within Twitter. If Facebook could hook into twitter on their end - 'log into twitter using your facebook' account - then it'd be easy to migrate users to a Facebook-native solution.
"Severe is a subjective word with no definition, which is exactly the problem with this. Severe is akin to "I don't like you, thus I find your content objectionable" and suddenly you committed a felony"
yes.. except for that pesky indictment thing, court proceedings if the judge doesn't throw it out before it even gets that far, etc.
are you sure you're posting on the right site using words like "content thieves"?
It's not stealing... it's not even copyright infringement (given that your page is publicly available). It might be against some manner of ToS if you serve the page behind a login and some other site uses that login and then re-serves it to the public (no, a 'public' ToS is pretty much moot). Maybe you could argue a misrepresentation or, worst case, fraud scenario.. but 'content thieves'?
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As for frames.. they're not all that evil - they were quite useful for things like having a static navigation bar before DHTML and the DOM were finally mature enough that you could use javascript to keep a menu stuck in pace; but those break whenever the user doesn't have any javascript. Frames also don't break navigation as long as you set the browser address correctly (without reloading the page was tricky, iirc).
I do agree that using them to simply wrap another site's content without adding significant functionality (a la Google Images), is utter crap.
Just wanted to highlight a portion of the parent poster's.. post:
In a world without scarcity, the concept of property has no meaning.
Let me paraphrase that.. In a world without scarcity, all physical property becomes intellectual property.
There is no (notable; you'll still have to use electricity, maybe the media to write them on, etc.) scarcity of bits/bytes - therefore everything that can be described in, and used almost directly from, those bits and bytes becomes intellectual property. The same applies to analog storage where that is feasible - e.g. music and video.
Say replicator (the star trek type, not the stargate type) technology existed, and there is no scarcity of whatever it uses to replicate objects from - suddenly you -can- make copies of any physical property. So what value would that physical property hold? The same as, to many, music and video now: next-to-none. It has in essence become intellectual property, where you may have had some initial reward for the original design and potentially fabrication, but after that it's trivial to make copies of at next-to-no expense; and I'm going to guess that the 'pirates' of tomorrow would be doing exactly that.
I think it's important to note that just about everyone I know who pirates does it in two stages
Don't be silly.. most pirates' stages are: 1. can I pirate this? If no: f it. If yes: 2. was that game fun? If no: whine about it wherever possible. If yes A: lol and it cost me $0. If yes B: 3. enough to spend money on it? If no: lol and it cost me $0. If yes A: well alright, I guess I'll pick it up in the bargain bin. If yes B: hells yes, where do I send my moneys!?
I won't claim to now the numbers here, but just looking around, I'd say 3b is pretty rare and 3a also an exception rather than the rule. 3a tends to actually happen if a pirate thinks "I should play that game again", finds that not a soul is seeding the thing anymore as it's now 2 years on, then sees it on sale at some online retailer and grabs it up for those few dollars instead of hunting down some other source of the pirated version.
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Now to address something else in your post - I'm sure you're well aware of this, but you're basically saying you are entitled to the things you want even if you can't afford them / think they're not worth the price. It's only because it's digital and copyright infringement isn't theft that you are, presumably, not extending that to physical goods (even if that physical good is highly overpriced and the maker of those goods is swimming in money). I'll leave it up to philosophers to ponder the nature of this type of self-entitlement.
As it stands, it looks like you're spending a small fortune on DVDs, so you -are- actively making a choice about what you want to spend your money on. Given that you do, I find it somewhat surprising that you might think something along the lines of 'I just purchased these 3 DVDs, that means I can't purchase that Nina Simone record - so I guess I'll just pirate that instead'.
1. "I bought GalCiv... they were not copyprotected." okay, got it, what you bought was not copyprotected... you can install it, play it, and nothing gets in your way.
2. "Later on they snuck online-hardware authentication into the game." I suppose that's by means of an update or something of the sort... okay, with you so far...
3. "So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought." and here you lost me, at least on technical grounds.
If at point 3 you can no longer play the game from point 2, could you still play the game from point 1? I presume that you can. You'd have to argue that the game at point 2 is still the game from point 1 - and I'd argue that it isn't ; what if the developer went bust immediately after launch? you wouldn't have gotten any updates for point 2 to exist.. but you could still play the game from point 1.
So if point 3 should happen, nothing happened to the game you bought - you've still got it from point 1. You can't play it with the updates from point 2, but presumably you didn't buy those updates*.
Doesn't make what you mention any less troublesome - but in terms of what would happen to the games you purchased, in this case? Presumably not a whole lot.
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* Though more and more it seems that an implied part of the cost of purchasing a game is the 'privilege' to download major bugfix patches, often through some major gaming portal that will ditch that patch after a year or so and you have to hunt around to find the patch elsewhere.
They don't sue you for downloading "stuff". They sue you for allegedly* downloading their movies that you supposedly don't watch, and apparently don't buy the DVDs for (or, you know, rent).
I'm sure they would have a MUCH bigger issue with everybody just downloading completely free movies - then they get neither direct money, nor anything valid to complain about - but they'd also have a much bigger problem formulating laws to deal with that sort of thing.
Thankfully, for them, yea olde pirate LIKES the hollywood blockbuster type movie far too much for them to switch to downloading only free content (at which point they wouldn't be pirates anymore anyway).
* (IANAL and most certainly not yours) I do stress allegedly as their evidence is usually pathetically weak from a legal viewpoint.
"That's cute, sir - now give us the other password" - "what other password?" "for the hidden truecrypt volume" - "what hidden truecrypt volume??" "the one that's being referred to by half a dozen applications' most recently used files lists" - "oh err.. that's uh.. another drive entirely" "very well, then hand us that other drive" - "err uhm.. my dog ate it?"
If you're really, really serious about these things, maybe you could work super-diligently to prevent leaving any clues as to that hidden volume's existence.. odds are something's going to bite you in the behind somewhere though.
Considering you would run into the exact same problem if you disabled autoplay/run, and opened the JPG file yourself? Yeah, why the heck not.
Of course if you already KNOW you have that vulnerable component, and keep telling yourself "I will not open any JPG, I will not open any JPG, I will not open any JPG", and then get pissed when the CD-ROM with JPGs automatically opened in your favorite slideshow app and you got infected... THEN WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU STILL DOING WITH THE VULNERABLE COMPONENT!?!?
That same argument applies to the other poster regarding WMVs - vulns were fixed ages ago.. if you still click on the button to install supermegazomgcodec so it can play back the malware, then you were going to do so when manually opening that WMV just as well.
Anyway.. like I said, you *can* disable it altogether in Vista.. sure, maybe that should be the default.. but then everybody will whine that their DVDs no longer automatically play back. Or they could ask during setup what the user wants to do, but then everybody will whine that Windows setup takes so much longer than -other operating system here-, nagging you with stupid questions like "what do you want to do when a DVD is inserted?".
Microsoft truly can't win in these cases - but I like to think they got it pretty right in Vista (I'd like some more granularity, myself, but that's me).. they're fixing the wrong thing, thereby not fixing the problem at all.
and then of course there's - the things that run for all users - the things that run for the current user only
- the things that just sit in the background managing who the heck knows what (presentationfontcache.exe) - the things that are part of your computer's functionality (ntvdm.exe) - the things that are applications you want to actually start (firefox.exe)
The lack of clear separation between all of those makes it difficult enough now - any changes in the future would do well to make this more clear. There's plenty of information on the web about processes, what they do, whether or not you can safely disable them from start-up, etc. It can't be that hard to write an application around this (somebody probably already did - I haven't looked).
except that he gave the example of Windows Vista as actually getting things fairly right.
DVD video, CD audio -> autoplay OK USB/PhotoCD, CD/DVD with just images -> autoplay OK USB/CD/DVD with autorun specifying an executable -> DO NOT AUTORUN.
Within 'do not autorun' you even get choices... A. Ask me what the flippant to do B. Do nothing whatsoever.
Option A is perfectly sane. The only problem is in the presentation. People exploit the fact that one of the usual options is the 'browse disc' thing. They use the same icon, give it the same name, it appears at the top and voila.. people think that's the regular ol' browse disc option but in reality they end up running nefarious software.
Autorun/Autoplay are not the issue given the above - the design of that dialog asking you what to do *is*.
The new method sucks monkeyballs. Thankfully there's third-party autorun utilities and I'll be installing one of those once I land on Windows Se7en.
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
6,000,000 frames per second means that each frame takes 1/6,000,000th of a second.
I know, dur, right? Here comes the awesome bit. The speed of light is 299,792,458 meter per second. divide one by the other (or multiply if you take the fraction): 299792458 meters per second / 6000000 frames per second = 49.9654097 meters per frame.
In other words, if you'd turn on the light at one end of a 400 meter street and start recording near that light source at that very moment, you could actually see light expand from the light source along the street to the other end in ~16 frames (the light has to travel back to the camera). It would be a real world representation of the relativistic raytracing experiments regarding travelling light here: http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/
Note that 6 million frames per second is not the impressive part about this camera, though. The fastest camera reportedly does 200,000,000 frames per second; but it has lower resolution, only lets you capture a few frames, etc.
In addition, it's an element used here for battery tech. We already -have- existing battery technology, and they're coming up with new ones all the time.
That's not to say that we should squander Lithium resources any more than we should oil, thinking there'll be an alternative at hand anyway - but there's far fewer reasonable alternatives to oil (think about the uses beyond fuel) than there are to random-electric-battery-tech-X.
I'm all for what you suggest - that people have a clue what they're voting on before the fact. In NL there's various 'vote guides' that ask you a bunch of questions and at the end you see what political party your view is most aligned with, then 2nd choice, etc. with links to their full agendas, ideals, etc. so you can do some more checking of your own. That's great!
Go outside of that, though, and you have mob rule, groupthink, etc. What was that twitter thing again, #amazonfail?
People -enjoy- assuming the worst about anything, well outside of reason, they thrive on conspiracy theories, etc.
Most of those people will readily cast aside such 'vote guides' in favor of some anonymous troll on a popular social networking site claiming some candidate eats babies for breakfast.
These are the people we want as a major factor in driving political process? I find that every bit as scary as Oprah all but asking people to vote for the presidential candidate she likes best and the Oprahlites doing so like the sheep they are.
We don't exactly have much choice in who get to vote or where they get their information, and that's a good thing - but I do wish that 'we' could better educate those who do vote and teach them that random unfounded information from their peers is every bit as worthless as political parties' own propaganda.
Btw, a few percents for the big medicinals -is- skyrocketing. They'll come back down, but the people playing these markets will already have their gains./nokarmabonus
I think GP was more aiming at the "don't sell software, sell services and support" thing.
Difficult to 'sell support' if your enthusiastic users are providing it for free to the other users.
Unless, of course, your project's big, popular even with corporations, etc. Then you can sell because a manager will throw money at you rather than have his underlings 'waste time' trolling forums for the exact same answers; http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
the various rights holders having so much clout is hilarious when you think about it... how they get so much clout? lobbying what's that translate into? money how much money in $ do they have? X
how many 'pirates' are out there? Y
Is Y > X? Yes | No
Would those 'pirates' even be willing to spend that $1 ? Yes | No
If yes to both - why isn't it happening? Seems to me there should be way more people -and- money on the pirates' end of things. Yet.. get themselves organised to actually do something? huh.
Well at least the pirate party in Sweden is trying and having *some* success.
Just to note... declaring a 'Public Health Emergency' sounds all kinds of doom&gloom-y, but doing so simply enables measures to be taken more quickly, more easily, etc.
"We are declaring today a public health emergency," Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said today at a White House news briefing. That declaration is "standard operating procedure," Napolitano said. "It is similar to what we do when we see a hurricane approaching a site. The hurricane might not actually hit but allows you to take a number of preparatory steps. We really don't know ultimately what the size or seriousness of this outbreak is going to be." - webmd.com
It's when the CDC starts issuing emergencies, quarantining local communities, ordering a halt to any and all traffic into / out of certain areas, etc. that you should start raising eyebrows.
If you'd take a little time to read about it... yes, it's 'really' special.
I'm not saying "ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE"-special - we're not, as it is, many of those infected happily survive.
Let's start with 'the flu', though.. There is no 'the flu'. Influenza is a big ol' family of viruses.
This one - although it baffles me why the media latched onto 'swine' as their name for it, maybe the pork industry lobbied strongly against naming it 'pork' or 'pig' flu - is one of the mutations of form H1N1 ('bird flu' was H5N1; H and N refer to certain protein types). That only tells part of the story as there's multiple H1N1s with different aminoacids and whatnot, like yea olde Spanish flu (yeah, the proper pandemic one) was H1N1 as well. There's the first 'special' bit; it shares a name with the Spanish flu.
Won't go into details about how it differs from Spanish flu - suffice it to say that this particular strain of H1N1 influenza appears to be a mixture of porcine, bird and human flu viruses' RNA. From there comes the second 'special' bit. It's 'rare' that the flu jumps species from pigs to humans in general, even rarer for it to thrive, but even more rare that it appears to spread between humans.
Now for the third special bit... even H5N1 - that other 'big scare' - mostly affected the (really) young, the elderly, and the weak in terms of severity. This one, however, seems to just as happily make young healthy adults sick.
That's why it deserves its own little name. As for how scared you should be: 'Swine' flu responds well to the relatively recent anti-flu drug Oseltamivir (marketing name: Tamiflu). That is to say, it gets killed pretty quickly and eradicated from the body if treatment is followed through (yeah, I know, right?). That's good news for the producers of Tamiflu who love having this in the news, and for their shareholders who saw their stock skyrocket as a result. It's pretty special that there's tons of people out there just waiting around to make money off of this kind of thing. Oh, and it's also good news for those infected, of course.
Unfortunately, Tamiflu (and others) are prescribed willy-nilly as seasonal flu drugs (despite the CDC advising against it; like 'advice' matters if there's a mint to be made), making it all the more likely that more resistant strains will pop up in due time. At the same time, being a relatively recent drug, not all of the side-effects are fully known and understood yet.
As for what you can do about it... - I wouldn't plan a trip to Mexico and go frolic with any pigs if I were you. - I wouldn't swap spit/etc. with any of the students already diagnosed as being possibly infected. - If you are infected with any type of flu.. cover your mouth when sneezing/coughing, wash hands regularly. Won't do much for you, but it'll help prevent spreading of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they are - but now they can more-or-less show 'good faith' to the judge.
Currently mininova - knowing full well the reason why people use their site - simply go by the strict laws.. if a copyright holder / representative tells them they're hosting particular copyrighted content, they'll take it down.
Of course it will be back up there 5 minutes later. This is pissing the Dutch interest groups off who are trying to slap the mininova people around a bit with other laws / more loose interpretations.
But now they can say "ahh, but look.. we installed a filter.. it's not our fault that them sneaky pirates find ways around those filters.. it would be *impossible* for us to manually go over each and every upload!".. then hope to exit the court grinning while their main page continues to display top 10 lists of every popular category with scarce 'legal' torrents (I think the Windows 7 Release Candidate was the only one when I checked yesterday and yes, I know there's nothing illegal about a torrent file itself.. splitting hairs over technical details is what they'll be doing in court).
If I didn't like that happening, I would break out of the frameset. For iframes I'd check referrer, etc.
As it is, a midget porn site could be *linking* to your site.. that's a form of association as well.
full bit:
"She said that the organization running ICANN needs be one free of control by one single nation but controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations."
That's quite a different story than implied by the summary's "hand over control [implied: to the EU]".
I still think it's a bad idea to let 'multiple nations' govern the thing - there's too many nations that would seriously curb what can and cannot be done. I don't think the U.S. having sole control is all that great either, but out of the various options - I'd sooner 'trust' the U.S. with it (given existing records, although I disagree with the whole .xxx domain getting nixed - especially since ICANN has/had plans to offer .anythingyouwant anyway) than, say, the U.N. or a grouping of e.g. U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China to pick a semi-random grouping there.
no?
You already purchased Windows, one way or another (unless you're a pirate - ARRR!!!!!), so you can put whatever the heck you want on there.
The Windows Marketplace is a -store-. You don't own it. Why exactly should they have to -sell- (or offer) another company's software - especially if it's competing software?
Don't like it? Go to Handango.com or pocketgear.com or any of dozens of other stores.
Microsoft isn't stopping anybody from installing competing 'market place'-type software; they just don't want to offer/sell it through their own market place. Sounds normal to me.
That's been said before... I'm thinking MSN.. or MySpace and Facebook. They're all still around.
What I -do- think will happen is that Twitter is too specific in what it does. That makes it reasonably easy to duplicate its functionality and integrate that straight into e.g. MSN or Facebook. There's no reason why you couldn't just 'tweet' what you're doing as your Facebook status. In fact, you already can, but only from within Twitter. If Facebook could hook into twitter on their end - 'log into twitter using your facebook' account - then it'd be easy to migrate users to a Facebook-native solution.
your post is true both ways ;)
"Severe is a subjective word with no definition, which is exactly the problem with this. Severe is akin to "I don't like you, thus I find your content objectionable" and suddenly you committed a felony"
yes.. except for that pesky indictment thing, court proceedings if the judge doesn't throw it out before it even gets that far, etc.
are you sure you're posting on the right site using words like "content thieves"?
It's not stealing... it's not even copyright infringement (given that your page is publicly available). It might be against some manner of ToS if you serve the page behind a login and some other site uses that login and then re-serves it to the public (no, a 'public' ToS is pretty much moot). Maybe you could argue a misrepresentation or, worst case, fraud scenario.. but 'content thieves'?
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As for frames.. they're not all that evil - they were quite useful for things like having a static navigation bar before DHTML and the DOM were finally mature enough that you could use javascript to keep a menu stuck in pace; but those break whenever the user doesn't have any javascript.
Frames also don't break navigation as long as you set the browser address correctly (without reloading the page was tricky, iirc).
I do agree that using them to simply wrap another site's content without adding significant functionality (a la Google Images), is utter crap.
some call it "evolution of the English language"
I call it "devolution of the English language"
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000187.htm
It seems to be gaining popularity anymore, though. /nokarma
*cringe*twitch*
Just wanted to highlight a portion of the parent poster's.. post:
Let me paraphrase that.. In a world without scarcity, all physical property becomes intellectual property.
There is no (notable; you'll still have to use electricity, maybe the media to write them on, etc.) scarcity of bits/bytes - therefore everything that can be described in, and used almost directly from, those bits and bytes becomes intellectual property. The same applies to analog storage where that is feasible - e.g. music and video.
Say replicator (the star trek type, not the stargate type) technology existed, and there is no scarcity of whatever it uses to replicate objects from - suddenly you -can- make copies of any physical property. So what value would that physical property hold? The same as, to many, music and video now: next-to-none. It has in essence become intellectual property, where you may have had some initial reward for the original design and potentially fabrication, but after that it's trivial to make copies of at next-to-no expense; and I'm going to guess that the 'pirates' of tomorrow would be doing exactly that.
Don't be silly.. most pirates' stages are:
1. can I pirate this? If no: f it. If yes:
2. was that game fun? If no: whine about it wherever possible. If yes A: lol and it cost me $0. If yes B:
3. enough to spend money on it? If no: lol and it cost me $0. If yes A: well alright, I guess I'll pick it up in the bargain bin. If yes B: hells yes, where do I send my moneys!?
I won't claim to now the numbers here, but just looking around, I'd say 3b is pretty rare and 3a also an exception rather than the rule. 3a tends to actually happen if a pirate thinks "I should play that game again", finds that not a soul is seeding the thing anymore as it's now 2 years on, then sees it on sale at some online retailer and grabs it up for those few dollars instead of hunting down some other source of the pirated version.
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Now to address something else in your post - I'm sure you're well aware of this, but you're basically saying you are entitled to the things you want even if you can't afford them / think they're not worth the price. It's only because it's digital and copyright infringement isn't theft that you are, presumably, not extending that to physical goods (even if that physical good is highly overpriced and the maker of those goods is swimming in money). I'll leave it up to philosophers to ponder the nature of this type of self-entitlement.
As it stands, it looks like you're spending a small fortune on DVDs, so you -are- actively making a choice about what you want to spend your money on. Given that you do, I find it somewhat surprising that you might think something along the lines of 'I just purchased these 3 DVDs, that means I can't purchase that Nina Simone record - so I guess I'll just pirate that instead'.
1. "I bought GalCiv ... they were not copyprotected."
okay, got it, what you bought was not copyprotected... you can install it, play it, and nothing gets in your way.
2. "Later on they snuck online-hardware authentication into the game."
I suppose that's by means of an update or something of the sort... okay, with you so far...
3. "So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought."
and here you lost me, at least on technical grounds.
If at point 3 you can no longer play the game from point 2, could you still play the game from point 1? I presume that you can.
You'd have to argue that the game at point 2 is still the game from point 1 - and I'd argue that it isn't ; what if the developer went bust immediately after launch? you wouldn't have gotten any updates for point 2 to exist.. but you could still play the game from point 1.
So if point 3 should happen, nothing happened to the game you bought - you've still got it from point 1. You can't play it with the updates from point 2, but presumably you didn't buy those updates*.
Doesn't make what you mention any less troublesome - but in terms of what would happen to the games you purchased, in this case? Presumably not a whole lot.
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* Though more and more it seems that an implied part of the cost of purchasing a game is the 'privilege' to download major bugfix patches, often through some major gaming portal that will ditch that patch after a year or so and you have to hunt around to find the patch elsewhere.
They don't sue you for downloading "stuff". They sue you for allegedly* downloading their movies that you supposedly don't watch, and apparently don't buy the DVDs for (or, you know, rent).
I'm sure they would have a MUCH bigger issue with everybody just downloading completely free movies - then they get neither direct money, nor anything valid to complain about - but they'd also have a much bigger problem formulating laws to deal with that sort of thing.
Thankfully, for them, yea olde pirate LIKES the hollywood blockbuster type movie far too much for them to switch to downloading only free content (at which point they wouldn't be pirates anymore anyway).
* (IANAL and most certainly not yours) I do stress allegedly as their evidence is usually pathetically weak from a legal viewpoint.
"That's cute, sir - now give us the other password"
- "what other password?"
"for the hidden truecrypt volume"
- "what hidden truecrypt volume??"
"the one that's being referred to by half a dozen applications' most recently used files lists"
- "oh err.. that's uh.. another drive entirely"
"very well, then hand us that other drive"
- "err uhm.. my dog ate it?"
If you're really, really serious about these things, maybe you could work super-diligently to prevent leaving any clues as to that hidden volume's existence.. odds are something's going to bite you in the behind somewhere though.
Considering you would run into the exact same problem if you disabled autoplay/run, and opened the JPG file yourself? Yeah, why the heck not.
Of course if you already KNOW you have that vulnerable component, and keep telling yourself "I will not open any JPG, I will not open any JPG, I will not open any JPG", and then get pissed when the CD-ROM with JPGs automatically opened in your favorite slideshow app and you got infected...
THEN WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU STILL DOING WITH THE VULNERABLE COMPONENT!?!?
That same argument applies to the other poster regarding WMVs - vulns were fixed ages ago.. if you still click on the button to install supermegazomgcodec so it can play back the malware, then you were going to do so when manually opening that WMV just as well.
Anyway.. like I said, you *can* disable it altogether in Vista.. sure, maybe that should be the default.. but then everybody will whine that their DVDs no longer automatically play back. Or they could ask during setup what the user wants to do, but then everybody will whine that Windows setup takes so much longer than -other operating system here-, nagging you with stupid questions like "what do you want to do when a DVD is inserted?".
Microsoft truly can't win in these cases - but I like to think they got it pretty right in Vista (I'd like some more granularity, myself, but that's me).. they're fixing the wrong thing, thereby not fixing the problem at all.
and then of course there's
- the things that run for all users
- the things that run for the current user only
- the things that just sit in the background managing who the heck knows what (presentationfontcache.exe)
- the things that are part of your computer's functionality (ntvdm.exe)
- the things that are applications you want to actually start (firefox.exe)
The lack of clear separation between all of those makes it difficult enough now - any changes in the future would do well to make this more clear. There's plenty of information on the web about processes, what they do, whether or not you can safely disable them from start-up, etc. It can't be that hard to write an application around this (somebody probably already did - I haven't looked).
except that he gave the example of Windows Vista as actually getting things fairly right.
DVD video, CD audio -> autoplay OK
USB/PhotoCD, CD/DVD with just images -> autoplay OK
USB/CD/DVD with autorun specifying an executable -> DO NOT AUTORUN.
Within 'do not autorun' you even get choices...
A. Ask me what the flippant to do
B. Do nothing whatsoever.
Option A is perfectly sane. The only problem is in the presentation. People exploit the fact that one of the usual options is the 'browse disc' thing. They use the same icon, give it the same name, it appears at the top and voila.. people think that's the regular ol' browse disc option but in reality they end up running nefarious software.
Autorun/Autoplay are not the issue given the above - the design of that dialog asking you what to do *is*.
The new method sucks monkeyballs. Thankfully there's third-party autorun utilities and I'll be installing one of those once I land on Windows Se7en.
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
6,000,000 frames per second means that each frame takes 1/6,000,000th of a second.
I know, dur, right? Here comes the awesome bit.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meter per second.
divide one by the other (or multiply if you take the fraction): 299792458 meters per second / 6000000 frames per second = 49.9654097 meters per frame.
In other words, if you'd turn on the light at one end of a 400 meter street and start recording near that light source at that very moment, you could actually see light expand from the light source along the street to the other end in ~16 frames (the light has to travel back to the camera).
It would be a real world representation of the relativistic raytracing experiments regarding travelling light here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/
Note that 6 million frames per second is not the impressive part about this camera, though. The fastest camera reportedly does 200,000,000 frames per second; but it has lower resolution, only lets you capture a few frames, etc.
In addition, it's an element used here for battery tech. We already -have- existing battery technology, and they're coming up with new ones all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery
That's not to say that we should squander Lithium resources any more than we should oil, thinking there'll be an alternative at hand anyway - but there's far fewer reasonable alternatives to oil (think about the uses beyond fuel) than there are to random-electric-battery-tech-X.
I'm all for what you suggest - that people have a clue what they're voting on before the fact. In NL there's various 'vote guides' that ask you a bunch of questions and at the end you see what political party your view is most aligned with, then 2nd choice, etc. with links to their full agendas, ideals, etc. so you can do some more checking of your own. That's great!
Go outside of that, though, and you have mob rule, groupthink, etc. What was that twitter thing again, #amazonfail?
People -enjoy- assuming the worst about anything, well outside of reason, they thrive on conspiracy theories, etc.
Most of those people will readily cast aside such 'vote guides' in favor of some anonymous troll on a popular social networking site claiming some candidate eats babies for breakfast.
These are the people we want as a major factor in driving political process? I find that every bit as scary as Oprah all but asking people to vote for the presidential candidate she likes best and the Oprahlites doing so like the sheep they are.
We don't exactly have much choice in who get to vote or where they get their information, and that's a good thing - but I do wish that 'we' could better educate those who do vote and teach them that random unfounded information from their peers is every bit as worthless as political parties' own propaganda.
Try a little foresight :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/global/28drug.html?_r=1
Btw, a few percents for the big medicinals -is- skyrocketing. They'll come back down, but the people playing these markets will already have their gains. /nokarmabonus
I think GP was more aiming at the "don't sell software, sell services and support" thing.
Difficult to 'sell support' if your enthusiastic users are providing it for free to the other users.
Unless, of course, your project's big, popular even with corporations, etc. Then you can sell because a manager will throw money at you rather than have his underlings 'waste time' trolling forums for the exact same answers;
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
the various rights holders having so much clout is hilarious when you think about it...
how they get so much clout? lobbying
what's that translate into? money
how much money in $ do they have? X
how many 'pirates' are out there? Y
Is Y > X? Yes | No
Would those 'pirates' even be willing to spend that $1 ? Yes | No
If yes to both - why isn't it happening? Seems to me there should be way more people -and- money on the pirates' end of things. Yet.. get themselves organised to actually do something? huh.
Well at least the pirate party in Sweden is trying and having *some* success.
Just to note... declaring a 'Public Health Emergency' sounds all kinds of doom&gloom-y, but doing so simply enables measures to be taken more quickly, more easily, etc.
"We are declaring today a public health emergency," Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said today at a White House news briefing. That declaration is "standard operating procedure," Napolitano said. "It is similar to what we do when we see a hurricane approaching a site. The hurricane might not actually hit but allows you to take a number of preparatory steps. We really don't know ultimately what the size or seriousness of this outbreak is going to be." - webmd.com
It's when the CDC starts issuing emergencies, quarantining local communities, ordering a halt to any and all traffic into / out of certain areas, etc. that you should start raising eyebrows.
If you'd take a little time to read about it... yes, it's 'really' special.
I'm not saying "ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE"-special - we're not, as it is, many of those infected happily survive.
Let's start with 'the flu', though.. There is no 'the flu'. Influenza is a big ol' family of viruses.
This one - although it baffles me why the media latched onto 'swine' as their name for it, maybe the pork industry lobbied strongly against naming it 'pork' or 'pig' flu - is one of the mutations of form H1N1 ('bird flu' was H5N1; H and N refer to certain protein types). That only tells part of the story as there's multiple H1N1s with different aminoacids and whatnot, like yea olde Spanish flu (yeah, the proper pandemic one) was H1N1 as well. There's the first 'special' bit; it shares a name with the Spanish flu.
Won't go into details about how it differs from Spanish flu - suffice it to say that this particular strain of H1N1 influenza appears to be a mixture of porcine, bird and human flu viruses' RNA. From there comes the second 'special' bit. It's 'rare' that the flu jumps species from pigs to humans in general, even rarer for it to thrive, but even more rare that it appears to spread between humans.
Now for the third special bit... even H5N1 - that other 'big scare' - mostly affected the (really) young, the elderly, and the weak in terms of severity. This one, however, seems to just as happily make young healthy adults sick.
That's why it deserves its own little name. As for how scared you should be:
'Swine' flu responds well to the relatively recent anti-flu drug Oseltamivir (marketing name: Tamiflu). That is to say, it gets killed pretty quickly and eradicated from the body if treatment is followed through (yeah, I know, right?). That's good news for the producers of Tamiflu who love having this in the news, and for their shareholders who saw their stock skyrocket as a result. It's pretty special that there's tons of people out there just waiting around to make money off of this kind of thing.
Oh, and it's also good news for those infected, of course.
Unfortunately, Tamiflu (and others) are prescribed willy-nilly as seasonal flu drugs (despite the CDC advising against it; like 'advice' matters if there's a mint to be made), making it all the more likely that more resistant strains will pop up in due time.
At the same time, being a relatively recent drug, not all of the side-effects are fully known and understood yet.
As for what you can do about it...
- I wouldn't plan a trip to Mexico and go frolic with any pigs if I were you.
- I wouldn't swap spit/etc. with any of the students already diagnosed as being possibly infected.
- If you are infected with any type of flu.. cover your mouth when sneezing/coughing, wash hands regularly. Won't do much for you, but it'll help prevent spreading of it.
Speaking of the CDC.. they have some pretty decent pages up as well:
http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/general_info.htm