It takes me about 20 minutes to drive to Blockbuster, select my movie, and drive back home.
My wonderful 26.4kb access (on a good day) to the Internet from home would mean that I would be able to download a 650mb film in under 20 years. If I started downloading Star Wars Episode II today, I'm almost certain that I would see Episode III in the theater before Episode II finished downloading.
I'll keep going to Blockbuster until somebody figures out how to put affordable broadband in my neighborhood.
I would watch out for the half-priced masters degrees. When I got mine, it was clear that the white-out hadn't even dried before they used a calligraphy pen to misspell my name over the top.
Great. Now they've published a MAP showing exactly where there is NO human footprint. All the filthy rich have to do now is look at the map, point at a green spot and say, "Build my new mansion right... THERE."
Don't they know that they'll do better if they keep it a great big secret. Then the dumb rich people will keep building and developing right by all of the other dumb rich people. But NOOOOOOOO. They have to go and make it easier for people to find and destroy pristine areas.
Dumb Filthy Rich Person: WHAT??? Nobody has developed Alaska yet??? Build me an oil derrick right... THERE. And... THERE. And... THERE. (etc.)
WCS: NO!
EPA: NO!
Sierra Club: NO!
Dumb Filthy Rich Person (to large lawfirm): Take this immense pile of money and make it happen.
WCS: Um...
EPA: Hey, give US some of that money!
Sierra Club: Crap! Stupid WCS idiots.
One more thing to worry about...
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 1
Don't we have enough to worry about with all of the other airborne pathogens out there? There are airborne viruses, airborne bacteria, airborne allergens like pollen, dust, and pet dander. But now now airborne mice???
Of course, the mask I was thinking of buying to filter all of that airborne crap out of the air that I breathe will most certainly be able to filter out airborne mice.
So what I really need to know is this: Do these airborne mice move at high velocities? If they do, I'll need to put the filtering mask inside a hockey mask. But if I do that, I'll have to worry about getting attacked by horror movie buffs at work. It seems that with airborne mice, some bruising will be inevitable.
I went to the Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and I noticed a couple of things:
1) Casinos often have moving walkways going INTO their casinos, but none coming out. My theory is that they expect you to be loaded down with a bunch of cash when you enter the casino and that you will be unencumbered by said cash on the way out.
2) People that play slot machines are stupid. While walking through a casinos, I saw two different slot machines with credits in them... more than 40 credits in a $1 slot machine and 13 credits in a $5 slot machine. Nobody was around. Nobody. I figured that if someone is too dumb to hit a button to pay out the credits, they deserve to lose the money. My souvenirs from the trip were paid for!
I FINALLY get a great idea that is going to make me MILLIONS, and now I'm too scared to go through with it. You see, I was going to market and sell pieces of stone sculpted into shapes resembling the buttocks of various celebrities.
But now I can't. I don't want the feds busting me for the sale of "Moon Rocks."
I was watching this the other day and noticed something I hadn't seen before. When the protagonists are riding the solar sailer toward the MCP, Mickey Mouse's face shows up in the landscape below the solar sailer. The Disney people just can't help theirselves, can they?
On a completely different note, I've been using insults that I gleaned from TRON 20 years ago. You should see the looks I get when I call someone a "null program." Cracks me up every time!
That would be more like...
9) Complete boxed set, the LAST TIME THE TRILOGY WILL EVER BE AVAILABLE IN THIS FORMAT!
10) Complete enhanced boxed set with new footage and digital effects.
Yes, I stole that man's shoes, but here's the reasons that I did so: (I own several other pairs of shoes, by the way)
First, I really love Nike Air Jordan shoes. Not the new ones, I'm talking the original red and black ones. But you can't buy those ANYWHERE these days. Not even on the internet.
Second, I have tried a lot of different shoes. A lot of the shoes I've tried fall apart soon after I buy them. So maybe I was just borrowing his shoes to see how long they would last before they wore out.
Third, I'm poor. I don't think I could afford more than a couple pairs of PAYLESS shoes a year. Can you believe my hardship! I'm probably the only poor college student in the world. Like I said, I have other pairs of shoes, but I wanted THOSE AIR JORDAN shoes that the other guy was wearing. I don't think I would actually go out and buy Air Jordan shoes though, even if they were for sale.
Fourth, everywhere I look, shoe sales are booming. And shoes cost even more now that when I was a teenager. Even more than when I could actually buy the original air jordan. Shoe companies sell PLENTY of shoes, probably even more because the guy I stole them from probably had to go buy another pair!
The only thing I can find in my local shoe stores are idiot employees, limited selection (plenty of Sketchers crap), and high prices. I could buy online, but it's more of the same except the salesperson is taken out and replaced by crappy customer service.
I'm glad this guy was there. I was able to get the shoes I wanted that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to find.
Seriously though, I know that shoes and digital music are not the same. Not at all. However, all of the reasons above are justifications for behavior that TeleoMan himself admits is wrong. (Unless he has a different interpretation of the word "pirating.") Every lawbreaker has their reasons, their justifications, but that doesn't make the action legal or moral.
For now, sharing digital music in certain ways has been ruled illegal. It might not always be. I hope it won't always be. But none of the reasons listed above would keep you out of trouble would the.mp3 police come knocking on your door. (I don't even want to go there! Imagine....mp3 police!)
I have been teaching classes at a local college for six years and my experience has been completely different. A majority of the students in my evening and weekend classes are "working stiffs," but many of these "working stiffs" are working in CS fields and are more knowledgable than the whiny brats in my daytime classes that are attending school and are funded by the "Bank of Daddy."
Age doesn't necessarily determine whether or not someone understands and uses *nix or the "other operating systems." The "working stiffs" in my evening and weekend classes tended to have more practical experience in computer science, including more exposure to a wider variety of operating systems, than their daytime counterparts.
When I teach evening classes, I am used to people being able to follow along when I use Vim and Cygwin so that I can feel at home and productive in the school-mandated MS OS. My first daytime class was an eye opener! I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc. At first, the blank stare "deer-in-the-headlights" looks that I got when I didn't explain such things surprised me. Then I realized that a majority of my day students seemed to care more about their grade than about the quality of the education they were receiving.
Yes, there are generalizations in what I have typed, but after my second daytime class, I vowed never to teach another class between 8am and 5pm.
If I get nothing more from this movie than Gimli wreaking havoc, spilling orc blood, and splitting orc skulls with his axe, it will be worth the seven dollars for the ticket.
Of course I don't expect it to be completely true to Tolkien's writing. Movie makers tend to take liberties with everything. (I would say that Pearl Harbor and Titanic come to mind, but that would mean I would have to admit having seen them!) I'm going to go see this movie with the sole purpose of being entertained. I'm not going to analyze how it deviates from what Tolkien wrote. I'm going to see this movie purely for the entertainment value. Unless they MAJORLY change the story, I think I'll be happy with what I see. Then again, the wrong filmmaker could MAJORLY change the story.
I'm waiting to pay my $7 until the week AFTER it opens though, just to miss most of the hype.
I, for one, don't really know how to feel about this. It seems that the same laws designed to protect me (my company develops software that is protected by these laws) sometimes seem to stab me in the back (I wish the old Napster was back!).
I seem to find myself wishing that I could select which portion of these laws and treaties that apply to me and ignore the rest.
I doubt I am the only one that feels this way. I was angry at the RIAA and others that shut down the Napster that I knew and loved, but I was probably more angry at the people caught with millions of copies of my company's software.
So in reality, I don't know what to think about this. I see a need to protect what people create, but I also see how this is taken way too far. Unfortunately, I have little hope that reason and sanity will come from an international group of politicians.
If the DOJ/FBI uses Magic Lantern in the way that they SHOULD use it, (probable cause, judges, warrants, blah blah blah) researchers at Symantec will never get their hands on it in the first place. If it is deployed just to sniff passwords from keyboards, it will be deployed, used, and then the computer containing Magic Lantern will most likely be siezed when a physical warrant is served. Symantec will probably never get their hands on Magic Lantern to analyze, research, and find ways to detect it.
As some have pointed out, Symantec may not have much of a choice in this case. In the unlikely event that they DO get their hands on Magic Lantern, it could be FAR more detrimental to their bottom line to include Magic Lantern detection in NAV than to leave out such detection. The government has deep pockets (i.e. 300 million pockets of taxpayers) and could easily tie Symantec up in lawsuits that would more than likely never see their day in court. Instead, Symantec would probably see that the benefits of detecting one trojan are not worth spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (or millions?) going to court to defend their right to detect Magic Lamp.
Regardless of how bad this decision looks on an idealistic level, the bottom line is this: Symantec will likely lose a few end users of NAV, but the cost is going to be a lot less than waging a legal/moral war against the FBI or the DOJ. Even if they win a moral victory, it may cost so much that they may lose their profitability. In the US judicial system, the guys with the white hats don't always win.
So boycott NAV if you feel it necessary (though most that read these types of articles probably don't care much), but Symantec is a corporation that is there to fight battles for their own bottom line, not battles for truth, justice, and the American way.
Orangatango provides a great method of surfing anonymously for extremely reasonable prices. I love their "MailBlox" email anonymizer.
Orangatango is based on a pretty cool idea: Rather than my computer negotiating a connection with every site I want to connect to, my computer negotiates a connection with Orangatango, and Orangatango does the rest. To the outside world, it looks as though Orangatango is making all of the requests. Maybe it's not a unique idea, but they have implemented it extremely well.
Yeah, I know that I have to give them my credit card and that makes my connection ultimately traceable through one means or another, but it's a far cry better than surfing directly through my ISP.
They have additional benefits other than just the anonymization as well. It really is "the web on your terms" as Orangatango claims. They're worth a look! Check them out.
Before you ask, I'll answer that no, I am not affiliated with Orangatango. The only reason that I know about them is that I applied for a development position at Orangatango a year ago. I've kept my eye on them (as well as my browser pointed at them) ever since.
Contractors, builders, city planners, etc. have the ability to pick the environment in which they build. Before a building permit is issued, studies are (usually) completed to make sure that the environment is sound and will support the proposed building.
This is a far cry better than the foundation upon which software engineers build. The foundation that has been laid and cannot be changed is usually the underlying operating system. Without being able to change an extremely shaky foundation, an extremely shaky "building" is the result.
This becomes even worse when all of the "building codes" are defined by the provider of the OS, but not all of these "codes" are published for the engineer to build from. No wonder the "building" software engineers create is so shabby! Give a contractor a rocky, uneven field with a stream running through it, don't tell him all of the building codes, make him and his workers build without breaking the ground (the environment in which the building is built) and make him work in the dark at least half of the time, and then we are approaching the conditions that M$ has given software engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes me about 20 minutes to drive to Blockbuster, select my movie, and drive back home.
My wonderful 26.4kb access (on a good day) to the Internet from home would mean that I would be able to download a 650mb film in under 20 years. If I started downloading Star Wars Episode II today, I'm almost certain that I would see Episode III in the theater before Episode II finished downloading.
I'll keep going to Blockbuster until somebody figures out how to put affordable broadband in my neighborhood.
I would watch out for the half-priced masters degrees. When I got mine, it was clear that the white-out hadn't even dried before they used a calligraphy pen to misspell my name over the top.
For the best degree money can buy, check out the University of Phoenix
Great. Now they've published a MAP showing exactly where there is NO human footprint. All the filthy rich have to do now is look at the map, point at a green spot and say, "Build my new mansion right... THERE."
Don't they know that they'll do better if they keep it a great big secret. Then the dumb rich people will keep building and developing right by all of the other dumb rich people. But NOOOOOOOO. They have to go and make it easier for people to find and destroy pristine areas.
Dumb Filthy Rich Person: WHAT??? Nobody has developed Alaska yet??? Build me an oil derrick right... THERE. And... THERE. And... THERE. (etc.)
WCS: NO!
EPA: NO!
Sierra Club: NO!
Dumb Filthy Rich Person (to large lawfirm): Take this immense pile of money and make it happen.
WCS: Um...
EPA: Hey, give US some of that money!
Sierra Club: Crap! Stupid WCS idiots.
Don't we have enough to worry about with all of the other airborne pathogens out there? There are airborne viruses, airborne bacteria, airborne allergens like pollen, dust, and pet dander. But now now airborne mice???
Of course, the mask I was thinking of buying to filter all of that airborne crap out of the air that I breathe will most certainly be able to filter out airborne mice.
So what I really need to know is this: Do these airborne mice move at high velocities? If they do, I'll need to put the filtering mask inside a hockey mask. But if I do that, I'll have to worry about getting attacked by horror movie buffs at work. It seems that with airborne mice, some bruising will be inevitable.
I went to the Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and I noticed a couple of things:
1) Casinos often have moving walkways going INTO their casinos, but none coming out. My theory is that they expect you to be loaded down with a bunch of cash when you enter the casino and that you will be unencumbered by said cash on the way out.
2) People that play slot machines are stupid. While walking through a casinos, I saw two different slot machines with credits in them... more than 40 credits in a $1 slot machine and 13 credits in a $5 slot machine. Nobody was around. Nobody. I figured that if someone is too dumb to hit a button to pay out the credits, they deserve to lose the money. My souvenirs from the trip were paid for!
Gambling is a tax on people that are bad at math.
Oh, GREAT.
I FINALLY get a great idea that is going to make me MILLIONS, and now I'm too scared to go through with it. You see, I was going to market and sell pieces of stone sculpted into shapes resembling the buttocks of various celebrities.
But now I can't. I don't want the feds busting me for the sale of "Moon Rocks."
Back to the drawing board...
The testing you mentioned wasn't, perchance, DRUG testing, was it?
I would have modded this up, but then Shiblon would be right about me being fat and lazy.
I was watching this the other day and noticed something I hadn't seen before. When the protagonists are riding the solar sailer toward the MCP, Mickey Mouse's face shows up in the landscape below the solar sailer. The Disney people just can't help theirselves, can they?
On a completely different note, I've been using insults that I gleaned from TRON 20 years ago. You should see the looks I get when I call someone a "null program." Cracks me up every time!
That would be more like...
9) Complete boxed set, the LAST TIME THE TRILOGY WILL EVER BE AVAILABLE IN THIS FORMAT!
10) Complete enhanced boxed set with new footage and digital effects.
More realistically:
For every time you modify a part of code, ten new bugs are introduced.
Yes, I stole that man's shoes, but here's the reasons that I did so: (I own several other pairs of shoes, by the way)
.mp3 police come knocking on your door. (I don't even want to go there! Imagine... .mp3 police!)
First, I really love Nike Air Jordan shoes. Not the new ones, I'm talking the original red and black ones. But you can't buy those ANYWHERE these days. Not even on the internet.
Second, I have tried a lot of different shoes. A lot of the shoes I've tried fall apart soon after I buy them. So maybe I was just borrowing his shoes to see how long they would last before they wore out.
Third, I'm poor. I don't think I could afford more than a couple pairs of PAYLESS shoes a year. Can you believe my hardship! I'm probably the only poor college student in the world. Like I said, I have other pairs of shoes, but I wanted THOSE AIR JORDAN shoes that the other guy was wearing. I don't think I would actually go out and buy Air Jordan shoes though, even if they were for sale.
Fourth, everywhere I look, shoe sales are booming. And shoes cost even more now that when I was a teenager. Even more than when I could actually buy the original air jordan. Shoe companies sell PLENTY of shoes, probably even more because the guy I stole them from probably had to go buy another pair!
The only thing I can find in my local shoe stores are idiot employees, limited selection (plenty of Sketchers crap), and high prices. I could buy online, but it's more of the same except the salesperson is taken out and replaced by crappy customer service.
I'm glad this guy was there. I was able to get the shoes I wanted that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to find.
Seriously though, I know that shoes and digital music are not the same. Not at all. However, all of the reasons above are justifications for behavior that TeleoMan himself admits is wrong. (Unless he has a different interpretation of the word "pirating.") Every lawbreaker has their reasons, their justifications, but that doesn't make the action legal or moral.
For now, sharing digital music in certain ways has been ruled illegal. It might not always be. I hope it won't always be. But none of the reasons listed above would keep you out of trouble would the
I completely disagree.
I have been teaching classes at a local college for six years and my experience has been completely different. A majority of the students in my evening and weekend classes are "working stiffs," but many of these "working stiffs" are working in CS fields and are more knowledgable than the whiny brats in my daytime classes that are attending school and are funded by the "Bank of Daddy."
Age doesn't necessarily determine whether or not someone understands and uses *nix or the "other operating systems." The "working stiffs" in my evening and weekend classes tended to have more practical experience in computer science, including more exposure to a wider variety of operating systems, than their daytime counterparts.
When I teach evening classes, I am used to people being able to follow along when I use Vim and Cygwin so that I can feel at home and productive in the school-mandated MS OS. My first daytime class was an eye opener! I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc. At first, the blank stare "deer-in-the-headlights" looks that I got when I didn't explain such things surprised me. Then I realized that a majority of my day students seemed to care more about their grade than about the quality of the education they were receiving.
Yes, there are generalizations in what I have typed, but after my second daytime class, I vowed never to teach another class between 8am and 5pm.
If I get nothing more from this movie than Gimli wreaking havoc, spilling orc blood, and splitting orc skulls with his axe, it will be worth the seven dollars for the ticket.
Of course I don't expect it to be completely true to Tolkien's writing. Movie makers tend to take liberties with everything. (I would say that Pearl Harbor and Titanic come to mind, but that would mean I would have to admit having seen them!) I'm going to go see this movie with the sole purpose of being entertained. I'm not going to analyze how it deviates from what Tolkien wrote. I'm going to see this movie purely for the entertainment value. Unless they MAJORLY change the story, I think I'll be happy with what I see. Then again, the wrong filmmaker could MAJORLY change the story.
I'm waiting to pay my $7 until the week AFTER it opens though, just to miss most of the hype.
I, for one, don't really know how to feel about this. It seems that the same laws designed to protect me (my company develops software that is protected by these laws) sometimes seem to stab me in the back (I wish the old Napster was back!).
I seem to find myself wishing that I could select which portion of these laws and treaties that apply to me and ignore the rest.
I doubt I am the only one that feels this way. I was angry at the RIAA and others that shut down the Napster that I knew and loved, but I was probably more angry at the people caught with millions of copies of my company's software.
So in reality, I don't know what to think about this. I see a need to protect what people create, but I also see how this is taken way too far. Unfortunately, I have little hope that reason and sanity will come from an international group of politicians.
If the DOJ/FBI uses Magic Lantern in the way that they SHOULD use it, (probable cause, judges, warrants, blah blah blah) researchers at Symantec will never get their hands on it in the first place. If it is deployed just to sniff passwords from keyboards, it will be deployed, used, and then the computer containing Magic Lantern will most likely be siezed when a physical warrant is served. Symantec will probably never get their hands on Magic Lantern to analyze, research, and find ways to detect it.
As some have pointed out, Symantec may not have much of a choice in this case. In the unlikely event that they DO get their hands on Magic Lantern, it could be FAR more detrimental to their bottom line to include Magic Lantern detection in NAV than to leave out such detection. The government has deep pockets (i.e. 300 million pockets of taxpayers) and could easily tie Symantec up in lawsuits that would more than likely never see their day in court. Instead, Symantec would probably see that the benefits of detecting one trojan are not worth spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (or millions?) going to court to defend their right to detect Magic Lamp.
Regardless of how bad this decision looks on an idealistic level, the bottom line is this: Symantec will likely lose a few end users of NAV, but the cost is going to be a lot less than waging a legal/moral war against the FBI or the DOJ. Even if they win a moral victory, it may cost so much that they may lose their profitability. In the US judicial system, the guys with the white hats don't always win.
So boycott NAV if you feel it necessary (though most that read these types of articles probably don't care much), but Symantec is a corporation that is there to fight battles for their own bottom line, not battles for truth, justice, and the American way.
Orangatango provides a great method of surfing anonymously for extremely reasonable prices. I love their "MailBlox" email anonymizer.
Orangatango is based on a pretty cool idea: Rather than my computer negotiating a connection with every site I want to connect to, my computer negotiates a connection with Orangatango, and Orangatango does the rest. To the outside world, it looks as though Orangatango is making all of the requests. Maybe it's not a unique idea, but they have implemented it extremely well.
Yeah, I know that I have to give them my credit card and that makes my connection ultimately traceable through one means or another, but it's a far cry better than surfing directly through my ISP.
They have additional benefits other than just the anonymization as well. It really is "the web on your terms" as Orangatango claims. They're worth a look! Check them out.
Before you ask, I'll answer that no, I am not affiliated with Orangatango. The only reason that I know about them is that I applied for a development position at Orangatango a year ago. I've kept my eye on them (as well as my browser pointed at them) ever since.
Contractors, builders, city planners, etc. have the ability to pick the environment in which they build. Before a building permit is issued, studies are (usually) completed to make sure that the environment is sound and will support the proposed building.
This is a far cry better than the foundation upon which software engineers build. The foundation that has been laid and cannot be changed is usually the underlying operating system. Without being able to change an extremely shaky foundation, an extremely shaky "building" is the result.
This becomes even worse when all of the "building codes" are defined by the provider of the OS, but not all of these "codes" are published for the engineer to build from. No wonder the "building" software engineers create is so shabby! Give a contractor a rocky, uneven field with a stream running through it, don't tell him all of the building codes, make him and his workers build without breaking the ground (the environment in which the building is built) and make him work in the dark at least half of the time, and then we are approaching the conditions that M$ has given software engineers.