I just read a post about a guy who got ripped off and was able to involve the Postal Inspectors. After 2 months, the asshole got thrown in jail. I never knew something like that could happen; how wonderful. I mean, I knew that the laws existed, but I didn't think that individuals could actually get nailed by them, and I don't think very many people do either.
I encourage anyone who has similar incidents to post them here; the existence of this story could prove a valuable deterrent that we can all utilize in the future. The next time you mail off a check and don't hear back from the guy, fire off an e-mail like this:
"Hi there! I noticed you haven't responded to my prior e-mails and I still have not received the item in question. It may interest you that, should you take my money and run, you have committed mail fraud, and which is a federal offense punishable by jail. And guess what -- it's actually enforced! (Link to this story.) I will report your name and address to the postal inspector in my area in five business days if I do not hear back from you."
Why are politicans so clueless when it comes to government-held, key escrow encryption? Has no one told them what a futile move it would be to outlaw "regular" crypto? I'm curious if you can shed some light on the extent of their pie-in-the-sky mentality. Has no one told them that public key encryption is already in the public domain and installed on literally tens of millions of computers worldwide? Are they honestly so deluded as to believe that they can just make all that just go away by the sheer force of their own will?
I'm using it right now. It works well, although I'm not sure if I can download from Kazaa. If you read the giFT README, these guys seem to be extremely competent (reverse) engineers. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to break through whatever Kazaa did.
I have to say I'm impressed. There is a reason that the only previous FastTrack clients were fr Windows: FastTrack is a closed source C++ based protocol stack that only exists for that operating system. FastTrack's livelihood is dependent upon licensing that stack to developers and hence keeping the protocol proprietary. That someone has reverse engineered it quite successfully is highly impressive and also a little worrisome if you're FastTrack. I'm surprised we haven't heard a lot more about this and FastTrack's response.
Don't you see that you are playing right into the terrorists' hands by saying that? When I first saw W on television on Tuesday ranting about how "freedom itself has been attacked," I dismissed it as shameless grandstanding. But the more I think about it, the more he is right. We no longer feel free to board an airplane or go to work in a tall building. And by voluntarily sacrificing your natural rights to civil liberty, free speech, and privacy, you are just making this situation worse. The real target behind Tuesday's attacks weren't the people on the planes or in the buildings. It wasn't the businesses that they worked for. What was attacked was our ability to freely speak our minds (in a secret manner, if we choose), to worship whomever we want, whenever we want, and to live our lives free from fear of violence. Everytime you voluntarily decide to cede some of those freedoms for the sake of what you percieve to be a greater good, you are handing these terrorists another victory.
I do believe that there is a lot of room for reform. I think that we should allow the CIA to use "dirty" operatives when conducting espionage. There is talk of rescinding LBJ's executive order banning the assassination of known criminal leaders, which should also be considered. The entire airline security industry needs to be reformed and perhaps socialized; it's clear that the lowest-bidder system being used now is a total and complete joke.
But along with those reforms I see the old specter of "key escrow" encryption being raised again. I see lots of talk about a curtailment of our first amendment rights on the "internet chatrooms" (whatever those are) that have become so villified by politicians. These "reforms" are counterproductive to the ostensible goal of fighting terrorists in the first place, which is to preserve our freedom. As such, that shouldn't even be considered.
As an aside, your faith in the Supreme Court is just completely naive. Where have you been living for the past ten years? Would you also expect the Supreme Court to act fairly and judiciously mildly important matters such as determining the true and fair winner in a presidential election? If you think that the Supreme Court is at all a friend of the common man's rights, I advise you run over the ACLU web site and look at the "In the Courts" section. You might be surprised.
Viscious? Is that like, "wickedly thick" or something? Hmm.. Wickedly Thick. Sounds like a name for a band. Or maybe a horse.
Re:...so are they changing the corporate name to..
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2
Corporate consolidation almost always accompanies industrywide slowdown. That behavior is as predictable as the rising and setting of the sun. Look at it this way - most of the brass will get to keep their jobs; some will get promoted, some demoted, but very few fired. Workers, on the other hand, are gonna get pink slipped because suddenly their services are "duplicated." The market just can't accomodate as many tech-behemoths as it could 2 years ago, so the logical thing to do is merge.
Not only have you completely missed the point, but you've in fact proved the very argument you're trying to refute. I'm glad my profs aren't this dumb.
What the guy is saying, quite correctly, is that money does not equal happiness. That's so trite and obvious that I shouldn't have to be pointing it out. Whether you realize it or not, you ascribe to this very notion by teaching physics at university instead of pursuing a much more lucrative career in the private industry. The original poster wasn't admonishing anyone to rest on their laurels; rather he was saying that we should look further than the almighty dollar when measuring success. If you have a job that you enjoy, that you find intellectually stimulating, and that allows you to make a decent living, well then I'd say you've got it. Engineering, software development, and teaching would presumably be all good examples of this in the right context.
First, to briefly paraphrase Stallman's arguement (in case you've been living in a cave the past ten years): You don't think the GNU belongs? Fine. Blow off all the GNU software off of your system, then try to run Linux! What's that, you can't? That's riiiiight -- because GNU gives you a shell, a standard implementation of the C librtary, an assembler, a linker, a bootloader, binutils, etc. So, no GNU = no Linux. Conversely, GNU/Linux,
Fair enough; that's a valid point. But look at what he is proposing, and you see that Stallman is a total hypocrite. His doctrinaire stance on issues like free speech and open source prompts him to fight this jihad, and yet when you get right down to his actual proposal, he's willing to bend the rules quite a bit. Though he would never say it, his rationale for "GNU" Linux essentially relies on GNU being more worthy of credit than anything else related to Linux -- not exactly a very principled argument; in fact, completely subjective.
For obvious reasons, he wants "GNU/Linux". No more, no less. But what is GNU, except a mere coalition of developers who are not named Richard Stallman, and who happen to put out most GNU software? So, in the interests of simple recognition -- after all, that's all Stallman is after, guys -- it's only fair that we put the names of everyone who has contributed to the GNU in front of "Linux" as well.
But who trained all of those developers? Why, MIT of course (here I'm generalizing, but that's actually not too far from the truth). So now we have "MIT/developers/GNU/Linux". And I suppose it's only fair to throw a nod to Donald Knuth, who's pioneering work on, well, everything, was of course instrumental in the development of the Linux operating system. Progressing back through history, there'd certainly be no "Knuth/MIT/developers/GNU/Linux" without Charles Babbage. Follow this train of thought far enough and you end up with "God/... / Babbage/Knuth/MIT/developers/GNU/Linux".
I'm exaggerating, but you see my point. Stallman is arrogating GNU to a point where it's contributions to Linux are more valuable than the many hundreds of equally important contributions from many other people & companies, all in the name of advancing his political agenda. Not exactly a radical departure from the status quo if you're Richard Stallman. But for everyone else, it's hard to reconcile his high-minded, egalitarian, and quite laudable beliefs about intellectual freedom with his disturbing willingness to essentially stifle the work of others in the name of "progress," which is a word that of course Stallman the Great has defined in his own terms on behalf of the rest of us.
It's obvious that the only simple, sane, and fair thing to do is:
CD's are variable speed, which is why people are advertising 52x (or however high it is now) CDROM drives nowadays. 52x on the outside. Unless it's a CAV drive.
On the contrary, AOLServer is really quite good. It's tight binding with Tcl makes it possible to pull of some incredibly elegant things in just a few short lines of code. If you want to see some good examples of AOLServer (which is OSS, by the way) in use, check out photo.net, arsdigita.com, or anything else done by Philip Greenspun/ArsDigita. He swears by it, and for good reason. The original poster's page doesn't do it much (any?) justice.
Here's a question which I've put repeatedly to the monarchs and @Home over the past few years. Never once have I received a response. I think that's telling.
What is your definition of "server"?
Chew this over for a couple milliseconds and you realize that, by banning servers from their TOS, they are effectively forbidding the use of all instant messaging services, many online games, all peer-to-peer applications, IRC, and a host of others. One is left to infer that the only kosher activities on the @Home network are web browsing and checking e-mail. They would never be caught dead saying this, but you can't not get that idea from a strict reading of the contract. Even in an single e-mail to an inquisitive customer, they would of course never be caught dead admitting this. To do so would, of course, invite lots of fun sloganeering on behalf of the various DSL providers, who would like nothing more than to put the phrase "@Home bars you from using 90% of the Internet services that you want to; we don't" into @Home's pipe and watch them smoke it. So, if you're a little bored on this Wednesday night, fire off an e-mail to your friends at @Home and await the response.:)
So buy a monster now and still be able to play games in 3 years.
Wow.. now there's an exaggeration if I ever heard one. Let's be honest: three years ago I dropped $1500 on a P2-400 with a TNT2 vanilla and an Aureal 4-channel soundcard. If you think that setup can play today's games, you are either out of your mind or haven't installed Max Payne:) I'm lucky to get 1.5 years outta my box before the games start looking like slide shows. I'm not really sure what the original poster was talking about anyways: games are the only category of software that actually push the performance envelope, and no, games aren't targeted at the current middle-end machine. They will run acceptably on such, but true gamers want all the bells and whistles, and for that you need the absolute high end. Think back to when Quake 3 was released: could the "middle of the road" do 32bpp on High Quality at 1600x1200. I think not; only some really powerful shit could. True gamers are hardly satisfied with their hardware 6 months down the road, to say nothing about years. So your partially right, you gotta buy that monster CPU. But it ain't gonna last you 3 years.
I've gotta agree with that. Cinematography-wise, I think the coolest effect in CTHD was when the camera pulled way back right as Michelle Yeoh threw a pair of "axes" (not sure exactly what they were) at Zhang Ziyi. It looked like something out of Tekken, and was impressive not only because we have proof that Zhang really did pull off that great reverse-handspring-nevermind-I-think-I'll-go-forwa rd-after-all move, but also because it looked amazingly fluid and beautiful. The Matrix also had some of this, like in the subway.
I also have to agree with you about the camera being in waaaay to close for most of the scenes. I think it's much cooler to actually see some connection. I think the most egregious example of this is in the recent "Kiss of the Dragon" with Jet Li. I can see what the producers were going for here by pulling in the camera so close -- they were trying to accentuate Li's amazing (and I mean, amazing) speed by turning the flick into a veritable slideshow of dark flashes, which would be Jet Li's flailing limbs beating the shit out of some bad guy. But 15 straight minutes of this technique got really, really tiresome.
And I don't care what Taco says. For reasons other than just the way it was filmed, Romeo Must Die sucked.
I'm sorry, but you have completely missed the point. Do you forget that Skylarov did not break the law? He wrote a program in Russia which was legal in Russia (and most other parts of the world, for that matter). If you are part of the small Slashdot majority who believes the contrary, that Skylarov did break the law and should be thrown in jail, then that tells us where you stand. But you aren't, because you say so yourself: unfairly imprisioned [sic] people need to be freed. You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't both believe that he did nothing wrong, and also that he should be martyred for the greater cause of putting the DMCA in the limelight. That is just completely unfair to Skylarov, his family, everyone involved. I have no problem with the prosecution and incarceration of people who really did break our laws. I really don't -- and that goes for even such travesties as the DMCA. But in this case, no laws were broken. The fact that the DMCA was ever signed into law distresses me greatly, but it's much more distressing to me that our government has essentially taken hostage a man who committed no crime. And as a responsible citizen, it should be to you too.
It certainly is fun to sit in our ivory towers and fantasize about the DMCA being tested in a court of law, isn't it? You seem to forget that this man has a wife and two children, one three months old. I find the bravado with which you proclaim that we should leave him to rot in jail until trial more than a little callous. Given the demographics of the Slashdot audience, I doubt that few of us have ever seen the inside of a prison. I certainly have not, and neither, in all likelihood, have you. I do have a notion of that experience being vaguely hellish based on what people who have been imprisoned have told me. And these people were not quite as couth as a law-abiding, 26 year old doctoral candidate. This is to say nothing of the enormous personal strain placed on Skylarov's family. Think for a moment what it would be like to see your significant other jailed in a foreign country, with no end in sight, possibly with no source of income, left to rear a two year old and a newborn infant.
Given the byzantine nature of the DMCA, violating one or more of its provisions does not seem to be too difficult. If you would really like to see the DMCA put to the test, then put your money where your mouth is and violate it. Flagrantly. And be prepared to suffer the consequences, which will include separation from your friends and family, a "hacker" stigmatization that will reflect upon you and your work for at least the next decade, and, barring some 11th-hour benevolence on behalf of the EFF and prominent defense attornies, a large drain on your financial resources. I might add that you would at least have the luxury of a passing familiarity with the American judicial system, which, unfortunately, is more than can be said for Skylarov. Until you are ready to take that leap, please don't come on Slashdot expounding the abstract benefits of this case while simultaneously completely blinding yourself to the actual human story underlying it all.
Re:Jet powered motorcycles and trucks
on
Pulse Jet Go-kart
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· Score: 4
Roger that. Here's some more stuff you might be interested in:
No one is really sure what the bike's top speed is. McIntyre had a pair of Sheriffs radaring him at both ends of an airport runway, but their guns maxed out at 199mph:) He theorizes probably above 250mph, though (!)
My Dad knows Jay through business and is a fellow motorcycle enthusiast. One day my Dad & some friends were at The Rock Store, which is a small restaraunt/biker hangout on Mullholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Lo' and behold, Jay pulled up on his "jet bike" so of course everyone wanted to go take a peek. Jay starts talking about his trip over and about how some guy in his shiny new BMW pulled up extra close behind Jay so he could get a look at the bike. The thing is, the exhaust from Jay's bike started melting the front bumper off of the guy's car (Jet exahust = 1500+ degrees Fahrenheit)! Jay said he tried to warn the guy but he didn't get it and since they were parked at a red light he just had to sit there and melt the front end off this guy's car till it turned green:)
NPR story about the bike (RealAudio). Cool because it has a phone interview with Jay, and you get to hear the thing starting up! Gives you a sort of "what hath God wrought" feeling when you realize someone's about to hop on that monster and drive it around:)
Yes, but you can convert it to heat, which (IR) is both a) much harder to detect at distance than RF (especially during the daytime, and especially if you are between the sun and an observer, and b) a secondary threat when you're carrying around a giant pair of jet engines.
Slashdot Mirror
Why wait?
I encourage anyone who has similar incidents to post them here; the existence of this story could prove a valuable deterrent that we can all utilize in the future. The next time you mail off a check and don't hear back from the guy, fire off an e-mail like this:
Or something along those lines.Why are politicans so clueless when it comes to government-held, key escrow encryption? Has no one told them what a futile move it would be to outlaw "regular" crypto? I'm curious if you can shed some light on the extent of their pie-in-the-sky mentality. Has no one told them that public key encryption is already in the public domain and installed on literally tens of millions of computers worldwide? Are they honestly so deluded as to believe that they can just make all that just go away by the sheer force of their own will?
No, they only used about 3,000.
The EFF is a non-profit organization. As such, they are prohibited by law from any lobbying activities.
Oh wait, that's because I'm in college.
I'm using it right now. It works well, although I'm not sure if I can download from Kazaa. If you read the giFT README, these guys seem to be extremely competent (reverse) engineers. I wouldn't put it past them to be able to break through whatever Kazaa did.
I have to say I'm impressed. There is a reason that the only previous FastTrack clients were fr Windows: FastTrack is a closed source C++ based protocol stack that only exists for that operating system. FastTrack's livelihood is dependent upon licensing that stack to developers and hence keeping the protocol proprietary. That someone has reverse engineered it quite successfully is highly impressive and also a little worrisome if you're FastTrack. I'm surprised we haven't heard a lot more about this and FastTrack's response.
I do believe that there is a lot of room for reform. I think that we should allow the CIA to use "dirty" operatives when conducting espionage. There is talk of rescinding LBJ's executive order banning the assassination of known criminal leaders, which should also be considered. The entire airline security industry needs to be reformed and perhaps socialized; it's clear that the lowest-bidder system being used now is a total and complete joke.
But along with those reforms I see the old specter of "key escrow" encryption being raised again. I see lots of talk about a curtailment of our first amendment rights on the "internet chatrooms" (whatever those are) that have become so villified by politicians. These "reforms" are counterproductive to the ostensible goal of fighting terrorists in the first place, which is to preserve our freedom. As such, that shouldn't even be considered.
As an aside, your faith in the Supreme Court is just completely naive. Where have you been living for the past ten years? Would you also expect the Supreme Court to act fairly and judiciously mildly important matters such as determining the true and fair winner in a presidential election? If you think that the Supreme Court is at all a friend of the common man's rights, I advise you run over the ACLU web site and look at the "In the Courts" section. You might be surprised.
Viscious? Is that like, "wickedly thick" or something? Hmm.. Wickedly Thick. Sounds like a name for a band. Or maybe a horse.
Corporate consolidation almost always accompanies industrywide slowdown. That behavior is as predictable as the rising and setting of the sun. Look at it this way - most of the brass will get to keep their jobs; some will get promoted, some demoted, but very few fired. Workers, on the other hand, are gonna get pink slipped because suddenly their services are "duplicated." The market just can't accomodate as many tech-behemoths as it could 2 years ago, so the logical thing to do is merge.
What the guy is saying, quite correctly, is that money does not equal happiness. That's so trite and obvious that I shouldn't have to be pointing it out. Whether you realize it or not, you ascribe to this very notion by teaching physics at university instead of pursuing a much more lucrative career in the private industry. The original poster wasn't admonishing anyone to rest on their laurels; rather he was saying that we should look further than the almighty dollar when measuring success. If you have a job that you enjoy, that you find intellectually stimulating, and that allows you to make a decent living, well then I'd say you've got it. Engineering, software development, and teaching would presumably be all good examples of this in the right context.
You bought it from ThinkGeek? Tsk, tsk -- Taco, you paid too much.
Fair enough; that's a valid point. But look at what he is proposing, and you see that Stallman is a total hypocrite. His doctrinaire stance on issues like free speech and open source prompts him to fight this jihad, and yet when you get right down to his actual proposal, he's willing to bend the rules quite a bit. Though he would never say it, his rationale for "GNU" Linux essentially relies on GNU being more worthy of credit than anything else related to Linux -- not exactly a very principled argument; in fact, completely subjective.
For obvious reasons, he wants "GNU/Linux". No more, no less. But what is GNU, except a mere coalition of developers who are not named Richard Stallman, and who happen to put out most GNU software? So, in the interests of simple recognition -- after all, that's all Stallman is after, guys -- it's only fair that we put the names of everyone who has contributed to the GNU in front of "Linux" as well.
But who trained all of those developers? Why, MIT of course (here I'm generalizing, but that's actually not too far from the truth). So now we have "MIT/developers/GNU/Linux". And I suppose it's only fair to throw a nod to Donald Knuth, who's pioneering work on, well, everything, was of course instrumental in the development of the Linux operating system. Progressing back through history, there'd certainly be no "Knuth/MIT/developers/GNU/Linux" without Charles Babbage. Follow this train of thought far enough and you end up with "God/ ... / Babbage/Knuth/MIT/developers/GNU/Linux".
I'm exaggerating, but you see my point. Stallman is arrogating GNU to a point where it's contributions to Linux are more valuable than the many hundreds of equally important contributions from many other people & companies, all in the name of advancing his political agenda. Not exactly a radical departure from the status quo if you're Richard Stallman. But for everyone else, it's hard to reconcile his high-minded, egalitarian, and quite laudable beliefs about intellectual freedom with his disturbing willingness to essentially stifle the work of others in the name of "progress," which is a word that of course Stallman the Great has defined in his own terms on behalf of the rest of us.
It's obvious that the only simple, sane, and fair thing to do is:
Linux
CD's are variable speed, which is why people are advertising 52x (or however high it is now) CDROM drives nowadays. 52x on the outside. Unless it's a CAV drive.
Oh. my. God. You are really fucking dense, man.
On the contrary, AOLServer is really quite good. It's tight binding with Tcl makes it possible to pull of some incredibly elegant things in just a few short lines of code. If you want to see some good examples of AOLServer (which is OSS, by the way) in use, check out photo.net, arsdigita.com, or anything else done by Philip Greenspun/ArsDigita. He swears by it, and for good reason. The original poster's page doesn't do it much (any?) justice.
What is your definition of "server"?
Chew this over for a couple milliseconds and you realize that, by banning servers from their TOS, they are effectively forbidding the use of all instant messaging services, many online games, all peer-to-peer applications, IRC, and a host of others. One is left to infer that the only kosher activities on the @Home network are web browsing and checking e-mail. They would never be caught dead saying this, but you can't not get that idea from a strict reading of the contract. Even in an single e-mail to an inquisitive customer, they would of course never be caught dead admitting this. To do so would, of course, invite lots of fun sloganeering on behalf of the various DSL providers, who would like nothing more than to put the phrase "@Home bars you from using 90% of the Internet services that you want to; we don't" into @Home's pipe and watch them smoke it. So, if you're a little bored on this Wednesday night, fire off an e-mail to your friends at @Home and await the response. :)
At least we'll have some authoritative info on what, exactly, the Clone Wars were. This one has been bugging me for a long time.
Wow.. now there's an exaggeration if I ever heard one. Let's be honest: three years ago I dropped $1500 on a P2-400 with a TNT2 vanilla and an Aureal 4-channel soundcard. If you think that setup can play today's games, you are either out of your mind or haven't installed Max Payne :) I'm lucky to get 1.5 years outta my box before the games start looking like slide shows. I'm not really sure what the original poster was talking about anyways: games are the only category of software that actually push the performance envelope, and no, games aren't targeted at the current middle-end machine. They will run acceptably on such, but true gamers want all the bells and whistles, and for that you need the absolute high end. Think back to when Quake 3 was released: could the "middle of the road" do 32bpp on High Quality at 1600x1200. I think not; only some really powerful shit could. True gamers are hardly satisfied with their hardware 6 months down the road, to say nothing about years. So your partially right, you gotta buy that monster CPU. But it ain't gonna last you 3 years.
I also have to agree with you about the camera being in waaaay to close for most of the scenes. I think it's much cooler to actually see some connection. I think the most egregious example of this is in the recent "Kiss of the Dragon" with Jet Li. I can see what the producers were going for here by pulling in the camera so close -- they were trying to accentuate Li's amazing (and I mean, amazing) speed by turning the flick into a veritable slideshow of dark flashes, which would be Jet Li's flailing limbs beating the shit out of some bad guy. But 15 straight minutes of this technique got really, really tiresome.
And I don't care what Taco says. For reasons other than just the way it was filmed, Romeo Must Die sucked.
I'm sorry, but you have completely missed the point. Do you forget that Skylarov did not break the law? He wrote a program in Russia which was legal in Russia (and most other parts of the world, for that matter). If you are part of the small Slashdot majority who believes the contrary, that Skylarov did break the law and should be thrown in jail, then that tells us where you stand. But you aren't, because you say so yourself: unfairly imprisioned [sic] people need to be freed. You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't both believe that he did nothing wrong, and also that he should be martyred for the greater cause of putting the DMCA in the limelight. That is just completely unfair to Skylarov, his family, everyone involved. I have no problem with the prosecution and incarceration of people who really did break our laws. I really don't -- and that goes for even such travesties as the DMCA. But in this case, no laws were broken. The fact that the DMCA was ever signed into law distresses me greatly, but it's much more distressing to me that our government has essentially taken hostage a man who committed no crime. And as a responsible citizen, it should be to you too.
Given the byzantine nature of the DMCA, violating one or more of its provisions does not seem to be too difficult. If you would really like to see the DMCA put to the test, then put your money where your mouth is and violate it. Flagrantly. And be prepared to suffer the consequences, which will include separation from your friends and family, a "hacker" stigmatization that will reflect upon you and your work for at least the next decade, and, barring some 11th-hour benevolence on behalf of the EFF and prominent defense attornies, a large drain on your financial resources. I might add that you would at least have the luxury of a passing familiarity with the American judicial system, which, unfortunately, is more than can be said for Skylarov. Until you are ready to take that leap, please don't come on Slashdot expounding the abstract benefits of this case while simultaneously completely blinding yourself to the actual human story underlying it all.
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Yes, but you can convert it to heat, which (IR) is both a) much harder to detect at distance than RF (especially during the daytime, and especially if you are between the sun and an observer, and b) a secondary threat when you're carrying around a giant pair of jet engines.
--