I just want to take this opportunity to thank Nikon for helping me to decide which DSLR camera to buy, which has been troubling me for a while.
This response from Nikon make it a no-brainer for me to choose Canon instead. I just bought a Canon 350D today. With the investments I will be making on lens and stuff, I probably won't ever consider buying a Nikon DSLR ever again.
So much of the threat of identity theft is because SSNs are so powerful.
No, much of the threat of the identity theft is because stupid banks and stupid credit card companies let people take all your money simply because they know your SSN.
Imagine if SSN disappeared and banks let people get all you money because they can spell your name, or know your birthday, etc. You will end up will the same problem.
The whole "identity theft" thing is just a scam pulled by banks to transfer their responsibility (to properly verify people's identity) into your responsibility (to safeguard some "secret" such as your SSN).
Guess what, in places like Hong Kong, where people actually have a mandatory identity card and number, you can't get peoples money simply by knowing the card number! Banks here use your signature to verify your identity, and sometimes you have present the physical card as well (which has anti-forgery features) for large withdrawals too.
Not to say forging signatures and id cards is impossible, but at least much more difficult than digging up an open "secret" like your SSN.
I read all these stories about buying LCD monitors with dead pixels, why don't you guys check the monitors before you buy them?
Here, in Hong Kong, when you buy a LCD monitor from a computer shop, they will hook it up to a PC and run a test program. It will cycle the screen through white, black, red, blue and green so you can check for dead pixels. And if you find them, you can ask for another, or just refuse to buy.
I find this kind of patent abuse as disgusting as any other/.er...
However, since the US is so insistent on telling other countries to respect their IP, maybe it would be instructive to the world how these patents should be properly "respected"?
Anyone remember Win32s and OS/2? The Win32 extension for Windows 3.1 gone through about 4-5 revision in less than a year, each revision comes out weeks after IBM supported the earlier version in OS/2. Until eventually IBM gave up.
None of the revisions broke any existing apps, but any new apps written with the latest revision will not run without the latest Win32s installed.
It will be trivial for MS to play this game with.NET if they deem Mono to be enough of a threat. MS just keep making new revisions to.NET, each adding a few nice-to-have API. The subsequent FUD fest of how Mono is "not very compatible" be very hard to fight off.
FYI, I can write a Java app that requires MS DLLs as well.
Yes, you can, and I damn well expect that your app will work with whatever other Java libraries out there (even some with their own DLLs) as long as all your DLLs are for the same OS.
Have you ever tried using a C++ library written for Borland compiler in to VC++ project? Good luck trying.
I am seeing a similar series of events in Hong Kong. We have seven (7) universities here serving a population of 7.5 million people. The govt is having the biggest ever deficit partly due to the economic downturn, partly due to expanded public spending.
We are getting round to step 4 and 5 recently, too bad our professors are probably not creative enough to try step 6.
Then, he sends out an instruction for all hosts to delete all data from all databases.
It will be 1000 times more destructive to slowly corrupt say, 2% of the database every week, then wipe them out after a year. That way, by that time, probably all backups they kept are corrupted, and even if they keep year old tapes, it is horribly out of date.
The whole point is just to scare people away from file sharing. Very few people are willing to deal with the legal hassle/expenses, and the anxiety of fighting a court case with RIAA. RIAA can lose every single case, but as long as they got the money to keep suing people to create news like these, many people will be think twice before creating anything that can be used/related to file-sharing. And that's what RIAA wants.
Most programming tasks nowadays involve picking up some toolkit, an IDE, and an office chair, and then dragging icons around to combine parts of the toolkit into some working product.
Yay! I say "Keep it up!" I work in a small company, and we get lots of business from big companies to fix systems made by this kind of "programming". If only there are more "programmers" working this way, thus creating more business for us, I might get a raise next year.
Didn't happen in Hongkong. Mobile phone companies in HK either offer discounts for phones with 12-18 months service contracts, with penalty for early withdrawal, so you get big discount for the phone up front, but have to stick with the service for sometime. Or offer rebates for the phone which is spread out in 12-18 months, i.e. you pay almost full price for the phone, but 1/3-1/2 of the price will be deducted from the service price in 12-18 portions. If you leave the service early, you don't get back the remaining rebates.
Since they claim this company policy applies to absolutely everyone in the company, I think it is reasonable to agree on the credit check only on the following conditions:
they tell you what subjective criteria will be used against the check result.
they certify (in writing) to you that everyone in the company has already passed such check with the same criteria, or provide the list of names that were exempted/failed, (you are a director, you should know who poses a risk to your company). You will be entitled to a very big severance package should you later discover that such list is inaccurate and decide to leave the company.
they agree (in writing) to notify you on any change of this policy, thus assuring you that any new hire will also pass the same check. You will also be entitled to a very big severance package should you later discover that some new hire are not subjected to such check and you are not notified before they are hired and if you decide to leave.
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I just want to take this opportunity to thank Nikon for helping me to decide which DSLR camera to buy, which has been troubling me for a while.
This response from Nikon make it a no-brainer for me to choose Canon instead. I just bought a Canon 350D today. With the investments I will be making on lens and stuff, I probably won't ever consider buying a Nikon DSLR ever again.
So much of the threat of identity theft is because SSNs are so powerful.
No, much of the threat of the identity theft is because stupid banks and stupid credit card companies let people take all your money simply because they know your SSN.
Imagine if SSN disappeared and banks let people get all you money because they can spell your name, or know your birthday, etc. You will end up will the same problem.
The whole "identity theft" thing is just a scam pulled by banks to transfer their responsibility (to properly verify people's identity) into your responsibility (to safeguard some "secret" such as your SSN).
Guess what, in places like Hong Kong, where people actually have a mandatory identity card and number, you can't get peoples money simply by knowing the card number! Banks here use your signature to verify your identity, and sometimes you have present the physical card as well (which has anti-forgery features) for large withdrawals too.
Not to say forging signatures and id cards is impossible, but at least much more difficult than digging up an open "secret" like your SSN.
I read all these stories about buying LCD monitors with dead pixels, why don't you guys check the monitors before you buy them?
Here, in Hong Kong, when you buy a LCD monitor from a computer shop, they will hook it up to a PC and run a test program. It will cycle the screen through white, black, red, blue and green so you can check for dead pixels. And if you find them, you can ask for another, or just refuse to buy.
"When you believe you are right, then all who do not believe as you do are wrong."
I remember this quote from the DragonLance books every time I see this kind of stuff.
A strong believe that they are right is what's wrong with these people.
However, since the US is so insistent on telling other countries to respect their IP, maybe it would be instructive to the world how these patents should be properly "respected"?
Of course they have thought it through, the feeding frenzy is exactly what they are after!
Anyone remember Win32s and OS/2? The Win32 extension for Windows 3.1 gone through about 4-5 revision in less than a year, each revision comes out weeks after IBM supported the earlier version in OS/2. Until eventually IBM gave up.
.NET if they deem Mono to be enough of a threat. MS just keep making new revisions to .NET, each adding a few nice-to-have API. The subsequent FUD fest of how Mono is "not very compatible" be very hard to fight off.
None of the revisions broke any existing apps, but any new apps written with the latest revision will not run without the latest Win32s installed.
It will be trivial for MS to play this game with
Yes, you can, and I damn well expect that your app will work with whatever other Java libraries out there (even some with their own DLLs) as long as all your DLLs are for the same OS.
Have you ever tried using a C++ library written for Borland compiler in to VC++ project? Good luck trying.
I am seeing a similar series of events in Hong Kong. We have seven (7) universities here serving a population of 7.5 million people. The govt is having the biggest ever deficit partly due to the economic downturn, partly due to expanded public spending.
We are getting round to step 4 and 5 recently, too bad our professors are probably not creative enough to try step 6.
Simple, the broken VM contains hundreds of calls to Windows specific functions that makes it a PITA to port to any other platform.
It will be 1000 times more destructive to slowly corrupt say, 2% of the database every week, then wipe them out after a year. That way, by that time, probably all backups they kept are corrupted, and even if they keep year old tapes, it is horribly out of date.
The whole point is just to scare people away from file sharing. Very few people are willing to deal with the legal hassle/expenses, and the anxiety of fighting a court case with RIAA. RIAA can lose every single case, but as long as they got the money to keep suing people to create news like these, many people will be think twice before creating anything that can be used/related to file-sharing. And that's what RIAA wants.
Yay! I say "Keep it up!" I work in a small company, and we get lots of business from big companies to fix systems made by this kind of "programming". If only there are more "programmers" working this way, thus creating more business for us, I might get a raise next year.
Didn't happen in Hongkong. Mobile phone companies in HK either offer discounts for phones with 12-18 months service contracts, with penalty for early withdrawal, so you get big discount for the phone up front, but have to stick with the service for sometime. Or offer rebates for the phone which is spread out in 12-18 months, i.e. you pay almost full price for the phone, but 1/3-1/2 of the price will be deducted from the service price in 12-18 portions. If you leave the service early, you don't get back the remaining rebates.