Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars or even the company that invented the hardware that makes multitouch work...
I think that's a very limited definition of "innovation."
A better definition might be "solving a problem through the novel application of technology". The technology might be completely new, or it might be existing technology used in a new way. Either one can be innovative.
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party or the other similar state-level parties.
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
Wait, wait, what now?! You need a good credit report to get a job?
For many jobs, yes. Especially those in public safety, or where you have access to money or pharmaceuticals (or anything else that's expensive and easy to steal). It's also a big part of getting a security clearance, if you want to work for the government.
I've seen ads for everything from IT work to nanny jobs that say "must have good credit" or "must pass credit check."
Well, the "No Trespassing" sign in this case is presumably a robots.txt file.
AVG is choosing not to follow robots.txt. If you accept that AVG's linkscanner is, in fact, a robot, then they're basically ignoring a clear warning to keep the hell out.
What's still open to debate, in my mind anyway, is whether the AVG linkscanner really qualifies as a robot. If it is, then certainly a web browser that performs pre-fetch is as well, and ought to follow the same standards.
Port 587 is used (or should be used) for authenticated SMTP only. No correctly-configured mailserver should accept un-authenticated connections on 587. That's what makes it different from Port 25.
Since no server should accept email from just anyone on port 587, there's no reason to block outgoing connections from it. It's not used for MTA-MTA relay, just MUA to MTA. You can try to spew all the spam you want from it, but you shouldn't really get anywhere.
The problem is that for email to function in its current form, MTAs have to accept incoming mail from other MTAs (for their users, not as open relays, obviously) somehow. Although it would be better to just fix email somehow, that's not happening. It's easier to just decide that certain network regions shouldn't be running MTAs and block any attempt they make at connecting and sending mail directly to the recipient's MTA.
Although I agree that this is a crappy solution, it's a moderately effective one and it's necessary given the crummy email system we have to work with. It would be great if we could just scrap email and start over with something fresh, but that's not happening. We're stuck with it and blocking port 25 on residential networks, forcing people instead onto 587, is a moderate stopgap.
Anyone wanting to run their own MTA from within a residential subnet ought to know how to configure a smarthost and connect to a real (running outside of a residential network) MTA on 587 anyway. If someone doesn't, they probably shouldn't be running an MTA.
Last time this came up for discussion, some people suggested that RST-injection was computationally easier than packet blocking, because it works on the connection level rather than the packet level.
It still seems to me like you'd have to do quite a bit of DPI to determine which connections are being used for Bittorrent, but maybe you can identify a connection, send a forged RST packet, and then ignore the packets in that connection for a while (saving you load on the DPI box) for a while, maybe just until it closes.
I'm not entirely clear how these Sandvine boxes work, but it seems like it would be easier to identify "okay, this connection is being used for x," "this connection is being used for Y," and then not have to pay more attention to them, than it would be to examine every single packet. That's where you get your cost reduction, I suspect.
Sandvine has a few patents out there that probably describe in greater detail how their QoS tool works (and which I haven't read yet); apparently the QoS RST-forging are part of their "Stateful Policy Management" product.
I don't think he was really complaining about the censorship, he was just explaining why their connection goes through China. He mentioned that because it's one of the reasons why he's behind so many layer of NAT.
China doesn't have a lot of assigned IPv4 space to begin with, and if they're your Internet provider, they're probably not going to give you a lot. Hence, he's catching the short end of the addressing stick twice. One was China getting shafted, the other was China doing the shafting.
Although IPv6 wouldn't change the routing, the path the traffic takes through China, or the censorship/monitoring, it would give him a globally unique address. That would be a big step and simplify server configuration considerably.
Probably since the Cape Cod and Martha's Vinyard wind-power projects kept running into trouble because of very politically well-connected people opposing them at every turn, because for whatever reasons they didn't want them in sight.
The Kennedys -- who own a massive family compound on the Cape -- were a big part of getting the Cape Cod project scuttled, or at least set back; Ted Kennedy apparently even connived with Ted Stevens (everybody's favorite!) in order to lessen its chances of getting a funding bill through the Senate. cite That sort of underhanded, backroom dealing is clear proof that his reasons for opposing it are personal and not something that would hold up to actual debate or scrutiny.
(Something to keep in mind if you ever hear that slimebag talking about alternative energy.)
I wonder if people bitched so much back when the Coast Guard was going around putting up lighthouses everywhere.
Now, some of the most expensive property on Cape Ann, MA is the coastline where the lighthouses are visible. They're considered picturesque; hell, more than that, they're 'romantic seacoast' to the point of being cliched.
We just need the political will to ram the wind-power projects through, and in a few years they'll just be another part of the landscape. A few generations, and people will be putting together comprehensive coffee-table books on "Wind Turbines of the Northeast U.S."
While that may be your opinion, and I don't really even disagree, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees. Had the court shared your belief that email was completely public, no warrant would have been required and the entire argument would have been moot. They didn't.
The stance of the courts has been that email is not public, and based on that there's no way that the act of simply sending an email to another individual would meet the definition of 'publication' as defined in 17 U.S.C. Sec. 101 (Definitions section of the Copyright Act). "Publication" is defined as the following:
"Publication" is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.
(Emph. mine)
Sending an email to a particular person is not distribution to the public, and I can't imagine it possibly being construed as publication.
There's probably room to argue that in sending an email, the sender gives the recipient an implied license to use it in certain ways simply because of how the medium works (store-and-forward, emails are quoted in reply, etc.), but I doubt you'd have any success trying to expand this implicit permission very far, at the expense of the author's control.
In general, I think you're blurring the line between what people should consider as being private, and what the law considers to be public. Email has seemingly been deemed private by the courts, however a user would be prudent to treat it as though it were completely public, because there's no guarantee that someone isn't going to read it in transit. That doesn't change their copyright on the message, however.
You could get a VoIP line for the house; this is what I've done for situations like that.
An "ATA" -- basically an Ethernet to analog telephone adapter -- will run you less than $50 and it's a one-time expense. I recommend the Linksys PAP2T-NA (just make sure you get the "NA" version and not one of the ones that's locked to Vonage, etc.).
Then you just plug in any old analog phone you want, corded or cordless, and configure the box to point to the VoIP provider of your choice. I use Callcentric; they'll give you an incoming number in your choice of most area codes for a few dollars a month, unlimited minutes, and outgoing calls are about $0.02USD on a pay-per-use plan.
It's significantly cheaper than even the base rate for real POTS service where I live, plus there's no long distance "surprises," you can move it from place to place with you if you want, free voicemail, incoming fax, etc. They provide (mandatory) E911 service if you live in the U.S., also.
The only real downside is that it obviously won't work if your broadband service goes out, which is a good argument for putting your broadband modem, router, and the ATA on a UPS.
Once you absorb the up-front cost of the ATA, the running costs for me were less than bumping my cell phone up to a plan with more minutes, which was the alternative I'd been considering. Plus, since getting it, I've realized that I really liked having a "house phone" in addition to individual cellphones. I just don't like paying $15 a month for it.
With most people, I doubt you'd have to go to any sort of work to intercept their phone calls -- chances are, they're using a cordless phone. I suspect the great majority of the installed base of cordless phones are just plain-old 49 or 900MHz FM types, that you could pick up with a $40 RadioShack scanner.
Intercepting one of the newer digital ones, or even an analog one on 2.4GHz, would be harder, but still probably easier than physically tapping the line; plus there's no chance it can be detected.
It hasn't happened in a few years, but back in the AMPS days, I used to routinely hear other people's conversations while using the cellphone. Sometimes it was clear that they could also hear us; it was almost a party-line situation.
There also were a few times when it apparently switched between cells and didn't move the call correctly, because I suddenly ended up talking to someone who wasn't the person I had been on the phone with a moment before.
When they worked, I think the audio quality was frequently better out of the AMPS phones than out of the modern digital cellular units, though. Plus, a mobile unit put out something like 15 Watts.
By far the dumbest thing about analog cellphones was how the FCC went around and insisted that nobody could buy an 800MHz scanner that had those bands in it... now that cell technology is dead, but we still have crippled scanners.
I don't think the GP was saying that you need to have Screen Sharing enabled for the exploit to work at all; you need to have Screen Sharing turned on for someone to run the exploit without physical access to the machine.
I.e., you can't run it over an SSH session; you need the Finder. The only ways to get access to the Finder are either physically, by sitting down in front of the computer, or by using a screen-sharing application like Screen Sharing (Remote Desktop), or VNC.
That was my understanding, at least.
The exploit works, if you have physical access to the machine, regardless of whether you have Screen Sharing enabled or not. However, it's when you have Screen Sharing turned on that it's possibly a remote root to anyone you let access your screen.
It's a bad vulnerability and one that I'd like to see Apple fix ASAP, but it's several steps down from a true unprivileged remote root. It might have negative consequences for shared and lab machines, but for most home and office users it doesn't seem like it means much, unless you typically allow lots of people remote-desktop/VNC access.
No, GP was correct. On Mac OS X, ".app" means an application bundle... which is a directory, not a file.
If you try to gzip an application bundle without putting it in a tarball first, you'll just get a "foo.app/ is a directory; ignored" error.
It's confusing because the Finder doesn't treat application bundles like normal directories, but that's what they are to the filesystem and *nix utilities.
Nothing like writing an Executive Order to make hiding your mistakes legal, and then having one guy in the Senate hold up all efforts to repeal your order.
Turns out, it takes exactly two people to subvert the entire democratic process.
Yes. But don't blame the judge for the ruling; she can only rule based on the evidence before her. [...] I think there's enough blame to go around.
Kollar-Kotelly seems suspiciously like a party apparatchik, delivering the exact rulings the Republicans need, just when they most desperately need them. She did it in the Microsoft case and she did it again now. Perhaps that isn't yet enough to establish a pattern, but at the very least it's enough to arouse suspicion.
And judges can and do decide cases based on many factors besides the evidence; the law leaves more than enough room for the introduction of personal biases. It's unfortunately very difficult to ferret out, because it can be trivially hidden behind a facade of nitpicking.
On March 1, 2007, a subcommittee of the Committee on Government Reform held a hearing on bill H.R. 1255, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007. At the hearing, several historians argued that Order 13233 has severely curtailed public access to presidential records and added to delays in obtaining materials from presidential libraries. The bill was reported favorably by the full committee, and on March 14, 2007, the House passed the bill in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 333-93. The bill also passed on June 13, 2007 in a Senate committee, but as of March 2008 has not yet been brought up for floor consideration, reportedly due to a hold placed on the measure by Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY)[4]. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, but the House vote marked a veto-proof majority and the Senate Committee passage was unanimous.
I wonder what he's getting in return for holding the party line until the destruction is a fait accompli?
Although if someone sends you a letter, the physical artifact -- the piece of paper with writing on it -- becomes yours, the copyright to unpublished letters remains with the author. Some biographers have gotten in trouble for printing the contents of unpublished letters that were given to them by the recipients, for this reason.
Allegations involving copyright infringement frequently occur when the author of an unauthorized biography makes use of the subject's published or unpublished letters and papers or possibly from oral conversations the author may have had with the subject.
In Salinger v. Random House, Inc., the author's use of extensive quotations from unpublished letters written by J.D. Salinger, the subject of the biography, without Salinger's permission was deemed to be copyright infringement. Under copyright law the writer of unpublished letters has the right to control the first publication of those letters.
Apparently as a result of that case the Copyright Act was amended, but it didn't really change the essential copyright ownership, it just raised the bar for infringement claims somewhat. The copyright to an unpublished work still rests in the author, not the recipient (or whoever they might pass the letter to, or who might inherit it in their estate, etc.). If you want to publish them, either you need to get the permission of the author or the author's estate, or you need to make sure you're covered by one of the Fair Use exemptions (e.g. the "criticism, scholarship or research" exemption).
> If you get them to mail it to you, and you truly did nothing to solicit it,
This doesn't make sense. Whatever you did to get them to mail it to you, would practically by definition make it solicited.
So you can't induce someone to send you something and then turn around and claim that it was unsolicited, and sell it. At least, not without lying. That's not the way it works.
The movies would really have to be unsolicited for you to be able to legally sell them.
This is why you can't just claim ownership of Netflix movies, for instance -- they're not unsolicited, they're being sent to you in response to your request. Hence not unsolicited, hence not a gift, and no transfer of ownership results.
It really doesn't give them that option, except insofar as it might make someone think they have that option, which is the whole point.
I think they would run squarely into this issue ("you don't own this Victrola, we do, and we're just leasing it to you, so you have to do whatever we say").
It's easy to print scary notices on things; it's harder for them to actually be valid.
> for example, change the amount by adding a bunch of zeros before the decimal point...
Sure you can; you just can't change it and then attempt to cash the check, because that's fraud.
If you want to eat your rebate check, or use it for toilet paper, or cat-box liner, or whatever... I don't see what legal theory would prevent you from doing it.
Where you run into problems is when you modify the check into something that it's not supposed to be, and then try to defraud someone out of money using it. If there are any restrictions on actually modifying the check, that's what they're aimed at, it's not really changing the unsolicited mail doctrine.
Not really. The music industry has pretty much tested, since its very inception, the outer bounds of what the legal system would allow.
The whole idea of "licensing" or "leasing" music rather than selling it isn't a new one. The Victrola Company attempted all sorts of shenanigans with its records, including invalidating your right to play the record if you bought it for less than $1 (that's from 1906!). They attempted to back this up not only with contract law, but with patents as well. Their attempts at price-fixing via this method, both on records but even more significantly on machines, went all the way to the Supreme Court ("STRAUS v. VICTOR TALKING MACH. CO. , 243 U.S. 490").
So this is really nothing new at all. It's just the music industry playing screw-the-consumer in the same manner they have always done.
I think (see my other post) that the major driver of Outlook's behavior is the business use case, where people want to keep a whole thread of messages together as they forward and reply.
However, it's probably equally important that Outlook is really designed as an intranet mail solution, not an Internet one. And when everybody's on a relatively fast LAN, shuttling really bloated email messages around isn't as much of a problem as it is on the Internet. Since the cost of quoting every message in a long thread in full is relatively low, there's no reason not to do it.
It's worth pointing out that some other intranet email systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) do this as well, when you reply and quote the original message. (Although I don't remember whether Notes' default is to quote or not.) Notes is even designed so you can expand and collapse the chain of quoted messages.
Where Outlook's behavior becomes really obnoxious is when it started being used for Internet email, rather than just intranet mail, because that's when you start noticing the 50 pages of replies-to-replies that are attached to every one-line message. And it's even worse when you start using mobile devices.
Outlook's whole idea of how to quote emails is different than what's traditionally considered proper in the Unix world and on Usenet. Its quoting style doesn't indent (use ">" characters); it just sticks a delimiter between the quoted text and the new part, and lets you start typing right on top.
I agree, this sucks. Usenet-style quoting is definitely better. However, it's important to understand why it was done this way (or at least why I think it was done this way), because it is not accidental. Most users of Outlook like this behavior. They want to be able to forward a big "stack" of messages, a whole chain of replies and replies-to-replies, around the office.
Why? Because it's easier to cover your ass that way, that's why. When you forward an email in Outlook, you're not just forwarding a single message (usually), you're forwarding the whole thread.
If you want to envision the paper-world use case that approximates Outlook, think of people passing memos around. Someone gets a stack of memos, they read through them, compose their own memo, and staple it to the top of the stack, and then pass it along. You typically do not -- and probably don't want -- people editing and chopping up other people's replies. (Yeah, they can -- there's no security involved -- and that's a big weakness.) If they want to include something that somebody else said, then they just type it into their memo, attributing it (or not) just as they would in a regular standalone letter or memo.
The disconnect between "the Usenet way" and "the Outlook way" is because the Usenet way is driven by people who honestly want to exchange information in the most efficient way possible. That is not the goal of most business communication. The goal of most Outlook users is to CMA and look smart for the boss.
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Innovation is 90% efficiency solar panels or 100 MPG cars or even the company that invented the hardware that makes multitouch work...
I think that's a very limited definition of "innovation."
A better definition might be "solving a problem through the novel application of technology". The technology might be completely new, or it might be existing technology used in a new way. Either one can be innovative.
Ugh. No. You're so wrong I don't know where to start.
Slavery is anathema to libertarian ideology, because it allows one person to impinge on the rights of another. That's a fundamentally Bad Thing; in fact the whole point of libertarianism is the maximization of personal freedom, up to the point where your freedom to do something starts impinging on someone else's.
Basically you've constructed a straw man and then proceeded to tear it down; congratulations. It's a good argument except that it has nothing to do with any actual libertarians that I've ever met, nor the positions of either the Libertarian party or the other similar state-level parties.
If you want to criticize libertarian theory, that's fine -- there are many valid critiques of it. But saying that it advocates or legitimizes slavery is just false and stupid, and a great way of advertising your own ignorance.
Wait, wait, what now?! You need a good credit report to get a job?
For many jobs, yes. Especially those in public safety, or where you have access to money or pharmaceuticals (or anything else that's expensive and easy to steal). It's also a big part of getting a security clearance, if you want to work for the government.
I've seen ads for everything from IT work to nanny jobs that say "must have good credit" or "must pass credit check."
Well, the "No Trespassing" sign in this case is presumably a robots.txt file.
AVG is choosing not to follow robots.txt. If you accept that AVG's linkscanner is, in fact, a robot, then they're basically ignoring a clear warning to keep the hell out.
What's still open to debate, in my mind anyway, is whether the AVG linkscanner really qualifies as a robot. If it is, then certainly a web browser that performs pre-fetch is as well, and ought to follow the same standards.
Port 587 is used (or should be used) for authenticated SMTP only. No correctly-configured mailserver should accept un-authenticated connections on 587. That's what makes it different from Port 25.
Since no server should accept email from just anyone on port 587, there's no reason to block outgoing connections from it. It's not used for MTA-MTA relay, just MUA to MTA. You can try to spew all the spam you want from it, but you shouldn't really get anywhere.
The problem is that for email to function in its current form, MTAs have to accept incoming mail from other MTAs (for their users, not as open relays, obviously) somehow. Although it would be better to just fix email somehow, that's not happening. It's easier to just decide that certain network regions shouldn't be running MTAs and block any attempt they make at connecting and sending mail directly to the recipient's MTA.
Although I agree that this is a crappy solution, it's a moderately effective one and it's necessary given the crummy email system we have to work with. It would be great if we could just scrap email and start over with something fresh, but that's not happening. We're stuck with it and blocking port 25 on residential networks, forcing people instead onto 587, is a moderate stopgap.
Anyone wanting to run their own MTA from within a residential subnet ought to know how to configure a smarthost and connect to a real (running outside of a residential network) MTA on 587 anyway. If someone doesn't, they probably shouldn't be running an MTA.
Last time this came up for discussion, some people suggested that RST-injection was computationally easier than packet blocking, because it works on the connection level rather than the packet level.
It still seems to me like you'd have to do quite a bit of DPI to determine which connections are being used for Bittorrent, but maybe you can identify a connection, send a forged RST packet, and then ignore the packets in that connection for a while (saving you load on the DPI box) for a while, maybe just until it closes.
I'm not entirely clear how these Sandvine boxes work, but it seems like it would be easier to identify "okay, this connection is being used for x," "this connection is being used for Y," and then not have to pay more attention to them, than it would be to examine every single packet. That's where you get your cost reduction, I suspect.
Sandvine has a few patents out there that probably describe in greater detail how their QoS tool works (and which I haven't read yet); apparently the QoS RST-forging are part of their "Stateful Policy Management" product.
I don't think he was really complaining about the censorship, he was just explaining why their connection goes through China. He mentioned that because it's one of the reasons why he's behind so many layer of NAT.
China doesn't have a lot of assigned IPv4 space to begin with, and if they're your Internet provider, they're probably not going to give you a lot. Hence, he's catching the short end of the addressing stick twice. One was China getting shafted, the other was China doing the shafting.
Although IPv6 wouldn't change the routing, the path the traffic takes through China, or the censorship/monitoring, it would give him a globally unique address. That would be a big step and simplify server configuration considerably.
Probably since the Cape Cod and Martha's Vinyard wind-power projects kept running into trouble because of very politically well-connected people opposing them at every turn, because for whatever reasons they didn't want them in sight.
The Kennedys -- who own a massive family compound on the Cape -- were a big part of getting the Cape Cod project scuttled, or at least set back; Ted Kennedy apparently even connived with Ted Stevens (everybody's favorite!) in order to lessen its chances of getting a funding bill through the Senate. cite That sort of underhanded, backroom dealing is clear proof that his reasons for opposing it are personal and not something that would hold up to actual debate or scrutiny.
(Something to keep in mind if you ever hear that slimebag talking about alternative energy.)
I wonder if people bitched so much back when the Coast Guard was going around putting up lighthouses everywhere.
Now, some of the most expensive property on Cape Ann, MA is the coastline where the lighthouses are visible. They're considered picturesque; hell, more than that, they're 'romantic seacoast' to the point of being cliched.
We just need the political will to ram the wind-power projects through, and in a few years they'll just be another part of the landscape. A few generations, and people will be putting together comprehensive coffee-table books on "Wind Turbines of the Northeast U.S."
The stance of the courts has been that email is not public, and based on that there's no way that the act of simply sending an email to another individual would meet the definition of 'publication' as defined in 17 U.S.C. Sec. 101 (Definitions section of the Copyright Act). "Publication" is defined as the following:(Emph. mine)
Sending an email to a particular person is not distribution to the public, and I can't imagine it possibly being construed as publication.
There's probably room to argue that in sending an email, the sender gives the recipient an implied license to use it in certain ways simply because of how the medium works (store-and-forward, emails are quoted in reply, etc.), but I doubt you'd have any success trying to expand this implicit permission very far, at the expense of the author's control.
In general, I think you're blurring the line between what people should consider as being private, and what the law considers to be public. Email has seemingly been deemed private by the courts, however a user would be prudent to treat it as though it were completely public, because there's no guarantee that someone isn't going to read it in transit. That doesn't change their copyright on the message, however.
You could get a VoIP line for the house; this is what I've done for situations like that.
An "ATA" -- basically an Ethernet to analog telephone adapter -- will run you less than $50 and it's a one-time expense. I recommend the Linksys PAP2T-NA (just make sure you get the "NA" version and not one of the ones that's locked to Vonage, etc.).
Then you just plug in any old analog phone you want, corded or cordless, and configure the box to point to the VoIP provider of your choice. I use Callcentric; they'll give you an incoming number in your choice of most area codes for a few dollars a month, unlimited minutes, and outgoing calls are about $0.02USD on a pay-per-use plan.
It's significantly cheaper than even the base rate for real POTS service where I live, plus there's no long distance "surprises," you can move it from place to place with you if you want, free voicemail, incoming fax, etc. They provide (mandatory) E911 service if you live in the U.S., also.
The only real downside is that it obviously won't work if your broadband service goes out, which is a good argument for putting your broadband modem, router, and the ATA on a UPS.
Once you absorb the up-front cost of the ATA, the running costs for me were less than bumping my cell phone up to a plan with more minutes, which was the alternative I'd been considering. Plus, since getting it, I've realized that I really liked having a "house phone" in addition to individual cellphones. I just don't like paying $15 a month for it.
With most people, I doubt you'd have to go to any sort of work to intercept their phone calls -- chances are, they're using a cordless phone. I suspect the great majority of the installed base of cordless phones are just plain-old 49 or 900MHz FM types, that you could pick up with a $40 RadioShack scanner.
Intercepting one of the newer digital ones, or even an analog one on 2.4GHz, would be harder, but still probably easier than physically tapping the line; plus there's no chance it can be detected.
It hasn't happened in a few years, but back in the AMPS days, I used to routinely hear other people's conversations while using the cellphone. Sometimes it was clear that they could also hear us; it was almost a party-line situation.
... now that cell technology is dead, but we still have crippled scanners.
There also were a few times when it apparently switched between cells and didn't move the call correctly, because I suddenly ended up talking to someone who wasn't the person I had been on the phone with a moment before.
When they worked, I think the audio quality was frequently better out of the AMPS phones than out of the modern digital cellular units, though. Plus, a mobile unit put out something like 15 Watts.
By far the dumbest thing about analog cellphones was how the FCC went around and insisted that nobody could buy an 800MHz scanner that had those bands in it
I don't think the GP was saying that you need to have Screen Sharing enabled for the exploit to work at all; you need to have Screen Sharing turned on for someone to run the exploit without physical access to the machine.
I.e., you can't run it over an SSH session; you need the Finder. The only ways to get access to the Finder are either physically, by sitting down in front of the computer, or by using a screen-sharing application like Screen Sharing (Remote Desktop), or VNC.
That was my understanding, at least.
The exploit works, if you have physical access to the machine, regardless of whether you have Screen Sharing enabled or not. However, it's when you have Screen Sharing turned on that it's possibly a remote root to anyone you let access your screen.
It's a bad vulnerability and one that I'd like to see Apple fix ASAP, but it's several steps down from a true unprivileged remote root. It might have negative consequences for shared and lab machines, but for most home and office users it doesn't seem like it means much, unless you typically allow lots of people remote-desktop/VNC access.
No, GP was correct. On Mac OS X, ".app" means an application bundle ... which is a directory, not a file.
If you try to gzip an application bundle without putting it in a tarball first, you'll just get a "foo.app/ is a directory; ignored" error.
It's confusing because the Finder doesn't treat application bundles like normal directories, but that's what they are to the filesystem and *nix utilities.
It wasn't even some sort of underhanded, creeping change, either. It was outright and bald-faced. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13233.
Nothing like writing an Executive Order to make hiding your mistakes legal, and then having one guy in the Senate hold up all efforts to repeal your order.
Turns out, it takes exactly two people to subvert the entire democratic process.
Kollar-Kotelly seems suspiciously like a party apparatchik, delivering the exact rulings the Republicans need, just when they most desperately need them. She did it in the Microsoft case and she did it again now. Perhaps that isn't yet enough to establish a pattern, but at the very least it's enough to arouse suspicion.
And judges can and do decide cases based on many factors besides the evidence; the law leaves more than enough room for the introduction of personal biases. It's unfortunately very difficult to ferret out, because it can be trivially hidden behind a facade of nitpicking.
From the Wikipedia article on E.O. 13233:I wonder what he's getting in return for holding the party line until the destruction is a fait accompli?
Although if someone sends you a letter, the physical artifact -- the piece of paper with writing on it -- becomes yours, the copyright to unpublished letters remains with the author. Some biographers have gotten in trouble for printing the contents of unpublished letters that were given to them by the recipients, for this reason.
You might find Publication Of An Unauthorized Biography interesting:
Apparently as a result of that case the Copyright Act was amended, but it didn't really change the essential copyright ownership, it just raised the bar for infringement claims somewhat. The copyright to an unpublished work still rests in the author, not the recipient (or whoever they might pass the letter to, or who might inherit it in their estate, etc.). If you want to publish them, either you need to get the permission of the author or the author's estate, or you need to make sure you're covered by one of the Fair Use exemptions (e.g. the "criticism, scholarship or research" exemption).
> If you get them to mail it to you, and you truly did nothing to solicit it,
This doesn't make sense. Whatever you did to get them to mail it to you, would practically by definition make it solicited.
So you can't induce someone to send you something and then turn around and claim that it was unsolicited, and sell it. At least, not without lying. That's not the way it works.
The movies would really have to be unsolicited for you to be able to legally sell them.
This is why you can't just claim ownership of Netflix movies, for instance -- they're not unsolicited, they're being sent to you in response to your request. Hence not unsolicited, hence not a gift, and no transfer of ownership results.
It really doesn't give them that option, except insofar as it might make someone think they have that option, which is the whole point.
I think they would run squarely into this issue ("you don't own this Victrola, we do, and we're just leasing it to you, so you have to do whatever we say").
It's easy to print scary notices on things; it's harder for them to actually be valid.
> for example, change the amount by adding a bunch of zeros before the decimal point ...
... I don't see what legal theory would prevent you from doing it.
Sure you can; you just can't change it and then attempt to cash the check, because that's fraud.
If you want to eat your rebate check, or use it for toilet paper, or cat-box liner, or whatever
Where you run into problems is when you modify the check into something that it's not supposed to be, and then try to defraud someone out of money using it. If there are any restrictions on actually modifying the check, that's what they're aimed at, it's not really changing the unsolicited mail doctrine.
Not really. The music industry has pretty much tested, since its very inception, the outer bounds of what the legal system would allow.
The whole idea of "licensing" or "leasing" music rather than selling it isn't a new one. The Victrola Company attempted all sorts of shenanigans with its records, including invalidating your right to play the record if you bought it for less than $1 (that's from 1906!). They attempted to back this up not only with contract law, but with patents as well. Their attempts at price-fixing via this method, both on records but even more significantly on machines, went all the way to the Supreme Court ("STRAUS v. VICTOR TALKING MACH. CO. , 243 U.S. 490").
So this is really nothing new at all. It's just the music industry playing screw-the-consumer in the same manner they have always done.
A good point also.
I think (see my other post) that the major driver of Outlook's behavior is the business use case, where people want to keep a whole thread of messages together as they forward and reply.
However, it's probably equally important that Outlook is really designed as an intranet mail solution, not an Internet one. And when everybody's on a relatively fast LAN, shuttling really bloated email messages around isn't as much of a problem as it is on the Internet. Since the cost of quoting every message in a long thread in full is relatively low, there's no reason not to do it.
It's worth pointing out that some other intranet email systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) do this as well, when you reply and quote the original message. (Although I don't remember whether Notes' default is to quote or not.) Notes is even designed so you can expand and collapse the chain of quoted messages.
Where Outlook's behavior becomes really obnoxious is when it started being used for Internet email, rather than just intranet mail, because that's when you start noticing the 50 pages of replies-to-replies that are attached to every one-line message. And it's even worse when you start using mobile devices.
Outlook's whole idea of how to quote emails is different than what's traditionally considered proper in the Unix world and on Usenet. Its quoting style doesn't indent (use ">" characters); it just sticks a delimiter between the quoted text and the new part, and lets you start typing right on top.
I agree, this sucks. Usenet-style quoting is definitely better. However, it's important to understand why it was done this way (or at least why I think it was done this way), because it is not accidental. Most users of Outlook like this behavior. They want to be able to forward a big "stack" of messages, a whole chain of replies and replies-to-replies, around the office.
Why? Because it's easier to cover your ass that way, that's why. When you forward an email in Outlook, you're not just forwarding a single message (usually), you're forwarding the whole thread.
If you want to envision the paper-world use case that approximates Outlook, think of people passing memos around. Someone gets a stack of memos, they read through them, compose their own memo, and staple it to the top of the stack, and then pass it along. You typically do not -- and probably don't want -- people editing and chopping up other people's replies. (Yeah, they can -- there's no security involved -- and that's a big weakness.) If they want to include something that somebody else said, then they just type it into their memo, attributing it (or not) just as they would in a regular standalone letter or memo.
The disconnect between "the Usenet way" and "the Outlook way" is because the Usenet way is driven by people who honestly want to exchange information in the most efficient way possible. That is not the goal of most business communication. The goal of most Outlook users is to CMA and look smart for the boss.