No, it's not "slightly sad". It's seriously disgusting that anyone claiming to be technically literate at all about the internet doesn't understand how easy it is to be traced by three-letter agencies who have the connections and resources.
The people who got caught were egotistical fools, not "elite hackers."
Hell, they aren't even "hackers" or "crackers" -- the vast majority of them are uneducated script kiddies and fools turning their machines over as bots to be run by someone else.
Now that East Texas has finally started rejecting patent troll claims, maybe Texas justice will take hold and they'll clean the gene pool a little by just SHOOTING idiots like this on their way out of court.
Apple invests in PATENTING UI components so they can SUE companies and people who use them.
IBM, on the other hand, sponsored, developed, published, and GAVE AWAY the Common User Interface Standard.
Apple has no intent on sharing anything with anyone. They want to OWN the market. All markets. And any device that makes the mistake of using a common sense gesture, icon, or interface that anyone with a functioning brain cell could have come up with.
Apple is a pimply leech on the ass of computing, sucking away for all it's worth, and giving NOTHING back.
No matter who is making "a statement" most of the general public "read this kind of stuff and just roll their eyes."
That's because the general public neither knows nor cares about the "political battles" of life, much less the technological challenges. They don't care if Apple is a walled garden, they don't care if the MPAA "censors" the internet", they don't care if the US is hated for interfering in foreign nations,...
Are you beginning to catch the key pattern of "most people" yet?
They don't care.
Just make it work. If it stops working, then the people will care -- once it's too late.
Actually, if you read the article, he did not "tape them" and post the video as some are assuming.
He twittered that his roommate was gay.
The problem I have with the gay community lately is that they want special protections and special priveleges and special treatment. They're no longer content to be merely accepted by society, they want to be special.
And that can NOT be allowed in a society that values equality.
If you told people your roommate was a drug dealer, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a slut, a whore, a thief, or any number of things, you would not be charged as this fellow is being charged. He's being charged solely because he flagged the fact that his roommate was gay.
This is not evidence of hatred at all. It's evidence of an intent to publicly humiliate him. And the only reason he would have felt humiliated is if he was ashamed of being gay, and the onus for his resulting suicide is on him and his choices.
The molly-coddling theory that people should be immune from harassment, embarrassment, humiliation, and generally being picked on by individuals just because they happen to be gay is insane, and that's what I see being done with this case. Someone is being prosecuted because he didn't like his roommate.
Not because he hated gays -- because he didn't like his roommate!!!
Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked. Add in the fact that bio-diesel forms of fuel are up and coming, and we will have no shortage of fuel sources for the foreseeable future.
As the droughts have affected Saskatchewan and US mid-west farmers over the past few years, I fail to see how "it's mostly poor black people affected." Such a statement implies there is a racist mission where there is none. The simple fact is that as long as people can get their discount crap at the local stores, they really don't give a damn about the poor and starving in any nation.
There is ZERO evidence that this kid had a general hatred of gays, persecuted gays, or otherwise was involved with "hate" speech of any kind.
As much as it will piss off the gay community, it IS legal to hate your roommate and to try to embarrass them.
The end result was sad and deplorable, but it's not the result of a "hate crime."
Had the roommate been some guy screwing around with this fellow's ex-girlfriend, and had he even posted videos of them on the internet, no one would be calling it a "hate crime."
The gay community needs to get over themselves. I'm starting to hate the gay community not because they're gay, but because they slam out stupid lawsuits like this that try to paint EVERYTHING as "hate crimes" when they're not. The gay community wanted us out of their bedrooms. Fine. They got their way. Now get the hell out of our court rooms.
If your government and corporations didn't interfere with the rest of the world's nations, believe me, we wouldn't give a shit about American politics.
If I try to catch a girlfriend cheating on me and post the video all over the place to show what a slut she is, it's stupid, it's childish, and it's selfish.
But it's not a hate crime.
There is no evidence that he had a general hatred of gays or was persecuting the gay community as a whole. Only that he wanted to "out" his roommate. And as despicable as that may be and as terrible as the end result was, that is NOT a hate crime.
Of course it makes perfect sense to use a $500 device as a remote control for a $300-400 device like a TV.
Truly this is a "killer app" to justify buying a tablet!
Alan Kay envisioned the Dynabook as a business workhorse, a literal replacement for the notepad. But no one has delivered a tablet yet that provides that basic functionality.
Apple envisioned the iPad as a media device that could surf the web, but it doesn't do Flash or a few other web content formats, so technically it fails on it's vision of being a web utility device.
Android? Time will tell. Android really wasn't made for tablets, but for mobile phones. It remains to be seen how well they'll adapt to the tablet form factor. At least it's more programmable and supports more web formats than iOS devices, provided it survives Oracle's lawsuit.
It would annoy the shit out of me to have to go this route, but maybe the only way I can get Alan Kay's basic functionality is to buy an Android device and write my own notebook app for the damned thing, if I can find one that works well with a stylus (because you don't do handwriting recognition using finger gestures, and fat fingers make LOUSY diagramming input devices.)
Did you ever notice that no one ever used a Star Trek PADD device to do any diagramming or editing? Voice recognition and dictation were used by a couple of characters to write stories and take notes, but the series never really did show how you were supposed to USE the damned things -- they were always just props that got set down or passed to another person with no details of how it would work considered. But it is interesting to note that I never saw a character "push a button" or "swipe a finger" on a PADD -- what little usage of the devices shown was always voice recognition control of an output only device that didn't seem to even have touch screen functionality.
They were let off with a warning, but some bozo expects to issue a court order demanding that a group of friends NOT EVEN TALK TO EACH OTHER for a DECADE?
I don't even try to get back to sleep any more. I just accept the fact that 3-4 hours at a stretch is all I'm comfortable sleeping. So I get up at 1-2 AM most nights and work until around 7, then sleep another 3-4 hours until 11-12. I get in my eight hours total, I feel fully rested, and I find those wee morning hour coding sessions are incredibly productive for some reason. (It's not like it's due to the peace and quiet -- I don't have family and neighbours making much noise during most days in the first place.)
A "full night's sleep" in the sense of an 8-9 hour stretch in bed is extremely rare for me nowadays.
It still freaks my Mom out when I call her and say something like "I was working on blah-blah at about 6 this morning..." because she KNOWS I'm not a "morning person" and never have been. But while I'm not exactly "chipper" without a couple cups of coffee when I get up, I find that with a split sleep shift, I'm at least not an outright grouch when I get up.
As far as I'm aware, there are precedent cases in Canada spanning almost 40 years which provision Canadians with the right to make backups of the media they own, and that such format shifting and backup making has been a Canadian right since the late 1970's to early 1980's. At the time, what was dealt with was making cassettes or 8-tracks of LP records for listening to in cars and elsewhere, and to protect the consumer from loss of the recording should the fragile LP become scratched or otherwise damaged.
Apparently Bill C-11 finally codifies those rights in law rather than just precedent cases, but the DMCA-like provisions fly in the face of existing precedent and should NOT be allowed to move forward. I do understand that this article is to explain to US authorities why Canada is not a pirate haven rather than to raise objections to any offending portions of C-11, but I think it's disingenuous to tout such an "advantage" of the new legislation when many Canadians are doing their damndest to see that clause struck from C-11 (myself included.)
But it's typical of the American government. They bleat whatever the media companies tell them to bleat; they don't actually analyze the legal landscape or alternative views and legislation of foreign nations. Essentially, if you don't do things "the US way", you must be a pirate nation.
A situation not all that dissimilar from Vic Toews claims that anyone who objects to the government spying on them in Canada must be siding with paedophiles -- it's a spurious and disingenous attempt to insult the public into obedience. And the US employs that pathetic and shameful tactic ALL THE TIME in their so-called "negotiations" and policies on international trade and agreements.
More to the point, such legislation to disconnect "infected" machines implies that there is some standard for a "clean machine". And you can BET that "clean machine" model is based on known, locked down, PROPRIETARY operating systems, not someone running their own mods for a Linux distribution.
Repeating the FACT that they found a flaw in the equipment which PERFECTLY explains the one-of-a-kind results is "religious"?
Methinks anyone clinging to the fading hope that we've "proven" FTL is possible are the ones who are exhibiting signs of religious fervor despite all indications that they're wrong.
If you don't have hardware acceleration baked into the drivers, you can kiss full-screen video playback good bye on older hardware. Even with NVidia's accelerated drivers on my aging P4 3.8GHz with 4G of fast RAM (purchased to allow for a CPU upgrade which hasn't happened yet), my box has a REAL tough time playing back a lot of video at 1600x1200 full screen resolution.
The latest "upgrade" for Flash is the worst culprit. Until this past week's upgrade, I could full-screen YouTube videos with no problem. With the "upgrade", I now get 2-3 frames per second being drawn in full-screen mode, so I can no longer watch videos properly.
Nothing changed in Ubuntu, the driver stack, nor my video hardware. So it's pretty clearly a software problem. (What??!?! A problem with Flash?!?!? Say it ain't so! That's NEVER happened before!:P:P:P)
Even with VLC, it wasn't until the latest version of the NVidia drivers that I could watch full screen video under Linux without tearing and dropped frames, which this EXACT SAME BOX had absolutely NO problems doing with a Windows XP OS and driver stack.
As to the USB mouse/trackball issue -- the problem is the upstream source post-10.04.1. I tried a number of Linux distributions over the course of a week, and all modern releases had the same problem: the "mouse" is not recognized AT ALL. Yet I've used this same device since the earliest days of Linux, around Red Hat 5.2 or 5.3 if I recall correctly. I mean, really, it's a freaking MOUSE!!! WTF can they POSSIBLY be doing in the kernel that a USB mouse stops working after over a decade of proper support? And it IS the kernel or the driver stack that is at fault, because the problem persists no matter which window manager I installed with the Linux versions I tried.
ITU standards are a bear to read, understand, and implement, I'll give you that.
But after that, we part ways.
The US has recently and repeatedly demonstrated that the neutrality of the internet is a thing of the past as the USG gives in to pressure from industry lobbyists who demand that sites be taken down on their say-so without any provisioning for due process. They even tried to LEGISLATE such behaviour because it was proving too difficult to comply with international law that requires the home nation's due process be respected before a company's website can be taken off line.
As inbred and outdated as many of the ITU administrators may be, they still do NOT have a history of taking kickbacks from unrelated industries as the US has been doing with SOPA, ACTA, and other bad legislation and policy that they're trying to shove down the world's throat on behalf of the media companies.
Both approaches are not "free" as the internet needs to be. But at least with the ITU I don't need to worry about a website being taken down because Disney, Sony, or some other media company is having a hissy fit.
Both Theora and VP8 were developed in the open, with source available.
MPEG-LA should have been approaching the developers when the patent violations were first found, so they could be licensed or the infringing code removed/rewritten.
Now that they're moving forward and taking a significant share of the market, MPEG-LA wants to rewrite history and claim patent infringement at this late date, now that there is money to be sued for.
Too bad.
As with a trademark, if you don't defend it in a timely fashion, you should lose your patent if you're not policing it's licensing and use BEFORE there is money to be made. Such an approach would ELIMINATE the infamous "submarine patent" so many trolls like to use, and save all KINDS of industries hundreds of millions if not billions in extortion fees.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point: if it's the kid's laptop, why don't they already have the root password?
It sounds like "Dad" is being a bit too controlling about the computers in his home, not that the security is excessive.
No, it's not "slightly sad". It's seriously disgusting that anyone claiming to be technically literate at all about the internet doesn't understand how easy it is to be traced by three-letter agencies who have the connections and resources.
The people who got caught were egotistical fools, not "elite hackers."
Hell, they aren't even "hackers" or "crackers" -- the vast majority of them are uneducated script kiddies and fools turning their machines over as bots to be run by someone else.
Damn Angelina Jolie for showing her tits and making that lame movie memorable!
Now that East Texas has finally started rejecting patent troll claims, maybe Texas justice will take hold and they'll clean the gene pool a little by just SHOOTING idiots like this on their way out of court.
And there we have the crux of the matter.
Someone's estate sold the rights to make the film. They also sold the rights to use the character for advertising products.
Put the blame where it belongs: on the people who did the selling out.
Bullshit.
Apple invests in PATENTING UI components so they can SUE companies and people who use them.
IBM, on the other hand, sponsored, developed, published, and GAVE AWAY the Common User Interface Standard.
Apple has no intent on sharing anything with anyone. They want to OWN the market. All markets. And any device that makes the mistake of using a common sense gesture, icon, or interface that anyone with a functioning brain cell could have come up with.
Apple is a pimply leech on the ass of computing, sucking away for all it's worth, and giving NOTHING back.
No matter who is making "a statement" most of the general public "read this kind of stuff and just roll their eyes."
That's because the general public neither knows nor cares about the "political battles" of life, much less the technological challenges. They don't care if Apple is a walled garden, they don't care if the MPAA "censors" the internet", they don't care if the US is hated for interfering in foreign nations, ...
Are you beginning to catch the key pattern of "most people" yet?
They don't care.
Just make it work. If it stops working, then the people will care -- once it's too late.
Pay for it.
Those students with the 3G and 4G dongles that you're laughing at have the right idea.
Internet access is not a "right", bub. It's a service you PAY for.
Actually, if you read the article, he did not "tape them" and post the video as some are assuming.
He twittered that his roommate was gay.
The problem I have with the gay community lately is that they want special protections and special priveleges and special treatment. They're no longer content to be merely accepted by society, they want to be special.
And that can NOT be allowed in a society that values equality.
If you told people your roommate was a drug dealer, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a slut, a whore, a thief, or any number of things, you would not be charged as this fellow is being charged. He's being charged solely because he flagged the fact that his roommate was gay.
This is not evidence of hatred at all. It's evidence of an intent to publicly humiliate him. And the only reason he would have felt humiliated is if he was ashamed of being gay, and the onus for his resulting suicide is on him and his choices.
The molly-coddling theory that people should be immune from harassment, embarrassment, humiliation, and generally being picked on by individuals just because they happen to be gay is insane, and that's what I see being done with this case. Someone is being prosecuted because he didn't like his roommate.
Not because he hated gays -- because he didn't like his roommate!!!
Your information is out of date.
Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked. Add in the fact that bio-diesel forms of fuel are up and coming, and we will have no shortage of fuel sources for the foreseeable future.
As the droughts have affected Saskatchewan and US mid-west farmers over the past few years, I fail to see how "it's mostly poor black people affected." Such a statement implies there is a racist mission where there is none. The simple fact is that as long as people can get their discount crap at the local stores, they really don't give a damn about the poor and starving in any nation.
It's not racism.
It's indifference and self-centeredness.
There is ZERO evidence that this kid had a general hatred of gays, persecuted gays, or otherwise was involved with "hate" speech of any kind.
As much as it will piss off the gay community, it IS legal to hate your roommate and to try to embarrass them.
The end result was sad and deplorable, but it's not the result of a "hate crime."
Had the roommate been some guy screwing around with this fellow's ex-girlfriend, and had he even posted videos of them on the internet, no one would be calling it a "hate crime."
The gay community needs to get over themselves. I'm starting to hate the gay community not because they're gay, but because they slam out stupid lawsuits like this that try to paint EVERYTHING as "hate crimes" when they're not. The gay community wanted us out of their bedrooms. Fine. They got their way. Now get the hell out of our court rooms.
If your government and corporations didn't interfere with the rest of the world's nations, believe me, we wouldn't give a shit about American politics.
I don't agree.
If I try to catch a girlfriend cheating on me and post the video all over the place to show what a slut she is, it's stupid, it's childish, and it's selfish.
But it's not a hate crime.
There is no evidence that he had a general hatred of gays or was persecuting the gay community as a whole. Only that he wanted to "out" his roommate. And as despicable as that may be and as terrible as the end result was, that is NOT a hate crime.
Of course it makes perfect sense to use a $500 device as a remote control for a $300-400 device like a TV.
Truly this is a "killer app" to justify buying a tablet!
Alan Kay envisioned the Dynabook as a business workhorse, a literal replacement for the notepad. But no one has delivered a tablet yet that provides that basic functionality.
Apple envisioned the iPad as a media device that could surf the web, but it doesn't do Flash or a few other web content formats, so technically it fails on it's vision of being a web utility device.
Android? Time will tell. Android really wasn't made for tablets, but for mobile phones. It remains to be seen how well they'll adapt to the tablet form factor. At least it's more programmable and supports more web formats than iOS devices, provided it survives Oracle's lawsuit.
It would annoy the shit out of me to have to go this route, but maybe the only way I can get Alan Kay's basic functionality is to buy an Android device and write my own notebook app for the damned thing, if I can find one that works well with a stylus (because you don't do handwriting recognition using finger gestures, and fat fingers make LOUSY diagramming input devices.)
Did you ever notice that no one ever used a Star Trek PADD device to do any diagramming or editing? Voice recognition and dictation were used by a couple of characters to write stories and take notes, but the series never really did show how you were supposed to USE the damned things -- they were always just props that got set down or passed to another person with no details of how it would work considered. But it is interesting to note that I never saw a character "push a button" or "swipe a finger" on a PADD -- what little usage of the devices shown was always voice recognition control of an output only device that didn't seem to even have touch screen functionality.
They were let off with a warning, but some bozo expects to issue a court order demanding that a group of friends NOT EVEN TALK TO EACH OTHER for a DECADE?
WTF?
I mean, seriously, WTF?!?!?!?!
I don't even try to get back to sleep any more. I just accept the fact that 3-4 hours at a stretch is all I'm comfortable sleeping. So I get up at 1-2 AM most nights and work until around 7, then sleep another 3-4 hours until 11-12. I get in my eight hours total, I feel fully rested, and I find those wee morning hour coding sessions are incredibly productive for some reason. (It's not like it's due to the peace and quiet -- I don't have family and neighbours making much noise during most days in the first place.)
A "full night's sleep" in the sense of an 8-9 hour stretch in bed is extremely rare for me nowadays.
It still freaks my Mom out when I call her and say something like "I was working on blah-blah at about 6 this morning..." because she KNOWS I'm not a "morning person" and never have been. But while I'm not exactly "chipper" without a couple cups of coffee when I get up, I find that with a split sleep shift, I'm at least not an outright grouch when I get up.
As far as I'm aware, there are precedent cases in Canada spanning almost 40 years which provision Canadians with the right to make backups of the media they own, and that such format shifting and backup making has been a Canadian right since the late 1970's to early 1980's. At the time, what was dealt with was making cassettes or 8-tracks of LP records for listening to in cars and elsewhere, and to protect the consumer from loss of the recording should the fragile LP become scratched or otherwise damaged.
Apparently Bill C-11 finally codifies those rights in law rather than just precedent cases, but the DMCA-like provisions fly in the face of existing precedent and should NOT be allowed to move forward. I do understand that this article is to explain to US authorities why Canada is not a pirate haven rather than to raise objections to any offending portions of C-11, but I think it's disingenuous to tout such an "advantage" of the new legislation when many Canadians are doing their damndest to see that clause struck from C-11 (myself included.)
But it's typical of the American government. They bleat whatever the media companies tell them to bleat; they don't actually analyze the legal landscape or alternative views and legislation of foreign nations. Essentially, if you don't do things "the US way", you must be a pirate nation.
A situation not all that dissimilar from Vic Toews claims that anyone who objects to the government spying on them in Canada must be siding with paedophiles -- it's a spurious and disingenous attempt to insult the public into obedience. And the US employs that pathetic and shameful tactic ALL THE TIME in their so-called "negotiations" and policies on international trade and agreements.
After all, if you aren't running Government and ISP Supported Operating Systems, you MUST be infected.
So if you run Linux, BSD, or any other "fringe" OS that isn't supported, you get disconnected.
Right?
More to the point, such legislation to disconnect "infected" machines implies that there is some standard for a "clean machine". And you can BET that "clean machine" model is based on known, locked down, PROPRIETARY operating systems, not someone running their own mods for a Linux distribution.
"pseudo-religious"?
Repeating the FACT that they found a flaw in the equipment which PERFECTLY explains the one-of-a-kind results is "religious"?
Methinks anyone clinging to the fading hope that we've "proven" FTL is possible are the ones who are exhibiting signs of religious fervor despite all indications that they're wrong.
Heart palpitations in a healthy person are a full-scale heart-attack in someone with a heart defect.
They're just lucky no one huffing on these things has died yet. Even the manufacturer warns you about how easy it is to overdose with them.
Don't cling to false hopes when every subsequent test by the same facility and elsewhere has failed to repeat the results.
It was a bad cable.
Period.
No FTL yet.
If you don't have hardware acceleration baked into the drivers, you can kiss full-screen video playback good bye on older hardware. Even with NVidia's accelerated drivers on my aging P4 3.8GHz with 4G of fast RAM (purchased to allow for a CPU upgrade which hasn't happened yet), my box has a REAL tough time playing back a lot of video at 1600x1200 full screen resolution.
The latest "upgrade" for Flash is the worst culprit. Until this past week's upgrade, I could full-screen YouTube videos with no problem. With the "upgrade", I now get 2-3 frames per second being drawn in full-screen mode, so I can no longer watch videos properly.
Nothing changed in Ubuntu, the driver stack, nor my video hardware. So it's pretty clearly a software problem. (What??!?! A problem with Flash?!?!? Say it ain't so! That's NEVER happened before! :P :P :P)
Even with VLC, it wasn't until the latest version of the NVidia drivers that I could watch full screen video under Linux without tearing and dropped frames, which this EXACT SAME BOX had absolutely NO problems doing with a Windows XP OS and driver stack.
As to the USB mouse/trackball issue -- the problem is the upstream source post-10.04.1. I tried a number of Linux distributions over the course of a week, and all modern releases had the same problem: the "mouse" is not recognized AT ALL. Yet I've used this same device since the earliest days of Linux, around Red Hat 5.2 or 5.3 if I recall correctly. I mean, really, it's a freaking MOUSE!!! WTF can they POSSIBLY be doing in the kernel that a USB mouse stops working after over a decade of proper support? And it IS the kernel or the driver stack that is at fault, because the problem persists no matter which window manager I installed with the Linux versions I tried.
ITU standards are a bear to read, understand, and implement, I'll give you that.
But after that, we part ways.
The US has recently and repeatedly demonstrated that the neutrality of the internet is a thing of the past as the USG gives in to pressure from industry lobbyists who demand that sites be taken down on their say-so without any provisioning for due process. They even tried to LEGISLATE such behaviour because it was proving too difficult to comply with international law that requires the home nation's due process be respected before a company's website can be taken off line.
As inbred and outdated as many of the ITU administrators may be, they still do NOT have a history of taking kickbacks from unrelated industries as the US has been doing with SOPA, ACTA, and other bad legislation and policy that they're trying to shove down the world's throat on behalf of the media companies.
Both approaches are not "free" as the internet needs to be. But at least with the ITU I don't need to worry about a website being taken down because Disney, Sony, or some other media company is having a hissy fit.
Both Theora and VP8 were developed in the open, with source available.
MPEG-LA should have been approaching the developers when the patent violations were first found, so they could be licensed or the infringing code removed/rewritten.
Now that they're moving forward and taking a significant share of the market, MPEG-LA wants to rewrite history and claim patent infringement at this late date, now that there is money to be sued for.
Too bad.
As with a trademark, if you don't defend it in a timely fashion, you should lose your patent if you're not policing it's licensing and use BEFORE there is money to be made. Such an approach would ELIMINATE the infamous "submarine patent" so many trolls like to use, and save all KINDS of industries hundreds of millions if not billions in extortion fees.