That's less true than you think. Many times the original copyright holders cannot be found, or worse, you find multiple parties all asserting the same copyright (every grandchild thinks it is their personal gift from granddad). Although if you make a million bucks on something you can bet that delinquent rightsholder will suddenly appear out of the woodwork with lawyers in hand. Sometimes authors simply don't want you to use their works too and won't sell them for anything, although it's more common that they simply overvalue their own work and ask for way too much money.
Remember that copyright spans multiple generations over several decades. Lets say you want to build on an obscure work published in 1930 by a little known author. You can pore over public records to try to find living decendents, but chances are they have no clue about the copyright status of their great grandfather's works. Nobody has any documentation and the will doesn't mention it. You can't even find half of the people who might have a claim on it. You have nobody to pay, but the work was never released to the Public Domain, so it is effectively lost. You might think you can get away with just using it, but if one of those missing kids suddenly has some bills to pay, they're going to hire an East Texas lawyer and milk you for everything you've ever owned.
That's not the same thing. It's a physical exclusivity agreement and does not use Copyright law. They're restricting physical access to the works for 10 years, not a copyright. If you already had a copy of a document in their archive it will still be in the Public Domain and you can do whatever you want with it. I agree that it's a pretty shitty situation for the public, but it's not a case of copyright being reasserted ex post facto. At least it's only for a decade and they're going to digitize all of the works so they can be backed up indefinitely. I would have been happier if someone like Archive.org had gotten this project, but you can't win every time.
Even if the CCTV images aren't tampered, all you are going to know is that a guy in a mask broke into the machine a week ago. At best you can limit the number of people you have to issue new cards to. Ok, you can stop laughing. I know the company is just going to offer a few months of "credit monitoring" and not reissue the compromised cards or even tell the people affected. But it could happen. Someday. Maybe.
I would like to say that I'm shocked that they don't use Trusted Computing principles to build ATMs, but I'm not. This stuff is built by the lowest bidder and designed to be installed and maintained by low end wage slaves.
This isn't necessarily an inside job either. These guys could have stolen an ATM whole at any point and taken as long as they needed to reverse engineer the thing, dumping the old firmware directly from its internal storage and everything. A quick patch to the dumped firmware and they're off to the races. Of course if this thing were properly built all of the firmware would be encrypted and signed, but again, lowest bidder.
The scary thing is that electronic voting machines are built by the same companies, to the same level of security, and it's literally impossible to know if they have been compromised because we use secret ballots. Worse, the machines were designed not to be auditable after the fact. If you were trying to design a system that let an insider steal the vote, you would have a tough time coming up with something better.
For me, a hobbyist programmer is one that is developing outside of a rigid formal process, which is why people who develop small applications that solve specific problems that they aren't planning to sell get lumped in, even though they're technically getting paid for it. A non-hobby developer is someone who is planning to sell their finished code to someone else, and probably works on a team with a project manager and everything.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where mining HE3 on the moon is more economically viable than wind/solar/hydro. Well, maybe for powering settlements on the moon itself, but there's a chicken and egg problem there. Right now there is little incentive to setup permanent habitation on the Moon, and the only reason people can think of is to mine HE3 that would primarily go towards powering said moon settlements.
Maybe someday we'll need to build absolutely massive space structures and it will make sense to mine the moon for raw materials to save on launch costs (especially if you're using nuclear rockets that would be politically impossible on Earth), but humanity is nowhere near undertaking this kind of project, and I fully expect it to be a pipe dream for my entire lifetime.
It's statistics. Garage fires are not uncommon, and Ford has manufactured a lot of Mustangs since 2007. The two are pretty much guaranteed to meet at some point.
I guarantee you that at least one modern generation Mustang has been destroyed in a garage fire. Heck, it might have even caused it (there are certainly ways for gasoline engines to catch on fire after they are parked), but it's not really news. You wouldn't have heard about it except maybe on page 37 of section D of the local paper where it goes "home damaged by fire" in the police report section.
I know you're joking, but time off is something NASA takes very seriously. It didn't used to be this way, they used to work Astronauts to the bone for exactly the reason you mentioned, but after a semi-revolt on one mission they changed the policy to insure that the astronauts get enough rest.
The problem is: What's safer? Certainly not the stock market. The Euro has been getting hammered for a long time now, as has the Yen. China (partially) pegs their currency to the dollar. Corporate bonds are fairly safe, but you can never be sure that you're not investing in another Enron or Washington Mutual. Even if you find a nice stable country to invest in (Canada?), it's economy is going to be way too small to absorb everything the US does.
Of course UEFI is a lot more complex and powerful, so owning it gives even more control over a machine and there are a lot more opportunities for security problems with it. Of course BIOS was built in a time before PCs understood the concept of security, so it's probably an improvement nonetheless.
CFLs really suck. I've tried quite a few different brands, and have tried to like them, but they just seem to have some flaws that can't be fixed. First, and most annoyingly, none of them come on immediately - they start out extremely dim when the switch is flicked, and take 30 seconds to a minute to completely warm up. Secondly, no CFLs made in the past five years come anywhere close to meeting their life expectancy – most of them burn out faster than incandescent bulbs. (I have a couple of old CFLs in a tableside lamp that are still going strong after nearly 10 years, but once the production lines switched to China, quality went to complete crap.)
This is not my experience at all. I have CFLs all throughout my house and they come one with full or nearly full light the instant I flip the switch. You can't even tell they are CFLs unless you look directly at the bulb. When I first started out I experimented and found a bunch of really bad bulbs that had bad color, flicker, long warmup times, and many of them died in the crib. This was the bad old days when they were new and the price had suddenly plummeted thanks to some new factories in China opening up that didn't really know what they were doing. I eventually found a brand with good performance (Commercial Electric) that I used to replace every regular bulb in the house. That was almost 8 years ago now, and I have not had to replace one yet. I'm actually missing out on the LED bulb revolution because my old CFLs refuse to die.
Yeah, it's exactly the same business model. Gather IP addresses from a porn sight, then send mass requests to the ISPs to get their home addresses, then send them extortion letters. In the US we had some judges that were less than friendly to being a pawn in an extortion racket, and now Prenda is in a tremendous amount of hot water. Hopefully the German judge has a similar reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
50 page monologues are what make the book unreadable. The terrible characterization is just a cherry on top.
That's less true than you think. Many times the original copyright holders cannot be found, or worse, you find multiple parties all asserting the same copyright (every grandchild thinks it is their personal gift from granddad). Although if you make a million bucks on something you can bet that delinquent rightsholder will suddenly appear out of the woodwork with lawyers in hand. Sometimes authors simply don't want you to use their works too and won't sell them for anything, although it's more common that they simply overvalue their own work and ask for way too much money.
Remember that copyright spans multiple generations over several decades. Lets say you want to build on an obscure work published in 1930 by a little known author. You can pore over public records to try to find living decendents, but chances are they have no clue about the copyright status of their great grandfather's works. Nobody has any documentation and the will doesn't mention it. You can't even find half of the people who might have a claim on it. You have nobody to pay, but the work was never released to the Public Domain, so it is effectively lost. You might think you can get away with just using it, but if one of those missing kids suddenly has some bills to pay, they're going to hire an East Texas lawyer and milk you for everything you've ever owned.
Yes, we must leave this to the professional film makers who absolutely did not release two nearly unwatchable Atlas Shrugged movies already...
That's not the same thing. It's a physical exclusivity agreement and does not use Copyright law. They're restricting physical access to the works for 10 years, not a copyright. If you already had a copy of a document in their archive it will still be in the Public Domain and you can do whatever you want with it. I agree that it's a pretty shitty situation for the public, but it's not a case of copyright being reasserted ex post facto. At least it's only for a decade and they're going to digitize all of the works so they can be backed up indefinitely. I would have been happier if someone like Archive.org had gotten this project, but you can't win every time.
Especially heart disease.
Even if the CCTV images aren't tampered, all you are going to know is that a guy in a mask broke into the machine a week ago. At best you can limit the number of people you have to issue new cards to. Ok, you can stop laughing. I know the company is just going to offer a few months of "credit monitoring" and not reissue the compromised cards or even tell the people affected. But it could happen. Someday. Maybe.
I would like to say that I'm shocked that they don't use Trusted Computing principles to build ATMs, but I'm not. This stuff is built by the lowest bidder and designed to be installed and maintained by low end wage slaves.
This isn't necessarily an inside job either. These guys could have stolen an ATM whole at any point and taken as long as they needed to reverse engineer the thing, dumping the old firmware directly from its internal storage and everything. A quick patch to the dumped firmware and they're off to the races. Of course if this thing were properly built all of the firmware would be encrypted and signed, but again, lowest bidder.
The scary thing is that electronic voting machines are built by the same companies, to the same level of security, and it's literally impossible to know if they have been compromised because we use secret ballots. Worse, the machines were designed not to be auditable after the fact. If you were trying to design a system that let an insider steal the vote, you would have a tough time coming up with something better.
I can't see how it would be any worse off than any other sparsely populated state. Do we wring our hands over New Mexico or North Dakota?
For me, a hobbyist programmer is one that is developing outside of a rigid formal process, which is why people who develop small applications that solve specific problems that they aren't planning to sell get lumped in, even though they're technically getting paid for it. A non-hobby developer is someone who is planning to sell their finished code to someone else, and probably works on a team with a project manager and everything.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where mining HE3 on the moon is more economically viable than wind/solar/hydro. Well, maybe for powering settlements on the moon itself, but there's a chicken and egg problem there. Right now there is little incentive to setup permanent habitation on the Moon, and the only reason people can think of is to mine HE3 that would primarily go towards powering said moon settlements.
Maybe someday we'll need to build absolutely massive space structures and it will make sense to mine the moon for raw materials to save on launch costs (especially if you're using nuclear rockets that would be politically impossible on Earth), but humanity is nowhere near undertaking this kind of project, and I fully expect it to be a pipe dream for my entire lifetime.
It's statistics. Garage fires are not uncommon, and Ford has manufactured a lot of Mustangs since 2007. The two are pretty much guaranteed to meet at some point.
I guarantee you that at least one modern generation Mustang has been destroyed in a garage fire. Heck, it might have even caused it (there are certainly ways for gasoline engines to catch on fire after they are parked), but it's not really news. You wouldn't have heard about it except maybe on page 37 of section D of the local paper where it goes "home damaged by fire" in the police report section.
Dude, punchcards.
I imagine an ENIAC would need hundreds of years to verify the blockchain by now.
The old fashioned police work in this case involved the cops asking him "Did you do it?" and him going "Yes".
I know you're joking, but time off is something NASA takes very seriously. It didn't used to be this way, they used to work Astronauts to the bone for exactly the reason you mentioned, but after a semi-revolt on one mission they changed the policy to insure that the astronauts get enough rest.
The problem is: What's safer? Certainly not the stock market. The Euro has been getting hammered for a long time now, as has the Yen. China (partially) pegs their currency to the dollar. Corporate bonds are fairly safe, but you can never be sure that you're not investing in another Enron or Washington Mutual. Even if you find a nice stable country to invest in (Canada?), it's economy is going to be way too small to absorb everything the US does.
They're probably waiting a couple more years before surfacing and suing Apple for a Billion dollars.
I don't know, 1.2 trillion dollars still sounds like a lot of debt to me.
Of course UEFI is a lot more complex and powerful, so owning it gives even more control over a machine and there are a lot more opportunities for security problems with it. Of course BIOS was built in a time before PCs understood the concept of security, so it's probably an improvement nonetheless.
You probably won't notice the rain distortion so much if your windshield always makes the world look like a softcore porn shoot.
Not even at $1000?
Or maybe the Bilderberg group. Whee, it's fun to pull guesses right out of my butt while presenting absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
This is not my experience at all. I have CFLs all throughout my house and they come one with full or nearly full light the instant I flip the switch. You can't even tell they are CFLs unless you look directly at the bulb. When I first started out I experimented and found a bunch of really bad bulbs that had bad color, flicker, long warmup times, and many of them died in the crib. This was the bad old days when they were new and the price had suddenly plummeted thanks to some new factories in China opening up that didn't really know what they were doing. I eventually found a brand with good performance (Commercial Electric) that I used to replace every regular bulb in the house. That was almost 8 years ago now, and I have not had to replace one yet. I'm actually missing out on the LED bulb revolution because my old CFLs refuse to die.
Yep, but you gloss over the fact that you have to replace those bulbs 10 times as often.
Yeah, it's exactly the same business model. Gather IP addresses from a porn sight, then send mass requests to the ISPs to get their home addresses, then send them extortion letters. In the US we had some judges that were less than friendly to being a pawn in an extortion racket, and now Prenda is in a tremendous amount of hot water. Hopefully the German judge has a similar reaction.