Wasn't it said a while back that a plain photograph of a public domain image automatically goes into public domain, unless it can be proven that the photograph is, in some way, unique? It sets a scary precedent if not.
Imagine being able to rescue your about-to-expire work of video/audio/music by re-recording it and calling it new? The base film would never be allowed to hit public domain because they could just sue anyone that uploads it, claiming that it's a re-recorded version with copyright.
Perfect privacy is impossible unless you never come into civilization. Detective work, for the longest time, has been about defeating privacy.
Example: You go AWOL because you didn't want to get sent to (insert next big US deployment) to die in the miserable conditions against an enemy that you don't have permission to shoot. You know they'll come and haul you to jail for many years, so you simply don't get a phone. The military calls your house, and of course, your roomie/parents/etc say that they haven't seen you, and act shocked. Then they call the neighbor and ask if they've seen you. Yeah, they say, you went out to get the paper, and were looking all sneaky about it.
Example #2: You're wanted for multiple felonies in one state, so you move to some random state, like Montana. The sheriff doesn't even have to know how to add to put 2 and 2 together when s/he gets a buzz from another police station telling them to be on the look out for a new guy trying to hide from the law, because he already had his eye on you and wondered why you moved into an old abandoned house anyway.
Thing is, perfect privacy is impossible. Your life will be seen by many people from many different angles, and all it takes is being memorable to one of those people.
Yes, but most cars don't require a NRC license to own/operate/sell.
Under current NRC rules, you could be held responsible if you sell the car and:
The new owner wrecks it, causing contamination. The new owner takes it apart and manufactures nuclear weapons and/or contamination-based weapons. The new owner sells it to people who do the above. The new owner gets rid of the car by driving it off the local dock or into the local rock quarry.
Because they want people to think they're on top. Unfortunately, the general population still believes that patents reward actual innovation and ingenuity, when actually they reward people that patent general ideas that can be used against the entire industry to kill innovation and make millions of dollars in royalties.
tl;dr: Patents are to make money rather than to protect unique ideas.
Wasn't this the same kid that claimed he could play video games through sound alone?
If not, I at least remember one kid playing SNES on the news who was 'completely blind' and clicking at a TV screen. I wanted to kick the news reporter for being a fool and getting trolled.
Most of earth's problems could be solved by having plentiful, cheap, easy, nearly-free energy. Not enough food? Grow-lights and mineral plants could fix that. Not enough fresh water? Purifiers would be easy to build as-needed along the coast. Not enough diamonds? Plenty of robots to mine them for you.
It's just that no one really diagnosed it before the 1900s.
Now every time a toddler babbles or talks to themselves, their parents think they have autism and demand that their doctor do something about it. Parents can be very convincing and many have resorted to lawyers to prove that they know more than the medical community.
In contrast, a lot of psychs and doctors are more educated in things like autism, so they're more likely to find and diagnose real cases.
I don't think that autism has gone up disproportionally.
The cyclists have every right to be on the road where it isn't specifically prohibited. The motorists have the same right.
However, it's just not right to intentionally block traffic just because you can legally be on the road. Technically I could walk in the middle of a lane if I wanted to, most areas don't have laws preventing that. Not to say that a cop wouldn't tell me to knock it off when they saw me, but if a car hit me for whatever reason, it would automatically be their fault and I would get a huge settlement out of it.
If traffic laws were enforced on bicyclers as well, there wouldn't be much of an issue. Those bikers would be guilty of creating a dangerous situation or obstructing the flow of traffic. Likewise, jackasses in cars that open their doors to try to hassle the riders could be arrested for the same reason.
So, the next step in evolution is to be inept-by-default at communication?
One of the reasons we're so advanced?
I agree that some social customs are way too complex, and that people need to be more forthcoming in general, but those are more personal flaws than flaws with society.
Let us say that your bank account were drained by said trojan. You look it up on an uninfected machine and see that all your money was just transferred to say, Zaire. You call your bank, bitch, moan, and you have your money back. Said account in Zaire is banned from all transfers by that bank.
That's standard practice for fraud transfers.
Now, lets say instead, that your bank account was only short a dollar.
One single dollar.
Would you notice?
Alright, if you noticed, do you think the people you work with would notice? All of them? What about one in ten, out of say, a thousand people?
By the time you figure this out, the attackers in Zaire have already made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Good luck getting the Bank of Zaire, or the police force in Zaire to get your money back. Most likely it has been converted into a big house and a few cars.
I would rather it take actual effort to vote. That includes driving out to a centralized location, with other people, etc.
Because its much easier to get dumb people all riled up to vote one way if all they have to do is click a mouse button. Whereas they have to take action and maybe an hour of their day to go and vote the current way.
Some things require very expensive materials, and some things require very expensive skills to work. Example being diamonds, gold, platinum, etc.
Some things require very expensive skills, but almost no tangible material. Some things require very expensive materials, but almost no tangible skill. Example, writing a novel. And another example, driving a Lexus.
If someone were to steal the electricity and computer-hours to write a novel on your computer, but didn't steal it from you, you would not be entitled to own the rights to the novel. Similarly, if someone stole your car and then used it to make pizza deliveries, you wouldn't be granted the income from the deliveries.
If Nintendo wanted, they could sue the contractor for millions and millions and millions since they violated the contract Nintendo set forth. Also, the contractor could sue the subcontractor for the same reason.
Sure, Nintendo catches some flak for this. I don't blame the people for giving them said flak, but the real blame is on the actual contractor or subcontractor that decided to use GPL'd code without following the terms of the license. Seems like Nintendo is handling it pretty well, though, all thing's considered.
Now for a car analogy.
If I ask my local do-it-all car repair shop to install a new engine for me, they may contract it out to a more equipped shop that they use for that kind of thing. Now if the contractor misses a step in the process and my car is totaled as a result, most likely what would happen is the insurance company covering the original shop will pay up and then sue the insurance company of the contractor, who will be forced to pay that amount and then some. I personally wouldn't blame the original shop for contracting it out, sometimes its necessary. But I would expect them to be forthcoming and helpful in resolving the issue.
Perhaps they should realize they already sold 'ringtone rights' and that the very term 'ringtone' denotes a public performance in their eyes..you can't tell someone they need x license to do y, but then say that x license is invalid for the purposes of y.
Still, there should be no commercial business in the USA where the threat of racism-induced violence is so great that you should be afraid to go to those places. You usually only see hate crimes being prosecuted against white people, but I'd like to see any kind of cross-racial violence in one of 'these' areas prosecuted as a hate crime as well, since that's what racism-induced violence falls under.
I can almost guarantee that $80,000 is less than they've actually spent on those songs. So when does the 'right to sue for damages' turn into the 'right to sue for profit'?
I doubt most people working in cell phone stores have any idea why their phones are crippled.
They're there to sell FEATURES, not limitations. They don't say that this phone can't be tethered to your computer, they sell you an unlimited data plan (phone only) and a tethering cable. Then they cackle with glee when they see that $.75/kilobit charge on your bill to the tune of $750.00. Should have read the contract, eh?
At any rate, you COULD use bluetooth to upload pictures or download ringtones from your computer to your phone, but its been disabled in the firmware. Also, you COULD use that built-in GPS with Google Maps to see where you're at, but that's disabled too unless you subscribe to whatever GPS mapping software they're getting kickbacks from this year.
The whole market is a perfect example of what would happen if 'trusted computing' ever took off. There would be no more of this "I didn't like the drivers so I installed hacked ones" or "Hey my nVidia card is a higher model that's been flashed to be a lower model, let me reflash that so it can be awesome again"
The companies that got 'hacked' should get a serious talking to by the anti-terrorism folks. After all, they played a part in terrorism (or at least, what is called terrorism, who knows what it really funded?), and should be punished!
Not changing default passwords is literally begging for trouble.
While I respect your opinion as a teacher who has more experience than I do in teaching (I never have, beyond random tutoring sessions), I still think not allowing students to use calculators is pretty much wasting everyone's time.
There's no point in the future that they're going to need to use any higher math when they don't have a calculator. If they do, its to convince the people they're trapped on an island with that they can do higher math without a calculator.
In my opinion, a better teaching experience would be to teach them the steps to it, then show them how to do it on a calculator. Teach them why it works. Teach them the method behind the madness of each step. If they want to learn more, delve deeper, get a real hands-on feel for it, fine. Let them. If they want to get their homework/studying done so they can go to work or hang out at a party, that's fine too.
Lets say that a store is selling a rake for $30. A rake of decent quality and material. However, the Rake Association has put a GPS device into every rake, so that you have to calibrate it when you get it home, so you can't use it in a neighbor's yard, and everyone has to buy this rake. You pay an extra $100 fee for this GPS device.
Now lets say that someone found out how easy it was to make these rakes, because they found the schematics. Your friend takes you to the place where he made his rake, and you make your rake based from said schematics.
This is a free market economy at its finest. Priced reasonably, without restrictions, most people I would say would buy the rake and not go through the trouble to make their own.
Its not uncommon by any stretch to have something seized or impounded, only to find that the responsible organization can no longer find it. You can threaten them with legal action, but then you have to prove the following:
A: That you owned said item. B: That you had said item with you at the time of seizure. C: That said item was seized. D: That said item wasn't returned.
Its pretty fucking hard to prove all of those things. You better have receipts/statements showing you had it, some kind of 'proof' of seizure with time/date and signed by someone, and certified mail saying that they were unable to find your item. If you're missing any of that, don't hold your breath when trying to get things back.
Remember how long it took for them to figure out that Detroit was keeping whichever impounded cars they wanted, by saying they didn't have it? Remember how many people got their cars back after the fact?
Actually if you take active measures to circumvent filters, firewalls, and other anti-porn software at work, I'd expect no less than for you to be shitcanned. After all, if they're willing to take such extreme measures to look at porn, they're willing to risk the safety and security of the company so they can look at some porn.
I've refused to sign NDA's before for this reason.
It takes me a while to read 40 pages, and I'm a fast reader. Especially 40 pages of olde-English legalese and latin terms.
Both times I've refused, the people asking me to sign it had no clue as to why I wouldn't sit there and read the whole damn thing while they were staring at me and waiting. I told them if they were serious, they'd give me an NDA that I could read while sitting there.
In both instances they gave me a concise version. There's simply no reason to have an NDA bigger than 5 pages.
I propose that if someone is stupid enough to take their computer in to get something installed when they have child porn out on their desktop, then they deserve to get hauled to court and beaten with the legal system.
However, if they've HIDDEN it on their system, then it can NOT be used in court.
My reasoning is that people are allowed to report crimes in your house if they see them during their normal duties. However, if the plumber goes into the attic on a whim and finds drugs, then its going to get suppressed by the court because they had NO REASON for being there. Because back in the day, police might command those people to find those things, and then 'call in a tip'
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't it said a while back that a plain photograph of a public domain image automatically goes into public domain, unless it can be proven that the photograph is, in some way, unique? It sets a scary precedent if not.
Imagine being able to rescue your about-to-expire work of video/audio/music by re-recording it and calling it new? The base film would never be allowed to hit public domain because they could just sue anyone that uploads it, claiming that it's a re-recorded version with copyright.
Children throw tantrums and do irrational things to defend their viewpoints as well.
Perfect privacy is impossible unless you never come into civilization. Detective work, for the longest time, has been about defeating privacy.
Example: You go AWOL because you didn't want to get sent to (insert next big US deployment) to die in the miserable conditions against an enemy that you don't have permission to shoot. You know they'll come and haul you to jail for many years, so you simply don't get a phone. The military calls your house, and of course, your roomie/parents/etc say that they haven't seen you, and act shocked. Then they call the neighbor and ask if they've seen you. Yeah, they say, you went out to get the paper, and were looking all sneaky about it.
Example #2: You're wanted for multiple felonies in one state, so you move to some random state, like Montana. The sheriff doesn't even have to know how to add to put 2 and 2 together when s/he gets a buzz from another police station telling them to be on the look out for a new guy trying to hide from the law, because he already had his eye on you and wondered why you moved into an old abandoned house anyway.
Thing is, perfect privacy is impossible. Your life will be seen by many people from many different angles, and all it takes is being memorable to one of those people.
Yes, but most cars don't require a NRC license to own/operate/sell.
Under current NRC rules, you could be held responsible if you sell the car and:
The new owner wrecks it, causing contamination.
The new owner takes it apart and manufactures nuclear weapons and/or contamination-based weapons.
The new owner sells it to people who do the above.
The new owner gets rid of the car by driving it off the local dock or into the local rock quarry.
Because they want people to think they're on top. Unfortunately, the general population still believes that patents reward actual innovation and ingenuity, when actually they reward people that patent general ideas that can be used against the entire industry to kill innovation and make millions of dollars in royalties.
tl;dr: Patents are to make money rather than to protect unique ideas.
Wasn't this the same kid that claimed he could play video games through sound alone?
If not, I at least remember one kid playing SNES on the news who was 'completely blind' and clicking at a TV screen. I wanted to kick the news reporter for being a fool and getting trolled.
Practical and cost effective?
Yes.
Most of earth's problems could be solved by having plentiful, cheap, easy, nearly-free energy. Not enough food? Grow-lights and mineral plants could fix that. Not enough fresh water? Purifiers would be easy to build as-needed along the coast. Not enough diamonds? Plenty of robots to mine them for you.
Autism has been around for a long, long time.
It's just that no one really diagnosed it before the 1900s.
Now every time a toddler babbles or talks to themselves, their parents think they have autism and demand that their doctor do something about it. Parents can be very convincing and many have resorted to lawyers to prove that they know more than the medical community.
In contrast, a lot of psychs and doctors are more educated in things like autism, so they're more likely to find and diagnose real cases.
I don't think that autism has gone up disproportionally.
I understand logic from both sides.
The cyclists have every right to be on the road where it isn't specifically prohibited. The motorists have the same right.
However, it's just not right to intentionally block traffic just because you can legally be on the road. Technically I could walk in the middle of a lane if I wanted to, most areas don't have laws preventing that. Not to say that a cop wouldn't tell me to knock it off when they saw me, but if a car hit me for whatever reason, it would automatically be their fault and I would get a huge settlement out of it.
If traffic laws were enforced on bicyclers as well, there wouldn't be much of an issue. Those bikers would be guilty of creating a dangerous situation or obstructing the flow of traffic. Likewise, jackasses in cars that open their doors to try to hassle the riders could be arrested for the same reason.
So, the next step in evolution is to be inept-by-default at communication? One of the reasons we're so advanced? I agree that some social customs are way too complex, and that people need to be more forthcoming in general, but those are more personal flaws than flaws with society.
Let us say that your bank account were drained by said trojan. You look it up on an uninfected machine and see that all your money was just transferred to say, Zaire. You call your bank, bitch, moan, and you have your money back. Said account in Zaire is banned from all transfers by that bank.
That's standard practice for fraud transfers.
Now, lets say instead, that your bank account was only short a dollar.
One single dollar.
Would you notice?
Alright, if you noticed, do you think the people you work with would notice? All of them? What about one in ten, out of say, a thousand people?
By the time you figure this out, the attackers in Zaire have already made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Good luck getting the Bank of Zaire, or the police force in Zaire to get your money back. Most likely it has been converted into a big house and a few cars.
I would rather it take actual effort to vote. That includes driving out to a centralized location, with other people, etc.
Because its much easier to get dumb people all riled up to vote one way if all they have to do is click a mouse button. Whereas they have to take action and maybe an hour of their day to go and vote the current way.
Actually, you're wrong in some cases.
Some things require very expensive materials, and some things require very expensive skills to work. Example being diamonds, gold, platinum, etc.
Some things require very expensive skills, but almost no tangible material. Some things require very expensive materials, but almost no tangible skill. Example, writing a novel. And another example, driving a Lexus.
If someone were to steal the electricity and computer-hours to write a novel on your computer, but didn't steal it from you, you would not be entitled to own the rights to the novel. Similarly, if someone stole your car and then used it to make pizza deliveries, you wouldn't be granted the income from the deliveries.
Risk?
If Nintendo wanted, they could sue the contractor for millions and millions and millions since they violated the contract Nintendo set forth. Also, the contractor could sue the subcontractor for the same reason.
Sure, Nintendo catches some flak for this. I don't blame the people for giving them said flak, but the real blame is on the actual contractor or subcontractor that decided to use GPL'd code without following the terms of the license. Seems like Nintendo is handling it pretty well, though, all thing's considered.
Now for a car analogy.
If I ask my local do-it-all car repair shop to install a new engine for me, they may contract it out to a more equipped shop that they use for that kind of thing. Now if the contractor misses a step in the process and my car is totaled as a result, most likely what would happen is the insurance company covering the original shop will pay up and then sue the insurance company of the contractor, who will be forced to pay that amount and then some. I personally wouldn't blame the original shop for contracting it out, sometimes its necessary. But I would expect them to be forthcoming and helpful in resolving the issue.
Perhaps they should realize they already sold 'ringtone rights' and that the very term 'ringtone' denotes a public performance in their eyes..you can't tell someone they need x license to do y, but then say that x license is invalid for the purposes of y.
Still, there should be no commercial business in the USA where the threat of racism-induced violence is so great that you should be afraid to go to those places. You usually only see hate crimes being prosecuted against white people, but I'd like to see any kind of cross-racial violence in one of 'these' areas prosecuted as a hate crime as well, since that's what racism-induced violence falls under.
I can almost guarantee that $80,000 is less than they've actually spent on those songs. So when does the 'right to sue for damages' turn into the 'right to sue for profit'?
I doubt most people working in cell phone stores have any idea why their phones are crippled.
They're there to sell FEATURES, not limitations. They don't say that this phone can't be tethered to your computer, they sell you an unlimited data plan (phone only) and a tethering cable. Then they cackle with glee when they see that $.75/kilobit charge on your bill to the tune of $750.00. Should have read the contract, eh?
At any rate, you COULD use bluetooth to upload pictures or download ringtones from your computer to your phone, but its been disabled in the firmware. Also, you COULD use that built-in GPS with Google Maps to see where you're at, but that's disabled too unless you subscribe to whatever GPS mapping software they're getting kickbacks from this year.
The whole market is a perfect example of what would happen if 'trusted computing' ever took off. There would be no more of this "I didn't like the drivers so I installed hacked ones" or "Hey my nVidia card is a higher model that's been flashed to be a lower model, let me reflash that so it can be awesome again"
The companies that got 'hacked' should get a serious talking to by the anti-terrorism folks. After all, they played a part in terrorism (or at least, what is called terrorism, who knows what it really funded?), and should be punished!
Not changing default passwords is literally begging for trouble.
While I respect your opinion as a teacher who has more experience than I do in teaching (I never have, beyond random tutoring sessions), I still think not allowing students to use calculators is pretty much wasting everyone's time.
There's no point in the future that they're going to need to use any higher math when they don't have a calculator. If they do, its to convince the people they're trapped on an island with that they can do higher math without a calculator.
In my opinion, a better teaching experience would be to teach them the steps to it, then show them how to do it on a calculator. Teach them why it works. Teach them the method behind the madness of each step. If they want to learn more, delve deeper, get a real hands-on feel for it, fine. Let them. If they want to get their homework/studying done so they can go to work or hang out at a party, that's fine too.
Lets say that a store is selling a rake for $30. A rake of decent quality and material. However, the Rake Association has put a GPS device into every rake, so that you have to calibrate it when you get it home, so you can't use it in a neighbor's yard, and everyone has to buy this rake. You pay an extra $100 fee for this GPS device.
Now lets say that someone found out how easy it was to make these rakes, because they found the schematics. Your friend takes you to the place where he made his rake, and you make your rake based from said schematics.
This is a free market economy at its finest. Priced reasonably, without restrictions, most people I would say would buy the rake and not go through the trouble to make their own.
You say this like its a joke.
Its not uncommon by any stretch to have something seized or impounded, only to find that the responsible organization can no longer find it. You can threaten them with legal action, but then you have to prove the following:
A: That you owned said item.
B: That you had said item with you at the time of seizure.
C: That said item was seized.
D: That said item wasn't returned.
Its pretty fucking hard to prove all of those things. You better have receipts/statements showing you had it, some kind of 'proof' of seizure with time/date and signed by someone, and certified mail saying that they were unable to find your item. If you're missing any of that, don't hold your breath when trying to get things back.
Remember how long it took for them to figure out that Detroit was keeping whichever impounded cars they wanted, by saying they didn't have it? Remember how many people got their cars back after the fact?
Actually if you take active measures to circumvent filters, firewalls, and other anti-porn software at work, I'd expect no less than for you to be shitcanned. After all, if they're willing to take such extreme measures to look at porn, they're willing to risk the safety and security of the company so they can look at some porn.
I've refused to sign NDA's before for this reason.
It takes me a while to read 40 pages, and I'm a fast reader. Especially 40 pages of olde-English legalese and latin terms.
Both times I've refused, the people asking me to sign it had no clue as to why I wouldn't sit there and read the whole damn thing while they were staring at me and waiting. I told them if they were serious, they'd give me an NDA that I could read while sitting there.
In both instances they gave me a concise version. There's simply no reason to have an NDA bigger than 5 pages.
I propose that if someone is stupid enough to take their computer in to get something installed when they have child porn out on their desktop, then they deserve to get hauled to court and beaten with the legal system.
However, if they've HIDDEN it on their system, then it can NOT be used in court.
My reasoning is that people are allowed to report crimes in your house if they see them during their normal duties. However, if the plumber goes into the attic on a whim and finds drugs, then its going to get suppressed by the court because they had NO REASON for being there. Because back in the day, police might command those people to find those things, and then 'call in a tip'