A good quote on this topic when they were discussing blowing up an asteroid instead of diverting it, "and so turn one dangerousl falling object into many?" I wonder which would really cause more damage... assuming you could not actually cause any part of such an asteroid to miss the earth, would it be better to break it up into say, 100 smaller pieces instead of letting it hit intact? This is assuming you don't know where it's going to hit, and they probably would. Would you prefer to be shot with a.45 or a shotgun?
One "single hit" scenario to consider is whether hittting water or hitting land is worse. I'm going to guess land is worse since you get a huge amount of particulate matter thrown into the air on a land impact. Either way you're probably getting a volcano and those are never good in populated places and would likely make a mess of the global climate for some time.
If they are interested in diverting the asteroid instead of breaking it up, (not much point in busting it into 100 pieces if they are all still on target for earth) wouldn't it be better to blow up the nukes on one side of the asteroid, such that it was pushed to a side? I don't know the physics involved with a nuclear explosion in space, usually you are dealing with the "every action requires an equal an opposite reaction", and since there are not two asteroids, one to "push off from", how much good does a nuke do on the side of the asteroid, to get it to move? I suppose the idean scenario then might be to put the nuke in the middle and pray there is a very weak fault line right down the midle of it, and blow it up right when the two halves are left and right of earth trajectory, and hope to get a nice 7-10 split on it.
Even if the rate is unacceptably high for automated use, it could prove very helpful.
Imagine someone coming in to get a license, gets his picture taken, and while he waits for the license to be printed and laminated, the system searches its database. It produces the 10 closest matches it can find, and presents them to the DMV worker. The worker then visually compares the ten images with the actual person sitting in the waiting area. It's not necessary for the system to make the decision, only to make it easier for the people to make the call. You can't expect the DMV people to remember 10,000 faces, but it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to try to identify one face in a group of 10. Then the false positive rate count is handed to the DMV staff.
A process like this should have a very high hit rate, a very low false positive rate, and assuming the sofware is reasonalby fast, would not impact service. It would be almost totally transparent to the public. Sounds like a very good idea.
One poster raises the point that the employee was working from home and that's why he had the data off site. I find that hard to believe for a bank to have people that "work from home". I still want to know what he was doing with the laptop full of personal information outside the walls of that bank in the first place.
Yes, access to the data is completely understandable. On company computers. On site. In a room out of sight of customers. But if you're out sitting at a keosk eating your lunch while browsing financial transaction records on your laptop, I don't care if you're doing your job, you are a risk.
If you think that's reasonable, then imagine a jewelwry store employee sitting next to you at the keosk. He's doing a pre-evaluation of a new collection to be sold next week at auction, about $350,000 worth of diamond and emerald pieces in a complete set. Wouldn't you ask yourself, what the heck is he DOING with that, HERE? Isn't that an incredible risk?
Suuure, jewelwry we can see the value of, and if he gets mugged, ouch, company's out 350 large ones. Lord knows they will never let that happen and he'd get his knuckles broke when he came back to the office if they ever found out he took the goods out of the safe.
But customer information. Big deal. Stolen? Do we really care? Are we out merchandise? Fined? OK maybe sued but we have 8 lawyers on retainer so that's not going anywhere this century. The only difference is who gets hurt. Hurt the company, and omigod protect it, pull out all the stops, we want automated turrets and a pit bull. Hurt the customer's privacy or credit rating, owell we got some customer ill-will but no biggie, life goes on. Just a calculated risk, too expensive, the return on investment for adding security there is just not worth it.
Go tell your boss tomorrow that you'd like to take home a copy of your bank's financial records to do some analysis on. (encrypted even) See how far he throws your can out of the office.
What does any employee of that bank need with the entire customer database? If he is doing work, he should be doing it at work not at home.
How many of this business's employees have full access to the entire customer database with account numbers?
Is it company policy to allow empoyees to take business records home at all? Or for that matter, is it even within company policy to bring your own personal laptop into the building?
So, what policies were broken, what policies are being changed, and what's not going to be fixed so that it just happens again?
Putting aside for a moment that "format shifting" hasn't really been tested yet in court, the end-user is not the one doing the copying here. It's hard to argue "fair use" when someone is making money by making a copy... that's the whole point of copyright.
I don't agree with that interpretation of copyright. Copyright exists to encourage creative development by guaranteeing the creator a reasonable period of time where they can have the exclusive ability to produce (and sell) a specific kind of content. (it grants the creator a "limited monopoly" on their creation) The company that is doing the format shifting is not benefiting from having a copy of the work, and the consumer has already paid the creator for his work. The only possible lost revenue is if the riaa was offering the same service or if it was impacting the sales of their product. They are not offering the service, and it is arguably increasing the benefits from their limited monopoly.
What stumps me here is "why?" Why are they doing this? It costs them money and ill-will (which at this point I think they have so much negative karma that a little more really doesn't matter anymore) and I don't see what's in it for them. The iPod is designed to make it difficult to copy content off from it, so the odds of someone swapping tracks on their ipod with a friend is fairly remote. There must be either a paranoid dellusional in authority there or there is a classified pie chart somewhere that say that this will nick off 2% of their proffits due to some complex market dependency.
The RIAA is not doing this because it's illegal. They could care less what's legal and what's not from morality's sake. They have a reason they don't want customers to do it, and they are using the DMCA as a tool to try to make the world behave the way they want them to. Having a law that could cover it just makes this job easier. This is what makes general laws like DMCA so dangerous. The people sponsoring them say it's necessary to make a very broad law so that it covers the largest percentage of offenders they are after, and try to make us believe that the law will be "properly interpreted" such that no innocents (people that "were not meant to be included") will not be harmed. But history shows that in 100% of those cases, there are abuses and they generally go unchecked because after all, they've made it legal. Copyright, seizure laws, and a really fun one, "enemy combatant". They all force us to surrender our rights and fredoms in the name of protecting our rights and our fredoms. What a scam.
The big problem with that is the chemicals that are used in electronics. There is a large business abroad in the poorer countries where places like Dell drop off cubic acres of computers in a pile and let the locals deal with them. (I'm not sure if the companies are paying for the privlege of dumping or getting paid TO dump...) Then you get these small towns of dirt poor people that tear the stuff apart, sort out the metal and what they can, and then they burn the circuit boards.
Yes, burn. These are the boards with PCBs and mercury and formeldahyde among other things in them. Goes right up in smoke. They do this to work out the gold and silver from the boards. The last thing you want to do with chemicals like this is burn them. A common electronic component, the capacitor, is a tightly wrapped combination of plastic, aluminum, paper, copper, rubber, and steel, along with an electrolyte, and there are dozens of them on any motherboard. You get nasty gasses when you burn the plasic, rubber, or the electrolyte. But how do you intend to separate them short of burning? It would take me a good 5 minutes to disassemble a 20 cent capacitor - at that rate it would cost a lot more to recycle it than to manufacture it.
Components like that can't be cheaply and safely recyled. The only practical system I've seen was a furnace that got so hot it broke down the PCBs, and those don't come cheap. In cases like that there is little proffit (or even loss) in the money spent vs the value of what is reclaimed.
There is no way to prove conclusively that a deity or deities exist or do not.
Actually for the most part there is. The reason it does not appear this way is that, if you create a god that can be tested for, since there isn't a god, your god will eventually be proven not to exist and your religion will disappear. Only religions that describe their god in ways that are untestable have survived the ages. Take a look at all current "modern religions", they all include the same qualities, god isn't around or is "everywhere", you cannot test god, "god works in mysterious ways", basically totally disconnected from your life, and you will never get to meet god until after you die. (makes it kinda hard to get back confirmation reports, eh?) If you look back in history for most of these religions you will find that they have undergone a lot of change over the ages, and if you dig enough you will find that they too had additional aspects earlier that would not have survived scrutiny, and so those aspects were deleted from the religion to keep it viable.
I recall someone telling me that they had studied a religion that as one of its main tennants had specified the exact day that the world was to end, and sadly they didn't pick like 2 million AD or something, they picked a much more "achievable" date. When the date came and went, that pretty much finished out that religion. heh... now there's a priest that didn't think ahead.
Check your history book. You'll find what, more than 70% of wars are fought over religion. It's the most popular reason to kill. Only recently has man learned to use politics as a better excuse to kill each other.
You would be amazed what alarms a cat can trip off when they enter "neurotic mode". My cat has repeatedly tripped off a "pet proof" system of dual motion sensors with "pet guard" features. The IR requires a body mass larger than a large dog to trip and the radar is aimed at the 4 ft level and above, both must trip at the same time to trigger the alarm. I'd love to be in the house to see what he's doing to trigger it. Nearest I can figure is he's either flying several feet off the floor while turning corners or is throwing things at the sensors.
When I was in high school I took their basic entrance test just to know what I had for options. Now I'm no einstein by any account, but I passed all but one of their tests by 94%+ and the recruiter looked at me like I was the Chosen One or something. I was talking with some of the other people in for testing and several of them were there on their third attempt.
I don't think most of the people taking those tests are very brigt bulbs. I'm sure that shakes out a bit when you move up the ranks and into career people though, but on the average the IQ of the group I was there with were around room temp. A lot of the questions on that test look like they were geared to see if you honestly gradudated from gradeschool.
The only test on that exam I had any respect for was decoding. I'm convinced you'd have to be a savante to complete that section with anywhere near 90% accuracy in the small time they give you.
Later someone pointed out to me, "you don't have to be smart to stop a bullet".
that Ballmer's hair would catch on fire or something if he used the word "Free" in public?
(or that Bill would beat the stuffing out of him all the way back to Redmond)
Seriously though, I'm sure there is a list of words that he has trained himself to avoid using in public at all costs, and I'm certain that "free software" is really high on that list.
Maybe they didn't sell you out? Maybe one of their machines got infected by a spammers mining tool? Most bots these days mine the PC for email addresses, bank account numbers, credit card numbers etc, as well as acting as SMTP relays and other things.
That is extremely likely. Though not much better. Would you be more upset if a company sold your info to a spammer, or more upset if they did not secure their servers and a virus/trojan/hacker stole your personal information? Really it doesn't matter which of the two scenarios occurred, the damage done is the same and they are ultimately the ones responsible for letting it happen.
Maybe your machine was the one infected? All the available virus checkers are useless at identifying the best tools currently used by hackers, even after a couple of months of updates.
Mac OS X Server? Not trying to be arrogant, just practical... I dun think so. And its hardened quite a bit more than the typical OS X machine. Statistically speaking, a miniscule percentage of mac servers get compromised, and essentially zero of them that are hardened are compromised.
Finally, are you sure that someone didn't probe your mail server to find the valid addresses?
I watch my logs, and I do see dictionary attacks on the ssh and pop servers from time to time, and "v1ford" is NOT something that their dictionary is going to hit. They go after names usually. And there have yet to be any hackers bored enough to try to brute force my ssh or pop.
In this instance I am going to assume one of the dealers that Ford gave my address to had his computer owned by a trojan that either assisted in building a mailing list for the herder or directly generated spam to all addresses it found on the machine. Can't fault Ford directly for it happening, but they clearly did not consider protecting against this (very likely) scenario when they set up this "have a dealer in your area contact you" promotion. For that I would call Ford more neglegent than the dealer.
eg... When a bank gets robbed, sure you can blame the burglar, but lets also look at the bank truck parked out back unattended while the drivers were doing lunch at Wendy's. Sometimes you have to take a closer look at the process at work to determine where it could best have been prevented. Like the old saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
The funadamental problem with computers is the nature of their design, or rather, the current easiest/cheapest methods. Take a look at a lot of the current day products and how easy some of them are to recycle. A lot of kids toys are made of one giant piece of plastic, all the same kind of plastic. Most food containers are now that way too. Computers can't be made that way. They are a very diverse collection of parts, assembled in ways not meant to be disassembled, and the parts are so small and so numerous that even if you wanted to take them apart it would be very difficult work. I can't imagine how long it would take someone to take apart a motherboard into recyclable pieces. Optical drives, power supplies, fans, none of these lend themselves well to recycling. We can't just keep burying our trash, that doesn't make the problem go away, it just pushes it off on the next generation to deal with. Eventually we are going to have to deal with all our trash.
Really it would not surprise me if in say, 50 years, there is an entire industry of waste reclamation, where a company bids on and BUYS a landfill, and sends in machines to process the garbage and make a proffit off what's reclaimed.
If you run your own mailserver this is a handy option. I have my primary email address that I only give to people I trust that are not using windows machines. Anytime I have to give my email to a "risky" place, like to submit a request for something, that requres a valid email address, or to register, I create a new email alias.
This spring I was shopping for a new SUV, interested in an Escape. I went to ford's web site and they had a "submit email address to have dealers in your area contact you". Sure that's easy enough. But I'm paranoid. Yes it's Ford but still. So I made "v1ford" forward to my main email address. I got five replies from dealers in my area and forgot about the whole thing.
SIX MONTHS LATER I started receiving spam, one per day, to v1ford. Bastards. And they waited half a year before sellign me out, thinking I would not know! So that alias which I had forgotten to delete after I got my replies, I just deleted and they "went away". It astounds me that someone that I am about to buy a $26k product from is doing things to piss me off.
Tho to be fair it was probably one of the five that replied to me, that got his PC owned by a spam virus. But still, that's not responsibly protecting the privacy of your (potential) customers. Just goes to show, you really can't trust ANYONE with your real address nowadays - even if they are reputable and have integrity, you can't count on them ALL being bright bulbs, and it only takes one to ruin it for you.
Using this system I have only received spam on a few occasions, one of which was when a large company I trusted posted my email address on their web site. (d'oh!)
Maybe there is personally identifying or unique information attached to each vote? To insure no one votes twice? There might be a "ballot secrecy" issue at stake.
Trying to find a good comparison here based on the "trespass" mentioned, here is what I have come up with.
Wardriving is a bit like going out to watch the fireworks on the 4th. You have a better view of the fireworks from your neighbor's property, so you walk over there. It's just a few steps across the grass, there is no fence, no "no trespassing" signs, no "keep out!". So you stand there watching the fireworks and find two officers standing behind you, here to cuff you and haul you to jail.
I don't see the difference.
I believe the trespass law should be interpreted that you cannot be charged with trespass if it is not posted so, if it is "freely and publicly accessible", and if you have not been asked to leave. What's happening with this guy is like pulling into the grocery store parking lot to switch drivers, and the store manager running out and getting your charged with trespass. It's outrageous and it's stupid.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. There are too many people out there that are convinced that the entire world needs to protect them from their own ignorance and that someone else must be held responsible for what happes due to their ignorance, and the owner of that WAP is in said group.
It also occurs to me that the laws nowadays are waaaay too general. The laws used to be very restrictive, and if you were guilty there was no doubt. The law tended to favor innocence, so there was no risk of finding the innocent guilty, but at the expense of not being able to prove everyone that is guilty as such. But now, in today's wonderful modern society, the laws are now "catch all". The justification usually is that somehow the legal system will "drop charges" or "look the other way" when you are doing something that is by-the-books illegal but wasn't what the law was meant to target. It would be simpler if they just said it was illegal to breathe. That way you could arrest anyone for anything and you would be sure to be able to catch the ones you believe are guilty of doing something bad. (and of cours the judges and police officers can be relied on to correctly apply the "exceptions"!) It sounds ridiculous when you look at it that way, but isn't that what the modern legal system has come to? Incriminating everyone to protect everyone.
In a free market, if supply is much lower than demand, price should go up until demand is slightly below supply, at least if you are the one doing the selling. I mean really, if Joe is willing to buy my product for $100 and Bill is willing to give me $120 for it, what price should I set for it?
I don't see why sony doesn't jack up the price... say a 50% increase. They could still clear 100% of their inventory. Unless there are some very good business reasons for having a very rapid initial release.
And look at it this way, there are now a lot of homeless in China that have an extra 20k Y in their pockets thanks to sony. For that I would say whatever their motives the outcome is at least somewhat positive.
What stumps me is how these buyers are managing the homeless. You have to give a bum a wad of cash and watch him walk into the store and out of sight with it? There has to be some serious risk involved for the buyers. But I suppose they are thoroughly threatened before they are given the cash. Or they are escorted.
Also, not sure if my understanding of exchange rates is way off base or what, but a quick access to a currency converter says that a bum getting Y$20,000 is about US$2,500 so I wonder if maybe someone slipped a decimal place or two?
He was consulted before the attack, (by the emperor iirc?) asked for his opinion on making an opening strike. He said "I will give you six months of continuous victories", and that was the only promise he would make.
So they knew what they were getting into. The attack on pearl harbor was a critical first step, and due to bad intel or bad luck, they did not catch even 60% of the boats at pearl harbor as they expected to, many of which were on manuever or patrol at the moment of the attack. If they had attacked any other day of that week the US losses would be close to double what they were and japan would have had a much stronger and longer hold on the pacific. Correct me if my memory's off... weren't most or all of the US carriers at sea during the attack? For the first 6 months Japan had naval superiority but did not command the skies as they needed to.
Taking these two things into account, Yamamoto was probably being pessemistic (even tho accurate) in his 6 month estimate, because it could have easily gone longer than that if luck had been with them.
When you consider that the US started out fighting a very separate two front war, they handled it well.
If you dig around in Mac OS X you will find a complete keycard access system, which supports at leat two different systems. You will also find large logos for army, navy, air force, marines, NOAA, coast guard, FBI, and a few other US govt agencies. I assume there is a small pack or kit or something that you run that enables all these dormant features. (if anyone knows how to turn them on please let us know)
Program launch detected! minesweeper.exe is an application. Please enter your administrator password to launch."
Windows is already bad that way. I've lost count of the number of programs that cannot be run by anyone except an admin. And it's all but impossible to find an app you can install without logging out and logging back in as an admin. Windows badly needs to find a happy medium between security and usability.
I recall a comment some months ago that bitlocker was this impenetrable wall of security, unless you're the admin, in which case you own it. (sort of like the master password feature in OS X's filevault, but manditory) Did they do away with this yet?
a Microsoft spokesperson said: 'Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.'"
Just when you thought microsoft could not pull anything stupider than they had lately... I mean really, what is this? Yes we have here a standard and we are backing it and we are making it the universally compatible technology, but wait, except for this major new product we're releasing. Doesn't this just incredibly piss off everyone - the customers, the manufacturers, the retailers? What on earth could they possibly be getting in exchange for all this horrid customer ill-will?
If I ever learned that the company responsible for protecting my security covered up a breech, they would be GONE. That day. That shows an incredible lack of integrity on your company's part. There's really nothing you can do to help your situation there. Eventually someone will catch them and that will be their undoing. Anyone around them will be tarnished. The best thing you can do is put the resume to work, DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, and talk with a lawyer that specializes in these things, there are probably a few minor little things you really need to do to make yourself proof against this coming back at you later. An hour's legal advice now may save you thousands and help you keep your next job two years from now. There is the chance that you could be pulled into this, even years from now. A cheap way to document is to send your documentation to yourself in registered mail, and DO NOT open it. If things ever come to a head, this is a very cheap and easy way to document what happened in a way that cannot be acused of being tampered with or fabricated after the fact.
I don't know if I can agree with that. I've owned a wallstreet, fw800 tibook, and 1.25ghz albook, and the battery life of this new mbp (2.16pd) tears those apart. Battery life on this laptop when not doing much of anything, estimates 5 hours. If I'm actively using it, it warms up as expected, but battery life can drop below 2 hours. So it seems to be doing a very good job of boosing uptime when idle. I always get two batteries, but in this case I rarely need the second one.
You can go to the Processor system pref and disable one of your processors if you need more battery life, but I've read several ppl argue that the one core that's left on really revs up so I wonder if you save or lose when you do that? I thought I ran into something to change clock or bus speed but I'm not seeing it now so probably was mistaken there.
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A good quote on this topic when they were discussing blowing up an asteroid instead of diverting it, "and so turn one dangerousl falling object into many?" I wonder which would really cause more damage... assuming you could not actually cause any part of such an asteroid to miss the earth, would it be better to break it up into say, 100 smaller pieces instead of letting it hit intact? This is assuming you don't know where it's going to hit, and they probably would. Would you prefer to be shot with a .45 or a shotgun?
One "single hit" scenario to consider is whether hittting water or hitting land is worse. I'm going to guess land is worse since you get a huge amount of particulate matter thrown into the air on a land impact. Either way you're probably getting a volcano and those are never good in populated places and would likely make a mess of the global climate for some time.
If they are interested in diverting the asteroid instead of breaking it up, (not much point in busting it into 100 pieces if they are all still on target for earth) wouldn't it be better to blow up the nukes on one side of the asteroid, such that it was pushed to a side? I don't know the physics involved with a nuclear explosion in space, usually you are dealing with the "every action requires an equal an opposite reaction", and since there are not two asteroids, one to "push off from", how much good does a nuke do on the side of the asteroid, to get it to move? I suppose the idean scenario then might be to put the nuke in the middle and pray there is a very weak fault line right down the midle of it, and blow it up right when the two halves are left and right of earth trajectory, and hope to get a nice 7-10 split on it.
I wonder what the false positive rate is.
Even if the rate is unacceptably high for automated use, it could prove very helpful.
Imagine someone coming in to get a license, gets his picture taken, and while he waits for the license to be printed and laminated, the system searches its database. It produces the 10 closest matches it can find, and presents them to the DMV worker. The worker then visually compares the ten images with the actual person sitting in the waiting area. It's not necessary for the system to make the decision, only to make it easier for the people to make the call. You can't expect the DMV people to remember 10,000 faces, but it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to try to identify one face in a group of 10. Then the false positive rate count is handed to the DMV staff.
A process like this should have a very high hit rate, a very low false positive rate, and assuming the sofware is reasonalby fast, would not impact service. It would be almost totally transparent to the public. Sounds like a very good idea.
One poster raises the point that the employee was working from home and that's why he had the data off site. I find that hard to believe for a bank to have people that "work from home". I still want to know what he was doing with the laptop full of personal information outside the walls of that bank in the first place.
Yes, access to the data is completely understandable. On company computers. On site. In a room out of sight of customers. But if you're out sitting at a keosk eating your lunch while browsing financial transaction records on your laptop, I don't care if you're doing your job, you are a risk.
If you think that's reasonable, then imagine a jewelwry store employee sitting next to you at the keosk. He's doing a pre-evaluation of a new collection to be sold next week at auction, about $350,000 worth of diamond and emerald pieces in a complete set. Wouldn't you ask yourself, what the heck is he DOING with that, HERE? Isn't that an incredible risk?
Suuure, jewelwry we can see the value of, and if he gets mugged, ouch, company's out 350 large ones. Lord knows they will never let that happen and he'd get his knuckles broke when he came back to the office if they ever found out he took the goods out of the safe.
But customer information. Big deal. Stolen? Do we really care? Are we out merchandise? Fined? OK maybe sued but we have 8 lawyers on retainer so that's not going anywhere this century. The only difference is who gets hurt. Hurt the company, and omigod protect it, pull out all the stops, we want automated turrets and a pit bull. Hurt the customer's privacy or credit rating, owell we got some customer ill-will but no biggie, life goes on. Just a calculated risk, too expensive, the return on investment for adding security there is just not worth it.
Go tell your boss tomorrow that you'd like to take home a copy of your bank's financial records to do some analysis on. (encrypted even) See how far he throws your can out of the office.
What does any employee of that bank need with the entire customer database? If he is doing work, he should be doing it at work not at home.
How many of this business's employees have full access to the entire customer database with account numbers?
Is it company policy to allow empoyees to take business records home at all? Or for that matter, is it even within company policy to bring your own personal laptop into the building?
So, what policies were broken, what policies are being changed, and what's not going to be fixed so that it just happens again?
Putting aside for a moment that "format shifting" hasn't really been tested yet in court, the end-user is not the one doing the copying here. It's hard to argue "fair use" when someone is making money by making a copy... that's the whole point of copyright.
I don't agree with that interpretation of copyright. Copyright exists to encourage creative development by guaranteeing the creator a reasonable period of time where they can have the exclusive ability to produce (and sell) a specific kind of content. (it grants the creator a "limited monopoly" on their creation) The company that is doing the format shifting is not benefiting from having a copy of the work, and the consumer has already paid the creator for his work. The only possible lost revenue is if the riaa was offering the same service or if it was impacting the sales of their product. They are not offering the service, and it is arguably increasing the benefits from their limited monopoly.
What stumps me here is "why?" Why are they doing this? It costs them money and ill-will (which at this point I think they have so much negative karma that a little more really doesn't matter anymore) and I don't see what's in it for them. The iPod is designed to make it difficult to copy content off from it, so the odds of someone swapping tracks on their ipod with a friend is fairly remote. There must be either a paranoid dellusional in authority there or there is a classified pie chart somewhere that say that this will nick off 2% of their proffits due to some complex market dependency.
The RIAA is not doing this because it's illegal. They could care less what's legal and what's not from morality's sake. They have a reason they don't want customers to do it, and they are using the DMCA as a tool to try to make the world behave the way they want them to. Having a law that could cover it just makes this job easier. This is what makes general laws like DMCA so dangerous. The people sponsoring them say it's necessary to make a very broad law so that it covers the largest percentage of offenders they are after, and try to make us believe that the law will be "properly interpreted" such that no innocents (people that "were not meant to be included") will not be harmed. But history shows that in 100% of those cases, there are abuses and they generally go unchecked because after all, they've made it legal. Copyright, seizure laws, and a really fun one, "enemy combatant". They all force us to surrender our rights and fredoms in the name of protecting our rights and our fredoms. What a scam.
The big problem with that is the chemicals that are used in electronics. There is a large business abroad in the poorer countries where places like Dell drop off cubic acres of computers in a pile and let the locals deal with them. (I'm not sure if the companies are paying for the privlege of dumping or getting paid TO dump...) Then you get these small towns of dirt poor people that tear the stuff apart, sort out the metal and what they can, and then they burn the circuit boards.
Yes, burn. These are the boards with PCBs and mercury and formeldahyde among other things in them. Goes right up in smoke. They do this to work out the gold and silver from the boards. The last thing you want to do with chemicals like this is burn them. A common electronic component, the capacitor, is a tightly wrapped combination of plastic, aluminum, paper, copper, rubber, and steel, along with an electrolyte, and there are dozens of them on any motherboard. You get nasty gasses when you burn the plasic, rubber, or the electrolyte. But how do you intend to separate them short of burning? It would take me a good 5 minutes to disassemble a 20 cent capacitor - at that rate it would cost a lot more to recycle it than to manufacture it.
Components like that can't be cheaply and safely recyled. The only practical system I've seen was a furnace that got so hot it broke down the PCBs, and those don't come cheap. In cases like that there is little proffit (or even loss) in the money spent vs the value of what is reclaimed.
There is no way to prove conclusively that a deity or deities exist or do not.
Actually for the most part there is. The reason it does not appear this way is that, if you create a god that can be tested for, since there isn't a god, your god will eventually be proven not to exist and your religion will disappear. Only religions that describe their god in ways that are untestable have survived the ages. Take a look at all current "modern religions", they all include the same qualities, god isn't around or is "everywhere", you cannot test god, "god works in mysterious ways", basically totally disconnected from your life, and you will never get to meet god until after you die. (makes it kinda hard to get back confirmation reports, eh?) If you look back in history for most of these religions you will find that they have undergone a lot of change over the ages, and if you dig enough you will find that they too had additional aspects earlier that would not have survived scrutiny, and so those aspects were deleted from the religion to keep it viable.
I recall someone telling me that they had studied a religion that as one of its main tennants had specified the exact day that the world was to end, and sadly they didn't pick like 2 million AD or something, they picked a much more "achievable" date. When the date came and went, that pretty much finished out that religion. heh... now there's a priest that didn't think ahead.
Check your history book. You'll find what, more than 70% of wars are fought over religion. It's the most popular reason to kill. Only recently has man learned to use politics as a better excuse to kill each other.
You would be amazed what alarms a cat can trip off when they enter "neurotic mode". My cat has repeatedly tripped off a "pet proof" system of dual motion sensors with "pet guard" features. The IR requires a body mass larger than a large dog to trip and the radar is aimed at the 4 ft level and above, both must trip at the same time to trigger the alarm. I'd love to be in the house to see what he's doing to trigger it. Nearest I can figure is he's either flying several feet off the floor while turning corners or is throwing things at the sensors.
When I was in high school I took their basic entrance test just to know what I had for options. Now I'm no einstein by any account, but I passed all but one of their tests by 94%+ and the recruiter looked at me like I was the Chosen One or something. I was talking with some of the other people in for testing and several of them were there on their third attempt.
I don't think most of the people taking those tests are very brigt bulbs. I'm sure that shakes out a bit when you move up the ranks and into career people though, but on the average the IQ of the group I was there with were around room temp. A lot of the questions on that test look like they were geared to see if you honestly gradudated from gradeschool.
The only test on that exam I had any respect for was decoding. I'm convinced you'd have to be a savante to complete that section with anywhere near 90% accuracy in the small time they give you.
Later someone pointed out to me, "you don't have to be smart to stop a bullet".
that Ballmer's hair would catch on fire or something if he used the word "Free" in public?
(or that Bill would beat the stuffing out of him all the way back to Redmond)
Seriously though, I'm sure there is a list of words that he has trained himself to avoid using in public at all costs, and I'm certain that "free software" is really high on that list.
Maybe they didn't sell you out? Maybe one of their machines got infected by a spammers mining tool? Most bots these days mine the PC for email addresses, bank account numbers, credit card numbers etc, as well as acting as SMTP relays and other things.
That is extremely likely. Though not much better. Would you be more upset if a company sold your info to a spammer, or more upset if they did not secure their servers and a virus/trojan/hacker stole your personal information? Really it doesn't matter which of the two scenarios occurred, the damage done is the same and they are ultimately the ones responsible for letting it happen.
Maybe your machine was the one infected? All the available virus checkers are useless at identifying the best tools currently used by hackers, even after a couple of months of updates.
Mac OS X Server? Not trying to be arrogant, just practical... I dun think so. And its hardened quite a bit more than the typical OS X machine. Statistically speaking, a miniscule percentage of mac servers get compromised, and essentially zero of them that are hardened are compromised.
Finally, are you sure that someone didn't probe your mail server to find the valid addresses?
I watch my logs, and I do see dictionary attacks on the ssh and pop servers from time to time, and "v1ford" is NOT something that their dictionary is going to hit. They go after names usually. And there have yet to be any hackers bored enough to try to brute force my ssh or pop.
In this instance I am going to assume one of the dealers that Ford gave my address to had his computer owned by a trojan that either assisted in building a mailing list for the herder or directly generated spam to all addresses it found on the machine. Can't fault Ford directly for it happening, but they clearly did not consider protecting against this (very likely) scenario when they set up this "have a dealer in your area contact you" promotion. For that I would call Ford more neglegent than the dealer.
eg... When a bank gets robbed, sure you can blame the burglar, but lets also look at the bank truck parked out back unattended while the drivers were doing lunch at Wendy's. Sometimes you have to take a closer look at the process at work to determine where it could best have been prevented. Like the old saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
The funadamental problem with computers is the nature of their design, or rather, the current easiest/cheapest methods. Take a look at a lot of the current day products and how easy some of them are to recycle. A lot of kids toys are made of one giant piece of plastic, all the same kind of plastic. Most food containers are now that way too. Computers can't be made that way. They are a very diverse collection of parts, assembled in ways not meant to be disassembled, and the parts are so small and so numerous that even if you wanted to take them apart it would be very difficult work. I can't imagine how long it would take someone to take apart a motherboard into recyclable pieces. Optical drives, power supplies, fans, none of these lend themselves well to recycling. We can't just keep burying our trash, that doesn't make the problem go away, it just pushes it off on the next generation to deal with. Eventually we are going to have to deal with all our trash.
Really it would not surprise me if in say, 50 years, there is an entire industry of waste reclamation, where a company bids on and BUYS a landfill, and sends in machines to process the garbage and make a proffit off what's reclaimed.
If you run your own mailserver this is a handy option. I have my primary email address that I only give to people I trust that are not using windows machines. Anytime I have to give my email to a "risky" place, like to submit a request for something, that requres a valid email address, or to register, I create a new email alias.
This spring I was shopping for a new SUV, interested in an Escape. I went to ford's web site and they had a "submit email address to have dealers in your area contact you". Sure that's easy enough. But I'm paranoid. Yes it's Ford but still. So I made "v1ford" forward to my main email address. I got five replies from dealers in my area and forgot about the whole thing.
SIX MONTHS LATER I started receiving spam, one per day, to v1ford. Bastards. And they waited half a year before sellign me out, thinking I would not know! So that alias which I had forgotten to delete after I got my replies, I just deleted and they "went away". It astounds me that someone that I am about to buy a $26k product from is doing things to piss me off.
Tho to be fair it was probably one of the five that replied to me, that got his PC owned by a spam virus. But still, that's not responsibly protecting the privacy of your (potential) customers. Just goes to show, you really can't trust ANYONE with your real address nowadays - even if they are reputable and have integrity, you can't count on them ALL being bright bulbs, and it only takes one to ruin it for you.
Using this system I have only received spam on a few occasions, one of which was when a large company I trusted posted my email address on their web site. (d'oh!)
Maybe there is personally identifying or unique information attached to each vote? To insure no one votes twice? There might be a "ballot secrecy" issue at stake.
Trying to find a good comparison here based on the "trespass" mentioned, here is what I have come up with.
Wardriving is a bit like going out to watch the fireworks on the 4th. You have a better view of the fireworks from your neighbor's property, so you walk over there. It's just a few steps across the grass, there is no fence, no "no trespassing" signs, no "keep out!". So you stand there watching the fireworks and find two officers standing behind you, here to cuff you and haul you to jail.
I don't see the difference.
I believe the trespass law should be interpreted that you cannot be charged with trespass if it is not posted so, if it is "freely and publicly accessible", and if you have not been asked to leave. What's happening with this guy is like pulling into the grocery store parking lot to switch drivers, and the store manager running out and getting your charged with trespass. It's outrageous and it's stupid.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. There are too many people out there that are convinced that the entire world needs to protect them from their own ignorance and that someone else must be held responsible for what happes due to their ignorance, and the owner of that WAP is in said group.
It also occurs to me that the laws nowadays are waaaay too general. The laws used to be very restrictive, and if you were guilty there was no doubt. The law tended to favor innocence, so there was no risk of finding the innocent guilty, but at the expense of not being able to prove everyone that is guilty as such. But now, in today's wonderful modern society, the laws are now "catch all". The justification usually is that somehow the legal system will "drop charges" or "look the other way" when you are doing something that is by-the-books illegal but wasn't what the law was meant to target. It would be simpler if they just said it was illegal to breathe. That way you could arrest anyone for anything and you would be sure to be able to catch the ones you believe are guilty of doing something bad. (and of cours the judges and police officers can be relied on to correctly apply the "exceptions"!) It sounds ridiculous when you look at it that way, but isn't that what the modern legal system has come to? Incriminating everyone to protect everyone.
In a free market, if supply is much lower than demand, price should go up until demand is slightly below supply, at least if you are the one doing the selling. I mean really, if Joe is willing to buy my product for $100 and Bill is willing to give me $120 for it, what price should I set for it?
I don't see why sony doesn't jack up the price... say a 50% increase. They could still clear 100% of their inventory. Unless there are some very good business reasons for having a very rapid initial release.
And look at it this way, there are now a lot of homeless in China that have an extra 20k Y in their pockets thanks to sony. For that I would say whatever their motives the outcome is at least somewhat positive.
What stumps me is how these buyers are managing the homeless. You have to give a bum a wad of cash and watch him walk into the store and out of sight with it? There has to be some serious risk involved for the buyers. But I suppose they are thoroughly threatened before they are given the cash. Or they are escorted.
Also, not sure if my understanding of exchange rates is way off base or what, but a quick access to a currency converter says that a bum getting Y$20,000 is about US$2,500 so I wonder if maybe someone slipped a decimal place or two?
He was consulted before the attack, (by the emperor iirc?) asked for his opinion on making an opening strike. He said "I will give you six months of continuous victories", and that was the only promise he would make.
So they knew what they were getting into. The attack on pearl harbor was a critical first step, and due to bad intel or bad luck, they did not catch even 60% of the boats at pearl harbor as they expected to, many of which were on manuever or patrol at the moment of the attack. If they had attacked any other day of that week the US losses would be close to double what they were and japan would have had a much stronger and longer hold on the pacific. Correct me if my memory's off... weren't most or all of the US carriers at sea during the attack? For the first 6 months Japan had naval superiority but did not command the skies as they needed to.
Taking these two things into account, Yamamoto was probably being pessemistic (even tho accurate) in his 6 month estimate, because it could have easily gone longer than that if luck had been with them.
When you consider that the US started out fighting a very separate two front war, they handled it well.
If you dig around in Mac OS X you will find a complete keycard access system, which supports at leat two different systems. You will also find large logos for army, navy, air force, marines, NOAA, coast guard, FBI, and a few other US govt agencies. I assume there is a small pack or kit or something that you run that enables all these dormant features. (if anyone knows how to turn them on please let us know)
Program launch detected! minesweeper.exe is an application. Please enter your administrator password to launch."
Windows is already bad that way. I've lost count of the number of programs that cannot be run by anyone except an admin. And it's all but impossible to find an app you can install without logging out and logging back in as an admin. Windows badly needs to find a happy medium between security and usability.
I recall a comment some months ago that bitlocker was this impenetrable wall of security, unless you're the admin, in which case you own it. (sort of like the master password feature in OS X's filevault, but manditory) Did they do away with this yet?
as Indian companies outsource to the United States
Sorry but am I the only one that had to re-read that twice to insure that I understood correctly?
Hello this is Chetan, how may I be helping you today?
a Microsoft spokesperson said: 'Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices.'"
Just when you thought microsoft could not pull anything stupider than they had lately... I mean really, what is this? Yes we have here a standard and we are backing it and we are making it the universally compatible technology, but wait, except for this major new product we're releasing. Doesn't this just incredibly piss off everyone - the customers, the manufacturers, the retailers? What on earth could they possibly be getting in exchange for all this horrid customer ill-will?
Bad Bill! No cookie!
If I ever learned that the company responsible for protecting my security covered up a breech, they would be GONE. That day. That shows an incredible lack of integrity on your company's part. There's really nothing you can do to help your situation there. Eventually someone will catch them and that will be their undoing. Anyone around them will be tarnished. The best thing you can do is put the resume to work, DOCUMENT EVERYTHING, and talk with a lawyer that specializes in these things, there are probably a few minor little things you really need to do to make yourself proof against this coming back at you later. An hour's legal advice now may save you thousands and help you keep your next job two years from now. There is the chance that you could be pulled into this, even years from now. A cheap way to document is to send your documentation to yourself in registered mail, and DO NOT open it. If things ever come to a head, this is a very cheap and easy way to document what happened in a way that cannot be acused of being tampered with or fabricated after the fact.
I don't know if I can agree with that. I've owned a wallstreet, fw800 tibook, and 1.25ghz albook, and the battery life of this new mbp (2.16pd) tears those apart. Battery life on this laptop when not doing much of anything, estimates 5 hours. If I'm actively using it, it warms up as expected, but battery life can drop below 2 hours. So it seems to be doing a very good job of boosing uptime when idle. I always get two batteries, but in this case I rarely need the second one.
You can go to the Processor system pref and disable one of your processors if you need more battery life, but I've read several ppl argue that the one core that's left on really revs up so I wonder if you save or lose when you do that? I thought I ran into something to change clock or bus speed but I'm not seeing it now so probably was mistaken there.