The incident is the second data theft from a motor vehicle announced this week. Yesterday, Minneapolis-based financial services company Ameriprise Financial Inc. said it is notifying some 158,000 customers and 68,000 financial advisers that a laptop containing personal information about them -- including names, account numbers or Social Security numbers -- was stolen from a parked car late last month (see "Ameriprise notifying 226,000 customers, advisers of data theft").
I can see hard disks being stolen..... but not tapes in the one case. Thieves like to take items with obvious value. Am I missing something here? Isn't it possible the workers simply sold the data?
Why is it that people act like AllofMP3.com is a legal service? It's not. It's barely treading the legal waters in Russia, and is definitely illegal outside of it.
So it's legal in Russia. And then it's legal to import, to my understanding. I don't understand your argument, are you arguing that Russia's laws, because you don't agree with them, don't have a say in the legality of this site?
It's more of a matter of not having the resources to get it shutdown.
The RIAA/Music companies don't have the resources?
And since, it's most likely owned by the Russian mob,
Is there some evidence of this?
All that said, I can't agree that a song isn't worth 99 cents.
This is very relative. What is the intrinsic value of a movie worth if it contains a 15 song songtrack within it and sells for 9.99 at Wal-mart? $-4.86 after subtracting for the songs?
I can agree that its often not worth record agencies getting 55 cents out of the 99 cents. But I know a ton of muscians trying to make a decent living, doing great work. And since I value my time pretty darn, well, I'd say saying here's a dollar for your effort isn't that bad.
But in any case, you aren't giving a dollar to that artist. The distributors take their cut. And what about sharing that music with your friend and increasing that artist's market, should you be paid as a promoter?
I don't need to hear arguments of scale.
But this is how the whole entertainment industry operates and thus you can't ignore it. Is a $200M dollar movie charge more admission than a movie that cost $30M to make?
I'm just talking basic value. Just because somethings easily reproduced shouldn't take away its intrinsic value.
True, but completely subjective. Do you think the average factory worker in China could afford to give a $1 for a song?
BTW, I stopped watching TV, movies (other than anime), or listing to RIAA-sponsored artist - I don't download nor do I really care about the subject.
It's dual fuel, you can use gasoline as well. In fact, one of the first hydrogen cars in the 50s or 60s was converted from a normal (american) car. Nothing had to be changed with the engine itself, just the fuel lines and such, as hydrogen tended to corrode certain materials that gasoline didn't.
And what you are talking about is a chicken and the egg problem. 150 years ago, I doubt that there was much of a gasoline infrastructure for cars.
And in Germany, there are enough pumps for Natural Gas powered cars which I have never seen in America. Because there are natural gas powered vehicles in Germany (it's cheaper). Does that mean natural gas will always be a non-option in America?
You ask why. I ask why not.
From the article I just linked: "I once rode from downtown Munich to the city's airport (a lengthy trip) in a fourth generation BMW 750hL and even "filled up" at a hydrogen service station located right on the airport property. It was an interesting experience, but a common enough routine at Munich airport where many of the vehicles used around the facility, including apron buses, are hydrogen-fuelled.
BMW has been operating 7-Series hydrogen-powered sedans on a daily basis in both Munich and Hanover. When running on hydrogen, the 750hL 12-cylinder engine develops 204 horsepower, tops 100 km/h in 9.6-seconds and is capable of a top speed of 226 km/h. The car's 140-litre cryogenic hydrogen tank gives the fully-equipped luxury car a range of 350 km. The cars are "dual fuel" units capable of being run on gasoline when needed. After all, you won't find a hydrogen filling station on every street corner just yet."
Why shouldn't they be in jail? Our laws prohibit the use, sale, growing, etc... of a particular plant. If people violate those criminal laws, why shouldn't they be in jail?
Arguing that the law is unjust is beside the point. The fact remains that growing (selling, using) marijuana is illegal in the United States.
By that logic alone, the founding fathers should have been hanging on the gallows. And those people who operated the underground railroad as well.
A stupid law causes comtempt for all laws. If a law is unjust, people have a duty to disobey it. Sometimes it's the only way to dispute something (can you see a national politician touching that issue with a ten foot pole in favor of drug legalization regardless of the facts?)
BTW, I don't care about drugs' legality one way or the other but I find it ironic that what people do to their own person is suddenly criminal law. Perhaps it's the same sort of hypocrisy that cause us to decry smoking/tobacco as bad as hell for you, have the government sue them for a billion dollars, yet NOT ban the substance but happily tax it's use where that gets used for wholly different purposes.
Perhaps the government should learn from it's mistake from prohibition and relize you can't legislate morality (where it doesn't hurt others) or successfully ban substances such as these.
But perhaps it did and keeping up the "war on drugs" has a wholly different purpose/advantages than the initially stated or planned. Like the war on terrorism.
Well, I'm rambling now - the law and whether you "should" be in jail or two different things. Do you go the exact stated speed limit on every road?
I believe, ethanol, can be, at best a transitional fuel, what with the human population increasing, the future will have less land available for such uses as a fuel crop.
I heard of hydrogen cars (non-production) in the '60s already. If fusion ever comes online, 0% land is needed, and there would be plenty of energy for electrolysis, or perhaps the more efficient steam electrolysis. Even if fusion doesn't pan out, solar energy could be harnessed for that purpose (I'm not talking about purely solar photaic cells, but a hybrid system of a parabolic dish design.) Afterall, collectively, millions of acres of roofs are being unused everyday!
Free will decisions don't have to be 'life changing' to be free will. Simply choosing between vanilla and chocolate is enough to make a 'free' choice (if indeed it is 'free').
Unless the reward center in your brain causes you to choose vanilla since you might be hardwired (or conditioned) to like it more;)
Are human beings nothing more than complicated animals working through complex, predictable behavior?
Yes.
Unless you believe a God really singled humans out as the chosen ones free from the rules all other animals live by. Like all other mammals, we need to eat, sleep, and breath.....
What seperates us is our brainsize/intelligence which can override some base-behavior/instincts (in our favor) but not all of it.
Consider how much of you behavior is truly routine. For example, for the majority of Americans, 12 years of our life is spent at school, which was initially modeled (in schedule) after an industry revolution factory. Then we go to work or college, many of us in a fairly similiar schedule. Perhaps simply phase shifted if you are a nightowl.
Very little is done against routine. Most (not all) 'free-will' decisions are judgement calls on relative minutae, not constant major life-changing choices (not that our circumstances/society/financial situation would allow for too many of those).
That was the apparent point of the First Amendment and its reason for being included though many interpretations exist- this being one of them.
I hate the "reason an amendment" was created line-of-logic. It's always used by the people who want to restrict said freedoms.
To the government: Stop trying to second guess the "intentions" of the founders (with your biases interpreting things in your favor) and just read what the Constitution says. If the intentions behind it were super-important, well guess what, it should have been included in the amendment.
I think Crazy Taxi (late 90's) already had product placement, where one had to drive to the KFC (or other fast food) or go to the GAP, among other things.
"I'm especially interested in hearing from the Slashdot readers of the female persuasion, as I have a husband, a dog, and a household to keep up with (no kids by choice, but I wouldn't have the time to take care of them, even if I wanted to). I also have the added responsibility of being the primary breadwinner. My free time is valuable in that it allows me to take care of that which I can't during the day (grocery shopping, dog responsibilities, cleaning, etc), and decompress/de-stress in order to prepare for the next day's work. I like tinkering with computers and learning new stuff, but I fear that if I'm expected train myself, outside of work, I may need to consider a different career.
Thanks in advance for the input."
Primary bread winner with no kids? Holy crap, does your husband do anything or sit around in his underwear all day.
2nd Question: Where can I find a geeky girl like you? It be almost as good as getting married to money:D
I have to agree with the author that Graham's writing is an attempt to merge different facets of himself into a consistent world view that he then extrapolates to all hackers. His introspective essays completely fail to shed any light on the overlap of art, science and philosophy when compared to the likes of Hoffsteader.
I believe every essayist is guilty of this, to one degree or another. ESR, particularly, as it's blatant he views hackers as those people who are like himself.
Graham's essays are however very good at stroking the egos of computer geeks who would like to belive their own programs are works of art as opposed to cumbersome mathematical transformations.
Of course, there are some very pretty algoriths I consider art (Donald Knuth's books come to mind) and Lisp comes to my twisted mind as very elegant (foundations based in math, as it was created by a mathematician).
You may be correct of course, I have a bias for Mr. Graham as he introduced me to Lisp (my favorite language) with his essays.
Perhaps the author of "Dabblers and Blowhards" should follow irony in his own title. From near the beginning of his own essay:
"But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual print book of collected essays, titled (of course) "Hackers and Painters". I felt it was time for me to step up.
So let me say it simply - hackers are nothing like painters."
"Graham has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."
"In 1985, diethylene glycol (an anti-freeze) appeared to to have been added as an adulterant by some Austrian producers of white wines to make them sweeter and upgrade the dry wines to sweet wines; production of sweet wines is expensive and addition of sugar is easy to detect. Fortunately, the amount added was not high enough to be toxic except at impossibly high levels of consumption (one would have had to have ingested about 28 bottles per day for two weeks)."
There were other instances, but 1985 was bit before the Simpsons hit the scene. I'm reminded of that South Park episode where Butters (?) tries to think up of a story only to have had the Simpsons already do it - except that here that's not the case^_^
There was a scandal in Europe in the 1980s, particularly Germany/Austria, where they added glycol (antifreeze) to the wine to bring out the flavor. A lot of experts, unaware, said that the glycol saturated wines had a deeper, mellower flavor or some such nonsense.
Needless to say, I think 90% of the whole "tasting" industry is pretentious nonsense started to skyrocket the price of certain brands/lines.
At that point India's and China's greatest strength (their population) will be their biggest burden because it will no longer be the nation with the largest work pool, but rather the nation with the most efficient machines. At this point, it seems that a number of nations could take that title, none being China or India.
I think 2030 is a bit optimistic for a fully automated workforce but I can forsee it being at the middle of a transition period.
But in any case, won't there still be a workforce? Even if most of the work is intellectual and not physical? China is pulling ahead there too - graduating more than 800,000 Bachelor engineers a year. I think the US in the 150K-200K range.....
Growth is the key to a strong economy. A strong economy without significant growth is not a very healthy economy.
I don't know about that, eternal (big) growth is unsustainable if the population of the country levels off or if all the 3rd world countries (cheap labor/new markets) evolve into 1st world countries over time.
I think growth is needed for a strong economy with a lot of debt (US: Government has 8 trillion dollars debt, individuals even more) and you can see this hit Japan even more, as it's population amount is leveling off (some Europeans countries also have low birth rate) and it's loaded with debt.
You are also seeing this in the housing market in the US. The prices are insane right now, and everybody who is buying is betting that growth/prices will increase even further in the near-term future, making the current prices a bit cheaper with inflation/future payoff. That's betting on future growth, but is it there?
But what about an economy with little (government) debt? Does it need much growth?
I do hope that's practically as well, otherwise that's effectively the end of the "freedom of religion" thing, which was a nice concept.
After the Waco massacre, I have less faith in the applied practical side - the FBI, who could have picked up David Koresh on any given Sunday preaching his religion in the city street corner, knowingly decided to confront him and his group instead with a warrant for their gun/weapons violations. Then they act "surprised" they get attacked by this "cult" and eventually firebomb the compound - killing many women and children in the process.
Cowboys and Indians, I tell you.
(Quotes are to show their words, not any disagreement on my part)
The tactics used by Jones and his group are raising quite a few questions, however, offering to pay students for recordings or teaching materials that could provide 'evidence' against professors in question.
Evidence for what exactly? I didn't realize that being of any political bent and speaking about it was illegal in America.... yet. Theoretically, even radical Muslim (or Christian) teachings would be protected by freedom of speech.
Of course, the group doing this is free to publish what they think of the professors as well.
And just like a professor's teachings, it's up to the audience to parse the message, think about it, question it, research it, and whether it causes them to take any action.
Of course, some days, I no longer have faith that the general audience has the patience to logically parse, question, research messages or to poke holes into it for the pros and cons but instead take the lazy route and react emotionally to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see hard disks being stolen..... but not tapes in the one case. Thieves like to take items with obvious value. Am I missing something here? Isn't it possible the workers simply sold the data?
So it's legal in Russia. And then it's legal to import, to my understanding. I don't understand your argument, are you arguing that Russia's laws, because you don't agree with them, don't have a say in the legality of this site?
The RIAA/Music companies don't have the resources?
Is there some evidence of this?
This is very relative. What is the intrinsic value of a movie worth if it contains a 15 song songtrack within it and sells for 9.99 at Wal-mart? $-4.86 after subtracting for the songs?
But in any case, you aren't giving a dollar to that artist. The distributors take their cut. And what about sharing that music with your friend and increasing that artist's market, should you be paid as a promoter?
But this is how the whole entertainment industry operates and thus you can't ignore it. Is a $200M dollar movie charge more admission than a movie that cost $30M to make?
True, but completely subjective. Do you think the average factory worker in China could afford to give a $1 for a song?
BTW, I stopped watching TV, movies (other than anime), or listing to RIAA-sponsored artist - I don't download nor do I really care about the subject.
On
You must be thinking of Volkswagen - the people's car. BMW simply stands for Bayerische Motor Werk.
BMW was already an airplane engine manufacture in WW1 and has been producing cars a while before the people's car concept even came to the scene.
Yes, at the Munich Airport, which I have been to often.
http://www.canadiandriver.com/articles/tw/bmw_hyd
It's dual fuel, you can use gasoline as well. In fact, one of the first hydrogen cars in the 50s or 60s was converted from a normal (american) car. Nothing had to be changed with the engine itself, just the fuel lines and such, as hydrogen tended to corrode certain materials that gasoline didn't.
And what you are talking about is a chicken and the egg problem. 150 years ago, I doubt that there was much of a gasoline infrastructure for cars.
And in Germany, there are enough pumps for Natural Gas powered cars which I have never seen in America. Because there are natural gas powered vehicles in Germany (it's cheaper). Does that mean natural gas will always be a non-option in America?
You ask why. I ask why not.
From the article I just linked:
"I once rode from downtown Munich to the city's airport (a lengthy trip) in a fourth generation BMW 750hL and even "filled up" at a hydrogen service station located right on the airport property. It was an interesting experience, but a common enough routine at Munich airport where many of the vehicles used around the facility, including apron buses, are hydrogen-fuelled.
BMW has been operating 7-Series hydrogen-powered sedans on a daily basis in both Munich and Hanover. When running on hydrogen, the 750hL 12-cylinder engine develops 204 horsepower, tops 100 km/h in 9.6-seconds and is capable of a top speed of 226 km/h. The car's 140-litre cryogenic hydrogen tank gives the fully-equipped luxury car a range of 350 km. The cars are "dual fuel" units capable of being run on gasoline when needed. After all, you won't find a hydrogen filling station on every street corner just yet."
By that logic alone, the founding fathers should have been hanging on the gallows. And those people who operated the underground railroad as well.
A stupid law causes comtempt for all laws. If a law is unjust, people have a duty to disobey it. Sometimes it's the only way to dispute something (can you see a national politician touching that issue with a ten foot pole in favor of drug legalization regardless of the facts?)
BTW, I don't care about drugs' legality one way or the other but I find it ironic that what people do to their own person is suddenly criminal law. Perhaps it's the same sort of hypocrisy that cause us to decry smoking/tobacco as bad as hell for you, have the government sue them for a billion dollars, yet NOT ban the substance but happily tax it's use where that gets used for wholly different purposes.
Perhaps the government should learn from it's mistake from prohibition and relize you can't legislate morality (where it doesn't hurt others) or successfully ban substances such as these.
But perhaps it did and keeping up the "war on drugs" has a wholly different purpose/advantages than the initially stated or planned. Like the war on terrorism.
Well, I'm rambling now - the law and whether you "should" be in jail or two different things. Do you go the exact stated speed limit on every road?
If not, should you be in jail?
BMW would like to disagree with you:
http://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/200
http://www.engineeringtalk.com/news/asc/asc109.ht
I believe, ethanol, can be, at best a transitional fuel, what with the human population increasing, the future will have less land available for such uses as a fuel crop.
I heard of hydrogen cars (non-production) in the '60s already. If fusion ever comes online, 0% land is needed, and there would be plenty of energy for electrolysis, or perhaps the more efficient steam electrolysis. Even if fusion doesn't pan out, solar energy could be harnessed for that purpose (I'm not talking about purely solar photaic cells, but a hybrid system of a parabolic dish design.) Afterall, collectively, millions of acres of roofs are being unused everyday!
Unless the reward center in your brain causes you to choose vanilla since you might be hardwired (or conditioned) to like it more;)
Yes.
Unless you believe a God really singled humans out as the chosen ones free from the rules all other animals live by. Like all other mammals, we need to eat, sleep, and breath.....
What seperates us is our brainsize/intelligence which can override some base-behavior/instincts (in our favor) but not all of it.
Consider how much of you behavior is truly routine. For example, for the majority of Americans, 12 years of our life is spent at school, which was initially modeled (in schedule) after an industry revolution factory. Then we go to work or college, many of us in a fairly similiar schedule. Perhaps simply phase shifted if you are a nightowl.
Very little is done against routine. Most (not all) 'free-will' decisions are judgement calls on relative minutae, not constant major life-changing choices (not that our circumstances/society/financial situation would allow for too many of those).
I hate the "reason an amendment" was created line-of-logic. It's always used by the people who want to restrict said freedoms.
To the government: Stop trying to second guess the "intentions" of the founders (with your biases interpreting things in your favor) and just read what the Constitution says. If the intentions behind it were super-important, well guess what, it should have been included in the amendment.
I think Crazy Taxi (late 90's) already had product placement, where one had to drive to the KFC (or other fast food) or go to the GAP, among other things.
Well, I was only joking with the first question - glad you didn't take it personally.
Now, if you only would answer the second question^_^.....
Primary bread winner with no kids? Holy crap, does your husband do anything or sit around in his underwear all day.
2nd Question: Where can I find a geeky girl like you? It be almost as good as getting married to money:D
I believe every essayist is guilty of this, to one degree or another. ESR, particularly, as it's blatant he views hackers as those people who are like himself.
Of course, there are some very pretty algoriths I consider art (Donald Knuth's books come to mind) and Lisp comes to my twisted mind as very elegant (foundations based in math, as it was created by a mathematician).
You may be correct of course, I have a bias for Mr. Graham as he introduced me to Lisp (my favorite language) with his essays.
Don't look at me, I'm trying to get into clean energy (mainly Solar/Wind power), only one problem at a time:)
Perhaps the author of "Dabblers and Blowhards" should follow irony in his own title. From near the beginning of his own essay:
"But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual print book of collected essays, titled (of course) "Hackers and Painters". I felt it was time for me to step up.
So let me say it simply - hackers are nothing like painters."
From the wiki on Paul Graham:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham
"Graham has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."
Someone who loves the challenge of AI may design intelligent enough robots one day......
You'll find enough info about it on the net if you google wine and antifreeze.
This for instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_fraud
"In 1985, diethylene glycol (an anti-freeze) appeared to to have been added as an adulterant by some Austrian producers of white wines to make them sweeter and upgrade the dry wines to sweet wines; production of sweet wines is expensive and addition of sugar is easy to detect. Fortunately, the amount added was not high enough to be toxic except at impossibly high levels of consumption (one would have had to have ingested about 28 bottles per day for two weeks)."
There were other instances, but 1985 was bit before the Simpsons hit the scene. I'm reminded of that South Park episode where Butters (?) tries to think up of a story only to have had the Simpsons already do it - except that here that's not the case^_^
There was a scandal in Europe in the 1980s, particularly Germany/Austria, where they added glycol (antifreeze) to the wine to bring out the flavor. A lot of experts, unaware, said that the glycol saturated wines had a deeper, mellower flavor or some such nonsense.
Needless to say, I think 90% of the whole "tasting" industry is pretentious nonsense started to skyrocket the price of certain brands/lines.
I think 2030 is a bit optimistic for a fully automated workforce but I can forsee it being at the middle of a transition period.
But in any case, won't there still be a workforce? Even if most of the work is intellectual and not physical? China is pulling ahead there too - graduating more than 800,000 Bachelor engineers a year. I think the US in the 150K-200K range.....
I don't know about that, eternal (big) growth is unsustainable if the population of the country levels off or if all the 3rd world countries (cheap labor/new markets) evolve into 1st world countries over time.
I think growth is needed for a strong economy with a lot of debt (US: Government has 8 trillion dollars debt, individuals even more) and you can see this hit Japan even more, as it's population amount is leveling off (some Europeans countries also have low birth rate) and it's loaded with debt.
You are also seeing this in the housing market in the US. The prices are insane right now, and everybody who is buying is betting that growth/prices will increase even further in the near-term future, making the current prices a bit cheaper with inflation/future payoff. That's betting on future growth, but is it there?
But what about an economy with little (government) debt? Does it need much growth?
After the Waco massacre, I have less faith in the applied practical side - the FBI, who could have picked up David Koresh on any given Sunday preaching his religion in the city street corner, knowingly decided to confront him and his group instead with a warrant for their gun/weapons violations. Then they act "surprised" they get attacked by this "cult" and eventually firebomb the compound - killing many women and children in the process.
Cowboys and Indians, I tell you.
(Quotes are to show their words, not any disagreement on my part)
http://www.despair.com/compromise.html
Evidence for what exactly? I didn't realize that being of any political bent and speaking about it was illegal in America.... yet. Theoretically, even radical Muslim (or Christian) teachings would be protected by freedom of speech.
Of course, the group doing this is free to publish what they think of the professors as well.
And just like a professor's teachings, it's up to the audience to parse the message, think about it, question it, research it, and whether it causes them to take any action.
Of course, some days, I no longer have faith that the general audience has the patience to logically parse, question, research messages or to poke holes into it for the pros and cons but instead take the lazy route and react emotionally to it.
GRC has some free tests too, like ShieldsUp and Leaktest, etcetera.
http://www.grc.com/