Now let's say that you are a "legitimate" customer of SpewYou Net (now WorldCon). You're not actually doing anything unethical, you just happen to be giving money to a company that openly enables criminal activities in exchange for network space.
Imagine you are living in a place where you have a choice of two and two only broadband ISPs. One is a large phone company that is going broke and perhaps therefore is slack at preventing abusive customers from spamming, etc. So I go with the other one. But I find my mail is bounced by Americans who simply ban geographically. That's where the Iraq analogy comes in, BTW, Americans' cheerful willingness to inflict massive collateral damage on people who happen to be living in the same country as someone they don't like.
Their actions can also degrade the quality of the internet.
I get my email bounced sometimes because AOL and some other ISPs have blacklisted mine; meanwhile I still get tons of spam. So I'm getting screwed by both the spammers and anti-spammers.
I've seen some of the most insightful comments come from Anonymous Cowards. But you've seen good comments from AC's and so that's why they're here.
I'm not posting "anonymously", in the Slashdot sense, however my real name is not "1u3hr", as you might have guessed. If one analysed all my posts and did some real-world detective work on the personal details I've given away over the years a sufficiently-motivated person could probably track me down. But on the same token, I suspect that a warrant could get the IP of an "AC" poster and lead to his identification (unless he's gone to the trouble to use a proxy).
My point is that most of us here are effectively "anonymous", not just ACs; but those who've registered an alias here at least have the possibility of entering into a discussion rather than the random sniping that most AC comments seem to be. Even when an AC makes a valid point in response to one of my posts I rarely respond because he's probably not going to see my reply (he won't get a notification as registered users do) and any other AC can answer in his place.
The Feds themselves have decided that we are, all of us, "potential terrorists" and in order to weed out that one in a million that might actually be a terrorist the rest of us must suffer the indignities of an invasive law enforcement..
And even worse, it DOESN'T MAKE ANYONE ANY SAFER. All of the 9/11 hijackers had valid , reasonably clean IDs (maybe a couple had overstayed their visas, but would easily have cleaned that up if it was going to be a problem), would have no problem getting on a plane today with similar IDs (except for the racial profiling of course).
The CSM article says "In what may become a major boost to US law enforcement and antiterrorism efforts..." Right. Because terrorists when asked their names would just tell the police their real names, show them real ID, and request they be given a south-facing cell in Guantanamo.
Terrorists are not like petty criminals; they don't get a rap sheet that follows them. Many have led exemplary lives till they get the call to do their bit for jihad. And if they do have a record, it's trivial to get a clean, government-issued identity overseas, and not much harder in the US.
Obviously you're not a lawyer, otherwise you'd be well familiar with the typeface "4-point legal flyspot".
The post referred to a "point 4 font", which would be 1/10th the height of "a 4 point font". But it was probably a typo, as 0.4 point type would be about 1/10th mm high, rather smaller than a flyspeck I think.
How do you think a cd is supposed to run a program after being inserted without using autorun?
"Autorun" is one of the most irritating features of Windows. It's easily disabled, but at the cost of losing "notification" when you insert or remove a CD, which means you have to manually prompt for a refresh sometimes. But it's better than some installer taking over every time you insert a program disk to refer to something or copy some files. Trusting to "pressing the shift key" to defeat it on each insertion is about as reliable as using the withdrawal method of birth control; pretty soon your PC is going to get knocked up.
I feel their pain. I'm an editor for a newsletter and I've had to completely redo an entire newsletter because word is just playing games with me.
I don't want to sound supercilious, but Word is a word processor, not a DTP app. I'm in publishing and am forced to use Word to deal with files people submit (though I do specify RTF, most are just baffled by the concept). So then I use Word to do a minimal clean up, and quickly export to a plain text format whener I do my editing (with ULtraEdit). I Use Ventura to do layout, but PageMaker, Quark, InDesign, LaTex, etc, etc are all good choices. Word isn't.
Media tie-ins and "books in the world of famous author by someone you never heard of" do more harm to real authors than e-books ever will.
I've downloaded a few of these. It was interesting and occasionally useful to have the searchable text of a book I was reading (legal printed edition) to find things. But I can't imagine reading a novel that way. Even if I printed it out, it's much less nice to read than in printed and bound form. With online used books (Amazon has them, many others) you can get most books, except for the very newest, for a couple of dollars, less than it would cost me to print it out, even if my time is free. And my public library has its catalogue online, I can search and find books in any branch, reserve them and pick them up a few days later.
Of course, Baen has been putting the full text of a lot of novels online. It's apparently borne out the belief that it would only encourage the hard copy sales.
No thanks, I'd rather have my somewhat longer and much more descriptive directory names. Especially if I have to go hunting around some user's system for something they misplaced.
Is it actually more descriptive to have "\Program files\Microsoft Office" than "progs\MSOffice"? Personally I get rather annoyed at very long folder names, most of which are the name of the company. And obviously if a "user" does this, they are taking responsibility for where things go. For me it's a bonus that it makes it harder for some intruder to find my stuff. (As if there weren't a dozen ways to find files anyway.)
What do you want to bet it'll confuse some real programs with hard coded paths, too?
I bet there are some programs that use MS Office out there, which expect it to be in \Program Files\Microsoft Office\..
So far I haven't found any, but I don't have much MSOffice-related software. After all, programs are supposed to look in the registry for that kind of thing. Even so, there is a bunch of stuff that goes ahead and creates folders in "C:\Program files\" and "C:\Program files\Common files" without any option.
>There are two problems with paths, both of which can interfere with running Windows programs this way. The first is that running programs from Windows can involve directories with spaces in their names.
The solution for this problem is to find the DOS name that corresponds to the directory you want to use. DOS does not allow spaces in names, so you can use DOS directory names in win commands.
That's in the FA. However, a better solution is not to accept the default paths whe you install stuff under Windows. Eg, instead of "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\" I use "C:\progs\msoffice". Saves typing when you need to, confuses viruses with hard-coded paths, works with old apps without looking up the ~ name.
Name one great game that came out in the past six months that works on your Mac?
If you want games, get a console. Other than an occasional Solitaire session, I don't play games on my computer. My daughter plays lots of Flash games though.
t is cold comfort to know that root remains untouched, but your home directory has been trashed.
You may have to be a little more clever in laying your trap, but users will launch executables that look attractive and plausible.
Yes, once you get it it's bad. However, without root privileges it will be much harder for such a virus/Trojan to spread to other systems.
sale computers in a Mom & Pop shop for a living, and I almost pity the people who buy new machines, only to have the machine exploited 30 minutes later when they first hook it up to the Internet.
Probably you aren't allowed to patch the systems before you sell them, but you could give, or sell if you're mercenary, a CD with the XP SP1 "network install" (offline), and later patches.
- however, one thing that would be nice to have built into the system itself, is anti-virus.
Bad idea -- single known point of failure. One exploit of that (after MS has put all the other commercial AV products out of business) and the next successful virus owns the whole fucking Internet.
I also suspect there may be licensing issues with some of the exhibits...
What possible licensing issues could prevent someone from taking a photo of something? People imagine that IP laws are even more draconian than they are.
Most museums ban photography because of the annoyance and possible damage from flashes, and because they sell postcards, books, etc in their giftshops. Art museums don't want people to use a photo to sell prints of their art, though if the art is old (out of copyright) and you can get a photo somehow I don't think they can stop that.
How would the currency block prevent me from printing a photo of a relative? I'm not claiming to have Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, etc. as an ancestor...
Not that, but it shows the mechanism -- DRM for images.
While there is a certain 'labor of love' comparison between scanlation and open source programming, and both involve alot of volunteer folks working on their own, that's about where the similarity ends. Open source is original work, and often it's an original idea.
Open Source started with the aim of duplicating the functions and interfaces of Unix; and much of current work is aimed at replicating Windows and MS apps. To continue the analogy, in Japan there's a large market of fan-drawn manga, using the commercial characters. (Some of this is porn, but not all or even most.) One might expect that some more original work will come out of the scanlation community as people get a taste and talent for creating rather than just translating.
Anybody with a reasonable high quality flatbed scanner could have duplicated the images, which then could have been brought into a Walgreens on a CD-ROM and printed.
It seems like people in this discussion are trying to bring up 'horror story' scenarios that really amount to people without a wit of common sense. The notion of paying a photography place to make the duplicates is really, really 20th century.
The point is that scanning the photo yourself and printing it is equally illegal as having a photo shop do it. Obviously you can get away with it now, but considering the way things are going: DMCA, the currency block in PhotoShop and printers, Palladium; it may not be long before it's impossible.
If I'm a wedding or portrait photographer, my business comes from the prints I sell to my customer. And I want to retain that copyright, because in 20 years, they might come back to me for reprints.
This is exactly the problem addressed. If in 20 years they want prints, they are willing to pay you, but you're dead and your negatives were trashed, they still legally have no right to make copies of their prints because the rights are held by your heirs, and it may cost a fortune to locate them if it's possible at all.
I've seen other companies buy a competing product just so they can kill it.
Adobe did this to a lot of font software, notably Ares. There was FontMonger (a font editor and converter), Chameleon (produced vaiations on a font), FontFiddler (kerning), FontMinder (organising). They apparently took some of the technology to use in their other products, then simply took them off the market. Most of these still work well, 12 years later, on current Windows, in spite of Adobe claiming they were unmaintainable. You can only find Warez versions now.
Turbo Pascal 7. Students usually asked for a copy to install it at home, and of course we couldn't oblige, even though Borland had stopped selling TP7 for quite a while (late 90's).
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine you are living in a place where you have a choice of two and two only broadband ISPs. One is a large phone company that is going broke and perhaps therefore is slack at preventing abusive customers from spamming, etc. So I go with the other one. But I find my mail is bounced by Americans who simply ban geographically. That's where the Iraq analogy comes in, BTW, Americans' cheerful willingness to inflict massive collateral damage on people who happen to be living in the same country as someone they don't like.
I get my email bounced sometimes because AOL and some other ISPs have blacklisted mine; meanwhile I still get tons of spam. So I'm getting screwed by both the spammers and anti-spammers.
I'm not posting "anonymously", in the Slashdot sense, however my real name is not "1u3hr", as you might have guessed. If one analysed all my posts and did some real-world detective work on the personal details I've given away over the years a sufficiently-motivated person could probably track me down. But on the same token, I suspect that a warrant could get the IP of an "AC" poster and lead to his identification (unless he's gone to the trouble to use a proxy).
My point is that most of us here are effectively "anonymous", not just ACs; but those who've registered an alias here at least have the possibility of entering into a discussion rather than the random sniping that most AC comments seem to be. Even when an AC makes a valid point in response to one of my posts I rarely respond because he's probably not going to see my reply (he won't get a notification as registered users do) and any other AC can answer in his place.
And even worse, it DOESN'T MAKE ANYONE ANY SAFER. All of the 9/11 hijackers had valid , reasonably clean IDs (maybe a couple had overstayed their visas, but would easily have cleaned that up if it was going to be a problem), would have no problem getting on a plane today with similar IDs (except for the racial profiling of course).
The CSM article says "In what may become a major boost to US law enforcement and antiterrorism efforts..." Right. Because terrorists when asked their names would just tell the police their real names, show them real ID, and request they be given a south-facing cell in Guantanamo.
Terrorists are not like petty criminals; they don't get a rap sheet that follows them. Many have led exemplary lives till they get the call to do their bit for jihad. And if they do have a record, it's trivial to get a clean, government-issued identity overseas, and not much harder in the US.
The post referred to a "point 4 font", which would be 1/10th the height of "a 4 point font". But it was probably a typo, as 0.4 point type would be about 1/10th mm high, rather smaller than a flyspeck I think.
"Autorun" is one of the most irritating features of Windows. It's easily disabled, but at the cost of losing "notification" when you insert or remove a CD, which means you have to manually prompt for a refresh sometimes. But it's better than some installer taking over every time you insert a program disk to refer to something or copy some files. Trusting to "pressing the shift key" to defeat it on each insertion is about as reliable as using the withdrawal method of birth control; pretty soon your PC is going to get knocked up.
I don't want to sound supercilious, but Word is a word processor, not a DTP app. I'm in publishing and am forced to use Word to deal with files people submit (though I do specify RTF, most are just baffled by the concept). So then I use Word to do a minimal clean up, and quickly export to a plain text format whener I do my editing (with ULtraEdit). I Use Ventura to do layout, but PageMaker, Quark, InDesign, LaTex, etc, etc are all good choices. Word isn't.
I've downloaded a few of these. It was interesting and occasionally useful to have the searchable text of a book I was reading (legal printed edition) to find things. But I can't imagine reading a novel that way. Even if I printed it out, it's much less nice to read than in printed and bound form. With online used books (Amazon has them, many others) you can get most books, except for the very newest, for a couple of dollars, less than it would cost me to print it out, even if my time is free. And my public library has its catalogue online, I can search and find books in any branch, reserve them and pick them up a few days later.
Of course, Baen has been putting the full text of a lot of novels online. It's apparently borne out the belief that it would only encourage the hard copy sales.
Is it actually more descriptive to have "\Program files\Microsoft Office" than "progs\MSOffice"? Personally I get rather annoyed at very long folder names, most of which are the name of the company. And obviously if a "user" does this, they are taking responsibility for where things go. For me it's a bonus that it makes it harder for some intruder to find my stuff. (As if there weren't a dozen ways to find files anyway.)
So far I haven't found any, but I don't have much MSOffice-related software. After all, programs are supposed to look in the registry for that kind of thing. Even so, there is a bunch of stuff that goes ahead and creates folders in "C:\Program files\" and "C:\Program files\Common files" without any option.
The solution for this problem is to find the DOS name that corresponds to the directory you want to use. DOS does not allow spaces in names, so you can use DOS directory names in win commands.
That's in the FA. However, a better solution is not to accept the default paths whe you install stuff under Windows. Eg, instead of "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\" I use "C:\progs\msoffice". Saves typing when you need to, confuses viruses with hard-coded paths, works with old apps without looking up the ~ name.
If you want games, get a console. Other than an occasional Solitaire session, I don't play games on my computer. My daughter plays lots of Flash games though.
Yes, once you get it it's bad. However, without root privileges it will be much harder for such a virus/Trojan to spread to other systems.
Probably you aren't allowed to patch the systems before you sell them, but you could give, or sell if you're mercenary, a CD with the XP SP1 "network install" (offline), and later patches.
Bad idea -- single known point of failure. One exploit of that (after MS has put all the other commercial AV products out of business) and the next successful virus owns the whole fucking Internet.
What possible licensing issues could prevent someone from taking a photo of something? People imagine that IP laws are even more draconian than they are.
Most museums ban photography because of the annoyance and possible damage from flashes, and because they sell postcards, books, etc in their giftshops. Art museums don't want people to use a photo to sell prints of their art, though if the art is old (out of copyright) and you can get a photo somehow I don't think they can stop that.
Thye rebuilt some of the 2001 ships for 2010; the Discovery as well as some pods made an appearance.
Do you mean Microsoft Deutschland Gmbh losing out to IBM Deutschland?
Not that, but it shows the mechanism -- DRM for images.
Open Source started with the aim of duplicating the functions and interfaces of Unix; and much of current work is aimed at replicating Windows and MS apps. To continue the analogy, in Japan there's a large market of fan-drawn manga, using the commercial characters. (Some of this is porn, but not all or even most.) One might expect that some more original work will come out of the scanlation community as people get a taste and talent for creating rather than just translating.
The point is that scanning the photo yourself and printing it is equally illegal as having a photo shop do it. Obviously you can get away with it now, but considering the way things are going: DMCA, the currency block in PhotoShop and printers, Palladium; it may not be long before it's impossible.
This is exactly the problem addressed. If in 20 years they want prints, they are willing to pay you, but you're dead and your negatives were trashed, they still legally have no right to make copies of their prints because the rights are held by your heirs, and it may cost a fortune to locate them if it's possible at all.
Adobe did this to a lot of font software, notably Ares. There was FontMonger (a font editor and converter), Chameleon (produced vaiations on a font), FontFiddler (kerning), FontMinder (organising). They apparently took some of the technology to use in their other products, then simply took them off the market. Most of these still work well, 12 years later, on current Windows, in spite of Adobe claiming they were unmaintainable. You can only find Warez versions now.
You can at least download and use TP 5.5 for free from Borland now.
Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.